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26354	----	WOODWARD'S COUNTRY HOMES, BY GEO. E. & F. W. WOODWARD, ARCHITECTS, =Authors of "Woodward's Graperies and Horticultural Buildings."= FOURTH THOUSAND. NEW-YORK: GEO. E. & F. W. WOODWARD, 37 PARK ROW, Office of the HORTICULTURIST. 1866. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1865, by GEO. E. & F. W. WOODWARD, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States, for the Southern District of New York. STEPHEN HALLET, PRINTER, No. 74 Fulton Street. CONTENTS. PAGE. INTRODUCTION. Domestic Architecture and Embellishment 7 DESIGN NO. 1. A Laborer's Cottage 25 DESIGN NO. 2. A Small Frame Cottage 28 DESIGN NO. 3. A Compact Frame Cottage 30 DESIGN NO. 4. A Rural Cottage of moderate extent 34 DESIGN NO. 5. A Gardener's Cottage 40 DESIGN NO. 6. Stone Stable and Coach House 45 DESIGN NO. 7. A Farm Cottage 46 DESIGN NO. 8. Design for a Timber Cottage 50 DESIGN NO. 9. Design for a Rural Church. 53 DESIGN NO. 10. A Suburban Cottage 58 DESIGN NO. 11. An Ornamental Summer House 64 DESIGN NO. 12. Stable and Carriage House 66 DESIGN NO. 13. A Model Cottage 68 DESIGN NO. 14. A Cottage Stable 75 DESIGN NO. 15. Design for an Ice House 76 DESIGN NO. 16. A Suburban Cottage 79 DESIGN NO. 17. Stable and Carriage House 86 DESIGN NO. 18. School House at Irvington 87 DESIGN NO. 19. A regular Country House 93 DESIGN NO. 20. A Country Chapel 96 DESIGN NO. 21. An Old House Remodeled 99 DESIGN NO. 22. Coach House and Stable 104 DESIGN NO. 23. Fences 106 DESIGN NO. 24. Plans of the Residence of C. F. Park, Esq. 108 DESIGN NO. 25. Carriage House and Stable 111 DESIGN NO. 26. Residence of T. H. Stout, Esq. 113 DESIGN NO. 27. A Chapter on Gates 119 DESIGN NO. 28. Mr. Tristram Allen's House at Ravenswood, Enlarged 131 DESIGN NO. 29. Plans of the Residence of L. M. Ferris, Esq. 134 DESIGN NO. 30. A Model Suburban Cottage 139 DESIGN NO. 31. Head Stone 149 BALLOON FRAMES. Balloon Frames 151 WOODWARD'S COUNTRY HOMES. IN presenting to the public a new work on DOMESTIC ARCHITECTURE, it is our aim to furnish practical designs and plans, adapted to the requirements of such as are about to build, or remodel and improve, their COUNTRY HOMES. The rapid progress in rural improvement and domestic embellishment all over the land, during the last quarter of a century, is evident to the observation of every traveler, and, as we have found during several years of professional experience, there has grown up a demand for architectural designs of various grades, from the simple farm cottage to the more elaborate and costly villa, which is not supplied by the several excellent works on this subject which are within the reach of the building and reading public. Among the permanent dwellers in the country this spirit of improvement, fostered as it is by the diffusion of publications in the various departments of Rural Art, and by a wider and more genial general culture as the means of intercommunication and education are increased, is becoming more manifest every year. But besides these intelligent farmers and tradesmen who make the country their home the year round, there is a large class of persons whose tastes or business avocations compel them to reside a considerable portion of the year in our cities or suburbs--prosperous merchants, bankers, professional men, and wealthy citizens--who have the tastes and means to command such enjoyments and luxuries as the country affords; who need the change in scenes, associations, employments and objects of interest, for themselves and their households, and who enjoy, with a keen relish, the seclusion, the comparative freedom from restraint, the pure, sweet air, the broad, open sunshine, and the numerous other rural advantages which are essentially denied them in their city homes. In former years this class of people resorted, almost exclusively, to the sea-side, and a few popular mineral springs, taking in, perhaps, Niagara in their transit, and rarely venturing into the wild and unexplored regions of Lake George. They returned to town in the early days of September, with many a backward, longing look at the attractions and delights from which they reluctantly tore themselves away, and settled down again to the weary tread-mill of business. But for some years past this class has largely increased in number, and instead of confining themselves to their former resorts, they now seek the upper country, and prolong their stay into the glorious days of Autumn. Many of them have provided permanent summer homes, among the hills and on the lake or river shores. They have bought, and built, and planted, until they have identified themselves with the chosen spot, and as their trees have taken root in the fertile soil, so have their affections taken root in the beautiful country. They hasten gladly to these rural scenes with the opening Summer, and they leave them with regret when the exigencies of business require their presence in the city,--when the Summer suns have ripened the luscious fruits, and the flowers fade with the frosty kisses of the cold, and the passenger birds fly Southward. This class of our population know where to find all the facilities for the best country enjoyments, and their ample means assure them a free choice of summer resorts, and adequate command of all the appliances of pleasant country living. But there is another and still larger class of citizens who have neither the means to enable them to keep up both town and country residences, nor such command of their time that they can pass two or three months of every summer away from their business. There are thousands of clerks and subordinate officers in the banking and insurance institutions in our cities and in our large commercial houses; there are many merchants who are making their way slowly and surely to competence and wealth, who would gladly compromise for one-third of such a summer vacation. These are men of intelligence, and sometimes of a good deal of social and intellectual culture and refinement. Many of them were born, and their boyhood nurtured amongst the hills. They love the country with the intensity and purity of a first love, and they long for communion once more with nature in all her moods of loveliness. Their sweetest dreams still, when they forget the hard realities of life, are of green lawns and sloping hill-sides, of waving trees and cool streams. And they would wish that their children should become familiar with the same wholesome associations, and be moved by the same attachments and inspirations. In the city they are constantly exposed to its excitements, and subjected to the restraints of its artificial modes, with few outward influences to counteract upon their development; with very little, indeed, except the discipline and the affections of home to emancipate them from the tendencies to a trivial, artificial, and sordid life. They would gladly supply to them the healthful tone and vigor--the outer and inner bloom and freshness--which are the product of out-door life in the pure air of the country. But they are compelled by considerations of economy, to forego most of these advantages, and allow their children to grow up with city tastes and habits. They long for the country but think they must content themselves with the town, until the time comes when their fortunes will enable them to command the coveted indulgences. The time may come, sooner than they anticipate, when they will be obliged to choose the country. Our towns are rapidly overflowing their local boundaries, and spreading out into suburbs, more or less beautiful and desirable. As far as New York city is concerned, it is simply a question of time how soon our middle-class citizens, who desire to live comfortably, with due regard to economical conditions, will be obliged to choose the country for their homes. During the last forty years this city has increased in population with a rapid and uniform rate. Within the memory of persons now living, it has grown from an inconsiderable commercial town, until it has become one of the great cities of the world. This rapid stride and steady progress furnish us with the elements for calculating the period when the whole island will be covered with buildings, and there will remain no more vacant space for the use of its commerce, or the domestic accommodation of its citizens. The present population of the city is estimated at fully one million. The entire territorial capacity of the city, the density of the population remaining the same as it is at present, cannot much exceed two millions. The ratio of increase during each period of five years, since 1820, is about twenty-eight per cent. It will thus be seen that the utmost limit of the city's capacity will be reached within the next sixteen or seventeen years, and New York will be a solid and compact city from the Battery to Westchester County. Meanwhile, the expenses of living in the city are increasing every year. Rents are higher now than ever before, and there is no prospect of their coming down for many years. For it must be remembered that when we renew our building operations, which have been nearly suspended for the last four years, in consequence of the unsettled condition of the country, we shall have to provide not only for the current increase in population, but for the deficiencies which result from the past four years or more, when comparatively few houses were erected. At the present time the rent of a convenient and respectable house, suitable to the requirements of a family having a fair income, and occupying a desirable position in society, is an excessive item of cost. And the remedy for this is to go into the country. Along the lines of our railroads and navigable waters there are localities where land is comparatively cheap,--beautiful, healthy regions, where the comforts of a rural home may be secured, with all the advantages of society, and of religious and educational establishments and institutions. The facilities for reaching these country homes are already adequate for general purposes, and will be increased every year, as the demand for them grows. Railroads and steamboats are built and run for the purpose of profit on freight and passenger transportation. According to the general law of trade, the supply will equal the demand, and as the population increases along our lines of travel, the facilities and accommodations for transit will be multiplied. Why, then, should the man who loves the country, and possesses tastes and capacities for its enjoyment, and yet is compelled by circumstances to practice economy in his mode of living, be restrained to the city limits? It is quite a practicable thing for him to realize his wishes,--live in the country and enjoy its best luxuries, without abandoning the city as far as its commercial advantages are concerned. There are localities _within an hour_ of the city hall, where land can be purchased at reasonable rates, and where all the advantages of health and beauty, of retirement, pure air and attractive scenery can be enjoyed for less money than is now expended in the narrow house in the crowded street, where every sense is offended--with no open sky or distant horizon tinged with the glories of the dying day or rising morn--no grassy lawns, or waving trees, or fragrant banks of flowers. For such accommodations as he has, he pays, we will say, a rent of one thousand or twelve hundred dollars. In the country he might purchase two acres of land and build a cottage, which would afford him all, or more, conveniences than he now has, without the necessity of climbing four or five flights of stairs--at an outlay, at the usual cost of building, not exceeding six thousand dollars. The interest on this sum would be four hundred and twenty dollars. The difference between this amount and his present house rent would in a few years pay the whole cost of the place, and he would have a _home_--a centre and gathering place for his domestic interests and affections. And this is no fancy sketch--no exaggerated statement of possibilities. We know of localities which can be reached from Wall Street in as many minutes as would be required to go to 50th Street, where land can be obtained for about five hundred dollars an acre, where there are all the conditions of health, good water, pure air, extensive and attractive views, and whatever else is desirable for a country home. In the direction we have now specially in mind, there are at least twenty railroad trains which daily stop at convenient stations, between the early morning and ten o'clock at night. For the ordinary purposes of business, and social intercourse, this is ample travelling accommodation, and as we said before, these accommodations will be increased in the proportion that the country population in the neighborhood of our cities becomes more dense, and thus creates a larger demand for such facilities. The necessity and desirableness of country homes being thus easily demonstrable, it is of importance to know how to choose sites for them, and how to build. The Poet-author of "Letters from under a bridge," has given a wise and admirable suggestion in regard to choice of sites, "leaving the climate and productiveness of soil out of the question, the main things to find united, are, _shade_, _water_, _and inequality of surface_. With these three features given by nature, any spot may be made beautiful, and at very little cost: and fortunately for purchasers in this country, most land is valued and sold with little or no reference to these or other capabilities for embellishment." There is an affluence of choice sites all over the country, and what we need most to learn is how to develop their capabilities, and add such fitting embellishments as belong to beautiful and convenient houses. Here it is that the popular taste requires additional cultivation. The impulse already given in this direction should be kept up. There is no deficiency of wealth for the appropriation and culture of these attractive places, and there is often a lavish expenditure upon country homes which ought to make them complete and even magnificent. But unfortunately we see, every year, costly establishments, designed for summer residences, or for permanent homes, built up with as little regard for taste, as for expense. The deficiency is found rather in the culture than in the dispositions and means of our people. And the remedy and supply for this must be provided by the dissemination of works treating upon this and kindred topics of rural art, by means of which the public taste may be refined and elevated to a higher standard. In constructing country houses there are several prime conditions to be observed, such as adaptation, accommodation, and expression. By adaptation is meant not only the arrangement of the main structure, as to form and material, to suit the locality and character of the grounds, but a fitness as respects the real wants--the habits and condition--of the occupants and the purposes of a country home. Nobody wants a modern city house planted down in the open country, nor should any sensible man seek a refuge from the bare streets of the city in the little less bare streets of a country village. There is no congruity between the classical forms of Grecian Architecture and the varying climate of our land. The material used in the construction of our country houses has not been sufficiently considered by us. Timber is abundant in almost all parts of the country, and the facility with which an establishment--mansion-house, office, and outbuildings--can be built up in a few weeks, of this material, has been the main reason, we suppose, why we have so many abortions, in the shape of Grecian temples, and miniature Gothic cathedrals and castles, scattered over the land. Let it be considered, that in building our country houses, we are not simply providing for ourselves, but for our children--we are constructing a homestead. It is for the want of this consideration that we have so few _homes_ in our country, so few home associations, around and among which our deepest and purest affections are entwined. Our thin lath and plaster constructions, which rattle and tremble in every wind and leak in every rain, do not afford very good or permanent centers for these associations and affections. We have some native woods that are durable, out of which we may build houses that will last for several generations; but with these, even, the cost of frequent repairs and painting is so great, to say nothing of the annoyances thereby entailed, that, in point of economy, wood is by no means the most desirable material. Nor is it, in any way, the most desirable. The prevailing taste in country dwellings, before Mr. Downing's time, was defective enough. A large, square, wooden house, painted intensely white, garnished with bright green Venetian blinds--standing in a contracted yard--inclosed with a red or white wooden fence, was the very beau ideal of a gentleman's country dwelling. We are thankful that this dispensation has passed away; and we revere the memory of Downing, and of others like him, who were instrumental in bringing in a better taste in such matters. The first cost of a stone or brick dwelling somewhat exceeds that of wood, even in places where these materials are readily obtained. But if they are properly constructed, such buildings will need very few repairs for many years. It is often objected, on the other hand, that such buildings are damp and unwholesome. This is, undoubtedly, true of many of the old stone houses which we find scattered about the country. And it is true, because they were not properly built. When properly built, they preserve the most equal temperature at all seasons. They are warm in winter and cool in summer, and the sudden changes which affect the weather without, need scarcely be felt by the delicate invalid within the walls of the stone mansion, if suitable attention is given to the simple matter of ventilation. But let us return to the subject of adaptation. The illustrations which occur to us may serve to furnish a somewhat clear idea of what we mean by the prime conditions necessary to be observed in building. By the term adaptation, we mean such choice of style, material, size and arrangement as shall fit the structure: 1st, to the site; 2d, to the climate; and 3d, to the uses for which it is built. And, first, as to the site: It would be obviously incongruous to erect the same house on these two different sites, with their different characteristic features and surroundings; for example, _the one_ a nearly level plane gently rising, perhaps, as you approach from the road the position where the house shall stand, and sloping away again towards other broad green fields and the fertile meadows beyond--with no background of hills or mountains, no irregularly formed lake, but with a placid, lazy stream, half-sleeping, half-gliding by the weeping elms, and among the scattered groups of stately, old trees:--_the other_, a romantic hillside in the native forest, with its neighboring mountain range, where in the bright summer-time, the noisy, laughing brook keeps time to your thoughts and fancies as you wander among the hills, and in the bleak winter the winds sigh mournfully through the pines or utter their clarion calls to the spirit of the storm. The one situation would be appropriate to the Italian villa, with its flat roof, and overhanging cornices, its spacious verandahs and balconies, all having that depth and boldness and variety of outline necessary to secure the proper effects of light and shadow which, the absence of all variety of form in the landscape, would render indispensable. But no man with an artist's eye would think, for a moment, of building such a house as this on our wooded hillside. He would construct there his English cottage in good solid stone, whose steep roofs would shed with facility the summer rain and the winter snow, whose irregularities of form and outline would harmonize with nature's Gothic work in precipice and rock, in trees and climbing vines. Or else, he would place there his Swiss chalét, which would be in harmony with the scene, and a pleasing object to the eye of the observer. On the broad, open plane the villa should be made, or seem, to cover a considerable space, while the nice cottage might be built more compactly. But here let us remark, that many of our attempts at the English cottage, generally known as the Gothic, have been failures, and some of them sad abortions. This comes from defective models and plans, and these defects arise mainly from these sources--the lack of boldness and variety in the main outlines, and in the construction of the roofs and chimneys. Such a cottage, to be pleasing and satisfactory, must have irregularities in form, variety in ornament, and boldness in treatment. A square house with additions of gables, and dormers and pinnacles, and ridge crests, will not give us an English cottage. It is a work of art, like a poem or a picture, and not a mechanical aggregation of Gothic features and ornaments. We were about to say that it should never be attempted in any other material than stone, but as many of us cannot command the means for such permanent buildings, we will concede that it may be allowable for us to put our wooden buildings into the cottage form, using the best taste and the most beautiful and picturesque styles, even if the material is objectionable. One other observation, before we return to our main topic, may be indulged. It is simply the suggestion that too little attention has been paid to the _sky-outlines_ of our country houses. Roofs and chimney-tops have been treated as necessary evils, instead of being made, as they may be, highly ornamental. The unity of the plan, as a work of art, is lost as you ascend above the eaves, all the rest seeming like excrescences growing out of structures otherwise commendable and satisfactory. The superior horizontal lines of the roof will depend somewhat upon the background of the house. When a building is placed upon the crest of a hill, or upon a slope descending from the main point of view, so that its outlines are seen against the sky, the treatment of the plan will be obviously different from that required where the background is solid, as a hill or a forest. In any case, however, the horizontal lines should be broken, as far as practicable, by making the roofs of the several parts of the house of unequal height. It will be apparent, without special argument, that our choice of style in our country houses should be controlled essentially by the climate. In our northern climate, the flat roof is objectionable, and we are obliged to modify the Italian styles somewhat in this respect, to obviate inconveniences. The hot summer sun, when, as on an August day, in the city, "The pavements all are piping hot, The sky above is brazen, And every head as good as dead The sun can shed his rays on," will be more than likely to open the joints and seams of the flat roof, and the sudden shower coming down with the force of a tropical storm, will find its way through, sadly to the detriment of our ceilings, our stuccoes and frescoes, as well as to the comfort and the commendable equability of temper of those who suffer the invasion. The heavy winter snows, too, require a steep roof, from which they will readily dislodge themselves without injury. And so in the interior arrangements of the house, the provisions for heating and ventilation, for summer freedom and winter coziness, for domestic comfort and the exercise of the commendable grace of country hospitality, due regard must be had to the conditions of climate. There must be a proper adaptation to them, if we would secure satisfactory country homes. And this brings us to our last topic, the uses for which our country seats are built. The place designed simply for a summer residence for the citizen, who is obliged to be at his office or counting room daily, bating the few weeks of summer vacation, need not be so complete in its appointments and arrangements, as the permanent country residence. One essential condition, however, in this case is, that there shall be _room enough_, with ample verandahs, and shaded gravel walks, which will afford opportunities for open air exercise in all states of the weather. There is nothing, perhaps, that interferes so essentially with the citizen's enjoyment of the country, as the want of facilities for out door exercise. It is too hot or too dusty to ride or walk, before the shower, and after its refreshment has come, it is too wet and muddy. Spacious verandahs, shaded with vines, and well-made walks, always firm and dry, bordered with shrubbery, or overhung with trees, will give us "ample scope and verge enough." But the uses of country seats depend mainly upon the tastes and habitudes of the occupants; and their adaptation in style size and arrangement should be accordingly. We believe there is no law against a man's building an elegant library and picture gallery, though he may have no taste for literature or art, but having plenty of money, chooses to make this display of it. There are a great many absurdities to which poor, frail humanity is liable, against which the legislature, in its wisdom, has not thought it worth while to make solemn and positive enactments; it is better for the general moral condition of society, perhaps, that the vulgar rich man's ambition for display should manifest itself in books and pictures, rather than in fast horses. Might not the cultivation of the garden--vegetables, fruits and flowers,--take the place of both, as simple means of display? These are wholesome and agreeable employments even for those who have passed that time of life when a taste for books and art may be acquired. A country seat should combine and express the real uses which are required by the intellectual and social condition of its occupants, and not attract attention as blazoning the wealth and money importance of the owner. If he is rich, let him make it as complete and simply elegant as he will, and this he may do without proclaiming to every passer-by his miserable pride of wealth. With these preliminary observations, we submit our work to the judgment of those who are interested in these subjects. We have not included in our present volume any considerable number of designs for the more spacious and costly Villa, the work being designed for popular use and to meet a demand which is unprovided for by previous publications. DESIGN No. 1. [Illustration: FIG. 1.--_Front Elevation._] [Illustration: FIG. 2.--_End Elevation._] This design as shown in figures 1 and 2, is for a laborer's cottage intended to be erected on the grounds connected with a fine estate on the western slope of the Palisades in New Jersey. It is to be built of rough stone, plainly finished. It is 16 by 24 feet outside, having a living-room with bed room on the first floor, (Fig. 3,) a large pantry, stairway, etc., and a fine cellar below. The second floor (Fig. 4,) has two bed-rooms, well lighted and ventilated, and large closets to each. This size will admit of several different arrangements; the rear door might open out from the pantry, and afford more convenient access to the cellar stairs, to get in heavy articles, and shut out some cold in winter, but would interfere with the fine ventilation so necessary in summer to a generally heated apartment, as a kitchen, dining, and living-room combined. A porch might be placed over the rear door, or better still, at a small additional expense, a summer-kitchen and wood-house might be added. A house of this accommodation is usually the first one put up by settlers on the western prairies. They are built of wood, balloon frame, with a plain pitch roof, without ornament. [Illustration: FIG. 3.--_First Floor._] [Illustration: FIG. 4.--_Second Floor._] The elevations as shown, give a greater variety than is usual in this class of building, and a house thus constructed may afterwards become a very pretty portion of a larger and more expensive structure. DESIGN No. 2. [Illustration: FIG. 5.--_Front Elevation._] [Illustration: FIG. 6.--_Side Elevation._] [Illustration: FIG. 7.--_First Floor._] The second design (Fig. 5,) is for a frame building giving more variety of outline. The plan (Fig. 7,) separates the sitting room from the kitchen and dining room, and insures more privacy. There is also a greater abundance of closets, though smaller. One of the bed rooms above might be divided into two, and thus increase the accommodation. A portion of the cellar may also be finished for a kitchen, and the living room used as a dining room. This plan admits of future additions being made without destroying the harmony or proportion of the building. To one of moderate means, such a mode of building presents some attractions, as it affords a house for immediate wants, to which additions may be made as one's means increase. Such houses, if tastefully furnished and embellished with suitable surroundings, as neat and well-kept grounds, fine trees, shrubbery, flowers, and climbing vines, will always attract more attention and admiration than the uninviting aspect of many more expensive structures. Money tastefully expended in this manner will always yield gratifying results. [Illustration: FIG. 8.--_Second Floor._] DESIGN No. 3. [Illustration: FIG. 9.--_Front Elevation._] [Illustration: FIG. 10.--_Side Elevation._] This design is similar, in some respects, to design No. 2, and gives, perhaps, the most compact arrangement of rooms for a building having so irregular an outline. Exteriorly considered, there is much to be admired in variety, and light and shadow, the different elevations being entirely unlike each other, and affording a constant change from every point of view; an object, we think, very much to be desired in cottage architecture, and when well managed never fails to make a pleasing impression. A high, bold appearance, without the overhanging eaves or depth of shadow, is not suitable for a country house; a feeling is created that something is wanting to make up the accessories of an agreeable habitation. [Illustration: FIG. 11.--_Basement Plan._] In this plan, (Fig. 11,) the kitchen is in the basement, convenient to the cellar, and with a good pantry attached to it. It is put there for the purpose of economizing in the construction. Our own preference is to put the kitchen in a well ventilated wing on a level with the main floor, and thus avoid, as much as possible, the necessity of running up and down stairs. This can be done at any future time when desired, as, indeed, can any addition of other rooms be made to meet the wants of an increasing family. A dumb waiter connects the kitchen with the dining room, and thus saves many steps. [Illustration: FIG. 12.--_First Floor._] The first floor (Fig. 12,) gives parlor, dining room, and a library, with a roomy vestibule, and a side door or private entrance, and supplies all the wants of a small family. The library might be used for a bed room. On the second floor (Fig. 13,) are 3 bed rooms with closets. The engravings are intended to tell their own story as far as possible, and but little explanation is necessary to make them fully comprehensible. In the matter of cost, one can hardly give a price that is reliable; the enormous advance in some building materials and slight advance in others, disarrange all old standards of estimating. Localities, of course, have much to do with the cost; yet, above all others, the business management must be considered. A good manager, thoroughly familiar with the qualities and values of materials, who knows how to direct labor to the best advantage, will execute work at a less cost than one who undertakes his own building without a previous training. [Illustration: FIG. 13.--_Second Floor._] DESIGN No. 4. This is a perspective view of a cottage, designed to afford a reasonable amount of accommodation for an average sized family, and which, if tastefully furnished, and fitted with suitable landscape surroundings, will convey a pleasing impression to all; much more so than dwellings of a more expensive class, where sufficient attention is not given to such accessories. [Illustration: FIG. 14.--_Perspective._] The plans of this house are compact, the rooms opening into each other in such a manner as to afford easy communication and economy in heating. The porch is spacious, and more pleasant than the long, narrow verandah. The supply of water for all purposes is from a filtering cistern, which is connected with the kitchen sink, by a pump. The entire house may be heated by a furnace, hot water, or steam, as is most preferable; or stoves may be used in nearly all the rooms, if first cost is to be closely considered. A passage underneath the staircase connects with the side door from the vestibule, and, with the exception of the library, all parts of the house are accessible without passing through other rooms. [Illustration: FIG. 15.--_Basement Floor._] [Illustration: FIG. 16.--_First Floor._] [Illustration: FIG. 17.--_Second Floor._] In the vicinity of large cities, and more particularly the city of New York, there are reasons which have a money value to them, why more attention should be given to suburban architecture, and why capitalists, as well as individuals, should undertake the construction of moderate-priced buildings, that shall command attention from the harmonious combination of fine architectural effects. It requires but a very limited experience to become aware of the fact, that dwellings of precisely the same cost, and similarly situated, will differ in their rental at least one half, and it is mainly owing to the reason that one is properly designed, and the other perhaps an amateur performance, modeled after the ill-proportioned Greek pediment style, too prevalent to be countenanced for a moment by any one who prides himself on his good taste. There can be no question that a fitly designed cottage, conveniently arranged, adds, independently of its own cost, a large per centage to the value of the acres which surround it, and is the point which arrests the eye and secures the purchaser. Rapid rail-road facilities, lower rents, more healthful localities, and the fact that the growth of this city "_Spuyten Duyvelward_" has reached a point beyond the convenient access of the strictly business man, necessarily turn the attention of those who look to the full measure of comfort, to a suburban life, ten to fifteen miles away from the unceasing noise and hurry of the city, where the business of the day is forgotten, and fresh air, fresh milk, butter and eggs, fruits, flowers, birds, &c., are luxuries unknown in town. Taking a strictly money view of building operations, for sale and rent, in suburban localities, and more particularly about New York, it would promise, by every course of reasoning, a remunerative return, if the plan were judiciously and tastefully carried out. The wants of the public, however, are so unequal, and their opinions so varied by the circumstances under which they are formed, that, unless an attractive beginning can be shown, very desirable property may remain a long time on the market. If we canvass real estate thoroughly, we shall find that property sells first, and at the best prices, which has ever so humble a cottage on it, a starting point in which one may temporarily reside, and lay out his plans of future operations; for the construction of a country place is of all things one with which to make haste slowly. With those actively engaged in business, and to whom time is every thing, there is no disposition to add the labor and annoyances of building; the demand is for a home ready for occupancy; the thought is entertained, and the wish gratified, simply because the opportunity presented itself; but it is far less trouble for young and middle-aged business men to stick to the city, than to give the time for building, particularly when they undertake their own architecture. Let capitalists invite them by snug, well-built, convenient, and tasteful cottages, and the demand will always be in advance of the supply, in all healthy localities, having rapid, reliable, and frequent communication with the city. [Illustration: FIG. 18.--_First Floor Enlarged._] DESIGN No. 5. A GARDENER'S COTTAGE. The accompanying design was made for William C. Bryant, Esq., by Fred'k S. Copley, Esq., Artist, Tompkinsville, Staten Island, and was erected on his beautiful estate at Roslyn, Long Island, in 1862. It stands on the hill above his residence, overlooking the bay from the village to the Sound, possessing one of the finest views on the Island. It was intended as a gardener's lodge, and to accommodate one or two families, as circumstances might require, (one on each floor,) giving each three rooms, and a joint right to the scullery, sink, and cellar. [Illustration: FIG. 19.--_Perspective View._] _Arrangement._--The first story is 9 feet in the clear throughout, with every convenience suitable for the health and comfort of the occupants. From the porch, a small hall, lighted from the roof, is entered, with doors on either hand, to parlor or living room, and staircase passage in front, communicating with the kitchen at the back, chambers above, and cellar beneath. [Illustration: FIG. 20.--_First Floor._] The chamber floor, second story, is 9 feet in the clear through the centre, and 6 feet at the sides, (from the floor to the plate,) the roof cutting off three feet of the ceiling at the sides at an angle of 45 degrees. This loss of a few feet of the ceiling is more than compensated by the cottage-like effect it gives to the rooms, harmonizing the inside with the external appearance. The two principal chambers are provided with fire-places and ample closet room. The one over the parlor has two closets, built outside the frame, and a door into the single room, over the porch, forming a most desirable family chamber. Both these rooms have ventilators in the same chimney breast, and the small one may be warmed by a stove leading thereto. The other has a large closet over the store-room for trunks, linen, &c. The attic room over the kitchen wing is intended for the domestics. [Illustration: FIG. 21.--_Chamber Floor._] By reference to the plans, it will be seen that every room is of good size and form, cheerfully lighted, thoroughly ventilated, and of easy access one to another, at the same time that privacy, so essential, is maintained throughout. _Construction._--The building is constructed of wood, vertically sided, and battened, (with 1-1/2 inch tongued and grooved pine plank,) with horizontal strips in line of the window sills and floors, to hide the buts, and small triangular pieces in the corners, which gives the pretty effect of paneling. The whole is stained by a mixture of oil, &c., that heightens the grain of the wood, and gives a brightness of color, and that cheerfulness of effect, so desirable in rural dwellings. The roof is of slate, in bands of purple and green, and the chimneys are surmounted by terra-cotta pots. The whole is filled in with brick. This cottage is built in a substantial and plain manner, with cellar under kitchen, cemented on the gravel the same as the cistern, and all the interior wood work is oiled and stained. As a specimen of cottage architecture, (on the smallest scale, lodge class,) it will rank as one of the best. For simplicity, variety of form, symmetry of proportion, with convenience of arrangement and economy of space and construction, it forms a model cottage, that any one might live in and many covet, besides being an addition to the landscape and an ornament to the grounds. DESIGN No. 6. STONE STABLE AND COACH HOUSE. [Illustration: FIG. 22.--_Perspective._] This design was erected on the Hudson, during the past year, of the beautiful rock faced stone so abundant between the Spuyten Duyvil and the Highlands, and is a good example of such a building as will meet the requirements of a moderately extensive establishment. It is conveniently arranged, enabling all the work to be done with the most ease, and gives thorough light and ventilation, so essential to the health and comfort of animals. The time has gone by to give prospective prices for anything, but we have seen the day when this building might have been erected for about $4,000. A room for the coachman may easily be made on the second floor, and the plan increased or decreased to suit the wants of any one. [Illustration: FIG. 23.--_Ground Plan._] DESIGN No. 7. A FARM COTTAGE. [Illustration: FIG. 24.--_Perspective View._] We show in this design a style of cottage which, in these high priced times of lumber and labor, can be erected at a very reasonable figure; and although prepared for a farm cottage, will admit of such changes as will adapt it to the wants of those who require a higher grade of accommodation. It is the most natural thing in the world for any one to take up a plan and suggest innumerable changes and additions, always forgetting the unalterable condition of price, situation, and object, which restrained the architect while working it up. To prepare a design regardless of expense is a very different matter from devising one that gives the largest amount of accommodation within a fixed limit of cost. We shall arrive gradually at the precise figures, and endeavor to get the accommodation wanted by some of our readers. [Illustration: FIG. 25.--_Cellar._] [Illustration: FIG. 26.--_First Floor._] [Illustration: FIG. 27.--_Second Floor._] It has been frequently observed that the gate lodges and farm cottages attached to large estates are generally more attractive in their architectural proportions and beauty than the mansion itself; and this has been usually attributed to the education of the proprietor's tastes, the cottages being the latest erections. This impression is not, however, always true; for there is a peculiar beauty and attractiveness about cottage architecture which can not be produced in buildings of a larger and more commodious class. Certain it is that a prettily designed cottage will always arrest attention. "Among the first and most pleasing impressions," says a late writer, "of our trite friend, the intelligent foreigner, as he entered England by the old Dover road, were those suggested by the little whitewashed and woodbined cottages which caught his eye at every turn. All books of travels on English ground are full of them. Snugly sheltered in its bower of apple trees, or more stately group of walnuts, approachable only by its rustic stairs, or dotted at neighborly distances along the straggling village, with its trim garden of lavender and wall flowers, seen through the wicket gate or over the privet hedge, the English cottage, above or below, near or in the distance, was alike the delight and envy of the traveler, the theme of the journalist and the poet. 'There is scarce a cottage,' says an American tourist just landed from America and France, 'between Dover and London which a poet might not be happy to live in. I saw a hundred little spots I coveted with quite a heart-ache.' Whether or not Rogers would have given up his picture-lighted snuggery in St. James' Place for his 'Cot beside the hill,' and really preferred to have his latch lifted by the pilgrim, instead of his knocker by a London footman, it is certain that the cottage homes of England that border the main roads have long possessed a beauty far beyond the houses in other lands belonging to classes much higher in the social scale, and have been coveted, sometimes not without reason, by those who could, if they chose, have purchased them fifty times over." DESIGN No. 8. This design for a timber cottage is simple and at the same time picturesque, and built upon a site adapted to it, and in harmony with the architectural expression, the effect could not fail to be in a high degree pleasing. [Illustration: FIG. 28.--_Perspective View._] It will be seen that some of the principal timbers of the frame are intended to show on the outside, and that there is a designed contrast between the horizontal siding extending to the top of the posts, and the vertical and battened covering of the pediment above the ornamental string course. The brackets and posts which support the roof of the porches, should be chamfered, and these timbers should be of sufficient thickness to avoid any appearance of meanness, while at the same time, they should not be too heavy, and so destroy the proportions of the design. [Illustration: FIG. 29.--_Cellar._] The roof should be covered with shingles having their ends clipped or rounded. [Illustration: FIG. 30.--_First Floor._] [Illustration: FIG. 31.--_Second Floor._] The cellar may be divided in such way as to serve the wants of the occupants. A portable furnace might be placed at the foot of the basement stairs, which would warm the rooms on the first floor, and temper the air of the chambers above. The interior accommodations and conveniences are readily seen on inspection of the plans--(Figs. 30. 31). There is no waste of room, and for the uses of a small family, the accommodations would be found as ample as could well be obtained in a cottage of such size and cost. DESIGN No. 9.--RURAL CHURCH. DESIGNED BY THE REV. DR. CRESSY. This design is intended for a church which is to occupy a beautiful and commanding site on the western shore of Lake George, in the midst of the original forest, and is now in process of erection. It will also meet the requirements of several correspondents who have requested plans for rural churches which could be erected as economically and cheaply as possible, with due regard to proportion, fitness and beauty of expression. This design will be found to comprehend, we may say, in an eminent degree, variety of outline, correctness of detail, force of expression and purity of taste, with simplicity of execution, and in those parts of the country where lumber is abundant, and labor not exorbitant, it can be erected at a low cost. [Illustration: FIG. 32.--_Perspective._] We have a right to congratulate ourselves on the improvement which the last quarter of a century has witnessed among our people in the building and adorning of our edifices devoted to Christian worship. Downing, in his time, said, "that the ugliest church architecture in Christendom, is at this moment to be found in the country towns and villages of the United States." And speaking of the influence of what our churches should be, in the beauty of their proportions, and in the expression of the sacred purposes which they embody, and the feelings of reverence and harmony with God and man which they suggest, he fitly says--"We fear there are very few country churches in our land that exert this kind of spell,--a spell which grows out of making stone, and brick, and timber, obey the will of the living soul, and express a religious sentiment. Most persons, most committees, select men, vestrymen, and congregations, who have to do with the building of churches, appear indeed wholly to ignore the fact, that the form and feature of a building may be made to express religious, civil, domestic, or a dozen other feelings, as distinctly as the form and features of the human face:--and yet this is a fact as well known by all true architects, as that joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, are capable of irradiating or darkening the countenance. Yes, and we do not say too much, when we add, that right expression in a building for religious purposes, has as much to do with awakening devotional feelings, and begetting an attachment in the heart, as the unmistakable signs of virtue and benevolence in our fellow-creatures have in awakening kindred feelings in our own breasts. [Illustration: FIG. 33.--_Floor Plan._] "We do not, of course, mean to say that a beautiful rural church will make all the population about it devotional, any more than that sunshine will banish gloom; but it is one of the influences that prepare the way for religious feeling, and which we are as unwise to neglect, as we should be to abjure the world and bury ourselves, like the ancient troglodytes, in caves and caverns." Happily we are coming to appreciate these truths, not only in our cities, but in the country, and the ugly, unsightly, and unseemly structures which have so long deformed the land are giving place to edifices in which the true ideas of harmony, grace, proportion, symmetry and expression, which make what we call Beauty, are brought out in due proportion. The church we present is designed to be of wood, the country about the site affording an abundance of that material, at the lowest cost. An inspection of the design will show that the principal timbers of the frame are intended to be visible externally,--the weather-boarding being set back from the face of the posts and beams. This exterior covering is intended to be made of sound _rough_ plank, from ten to fourteen inches wide, and at least one and a-half inches thick. These are to be tongued and grooved, so as to make a close joint, and nailed to the frame in a _vertical_ manner. The joint is to be covered with a narrow strip, or batten, of one and a-half inch plank. These unplaned plank may be painted with two good coats and sanded, or they may be left to take such tints and complexion as time and the weather may give them. Lumber, at the proposed site, being cheaper and more easily obtained than lime, the interior of the church will be neatly ceiled with narrow boards, which will be lightly stained and oiled. The roof will be "open timber" of simple construction. All the wood work of the interior will be of pine, smoothly planed, stained and oiled, without paint, except the ceiling of the roof which should be colored, in order to give something like warmth of tone to the interior, the lack of which is often sadly felt in our country churches, particularly. This mode of weather-boarding and "open timber" finish is now so common that a more particular description is unnecessary. This church will seat, comfortably, about two hundred persons. Its cost will depend entirely upon the price of lumber and labor, of course, and these vary with different localities, and are particularly uncertain at this time. We will only add that it will cost no more to build with correct proportions and in good taste, than in disregard and defiance of these desirable and commendable principles. DESIGN No. 10. [Illustration: FIG. 34.--_Perspective._] We give below a somewhat different example of Cottage Architecture, of a form that is compact and every way available, at the same time affording every convenience in the arrangement of rooms desirable for a family of refined tastes and moderate means. This cottage may be built of wood, or, better still, in favorable localities, of brick or stone, and if suitably surrounded with tasteful landscape embellishments, will make a snug, pretty, and attractive home. One can, by the exercise of appropriate taste, produce the right kind of an impression in a house of this character. It should become a part of, and belong to the acres which surround it; it should be an indispensable accessory to the place itself, and the grounds should be laid out and embellished in such a manner that the whole combination impresses all with harmonious beauty, and not, as is too frequently the case, seek to make up the wretched deficiencies in the grounds by elaborate expenditure and display about the house. A true appreciation of country life will not tolerate slovenly, ill-kept grounds, and no house exhibits its true value unless there is a harmony in its surroundings. If this be attended to, a high degree of effect can be produced in houses of very moderate cost; houses that shall be roomy, warm, substantial, and in every way agreeable to their occupants. [Illustration: FIG. 35.--_Basement Plan._] The plans show the arrangement of rooms, and these can be made larger or smaller, or be differently disposed, to suit almost any fancy. In this design the kitchen apartments are below stairs; in future plans we shall give some with kitchen, laundry, etc., on the principal floor; or they can be readily added to this plan. The cost of a house is the one thing desirable; every one asks for it, and yet every one within our knowledge who has built a house himself at a stated price has been sadly deceived. Close specifications are very dry reading, and not appropriate here, and it is questionable how much service they would be to any but professional builders. It is reasonable to suppose, that if one without building experience undertakes it, he will have to pay something additional for the knowledge he will gain. If he places it to the proper account, then we can not be accused of misleading him. [Illustration: FIG. 36.--_First Floor._] [Illustration: FIG. 37.--_Second Floor._] Most men contemplate, at some period of life, the construction of a dwelling-house, but few deem it necessary to study their wants or prepare their plans until they have selected their site and made all other arrangements for building, and then proceed with all possible haste to plan a home. That which should have been the study of months or years, is hurried through in as many days, imperfectly done at the best, and the cause of frequent annoying and expensive changes after the work has commenced. It is true, that the site has very much to do with the distribution of rooms, but any ingenious architect can readily adapt a proper combination of rooms to suit the exposures and views of a particular site. It would be vastly better for those who prefer to arrange their own plan of rooms, (and there are but very few who do not,) that they take abundant time to consider well every thing relating to them; and although the hope of building may be very remote, it should not be considered time lost to begin to give one's thoughts a definite form of what he thinks a house should be; for if nothing else results, it may furnish a valuable hint for a friend, and will certainly enlarge one's information and experience in these matters. Almost every one is capable, with such hints as have been freely given in the volumes of the HORTICULTURIST, in the leading papers which treat on rural art, and the numerous valuable publications on rural architecture, to make such a combination of rooms as will best suit his peculiar wants, tastes, or fancies, and then, with the aid of an architect, it can readily be freed from mechanical impracticabilities, and put into a proportionate and harmonious form. Architecture, both in design and construction, is a profession that requires long years of study and practice to develop an expert, and those who really want a good thing at the least cost, usually seek such assistance; those who prefer to do their own designing and building, find out with absolute certainty the most expensive modes of erecting very ugly and ill-proportioned structures. DESIGN No. 11. A SUBURBAN SUMMER HOUSE. [Illustration: FIG. 38.] In the adornment of ornamental grounds, some considerable attention has been given to summer houses, and similar structures; but these have been mainly _rustic_ in their design and finish, and in this respect well adapted to their purpose and surroundings. The good taste of these structures will not be called in question. There are locations, however, in the more immediate vicinity of our large cities, where a style less rustic would seem to be more in harmony with the architecture which is found to prevail. We refer to residences on the outskirts of our large cities, with inclosures containing a few city lots. Here the architecture, so far from being rural, is, on the contrary, stiff, sharp, and sometimes very ornate. A rustic summer house in such a place would be an incongruity. A rustic house is in itself a beautiful object; but there is a certain charm in association which can not be widely departed from without doing violence to our conceptions of the fitness of things; and hence a purely rustic house without rural surroundings is destitute of the chief elements which give rise to the beautiful. Most persons would say it was out of place. The design herewith presented was prepared to meet the requirements of such a case; it is consequently somewhat elaborate. It is located on a small plot of ground within the city limits, and in full view from three streets. The grounds are laid out with a few rectangular walks, and such shrubs as the small size of the place would admit of. The house, we think corresponds with its surroundings. Its faults, if any, are a little too much ornament, but something of this kind seemed to be required in the absence of that more beautiful ornamentation produced by the drapery of Nature. The house is so located that it receives the morning sun for a few hours, but during the rest of the day is in the shade; it therefore constitutes a pleasant place of retreat for the family at all hours, and is used by the children freely as a play house. The floor is laid in narrow stuff, and is elevated a foot above the ground for the sake of dryness. Easy seats, a handsome centre table, and a hanging lamp complete the interior. Venetian blinds afford ample protection on a misty day or a chilly night, or admit the soft summer breeze on a hot and sultry eve.--_Horticulturist._ DESIGN No. 12. STABLE AND CARRIAGE HOUSE. This stable affords abundant accommodation for three horses, with carriage house, feed room, and a large harness room on the first floor, while the loft above may contain a coachman's room, and leave ample space for hay and straw. If required, a shed and cow house can be extended on the side opposite the carriage house, thus adding considerably to the effect of the external appearance. Under the stable there should be a cellar for the storage of roots for feed, and, if desirable, the winter stock of vegetables for household use. This stable may be built of wood, or of stone or brick. [Illustration: FIG. 39.--_Stable._] [Illustration: FIG. 40.--_Stable Plan._] DESIGN No. 13. This design is intended to cover, at a low cost, as much comfort and convenience as a moderate-sized family would require, and to distribute the same as much as possible on one floor. The cellar or basement kitchen is dispensed with and only enough cellar room provided to meet the wants of those who occupy suburban places of a few acres in extent. Where large quantities of vegetables are stored, or where cellar room is required for farm purposes, we think it better to build cellars separate from the residence, (an arrangement much more healthful, as well as convenient and desirable.) For the preservation in warm weather of meats, milk, and other perishable articles, a refrigerator, or, better still, an ice closet, can be set up at one end of the laundry. This can be supplied with ice through an outside door, and is infinitely better and more convenient than any cellar or spring house. The kitchen is without a fire-place, but is provided with a ventilator in the chimney near the ceiling. The cooking may be done by a stove, which, if properly contrived, is one of the most effective ventilators, and preferred by many housekeepers for all kitchen purposes. Or a range can be placed in the chimney, if desirable, or a fire-place, if it should be considered indispensable. [Illustration: FIG. 41.--_Elevation._] [Illustration: FIG. 42.--_Plan._] A door under the stair-way separates the front and rear halls, and disconnects the kitchen apartments from the rest of the house. All the doors opening into the rear hall should be hung with the new spiral spring butt, the best door spring that has come under our notice. It is entirely concealed, and works without a fault. The closets in the dining room are finished to give an interior appearance of a bay window. The dining room and the two chambers above, are intended to be heated by a fire-place heater set in the chimney, thus warming three rooms, at pleasure, with one fire. A small stove in the library will keep that comfortable. Or, in place of all this, the whole house may be heated by any of the approved modes, in the use of hot air, hot water, or steam. [Illustration: FIG. 43.--_First Floor._] The library, parlor, or general living room in a country house--and we like these rooms in one--should have the cheerful, healthful luxury of an open fire-place, and we know of no more elegant, cleanly and effective contrivance for this purpose than Dixon's low down, Philadelphia Grate, in which wood, coal, or any other fuel can be used equally well. The advantages combined in this grate are these:--the fire flat on the hearth, and radiating the heat from an oval cast iron backing: cold air supplied from below, and ashes, dirt, &c., shaken down into an ash-pit in the cellar, beneath the grate. We speak confidently of this invention, after a trial of two winters, and do not hesitate to say that, compared with this, the ordinary grate is worthless. Large rooms can be kept perfectly comfortable in the coldest weather, without heat from any other source. [Illustration: FIG. 44.--_Second Floor._] This house is supplied with a cistern, constructed with the utmost care, ten feet in diameter, and ten feet deep, holding 6,000 gallons of water. The roof is of slate, and the rain-water is therefore of great purity, free from color, and the woody taste usually imparted to it by falling on a shingle roof. At the laundry sink is one of West's lift and force pumps, which draws the water from the cistern. This pump is a simple and effective affair, and works with remarkable ease, is always in order, and may be considered one of the best pumps known. We have given it a thorough trial, and speak from personal knowledge. On one side of the laundry sink there is also one of Kedzie's large size rain-water filters, which holds several pails full of water, and which we commend as an admirable contrivance for the purposes intended. It possesses every merit claimed for it, and after more than a year's use, the water drawn from it is of such crystal purity and sweetness as to attract the attention of all to whom it is offered. No well has been dug or contemplated on the premises connected with this cottage. About one-half the cost of a well has been expended upon a slate roof, a large and carefully-constructed cistern, West's pump and Kedzie's filter--the other half has been safely invested in U. S. 7-30's, and instead of hoisting water fifty feet, for household, garden, and stable uses, the turn of a croton water tap is not more easy and convenient, and the finest flow of a silver spring of soft water, is not more beautiful than that delivered by West's pump and Kedzie's filter, which supplies for all purposes of the cottage, stable, and garden, water unsurpassed in its pleasant and wholesome properties. Those who seek the most convenient and reliable modes of procuring the purest and sweetest water, will find this to be the least costly and the most satisfactory. For a compact, convenient cottage, with every facility for doing the work of the household, with the least number of steps--in which all the essential modern conveniences are introduced, without the modern prices attached--for a low-priced, elegant cottage, we do not know of any plan more appropriate than this. In the construction of this house a bay-window was introduced in front, in the parlor, (Fig. 43.) and the veranda was made half octagon. These alterations add much to exterior appearance, as well as to the capacity of the parlor. On the side of the parlor and dining room an addition is contemplated, which will relieve the apparent want of variety which now exists, and essentially improve the external appearance. DESIGN No. 14. [Illustration: FIG. 45.--_Cottage Stable._] [Illustration: FIG. 46.--_Plan._] Fig. 45 shows a design for a cottage stable, giving accommodations for a horse and cow, two carriages, one or two wagons, and two tons of hay. The main building is so proportioned, that three more stalls may be added, and it may then become the wing of a larger building, to be used for carriage room and other purposes. For those who keep but one horse and cow, this design affords abundant room. DESIGN No. 15. ICE HOUSE. It is only within a few years that ice, in all seasons, has been classed among the necessaries of life. In large cities it is indispensable, but the cool spring-house or cellar in the country impresses many with the idea that ice, in summer months, can only be regarded as a luxury. Along with other conveniences in keeping with this progressive age, the ice-house has its place, and a country-seat of any pretensions is not complete without it. It is simple in construction, and can be built very cheaply of rough materials, or made as elaborate as is desirable. It forms a pretty feature about the grounds, if treated with some architectural taste. [Illustration: FIG. 47.--_Ice House._] [Illustration: FIG. 48.--_Ground Plan._] [Illustration: FIG. 49.--_Perspective._] DESIGN No. 16. This design, with the accompanying plans sufficiently explain themselves without minute description. The arrangement, as will be seen upon examination, secures a very large amount of accommodation, with good sized rooms, and ample store and closet conveniences. The building is compact, and at the same time presents a pleasing variety in its exterior appearance. By carrying up the library, two dressing rooms, for the two principal chambers, may be secured. When one contemplates building, and has put his thoughts and wishes into a tangible form, the leading question asked is, how much will all this cost? for what price in dollars and cents, without extras or additional charges of any kind, can this dwelling be erected in a good and workmanlike manner, in accordance with plans and specifications, and satisfactory to the owner? This is precisely the plain English of what a business man wants to know; for we hold that it is right and proper, that every one should look right through all the connected links and complications that require a considerable expenditure of money, and see that he lands carefully in the place anticipated. To start with the intention of disbursing $5,000, and wind up with an expenditure of $12,000, is not only annoying in a money point of view, but an impeachment of one's judgment and good sense, not pleasant to hear outsiders reflect on; for however much one might wish to shift the responsibility on others, it is one of those things that time will always place where it belongs. As long as men consider the arts of designing and constructing buildings to be of no special importance, or that they are qualified, without instruction or experience, to practice them, expensive blunders will naturally result, and sooner or later it will be discovered that such wisdom is dearly bought. There are many, however, who prefer to manage their building affairs thus, and who can only learn more agreeable and less expensive modes by actual experience; some do it from ignorance, some from supposed economy, and others from the supposition that they are best qualified. The design for a house or other building, and a plan of the interior arrangement of each floor, prepared by a professional man who makes such things the business of his life, is now very generally admitted by intelligent men to be essential; but the management or superintendence of the work by the party who has studied and designed it, does not seem quite so apparent. An architect prepares the drawings for a dwelling to cost $5,000; now whether it actually will cost $5,000, $8,000 or $10,000, in the hands of another superintendent, is an unanswered problem. A prevailing folly which we find very general, is to suppose that all men can build the same house, in all places, for precisely the same amount of money; and but few are willing to admit that they, of all others, are not the most competent to carry through the whole business of building at the lowest figure. Some must find out in the most expensive manner, that the profession of an architect, or the skill of a builder, can only be attained by long years of careful application. [Illustration: FIG. 50.--_Basement Plan._] [Illustration: FIG. 51.--_First Floor._] What a house will cost to build is a question always asked with the utmost simplicity, and a prompt and reliable answer always expected, and if not forthcoming at once, gives rise to a suspicion that one's professional ability is not of the most thorough character. There are so many conditions to govern results in house building, that even an approximate estimate may fall very wide of the mark. Two houses may be built from the same plan, and we may also say, from the same specifications; one by day's work, and the other by contract, and they shall be so exactly alike in all respects when finished, that an unprofessional observer would detect no difference, and yet one may honestly cost just double the amount in money expended on the other; even the same builder may build two houses precisely alike in all respects, and yet the cost be quite unequal. On one site stone may be easily obtained, a sand bank on the premises, a running brook close at hand, saw mills, brick yards, and lime kilns within moderate distances and accessible by good roads. The other site may be quite the reverse in situation, or have some decided disadvantages in obtaining some very necessary materials. We once built a fine stone house where stone was abundant and close at hand, but all the lumber and brick had to be hauled thirteen miles over hilly roads; the cost of that house has nothing to do with the cost of a similar house in a different locality. [Illustration: FIG. 52.--_Second Floor._] A competent business superintendent has a great deal to do with the cost of a house; one that understands all the tricks of every building trade, that knows the market well, and the value and quality of all building materials, and where inferior workmanship and materials can be used to an equal advantage with those of first class. To slight work and yet do it justice; to give it all the strength and endurance necessary, requires one of skillful acquirements. A mechanic may persuade a proprietor into many a long day's work, as it pays well to nurse good jobs when other work is slack, but an architect who understands such things would save the value of useless work. The cost of a house depends on a well-studied plan; this plan does not consist alone in the arrangement of rooms, windows, doors, etc., but involves a careful study of the anatomy of construction. One may save by a proper distribution of timbers, as well as make a very great saving by the arrangement of rooms. Good management is of the greatest importance, not only as a matter of economy, but as securing the best class of workmanship, and the most judicious use of materials. Good or bad management produces the same results in building operations as in war or any other pursuit. One takes up a capital work on rural architecture, written perhaps ten or fifteen years ago, before the general introduction of furnaces, steam pipes, gas, baths, marble basins, etc.; they find a house that suits them, which the book says will cost $6,000, and that is just the amount, by close figuring, that can be raised for building. The house is ordered, put in the hands of the best mechanic to finish all complete, and he goes ahead; he is unrestricted except by the book, and the author of it is a man of reputation. In the way of details perhaps nothing has been said; they are therefore extravagant in the use of materials, and elaborate in workmanship; as it is not considered good policy for a workman who has a good order, to make suggestions calculated to decrease the amount of work. When the bills to the amount of $6,000 have been settled, the house is found to be half finished, and an additional $6,000 is necessary to complete it; less that one year's interest of which would have amply sufficed to secure the services of one who has spent the best years of his life to learn how to design and to manage work to cost a specified price. When an architect says a house can be built for a certain price, it is to be understood that materials delivered on the ground shall not exceed an average cost, that the payments made are to be in cash, and that he manages the work. To hold an architect responsible or blame him for blunders in the cost of work that he designed and did not superintend, is manifestly unjust, yet it is a frequent occurrence. The cost of work is a question easily answered, when one is fully acquainted with all its bearings and has it under his control, but no one can say at what price a novice in building operations can execute it. DESIGN No. 17. [Illustration: FIG. 53.--_Stable._] [Illustration: FIG. 54.--_Stable Plan._ (_Reversed._)] Fig. 53 is a design for a cottage stable, with stalls for two horses, and the necessary carriage room and other conveniences. This design, in its exterior, presents as great a degree of variety in the combinations of form and shadow as the price will admit of. It answers the purposes of comfortable protection and convenience, as well or even better than the most costly structures. A horse needs a dry, well-ventilated apartment, and enjoys fresh air, daylight, and sunlight as well as human beings. Unless these very inexpensive wants are provided, no compensation is afforded by elaborate detail and workmanship. DESIGN No. 18. SCHOOL HOUSE AT IRVINGTON, ON THE HUDSON. Our architectural series would be by no means complete if devoted entirely to dwellings; and as the resources of an extensive professional practice in the arts which embellish and beautify our country may be largely made use of, we present here a design for another class of buildings. A school-house is not a building which every one contemplates erecting, and yet a large proportion are, or ought to be, interested in developing in structures of this class such architectural principles as shall make their impressions in early life, and influence future tastes. [Illustration: FIG. 55.--_School House._] This building is designed to accommodate about fifty scholars, being 25 by 40 feet, with a front projection 10 by 18 feet. In the basement a large furnace and abundant accommodation for coal. The main floor is divided into school-room, two recitation rooms, hat and coat room, wash closet with sink, and water closet, above which is a large tank, supplied from the roof. An outside cistern supplies cool drinking-water, the purest and healthiest water known, and renders the use of ice unnecessary in summer. The height of all these ceilings is nearly fourteen feet, and each room is thoroughly ventilated; the belfry is provided with a one hundred pound bell; indeed, nothing has been left undone that is calculated to promote the health and comfort of the pupils. The partition between the doors to the recitation rooms is made in sections, and can be easily removed, thus making one large room for exhibition and lecture purposes. The stage, in this case is to be placed at the left end of the room. The capacity of the building can be nearly doubled by occupying the entire floor as a school-room, and building an addition 12 by 24 feet directly in the rear, opposite to the front projection, for recitation rooms. The situation of this building at Irvington, on the Hudson, some twenty-five miles above the city of New York, is in a charming, healthy, and delightful locality; one made famous by the pen and residence of Washington Irving, and noted for its magnificent scenery, its views of river and mountain, and the fine taste displayed in landscape and architectural embellishments by those who have made their homes in this vicinity. We have always thought that those educational institutions possess the most attractions that are so situated that all surroundings shall have a favorable influence; and there is nothing like example in early training. Bring up and educate a boy among those who know nothing of the refinements of life, away from the progressive examples of art and taste, in a tumble-down, unplastered, ill-heated and ventilated apartment, and he never can become, with all the aid of books and teachers, as thoroughly cultivated and fitted for the duties of life, as one who has enjoyed associations of a higher order. School architecture has a meaning in it; there is value in proportion, harmony, beauty, light and shade, as applied to school buildings, that is not comprehended by all. A recent writer says better than we can say it, that "It is the duty of teachers, as well as parents and school committees, to see that the circumstances under which children study are such as shall leave a happy impression upon their minds; for whatever is brought under the frequent observation of the young must have its influence upon their susceptible natures for good or evil. Shabby school-houses induce slovenly habits. Ill-constructed benches may not only distort the body, but, by reflex influence, the mind as well. Conditions like these seldom fail to disgust the learner with his school, and neutralize the best efforts of his teachers. On the other hand, neat, comfortable places for study may help to awaken the associations enchaining the mind and the heart to learning and virtuous instruction with links of gold brightening forever." [Illustration: FIG. 56.--_Principal Floor._] [Illustration: FIG. 57.--_Perspective View._] DESIGN No. 19. This design was prepared for erection in the vicinity of Goshen, Orange Co., N. Y., and the accommodation limited to a price not exceeding ----. It presents in hall, verandas, and large parlor, some of the very necessary attractions of a country house, and is a good example of what can be done for a limited sum. While the plan is a parallelogram, and the roof free from hips and valleys, the general arrangement is such as to show considerable variety in outline, and one, we think, that will have a pleasing effect. Such houses, erected in the vicinity of New York, and many of our large cities, would add a large value to the ground they stand on, and pay a handsome rate of interest on their cost; better than any other class of building investments, as the supply is in nowise equal to the demand. It is so simple a matter, with present prompt and rapid railroad facilities, to invite a fair proportion of the young business men of our large cities to make their homes in the adjoining country, that we wonder capitalists and real estate owners do not more frequently make money for themselves and others by erecting tasteful, low-priced suburban homes. In former times, a house of this class erected in the country, would be painted exteriorly a pure white, with no relief, except probably in the violent contrast of bright green venetian blinds to the windows. This sort of taste unfortunately still remains, although in the progress of rural taste and art, the country is much improved in this respect. [Illustration: FIG. 58.--_Cellar._] There is a variety of colors, known as neutral tints, which are suitable for exteriors, and the effect produced by them is altogether pleasing, while a house painted white can never be an agreeable object in any landscape, however admirable its architectural proportions and finish may be. The tone of color for a house will depend upon its size, form, and situation, and it often requires a nice and cultivated eye to determine what would be most appropriate and effective. [Illustration: FIG. 59.--_First Floor._] For such a house as this, we should choose a light fawn color--not yellow--and paint the cornice, window-frames and other projecting and ornamental parts two or three shades darker than the body of the building. This will give a depth of shadow and expression which cannot be obtained in any other way. Large houses, with massive features of construction, will bear to be painted with darker colors, but they should not be too sombre, so as to give a gloomy appearance to the house. The country, with its bright sunshine, its rich adornments of flowers, and its numberless forms of beauty and grace, is eminently cheerful. It often happens that the painter does all he can to mar this cheerfulness and beauty, by startling contrasts of colors, and by destroying the harmony which pervades the landscape. [Illustration: FIG. 60.--_Second Floor._] DESIGN No. 20. A COUNTRY CHAPEL. [Illustration: FIG. 61.--_Perspective._] We present in this design a plan for a substantial and permanent chapel, having capacity for seating about four hundred. For the purpose for which it was designed, no distinct chancel was required. Such a chancel could be arranged, if desired, in a recess taken off the lecture or class room in the rear of the chapel. It could be lighted at the roof, or on the sides. [Illustration: FIG. 62.--_Ground Plan._] This chapel, built of stone throughout, with an open timber roof and stained glass windows, would be an ornament to any country locality, and a credit to the taste and liberality of those who built it. Every thing about such a chapel should be _real_, and no suspicion of sham or unreality should be tolerated in any part of the work. The practice of building the fronts of churches of stone, while the side and rear walls are constructed of rough brick, painted and marked off to resemble the stone, is very common, we know, both in town and country, but it is a species of deceit and false pretence which ought not to be. If the best and costliest material cannot be used for the entire structure, let the rougher and inferior material be fairly shown, in every part. If the means and liberality of the parish cannot provide oak or walnut for the interior finish, let the wood work be plainly painted, or what is better still, simply oiled, but there should be no cunning deception of graining, to represent the costlier wood. It is not _honest_, and, we take it, a church, built for religious worship, is the last place that should betray our human meanness and want of honesty. DESIGN No. 21. We show in this design what can be done with a substantial old farm house; how easily and beautifully it can be changed into a suburban home of elegant exterior, and comfortable and convenient interior appointments. [Illustration: FIG. 63.--_View of the House at the time of Purchase._] [Illustration: FIG. 64.--_The same remodeled._] This class of spacious and substantial farm houses, with the gambrel, curb, or Mansard roof, as shown in Fig. 63, is very numerous about the suburbs of New York City, and more particularly in the "neighboring province of New Jersey," where one finds them nestled in the valleys or by the road side, as best fitting to the taste of our early Dutch settlers, who prized seclusion and protection above bleak exposure and far-reaching views. [Illustration: FIG. 65.] As a general thing, the better class of New Jersey farm houses of this type were built of squared and hammered red sand-stone, laid up in regular courses, and in many instances the character of the work differed on all sides, the front being the most finely finished. And in many of the most pretentious of these houses, brick was substituted for the front, as being less common. There is, perhaps, nothing more difficult in an architect's experience than to make a fine thing out of a subject so destitute of beauty of form or proportion, and yet preserve the substantial walls and other belongings, that have stood for half a century, and are now stronger, and promise a durability that exceeds those of other houses built in this progressive age; and yet here is a "presto change" that will almost defy the keen eyes of the old settlers to recognize any trace of the ancient landmark that for fifty years has overlooked the beautiful valley of the Tenakill. [Illustration: FIG. 66.] There are very many of these old houses that are equally well adapted to wear a modern face, though but few purchasers can look through all such changes with the eye of a professional expert, and select that to which, at a low price, a certain beauty can be added, which, when done, shall indicate the wisdom of their choice. First impressions many times are sadly against all hopes of success. "With weather-stains upon the wall, And stairways worn, and crazy doors, And creaking and uneven floors, And chimneys huge, and tiled and tall." But these difficulties are the least troublesome to adjust, if the walls are good, and ceilings of a fair modern height. It may then be a better choice to adapt such a house to the present cultivated tastes and requirements, than to build anew from the foundation. In the plans, the dotted lines show the centers of the old partitions. Six feet have been added to the length of the wing, thus improving the kitchen accommodations. This house is situated some fifteen miles from the great commercial metropolis, on one of the new lines of Railroad, and in a locality of easy access to New York business men. DESIGN No. 22. [Illustration: FIG. 67.--_Stable._] [Illustration: FIG. 68.--_Plan._] This stable may be constructed either of wood, or of stone. It contains stalls for four horses, and affords space for their accommodation, together with a harness room and a tool closet. This latter is a convenience very essential to the comfort of the owner, as well as to the proper care and preservation of such implements as belong especially to the carriage house and stable. This building should be surrounded and screened with fruit trees and shrubbery, and then, with its evident architectural effects, it will become an attractive feature in the landscape of which it becomes a part, with the other accessories of the elegant country home. DESIGN No. 23. FENCES. In spite of all laws to the contrary, cattle will intrude upon one's property, and each and all must at great expense build and maintain fences for their own protection. There has not as yet been devised any practicable mode by which the enormous sums annually spent in fencing might be saved. The theory advanced, that it is cheaper for each to fence his cattle in, than to fence his neighbor's out, has not as yet been practically illustrated, if we except a few suburban localities. [Illustration: FIG. 69.] [Illustration: FIG. 70.] Fig. 69 represents a substantial fence, with a paneled base, of simple construction, and yet quite effective in appearance. In Fig. 70 the work is somewhat more elaborate, while the base is of stone, or brick. Each engraving shows two panels, with a gate in the centre. With chestnut or cedar posts, the pickets cut from 1-1/2 inch plank, and the whole kept painted, such a fence would last many years. DESIGN No. 24. RESIDENCE OF CHARLES F. PARK, ESQ. This residence of which we show only the floor plans, occupies a commanding position on the northern end of the Palisades, on the western side of the Hudson, some twenty miles above the city of New York, the river, mountain, and inland views from which are exceedingly fine, embracing the villages of Dobbs' Ferry, Irvington, Tarrytown, Sing Sing, Piermont, Nyack, and Tappan, as well as Tappan Zee and Haverstraw Bay, the distant Highlands of the Hudson, and the beautiful valleys of the Sparkill and the Hackensack, a section of country rich in historic associations, and highly appreciated by those who seek suburban homes. [Illustration: FIG. 71.--_First Floor._] [Illustration: FIG. 72.--_Second Floor._] [Illustration: FIG. 73.--_Third Floor._] This house was designed principally for a summer residence, being nearly fifty feet square, with wide halls and spacious verandah, and commodious and well ventilated sleeping apartments, the plans showing the arrangement of rooms. The style of architecture selected is that generally known as the Rural Gothic, which, perhaps, is the most useful and most beautiful of any that are adapted to the requirements of our climate. The almost square form of the plan is one of the most difficult to treat successfully in this style, yet has been carried out in the most satisfactory manner. This style admits of an almost never-ending variety of form and proportion, and in effects of light and shadow at all hours of day is unequaled. Its comparative expense but little exceeds the hipped and Mansard roofs. The building is constructed in the most thorough and workman-like manner, and is as well adapted for a winter residence as for summer. The frame is built in the balloon style, (the strongest known form of framing,) with deep studding filled in with brick, having double air chambers, is thoroughly finished throughout, is covered with a slate roof, and fulfills all the requirements of a substantial and commodious country residence. DESIGN No. 25. CARRIAGE HOUSE AND STABLE. The accompanying design for a carriage house and stable affords about the same amount of accommodation as Design 22. The arrangement, however, is somewhat different, and the exterior quite unlike it. In this plan the portion appropriated to the stalls is more ample, and the means for ventilation abundant. [Illustration: FIG. 74.--_Stable._] [Illustration: FIG. 75.--_Stable Plan._] DESIGN No. 26. RESIDENCE OF THOS. H. STOUT, ESQ., IRVINGTON, ON THE HUDSON. Irvington is a noted locality for the higher grades of country homes, there being many fine examples of substantial, roomy, and elegantly appointed mansions. Far within the gradually extending circle which limits the daily intercourse of the business man to the city of New York, it has become, in virtue of its position, healthfulness, fine scenery, and ease of access, one of the most favored of the suburbs of this city; a city whose rapid increase of population and corresponding decreasing comforts in conveyance from one portion to another, is turning the attention of those who like ease of transit, and the quiet and health of the country, to a residence among its beautiful and attractive suburbs. What the last ten years have accomplished in introducing rapid and reliable communication, and building up and improving the country about New York, will probably be repeated several times over in the next decade. An impetus has been given to rural life, that will increase with every facility that is offered, and it will not be many years before the suburbs of New York will compare with any city in the world; and we question, even now, if elsewhere can be found a suburban locality comparable with the east bank of the Hudson, from New York to the Highlands. [Illustration: FIG. 76.--_Residence of Thos. H. Stout, Esq., Irvington, on the Hudson._] The accompanying engravings illustrate a country house that embraces many of the best features of exterior variety, and interior compactness and convenience. The workmanship and materials throughout have been of the best description, and no pains have been spared to make it first class in every respect. Situated on the slope of the eastern bank of the Hudson, it overlooks the broad expanse of "Tappan Zee," and commands the views peculiar to this locality, that reach from the Highlands to the ocean. To build well, and to do so at a low price, is always desirable; and to build artistically, imposingly, attractively, does not imply elaborate finish or profuse ornament. Sand paper and decoration will never make an ill-proportioned building attractive to an educated taste, while a rough exterior of harmonious lines and forms will pass current with those who have an eye to the artistic. One of the most important lessons that the art student learns is that of effect; that effects can not be produced by smoothly finished surfaces or details; and that in architecture, as well as in sculpture or painting, there must be a strong bold manner of execution, when there is a desire to convey an impression of strength or power. [Illustration: FIG. 77.--_Cellar._] Where stone is conveniently obtained as a building material, its use in rural architecture deserves far more consideration than is usually bestowed on it; and in its unchiselled, quarried form it becomes desirable in an economical point of view. There is an imposing grandeur in the unhewn stone that asserts its presence in both near and distant views, and, with the proper combinations of proportion, and light and shade, will illustrate the finest architectural effects. Prevailing prejudices are too apt to consider it not only cheap, but inferior in protection and durability to finely wrought surfaces and smooth, close-fitting joints. We are too apt to estimate the value and beauty of a stone house by the amount of labor lavished on its exterior, as if the chisel possessed the power to make the joints more impenetrable, and bestowed an endurance commensurate with the story of expense that it tells. So long as we build well and honestly, with a proper regard to protection from the weather, in a substantial and workmanlike manner, good taste and sound sense will uphold the use of quarried rock, and discover a permanent strength and power in this Cyclopean masonry that elaborately finished surfaces and delicately wrought ornaments fail to express. [Illustration: FIG. 78.--_First Floor._] Dressed in squared blocks and hammered lines, stone becomes an expensive building material, and preference is then given to something else less costly; but if used in its quarried form, irregular in size and shape, it becomes, wherever conveniently obtained, among the economical materials used for building, and is unsurpassed for its impressiveness and durability. No paint is required to preserve it from the weather, and no color is so good as the color of the stone; time softens its tints, and the clambering vine that lays hold of the massive walls is a decoration beyond the resources of architecture. [Illustration: FIG. 79.--_Second Floor._] "If a building," says Mr. Ruskin, "be under the mark of average magnitude, it is not in our power to increase its apparent size by any proportionate diminution in the scale of its masonry; but it may be often in our power to give it a certain nobility by building it of massy stones, or, at all events, introducing such into its make. Thus it is impossible that there should ever be majesty in a cottage built of brick; but there is a marked element of sublimity in the rude and irregular piling of the rocky walls of the mountain cottages of Wales, Cumberland, and Scotland. "And if the nobility of this confessed and natural masonry were more commonly felt, we should not lose the dignity of it by smoothing surfaces and fitting joints. The sums which we waste in chiselling and polishing stones, which would have been better left as they came from the quarry, would often raise a building a story higher. "There is also a magnificence in the natural cleavage of the stone to which the art must indeed be great, that pretends to be equivalent; and a stern expression of brotherhood with the mountain heart from which it has been rent, ill-exchanged for a glistering obedience to the rule and measure of men. His eye must be delicate indeed who would desire to see the Pitti Palace polished." DESIGN No. 27. A CHAPTER ON GATES. We present in the following designs, several illustrations of the principle of the truss applied to wooden gates. It was described by us, several years ago in the _Country Gentleman_. [Illustration: FIG. 80.] [Illustration: FIG. 81.] [Illustration: FIG. 82.] [Illustration: FIG. 83.] Since then, in our professional rambles, we have accidentally noticed some thirty gates erected after these designs in different sections of the country, and, for aught we know to the contrary, it is one of the most popular gates that swing. The principle of this gate is best shown in figure 80, and consists of four panels of braces crossing each other, and held firmly in position by five iron rods, which can be tightened by the screws at the bottom. The braces are not tenoned, and there are no nails about the gate. There can be no sagging under any circumstances; but should such a thing occur from unequal shrinkage, it can easily be remedied by placing a thin strip of wood or sheet lead under the foot of the braces running forward. There is economy in the construction of these gates, as they can be made with a less number of joints, and greater strength and stiffness secured with lighter materials, than in any other style of gate we know of. The principle is the one used in railroad bridges and roofs of great span, and our own experience with them, having built and tested all the gates here illustrated, is, that they possess very decided merits. [Illustration: FIG. 84.] [Illustration: FIG. 85.] [Illustration: FIG. 86.] [Illustration: FIG. 87.] [Illustration: FIG. 88.] [Illustration: FIG. 89.] Fig. 81 is the principal entrance gate to one of the finest estates on the Hudson, above Tarrytown, and although similar in appearance to figure 82, has some very decided differences, the cross braces in this case reaching only to a second rail; the rods, however, pass through to the bottom; it is much more elaborate in workmanship, and the addition of a moulding on the top and bottom would increase its effect. Fig. 84 is the entrance gate at the New Windsor, N. Y., Parsonage, and has been hanging six years without a perceptible change. The braces in this are one inch square and doubled; they are not halved, but cross each other, two one way and one the other, in the manner shown in figure 85. There is no other mode of constructing gates in which rustic work can be made such good use of. The chief objection to all things made in the rustic manner is, that they soon fall to pieces, limbs shrink and twist, and nails do not hold; but a rustic gate held together by iron rods will remain good until the last brace has decayed. Fig. 86 is the principal entrance gate to one of the most finely finished country seats on Newburgh Bay. Figs. 87, 88, and 89, illustrate a novel style of hinge, peculiarly adapted to this gate, and is really stronger than any other. It requires less iron and less blacksmith work. Fig. 87 shows the top hinge corner, and figure 88 the bottom hinge corner. The iron which secures this end of the gate, passes through both top and bottom hinge, and binds them and the gate securely together. The additional fastenings for hinge are made with carriage-bolts. Nothing but a power beyond the enormous tensile strength of iron and the compressible strength of wood, will cause the gates to yield in ordinary use. Fig. 89 is a perspective view of the hinge, showing how it may be counter-sunk, and thus almost entirely concealed. Figs. 80, 81, 82, and 83, also show the hinge, and four different styles of stone gate piers. [Illustration: FIG. 90.] Fig. 90 is intended for a farm gate. The cross rails are secured by carriage-bolts passed through them and the main braces. Each end of the gate has an iron rod only, which is made heavier than the others, and saves framing. The hinge is made by having the iron rod project beyond the bolt head and nut, and the upper end is passed into an eye, as shown in Fig. 91, which is screwed into the post; the lower end is pointed, and is placed in a stone as shown, or it may rest on solid iron of similar form to the eye. Any intelligent laborer, with an axe and auger, can, with the iron work, make these farm gates. [Illustration: FIG. 91.] This principle of constructing gates admits of an infinite variety of designs; those given are merely suggestive. It admits of all classes of workmanship, from the plainest to the most elaborate, from the simplest farm gate to those required for the finished park, and in beauty, strength, and economy stands unequaled. Fig. 92 and 93.--Plan and elevation of an entrance gate, which we have executed in oak, and presents an effective appearance. [Illustration: FIG. 92.--_Elevation of Entrance Gate._] [Illustration: FIG. 93.--_Plan._] DESIGN No. 28. RESIDENCE OF TRISTRAM ALLEN, ESQ., RAVENSWOOD, N. Y. The accompanying view of Mr. Allen's house is a good example of the method of adding to a dwelling which has ceased to be of sufficient capacity for the requirements of the family. By reference to the basement or cellar plan, the outline of the old house and the foundation of the new will be distinctly seen. The addition transforms the cottage to a villa, and in a manner which preserves the proportions as harmoniously as if the whole had been erected at one time and from one plan, thus illustrating a prominent advantage in this style of architecture, which admits more freely than any other, successive additions, which, when properly designed, add to the variety of outline, and its beauty of light and shade. The different floor plans show the arrangements of rooms and their connection with the original building, which, it will be seen, are convenient and compact. [Illustration: FIG. 94.--_Perspective._] [Illustration: FIG. 95.--_Basement._] [Illustration: FIG. 96.--_First Floor._] [Illustration: FIG. 97.--_Second Floor._] Ravenswood is one of the most elegant of the suburbs of New York, being near at hand, and having frequent and rapid communication with the city. Situated on the Long Island shore, opposite the centre of Manhattan Island, overlooking the great metropolis and its outlying cities, of easy access to the Central Park by the Hell Gate Ferry, amid all the refinement of fine gardens, polished landscape scenery, and architectural taste, it presents at once all the enjoyments that a combination of city and country life can afford. [Illustration: FIG. 98.--_Attic._] DESIGN No. 29. RESIDENCE OF LINDLEY M. FERRIS, ESQ., NEAR POUGHKEEPSIE, N. Y. The residence of Mr. Ferris, of which we give the plans only, is located south of the city of Poughkeepsie, and almost or quite within its suburbs. The surrounding estate, of 150 acres of handsomely rolling land, possesses all the attractions of beauty and fertility so generally awarded to the finer portions of Dutchess county. In the immediate vicinity are some of the highly finished and well-kept country seats which adorn this portion of the Hudson, and make up the attractions which taste and refinement always add to country life. [Illustration: FIG. 99.--_First Floor._] The object aimed at in the design of this house, was that of a substantial and commodious mansion, suited to the requirements of a large family, and that should express its purpose in the simplest manner at a moderate expense. It was therefore desirable to avoid all costly irregularity of form, and all the fanciful varieties of gimcracks. The style selected as best illustrating this purpose is the Chateau roof, Louis XV style; the main building being 43 feet square, with a rear addition 25 by 29 feet; the plan illustrating the arrangement of rooms, verandah, etc. The first floor gives double parlors, (one of which may be used as a bed-room or library,) a sitting-room or reception-room, dining-room, and a large kitchen, with necessary closets, an inclosed verandah, water closets, etc. The second floor, main building, gives four large bed rooms and two smaller rooms for other purposes, and in the rear are four servants' rooms and a bath-room. The attic story, main building, has now five rooms, finished with closets, and two rooms more can be added by putting up two partitions. These upper rooms, in a roof of this character, are cool, well ventilated, well lighted, and agreeable in warm weather, there being roomy air chambers between the attic ceiling and the upper roof, and also between the walls of the rooms and the outer wall of the house. There is but little difference in the value of these rooms and those on the floor below, except convenience of access. The house is built of brick, in a first class manner, the lower roof slate, the upper one being tin; is thoroughly finished throughout, and is in all respects a convenient, durable, and commanding structure, giving the largest amount of room in a desirable and attractive form, with the most economy of means. It is situated on a knoll overlooking all the surrounding grounds, which include a number of other fine sites, one or two of which, we think, even more desirable than the one selected. It is not, however, an easy matter to choose one from a dozen sites, each almost equally good. [Illustration: FIG. 100.--_Second Floor._] A new road is now being laid through these and the adjoining premises, to connect two of the principal drives southward from Poughkeepsie, which when completed, will add a new attraction to the beautiful suburbs of this city. The views from the grounds, more particularly from the top of the house, are varied and extensive. The mountain panorama, which sweeps three-fourths of the horizon, beginning with the Fishkill mountains, and ending with the Catskills, is exceedingly fine. The eastern view embraces the Vassar Female College, the noble gift of Matthew Vassar, Esq., to the cause of female education. In the foreground and middle distance are the rich rolling landscapes of Dutchess and the fertile hillsides of Ulster counties, the glittering spires of Poughkeepsie, the lordly Hudson, and southerly are seen the famous Beacons and the Highland Pass, "Where Hudson's wave o'er silvery sands Winds through the hills afar." DESIGN No. 30. MODEL SUBURBAN COTTAGE--IN THE OLD ENGLISH OR RURAL GOTHIC STYLE. BY FREDERICK S. COPLEY, ARTIST, TOMPKINSVILLE, S. I. The general appearance of this Cottage, as seen from the road, is shown in the engraving, (Fig. 101.) which is a perspective view of the North and East Fronts. It is situated at Montrose, on the lake-like shores of Hempstead Harbor, near the village of Roslyn, Long Island, a spot noted for its beauty and healthfulness. [Illustration: FIG. 101.--_Perspective._] Size of building, 44 by 38 feet. Principal Plan (Fig. 103.) 10 feet high. P. shows a recessed porch, with double doors of oak, (oiled) the outer ones open, to be closed only at night and stormy weather, behind the one on the right is a space for wet umbrellas, &c., the inner doors have glazed panels to give light within, and should always be closed. V. is the vestibule, containing a spiral staircase, with walnut steps and rail (oiled). The floor laid with encaustic tiles, with ceiling groined, and walls finished in imitation of stone in the sand coat. On the left (under the stairs) is a private door opening into a lobby, fitted with wash-basin, water, &c., and lighted by a narrow window, that also serves to light the front basement stairs, so that a servant could answer a call, at either front or back doors, without passing through the central hall; which would not only be more convenient for them, but would be to the family and guests, especially in time of company, when the hall would form a central room, by closing the doors that lead to the stairs: nor would this interfere in the least with the domestics, or their duties: as they can go from cellar to attic without disturbing the privacy of a single room: and the guests could ascend, unseen to the dressing rooms above, (from either entrance) or depart in the same manner. [Illustration: FIG. 102.--_First Floor._] The hall screen, separating the vestibule, should be of real oak, (oiled) and lighted in the panels with stained glass, which would impart a soft and pleasant light to the hall, and produce a fine effect on either side, day or night. The hall is here placed in the centre of the plan, and so happily arranged are the doors and rooms, as not only to give it a symmetrical effect, but to unite the whole, _en suite_, without disturbing the individuality of either. Also, the hall lamp and stove would light and warm, equally, every room, besides passage, vestibule, and stairs. The cloak closet is in the passage which contains the back stairs. P. is the Parlor, which would be the favorite living room in the summer, as it faces the north, and has a large bay-window commanding a fine view down the harbor to the sound. [Illustration: FIG. 103.--_Second Floor._] L. is the Library, and living room, connected with the parlor by sliding doors, with recessed book-cases, on each side, and the same on the sides of the bay-window, here facing the south, and possessing a beautiful view of the bay and hills, with the village in the distance, which make it the favorite quarters in winter, being fully exposed to the genial influences of the sun during the absence of foliage at that season. On the right of the mantel is a private closet for plate, papers, &c., both these rooms have windows opening on the west veranda, with a fine view across the harbor. D. is the Dining room, and a most cheerful one, (as it should be,) with a large ornamental window on the east, admitting the morning sun, and a fine bay-window on the north, looking down the road and harbor, possessing a charming prospect of land and water. To harmonize with the bay (on the other end) is the sideboard recess with a dumb-waiter on the right, and a china closet on the left; on one side of the mantel is the door opening into the lobby, which communicates with the hall, and basement plan below, and fitted with wash-basin, water, &c., which would be found most convenient to wash hands or glasses, delicate or valuable articles of use not wished to be trusted to careless servants. It will be seen that the three bay-windows on this plan, are of different forms, and each fitted with inside shutters. C. is the principal chamber, or boudoir, facing south and east, with fine large windows in each. The one on the south has closets on each side, and opens into the conservatory, making this a most delightful ladies'-work-room. It will be seen that all the rooms on this floor, although not large, are of the most comfortable size, perfect and elegantly proportioned, and arranged with every conceivable convenience requisite for the enjoyment of all the comforts and luxuries of life. Chamber Plan (Fig. 103.) is nine feet high, and in keeping with the rest, in its admirable arrangements, furnishing five excellent rooms, with a bath room, convenient to all, fitted with the latest improvements, (the water closet enclosed, and vertical pipes, which would make freezing impossible). The four principal rooms are about equal in size and attractiveness, as they possess the same fine views as the corresponding ones beneath, and each finished with fire-places and ample closet room. The small room windows open on a balcony, with a charming view of the bay; and would afford an agreeable lounge in summer evenings, to enjoy the setting sun, or cool breeze. All the rooms on these two floors (except the last) to be fitted with Dixon's patent grates, and Arnott's ventilating valves, which would secure sweet, healthy, and warm rooms, without draughts. The hall, as will be seen, is well lighted and ventilated, not only by the staircase window, on the north, but by the ventilating sash-lights over the doors of every-room; the bath room door is also lighted in the panel with ground glass. Between the doors, on the east side, is the lift, or dumb-waiter, and dust register, which being in the centre of the plan, is of equal convenience to all. [Illustration: FIG. 104.--_Attic and Roof._] Fig. 104. Roof and attic plan. The attic contains five good rooms for the accommodation of the servants, storing fruit, trunks, &c., and drying clothes. As this plan has the same central arrangements as all the rest, consequently the same advantages in economy of space, and of direct and easy access to every room, stairs, &c. The landing here is lighted in the same way as the hall below, and by the same staircase window, with the addition of a large sky-light and ventilator in the centre, which would keep the rooms sweet and cool. Fig. 105, shows the Basement and Cellar plan, nine feet high, and containing every requisite convenience for the domestic duties of a family. As they are on the same level, and under the principal story, the noise and smell of the kitchen would be excluded. The garden entrance is shown by the steps on the southwest corner of area, which extends the whole of the west side, round to the hall door on the south; and covered by verandah, would make these rooms dry, cool, and pleasant, as they are but little below ground, and well lighted on two sides, with a large bay-window in each; the north bay fitted with wash-tubs, as this kitchen is intended as a back one, or scullery, and for cooking in during the heat of summer, it has a sink closet on the left of the fire-place, and dresser and shelves for pots and pans on the south side, by which, is a door opening into the basement, and one out on the area. The basement would be a cheerful room, facing the south with a large bay-window with seats and inside shutters, on the opposite side is a dresser fitted with plate rack, &c. On the east is the range and pantry; behind the range, in the hall, is a warm closet for clothes, shoes, &c., and opposite, under the stairs, is a dark one, for potatoes. At the north end of the hall, (and behind the scullery, fire-place, &c.) is the furnace room and front basement stairs. On the east side of the hall is the dumb-waiter, or lift. The coal cellar has two bins placed under the shoots, for large and small coal, with two on the east side for ashes and wood. Against the middle window is a wire gauze safe, for cooked meats, &c.; between this and the wine cellar is the dairy; the other division is for stores in general. All the partitions are made open, so as to admit the free circulation of light and air. [Illustration: FIG. 105.--_Basement and Cellar._] On observing the relative position of the different doors and windows, in the several plans, it will be found that the house may be ventilated by through drafts in every direction at pleasure; a luxury to be appreciated in the heat of summer. Also, by carrying the lift, or dumb-waiter, to the top of the house, and communicating with every floor, its full value would be secured, besides forming a ventilating shaft for the whole building, from cellar to attic. Another valuable labor-saving convenience (next to the water-works and lift) is the dust shoot, which is simply a tin tube, with registers in the floors of the different plans, to sweep the dust into, from the rooms, where it descends to the cellar, and is caught in a barrel, to be removed when full. It is here placed in the hall, by the side of the lift, on every floor, which by this central arrangement is at the door of every room. Construction, although of wood, is made nearly fire proof, by making the floors, walls, partitions and stairs solid. The walls and principal partitions are formed of slats of one inch thick by four inches broad, securely nailed one on the other, so as to form a one inch groove on both sides, to plaster on. This forms a good strong six inch solid wall, fire and vermin proof, and dryer than any built of stone or brick. The stairs to have their skeletons of iron work, filled in solid with cement. The floors of basement and entry to be of earthenware tiles, the kitchen and cellar cemented. That of the principal plan, (forming the ceiling of the basement, &c., the seat of danger,) should be formed of brick, arched on iron girders, and filled up with cement, and laid with larch, (as that burns less freely than any other wood). The hall, &c., to be laid with encaustic tiles. The floors of the chamber plans should have their timbers coated with plaster paris, and filled up with mortar and laid with larch, the plastering of the ceilings, &c., on wire gauze, instead of lath; a slate roof, and the walls of the basement plan of hollow brick, and plastered on the inner surface. By these simple and inexpensive means, the house would be nearly fire proof, and life and property secure. The exterior is covered by a sand coat, of a cheerful and rich light brown ochre tint, it being the most befitting for the situation and design, besides possessing the advantages of economy, and imparting a more substantial effect, it avoids that harsh and disagreeable glare and glisten of paint. DESIGN No. 31. The design on the following page, for a Head Stone, was published by us in the May number, 1864, of the HORTICULTURIST. It attracted the attention of one of our most intelligent subscribers and valuable contributors in Western New York, who desired to set up, in their beautiful Cemetery, a memorial of one of his household who "who had gone before." The monument was executed in this city, under the supervision of the friend who furnished the design for the HORTICULTURIST. It was cut from the Caen stone, and the execution was every way satisfactory. The gentleman for whom it was made says in a letter advising of its safe arrival:--"Last week I had it set in a solid foundation, and my highest anticipations are more than realized. I do not see how the monument could be better, as to material, design, and inscriptions. It is unique, yet chaste, highly significant and satisfactory. I have only words of praise and feelings of gratitude for a result that so fully answers to my ideal." [Illustration: FIG. 106.--_Head Stone._] "BALLOON FRAMES." "If it had not been for the knowledge of balloon frames, Chicago and San Francisco would never have arisen as they did, from little villages, to great cities in a single year."--SOLON ROBINSON. In these days of BALLOONING, it is gratifying to know that there is one practically useful, well tested principle, which has risen above the character of an experiment, and is destined to hold an elevated position in the opinions of the masses. That principle is the one which is technically, as well as sarcastically, termed Balloon Framing, as applied to the construction of all classes of wooden buildings. The early history of the Balloon Frame, is somewhat obscure, there being no well authenticated statements of its origin. It may, however, be traced back to the early settlement of our prairie countries, where it was impossible to obtain heavy timber and skillful mechanics, and the fact is patent to any one who has passed through the pleasures and the vicissitudes of the life of a pioneer, that his own necessities have indicated the adoption of some principle in construction, that, with the materials he has at hand, shall fulfill all the necessary conditions of comfort, strength and protection. To these circumstances we must award the early conception of this frame, which, with subsequent additions and improvements, has led to its universal adoption for buildings of every class throughout the States and cities of the West, and on the Pacific coast. The Balloon Frame has for more than twenty years been before the building public. Its success, adaptability, and practicability, have been fully demonstrated. Its simple, effective and economical manner of construction, has very materially aided the rapid settlement of the West, and placed the art of building, to a great extent, within the control of the pioneer. That necessity, which must do without the aid of the mechanic or the knowledge of his skill, has developed a principle in construction that has sufficient merit to warrant its use by all who wish to erect in a cheap and substantial manner any class of wooden buildings. Like all successful improvements, which thrive on their own merits, the Balloon Frame has passed through and survived the theory, ridicule and abuse of all who have seen fit to attack it, and may be reckoned among the prominent inventions of the present generation, an invention neither fostered nor developed by any hope of great rewards, but which plainly and boldly acknowledges its origin in necessity. [Illustration: FIG. 107.--_Isometrical Perspective View of the Balloon Frame._] The increasing value of lumber and labor, must turn the attention of men of moderate means to those successful plans which have demonstrated economy in both, and at the same time preserved the full qualities of strength and security so generally accorded to the old fogy principles of framing, and which, we presume to say, is inferior in all the true requisites of cheap and substantial building. Light sticks, uninjured by cutting mortices or tenons, a close basket-like manner of construction, short bearings, a continuous support for each piece of timber from foundation to rafter, and embracing and taking advantage of the practical fact, that the tensile and compressible strength of pine lumber is equal to one-fifth of that of wrought iron, constitute improvements introduced with this frame. If, in erecting a building, we can so use our materials that every strain will come in the direction of the fibre of some portion of the wood work, we can make inch boards answer a better purpose than foot square beams, and this application of materials is one reason of the strength of Balloon Frames. [Illustration: FIG. 108.--_Floor Plan._] The Balloon Frame belongs to no one person; nobody claims it as an invention, and yet in the art of construction it is one of the most sensible improvements that has ever been made. That which has hitherto called out a whole neighborhood, and required a vast expenditure of labor, time, and noise, can, by the adoption of the balloon frame, be done with all the quietness and security of an ordinary day's work. A man and boy can now attain the same results, with ease, that twenty men could on an old fashioned frame. The name of "Basket Frame" would convey a better impression, but the name "Balloon" has long ago outlived the derision which suggested it. [Illustration: FIG. 109.--_Elevation Section--manner of nailing--A. corner stud, 4 by 4--B. joist, 3 by 8--C. stud, 2 by 4._] [Illustration: FIG. 110.--_D. Upper Edge of Joist--E. Stud._] The moment the foundation is prepared, and the bill of lumber on the ground, the balloon frame is ready to raise, and a man and boy can do all of it. The sills are generally 3 inches by 8 inches, halved at the ends or corners, and nailed together with large nails. Having laid the sills upon the foundation, the next thing in order is to put up the studding. Use 4 by 4 studs for corners and door posts, or spike two 2 by 4 studs together, stand them up, set them plumb, and with stay laths secure them in position. Set up the intermediate studs, which are 2 by 4 inches, and 16 inches between centres, toe or nail them diagonally to the sill. Then put in the floor joists for first floor, each joist to be placed alongside each stud, and nailed to it and to the sill. Next measure the height to ceiling, and with a chalk line mark it around the entire range of studding; below the ceiling line notch each stud one inch deep and four inches wide, and into this, flush with the inside face of the studding, nail an inch strip four inches wide. This notch may be cut before putting up the studs. If the frame be lined on the inside, it will not be necessary to notch the strip into the studs, but simply to nail it to the studding; the object of notching the studding is to present a flush surface for lathing, as well as to form a shoulder or bearing necessary to sustain the second floor; both of these are accomplished by lining inside the studding--(for small barns and outbuildings that do not require plastering, nail the strip 1 by 4 to the studding)--on this rests the joists of the second floor, the ends of which come flush to the outside face of the studding, and both ends of each joist are securely nailed to each stud; the bearing of the joist on the inch strip below is close by the stud, and the inch strip rests on a shoulder or lower side of the notch cut to receive it. This bearing is so strong that the joists will break before it would yield. Having reached the top of the building, each stud is sawed off to an equal height; if any are too short they are spliced by placing one on top of the other, and nailing a strip of inch board on both sides. The wall plate, 2 by 4 inches, is laid flat on top of the studding, and nailed to each stud; the rafters are then put on; they are notched, allowing the ends to project outside for cornice, &c. The bearing of each rafter comes directly over the top of each stud, and is nailed to it. [Illustration: FIG. 111.--_Side Elevation.--G. Manner of splicing sills.--F. Manner of splicing studs._] [Illustration: FIG. 112.--_End Elevation._] A Balloon Frame looks light, and its name was given in contempt by those old fogy mechanics who had been brought up to rob a stick of timber of all its strength and durability, by cutting it full of mortices, tenons and augur holes, and then supposing it to be stronger than a far lighter stick differently applied, and with all its capabilities unimpaired. Properly constructed, and with timber adapted to its purposes, it will stand securely against the fury of the elements, and answer every purpose that an old fashioned timber frame is calculated to fulfill. When the building is supported on posts, heavy sills are necessary, and the frame should be securely nailed or spiked together. The bents may be 16, 24 or 30 inches apart, and covered in the usual manner. The thrust of both the rafters and contents of the building are outward; the tie, 1 by 4, is abundantly strong, as each one will practically sustain, in the direction of its fibre, three tons. The floor joists are nailed to studs at each end. No one need fear any lack of perfect security, as these ties exceed in strength any hold that tenons could have. Fig. 113 illustrates the manner of framing buildings of one story, such as are used about almost every farm or country seat, as tool houses, granaries, wash-houses, spring houses, &c., &c. [Illustration: FIG. 113.--_Isometrical Perspective Balloon Frame._] Very small buildings, if unplastered, will not require ceiling joists; a tie at each end will be all-sufficient. Moderate size buildings will be strong enough if the ceiling joists are left out, and collars put on half way up the rise of the rafter. According to the size and uses of the building, the collars or ceiling joists may be put on every rafter, every other, or every third rafter; floor joists should be about 16 inches between centres, and the studding may be from 16 inches to 8 feet apart; in the last case only, every sixth floor joist is nailed to the stud, the intermediate ones being arranged equally distant from each other between the studding. Where the studding is placed wide apart, the plate must necessarily be heavier to sustain the roof; if vertical siding be used, it should be nailed to the sill and plate, and to an intermediate horizontal strip spiked in between the studding; if done in this way, the plate may be lighter; when horizontal siding is used, the studding should not be more than 4 feet apart--in small buildings, say 12 by 20 feet, we should cut all our stuff, except joists, from 1-1/4 inch plank. Studs 4 inches wide, rafters 5 inches wide; floor joists should be 2 by 9 inches, and put all up 30 inches between centres. In Fig. 114 is shown the manner of constructing frames for buildings of three stories. The corner stud, 4 by 4, is composed of and built up with two 2 by 4 studs, which are nailed together, breaking joints as the building progresses in height; the splicing of studs is done in the same manner, being nailed together as fast as additional length is required; the joists of the last floor are laid upon the plate, and they act as tie-beams to sustain the thrust of the rafters. We consider the splice where the studs butt and have side strips nailed to them, to be the most secure; the lapping splice is very generally used, however, and found to answer every purpose. Ribs for vertical siding may be put on in two ways; one as shown, by which the ribs run over the sill, and are nailed to it; a strip of the same thickness as ribs, say 1-1/4 inches, nailed on to the sill to fill up the space between the ribs, and is then covered by the outside plinth or base. The other plan is to set the studs back 1-1/4 inches from face edge of sill; then let the end of ribs bevel down on the sill, or dovetail them into the edge. [Illustration: FIG. 114.--_Three Story Building._ _Balloon Framing._ _Details._ Fig. 115. Joist notched down on plate. Fig. 116. Side girt not gained in for small unplastered buildings. Fig. 117. Inside lining--answers the same purpose as a side girth. Fig. 118. Joist bearing on sill.] Either outside or inside lining may be used, or both together. Where diagonal lining is used, it should be reversed or run the other way on the opposite side of the house. [Illustration: FIG. 120.--_Diagonal Ribs for Vertical or Battened Siding._] The lining of a Balloon Frame adds immensely to its strength, particularly so if put on diagonally; it may be done outside or inside, though on the whole the inside is preferable. If done outside, it should be carried over the sill and nailed to it; the sill being wider than the studding, in order to get a larger bearing on the masonry, and the floor joists being in the way, does not admit of inside lining being put on in the same manner. A first-class Balloon Frame should be lined, if for vertical siding, outside the studding--if horizontal siding is used, line inside; it makes the frame stiffer and the building warmer. Some line diagonally, say from centre next the first floor towards extreme upper corners both ways; others line one side diagonally in one direction, and the other in an opposite direction. This makes assurance of strength doubly sure. If lined inside, nail perpendicular lath to the lining 16 inches from centres, and on this lath horizontally for plastering. [Illustration: FIG. 121.--_Showing lengthwise and crosswise manner of tying frame._] The principle of Balloon Framing is the true one for strength, as well as for economy. If a mechanic is employed, the Balloon Frame can be put up for _forty per cent. less money_ than the mortice and tenon frame. If you erect a balloon frame yourself, which you can easily do without the aid of a mechanic, it costs the price of the materials and whatever value you put upon your own time. Fig. 23 shows the manner of attaching the flooring to gable end studding, and in those buildings in which the thrust of the rafters is in the direction of the flooring--if every third stud be bolted to the joist in the manner shown, it makes the tie equal if not superior to that in the direction of the joists. [Illustration: FIG. 122.--_Manner of Framing Large Barns._] Fig. 122 explains the manner of framing the largest class of barns. Wide openings, like bays, require the use of heavy timber, and the mortice, tenon and brace, only so far as the gallows frame is concerned; the balance of the frame is of light stuff, studding 2 feet to 2-1/2 feet apart, 2 by 6 inches, every third one 2 by 8 inches, into which is gained the side girt, it being nailed to the others. On this rests one end of the temporary floors, the gallows frame supports the roof, and the rafters are secured to it, so that they become ties. The side of this building is like a floor turned on edge, and is firmly secured by the floor joists at the bottom and the rafters at the top. Warehouses, depots, and other buildings of a very large size, can be made stronger by using the Balloon Frame, instead of the heavy timber frame. Those who prefer to err on the right side, can get unnecessary strength by using deeper studding, placing them closer together, putting in one or more rows of bridging and as many diagonal ribs as they like. In large buildings there is no saving in timber, only the substitution of small sizes for large--the great saving is in the labor, which is quite important. The following are some of the advantages claimed for the Balloon Frame: 1. The principal labor of framing is dispensed with. 2. It is a far cheaper frame to raise. 3. It is stronger and more durable than any other frame. 4. Any stick can be removed, and another put in its place, without disturbing the strength of those remaining--in fact, the whole building can be renewed stick by stick. 5. It is adapted to every style of building, and better adapted for all irregular forms. 6. It is forty per cent. cheaper than any other known style of frame. 7. It embraces strength, security, comfort and economy, and can be put up without the aid of a mechanic. Established in 1846. "THE HORTICULTURIST," AND JOURNAL OF RURAL ART AND RURAL TASTE. Published Monthly at Two Dollars and Fifty Cents per Annum, Twenty-five Cents per Number, and devoted to GRAPE CULTURE, FLOWERS, RURAL ARCHITECTURE, FRUITS, GARDENING, LANDSCAPE ADORNMENT, AND RURAL PURSUITS. Forming an annual volume of 400 royal octavo pages handsomely Illustrated. The Author of _My Farm of Edgewood_, The Author of _Ten Acres Enough_, The Author of _The Grape Culturist_, The Author of _Flowers for Parlor and Garden_, The Author of _American Fruit Grower's Guide_. Rev. Dr. CRESCY, and others of the best practical talent and ability, both East and West, write regularly. _Back Volumes and Numbers supplied._ GEO. E. & F. W. WOODWARD, PUBLISHERS, 37 PARK ROW, N. Y. WOODWARD'S GRAPERIES AND HORTICULTURAL BUILDINGS, By Geo. E. & F. W. Woodward, ARCHITECTS AND HORTICULTURISTS. A new, practical, and original Work on the design and construction of all classes of Horticultural Buildings, including Hot-beds, Propagating Houses, Hot and Cold Graperies, Orchard Houses, Conservatories, &c., with the best modes of heating, &c. Elegantly Illustrated. Being the result of an extensive professional practice. GEO. E. & F. W. WOODWARD, PUBLISHERS, _Office of the "Horticulturist," 37 PARK ROW, N. Y._ GEO. E. & F. W. WOODWARD, PUBLISHERS No. 37 PARK ROW, NEW YORK OFFICE OF THE HORTICULTURIST. BOOKS ON AGRICULTURE, HORTICULTURE, ARCHITECTURE, LANDSCAPE GARDENING, AND RURAL ART For Sale at this Office, or mailed, post paid, on receipt of Publisher's prices. *** _Priced Catalogue on application._ NEW YORK AGENTS for the _Country Gentleman, Gardeners' Monthly, & Hovey's Magazine_. Subscriptions received and back numbers supplied. FIRE ON THE HEARTH. GEO. E. & F. W. WOODWARD, 37 PARK ROW, N. Y. _New York Agents for Dixon's low down Philadelphia Grates, for burning Wood or Coal, for sale at Manufacturer's Prices._ "It is a plan for warming houses, which has never in all its points been surpassed." * * * * * * "It is believed that there is scarcely a single educated Physician in Philadelphia, who owns the house he lives in, who is not supplied with one or more of these delightful luxuries." * * "We have one of these admirable contrivances, put in our house in 1859, and every additional year only increases our appreciation of the luxury."--_Dr. W. W. Hall, editor of Hall's Journal of Health, N. Y._ _Price $35 and upwards according to size and finish. Samples at this Office._ * * * * * Transcriber's Notes: Obvious punctuation errors repaired. This text uses both hyphenated and spaced forms of its rooms, i.e. bed-room and bed room. Also used were variations on hyphenated and not words such stair-way and stairway. Page 16 "ofwhich" changed to "of which" (of which the public) Page 28, "accomodation" changed to "accommodation" (of this accommodation) Page 34, "accomodation" changed to "accommodation" (amount of accommodation) Page 83, "understand" changed to "understands" (one that understands) Page 104, "accomodation" changed to "accommodation" (for their accommodation) Page 124, "posesses" changed to "possesses" (possesses all the attractions) Page 148, "desends" changed to "descends" (where it descends) Page 164, "23" changed to "121" (Fig. 121 shows the manner) 
37189	----	produced from scanned images of public domain material from the Google Print project.) [Illustration: frontispiece] THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER BY REBECCA WEST NEW [Illustration: colophon] YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER -C- PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS He lay there in the confiding relaxation of a child _Frontispiece_ FACING PAGE "Give it a brush now and then, like a good soul" 6 She would get into the four-foot punt that was used as a ferry and bring it over very slowly 66 "I oughtn't to do it, ought I?" 176 THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER CHAPTER I "Ah, don't begin to fuss!" wailed Kitty. "If a woman began to worry in these days because her husband hadn't written to her for a fortnight! Besides, if he'd been anywhere interesting, anywhere where the fighting was really hot, he'd have found some way of telling me instead of just leaving it as 'Somewhere in France.' He'll be all right." We were sitting in the nursery. I had not meant to enter it again, now that the child was dead; but I had come suddenly on Kitty as she slipped the key into the lock, and I had lingered to look in at the high room, so full of whiteness and clear colors, so unendurably gay and familiar, which is kept in all respects as though there were still a child in the house. It was the first lavish day of spring, and the sunlight was pouring through the tall, arched windows and the flowered curtains so brightly that in the old days a fat fist would certainly have been raised to point out the new, translucent glories of the rosebud. Sunlight was lying in great pools on the blue cork floor and the soft rugs, patterned with strange beasts, and threw dancing beams, which should have been gravely watched for hours, on the white paint and the blue distempered walls. It fell on the rocking-horse, which had been Chris's idea of an appropriate present for his year-old son, and showed what a fine fellow he was and how tremendously dappled; it picked out Mary and her little lamb on the chintz ottoman. And along the mantelpiece, under the loved print of the snarling tiger, in attitudes that were at once angular and relaxed, as though they were ready for play at their master's pleasure, but found it hard to keep from drowsing in this warm weather, sat the Teddy Bear and the chimpanzee and the woolly white dog and the black cat with eyes that roll. Everything was there except Oliver. I turned away so that I might not spy on Kitty revisiting her dead. But she called after me: "Come here, Jenny. I'm going to dry my hair." And when I looked again I saw that her golden hair was all about her shoulders and that she wore over her frock a little silken jacket trimmed with rosebuds. She looked so like a girl on a magazine cover that one expected to find a large "15 cents" somewhere attached to her person. She had taken Nanny's big basket-chair from its place by the high-chair, and was pushing it over to the middle window. "I always come in here when Emery has washed my hair. It's the sunniest room in the house. I wish Chris wouldn't have it kept as a nursery when there's no chance--" She sat down, swept her hair over the back of the chair into the sunlight, and held out to me her tortoiseshell hair-brush. "Give it a brush now and then, like a good soul; but be careful. Tortoise snaps so!" I took the brush and turned to the window, leaning my forehead against the glass and staring unobservantly at the view. You probably know the beauty of that view; for when Chris rebuilt Baldry Court after his marriage he handed it over to architects who had not so much the wild eye of the artist as the knowing wink of the manicurist, and between them they massaged the dear old place into matter for innumerable photographs in the illustrated papers. The house lies on the crest of Harrowweald, and from its windows the eye drops to miles of emerald pasture-land lying wet and brilliant under a westward line of sleek hills; blue with distance and distant woods, while nearer it range the suave decorum of the lawn and the Lebanon cedar, the branches of which are like darkness made palpable, and the minatory gauntnesses of the topmost pines in the wood that breaks downward, its bare boughs a close texture of browns and purples, from the pond on the edge of the hill. [Illustration: "Give it a brush now and then, like a good soul"] That day its beauty was an affront to me, because, like most Englishwomen of my time, I was wishing for the return of a soldier. Disregarding the national interest and everything else except the keen prehensile gesture of our hearts toward him, I wanted to snatch my Cousin Christopher from the wars and seal him in this green pleasantness his wife and I now looked upon. Of late I had had bad dreams about him. By nights I saw Chris running across the brown rottenness of No-Man's-Land, starting back here because he trod upon a hand, not even looking there because of the awfulness of an unburied head, and not till my dream was packed full of horror did I see him pitch forward on his knees as he reached safety, if it was that. For on the war-films I have seen men slip down as softly from the trench-parapet, and none but the grimmer philosophers could say that they had reached safety by their fall. And when I escaped into wakefulness it was only to lie stiff and think of stories I had heard in the boyish voice of the modern subaltern, which rings indomitable, yet has most of its gay notes flattened: "We were all of us in a barn one night, and a shell came along. My pal sang out, 'Help me, old man; I've got no legs!' and I had to answer, 'I can't, old man; I've got no hands!'" Well, such are the dreams of Englishwomen to-day. I could not complain, but I wished for the return of our soldier. So I said: "I wish we could hear from Chris. It is a fortnight since he wrote." And then it was that Kitty wailed, "Ah, don't begin to fuss!" and bent over her image in a hand-mirror as one might bend for refreshment over scented flowers. I tried to build about me such a little globe of ease as always ensphered her, and thought of all that remained good in our lives though Chris was gone. I was sure that we were preserved from the reproach of luxury, because we had made a fine place for Chris, one little part of the world that was, so far as surfaces could make it so, good enough for his amazing goodness. Here we had nourished that surpassing amiability which was so habitual that one took it as one of his physical characteristics, and regarded any lapse into bad temper as a calamity as startling as the breaking of a leg; here we had made happiness inevitable for him. I could shut my eyes and think of innumerable proofs of how well we had succeeded, for there never was so visibly contented a man. And I recalled all that he did one morning just a year ago when he went to the front. First he had sat in the morning-room and talked and stared out on the lawns that already had the desolation of an empty stage, although he had not yet gone; then broke off suddenly and went about the house, looking into many rooms. He went to the stables and looked at the horses and had the dogs brought out; he refrained from touching them or speaking to them, as though he felt himself already infected with the squalor of war and did not want to contaminate their bright physical well-being. Then he went to the edge of the wood and stood staring down into the clumps of dark-leaved rhododendrons and the yellow tangle of last year's bracken and the cold winter black of the trees. (From this very window I had spied on him.) Then he moved broodingly back to the house to be with his wife until the moment of his going, when Kitty and I stood on the steps to see him motor off to Waterloo. He kissed us both. As he bent over me I noticed once again how his hair was of two colors, brown and gold. Then he got into the car, put on his Tommy air, and said: "So long! I'll write you from Berlin!" and as he spoke his head dropped back, and he set a hard stare on the house. That meant, I knew, that he loved the life he had lived with us and desired to carry with him to the dreary place of death and dirt the complete memory of everything about his home, on which his mind could brush when things were at their worst, as a man might finger an amulet through his shirt. This house, this life with us, was the core of his heart. "If he could come back!" I said. "He was so happy here!" And Kitty answered: "He could not have been happier." It was important that he should have been happy, for, you see, he was not like other city men. When we had played together as children in that wood he had always shown great faith in the imminence of the improbable. He thought that the birch-tree would really stir and shrink and quicken into an enchanted princess, that he really was a red Indian, and that his disguise would suddenly fall from him at the right sundown, that at any moment a tiger might lift red fangs through the bracken, and he expected these things with a stronger motion of the imagination than the ordinary child's make-believe. And from a thousand intimations, from his occasional clear fixity of gaze on good things as though they were about to dissolve into better, from the passionate anticipation with which he went to new countries or met new people, I was aware that this faith had persisted into his adult life. He had exchanged his expectation of becoming a red Indian for the equally wistful aspiration of becoming completely reconciled to life. It was his hopeless hope that some time he would have an experience that would act on his life like alchemy, turning to gold all the dark metals of events, and from that revelation he would go on his way rich with an inextinguishable joy. There had been, of course, no chance of his ever getting it. Literally there wasn't room to swing a revelation in his crowded life. First of all, at his father's death he had been obliged to take over a business that was weighted by the needs of a mob of female relatives who were all useless either in the old way, with antimacassars, or in the new way, with golf-clubs; then Kitty had come along and picked up his conception of normal expenditure, and carelessly stretched it as a woman stretches a new glove on her hand. Then there had been the difficult task of learning to live after the death of his little son. It had lain on us, the responsibility, which gave us dignity, to compensate him for his lack of free adventure by arranging him a gracious life. But now, just because our performance had been so brilliantly adequate, how dreary was the empty stage! We were not, perhaps, specially contemptible women, because nothing could ever really become a part of our life until it had been referred to Chris's attention. I remember thinking, as the parlor-maid came in with a card on the tray, how little it mattered who had called and what flag of prettiness or wit she flew, since there was no chance that Chris would come in and stand over her, his fairness red in the firelight, and show her that detached attention, such as an unmusical man pays to good music, which men of anchored affections give to attractive women. Kitty read from the card: "'Mrs. William Grey, Mariposa, Ladysmith Road, Wealdstone,' I don't know anybody in _Wealdstone_." That is the name of the red suburban stain which fouls the fields three miles nearer London than Harrowweald. One cannot now protect one's environment as one once could. "Do I know her, Ward? Has she been here before?" "Oh, no, ma'am." The parlor-maid smiled superciliously. "She said she had news for you." From her tone one could deduce an over-confiding explanation made by a shabby visitor while using the door-mat almost too zealously. Kitty pondered, then said: "I'll come down." As the girl went, Kitty took up the amber hair-pins from her lap and began swathing her hair about her head. "Last year's fashion," she commented; "but I fancy it'll do for a person with that sort of address." She stood up, and threw her little silk dressing-jacket over the rocking-horse. "I'm seeing her because she may need something, and I specially want to be kind to people while Chris is away. One wants to deserve well of heaven." For a minute she was aloof in radiance, but as we linked arms and went out into the corridor she became more mortal, with a pout. "The people that come breaking into one's nice, quiet day!" she moaned reproachfully, and as we came to the head of the broad stair-case she leaned over the white balustrade to peer down on the hall, and squeezed my arm. "Look!" she whispered. Just beneath us, in one of Kitty's prettiest chintz arm-chairs, sat a middle-aged woman. She wore a yellowish raincoat and a black hat with plumes. The sticky straw hat had only lately been renovated by something out of a little bottle bought at the chemist's. She had rolled her black thread gloves into a ball on her lap, so that she could turn her gray alpaca skirt well above her muddy boots and adjust its brush-braid with a seamed red hand that looked even more worn when she presently raised it to touch the glistening flowers of the pink azalea that stood on a table beside her. Kitty shivered, then muttered: "Let's get this over," and ran down the stairs. On the last step she paused and said with conscientious sweetness, "Mrs. Grey!" "Yes," answered the visitor. She lifted to Kitty a sallow and relaxed face the expression of which gave me a sharp, pitying pang of prepossession in her favor: it was beautiful that so plain a woman should so ardently rejoice in another's loveliness. "Are you Mrs. Baldry?" she asked, almost as if she were glad about it, and stood up. The bones of her bad stays clicked as she moved. Well, she was not so bad. Her body was long and round and shapely, and with a noble squareness of the shoulders; her fair hair curled diffidently about a good brow; her gray eyes, though they were remote, as if anything worth looking at in her life had kept a long way off, were full of tenderness; and though she was slender, there was something about her of the wholesome, endearing heaviness of the ox or the trusted big dog. Yet she was bad enough. She was repulsively furred with neglect and poverty, as even a good glove that has dropped down behind a bed in a hotel and has lain undisturbed for a day or two is repulsive when the chambermaid retrieves it from the dust and fluff. She flung at us as we sat down: "My general maid is sister to your second housemaid." It left us at a loss. "You've come about a reference?" asked Kitty. "Oh, no. I've had Gladys two years now, and I've always found her a very good girl. I want no reference." With her finger-nail she followed the burst seam of the dark pigskin purse that slid about on her shiny alpaca lap. "But girls talk, you know. You mustn't blame them." She seemed to be caught in a thicket of embarrassment, and sat staring up at the azalea. With the hardness of a woman who sees before her the curse of women's lives, a domestic row, Kitty said that she took no interest in servants' gossip. "Oh, it isn't--" her eyes brimmed as though we had been unkind--"servants' gossip that I wanted to talk about. I only mentioned Gladys"--she continued to trace the burst seam of her purse--"because that's how I heard you didn't know." "What don't I know?" Her head drooped a little. "About Mr. Baldry. Forgive me, I don't know his rank." "Captain Baldry," supplied Kitty, wonderingly. "What is it that I don't know?" She looked far away from us, to the open door and its view of dark pines and pale March sunshine, and appeared to swallow something. "Why, that he's hurt," she gently said. "Wounded, you mean?" asked Kitty. Her rusty plumes oscillated as she moved her mild face about with an air of perplexity. "Yes," she said, "he's wounded." Kitty's bright eyes met mine, and we obeyed that mysterious human impulse to smile triumphantly at the spectacle of a fellow-creature occupied in baseness. For this news was not true. It could not possibly be true. The War Office would have wired to us immediately if Chris had been wounded. This was such a fraud as one sees recorded in the papers that meticulously record squalor in paragraphs headed, "Heartless Fraud on Soldier's Wife." Presently she would say that she had gone to some expense to come here with her news and that she was poor, and at the first generous look on our faces there would come some tale of trouble that would disgust the imagination by pictures of yellow-wood furniture that a landlord oddly desired to seize and a pallid child with bandages round its throat. I cast down my eyes and shivered at the horror. Yet there was something about the physical quality of the woman, unlovely though she was, which preserved the occasion from utter baseness. I felt sure that had it not been for the tyrannous emptiness of that evil, shiny pigskin purse that jerked about on her trembling knees the poor driven creature would have chosen ways of candor and gentleness. It was, strangely enough, only when I looked at Kitty and marked how her brightly colored prettiness arched over this plain criminal as though she were a splendid bird of prey and this her sluggish insect food that I felt the moment degrading. Kitty was, I felt, being a little too clever over it. "How is he wounded?" she asked. The caller traced a pattern on the carpet with her blunt toe. "I don't know how to put it; he's not exactly wounded. A shell burst--" "Concussion?" suggested Kitty. She answered with an odd glibness and humility, as though tendering us a term she had long brooded over without arriving at comprehension, and hoping that our superior intelligences would make something of it: "Shell-shock." Our faces did not illumine, so she dragged on lamely, "Anyway, he's not well." Again she played with her purse. Her face was visibly damp. "Not well? Is he dangerously ill?" "Oh, no." She was too kind to harrow us. "Not dangerously ill." Kitty brutally permitted a silence to fall. Our caller could not bear it, and broke it in a voice that nervousness had turned to a funny, diffident croak. "He's in the Queen Mary Hospital at Boulogne." We did not speak, and she began to flush and wriggle on her seat, and stooped forward to fumble under the legs of her chair for her umbrella. The sight of its green seams and unveracious tortoiseshell handle disgusted Kitty into speech. "How do you know all this?" Our visitor met her eyes. This was evidently a moment for which she had steeled herself, and she rose to it with a catch of her breath. "A man who used to be a clerk along with my husband is in Mr. Baldry's regiment." Her voice croaked even more piteously, and her eyes begged: "Leave it at that! Leave it at that! If you only knew--" "And what regiment is that?" pursued Kitty. The poor sallow face shone with sweat. "I never thought to ask," she said. "Well, your friend's name--" Mrs. Grey moved on her seat so suddenly and violently that the pigskin purse fell from her lap and lay at my feet. I supposed that she cast it from her purposely because its emptiness had brought her to this humiliation, and that the scene would close presently in a few quiet tears. I hoped that Kitty would let her go without scarring her too much with words and would not mind if I gave her a little money. There was no doubt in my mind but that this queer, ugly episode in which this woman butted like a clumsy animal at a gate she was not intelligent enough to open would dissolve and be replaced by some more pleasing composition in which we would take our proper parts; in which, that is, she would turn from our rightness ashamed. Yet she cried: "But Chris is ill!" It took only a second for the compact insolence of the moment to penetrate, the amazing impertinence of the use of his name, the accusation of callousness she brought against us whose passion for Chris was our point of honor, because we would not shriek at her false news, the impudently bright, indignant gaze she flung at us, the lift of her voice that pretended she could not understand our coolness and irrelevance. I pushed the purse away from me with my toe, and hated her as the rich hate the poor as insect things that will struggle out of the crannies which are their decent home and introduce ugliness to the light of day. And Kitty said in a voice shaken with pitilessness: "You are impertinent. I know exactly what you are doing. You have read in the 'Harrow Observer' or somewhere that my husband is at the front, and you come to tell this story because you think that you will get some money. I've read of such cases in the papers. You forget that if anything had happened to my husband the War Office would have told me. You should think yourself very lucky that I don't hand you over to the police." She shrilled a little before she came to the end. "Please go!" "Kitty!" I breathed. I was so ashamed that such a scene should spring from Chris's peril at the front that I wanted to go out into the garden and sit by the pond until the poor thing had removed her deplorable umbrella, her unpardonable raincoat, her poor frustrated fraud. But Mrs. Grey, who had begun childishly and deliberately, "It's _you_ who are being--" and had desisted simply because she realized that there were no harsh notes on her lyre, and that she could not strike these chords that others found so easy, had fixed me with a certain wet, clear, patient gaze. It is the gift of animals and those of peasant stock. From the least regarded, from an old horse nosing over a gate, or a drab in a work-house ward, it wrings the heart. From this woman--I said checkingly: "Kitty!" and reconciled her in an undertone. "There's some mistake. Got the name wrong, perhaps. Please tell us all about it." Mrs. Grey began a forward movement like a curtsy. She was groveling after that purse. When she rose, her face was pink from stooping, and her dignity swam uncertainly in a sea of half-shed tears. She said: "I'm sorry I've upset you. But when you know a thing like that it isn't in flesh and blood to keep it from his wife. I am a married woman myself, and I know. I knew Mr. Baldry fifteen years ago." Her voice freely confessed that she had taken a liberty. "Quite a friend of the family he was." She had added that touch to soften the crude surprisingness of her announcement. It hardly did. "We lost sight of each other. It's fifteen years since we last met. I had never seen nor heard of him nor thought to do again till I got this a week ago." She undid the purse and took out a telegram. I knew suddenly that all she said was true; for that was why her hands had clasped that purse. "He isn't well! He isn't well!" she said pleadingly. "He's lost his memory, and thinks--thinks he still knows me." She passed the telegram to Kitty, who read it, and laid it on her knee. "See," said Mrs. Grey, "it's addressed to Margaret Allington, my maiden name, and I've been married these ten years. And it was sent to my old home, Monkey Island, at Bray. Father kept the inn there. It's fifteen years since we left it. I never should have got this telegram if me and my husband hadn't been down there last September and told the folks who keep it now who I was." Kitty folded up the telegram and said in a little voice: "This is a likely story." Again Mrs. Grey's eyes brimmed. "People are rude to one," she visibly said, but surely not nice people like this. She simply continued to sit. Kitty cried out, as though arguing: "There's nothing about shell-shock in this wire." Our visitor melted into a trembling shyness. "There was a letter, too." Kitty held out her hand. She gasped: "Oh, no, I couldn't do that!" "I must have it," said Kitty. The caller's eyes grew great. She rose and dived clumsily for her umbrella, which had again slipped under the chair. "I can't," she cried, and scurried to the open door like a pelted dog. She would have run down the steps at once had not some tender thought arrested her. She turned to me trustfully and stammered, "He is at that hospital I said," as if, since I had dealt her no direct blow, I might be able to salve the news she brought from the general wreck of manners. And then Kitty's stiff pallor struck to her heart, and cried comfortingly across the distance, "I tell you, I haven't seen him for fifteen years." She faced about, pushed down her hat on her head, and ran down the steps to the gravel. "They won't understand!" we heard her sob. For a long time we watched her as she went along the drive, her yellowish raincoat looking sick and bright in the sharp sunshine, her black plumes nodding like the pines above, her cheap boots making her walk on her heels, a spreading stain on the fabric of our life. When she was quite hidden by the dark clump of rhododendrons at the corner, Kitty turned and went to the fireplace. She laid her arms against the oak mantel-piece and cooled her face against her arms. When at last I followed her she said: "Do you believe her?" I started. I had forgotten that we had ever disbelieved her. "Yes," I replied. "What can it mean?" She dropped her arms and stared at me imploringly. "Think, think, of something it can mean which isn't detestable!" "It's all a mystery," I said; and added madly, because nobody had ever been cross with Kitty, "You didn't help to clear it up." "Oh, I know you think I was rude," she petulantly moaned; "but you're so slow you don't see what it means. Either it means that he's mad, our Chris, our splendid, sane Chris, all broken and queer, not knowing us--I can't bear to think of that. It can't be true. But if he isn't--Jenny, there was nothing in that telegram to show he'd lost his memory. It was just affection--a name that might have been a pet name, things that it was a little common to put in a telegram. It's queer he should have written such a message, queer that he shouldn't have told me about knowing her, queer that he ever should have known such a woman. It shows there are bits of him we don't know. Things may be awfully wrong. It's all such a breach of trust! I resent it." I was appalled by these stiff, dignified gestures that seemed to be plucking Chris's soul from his body, tormented though it was by this unknown calamity. "But Chris is ill!" I cried. She stared at me. "You're saying what she said." Indeed, there seemed no better words than those Mrs. Grey had used. I repeated: "But he is ill!" She laid her face against her arms again. "What does that matter?" she wailed. "If he could send that telegram, he is no longer ours." CHAPTER II I was sorry the next morning that the post comes too late at Harrowweald to be brought up with the morning tea and waits for one at the breakfast table; for under Kitty's fixed gaze I had to open a letter which bore the Boulogne postmark and was addressed in the writing of Frank Baldry, Chris's cousin, who is in the church. He wrote: DEAR JENNY: You will have to break it to Kitty and try to make her take it as quietly as possible. This sentence will sound ominous as a start, but I'm so full of the extraordinary thing that has happened to Chris that I feel as if every living creature was in possession of the facts. I don't know how much you know about it, so I'd better begin at the beginning. Last Thursday I got a wire from Chris, saying that he had had concussion, though not seriously, and was in a hospital about a mile from Boulogne, where he would be glad to see me. It struck me as odd that it had been sent to Ollenshaws, where I was curate fifteen years ago. Fortunately, I have always kept in touch with Sumpter, whom I regard as a specimen of the very best type of country clergymen, and he forwarded it without unnecessary delay. I started that evening, and looked hard for you and Kitty on the boat; but came to the conclusion I should probably find you at the hospital. After having breakfasted in the town,--how superior French cooking is! I would have looked in vain for such coffee, such an omelet, in my own parish,--I went off to look for the hospital. It is a girls' school, which has been taken over by the Red Cross, with fair-sized grounds and plenty of nice dry paths under the _tilleuls_. I could not see Chris for an hour, so I sat down on a bench by a funny, little round pond, with a stone coping, very French. Some wounded soldiers who came out to sit in the sun were rather rude because I was not in khaki, even when I explained that I was a priest of God and that the feeling of the bishops was strongly against the enlistment of the clergy. I do feel that the church has lost its grip on the masses. Then a nurse came out and took me in to see Chris. He is in a nice room, with a southern exposure, with three other officers, who seemed very decent (not the "new army," I am glad to say). He was better than I had expected, but did not look quite himself. For one thing, he was oddly boisterous. He seemed glad to see me, and told me he could remember nothing about his concussion, but that he wanted to get back to Harrowweald. He talked a lot about the wood and the upper pond and wanted to know if the daffies were out yet, and when he would be allowed to travel, because he felt that he would get well at once if only he could get home. And then he was silent for a minute, as though he was holding something back. It will perhaps help you to realize the difficulty of my position when you understand that all this happened before I had been in the room five minutes! Without flickering an eyelid, quite easily and naturally, he gave me the surprising information that he was in love with a girl called Margaret Allington, who is the daughter of a man who keeps the inn on Monkey Island, at Bray on the Thames. He uttered some appreciations of this woman which I was too upset to note. I gasped, "How long has this been going on?" He laughed at my surprise, and said, "Ever since I went down to stay with Uncle Ambrose at Dorney after I'd got my B.Sc." Fifteen years ago! I was still staring at him, unable to believe this barefaced admission of a deception carried on for years, when he went on to say that, though he had wired to her and she had wired a message in return, she hadn't said anything about coming over to see him. "Now," he said quite coolly, "I know old Allington's had a bad season,--oh, I'm quite well up in the innkeeping business these days,--and I think it may quite possibly be a lack of funds that is keeping her away. I've lost my check-book somewhere in the scrim, and so I wonder if you'd send her some money. Or, better still, for she's a shy country thing, you might fetch her." I stared. "Chris," I said, "I know the war is making some of us very lax, and I can only ascribe to that the shamelessness with which you admit the existence of a long-standing intrigue; but when it comes to asking me to go over to England and fetch the woman--" He interrupted me with a sneer that we parsons are inveterately eighteenth century and have our minds perpetually inflamed by visions of squires' sons seducing country wenches, and declared that he meant to marry this Margaret Allington. "Oh, indeed!" I said. "And may I ask what Kitty says to this arrangement?" "Who the devil is Kitty?" he asked blankly. "Kitty is your wife," I said quietly, but firmly. He sat up and shouted: "I haven't got a wife! Has some woman been turning up with a cock-and-bull story of being my wife? Because it's the damnedest lie!" I determined to settle the matter by sharp, common-sense handling. "Chris," I said, "you have evidently lost your memory. You were married to Kitty Ellis at St. George's, Hanover Square, on the third, or it may have been the fourth"--you know my wretched memory for dates--"of February, in 1906." He turned very pale and asked what year this was. "1916," I told him. He fell back in a fainting condition. The nurse came, and said I had done it all right this time, so she at least seemed to have known that he required a rude awakening, although the doctor, a very nice man, Winchester and New, told me he had known nothing of Chris's delusions. An hour later I was called back into the room. Chris was looking at himself in a hand-mirror, which he threw on the floor as I entered. "You are right," he said; "I'm not twenty-one, but thirty-six." He said he felt lonely and afraid, and that I must bring Margaret Allington to him at once or he would die. Suddenly he stopped raving and asked, "Is father all right?" I prayed for guidance, and answered, "Your father passed away twelve years ago." He said, "Good God! can't you say he _died_," and he turned over and lay with his back to me. I have never before seen a strong man weep, and it is indeed a terrible sight. He moaned a lot, and began to call for this Margaret. Then he turned over again and said, "Now tell us all about this Kitty that I've married." I told him she was a beautiful little woman, and mentioned that she had a charming and cultivated soprano voice. He said very fractiously: "I don't like little women, and I hate anybody, male or female, who sings. O God, I don't like this Kitty. Take her away!" And then he began to rave again about this woman. He said that he was consumed with desire for her and that he would never rest until he once more held her in his arms. I had no suspicion that Chris had this side to his nature, and it was almost a relief when he fainted again. I have not seen him since, and it is evening; but I have had a long talk with the doctor, who says that he has satisfied himself that Chris is suffering from a loss of memory extending over a period of fifteen years. He says that though, of course, it will be an occasion of great trial to us all, he thinks that, in view of Chris's expressed longing for Harrowweald, he ought to be taken home, and advises me to make all arrangements for bringing him back some time next week. I hope I shall be upheld in this difficult enterprise. In the meantime I leave it to you to prepare Kitty for this terrible shock. I could have wished it were a woman of a different type who was to see my poor cousin through these dark days, but convey to her my deepest sympathy. Indeed, I never realized the horror of warfare until I saw my cousin, of whose probity I am as firmly convinced as of my own wantonly repudiating his most sacred obligations. Yours ever, FRANK. Over my shoulder Kitty muttered: "And he always pretended he liked my singing." Then she gripped my arm and shrieked in a possessive fury: "Bring him home! Bring him home!" So, a week later, they brought Chris home. From breakfast-time that day the house was pervaded with a day-before-the-funeral feeling. Although all duties arising from the occasion had been performed, one could settle to nothing else. Chris was expected at one, but then there came a telegram to say he was delayed till the late afternoon. So Kitty, whose beauty was as changed in grief from its ordinary seeming as a rose in moonlight is different from a rose by day, took me down after lunch to the greenhouses and had a snappishly competent conversation about the year's vegetables with Pipe, the gardener. Then Kitty went into the drawing-room and filled the house with the desolate merriment of an inattentively played pianola, while I sat in the hall and wrote letters and noticed how sad dance-music has sounded ever since the war began. After that she started a savage raid of domestic efficiency, and made the housemaids cry because the brass handles of the tall-boys were not bright enough and because there was only ten-to-one instead of a hundred-to-one risk of breaking a leg on the parquet. Then she had tea, and hated the soda-cake. She was a little, shrunk thing, huddled in the arm-chair farthest from the light, when at last the big car came nosing up the drive through the dark. We stood up. Through the thudding of the engines came the sound of Chris's great male voice which always had in it a note like the baying of a big dog. "Thanks, I can manage by myself." I heard, amazed, his step ring strong upon the stone, for I had felt his absence as a kind of death from which he would emerge ghostlike, impalpable. And then he stood in the doorway, the gloom blurring his outlines like fur, the faint, clear candle-light catching the fair down on his face. He did not see me, in my dark dress, or huddled Kitty, and with the sleepy smile of one who returns to a dear, familiar place to rest he walked into the hall and laid down his stick and his khaki cap beside the candlestick on the oak table. With both hands he felt the old wood, and stood humming happily through his teeth. I cried out, because I had seen that his hair was of three colors now, brown and gold and silver. With a quick turn of the head, he found me out in the shadows. "Hullo, Jenny!" he said, and gripped my hands. "O Chris, I am so glad!" I stuttered, and then could say no more for shame that I was thirty-five instead of twenty. For his eyes had hardened in the midst of his welcome, as though he had trusted that I at least would have been no party to this conspiracy to deny that he was young, and he said: "I've dropped Frank in town. My temper's of the convalescent type." He might as well have said, "I've dropped Frank, who had grown old, like you." "Chris," I went on, "it's so wonderful to have you safe." "Safe," he repeated. He sighed very deeply and continued to hold my hands. There was a rustle in the shadows, and he dropped my hands. The face that looked out of the dimness to him was very white, and her upper lip was lifted over her teeth in a distressed grimace. It was immediately as plain as though he had shouted it that this sad mask meant nothing to him. He knew not because memory had given him any insight into her heart, but because there is an instinctive kindliness in him which makes him wise about all suffering, that it would hurt her if he asked if this was his wife; but his body involuntarily began a gesture of inquiry before he realized that that, too, would hurt her, and he checked it half-way. So, through a silence, he stood before her slightly bent, as though he had been maimed. "I am your wife." There was a weak, wailing anger behind the words. "Kitty," he said softly and kindly. He looked around for some graciousness to make the scene less wounding, and stooped to kiss her; but he could not. The thought of another woman made him unable to breathe, sent the blood running under his skin. With a toss, like a child saying, "Well, if you don't want to, I'm sure I wouldn't for the world!" Kitty withdrew from the suspended caress. He watched her retreat into the shadows as though she were a symbol of this new life by which he was baffled and oppressed, until the darkness outside became filled with the sound like the surf which we always hear at Harrowweald on angry evenings, and his eyes became distant, and his lips smiled. "Up here--in this old place--how one hears the pines!" She cried out from the other end of the room, as though she were speaking with some one behind a shut door: "I've ordered dinner at seven. I thought you'd probably have missed a meal or two, or would want to go to bed early." She said it very smartly, with her head on one side like a bird, as if she was pleading that he would find her very clever about ordering dinner and thinking of his comfort. "Good," he said. "I'd better dress now, hadn't I?" He looked up the stair-case, and would have gone up had I not held him back; for the little room in the south wing, with the fishing-rods and the old books, went in the rebuilding, absorbed by the black-and-white magnificence that is Kitty's bedroom. "Oh, I'll take you up," Kitty rang out efficiently. She pulled at his coat-sleeve, so they started level on the lowest step. But as they went up, the sense of his separateness beat her back; she lifted her arms as though she struggled through a fog, and fell behind. When he reached the top she was standing half-way down the stairs, her hands clasped under her chin. But he did not see her. He was looking along the corridor and saying, "This house is different." If the soul has to stay in its coffin till the lead is struck asunder, in its captivity it speaks with such a voice. She braced herself with a gallant laugh. "How you've forgotten!" she cried, and ran up to him, rattling her keys and looking grave with housewifery, and I was left alone with the dusk and the familiar things. The dusk flowed in wet and cool from the garden, as if to put out the fire of confusion lighted on our hearthstone, and the furniture, very visible through that soft evening opacity with the observant brightness of old, well-polished wood, seemed terribly aware. Strangeness had come into the house, and everything was appalled by it, even time. For the moments dragged. It seemed to me, half an hour later, that I had been standing for an infinite period in the drawing-room, remembering that in the old days the blinds had never been drawn in this room because old Mrs. Baldry had liked to see the night gathering like a pool in the valley while the day lingered as a white streak above the farthest hills, and perceiving in pain that the heavy blue blinds that shroud the nine windows because a lost Zeppelin sometimes clanks like a skeleton across the sky above us would make his home seem even more like prison. I began to say what was in my mind to Kitty when she came in, but she moved past me, remote in preoccupation, and I was silent when I saw that she was dressed in all respects like a bride. The gown she wore on her wedding-day ten years ago had been cut and embroidered as this white satin was; her hair had been coiled low on her neck, as it was now. Around her throat were her pearls, and her longer chain of diamonds dropped, looking cruelly bright, to her white, small breasts; because she held some needlework to her bosom, I saw that her right hand was stiff with rings and her left hand bare save for her wedding-ring. She dropped her load of flannel on a work-table and sat down, spreading out her skirts, in an arm-chair by the fire. With her lower lip thrust out, as if she were considering a menu, she lowered her head and looked down on herself. She frowned to see that the high lights on the satin shone scarlet from the fire, that her flesh glowed like a rose, and she changed her seat for a high-backed chair beneath the farthest candle-sconce. There were green curtains close by, and now the lights on her satin gown were green like cleft ice. She looked as cold as moonlight, as virginity, but precious; the falling candle-light struck her hair to bright, pure gold. So she waited for him. There came suddenly a thud at the door. We heard Chris swear and stumble to his feet, while one of the servants spoke helpfully. Kitty knitted her brows, for she hates gracelessness, and a failure of physical adjustment is the worst indignity she can conceive. "He's fallen down those three steps from the hall," I whispered. "They're new." She did not listen, because she was controlling her face into harmony with the appearance of serene virginity upon which his eyes would fall when he entered the room. His fall had ruffled him and made him look very large and red, and he breathed hard, like an animal pursued into a strange place by night, and to his hot consciousness of his disorder the sight of Kitty, her face and hands and bosom shining like the snow, her gown enfolding her, and her gold hair crowning her with radiance, and the white fire of jewels giving passion to the spectacle, was a deep refreshment. She sat still for a time, so that he might feel this well, then raised her ringed hand to her necklaces. "It seems so strange that you should not remember me," she said. "You gave me all these." He answered kindly: "I am glad I did that. You look very beautiful in them." But as he spoke his gaze shifted to the shadows in the corners of the room, and the blood ran hot under his skin. He was thinking of another woman, of another beauty. Kitty put up her hands as if to defend her jewels. In that silence dinner was announced, and we went into the dining-room. It is the fashion at Baldry Court to use no electric light save when there is work to be done or a great company to be entertained, and to eat and talk by the mild clarity of many candles. That night it was a kindly fashion, for we sat about the table with our faces veiled in shadow, and seemed to listen in quiet contentment to the talk of our man who had come back to us. Yet all through the meal I was near to weeping, because whenever he thought himself unobserved he looked at the things that were familiar to him. Dipping his head, he would glance sidewise at the old oak paneling, and nearer things he fingered as though sight were not intimate enough a contact. His hand caressed the arm of his chair, because he remembered the black gleam of it, stole out and touched the recollected salt-cellar. It was his furtiveness that was heartrending; it was as though he were an outcast, and we who loved him stout policemen. Was Baldry Court so sleek a place that the unhappy felt offenders there? Then we had all been living wickedly, and he, too. As his fingers glided here and there he talked bravely about non-committal things: to what ponies we had been strapped when at the age of five we were introduced to the hunting-field; how we had teased to be allowed to keep swans in the pond above the wood, and how the yellow bills of our intended pets had sent us shrieking homeward; and all the dear life that makes the bland English country-side secretly adventurous. "Funny thing," he said. "All the time I was at Boulogne I wanted to see a kingfisher, that blue scudding down a stream, or a heron's flight round a willow--" He checked himself suddenly; his head fell forward on his chest. "You have no herons here, of course," he said drearily, and fingered the arm of his chair again. Then he raised his head again, brisk with another subject. "Do they still have trouble with foxes at Steppy End?" Kitty shook her head. "I don't know." "Griffiths will know," Chris said cheerily, and swung round on his seat to ask the butler, and found him osseous, where Griffiths was rotund; dark, where Griffiths had been merrily mottled; strange, where Griffiths had been a part of home, a condition of life. He sat back in his chair as though his heart had stopped. When the butler who is not Griffiths had left the room he spoke gruffly. "Stupid of me, I know; but where is Griffiths?" "Dead seven years ago," said Kitty, her eyes on her plate. He sighed deeply in a shuddering horror. "I'm sorry. He was a good man." I cleared my throat. "There are new people here, Chris, but they love you as the old ones did." He forced himself to smile at us both, to a gay response. "As if I didn't know that to-night!" But he did not know it. Even to me he would give no trust, because it was Jenny the girl who had been his friend and not Jenny the woman. All the inhabitants at this new tract of time were his enemies, all its circumstances his prison-bars. There was suspicion in the gesture with which, when we were back in the drawing-room he picked up the flannel from the work-table. "Whose is this?" he said curiously. His mother had been a hard-riding woman, not apt with her needle. "Clothes for one of the cottages," answered Kitty, breathlessly. "We--we've a lot of responsibilities, you and I. With all of the land you've bought, there are ever so many people to look after." He moved his shoulders uneasily, as if under a yoke, and, after he had drunk his coffee, pulled up one of the blinds and went out to pace the flagged walk under the windows. Kitty huddled carelessly by the fire, her hands over her face, unheeding by its red glow she looked not so virginal and bride-like; so I think she was too distracted even to plan. I went to the piano. Through this evening of sentences cut short because their completed meaning was always sorrow, of normal life dissolved to tears, the chords of Beethoven sounded serenely. "So you like Jenny," said Kitty, suddenly, "to play Beethoven when it's the war that's caused all this. I could have told that you would have chosen to play German music this night of all nights." So I began a saraband by Purcell, a jolly thing that makes one see a plump, sound woman dancing on a sanded floor in some old inn, with casks of good ale all about her and a world of sunshine and May lanes without. As I played I wondered if things like this happened when Purcell wrote such music, empty of everything except laughter and simple greeds and satisfactions and at worst the wail of unrequited love. Why had modern life brought forth these horrors, which made the old tragedies seem no more than nursery-shows? And the sky also is different. Behind Chris's head, as he halted at the open window, a search-light turned all ways in the night, like a sword brandished among the stars. "Kitty." "Yes, Chris." She was sweet and obedient and alert. "I know my conduct must seem to you perversely insulting,"--behind him the search-light wheeled while he gripped the sides of the window,--"but if I do not see Margaret Allington I shall die." She raised her hands to her jewels, and pressed the cool globes of her pearls into her flesh. "She lives near here," she said easily. "I will send the car down for her to-morrow. You shall see as much of her as you like." His arms fell to his sides. "Thank you," he muttered; "you're all being so kind--" He disengaged himself into the darkness. I was amazed at Kitty's beautiful act and more amazed to find that it had made her face ugly. Her eyes snapped as they met mine. "That dowd!" she said, keeping her voice low, so that he might not hear it as he passed to and fro before the window. "That dowd!" This sudden abandonment of beauty and amiability meant so much in our Kitty, whose law of life is grace, that I went over and kissed her. "Dear, you're taking things all the wrong way," I said. "Chris is ill--" "He's well enough to remember her all right," she replied unanswerably. Her silver shoe tapped the floor; she pinched her lips for some moments. "After all, I suppose I can sit down to it. Other women do. Teddy Rex keeps a Gaiety girl, and Mrs. Rex has to grin and bear it." She shrugged in answer to my silence. "What else is it, do you think? It means that Chris is a man like other men. But I did think that bad women were pretty. I suppose he's had so much to do with pretty ones that a plain one's a change." "Kitty! Kitty! how can you!" But her little pink mouth went on manufacturing malice. "This is all a blind," she said at the end of an unpardonable sentence. "He's pretending." I, who had felt his agony all the evening like a wound in my own body, was past speech then, and I did not care what I did to stop her. I gripped her small shoulders with my large hands, and shook her till her jewels rattled and she scratched my fingers and gasped for breath. But I did not mind so long as she was silent. Chris spoke from the darkness. "Jenny!" I let her go. He came in and stood over us, running his hand through his hair unhappily. "Let's all be decent to each other," he said heavily. "It's all such a muddle, and it's so rotten for all of us--" Kitty shook herself neat and stood up. "Why don't you say, 'Jenny, you mustn't be rude to visitors'? It's how you feel, I know." She gathered up her needlework. "I'm going to bed. It's been a horrid night." She spoke so pathetically, like a child who hasn't enjoyed a party as much as it had thought it would, that both of us felt a stir of tenderness toward her as she left the room. We smiled sadly at each other as we sat down by the fire, and I perceived that, perhaps because I was flushed and looked younger, he felt more intimate with me than he had yet done since his return. Indeed, in the warm, friendly silence that followed he was like a patient when tiring visitors have gone and he is left alone with his trusted nurse; smiled under drooped lids and then paid me the high compliment of disregard. His limbs relaxed, he sank back into his chair. I watched him vigilantly, and was ready at that moment when thought intruded into his drowsings and his face began to twitch. I asked: "You can't remember her at all?" "Oh, yes," he said, without raising his eyelids, "in a sense. I know how she bows when you meet her in the street, how she dresses when she goes to church. I know her as one knows a woman staying in the same hotel, just like that." "It's a pity you can't remember Kitty. All that a wife should be she's been to you." He sat forward, warming his palms at the blaze and hunching his shoulders as though there were a draft. His silence compelled me to look at him, and I found his eyes, cold and incredulous and frightened, on me. "Jenny, is this true?" "That Kitty's been a good wife?" "That Kitty is my wife, that I am old, that"--he waved a hand at the altered room--"all this." "It is all true. She is your wife, and this place is changed, and it's better and jollier in all sorts of ways, believe me, and fifteen years have passed. Why, Chris, can't you see that I have grown old?" My vanity could hardly endure his slow stare, but I kept my fingers clasped on my lap. "You see?" He turned away with an assenting mutter; but I saw that deep down in him, not to be moved by any material proof, his spirit was incredulous. "Tell me what seems real to you," I begged. "Chris, be a pal. I'll never tell." "M-m-m," he said. His elbows were on his knees, and his hands stroked his thick tarnished hair. I could not see his face, but I knew that his skin was red and that his gray eyes were wet and bright. Then suddenly he lifted his chin and laughed, like a happy swimmer breaking through a wave that has swept him far inshore. He glowed with a radiance that illuminated the moment till my blood tingled and I began to rub my hands together and laugh, too. "Why, Monkey Island's real. But you don't know old Monkey. Let me tell you." CHAPTER III Chris told the story lingeringly, in loving detail. From Uncle Ambrose's gates, it seems, one took the path across the meadow where Whiston's cows are put to graze, passed through the second stile--the one between the two big alders--into a long straight road that ran across the flat lands to Bray. After a mile or so there branched from it a private road that followed a line of noble poplars down to the ferry. Between two of them--he described it meticulously, as though it were of immense significance--there stood a white hawthorn. In front were the dark-green, glassy waters of an unvisited back-water, and beyond them a bright lawn set with many walnut-trees and a few great chestnuts, well lighted with their candles, and to the left of that a low, white house with a green dome rising in its middle, and a veranda with a roof of hammered iron that had gone verdigris-color with age and the Thames weather. This was the Monkey Island Inn. The third Duke of Marlborough had built it for a "folly," and perching there with nothing but a line of walnut-trees and a fringe of lawn between it and the fast, full, shining Thames, it had an eighteenth-century grace and silliness. Well, one sounded the bell that hung on a post, and presently Margaret in a white dress would come out of the porch and would walk to the stone steps down to the river. Invariably, as she passed the walnut-tree that overhung the path, she would pick a leaf, crush it, and sniff the sweet scent; and as she came near the steps she would shade her eyes and peer across the water. "She is a little near-sighted; you can't imagine how sweet it makes her look," Chris explained. (I did not say that I had seen her, for, indeed, this Margaret I had never seen.) A sudden serene gravity would show that she had seen one, and she would get into the four-foot punt that was used as a ferry and bring it over very slowly, with rather stiff movements of her long arms, to exactly the right place. When she had got the punt up on the gravel her serious brow would relax, and she would smile at one and shake hands and say something friendly, like, "Father thought you'd be over this afternoon, it being so fine; so he's saved some duck's eggs for tea." And then one took the pole from her and brought her back to the island, though probably one did not mount the steps to the lawn for a long time. It was so good to sit in the punt by the landing-stage while Margaret dabbled her hands in the black waters and forgot her shyness as one talked. "She's such good company. She's got an accurate mind that would have made her a good engineer, but when she picks up facts she kind of gives them a motherly hug. She's charity and love itself." (Again I did not say that I had seen her.) If people drifted in to tea, one had to talk to her while she cut the bread and butter and the sandwiches in the kitchen, but in this year of floods few visitors cared to try the hard rowing below Bray Lock. [Illustration: She would get into the four-foot punt that was used as a ferry and bring it over very slowly] So usually one sat down there in the boat, talking with a sense of leisure, as though one had all the rest of one's life in which to carry on this conversation, and noting how the reflected ripple of the water made a bright, vibrant, mark upon her throat, and other effects of the scene upon her beauty, until the afternoon grew drowsy, and she said, "Father will be wanting his tea." And they would go up and find old Allington, in white ducks, standing in the fringe of long grasses and cow-parsley on the other edge of the island, looking to his poultry or his rabbits. He was a little man, with a tuft of copper-colored hair rising from the middle of his forehead like a clown's curl, who shook hands hard and explained very soon that he was a rough diamond. Then they all had tea under the walnut-tree where the canary's cage was hanging, and the ducks' eggs would be brought out, and Mr. Allington would talk much Thames-side gossip: how the lock-keeper at Teddington had had his back broken by a swan, mad as swans are in May; how they would lose their license at the Dovetail Arms if they were not careful; and how the man who kept the inn by Surly Hall was like to die, because after he had been cursing his daughter for two days for having run away with a soldier from Windsor Barracks, he had suddenly seen her white face in a clump of rushes in the river just under the hole in the garden fence. Margaret would sit quiet, round-eyed at the world's ways, and shy because of Chris. So they would sit on that bright lawn until the day was dyed with evening blue, and Mr. Allington was more and more often obliged to leap into the punt to chase his ducks, which had started on a trip to Bray Lock, or to crawl into the undergrowth after rabbits similarly demoralized by the dusk. Then Chris would say he had to go, and they would stand in a communing silence while the hearty voice of Mr. Allington shouted from midstream or under the alder-boughs a disregarded invitation to stay and have a bite of supper. In the liquefaction of colors which happens on a summer evening, when the green grass seemed like a precious fluid poured out on the earth and dripping over to the river, and the chestnut candles were no longer proud flowers, but just wet, white lights in the humid mass of the tree, when the brown earth seemed just a little denser than the water, Margaret also participated. Chris explained this part of his story stumblingly; but I, too, have watched people I loved in the dusk, and I know what he meant. As she sat in the punt while he ferried himself across it was no longer visible that her fair hair curled differently and that its rather wandering parting was a little on one side; that her straight brows, which were a little darker than her hair, were nearly always contracted in a frown of conscientious speculation; that her mouth and chin were noble, yet as delicate as flowers; that her shoulders were slightly hunched because her young body, like a lily-stem, found it difficult to manage its own tallness. She was then just a girl in white who lifted a white face or drooped a dull-gold head. Then she was nearer to him than at any other time. That he loved her in this twilight, which obscured all the physical details which he adored, seemed to him a guarantee that theirs was a changeless love which would persist if she were old or maimed or disfigured. He stood beside the crazy post where the bell hung and watched the white figure take the punt over the black waters, mount the gray steps, and assume some of their grayness, become a green shade in the green darkness of the foliage-darkened lawn, and he exulted in that guarantee. How long this went on he had forgotten; but it continued for some time before there came the end of his life, the last day he could remember. I was barred out of that day. His lips told me of its physical appearances, while from his wet, bright eyes and his flushed skin, his beautiful signs of a noble excitement, I tried to derive the real story. It seemed that the day when he bicycled over to Monkey Island, happy because Uncle Ambrose had gone up to town and he could stay to supper with the Allingtons, was the most glorious day the year had yet brought. The whole world seemed melting into light. Cumulus-clouds floated very high, like lumps of white light, against a deep, glowing sky, and dropped dazzling reflections on the beaming Thames. The trees moved not like timber, shocked by wind, but floatingly, like weeds at the bottom of a well of sunshine. When Margaret came out of the porch and paused, as she always did, to crush and smell the walnut-leaf and shade her eyes with her hand, her white dress shone like silver. [Illustration: He lay there in the confiding relaxation of a child] She brought the punt across and said very primly, "Dad will be disappointed; he's gone up to town on business," and answered gravely, "That is very kind of you," when he took the punt-pole from her and said laughingly: "Never mind. I'll come and see you all the same." (I could see them as Chris spoke, so young and pale and solemn, with the intense light spilling all around them.) That afternoon they did not sit in the punt by the landing-stage, but wandered about the island and played with the rabbits and looked at the ducks and were inordinately silent. For a long time they stood in the fringe of rough grass on the other side of the island, and Margaret breathed contentedly that the Thames was so beautiful. Past the spit of sand at the far end of the island, where a great swan swanked to the empty reach that it would protect its mate against all comers, the river opened to a silver breadth between flat meadows stretching back to far rows of pin-thick black poplars, until it wound away to Windsor behind a line of high trees whose heads were bronze with unopened buds, and whose flanks were hidden by a head of copper-beech and crimson and white hawthorn. Chris said he would take her down to Dorney Lock in the skiff, and she got in very silently and obediently; but as soon as they were out in midstream she developed a sense of duty, and said she could not leave the inn with just that boy to look after it. And then she went into the kitchen and, sucking in her lower lip for shyness, very conscientiously cut piles of bread and butter in case some visitors came to tea. Just when Chris was convincing her of the impossibility of any visitors arriving they came, a fat woman in a luscious pink blouse and an old chap who had been rowing in a tweed waistcoat. Chris went out, though Margaret laughed and trembled and begged him not to, and waited on them. It should have been a great lark, but suddenly he hated them, and when they offered him a tip for pushing the boat off, he snarled absurdly and ran back, miraculously relieved, to the bar-parlor. Still Margaret would not leave the island. "Supposing," she said, "that Mr. Learoyd comes for his ale." But she consented to walk with him to the wild part of the island, where poplars and alders and willows grew round a clearing in which white willow-herb and purple figwort and here and there a potato-flower, last ailing consequence of one of Mr. Allington's least successful enterprises, fought down to the fringe of iris on the river's lip. In this gentle jungle was a rustic seat, relic of a reckless aspiration on the part of Mr. Allington to make this a pleasure-garden, and on it they sat until a pale moon appeared above the green corn-field on the other side of the river. "Not six yet," he said, taking out his watch. "Not six yet," she repeated. Words seemed to bear more significance than they had ever borne before. Then a heron flapped gigantic in front of the moon, and swung in wide circles round the willow-tree before them. "Oh, look!" she cried. He seized the hand she flung upward and gathered her into his arms. They were so for long, while the great bird's wings beat about them. Afterward she pulled at his hand. She wanted to go back across the lawn and walk round the inn, which looked mournful, as unlit houses do by dusk. They passed beside the green-and-white stucco barrier of the veranda and stood on the three-cornered lawn that shelved high over the stream at the island's end, regarding the river, which was now something more wonderful than water, because it had taken to its bosom the rose and amber glories of the sunset smoldering behind the elms and Bray church-tower. Birds sat on the telegraph wires that spanned the river as the black notes sit on a staff of music. Then she went to the window of the parlor and rested her cheek against the glass, looking in. The little room was sad with twilight, and there was nothing to be seen but Margaret's sewing-machine on the table and the enlarged photograph of Margaret's mother over the mantel-piece, and the views of Tintern Abbey framed in red plush, and on the floor, the marigold pattern making itself felt through the dusk, Mr. Allington's carpet slippers. "Think of me sitting in there," she whispered, "not knowing you loved me." Then they went into the bar and drank milk, while she walked about fingering familiar things with an absurd expression of exaltation, as though that day she was fond of everything, even the handles of the beer-engine. When there had descended on them a night as brilliant as the day he drew her out into the darkness, which was sweet with the scent of walnut-leaves, and they went across the lawn, bending beneath the chestnut-boughs, not to the wild part of the island, but to a circle of smooth turf divided from it by a railing of wrought iron. On this stood a small Greek temple, looking very lovely in the moonlight. He had never brought Margaret here before, because Mr. Allington had once told him, spatulate forefinger at his nose, that it had been built for the "dook" for his excesses, and it was in the quality of his love for her that he could not bear to think of her in association with anything base. But to-night there was nothing anywhere but beauty. He lifted her in his arms and carried her within the columns, and made her stand in a niche above the altar. A strong stream of moonlight rushed upon her there; by its light he could not tell if her hair was white as silver or yellow as gold, and again he was filled with exaltation because he knew that it would not have mattered if it had been white. His love was changeless. Lifting her down from the niche, he told her so. And as he spoke, her warm body melted to nothingness in his arms. The columns that had stood so hard and black against the quivering tide of moonlight and starlight seemed to totter and dissolve. He was lying in a hateful world where barbed-wire entanglements showed impish knots against a livid sky full of blooming noise and splashes of fire and wails for water, and his back was hurting intolerably. Chris fell to blowing out the candles, and I, perhaps because the egotistical part of me was looking for something to say that would make him feel me devoted and intimate, could not speak. Suddenly he desisted, stared at a candle-flame, and said: "If you had seen the way she rested her cheek against the glass and looked into the little room you'd understand that I can't say, 'Yes, Kitty's my wife, and Margaret somehow just nothing at all.'" "Of course you can't," I murmured sympathetically. We gripped hands, and he brought down on our conversation the finality of darkness. CHAPTER IV Next morning it appeared that the chauffeur had taken the car up to town to get a part replaced, and Margaret could not be brought from Wealdstone till the afternoon. It fell to me to fetch her. "At least," Kitty had said, "I might be spared that humiliation." Before I started I went to the pond on the hill's edge. It is a place where autumn lives for half the year, for even when the spring lights tongues of green fire in the undergrowth, and the valley shows sunlit between the tree-trunks, here the pond is fringed with yellow bracken and tinted bramble, and the water flows amber over last winter's leaves. Through this brown gloom, darkened now by a surly sky, Chris was taking the skiff, standing in the stern and using his oar like a gondolier. He had come down here soon after breakfast, driven from the house by the strangeness of all but the outer walls, and discontented with the grounds because everything but this wet, intractable spot bore the marks of Kitty's genius. After lunch there had been another attempt to settle down, but with a grim glare at a knot of late Christmas roses bright in a copse that fifteen years ago had been dark he went back to the russet-eaved boat-house and this play with the skiff. It was a boy's sport, and it was dreadful to see him turn a middle-aged face as he brought the boat inshore. "I'm just going down to fetch Margaret," I said. He thanked me for it. "But, Chris, I must tell you. I've seen Margaret. She came up here, so kind and sweet, to tell us you were wounded. She's the greatest dear in the world, but she's not as you think of her. She's old, Chris. She isn't beautiful any longer. She's drearily married. She's seamed and scored and ravaged by squalid circumstances. You can't love her when you see her." "Didn't I tell you last night," he said, "that that doesn't matter?" He dipped his oar to a stroke that sent him away from me. "Bring her soon. I shall wait for her down here." Wealdstone is not, in its way, a bad place; it lies in the lap of open country, and at the end of every street rise the green hills of Harrow and the spires of Harrow School. But all the streets are long and red and freely articulated with railway arches, and factories spoil the skyline with red, angular chimneys, and in front of the shops stood little women with backs ridged by cheap stays, who tapped their upper lips with their forefingers and made other feeble, doubtful gestures, as though they wanted to buy something and knew that if they did they would have to starve some other appetite. When we asked them the way they turned to us faces sour with thrift. It was a town of people who could not do as they liked. And here Margaret lived in a long road of red-brick boxes, flecked here and there with the pink blur of almond-blossom, which debouched in a flat field where green grass rose up rank through clay mold blackened by coal-dust from the railway. Mariposa, which was the last house in the road, did not even have an almond-tree. In the front garden, which seemed to be imperfectly reclaimed from the greasy field, yellow crocus and some sodden squills just winked, and the back, where a man was handling a spade without mastery, presented the austere appearance of an allotment. And not only did Margaret live in this place; she also belonged to it. When she opened the door she gazed at me with watering eyes, and in perplexity stroked her disordered hair with a floury hand. Her face was sallow with heat, and beads of perspiration glittered in the deep, dragging line between her nostrils and the corners of her mouth. She said: "He's home?" I nodded. She pulled me inside and slammed the door. "Is he well?" she asked. "Quite," I answered. Her tense stare relaxed. She rubbed her hands on her overall and said: "You'll excuse me. It's the girl's day out. If you'll step into the parlor--" So in her parlor I sat and told her how it was with Chris and how greatly he desired to see her. And as I spoke of his longing I turned my eyes away from her, because she was sitting on a sofa, upholstered in velveteen of a sickish green, which was so low that her knees stuck up in front of her, and she had to clasp them with her seamed, floury hands. I could see that the skin of her face was damp. And my voice failed me as I looked round the room, because I saw just what Margaret had seen that evening fifteen years ago when she had laid her cheek to the parlor window at Monkey Island. There was the enlarged photograph of Margaret's mother over the mantelpiece, on the walls were the views of Tintern Abbey framed in red plush, between the rickety legs of the china cupboard was the sewing-machine, and tucked into the corner between my chair and the fender were a pair of carpet slippers. All her life long Margaret, who in her time had partaken of the supreme dignity of a requited love, had lived with men who wore carpet slippers in the house. I turned my eyes away again, and this time looked down the garden at the figure that was not so much digging as exhibiting his incapacity to deal with a spade. He was sneezing very frequently, and his sneezes made the unbuckled straps at the back of his waistcoat wag violently. I supposed him to be Mr. William Grey. I had finished the statement of our sad case, and I saw that though she had not moved, clasping her knees in a set, hideous attitude, the tears were rolling down her cheeks. "Oh, don't! Oh, don't!" I exclaimed, standing up. Her tear-stained immobility touched the heart. "He's not so bad; he'll get quite well." "I know, I know," she said miserably. "I don't believe that anything bad could be allowed to happen to Chris for long. And I'm sure," she said kindly, "you're looking after him beautifully. But when a thing you had thought had ended fifteen years ago starts all over again, and you're very tired--" She drew a hand across her tears, her damp skin, her rough, bagging overall. "I'm hot. I've been baking. You can't get a girl nowadays that understands the baking." Her gaze became remote and tender, and she said in a manner that was at once argumentative and narrative, as though she were telling the whole story to a neighbor over the garden wall: "I suppose I ought to say that he isn't right in his head, and that I'm married, so we'd better not meet; but, oh," she cried, and I felt as though, after much fumbling with damp matches and many doubts as to whether there was any oil in the wick, I had lit the lamp at last, "I want to see him so! It's wrong, I know it's wrong, but I am so glad Chris wants to see me, too!" "You'll do him good." I found myself raising my voice to the pitch she had suddenly attained as though to keep her at it. "Come now!" She dipped suddenly to compassion. "But the young lady?" she asked timidly. "She was upset the last time. I've often wondered if I did right in going. Even if Chris has forgotten, he'll want to do what's right. He couldn't bear to hurt her." "That's true," I said. "You do know our Chris. He watches her out of the corner of his eye, even when he's feeling at his worst, to see she isn't wincing. But she sent me here to-day." "Oh!" cried Margaret, glowing, "she must have a lovely nature!" I lost suddenly the thread of the conversation. I could not talk about Kitty. She appeared to me at that moment a faceless figure with flounces, just as most of the servants at Baldry Court appear to me as faceless figures with caps and aprons. There were only two real people in the world, Chris and this woman whose personality was sounding through her squalor like a beautiful voice singing in a darkened room, and I was absorbed in a mental vision of them. You know how the saints and the prophets are depicted in the steel engravings in old Bibles; so they were standing, in flowing white robes on rocks against a pitch-black sky, a strong light beating on their eyes upturned in ecstasy and their hand outstretched to receive the spiritual blessing of which the fierce rays were an emanation. Into that rapt silence I desired to break, and I whispered irrelevantly, "Oh, nothing, nothing is too good for Chris!" while I said to myself, "If she really were like that, solemn and beatified!" and my eyes returned to look despairingly on her ugliness. But she really was like that. She had responded to my irrelevant murmur of adoration by just such a solemn and beatified appearance as I had imagined. Her grave eyes were upturned, her worn hands lay palm upward on her knees, as though to receive the love of which her radiance was an emanation. And then, at a sound in the kitchen, she snatched my exaltation from me by suddenly turning dull. "I think that's Mr. Grey come in from his gardening. You'll excuse me." Through the open door I heard a voice saying in a way which suggested that its production involved much agitation of a prominent Adam's apple: "Well, dear, seeing you had a friend, I thought I'd better slip up and change my gardening trousers." I do not know what she said to him, but her voice was soft and comforting and occasionally girlish and interrupted by laughter, and I perceived from its sound that with characteristic gravity she had accepted it as her mission to keep loveliness and excitement alive in his life. "An old friend of mine has been wounded," was the only phrase I heard; but when she drew him out into the garden under the window she had evidently explained the situation away, for he listened docilely as she said: "I've made some rock-cakes for your tea. And if I'm late for supper, there's a dish of macaroni cheese you must put in the oven and a tin of tomatoes to eat with it. And there is a little rhubarb and shape." She told them off on her fingers, and then whisked him round and buckled the wagging straps at the back of his waistcoat. He was a lank man, with curly gray hairs growing from every place where it is inadvisable that hairs should grow,--from the inside of his ears, from his nostrils, on the back of his hands,--but he looked pleased when she touched him, and he said in a devoted way: "Very well, dear. Don't worry about me. I'll trot along after tea and have a game of draughts with Brown." She answered: "Yes, dear. And now get on with those cabbages. You're going to keep me in lovely cabbages, just as you did last year, won't you, darling?" She linked arms with him and took him back to his digging. When she came back into the parlor again she was wearing that yellowish raincoat, that hat with hearse plumes nodding over its sticky straw, that gray alpaca skirt. I first defensively clenched my hands. It would have been such agony to the finger-tips to touch any part of her apparel. And then I thought of Chris, to whom a second before I had hoped to bring a serene comforter. I perceived clearly that that ecstatic woman lifting her eyes and her hands to the benediction of love was Margaret as she existed in eternity; but this was Margaret as she existed in time, as the fifteen years between Monkey Island and this damp day in Ladysmith Road had irreparably made her. Well, I had promised to bring her to him. She said: "I'm ready," and against that simple view of her condition I had no argument. But when she paused by the painted drainpipe in the hall and peered under contracted brows for that unveracious tortoiseshell handle, I said hastily: "Oh, don't trouble about an umbrella." "I'll maybe need it walking home," she pondered. "But the car will bring you back." "Oh, that will be lovely," she said, and laughed nervously, looking very plain. "Do you know, I know the way we're coming together is terrible, but I can't think of a meeting with Chris as anything but a kind of treat. I've got a sort of party feeling now." As she held the gate open for me she looked back at the house. "It's a horrid little house, isn't it?" she asked. She evidently desired sanction for a long-suppressed discontent. "It isn't very nice," I agreed. "They put cows sometimes into the field at the back," she went on, as if conscientiously counting her blessings. "I like that; but otherwise it isn't much." "But it's got a very pretty name," I said, laying my hand on the raised metal letters that spelled "Mariposa" across the gate. "Ah, isn't it!" she exclaimed, with the smile of the inveterate romanticist. "It's Spanish, you know, for butterfly." Once we were in the automobile, she became a little sullen with shyness, because she felt herself so big and clumsy, her clothes so coarse, against the fine upholstery, the silver vase of Christmas roses, and all the deliberate delicacy of Kitty's car. She was afraid of the chauffeur, as the poor are always afraid of men-servants, and ducked her head when he got out to start the car. To recall her to ease and beauty I told her that though Chris had told me all about their meeting, he knew nothing of their parting, and that I wished very much to hear what had happened. In a deep, embarrassed voice she began to tell me about Monkey Island. It was strange how both Chris and she spoke of it as though it were not a place, but a magic state which largely explained the actions performed in it. Strange, too, that both of them should describe meticulously the one white hawthorn that stood among the poplars by the ferry-side. I suppose a thing that one has looked at with some one one loves acquires forever after a special significance. She said that her father had gone there when she was fourteen. After Mrs. Arlington had been taken away by a swift and painful death the cheer of his Windsor hostelry had become intolerable to the man; he regarded the whole world as her grave, and the tipsy sergeants in scarlet, the carter crying for a pint of four-half, and even the mares dipping their mild noses to the trough in the courtyard seemed to be defiling it by their happy, simple appetites. So they went to Monkey Island, the utter difference of which was a healing, and settled down happily in its green silence. All the summer was lovely; quiet, kind people, schoolmasters who fished, men who wrote books, married couples who still loved solitude, used to come and stay in the bright little inn. And all the winter was lovely, too; her temperament could see an adventure in taking up the carpets because the Thames was coming into the coffee-room. That was the tale of her life for four years. With her head on one side, and the air of judging this question by the light of experience, she pronounced that she had then been happy. Then one April afternoon Chris landed at the island, and by the first clean, quick movement of tying up his boat made her his slave. I could imagine that it would be so. He was wonderful when he was young; he possessed in great measure the loveliness of young men, which is like the loveliness of the spry foal or the sapling, but in him it was vexed into a serious and moving beauty by the inhabiting soul. When the sunlight lay on him, disclosing the gold hairs on his brown head, or when he was subject to any other physical pleasure, there was always reserve in his response to it. From his eyes, which, though gray, were somehow dark with speculation, one perceived that he was distracted by participation in some spiritual drama. To see him was to desire intimacy with him, so that one might intervene between this body, which was formed for happiness, and this soul, which cherished so deep a faith in tragedy. Well, she gave Chris ducks' eggs for tea. "No one ever had ducks' eggs like father did. It was his way of feeding them. It didn't pay, of course, but they were good." Before the afternoon was out he had snared them all with the silken net of his fine manners; he had talked to father about his poultry and had walked about the runs and shown an intelligent interest, and then, as on many succeeding days, he had laid his charm at the girl's feet. "But I thought he must be some one royal, and when he kept on coming, I thought it must be for the ducks' eggs." Then her damp, dull skin flushed suddenly to a warm glory, and she began to stammer. "I know all about that," I said quickly. I was more afraid that I should feel envy or any base passion in the presence of this woman than I have ever been of anything else in my life. "I want to hear how you came to part." "Oh," she cried, "it was the silliest quarrel! We had known how we felt for just a week. Such a week! Lovely weather we had, and father hadn't noticed anything. I didn't want him to, because I thought father might want the marriage soon and think any delay a slight on me, and I knew we would have to wait. Eh! I can remember saying to myself, 'Perhaps five years,' trying to make it as bad as could be so that if we could marry sooner it would be a lovely surprise." She repeated with soft irony, "Perhaps five years!" "Well, then, one Thursday afternoon I'd gone on the back-water with Bert Batchard, nephew to Mr. Batchard who keeps the inn at Surly Hall. I was laughing out loud because he did row so funny! He's a town chap, and he was handling those oars for all the world as though they were teaspoons. The old dinghy just sat on the water like a hen on its chicks and didn't move, and he so sure of himself! I just sat and laughed and laughed. Then all of a sudden, _clang! clang!_ the bell at the ferry. And there was Chris, standing up there among the poplars, his brows straight and black, and not a smile on him. I felt very bad. We picked him up in the dinghy and took him across, and still he didn't smile. He and I got on the island, and Bert, who saw there was something wrong, said, 'Well, I'll toddle off.' And there I was on the lawn with Chris, and he angry and somehow miles away. I remember him saying, 'Here am I coming to say good-by, because I must go away to-night, and I find you larking with that bounder.' And I said: 'O Chris, I've known Bert all my life through him coming to his uncle for the holidays, and we weren't larking. It was only that he couldn't row.' And he went on talking, and then it struck me he wasn't trusting me as he would trust a girl of his own class, and I told him so, and he went on being cruel. Oh, don't make me remember the things we said to each other! It doesn't help. At last I said something awful, and he said: 'Very well; I agree. I'll go,' and he walked over to the boy, who was chopping wood, and got him to take him over in the punt. As he passed me he turned away his face. Well, that's all." I had got the key at last. There had been a spring at Baldry Court fifteen years ago that was desolate for all that there was beautiful weather. Chris had lingered with Uncle Ambrose in his Thames-side rectory as he had never lingered before, and old Mr. Baldry was filling the house with a sense of hot, apoplectic misery. All day he was up in town at the office, and without explanation he had discontinued his noontide habit of ringing up his wife. All night he used to sit in the library looking over his papers and ledgers; often in the mornings the housemaids would find him asleep across his desk, very red, yet looking dead. The men he brought home to dinner treated him with a kindness and consideration which were not the tributes that that victorious and trumpeting personality was accustomed to exact, and in the course of conversation with them he dropped braggart hints of impending ruin which he would have found it humiliating to address to us directly. At last there came a morning when he said to Mrs. Baldry across the breakfast-table: "I've sent for Chris. If the boy's worth his salt--" It was an appalling admission, like the groan of an old ship as her timbers shiver, from a man who doubted the capacity of his son, as fathers always doubt the capacity of the children born of their old age. It was that evening, as I went down to see the new baby at the lodge, that I met Chris coming up the drive. Through the blue twilight his white face had had a drowned look. I remembered it well, because my surprise that he passed me without seeing me had made me perceive for the first time that he had never seen me at all save in the most cursory fashion. On the eye of his mind, I realized thenceforward, I had hardly impinged. That night he talked till late with his father, and in the morning he had started for Mexico to keep the mines going, to keep the firm's head above water and Baldry Court sleek and hospitable--to keep everything bright and splendid save only his youth, which ever after that was dulled by care. Something of this I told Margaret, to which she answered, "Oh, I know all that," and went on with her story. On Sunday, three days after their quarrel, Mr. Allington was found dead in his bed. "I wanted Chris so badly; but he never came, he never wrote," and she fell into a lethargic disposition to sit all day and watch the Thames flow by, from which she was hardly roused by finding that her father had left her nothing save an income of twenty pounds a year from unrealizable stock. She negotiated the transfer of the lease of the inn to a publican, and, after exacting a promise from the new hostess that she would forward all letters that might come, embarked upon an increasingly unfortunate career as a mother's help. First she fell into the hands of a noble Irish family in reduced circumstances, whose conduct in running away and leaving her in a Brighton hotel with her wages and her bill unpaid still distressed and perplexed her. "Why did they do it?" she asked. "I liked them so. The baby was a darling, and Mrs. Murphy had such a nice way of speaking. But it almost makes one think evil of people when they do a thing like that." After two years of less sensational, but still uneasy, adventures, she had come upon a large and needy family called Watson who lived at Chiswick, and almost immediately Mr. William Grey, who was Mrs. Watson's brother, had begun a courtship that I suspected of consisting of an incessant whining up at her protective instinct. "Mr. Grey," she said softly, as though stating his chief aim to affection, "has never been very successful." And still no letter ever came. So, five years after she left Monkey Island, she married Mr. William Grey. Soon after their marriage he lost his job and was for some time out of work; later he developed a weak chest that needed constant attention. "But it all helped to pass the time," she said cheerfully and without irony. So it happened that it was not till two years after that she had the chance of revisiting Monkey Island. At first there was no money, and later there was the necessity of seeking the healthful breezes of Brighton or Bognor or Southend, which were the places in which Mr. Grey's chest oddly elected to thrive. And when these obstacles were removed, she was lethargic; also she had heard that the inn was not being managed as it ought to be, and she could not have borne to see the green home of her youth defiled. But then there had come a time when she had been very much upset,--she glared a little wildly at me as she said this, as if she would faint if I asked her any questions,--and then she had suddenly become obsessed with a desire to see Monkey Island once more. "Well, when we got to the ferry, Mr. Grey says, 'But mercy, Margaret, there's water all round it!' and I said, 'William, that's just it.'" They found that the island was clean and decorous again, for it had only recently changed hands. "Father and daughter the new people are, just like me and dad, and Mr. Taylor's something of dad's cut, too, but he comes from the North. But Miss Taylor's much handsomer than I ever was; a really big woman she is, and such lovely golden hair. They were very kind when I told them who I was; gave us duck and green peas for lunch and I did think of dad. They were nothing like as good as his ducks, but then I expect they paid. And then Miss Taylor took William out to look at the garden. I knew he didn't like it, for he's always shy with a showy woman, and I was going after them when Mr. Taylor said: 'Here, stop a minute. I've got something here that may interest you. Just come in here. He took me up to the roller desk in the office, and out of the drawer he took twelve letters addressed to me in Chris's handwriting. "He was a kind man. He put me into a chair and called Miss Taylor in and told her to keep William out in the garden as long as possible. At last I said, 'But Mrs. Hitchcock did say she'd send my letters on.' And he said, 'Mrs. Hitchcock hadn't been here three weeks before she bolted with a bookie from Bray, and after that Hitchcock mixed his drinks and got careless.' He said they had found these stuffed into the desk." "And what was in them?" "For a long time I did not read them; I thought it was against my duty as a wife. But when I got that telegram saying he was wounded, I went up-stairs and read those letters. Oh, those letters!" She bowed her head and wept. As the car swung through the gates of Baldry Court she sat up and dried her eyes. She looked out at the strip of turf, so bright that one would think it wet, and lighted here and there with snowdrops and scillas and crocuses, that runs between the drive and the tangle of silver birch and bramble and fern. There is no esthetic reason for that border; the common outside looks lovelier where it fringes the road with dark gorse and rough amber grasses. Its use is purely philosophic; it proclaims that here we esteem only controlled beauty, that the wild will not have its way within our gates, that it must be made delicate and decorated into felicity. Surely, she must see that this was no place for beauty that had been not mellowed, but lacerated, by time, that no one accustomed to live here could help wincing at such external dinginess as hers. But instead she said: "It's a big place. Chris must have worked hard to keep all this up." The pity of this woman was like a flaming sword. No one had ever before pitied Chris for the magnificence of Baldry Court. It had been our pretense that by wearing costly clothes and organizing a costly life we had been the servants of his desire. But she revealed the truth that, although he did indeed desire a magnificent house, it was a house not built with hands. But that she was wise, that the angels would of a certainty be on her side, did not make her any the less physically offensive to our atmosphere. All my doubts as to the wisdom of my expedition revived in the little time we had to spend in the hall waiting for the tea which I had ordered in the hope that it might help Margaret to compose her distressed face. She hovered with her back to the oak table, fumbling with her thread gloves, winking her tear-red eyes, tapping with her foot on the carpet, throwing her weight from one leg to the other, and I constantly contrasted her appearance by some clumsiness with the new acquisition of Kitty's decorative genius that stood so close behind her on the table that I was afraid it might be upset by one of her spasmodic movements. This was a shallow black bowl in the center of which crouched on all fours a white, naked nymph, her small head intently drooped to the white flowers that floated on the black waters all around her. Beside the pure black of the bowl her rusty plumes looked horrible; beside that white nymph, eternally innocent of all but the contemplation of beauty, her opaque skin and her suffering were offensive; beside its air of being the coolly conceived and leisurely executed production of a hand and brain lifted by their rare quality to the service of the not absolutely necessary, her appearance of having only for the moment ceased to cope with a vexed and needy environment struck me as a cancerous blot on the fair world. Perhaps it was absurd to pay attention to this indictment of a noble woman by a potter's toy, but that toy happened to be also a little image of Chris's conception of women. Exquisite we were according to our equipment, unflushed by appetite or passion, even noble passion, our small heads bent intently on the white flowers of luxury floating on the black waters of life, he had known none other than us. With such a mental habit a man could not help but wince at Margaret. I drank my tea very slowly because I previsioned what must happen in the next five minutes. Down there by the pond he would turn at the sound of those heavy boots on the path, and with one glance he would assess the age of her, the rubbed surface of her, the torn fine texture, and he would show to her squalid mask just such a blank face as he had shown to Kitty's piteous mask the night before. Although I had a gift for self-pity, I knew her case would then be worse than mine; for it would be worse to see, as she would see, the ardor in his eyes give place to kindliness than never to have ardor there. He would hesitate; she would make one of her harassed gestures, and trail away with that wet, patient look which was her special line. He would go back to his boyish sport with the skiff; I hoped the brown waters would not seem too kind. She would go back to Mariposa, sit on her bed, and read those letters. "And now," she said brightly as I put down my cup, "may I see Chris?" She had not a doubt of the enterprise. I took her into the drawing-room and opened one of the French windows. "Go past the cedars to the pond," I told her. "He is rowing there." "That is nice," she said. "He always looks so lovely in a boat." I called after her, trying to hint the possibility of a panic breakdown to their meeting: "You'll find he's altered--" She cried gleefully: "Oh, I shall know him." As I went up-stairs I became aware that I was near to a bodily collapse; I suppose the truth is that I was physically so jealous of Margaret that it was making me ill. But suddenly, like a tired person dropping a weight that they know to be precious, but cannot carry for another minute, my mind refused to consider the situation any longer and turned to the perception of material things. I leaned over the balustrade and looked down at the fineness of the hall: the deliberate figure of the nymph in her circle of black waters, the clear pink-and-white of Kitty's chintz, the limpid surface of the oak, the broken burning of all the gay reflected colors in the paneled walls. I said to myself, "If everything else goes, there is always this to fall back on," and I went on, pleased that I was wearing delicate stuffs and that I had a smooth skin, pleased that the walls of the corridor were so soft a twilight blue, pleased that through a far-off open door there came a stream of light that made the carpet blaze its stronger blue. And when I saw that it was the nursery door that was open, and that Kitty was sitting in Nanny's big chair by the window, I did not care about the peaked face she lifted, its fairness palely gilt by the March sunlight, or the tremendous implications of the fact that she had come to her dead child's nursery although she had not washed her hair. I said sternly, because she had forgotten that we lived in the impregnable fort of a gracious life: "O Kitty, that poor battered thing outside!" She stared so grimly out into the garden that my eyes followed her stare. It was one of those draggled days, common at the end of March when a garden looks at its worst. The wind that was rolling up to check a show of sunshine had taken away the cedar's dignity of solid blue shade, had set the black firs beating their arms together, and had filled the sky with glaring gray clouds that dimmed the brilliance of the crocuses. It was to give gardens a point on days such as these, when the planned climax of this flower-bed and that stately tree goes for nothing, that the old gardeners raised statues in their lawns and walks, large things with a subject, mossy Tritons or nymphs with an urn, that held the eye. Even so in this unrestful garden one's eyes lay on the figure in the yellow raincoat that was standing still in the middle of the lawn. How her near presence had been known by Chris I do not understand, but there he was, running across the lawn as night after night I had seen him in my dreams running across No-Man's-Land. I knew that so he would close his eyes as he ran; I knew that so he would pitch on his knees when he reached safety. I assumed naturally that at Margaret's feet lay safety even before I saw her arms brace him under the armpits with a gesture that was not passionate, but rather the movement of one carrying a wounded man from under fire. But even when she had raised his head to the level of her lips, the central issue was not decided. I covered my eyes and said aloud, "In a minute he will see her face, her hands." But although it was a long time before I looked again, they were still clinging breast to breast. It was as though her embrace fed him, he looked so strong as he broke away. They stood with clasped hands looking at one another. They looked straight, they looked delightedly! And then, as if resuming a conversation tiresomely interrupted by some social obligation, they drew together again, and passed under the tossing branches of the cedar to the wood beyond. I reflected, while Kitty shrilly wept, how entirely right Chris had been in his assertion that to lovers innumerable things do not matter. CHAPTER V After the automobile had taken Margaret away Chris came to us as we sat in the drawing-room, and, after standing for a while in the glow of the fire, hesitantly said: "I want to tell you that I know it is all right. Margaret has explained to me." Kitty crumpled her sewing into a white ball. "You mean, I suppose, that you know I'm your wife. I'm pleased that you describe that as knowing 'it's all right,' and grateful that you have accepted it at last--on Margaret's authority. This is an occasion that would make any wife proud." Her irony was as faintly acrid as a caraway-seed, and never afterward did she reach even that low pitch of violence; for from that mild, forward droop of the head with which he received the mental lunge she realized suddenly that this was no pretense and that something as impassable as death lay between them. Thereafter his proceedings evoked no comment but suffering. There was nothing to say when all day, save for those hours of the afternoon that Margaret spent with him, he sat like a blind man waiting for his darkness to lift. There was nothing to say when he did not seem to see our flowers, yet kept till they rotted the daffodils which Margaret brought from the garden that looked like an allotment. So Kitty lay about like a broken doll, face downward on a sofa, with one limp arm dangling to the floor, or protruding stiff feet in fantastic slippers from the end of her curtained bed; and I tried to make my permanent wear that mood which had mitigated the end of my journey with Margaret--a mood of intense perception in which my strained mind settled on every vivid object that came under my eyes and tried to identify myself with its brightness and its lack of human passion. This does not mean that I passed my day in a state of joyous appreciation; it means that many times in the lanes of Harrowweald I have stood for long looking up at a fine tracery of bare boughs against the hard, high spring sky while the cold wind rushed through my skirts and chilled me to the bone, because I was afraid that when I moved my body and my attention I might begin to think. Indeed, grief is not the clear melancholy the young believe it. It is like a siege in a tropical city. The skin dries and the throat parches as though one were living in the heat of the desert; water and wine taste warm in the mouth, and food is of the substance of the sand; one snarls at one's company; thoughts prick one through sleep like mosquitos. A week after my journey to Wealdstone I went to Kitty to ask her to come for a walk with me and found her stretched on her pillows, holding a review of her underclothing. She refused bitterly and added: "Be back early. Remember Dr. Gilbert Anderson is coming at half-past four. He's our last hope. And tell that woman she must see him. He says he wants to see everybody concerned." She continued to look wanly at the frail, luminous silks her maid brought her as a speculator who had cornered an article for which there had been no demand might look at his damnably numerous, damnably unprofitable freights. So I went out alone into a soft day, with the dispelled winter lurking above in high dark clouds, under which there ran quick, fresh currents of air and broken shafts of insistent sunshine that spread a gray clarity of light in which every color showed sharp and strong. On the breast that Harrowweald turns to the south they had set a lambing-yard. The pale-lavender hurdles and gold-strewn straw were new gay notes on the opaque winter green of the slope, and the apprehensive bleatings of the ewes wound about the hill like a river of sound as they were driven up a lane hidden by the hedge. The lines of bare elms darkening the plains below made it seem as though the tide of winter had fallen and left this bare and sparkling in the spring. I liked it so much that I opened the gate and went and sat down on a tree which had been torn up by the roots in the great gale last year, but had not yet resigned itself to death, and was bravely decking its boughs with purple elm-flowers. That pleased me, too, and I wished I had some one with me to enjoy this artless little show of the new year. I had not really wanted Kitty; the companions I needed were Chris and Margaret. Chris would have talked, as he loved to do when he looked at leisure on a broad valley, about ideas which he had to exclude from his ordinary hours lest they should break the power of business over his mind, and Margaret would have gravely watched the argument from the shadow of her broad hat to see that it kept true, like a housewife watching a saucepan of milk lest it should boil over. They were naturally my friends, these gentle, speculative people. Then suddenly I was stunned with jealousy. It was not their love for each other that caused me such agony at that moment; it was the thought of the things their eyes had rested upon together. I imagined that white hawthorn among the poplars by the ferry on which they had looked fifteen years ago at Monkey Island, and it was more than I could bear. I thought how even now they might be exclaiming at the green smoke of the first buds on the brown undergrowth by the pond, and at that I slid off the tree-trunk and began walking very quickly down the hill. The red cows drank from the pond cupped by the willow-roots; a raw-boned stallion danced clumsily because warmth was running through the ground. I found a stream in the fields and followed it till it became a shining dike embanked with glowing green and gold mosses in the midst of woods; and the sight of those things was no sort of joy, because my vision was solitary. I wanted to end my desperation by leaping from a height, and I climbed on a knoll and flung myself face downward on the dead leaves below. I was now utterly cut off from Chris. Before, when I looked at him, I knew an instant ease in the sight of the short golden down on his cheeks, the ridge of bronze flesh above his thick, fair eyebrows. But now I was too busy reassuring him by showing a steady, undistorted profile crowned by a neat, proud sweep of hair instead of the tear-darkened mask he always feared ever to have enough vitality left over to enjoy his presence. I spoke in a calm voice full from the chest, quite unfluted with agony; I read "Country Life" with ponderous interest; I kept my hands, which I desired to wring, in doeskin gloves for most of the day; I played with the dogs a great deal and wore my thickest tweeds; I pretended that the slight heaviness of my features is a correct indication of my temperament. The only occasion when I could safely let the sense of him saturate me as it used was when I met Margaret in the hall as she came or went. She was very different now; she had a little smile in her eyes, as though she were listening to a familiar air played far away. Her awkwardness seemed indecision as to whether she should walk or dance to that distant music; her shabbiness was no more repulsive than the untidiness of a child who had been so eager to get to the party that it has not let its nurse finish fastening its frock. Always she extended a hand in an unbuttoned black thread glove and said, "It's another fine day again," or diffidently, as Kitty continued to withhold her presence, "I hope Mrs. Baldry is keeping well." Then, as our hands touched, he was with us, invoked by our common adoration. I felt his rough male texture and saw the clear warmth of his brown and gold coloring; I thought of him with the passion of exile. To Margaret it was a call, and she moved past me to the garden, holding her hands in front of her as though she bore invisible gifts, and pausing on the step of the French window to smile to herself, as if in her heart she turned over the precious thought: "He is here. This garden holds him." My moment, my small sole subsistence, ended in a feeling of jealousy as ugly and unmental as sickness. This was the saddest spring. Nothing could mitigate the harshness of our dejection. You may think we were attaching an altogether fictitious importance to what was merely the delusion of a madman. But every minute of the day, particularly at those trying times when he strolled about the house and grounds with the doctors, smiling courteously, but without joy, and answering their questions with the crisp politeness of a man shaking off an inquisitive commercial traveler in a hotel smoking-room, it became plain that if madness means a liability to wild error about the world Chris was not mad. It was our peculiar shame that he had rejected us when he had attained to something saner than sanity. His very loss of memory was a triumph over the limitations of language which prevent the mass of men from making explicit statements about their spiritual relationships. If he had said to Kitty and me, "I do not know you," we would have gaped; if he had expanded his meaning and said, "You are nothing to me; my heart is separate from your hearts," we would have wept at an unkindness he had not intended. But by the blankness of those eyes which saw me only as a disregarded playmate and Kitty not at all save as a stranger who had somehow become a decorative presence in his home and the orderer of his meals he let us know completely where we were. Even though I lay weeping at it on the dead leaves I was sensible of the bitter rapture which attends the discovery of any truth. I felt, indeed, a cold intellectual pride in his refusal to remember his prosperous maturity and his determined dwelling in the time of his first love, for it showed him so much saner than the rest of us, who take life as it comes, loaded with the unessential and the irritating. I was even willing to admit that this choice of what was to him reality out of all the appearances so copiously presented by the world, this adroit recovery of the dropped pearl of beauty, was the act of genius I had always expected from him. But that did not make less agonizing this exclusion from his life. I could not think clearly about it. I suppose that the subject of our tragedy, written in spiritual terms, was that in Kitty he had turned from the type of woman that makes the body conqueror of the soul and in me the type that mediates between the soul and the body and makes them run even and unhasty like a well-matched pair of carriage horses, and had given himself to a woman whose bleak habit it was to champion the soul against the body. But I saw it just as a fantastic act of cruelty that I could think of only as a conjunction of calamitous images. I think of it happening somewhere behind the front, at the end of a straight road that runs by a line of ragged poplars between mud flats made steel-bright with floods pitted by the soft, slow rain. There, past a church that lacks its tower, stand a score of houses, each hideous with patches of bare bricks that show like sores through the ripped-off plaster and uncovered rafters that stick out like broken bones. There are people still living here. A slouchy woman sits at the door of a filthy cottage, counting some dirty linen and waving her bare arm at some passing soldiers. And at another house there is a general store with strings of orange onions and bunches of herbs hanging from the roof, a brown gloom rich with garlic and humming with the flies that live all the year round in French village shops, a black cat rubbing her sleepiness against the lintel. It is in there that Chris is standing, facing across the counter an old man in a blouse, with a scar running white into the gray thickets of his beard, an old man with a smile at once lewd and benevolent, repulsive with dirt and yet magnificent by reason of the Olympian structure of his body. I think he is the soul of the universe, equally cognizant and disregardful of every living thing, to whom I am not more dear than the bare-armed slouchy woman at the neighboring door. And Chris is leaning on the counter, his eyes glazed. (This is his spirit; his body lies out there in the drizzle, at the other end of the road.) He is looking down on the two crystal balls that the old man's foul, strong hands have rolled across to him. In one he sees Margaret, not in her raincoat and her nodding plumes, but as she is transfigured in the light of eternity. Long he looks there; then drops a glance to the other, just long enough to see that in its depths Kitty and I walk in bright dresses through our glowing gardens. We had suffered no transfiguration, for we are as we are, and there is nothing more to us. The whole truth about us lies in our material seeming. He sighs a deep sigh of delight and puts out his hand to the ball where Margaret shines. His sleeve catches the other one and sends it down to crash in a thousand pieces on the floor. The old man's smile continues to be lewd and benevolent; he is still not more interested in me than in the bare-armed woman. Chris is wholly inclosed in his intentness on his chosen crystal. No one weeps for this shattering of our world. I stirred on the dead leaves as though I had really heard the breaking of the globe and cried out, "Gilbert Anderson, Gilbert Anderson must cure him." Heaven knows that I had no reason for faith in any doctor, for during the last week so many of them, as sleek as seals with their neatly brushed hair and their frock-coats, had stood round Chris and looked at him with the consequenceless deliberation of a plumber. Their most successful enterprise had been his futile hypnotism. He had submitted to it as a good-natured man submits to being blindfolded at a children's party, and under its influence had recovered his memory and his middle-aged personality, had talked of Kitty with the humorous tenderness of the English husband, and had looked possessively about him. But as his mind came out of the control he exposed their lie that they were dealing with a mere breakdown of the normal process by pushing away this knowledge and turning to them the blank wall, all the blanker because it was unconscious, of his resolution not to know. I had accepted that it would always be so. But at that moment I had so great a need to throw off my mood of despair, so insupportably loaded with all the fantastic images to which my fevered mind transmuted the facts of our tragedy, that I filled myself with a gasping, urgent faith in this new doctor. I jumped up and pushed through the brambles to the hedge that divided the preserves in which I was trespassing from our own woods, breathless because I had let it go past four and I had still to find Chris and Margaret for the doctor's visit at the half-hour. There had been a hardening of the light while I slept that made the dear, familiar woods rich and sinister, and to the eye, tropical. The jewel-bright buds on the soot-black boughs, the blue valley distances, smudged here and there with the pink enamel of villa-roofs, and seen between the black-and-white intricacies of the birch-trunks and the luminous gray pillars of the beeches, hurt my wet eyes as might beauty blazing under an equatorial sun. There was a tropical sense of danger, too, for I walked as apprehensively as though a snake coiled under every leaf, because I feared to come on them when he was speaking to her without looking at her or thinking in silence while he played with her hand. Embraces do not matter; they merely indicate the will to love, and may as well be followed by defeat as victory. But disregard means that now there needs to be no straining of the eyes, no stretching forth of the hands, no pressing of the lips, because theirs is such a union that they are no longer aware of the division of their flesh. I know it must be so; a lonely life gives one opportunities of thinking these things out. I could not have borne to see signs of how he had achieved this intimacy with the woman whom a sudden widening of the downward vista showed as she leaned her bent back, ridged by her cheap stays, against a birch that some special skill of our forester had made wonderful for its straight slenderness. Against the clear colors of the bright bare wood her yellow raincoat made a muddy patch, and as a dead bough dropped near her she made a squalid dodging movement like a hen. She was not so much a person as an implication of dreary poverty, like an open door in a mean house that lets out the smell of cooking cabbage and the screams of children. Doubtlessly he sat somewhere close to her, lumpishly content. I thought distractedly how necessary it was that Gilbert Anderson should cure him, and tried to shout to her, but found my throat full of sobs. So I broke my way down through the fern and bramble and stood level with them, though still divided by some yards of broken ground. It was not utter dullness not to have anticipated the beauty that I saw. No one could have told. They had taken the mackintosh rug out of the dinghy and spread it on this little space of clear grass, I think so that they could look at a scattering of early primroses in a pool of white anemones at an oak-tree's foot. She had run her hands over the rug so that it lay quite smooth and comfortable under him when at last he felt drowsy and turned on his side to sleep. He lay there in the confiding relaxation of a sleeping child, his hands unclenched, and his head thrown back so that the bare throat showed defenselessly. Now he was asleep and his face undarkened by thought, one saw how very fair he really was. And she, her mournfully vigilant face pinkened by the cold river of air sent by the advancing evening through the screen of rusted-gold bracken behind her, was sitting by him, just watching. I have often seen people grouped like that on the common outside our gates on Bank holidays. Most often the man has a handkerchief over his face to shade him from the sun, and the woman squats beside him and peers through the undergrowth to see that the children come to no harm as they play. It has sometimes seemed to me that there was a significance about it. You know when one goes into the damp, odorous coolness of a church in a Catholic country and sees the kneeling worshipers, their bodies bent stiffly and reluctantly, and yet with abandonment as though to represent the inevitable bending of the will to a purpose outside the individual person, or when under any sky one sees a mother with her child in her arms, something turns in one's heart like a sword, and one says to oneself, "If humanity forgets these attitudes there is an end to the world." But people like me, who are not artists, are never sure about people they don't know. So it was not until now, when it happened to my friends, when it was my dear Chris and my dear Margaret who sat thus englobed in peace as in a crystal sphere, that I knew it was the most significant, as it was the loveliest, attitude in the world. It means that the woman has gathered the soul of the man into her soul and is keeping it warm in love and peace so that his body can rest quiet for a little time. That is a great thing for a woman to do. I know there are things at least as great for those women whose independent spirits can ride fearlessly and with interest outside the home park of their personal relationships, but independence is not the occupation of most of us. What we desire is greatness such as this, which had given sleep to the beloved. I had known that he was having bad nights at Baldry Court in that new room with the jade-green painted walls and the lapis-lazuli fireplace, which he found with surprise to be his instead of the remembered little room with the fishing-rods; but I had not been able to do anything about it. It was not fair that by the exercise of a generosity which seemed as fortuitous a possession as a beautiful voice a woman should be able to do such wonderful things for a man. For sleep was the least of her gifts to him. What she had done in leading him into the quiet magic circle out of our life, out of the splendid house which was not so much a house as a vast piece of space partitioned off from the universe and decorated partly for beauty and partly to make our privacy more insolent, out of the garden where the flowers took thought as to how they should grow and the wood made as formal as a pillared aisle by forestry, may be judged from my anguish in being left there alone. Indeed she had been generous to us all, for at her touch our lives had at last fallen into a pattern; she was the sober thread the interweaving of which with our scattered magnificences had somewhat achieved the design that otherwise would not appear. Perhaps even her dinginess was part of her generosity, for in order to fit into the pattern one has sometimes to forego something of one's individual beauty. That is why women like us do not wear such obviously lovely dresses as cocottes, but clothe ourselves in garments that by their slight neglect of the possibilities of beauty declare that there are such things as thrift and restraint and care for the future. And so I could believe of Margaret that her determined dwelling in places where there was not enough of anything, her continued exposure of herself to the grime of squalid living, was unconsciously deliberate. The deep internal thing that had guided Chris to forgetfulness had guided her to poverty, so that when the time came for her meeting with her lover there should be not one intimation of the beauty of suave flesh to distract him from the message of her soul. I looked upward at this supreme act of sacrifice and glowed at her private gift to me. My sleep, though short, was now dreamless. No more did I see his body rotting into union with that brown texture of corruption which is No-Man's-Land; no more did I see him slipping softly down the parapet into the trench; no more did I hear voices talking in a void: "Help me, old man; I've got no legs--" "I can't, old man; I've got no hands." They could not take him back to the army as he was. Only that morning as I went through the library he had raised an appalled face from the pages of a history of the war. "Jenny, it can't be true that they did that to Belgium? Those funny, quiet, stingy people!" And his soldierly knowledge was as deeply buried as this memory of that awful August. While her spell endured they could not send him back into the hell of war. This wonderful, kind woman held his body as safely as she held his soul. I was so grateful that I was forced to go and sit down on the rug beside her. It was an intrusion, but I wanted to be near her. She did not look surprised when she turned to me her puckered brows, but smiled through the ugly fringe of vagrant hairs the weather had plucked from under the hard rim of her hat. It was part of her loveliness that even if she did not understand an act she could accept it. Presently she leaned over to me across his body and whispered: "He's not cold. I put the overcoat on him as soon as he was fairly off. I've just felt his hands, and they're as warm as toast." If I had whispered like that I would have wakened him. Soon he stirred, groped for her hand, and lay with his cheek against the rough palm. He was awake, but liked to lie so. In a little she shook her hand away and said: "Get up and run along to the house and have some hot tea. You'll catch your death lying out here." He caught her hand again. It was evident that for some reason the moment was charged with ecstasy for them both. It seemed as though there was a softer air in this small clearing than anywhere else in the world. I stood up, with my back against a birch and said negligently, knowing now that nothing could really threaten them: "There is a doctor coming at half-past four who wants to see you both." It cast no shadow on their serenity. He smiled upward, still lying on his back, and hailed me, "Hallo, Jenny." But she made him get up and help her to fold the rug. "It's not right to keep a doctor waiting in these times," she declared, "so overworked they are, poor men, since the war." As I led the way up through the woods to the house I heard her prove her point by an illustrative anecdote about something that had happened down her road. I heard, too, their footsteps come to a halt for a space. I think her gray eyes had looked at him so sweetly that he had been constrained to take her in his arms. CHAPTER VI I felt, I remember with the little perk of self-approbation with which one remembers any sort of accurate premonition even if its fulfilment means disaster, a cold hand close round my heart as we turned the corner of the house and came on Dr. Gilbert Anderson. I was startled, to begin with, by his unmedical appearance. He was a little man with winking blue eyes, a flushed and crumpled forehead, a little gray mustache that gave him the profile of an amiable cat, and a lively taste in spotted ties, and he lacked that appetiteless look which is affected by distinguished practitioners. He was at once more comical and more suggestive of power than any other doctor I had ever seen, and this difference was emphasized by his unexpected occupation. A tennis-ball which he had discovered somewhere had roused his sporting instincts, and he was trying at what range it was possible to kick it between two large stones which he had placed close together in front of the steps up to the house. It was his chubby absorption in this amusement which accounted for his first moment of embarrassment. "Nobody about in there; we professional men get so little fresh air," he said bluffly, and blew his nose in a very large handkerchief, from the folds of which he emerged with perfect self-possession. "You," he said to Chris, with a naïve adoption of the detective tone, "are the patient." He rolled his blue eye on me, took a good look, and, as he realized I did not matter, shook off the unnecessary impression like a dog coming out of water. He faced Margaret as though she were the nurse in charge of the case and gave her a brisk little nod. "You're Mrs. Grey. I shall want to talk to you later. Meantime--this man. I'll come back." He indicated by a windmill gesture that we should go into the house, and swung off with Chris. She obeyed; that sort of woman always does what the doctor orders. But I delayed for a moment to stare after this singular specialist, to sidetrack my foreboding by pronouncing him a bounder, to wish, as my foreboding persisted, that like a servant I could give notice because there was "always something happening in the house." Then, as the obedient figure at the top of the stairs was plainly shivering under its shoddy clothes in the rising wind that was polishing the end of the afternoon to brightness, I hastened to lead her into the hall. We stood about uneasily in its gloaming. Margaret looked round her and said in a voice flattened by the despondency she evidently shared with me: "It is nice to have everything ready that people can want and everything in its place. I used to do it at Monkey Island Inn. It was not grand like this, of course, but our visitors always came back a second time." Abstractedly and yet with joy she fingered the fine work of the table-leg. There was a noise above us like the fluttering of doves. Kitty was coming downstairs in a white serge dress against which her hands were rosy; a woman with such lovely little hands never needed to wear flowers. By her kind of physical discipline she had reduced her grief to no more than a slight darkening under the eyes, and for this moment she was glowing. I knew it was because she was going to meet a new man and anticipated the kindling of admiration in his eyes, and I smiled, contrasting her probable prefiguring of Dr. Anderson with the amiable rotundity we had just encountered. Not that it would have made any difference if she had seen him. Beautiful women of her type lose, in this matter of admiration alone, their otherwise tremendous sense of class distinction; they are obscurely aware that it is their civilizing mission to flash the jewel of their beauty before all men, so that they shall desire it and work to get the wealth to buy it, and thus be seduced by a present appetite to a tilling of the earth that serves the future. There is, you know, really room for all of us; we each have our peculiar use. "The doctor's talking to Chris outside," I said. "Ah," breathed Kitty. I found, though the occasion was a little grim, some entertainment in the two women's faces, so mutually intent, so differently fair, the one a polished surface that reflected light, like a mirror hung opposite a window, the other a lamp grimed by the smoke of careless use, but still giving out radiance from its burning oil. Margaret was smiling wonderingly up at this prettiness, but Kitty seemed to be doing some brainwork. "How do you do, Mrs. Grey?" she said, suddenly shaking out her cordiality as one shakes out a fan. "It's very kind of you. Won't you go up-stairs and take off your things?" "No, thank you," answered Margaret, shyly, "I shall have to go away so soon." "Ah, do!" begged Kitty, prettily. It was, of course, that she did not want Margaret to meet the specialist in those awful clothes; but I did not darken the situation by explaining that this disaster had already happened. Instead, I turned to Margaret an expression which conveyed that this was an act of hospitality the refusal of which we would find wounding, and to that she yielded, as I knew she would. She followed me up-stairs and along the corridors very slowly, like a child paddling in a summer sea. She enjoyed the feeling of the thick carpet underfoot; she looked lingeringly at the pictures on the wall; occasionally she put a finger to touch a vase as if by that she made its preciousness more her own. Her spirit, I could see, was as deeply concerned about Chris as was mine; but she had such faith in life that she retained serenity enough to enjoy what beauty she came across in her period of waiting. Even her enjoyment was indirectly generous. When she came into my room the backward flinging of her head and her deep "Oh!" recalled to me what I had long forgotten, how fine were its proportions, how clever the grooved arch above the window, how like the evening sky my blue curtains. "And the lovely things you have on your dressing-table," she commented. "You must have very good taste." The charity that changed my riches to a merit! As I helped her to take off her raincoat and reflected that Kitty would not be pleased when she saw that the removal of the garment disclosed a purple blouse of stuff called moirette that servants use for petticoats, she exclaimed softly Kitty's praises. "I know I shouldn't make personal remarks, but Mrs. Baldry is lovely. She has three circles round her neck. I've only two." It was a touching betrayal that she possessed that intimate knowledge of her own person which comes to women who have been loved. I could not for the life of me have told you how many circles there were round my neck. Plainly discontented with herself in the midst of all this fineness, she said diffidently, "Please, I would like to do my hair." So I pulled the arm-chair up to the dressing-table, and leaned on its back while she, sitting shyly on its very edge, unpinned her two long braids, so thick, so dull. "You've lovely hair," I said. "I used to have nice hair," she mourned, "but these last few years I've let myself go." She made half-hearted attempts to smooth the straggling tendrils on her temples, but presently laid down her brush and clicked her tongue against her teeth. "I hope that man's not worrying Chris," she said. There was no reassurance ready, so I went to the other side of the room to put her hat down on a chair, and stayed for a moment to pat its plumes and wonder if nothing could be done with it. But it was, as surgeons say, an inoperable case. So I just gloomed at it and wished I had not let this doctor interpose his plumpness between Chris and Margaret, who since that afternoon seemed to me as not only a woman whom it was good to love, but, as a patron saint must appear to a Catholic, as an intercessory being whose kindliness could be daunted only by some special and incredibly malicious decision of the Supreme Force. I was standing with eyes closed and my hands abstractedly stroking the hat that was the emblem of her martyrdom, and I was thinking of her in a way that was a prayer to her, when I heard her sharp cry. That she, whose essence was a patient silence, should cry out sharply, startled me strangely. I turned quickly. She was standing up, and in her hand she held the photograph of Oliver that I keep on my dressing-table. It is his last photograph, the one taken just a week before he died. "Who is this?" she asked. "The only child Chris ever had. He died five years ago." "Five years ago?" Why did it matter so? "Yes," I said. "_He_ died five years ago, my Dick." Her eyes grew great. "How old was he?" "Just two." "My Dick was two." We both were breathing hard. "Why did he die?" "We never knew. He was the loveliest boy, but delicate from his birth. At the end he just faded away, with the merest cold." "So did my Dick--a chill. We thought he would be up and about the next day, and he just--" Her awful gesture of regret was suddenly paralyzed. She seemed to be fighting her way to a discovery. "It's--it's as if," she stammered, "they each had half a life." I felt the usual instinct to treat her as though she were ill, because it was evident that she was sustained by a mystic interpretation of life. But she had already taught me something, so I stood aside while she fell on her knees, and wondered why she did not look at the child's photograph, but pressed it to her bosom, as though to stanch a wound. I thought, as I have often thought before, that the childless have the greatest joy in children, for to us they are just slips of immaturity lovelier than the flowers and with the power over the heart, but to mothers they are fleshly cables binding one down to such profundities of feeling as the awful agony that now possessed her. For although I knew I would have accepted it with rapture because it was the result of intimacy with Chris, its awfulness appalled me. Not only did it make my body hurt with sympathy; it shook the ground beneath my feet. For that her serenity, which a moment before had seemed as steady as the earth and as all-enveloping as the sky, should be so utterly dispelled made me aware that I had of late been underestimating the cruelty of the order of things. Lovers are frustrated; children are not begotten that should have had the loveliest life; the pale usurpers of their birth die young. Such a world will not suffer magic circles to endure. The parlor-maid knocked at the door. "Mrs. Baldry and Dr. Anderson are waiting in the drawing-room, ma'am." Margaret reassumed her majesty, and put her white face close to the glass as she pinned up her braids. "I knew there was a something," she moaned, and set the hair-pins all awry. More she could not say, though I clung to her and begged her; but the slow gesture with which, as we were about to leave the room, she laid her hand across the child's photograph somehow convinced me that we were not to be victorious. When we went into the drawing-room we found Dr. Anderson, plump and expository, balancing himself on the balls of his feet on the hearth-rug and enjoying the caress of the fire on his calves, while Kitty, showing against the dark frame of her oak chair like a white rosebud that was still too innocent to bloom, listened with that slight reservation of the attention customary in beautiful women. "A complete case of amnesia," he was saying as Margaret, white-lipped, yet less shy than I had ever seen her, went to a seat by the window, and I sank down on the sofa. "His unconscious self is refusing to let him resume his relations with his normal life, and so we get this loss of memory." "I've always said," declared Kitty, with an air of good sense, "that if he would make an effort--" "Effort!" He jerked his round head about. "The mental life that can be controlled by effort isn't the mental life that matters. You've been stuffed up when you were young with talk about a thing called self-control, a sort of barmaid of the soul that says, 'Time's up, gentlemen,' and 'Here, you've had enough.' There's no such thing. There's a deep self in one, the essential self, that has its wishes. And if those wishes are suppressed by the superficial self,--the self that makes, as you say, efforts, and usually makes them with the sole idea of putting up a good show before the neighbors,--it takes its revenge. Into the house of conduct erected by the superficial self it sends an obsession, which doesn't, owing to a twist that the superficial self, which isn't candid, gives it, seem to bear any relation to the suppressed wish. A man who really wants to leave his wife develops a hatred for pickled cabbage which may find vent in performances that lead straight to the asylum. But that's all technical," he finished bluffly. "My business to understand it, not yours. The point is, Mr. Baldry's obsession is that he can't remember the latter years of his life. Well,"--his winking blue eyes drew us all into a community we hardly felt,--"what's the suppressed wish of which it's the manifestation?" "He wished for nothing," said Kitty. "He was fond of us, and he had a lot of money." "Ah, but he did!" countered the doctor, gleefully. He seemed to be enjoying it all. "Quite obviously he has forgotten his life here because he is discontented with it. What clearer proof could you need than the fact you were just telling me when these ladies came in--that the reason the War Office didn't wire to you when he was wounded was that he had forgotten to register his address? Don't you see what that means?" "Forgetfulness," shrugged Kitty. "He isn't businesslike." She had always nourished a doubt as to whether Chris was really, as she put it, practical, and his income and his international reputation weighed nothing as against his evident inability to pick up pieces at sales. "One forgets only those things that one wants to forget. It's our business to find out why he wanted to forget this life." "He can remember quite well when he is hypnotized," she said obstructively. She had quite ceased to glow. "Oh, hypnotism's a silly trick. It releases the memory of a dissociated personality which can't be related--not possibly in such an obstinate case as this--to the waking personality. I'll do it by talking to him. Getting him to tell his dreams." He beamed at the prospect. "But you--it would be such a help if you would give me any clue to this discontent." "I tell you," said Kitty, "he was not discontented till he went mad." He caught the glint of her rising temper. "Ah," he said, "madness is an indictment not of the people one lives with, only of the high gods. If there was anything, it's evident that it was not your fault." A smile sugared it, and knowing that where he had to flatter his dissecting hand had not an easy task, he turned to me, whose general appearance suggests that flattery is not part of my daily diet. "You, Miss Baldry, you've known him longest." "Nothing and everything was wrong," I said at last. "I've always felt it." A sharp movement of Kitty's body confirmed my deep, old suspicion that she hated me. He went back further than I expected. "His relations with his father and mother, now?" "His father was old when he was born, and always was a little jealous of him. His mother was not his sort. She wanted a stupid son who would have been satisfied with shooting." He laid down a remark very softly, like a hunter setting a snare. "He turned, then, to sex with a peculiar need." It was Margaret who spoke, shuffling her feet awkwardly under her chair. "Yes, he was always dependent." We gaped at her who said this of our splendid Chris, and I saw that she was not as she had been. There was a directness of speech, a straight stare, that was for her a frenzy. "Doctor," she said, her mild voice roughened, "what's the use of talking? You can't cure him,"--she caught her lower lip with her teeth and fought back from the brink of tears,--"make him happy, I mean. All you can do is to make him ordinary." "I grant you that's all I do," he said. It queerly seemed as though he was experiencing the relief one feels on meeting an intellectual equal. "It's my profession to bring people from various outlying districts of the mind to the normal. There seems to be a general feeling it's the place where they ought to be. Sometimes I don't see the urgency myself." She continued without joy: "I know how you could bring him back--a memory so strong that it would recall everything else in spite of his discontent." The little man had lost in a moment his glib assurance, his knowingness about the pathways of the soul. "Well, I'm willing to learn." "Remind him of the boy," said Margaret. The doctor ceased suddenly to balance on the balls of his feet. "What boy?" "They had a boy." He looked at Kitty. "You told me nothing of this!" "I didn't think it mattered," she answered, and shivered and looked cold, as she always did at the memory of her unique contact with death. "He died five years ago." He dropped his head back, stared at the cornice, and said with the soft malignity of a clever person dealing with the slow-witted. "These subtle discontents are often the most difficult to deal with." Sharply he turned to Margaret. "How would you remind him?" "Take him something the boy wore, some toy he played with." Their eyes met wisely. "It would have to be you that did it." Her face assented. Kitty said: "I don't understand. How does it matter so much?" She repeated it twice before she broke the silence that Margaret's wisdom had brought down on us. Then Dr. Anderson, rattling the keys in his trousers-pockets and swelling red and perturbed, answered: "I don't know, but it does." Kitty's voice soared in satisfaction. "Oh, then it's very simple. Mrs. Grey can do it now. Jenny, take Mrs. Grey up to the nursery. There are lots of things up there." Margaret made no movement, but continued to sit with her heavy boots resting on the edge of their soles. Dr. Anderson searched Kitty's face, exclaimed, "Oh, well!" and flung himself into an arm-chair so suddenly that the springs spoke. Margaret smiled at that and turned to me, "Yes, take me to the nursery, please." Yet as I walked beside her up the stairs I knew this compliance was not the indication of any melting of this new steely sternness. The very breathing that I heard as I knelt beside her at the nursery door and eased the disused lock seemed to come from a different and a harsher body than had been hers before. I did not wonder that she was feeling bleak, since in a few moments she was to go out and say the words that would end all her happiness, that would destroy all the gifts her generosity had so difficultly amassed. Well, that is the kind of thing one has to do in this life. But hardly had the door opened and disclosed the empty, sunny spaces swimming with motes before her old sweetness flowered again. She moved forward slowly, tremulous and responsive and pleased, as though the room's loveliness was a gift to her. She stretched out her hands to the clear sapphire walls and the bright fresco of birds and animals with a young delight. So, I thought, might a bride go about the house her husband secretly prepared for her. Yet when she reached the hearth and stood with her hands behind her on the fireguard, looking about her at all the exquisite devices of our nursery to rivet health and amusement on our reluctant little visitor, it was so apparent that she was a mother that I could not imagine how it was that I had not always known it. It has sometimes happened that painters who have kept close enough to earth to see a heavenly vision have made pictures of the assumption of the Blessed Virgin which do indeed show women who could bring God into the world by the passion of their motherhood. "Let there be life," their suspended bodies seem to cry out to the universe about them, and the very clouds under their feet change into cherubim. As Margaret stood there, her hands pressed palm to palm beneath her chin and a blind smile on her face, she looked even so. "Oh, the fine room!" she cried. "But where's his little cot?" "It isn't here. This is the day nursery. The night nursery we didn't keep. It is just bedroom now." Her eyes shone at the thought of the cockered childhood this had been. "I couldn't afford to have two nurseries. It makes all the difference to the wee things." She hung above me for a little as I opened the ottoman and rummaged among Oliver's clothes. "Ah, the lovely little frocks! Did she make them? Ah, well, she'd hardly have the time, with this great house to see to. But I don't care much for baby frocks. The babies themselves are none the happier for them. It's all show." She went over to the rocking-horse and gave a ghostly child a ride. For long she hummed a tuneless song into the sunshine and retreated far away into some maternal dream. "He was too young for this," she said. "His daddy must have given him it. I knew it. Men always give them presents above their age, they're in such a hurry for them to grow up. We like them to take their time, the loves. But where's his engine? Didn't he love puffer-trains? Of course he never saw them. You're so far from the railway station. What a pity! He'd have loved them so. Dick was so happy when I stopped his pram on the railway-bridge on my way back from the shops, and he could sit up and see the puffers going by." Her distress that Oliver had missed this humble pleasure darkened her for a minute. "Why did he die! You didn't overtax his brain? He wasn't taught his letters too soon?" "Oh, no," I said. I couldn't find the clothes I wanted. "The only thing that taxed his little brain was the prayers his Scotch nurse taught him, and he didn't bother much over them. He would say, 'Jesus, tender leopard,' instead of 'Jesus, tender shepherd,' as if he liked it better." "Did you ever! The things they say! He'd a Scotch nurse. They say they're very good. I've read in the papers the Queen of Spain has one." She had gone back to the hearth again, and was playing with the toys on the mantelpiece. It was odd that she showed no interest in my search for the most memorable garment. A vivacity which played above her tear-wet strength, like a ball of St. Elmo's fire on the mast of a stout ship, made me realize she still was strange. "The toys he had! His nurse didn't let him have them all at once. She held him up and said, 'Baby, you must choose!' and he said, 'Teddy, please, Nanny,' and wagged his head at every word." I had laid my hand on them at last. I wished, in the strangest way, that I had not. Yet of course it had to be. "That's just what he did do," I said. As she felt the fine kid-skin of the clockwork dog, her face began to twitch. "I thought perhaps my baby had left me because I had so little to give him. But if a baby could leave all this!" She cried flatly, as though constant repetition in the night had made it as instinctive a reaction to suffering as a moan, "I want a child! I want a child!" Her arms invoked the wasted life that had been squandered in this room. "It's all gone so wrong," she fretted, and her voice dropped to a solemn whisper. "They each had only half a life." I had to steady her. She could not go to Chris and shock him not only by her news, but also by her agony. I rose and took her the things I had found in the ottoman and the toy cupboard. "I think these are the best things to take. This is one of the blue jerseys he used to wear. This is the red ball he and his father used to play with on the lawn." Her hard hunger for the child that was not melted into a tenderness for the child that had been. She looked broodingly at what I carried, then laid a kind hand on my arm. "You've chosen the very things he will remember. Oh, you poor girl!" I found that from her I could accept even pity. She nursed the jersey and the ball, changed them from arm to arm, and held them to her face. "I think I know the kind of boy he was--a man from the first." She kissed them, folded up the jersey, and neatly set the ball upon it on the ottoman, and regarded them with tears. "There, put them back. That's all I wanted them for. All I came up here for." I stared. "To get Chris's boy," she moaned. "You thought I meant to take them out to Chris?" She wrung her hands; her weak voice quavered at the sternness of her resolution. "How can I?" I grasped her hands. "Why should you bring him back?" I said. I might have known there was deliverance in her yet. Her slow mind gathered speed. "Either I never should have come," she pleaded, "or you should let him be." She was arguing not with me, but with the whole hostile, reasonable world. "Mind you, I wasn't sure if I ought to come the second time, seeing we both were married and that. I prayed and read the Bible, but I couldn't get any help. You don't notice how little there is in the Bible really till you go to it for help. But I've lived a hard life and I've always done my best for William, and I know nothing in the world matters so much as happiness. If anybody's happy, you ought to let them be. So I came again. Let him be. If you knew how happy he was just pottering round the garden. Men do love a garden. He could just go on. It can go on so easily." But there was a shade of doubt in her voice; she was pleading not only with me, but with fate. "You wouldn't let them take him away to the asylum. You wouldn't stop me coming. The other one might, but you'd see she didn't. Oh, do just let him be! "Put it like this." She made such explanatory gestures as I have seen cabmen make over their saucers of tea round a shelter. "If my boy had been a cripple,--he wasn't; he had the loveliest limbs,--and the doctors had said to me, 'We'll straighten your boy's legs for you, but he will be in pain all the rest of his life,' I'd not have let them touch him. "I seemed to have to tell them that I knew a way. I suppose it would have been sly to sit there and not tell them. I told them, anyhow. But, oh, I can't do it! Go out and put an end to the poor love's happiness. After the time he's had, the war and all. And then he'll have to go back there! I can't! I can't!" [Illustration: "I oughtn't to do it, ought I?"] I felt an ecstatic sense of ease. Everything was going to be right. Chris was to live in the interminable enjoyment of his youth and love. There was to be a finality about his happiness which usually belongs only to loss and calamity; he was to be as happy as a ring cast into the sea is lost, as a man whose coffin has lain for centuries beneath the sod is dead. Yet Margaret continued to say, and irritated me by the implication that the matter was not settled: "I oughtn't to do it, ought I?" "Of course not! Of course not!" I cried heartily, but the attention died in her eyes. She stared over my shoulder at the open door, where Kitty stood. The poise of her head had lost its pride, the shadows under her eyes were black like the marks of blows, and all her loveliness was diverted to the expression of grief. She held in her arms her Chinese sleeve dog, a once-prized pet that had fallen from favor and was now only to be met whining upward for a little love at every passer in the corridors, and it sprawled leaf-brown across her white frock, wriggling for joy at the unaccustomed embrace. That she should at last have stooped to lift the lonely little dog was a sign of her deep unhappiness. Why she had come up I do not know, nor why her face puckered with tears as she looked in on us. It was not that she had the slightest intimation of our decision, for she could not have conceived that we could follow any course but that which was obviously to her advantage. It was simply that she hated to see this strange, ugly woman moving about among her things. She swallowed her tears and passed on, to drift, like a dog, about the corridors. Now, why did Kitty, who was the falsest thing on earth, who was in tune with every kind of falsity, by merely suffering somehow remind us of reality? Why did her tears reveal to me what I had learned long ago, but had forgotten in my frenzied love, that there is a draft that we must drink or not be fully human? I knew that one must know the truth. I knew quite well that when one is adult one must raise to one's lips the wine of the truth, heedless that it is not sweet like milk, but draws the mouth with its strength, and celebrate communion with reality, or else walk forever queer and small like a dwarf. Thirst for this sacrament had made Chris strike away the cup of lies about life that Kitty's white hands held to him and turn to Margaret with this vast trustful gesture of his loss of memory. And helped by me, she had forgotten that it is the first concern of love to safeguard the dignity of the beloved, so that neither God in his skies nor the boy peering through the hedge should find in all time one possibility for contempt, and had handed him the trivial toy of happiness. We had been utterly negligent of his future, blasphemously careless of the divine essential of his soul. For if we left him in his magic circle there would come a time when his delusion turned to a senile idiocy; when his joy at the sight of Margaret disgusted the flesh because his smiling mouth was slack with age; when one's eyes no longer followed him caressingly as he went down to look for the first primroses in the wood, but flitted here and there defensively to see that nobody was noticing the doddering old man. Gamekeepers would chat kindly with him, and tap their foreheads as they passed through the copse; callers would be tactful and dangle bright talk before him. He who was as a flag flying from our tower would become a queer-shaped patch of eccentricity on the country-side, the full-mannered music of his being would become a witless piping in the bushes. He would not be quite a man. I did not know how I could pierce Margaret's simplicity with this last cruel subtlety, and turned to her, stammering. But she said: "Give me the jersey and the ball." The rebellion had gone from her eyes, and they were again the seat of all gentle wisdom. "The truth's the truth," she said, "and he must know it." I looked up at her, gasping, yet not truly amazed; for I had always known she could not leave her throne of righteousness for long, and she repeated, "The truth's the truth," smiling sadly at the strange order of this earth. We kissed not as women, but as lovers do; I think we each embraced that part of Chris the other had absorbed by her love. She took the jersey and the ball, and clasped them as though they were a child. When she got to the door she stopped and leaned against the lintel. Her head fell back; her eyes closed; her mouth was contorted as though she swallowed bitter drink. I lay face downward on the ottoman and presently heard her poor boots go creaking down the corridors. Through the feeling of doom that filled the room as tangibly as a scent I stretched out to the thought of Chris. In the deep daze of devotion which followed recollection of the fair down on his cheek, the skin burned brown to the rim of his gray eyes, the harsh and diffident masculinity of him, I found comfort in remembering that there was a physical gallantry about him which would still, even when the worst had happened, leap sometimes to the joy of life. Always, to the very end, when the sun shone on his face or his horse took his fences well, he would screw up his eyes and smile that little stiff-lipped smile. I nursed a feeble glow at that. "We must ride a lot," I planned. And then Kitty's heels tapped on the polished floor, and her skirts swished as she sat down in the arm-chair, and I was distressed by the sense, more tiresome than a flickering light, of some one fretting. She said: "I wish she would hurry up. She's got to do it sooner or later." My spirit was asleep in horror. Out there Margaret was breaking his heart and hers, using words like a hammer, looking wise, doing it so well. "Aren't they coming back?" asked Kitty. "I wish you'd look." There was nothing in the garden; only a column of birds swinging across the lake of green light that lay before the sunset. A long time after Kitty spoke once more: "Jenny, do look again." There had fallen a twilight which was a wistfulness of the earth. Under the cedar-boughs I dimly saw a figure mothering something in her arms. Almost had she dissolved into the shadows; in another moment the night would have her. With his back turned on this fading unhappiness Chris walked across the lawn. He was looking up under his brows at the over-arching house as though it were a hated place to which, against all his hopes, business had forced him to return. He stepped aside to avoid a patch of brightness cast by a lighted window on the grass; lights in our house were worse than darkness, affection worse than hate elsewhere. He wore a dreadful, decent smile; I knew how his voice would resolutely lift in greeting us. He walked not loose-limbed like a boy, as he had done that very afternoon, but with the soldier's hard tread upon the heel. It recalled to me that, bad as we were, we were yet not the worst circumstance of his return. When we had lifted the yoke of our embraces from his shoulders he would go back to that flooded trench in Flanders, under that sky more full of flying death than clouds, to that No-Man's-Land where bullets fall like rain on the rotting faces of the dead. "Jenny, aren't they there?" Kitty asked again. "They're both there." "Is he coming back?" "He's coming back." "Jenny! Jenny! How does he look?" "Oh,"--how could I say it?--"every inch a soldier." She crept behind me to the window, peered over my shoulder and saw. I heard her suck in her breath with satisfaction. "He's cured!" she whispered slowly. "He's cured!" THE END 
15099	----	THE HOOSIER SCHOOLMASTER A Story of Backwoods Life in Indiana REVISED with an introduction and Notes on the District by the Author, EDWARD EGGLESTON With Character Sketches by F. OPPER and other Illustrations by W.E.B. STARKWEATHER GROSSET & DUNLAP PUBLISHERS NEW YORK 1871 AS A PEBBLE CAST UPON A GREAT CAIRN, THIS EDITION IS INSCRIBED TO THE MEMORY OF JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, WHOSE CORDIAL ENCOURAGEMENT TO MY EARLY STUDIES OF AMERICAN DIALECT IS GRATEFULLY REMEMBERED. THE AUTHOR. PREFACE TO THE LIBRARY EDITION. BEING THE HISTORY OF A STORY. "THE HOOSIER SCHOOL-MASTER" was written and printed in the autumn of 1871. It is therefore now about twenty-one years old, and the publishers propose to mark its coming of age by issuing a library edition. I avail myself of the occasion to make some needed revisions, and to preface the new edition with an account of the origin and adventures of the book. If I should seem to betray unbecoming pride in speaking of a story that has passed into several languages and maintained an undiminished popularity for more than a score of years, I count on receiving the indulgence commonly granted to paternal vanity when celebrating the majority of a first-born. With all its faults on its head, this little tale has become a classic, in the bookseller's sense at least; and a public that has shown so constant a partiality for it has a right to feel some curiosity regarding its history. I persuade myself that additional extenuation for this biography of a book is to be found in the relation which "The Hoosier School-Master" happens to bear to the most significant movement in American literature in our generation. It is the file-leader of the procession of American dialect novels. Before the appearance of this story, the New England folk-speech had long been employed for various literary purposes, it is true; and after its use by Lowell, it had acquired a standing that made it the classic _lingua rustica_ of the United States. Even Hoosiers and Southerners when put into print, as they sometimes were in rude burlesque stories, usually talked about "huskin' bees" and "apple-parin' bees" and used many other expressions foreign to their vernacular. American literature hardly touched the speech and life of the people outside of New England; in other words, it was provincial in the narrow sense. I can hardly suppose that "The Hoosier School-Master" bore any causative relation to that broader provincial movement in our literature which now includes such remarkable productions as the writings of Mr. Cable, Mr. Harris, Mr. Page, Miss Murfree, Mr. Richard Malcom Johnson, Mr. Howe, Mr. Garland, some of Mrs. Burnett's stories and others quite worthy of inclusion in this list. The taking up of life in this regional way has made our literature really national by the only process possible. The Federal nation has at length manifested a consciousness of the continental diversity of its forms of life. The "great American novel," for which prophetic critics yearned so fondly twenty years ago, is appearing in sections. I may claim for this book the distinction, such as it is, of being the first of the dialect stories that depict a life quite beyond New England influence. Some of Mr. Bret Harte's brief and powerful tales had already foreshadowed this movement toward a larger rendering of our life. But the romantic character of Mr. Harte's delightful stories and the absence of anything that can justly be called dialect in them mark them as rather forerunners than beginners of the prevailing school. For some years after the appearance of the present novel, my own stories had to themselves the field of provincial realism (if, indeed, there be any such thing as realism) before there came the succession of fine productions which have made the last fourteen years notable. Though it had often occurred to me to write something in the dialect now known as Hoosier--the folk-speech of the southern part of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois of forty years ago--I had postponed the attempt indefinitely, probably because the only literary use that had been made of the allied speech of the Southwest had been in the books of the primitive humorists of that region. I found it hard to dissociate in my own mind the dialect from the somewhat coarse boisterousness which seemed inseparable from it in the works of these rollicking writers. It chanced that in 1871 Taine's lectures on "Art in the Netherlands," or rather Mr. John Durand's translation of them, fell into my hands as a book for editorial review. These discourses are little else than an elucidation of the thesis that the artist of originality will work courageously with the materials he finds in his own environment. In Taine's view, all life has matter for the artist, if only he have eyes to see. Many years previous to the time of which I am now speaking, while I was yet a young man, I had projected a lecture on the Hoosier folk-speech, and had even printed during the war a little political skit in that dialect in a St. Paul paper. So far as I know, nothing else had ever been printed in the Hoosier. Under the spur of Taine's argument, I now proceeded to write a short story wholly in the dialect spoken in my childhood by rustics on the north side of the Ohio River. This tale I called "The Hoosier School-Master." It consisted almost entirely of an autobiographical narration in dialect by Mirandy Means of the incidents that form the groundwork of the present story. I was the newly installed editor of a weekly journal, _Hearth and Home_, and I sent this little story in a new dialect to my printer. It chanced that one of the proprietors of the paper saw a part of it in proof. He urged me to take it back and make a longer story out of the materials, and he expressed great confidence in the success of such a story. Yielding to his suggestion, I began to write this novel from week to week as it appeared in the paper, and thus found myself involved in the career of a novelist, which had up to that time formed no part of my plan of life. In my inexperience I worked at a white-heat, completing the book in ten weeks. Long before these weeks of eager toil were over, it was a question among my friends whether the novel might not write _finis_ to me before I should see the end of it. The sole purpose I had in view at first was the resuscitation of the dead-and-alive newspaper of which I had ventured to take charge. One of the firm of publishers thought much less favorably of my story than his partner did. I was called into the private office and informed with some severity that my characters were too rough to be presentable in a paper so refined as ours. I confess they did seem somewhat too robust for a sheet so anæmic as _Hearth and Home_ had been in the months just preceding. But when, the very next week after this protest was made, the circulation of the paper increased some thousands at a bound, my employer's critical estimate of the work underwent a rapid change--a change based on what seemed to him better than merely literary considerations. By the time the story closed, at the end of fourteen instalments, the subscription list had multiplied itself four or five fold. It is only fair to admit, however, that the original multiplicand had been rather small. Papers in Canada and in some of the other English colonies transferred the novel bodily to their columns, and many of the American country papers helped themselves to it quite freely. It had run some weeks of its course before it occurred to any one that it might profitably be reprinted in book form. The publishers were loath to risk much in the venture. The newspaper type was rejustified to make a book page, and barely two thousand copies were printed for a first edition. I remember expressing the opinion that the number was too large. "The Hoosier School-Master" was pirated with the utmost promptitude by the Messrs. Routledge, in England, for that was in the barbarous days before international copyright, when English publishers complained of the unscrupulousness of American reprinters, while they themselves pounced upon every line of American production that promised some shillings of profit. "The Hoosier School-Master" was brought out in England in a cheap, sensational form. The edition of ten thousand has long been out of print. For this large edition and for the editions issued in the British colonies and in continental Europe I have never received a penny. A great many men have made money out of the book, but my own returns have been comparatively small. For its use in serial form I received nothing beyond my salary as editor. On the copyright edition I have received the moderate royalty allowed to young authors at the outset of their work. The sale of the American edition in the first twenty years amounted to seventy thousand copies. The peculiarity of this sale is its steadiness. After twenty years, "The Hoosier School-Master" is selling at the average rate of more than three thousand copies per annum. During the last half-dozen years the popularity of the book has apparently increased, and its twentieth year closed with a sale of twenty-one hundred in six months. Only those who are familiar with the book trade and who know how brief is the life of the average novel will understand how exceptional is this long-continued popularity. Some of the newspaper reviewers of twenty years ago were a little puzzled to know what to make of a book in so questionable a shape, for the American dialect novel was then a new-comer. But nothing could have given a beginner more genuine pleasure than the cordial commendation of the leading professional critic of the time, the late Mr. George Ripley, who wrote an extended review of this book for the _Tribune_. The monthly magazines all spoke of "The Hoosier School-Master" in terms as favorable as it deserved. I cannot pretend that I was content with these notices at the time, for I had the sensitiveness of a beginner. But on looking at the reviews in the magazines of that day, I am amused to find that the faults pointed out in the work of my prentice hand are just those that I should be disposed to complain of now, if it were any part of my business to tell the reader wherein I might have done better. _The Nation_, then in its youth, honored "The Hoosier School-Master" by giving it two pages, mostly in discussion of its dialect, but dispensing paradoxical praise and censure in that condescending way with which we are all familiar enough. According to its critic, the author had understood and described the old Western life, but he had done it "quite sketchily, to be sure." Yet it was done "with essential truth and some effectiveness." The critic, however instantly stands on the other foot again and adds that the book "is not a captivating one." But he makes amends in the very next sentence by an allusion to "the faithfulness of its transcript of the life it depicts," and then instantly balances the account on the adverse side of the ledger by assuring the reader that "it has no interest of passion or mental power." But even this fatal conclusion is diluted by a dependent clause. "Possibly," says the reviewer, "the good feeling of the intertwined love story may conciliate the good-will of some of the malcontent." One could hardly carry further the fine art of oscillating between moderate commendation and parenthetical damnation--an art that lends a factitious air of judicial impartiality and mental equipoise. Beyond question, _The Nation_ is one of the ablest weekly papers in the world; the admirable scholarship of its articles and reviews in departments of special knowledge might well be a subject of pride to any American. But its inadequate reviews of current fiction add nothing to its value, and its habitual tone of condescending depreciation in treating imaginative literature of indigenous origin is one of the strongest discouragements to literary production. The main value of good criticism lies in its readiness and penetration in discovering and applauding merit not before recognized, or imperfectly recognized. This is a conspicuous trait of Sainte-Beuve, the greatest of all newspaper critics. He knew how to be severe upon occasion, but he saw talent in advance of the public and dispensed encouragement heartily, so that he made himself almost a foster-father to the literature of his generation in France. But there is a class of anonymous reviewers in England and America who seem to hold a traditional theory that the function of a critic toward new-born talent is analogous to that of Pharaoh toward the infant Jewish population[1]. During the first year after its publication "The Hoosier School-Master" was translated into French and published in a condensed form in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_. The translator was the writer who signs the name M. Th. Bentzon, and who is well known to be Madame Blanc. This French version afterward appeared in book form in the same volume with one of Mr. Thomas Bailey Aldrich's stories and some other stories of mine. In this latter shape I have never seen it. The title given to the story by Madame Blanc was "Le Maître d'École de Flat Creek." It may be imagined that the translator found it no easy task to get equivalents in French for expressions in a dialect new and strange. "I'll be dog-on'd" appears in French as "devil take me" ("_diable m'emporte_"), which is not bad; the devil being rather a jolly sort of fellow, in French. "The Church of the Best Licks" seems rather unrenderable, and I do not see how the translator could have found a better phrase for it than "_L'Eglise des Raclées_" though "_raclées_" does not convey the double sense of "licks." "_Jim epelait vite comme l'eclair_" is not a good rendering of "Jim spelled like lightning," since it is not the celerity of the spelling that is the main consideration. "_Concours d'epellation_" is probably the best equivalent for "spelling-school," but it seems something more stately in its French dress. When Bud says, with reference to Hannah, "I never took no shine that air way," the phrase is rather too idiomatic for the French tongue, and it becomes "I haven't run after that hare" ("_Je n'ai pas chassé ce lièvre-la_"). Perhaps the most sadly amusing thing in the translation is the way the meaning of the nickname Shocky is missed in an explanatory foot-note. It is, according to the translator, an abbreviation or corruption of the English word "shocking," which expresses the shocking ugliness of the child--"_qui exprime la laideur choquante de l'enfant_." A German version of "The Hoosier School-Master" was made about the time of the appearance of the French translation, but of this I have never seen a copy. I know of it only from the statement made to me by a German professor, that he had read it in German before he knew any English. What are the equivalents in High German for "right smart" and "dog-on" I cannot imagine. Several years after the publication of "The Hoosier School-Master" it occurred to Mr. H. Hansen, of Kjöge, in Denmark, to render it into Danish. Among the Danes the book enjoyed a popularity as great, perhaps, as it has had at home. The circulation warranted Mr. Hansen and his publisher in bringing out several other novels of mine. The Danish translator was the only person concerned in the various foreign editions of this book who had the courtesy to ask the author's leave. Under the old conditions in regard to international copyright, an author came to be regarded as one not entitled even to common civilities in the matter of reprinting his works--he was to be plundered without politeness. As I look at the row of my books in the unfamiliar Danish, I am reminded of that New England mother who, on recovering her children carried away by the Canadian Indians, found it impossible to communicate with a daughter who spoke only French and a son who knew nothing but the speech of his savage captors. Mr. Hansen was thoughtful enough to send me the reviews of my books in the Danish newspapers; and he had the double kindness to translate these into English and to leave out all but those that were likely to be agreeable to my vanity. Of these I remember but a single sentence, and that because it was expressed with felicity. The reviewer said of the fun in "The Hoosier School-Master:" "This is humor laughing to keep from bursting into tears." A year or two before the appearance of "The Hoosier School-Master," a newspaper article of mine touching upon American dialect interested Mr. Lowell, and he urged me to "look for the foreign influence" that has affected the speech of the Ohio River country. My reverence for him as the master in such studies did not prevent me from feeling that the suggestion was a little absurd. But at a later period I became aware that North Irishmen used many of the pronunciations and idioms that distinctly characterized the language of old-fashioned people on the Ohio. Many Ulster men say "wair" for were and "air" for are, for example. Connecting this with the existence of a considerable element of Scotch-Irish names in the Ohio River region, I could not doubt that here was one of the keys the master had bidden me look for. While pursuing at a later period a series of investigations into the culture-history of the American people in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, I became much interested in the emigration to America from the north of Ireland, a movement that waxed and waned as the great Irish-linen industry of the last century declined or prospered. The first American home of these Irish was Pennsylvania. A portion of them were steady-going, psalm-singing, money-getting people, who in course of time made themselves felt in the commerce, politics, and intellectual life of the nation. There was also a dare-devil element, descended perhaps from those rude borderers who were deported to Ireland more for the sake of the peace of North Britain than for the benefit of Ireland. In this rougher class there was perhaps a larger dash of the Celtic fire that came from the wild Irish women whom the first Scotch settlers in Ulster made the mothers of their progeny. Arrived in the wilds of Pennsylvania, these Irishmen built rude cabins, planted little patches of corn and potatoes, and distilled a whiskey that was never suffered to grow mellow. The forest was congenial to men who spent much the larger part of their time in boisterous sport of one sort or another. The manufacture of the rifle was early brought to Lancaster, in Pennsylvania, direct from the land of its invention by Swiss emigrants, and in the adventurous Scotch-Irishman of the Pennsylvania frontier the rifle found its fellow. Irish settlers became hunters of wild beasts, explorers, pioneers, and warriors against the Indians, upon whom they avenged their wrongs with relentless ferocity. Both the Irish race and the intermingled Pennsylvania Dutch were prolific, and the up-country of Pennsylvania soon overflowed. Emigration was held in check to the westward for a while by the cruel massacres of the French and Indian wars, and one river of population poured itself southward into the fertile valleys of the Virginia mountain country; another and larger flood swept still farther to the south along the eastern borders of the Appalachian range until it reached the uplands of Carolina. When the militia of one county in South Carolina was mustered during the Revolution, it was found that every one of the thirty-five hundred men enrolled were natives of Pennsylvania. These were mainly sons of North Irishmen, and from the Carolina Irish sprang Calhoun, the most aggressive statesman that has appeared in America, and Jackson, the most brilliant military genius in the whole course of our history. Before the close of the Revolution this adventurous race had begun to break over the passes of the Alleghanies into the dark and bloody ground of Kentucky and Tennessee. Soon afterward a multitude of Pennsylvanians of all stocks--the Scotch-Irish and those Germans, Swiss, and Hollanders who are commonly classed together as the Pennsylvania Dutch, as well as a large number of people of English descent--began to migrate down the Ohio Valley. Along with them came professional men and people of more or less culture, chiefly from eastern Virginia and Maryland. There came also into Indiana and Illinois, from the border States and from as far south as North Carolina and Tennessee, a body of "poor whites." These semi-nomadic people, descendants of the colonial bond-servants, formed, in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the lowest rank of Hoosiers. But as early as 1845 there was a considerable exodus of these to Missouri. From Pike County, in that State, they wended their way to California, to appear in Mr. Bret Harte's stories as "Pikes." The movement of this class out of Indiana went on with augmented volume in the fifties. The emigrants of this period mostly sought the States lying just west of the Mississippi, and the poorer sort made the trip in little one-horse wagons of the sorriest description, laden mainly with white-headed children and followed by the yellow curs that are the one luxury indispensable to a family of this class. To this migration and to a liberal provision for popular education Indiana owes a great improvement in the average intelligence of her people. As early as 1880, I believe, the State had come to rank with some of the New England States in the matter of literacy. The folk-speech of the Ohio River country has many features in common with that of the eastern Middle States, while it received but little from the dignified eighteenth-century English of eastern Virginia. There are distinct traces of the North-Irish in the idioms and in the peculiar pronunciations. One finds also here and there a word from the "Pennsylvania Dutch," such as "waumus" for a loose jacket, from the German _wamms_, a doublet, and "smearcase" for cottage cheese, from the German _schmierkäse_. The only French word left by the old _voyageurs_, so far as I now remember, is "cordelle," to tow a boat by a rope carried along the shore. Substantially the same folk-speech exists wherever the Pennsylvania migration formed the main element of the primitive settlement. I have heard the same dialect in the South Carolina uplands that one gets from a Posey County Hoosier, or rather that one used to get in the old days before the vandal school-master had reduced the vulgar tongue to the monotonous propriety of what we call good English. In drawing some of the subordinate characters in this tale a little too baldly from the model, I fell into an error common to inexperienced writers. It is amusing to observe that these portrait characters seem the least substantial of all the figures in the book. Dr. Small is a rather unrealistic villain, but I knew him well and respected him in my boyish heart for a most exemplary Christian of good family at the very time that, according to testimony afterward given, he was diversifying his pursuits as a practising physician by leading a gang of burglars. More than one person has been pointed out as the original of Bud Means, and I believe there are one or two men each of whom flatters himself that he posed for the figure of the first disciple of the Church of the Best Licks. Bud is made up of elements found in some of his race, but not in any one man. Not dreaming that the story would reach beyond the small circulation of _Hearth and Home_, I used the names of people in Switzerland and Decatur counties, in Indiana, almost without being aware of it. I have heard that a young man bearing the surname given to one of the rudest families in this book had to suffer many gibes while a student at an Indiana college. I here do public penance for my culpable indiscretion. "Jeems Phillips," name and all, is a real person whom at the time of writing this story I had not seen since I was a lad of nine and he a man of nearly forty. He was a mere memory to me, and was put into the book with some slighting remarks which the real Jeems did not deserve. I did not know that he was living, and it did not seem likely that the story would have vitality enough to travel all the way to Indiana. But the portion referring to Phillips was transferred to the county paper circulating among Jeems' neighbors. For once the good-natured man was, as they say in Hoosier, "mad," and he threatened to thrash the editor. "Do you think he means you?" demanded the editor. "To be sure he does," said the champion speller. "Can you spell?" "I can spell down any master that ever came to our district," he replied. As time passed on, Phillips found himself a lion. Strangers desired an introduction to him as a notability, and invited the champion to dissipate with them at the soda fountain in the village drug store. It became a matter of pride with him that he was the most famous speller in the world. Two years ago, while visiting the town of my nativity, I met upon the street the aged Jeems Phillips, whom I had not seen for more than forty years. I would go far to hear him "spell down" a complacent school-master once more. The publication of this book gave rise to an amusing revival of the spelling-school as a means of public entertainment, not in rustic regions alone, but in towns also. The furor extended to the great cities of New York and London, and reached at last to farthest Australia, spreading to every region in which English is spelled or spoken. But the effect of the chapter on the spelling-school was temporary and superficial; the only organization that came from the spelling-school mania, so far as I know, was an association of proof-readers in London to discuss mooted points. The sketch of the Church of the Best Licks, however, seems to have made a deep and enduring impression upon individuals and to have left some organized results. I myself endeavored to realize it, and for five years I was the pastor of a church in Brooklyn, organized on a basis almost as simple as that in the Flat Creek school-house. The name I rendered into respectable English, and the Church of the Best Licks became the Church of Christian Endeavor. It was highly successful in doing that which a church ought to do, and its methods of work have been widely copied. After my work as a minister had been definitely closed, the name and the underlying thought of this church were borrowed for a young people's society; and thus the little story of good endeavor in Indiana seems to have left a permanent mark on the ecclesiastical organization of the time. If any one, judging by the length of this preface, should conclude that I hold my little book in undue esteem, let him know that I owe it more than one grudge. It is said that Thomas Campbell, twenty years after the appearance of his best-known poem, was one day introduced as "the author of 'The Pleasures of Hope.'" "Confound 'The Pleasures of Hope,'" he protested; "can't I write anything else?" So, however much I may prefer my later work, more carefully wrought in respect of thought, structure, and style, this initial novel, the favorite of the larger public, has become inseparably associated with my name. Often I have mentally applied Campbell's imprecation on "The Pleasures of Hope" to this story. I could not write in this vein now if I would, and twenty-one years have made so many changes in me that I dare not make any but minor changes in this novel. The author of "The Hoosier School-Master" is distinctly not I; I am but his heir and executor; and since he is a more popular writer than I, why should I meddle with his work? I have, however, ventured to make some necessary revision of the diction, and have added notes, mostly with reference to the dialect. A second grudge against this story is that somehow its readers persist in believing it to be a bit of my own life. Americans are credulous believers in that miracle of the imagination whom no one has ever seen in the flesh--the self-made man. Some readers of "The Hoosier School-Master" have settled it for a certainty that the author sprang from the rustic class he has described. One lady even wrote to inquire whether my childhood were not represented in Shocky, the little lad out of the poor-house. A biographical sketch of me in Italian goes so far as to state that among the hard resorts by which I made a living in my early life was the teaching of a Sunday-school in Chicago. No one knows so well as I the faults of immaturity and inexperience that characterize this book. But perhaps after all the public is right in so often preferring an author's first book. There is what Emerson would have called a "central spontaneity" about the work of a young man that may give more delight to the reader than all the precision of thought and perfection of style for which we strive as life advances. JOSHUA'S ROCK ON LAKE GEORGE, 1892. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 1: Since writing the passage in the text, I have met with the following in _The Speaker_, of London: "Everybody knows that when an important work is published in history, philosophy, or any branch of science, the editor of a respectable paper employs an expert to review it; . . . indeed, the more abstruse the subject of the book, the more careful and intelligent you will find the review. . . . It is equally well known that works of fiction and books of verse are not treated with anything like the same care. . . . A good poem, play, or novel is at least as fine an achievement as a good history; yet the history gets the benefit of an expert's judgment and two columns of thoughtful pimse or censure, while the poem, play, or novel is treated to ten skittish lines by the hack who happens to be within nearest call when the book comes in."] PART OF THE PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. I may as well confess, what it would be affectation to conceal, that I am more than pleased with the generous reception accorded to this story as a serial in the columns of _Hearth and Home_. It has been in my mind since I was a Hoosier boy to do something toward describing life in the back-country districts of the Western States. It used to be a matter of no little jealousy with us, I remember, that the manners, customs, thoughts, and feelings of New England country people filled so large a place in books, while our life, not less interesting, not less romantic, and certainly not less filled with humorous and grotesque material, had no place in literature. It was as though we were shut out of good society. And, with the single exception of Alice Gary, perhaps, our Western writers did not dare speak of the West otherwise than as the unreal world to which Cooper's lively imagination had given birth. I had some anxiety lest Western readers should take offence at my selecting what must always seem an exceptional phase of life to those who have grown up in the more refined regions of the West. But nowhere has the School-master been received more kindly than in his own country and among his own people. Some of those who have spoken generous words of the School-master and his friends have suggested that the story is an autobiography. But it is not, save in the sense in which every work of art is an autobiography: in that it is the result of the experience and observation of the writer. Readers will therefore bear in mind that not Ralph nor Bud nor Brother Sodom nor Dr. Small represents the writer, nor do I appear, as Talleyrand said of Madame de Staël, "disguised as a woman," in the person of Hannah or Mirandy. Some of the incidents have been drawn from life; none of them, I believe, from my own. I should like to be considered a member of the Church of the Best Licks, however. It has been in my mind to append some remarks, philological and otherwise, upon the dialect, but Professor Lowell's admirable and erudite preface to the Biglow Papers must be the despair of every one who aspires to write on Americanisms. To Mr. Lowell belongs the distinction of being the only one of our most eminent authors and the only one of our most eminent scholars who has given careful attention to American dialects. But while I have not ventured to discuss the provincialisms of the Indiana backwoods, I have been careful to preserve the true _usus loquendi_ of each locution. BROOKLYN, December, 1871. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I PAGE A Private Lesson from a Bulldog . . . 37 CHAPTER II. A Spell Coming. . . . . . . . . . . . 52 CHAPTER III. Mirandy, Hank, and Shocky . . . . . . 57 CHAPTER IV. Spelling Down the Master. . . . . . . 70 CHAPTER V. The Walk Home . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 CHAPTER VI. A Night at Pete Jones's . . . . . . . 97 CHAPTER VII Ominous Remarks of Mr. Jones. . . . . 105 CHAPTER VIII. The Struggle in the Dark. . . . . . . 109 CHAPTER IX. Has God Forgotten Shocky? . . . . . . 114 CHAPTER X. The Devil of Silence. . . . . . . . . 118 CHAPTER XI. Miss Martha Hawkins . . . . . . . . . 125 CHAPTER XII. The Hardshell Preacher. . . . . . . . 133 CHAPTER XIII. A Struggle for the Mastery. . . . . . 143 CHAPTER XIV. A Crisis with Bud . . . . . . . . . . 150 CHAPTER XV. The Church of the Best Licks. . . . . 157 CHAPTER XVI. The Church Militant . . . . . . . . . 163 CHAPTER XVII. A Council of War. . . . . . . . . . . 169 CHAPTER XVIII. Odds and Ends . . . . . . . . . . . . 175 CHAPTER XIX. Face to Face. . . . . . . . . . . . . 180 CHAPTER XX. God Remembers Shocky. . . . . . . . . 185 CHAPTER XXI. Miss Nancy Sawyer . . . . . . . . . . 192 CHAPTER XXII. Pancakes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195 CHAPTER XXIII. A Charitable Institution. . . . . . . 203 CHAPTER XXIV The Good Samaritan. . . . . . . . . . 212 CHAPTER XXV. Bud Wooing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215 CHAPTER XXVI. A Letter and its Consequences . . . . 220 CHAPTER XXVII. A Loss and a Gain . . . . . . . . . . 224 CHAPTER XXVIII. The Flight. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228 CHAPTER XXIX. The Trial . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234 CHAPTER XXX. "Brother Sodom" . . . . . . . . . . . 249 CHAPTER XXXI. The Trial Concluded . . . . . . . . . 254 CHAPTER XXXII. After the Battle. . . . . . . . . . . 269 CHAPTER XXXIII. Into the Light. . . . . . . . . . . . 274 CHAPTER XXXIV. "How it Came Out" . . . . . . . . . . 278 The Hoosier School-Master. CHAPTER I A PRIVATE LESSON FROM A BULLDOG. "Want to be a school-master, do you? You? Well, what would _you_ do in Flat Crick deestrick, _I'd_ like to know? Why, the boys have driv off the last two, and licked the one afore them like blazes. You might teach a summer school, when nothin' but children come. But I 'low it takes a right smart _man_ to be school-master in Flat Crick in the winter. They'd pitch you out of doors, sonny, neck and heels, afore Christmas." The young man, who had walked ten miles to get the school in this district, and who had been mentally reviewing his learning at every step he took, trembling lest the committee should find that he did not know enough, was not a little taken aback at this greeting from "old Jack Means," who was the first trustee that he lighted on. The impression made by these ominous remarks was emphasized by the glances which he received from Jack Means's two sons. The older one eyed him from the top of his brawny shoulders with that amiable look which a big dog turns on a little one before shaking him. Ralph Hartsook had never thought of being measured by the standard of muscle. This notion of beating education into young savages in spite of themselves dashed his ardor. He had walked right to where Jack Means was at work shaving shingles in his own front yard. While Mr. Means was making the speech which we have set down above, and punctuating it with expectorations, a large brindle bulldog had been sniffing at Ralph's heels, and a girl in a new linsey-woolsey dress, standing by the door, had nearly giggled her head off at the delightful prospect of seeing a new school-teacher eaten up by the ferocious brute. The disheartening words of the old man, the immense muscles of the young man who was to be his rebellious pupil, the jaws of the ugly bulldog, and the heartless giggle of the girl, gave Ralph a delightful sense of having precipitated himself into a den of wild beasts. Faint with weariness and discouragement, and shivering with fear, he sat down on a wheelbarrow. "You, Bull!" said the old man to the dog, which was showing more and more a disposition to make a meal of the incipient pedagogue, "you, Bull! git aout[2], you pup!" The dog walked sullenly off, but not until he had given Ralph a look full of promise of what he meant to do when he got a good chance. Ralph wished himself back in the village of Lewisburg, whence he had come. "You see," continued Mr. Means, spitting in a meditative sort of a way, "you see, we a'n't none of your saft sort in these diggings. It takes a _man_ to boss this deestrick. Howsumdever, ef you think you kin trust your hide in Flat Crick school-house I ha'n't got no 'bjection. But ef you git licked, don't come on us. Flat Crick don't pay no 'nsurance, you bet! Any other trustees? Wal, yes. But as I pay the most taxes, t'others jist let me run the thing. You can begin right off a Monday. They a'n't been no other applications. You see, it takes grit to apply for this school. The last master had a black eye for a month. But, as I wuz sayin', you can jist roll up and wade in. I 'low you've got spunk, maybe, and that goes for a heap sight more'n sinnoo with boys. Walk in, and stay over Sunday with me. You'll hev' to board roun', and I guess you better begin here." Ralph did not go in, but sat out on the wheelbarrow, watching the old man shave shingles, while the boys split the blocks and chopped wood. Bull smelled of the new-comer again in an ugly way, and got a good kick from the older son for his pains. But out of one of his red eyes the dog warned the young school-master that _he_ should yet suffer for all kicks received on his account. "Ef Bull once takes a holt, heaven and yarth can't make him let go," said the older son to Ralph, by way of comfort. It was well for Ralph that he began to "board roun'" by stopping at Mr. Means's. Ralph felt that Flat Creek was what he needed. He had lived a bookish life; but here was his lesson in the art of managing people, for he who can manage the untamed and strapping youths of a winter school in Hoopole County has gone far toward learning one of the hardest of lessons. And in Ralph's time, things were worse than they are now. The older son of Mr. Means was called Bud Means. What his real name was, Ralph could not find out, for in many of these families the nickname of "Bud" given to the oldest boy, and that of "Sis," which is the birth-right of the oldest girl, completely bury the proper Christian name. Ralph saw his first strategic point, which was to capture Bud Means. After supper, the boys began to get ready for something. Bull stuck up his ears in a dignified way, and the three or four yellow curs who were Bull's satellites yelped delightedly and discordantly. "Bill," said Bud Means to his brother, "ax the master ef he'd like to hunt coons. I'd like to take the starch out uv the stuck-up feller." "'Nough said[3]," was Bill's reply. "You durn't[4] do it," said Bud. "I don't take no sech a dare[5]," returned Bill, and walked down to the gate, by which Ralph stood watching the stars come out, and half wishing he had never seen Flat Creek. "I say, mister," began Bill, "mister, they's a coon what's been a eatin' our chickens lately, and we're goin' to try to ketch[6] the varmint. You wouldn't like to take a coon hunt nor nothin', would you?" "Why, yes," said Ralph, "there's nothing I should like better, if I could only be sure Bull wouldn't mistake me for the coon." And so, as a matter of policy, Ralph dragged his tired legs eight or ten miles, on hill and in hollow, after Bud, and Bill, and Bull, and the coon. But the raccoon[7] climbed a tree. The boys got into a quarrel about whose business it was to have brought the axe, and who was to blame that the tree could not be felled. Now, if there was anything Ralph's muscles were good for, it was climbing. So, asking Bud to give him a start, he soon reached the limb above the one on which the raccoon was. Ralph did not know how ugly a customer a raccoon can be, and so got credit for more courage than he had. With much peril to his legs from the raccoon's teeth, he succeeded in shaking the poor creature off among the yelping brutes and yelling boys. Ralph could not help sympathizing with the hunted animal, which sold its life as dearly as possible, giving the dogs many a scratch and bite. It seemed to him that he was like the raccoon, precipitated into the midst of a party of dogs who would rejoice in worrying _his_ life out, as Bull and his crowd were destroying the poor raccoon. When Bull at last seized the raccoon and put an end to it, Ralph could not but admire the decided way in which he did it, calling to mind Bud's comment, "Ef Bull once takes a holt, heaven and yarth[8] can't make him let go." But as they walked home, Bud carrying the raccoon by the tail, Ralph felt that his hunt had not been in vain. He fancied that even red-eyed Bull, walking uncomfortably close to his heels, respected him more since he had climbed that tree. "Purty peart kind of a master," remarked the old man to Bud, after Ralph had gone to bed. "Guess you better be a little easy on him. Hey?" But Bud deigned no reply. Perhaps because he knew that Ralph heard the conversation through the thin partition. Ralph woke delighted to find it raining. He did not want to hunt or fish on Sunday, and this steady rain would enable him to make friends with Bud. I do not know how he got started, but after breakfast he began to tell stories. Out of all the books he had ever read he told story after story. And "old man Means," and "old _Miss_ Means," and Bud Means, and Bill Means, and Sis Means listened with great eyes while he told of Sinbad's adventures, of the Old Man of the Sea, of Robinson Crusoe, of Captain Gulliver's experiences in Liliput, and of Baron Munchausen's exploits. Ralph had caught his fish. The hungry minds of these backwoods people were refreshed with the new life that came to their imaginations in these stories. For there was but one book in the Means library, and that, a well-thumbed copy of "Captain Riley's Narrative," had long since lost all freshness. "I'll be dog-on'd[9]," said Bill, emphatically, "ef I hadn't 'ruther hear the master tell them whoppin' yarns than to go to a circus the best day I ever seed!" Bill could pay no higher compliment. What Ralph wanted was to make a friend of Bud. It's a nice thing to have the seventy-four-gun ship on your own side, and the more Hartsook admired the knotted muscles of Bud Means the more he desired to attach him to himself. So, whenever he struck out a peculiarly brilliant passage, he anxiously watched Bud's eye. But the young Philistine kept his own counsel. He listened, but said nothing, and the eyes under his shaggy brows gave no sign. Ralph could not tell whether those eyes were deep and inscrutable or only stolid. Perhaps a little of both. When Monday morning came, Ralph was nervous. He walked to school with Bud. "I guess you're a little skeered by what the old man said, a'n't you?" Ralph was about to deny it, but on reflection concluded that it was best to speak the truth. He said that Mr. Means's description of the school had made him feel a little down-hearted. "What will you do with the tough boys? You a'n't no match for 'em." And Ralph felt Bud's eyes not only measuring his muscles, but scrutinizing his countenance. He only answered: "I don't know." "What would you do with me, for instance?" and Bud stretched himself up as if to shake out the reserve power coiled up in his great muscles. "I sha'n't have any trouble with you." "Why, I'm the wust chap of all. I thrashed the last master, myself." And again the eyes of Bud Means looked out sharply from his shadowing brows to see the effect of this speech on the slender young man. "You won't thrash me, though," said Ralph. "Pshaw! I 'low I could whip you in an inch of your life with my left hand, and never half try," said young Means, with a threatening sneer. "I know that as well as you do." "Well, a'n't you afraid of me, then?" and again he looked sidewise at Ralph. "Not a bit," said Ralph, wondering at his own courage. They walked on in silence a minute. Bud was turning the matter over. "Why a'n't you afraid of me?" he said presently. "Because you and I are going to be friends." "And what about t'others?" "I am not afraid of all the other boys put together." "You a'n't! The mischief! How's that?" "Well, I'm not afraid of them because you and I are going to be friends, and you can whip all of them together. You'll do the fighting and I'll do the teaching." The diplomatic Bud only chuckled a little at this; whether he assented to the alliance or not Ralph could not tell. When Ralph looked round on the faces of the scholars--the little faces full of mischief and curiosity, the big faces full of an expression which was not further removed than second-cousin from contempt--when when young Hartsook looked into these faces, his heart palpitated with stage-fright. There is no audience so hard to face as one of school-children, as many a man has found to his cost. Perhaps it is that no conventional restraint can keep down their laughter when you do or say anything ridiculous. Hartsook's first day was hurried and unsatisfactory. He was not of himself, and consequently not master of anybody else. When evening came, there were symptoms of insubordination through the whole school. Poor Ralph was sick at heart. He felt that if there had ever been the shadow of an alliance between himself and Bud, it was all "off" now. It seemed to Hartsook that even Bull had lost his respect for the teacher. Half that night the young man lay awake. At last comfort came to him. A reminiscence of the death of the raccoon flashed on him like a vision. He remembered that quiet and annihilating bite which Bull gave. He remembered Bud's certificate, that "Ef Bull once takes a holt, heaven and yarth can't make him let go." He thought that what Flat Creek needed was a bulldog. He would be a bulldog, quiet, but invincible. He would take hold in such a way that nothing should make him let go. And then he went to sleep. In the morning Ralph got out of bed slowly. He put his clothes on slowly. He pulled on his boots in a bulldog mood. He tried to move as he thought Bull would move if he were a man. He ate with deliberation, and looked everybody in the eyes with a manner that made Bud watch him curiously. He found himself continually comparing himself with Bull. He found Bull possessing a strange fascination for him. He walked to school alone, the rest having gone on before. He entered the school-room preserving a cool and dogged manner. He saw in the eyes of the boys that there was mischief brewing. He did not dare sit down in his chair for fear of a pin. Everybody looked solemn. Ralph lifted the lid of his desk. "Bow-wow! wow-wow!" It was the voice of an imprisoned puppy, and the school giggled and then roared. Then everything was quiet. The scholars expected an outburst of wrath from the teacher. For they had come to regard the whole world as divided into two classes, the teacher on the one side representing lawful authority, and the pupils on the other in a state of chronic rebellion. To play a trick on the master was an evidence of spirit; to "lick" the master was to be the crowned hero of Flat Creek district. Such a hero was Bud Means; and Bill, who had less muscle, saw a chance to distinguish himself on a teacher of slender frame. Hence the puppy in the desk. Ralph Hartsook grew red in the face when he saw the puppy. But the cool, repressed, bulldog mood in which he had kept himself saved him. He lifted the dog into his arms and stroked him until the laughter subsided. Then, in a solemn and set way, he began: "I am sorry," and he looked round the room with a steady, hard eye--everybody felt that there was a conflict coming--"I am sorry that any scholar in this school could be so mean"--the word was uttered with a sharp emphasis, and all the big boys felt sure that there would be a fight with Bill Means, and perhaps with Bud--"could be so _mean_--as to--shut up his _brother_ in such a place as that!" There was a long, derisive laugh. The wit was indifferent, but by one stroke Ralph had carried the whole school to his side. By the significant glances of the boys, Hartsook detected the perpetrator of the joke, and with the hard and dogged look in his eyes, with just such a look as Bull would give a puppy, but with the utmost suavity in his voice, he said: "William Means, will you be so good as to put this dog out of doors?" FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 2: _Aout_ is not the common form of _out_, as it is in certain rustic New England regions. The vowel is here drawn in this way for imperative emphasis, and it occurs as a consequence of drawling speech.] [Footnote 3: "_'Nough said_" is more than enough said for the French translator, who takes it apparently for a sort of barbarous negative and renders it, "I don't like to speak to him." I need hardly explain to any American reader that _enough said_ implies the ending of all discussion by the acceptance of the proposition or challenge.] [Footnote 4: _Durn't, daren't, dasent, dursent_, and _don't dast_ are forms of this variable negative heard in the folk-speech of various parts of the country. The tenses of this verb seem to have got hopelessly mixed long ago, even in literary use, and the speech of the people reflects the historic confusion.] [Footnote 5: _To take a dare_ is an expression used in senses diametrically opposed. Its common sense is that of the text. The man who refuses to accept a challenge is said to take a dare, and there is some implication of cowardice in the imputation. On the other hand, one who accepts a challenge is said also to take the dare.] [Footnote 6: Most bad English was once good English. _Ketch_ was used by writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for _catch_. A New Hampshire magistrate in the seventeenth century spells it _caitch_, and probably pronounced it in that way. _Ketch_, a boat, was sometimes spelled _catch_ by the first American colonists, and the far-fetched derivation of the word from the Turkish may be one of the fancies of etymologists.] [Footnote 7: The derivation of _raccoon_ from the French _raton_, to which Mr. Skeat gives currency, still holds its place in some of our standard dictionaries. If American lexicographers would only read the literature of American settlement they would know that Mr. Skeat's citation of a translation of Buffon is nearly two centuries too late. As early as 1612 Captain John Smith gives _aroughcune_ as the aboriginal Virginia word, and more than one New England writer used _rackoon_ a few years later.] [Footnote 8: This prefixed _y_ is a mark of a very illiterate or antique form of the dialect. I have known _piece yarthen_ used for "a piece of earthen" [ware], the preposition getting lost in the sound of the _y_. I leave it to etymologists to determine its relation to that ancient prefix that differentiates _earn_ in one sense from _yearn_. But the article before a vowel may account for it if we consider it a corruption. "The earth" pronounced in a drawling way will produce _the yearth_. In the New York Documents is a letter from one Barnard Hodges, a settler in Delaware in the days of Governor Andros, whose spelling indicates a free use of the parasitic _y_. He writes "yunless," "yeunder" (under), "yunderstanding," "yeundertake," and "yeouffeis" (office).] [Footnote 9: Like many of the ear-marks of this dialect, the verb "dog-on" came from Scotland, presumably by the way of the north of Ireland. A correspondent of _The Nation_ calls attention to the use of "dagon" as Scotch dialect in Barrie's "Little Minister," a recent book. On examining that story, I find that the word has precisely the sense of our Hoosier "dog-on," which is to be pronounced broadly as a Hoosier pronounces dog--"daug-on." If Mr. Barrie gives his _a_ the broad sound, his "dagon" is nearly identical with "dog-on." Here are some detached sentences from "The Little Minister:" "Beattie spoke for more than himself when he said: 'Dagon that Manse! I never gie a swear but there it is glowering at me.'" "'Dagon religion,' Rob retorted fiercely; 't spoils a' thing.'" "There was some angry muttering from the crowd, and young Charles Yuill exclaimed, 'Dagon you, would you lord it ower us on week-days as well as on Sabbaths?'" "'Have you on your Sabbath shoon or have you no on your Sabbath shoon?' 'Guid care you took I should ha'e the dagont things on!' retorted the farmer." It will be seen that "dagont," as used above, is the Scotch form of "dog-oned." But Mr. Barrie uses the same form apparently for "dog-on it" in the following passage: "Ay, there was Ruth when she was na wanted, but Ezra, dagont, it looked as if Ezra had jumped clean out o' the Bible!" Strangely enough, this word as a verb is not to be found in Jamieson's dictionary of the Scottish dialect, but Jamieson gives "dugon" as a noun. It is given in the supplement to Jamieson, however, as "dogon," but still as a noun, with an ancient plural _dogonis_. It is explained as "a term of contempt." The example cited by Jamieson is Hogg's "Winter Tales," I. 292, and is as follows: "What wad my father say if I were to marry a man that loot himsel' be thrashed by Tommy Potts, a great supple wi' a back nae stiffer than a willy brand? . . . When one comes to close quarters wi' him he's but a dugon." Halliwell and Wright give _dogon_ as a noun, and mark it Anglo-Norman, but they apparently know it only from Jamieson and the supplement to Jamieson, where _dogguin_ is cited from Cotgrave as meaning "a filthie old curre," and _doguin_ from Roquefort, defined by "brutal, currish" [hargneux]. A word with the same orthography, _doguin_, is still used in French for puppy. It is of course a question whether the noun _dogon_ and its French antecedents are connected with the American verb _dog-on_. It is easy to conceive that such an epithet as _dogon_ might get itself mixed up with the word dog, and so become an imprecation. For instance, a servant in the family of a friend of mine in Indiana, wishing to resign her place before the return of some daughters of the house whom she had never seen, announced that she was going to leave "before them dog-on girls got home." Here the word might have been the old epithet, or an abbreviated participle. _Dogged_ is apparently a corruption of dog-on in the phrase "I'll be dogged." I prefer _dog-on_ to _dogone_, because in the dialect the sense of setting a dog on is frequently present to the speaker, though far enough away from the primitive sense of the word; perhaps.] CHAPTER II. A SPELL COMING. There was a moment of utter stillness; but the magnetism of Ralph's eye was too much for Bill Means. The request was so polite, the master's look was so innocent and yet so determined. Bill often wondered afterward that he had not "fit" rather than obeyed the request. But somehow he put the dog out. He was partly surprised, partly inveighed, partly awed into doing just what he had not intended to do. In the week that followed, Bill had to fight half a dozen boys for calling him "Puppy Means." Bill said he wished he'd licked the master on the spot. 'Twould 'a' saved five fights out of the six. And all that day and the next, the bulldog in the master's eye was a terror to evil-doers. At the close of school on the second day Bud was heard to give it as his opinion that "the master wouldn't be much in a tussle, but he had a heap of thunder and lightning in him." Did he inflict corporal punishment? inquires some philanthropic friend. Would you inflict corporal punishment if you were tiger-trainer in Van Amburgh's happy family? But poor Ralph could never satisfy his constituency in this regard. "Don't believe he'll do," was Mr. Pete Jones's comment to Mr. Means. "Don't thrash enough. Boys won't l'arn 'less you thrash 'em, says I. Leastways, mine won't. Lay it on good is what I says to a master. Lay it on good. Don't do no harm. Lickin' and l'arnin' goes together. No lickin', no l'arnin', says I. Lickin' and l'arnin,' lickin' and larnin', is the good ole way." And Mr. Jones, like some wiser people, was the more pleased with his formula that it had an alliterative sound. Nevertheless, Ralph was master from this time until the spelling-school came. If only it had not been for that spelling-school! Many and many a time after the night of the fatal spelling-school Ralph used to say, "If only it had not been for that spelling-school!" There had to be a spelling-school. Not only for the sake of my story, which would not have been worth the telling if the spelling-school had not taken place, but because Flat Creek district had to have a spelling-school. It is the only public literary exercise known in Hoopole County. It takes the place of lyceum lecture and debating club. Sis Means, or, as she wished now to be called, Mirandy Means, expressed herself most positively in favor of it. She said that she 'lowed the folks in that district couldn't in no wise do without it. But it was rather to its social than to its intellectual benefits that she referred. For all the spelling-schools ever seen could not enable her to stand anywhere but at the foot of the class. There is one branch diligently taught in a backwoods school. The public mind seems impressed with the difficulties of English orthography, and there is a solemn conviction that the chief end of man is to learn to spell. "'Know Webster's Elementary' came down from Heaven," would be the backwoods version of the 'Greek saying but that, unfortunately for the Greeks, their fame has not reached so far. It often happens that the pupil does not know the meaning of a single word in the lesson. This is of no consequence. What do you want to know the meaning of a word for? Words were made to be spelled, and men were probably created that they might spell them. Hence the necessity for sending a pupil through the spelling-book five times before you allow him to begin to read, or indeed to do anything else. Hence the necessity for those long spelling-classes at the close of each forenoon and afternoon session of the school, to stand at the head of which is the cherished ambition of every scholar. Hence, too, the necessity for devoting the whole of the afternoon session of each Friday to a "spelling-match." In fact, spelling is the "national game" in Hoopole County. Baseball and croquet matches are as unknown as Olympian chariot-races. Spelling and shucking[10] are the only public competitions. So the fatal spelling-school had to be appointed for the Wednesday of the second week of the session, just when Ralph felt himself master of the situation. Not that he was without his annoyances. One of Ralph's troubles in the week before the spelling-school was that he was loved. The other that he was hated. And while the time between the appointing of the spelling tournament and the actual occurrence of that remarkable event is engaged in elapsing, let me narrate two incidents that made it for Ralph a trying time. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 10: In naming the several parts of the Indian corn and the dishes made from it, the English language was put to many shifts. Such words as _tassel_ and _silk_ were poetically applied to the blossoms; _stalk_, _blade_, and _ear_ were borrowed from other sorts of corn, and the Indian tongues were forced to pay tribute to name the dishes borrowed from the savages. From them we have _hominy_, _pone_, _supawn_, and _succotash_. For other nouns words were borrowed from English provincial dialects. _Shuck_ is one of these. On the northern belt, shucks are the outer covering of nuts; in the middle and southern regions the word is applied to what in New England is called the husks of the corn. _Shuck_, however, is much more widely used than _husk_ in colloquial speech--the farmers in more than half of the United States are hardly acquainted with the word _husk_ as applied to the envelope of the ear. _Husk_, in the Middle States, and in some parts of the South and West, means the bran of the cornmeal, as notably in Davy Crockett's verse: "She sifted the meal, she gimme the hus'; She baked the bread, she gimme the crus'; She b'iled the meat, she gimme the bone; She gimme a kick and sent me home." In parts of Virginia, before the war, the word _husk_ or _hus'_ meant the cob or spike of the corn. "I smack you over wid a cawn-hus'" is a threat I have often heard one negro boy make to another. _Cob_ is provincial English for ear, and I have known "a cob of corn" used in Canada for an ear of Indian corn. While writing this note "a cob of Indian corn "--meaning an ear--appears in the report of an address by a distinguished man at a recent meeting of the Royal Geographical Society. A lady tells me that she met, in the book of an English traveller, the remarkable statement that "the Americans are very fond of the young grain called cob." These Indian-corn words have reached an accepted meaning after a competition. To _shell_ corn, among the earliest settlers of Virginia, meant to take it out of the envelope, which was presumably called the shell. The analogy is with the shelling of pulse.] CHAPTER III. MIRANDY, HANK, AND SHOCKY. Mirandy had nothing but contempt for the new master until he developed the bulldog in his character. Mirandy fell in love with the bulldog. Like many other girls of her class, she was greatly enamored with the "subjection of women," and she stood ready to fall in love with any man strong enough to be her master. Much has been said of the strong-minded woman. I offer this psychological remark as a contribution to the natural history of the weak-minded woman. It was at the close of that very second day on which Ralph had achieved his first victory over the school, and in which Mirandy had been seized with her desperate passion for him, that she told him about it. Not in words. We do not allow _that_ in the most civilized countries, and still less would it be tolerated in Hoopole County. But Mirandy told the master the fact that she was in love with him, though no word passed her lips. She walked by him from school. She cast at him what are commonly called sheep's-eyes. Ralph thought them more like calf's eyes. She changed the whole tone of her voice. She whined ordinarily. Now she whimpered. And so by ogling him, by blushing at him, by tittering at him, by giggling at him, by snickering at him, by simpering at him, by making herself tenfold more a fool even than nature had made her, she managed to convey to the dismayed soul of the young teacher the frightful intelligence that he was loved by the richest, the ugliest, the silliest, the coarsest, and the most entirely contemptible girl in Flat Creek district. Ralph sat by the fire the next morning trying to read a few minutes before school-time, while the boys were doing the chores and the bound girl was milking the cows, with no one in the room but the old woman. She was generally as silent as Bud, but now she seemed for some unaccountable reason disposed to talk. She had sat down on the broad hearth to have her usual morning smoke; the poplar table, adorned by no cloth, stood in the middle of the floor; the unwashed blue teacups sat in the unwashed blue saucers; the unwashed blue plates kept company with the begrimed blue pitcher. The dirty skillets by the fire were kept in countenance by the dirtier pots, and the ashes were drifted and strewn over the hearth-stones in a most picturesque way. "You see," said the old woman, knocking the residuum from her cob pipe, and chafing some dry leaf between her withered hands preparatory to filling it again, "you see, Mr. Hartsook, my ole man's purty well along in the world. He's got a right smart lot of this world's plunder[11], one way and another." And while she stuffed the tobacco into her pipe Ralph wondered why she should mention it to him. "You see, we moved in here nigh upon twenty-five years ago. 'Twas when my Jack, him as died afore Bud was born, was a baby. Bud'll be twenty-one the fif' of next June." Here Mrs. Means stopped to rake a live coal out of the fire with her skinny finger, and then to carry it in her skinny palm to the bowl--or to the _hole_--of her cob pipe. When she got the smoke a-going, she proceeded: "You see, this yere bottom land was all Congress land[12] in them there days, and it sold for a dollar and a quarter, and I says to my ole man, 'Jack,' says I, 'Jack, do you git a plenty while you're a-gittin'. Git a plenty while you're a-gittin',' says I, 'fer 'twon't never be no cheaper'n 'tis now,' and it ha'n't been; I knowed 'twouldn't," and Mrs. Means took the pipe from her mouth to indulge in a good chuckle at the thought of her financial shrewdness. "'Git a plenty while you're a-gittin' says I. I could see, you know, they was a powerful sight of money in Congress land. That's what made me say, 'Git a plenty while you're a-gittin'.' And Jack, he's wuth lots and gobs of money, all made out of Congress land. Jack didn't git rich by hard work. Bless you, no! Not him. That a'n't his way. Hard work a'n't, you know. 'Twas that air six hundred dollars he got along of me, all salted down into Flat Crick bottoms at a dollar and a quarter a' acre, and 'twas my sayin' 'Git a plenty while you're a gittin'' as done it." And here the old ogre laughed, or grinned horribly, at Ralph, showing her few straggling, discolored teeth. Then she got up and knocked the ashes out of her pipe, and laid the pipe away and walked round In front of Ralph. After adjusting the chunks[13] so that the fire would burn, she turned her yellow face toward Ralph, and scanning him closely came out with the climax of her speech in the remark: "You see as how, Mr. Hartsook, the man what gits my Mirandy'll do well. Flat Crick land's wuth nigt upon a hundred a' acre." This gentle hint came near knocking Ralph down. Had Flat Creek land been worth a hundred times a hundred dollars an acre, and had he owned five hundred times Means's five hundred acres, he would have given it all just at that moment to have annihilated the whole tribe of Meanses. Except Bud. Bud was a giant, but a good-natured one. He thought he would except Bud from the general destruction. As for the rest, he mentally pictured to himself the pleasure of attending their funerals. There was one thought, however, between him and despair. He felt confident that the cordiality, the intensity, and the persistency of his dislike of Sis Means were such that he should never inherit a foot of the Flat Creek bottoms. But what about Bud? What if he joined the conspiracy to marry him to this weak-eyed, weak-headed wood-nymph, or backwoods nymph? If Ralph felt it a misfortune to be loved by Mirandy Means, he found himself almost equally unfortunate in having incurred the hatred of the meanest boy in school. "Hank" Banta, low-browed, smirky, and crafty, was the first sufferer by Ralph's determination to use corporal punishment, and so Henry Banta, who was a compound of deceit and resentment, never lost an opportunity to annoy the young school-master, who was obliged to live perpetually on his guard against his tricks. One morning, as Ralph walked toward the school-house, he met little Shocky. What the boy's first name or last name was the teacher did not know. He had given his name as Shocky, and all the teacher knew was that he was commonly called Shocky, that he was an orphan, that he lived with a family named Pearson over in Rocky Hollow, and that he was the most faithful and affectionate child in the school. On this morning that I speak of, Ralph had walked toward the school early to avoid the company of Mirandy. But not caring to sustain his dignity longer than was necessary, he loitered along the road, admiring the trunks of the maples, and picking up a beech-nut now and then. Just as he was about to go on toward the school, he caught sight of little Shocky running swiftly toward him, but looking from side to side, as if afraid of being seen. [Illustration: BETSY SHORT] "Well, Shocky, what is it?" and Ralph put his hand kindly on the great bushy head of white hair from which came Shocky's nickname. Shocky had to pant a minute. "Why, Mr. Hartsook," he gasped, scratching his head, "they's a pond down under the school-house," and here Shocky's breath gave out entirely for a minute. "Yes, Shocky, I know that. What about it? The trustees haven't come to fill it up, have they?" "Oh! no, sir; but Hank Banta, you know--" and Shocky took another breathing spell, standing as dose to Ralph as he could, for poor Shocky got all his sunshine from the master's presence. "Has Henry fallen in and got a ducking, Shocky?" "Oh! no, sir; he wants to git you in, you see." "Well, I won't go in, though, Shocky." "But, you see, he's been and gone and pulled back the board that you have to step on to git ahind your desk; he's been and gone and pulled back the board so as you can't help a-tippin' it up, and a-sowsin' right in ef you step there." "And so you came to tell me." There was a huskiness in Ralph's voice. He had, then, one friend in Flat Creek district--poor little Shocky. He put his arm around Shocky just a moment, and then told him to hasten across to the other road, so as to come back to the school-house in a direction at right angles to the master's approach. But the caution was not needed. Shocky had taken care to leave in that way, and was altogether too cunning to be seen coming down the road with Mr. Hartsook. But after he got over the fence to go through the "sugar camp" (or sugar _orchard_, as they say at the East), he stopped and turned back once or twice, just to catch one more smile from Ralph. And then he hied away through the tall trees, a very happy boy, kicking and ploughing the brown leaves before him in his perfect delight, saying over and over again: "How he looked at me! how he did look!" And when Ralph came up to the school-house door, there was Shocky sauntering along from the other direction, throwing bits of limestone at fence rails, and smiling still clear down to his shoes at thought of the master's kind words. "What a quare boy Shocky is!" remarked Betsey Short, with a giggle. "He just likes to wander round alone. I see him a-comin' out of the sugar camp just now. He's been in there half an hour." And Betsey giggled again; for Betsey Short could giggle on slighter provocation than any other girl on Flat Creek. When Ralph Hartsook, with the quiet, dogged tread that he was cultivating, walked into the school-room, he took great care not to seem to see the trap set for him; but he carelessly stepped over the board that had been so nicely adjusted. The boys who were Hank's confidants in the plot were very busy over their slates, and took pains not to show their disappointment. The morning session wore on without incident. Ralph several times caught two people looking at him. One was Mirandy. Her weak and watery eyes stole loving glances over the top of her spelling-book, which she would not study. Her looks made Ralph's spirits sink to forty below zero, and congeal. But on one of the backless little benches that sat in the middle of the school-room was little Shocky, who also cast many love glances at the young master; glances as grateful to his heart as Mirandy's ogling--he was tempted to call it ogring--was hateful. "Look at Shocky," giggled Betsey Short, behind her slate. "He looks as if he was a-goin' to eat the master up, body and soul." And so the forenoon wore on as usual, and those who laid the trap had forgotten it, themselves. The morning session was drawing to a close. The fire in the great old fire-place had burnt low. The flames, which seemed to Shocky to be angels, had disappeared, and now the bright coals, which had played the part of men and women and houses in Shocky's fancy, had taken on a white and downy covering of ashes, and the great half-burnt back-log lay there smouldering like a giant asleep in a snow-drift. Shocky longed to wake him up. As for Henry Banta, he was too much bothered to get the answer to a "sum" he was doing, to remember anything about his trap. In fact, he had quite forgotten that half an hour ago in the all-absorbing employment of drawing ugly pictures on his slate and coaxing Betsey Short to giggle by showing them slyly across the school-room. Once or twice Ralph had been attracted to Betsey's extraordinary fits of giggling, and had come so near to catching Hank that the boy thought it best not to run any further risk of the beech switches, four or five feet long, laid up behind the master in sight of the school as a prophylactic. Hence his application just now to his "sum" in long division, and hence his puzzled look, for, idler that he was, his "sums" did not solve themselves easily. As usual in such cases, he came up in front of the master's desk to have the difficulty explained. He had to wait a minute until Ralph got through with showing Betsey Short, who had been seized with a studying fit, and who could hardly give any attention to the teacher's explanations, she did want to giggle so much! Not at anything in particular, but just at things in general. While Ralph was "doing" Betsey's "sum" for her, he was solving a much more difficult question. A plan had flashed upon him, but the punishment seemed a severe one. He gave it up once or twice, but he remembered how turbulent the Flat Creek elements were; and had he not inly resolved to be as unrelenting as a bulldog? He fortified himself by recalling again the oft-remembered remark of Bud, "Ef Bull wunst takes a holt, heaven and yarth can't make him let go." And so he resolved to give Hank and the whole school one good lesson. "Just step round behind me, Henry, and you can see how I do this," said Ralph. Hank was entirely off his guard, and, with his eyes fixed upon the slate on the teacher's desk, he sidled round upon the broad loose board misplaced by his own hand, and in an instant the other end of the board rose up in the middle of the school-room, almost striking Shocky in the face, while Henry Banta went down into the ice-cold water beneath the school-house. "Why, Henry!" cried Ralph, jumping to his feet with well-feigned surprise. "How _did_ this happen?" him by the fire. Betsey Short giggled. Shocky was so tickled that he could hardly keep his seat. The boys who were in the plot looked very serious indeed. Ralph made some remarks by way of improving the occasion. He spoke strongly of the utter meanness of the one who could play so heartless a trick on a schoolmate. He said that it was as much thieving to get your fun at the expense of another as to steal his money. And while he talked, all eyes were turned on Hank--all except the eyes of Mirandy Means. They looked simperingly at Ralph. All the rest looked at Hank. The fire had made his face very red. Shocky noticed that. Betsey Short noticed it, and giggled. The master wound up with an appropriate quotation from Scripture. He said that the person who displaced that board had better not be encouraged by the success--he said _success_ with a curious emphasis--of the present experiment to attempt another trick of the kind. For it was set down in the Bible that if a man dug a pit for the feet of another he would be very likely to fall in it himself. Which made all the pupils look solemn, except Betsey Short, who giggled. And Shocky wanted to. And Mirandy cast an expiring look at Ralph. And if the teacher was not love-sick, he certainly was sick of Mirandy's love. [Illustration: HANK BANTA'S IMPROVED PLUNGE BATH] When school was "let out," Ralph gave Hank every caution that he could about taking cold, and even lent him his overcoat, very much against Hank's will. For Hank had obstinately refused to go home before the school was dismissed. Then the master walked out in a quiet and subdued way to spend the noon recess in the woods, while Shocky watched his retreating footsteps with loving admiration. And the pupils not in the secret canvassed the question of who moved the board. Bill Means said he'd bet Hank did it, which set Betsey Short off in an uncontrollable giggle. And Shocky listened innocently. But that night Bud said slyly: "Thunder and lightning! what a manager you _air_, Mr. Hartsook!" To which Ralph returned no reply except a friendly smile. Muscle paid tribute to brains that time. But Ralph had no time for exultation; for just here came the spelling-school. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 11: This word _plunder_ is probably from Pennsylvania, as it is exactly equivalent to the German word _plunder_, in the sense of household effects, the original meaning of the word in German. Any kind of baggage may be called _plunder_, but the most accepted sense is household goods. It is quite seriously used. I have seen bills of lading on the Western waters certifying that A.B. had shipped "1 lot of plunder;" that is, household goods. It is here used figuratively for goods in general.] [Footnote 12: _Congress land_ was the old designation for land owned by the government. Under the Confederation, the Congress was the government, and the forms of speech seem to have long retained the notion that what belonged to the United States was the property of Congress.] [Footnote 13: The commonest use of the word _chunk_ in the old days was for the ends of the sticks of cord-wood burned in the great fireplaces. As the sticks burned in two, the chunks fell down or rolled back on the wall side of the andirons. By putting the chunks together, a new fire was set a-going without fresh wood. This use of the word is illustrated in a folk-rhyme or nursery jingle of the country which has neither sense nor elegance to recommend it: "Old Mother Hunk She got drunk And fell in the fire And kicked up a chunk." ] CHAPTER IV. SPELLING DOWN THE MASTER. "I 'low," said Mrs. Means, as she stuffed the tobacco into her cob pipe after supper on that eventful Wednesday evening: "I 'low they'll app'int the Squire to gin out the words to-night. They mos' always do, you see, kase he's the peartest[14] _ole_ man in this deestrick; and I 'low some of the young fellers would have to git up and dust ef they would keep up to him. And he uses sech remarkable smart words. He speaks so polite, too. But laws! don't I remember when he was poarer nor Job's turkey? Twenty year ago, when he come to these 'ere diggings, that air Squire Hawkins was a poar Yankee school-master, that said 'pail' instid of bucket, and that called a cow a 'caow,' and that couldn't tell to save his gizzard what we meant by '_low_[15] and by _right smart_[16]. But he's larnt our ways now, an' he's jest as civilized as the rest of us. You would-n know he'd ever been a Yankee. He didn't stay poar long. Not he. He jest married a right rich girl! He! he!" And the old woman grinned at Ralph, and then at Mirandy, and then at the rest, until Ralph shuddered. Nothing was so frightful to him as to be fawned on by this grinning ogre, whose few lonesome, blackish teeth seemed ready to devour him. "He didn't stay poar, you bet a hoss!" and with this the coal was deposited on the pipe, and the lips began to crack like parchment as each puff of smoke escaped. "He married rich, you see," and here another significant look at the young master, and another fond look at Mirandy, as she puffed away reflectively. "His wife hadn't no book-larnin'. She'd been through the spellin'-book wunst, and had got as fur as 'asperity' on it a second time. But she couldn't read a word when she was married, and never could. She warn't overly smart. She hadn't hardly got the sense the law allows. But schools was skase in them air days, and, besides, book-larnin' don't do no good to a woman. Makes her stuck up. I never knowed but one gal in my life as had ciphered into fractions, and she was so dog-on stuck up that she turned up her nose one night at a apple-peelin' bekase I tuck a sheet off the bed to splice out the table-cloth, which was rather short. And the sheet was mos' clean too. Had-n been slep on more'n wunst or twicet. But I was goin' fer to say that when Squire Hawkins married Virginny Gray he got a heap o' money, or, what's the same thing mostly, a heap o' good land. And that's better'n book-larnin', says I. Ef a gal had gone clean through all eddication, and got to the rule of three itself, that would-n buy a feather-bed. Squire Hawkins jest put eddication agin the gal's farm, and traded even, an' ef ary one of 'em got swindled, I never heerd no complaints." And here she looked at Ralph in triumph, her hard face splintering into the hideous semblance of a smile. And Mirandy cast a blushing, gushing, all-imploring, and all-confiding look on the young master. "I say, ole woman," broke in old Jack, "I say, wot is all this 'ere spoutin' about the Square fer?" and old Jack, having bit off an ounce of "pigtail," returned the plug to his pocket. As for Ralph, he fell into a sort of terror. He had a guilty feeling that this speech of the old lady's had somehow committed him beyond recall to Mirandy. He did not see visions of breach-of-promise suits. But he trembled at the thought of an avenging big brother. "Hanner, you kin come along, too, ef you're a mind, when you git the dishes washed," said Mrs. Means to the bound girl, as she shut and latched the back door. The Means family had built a new house in front of the old one, as a sort of advertisement of bettered circumstances, an eruption of shoddy feeling; but when the new building was completed, they found themselves unable to occupy it for anything else than a lumber room, and so, except a parlor which Mirandy had made an effort to furnish a little (in hope of the blissful time when somebody should "set up" with her of evenings), the new building was almost unoccupied, and the family went in and out through the back door, which, indeed, was the front door also, for, according to a curious custom, the "front" of the house was placed toward the south, though the "big road" (Hoosier for _highway_) ran along the north-west side, or, rather, past the north-west corner of it. When the old woman had spoken thus to Hannah and had latched the door, she muttered, "That gal don't never show no gratitude fer favors;" to which Bud rejoined that he didn't think she had no great sight to be pertickler thankful fer. To which Mrs. Means made no reply, thinking it best, perhaps, not to wake up her dutiful son on so interesting a theme as her treatment of Hannah. Ralph felt glad that he was this evening to go to another boarding place. He should not hear the rest of the controversy. Ralph walked to the school-house with Bill. They were friends again. For when Hank Banta's ducking and his dogged obstinacy in sitting in his wet clothes had brought on a serious fever, Ralph had called together the big boys, and had said: "We must take care of one another, boys. Who will volunteer to take turns sitting up with Henry?" He put his own name down, and all the rest followed. "William Means and myself will sit up to-night," said Ralph. And poor Bill had been from that moment the teacher's friend. He was chosen to be Ralph's companion. He was Puppy Means no longer! Hank could not be conquered by kindness, and the teacher was made to feel the bitterness of his resentment long after. But Bill Means was for the time entirely placated, and he and Ralph went to spelling-school together. Every family furnished a candle. There were yellow dips and white dips, burning, smoking, and flaring. There was laughing, and talking, and giggling, and simpering, and ogling, and flirting, and courting. What a full-dress party is to Fifth Avenue, a spelling-school is to Hoopole County. It is an occasion which is metaphorically inscribed with this legend: "Choose your partners." Spelling is only a blind in Hoopole County, as is dancing on Fifth Avenue. But as there are some in society who love dancing for its own sake, so in Flat Creek district there were those who loved spelling for its own sake, and who, smelling the battle from afar, had come to try their skill in this tournament, hoping to freshen the laurels they had won in their school-days. "I 'low," said Mr. Means, speaking as the principal school trustee, "I 'low our friend the Square is jest the man to boss this 'ere consarn to-night. Ef nobody objects, I'll app'int him. Come, Square, don't be bashful. Walk up to the trough, fodder or no fodder, as the man said to his donkey." There was a general giggle at this, and many of the young swains took occasion to nudge the girls alongside them, ostensibly for the purpose of making them see the joke, but really for the pure pleasure of nudging. The Greeks figured Cupid as naked, probably because he wears so many disguises that they could not select a costume for him. The Squire came to the front. Ralph made an inventory of the agglomeration which bore the name of Squire Hawkins, as follows: 1. A swallow-tail coat of indefinite age, worn only on state occasions^ when its owner was called to figure in his public capacity. Either the Squire had grown too large or the coat too small. 2. A pair of black gloves, the most phenomenal, abnormal, and unexpected apparition conceivable in Flat Creek district, where the preachers wore no coats in the summer, and where a black glove was never seen except on the hands of the Squire. 3. A wig of that dirty, waxen color so common to wigs. This one showed a continual inclination to slip off the owner's smooth, bald pate, and the Squire had frequently to adjust it. As his hair had been red, the wig did not accord with his face, and the hair ungrayed was doubly discordant with a countenance shrivelled by age. 4. A semicircular row of whiskers hedging the edge of the jaw and chin. These were dyed a frightful dead-black, such a color as belonged to no natural hair or beard that ever existed. At the roots there was a quarter of an inch of white, giving the whiskers the appearance of having been stuck on. 5. A pair of spectacles "with tortoise-shell rim." Wont to slip off. 6. A glass eye, purchased of a peddler, and differing in color from its natural mate, perpetually getting out of focus by turning in or out. 7. A set of false teeth, badly fitted, and given to bobbing up and down. 8. The Squire proper, to whom these patches were loosely attached. It is an old story that a boy wrote home to his father begging him to come West, because "mighty mean men get into office out here." But Ralph concluded that some Yankees had taught school in Hoopole County who would not have held a high place in the educational institutions of Massachusetts. Hawkins had some New England idioms, but they were well overlaid by a Western pronunciation. "Ladies and gentlemen," he began, shoving up his spectacles, and sucking his lips over his white teeth to keep them in place, "ladies and gentlemen, young men and maidens, raley I'm obleeged to Mr. Means fer this honor," and the Squire took both hands and turned the top of his head round half an inch. Then he adjusted his spectacles. Whether he was obliged to Mr. Means for the honor of being compared to a donkey was not clear. "I feel in the inmost compartments of my animal spirits a most happifying sense of the success and futility of all my endeavors to sarve the people of Flat Creek deestrick, and the people of Tomkins township, in my weak way and manner." This burst of eloquence was delivered with a constrained air and an apparent sense of a danger that he, Squire Hawkins, might fall to pieces in his weak way and manner, and of the success and futility of all attempts at reconstruction. For by this time the ghastly pupil of the left eye, which was black, was looking away round to the left, while the little blue one on the right twinkled cheerfully toward the front. The front teeth would drop down so that the Squire's mouth was kept nearly closed, and his words whistled through. "I feel as if I could be grandiloquent on this interesting occasion," twisting his scalp round, "but raley I must forego any such exertions. It is spelling you want. Spelling is the corner-stone, the grand, underlying subterfuge, of a good eddication. I put the spellin'-book prepared by the great Daniel Webster alongside the Bible. I do, raley. I think I may put it ahead of the Bible. For if it wurn't fer spellin'-books and sich occasions as these, where would the Bible be? I should like to know. The man who got up, who compounded this work of inextricable valoo was a benufactor to the whole human race or any other." Here the spectacles fell off. The Squire replaced them in some confusion, gave the top of his head another twist, and felt of his glass eye, while poor Shocky stared in wonder, and Betsey Short rolled from side to side in the effort to suppress her giggle. Mrs. Means and the other old ladies looked the applause they could not speak. "I app'int Larkin Lanham and Jeems Buchanan fer captings," said the Squire. And the two young men thus named took a stick and tossed it from hand to hand to decide which should have the "first choice." One tossed the stick to the other, who held it fast just where he happened to catch it. Then the first placed his hand above the second, and so the hands were alternately changed to the top. The one who held the stick last without room for the other to take hold had gained the lot. This was tried three times. As Larkin held the stick twice out of three times, he had the choice. He hesitated a moment. Everybody looked toward tall Jim Phillips. But Larkin was fond of a venture on unknown seas, and so he said, "I take the master," while a buzz of surprise ran round the room, and the captain of the other side, as if afraid his opponent would withdraw the choice, retorted quickly, and with a little smack of exultation and defiance in his voice, "And _I_ take Jeems Phillips." And soon all present, except a few of the old folks, found themselves ranged in opposing hosts, the poor spellers lagging in, with what grace they could, at the foot of the two divisions. The Squire opened his spelling-book and began to give out the words to the two captains, who stood up and spelled against each other. It was not long until Larkin spelled "really" with one _l_, and had to sit down in confusion, while a murmur of satisfaction ran through the ranks of the opposing forces. His own side bit their lips. The slender figure of the young teacher took the place of the fallen leader, and the excitement made the house very quiet. Ralph dreaded the loss of prestige he would suffer if he should be easily spelled down. And at the moment of rising he saw in the darkest corner the figure of a well-dressed young man sitting in the shadow. Why should his evil genius haunt him? But by a strong effort he turned his attention away from Dr. Small, and listened carefully to the words which the Squire did not pronounce very distinctly, spelling them with extreme deliberation. This gave him an air of hesitation which disappointed those on his own side. They wanted him to spell with a dashing assurance. But he did not begin a word until he had mentally felt his way through it. After ten minutes of spelling hard words Jeems Buchanan, the captain on the other side, spelled "atrocious" with an _s_ instead of a _c_, and subsided, his first choice, Jeems Phillips, coming up against the teacher. This brought the excitement to fever-heat. For though Ralph was chosen first, it was entirely on trust, and most of the company were disappointed. The champion who now stood up against the school-master was a famous speller. Jim Phillips was a tall, lank, stoop-shouldered fellow who had never distinguished himself in any other pursuit than spelling. Except in this one art of spelling he was of no account. He could not catch well or bat well in ball. He could not throw well enough to make his mark in that famous West ern game of bull-pen. He did not succeed well in any study but that of Webster's Elementary. But in that he was--to use the usual Flat Creek locution--in that he was "a boss." This genius for spelling is in some people a sixth sense, a matter of intuition. Some spellers are born, and not made, and their facility reminds one of the mathematical prodigies that crop out every now and then to bewilder the world. Bud Means, foreseeing that Ralph would be pitted against Jim Phillips, had warned his friend that Jim could "spell like thunder and lightning," and that it "took a powerful smart speller" to beat him, for he knew "a heap of spelling-book." To have "spelled down the master" is next thing to having whipped the biggest bully in Hoopole County, and Jim had "spelled down" the last three masters. He divided the hero-worship of the district with Bud Means. For half an hour the Squire gave out hard words. What a blessed thing our crooked orthography is! Without it there could be no spelling-schools. As Ralph discovered his opponent's mettle he became more and more cautious. He was now satisfied that Jim would eventually beat him. The fellow evidently knew more about the spelling-book than old Noah Webster himself. As he stood there, with his dull face and long sharp nose, his hands behind his back, and his voice spelling infallibly, it seemed to Hartsook that his superiority must lie in his nose. Ralph's cautiousness answered a double purpose; it enabled him to tread surely, and it was mistaken by Jim for weakness. Phillips was now confident that he should carry off the scalp of the fourth school-master before the evening was over. He spelled eagerly, confidently, brilliantly. Stoop-shouldered as he was, he began to straighten up. In the minds of all the company the odds were in his favor. He saw this, and became ambitious to distinguish himself by spelling without giving the matter any thought. Ralph always believed that he would have been speedily defeated by Phillips had it not been for two thoughts which braced him. The sinister shadow of young Dr. Small sitting in the dark corner by the water-bucket nerved him. A victory over Phillips was a defeat to one who wished only ill to the young school-master. The other thought that kept his pluck alive was the recollection of Bull. He approached a word as Bull approached the raccoon. He did not take hold until he was sure of his game. When he took hold, it was with a quiet assurance of success. As Ralph spelled in this dogged way for half an hour the hardest words the Squire could find, the excitement steadily rose in all parts of the house, and Ralph's friends even ventured to whisper that "maybe Jim had cotched his match, after all!" But Phillips never doubted of his success. "Theodolite," said the Squire. "T-h-e, the o-d, od, theod, o, theodo, l-y-t-e, theodolite," spelled the champion. "Next," said the Squire, nearly losing his teeth In his excitement. Ralph spelled the word slowly and correctly, and the conquered champion sat down In confusion. The excitement was so great for some minutes that the spelling was suspended. Everybody In the house had shown sympathy with one or the other of the combatants, except the silent shadow in the corner. It had not moved during the contest, and did not show any interest now in the result. "Gewhilliky crickets! Thunder and lightning! Licked him all to smash!" said Bud, rubbing his hands on his knees, "That beats my time all holler!" And Betsey Short giggled until her tuck-comb fell out, though she was on the defeated side. Shocky got up and danced with pleasure. But one suffocating look from the aqueous eyes of Mirandy destroyed the last spark of Ralph's pleasure in his triumph, and sent that awful below-zero feeling all through him. "He's powerful smart, is the master," said old Jack to Mr. Pete Jones. "He'll beat the whole kit and tuck of 'em afore he's through. I know'd he was smart. That's the reason I tuck him," proceeded Mr. Means. "Yaas, but he don't lick enough. Not nigh," answered Pete Jones. "No lickin', no larnin', says I." It was now not so hard. The other spellers on the opposite side went down quickly under the hard words which the Squire gave out. The master had mowed down all but a few, his opponents had given up the battle, and all had lost their keen interest in a contest to which there could be but one conclusion, for there were only the poor spellers left. But Ralph Hartsook ran against a stump where he was least expecting it. It was the Squire's custom, when one of the smaller scholars or poorer spellers rose to spell against the master, to give out eight or ten easy words, that they might have some breathing-spell before being slaughtered, and then to give a poser or two which soon settled them. He let them run a little, as a cat does a doomed mouse. There was now but one person left on the opposite side, and, as she rose in her blue calico dress, Ralph recognized Hannah, the bound girl at old Jack Means's. She had not attended school in the district, and had never spelled in spelling-school before, and was chosen last as an uncertain quantity. The Squire began with easy words of two syllables, from that page of Webster, so well known to all who ever thumbed it, as "baker," from the word that stands at the top of the page. She spelled these words in an absent and uninterested manner. As everybody knew that she would have to go down as soon as this preliminary skirmishing was over, everybody began to get ready to go home, and already there was the buzz of preparation. Young men were timidly asking girls if "they could see them safe home," which was the approved formula, and were trembling in mortal fear of "the mitten." Presently the Squire, thinking it time to close the contest, pulled his scalp forward, adjusted his glass eye, which had been examining his nose long enough, and turned over the leaves of the book to the great words at the place known to spellers as "incomprehensibility," and began to give out those "words of eight syllables with the accent on the sixth." Listless scholars now turned round, and ceased to whisper, in order to be in at the master's final triumph. But to their surprise "ole Miss Meanses' white nigger," as some of them called her in allusion to her slavish life, spelled these great words with as perfect ease as the master. Still not doubting the result, the Squire turned from place to place and selected all the hard words he could find. The school became utterly quiet, the excitement was too great for the ordinary buzz. Would "Meanses' Hanner" beat the master? beat the master that had laid out Jim Phillips? Everybody's sympathy was now turned to Hannah. Ralph noticed that even Shocky had deserted him, and that his face grew brilliant every time Hannah spelled a word. In fact, Ralph deserted himself. As he saw the fine, timid face of the girl so long oppressed flush and shine with interest; as he looked at the rather low but broad and intelligent brow and the fresh, white complexion and saw the rich, womanly nature coming to the surface under the influence of applause and sympathy--he did not want to beat. If he had not felt that a victory given would insult her, he would have missed intentionally. The bulldog, the stern, relentless setting of the will, had gone, he knew not whither. And there had come in its place, as he looked in that face, a something which he did not understand. You did not, gentle reader, the first time it came to you. The Squire was puzzled. He had given out all the hard words in the book. He again pulled the top of his head forward. Then he wiped his spectacles and put them on. Then out of the depths of his pocket he fished up a list of words just coming into use in those days--words not in the spelling-book. He regarded the paper attentively with his blue right eye. His black left eye meanwhile fixed itself in such a stare on Mirandy Means that she shuddered and hid her eyes in her red silk handkerchief. "Daguerreotype," sniffed the Squire. It was Ralph's turn. "D-a-u, dau--" "Next." And Hannah spelled it right. Such a buzz followed that Betsey Short's giggle could not be heard, but Shocky shouted: "Hanner beat! my Hanner spelled down the master!" And Ralph went over and congratulated her. And Dr. Small sat perfectly still in the corner. And then the Squire called them to order, and said: "As our friend Hanner Thomson is the only one left on her side, she will have to spell against nearly all on t'other side. I shall therefore take the liberty of procrastinating the completion of this interesting and exacting contest until to-morrow evening. I hope our friend Hanner may again carry off the cypress crown of glory. There is nothing better for us than healthful and kindly simulation." Dr. Small, who knew the road to practice, escorted Mirandy, and Bud went home with somebody else. The others of the Means family hurried on, while Hannah, the champion, stayed behind a minute to speak to Shocky. Perhaps it was because Ralph saw that Hannah must go alone that he suddenly remembered having left something which was of no consequence, and resolved to go round by Mr. Means's and get it. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 14: _Peart_ or peert is only another form of the old word _pert_--probably an older form. Bartlett cites an example of _peart_ as far back as Sir Philip Sidney; and Halliwell finds it in various English dialects. Davies, afterward president of Princeton College, describes Dr. Lardner, in 1754, as "a little pert old gent." I do not know that Dr. Daries pronounced his _pert_ as though it were _peart_, but he uses it in the sense it has in the text, viz., bright-witted, intelligent. The general sense of _peart_ is lively, either in body or mind.] [Footnote 15: Mr. Lowell suggested to me in 1869 that this word _'low_ has no kinship with _allow_, but is an independent word for which he gave a Low Latin original of similar sound. I have not been able to trace any such word, but Mr. Lowell had so much linguistic knowledge of the out-of-the-way sort that it may be worth while to record his impression. Bartlett is wrong in defining this word, as he is usually in his attempts to explain dialect outside of New England. It does not mean "to declare, assert, maintain," etc. It is nearly the equivalent of _guess_ in the Northern and Middle States, and of _reckon_ in the South. It agrees precisely with the New England _calk'late_. Like all the rest of these words it may have a strong sense by irony. When a man says, "I 'low that is a purty peart sort of a hoss," he understates for the sake of emphasis. It is rarely or never _allow_, but simply _'low_. In common with _calk'late_, it has sometimes a sense of purpose or expectation, as when a man says, "I 'low to go to town to-morry."] [Footnote 16: No phrase of the Hoosier and South-western dialect is such a stumbling-block to the outsider as _right smart_. The writer from the North or East will generally use it wrongly. Mrs. Stowe says, "I sold right smart of eggs," but the Hoosier woman as I knew her would have said "a right smart lot of eggs" or "a right smart of eggs," using the article and understanding the noun. A farmer omitting the preposition boasts of having "raised right smart corn" this year. No expression could have a more vague sense than this. In the early settlement of Minnesota it was a custom of the land officers to require a residence of about ten days on "a claim" in order to the establishment of a pre-emption right. One of the receivers at a land office under Buchanan's administration was a German of much intelligence who was very sensitive regarding his knowledge of English. "How long has the claimant lived on his claim?" he demanded of a Hoosier witness. "Oh, a right smart while," was the reply. The receiver had not the faintest notion of the meaning of the answer, but fearing to betray his ignorance of English he allowed the land to be entered, though the claimant had spent but about two hours in residing on his quarter-section.] CHAPTER V. THE WALK HOME. You expect me to describe that walk. You have had enough of the Jack Meanses and the Squire Hawkinses, and the Pete Joneses, and the rest. You wish me to tell you now of this true-hearted girl and her lover; of how the silvery moonbeams came down in a shower--to use Whittier's favorite metaphor--through the maple boughs, flecking the frozen ground with light and shadow. You would have me tell of the evening star, not yet gone down, which shed its benediction on them. But I shall do no such thing. For the moon was not shining, neither did the stars give their light. The tall, black trunks of the maples swayed and shook in the wind, which moaned through their leafless boughs. Novelists always make lovers walk in the moonlight. But if love is not, as the cynics believe, all moonshine, it can at least make its own light. Moonlight is never so little needed or heeded, never so much of an impertinence, as in a love-scene. It was at the bottom of the first hollow beyond the school-house that Ralph overtook the timid girl walking swiftly through the dark. He did not ask permission to walk with her. Love does not go by words, and there are times when conventionality is impossible. There are people who understand one another at once. When one soul meets another, it is not by pass-word, nor by hailing sign, nor by mysterious grip that they recognize. The subtlest freemasonry in the world is this freemasonry of the spirit. Ralph and Hannah knew and trusted. Ralph had admired and wondered at the quiet drudge. But it was when, in the unaccustomed sunshine of praise, she spread her wings a little, that he loved her. He had seen her awake. You, Miss Amelia, wish me to repeat all their love-talk. I am afraid you'd find it dull. Love can pipe through any kind of a reed. Ralph talked love to Hannah when he spoke of the weather, of the crops, of the spelling-school. Weather, crops, and spelling-school--these were what his words would say if reported. But below all these commonplaces there vibrated something else. One can make love a great deal better when one doesn't speak of love. Words are so poor! Tones and modulations are better. It is an old story that Whitefield could make an audience weep by his way of pronouncing the word Mesopotamia. A lover can sound the whole gamut of his affection in saying Good-morning. The solemnest engagements ever made have been without the intervention of speech. And you, my Gradgrind friend, you think me sentimental. Two young fools they were, walking so slowly though the night was sharp, dallying under the trees, and dreaming of a heaven they could not have realized if all their wishes had been granted. Of course they were fools! Either they were fools to be so happy, or else some other people are fools not to be. After all, dear Gradgrind, let them be. There's no harm in it. They'll get trouble enough before morning. Let them enjoy the evening. I am not sure but these lovers whom we write down fools are the only wise people after all. Is it not wise to be happy? Let them alone. For the first time in three years, for the first time since she had crossed the threshold of "Old Jack Means" and come under the domination of Mrs. Old Jack Means, Hannah talked cheerfully, almost gayly. It was something to have a companion to talk to. It was something to be the victor even in a spelling-match, and to be applauded even by Flat Creek. And so, chatting earnestly about the most uninteresting themes, Ralph courteously helped Hannah over the fence, and they took the usual short-cut through the "blue-grass pasture." There came up a little shower, hardly more than a sprinkle, but then It was so nice to have a shower just as they reached the box-elder tree by the spring! It was so thoughtful in Ralph to suggest that the shade of a box-elder is dense, and that Hannah might take cold! And it was so easy for Hannah to yield to the suggestion! Just as though she had not milked the cows in the open lot in the worst storms of the last three years! And just as though the house were not within a stone's-throw! Doubtless it was not prudent to stop here. But let us deal gently with them. Who would not stay in an earthy paradise ten minutes longer, even though it did make purgatory the hotter afterward? And so Hannah stayed. "Tell me your circumstances," said Ralph, at last. "I am sure I can help you in something." "No, no! you cannot," and Hannah's face was clouded. "No one can help me. Only time and God. I must go, Mr. Hartsook." And they walked on to the front gate in silence and in some constraint. But still in happiness. As they came to the gate, Dr. Small pushed past them in his cool, deliberate way, and mounted his horse. Ralph bade Hannah good-night, having entirely forgotten the errand which had been his excuse to himself for coming out of his way. He hastened to his new home, the house of Mr. Pete Jones, the same who believed in the inseparableness of "lickin' and larnin'." "You're a purty gal, a'n't you? You're a purty gal, a'n't you? _You_ air! Yes, you _air_" and Mrs. Means seemed so impressed with Hannah's prettiness that she choked on it, and could get no further. "A purty gal! you! Yes! you air a mighty purty gal!" and the old woman's voice rose till it could have been heard half a mile. "To be a-santerin' along the big road after ten o'clock with the master! Who knows whether he's a fit man fer anybody to go with? Arter all I've been and gone and done fer you! That's the way you pay me! Disgrace me! Yes, I say disgrace me! You're a mean, deceitful thing. Stuck up bekase you spelt the master down. Ketch _me_ lettin' you got to spellin'-school to-morry night! Ketch ME! Yes, ketch ME, I say!" "Looky here, marm," said Bud, "it seems to me you're a-makin' a blamed furss about nothin'. Don't yell so's they'll hear you three or four mile. You'll have everybody 'tween here and Clifty waked up." For Mrs. Means had become so excited over the idea of being caught allowing Hannah to go to spelling-school that she had raised her last "Ketch me!" to a perfect whoop. "That's the way I'm treated," whimpered the old woman, who knew how to take the "injured innocence" dodge as well as anybody. "That's the way I'm treated. You allers take sides with that air hussy agin your own flesh and blood. You don't keer how much trouble I have. Not you. Not a dog-on'd bit. I may be disgraced by that air ongrateful critter, and you set right here in my own house and sass me about it. A purty fellow you air! An' me a-delvin' and a-drudgin' fer you all my born days. A purty son, a'n't you?" Bud did not say another word. He sat in the chimney-corner and whistled "Dandy Jim from Caroline." His diversion had produced the effect he sought: for while his tender-hearted mother poured her broadside into his iron-clad feelings, Hannah had slipped up the stairs to her garret bedroom, and when Mrs. Means turned from the callous Bud to finish her assault upon the sensitive girl, she could only gnash her teeth in disappointment. Stung by the insults to which she could not grow insensible, Hannah lay awake until the memory of that walk through the darkness came into her soul like a benediction. The harsh voice of the scold died out, and the gentle and courteous voice of Hartsook filled her soul. She recalled piece by piece the whole conversation--all the commonplace remarks about the weather; all the insignificant remarks about the crops; all the unimportant words about the spelling-school. Not for the sake of the remarks. Not for the sake of the weather. Not for the sake of the crops. Not for the sake of the spelling-school. But for the sake of the undertone. And then she traveled back over the three years of her bondage and forward over the three years to come, and fed her heart on the dim hope of rebuilding in some form the home that had been so happy. And she prayed, with more faith than ever before, for deliverance. For love brings faith. Somewhere on in the sleepless night she stood at the window. The moon was shining now, and there was the path through the pasture, and there was the fence, and there was the box-elder. She sat there a long time. Then she saw someone come over the fence and walk to the tree, and then on toward Pete Jones's. Who could it be? She thought she recognized the figure. But she was chilled and shivering, and she crept back again into bed, and dreamed not of the uncertain days to come, but of the blessed days that were past--of a father and a mother and a brother in a happy home. But somehow the school-master was there too. CHAPTER VI. A NIGHT AT PETE JONES'S. When Ralph got to Pete Jones's he found that sinister-looking individual in the act of kicking one of his many dogs out of the house. "Come in, stranger, come in. You'll find this 'ere house full of brats, but I guess you kin kick your way around among 'em. Take a cheer. Here, git out! go to thunder with you!" And with these mild imperatives he boxed one of his boys over in one direction and one of his girls over in the other. "I believe in trainin' up children to mind when they're spoke to," he said to Ralph apologetically. But it seemed to the teacher that he wanted them to mind just a little before they were spoken to. "P'raps you'd like a bed. Well, jest climb up the ladder on the outside of the house. Takes up a thunderin' sight of room to have a stairs inside, and we ha'n't got no room to spare. You'll find a bed in the furdest corner. My Pete's already got half of it, and you can take t'other half. Ef Pete goes to takin' his half in the middle, and tryin' to make you take yourn on both sides, jest kick him." In this comfortless bed "in the furdest corner," Ralph found sleep out of the question. Pete took three-fourths of the bed, and Hannah took all of his thoughts. So he lay, and looked out through the cracks in the "clapboards" (as they call rough shingles in the old West) at the stars. For the clouds had now broken away. And he lay thus recounting to himself, as a miser counts the pieces that compose his hoard, every step of that road from the time he had overtaken Hannah in the hollow to the fence. Then he imagined again the pleasure of helping her over, and then he retraced the ground to the box-elder tree at the spring, and repeated to himself the conversation until he came to the part in which she said that only time and God could help her. What did she mean? What was the hidden part of her life? What was the connection between her and Shocky? Hours wore on, and still the mind of Ralph Hartsook went back and traveled the same road, over the fence, past the box-elder, up to the inexplicable part of the conversation, and stood bewildered with the same puzzling questions about the bound girl's life. At last he got up, drew on his clothes, and sat down on the top of the ladder, looking down over the blue-grass pasture which lay on the border between the land of Jones and the land of Means. The earth was white with moonlight. He could not sleep. Why not walk? It might enable him to sleep. And once determined on walking, he did not hesitate a moment as to the direction in which he should walk. The blue-grass pasture (was it not like unto the garden of Eden?) lay right before him. That box-elder stood just in sight. To spring over the fence and take the path down the hill and over the brook was as quickly done as decided upon. To stand again under the box-elder, to climb again over the farther fence, and to walk down the road toward the school-house was so easy and so delightful that it was done without thought. For Ralph was an eager man--when he saw no wrong in anything that proposed itself, he was wont to follow his impulse without deliberation. And this keeping company with the stars, and the memory of a delightful walk, were so much better than the commonplace Flat Creek life that he threw himself into his night excursion with enthusiasm. At last he stood in the little hollow where he had joined Hannah. It was the very spot at which Shocky, too, had met him a few mornings before. He leaned against the fence and tried again to solve the puzzle of Hannah's troubles. For that she had troubles he did not doubt. Neither did he doubt that he could help her if he could discover what they were. But he had no clue. In the midst of This meditations he heard the thud of horses' hoofs coming down the road. Until that moment he had not felt his own loneliness. He shrank back into the fence-corner. The horsemen were galloping. There were three of them, and there was one figure that seemed familiar to Ralph. But he could not tell who it was. Neither could he remember having seen the horse, which was a sorrel with a white left forefoot and a white nose. The men noticed him and reined up a little. Why he should have been startled by the presence of these men he could not tell, but an indefinable dread seized him. They galloped on, and he stood still shivering with a nervous fear. The cold seemed to have got into his bones. He remembered that the region lying on Flat Creek and Clifty Creek had the reputation of being infested with thieves, who practiced horse-stealing and house-breaking. For ever since the day when Murrell's confederate bands were paralyzed by the death of their leader, there have still existed gangs of desperadoes in parts of Southern Indiana and Illinois, and in Iowa, Missouri, Kentucky, and the Southwest. It is out of these materials that border ruffianism has grown, and the nine members of the Reno band who were hanged two or three years ago by lynch law[17], were remains of the bad blood that came into the West in the days of Daniel Boone. Shall I not say that these bands of desperadoes still found among the "poor whitey, dirt-eater" class are the outcroppings of the bad blood sent from England in convict-ships? Ought an old country to sow the fertile soil of a colony with such noxious seed? Before Ralph was able to move, he heard the hoofs of another horse striking upon the hard ground in an easy pace. The rider was Dr. Small. He checked his horse in a cool way, and stood still a few seconds while he scrutinized Ralph. Then he rode on, keeping the same easy gait as before, Ralph had a superstitious horror of Henry Small. And, shuddering with cold, he crept like a thief over the fence, past the tree, through the pasture, back to Pete Jones's, never once thinking of the eyes that looked out of the window at Means's. Climbing the ladder, he got into bed, and shook as with the ague. He tried to reason himself out of the foolish terror that possessed him, but he could not. Half an hour later he heard a latch raised. Were the robbers breaking into the house below? He heard a soft tread upon the floor. Should he rise and give the alarm? Something restrained him. He reflected that a robber would be sure to stumble over some of the "brats." So he lay still and finally slumbered, only awakening when the place in which he slept was full of the smoke of frying grease from the room below. At breakfast Pete Jones scowled. He was evidently angry about something. He treated Ralph with a rudeness not to be overlooked, as if he intended to bring on a quarrel. Hartsook kept cool, and wished he could drive from his mind all memory of the past night. Why should men on horseback have any significance to him? He was trying to regard things in this way, and from a general desire to keep on good terms with his host he went to the stable to offer his services in helping to feed the stock. "Don't want no saft-handed help!" was all he got in return for his well-meant offer. But just as he turned to leave the stable he saw what made him tremble again. There was the same sorrel horse with a white left forefoot and a white nose. To shake off his nervousness, Ralph started to school before the time. But, plague upon plagues! Mirandy Means, who had seen him leave Pete Jones's, started just in time to join him where he came into the big road. Ralph was not in a good humor after his wakeful night, and to be thus dogged by Mirandy did not help the matter. So he found himself speaking crabbedly to the daughter of the leading trustee, in spite of himself. "Hanner's got a bad cold this mornin' from bein' out last night, and she can't come to spellin'-school to-night," began Mirandy, in her most simpering voice. Ralph had forgotten that there was to be another spelling-school. It seemed to him an age since the orthographical conflict of the past night. This remark of Mirandy's fell upon his ear like an echo from the distant past. He had lived a lifetime since, and was not sure that he was the same man who was spelling for dear life against Jim Phillips twelve hours before. But he was sorry to hear that Hannah had a cold. It seemed to him, in his depressed state, that he was to blame for it. In fact, it seemed to him that he was to blame for a good many things. He seemed to have been committing sins in spite of himself. Broken nerves and sleepless nights often result in a morbid conscience. And what business had he to wander over this very road at two o'clock in the morning, and to see three galloping horsemen, one of them on a horse with a white left forefoot and a white nose? What business had he watching Dr. Small as he went home from the bedside of a dying patient near daylight in the morning? And because he felt guilty he felt cross with Mirandy, and to her remark about Hannah he only replied that "Hannah was a smart girl." "Yes," said Mirandy, "Bud thinks so." "Does he?" said Ralph. "I should say so. What's him and her been a-courtin' fer for a year ef he didn't think she was smart? Marm don't like it; but ef Bud and her does, and they seem to, I don't see as it's marm's lookout." When one is wretched, there is a pleasure in being entirely wretched. Ralph felt that he must have committed some unknown crime, and that some Nemesis was following him. Was Hannah deceitful? At least, if she were not, he felt sure that he could supplant Bud. But what right had he to supplant Bud? "Did you hear the news?" cried Shocky, running out to meet him. "The Dutchman's house was robbed last night." Ralph thought of the three men on horseback, and to save his life he could not help associating Dr. Small with them. And then he remembered the sorrel horse with the left forefoot and muzzle white, and he recalled the sound he had heard as of the lifting of a latch. And it really seemed to him that in knowing what he did he was in some sense guilty of the robbery. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 17: Written in 1871.] CHAPTER VII. OMINOUS REMARKS OF MR. JONES. The school-master's mind was like ancient Gaul--divided into three parts. With one part he mechanically performed his school duties. With another he asked himself, What shall I do about the robbery? And with the third he debated about Bud and Hannah. For Bud was not present, and it was clear that he was angry, and there was a storm brewing. In fact, it seemed to Ralph that there was a storm brewing all round the sky. For Pete Jones was evidently angry at the thought of having been watched, and it was fair to suppose that Dr. Small was not in any better humor than usual. And so, between Bud's jealousy and revenge and the suspicion and resentment of the men engaged in the robbery at "the Dutchman's" (as the only German in the whole region was called), Ralph's excited nerves had cause for tremor. At one moment he would resolve to have Hannah at all costs. In the next his conscience would question the rightfulness of the conclusion. Then he would make up his mind to tell all he knew about the robbery. But if he told his suspicions about Small, nobody would believe him. And if he told about Pete Jones, he really could tell only enough to bring vengeance upon himself. And how could he explain his own walk through the pasture and down the road? What business had he being out of bed at two o'clock in the morning? The circumstantial evidence was quite as strong against him as against the man on the horse with the white left forefoot and the white nose. Suspicion might fasten on himself. And then what would be the effect on his prospects? On the people at Lewisburg? On Hannah? It is astonishing how much instruction and comfort there is in a bulldog. This slender school-master, who had been all his life repressing the animal and developing the finer nature, now found a need of just what the bulldog had. And so, with the thought of how his friend the dog would fight in a desperate strait, he determined to take hold of his difficulties as Bull took hold of the raccoon. Moral questions he postponed for careful decision. But for the present he set his teeth together in a desperate, bulldog fashion, and he set his feet down slowly, positively, bulldoggedly. After a wretched supper at Pete Jones's he found himself at the spelling-school, which, owing to the absence of Hannah, and the excitement about the burglary, was a dull affair. Half the evening was spent in talking in little knots. Pete Jones had taken the afflicted "Dutchman" under his own particular supervision. "I s'pose," said Pete, "that them air fellers what robbed your house must a come down from Jinkins Run. They're the blamedest set up there I ever see." "Ya-as," said Schroeder, "put how did Yinkins vellers know dat I sell te medder to te Shquire, hey? How tid Yinkins know anyting 'bout the Shquire's bayin' me dree huntert in te hard gash--hey?" "Some scoundrels down in these 'ere parts is a-layin' in with Jinkins Run, I'll bet a hoss," said Pete. Ralph wondered whether he'd bet the one with the white left forefoot and the white nose. "Now," said Pete, "ef I could find the feller that's a-helpin' them scoundrels rob us folks, I'd help stretch him to the neardest tree." "So vood I," said Schroeder. "I'd shtretch him dill he baid me my dree huntert tollars pack, so I vood." And Betsey Short, who had found the whole affair very funny, was transported with a fit of tittering at poor Schroeder's English. Ralph, fearing that his silence would excite suspicion, tried to talk. But he could not tell what he knew, and all that he said sounded so hollow and hypocritical that it made him feel guilty. And so he shut his mouth, and meditated profitably on the subject of bull dogs. And when later he overheard the garrulous Jones declare that he'd bet a hoss he could p'int out somebody as know'd a blamed sight more'n they keerd to tell, he made up his mind that if it came to p'inting out he should try to be even with Jones. CHAPTER VIII. THE STRUGGLE IN THE DARK It was a long, lonesome, fearful night that the school-master passed, lying with nerves on edge and eyes wide open in that comfortless bed in the "furdest corner" of the loft of Pete Jones's house, shivering with cold, while the light snow that was falling sifted in upon the ragged patch-work quilt that covered him. Nerves broken by sleeplessness imagine many things, and for the first hour Ralph felt sure that Pete would cut his throat before morning. And you, friend Callow, who have blunted your palate by swallowing the Cayenne pepper of the penny-dreadfuls, you wish me to make this night exciting by a hand-to-hand contest between Ralph and a robber. You would like it better if there were a trap-door. There's nothing so convenient as a trap-door, unless it be a subterranean passage. And you'd like something of that sort just here. It's so pleasant to have one's hair stand on end, you know, when one is safe from danger to one's self. But if you want each individual hair to bristle with such a "Struggle in the Dark," you can buy trap-doors and subterranean passages dirt cheap at the next news-stand. But it was, indeed, a real and terrible "Struggle in the Dark" that Ralph fought out at Pete Jones's. When he had vanquished his fears of personal violence by reminding himself that it would be folly for Jones to commit murder in his own house, the question of Bud and Hannah took the uppermost place in his thoughts. And as the image of Hannah spelling against the master came up to him, as the memory of the walk, the talk, the box-elder tree, and all the rest took possession of him, it seemed to Ralph that his very life depended upon his securing her love. He would shut his teeth like the jaws of a bulldog, and all Bud's muscles should not prevail over his resolution and his stratagems. It was easy to persuade himself that this was right. Hannah ought not to throw herself away on Bud Means. Men of some culture always play their conceit off against their consciences. To a man of literary habits it usually seems to be a great boon that he confers on a woman when he gives her his love. Reasoning thus, Ralph had fixed his resolution, and if the night had been shorter, or sleep possible, the color of his life might have been changed. But some time along in the tedious hours came the memory of his childhood, the words of his mother, the old Bible stories, the aspiration after nobility of spirit, the solemn resolutions to be true to his conscience. These angels of the memory came flocking back before the animal, the bull-doggedness, had "set," as workers in plaster say. He remembered the story of David and Nathan, and it seemed to him that he, with all his abilities and ambitions and prospects, was about to rob Bud of the one ewe-lamb, the only thing he had to rejoice in in his life. In getting Hannah, he would make himself unworthy of Hannah. And then there came to him a vision of the supreme value of a true character; how it was better than success, better than to be loved, better than heaven. And how near he had been to missing it! And how certain he was, when these thoughts should fade, to miss it! He was as one fighting for a great prize who feels his strength failing and is sure of defeat. This was the real, awful "Struggle in the Dark." A human soul fighting with heaven in sight, but certain of slipping inevitably into hell! It was the same old battle. The Image of God fought with the Image of the Devil. It was the same fight that Paul described so dramatically when he represented the Spirit as contending with the Flesh. Paul also called this dreadful something the Old Adam, and I suppose Darwin would call it the remains of the Wild Beast. But call it what you will, it is the battle that every well-endowed soul must fight at some point. And to Ralph it seemed that the final victory of the Evil, the Old Adam, the Flesh, the Wild Beast, the Devil, was certain. For, was not the pure, unconscious face of Hannah on the Devil's side? And so the battle had just as well be given up at once, for it must be lost in the end. But to Ralph, lying there in the still darkness, with his conscience as wide awake as if it were the Day of Doom, there seemed something so terrible in this overflow of the better nature which he knew to be inevitable as soon as the voice of conscience became blunted, that he looked about for help. He did not at first think of God; but there came into his thoughts the memory of a travel-worn Galilean peasant, hungry, sleepy, weary, tempted, tried, like other men, but having a strange, divine Victory in him by which everything evil was vanquished at his coming. He remembered how He had reached out a Hand to every helpless one, how He was the Helper of every weak one. And out of the depths of his soul he cried to the Helper, and found comfort. Not victory, but, what is better, strength. And so, without a thought of the niceties of theological distinctions, without dreaming that it was the beginning of a religious experience, he found what he needed, help. And the Helper gave His beloved sleep. CHAPTER IX. HAS GOD FORGOTTEN SHOCKY? "Pap wants to know ef you would spend to-morry and Sunday at our house?" said one of Squire Hawkins's girls, on the very next evening, which was Friday. The old Squire was thoughtful enough to remember that Ralph would not find it very pleasant "boarding out" all the time he was entitled to spend at Pete Jones's. For in view of the fact that Mr. Pete Jones sent seven children to the school, the "master" in Flat Creek district was bound to spend two weeks in that comfortable place, sleeping in a preoccupied bed, in the "furdest corner," with insufficient cover, under an insufficient roof, and eating floating islands of salt pork fished out of oceans of hot lard. Ralph was not slow to accept the relief offered by the hospitable justice of the peace, whose principal business seemed to be the adjustment of the pieces of which he was composed. And as Shocky traveled the same road, Ralph took advantage of the opportunity to talk with him. The master could not dismiss Hannah wholly from his mind. He would at least read the mystery of her life, if Shocky could be prevailed on to furnish the clue. "Poor old tree!" said Shocky, pointing to a crooked and gnarled elm standing by itself in the middle of a field. For when the elm, naturally the most graceful of trees, once gets a "bad set," it can grow to be the most deformed. This solitary tree had not a single straight limb. "Why do you say 'poor old tree'?" asked Ralph. "'Cause it's lonesome. All its old friends is dead and chopped down, and there's their stumps a-standin' jes like grave-stones. It _must_ be lonesome. Some folks says it don't feel, but I think it does. Everything seems to think and feel. See it nodding its head to them other trees in the woods? and a-wantin' to shake hands! But it can't move. I think that tree must a growed in the night." "Why, Shocky?" "'Cause it's so crooked," and Shocky laughed at his own conceit; "must a growed when they was no light so as it could see how to grow." And then they walked on in silence a minute. Presently Shocky began looking up into Ralph's eyes to get a smile. "I guess that tree feels just like me. Don't you?" "Why, how do you feel?" "Kind o' bad and lonesome, and like as if I wanted to die, you know. Felt that way ever sence they put my father into the graveyard, and sent my mother to the poor-house and Hanner to ole Miss Means's. What kind of a place is a poor-house? Is it a poorer place than Means's? I wish I was dead and one of them clouds was a-carryin' me and Hanner and mother up to where father's gone, you know! I wonder if God forgets all about poor folks when their father dies and their mother gits into the poor-house? Do you think He does? Seems so to me. Maybe God lost track of my father when he come away from England and crossed over the sea. Don't nobody on Flat Creek keer fer God, and I guess God don't keer fer Flat Creek. But I would, though, ef he'd git my mother out of the poor-house and git Hanner away from Means's, and let me kiss my mother every night, you know, and sleep on my Hanner's arm, jes like I used to afore father died, you see." Ralph wanted to speak, but he couldn't. And so Shocky, with his eyes looking straight ahead, and as if forgetting Ralph's presence, told over the thoughts that he had often talked over to the fence-rails and the trees. "It was real good in Mr. Pearson to take me, wasn't it? Else I'd a been bound out tell I was twenty-one, maybe, to some mean man like Ole Means. And I a'n't but seven. And it would take me fourteen years to git twenty-one, and I never could live with my mother again after Hanner gets done her time. 'Cause, you see, Hanner'll be through in three more year, and I'll be ten and able to work, and we'll git a little place about as big as Granny Sanders's, and--" Ralph did not hear another word of what Shocky said that afternoon. For there, right before them, was Granny Sanders's log-cabin, with its row of lofty sunflower stalks, now dead and dry, in front, with its rain-water barrel by the side of the low door, and its ash-barrel by the fence. In this cabin lived alone the old and shriveled hag whose hideousness gave her a reputation for almost supernatural knowledge. She was at once doctress and newspaper. She collected and disseminated medicinal herbs and personal gossip. She was in every regard indispensable to the intellectual life of the neighborhood. In the matter of her medical skill we cannot express an opinion, for her "yarbs" are not to be found in the pharmacopoeia of science. What took Ralph's breath was to find Dr. Small's fine, faultless horse standing at the door. What did Henry Small want to visit this old quack for? CHAPTER X. THE DEVIL OF SILENCE. Ralph had reason to fear Small, who was a native of the same village of Lewisburg, and some five years the elder. Some facts in the doctor's life had come into Ralph's possession in such a way as to confirm life-long suspicion without giving him power to expose Small, who was firmly intrenched in the good graces of the people of the county-seat village of Lewisburg, where he had grown up, and of the little cross-roads village of Clifty, where his "shingle" now hung. Small was no ordinary villain. He was a genius. Your ordinary hypocrite talks cant. Small talked nothing. He was the coolest, the steadiest, the most silent, the most promising boy ever born in Lewisburg. He made no pretensions. He set up no claims. He uttered no professions. He went right on and lived a life above reproach. Your vulgar hypocrite makes long prayers in prayer-meeting. Small did nothing of the sort. He sat still in prayer-meeting, and listened to the elders as a modest young man should. Your commonplace hypocrite boasts. Small never alluded to himself, and thus a consummate egotist got credit for modesty. It is but an indifferent trick for a hypocrite to make temperance speeches. Dr. Small did not even belong to a temperance society. But he could never be persuaded to drink even so much as a cup of tea. There was something sublime in the quiet voice with which he would say, "Cold water, if you please," to a lady tempting him with smoking coffee on a cold morning. There was no exultation, no sense of merit in the act. Everything was done in a modest and matter-of-course way beautiful to behold. And his face was a neutral tint. Neither face nor voice expressed anything. Only a keen reader of character might have asked whether all there was in that eye could live contented with this cool, austere, self-contained life; whether there would not be somewhere a volcanic eruption. But if there was any sea of molten lava beneath, the world did not discover it. Wild boys were sick of having Small held up to them as the most immaculate of men[18]. Ralph had failed to get two schools for which he had applied, and had attributed both failures to certain shrugs of Dr. Small. And now, when he found Small at the house of Granny Sanders, the center of intelligence as well as of ignorance for the neighborhood, he trembled. Not that Small would say anything. He never said anything. He damned people by a silence worse than words. Granny Sanders was not a little flattered by the visit. "Why, doctor, howdy, howdy! Come in, take a cheer. I am glad to see you. I 'lowed you'd come. Old Dr. Flounder used to say he larnt lots o' things of me. But most of the doctors sence hez been kinder stuck up, you know. But I know'd you fer a man of intelligence." Meantime, Small, by his grave silence and attention, had almost smothered the old hag with flattery. "Many's the case I've cured with yarbs and things. Nigh upon twenty year ago they was a man lived over on Wild Cat Run as had a breakin'-out on his side. 'Twas the left side, jes below the waist. Doctor couldn't do nothin'. 'Twas Doctor Peacham. He never would have nothin' to do with 'ole woman's cures.' Well, the man was goin' to die. Everybody seed that. And they come a-drivin' away over here all the way from the Wild Cat. Think of that air! I never was so flustered. But as soon as I laid eyes on that air man, I says, says I, that air man, says I, has got the shingles, says I. I know'd the minute I seed it. And if they'd gone clean around, nothing could a saved him. I says, says I, git me a black cat. So I jist killed a black cat, and let the blood run all over the swellin'. I tell you, doctor, they's nothin' like it. That man was well in a month." [Illustration: MRS. MEANS] "Did you use the blood warm?" asked Small, with a solemnity most edifying. These were almost the only words he had uttered since he entered the cabin. "Laws, yes; I jest let it run right out of the cat's tail onto the breakin'-out. And fer airesipelus, I don't know nothin' so good as the blood of a black hen." "How old?" asked the doctor. "There you showed yer science, doctor! They's no power in a pullet. The older the black hen the better. And you know the cure fer rheumatiz?" And here the old woman got down a bottle of grease. "That's ile from a black dog. Ef it's rendered right, it'll knock the hind sights off of any rheumatiz you ever see. But it must be rendered in the dark of the moon. Else a black dog's ile a'n't worth no more nor a white one's." And all this time Small was smelling of the uncorked bottle, taking a little on his finger and feeling of it, and thus feeling his way to the heart--drier than her herbs--of the old witch. And then he went round the cabin gravely, lifting each separate bunch of dried yarbs from its nail, smelling of it, and then, by making an interrogation-point of his silent face, he managed to get a lecture from her on each article in her _materia medica_> with the most marvelous stories illustrative of their virtues. When the Granny had got her fill of his silent flattery, he was ready to carry forward his main purpose. There was something weird about this silent man's ability to turn the conversation as he chose to have it go. Sitting by the Granny's tea-table, nibbling corn-bread while he drank his glass of water, having declined even her sassafras, he ceased to stimulate her medical talk and opened the vein of gossip. Once started, Granny Sanders was sure to allude to the robbery. And once on the robbery the doctor's course was clear. "I 'low somebody not fur away is in this 'ere business!" Not by a word, nor even by a nod, but by some motion of the eyelids, perhaps, Small indicated that he agreed with her. "Who d'ye s'pose 'tis?" But Dr. Small was not in the habit of supposing. He moved his head in a quiet way, just the least perceptible bit, but so that the old creature understood that he could give light if he wanted to. "I dunno anybody that's been 'bout here long as could be suspected." Another motion of the eyelids indicated Small's agreement with this remark. "They a'n't nobody come in here lately 'ceppin' the master." Small looked vacantly at the wall. "But I low he's allers bore a tip-top character." The doctor was too busy looking at his corn-bread to answer this remark even by a look. "But I think these oversmart young men'll bear looking arter, _I_ do." Dr. Small raised his eyes and let them _shine_ an assent. That was all. "Shouldn't wonder ef our master was overly fond of gals." Doctor looks down at his plate. "Had plenty of sweethearts afore he walked home with Hanner Thomson t'other night, I'll bet." Did Dr. Small shrug his shoulder? Granny thought she detected a faint motion of the sort, but she could not be sure. "And I think as how that a feller what trifles with gals' hearts and then runs off ten miles, maybe a'n't no better'n he had orter be. That's what I says, says I." To this general remark Dr. Small assented in his invisible--shall I say _intangible_?--way. "I allers think, maybe, that some folks has found it best to leave home and go away. You can't never tell. But when people is a-bein' robbed it's well to lookout. Hey?" "I think so," said Small quietly, and, having taken his hat and bowed a solemn and respectful adieu, he departed. He had not spoken twenty words, but he had satisfied the news-monger of Flat Creek that Ralph was a bad character at home and worthy of suspicion of burglary. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 18: The original from which this character was drawn is here described accurately. The author now knows that such people are not to be put into books. They are not realistic enough.] CHAPTER XI MISS MARTHA HAWKINS. "It's very good for the health to dig in the elements. I was quite emaciated last year at the East, and the doctor told me to dig in the elements. I got me a florial hoe and dug, and it's been most excellent for me[19]." Time, the Saturday following the Friday on which Ralph kept Shocky company as far as the "forks" near Granny Sanders's house. Scene, the Squire's garden. Ralph helping that worthy magistrate perform sundry little jobs such as a warm winter day suggests to the farmer. Miss Martha Hawkins, the Squire's niece, and his housekeeper in his present bereaved condition, leaning over the palings--pickets she called them--of the garden fence, talking to the master. Miss Hawkins was recently from Massachusetts. How many people there are in the most cultivated communities whose education is partial! "It's very common for school-master to dig in the elements at the East," proceeded Miss Martha. Like many other people born in the celestial empires (of which there are three--China, Virginia, Massachusetts), Miss Martha was not averse to reminding outside barbarians of her good fortune in this regard. It did her good to speak of the East. Now Ralph was amused with Miss Martha. She really had a good deal of intelligence despite her affectation, and conversation with her was both interesting and diverting. It helped him to forget Hannah, and Bud, and the robbery, and all the rest, and she was so delighted to find somebody to make an impression on that she had come out to talk while Ralph was at work. But just at this moment the school-master was not so much interested in her interesting remarks, nor so much amused by her amusing remarks, as he should have been. He saw a man coming down the road riding one horse and leading another, and he recognized the horses at a distance. It must be Bud who was riding Means's bay mare and leading Bud's roan colt. Bud had been to mill, and as the man who owned the horse-mill kept but one old blind horse himself, it was necessary that Bud should take two. It required three horses to run the mill; the old blind one could have ground the grist, but the two others had to overcome the friction of the clumsy machine. But it was not about the horse-mill that Ralph was thinking nor about the two horses. Since that Wednesday evening on which he escorted Hannah home from the spelling-school he had not seen Bud Means. If he had any lingering doubts of the truth of what Mirandy had said, they had been dissipated by the absence of Bud from school. "When I was to Bosting--" Miss Martha was _to_ Boston only once in her life, but as her visit to that sacred city was the most important occurrence of her life, she did not hesitate to air her reminiscences of it frequently. "When I was to Bosting," she was just saying, when, following the indication of Ralph's eyes, she saw Bud coming up the hill near Squire Hawkins's house. Bud looked red and sulky, and to Ralph's and Miss Martha Hawkins's polite recognitions he returned only a surly nod. They both saw that he was angry. Ralph was able to guess the meaning of his wrath. Toward evening Ralph strolled through the Squire's cornfield toward the woods. The memory of the walk with Hannah was heavy upon the heart of the young master, and there was comfort in the very miserableness of the cornstalks with their disheveled blades hanging like tattered banners and rattling discordantly in the rising wind. Wandering without purpose, Ralph followed the rows of stalks first one way and then the other in a zigzag line, turning a right angle every minute or two. At last he came out in a woods mostly of beech, and he pleased his melancholy fancy by kicking the dry and silky leaves before him in billows, while the soughing of the wind through the long, vibrant boughs and slender twigs of the beech forest seemed to put the world into the wailing minor key of his own despair. What a fascination there is in a path come upon suddenly without a knowledge of its termination! Here was one running in easy, irregular curves through the wood, now turning gently to the right in order to avoid a stump, now swaying suddenly to the left to gain an easier descent at a steep place, and now turning wantonly to the one side or the other, as if from very caprice in the man who by idle steps unconsciously marked the line of the foot-path at first. Ralph could not resist the impulse--who could?--to follow the path and find out its destination, and following it he came presently into a lonesome hollow, where a brook gurgled among the heaps of bare limestone rocks that filled its bed. Following the path still, he came upon a queer little cabin built of round logs, in the midst of a small garden-patch inclosed by a brush fence. The stick chimney, daubed with clay and topped with a barrel open at both ends, made this a typical cabin. [Illustration: CAPTAIN PEARSON] It flashed upon Ralph that this place must be Rocky Hollow, and that this was the house of old John Pearson, the one-legged basket-maker, and his rheumatic wife--the house that hospitably sheltered Shocky. Following his impulse, he knocked and was admitted, and was not a little surprised to find Miss Martha Hawkins there before him. "You here, Miss Hawkins?" he said when he had returned Shocky's greeting and shaken hands with the old couple. "Bless you, yes," said the old lady. "That blessed gyirl"--the old lady called her a girl by a sort of figure of speech perhaps--"that blessed gyirl's the kindest creetur you ever saw--comes here every day, most, to cheer a body up with somethin' or nuther." Miss Martha blushed, and said "she came because Rocky Hollow looked so much like a place she used to know at the East. Mr. and Mrs. Pearson were the kindest people. They reminded her of people she knew at the East. When she was to Bosting--" Here the old basket-maker lifted his head from his work, and said: "Pshaw! that talk about kyindness" (he was a Kentuckian and said _kyindness_) "is all humbug. I wonder so smart a woman as you don't know better. You come nearder to bein kyind than anybody I know; but, laws a me! we're all selfish akordin' to my tell." "You wasn't selfish when you set up with my father most every night for two weeks," said Shocky as he handed the old man a splint. "Yes, I was, too!" This in a tone that made Ralph tremble. "Your father was a miserable Britisher. I'd fit red-coats, in the war of eighteen-twelve, and lost my leg by one of 'em stickin' his dog-on'd bagonet right through it, that night at Lundy's Lane; but my messmate killed him though which is a satisfaction to think on. And I didn't like your father 'cause he was a Britisher. But ef he'd a died right here in this free country, 'though nobody to give him a drink of water, blamed ef I wouldn't a been ashamed to set on the platform at a Fourth of July barbecue, and to hold up my wooden leg fer to make the boys cheer! That was the selfishest thing I ever done. We're all selfish akordin' to my tell." "You wasn't selfish when you took me that night, you know," and Shocky's face beamed with gratitude. "Yes, I war, too, you little sass-box! What did I take you fer? Hey? Bekase I didn't like Pete Jones nor Bill Jones. They're thieves, dog-on 'em!" Ralph shivered a little. The horse with the white forefoot and white nose galloped before his eyes again. "They're a set of thieves. That's what they air." "Please, Mr. Pearson, be careful. You'll get into trouble, you know, by talking that way," said Miss Hawkins. "You're just like a man that I knew at the East." "Why, do you think an old soldier like me, hobbling on a wooden leg, is afraid of them thieves? Didn't I face the Britishers? Didn't I come home late last Wednesday night? I rather guess I must a took a little too much at Welch's grocery, and laid down in the middle of the street to rest. The boys thought 'twas funny to crate[20] me. I woke up kind o' cold, 'bout one in the mornin.' 'Bout two o'clock I come up Means's hill, and didn't I see Pete Jones, and them others that robbed the Dutchman, and somebody, I dunno who, a-crossin' the blue-grass paster _towards_ Jones's?" (Ralph shivered.) "Don't shake your finger at me, old woman. Tongue is all I've got to fight with now; but I'll fight them thieves tell the sea goes dry, I will. Shocky, gim me a splint." "But you wasn't selfish when you tuck me. Shocky stuck to his point most positively. "Yes, I was, you little tow-headed fool! I didn't take you kase I was good, not a bit of it. I hated Bill Jones what keeps the poor-house, and I knowed him and Pete would get you bound to some of their click, and I didn't want no more thieves raised; so when your mother hobbled, with you a-leadin' her, poor blind thing! all the way over here on that winter night, and said, 'Mr. Pearson, you're all the friend I've got, and I want you to save my boy,' why, you see I was selfish as ever I could be in takin' of you. Your mother's cryin' sot me a-cryin' too. We're all selfish in everything, akordin' to my tell. Blamed ef we ha'n't, Miss Hawkins, only sometimes I'd think you was real benev'lent ef I didn't know we war all selfish." FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 19: Absurd as this speech seems, it is a literal transcript of words spoken in the author's presence by a woman who, like Miss Hawkins, was born in Massachusetts.] [Footnote 20: When the first edition of this book appeared, the critic who analyzed the dialect in _The Nation_ confessed that he did not know what to "crate" meant. It was a custom in the days of early Indiana barbarism for the youngsters of a village, on spying a sleeping drunkard, to hunt up a "queensware crate"--one of the cages of round withes in which crockery was shipped. This was turned upside down over the inebriate, and loaded with logs or any other heavy articles that would make escape difficult when the poor wretch should come to himself. It was a sort of rude punishment for inebriety, and it afforded a frog-killing delight to those who executed justice.] CHAPTER XII. THE HARDSHELL PREACHER. "They's preachin' down to Bethel Meetin'-house to-day," said the Squire at breakfast. Twenty years In the West could not cure Squire Hawkins of saying "to" for "at." "I rather guess as how the old man Bosaw will give pertickeler fits to our folks to-day." For Squire Hawkins, having been expelled from the "Hardshell" church of which Mr. Bosaw was pastor, for the grave offense of joining a temperance society, had become a member of the "Reformers," the very respectable people who now call themselves "Disciples," but whom the profane will persist in calling "Campbellites." They had a church in the village of Clifty, three miles away. I know that explanations are always abominable to story readers, as they are to story writers, but as so many of my readers have never had the inestimable privilege of sitting under the gospel as it is ministered in enlightened neighborhoods like Flat Creek, I find myself under the necessity--need-cessity the Rev. Mr. Bosaw would call it--of rising to explain. Some people think the "Hardshells" a myth, and some sensitive Baptist people at the East resent all allusion to them. But the "Hardshell Baptists," or, as they are otherwise called, the "Whisky Baptists," and the "Forty-gallon Baptists," exist in all the old Western and South-western States. They call themselves "Anti-means Baptists" from their Antinomian tenets. Their confession of faith is a caricature of Calvinism, and is expressed by their preachers about as follows: "Ef you're elected, you'll be saved; ef you a'n't, you'll be damned. God'll take keer of his elect. It's a sin to run Sunday-schools, or temp'rince s'cieties, or to send missionaries. You let God's business alone. What is to be will be, and you can't hender it." This writer has attended a Sunday-school, the superintendent of which was solemnly arraigned and expelled from the Hardshell Church for "meddling with God's business" by holding a Sunday-school. Of course the Hardshells are prodigiously illiterate, and often vicious. Some of their preachers are notorious drunkards. They sing their sermons out sometimes for three hours at a stretch[21]. Ralph found that he was to ride the "clay-bank mare," the only one of the horses that would "carry double," and that consequently he would have to take Miss Hawkins behind him. If it had been Hannah instead, Ralph might not have objected to this "young Lochinvar" mode of riding with a lady on "the croup," but Martha Hawkins was another affair. He had only this consolation; his keeping the company of Miss Hawkins might serve to disarm the resentment of Bud. At all events, he had no choice. What designs the Squire had in this arrangement he could not tell; but the clay-bank mare carried him to meeting on that December morning, with Martha Hawkins behind. And as Miss Hawkins was not used to this mode of locomotion, she was in a state of delightful fright every time the horse sank to the knees in the soft, yellow Flat Creek clay. "We don't go to church so at the East," she said. "The mud isn't so deep at the East. When I was to Bosting--" but Ralph never heard what happened when she was to Bosting, for just as she said Bosting the mare put her foot into a deep hole molded by the foot of the Squire's horse, and already full of muddy water. As the mare's foot went twelve inches down into this track, the muddy water spurted higher than Miss Hawkins's head, and mottled her dress with golden spots of clay. She gave a little shriek, and declared that she had never "seen it so at the East." The journey seemed a little long to Ralph, who found that the subjects upon which he and Miss Hawkins could converse were few; but Miss Martha was determined to keep things going, and once, when the conversation had died out entirely, she made a desperate effort to renew it by remarking, as they met a man on horseback, "That horse switches his tail just as they do at the East. When I was to Bosting I saw horses switch their tails just that way." What surprised Ralph was to see that Flat Creek went to meeting. Everybody was there--the Meanses, the Joneses, the Bantas, and all the rest. Everybody on Flat Creek seemed to be there, except the old wooden-legged basket-maker. His family was represented by Shocky, who had come, doubtless, to get a glimpse of Hannah, not to hear Mr. Bosaw preach. In fact, few were thinking of the religious service. They went to church as a common resort to hear the news, and to find out what was the current sensation. On this particular morning there seemed to be some unusual excitement. Ralph perceived it as he rode up. An excited crowd, even though it be at a church-door on Sunday morning, can not conceal its agitation. Ralph deposited Miss Hawkins on the stile, and then got down himself, and paid her the closest attention to the door. This attention was for Bud's benefit. But Bud only stood with his hands in his pockets, scowling worse than ever. Ralph did not go in at the door. It was not the Flat Creek custom. The men gossiped outside, while the women chatted within. Whatever may have been the cause of the excitement, Ralph could not get at it. When he entered a little knot of people they became embarrassed, the group dissolved, and its component parts joined other companies. What had the current of conversation to do with him? He overheard Pete Jones saying that the blamed old wooden leg was in it anyhow. He'd been seen goin' home at two in the mornin'. And he could name somebody else ef he choosed. But it was best to clean out one at a time. And just then there was a murmur: "Meetin's took up." And the masculine element filled the empty half of the "hewed-log" church. When Ralph saw Hannah looking utterly dejected, his heart smote him, and the great struggle set in again. Had it not been for the thought of the other battle, and the comforting presence of the Helper, I fear Bud's interests would have fared badly. But Ralph, with the spirit of a martyr, resolved to wait until he knew what the result of Bud's suit should be, and whether, indeed, the young Goliath had prior claims, as he evidently thought he had. He turned hopefully to the sermon, determined to pick up any crumbs of comfort that might fall from Mr. Bosaw's meager table. In reporting a single specimen passage of Mr. Bosaw's sermon, I shall not take the liberty which Thucydides and other ancient historians did, of making the sermon and putting it into the hero's mouth, but shall give that which can be vouched for. "You see, my respective hearers," he began--but alas! I can never picture to you the rich red nose, the see sawing gestures, the nasal resonance, the sniffle, the melancholy minor key, and all that. "My respective hearers-ah, you see-ah as how-ah as my tex'-ah says that the ox-ah knoweth his owner-ah, and-ah the ass-ah his master's crib-ah. A-h-h! Now, my respective hearers-ah, they're a mighty sight of resemblance-ah atwext men-ah and oxen-ah" [Ralph could not help reflecting that there was a mighty sight of resemblance between some men and asses. But the preacher did not see this analogy. It lay too close to him], "bekase-ah, you see, men-ah is mighty like oxen-ah. Fer they's a tremengious defference-ah atwixt defferent oxen-ah, jest as thar is atwext defferent men-ah; fer the ox knoweth-ah his owner-ah, and the ass-ah, his master's crib-ah. Now, my respective hearers-ah" [the preacher's voice here grew mellow, and the succeeding sentences were in the most pathetic and lugubrious tones], "you all know-ah that your humble speaker-ah has got-ah jest the best yoke of steers-ah in this township-ah." [Here Betsey Short shook the floor with a suppressed titter.] "They a'n't no sech steers as them air two of mine-ah in this whole kedentry-ah. Them crack oxen over at Clifty-ah ha'n't a patchin' to mine-ah. Fer the ox knoweth his owner-ah and the ass-ah his master's crib-ah. "Now, my respective hearers-ah, they's a right smart sight of defference-ah atwext them air two oxen-ah, jest like they is atwext defferent men-ah. Fer-ah" [here the speaker grew earnest, and sawed the air, from this to the close, in a most frightful way], "fer-ah, you see-ah, when I go out-ah in the mornin'-ah to yoke-ah up-ah them air steers-ah, and I says-ah, 'Wo, Berry-ah! _Wo, Berry-ah!_ WO, BERRY-AH', why Berry-ah jest stands stock still-ah and don't hardly breathe-ah while I put on the yoke-ah, and put in the bow-ah, and put in the key-ah, fer, my brethering-ah and sistering-ah, the ox knoweth his owner-ah, and the ass-ah his master's crib-ah. Hal-le-lu-ger-ah! "But-ah, my hearers-ah, but-ah when I stand at t'other eend of the yoke-ah, and say, 'Come, Buck-ah! _Come, Buck-ah!_ COME, BUCK-AH! COME, BUCK-AH!' why what do you think-ah? Buck-ah, that ornery ole Buck-ah, 'stid of comin' right along-ah and puttin' his neck under-ah, acts jest like some men-ah what is fools-ah. Buck-ah jest kinder sorter stands off-ah, and kinder sorter puts his head down-ah this 'ere way-ah, and kinder looks mad-ah, and says, Boo-_oo_-OO-OO-ah!" Alas! Hartsook found no spiritual edification there, and he was in no mood to be amused. And so, while the sermon drew on through two dreary hours, he forgot the preacher in noticing a bright green lizard which, having taken up its winter quarters behind the tin candlestick that hung just back of the preacher's head, had been deceived by the genial warmth coming from the great box-stove, and now ran out two or three feet from his shelter, looking down upon the red-nosed preacher in a most confidential and amusing manner. Sometimes he would retreat behind the candlestick, which was not twelve inches from the preacher's head, and then rush out again. At each reappearance Betsey Short would stuff her handkerchief into her mouth and shake in a most distressing way. Shocky wondered what the lizard was winking at the preacher about. And Miss Martha thought that it reminded her of a lizard that she see at the East, the time she was to Bosting, in a jar of alcohol in the Natural History Rooms. The Squire was not disappointed in his anticipation that Mr. Bosaw would attack his denomination with some fury. In fact, the old preacher outdid himself in his violent indignation at "these people that follow Campbell-ah, that thinks-ah that obejience-ah will save 'em-ah and that belongs-ah to temp'rince societies-ah and Sunday-schools-ah, and them air things-ah, that's not ortherized in the Bible-ah, but comes of the devil-ah, and takes folks as belongs to 'em to hell-ah." As they came out the door Ralph rallied enough to remark: "He did attack your people, Squire." "Oh, yes," said the Squire. "Didn't you see the Sarpent inspirin' him?" But the long, long hours were ended and Ralph got on the clay-bank mare and rode up alongside the stile whence Miss Martha mounted. And as he went away with a heavy heart, he overheard Pete Jones call out to somebody: "We'll tend to his case & Christmas." Christmas was two days off. And Miss Martha remarked with much trepidation that poor Pearson would have to leave. She'd always been afraid that would be the end of it. It reminded her of something she heard at the East, the time she was down to Bosting. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 21: Even the Anti-means Baptists have suffered from the dire spirit of the age. They are to-day a very respectable body of people calling themselves "Primitive Baptists." Perhaps the description in the text never applied to the whole denomination, but only to the Hardshells of certain localities. Some of these intensely conservative churches, I have reason to believe, were always composed of reputable people. But what is said above is not in the least exaggerated as a description of many of the churches in Indiana and Illinois. Their opposition to the temperance reformation was both theoretical and practical. A rather able minister of the denomination whom I knew as a boy used to lie in besotted drunkenness by the roadside. I am sorry to confess that he once represented the county in the State legislature. The piece of a sermon given in this chapter was heard near Cairo, Illinois, in the days before the war. Most of the preachers were illiterate farmers. I have heard one of them hold forth two hours at a stretch. But even in that day there were men among the Hardshells whose ability and character commanded respect. This was true, especially in Kentucky, where able men like the two Dudleys held to the Antinomian wing of their denomination. But the Hardshells are perceptibly less hard than they were. You may march at the rear of the column among Hunkers and Hardshells if you will, but you are obliged to march. Those who will not go voluntarily, the time-spirit, walking behind, prods onward with a goad.] CHAPTER XIII. A STRUGGLE FOR THE MASTERY The school had closed on Monday evening as usual. The boys had been talking in knots all day. Nothing but the bulldog in the slender, resolute young master had kept down the rising storm. A teacher who has lost moral support at home, can not long govern a school. Ralph had effectually lost his popularity in the district, and the worst of it was that he could not divine from just what quarter the ill wind came, except that he felt sure of Small's agency in it somewhere. Even Hannah had slighted him, when he called at Means's on Monday morning to draw the pittance of pay that was due him. He had expected a petition for a holiday on Christmas day. Such holidays are deducted from the teacher's time, and it is customary for the boys to "turn out" the teacher who refuses to grant them, by barring him out of the school-house on Christmas and New Year's morning. Ralph had intended to grant a holiday if it should be asked, but it was not asked. Hank Banta was the ringleader in the disaffection, and he had managed to draw the surly Bud, who was present this morning, into it. It is but fair to say that Bud was in favor of making a request before resorting to extreme measures, but he was overruled. He gave it as his solemn opinion that the master was mighty peart, and they would be beat anyhow some way, but he would lick the master fer two cents ef he warn't so slim that he'd feel like he was fighting a baby. And all that day things looked black. Ralph's countenance was cold and hard as stone, and Shocky trembled where he sat. Betsey Short tittered rather more than usual. A riot or a murder would have seemed amusing to her. School was dismissed, and Ralph, instead of returning to the Squire's, set out for the village of Clifty, a few miles away. No one knew what he went for, and some suggested that he had "sloped." But Bud said "he warn't that air kind. He was one of them air sort as died in their tracks, was Mr. Hartsook. They'd find him on the ground nex' morning, and he lowed the master war made of that air sort of stuff as would burn the dog-on'd ole school-house to ashes, or blow it into splinters, but what he'd beat. Howsumdever he'd said he was a-goin' to help, and help he would; but all the sinno in Golier wouldn't be no account again the cute they was in the head of the master." But Bud, discouraged as he was with the fear of Ralph's "cute," went like a martyr to the stake and took his place with the rest in the school-house at nine o'clock at night. It may have been Ralph's intention to preoccupy the school-house, for at ten o'clock Hank Banta was set shaking from head to foot at seeing a face that looked like the master's at the window. He waked up Bud and told him about it. "Well, what are you a-tremblin' about, you coward?" growled Bud. "He won't shoot you; but he'll beat you at this game, I'll bet a hoss, and me, too, and make us both as 'shamed of ourselves as dogs with tin-kittles to their tails. You don't know the master, though he did duck you. But he'll larn you a good lesson this time, and me too, like as not." And Bud soon snored again, but Hank shook with fear every time he looked at the blackness outside the windows. He was sure he heard foot-falls. He would have given anything to have been at home. When morning came, the pupils began to gather early. A few boys who were likely to prove of service in the coming siege were admitted through the window, and then everything was made fast, and a "snack" was eaten. "How do you 'low he'll get in?" said Hank, trying to hide his fear. "How do I 'low?" said Bud. "I don't 'low nothin' about it. You might as well ax me where I 'low the nex' shootin' star is a-goin' to drap. Mr. Hartsook's mighty onsartin. But he'll git in, though, and tan your hide fer you, you see ef he don't. _Ef_ he don't blow up the school-house with gunpowder!" This last was thrown in by way of alleviating the fears of the cowardly Hank, for whom Bud had a great contempt. The time for school had almost come. The boys inside were demoralized by waiting. They began to hope that the master had "sloped." They dreaded to see him coming. "I don't believe he'll come," said Hank, with a cold shiver. "It's past school-time." "Yes, he will come, too," said Bud. "And he 'lows to come in here mighty quick. I don't know how. But he'll be a-standin' at that air desk when it's nine o'clock. I'll bet a thousand dollars on that. _Ef_ he don't take it into his head to blow us up!" Hank was now white. Some of the parents came along, accidentally of course, and stopped to see the fun, sure that Bud would thrash the master if he tried to break in. Small, on the way to see a patient perhaps, reined up in front of the door. Still no Ralph. It was just five minutes before nine. A rumor now gained currency that he had been seen going to Clifty the evening before, and that he had not come back, though in fact Ralph had come back, and had slept at Squire Hawkins's. "There's the master," cried Betsey Short, who stood out in the road shivering and giggling alternately. For Ralph at that moment emerged from the sugar-camp by the school-house, carrying a board. "Ho! ho!" laughed Hank, "he thinks he'll smoke us out. I guess he'll find us ready." The boys had let the fire burn down, and there was now nothing but hot hickory coals on the hearth. "I tell you he'll come in. He didn't go to Clifty fer nothing" said Bud, who sat still on one of the benches which leaned against the door. "I don't know how, but they's lots of ways of killing a cat besides chokin' her with butter. He'll come in--_ef_ he don't blow us all sky-high!" Ralph's voice was now heard, demanding that the door be opened. "Let's open her," said Hank, turning livid with fear at the firm, confident tone of the master. Bud straightened himself up. "Hank, you're a coward. I've got a mind to kick you. You got me into this blamed mess, and now you want to craw-fish. You jest tech one of these 'ere fastenings, and I'll lay you out flat of your back afore you can say Jack Robinson." The teacher was climbing to the roof with the board in hand. "That air won't win," laughed Pete Jones outside. He saw that there was no smoke. Even Bud began to hope that Ralph would fail for once. The master was now on the ridge-pole of the school-house. He took a paper from his pocket, and deliberately poured the contents down the chimney. Mr. Pete Jones shouted "Gunpowder!" and set off down the road to be out of the way of the explosion. Dr. Small remembered, probably, that his patient might die while he sat here, and started on. But Ralph emptied the paper, and laid the board over the chimney. What a row there was inside! The benches that were braced against the door were thrown down, and Hank Banta rushed out, rubbing his eyes, coughing frantically, and sure that he had been blown up. All the rest followed, Bud bringing up the rear sulkily, but coughing and sneezing for dear life. Such a smell of sulphur as came from that school-house! Betsey had to lean against the fence to giggle. [Illustration: FIRE AND BRIMSTONE] As soon as all were out, Ralph threw the board off the chimney, leaped to the ground, entered the school-house, and opened the windows. The school soon followed him, and all was still. "Would he thrash?" This was the important question in Hank Banta's mind. And the rest looked for a battle with Bud. "It is just nine o'clock," said Ralph, consulting his watch, "and I'm glad to see you all here promptly. I should have given you a holiday if you had asked me like gentlemen yesterday. On the whole, I think I shall give you a holiday, anyhow. The school is dismissed." And Hank felt foolish. And Bud secretly resolved to thrash Hank or the master, he didn't care which. And Mirandy looked the love she could not utter. And Betsey giggled. CHAPTER XIV. A CRISIS WITH BUD. Ralph sat still at his desk. The school had gone. All at once he became conscious that Shocky sat yet in his accustomed place upon the hard, backless bench. "Why, Shocky, haven't you gone yet?" "No--sir--I was waitin' to see if you warn't a-goin', too--I--" "Well?" "I thought it would make me feel as if God warn't quite so fur away to talk to you. It did the other day." The master rose and put his hand on Shocky's head. Was it the brotherhood in affliction that made Shocky's words choke him so? Or, was it the weird thoughts that he expressed? Or, was it the recollection that Shocky was Hannah's brother? Hannah so far, far away from him now! At any rate, Shocky, looking up for the smile on which he fed, saw the relaxing of the master's face, that had been as hard as stone, and felt just one hot tear on his hand. "P'r'aps God's forgot you, too," said Shocky in a sort of half soliloquy. "Better get away from Flat Creek. You see God forgets everybody down here. 'Cause 'most everybody forgets God, 'cept Mr. Bosaw, and I 'low God don't no ways keer to be remembered by sich as him. Leastways I wouldn't if I was God, you know. I wonder what becomes of folks when God forgets 'em?" And Shocky, seeing that the master had resumed his seat and was looking absently into the fire, moved slowly out the door. "Shocky!" called the master. The little poet came back and stood before him. "Shocky, you mustn't think God has forgotten you. God brings things out right at last." But Ralph's own faith was weak, and his words sounded hollow and hypocritical to himself. Would God indeed bring things out right? He sat musing a good while, trying to convince himself of the truth of what he had just been saying to Shocky--that God would indeed bring things out right at last. Would it all come out right if Bud married Hannah? Would it all come out right if he were driven from Flat Creek with a dark suspicion upon his character? Did God concern himself with these things? Was there any God? It was the same old struggle between Doubt and Faith. And when Ralph looked up, Shocky had departed. In the next hour Ralph fought the old battle of Armageddon. I shall not describe it. You will fight it in your own way. No two alike. The important thing is the End. If you come out as he did, with the doubt gone and the trust in God victorious, it matters little just what shape the battle may take. Since Jacob became Israel there have never been two such struggles alike, save in that they all end either in victory or in defeat. It was after twelve o'clock on that Christmas day when Ralph put his head out the door of the school-house and called out: "Bud, I'd like to see you." Bud did not care to see the master, for he had inly resolved to "thrash him" and have done with him. But he couldn't back out, certainly not in sight of the others who were passing along the road with him. "I don't want the rest of you," said Ralph in a decided way, as he saw that Hank and one or two others were resolved to come also. "Thought maybe you'd want somebody to see far play," said Hank as he went off sheepishly. "If I did, you would be the last one I should ask," said Ralph. "There's no unfair play in Bud, and there is in you." And he shut the door. "Now, looky here, Mr. Ralph Hartsook," said Bud. "You don't come no gum games over me with your saft sodder and all that. I've made up my mind. You've got to promise to leave these 'ere digging, or I've got to thrash you." "You'll have to thrash me, then," said Ralph, turning a little pale, but remembering the bulldog. "But you'll tell me what It's all about, won't you?" "You know well enough. Folks says you know more 'bout the robbery at the Dutchman's than you orter. But I don't believe them. Fer them as says it is liars and thieves theirselves. 'Ta'n't fer none of that. And I shan't tell you what it _is_ fer. So now, if you won't travel, why, take off your coat and git ready fer a thrashing." The master took off his coat and showed his slender arms. Bud laid his off, and showed the physique of a prize-fighter. "You a'n't a-goin to fight _me_?" said Bud. "Not unless you make me." "Why I could chaw you all up." "I know that." "Well, you're the grittiest feller I ever did see, and ef you'd jest kep off of my ground I wouldn't a touched you. But I a'n't a-goin' to be cut out by no feller a livin' 'thout thrashin' him in an inch of his life. You see I wanted to git out of this Flat Crick way. We're a low-lived set here in Flat Crick. And I says to myself, I'll try to be somethin' more nor Pete Jones, and dad, and these other triflin', good-fer-nothin' ones 'bout here. And when you come I says, There's one as'll help me. And what do you do with yor book-larnin' and town manners but start right out to git away the gal that I'd picked out, when I'd picked her out kase I thought, not bein' Flat Crick born herself, she might help a feller to do better! Now I won't let nobody cut me out without givin' 'em the best thrashin' it's in these 'ere arms to give." "But I haven't tried to cut you out." "You can't fool _me_." "Bud, listen to me, and then thrash me if you will. I went with that girl once. When I found you had some claims, I gave her up. Not because I was afraid of you, for I would rather have taken the worst thrashing you can give me than give her up. But I haven't spoken to her since the night of the first spelling-school." "You lie!" said Bud, doubling his fists. Ralph grew red. "You was a-waitin' on her last Sunday right afore my eyes, and a-tryin' to ketch my attention too. So when you're ready say so." "Bud, there is some misunderstanding." Hartsook spoke slowly and felt bewildered. "I tell you that I did not speak to Hannah last Sunday, and you know I didn't." "Hanner!" Bud's eyes grew large. "Hanner!" Here he gasped for breath, and looked around, "Hanner!" He couldn't get any further than the name at first. "Why, plague take it, who said Hanner?" "Mirandy said you were courting Hannah," said Ralph, feeling round in a vague way to get his ideas together. "Mirandy! Thunder! You believed Mirandy! Well! Now, looky here, Mr. Hartsook, ef you was to say that my sister lied, I'd lick you till yer hide wouldn't hold shucks. But _I_ say, a-twix you and me and the gate-post, don't you never believe nothing that Mirandy Means says. Her and marm has set theirselves like fools to git you. Hanner! Well, she's a mighty nice gal, but you're welcome to _her_. I never tuck no shine that air way. But I was out of school last Thursday and Friday a-shucking corn to take to mill a-Saturday. And when I come past the Squire's and seed you talking to a gal as is a gal, you know"--here Bud hesitated and looked foolish--"I felt hoppin' mad." Bud put on his coat. Ralph put on his coat. Then they shook hands and Bud went out. Ralph sat looking into the fire. There was no conscientious difficulty now in the way of his claiming Hannah. The dry forestick lying on the rude stone andirons burst into a blaze. The smoldering hope In the heart of Ralph Hartsook did the same. He could have Hannah If he could win her. But there came slowly back the recollection of his lost standing in Flat Creek. There was circumstantial evidence against him. It was evident that Hannah believed something of this. What other stones Small might have put in circulation he did not know. Would Small try to win Hannah's love to throw it away again, as he had done with others? At least he would not spare any pains to turn the heart of the bound girl against Ralph. The bright flame on the forestick, which Ralph had been watching, flickered and burned low. CHAPTER XV. THE CHURCH OF THE BEST LICKS. Just as the flame on the forestick, which Ralph had watched so intensely, flickered and burned low, and just as Ralph with a heavy but not quite hopeless heart rose to leave, the latch lifted and Bud re-entered. "I wanted to say something," he stammered, "but you know it's hard to say it. I ha'n't no book-larnin to speak of, and some things is hard to say when a man ha'n't got book-words to say 'em with. And they's some things a man can't hardly ever say anyhow to anybody." Here Bud stopped. But Ralph spoke in such a matter-of-course way in reply that he felt encouraged to go on. "You gin up Hanner kase you thought she belonged to me. That's more'n I'd a done by a long shot. Now, arter I left here jest now, I says to myself, a man what can gin up his gal on account of sech a feeling fer the rights of a Flat Cricker like me, why, dog-on it, says I, sech a man is the man as can help me do better. I don't know whether you're a Hardshell or a Saftshell, or a Methodist, or a Campbellite, or a New Light, or a United Brother, or a Millerite, or what-not. But I says, the man what can do the clean thing by a ugly feller like me, and stick to it, when I was jest ready to eat him up, is a kind of a man to tie to." Here Bud stopped in fright at his own volubility, for he had run his words off like a piece learned by heart, as though afraid that if he stopped he would not have courage to go on. Ralph said that he did not belong to any church, and he was afraid he couldn't do Bud much good. But his tone was full of sympathy, and, what is better than sympathy, a yearning for sympathy. "You see," said Bud, "I wanted to git out of this low-lived, Flat Crick way of livin'. We're a hard set down here, Mr. Hartsook. And I'm gittin' to be one of the hardest of 'em. But I never could git no good out of Bosaw with his whisky and meanness. And I went to the Mount Tabor church concert. I heard a man discussin' baptism, and regeneration, and so on. That didn't seem no cure for me, I went to a revival over at Clifty. Well, 'twarn't no use. First night they was a man that spoke about Jesus Christ in sech a way that I wanted to foller him everywhere. But I didn't feel fit. Next night I come back with my mind made up that I'd try Jesus Christ, and see ef he'd have me. But laws! they was a big man that night that preached hell. Not that I don't believe they's a hell. They's plenty not a thousand miles away as deserves it, and I don't know as I'm too good for it myself. But he pitched it at us, and stuck it in our faces in sech a way that I got mad. And I says, Well, ef God sends me to hell he can't make me holler 'nough nohow. You see my dander was up. And when my dander's up, I wouldn't gin up fer the devil his-self. The preacher was so insultin' with his way of doin' it. He seemed to be kind of glad that we was to be damned, and he preached somethin' like some folks swears. It didn't sound a bit like the Christ the little man preached about the night afore. So what does me and a lot of fellers do but slip out and cut off the big preacher's stirrups, and hang 'em on to the rider of the fence, and then set his hoss loose! And from that day, sometimes I did, and sometimes I didn't, want to be better. And to-day it seemed to me that you must know somethin' as would help me." Nothing is worse than a religious experience kept ready to be exposed to the gaze of everybody, whether the time is appropriate or not. But never was a religious experience more appropriate than the account which Ralph gave to Bud of his Struggle in the Dark. The confession of his weakness and wicked selfishness was a great comfort to Bud. "Do you think that Jesus Christ would--would--well, do you think he'd help a poor, unlarnt Flat Cricker like me?" "I think he was a sort of a Flat Creeker himself," said Ralph, slowly and very earnestly. "You don't say?" said Bud, almost getting off his seat. "Why, you see the town he lived in was a rough place. It was called Nazareth, which meant 'Bush-town.'" "You don't say?" "And he was called a Nazarene, which was about the same as 'backwoodsman.'" And Ralph read the different passages which he had studied at Sunday-school, illustrating the condescension of Jesus, the stories of the publicans, the harlots, the poor, who came to him. And he read about Nathanael, who lived only six miles away, saying, 'Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?'" "Jus' what Clifty folks says about Flat Crick," broke in Bud. "Do you think I could begin without being baptized?" he added presently. "Why not? Let's begin now to do the best we can, by his help." "You mean, then, that I'm to begin now to put in my best licks for Jesus Christ, and that he'll help me?" This shocked Ralph's veneration a little. But it was the sincere utterance of an earnest soul. It may not have been an orthodox start, but it was the one start for Bud. And there be those who have repeated with the finest æsthetic appreciation the old English liturgies who have never known religious aspiration so sincere as that of this ignorant young Hercules, whose best confession was that he meant hereafter "to put in his best licks for Jesus Christ." And there be those who can define repentance and faith to the turning of a hair who never made so genuine a start for the kingdom of Heaven as Bud Means did. Ralph said yes, that he thought that was just it. At least, he guessed if there was something more, the man that was putting in his best licks would be sure to find it out. "Do you think he'd help a feller? Seems to me it would be number one to have God help you. Not to help you fight other folks, but to help you when it comes to fighting the devil inside. But you see I don't belong to no church" "Well, let's you and me have one right off. Two people that help one another to serve God make a church." I am afraid this ecclesiastical theory will not be considered orthodox. It was Ralph's, and I write it down at the risk of bringing him into condemnation. But other people before the days of Bud and Ralph have discussed church organization when they should have been doing Christian work. For both of them had forgotten the danger that hung over the old basket-maker, until Shocky burst into the school-house, weeping. Indeed, the poor, nervous little frame was ready to go into convulsions. "Miss Hawkins--" Bud started at mention of the name. "Miss Hawkins has just been over to say that a crowd is going to tar and feather Mr. Pearson to-night. And--" here Shocky wept again. "And he won't run, but he's took up the old flintlock, and he'll die in his tracks." CHAPTER XVI. THE CHURCH MILITANT. Bud was doubly enlisted on the side of John Pearson, the basket-maker. In the first place, he knew that this persecution of the unpopular old man was only a blind to save somebody else; that they were thieves who cried, "Stop thief!" And he felt consequently that this was a chance to put his newly-formed resolutions into practice. The Old Testament religious life, which consists in fighting the Lord's enemies, suited Bud's temper and education. It might lead to something better. It was the best possible to him, now. But I am afraid I shall have to acknowledge that there was a second motive that moved Bud to this championship. The good heart of Martha Hawkins having espoused the cause of the basket-maker, the heart of Bud Means could not help feeling warmly on the same side. Blessed is that man in whose life the driving of duty and the drawing of love impel the same way! But why speak of the driving of duty? For already Bud was learning the better lesson of serving God for the love of God. The old basket-maker was the most unpopular man in Flat Creek district. He had two great vices. He would go to Clifty and have a "spree" once in three months. And he would tell the truth in a most unscrupulous manner. A man given to plain speaking was quite as objectionable in Flat Creek as he would have been in France under the Empire, the Commune, or the Republic, and almost as objectionable as he would be in any refined community in America. People who live in glass houses have a horror of people who throw stones. And the old basket-maker, having no friends, was a good scape-goat. In driving him off, Pete Jones would get rid of a dangerous neighbor and divert attention from himself. The immediate crime of the basket-maker was that he had happened to see too much. "Mr. Hartsook," said Bud, when they got out into the road, "you'd better go straight home to the Squire's. Bekase ef this lightnin' strikes a second time it'll strike awful closte to you. You hadn't better be seen with us. Which way did you come, Shocky?" "Why, I tried to come down the holler, but I met Jones right by the big road, and he sweared at me and said he'd kill me ef I didn't go back and stay. And so I went back to the house and then slipped out through the graveyard. You see I was bound to come ef I got skinned. For Mr. Pearson's, stuck to me and I mean to stick to him, you see." Bud led Shocky through the graveyard. But when they reached the forest path from the graveyard he thought that perhaps it was not best to "show his hand," as he expressed it, too soon. "Now, Shocky," he said, "do you run ahead and tell the ole man that I want to see him right off down by the Spring-in-rock. I'll keep closte behind you, and ef anybody offers to trouble you, do you let off a yell and I'll be thar in no time." When Ralph left the school-house he felt mean. There were Bud and Shocky gone on an errand of mercy, and he, the truant member of the Church of the Best Licks, was not with them. The more he thought of it the more he seemed to be a coward, and the more he despised himself; so, yielding as usual to the first brave impulse, he leaped nimbly over the fence and started briskly through the forest in a direction intersecting the path on which were Bud and Shocky. He came in sight just in time to see the first conflict of the Church in the Wilderness with her foes. For Shocky's little feet went more swiftly on their eager errand than Bud had anticipated. He got farther out of Bud's reach than the latter intended he should, and he did not discover Pete Jones until Pete, with his hog-drover's whip, was right upon him. Shocky tried to halloo for Bud, but he was like one in a nightmare. The yell died into a whisper which could not have been heard ten feet. I shall not repeat Mr. Jones's words. They were frightfully profane. But he did not stop at words. He swept his whip round and gave little Shocky one terrible cut. Then the voice was released, and the piercing cry of pain brought Bud down the path flying. "You good-for-nothing scoundrel," growled Bud, "you're a coward and a thief to be a-beatin' a little creetur like him!" and with that Bud walked up on Jones, who prudently changed position in such a way as to get the upper side of the hill. "Well, I'll gin you the upper side, but come on," cried Bud, "ef you a'n't afeared to fight somebody besides a poor little sickly baby or a crippled soldier. Come on!" [Illustration: Bud Means comes to the rescue of Shocky.] Pete was no insignificant antagonist. He had been a great fighter, and his well-seasoned arms were like iron. He had not the splendid set of Bud, but he had more skill and experience in the rude tournament of fists to which the backwoods is so much given. Now, being out of sight of witnesses and sure that he could lie about the fight afterward, he did not scruple to take advantages which would have disgraced him forever if he had taken them in a public fight on election day or at a muster. He took the uphill side, and he clubbed his whip-stalk, striking Bud with all his force with the heavy end, which, coward-like, he had loaded with lead. Bud threw up his strong left arm and parried the blow, which, however, was so fierce that it fractured one of the bones of the arm. Throwing away his whip Pete rushed upon Bud furiously, intending to overpower him, but Bud slipped quickly to one side and let Jones pass down the hill, and as Jones came up again Means dealt him one crushing blow that sent him full length upon the ground. Nothing but the leaves saved him from a most terrible fall. Jones sprang to his feet more angry than ever at being whipped by one whom he regarded as a boy, and drew a long dirk-knife. But he was blind with rage, and Bud dodged the knife, and this time gave Pete a blow on the nose which marred the homeliness of that feature and doubled the fellow up against a tree ten feet away. Ralph came in sight in time to see the beginning of the fight, and he arrived on the ground just as Pete Jones went down under the well-dealt blow from the only remaining fist of Bud Means. While Ralph examined Bud's disabled left arm Pete picked himself up slowly, and, muttering that he felt "consid'able shuck up like," crawled away like a whipped puppy. To every one whom he met, Pete, whose intellect seemed to have weakened in sympathy with his frame, remarked feebly that he was consid'able shuck up like, and vouchsafed no other explanation. Even to his wife he only said that he felt purty consid'able shuck up like, and that the boys would have to get on to-night without him. There are some scoundrels whose very malignity is shaken out of them for the time being by a thorough drubbing. "I'm afraid you're going to have trouble with your arm, Bud," said Ralph tenderly. "Never mind; I put in my best licks fer _Him_ that air time, Mr. Hartsook." Ralph shivered a little at thought of this, but if it was right to knock Jones down at all, why might not Bud do it "heartily as unto the Lord?" Gideon did not feel any more honest pleasure in chastising the Midianites than did Bud in sending Pete Jones away purty consid'able shuck up like. CHAPTER XVII. A COUNCIL OF WAR. Shocky, whose feet had flown as soon as he saw the final fall of Pete Jones, told the whole story to the wondering and admiring ears of Miss Hawkins, who unhappily could not remember anything at the East just like it; to the frightened ears of the rheumatic old lady who felt sure her ole man's talk and stubbornness would be the ruin of him, and to the indignant ears of the old soldier who was hobbling up and down, sentinel-wise, in front of his cabin, standing guard over himself. "No, I won't leave," he said to Ralph and Bud. "You see I jest won't. What would Gin'ral Winfield Scott say ef he knew that one of them as fit at Lundy's Lane backed out, retreated, run fer fear of a passel of thieves? No, sir; me and the old flintlock will live and die together. I'll put a thunderin' charge of buckshot into the first one of them scoundrels as comes up the holler. It'll be another Lundy's Lane. And you, Mr. Hartsook, may send Scott word that ole Pearson, as fit at Lundy's Lane under him, died a-fightin' thieves on Rocky Branch, in Hoopole Kyounty, State of Injeanny." And the old man hobbled faster and faster, taxing his wooden leg to the very utmost, as if his victory depended on the vehemence with which he walked his beat. Mrs. Pearson sat wringing her hands and looking appealingly at Martha Hawkins, who stood in the door, in despair, looking appealingly at Bud. Bud was stupefied by the old man's stubbornness and his own pain, and in his turn appealed mutely to the master, in whose resources he had boundless confidence. Ralph, seeing that all depended on him, was taxing his wits to think of some way to get round Pearson's stubbornness. Shocky hung to the old man's coat and pulled away at him with many entreating words, but the venerable, bare-headed sentinel strode up and down furiously, with his flintlock on his shoulder and his basket-knife in his belt. Just at this point somebody could be seen indistinctly through the bushes coming up the hollow. "Halt!" cried the old hero. "Who goes there?" "It's me, Mr. Pearson. Don't shoot me, please." It was the voice of Hannah Thomson. Hearing that the whole neighborhood was rising against the benefactor of Shocky and of her family, she had slipped away from the eyes of her mistress, and run with breathless haste to give warning in the cabin on Rocky Branch. Seeing Ralph, she blushed, and went into the cabin. "Well," said Ralph, "the enemy is not coming yet. Let us hold a council of war." This thought came to Ralph like an inspiration. It pleased the old man's whim, and he sat down on the door-step. "Now, I suppose," said Ralph, "that General Winfield Scott always looked into things a little before he went into a fight. Didn't he?" "_To_ be sure," assented the old man. "Well," said Ralph. "What is the condition of the enemy? I suppose the whole neighborhood's against us." "_To_ be sure," said the old man. The rest were silent, but all felt the statement to be about true. "Next," said Ralph, "I suppose General Winfield Scott would always inquire into the condition of his own troops. Now let us see. Captain Pearson has Bud, who is the right wing, badly crippled by having his arm broken in the first battle." (Miss Hawkins looked pale.) "_To_ be sure," said the old man. "And I am the left wing, pretty good at giving advice, but very slender in a fight." "_To_ be sure," said the old man. "And Shocky and Miss Martha and Hannah good aids, but nothing in a battle." "_To_ be sure," said the basket-maker, a little doubtfully. "Now let's look at the arms and accouterments, I think you call them. Well, this old musket has been loaded--" "This ten year," said the old lady. "And the lock is so rusty that you could not cock it when you wanted to take aim at Hannah." The old man looked foolish, and muttered "_To_ be sure." "And there isn't another round of ammunition in the house." The old man was silent. "Now let us look at the incumbrances. Here's the old lady and Shocky. If you fight, the enemy will be pleased. It will give them a chance to kill you. And then the old lady will die and they will do with Shocky as they please." "_To_ be sure," said the old man reflectively. "Now," said Ralph, "General Winfield Scott, under such circumstances, would retreat in good order. Then, when he could muster his forces rightly, he would drive the enemy from his ground." "To be sure," said the old man. "What ort I to do?" "Have you any friends?" "Well, yes; ther's my brother over in Jackson Kyounty. I mout go there." "Well," said Bud, "do you just go down to Spring-in-rock and stay there. Them folks won't be here tell midnight. I'll come fer you at nine with my roan colt, and I'll set you down over on the big road on Buckeye Run. Then you can git on the mail-wagon that passes there about five o'clock in the mornin', and go over to Jackson County and keep shady till we want you to face the enemy and to swear agin some folks. And then well send fer you." "To be sure," said the old man in a broken voice. "I reckon General Winfield Scott wouldn't disapprove of such a maneuver as that thar." Miss Martha beamed on Bud to his evident delight, for he carried his painful arm part of the way home with her. Ralph noticed that Hannah looked at _him_ with a look full of contending emotions. He read admiration, gratitude, and doubt in the expression of her face, as she turned toward home. "Well, good-by, ole woman," said Pearson, as he took up his little handkerchief full of things and started for his hiding-place; "good-by. I didn't never think I'd desart you, and ef the old flintlock hadn't a been rusty, I'd a staid and died right here by the ole cabin. But I reckon 'ta'n't best to be brash[22]." And Shocky looked after him, as he hobbled away over the stones, more than ever convinced that God had forgotten all about things on Flat Creek. He gravely expressed his opinion to the master the next day. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 22: The elaborate etymological treatment of this word in its various forms in our best dictionary is a fine illustration of the fact that something more than scholarship is needed for penetrating the mysteries of current folk-speech. _Brash_--often _bresh_--in the sense of refuse boughs of trees, is only another form of _brush_; the two are used as one word by the people. _Brash_ in the sense of brittle has no conscious connection with the noun in popular usage, but it is accounted by the people the same word as _brash_ in the sense of rash or impetuous. The suggestion in the Century Dictionary that the words spelled _brash_ are of modern formation violates the soundest canon of antiquarian research, which is that a word phrase or custom widely diffused among plain or rustic people is of necessity of ancient origin. Now _brash_, the adjective, exists in both senses in two or three of the most widely separated dialects of the United States, and hence must have come from England. Indeed, it appears in Wright's Dictionary of Provincial English in precisely the sense it has in the text.] CHAPTER XVIII. ODDS AND ENDS. The Spring-in-rock, or, as it was sometimes, by a curious perversion, called, the "rock-in-spring," was a spring running out of a cave-like fissure in a high limestone cliff. Here the old man sheltered himself on that dreary Christmas evening, until Bud brought his roan colt to the top of the cliff above, and he and Ralph helped the old man up the cliff and into the saddle. Ralph went back to bed, but Bud, who was only too eager to put in his best licks, walked by the side of old John Pearson the six miles over to Buckeye Run, and at last, after eleven o'clock, he deposited him in a hollow sycamore by the road, there to wait the coming of the mail-wagon that would carry him into Jackson County. "Good-by," said the basket-maker, as Bud mounted the colt to return. "Ef I'm wanted jest send me word, and I'll make a forrard movement any time. I don't like this 'ere thing of running off in the night-time. But I reckon General Winfield Scott would a ordered a retreat ef he'd a been in my shoes. I'm lots obleeged to you. Akordin' to my tell, we're all of us selfish in everything; but I'll be dog-on'd ef I don't believe you and one or two more is exceptions." Whether it was that the fact that Pete Jones had got consid'able shuck up demoralized his followers, or whether it was that the old man's flight was suspected, the mob did not turn out in very great force, and the tarring was postponed indefinitely, for by the time they came together it became known somehow that the man with a wooden leg had outrun them all. But the escape of one devoted victim did not mollify the feelings of the people toward the next one. By the time Bud returned his arm was very painful, and the next day he went under Dr. Small's treatment to reduce the fracture. Whatever suspicions Bud might have of Pete Jones, he was not afflicted with Ralph's dread of the silent young doctor. And if there was anything Small admired it was physical strength and courage. Small wanted Bud on his side, and least of all did he want him to be Ralph's champion. So that the silent, cool, and skillful doctor went to work to make an impression on Bud Means. Other influences were at work upon him also. Mrs. Means volleyed and thundered in her usual style about his "takin' up with a one-legged thief, and runnin' arter that master that was a mighty suspicious kind of a customer, akordin' to her tell. She'd allers said so. Ef she'd a been consulted he wouldn't a been hired. He warn't fit company fer nobody." And old Jack Means 'lowed Bud must want to have _their_ barns burnt like some other folkses had been. Fer his part, he had sense enough to know they was some people as it wouldn't do to set a body's self agin. And as fer him, he didn't butt his brains out agin a buckeye-tree. Not when he was sober. And so they managed, during Bud's confinement to the house, to keep him well supplied with all the ordinary discomforts of life. But one visit from Martha Hawkins, ten words of kindly inquiry from her, and the remark that his broken arm reminded her of something she had seen at the East and something somebody said the time she was to Bosting, were enough to repay the champion a thousand fold for all that he suffered. Indeed, that visit, and the recollection of Ralph's saying that Jesus Christ was a sort of a Flat Creeker himself, were manna in the wilderness to Bud. Poor Shocky was sick. The excitement had been too much for him, and though his fever was very slight it was enough to produce just a little delirium. Either Ralph or Miss Martha was generally at the cabin. "They're coming," said Shocky to Ralph, "they're coming. Pete Jones is a-going to bind me out for a hundred years. I wish Hanner would hold me so's he couldn't. God's forgot all about us here in Flat Creek, and there's nobody to help it." And he shivered at every sudden sound. He was never free from this delirious fright except when the master held him tight in his arms. He staggered around the floor, the very shadow of Shocky, and was so terrified by the approach of darkness that Ralph staid in the cabin on Wednesday night and Miss Hawkins staid on Thursday night. On Friday, Bud sent a note to Ralph, askin him to come and see him. "You see, Mr. Hartsook, I ha'n't forgot what was said about puttin' in our best licks for Jesus Christ. I've been a-trying to read some about him while I set here. And I read where he said somethin about doing fer the least of his brethren being as the same like as if it was done fer Jesus Christ his-self. Now there's Shocky. I reckon, p'r'aps, as anybody is a little brother of Jesus Christ, it is that Shocky. Pete Jones and his brother Bill is determined to have him back there to-morry. Bekase you see, Pete's one of the County Commissioners and to-morry's the day that they bind out. He wants to bind out that boy jes' to spite ole Pearson and you and me. You see, the ole woman's been helped by the neighbors, and he'll claim Shocky to be a pauper, and they a'n't no human soul here as dares to do a thing con_tra_ry to Pete. Couldn't you git him over to Lewisburg? I'll lend you my roan colt." Ralph thought a minute. He dared not take Shocky to the uncle's where he found his only home. But there was Miss Nancy Sawyer, the old maid who was everybody's blessing. He could ask her to keep him. And, at any rate, he would save Shocky somehow. As he went out in the dusk, he met Hannah in the lane. CHAPTER XIX. FACE TO FACE. In the lane, in the dark, under the shadow of the barn, Ralph met Hannah carrying her bucket of milk (they have no pails in Indiana)[23]. He could see only the white foam on the milk, and Hannah's white face. Perhaps it was well that he could not see how white Hannah's face was at that moment when a sudden trembling made her set down the heavy bucket. At first neither spoke. The recollection of all the joy of that walk together in the night came upon them both. And a great sense of loss made the night seem supernaturally dark to Ralph. Nor was it any lighter in the hopeless heart of the bound girl. The presence of Ralph did not now, as before, make the darkness of her life light. "Hannah--" said Ralph presently, and stopped. For he could not finish the sentence. With a rush there came upon him a consciousness of the suspicions that filled Hannah's mind. And with it there came a feeling of guilt. He saw himself from her stand-point, and felt a remorse almost as keen as it could have been had he been a criminal. And this sudden and morbid sense of his guilt as it appeared to Hannah paralyzed him. But when Hannah lifted her bucket with her hand, and the world with her heavy heart, and essayed to pass him, Ralph rallied and said: "_You_ don't believe all these lies that are told about me." "I don't believe anything, Mr. Hartsook; that is, I don't want to believe anything against you. And I wouldn't mind anything they say if it wasn't for two things"--here she stammered and looked down. "If it wasn't for what?" said Ralph with a spice of indignant denial in his voice. Hannah hesitated, but Ralph pressed the question with eagerness. "I saw you cross that blue-grass pasture the night--the night that you walked home with me." She would have said the night of the robbery, but her heart smote her, and she adopted the more kindly form of the sentence. Ralph would have explained, but how? "I did cross the pasture," he began, "but--" Just here it occurred to Ralph that there was no reason for his night excursion across the pasture. Hannah again took up her bucket, but he said: "Tell me what else you have against me." "I haven't anything against you. Only I am poor and friendless, and you oughtn't to make my life any heavier. They say that you have paid attention to a great many girls. I don't know why you should want to trifle with me." Ralph answered her this time. He spoke low. He spoke as though he were speaking to God. "If any man says that I ever trifled with any woman, he lies. I have never loved but one, and you know who that is. And God knows." "I don't know what to say, Mr. Hartsook." Hannah's voice was broken. These solemn words of love were like a river in the desert, and she was like a wanderer dying of thirst. "I don't know, Mr. Hartsook. If I was alone, it wouldn't matter. But I've got my blind mother and my poor Shocky to look after. And I don't want to make mistakes. And the world is so full of lies I don't know what to believe. Somehow I can't help believing what you say. You seem to speak so true. But--" "But what?" said Ralph. "But you know how I saw you just as kind to Martha Hawkins on Sunday as--as--" "Han--ner!" It was the melodious voice of the angry Mrs. Means, and Hannah lifted her pail and disappeared. Standing in the shadow of his own despair, Ralph felt how dark a night could be when it had no promise of morning. And Dr. Small, who had been stabling his horse just inside the barn, came out and moved quietly into the house just as though he had not listened intently to every word of the conversation. As Ralph walked away he tried to comfort himself by calling to his aid the bulldog in his character. But somehow it did not do him any good. For what is a bulldog but a stoic philosopher? Stoicism has its value, but Ralph had come to a place where stoicism was of no account. The memory of the Helper, of his sorrow, his brave and victorious endurance, came when stoicism failed. Happiness might go out of life, but in the light of Christ's life happiness seemed but a small element anyhow. The love of woman might be denied him, but there still remained what was infinitely more precious and holy, the love of God. There still remained the possibility of heroic living. Working, suffering, and enduring still remained. And he who can work for God and endure for God, surely has yet the best of life left. And, like the knights who could find the Holy Grail only in losing themselves, Hartsook, in throwing his happiness out of the count, found the purest happiness, a sense of the victory of the soul over the tribulations of life. The man who knows this victory scarcely needs the encouragement of the hope of future happiness. There is a real heaven in bravely lifting the load of one's own sorrow and work. And it was a good thing for Ralph that the danger hanging over Shocky made immediate action necessary. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 23: The total absence of the word _pail_ not only from the dialect, but even from cultivated speech in the Southern and Border States until very recently, is a fact I leave to be explained on further investigation. The word is an old one and a good one, but I fancy that its use in England could not have been generally diffused in the seventeenth century. So a Hoosier or a Kentuckian never _pared_ an apple, but _peeled_ it. Much light might be thrown on the origin and history of our dialects by investigating their deficiencies.] CHAPTER XX. GOD REMEMBERS SHOCKY. At four o'clock the next morning, in the midst of a driving snow, Ralph went timidly up the lane toward the homely castle of the Meanses. He went timidly, for he was afraid of Bull. But he found Bud waiting for him, with the roan colt bridled and saddled. The roan colt was really a large three-year-old, full of the finest sort of animal life, and having, as Bud declared, "a mighty sight of hoss sense fer his age." He seemed to understand at once that there was something extraordinary on hand when he was brought out of his comfortable quarters at four in the morning in the midst of a snow-storm. Bud was sure that the roan colt felt his responsibility. In the days that followed, Ralph often had occasion to remember this interview with Bud, who had risked much in bringing his fractured arm out into the cold, damp air. Jonathan never clave to David more earnestly than did Bud this December morning to Ralph. "You see, Mr. Hartsook," said Bud, "I wish I was well myself. It's hard to set still. But it's a-doing me a heap of good. I'm like a boy at school. And I'm a-findin' out that doing one's best licks fer others ain't all they is of it, though it's a good part. I feel like as if I must git Him, you know, to do lots for me. They's always some sums too hard fer a feller, and he has to ax the master to do 'em, you know. But see, the roan's a-stomping round. He wants to be off. Do you know I think that hoss knows something's up? I think he puts in his best licks fer me a good deal better than I do fer Him." Ralph pressed Bud's right hand. Bud rubbed his face against the colt's nose and said: "Put in your best licks, old fellow." And the colt whinnied. How a horse must want to speak! For Bud was right. Men are gods to horses, and they serve their deities with a faithfulness that shames us. Then Ralph sprang into the saddle, and the roan, as if wishing to show Bud his willingness, broke into a swinging gallop, and was soon lost to the sight of his master in the darkness and the snow. When Bud could no more hear the sound of the roan's footsteps he returned to the house, to lie awake picturing to himself the journey of Ralph with Shocky and the roan colt. It was a great comfort to Bud that the roan, which was almost a part of himself, represented him in this ride. And he knew the roan well enough to feel sure that he would do credit to his master. "He'll put in his best licks," Bud whispered to himself many a time before daybreak. The ground was but little frozen, and the snow made the roads more slippery than ever. But the rough-shod roan handled his feet dexterously and with a playful and somewhat self-righteous air, as though he said: "Didn't I do it handsomely that time?" Down slippery hills, through deep mud-holes covered with a slender film of ice he trod with perfect assurance. And then up over the rough stones of Rocky Hollow, where there was no road at all, he picked his way through the darkness and snow. Ralph could not tell where he was at last, but gave the reins to the roan, who did his duty bravely, and not without a little flourish, to show that he had yet plenty of spare power. A feeble candle-ray, making the dense snow-fall visible, marked for Ralph the site of the basket-maker's cabin. Miss Martha had been admitted to the secret, and had joined in the conspiracy heartily, without being able to recall anything of the kind having occurred at the East, and not remembering having seen or heard of anything of the sort the time she was to Bosting. She had Shocky all ready, having used some of her own capes and shawls to make him warm. Miss Martha came out to meet Ralph when she heard the feet of the roan before the door. "O Mr. Hartsook! is that you? What a storm. This is jest the way it snows at the East. Shocky's all ready. He didn't know a thing about it tell I waked him this morning. Ever since that he's been saying that God hasn't forgot, after all. It's made me cry more'n once." And Shocky kissed Mrs. Pearson, and told her that when he got away from Flat Creek he'd tell God all about it, and God would bring Mr. Pearson back again. And then Martha Hawkins lifted the frail little form, bundled in shawls, in her arms, and brought him out into the storm; and before she handed him up he embraced her, and said: "O Miss Hawkins! God ha'n't forgot me, after all. Tell Hanner that He ha'n't forgot. I'm going to ask him to git her away from Means's and mother out of the poor-house. I'll ask him just as soon as I get to Lewisburg." Ralph lifted the trembling form into his arms, and the little fellow only looked up in the face of the master and said: "You see, Mr. Hartsook, I thought God had forgot. But he ha'n't." And the words of the little boy comforted the master also. God had not forgotten him, either! From the moment that Ralph took Shocky into his arms, the conduct of the roan colt underwent an entire revolution. Before that he had gone over a bad place with a rush, as though he were ambitious of distinguishing himself by his brilliant execution. Now he trod none the less surely, but he trod tenderly. The neck was no longer arched. He set himself to his work as steadily as though he were twenty years old. For miles he traveled on in a long, swinging walk, putting his feet down carefully and firmly. And Ralph found the spirit of the colt entering into himself. He cut the snow-storm with his face, and felt a sense of triumph over all his difficulties. The bulldog's jaws had been his teacher, and now the steady, strong, and conscientious legs of the roan inspired him. Shocky had not spoken. He lay listening to the pattering music of the horse's feet, doubtless framing the footsteps of the roan colt into an anthem of praise to the God who had not forgot. But as the dawn came on, making the snow whiter, he raised himself and said half-aloud, as he watched the flakes chasing one another in whirling eddies, that the snow seemed to be having a good time of it. Then he leaned down again on the master's bosom, full of a still joy, and only roused himself from his happy reverie to ask what that big, ugly-looking house was. "See, Mr. Hartsook, how big it is, and how little and ugly the windows is! And the boards is peeling off all over it, and the hogs is right in the front yard. It don't look just like a house. It looks dreadful. What is it?" Ralph had dreaded this question. He did not answer it, but asked Shocky to change his position a little, and then he quickened the pace of the horse. But Shocky was a poet, and a poet understands silence more quickly than he does speech. The little fellow shivered as the truth came to him. "Is that the poor-house?" he said, catching his breath. "Is my mother in that place? _Won't_ you take me in there, so as I can just kiss her once? 'Cause she can't see much, you know. And one kiss from me will make her feel so good. And I'll tell her that God ha'n't forgot." He had raised up and caught hold of Ralph's coat. Ralph had great difficulty in quieting him. He told him that if he went in there Bill Jones might claim that he was a runaway and belonged there. And poor Shocky only shivered and said he was cold. A minute later, Ralph found that he was shaking with a chill, and a horrible dread came over him. What if Shocky should die? It was only a minute's work to get down, take the warm horse-blanket from under the saddle, and wrap it about the boy, then to strip off his own overcoat and add that to it. It was now daylight, and finding, after he had mounted, that Shocky continued to shiver, he put the roan to his best speed for the rest of the way, trotting up and down the slippery hills, and galloping away on the level ground. How bravely the roan laid himself to his work, making the fence-corners fly past in a long procession! But poor little Shocky was too cold to notice them, and Ralph shuddered lest Shocky should never be warm again, and spoke to the roan, and the roan stretched out his head, and dropped one ear back to hear the first word of command, and stretched the other forward to listen for danger, and then flew with a splendid speed down the road, past the patches of blackberry briars, past the elderberry bushes, past the familiar red-haw tree in the fence-corner, over the bridge without regard to the threat of a five-dollar fine, and at last up the long lane into the village, where the smoke from the chimneys was caught and whirled round with the snow. CHAPTER XXI. MISS NANCY SAWYER. In a little old cottage in Lewisburg, on one of the streets which was never traveled except by a solitary cow seeking pasture or a countryman bringing wood to some one of the half-dozen families living in it, and which in summer was decked with a profusion of the yellow and white blossoms of the dog-fennel--in this unfrequented street, so generously and unnecessarily broad, lived Miss Nancy Sawyer and her younger sister Semantha. Miss Nancy was a providence, one of those old maids that are benedictions to the whole town; one of those in whom the mother-love, wanting the natural objects on which to spend itself, overflows all bounds and lavishes itself on every needy thing, and grows richer and more abundant with the spending, a fountain of inexhaustible blessing. There is no nobler life possible to any one than to an unmarried woman. The more shame that some choose a selfish one, and thus turn to gall all the affection with which they are endowed. Miss Nancy Sawyer had been Ralph's Sunday-school teacher, and it was precious little, so far as information went, that he learned from her; for she never could conceive of Jerusalem as a place in any essential regard very different from Lewisburg, where she had spent her life. But Ralph learned from her what most Sunday-school teachers fail to teach, the great lesson of Christianity, by the side of which all antiquities and geographies and chronologies and exegetics and other niceties are as nothing. And now he turned the head of the roan toward the cottage of Miss Nancy Sawyer as naturally as the roan would have gone to his own stall in the stable at home. The snow had gradually ceased to fall, and was eddying round the house, when Ralph dismounted from his foaming horse, and, carrying the still form of Shocky as reverently as though it had been something heavenly, knocked at Miss Nancy Sawyer's door. With natural feminine instinct that lady started back when she saw Hartsook, for she had just built a fire in the stove, and she now stood at the door with unwashed face and uncombed hair. "Why, Ralph Hartsook, where did you drop down from--and what have you got?" "I came from Flat Creek this morning, and I brought you a little angel who has got out of heaven, and needs some of your motherly care." Shocky was brought in. The chill shook him now by fits only, for a fever had spotted his cheeks already. "Who are you?" said Miss Nancy, as she unwrapped him. "I'm Shocky, a little boy as God forgot, and then thought of again." CHAPTER XXII. PANCAKES. Half an hour later, Ralph, having seen Miss Nancy Sawyer's machinery of warm baths and simple remedies safely in operation, and having seen the roan colt comfortably stabled, and rewarded for his faithfulness by a bountiful supply of the best hay and the promise of oats when he was cool--half an hour later Ralph was doing the most ample, satisfactory, and amazing justice to his Aunt Matilda's hot buckwheat-cakes and warm coffee. And after his life in Flat Creek, Aunt Matilda's house did look like paradise. How white the table-cloth, how bright the coffee-pot, how clean the wood-work, how glistening the brass door-knobs, how spotless everything that came under the sovereign sway of Mrs. Matilda White! For in every Indiana village as large as Lewisburg, there are generally a half-dozen women who are admitted to be the best housekeepers. All others are only imitators. And the strife is between these for the pre-eminence. It is at least safe to say that no other in Lewisburg stood so high as an enemy to dirt, and as a "rat, roach, and mouse exterminator," as did Mrs. Matilda White, the wife of Ralph's maternal uncle, Robert White, Esq., a lawyer in successful practice. Of course no member of Mrs. White's family ever stayed at home longer than was necessary. Her husband found his office--which he kept in as bad a state as possible in order to maintain an equilibrium in his life--much more comfortable than the stiffly clean house at home. From the time that Ralph had come to live as a chore-boy at his uncle's, he had ever crossed the threshold of Aunt Matilda's temple of cleanliness with a horrible sense of awe. And Walter Johnson, her son by a former marriage, had--poor, weak-willed fellow!--been driven into bad company and bad habits by the wretchedness of extreme civilization. And yet he showed the hereditary trait, for all the genius which Mrs. White consecrated to the glorious work of making her house too neat to be habitable, her son Walter gave to tying exquisite knots in his colored cravats and combing his oiled locks so as to look like a dandy barber. And she had no other children. The kind Providence that watches over the destiny of children takes care that very few of them are lodged in these terribly clean houses. But Walter was not at the table, and Ralph had so much anxiety lest his absence should be significant of evil, that he did not venture to inquire after him as he sat there between Mr. and Mrs. White disposing of Aunt Matilda's cakes with an appetite only justified by his long morning's ride and the excellence of the brown cakes, the golden honey, and the coffee, enriched, as Aunt Matilda's always was, with the most generous cream. Aunt Matilda was so absorbed in telling of the doings of the Dorcas Society that she entirely forgot to be surprised at the early hour of Ralph's arrival. When she had described the number of the garments finished to be sent to the Five Points Mission, or the Home for the Friendless, or the South Sea Islands, I forget which, Ralph thought he saw his chance, while Aunt Matilda was in a benevolent mood, to broach a plan he had been revolving for some time. But when he looked at Aunt Matilda's immaculate--horribly immaculate--housekeeping, his heart failed him, and he would have said nothing had she not inadvertently opened the door herself. "How did you get here so early, Ralph?" and Aunt Matilda's face was shadowed with a coming rebuke. "By early rising," said Ralph. But, seeing the gathering frown on his aunt's brow, he hastened to tell the story of Shocky as well as he could. Mrs. White did not give way to any impulse toward sympathy until she learned that Shocky was safely housed with Miss Nancy Sawyer. "Yes, Sister Sawyer has no family cares," she said by way of smoothing her slightly ruffled complacency, "she has no family cares, and she can do those things. Sometimes I think she lets people impose on her and keep her away from the means of grace, and I spoke to our new preacher about it the last time he was here, and asked him to speak to Sister Sawyer about staying away from the ordinances to wait on everybody, but he is a queer man, and he only said that he supposed Sister Sawyer neglected the inferior ordinances that she might attend to higher ones. But I don't see any sense in a minister of the gospel calling prayer-meeting a lower ordinance than feeding catnip-tea to Mrs. Brown's last baby. But hasn't this little boy--Shocking, or what do you call him?--got any mother?" "Yes," said Ralph, "and that was just what I was going to say." And he proceeded to tell how anxious Shocky was to see his half-blind mother, and actually ventured to wind up his remarks by suggesting that Shocky's mother be invited to stay over Sunday in Aunt Matilda's house. "Bless my stars!" said that astounded saint, "fetch a pauper here? What crazy notions you have got! Fetch her here out of the poor-house? Why, she wouldn't be fit to sleep in my--" here Aunt Matilda choked. The bare thought of having a pauper in her billowy beds, whose snowy whiteness was frightful to any ordinary mortal, the bare thought of the contagion of the poor-house taking possession of one of her beds, smothered her. "And then you know sore eyes are very catching." Ralph boiled a little. "Aunt Matilda, do you think Dorcas was afraid of sore eyes?" It was a center shot, and the lawyer-uncle, lawyerlike, enjoyed a good hit. And he enjoyed a good hit at his wife best of all, for he never ventured on one himself. But Aunt Matilda felt that a direct reply was impossible. She was not a lawyer but a woman, and so dodged the question by making a counter-charge. "It seems to me, Ralph, that you have picked up some very low associates. And you go around at night, I am told. You get over here by daylight, and I hear that you have made common cause with a lame soldier who acts as a spy for thieves, and that your running about of night is likely to get you into trouble." Ralph was hit this time. "I suppose," he said, "that you've been listening to some of Henry Small's lies." "Why, Ralph, how you talk! The worst sign of all is that you abuse such a young man as Dr. Small, the most exemplary Christian young man in the county. And he is a great friend of yours, for when he was here last week he did not say a word against you, but looked so sorry when your being in trouble was mentioned. Didn't he, Mr. White?" Mr. White, as in duty bound, said yes, but he said yes in a cool, lawyerlike way, which showed that he did not take quite so much stock in Dr. Small as his wife did. This was a comfort to Ralph, who sat picturing to himself the silent flattery which Dr. Small's eyes paid to his Aunt Matilda, and the quiet expression of pain that would flit across his face when Ralph's name was mentioned. And never until that moment had Hartsook understood how masterful Small's artifices were. He had managed to elevate himself in Mrs. White's estimation and to destroy Ralph at the same time, and had managed to do both by a contraction of the eyebrows! But the silence was growing painful and Ralph thought to break it and turn the current of talk from himself by asking after Mrs. White's son. "Where is Walter?" "Oh! Walter's doing well. He went down to Clifty three weeks ago to study medicine with Henry Small. He seems so fond of the doctor, and the doctor is such an excellent man, you know, and I have strong hopes that Wallie will be led to see the error of his ways by his association with Henry. I suppose he would have gone to see you but for the unfavorable reports that he heard. I hope, Ralph, you too will make the friendship of Dr. Small. And for the sake of your poor, dead mother"--here Aunt Matilda endeavored to show some emotion--"for the sake of your poor dead mother--" But Ralph heard no more. The buckwheat-cakes had lost their flavor. He remembered that the colt had not yet had his oats, and so, in the very midst of Aunt Matilda's affecting allusion to his mother, like a stiff-necked reprobate that he was, Ralph Hartsook rose abruptly from the table, put on his hat, and went out toward the stable. "I declare," said Mrs. White, descending suddenly from her high moral stand-point, "I declare that boy has stepped right on the threshold of the back-door," and she stuffed her white handkerchief into her pocket, and took down the floor-cloth to wipe off the imperceptible blemish left by Ralph's boot-heels. And Mr. White followed his nephew to the stable to request that he would be a little careful what he did about anybody in the poor-house, as any trouble with the Joneses might defeat Mr. White's nomination to the judgeship of the Court of Common Pleas. CHAPTER XXIII. A CHARITABLE INSTITUTION. When Ralph got back to Miss Nancy Sawyer's, Shocky was sitting up in bed talking to Miss Nancy and Miss Semantha. His cheeks were a little flushed with fever and the excitement of telling his story; theirs were wet with tears. "Ralph," whispered Miss Nancy, as she drew him into the kitchen, "I want you to get a buggy or a sleigh, and go right over to the poor-house and fetch that boy's mother over here. It'll do me more good than any sermon I ever heard to see that boy in his mother's arms to-morrow. We can keep the old lady over Sunday." Ralph was delighted, so delighted that he came near kissing good Miss Nancy Sawyer, whose plain face was glorified by her generosity. But he did not go to the poor-house immediately. He waited until he saw Bill Jones, the Superintendent of the Poor-House, and Pete Jones, the County Commissioner, who was still somewhat shuck up, ride up to the court-house. Then he drove out of the village, and presently hitched his horse to the poor-house fence, and took a survey of the outside. Forty hogs, nearly ready for slaughter, wallowed in a pen in front of the forlorn and dilapidated house; for though the commissioners allowed a claim for repairs at every meeting, the repairs were never made, and it would not do to scrutinize Mr. Jones's bills too closely, unless you gave up all hope of renomination to office. One curious effect of political aspirations in Hoopole County, was to shut the eyes that they could not see, to close the ears that they could not hear, and to destroy the sense of smell. But Ralph, not being a politician, smelled the hog-pen without and the stench within, and saw everywhere the transparent fraud, and heard the echo of Jones's cruelty. A weak-eyed girl admitted him, and as he did not wish to make his business known at once, he affected a sort of idle interest in the place, and asked to be allowed to look round. The weak-eyed girl watched him. He found that all the women with children, twenty persons in all, were obliged to sleep in one room, which, owing to the hill-slope, was partly under ground, and which had but half a window for light, and no ventilation, except the chance draft from the door. Jones had declared that the women with children must stay there--"he warn't goin' to have brats a-runnin' over the whole house." Here were vicious women and good women, with their children, crowded like chickens in a coop for market. And there were, as usual in such places, helpless, idiotic women with illegitimate children. Of course this room was the scene of perpetual quarreling and occasional fighting. In the quarters devoted to the insane, people slightly demented and raving maniacs were in the same rooms, while there were also those utter wrecks which sat in heaps on the floor, mumbling and muttering unintelligible words, the whole current of their thoughts hopelessly muddled, turning around upon itself in eddies never ending. "That air woman," said the weak-eyed girl, "used to holler a heap when she was brought in here. But Pap knows how to subjue 'em. He slapped her in the mouth every time she hollered. She don't make no furss now, but jist sets down that way all day, and keeps a-whisperin'." Ralph understood it. When she came in she was the victim of mania; but she had been beaten into hopeless idiocy. Indeed this state of incurable imbecility seemed the end toward which all traveled. Shut in these bare rooms, with no treatment, no exercise, no variety, and meager food, cases of slight derangement soon grew into chronic lunacy. One young woman, called Phil, a sweet-faced person, apparently a farmer's wife, came up to Ralph and looked at him kindly, playing with the buttons on his coat in a childlike simplicity. Her blue-drilling dress was sewed all over with patches of white, representing ornamental buttons. The womanly instinct toward adornment had in her taken this childish turn. "Don't you think they ought to let me go home?" she said with a sweetness and a wistful, longing, home-sick look, that touched Ralph to the heart. He looked at her, and then at the muttering crones, and he could see no hope of any better fate for her. She followed him round the barn-like rooms, returning every now and then to her question. "Don't you think I might go home now?" The weak-eyed girl had been called away for a moment, and Ralph stood looking into a cell, where there was a man with a gay red plume in his hat and a strip of red flannel about his waist. He strutted up and down like a drill-sergeant. "I am General Andrew Jackson," he began. "People don't believe it, but I am. I had my head shot off at Bueny Visty, and the new one that growed on isn't nigh so good as the old one; it's tater on one side[24]. That's why they take advantage of me to shut me up. But I know some things. My head is tater on one side, but it's all right on t'other. And when I know a thing in the left side of my head, I know it. Lean down here. Let me tell you something out of the left side. Not out of the tater side, mind ye. I wouldn't a told you if he hadn't locked me up fer nothing. _Bill Jones is a thief_! He sells the bodies of the dead paupers, and then sells the empty coffins back to the county agin. But that a'n't all--" Just then the weak-eyed girl came back, and, as Ralph moved away, General Jackson called out: "That a'n't all. I'll tell the rest another time. And that a'n't out of the tater side, you can depend on that. That's out of the left side. Sound as a nut on that side!" But Ralph began to wonder where he should find Hannah's mother. "Don't go in there," cried the weak-eyed girl, as Ralph was opening a door. "Ole Mowley's in there, and she'll cuss you." "Oh! well, if that's all, her curses won't hurt," said Hartsook, pushing open the door. But the volley of blasphemy and vile language that he received made him stagger. The old hag paced the floor, abusing everybody that came in her way. And by the window, in the same room, feeling the light that struggled through the dusty glass upon her face, sat a sorrowful, intelligent Englishwoman. Ralph noticed at once that she was English, and in a few moments he discovered that her sight was defective. Could it be that Hannah's mother was the room-mate of this loathsome creature, whose profanity and obscenity did not intermit for a moment? Happily the weak-eyed girl had not dared to brave the curses of Mowley. Ralph stepped forward to the woman by the window, and greeted her. "Is this Mrs. Thomson?" "That is my name, sir," she said, turning her face toward Ralph, who could not but remark the contrast between the thorough refinement of her manner and her coarse, scant, unshaped pauper-frock of blue drilling. "I saw your daughter yesterday." "Did you see my boy?" There was a tremulousness in her voice and an agitation in her manner which disclosed the emotion she strove in vain to conceal. For only the day before Bill Jones had informed her that Shocky would be bound out on Saturday, and that she would find that goin' agin him warn't a payin' business, so much as some others he mout mention. Ralph told her about Shocky's safety. _I_ shall not write down the conversation here. Critics would say that it was an overwrought scene. As if all the world were as cold as they! All I can tell is that this refined woman had all she could do to control herself in her eagerness to get out of her prison-house, away from the blasphemies of Mowley, away from the insults of Jones, away from the sights and sounds and smells of the place, and, above all, her eagerness to fly to the little shocky-head from whom she had been banished for two years. It seemed to her that she could gladly die now, if she could die with that flaxen head upon her bosom. And so, in spite of the opposition of Bill Jones's son, who threatened her with every sort of evil if she left, Ralph wrapped Mrs. Thomson's blue drilling in Nancy Sawyer's shawl, and bore the feeble woman off to Lewisburg. And as they drove away, a sad, childlike voice cried from the gratings of the upper window, "Good-by! good-by!" Ralph turned and saw that it was Phil, poor Phil, for whom there was no deliverance[25]. And all the way back Ralph pronounced mental maledictions on the Dorcas Society, not for sending garments to the Five Points or the South Sea Islands, whichever it was, but for being so blind to the sorrow and poverty within its reach. He did not know, for he had not read the reports of the Boards of State Charities, that nearly all alms-houses are very much like this, and that the State of New York is not better in this regard than Indiana. And he did not know that it is true in almost all other counties, as it was in his own, that "Christian" people do not think enough of Christ to look for him in these lazar-houses. And while Ralph denounced the Dorcas Society, the eager, hungry heart of the mother ran, flew toward the little white-headed boy. No, I can not do it; I can not tell you about that meeting. I am sure that Miss Nancy Sawyer's tea tasted exceedingly good to the pauper, who had known nothing but cold water for years, and that the bread and butter were delicious to a palate that had eaten poor-house soup for dinner, and coarse poor-house bread and vile molasses for supper, and that without change for three years. But I can not tell you how it seemed that evening to Miss Nancy Sawyer, as the poor English lady sat in speechless ecstacy, rocking in the old splint-bottomed rocking-chair in the fire-light, while she pressed to her bosom with all the might of her enfeebled arms, the form of the little Shocky, who half-sobbed and half-sang, over and over again, "God ha'n't forgot us, mother; God ha'n't forgot us." FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 24: Some time after this book appeared Dr. Brown-Séquard announced his theory of the dual brain. A writer in an English magazine called attention to the fact that the discovery had been anticipated by an imaginative writer, and cited the passage in the text as proving that the author of "The Hoosier School-Master" had outrun Dr. Brown-Séquard in perceiving the duality of the brain. It is a matter for surprise that an author, even an "imaginative" one, should have made so great a discovery without suspecting its meaning until it was explained by some one else.] [Footnote 25: The reader may be interested to know that "Phil" was drawn from the life, as was old Mowley and in part "General Jackson" also. Between 1867 and 1870, I visited many jails and poor-houses with philanthropic purpose, publishing the results of my examination in some cases in _The Chicago Tribune_. Some of the abuses pointed out were reformed, others linger till this day, I believe.] CHAPTER XXIV. THE GOOD SAMARITAN. The Methodist church to which Mrs. Matilda White and Miss Nancy Sawyer belonged was the leading one in Lewisburg, as it was in most county-seat villages in Indiana. If I may be permitted to express my candid and charitable opinion of the difference between the two women, I shall have to use the old Quaker locution, and say that Miss Sawyer was a Methodist and likewise a Christian; Mrs. White was a Methodist, but I fear she was not likewise. As to the first part of this assertion, there was no room to doubt Miss Nancy's piety. She could get happy in class-meeting (for who had a better right?), and could witness a good experience in the quarterly love-feast. But it is not upon these grounds that I base my opinion of Miss Nancy. Do not even the Pharisees the same? She never dreamed that she had any right to speak of "Christian Perfection" (which, as Mrs. Partington said of total depravity, is an excellent doctrine if it is lived up to); but when a woman's heart is full of devout affections and good purposes, when her head devises liberal and Christlike things, when her hands are always open to the poor and always busy with acts of love and self-denial, and when her feet are ever eager to run upon errands of mercy, why, if there be anything worthy of being called Christian Perfection in this world of imperfection, I do not know why such an one does not possess it. What need of analyzing her experiences _in vacuo_ to find out the state of her soul? How Miss Nancy managed to live on her slender income and be so generous was a perpetual source of perplexity to the gossips of Lewisburg. And now that she declared that Mrs. Thomson and Shocky should not return to the poor-house there was a general outcry from the whole Committee of Intermeddlers that she would bring herself to the poor-house before she died. But Nancy Sawyer was the richest woman in Lewisburg, though nobody knew it, and though she herself did not once suspect it. How Miss Nancy and the preacher conspired together, and how they managed to bring Mrs. Thomson's case up at the time of the "Sacramental Service" in the afternoon of that Sunday in Lewisburg, and how the preacher made a touching statement of it just before the regular "Collection for the Poor" was taken, and how the warm-hearted Methodists put in dollars instead of dimes while the Presiding Elder read those passages about Zaccheus and other liberal people, and how the congregation sang "He dies, the Friend of sinners dies" more lustily than ever, after having performed this Christian act--how all this happened I can not take up the reader's time to tell. But I can assure him that the nearly blind English woman did not room with blasphemous old Mowley any more, and that the blue-drilling pauper frock gave way to something better, and that grave little Shocky even danced with delight, and declared that God hadn't forgot, though he'd thought that He had. And Mrs. Matilda White remarked that it was a shame that the collection for the poor at a Methodist sacramental service should be given to a woman who was a member of the Church of England, and like as not never soundly converted! And Shocky slept in his mother's arms and prayed God not to forget Hannah, while Shocky's mother knit stockings for the store day and night, and day and night she prayed and hoped. CHAPTER XXV. BUD WOOING. The Sunday that Ralph spent in Lewisburg, the Sunday that Shocky spent in an earthly paradise, the Sunday that Mrs. Thomson spent with Shocky instead of old Mowley, the Sunday that Miss Nancy thought was "just like heaven," was also an eventful Sunday with Bud Means. He had long adored Miss Martha in his secret heart, but, like many other giants, while brave enough to face and fight dragons, he was a coward in the presence of the woman that he loved. Let us honor him for it. The man who loves a woman truly, reverences her profoundly and feels abashed in her presence. The man who is never abashed in the presence of womanhood, the man who tells his love without a tremor, is a shallow egotist. Bud's nature was not fine. But it was deep, true, and manly. To him Martha Hawkins was the chief of women. What was he that he should aspire to possess her? And yet on that Sunday, with his crippled arm carefully bound up, with his cleanest shirt, and with his heavy boots freshly oiled with the fat of the raccoon, he started hopefully through fields white with snow to the house of Squire Hawkins. When he started his spirits were high, but they descended exactly in proportion to his proximity to the object of his love. He thought himself not dressed well enough He wished his shoulders were not so square, and his arms not so stout. He wished that he had book-larnin' enough to court in nice, big words. And so, by recounting his own deficiencies, he succeeded in making himself feel weak, and awkward, and generally good-for-nothing, by the time he walked up between the rows of dead hollyhocks to the Squire's front door, to tap at which took all his remaining strength. Miss Martha received her perspiring lover most graciously, but this only convinced Bud more than ever that she was a superior being. If she had slighted him a bit, so as to awaken his combativeness, his bashfulness might have disappeared. It was in vain that Martha inquired about his arm and complimented his courage. Bud could only think of his big feet, his clumsy hands, and his slow tongue. He answered in monosyllables, using his red silk handkerchief diligently. "Is your arm improving?" asked Miss Hawkins. "Yes, I think it is," said Bud, hastily crossing his right leg over his left, and trying to get his fists out of sight. "Have you heard from Mr. Pearson?" "No, I ha'n't," answered Bud, removing his right foot to the floor again, because it looked so big, and trying to push his left hand into his pocket. "Beautiful sunshine, isn't it?" said Martha. "Yes, 'tis," answered Bud, sticking his right foot up on the rung of the chair and putting his right hand behind him. "This snow looks like the snow we have at the East," said Martha. "It snowed that way the time I was to Bosting." "Did it?" said Bud, not thinking of the snow at all nor of Boston, but thinking how much better he would have appeared had he left his arms and legs at home. "I suppose Mr. Hartsook rode your horse to Lewisburg?" "Yes, he did;" and Bud hung both hands at his side. "You were very kind." This set Bud's heart a-going so that he could not say anything, but he looked eloquently at Miss Hawkins, drew both feet under the chair, and rammed his hands into his pockets. Then, suddenly remembering how awkward he must look, he immediately pulled his hands out again, and crossed his legs. There was a silence of a few minutes, during which Bud made up his mind to do the most desperate thing he could think of--to declare his love and take the consequences. "You see, Miss Hawkins," he began, forgetting boots and fists in his agony, "I thought as how I'd come over here to-day, and"--but here his heart failed him utterly--"and--see--you." "I'm glad to see you, Mr. Means." "And I thought I'd tell you"--Martha was sure it was coming now, for Bud was in dead earnest--"and I thought I'd just like to tell you, ef I only know'd jest how to tell it right"--here Bud got frightened, and did not dare close the sentence as he had intended--"I thought as how you might like to know--or ruther I wanted to tell you--that--the--that I--that we--all of us--think--that--I--that we are going to have a spellin'-school a Chewsday night." "I'm real glad to hear it," said the bland but disappointed Martha. "We used to have spelling-schools at the East." But Miss Martha could not remember that they had them "to Bosting." Hard as it is for a bashful man to talk, it is still more difficult for him to close the conversation. Most men like to leave a favorable impression, and a bashful man is always waiting with the forlorn hope that some favorable turn in the talk may let him out without absolute discomfiture. And so Bud stayed a long time, and how he ever did get away he never could tell. CHAPTER XXVI. A LETTER AND ITS CONSEQUENCES. "SQUAR HAUKINS "this is too Lett u no that u beter be Keerful hoo yoo an yore familly tacks cides with fer peepl wont Stan it too hev the Men wat's sportin the wuns wat's robin us, sported bi yor Fokes kepin kumpne with 'em, u been a ossifer ov the Lau, yor Ha wil bern as qick as to an yor Barn tu, so Tak kere. No mor ad pressnt." This letter accomplished its purpose. The Squire's spectacles slipped off several times while he read it. His wig had to be adjusted. If he had been threatened personally he would not have minded it so much. But the hay stacks were dearer to him than the apple of his glass eye. The barn was more precious than his wig. And those who hoped to touch Bud in a tender place through this letter knew the Squire's weakness far better than they knew the spelling-book. To see his new red barn with its large "Mormon" hay-press inside, and the mounted Indian on the vane, consumed, was too much for the Hawkins heart to stand. Evidently the danger was on the side of his niece. But how should he influence Martha to give up Bud? Martha did not value the hay-stacks half so highly as she did her lover. Martha did not think the new red barn, with the great Mormon press inside and the galloping Indian on the vane, worth half so much as a moral principle or a kind-hearted action. Martha, bless her! would have sacrificed anything rather than forsake the poor. But Squire Hawkins's lips shut tight over his false teeth in a way that suggested astringent purse-strings, and Squire Hawkins could not sleep at night if the new red barn, with the galloping Indian on the vane, were in danger. Martha must be reached somehow. So, with many adjustings of that most adjustable wig? with many turnings of that reversible glass eye? the Squire managed to frighten Martha by the intimation that he had been threatened, and to make her understand, what it cost her much to understand, that she must turn the cold shoulder to chivalrous, awkward Bud, whom she loved most tenderly, partly, perhaps, because he did not remind her of anybody she had ever known at the East. Tuesday evening was the fatal time. Spelling-school was the fatal occasion. Bud was the victim. Pete Jones had his revenge. For Bud had been all the evening trying to muster courage enough to offer himself as Martha's escort. He was not encouraged by the fact that he had spelled even worse than usual, while Martha had distinguished herself by holding her ground against Jeems Phillips for half an hour. But he screwed his courage to the sticking place, not by quoting to himself the adage, "Faint heart never won fair lady," which, indeed, he had never heard, but by reminding himself that "ef you don't resk notin' you'll never git nothin'." So, when the spelling-school had adjourned, he sidled up to her, and, looking dreadfully solemn and a little foolish, he said: "Kin I see you safe home?" And she, with a feeling that her uncle's life was in danger, and that his salvation depended upon her resolution--she, with a feeling that she was pronouncing sentence of death on her own great hope, answered huskily: "No, I thank you." If she had only known that it was the red barn with the Indian on top that was in danger, she would probably have let the galloping brave take care of himself. It seemed to Bud, as he walked home mortified, disgraced, disappointed, hopeless, that all the world had gone down in a whirlpool of despair. "Might a knowed it," he said to himself. "Of course, a smart gal like Martha a'n't agoin' to take a big, blunderin' fool that can't spell in two syllables. What's the use of tryin'? A Flat Cricker Is a Flat Cricker. You can't make nothin' else of him, no more nor you can make a Chiny hog into a Berkshire." CHAPTER XXVII. A LOSS AND A GAIN. Dr. Small, silent, attentive, assiduous Dr. Small, set himself to work to bind up the wounded heart of Bud Means, even as he had bound up his broken arm. The flattery of his fine eyes, which looked at Bud's muscles so admiringly, which gave attention to his lightest remark, was not lost on the young Flat Creek Hercules. Outwardly at least Pete Jones showed no inclination to revenge himself on Bud. Was it respect for muscle, or was it the influence of Small? At any rate, the concentrated extract of the resentment of Pete Jones and his clique was now ready to empty itself upon the head of Hartsook. And Ralph found himself in his dire extremity without even the support of Bud, whose good resolutions seemed to give way all at once. There have been many men of culture and more favorable surroundings who have thrown themselves away with less provocation. As it was, Bud quit school, avoided Ralph, and seemed more than ever under the influence of Dr. Small, besides becoming the intimate of Walter Johnson, Small's student and Mrs. Matilda White's son. They made a strange pair--Bud with his firm jaw and silent, cautious manner, and Walter Johnson with his weak chin, his nice neck-ties, and general dandy appearance. To be thus deserted in his darkest hour by his only friend was the bitterest ingredient in Ralph's cup. In vain he sought an interview. Bud always eluded him. While by all the faces about him Ralph learned that the storm was getting nearer and nearer to himself. It might delay. If it had been Pete Jones alone, it might blow over. But Ralph felt sure that the relentless hand of Dr. Small was present in all his troubles. And he had only to look into Small's eye to know how inextinguishable was a malignity that burned so steadily and so quietly. But there is no cup of unmixed bitterness. With an innocent man there is no night so dark that some star does not shine. Ralph had one strong sheet-anchor. On his return from Lewisburg on Monday Bud had handed him a note, written on common blue foolscap, in round, old-fashioned hand. It ran: "Dear Sir: Anybody who can do so good a thing as you did for our Shocky, can not be bad. I hope you will forgive me. All the appearances in the world, and all that anybody says, can not make me think you anything else but a good man. I hope God will reward you. You must not answer this, and you hadn't better see me again, or think any more of what you spoke about the other night. I shall be a slave for three years more, and then I must work for my mother and Shocky; but I felt so bad to think that I had spoken so hard to you, that I could not help writing this. Respectfully, "HANNAH THOMSON. "To MR. R. HARTSOOK, ESQ." Ralph read it over and over. What else he did with it I shall not tell. You want to know whether he kissed it, and put it into his bosom. Many a man as intelligent and manly as Hartsook has done quite as foolish a thing as that. You have been a little silly perhaps--if it is silly--and you have acted in a sentimental sort of a way over such things. But it would never do for me to tell you what Ralph did. Whether he put the letter into his bosom or not, he put the words into his heart, and, metaphorically speaking, he shook that little blue billet, written on coarse foolscap paper--he shook that little letter full of confidence, in the face and eyes of all the calamities that haunted him. If Hannah believed in him, the whole world might distrust him. When Hannah was in one scale and the whole world in the other, of what account was the world? Justice may be blind, but all the pictures of blind cupids in the world can not make Love blind. And it was well that Ralph weighed things in this way. For the time was come in which he needed all the courage the blue billet could give him. CHAPTER XXVIII. THE FLIGHT. About ten days after Ralph's return to Flat Creek things came to a crisis. The master was rather relieved at first to have the crisis come. He had been holding juvenile Flat Creek under his feet by sheer force of will. And such an exercise of "psychic power" is very exhausting. In racing on the Ohio the engineer sometimes sends the largest of the firemen to hold the safety valve down, and this he does by hanging himself to the lever by his hands. Ralph felt that he had been holding the safety-valve down, and that he was so weary of the operation that an explosion would be a real relief. He was a little tired of having everybody look on him as a thief. It was a little irksome to know that new bolts were put on the doors of the houses in which he had staid. And now that Shocky was gone, and Bud had turned against him, and Aunt Matilda suspected him, and even poor, weak, exquisite Walter Johnson would not associate with him, he felt himself an outlaw indeed. He would have gone away to Texas or the new gold fields in California had It not been for one thing. That letter on blue foolscap paper kept a little warmth in his heart. His course from school on the evening that something happened lay through the sugar-camp. Among the dark trunks of the maples, solemn and lofty pillars, he debated the case. To stay, or to flee? The worn nerves could not keep their present tension much longer. It was just by the brook, or, as they say in Indiana, the "branch[26]," that something happened which brought him to a sudden decision. Ralph never afterward could forget that brook. It was a swift-running little stream, that did not babble blatantly over the stones. It ran through a thicket of willows, through the sugar-camp, and out into Means's pasture. Ralph had just passed through the thicket, had just crossed the brook on the half-decayed log that spanned it, when, as he emerged from the water-willows on the other side, he started with a sudden shock. For there was Hannah, with a white, white face, holding out a little note folded like an old-fashioned thumb-paper. "Go quick!" she stammered as she slipped it Into Ralph's hand, inadvertently touching his fingers with her own--a touch that went tingling through the school-master's nerves. But she had hardly said the words until she was gone down the brookside path and over into the pasture. A few minutes afterward she drove the cows up into the lot and meekly took her scolding from Mrs. Means for being gone sech an awful long time, like a lazy, good-fer-nothin piece of goods that she was. Ralph opened the thumb-paper note, written on a page torn from an old copy-book, in Bud's "hand-write" and running: "Mr. Heartsook "deer Sur: "I Put in my best licks, taint no use. Run fer yore life. A plans on foot to tar an fether or wuss to-night. Go rite off. Things is awful juberous[27]. "BUD." The first question with Ralph was whether he could depend on Bud. But he soon made up his mind that treachery of any sort was not one of his traits. He had mourned over the destruction of Bud's good resolutions by Martha Hawkins's refusal, and being a disinterested party he could have comforted Bud by explaining Martha's "mitten." But he felt sure that Bud was not treacherous. It was a relief, then, as he stood there to know that the false truce was over, and worst had come to worst. His first impulse was to stay and fight. But his nerves were not strong enough to execute so foolhardy a resolution. He seemed to see a man behind every maple-trunk. Darkness was fast coming on, and he knew that his absence from supper at his boarding-place could not fail to excite suspicion. There was no time to be lost. So he started. Once run from a danger, and panic is apt to ensue. The forest; the stalk-fields, the dark hollows through which he passed, seemed to be peopled with terrors. He knew Small and Jones well enough to know that every avenue of escape would be carefully picketed. So there was nothing to do but to take the shortest path to the old trysting place, the Spring-in-rock. Here he sat and shook with terror. Angry with himself, he inly denounced himself for a coward. But the effect was really a physical one. The chill and panic now were the reaction from the previous strain. For when the sound of his pursuers' voices broke upon his ears early in the evening, Ralph shook no more; the warm blood set back again toward the extremities, and his self-control returned when he needed it. He gathered some stones about him, as the only weapons of defense at hand. The mob was on the cliff above. But he thought that he heard footsteps in the bed of the creek below. If this were so, there could be no doubt that his hiding-place was suspected. "O Hank!" shouted Bud from the top of the cliff to some one in the creek below, "be sure to look at the Spring-in-rock--I think he's there." This hint was not lost on Ralph, who speedily changed his quarters by climbing up to a secluded, shelf-like ledge above the spring. He was none too soon, for Pete Jones and Hank Banta were soon looking all around the spring for him, while he held a twenty-pound stone over their heads ready to drop upon them in case they should think of looking on the ledge above. When the crowd were gone Ralph knew that one road was open to him. He could follow down the creek to Clifty, and thence he might escape. But, traveling down to Clifty, he debated whether it was best to escape. To flee was to confess his guilt, to make himself an outlaw, to put an insurmountable barrier between himself and Hannah, whose terror-stricken and anxious face as she stood by the brook-willows haunted him now, and was an involuntary witness to her love. Long before he reached Clifty his mind was made up not to flee another mile. He knocked at the door of Squire Underwood. But Squire Underwood was also a doctor, and had been called away. He knocked at the door of Squire Doolittle. But Squire Doolittle had gone to Lewisburg. He was about to give up all hope of being able to surrender himself to the law when he met Squire Hawkins, who had come over to Clifty to avoid responsibility for the ill-deeds of his neighbors which he was powerless to prevent. "Is that you, Mr. Hartsook?" "Yes, and I want you to arrest me and try me here in Clifty." FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 26: I have already mentioned the absence of _pail_ and _pare_ from the ancient Hoosier folk-speech. _Brook_ is likewise absent. The illiterate Indiana countryman before the Civil War, let us say, had no pails, pared no apples, husked no corn, crossed no brooks. The same is true, I believe, of the South generally. As the first settlers on the Southern coast entered the land by the rivers, each smaller stream was regarded as a branch of the larger one. A small stream was therefore called a _branch_. The word brook was probably lost in the first generation. But a small stream is often called a _run_ in the Middle and Southern belt. Halliwell gives _rundel_ as used with the same signification in England, and he gives _ryn_ in the same sense from an old manuscript.] [Footnote 27: _Juberous_ is in none of the vocabularies that I have seen. I once treated this word in print as an undoubted corruption of _dubious_, and when used subjectively it apparently feels the influence of dubious, as where one says: "I feel mighty juberous about it." But it is much oftener applied as in the text to the object of fear, as "The bridge looks kind o' juberous." Halliwell gives the verb _juberd_ and defines it as "to jeopard or endanger." It is clearly a dialect form of _jeopard_, and I make no doubt that _juberous_ is a dialect variation of _jeopardous_, occasionally used as a form of _dubious_.] CHAPTER XXIX. THE TRIAL. The "prosecuting attorney" (for so the State's attorney is called in Indiana) had been sent for the night before. Ralph refused all legal help. It was not wise to reject counsel, but all his blood was up, and he declared that he would not be cleared by legal quibbles. If his innocence were not made evident to everybody, he would rather not be acquitted on a preliminary examination. He would go over to the circuit court and have the matter sifted to the bottom. But he would have been pleased had his uncle offered his counsel, though he would have declined it. He would have felt better to have had a letter from home somewhat different from the one he received from his Aunt Matilda by the hand of the prosecuting attorney. It was not very encouraging or very sympathetic, though it was very characteristic. "Dear Ralph: "This is what I have always been afraid of. I warned you faithfully the last time I saw you. My skirts are clear of your blood, I can not consent for your uncle to appear as your counsel or to go your bail. You know how much it would injure him in the county, and he has no right to suffer for your evil acts. O my dear nephew! for the sake of your poor, dead mother--" We never shall know what the rest of that letter was. Whenever Aunt Matilda got to Ralph's poor, dead mother in her conversation Ralph ran out of the house. And now that his poor, dead mother was again made to do service in his aunt's pious rhetoric, he landed the letter on the hot coals before him, and watched it vanish into smoke with a grim satisfaction. Ralph was a little afraid of a mob. But Clifty was better than Flat Creek, and Squire Hawkins, with all his faults, loved justice, and had a profound respect for the majesty of the law, and a profound respect for his own majesty when sitting as a court representing the law. Whatever maneuvers he might resort to in business affairs in order to avoid a conflict with his lawless neighbors, he was courageous and inflexible on the bench. The Squire was the better part of him. With the co-operation of the constable, he had organized a _posse_ of men who could be depended on to enforce the law against a mob. By the time the trial opened in the large school-house in Clifty at eleven o'clock, all the surrounding country had emptied its population into Clifty, and all Flat Creek was on hand ready to testify to something. Those who knew the least appeared to know the most, and were prodigal of their significant winks and nods. Mrs. Means had always suspected him. She seed some mighty suspicious things about him from the word go. She'd allers had her doubts whether he was jist the thing, and ef her ole man had axed her, liker-n not he never'd a been hired. She'd seed things with her own livin' eyes that beat all she ever seed in all her born days. And Pete Jones said he'd allers knowed ther warn't no good in sech a feller. Couldn't stay abed when he got there. And Granny Sanders said, Law's sakes! nobody'd ever a found him out ef it hadn't been fer her. Didn't she go all over the neighborhood a-warnin' people? Fer her part, she seed straight through that piece of goods. He was fond of the gals, too! Nothing was so great a crime in her eyes as to be fond of the gals. The constable paid unwitting tribute to William the Conquerer by crying Squire Hawkins's court open with an Oyez! or, as he said, "O yes!" and the Squire asked Squire Underwood, who came in at that minute, to sit with him. From the start, it was evident to Ralph that the prosecuting attorney had been thoroughly posted by Small, though, looking at that worthy's face, one would have thought him the most disinterested and philosophical spectator in the court-room. Bronson, the prosecutor, was a young man, and this was his first case since his election. He was very ambitious to distinguish himself, very anxious to have Flat Creek influence on his side in politics; and, consequently, he was very determined to send Ralph Hartsook to State prison, justly or unjustly, by fair means or foul. To his professional eyes this was not a question of right and wrong, not a question of life or death to such a man as Ralph. It was George H. Bronson's opportunity to distinguish himself. And so, with many knowing and confident nods and hints, and with much deference to the two squires, he opened the case, affecting great indignation at Ralph's wickedness, and uttering Delphic hints about striped pants and shaven head, and the grating of prison-doors at Jeffersonville. "And, now, if the court please, I am about to call a witness whose testimony is very important indeed. Mrs. Sarah Jane Means will please step forward and be sworn." This Mrs. Means did with alacrity. She had met the prosecutor, and impressed him with her dark hints. She was sworn. "Now, Mrs. Means, have the goodness to tell us what you know of the robbery at the house of Peter Schroeder, and the part defendant had in it." "Well, you see, I allers suspected that air young man--" Here Squire Underwood stopped her, and told her that she must not tell her suspicions, but facts. "Well, it's facts I am a-going to tell," she sniffed indignantly. "It's facts that I mean to tell." Here her voice rose to a keen pitch, and she began to abuse the defendant. Again and again the court insisted that she must tell what there was suspicious about the school-master. At last she got it out. "Well, fer one thing, what kind of gals did he go with? Hey? Why, with my bound gal, Hanner, a-loafin' along through the blue-grass paster at ten o'clock, and keepin' that gal that's got no protector but me out that a-way, and destroyin' her character by his company, that a'n't fit fer nobody." Here Bronson saw that he had caught a tartar. He said he had no more questions to ask of Mrs. Means, and that, unless the defendant wished to cross-question her, she could stand aside. Ralph said he would like to ask her one question. "Did I ever go with your daughter Miranda?" "No, you didn't," answered the witness, with a tone and a toss of the head that let the cat out, and set the court-room in a giggle. Bronson saw that he was gaining nothing, and now resolved to follow the line which Small had indicated. Pete Jones was called, and swore point-blank that he heard Ralph go out of the house soon after he went to bed, and that he heard him return at two in the morning. This testimony was given without hesitation, and made a great impression against Ralph in the minds of the justices. Mrs. Jones, a poor, brow-beaten woman, came on the stand in a frightened way, and swore to the same lies as her husband. Ralph cross-questioned her, but her part had been well learned. There, seemed now little hope for Ralph. But just at this moment who should stride into the school-house but Pearson, the one-legged old soldier basket-maker? He had crept home the night before, "to see ef the ole woman didn't want somethin'," and hearing of Ralph's arrest, he concluded that the time for him to make "a forrard movement" had come, and so he determined to face the foe. "Looky here, Squar," he said, wiping the perspiration from his brow, "looky here. I jes want to say that I kin tell as much about this case as anybody." "Let us hear it, then," said Bronson, who thought he would nail Ralph now for certain. So, with many allusions to the time he fit at Lundy's Lane, and some indignant remarks about the pack of thieves that driv him off, and a passing tribute to Miss Martha Hawkins, and sundry other digressions, in which he had to be checked, the old man told how he'd drunk whisky at Welch's store that night, and how Welch's whisky was all-fired mean, and how it allers went straight to his head, and how he had got a leetle too much, and how he had felt kyinder gin aout by the time he got to the blacksmith's shop, and how he had laid down to rest, and how as he s'posed the boys had crated him, and how he thought it war all-fired mean to crate a old soldier what fit the Britishers, and lost his leg by one of the blamed critters a-punchin' his bagonet[28] through it; and how when he woke up it was all-fired cold, and how he rolled off the crate and went on to_wurds_ home, and how when he got up to the top of Means's hill he met Pete Jones and Bill Jones, and a slim sort of a young man, a-ridin'; and how he know'd the Joneses by ther hosses, and some more things of that kyind about 'em; but he didn't know the slim young man, tho' he tho't he might tell him ef he seed him agin kase he was dressed up so slick and town-like. But blamed ef he didn't think it hard that a passel o thieves sech as the Joneses should try to put ther mean things on to a man like the master, that was so kyind to him and to Shocky, tho', fer that matter, blamed ef he didn't think we was all selfish, akordin' to his tell. Had seed somebody that night a-crossin' over the blue-grass paster. Didn't know who in thunder 'twas, but it was somebody a-makin' straight fer Pete Jones's. Hadn't seed nobody else, 'ceptin' Dr. Small, a short ways behind the Joneses. Hannah was now brought on the stand. She was greatly agitated, and answered with much reluctance. Lived at Mr. Means's. Was eighteen years of age in October. Had been bound to Mrs. Means three years ago. Had walked home with Mr. Hartsook that evening, and, happening to look out of the window toward morning, she saw some one cross the pasture. Did not know who it was. Thought it was Mr. Hartsook. Here Mr. Bronson (evidently prompted by a suggestion that came from what Small had overheard when he listened in the barn) asked her if Mr. Hartsook had ever said anything to her about the matter afterward. After some hesitation, Hannah said that he had said that he crossed the pasture. Of his own accord? No, she spoke of it first. Had Mr. Hartsook offered any explanations? No, he hadn't. Had he ever paid her any attention afterward? No. Ralph declined to cross-question Hannah. To him she never seemed so fair as when telling the truth so sublimely. Bronson now informed the court that this little trick of having the old soldier happen in, in the flick of time, wouldn't save the prisoner at the bar from the just punishment which an outraged law visited upon such crimes as his. He regretted that his duty as a public prosecutor caused it to fall to his lot to marshal the evidence that was to blight the prospects and blast the character, and annihilate for ever, so able and promising a young man, but that the law knew no difference between the educated and the uneducated, and that for his part he thought Hartsook a most dangerous foe to the peace of society. The evidence already given fastened suspicion upon him. The prisoner had not yet been able to break its force at all. The prisoner had not even dared to try to explain to a young lady the reason for his being out at night. He would now conclude by giving the last touch to the dark evidence that would sink the once fair name of Ralph Hartsook in a hundred fathoms of infamy. He would ask that Henry Banta be called. Hank came forward sheepishly, and was sworn. Lived about a hundred yards from the house that was robbed. He seen ole man Pearson and the master and one other feller that he didn't know come away from there together about one o'clock. He heerd the horses kickin', and went out to the stable to see about them. He seed two men come out of Schroeder's back door and meet one man standing at the gate. When they got closter he knowed Pearson by his wooden leg and the master by his hat. On cross-examination he was a little confused when asked why he hadn't told of it before, but said that he was afraid to say much, bekase the folks was a-talkin' about hanging the master, and he didn't want no lynchin'. The prosecution here rested, Bronson maintaining that there was enough evidence to justify Ralph's committal to await trial. But the court thought that as the defendant had no counsel and offered no rebutting testimony, it would be only fair to hear what the prisoner had to say in his own defense. All this while poor Ralph was looking about the room for Bud. Bud's actions had of late been strangely contradictory. But had he turned coward and deserted his friend? Why else did he avoid the session of the court? After asking himself such questions as these, Ralph would wonder at his own folly. What could Bud do if he were there? There was no human power that could prevent the victim of so vile a conspiracy as this, lodging in that worst of State prisons at Jeffersonville, a place too bad for criminals. But when there is no human power to help, how naturally does the human mind look for some divine intervention on the side of Right! And Ralph's faith in Providence looked in the direction of Bud. But since no Bud came, he shut down the valves and rose to his feet, proudly, defiantly, fiercely calm. "It's of no use for me to say anything. Peter Jones has sworn to a deliberate falsehood, and he knows it. He has made his wife perjure her poor soul that she dare not call her own." Here Pete's fists clenched, but Ralph in his present humor did not care for mobs. The spirit of the bulldog had complete possession of him. "It is of no use for me to tell you that Henry Banta has sworn to a lie, partly to revenge himself on me for punishments I have given him, and partly, perhaps, for money. The real thieves are in this court-room. I could put my finger on them." "_To_ be sure," responded the old basket-maker. Ralph looked at Pete Jones, then at Small. The fiercely calm look attracted the attention of the people. He knew that this look would probably cost him his life before the next morning. But he did not care for life. "The testimony of Miss Hannah Thomson is every word true, I believe that of Mr. Pearson to be true. The rest is false. But I can not prove it. I know the men I have to deal with. I shall not escape with State prison. They will not spare my life. But the people of Clifty will one day find out who are the thieves." Ralph then proceeded to tell how he had left Pete Jones's, Mr. Jones's bed being uncomfortable; how he had walked through the pasture; how he had seen three men on horseback: how he had noticed the sorrel with the white left forefoot and white nose; how he had seen Dr. Small; how, after his return, he had heard some one enter the house, and how he had recognized the horse the next morning. "There," said Ralph desperately, leveling his finger at Pete, "there is a man who will yet see the inside of a penitentiary, I shall not live to see it, but the rest of you will." Pete quailed. Ralph's speech could not of course break the force of the testimony against him. But it had its effect, and it had effect enough to alarm Bronson, who rose and said: "I should like to ask the prisoner at the bar one question." "Ask me a dozen," said Hartsook, looking more like a king than a criminal. "Well, then, Mr. Hartsook. You need not answer unless you choose; but what prompted you to take the direction you did in your walk on that evening?" This shot brought Ralph down. To answer this question truly would attach to friendless Hannah Thomson some of the disgrace that now belonged to him. "I decline to answer," said Ralph. "Of course, I do not want the prisoner to criminate himself," said Bronson significantly. During this last passage Bud had come in, but, to Ralph's disappointment he remained near the door, talking to Walter Johnson, who had come with him. The magistrates put their heads together to fix the amount of bail, and, as they differed, talked for some minutes. Small now for the first time thought best to make a move in his own proper person. He could hardly have been afraid of Ralph's acquittal. He may have been a little anxious at the manner in which he had been mentioned, and at the significant look of Ralph, and he probably meant to excite indignation enough against the school-master to break the force of his speech, and secure the lynching of the prisoner, chiefly by people outside his gang. He rose and asked the court in gentlest tones to hear him. He had no personal interest in this trial, except his interest in the welfare of his old schoolmate, Mr. Hartsook. He was grieved and disappointed to find the evidence against him so damaging and he would not for the world add a feather to it, if it were not that his own name had been twice alluded to by the defendant, and by his friend, and perhaps his confederate, John Pearson. He was prepared to swear that he was not over in Flat Creek the night of the robbery later than ten o'clock, and while the statements of the two persons alluded to, whether maliciously intended or not, could not implicate him at all, he thought perhaps this lack of veracity in their statements might be of weight in determining some other points. He therefore suggested--he could only suggest, as he was not a party to the case in any way--that his student, Mr. Walter Johnson, be called to testify as to his--Dr. Small's--exact whereabouts on the night in question. They were together in his office until two, when he went to the tavern and went to bed. Squire Hawkins, having adjusted his teeth, his wig, and his glass eye, thanked Dr. Small for a suggestion so valuable, and thought best to put John Pearson under arrest before proceeding further. Mr. Pearson was therefore arrested, and was heard to mutter something about a "passel of thieves," when the court warned him to be quiet. Walter Johnson was then called. But before giving his testimony, I must crave the reader's patience while I go back to some things which happened nearly a week before and which will serve to make it intelligible. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 28: This form, _bagonet_, is not in the vocabularies, but it was spoken as I have written it. The Century Dictionary gives _bagnet_, and Halliwell and Wright both give _baginet_ with the _g_ soft apparently, though neither the one nor the other is very explicit in distinguishing transcriptions from old authors from phonetic spellings of dialect forms. I fancy that this _bagonet_ is impossible as a corruption of _bayonet_, and that it points to some other derivation of that word than the doubtful one from _Bayonne_.] CHAPTER XXX. "BROTHER SODOM." In order to explain Walter Johnson's testimony and his state of mind, I must carry the reader back nearly a week. The scene was Dr. Small's office. Bud and Walter Johnson had been having some confidential conversation that evening, and Bud had got more out of his companion than that exquisite but weak young man had intended. He looked round in a frightened way. "You see," said Walter, "if Small knew I had told you that, I'd get a bullet some night from somebody. But when you're initiated it'll be all right. Sometimes I wish I was out of it. But, you know, Small's this kind of a man. He sees through you. He can look through a door"--and there he shivered, and his voice broke down into a whisper. But Bud was perfectly cool, and doubtless it was the strong coolness of Bud that made Walter, who shuddered at a shadow, come to him for sympathy and unbosom himself of one of his guilty secrets. "Let's go and hear Brother Sodom preach to-night," said Bud. "No, I don't like to." "He don't scare you?" There was just a touch of ridicule in Bud's voice. He knew Walter, and he had not counted amiss when he used this little goad to prick a skin so sensitive. "Brother Sodom" was the nickname given by scoffers to the preacher--Mr. Soden--whose manner of preaching had so aroused Bud's combativeness, and whose saddle-stirrups Bud had helped to amputate. For reasons of his own, Bud thought best to subject young Johnson to the heat of Mr. Soden's furnace. Peter Cartwright boasts that, on a certain occasion, he "shook his brimstone wallet" over the people. Mr. Soden could never preach without his brimstone wallet. There are those of refinement so attenuated that they will not admit that fear can have any place in religion. But a religion without fear could never have evangelized or civilized the West, which at one time bade fair to become a perdition as bad as any that Brother Sodom ever depicted. And against these on the one side, and the Brother Sodoms on the other, I shall interrupt my story to put this chapter under shelter of that wise remark of the great Dr. Adam Clark, who says "The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, the terror of God confounds the soul;" and that other saying of his: "With the _fear_ of God the love of God is ever consistent; but where the _terror_ of the Lord reigns, there can neither be _fear, faith_, nor _love_; nay, nor _hope_ either." And yet I am not sure that even the Brother Sodoms were made in vain. On this evening Mr. Soden was as terrible as usual. Bud heard him without flinching. Small, who sat farther forward, listened with pious approval. Mr. Soden, out of distorted figures pieced together from different passages of Scripture, built a hell, not quite, Miltonic, nor yet Dantean, but as Miltonic and Dantean as his unrefined imagination could make it. As he rose toward his climax of hideous description, Walter Johnson trembled from head to foot and sat close to Bud. Then, as burly Mr. Soden, with great gusto, depicted materialistic tortures that startled the nerves of everybody except Bud, Walter wanted to leave, but Bud would not let him. For some reason he wished to keep his companion in the crucible as long as possible. "Young man!" cried Mr. Soden, and the explosive voice seemed to come from the hell that he had created--"young man! you who have followed the counsel of evil companions"--here he paused and looked about, as if trying to find the man he wanted, while Walter crept up close to Bud and shaded his face--"I mean you who have chosen evil pursuits and who can not get free from bad habits and associations that are dragging you down to hell! You are standing on the very crumbling brink of hell to-night. The smell of the brimstone is on your garments; the hot breath of hell is in your face! The devils are waiting for you! Delay and you are damned! You may die before daylight! You may never get out that door! The awful angel of death is just ready to strike you down!" Here some shrieked with terror, others sobbed, and Brother Sodom looked with approval on the storm he had awakened. The very harshness of his tone, his lofty egotism of manner, that which had roused all Bud's combativeness, shook poor Walter as a wind would shake a reed. In the midst of the general excitement he seized his hat and hastened out the door. Bud followed, while Soden shot his lightnings after them, declaring that "young men who ran away from the truth would dwell in torments forever." Bud had not counted amiss when he thought that Mr. Soden's preaching would be likely to arouse so mean-spirited a fellow as Walter. So vivid was the impression that Johnson begged Bud to return to the office with him. He felt sick, and was afraid that he should die before morning. He insisted that Bud should stay with him all night. To this Means readily consented, and by morning he had heard all that the frightened Walter had to tell. And now let us return to the trial, where Ralph sits waiting the testimony of Walter Johnson, which is to prove his statement false. CHAPTER XXXI. THE TRIAL CONCLUDED. I do not know how much interest the "gentle reader" may feel in Bud. But I venture to hope that there are some Buddhists among my readers who will wish the contradictoriness of his actions explained. The first dash of disappointment had well-nigh upset him. And when a man concludes to throw overboard his good resolutions, he always seeks to avoid the witness of those resolutions. Hence Bud, after that distressful Tuesday evening on which Miss Martha had given him "the sack," wished to see Ralph less than any one else. And yet when he came to suspect Small's villainy, his whole nature revolted at it. But having broken with Ralph, he thought it best to maintain an attitude of apparent hostility, that he might act as a detective, and, perhaps, save his friend from the mischief that threatened him. As soon as he heard of Ralph's arrest he determined to make Walter Johnson tell his own secret in court, because he knew that it would be best for Ralph that Walter should tell it. Bud's telling at second-hand would not be conclusive. And he sincerely desired to save Walter from prison. For Walter Johnson was the victim of Dr. Small, or of Dr. Small and such novels as "The Pirate's Bride," "Claude Duval," "The Wild Rover of the West Indies," and the cheap biographies of such men as Murrell. Small found him with his imagination inflamed by the history of such heroes, and opened to him the path to glory for which he longed. The whole morning after Ralph's arrest Bud was working on Walter's conscience and his fears. The poor fellow, unable to act for himself, was torn asunder between the old ascendency of Small and the new ascendency of Bud Means. Bud finally frightened him, by the fear of the penitentiary, into going to the place of trial. But once inside the door, and once in sight of Small, who was more to him than God, or, rather, more to him than the devil--for the devil was Walter's God, or, perhaps, I should say, Walter's God was a devil--once in sight of Small, he refused to move an inch farther. And Bud, after all his perseverance, was about to give up in sheer despair. Fortunately, just at that moment Small's desire to relieve himself from the taint of suspicion and to crush Ralph as completely as possible, made him overshoot the mark by asking that Walter be called to the stand, as we have before recounted. He knew that he had no tool so supple as the cowardly Walter. In the very language of the request, he had given Walter an intimation of what he wanted him to swear to. Walter listened to Small's words as to his doom. He felt that he should die of indecision. The perdition of a man of his stamp is to have to make up his mind. Such men generally fall back on some one more positive, and take all their resolutions ready-made. But here Walter must decide for himself. For the constable was already calling his name; the court, the spectators, and, most of all, Dr. Small, were waiting for him. He moved forward mechanically through the dense crowd, Bud following part of the way to whisper, "Tell the truth or go to penitentiary." Walter shook and shivered at this. The witness with difficulty held up his hand long enough to be sworn. "Please tell the court," said Bronson, "whether you know anything of the whereabouts of Dr. Small on the night of the robbery at Peter Schroeder's." Small had detected Walter's agitation, and, taking alarm, had edged his way around so as to stand full in Walter's sight, and there, with keen, magnetic eye on the weak orbs of the young man, he was able to assume his old position, and sway the fellow absolutely. "On the night of the robbery"--Walter's voice was weak, but he seemed to be reading his answer out of Small's eyes--"on the night of the robbery Dr. Small came home before--" here the witness stopped and shook and shivered again. For Bud, detecting the effect of Small's gaze, had pushed his great hulk in front of Small, and had fastened his eyes on Walter with a look that said, "Tell the truth or go to penitentiary." "I can't, I can't. O God! What shall I do?" the witness exclaimed, answering the look of Bud. For it seemed to him that Bud had spoken. To the people and the court this agitation was inexplicable. Squire Hawkins's wig got awry, his glass eye turned in toward his nose, and he had great difficulty in keeping his teeth from falling out. The excitement became painfully intense. Ralph was on his feet, looking at the witness, and feeling that somehow Bud and Dr. Small--his good angel and his demon--were playing an awful game, or which he was the stake. The crowd swayed to and fro, but remained utterly silent, waiting to hear the least whisper from the witness, who stood trembling a moment with his hands over his face, and then fainted. The fainting of a person in a crowd is a signal for everybody else to make fools of themselves. There was a rush toward the fainting man, there was a cry for water. Everybody asked everybody else to open the window, and everybody wished everybody else to stand back and give him air. But nobody opened the window, and nobody stood back. The only perfectly cool man in the room was Small. With a quiet air of professional authority he pushed forward and felt the patient's pulse, remarking to the court that he thought it was a sudden attack of fever with delirium. When Walter revived, Dr. Small would have removed him, but Ralph insisted that his testimony should be heard. Under pretense of watching his patient, Small kept close to him. And Walter began the same old story about Dr. Small's having arrived at the office before eleven o'clock, when Bud came up behind the doctor and fastened his eyes on the witness with the same significant look, and Walter, with visions of the penitentiary before him halted, stammered, and seemed about to faint again. "If the court please," said Bronson, "this witness is evidently intimidated by that stout young man," pointing to Bud. "I have seen him twice interrupt witness's testimony by casting threatening looks at him, I trust the court will have him removed from the court-room." After a few moments' consultation, during which Squire Hawkins held his wig in place with one hand and alternately adjusted his eye and his spectacles with the other, the magistrates, who were utterly bewildered by the turn things were taking, decided that It could do no harm, and that it was best to try the experiment of removing Bud. Perhaps Johnson would then be able to get through with his testimony. The constable therefore asked Bud if he would please leave the room. Bud cast one last look at the witness and walked out like a captive bear. Ralph stood watching the receding form of Bud. The emergency had made him as cool as Small ever was. Bud stopped at the door, where he was completely out of sight of the witness, concealed by the excited spectators, who stood on the benches to see what was going on in front. "The witness will please proceed," said Bronson. "If the court please"--it was Ralph who spoke--"I believe I have as much at stake in this trial as any one. That witness is evidently intimidated. But not by Mr. Means. I ask that Dr. Small be removed out of sight of the witness." "A most extraordinary request, truly." This was what Small's bland countenance said; he did not open his lips. "It's no more than fair," said Squire Hawkins, adjusting his wig, "that the witness be relieved of everything that anybody might think affects his veracity in this matter." Dr. Small, giving Walter one friendly, appealing look, moved back by the door, and stood alongside Bud, as meek, quiet, and disinterested as any man in the house. "The witness will now proceed with his testimony." This time it was Squire Hawkins who spoke. Bronson had been attacked with a suspicion that this witness was not just what he wanted, and had relapsed into silence. Walter's struggle was by no means ended by the disappearance of Small and Bud. There came the recollection of his mother's stern face--a face which had never been a motive toward the right, but only a goad to deception. What would she say if he should confess? Just as he had recovered himself, and was about to repeat the old lie which had twice died upon his lips at the sight of Bud's look, he caught sight of another face, which made him tremble again. It was the lofty and terrible countenance of Mr. Soden. One might have thought, from the expression it wore, that the seven last vials were in his hands, the seven apocalyptic trumpets waiting for his lips, and the seven thunders sitting upon his eyebrows. The moment that Walter saw him he smelled the brimstone on his own garments, he felt himself upon the crumbling brink of the precipice, with perdition below him. Now I am sure that "Brother Sodoms" were not made wholly in vain. There are plenty of mean-spirited men like Walter Johnson, whose feeble consciences need all the support they can get from the fear of perdition, and who are incapable of any other conception of it than a coarse and materialistic ones Let us set it down to the credit of Brother Sodom, with his stiff stock, his thunderous face, and his awful walk, that his influence over Walter was on the side of truth. "Please proceed," said Squire Hawkins to Walter. The Squire's wig lay on one side, he had forgotten to adjust his eye, and he leaned forward, tremulous with interest. "Well, then," said Walter, looking not at the court nor at Bronson nor at the prisoner, but furtively at Mr. Soden--"well, then, if I must"--and Mr. Soden's awful face seemed to answer that he surely must--"well, then, I hope you won't send me to prison"--this to Squire Hawkins, whose face reassured him--"but, oh! I don't see how I can!" But one look at Mr. Soden assured him that he could and that he must, and so, with an agony painful to the spectators, he told the story in driblets. How, while yet in Lewisburg, he had been made a member of a gang of which Small was chief; how they concealed from him the names of all the band except six, of whom the Joneses and Small were three. Here there was a scuffle at the door. The court demanded silence. "Dr. Small's trying to git out, plague take him," said Bud, who stood with his back planted against the door. "I'd like the court to send and git his trunk afore he has a chance to burn up all the papers that's in it." "Constable, you will arrest Dr. Small, Peter Jones, and William Jones. Send two deputies to bring Small's trunk into court," said Squire Underwood. The prosecuting attorney was silent. Walter then told of the robbery at Schroeder's, told where he and Small had whittled the fence while the Joneses entered the house, and confirmed Ralph's story by telling how they had seen Ralph in a fence-corner, and how they had met the basket-maker on the hill. "_To_ be sure," said the old man, who had not ventured to hold up his head, after he was arrested, until Walter began his testimony. Walter felt inclined to stop, but he could not do it, for there stood Mr. Soden, looking to him like a messenger from the skies, or the bottomless pit, sent to extort the last word from his guilty soul He felt that he was making a clean breast of it--at the risk of perdition, with the penitentiary thrown in, if he faltered. And so he told the whole thing as though it had been the day of doom, and by the time he was through, Small's trunk was in court. Here a new hubbub took place at the door. It was none other than the crazy pauper, Tom Bifield, who personated General Andrew Jackson in the poor-house. He had caught some inkling of the trial, and had escaped in Bill Jones's absence. His red plume was flying, and in his tattered and filthy garb he was indeed a picturesque figure. "Squar," said he, elbowing his way through the crowd, "I kin tell you sornethin'. I'm Gineral Andrew Jackson. Lost my head at Bueny Visty. This head growed on. It a'n't good fer much. One side's tater. But t'other's sound as a nut. Now, I kind give you information." Bronson, with the quick perceptions of a politician, had begun to see which way future winds would probably blow. "If the court please," he said, "this man is not wholly sane, but we might get valuable information out of him. I suggest that his testimony be taken for what it is worth." "No, you don't swar me," broke in the lunatic. "Not if I knows myself. You see, when a feller's got one side of his head tater, he's mighty onsartain like. You don't swar me, fer I can't tell what minute the tater side'll begin to talk. I'm talkin' out of the lef' side now, and I'm all right. But you don't swar me. But ef you'll send some of your constables out to the barn at the pore-house and look under the hay-mow in the north-east corner, you'll find some things maybe as has been a-missin' fer some time. And that a'n't out of the tater side, nuther." Meantime Bud did not rest. Hearing the nature of the testimony given by Hank Banta before he entered, he attacked Hank and vowed he'd send him to prison if he didn't make a clean breast. Hank was a thorough coward, and, now that his friends were prisoners, was ready enough to tell the truth if he could be protected from prosecution. Seeing the disposition of the prosecuting attorney, Bud got from him a promise that he would do what he could to protect Hank. That worthy then took the stand, confessed his lie, and even told the inducement which Mr. Pete Jones had offered him to perjure himself. "_To_ be sure," said Pearson. Squire Hawkins, turning his right eye upon him, while the left looked at the ceiling, said: "Be careful, Mr. Pearson, or I shall have to punish you for contempt." "Why, Squar, I didn't know 'twas any sin to hev a healthy contemp' fer sech a thief as Jones!" The Squire looked at Mr. Pearson severely, and the latter, feeling that he had committed some offense without knowing it, subsided into silence. Bronson now had a keen sense of the direction of the gale. "If the court please," said he, "I have tried to do my duty in this case. It was my duty to prosecute Mr. Hartsook, however much I might feel assured that he was innocent, and that he would be able to prove his innocence. I now enter a _nolle_ in his case and that of John Pearson, and I ask that this court adjourn until to-morrow, in order to give me time to examine the evidence in the case of the other parties under arrest. I am proud to think that my efforts have been the means of sifting the matter to the bottom, of freeing Mr. Hartsook from suspicion, and of detecting the real criminals." "Ugh!" said Mr. Pearson, who conceived a great dislike to Bronson. "The court," said Squire Hawkins, "congratulates Mr. Hartsook on his triumphant acquittal. He is discharged from the bar of this court, and from the bar of public sentiment, without a suspicion of guilt. Constable, discharge Ralph Hartsook and John Pearson." Old Jack Means, who had always had a warm side for the master, now proposed three cheers for Mr. Hartsook, and they were given with a will by the people who would have hanged him an hour before. Mrs. Means gave it as her opinion that "Jack Means allers wuz a fool!" "This court," said Dr. Underwood, "has one other duty to perform before adjourning for the day. Recall Hannah Thomson." "I jist started her on ahead to git supper and milk the cows," said Mrs. Means. "A'n't a-goin' to have her loafin' here all day." "Constable, recall her. This court can not adjourn until she returns!" Hannah had gone but a little way, and was soon in the presence of the court, trembling for fear of some new calamity. "Hannah Thomson"--it was Squire Underwood who spoke--"Hannah Thomson, this court wishes to ask you one or two questions." "Yes, sir," but her voice died to a whisper. "How old did you say you were? "Eighteen, sir, last October." "Can you prove your age?" "Yes, sir--by my mother." "For how long are you bound to Mr. Means?" "Till I'm twenty-one." "This court feels in duty bound to inform you that, according to the laws of Indiana, a woman is of age at eighteen, and as no indenture could be made binding after you had reached your majority, you are the victim of a deception. You are free, and if it can be proven that you have been defrauded by a willful deception, a suit for damages will lie." "Ugh!" said Mrs. Means. "You're a purty court, a'n't you, Dr. Underwood?" "Be careful, Mrs. Means, or I shall have to fine you for contempt of court." But the people, who were in the cheering humor, cheered Hannah and the justices, and then cheered Ralph again. Granny Sanders shook hands with him, and allers knowed he'd come out right. It allers 'peared like as if Dr. Small warn't jist the sort to tie to, you know. And old John Pearson went home, after drinking two or three glasses of Welch's whisky, keeping time to an imaginary triumphal march, and feeling prouder than he had ever felt since he fit the Britishers under Scott at Lundy's Lane. He told his wife that the master had jist knocked the hind-sights offen that air young lawyer from Lewisburg. Walter was held to bail that he might appear as a witness, and Ralph might have sent his aunt a Roland for an Oliver. But he only sent a note to his uncle, asking him to go Walter's bail. If he had been resentful, he could not have wished for a more complete revenge than the day had brought. CHAPTER XXXII. AFTER THE BATTLE. Nothing can be more demoralizing in the long run than lynch law. And yet lynch law often originates in a burst of generous indignation which is not willing to suffer a bold oppressor to escape by means of corrupt and cowardly courts. It is oftener born of fear. Both motives powerfully agitated the people of the region round about Clifty as night drew on after Ralph's acquittal. They were justly indignant that Ralph had been made the victim of such a conspiracy, and they were frightened at the unseen danger to the community from such a band as that of Small's. It was certain that they did not know the full extent of the danger as yet. And what Small might do with a jury, or what Pete Jones might do with a sheriff, was a question. I must not detain the reader to tell how the mob rose. Nobody knows how such things come about. Their origin is as inexplicable as that of an earthquake. But, at any rate, a rope was twice put round Small's neck during that night, and both times Small was saved only by the nerve and address of Ralph, who had learned how unjust mob law may be. As for Small, he neither trembled when they were ready to hang him, nor looked relieved when he was saved, nor showed the slightest flush of penitence or gratitude. He bore himself in a quiet, gentlemanly way throughout, like the admirable villain that he was. He waived a preliminary examination the next day; his father went his bail, and he forfeited bail and disappeared from the county and from the horizon of my story. Two reports concerning Small have been in circulation--one that he was running a faro-bank in San Francisco, the other that he was curing consumption in New York by some quack process. If this latter were true, it would leave it an open question whether Ralph did well to save him from the gallows. Pete Jones and Bill, as usually happens to the rougher villains, went to prison, and when their terms had expired moved to Pike County, Missouri. But it is about Hannah that you wish to hear, and that I wish to tell. She went straight from the court room to Flat Creek, climbed to her chamber, packed in a handkerchief all her earthly goods, consisting chiefly of a few family relics, and turned her back on the house of Means forever. At the gate she met the old woman, who shook her fist in the girl's face and gave her a parting benediction in the words: "You mis'able, ongrateful critter you, go 'long. I'm glad to be shed of you!" At the barn she met Bud, and he told her good-by with a little huskiness in his voice, while a tear glistened in her eyes. Bud had been a friend in need, and such a friend one does not leave without a pang. "Where are you going? Can I--" "No, no!" And with that she hastened on, afraid that Bud would offer to hitch up the roan colt. And she did not want to add to his domestic unhappiness by compromising him in that way. It was dusk and was raining when she left. The hours were long, the road was lonely, and after the revelations of that day it did not seem wholly safe. But from the moment that she found herself free, her heart had been ready to break with an impatient homesickness. What though there might be robbers in the woods? What though there were ten rough miles to travel? What though the rain was in her face? What though she had not tasted food since the morning of that exciting day? Flat Creek and bondage were behind; freedom, mother, Shocky, and home were before her, and her feet grew lighter with the thought. And if she needed any other joy, it was to know that the master was clear. And he would come? And so she traversed the weary distance, and so she inquired and found the house, the beautiful, homely old house of beautiful, homely old Nancy Sawyer, and knocked, and was admitted, and fell down, faint and weary, at her blind mother's feet, and laid her tired head in her mother's lap and wept and wept like a child, and said, "O mother! I'm free! I'm free!" while the mother's tears baptized her face, and the mother's trembling fingers combed out her tresses. And Shocky stood by her and cried: "I knowed God wouldn't forget you, Hanner!" Hannah was ready now to do anything by which she could support her mother and Shocky. She was strong, and inured to toil. She was willing and cheerful, and she would gladly have gone to service if by that means she could have supported the family. And, for that matter her mother was already able nearly to support herself by her knitting. But Hannah had been carefully educated when young, and at that moment the old public schools were being organized into a graded school, and the good minister, who shall be nameless, because he is, perhaps, still living in Indiana, and who in Methodist parlance was called "the preacher-in-charge of Lewisburg Station"--this good minister and Miss Nancy Sawyer got Hannah a place as teacher in the primary department. And then a little house with four rooms was rented, and a little, a very little furniture was put into it, and the old sweet home was established again. The father was gone, never to come back again. But the rest were here. And somehow Hannah kept waiting for somebody else to come. CHAPTER XXXIII. INTO THE LIGHT. For two weeks longer Ralph taught at the Flat Creek school-house. He was everybody's hero. And he was Bud's idol. He did what he could to get Bud and Martha together, and though Bud always "saw her safe home" after this, and called on her every Sunday evening, yet, to save his life, he could not forget his big fists and his big feet long enough to say what he most wanted to say, and what Martha most wanted him to say. At the end of two weeks Ralph found himself exceedingly weary of Flat Creek, and exceedingly glad to hear from Mr. Means that the school-money had "gin out." It gave him a good excuse to return to Lewisburg, where his heart and his treasure were. A certain sense of delicacy had kept him from writing to Hannah just yet. When he got to Lewisburg he had good news. His uncle, ashamed of his previous neglect, and perhaps with an eye to his nephew's growing popularity, had got him the charge of the grammar department in the new graded school in the village. So he quietly arranged to board at a boarding-house. His aunt could not have him about, of which fact he was very glad. She could not but feel, she said, that he might have taken better care of Walter than he did, when they were only four miles apart. He did not hasten to call on Hannah. Why should he? He sent her a message, of no consequence in itself, by Nancy Sawyer. Then he took possession of his school; and then, on the evening of the first day of school, he went, as he had appointed to himself, to see Hannah Thomson. And she, with some sweet presentiment, had got things ready by fixing up the scantily-furnished room as well as she could. And Miss Nancy Sawyer, who had seen Ralph that afternoon, had guessed that he was going to see Hannah. It's wonderful how much enjoyment a generous heart can get out of the happiness of others. Is not that what He meant when he said of such as Miss Sawyer that they should have a hundred-fold in this life for all their sacrifices? Did not Miss Nancy enjoy a hundred weddings and have the love of five hundred children? And so Miss Nancy just happened over at Mrs. Thomson's humble home, and, just in the most matter-of-course way, asked that lady and Shocky to come over to her house. Shocky wanted Hannah to come too. But Hannah blushed a little, and said that she would rather not. And when she was left alone, Hannah fixed her hair two or three times, and swept the hearth, and moved the chairs first one way and then another, and did a good many other needless things. Needless: for a lover, if he be a lover, does not see furniture or dress. And then she sat down by the fire, and tried to sew, and tried to look unconcerned, and tried to feel unconcerned, and tried not to expect anybody, and tried to make her heart keep still. And tried in vain. For a gentle rap at the door sent her pulse up twenty beats a minute and made her face burn. And Hartsook was for the first time, abashed in the presence of Hannah. For the oppressed girl had, in two weeks, blossomed out into the full-blown woman. And Ralph sat down by the fire, and talked of his school and her school, and everything else but what he wanted to talk about. And then the conversation drifted back to Flat Creek, and to the walk through the pasture, and to the box-elder tree, and to the painful talk in the lane. And Hannah begged to be forgiven, and Ralph laughed at the idea that she had done anything wrong. And she praised his goodness to Shocky, and he drew her little note out of--But I agreed not tell you where he kept it. And then she blushed, and he told how the note had sustained him, and how her white face kept up his courage in his flight down the bed of Clifty Creek. And he sat a little nearer, to show her the note that he had carried in his bosom--I have told it! And--but I must not proceed. A love-scene, ever so beautiful in itself, will not bear telling. And so I shall leave a little gap just here, which you may fill up as you please. . . . Somehow, they never knew how, they got to talking about the future instead of the past, after that, and to planning their two lives as one life. And . . . And when Miss Nancy and Mrs. Thomson returned later in the evening, Ralph was standing by the mantel-piece, but Shocky noticed that his chair was close to Hannah's. And good Miss Nancy Sawyer looked in Hannah's face and was happy. CHAPTER XXXIV. "HOW IT CAME OUT" We are all children in reading stories. We want more than all else to know how it all came out at the end, and, if our taste is not perverted, we like it to come out well. For my part, ever since I began to write this story, I have been anxious to know how it was going to come out. Well, there were very few invited. It took place at ten in the morning. The "preacher-in-charge" came, of course. Miss Nancy Sawyer was there. But Ralph's uncle was away, and Aunt Matilda had a sore throat and couldn't come. Perhaps the memory of the fact that she had refused Mrs. Thomson, the pauper, a bed for two nights, affected her throat. But Miss Nancy and her sister were there, and the preacher. And that was all, besides the family, and Bud and Martha. Of course Bud and Martha came. And driving Martha to a wedding in a "jumper" was the one opportunity Bud needed. His hands were busy, his big boots were out of sight, and it was so easy to slip from Ralph's love affair to his own, that Bud somehow, in pulling Martha Hawkins's shawl about her, stammered out half a proposal, which Martha, generous soul, took for the whole ceremony, and accepted. And Bud was so happy that Ralph guessed from his face and voice that the agony was over, and Bud was betrothed at last to the "gal as was a gal." And after Ralph and Hannah were married--there was no trip, Ralph only changed his boarding-place and became head of the house at Mrs. Thomson's thereafter--after it was all over, Bud came to Mr. Hartsook, and, snickering just a little, said as how as him and Martha had fixed it all up, and now they wanted to ax his advice; and Martha proud but blushing, came up and nodded assent. Bud said as how as he hadn't got no book-larnin' nor nothin', and as how as he wanted to be somethin', and put in his best licks fer Him, you know'. And that Marthy, she was of the same way of thinkin', and that was a blessin'. And the Squire was a-goin' to marry agin', and Marthy would ruther vacate. And his mother and Mirandy was sech as he wouldn't take no wife to. And he thought as how Mr. Hartsook might think of some way or some place where he and Marthy mout make a livin' fer the present, and put in their best licks fer Him, you know. Ralph thought a moment. He was about to make an allusion to Hercules and the Augean stables, but he remembered that Bud would not understand it, though it might remind Martha of something she had seen at the East, the time she was to Bosting. "Bud, my dear friend," said Ralph, "it looks a little hard to ask you to take a new wife"--here Bud looked admiringly at Martha--"to the poor-house. But I don't know anywhere where you can do so much good for Christ as by taking charge of that place, and I can get the appointment for you. The new commissioners want just such a man." "What d'ye say, Marthy?" said Bud. "Why, somebody ought to do for the poor, and I should like to do it." And so Hercules cleaned the Augean stables. And so my humble, homely Hoosier story of twenty years ago[29] draws to a close, and not without regret I take leave of Ralph and Hannah; and Shocky, and Bud, and Martha, and Miss Nancy, and of my readers. * * * * * P.S.--A copy of the Lewisburg _Jeffersonian_ came into my hands to-day, and I see by its columns that Ralph Hartsook is principal of the Lewisburg Academy. It took me some time, however, to make out that the sheriff of the county, Mr. Israel W. Means, was none other than my old friend Bud, of the Church of the Best Licks. I was almost as much puzzled over his name as I was when I saw an article in a city paper, by Prof. W.J. Thomson, on Poor-Houses. I should not have recognized the writer as Shocky, had I not known that Shocky has given his spare time to making outcasts feel that God has not forgot. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 29: Written in 1871.] THE END 
41781	----	Transcriber's note: Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_). [oe] represents the oe ligature. Friendly Contributions for 1842. THE COUNTRY HOUSE, (WITH DESIGNS,) Edited by LADY MARY FOX. London: J. Murray, Albemarle Street. MDCCCXLIII. C. Whittingham, Tooks Court, Chancery Lane. [Heading illustration] PREFACE. Hitherto the Contributions have appeared in a small volume: but a friend having furnished me with the Manuscripts of the following Letters, in order to do justice to the beautiful designs, it has been necessary to increase the size of the work. I trust that the merit of the drawings will reconcile my subscribers to the increased price. The observation on the style fittest for domestic architecture, the description of the proposed house and the designs, are by Monsieur De Chateauneuf; to these, Mr. Eastlake kindly added a very valuable Letter on the Principles of Interior Decoration. Monsieur De Chateauneuf is already known in this country by his elegant work, ARCHITECTURA DOMESTICA, and his design for the new Royal Exchange; all who have visited Hamburg must be well acquainted with the refined taste which characterizes the buildings erected under his superintendance. It is but justice to M. De Chateauneuf to state that his letters were written merely as matter of amusement, and arose out of a discussion with a friend, as to which was the best style to be adopted for domestic architecture; the letters have been translated from the German, and unfortunately have not had the advantage of being submitted to the writer for correction. It is proposed that the next volume should contain a reprint of the late Mr. Whately's admirable work on Modern Gardening; this it is hoped will be considered as a fit companion to the "COUNTRY HOUSE." I take this opportunity of thanking Mr. C. Knight and Mr. Jackson, who kindly furnished me with the blocks from which the vignettes have been printed. MARY FOX. [Decorative illustration] [Heading illustration] ROYAL SCHOOLS OF INDUSTRY, AT KENSINGTON, THE POTTERIES, AND SHEPHERDS' BUSH. Patron: HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS THE DUKE OF SUSSEX. Patronesses: LADY ELIZABETH WHITBREAD, LADY AUGUSTA GORDON, LADY MARY FOX, LADY (V) HOLLAND. HONOURABLE MISS FOX, LADY CALCOTT, MRS. VALPY. IT is now ten years since the first of these Schools was established, and instruction is now afforded to nearly _one hundred and fifty_ children of the poorer class, who, but for this aid, would linger on in idleness and ignorance. The teaching is not merely confined to reading and writing; the main object of the Schools is to inculcate habits of industry, and to teach the principles and practice of the Christian Religion. On the formation of the Schools, the plan of self-support was adopted, each child contributing a weekly payment--Infants, 1_d._; Girls who are taught to work, and the younger Boys, pay 2_d._; and the elder Boys, who are taught to write, 3_d._ Although these payments go some way towards the maintenance of the Establishment, yet the funds hitherto have been found very inadequate, and the deficiency has been supplied by voluntary contributions, the produce of bazaars, ladies' work, &c. One of the most successful sources of profit has been a small Volume, printed under the title of "Friendly Contributions;" the profits from the sale of this Work have been applied to the support of the Schools: three Volumes have already appeared, and the present forms the fourth. It is conceived that it is unnecessary now to urge one word in favour of the absolute necessity of affording education to all; the question is narrowed to the consideration of what are the most efficient means by which this great object is to be accomplished; it is hoped that, notwithstanding the many excellent charities which claim the attention of the benevolent, few will be found unwilling to aid an Institution which, in addition to teaching to read and write, instils habits of industry and inculcates the principles of Christianity amongst the children of one of the poorest and most populous districts around London. LIST OF SUBSCRIBERS. THE QUEEN (five copies). H. R. H. PRINCE ALBERT. THE QUEEN ADELAIDE (ten copies). THE DUCHESS OF KENT. H. R. H. THE DUKE OF SUSSEX. H. R. H. THE DUCHESS OF GLOUCESTER (five copies). THE DUCHESS OF INVERNESS. THE DUCHESS OF SUTHERLAND. EARL AMHERST. LORD ASHBROOK. JOHN ALLEN, ESQ. SIR H. BUNBURY. LADY BUNBURY. MRS. BASSET. MRS. BLAKE. MRS. BETHUNE. THE ARCHDEACON BERENS. HENRY BERENS, ESQ. RICHARD BERENS, ESQ. JACOB HANS BUSH, ESQ. ROBERT BICKNELL, ESQ. CHARLES DACRES BEVAN, ESQ. ROBERT BEVAN, ESQ. EDWARD BLORE, ESQ. MISS HARRIET CLARKE. THE COUNTESS OF CARNARVON. LORD COLBORNE. HON. R. CLIVE. DR. CHAMBERS (two copies). LADY MARY COLE. I. G. TIMURAN. MESSRS. COUTTS AND CO. (five copies). MRS. BEAUMONT COLES. RICHARD D. CRAIG, ESQ. JOHN BONHAM CARTER, ESQ. C. ROBERT COCKERELL, ESQ. R. A. B. BOND CABBELL, ESQ. THE HON. ANNABELLA CREWE. DAVID DUNDAS, ESQ. F. D. DANVERS, ESQ. CHARLES PALMER DIMOND, ESQ. SAMUEL DUCKWORTH, ESQ. LEWIS DUVAL, ESQ. MRS. LEWIS DILLWYN. MRS. DIMSDALE. MRS. GENERAL DORRIEN. WILLIAM EASTLAKE, ESQ. CHARLES LOCK EASTLAKE, ESQ. R. A. GEORGE EASTLAKE, ESQ. GEORGE EASTLAKE, ESQ. JUNIOR. WILLIAM ETTY, ESQ. R. A. HON. MISS FOX (two copies). COLONEL FOX (three copies). B. FRERE, ESQ. MRS. B. FRERE. J. B. FREELAND, ESQ. LADY E. GOWER. MRS. R. HANBURY GURNEY. MISS GURNEY. SIR J. L. GOLDSMID, BART. G. B. GREENOUGH, ESQ. J. R. GOWAN, ESQ. J. R. GARDINER, ESQ. HENRY GAWLER, ESQ. MISS GORDON. MISS GULSTON. MISS STEPNEY GULSTON. LADY (V) HOLLAND. MRS. HOLLAND. LORD HATHERTON. MRS. HUSKISSON. LIEUT.-GENERAL HUSKISSON. RICHARD HARRISON, ESQ. MRS. CHARLES HALL. MRS. HOUSEMAN. MRS. JOHN HOUSEMAN. THE COUNTESS OF KERRY (two copies). THE EARL OF ILCHESTER. MRS. GEORGE JENNER. DAVID JARDINE, ESQ. SIR JAMES KEMPT. MRS. H. BELLENDEN KER. THE MARQUISS OF LANSDOWNE. THE MARCHIONESS OF LANSDOWNE. LADY ELIZABETH LEVISON. SIR THOMAS BARRETT LENNARD, BART. THOMAS BARRETT LENNARD, ESQ. SIR DENIS LE MARCHANT, BART. JOHN GEORGE LEFEVRE, ESQ. EDMUND LUDLOW, ESQ. HENRY LOWE, ESQ. JOHN MALCOLM LUDLOW, ESQ. JAMES LONSDALE, ESQ. DOWAGER COUNTESS MONSON. LADY MACDONALD. LADY MAYO. CAPTAIN MEYNELL. MRS. MITCHELL. THE HON. MRS. OFFLEY. OLD WINDSOR BOOK CLUB. LADY JANE PEEL. LADY PELLEW. LADY PECHELL. MISS PRICE. MR. PANIZZI. F. PIGOU, ESQ. J. DELAFIELD PHELPS, ESQ. LOUIS HAYES PETIT, ESQ. REV. J. LEWIS PETIT (two copies). FRANCIS BARLOW ROBINSON, ESQ. SAMUEL ROGERS, ESQ. MISS ROGERS. JOHN RICHARDS, ESQ. SIR JAMES SOUTH. LADY SOUTH. RIGHT HON. V. SMITH. MRS. V. SMITH. CHARLES STOKES, ESQ. CHARLES SWEETING, ESQ. REV. CLEMENT STRONG. THOMAS TEESDALE, ESQ. J. THOMSON, ESQ. (Clitheroe.) FRANCIS CHARLES TROWER, ESQ. W. H. TINNEY, ESQ. REV. T. M. TREHERNE. MRS. TREHERNE. SIR CHARLES VAUGHAN. R. VALPY, ESQ. MRS. VALPY. M. VANDE WEYER (two copies). LADY WALPOLE. LADY ELIZABETH WHITBREAD. W. WINGFIELD, ESQ. MRS. WICKHAM. MRS. WIMBERLY. MISS WALLS. R. WHITE, ESQ. J. WINTLE, ESQ. [Heading illustration] LETTER I. DEAR SIR, AS I am about to build a new house, I have determined to avail myself of your assistance, should it be convenient to you to give it. I do not by so doing intend that it should be supposed I think that the many very intelligent architects in this country are incapable of giving me good advice; but independently of my friendship for you, and great respect for your talents, I wish to consult one who is not likely to be so much wedded to the routine of modern Italian villas, Elizabethan houses, and thatched cottages, as is the case with most of our English professors: not that I mean to say anything in disparagement of a Palladian villa, always beautiful, though not always best suited to our climate. I am also fully sensible of many of the beauties of the old Elizabethan houses, and also of some of the imitations of them; and a small thatched cottage is very pretty. I shall begin by stating the sort of house we want, and give a short description of the ground on which it is proposed to build it, in order that you may in the first place, give your notions as to the site, and the style which you would recommend. On the style, perhaps you would give us your views in detail, pointing out, as far as your leisure and inclination will permit, the merits of each, and which on the whole you prefer. As regards the ground, we have no park, but sufficient extent of land to make a large paddock very park-like: it would not suit our views to have a park: the situation is not romantic; but as the ground is poor and wild, we shall command more ornament than profit. To the north or north-west there is a rising terrace, well sheltered with high trees; this slopes down for about a quarter of a mile into the valley of the Cray; the aspect is therefore south-east, and this comes best according to the slope of the ground. If you prefer that the house should stand high, you may have in front a good terrace of at least two hundred yards long and eight feet high; if lower down the hill (half way), the terrace will not be so good, but there will be better shelter from the north wind, and at the back there will be rising ground, through which the walks of the pleasure ground may be conducted, and still the house will be well above the valley. In front, looking over this valley, and across some fine orchards (for which Kent is celebrated) and some waving fields of corn, there is a mass of wood on a rising hill, about equal to the hill on which we are situated; on the right there is a fine view of Knocholt beeches; in the valley there is the town of Footscray, seen through the orchard at about half a mile distant, and by a little dexterous cutting and levelling we shall be able to get a glimpse of the small winding river. On the right of the hill on which we are to build, there is a small spring at present rising in some swampy ground covered with alders; this we propose to clear, and shall be enabled, if you think it worth while, to enlarge into a small sheet of water. With this general view, you will see that we are well off as to aspect, have woods in the distance, and a valley (of no great beauty indeed, but still a valley) with a quiet stream, and this is always pleasing. I think it may be considered as a fair average specimen of English scenery, such as is met with in the southern counties. Now as regards the house. There must be a good dining-room, a good general morning room, which will serve as drawing-room, and a large library; one or two small rooms, in which to receive persons on business, &c. As regards bed-rooms, offices, &c. this will be matter of future consideration, when we have settled the important matter of site and style. I should, however, mention, that, as circumstances may make it desirable to add to the size, it will be advisable that there should be that irregularity in the plan as will admit of this, so that it may be in the end, a house costing from £10,000 to £12,000. With respect to the offices, I think we make a great mistake in England, as we manage to hide them, and lose all the benefit of increasing the size and importance of the house by these additions. I know, however, this is a very difficult point to manage, and merely throw it out for your consideration. The general building material in this part of the country is brick, though we are enabled, at no very great cost, to get some stone for window or door frames, &c. I have been reading a little about the sites of ancient villas, but shall not trouble you with my views until I receive your answer: recollect we have a bad and variable climate, though we go out as much in the winter as summer; so that there must be at once shelter from the sun for our short summer, and warmth and shelter during the long winters and cold springs. H. B. [Decorative illustration] [Heading illustration] LETTER II. FOR your letter, accept my thanks. It is doubly flattering to me, being a foreigner, to be commissioned to make the designs for the country house you intend to build. Yet while I derive great satisfaction from the task, I am impressed with the difficulties attending it, one of which is, that I am at present prevented by business from discussing the matter with you in person, and am therefore compelled to put my ideas upon paper. Simple as the commission appears, it however involves considerations of some moment, and which render it necessary that I should previously state to you my opinion in detail in regard to the style I propose to adopt. I have not forgotten what you once said to me, namely, that in order to make himself intelligible to others, it is essential that the artist should be clear as to his own meaning. I even suspect that opinions once defined, if not clearly and sincerely put down, may lead to misapprehension, and (inasmuch as they commit the person who gives them) to the misleading of the artist himself. You invite me, however, to give my opinion, and having freely stated the difficulties of the undertaking, I begin with more confidence. What then, with a view to your individual taste, is the style I would recommend as most suitable for the intended situation and purpose? And if such a question is now become not an uncommon one, you must allow that, sixty years ago, no one would have thought of proposing it to an architect for his consideration. Every architect would then have at once answered it by saying, "In that style which is in general use, and according to my own particular views of it." Or during any of the various epochs of the art, would any one have thought of suggesting to a Greek, an Italian, or native of the north of Europe, &c. to build in any other style than that belonging to their respective countries? It ought also to be borne in mind, that if we occasionally meet with an intermixture of styles, it is only in buildings of _transition periods_, during the change from one mode to another; and such periods were of only short duration, because the previous style had already outlived itself. Circumstances are now totally altered. We recognize and practically adopt various styles indiscriminately: nor is it difficult to explain how it happens that we now employ one and then another. For this, two reasons may be assigned: the first (a very meritorious one) is, that we with a generalizing view, anxiously study and investigate the most difficult examples of art. The second reason however, is of a very unsatisfactory nature, which is that in our weak hands no style has been so naturalized among us as to constitute a permanent canon by which to regulate the modifications of any and every architectural purpose. This is the cause of that indecision of style which manifests itself more or less in modern edifices, and of that changeableness of taste which has hitherto hindered us from establishing the art upon fixed principles, regulated according to the high requisites which our modern cultivation requires. We seem to be of opinion that variety of character is attainable only by variety of style: hence our Museums are classically _antique_, our churches after the mode of the middle ages, and so forth, according as the buildings happen to belong to the class in which any particular period was most distinguished for buildings of that class. The character of such examples strikes us by its expressiveness; nor do we find it difficult, with models before us that we are now acquainted with and understand, to produce the same kind of effect and expression by merely copying their physiognomy and style. He, however, who is well grounded in the study, is aware that at different periods the art was treated according to its own principles as resulting from different modes of culture; and that consequently the adoption of a style previously discarded, though it may suit the vitiated taste of the artist, as the _haut gout_ pleases the fastidious palate of the Epicure, yet it can never be pleasing to a really cultivated taste. You may think me somewhat fantastical, but it appears to me that we cannot read Homer with perfect relish in a saloon à la Louis Quatorze, or Shakespeare beneath the roof of a Grecian impluvium; and that it is only where the character of the surrounding forms and objects in some degree accord, at least do not harshly contrast with our mental occupation, that we can fully abandon ourselves to the imaginings of genius. I might, however, without impropriety, substitute "_character_" for "_style_" in the question you put to me, and my answer would then be: Let it be as noble and as cheerful as possible. Still the making a distinction between style and character does not entirely get rid of the difficulty; for a person who is as intelligent as you are in matters of art will say, "Even if you hit the character, the mere _desire_ to invent an appropriate style does not of itself satisfy me, and on this account I wish you to state more explicitly which of former styles you intend mainly to select." This I will now attempt to do, and begin by stating it as my opinion, that the most perfect architectural style is that which admits at the same time of a refined style both of sculpture and of painting:--that which, while it serves as the vehicle of graceful embellishment, can maintain an equal excellence in itself. Such, as it appears to me, is the ideal which an architect of the present day ought to keep in his mind's eye. Yet before we proceed to inquire which of the principal styles we are acquainted with possesses such a quality in the most eminent degree, it will be proper to consider what is the kind of relationship which the three separate arts of architecture, painting, and sculpture, bear to each other. According to the usual metaphor, the consanguinity is that of sisterhood. Yet in my opinion this is somewhat incorrect. In its origin and development every organic style of architecture has preceded the other two arts, consequently the relationship in which it stands to them may more properly be termed maternal, it being under her fostering protection that they have afterwards grown up: nor would it be difficult to exemplify this sort of connexion between the three arts by instances taken from different styles of architecture; and one who has applied himself to studying the motives and principles governing the formation of those different styles, will easily follow me in my remarks. The two daughter arts were unknown to, or did not exist for the earliest Asiatic architecture; on which account, imposing as its gigantic remains are, they oppress the mind by the feeling they excite of stern and monstrous vastness. In the Egyptian style the growth of the children arts appears to have been stunted and repressed by the servitude in which they were kept; nor have any later race or nation attempted to rival the massiveness of its edifices, tattooed over with hieroglyphics. It is only in the genuine architecture of ancient Greece itself, and in the Italian style of the fifteenth century, that we meet with all the three arts growing up to completeness together, and as is universally acknowledged, brought to a very high degree of refinement and perfection. Notwithstanding the long continued progressive formation and manifold development of Gothic architecture, that style failed to attach to, and as it were to incorporate with itself the two kindred arts, which were checked both by unfavourableness of climate, and by war and political disturbances. Architecture was therefore compelled to trust chiefly to its own power and resources, employing sculpture and painting merely as subordinate decoration. And who shall say that this style, so full of creative power, would not have preserved itself more pure, have avoided falling into the cold and gloomy on the one hand, the bizarre and overloaded on the other, could it have availed itself of the assistance of sculpture and painting, so that they should have accompanied it in all the varieties of its times and developments? This was to an extent the case with Arabian architecture,[1] which, both in regard to the dominion it obtained and its organization, has many points of similarity with the nearly contemporary Gothic style, notwithstanding the marked distinctions which prevail between them. This reminds me of the remark of a poetical friend, who once said to me, "Like a rainbow on the horizon of art, Gothic architecture stretches itself across Europe from Byzantium to Portugal; while Arabian architecture may be compared to its reflection, somewhat flattened however, commencing from the same point, and crossing along the north coast of Africa till it reaches Spain: or to a reflection in the water, whose wavy surface occasions some little difference of appearance; and in fact we behold both styles united together in the amphibious city of Venice." This simile would be more literally appropriate had the uses to which the two styles were applied been more nearly alike. [1] As regards _Arabian architecture_, the parent art may be said to have been entirely childless, depending entirely on its own resources, discarding all representation of animal life, whether in painting or sculpture. With respect to modern architecture, it may be said that it has quite rejected the services of the other two arts, and, as I fear, greatly to its own detriment; while these latter arts, notwithstanding the eminence they have attained apart from architecture, are not so solidly united as they otherwise would be, nor capable of so completely developing their powers, had the union of the three been complete. It is well known that, owing to the fetters imposed upon them in Egypt by the religion of the people and its priesthood, it was only in Europe that sculpture and painting could at different epochs attain to maturity. But it is not perhaps so generally known or considered, that it is one characteristic mark of European architecture, that it has at all times, whether those of its progress and advancement, or its decline, availed itself of natural forms, both vegetable and animal, for purposes of decoration; while the Asiatic styles were confined to geometrical figures for the ornaments. The above cursory glance at the history of the art, may at least serve to shew how incumbent it is upon the architect of the present day to make himself acquainted with the creative power and processes of his art, by studying them as they actually manifest themselves at different epochs, and according to the different views and purposes to which the art was applied. By so doing, however, he is in some danger of being worked upon by conflicting impressions, occasioned by the diversity of styles and the opposite tastes they exhibit. Yet, unless I am greatly mistaken, the whole system of the art, as developed in the different styles, must henceforth have considerable influence upon our modern architecture. Limiting our views for the present to those architectural productions in which a union with the other arts is more directly attainable, we find Grecian or early Italian architecture the predominating style. The last grafted on the former, may be said to be more or less complete in the greater or less proportion in which it derives its nourishment from the parent stem. If we look, for example, to the progress or course of painting in Italy, that art flourished there in proportion to the nourishment it derived from the antique. The works of Mantegna, M. Angelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Raphael bear testimony to this; and those great men would probably have attained to a higher degree of excellence, had they been as well acquainted with the sculptures of the Parthenon, and the Greek bronzes, as they were with the works of the Romans. Most assuredly a knowledge of the architecture of the time of Pericles, or of that of Pompey, would not have been without its influence upon such men as Bramante, San Gallo, and Baldassore Peruzzi, nor have failed of being turned to account by them: observe, however, that this remark is not intended to depreciate what they actually accomplished, nor to disparage the style which they formed. These explorers had unquestionably discovered new veins in the rich mine which had been opened by the Greeks; as the Romans, who were the immediate imitators of the Greeks, had already extended the one first of all worked. In all subsequent operations, as in what the French term the _Renaissance_ style, nothing more was done than to go on excavating, seldom, however, with sufficient pains or caution, so as to separate completely the gold from the dross. When, therefore, I propose to make a design in the "Greek style," I wish you to observe that I understand by this term a striving after the purity of this canon, but at the same time with a reserved right to the free use of those modes and motives with which later European architecture supplies us. If a determinate name must be given to the style, I propose I should call it, "the Renaissance style of the nineteenth century." But many may say, "How conveniently he contrives to get rid of the Gothic architecture!" while others will exclaim, "According to such principles, a very pretty sort of medley is likely to be produced." In answer to the first set of objections I reply: "If you can introduce modern sculpture and painting into Gothic architecture without prejudice to _them_ or _it_, I will say that you have attained a great end." To the others I should reply: "You misunderstand or pervert my meaning. I have not spoken of a merely mixing up of different styles, but of compounding them together; between which two processes there is, I conceive, a wide difference, the ingredients being merely put together in the one case, without losing their respective qualities; while in the other they amalgamate with each other, and produce an entirely new combination: and it is in accomplishing combinations of this kind that the power of genuine art manifests itself; and the distinction may be likened to the difference between a mechanical and a chemical combination. Nor are some compound styles of architecture less beautiful than others which are quite unmixed." I know not whether these remarks will prove of much service to you, but I trust they will at least enable you, after seeing what are my views generally on the subject, to make your own suggestions in return for my further guidance. I am, &c. A. C. [Heading illustration] LETTER III. DEAR SIR, THANKS for your letter in answer to mine, or rather in part answer to it, for you have confined yourself solely to a discussion of the style to be selected. A subject which has hitherto, I think, not been sufficiently considered; at least in England. I believe that amateurs order a Grecian Palladian, or Elizabethan house without having much speculated on what are the different merits or demerits of each, but merely with reference to some one example which may be in their recollection, and which may have pleased them; or what is oftener the case, they submit to be guided by the bent of their architect, who in general, are wedded to some particular favourite style. Thus, we have Mr. ----, all Gothic and Elizabethan; Mr. ----, all Italian, with a dash of the Byzantine, Renaissance, &c. I am, I own, much pleased as well as instructed by this discussion, and I hope you will not consider me as intruding too much upon your time and patience, if I venture to seek further elucidations of some of the positions in your letter. I quite agree it is clear that as yet we have a style to choose, and that in future ages, no architect will be able to apply any definite character to our present mode of building. I must, however, premise what indeed my letter will fully prove, that your partiality has induced you to give me credit for greater knowledge in matters of art, especially as regards architecture, than I possess. I agree that the style which best admits of being combined with the sister arts (or filial if you please) of painting and sculpture, must be the one to adopt, and that it is clear their union is always a mutual improvement. It seems you come to the conclusion that the pure Greek style of architecture is that which best admits of this union. Now, as regards domestic architecture, I am not sure that I have any very clear perception of what is pure Greek style. I suspect our notion as regards a house of pure Greek style, is a cube of building of mock stone with a portico, if a large house; or if a small one, with some thin paste-like pilasters, and a certain number of parallelogram holes cut into the walls for windows, with two smaller cubes for wings; and, in the inside, a repetition of the outside, in the shape of the rooms; that is, two oblong rooms for dining and drawing rooms, with an oblong hall placed the other way: the usual accompaniment of folding doors, and two or three small and often dark rooms at the back. There are certainly some changes rung on these forms, but the theme is always the same. I call Sir R. Smirties' Post Office a gigantic small Grecian house. I am aware that the Palladian improvements, or additions, (which ever you will) have multiplied the resources, and have given us much to delight; namely, the circular dome, pillars, and gallery, and the consequent change in the disposition of the apartments. I mention these points to let you see the nakedness of the land, and trust to your kindness for better instruction. You assume that the Grecian style is the best adapted to pictorial and sculptural decoration, but I do not see the reason of this; in fact, without a more precise definition of what you mean by Greek style, as adapted to domestic architecture, I do not see how this can be shewn. You state that the Gothic style is not so well adapted to the union with the filial arts, and that hitherto when so used they were subordinate only. I shall be the more ready to agree when I have some further exposition on this point. Though not so distrustful as our Royal Society who adopt "_Nullius in verba_" as their motto, yet cling to an old monkish law maxim of Lord Coke; I may say of your position what he says of law, "_Lex plus laudatur quando ratione probatur_." I am aware that the Gothic churches are often overloaded with ornament, and that the sculpture often seems as if merely stuck on, and the pictures are hung up as ornaments, not as part and parcel of the building; and, I believe, that tapestry was often called in aid to decorate our cathedrals, and with great effect; but is it of necessity so? Are there no exceptions? at all events, it is not so in the Byzantine style, which approaches so nearly to the Gothic; and, as regards the Arabian, (take for instance the Alhambra) the fair daughters unite in great harmony with their beautiful mother. You have besides omitted, I think, one point in which Gothic architecture has been greatly aided by the pictorial art, namely, the painted windows: With hues romantic tinged the gorgeous pane, To fill with holy light this wondrous fane, To aid the builder's model richly rude, By no Vitruvian symmetry subdued. I begin to feel that it is probable I have entirely mistaken what you mean by Grecian style, and that it does not preclude the use of arches, groined ceilings, domes, &c. I have been the more diffuse on this point because I own I have a leaning to what we have called ELIZABETHAN; conceiving, whether true or not, that there is more fitness in it for domestic architecture than in the Grecian style; that the regularity and repetition of form, which in a great building is delightful, in a small one does not please from the diminutive size of the objects. And, again, as regards the material and colour, as we use Grecian style in this country, the material is either white stone or white stucco, which in our climate appears cold, and does not give half so much the notion of warmth and comfort as the fine rich-toned red brick; and what refers to the exterior, is perhaps equally applicable to the interior. Although in a building on a grand scale the mind is pleased with symmetry and regularity, "in little" this is irksome, and gives the notion of poverty, in fact, too soon lets you into the secret of the whole house; there is no surprise, no discovery to make. Shew me a Palladian villa a mile off, and I could draw you the plan of the inside at once. Indeed, I could walk blindfolded into the drawing-room, dining-room, library, and boudoir, and go up to bed in the best bed-room, without a guide, or a light. Here are no Rich windows that exclude the light, And passages that lead to nothing. A good deal also, I am willing to own, arises from association and national prejudices; some of our most delightful houses are built in this style, and they have, at all events within, signs of harmony in the style of decoration, and in the accessories. The gardens and out-buildings were often made more appropriate and better suited to the house than in any other architectural attempts that we have made; and, I believe, no Englishman ever fancied building a house that did not have the large bay window and the large fireplace (against all principles of good grates and Arnott's stoves I admit,) and the low groined passage and the panelled hall in his mind. But it seems you think it most difficult ----------"To reconcile The willing graces to the Gothic pile," or rather say coy than willing. I beg you will not suppose I am opposing your views, all I mean is to canvass and to be sure that I understand them. I have to repeat that I agree entirely that the style is best which is most susceptible of uniting the three arts; but I only wish to know why the Greek is most susceptible; and what is the kind of sculpture and painting you wish to unite; in order to see that such a union is suitable to our climate, and can be obtained at a reasonable cost, for you must bear in mind that I want to build a country-house, not a palace! It is a long time since I was in Italy, and when I was there I did not pay so much attention to architecture as I should do, if I were to go over the same ground again, now that I have got a house to build; but there is a strong impression on my mind that the other parts of Europe may rival or surpass us in palaces and grand architectural monuments, yet that there is no country which would present so many good hints in domestic architecture as England; always referring to the great points, convenience, and comfort; for I own, as _fitness_ is the guiding principles of all perfection in building, I conceive it essential in purely domestic architecture, that a character of fitness for habitation and comfort should always be prominent. I am a great admirer of Balzac, and I think one of his best descriptions of still life is the account of the house in his "Recherche de l'absolu;" it is so good that I should be tempted, if it were not too long for a letter, to copy and send it to you as a model, if not of what a house should be, at least of how one should be described.[2] Yours, &c. H. B. [2] Unfortunately these letters were written long before the appearance of Mr. Fonnereau's very intelligent and instructive Observations on Architecture were printed. [Decorative illustration] [Heading illustration] LETTER IV DEAR SIR, BUT for the trouble of answering your letter I should have been much amused by your remarks upon what, at no very distant period, used to pass for Grecian architecture; but thank heaven we have passed over that barren tract of human invention. Continuing in the same strain, you would fain have me believe you are one of those pilgrims to the shrine of art, who fancy they have now luckily gained a verdant and flowery oasis; or rather that they have discovered the true Eden itself, which it seems is no other than the Elizabethan style; and to complete all, you treat me as the evil spirit, harbouring deadly enmity against this fair paradise. It is easy enough for you to give your opinions off-hand on these matters, but with us the case is different: the architect finds it less difficult to exhibit his ideas in his design, than to explain all the motives which lead to it,--how the ideas exactly arose, and how far they may have been influenced, either by our studies or our fancy. I must be allowed, therefore, to return to my former examination of the subject of style, and my deduction from such examination. You will call to mind that the principal different manners which have prevailed in Europe, are, first the Greek style, and the additions made to it by the Roman adaptation of it, then the Gothic in its different periods, and the different treatments of such periods in the different countries; and under this period may be added the partial adoption of the Arabian style in the south. Then this great æra of the revival or Renaissance style, as it seemingly arose in Italy, France, Germany, Flanders, and England. This being, as regards England, your boasted Elizabethan style. It is only very recently that my attention has been bestowed on that style which in the north of Europe succeeded to the Gothic; whereas, till then, it had been all along imagined that the Italians alone had comprehended the spirit of the antique, and been able to revive it in a newer form of their own; an error against which we should be upon our guard. Why should we not recognize the various modes of treating the antique, as we find them in different countries; and admit them to be all emanations from one common source and principle. In like manner, the Gothic principle or style was in common adopted and worked out through the whole of Europe, and was in common consentaneously abandoned wherever it had flourished; and the elements of ancient architecture became as commonly substituted for it. And this abandonment of the Gothic, it may be remarked, is the first instance in all history, when the creative power of a people (and, by people, I do not mean a single nation, but the whole of Christendom, united by one common religion) has survived the style of architecture, originally invented and brought to perfection by themselves. This last subject would be an interesting and fertile one to investigate, and would throw considerable light on the development of the human mind throughout Europe. Such consideration, even confined merely as regards architecture, would be one too far from the present subject now to discuss. Since, however, the Gothic as well as the revival of the antique principle have extended over all Europe, in order to attain a knowledge of either, we should not confine ourselves to isolated specimens of particular countries. It is only by taking a survey of the entire field of Gothic architecture, that we can rightly comprehend its varied powers. Is it possible I would ask, from the mere acquaintance with English Gothic to imagine, or from its elements to compose a tower like that of the Minster of Freiburg in Brisgau, or a loggia of similar character to that called the Loggia da Orcagna, at Florence? On the other hand an acquaintance with continental Gothic alone will furnish no idea of the peculiar character of the English perpendicular class. The Renaissance style which is fraught with so much plasticity and variety, springs also but from one root. In like manner as it is impossible for a botanist to understand all the species of one particular family without tracing all that are found in different parts of the globe; so too, is it impossible to become acquainted with the power of any one style of architecture without a similar comparative study of all its specimens, as exhibited in the works of different nations which have adopted it. To the north of Europe must justly be allowed the merit of having exhausted the whole circuit of Gothic architecture, and the application of its principles; this was certainly not accomplished in Italy. It is therefore on this side of the Alps that we observe many of the motives and principles of the Gothic retained to a very late period not disturbed, as was the case in Italy, by types from the antique. At the same time it must be admitted, that when the style founded upon this latter, began to find its way northwards, the two sister arts, painting and sculpture, though they followed in the train of architecture, did not strike root very deeply, but were for the most part treated capriciously and mechanically as mere handicrafts; and this was especially the case in England. It is therefore remarked with some truth, that the Renaissance style is characterized in Italy by greater delicacy and beauty than elsewhere; in France and the Low countries by greater richness, and in England by capriciousness and extravagance. Lest, however, the term itself, Renaissance, should be thought too loose and vague, it may be proper to define it as used to signify "that style which everywhere succeeded immediately to the Gothic." In Italy, this first period of the proper application of the antique terminates with the tendency of Michael Angelo, to destroy the true proportions of his buildings by colossal details; on the other parts of the continent it disappeared in consequence of the diffusion of M. Angelo's taste by the Jesuits; and in England it terminated at the time of Wren. Accordingly, this architectural period extends very little beyond a single century, commencing in other countries about the time when it was already on the decline in Italy. In what I have just been stating, I must be understood to allude to one uniform aim, namely, the free appropriation and adaptation of the elements of the antique style to modern purposes; consequently it is evident that the so-called Elizabethan style is only one of the links of a progressive series of such attempts. You must, therefore, admit that architecture which is capable of producing independent works out of its own resources, and from its own principles, is degraded to what is little better than mere decoration and scene painting, when, (apprehensive of falling into contradiction and want of harmony, unless it retains all the individual particulars of extant examples,) it timidly strives to imitate the dialect of a single province. How short a time, however, must the impression produced by such mummery last! and how long the impression of a work of architecture is destined to remain! It is because we are ashamed of, or mistrust the results of our own study and conviction, that we venture to exhibit ourselves to posterity, merely as the copyists of examples; the repute of which is already established, and which may be learnt and repeated by rote? At various periods men have shewn themselves either barbarous or puerile in their notions on art; yet never till now such slavish copyists, such mere plagiarists, such mocking-birds in style. You may judge by this sally in what an ill humour I am, at finding that you would shut me up in a cage and there make me sing. If you examine your Elizabethan architecture with some little critical attention, you will hardly fail to perceive that, with all its richness of expression, the elementary sounds are no more harmonious than the crowing of a cock, or the braying of an ass. All this concerns merely the STYLE, as style; for in other respects we often meet with much that deserves praise; convenient arrangement, and contrivance, striking effect, and much cleverness of construction and execution, although so far from being pure or refined, the taste displayed may be decidedly vulgar and coarse. I freely confess that the merits I have just mentioned, were retained in the architecture of the north of Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: I say retained, because the Gothic style that was then abandoned, had been treated with masterly and skill, and shewed disciplined artificers in all that belongs to mechanical execution; consequently, the ability thus produced had only to employ itself upon a fresh task. At the end of the last century, on the contrary, so completely had every thing like a school of the art disappeared, that at the University of Gottingen, architecture was taught as supplementary to the elementary course of mathematics. Is it then to be wondered at that we should have been filled with stupid wonder at the sublime works then newly brought to light, or that we should have set about copying them for the nonce, out of the affectation of classical purity, but without bestowing any study on the peculiar motives to be detected in them, or on the necessary alterations to be made in consequence of new exigences? If we allow that as far as it proceeded, Grecian architecture is stamped by perfect beauty, it is of little moment to our argument whether it was so comprehensive as it might have been, and had sufficiently developed itself for those purposes which we now more especially require; since the perfection it did actually attain in the direction it took, ought to be sufficient to inspire the artist. It was not necessary that the latter should surrender up the freedom belonging to him as such, and confine himself to following Grecian motives and intentions. In fact, the peculiar charm,--the grace and freshness of Grecian architecture become withered as soon as we begin to treat it according to dry systematic rules. The Vitruvius, capable of legislating for it according to its genius and true spirit perhaps is not yet born! For indulging at such length in these somewhat abstract remarks upon style alone, I must again entreat your pardon. You ask for some more distinct and explicit ideas on the subject; and are apparently, like many others, of opinion, that the remains of a few temples, such as we behold in Stuart and Revett, comprise nearly the whole of Greek architecture. The chief point for our present consideration is, how far it had accommodated itself to buildings for domestic purposes: and here I must remind you that Pliny's description of his villas are still extant. It must, indeed, be confessed that those two residences do not belong to the epoch of Pericles; yet they belong nevertheless to that same series of actual Greek plans and constructions which have been preserved to us at Pompeii and Herculaneum, and which Sir W. Gell's tasteful delineations have rendered so familiar to all. Many remains of the same class in the vicinity of Rome, and more especially in the Golfo di Gaeta, at Puzzoli, and in the environs of Naples, sufficiently attest the fancy and variety with which the ancients availed themselves of the conditions imposed by peculiarities of ground and locality,--contrived to combine the advantages of coolness and shade on the one hand, with the glow of sunshine on the other; to provide a frame and foreground for the prospect from the house; and to produce happily imagined effects and picturesqueness of character by means of the irregularity and declivity of the ground. Each of those ancient villas presents us with a new idea, and may be taken as an architectural study. Look, for instance, at those examples of the kind on the Lake of Albano and the Gulf of Gaëta, where the dwelling itself is connected with grottoes offering cool retreats, either for sitting in or for the purpose of baths, and upon entering which the visitor is so fascinated by the magic effect of reflected light from the water, that he almost fancies the whole scene to be a visionary and unearthly one. Water, it may be observed, either gushing in a stream, or exhibiting an expanded mirror-like surface, appears to have been considered by the ancients indispensable to the charm of a villa residence. In both the destroyed cities, even the smallest town houses offered upon entering them the reflection of the sky on the surface of the water contained in the basin of the impluvium. In larger dwellings, water was introduced more abundantly, and also in greater variety of modes; and residences upon the coast were built out quite into the sea. Besides much else that they have derived from the ancients, the modern Italians have retained this fondness for the combination of water and architecture, as many of their villas testify. For examples of the kind I refer you to the Villa Madama near Rome, and also to several at Frescati; and yet there the water and the architecture are not so intimately connected as in the villas and houses of the ancients. The climate of the north, in a great measure, prevents our availing ourselves of water as a means of producing reflection of light in the interior; but we may imitate this principle in a due arrangement of light and shade, and also in some cases by the use of mirrors in place of water. Another very great, though little regarded point of excellence and architectural effect in the latter consists in the covered ambulatories and porticoes, which, indeed, were intended chiefly as a defence against heat and sun, yet recommend themselves equally to us, as affording protection from rain and wind. Nevertheless it is rarely but in cloisters that we find this architectural convenience retained. Great attention seems also to have been paid by the ancients to planning the internal communication in such a manner, that the domestics could pass to and fro, and have access to the different rooms, without incommoding those occupying any of the suite; and in this sort of arrangement they frequently exhibit so much ingenuity and contrivance, that we may study for some time ere we shall be able to surpass them. For the present, these few hints and suggestions must suffice; but I could discourse to you for days together of the varied effects of light, the manifold diversity of form, the richness of play in regard to decoration, and all the combinations and beauties, both with respect to circumstances of locality and arrangement, that are to be met with in the remains of ancient domestic architecture. Among other questions which you have submitted for my consideration, is, whether pure Greek architectural forms and details will bear to be united with such a material as coloured brickwork? And by way of removing your doubts, I beg to remind you of the highly praised brick edifices of King Mausolus, described by Vitruvius. Texture and colour of materials are to be considered merely as the vehicle made use of by the artist, and may be employed in one style almost equally as well as in another. Another doubt suggested, is whether arches and vaulting can properly be admitted into the style above-named? Now, were you to consult the Delphic oracle, it would probably return you some such answer as the following: _When the edge of an aperture in a wall forms a right angle, the archivolt may still descend to the base without being interrupted by an impost. In vaulting, the diagonal crossing lines must be considered as secondary ones._ Perhaps this will but ill satisfy you, and you will say that, instead of solving one enigma, I have merely added another. Yet of one thing you may be assured, namely, that those difficult problems and mysteries in art, which have been expounded in formal terms, have been already actually decyphered, and explained more clearly by the practical solution of them in productions of art. It seems you think I have not yet given you any satisfactory reason for my position, that the present improved state, both of painting and sculpture, renders it difficult to reconcile them with the conditions required by Gothic architecture. I admit this would be otherwise were we to go back to the hard dry style of the Van Eyck school. I can only say that such an attempt has been made by some of the best artists in Germany, and that after persisting in the trial for some time, they have now abandoned the imitation of the early German style, and have preferred the Italian. At any rate, my opinion is not contradicted by history, since the latter informs us that the powerful impression produced by the broad handling and simple masses of the ancient works of sculpture, then first discovered in various parts of Italy, had the effect of giving the representation of nature an entirely new direction. It is also a striking circumstance that, owing to the fresh impulse which both painting and sculpture hence received, not only the taste for Gothic architecture declined, but the system itself was opposed both by painters and sculptors, who attempted to make architecture subsidiary to their productions. Such being the case, as they alleged, in regard to ancient art. With what eagerness not only the learned men of Italy, and the architects who were urged on by them to the study of classical antiquity, but also both sculptors and painters, entered the lists against Gothic art, is sufficiently evident from Ghiberti's journal; and again afterwards, when a decided victory had been already obtained over it, from Raphael's report to Leo X. on the ancient edifices and other remains at Rome. It is perhaps not so generally known, that in more northern countries it was the painters who set up for reformers in architecture. Holbein, there is reason to think, erected the first specimen of the antique in England: the portal of Wilton House, for his patron the Earl of Pembroke, still existing. About a hundred years later, Rubens, with the view of giving the death-blow to the still lingering taste for Gothic architecture in the Netherlands, made drawings of the Palaces of Genoa, and caused them to be disseminated in engravings. At the present day, indeed, we may be excused for smiling at the classical zeal of the worthy Peter Paul, who, in his preface to that collection of designs, inveighs against Gothic architecture as barbarous, at the same time that the plates themselves which he gives, are little better than hideous caricatures of the modern Genoese style, which, at the best is by no means remarkable for purity of taste. Should Gothic architecture, which is just now employed upon a liberal scale, and with more or less of true feeling for it, in your country ever obtain firm footing there again, depend upon it my professional brethren who have, I think, adopted it without due consideration of the present condition of the other fine arts, will have to encounter serious, and, perhaps, unforeseen difficulties from the painters and sculptors. Were some gifted sculptor to apply himself to architecture, I am persuaded he would drive us all out of the field, for the charm with which that art is capable of investing architecture by a skilful union of the flesh-like sculpture with the hard bones of architecture, would produce an irresistibly fascinating effect. From this long letter you will collect that, whilst on the other hand I do not mean to be confined either to a servile imitation of a pure Pompean house; so, on the other, I do not mean to be tied down to repeat your Elizabethan architecture, or the Gothic of Germany or England. Nor do I propose to give you a fac-simile of any building of the Renaissance school. To the best of my power, I propose (as the best style) that which adopts the pure broad principles of beauty in building, and which were, I sincerely believe, best propounded by the Greeks; and which all experience has shewn to be best suited to receive addition from the highest style of painting and sculpture; and which are, in fact, parts of architecture. How far I may succeed is another point. It is indeed difficult in all cases, even to select what is best; but with the most lofty aspirations, I am aware that I may indeed fall very short of the execution of my wishes; perhaps, I have already done myself some harm in this very discussion of style, by preparing you to expect too much. Yours, &c. A. C. [Heading illustration] LETTER V DEAR SIR, THE letter you send in answer to mine, on the question of the most preferable style, I must allow, contains many good reasons in support of your opinion and views; and laying aside prejudice and early associations, I am willing to admit that it is wise to adopt that style which possesses the most completely the elements of beauty, and which is most susceptible of being united to painting and sculpture, essential accessories of architecture, or rather, important branches of that art. Some of the facts which you mention are very interesting and striking, indeed, convincing; and the more I have reflected on the subject, the more I feel the advantage of breadth, and the superior beauty of the simple and grand lines of Grecian architecture; and my curiosity to see the mode in which you will follow out your precepts by your example, is hourly increasing, although I am quite aware that one specimen of a building will not be sufficient to illustrate the general positions you have, I think, so well established. I almost wish that you had been tempted to extend your letter, already long, for the purpose of entering still further into a subject of such interest. I should be curious to learn to what extent the arts of painting and sculpture had been applied, in conjunction with the Gothic; and where they had most failed, and to ascertain whether those instances fully corroborate your positions. As regards your oracular distinction between the two styles, I am not sure I quite understand you. I shall, however, leave this till the termination of the discussion of the plan. The merits of the arrangements and contrivances of the ancient villas, as ascertainable from the descriptions extant, and the plans of those of Pompeii had not entirely escaped me. In addition to the published information, I recollect to have received, many years since, much information and instruction on the subject from Mr. Cocherell, soon after his return from Italy; he having devoted much attention to the arrangement of ancient villas, and having selected some very interesting materials to illustrate the ingenuity of the contrivances, and the judicious selection of the sites, &c. Every part of your letter is tantalizing, and makes me regret that you have merely touched on subjects of such deep interest; whilst reading it, I forgot that I had commissioned you to give me the plan of a house, not to write a complete treatise on ancient and modern architecture. Conceding to you the choice of the style, convinced by your reasons and arguments in favour of its superior beauty and capability, I own to you I do so reluctantly, not without a sigh, and not without much hesitation. Although, abstractedly, a building constructed on the principles you advocate, may have more beauty than our own Gothic or Elizabethan, and may be more susceptible of a union of the three arts; yet there is one part of the subject to which you have not adverted, and on which, perhaps, you are not likely to feel so strongly as we do in England, the most aristocratic country in the world. Some of our most beautiful houses are in this the rejected style, and with them are connected all the prejudices and associations of antiquity, of ancestral dignity and greatness; and a house of this kind carries the mind back to other times, and awakens recollections that it has been enjoyed by a long line of ancestry, and hence, perhaps, has in a great degree arisen the desire of many who have built modern houses, to imitate those of the elder time; not indeed from any attempt actually to devise and construct a forgery, but to avail themselves to a certain degree of the associations to be derived from the recollections associated with the buildings of former ages, and in the construction of which, at least, the most skill and talent had been employed; and again perhaps, the very clumsy and unsuccessful adaptation of the principles of the revived Grecian and Roman, or Palladian architecture, to our modern houses, (especially in the smaller ones,) may have tended to keep alive the prejudice in favour of that style, which even if it were not the best, was at least the best executed; more especially in its adaptation to the fitness of domestic arrangements and comfort. Whilst I have been advocating the merits of our Elizabethan houses, you must not suppose I refer to the multitudes of grotesque little villas which grow up every summer round London; or to those alterations and adaptations, by which one sees Gothic spires, plastered over with stucco, starting up out of one half of an old farm house; the walls notched into battlements, and uncouth animals set a grinning against each other over the gate posts, and the hall crammed and fortified with rusty swords and pikes of all ages and fashions. And on the other half, Venetian windows slices of pilasters, balustrades, and other parts of Italian architecture. Although I have not such a greedy appetite for every thing Gothic, as Horace Walpole had, yet I own I partake somewhat of his feelings, as expressed in a letter from Stowe, when he says, "The Grecian Temple is glorious, this, I openly worship, but in the heretical corner of my heart I adore the Gothic building." Though I own the character he gives of the Gothic building he so adores is barbarous enough, for he says, "That some unusual inspiration of Gibbs has made it _pure_ and venerable, with a propensity to the Venetian, or Moresque Gothic; and the great column near it puts me in mind of the Place of St. Mark." Strawberry Hill, however, is a sufficient proof of his knowledge and taste for pure Gothic. There is one point on which I entirely agree, which is that the style of decoration should be consistent with the style of the architecture. I think we have been more deficient in attention to the style of decoration, than even to the choice of the style of the building itself; and nothing is now more common than to plaster the walls of a modern London house with the Gothic paper of Henry VII.'s Chapel, and to fill it with a load of old carving of all ages and times; and to finish with a cartload of Louis XIV.'s clocks, and other similar ornaments: but of this, more when we come to discuss the decoration of your rooms. [Heading illustration] LETTER VI. BY my first letter you will see I have explained to you the _site_, and I think the next point which we have to settle will be the advantages and disadvantages of _aspect_; and whether the house should be placed at the top of the low hill I have mentioned to you, or half way down, or at the bottom. I think in general, the modern fashion has been to seek a lofty spot, without reference to shelter; so that the architect's work should shew well to the surrounding country. My object is that the house should be placed in the most convenient spot as to _shelter_, with the best aspect suitable to our uncertain climate, always taking care that there be sufficient drainage, an essential, though often a neglected point. Having explained the essential, I come next, to the ornamental; I do not think it is so necessary that the house should form a handsome feature of the surrounding landscape, as that it should form an harmonious picture in combination with the grounds in immediate connexion with it; I must refer you again to a description of the _locale_. I have nothing to add to this. You will see that the spot I have chosen has somewhat of an amphitheatrical shape, and that I have the means of making a terrace; that I am well backed at the north by trees and hill, and open well to the south-east. You have the choice of aspect within the range of south-east to south-west; yet the house, for meteorological reasons, should not be placed too low down in the valley. I refer you to Mr. Professor Daniell's essays on the subject of the difference of temperature between the top and bottom of a hill; this, though it applies principally to the position of a garden, has some weight even in the site of a house. It will be necessary that the approach should be from the south-west; and as regards plantations and protection from wood, I am well defended on all sides. I had meant to have added some observations on the _picturesque_, of which we fancy we are the discoverers; but at present, I have not time. I may, perhaps, (if I find you inclined to enter into the subject,) send a few remarks on this; particularly, as I believe it is considered that the ancients did not, in the situations of their houses or buildings, consult those principles of taste which we call the picturesque. I think Dr. Copplestone, in his lectures on ancient poetry, states this, and yet one should judge otherwise, from seeing the sites of many of the Roman buildings in this country. That at Bignor in Sussex is particularly beautiful, nay, grand; but yet it was low: perhaps, the advantage of a running stream was the general cause in former times of building quite down in the valley. I think it will be an object to have as much veranda as possible, closed in and very wide, but not, perhaps, in front of the best windows; but somewhere so as to have both a shaded and a winter's sheltered walk. I must apologize for the indefiniteness of this letter, but I think I have given enough to serve as a text for the answer. The style and site settled, I propose we should at once come to materials to be used, ground plan and elevation. As regards offices, I will mention such as are essential; as you may, in consideration of the plan, like to know this; there will be one small lodge at the entrance on the south-west, and should have no objection to a back entrance at the north; as this may be used as a labourer's cottage. There will be a double coach-house, stables for six horses; a small ice-house and gardener's cottage. The two latter may be arranged so as to form part of the garden wall. I mean the kitchen garden, which will be at some small distance from the house, at the back, or north; but I mean it to be connected with the house by the flower-garden and plantations. Yours, &c. H. B. [Decorative illustration] [Heading illustration] LETTER VII. DEAR SIR, WE come now to fix upon a part of the grounds that shall appear most healthy, neither too confined nor too exposed; commanding a good prospect, yet well sheltered. This is a very material point, and not indeed altogether free from difficulty; nevertheless, proper attention to the two circumstances just mentioned would perhaps, in the generality of cases, lead at once to the selection of the most favourable site for building upon; both as regards prospect from the house, and the view towards it; so that as regards the latter, it would display itself to the utmost advantage. With respect to the mode of combining buildings with the surrounding scenery, the following principles and directions are laid down by the ablest of our writers in the German language, on the subject of landscape gardening.[3] "If due care be taken to distribute the masses of light and shade, so that they shall judiciously relieve and balance each other, satisfactory effect, as regards the general grouping and composition of the scenery, can hardly fail to be secured. Grass, water, and level lawns, which throw no shadow upon other objects, but merely receive those which the latter cast upon them, are to be considered as _lights_ in landscape gardening, while trees, woods, buildings, and rocks, (should there be any) afford the artist his _shadows_ and darker tints. In making use of these contrary elements, care must be taken lest breadth of effect be destroyed, and a disagreeable spottiness substituted for it; in consequence of there being too many separate and partial effects independent of each other; or else by there being too great a proportion of unbroken _light_. On the other hand an equal fault is committed, if a few dark masses of shadow are allowed so to predominate, as to overpower all besides; or again, if lawn and water exhibit naked unbroken surfaces of light too harshly defined; whereas they ought to be left partially to lose themselves in indistinctness, or the shadow of deep vegetation; or to detach themselves from a darker background as brilliant lights opposed to it. With respect to buildings, these ought never to stand perfectly isolated, because in that case they become spots, and look as if they had no business there, nor belonged to any of the rest. Besides, a partial concealment is always advantageous to every kind of beauty, and it is highly desirable that the imagination should be interested by there being something for it to exercise itself upon, and to divine. The eye frequently rests with more satisfaction upon a chimney peeping out in the distance, and emitting a gray volume of smoke from amidst the dense foliage of trees that embower and exclude from sight the building whose presence is so indicated, than it does upon a large formal mansion standing fully exposed to view, with no shelter or skreen on any side, with nothing to break its outline, with nothing to render it an appropriate and consistent feature in the general scene." From the beginning of what I have here extracted, you perceive that this writer treats the subject in a masterly manner, taking a comprehensive view, and is guided by such sound theoretical principles, as to be able to determine beforehand, the results of his art with almost as much certainty as an architect can judge of an intended building from its ground plan. [3] Prince Puchler Muskau. Andenkungen über Landshaftgärtnerei. Stuttgart, 1834. Having determined upon the precise site, that which seems most recommended by considerations of healthiness, convenience, &c.; we have next to attend to what appertains exclusively to architectural treatment and character. The general idea of the building, as to its chief masses and parts, extent and arrangement, being sketched out, regard must be had to the greater or less space of the immediate site; to obtaining for it due effect of light and shade, and a background calculated to set it off, upon all which circumstances, it depends nearly as much as a work of sculpture does. In like manner as statues in general have only three sides from which they are calculated to be seen, so also have buildings; nor can I help being of opinion that much harm has been done of late years, both in architecture and sculpture by the attempt at equal display on all sides. The greater part of antique statues were evidently intended to have a wall or background behind them; nor is there, perhaps, any thing more at variance with the effect which statues ought to produce, than the present frequent practice of erecting them in the centre of large squares. Nearly all productions of architecture, more especially structures adapted for habitation, offer one side stamped as the principal or front, and another, which is its reverse; in which respect they bear a greater analogy to living beings than to plants; the latter having no definite foreside, on the contrary, any part becoming the front, that is towards the spectator. Such being the case, the same rules that are to be observed for displaying a statue, or representation of a living figure to advantage, ought to be attended to in regard to the position of buildings. Agreeing with you that a sheltered situation is the most desirable for your intended villa, I will attempt to explain it upon the theory of the following general principles; namely, upon our beholding any building of the kind, it ought immediately to be evident wherefore it is so placed, and that by being placed precisely where it is, it is part and parcel of its immediate vicinity. But to confine myself to our particular instance. I think I shall be able to provide an exceedingly agreeable site for your residence, as I learn that a supply of water may be obtained in the grounds, capable of floating superficies of about fifty thousand square feet, and depth in proportion. Accordingly I propose, after the manner shewn in the accompanying ground sketch, (Plate I.) to avail myself of this circumstance, in order to give animation to the now comparatively tame and lifeless character of the place. The reservoir on the upper terrace would keep the basin constantly filled to the level of the lower terrace, before the water escapes into the valley below. By this means, a sheet of water may be provided almost in the centre of the grounds, and my plan suggests, that the house itself should be erected immediately on the north shore of this artificial lake. On the spot where I have placed it, the ground floor would be about fifty feet above the level of the brook itself, and that part of the grounds through which it runs, consequently would not be exposed to any injurious exhalations from the lower grounds. I need hardly point out to you the unusual agreeableness and even piquant effect of a residence so situated; and when I send my plans for the house itself, you will see what are the apartments that will occupy this side of the building, and what a charming prospect they will command of the lake immediately below, and the grounds on its opposite banks. At present I will only remark as regards the increased effect thus to be gained, that a building immediately on the edge of a piece of water appears more considerable than in any other situation; and that the reflected image of the architecture will form a brilliant contrast to the darker reflections of trees and foliage. Besides which, the most favourable point of distance for viewing the building itself on this side, would thus become fixed--being that from the opposite bank of the lake. A very cursory examination of the plan of the ground will convince you, that the whole of the buildings you require are massed together in one group. Such an arrangement certainly contributes to convenience; and I agree with you by shewing the various offices, instead of attempting to mask or screen them, the house itself may be made to possess greater importance and apparent extent; that is, you will get a large looking country house at a small cost. It may be further remarked, that by adopting such treatment of the plan, some kind of architectural foreground is introduced into the prospects seen from the house itself, together with much contrast and variety, and that too without incurring unnecessary or extra expense, since the same accommodation must be provided. Another advantage is, that the subordinate buildings of this kind attached to the main structure, may be made use of as a kind of connecting link between the more artificial and studied regularity of the latter, and the natural objects in its immediate vicinity; without which sort of intermediate transition, a house is apt to have the appearance of a mushroom structure that has over night started up out of the ground. From the north east angle of the house, the stables extend northwards, while the conservatories run in an eastern direction from the same point. By this means an open avenue is left before the north side of the house: and on the east side a flower garden, which is screened towards the north. The piece of ground enclosed on two sides by the stables and hothouses or conservatories, and therefore not exposed to view from the house itself, would be occupied as the stable-yards, &c. Further on, towards the upper terrace, is the fruit and kitchen garden, stretching out more eastward. At the end of the conservatories is the gardener's lodge, the upper part of which forms a small dovecot. [Illustration: Plate I. Drawing of the ground plan and upper story.] I have not yet said any thing of the west side of the house, although it forms one of the principal elevations of the external designs, the carriage entrance porch being placed there; the approach to which latter is over a bridge, and by the road which runs to the south-west towards the village. You therefore perceive that, before they actually arrive, visitors will obtain a distinct view, across the lake, of the entire range of the buildings from east to west; from the gardener's lodge and tower along the line of south front and terrace, to the bridge itself; of which group of architecture, the greater part, would be reflected in the water, from which it appears immediately to rise up. You will observe, I have _not_ carried the approach to the house in a curved or serpentine direction line, as is generally done, whereby the object to which the visitor is hastening, is now seen and now again suddenly lost sight of; but in a _straight line_, so that the building displays itself more and more plainly to the eye at every step. From the high road, the approach is on the north-east; and of the portico lodge and gate at that entrance into the grounds, the sketch prefixed to this letter will afford you an idea. The direction of the drives and paths, the arrangement of the plantations and groups of trees, wherein I have taken care that the greater part of the fine elms shall remain untouched. The source of the stream and the weir, from which the superfluous water finds its way into the lower valley, would almost of course suggest the propriety of erecting seats at those points of the grounds. A more detailed description of the house follows by next post, with the plans and elevations.[4] Yours, &c. A. C. [4] Plate I. shews the ground plan, &c. [Heading illustration] LETTER VIII. AT length I have sent my notions on the site, and _generally_ as to the house with which I trust you are satisfied. Now that I come to more particular description, and to speak of my design in detail, my confidence is somewhat abated, it being exceedingly problematical how far my ideas will accord with your own wishes and expectations. To the best of my ability I have endeavoured to meet both; to fulfil the conditions belonging to the particular subject and occasion; for be it remarked, every production of art is like every poem, a composition on some particular occasion or theme; and if it fails of its purposed aim as such, it may be said to be a failure altogether, and doomed to oblivion; or rather, in my case, to be stuck up as a monument of my ignorance. All that I dare hope as yet, is that the drawings have not been met with a hasty and decided "It won't do;" but that you at least suspend your judgment until I explain more fully my ideas and the motives which have guided me. The principal sitting-rooms face the south, by which means they will have not only the most favourable aspect, but as it so happens, the best prospect also; therefore, so far you are not likely to start any objection; neither, I presume, will any exception be taken at the situation and aspect of the dining-room, which is towards the east; which last circumstance has induced me almost, as a matter of course, to place the entrance at the west, or opposite end of the house, it being on many accounts objectionable; (with regard to quiet and privacy,) to make the corridor, or inner vestibule running behind and serving as the communication between the principal apartments immediately connected with, or in continuation of the first entrance into the house from the open air; for one reason, because it is hardly possible in such case to prevent a continual current of cold air through the whole of that part of the building. Another point here attended to, is to place the dining-room beyond the other sitting apartments, so that it shall be the last and the most distant from the entrance. Attention to these circumstances have led to that arrangement of the space afforded by the plan which I have adopted. In order both to give some play to that part of the plan, and to avoid all sky-lights, I have broken the north side of the plan by a small court; surrounded on three sides by the house, in such manner that from the corridors, &c. turned towards it, a free prospect of the court and grounds shall present itself from various points of view; whereby an architectural foreground, and the natural scenery beyond it are combined; so that you feel yourself in every part of the house quite in the country. Permit me now to receive you at the entrance, and be your _cicerone_ over the building; in which character I must, before we proceed further, call attention to the exterior of this part, as you will have perceived by the designs it is carried up loftier than the rest, for the purpose of breaking the outline, and of providing a conspicuous and important feature in a distant view of the building. This tower-like portion of the structure does not carry with it any formidable appearance; it has neither battlements nor watch-turrets, for which there exist no historical grounds. On the contrary, crowned by a rich cupola roof, and ornamented with statues, it serves to announce that the house belongs to a lover of the arts and muses, who may be supposed here to enjoy at once, the refinements of literature and art, and the beauties of cultivated nature. The ground floor of this mass of the building is occupied by the entrance vestibule, which has a vaulted ceiling whose arches descend rather low, and which is lighted directly, by only a single small window at some distance from the floor, but which receives a strong reflected light through the doorways. It is highly desirable that a vestibule, entered immediately from the open air, should be moderately lighted, in order that the eyes may not be too much strained at first, but accustom themselves to in-door light; and also that the other rooms may derive additional effect from the contrast. Most assuredly too, a subdued degree of light will suffice for a vestibule which is not intended for a sitting-room, nor for reading, writing, or any other occupation, consequently, it very properly admits of a kind of Rembrandtish effect, which here becomes rather a merit than a defect; especially as it tends to set off all that follows. A group of statues against the wall facing the entrance, would here produce a good effect on account of the stream of light which would fall upon it from the window, and would make a pleasing impression on the visitor as soon as he had crossed the threshold. Instead of seeing from this vestibule any of the other parts of the house, the situation of the rooms, or those who may be passing through the corridors, we have first to turn to the left, where we perceive the staircase, not however exposed to full view, but merely so as to allow the upper part of it to be seen through a screen, formed of columns placed upon a lofty stylobate; which I conceive would produce a more than ordinary picturesque bit of interior architecture. We do not, however, enter the staircase, but pass on to the hall or inner vestibule, which affords immediate access to the sitting-rooms. Perhaps I may as well mention here, that the servants' hall, &c. for the men-servants would be in the basement at this end of the house, consequently would be just by the entrance. The hall or inner vestibule is a spacious room overlooking the small flower-court above mentioned, the avenue leading to the stables, and the larger trees on the north side of the house. A small door opens into the court, while one of rich architectural character forms the entrance to the suite of rooms occupying the south or water front of the building. This last mentioned doorway leads into a small anti-room, right and left of which are two moderate sized drawing-rooms, capable of being used as one when the company is numerous. The folding doors being thrown open, and the smaller intermediate room becoming the centre-piece of the triple apartment thus formed. In front of these three rooms is an open loggia on a somewhat lower level, there being a descent to it of four steps, looking immediately upon the water; this loggia would form a sheltered terrace immediately connected with the sitting-rooms which it would also serve to screen from the sun. The library, which, according to your wishes, is made one of the principal suite of rooms, is the last of those in this front, it being on the south-east angle. It has an alcove or deeply recessed bay with a window in it, which not only affords a very agreeable little snuggery, bower, or whatever else you may term it, for reading or studying, or meditating in apart, but also gives additional spaciousness and variety to the whole apartment. From this room a jib or concealed door opens to the small private staircase, and another of the same kind leads into the flower garden. The larger door on the north side of the room, is that by which we enter the dining-room, to which, as it is upon a lower level, there is a descent of a few steps. The reason for this difference of level is that the room being more spacious requires to be of more height than the others, and also that it may be upon the same level as the terrace looking out upon the flower garden. Beyond the dining-room, is the serving room, and behind that the kitchen, which, however, does not form part of the body of the house, but is included in the same range of buildings as the stables, being under the same roof. Attached to it is a kitchen court, and it is connected with the rest of the house by the servants' staircase, which last leads both down to the cellars and rooms in the basement, and to those above for the female domestics, to the childrens' rooms, &c. The stables and conservatories call for no other explanation than what the drawings themselves supply; we will therefore now return to the principal staircase, on one side of which are two rooms not yet mentioned, one of which may be used as a business room. On ascending the stairs, we have first two stranger's rooms on the left, on the right a billiard-room in the tower, and an upper hall or corridor over that below, and of the same size though not so lofty; this would serve for the children to play in and exercise themselves in winter or bad weather. On the south side of this are two sleeping, and two sitting-rooms, the larger of which might be used as a winter breakfast-room. The larger of the two sleeping-rooms, namely, that over the library is the one you would yourself occupy, it being adjoining the private staircase. On the south side of it is an alcove, raised a few steps above the rest of the floor; and on the east a small dressing-room looking out upon the flower garden. The upper part of the tower contains two other handsome sleeping-rooms, which, as they command a fine prospect, may be appropriated either to visitors or to the grown up members of your family. It has been my endeavour to give an agreeable variety, play and contrast to the different parts of the interior, which I hope will not displease you; and I trust that the drawings and descriptions of the several apartments, their architectural character and decoration, which will form the subject of my next letter, will shew that while I have adhered to one uniform style throughout, I have neglected neither the variety in the individual parts, nor harmony and unity of expression in the ensemble, but have reconciled together those two, somewhat contrary, yet highly desirable qualities.[5] Yours, &c. A. C. [5] N.B. The Plates II. III. and IV. shew the south, north, and east elevations. [Decorative illustration] [Heading illustration] LETTER IX. MY DEAR SIR, FROM the two letters, and the accompanying plans, I think I fully understand your views. On the whole I am much pleased with the design, and own your example has fully supported your precepts; and bating all pleasure to be derived from associations, as I have before noticed, I willingly subscribe to your views, as to the beauty of the principles of Grecian architecture applied as they have been in your pleasing design. There are only two points on which, perhaps, you have allowed your imagination to carry you too far: first, you have taken rather a poetical notion of the means to be applied in building, what will, I fear be a very expensive structure, and larger than was intended; and next as regards the lake, on the borders of which you propose to place the house. I fully subscribe to your notions as to the beauty which would be gained by the proposed sheet of water, and feel all the advantages of the broad expanse of light, and the extent and variety to be derived from the reflection of the building in this natural mirror, &c.; but there are disadvantages, some of which are not to be overcome, and others, of which in my opinion, more than counterbalance all that is to be gained in beauty and variety. I suspect you have been misinformed as to the possibility of making the lake as you propose, and next the expense to execute this perfectly and so as to ensure that it should always be filled with fresh and transparent water, would be very considerable, and indeed at times it would be impossible to accomplish this at any cost. But our climate I think is an insuperable objection to have a house actually bordering on still water; recollect how few months in the year the notion of the coolness of water would add pleasure to the prospect from the library or drawing-room window, and how often one should shudder at the very notion of it; moreover that according to our apportionment of the seasons for town and country those very months will be passed in London,--April, May, June, and generally July, being the time when "every body is in town." Although I believe the neighbourhood of water may not always be unwholesome, still there is much prejudice to overcome on this subject; not a toothache, cold, or rheumatic twinge would be felt by a person in the family, from the stable to the drawing-room, but would be attributed to the _pond_, for when angry, nobody would call it the LAKE; malignant malaria would be discussed in every variety of tone and phrase, and Dr. Chambers would think it his duty to enter his protest against any patient of his ever venturing to make a visit of twenty-four hours to the proscribed spot. I am, however, not sorry that you had conceived the notion of the lake, because it has given an opportunity of shewing what a beautiful accessory water becomes to a house, applied as you have suggested, and because I believe you will have no difficulty in substituting some broad expanse either of turf or gravel, which, though it will not give you the reflections of the buildings and the play of light you require, will still afford a flat surface for the receiving the shadows, and will not interrupt the harmony and simplicity of the general lines of your building. The loggia though it may not look out upon the water as you propose, will always be delightful as affording shelter in the winter, and shade in the summer; and the portico is, I think, a valuable addition. Our unhappy rage for adaptation or rather perversion of the Grecian portico; hitherto the portico has increased rather than diminished, the distance which has to be traversed in cold and rainy weather, from the door to the carriage. The perfection of this maladaptation is to be seen in our unfortunate National Gallery, where is annually erected a tarpaulin lean-to in order to prevent people being drenched in rainy weather in their progress to the entrance door, the access to which is opposed by an inaccessible portico. I quite agree with you that there being no historical associations connected with the site, it is right that the tower should have no battlements, and should not show any angry front where no defence against invading enemies, (whether chartists, socialists, or bread-taxing tories), is intended. I agree in the advantage to be derived from the variety of line and the grandeur of the tower, and am willing that the ornaments you propose of statues should indicate (as it will truly) the propensities of the owner, especially as terra cotta affords the means at a small cost, of obtaining examples of fine statues. However, as regards the shape of the tower, and especially the cupola, some doubts of its beauty have been expressed, more however by others than myself, though I cannot help feeling that, if this part partook more of the tall tower of the modern Italian buildings, finishing with the nearly flat roof and long projecting eaves, the effect would be more picturesque and less pretending. I mention this merely for your consideration, and am quite willing that your greater knowledge and better taste should determine its shape. As regards the exterior in general, I have little or nothing further to suggest, except that I may observe that I have remarked in most of the best modern houses the cornices and ornaments are in my opinion too thin and minute, and this, I take it, is owing to the too servile copying from buildings designed for a country where the sun shines nearly throughout the year, and where the light colour of the material (unstained by damp or weather) marks more sharply and completely the light and shade than is the case in our gloomy season, and where the walls are soon disfigured and weather-stained. Although I assume that the project of the lake is to be abandoned, yet I should wish still that the ground floor should be at least raised as much above the level as it at present is. Although every facility of access to the gardens and grounds is desirable in a country house, yet I think it is disagreeable to be on an actual level with the walks; both from the interior and from the exterior, it gives the notion of the house springing from the earth as a mushroom, as you have observed. I will now follow you through the building at your invitation, observing that I agree as to the choice of aspects and the arrangements of the rooms. With reference to this, the west is well arranged so as to avoid that aspect for any of the rooms to be generally inhabited, and I subscribe to the notion that the entrance should be somewhat gloomy, at least enough so, as to create a feeling of pleasure on emerging into more light. As regards the large hall, perhaps for the size and style of the house there is a little too much sacrificed to it; but as I think it is an object of importance to obtain an open and airy access to the whole suit of rooms, and as this will afford ample scope for ornament, and casts of statues and bas-reliefs, and perhaps fresco ornamental painting, I am willing that some sacrifice should be made. The two rooms beyond the staircase will be useful, and indeed are necessary. I have already appropriated one as a gun room and audience chamber for those whose shoes may not be clean enough to be admitted to the best library. I like the disposition of the two drawing-rooms; perhaps, however, it may be worth consideration whether it may not be better to make some sacrifice of symmetry, and convert them into two rooms, one large and one small; keeping the small one at the end next the staircase, and making it either octagon or circular; either shape is pleasing, and admits of variety in decoration. In that case it would be advisable to make separate entrances to each room for the interior hall: indeed, if the present arrangement is retained, this may be desirable, so as to avoid using the middle room entirely as a passage room. As regards the library, I have no observation to make on its shape or disposition. I assume that the two windows will sufficiently light it. At first I thought that it might be advisable to have the means of shutting off the recess by sliding doors from the large room, making a kind of inner library or study of it; but I presume, as this would leave but one window, the large room would be too dark. I think it would be desirable that there should be an entrance to the dining-room across the hall and through the corridor, as well as through the library. There might be occasions where it may be inconvenient to pass through the library to the dining-room, although this might be considered as the usual and grand entrance. I do not see where you have placed your fire-place in the library. I should conceive from its size, that you might want either two fire-places, or at least one stove and one fireplace to warm so large a room. The mention of fireplaces reminds me that I see no chimneys in the drawing, I suppose they are hidden by the balustrade. I shall be glad if this is so, as it will be well to get rid of so unsightly an object as chimneys generally are. As regards the kitchen, it certainly is well placed with reference to the convenience of access to the dining-room; but though not under the same roof with the house, I should fear that not only the smell of the cooking, but the noise of the offices may reach the dining-room. This is a common evil, and one which it is essential to avoid. When we come to discuss the offices more in detail, this point must be well considered. I approve of the dining-room windows opening on the flower-garden, as this will also (unless when we are alone) be the breakfast room, and occasionally the morning room in hot weather; perhaps, however, to avoid any notion of coldness, only _one_ of the three windows should go down to the floor and open on the garden. As regards the kitchen, there must be added some additional offices, such as scullery, out-door's larder, &c. &c. but as I see space sufficient for these in the direction of the orangery, this will make no material alteration in your plan. In addition to the wine and beer cellars, I think the servants' offices may be well included in the space under the east and south fronts, particularly as I think it will be necessary that some sleeping rooms for servants should be obtained in the attics, and I presume your plan will admit of this without deranging your elevation; though I am aware something must be sacrificed in the height of the rooms; but though there may, for the purpose of protection of the lower part of the house, be a sleeping room for one or two men-servants, yet I think the women's sleeping apartments will not be conveniently arranged on the basement story. As it is important to economize, I should suggest to you that it will not be necessary to continue the basement story on the west front, and perhaps not under the interior or large hall. As regards the arrangement of the sleeping-rooms, if the attics are obtained, I think those you propose sufficient. If any more should be required, perhaps the large corridor or hall might be abridged, and at all events the billiard room may be made into another bed-room, and the billiard table taken down to the hall: increasing moral habits and the spread of useful knowledge, prevents our employing so much time as formerly in mere games of amusement, and I observe that the billiard room is somewhat going out of fashion, and that where it remains, is rarely used. I should, however, be sorry to give it up altogether. It is a very useful and innocent assistant with a dull party on a rainy day, or during a long evening at Christmas; and occasionally is a good "bore escape." The dressing-room at the east angle is inaccessible except through the bedroom, but this is an evil which cannot be in all cases avoided. I have thus given you in detail the observations which occur to me on going over your plan, and except such alterations as occur to you as necessarily arising out of the rejection of the lake, I would not wish that any alteration should be made, and I shall be glad to receive from you the details as to the interior, and your opinion as to the few alterations I have suggested. You have not stated to what use you design to put the building at the top of the north-east end; this, I presume, is to remain open, and so merely designed as a balance for the tower. Perhaps, however, it may be put to some use, either as a store or lumber room: I think it adds much to the picturesque appearance of the whole. Although I have rejected the lake, I should be sorry to lose the bridge in the approach, but as the ground in front slopes, a terrace may be well substituted, and perhaps the bridge may remain as passing over some road, or may form some part of the arrangement as to the angles of the terrace. As regards your observations of the position of the house, I agree with what you state, but when I consult you in detail on the order and disposition of the grounds, I propose to make some suggestions on the subject. With respect to the materials, I assume you mean to have light coloured brick with stone at the angles, and for the moulding. I presume the additions of painting and sculpture (one of the grounds for the rejection of the Gothic) will play their proper part in the interior; as in the exterior, except in respect of the figures in the tower, no addition is gained from them in the elevation. Yours, &c. H. B. [Decorative illustration] [Heading illustration] LETTER X. THANKS for your letter approving of my design in the principal parts of the interior; I shall now briefly point out the materials which I would recommend to be employed for the floors, walls, and ceilings. For the entrance hall, I propose that the doorcases, chimney-piece, and the socle or dado should be carried up about four feet high, and should be of yellowish Derbyshire marble, and the walls in stucco, but made to show the joints of different courses, and marbled in fresco of a lighter tint than the rest, while the vaulted ceiling should have the ribs coloured white and brown upon a pale blue ground; for here in the lower part of the tower it will, I conceive, be most proper to indicate as forcibly as possible to the eye, solidity of material and construction. In the second or inner hall, which we enter from the preceding one, and beyond which is obtained a view of the staircase, as seen through the columns placed on a stylobate, serving as a screen to the stairs, the walls might be marbled of a light greenish tint, intermixed in the socle with brown lines. The columns and entablature should be white; and the ceiling panelled in wainscot, with coffers or compartments containing ornaments in relief on a green ground. As regards this part of the interior, I would remark that should such be deemed preferable, there would be no objection to filling in the upper part of the screen (that is, the openings between the columns) with glass. While this would prevent all draught from the staircase, and in some degree intercept sound also, it would not in anywise affect the general design; but rather might be made to conduce to it, by adopting some ornamental pattern, of course in a corresponding style. Both in this and the preceding vestibule, the floor should be paved with marble or coloured stone, as should also that of the corridors; but the large hall should have a parquetted wood flooring, because that room will occasionally be made use of for dancing. In this last, the walls should be wainscoted and panelled with oak, to the height of about seven feet; and the doorway which forms the entrance to the suite of sitting-rooms should be distinguished by richness of carved decoration in the same material. I further recommend the application of embellishment of inlaid woods or marquetrie of different colours, for the cornice or upper mouldings of this wainscoting, so as to produce a rich border or band along the walls, above which there will remain space for pictures in frames, (inclining forwards) and even if these paintings are of no very great value in themselves as works of art, they will be of use as contributing to the general design, and add greatly to its effect. The upper part of the walls might be painted in fresco in imitation of grey marble streaked with red, which last mentioned colour should be that of the coffers in the wainscoted ceiling. The ante-room or first room of the suite being smaller than the others, should have a coved ceiling, in order to diminish its apparent height; and this might be painted with Arabesque ornaments on a white ground, somewhat after the manner of several of the ceilings of Julio Romano in the Villa _Lanti_. The walls of this and of the two adjoining rooms should be hung with silk or other stuff of a quiet sober hue, so as to give the greatest relief to the pictures, I taking it for granted that you would be inclined to place here the principal part of such pictures as you may possess. Though the ceilings of the two drawing-rooms should not be much ornamented, yet they may be relieved by the introduction of gilding in parts. For all these rooms I propose that the doors, &c. should be white with gilt mouldings. In the library, the ribs or bands of the vaulted ceiling should be gilt upon a white ground; and as regards the bookcases or shelves for books, they ought to be of some light coloured wood, highly polished, and not go higher than the corbels or consoles from which the vaulting springs, in order that there may be sufficient space for busts, vases, and other ornaments of that kind upon the cornices; and this will avoid the inconvenience of having the upper shelves quite out of reach, except with the help of high library steps--always inconvenient. For the lunettes or arched spaces between the corbels, I have not proposed any particular decoration, as they might be filled up by reliefs and casts let into the wall. The dining room with the arcs-doubleaux and compartments of its vaulted ceiling afford scope for fresco painting of a superior style; and the pencil of our friend Eastlake, who has already shown so much classical talent in decorating the dining-room in London, might render this one of the most striking and charming apartments of its kind in England. It is true that fresco is so little practised in your country, and consequently its process so imperfectly understood, that he would probably have to encounter some difficulties at the outset; but I flatter myself I could be of considerable assistance to him, as regards the practical details, having already succeeded in introducing that mode of painting in spite of most unfavourable circumstances. I would advise that the pictures should be confined to the ceiling and the lunettes, and that the walls should be merely stuccoed, as being upon the whole more in accordance with the destination of the room itself, and affording a quieter background to the company seated around the dinner-table; at the same time that the frescoes in the upper part of the room would thereby show to greater advantage. You will observe that the fresco requires a bold broad style, and has an advantage over oil, as it is very effective even when not seen by a strong or favourable light. Should somewhat more of decoration be thought advisable, I would suggest the adoption of glass-mosaic in narrow upright pannels at intervals. Of this species of embellishment, which was much used by the Romans, and after, much in vogue throughout Italy during the middle ages, for pulpits, monuments, &c. I have lately introduced an application in a room fitted up by myself, the effect of which is allowed to be singularly striking and good. The remaining drawing shows the large corridor on the upper floor. I need hardly remark that these designs are only intended to convey an idea of the general character and style of the different rooms, as submitted to you for consideration. Much yet remains to be definitively settled, there being a variety of circumstances with which I am at present but imperfectly acquainted; nor can I possibly say what modifications of the plan I should advise, until I know wherein you consider it objectionable, or wherein it fails to meet your precise wishes. Some objections I may probably be able to combat; others may possibly, by leading me to consider the points in difference afresh, enable me to hit upon variations that may not immediately occur to me. Much will depend upon your collection of works of art, which is as yet but imperfectly known to me; much also upon my meeting with clever workmen, capable, not only of entering into my ideas, and executing without further trouble any piece of decoration that may be required, but also, as has not seldom happened to me, of suggesting valuable hints during the progress of the work. So far indeed am I from wishing you to decide at once in favour of what I propose, I am most of all solicitous that you should as completely comprehend not only the general scheme, but the contemplated effect of every part. Undoubtedly it is very pleasant to an architect to meet with an employer disposed to give him _carte-blanche_ and permission to follow out his own ideas unrestrictedly; yet it is still more delightful to meet with one who, instead of merely passively acquiescing, assents from conviction after deliberate study of the ideas submitted to him, and from the lively interest he takes in them. If I have ventured to propose marble, gilding, fresco painting, and glass-mosaic, do not be alarmed at the seeming extravagance, or imagine that any great expense will be incurred. In architecture the most durable materials are the most economical, and they carry with them a nobleness of appearance not attainable by even lavish ornaments, costly at first, yet of a perishable nature. Consider what large sums are expended in the course of a few years in keeping up houses that have to be repaired or refitted up from time to time as regards all but their bare walls, in consequence either of the materials getting soiled and shabby, or of the changes of fashion, which having been the only guidance in matters of taste at first, must continue to be consulted and conformed to, otherwise the whole looks out of date; whereas, that which is originally beautiful, independently of any particular fashion of the day, will so remain, let the caprice of fashion change as it will. I do really believe there are many rooms that would have cost their owners less, had they been entirely lined with marble, and otherwise ornamented with fresco painting and mosaic, than they have done in consequence of being furbished up every now and then by decorators and paper-hangers, and often in very questionable taste, while after all, the effect for the time is at the best of an inferior kind. Besides by economy and a little dexterity of management even materials may be obtained at a comparatively moderate cost: works in _Carrara_ marble, for instance, may be executed in Italy from designs sent over for that purpose, at about half the price, including freight and duty, which they would cost in England. The only inconvenience is that they cannot be furnished so promptly, it being requisite that the orders for them should be given some time beforehand. You will perhaps recollect the circumstance I have stated in respect to this matter in my "ARCHITECTURA DOMESTICA." As to gilding--oil-gilding is cheaper than water-gilding; which last has only the advantage of looking more brilliant than the former at first. Fresco painting, again is less expensive than any mode of painting in oil; for it necessarily demands far greater rapidity of execution, and the effect being produced at once, instead of the work proceeding through all the different stages from dead colouring to the last finishing. How very poor a succedaneum for fresco painting is Gobelius tapestry! in which latter the execution is entirely mechanical, giving a mere soulless plodding transcript of the original, while as some of the colours fade sooner than the rest, the whole becomes in a short time quite inharmonious. I am moreover convinced that there are many able artists now living, who would execute designs in fresco for the same price that is paid for designs in tapestry; so that durability being considered, the saving accruing from the former would be considerable. Nor is it the least important consideration of all, that art itself would be extensively benefited by the adoption of such practice. I at least am thoroughly convinced, that a single room painted in fresco by an able artist would do more for the advancement of sound art in England than a score of commissions for oil-pictures, or than a hundred so called illustrated editions of popular works, with wood cuts. Pre-eminently gifted as is England with a true feeling for colouring, there is no doubt but that her school would be able to impart a fresh vigour to fresco painting, and would set a bright example to the continent in this branch of the art. Yours, &c. A. C. N.B. Some further observations of M. de Chateauneuf's, in defence of his views regarding the fit style of architecture for a modern house, and also his design for the interior, have been omitted: I regret this, and so, I think, will the reader; the additions, however, would have made the work too expensive. The plates at the end will give a clear idea of the general plan and the elevation, and the last plate contains the proposed alteration of the tower, and omitting the lake. _Editor._ [Heading illustration] LETTER XI. TO CHARLES LOCK EASTLAKE, ESQ. R.A. ETC. MY DEAR SIR, AT length I write to claim the performance of your promise, viz. that you would give me your advice as regards the decoration of the house designed by M. de Chateauneuf, the drawings and plans for which you have seen. After some discussion, and a struggle on my part in favour of the Elizabethan, the Perpendicular-gothic, or whatever the style is to be designated, M. de Chateauneuf has triumphed, and the Italian, or revived antique, (essentially the Grecian,) has been finally agreed on. You are aware how strongly I feel that one of the best modes of advancing the fine arts, is by paying greater attention to the interior decorations of our houses, than has hitherto been the fashion in England. The best proof of your own opinion on this subject, is the kindness with which you devoted much time and labour to the designing and executing for me the Pompeian room so deservedly admired. Entertaining this view on the subject of ornament, makes me the more anxious to take all possible pains in selecting the style of decoration, so as the house should prove that its owner is a lover of art, and that it should, as far as is compatible with a reasonable economy, be considered in some degree as a pattern of what might be accomplished in the matter of decoration. I never think on the subject without calling to mind the principles laid down for the ornamenting a country house, in Mr. Rogers's "Invitation to a Friend:" indeed, looking to his intimate knowledge of the whole circle of fine arts, and lastly, the specimen of refined taste which his own town house exhibits, my _beau ideal_ is a house decorated under his direction; but as this cannot be obtained, I trust that you, who possess so much of his spirit and refinement, will, as far as may be compatible with your engagements, afford me the benefit of your assistance. Although the subject of decoration, both as regards houses and public buildings, has been hitherto much neglected in this country, I think now every one is becoming fully alive to its importance. The establishment of the Government School of Design, in which, for the first time in England, the art of design, as applied to decoration, is systematically taught;--the opportunity afforded by the building of the Houses of Parliament;--the Committee of the House of Commons, which has already reported on the subject of their decoration;--and the Royal commission entrusted with the further consideration of the subject,--cannot fail to produce within a few years a great alteration in the views and taste of the public. I may here observe, that the School of Design, and the training of young workmen, will mainly tend to assist those who may be inclined to give up the ornamenting their saloons and halls with cheap printed papers, by producing persons who will be able, at a moderate cost, to execute the original designs of eminent artists, or to copy the great works of antiquity. Hitherto, except when foreigners were introduced, it has been scarcely possible to obtain the assistance of workmen capable of executing anything beyond the commonest and simplest scrolls or straight lines; or if such assistance were obtained, it could only be procured at a cost which put any extensive scale of decoration beyond the reach of any but the affluent. As regards the style and mode of execution of the proposed decorations, I should, of course, wish to be guided by your judgment. Whether it may be expedient merely to copy or adapt from known examples, such as the baths of Titus, and the paintings of Pompeii, or from the great masters of modern times, such as the designs of Raphael and Giulio Romano;--or whether an entirely new style, founded on a study of the general principles of art as applied to decoration, should be attempted, is for you to determine. Again, it may be a question, whether in different rooms a different course should be pursued, for the sake of variety. Respecting the vehicle, whether encaustic, fresco, or oil, or all three, should be used, must be determined by you. You will observe there is the outer hall, and staircase, the inner hall, the library, the two drawing rooms, and the dining room, all requiring your attention. The library, I should wish to be devoted as far as possible to art, especially as the books it will contain relate principally to painting and sculpture. I remain yours very sincerely, H. B. * * * * * P. S.--I should state that this application is made to you, with the perfect assent, nay, indeed, at the request of M. de Chateauneuf, who is desirous that his design should have the benefit of your advice, as regards its ornament: the specimen given in M. de Chateauneuf's work on Domestic Architecture, of the embellishment of the house executed by him at Hamburgh, and indeed some observations he has sent to me, sufficiently prove that he is in nowise deficient in this important branch of an architect's duty. [Decorative illustration] [Decorative illustration along left margin] LETTER XII. MY DEAR SIR, I SHOULD willingly refer you to abler advisers if M. de Chateauneuf's house were as real as it deserves to be; but although the conditions which you and the architect have proposed to yourselves have led to very definite arrangements in the structure itself, a pleasing uncertainty may be assumed to exist with regard to the decorations: in a word, I can scarcely shrink from a responsibility as ideal as the subject of our speculation. I am sorry you have again referred to a certain "Pompeian" room; believe me, too much has been said of what you know was a rough experiment, to see the effect of a particular kind of decoration for small rooms, and which, as regards its details, can only deserve attention from the skill with which Mr. Harvey executed the animals that are introduced. The word "decoration," however appropriate to fantastic ornaments, and in some degree to insulated figures, has, as you know, been considered vilifying when applied to works that are addressed to the mind. But, as we have no other term, we must consent to use it in both meanings. It is, indeed, important to remember, that no works of art, however elevated, can dispense with the appeal, the impressive or winning appeal, to the eye. Thus much for our definition of terms. As a general principle in decoration, I would recommend that the eye should be solely or chiefly addressed where a passing glance only can be given to the work, and that the attention should be more taxed where leisure and surrounding circumstances permit or invite contemplation. The reverse of this would be manifestly wrong; but the recommendation itself is not to be understood too literally. Every display has its legitimate exuberance: the "over and above" in decoration can only be that of quality, for mere taste is supposed to define all that relates to quantity. As common poetic description sometimes exalts its subject less by accumulation than by supposing costly materials where mean ones would do, so in art the augmenting excellence ascends from sense to thought. If, therefore, the intention to afford mental pleasure is very apparent even in situations where this may appear superfluous and in a manner thrown away, the impression must of itself be elevating. But the indispensable condition is, that a gradation should still be maintained; that higher excellence should still be in reserve. What must be the character of works of art to which Raphael's Corridor in the Vatican forms the mere approach? The answer is given by the perfection of the works in the Stanze. All that is to be insisted on, therefore, is a due gradation in conformity with the principle first proposed. In the remarks that follow, I cannot strictly follow the plan of the house, but must often generalize; the observations submitted, if tenable at all, will, however, be easily applicable to your purpose. The pavement of the halls might be enriched, but I can hardly approve the occasional practice of the ancients in placing mosaic "histories" under their feet:[6] the objections are sufficiently obvious. The forms and hues employed should be merely calculated to gratify the sight. Among other preliminary considerations, I would also include the nature of the mere surface, as well as the distinction of every apartment. Thus a pavement, however decorated, should still express the character of firmness and solidity. For this reason I would banish even the lowest kind of life, (that of plants,) and every approach to perspective. Geometrical forms would thus be alone admissible: the variety is infinite; but even here I would again exclude abrupt and irregular contrasts of colour, which have sometimes the effect of making the evenness of the surface doubtful: the last consideration is even applicable to carpets. With respect to the classic fashion of inscriptions on the threshold,[7] I merely remark, that letters are only ornamental in architecture when disposed symmetrically, and enclosed in a regular frame-work. [6] The passion for this kind of decoration was carried so far that the ornamented floor of the dining-room sometimes represented the scattered fragments of a repast. _Plin._ I. xxxvi. c. 25. [7] Even the Mosaic floor at the entrance to bed-rooms, had inscriptions; a pavement of this kind was found at Brindisi, wit the words BENE DORMIO. In approving the common practice of placing statues and bas-reliefs in the principal hall, I do not depart from the spirit of our first principles. A statue has generally the advantage of being seen in various points of view, and thus commands attention in situations where paintings could not. The rich effect of bas-reliefs is sufficient to recommend them; associations of classic taste are naturally connected with the classic materials of marble or bronze; and architecture, when displayed as such, seems to acquire additional solidity by the presence of sculpture. But works of sculpture of the first excellence should be admitted to the library or drawing room, and even fragments of rare beauty should be enshrined with like distinction. For the present, however, we are in the hall. I do not recommend mixing mural painting and sculpture: no painted devices should compete injudiciously with the bas-reliefs. But let us suppose that your bas-reliefs are in the outer hall, and that you have only some sculptured vases on detached pedestals in the inner hall or corridor, then by all means decorate the walls of the latter with arabesques: to these we shall return. In the staircase, also, it will be necessary to make your election between the two arts. I will assume that you decide for painting. Few people linger in a staircase; still fewer break their necks to look at a painted ceiling. If the scene affects the eye and the imagination agreeably, this may be considered sufficient. When we see the whole Pantheon on the ceiling and walls of great staircases, this undoubtedly might be defended on the ground that a mere passing impression of magnificence is intended: but the exuberance of quantity rather than of quality is here obvious. In whatever mode the walls of the staircase are adorned, the decoration should be entirely subservient to the architectural effect. This involves a more radical objection to the mythologic crowds before alluded to, because they have frequently the effect (and intentionally so) of destroying all idea of the angles of the building. I am of opinion, on the contrary, that the decorator should dispose his paintings in shapes which shall appear to grow out of and complete the architecture. The inclination of the panelling of the wall to agree with the line of the stairs, may be considered incompatible with paintings: a horizontal termination, perhaps level with the chief landing-place, is essential, and the triangular spaces, or sections of such spaces, between this and the stairs, had better be left nearly plain, and not very light in colour. Of all mistakes, that of introducing painted figures, sometimes the size of life, where living figures must so often come in contact with them, is the worst. The compartment or compartments above the horizontal line might be painted in fresco, certainly not in oil on the wall, nor in the newly revived encaustic, at least not till it has been further tried. The figures should not extend to the angles of the walls where the staircase turns; the pseudo or real compartments which form the frames might finish at a little distance from the angle; the real wall is, in short, never to be lost sight of; and whatever merits ocular illusion may have in paintings generally, it would be injudicious to attempt it here. Where the light is unfavourable for painting, the flattest style of bas-relief is still admissible. But as you are especially desirous of having your staircase coloured, I really can propose nothing fitter to gratify the eye and imagination merely, than the more refined and at the same time familiar subjects of the Greek mythology; such as the personifications of Poetry, the progress of the Hours and of Light, and so forth. Such subjects afford the best materials for mere beauty of line and drapery, for composition generally, and, if not too statue-like, for colour; and even when they suggest no profounder range of thought, (not that their import is necessarily thus superficial,) they leave an elegant impression on the mind. The objection is, that they are old; but there would be some novelty in treating them as detached compositions, instead of beclouding and peopling the whole space in the style of the seventeenth century. It is to be remarked, that Raphael and Michael Angelo bounded their compositions of this kind by definite forms, especially on ceilings. Pietro da Cortona and the machinists generally, were as intent on destroying the connection between painting and architecture as the great masters were to preserve it. But this separation of the compositions into compartments supposes at once a great latitude in the choice of subjects. Milton's smaller poems, and many other English sources, might be preferred to classic inventions; only it should be remembered, that fresco, from the nature of its means, is privileged to aim at the ideal rather than the actual world, and that the character of the decorations required for the place must necessarily influence the selection and treatment of the subjects. Dark effects are equally unfit for the situation and for the powers of fresco. In the ornamented divisions of the compartments, perhaps partial gilding might be employed with better effect than colours; on the ceiling both might be introduced, (in merely decorative forms,) unless your staircase ends in light, in which case your glass must of course be ornamented, even if colourless. Dining rooms, strictly so called and employed, are generally unadorned with pictures: this hardly seems necessary. In theory we may admit that subjects requiring some contemplation would be out of place in a room exclusively devoted to "the table;" but portraits of celebrated individuals, and landscapes, although they cannot be duly examined in such moments, may convey associations, to which the spectator, even if not particularly conversant in pictures, is supposed to be alive at all times. Portraits of the class alluded to, as historic texts, are connected with _time_; and landscape, especially if founded on actual scenes, suggests the conditions of _place_. A room used for the purpose in question, and for _nothing else_, is, however, not the place where fine works of art should be bestowed; and I incline to think that this is the fittest field for small frescos and arabesques. This, in short, is one of the occasions to please the eye and the imagination merely. Accordingly, in the mode proposed, no definite idea is presented to the mind, but an air of elegant and festive splendour surrounds the guests. There should, however, be endless variety; scarcely a form should be repeated in the details, although an architectural symmetry is, as usual, to be preserved in the masses. A dining room _per se_ is not uncommon; but a professed and exclusive breakfast room supposes a degree of order in the family migrations, to which the muses could hardly be expected to accommodate themselves. Nevertheless, to complete my catalogue, I will suppose one; or rather I will suppose that one of your drawing rooms is used chiefly as a morning room. Indeed, without condemning a family to betake themselves to particular rooms at stated hours, it may be allowable to decorate and furnish apartments on such a supposition, by way of ensuring a marked and agreeable variety of character. Lucullus had even a series of dining rooms from the "Apollo" downwards; and we learn from Vitruvius,[8] that the opulent Romans changed the scene of their banquets according to the season of the year. The morning has its own feelings even for those whom affluence frees from any kind of labour. The purposes of the day are unfinished--every thing is contingent. Under such circumstances the character or subject of pictures is to be adapted to the mind--not the mind to the subject. The open face of nature by sea and land may here enliven the walls, and agree with the excursive feelings of the hour. The chase and its incidents may here triumph. The English pastoral is here strictly in its place. Solemn themes, solemn effects, should not be admitted; while all that responds to buoyancy of spirit would, on the contrary, be appropriate. It need not be gravely objected, that accidental or even average states of feeling may be little in unison with the impressions which the arts profess to give; for the same objection is frequently applicable to all of the accompaniments of civilized life, nay, to the beauties of nature, which so often appeal even to cultivated human sympathies in vain. The occasional contradiction is unavoidable, where, of two conditions, one is permanent, the other mutable. [8] De Architect, 1. vi. c. 7. Corridors on the ground-floor, or even upstairs in houses where pictures do not abound, may be fitly decorated with arabesques. The same kind of ornament might be applied to garden pavilions, and, in the present instance, even to your portico next the lake, if there are no statues there, but not to conservatories, where the conventional forms and tints of art would contend injudiciously with nature. In these decorations it is absolutely necessary to set out with an architectural scheme, and subdivide the spaces with some attention to congruity and subordination. In the details, pleasing masses and forms are essential, because here nothing can be concealed; there is, strictly speaking, no chiaro-scuro, no perspective: form and colour are the chief means. The possibility of approaching and even coming in contact with the painted wall, suggests the necessity of a small scale in the objects, and of precision and delicacy of outline; yet, from the circumstance of the forms and hues being relieved on a light ground, they are at the same time effective at a considerable distance.[9] Stucco ornaments in very low relief, mixed with the painting, are admissible, (as they can hardly be said to come under the head of sculpture,) but they require a strong light to display them. [9] The best examples of decorations of this kind are now accessible to all, in a recently published work by Thurmer and Gutensohn, containing the arabesques of the Vatican, the Farnesina, the Villa Lanti, and the Villa Madama: edited by Ludwig Gruner, to be had of Mr. Murray, Albemarle Street: with this work may be classed the publications of Zahn, on the ornamental inventions of Giulio Romano at Mantua, and on the decorations of Pompeii. I cannot recommend frescos for the sitting rooms of dwelling houses. The sum of enjoyment to be derived from one or two large paintings is not to be compared to that which the contributions of various schools can afford, even assuming the highest merit. It is true, frescos like those of the Villa Madama near Rome, from the school of Raphael, may be beautifully executed in a small size, but they still seem fitter for open galleries than for rooms. (I have only ventured to except the dining room.) The impossibility of change in such situations is an unpleasant feeling; in a public building, on the contrary, it is satisfactory, and a staircase approaches this character. I may here observe, that a staircase covered with ancient family portraits is seldom agreeable to the eye; indeed if it were a desirable kind of decoration, centuries must often elapse before the materials would be ready. The first impression on seeing a quantity of portraits in a staircase is, that it is an accidental if not a troublesome accumulation, and that there is no room for the pictures in better situations. Far be it from me to speak with any disrespect of the taste for family portraits so peculiar to the English. The domestic "charities," it has been often observed, are pleasingly fostered by them; but I hold it not always necessary to place the portraits of the household in prominent situations. The interest such works inspire is in most cases strictly domestic and private. The portrait has, in short, no pretension to be conspicuous to all eyes till the individual is celebrated, or till the work of art is canonized. These conditions, I admit, may often exist from the first; but then, _à fortiori_, a staircase is not the place for such a production. The Romans appropriated one of the most public rooms of the house (the _tablinum_) to genealogies, records, and inscriptions relating to the family history, and covered the remaining space--often the _atrium_ as well--with the portraits and busts of their ancestors.[10] This does not appear to have been the custom with the Athenians. [10] Juv. Sat. 8; Plin. 1. xxxv. c. 2. We have decided against frescos in what are called sitting rooms: your oil pictures are, however, to be selected. I shall consider the library as distinct from the drawing rooms; but it is quite possible to blend their character. The library in the ducal palace at Urbino, had a room or study adjoining it, decorated with portraits (in this case, by the way, they appear to have been frescos) of learned men of all ages. In a library, literally to be used as such, pictures of extensive interest seem to be inappropriate. They may be said to divert the attention from the business or amusement of the place. But the portrait of the poet, or the sage, is a source of pleasing and elevating associations, and may sometimes command a deep interest. The library may contain the cabinets of gems and medals, the collections of engravings, the terra cottas, &c.; or if the drawing room is ample enough, all these treasures of virtù may be deposited there. I prefer a library without coloured decorations; the wood-work may be carved in flat relief, even to the panels of the walls; a mode of decoration now beautifully supplied by embossed leather, which need not be dark in colour. Whatever colour appears, except in the portraits, miniatures, or illuminations hung around, should be in the books; these should strike the eye, and be, so to speak, in the foreground of the picture. Vases, or busts, may surmount the cases. The ancients preferred the latter; and many, like Asinius Pollio, collected in their libraries the authentic, and even imaginary, portraits of great men. Among the latter was the bust of Homer.[11] The light is generally so unfavourable in the upper part of modern rooms, that busts when placed so high, are reduced to mere ornaments, and require the addition of names. This, indeed, is not objectionable in any case, for the interest of a portrait commonly depends on historical associations. I see no objection even to inscribing both the subject and the name of the master under works of art generally: a volume bears its title and author's name; and pictures, to many, are as sealed books till inquiry is stimulated or interest quickened by similar means. When the description is too long to admit of this, the words "see Catalogue, No. --" might be added. [11] Plin. 1. xxxv. c. 2. If colour is admitted any where in the library, it might be in subjects on the ceiling, allowable here, if at all, in the region of easy chairs and occasional meditation; perhaps too, to a certain extent, in the windows. The introduction of subjects on ceilings has not been recommended generally, but in the system of arabesque painting the universal decoration of the walls requires to be carried into the ceiling. Sculpture, from the reasons already given, or rather in accordance with the same taste, is quite admissible in the library. Cicero frequently writes to his friend at Athens, to send him any good works in sculpture, fit to adorn the library and residence of a man of letters.[12] [12] Epist. ad Attic. 1. i. c. 3, 8, 9, 10, &c. It is remarkable that a bas-relief, in the finest Greek style, representing a philosopher reading, was found in the ruins of Cicero's Tusculan villa. Some English sculptors and myself, during an excursion from Rome, first, I may almost say, discovered this marble, walled into the staircase of the Episcopal palace at Grotta Ferrata. A mould was afterwards taken from it, through the exertions of Mr. Gibson, and the cast is now common in Rome. The marble was, I think, afterwards removed to the Vatican. But the choicest works of taste should unquestionably be in the room most occupied in hours of calm seclusion and leisure; and in order to find wall enough for the pictures, this may be assumed to be the principal drawing room. Here, therefore, may be the best specimens of painting, and even of sculpture, if the space permits: here, the chimney-piece may be by Flaxman, and the doors of the print-case by Stothard. The pictures cannot be very large, on account of their number and the size of the room. This, the objection which in a great measure excludes the grandest works from our dwelling houses, was met by the Italians, and by Nicolo Poussin, by reducing the grand to domestic conditions. If you have only small pictures, however, you cannot cover the upper part of the walls, for you are not supposed to have any work of art _here_ which can be sacrificed. Enlightened connoisseurs see excellence both in the Dutch and Italian schools, but they are often embarrassed in arranging them together. I am convinced, however, from instances I have seen, that this is to be accomplished satisfactorily. It is sometimes argued, that no one reads Milton and Crabbe alternately; but this is hardly a parallel case. Many go to a gallery to look at a particular picture, and see nothing else; the eye is blind when the attention is not actively exerted. So in a room, the spectator selects his favourites--his favourites at least for the time, and scarcely looks beyond them. At another moment, he will perhaps direct his undivided attention to works which he passed over on a former occasion. A certain congruity is sometimes to be accomplished, by attending to impressions rather than names and schools. Many an Italian picture would not be out of place with the Flemish and Dutch school; while Vandyck, Rembrandt, Cuyp, and others, might sometimes harmonize in many respects with the genius of the south. The arrangement of pictures comprehends some of the difficulties which the artist experiences in the production of _one_; for a certain balance and repose are as essential for the eye, as an harmonious impression for the mind. Much must, therefore, depend on the nature of the materials; and the (assumed) different character of your two drawing rooms may here be an advantage. You, I know, will not ask whether the productions of the English school are admissible in this "Tribune" as well as elsewhere. Such is the variety of English art, that the more refined Dutch, the Flemish, and the Italian taste, may be recognized in it by turns, and no modern pictures harmonize with the scheme of colour and effect which characterize the master-works of former ages so well as the English of the last century. Thus much of schools, and those we have not mentioned may be tried by the same tests. With regard to subjects, the mind as well as the eye must be respected: the _ethos_ of painting is quite compatible with familiar and homely subjects; and, on the other hand, the greatest Italian masters have sometimes sought for poetic impressions in regions where it would be unsafe to follow them. But, with this reservation, you must not be exclusive: various minds, or the same mind in various moods, will like variety of aliment. In other situations, which we have had occasion to consider, the subject has been in a great degree calculated on the probable feelings of the spectator; here, the subject is independent, because the attention is free, and the whole art appeals by turns to the whole range of thought. The leisure of cultivated human beings should be so far complimented as to assume that all the strivings of the mind are worthy to be ministered to. It is a mistake to suppose that solemn or even terrible themes are always objectionable; I believe it will be found that the grander efforts of invention (I speak of works by the ancient masters) are very generally appreciated by the gentler sex. On the other hand, the fondness for humbler subjects is not always referable to the homeliness of the incident represented. The subject often acquires elevation, and commands respect, by the evidence of mental labour and power in the artist. To a true connoisseur, this skilful application of principles derived from universal nature, supersedes the mere subject; and the idea which he recognizes, whatever may be its vehicle, is grand and poetical. Less experienced observers are often deceived by the title of pictures: "A Court Yard" (de Hooghe) sounds unpromising enough; but when it is seen that the painter has represented _daylight_ with magical truth, and that all is subservient to this, his aim must be acknowledged to be dignified. It is to be observed too, that the influence of this high aim on the part of the artist, often extends itself to the treatment of the materials which constitute his ostensible subject. It is easy to see from the unaffected feeling, as well as from the _relative_ character of the execution in some (though not all) of the Dutch masters, that the real subject of their meditation was noble. I should like to see a _catalogue raisonné_ on the principle to which I have alluded, distinguishing the title of a picture from the real intention of the artist. Many frequenters of the National Gallery criticise Reynolds's Three Graces, whence it appears they are not sufficiently aware that the personages in question are portraits of three fashionable ladies of the day, under the name of the Graces, &c. If some titles were translated, what a contrast the real import of the work would present to the actual name! What a change, for instance, from the modesty of some of ----'s titles, "Crossing the Brook,"--"Coal-barges in the Thames: Night," to the beauty and grandeur that would have to be clothed in language! But what language would be adequate? With respect to the colour of the walls on which pictures are hung, my opinion is singular without being novel. I am quite aware that it is necessary to consider wall, pictures, gold frames, and all, in relation to general effect: the gold, especially, is to be treated as part of the coup d'[oe]il. But, though I remember examples of light walls hung with pictures, producing an agreeable effect, I prefer a colour which displays the pictures more, and must also maintain, that living pictures are seldom seen to the best advantage against a bright ground; the quantity of actual light (it may always be assumed) making reflected light unnecessary: my idea, in one word, is, that the wall should not be so light as the lights of the pictures; and this supposes a sufficiently low tint. Of such colours, the most agreeable is the long established rich red, which might be sufficiently allied to purple, to give value to the gold frames and the warm colour of the pictures. I need not recommend you to avoid too much unbroken polish in the frames, since this is now very generally disapproved of. I have, as you see, exercised, apparently without scruple, the dictatorial authority with which you have invested me; but the frequent recurrence of "my opinion" becomes painful even to the arbiter who has a _carte blanche_ to lay down the law. As a relief, I intended to have given you some extracts from an Italian ethical work (printed about the middle of the 16th century[13]) in which there is a chapter on the "ornamenti della casa;" but they would have been, perhaps, little suited to your purpose, and I have already far exceeded the space I ought to occupy. As I may not, however, again have an opportunity of alluding to this work, which is not unimportant in the history of Italian art, I wish briefly to advert to one or two points. [13] Castiglione Saba, Ricordi ovvero Ammaestramenti, &c. Milano, 1559. The list of pictures given seems to prove that the Italians long remained faithful to the older masters. The names of Titian and Coreggio do not appear! (I hope you will not follow the Catalogue in such defects.) This is not to be explained, by supposing that the writer speaks for himself only; for he repeatedly says, "Some like to ornament their rooms with the works of ----, others, with those of ----," and so on, as if professing to give a variety of tastes. I can only account for this in one way: the author lived in Milan, and it would appear that the taste of Leonardo, closely allied as it was to that of the schools of Central Italy, long continued to influence the Milanese amateurs as well as the Milanese painters. I pass over the musical instruments, which, beside their chief use, "piacciono assai al'occhio," especially when made by Lorenzo da Pavia, or Bastiano da Verona. Donatello, Michael Angelo, Alfonso Lombardi, and Cristoforo Romano, are the sculptors he enumerates. The terra cottas are by Pagaino da Modena; the bronzes by Verocchio and Pollaiuolo. Beside antique medals, he admires those of Giovanni Corona of Venice, together with the chasings of Caradosso. Among the works of the latter, he mentions a silver inkstand in basso rilievo, "fatica d'anni venti sei! ma certo divina." Cameos and intaglios should be, he thinks, by the hand of Pietro Maria, Tagliacarne, &c. but above all by Giovanni di Castello. Now for his list of painters: Filippo Lippi, Mantegna, Giovanni Bellini, Leonardo da Vinci, although, he adds, he left but few works.[14] Then follow the younger Lippi, and Perugino, and, heralded with appropriate honours, Raphael, accompanied by Giulio Romano. Pietro della Francesca, and Melozzo da Forlì, are characterized well, as indeed are all the painters. He next mentions some artists, all monks, who wrought in inlaid wood; (commesso, tarsia;) but his highest praises in this department are reserved for Fra Damiano da Bergamo, the artist of the choir of S. Domenico at Bologna. The engravings he speaks of are by Albert Durer and Lucas van Leyden. [14] The author says he was an eye-witness of the Gascon crossbowmen making a target of Leonardo's model for the equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza. Tapestries from Flanders, carpets from Syria, Turkey, and Barbary, figured leather from Spain, are all admitted to be desirable ornaments: "Tutti questi ornamenti ancora commendo perchè arguiscono ingegno, politezza, civilità e cortegiania." The author next describes his own treasures; but, except a head by Donatello and some rare books, he has nothing to boast of. His tastes are characteristic of the age: though a priest, his ambition is to have a collection of arms and armour, if wrought by a good Italian or German armourer; and above all, he aspires to the possession of a large steel mirror, of the kind made by Giovanni della Barba, a German: the mirrors of glass then in use, were, it appears, very small and imperfect. The author's judicious observations (to which I refer you) on the chief use of mirrors, may reconcile you to their occasional introduction over chimney pieces, which, for the rest, are by no means the best places for pictures. The chapter ends with a pleasing story about a mirror and a lady, and Galeazzo Visconti, Duke of Milan, a story not unworthy to be a _pendant_ for "Collalto,"[15] and which might have furnished a subject for the graceful pencil of Stothard; but it is time to make an end. I am yours faithfully, C. L. EASTLAKE. [15] See Rogers's Italy. FINIS. [Illustration: _Maistre, il sembleroit que ne fussiez grandement sage de nous escrire ces balivernes!_] LONDON: C. WHITTINGHAM, TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE. [Illustration: Plate II. South elevation.] [Illustration: Plate III. North elevation.] [Illustration: Plate IV. East elevation.] [Illustration: Plate V. Proposed alteration of the tower.] Transcriber's note: Text in small capitals was transformed to all capitals. The following corrections have been made: p. 22: "expect too much" Period added after much; "pure Pompean house" Pompean changed to Pompeian; p. 36: "into a small anti-room" anti-room changed to ante-room; p. 40: "not a toothach" toothach changed to toothache; p. 42: "statues and bas reliefs" bas reliefs changed to bas-reliefs; p. 48: "particlar fashion of the day" particlar changed to particular; p. 50: "LOCK EASTLAKE, ESQ," Comma after ESQ replaced with period; p. 55: A misplaced line. The original text is [relevant part enclosed by number signs (#)]: "In approving the common practice of placing statues and bas-reliefs in statue has generally the advantage of being seen in various points of view, and thus commands attention in situations where paintings could not. The rich effect of bas-reliefs is sufficient to recommend them; associations of classic taste are naturally connected with the classic materials of marble or #the principal hall, I do not depart from the spirit of our first principles. A# bronze; and architecture, when displayed as such, seems to acquire additional" This part was moved to after "In approving the common practice of placing statues and bas-reliefs in" Footnote 8: "De Architect." Period replaced with comma; Everything else retained as printed. 
12164	----	Proofreading Team. Strawberry Acres By GRACE S. RICHMOND 1911 TO THE OWNER OF "GRASSLANDS" CONTENTS PART I.--FIVE MILES OUT CHAPTER I. Five Miles Out II. Everybody Explores III. The Apartment Overflows IV. Arguments and Answers V. Telephones and Tents VI. In the Pine Grove VII. Everybody is Satisfied VIII. Problems and Hearts IX. Max Compromises X. Jack-O'-Lantern PART II.--THE LANES AND THE ACRES I. What's in a Name II. In the Old Garden III. Afternoon Tea IV. Two and Two V. On an August Evening VI. Time-Tables VII. The Southbound Limited VIII. From April North IX. Round the Corner X. Green Leaves Strawberry Acres PART I.--FIVE MILES OUT CHAPTER I FIVE MILES OUT The four Lanes--Max, Sally, Alec and Robert--climbed the five flights of stairs to their small flat with the agility of youth and the impetus of high but subdued excitement. Uncle Timothy Rudd, following more slowly, reached the outer door of the little suite of rooms in time to hear what seemed to be the first outburst. "Well, what do you think now?" "Forty-two acres _and_ the house! Open the windows and give us air!" "Acres run to seed, and the house tumbling down about its own ears! A magnificent inheritance that!" Max cast his hat upon a chair as if he flung it away with the inheritance. "But who ever thought Uncle Maxwell Lane would ever leave his poor relations anything?" This was Sally. "Five miles out by road--a bit less by trolley. Let's go and see it to-morrow afternoon. Thank goodness a half holiday is so near." "Anybody been by the place lately?" "I was, just the other day, on my wheel. I didn't think it looked so awfully bad." This was Robert, the sixteen-year-old. As Uncle Timothy entered the tiny sitting-room Sally was speaking. She had thrown her black veil back over her hat, revealing masses of flaxen hair, and deep blue eyes glowing with interest. Her delicate cheeks were warmly flushed, partly with excitement, and partly because for two hours now--during the journey from the flat to the lawyer's office, the period spent therein listening to the reading of Uncle Maxwell Lane's will and the business appertaining thereto, and the return trip home--she had worn the veil closely drawn. Her simple mourning was to her a screen behind which to shield herself from curious eyes, always attracted by those masses of singularly fair hair and the unusual contours of the young face beneath. "I think it's a godsend, if ever anything was," she was saying. "Here's Max, killing himself in the bank, and Alec growing pale and grouchy in the office, and even Bob--" She was interrupted by a chorus of protests against her terms of description. "I'm not killing myself!" "Pale and grouchy! I'm not a patch on--" "What's the matter with Bob, Sally Lunn?" "And Uncle Timmy," continued Sally, undisturbed by interpolations to which she was quite accustomed, "pining for fresh air--." "I walk in the park every day, my dear," Uncle Timothy felt obliged to remind her. "Yes, I know. But you've lived in a little city flat just as long as it's good for you, and you need to be turned outdoors. So do we all. Oh, boys, and Uncle Timmy!--I just sat there, crying and smiling under my veil in that dreadful office--crying to think that I _couldn't_ cry for Uncle Maxwell, because he was so cold and queer to us always, and yet he had given us this property, after all--." "And a mighty small fraction of the estate it is, I hope you understand!" growled Max. But Sally went on without minding. Everybody was used to Max's growls. "And smiling because I couldn't help it just to think we had a chance at last to get out of the city. We can do it. Five miles by trolley is nothing for you boys, or for me, when I need to come in." "You're not talking about our going to live out there!" Max's tone was derisive. "Why not?" "Have you seen the place lately?" "Not since I was a little girl, but I remember I thought it was lovely then." "It isn't lovely now, if it ever was--which I doubt. In the first place it belongs to that little suburb of Wybury--as commonplace a village as ever existed within five miles of as big a city as this. In the second place it's as much an abandoned farm as neglect can make a place that was once, I suppose, an aristocratic sort of country home. The old mansion is as big as a barn, and as hopeless. You couldn't any more make a home out of it!--Why, you could put this whole apartment into the room at the left of the hall!" "How do you know so much about it?" demanded Sally. "None of us has been there since Aunt Alicia died--that was when we were children, and Uncle Maxwell used to spend his summers there." "He hasn't spent them there since she died," Max asserted. "How do I know so much about it? I was down there last summer with Frank Sustis. His father sent him out to look the place over, with a view to buying it himself for a summer home. You should have heard Prank jeer at the idea while we were going about." "It makes no difference," persisted Sally, removing her hat and folding the veil with care. "I want to see it. We'll go out to-morrow, won't we?" She appealed to her second brother, Alec, a young fellow of twenty, who had thrown himself listlessly into a chair but who was listening attentively to the discussion. He nodded. "Of course. You couldn't keep one of us away, even Max. He wouldn't be done out of the pleasure of showing us over the place and pointing out the defects, if, by keeping still, he could own the whole ranch himself." "It'll be jolly fun to go!" cried Bob, quickly. He could not bear sounds of disagreement between the members of his family, because he knew Sally did not like it. "What do you think about the old place, Uncle Timmy?" questioned Sally presently. She had taken off her one carefully-used street suit, and had put on a fresh little black-and-white print, in which she was setting the table for dinner. All the others except Uncle Timothy had gone out on various errands. "Well, Sally," said Mr. Timothy Rudd, thoughtfully, "I don't know that I'm a competent judge. Your Uncle Maxwell's place was considered a fine one in its day. Before he made so much money and took to living in town, he used to like it there, I think, though he didn't say much about it. I'm sorry it's been allowed to run down. There was a pine grove on it, and a splendid young apple orchard, and a timber tract at the back that ought to be worth considerable money by this time, if it hasn't been cut. Probably it has, with timber bringing the prices it does now." "About the house," inquired Sally, after Uncle Timothy had gone into more or less detail concerning the place itself. "I'm especially interested in the house. Do you think it would be out of the question for us to live there?" "I don't know. It would be something of a change from this," he admitted, looking about the little dining-room. "You've managed to make us all pretty comfortable here, with what there was left of the furniture after the sale. I don't know how far it would go in Maxwell's big house. It's pretty large, that's a fact. According to Max, it's in need of a good deal of repair. Of course, as far as I'm concerned, I should like to live out in the country among the green things, as I used to do, up in New Hampshire. It would be good for us all. But you can tell better after you've seen the place again." There was no denying this. Sally's head was so full of plans it was difficult to wait until the afternoon of the next day, when everybody should be at liberty to make the trip to Wybury. The moment luncheon was over they started, and by two o'clock the trolley-car, whizzing out through the suburbs to the open country, then following the curve along the river edge to pass through the small settlement called Wybury, had deposited them in the centre of that village. The Maxwell place lay a quarter of a mile down the river road, and the party set off promptly to cover the short distance. It was early April, sunny and mild, but still rather damp under foot. After leaving the board sidewalks of Wybury there was no accommodation for foot passengers except the path at the side of the road. "Imagine tramping through this mud every night and morning," was Max's first contribution to the effort he meant to make to disillusionize his romantic sister, whose dreams of life in the country he considered worse than folly. He turned up his trousers widely at the bottom as he spoke. "It's such a little way, we could soon have a better path," Sally replied. "Look, there are the chimneys, I'm sure, just beyond that grove of pines. It's hardly more than five minutes' walk from the car." "Five minutes through a February blizzard is five minutes too much." "But five minutes through a midsummer evening is an hour too little," Sally gave him back. "That pine grove belongs to the place," called back Bob, who was considerably in advance of the others. Sally, in spite of her eagerness, was adapting her pace to the limitations of Uncle Timothy, who at sixty could hardly be expected to walk in competition with nineteen. "Pine groves are worth something these days," said Max, eyeing the thick tops critically. Sally had charmed eyes for the pine grove; but she did not look at it long, for beyond showed the great chimney-tops she remembered from her childhood, when it had been the happiest treat she knew to be invited by Aunt Alicia to spend the day at Uncle Maxwell's country place. The young Lanes had all been born and brought up in the city. Their home had been one of moderate luxury until, three years before, their father had died suddenly, leaving the mere remnant of an estate which had been supposed to be a large one. The shock, and the change from a life of ease to one of close economy, had weakened the always delicate constitution of the wife and mother until, a year after her husband's death, she had followed him. Max had left college at the end of his third year and gone into the bank of which his Uncle Maxwell was vice-president. Alec, just ready for college, had reluctantly resigned his purpose and taken a position in the drafting-office of a firm of contractors, friends of his father. Even Robert, the youngest, had found something to do. The family had sold the old home to obtain money with which to meet expenses until the salaries of the workers should begin to count, and had moved into the little flat where the nineteen-year-old sister had, for a year now, done her girlish best to make a home for her "four men," as she called them, while she kept many violent attacks of heartache bravely hidden--for the most part--under a bright exterior. Nobody knew how Sally disliked the flat--unless it was Bob, who was her closest confidant. "There's your fine family mansion!" called Max, pointing from the curve of the road, which he had reached close after Bob. Sally stood still in astonished surprise. Could that really be the aristocratic old place of her memory? Max could hardly be blamed for his derisive comments. A noble house gone to decay is a sight infinitely more depressing than that of an humble one. This once had been an imposing structure; it looked now like a relic of war times. "Look at the tumbling chimneys!" crowed Alec. "Look at the broken shutters, swinging by one hinge. See those porch pillars--were they ever white? Behold that side entrance--looks as if a cyclone had struck it!" Sally was silent. Even her buoyant hopes fell before the indisputable evidence given by her eyes. It was so big--the old place! A small house one might hope to repair, but a large building like this--it would cost more than they would have to spare in years. If the outside were any indication of the inside, the situation was hopeless. She followed Alec in through the gateway, at the dilapidated stone side-posts of which Max gave a significant wave of the hand as he passed. An overgrown hedge ran along the entire front of the place, its untrimmed wildness adding to the general unkempt look, as did the sodden, tangled surface of what had once been a lawn, the rank bunches of shrubbery which half hid the front windows from sight, and the broken bricks in the old walk which led, beside a grass-grown driveway, from gate-post to porch. "How did Maxwell ever come to let this place go to seed like this?" lamented Uncle Timothy. "He must have cared nothing at all for it. One would think it was forty years instead of only ten that it had been left to wind and weather." "It's a wonder that some passing tramp hasn't set fire to it," commented Max, searching in his pocket for the key which had been delivered to him by Mr. Sidway, his uncle's executor. "Take a long breath before I let you in. It'll be musty and fusty enough to stifle you, probably." With considerable difficulty he turned the key in the rusty lock and opened the door, which turned creakingly upon its long unused hinges. But with the first step inside Sally's drooping spirits leaped up again. "Oh Max," she cried, "what a beautiful old hall!" "Beautiful, is it?" inquired Max, laughing contemptuously. "Well, I can't say I see it." "Looks just like a barracks to me!" sniffed Alec. "Phew-w--what air--or lack of it!" "But it _is_ beautiful," persisted Sally, in genuine enthusiasm. "See how wide and high, sweeping straight through to that door at the back. And see the wide, low staircase with the spindle railing and the curved posts at the bottom. See the carving over the doors--and the fanlight over the outside ones. And look at that fireplace!" She dragged Max by one arm and Uncle Timothy by the other, to stand in front of it. Halfway down the hall, sharing one of the great chimneys with another fireplace on the other side of the wall, was a chimney-piece of fine old colonial design. The proportions were colossal. "It would take a cord of wood to keep the thing going an evening," asserted Max. "And then nobody'd be warm unless he was sitting with his head inside the hood," supplemented Alec. But Sally was already off upon explorations. She rushed into the room upon the left of the hall; it was a drawing-room thirty feet long by twenty wide. She darted into the room on the right--it was twenty feet square, and back of it lay another of similar size. She could no longer wait for her party, with their slow and indifferent following of her, but ran from room to room, calling back injunctions to note special points of interest. Bob kept close behind her. If he cared little for old houses, he cared much for Sally, and he liked to see her eyes sparkle and her lips laugh. Sally had times of being very sad and discouraged, as no one knew so well as he, and if she could find interest in this old barracks--he thought Alec had struck the right word--he was not the boy to dampen it. "Let's skip up this back staircase, Bobby," proposed Sally, as they turned about from exploring the kitchen and store-rooms. "I'm crazy to find if there aren't some smaller rooms--nice, cozy ones, you know. It can't be all so big everywhere." "Don't you suppose the upstairs rooms are just the shape of the lower ones?" suggested Bob, as they ran up. "In front, perhaps, but not back here. There ought to be some lovely rambling passageways, and steps up and steps down, and rooms where you don't expect them, and a splendid attic--and perhaps a secret staircase. Bob--what if there should actually be a secret staircase!" Bob laughed. "You've been reading spooky stories. I suppose--" "Robert Rudd Lane! Will you behold that little flight of five steps, leading up to that door!" Sally was down the hall and up the five steps in a flash. She would have burst into the unknown region beyond, but a locked door barred her way. Bob stood below and laughed at her baffled expression. "You'd rather see through that door than into any other spot in the house that isn't locked up, wouldn't you, Sally Lunn?" he commented, knowingly. "Run down to Max for the keys, will you, dear?" she begged, and Bob ran. The others came up. Max and Bob, Alec, and even Uncle Timothy, tried every key in the bunch in vain. Sally attempted to peer through the key-hole. Bob ran outside, and returning reported that there were no shutters in the region opposite the probable position of the door. "It's undoubtedly a dark store-room, with a row of empty shelves," said Max. "Give it up, Sally. There are places enough to explore. A regiment of infantry could be bivouacked in this second story. See the rooms, and rooms inside of rooms." "Oh, come away home!" cried Alec, impatiently, before Sally was half satisfied. "I'm going over to the timber tract. You'd better come along, Al. Let Sally stay here and plan her hotel. Maxwell Inn--eh, Sally? A number on each door, and a fire-escape at each end of the hall. A bell-boy and two chambermaids for this floor; in time, an elevator and a manicure shop!" And Max clattered laughing away down the front staircase, the shallow steps of which he took two at a time. "It isn't a very cozy nest, is it, Sis?" said Bob, sympathetically, as Sally, after one look into the great square rooms over the front, closed the doors with a bang. At mention of the timber tract Uncle Timothy had gone downstairs after the others. They heard him shut the front door, and from an upper window saw him walking briskly away. "No, it isn't--now," she admitted, soberly, "but--what a home it could be made!" "It's pretty near twice as big as our old one, and that was a fairly good size. We could camp out in a corner of it, but that would be lonesome, don't you think so? We might keep summer boarders." Sally shook her head. She began to walk back through the upper halls. Bob followed her, and they climbed the attic stairs, finding a great space above, lighted by low windows shut in by patterns of ironwork. "Jolly, what a place for rainy days!" ejaculated the boy, moved to greater enthusiasm than he had felt anywhere below stairs. "You could have a workshop and a gymnasium and all sorts of things. You could make it really festive with a few rugs and pillows and hammocks and things. How the fellows I know would like to get up here!" He lingered behind his sister, who, after one comprehensive look round the big, bare, dusty place, had slipped away downstairs again, guarding her skirts carefully. When Bob, after planning in detail a possible and desirable arrangement of the attic, reluctantly descended, he found her at the top of the little flight of steps which led to the one locked door. "Look out! The family skeleton may be hidden behind that door!" he called, racing down the hall. "Or worse. Come away, Fatima!" "Bob," said Sally, regarding him from the top of the steps, her cheeks brightly flushed, her eyes alight with interest, "I simply have to know what's beyond this door." "What are you expecting to find there, Sis? Trunks full of gold? Family papers, leaving all the Maxwell Lane estate to the Lanes of Henley Street?" She shook her head with a laughing challenge. "Wait till I get a locksmith here!" she said. "I'll wait," and Bob sat composedly down on the bottom step, grinning up at his excited sister. "Going to get him out by wireless?" CHAPTER II EVERYBODY EXPLORES Alighting from her mother's carriage in front of the Winona apartments in Henley Street, Josephine Burnside dismissed her coachman and hurried eagerly into the florid vestibule. "I don't see how Sally endures this sort of thing," she thought, for the hundredth time since the Lane house, near her own in Grosvenor Place, had been sold. The door-latch clicked promptly in answer to her ring, and at the top of the third flight she met Sally. "I was sure it was you! I'm so glad! I'm all alone," was Sally's joyful welcome; and the next minute Josephine found herself inside the small passage, her outer garments being forcibly removed, and herself borne into the little living-room and established in Uncle Timothy's reading chair, which was the most comfortable one in the place. "Sewing--as usual? What are you making now? Something lovely out of nothing at all, I suppose?" "Of course. It's a convenient accomplishment. You didn't know that four and a half yards of Swiss muslin would make a whole frock, did you? Well, it will--under some conditions." And Sally proudly held up the work of her hands, a nearly finished product at which her friend, attired at the moment in some fifteen yards of silk, stared in amazement. "Sally Lunn! You didn't--you couldn't! It's not skimpy in the least. You must have pieced out with something else. But where?" "The remains of my old one, re-enforced underneath, and used where the least wear will come on it. It's not an exact match, but I don't think it will show." "Show! Not a bit. But I thought putting old and new wash goods together wouldn't do." "I've shrunk the new, and, as I told you, re-enforced the old with some very thin, cheap lawn. I shall wash it myself--with the ends of my fingers, and my eyes looking the other way. Find the old parts!" Thus challenged, Josephine brought a pair of very bright black eyes to bear upon the pretty frock, turning it over critically, and after some search discovered the resourceful trick which had made the whole lower half of the skirt and part of the sleeves out of the old muslin. "You genius!" she cried. "I wish I were half as clever as you." She regarded her friend with the genuine admiration and affection which had carried the comradeship of the two girls safely through the test of the Lanes' altered fortunes. "How good it is to have you back!" said Sally, returning the look. "You haven't half told me about your winter." "Yes--but never mind that just now," said Josephine. "I've come to hear about you. Jarvis met Max this morning, heard the news, and told it at luncheon. I simply flew down to show you how glad I am, and to hear more. Tell me, is it a beautiful old place, and shall you go there to live? I suppose I've seen it, but I've forgotten." "It's a forlorn old place, dreadfully run down, but I want to live in it. The boys won't hear of it--as yet. We've only been there once. We're going again Saturday--you know that's the only time they can all get away." "What fun. Can't I go, too? There must be something nice about it, or you wouldn't want to live there." "There's a locked door in it," said Sally, smiling, as her thoughts turned to the mystery. She described the finding of the door to Josephine, who exclaimed: "I must be there to see it opened! What do you suppose you'll find?" "Dust and empty shelves, Max says. Blue-beard's murdered wives, says Bob. Alec guesses a lot of broken-backed chairs and a desk with the hinges off. Uncle Timothy thinks it merely leads to the roof. But the steps from the attic do that." "What do _you_ think?" "I think everything," admitted Sally, "from antique mirrors and old clothes to empty flower pots and battered and rons. I'm prepared for anything--except the empty shelves. Why should the door be locked so securely if there's nothing behind it?" "Why, indeed? I don't know why, but my imagination shudders deliciously at the thought of seeing it opened. May I go on Saturday? May Jarvis go? He wanted me to ask. He's having a bad time with his eyes again, can't read, and pines for something to do. A locked closet will interest him." "Of course you may both go, if you'll get Jarvis to promise not to throw any cold water on my schemes." "He's not likely to discourage any of your schemes, you know well enough. Hasn't he always taken your part, even against me, since we used to quarrel over which should have the shady side of the sand pile? 'Sun won't hurt your gipsy face, Joey,' he'd say. 'Give Sally the shade, like a gentleman.'" Both girls laughed. Then Sally grew sober. "Seems to me it's only a little while since Jarvis had his last siege with his eyes," she observed. "Are they quite as bad again?" "He's not shut up in the dark this time, but has to wear blue goggles in the daytime, is forbidden reading and writing absolutely for weeks, and goes to Doctor Meyer every other day for treatment. He's getting as rampageous as a caged lion, and vows he'll go off to the South Seas, or Labrador, or some other place where books and libraries and literary work won't tantalize him. He'd go to-morrow, I believe, if it weren't for mother. She can't bear the idea." "It was that last awful year's work at college," said Sally regretfully. "Why did he ever conceive the idea of doing two years' work in one--and why did his friends let him do it?" "I know--that's what we all say now. So does he." "Of course he must go Saturday; tell him I particularly want him." "That will please him. Now do tell me about the whole place," and Josephine settled herself to listen. Long before Sally had finished, her friend was as eager as herself to see the old house, and was planning with all the help of a vivid imagination what it would be like when it should be "restored." When she went away, just before Sally set about getting dinner for her family, it was with assurances that she and her brother would help Sally, to the best of their ability, to realize her hopes. This assurance was renewed when, on Saturday afternoon, the Lanes met the Burnsides at the appointed hour to take the trolley-car. With the exception of Uncle Timothy, they were all there, even Max, who had declared his only interest in the place was to sell it. But, hearing that Jarvis Burnside was to inspect it, he had decided to point out to Jarvis the impracticability of making a home out of the property--unless for some rich man who might be induced to buy it at a figure worth while. He sat beside Jarvis in the car, talking to him, as Sally could see, in a way intended to prejudice him against the place. But as the party left the car, Jarvis joined Sally, smiled at her from behind the ugly goggles which half disguised a face by no means ugly, and said in an undertone: "I believe I'm in possession of all the facts. From now on I intend to let the fancies have full play." "Good for you! I knew you'd never desert me, no matter how much in the wrong I might be," answered Sally, gratefully. Jarvis had been a fourth brother to her for so long that it seemed a matter of course for her to depend upon his support, but she appreciated it when occasionally the real brothers failed to remember how lonely the young sister was, with no mother at hand to love or advise her. All but Bob. He, the youngest of the family, was like a faithful dog, always beside her when the others jeered or reproached, and always her strongest, most faithful, ally. "The walking is better today," Sally called out, as they started. Max, true to his cause, promptly denied the truth of this statement. Josephine came to the rescue. "Who cares what the walking is like, on an April day like this?" she challenged Max. "Isn't the air glorious? And won't it be lovely, across the bridge and along the river, as soon as the leaves are out?" Max was escorting Josephine, and as they turned the bend in the road he pointed out to her the boundary lines of the estate. She asked him about the values of land in this neighbourhood and the possibilities of making such a place profitable. "You sound like a business woman," was his comment. "Thinking of investing out here? You ought to get Sally to talk the place up to you. She estimates that by raising violets on the whole forty-two acres and selling them to the florists in town we can be millionaires the first year." "Why not, at a dollar a bunch?" laughed Josephine. "And think how picturesque your property will look, all a soft purple in the sunshine!" "Won't it!" agreed Max. "There, that's the house. I suppose you're prepared to fall into ecstasies with Sally on the door-step, and dance a reel with her down the hall." "Of course I am. But what I really came for is the locked door." "The door! I believe Sally's forgotten the subject of her dreams. We haven't a tool, any more than we had a week ago." "Haven't we though?" shouted Bob, from the rear. He began to extract various implements from his pockets on the spot. Sally herself waved her shopping-bag. Jarvis Burnside pulled off his glove and began to search his own pockets. "I think we'll effect an entrance," he declared, and produced a curious-looking skeleton key. "This will open any ordinary lock." Josephine said everything Sally could have hoped for about the exterior of the house, and a few things more. It did seem a little less forlorn than before, the effect, perhaps, of the April sunshine, which lighted its red brick walls into warm and cheerful hues. Jarvis, within the door, removed his goggles and blinked approvingly at the fine colonial features of the wood-work, the lines of the stairway, and the proportions of the fireplace. "Anybody can see those two are loaded," complained Alec in Max's ear, as they brought up the rear of the procession. "Trust Jarve Burnside to back up Sally every time, and Josephine to join 'em. It's all right enough for him to talk about restoration. He could do it by putting his hand into his pocket. Between 'em they'll get Sally completely off her head." "There's no harm in looking the thing over," Max replied, absently, but Alec continued to rail. Bob turned and frowned at him as meaningly as Bob's round and sunny face could frown. Why must Alec follow Max's lead? he thought. One could gain one's point quite as readily and much more agreeably by being amiable. At least, this was Bob's philosophy. "The door, Sally, the door!" urged Josephine, as the party finished the survey of the lower floor. "I can't take an interest in any more open rooms while I know there's a closed one waiting. Do lead the way up that impressive staircase and take us straight to the place of mystery!" "Sally's still young enough to want to save the plums in the cake till the last," said Jarvis, as they went up. "Well, well, this stairway is certainly a quaint one--risers about five inches, aren't they, Max? Treads fourteen, at least. Fine for infants and invalids. And comfortable for sitting out dances, Sally!" "But not so interesting as the five steep steps we are coming to," and Sally led the way down the hall to the side passage, from the end of which rose the little flight which approached the locked door. "Here we are. Now who'll let us in?" It took the combined efforts of Jarvis and Max, working with one tool after another, to effect an entrance. Clearly this was not an ordinary closet lock which barred the way. But at last, with a vigorous wrench, Jarvis held the yielding door under his hand. From the top step he waved his free arm at the company, standing below. "One last guess apiece," he demanded of them, "before you look." "Old seed catalogues and empty hair-oil bottles," said Alec. "A skeleton in armour!" cried Bob. "All your Aunt Alicia's ball-dresses and your Uncle Maxwell's wedding clothes," guessed Josephine. "A mahogany sideboard, dining-table and chairs," murmured Sally, at which there was a general shout. "Dead beetles, fallen plaster, and a musty copy of 'Plutarch's Lives,'" was Max's cynical contribution. "Open the door!" cried Bob. But Jarvis still held it. "I think I'll let in one at a time," he declared. "Who'll venture first?" Sally walked up the steps. "Oh, don't send her in all alone!" begged Josephine. "Think, what if there _should_ be--" "The skeleton in armour," urged Bob. "Go on, Sally, you're game," and Max grinned at Josephine and Bob. "It doesn't take much to rouse some people's imaginations. Go ahead, and confront the seed catalogues and the beetles with a bold front." Jarvis, smiling at Sally and taking note of her pink cheeks, detained her with an injunction. "Whatever you find," he stipulated, "make no outcry. Retain your composure. Remember your friends are close at hand. Three raps on the inside of this door will summon four stout retainers to your side. Are you ready?" "Ready." "Remember that defunct beetles are harmless, old clothes retain no characteristics of their former owners, no matter how blood-thirsty, and empty bottles probably never contained fatal potions. If the place is dark, press your finger on this"--he thrust a small electric search-light into her hand--"and the mystery will be illumined. Brave lady, enter!" He opened the door just wide enough to admit the slim figure in black, which slipped through and promptly closed the door upon itself. Josephine interfered. "Jarvis, don't let her shut that door! Something might happen! There might be a--hole in the floor." "She has blue eyes and you black!" retorted Jarvis. "She has golden locks, you raven. Don't let the outward attributes belie themselves like that." "_Sh!--Sh-h!_" Josephine held up a beseeching finger. Everybody listened. A silence ensued, unbroken by raps or sounds of any sort. When this had continued for some five minutes, Josephine spoke urgently: "Jarvis Burnside, open that door! It's all right to joke, but things do happen, and it's not right to fool this way!" "What's the matter with you, Jo Burnside?" demanded Max, while Jarvis, looking quizzical, still held the door. "Don't you know Sally well enough to know she's not afraid of her shadow? She's playing the game through. She'll come back in her own good time, when she's thoroughly explored whatever's behind that door. A mouse won't give her hysterics, or a flapping window-shade make her scream." Josephine held her peace, but she looked at Bob. Bob was genuinely uneasy, though determined not to show it. There is undeniably a peculiar atmosphere about old and unused houses, and queer fancies are prone to take possession of those who explore them. It was ten years since this house had been lived in. There was something odd about its having been so completely deserted, with not even a tenant left to occupy its kitchen regions and look after it. And the lock on this door had been strangely resistant. Josephine suddenly opened her lips to say: "I shall not stand here waiting another minute!" when three raps on the door brought back her composure. Jarvis, himself looking a trifle relieved, promptly turned the knob. But he could not open the door. "It must be a spring-lock," he grunted disgustedly. "Idiot that I was! All right, Sally!" he called. "Got to work the tools over again." "Sally, O Sally, are you all right?" called Josephine. There was no reply. Jarvis worked rapidly, repeating his former processes with an impatient hand. When the lock yielded once more, he threw the door open, and the others crowded up the steps. "A staircase!" was the common ejaculation. Bob pushed by the rest and ran up it, closely followed by all except Jarvis. "I'll stay on the outside of this fool lock!" he called. But a moment later, investigating, he found that it could be rendered inoperative by a catch on the inside, which, being set, allowed the door to open and close freely. So, after the others, he hurried up the stairs. These ascended straight between the walls until a sharp curve at the top brought them to a door now wide open. Within the room beyond stood the party, exclaiming at the tops of their voices. They might well exclaim. Of all the guesses, none had come within distant range of the real thing. The room was that of a collector of old books, and it had been closed and left precisely as its former owner had arranged it, so far as could be judged by its present appearance. A faded Turkey carpet covered the floor; sun-rotted and dusty draperies hung at the windows, which were of the same sort as those in the attic, close under the eaves, and shut in by a pattern of ironwork. All around the walls stood bookcases, filled with a large collection of books, the greater proportion of them of an age suggestive, to the inexperienced eye, of worthlessness, to the more discerning, of value. An antique desk and a few straight-backed chairs were all the other furnishings of the room, but of these it needed none. Even in its dust-covered condition it was a room to command respectful consideration. As Jarvis came in, Max was studying the rows of books. He turned about with a small calf-bound volume in his hand, and his eye fell on Jarvis, entering. "Jarve," he exclaimed, "I believe this is treasure-trove, sure enough! If this isn't a 'first edition,' I'll eat the book, covers and all!" Jarvis hurried to his side. He took the book, examined the fly-leaf, and turned its pages. His eyes lighted with interest. "Of course it is!" he declared. "And by the looks of them, there are plenty more. How on earth do they come to be here? This is a gold mine that beats the mahogany sideboard out of sight." "It's more than I know. Uncle Maxwell was no book-lover, as far as I've ever heard. Perhaps Uncle Tim can tell, though he's on mother's side, and never was here much." Bob's eyes were round with delight. He did not know much about books, but the flush on Sally's cheeks and the excitement in Max's voice were enough for him. He could not resist giving his elder brother a rap on the back. "How about the dead beetles now, Max?" he exulted. Alec was poking in the pigeon-holes of the desk. There were no papers to be found except one bundle of letters, yellow with age. In one of the drawers, there were a few old daguerreo-types in velvet cases and a yellowed meer-schaum pipe. "'Eliphalet Lane, Esquire,'" read Sally, from the addresses on the letters, which were written on the folded outer sheet of the letters themselves. "Why, I know who he was. He was Uncle Maxwell's elder brother. He lived with them all his life. He died before we were born, but I've heard father tell about him. He was a queer old man when father was a boy. This must be his collection." "And Uncle Maxwell didn't think enough of it to take it to town with him--just locked it up and left it." This was Max's theory. "Uncle Maxwell knew nothing about books and cared less; he was all for business." "Luckily for you. This must be worth a good deal, if you care to sell it," said Jarvis, who, close by one of the odd windows, was studying the fine text of a set of English dramatists. Sally walked over and gently took the books out of his hand. "Jarvis Burnside," said she, decidedly, "the value of this collection is nothing beside the value of your eyes. Put on your goggles, and don't look at another line of type!" CHAPTER III THE APARTMENT OVERFLOWS The telephone bell in the Lanes' apartment rang sharply. It had rung once before, but Sally, half-asleep on the couch in the middle of a warm April morning, had not roused enough to notice. She moved reluctantly toward it. Max's voice speaking urgently brought her back to her senses with a jump. "Sally, where on earth are you? I've just had a wire from the Chases that they're coming through, and will stop off to see us. We'll have to put them up somehow. Of course they don't know how we're fixed, but they'll find out." "Oh, Max!" Sally's tones were dismayed. "Why, we _can't_!" "We'll have to. What would you have me do--wire them not to stop? Besides, I couldn't get them. They've left the place they wired from--reach here to-night at nine. You'll have to have some kind of supper for them." "But, Max--where--" "Oh, figure it out somehow--you can, you know. I haven't a minute more to talk--inspector's here--everybody busy--" and the click of the receiver in Sally's ear ended the interview. The Chases! They were young married people, who had been neighbours and schoolmates of the Lanes. Dorothy Eustis, as an older girl, had been much admired by Sally and Josephine until she married Neil Chase; that event had made a great difference in their warmth of feeling. Sally did not like Neil, never had liked him, and never would like him. A certain pomposity of manner, which had been a characteristic of his, ever since the days when he wore dresses and lorded it over the other infants in the park, had made him unpopular. He had, however, become a successful young attorney in his father's law firm, and had within the last year gone to a larger city several hundred miles away to start practice for himself. The thought of entertaining Neil and Dorothy Chase in the little apartment was almost too much for Sally Lane. The Chases had gone away just before the Lanes had sold the old house, and knew nothing of the new quarters--evidently realized nothing of their small dimensions. It had been characteristic of them to telegraph that they were coming, without waiting for a reply. That was precisely like Neil. Something must be done, and at once. It was now eleven o'clock. There was none too much time in which to make ready. Sally began reluctantly to plan. The Chases must have her room, of course; it was the best in the flat, measuring eight feet by ten. Bob would have to go in with Uncle Timothy and let Sally have his usual quarters, the couch in the living-room. Sally's room must be hastily put in guest-room order--no easy task, in a space where every inch counts because it must be made the most of. She was thankful, for once, that she need expect none of her family home to luncheon. At noon, however, quite unexpectedly Bob ran in upon her, an errand from the office where he worked having brought him within a stone's throw of home. He liked to surprise Sally with two-minute visits, when he could do so by making time over the rest of his course. "Hello, what's up?" was his greeting, as he surveyed his sister standing in the centre of an extraordinary confusion of furnishings which seemed to him to extend over the entire flat. Sally flung down her dust-cloth and sank into a chair, showing a flushed face and disturbed eyes. "Max telephoned that the Chases are coming to-night--Neil and Dorothy, on their way somewhere. Isn't it horrible? What do you suppose they'll think of things here?" "Well, well--old Neil's coming to show us his chest expansion, is he? And my Lady Dolly! Hum--well--I guess it will do'em good to see how some people live. Mrs. Chase will bring four trunks and a lot of hand stuff, will she? If she does, we'll move out and leave them the place." "Mercy! They're only going to stay overnight--at least, I _think_ that's all. The only thing that keeps me up is the thought that at this time to-morrow they'll be gone! A hospitable hostess I am, Bob. But--Oh, Bobby, my head aches so this morning I just can't rise to the occasion!" "Your head aches? What's the reason for that?" Bob asked, in some dismay. "You're not a headache sort of girl." "No, and that's why it seems to take the pluck out of me so. It ached yesterday, too. And I feel just heavy and stupid." As she spoke, she turned and laid her head down on her arms on the back of her chair. Bob darted across from the doorway and laid an awkwardly sympathetic young hand on the flaxen masses of his sister's hair. "It's a shame!" he said, warmly. "I wish I could stay and help you. But I tell you what I'll do. I'll be up the minute I get out of the office. Leave the heavy things for me to do. And don't try to house-clean the whole flat just because of Mrs. Dorothy Chase. She isn't worth it." He was as good as his word. Five o'clock in the afternoon saw him at home again, helping Sally in every way he could think of. Bob was good help, and she had seldom needed him more than to-day. She went about with flushed cheeks, moving languidly, yet keeping steadily at work with the determination of the young hostess who sees nothing else to do. She had spent the afternoon in the kitchen; she spent the evening in all those little final tasks which seem so small and yet in the aggregate do weigh heavily, upon the eve of entertaining. Work at the bank kept Max until he had barely time to go to the station for his guests. Alec, coming home to dinner, and finding himself put off with what he hungrily characterized as a mere "bite," on account of the necessities of the occasion, went off again somewhere, declaring that he did not see the occasion for starving the family just on account of entertaining two already overfed visitors. Uncle Timothy, as was to be expected, as soon as he heard of the emergency, joined Bob in coming to Sally's aid, and at half past seven in the evening might have been discovered by the curious, sitting in the small kitchen, a blue-checked apron tied about his neck, busily polishing silver. "It seemed to me pretty bright before, Sally," was his only comment as he worked. "But I suppose no man could really comprehend the difference between the degree of brightness suitable for one's family and that demanded by company." "If you had seen Dorothy Chase's wedding silver--" responded Sally, and stopped there, as if words could no further go. "Yes, yes, I suppose so." Uncle Timothy was rubbing away at a set of thin old teaspoons which had belonged to Sally's grandmother. "Still, my dear, it seems as if things taste better out of these old spoons than out of those handsome new ones the boys gave you Christmas." "Oh, I love the old things." Sally held a china sugar bowl with a gold band round it up to the light as she wiped it. She had taken all the best old china out of its hiding place under the couch, and was giving it a hot-water bath, drying each article herself, not daring to trust the frail pieces to Bob's hands. "But Dorothy hates old stuff, and wants everything modern." "I remember," said Uncle Timothy, mildly. "I was always too antique for her to notice. I sha'n't be surprised if she stumbles over me to-night, not noticing that I'm here." "If she does," called Bob, from the depths of a closet which he was sweeping out under Sally's direction, "she'll settle with me! She'll find I've grown a few inches since she used to call me Sally's 'everlasting little brother.'" It was all done at last. Sally went to dress, wearily exhorting herself to remember that her room was not her room to-night, and that she must not forget and leave so much as a stray hair-pin on the freshly washed and ironed linen of the little toilet-table. She stowed away, under the couch on which she was to sleep, the clean cambric house-dress she meant to put on the next morning, feeling that it would not be at all surprising if she were unable to rise from that couch to get breakfast, and wondering what Dorothy Chase could do about breakfast if thrown upon her own resources. It was so unusual for Sally's vigorous young frame to experience such exhaustion after even more severe effort than that of the past day that she could only wonder what it meant, and finally decided, after some speculation, that it was the effect of these first warm days of spring, combined with the stress of entertaining under difficulties. "Well, here we are!" Max's voice could be heard in the hall outside, ushering in his guests. "Go single file down this passage--you can't get through side by side!" Sally went hurriedly forward and met Dorothy Chase's smartly tailored figure in the middle of the tiny passage. "Goodness gracious!" Bob and Alec and Mr. Timothy Rudd heard a familiar high-pitched voice exclaim. "You don't mean to tell us you live in this mouse-hole! Actually, my hat hits on both sides!" Then came Neil Chase's barytone drawl--how well Bob remembered hating the sound of it with a profound hatred when it had been addressed contemptuously to him! "Really, Dorothy--you know--I told you that brim of yours was an inch and a half beyond the limit, and this proves it!" But Sally's pretty head was held high. If she had a headache, its effect was visible only in her brilliant cheeks. "You always ran to extremes, Dorothy, dear. Why didn't you take that absurd creation off in the vestibule? Neil, how are you? Have you your best Chesterfieldian manner with you? Because you'd better leave it outside; the apartment's not large enough for you and it, too!" "The same impertinent child," declared Mrs. Chase, surveying her hostess in the light of the living-room. "And here's smart Alec," as that youth came forward, his smile of welcome undergoing a wry twist at this somewhat unusual greeting. "And Bob--heavens, child, how you've grown! And this is--oh, yes--Mr. Rudd!" Her careless hand, in its travelling glove, met Uncle Timothy's grasp, and left it as casually as her bright hazel eyes left the glance of his faded blue ones. Bob, watching, grinned at Uncle Timothy meaningly, and received in return the mild sparkle of amusement with which the "antique" was accustomed to show himself invulnerable to neglect from young persons of Dorothy Chase's stamp. Neil's greetings of the family were also highly characteristic. One who had never before seen him might have argued many things from the style of his opening address: "This is Alec, eh? Well, Alec, I see you're still the flower of the family. Bob--how do you like sweeping out offices? Better than going to school? And here's Uncle Thomas--beg pardon--Uncle Joshua. Not got it right yet, Sally? Confound my memory--yes, yes--Uncle Timothy. How are you, my dear sir?" "I see," responded Mr. Rudd, suddenly grown quietly dignified, as he surveyed this jocular young man whom he remembered as a youth whom he had frequently longed to thrash, "that in spite of the pressure of years and responsibility you happily retain your boyish characteristics." Young Mr. Chase regarded Uncle Timothy for an instant without speaking. Then he turned to Sally with a quite audible comment: "The old gentleman hasn't changed much, has he? Keep him with you all the time?" "We couldn't live without him," was Sally's quick reply. Uncle Timothy, catching the answer, smiled to himself. It would take more than the advent of these gay comets in his sky to disturb his content in the stars which revolved loyally about him. The two hours which followed were occupied in instructing the guests how to bestow themselves in the unaccustomed limitations of the Lane apartment without doing themselves physical injury. The Chases evidently felt that the surest way to show their appreciation of the hospitality offered them was to be uninterruptedly mirthful at its character. "For goodness' sake, Sally," cried Mrs. Chase, with a little shriek, "you're not going to put us both in here! Neil, don't you dare to come in until I get out--there isn't room. Where shall I hang my coat? Oh, is there a closet behind that curtain? Six hooks! Neil, you can't have but one of them--I want the rest. Sally, how did you ever come to it, after that great roomy old house of yours? I should suffocate in a week! It's lucky we're going on to-morrow. I couldn't change my gowns in here." "I thought you were an experienced traveller," retorted Sally, lightly enough. She had known quite what to expect from Dorothy; it did not disturb her seriously. "Good travellers can tuck themselves away anywhere. Besides, this room is palatial in comparison with Uncle Timothy's. There's not room for a dressing-table in his. You should be thankful that you have one, and a mirror. The mirror's the one real essential for Dorothy Eustis Chase. I made sure you had that." "It's just like you not to own up that you're cramped." Dorothy was taking full advantage of the mirror pointed out. Her elaborately waved chestnut locks received her full attention for a space, and Sally slipped away to the kitchen. They sat down presently to something which was not a dinner, and proved decidedly more than a lunch. The guests ate ravenously, but did not forget to take note of their surroundings. Neil's back was too close to the wall for Sally to squeeze by him when she rose to change the plates, and this amused him very much. "Two more guests, and the room would burst, wouldn't it?" he suggested, as he handed a plate at her request. "I didn't know they ever made a flat as small as this" "They make them much smaller," declared Max, with a sparkle of the eye. "I assure you we have never felt crowded--until to-night." "Oh, don't mind us!" Dorothy cried. "You see, we've just come from visiting the Grandons, and their house is so enormous it makes everything seem small. It was a day's journey across our room, and Neil's dressing-room was as big as this whole flat. It's a lovely place to visit, they do everything for you. They have so many servants, and such well trained ones, you absolutely forget how to wait on yourself." "How long were you there?" Alec inquired. "Why, from Wednesday to--when did we leave there, Neil? Oh, yes, it must have been yesterday morning." "Three days? No wonder you became too used to such luxury to be able to come down to waiting on yourselves." And Alec applied himself to his plate with a sense of having evened things up with Mrs. Chase in return for her "smart Alec." It was Sally who kept matters running smoothly, her head throbbing all the while. When the Chases had been finally tucked away--still ironic--in their quarters, and the rest of the family had bestowed themselves in the space belonging to them, she sat down by the open window, too weary to undress. Here Bob, emerging from Uncle Timothy's room in search of belongings necessary to his comfort, found her. "Why don't you go to bed?" he asked. "I'm going. But I'd like to sit here all night." "You'll catch cold by that window. Head still ache?" "I suppose so. I'm too tired to feel anything any more." "Cheer up. I'll be around bright and early and do everything I know." "Of course you will, Bobby," and she held out her hand. He grasped it. "Your hand's hot," he observed. "Aren't sick, are you?" "Of course not. I'm never sick. Go to bed, dear. I'll be all right in the morning." Optimistically, Bob thought she would. The next morning, however, the Sally who confronted him looked so far from herself, as she went slowly about the little kitchen, that he was worried, and said so. "Never mind. Don't say anything. After breakfast I can rest." "Can you brace up to get through breakfast?" demanded Bob, anxiously. Sally assured him that she could, and proved it. Somehow, after the manner of women, she came to the table with a smile so bright that nobody noticed that she ate almost nothing, that her hand shook as she poured the coffee, and that her long-lashed blue eyes were very heavy. Immediately after breakfast the Chases were off--in a cab engaged by Max, in deference to Sally's wishes. Neil and Dorothy took a jocose farewell, the one declaring that their presence had stretched the apartment till it could be seen to gape at the seams, the other vowing that Sally must come to see her soon, in order to be able to take a full breath again. Then the cab bore them away. "Well, of all the--" Alec left the sentence unfinished. Max completed it for him. "Nerve! If that's a sample of legal brilliancy of wit, I'm sorry for the defendant who employs him," he grunted. The Chases had arrived on Saturday night, and were continuing their journey without reference to the fact that it was Sunday. Sally turned back into the passage, remembering that on Sundays her family were to be provided for in the matter of luncheon, and that they were in the habit of looking forward to the extra good things she was accustomed to serve them upon that day. She sank into a chair and stared at the breakfast-table standing just as they had all left it. "Don't you stir, Sis!" cried Bob, returning with the others. "Al and I'll do the dishes." Then, as he saw an expression of disfavour cross his brother's face at this unwelcome proposal, he added quickly, "She's sick, Sally is, with all this, and it's time somebody noticed it." They all looked at her. She tried to smile up at them, but the unwilling tears came instead. "I'll be all right, if I can just lie down a while," she said. Then they rallied, in alarm. Not one of them but loved Sally as the dearest thing in the world, however careless of her comfort one or another of them might now and then seem to be. Max put a brotherly arm round her. "Tired out, little girl?" he asked, gently, and led her toward the couch in the living-room. "All for those ungrateful duffers!" As he followed to put a pillow under his sister's head Alec looked as if he would like to knock at least one of the "duffers" down. "She's had all she could do to keep up, for twenty-four hours!" cried Bob, pulling a small knit rug over Sally's feet. She managed to smile at them, choking back quite unwonted tears--Sally was no baby, to cry at a touch of fatigue. She had known they would be very good to her, once they understood. It was Uncle Timothy who at once became practical. He drew up a chair beside the couch and took Sally's wrist in his, counting carefully. Then he laid his hand on her forehead, against her flushed cheeks. He bade her put out her tongue, and surveying that tell-tale member through his spectacles, came to his conclusions. These he did not inflict upon Sally, who had closed her eyes, and lay like a tired child. Instead, he beckoned Max into another room, and said, "She's sick, sure enough. Pulse jumping, skin hot and dry--and too tired to move. Suppose you telephone Doctor Wood to look in this morning." Max lost no time. He went down stairs to telephone, that Sally-might not hear, and in his suddenly roused anxiety made his message so urgent that the doctor arrived within the hour. He was the family physician long employed by the Lanes, and he had known Sally from her babyhood. It took him but the space of a brief, yet thorough, examination to form his opinion. He communicated it, under his breath, to Sally's "four men," who had tiptoed anxiously out into the hall where he had beckoned them. "It looks mighty like typhoid," he said--and they winced at the word. "It's too soon to be certain, but there's more or less of it about. You can't take care of her here, and she'll be far better off at the hospital. I'll send a carriage and a nurse by twelve o'clock." So do hours change outlooks. The last thing any one of the Lanes had expected to be doing at noon on that peaceful spring Sunday was to be standing in the vestibule of the Winona flats, watching the little sister being conveyed away, in the care of a nurse. But so it was. "Don't look so blue, dears," Sally had murmured, as she left them. "I'll soon be back, you know." "Heaven grant it!" ejaculated Uncle Timothy, in his heart. As for the others, they filed silently up stairs again, and into the empty room. It was full of all the things that had seemed to make it home--with Sally there. But somehow it looked empty now. Nobody said much of anything unless it became necessary, but before bedtime four pregnant sentences had been uttered. "That nurse looked as if she knew something," said Max, suddenly. "There's not a man in the city equal to Wood," declared Alec. "Seems as if she couldn't smile quite like that if she was going to be awfully sick," was Bob's contribution to the sum total of hopefulness. But it was Uncle Timothy, as usual, who hit the nail on the head. "Boys," said he, "we can do our part--on our knees." And, to a man, they nodded. Suddenly, they could not speak. CHAPTER IV ARGUMENTS AND ANSWERS "I'm sure that's as good a report as we could hope for," urged Josephine Burnside. But the anxiety in her eyes somewhat qualified her cheerfulness. Maxwell Lane shook his head doubtfully. "'Holding her own'--that's all they've said the last three days," he said. "Yes, but that's a good deal at this stage. It's the end of the second week." "She's out of her head." "They usually are, I think." The pair emerged from the door of the hospital. "Well, I'm glad I met you here," said Max. "It's kind of you to come so often." "It's not kind at all. I couldn't stay away. And if I could, Jarvis wouldn't let me. No telephone messages will satisfy him." "Good old fellow. How are his eyes?" "Worse than ever. Mother and I take turns reading to him, while he tramps the floor. We should try to get him off somewhere into the country, but he won't leave until Sally is out of the hospital. And I've no idea he will leave then, he'll be so anxious to do things for her." "Good old chap," murmured Max again, absently. He was looking at Josephine as if an idea had struck him. "Are you going to do anything in particular the rest of the afternoon?" "I don't know that I am. Why?" "Don't you want to invite me to drive out into the country in your trap? The roads are pretty good now, and I ought to go out and take a look at the farm. Besides, I'm too restless to keep still. Saturday afternoons and Sundays are tough to get through with, just now." "I shall be delighted. Come home with me, and we'll start right away. I should like to see the place again, too." Fifteen minutes by trolley-car, and ten to allow for the ordering of the trap, and the two young people were driving away. Josephine held the reins over the back of a fine gray mare that seemed glad to get out of the stable on this sunny May afternoon. The roads were even better than Max had predicted, and the seven-mile drive was soon over. "There are the pines." Josephine pointed with her whip. "How far away they show, against the lighter foliage. I'm fond of pines--they make me think of the mountains. You're lucky to have that grove. If you ever live here, it will be a lovely spot for hot summer afternoons." "We'll never live here, if I can help it," answered Max. "As for the pine grove, the best thing to do with that is to cut it down and get the money out of it." "Max!" exclaimed Josephine. "Don't do that without the permission of every member of your family and most of your friends. What's the money?" "The money's a good deal to me. This illness of Sally's--" "Sell the books, if you must, but not the trees. Of course you ought to keep both, but don't--_don't_ cut down those trees!" "You're as bad as Sally about this old place. Hello, there's some one in the grove now! What's he doing? Standing on his head?" For a leg could be descried waving in the air, while its owner apparently lay partly on his back, his shoulders against a tree trunk. As the trap came nearer, the man could be seen distinctly; he was reading, with one leg balancing across the knee of the other. "Seems to have taken possession of my grounds. I suppose he also would object if I offered to cut down the grove. Is he going to see us? No--too absorbed in his yellow novel." "He sees us. But we're nothing to him. He's turned back to his page. Shall we drive in? Are you going to get out?" "Yes, of course, if only to show that chap I'm the owner of his lounging place." Josephine turned in, and the trap swung through the gateway and on past the pine grove. Max saw the reader get to his feet. "Coming to apologize," murmured Max. "Well, if he asks permission, he can stay--till I cut down the grove." Before the horse had been tied, the stranger was at hand. "Since I'm caught in the act, I'll come and ask if I may," he said, genially. "This is Mr. Lane, I believe. I'm Donald Ferry, a neighbour of yours. Your fine grove is a sort of 'call of the wild' to me." Max shook hands, attracted at once by both voice and face. Donald Ferry was a sturdy young man, with broad shoulders and a thick thatch of reddish-brown hair; he possessed a pair of searching but friendly hazel eyes. He was dressed in a rough suit of blue serge, and a gray flannel shirt with a rolling collar and flowing blue tie gave him an out-door air confirmed by the tan and freckles on his face and the sinewy grip of his brown hand. He had closed his book and tucked it under his arm, so that its title could not be observed, but it had not exactly the look of a "yellow novel." "You're entirely welcome to make use of the grove as much as you like," Max answered, with the cordiality he could not help feeling toward the possessor of so frank and genial a look as that with which the strange young man continued to regard him. "I live with my mother in the little house on the other side of the grove," explained Mr. Ferry. "We've been living there for a fortnight, but this is the first time I've caught sight of anybody about the place. It seemed so completely deserted I've been proposing to my mother that we appropriate the house. But she seems a trifle appalled by the size of it. On the whole, for us, ours is rather the better fit." "This house is too big to fit anything but an orphan asylum," said Max, with a wave toward the brick walls now heavily vine-clad with the tender green leafage of May. "It's in bad shape, from chimneys to cellar. Just the same, I've a sister who is wild to live here." "Yet you are the one who comes out to look over the place? Perhaps you have a sort of sneaking fondness for it, after all!" "My sister would come if she could. She's in the hospital with typhoid," explained Max, wondering, as he did so, how he came to be giving details like these in his first conversation with a stranger. He really liked the look of the fellow extraordinarily well. "This will be a great place for her to grow strong in, by and by," suggested the other, his tone indicating his sympathy with the situation. "The pine grove, in June, will be better than a sanatorium." Max shook his head. "It's not practical for us to think of living here. Of course we can bring her out for a day at a time." "You might put up a tent in the grove. Nothing like out-doors for convalescents--and for well people. Well, Mr. Lane, thank you immensely for letting me feel free of the grove--until you come to live. I am fairly sure you will come to live here some day. It's an irresistible old place." He took his leave with a pleasant grace of manner which, in spite of the rough old suit and flannel shirt, spoke of training in other places than pine groves. When he had gone off among the pines toward the hedge, which lay between the grove and the little white cottage on the side toward Wybury, Max rejoined Josephine. "He looked a pretty good sort, didn't he? If anybody did live here, he'd be an interesting neighbour. I hardly knew there was a house there, did you?" "Oh, yes, I saw it as we came by. It had been freshly painted white, and I noticed how pleasant it looked. It's a tiny house. Unless his mother is smaller than he is, it certainly must be a tight fit." "She's probably about the size of a pint pot. Mothers of strapping fellows like that usually are." "He wasn't any taller than you." "Wasn't he? I thought he was a giant. He'd outweigh me by fifty pounds." Josephine glanced at him. It struck her that Max, never of stalwart build, looked paler and thinner than usual. There was a slight stoop in his shoulders. She recalled the straight set of those belonging to the strange young man. "Max," she asked, quite suddenly, "how much light do you have in your office?" "Floods of it," replied Max, promptly. "I have to wear a shade sometimes." "Daylight?" "Bless your soul, no! What do you think a ground-floor banking house gets, between a lot of ten-story buildings? Electrics, of course, are the only things possible." "Then you don't have the daylight at all?" "I have plenty of light to work by." "I think it's dreadful!" cried Josephine. She had never thought of it before, or considered Max's pale skin as the direct result of spending his days under such conditions. "If you could see the difference between your face and Mr. Ferry's--" Max stared at her. "That red-headed, freckle-faced chap seems to have made a great impression on you," he complained. "He probably has an out-door job of some sort--his clothes showed it. Engineering, more than likely. That was undoubtedly a book on dynamics or hydraulics, or something of that sort. You can't expect a bank clerk to have a skin like an Indian's--under electric light. Come on, shall we walk back to the timber tract? That's what I want to look at. I suppose you won't object to my cutting there? There must be a lot of stuff fit to sell, and, as I told you, I need the money. When Sally gets out of the hospital, it will be a long time before she's fit to work. Uncle Tim says typhoid convalescents are pretty slow at getting back to the working stage. We'll have to keep on hiring that Mary Ann Flinders. She polishes the stove with the napkins, I think--they look it." "Goodness! How poor Sally would feel if she knew!" "She does know. I told her the last time I saw her--before she got these funny notions in her head. To-day she thought I was an Episcopal bishop come to marry her to the doctor--they got me out right away." "Max! You must not tell Sally disturbing things about home. She will be anxious enough when she's herself, without hearing about napkins and things from you." "I suppose so. But I've been so blue ever since she went I couldn't keep in." "Then keep out." Max looked at her. Josephine's dark cheeks were pink, partly with indignation, partly with the brisk progress over the slightly rising grade of the cartpath through the fields toward the timber tract. "Well, you _are_ sort of down on your friends to-day, aren't you? I'm an idiot to think of cutting down the pine grove. I'm a milksop compared with a red-headed Indian you never saw before. Now I'm a blunderbuss for answering a simple question asked me by my sister. What do you think I am, anyhow? Fit to cumber the earth?" Josephine returned his gaze. She seemed not in the least awed by this burst of wrath. She replied with spirit, not unmixed with good humour: "I think you're peppery--as usual. Hasn't an old friend like me a right to try to keep things straight? You ought to know better than to say one word to Sally that will give her a minute's anxiety. Goodness knows she's had enough of it, keeping house for you four people for three whole years." "Haven't we been taking care of her all that time?" demanded Max, with rising colour of his own. "Haven't we all been working our heads off to pay expenses, and giving her every cent we could get to run things with?" "Of course you have. It's what you ought to do, but I certainly give you credit for doing it. Only I don't think you've fully appreciated Sally's part. She's worked harder than any of you." "Has she told you so?" Max was looking straight in front of him, and his eyes were angry. "Never! You know she hasn't. She's not that kind of girl. But I'm another girl, and I can see for myself. Sally's worked hard to make that apartment seem like home. No matter how blue she felt herself, she's never acted blue before you--now has she?" "I can't say that she has. She's a light-hearted girl--always was, and--" "Don't you think it. Sally's been putting on a brave face and letting everybody suppose she's cheerful. She's kept you all up when she was bluer than you are now." Max stopped short, stood still in the cart-path and looked Josephine in the eye. She stopped also, and faced him coolly. "Will you tell me how you know all this?" he inquired, fiercely. "I've put two and two together, and found they make four," replied Josephine. "See here, Max "--she spoke more gently, but quite as decidedly as before--"you mustn't think I'm trying to be disagreeable, now, of all times. Of course I know you boys all love Sally as devotedly as brothers can, and do a great deal to show it. But when it comes to sparing her anxiety and letting her have her way about things she has set her heart on, I don't think you're always quite as considerate as you might be. I didn't dream of saying all this to-day. But when you began to talk about cutting down that pine grove, though you knew what a fancy Sally took to it, it came over me that you would be just as likely as anything to do it right now, while Sally is sick--and I just couldn't help speaking out." The two walked on in silence for some distance. Then Max spoke, gloomily: "It's all right enough to consider sentiment, and I know you well enough to understand what you mean by pitching into me this way. But the craze Sally's been in over this old place seems to me a thing out of all reason. What are we, a family of bank clerks and office boys, to shoulder a proposition like this? We can't think of moving out here and living in that barracks, and trying to make a living off the soil. Neither can we put a tenant on here, and fit him out with farm tools, and take the responsibility and the risk of his running the place. He'd undoubtedly run us into the ground the first year. I've thought it over and thought it over, and the only course seems to me to be to find a buyer for the place. Money isn't easy just now, and I've no doubt we'd have a hard time to get a decent price. Meanwhile it seems to me only common sense to get what income we can out of it. If I could sell that big pine grove, and cut off what timber is ready for the axe up here, it would bring us something quite substantial." Now this certainly was a presentation of the case which called for a considerate listening. But, quite as if she had not heard a word of his argument, Josephine cried out: "Max, why not do what Mr. Ferry proposed, if you think the house can't be lived in? Put up a tent in the grove and bring Sally there as soon as she's fit for it. She'd get strong twice as fast as in that stuffy flat!" Max gazed at her. "That's just what you get," he ejaculated, "when you try to talk business with a girl. Show her a good and sufficient reason why you can't do a thing, and she instantly asks why you can't do something ten times harder. Will you tell me how, with Sally out here in a tent, we fellows are going to get along in the flat? And what would she do out here, all by herself?" It was now Josephine's turn to gaze with scorn at her companion. "Do you think I'm proposing for Sally to camp by herself out here, while Mary Ann Flinders keeps house for you in town? No; bring Mary Ann out here to cook for Sally, and you boys come out for the nights. If you had a bit of camp spirit, you'd jump at the chance to get a real outing right along with your work." "Camp," exclaimed Max, "in your own front yard!" "The pine grove isn't your front yard, and the farther end of it is so far away from the road, nobody could tell who was who, back there. Besides, what difference, if Sally gets strong again as fast as out-door life can make her?" "It's not practical," Max continued to object, and Josephine realized afresh that the Lane temperament was not one easily swayed by argument or appeal. There was a stubborn streak in Max which was as hard to deal with now as it had been in the days when Josephine had fought it out with him in playground affairs. Yet she did not lose hope. She had known Max to come round, if left to himself, convinced in the end by logic derived from his own consideration of the case. If he could once see a course as fair and right he would accept it. Clearly, he did not yet see this thing in any such light, and it was of no use to persist in heated argument which would only result in prejudicing him yet further against the plan which seemed to Josephine so wise a one. The two walked through the timber tract, Max pointing out trees which he thought could be sacrificed with a real gain to the timber to be left standing. Josephine listened and agreed, finding genuine interest in the long vistas of oak and chestnut pillars stretching away to what seemed an infinite distance, for dense undergrowth at the back of the wood prevented the appearance of an outlet anywhere. As they drove away, they noted with new interest the small white cottage on the farther side of the dividing hedge. "There's your friend Ferry," observed Max, as they flew by at the gray mare's smartest pace, "working away in a strawberry patch as if his life depended on it. That's where he gets his beautiful Indian complexion you admire so much, when he isn't doing engineering stunts. Probably he's home just now between jobs, fixing up his mother in her new place. Well, we can't all grow strawberries and lie round on our backs reading hydraulics. Some of us have to do the in-door jobs. Of course those are useless--mere folly. All the really sensible chaps are looking after the colour of their skins!" CHAPTER V TELEPHONES AND TENTS "Hello, Jarve! This you?" Over the telephone Jarvis Burnside recognized Max Lane's voice, eager and cheerful. The last time he had heard it, it had been so despondent that his own anxiety had been heavily increased. He answered eagerly: "Yes. What is it?" "There's a break in her temperature." "A break! You mean--" "A drop--a landslide--during the last twelve hours. She's sleeping quietly. She's--" But something suddenly interfered with the speaker's articulation. Although Jarvis continued to listen with strained attention, a silence succeeded. His imagination filled the gap. He essayed to offer congratulations, but found something the matter with his own powers of speech. After a moment's struggle, however, he was able to say, "I'll be round as quick as I can get there." Mrs. Burnside, passing the telephone closet at the back of the hall, heard a rush therefrom, and found herself suddenly embraced by a pair of long arms. Although blue goggles concealed her son's eyes from her look of sympathetic inquiry, the smile which transformed his face was not to be mistaken. "Jarvis, dear--you've had good news!" "Max couldn't say much, but his voice told. The fever's down--she's sleeping!" "Oh, I am glad--so glad! The dear child! I couldn't sleep last night, after the discouraging news." Her son did not say that he had not slept, but he looked it. His finely cut features showed plainly that for more than one night he had been suffering severe and increasing strain. "We must tell Josephine," said his mother happily, proceeding on her way with Jarvis's arm about her shoulders. "You look her up, please. I'm going to bolt down to see Max and the rest. Uncle Timothy was about all in last night when I met him. These last five days--" Jarvis released his mother, seized his hat from a tree they were passing, and escaped out of a side door. Mrs. Burnside hurried away upstairs to find her daughter. If the Burnside family had been bound to the Lanes by ties of blood, each member of it could hardly have been more intimately concerned with the issue of Sally's illness. Away down town, at the Winona flats, Jarvis's ring brought an instant response, and a minute later Bob was shaking his hand off at the half-way landing. Then Alec was rushing to the top of the stairs, and Max was shouting from the bath-room, where he was shaving. Uncle Timothy alone remained quiet in his chair, but his worn face was bright. "It's great news, Mr. Rudd, great news!" cried Jarvis, wringing Uncle Timothy's out-stretched hand of welcome. "Yes, Jarvis--yes. But--I must warn you all to make haste slowly in the matter of assurance. It looks favourable, certainly, but the child has been through a hard fight, and she is not out of danger yet. You know I don't want to dampen your happiness, boys--" and Uncle Timothy looked tenderly from one face to another, out of the wisdom of his greater experience. Their faces had sobered. "I understand, sir, of course," Jarvis agreed. "But the drop in the fever and the quiet sleep surely mean a promising change?" "Very promising--no doubt of it. And we are thankful--thankful. It is a wonderful relief after the reports we have been getting." He took off his spectacles and wiped them. Then he wiped his eyes. "With care, now--" he began again, cheerfully. But Bob could not help interrupting. "She's getting splendid care," he cried. He could not endure the thought that it was still necessary to exercise caution lest they rejoice prematurely. He had taken the leap from boyish despair to boyish confidence at a bound, and he had no mind to drop back to a half-way point of doubt and depression. "I suppose we ought to wait a few days before we run up any flags," Max admitted, and the others reluctantly agreed. During the following week they learned the reasons for respecting Mr. Rudd's advice. Though Sally's bark had certainly rounded the most threatening danger point, there yet remained seas by no means smooth to be traversed, and more than once wind and waves rose again sufficiently to cause a return of anxiety to those who watched but could not go to the rescue. But, in due time, recovery became assured, convalescence was established, and finally the great day was at hand, when she should come home from the hospital. She looked still very pale and weak, as they saw her lying in her high white bed in the long ward--how they had mourned that they could not afford to give her a private room!--But she was Sally herself once more, and looking so eagerly forward to being at home again that it was a joy to see her smile at the thought of it. "I wish it were not so excessively hot," said Uncle Timothy, regretfully. He stood in the doorway of Sally's room. It had been put in order by Mary Ann Flinders--or, to be more exact, Mary Ann Flinders had attempted to put it in order for Sally's reception the next day. Max looked in over his uncle's shoulder. "I don't know that it's any hotter in here than anywhere else!" he demurred, irritably. He was in his shirt-sleeves, and he had that moment removed his collar and neck-tie. Uncle Timothy had got as far as taking off his waistcoat and donning an old alpaca coat, in which he had been striving to imagine himself comfortable. "I think it must be several degrees warmer in this small room than in the dining-room," asserted Uncle Timothy. "And it is ninety-two there. It is unfortunate that the poor child should have to come back to such an oven as this. At the hospital a breeze circulates through the wards. Here there seems to be none." "She could sleep on the couch in the living-room." suggested Max. "_Whew!_ It _is_ hot! What possesses the weather to start in like this, before June's half over? I believe it was one hundred and twelve in the office to-day." He threw himself on the couch. After a moment of reclining upon it, during which he mopped his brow and drew his handkerchief about his neck, he rose and jerked the couch toward one of the two open windows. When he had lain in this new situation for the space of two minutes more, he got up again and sought the tiny kitchen, where he could be heard drawing water from the tap. "Ugh--warm as dish water!" Uncle Timothy could hear his distant splutter. Bob and Alec were out somewhere--presumably cooling off in one of the city parks or on the river front. Also, they were getting impatiently through the hours before Sally's return. The entire Lane household had reached the point where her coming home seemed a thing never to be attained. To a man, they felt that one week more without her would be unendurable. But the next day--it was Sunday again--she came home. Josephine and Max, with the Burnside carriage and horses, brought her to the door. Max and Alec, making a "chair" of hands and wrists, carried the pitifully light figure up the four flights of stairs, and Josephine hovered over the convalescent as she was established upon the couch, among many pillows. The rest of them stood about in a smiling circle. "Oh, but it's good to be home!" sighed Sally, happily, looking from one to another with eyes which seemed to them all as big as saucers, so deep were the hollows about them and so thin her cheeks. "But how pale and tired you all look! What in the world is the matter with you?" "The truth is, I think, dear," explained Josephine, glancing from Max to Uncle Timothy, "your family have been having typhoid." Then, at Sally's startled expression, she added, gently, "It's almost as wearing, you know, to have a fever of anxiety over somebody you love as to have the real thing in the hospital." "Oh!" exclaimed Sally, softly, and her eyes fell. Then she drooped limply against her pillows. "It's--just a little hot to-day, isn't it?" she murmured. Alec consulted the thermometer. "It's ninety here now," he announced. "At ten o'clock in the morning! About three this afternoon, Sally, you'll see what we can do here. And no let-up promised by the weather man." Bob brought a palm-leaf fan, and perching himself at the head of Sally's couch, began to fan her. "I'll produce 'breezes from the north and east,'" he promised. "Al, why don't you get her some ice-water? We began to take ice yesterday." "Only yesterday?" questioned Sally, with her eyes closed. But she forbore to ask why they had delayed so long. Well she knew that illnesses are expensive affairs. "If you only had let us take you to our house!" cried Josephine, for the tenth time since she had first proposed that plan. "We could have made you so much more comfortable." Sally opened her eyes again. "No, you couldn't, Joey," she said, "unless you had taken all the rest of them. I couldn't spare my family another day!" "May we come in?" It was Jarvis Burnside, bringing his mother to see Sally. Neither of them had yet set eyes upon her since her illness. Sally had been at home for two days now, two intemperately hot days. During this entire period she had lain on the couch, which was drawn as close to the window as it could be placed. Uncle Timothy had remained at hand with fans and iced lemonade and every other expedient he could think of for mitigating the perfervid temperature of the flat. Just now, at five o'clock in the afternoon, with no breeze whatever entering at the window, the small living-room was at its worst. "Oh, I'm so glad to see you!" Sally held out a languid hand, but her face lighted up with pleasure. While his mother bent over Sally, Jarvis pushed up his goggles, then pulled them off. The room was shaded, but even so, the daylight made him blink painfully for a minute. But by the time he got his chance at greeting the invalid, he was able to see clearly for himself just how Sally was looking. He stared hard at her, noting with a contraction of the heart all the evidences of the fight for life she had been through. There was no doubt about it, it was as Josephine had said: she looked as if a breath might blow her away. "I look like a little boy now, don't I?" suggested Sally, smiling up at him as his hand closed over hers. She put up her other hand to her head, where the heavy masses of fair hair had given way to a short, curly crop most childish in its clustering framing of her now delicate face. "It's a blow to my vanity, but it's growing fast, and by the time I can hold my head up good and strong, like a six-months-old baby, it will be long enough to tie with a bow at my neck." "You can't hold your head up yet?" questioned Jarvis anxiously. "Oh, yes, I can," declared Sally, cheerfully. "I just don't seem to want to--not when there's a convenient pillow to lay it on. But I shall get strong pretty soon now. When the weather changes--why, even to-day, if I were lying down on the bank of a brook somewhere, or in the woods--or almost anywhere out-doors--I believe I'd feel quite a lot stiffer in my backbone." "And still you won't come to us and let us make you comfortable?" Mrs. Burnside looked as if she would enjoy doing it. But Sally looked over at Uncle Timothy, and her shake of the head was as decided as ever. "Not while Uncle Timmy and the boys stay here. Have you seen Max and Alec lately, Mrs. Burnside? I don't believe I'm a bit paler than they are, working in those hot offices in the artificial light. I shall grow strong fast enough--the nurse told me people always feel like this after typhoid. And when I do get strong I shall be a Trojan--just wait." "We don't like to wait," said Jarvis, still watching Sally, although his eyes were feeling the adverse influences of the white daylight which beat into the room underneath the shades. He put up his hand for an instant to shield them, and Sally was quick to notice. "I thought you were wearing goggles, Jarvis," she said. Mrs. Burnside turned with a reproachful expression, and with a laugh Jarvis drew the goggles out of his pocket and replaced them. "A fellow gets tired of viewing life through these things," he explained. "And I've been seeing you in imagination through blue spectacles, so to speak, for five weeks now. I thought I'd like a glimpse of your true complexion." Sally put up two thin hands and pinched her cheeks fiercely. "I believe I must resemble a tallow candle," she complained. "What can you people expect of a patient just out of the hospital?" "We'd like to get you where nature would attend to putting on the rouge--eh, mother?" and Jarvis thought of his friend Max with a strong desire to take that refractory young man by the collar and argue with him with his fists. If it had not been for Max's stubbornness, Sally would not now be suffering the discomfort of this unspeakable apartment. When he and his mother had reached the outer air again and were driving away, Jarvis burst out: "Something must be done! If Sally won't let you and Jo have her--and that wouldn't be getting her out of the city, only into a more bearable in-door atmosphere--she must be taken into the country. Jo's plan is perfectly feasible. A tent in that pine grove would do the business. Mother, I'm going to put one there. If Max doesn't like it, he can stay away." "Jarvis, dear, how can you do that? Max would resent that high-handed way of managing his affairs." "I dare say he would. What of that? If ever a frail child needed to get out-doors, Sally does. Aren't we old friends enough to take things into our own hands?" "Max won't accept a tent from you--or Sally, either." "Won't they? They won't have to. It'll be my tent; I'll lend it to them." Jarvis grinned, his white teeth making a striking contrast to the sombre effect of his big goggles. "Hold on, Cheney," he said to the coachman. "Let me out at the corner of Seventeenth. I will look up the tent business right here and now." His mother looked after his tall figure as he hurried away through the down town crowds, his straw hat a little pushed back, as it was wont to be in moments of excitement. She herself felt like heartily aiding and abetting his friendly schemes, for Sally was very dear to her motherly heart, and it had seemed to her impossible that the girl should recover her strength while shut up in the little flat. If the heat lasted--and there were no indications of any near break in the high temperature--it would certainly be a severe test on the young convalescent, and might seriously retard her in the important business of getting back her old vigour. Within an hour Jarvis was at home again, in time for dinner. He came to the table with a catalogue in his hand. Determination was written large upon his face. Josephine had heard from her mother of his expressed intention, and she eyed the catalogue eagerly. "Are you really going to do it, Jarve?" she cried. "Of course I'm going to do it--with your help." "Help! I'll do any thing. Have you told Max?" "I'll tell him nothing till the tent's up--and furnished. Here, look at this list, and advise me as to size. Would an eighteen by twenty-four wall-tent--of the heaviest duck--be about right?" "Eighteen by twenty-four! Why, that's--how big would that be?" "About the size of this dining-room. I could get an eighteen by thirty-four--" Josephine interrupted him with a burst of delighted laughter. "You might get Sally a circus tent," she cried. "As big as this dining-room! Why, Jarve--" "She wants the whole family with her," explained Jarvis, with composure. "That means the tent must be divided off into rooms. And she must have one section for a living-room. I'm going to have a floor made--the carpenter will go out in the morning, if he keeps his word. By quick work we ought to be able to take her out there to-morrow night, but allowing for delays, the next evening will have to do. Mother, have we any cots?" "I'm afraid we have no cots. There are two single-width white iron beds in the attic--" "All the better. May I have them?" "I wonder you stop to ask permission of anybody for anything," observed Josephine. "Mother, have you seen Jarvis look so waked up since he put on goggles?" Mrs. Burnside smiled. She was very glad to see her son so interested, although she felt decidedly doubtful as to the way in which the Lanes would take his interference in their affairs. Still, as Jarvis had urged, people who have been friends from childhood, with an old family friendship of fathers and grandfathers behind them, should have some rights when it comes to matters so important. And if anybody could manage Max's proud and intolerant temper, Jarvis, with his quiet firmness, should be the one. Josephine, also, was of the make-up which can fight for that which seems right. Between them, if they could not put the thing through, it would be rather remarkable. "Joey, will you and mother drive out with me this evening and decide on where to put the tent?" Jarvis rose from the table, after having made a hasty meal which did not include any superfluous courses. "Of course I will." Josephine pushed aside her dessert. "I will stay at home and look up blankets and bedding," announced Mrs. Burnside. "Have you thought of the cooking question? Shall we try to supply the utensils?" "If you can spare them, mother. I'll buy what you can't contribute. I've bargained for a little gasolene stove and a small tent for a kitchen. As for the cooking, is that specimen they have in the flat now good enough to import to the camp?" "She's pretty poor. I had luncheon there yesterday with Sally." Josephine's face spoke louder than her words. "Mother, could you spare Joanna for a week or two, till they can find somebody? She can cook almost as well as Sarah, you know. She cooked for me last fall, when you were away and Sarah was taken ill." Jarvis's mother looked at him doubtfully. "I think you had better not go as far as that. Be content with supplying the tent and its equipment, and see how Max and Alec take it. The young girl they have now will do for a time, surely." "All right--if you think that's the better plan. Ready, Sis?" Jarvis put the gray mare through her paces, and there was still an hour of daylight left when he and Josephine reached the pine grove. "It's ten degrees cooler out here than it is in town at this hour," declared Jarvis, with satisfaction. He pushed up the goggles and lowered them again quickly. Even the subdued light in the grove, at a point where the setting sun did not penetrate, was too much for his eyes. "Confound the things!" he exploded. "Shall I ever be anything again but an owl in daylight? Well, where shall the tent go?" "Over there," replied Josephine, promptly. "There's just one perfect spot for it--on the top of that little rise, looking toward the south, and away from the grove." "Right you are. But the trees are too thick." He pulled out a foot-rule and began to measure. Presently he announced the result: "One tree, this little fellow, will have to come down." "Do you dare?" "Of course I dare. Where can I get an axe?" Josephine glanced toward the house. Then she thought of the Ferry cottage. "The little house beyond the hedge--I know the people--at least, I've met one of them. Shall we go and ask?" Jarvis was already hurrying toward a distant gap in the hedge. "I'll go!" he called back. In two minutes he reappeared. With him was a sturdy figure. Josephine recognized the broad shoulders, the thick reddish-brown hair, the gleam of the hazel eyes. She nodded at Donald Ferry, noting that he was not now clad in a gray flannel shirt, but in one of white, with a low collar and silk neck-tie, similar to Jarvis's--hot-weather dress with an urban air about it. He carried an axe. "Thank you," said Jarvis, when they had reached the spot which Josephine had designated. He held out his hand for the axe. Ferry shook his head, smiling. "Which is the tree?" he inquired. "Give me the axe, please," repeated Jarvis. "There's no reason why you should chop down trees for us on a sweltering night like this." "It won't make me swelter as much as it will you," asserted Ferry retaining his hold on the axe. "I'm an old woodman. Come, show me the tree, or I'll chop at a venture. Miss Burnside?" Josephine pointed out the tree. Ferry lifted the axe and swung it, and it sank deeply into the trunk. Another blow; it struck the same spot. Another and another, with an unerring aim. "You are a woodman," admitted Jarvis, admiringly, watching the powerful swing and the telling blows. Ferry laughed, without abating the vigour of his work. "There's no better out-door fun that I know of," said he, "than chopping down a tree. I couldn't think of missing this chance." CHAPTER VI IN THE PINE GROVE "Sally, will you and Max go for a drive with us? It will cool you off for sleep." Josephine stood looking in on them, herself in white from head to foot, a refreshing sight for tired eyes to rest upon. Sally drew herself up eagerly upon her couch pillows. Max yawned and stretched in the chair in which he had been half asleep. "Oh, it would be so good to get out!" Sally rose unsteadily to her feet. Max rubbed his eyes. "Sally can go. I think I'll go to bed. Much obliged." "Please go, Max. We want you very much, and it's too hot here to sleep." "He's worn out," explained Sally. "But the drive will rest you, boy," she insisted. "Jarvis is driving. He has something to talk over with you," urged Josephine. Max unwillingly put on his coat. He felt tired enough. He had never known so trying a period of work as that which had been driving him now for weeks at the bank, with this accompaniment of intense heat which made his labours seem doubly hard. He gave Sally his arm, down the stairs, wondering if she felt much weaker than he did, and reflecting that in one thing she had the advantage over him--she need not work until she should feel fit. As for himself, he must work, fit or not. The rest of Sally's family were out. She had been sending them away nightly to sit in the park by the river bank, allowing only one to remain with her. Although she had been at home nearly a week, it was difficult for them to see that she had made any gain in acquiring strength. Each evening Bob and Uncle Timothy searched the daily paper in vain for prophecy of change in the weather, and each morning they eyed the flags upon a certain tall building with a distinct sense of resentment toward them for persistently indicating "Fair and dry." "Good! Delighted to be able to lure you out!" called Jarvis, from his driver's seat. Although it was evening, he wore his goggles, on account of the myriad bright lights of this down-town district, and they shone upon his guests like welcoming lamps above his satisfied smile. "Tired out, old fellow?" he asked Max, as he wheeled the horses about. "Absolutely done. This heat is the worst I ever knew. The place where my desk stands is the hottest corner in the hottest bank in the hottest city in the universe!" "This certainly has been the worst day yet. That's why I thought you might like to get out into the country." "Don't care where I go," said Max. "Excuse me if I shut my eyes and keep quiet. I haven't energy enough to say any more for a mile." "All right. Shut your eyes, and I'll tell you when to open them." Max turned sidewise in his seat, rested his elbow on the back, propped his head upon his hand, closed his eyes, and appeared to slumber. Jarvis drove on silently, noting with pleasure the subdued murmur of talk going on behind him, where Sally, after a long and lonely day, was enjoying the chance to visit with her friend. The girl lay back against the luxurious padding of the Burnside carriage, resting and drinking in the refreshing sense of coolness caused more by the motion than by a greatly lowered temperature, for the evening was very warm. Presently, however, as they left the city and turned out upon a country road, the lessening heat and freer stirring of the air became distinctly perceptible. A passing stream of automobiles, setting out for some scene of festivity at a popular resort several miles away, roused Max from his lethargy with their tooting horns and brilliant lights. "Lucky ducks!" he muttered, in surly tones. "They can always stir up a breeze." "They're not the only ones who can stir up breezes," rejoined Jarvis. "I'm about to stir up one myself." "I should think you'd own a runabout," remarked Max. "Perhaps I will some day--when you people get to living out here." Max looked about him. "Headed for the farm, are we? You seem to have a fancy for this road." "It's the prettiest outside the city. Look here, Max"--he lowered his voice, that Sally might not catch a word of the coming talk--"I want to own up to something. I've been taking liberties with your place out here." Jarvis pulled off his goggles and turned his eyes upon his companion. Max yawned once more--it was the last time he yawned that evening. From that moment he became thoroughly awake. "Well, what is it?" he asked. "Had the house painted and moved in?" "Not quite so bad as that. I've put up a tent in your grove and moved out." Max stared. "_What_?" "Let's keep our voices low for a bit," urged Jarvis. "I want to surprise Sally. I knew if I asked your permission to camp in your grove you'd give it to me without a minute's hesitation, so, banking on your generosity, I took possession. I wanted to surprise you all. It struck me that every last one of you needed an outing, and I thought if you found a tent all in order out here, perhaps you'd like to try camping through this hot spell." Max was still staring. Jarvis faced him silently, straining his eyes in the darkness to see what manner of expression might be discovered upon the face beside him, showing so whitely through the obscurity. Max did not reply for the space of a full minute. When he did it was not necessary for Jarvis to strain his eyes to make out the expression. He could tell what it was quite without seeing it. "It may be the proper thing to bank on a person's generosity," said Max, in a tone of deep displeasure, "but as a rule I think it pays to consult a man before you take possession of his property." Now this speech was highly characteristic and therefore not unexpected. Nevertheless, it made Jarvis Burnside feel exceedingly like kicking his friend violently from his seat into the road. For a moment, all he could command himself to do was to tighten his grip on his horses and send them at a considerably accelerated pace along the smooth turnpike. When he spoke, however, it was with no change from the quiet good humour of his former tone. "You don't mean just that, with an old friend like me. Mother and Jo are with me in this attempt at a pleasant surprise. They will be tremendously hurt if you get up on your dignity and take it this way. We knew you had no time to be arranging camps, here or anywhere else, yet we saw you working yourself to death, and Sally needing to get out of the heat--" "I understand. Jo talked this thing at me the last time we were out here. It's a trick to get round my refusal to live here. You think you can get in an entering wedge. It's no use won't live out here. It's nonsense, and--" Sally's voice interrupted from behind: "Max, isn't this glorious? Don't you feel like a new person? We must be almost at the farm. Just think, I haven't seen the farm since April, before a leaf was out!" But Josephine, who understood the situation, and was anxious to prevent any interference with the conversation now going on upon the front seat, promptly drew Sally back to their own interview. "Max, listen to me." Jarvis spoke in a still lower voice. "Do one thing for the sake of my pride, if not for yours. I may have blundered, but you know I didn't mean to. I thought I could count on your understanding my motives. But anyhow, just for to-night, give way to my schemes, and don't let the others see that you're offended with us. If after a night here you still honestly think I'm a fool and a meddler, I won't say another word--" "A night here! Do you expect to keep us here all night?" "Why not?" "You must think I'm--" "I think you're a reasonable being and a kind-hearted brother. If Sally likes the plan and wants to stay, let her. If she doesn't, I'll cheerfully take you both home. Mother's here to welcome us and make the thing proper, and we've all planned to stay. Think of the oven your flat is to-night. Come, be good, and you'll be cool!" "Do you realize you're treating me like a small boy?" "I feel rather like one myself--one who has stolen a cake out of the pantry and is in danger of a thrashing," was Jarvis's whimsical admission. "See here. I'll give you leave to take it out of me all you like. I'll agree to meet you at midnight in the timber tract, and take whatever you see fit to administer--provided you'll keep in before the rest. What do you say?" In making this preposterous proposition he was apparently perfectly serious. It was as Mrs. Burnside had said. If anybody could manage Max's proud stubbornness, it was Jarvis, with his cool command of himself and his inborn habit of courtesy to everybody. Yet even Jarvis had his hands full to-night. Max's physical condition of fatigue and overwrought nerves made him more than ordinarily captious and difficult to handle. "Confound you, you've got me in a corner!" he muttered. "That's what I don't like. If you had come out in the open with your plans--" "You'd have refused me." "You just said you counted on my generosity. If you were so sure of it, why didn't you ask for it?" Jarvis laughed. "Oh, be reasonable! Don't you let people plot, at Christmas time and on birthdays, to take you by surprise? You hardly call it not being in the open because they don't ask your permission to present you with a house-jacket or a fountain-pen!" The horses trotted briskly on, quiet ensuing behind them for a little while. Max fell into a sulky silence; Sally into a happy one, as she leaned out, watching for the final turn in the road before the pines should come into sight. Jarvis was wondering just how Max would behave, and hoping that Sally's pleasure would blind her eyes to her brother's dissatisfaction. He was counting a good deal on the impression his camp would make. As he thought it would look in the moonlight, with a little camp fire before it, it seemed to him it must appeal to anybody. Sally gave a little cry. "There's the grove! How big and dark it looms up at night! I can smell it before I get near it--in my imagination. I've been smelling it all these hot days, and longing for it. Oh, what's that at the back? Didn't you see a flash of something?" Sally was fairly hanging out of the carriage, her gaze feasting on the cool depths of gloom under the tall trees, when she caught sight of the little leaping flames of the camp fire. "Somebody must be in there," agreed Josephine. "Perhaps it's Mr. Ferry, who lives next door, in the white cottage. Remember my telling you about him? Max gave him leave to inhabit the grove all he liked." "Everything's so dry, he might set it on fire," considered Sally anxiously. "You won't fear any such carelessness on his part when you see him," Josephine assured her confidently. The carriage turned in at the gate. In another minute it had reached a point where the tent began to show from behind a clump of bushes. Sally's hand clutched Max's shoulder. Her brother was ill-humouredly surveying the signs of occupancy of the debatable ground. "Why, there's a tent there!" she cried. "A big tent, and some one in front! Who is it--do you know?" She turned excitedly to Josephine; then she touched Jarvis's shoulder. "I seem to be doing all the exclaiming," she declared. "You people must know about this. Is it--is it a _surprise_?" "It seems to be," replied Jarvis, turning to see her face, as the fire-light struck it, aglow with wonder and anticipation. Josephine caught her hand. "It's on your land, Sally dear," she said. "Do you mind?" "Did it ever strike you," said Jarvis, quickly, in Max's ear, "that this _is_ Sally's land, and Alec's, and Bob's, quite as much as yours?" Mrs. Burnside came out to greet the party, and Sally tumbled into her welcoming arms, hugging her frantically, and pulling away from her again to look about her. She seemed a different girl from the limp and languid one who had climbed into the carriage an hour before. "Isn't it absolutely enchanting?" she exclaimed, gazing eagerly into the big tent, the open flaps of which showed an outer room arranged with rugs, chairs, couch, and table. Other open flaps at the corners of this outer enclosure invited exploration, and Sally promptly obeyed the summons. She found four smaller rooms, securely partitioned by high, tightly stretched canvas walls. She came back beaming. "What does it all mean?" she begged. "Are we to stay here to-night? Was there ever anything so inviting as those beds and cots? I could hardly keep from falling into one of them." "You may fall into one as soon as you choose," said Josephine, gleefully. "The one on the southeast corner is yours, the one with the blue Japanese rug on the floor and the wicker chair with the blue cushion. We've sent a telephone message to the rest of your family, so they won't expect you back." Jarvis, returning with Max from the bestowal of his horses in the barn, found his mother and the two girls sitting in a row upon a rustic seat at a little distance from the tent, their faces toward the camp fire, now a mere flicker, which nobody had taken the trouble to revive. It was too hot a night for camp fires, except as welcoming beacons. "Well?" questioned Jarvis, standing before the three, upon whom the bright midsummer moonlight streamed so luminously that the white figures were visible in every detail. "Well?" responded Josephine. "Very well, I think," added Mrs. Burnside. "More than well!" And Sally clasped her hands in a way both characteristic and eloquent. "A dozen tonics couldn't have made me feel so much stronger as the notion of sleeping in that big white tent. I wish I knew just what the thermometer says it is in the flat at home. Oh, poor Uncle Timmy, and Bob and Alec! How I wish they were here--don't you, Max?" It would have taken a harder heart than that which beat wearily in Max's breast to allow him to answer his sister sullenly. "You like it, Sally?" he asked, taking a position where the moonlight did not illumine his face. "Like it!" she exclaimed. "Jo says we're to stay if you are willing--live in this tent, and have the others out, and Mary Ann Flinders! We won't need Mary Ann long. I'll be strong enough myself to cook in another week. Oh, wasn't it dear and kind of these people to plan this for us?" What could he do or say against it all without seeming a churl and an ingrate? But before he could formulate the inwardly grudging yet outwardly appreciative reply he felt forced to make, Jarvis himself had interposed with a flow of lively talk, explaining to Sally various details of arrangement, and sparing Max the necessity of making any insincere speeches. And the next thing that happened was the setting forth by Josephine, on the table in the tent's outer room, of a light but tempting supper, brought from home in a hamper--the product of no Mary Ann Flinders, but of the Burnside cook. "Mm--mm!" The soft but eloquent sound came from Sally's closed lips when she had taken her first taste of a sandwich of unknown but delicious compound. "Was ever anything so good? Max, boy, please try one, quick! What is this perfect drink, Joey?--how it does go to the spot! Oh, if you are all half as happy as Sally Lunn, you don't know how to express it!" "We're even happier," said Josephine, laughing softly, "for it seems at last as if we have Sally Lunn back." Jarvis had hard work to keep his own pleasure properly subdued. He sat just across the table from Max, and the light from two candles shone revealingly into his satisfied face. He put on his goggles to screen his eyes, hoping that they might assist in concealing his content. Until Max gave in and agreed to it all, it would never do to let anybody but Sally crow with delight. Mrs. Burnside insisted on an early bedtime for Sally, and the convalescent reluctantly admitted that not even joy was wholly sustaining to such weakness of limb as was still hers. So she submitted, with a sigh of appreciation, to being tucked away in the bed in the southeast enclosure of the tent, and soon was lying peacefully there, watching through her open tent-flap the moonlight as it lay on the open lawn, beyond the vista of trees. The air was now stirring refreshingly through the grove, and Sally, under the thinnest of light summer blankets, was absolutely comfortable and restful, as she had not been for many weary nights. In the adjoining room, Max was asleep in two minutes after he had stretched himself upon his cot. Outside, by the embers of the camp fire, Jarvis and Josephine exchanged a brief conversation. "Is he taking it worse or better than you expected?" Josephine asked, in the lowest of whispers. "He took it like the bumptious idiot he can be, at first. He's a trifle calmer now. I'm hoping by morning he'll be reasonable." "Don't you think he must see the beauty of it when he looks at Sally?" "One would think so. I suppose we mustn't blame him too much, for he certainly is worn out with work in this heat, and isn't himself. If he'll only be sensible, the staying here will do him as much good as it will Sally. She is pleased isn't she?" "Pleased doesn't express it. But she thinks it's all my doing." "Don't let her think anything else. It was your suggestion, and you've done half the work." "It was Mr. Ferry's suggestion. Did you know he put up that rustic bench out there this afternoon? Made it out of the tree he chopped down." "I didn't stop to wonder how it came there. I wonder if Max noticed it? I suppose he will think that was more of our impudence. It was kind of Ferry, though. He'll be a good neighbour for them." "Oh, Jarvis, how I wish we could all stay here, too!" Her brother gave vent to a curious little ejaculation, whether of agreement or dissent she could not tell. "Of course we can't," he said shortly. "Perhaps Max will come round and ask us to put up another tent for ourselves." "Not much he won't. Never mind, I'm satisfied if he submits to this." When Max opened his eyes the next morning it was difficult for him to realize where he was. He lay staring at the flecks of sunlight on the pine-needle-strewn ground, wondering how it happened that he had not wakened in damp discomfort from hot and perspiring slumbers. Before he felt himself fully awake he was conscious of a voice a few feet away, exclaiming: "Oh, Mr. Ferry, how kind of you! What splendid strawberries! Out of your own garden? You must be an accomplished gardener." It was Josephine's voice. "Only a novice, but I'm rather proud of these. I hope the first night was a comfortable one?" "Perfect! Our friends are still sleeping--though they won't be long if I shout like this." "I've been up so long I didn't realize it was barely seven o'clock. But I wanted to make sure of your having these for the first camp breakfast. I'll disappear now, and perhaps I can venture to appear again, later in the day, with my mother. We want to offer our services as neighbours from whom anything, from axes to apricots, can be borrowed." Max could hear Josephine's low laugh echoed by a small ecstatic chuckle from the other side of the canvas wall which separated his head from Sally's. Her whisper came from very near his ear: "Max, are you awake? Did you hear what Jo said? We're to have fresh strawberries, right out of a garden, for breakfast. Aren't you glad you're alive?" Where was his ill-temper? He felt for it, in the recesses of his inner man, and couldn't seem to find it. He had had nine long hours of refreshing sleep, in the purest air to be found in the country, and had wakened with a sense of refreshment and well-being such as he had not experienced in many months. A faint, but appetizing, odour of cookery, including that of fragrant coffee, was in the air, and there were to be freshly picked strawberries for breakfast. And on the other side of the tent wall was a happy young convalescent, demanding of him whether it was not good to be alive. He found himself answering, in a genuinely cheerful tone: "I'm certainly mighty glad you're alive, Sally Lunn!" CHAPTER VII EVERYBODY IS SATISFIED "Bobby, let's have a garden, you and I." Bob looked up from the front of the tent platform, where he sat polishing a pair of much-worn russet shoes. Riding back and forth, nights and mornings, on a bicycle, over very dusty roads, made it necessary to polish often. But Bob didn't mind. The two weeks of camp life he had enjoyed had made him indifferent to any extra trouble involved. "Looks as if you had a garden somewhere," he responded, eyeing with favour the pailful of red raspberries Sally held up. "You must have got up with the lark, to have picked all those. Mary Ann hasn't more than started the fire in the kitchen tent. I had to go and help her. That girl doesn't know how to boil an egg. She cracks it getting it in. Her coffee is a thick, dark, wicked looking stuff. What do you suppose she does to it?" he asked in a whisper. "Never mind. I'm growing stronger every minute, and mean to begin to cook, next week." "Thank goodness!" murmured Bob. "I mean," he explained quickly, "that I'm thankful you're well enough." Sally laughed, pulled off her wide straw hat, and sat down beside Bob. "Your cheeks are pink as hollyhocks," he observed, eyeing her with satisfaction. "I had a lovely time picking those raspberries," she said. "There must have been a big patch of them back there once. Bob, I want to start a kitchen garden. Max and Alec haven't waked up yet to the fun it would be to grow things on this old place, but you're always awake. Come on!" Bob stood up. "I'm ready for anything you say, but I don't know any more about planting gardens than I do about building bridges. You don't plant a garden in July--I'm sure of that." "Isn't there a thing that can go in late, and produce a late crop?" "Don't ask me. Maybe our friend Ferry would know. If there's anything he doesn't know, I haven't found it out. It's funny a preacher should be such an all-round sort of fellow, isn't it?" "A--what?" Sally nearly dropped her raspberries, she was so astonished. "A preacher. He preaches in the old white church with the big pillars, away down town in the middle of everything. I just found it out yesterday from a fellow in the office." "Why, it can't be! He's always busy round that garden--or chopping wood up in our timber tract. He asked Max to let him work at that--for the sake of his muscle, he said." "If you'll just stop and think, you'll find he isn't round all the time. He's in the city every day--has to be. He holds a half-hour noon service in the old church every day in the week for men. Fred Kentner says they flock in there like sheep--says he goes in often. It's cool in there, and he likes the things Ferry says. I'm going in with Fred some day soon. I'd like to find out what a fellow that can chop trees and fight with his fists can find to say in a pulpit." "Fight with his fists!" Bob chuckled. "I tackled him the other evening, out behind his house, just for fun. I got all I wanted in about two minutes. He was laughing all the time, but I couldn't get near him. He laid me on my back as helpless as a baby. Say, if Mary Ann doesn't get round with the oatmeal pretty soon, I'll have to go without. It's twenty minutes past six now." "I'll see about it," and Sally hurried away, revolving in her mind this astonishing news. "He can't be as young as he looks, then," she said to herself. "I shouldn't say he was a minute over twenty-five, but he must be." Her mind turned later that day to a project more immediately promising than the garden. She wanted to have a house party--a tent party, to be accurate. The Burnsides had driven out twice to see them since they had become established, but Jarvis had been having another siege with his eyes, and Josephine had been entertaining visitors. Sally, in the fast-increasing strength and enthusiasm of returning health, longed for her friends, and began to plan how she could have all three with her for the space of at least two days. "Wait a little longer," counselled Uncle Timothy. "Your strength is more that of happiness than of real physical gain, though you are certainly acquiring health rapidly. There will be plenty of hot weather in August, and you will be better fit to exert yourself." Max and Alec backed him, for they were still more or less indifferent to the charms of active exercise, and when they had been fed, each evening, were in the habit of falling into postures of ease on the ground before the tent, while they discussed the happenings of the day. At the end of another fortnight, however, everybody admitted that Sally seemed enough like herself to be permitted the mild dissipation of a tent party, and she proceeded joyfully to plan for the occasion. "Alec and Bob will have to sleep outside," she decided. "Thank you, not for me!" said Alec. "Oh, don't go and be a spoil-sport now, Al!" cried Bob. "I'd a good deal rather sleep outdoors than not." "You have my permission," rejoined Alec. "I will sleep out-doors, with pleasure," said Uncle Timothy. "Never, if I give you my room!" and Sally looked indignant. "I should enjoy it," Mr. Rudd insisted. "This out-door life has renewed my youth. If the weather is favourable during your friends' visit you can count on having my room for them." Of course Alec could not allow such a reversal of the natural order of things, and he announced the fact with firmness mixed with irritation. Uncle Timothy, however, also persisted, went into town and bought a hammock, and returning hung it under the trees. Sally, with the help of Mary Ann, did considerable preliminary baking, and the Ferrys, hearing of the coming event, contributed a large basketful of garden produce. Sally, running over to thank Mrs. Ferry, told her all about her plans. She had already grown very fond of the little lady, whose happiness at being with her son, after a long period of separation from him, made her a cheery companion. "I hope you and Mr. Ferry will come over this evening," urged Sally. "We want to make it a jolly time for our friends, and I'm sure you'll enjoy knowing Mrs. Burnside." "Mother's a little shy," said a voice from behind Mrs. Ferry, who stood in the small porch, looking down at her visitor. Sally, in a crisp frock of white with tiny black figures, her sunny head uplifted, and her cheeks now round and rosy with returning health, looked past Mrs. Ferry's shoulder, smiling. "She is decidedly modest about showing off before people, but she could entertain your guests quite by herself, if she would." "Donald!" The small lady faced about, as her son's arm came round her shoulders. "What an idea!" "She's the finest reader in the state," asserted the young man. "She's a scholar, she's--" "Donald, you will lose your car!" "She taught me all I know, and a great deal more that I don't know, because my head wouldn't hold it. 'And still the wonder grew, That one small head could carry all she knew.' Now I shall have to run for it, which will be most undignified. Good-by, mother!" He kissed her. "Good-by, Miss Sally! We'll be there to-night." He swung away down the road at a brisk pace, turning once to wave his hat at the figure on the porch. "Such a boy!" breathed the mother. "Yet such a man, Miss Sally, though his mother says it. And he'll go off with all that nonsense on his lips, and a head full of talk for those men in the church at noon--talk that will go straight to their hearts--and, better, to their judgments." "I haven't yet been able to realize that he's a minister," Sally ventured. "Somehow, seeing him out-doors here--" Mrs. Ferry nodded. "I know. Nobody takes him for what he is, because he will not do what he calls 'dress the part every day.' And he is such a believer in making the physical life offset the mental and spiritual--if I may put it so--that I tell him he may be in danger of becoming so athletic--and so agricultural"--she smiled--"that he will crowd out the spiritual. Yet he knows I don't mean that. He turns up many a rich nugget of thought, when he is hoeing the ground--and chops down many an error when he fells a tree, perhaps!" "I don't doubt it," agreed Sally, regarding the proud little mother with real envy of her fortunate son. "Please come over early," she begged, as she took her leave, after lingering a little to tell Mrs. Ferry more about her plans for the evening. "Sally Lunn!" Josephine exclaimed, a few hours later. "What have you been doing to yourself? You never looked so well. Behold her, Jarvis! But don't dare take off your blue goggles. Her radiance is fairly dazzling, and is liable to blind you." "It's partly sunburn," confessed Sally. "I go deliberately out and let the sun smite me, first on the right cheek and then on the left. For awhile I burned my nose at the same time, which was not picturesque. But now I put a thick coating of talcum powder on my nose, and burn myself only where it is artistic." "There's an honest confession for you," and Jarvis shook hands so heartily that Sally's fingers ached for a minute afterward. "I can see some of the rouge through my glasses." "I must look purple to you, then. Red and blue make purple, on cheeks as well as palettes, don't they? Joey, what made you put on a white dress? I planned to take you all blackberrying over in the pasture." "Lovely! Lend me an apron, and I'll risk the dress. This is a beautiful time of day to pick blackberries." The three set off. As they passed the garden on the farther side of the hedge they were hailed by Donald Ferry. "May I go, too?" called the young man, and he leaped lightly over the hedge. Jarvis Burnside went forward and held out his hand. "I heard you speak, this noon," he said, in a low tone. Ferry returned the pressure heartily. "I saw you," he answered. "You did? I was away back by the door." "My eyes are pretty good. And it's easy to see a friend, you know." "I'll be glad to have you call me that," said Jarvis. "I've wanted to since I saw you first," replied Ferry, with the simplicity of manner which won him confidence and warm liking wherever he went. He was in a holiday mood. He insisted on carrying all the pails, and juggled with them, producing a clash of sound which echoed through the meadows. In his gray flannels and flowing blue tie, he looked much more like a college boy than a member of the most dignified of professions. "How strong and healthy he looks!" observed Jarvis to Sally, as they led the way toward the blackberry pasture. "He couldn't have got his education without spending more or less time in-doors, but he must have put in every spare minute in the open air. The sight of him makes me feel more than ever that I was a fool to dig away as I did, ruining my eyes for the sake of doing two years' work in one. Gained a lot, didn't I? Do you realize it's more than a year since I took my degree? And not a blessed thing since but idle around, waiting for these eyes to get back into shape." "It must have seemed a long year," agreed Sally, sympathetically. "But haven't you made things worse by using your eyes every now and then against orders?" "Guilty. The sight of a book is like cheese to a mouse, to me. Just after a visit to Doctor Meyer I'm meek and obedient as a lamb; then I pass a book-shop, look in at the windows, glance round to see if any oculists or mothers observe me, dodge in, get into a corner with some book--and an hour is gone before I think I've done more than inspect the table of contents." "I knew you must be breaking rules, when you had so many relapses, after Jo had said the eyes were better. It's a pity you live in a stone block, instead of a place like this, where there is out-doors enough to keep any one busy." "It is a pity. I wish we lived on a farm like this. I'd like nothing better than trying my hand at scientific farming. If I'm going to be everlastingly handicapped by these eyes I might as well look round for an out-door job. You can't think how I wish now I'd put in my time studying civil engineering." "I thought scientific farming called for lots of reading." "It does, properly. I should have to have a partner to do the studying. But it also calls for plenty of open-air work, and that--well, it's getting to have more and more attraction for me. Look up the pasture there. Isn't that a beautiful scene at this hour of day, even through blue glasses?" "If Max only felt as you do! But don't you think he's looking better since he's been sleeping out here? He actually owned this morning that he was sorry he couldn't get back in time for the blackberry picking." "Really? The old boy must be waking up a bit. I'm thinking of offering to rent a few acres out here, so as to start a market-garden next spring--if my eyes still need favouring, and there's not much doubt of that. Perhaps the sight of me digging round here will stir him up." "If it only would! Oh, Jarvis, how I'd love to spend the winter in that house!" and Sally turned to gaze back at it. "Would you--clear off out here among the snow-drifts? Well, I could imagine myself doing it with enthusiasm--under two conditions. The use of my eyes and the use of the library at the top of those stairs. By the way, has Max taken any steps to sell that?" "He's been consulting a man or two, and he had one out here not long ago. I've begged him to be careful, if he must sell it, lest he shouldn't get all it's worth." "He'd better be mighty careful. I wish he'd trust me with that commission. I believe I'll mention it to him to-night. I understood he didn't intend to do anything about it at present, but if he has his mind on selling it I must have a word with him. I believe the collection is worth a good deal more than any of us appreciate." Jarvis did not fail to follow up this idea. When the party returned to the tent Max was coming from the house. Jarvis talked with him for some time, and the conference ended with both of them looking cheerful. Max was undoubtedly feeling the benefit of his taste of out-door life. He joined in the festivities of the evening with more zest than he had shown in a long time, greatly to the delight of everybody. It was a merry evening, and was followed by much jollity over the bestowing of so many people comfortably for the night. Going to occupy his hammock, Mr. Rudd found a long figure swinging reposefully in it. "Why, Jarvis!" he ejaculated. "This is my place. You are to have a room in the tent." "Not while you sleep outside, sir," returned the guest, remaining composed for slumber. "Beside, I don't get a chance to sleep outdoors very often, and on such a night as this I wouldn't miss it." "I don't suppose I can forcibly eject you," admitted Mr. Rudd. "No, I think not. I may not be as muscular as our friend Ferry, but I haven't given up my morning exercise before my cold plunge since I left college, and I'm in fair shape to hold my own with whoever attempts to take this hammock away from me. Go back to your room, please, Mr. Rudd. I never was more comfortable in my life." To prove it, Jarvis went promptly to sleep, and nearly every one else did the same. Mrs. Burnside was awake for some time, but she, too, fell asleep at last, leaving only one pair of wide-awake eyes in the tent. Sally, for some unknown reason, could not feel the first inclination to repose. She was up and sitting on a pillow beside her open tent flap, gazing out into the night, when she heard a singular noise. It was like the distant roar of the sea, but there was no sea within many miles. It did not sound in the least like wind, yet wind it must be, she thought, and in the space of a half minute the roar had so gained in volume that it appeared to be approaching with great rapidity. Sally rose and peered up toward the sky, for usually she could see a small patch of it beyond the grove. But she could discern no appearance of the sky, although a few minutes before the stars had been shining brilliantly. She had no time within which to take any further observations. Before she had fairly begun to wonder what might be coming, and to tell herself that she had heard no growl of thunder and that therefore this could not be the approach of one of those severe electrical storms with which a period of intense heat sometimes terminates, the thing had happened. With a burst, a tremendous blast of wind struck the tent. It swayed and strained at its guy-ropes, the poles creaked and cracked, and in less time than it takes to tell it, the whole flapping structure had gone down with one ballooning heave, flat upon the ground, covering its inmates with billowing canvas. Then came a terrific clap of thunder and a flash of the fiercest lightning Sally had ever seen. Instantly there was a sudden and overwhelming downpour of rain, as if the heavens had opened. Then everybody was shouting or calling. Outside the tent, Jarvis, in his hammock, and Bob, on his blankets on the ground, had been soaked to the skin before they knew what had happened, and were trying to discover a place where they could crawl under the wrecked canvas and find a shelter from the deluge. "Where are you all? Anybody hurt?" cried Jarvis, groping in the blackness. "All right!" screamed Josephine, who had put her hand under the canvas partition and found her mother, whose bed was next her own. "All right!" shrieked Sally, who had received a soaking by having been close to the open tent-flap when the flood came. But she did not mention that just now. "Here's a place to get under!" cried Bob to Jarvis, and the two managed to work themselves under cover. A convenient table made a nook to receive them, and kept the tent off their heads. "I've crawled under my cot!" announced Alec, at the top of his lungs. "So have I!" called Mr. Rudd. He was congratulating himself that he had not slept in the hammock, but he was much worried concerning Jarvis and Bob. Then Max fired the shot that, sooner or later, he might have been expected to fire. As loudly as he could vociferate against the roar of the storm, he sent a triumphant challenge to the party: "I hope you're all--_satisfied_--with the beauty of sleeping in the--_open air_!" CHAPTER VIII PROBLEMS AND HEARTS The storm had passed almost as abruptly as it had come. The rain ceased as if a trap-door in the heavens had been suddenly closed. The wind had gone when the rain came, so that the moment the downfall was over the whole affair was ended. It had not occupied the space of more than four minutes, but it had managed to make as complete a wreck of the sleeping arrangements in the pine grove as if it had been of an hour's duration. "The stars are shining!" announced Bob, putting his head under the edge of the canvas the moment the rain had stopped. "The show is over." "So is the tent--and sleep," added Alec. Crawling along under the wreckage, he had encountered Bob's heel. "This is a nice mess! What on earth are we to do now?" "Get everybody out under the sky," commanded Jarvis, working his way out. He ran round to the back of the tent and found Sally emerging. He gave her a hand. "Why, you're wet!" he said, as his hand touched the sleeve of the blue kimono she had been wearing when she sat in the open doorway. She felt of his sleeve in turn. "I'm not a circumstance to you," she answered. "You must be soaked to the skin, you and Bob." "That's no matter, this warm night. Mother, Jo, where are you? Max, lend a hand here, and let's lift this canvas so they can get out." "But it's not a warm night now," declared Mrs. Burnside, when she had reached the open air, and had found out for herself how wet at least three of the party were. "We must manage to dry you all, somehow." "I hope you people are satisfied," Max reiterated. It was the fourth time he had said it. "Of course we're satisfied!" cried Sally, with spirit. "Who wants a camping party without any adventures? We can't have bears here in our pine grove, so we have thunderstorms." "Thunderstorms! That was a cyclone, if it was anything!" growled Max. "If it was, we're safe from ever having another!" cried Bob. "They never hit the same place twice, I'm told. Hello, there comes a lantern through the hedge. Thought Mr. Ferry'd be looking us up." "Ship ahoy!" called a hailing voice. "All hands on deck? Shall I man a lifeboat? Well, well," in astonishment, as he came nearer, "where are you, anyhow? Where's the tent?" "Don't look so high up!" Jarvis called back. "Lower your glass to the horizon line. We're out in the open sea!" Ferry surveyed the group by the light of his lantern. "Anybody get wet?" he asked. "Yes, I should say you did. See here, you wet ones, don't delay a minute, for the storm has made the air twenty degrees cooler. Run over to our house. Mother's expecting you all." "We can't all get inside your house!" chuckled Bob. "Let's go into our own," urged Sally. "Max has the key, and we can carry in the cots--they're not wet--and have a fire in the big fireplace--" Bob pinched her arm. "Say, Sis, it's a chance for you to get into the house." "Of course it is," Sally whispered back, her eyes dancing in the light from the lantern. "I think that is the best plan, don't you, Max?" questioned Jarvis. Max nodded reluctantly. No matter how hospitably the tiny cottage might be thrown open for their reception, it would certainly be overtaxing its capacity to attempt to make nine extra people comfortable there for the remainder of the night--it was barely one o'clock. "We'll gladly stretch the walls to take you all in," said Donald Ferry, "but perhaps the big house plan is the better. Suppose you ladies go over and let mother satisfy her longing to be of use by making Miss Sally dry, while we fellows get the cots into the house, and bring over some wood from our pile for the fireplace. It will need open windows and a rousing fire in there to freshen the musty air." "Jarvis, you must come, too--you and Bob. You're both very wet," urged Mrs. Burnside. "Yes, go over, Burnside, and ask mother for some dry clothes of mine," said Ferry. "Bob--" "I've got some dry clothes packed away somewhere in the tent, if I can only find where they've gone to," answered Bob. "I'll work myself dry," and Jarvis suited the action to the word by beginning to unfasten the guy ropes. "Jarvis!" It was his mother's voice. At the note in it, he stood up again, laughing. "All right, mother," he agreed, and walked away with her toward the cottage. "These people who have been so anxious to camp," said Max to Ferry, "I hope they're satisfied now." "Oh, such experiences are a part of the fun of camping," asserted Ferry. "Mr. Rudd certainly looks cheerful," and he held up his lantern so that its rays illumined Uncle Timothy's face. The elder man smiled. "It seems to me we are fortunate to have had no worse happen," said he. "That was the most violent wind I have ever known." "It shook our little house to its foundations," replied Ferry. "I think it took down a chimney, but I didn't stop to find out. Mother was certain your camp must be blown over into the next township, and could hardly wait for me to get out and see. Well, shall we go to work? Tent down first--and that will take all hands, for wet canvas is heavy." They fell to, Jarvis soon returning to join them. It took considerable time to remove the tent from its position, for much care was necessary to prevent its dampening the tent furniture beneath. But after that it was easy to move the cots and bedding to the house, the hallway of which was now lighted by two lamps brought over from the cottage. "We'll make up the beds!" cried Sally, appearing with Josephine in the big hall, her face radiant. "I can't lose any more time tamely discussing this event over there, when I can be here in the midst of things." "Good for you! Now, Bob, suppose you and I leave the others to bring over the rest of the stuff, while we haul some wood for the fireplace," and Ferry beckoned Bob away to the next job. He was smiling back at Sally as he went, for her joy, though he did not quite understand its cause, was contagious. So it was not long before a cheerful blaze was throwing grotesque lights and shadows down the hall, showing up the odd array of cots and beds which had been brought, without regard to final disposition, into the hall. Sally selected the long room on the left of the hall, its doorway directly opposite the fireplace, for the feminine portion of the family, announcing that the others could sleep in the hall itself. Into this room she directed Uncle Timothy and Alec to move four of the cots, and set Mary Ann at work making up the beds in the hall. "Isn't this more fun than the jolliest picnic you ever went to?" exulted Sally, as she and Josephine spread sheets and blankets upon the beds. "It's great! I'm so glad it happened to-night, when we were here. Sally, do you suppose they can dry the tent and get it up again by to-morrow night?" "I hope not! If it would only rain again to-morrow! I'd give worlds to be forced to stay here in the house, much as I've enjoyed sleeping in the tent. If I could only make Max take a little liking to the house--and I could if I just had our things out here from town. But of course he'll never let me. Hasn't he been funny to-night, with his solemn 'hoping we're satisfied'? Oh, if the poor dear only had just a tiny sense of humour!" "I'm sure he has, if we could wake it up. This scene ought to do it, if anything would," agreed Josephine. "Look at Mr. Rudd, with his hair all rumpled and his sleeping-cap still on. See Mary Ann out there; doesn't she look dazed and serious? Here I am, with my hair in two tails down my back--and it's the first time I've thought of it. As for you, in that red sweater jacket, with your curly mop of hair, you look more like a lively small boy than ever before." "I'd like to be one. Do you suppose we can ever settle down to slumber again to-night? I'd like to have larks the rest of the time, till morning. We will have them to-morrow night, Joey Burnside, if we can manage to stay in this house." It certainly was hard to get to sleep under these new conditions. Even after everybody was quiet, there were still sources of amusement for Sally. The sound of a low growl in the hall was enough to set her off, and she leaned over to Josephine's cot to whisper: "That's Max, muttering, 'I hope you're satisfied!'"--at which Josephine began to laugh, and the two shook together for some time thereafter. The first thing in the morning of which Josephine was conscious was Sally again, breathing joyously in her ear, "Jo, Jo--it's raining!" So it was. The long dry spell had been broken by the severe storm of the night, and a heavy rain was now falling. As she dressed, Sally gazed out upon it with satisfaction. "How on earth are we to have any breakfast?" came booming from the hall, as Max, reluctantly getting to his feet, took in the situation. "Mr. Ferry and I brought all the kitchen tent stuff into the back of this house," said Bob. "He said it was best in time of peace to prepare for war, and we might get another storm before morning. So we're all fixed." "Very nice for those who can stay here, but not so fine for the ones who have to catch the trolley." Max applied himself discontentedly to the business of dressing. "Oh, what's that! Who minds a little walk in the rain? I wouldn't be such a granny. You've done nothing but fuss ever since the tent came down. Nobody else has howled a minute. You must enjoy being everlastingly in a grouch." It was not often that Bob's good humour forsook him to the point of addressing his elder brother in such disrespectful terms, and Max glared at him wrathfully. "Cut that! I'm a few years older than you are, and you've no business to be impudent. When you work the way I do, you'll earn the right to have your rest undisturbed." "Yes, grandpa," mocked Bob. Alec, sitting on the edge of his cot, laughed. This was too much for Max. He seized his younger brother by the collar and attempted to shake him. But Bob was more athletic than Max had realized. The sturdy young figure resisted doughtily, and Max, who was by no means muscular, found his hands full. Uncle Timothy and Alec looked on in amusement as the battle raged, and when Bob finally succeeded in depositing Max on the latter's own cot, back downward, the victor's knee on the conquered one's chest, they applauded heartily. "Take it good-naturedly, nephew," advised Mr. Rudd, catching sight of Max's angry countenance. "It was a fair encounter, and the lad is stronger than you." "If there was any way of pounding a laugh into Maxwell Lane, I'd tackle him myself," declared Alec. "Boys, what are you doing?" called Sally. "Are you dressed? May we come through? We want to help Mary Ann about breakfast." Max rose to his feet, his face red and his collar awry. As the girls appeared he strode away up the stairs affecting not to see them. "Max, are you going up to find out if any burglars got in overnight?" called Sally after him, "If you are, please see if my jewel case is undisturbed." To Sally's intense gratification, it rained all day. To be sure, she had invited her friends to a tent party, not to stay in an empty house, but it seemed to be so much more fun for everybody to roam about the house, exploring it from attic to cellar, suggesting what could be done to make it all inviting and attractive, that the hours by no means dragged. Mrs. Burnside, especially, seemed to take deep interest in every detail of the rooms, declaring them to be susceptible to treatment which should easily make them homelike and beautiful. The rugs from the tent had been laid in the hall, by the fireplace, where a small fire burned, its cheer and warmth grateful to those who gathered round it, for the change in the weather had become more pronounced as the day advanced, and a north-east wind was doing its part in making indoors desirable. Such of the camp furniture as fitted the uses of a sitting-room had also been placed in the hall, and the result was that at least one spot in the big house presented a highly inviting appearance. "I wish we had some books and magazines now," said Josephine, disposing herself comfortably in a steamer chair, with her back toward the fire. "I've read all those we had in the tent." "I'll find you some," and Sally disappeared--by way of the kitchen, where Mary Ann was sure to need coaching from time to time. Thence she ran up a back stairway to the floor above, and on to the small flight of steps which led to the door opening on the stairway between the walls, above which was the old library. She meant to make a selection of volumes for Josephine's delectation, more as a joke than as an offer of reading matter, for she did not suppose there was much in the collection which might serve to entertain her friend. To her surprise, she found it unnecessary to use her key, and went on up the stairs, remembering that she had not seen Jarvis for the last hour. If he should be up here reading, it was well that she had come, for the fine print of the old books was the worst thing possible for his eyes. But Jarvis was not reading. Instead, she found him standing by one of the windows, staring out through the curious old wrought-iron latticework, which, after the fashion in many old houses, made the upper windows impregnable. His hands were in his pockets, his eyes were fixed on the outlook of field and meadow stretching away up the slope of the hillside to the woods beyond. It was a fine prospect, even through the falling rain, and Jarvis appeared to be fascinated by it, so that he did not hear the light fall of Sally's footsteps on the stairs. She came softly up and stood beside him. "Isn't that lovely off there?" she asked, and Jarvis started. Then he laughed, bringing his gaze back to rest with a look of pleasure upon the girl at his side. "It certainly is. From this height one gets a better idea of the way the farm lies than from below." "Do you wonder I want to live here?" "Not a bit. The idea of it grows more attractive to me every time I come here. If it were any place but yours, I should be strongly tempted to buy it myself--mother and I, of course, I mean. She would jump at the idea, I fancy, of this for a summer home." "Oh, Jarvis!" Sally looked so dismayed that he reassured her in haste: "Of course I'd never mention such a thing unless you yourself wanted to sell. But you can see I'm in sympathy with your longing to live here. I only wish I could see you carry out your plan. If there were anything I could do to bring it about, I certainly would do it. Look here." He paused to consider an idea which had just occurred to him. "Do you suppose if I were seriously to talk of buying the place it might make Max want to keep it? By all the laws of human nature, the thing ought to work that way." "I don't know. You never know how Max is going to take things. If you offered a good price he might jump at it." "I wouldn't offer a good price--that is, not the price I would give if I were very anxious to get it." Sally thought it over. "I don't know," she said again. "You told me you were thinking of offering to rent a few acres of us and try some market gardening." "I have thought of that. If I could only get 'the leader of the opposition' interested to go in with me, your case would be won." "You never can. He'll have to see somebody making a success of it before he will think of it for a minute. There's nothing anybody can do before spring, I suppose." "There's considerable to be done in winter, I understand. And the spring work begins so early it's practically winter then." "You can't think how I want to stay here this winter!" sighed Sally. "You really mean it? Snow-drifts and isolation, empty rooms and cold winds, and all?" "The Ferrys don't think it isolated. When they came, they expected to go back to rooms in town for the winter, but they've fallen so in love with their cottage they're going to stay. This isn't the country; it's only the suburbs, eight minutes' walk from the electrics." "True enough. It depends upon one's point of view, doesn't it? There's a lot of fun made of the commuters, but they're not by any means to be placed all in the same class. To people who genuinely love the country it's a delight to get out here, no matter how many minutes it takes to make the run. And it really takes only about twenty-five minutes to get into the heart of the city. So you honestly want to stay here, do you, Sally Lunn? From this hour I'm committed to the task of trying to bring that thing about." "Jarvis! That's lovely of you! You did bring about my getting out here in the tent. Yes, I've heard the whole story from Jo--I know what a strategist you were. You're such a good friend, to take so much trouble." "Am I? There's nobody I'd rather take trouble for. You know that, don't you?" If there were more than friendship in his eyes and voice, Sally did not perceive it. She was so accustomed to kindness and consideration from this young man, who had grown up only a few years ahead of her, and who had been her champion so long that she had never thought of him in any other light, that no such declaration of his friendly feeling for her was likely to impress her as at all out of the ordinary. The eyes behind the blue goggles were hidden from her, the voice to her ear had merely its usual warm ring of comradeship, and she did not note the fact that upon the smooth, dark cheek a touch of unwonted colour spoke of feeling deeper than that hinted at in the simple words. "I know you're my stand-by, and you know I appreciate it. If you can possibly bring such a thing about, I'll bless you forever. Now help me find some books that will entertain Jo and your mother, for I must go down to them." He pointed out a number of quaint volumes whose contents he thought might prove interesting, and she selected several, with which she departed, taking a gay farewell of him and adjuring him not to use his eyes. "Thank you, I'll use my brains instead," he answered. "It will take all you've got!" she called back. "I wonder if hearts are any help in solving problems?" Jarvis thought, half-smiling to himself when she had gone. "Hers certainly isn't concerned with anybody at present. But I wonder if I'm a wise fellow to be plotting to help her spend the winter next door to the finest chap I know. I wonder! But I'm certainly committed to the endeavour." Whatever was the result of his use of the brains with which he had been endowed, he lost no time in making his first effort. That evening, as the company finished their dinner and strolled back into the hall, Jarvis challenged Max to a walk up the cartpath toward the timber tract. "Too wet," objected Max. "The rain stopped only an hour ago; everything's soaking." "I know it, but we've both been shut up all day in-doors, and need the exercise. Besides, while we were at dinner I saw Ferry making for the woods with his axe over his shoulder. We'll find him there and have a jolly visit. He's great company when he's at work--which is saying a good deal, for better company at any time I don't know of." Max reluctantly submitted, turned up his trousers widely, shouldered an umbrella, and the two set out. Sally looked after them, her hopes following them, for she had received a meaning look from Jarvis which told her that his schemes were already on foot. She had seen him in conference with his mother that afternoon, and was sure the two were agreed upon whatever suggestion of purchase Jarvis might be about to make. Yet Sally held her breath. What if--what if--Max should, after all, jump at the offer? CHAPTER IX MAX COMPROMISES "I'll tell you what I'll do," said Maxwell Lane. "I'll compromise. If Sally and the rest of you will let up on your nonsensical plan of staying in this barracks all winter, I'll agree to stick it out till--November." He encountered Sally's gaze. They were all upon the great, high-columned porch which gave to the front of the house its impressive air of being an old family mansion. It was a fortnight after the tent party--a fine August evening. Josephine and Jarvis Burnside had just driven out, and Donald Ferry, seeing them come, had strolled over. So not only Sally, but six other people, were hanging on Max's decision. He had meant to say "till October." But as he met his sister's eyes it occurred to him that a compromise, which offered one month instead of six, might perhaps be considered a trifle too one-sided to be accepted as a compromise at all. So he finished the sentence, after a perceptible pause, with "till November." That, surely, was being generous, he considered. Just why all decisions should be made by him, as supreme arbiter, can hardly be explained, except that he had assumed that position three years before, when the other young Lanes had been negligible factors in all matters of business, and he, by the divine right of his twenty-one years, had, upon the death of his father, taken the management of the family affairs into his own hands. Sally drew a long breath of relief. Anyhow, she now had more than two months' reprieve. By the end of that period something might happen to make Max willing to extend it. The tent had been put up again, and all but Max had returned to sleeping in it. He had announced that he cared to take no more chances with thunderstorms and cyclones, so Sally had arranged comfortable quarters for him in the house, in one of the smaller downstairs rooms, looking out upon the grove. There was a fireplace in this room, and Bob had placed a well-stocked wood-box beside it, so that his brother might have no excuse for feeling himself neglected. "Your compromise gives you so much the bigger half of the bargain," said Josephine, her brilliant dark eyes fixed on Max, "that I think you ought to give Sally something to boot. Isn't that the word?" "What does she want? The house furnished for the two months?" "Much simpler than that. Sally and I want to have our friends out for a frolic." "In an empty house?" "Yes. What jollier place for a lot of fun? Only it wouldn't seem empty by the time we had put up a lot of flags and bunting and goldenrod and balsam branches. That long drawing-room of yours, with crash on the floor--and a harp and violins behind a screen--and Chinese lanterns all over the rooms and on the porch and down the driveway--" Josephine's imagination worked fast. She had gone into a dozen specifications before Max could get a chance to interpose. "Very fine, very fine! And a supper-table, loaded with salads and ices. Glorious idea! How much do you think all this would cost? Of course that's of no consequence, but just out of curiosity I should like to know." "Goodness, we've boxes of lanterns, rolls of bunting and flags, and yards of crash left from parties way back to my first birthday ones," Josephine assured him. "As for the supper--" She paused to think it out, for party suppers are unquestionably expensive details. "Wait till October and make it a husking-bee," suggested Donald Ferry. He had become in these few weeks as much a member of this circle of friends as if he had always belonged to it. "Then you'll need only coffee and doughnuts and apples and that sort of thing. There'll be corn enough in my patch to trim your rooms, and plenty for the husking." "Jolly!" exploded Bob. "Fine!" cried Alec. Sally's eyes were radiant. Even Uncle Timothy smiled. Max himself, being, after all, in spite of his grave air, only twenty-four, and capable of enjoying gay times like the rest of them, felt his indifference melt away. "That would give us a chance to do something in return for all the invitations we've had ever since we've been in the apartment," urged Sally. "Wouldn't you like to ask your friends in the bank, Max?" "If we had the thing, I shouldn't mind asking two of the fellows--Harper and Ward," Max admitted. "Oh, I suppose we'll have it. When Jo and Sally get their minds on anything, it has to go through. If you can figure it out so it doesn't mean a big bill, it may do very well as a wind-up to this out-door business." This was being condescending, for Max; and Jarvis smiled to himself as he reflected that there's nothing like having your own way in big matters to make you decently amiable as regards small ones. From this evening the arrangements for the October husking-bee occupied a more or less prominent part in the plans of the Lanes and their friends. Meanwhile everybody, including Max himself--although he could seldom be made to admit it--thoroughly enjoyed the intervening weeks. "Did you ever see finer corn than this?" asked Ferry, as he and Bob set up a great shock of rustling stalks at one end of the "drawing-room." "To be sure, I didn't plant it--I owe the owner of the place for that--but I hoed it, and I cut it, and I'm reaping the credit." "It's magnificent, Mr. Ferry," Sally agreed readily, from the floor where she sat, fitting candles into Chinese lanterns of every form and hue, from small round ones to gorgeous great affairs of fantastic shape and design. It was Saturday afternoon, and the entire force was busy. On the front porch Max and Josephine were hanging lanterns, while Alec was stringing wires among the trees and down the driveway. It was extraordinary how many lanterns the Burnsides seemed to have stored away, and in what fresh condition they were; the bunting and the flags, also. Although some of this material showed unmistakable signs of use, bales more of it had had to be hastily rumpled by Josephine, to get it into the proper condition for lending. "I'll tell you where I've put in my fine touches," chuckled Bob. "Those twenty jack-o'-lanterns of mine have teeth, every one of 'em. Maybe you don't think that was some work." "Not only was it work, but it shows a trained sense of artistic effect," Ferry assured him. "That monster you've put on the porch, with four faces pointing to the four points of the compass, has Janus, the god of beginnings, beaten to a finish." "Sally," Josephine called in at one of the front windows, "I've forgotten to tell you who are in town! Neil and Dorothy Chase. They just came last night. Don't you want to ask them out to-night?" Alec, down the driveway, heard, and was first to shout his approbation of this idea: "_Sure_! Get 'em here and ask 'em if they think there's room enough to turn round in!" Max, from the top of the step-ladder, added his approval: "Have them, whatever you do, Sally. Of all the chumps!" Bob whistled. "Neil was afraid he'd burst our rooms in town," he recalled. "He can get as chesty as he likes out here. You'll have him, won't you, Sally?" Sally looked up at their neighbour, who was laughing quietly at the comments. "You must think we have odd motives for our invitations." "I think the house is going to give the impression to-night of being a hospitable mansion," he returned. "It will be just the time to invite anybody who likes space and effect." There could be no doubt of this. When all was done, even before the lanterns and the fires were lighted, the drawing-room, the hall, and the dining-room all had taken on such a festal air that it could occur to nobody to miss the furniture which ordinarily occupies houses of this character. Across the hall two rooms had been arranged for dressing-rooms, and even these were highly attractive. After the lanterns were lighted, outside was fairyland! Inside, with the fireplaces burning huge logs and flashing intermittently over the scene, the jack-o'-lanterns grinning cheerfully from every corner, the flags and bunting contributing colour, and the masses of evergreen and clumps of corn-shocks adding nooks and corners for shadows to dance in, there certainly could have been no quainter or prettier background for a party. "What I want to know is, whether the lady of the manor feels her part. She certainly looks it!" It was Jarvis's greeting as he came up the steps into the big porch, after a hasty trip home to dress. Just as he approached the house a figure in white had come out of the doorway, and he congratulated himself on having caught Sally alone for the first time in several days. Sally met him with an eager welcome: "Oh, I'm so glad you got back before the rest came! I wanted you here to help make things go from the beginning. Max is having fits with his tie, and Alec is in distress because his pumps don't look as smart as he thinks they ought. Even Bob is more than usually fussy about the parting of his hair!" "Too bad, but such small anxieties always go along with dress occasions. You don't answer my question. Do you feel like the mistress of an ancestral home?" "Do I? I should say I didn't. I feel like a small girl giving her first party. I hadn't a thing to wear but this old white frock--it's lucky for me our lights are the sort they are. Electrics would show me up for what I am." "Do you know what you are?" "Hardly--to-night. What am I, do you think?" "A healthy, happy, sensible girl, who doesn't care if she isn't wearing a fussy frock from the most expensive place in town. And if you were, you couldn't look nicer." "Thank you. That's a straight masculine compliment, and I appreciate it. How good it seems to see you without those blue glasses! Are you going to leave them off to-night?" "I certainly am. I don't care to contribute to the weird effects among the jack-o'-lanterns. I want to see everything as it is to-night--including Sally Lane." She looked straight into his eyes, with the frank friendliness which never dreamed of turning these pleasant speeches into meaning ones. She was heartily pleased to see him without the disfiguring glasses, for the brown eyes were fine ones, and the face was full of character as well as comeliness. "No girl ever had such good friends as Sally Lunn," she said. "Do you think I don't know that no decorations of your house in town ever called for so much bunting and crash and so many flags and lanterns as we have here to-night? The others haven't thought of it, but I've done a bit of estimating, if you please." Jarvis laughed. "It's hard to get round you. But you don't mind? Mother and Jo are certainly near enough to being mother and sister to you to be allowed a bit of fun like this." "You are sure brother Jarvis didn't have a hand?" It was on his lips to tell her that whatever relation he might hold to her, that of brother wouldn't do--but he restrained the words. Not yet! It would be a pity to risk anything yet--certainly not now, when her mind was full of the coming party. Beside, he was not at all sure that a word might not spoil all his chances. Sally, in spite of her twenty years, was, in some ways, still such a girl. So he only answered gayly: "Both hands, if you don't mind. It took hands, shoulders, and back to get the stuff down from our attic!" Donald Ferry and his mother now came up the steps, and Jarvis and Sally turned to greet them. Ferry had given them both a quick look of keen scrutiny as he saw them standing there alone together under the lanterns. For some time he had been observing that the two seemed to be close friends. What he thought, however, could not have been told from his manner, for he had never seemed in a blither mood as he shook hands and presented himself to Sally in the capacity of one of her right-hand men. "Thank you," she answered, looking at him precisely as she had looked at Jarvis, with the girlish fearlessness and absence of coquetry which is so charming at her age, much as a younger brother sometimes looks at an elder one whom he sincerely likes and admires. "I've just been telling Jarvis that no girl ever had nicer friends. You've all worked like slaves, and I do hope you'll have good times enough to-night to half pay you. Jarvis, please present Mr. Ferry to the prettiest, jolliest girls we know, won't you? And don't forget to take advantage of your chance to dance with the nicest ones yourself," she added, laughing, and leading the way into the house with Mrs. Ferry, who, with Mrs. Burnside, was to chaperon the party. Both Jarvis's and Ferry's eyes followed the graceful young figure as it made its way with the elder one down the hall, among the parti-coloured lights. Then, for some reason, they turned to look at each other, and smiled. "Are you prepared to do your duty by those prettiest and jolliest girls?" inquired Ferry. "If you are. It's the surest way of pleasing Sally," replied Jarvis, with conviction. Sally's characterization of the girls who were her guests was undoubtedly a true one. They were attractive young people, indeed, who shortly came trooping up the steps, in gauzy gowns of all hues. Youth and happiness are always good to look upon, and freshness of skin and brightness of eye make features not strictly beautiful charming in their own way. There were plenty of young men and youths, Max's companion bank-clerks were among them, clear-eyed, keen-faced fellows whom the Lanes liked upon sight and were glad to entertain both for Max's sake and their own. Alec and Bob had not been denied the privilege of inviting certain youthful intimates, so it was a somewhat diversified company, in point of age, which laughed and danced and talked and sang, under the lanterns. For sing they did now and then, when tempted by some popular air from the little orchestra--which somehow had been enlarged to include several other instruments besides harp and violin, Josephine arguing that there must be sound enough to be heard upon the porch and lawn. It was a gay company, and the fun was at its height when the last guests to arrive drove up with a proclaiming flourish of a musical horn. "It's the Chases--we must go out and meet them, Max," and Sally caught at her brother as he was hastening by. They reached the porch as Neil and Dorothy descended from their car and looked about them. "Well, of all the surprises!" was young Mrs. Chase's greeting, as she swept across the porch in a Paris gown which fairly took one's breath away, as it was disclosed by the falling open of a gorgeous evening wrap. Jarvis Burnside, looking out of a porch window at the moment, as he fanned one of the "prettiest and jolliest girls," after a brisk "two-step," noted the contrast between Dorothy and Sally. Mrs. Chase was twenty-four, as he happened to know, but she looked considerably older, and one would have said there were at least eight years between them. Yet Sally, although she seemed so girlish, had the hostess's pretty air of self-possession which is equal to greeting any number of Parisian gowns and their wearers. "Yes, we hoped you would enjoy seeing us again with room enough to shake hands in," and Sally made them welcome with a hearty greeting apiece. "This you, Sally?" asked Neil Chase, surveying her with interest. "You look more like sixteen than ever. Going to put your hair up when you get to be thirty or forty?" "My hair is as much up as it can be in the circumstances," retorted Sally, gayly. "Unless I wear a wig, the best I can do is to tie it this way with a bow." "That's so; we did hear you had a fever in the spring. You don't look much like it now--more like an infant cherub. Well, Max, this the old place you had left you? My congratulations. It's not half bad, you know--at least as it looked coming up the drive, by the light of the lanterns. You must hug yourselves to get out of that six-by-nine flat, if this _is_ a good way out in the country. Country places are getting to be the thing these days. Anybody here we know, or is it a neighbourhood blowout?" Max stiffened--as he usually did by the time Neil Chase had got out a few of his patronizing sentences. "I think you'll find the same set here you'd find in town," he answered. "We haven't asked a crowd--just enough to be comfortable and have plenty of room. But we have some of our neighbours here, and jolly people they are, too." "Sally, I can't possibly husk any corn," Mrs. Chase murmured, as Sally led her into the drawing-room. "This gauze is a fright now, and I've worn it only three times. It's awfully expensive--but it's the thing now, you know, so one must have it." Her eyes fell on Sally's dress as she spoke. "Sally Lane!" she half-shrieked into Sally's ear, as, at the moment, the orchestra burst into a swinging waltz, "if that isn't the very same embroidered Swiss that you had for my wedding, almost four years ago, when you were a mere child!" "Absolutely the same. Doesn't it wear well?" Sally answered, serenely. "Much better than gauze. No, you needn't husk any corn. That's just for those who want a little fun for a few minutes by and by. Mr. Ferry!"--as that young man passed with an inquiring look at her which meant, "Do you want me for anything in connection with these new arrivals?"--and Ferry was at her side. She enjoyed presenting him to the Chases, for she wanted to see what would happen. She had noted a new side of their neighbour to-night. Thus far their acquaintance had been carried on in tents and wood-lots, in an out-door, every-day environment, so to speak. Donald Ferry as a good comrade she had come to know well; Donald Ferry as a popular preacher she knew by many an enthusiastic report from Jarvis, Alec, and Bob; but the same person as a society man in evening dress, with most engaging manners, was a new acquaintance! She observed him with interest as he made himself entertaining to Neil and Dorothy, and blessed him for his tact when he presently went off with Mrs. Chase, to do her special honour as the only young matron present. She observed that Dorothy seemed very ready to accompany him. Neil looked after his wife and her companion with an expression of curiosity. "I'd like to know how you came to have him here?" he suggested. "Isn't he that chap the papers are full of, who holds forth to a crowd of men every day down in the Old Dutch Church?" "He's the one," Max replied. "I haven't heard him yet, though I mean to soon. Burnside and the boys say he's great. He lives next door to us here." "He's not at all the sort I expected to see, from the stories about him. Still, the sanctimonious sort probably couldn't hold the class of men they say go there regularly. He lives next door to you here, does he? That's odd. My brother Ches didn't talk about anything else than Ferry this morning at breakfast. Says he refused a flattering invitation to a church in Washington because he preferred to stay by the Old Dutch. Well, Dorothy didn't realize he was a parson, or she wouldn't have gone off with him with such a flourish. If she finds it out, you can look to see her begin to be demure. I say, you've certainly got a stunning old place here." "Think so?" Chase gazed about him at the details of the long drawing-room, noting its wood-work and general proportions. "I'd rather like to look it over," he proposed. "Mind taking me about?" "No, only it's not furnished, nor lighted, except down here where we're entertaining." "No electricity, or gas, I suppose, out here. Well, you can raise some kind of a light to trot round by, can't you? I'm a crank on ancient houses and furniture. Wish you had some old mahogany--that's what you need in these rooms." Max procured a small hand-lamp from the kitchen, and proceeded to escort his guest about. Neil began by showing a patronizing approval of details here and there, but as the survey continued he became less conversational, and walked about in silent inspection of everything, floors, walls, windows, and ceilings, putting on a pair of eye-glasses and assuming a hypercritical expression in excess even of his ordinary attitude. "Very fair, very fair," was his reply, when Max asked him, at the conclusion of the round of the second story, how he liked it. Determined to make the most of his chance to interest this ordinarily bored young man, Max led the way up the stairs to the old library. Here Neil opened his eyes. But as he immediately narrowed them again, and began to examine books with an indifferent air, Max was not sure how much of an impression the collection was making. Neil presently sat down. "Suppose we stay a few minutes. Quiet spot. Rather enjoy getting away from the crowd. Er--not intending to furnish up and stay here, are you? Quite a distance from town, isn't it?" "That's the objection to living out here." "Have you heard that I'm coming back to practise in the city?" "No. That so? With your father's firm?" "Yes. Dad's made me a pretty good offer, and while it was considerable of a sacrifice to leave the business I've built up down there, I'm willing to humour the old man." He crossed his legs in a superior sort of way, his head thrown back after a fashion which always made Max want to throw something at him and disturb his pose. His tone was immensely condescending. "When do you make the move?" "Right away. The governor's in a hurry, and I've agreed to lose no time. Don't care to live with the old folks again, so I shall look round a bit for a place. I drive a car, you know, and I've rather taken a fancy to having a country place, something on the old-style order. I've picked up rather a decent collection of old mahogany and prints, Sheffield plate and Lowestoft china--that sort of thing--that needs a certain background to show it off. I've heard of a number of places that might suit me; there are a good many abandoned country places these days--people like to get into town. Not many care, like me, for the artistic point of view in such matters. Er--I suppose you'll sell this place?" His tone was careless, but Max, who was watching him closely, saw a peculiar gleam in his eye which put him on his guard. Neil Chase was nothing if not shrewd and sharp to the point where the man who dealt with him must look closely after his own interests. "Oh, I don't know," Max replied, slowly. "Haven't made up my mind. I'm considering an offer now for the place. Some people like to get into town, as you say, but plenty more appreciate life in the country, when they can get such a spot as this. Values in such property are going up, not down, in my opinion." If Sally could have heard him! CHAPTER X JACK-O'-LANTERNS To the strains of the intermezzo from the "Cavalleria Rusticana," which the orchestra was sending out through the open windows, Max was returning from the gateway to the house. The October night was so mild that he had stolen out bareheaded upon the errand which had taken him to the road. The errand might have been considered an odd one: he wanted to look at the house! To be sure, illuminated as it was by many gayly coloured lights, the lanterns glowing all across the porch and down the driveway, it was well worth looking at. But it was not this decorative effect which the young host had come out to exult over. And, viewed as a residence only, he had certainly observed it many times before, and under varying conditions. He knew to a nicety just how many slats were lacking from certain of the blinds, just how the ragged edge of the great chimney showed against the sky line, precisely where the big pillared porch needed repairing. No, it was not in any of these aspects that he had come curiously out to view it now. He wanted to see it with the eyes of the prospective purchasers, Jarvis Burnside and Neil Chase. He wanted particularly to see it as Chase saw it, that upon mention of the fact that Max had already been interviewed by a prospective buyer, he had, in spite of his effort to appear indifferent, really shown such eagerness to be given an option upon the place. Max walked slowly back toward the house, under the shadow of the row of great trees bordering what had once been a lawn. Two figures had just come out upon the porch; he recognized them, even at this distance, as the Chases. At the moment, nobody else occupied the porch. Neil and Dorothy stood for a moment under the lanterns, looking back into the hall, then turned and descended the steps. They surveyed the house as they did so; they backed farther away from it; they strolled round to the west side, and viewed it from that point. Finally, as Max halted beside a tree-trunk, watching them, they began to walk slowly down the driveway, turning from time to time to gaze back at the house-front. As they passed Max, catching no hint of his presence in the shadow, they conversed in phrases which were of interest to him, and to which, since they intimately concerned himself, he might be excused for listening. "It's simply stunning," Dorothy was saying eagerly, as they passed. "I'd rather have it than forty new houses. When it's restored it will have such an air! I don't suppose they appreciate it at all, do they? Oh, do get hold of it before anybody tells them!" "Max says Sally is crazy to live in it. But that can't be because she realizes its value." "No, she's just old-fashioned child enough to like it because it's homelike, and her uncle and grandfather lived in it, not because it's such a swell type of the real old thing that people rave over now." "Max isn't the sort to care for it either. But he has an eye on the cash. I shall have to put up a fair price, all right, to get it. I'll try bluffing first, though. He's too much of an office grind to care for anything else, so long as he gets his money. I say, won't that gateway be a corker, when it's put right?" They walked on out of hearing, but Max had heard all that was necessary to make him tingle. "Oh, it will be a corker, will it?" he said to himself, as he made for the back of the house by way of the pine grove. "Maybe it will, old, man--but not when _you_ put it right! An office grind, am I? Too dull to know a good thing when I own it, eh? And you'll try bluffing, will you? All right, bluff away--and much good may it do you! I'd sell it to Jarve Burnside before I'd sell it to you, but I--Hello, where are you going?" He had almost run into Jarvis, hastily emerging from the kitchen door with a smoking jack-o'-lantern, the declining candle of which had made of it both a wreck and the source of a horrible odour. Jarvis cast the pumpkin to one side and wiped his hands on his handkerchief. "Just prevented a small conflagration of corn-stalks," he explained. "What are you doing, prowling round your own back door?" "Making up my mind not to sell this place to you or to anybody else," said Max, promptly, speaking under the impulse of his irritation. "Good work! I don't blame you. I certainly don't want it--_if you do_. I hope you won't go back on letting me rent a few acres, though, to try my hand at farming, in the spring?" "Jarve,"--Max sat down on the kitchen step--"do you seriously think a fellow could make a living off this land--taking into account all the squash-bugs and fruit-tree pests and tomato-grubs and every other thing that I've always understood makes the life of the farmer miserable?" "I think," replied Jarvis, laughing a little at Max's way of putting it, but awake to the importance of discussing the matter seriously, if Max showed an inclination to do so, "that trying to do it, with the help of all the experience that modern experiment stations have placed at our hands, would be about the most interesting thing possible. You might not want to give up all other business till you had proved that you really could do it, but I certainly do think the thing would be well worth trying. It's being attempted more and more these days by educated men, college graduates and professional men of all ranks, partly for the pure interest of the thing, partly because the out-door life is about the best worth living. Look at Don Ferry, for an example. Could he possibly have the hold he has on that crowd of his at the Old Dutch if he weren't a man made of substantial flesh and blood, his brain as healthy and his heart as warm as exercise and oxygen can make them?--Well, perhaps he could, if he were one of your pale and scholarly ghosts, but I doubt it." "This idea of living out here in winter--" Max went off on a new tack--"it's seemed to me absolute foolishness. But if Neil Chase is so, confoundedly anxious to move in before we can move out--" "Neil Chase!" "Yes. He practically made me an offer for the place to-night." "Well, well!" Jarvis's eyes gleamed with satisfaction in the darkness. So old Neil was helping the thing along, was he? Nothing could have been better. "Going to consider it?" "Hardly! See here, could we keep warm in that barracks this winter?" "You don't have to live all over it. With those fireplaces and waste wood enough in your lot up there to run a blast-furnace, I don't see why you should have any fear of freezing." "Our little stock of furniture wouldn't go anywhere in furnishing." "It would furnish a certain amount of space. Keep the rest shut up till you could furnish it." "I shouldn't think of the thing for a minute," said Max, in the tone of one who explains the inconsistency of so sudden a change of attitude, "if I hadn't this day been notified that the price of our flat is to go up ten dollars a month on the first of November. It's an outrage!" "It's an extraordinary piece of luck," said Jarvis to himself. But aloud he admitted that it was a good deal of a jump, and a pretty high price for the flat. At this moment some one looked out of the kitchen window, and then asked Mary Ann inside if she had seen anything lately of Mr. Max. "I suppose we'll have to go back to the crowd," admitted Max, and they returned just in time to see the first guests taking their leave. When all had gone, Jarvis hunted up Sally. He found her in one of the dressing-rooms, extinguishing candles which had nearly burned to the bottoms of the lanterns, and were threatening their inflammable surroundings. "Here, don't touch those things, with your thin clothes on!" Jarvis cried. "We fellows must go round and make all safe--no taking any chances with the house full of dry corn-stalks. But first--have you had a good time to-night?" "A glorious time. All the evening I've felt as if I lived here--it looked so furnished, somehow, with all the lights and decorations." "It made you want to live here more than ever, didn't it?" "It did, indeed. And in ten days we shall be going back to town," "Perhaps you won't." She stared at him. "What in the world do you mean?" "I don't mean anything," said he, laughing. "I'm like a small boy bursting with the secret information that there's to be ice-cream for dinner. So I don't mean anything--but I'd like to shake hands on it, just the same." "Jarvis!" She let him seize both her hands and shake them up and down. "You do mean something!" "Come out in the hall and do the corn-stalk prance with me." "The corn-stalk prance! What in the world is that? Are you crazy?" "I'll teach it to you," and he led her out into the wide hall, which had been all the evening the most attractive spot in the house. He pulled two stalks from one of the sheaves which stood on each side of the great fireplace. He handed her one, and throwing the other across his shoulder as if it were a gun, marched to the drawing-room door. The musicians were just putting away their instruments, having played till the last guests were out of hearing. "Just one more, will you?" he asked, grinning at them in a way which they understood meant an extra fee. Then he came back to Sally. "Now for it!" he said. "I never did this myself,--nor heard of it--but if we can't do an impromptu turn to-night, on our high spirits, we never can again. Come on!"--as the music burst forth. And he made her an impressive bow. Smiling, and ready enough to follow his lead, Sally returned him a sweeping courtesy, in minuet style. "Hi, what's this?" cried Bob, returning from the porch, where he, with the others, had been watching the departure of the procession of carriages and automobiles which had borne the guests away. "Here, come and see what's going on!" he shouted back to the porch, and they came hurrying in. Mrs. Burnside and Donald Ferry, Josephine and Max, Mrs. Ferry and Alec and Uncle Timothy ranged themselves along the walls, their faces all enjoyment of the somewhat remarkable affair now in progress. Jarvis and Sally might have been improvising, there was no doubt that they were, but the result was the product of inspiration. Up and down, double and single, in and out, round and round, with all manner of fancy steps, both surprising and picturesque, saluting each other every now and then with bows, with wavings of the corn-stalks, with gestures of greeting and farewell. Jarvis, without his glasses, his face brilliant with life and merriment, looked a different fellow from the one his friends had been accustomed to see of late; and Sally, her cheeks like crimson carnations, her eyes dark with fun and happiness, her steps the embodiment of youthful grace, was a fascinating figure to watch. "Isn't that the prettiest thing you ever saw?" asked Josephine of Donald Ferry, as he stood beside her with folded arms. He nodded. "I suppose they're making it up as they go along," he said, "but it's very clever and charming. I didn't know your brother had it in him to be so gay." "Oh, he has. It's this long bother with his eyes that has made him look like an owl, and feel like one. He has plenty of fun and energy in him when it gets a chance." "I'm beginning to find him out. I like a chap who can relax like that, and show the boyish side of himself now and then." "And isn't Sally perfectly dear? I never saw her look prettier than to-night," declared Josephine, with an unconscious glance from Sally's white frock, which she knew was an old and much mended one, down at her own pale blue gown, just home from an expensive shop. She was thinking that if she looked half as well in her fine things as Sally in her simple old ones, she should be quite content. Ferry looked down at the dark head beside him. He remembered no less than three fair maids who had, that evening, called his attention, by one means and another, to points less attractive than their own in other girls. It struck him, as it had done more than once before, that a very warm generosity characterized the friendship between Josephine and Sally, inasmuch as each had seemed to him to be most anxious to have him appreciate the charms of the other. As for Josephine herself, though he would not bluntly tell her so, she had seldom presented a more winsome picture than to-night. Her dark colouring and piquant features possessed a quality very close to beauty, and her smile at Sally, at a moment when the girl, sweeping close, made her friend a special salutation, was undoubtedly a very attractive thing. A burst of enthusiastic applause greeted the final whirl and bows of the "corn-stalk prance," and Sally, breathless, dropped upon the bottom step of the wide staircase. Jarvis, coming close to Max, whose hand-clapping was of the heartiest, said in his friend's ear, "Why not tell her now that you've decided to stay here? If you do, you'll make this the happiest night of her life." Max looked at him. Sally's elder brother was in a more genial mood than he had been in for some time. Somehow his new understanding that the Lanes possessed a more valuable piece of property than they had realized, property for which two buyers were ready at any hour to give them a satisfactory price, had put him into good humour. Then he had been all the evening playing the pleasant part of host under conditions which had called forth many complimentary remarks from guests whose opinions he valued, and he was experiencing the comfortable glow which comes with such a role. Just now, the sight of his little sister making of herself so charming a spectacle, had caused him to feel an unusual stirring of pride in her. All these factors combined to help Jarvis's suggestion. He approached his sister as she sat, rosy cheeked and laughing, on the lowest stair, and stood before her. "That wasn't so bad," he said, approvingly. "You and Jarve had better get out a copyright on that--you worked in some pretty fancy steps. Got your skates on to-night, haven't you?" Sally thrust forward a small, white-shod foot. "No, only some badly used-up pumps. If it hadn't been for Bob and his pipe-clay they would never have been presentable again." "You're certainly great on making things go. Er--that is--suppose you could make six chairs, a table, and an old couch furnish that room in there--for the winter?" Their eyes met. Those who happened to be observing from a little distance--and of these there were at least three who had as yet been unable to take their eyes off Sally--saw such a wave of delight sweep over her expressive face as made it even more vivid than they had ever seen it. After an instant's wide-eyed silence, her lips parted, the girl was on her feet. "Max! Do you mean it? Are we to stay? Oh--you old dear! Make our things furnish that room? Of course I can!" Her arms were round his neck for the space of two seconds; then she had seized his hand, and was pulling him toward the others. Jarvis, watching Max's face, saw there more amiability than he could have hoped. Yet it would have been a strangely flinty heart, he thought, that could have resisted Sally to-night. "Ladies and gentlemen,"--Sally made them a low bow,--"we are so glad you've enjoyed our hospitality. Allow us to express our hope that we may have the pleasure of entertaining you often during the winter. We shall be at home here every Saturday evening throughout the season--pop-corn refreshments and corn-stalk-fiddle music, with conversation!" Bob was first to respond. With a shout, he dashed into the long drawing-room, from which the musicians had now departed, and relieved his feelings by turning a series of handsprings from one end of it to the other. Alec, who had not much cared to spend the winter in the country, but had of late become immensely drawn toward Donald Ferry, reflected that there might be good times forthcoming out here which would never happen in town. So he grinned pleasantly enough. Uncle Timothy, beaming, said, "That's very good!" to Mrs. Burnside, and she returned warmly: "Indeed, I think it is, Mr. Rudd." Josephine clapped both her hands, then ran to wring Sally's and Max's, declaring joyfully: "You'll be the most popular resort outside the city." Jarvis followed, to observe, in a calm tone--to cover his delight, though he succeeded in only partially concealing it from Max, and not at all from Sally--"I think it's a wise decision, and I hope it will mean a partnership in strawberries and squashes next summer. You'll see me out soon with seed-catalogues--since we didn't find any behind that locked door last April." "We shall be so glad to have such neighbours for the winter," said Mrs. Ferry, with genuine pleasure in her face. "And I hope Donald and I can do something toward making you feel that you have real country neighbours of the kind who are counted as assets." "If it weren't for you people, I don't think I should have the courage to try it," acknowledged Max. "We'll make it such a winter you'll never have the courage to go back," prophesied Ferry. "I have a pair of toboggans stowed away somewhere; I'll send for them when the snow comes. That slope from your timber lot down across the fields--" Bob, returning from the handspring episode, caught these words and raised a whoop of anticipation. "Hi--toboggans!" he was heard to ejaculate at intervals during the next ten minutes. "Sally," said Uncle Timothy Rudd, "up in New Hampshire, where I used to live before I came to stay with your family, there is an attic full of old furniture which belonged to my father. I have never disposed of it, because certain associations made me have an affection for it. It is pretty old style, and not, I am afraid, in very good condition, but if you care for it--" "Oh, Uncle Timmy! No matter how old it is or how shaky, we can use it." "Probably the older and shakier it is, the more valuable when it has been restored," suggested Mrs. Burnside. "I should say so," declared Jarvis, with emphasis. "You should have heard the Neil Chases rave over some of theirs. Neil found a sideboard in an old cabin down South; it had the doors nailed on with strips of leather; they kept corn meal and molasses in it. He wouldn't take five hundred dollars for it now." "I don't imagine," said Uncle Timothy, cautiously, "that any of my things are as valuable as that, so don't get your expectations too high, Sally. But they may help you in the matter of supplying chairs and beds for your friends. I take it this will be a hospitable homestead, when Sally is mistress of it." "How could it help being hospitable," cried Sally, happily, "with friends like ours for guests?" "Let's make a circle on the hearth, for good luck," proposed Josephine. Beckoning, she led the way toward the fireplace, where the flames of the big logs, which had leaped and danced there all the evening, carefully fed by Bob from time to time, had now died down into a mass of brilliant coals. On either side the sheaves of yellow corn-stalks stood like sentinels, and above a row of jack-o'-lanterns, whose candles had been renewed when they threatened to burn low, looked cheerfully down from the high chimney-piece. "All join hands," commanded Josephine, "and sing 'Auld Lang Syne.'" "Will you let such new acquaintances join in that song?" asked Mrs. Ferry, as Alec, who was next her, caught her hand in obedience to orders. "Of course we will. We hope that time will make you old friends," answered Uncle Timothy, gallantly, stretching out his hand, as he stood next upon her other side. It is rather curious how, in any such grouping, certain combinations come about. Neither Jarvis Burnside nor Donald Ferry seemed to make any abrupt moves, and there certainly was a moment when it might have seemed the natural thing that Jarvis should grasp Uncle Timothy's hand, Ferry seize upon Bob's. But so it did not turn out. When the circle began slowly to revolve before the fire, one of Sally's hands was in Jarvis's, the other in that of the neighbour who could chop down trees as easily as he could address audiences, and whose hand, therefore, possessed a warm and even grip which suggested both friendliness and strength. Upon Donald Ferry's farther side was Josephine, and Max clasped her other hand. As for Alec and Bob, it did not matter much to them whose hands they held, so that the circle moved briskly and sang lustily. And this it surely did. "Are you happy, little girl?" asked Jarvis, bending to speak into Sally's ear, as the circle broke up. Smiling, Sally dashed away a tear. "So happy I'm almost crying," she owned. "It's beginning to seem as if we were going to have a--home, a real home once more--as much as we ever can--without--" "I understand," he whispered, and led her away down the hall, that she might recover the poise the singing of the old song had shaken. "They must have been here often when we children were little," she murmured, pausing by the open door under the staircase, which led to a side porch. Just here she was hidden from the rest. "I'm sure they were. I remember driving out here once with your father, and seeing him sit in front of that hall fireplace with your Uncle Maxwell, talking business. They were here more, I imagine, when you were very small, than afterward, when you were old enough to remember." "They've been here," said Sally softly. "They've walked about these old floors and looked out of these windows. That makes it home to me. And if I can only make it home to the others--" "You couldn't help making it home--anywhere." "Oh, Jarvis, you're such a good friend!--I keep telling you that, till you must be tired of hearing it." "I'm not tired of hearing it." There followed an eloquent little silence, during which Jarvis took the girl's hand in both his own and held it close in a way which meant to her the comprehending sympathy with all her joys and sorrows which he had long given her. To him it meant so much more that he dared not give expression to it in any but this mute fashion. But his heart beat high with longing and with hope, though he was firmly bidding himself wait--and wait a long time yet before he put his fortune to the touch, "to win or lose it all!" Then Sally wiped her eyes, put her handkerchief away, and faced about. "Now I can go back," she said. "Thank you for giving me a chance to put Sally Lunn in order. The mistress of a mansion like this must always have herself in hand, mustn't she?" Standing on her own hearth-stone, Sally said good-night to all her guests like the grand lady she gayly affected to be. But like the girl she was, she ran after them to wave her hand at them from the big porch, crying, "Come again--please _all_ do come again--oh, _very_ soon!" PART TWO THE LANES AND THE ACRES CHAPTER XI WHAT'S IN A NAME? "Well, here he comes," announced Maxwell Lane. With his hands in his pockets he was standing by a window which commanded a view of the gateway and approach to the house. "He 'phoned me this morning he'd be out--loaded for bear. I'll wager if he has one treatise on farming in that cutter he has forty." Sally ran to look. "I don't see anything unusual," said she, her eyes on the trim sleigh drawn by a pair of fine grays, the driver waving an arm at the window as he caught sight of the faces thereat. "Expect to see horse-hoes and threshing machines sticking out from under his furs? Jolly!--that's a magnificent fox-skin robe he has over his knees. Looks like a farmer, doesn't he, now? Think a fellow in a silk-lined overcoat and driving-gloves like those knows anything about farming?--Or ever can know?" he added skeptically. "I don't see why not. There's nothing about a silk-lined overcoat to prevent." Sally's tone was spirited. She thrust her hands into the pockets of the small ruffled apron she wore, and her elbows assumed an argumentative air. The black ribbon which tied her lengthening curly locks into a knot upon her head seemed to acquire a defiant effect. Evidently she was prepared to take sides in this matter. "If rich men's sons can learn railroading and mining and every other kind of business that soils their hands, I don't know what's to prevent one of them from learning farming." "Oh, he'll get hold of a tremendous amount of book wisdom--I'm prepared for that," admitted Max. "But it takes a practical man to be a farmer. He'll want to use up a lot of money in experiments, of course--" But Sally had disappeared into the hall, and was throwing open the front door. The sleigh, however, was going on past the house to the barn. "That means he intends to stay," reflected the girl and ran back to the kitchen for a few hurried words with Mary Ann Flinders. It was not the habit of the house materially to change any plans for the table on account of unexpected arrivals, but there were certain dishes Jarvis was known to enjoy so much that Sally liked to confront him with at least one of them, when she could. "Make some of the apple-fry to go with the baked beans, please, Mary," she directed. "And be sure to put in plenty of sugar so it will get brown and candied, the way we like it. Use the Baldwin apples, and leave the red skins on the slices--that makes it look prettiest." She peeped into the small kitchen mirror as she went by, the mirror whose presence was designed to point out to Mary Ann that her rough red locks might now and then need smoothing. Sally's own hair was the source of considerable bother at present, it having reached that stage, in its growth since her fever, when it was neither short nor long, and called for much skill in arrangement. She tucked in a stray curl or two, gave a perk to the black bow, stood on her tip-toes to make sure that the silk knot which fastened her sailor collar was in trim shape, and felt of the crisp strings which tied her decidedly coquettish apron, to ascertain that that bow was also snug. Then she looked round at Mary Ann, and caught that young person eyeing her slyly, but with great admiration. Sally laughed, and Mary Ann giggled. Then the latter glanced significantly out of the kitchen window toward the barn, whence a tall figure was issuing with its arms full of books and magazines. "I guess I'd know, Miss Sally," ventured Mary Ann, "who was comin' if I didn't see for myself. Apple-fry, an' you primpin' up like that when you don't need it at all, bein' always tidy--" "Mary, I'm surprised at you," said Sally severely, and walked out of the kitchen with her head up. But she had laughed, and Mary Ann was not afraid. "Ridiculous!" said Sally to herself, in the hall. "I shall never look in that kitchen glass again, when anybody is here. As if I ever did any special 'primpin'' for an old friend like Jarvis! Girls like that are always thinking silly things." And she walked on to the hall door, of half a mind not to open it after all, lest Jarvis himself think his welcome too eager. Yet, as she always did open it for him, or for any other of their special friends whom she chanced to see approaching, she promptly discarded this line of conduct as absurd, and threw the door wide with the hospitable sweep to which he was so accustomed that he would have been surprised and puzzled at its absence. He looked at her over his armful of books, his face red with the sting of the sharp January air, his eyes keen through the eye-glasses astride his nose. Goggles were now a thing of the past, but the eyeglasses, their lenses thick with the combination of formulae which had ruled their grinding, were a permanent necessity. It was the first time Sally had seen him since he had acquired them. "Very becoming," she said, critically, as he put down the books on the hall table, pulled off the handsome driving-gloves which, according to Max, helped to disqualify him for his present ambitions, and shook hands with heartiness. "You no longer look pathetic, but distinguished--even scientific." "'Scientific' is the word, if you want to flatter me," he declared, throwing off his overcoat and gathering up the books again. "I'm acquiring agricultural science by the peck measure--chock full and running over. I've reached the point where I must get rid of some of it upon my partners or suffer serious consequences. Max here? Was it he at the window? I can't see more than a rod through these things yet--not used to them." "Yes, he's here. He always spends his Saturday half-holiday at home now. The rest are away. Alec and Bob are off on the hill by the timber lot, trying Mr. Ferry's toboggan with him--it's just come. Uncle Tim has gone over to see how they're making it go." "Glad the coast is clear. It might embarrass me to set forth my schemes to more than two at once." Sally led the way to the living-room--in old times the "drawing-room," but now deserving the less imposing title after a fashion which made it the most homelike of apartments. It was the only room on the lower floor--except the dining-room and kitchen--which the Lanes had attempted to furnish for the winter, so the rugs and chairs, tables and couch, of the little flat had been all that was necessary to make it habitable and pleasant. A brisk fire burned on the wide hearth, of itself a furnishing without which many a sumptuous room may seem cheerless and in-hospitable. The walls were covered with a quaint old paper of white, with gold stripes about which green ivy leaves wound conventionally. This might have given the room a cold aspect, but Sally had hung curtains of Turkey-red print at the windows, and had covered the couch and its pillows with the same warm-coloured fabric, with a result so pleasing to the eye that visitors, at the first sight, were wont to exclaim: "Who would think you could have made this big room look so homelike? How have you done it?" "Thirty-two yards of Turkey-red," was Sally's customary demure answer, and the visitor, if a woman, was sure to respond, "Oh, yes, of course. Such a lovely idea for winter." If a man, he was more apt merely to stare at Sally, with real respect for the feminine comprehension of the influence of a hue upon a general effect, not understanding the matter himself, but dimly comprehending that the result had been accomplished and the room made to look like a refuge from the bitterest storms which might sweep outside. "Well, primed to the muzzle?" was Max's greeting. He had not taken the trouble to go to the hall to welcome the guest, but had thrown himself among the red pillows, facing the fire. The wide couch stood always in comfortable proximity to the hearth, and was a favourite resort for the entire household. Not unadvisedly had Sally covered the eight pillows with the strong red fabric. It could withstand the wear and tear of pillow fights and of use as seats upon the floor before the fire better than almost any material that could be found at the price. "Look at the titles of these, and see if I haven't a right to be primed. Mother and Jo have taken turns reading to me for a week--they too are possessed of an extraordinary amount of miscellaneous information." "Miscellaneous--that's undoubtedly the word. It will be a long day before any of us have any classified and usable knowledge to work with." With a critical eye Max scanned the titles of the books as Jarvis set them forth in an impressive row upon the old mahogany table where the reading lamp stood, surrounded by books, magazines, and papers, in generous quantity. "Strawberries--Market Gardening--Analyses of the Soil--Bacteria--Nitrogen--Drainage--Agricultural Implements--Increasing the Fertility of the Land--and so forth--and so forth," Max murmured, as his eye ran hurriedly along the subjects represented. "Well, you've certainly gone in deep." "Nearly submerged, at times. But I think I've got my head out of water now, and have evolved a scheme that will do to begin on--with your approval. I wish you'd go at the reading of these--some of them, anyhow. I've marked what seemed to be the most important. You can do it while I'm away. I'm planning to take a trip around to the best farms I can hear of, and have a series of talks with the owners. I shall end up with a scientific experiment station, for by that time I ought to have some working knowledge to build on, and can understand what I'm trying to get at." From among his pillows Max gazed at his friend. Saturday afternoon was always a time of relaxation for the bank clerk, when he could get through with his work and hurry home. He did not as yet feel a particle of enthusiasm over the farming plans, and it was difficult for him to comprehend Jarvis's interest. But he had ceased to oppose the project, except by comments skeptical to a degree. Jarvis was to assume the risk of all expensive experiments during the first two seasons, and Max was not to leave the bank, so there was everything to be gained and nothing to be lost by giving the experimenter a free hand. Jarvis was sitting bolt upright by the table, his shoulders back, his head up, energy in every outline. Sally, studying him, and remembering his long exile from all active labour while his eyes were recovering from their misuse at college, silently rejoiced in his appearance of vigour. Just now, as he spoke of his plans, he seemed especially full of life and determination, and the contrast between the two young men was one which made the girl wonder rather anxiously if they could really become partners in this new enterprise. "When will you go?" Max inquired. "Wish I weren't tied to a desk. I'd go too--for the trip." "I wish you could. You'd enjoy not only the trip but the interviews. I'd guarantee your interest before we'd made half our rounds." "Any idea what you'll make the chief crop?" Max inquired, his eyes again wandering over the titles of the books. "Strawberries," his prospective partner responded, at once. "Strawberries! Expect to make a living off those?" "Strawberries!"--This was Sally, in a tone of delight. "Lovely! I'll help pick. Can we have them next June? Oughtn't we to have sowed them last fall?" A roar from the young man on the couch, and an irrepressible broad smile on the face of the one by the table, made Sally colour with chagrin. "I suppose I've said something awful?" she queried. "Max and I'll make worse blunders than that before we are through," Jarvis consoled her, while Max, chuckling, attempted to instruct his sister and prove that after all he did know a thing or two about farming. "You don't sow strawberries for a crop," he explained, wisely, "you set out plants. And you don't get a crop the first year, either--eh, Jarve? So Sally needn't begin to make a sun-bonnet to wear picking berries next June." "Nor the second June, either, perhaps," admitted Jarvis, reluctantly. "To get the best results we shouldn't use land that's just been ploughed where there's been only sod for years. We ought to plant potatoes or cabbages the first year, to get the ground in shape. Then it'll need a lot of fertilizing after that. We have to get rid of the grubs in the old sod--" "Grubs!" Max sat upright with a jerk. "There you are, at the first drop of the hat. Grubs--pests--not only after you get your plants out but two seasons beforehand." He eyed his friend, as if he had presented a conclusive argument against strawberry raising. But Jarvis only laughed good-humouredly. "That's part of the game," said he. "Meanwhile, there are some quick crops we ought to be able to market the first year. But, after talking with several city dealers and commission men, I'm confident it will pay us to go about strawberry culture with the most careful preparation we can make. Some cities are surrounded by strawberry gardeners, but there's almost nobody in that business around here. No reason why not--soil and climate all right enough--so it seems to me it's our chance. The city gets most of its 'home-grown' strawberries from a hundred miles away, which means that they can't be marketed as fresh as ours can be. I propose to build up a demand for absolutely fresh berries, picked at dawn and marketed before the dew is off, strictly fine to the bottom of the full-sized basket. Several grades, but our reputation on the big ones, of course. There's no reason why we can't do it--" But he had gone as far as could have been expected without an ironic comment from Max. "Oh, it's all clear as daylight!" that young man agreed. "Even the grubs that infest the soil now will take to the woods when they hear of the onslaught that's coming. We've only to set out the plants, sit on the fence till the gigantic berries are ripe, than haul in the nets. No May freezes, no droughts, no--" "You _are_ a pessimist, aren't you?" Jarvis broke in. "I know of only one thing that will ever work a reformation in you--and that's a summer's work in the open air." "Pessimist, am I? Well--" It was Sally who interrupted, this time. During Jarvis's explanation of his plan she had been absorbed in the contemplation of a new idea. She proceeded to launch it against the tide of Max's retort, and her enthusiastic shriek overbore his deeper-toned growl. "I've a name for this place!" she cried, clapping her hands. "A name! I've tried and tried to think of one, you know, Jarvis, and nothing has suited. Uncle Maxwell never named it anything. Uncle Timothy thinks '_The Pines_' would be a good name but I'm sure there are hundreds of country places called '_The Pines_.' Alec says '_Woodlands_,' and Bob votes for '_Farview_'--though there's no far view at all till you get up to the hill by the timber lot. But now--I have the name!" She spoke impressively, and they both looked at her, waiting for the revelation about to fall from her lips. She did not keep them waiting long. "'_Strawberry Acres_.'" Silence ensued. Sally looked from one to the other. Max began to laugh. "Better call it '_Prospective Strawberry Acres_'" said he. "It's certainly an original name," mused Jarvis. "Not a high-sounding one, certainly. But you don't want a high-sounding name--for a farm." "It's a nice, colourful name," argued Sally. "'Colourful!'--Now, by all that's eccentric, what's a colourful name?" demanded Jarvis, laughing. "Think of strawberries among the green leaves, in the sun--Jarvis, let's have green leaves on all the baskets!--and think of crushed strawberries, and the beautiful, rich, red juice. It's a nice, rich name, just as my Turkey-red curtains make a warm, homey-looking room." Jarvis shook his head. "These are mysteries too deep for my imagination," he owned. "But you can call it '_Pumpkin Hollow_,' if you like--that's a colourful name, too, I should judge--a fine natural yellow." "Oh," Sally exclaimed, "we must raise pumpkins, among the corn--of course we'll have corn. Pumpkins lying about among shocks of corn in the fall sunshine make the most delightful picture." Max lay back among his pillows, apparently overcome with emotion. "Oh, you're a practical person for a farmer's housekeeper!" he jeered. "Your one idea will be to have the crops look pretty in the sunshine. You'll be tying ribbons on the strawberry baskets to match the fruit." Sally nodded. "Maybe I shall," she acknowledged. "Anyhow, I know people buy the things that are most artfully put up." A loud bang of the front door made her pause to listen. Hurried footsteps clattering through the hall prepared the party for the bursting open of the door. Bob, his cheeks like winter apples, his boots crusted with snow, shouted at the company: "Oh, pull yourselves loose from this stuffy fire and come up on the hill. Mr. Ferry's toboggan goes like lightning express from the top of the hill clear down to the big elm in the middle of the south meadow. He's a dandy at it. I can't steer the thing yet, at all, but he'll teach me. Put on your duds and come on--he sent me for you." Max settled himself more reposefully than ever among his pillows. "Go 'way," he commanded. "My half-holidays are not for work." But Sally sprang to her feet, seeing which Jarvis got promptly to his. "Sorry we haven't blanket tobogganing suits, Bob," said Jarvis, "but we can try it in derby hats and kid gloves. I'm ready." Sally rushed away to array herself in a miscellaneous costume composed of Max's gray sweater-jacket, Bob's crimson skating cap, Uncle Timothy's white muffler, and a short, rainy-day skirt of her own. The others eyed her approvingly as she rejoined them, the crimson cap on her blonde curls proving most picturesque. Out of doors the colour in her cheeks, stung by the frosty air, presently brought them to match the cap. By the time the three reached the hill they looked as ready for sport as Donald Ferry himself. That young man, in a regulation toboggan suit of gray blanket cloth, with a cap of the same, looked like a jolly boy as he brought the toboggan into place with a flourish and invited his guests to "pile on." It was glorious fun. Certainly Ferry was an accomplished tobogganist, for he steered with great skill over a somewhat complicated course, including excursions between trees set rather closely together, over hummocks and through erratic dips, at a pace which quite took his passengers' breath away. "It's the best fun I ever had in my life," cried Sally, as they climbed the hill for the third time. "What a shame for Max not to come." "We'll have him out next time. To taste tobogganing is to become an enthusiast," declared Ferry, walking at one side of the crimson cap, while Jarvis kept close upon the other. Alec and Bob were doing tricks in the snow all the way up the hill, to the amusement of Uncle Timothy Rudd, who watched interestedly from the top, but could not be prevailed upon to try a journey. Suddenly Sally looked down toward the house. She shielded her eyes with one hand. "There's Mary Ann Flinders, watching at the kitchen window," she exclaimed. "Poor child, how she must envy us!" She stopped short and looked at the toboggan's owner. "Why can't we ask her up for a little while, Mr. Ferry?" she suggested. "You wouldn't mind, would you?" "Not in the least. Shall I go for her?" "I'll go. Please don't come." And Sally was off like the wind, down over the path which much tramping had made through the snow. Jarvis and Ferry looked at one another and smiled. "Do you know another girl in the world who would have thought of doing that?" asked Jarvis, with amusement. "Not many, out of those who happened to have devoted cavaliers beside them, certainly," admitted the other young man, looking after the rapid transit of the crimson cap across the snowy fields. "But Miss Sally is a law unto herself--and the unexpected is the thing one may expect from her every time. Yet she's not capricious purely for the sake of being capricious, like so many girls. She can be counted on--at the same time that one doesn't know exactly where to find her." He laughed. "There's a paradox for you." "Counted on to do the thing you're glad afterward she has done," supplemented Sally's old friend. If Sally could have heard them, her small ears--burning with the transition from cold air to warm, as in the kitchen she hurriedly forced Mary Ann, protesting with feeble giggles, into whatsoever garments could be adapted to the purpose--would have burned even more fiercely. But it is quite safe to say that she had no thought whatever of the effect her impulsive little act might have upon anybody--except Mary Ann herself. CHAPTER XII IN THE OLD GARDEN "Mother, won't you drive out to the farm with us? Jo will tell you I drive like a veteran, and the roads aren't bad--with chains on the rear tires." Jarvis's hand was on the door as he spoke. He wore a motorist's cap, coat, and leather gauntlets. Mrs. Burnside shook her head, smiling. "I'll make my first trip into the country when the chains are not needed, son. Give Sally my love, and tell her that now spring is at hand I shall come out with you often." "Let me tell her you'll come out and spend the whole season there. Furnish the west side of the house, take Joanna, share expenses--and chaperon her." "Whom--Joanna?" Josephine Burnside, sheathing herself in veils for the drive in the chilly early April air, glanced at her brother with a mischievous air. "She's forty, if she's a day. Surely she doesn't need--" "I wish you people would take me seriously. Could you find a pleasanter place to spend the summer? I expect to spend every daylight hour of every day there, from the fifteenth of April on." "Then it's you who need the chaperon," declared Josephine. "Uncle Timothy Rudd is dragon enough for Sally." "I shall want to be out there for every noon meal. Can't break off work and rush home three times a day, even with the new car--and she'll make it in twenty minutes, when the roads are good. I shall have to take my lunch in a pail, like my farm hands, if you don't come, for I'm not going to cast myself on the Lanes for food, except now and then." "Come on, I'm ready. Talk to me about it on the way out, and when I come back I'll put it to mother so artfully she can't refuse." And Josephine took the control of the door-knob out of her brother's hand. Jarvis applied himself silently to his steering-wheel until they were out of the city, for although after a month's practice he drove with considerable skill, he had not yet reached the point where steering through city traffic becomes purely mechanical. But once on the open road, with few vehicles in the way, Jarvis continued the subject. "Do you think mother really dislikes the idea? It seems to me the most practical in the world. Those west rooms would be fine, furnished with summer stuff--I wouldn't for the world have you put anything in them that would make the other part of the house look shabby by contrast." "Jarvis! As if we would! Why, it would be just mattings and wicker chairs, muslin curtains, and that sort of thing. And I think mother rather likes the idea. But she is afraid we should be forcing ourselves on them, as we did last summer with the tent. She doesn't doubt they would all like it, except Max. But he's so queer--he never likes what he's expected to." "Max is the very one who would favour it this time. He said the other day he wished I could live out here, since I'm to run everything this season. I said I'd like mighty well to be on the ground, but couldn't, of course, in the circumstances, unless the family were along. He said, 'Set up for yourselves in the west wing, and be here to get up with the lark, in the approved farmer's style. I propose to sleep till the last minute, and let the early birds get all the worms they like.'" "Oh, he was only joking." "Of course he was joking, but I feel certain he'd favour the plan. He has reason to give me my head in every way, hasn't he? I'm equipping the place with farm tools and machines at my own expense, hiring help out of my own pocket, and taking all the risk. If I can't have the west wing for the summer I'll send back that disc-harrow that arrived yesterday--I'm as proud of it as I am of the car." "Would you dare mention it to Sally?" "The disc-harrow--or the plan? If she likes the plan as well as she does the harrow, she'll welcome it with open arms. I tell you, if I could strike the sparks out of Max with an expensive seed-sower that the mere sight of a set of hoes and rakes for her flower garden does with Sally, I'd be content. No, I don't dare mention it to Sally, but I should think you might. She'd certainly be delighted to have you and mother there--and she has to have me there anyhow, whether she likes it or not." "Whether she likes it or not! Of course she likes it! Aren't you and she the best friends in the world?" "I'm not so sure. Sally's good friends with everybody--but 'the best in the world'--well--I don't know!" His tone was peculiar. Josephine looked quickly at him, through her enveloping veils. He was staring at the road ahead--as the driver of a high-powered motor through April mud must do, of course--yet his sister thought she detected a curious compression of the lips not due wholly to the strain of driving under difficulties. "You're not afraid of her next-door neighbour, are you?" ventured the girl, casually, as if she meant nothing by the query. "I like him immensely, as you know," was the quick reply. "And trust him, too--like a brother. But--well--it's no use talking about it. It's a fair field and no favours--and I can't complain of that. But--I'd rather like the advantage of being on the ground all summer, don't you see? Alone, there, even though I'm off in the fields half the time, I'll have to be everlastingly careful that I don't make myself intrusive. With you and mother there, the whole situation would be different. You do see, don't you, Sis?" He looked round at her for an instant, to search her face beneath the masking veils, confident that if he could be sure of her sympathy his sister was the strongest ally he could have. The subject had never been brought up quite so definitely between them before, although Jarvis had no doubt that both mother and sister understood the long persisting intention which within the last year had grown in him so overwhelmingly strong. The machine, after the manner of motor-cars, took the opportunity of his momentary relaxation of vigilance to skid rather alarmingly in a particularly slippery section of clay road. Though Jarvis promptly brought it about and had things in hand again, Josephine forgot to answer while she resumed control over the function of breathing. But when her brother gently repeated his question she answered warmly: "Indeed I do, boy--and more clearly than I have before. For myself, I should love to spend the summer with Sally, and I'll do my best to bring it about." That was all he wanted, and he plunged into talk about the farm, what had been done, what was being done, and what remained to do. It seemed that, while much had been accomplished, a mountain of tasks remained. The place had been running down so long that every inch of it required immediate taking in hand. "There's not much to expect the first year in the way of crops," he explained. "We shall plough all we can in April, and sow it in May to buckwheat." "Buckwheat! What do you want of that?" "Nothing--but to turn it under and give the ground a chance to enrich itself. All the north meadow we shall let come to the haying--by the way, that'll be a jolly time for you to be there. I believe Sally has great plans for the haying. The old apple orchard we had carefully pruned in February, and we're going to plough it--Sally's not pleased at that, she says it will be prettier not ploughed; but the poor old roots need to be saved from starving. We nearly came to blows over that, and of course I was sorry to oppose her about anything that has to do with the beauty of the place. But the quickest road to lasting improvement is the one we must take, and I hope there'll be enough more blossoms on the trees in the future to make up for the loss of the grass." "You won't lose ground with Sally by opposing her, now and then. She'll come round in the end to seeing you're right." "I'll have plenty of chances to win favour by opposition with everybody. Even Mr. Rudd has his ideas about what ought to be, because of what was when he was a boy on the farm up in New Hampshire. Max wanted the new fence posts of ash, though locust is much more lasting, and there's plenty to spare in the timber lot. As for the neighbouring farmers, they're already keenly alive to our first efforts, and some of them are watching eagerly to see us make mistakes--but not all. There are several who are progressive enough themselves to want to see us win out with modern methods." "With all your studying, I suppose you'll make some mistakes." "Mistakes!--Dozens of them. But we won't make the same one twice. Jo, if you could have heard those fellows talk whom I heard on my trip, the ones who run the really successful farms on scientific methods, you wouldn't wonder at my interest." He was still talking away when he turned the car in through the now restored gateway. It may be worth while to mention that the first thing in which Max had shown a real interest was the restoration of that gateway. He had declared--nobody knew why--that it must be in absolutely correct shape before the Neil Chases came through it again. So the mason who came to mend the broken chimney found himself, much to his surprise, put first at the tumble-down stone pillars of the gateway. The carpenter, also, who arrived prepared to repair the porch columns and floor, and to mend the broken shutters, was led at once by the young master of the place to the gateway and instructed that he must make the old gate itself substantial, and hang it so that it should swing true. But although it was nearly six months since the Chases had tried to buy the place, they had not yet driven through that restored gateway. Possibly they did not care to be in haste to look at the place they could not own. "There's Sally, in the old garden. She told me she could hardly wait to begin on it," and Josephine waved her hand at a distant figure with a spade in its hand. The spade was promptly cast aside and the worker came running around the house to meet the arriving car. "Isn't she looking splendidly?" Sally's friend murmured in her brother's ear, as the figure came near enough for a pair of very blooming cheeks to show clearly in the April sunshine. "Never better. Out-door life is going to make her a Hebe," replied the driver of the car, under his breath, though he kept his eyes dutifully on the roadway until the car came to a standstill and he had stopped his engine. "Come and see the garden, and listen to my plans," commanded Sally, the moment her friends were on the ground. "No, I don't mean Jarvis. I know he has more important business--in the orchard, or the barns, or the woods, or the south lot--" "Meadow, please," corrected Jarvis, with a smile which suggested past efforts to teach Sally the nomenclature of the farm. "--or anywhere that he can walk to in the mud, and come back covered with stick-tights, with a tear in his coat. He looks happiest when his clothes are most demoralized and his boots thickest with clay." "The sign of your true farmer," urged Jarvis. But Sally had no further attention to bestow on him, and immediately led Josephine away over the damp and spongy sod to that portion of the ground at the rear of the house which showed, by a few lingering signs, that it once had been a proud and stately old-time garden. "You see the old box border is still in pretty good condition, only winter-killed--is that the word?--in a few places. I shall try to fill those in, for I care more for the box than for anything I could have. See how it outlines all those funny little curving paths, where I suppose roses and larkspur and bleeding hearts and sweet-williams used to grow. They're going to grow again, if I can make them." "Lovely! I can see it now. And phlox--Sally, you must have masses of phlox--and candy-tuft, and mignonette, and sweet alyssum--" "And love-in-a-mist, and forget-me-nots, and sweet peas, and hollyhocks. Only the hollyhocks are not going to be in the garden, but in a long row back there, to screen away the kitchen garden from the lawn. Only--oh, dear, you have to wait so long for the things you want most! Hollyhocks don't bloom the first year from seed--and I want to see them there this first summer, pink and white and red and yellow in the sun, like a row of children dressed for a party." "Can't you get plants somewhere?" "Perhaps, from the neighbours--only country people don't go in much for the old-fashioned flowers now. They have rubber-plants and hydrangeas--in tubs--just think--in tubs! And geraniums in tomato cans!" "Sally! Not all of them. They have nasturtiums--." "Yes, and pink sweet peas beside them, to set one's teeth on edge. By the way, my sweet peas are in!" Her voice proclaimed triumph, and she led the way down one of the damp, moss-grown paths to a sunny spot where a long strip of freshly raked earth showed that somebody had lately been at work. "Bob dug it up for me, Uncle Timmy fertilized it, I raked it and planted the seeds, while the whole family stood around and gave advice. Max wanted them sowed thinner and Alec thicker. I consulted the seed catalogue and the directions on the paper packet, and then sowed them just as my judgment directed." "As you haven't a particle of judgment--" "Experience, you mean. No, I haven't experience, but I consider that I have judgment, and I sowed the seeds according to that. In June I will pick you a gorgeous bunch of them." "In June--if I'm not away somewhere. In which case you can send them to me in a paste-board box." "Joey Burnside!" Sally picked up a rake lying in the path and brandished it fiercely. "Don't you dare to go away--anywhere. You're to come and visit me--from June till September." "How would May till November do?" "Still better. The idea of your expecting me to get along without you, the very first summer I live in a place big enough for anybody to visit me in! You can go off to your fashionable resorts in the winter, if you want to--I can spare you better, then. But this summer! Jo, think of the moonlight nights, with the odour of mignonette coming up to the porch from the garden--" "I don't think the odour of the mignonette would carry so far." "We can walk within range, then. And the evenings on the porch, with Mr. Ferry and his sister over--and his sister's friend--" "I didn't know he had a sister--or that the sister had a friend." "She's been in Germany the last two years, living with an aunt, and studying music--the piano. The friend has a voice. Oh, we'll have the jolliest times--you can't think. And in July will be the haying. Jo, we'll have larks during haying--real country larks--and a barn dance. You _can't_ go away anywhere--not even for a week-end house party! Say you won't!" "You artful schemer--I don't see how I can," and Josephine looked as if she couldn't. "But see here, Sally. I couldn't come and visit you here and leave mother alone. You know she would go with me, if it were to the mountains or to the sea-side." "I'd love to have her come too," said Sally, quickly, "if she would care to. How I wish she would. Then I shouldn't have to bother Mrs. Ferry to come over every time we had the young people all here. If I could just furnish the west wing for you--" "Why not let us furnish it?" Josephine jumped at her opportunity. Somehow, during the last few minutes she had become firmly convinced that she could not think of spending the summer months anywhere but at the farm. All sorts of pictures had leaped into her mind at Sally's outlines of what the summer was to be. The stage seemed set for happenings of extraordinary interest, from which she did not want to be left out. There would be other things going on at the old place besides ploughings and plantings, harvestings and threshings--or perhaps it might be that these very terms in the vegetable kingdom might come to be used significantly of doings in the human sphere of action. Sally looked up with a flash of protest in her eyes. "Let you furnish it!" she exclaimed. "Oh, but I couldn't--I know what your furnishing it would mean. Persian rugs and silk hangings, Satsuma jars and cut-glass bowls filled with roses. And on the other side of the hall our poor things would look"--she stopped short, and was silent for an instant. Then, "I'm an envious pig," she owned. "If you'll only come you may furnish it in teak wood and Chinese embroidery, and I'll be contented on my--bare floors." But Josephine's affectionate arm was around her friend's shoulders. "Sally Lunn," said she, soothingly, "give us credit for better taste than that, entirely from the standpoint of harmony. In a summer home on a farm people of sense don't use Persian rugs or teak wood. We'd put plain white straw matting on the floors, hang muslin curtains at the windows, and use the simplest willow furniture to be had. The windows should be open every minute, and there would be bowls of roses about--only I'd rather it would be sweet-williams or clove-pinks. Sally, don't you adore the old-fashioned clove-pinks, with their dear, spicy smell? And the bowls themselves wouldn't be cut glass--I despise cut glass for old-fashioned flowers, and so do you. Now, will you let us come?" Sally looked at her friend for a minute, thinking as she did so that for a rich girl Josephine Burnside possessed the sweetest common sense ever owned by anybody. Then she dropped her rake and pulled at Josephine's hand. "Come!" she cried. "Let's go back and look at the west wing. And the bedrooms over it are the nicest in the house. I haven't used them only because they were so big. But you won't care how many acres of straw matting have to be used to cover them." "Do you think Max will be willing for us to come?" Josephine asked with some anxiety, as they went in. "You remember, about the tent--" "Oh, he's anxious now to get Jarvis on the ground. And he's spoken more than once about the desirability of our renting some of our unused space, only of course I wouldn't hear of it, before, to strangers." Josephine plunged into details. They would bring Joanna for the season, that paragon of cooks. She should assist Mary Ann-- At which Sally laughed, and said that if incompetent little Mary Ann could assist dignified, competent Joanna, it would be a matter for congratulation. "We'll all dine together every night in the big dining-room, with all the windows also open, and more flowers on the table." Josephine would have gone on to further details, but as they crossed the hall to the west wing, the knocker on the front door banged with a decisive sound, and Sally opened to find Donald Ferry on the threshold. "I came on a matter of business," said he, when he had shaken hands, "if you can call asking a favour business. Shall I plunge into it?--A certain storage house in a city near our old home has gone out of commission, and we are notified that everything my mother has had stored there since we left the home must be moved at once. Now that my sister and her friend are to be here with us through the summer we should like to have my sister's piano where she could use it. But"--he spread out his arms with a gesture conveying the idea of great proportions--"the piano is a grand--and not a miniature grand at that--concert size. We couldn't possibly put it in our little house. Would it be asking too much of you to allow it to stand in one of your rooms through the summer, where Janet could do some practising on it? I assure you her practising is of the nature of a morning musicale," he added--as if Sally might need assurance in the matter. Sally turned to Josephine. "It's a special providence," said she solemnly, "to keep me from envying you your matting and willow furniture. Will you have a concert grand in the west wing? I trow not." Then she answered to her questioner. "Of course we shall be delighted," she told him. "And as I say, it will have a chastening effect on the Burnside family, who are thinking of furnishing our west wing and spending the summer with us. I'm sure they won't think of bringing a grand piano out here." Donald Ferry looked greatly pleased at this news. "That's fine," said he. "Mother has been promising Miss Constance Carew and Janet all sorts of pleasures in the country, and I should say this makes a sure thing of it. If four girls on a farm can't have a good time together--even when not aided and abetted by as many boys--there will be something wrong with them--and the boys. Can't we be called boys?--That's great news. And I may tell mother you will prove your good friendship by taking the white elephant of a piano? May we send it right away? You see, since it must be moved at once, it had best come where it is to stay. And we'll send around a tuner. Please use it all you can, just to keep it in good shape." "I'm not the tiniest sort of a musician," said Sally regretfully. "But Josephine is--she'll keep it in tune for you. I'll merely see that it's dusted." When he had gone Sally and Josephine looked at each other. "Miss Burnside," said Sally, solemnly, "I feel it in my bones that you and Miss Ferry and Miss Carew and Miss Lane are to take part, this summer, in a melodrama of thrilling interest. Country setting, background of hay-field, with cows coming down the lane. Curtain rises to the time of 'Sweet Lavender.' Miss Burnside is discovered, sun-bonnet on head, rake in hand, pretending to accomplish the bunching up of one hay-cock before the sun goes down. Enter at right young city clergyman, also in rustic attire. At the same time, enter, left, Miss Carew, in rival sun-bonnet. Miss Burnside gives one glance at her rival--" But a warm hand over Sally's saucy mouth, and a protesting--"Sally Lane, if you begin that sort of thing I won't live a minute in your west wing,"--put an end to the stage directions. "All right, dear," agreed Sally. "We won't talk any such silly stuff. We'll be four little country girls together, playing in the hay, and if we want to go barefoot we will--when there's nobody to see. But I hope, don't you, Jo? that 'Miss Carew' isn't as grand as she sounds!" CHAPTER XIII AFTERNOON TEA "I feel," said Sally Lane, impressively, "that the way to receive them properly is to have afternoon tea on the lawn. What is the use of having a lawn--even though it's still rather hummocky--and four magnificent ancestral oaks--ancestral oaks sounds like an English novel--if we don't have afternoon tea on It--under Them?" She stood in the doorway of the front room in the west wing, where Mrs. Burnside and Josephine were sitting, the one busy with some small piece of sewing, the other writing letters at a desk. "Are they coming over before we call on them?" Josephine inquired, with poised pen. "Coming to-day? Why, they only arrived last night." "I saw Mr. Ferry this morning, and he said he did not want to wait for us to come over with our hats and gloves on and call, he wanted to bring the girls and his mother over this afternoon, so as to lose no time in having them find out what was on the farther side of the hedge. I asked him why he hadn't brought them with him then--it was at eight o'clock this morning. But he said he wanted to bring them himself, and he was then on his way to his car--otherwise he thought he should not have hesitated at all on account of the hour. He said they were crazy to come." "Sally! He didn't say they were _crazy_ to come." "He didn't use that particular word, perhaps--men never do, of course. But he said 'eager,' or 'anxious,' or something like that--it means the same thing. Evidently they've been told all about us. What would you give, Jo Burnside, to know how we've been described?" "We probably haven't been described. Men never describe people. They just say, 'She's all right, you'll like her,' or something equally vague." "It would give me a chance to wear my lilac muslin," mused Sally quite irrelevantly, but Josephine caught her meaning. "Afternoon tea on the lawn? Then do let's have it. Anything to see you in that lilac muslin." "Then we'll trail over the lawn to meet them--only the lilac muslin doesn't trail--and we'll hold out our hands at a medium sort of angle, so that we'll be prepared to reciprocate whatever sort of high-low shake fresh from abroad they give us. Since Dorothy Chase came back last fall she gives a side-to-side jerk that stops your breath short just where it happens to be at the moment. What do you suppose they'll be like? Young ladies from two years' residence in Germany, or just plain, jolly girls?" Josephine shook her head, but her mother replied in a quiet tone of conviction: "I doubt if the daughter of that family will be anything but a simple-mannered girl, no matter how experienced she may be in foreign usages." Sally nodded. "So I'm hoping. But 'Miss Carew'--with a voice--sounds more formidable. It's for Miss Carew I'm going to have afternoon tea. I'll go out now and make my little cakes. And I'll have very, very thin bread and butter. I've just one cherished jar of the choicest Orange Pekoe, so the tea will be above reproach. And my one pride is my linen--you know how much mother always kept--not only her own but Grandmother Rudd's." Then she vanished, quite suddenly, from the doorway, as if, having once mentioned the mother of whom she seldom spoke, she could not come back again to other subjects until a period of silence had intervened. "I'm so anxious to see her put away the black clothes," said Josephine to her mother. "It will be good for her to wear the lilac muslin, for now she's made it she can't bring herself to put it on, though she knows how we all want to see her in colours again. Speaking of colours--Jarvis said this morning that by the fence in the south meadow the grass was blue with wild violets. I believe I'll go and pick a big bunch for Sally's tea-table." "It seems rather early for tea on the lawn," suggested Mrs. Burnside, "though I couldn't bear to damp Sally's ardour by saying so." "Oh, it's really very warm, and the lawn seems quite dry. I don't blame Sally for wanting to show off the 'ancestral oaks.' It's almost like June." But--alas for plans which count upon the most June-like May weather--no guests were served with afternoon tea that day except under a roof more substantial than the low-hanging boughs of the great oaks. At mid-afternoon, treacherously enough, the sky showed not a cloud, except over beyond the timber lot, where they had risen to some height before they could be discerned from the lawn. There Sally, lilac-clad, was laying her fine linen cloth, setting out her thin teacups of the old gold-banded china, and arranging Josephine's blue meadow-violets in a curious, engraved glass bowl of Grandmother Rudd's. A small gust of wind, lifting the edges of the heavy damask cloth and nearly capsizing the violets, first called her attention to a change in the weather. Uncle Timothy, bringing out chairs at her behest, paused and scanned the horizon with an experienced eye. "Looks a little dubious to me, Sally," he observed, although he came on with his chairs. "Company due pretty soon?" "It's four o'clock--they'll come very soon, for I sent word that we'd have tea early on account of its growing cool after five. Yes--there is a little bit of a dark cloud in the south beyond the woods, but you don't think it will bring rain right away, do you?" "If it begins to blow, it will--look out, there--" for another brisk little zephyr lifted the corner of the tea-table cloth again, and threatened the teacups. "Weather changes pretty suddenly sometimes, in May." "But the sun is so bright--and a minute ago I was thinking that it was lucky the branches are so thick on this old oak, for the sunshine was really uncomfortably hot. It can't rain right away. I'll bring out everything, and be ready to offer them tea the minute they've said 'Good afternoon.'" Sally hurried away to the house, leaving Uncle Timothy standing guard over the tea-table and keeping a weather eye on the gathering patch of clouds. But it could rain right away, as it presently proved. By the time Sally crossed the lawn with her plates of bread and butter and tiny sugary cakes, Mary Ann following with the tray holding the tea equipage, there were strong indications of what was soon to happen. Sally had not more than decided that it was best to retreat to the porch and await developments, than the first drops on her upturned forehead warned her that the retreat could not be too hasty. The Ferry party, coming through the gap in the hedge a few minutes earlier than they would have done if it had not seemed expedient to forestall the gathering shower, saw the scurrying hosts. Jarvis and Max were with them, for it was Saturday afternoon. The Ferrys themselves were forced to make haste also, and as a result, guests and hostess, tea-tray and chairs, bread-and-butter and violets, reached the shelter of the big porch at nearly the same time, and sixty seconds later the first pursuing dash of rain rattled against the pillars. "It's too bad," cried Sally, breathless and laughing, as she turned around to greet her guests, little curls escaping about her forehead and over her ears, in spite of all her previous care to insure their smooth order. But her hand gave warm welcome all around the circle, and she led the party into the wide hall, now transformed by the waxing of its dark floor and the presence of several old-time rag rugs, into a hospitable-looking entrance. "Put the tea-table here by the open door, please, Max," she directed. "We'll be as near out of doors as we can." At the first sound of voices Mrs. Burnside and Josephine had appeared, and between them things were in order in the new setting in less time than it takes to tell it. A great bunch of daffodils on an old table near the door made the spot seem quite festive enough for the occasion, and Sally, when she had caught her breath and pushed back the distracting curls, proved herself to possess a fair amount of the poise of the accustomed hostess whom nothing can really upset. She rearranged her tea-table just inside the hall door, and before she had finished, a dash of sunshine fell across it, making her declare, as she settled the bowl of violets, that if the shower could just have confined its efforts to her garden, which needed watering, and not to sprinkling the lawn, which didn't need it, she would not have felt so ungrateful to it. "And we came especially to see the garden," said Janet Ferry. "We've heard of that garden in every letter since the first of April." She looked at her brother with a mischievous twinkle in her hazel eyes, much like his own. "Do tell me what you have heard," said Sally serenely, preparing to make her tea, and sending Max for the hot water. "The really important things, like the coming up of the sweet peas, or unimportant ones, like the strange way the weeds have of appearing faster than the seeds?" From the nonchalance of this question it will be seen that Sally herself thought nothing of the fact that items concerning her garden should have seemed of sufficient importance to go into the letters of a brother whose time was ordinarily occupied with affairs much more momentous. The garden was of overwhelming importance to Sally, why shouldn't it be interesting to everybody? But there were two people in the company besides his sister who glanced rather quickly at Donald Ferry. He, however, seemed to think there could be no reason for anybody's minding what he might choose to write about. "Here were two girls," he said, from his position in the doorway, where he stood leaning against the lintel, watching the process of tea making, "writing long descriptions of all sorts of rural beauties they had discovered in their travels about Germany and France--given them as a reward for long study by a discerning aunt. They professed special interest in gardens. Should I refrain from telling them about the only one in sight, even though it couldn't be said to have reached the show stage?" "You certainly didn't refrain," said Miss Constance Carew, smiling at him from her seat near Sally. "We were told that if we would spend the summer here, one of our chief joys would be the old, box-bordered garden." "So long as it helped to bring you, I don't regret it," said he, returning the smile in a way which made those who observed decide at once that these other two were old and familiar friends. Miss Carew, though she was not precisely a pretty girl, was really beautiful when she smiled, and had, at all times, an undeniable charm about her which came from one knew not just what. She was rather tall but very graceful, and her manner had about it an indefinable something which made one like to watch her, admiring each move she made as something done just a little differently from the way other people did it. Sally poured her tea, and the three young men handed about the cups. Everybody fell to talking at once. Max, who had had an approving eye on Miss Janet Ferry from the first, and had decided that he should much prefer her conversation to that of her more impressive friend, drew up a chair beside her when his duties were over, and presently proved her to be as blithely entertaining as her appearance had promised. She was a small person in stature, but her personality was one not to be ignored. She looked like a miniature edition of her brother, heavy braids of the same red-brown hair wound about her small head, the same brilliant, good-humoured hazel eyes looking out of a prepossessing young face, and the same seemingly quick appreciation of everything other people said and did making her a delightful person to talk with. Max, as he supplied her with bread-and-butter, plied her with questions about her life in Germany, and listened to her vivacious stories of her experiences, thinking that it was a long time since he had met a girl he liked so well. "You don't know how much it means to Constance and Janet to find two girls of their own sort so near," declared Donald Ferry, bringing his cup to take it with Josephine close beside the doorway. "I think they've been feeling a little dubious over finding us out here in a place which had neither lake, seashore, nor mountains to recommend it." "Perhaps they're still feeling so," suggested Josephine. "There's not much about tea in a shower to cheer their spirits." "Do they look as if they needed cheering?" Josephine glanced from Janet, laughing whole-heartedly at something Max was apparently describing with great eloquence, to Constance Carew, leaning back in her chair and looking up at Jarvis, who stood beside her, with the smile which made her face a picture to study. "It's delightful for us, I'm sure, that they've come," Josephine said warmly. "You'll find Janet up to the wildest schemes for sport you can devise. And Constance, though she looks so stately, can unbend like a school-girl. As for her voice--you must hear her pretty soon. Janet is anxious to touch her old piano again, and both are always obliging with their music. They are equal to quite a concert between them." "So we've been hoping. Sally has dusted the piano no less than five times to-day in anticipation. You can't think what a pleasure it is to Sally just to see that piano standing there. It happens to be almost the precise duplicate of the one that was sold when her old home was broken up." "I'm glad. I hope she uses it?" "Not in a way that she would let me call using it. She sits down and plays little bits--mostly out of her head, I think. She--Why, what's that?" It was Bob, tearing by the front door and yelling as he ran: "Team running away in the south meadow--man knocked down!" In an instant three teacups clinked and clattered as they were set hastily down, and three male figures bolted out of the door, without apology further than three ejaculations of surprise and chagrin. Mr. Rudd followed at a brisk walk. As for the portion of the company remaining, they also put aside teacups and plates, and followed Sally to the living-room. They ran in to the four windows of the long room, between two of which stood the piano. Janet Ferry gave it a private nod and pat as she went by, whispering, "You dear old thing! I'll speak to you as soon as I can." They could see the runaway team, a plough jerking at their heels, dashing madly across the furrows, one of the horses apparently much wilder than the other. They saw Jarvis, Ferry, and Max reach the rail fence at nearly the same moment, and go over it at a rate of speed which suggested danger to trousers-legs. Bob could be discerned, racing frantically in the wake of the careering horses, and in the nearer distance Mr. Rudd could be heard shouting something wholly unintelligible. One of the running figures halted near the fence, stooping, and the watching eyes understood that the presumably injured ploughman was lying there. "It's Don that has stopped," said Janet Ferry to her mother. "Now he'll probably have a new case on his hands. I do hope the man isn't much hurt." "I can't stay here to look!" cried Sally, and, gathering up her lilac skirts, ran away out of the room. In a moment they saw her flying across the wet grass, her tea-party forgotten. "I am going too," and Janet Ferry, delicate folds of pale gray silk caught up as Sally had caught up her muslin, was off in Sally's train. Josephine and Constance Carew looked at each other. The guest nodded. "I don't mind the wet grass," said she--though one glance at the ephemeral fabric of her frock made Josephine say, as the two hurried to the hall, "Had you really better? The grass is soaking." "Who cares for clothes when there's a runaway?" replied Miss Carew. "Besides, this will tub, and yours won't." "But the man may be badly hurt," and away went Josephine, high-heeled pumps making her flight a trifle dangerous, over the slippery turf. And her guest ran at her side. By the time they reached the meadow fence the team had been brought panting to a standstill, cornered by Bob and Jarvis at the far end of the meadow. When Donald Ferry looked up from the prostrate form of the ploughman, he beheld four figures in dainty dresses also brought to a stand-still by a splintery rail fence over which it did not seem discretion to attempt to scramble unless the need were dire. It was not dire. Jake Kelly had only been stunned by striking his head upon a big stone just upturned by his plough. He was already opening his eyes and the colour was returning to his sunburned face. He put his hand to his head. "All right," called Ferry to the row of anxious faces by the fence, at which the tense expressions relaxed, and certain dimples began to play. If nobody were seriously hurt, the situation certainly had its amusing side. Five minutes ago they had all been demurely drinking afternoon tea, with the most correct society manners evident on all sides. They had not known each other very well, but each had wondered what the others were like upon less formal occasions. And suddenly a decidedly less formal occasion had been precipitated into their midst. "Guess I ain't much the wuss for wear," declared Jake Kelly, sitting up. "All's hurt's my feelin's at havin' that there team git away from me like that. The old mare's steady's a clock--thought she could hold the young one down, if he did git lively. Dunno now what he took off at. Serves me right for trustin' 'em a minute while I lit up my pipe." Bob, on the old mare's back, and Jarvis, at the bits of the young horse, were bringing back the plough undamaged by its brisk career across the field. Jarvis certainly presented a somewhat incongruous appearance in his afternoon attire, as he plunged along the furrows in foot-gear not intended for locomotion over freshly ploughed land. Jake rose to his feet, answering the queries of Ferry at his side as to his fitness for continuing work with a decided: "Sure I am. Sha'n't get even with myself for that fool trick till I've done a good dozen furrows. You don't ketch that there pair o'hosses gittin' away from Jake Kelly again this day!" "The rescue party may as well go back to the teacups," observed Jarvis, as the whole group, standing partly on the one and partly on the other side of the rail fence, watched the now subdued team take a fresh start under the guidance of a vigilant driver with a large bump on the back of his head, which he had refused to have treated in any way but with contempt. Saying which, Jarvis mounted the fence--tearing a slight rent near the hem of his trousers-leg because he was not looking where he went. He had been observing the effect of the now brilliant sunshine on an uncovered fair head, and in the fashion of Jake he accepted the proffered sympathy of Bob on the disaster to his clothing with a murmured: "Serves me right for not attending strictly to business." The company marched back in more orderly ranks than it had come forth. Max found himself by the side of Constance Carew, and discovered that she had quite as strong a sense of humour as Janet Ferry, for she described to him most amusingly the way in which the four girls had abandoned all concern for their afternoon finery, and had rushed forth prepared to help bear a stretcher down a wet ploughed field, or share in dashing about in the attempt to catch the runaway team. "This is what comes," said he, in reply, and looking around at Sally with mirth in his eye, "of trying to be fashionable on a farm." "Trying to be fashionable!" cried Sally, behind him, catching the words. "I was merely trying to be hospitable. But Fate evidently didn't mean I should be either. Twice in one afternoon!" "Let's go back and turn the tea-drinking into a musicale," suggested Ferry. "I know my sister is longing to get her hands on the piano." "You shouldn't propose to have your own family perform," Janet reproached her brother. "Why shouldn't I? I haven't heard you play for two years, nor Constance sing for three. No false modesty shall keep me from demanding to be satisfied." "I heard somebody telling somebody else I had dusted the piano five times to-day," said Sally, as she led the way in, "and I surely ought to be rewarded for such care as that." So they trooped in, a somewhat less faultlessly attired party than they had gone out, for Sally's curls were more rebellious than ever, Josephine's skirts had a mud stain on their hem, Jarvis's rent showed plainly, and everybody's foot-gear was decidedly the worse for the run over wet sod and fresh earth. But they had left behind them all stiffness born of untried acquaintance, had discovered that there was nobody in the company who could not be depended upon to play a gallant part in whatever emergency might arise, and were in a mood thoroughly to enjoy the remainder of the visit. Without being asked again Janet went straight to the piano, sat down at it as if it were the old friend it claimed to be, and with one or two affectionate soft layings of her hands upon it in almost noiseless chords, as if she were asking it something to which it responded under its breath, swept into a movement from one of the greatest compositions the world knows. When she finished she looked up at her brother, who had come to stand close beside the instrument. Her eyes were full of tears, and his were by no means free from a suspicion of moisture. Evidently the sound of the familiar keys had many associations for both, and they were associations which their mother shared, for her face was turned away toward the open window, and she was very still. But in a minute more Janet had turned to beckon to her friend, and was beginning an accompaniment without so much as waiting for Constance to reach the piano. Smiling, the tall girl found a place beside it just in time to take up her part. And then--the listeners held their breath. The golden notes rang through the rooms and out upon the warm May air, while the singer herself seemed as little to be "performing" as if the song had been a mere child's play tune. "What made you start with that?" protested Constance, in her friend's ear, the moment it was over. "Such a show song!" But Donald, from the other side of the piano, leaned across. "Don't mind," he whispered. "Any of the simple things would have done us out just now." Constance nodded quickly. The next minute, with a word to Janet, she had plunged into a gay little German song, with a spirit in it as light as the spring itself, and every one was smiling. When they had gone, Jarvis, passing through the hall with a glance into the room where the piano stood, caught a glimpse of Sally standing by the open window, looking after the four who were just disappearing through the hedge. He crossed the room softly and looked out over her head. "They're all right, aren't they?" said he. "Splendid!" agreed Sally. "I like them both, even more than I expected." Then she added, in a lower tone, "I'd give the hair off my head to be able to make such music as that, either with my hands or with my voice." Jarvis, smiling to himself, unperceived touched one fair strand with a reverent hand. "I wouldn't give," said he, "even for such magnificent music as that, so much as that one curl over your right ear--if another wouldn't grow there in its place." Sally faced about. "The idea!" said she. "Of course you wouldn't. It's not yours, sir, to give! But I'd cut it off, when you weren't looking!" CHAPTER XIV TWO AND TWO "Shall we make the haying a society affair for ladies in French frocks, or an athletic event for a lot of young fellows who don't know a rake from a pitchfork?" The questioner was a tall young man in corduroy trousers and high boots, a blue flannel shirt and a nondescript hat--though the hat had come off as he approached the garden, where Sally Lane, in blue gingham and short sleeves, was carefully setting out some spice-pink roots. Sally looked up. She had become accustomed in a measure to seeing the heir of the house of Burnside thus attired, and to noting the daily deepening coat of tan upon his face and arms, but it never failed to strike her afresh as a miracle which a year ago would not have seemed possible. "I haven't the faintest intention of inviting any ladies in French frocks," she replied. "Do you know any gentlemen in frock coats who wish to be asked?" "Plenty--but I'm not asking any invitations for them--this time. No--it's a bunch of the Reverend Donald Ferry's friends I want to invite." "The Reverend--how odd that sounds!--Who are they?" "News-boys, boot-blacks, office-boys, messenger boys--every kind of boy. He proposes to buy or borrow the rakes and pitchforks, have out a different set of lads for two days running, and present us with the labour of the crowd in return for the lark he expects it to be for them. Janet and Constance will supply the lunch. Of course the amount of work the boys do isn't to be reckoned on like that of trained hands. But our ten acres of hay isn't a tremendous crop, and with Jake Kelly and myself to boss the job, we ought to get through in respectable season, if the weather favours." "Do have them come. Max is going to let Bob have his way at last, and leave the office, so he'll be on hand, too." "Good! Bob's been on tenter-hooks all the week, I know, but I didn't know old Max had given in. Alec will be the next deserter from the ranks of the business men. Max may hang on through this season and next, but you'll see him with us the third, or I'll sacrifice my hat." He surveyed the specimen in his hands as he spoke. "Valuable offering it would make, wouldn't it? That hat began its career at a university and ends it on a farm. In my present state of mind I don't call that a come-down." "Don't you?" asked a voice behind him, and Jarvis swung round to behold Janet Ferry, gloves and weeding instrument in hand. "Then I suppose it's not a come-down for my gloves, bought in Berlin, worn in London, and worn out in Sally's service in a garden composed mostly of weeds." "Weeds! Will you have the goodness to look at my sweet-peas?" Sally indignantly waved an earth-bestained hand toward the trellis, where three pink, one white, and one brilliant crimson blossom flaunted themselves in the July sunshine as the first blooms of the sweet-pea season. "I take it back," admitted Janet, "and I'll not call my work 'weeding.' What are you doing, idling here, Mr. Farmer? I thought you never allowed a moment to go to waste." "I'm not wasting any now," disputed the farmer. "I merely paused a moment on my way to the barn where I intend to rig up a fork for unloading. I'm consulting the Lady of Strawberry Acres about letting your brother's boys come and rake hay for us." "Oh, yes. He's full of that plan. I'll give you fair warning, Sally, if you give Don half an opening he'll have you overrun here with his protégés. Have you the least idea how many men, boys, and babies he has on his lists? And every one of them is a personal and particular friend of his." "I know he's a tremendous worker." Sally rose to her feet and surveyed the result of her labours. "They look dreadfully droopy, don't they?" "You need more water. I'll get it." And Jarvis picked up her sprinkling-can and was off with it. "I shall be delighted to have the boys come, Janet," Sally went on heartily. "I think your brother's work is fine--great--and if the old farm can help in any way I shall be glad." "I thought you were arranging to have a house-party from town, and I was afraid his plan would interfere." "I did plan that, some time ago, but I like this idea much better. What's the use of exerting ourselves to entertain a lot of indifferent people when we can give a jolly time to the ones who never have any fun at all?" "That's what Don says. And these boys are his special care. He has club-rooms for them in the city, and he's working now to get all sorts of additions to it--baths and showers and gymnasium apparatus. Oh, I think it's fine, too. I didn't at first, when he wrote me about it, but now that I'm here and see for myself, I'm immensely interested and want to help." They discussed the coming event fully as they worked. It was discussed by everybody during the next few days, and plans were carefully perfected with the view of combining a good time for the young guests with the serious purpose of getting the haying done as promptly and effectually as possible. So, on a certain day in early July, Jake Kelly cut the hay, the entire ten acres, and reported a fair crop for land that had been running wild so long, a rather rainy spring having helped matters considerably. On the morning of the next day Ferry's boys were to arrive. "I wish it were a holiday for me," admitted Max, as he left the house to catch his car. "I'd rather enjoy seeing the mess Ferry and Jarve get into with a corps of bootblacks to make hay for them. They'll '_make hay_,' all right, mark my word." "Each of us girls is going to drive one load down to the barn," called Sally gayly, from the porch. As he ran down the driveway, Max waved his hand with a gesture of despair as if to indicate that this announcement certainly finished the prospect of getting anything done on the farm. "Don't mind him," said Jarvis, appearing in the doorway behind her. "I'm going to drive out the Southville road about five miles after a hay-fork and tackle I've bought of a man who's selling out. We don't really need one for our small crop, but it's too cheap to refuse. Back in a jiffy. Don't you want to go?" "Thank you--too busy." "You don't look it--" for she was starting away at a moderate pace down the driveway, her fresh blue-and-white print skirts giving forth a crisp little sound as she walked. "But I am. I'm going on an errand." "Which way?" "Down the road--Mrs. Hill's." "Wait a minute and I'll have you there quicker than you can walk." He ran in for his driving-gloves, and out through the back hall to the old carriage house where the car stood. He was only a minute in getting under way, for he had learned to leave his machine in a condition in which it could be used the next time without waiting to fill gasoline tanks or radiators. It was natural for him to go at things in a systematic way, and he kept his car, as he kept his books and papers, in order, quite without thinking much about it. But with all his haste Sally had reached the driveway and gone a rod or two down the road before he overtook her. He slowed down at her side. "Why didn't you wait? Jump in," said he, "and I'll have you there in one burst of speed." Sally stepped up on the running board and stood there, her arm on the back of the roadster's seat. "Get clear in, please," requested Jarvis. "There'll be no bursts of speed with you standing there." "I can hold on perfectly well." "So can the car stand still. It will stand still till you get in." Sally took the seat. "Now hurry up, please," said she. "There isn't any use in my getting in at all, just for a foot or two of ride." The car moved off. "Let's make it longer," Jarvis urged. "Drive out with me for the fork. We won't be half an hour away, and you can't have anything very pressing left on hand, with all the work you girls have done to get ready for those youngsters." He opened his throttle, as he spoke, and the car responded. Sally shook her head, decidedly. "No, no--I'm not going. I told Jo I'd be back in five minutes with the big pail Mrs. Hill said we might take for the lemonade." "They won't need lemonade for two hours yet. Come on--I want company." "Slow down, please," requested Sally, for the car was already approaching the farm house which was her destination. But instead of slowing down Jarvis deliberately increased his speed. "I'm in the habit of doing most things you ask me to," said he, "but this time I'm going to have my way. There are plenty of people there to finish it all, this morning. I'll have you back before they miss you." And the car shot by the Hill farm house at a pace which supported his promise. Sally sat back silently. Although Jarvis went on talking about various things she did not reply, and her silence lasted until, having gone a mile on his way, Jarvis slowed down a little and turned to look at her. "What's the matter?" he asked. "You're certainly not angry with me for running away with you?" She nodded, looking straight ahead. This was not like Sally, who, though she possessed plenty of spirit, was seldom known to sulk. "Well, I'm sorry if you are--but not sorry I ran away with you. You can talk to me or not, but you can't get away. I'm in too much of a hurry to have time to take you back, so I can keep you to myself for one straight half-hour. And that's--whether you know it or not--more than I've had for a month--six weeks--two months." This declaration unlocked Sally's lips. "How absurd," said she, still gazing straight ahead. "It may be absurd, but it's true. You may not have noticed it, but it's true just the same. I don't know whether it's intentional on your part or not--and I don't know which I would rather have it, that you've meant to keep away, or that you haven't noticed that you have. I think," he added, judicially, "that not knowing that you have would be much the worse, so I choose to think you've meant to do it. And I want to know why." He turned and looked at her again. The cheek next him was pink, and momentarily growing pinker. Sally again murmured something which sounded like "perfectly absurd." But Jarvis considered that no answer at all. The car began to climb a long grade. "Please tell me," he urged. "There's nothing to tell," said the girl, reluctantly. "There are ever so many of us, now, and we're naturally all together--or some of us are together--" "And some of us aren't." "We're just a lot of boys and girls--" "Are we? I feel rather grown up myself." Sally spoke quickly. "I'm not. Or, at least, I don't want to be. I want to stay a girl--a little girl, I'd be, if I could--just as long as I can. I want to have good times--all together. Not--two and two." The cheek next him was a very deep pink indeed, now. "Do I try to make it 'two and two'?" "You seem to." "And you don't want me to?" "No." "If I happen to see you alone in the garden, must I go and get your Uncle Tim or my mother?" "Not if you'll talk sense." "I don't talk sense?" Sally did not answer this question, so he repeated it, in the form of an accepted statement: "So I don't talk sense." This certainly called loudly for an explanation, and Sally made it--in a way. "I think you know what I mean." "I know what _I_ mean, but I didn't know it deserved that name." "It's only--" Sally hesitated, then she went through with it, speaking hurriedly: "I don't want you to bother about me--doing things for me--except as you do them for us all. You--you--are getting--" "Well, what am I getting? Out with it!" "To seem--not like my old friend Jarvis Burnside. And--I'd rather have him back." It was certainly out now. Jarvis drove on up the hill steadily, without any further questioning. It was precisely like Sally thus bravely to have shown him where he stood. It was a position clearly defined; he had stood on it so long that he ought surely to be able easily to go back to it. But he had driven to the top of the hill and on for two miles down the road, had taken the turn to the left and pursued that road for another mile, so that he was nearly at his destination, before he spoke. When at last he did speak it was only to say, very quietly and cheerfully--at least, so it sounded: "All right, Sally." Then he turned in at an open gate, and in less than five minutes, with the hay-fork and tackle and ropes at their feet, he was turning out again. The drive back was rather a silent one. Jarvis spoke often, and Sally replied, but it was about things to be seen along the wayside, or of the plans for the day. The trip was made rather faster than it had been done in coming, and the pace was excuse enough for there being no prolonged conversation on any subject. Jarvis was now an expert driver and by no means an over-cautious one, though he took no risks that he would have called by that name, when he was not alone. More than once his passenger held her breath, but realized afterward that she had been in no real danger. Then they were at home, and Sally was saying, "Thank you very much," as she jumped out, quite as if she had eagerly requested to be taken. "You are entirely welcome," was his response, in such an odd tone that she looked round at him. He was smiling, but not at her--at the driveway before him, and she could not help noting that he did not appear to be at all crushed by anything that had occurred that morning. It struck her that he had never seemed a stronger or more attractive figure than he looked at this moment, sitting at the wheel with the bright July sunlight touching his brown cheek and clean-cut profile; his head, with its heavy crop of dark hair, bare and breeze-tossed; his powerful engine throbbing before him. Suddenly she wanted to say: "You don't mind, do you?" with a queer little feeling that he didn't mind quite enough! But the car was already off, and she went on into the house with a sense of not feeling quite so relieved as might have been expected at having brought about something she had been wishing for some time to accomplish, but hadn't known just how. But she had no time left in which to do any thinking about her own affairs. As was easily to be discerned by the distant shoutings, Ferry's city guests had arrived, and had taken possession of the hayfield. From the kitchen window they could be seen, swarming about with rakes and pitchforks, like so many black spiders. There were many more of them than could possibly be used to any advantage, it seemed; but as about half of the distant figures appeared to be standing on their heads it might be taken for granted that employment of some sort could be had for everybody. At noon the four girls captured Jake and his horses, filled the bottom of the hay-wagon with baskets and pails, and were borne up to the fields, where they were hailed with cheers. Under a tall elm, at one side of the scene of operations, they spread the lunch, and a motley crowd was presently encamped around it. Their entertainers thought they had never seen a happier lot of youngsters. They were of all sorts and sizes, but in one point they were alike: their ignorance of the country and their delight in this interesting and novel experience. They were very plainly all devoted friends of the young man who had brought them there, as could be seen in their every look at him. "How long have you known Mr. Ferry?" Josephine asked of one slim, tall lad, with black hair drooping over a pair of sharp black eyes, his pale face full of animation. "Oh, ever since he come down our street one day an' axed me 'bout a feller I knowed that jes' come back from the horspital. Chap got run over--Mr. Ferry was feared he wouldn't have no home to stay in when he got out o' horspital. No more he didn't--till then. After that day, he did, all right." Josephine glanced toward the subject of these remarks and then back at the lad, who nodded. "Bet yer life 'twas him fixed it," he declared. "There don't no kid go without some kind of a home, if he can fix things for 'em." "You boys must think a good deal of him," suggested Josephine. The boy's lips answered only "You bet!" But his face instantly became eloquent. After lunch the first load of hay was pitched upon the wagon, Jarvis, Jake, and Ferry wielding the pitchforks, Sally driving, and a big boy at the bridle of the colt that had run away during the ploughing season and so could not be trusted entirely to Sally, although she begged to be allowed to manage him without help. He was not exactly a colt, after all, being four years old, but he was new in the traces of the work-horse and Jake kept an eye on him. "You fellers pitch pretty well fer green hands," acknowledged Jake, when the load was nearly on. He was on the wagon with Sally, placing the forkfuls as they were pitched on. "Expected to see one or 'tother of you git winded and go set down under the ellum. 'Bout the third load'll git you, though, I calc'late." The two contestants exchanged laughing glances under the forkfuls at the moment lifted above their heads. "This fellow's a Hercules for muscle," said Jarvis to Jake, "but I've discovered several places in my anatomy not so well developed as they might be. I'm going to get after them right away and train them up to the standard. Great Caesar, but it's a hot day!" He stood up and wiped his perspiring brow. "I think it's deliciously cool," remarked Sally from the top of the load. "It's perfectly comfortable here," called Janet, from the fence near by, where the other three girls were perched. Jake grinned. He had been grinning more or less all day. This "haying it" with a field full of boys and young ladies was a new and interesting experience for Mr. Kelly. At this moment a diversion arose. Two of the guests, disputing for the possession of a pitchfork, both naturally preferring it to a rake for bunching up from the winrows--being raked by Bob with a horse-rake--had decided to settle the matter, street fashion, with their fists. They were pretty evenly matched and a rough-and-tumble fight ensued. Ferry stopped to watch the bout and see that fair play was enforced. Everybody else stopped work also, and stood looking that way. Jake Kelly, perhaps the most interested spectator in the field, slid down from the load and strolled toward the affair, still grinning. Jarvis, with the precaution of a glance around at the wagon, on the top of which perched Sally, took a few steps in the same direction. It was hot, and he was glad of a moment's respite from his labours. He did not see that the lad at the bridle of the "colt" had relaxed his hold. Suddenly one of the lads in the affair of the pitchfork got in a bit of unfair work--unfair according to the standards Ferry had introduced among these young friends of his. A protesting yell from at least a dozen throats instantly called the fighters' attention to this fact, and Ferry himself called out, "No fouls, Bates!" At the yells the "colt" plunged, carrying his mate with him. Sally, though unprepared, hung on gallantly to the lines, trying hard to pull the pair to a standstill. The ground was uneven, and not free from an occasional stone. The wagon had not gone its own length before a shriek from the girls on the fence had brought Jarvis, Jake, and Ferry to the right-about, and all three rushed for the horses' heads. But they were too late to prevent the accident which is always liable to happen in a hayfield, particularly when the driver is a novice. The right front wheel swerved into a hollow, the wagon tipped, the "colt" plunged again. Sally slipped, and tried to throw herself down in safety upon the top of the load, but it slid with her, and in an instant the spectators and the three dashing to the rescue saw the whole load go like a green mountain to the ground, covering Sally from sight. Now a forkful of hay is light, but a load of the fragrant stuff is very heavy and very smothery, and it depends entirely upon where the victim lands under such an avalanche whether the matter is serious or otherwise. For a minute nobody could be sure just where the slender, blue-clad figure might be, for it made no outcry. The hearts of them all were in their throats for a minute, as the men tore at the hay with their hands, Jarvis thundering at the tall lad, who seized upon a pitchfork, "Don't touch it with that, you fool!" He was blaming himself savagely as he worked for leaving the girl for an instant, under such conditions. Ferry was calling, "Don't be frightened, we'll have you out in a minute!" Jake was grunting, "Hope the little gal ain't far under--hope to mercy she ain't!" and Josephine, Janet, and Constance were trying to get a chance to help, though the most they could do was to keep clear of the desperately working arms of the men. It was Jarvis who, with a hoarse ejaculation of thankfulness, came first upon a fold of the blue skirt. Sally had not been under the heaviest part of the load, and doubtless it was only the smother of the hay which kept her from calling out--if the fall itself had not hurt her. In a minute more they had her out, very red and choky, her eyes blinded with dust, her curls full of hay-seed; and she was lying on a soft mound of the fragrant stuff, the girls fanning her, Ferry bringing her lemonade from the pail, and Jarvis watching her with his heart in his eyes--only, fortunately, considering the conversation of the morning, her own eyes were too full of sticks to see. "You're not hurt anywhere, dear?" one or other of the girls asked her, at close intervals, and Sally shook her head each time, until at length she was able to clear her throat enough to murmur: "Only my feelings, as Jake said. It was so--silly--of me!" "It was much worse than silly--of us," vowed Donald Ferry, his fine, freckled face a deep Indian-red with heat and anxiety, his breath still a trifle laboured with the furious exertion of the rescue. But in a very short time she was all right again, and sitting up on her hay throne, watching the wrecked load being pitched back upon the wagon. The horses had not escaped, for a dozen boys had set after them, headed by the tall youth, and the boot-blacks and news-boys had proved themselves decidedly more efficient at stopping runaways than at making symmetrical hay-cocks. "If you have any regard for my pride," said Sally suddenly, when the load was half replaced, "you'll let me drive down to the barn." The three men stopped and looked at her. "That's mighty plucky of you, Miss Sally," declared Donald Ferry, "but--if you have any regard for _our_ feelings--" and he let an eloquent shake of the head finish his sentence for him. Jarvis said nothing. But a certain peculiar set of his jaw, as he went on with his pitching, spoke volumes. As for Jake Kelly--"Wall, I want to know!" said he. Then he laughed outright. "I calc'late, miss," said he, "ef you ride on that thar' load o' hay again to-day it'll be because them two's rendered incompetent o' action! An' they don't look to me much 'sif paralysis would set in yit awhile!" CHAPTER XV ON AN AUGUST EVENING "Oh, dear--who's this coming?--just as we've settled down to accomplish something!" "It's the Chases. Girls--we simply can't stop work to entertain them!" "We don't need to stop--this sort of work." They bent over their sewing--all but Sally, who with inward reluctance got to her feet as the Chases' big car rolled up the driveway and approached the porch, where the four girls were sitting, busy with some extremely important matters. But of course the work had to be put down for a little when Dorothy Chase actually set foot on the porch. "Oh, what an energetic crowd!" she cried, "this hot August morning, too. Sally, where are your men? Neil wants to see some of them while I talk to you." Sally pointed off into the distance. "Jarvis and Bob are hoeing potatoes over there in the field. There's a tree near by, and Neil can sit in the shade of that. You don't mind going, Neil? They're 'way behind with the potatoes." Neil Chase bowed impressively to the group on the porch. "I should much prefer to stay here," said he gallantly, "but business reasons impel me to seek that inferno out yonder. What Jarve finds interesting in that sort of thing is beyond me." He drove on by the house and over the grass behind, getting as near to the corn-field as possible, that he might have to walk only the least necessary distance. Meanwhile his wife sat down and inspected the quality of the work being done on the porch. "Are you people sewing for an orphan asylum?" she inquired, after discovering that red and blue ginghams and white cotton cloth of a grade only moderately fine were the materials being used for certain small garments. "Something like it. One of Mr. Ferry's poor families was burned out the other day--five children and an invalid mother." "Of course--the mother's always an invalid, isn't she? I believe they make themselves invalids on purpose. Well--it makes no difference how important it is. Those children won't freeze in this weather, if you don't get these things all done to-night. And I'm in a perfectly awful difficulty. You all have simply got to help me out." "What's the matter?" Josephine asked the question calmly, being used to Dorothy Chase's fashion of putting things. She threaded her needle as she spoke, as if she had every intention of continuing to work for as long a period as she had planned to do. The other girls resumed their sewing also. The cause of their being at work at all certainly was apology sufficient for going on with it, in spite of the visitor. "Just listen--and nobody is to say a word till I'm through. It's no use raising objections--you're to do as I ask, if you care anything whatever about my friendship." She grasped the ends of the lavender-silk parasol lying on her lavender-linen lap, nodded her head violently, causing several lavender plumes to nutter agitatedly upon her lavender-straw hat, and plunged into her subject. "I'm entertaining to-night for our new bishop--and he's a distant connection besides. I made it an evening affair, because it's so hot, and our new house opens up so beautifully. I planned to have some informal music--and at this last minute Herr Braun and Madame Hafsky have failed me. It was a misunderstanding about the date. It turns out they were engaged for to-day weeks ago by somebody very important--they won't give it up. I must have music--and everybody is out of town. Now what I want is to have you four go back with me to luncheon, help me about the decorations and things this afternoon, and then have Miss Carew sing and Miss Ferry play for us in the evening. Neil will come back for the men for the evening. You know I didn't ask you in the beginning only because I knew you didn't want to be invited. But now--you _must_ come!" It was precisely like Dorothy Chase. That was all that could be said. Nobody said it, but Sally and Josephine thought it, and Janet and Constance told themselves, as they sewed on, that the young matron who made this decidedly startling proposition must be accustomed to having things her own way, or she would not have acquired so confident a manner of making her demands. Sally was the first to give voice to her astonishment. "Well, Dorothy," said she, "you certainly take us off our feet. Here are we, just settled down to work that absolutely must be done, and in you walk and ask us to lay it down and go off to help entertain a bishop who's probably wishing you wouldn't do anything special at all for him this hot weather!" "Nothing of the sort. He's heard all about Miss Carew's voice--people that met her last year in Leipsic." Constance sat up. "Who, please?" "The Markhams--and the Carrolls. Now will you be good?" Constance leaned back again, applying herself to her sewing. "I don't remember anybody of that name," mused Janet, looking at Constance. "Yes, you do--friends of Mrs. Sears--just stopping over a day?" The two pairs of eyes met. There must have been something in Constance's--invisible to other beholders--which recalled some incident or other to Janet, for after staring a minute she suddenly dropped her eyes, said, "Oh, yes--" and sewed away faster than ever. "Will you come?" demanded Dorothy Chase. They tried to get out of it--they pointed out various reasons why it would be difficult for them to come away. Dorothy overrode all their objections, and became so persistent that at last the four agreed, but refused to go until evening. As for the young men of the household, it would be of no use to ask them. "Send out for us just in time for your affair, and we'll come," promised Sally. "But what you want of Jo and me I don't see. We can't perform for you in any way." "Oh, but you can help make things go. Sally can talk to the bishop--" "I can't," cried Sally, dismayed. "And Jo can be nice to Mrs. bishop. I don't see why your men won't come. It's so hard to get men for anything except sports in summer. How perfectly absurd it is for Jarvis Burnside to prefer hoeing potatoes in this frightful sun to playing society man for an hour or two in the evening!" "It's truly incomprehensible, but so it is. Besides, he looks like an Indian, and in his evening clothes would resemble a fiend. Be satisfied, Dorothy, now you have us for victims, and let the men stay at home." And Sally slashed a seam open with shears that clipped like her speech. But Mrs. Chase was not satisfied, and berated Jarvis roundly, when, presently he came walking up to the porch with Neil, looking the picture of well-browned contentment. He took her displeasure lightly enough, and presently had her laughing in spite of herself. "Well, I know all about it now," Neil Chase informed the company, as he got into his car. "We ploughed seven acres and sowed it to buckwheat, turned the buckwheat under and have now planted the ground to potatoes. In the end there are to be strawberries on the seven acres--or a good share of it--and Burnside, Lane & Co. are to become the most successful strawberry culturists in this part of the country." "Right you are," agreed Jarvis placidly, sitting down on the edge of the porch and poking about in Janet Ferry's work-bag until he found a thimble, which he placed on the only finger it would fit, the smallest one on his right hand. He had washed the hands before he came to the porch, but they were so brown that the little gold thimble looked most absurd in its new position. "If I sew for you for an hour, Miss Janet," he proposed, as the car bolted away down the drive, "will you come and hoe potatoes for me until lunch time?" "I would gladly hoe potatoes all day if I could be let off from going to play for Mrs. Chase's friends this evening." The fierce energy with which Janet pulled out a row of bastings gave emphasis to her words. Jarvis looked at his sister. "How did you manage not to let me in for this affair, Sis?" "I knew you wouldn't go, and Janet knew her brother wouldn't. Sally said Max would be too used up. Happy boys--we saved you from it at the price of going ourselves." "Self-sacrificing girls! We'll have to make it up to you somehow. When I see Ferry I'll--Hold on, I've an idea. How are you coming home?" "In Neil's car--as we go." "We'll see that you come in a better way. Be good little girls, do your stunts, keep up your courage, and we'll rescue you promptly at eleven o'clock," and putting down the thimble Jarvis went away, deaf to entreaties to tell what his interesting plan might be. "Oh, dear, isn't it horrid?" demanded Sally that evening, running into Josephine's room in the course of her dressing to have certain unreachable hooks and eyes fastened. "After sewing all day we deserve something better than one of the Chases' fussy affairs." "Stop fuming and stand still. Anybody who looks as pretty as you do in this white swiss--" "Poor old white swiss--the same one. I wish Dorothy could forget the pattern of it. She'll undoubtedly mention that I wore it at her wedding,--she does, every time." "Don't you care a bit. Those touches of blue make it seem perfectly fresh to me, and I've seen it much oftener than Dorothy Chase has." "You're a comfort. You look like a dream yourself, in that peach-coloured thing." "A midsummer day's dream, then--with my gypsy skin. Oh, there's Neil and his car." "A nice lot you are," Neil Chase was exclaiming outside, as he drove up to the porch and eyed the male figures occupying its comfortable recesses. Max reposed in a hammock; Mr. Timothy Rudd swayed to and fro in a rocker, reading the evening paper by the sunset light; Alec and Bob, sitting on the steps, were playing a game of some sort; and Jarvis lay stretched at full length on a rug, his arms beneath his head, luxuriously resting after his bath and change of work clothes for fresh flannels, enjoying the sense of virtue earned by having hoed many rows of potatoes with a vigorous arm. "A nice lot," Neil went on. "We have it in for you particularly, Jarve. Max never was much of a society chap, but you once could be depended upon to do your duty like a man. Bob, run in and see if those girls are ready. Dorothy won't be easy till she sees them. One thing I know--you'll soon tire of this playing at farming. To be the real thing you fellows ought to work till the sun goes down, doing 'chores.' I'll wager a fiver you come in and get your bath every night before dinner, eh?" "We certainly do," Jarvis laughed. "And you don't sit down in your shirt-sleeves?" "Well--hardly." "You're not the real thing--never will be. Look at those girls!" He pulled off his straw hat as two figures appeared in the doorway. "Nice farmers' folks they are!" "We're glad you think we're nice," responded Sally, gathering her white skirts about her. "Jo, be careful--don't get that peaches-and-cream frill against the running board." Jarvis's reposeful posture had become an active one, and he took care that neither peach-coloured skirts nor white ones fluttered against anything on the outside of the car that might soil them. "Here come Constance and Janet. Aren't they imposing society ladies now?" and Sally stood up to wave at the two coming through the hedge, accompanied by Janet's brother. Ferry had an eye upon the porch and meant to spend the evening consoling his friends for the absence of the usual feminine contingent. "You exquisite person--may I venture to sit beside you?" whispered Sally, as Constance, in trailing pale gray with bands of violet velvet, a shimmering cloak of the same hues enveloping her like a mist, took the place beside her. "This is the singer, not my friend Constance. I'm--just--a little--afraid of you!" "Nonsense!" Constance's warm hand caught Sally's beneath the cloak. "You know I don't like show singing--or anything that goes with it." "Don't forget your promise--" Josephine called back, as the big car, with its rainbow-tinted load rolled away. An answering shout from the porch, accompanied by the waving of several arms, conveyed assurance. "What promise?" asked Janet, turning to the others. Being the smallest of the party she occupied one of the folding seats which enable a roomy tonneau to hold five people. "The boys are coming after us--we don't know how. Doesn't that give you courage to face the evening?" murmured Josephine, and the expression on Janet's face became decidedly more hopeful. "But how can they come? They've only your brother's car!" she said in Josephine's ear. "Don't know, and don't care. They'll come--and rescue us from our fate." They felt, during the following hours, that they needed the cheering prospect of a merry home-going, to enable them to bear the rigours of the form of entertainment offered them. It was not that the affair differed much from affairs of its sort, but the fact that it did not materially differ might have been what made it seem so tiresome. Possibly the effect of a summer of out-door, home merrymaking, under the least conventional of conditions, had been to make formal entertaining under a roof seem more than ordinarily fatiguing and pointless. The handsome rooms were hot, in spite of open windows; the guests quite evidently were making heroic efforts to seem gay. Somehow even Janet's brilliant music stirred only a perfunctory sort of applause. "Never played so badly in my life," whispered the performer, when she regained Josephine's side, after her second number. "You played perfectly, as you always do." "I played like an automaton--a 'piano-player.' Don't pretend you don't know the difference." "I understand, of course. But, you know, we shouldn't really like to have you play for the bishop and these people as you do for us on your own piano." "The poor bishop! Doesn't he look like a martyr? I'm sure he's delightful--in his own library, or at his friends' dinner-tables--but he hates this sort of thing. He's beautifully polite, but he's bored. My only hope is that Con will revive him. It's her turn next." If anything could revive a weary bishop, who had that day attended two funerals and a diocesan convention, it would be both the sight and the sound of Miss Constance Carew. "Isn't she _dear_?" breathed Sally, in Josephine's ear, as Constance took her place, her slender, gray-clad figure and interest-stirring face a notable contrast to the personality of the professional singer who had opened the program of occasional numbers, interspersed through an evening of--so-called--conversation. Sally's hands were unconsciously clasped tight all through the song, and her eyes left the singer's face only long enough to observe that the bishop's tired eyes were also fixed upon the creator of all those wonderful, liquid notes, and to fancy that, for the moment, at least, he forgot how hot his neck was inside his close, clerical neckwear. "That pays me for coming," was the reward Constance had from Sally, whose praise she had somehow come to value more highly than that of most people she knew. Sally might be no musician herself, but she was a most sympathetic listener, and could appreciate the points singers love to have appreciated, as few people can. "That pays me!" Constance answered, drawing a long breath. "But, Sally, will it never end? It's nearly eleven, now." "Thank heaven! I'd lost all count of time. The boys said they'd be here at eleven. But Dorothy is not to know they're within five miles of here. She'd never forgive them." As she spoke a maid came to her elbow and handed her a note. Retiring to a secluded corner to read it, Sally returned with triumphant eyes. "We're to go down the lawn to a gate that opens on the other road. They're there. Now--to get away from Dorothy." This proved difficult. "Not let Neil take you back? Why not? How will you get back? But you're not going yet?" "Both the girls have performed twice, with two encores. You don't expect any more of them this hot night? Your bishop is going to sleep; do let him off and send him to bed. Yes, we must go now. They've sent for us. Don't bother about how we're going to get back--Neil will be thankful not to have to take us." Thus Sally. And when Dorothy persisted in exclamations and questions her guests fell into a little gusto of enthusiasm over the stately old house which Neil had bought after he had to give up the Maxwell Lane place, and diverted Dorothy's attention. Sally also praised everything she could honestly praise in relation to the affair of the evening--and not a thing she couldn't, for Sally was the most honest creature alive. Somehow at last she got her party away from their hostess, taking advantage of the bishop's approach to whisper hastily--"Here comes your guest of honour. Now do attend to him and forget us!"--and so had them all out a side door and off down the lawn out of range of the lighted windows. As they hurried along in their airy dresses, they were pulling off long, hot gloves, and saying, still under their breath, "Oh, isn't it good to get out?" They were laughing softly, and breathing deep breaths of the warm summer air, and looking up at the starlit sky. "Now where is that gate?" They had reached the high fence at the back of the grounds. "Here you are--this way," came back a low voice, and a doorway in the fence swung open. There was a rush of skirts, and the four were out in the road at the back of the suburban place, a country road on which stood, most appropriately, a long hay-wagon, cushioned with hay and rugs, drawn by a pair of farm horses, with Jake Kelly in command. Four other dark figures were grouped about the back end. "You splendid things!" "What a jolly idea!" "Oh, what a delicious change from a hot music-room!" "Here's Mother Burnside, tucked away in the corner. How good of you to come, you patient person!" "Now tell us all about it," demanded Donald Ferry of Sally, next whom, at the end of the load, he sat. It may be noted that Jarvis had not been found, of late, at Sally's elbow. Without a suggestion of seeming avoidance on her part, or of umbrage on his, the two no longer fell to each other as a matter of course. Sally's plea had had the effect she wished for. Both Constance and Janet appeared to like Jarvis immensely, and Sally could not detect any failure on his part to enjoy their society. She told herself it was a very good thing that she had been so frank with him. "All about it?" She was answering Ferry's question. "Why, I don't need to tell you. You know, without having been there, exactly how things went." "More or less, probably. Was it very hot?" "Stifling! How could it be anything else on an August night? Janet vows her fingers burned on the keys. But she played beautifully, of course, and the bishop had a little interval of being glad he was there. Poor man--I wonder if anything can be warmer than a clerical waistcoat." "Nothing, except a clerical collar, I believe. Did Constance have a bad time of it, too? She doesn't like singing in hot rooms." "She sang like an angel. The bishop opened his eyes and stared at her all through, and applauded so vigorously it must have made him several degrees warmer. But she deserved it." "I don't doubt it. And what did you and Miss Josephine do?" "Stood about and tried to look pleased and happy. My gloves felt like furs and a soapstone, and I couldn't think of anything intelligent to say to anybody." Ferry laughed. "I wonder if anybody ever does say anything intelligent at such entertainments. Did Mr. Neil Chase himself rise to the occasion and play the genial host as he should?" "I think he mostly spent the evening sitting on the porch rail at the farthest corner away from the drawing-room." "The memory of the fellows lounging comfortably on your porch undoubtedly made his role seem the harder by contrast. I saw a longing look in his eye as he drove away, and had an idea he might be back. But I suppose he couldn't get out of it." "No--their 'country home' isn't much like our 'country home.' Oh, isn't this air delicious? Do you suppose Constance would be willing to sing in it? Wouldn't it sound like a part of the summer night out here?" They were bowling along the quiet country road, only the chirp of many locusts, the rumble of the wheels, and the sound of their own voices to break the stillness. Ferry leaned forward. Constance was at the farther end of the wagon, between Jarvis and Max. "Constance!" he called softly. Sally thought she would not hear, but she did. Ferry's voice, even in its subdued tones, possessed that carrying quality which is the peculiar acquirement of the trained public speaker. "Yes, Don," she called back, and everybody stopped talking. People had a way of stopping other talk to listen when either of these two had anything to say. "Here's a person, at this end of the chariot, who wonders if people with drawing-room voices ever venture to test them in the open air." "What do you think about it?" "That one of them will, if we ask her. Therefore, we ask." Constance considered an instant. "Will you and Janet sing 'My Garden' with me--especially for Sally?" For answer Ferry tried for the proper key, found it--under his breath--and began, very softly, and on a low note, to sing. Janet joined him with a subdued contralto, and the two voices, without words, made themselves into a harmonious undertone of an accompaniment. Upon this support, presently, rose Constance's pure notes. It was no "show singing," this time, and the song did not lift above a gentle volume which seemed to fit, as Sally had anticipated, into the night. But the listeners gave themselves to the listening as they had never done before, even in the many times they had heard this girl. Even Jake Kelly, on his driver's seat, turned about to hearken with held breath. The farm-hand drew his horses down to a walk, that not a note might be marred. "A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot! Rose plot, Fringed pool, Ferned grot-- The veriest school Of Peace, and yet the fool Contends that God is not-- Not God! in gardens! when the eve is cool? Nay, but I have a sign: 'Tis very sure God walks in mine." The words[A] were familiar to some of them--the music new. Together words and music were something to remember. [Footnote A: The words are those of Thomas Edward Brown.] Certain of these phrases came in over and over, throughout the song--taking hold of one's heart most appealingly. "_Not God--in gardens!--when the eve is cool_?" came again and again, till one felt it indeed to be the word of the fool. Then, in exquisite harmony, fell the assurance--"_Nay, but I have a sign--a sign--a sign--'Tis very sure God walks in mine_!" Everybody but Sally found words in which to tell, in some sort, how the song had seemed to them, even Alec observing boyishly, "I say, but that's great. I didn't know you folks could all sing." After some minutes had gone by, Donald Ferry bent to speak in Sally's ear. She was looking off into the night, her hands clasped tight together in her lap. "I know," he said, very gently. "You always know," she answered, under cover of the talk, which was now going on again. "Tell me,"--wistfully--"do you think--He--walks in mine?" "I know it. He walks in every garden--when He is wanted there." CHAPTER XVI TIME-TABLES "If ever I felt weepy over seeing people off, it's this minute!" "We feel just as weepy over going, Sally Lunn. But cheer up. We shall come out every other minute, Jarvis and I, and mother will be planning all winter, I know, how early she can get back in the spring." Josephine gave Sally a tremendous hug as she spoke, and Mrs. Burnside, in her turn, took the girl into her motherly embrace. "I shouldn't have believed," she said warmly, "how reluctant I should be to go back to town in the fall, after this charming summer--nor how willing I should be to promise to return in the spring. Sally, dear--do make use of our rooms all you care to--though they're not half as cheery as your own, for the winter." "It _has_ been a lovely summer, hasn't it?" cried Sally, as the Burnside carriage, fine bay horses and liveried coachman, appeared upon the driveway, looking suggestively like city life again. "A successful one too, don't you think, for the boys? They're confident they have improved the ground so much that their first real crops, next year-will begin to show what crops ought to be." "Yes, it has all been a success," agreed Mrs. Burnside, "in spite of the mistakes they own to and laugh over. Jarvis himself has received a world of good from his out-door life. I'm hoping that all your brothers will make the most of next season--especially Max." "Oh, Max will come round in time," declared Josephine confidently. "I caught him feeling enviously of Jarvis's arms the other day. When Jarvis said he felt like a giant, Max said he thought he'd have to begin giant culture, whether he succeeded in making any squashes grow or not." This thought cheered Sally through the trying moment of watching her friends drive away. Their going took place at rather an unfortunate time for her. Uncle Timothy was off on a visit to his old New Hampshire home; Constance Carew had departed the week before--though under promise to return for a long visit the following summer; and Janet was away for a wedding in which she was to play the part of bridesmaid. Sally's one consolation was that Joanna was to take the place of Mary Ann Flinders in the kitchen. This arrangement had been made by Mrs. Burnside. On just what terms it had been effected Sally was not permitted to inquire. She had protested against it, but the argument had ended by the elder woman's saying gently, "Sally dear, I shall spend a happier winter if I know you have my good Joanna here. She likes the place, it is a pleasant change for her from the responsibilities of my entertaining, and her sister is eager to take her place with me. So let me have my way--at least for this winter." It was a way of putting the matter which could not be set aside. When the carriage had disappeared, Sally wandered out to the kitchen to console herself with the sight of Joanna. There was no doubt that the presence of that capable, comfortable person, possessed as she was of intelligence and common sense, would be a real support to the young mistress of the house. But at this moment even Joanna failed her, for she had gone to her room, the hour being that of mid-afternoon. Sally wandered back again into the living-room, feeling too disconsolate even to make the effort to cheer herself by going for a brisk walk in the keen late October air, a measure which usually had a prompt effect upon her spirits. From the living-room window she saw a messenger boy approaching, and hurried to the porch door to meet him, hoping he brought no ill news. Two minutes later she was reading the message, alone in the living-room, while the boy waited in the hall. Its purport banished all thought of present circumstances, except to bring the wish that it had arrived a half-hour earlier. "Mr. Rudd seriously ill anxious to have you come at once" it read, and was signed by the name of one of Mr. Rudd's old New Hampshire friends. After a minute's deliberation, Sally wrote her reply "Will come at once. Leave to-night if possible," and sent the boy off with it. As he departed Jarvis came into the hall from the door at the rear. Sally turned with an exclamation of surprise and relief. "Oh, I thought you had gone." "Without saying good-by? You ought to know better. But I'd have been off when the others went if I hadn't had some unexpected magneto trouble. All right now, and I'm going at once. What's that?" as he caught sight of the yellow envelope in her hand. "No bad news, I hope?" "Uncle Timmy's very sick--up in New Hampshire. I'm going to him as fast as I can get off." "Uncle Timmy? Oh, I'm mighty sorry! You're going, you say?" "Of course. He asked me to come. I was just going to telephone to find out about trains." "I'll see to all that--if you must go. But, Sally--have you let Max know?" "Not yet." "Have you sent an answer saying you will come, on your own responsibility?" Sally's slight figure drew itself up. "Why not? There's nothing else to do but go--and if there were, I wouldn't do it." "It will take you at least twenty-four hours to get there." "Yes. What has that to do with it?" Jarvis's face looked as if he thought it had a good deal to do with it. He knew that, dress as quietly as she would--and Sally's dressing for the street meant always the plainest and simplest of attire--there was that about her which invariably attracted attention. He understood with just what a barrier of youthful reserve she would be likely to surround herself upon such a journey, but he understood also that barriers of reserve are not all the defences sometimes necessary for a girl who travels alone. For one moment he felt as if he must go along to take care of her, in the next that nothing could be more out of the question. "I'm glad it's no farther, anyhow," he replied to Sally's quick question. "But hadn't you better let the boys know, before you go at your preparations? Max wouldn't be pleased at not being consulted, you know." "Will you tell him, please? But first find out what train I must take, so you can be definite with him." "But, Sally--really--shouldn't you ask old Maxy's consent?" "Why?" "Well--it's the diplomatic thing to do." "I don't care one bit about diplomacy. Uncle Timmy's sick and wants me. I'm going up to get ready. You can telephone what you like." With something in her voice which sounded suspiciously like a sob, she ran away up the stairs. Knitting his brows, Jarvis went into the west wing to the telephone, that instrument having been promptly installed upon the Burnside family's arrival for the summer. After considering a minute he called up a railway ticket-office and learned that the best through train Sally could take would leave at 5.30 that afternoon. His watch told him that it was then nearly half after three. There must be rapid work if Sally was to catch that train. Then he had Max on the wire. Statement, question, and answer now came back and forth in quick succession. "What, start to-night?" Max's tone was incredulous. "So she wants to do--with your permission. I suppose you'll give it. By the despatch we judge he's pretty ill." "Well, but--look here. I must say that's asking a good deal for her to go off up there. Why not wire whoever sent the thing to keep us informed, and if he gets much worse--" "Won't do, she's already answered she'll go." "Well, of all the--see here--but we can't really afford--" "I'll see to that--don't mention it." Jarvis's tone was curt. He was beginning to sympathize with Sally's reluctance to consult her elder brother. He wondered if Max would ever outgrow his habit of objecting to everything first and unwillingly taking it into consideration afterward. "I'm awfully busy here--can't do a thing to get her off--can't get away from the bank before five." "Don't try. Meet us at the train. I'll engage a berth for her--mustn't lose more time about it," and Jarvis hang-up his receiver without waiting to hear anything further. Then he had a wrestle with the Pullman ticket-office, in the attempt to secure a full sleeping-car section for Sally. "Can't do it," came back the answer. "Too full?" "No, but we don't give a section to one passenger." "Not if it's paid for?" "Not on one ticket." "On two tickets, then?" "Why, of course, if you want to pay for two full-fare tickets." Jarvis considered rapidly. If he secured the section on two tickets, Sally would be forced to show them both, so she couldn't be kept from knowing about it--unless he--yes, he could hunt up the Pullman conductor and give him one ticket. Wait--why not engage a state-room--if he could get it at this late hour?--though the train was a fast and popular one, and he knew this was doubtful. But a moment's reflection negatived this idea. Sally would certainly resent his taking the liberty of paying all the difference between one ordinary berth and a luxuriously private state-room. He realized, with a sense of irritation, that it was of no use. He could not send Sally up into New Hampshire packed in jewellers' cotton, marked "Fragile and Valuable," a registered package conveyed by special messenger. But he could make sure that nobody else shared the section either by night or day, and this he did, and double-tied his reservation until he could get to town to see about it personally. Then he ran over to the Ferry cottage, thinking that Sally might be glad, in the absence of the girls, to have Mrs. Ferry come over and help her with her hurried preparations. But he found the place locked and silent, and understood that the mistress of it had probably gone into town for the day, as she frequently did. So he dashed back and upstairs to Joanna's room, where he routed her from her sewing with the request: "Go see if you can be mother, sister, and friend to Miss Sally, Joanna--there's an angel!" Which intimate form of address may be comprehended if it is added that Joanna had been in the Burnside family since Jarvis himself was a small lad in knickerbockers--and the good woman's especial pride--and that therefore a warm friendship existed between them. Joanna made all haste to Sally's room, ready to do her best, but she found her charge already clad in travelling dress, pinning a veil about her hat, her gloves and purse laid out, and a bag packed with necessaries. The mind of the young mistress of the house was concerned less with her own preparations than with the comfort of those she was to leave behind. "You'll take good care of them, won't you, Joanna?" begged Sally. "Give them the things they like best--_all the time_. And you'll see that the living-room looks the way I like to have it when they come home, won't you?--the fire blazing, and the couch pillows plumped up. And you know they like a nice lot of shiny red apples brought up to eat before they go to bed!" "Yes, Miss Sally, I'll remember all the things. Don't you fret yourself. I can't take your place, but I'll see that the young gentlemen have their buttons sewed on, and plenty of good food. But I'm hoping you won't be gone long. Most likely you'll find your uncle better--I hope that, indeed I do, Miss Sally." "Thank you, Joanna--indeed I do, too. And--Joanna--I'm so glad you're here. I don't think I could go away and leave my brothers with just little Mary Ann to look after them!" Sally held the big hand tight a minute, looked into the plump, kind face with eyes which were suddenly like drenched violets--then dashed away the tears, smiled at Joanna, caught up her belongings, and ran downstairs, followed by the woman, who felt relieved when she saw Mr. Jarvis waiting in the hall below. It had suddenly seemed to Joanna as if she must go with the girl herself. It must not be supposed that Sally did not possess plenty of the air of capable independence. It was only that--well--the fair, curly hair, the dark-lashed blue eyes, the flower-like bloom of the young face, appealed to her, as they did to Jarvis, as needing protection from the eyes sure to follow her wherever she went. Looking up at her from below it also occurred to Jarvis that the plain and unrelieved dark blue of Sally's whole attire somehow served only to heighten the probable effect of her upon the observant public, and he longed fiercely himself to double the thickness of that veil and tie it tight about her head, requesting her not to untie it till she was safe in Uncle Timothy's presence! But all he said was: "Ready? You're a quick one--wouldn't have thought any girl could make such time. This all your baggage? Come on--the car's at the door." Outside he spoke hurriedly: "Sally, you haven't given me a chance to ask you about funds for this trip. One can't always lay one's hand on just the amount--and Max is busy, so--" But Sally answered with assurance. "It's all right, thank you, Jarvis. I've a little fund of my own. There isn't any need to bother Max. I'm so glad of that. How lucky for me you hadn't gone with the car! I should have been so flurried, trying to catch the trolley with my bag and umbrella." She took her place and in a minute they were off. And there had been nobody but Joanna on the big porch to wave good-by at Sally Lane! Then came a fast drive to town, during which neither of them talked much. "I wish there were time to take you up to the house to see mother and Jo," Jarvis said, as they came into the down-town streets. "But Jo may be at the station. I telephoned the house, but they'd evidently driven somewhere else before going home. I left word, so I'm hoping Jo will get it. She'll be heart-broken if you get off without her seeing you." But Josephine was not at the station. Alec and Bob were there, however, and they told Sally that Max would come in time to see her off. Personally they were much upset at the outlook. "I don't see why you have to be the one," protested Alec. "Uncle Timothy must have some ancient sister or cousin or aunt to see to him, without sending for a girl like you." Jarvis had rushed away to the ticket-office, and Sally had her brothers to herself for the time. She made the most of it. "But he hasn't, Alec," she explained. "I simply have to go. But I want you boys not to mind my being away. Joanna will take beautiful care of everything, and you must have your friends out, and crack nuts and pop corn and roast apples in the evenings, and be just as jolly as if--" "Oh, _wow_!" cried Bob. "Sally, what do you take us for? What we'll do will be to moon around the fire and wonder what you're doing. We--" "No, no! It will be winter soon, and you must go tobogganing--" "Why, you aren't going to stay away all winter, are you?" Alec grew wrathful. "Look here--I won't stand for anything like that--neither will the rest. You've got to--" "Listen, dear. I may be back in a--well--in a very short time, if Uncle Timothy gets on. But you know how it was a few years ago when he had pneumonia--he was a long time getting about. He's older now, and--" "Yes, but we've first right to you. Besides, you'll use yourself all up trying to nurse--" "No--I'm strong and well, Alec--I won't use myself up. But Uncle Timmy is all we have left--and--oh, please don't talk about it!--I'm so anxious lest I can't do anything for him when I get there." She conquered a constriction in her throat, while they waited, for that last phrase had silenced them. They were all fond of Uncle Timothy--they didn't want to lose him. In a minute Sally went on cheerfully: "If you'll only write to me I can stand anything. Tell me all about everything. Oh, here's Max!" She turned to meet him. He was looking gravely disapproving, as was to have been expected, but something in the sight of his sister's face made him refrain from reproaching her for not having consulted him, as he had intended to do. Besides, the hands of the clock were pointing too nearly to the time of her departure for him to feel like thrusting upon her the weight of his displeasure. Jarvis came back, tickets in hand, and gave them to Sally with the little purse she had handed him. Announcing that there was no time to lose he then convoyed the whole party through the door to the trains, using some influence which he possessed with the blue-capped official thereat to obtain the favour. So the passengers already in the crowded sleeper were treated to the somewhat unusual spectacle of a particularly charming girl being brought aboard her train by a party of four quietly solicitous young men, even the youngest of them, by virtue of his height and broad shoulders, counting as a male "grown-up." Jarvis went off for a hasty interview with the Pullman conductor then hunted up the porter of Sally's car, the "Lucatia," and gave him certain instructions, accompanied by a transfer of something which brought a broad grin to that person's dusky face, with the assertion, "Suah, sah--I'll make the young lady comf'able--thank you, sah." He got back to the "Lucatia" only in time to hear the call of "all aboard," from outside, to see the blue veil surrounded by three leave-taking brothers bestowing hurried but hearty testimonials of their affection and bidding her "Take care of yourself," "Write often," and "Don't kill yourself working," and to push past them as they made for the door, to say his own good-by. It was easy for the interested fellow-travellers to see that this young man evidently was not a brother, for his farewell consisted only of a somewhat prolonged grip of the hand, his hat off, his eyes searching the blue ones lifted to his with the expression of one who cannot quite trust her lips to speak. Then, without a word on either side, Jarvis had dropped Sally's hand and was rushing to the door, for the train was under way. Remembering suddenly that this happened to be the last car on the train when she came in, Sally hurried through it to the rear. There they were, lined up in a solid row, and as she appeared, their hats came off and were waved in the air. Beneath the bright electric lights of the station she could see their cheerful smiles, and she smiled back, waving her handkerchief as long as she could see them. From their point of view the picture was quite as absorbing as from hers, for her slender figure holding to the brass rail of the platform against the background of the car looked both girlish and solitary, and as they watched it recede into the distance they were all of them hoping that it would not be long before they could welcome her back into that same great dingy station. "If you have any pity on us, Jarve, come back to the house, and don't go home to stay in town till she comes. We shall be bluer than tombstones." This was Max's double tribute to the homemaking qualities of his sister and to the partnership qualities of his friend, and Jarvis responded readily, for, truth told, it was the very thing he wanted to do most. It seemed to him that while he should not miss Sally less in the house whose every corner would be eloquent of her absence, there would be a certain consolation in being there. He had a queer feeling that she had not gone for a speedy return, and that more than one moon would change before they should see her again. Meanwhile, it occurred to him that she would like to have him there for her brothers' sake, since they wanted him. Alec and Bob eagerly echoed Max's plea. "Bachelors' hall? Well, I don't know that I mind, since my stuff hasn't gone back yet. Mother and Jo have company asked for next week, and will expect me to help entertain, but I can be out at Strawberry Acres more or less. Come up to the house in the car with me, while I explain; then we'll drive out. Al and Bob can ride on the running boards, if they like." They jumped on, feeling that to stay together was to mind things less. It was odd how low of spirit they all were already. Surely, one would think that four strapping fellows might contemplate getting on for a space without one slim young person who was accustomed not only to humour them, but to make three of them toe certain well-defined marks in the matter of clean linen, fresh cravats, and carefully parted hair. Yet not one of them was really willing to go home till the others should be coming along too. In front of the fireplace, later, when Joanna had given them so good a dinner that it would seem as if their content could hardly be preyed upon by any contemplation of the future, Bob suddenly voiced the general sentiment. He was lying on his side upon the hearth-rug, his round face fiery from his proximity to the blaze. "Why does it feel so different when you know people are miles away and getting farther every minute than when you know they've just gone to town for a party?" he queried, thoughtfully. "They're away just the same--they aren't here, I mean. Why isn't being away the same thing as _being away_?" At any other time this somewhat involved statement of conditions would have provoked jeers from the company. But no jeers were forthcoming. Max grunted, lying flat on his back on the couch--whose pillows Joanna had carefully plumped up--his heels on the arm at the end. Alec, standing at the window with his hands in his pockets, staring out into the frosty night, turned about and remarked that on a train averaging sixty to seventy miles an hour Sally must already be out of the state. "Wonder if she's asleep," speculated Bob. "She used to like sleeping on sleepers, when father and mother used to take us around so much. Say, she had a whole section to herself--at least till we left, and nobody was coming aboard then. Hope she has the luck to keep it. Funny! The car was crowded, and so was the next one. I looked in." "Plenty of people may get on before midnight." reflected Alec. Jarvis picked up a magazine. "Suppose I read aloud this article on railroading," he proposed. The company consented and he began. He had not read two pages before he ran, so to speak, into a series of frightful railway wrecks. But, wishing he had chosen something else, he kept on till suddenly Bob interrupted with a fierce: "Cut it! I've got her knocked into five thousand pieces now--I'll dream of those confounded smash-ups and Sally in the midst of 'em, if you don't drop that magazine." The others murmured a somewhat sheepish assent, and Jarvis turned willingly enough to a tale of adventure at sea. A snore from the couch interrupted him in the middle of a most thrilling crisis, and only the appearance of Joanna with a big dish of shiny apples prevented Bob from following suit. "Jove, Joanna, you're a good one. How did you come to think of it?" asked Alec, selecting a beauty and setting his teeth into it with a sense of refreshment. "Miss Sally said I was not to forget anything she usually did, Mr. Alec," replied Joanna. "If you remember everything she usually does you'll be a brick, Joanna," cried Bob, rousing to his opportunity and getting up on his knees to accept his apple. "There's one thing she does, that nobody can possibly do for her," thought Jarvis as, consuming the crisp, cool specimen Joanna had bestowed upon him with a motherly smile for the boy she had known so long, he paced up and down the room, passing the piano at the end with a vivid recollection of how Sally was accustomed to play what she called "little tunes" upon it in the firelight. "And that's to fill one small corner of her place in the home she has made here." CHAPTER XVII THE SOUTHBOUND LIMITED Sally's first letter home was a short one, stating merely that Uncle Timothy was very ill, very glad to see her, and that she was extremely thankful she had come. The second letter, two days later, showed strong anxiety. The illness was pneumonia, although not in its severest form; but Mr. Rudd's age was an important factor in the case. For a week bulletins were brief, then came a long letter, telling of improvement. "The minute he is well out of danger she ought to come home," was Max's opinion. "She won't, though," Alec predicted. "She'll stay till she can bring him with her." "Not if she listens to me," and Max set about writing a reply which would indicate to his sister in no uncertain terms the course he thought she should pursue. Her answer was prompt. "I want to come home just as much as you want to have me, Max dear, but it is so much to Uncle Timmy to have me with him I can't think of leaving." Max frowned over this. "She seems to consult me precious little about anything lately," he observed to Jarvis. "You must admit she's grown up and can think for herself. Besides, much as I'd like to see her back, I think she's right," was Jarvis's opinion. "Of course you'd side with her against me every time. But I think her brothers are a trifle nearer to her than her uncle." "She'd undoubtedly think so too, if you were in bed with pneumonia. Since you're all in vigorous health she imagines you can get on without her. But she's not having a very jolly time of it, I should judge. Cheer her up with a lively letter, not a peevish one," was Jarvis's advice. "You can do that." "I'm not writing." "Not?" Max was surprised. "You and Sally haven't quarrelled, have you?" "Not at all. But I've no reason to think she would care to hear from me. You fellows are undoubtedly telling her all the news." Jarvis flung a fresh log on the fire as he spoke, then took his place on the hearth-rug with his back to the blaze and his face in the shadow. Max stared at him interestedly, and was about to begin a discussion of the subject when his companion abruptly opened up a new line of conversation, in relation to plans for the farm, and the moment for asking certain questions did not occur again. The days went by, brief letters from Sally arriving at frequent intervals. They reported very slow improvement in the invalid, with a return of strength so tardy that she still felt she should not leave him. The home in which they were was not that of relatives, and she was unwilling to leave the responsibility of Mr. Rudd's care to those who had expected to have him with them only for a brief visit. A month passed, and then, just as her brothers were making up their minds that the limit had certainly been reached and her duty done, came a letter which gave a blow to their hopes. It read: "DEAREST FAMILY: "Doctor Wood has ordered Uncle Timmy South. The doctor says he positively must get out of this wretched climate, and he must not think of coming back before spring--and spring well advanced. If you could see what a shadow of himself the poor dear is you would understand that I simply must do what I have agreed to do--go with him. He will pay all my expenses. I think he must have quite a bit more property than we have known of, the matter of finances seems to trouble him so little. Of course I know how you will feel about this--and I want you to believe that I feel a thousand times sorrier than you possibly can. But I know there is nothing else to do. He can't possibly go alone, and I can't see mother's only brother have to hire some stranger to be with him when he has a niece who loves him dearly and owes him for a deal of love he has always lavished on her. It isn't as if you needed me in ways that Joanna couldn't supply--for actual food and drink, I mean. Of course I hope--I know--you all miss your little sister. I'm afraid I should feel very badly if I thought you didn't! "We plan to start Thursday evening, December third. We can't make quite as good connections as I did in coming, so, according to Doctor Wood's figuring with the time-tables, we shall go through the home city at one o'clock on Saturday morning. We shall be in the station twenty minutes, being switched around, and--well, I don't like to ask anybody to stay up till that hour, but--I shall be up, and looking out--and--and--I'm almost afraid that if I didn't see anybody, I should shed just a tear or two! You see I haven't really cried once yet--and I don't want to break my record. "Your Sally." It really is not necessary to report what was said in Sally's home upon the receipt of this announcement. There was a good deal of excited talking done, and a number of statements were made to the effect that it was out of the question for Sally to be spared all winter, that she should have waited for the consent of her family before deciding on such an absence, and that it absolutely must not be allowed. Yet, after all, when it came to forbidding it, nobody seemed to have quite the authority to do that. Even Max, protesting that the thing was out of all reason, and going so far as to take his pen in hand to write his refusal to permit it, found himself brought to a halt by the remembrance that Sally was showing more and more evidences of possessing a will of her own, and of being perfectly competent to carry out its dictates when they seemed to her right. Clearly she did not want to go South with Uncle Timothy--or with anybody else. There was a homesick touch in more than one line of the stoutly written letter--unquestionably Sally would not be doing this thing if she were not persuaded of her duty. At one o'clock in the morning of Saturday a party of people stood in the great electric-lighted station. Again the offices of Mr. Jarvis Burnside had taken the group past the usual hindrances and established them on a certain platform, nearly in the centre of the rows of tracks, where the Southbound Limited would come in. This time their numbers were considerably augmented by the presence of Mrs. Burnside and Josephine, Donald and Janet Ferry. Various packages encumbered the arms of each member of the party, and appearances certainly boded well for the reception of the young traveller who at the moment was watching eagerly, as the train rolled through the familiar streets, for the first sign of approach to the station. "Here she comes!" Bob was the first to cry, pointing to a brilliant headlight just rounding into view on the distant track. "Jolly, I'll bet Sally's wide awake, if she ever was in her life!" "I expect we're going to find out now how dreadfully short twenty minutes can be," said Janet Ferry to Jarvis, beside whom she stood, an attractively put-up basket of hot-house grapes in her hand. He nodded, watching the great headlight grow all too slowly bigger and bigger. "Even the twenty minutes will probably be cut short. The train's considerably overdue now." The long line of sleepers came to a stand-still beside them, and they scanned the cars anxiously for the first sign of Sally. Far down the track could be seen a coloured porter waving in their direction, and the next instant a girl in dark blue jumped off the step of the Pullman and ran toward them. They ran to meet her, Bob and Alec outstripping the rest, and when the others arrived all that could be seen of Sally Lane was the top of a bright head on Bob's shoulder, both blue arms about his neck, his affectionate hand patting her back. Then they had her in their midst, and everybody was trying to greet her at once. Josephine's arm was about her, and Sally was regarding the group with a radiant smile, crying girlishly; "Oh, how good you people do look! How dear of you all to come down! If I only could stay just a little longer! We don't stop but ten minutes, instead of twenty, the train is so late. Uncle Tim doesn't know you are here--I was afraid he would be too excited to sleep the rest of the night, and he's only just dropped off. Oh, how are you all? You look perfectly fine--I don't believe you've pined away a bit, missing me! Let me look at you." She studied each in turn, missing nobody. Her clear gaze, the blue eyes black beneath the shadowing thick lashes, met each answering pair of eyes with a steady scrutiny which did not once waver. "That was a review one would be sorry not to be able to stand," said Ferry to Josephine, as Sally ended by thrusting her arm through Max's and leading him off by himself. "Miss Sally put us all to the test in that minute, didn't she? She gives the impression of demanding the best one has--rather an unusual characteristic in a girl of her age." "She does demand the best--and gets it," answered Josephine warmly. Ten feet away Sally was speaking hurriedly: "The thing I wanted most to see you for, Maxy, was to make sure you weren't really angry with me for taking my own way about this." Her hand pressed his arm. She was looking up into his face. He returned the gaze. "I was angry, Sis," he admitted. "But, somehow, now that I see you, I can't seem to get up steam to tell you so. I suppose you're right--but the place is mighty lonesome without you. If it wasn't for the Ferrys--" "Are they over much?" "We get them over as often as we can. I say, I've been noticing that Jarve and Janet seem to hit it off pretty well." "Do they? That's very nice. You like Janet yourself, don't you?" "She's the belle of the ball, now you're away, and a mighty jolly girl to have around. If you don't look out your old friend J.B. will slip away from you." Sally's head went up, her cheeks bloomed a deeper colour. "If I weren't going to leave you in a minute I should punish you for that piece of brotherly impertinence," said she, with spirit. "Have I ever laid hands on anybody to keep him, for you to talk of 'slipping away'?" "No--you're not that sort," conceded Max, with a laugh which certainly carried a hint of brotherly admiration. Sally walked straight over to Janet, at whose other side stood Jarvis. "Janet," said she, "Max says you are the life of them all. I'm so glad--and it's so kind of your mother and brother to bring you over to make the evenings pleasant. You'll keep on being good to them all winter, won't you?" "Sally"--Janet caught hold of both her hands--"let me give you an illustration of how nobly and completely I fill your place. The last time we were over I played for them--played my best, too. I ended with my most brilliant performance of Liszt. Two minutes afterward, when I had gone back to the fire, I heard somebody very softly doing a one-finger melody, picking it out note by note. I listened, and presently made out one of your favourite 'little tunes'--'A Red, Red Rose.' I looked around the group to see who was missing. It was not Bob. It was not Max. It was not Alec. It was not Don. It was not--" "Anybody. It was--a ghost," supplied Jarvis. He was looking intently at Sally, but she was smiling back at Janet, and the colour in her face was not less than it had been a moment before. "My ghost, probably," she said lightly. "I'm sure if it were with you all by that fire as often as I think about you, it would be playing little tunes for itself, most of the time. Now I must spend my next minute with Alec," and she was away again. The minutes certainly were flying. Janet looked after her. "There's something perfectly irresistible about her, isn't there?" she suggested to her companion. He did not answer and she glanced at him. He had pulled out a card-case from his pocket and was writing something on one of the cards. He slipped the card into the big, green paper-box he held. "Suppose I take all our packages to the porter and have him put them in her berth while she is off with Alec. Then she'll not have to bother with them, getting on," he proposed. Janet assented, and in a minute Jarvis, laden with packages, approached the porter. Retaining half his burden he followed the porter into the car. He did not immediately return therefrom, and when, three minutes afterward, the signal came for the departure of the train, he was not in the group of whom she took leave. "Has Jarvis gone? Say good-by for me to him, please, Jo," she whispered as she embraced her friend. Waving the others back Max escorted her into her car. In the passage they met Jarvis. Over her head the two young men looked at each other. "Good-by, sister," said Max, and kissed her, "I see Jarve wants me to cut it short." With which tactful brotherly explanation he abruptly retraced his steps to the vestibule, where he waited. In the half-lit narrow passage Jarvis made the most of his minute of grace, although Sally's hand was already extended, and a friendly good-by, with a frank smile, was on her lips. "Are you in such a hurry to be rid of me?" said he, taking the hand. "You make me feel somehow as if you didn't care even for the old friendship. Is that so, Sally?" "Not at all. I care very much. It seems so good to see you all." "To see 'us all' doesn't flatter me much." He smiled a little. "Sally, may I write to you?" "Do. Tell me all about everybody." "Will you answer?" "Now and then." "You are--" He stopped, with a half impatient movement of his broad shoulders. "I'm Sally Lane." She said this very distinctly, even though both were speaking under their breath. Then she laughed, with a delicate touch of defiance. "You certainly are," he agreed. "No doubt in the world of that. But I want you to know I'm Jarvis Burnside, and that stands for something too--something positive--and permanent. My letters will be signed by that name." "Mine--if I write any--now and then--will be signed by mine--The train is moving. Good-by--old friend!" She was a slim maid to oppose so colossal a resistance as she did to anything in the least suggestive to sentiment in the leave-taking. Oppose it, however, did the small hand which drew itself away with decision, the pretty lips which smiled again that coolly friendly smile, the blue-black eyes which were steady as ever in their straight look. Max, peering in upon the two to tell Jarvis to come along, saw his sister break down in her self-command, but only at sight of himself. As Jarvis turned away she ran after him to reach beyond him and clutch her brother's arm for one quick pressure, with the low cry, "Oh, Max--_please--please_--write to me often!" As Max jumped off, Jarvis turned again. Sally was upon the platform. "That almost makes me wish I were a brother," said he rapidly, from the bottom step, looking straight up at her. He prepared to drop off. "_But not quite_" he added--and swung himself off and out of sight. Back in her berth, the little electric side-light on, Sally opened her bundles. Their contents made her feel like laughing and crying both together, all by herself, there on the fast train flying southward through the night. Janet's superb grapes, Mrs. Ferry's preserved Canton ginger, Donald Ferry's little book of verse, with the ribbon mark opening it at "My Garden," all pleased her greatly, each in its way. Then there was a fascinating little traveller's work-box from Josephine, a letter writing-case from Mrs. Burnside, an ink-pencil from Max, a package of current magazines from Alec, a box of chocolates from Bob. The cards and merry messages accompanying these remembrances made pleasant reading, and Sally put them all together in her handbag, that she might look them over many times. Jarvis's box she did not open till the last. Why, might be a subject for speculation. Does one leave the most interesting letter or package till the last--or does one eagerly open it first? When everything else had been disposed of Sally's fingers untied the cord slowly, she lifted the cover with apparent reluctance, she drew aside the sheltering sheets of green tissue as if she feared to disclose that which they protected. But then, when the bright light at her side shone in upon fresh tints of pink and white and lilac, she drew one deep breath and buried her face in the mass. "Sweet peas!" she murmured, and shut her eyes and thought of her garden, lying forsaken and desolate in the December frost. Then she picked up the card. On its back she read, in vigorous pencilling: "A ghost from the garden, sent by the ghost who tried to pick out the 'little tune.' There seem no other tunes in the world worth listening to." The next morning Mr. Timothy Rudd had many questions to ask his niece. He sat comfortably among pillows and rugs, his breakfast brought in from the dining-car and served in his section by a waiter who was ready to show him every attention, to oblige the young lady whose smile he liked to win. "You say they were all down, Sally? This breakfast looks very nice, my dear--I wish I could eat more of it." He laid down a half slice of toast and brushed his thin fingers. "Uncle Timmy, are you sure you can't manage just a little more? Two spoonfuls of boiled egg, half a slice of toast, and a cup of coffee--that's no breakfast at all. If I tell you all about it, won't you eat just half the egg?" "I'll try, child, but--really--the old fellow who is wearing my clothes--and not half big enough for them--doesn't seem to be able to summon much of an appetite." "If you don't eat a good breakfast I shall feel more than ever guilty for not telling you they were coming--though of course I didn't dream of their _all_ coming. But if you had seen them you wouldn't have slept a bit." "No, like enough I shouldn't. I'll be satisfied if you tell me how they all looked. The boys--Max?" "Very well, indeed--he's a trifle heavier than when I went away. Joanna's cooking is beginning to tell. I think she pampers them, don't you?--I'm so grateful to her for that." "Alec?" "Just as usual. He was wearing a new overcoat, and looked a glass of fashion! He says as long as Mr. Ferry lives in the country in the winter he's willing to stand it there. Isn't it lucky they're staying at least one more year? By another winter the demands on Mr. Ferry in town may be so heavy he can't take time to go back and forth." "Yes, I should say it was a very good thing for Alec to be as much under the influence of such a man as could be brought about, until he is where he can do his own thinking along the right lines. How is my nephew Robert?" "Oh, Bob's cheeks are so round and red they look like a very large infant's. Dear Bobby--think he misses us most. He ran in and peeped into your berth while the train stood there. I think he rather hoped to wake you." "Bless the lad--I wish he had." Mr. Rudd took another spoonful of egg under the stimulus of the wish, forgetting that he had not meant to take up that spoon again. "Mrs. Burnside and Jo looked their own dear selves--every line of them. It struck me afresh, as it always does when I see them after an interval, how beautifully yet quietly dressed they are, and how their photographs might be taken at any minute with delightful results. 'Portrait of a Lady and her Daughter' it would be." And Sally sighed a little sigh of a quite feminine sort, looking down at her own blue travelling attire and wondering how the same material would have looked if made up by Mrs. Burnside's tailor. "And Jarvis--how is he? I am very fond of Jarvis. I suppose he has lost some of the summer's tan?" "If he has it's been put back again by the frosty winds, for he's the image of health. Mr. Ferry and Janet are very much themselves, too. And they all sent you something." Sally reached under the berth and drew out a big florists' box, signalled the waiter to remove the remains of the breakfast, and then spread forth the cards which accompanied the great bunch of crimson roses, enjoying Mr. Rudd's almost boyish pleasure in the remembrance of his friends. "These must be for you too, Sally," said he, burying his nose in one fine half-open bud. "Not a bit of it." "No flowers for you, child?" "Fruit and chocolates and writing-tablets and other delightful things. You must have some of the grapes, Uncle Timmy--I ought to have thought of them for your breakfast." "These roses are as good as a square meal--but they should have been for you, not for an old fossil like me." "Don't you dare call yourself an old fossil, Uncle Timmy. Now look at all these pretty gifts," and Sally brought them forth, exhibiting them well concealed from the other passengers. Uncle Timothy looked and exclaimed and admired, and did not note that one person seemed to be unrepresented by any remembrance. Neither did he guess that tucked far away under Sally's berth was a box containing a mass of sweet peas which had that morning been carefully sprinkled, but which were destined never to be seen again by mortal eye except her own. CHAPTER XVIII FROM APRIL NORTH During a winter which seemed, in spite of all the beauties of the far South, the longest she had ever known, Sally was kept well in touch with affairs at home by the letters. If it had not been for these she thought she could hardly have waited for the spring to come. Mr. Rudd had gained slowly but positively throughout the winter, yet it was not thought best for him to come home until the spring should be well advanced. The first of May was the date set, and proved a judicious choice, for April was a cold and rainy month. There was just one odd fact about this month of April--during its course Sally received at least one letter from every member of her own family and from each one of those other two families most closely connected with her history. In an idle hour one day, just before she went home, she carefully selected one letter from each of these correspondents, in the order received, and tied them in a bunch, labelling them "April North to April South." Whatever may have happened to other letters, this packet remained in her possession for many years. The first of them arrived on April fourth, and was in the round, school-boy hand of young Robert Lane. "DEAR SALLY: "This is April Fool's Day, and I've had a great old time fooling everybody. Sewed down the knives and forks to the breakfast-table, tied the chairs to the legs, salted the coffee, and did quite a few little every-day stunts like that. Max got maddest when he ran onto a big lump of cayenne in his oatmeal, but Joanna gave him another dish right away and another cup of coffee. She's awfully soft over old Max. The best lining I did was the way I fooled Jarve on a letter from you. I knew he had had one from you sometime in March, so I looked in his coat-pocket while he was up in the timber lot with a sweater on. I found it--pretty much used up with being carried around--suppose he forgot to take it out. Got a fresh thin envelope, put the old one inside, traced the address through, pasted on a postmark from your last one to me, and put three heavy sheets inside to make it fat--a lot fatter than the one I got out of his pocket. Stuck on old stamps--two of 'em--overweight, you know. "When he came in to luncheon he found the letter with his other mail. I had my eye on him--I was pretending to read the morning paper. He read all his other letters, but he put that one in his pocket. He got terribly jolly after that--cracking jokes and everything. The minute luncheon was over he went off to his room, and I cut for out-of-doors. Didn't let him get a sight of me for hours. When I did come in I thought maybe he'd have got over being fussed, but--pitchforks and hammer handles!--if the minute I hove in sight he didn't get after me! He must have put on a lot of muscle chopping wood and hoeing, for I thought a cyclone had struck me. I'm resting up now, but I feel pretty sore yet--in spots. That's why I'm writing to you. I think you'd better write him once in a while, so that getting what he thinks is a letter won't go to his head like that. "It'll be the first of May in one month more, and you'll be home! Jolly!--that seems good to think of. "Heaps of love from BOB." On the following day came a letter from Janet Ferry. It was a letter of several sheets, and the last two pages ran thus: "The boys think you ought not to know about it, and intend it for a surprise, but I am so sure that it will do you even more good to hear while you are waiting to come home, I'm going to tell you. Alec and Bob have been rolling the lawn with a roller they were at great pains to get from the Burnside place in the city! You should have seen them at it, encouraging each other to do the thing thoroughly. Afterward they scattered wood ashes in all the thin places; Bob said they had been saving them all winter from the fireplace. I didn't know Alec could be so interested in out-door labour, but this winter seems to have given him an impetus toward following Mr. Burnside's example--and Don's--for I think Don has had a hand in waking him up. "Speaking of Don--I found him out in your garden yesterday, pruning your old rose-bushes--the ones that you inherited with the garden. He says you are particularly fond of the many-leaved pink ones that smell so much sweeter than any hot-house rose that ever grew. "Mr. Burnside has been busy all through March, and already has garden peas in. It seems absurdly early, but he prophesies that there'll be no more frosts that they can't stand, and promises us peas on the table three weeks earlier than our neighbours. He is nothing if not daring. He reads and reads in those books and magazines and papers of his, and then starts out, armed for action. He and Jake spend much time arguing over details, but I believe he usually carries his point. "Don says that while he was finishing his work in your garden your brother Max came home and strolled out to see what he was doing. Don mentioned the fact that it would soon be time for the whole garden to be dug and raked and put in spring order, and Mr. Lane answered that he would see that it was done--in fact he thought he should do it himself. I don't exactly understand why this should seem to give Don so much satisfaction, but it does. He told me to be sure to tell you." Clearly it gave Sally satisfaction also, for she read this particular paragraph a second time, smiling to herself, before she put the letter aside. On the seventh of April came a screed from Alec of quite surprising length--for Alec, and it interested his sister more than any letter she had had from him during the winter. "DEAR SALLY LUNN: "Haven't time to write much. Have hired out J.B. as a farm hand, and he keeps a fellow some busy. For two weeks, now, we've been clearing up the old wood in the timber lot and getting out new stuff for fence posts, etc. Evenings he gets me at books. Am reading up on soil now, surprised to find it quite interesting. J.B. and I talk plans a lot more than Max does, though I think the old boy is going to get into it in time all right. Maybe you'd like to know what our plans are. Well, here goes: "Cut off the suckers in the orchard, plough, and later spray--before the leaves come. That means hustle--but we're nearly through with the pruning. Bob and Mr. Ferry are at that. "Then we'll plough five acres of what we let go to hay last year, and plant it to corn, with half an acre of potatoes. The other five acres we'll let grow to hay. Next year we'll have alfalfa where we have corn this year. J.B. is daft on alfalfa, and I'm beginning to see why. The five acres of hay, with the corn, will be enough for the two cows, and we'll keep the pasture over beyond the orchard for them. Miss Janet says as long as she lives there she wants to see those cows--or other ones--come down the lane by the orchard at milking time--only she wishes there were more of them and a collie to drive them. Think I'll have to get a collie, to satisfy her, though Cowslip and Whitenose are at the bars regular as a clock, all by themselves. "The seven acres where we had the buckwheat and afterward the potatoes last year are to be set with strawberries this May. I tell you, here's where the real serious business comes in. J.B. hasn't done a thing this winter but study the soil in that seven acres and figure out what kind of berries to plant. He's given a lot of thought to what sort of fertilizers to use, and I tell you if there's any such thing as improving soil, the soil in that strawberry land is going to be improved. Tons of stuff are going into it and it's going to be well mixed in, too. Then if cultivating and irrigating and all the rest of it can bring us big fruit, we'll get it. J.B.'s idea is the more we put in the more we'll get out, and the better quality. Of course it's lucky for us we have him to pay out the money for getting things going, but I believe Strawberry Acres will support itself some day and bring us in good returns. "Anyhow, I must say I'm beginning to like the whole thing, though it's hard work and plenty of it. Never was so hungry in my life. Joanna sets it up to us in good shape, but we'll be glad to see you back. House seems sort of empty, in spite of four fellows tumbling over each other in it. "With love, your brother, ALEC. "P. S. The old asparagus bed is trying so hard to show signs of life we've given it a good salting. The Ferrys' crocuses are up, grass all full of them--look mighty pretty." This was certainly very satisfactory, when one considered that Alec had been in the beginning only second to Max in scoffing at the idea of living on a farm, not to mention working on one. More than any of the boys Alec had preferred life in the city, had been the one who cared most about his personal appearance, and had prided himself upon doing things in the urban way. For him to be willing to put on old clothes and rough boots, and soil his hands with manual labour, indicated a change of thought and ideals hardly to have been expected so soon. Sally put away the letter, rejoicing at these indications of growth, for growth it surely was, in his case. His work in the office where he had been employed had been work likely to lead no further, nor to promise any promotion to a position of greater honour. But on Strawberry Acres it seemed to Sally that, with Jarvis Burnside for a leader, Alec might develop qualities as yet only to be guessed at. The most interesting part of Josephine's long letter, which reached Sally on the ninth, was, as is usually the case in feminine letters, toward its close. After every other subject had been touched upon, Sally's correspondent remarked: "You may care to know that I have been much surprised of late to receive two calls, here at home, from Mr. Ferry. One was in March, but I didn't mention it, for I thought probably it was the first, last, and only one he would ever make, and I wouldn't crow about it. It was on one of mother's Thursdays, and of course a lot of other people were here. I was busy with the tea things, so couldn't give him much attention. He was very nice, and everybody seemed much interested to see him here. When he went away he came over and said to me that he should like to come again when we were not "At Home," only at home! Of course I said he might, and mother asked him specially, too. So just yesterday evening--it was Tuesday--he came again. Mother was out until just before he went. We had a delightful time in the library over a box of new books Jarvis had just had sent up--not farm books, this time. Mr. Ferry found something which specially pleased him, and read several pages to me--sitting on the edge of the library table--I mean that he was sitting on the edge of it--not I! I was most properly disposed in a chair--and congratulating myself that I had on a little new home frock of dull green with bands of blue and gold embroidery that had just come home--the most becoming thing Celeste has ever made me. I think he had a good time--anyhow, he stayed much longer than he need have done if he didn't--I meant that if he wasn't having a good time!--I don't seem to be able to write lucidly. We talked much of you, and of how good it would seem to have you back, and of the garden, and the coming summer. He wanted to know if mother and I were coming out to spend the season again, and I said yes. He asked if I didn't think we ought to be there by the latter part of April, so as to welcome you when you come the first of May. It seemed rather a good idea to me--what do you think of it? Mother has set the fifteenth, but I really do want to see the first spring things coming up. Jarvis brought home a great bunch of daffodils yesterday. I wanted to send them on to you, but he thought they wouldn't last out the journey." The thought of the daffodils made Sally long intensely for her garden. There was a long row of them at the farther end, and another clump at the edge of the lawn, with stray ones here and there through the grass which she had not been willing to have removed. She thought about them many times until the arrival of the next letter, on the eleventh, which was from Joanna, and which turned her thoughts into housewifely channels. "Dear Miss," it began, in a cramped hand upon a large sheet of ruled paper. "I suppose you would like to know what has been done about the house cleaning. You wrote me to wate till you come, but I never like to wate later than March, and so I did what was nesessary myself, peice by peice, as I could find time. Mr. Max and Mr. Alec and Mr. Bob seemed to think the house didn't need cleaning, but Mr. Jarvis being used to my ways and his mothers said you would want it right. He spared me Jake Kelly to clean the rugs and peices of carpet, and I did the rest. I think there is no dirt in the house now. Fireplaces makes lots of dust but I should say the way they are enjoyed makes up for it. I have tryed to do as you wanted about the pillows and apples and good food and I don't think the young gentlemen are any liter in wate than when you went away. "Hoping you will come home soon, "Respectfully yours, "JOANNA MARSHFIELD." Nobody but a housekeeper, and a young one at that, could appreciate what a load of anxiety this letter lifted from Sally's mind. She wanted to have the house immaculately clean, but--the garden was waiting for her. Now she could give her undivided thought to plans for the box-bordered beds, blessing Joanna for a maid-servant of priceless value. Mrs. Ferry's letter, arriving on the thirteenth, made Sally smile with the lilt of its lines: "Come, Sally dear, the spring is here, the air is mild and warm; showers happen by, but cause no sigh, they're needed on the farm. The garden waits, and stirs, and shakes the sleep from out its eyes, and gently sets the violets to blooming in surprise. The grass grows green, a lark is seen, a robin calls "It's Spring!" And everywhere, in earth and air, rejoices everything. We want you near, we need you here to share each day's delights; so hasten home, come soon, dear, come, _we miss you so o' nights_!" "Sweet little lady," the girl, thought affectionately, "to take the trouble to think it out in rhyme for me." On the sixteenth of the month a rather interesting coincidence occurred; letters from Donald Ferry and from Jarvis Burnside arrived on that day. Sally studied the superscriptions with interest, wondering what the handwriting might have indicated to her of the character of the writers, had she known nothing of either. Opening the envelopes, she laid the sheets side by side. Jarvis wrote a rather small but very black and regular hand, the result being serried rows marching like a regiment down the page, the hand of the man who is accustomed to do everything in an orderly and masterful way, and who can no more allow his words to straggle over a sheet of paper than he can permit his books to stand upside down upon the shelf, or the affairs of his every-day life to fall into confusion. Ferry wrote a more dashing hand, the penmanship of the man whose ideas flow faster than his pen can put the words upon paper, and who cares less about the appearance of his page than for what can be fixed there before it shall escape him. This letter, therefore, appeared less easy to read than the other, and this may have been why Sally attacked it first: "Dear Lady Of The Garden (it began whimsically): "I am sure that no one has told you--and that no one will tell you unless I do--that the chickweed is looking exceedingly fresh and spring-like between the box-borders. Further--a patch of small white violets is to be discovered in the sunny spots beyond the sweet pea trellis. I have a bunch of them pinned on my coat at this moment, purloined by my own hand, and smelling like spring itself. The daffodils are gorgeous, and a small blue flower which gives forth a modest and unobtrusive odour all its own is to be found in clumps in several places. "Alec tells me he has written you all about the progress of the early spring work, but you may possibly be still more interested in the human culture going on upon Strawberry Acres, in which he is bearing an important part. To-day he and Burnside, protected by blue jeans and looking highly disreputable, have been spraying the apple orchard. A disagreeable job it looks to be, from the standpoint of cleanliness, although a necessary one. But whenever I appeared, as an interested spectator on the scene, Alec was toiling away with the greatest good humour, which did not fail him when the apparatus suddenly stopped working properly, and had to be nursed and tended through at least the final third of the operation. "I believe your brother Max is beginning to long to leave the bank and to begin his life upon the farm. In spite of his somewhat satirical comments upon the probable folly of Alec's having taken this step, I am confident he himself would like to try it. Another spring will see him burning his bridges, or I am no prophet. "No one, Miss Sally, could be thrown, as your brothers are with such a fellow as Jarvis Burnside, without being stimulated to action. He is the most thoroughly alive recent college graduate I know of in any line of work. It's a refreshing sight to me, to see a man with all the instincts for a literary life, but handicapped by the necessity for taking care of his eyesight, throw himself with such ardour into labour which would have seemed the very last he would have been likely to care for. On my word, I don't know when I admire him most--when, in his careful dress he sits down to his books and journals in the evening, getting Alec to read aloud to him when he has reached the limit of safety for his own eyes, talking to the lad in a way to wake the boy up--as he is most certainly doing--or when I see him at such a job as he tackled to-day, putting into it the care and precision of your true scientist and experimenter with intent to get the full result of the best directed effort possible. Wherever you put him, he's a man worth knowing--and I'm glad I know him and have him for a friend." "I like to hear one man praise another like that," commented Sally to herself, as having finished the letter, which recounted briefly what Mrs. Ferry and Janet were doing and conveyed messages from both, she turned back to re-read the whole. Then she took up Jarvis's letter, wondering if he might chance to refer to Donald Ferry in as high terms as those in which he had himself been mentioned. Jarvis had a crisp, clear style of composition all his own. The letter was not a long one, but it brought the writer vividly before his reader: "DEAR SALLY: "One of the apple-wood fires you like so well is blazing on the hearth. Across the table, in the lamplight, sits Alec absorbed in a column of experiences in strawberry culture contributed by experts from all parts of the country. You may not readily believe me, but in a quite upright position on the end of the couch, where the firelight illumines the page, Max is deep in a concise and practical treatise on the same subject. Bob stands on the hearth rug, drying out, after a run home from the Ferry cottage through a brisk shower. So you have us. Is it a satisfactory picture? "According to Alec you have been told all our plans for the season, and Ferry said to-day that he meant soon to write you precisely what is happening in your garden. If he does you will have a masterpiece of a description, for he's a writer of distinction. He's everything else that's worth while as well, by the way--the finest ever. I never liked a man so well with so good reason. Other men say the same sort of thing of him, but I fancy I am getting to know and appreciate him better then most. "Before I forget it--Joanna wishes me to state that she has spoken for a kitchen garden which shall contain parsley, summer-savoury, lettuces, radishes, and mint. With Bob's help she has even concocted a small hot-bed in which she will begin operations at once. These subjects having been disposed of, you may forgive me for becoming slightly personal. "Do you know that you haven't answered my last letter? I had one sheet from you in January, one in early March, and a post-card a week ago. The post-card was very attractive, but it hardly took the place of a letter. Was it intended to do so? "But you are coming home soon, and you must expect to answer these questions for me then. I assure you there are long arrears for you to make up with us all, in one way and another. Bob is counting the days till your return. Max has reached the limit of his patience. Alec declares this thing must never happen again. Joanna--but it would be a breach of confidence to reveal Joanna's feelings. "There's na luck aboot the hoose," she is confident, with its mistress away. "As for me--do you care to know how I feel about your coming home? But I would rather tell you that than write it. You have kept me at arm's length all winter. Won't you just bend your rigid little elbow a trifle at the joint when you shake hands with me the first of May? "As ever I am "Yours, JARVIS." It remained for Max to put the crowning touch to Sally's rather complicated thoughts about going home, with the following characteristic communication: "DEAR SISTER: This thing is played out. I want you to understand that the first of May is the first of May, and you are to get here on it, not leave there that day--nor the day after. Bachelors' Hall is well enough in its way, but not for a lifetime. You'd better be on hand mighty soon and sudden if you want to keep J.B. to yourself. J.F's running you a close second, and she's liable to pass you in sight of the wire. Take a brother's advice. I don't suppose either of them has written you a word about the other--but if they haven't that's just as bad a sign as if they'd kept you in full knowledge of the way they get on--like a basket of chips. Come home--come home! "Your affec. brother, "MAX." CHAPTER XIX ROUND THE CORNER Joanna Marshfield, left alone in charge of the house at Strawberry Acres, on the evening of the twenty-ninth of April, stood in the front doorway, looking out into the rain. The air was mild but like a wet sponge in the feel of it against her cheek. "I hope to goodness 'twill clear off before the folks come," said she to herself. "Here's Mrs. Burnside coming out most a month sooner than she wanted to and Miss Sally looking forward to seeing things well under way in that old garden she sets such store by. If May Day would just be nice and sunshiny for 'em all 'twould please me. Well, now--who can that be?" A figure was approaching on the drive-way, carrying an umbrella and a tag, and walking rapidly. As it neared Joanna could see, in the light thrown out from the hallway and the front windows, that the figure wore skirts of dark blue. The next instant the umbrella was tilted back at a reckless angle, and a voice called guardedly out of the mist: "O Joanna--is that you? Hush--don't answer out loud!" "Miss Sally!" Joanna, amazed, crossed the porch to meet her young mistress. "Who'd ever have thought of seeing you to-night? Why--we wasn't expecting you till day after to-morrow. And where's Mr. Rudd?" "Joanna dear!--don't speak so loud. I want to surprise them," came back the laughing whisper, and the next minute Sally's bag and umbrella were on the porch, and she was wringing both her housekeeper's plump hands in her own. "How do you do, Joanna! I'm so glad to see you again. Uncle Timothy stopped off for a week in Washington, and I couldn't wait, so came on alone. Is everybody well?" "They're well enough, Miss Sally, but--you'll be pretty disappointed. You see they wasn't expecting you, so--" "Oh, are they _away_? They can't be _all_ away! Where are they?" "Well, you see they was getting sort of restless, waiting for the first of May, and Mr. Max took them into town to some show. It's too bad. They'd rather have seen you than any show, I reckon." "But they'll be back to-night?" "I expect they will--near eleven." "Oh, well--I can wait." Sally drew a long breath. "I've waited months--I can stand it a few hours longer." "It's a shame." Joanna picked up the bag and umbrella and led the way into the hall. "The Burnsides are coming the day after to-morrow." She pointed toward the open door into the west wing, the hall light shining in a short distance among the shadows and showing a room in order. "It's awful too bad they didn't get here to-day." "Never mind--it's a great deal just to be at home again. How pleasant it all looks--and how fresh!" Joanna led on into the long living-room where a light fire blazed on the hearth. "It's as fresh as I could make it," she admitted, "but there's some ways it can be made fresher that you'll see right away. Them red pillows--" Evidently the pillows had been on Joanna's mind ever since she had been put in charge of them upon Sally's departure. Sally gave them one glance and burst into appreciative laughter. "Pillow-fights, Joanna--and being sat on around the fire, and used for acrobatic performances--yes, I see. I'll re-cover them right away. I'd do it to-night while I wait if I had the stuff--if I could sit still long enough. I want to go all over the house--and if it wasn't raining I'd go out in the garden and through the pine grove and over into the orchard. Oh, here's a new picture of Alec, on the chimney-piece--why didn't he send it to me?" "I could go over and let the Ferry people know you're here," suggested Joanna, watching Sally eye the small snap-shot likeness hungrily, so that it seemed a matter of charity to present some human creature to her gaze. "No, no, thank you--I'd rather see my own family first. I can wait. I'll go up and get off these travelling things and unpack my bag--that will take up a little time," and Sally prepared to put her suggestion into action. "Just let me go up first, Miss Sally," urged Joanna. "Not expecting you so soon the room's no linen in it--it won't look like home to you. I won't be ten minutes. It's too bad--Miss Josephine was going to have the house all trimmed up with flowers for you." Seeing that to refuse to allow this would disappoint Joanna, Sally submitted and went out to the open front door again, to stand looking off into the wet night where a row of distant lights glimmering vaguely through the mist outlined the course of the trolley connecting Wybury with the city. "Anyhow, I'm at home," she consoled herself. "I might be content with that, for an hour or two, but it does seem as if I could never wait. If I could only see my garden--" She went to the end of the porch and tried to make out some sign that would indicate its presence, but the mist was too thick. Yet the light from the living-room windows shone directly down that way. "I believe if I were out there I could see something," she reflected. "I'm going to change my clothes--I might as well soak them a little more." She ran back into the hall, caught up her blue coat, and pulling it on flew out again and plunged off the porch into the darkness, the April rain, more mist than drops, falling on her fair curls. The grass was long and wet, but she cared for nothing now, and dashed on till she came to the first box-border, lying distinct in one of the shafts of light from the windows. Hunting expectantly about she explored the whole garden, laughing softly to herself at the absurdity of the performance, for she was growing wetter every minute. She felt of the ground where she could not see it, exulting in the discovery of ranks of tulips, where she had planted their bulbs last fall, just breaking into bud. "You dear things," she said, under her breath, "how enchanting of you to be out to welcome me home, when you had never met me before!--Over there's the sweet pea trellis--I wonder if Bob put the seeds in as I wrote him? Can I tell by the feel of the ground? Oh, the light falls there--I can see." She was so absorbed in this entertaining exploration that she did not hear the distant closing of a door beyond the pine grove, nor the footsteps which presently came that way and paused, just beyond the orchard. Neither did she guess at the quiet approach of a tall figure through the mist, until it stood upon the edge of the garden. The first she knew of its presence was the sound of a familiar voice, speaking quietly so that it might not startle her, yet with a note of joy plainly perceptible through its control. "Can I believe my eyes--or am I dreaming that I see you, Sally Lane?" "Oh, Jarvis!" The cry was a startled one, in spite of his precaution. Then the blue figure flew toward the gray one in the shadow, both hands out, as Sally forgot everything except that here at last was one who seemed to belong to her own household. "My dear girl! When did you come? Have we missed getting a message?" Jarvis, meeting her more than half way, held the small hands tight, stooping to try to see into her face. "No, no--I didn't send any--I wanted to surprise you all. Uncle Tim decided to stop off in Washington for a week, and I couldn't bear to wait. He is perfectly well now, and said I might come on. So I came. I never dreamed that every one would be away." "It's a confounded mischance," his lips said heartily, but his thoughts added--"_for everybody but me_." He went on quickly, "You mustn't stay out here. How long have you been out?" He touched her hair. "Why, it's soaking wet. Come in, child." He kept firm hold of one hand and drew her with him in a rapid progress to the porch. The moment the light fell on her face he was expectantly studying it, and when he had her in the hall under the stronger rays he stood still and looked at her as if he wanted to make up for months of deprivation. She turned a rosy red under his scrutiny, her cheeks looking like moist but vivid flowers, drops of rain sparkling in her hair and clinging even to her lashes. "Come in by the fire and dry your hair," he commanded. She shook her head and drew away her hand. "No, I'll run up and dry everything at once." "You won't be all the evening about it?" he questioned, with suspicion, for her attitude suggested flight. "How can I tell?" The old mischief looked out of her eyes. He took a step toward her. "Come and get the first wet off by the fire," he urged. But, laughing, she fled up the stairs. "I didn't know he was such a distinguished-looking person," she was owning to herself as she ran along the upper hall. "Why, he's grown so much heavier and handsomer I'm actually afraid of him--it doesn't seem like the same Jarvis Burnside I've known so long. He's--he's--what Dorothy Chase would call stunning! I never supposed that farming would have that effect on anybody." Then she rushed into her own room to find it in spotless order, with evidences of Joanna's recent presence in a brisk little fire burning in the small bedroom fireplace, the freshest of appointments everywhere, and a trimly bright lamp upon the old cherry dressing-table which had come from New Hampshire among Uncle Timothy's furniture. "My trunk isn't here--what in the world shall I put on?" was her first anxiety. She opened the door of her closet, to find all her last summer's frocks newly "done up" and hanging there in inviting daintiness. She caught at the lilac muslin, now faded by many washings into a mere tint, but looking so like home and good times that it seemed the fitting thing to don, in the absence of her heavier dresses, even upon an April night. A half-hour later, her hair crisply dried by the fire and curling blithely from its recent bath, herself sweet with the soap-and-water and clean-clothes freshness which is the only fragrance worth cultivating, Sally stole on tiptoe to the top of the stairs and peeped down. She beheld Jarvis pacing up and down the hall, and as she looked saw him take his watch out and scan its face as if he had an appointment to keep. She stood still, her pulses beating rather quickly. This was not exactly the sort of home-coming she had planned, this reception by one person. But it was nearly ten o'clock already, she had managed to consume so much time upstairs. Also, upon Joanna's return to her room to inquire if there were anything else she wanted, the young mistress of the house had imperatively commanded the presence in the living-room of the middle-aged housekeeper until such time as Max and the boys should arrive. Joanna, with her neat black dress and smooth hair, was certainly fitted in appearance for the duties of duenna, and Sally had felt no hesitation whatever in requiring her to assume that rôle. So Joanna now waited in the living-room--rather reluctantly, it must be admitted, for it seemed to her that this was carrying chaperonage unnecessarily far. But Jarvis was in the hall, and the door had been closed between. Sally did not realize this latter fact until she had almost reached the bottom of the stairs, where Jarvis, the moment that he had caught sight of her, had advanced to meet her. She looked at the door with a startled expression. It was ordinarily kept open, except in very cold weather. "Yes, I know it's shut," said the young man at the foot of the stairs, with a smile. "Awful situation, isn't it? But you can escape back up the stairs--if you are quick. I warn you that you'll have to be very quick!" "Will you give me sixty seconds' start?" "Not I. You've had five months' start--that's enough. Now you are back--how well you are looking!" She stood still, two steps above him. Even so, she had not much the advantage of him in height. "So are you," she retorted. "But we don't need to stay out here to tell each other that. Let's--" "Are you so eager to see Joanna again? She's looking very well also--for Joanna--but she can wait a minute or two to hear it." "Joanna has been so good--she's cleaned the whole house for me. She--" "I know. She's a treasure--but I haven't time to think about her now. All I can think of is that--I'm looking at you again! I told you in my last letter that I wanted to tell you how I felt about your coming home. Do you care to know?" "Are you really glad?" Sally tried to ask it as she would have done a year ago, in the old friendly time when it was a matter of course that she and Jarvis should be glad to see each other. "Am I? What do you think?" "I should be very disappointed if you were not, of course. I want everybody to welcome me home--I've missed it so." "But you still don't want the welcoming done--'_two and two_'? Sally, it's a long lane that has no turning. Am I never to come to one?" "I'm not a very 'long Lane,'" expostulated the girl, laughter on her lips but her eyes shy. "That may be. But though you have so many turnings it seems to me as if I had been kept a good while on the straight stretch. What if you should let me see just a little way round the corner? You know what I want to find there! You know how dearly I--love you!" There was a moment's silence. "Will you be contented to see a very little way?" "I can't promise to be contented, but I'll agree to be patient, if I can get even a glimpse of where my lane may lead in the end." Sally tried to look frankly at him, in the old way. It proved less easy than she would have supposed. His whole personality seemed to have grown so dominant, so compelling. She put out one hand. He grasped it eagerly, and would have drawn her down to where he stood, but she prevented this with a warning gesture. "No, no--" she said quickly--"it's only round the corner you're to look! That only means--I'm willing to be very good friends--better than we have been, perhaps. I don't want to be--tied--by any promises. I want to be a girl yet--only not--perhaps--quite so little a girl as before. Meanwhile--you're not tied, either." A short laugh interrupted her. "There's nothing on earth I should like so much!" "There's such a lovely girl next door--I've heard--" "What have you heard?" Sally did not seem to be willing to tell. "It makes no difference what you've heard. Ask her herself what we've talked of most. But, Sally--how long before I may see round another corner?" She hesitated. "I don't know. Not--this year, please." "Not this year! Well--I certainly shall have to cultivate patience. But I will--if I must. When--?" Her lips twitched a little. It was the girl he had known a long time who answered: "When the first strawberries go to market--from Strawberry Acres!" "Shades of Job! A year from this June? And till then I must walk on neutral ground?" It was harder to resist him--harder to put him off--than she had thought it would be. But she had made up her mind--and when Sally Lane did that she could not be easily swayed from her purpose. "You've seen around the corner," she murmured. "You promised to be content with that." "Not content--patient--if I can. I will be. Thank you for that much." He reluctantly let her draw away her hand, and she came down the two steps, passed him, and led the way toward the living-room door. With her hand on the knob he stopped her. "Sally--" "Yes--" "I can't help liking the look of the lane--beyond the corner!" Laughing and blushing more brilliantly than before--which was rather superfluous--Sally threw open the door, regardless of the fact that Joanna, who possessed a pair of very good eyes, was awaiting her in the room beyond. But there is such a thing as dazzling people's eyesight so that they cannot judge perfectly of what they see, and this effect Joanna's mistress immediately proceeded to produce. For the following hour, between raptures over being at home, tales of her Southern experiences--told so vividly that her listeners seemed to see them for themselves--eager questionings of the home stayers, there was small chance for anybody to put a finger upon exactly what Miss Sally Lane's inmost thoughts might be. Then, quite unexpectedly, a quarter hour earlier than it had been supposed possible, the tramp of feet was heard upon the porch. Sally flew toward the hall--then flew back again, leaving the door closed, and standing still and breathless upon the hearth-rug, in the full light of the fire. Voices were heard in the hall, and the rattle of umbrellas in the rack. "Plaguey poor play," Max was complaining. "Rather stay by the fire any night than poke to town to bore myself like that. I don't think--" He flung open the door. Behind him Alec's voice was saying: "I'm as wet as a rat. You fellows had the big umbrella. The little one isn't big enough to--" "Well, I'll be--" Max's exclamation cut his brother short. He stood still, staring. There was a flutter of lilac skirts, a low cry of joy, and Jarvis was looking on enviously at an illustration of the privileges that exist for brothers, who--stupid fellows--do not half appreciate them. A moment later Alec and Bob had come in for their share of sisterly greeting, and the three were standing round the returned traveller in a highly satisfied semi-circle, putting questions, making comments, and generally behaving as they might have been counted on to do. "I hope you don't expect us to believe those piteous tales about your losing flesh and colour with homesickness," declared Max, his hand on his sister's shoulder, as he turned her full toward the firelight. "Jove, I never saw you look more like one of those pink peonies you think so much of, in your garden." "I didn't write piteous tales!" His sister involuntarily accentuated the likeness he had suggested by growing pinker than before. "It was Uncle Tim, then. He got worried about you, and wrote me so. He must have been off his base. You never looked healthier. But, see here, miss--you don't do this thing again--understand? We'll never keep house here another winter without you!" * * * * * Sally had come home on Saturday night. On Sunday morning the rain had ceased, and the sun was shining brilliantly. Before breakfast she was out in the garden. Spying her there as he looked out of his window, Max hastened his dressing and went out to join her. "Looks fairly well in order, eh?" he questioned. Sally remembered certain information sent her in one of Janet's letters. "Indeed it does. And you made it so. That pleases me more than I can tell you, Max." "How do you know I did?" "Guessed it from your expression--and a hint I had had. Didn't you rather enjoy doing it?" "Much more than I should have expected," he was forced to admit under the scrutiny of her eyes. "How I wish you could leave the bank and join the boys in the work out here. Don't you almost wish so yourself?" she demanded, thrusting her hand through his arm, as he paced along, his hands in his pockets. The old garden paths were quite wide enough for two, when they walked close together. Max looked down at her. "To tell the truth, I'm beginning to wish so too." This, from Max, was a great admission. Sally's eyes sparkled with pleasure. "Oh, can't you?" she cried. "I don't see how I can, this year. To be sure, Jarve's paying all the expenses and taking all the responsibility these first two years, according to agreement, but I can't lie down on him. Of course it's all outgo and no income until we get the strawberries to bearing next year. Meanwhile the family has to be supported, and what timber we've thought best to sell won't do that, if all of us stop work. It's all right for Al and Bob to spend this season on the farm, for Jarve would have to hire somebody anyway, but it's different with me, and my salary is more than they could earn, both together, at their old jobs. No--I must grind away another year. But then--" "Then you'll come?" "Yes, and be glad to." "I'm so delighted to hear you say that!" "I need the change. I realize, at last, what a bear I've been these three years. I'm tired of being a bear. It's half nerves, I believe--but a fellow of my age ought not to know he has nerves. Besides--" He paused, looking off through the pine grove to the gap in the hedge, through which a glimpse of the white cottage could be had. Sally waited. It was rarely that her elder brother became confidential, and this mood seemed more than ordinarily propitious for getting at his best thoughts. After a little he went on, in a firm tone, speaking after a fashion which made his sister feel for him a new respect. "I may as well tell you that in a way I think I'm rather a different fellow from the one you left last November. I see things differently. It's his doing--" He nodded toward the cottage, and Sally understood. Also, she felt infinitely thankful to the influence which had brought about this change. "I've come to see," he went on more slowly, "what it means to have a definite purpose in life beyond merely making a living and having as much of a good time as you can manage to extract. I want to make a man of myself--the sort of man my Maker intended me to be. "Ferry's doing it--Jarvis is doing it--even Alec and Bob put me to shame with the manliness they're developing. If Maxwell Lane can't swing into line--" "He can, dear--he will. He's swung already, when he can talk like this." His sister's hand squeezed his arm tight for a minute, in her happiness. "It's not going to be a matter of talk, mind you," he said earnestly. "Don Ferry doesn't talk about his own life--he lives it. I want to do the same. But I felt as if I'd like you to know--that's all. What's that coming up in the corner there?" "Lilies-of-the-valley--they're almost ready to bud." And Sally let him lead the conversation away from himself to talk about the garden, understanding that the little revelation was a great one for him to make, and that it had cost him a decided effort. But while she talked of the pruning of the roses and the prospects of the sweet peas, just sown, her heart was rejoicing over the growth in this "human garden," as Ferry had called it, so much dearer to her. "Alec's to go away next winter for a course at an agricultural school," Max announced suddenly. "I've made up my mind to that. He shows more bent than any of us toward making a science of this thing. Odd, isn't it?--where you consider how set he was against even living here. I tell you Don Ferry's a great chap. He's done more for us than we can pay back. I'd like to keep him in the family. Janet too. See here--" he rose upright from having stooped over certain newly upspringing shoots, and favoured his sister with a sharp glance. "What's the matter with you and Don hitting it off? That would leave Jarve to Janet, and make a mighty nice combination of us--eh? Judging by appearances Don wouldn't object a bit.--I say--where are you going?" "Didn't you hear the breakfast-bell?" Sally was walking away from him toward the house. "No, I didn't. Neither did you." But Sally continued to walk, regardless of the fact that both Alec and Bob had appeared round the corner of the house, coming toward her, hands in the pockets of their Sunday trousers, feet treading gingerly over the damp grass in their freshly-polished best shoes. On whatever part of Strawberry Acres Sally should be descried to-day, it might be safely prophesied that there her family would be likely to foregather. CHAPTER XX GREEN LEAVES "So the great day has come at last! My word, but you've had the courage of your convictions! What a stretch of 'em!" "Of convictions? Well, they're certainly embodied in those seven acres, whether there are any strawberries there or not. Don't you want to get over the fence and stroll up one of the rows? You may find a specimen or two of fruit worth setting your teeth into." Neil Chase, correctly clad in light flannels, eyed the fence critically before he clambered over it. "I can be trusted to tear myself if there's a twopenny splinter anywhere," said he. "Must admit it looks rather worth while over here, though. Hello--Dorothy's over already. Who's that assisting her? The Reverend Donald--in blue overalls! It's lucky Old Dutch can't see him now! I say, you've got a lot of pickers. Are they all members of the firm?" Jarvis laughed as he followed Chase's glance up the rows. "You've struck us on our first day," he admitted. "We agreed to make it a special celebration among ourselves, since only a small part of the berries are ripe." "The pink sun-bonnet covers an acquaintance, then," inferred Neil, watching it approach from a distance. "Hello--it's Sally!" and he pulled off his hat to wave it in response to a salutation from the pink sun-bonnet, whose removal had disclosed a fair head whose locks the June sunshine was turning into gold. "I suppose the blue one conceals Jo Burnside, the white one Miss Ferry, and so forth. I always said you people were no farmers--to dress for the part like stage strawberry-pickers," he added, as Sally came within hearing. "Why not? Could any stage be set to equal this one?" inquired Sally Lane. "No, no--you can't shake hands with me--" She held up ten carmine-tipped fingers. "What could be more appropriate for picking strawberries than a pink gingham?" "It's mighty becoming, anyhow," Neil offered tribute. "Jove, Sally, but farming certainly does agree with you. Talk of roses--Dorothy!" he called, "come here and look at these cheeks! Full in the sunlight, too. I'll wager yours couldn't stand such a test." Sally promptly put on her sun-bonnet. "A strawberry patch is no place for flattery, Mr. Neil Chase," said she. "Come with me, Dorothy. I'll show you the biggest berry you ever saw in your life--and you may eat it, too." Mrs. Chase gathered her white skirts about her, planted her white-shod feet recklessly in the wake of Sally's, and arrived in due time at the point where Sally had been picking. From nearby rows Josephine Burnside, Janet Ferry, and Constance Carew lifted heads to greet her. "How awfully busy you all are!" cried Dorothy, consuming a fat berry with which Sally presented her. "Too busy to greet your friends!" "This isn't a reception, it's a working affair," Janet replied gayly. "Guests may help themselves to refreshments, but mustn't expect the hostesses to stop picking." "You have no trouble about getting the men at your entertainments, Sally," observed Dorothy, scanning the field. "They're all here, I see--even Max. Has he left the bank?" "Yes, the first of May. This is our third season, you know--but the first one of bearing. Max is as enthusiastic as anybody, now. When you see him nearer you'll discover a great change in him. No more banks for him, if we can make anything like a success with the strawberries." "How do you know that you will? You're such amateurs at it." "We're not, if study of the subject amounts to anything," Sally asserted, with a little air of pride. "Between books and experiment stations, and Alec's course at an agricultural school last winter, and Jarvis's visits to practical strawberry-growers, it would be strange if our methods went all astray. But they're not going astray. Look at these berries you're eating!" Down the rows Jarvis was pursuing much the same line of argument with Neil Chase. "It's not in reason, you know," the visitor objected, critically selecting choice specimens of fruit along the rows and eating them with evident relish, "it's not in reason for a lot of fellows like you, fresh from books and banks, to jump into this sort of thing and make it go without a hitch." "Well, you have the evidence of your eyes before you," Jarvis returned with great good humour, from his knees among the vines where he was now picking busily again. "To be sure it hasn't gone without a hitch. Last season we had a long spring drought to fight--and fought it, too, with irrigation. This spring the shot-hole fungus attacked us, but we overcame it with spraying. Of course next year a killing frost may come along and finish the crop for the year--we can't fight that. Such a frost is to be reckoned with on an average of about once in five years. But on the other years we expect to make up. Don't you think we can get our prices for such berries as these? And will you tell me why brains, even amateur ones, can't solve such problems as we have to face? You lawyers tackle hard cases and win them, even while you're green--if you possess certain qualities to begin with. We may be conceited, but we have an idea we possess the qualities necessary to successful strawberry culture. As a game, it's certainly a mighty interesting one." "The average farmer," Neil argued, "isn't a rich experimenter like you. He can't afford to put good gold into fertilizers and irrigating pumps. I should think these fellows all around you would hate you for having the advantage of them." "On the contrary, as a matter of fact all but one or two are our very good friends, and much interested in our schemes. They've given us a lot of valuable advice--not on strawberry culture, because that's not in their line, but in other ways. They enjoy our mistakes hugely--that's only human--but they don't do it in an ill-natured way. Last spring when we sowed clover-seed for millet and didn't recognize it till the crop appeared, it was worth it to see them laugh at the joke, particularly as we didn't mind laughing with them. But I can tell you where we're scoring the biggest success after all, _and the one that would pay if half our crops turned out failures_. You haven't been out here for a year, at least. Take a look at Max, Alec, and Bob, when you get close to them, and tell me if they look like the same chaps you used to know in town." "You don't, yourself," admitted Chase, somewhat grudgingly. He, himself, was decidedly slender of limb much to his regret. Also, in spite of incessant motoring, his face was not that of unexceptionable health. "You look as rugged as a rock. Never thought you were cut out for an athlete, either, when you were in college." "I rather think that siege with my eyes was the best thing that ever happened to me--though it didn't seem much like it at the time. Look at that berry." He held out a fine specimen. "That goes in Class A--specials, all right." "How many classes do you have?" Neil inquired, making way with the specimen from Class A in one huge mouthful, and finding it so juicy he was forced to make prompt use of his handkerchief. "Two, but we're going to draw a strict line. The big ones are to be big to the bottom of the basket--and no false bottoms. A reputation is what we're after--then the prices will take care of themselves." Neil strolled down the row. He had information enough. He wanted to inspect the strawberry-pickers, one at a time. It was not every day that one could meet distinguished young clergymen, accomplished pianists, and singers of unusual promise, between rows of strawberry vines. The Chases had not been invited to be present at this special celebration of the first day of the strawberry picking, but they unhesitatingly accepted the invitation to stay to luncheon offered them as the hour for that meal drew near. When the party left the field for the house it was discovered that Joanna, assisted by Mrs. Burnside and Mrs. Ferry, had moved the luncheon-table from the dining-room to the big porch. "Well, of all the romantic, impractical farmers!" ejaculated Neil Chase, as he beheld this arrangement at close range, the table set with old blue-and-white china, a great bowl of Sally's old-fashioned pink roses in the centre. "Don't you know that fried salt-pork and potatoes, in the kitchen, in your shirt-sleeves, is your only consistent meal, in the work season?" "If you will insist on our living up to your notion of the real thing, we can set a special table for you in the kitchen. I've no doubt we can borrow some pork somewhere. You can take off your coat and eat your noon meal there, if you like, sustained by your sense of what is fitting," offered Alec. "As for me, I'm going in to wash up, put on my coat, and eat about twelve square inches of the strawberry-shortcake Joanna's building for this table. There won't be any of that served in the kitchen, I warn you, Mr. Chase." "Thank you, I'm not pointing out my course of action, but criticizing yours," retorted Neil, surveying with favour a vine-wreathed platter of broiled chicken, and eyeing hungrily a large salad-bowl filled with a compound which he knew by experience to be one of Joanna's choicest. "I say, to be consistent--" But he found himself delivering his views to Mrs. Burnside alone, for the rest had trooped in to make themselves presentable. "You people certainly do manage to get a lot of fun out of your farming," observed Dorothy Chase, as she watched Sally splashing her round arms in a vain effort to remove the tan. "We live just as far out from town as you do, but nothing could be more different than our way of living from yours." "Well, if we depended on tennis, golf, and bridge for our fun we'd be just like you. As we like hayfields, strawberry-patches, and pine groves better--with tobogganing in winter--we continue to be different." "I should say golf and tennis were just as healthy exercise as haying and picking strawberries." "No doubt they are--but the company isn't so select," declared Sally audaciously, towelling her wet face so briskly that it emerged looking more than ever like the roses to which Neil had that morning compared it. "You impertinent girl! What do you mean by that?" "I mean that Tom Westlake isn't to be spoken of in the same breath with Donald Ferry. Billy North is an idiot compared with Jarvis Burnside. There aren't two girls among all your society friends who can equal Janet and Constance, and--" "And Sally Lane, as a hostess, is infinitely superior to Dorothy Chase!" "Don't put words into my mouth." Sally came close and laid a warm pink palm on either of Dorothy's cheeks. "Sally Lane is such a bad hostess she says insulting things to her guests. Don't mind her. She's so excited and happy to-day over her strawberry acres she's not responsible for what she says. Come, let's hurry down." "You people look more like a set of golfers at a summer hotel than you do like farmers," began Neil Chase, still harping on the theme which seemed to cause him so much unrest, as the party sat down. Max opened his mouth for a retort. But, with one look at Donald Ferry, who sat across the table, he closed it again. He met an amused glance of comprehension. Then Ferry also opened his lips to speak. But before the words found breath Mr. Timothy Rudd rose to the occasion. "Mr. Chase," said he, "since a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, let me suggest that you call us strawberry gardeners. Not that we object in the least to being called farmers, for we consider the title one of honour. But I am confident that you will then be able to reconcile our having luncheon on the front porch, our coming to the table with our coats and collars on, and our having strawberries to eat in spite of the fact that we raise them ourselves, with the indisputable truth that we make--or are attempting to make--our living off the soil. We profoundly respect the desire of a member of the legal profession for exactness, not only in the use of terms, but in the conformity of facts to those terms. I trust, however, that the compromise I suggest--" But he got no further. A burst of appreciative laughter, in which Chase himself was forced to join, bore witness to the effectiveness with which the cynical critic had been politely answered. However it might be on after occasions, for to-day Chase became content to enjoy his broiled chicken and strawberry-shortcake without further comment on the inconsistency of their appearance upon the table at Strawberry Acres. * * * * * It was late in the afternoon. The Chases had reluctantly taken their departure, bearing with them gifts of strawberries and roses. In the strawberry-patch sunshine and silence reigned undisturbed, except by the light June breeze which rustled the leaves enough to show beneath them the fruit which by day-after-to-morrow would be ripe enough to pick. The first picking had been a small one, and had gone wholly to neighbours and friends and to consumption upon the home table. In two days more the gathering of the harvest would begin in earnest. It may not have been strictly business-like, this opening of the season by feasting and bestowal, but it had pleased the "Lady of the Garden" so to elect, and there had been no dissenting voice--not even that of her brother Max. Everybody else, it may be presumed, had retired to rest and dress for the evening, which was always spent, when the weather was fair, upon the porch, when Sally, alone, slipped quietly out of the door at the back of the hall and betook herself over the grass, through the garden, to the path which led up the slope to the woods. The path wound past the orchard, past the strawberry field, and by the side of the pasture where Cowslip and Whiteface were already turning their faces toward the bars. Its appearance was an example of the fashion in which utility and sentiment were likely to find themselves mixed upon the farm called Strawberry Acres. Along its borders ran a riot of vines, wild bushes, even of weeds, only such of the latter having been cut as were pests of the sort which scatter their seeds to the winds. Trim and workmanlike as was the clearing up of the ground just beyond the lane, on either side the lane itself was very nearly in a state of nature. It was, therefore, a picturesque roadway enough, and Sally walking along it bareheaded, clad still in the pink gingham of the morning, found it so to an unusual degree. Yet it must be admitted that it would have been an object ugly indeed which would have seemed devoid of all beauty to Sally Lane, on this, the sixteenth of June. She kept on, straight up the winding lane, to the border of the woods. When she had reached the first trees, a fine group of oak and chestnut, lifting stately limbs, long uncut, far into the summer air, she turned and paused to look back. From this point she could see far, and the whole of her family's possessions lay before her, outspread in all the beauty of June at its bonniest. Impulsively she stretched out her arms. "Sally Lane," she said softly to herself, with her eyes scanning it all, "if there's a happier girl than you in the world to-day, she must be entirely out of her senses with joy." After a little she sat down, her back against a tree-trunk, her face toward the distant view.... Presently a big green oak leaf fluttered down past her eyes, and fell into her lap. "That's odd," she thought, and looked up. Nothing could be seen but the great limbs, rugged with years, of the oak beneath which she sat. She looked off again at the view. Another leaf came swirling down past her, lighting on the ground. "It's probably a squirrel," she explained to herself, concerning this phenomenon of falling leaves in June, and tried again to descry its source, without success. When, however, a shower of the green missiles came down together, she got to her feet, and walked around the tree. "They had to come, thick as leaves in Vallombrosa," remarked a familiar voice from far above her, "before you would pay attention. I fired for at least ten minutes before you would so much as look up. Will you come up, or shall I come down?" "I'd like to come up," Sally replied, smiling up into Jarvis's brown face, as she espied him, sitting astride a limb well up in the branching foliage. "But I don't think it's practical." "Why be practical? Nobody is practical on Strawberry Acres, according to a certain brilliant but skeptical attorney from town. Your greatest aim has been to remain a girl as long as possible. Girls climb trees. _Ergo_--" He began to descend. "Wait!" cried Sally, as he set foot on the lowest limb, a matter of ten feet above her head, and paused to look down at her. "Stay there, please--Do you really want me to come up?" "Very much. It's entirely possible. Set your foot on that knob, reach up your arm, I'll let myself down far enough to get hold of your hand, and the next thing you know you'll be sitting beside me here." "Then what will happen?" "Then--we'll have a little talk I've been waiting for all day. I began to think I couldn't get it till evening fell, when the garden might help me out." "I think the garden is a very nice place for conversation." Sally put both hands behind her back, looking up at him. "Better than the limb of an oak tree? I admit it--for some sorts of conversation. Up here I should be forced to hold on with one arm. But there would be compensation in that, for with the other arm I should be forced to hold you on!" His laughing eyes looked down at her. She shook her head. "If I came up the tree I should prove that I am still a girl. If I am still a girl--" "Are you still a girl? Is that still your greatest desire?" He leaned forward, and the smile suddenly left his lips. His eyes searched hers. The face she bravely lifted to him was a girl's for youthful beauty, but into it had come something very sweet and womanly, which at last gave him the leave he had waited so long for. "No--I think I've grown up." she said, quite clearly. With an exclamation, the sinewy figure in the tree made short work of the ten feet to the ground, swinging itself off from the limb by both hands and dropping lightly down. "I don't think I could have waited a day longer," said Jarvis Burnside. Then, with the sheltering trunk of the great oak shutting off all possible vision from the far distant house, he drew Sally Lane into his eager arms. * * * * * "Why so late?" Maxwell Lane looked up to ask, as his sister Sally came somewhat hurriedly in to dinner, when the rest of the household were half through. "Please excuse my pink gingham," apologized Sally, as she dropped into her chair. She glanced from Mrs. Burnside in cool white to Josephine in crisp blue. "Nothing could be more becoming," Josephine asserted, always ready to defend her friend. "There's a strawberry stain on her right sleeve," Bob pointed out. "Where's Jarve?" asked Alec. "I saw him as I came in. He was on his way," replied Sally, lifting a glass of water to hide a pair of lips which wanted to laugh. Jarvis appeared. He also was in the garb be had worn all day. The pair seemed oddly similar in the nonchalance they could not quite successfully carry through. "Look here!" Alec scanned both faces. "You two have been up to something." "I've been up a tree," Jarvis replied. "Have you been up a tree too?" Alec questioned his sister. "Not at all." "Did you get him up one?" Sally attempted to answer, but the merriment upon her lips would not be controlled. She gave way to it. Her eyes, in spite of themselves, met Jarvis's. He was laughing too. His face, red showing beneath the tan, was too radiant with his happiness for him to be able to help Sally with any further effort at concealment. "Don't you think we may as well own up?" he questioned her. "Own up!" cried Alec. "Do you people flatter yourselves there's anything for you to own up to, that we don't already know?" "Good for you!" And Max rose up to shake Jarvis's hand. "It's nothing new, but it's great!" roared Bob, and patted his sister's shoulder. "My dear!" said Mrs. Burnside. She rose, and Sally ran to her. Josephine followed eagerly, pausing to embrace her brother on the way. "I don't see," said Uncle Timothy, "but that I am the one to say the only fitting thing. Therefore I say it--from my heart." He seized Jarvis's hand. Sally turned from Josephine to put her arm about his neck. "God bless you, my children," said Uncle Timothy. 
33325	----	The Spoils of Poynton By Henry James BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY The Riverside Press, Cambridge 1897 Copyright, 1896, By HENRY JAMES. _All rights reserved._ _The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U.S.A._ Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company. THE SPOILS OF POYNTON I Mrs. Gereth had said she would go with the rest to church, but suddenly it seemed to her that she should not be able to wait even till church-time for relief: breakfast, at Waterbath, was a punctual meal, and she had still nearly an hour on her hands. Knowing the church to be near, she prepared in her room for the little rural walk, and on her way down again, passing through corridors and observing imbecilities of decoration, the æsthetic misery of the big commodious house, she felt a return of the tide of last night's irritation, a renewal of everything she could secretly suffer from ugliness and stupidity. Why did she consent to such contacts, why did she so rashly expose herself? She had had, heaven knew, her reasons, but the whole experience was to be sharper than she had feared. To get away from it and out into the air, into the presence of sky and trees, flowers and birds, was a necessity of every nerve. The flowers at Waterbath would probably go wrong in color and the nightingales sing out of tune; but she remembered to have heard the place described as possessing those advantages that are usually spoken of as natural. There were advantages enough it clearly didn't possess. It was hard for her to believe that a woman could look presentable who had been kept awake for hours by the wall-paper in her room; yet none the less, as in her fresh widow's weeds she rustled across the hall, she was sustained by the consciousness, which always added to the unction of her social Sundays, that she was, as usual, the only person in the house incapable of wearing in her preparation the horrible stamp of the same exceptional smartness that would be conspicuous in a grocer's wife. She would rather have perished than have looked _endimanchée_. She was fortunately not challenged, the hall being empty of the other women, who were engaged precisely in arraying themselves to that dire end. Once in the grounds, she recognized that, with a site, a view that struck the note, set an example to its inmates, Waterbath ought to have been charming. How she herself, with such elements to handle, would have taken the fine hint of nature! Suddenly, at the turn of a walk, she came on a member of the party, a young lady seated on a bench in deep and lonely meditation. She had observed the girl at dinner and afterwards: she was always looking at girls with an apprehensive or speculative reference to her son. Deep in her heart was a conviction that Owen would, in spite of all her spells, marry at last a frump; and this from no evidence that she could have represented as adequate, but simply from her deep uneasiness, her belief that such a special sensibility as her own could have been inflicted on a woman only as a source of anguish. It would be her fate, her discipline, her cross, to have a frump brought hideously home to her. This girl, one of the two Vetches, had no beauty, but Mrs. Gereth, scanning the dullness for a sign of life, had been straightway able to classify such a figure as the least, for the moment, of her afflictions. Fleda Vetch was dressed with an idea, though perhaps with not much else; and that made a bond when there was none other, especially as in this case the idea was real, not imitation. Mrs. Gereth had long ago generalized the truth that the temperament of the frump is amply consistent with a certain usual prettiness. There were five girls in the party, and the prettiness of this one, slim, pale, and black-haired, was less likely than that of the others ever to occasion an exchange of platitudes. The two less developed Brigstocks, daughters of the house, were in particular tiresomely "lovely." A second glance, this morning, at the young lady before her conveyed to Mrs. Gereth the soothing assurance that she also was guiltless of looking hot and fine. They had had no talk as yet, but this was a note that would effectually introduce them if the girl should show herself in the least conscious of their community. She got up from her seat with a smile that but partly dissipated the prostration Mrs. Gereth had recognized in her attitude. The elder woman drew her down again, and for a minute, as they sat together, their eyes met and sent out mutual soundings. "Are you safe? Can I utter it?" each of them said to the other, quickly recognizing, almost proclaiming, their common need to escape. The tremendous fancy, as it came to be called, that Mrs. Gereth was destined to take to Fleda Vetch virtually began with this discovery that the poor child had been moved to flight even more promptly than herself. That the poor child no less quickly perceived how far she could now go was proved by the immense friendliness with which she instantly broke out: "Isn't it too dreadful?" "Horrible--horrible!" cried Mrs. Gereth, with a laugh, "and it's really a comfort to be able to say it." She had an idea, for it was her ambition, that she successfully made a secret of that awkward oddity, her proneness to be rendered unhappy by the presence of the dreadful. Her passion for the exquisite was the cause of this, but it was a passion she considered that she never advertised nor gloried in, contenting herself with letting it regulate her steps and show quietly in her life, remembering at all times that there are few things more soundless than a deep devotion. She was therefore struck with the acuteness of the little girl who had already put a finger on her hidden spring. What was dreadful now, what was horrible, was the intimate ugliness of Waterbath, and it was of that phenomenon these ladies talked while they sat in the shade and drew refreshment from the great tranquil sky, from which no blue saucers were suspended. It was an ugliness fundamental and systematic, the result of the abnormal nature of the Brigstocks, from whose composition the principle of taste had been extravagantly omitted. In the arrangement of their home some other principle, remarkably active, but uncanny and obscure, had operated instead, with consequences depressing to behold, consequences that took the form of a universal futility. The house was bad in all conscience, but it might have passed if they had only let it alone. This saving mercy was beyond them; they had smothered it with trumpery ornament and scrapbook art, with strange excrescences and bunchy draperies, with gimcracks that might have been keepsakes for maid-servants and nondescript conveniences that might have been prizes for the blind. They had gone wildly astray over carpets and curtains; they had an infallible instinct for disaster, and were so cruelly doom-ridden that it rendered them almost tragic. Their drawing-room, Mrs. Gereth lowered her voice to mention, caused her face to burn, and each of the new friends confided to the other that in her own apartment she had given way to tears. There was in the elder lady's a set of comic water-colors, a family joke by a family genius, and in the younger's a souvenir from some centennial or other Exhibition, that they shudderingly alluded to. The house was perversely full of souvenirs of places even more ugly than itself and of things it would have been a pious duty to forget. The worst horror was the acres of varnish, something advertised and smelly, with which everything was smeared; it was Fleda Vetch's conviction that the application of it, by their own hands and hilariously shoving each other, was the amusement of the Brigstocks on rainy days. When, as criticism deepened, Fleda dropped the suggestion that some people would perhaps see something in Mona, Mrs. Gereth caught her up with a groan of protest, a smothered familiar cry of "Oh, my dear!" Mona was the eldest of the three, the one Mrs. Gereth most suspected. She confided to her young friend that it was her suspicion that had brought her to Waterbath; and this was going very far, for on the spot, as a refuge, a remedy, she had clutched at the idea that something might be done with the girl before her. It was her fancied exposure at any rate that had sharpened the shock; made her ask herself with a terrible chill if fate could really be plotting to saddle her with a daughter-in-law brought up in such a place. She had seen Mona in her appropriate setting and she had seen Owen, handsome and heavy, dangle beside her; but the effect of these first hours had happily not been to darken the prospect. It was clearer to her that she could never accept Mona, but it was after all by no means certain that Owen would ask her to. He had sat by somebody else at dinner, and afterwards he had talked to Mrs. Firmin, who was as dreadful as all the rest, but redeemingly married. His heaviness, which in her need of expansion she freely named, had two aspects: one of them his monstrous lack of taste, the other his exaggerated prudence. If it should come to a question of carrying Mona with a high hand there would be no need to worry, for that was rarely his manner of proceeding. Invited by her companion, who had asked if it weren't wonderful, Mrs. Gereth had begun to say a word about Poynton; but she heard a sound of voices that made her stop short. The next moment she rose to her feet, and Fleda could see that her alarm was by no means quenched. Behind the place where they had been sitting the ground dropped with a certain steepness, forming a long grassy bank, up which Owen Gereth and Mona Brigstock, dressed for church but making a familiar joke of it, were in the act of scrambling and helping each other. When they had reached the even ground Fleda was able to read the meaning of the exclamation in which Mrs. Gereth had expressed her reserves on the subject of Miss Brigstock's personality. Miss Brigstock had been laughing and even romping, but the circumstance hadn't contributed the ghost of an expression to her countenance. Tall, straight and fair, long-limbed and strangely festooned, she stood there without a look in her eye or any perceptible intention of any sort in any other feature. She belonged to the type in which speech is an unaided emission of sound and the secret of being is impenetrably and incorruptibly kept. Her expression would probably have been beautiful if she had had one, but whatever she communicated she communicated, in a manner best known to herself, without signs. This was not the case with Owen Gereth, who had plenty of them, and all very simple and immediate. Robust and artless, eminently natural, yet perfectly correct, he looked pointlessly active and pleasantly dull. Like his mother and like Fleda Vetch, but not for the same reason, this young pair had come out to take a turn before church. The meeting of the two couples was sensibly awkward, and Fleda, who was sagacious, took the measure of the shock inflicted on Mrs. Gereth. There had been intimacy--oh yes, intimacy as well as puerility--in the horse-play of which they had just had a glimpse. The party began to stroll together to the house, and Fleda had again a sense of Mrs. Gereth's quick management in the way the lovers, or whatever they were, found themselves separated. She strolled behind with Mona, the mother possessing herself of her son, her exchange of remarks with whom, however, remained, as they went, suggestively inaudible. That member of the party in whose intenser consciousness we shall most profitably seek a reflection of the little drama with which we are concerned received an even livelier impression of Mrs. Gereth's intervention from the fact that ten minutes later, on the way to church, still another pairing had been effected. Owen walked with Fleda, and it was an amusement to the girl to feel sure that this was by his mother's direction. Fleda had other amusements as well: such as noting that Mrs. Gereth was now with Mona Brigstock; such as observing that she was all affability to that young woman; such as reflecting that, masterful and clever, with a great bright spirit, she was one of those who impose themselves as an influence; such as feeling finally that Owen Gereth was absolutely beautiful and delightfully dense. This young person had even from herself wonderful secrets of delicacy and pride; but she came as near distinctness as in the consideration of such matters she had ever come at all in now surrendering herself to the idea that it was of a pleasant effect and rather remarkable to be stupid without offense--of a pleasanter effect and more remarkable indeed than to be clever and horrid. Owen Gereth at any rate, with his inches, his features, and his lapses, was neither of these latter things. She herself was prepared, if she should ever marry, to contribute all the cleverness, and she liked to think that her husband would be a force grateful for direction. She was in her small way a spirit of the same family as Mrs. Gereth. On that flushed and huddled Sunday a great matter occurred; her little life became aware of a singular quickening. Her meagre past fell away from her like a garment of the wrong fashion, and as she came up to town on the Monday what she stared at in the suburban fields from the train was a future full of the things she particularly loved. II These were neither more nor less than the things with which she had had time to learn from Mrs. Gereth that Poynton overflowed. Poynton, in the south of England, was this lady's established, or rather her disestablished home, having recently passed into the possession of her son. The father of the boy, an only child, had died two years before, and in London, with his mother, Owen was occupying for May and June a house good-naturedly lent them by Colonel Gereth, their uncle and brother-in-law. His mother had laid her hand so engagingly on Fleda Vetch that in a very few days the girl knew it was possible they should suffer together in Cadogan Place almost as much as they had suffered together at Waterbath. The kind colonel's house was also an ordeal, but the two women, for the ensuing month, had at least the relief of their confessions. The great drawback of Mrs. Gereth's situation was that, thanks to the rare perfection of Poynton, she was condemned to wince wherever she turned. She had lived for a quarter of a century in such warm closeness with the beautiful that, as she frankly admitted, life had become for her a kind of fool's paradise. She couldn't leave her own house without peril of exposure. She didn't say it in so many words, but Fleda could see she held that there was nothing in England really to compare to Poynton. There were places much grander and richer, but there was no such complete work of art, nothing that would appeal so to those who were really informed. In putting such elements into her hand fortune had given her an inestimable chance; she knew how rarely well things had gone with her and that she had tasted a happiness altogether rare. There had been in the first place the exquisite old house itself, early Jacobean, supreme in every part: it was a provocation, an inspiration, a matchless canvas for the picture. Then there had been her husband's sympathy and generosity, his knowledge and love, their perfect accord and beautiful life together, twenty-six years of planning and seeking, a long, sunny harvest of taste and curiosity. Lastly, she never denied, there had been her personal gift, the genius, the passion, the patience of the collector--a patience, an almost infernal cunning, that had enabled her to do it all with a limited command of money. There wouldn't have been money enough for any one else, she said with pride, but there had been money enough for her. They had saved on lots of things in life, and there were lots of things they hadn't had, but they had had in every corner of Europe their swing among the Jews. It was fascinating to poor Fleda, who hadn't a penny in the world nor anything nice at home, and whose only treasure was her subtle mind, to hear this genuine English lady, fresh and fair, young in the fifties, declare with gayety and conviction that she was herself the greatest Jew who had ever tracked a victim. Fleda, with her mother dead, hadn't so much even as a home, and her nearest chance of one was that there was some appearance her sister would become engaged to a curate whose eldest brother was supposed to have property and would perhaps allow him something. Her father paid some of her bills, but he didn't like her to live with him; and she had lately, in Paris, with several hundred other young women, spent a year in a studio, arming herself for the battle of life by a course with an impressionist painter. She was determined to work, but her impressions, or somebody's else, were as yet her only material. Mrs. Gereth had told her she liked her because she had an extraordinary _flair_; but under the circumstances a _flair_ was a questionable boon: in the dry places in which she had mainly moved she could have borne a chronic catarrh. She was constantly summoned to Cadogan Place, and before the month was out was kept to stay, to pay a visit of which the end, it was agreed, should have nothing to do with the beginning. She had a sense, partly exultant and partly alarmed, of having quickly become necessary to her imperious friend, who indeed gave a reason quite sufficient for it in telling her there was nobody else who understood. From Mrs. Gereth there was in these days an immense deal to understand, though it might be freely summed up in the circumstance that she was wretched. She told Fleda that she couldn't completely know why till she should have seen the things at Poynton. Fleda could perfectly grasp this connection, which was exactly one of the matters that, in their inner mystery, were a blank to everybody else. The girl had a promise that the wonderful house should be shown her early in July, when Mrs. Gereth would return to it as to her home; but even before this initiation she put her finger on the spot that in the poor lady's troubled soul ached hardest. This was the misery that haunted her, the dread of the inevitable surrender. What Fleda had to sit up to was the confirmed appearance that Owen Gereth would marry Mona Brigstock, marry her in his mother's teeth, and that such an act would have incalculable bearings. They were present to Mrs. Gereth, her companion could see, with a vividness that at moments almost ceased to be that of sanity. She would have to give up Poynton, and give it up to a product of Waterbath--that was the wrong that rankled, the humiliation at which Fleda would be able adequately to shudder only when she should know the place. She did know Waterbath, and she despised it--she had that qualification for sympathy. Her sympathy was intelligent, for she read deep into the matter; she stared, aghast, as it came home to her for the first time, at the cruel English custom of the expropriation of the lonely mother. Mr. Gereth had apparently been a very amiable man, but Mr. Gereth had left things in a way that made the girl marvel. The house and its contents had been treated as a single splendid object; everything was to go straight to his son, and his widow was to have a maintenance and a cottage in another county. No account whatever had been taken of her relation to her treasures, of the passion with which she had waited for them, worked for them, picked them over, made them worthy of each other and the house, watched them, loved them, lived with them. He appeared to have assumed that she would settle questions with her son, that he could depend upon Owen's affection. And in truth, as poor Mrs. Gereth inquired, how could he possibly have had a prevision--he who turned his eyes instinctively from everything repulsive--of anything so abnormal as a Waterbath Brigstock? He had been in ugly houses enough, but had escaped that particular nightmare. Nothing so perverse could have been expected to happen as that the heir to the loveliest thing in England should be inspired to hand it over to a girl so exceptionally tainted. Mrs. Gereth spoke of poor Mona's taint as if to mention it were almost a violation of decency, and a person who had listened without enlightenment would have wondered of what fault the girl had been or had indeed not been guilty. But Owen had from a boy never cared, had never had the least pride or pleasure in his home. "Well, then, if he doesn't care!"--Fleda exclaimed, with some impetuosity; stopping short, however, before she completed her sentence. Mrs. Gereth looked at her rather hard. "If he doesn't care?" Fleda hesitated; she had not quite had a definite idea. "Well--he'll give them up." "Give what up?" "Why, those beautiful things." "Give them up to whom?" Mrs. Gereth more boldly stared. "To you, of course--to enjoy, to keep for yourself." "And leave his house as bare as your hand? There's nothing in it that isn't precious." Fleda considered; her friend had taken her up with a smothered ferocity by which she was slightly disconcerted. "I don't mean of course that he should surrender everything; but he might let you pick out the things to which you're most attached." "I think he would if he were free," said Mrs. Gereth. "And do you mean, as it is, that _she_'ll prevent him?" Mona Brigstock, between these ladies, was now nothing but "she." "By every means in her power." "But surely not because she understands and appreciates them?" "No," Mrs. Gereth replied, "but because they belong to the house and the house belongs to Owen. If I should wish to take anything, she would simply say, with that motionless mask: 'It goes with the house.' And day after day, in the face of every argument, of every consideration of generosity, she would repeat, without winking, in that voice like the squeeze of a doll's stomach: 'It goes with the house--it goes with the house.' In that attitude they'll shut themselves up." Fleda was struck, was even a little startled with the way Mrs. Gereth had turned this over--had faced, if indeed only to recognize its futility, the notion of a battle with her only son. These words led her to make an inquiry which she had not thought it discreet to make before; she brought out the idea of the possibility, after all, of her friend's continuing to live at Poynton. Would they really wish to proceed to extremities? Was no good-humored, graceful compromise to be imagined or brought about? Couldn't the same roof cover them? Was it so very inconceivable that a married son should, for the rest of her days, share with so charming a mother the home she had devoted more than a score of years to making beautiful for him? Mrs. Gereth hailed this question with a wan, compassionate smile; she replied that a common household, in such a case, was exactly so inconceivable that Fleda had only to glance over the fair face of the English land to see how few people had ever conceived it. It was always thought a wonder, a "mistake," a piece of overstrained sentiment; and she confessed that she was as little capable of a flight of that sort as Owen himself. Even if they both had been capable, they would still have Mona's hatred to reckon with. Fleda's breath was sometimes taken away by the great bounds and elisions which, on Mrs. Gereth's lips, the course of discussion could take. This was the first she had heard of Mona's hatred, though she certainly had not needed Mrs. Gereth to tell her that in close quarters that young lady would prove secretly mulish. Later Fleda perceived indeed that perhaps almost any girl would hate a person who should be so markedly averse to having anything to do with her. Before this, however, in conversation with her young friend, Mrs. Gereth furnished a more vivid motive for her despair by asking how she could possibly be expected to sit there with the new proprietors and accept--or call it, for a day, endure--the horrors they would perpetrate in the house. Fleda reasoned that they wouldn't after all smash things nor burn them up; and Mrs. Gereth admitted when pushed that she didn't quite suppose they would. What she meant was that they would neglect them, ignore them, leave them to clumsy servants (there wasn't an object of them all but should be handled with perfect love), and in many cases probably wish to replace them by pieces answerable to some vulgar modern notion of the convenient. Above all, she saw in advance, with dilated eyes, the abominations they would inevitably mix up with them--the maddening relics of Waterbath, the little brackets and pink vases, the sweepings of bazaars, the family photographs and illuminated texts, the "household art" and household piety of Mona's hideous home. Wasn't it enough simply to contend that Mona would approach Poynton in the spirit of a Brigstock, and that in the spirit of a Brigstock she would deal with her acquisition? Did Fleda really see _her_, Mrs. Gereth demanded, spending the remainder of her days with such a creature's elbow in her eye? Fleda had to declare that she certainly didn't, and that Waterbath had been a warning it would be frivolous to overlook. At the same time she privately reflected that they were taking a great deal for granted, and that, inasmuch as to her knowledge Owen Gereth had positively denied his betrothal, the ground of their speculations was by no means firm. It seemed to our young lady that in a difficult position Owen conducted himself with some natural art; treating this domesticated confidant of his mother's wrongs with a simple civility that almost troubled her conscience, so deeply she felt that she might have had for him the air of siding with that lady against him. She wondered if he would ever know how little really she did this, and that she was there, since Mrs. Gereth had insisted, not to betray, but essentially to confirm and protect. The fact that his mother disliked Mona Brigstock might have made him dislike the object of her preference, and it was detestable to Fleda to remember that she might have appeared to him to offer herself as an exemplary contrast. It was clear enough, however, that the happy youth had no more sense for a motive than a deaf man for a tune, a limitation by which, after all, she could gain as well as lose. He came and went very freely on the business with which London abundantly furnished him, but he found time more than once to say to her, "It's awfully nice of you to look after poor Mummy." As well as his quick speech, which shyness made obscure--it was usually as desperate as a "rush" at some violent game--his child's eyes in his man's face put it to her that, you know, this really meant a good deal for him and that he hoped she would stay on. With a person in the house who, like herself, was clever, poor Mummy was conveniently occupied; and Fleda found a beauty in the candor and even in the modesty which apparently kept him from suspecting that two such wiseheads could possibly be occupied with Owen Gereth. III They went at last, the wiseheads, down to Poynton, where the palpitating girl had the full revelation. "_Now_ do you know how I feel?" Mrs. Gereth asked when in the wonderful hall, three minutes after their arrival, her pretty associate dropped on a seat with a soft gasp and a roll of dilated eyes. The answer came clearly enough, and in the rapture of that first walk through the house Fleda took a prodigious span. She perfectly understood how Mrs. Gereth felt--she had understood but meagrely before; and the two women embraced with tears over the tightening of their bond--tears which on the younger one's part were the natural and usual sign of her submission to perfect beauty. It was not the first time she had cried for the joy of admiration, but it was the first time the mistress of Poynton, often as she had shown her house, had been present at such an exhibition. She exulted in it; it quickened her own tears; she assured her companion that such an occasion made the poor old place fresh to her again and more precious than ever. Yes, nobody had ever, that way, felt what she had achieved: people were so grossly ignorant, and everybody, even the knowing ones, as they thought themselves, more or less dense. What Mrs. Gereth had achieved was indeed an exquisite work; and in such an art of the treasure-hunter, in selection and comparison refined to that point, there was an element of creation, of personality. She had commended Fleda's _flair_, and Fleda now gave herself up to satiety. Preoccupations and scruples fell away from her; she had never known a greater happiness than the week she passed in this initiation. Wandering through clear chambers where the general effect made preferences almost as impossible as if they had been shocks, pausing at open doors where vistas were long and bland, she would, even if she had not already known, have discovered for herself that Poynton was the record of a life. It was written in great syllables of color and form, the tongues of other countries and the hands of rare artists. It was all France and Italy, with their ages composed to rest. For England you looked out of old windows--it was England that was the wide embrace. While outside, on the low terraces, she contradicted gardeners and refined on nature, Mrs. Gereth left her guest to finger fondly the brasses that Louis Quinze might have thumbed, to sit with Venetian velvets just held in a loving palm, to hang over cases of enamels and pass and repass before cabinets. There were not many pictures--the panels and the stuffs were themselves the picture; and in all the great wainscoted house there was not an inch of pasted paper. What struck Fleda most in it was the high pride of her friend's taste, a fine arrogance, a sense of style which, however amused and amusing, never compromised nor stooped. She felt indeed, as this lady had intimated to her that she would, both a respect and a compassion that she had not known before; the vision of the coming surrender filled her with an equal pain. To give it all up, to die to it--that thought ached in her breast. She herself could imagine clinging there with a closeness separate from dignity. To have created such a place was to have had dignity enough; when there was a question of defending it the fiercest attitude was the right one. After so intense a taking of possession she too was to give it up; for she reflected that if Mrs. Gereth's remaining there would have offered her a sort of future--stretching away in safe years on the other side of a gulf--the advent of the others could only be, by the same law, a great vague menace, the ruffling of a still water. Such were the emotions of a hungry girl whose sensibility was almost as great as her opportunities for comparison had been small. The museums had done something for her, but nature had done more. If Owen had not come down with them nor joined them later, it was because he still found London jolly; yet the question remained of whether the jollity of London was not merely the only name his small vocabulary yielded for the jollity of Mona Brigstock. There was indeed in his conduct another ambiguity--something that required explaining so long as his motive didn't come to the surface. If he was in love, what was the matter? And what was the matter still more if he wasn't? The mystery was at last cleared up: this Fleda gathered from the tone in which, one morning at breakfast, a letter just opened made Mrs. Gereth cry out. Her dismay was almost a shriek: "Why, he's bringing her down--he wants her to see the house!" They flew, the two women, into each other's arms and, with their heads together, soon made out that the reason, the baffling reason why nothing had yet happened, was that Mona didn't know, or Owen didn't, whether Poynton would really please her. She was coming down to judge; and could anything in the world be more like poor Owen than the ponderous probity which had kept him from pressing her for a reply till she should have learned whether she approved what he had to offer her? That was a scruple it had naturally been impossible to impute. If only they might fondly hope, Mrs. Gereth wailed, that the girl's expectations would be dashed! There was a fine consistency, a sincerity quite affecting, in her arguing that the better the place should happen to look and to express the conceptions to which it owed its origin, the less it would speak to an intelligence so primitive. How could a Brigstock possibly understand what it was all about? How, really, could a Brigstock logically do anything but hate it? Mrs. Gereth, even as she whisked away linen shrouds, persuaded herself of the possibility on Mona's part of some bewildered blankness, some collapse of admiration that would prove disconcerting to her swain--a hope of which Fleda at least could see the absurdity and which gave the measure of the poor lady's strange, almost maniacal disposition to thrust in everywhere the question of "things," to read all behavior in the light of some fancied relation to them. "Things" were of course the sum of the world; only, for Mrs. Gereth, the sum of the world was rare French furniture and Oriental china. She could at a stretch imagine people's not having, but she couldn't imagine their not wanting and not missing. The young couple were to be accompanied by Mrs. Brigstock, and with a prevision of how fiercely they would be watched Fleda became conscious, before the party arrived, of an amused, diplomatic pity for them. Almost as much as Mrs. Gereth's her taste was her life, but her life was somehow the larger for it. Besides, she had another care now: there was some one she wouldn't have liked to see humiliated even in the form of a young lady who would contribute to his never suspecting so much delicacy. When this young lady appeared Fleda tried, so far as the wish to efface herself allowed, to be mainly the person to take her about, show her the house, and cover up her ignorance. Owen's announcement had been that, as trains made it convenient, they would present themselves for luncheon and depart before dinner; but Mrs. Gereth, true to her system of glaring civility, proposed and obtained an extension, a dining and spending of the night. She made her young friend wonder against what rebellion of fact she was sacrificing in advance so profusely to form. Fleda was appalled, after the first hour, by the rash innocence with which Mona had accepted the responsibility of observation, and indeed by the large levity with which, sitting there like a bored tourist in fine scenery, she exercised it. She felt in her nerves the effect of such a manner on her companion's, and it was this that made her want to entice the girl away, give her some merciful warning or some jocular cue. Mona met intense looks, however, with eyes that might have been blue beads, the only ones she had--eyes into which Fleda thought it strange Owen Gereth should have to plunge for his fate and his mother for a confession of whether Poynton was a success. She made no remark that helped to supply this light; her impression at any rate had nothing in common with the feeling that, as the beauty of the place throbbed out like music, had caused Fleda Vetch to burst into tears. She was as content to say nothing as if, Mrs. Gereth afterwards exclaimed, she had been keeping her mouth shut in a railway-tunnel. Mrs. Gereth contrived at the end of an hour to convey to Fleda that it was plain she was brutally ignorant; but Fleda more subtly discovered that her ignorance was obscurely active. She was not so stupid as not to see that something, though she scarcely knew what, was expected of her that she couldn't give; and the only mode her intelligence suggested of meeting the expectation was to plant her big feet and pull another way. Mrs. Gereth wanted her to rise, somehow or somewhere, and was prepared to hate her if she didn't: very well, she couldn't, she wouldn't rise; she already moved at the altitude that suited her, and was able to see that, since she was exposed to the hatred, she might at least enjoy the calm. The smallest trouble, for a girl with no nonsense about her, was to earn what she incurred; so that, a dim instinct teaching her she would earn it best by not being effusive, and combining with the conviction that she now held Owen, and therefore the place, she had the pleasure of her honesty as well as of her security. Didn't her very honesty lead her to be belligerently blank about Poynton, inasmuch as it was just Poynton that was forced upon her as a subject for effusiveness? Such subjects, to Mona Brigstock, had an air almost of indecency, and the house became uncanny to her through such an appeal--an appeal that, somewhere in the twilight of her being, as Fleda was sure, she thanked heaven she _was_ the girl stiffly to draw back from. She was a person whom pressure at a given point infallibly caused to expand in the wrong place instead of, as it is usually administered in the hope of doing, the right one. Her mother, to make up for this, broke out universally, pronounced everything "most striking," and was visibly happy that Owen's captor should be so far on the way to strike: but she jarred upon Mrs. Gereth by her formula of admiration, which was that anything she looked at was "in the style" of something else. This was to show how much she had seen, but it only showed she had seen nothing; everything at Poynton was in the style of Poynton, and poor Mrs. Brigstock, who at least was determined to rise, and had brought with her a trophy of her journey, a "lady's magazine" purchased at the station, a horrible thing with patterns for antimacassars, which, as it was quite new, the first number, and seemed so clever, she kindly offered to leave for the house, was in the style of a vulgar old woman who wore silver jewelry and tried to pass off a gross avidity as a sense of the beautiful. By the day's end it was clear to Fleda Vetch that, however Mona judged, the day had been determinant; whether or no she felt the charm, she felt the challenge: at an early moment Owen Gereth would be able to tell his mother the worst. Nevertheless, when the elder lady, at bedtime, coming in a dressing-gown and a high fever to the younger one's room, cried out, "She hates it; but what will she do?" Fleda pretended vagueness, played at obscurity and assented disingenuously to the proposition that they at least had a respite. The future was dark to her, but there was a silken thread she could clutch in the gloom--she would never give Owen away. He might give himself--he even certainly would; but that was his own affair, and his blunders, his innocence, only added to the appeal he made to her. She would cover him, she would protect him, and beyond thinking her a cheerful inmate he would never guess her intention, any more than, beyond thinking her clever enough for anything, his acute mother would discover it. From this hour, with Mrs. Gereth, there was a flaw in her frankness: her admirable friend continued to know everything she did; what was to remain unknown was the general motive. From the window of her room, the next morning before breakfast, the girl saw Owen in the garden with Mona, who strolled beside him with a listening parasol, but without a visible look for the great florid picture that had been hung there by Mrs. Gereth's hand. Mona kept dropping her eyes, as she walked, to catch the sheen of her patent-leather shoes, which resembled a man's and which she kicked forward a little--it gave her an odd movement--to help her see what she thought of them. When Fleda came down Mrs. Gereth was in the breakfast-room; and at that moment Owen, through a long window, passed in alone from the terrace and very endearingly kissed his mother. It immediately struck the girl that she was in their way, for hadn't he been borne on a wave of joy exactly to announce, before the Brigstocks departed, that Mona had at last faltered out the sweet word he had been waiting for? He shook hands with his friendly violence, but Fleda contrived not to look into his face: what she liked most to see in it was not the reflection of Mona's big boot-toes. She could bear well enough that young lady herself, but she couldn't bear Owen's opinion of her. She was on the point of slipping into the garden when the movement was checked by Mrs. Gereth's suddenly drawing her close, as if for the morning embrace, and then, while she kept her there with the bravery of the night's repose, breaking out: "Well, my dear boy, what _does_ your young friend there make of our odds and ends?" "Oh, she thinks they're all right!" Fleda immediately guessed from his tone that he had not come in to say what she supposed; there was even something in it to confirm Mrs. Gereth's belief that their danger had dropped. She was sure, moreover, that his tribute to Mona's taste was a repetition of the eloquent words in which the girl had herself recorded it; she could indeed hear, with all vividness, the pretty passage between the pair. "Don't you think it's rather jolly, the old shop?" "Oh, it's all right!" Mona had graciously remarked; and then they had probably, with a slap on a back, run another race up or down a green bank. Fleda knew Mrs. Gereth had not yet uttered a word to her son that would have shown him how much she feared; but it was impossible to feel her friend's arm round her and not become aware that this friend was now throbbing with a strange intention. Owen's reply had scarcely been of a nature to usher in a discussion of Mona's sensibilities; but Mrs. Gereth went on, in a moment, with an innocence of which Fleda could measure the cold hypocrisy: "Has she any sort of feeling for nice old things?" The question was as fresh as the morning light. "Oh, of course she likes everything that's nice." And Owen, who constitutionally disliked questions--an answer was almost as hateful to him as a "trick" to a big dog--smiled kindly at Fleda and conveyed that she would understand what he meant even if his mother didn't. Fleda, however, mainly understood that Mrs. Gereth, with an odd, wild laugh, held her so hard that she hurt her. "I could give up everything without a pang, I think, to a person I could trust, I could respect." The girl heard her voice tremble under the effort to show nothing but what she wanted to show, and felt the sincerity of her implication that the piety most real to her was to be on one's knees before one's high standard. "The best things here, as you know, are the things your father and I collected, things all that we worked for and waited for and suffered for. Yes," cried Mrs. Gereth, with a fine freedom of fancy, "there are things in the house that we almost starved for! They were our religion, they were our life, they were _us_! And now they're only _me_--except that they're also _you_, thank God, a little, you dear!" she continued, suddenly inflicting on Fleda a kiss apparently intended to knock her into position. "There isn't one of them I don't know and love--yes, as one remembers and cherishes the happiest moments of one's life. Blindfold, in the dark, with the brush of a finger, I could tell one from another. They're living things to me; they know me, they return the touch of my hand. But I could let them all go, since I have to, so strangely, to another affection, another conscience. There's a care they want, there's a sympathy that draws out their beauty. Rather than make them over to a woman ignorant and vulgar, I think I'd deface them with my own hands. Can't you see me, Fleda, and wouldn't you do it yourself?"--she appealed to her companion with glittering eyes. "I couldn't bear the thought of such a woman here--I _couldn't_. I don't know what she'd do; she'd be sure to invent some deviltry, if it should be only to bring in her own little belongings and horrors. The world is full of cheap gimcracks, in this awful age, and they're thrust in at one at every turn. They'd be thrust in here, on top of my treasures, my own. Who would save _them_ for me--I ask you who _would_?" and she turned again to Fleda with a dry, strained smile. Her handsome, high-nosed, excited face might have been that of Don Quixote tilting at a windmill. Drawn into the eddy of this outpouring, the girl, scared and embarrassed, laughed off her exposure; but only to feel herself more passionately caught up and, as it seemed to her, thrust down the fine open mouth (it showed such perfect teeth) with which poor Owen's slow cerebration gaped. "_You_ would, of course--only you, in all the world, because you know, you feel, as I do myself, what's good and true and pure." No severity of the moral law could have taken a higher tone in this implication of the young lady who had not the only virtue Mrs. Gereth actively esteemed. "_You_ would replace me, _you_ would watch over them, _you_ would keep the place right," she austerely pursued, "and with you here--yes, with you, I believe I might rest, at last, in my grave!" She threw herself on Fleda's neck, and before Fleda, horribly shamed, could shake her off, had burst into tears which couldn't have been explained, but which might perhaps have been understood. IV A week later Owen Gereth came down to inform his mother that he had settled with Mona Brigstock; but it was not at all a joy to Fleda, conscious how much to himself it would be a surprise, that he should find her still in the house. That dreadful scene before breakfast had made her position false and odious; it had been followed, after they were left alone, by a scene of her own making with her extravagant friend. She notified Mrs. Gereth of her instant departure: she couldn't possibly remain after being offered to Owen, that way, before her very face, as his mother's candidate for the honor of his hand. That was all he could have seen in such an outbreak and in the indecency of her standing there to enjoy it. Fleda had on the prior occasion dashed out of the room by the shortest course and in her confusion had fallen upon Mona in the garden. She had taken an aimless turn with her, and they had had some talk, rendered at first difficult and almost disagreeable by Mona's apparent suspicion that she had been sent out to spy, as Mrs. Gereth had tried to spy, into her opinions. Fleda was sagacious enough to treat these opinions as a mystery almost awful; which had an effect so much more than reassuring that at the end of five minutes the young lady from Waterbath suddenly and perversely said: "Why has she never had a winter garden thrown out? If ever I have a place of my own I mean to have one." Fleda, dismayed, could see the thing--something glazed and piped, on iron pillars, with untidy plants and cane sofas; a shiny excrescence on the noble face of Poynton. She remembered at Waterbath a conservatory where she had caught a bad cold in the company of a stuffed cockatoo fastened to a tropical bough and a waterless fountain composed of shells stuck into some hardened paste. She asked Mona if her idea would be to make something like this conservatory; to which Mona replied: "Oh no, much finer; we haven't got a winter garden at Waterbath." Fleda wondered if she meant to convey that it was the only grandeur they lacked, and in a moment Mona went on: "But we have got a billiard-room--that I will say for us!" There was no billiard-room at Poynton, but there would evidently be one, and it would have, hung on its walls, framed at the "Stores," caricature-portraits of celebrities, taken from a "society-paper." When the two girls had gone in to breakfast it was for Fleda to see at a glance that there had been a further passage, of some high color, between Owen and his mother; and she had turned pale in guessing to what extremity, at her expense, Mrs. Gereth had found occasion to proceed. Hadn't she, after her clumsy flight, been pressed upon Owen in still clearer terms? Mrs. Gereth would practically have said to him: "If you'll take _her_, I'll move away without a sound. But if you take any one else, any one I'm not sure of, as I am of her--heaven help me, I'll fight to the death!" Breakfast, this morning, at Poynton, had been a meal singularly silent, in spite of the vague little cries with which Mrs. Brigstock turned up the underside of plates and the knowing but alarming raps administered by her big knuckles to porcelain cups. Some one had to respond to her, and the duty assigned itself to Fleda, who, while pretending to meet her on the ground of explanation, wondered what Owen thought of a girl still indelicately anxious, after she had been grossly hurled at him, to prove by exhibitions of her fine taste that she was really what his mother pretended. This time, at any rate, their fate was sealed: Owen, as soon as he should get out of the house, would describe to Mona that lady's extraordinary conduct, and if anything more had been wanted to "fetch" Mona, as he would call it, the deficiency was now made up. Mrs. Gereth in fact took care of that--took care of it by the way, at the last, on the threshold, she said to the younger of her departing guests, with an irony of which the sting was wholly in the sense, not at all in the sound: "We haven't had the talk we might have had, have we? You'll feel that I've neglected you, and you'll treasure it up against me. _Don't_, because really, you know, it has been quite an accident, and I've all sorts of information at your disposal. If you should come down again (only you won't, ever,--I feel that!) I should give you plenty of time to worry it out of me. Indeed there are some things I should quite insist on your learning; not permit you at all, in any settled way, _not_ to learn. Yes indeed, you'd put me through, and I should put you, my dear! We should have each other to reckon with, and you would see me as I really am. I'm not a bit the vague, mooning, easy creature I dare say you think. However, if you won't come, you won't; _n'en parlons plus_. It _is_ stupid here after what you're accustomed to. We can only, all round, do what we can, eh? For heaven's sake, don't let your mother forget her precious publication, the female magazine, with the what-do-you-call-'em?--the grease-catchers. There!" Mrs. Gereth, delivering herself from the doorstep, had tossed the periodical higher in air than was absolutely needful--tossed it toward the carriage the retreating party was about to enter. Mona, from the force of habit, the reflex action of the custom of sport, had popped out, with a little spring, a long arm and intercepted the missile as easily as she would have caused a tennis-ball to rebound from a racket. "Good catch!" Owen had cried, so genuinely pleased that practically no notice was taken of his mother's impressive remarks. It was to the accompaniment of romping laughter, as Mrs. Gereth afterwards said, that the carriage had rolled away; but it was while that laughter was still in the air that Fleda Vetch, white and terrible, had turned upon her hostess with her scorching "How _could_ you? Great God, how _could_ you?" This lady's perfect blankness was from the first a sign of her serene conscience, and the fact that till indoctrinated she didn't even know what Fleda meant by resenting her late offense to every susceptibility gave our young woman a sore, scared perception that her own value in the house was just the value, as one might say, of a good agent. Mrs. Gereth was generously sorry, but she was still more surprised--surprised at Fleda's not having liked to be shown off to Owen as the right sort of wife for him. Why not, in the name of wonder, if she absolutely _was_ the right sort? She had admitted on explanation that she could see what her young friend meant by having been laid, as Fleda called it, at his feet; but it struck the girl that the admission was only made to please her, and that Mrs. Gereth was secretly surprised at her not being as happy to be sacrificed to the supremacy of a high standard as she was happy to sacrifice her. She had taken a tremendous fancy to her, but that was on account of the fancy--to Poynton of course--Fleda herself had taken. Wasn't this latter fancy then so great after all? Fleda felt that she could declare it to be great indeed when really for the sake of it she could forgive what she had suffered and, after reproaches and tears, asseverations and kisses, after learning that she was cared for only as a priestess of the altar and a view of her bruised dignity which left no alternative to flight, could accept the shame with the balm, consent not to depart, take refuge in the thin comfort of at least knowing the truth. The truth was simply that all Mrs. Gereth's scruples were on one side and that her ruling passion had in a manner despoiled her of her humanity. On the second day, after the tide of emotion had somewhat ebbed, she said soothingly to her companion: "But you _would_, after all, marry him, you know, darling, wouldn't you, if that girl were not there? I mean of course if he were to ask you," Mrs. Gereth had thoughtfully added. "Marry him if he were to ask me? Most distinctly not!" The question had not come up with this definiteness before, and Mrs. Gereth was clearly more surprised than ever. She marveled a moment. "Not even to have Poynton?" "Not even to have Poynton." "But why on earth?" Mrs. Gereth's sad eyes were fixed on her. Fleda colored; she hesitated. "Because he's too stupid!" Save on one other occasion, at which we shall in time arrive, little as the reader may believe it, she never came nearer to betraying to Mrs. Gereth that she was in love with Owen. She found a dim amusement in reflecting that if Mona had not been there and he had not been too stupid and he verily had asked her, she might, should she have wished to keep her secret, have found it possible to pass off the motive of her action as a mere passion for Poynton. Mrs. Gereth evidently thought in these days of little but things hymeneal; for she broke out with sudden rapture, in the middle of the week: "I know what they'll do: they _will_ marry, but they'll go and live at Waterbath!" There was positive joy in that form of the idea, which she embroidered and developed: it seemed so much the safest thing that could happen. "Yes, I'll have you, but I won't go _there_!" Mona would have said with a vicious nod at the southern horizon: "we'll leave your horrid mother alone there for life." It would be an ideal solution, this ingress the lively pair, with their spiritual need of a warmer medium, would playfully punch in the ribs of her ancestral home; for it would not only prevent recurring panic at Poynton--it would offer them, as in one of their gimcrack baskets or other vessels of ugliness, a definite daily felicity that Poynton could never give. Owen might manage his estate just as he managed it now, and Mrs. Gereth would manage everything else. When, in the hall, on the unforgettable day of his return, she had heard his voice ring out like a call to a terrier, she had still, as Fleda afterwards learned, clutched frantically at the conceit that he had come, at the worst, to announce some compromise; to tell her she would have to put up with the girl, yes, but that some way would be arrived at of leaving her in personal possession. Fleda Vetch, whom from the first hour no illusion had brushed with its wing, now held her breath, went on tiptoe, wandered in outlying parts of the house and through delicate, muffled rooms, while the mother and son faced each other below. From time to time she stopped to listen; but all was so quiet she was almost frightened: she had vaguely expected a sound of contention. It lasted longer than she would have supposed, whatever it was they were doing; and when finally, from a window, she saw Owen stroll out of the house, stop and light a cigarette and then pensively lose himself in the plantations, she found other matter for trepidation in the fact that Mrs. Gereth didn't immediately come rushing up into her arms. She wondered whether she oughtn't to go down to her, and measured the gravity of what had occurred by the circumstance, which she presently ascertained, that the poor lady had retired to her room and wished not to be disturbed. This admonition had been for her maid, with whom Fleda conferred as at the door of a death-chamber; but the girl, without either fatuity or resentment, judged that, since it could render Mrs. Gereth indifferent even to the ministrations of disinterested attachment, the scene had been tremendous. She was absent from luncheon, where indeed Fleda had enough to do to look Owen in the face; there would be so much to make that hateful in their common memory of the passage in which his last visit had terminated. This had been her apprehension at least; but as soon as he stood there she was constrained to wonder at the practical simplicity of the ordeal--a simplicity which was really just his own simplicity, the particular thing that, for Fleda Vetch, some other things of course aiding, made almost any direct relation with him pleasant. He had neither wit, nor tact, nor inspiration: all she could say was that when they were together the alienation these charms were usually depended on to allay didn't occur. On this occasion, for instance, he did so much better than "carry off" an awkward remembrance: he simply didn't have it. He had clean forgotten that she was the girl his mother would have fobbed off on him; he was conscious only that she was there in a manner for service--conscious of the dumb instinct that from the first had made him regard her not as complicating his intercourse with that personage, but as simplifying it. Fleda found beautiful that this theory should have survived the incident of the other day; found exquisite that whereas she was conscious, through faint reverberations, that for her kind little circle at large, whom it didn't concern, her tendency had begun to define itself as parasitical, this strong young man, who had a right to judge and even a reason to loathe her, didn't judge and didn't loathe, let her down gently, treated her as if she pleased him, and in fact evidently liked her to be just where she was. She asked herself what he did when Mona denounced her, and the only answer to the question was that perhaps Mona didn't denounce her. If Mona was inarticulate he wasn't such a fool, then, to marry her. That he was glad Fleda was there was at any rate sufficiently shown by the domestic familiarity with which he said to her: "I must tell you I've been having an awful row with my mother. I'm engaged to be married to Miss Brigstock." "Ah, really?" cried Fleda, achieving a radiance of which she was secretly proud. "How very exciting!" "Too exciting for poor Mummy. She won't hear of it. She has been slating her fearfully. She says she's a 'barbarian.'" "Why, she's lovely!" Fleda exclaimed. "Oh, she's all right. Mother must come round." "Only give her time," said Fleda. She had advanced to the threshold of the door thus thrown open to her and, without exactly crossing it, she threw in an appreciative glance. She asked Owen when his marriage would take place, and in the light of his reply read that Mrs. Gereth's wretched attitude would have no influence at all on the event, absolutely fixed when he came down, and distant by only three months. He liked Fleda's seeming to be on his side, though that was a secondary matter, for what really most concerned him now was the line his mother took about Poynton, her declared unwillingness to give it up. "Naturally I want my own house, you know," he said, "and my father made every arrangement for me to have it. But she may make it devilish awkward. What in the world's a fellow to do?" This it was that Owen wanted to know, and there could be no better proof of his friendliness than his air of depending on Fleda Vetch to tell him. She questioned him, they spent an hour together, and, as he gave her the scale of the concussion from which he had rebounded, she found herself saddened and frightened by the material he seemed to offer her to deal with. It _was_ devilish awkward, and it was so in part because Owen had no imagination. It had lodged itself in that empty chamber that his mother hated the surrender because she hated Mona. He didn't of course understand why she hated Mona, but this belonged to an order of mysteries that never troubled him: there were lots of things, especially in people's minds, that a fellow didn't understand. Poor Owen went through life with a frank dread of people's minds: there were explanations he would have been almost as shy of receiving as of giving. There was therefore nothing that accounted for anything, though in its way it was vivid enough, in his picture to Fleda of his mother's virtual refusal to move. That was simply what it was; for didn't she refuse to move when she as good as declared that she would move only with the furniture? It was the furniture she wouldn't give up; and what was the good of Poynton without the furniture? Besides, the furniture happened to be his, just as everything else happened to be. The furniture--the word, on his lips, had somehow, for Fleda, the sound of washing-stands and copious bedding, and she could well imagine the note it might have struck for Mrs. Gereth. The girl, in this interview with him, spoke of the contents of the house only as "the works of art." It didn't, however, in the least matter to Owen what they were called; what did matter, she easily guessed, was that it had been laid upon him by Mona, been made in effect a condition of her consent, that he should hold his mother to the strictest accountability for them. Mona had already entered upon the enjoyment of her rights. She had made him feel that Mrs. Gereth had been liberally provided for, and had asked him cogently what room there would be at Ricks for the innumerable treasures of the big house. Ricks, the sweet little place offered to the mistress of Poynton as the refuge of her declining years, had been left to the late Mr. Gereth, a considerable time before his death, by an old maternal aunt, a good lady who had spent most of her life there. The house had in recent times been let, but it was amply furnished, it contained all the defunct aunt's possessions. Owen had lately inspected it, and he communicated to Fleda that he had quietly taken Mona to see it. It wasn't a place like Poynton--what dower-house ever was?--but it was an awfully jolly little place, and Mona had taken a tremendous fancy to it. If there were a few things at Poynton that were Mrs. Gereth's peculiar property, of course she must take them away with her; but one of the matters that became clear to Fleda was that this transfer would be immediately subject to Miss Brigstock's approval. The special business that she herself now became aware of being charged with was that of seeing Mrs. Gereth safely and singly off the premises. Her heart failed her, after Owen had returned to London, with the ugliness of this duty--with the ugliness, indeed, of the whole close conflict. She saw nothing of Mrs. Gereth that day; she spent it in roaming with sick sighs, in feeling, as she passed from room to room, that what was expected of her companion was really dreadful. It would have been better never to have had such a place than to have had it and lose it. It was odious to _her_ to have to look for solutions: what a strange relation between mother and son when there was no fundamental tenderness out of which a solution would irrepressibly spring! Was it Owen who was mainly responsible for that poverty? Fleda couldn't think so when she remembered that, so far as he was concerned, Mrs. Gereth would still have been welcome to have her seat by the Poynton fire. The fact that from the moment one accepted his marrying one saw no very different course for Owen to take made her all the rest of that aching day find her best relief in the mercy of not having yet to face her hostess. She dodged and dreamed and romanced away the time; instead of inventing a remedy or a compromise, instead of preparing a plan by which a scandal might be averted, she gave herself, in her sentient solitude, up to a mere fairy tale, up to the very taste of the beautiful peace with which she would have filled the air if only something might have been that could never have been. V "I'll give up the house if they'll let me take what I require!" That, on the morrow, was what Mrs. Gereth's stifled night had qualified her to say, with a tragic face, at breakfast. Fleda reflected that what she "required" was simply every object that surrounded them. The poor woman would have admitted this truth and accepted the conclusion to be drawn from it, the reduction to the absurd of her attitude, the exaltation of her revolt. The girl's dread of a scandal, of spectators and critics, diminished the more she saw how little vulgar avidity had to do with this rigor. It was not the crude love of possession; it was the need to be faithful to a trust and loyal to an idea. The idea was surely noble: it was that of the beauty Mrs. Gereth had so patiently and consummately wrought. Pale but radiant, with her back to the wall, she rose there like a heroine guarding a treasure. To give up the ship was to flinch from her duty; there was something in her eyes that declared she would die at her post. If their difference should become public the shame would be all for the others. If Waterbath thought it could afford to expose itself, then Waterbath was welcome to the folly. Her fanaticism gave her a new distinction, and Fleda perceived almost with awe that she had never carried herself so well. She trod the place like a reigning queen or a proud usurper; full as it was of splendid pieces, it could show in these days no ornament so effective as its menaced mistress. Our young lady's spirit was strangely divided; she had a tenderness for Owen which she deeply concealed, yet it left her occasion to marvel at the way a man was made who could care in any relation for a creature like Mona Brigstock when he had known in any relation a creature like Adela Gereth. With such a mother to give him the pitch, how could he take it so low? She wondered that she didn't despise him for this, but there was something that kept her from it. If there had been nothing else it would have sufficed that she really found herself from this moment the medium of communication with him. "He'll come back to assert himself," Mrs. Gereth had said; and the following week Owen in fact reappeared. He might merely have written, Fleda could see, but he had come in person because it was at once "nicer" for his mother and stronger for his cause. He didn't like the row, though Mona probably did; if he hadn't a sense of beauty he had after all a sense of justice; but it was inevitable he should clearly announce at Poynton the date at which he must look to find the house vacant. "You don't think I'm rough or hard, do you?" he asked of Fleda, his impatience shining in his idle eyes as the dining-hour shines in club-windows. "The place at Ricks stands there with open arms. And then I give her lots of time. Tell her she can remove everything that belongs to her." Fleda recognized the elements of what the newspapers call a deadlock in the circumstance that nothing at Poynton belonged to Mrs. Gereth either more or less than anything else. She must either take everything or nothing, and the girl's suggestion was that it might perhaps be an inspiration to do the latter and begin again on a clean page. What, however, was the poor woman, in that case, to begin with? What was she to do at all, on her meagre income, but make the best of the _objets d'art_ of Ricks, the treasures collected by Mr. Gereth's maiden aunt? She had never been near the place: for long years it had been let to strangers, and after that the foreboding that it would be her doom had kept her from the abasement of it. She had felt that she should see it soon enough, but Fleda (who was careful not to betray to her that Mona had seen it and had been gratified) knew her reasons for believing that the maiden aunt's principles had had much in common with the principles of Waterbath. The only thing, in short, that she would ever have to do with the objets d'art of Ricks would be to turn them out into the road. What belonged to her at Poynton, as Owen said, would conveniently mitigate the void resulting from that demonstration. The exchange of observations between the friends had grown very direct by the time Fleda asked Mrs. Gereth whether she literally meant to shut herself up and stand a siege, or whether it was her idea to expose herself, more informally, to be dragged out of the house by constables. "Oh, I prefer the constables and the dragging!" the heroine of Poynton had answered. "I want to make Owen and Mona do everything that will be most publicly odious." She gave it out that it was her one thought now to force them to a line that would dishonor them and dishonor the tradition they embodied, though Fleda was privately sure that she had visions of an alternative policy. The strange thing was that, proud and fastidious all her life, she now showed so little distaste for the world's hearing of the squabble. What had taken place in her above all was that a long resentment had ripened. She hated the effacement to which English usage reduced the widowed mother: she had discoursed of it passionately to Fleda; contrasted it with the beautiful homage paid in other countries to women in that position, women no better than herself, whom she had seen acclaimed and enthroned, whom she had known and envied; made in short as little as possible a secret of the injury, the bitterness she found in it. The great wrong Owen had done her was not his "taking up" with Mona--that was disgusting, but it was a detail, an accidental form: it was his failure from the first to understand what it was to have a mother at all, to appreciate the beauty and sanctity of the character. She was just his mother as his nose was just his nose, and he had never had the least imagination or tenderness or gallantry about her. One's mother, gracious heaven, if one were the kind of fine young man one ought to be, the only kind Mrs. Gereth cared for, was a subject for poetry, for idolatry. Hadn't she often told Fleda of her friend Madame de Jaume, the wittiest of women, but a small, black, crooked person, each of whose three boys, when absent, wrote to her every day of their lives? She had the house in Paris, she had the house in Poitou, she had more than in the lifetime of her husband (to whom, in spite of her appearance, she had afforded repeated cause for jealousy), because she had to the end of her days the supreme word about everything. It was easy to see that Mrs. Gereth would have given again and again her complexion, her figure, and even perhaps the spotless virtue she had still more successfully retained, to have been the consecrated Madame de Jaume. She wasn't, alas, and this was what she had at present a magnificent occasion to protest against. She was of course fully aware of Owen's concession, his willingness to let her take away with her the few things she liked best; but as yet she only declared that to meet him on this ground would be to give him a triumph, to put him impossibly in the right. "Liked best"? There wasn't a thing in the house that she didn't like best, and what she liked better still was to be left where she was. How could Owen use such an expression without being conscious of his hypocrisy? Mrs. Gereth, whose criticism was often gay, dilated with sardonic humor on the happy look a dozen objects from Poynton would wear and the charming effect they would conduce to when interspersed with the peculiar features of Ricks. What had her whole life been but an effort toward completeness and perfection? Better Waterbath at once, in its cynical unity, than the ignominy of such a mixture! All this was of no great help to Fleda, in so far as Fleda tried to rise to her mission of finding a way out. When at the end of a fortnight Owen came down once more, it was ostensibly to tackle a farmer whose proceedings had been irregular; the girl was sure, however, that he had really come, on the instance of Mona, to see what his mother was doing. He wished to satisfy himself that she was preparing her departure, and he wished to perform a duty, distinct but not less imperative, in regard to the question of the perquisites with which she would retreat. The tension between them was now such that he had to perpetrate these offenses without meeting his adversary. Mrs. Gereth was as willing as himself that he should address to Fleda Vetch whatever cruel remarks he might have to make: she only pitied her poor young friend for repeated encounters with a person as to whom she perfectly understood the girl's repulsion. Fleda thought it nice of Owen not to have expected her to write to him; he wouldn't have wished any more than herself that she should have the air of spying on his mother in his interest. What made it comfortable to deal with him in this more familiar way was the sense that she understood so perfectly how poor Mrs. Gereth suffered, and that she measured so adequately the sacrifice the other side did take rather monstrously for granted. She understood equally how Owen himself suffered, now that Mona had already begun to make him do things he didn't like. Vividly Fleda apprehended how _she_ would have first made him like anything she would have made him do; anything even as disagreeable as this appearing there to state, virtually on Mona's behalf, that of course there must be a definite limit to the number of articles appropriated. She took a longish stroll with him in order to talk the matter over; to say if she didn't think a dozen pieces, chosen absolutely at will, would be a handsome allowance; and above all to consider the very delicate question of whether the advantage enjoyed by Mrs. Gereth mightn't be left to her honor. To leave it so was what Owen wished; but there was plainly a young lady at Waterbath to whom, on his side, he already had to render an account. He was as touching in his offhand annoyance as his mother was tragic in her intensity; for if he couldn't help having a sense of propriety about the whole matter, so he could as little help hating it. It was for his hating it, Fleda reasoned, that she liked him so, and her insistence to his mother on the hatred perilously resembled, on one or two occasions, a revelation of the liking. There were moments when, in conscience, that revelation pressed her; inasmuch as it was just on the ground of her not liking him that Mrs. Gereth trusted her so much. Mrs. Gereth herself didn't in these days like him at all, and she was of course and always on Mrs. Gereth's side. He ended really, while the preparations for his marriage went on, by quite a little custom of coming and going; but on no one of these occasions would his mother receive him. He talked only with Fleda and strolled with Fleda; and when he asked her, in regard to the great matter, if Mrs. Gereth were really doing nothing, the girl usually replied: "She pretends not to be, if I may say so; but I think she's really thinking over what she'll take." When her friend asked her what Owen was doing, she could have but one answer: "He's waiting, dear lady, to see what _you_ do!" Mrs. Gereth, a month after she had received her great shock, did something abrupt and extraordinary: she caught up her companion and went to have a look at Ricks. They had come to London first and taken a train from Liverpool Street, and the least of the sufferings they were armed against was that of passing the night. Fleda's admirable dressing-bag had been given her by her friend. "Why, it's charming!" she exclaimed a few hours later, turning back again into the small prim parlor from a friendly advance to the single plate of the window. Mrs. Gereth hated such windows, the one flat glass, sliding up and down, especially when they enjoyed a view of four iron pots on pedestals, painted white and containing ugly geraniums, ranged on the edge of a gravel-path and doing their best to give it the air of a terrace. Fleda had instantly averted her eyes from these ornaments, but Mrs. Gereth grimly gazed, wondering of course how a place in the deepest depths of Essex and three miles from a small station could contrive to look so suburban. The room was practically a shallow box, with the junction of the walls and ceiling guiltless of curve or cornice and marked merely by the little band of crimson paper glued round the top of the other paper, a turbid gray sprigged with silver flowers. This decoration was rather new and quite fresh; and there was in the centre of the ceiling a big square beam papered over in white, as to which Fleda hesitated about venturing to remark that it was rather picturesque. She recognized in time that this remark would be weak and that, throughout, she should be able to say nothing either for the mantelpieces or for the doors, of which she saw her companion become sensible with a soundless moan. On the subject of doors especially Mrs. Gereth had the finest views: the thing in the world she most despised was the meanness of the single flap. From end to end, at Poynton, there were high double leaves. At Ricks the entrances to the rooms were like the holes of rabbit-hutches. It was all, none the less, not so bad as Fleda had feared; it was faded and melancholy, whereas there had been a danger that it would be contradictious and positive, cheerful and loud. The house was crowded with objects of which the aggregation somehow made a thinness and the futility a grace; things that told her they had been gathered as slowly and as lovingly as the golden flowers of Poynton. She too, for a home, could have lived with them: they made her fond of the old maiden-aunt; they made her even wonder if it didn't work more for happiness not to have tasted, as she herself had done, of knowledge. Without resources, without a stick, as she said, of her own, Fleda was moved, after all, to some secret surprise at the pretensions of a shipwrecked woman who could hold such an asylum cheap. The more she looked about the surer she felt of the character of the maiden-aunt, the sense of whose dim presence urged her to pacification: the maiden-aunt had been a dear; she would have adored the maiden-aunt. The poor lady had had some tender little story; she had been sensitive and ignorant and exquisite: that too was a sort of origin, a sort of atmosphere for relics and rarities, though different from the sorts most prized at Poynton. Mrs. Gereth had of course more than once said that one of the deepest mysteries of life was the way that, by certain natures, hideous objects could be loved; but it wasn't a question of love, now, for these: it was only a question of a certain practical patience. Perhaps some thought of that kind had stolen over Mrs. Gereth when, at the end of a brooding hour, she exclaimed, taking in the house with a strenuous sigh: "Well, something can be done with it!" Fleda had repeated to her more than once the indulgent fancy about the maiden-aunt--she was so sure she had deeply suffered. "I'm sure I hope she did!" was, however, all that Mrs. Gereth had replied. VI It was a great relief to the girl at last to perceive that the dreadful move would really be made. What might happen if it shouldn't had been from the first indefinite. It was absurd to pretend that any violence was probable--a tussel, dishevelment, shrieks; yet Fleda had an imagination of a drama, a "great scene," a thing, somehow, of indignity and misery, of wounds inflicted and received, in which indeed, though Mrs. Gereth's presence, with movements and sounds, loomed large to her, Owen remained indistinct and on the whole unaggressive. He wouldn't be there with a cigarette in his teeth, very handsome and insolently quiet: that was only the way he would be in a novel, across whose interesting page some such figure, as she half closed her eyes, seemed to her to walk. Fleda had rather, and indeed with shame, a confused, pitying vision of Mrs. Gereth with her great scene left in a manner on her hands, Mrs. Gereth missing her effect and having to appear merely hot and injured and in the wrong. The symptoms that she would be spared even that spectacle resided not so much, through the chambers of Poynton, in an air of concentration as in the hum of buzzing alternatives. There was no common preparation, but one day, at the turn of a corridor, she found her hostess standing very still, with the hanging hands of an invalid and the active eyes of an adventurer. These eyes appeared to Fleda to meet her own with a strange, dim bravado, and there was a silence, almost awkward, before either of the friends spoke. The girl afterwards thought of the moment as one in which her hostess mutely accused her of an accusation, meeting it, however, at the same time, by a kind of defiant acceptance. Yet it was with mere melancholy candor that Mrs. Gereth at last sighingly exclaimed: "I'm thinking over what I had better take!" Fleda could have embraced her for this virtual promise of a concession, the announcement that she had finally accepted the problem of knocking together a shelter with the small salvage of the wreck. It was true that when after their return from Ricks they tried to lighten the ship, the great embarrassment was still immutably there, the odiousness of sacrificing the exquisite things one wouldn't take to the exquisite things one would. This immediately made the things one wouldn't take the very things one ought to, and, as Mrs. Gereth said, condemned one, in the whole business, to an eternal vicious circle. In such a circle, for days, she had been tormentedly moving, prowling up and down, comparing incomparables. It was for that one had to cling to them and their faces of supplication. Fleda herself could judge of these faces, so conscious of their race and their danger, and she had little enough to say when her companion asked her if the whole place, perversely fair on October afternoons, looked like a place to give up. It looked, to begin with, through some effect of season and light, larger than ever, immense, and it was filled with the hush of sorrow, which in turn was all charged with memories. Everything was in the air--every history of every find, every circumstance of every struggle. Mrs. Gereth had drawn back every curtain and removed every cover; she prolonged the vistas, opened wide the whole house, gave it an appearance of awaiting a royal visit. The shimmer of wrought substances spent itself in the brightness; the old golds and brasses, old ivories and bronzes, the fresh old tapestries and deep old damasks threw out a radiance in which the poor woman saw in solution all her old loves and patiences, all her old tricks and triumphs. Fleda had a depressed sense of not, after all, helping her much: this was lightened indeed by the fact that Mrs. Gereth, letting her off easily, didn't now seem to expect it. Her sympathy, her interest, her feeling for everything for which Mrs. Gereth felt, were a force that really worked to prolong the deadlock. "I only wish I bored you and my possessions bored you," that lady, with some humor, declared; "then you'd make short work with me, bundle me off, tell me just to pile certain things into a cart and have done." Fleda's sharpest difficulty was in having to act up to the character of thinking Owen a brute, or at least to carry off the inconsistency of seeing him when he came down. By good fortune it was her duty, her function, as well as a protection to Mrs. Gereth. She thought of him perpetually, and her eyes had come to rejoice in his manly magnificence more even than they rejoiced in the royal cabinets of the red saloon. She wondered, very faintly at first, why he came so often; but of course she knew nothing about the business he had in hand, over which, with men red-faced and leather-legged, he was sometimes closeted for an hour in a room of his own that was the one monstrosity of Poynton: all tobacco-pots and bootjacks, his mother had said--such an array of arms of aggression and castigation that he himself had confessed to eighteen rifles and forty whips. He was arranging for settlements on his wife, he was doing things that would meet the views of the Brigstocks. Considering the house was his own, Fleda thought it nice of him to keep himself in the background while his mother remained; making his visits, at some cost of ingenuity about trains from town, only between meals, doing everything to let it press lightly upon her that he was there. This was rather a stoppage to her meeting Mrs. Gereth on the ground of his being a brute; the most she really at last could do was not to contradict her when she repeated that he was watching--just insultingly watching. He _was_ watching, no doubt; but he watched somehow with his head turned away. He knew that Fleda knew at present what he wanted of her, so that it would be gross of him to say it over and over. It existed as a confidence between them, and made him sometimes, with his wandering stare, meet her eyes as if a silence so pleasant could only unite them the more. He had no great flow of speech, certainly, and at first the girl took for granted that this was all there was to be said about the matter. Little by little she speculated as to whether, with a person who, like herself, could put him, after all, at a sort of domestic ease, it was not supposable that he would have more conversation if he were not keeping some of it back for Mona. From the moment she suspected he might be thinking what Mona would say to his chattering so to an underhand "companion," who was all but paid, this young lady's repressed emotion began to require still more repression. She grew impatient of her situation at Poynton; she privately pronounced it false and horrid. She said to herself that she had let Owen know that she had, to the best of her power, directed his mother in the general sense he desired; that he quite understood it and that he also understood how unworthy it was of either of them to stand over the good lady with a notebook and a lash. Wasn't this practical unanimity just practical success? Fleda became aware of a sudden desire, as well as of pressing reasons, to bring her stay at Poynton to a close. She had not, on the one hand, like a minion of the law, undertaken to see Mrs. Gereth down to the train and locked, in sign of her abdication, into a compartment; neither had she on the other committed herself to hold Owen indefinitely in dalliance while his mother gained time or dug a counter-mine. Besides, people _were_ saying that she fastened like a leech on other people--people who had houses where something was to be picked up: this revelation was frankly made her by her sister, now distinctly doomed to the curate and in view of whose nuptials she had almost finished, as a present, a wonderful piece of embroidery, suggested, at Poynton, by an old Spanish altar-cloth. She would have to exert herself still further for the intended recipient of this offering, turn her out for her marriage with more than that drapery. She would go up to town, in short, to dress Maggie; and their father, in lodgings at West Kensington, would stretch a point and take them in. He, to do him justice, never reproached her with profitable devotions; so far as they existed he consciously profited by them. Mrs. Gereth gave her up as heroically as if she had been a great bargain, and Fleda knew that she wouldn't at present miss any visit of Owen's, for Owen was shooting at Waterbath. Owen shooting was Owen lost, and there was scant sport at Poynton. The first news she had from Mrs. Gereth was news of that lady's having accomplished, in form at least, her migration. The letter was dated from Ricks, to which place she had been transported by an impulse apparently as sudden as the inspiration she had obeyed before. "Yes, I've literally come," she wrote, "with a bandbox and a kitchen-maid; I've crossed the Rubicon, I've taken possession. It has been like plumping into cold water: I saw the only thing was to do it, not to stand shivering. I shall have warmed the place a little by simply being here for a week; when I come back the ice will have been broken. I didn't write to you to meet me on my way through town, because I know how busy you are and because, besides, I'm too savage and odious to be fit company even for you. You'd say I really go too far, and there's no doubt whatever I do. I'm here, at any rate, just to look round once more, to see that certain things are done before I enter in force. I shall probably be at Poynton all next week. There's more room than I quite measured the other day, and a rather good set of old Worcester. But what are space and time, what's even old Worcester, to your wretched and affectionate A. G.?" The day after Fleda received this letter she had occasion to go into a big shop in Oxford Street--a journey that she achieved circuitously, first on foot and then by the aid of two omnibuses. The second of these vehicles put her down on the side of the street opposite her shop, and while, on the curbstone, she humbly waited, with a parcel, an umbrella, and a tucked-up frock, to cross in security, she became aware that, close beside her, a hansom had pulled up short, in obedience to the brandished stick of a demonstrative occupant. This occupant was Owen Gereth, who had caught sight of her as he rattled along and who, with an exhibition of white teeth that, from under the hood of the cab, had almost flashed through the fog, now alighted to ask her if he couldn't give her a lift. On finding that her destination was only over the way he dismissed his vehicle and joined her, not only piloting her to the shop, but taking her in; with the assurance that his errands didn't matter, that it amused him to be concerned with hers. She told him she had come to buy a trimming for her sister's frock, and he expressed an hilarious interest in the purchase. His hilarity was almost always out of proportion to the case, but it struck her at present as more so than ever; especially when she had suggested that he might find it a good time to buy a garnishment of some sort for Mona. After wondering an instant whether he gave the full satiric meaning, such as it was, to this remark, Fleda dismissed the possibility as inconceivable. He stammered out that it was for _her_ he would like to buy something, something "ripping," and that she must give him the pleasure of telling him what would best please her: he couldn't have a better opportunity for making her a present--the present, in recognition of all she had done for Mummy, that he had had in his head for weeks. Fleda had more than one small errand in the big bazaar, and he went up and down with her, pointedly patient, pretending to be interested in questions of tape and of change. She had now not the least hesitation in wondering what Mona would think of such proceedings. But they were not her doing--they were Owen's; and Owen, inconsequent and even extravagant, was unlike anything she had ever seen him before. He broke off, he came back, he repeated questions without heeding answers, he made vague, abrupt remarks about the resemblances of shopgirls and the uses of chiffon. He unduly prolonged their business together, giving Fleda a sense that he was putting off something particular that he had to face. If she had ever dreamed of Owen Gereth as nervous she would have seen him with some such manner as this. But why should he be nervous? Even at the height of the crisis his mother hadn't made him so, and at present he was satisfied about his mother. The one idea he stuck to was that Fleda should mention something she would let him give her: there was everything in the world in the wonderful place, and he made her incongruous offers--a traveling-rug, a massive clock, a table for breakfast in bed, and above all, in a resplendent binding, a set of somebody's "works." His notion was a testimonial, a tribute, and the "works" would be a graceful intimation that it was her cleverness he wished above all to commemorate. He was immensely in earnest, but the articles he pressed upon her betrayed a delicacy that went to her heart: what he would really have liked, as he saw them tumbled about, was one of the splendid stuffs for a gown--a choice proscribed by his fear of seeming to patronize her, to refer to her small means and her deficiencies. Fleda found it easy to chaff him about his exaggeration of her deserts; she gave the just measure of them in consenting to accept a small pin-cushion, costing sixpence, in which the letter F was marked out with pins. A sense of loyalty to Mona was not needed to enforce this discretion, and after that first allusion to her she never sounded her name. She noticed on this occasion more things in Owen Gereth than she had ever noticed before, but what she noticed most was that he said no word of his intended. She asked herself what he had done, in so long a parenthesis, with his loyalty or at least his "form;" and then reflected that even if he had done something very good with them the situation in which such a question could come up was already a little strange. Of course he wasn't doing anything so vulgar as making love to her; but there was a kind of punctilio for a man who was engaged. That punctilio didn't prevent Owen from remaining with her after they had left the shop, from hoping she had a lot more to do, and from pressing her to look with him, for a possible glimpse of something she might really let him give her, into the windows of other establishments. There was a moment when, under this pressure, she made up her mind that his tribute would be, if analyzed, a tribute to her insignificance. But all the same he wanted her to come somewhere and have luncheon with him: what was that a tribute to? She must have counted very little if she didn't count too much for a romp in a restaurant. She had to get home with her trimming, and the most, in his company, she was amenable to was a retracing of her steps to the Marble Arch and then, after a discussion when they had reached it, a walk with him across the Park. She knew Mona would have considered that she ought to take the omnibus again; but she had now to think for Owen as well as for herself--she couldn't think for Mona. Even in the Park the autumn air was thick, and as they moved westward over the grass, which was what Owen preferred, the cool grayness made their words soft, made them at last rare and everything else dim. He wanted to stay with her--he wanted not to leave her: he had dropped into complete silence, but that was what his silence said. What was it he had postponed? What was it he wanted still to postpone? She grew a little scared as they strolled together and she thought. It was too confused to be believed, but it was as if somehow he felt differently. Fleda Vetch didn't suspect him at first of feeling differently to _her_, but only of feeling differently to Mona; yet she was not unconscious that this latter difference would have had something to do with his being on the grass beside her. She had read in novels about gentlemen who on the eve of marriage, winding up the past, had surrendered themselves for the occasion to the influence of a former tie; and there was something in Owen's behavior now, something in his very face, that suggested a resemblance to one of those gentlemen. But whom and what, in that case, would Fleda herself resemble? She wasn't a former tie, she wasn't any tie at all; she was only a deep little person for whom happiness was a kind of pearl-diving plunge. It was down at the very bottom of all that had lately happened; for all that had lately happened was that Owen Gereth had come and gone at Poynton. That was the small sum of her experience, and what it had made for her was her own affair, quite consistent with her not having dreamed it had made a tie--at least what _she_ called one--for Owen. The old one, at any rate, was Mona--Mona whom he had known so very much longer. They walked far, to the southwest corner of the great Gardens, where, by the old round pond and the old red palace, when she had put out her hand to him in farewell, declaring that from the gate she must positively take a conveyance, it seemed suddenly to rise between them that this was a real separation. She was on his mother's side, she belonged to his mother's life, and his mother, in the future, would never come to Poynton. After what had passed she wouldn't even be at his wedding, and it was not possible now that Mrs. Gereth should mention that ceremony to the girl, much less express a wish that the girl should be present at it. Mona, from decorum and with reference less to the bridegroom than to the bridegroom's mother, would of course not invite any such girl as Fleda. Everything therefore was ended; they would go their different ways; this was the last time they would stand face to face. They looked at each other with the fuller sense of it and, on Owen's part, with an expression of dumb trouble, the intensification of his usual appeal to any interlocutor to add the right thing to what he said. To Fleda, at this moment, it appeared that the right thing might easily be the wrong. He only said, at any rate: "I want you to understand, you know--I want you to understand." What did he want her to understand? He seemed unable to bring it out, and this understanding was moreover exactly what she wished not to arrive at. Bewildered as she was, she had already taken in as much as she should know what to do with; the blood also was rushing into her face. He liked her--it was stupefying--more than he really ought: that was what was the matter with him and what he desired her to assimilate; so that she was suddenly as frightened as some thoughtless girl who finds herself the object of an overture from a married man. "Good-bye, Mr. Gereth--I _must_ get on!" she declared with a cheerfulness that she felt to be an unnatural grimace. She broke away from him sharply, smiling, backing across the grass and then turning altogether and moving as fast as she could. "Good-bye, good-bye!" she threw off again as she went, wondering if he would overtake her before she reached the gate; conscious with a red disgust that her movement was almost a run; conscious too of just the confused, handsome face with which he would look after her. She felt as if she had answered a kindness with a great flouncing snub, but at any rate she had got away, though the distance to the gate, her ugly gallop down the Broad Walk, every graceless jerk of which hurt her, seemed endless. She signed from afar to a cab on the stand in the Kensington Road and scrambled into it, glad of the encompassment of the four-wheeler that had officiously obeyed her summons and that, at the end of twenty yards, when she had violently pulled up a glass, permitted her to recognize the fact that she was on the point of bursting into tears. VII As soon as her sister was married she went down to Mrs. Gereth at Ricks--a promise to this effect having been promptly exacted and given; and her inner vision was much more fixed on the alterations there, complete now, as she understood, than on the success of her plotting and pinching for Maggie's happiness. Her imagination, in the interval, had indeed had plenty to do and numerous scenes to visit; for when on the summons just mentioned it had taken a flight from West Kensington to Ricks, it had hung but an hour over the terrace of painted pots and then yielded to a current of the upper air that swept it straight off to Poynton and to Waterbath. Not a sound had reached her of any supreme clash, and Mrs. Gereth had communicated next to nothing; giving out that, as was easily conceivable, she was too busy, too bitter, and too tired for vain civilities. All she had written was that she had got the new place well in hand and that Fleda would be surprised at the way it was turning out. Everything was even yet upside down; nevertheless, in the sense of having passed the threshold of Poynton for the last time, the amputation, as she called it, had been performed. Her leg had come off--she had now begun to stump along with the lovely wooden substitute; she would stump for life, and what her young friend was to come and admire was the beauty of her movement and the noise she made about the house. The reserve of Poynton and Waterbath had been matched by the austerity of Fleda's own secret, under the discipline of which she had repeated to herself a hundred times a day that she rejoiced at having cares that excluded all thought of it. She had lavished herself, in act, on Maggie and the curate, and had opposed to her father's selfishness a sweetness quite ecstatic. The young couple wondered why they had waited so long, since everything was after all so easy. She had thought of everything, even to how the "quietness" of the wedding should be relieved by champagne and her father kept brilliant on a single bottle. Fleda knew, in short, and liked the knowledge, that for several weeks she had appeared exemplary in every relation of life. She had been perfectly prepared to be surprised at Ricks, for Mrs. Gereth was a wonder-working wizard, with a command, when all was said, of good material; but the impression in wait for her on the threshold made her catch her breath and falter. Dusk had fallen when she arrived, and in the plain square hall, one of the few good features, the glow of a Venetian lamp just showed, on either wall, the richness of an admirable tapestry. This instant perception that the place had been dressed at the expense of Poynton was a shock: it was as if she had abruptly seen herself in the light of an accomplice. The next moment, folded in Mrs. Gereth's arms, her eyes were diverted; but she had already had, in a flash, the vision of the great gaps in the other house. The two tapestries, not the largest, but those most splendidly toned by time, had been on the whole its most uplifted pride. When she could really see again she was on a sofa in the drawing-room, staring with intensity at an object soon distinct as the great Italian cabinet that, at Poynton, had been in the red saloon. Without looking, she was sure the room was occupied with other objects like it, stuffed with as many as it could hold of the trophies of her friend's struggle. By this time the very fingers of her glove, resting on the seat of the sofa, had thrilled at the touch of an old velvet brocade, a wondrous texture that she could recognize, would have recognized among a thousand, without dropping her eyes on it. They stuck to the cabinet with a kind of dissimulated dread, while she painfully asked herself whether she should notice it, notice everything, or just pretend not to be affected. How could she pretend not to be affected, with the very pendants of the lustres tinkling at her and with Mrs. Gereth, beside her and staring at her even as she herself stared at the cabinet, hunching up a back like Atlas under his globe? She was appalled at this image of what Mrs. Gereth had on her shoulders. That lady was waiting and watching her, bracing herself, and preparing the same face of confession and defiance she had shown the day, at Poynton, she had been surprised in the corridor. It was farcical not to speak; and yet to exclaim, to participate, would give one a bad sense of being mixed up with a theft. This ugly word sounded, for herself, in Fleda's silence, and the very violence of it jarred her into a scared glance, as of a creature detected, to right and left. But what again the full picture most showed her was the far-away empty sockets, a scandal of nakedness in high, bare walls. She at last uttered something formal and incoherent--she didn't know what: it had no relation to either house. Then she felt Mrs. Gereth's hand once more on her arm. "I've arranged a charming room for you--it's really lovely. You'll be very happy there." This was spoken with extraordinary sweetness and with a smile that meant, "Oh, I know what you're thinking; but what does it matter when you're so loyally on my side?" It had come indeed to a question of "sides," Fleda thought, for the whole place was in battle array. In the soft lamplight, with one fine feature after another looming up into sombre richness, it defied her not to pronounce it a triumph of taste. Her passion for beauty leaped back into life; and was not what now most appealed to it a certain gorgeous audacity? Mrs. Gereth's high hand was, as mere great effect, the climax of the impression. "It's too wonderful, what you've done with the house!"--the visitor met her friend's eyes. They lighted up with joy--that friend herself so pleased with what she had done. This was not at all, in its accidental air of enthusiasm, what Fleda wanted to have said: it offered her as stupidly announcing from the first minute on whose side she was. Such was clearly the way Mrs. Gereth took it: she threw herself upon the delightful girl and tenderly embraced her again; so that Fleda soon went on, with a studied difference and a cooler inspection: "Why, you brought away absolutely everything!" "Oh no, not everything; I saw how little I could get into this scrap of a house. I only brought away what I required." Fleda had got up; she took a turn round the room. "You 'required' the very best pieces--the _morceaux de musée_, the individual gems!" "I certainly didn't want the rubbish, if that's what you mean." Mrs. Gereth, on the sofa, followed the direction of her companion's eyes; with the light of her satisfaction still in her face, she slowly rubbed her large, handsome hands. Wherever she was, she was herself the great piece in the gallery. It was the first Fleda had heard of there being "rubbish" at Poynton, but she didn't for the moment take up this insincerity; she only, from where she stood in the room, called out, one after the other, as if she had had a list in her hand, the pieces that in the great house had been scattered and that now, if they had a fault, were too much like a minuet danced on a hearth-rug. She knew them each, in every chink and charm--knew them by the personal name their distinctive sign or story had given them; and a second time she felt how, against her intention, this uttered knowledge struck her hostess as so much free approval. Mrs. Gereth was never indifferent to approval, and there was nothing she could so love you for as for doing justice to her deep morality. There was a particular gleam in her eyes when Fleda exclaimed at last, dazzled by the display: "And even the Maltese cross!" That description, though technically incorrect, had always been applied, at Poynton, to a small but marvelous crucifix of ivory, a masterpiece of delicacy, of expression, and of the great Spanish period, the existence and precarious accessibility of which she had heard of at Malta, years before, by an odd and romantic chance--a clue followed through mazes of secrecy till the treasure was at last unearthed. "'Even' the Maltese cross?" Mrs. Gereth rose as she sharply echoed the words. "My dear child, you don't suppose I'd have sacrificed _that_! For what in the world would you have taken me?" "A _bibelot_ the more or the less," Fleda said, "could have made little difference in this grand general view of you. I take you simply for the greatest of all conjurers. You've operated with a quickness--and with a quietness!" Her voice trembled a little as she spoke, for the plain meaning of her words was that what her friend had achieved belonged to the class of operation essentially involving the protection of darkness. Fleda felt she really could say nothing at all if she couldn't say that she knew what the danger had been. She completed her thought by a resolute and perfectly candid question: "How in the world did you get off with them?" Mrs. Gereth confessed to the fact of danger with a cynicism that surprised the girl. "By calculating, by choosing my time. I _was_ quiet, and I _was_ quick. I manoeuvred; then at the last rushed!" Fleda drew a long breath: she saw in the poor woman something much better than sophistical ease, a crude elation that was a comparatively simple state to deal with. Her elation, it was true, was not so much from what she had done as from the way she had done it--by as brilliant a stroke as any commemorated in the annals of crime. "I succeeded because I had thought it all out and left nothing to chance: the whole process was organized in advance, so that the mere carrying it into effect took but a few hours. It was largely a matter of money: oh, I was horribly extravagant--I had to turn on so many people. But they were all to be had--a little army of workers, the packers, the porters, the helpers of every sort, the men with the mighty vans. It was a question of arranging in Tottenham Court Road and of paying the price. I haven't paid it yet; there'll be a horrid bill; but at least the thing's done! Expedition pure and simple was the essence of the bargain. 'I can give you two days,' I said; 'I can't give you another second.' They undertook the job, and the two days saw them through. The people came down on a Tuesday morning; they were off on the Thursday. I admit that some of them worked all Wednesday night. I had thought it all out; I stood over them; I showed them how. Yes, I coaxed them, I made love to them. Oh, I was inspired--they found me wonderful. I neither ate nor slept, but I was as calm as I am now. I didn't know what was in me; it was worth finding out. I'm very remarkable, my dear: I lifted tons with my own arms. I'm tired, very, very tired; but there's neither a scratch nor a nick, there isn't a teacup missing." Magnificent both in her exhaustion and in her triumph, Mrs. Gereth sank on the sofa again, the sweep of her eyes a rich synthesis and the restless friction of her hands a clear betrayal. "Upon my word," she laughed, "they really look better here!" Fleda had listened in awe. "And no one at Poynton said anything? There was no alarm?" "What alarm should there have been? Owen left me almost defiantly alone: I had taken a time that I had reason to believe was safe from a descent." Fleda had another wonder, which she hesitated to express: it would scarcely do to ask Mrs. Gereth if she hadn't stood in fear of her servants. She knew, moreover, some of the secrets of her humorous household rule, all made up of shocks to shyness and provocations to curiosity--a diplomacy so artful that several of the maids quite yearned to accompany her to Ricks. Mrs. Gereth, reading sharply the whole of her visitor's thought, caught it up with fine frankness. "You mean that I was watched--that he had his myrmidons, pledged to wire him if they should see what I was 'up to'? Precisely. I know the three persons you have in mind: I had them in mind myself. Well, I took a line with them--I settled them." Fleda had had no one in particular in mind; she had never believed in the myrmidons; but the tone in which Mrs. Gereth spoke added to her suspense. "What did you do to them?" "I took hold of them hard--I put them in the forefront. I made them work." "To move the furniture?" "To help, and to help so as to please me. That was the way to take them; it was what they had least expected. I marched up to them and looked each straight in the eye, giving him the chance to choose if he'd gratify me or gratify my son. He gratified _me_. They were too stupid!" Mrs. Gereth massed herself there more and more as an immoral woman, but Fleda had to recognize that she too would have been stupid and she too would have gratified her. "And when did all this take place?" "Only last week; it seems a hundred years. We've worked here as fast as we worked there, but I'm not settled yet: you'll see in the rest of the house. However, the worst is over." "Do you really think so?" Fleda presently inquired. "I mean, does he, after the fact, as it were, accept it?" "Owen--what I've done? I haven't the least idea," said Mrs. Gereth. "Does Mona?" "You mean that she'll be the soul of the row?" "I hardly see Mona as the 'soul' of anything," the girl replied. "But have they made no sound? Have you heard nothing at all?" "Not a whisper, not a step, in all the eight days. Perhaps they don't know. Perhaps they're crouching for a leap." "But wouldn't they have gone down as soon as you left?" "They may not have known of my leaving." Fleda wondered afresh; it struck her as scarcely supposable that some sign shouldn't have flashed from Poynton to London. If the storm was taking this term of silence to gather, even in Mona's breast, it would probably discharge itself in some startling form. The great hush of every one concerned was strange; but when she pressed Mrs. Gereth for some explanation of it, that lady only replied, with her brave irony: "Oh, I took their breath away!" She had no illusions, however; she was still prepared to fight. What indeed was her spoliation of Poynton but the first engagement of a campaign? All this was exciting, but Fleda's spirit dropped, at bedtime, in the chamber embellished for her pleasure, where she found several of the objects that in her earlier room she had most admired. These had been reinforced by other pieces from other rooms, so that the quiet air of it was a harmony without a break, the finished picture of a maiden's bower. It was the sweetest Louis Seize, all assorted and combined--old chastened, figured, faded France. Fleda was impressed anew with her friend's genius for composition. She could say to herself that no girl in England, that night, went to rest with so picked a guard; but there was no joy for her in her privilege, no sleep even for the tired hours that made the place, in the embers of the fire and the winter dawn, look gray, somehow, and loveless. She couldn't care for such things when they came to her in such ways; there was a wrong about them all that turned them to ugliness. In the watches of the night she saw Poynton dishonored; she had cared for it as a happy whole, she reasoned, and the parts of it now around her seemed to suffer like chopped limbs. Before going to bed she had walked about with Mrs. Gereth and seen at whose expense the whole house had been furnished. At poor Owen's, from top to bottom--there wasn't a chair he hadn't sat upon. The maiden aunt had been exterminated--no trace of her to tell her tale. Fleda tried to think of some of the things at Poynton still unappropriated, but her memory was a blank about them, and in trying to focus the old combinations she saw again nothing but gaps and scars, a vacancy that gathered at moments into something worse. This concrete image was her greatest trouble, for it was Owen Gereth's face, his sad, strange eyes, fixed upon her now as they had never been. They stared at her out of the darkness, and their expression was more than she could bear: it seemed to say that he was in pain and that it was somehow her fault. He had looked to her to help him, and this was what her help had been. He had done her the honor to ask her to exert herself in his interest, confiding to her a task of difficulty, but of the highest delicacy. Hadn't that been exactly the sort of service she longed to render him? Well, her way of rendering it had been simply to betray him and hand him over to his enemy. Shame, pity, resentment oppressed her in turn; in the last of these feelings the others were quickly submerged. Mrs. Gereth had imprisoned her in that torment of taste; but it was clear to her for an hour at least that she might hate Mrs. Gereth. Something else, however, when morning came, was even more intensely definite: the most odious thing in the world for her would be ever again to meet Owen. She took on the spot a resolve to neglect no precaution that could lead to her going through life without that accident. After this, while she dressed, she took still another. Her position had become, in a few hours, intolerably false; in as few more hours as possible she would therefore put an end to it. The way to put an end to it would be to inform Mrs. Gereth that, to her great regret, she couldn't be with her now, couldn't cleave to her to the point that everything about her so plainly urged. She dressed with a sort of violence, a symbol of the manner in which this purpose was precipitated. The more they parted company the less likely she was to come across Owen; for Owen would be drawn closer to his mother now by the very necessity of bringing her down. Fleda, in the inconsequence of distress, wished to have nothing to do with her fall; she had had too much to do with everything. She was well aware of the importance, before breakfast and in view of any light they might shed on the question of motive, of not suffering her invidious expression of a difference to be accompanied by the traces of tears; but it none the less came to pass, downstairs, that after she had subtly put her back to the window, to make a mystery of the state of her eyes, she stupidly let a rich sob escape her before she could properly meet the consequences of being asked if she wasn't delighted with her room. This accident struck her on the spot as so grave that she felt the only refuge to be instant hypocrisy, some graceful impulse that would charge her emotion to the quickened sense of her friend's generosity--a demonstration entailing a flutter round the table and a renewed embrace, and not so successfully improvised but that Fleda fancied Mrs. Gereth to have been only half reassured. She had been startled, at any rate, and she might remain suspicious: this reflection interposed by the time, after breakfast, the girl had recovered sufficiently to say what was in her heart. She accordingly didn't say it that morning at all: she had absurdly veered about; she had encountered the shock of the fear that Mrs. Gereth, with sharpened eyes, might wonder why the deuce (she often wondered in that phrase) she had grown so warm about Owen's rights. She would doubtless, at a pinch, be able to defend them on abstract grounds, but that would involve a discussion, and the idea of a discussion made her nervous for her secret. Until in some way Poynton should return the blow and give her a cue, she must keep nervousness down; and she called herself a fool for having forgotten, however briefly, that her one safety was in silence. Directly after luncheon Mrs. Gereth took her into the garden for a glimpse of the revolution--or at least, said the mistress of Ricks, of the great row--that had been decreed there; but the ladies had scarcely placed themselves for this view before the younger one found herself embracing a prospect that opened in quite another quarter. Her attention was called to it, oddly, by the streamers of the parlor-maid's cap, which, flying straight behind the neat young woman who unexpectedly burst from the house and showed a long red face as she ambled over the grass, seemed to articulate in their flutter the name that Fleda lived at present only to catch. "Poynton--Poynton!" said the morsels of muslin; so that the parlor-maid became on the instant an actress in the drama, and Fleda, assuming pusillanimously that she herself was only a spectator, looked across the footlights at the exponent of the principal part. The manner in which this artist returned her look showed that she was equally preoccupied. Both were haunted alike by possibilities, but the apprehension of neither, before the announcement was made, took the form of the arrival at Ricks, in the flesh, of Mrs. Gereth's victim. When the messenger informed them that Mr. Gereth was in the drawing-room, the blank "Oh!" emitted by Fleda was quite as precipitate as the sound on her hostess's lips, besides being, as she felt, much less pertinent. "I thought it would be somebody," that lady afterwards said; "but I expected on the whole a solicitor's clerk." Fleda didn't mention that she herself had expected on the whole a pair of constables. She was surprised by Mrs. Gereth's question to the parlor-maid. "For whom did he ask?" "Why, for _you_, of course, dearest friend!" Fleda interjected, falling instinctively into the address that embodied the intensest pressure. She wanted to put Mrs. Gereth between her and her danger. "He asked for Miss Vetch, mum," the girl replied, with a face that brought startlingly to Fleda's ear the muffled chorus of the kitchen. "Quite proper," said Mrs. Gereth austerely. Then to Fleda: "Please go to him." "But what to do?" "What you always do--to see what he wants." Mrs. Gereth dismissed the maid. "Tell him Miss Vetch will come." Fleda saw that nothing was in the mother's imagination at this moment but the desire not to meet her son. She had completely broken with him, and there was little in what had just happened to repair the rupture. It would now take more to do so than his presenting himself uninvited at her door. "He's right in asking for you--he's aware that you're still our communicator; nothing has occurred to alter that. To what he wishes to transmit through you I'm ready, as I've been ready before, to listen. As far as _I_'m concerned, if I couldn't meet him a month ago, how am I to meet him to-day? If he has come to say, 'My dear mother, you're here, in the hovel into which I've flung you, with consolations that give me pleasure,' I'll listen to him; but on no other footing. That's what you're to ascertain, please. You'll oblige me as you've obliged me before. There!" Mrs. Gereth turned her back and, with a fine imitation of superiority, began to redress the miseries immediately before her. Fleda meanwhile hesitated, lingered for some minutes where she had been left, feeling secretly that her fate still had her in hand. It had put her face to face with Owen Gereth, and it evidently meant to keep her so. She was reminded afresh of two things: one of which was that, though she judged her friend's rigor, she had never really had the story of the scene enacted in the great awestricken house between the mother and the son weeks before--the day the former took to her bed in her over-throw; the other was, that at Ricks as at Poynton, it was before all things her place to accept thankfully a usefulness not, she must remember, universally acknowledged. What determined her at the last, while Mrs. Gereth disappeared in the shrubbery, was that, though she was at a distance from the house and the drawing-room was turned the other way, she could absolutely see the young man alone there with the sources of his pain. She saw his simple stare at his tapestries, heard his heavy tread on his carpets and the hard breath of his sense of unfairness. At this she went to him fast. VIII "I asked for you," he said when she stood there, "because I heard from the flyman who drove me from the station to the inn that he had brought you here yesterday. We had some talk, and he mentioned it." "You didn't know I was here?" "No. I knew only that you had had, in London, all that you told me, that day, to do; and it was Mona's idea that after your sister's marriage you were staying on with your father. So I thought you were with him still." "I am," Fleda replied, idealizing a little the fact. "I'm here only for a moment. But do you mean," she went on, "that if you had known I was with your mother you wouldn't have come down?" The way Owen hung fire at this question made it sound more playful than she had intended. She had, in fact, no consciousness of any intention but that of confining herself rigidly to her function. She could already see that, in whatever he had now braced himself for, she was an element he had not reckoned with. His preparation had been of a different sort--the sort congruous with his having been careful to go first and lunch solidly at the inn. He had not been forced to ask for her, but she became aware, in his presence, of a particular desire to make him feel that no harm could really come to him. She might upset him, as people called it, but she would take no advantage of having done so. She had never seen a person with whom she wished more to be light and easy, to be exceptionally human. The account he presently gave of the matter was that he indeed wouldn't have come if he had known she was on the spot; because then, didn't she see? he could have written to her. He would have had her there to let fly at his mother. "That would have saved me--well, it would have saved me a lot. Of course I would rather see you than her," he somewhat awkwardly added. "When the fellow spoke of you, I assure you I quite jumped at you. In fact I've no real desire to see Mummy at all. If she thinks I _like_ it--!" He sighed disgustedly. "I only came down because it seemed better than any other way. I didn't want her to be able to say I hadn't been all right. I dare say you know she has taken everything; or if not quite everything, why, a lot more than one ever dreamed. You can see for yourself--she has got half the place down. She has got them crammed--you can see for yourself!" He had his old trick of artless repetition, his helpless iteration of the obvious; but he was sensibly different, for Fleda, if only by the difference of his clear face, mottled over and almost disfigured by little points of pain. He might have been a fine young man with a bad toothache; with the first even of his life. What ailed him above all, she felt, was that trouble was new to him: he had never known a difficulty; he had taken all his fences, his world wholly the world of the personally possible, rounded indeed by a gray suburb into which he had never had occasion to stray. In this vulgar and ill-lighted region he had evidently now lost himself. "We left it quite to her honor, you know," he said ruefully. "Perhaps you've a right to say that you left it a little to mine." Mixed up with the spoils there, rising before him as if she were in a manner their keeper, she felt that she must absolutely dissociate herself. Mrs. Gereth had made it impossible to do anything but give her away. "I can only tell you that, on my side, I left it to her. I never dreamed either that she would pick out so many things." "And you don't really think it's fair, do you? You _don't_!" He spoke very quickly; he really seemed to plead. Fleda faltered a moment. "I think she has gone too far." Then she added: "I shall immediately tell her that I've said that to you." He appeared puzzled by this statement, but he presently rejoined: "You haven't then said to mamma what you think?" "Not yet; remember that I only got here last night." She appeared to herself ignobly weak. "I had had no idea what she was doing; I was taken completely by surprise. She managed it wonderfully." "It's the sharpest thing I ever saw in _my_ life!" They looked at each other with intelligence, in appreciation of the sharpness, and Owen quickly broke into a loud laugh. The laugh was in itself natural, but the occasion of it strange; and stranger still, to Fleda, so that she too almost laughed, the inconsequent charity with which he added: "Poor dear old Mummy! That's one of the reasons I asked for you," he went on--"to see if you'd back her up." Whatever he said or did, she somehow liked him the better for it. "How can I back her up, Mr. Gereth, when I think, as I tell you, that she has made a great mistake?" "A great mistake! That's all right." He spoke--it wasn't clear to her why--as if this declaration were a great point gained. "Of course there are many things she hasn't taken," Fleda continued. "Oh yes, a lot of things. But you wouldn't know the place, all the same." He looked about the room with his discolored, swindled face, which deepened Fleda's compassion for him, conjuring away any smile at so candid an image of the dupe. "You'd know this one soon enough, wouldn't you? These are just the things she ought to have left. Is the whole house full of them?" "The whole house," said Fleda uncompromisingly. She thought of her lovely room. "I never knew how much I cared for them. They're awfully valuable, aren't they?" Owen's manner mystified her; she was conscious of a return of the agitation he had produced in her on that last bewildering day, and she reminded herself that, now she was warned, it would be inexcusable of her to allow him to justify the fear that had dropped on her. "Mother thinks I never took any notice, but I assure you I was awfully proud of everything. Upon my honor, I _was_ proud, Miss Vetch." There was an oddity in his helplessness; he appeared to wish to persuade her and to satisfy himself that she sincerely felt how worthy he really was to treat what had happened as an injury. She could only exclaim, almost as helplessly as himself: "Of course you did justice! It's all most painful. I shall instantly let your mother know," she again declared, "the way I've spoken of her to you." She clung to that idea as to the sign of her straightness. "You'll tell her what you think she ought to do?" he asked with some eagerness. "What she ought to do?" "_Don't_ you think it--I mean that she ought to give them up?" "To give them up?" Fleda hesitated again. "To send them back--to keep it quiet." The girl had not felt the impulse to ask him to sit down among the monuments of his wrong, so that, nervously, awkwardly, he fidgeted about the room with his hands in his pockets and an effect of returning a little into possession through the formulation of his view. "To have them packed and dispatched again, since she knows so well how. She does it beautifully"--he looked close at two or three precious pieces. "What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander!" He had laughed at his way of putting it, but Fleda remained grave. "Is that what you came to say to her?" "Not exactly those words. But I did come to say"--he stammered, then brought it out--"I did come to say we must have them right back." "And did you think your mother would see you?" "I wasn't sure, but I thought it right to try--to put it to her kindly, don't you see? If she won't see me, then she has herself to thank. The only other way would have been to set the lawyers at her." "I'm glad you didn't do that." "I'm dashed if I want to!" Owen honestly declared. "But what's a fellow to do if she won't meet a fellow?" "What do you call meeting a fellow?" Fleda asked, with a smile. "Why, letting _me_ tell her a dozen things she can have." This was a transaction that Fleda, after a moment, had to give up trying to represent to herself. "If she won't do that--?" she went on. "I'll leave it all to my solicitor. _He_ won't let her off: by Jove, I know the fellow!" "That's horrible!" said Fleda, looking at him in woe. "It's utterly beastly!" His want of logic as well as his vehemence startled her; and with her eyes still on his she considered before asking him the question these things suggested. At last she asked it. "Is Mona very angry?" "Oh dear, yes!" said Owen. She had perceived that he wouldn't speak of Mona without her beginning. After waiting fruitlessly now for him to say more, she continued: "She has been there again? She has seen the state of the house?" "Oh dear, yes!" Owen repeated. Fleda disliked to appear not to take account of his brevity, but it was just because she was struck by it that she felt the pressure of the desire to know more. What it suggested was simply what her intelligence supplied, for he was incapable of any art of insinuation. Wasn't it at all events the rule of communication with him to say for him what he couldn't say? This truth was present to the girl as she inquired if Mona greatly resented what Mrs. Gereth had done. He satisfied her promptly; he was standing before the fire, his back to it, his long legs apart, his hands, behind him, rather violently jiggling his gloves. "She hates it awfully. In fact, she refuses to put up with it at all. Don't you see?--she saw the place with all the things." "So that of course she misses them." "Misses them--rather! She was awfully sweet on them." Fleda remembered how sweet Mona had been, and reflected that if that was the sort of plea he had prepared it was indeed as well he shouldn't see his mother. This was not all she wanted to know, but it came over her that it was all she needed. "You see it puts me in the position of not carrying out what I promised," Owen said. "As she says herself"--he hesitated an instant--"it's just as if I had obtained her under false pretenses." Just before, when he spoke with more drollery than he knew, it had left Fleda serious; but now his own clear gravity had the effect of exciting her mirth. She laughed out, and he looked surprised, but went on: "She regards it as a regular sell." Fleda was silent; but finally, as he added nothing, she exclaimed: "Of course it makes a great difference!" She knew all she needed, but none the less she risked, after another pause, an interrogative remark. "I forget when it is that your marriage takes place?" Owen came away from the fire and, apparently at a loss where to turn, ended by directing himself to one of the windows. "It's a little uncertain; the date isn't quite fixed." "Oh, I thought I remembered that at Poynton you had told me a day, and that it was near at hand." "I dare say I did; it was for the 19th. But we've altered that--she wants to shift it." He looked out of the window; then he said: "In fact, it won't come off till Mummy has come round." "Come round?" "Put the place as it was." In his offhand way he added: "You know what I mean!" He spoke not impatiently, but with a kind of intimate familiarity, the sweetness of which made her feel a pang for having forced him to tell her what was embarrassing to him, what was even humiliating. Yes indeed, she knew all she needed: all she needed was that Mona had proved apt at putting down that wonderful patent-leather foot. Her type was misleading only to the superficial, and no one in the world was less superficial than Fleda. She had guessed the truth at Waterbath and she had suffered from it at Poynton; at Ricks the only thing she could do was to accept it with the dumb exaltation that she felt rising. Mona had been prompt with her exercise of the member in question, for it might be called prompt to do that sort of thing before marriage. That she had indeed been premature who should say save those who should have read the matter in the full light of results? Neither at Waterbath nor at Poynton had even Fleda's thoroughness discovered all that there was--or rather, all that there was not--in Owen Gereth. "Of course it makes all the difference!" she said in answer to his last words. She pursued, after considering: "What you wish me to say from you then to your mother is that you demand immediate and practically complete restitution?" "Yes, please. It's tremendously good of you." "Very well, then. Will you wait?" "For Mummy's answer?" Owen stared and looked perplexed; he was more and more fevered with so much vivid expression of his case. "Don't you think that if I'm here she may hate it worse--think I may want to make her reply bang off?" Fleda thought. "You don't, then?" "I want to take her in the right way, don't you know?--treat her as if I gave her more than just an hour or two." "I see," said Fleda. "Then, if you don't wait--good-bye." This again seemed not what he wanted. "Must _you_ do it bang off?" "I'm only thinking she'll be impatient--I mean, you know, to learn what will have passed between us." "I see," said Owen, looking at his gloves. "I can give her a day or two, you know. Of course I didn't come down to sleep," he went on. "The inn seems a horrid hole. I know all about the trains--having no idea you were here." Almost as soon as his interlocutress he was struck with the absence of the visible, in this, as between effect and cause. "I mean because in that case I should have felt I could stop over. I should have felt I could talk with you a blessed sight longer than with Mummy." "We've already talked a long time," smiled Fleda. "Awfully, haven't we?" He spoke with the stupidity she didn't object to. Inarticulate as he was, he had more to say; he lingered perhaps because he was vaguely aware of the want of sincerity in her encouragement to him to go. "There's one thing, please," he mentioned, as if there might be a great many others too. "Please don't say anything about Mona." She didn't understand. "About Mona?" "About its being _her_ that thinks she has gone too far." This was still slightly obscure, but now Fleda understood. "It mustn't seem to come from _her_ at all, don't you know? That would only make Mummy worse." Fleda knew exactly how much worse, but she felt a delicacy about explicitly assenting: she was already immersed moreover in the deep consideration of what might make "Mummy" better. She couldn't see as yet at all; she could only clutch at the hope of some inspiration after he should go. Oh, there was a remedy, to be sure, but it was out of the question; in spite of which, in the strong light of Owen's troubled presence, of his anxious face and restless step, it hung there before her for some minutes. She felt that, remarkably, beneath the decent rigor of his errand, the poor young man, for reasons, for weariness, for disgust, would have been ready not to insist. His fitness to fight his mother had left him--he wasn't in fighting trim. He had no natural avidity and even no special wrath; he had none that had not been taught him, and it was doing his best to learn the lesson that had made him so sick. He had his delicacies, but he hid them away like presents before Christmas. He was hollow, perfunctory, pathetic; he had been girded by another hand. That hand had naturally been Mona's, and it was heavy even now on his strong, broad back. Why then had he originally rejoiced so in its touch? Fleda dashed aside this question, for it had nothing to do with her problem. Her problem was to help him to live as a gentleman and carry through what he had undertaken; her problem was to reinstate him in his rights. It was quite irrelevant that Mona had no intelligence of what she had lost--quite irrelevant that she was moved not by the privation, but by the insult: she had every reason to be moved, though she was so much more movable, in the vindictive way, at any rate, than one might have supposed--assuredly more than Owen himself had imagined. "Certainly I shall not mention Mona," Fleda said, "and there won't be the slightest necessity for it. The wrong's quite sufficiently yours, and the demand you make is perfectly justified by it." "I can't tell you what it is to me to feel you on my side!" Owen exclaimed. "Up to this time," said Fleda, after a pause, "your mother has had no doubt of my being on hers." "Then of course she won't like your changing." "I dare say she won't like it at all." "Do you mean to say you'll have a regular kick-up with her?" "I don't exactly know what you mean by a regular kick-up. We shall naturally have a great deal of discussion--if she consents to discuss the matter at all. That's why you must decidedly give her two or three days." "I see you think she _may_ refuse to discuss it at all," said Owen. "I'm only trying to be prepared for the worst. You must remember that to have to withdraw from the ground she has taken, to make a public surrender of what she has publicly appropriated, will go uncommonly hard with her pride." Owen considered; his face seemed to broaden, but not into a smile. "I suppose she's tremendously proud, isn't she?" This might have been the first time it had occurred to him. "You know better than I," said Fleda, speaking with high extravagance. "I don't know anything in the world half so well as you. If I were as clever as you I might hope to get round her." Owen hesitated; then he went on: "In fact I don't quite see what even you can say or do that will really fetch her." "Neither do I, as yet. I must think--I must pray!" the girl pursued, smiling. "I can only say to you that I'll try. I _want_ to try, you know--I want to help you." He stood looking at her so long on this that she added with much distinctness: "So you must leave me, please, quite alone with her. You must go straight back." "Back to the inn?" "Oh no, back to town. I'll write to you to-morrow." He turned about vaguely for his hat. "There's the chance, of course, that she may be afraid." "Afraid, you mean, of the legal steps you may take?" "I've got a perfect case--I could have her up. The Brigstocks say it's simple stealing." "I can easily fancy what the Brigstocks say!" Fleda permitted herself to remark without solemnity. "It's none of their business, is it?" was Owen's unexpected rejoinder. Fleda had already noted that no one so slow could ever have had such rapid transitions. She showed her amusement. "They've a much better right to say it's none of mine." "Well, at any rate, you don't call her names." Fleda wondered whether Mona did; and this made it all the finer of her to exclaim in a moment: "You don't know what I shall call her if she holds out!" Owen gave her a gloomy glance; then he blew a speck off the crown of his hat. "But if you do have a set-to with her?" He paused so long for a reply that Fleda said: "I don't think I know what you mean by a set-to." "Well, if she calls _you_ names." "I don't think she'll do that." "What I mean to say is, if she's angry at your backing me up--what will you do then? She can't possibly like it, you know." "She may very well not like it; but everything depends. I must see what I shall do. You mustn't worry about me." She spoke with decision, but Owen seemed still unsatisfied. "You won't go away, I hope?" "Go away?" "If she does take it ill of you." Fleda moved to the door and opened it. "I'm not prepared to say. You must have patience and see." "Of course I must," said Owen--"of course, of course." But he took no more advantage of the open door than to say: "You want me to be off, and I'm off in a minute. Only, before I go, please answer me a question. If you _should_ leave my mother, where would you go?" Fleda smiled again. "I haven't the least idea." "I suppose you'd go back to London." "I haven't the least idea," Fleda repeated. "You don't--a--live anywhere in particular, do you?" the young man went on. He looked conscious as soon as he had spoken; she could see that he felt himself to have alluded more grossly than he meant to the circumstance of her having, if one were plain about it, no home of her own. He had meant it as an allusion of a tender sort to all that she would sacrifice in the case of a quarrel with his mother; but there was indeed no graceful way of touching on that. One just couldn't be plain about it. Fleda, wound up as she was, shrank from any treatment at all of the matter, and she made no answer to his question. "I _won't_ leave your mother," she said. "I'll produce an effect on her; I'll convince her absolutely." "I believe you will, if you look at her like that!" She was wound up to such a height that there might well be a light in her pale, fine little face--a light that, while, for all return, at first, she simply shone back at him, was intensely reflected in his own. "I'll make her see it--I'll make her see it!" She rang out like a silver bell. She had at that moment a perfect faith that she should succeed; but it passed into something else when, the next instant, she became aware that Owen, quickly getting between her and the door she had opened, was sharply closing it, as might be said, in her face. He had done this before she could stop him, and he stood there with his hand on the knob and smiled at her strangely. Clearer than he could have spoken it was the sense of those seconds of silence. "When I got into this I didn't know you, and now that I know you how can I tell you the difference? And _she_'s so different, so ugly and vulgar, in the light of this squabble. No, like _you_ I've never known one. It's another thing, it's a new thing altogether. Listen to me a little: can't something be done?" It was what had been in the air in those moments at Kensington, and it only wanted words to be a committed act. The more reason, to the girl's excited mind, why it shouldn't have words; her one thought was not to hear, to keep the act uncommitted. She would do this if she had to be horrid. "Please let me out, Mr. Gereth," she said; on which he opened the door with an hesitation so very brief that in thinking of these things afterwards--for she was to think of them forever--she wondered in what tone she could have spoken. They went into the hall, where she encountered the parlor-maid, of whom she inquired whether Mrs. Gereth had come in. "No, miss; and I think she has left the garden. She has gone up the back road." In other words, they had the whole place to themselves. It would have been a pleasure, in a different mood, to converse with that parlor-maid. "Please open the house-door," said Fleda. Owen, as if in quest of his umbrella, looked vaguely about the hall--looked even wistfully up the staircase--while the neat young woman complied with Fleda's request. Owen's eyes then wandered out of the open door. "I think it's awfully nice here," he observed; "I assure you I could do with it myself." "I should think you might, with half your things here! It's Poynton itself--almost. Good-bye, Mr. Gereth," Fleda added. Her intention had naturally been that the neat young woman, opening the front door, should remain to close it on the departing guest. That functionary, however, had acutely vanished behind a stiff flap of green baize which Mrs. Gereth had not yet had time to abolish. Fleda put out her hand, but Owen turned away--he couldn't find his umbrella. She passed into the open air--she was determined to get him out; and in a moment he joined her in the little plastered portico which had small resemblance to any feature of Poynton. It was, as Mrs. Gereth had said, like the portico of a house in Brompton. "Oh, I don't mean with all the things here," he explained in regard to the opinion he had just expressed. "I mean I could put up with it just as it was; it had a lot of good things, don't you think? I mean if everything was back at Poynton, if everything was all right." He brought out these last words with a sort of smothered sigh. Fleda didn't understand his explanation unless it had reference to another and more wonderful exchange--the restoration to the great house not only of its tables and chairs, but of its alienated mistress. This would imply the installation of his own life at Ricks, and obviously that of another person. Such another person could scarcely be Mona Brigstock. He put out his hand now; and once more she heard his unsounded words: "With everything patched up at the other place, I could live here with _you_. Don't you see what I mean?" Fleda saw perfectly, and, with a face in which she flattered herself that nothing of this vision appeared, gave him her hand and said: "Good-bye, good-bye." Owen held her hand very firmly and kept it even after an effort made by her to recover it--an effort not repeated, as she felt it best not to show she was flurried. That solution--of her living with him at Ricks--disposed of him beautifully, and disposed not less so of herself; it disposed admirably too of Mrs. Gereth. Fleda could only vainly wonder how it provided for poor Mona. While he looked at her, grasping her hand, she felt that now indeed she was paying for his mother's extravagance at Poynton--the vividness of that lady's public plea that little Fleda Vetch was the person to insure the general peace. It was to that vividness poor Owen had come back, and if Mrs. Gereth had had more discretion little Fleda Vetch wouldn't have been in a predicament. She saw that Owen had at this moment his sharpest necessity of speech, and so long as he didn't release her hand she could only submit to him. Her defense would be perhaps to look blank and hard; so she looked as blank and as hard as she could, with the reward of an immediate sense that this was not a bit what he wanted. It even made him hang fire, as if he were suddenly ashamed of himself, were recalled to some idea of duty and of honor. Yet he none the less brought it out. "There's one thing I dare say I ought to tell you, if you're going so kindly to act for me; though of course you'll see for yourself it's a thing it won't do to tell _her_." What was it? He made her wait for it again, and while she waited, under firm coercion, she had the extraordinary impression that Owen's simplicity was in eclipse. His natural honesty was like the scent of a flower, and she felt at this moment as if her nose had been brushed by the bloom without the odor. The allusion was undoubtedly to his mother; and was not what he meant about the matter in question the opposite of what he said--that it just _would_ do to tell her? It would have been the first time he had said the opposite of what he meant, and there was certainly a fascination in the phenomenon, as well as a challenge to suspense in the ambiguity. "It's just that I understand from Mona, you know," he stammered; "it's just that she has made no bones about bringing home to me--" He tried to laugh, and in the effort he faltered again. "About bringing home to you?"--Fleda encouraged him. He was sensible of it, he achieved his performance. "Why, that if I don't get the things back--every blessed one of them except a few _she_'ll pick out--she won't have anything more to say to me." Fleda, after an instant, encouraged him again. "To say to you?" "Why, she simply won't marry me, don't you see?" Owen's legs, not to mention his voice, had wavered while he spoke, and she felt his possession of her hand loosen so that she was free again. Her stare of perception broke into a lively laugh. "Oh, you're all right, for you _will_ get them. You will; you're quite safe; don't worry!" She fell back into the house with her hand on the door. "Good-bye, good-bye." She repeated it several times, laughing bravely, quite waving him away and, as he didn't move and save that he was on the other side of it, closing the door in his face quite as he had closed that of the drawing-room in hers. Never had a face, never at least had such a handsome one, been so presented to that offense. She even held the door a minute, lest he should try to come in again. At last, as she heard nothing, she made a dash for the stairs and ran up. IX In knowing a while before all she needed, Fleda had been far from knowing as much as that; so that once upstairs, where, in her room, with her sense of danger and trouble, the age of Louis Seize suddenly struck her as wanting in taste and point, she felt that she now for the first time knew her temptation. Owen had put it before her with an art beyond his own dream. Mona would cast him off if he didn't proceed to extremities; if his negotiation with his mother should fail he would be completely free. That negotiation depended on a young lady to whom he had pressingly suggested the condition of his freedom; and as if to aggravate the young lady's predicament designing fate had sent Mrs. Gereth, as the parlor-maid said, "up the back road." This would give the young lady more time to make up her mind that nothing should come of the negotiation. There would be different ways of putting the question to Mrs. Gereth, and Fleda might profitably devote the moments before her return to a selection of the way that would most surely be tantamount to failure. This selection indeed required no great adroitness; it was so conspicuous that failure would be the reward of an effective introduction of Mona. If that abhorred name should be properly invoked Mrs. Gereth would resist to the death, and before envenomed resistance Owen would certainly retire. His retirement would be into single life, and Fleda reflected that he had now gone away conscious of having practically told her so. She could only say, as she waited for the back road to disgorge, that she hoped it was a consciousness he enjoyed. There was something _she_ enjoyed; but that was a very different matter. To know that she had become to him an object of desire gave her wings that she felt herself flutter in the air: it was like the rush of a flood into her own accumulations. These stored depths had been fathomless and still, but now, for half an hour, in the empty house, they spread till they overflowed. He seemed to have made it right for her to confess to herself her secret. Strange then there should be for him in return nothing that such a confession could make right! How could it make right that he should give up Mona for another woman? His attitude was a sorry appeal to Fleda to legitimate that. But he didn't believe it himself, and he had none of the courage of his suggestion. She could easily see how wrong everything must be when a man so made to be manly was wanting in courage. She had upset him, as people called it, and he had spoken out from the force of the jar of finding her there. He had upset her too, heaven knew, but she was one of those who could pick themselves up. She had the real advantage, she considered, of having kept him from seeing that she had been overthrown. She had moreover at present completely recovered her feet, though there was in the intensity of the effort required to do so a vibration which throbbed away into an immense allowance for the young man. How could she after all know what, in the disturbance wrought by his mother, Mona's relations with him might have become? If he had been able to keep his wits, such as they were, more about him he would probably have felt--as sharply as she felt on his behalf--that so long as those relations were not ended he had no right to say even the little he had said. He had no right to appear to wish to draw in another girl to help him to an escape. If he was in a plight he must get out of the plight himself, he must get out of it first, and anything he should have to say to any one else must be deferred and detached. She herself, at any rate--it was her own case that was in question--couldn't dream of assisting him save in the sense of their common honor. She could never be the girl to be drawn in, she could never lift her finger against Mona. There was something in her that would make it a shame to her forever to have owed her happiness to an interference. It would seem intolerably vulgar to her to have "ousted" the daughter of the Brigstocks; and merely to have abstained even wouldn't assure her that she had been straight. Nothing was really straight but to justify her little pensioned presence by her use; and now, won over as she was to heroism, she could see her use only as some high and delicate deed. She couldn't do anything at all, in short, unless she could do it with a kind of pride, and there would be nothing to be proud of in having arranged for poor Owen to get off easily. Nobody had a right to get off easily from pledges so deep, so sacred. How could Fleda doubt they had been tremendous when she knew so well what any pledge of her own would be? If Mona was so formed that she could hold such vows light, that was Mona's peculiar business. To have loved Owen apparently, and yet to have loved him only so much, only to the extent of a few tables and chairs, was not a thing she could so much as try to grasp. Of a different way of loving him she was herself ready to give an instance, an instance of which the beauty indeed would not be generally known. It would not perhaps if revealed be generally understood, inasmuch as the effect of the particular pressure she proposed to exercise would be, should success attend it, to keep him tied to an affection that had died a sudden and violent death. Even in the ardor of her meditation Fleda remained in sight of the truth that it would be an odd result of her magnanimity to prevent her friend's shaking off a woman he disliked. If he didn't dislike Mona, what was the matter with him? And if he did, Fleda asked, what was the matter with her own silly self? Our young lady met this branch of the temptation it pleased her frankly to recognize by declaring that to encourage any such cruelty would be tortuous and base. She had nothing to do with his dislikes; she had only to do with his good-nature and his good name. She had joy of him just as he was, but it was of these things she had the greatest. The worst aversion and the liveliest reaction moreover wouldn't alter the fact--since one was facing facts--that but the other day his strong arms must have clasped a remarkably handsome girl as close as she had permitted. Fleda's emotion at this time was a wondrous mixture, in which Mona's permissions and Mona's beauty figured powerfully as aids to reflection. She herself had no beauty, and _her_ permissions were the stony stares she had just practiced in the drawing-room--a consciousness of a kind appreciably to add to the particular sense of triumph that made her generous. I may not perhaps too much diminish the merit of that generosity if I mention that it could take the flight we are considering just because really, with the telescope of her long thought, Fleda saw what might bring her out of the wood. Mona herself would bring her out; at the least Mona possibly might. Deep down plunged the idea that even should she achieve what she had promised Owen, there was still the contingency of Mona's independent action. She might by that time, under stress of temper or of whatever it was that was now moving her, have said or done the things there is no patching up. If the rupture should come from Waterbath they might all be happy yet. This was a calculation that Fleda wouldn't have committed to paper, but it affected the total of her sentiments. She was meanwhile so remarkably constituted that while she refused to profit by Owen's mistake, even while she judged it and hastened to cover it up, she could drink a sweetness from it that consorted little with her wishing it mightn't have been made. There was no harm done, because he had instinctively known, poor dear, with whom to make it, and it was a compensation for seeing him worried that he hadn't made it with some horrid mean girl who would immediately have dished him by making a still bigger one. Their protected error (for she indulged a fancy that it was hers too) was like some dangerous, lovely living thing that she had caught and could keep--keep vivid and helpless in the cage of her own passion and look at and talk to all day long. She had got it well locked up there by the time that, from an upper window, she saw Mrs. Gereth again in the garden. At this she went down to meet her. X Fleda's line had been taken, her word was quite ready; on the terrace of the painted pots she broke out before her interlocutress could put a question. "His errand was perfectly simple: he came to demand that you shall pack everything straight up again and send it back as fast as the railway will carry it." The back road had apparently been fatiguing to Mrs. Gereth; she rose there rather white and wan with her walk. A certain sharp thinness was in her ejaculation of "Oh!"--after which she glanced about her for a place to sit down. The movement was a criticism of the order of events that offered such a piece of news to a lady coming in tired; but Fleda could see that in turning over the possibilities this particular peril was the one that during the last hour her friend had turned up oftenest. At the end of the short, gray day, which had been moist and mild, the sun was out; the terrace looked to the south, and a bench, formed as to legs and arms of iron representing knotted boughs, stood against the warmest wall of the house. The mistress of Ricks sank upon it and presented to her companion the handsome face she had composed to hear everything. Strangely enough, it was just this fine vessel of her attention that made the girl most nervous about what she must drop in. "Quite a 'demand,' dear, is it?" asked Mrs. Gereth, drawing in her cloak. "Oh, that's what I should call it!" Fleda laughed, to her own surprise. "I mean with the threat of enforcement and that sort of thing." "Distinctly with the threat of enforcement--what would be called, I suppose, coercion." "What sort of coercion?" said Mrs. Gereth. "Why, legal, don't you know?--what he calls setting the lawyers at you." "Is that what he calls it?" She seemed to speak with disinterested curiosity. "That's what he calls it," said Fleda. Mrs. Gereth considered an instant. "Oh, the lawyers!" she exclaimed lightly. Seated there almost cosily in the reddening winter sunset, only with her shoulders raised a little and her mantle tightened as if from a slight chill, she had never yet looked to Fleda so much in possession nor so far from meeting unsuspectedness halfway. "Is he going to send them down here?" "I dare say he thinks it may come to that." "The lawyers can scarcely do the packing," Mrs. Gereth humorously remarked. "I suppose he means them--in the first place, at least--to try to talk you over." "In the first place, eh? And what does he mean in the second?" Fleda hesitated; she had not foreseen that so simple an inquiry could disconcert her. "I'm afraid I don't know." "Didn't you ask?" Mrs. Gereth spoke as if she might have said, "What then were you doing all the while?" "I didn't ask very much," said her companion. "He has been gone some time. The great thing seemed to be to understand clearly that he wouldn't be content with anything less than what he mentioned." "My just giving everything back?" "Your just giving everything back." "Well, darling, what did you tell him?" Mrs. Gereth blandly inquired. Fleda faltered again, wincing at the term of endearment, at what the words took for granted, charged with the confidence she had now committed herself to betray. "I told him I would tell you!" She smiled, but she felt that her smile was rather hollow and even that Mrs. Gereth had begun to look at her with some fixedness. "Did he seem very angry?" "He seemed very sad. He takes it very hard," Fleda added. "And how does _she_ take it?" "Ah, that--that I felt a delicacy about asking." "So you didn't ask?" The words had the note of surprise. Fleda was embarrassed; she had not made up her mind definitely to lie. "I didn't think you'd care." That small untruth she would risk. "Well--I don't!" Mrs. Gereth declared; and Fleda felt less guilty to hear her, for the statement was as inexact as her own. "Didn't you say anything in return?" Mrs. Gereth presently continued. "Do you mean in the way of justifying you?" "I didn't mean to trouble you to do that. My justification," said Mrs. Gereth, sitting there warmly and, in the lucidity of her thought, which nevertheless hung back a little, dropping her eyes on the gravel--"my justification was all the past. My justification was the cruelty--" But at this, with a short, sharp gesture, she checked herself. "It's too good of me to talk--now." She produced these sentences with a cold patience, as if addressing Fleda in the girl's virtual and actual character of Owen's representative. Our young lady crept to and fro before the bench, combating the sense that it was occupied by a judge, looking at her boot-toes, reminding herself in doing so of Mona, and lightly crunching the pebbles as she walked. She moved about because she was afraid, putting off from moment to moment the exercise of the courage she had been sure she possessed. That courage would all come to her if she could only be equally sure that what she should be called upon to do for Owen would be to suffer. She had wondered, while Mrs. Gereth spoke, how that lady would describe her justification. She had described it as if to be irreproachably fair, give her adversary the benefit of every doubt, and then dismiss the question forever. "Of course," Mrs. Gereth went on, "if we didn't succeed in showing him at Poynton the ground we took, it's simply that he shuts his eyes. What I supposed was that you would have given him your opinion that if I was the woman so signally to assert myself, I'm also the woman to rest upon it imperturbably enough." Fleda stopped in front of her hostess. "I gave him my opinion that you're very logical, very obstinate, and very proud." "Quite right, my dear: I'm a rank bigot--about that sort of thing!" and Mrs. Gereth jerked her head at the contents of the house. "I've never denied it. I'd kidnap--to save them, to convert them--the children of heretics. When I know I'm right I go to the stake. Oh, he may burn me alive!" she cried with a happy face. "Did he abuse me?" she then demanded. Fleda had remained there, gathering in her purpose. "How little you know him!" Mrs. Gereth stared, then broke into a laugh that her companion had not expected. "Ah, my dear, certainly not so well as you!" The girl, at this, turned away again--she felt she looked too conscious; and she was aware that, during a pause, Mrs. Gereth's eyes watched her as she went. She faced about afresh to meet them, but what she met was a question that reinforced them. "Why had you a 'delicacy' as to speaking of Mona?" She stopped again before the bench, and an inspiration came to her. "I should think _you_ would know," she said with proper dignity. Blankness was for a moment on Mrs. Gereth's brow; then light broke--she visibly remembered the scene in the breakfast-room after Mona's night at Poynton. "Because I contrasted you--told him _you_ were the one?" Her eyes looked deep. "You were--you are still!" Fleda gave a bold dramatic laugh. "Thank you, my love--with all the best things at Ricks!" Mrs. Gereth considered, trying to penetrate, as it seemed; but at last she brought out roundly: "For you, you know, I'd send them back!" The girl's heart gave a tremendous bound; the right way dawned upon her in a flash. Obscurity indeed the next moment engulfed this course, but for a few thrilled seconds she had understood. To send the things back "for her" meant of course to send them back if there were even a dim chance that she might become mistress of them. Fleda's palpitation was not allayed as she asked herself what portent Mrs. Gereth had suddenly perceived of such a chance: that perception could come only from a sudden suspicion of her secret. This suspicion, in turn, was a tolerably straight consequence of that implied view of the propriety of surrender from which, she was well aware, she could say nothing to dissociate herself. What she first felt was that if she wished to rescue the spoils she wished also to rescue her secret. So she looked as innocent as she could and said as quickly as possible: "For me? Why in the world for me?" "Because you're so awfully keen." "Am I? Do I strike you so? You know I hate him," Fleda went on. She had the sense for a while of Mrs. Gereth's regarding her with the detachment of some stern, clever stranger. "Then what's the matter with you? Why do you want me to give in?" Fleda hesitated; she felt herself reddening. "I've only said your son wants it. I haven't said _I_ do." "Then say it and have done with it!" This was more peremptory than any word her friend, though often speaking in her presence with much point, had ever yet directly addressed to her. It affected her like the crack of a whip, but she confined herself, with an effort, to taking it as a reminder that she must keep her head. "I know he has his engagement to carry out." "His engagement to marry? Why, it's just that engagement we loathe!" "Why should _I_ loathe it?" Fleda asked with a strained smile. Then, before Mrs. Gereth could reply, she pursued: "I'm thinking of his general undertaking--to give her the house as she originally saw it." "To give her the house!" Mrs. Gereth brought up the words from the depth of the unspeakable. The effort was like the moan of an autumn wind; it was in the power of such an image to make her turn pale. "I'm thinking," Fleda continued, "of the simple question of his keeping faith on an important clause of his contract: it doesn't matter whether it's with a stupid girl or with a monster of cleverness. I'm thinking of his honor and his good name." "The honor and good name of a man you hate?" "Certainly," the girl resolutely answered. "I don't see why you should talk as if one had a petty mind. You don't think so. It's not on that assumption you've ever dealt with me. I can do your son justice, as he put his case to me." "Ah, then he did put his case to you!" Mrs. Gereth exclaimed, with an accent of triumph. "You seemed to speak just now as if really nothing of any consequence had passed between you." "Something always passes when one has a little imagination," our young lady declared. "I take it you don't mean that Owen has any!" Mrs. Gereth cried with her large laugh. Fleda was silent a moment. "No, I don't mean that Owen has any," she returned at last. "Why is it you hate him so?" her hostess abruptly inquired. "Should I love him for all he has made you suffer?" Mrs. Gereth slowly rose at this and, coming across the walk, took her young friend in her arms and kissed her. She then passed into one of Fleda's an arm perversely and imperiously sociable. "Let us move a little," she said, holding her close and giving a slight shiver. They strolled along the terrace, and she brought out another question. "He _was_ eloquent, then, poor dear--he poured forth the story of his wrongs?" Fleda smiled down at her companion, who, cloaked and perceptibly bowed, leaned on her heavily and gave her an odd, unwonted sense of age and cunning. She took refuge in an evasion. "He couldn't tell me anything that I didn't know pretty well already." "It's very true that you know everything. No, dear, you haven't a petty mind; you've a lovely imagination and you're the nicest creature in the world. If you were inane, like most girls--like every one, in fact--I would have insulted you, I would have outraged you, and then you would have fled from me in terror. No, now that I think of it," Mrs. Gereth went on, "you wouldn't have fled from me; nothing, on the contrary, would have made you budge. You would have cuddled into your warm corner, but you would have been wounded and weeping and martyrized, and you would have taken every opportunity to tell people I'm a brute--as indeed I should have been!" They went to and fro, and she would not allow Fleda, who laughed and protested, to attenuate with any light civility this spirited picture. She praised her cleverness and her patience; then she said it was getting cold and dark and they must go in to tea. She delayed quitting the place, however, and reverted instead to Owen's ultimatum, about which she asked another question or two; in particular whether it had struck Fleda that he really believed she would comply with such a summons. "I think he really believes that if I try hard enough I can make you:" after uttering which words our young lady stopped short and emulated the embrace she had received a few moments before. "And you've promised to try: I see. You didn't tell me that, either," Mrs. Gereth added as they went on. "But you're rascal enough for anything!" While Fleda was occupied in thinking in what terms she could explain why she had indeed been rascal enough for the reticence thus denounced, her companion broke out with an inquiry somewhat irrelevant and even in form somewhat profane. "Why the devil, at any rate, doesn't it come off?" Fleda hesitated. "You mean their marriage?" "Of course I mean their marriage!" Fleda hesitated again. "I haven't the least idea." "You didn't ask him?" "Oh, how in the world can you fancy?" She spoke in a shocked tone. "Fancy your putting a question so indelicate? _I_ should have put it--I mean in your place; but I'm quite coarse, thank God!" Fleda felt privately that she herself was coarse, or at any rate would presently have to be; and Mrs. Gereth, with a purpose that struck the girl as increasing, continued: "What, then, _was_ the day to be? Wasn't it just one of these?" "I'm sure I don't remember." It was part of the great rupture and an effect of Mrs. Gereth's character that up to this moment she had been completely and haughtily indifferent to that detail. Now, however, she had a visible reason for being clear about it. She bethought herself and she broke out--"Isn't the day past?" Then, stopping short, she added: "Upon my word, they must have put it off!" As Fleda made no answer to this she sharply went on: "_Have_ they put it off?" "I haven't the least idea," said the girl. Her hostess was looking at her hard again. "Didn't he tell you--didn't he say anything about it?" Fleda, meanwhile, had had time to make her reflections, which were moreover the continued throb of those that had occupied the interval between Owen's departure and his mother's return. If she should now repeat his words, this wouldn't at all play the game of her definite vow; it would only play the game of her little gagged and blinded desire. She could calculate well enough the effect of telling Mrs. Gereth how she had had it from Owen's troubled lips that Mona was only waiting for the restitution and would do nothing without it. The thing was to obtain the restitution without imparting that knowledge. The only way, also, not to impart it was not to tell any truth at all about it; and the only way to meet this last condition was to reply to her companion, as she presently did: "He told me nothing whatever: he didn't touch on the subject." "Not in any way?" "Not in any way." Mrs. Gereth watched Fleda and considered. "You haven't any idea if they are waiting for the things?" "How should I have? I'm not in their counsels." "I dare say they are--or that Mona is." Mrs. Gereth reflected again; she had a bright idea. "If I don't give in, I'll be hanged if she'll not break off." "She'll never, never break off!" said Fleda. "Are you sure?" "I can't be sure, but it's my belief." "Derived from _him_?" The girl hung fire a few seconds. "Derived from him." Mrs. Gereth gave her a long last look, then turned abruptly away. "It's an awful bore you didn't really get it out of him! Well, come to tea," she added rather dryly, passing straight into the house. XI The sense of her adversary's dryness, which was ominous of something she couldn't read, made Fleda, before complying, linger a little on the terrace; she felt the need moreover of taking breath after such a flight into the cold air of denial. When at last she rejoined Mrs. Gereth she found her erect before the drawing-room fire. Their tea had been set out in the same quarter, and the mistress of the house, for whom the preparation of it was in general a high and undelegated function, was in an attitude to which the hissing urn made no appeal. This omission, for Fleda, was such a further sign of something to come that, to disguise her apprehension, she immediately and without an apology took the duty in hand; only, however, to be promptly reminded that she was performing it confusedly and not counting the journeys of the little silver shovel she emptied into the pot. "Not _five_, my dear--the usual three," said her hostess, with the same dryness; watching her then in silence while she clumsily corrected her mistake. The tea took some minutes to draw, and Mrs. Gereth availed herself of them suddenly to exclaim: "You haven't yet told me, you know, how it is you propose to 'make' me!" "Give everything back?" Fleda looked into the pot again and uttered her question with a briskness that she felt to be a little overdone. "Why, by putting the question well before you; by being so eloquent that I shall persuade you, shall act upon you; by making you sorry for having gone so far," she said boldly; "by simply and earnestly asking it of you, in short; and by reminding you at the same time that it's the first thing I ever have so asked. Oh, you've done things for me--endless and beautiful things," she exclaimed; "but you've done them all from your own generous impulse. I've never so much as hinted to you to lend me a postage-stamp." "Give me a cup of tea," said Mrs. Gereth. A moment later, taking the cup, she replied: "No, you've never asked me for a postage-stamp." "That gives me a pull!" Fleda returned, smiling. "Puts you in the situation of expecting that I shall do this thing just simply to oblige you?" The girl hesitated. "You said a while ago that for me you _would_ do it." "For you, but not for your eloquence. Do you understand what I mean by the difference?" Mrs. Gereth asked as she stood stirring her tea. Fleda, to postpone answering, looked round, while she drank it, at the beautiful room. "I don't in the least like, you know, your having taken so much. It was a great shock to me, on my arrival here, to find you had done so." "Give me some more tea," said Mrs. Gereth; and there was a moment's silence as Fleda poured out another cup. "If you were shocked, my dear, I'm bound to say you concealed your shock." "I know I did. I was afraid to show it." Mrs. Gereth drank off her second cup. "And you're not afraid now?" "No, I'm not afraid now." "What has made the difference?" "I've pulled myself together." Fleda paused; then she added: "And I've seen Mr. Owen." "You've seen Mr. Owen"--Mrs. Gereth concurred. She put down her cup and sank into a chair, in which she leaned back, resting her head and gazing at her young friend. "Yes, I did tell you a while ago that for you I'd do it. But you haven't told me yet what you'll do in return." Fleda thought an instant. "Anything in the wide world you may require." "Oh, 'anything' is nothing at all! That's too easily said." Mrs. Gereth, reclining more completely, closed her eyes with an air of disgust, an air indeed of inviting slumber. Fleda looked at her quiet face, which the appearance of slumber always made particularly handsome; she noted how much the ordeal of the last few weeks had added to its indications of age. "Well then, try me with something. What is it you demand?" At this, opening her eyes, Mrs. Gereth sprang straight up. "Get him away from her!" Fleda marveled: her companion had in an instant become young again. "Away from Mona? How in the world--?" "By not looking like a fool!" cried Mrs. Gereth very sharply. She kissed her, however, on the spot, to make up for this roughness, and summarily took off her hat, which, on coming into the house, our young lady had not removed. She applied a friendly touch to the girl's hair and gave a businesslike pull to her jacket. "I say don't look like an idiot, because you happen not to be one, not the least bit. _I_'m idiotic; I've been so, I've just discovered, ever since our first days together. I've been a precious donkey; but that's another affair." Fleda, as if she humbly assented, went through no form of controverting this; she simply stood passive to her companion's sudden refreshment of her appearance. "How _can_ I get him away from her?" she presently demanded. "By letting yourself go." "By letting myself go?" She spoke mechanically, still more like an idiot, and felt as if her face flamed out the insincerity of her question. It was vividly back again, the vision of the real way to act upon Mrs. Gereth. This lady's movements were now rapid; she turned off from her as quickly as she had seized her, and Fleda sat down to steady herself for full responsibility. Her hostess, without taking up her ejaculation, gave a violent poke at the fire and then faced her again. "You've done two things, then, to-day--haven't you?--that you've never done before. One has been asking me the service, or favor, or concession--whatever you call it--that you just mentioned; the other has been telling me--certainly too for the first time--an immense little fib." "An immense little fib?" Fleda felt weak; she was glad of the support of her seat. "An immense big one, then!" said Mrs. Gereth irritatedly. "You don't in the least 'hate' Owen, my darling. You care for him very much. In fact, my own, you're in love with him--there! Don't tell me any more lies!" cried Mrs. Gereth with a voice and a face in the presence of which Fleda recognized that there was nothing for her but to hold herself and take them. When once the truth was out, it was out, and she could see more and more every instant that it would be the only way. She accepted therefore what had to come; she leaned back her head and closed her eyes as her companion had done just before. She would have covered her face with her hands but for the still greater shame. "Oh, you're a wonder, a wonder," said Mrs. Gereth; "you're magnificent, and I was right, as soon as I saw you, to pick you out and trust you!" Fleda closed her eyes tighter at this last word, but her friend kept it up. "I never dreamed of it till a while ago, when, after he had come and gone, we were face to face. Then something stuck out of you; it strongly impressed me, and I didn't know at first quite what to make of it. It was that you had just been with him and that you were not natural. Not natural to _me_," she added with a smile. "I pricked up my ears, and all that this might mean dawned upon me when you said you had asked nothing about Mona. It put me on the scent, but I didn't show you, did I? I felt it was _in_ you, deep down, and that I must draw it out. Well, I _have_ drawn it, and it's a blessing. Yesterday, when you shed tears at breakfast, I was awfully puzzled. What has been the matter with you all the while? Why, Fleda, it isn't a crime, don't you know that?" cried the delighted woman. "When I was a girl I was always in love, and not always with such nice people as Owen. I didn't behave as well as you; compared with you I think I must have been horrid. But if you're proud and reserved, it's your own affair; I'm proud too, though I'm not reserved--that's what spoils it. I'm stupid, above all--that's what I am; so dense that I really blush for it. However, no one but you could have deceived me. If I trusted you, moreover, it was exactly to be cleverer than myself. You must be so now more than ever!" Suddenly Fleda felt her hands grasped: Mrs. Gereth had plumped down at her feet and was leaning on her knees. "Save him--save him: you _can_!" she passionately pleaded. "How could you _not_ like him, when he's such a dear? He _is_ a dear, darling; there's no harm in my own boy! You can do what you will with him--you know you can! What else does he give us all this time for? Get him away from her; it's as if he besought you to, poor wretch! Don't abandon him to such a fate, and I'll never abandon _you_. Think of him with that creature, that future! If you'll take him I'll give up everything. There, it's a solemn promise, the most sacred of my life! Get the better of her, and he shall have every stick I removed. Give me your word, and I'll accept it. I'll write for the packers to-night!" Fleda, before this, had fallen forward on her companion's neck, and the two women, clinging together, had got up while the younger wailed on the other's bosom. "You smooth it down because you see more in it than there can ever be; but after my hideous double game how will you be able to believe in me again?" "I see in it simply what _must_ be, if you've a single spark of pity. Where on earth was the double game, when you've behaved like such a saint? You've been beautiful, you've been exquisite, and all our trouble is over." Fleda, drying her eyes, shook her head ever so sadly. "No, Mrs. Gereth, it isn't over. I can't do what you ask--I can't meet your condition." Mrs. Gereth stared; the cloud gathered in her face again. "Why, in the name of goodness, when you adore him? I know what you see in him," she declared in another tone. "You're right!" Fleda gave a faint, stubborn smile. "He cares for her too much." "Then why doesn't he marry her? He's giving you an extraordinary chance." "He doesn't dream I've ever thought of him," said Fleda. "Why should he, if you didn't?" "It wasn't with me you were in love, my duck." Then Mrs. Gereth added: "I'll go and tell him." "If you do any such thing, you shall never see me again,--absolutely, literally never!" Mrs. Gereth looked hard at her young friend, showing she saw she must believe her. "Then you're perverse, you're wicked. Will you swear he doesn't know?" "Of course he doesn't know!" cried Fleda indignantly. Her interlocutress was silent a little. "And that he has no feeling on _his_ side?" "For me?" Fleda stared. "Before he has even married her?" Mrs. Gereth gave a sharp laugh at this. "He ought at least to appreciate your wit. Oh, my dear, you _are_ a treasure! Doesn't he appreciate anything? Has he given you absolutely no symptom--not looked a look, not breathed a sigh?" "The case," said Fleda coldly, "is as I've had the honor to state it." "Then he's as big a donkey as his mother! But you know you must account for their delay," Mrs. Gereth remarked. "Why must I?" Fleda asked after a moment. "Because you were closeted with him here so long. You can't pretend at present, you know, not to have any art." The girl hesitated an instant; she was conscious that she must choose between two risks. She had had a secret and the secret was gone. Owen had one, which was still unbruised, and the greater risk now was that his mother should lay her formidable hand upon it. All Fleda's tenderness for him moved her to protect it; so she faced the smaller peril. "Their delay," she brought herself to reply, "may perhaps be Mona's doing. I mean because he has lost her the things." Mrs. Gereth jumped at this. "So that she'll break altogether if I keep them?" Fleda winced. "I've told you what I believe about that. She'll make scenes and conditions; she'll worry him. But she'll hold him fast; she'll never give him up." Mrs. Gereth turned it over. "Well, I'll keep them, to try her," she finally pronounced; at which Fleda felt quite sick, as if she had given everything and got nothing. XII "I must in common decency let him know that I've talked of the matter with you," she said to her hostess that evening. "What answer do you wish me to write to him?" "Write to him that you must see him again," said Mrs. Gereth. Fleda looked very blank. "What on earth am I to see him for?" "For anything you like." The girl would have been struck with the levity of this had she not already, in an hour, felt the extent of the change suddenly wrought in her commerce with her friend--wrought above all, to that friend's view, in her relation to the great issue. The effect of what had followed Owen's visit was to make that relation the very key of the crisis. Pressed upon her, goodness knew, the crisis had been, but it now seemed to put forth big, encircling arms--arms that squeezed till they hurt and she must cry out. It was as if everything at Ricks had been poured into a common receptacle, a public ferment of emotion and zeal, out of which it was ladled up to be tasted and talked about; everything at least but the one little treasure of knowledge that she kept back. She ought to have liked this, she reflected, because it meant sympathy, meant a closer union with the source of so much in her life that had been beautiful and renovating; but there were fine instincts in her that stood off. She had had--and it was not merely at this time--to recognize that there were things for which Mrs. Gereth's _flair_ was not so happy as for bargains and "marks." It wouldn't be happy now as to the best action on the knowledge she had just gained; yet as from this moment they were still more intimately together, so a person deeply in her debt would simply have to stand and meet what was to come. There were ways in which she could sharply incommode such a person, and not only with the best conscience in the world, but with a sort of brutality of good intentions. One of the straightest of these strokes, Fleda saw, would be the dance of delight over the mystery Mrs. Gereth had laid bare--the loud, lawful, tactless joy of the explorer leaping upon the strand. Like any other lucky discoverer, she would take possession of the fortunate island. She was nothing if not practical: almost the only thing she took account of in her young friend's soft secret was the excellent use she could make of it--a use so much to her taste that she refused to feel a hindrance in the quality of the material. Fleda put into Mrs. Gereth's answer to her question a good deal more meaning than it would have occurred to her a few hours before that she was prepared to put, but she had on the spot a foreboding that even so broad a hint would live to be bettered. "Do you suggest that I shall propose to him to come down here again?" she presently inquired. "Dear, no; say that you'll go up to town and meet him." It _was_ bettered, the broad hint; and Fleda felt this to be still more the case when, returning to the subject before they went to bed, her companion said: "I make him over to you wholly, you know--to do what you please with. Deal with him in your own clever way--I ask no questions. All I ask is that you succeed." "That's charming," Fleda replied, "but it doesn't tell me a bit, you'll be so good as to consider, in what terms to write to him. It's not an answer from you to the message I was to give you." "The answer to his message is perfectly distinct: he shall have everything in the place the minute he'll say he'll marry you." "You really pretend," Fleda asked, "to think me capable of transmitting him that news?" "What else can I really pretend when you threaten so to cast me off if I speak the word myself?" "Oh, if _you_ speak the word!" the girl murmured very gravely, but happy at least to know that in this direction Mrs. Gereth confessed herself warned and helpless. Then she added: "How can I go on living with you on a footing of which I so deeply disapprove? Thinking as I do that you've despoiled him far more than is just or merciful--for if I expected you to take something, I didn't in the least expect you to take everything--how can I stay here without a sense that I'm backing you up in your cruelty and participating in your ill-gotten gains?" Fleda was determined that if she had the chill of her exposed and investigated state she would also have the convenience of it, and that if Mrs. Gereth popped in and out of the chamber of her soul she would at least return the freedom. "I shall quite hate, you know, in a day or two, every object that surrounds you--become blind to all the beauty and rarity that I formerly delighted in. Don't think me harsh; there's no use in my not being frank now. If I leave you, everything's at an end." Mrs. Gereth, however, was imperturbable: Fleda had to recognize that her advantage had become too real. "It's too beautiful, the way you care for him; it's music in my ears. Nothing else but such a passion could make you say such things; that's the way I should have been too, my dear. Why didn't you tell me sooner? I'd have gone right in for you; I never would have moved a candlestick. Don't stay with me if it torments you; don't, if you suffer, be where you see the old rubbish. Go up to town--go back for a little to your father's. It need be only for a little; two or three weeks will see us through. Your father will take you and be glad, if you only will make him understand what it's a question of--of your getting yourself off his hands forever. _I_'ll make him understand, you know, if you feel shy. I'd take you up myself, I'd go with you, to spare your being bored; we'd put up at an hotel and we might amuse ourselves a bit. We haven't had much pleasure since we met, have we? But of course that wouldn't suit our book. I should be a bugaboo to Owen--I should be fatally in the way. Your chance is there--your chance is to be alone; for God's sake, use it to the right end. If you're in want of money I've a little I can give you. But I ask no questions--not a question as small as your shoe!" She asked no questions, but she took the most extraordinary things for granted. Fleda felt this still more at the end of a couple of days. On the second of these our young lady wrote to Owen; her emotion had to a certain degree cleared itself--there was something she could say briefly. If she had given everything to Mrs. Gereth and as yet got nothing, so she had on the other hand quickly reacted--it took but a night--against the discouragement of her first check. Her desire to serve him was too passionate, the sense that he counted upon her too sweet: these things caught her up again and gave her a new patience and a new subtlety. It shouldn't really be for nothing that she had given so much; deep within her burned again the resolve to get something back. So what she wrote to Owen was simply that she had had a great scene with his mother, but that he must be patient and give her time. It was difficult, as they both had expected, but she was working her hardest for him. She had made an impression--she would do everything to follow it up. Meanwhile he must keep intensely quiet and take no other steps; he must only trust her and pray for her and believe in her perfect loyalty. She made no allusion whatever to Mona's attitude, nor to his not being, as regarded that young lady, master of the situation; but she said in a postscript, in reference to his mother, "Of course she wonders a good deal why your marriage doesn't take place." After the letter had gone she regretted having used the word "loyalty;" there were two or three milder terms which she might as well have employed. The answer she immediately received from Owen was a little note of which she met all the deficiencies by describing it to herself as pathetically simple, but which, to prove that Mrs. Gereth might ask as many questions as she liked, she at once made his mother read. He had no art with his pen, he had not even a good hand, and his letter, a short profession of friendly confidence, consisted of but a few familiar and colorless words of acknowledgment and assent. The gist of it was that he would certainly, since Miss Vetch recommended it, not hurry mamma too much. He would not for the present cause her to be approached by any one else, but he would nevertheless continue to hope that she would see she _must_ come round. "Of course, you know," he added, "she can't keep me waiting indefinitely. Please give her my love and tell her that. If it can be done peaceably I know you're just the one to do it." Fleda had awaited his rejoinder in deep suspense; such was her imagination of the possibility of his having, as she tacitly phrased it, let himself go on paper that when it arrived she was at first almost afraid to open it. There was indeed a distinct danger, for if he should take it into his head to write her love-letters the whole chance of aiding him would drop: she would have to return them, she would have to decline all further communication with him: it would be quite the end of the business. This imagination of Fleda's was a faculty that easily embraced all the heights and depths and extremities of things; that made a single mouthful, in particular, of any tragic or desperate necessity. She was perhaps at first just a trifle disappointed not to find in the note in question a syllable that strayed from the text; but the next moment she had risen to a point of view from which it presented itself as a production almost inspired in its simplicity. It was simple even for Owen, and she wondered what had given him the cue to be more so than usual. Then she saw how natures that are right just do the things that are right. He wasn't clever--his manner of writing showed it; but the cleverest man in England couldn't have had more the instinct that, under the circumstances, was the supremely happy one, the instinct of giving her something that would do beautifully to be shown to Mrs. Gereth. This was a kind of divination, for naturally he couldn't know the line Mrs. Gereth was taking. It was furthermore explained--and that was the most touching part of all--by his wish that she herself should notice how awfully well he was behaving. His very bareness called her attention to his virtue; and these were the exact fruits of her beautiful and terrible admonition. He was cleaving to Mona; he was doing his duty; he was making tremendously sure he should be without reproach. If Fleda handed this communication to her friend as a triumphant gage of the innocence of the young man's heart, her elation lived but a moment after Mrs. Gereth had pounced upon the tell-tale spot in it. "Why in the world, then," that lady cried, "does he still not breathe a breath about the day, the _day_, the day?" She repeated the word with a crescendo of superior acuteness; she proclaimed that nothing could be more marked than its absence--an absence that simply spoke volumes. What did it prove in fine but that she was producing the effect she had toiled for--that she had settled or was rapidly settling Mona? Such a challenge Fleda was obliged in some manner to take up. "You may be settling Mona," she returned with a smile, "but I can hardly regard it as sufficient evidence that you're settling Mona's lover." "Why not, with such a studied omission on his part to gloss over in any manner the painful tension existing between them--the painful tension that, under providence, I've been the means of bringing about? He gives you by his silence clear notice that his marriage is practically off." "He speaks to me of the only thing that concerns me. He gives me clear notice that he abates not one jot of his demand." "Well, then, let him take the only way to get it satisfied." Fleda had no need to ask again what such a way might be, nor was her support removed by the fine assurance with which Mrs. Gereth could make her argument wait upon her wish. These days, which dragged their length into a strange, uncomfortable fortnight, had already borne more testimony to that element than all the other time the two women had passed together. Our young lady had been at first far from measuring the whole of a feature that Owen himself would probably have described as her companion's "cheek." She lived now in a kind of bath of boldness, felt as if a fierce light poured in upon her from windows opened wide; and the singular part of the ordeal was that she couldn't protest against it fully without incurring, even to her own mind, some reproach of ingratitude, some charge of smallness. If Mrs. Gereth's apparent determination to hustle her into Owen's arms was accompanied with an air of holding her dignity rather cheap, this was after all only as a consequence of her being held in respect to some other attributes rather dear. It was a new version of the old story of being kicked upstairs. The wonderful woman was the same woman who, in the summer, at Poynton, had been so puzzled to conceive why a good-natured girl shouldn't have contributed more to the personal rout of the Brigstocks--shouldn't have been grateful even for the handsome puff of Fleda Vetch. Only her passion was keener now and her scruple more absent; the fight made a demand upon her, and her pugnacity had become one with her constant habit of using such weapons as she could pick up. She had no imagination about anybody's life save on the side she bumped against. Fleda was quite aware that she would have otherwise been a rare creature; but a rare creature was originally just what she had struck her as being. Mrs. Gereth had really no perception of anybody's nature--had only one question about persons: were they clever or stupid? To be clever meant to know the marks. Fleda knew them by direct inspiration, and a warm recognition of this had been her friend's tribute to her character. The girl had hours, now, of sombre wishing that she might never see anything good again: that kind of experience was evidently not an infallible source of peace. She would be more at peace in some vulgar little place that should owe its _cachet_ to Tottenham Court Road. There were nice strong horrors in West Kensington; it was as if they beckoned her and wooed her back to them. She had a relaxed recollection of Waterbath; and of her reasons for staying on at Ricks the force was rapidly ebbing. One of these was her pledge to Owen--her vow to press his mother close; the other was the fact that of the two discomforts, that of being prodded by Mrs. Gereth and that of appearing to run after somebody else, the former remained for a while the more endurable. As the days passed, however, it became plainer to Fleda that her only chance of success would be in lending herself to this low appearance. Then, moreover, at last, her nerves settling the question, the choice was simply imposed by the violence done to her taste--to whatever was left of that high principle, at least, after the free and reckless meeting, for months, of great drafts and appeals. It was all very well to try to evade discussion: Owen Gereth was looking to her for a struggle, and it wasn't a bit of a struggle to be disgusted and dumb. She was on too strange a footing--that of having presented an ultimatum and having had it torn up in her face. In such a case as that the envoy always departed; he never sat gaping and dawdling before the city. Mrs. Gereth, every morning, looked publicly into "The Morning Post," the only newspaper she received; and every morning she treated the blankness of that journal as fresh evidence that everything was "off." What did the Post exist for but to tell you your children were wretchedly married?--so that if such a source of misery was dry, what could you do but infer that for once you had miraculously escaped? She almost taunted Fleda with supineness in not getting something out of somebody--in the same breath indeed in which she drenched her with a kind of appreciation more onerous to the girl than blame. Mrs. Gereth herself had of course washed her hands of the matter; but Fleda knew people who knew Mona and would be sure to be in her confidence--inconceivable people who admired her and had the privilege of Waterbath. What was the use therefore of being the most natural and the easiest of letter-writers, if no sort of side-light--in some pretext for correspondence--was, by a brilliant creature, to be got out of such barbarians? Fleda was not only a brilliant creature, but she heard herself commended in these days for new and strange attractions; she figured suddenly, in the queer conversations of Ricks, as a distinguished, almost as a dangerous beauty. That retouching of her hair and dress in which her friend had impulsively indulged on a first glimpse of her secret was by implication very frequently repeated. She had the sense not only of being advertised and offered, but of being counseled and enlightened in ways that she scarcely understood--arts obscure even to a poor girl who had had, in good society and motherless poverty, to look straight at realities and fill out blanks. These arts, when Mrs. Gereth's spirits were high, were handled with a brave and cynical humor with which Fleda's fancy could keep no step: they left our young lady wondering what on earth her companion wanted her to do. "I want you to cut in!"--that was Mrs. Gereth's familiar and comprehensive phrase for the course she prescribed. She challenged again and again Fleda's picture, as she called it (though the sketch was too slight to deserve the name), of the indifference to which a prior attachment had committed the proprietor of Poynton. "Do you mean to say that, Mona or no Mona, he could see you that way, day after day, and not have the ordinary feelings of a man?" This was the sort of interrogation to which Fleda was fitfully and irrelevantly treated. She had grown almost used to the refrain. "Do you mean to say that when, the other day, one had quite made you over to him, the great gawk, and he was, on this very spot, utterly alone with you--?" The poor girl at this point never left any doubt of what she meant to say, but Mrs. Gereth could be trusted to break out in another place and at another time. At last Fleda wrote to her father that he must take her in for a while; and when, to her companion's delight, she returned to London, that lady went with her to the station and wafted her on her way. "The Morning Post" had been delivered as they left the house, and Mrs. Gereth had brought it with her for the traveler, who never spent a penny on a newspaper. On the platform, however, when this young person was ticketed, labeled, and seated, she opened it at the window of the carriage, exclaiming as usual, after looking into it a moment: "Nothing--nothing--nothing: don't tell _me_!" Every day that there was nothing was a nail in the coffin of the marriage. An instant later the train was off, but, moving quickly beside it, while Fleda leaned inscrutably forth, Mrs. Gereth grasped her friend's hand and looked up with wonderful eyes. "Only let yourself go, darling--only let yourself go!" XIII That she desired to ask no questions Mrs. Gereth conscientiously proved by closing her lips tight after Fleda had gone to London. No letter from Ricks arrived at West Kensington, and Fleda, with nothing to communicate that could be to the taste of either party, forbore to open a correspondence. If her heart had been less heavy she might have been amused to perceive how much rope this reticence of Ricks seemed to signify to her that she could take. She had at all events no good news for her friend save in the sense that her silence was not bad news. She was not yet in a position to write that she had "cut in;" but neither, on the other hand, had she gathered material for announcing that Mona was undisseverable from her prey. She had made no use of the pen so glorified by Mrs. Gereth to wake up the echoes of Waterbath; she had sedulously abstained from inquiring what in any quarter, far or near, was said or suggested or supposed. She only spent a matutinal penny on "The Morning Post;" she only saw, on each occasion, that that inspired sheet had as little to say about the imminence as about the abandonment of certain nuptials. It was at the same time obvious that Mrs. Gereth triumphed on these occasions much more than she trembled, and that with a few such triumphs repeated she would cease to tremble at all. What was most manifest, however, was that she had had a rare preconception of the circumstances that would have ministered, had Fleda been disposed, to the girl's cutting in. It was brought home to Fleda that these circumstances would have particularly favored intervention; she was quickly forced to do them a secret justice. One of the effects of her intimacy with Mrs. Gereth was that she had quite lost all sense of intimacy with any one else. The lady of Ricks had made a desert around her, possessing and absorbing her so utterly that other partakers had fallen away. Hadn't she been admonished, months before, that people considered they had lost her and were reconciled on the whole to the privation? Her present position in the great unconscious town defined itself as obscure: she regarded it at any rate with eyes suspicious of that lesson. She neither wrote notes nor received them; she indulged in no reminders nor knocked at any doors; she wandered vaguely in the western wilderness or cultivated shy forms of that "household art" for which she had had a respect before tasting the bitter tree of knowledge. Her only plan was to be as quiet as a mouse, and when she failed in the attempt to lose herself in the flat suburb she felt like a lonely fly crawling over a dusty chart. How had Mrs. Gereth known in advance that if she had chosen to be "vile" (that was what Fleda called it) everything would happen to help her?--especially the way her poor father, after breakfast, doddered off to his club, showing seventy when he was really fifty-seven, and leaving her richly alone for the day. He came back about midnight, looking at her very hard and not risking long words--only making her feel by inimitable touches that the presence of his family compelled him to alter all his hours. She had in their common sitting-room the company of the objects he was fond of saying that he had collected--objects, shabby and battered, of a sort that appealed little to his daughter: old brandy-flasks and match-boxes, old calendars and hand-books, intermixed with an assortment of pen-wipers and ash-trays, a harvest he had gathered in from penny bazaars. He was blandly unconscious of that side of Fleda's nature which had endeared her to Mrs. Gereth, and she had often heard him wish to goodness there was something striking she cared for. Why didn't she try collecting something?--it didn't matter what. She would find it gave an interest to life, and there was no end of little curiosities one could easily pick up. He was conscious of having a taste for fine things which his children had unfortunately not inherited. This indicated the limits of their acquaintance with him--limits which, as Fleda was now sharply aware, could only leave him to wonder what the mischief she was there for. As she herself echoed this question to the letter she was not in a position to clear up the mystery. She couldn't have given a name to her errand in town or explained it save by saying that she had had to get away from Ricks. It was intensely provisional, but what was to come next? Nothing could come next but a deeper anxiety. She had neither a home nor an outlook--nothing in all the wide world but a feeling of suspense. Of course she had her duty--her duty to Owen--a definite undertaking, reaffirmed, after his visit to Ricks, under her hand and seal; but there was no sense of possession attached to that; there was only a horrible sense of privation. She had quite moved from under Mrs. Gereth's wide wing; and now that she was really among the pen-wipers and ash-trays she was swept, at the thought of all the beauty she had forsworn, by short, wild gusts of despair. If her friend should really keep the spoils she would never return to her. If that friend should on the other hand part with them, what on earth would there be to return to? The chill struck deep as Fleda thought of the mistress of Ricks reduced, in vulgar parlance, to what she had on her back: there was nothing to which she could compare such an image but her idea of Marie Antoinette in the Conciergerie, or perhaps the vision of some tropical bird, the creature of hot, dense forests, dropped on a frozen moor to pick up a living. The mind's eye could see Mrs. Gereth, indeed, only in her thick, colored air; it took all the light of her treasures to make her concrete and distinct. She loomed for a moment, in any mere house, gaunt and unnatural; then she vanished as if she had suddenly sunk into a quicksand. Fleda lost herself in the rich fancy of how, if _she_ were mistress of Poynton, a whole province, as an abode, should be assigned there to the august queen-mother. She would have returned from her campaign with her baggage-train and her loot, and the palace would unbar its shutters and the morning flash back from its halls. In the event of a surrender the poor woman would never again be able to begin to collect: she was now too old and too moneyless, and times were altered and good things impossibly dear. A surrender, furthermore, to any daughter-in-law save an oddity like Mona needn't at all be an abdication in fact; any other fairly nice girl whom Owen should have taken it into his head to marry would have been positively glad to have, for the museum, a custodian who was a walking catalogue and who understood beyond any one in England the hygiene and temperament of rare pieces. A fairly nice girl would somehow be away a good deal and would at such times count it a blessing to feel Mrs. Gereth at her post. Fleda had fully recognized, the first days, that, quite apart from any question of letting Owen know where she was, it would be a charity to give him some sign: it would be weak, it would be ugly, to be diverted from that kindness by the fact that Mrs. Gereth had attached a tinkling bell to it. A frank relation with him was only superficially discredited: she ought for his own sake to send him a word of cheer. So she repeatedly reasoned, but she as repeatedly delayed performance: if her general plan had been to be as still as a mouse, an interview like the interview at Ricks would be an odd contribution to that ideal. Therefore with a confused preference of practice to theory she let the days go by; she felt that nothing was so imperative as the gain of precious time. She shouldn't be able to stay with her father forever, but she might now reap the benefit of having married her sister. Maggie's union had been built up round a small spare room. Concealed in this apartment she might try to paint again, and abetted by the grateful Maggie--for Maggie at least was grateful--she might try to dispose of her work. She had not indeed struggled with a brush since her visit to Waterbath, where the sight of the family splotches had put her immensely on her guard. Poynton moreover had been an impossible place for producing; no active art could flourish there but a Buddhistic contemplation. It had stripped its mistress clean of all feeble accomplishments; her hands were imbrued neither with ink nor with water-color. Close to Fleda's present abode was the little shop of a man who mounted and framed pictures and desolately dealt in artists' materials. She sometimes paused before it to look at a couple of shy experiments for which its dull window constituted publicity, small studies placed there for sale and full of warning to a young lady without fortune and without talent. Some such young lady had brought them forth in sorrow; some such young lady, to see if they had been snapped up, had passed and repassed as helplessly as she herself was doing. They never had been, they never would be, snapped up; yet they were quite above the actual attainment of some other young ladies. It was a matter of discipline with Fleda to take an occasional lesson from them; besides which, when she now quitted the house, she had to look for reasons after she was out. The only place to find them was in the shop-windows. They made her feel like a servant-girl taking her "afternoon," but that didn't signify: perhaps some day she would resemble such a person still more closely. This continued a fortnight, at the end of which the feeling was suddenly dissipated. She had stopped as usual in the presence of the little pictures; then, as she turned away, she had found herself face to face with Owen Gereth. At the sight of him two fresh waves passed quickly across her heart, one at the heels of the other. The first was an instant perception that this encounter was not an accident; the second a consciousness as prompt that the best place for it was the street. She knew before he told her that he had been to see her, and the next thing she knew was that he had had information from his mother. Her mind grasped these things while he said with a smile: "I saw only your back, but I was sure. I was over the way. I've been at your house." "How came you to know my house?" Fleda asked. "I like that!" he laughed. "How came you not to let me know that you were there?" Fleda, at this, thought it best also to laugh. "Since I didn't let you know, why did you come?" "Oh, I say!" cried Owen. "Don't add insult to injury. Why in the world didn't you let me know? I came because I want awfully to see you." He hesitated, then he added: "I got the tip from mother: she has written to me--fancy!" They still stood where they had met. Fleda's instinct was to keep him there; the more so that she could already see him take for granted that they would immediately proceed together to her door. He rose before her with a different air: he looked less ruffled and bruised than he had done at Ricks, he showed a recovered freshness. Perhaps, however, this was only because she had scarcely seen him at all as yet in London form, as he would have called it--"turned out" as he was turned out in town. In the country, heated with the chase and splashed with the mire, he had always rather reminded her of a picturesque peasant in national costume. This costume, as Owen wore it, varied from day to day; it was as copious as the wardrobe of an actor; but it never failed of suggestions of the earth and the weather, the hedges and the ditches, the beasts and the birds. There had been days when it struck her as all nature in one pair of boots. It didn't make him now another person that he was delicately dressed, shining and splendid--that he had a higher hat and light gloves with black seams, and a spearlike umbrella; but it made him, she soon decided, really handsomer, and that in turn gave him--for she never could think of him, or indeed of some other things, without the aid of his vocabulary--a tremendous pull. Yes, this was for the moment, as he looked at her, the great fact of their situation--his pull was tremendous. She tried to keep the acknowledgement of it from trembling in her voice as she said to him with more surprise than she really felt: "You've then reopened relations with her?" "It's she who has reopened them with me. I got her letter this morning. She told me you were here and that she wished me to know it. She didn't say much; she just gave me your address. I wrote her back, you know, 'Thanks no end. Shall go to-day.' So we _are_ in correspondence again, aren't we? She means of course that you've something to tell me from her, eh? But if you have, why haven't you let a fellow know?" He waited for no answer to this, he had so much to say. "At your house, just now, they told me how long you've been here. Haven't you known all the while that I'm counting the hours? I left a word for you--that I would be back at six; but I'm awfully glad to have caught you so much sooner. You don't mean to say you're not going home!" he exclaimed in dismay. "The young woman there told me you went out early." "I've been out a very short time," said Fleda, who had hung back with the general purpose of making things difficult for him. The street would make them difficult; she could trust the street. She reflected in time, however, that to betray to him she was afraid to admit him would give him more a feeling of facility than of anything else. She moved on with him after a moment, letting him direct their course to her door, which was only round a corner: she considered as they went that it might not prove such a stroke to have been in London so long and yet not to have called him. She desired he should feel she was perfectly simple with him, and there was no simplicity in that. None the less, on the steps of the house, though she had a key, she rang the bell; and while they waited together and she averted her face she looked straight into the depths of what Mrs. Gereth had meant by giving him the "tip." This had been perfidious, had been monstrous of Mrs. Gereth, and Fleda wondered if her letter had contained only what Owen repeated. XIV When Owen and Fleda were in her father's little place and, among the brandy-flasks and pen-wipers, still more disconcerted and divided, the girl--to do something, though it would make him stay--had ordered tea, he put the letter before her quite as if he had guessed her thought. "She's still a bit nasty--fancy!" He handed her the scrap of a note which he had pulled out of his pocket and from its envelope. "Fleda Vetch," it ran, "is at 10 Raphael Road, West Kensington. Go to see her, and try, for God's sake, to cultivate a glimmer of intelligence." When in handing it back to him she took in his face she saw that its heightened color was the effect of his watching her read such an allusion to his want of wit. Fleda knew what it was an allusion to, and his pathetic air of having received this buffet, tall and fine and kind as he stood there, made her conscious of not quite concealing her knowledge. For a minute she was kept silent by an angered sense of the trick that had been played her. It was a trick because Fleda considered there had been a covenant; and the trick consisted of Mrs. Gereth's having broken the spirit of their agreement while conforming in a fashion to the letter. Under the girl's menace of a complete rupture she had been afraid to make of her secret the use she itched to make; but in the course of these days of separation she had gathered pluck to hazard an indirect betrayal. Fleda measured her hesitations and the impulse which she had finally obeyed and which the continued procrastination of Waterbath had encouraged, had at last made irresistible. If in her high-handed manner of playing their game she had not named the thing hidden, she had named the hiding-place. It was over the sense of this wrong that Fleda's lips closed tight: she was afraid of aggravating her case by some ejaculation that would make Owen prick up his ears. A great, quick effort, however, helped her to avoid the danger; with her constant idea of keeping cool and repressing a visible flutter, she found herself able to choose her words. Meanwhile he had exclaimed with his uncomfortable laugh: "That's a good one for me, Miss Vetch, isn't it?" "Of course you know by this time that your mother's very sharp," said Fleda. "I think I can understand well enough when I know what's to be understood," the young man asserted. "But I hope you won't mind my saying that you've kept me pretty well in the dark about that. I've been waiting, waiting, waiting; so much has depended on your news. If you've been working for me I'm afraid it has been a thankless job. Can't she say what she'll do, one way or the other? I can't tell in the least where I am, you know. I haven't really learnt from you, since I saw you there, where _she_ is. You wrote me to be patient, and upon my soul I have been. But I'm afraid you don't quite realize what I'm to be patient with. At Waterbath, don't you know? I've simply to account and answer for the damned things. Mona looks at me and waits, and I, hang it, I look at you and do the same." Fleda had gathered fuller confidence as he continued; so plain was it that she had succeeded in not dropping into his mind the spark that might produce the glimmer invoked by his mother. But even this fine assurance gave a start when, after an appealing pause, he went on: "I hope, you know, that after all you're not keeping anything back from me." In the full face of what she was keeping back such a hope could only make her wince; but she was prompt with her explanations in proportion as she felt they failed to meet him. The smutty maid came in with tea-things, and Fleda, moving several objects, eagerly accepted the diversion of arranging a place for them on one of the tables. "I've been trying to break your mother down because it has seemed there may be some chance of it. That's why I've let you go on expecting it. She's too proud to veer round all at once, but I think I speak correctly in saying that I've made an impression." In spite of ordering tea she had not invited him to sit down; she herself made a point of standing. He hovered by the window that looked into Raphael Road; she kept at the other side of the room; the stunted slavey, gazing wide-eyed at the beautiful gentleman and either stupidly or cunningly bringing but one thing at a time, came and went between the tea-tray and the open door. "You pegged at her so hard?" Owen asked. "I explained to her fully your position and put before her much more strongly than she liked what seemed to me her absolute duty." Owen waited a little. "And having done that, you departed?" Fleda felt the full need of giving a reason for her departure; but at first she only said with cheerful frankness: "I departed." Her companion again looked at her in silence. "I thought you had gone to her for several months." "Well," Fleda replied, "I couldn't stay. I didn't like it. I didn't like it at all--I couldn't bear it," she went on. "In the midst of those trophies of Poynton, living with them, touching them, using them, I felt as if I were backing her up. As I was not a bit of an accomplice, as I hate what she has done, I didn't want to be, even to the extent of the mere look of it--what is it you call such people?--an accessory after the fact." There was something she kept back so rigidly that the joy of uttering the rest was double. She felt the sharpest need of giving him all the other truth. There was a matter as to which she had deceived him, and there was a matter as to which she had deceived Mrs. Gereth, but her lack of pleasure in deception as such came home to her now. She busied herself with the tea and, to extend the occupation, cleared the table still more, spreading out the coarse cups and saucers and the vulgar little plates. She was aware that she produced more confusion than symmetry, but she was also aware that she was violently nervous. Owen tried to help her with something: this made rather for disorder. "My reason for not writing to you," she pursued, "was simply that I was hoping to hear more from Ricks. I've waited from day to day for that." "But you've heard nothing?" "Not a word." "Then what I understand," said Owen, "is that, practically, you and Mummy have quarreled. And you've done it--I mean you personally--for _me_." "Oh no, we haven't quarreled a bit!" Then with a smile: "We've only diverged." "You've diverged uncommonly far!"--Owen laughed back. Fleda, with her hideous crockery and her father's collections, could conceive that these objects, to her visitor's perception even more strongly than to her own, measured the length of the swing from Poynton and Ricks; she was aware too that her high standards figured vividly enough even to Owen's simplicity to make him reflect that West Kensington was a tremendous fall. If she had fallen it was because she had acted for him. She was all the more content he should thus see she _had_ acted, as the cost of it, in his eyes, was none of her own showing. "What seems to have happened," he exclaimed, "is that you've had a row with her and yet not moved her!" Fleda considered a moment; she was full of the impression that, notwithstanding her scant help, he saw his way clearer than he had seen it at Ricks. He might mean many things; and what if the many should mean in their turn only one? "The difficulty is, you understand, that she doesn't really see into your situation." She hesitated. "She doesn't comprehend why your marriage hasn't yet taken place." Owen stared. "Why, for the reason I told you: that Mona won't take another step till mother has given full satisfaction. Everything must be there. You see, everything _was_ there the day of that fatal visit." "Yes, that's what I understood from you at Ricks," said Fleda; "but I haven't repeated it to your mother." She had hated, at Ricks, to talk with him about Mona, but now that scruple was swept away. If he could speak of Mona's visit as fatal, she need at least not pretend not to notice it. It made all the difference that she had tried to assist him and had failed: to give him any faith in her service she must give him all her reasons but one. She must give him, in other words, with a corresponding omission, all Mrs. Gereth's. "You can easily see that, as she dislikes your marriage, anything that may seem to make it less certain works in her favor. Without my telling her, she has suspicions and views that are simply suggested by your delay. Therefore it didn't seem to me right to make them worse. By holding off long enough, she thinks she may put an end to your engagement. If Mona's waiting, she believes she may at last tire Mona out." That, in all conscience, Fleda felt was lucid enough. So the young man, following her attentively, appeared equally to feel. "So far as that goes," he promptly declared, "she _has_ at last tired Mona out." He uttered the words with a strange approach to hilarity. Fleda's surprise at this aberration left her a moment looking at him. "Do you mean your marriage is off?" Owen answered with a kind of gay despair. "God knows, Miss Vetch, where or when or what my marriage is! If it isn't 'off,' it certainly, at the point things have reached, isn't _on_. I haven't seen Mona for ten days, and for a week I haven't heard from her. She used to write me every week, don't you know? She won't budge from Waterbath, and I haven't budged from town." Then he suddenly broke out: "If she _does_ chuck me, will mother come round?" Fleda, at this, felt that her heroism had come to its real test--felt that in telling him the truth she should effectively raise a hand to push his impediment out of the way. Was the knowledge that such a motion would probably dispose forever of Mona capable of yielding to the conception of still giving her every chance she was entitled to? That conception was heroic, but at the same moment it reminded Fleda of the place it had held in her plan, she was also reminded of the not less urgent claim of the truth. Ah, the truth--there was a limit to the impunity with which one could juggle with it! Wasn't what she had most to remember the fact that Owen had a right to his property and that he had also her vow to stand by him in the effort to recover it? How did she stand by him if she hid from him the single way to recover it of which she was quite sure? For an instant that seemed to her the fullest of her life she debated. "Yes," she said at last, "if your marriage is really abandoned, she will give up everything she has taken." "That's just what makes Mona hesitate!" Owen honestly exclaimed. "I mean the idea that I shall get back the things only if she gives me up." Fleda thought an instant. "You mean makes her hesitate to keep you--not hesitate to renounce you?" Owen looked a trifle bewildered. "She doesn't see the use of hanging on, as I haven't even yet put the matter into legal hands. She's awfully keen about that, and awfully disgusted that I don't. She says it's the only real way, and she thinks I'm afraid to take it. She has given me time and then has given me again more. She says I give Mummy too much. She says I'm a muff to go pottering on. That's why she's drawing off so hard, don't you see?" "I don't see very clearly. Of course you must give her what you offered her; of course you must keep your word. There must be no mistake about _that_!" the girl declared. Owen's bewilderment visibly increased. "You think, then, as she does, that I _must_ send down the police?" The mixture of reluctance and dependence in this made her feel how much she was failing him. She had the sense of "chucking" him too. "No, no, not yet!" she said, though she had really no other and no better course to prescribe. "Doesn't it occur to you," she asked in a moment, "that if Mona is, as you say, drawing away, she may have, in doing so, a very high motive? She knows the immense value of all the objects detained by your mother, and to restore the spoils of Poynton she is ready--is that it!--to make a sacrifice. The sacrifice is that of an engagement she had entered upon with joy." Owen had been blank a moment before, but he followed this argument with success--a success so immediate that it enabled him to produce with decision: "Ah, she's not that sort! She wants them herself," he added; "she wants to feel they're hers; she doesn't care whether I have them or not! And if she can't get them she doesn't want _me_. If she can't get them she doesn't want anything at all." This was categoric; Fleda drank it in. "She takes such an interest in them?" "So it appears." "So much that they're _all_, and that she can let everything else absolutely depend upon them?" Owen weighed her question as if he felt the responsibility of his answer. But that answer came in a moment, and, as Fleda could see, out of a wealth of memory. "She never wanted them particularly till they seemed to be in danger. Now she has an idea about them; and when she gets hold of an idea--Oh dear me!" He broke off, pausing and looking away as with a sense of the futility of expression: it was the first time Fleda had ever heard him explain a matter so pointedly or embark at all on a generalization. It was striking, it was touching to her, as he faltered, that he appeared but half capable of floating his generalization to the end. The girl, however, was so far competent to fill up his blank as that she had divined, on the occasion of Mona's visit to Poynton, what would happen in the event of the accident at which he glanced. She had there with her own eyes seen Owen's betrothed get hold of an idea. "I say, you know, _do_ give me some tea!" he went on irrelevantly and familiarly. Her profuse preparations had all this time had no sequel, and, with a laugh that she felt to be awkward, she hastily complied with his request. "It's sure to be horrid," she said; "we don't have at all good things." She offered him also bread and butter, of which he partook, holding his cup and saucer in his other hand and moving slowly about the room. She poured herself a cup, but not to take it; after which, without wanting it, she began to eat a small stale biscuit. She was struck with the extinction of the unwillingness she had felt at Ricks to contribute to the bandying between them of poor Mona's name; and under this influence she presently resumed: "Am I to understand that she engaged herself to marry you without caring for you?" Owen looked out into Raphael Road. "She _did_ care for me awfully. But she can't stand the strain." "The strain of what?" "Why, of the whole wretched thing." "The whole thing has indeed been wretched, and I can easily conceive its effect upon her," Fleda said. Her visitor turned sharp round. "You _can_?" There was a light in his strong stare. "You can understand it's spoiling her temper and making her come down on _me_? She behaves as if I were of no use to her at all!" Fleda hesitated. "She's rankling under the sense of her wrong." "Well, was it _I_, pray, who perpetrated the wrong? Ain't I doing what I can to get the thing arranged?" The ring of his question made his anger at Mona almost resemble for a minute an anger at Fleda; and this resemblance in turn caused our young lady to observe how handsome he looked when he spoke, for the first time in her hearing, with that degree of heat, and used, also for the first time, such a term as "perpetrated." In addition, his challenge rendered still more vivid to her the mere flimsiness of her own aid. "Yes, you've been perfect," she said. "You've had a most difficult part. You've _had_ to show tact and patience, as well as firmness, with your mother, and you've strikingly shown them. It's I who, quite unintentionally, have deceived you. I haven't helped you at all to your remedy." "Well, you wouldn't at all events have ceased to like me, would you?" Owen demanded. It evidently mattered to him to know if she really justified Mona. "I mean of course if you _had_ liked me--liked me as _she_ liked me," he explained. Fleda looked this inquiry in the face only long enough to recognize that, in her embarrassment, she must take instant refuge in a superior one. "I can answer that better if I know how kind to her you've been. _Have_ you been kind to her?" she asked as simply as she could. "Why, rather, Miss Vetch!" Owen declared. "I've done every blessed thing she wished. I rushed down to Ricks, as you saw, with fire and sword, and the day after that I went to see her at Waterbath." At this point he checked himself, though it was just the point at which her interest deepened. A different look had come into his face as he put down his empty teacup. "But why should I tell you such things, for any good it does me? I gather that you've no suggestion to make me now except that I shall request my solicitor to act. _Shall_ I request him to act?" Fleda scarcely heard his words; something new had suddenly come into her mind. "When you went to Waterbath after seeing me," she asked, "did you tell her all about that?" Owen looked conscious. "All about it?" "That you had had a long talk with me, without seeing your mother at all?" "Oh yes, I told her exactly, and that you had been most awfully kind, and that I had placed the whole thing in your hands." Fleda was silent a moment. "Perhaps that displeased her," she at last suggested. "It displeased her fearfully," said Owen, looking very queer. "Fearfully?" broke from the girl. Somehow, at the word, she was startled. "She wanted to know what right you had to meddle. She said you were not honest." "Oh!" Fleda cried, with a long wail. Then she controlled herself. "I see." "She abused you, and I defended you. She denounced you--" She checked him with a gesture. "Don't tell me what she did!" She had colored up to her eyes, where, as with the effect of a blow in the face, she quickly felt the tears gathering. It was a sudden drop in her great flight, a shock to her attempt to watch over what Mona was entitled to. While she had been straining her very soul in this attempt, the object of her magnanimity had been pronouncing her "not honest." She took it all in, however, and after an instant was able to speak with a smile. She would not have been surprised to learn, indeed, that her smile was strange. "You had said a while ago that your mother and I quarreled about you. It's much more true that you and Mona have quarreled about _me_." Owen hesitated, but at last he brought it out. "What I mean to say is, don't you know, that Mona, if you don't mind my saying so, has taken it into her head to be jealous." "I see," said Fleda. "Well, I dare say our conferences have looked very odd." "They've looked very beautiful, and they've been very beautiful. Oh, I've told her the sort you are!" the young man pursued. "That of course hasn't made her love me better." "No, nor love me," said Owen. "Of course, you know, she says she loves me." "And do you say you love her?" "I say nothing else--I say it all the while. I said it the other day a dozen times." Fleda made no immediate rejoinder to this, and before she could choose one he repeated his question of a moment before. "_Am_ I to tell my solicitor to act?" She had at that moment turned away from this solution, precisely because she saw in it the great chance of her secret. If she should determine him to adopt it she might put out her hand and take him. It would shut in Mrs. Gereth's face the open door of surrender: she would flare up and fight, flying the flag of a passionate, an heroic defense. The case would obviously go against her, but the proceedings would last longer than Mona's patience or Owen's propriety. With a formal rupture he would be at large; and she had only to tighten her fingers round the string that would raise the curtain on that scene. "You tell me you 'say' you love her, but is there nothing more in it than your saying so? You wouldn't say so, would you, if it's not true? What in the world has become, in so short a time, of the affection that led to your engagement?" "The deuce knows what has become of it, Miss Vetch!" Owen cried. "It seemed all to go to pot as this horrid struggle came on." He was close to her now, and, with his face lighted again by the relief of it, he looked all his helpless history into her eyes. "As I saw you and noticed you more, as I knew you better and better, I felt less and less--I couldn't help it--about anything or any one else. I wished I had known you sooner--I knew I should have liked you better than any one in the world. But it wasn't you who made the difference," he eagerly continued, "and I was awfully determined to stick to Mona to the death. It was she herself who made it, upon my soul, by the state she got into, the way she sulked, the way she took things, and the way she let me have it! She destroyed our prospects and our happiness, upon my honor. She made just the same smash of them as if she had kicked over that tea-table. She wanted to know all the while what was passing between us, between you and me; and she wouldn't take my solemn assurance that nothing was passing but what might have directly passed between me and old Mummy. She said a pretty girl like you was a nice old Mummy for me, and, if you'll believe it, she never called you anything else but that. I'll be hanged if I haven't been good, haven't I? I haven't breathed a breath of any sort to you, have I? You'd have been down on me hard if I had, wouldn't you? You're down on me pretty hard as it is, I think, aren't you? But I don't care what you say now, or what Mona says, either, or a single rap what any one says: she has given me at last, by her confounded behavior, a right to speak out, to utter the way I feel about it. The way I feel about it, don't you know, is that it had all better come to an end. You ask me if I don't love her, and I suppose it's natural enough you should. But you ask it at the very moment I'm half mad to say to you that there's only one person on the whole earth I _really_ love, and that that person--" Here Owen pulled up short, and Fleda wondered if it was from the effect of his perceiving, through the closed door, the sound of steps and voices on the landing of the stairs. She had caught this sound herself with surprise and a vague uneasiness: it was not an hour at which her father ever came in, and there was no present reason why she should have a visitor. She had a fear, which after a few seconds deepened: a visitor was at hand; the visitor would be simply Mrs. Gereth. That lady wished for a near view of the consequence of her note to Owen. Fleda straightened herself with the instant thought that if this was what Mrs. Gereth desired Mrs. Gereth should have it in a form not to be mistaken. Owen's pause was the matter of a moment, but during that moment our young couple stood with their eyes holding each other's eyes and their ears catching the suggestion, still through the door, of a murmured conference in the hall. Fleda had begun to make the movement to cut it short when Owen stopped her with a grasp of her arm. "You're surely able to guess," he said, with his voice dropped and her arm pressed as she had never known such a drop or such a pressure--"you're surely able to guess the one person on earth I love?" The handle of the door turned, and Fleda had only time to jerk at him: "Your mother!" The door opened, and the smutty maid, edging in, announced "Mrs. Brigstock!" XV Mrs. Brigstock, in the doorway, stood looking from one of the occupants of the room to the other; then they saw her eyes attach themselves to a small object that had lain hitherto unnoticed on the carpet. This was the biscuit of which, on giving Owen his tea, Fleda had taken a perfunctory nibble: she had immediately laid it on the table, and that subsequently, in some precipitate movement, she should have brushed it off was doubtless a sign of the agitation that possessed her. For Mrs. Brigstock there was apparently more in it than met the eye. Owen at any rate picked it up, and Fleda felt as if he were removing the traces of some scene that the newspapers would have characterized as lively. Mrs. Brigstock clearly took in also the sprawling tea-things and the mark as of high water in the full faces of her young friends. These elements made the little place a vivid picture of intimacy. A minute was filled by Fleda's relief at finding her visitor not to be Mrs. Gereth, and a longer space by the ensuing sense of what was really more compromising in the actual apparition. It dimly occurred to her that the lady of Ricks had also written to Waterbath. Not only had Mrs. Brigstock never paid her a call, but Fleda would have been unable to figure her so employed. A year before the girl had spent a day under her roof, but never feeling that Mrs. Brigstock regarded this as constituting a bond. She had never stayed in any house but Poynton where the imagination of a bond, one way or the other, prevailed. After the first astonishment she dashed gayly at her guest, emphasizing her welcome and wondering how her whereabouts had become known at Waterbath. Had not Mrs. Brigstock quitted that residence for the very purpose of laying her hand on the associate of Mrs. Gereth's misconduct? The spirit in which this hand was to be laid our young lady was yet to ascertain; but she was a person who could think ten thoughts at once--a circumstance which, even putting her present plight at its worst, gave her a great advantage over a person who required easy conditions for dealing even with one. The very vibration of the air, however, told her that whatever Mrs. Brigstock's spirit might originally have been, it had been sharply affected by the sight of Owen. He was essentially a surprise: she had reckoned with everything that concerned him but his presence. With that, in awkward silence, she was reckoning now, as Fleda could see, while she effected with friendly aid an embarrassed transit to the sofa. Owen would be useless, would be deplorable: that aspect of the case Fleda had taken in as well. Another aspect was that he would admire her, adore her, exactly in proportion as she herself should rise gracefully superior. Fleda felt for the first time free to let herself "go," as Mrs. Gereth had said, and she was full of the sense that to "go" meant now to aim straight at the effect of moving Owen to rapture at her simplicity and tact. It was her impression that he had no positive dislike of Mona's mother; but she couldn't entertain that notion without a glimpse of the implication that he had a positive dislike of Mrs. Brigstock's daughter. Mona's mother declined tea, declined a better seat, declined a cushion, declined to remove her boa: Fleda guessed that she had not come on purpose to be dry, but that the voice of the invaded room had itself given her the hint. "I just came on the mere chance," she said. "Mona found yesterday, somewhere, the card of invitation to your sister's marriage that you sent us, or your father sent us, some time ago. We couldn't be present--it was impossible; but as it had this address on it I said to myself that I might find you here." "I'm very glad to be at home," Fleda responded. "Yes, that doesn't happen very often, does it?" Mrs. Brigstock looked round afresh at Fleda's home. "Oh, I came back from Ricks last week. I shall be here now till I don't know when." "We thought it very likely you would have come back. We knew of course of your having been at Ricks. If I didn't find you I thought I might perhaps find Mr. Vetch," Mrs. Brigstock went on. "I'm sorry he's out. He's always out--all day long." Mrs. Brigstock's round eyes grew rounder. "All day long?" "All day long," Fleda smiled. "Leaving you quite to yourself?" "A good deal to myself, but a little, to-day, as you see, to Mr. Gereth,--" and the girl looked at Owen to draw him into their sociability. For Mrs. Brigstock he had immediately sat down; but the movement had not corrected the sombre stiffness taking possession of him at the sight of her. Before he found a response to the appeal addressed to him Fleda turned again to her other visitor. "Is there any purpose for which you would like my father to call on you?" Mrs. Brigstock received this question as if it were not to be unguardedly answered; upon which Owen intervened with pale irrelevance: "I wrote to Mona this morning of Miss Vetch's being in town; but of course the letter hadn't arrived when you left home." "No, it hadn't arrived. I came up for the night--I've several matters to attend to." Then looking with an intention of fixedness from one of her companions to the other, "I'm afraid I've interrupted your conversation," Mrs. Brigstock said. She spoke without effectual point, had the air of merely announcing the fact. Fleda had not yet been confronted with the question of the sort of person Mrs. Brigstock was; she had only been confronted with the question of the sort of person Mrs. Gereth scorned her for being. She was really, somehow, no sort of person at all, and it came home to Fleda that if Mrs. Gereth could see her at this moment she would scorn her more than ever. She had a face of which it was impossible to say anything but that it was pink, and a mind that it would be possible to describe only if one had been able to mark it in a similar fashion. As nature had made this organ neither green nor blue nor yellow, there was nothing to know it by: it strayed and bleated like an unbranded sheep. Fleda felt for it at this moment much of the kindness of compassion, since Mrs. Brigstock had brought it with her to do something for her that she regarded as delicate. Fleda was quite prepared to help it to perform, if she should be able to gather what it wanted to do. What she gathered, however, more and more, was that it wanted to do something different from what it had wanted to do in leaving Waterbath. There was still nothing to enlighten her more specifically in the way her visitor continued: "You must be very much taken up. I believe you quite espouse his dreadful quarrel." Fleda vaguely demurred. "His dreadful quarrel?" "About the contents of the house. Aren't you looking after them for him?" "She knows how awfully kind you've been to me," Owen said. He showed such discomfiture that he really gave away their situation; and Fleda found herself divided between the hope that he would take leave and the wish that he should see the whole of what the occasion might enable her to bring to pass for him. She explained to Mrs. Brigstock. "Mrs. Gereth, at Ricks, the other day, asked me particularly to see him for her." "And did she ask you also particularly to see him here in town?" Mrs. Brigstock's hideous bonnet seemed to argue for the unsophisticated truth; and it was on Fleda's lips to reply that such had indeed been Mrs. Gereth's request. But she checked herself, and before she could say anything else Owen had addressed their companion. "I made a point of letting Mona know that I should be here, don't you see? That's exactly what I wrote her this morning." "She would have had no doubt you would be here, if you had a chance," Mrs. Brigstock returned. "If your letter had arrived it might have prepared me for finding you here at tea. In that case I certainly wouldn't have come." "I'm glad, then, it didn't arrive. Shouldn't you like him to go?" Fleda asked. Mrs. Brigstock looked at Owen and considered: nothing showed in her face but that it turned a deeper pink. "I should like him to go with _me_." There was no menace in her tone, but she evidently knew what she wanted. As Owen made no response to this Fleda glanced at him to invite him to assent; then, for fear that he wouldn't, and would thereby make his case worse, she took upon herself to declare that she was sure he would be very glad to meet such a wish. She had no sooner spoken than she felt that the words had a bad effect of intimacy: she had answered for him as if she had been his wife. Mrs. Brigstock continued to regard him as if she had observed nothing, and she continued to address Fleda: "I've not seen him for a long time--I've particular things to say to him." "So have I things to say to you, Mrs. Brigstock!" Owen interjected. With this he took up his hat as if for an immediate departure. The other visitor meanwhile turned to Fleda. "What is Mrs. Gereth going to do?" "Is that what you came to ask me?" Fleda demanded. "That and several other things." "Then you had much better let Mr. Gereth go, and stay by yourself and make me a pleasant visit. You can talk with him when you like, but it is the first time you've been to see me." This appeal had evidently a certain effect; Mrs. Brigstock visibly wavered. "I can't talk with him whenever I like," she returned; "he hasn't been near us since I don't know when. But there are things that have brought me here." "They are not things of any importance," Owen, to Fleda's surprise, suddenly asserted. He had not at first taken up Mrs. Brigstock's expression of a wish to carry him off: Fleda could see that the instinct at the bottom of this was that of standing by her, of seeming not to abandon her. But abruptly, all his soreness working within him, it had struck him that he should abandon her still more if he should leave her to be dealt with by her other visitor. "You must allow me to say, you know, Mrs. Brigstock, that I don't think you should come down on Miss Vetch about anything. It's very good of her to take the smallest interest in us and our horrid little squabble. If you want to talk about it, talk about it with _me_." He was flushed with the idea of protecting Fleda, of exhibiting his consideration for her. "I don't like your cross-questioning her, don't you see? She's as straight as a die: _I_'ll tell you all about her!" he declared with an excited laugh. "Please come off with me and let her alone." Mrs. Brigstock, at this, became vivid at once; Fleda thought she looked most peculiar. She stood straight up, with a queer distention of her whole person and of everything in her face but her mouth, which she gathered into a small, tight orifice. Fleda was painfully divided; her joy was deep within, but it was more relevant to the situation that she should not appear to associate herself with the tone of familiarity in which Owen addressed a lady who had been, and was perhaps still, about to become his mother-in-law. She laid on Mrs. Brigstock's arm a repressive hand. Mrs. Brigstock, however, had already exclaimed on her having so wonderful a defender. "He speaks, upon my word, as if I had come here to be rude to you!" At this, grasping her hard, Fleda laughed; then she achieved the exploit of delicately kissing her. "I'm not in the least afraid to be alone with you, or of your tearing me to pieces. I'll answer any question that you can possibly dream of putting to me." "I'm the proper person to answer Mrs. Brigstock's questions," Owen broke in again, "and I'm not a bit less ready to meet them than you are." He was firmer than she had ever seen him: it was as if she had not known he could be so firm. "But she'll only have been here a few minutes. What sort of a visit is that?" Fleda cried. "It has lasted long enough for my purpose. There was something I wanted to know, but I think I know it now." "Anything you don't know I dare say I can tell you!" Owen observed as he impatiently smoothed his hat with the cuff of his coat. Fleda by this time desired immensely to keep his companion, but she saw she could do so only at the cost of provoking on his part a further exhibition of the sheltering attitude, which he exaggerated precisely because it was the first thing, since he had begun to "like" her, that he had been able frankly to do for her. It was not in her interest that Mrs. Brigstock should be more struck than she already was with that benevolence. "There may be things you know that I don't," she presently said to her, with a smile. "But I've a sort of sense that you're laboring under some great mistake." Mrs. Brigstock, at this, looked into her eyes more deeply and yearningly than she had supposed Mrs. Brigstock could look; it was the flicker of a certain willingness to give her a chance. Owen, however, quickly spoiled everything. "Nothing is more probable than that Mrs. Brigstock is doing what you say; but there's no one in the world to whom you owe an explanation. I may owe somebody one--I dare say I do; but not you, no!" "But what if there's one that it's no difficulty at all for me to give?" Fleda inquired. "I'm sure that's the only one Mrs. Brigstock came to ask, if she came to ask any at all." Again the good lady looked hard at her young hostess. "I came, I believe, Fleda, just, you know, to plead with you." Fleda, with a bright face, hesitated a moment. "As if I were one of those bad women in a play?" The remark was disastrous. Mrs. Brigstock, on whom her brightness was lost, evidently thought it singularly free. She turned away, as from a presence that had really defined itself as objectionable, and Fleda had a vain sense that her good humor, in which there was an idea, was taken for impertinence, or at least for levity. Her allusion was improper, even if she herself wasn't; Mrs. Brigstock's emotion simplified: it came to the same thing. "I'm quite ready," that lady said to Owen rather mildly and woundedly. "I do want to speak to you very much." "I'm completely at your service." Owen held out his hand to Fleda. "Good-bye, Miss Vetch. I hope to see you again to-morrow." He opened the door for Mrs. Brigstock, who passed before the girl with an oblique, averted salutation. Owen and Fleda, while he stood at the door, then faced each other darkly and without speaking. Their eyes met once more for a long moment, and she was conscious there was something in hers that the darkness didn't quench, that he had never seen before and that he was perhaps never to see again. He stayed long enough to take it--to take it with a sombre stare that just showed the dawn of wonder; then he followed Mrs. Brigstock out of the house. XVI He had uttered the hope that he should see her the next day, but Fleda could easily reflect that he wouldn't see her if she were not there to be seen. If there was a thing in the world she desired at that moment, it was that the next day should have no point of resemblance with the day that had just elapsed. She accordingly aspired to an absence: she would go immediately down to Maggie. She ran out that evening and telegraphed to her sister, and in the morning she quitted London by an early train. She required for this step no reason but the sense of necessity. It was a strong personal need; she wished to interpose something, and there was nothing she could interpose but distance, but time. If Mrs. Brigstock had to deal with Owen she would allow Mrs. Brigstock the chance. To be there, to be in the midst of it, was the reverse of what she craved: she had already been more in the midst of it than had ever entered into her plan. At any rate she had renounced her plan; she had no plan now but the plan of separation. This was to abandon Owen, to give up the fine office of helping him back to his own; but when she had undertaken that office she had not foreseen that Mrs. Gereth would defeat it by a manoeuvre so simple. The scene at her father's rooms had extinguished all offices, and the scene at her father's rooms was of Mrs. Gereth's producing. Owen, at all events, must now act for himself: he had obligations to meet, he had satisfactions to give, and Fleda fairly ached with the wish that he might be equal to them. She never knew the extent of her tenderness for him till she became conscious of the present force of her desire that he should be superior, be perhaps even sublime. She obscurely made out that superiority, that sublimity, mightn't after all be fatal. She closed her eyes and lived for a day or two in the mere beauty of confidence. It was with her on the short journey; it was with her at Maggie's; it glorified the mean little house in the stupid little town. Owen had grown larger to her: he would do, like a man, whatever he should have to do. He wouldn't be weak--not as she was: she herself was weak exceedingly. Arranging her few possessions in Maggie's fewer receptacles, she caught a glimpse of the bright side of the fact that her old things were not such a problem as Mrs. Gereth's. Picking her way with Maggie through the local puddles, diving with her into smelly cottages and supporting her, at smellier shops, in firmness over the weight of joints and the taste of cheese, it was still her own secret that was universally inter-woven In the puddles, the cottages, the shops she was comfortably alone with it; that comfort prevailed even while, at the evening meal, her brother-in-law invited her attention to a diagram, drawn with a fork on too soiled a tablecloth, of the scandalous drains of the Convalescent Home. To be alone with it she had come away from Ricks; and now she knew that to be alone with it she had come away from London. This advantage was of course menaced, but not immediately destroyed, by the arrival, on the second day, of the note she had been sure she should receive from Owen. He had gone to West Kensington and found her flown, but he had got her address from the little maid and then hurried to a club and written to her. "Why have you left me just when I want you most?" he demanded. The next words, it was true, were more reassuring on the question of his steadiness. "I don't know what your reason may be," they went on, "nor why you've not left a line for me; but I don't think you can feel that I did anything yesterday that it wasn't right for me to do. As regards Mrs. Brigstock, certainly, I just felt what was right and I did it. She had no business whatever to attack you that way, and I should have been ashamed if I had left her there to worry you. I won't have you worried by any one; no one shall be disagreeable to you but me. I didn't mean to be so yesterday, and I don't to-day; but I'm perfectly free now to want you, and I want you much more than you've allowed me to explain. You'll see if I'm not all right, if you'll let me come to you. Don't be afraid--I'll not hurt you nor trouble you. I give you my honor I'll not hurt any one. Only I _must_ see you, on what I had to say to Mrs. B. She was nastier than I thought she could be, but I'm behaving like an angel. I assure you I'm all right--that's exactly what I want you to see. You owe me something, you know, for what you said you would do and haven't done; what your departure without a word gives me to understand--doesn't it?--that you definitely can't do. Don't simply forsake me. See me, if you only see me once. I shan't wait for any leave--I shall come down to-morrow. I've been looking into trains and find there's something that will bring me down just after lunch and something very good for getting me back. I won't stop long. For God's sake, be there." This communication arrived in the morning, but Fleda would still have had time to wire a protest. She debated on that alternative; then she read the note over and found in one phrase an exact statement of her duty. Owen's simplicity had expressed it, and her subtlety had nothing to answer. She owed him something for her obvious failure, and what she owed him was to receive him. If indeed she had known he would make this attempt she might have been held to have gained nothing by her flight. Well, she had gained what she had gained--she had gained the interval. She had no compunction for the greater trouble she should give the young man; it was now doubtless right that he should have as much trouble as possible. Maggie, who thought she was in her confidence, but was immensely not, had reproached her for having left Mrs. Gereth, and Maggie was just in this proportion gratified to hear of the visitor with whom, early in the afternoon, she would have to ask to be left alone. Maggie liked to see far, and now she could sit upstairs and rake the whole future. She had known that, as she familiarly said, there was something the matter with Fleda, and the value of that knowledge was augmented by the fact that there was apparently also something the matter with Mr. Gereth. Fleda, downstairs, learned soon enough what this was. It was simply that, as he announced the moment he stood before her, he was now all right. When she asked him what he meant by that state he replied that he meant he could practically regard himself henceforth as a free man: he had had at West Kensington, as soon as they got into the street, such a horrid scene with Mrs. Brigstock. "I knew what she wanted to say to me: that's why I was determined to get her off. I knew I shouldn't like it, but I was perfectly prepared," said Owen. "She brought it out as soon as we got round the corner; she asked me point-blank if I was in love with you." "And what did you say to that?" "That it was none of her business." "Ah," said Fleda, "I'm not so sure!" "Well, _I_ am, and I'm the person most concerned. Of course I didn't use just those words: I was perfectly civil, quite as civil as she. But I told her I didn't consider she had a right to put me any such question. I said I wasn't sure that even Mona had, with the extraordinary line, you know, that Mona has taken. At any rate the whole thing, the way _I_ put it, was between Mona and me; and between Mona and me, if she didn't mind, it would just have to remain." Fleda was silent a little. "All that didn't answer her question." "Then you think I ought to have told her?" Again our young lady reflected. "I think I'm rather glad you didn't." "I knew what I was about," said Owen. "It didn't strike me that she had the least right to come down on us that way and ask for explanations." Fleda looked very grave, weighing the whole matter. "I dare say that when she started, when she arrived, she didn't mean to 'come down.'" "What then did she mean to do?" "What she said to me just before she went: she meant to plead with me." "Oh, I heard her!" said Owen. "But plead with you for what?" "For you, of course--to entreat me to give you up. She thinks me awfully designing--that I've taken some sort of possession of you." Owen stared. "You haven't lifted a finger! It's I who have taken possession." "Very true, you've done it all yourself." Fleda spoke gravely and gently, without a breath of coquetry. "But those are shades between which she's probably not obliged to distinguish. It's enough for her that we're singularly intimate." "I am, but you're not!" Owen exclaimed. Fleda gave a dim smile. "You make me at least feel that I'm learning to know you very well when I hear you say such a thing as that. Mrs. Brigstock came to get round me, to supplicate me," she went on; "but to find you there, looking so much at home, paying me a friendly call and shoving the tea-things about--that was too much for her patience. She doesn't know, you see, that I'm after all a decent girl. She simply made up her mind on the spot that I'm a very bad case." "I couldn't stand the way she treated you, and that was what I had to say to her," Owen returned. "She's simple and slow, but she's not a fool: I think she treated me, on the whole, very well." Fleda remembered how Mrs. Gereth had treated Mona when the Brigstocks came down to Poynton. Owen evidently thought her painfully perverse. "It was you who carried it off; you behaved like a brick. And so did I, I consider. If you only knew the difficulty I had! I told her you were the noblest and straightest of women." "That can hardly have removed her impression that there are things I put you up to." "It didn't," Owen replied with candor. "She said our relation, yours and mine, isn't innocent." "What did she mean by that?" "As you may suppose, I particularly inquired. Do you know what she had the cheek to tell me?" Owen asked. "She didn't better it much: she said she meant that it's excessively unnatural." Fleda considered afresh. "Well, it is!" she brought out at last. "Then, upon my honor, it's only you who make it so!" Her perversity was distinctly too much for him. "I mean you make it so by the way you keep me off." "Have I kept you off to-day?" Fleda sadly shook her head, raising her arms a little and dropping them. Her gesture of resignation gave him a pretext for catching at her hand, but before he could take it she had put it behind her. They had been seated together on Maggie's single sofa, and her movement brought her to her feet, while Owen, looking at her reproachfully, leaned back in discouragement. "What good does it do me to be here when I find you only a stone?" She met his eyes with all the tenderness she had not yet uttered, and she had not known till this moment how great was the accumulation. "Perhaps, after all," she risked, "there may be even in a stone still some little help for you." Owen sat there a minute staring at her. "Ah, you're beautiful, more beautiful than any one," he broke out, "but I'll be hanged if I can ever understand you! On Tuesday, at your father's, you were beautiful--as beautiful, just before I left, as you are at this instant. But the next day, when I went back, I found it had apparently meant nothing; and now, again, that you let me come here and you shine at me like an angel, it doesn't bring you an inch nearer to saying what I want you to say." He remained a moment longer in the same position; then he jerked himself up. "What I want you to say is that you like me--what I want you to say is that you pity me." He sprang up and came to her. "What I want you to say is that you'll _save_ me!" Fleda hesitated. "Why do you need saving, when you announced to me just now that you're a free man?" He too hesitated, but he was not checked. "It's just for the reason that I'm free. Don't you know what I mean, Miss Vetch? I want you to marry me." Fleda, at this, put out her hand in charity; she held his own, which quickly grasped it a moment, and if he had described her as shining at him it may be assumed that she shone all the more in her deep, still smile. "Let me hear a little more about your freedom first," she said. "I gather that Mrs. Brigstock was not wholly satisfied with the way you disposed of her question." "I dare say she wasn't. But the less she's satisfied the more I'm free." "What bearing have _her_ feelings, pray?" Fleda asked. "Why, Mona's much worse than her mother. She wants much more to give me up." "Then why doesn't she do it?" "She will, as soon as her mother gets home and tells her." "Tells her what?" Fleda inquired. "Why, that I'm in love with _you_!" Fleda debated. "Are you so very sure she will?" "Certainly I'm sure, with all the evidence I already have. That will finish her!" Owen declared. This made his companion thoughtful again. "Can you take such pleasure in her being 'finished'--a poor girl you've once loved?" Owen waited long enough to take in the question; then with a serenity startling even to her knowledge of his nature, "I don't think I can have _really_ loved her, you know," he replied. Fleda broke into a laugh which gave him a surprise as visible as the emotion it testified to. "Then how am I to know that you 'really' love--anybody else?" "Oh, I'll show you that!" said Owen. "I must take it on trust," the girl pursued. "And what if Mona doesn't give you up?" she added. Owen was baffled but a few seconds; he had thought of everything. "Why, that's just where you come in." "To save you? I see. You mean I must get rid of her for you." His blankness showed for a little that he felt the chill of her cold logic; but as she waited for his rejoinder she knew to which of them it cost most. He gasped a minute, and that gave her time to say: "You see, Mr. Owen, how impossible it is to talk of such things yet!" Like lightning he had grasped her arm. "You mean you _will_ talk of them?" Then as he began to take the flood of assent from her eyes: "You _will_ listen to me? Oh, you dear, you dear--when, when?" "Ah, when it isn't mere misery!" The words had broken from her in a sudden loud cry, and what next happened was that the very sound of her pain upset her. She heard her own true note; she turned short away from him; in a moment she had burst into sobs; in another his arms were round her; the next she had let herself go so far that even Mrs. Gereth might have seen it. He clasped her, and she gave herself--she poured out her tears on his breast; something prisoned and pent throbbed and gushed; something deep and sweet surged up--something that came from far within and far off, that had begun with the sight of him in his indifference and had never had rest since then. The surrender was short, but the relief was long: she felt his lips upon her face and his arms tighten with his full divination. What she did, what she _had_ done, she scarcely knew: she only was aware, as she broke from him again, of what had taken place in his own quick breast. What had taken place was that, with the click of a spring, he saw. He had cleared the high wall at a bound; they were together without a veil. She had not a shred of a secret left; it was as if a whirlwind had come and gone, laying low the great false front that she had built up stone by stone. The strangest thing of all was the momentary sense of desolation. "Ah, all the while you _cared_?" Owen read the truth with a wonder so great that it was visibly almost a sadness, a terror caused by his sudden perception of where the impossibility was not. That made it all perhaps elsewhere. "I cared, I cared, I cared!" Fleda moaned it as defiantly as if she were confessing a misdeed. "How couldn't I care? But you mustn't, you must never, never ask! It isn't for us to talk about!" she insisted. "Don't speak of it, don't speak!" It was easy indeed not to speak when the difficulty was to find words. He clasped his hands before her as he might have clasped them at an altar; his pressed palms shook together while he held his breath and while she stilled herself in the effort to come round again to the real and the right. He helped this effort, soothing her into a seat with a touch as light as if she had really been something sacred. She sank into a chair and he dropped before her on his knees; she fell back with closed eyes and he buried his face in her lap. There was no way to thank her but this act of prostration, which lasted, in silence, till she laid consenting hands on him, touched his head and stroked it, held it in her tenderness till he acknowledged his long density. He made the avowal seem only his--made her, when she rose again, raise him at last, softly, as if from the abasement of shame. If in each other's eyes now, however, they saw the truth, this truth, to Fleda, looked harder even than before--all the harder that when, at the very moment she recognized it, he murmured to her ecstatically, in fresh possession of her hands, which he drew up to his breast, holding them tight there with both his own: "I'm saved, I'm saved,--I _am_! I'm ready for anything. I have your word. Come!" he cried, as if from the sight of a response slower than he needed, and in the tone he so often had of a great boy at a great game. She had once more disengaged herself, with the private vow that he shouldn't yet touch her again. It was all too horribly soon--her sense of this was rapidly surging back. "We mustn't talk, we mustn't talk; we must _wait_!" she intensely insisted. "I don't know what you mean by your freedom; I don't see it, I don't feel it. Where is it yet, where, your freedom? If it's real there's plenty of time, and if it isn't there's more than enough. I hate myself," she protested, "for having anything to say about her: it's like waiting for dead men's shoes! What business is it of mine what she does? She has her own trouble and her own plan. It's too hideous to watch her and count on her!" Owen's face, at this, showed a reviving dread, the fear of some darksome process of her mind. "If you speak for yourself I can understand, but why is it hideous for _me_?" "Oh, I mean for myself!" Fleda said impatiently. "_I_ watch her, _I_ count on her: how can I do anything else? If I count on her to let me definitely know how we stand, I do nothing in life but what she herself has led straight up to. I never thought of asking you to 'get rid of her' for me, and I never would have spoken to you if I hadn't held that I _am_ rid of her, that she has backed out of the whole thing. Didn't she do so from the moment she began to put it off? I had already applied for the license; the very invitations were half addressed. Who but she, all of a sudden, demanded an unnatural wait? It was none of _my_ doing; I had never dreamed of anything but coming up to the scratch." Owen grew more and more lucid, and more confident of the effect of his lucidity. "She called it 'taking a stand,' to see what mother would do. I told her mother would do what I would make her do; and to that she replied that she would like to see me make her first. I said I would arrange that everything should be all right, and she said she really preferred to arrange it herself. It was a flat refusal to trust me in the smallest degree. Why then had she pretended so tremendously to care for me? And of course, at present," said Owen, "she trusts me, if possible, still less." Fleda paid this statement the homage of a minute's muteness. "As to that, naturally, she has reason." "Why on earth has she reason?" Then, as his companion, moving away, simply threw up her hands, "I never looked at you--not to call looking--till she had regularly driven me to it," he went on. "I know what I'm about. I do assure you I'm all right!" "You're not all right--you're all wrong!" Fleda cried in despair. "You mustn't stay here, you mustn't!" she repeated with clear decision. "You make me say dreadful things, and I feel as if I made _you_ say them." But before he could reply she took it up in another tone. "Why in the world, if everything had changed, didn't you break off?" "I?--" The inquiry seemed to have moved him to stupefaction. "Can you ask me that question when I only wanted to please you? Didn't you seem to show me, in your wonderful way, that that was exactly how? I didn't break off just on purpose to leave it to _her_. I didn't break off so that there shouldn't be a thing to be said against me." The instant after her challenge Fleda had faced him again in self-reproof. "There _isn't_ a thing to be said against you, and I don't know what nonsense you make me talk! You _have_ pleased me, and you've been right and good, and it's the only comfort, and you must go. Everything must come from Mona, and if it doesn't come we've said entirely too much. You must leave me alone--forever." "Forever?" Owen gasped. "I mean unless everything is different." "Everything _is_ different--when I _know_!" Fleda winced at what he knew; she made a wild gesture which seemed to whirl it out of the room. The mere allusion was like another embrace. "You know nothing--and you must go and wait! You mustn't break down at this point." He looked about him and took up his hat: it was as if, in spite of frustration, he had got the essence of what he wanted and could afford to agree with her to the extent of keeping up the forms. He covered her with his fine, simple smile, but made no other approach. "Oh, I'm so awfully happy!" he exclaimed. She hesitated: she would only be impeccable even though she should have to be sententious. "You'll be happy if you're perfect!" she risked. He laughed out at this, and she wondered if, with a new-born acuteness, he saw the absurdity of her speech, and that no one was happy just because no one could be what she so lightly prescribed. "I don't pretend to be perfect, but I shall find a letter to-night!" "So much the better, if it's the kind of one you desire." That was the most she could say, and having made it sound as dry as possible she lapsed into a silence so pointed as to deprive him of all pretext for not leaving her. Still, nevertheless, he stood there, playing with his hat and filling the long pause with a strained and anxious smile. He wished to obey her thoroughly, to appear not to presume on any advantage he had won from her; but there was clearly something he longed for beside. While he showed this by hanging on she thought of two other things. One of these was that his countenance, after all, failed to bear out his description of his bliss. As for the other, it had no sooner come into her head than she found it seated, in spite of her resolution, on her lips. It took the form of an inconsequent question. "When did you say Mrs. Brigstock was to have gone back?" Owen stared. "To Waterbath? She was to have spent the night in town, don't you know? But when she left me, after our talk, I said to myself that she would take an evening train. I know I made her want to get home." "Where did you separate?" Fleda asked. "At the West Kensington station--she was going to Victoria. I had walked with her there, and our talk was all on the way." Fleda pondered a moment. "If she did go back that night you would have heard from Waterbath by this time." "I don't know," said Owen. "I thought I might hear this morning." "She can't have gone back," Fleda declared. "Mona would have written on the spot." "Oh yes, she _will_ have written bang off!" Owen cheerfully conceded. Fleda thought again. "Then, even in the event of her mother's not having got home till the morning, you would have had your letter at the latest to-day. You see she has had plenty of time." Owen hesitated; then, "Oh, she's all right!" he laughed. "I go by Mrs. Brigstock's certain effect on her--the effect of the temper the old lady showed when we parted. Do you know what she asked me?" he sociably continued. "She asked me in a kind of nasty manner if I supposed you 'really' cared anything about me. Of course I told her I supposed you didn't--not a solitary rap. How could I suppose you _do_, with your extraordinary ways? It doesn't matter; I could see she thought I lied." "You should have told her, you know, that I had seen you in town only that one time," Fleda observed. "By Jove, I did--for _you_! It was only for you." Something in this touched the girl so that for a moment she could not trust herself to speak. "You're an honest man," she said at last. She had gone to the door and opened it. "Good-bye." Even yet, however, he hung back; and she remembered how, at the end of his hour at Ricks, she had been put to it to get him out of the house. He had in general a sort of cheerful slowness which helped him at such times, though she could now see his strong fist crumple his big, stiff gloves as if they had been paper. "But even if there's no letter--" he began. He began, but there he left it. "You mean, even if she doesn't let you off? Ah, you ask me too much!" Fleda spoke from the tiny hall, where she had taken refuge between the old barometer and the old mackintosh. "There are things too utterly for yourselves alone. How can I tell? What do I know? Good-bye, good-bye! If she doesn't let you off, it will be because she _is_ attached to you." "She's not, she's not: there's nothing in it! Doesn't a fellow know?--except with _you_!" Owen ruefully added. With this he came out of the room, lowering his voice to secret supplication, pleading with her really to meet him on the ground of the negation of Mona. It was this betrayal of his need of support and sanction that made her retreat--harden herself in the effort to save what might remain of all she had given, given probably for nothing. The very vision of him as he thus morally clung to her was the vision of a weakness somewhere in the core of his bloom, a blessed manly weakness of which, if she had only the valid right, it would be all a sweetness to take care. She faintly sickened, however, with the sense that there was as yet no valid right poor Owen could give. "You can take it from my honor, you know," he whispered, "that she loathes me." Fleda had stood clutching the knob of Maggie's little painted stair-rail; she took, on the stairs, a step backward. "Why then doesn't she prove it in the only clear way?" "She _has_ proved it. Will you believe it if you see the letter?" "I don't want to see any letter," said Fleda. "You'll miss your train." Facing him, waving him away, she had taken another upward step; but he sprang to the side of the stairs and brought his hand, above the banister, down hard on her wrist. "Do you mean to tell me that I must marry a woman I hate?" From her step she looked down into his raised face. "Ah, you see it's not true that you're free!" She seemed almost to exult. "It's not true--it's not true!" He only, at this, like a buffeting swimmer, gave a shake of his head and repeated his question. "Do you mean to tell me I must marry such a woman?" Fleda hesitated; he held her fast. "No. Anything is better than that." "Then, in God's name, what must I do?" "You must settle that with her. You mustn't break faith. Anything is better than that. You must at any rate be utterly sure. She _must_ love you--how can she help it? _I_ wouldn't give you up!" said Fleda. She spoke in broken bits, panting out her words. "The great thing is to keep faith. Where _is_ a man if he doesn't? If he doesn't he may be so cruel. So cruel, so cruel, so cruel!" Fleda repeated. "I couldn't have a hand in _that_, you know: that's my position--that's mine. You offered her marriage: it's a tremendous thing for her." Then looking at him another moment, "_I_ wouldn't give you up!" she said again. He still had hold of her arm; she took in his blank alarm. With a quick dip of her face she reached his hand with her lips, pressing them to the back of it with a force that doubled the force of her words. "Never, never, never!" she cried; and before he could succeed in seizing her she had turned and, scrambling up the stairs, got away from him even faster than she had got away from him at Ricks. XVII Ten days after his visit she received a communication from Mrs. Gereth--a telegram of eight words, exclusive of signature and date. "Come up immediately and stay with me here"--it was characteristically sharp, as Maggie said; but, as Maggie added, it was also characteristically kind. "Here" was an hotel in London, and Maggie had embraced a condition of life which already began to produce in her some yearning for hotels in London. She would have responded in an instant, and she was surprised that her sister seemed to hesitate. Fleda's hesitation, which lasted but an hour, was expressed in that young lady's own mind by the reflection that in obeying her friend's summons she shouldn't know what she should be "in for." Her friend's summons, however, was but another name for her friend's appeal; and Mrs. Gereth's bounty had laid her under obligations more sensible than any reluctance. In the event--that is at the end of her hour--she testified to her gratitude by taking the train and to her mistrust by leaving her luggage. She went as if she had gone up for the day. In the train, however, she had another thoughtful hour, during which it was her mistrust that mainly deepened. She felt as if for ten days she had sat in darkness, looking to the east for a dawn that had not yet glimmered. Her mind had lately been less occupied with Mrs. Gereth; it had been so exceptionally occupied with Mona. If the sequel was to justify Owen's prevision of Mrs. Brigstock's action upon her daughter, this action was at the end of a week as much a mystery as ever. The stillness, all round, had been exactly what Fleda desired, but it gave her for the time a deep sense of failure, the sense of a sudden drop from a height at which she had all things beneath her. She had nothing beneath her now; she herself was at the bottom of the heap. No sign had reached her from Owen--poor Owen, who had clearly no news to give about his precious letter from Waterbath. If Mrs. Brigstock had hurried back to obtain that this letter should be written, Mrs. Brigstock might then have spared herself so great an inconvenience. Owen had been silent for the best of all reasons--the reason that he had had nothing in life to say. If the letter had not been written he would simply have had to introduce some large qualification into his account of his freedom. He had left his young friend under her refusal to listen to him until he should be able, on the contrary, to extend that picture; and his present submission was all in keeping with the rigid honesty that his young friend had prescribed. It was this that formed the element through which Mona loomed large; Fleda had enough imagination, a fine enough feeling for life, to be impressed with such an image of successful immobility. The massive maiden at Waterbath _was_ successful from the moment she could entertain her resentments as if they had been poor relations who needn't put her to expense. She was a magnificent dead weight; there was something positive and portentous in her quietude. "What game are they all playing?" poor Fleda could only ask; for she had an intimate conviction that Owen was now under the roof of his betrothed. That was stupefying if he really hated Mona; and if he didn't really hate her what had brought him to Raphael Road and to Maggie's? Fleda had no real light, but she felt that to account for the absence of any result of their last meeting would take a supposition of the full sacrifice to charity that she had held up before him. If he had gone to Waterbath it had been simply because he had to go. She had as good as told him that he would have to go; that this was an inevitable incident of his keeping perfect faith--faith so literal that the smallest subterfuge would always be a reproach to him. When she tried to remember that it was for herself he was taking his risk, she felt how weak a way that was of expressing Mona's supremacy. There would be no need of keeping him up if there were nothing to keep him up to. Her eyes grew wan as she discerned in the impenetrable air that Mona's thick outline never wavered an inch. She wondered fitfully what Mrs. Gereth had by this time made of it, and reflected with a strange elation that the sand on which the mistress of Ricks had built a momentary triumph was quaking beneath the surface. As The Morning Post still held its peace, she would be, of course, more confident; but the hour was at hand at which Owen would have absolutely to do either one thing or the other. To keep perfect faith was to inform against his mother, and to hear the police at her door would be Mrs. Gereth's awakening. How much she was beguiled Fleda could see from her having been for a whole month quite as deep and dark as Mona. She had let her young friend alone because of the certitude, cultivated at Ricks, that Owen had done the opposite. He had done the opposite indeed, but much good had that brought forth! To have sent for her now, Fleda felt, was from this point of view wholly natural: she had sent for her to show at last how much she had scored. If, however, Owen was really at Waterbath the refutation of that boast was easy. Fleda found Mrs. Gereth in modest apartments and with an air of fatigue in her distinguished face--a sign, as she privately remarked, of the strain of that effort to be discreet of which she herself had been having the benefit. It was a constant feature of their relation that this lady could make Fleda blench a little, and that the effect proceeded from the intense pressure of her confidence. If the confidence had been heavy even when the girl, in the early flush of devotion, had been able to feel herself most responsive, it drew her heart into her mouth now that she had reserves and conditions, now that she couldn't simplify with the same bold hand as her protectress. In the very brightening of the tired look, and at the moment of their embrace, Fleda felt on her shoulders the return of the load, so that her spirit frankly quailed as she asked herself what she had brought up from her trusted seclusion to support it. Mrs. Gereth's free manner always made a joke of weakness, and there was in such a welcome a richness, a kind of familiar nobleness, that suggested shame to a harried conscience. Something had happened, she could see, and she could also see, in the bravery that seemed to announce it had changed everything, a formidable assumption that what had happened was what a healthy young woman must like. The absence of luggage had made this young woman feel meagre even before her companion, taking in the bareness at a second glance, exclaimed upon it and roundly rebuked her. Of course she had expected her to stay. Fleda thought best to show bravery too, and to show it from the first. "What you expected, dear Mrs. Gereth, is exactly what I came up to ascertain. It struck me as right to do that first. I mean to ascertain, without making preparations." "Then you'll be so good as to make them on the spot!" Mrs. Gereth was most emphatic. "You're going abroad with me." Fleda wondered, but she also smiled. "To-night--to-morrow?" "In as few days as possible. That's all that's left for me now." Fleda's heart, at this, gave a bound; she wondered to what particular difference in Mrs. Gereth's situation as last known to her it was an allusion. "I've made my plan," her friend continued: "I go for at least a year. We shall go straight to Florence; we can manage there. I of course don't look to you, however," she added, "to stay with me all that time. That will require to be settled. Owen will have to join us as soon as possible; he may not be quite ready to get off with us. But I'm convinced it's quite the right thing to go. It will make a good change; it will put in a decent interval." Fleda listened; she was deeply mystified. "How kind you are to me!" she presently said. The picture suggested so many questions that she scarcely knew which to ask first. She took one at a venture. "You really have it from Mr. Gereth that he'll give us his company?" If Mr. Gereth's mother smiled in response to this, Fleda knew that her smile was a tacit criticism of such a form of reference to her son. Fleda habitually spoke of him as Mr. Owen, and it was a part of her present vigilance to appear to have relinquished that right. Mrs. Gereth's manner confirmed a certain impression of her pretending to more than she felt; her very first words had conveyed it, and it reminded Fleda of the conscious courage with which, weeks before, the lady had met her visitor's first startled stare at the clustered spoils of Poynton. It was her practice to take immensely for granted whatever she wished. "Oh, if you'll answer for him, it will do quite as well!" she said. Then she put her hands on the girl's shoulders and held them at arm's length, as if to shake them a little, while in the depths of her shining eyes Fleda discovered something obscure and unquiet. "You bad, false thing, why didn't you tell me?" Her tone softened her harshness, and her visitor had never had such a sense of her indulgence. Mrs. Gereth could show patience; it was a part of the general bribe, but it was also like the handing in of a heavy bill before which Fleda could only fumble in a penniless pocket. "You must perfectly have known at Ricks, and yet you practically denied it. That's why I call you bad and false!" It was apparently also why she again almost roughly kissed her. "I think that before I answer you I had better know what you're talking about," Fleda said. Mrs. Gereth looked at her with a slight increase of hardness. "You've done everything you need for modesty, my dear! If he's sick with love of you, you haven't had to wait for me to inform you." Fleda hesitated. "Has he informed _you_, dear Mrs. Gereth?" Dear Mrs. Gereth smiled sweetly. "How could he, when our situation is such that he communicates with me only through you, and that you are so tortuous you conceal everything?" "Didn't he answer the note in which you let him know that I was in town?" Fleda asked. "He answered it sufficiently by rushing off on the spot to see you." Mrs. Gereth met that allusion with a prompt firmness that made almost insolently light of any ground of complaint, and Fleda's own sense of responsibility was now so vivid that all resentments turned comparatively pale. She had no heart to produce a grievance; she could only, left as she was with the little mystery on her hands, produce, after a moment, a question. "How then do you come to know that your son has ever thought--" "That he would give his ears to get you?" Mrs. Gereth broke in. "I had a visit from Mrs. Brigstock." Fleda opened her eyes. "She went down to Ricks?" "The day after she had found Owen at your feet. She knows everything." Fleda shook her head sadly; she was more startled than she cared to show. This odd journey of Mrs. Brigstock's, which, with a simplicity equal for once to Owen's, she had not divined, now struck her as having produced the hush of the last ten days. "There are things she doesn't know!" she presently exclaimed. "She knows he would do anything to marry you." "He hasn't told her so," Fleda said. "No, but he has told you. That's better still!" laughed Mrs. Gereth. "My dear child," she went on with an air that affected the girl as a sort of blind profanity, "don't try to make yourself out better than you are. _I_ know what you are. I haven't lived with you so much for nothing. You're not quite a saint in heaven yet. Lord, what a creature you'd have thought me in my good time! But you do like it, fortunately, you idiot. You're pale with your passion, you sweet thing. That's exactly what I wanted to see. I can't for the life of me think where the shame comes in." Then with a finer significance, a look that seemed to Fleda strange, she added: "It's all right." "I've seen him but twice," said Fleda. "But twice?" Mrs. Gereth still smiled. "On the occasion, at papa's, that Mrs. Brigstock told you of, and one day, since then, down at Maggie's." "Well, those things are between yourselves, and you seem to me both poor creatures at best." Mrs. Gereth spoke with a rich humor which tipped with light for an instant a real conviction. "I don't know what you've got in your veins: you absurdly exaggerated the difficulties. But enough is as good as a feast, and when once I get you abroad together--!" She checked herself as if from excess of meaning; what might happen when she should get them abroad together was to be gathered only from the way she slowly rubbed her hands. The gesture, however, made the promise so definite that for a moment her companion was almost beguiled. But there was nothing to account, as yet, for the wealth of Mrs. Gereth's certitude: the visit of the lady of Waterbath appeared but half to explain it. "Is it permitted to be surprised," Fleda deferentially asked, "at Mrs. Brigstock's thinking it would help her to see you?" "It's never permitted to be surprised at the aberrations of born fools," said Mrs. Gereth. "If a cow should try to calculate, that's the kind of happy thought she'd have. Mrs. Brigstock came down to plead with me." Fleda mused a moment. "That's what she came to do with _me_," she then honestly returned. "But what did she expect to get of you, with your opposition so marked from the first?" "She didn't know I want _you_, my dear. It's a wonder, with all my violence--the gross publicity I've given my desires. But she's as stupid as an owl--she doesn't feel your charm." Fleda felt herself flush slightly, but she tried to smile. "Did you tell her all about it? Did you make her understand you want me?" "For what do you take me? I wasn't such a donkey." "So as not to aggravate Mona?" Fleda suggested. "So as not to aggravate Mona, naturally. We've had a narrow course to steer, but thank God we're at last in the open!" "What do you call the open, Mrs. Gereth?" Fleda demanded. Then as the other faltered: "Do you know where Mr. Owen is to-day?" Mrs. Gereth stared. "Do you mean he's at Waterbath? Well, that's your own affair. I can bear it if _you_ can." "Wherever he is, I can bear it," Fleda said. "But I haven't the least idea where he is." "Then you ought to be ashamed of yourself!" Mrs. Gereth broke out with a change of note that showed how deep a passion underlay everything she had said. The poor woman, catching her companion's hand, however, the next moment, as if to retract something of this harshness, spoke more patiently. "Don't you understand, Fleda, how immensely, how devotedly, I've trusted you?" Her tone was indeed a supplication. Fleda was infinitely shaken; she was silent a little. "Yes, I understand. Did she go to you to complain of me?" "She came to see what she could do. She had been tremendously upset, the day before, by what had taken place at your father's, and she had posted down to Ricks on the inspiration of the moment. She hadn't meant it on leaving home; it was the sight of you closeted there with Owen that had suddenly determined her. The whole story, she said, was written in your two faces: she spoke as if she had never seen such an exhibition. Owen was on the brink, but there might still be time to save him, and it was with this idea she had bearded me in my den. 'What won't a mother do, you know?'--that was one of the things she said. What wouldn't a mother do indeed? I thought I had sufficiently shown her what! She tried to break me down by an appeal to my good nature, as she called it, and from the moment she opened on _you_, from the moment she denounced Owen's falsity, I was as good-natured as she could wish. I understood that it was a plea for mere mercy, that you and he between you were killing her child. Of course I was delighted that Mona should be killed, but I was studiously kind to Mrs. Brigstock. At the same time I was honest, I didn't pretend to anything I couldn't feel. I asked her why the marriage hadn't taken place months ago, when Owen was perfectly ready; and I showed her how completely that fatuous mistake on Mona's part cleared his responsibility. It was she who had killed _him_--it was she who had destroyed his affection, his illusions. Did she want him now when he was estranged, when he was disgusted, when he had a sore grievance? She reminded me that Mona had a sore grievance too, but she admitted that she hadn't come to me to speak of that. What she had come to me for was not to get the old things back, but simply to get Owen. What she wanted was that I would, in simple pity, see fair play. Owen had been awfully bedeviled--she didn't call it that, she called it 'misled'--but it was simply you who had bedeviled him. He would be all right still if I would see that you were out of the way. She asked me point-blank if it was possible I could want him to marry you." Fleda had listened in unbearable pain and growing terror, as if her interlocutress, stone by stone, were piling some fatal mass upon her breast. She had the sense of being buried alive, smothered in the mere expansion of another will; and now there was but one gap left to the air. A single word, she felt, might close it, and with the question that came to her lips as Mrs. Gereth paused she seemed to herself to ask, in cold dread, for her doom. "What did you say to that?" she inquired. "I was embarrassed, for I saw my danger--the danger of her going home and saying to Mona that I was backing you up. It had been a bliss to learn that Owen had really turned to you, but my joy didn't put me off my guard. I reflected intensely for a few seconds; then I saw my issue." "Your issue?" Fleda murmured. "I remembered how you had tied my hands about saying a word to Owen." Fleda wondered. "And did you remember the little letter that, with your hands tied, you still succeeded in writing to him?" "Perfectly; my little letter was a model of reticence. What I remembered was all that in those few words I forbade myself to say. I had been an angel of delicacy--I had effaced myself like a saint. It was not for me to have done all that and then figure to such a woman as having done the opposite. Besides, it was none of her business." "Is that what you said to her?" Fleda asked. "I said to her that her question revealed a total misconception of the nature of my present relations with my son. I said to her that I had no relations with him at all, and that nothing had passed between us for months. I said to her that my hands were spotlessly clean of any attempt to make him make up to you. I said to her that I had taken from Poynton what I had a right to take, but had done nothing else in the world. I was determined that if I had bit my tongue off to oblige you I would at least have the righteousness that my sacrifice gave me." "And was Mrs. Brigstock satisfied with your answer?" "She was visibly relieved." "It was fortunate for you," said Fleda, "that she's apparently not aware of the manner in which, almost under her nose, you advertised me to him at Poynton." Mrs. Gereth appeared to recall that scene; she smiled with a serenity remarkably effective as showing how cheerfully used she had grown to invidious allusions to it. "How should she be aware of it?" "She would if Owen had described your outbreak to Mona." "Yes, but he didn't describe it. All his instinct was to conceal it from Mona. He wasn't conscious, but he was already in love with you!" Mrs. Gereth declared. Fleda shook her head wearily. "No--I was only in love with him!" Here was a faint illumination with which Mrs. Gereth instantly mingled her fire. "You dear old wretch!" she exclaimed; and she again, with ferocity, embraced her young friend. Fleda submitted like a sick animal: she would submit to everything now. "Then what further passed?" "Only that she left me thinking she had got something." "And what had she got?" "Nothing but her luncheon. But _I_ got everything!" "Everything?" Fleda quavered. Mrs. Gereth, struck apparently by something in her tone, looked at her from a tremendous height. "Don't fail me now!" It sounded so like a menace that, with a full divination at last, the poor girl fell weakly into a chair. "What on earth have you done?" Mrs. Gereth stood there in all the glory of a great stroke. "I've settled you." She filled the room, to Fleda's scared vision, with the glare of her magnificence. "I've sent everything back." "Everything?" Fleda gasped. "To the smallest snuff-box. The last load went yesterday. The same people did it. Poor little Ricks is empty." Then as if, for a crowning splendor, to check all deprecation, "They're yours, you goose!" Mrs. Gereth concluded, holding up her handsome head and rubbing her white hands. Fleda saw that there were tears in her deep eyes. XVIII She was slow to take in the announcement, but when she had done so she felt it to be more than her cup of bitterness would hold. Her bitterness was her anxiety, the taste of which suddenly sickened her. What had she become, on the spot, but a traitress to her friend? The treachery increased with the view of the friend's motive, a motive magnificent as a tribute to her value. Mrs. Gereth had wished to make sure of her and had reasoned that there would be no such way as by a large appeal to her honor. If it be true, as men have declared, that the sense of honor is weak in women, some of the bearings of this stroke might have thrown a light on the question. What was now, at all events, put before Fleda was that she had been made sure of, for the greatness of the surrender imposed an obligation as great. There was an expression she had heard used by young men with whom she danced: the only word to fit Mrs. Gereth's intention was that Mrs. Gereth had designed to "fetch" her. It was a calculated, it was a crushing bribe; it looked her in the eyes and said simply: "That's what I do for you!" What Fleda was to do in return required no pointing out. The sense, at present, of how little she had done made her almost cry aloud with pain; but her first endeavor, in the face of the fact, was to keep such a cry from reaching her companion. How little she had done Mrs. Gereth didn't yet know, and possibly there would be still some way of turning round before the discovery. On her own side too Fleda had almost made one: she had known she was wanted, but she had not after all conceived how magnificently much. She had been treated by her friend's act as a conscious prize, but what made her a conscious prize was only the power the act itself imputed to her. As high, bold diplomacy it dazzled and carried her off her feet. She admired the noble risk of it, a risk Mrs. Gereth had faced for the utterly poor creature that the girl now felt herself. The change it instantly wrought in her was, moreover, extraordinary: it transformed at a touch her emotion on the subject of concessions. A few weeks earlier she had jumped at the duty of pleading for them, practically quarreling with the lady of Ricks for her refusal to restore what she had taken. She had been sore with the wrong to Owen, she had bled with the wounds of Poynton; now however, as she heard of the replenishment of the void that had so haunted her, she came as near sounding an alarm as if from the deck of a ship she had seen a person she loved jump into the sea. Mrs. Gereth had become in a flash the victim; poor little Ricks had been laid bare in a night. If Fleda's feeling about the old things had taken precipitate form the form would have been a frantic command. It was indeed for mere want of breath that she didn't shout: "Oh, stop them--it's no use; bring them back--it's too late!" And what most kept her breathless was her companion's very grandeur. Fleda distinguished as never before the purity of such a passion; it made Mrs. Gereth august and almost sublime. It was absolutely unselfish--she cared nothing for mere possession. She thought solely and incorruptibly of what was best for the things; she had surrendered them to the presumptive care of the one person of her acquaintance who felt about them as she felt herself, and whose long lease of the future would be the nearest approach that could be compassed to committing them to a museum. Now it was indeed that Fleda knew what rested on her; now it was also that she measured as if for the first time Mrs. Gereth's view of the natural influence of a fine acquisition. She had adopted the idea of blowing away the last doubt of what her young friend would gain, of making good still more than she was obliged to make it the promise of weeks before. It was one thing for the girl to have heard that in a certain event restitution would be made; it was another for her to see the condition, with a noble trust, treated in advance as performed, and to be able to feel that she should have only to open a door to find every old piece in every old corner. To have played such a card was therefore, practically, for Mrs. Gereth, to have won the game. Fleda had certainly to recognize that, so far as the theory of the matter went, the game had been won. Oh, she had been made sure of! She couldn't, however, succeed for so very many minutes in deferring her exposure. "Why didn't you wait, dearest? Ah, why didn't you wait?"--if that inconsequent appeal kept rising to her lips to be cut short before it was spoken, this was only because at first the humility of gratitude helped her to gain time, enabled her to present herself very honestly as too overcome to be clear. She kissed her companion's hands, she did homage at her feet, she murmured soft snatches of praise, and yet in the midst of it all was conscious that what she really showed most was the wan despair at her heart. She saw Mrs. Gereth's glimpse of this despair suddenly widen, heard the quick chill of her voice pierce through the false courage of endearments. "Do you mean to tell me at such an hour as this that you've really lost him?" The tone of the question made the idea a possibility for which Fleda had nothing from this moment but terror. "I don't know, Mrs. Gereth; how can I say?" she asked. "I've not seen him for so long; as I told you just now, I don't even know where he is. That's by no fault of his," she hurried on: "he would have been with me every day if I had consented. But I made him understand, the last time, that I'll receive him again only when he's able to show me that his release has been complete and definite. Oh, he can't yet, don't you see, and that's why he hasn't been back. It's far better than his coming only that we should both be miserable. When he does come he'll be in a better position. He'll be tremendously moved by the splendid thing you've done. I know you wish me to feel that you've done it as much for me as for Owen, but your having done it for me is just what will delight him most! When he hears of it," said Fleda, in desperate optimism, "when he hears of it--" There indeed, regretting her advance, she quite broke down. She was wholly powerless to say what Owen would do when he heard of it. "I don't know what he won't make of you and how he won't hug you!" she had to content herself with lamely declaring. She had drawn Mrs. Gereth to a sofa with a vague instinct of pacifying her and still, after all, gaining time; but it was a position in which her great duped benefactress, portentously patient again during this demonstration, looked far from inviting a "hug." Fleda found herself tricking out the situation with artificial flowers, trying to talk even herself into the fancy that Owen, whose name she now made simple and sweet, might come in upon them at any moment. She felt an immense need to be understood and justified; she averted her face in dread from all that she might have to be forgiven. She pressed on her companion's arm as if to keep her quiet till she should really know, and then, after a minute, she poured out the clear essence of what in happier days had been her "secret." "You mustn't think I don't adore him when I've told him so to his face. I love him so that I'd die for him--I love him so that it's horrible. Don't look at me therefore as if I had not been kind, as if I had not been as tender as if he were dying and my tenderness were what would save him. Look at me as if you believe me, as if you feel what I've been through. Darling Mrs. Gereth, I could kiss the ground he walks on. I haven't a rag of pride; I used to have, but it's gone. I used to have a secret, but every one knows it now, and any one who looks at me can say, I think, what's the matter with me. It's not so very fine, my secret, and the less one really says about it the better; but I want you to have it from me because I was stiff before. I want you to see for yourself that I've been brought as low as a girl can very well be. It serves me right," Fleda laughed, "if I was ever proud and horrid to you! I don't know what you wanted me, in those days at Ricks, to do, but I don't think you can have wanted much more than what I've done. The other day at Maggie's I did things that made me, afterwards, think of you! I don't know what girls may do; but if he doesn't know that there isn't an inch of me that isn't his--!" Fleda sighed as if she couldn't express it; she piled it up, as she would have said; holding Mrs. Gereth with dilated eyes, she seemed to sound her for the effect of these words. "It's idiotic," she wearily smiled; "it's so strange that I'm almost angry for it, and the strangest part of all is that it isn't even happiness. It's anguish--it was from the first; from the first there was a bitterness and a kind of dread. But I owe you every word of the truth. You don't do him justice, either: he's a dear, I assure you he's a dear. I'd trust him to the last breath; I don't think you really know him. He's ever so much cleverer than he makes a show of; he's remarkable in his own shy way. You told me at Ricks that you wanted me to let myself go, and I've 'gone' quite far enough to discover as much as that, as well as all sorts of other delightful things about him. You'll tell me I make myself out worse than I am," said the girl, feeling more and more in her companion's attitude a quality that treated her speech as a desperate rigmarole and even perhaps as a piece of cold immodesty. She wanted to make herself out "bad"--it was a part of her justification; but it suddenly occurred to her that such a picture of her extravagance imputed a want of gallantry to the young man. "I don't care for anything you think," she declared, "because Owen, don't you know, sees me as I am. He's so kind that it makes up for everything!" This attempt at gayety was futile; the silence with which, for a minute, her adversary greeted her troubled plea brought home to her afresh that she was on the bare defensive. "Is it a part of his kindness never to come near you?" Mrs. Gereth inquired at last. "Is it a part of his kindness to leave you without an inkling of where he is?" She rose again from where Fleda had kept her down; she seemed to tower there in the majesty of her gathered wrong. "Is it a part of his kindness that, after I've toiled as I've done for six days, and with my own weak hands, which I haven't spared, to denude myself, in your interest, to that point that I've nothing left, as I may say, but what I have on my back--is it a part of his kindness that you're not even able to produce him for me?" There was a high contempt in this which was for Owen quite as much, and in the light of which Fleda felt that her effort at plausibility had been mere groveling. She rose from the sofa with an humiliated sense of rising from ineffectual knees. That discomfort, however, lived but an instant: it was swept away in a rush of loyalty to the absent. She herself could bear his mother's scorn; but to avert it from his sweet innocence she broke out with a quickness that was like the raising of an arm. "Don't blame him--don't blame him: he'd do anything on earth for me! It was I," said Fleda, eagerly, "who sent him back to her; I made him go; I pushed him out of the house; I declined to have anything to say to him except on another footing." Mrs. Gereth stared as at some gross material ravage. "Another footing? What other footing?" "The one I've already made so clear to you: my having it in black and white, as you may say, from her that she freely gives him up." "Then you think he lies when he tells you that he has recovered his liberty?" Fleda hesitated a moment; after which she exclaimed with a certain hard pride: "He's enough in love with me for anything!" "For anything, apparently, except to act like a man and impose his reason and his will on your incredible folly. For anything except to put an end, as any man worthy of the name would have put it, to your systematic, to your idiotic perversity. What are you, after all, my dear, I should like to know, that a gentleman who offers you what Owen offers should have to meet such wonderful exactions, to take such extraordinary precautions about your sweet little scruples?" Her resentment rose to a strange insolence which Fleda took full in the face and which, for the moment at least, had the horrible force to present to her vengefully a showy side of the truth. It gave her a blinding glimpse of lost alternatives. "I don't know what to think of him," Mrs. Gereth went on; "I don't know what to call him: I'm so ashamed of him that I can scarcely speak of him even to _you_. But indeed I'm so ashamed of you both together that I scarcely know in common decency where to look." She paused to give Fleda the full benefit of this remarkable statement; then she exclaimed: "Any one but a jackass would have tucked you under his arm and marched you off to the Registrar!" Fleda wondered; with her free imagination she could wonder even while her cheek stung from a slap. "To the Registrar?" "That would have been the sane, sound, immediate course to adopt. With a grain of gumption you'd both instantly have felt it. _I_ should have found a way to take you, you know, if I'd been what Owen's supposed to be. _I_ should have got the business over first; the rest could come when you liked! Good God, girl, your place was to stand before me as a woman honestly married. One doesn't know what one has hold of in touching you, and you must excuse my saying that you're literally unpleasant to me to meet as you are. Then at least we could have talked, and Owen, if he had the ghost of a sense of humor, could have snapped his fingers at your refinements." This stirring speech affected our young lady as if it had been the shake of a tambourine borne towards her from a gypsy dance: her head seemed to go round and she felt a sudden passion in her feet. The emotion, however, was but meagrely expressed in the flatness with which she heard herself presently say: "I'll go to the Registrar now." "Now?" Magnificent was the sound Mrs. Gereth threw into this monosyllable. "And pray who's to take you?" Fleda gave a colorless smile, and her companion continued: "Do you literally mean that you can't put your hand upon him?" Fleda's wan grimace appeared to irritate her; she made a short, imperious gesture. "Find him for me, you fool--_find_ him for me!" "What do you want of him," Fleda sadly asked, "feeling as you do to both of us?" "Never mind how I feel, and never mind what I say when I'm furious!" Mrs. Gereth still more incisively added. "Of course I cling to you, you wretches, or I shouldn't suffer as I do. What I want of him is to see that he takes you; what I want of him is to go with you myself to the place." She looked round the room as if, in feverish haste, for a mantle to catch up; she bustled to the window as if to spy out a cab: she would allow half an hour for the job. Already in her bonnet, she had snatched from the sofa a garment for the street: she jerked it on as she came back. "Find him, find him," she repeated; "come straight out with me, to try, at least, to get at him!" "How can I get at him? He'll come when he's ready," Fleda replied. Mrs. Gereth turned on her sharply. "Ready for what? Ready to see me ruined without a reason or a reward?" Fleda was silent; the worst of it all was that there was something unspoken between them. Neither of them dared to utter it, but the influence of it was in the girl's tone when she returned at last, with great gentleness: "Don't be harsh to me--I'm very unhappy." The words produced a visible impression on Mrs. Gereth, who held her face averted and sent off through the window a gaze that kept pace with the long caravan of her treasures. Fleda knew she was watching it wind up the avenue of Poynton--Fleda participated indeed fully in the vision; so that after a little the most consoling thing seemed to her to add: "I don't see why in the world you take so for granted that he's, as you say, 'lost.'" Mrs. Gereth continued to stare out of the window, and her stillness denoted some success in controlling herself. "If he's not lost, why are you unhappy?" "I'm unhappy because I torment you, and you don't understand me." "No, Fleda, I don't understand you," said Mrs. Gereth, finally facing her again. "I don't understand you at all, and it's as if you and Owen were of quite another race and another flesh. You make me feel very old-fashioned and simple and bad. But you must take me as I am, since you take so much else _with_ me!" She spoke now with the drop of her resentment, with a dry and weary calm. "It would have been better for me if I had never known you," she pursued, "and certainly better if I hadn't taken such an extraordinary fancy to you. But that too was inevitable: everything, I suppose, is inevitable. It was all my own doing--you didn't run after me: I pounced on you and caught you up. You're a stiff little beggar, in spite of your pretty manners: yes, you're hideously misleading. I hope you feel how handsome it is of me to recognize the independence of your character. It was your clever sympathy that did it--your extraordinary feeling for those accursed vanities. You were sharper about them than any one I had ever known, and that was a thing I simply couldn't resist. Well," the poor lady concluded after a pause, "you see where it has landed us!" "If you'll go for him yourself, I'll wait here," said Fleda. Mrs. Gereth, holding her mantle together, appeared for a while to consider. "To his club, do you mean?" "Isn't it there, when he's in town, that he has a room? He has at present no other London address," Fleda said: "it's there one writes to him." "How do _I_ know, with my wretched relations with him?" Mrs. Gereth asked. "Mine have not been quite so bad as that," Fleda desperately smiled. Then she added: "His silence, _her_ silence, our hearing nothing at all--what are these but the very things on which, at Poynton and at Ricks, you rested your assurance that everything is at an end between them?" Mrs. Gereth looked dark and void. "Yes, but I hadn't heard from you then that you could invent nothing better than, as you call it, to send him back to her." "Ah, but, on the other hand, you've learned from them what you didn't know--you've learned by Mrs. Brigstock's visit that he cares for me." Fleda found herself in the position of availing herself of optimistic arguments that she formerly had repudiated; her refutation of her companion had completely changed its ground. She was in a fever of ingenuity and painfully conscious, on behalf of her success, that her fever was visible. She could herself see the reflection of it glitter in Mrs. Gereth's sombre eyes. "You plunge me in stupefaction," that lady answered, "and at the same time you terrify me. Your account of Owen is inconceivable, and yet I don't know what to hold on by. He cares for you, it does appear, and yet in the same breath you inform me that nothing is more possible than that he's spending these days at Waterbath. Excuse me if I'm so dull as not to see my way in such darkness. If he's at Waterbath he doesn't care for you. If he cares for you he's not at Waterbath." "Then where is he?" poor Fleda helplessly wailed. She caught herself up, however; she did her best to be brave and clear. Before Mrs. Gereth could reply, with due obviousness, that this was a question for her not to ask, but to answer, she found an air of assurance to say: "You simplify far too much. You always did and you always will. The tangle of life is much more intricate than you've ever, I think, felt it to be. You slash into it," cried Fleda finely, "with a great pair of shears, you nip at it as if you were one of the Fates! If Owen's at Waterbath he's there to wind everything up." Mrs. Gereth shook her head with slow austerity. "You don't believe a word you're saying. I've frightened you, as you've frightened me: you're whistling in the dark to keep up our courage. I do simplify, doubtless, if to simplify is to fail to comprehend the insanity of a passion that bewilders a young blockhead with bugaboo barriers, with hideous and monstrous sacrifices. I can only repeat that you're beyond me. Your perversity's a thing to howl over. However," the poor woman continued with a break in her voice, a long hesitation and then the dry triumph of her will, "I'll never mention it to you again! Owen I can just make out; for Owen _is_ a blockhead. Owen's a blockhead," she repeated with a quiet, tragic finality, looking straight into Fleda's eyes. "I don't know why you dress up so the fact that he's disgustingly weak." Fleda hesitated; at last, before her companion's, she lowered her look. "Because I love him. It's because he's weak that he needs me," she added. "That was why his father, whom he exactly resembles, needed _me_. And I didn't fail his father," said Mrs. Gereth. She gave Fleda a moment to appreciate the remark; after which she pursued: "Mona Brigstock isn't weak; she's stronger than you!" "I never thought she was weak," Fleda answered. She looked vaguely round the room with a new purpose: she had lost sight of her umbrella. "I did tell you to let yourself go, but it's clear enough that you really haven't," Mrs. Gereth declared. "If Mona has got him--" Fleda had accomplished her search; her interlocutress paused. "If Mona has got him?" the girl inquired, tightening the umbrella. "Well," said Mrs. Gereth profoundly, "it will be clear enough that Mona _has_." "Has let herself go?" "Has let herself go." Mrs. Gereth spoke as if she saw it in every detail. Fleda felt the tone and finished her preparation; then she went and opened the door. "We'll look for him together," she said to her friend, who stood a moment taking in her face. "They may know something about him at the Colonel's." "We'll go there." Mrs. Gereth had picked up her gloves and her purse. "But the first thing," she went on, "will be to wire to Poynton." "Why not to Waterbath at once?" Fleda asked. Her companion hesitated. "In _your_ name?" "In my name. I noticed a place at the corner." While Fleda held the door open Mrs. Gereth drew on her gloves. "Forgive me," she presently said. "Kiss me," she added. Fleda, on the threshold, kissed her; then they went out. XIX In the place at the corner, on the chance of its saving time, Fleda wrote her telegram--wrote it in silence under Mrs. Gereth's eye and then in silence handed it to her. "I send this to Waterbath, on the possibility of your being there, to ask you to come to me." Mrs. Gereth held it a moment, read it more than once; then keeping it, and with her eyes on her companion, seemed to consider. There was the dawn of a kindness in her look; Fleda perceived in it, as if as the reward of complete submission, a slight relaxation of her rigor. "Wouldn't it perhaps after all be better," she asked, "before doing this, to see if we can make his whereabouts certain?" "Why so? It will be always so much done," said Fleda. "Though I'm poor," she added with a smile, "I don't mind the shilling." "The shilling's _my_ shilling," said Mrs. Gereth. Fleda stayed her hand. "No, no--I'm superstitious." "Superstitious?" "To succeed, it must be all me!" "Well, if that will make it succeed!" Mrs. Gereth took back her shilling, but she still kept the telegram. "As he's most probably not there--" "If he shouldn't be there," Fleda interrupted, "there will be no harm done." "If he 'shouldn't be' there!" Mrs. Gereth ejaculated. "Heaven help us, how you assume it!" "I'm only prepared for the worst. The Brigstocks will simply send any telegram on." "Where will they send it?" "Presumably to Poynton." "They'll read it first," said Mrs. Gereth. "Read it?" "Yes, Mona will. She'll open it under the pretext of having it repeated; and then she'll probably do nothing. She'll keep it as a proof of your immodesty." "What of that?" asked Fleda. "You don't mind her seeing it?" Rather musingly and absently Fleda shook her head. "I don't mind anything." "Well, then, that's all right," said Mrs. Gereth as if she had only wanted to feel that she had been irreproachably considerate. After this she was gentler still, but she had another point to clear up. "Why have you given, for a reply, your sister's address?" "Because if he _does_ come to me he must come to me there. If that telegram goes," said Fleda, "I return to Maggie's to-night." Mrs. Gereth seemed to wonder at this. "You won't receive him here with me?" "No, I won't receive him here with you. Only where I received him last--only there again." She showed her companion that as to that she was firm. But Mrs. Gereth had obviously now had some practice in following queer movements prompted by queer feelings. She resigned herself, though she fingered the paper a moment longer. She appeared to hesitate; then she brought out: "You couldn't then, if I release you, make your message a little stronger?" Fleda gave her a faint smile. "He'll come if he can." Mrs. Gereth met fully what this conveyed; with decision she pushed in the telegram. But she laid her hand quickly upon another form and with still greater decision wrote another message. "From _me_, this," she said to Fleda when she had finished: "to catch him possibly at Poynton. Will you read it?" Fleda turned away. "Thank you." "It's stronger than yours." "I don't care," said Fleda, moving to the door. Mrs. Gereth, having paid for the second missive, rejoined her, and they drove together to Owen's club, where the elder lady alone got out. Fleda, from the hansom, watched through the glass doors her brief conversation with the hall-porter and then met in silence her return with the news that he had not seen Owen for a fortnight and was keeping his letters till called for. These had been the last orders; there were a dozen letters lying there. He had no more information to give, but they would see what they could find at Colonel Gereth's. To any connection with this inquiry, however, Fleda now roused herself to object, and her friend had indeed to recognize that on second thoughts it couldn't be quite to the taste of either of them to advertise in the remoter reaches of the family that they had forfeited the confidence of the master of Poynton. The letters lying at the club proved effectively that he was not in London, and this was the question that immediately concerned them. Nothing could concern them further till the answers to their telegrams should have had time to arrive. Mrs. Gereth had got back into the cab, and, still at the door of the club, they sat staring at their need of patience. Fleda's eyes rested, in the great hard street, on passing figures that struck her as puppets pulled by strings. After a little the driver challenged them through the hole in the top. "Anywhere in particular, ladies?" Fleda decided. "Drive to Euston, please." "You won't wait for what we may hear?" Mrs. Gereth asked. "Whatever we hear, I must go." As the cab went on she added: "But I needn't drag _you_ to the station." Mrs. Gereth was silent a moment; then "Nonsense!" she sharply replied. In spite of this sharpness they were now almost equally and almost tremulously mild; though their mildness took mainly the form of an inevitable sense of nothing left to say. It was the unsaid that occupied them--the thing that for more than an hour they had been going round and round without naming it. Much too early for Fleda's train, they encountered at the station a long half-hour to wait. Fleda made no further allusion to Mrs. Gereth's leaving her; their dumbness, with the elapsing minutes, grew to be in itself a reconstituted bond. They slowly paced the great gray platform, and presently Mrs. Gereth took the girl's arm and leaned on it with a hard demand for support. It seemed to Fleda not difficult for each to know of what the other was thinking--to know indeed that they had in common two alternating visions, one of which, at moments, brought them as by a common impulse to a pause. This was the one that was fixed; the other filled at times the whole space and then was shouldered away. Owen and Mona glared together out of the gloom and disappeared, but the replenishment of Poynton made a shining, steady light. The old splendor was there again, the old things were in their places. Our friends looked at them with an equal yearning; face to face, on the platform, they counted them in each other's eyes. Fleda had come back to them by a road as strange as the road they themselves had followed. The wonder of their great journeys, the prodigy of this second one, was the question that made her occasionally stop. Several times she uttered it, asked how this and that difficulty had been met. Mrs. Gereth replied with pale lucidity--was naturally the person most familiar with the truth that what she undertook was always somehow achieved. To do it was to do it--she had more than one kind of magnificence. She confessed there, audaciously enough, to a sort of arrogance of energy, and Fleda, going on again, her inquiry more than answered and her arm rendering service, flushed, in her diminished identity, with the sense that such a woman was great. "You do mean literally everything, to the last little miniature on the last little screen?" "I mean literally everything. Go over them with the catalogue!" Fleda went over them while they walked again; she had no need of the catalogue. At last she spoke once more: "Even the Maltese cross?" "Even the Maltese cross. Why not that as well as everything else?--especially as I remembered how you like it." Finally, after an interval, the girl exclaimed: "But the mere fatigue of it, the exhaustion of such a feat! I drag you to and fro here while you must be ready to drop." "I'm very, very tired." Mrs. Gereth's slow head-shake was tragic. "I couldn't do it again." "I doubt if they'd bear it again!" "That's another matter: they'd bear it if I could. There won't have been, this time either, a shake or a scratch. But I'm too tired--I very nearly don't care." "You must sit down, then, till I go," said Fleda. "We must find a bench." "No. I'm tired of _them_: I'm not tired of you. This is the way for you to feel most how much I rest on you." Fleda had a compunction, wondering as they continued to stroll whether it was right after all to leave her. She believed, however, that if the flame might for the moment burn low, it was far from dying out; an impression presently confirmed by the way Mrs. Gereth went on: "But one's fatigue is nothing. The idea under which one worked kept one up. For you I _could_--I can still. Nothing will have mattered if _she's_ not there." There was a question that this imposed, but Fleda at first found no voice to utter it: it was the thing that, between them, since her arrival, had been so consciously and vividly unsaid. Finally she was able to breathe: "And if she _is_ there--if she's there already?" Mrs. Gereth's rejoinder too hung back; then when it came--from sad eyes as well as from lips barely moved--it was unexpectedly merciful. "It will be very hard." That was all, now; and it was poignantly simple. The train Fleda was to take had drawn up; the girl kissed her as if in farewell. Mrs. Gereth submitted, then after a little brought out: "If we _have_ lost--" "If we have lost?" Fleda repeated as she paused again. "You'll all the same come abroad with me?" "It will seem very strange to me if you want me. But whatever you ask, whatever you need, that I will always do." "I shall need your company," said Mrs. Gereth. Fleda wondered an instant if this were not practically a demand for penal submission--for a surrender that, in its complete humility, would be a long expiation. But there was none of the latent chill of the vindictive in the way Mrs. Gereth pursued: "We can always, as time goes on, talk of them together." "Of the old things?" Fleda had selected a third-class compartment: she stood a moment looking into it and at a fat woman with a basket who had already taken possession. "Always?" she said, turning again to her companion. "Never!" she exclaimed. She got into the carriage, and two men with bags and boxes immediately followed, blocking up door and window so long that when she was able to look out again Mrs. Gereth had gone. XX There came to her at her sister's no telegram in answer to her own: the rest of that day and the whole of the next elapsed without a word either from Owen or from his mother. She was free, however, to her infinite relief, from any direct dealing with suspense, and conscious, to her surprise, of nothing that could show her, or could show Maggie and her brother-in-law, that she was excited. Her excitement was composed of pulses as swift and fine as the revolutions of a spinning top: she supposed she was going round, but she went round so fast that she couldn't even feel herself move. Her emotion occupied some quarter of her soul that had closed its doors for the day and shut out even her own sense of it; she might perhaps have heard something if she had pressed her ear to a partition. Instead of that she sat with her patience in a cold, still chamber from which she could look out in quite another direction. This was to have achieved an equilibrium to which she couldn't have given a name: indifference, resignation, despair were the terms of a forgotten tongue. The time even seemed not long, for the stages of the journey were the items of Mrs. Gereth's surrender. The detail of that performance, which filled the scene, was what Fleda had now before her eyes. The part of her loss that she could think of was the reconstituted splendor of Poynton. It was the beauty she was most touched by that, in tons, she had lost--the beauty that, charged upon big wagons, had safely crept back to its home. But the loss was a gain to memory and love; it was to her too, at last, that, in condonation of her treachery, the old things had crept back. She greeted them with open arms; she thought of them hour after hour; they made a company with which solitude was warm and a picture that, at this crisis, overlaid poor Maggie's scant mahogany. It was really her obliterated passion that had revived, and with it an immense assent to Mrs. Gereth's early judgment of her. She too, she felt, was of the religion, and like any other of the passionately pious she could worship now even in the desert. Yes, it was all for her; far round as she had gone she had been strong enough: her love had gathered in the spoils. She wanted indeed no catalogue to count them over; the array of them, miles away, was complete; each piece, in its turn, was perfect to her; she could have drawn up a catalogue from memory. Thus again she lived with them, and she thought of them without a question of any personal right. That they might have been, that they might still be hers, that they were perhaps already another's, were ideas that had too little to say to her. They were nobody's at all--too proud, unlike base animals and humans, to be reducible to anything so narrow. It was Poynton that was theirs; they had simply recovered their own. The joy of that for them was the source of the strange peace in which the girl found herself floating. It was broken on the third day by a telegram from Mrs. Gereth. "Shall be with you at 11.30--don't meet me at station." Fleda turned this over, but was sufficiently expert not to disobey the injunction. She had only an hour to take in its meaning, but that hour was longer than all the previous time. If Maggie had studied her convenience the day Owen came, Maggie was also at the present juncture a miracle of refinement. Increasingly and resentfully mystified, in spite of all reassurance, by the impression that Fleda suffered more than she gained from the grandeur of the Gereths, she had it at heart to exemplify the perhaps truer distinction of nature that characterized the house of Vetch. She was not, like poor Fleda, at every one's beck, and the visitor was to see no more of her than what the arrangement of luncheon might tantalizingly show. Maggie described herself to her sister as intending for a just provocation even the understanding she had had with her husband that he also should remain invisible. Fleda accordingly awaited alone the subject of so many manoeuvres--a period that was slightly prolonged even after the drawing-room door, at 11.30, was thrown open. Mrs. Gereth stood there with a face that spoke plain, but no sound fell from her till the withdrawal of the maid, whose attention had immediately attached itself to the rearrangement of a window-blind and who seemed, while she bustled at it, to contribute to the pregnant silence; before the duration of which, however, she retreated with a sudden stare. "He has done it," said Mrs. Gereth, turning her eyes avoidingly but not unperceivingly about her and in spite of herself dropping an opinion upon the few objects in the room. Fleda, on her side, in her silence, observed how characteristically she looked at Maggie's possessions before looking at Maggie's sister. The girl understood and at first had nothing to say; she was still dumb while Mrs. Gereth selected, with hesitation, a seat less distasteful than the one that happened to be nearest. On the sofa near the window the poor woman finally showed what the two past days had done for the age of her face. Her eyes at last met Fleda's. "It's the end." "They're married?" "They're married." Fleda came to the sofa in obedience to the impulse to sit down by her; then paused before her while Mrs. Gereth turned up a dead gray mask. A tired old woman sat there with empty hands in her lap. "I've heard nothing," said Fleda. "No answer came." "That's the only answer. It's the answer to everything." So Fleda saw; for a minute she looked over her companion's head and far away. "He wasn't at Waterbath; Mrs. Brigstock must have read your telegram and kept it. But mine, the one to Poynton, brought something. 'We are here--what do you want?'" Mrs. Gereth stopped as if with a failure of voice; on which Fleda sank upon the sofa and made a movement to take her hand. It met no response; there could be no attenuation. Fleda waited; they sat facing each other like strangers. "I wanted to go down," Mrs. Gereth presently continued. "Well, I went." All the girl's effort tended for the time to a single aim--that of taking the thing with outward detachment, speaking of it as having happened to Owen and to his mother and not in any degree to herself. Something at least of this was in the encouraging way she said: "Yesterday morning?" "Yesterday morning. I saw him." Fleda hesitated. "Did you see _her_?" "Thank God, no!" Fleda laid on her arm a hand of vague comfort, of which Mrs. Gereth took no notice. "You've been capable, just to tell me, of this wretched journey, of this consideration that I don't deserve?" "We're together, we're together," said Mrs. Gereth. She looked helpless as she sat there, her eyes, unseeingly enough, on a tall Dutch clock, old but rather poor, that Maggie had had as a wedding-gift and that eked out the bareness of the room. To Fleda, in the face of the event, it appeared that this was exactly what they were not: the last inch of common ground, the ground of their past intercourse, had fallen from under them. Yet what was still there was the grand style of her companion's treatment of her. Mrs. Gereth couldn't stand upon small questions, couldn't, in conduct, make small differences. "You're magnificent!" her young friend exclaimed. "There's a rare greatness in your generosity." "We're together, we're together," Mrs. Gereth lifelessly repeated. "That's all we _are_ now; it's all we have." The words brought to Fleda a sudden vision of the empty little house at Ricks; such a vision might also have been what her companion found in the face of the stopped Dutch clock. Yet with this it was clear that she would now show no bitterness: she had done with that, had given the last drop to those horrible hours in London. No passion even was left to her, and her forbearance only added to the force with which she represented the final vanity of everything. Fleda was so far from a wish to triumph that she was absolutely ashamed of having anything to say for herself; but there was one thing, all the same, that not to say was impossible. "That he has done it, that he couldn't _not_ do it, shows how right I was." It settled forever her attitude, and she spoke as if for her own mind; then after a little she added very gently, for Mrs. Gereth's: "That's to say, it shows that he was bound to her by an obligation that, however much he may have wanted to, he couldn't in any sort of honor break." Blanched and bleak, Mrs. Gereth looked at her. "What sort of an obligation do you call that? No such obligation exists for an hour between any man and any woman who have hatred on one side. He had ended by hating her, and now he hates her more than ever." "Did he tell you so?" Fleda asked. "No. He told me nothing but the great gawk of a fact. I saw him but for three minutes." She was silent again, and Fleda, as before some lurid image of this interview, sat without speaking. "Do you wish to appear as if you don't care?" Mrs. Gereth presently demanded. "I'm trying not to think of myself." "Then if you're thinking of Owen, how can you _bear_ to think?" Sadly and submissively Fleda shook her head; the slow tears had come into her eyes. "I can't. I don't understand--I don't understand!" she broke out. "_I_ do, then." Mrs. Gereth looked hard at the floor. "There was no obligation at the time you saw him last--when you sent him, hating her as he did, back to her." "If he went," Fleda asked, "doesn't that exactly prove that he recognized one?" "He recognized rot! You know what _I_ think of him." Fleda knew; she had no wish to challenge a fresh statement. Mrs. Gereth made one--it was her sole, faint flicker of passion--to the extent of declaring that he was too abjectly weak to deserve the name of a man. For all Fleda cared!--it was his weakness she loved in him. "He took strange ways of pleasing you!" her friend went on. "There was no obligation till suddenly, the other day, the situation changed." Fleda wondered. "The other day?" "It came to Mona's knowledge--I can't tell you how, but it came--that the things I was sending back had begun to arrive at Poynton. I had sent them for you, but it was _her_ I touched." Mrs. Gereth paused; Fleda was too absorbed in her explanation to do anything but take blankly the full, cold breath of this. "They were there, and that determined her." "Determined her to what?" "To act, to take means." "To take means?" Fleda repeated. "I can't tell you what they were, but they were powerful. She knew how," said Mrs. Gereth. Fleda received with the same stoicism the quiet immensity of this allusion to the person who had not known how. But it made her think a little, and the thought found utterance, with unconscious irony, in the simple interrogation: "Mona?" "Why not? She's a brute." "But if he knew that so well, what chance was there in it for her?" "How can I tell you? How can I talk of such horrors? I can only give you, of the situation, what I see. He knew it, yes. But as she couldn't make him forget it, she tried to make him like it. She tried and she succeeded: that's what she did. She's after all so much less of a fool than he. And what _else_ had he originally liked?" Mrs. Gereth shrugged her shoulders. "She did what you wouldn't!" Fleda's face had grown dark with her wonder, but her friend's empty hands offered no balm to the pain in it. "It was that if it was anything. Nothing else meets the misery of it. Then there was quick work. Before he could turn round he was married." Fleda, as if she had been holding her breath, gave the sigh of a listening child. "At that place you spoke of in town?" "At the Registrar's, like a pair of low atheists." The girl hesitated. "What do people say of that? I mean the 'world.'" "Nothing, because nobody knows. They're to be married on the 17th, at Waterbath church. If anything else comes out, everybody is a little prepared. It will pass for some stroke of diplomacy, some move in the game, some outwitting of _me_. It's known there has been a row with me." Fleda was mystified. "People surely knew at Poynton," she objected, "if, as you say, she's there." "She was there, day before yesterday, only for a few hours. She met him in London and went down to see the things." Fleda remembered that she had seen them only once. "Did _you_ see them?" she then ventured to ask. "Everything." "Are they right?" "Quite right. There's nothing like them," said Mrs. Gereth. At this her companion took up one of her hands again and kissed it as she had done in London. "Mona went back that night; she was not there yesterday. Owen stayed on," she added. Fleda stared. "Then she's not to live there?" "Rather! But not till after the public marriage." Mrs. Gereth seemed to muse; then she brought out: "She'll live there alone." "Alone?" "She'll have it to herself." "He won't live with her?" "Never! But she's none the less his wife, and you're not," said Mrs. Gereth, getting up. "Our only chance is the chance she may die." Fleda appeared to consider: she appreciated her visitor's magnanimous use of the plural. "Mona won't die," she replied. "Well, _I_ shall, thank God! Till then"--and with this, for the first time, Mrs. Gereth put out her hand--"don't desert me." Fleda took her hand, and her clasp of it was a reiteration of a promise already given. She said nothing, but her silence was an acceptance as responsible as the vow of a nun. The next moment something occurred to her. "I mustn't put myself in your son's way." Mrs. Gereth gave a dry, flat laugh. "You're prodigious! But how shall you possibly be more out of it? Owen and I--" She didn't finish her sentence. "That's your great feeling about _him_," Fleda said; "but how, after what has happened, can it be his about you?" Mrs. Gereth hesitated. "How do you know what has happened? You don't know what I said to him." "Yesterday?" "Yesterday." They looked at each other with a long, deep gaze. Then, as Mrs. Gereth seemed again about to speak, the girl, closing her eyes, made a gesture of strong prohibition. "Don't tell me!" "Merciful powers, how you worship him!" Mrs. Gereth wonderingly moaned. It was, for Fleda, the shake that made the cup overflow. She had a pause, that of the child who takes time to know that he responds to an accident with pain; then, dropping again on the sofa, she broke into tears. They were beyond control, they came in long sobs, which for a moment Mrs. Gereth, almost with an air of indifference, stood hearing and watching. At last Mrs. Gereth too sank down again. Mrs. Gereth soundlessly, wearily wept. XXI "It looks just like Waterbath; but, after all, we bore _that_ together:" these words formed part of a letter in which, before the 17th, Mrs. Gereth, writing from disfigured Ricks, named to Fleda the day on which she would be expected to arrive there on a second visit. "I sha'n't, for a long time to come," the missive continued, "be able to receive any one who may _like_ it, who would try to smooth it down, and me with it; but there are always things you and I can comfortably hate together, for you're the only person who comfortably understands. You don't understand quite everything, but of all my acquaintance you're far away the least stupid. For action you're no good at all; but action is over, for me, forever, and you will have the great merit of knowing, when I'm brutally silent, what I shall be thinking about. Without setting myself up for your equal, I dare say I shall also know what are your own thoughts. Moreover, with nothing else but my four walls, you'll at any rate be a bit of furniture. For that, you know, a little, I've always taken you--quite one of my best finds. So come, if possible, on the 15th." The position of a bit of furniture was one that Fleda could conscientiously accept, and she by no means insisted on so high a place in the list. This communication made her easier, if only by its acknowledgment that her friend had some thing left: it still implied recognition of the principle of property. Something to hate, and to hate "comfortably," was at least not the utter destitution to which, after their last interview, she had helplessly seemed to see Mrs. Gereth go forth. She remembered indeed that, in the state in which they first saw it, she herself had "liked" the blessed refuge of Ricks; and she now wondered if the tact for which she was commended had then operated to make her keep her kindness out of sight. She was at present ashamed of such obliquity, and made up her mind that if this happy impression, quenched in the spoils of Poynton, should revive on the spot, she would utter it to her companion without reserve. Yes, she was capable of as much "action" as that: all the more that the spirit of her hostess seemed, for the time at least, wholly to have failed. Mrs. Gereth's three minutes with Owen had been a blow to all talk of travel, and after her woeful hour at Maggie's she had, like some great moaning, wounded bird, made her way, with wings of anguish, back to the nest she knew she should find empty. Fleda, on that dire day, could neither keep her nor give her up; she had pressingly offered to return with her, but Mrs. Gereth, in spite of the theory that their common grief was a bond, had even declined all escort to the station, conscious apparently of something abject in her collapse and almost fiercely eager, as with a personal shame, to be unwatched. All she had said to Fleda was that she would go back to Ricks that night, and the girl had lived for days after with a dreadful image of her position and her misery there. She had had a vision of her now lying prone on some unmade bed, now pacing a bare floor like a lioness deprived of her cubs. There had been moments when her mind's ear was strained to listen for some sound of grief wild enough to be wafted from afar. But the first sound, at the end of a week, had been a note announcing, without reflections, that the plan of going abroad had been abandoned. "It has come to me indirectly, but with much appearance of truth, that _they_ are going--for an indefinite time. That quite settles it; I shall stay where I am, and as soon as I've turned round again I shall look for you." The second letter had come a week later, and on the 15th Fleda was on her way to Ricks. Her arrival took the form of a surprise very nearly as violent as that of the other time. The elements were different, but the effect, like the other, arrested her on the threshold: she stood there stupefied and delighted at the magic of a passion of which such a picture represented the low-water mark. Wound up but sincere, and passing quickly from room to room, Fleda broke out before she even sat down. "If you turn me out of the house for it, my dear, there isn't a woman in England for whom it wouldn't be a privilege to live here." Mrs. Gereth was as honestly bewildered as she had of old been falsely calm. She looked about at the few sticks that, as she afterwards phrased it, she had gathered in, and then hard at her guest, as if to protect herself against a joke sufficiently cruel. The girl's heart gave a leap, for this stare was the sign of an opportunity. Mrs. Gereth was all unwitting; she didn't in the least know what she had done, and as Fleda could tell her Fleda suddenly became the one who knew most. That counted for the moment as a magnificent position; it almost made all the difference. Yet what contradicted it was the vivid presence of the artist's idea. "Where on earth did you put your hand on such beautiful things?" "Beautiful things?" Mrs. Gereth turned again to the little worn, bleached stuffs and the sweet spindle-legs. "They're the wretched things that were here--that stupid, starved old woman's." "The maiden aunt's, the nicest, the dearest old woman that ever lived? I thought you had got rid of the maiden aunt." "She was stored in an empty barn--stuck away for a sale; a matter that, fortunately, I've had neither time nor freedom of mind to arrange. I've simply, in my extremity, fished her out again." "You've simply, in your extremity, made a delight of her." Fleda took the highest line and the upper hand, and as Mrs. Gereth, challenging her cheerfulness, turned again a lustreless eye over the contents of the place, she broke into a rapture that was unforced, but that she was conscious of an advantage in being able to feel. She moved, as she had done on the previous occasion, from one piece to another, with looks of recognition and hands that lightly lingered, but she was as feverishly jubilant now as she had formerly been anxious and mute. "Ah, the little melancholy, tender, tell-tale things: how can they _not_ speak to you and find a way to your heart? It's not the great chorus of Poynton; but you're not, I'm sure, either so proud or so broken as to be reached by nothing but that. This is a voice so gentle, so human, so feminine--a faint, far-away voice with the little quaver of a heart-break. You've listened to it unawares; for the arrangement and effect of everything--when I compare them with what we found the first day we came down--shows, even if mechanically and disdainfully exercised, your admirable, infallible hand. It's your extraordinary genius; you make things 'compose' in spite of yourself. You've only to be a day or two in a place with four sticks for something to come of it!" "Then if anything has come of it here, it has come precisely of just four. That's literally, by the inventory, all there are!" said Mrs. Gereth. "If there were more there would be too many to convey the impression in which half the beauty resides--the impression, somehow, of something dreamed and missed, something reduced, relinquished, resigned: the poetry, as it were, of something sensibly _gone_." Fleda ingeniously and triumphantly worked it out. "Ah, there's something here that will never be in the inventory!" "Does it happen to be in your power to give it a name?" Mrs. Gereth's face showed the dim dawn of an amusement at finding herself seated at the feet of her pupil. "I can give it a dozen. It's a kind of fourth dimension. It's a presence, a perfume, a touch. It's a soul, a story, a life. There's ever so much more here than you and I. We're in fact just three!" "Oh, if you count the ghosts!" "Of course I count the ghosts. It seems to me ghosts count double--for what they were and for what they are. Somehow there were no ghosts at Poynton," Fleda went on. "That was the only fault." Mrs. Gereth, considering, appeared to fall in with the girl's fine humor. "Poynton was too splendidly happy." "Poynton was too splendidly happy," Fleda promptly echoed. "But it's cured of that now," her companion added. "Yes, henceforth there'll be a ghost or two." Mrs. Gereth thought again: she found her young friend suggestive. "Only _she_ won't see them." "No, 'she' won't see them." Then Fleda said, "What I mean is, for this dear one of ours, that if she had (as I _know_ she did; it's in the very taste of the air!) a great accepted pain--" She had paused an instant, and Mrs. Gereth took her up. "Well, if she had?" Fleda still hesitated. "Why, it was worse than yours." Mrs. Gereth reflected. "Very likely." Then she too hesitated. "The question is if it was worse than yours." "Mine?" Fleda looked vague. "Precisely. Yours." At this our young lady smiled. "Yes, because it was a disappointment. She had been so sure." "I see. And you were never sure." "Never. Besides, I'm happy," said Fleda. Mrs. Gereth met her eyes awhile. "Goose!" she quietly remarked as she turned away. There was a curtness in it; nevertheless it represented a considerable part of the basis of their new life. On the 18th The Morning Post had at last its clear message, a brief account of the marriage, from the residence of the bride's mother, of Mr. Owen Gereth of Poynton Park to Miss Mona Brigstock of Waterbath. There were two ecclesiastics and six bridesmaids and, as Mrs. Gereth subsequently said, a hundred frumps, as well as a special train from town: the scale of the affair sufficiently showed that the preparations had been complete for weeks. The happy pair were described as having taken their departure for Mr. Gereth's own seat, famous for its unique collection of artistic curiosities. The newspapers and letters, the fruits of the first London post, had been brought to the mistress of Ricks in the garden; and she lingered there alone a long time after receiving them. Fleda kept at a distance; she knew what must have happened, for from one of the windows she saw her rigid in a chair, her eyes strange and fixed, the newspaper open on the ground and the letters untouched in her lap. Before the morning's end she had disappeared, and the rest of that day she remained in her room: it recalled to Fleda, who had picked up the newspaper, the day, months before, on which Owen had come down to Poynton to make his engagement known. The hush of the house was at least the same, and the girl's own waiting, her soft wandering, through the hours: there was a difference indeed sufficiently great, of which her companion's absence might in some degree have represented a considerate recognition. That was at any rate the meaning Fleda, devoutly glad to be alone, attached to her opportunity. Mrs. Gereth's sole allusion, the next day, to the subject of their thoughts, has already been mentioned: it was a dazzled glance at the fact that Mona's quiet pace had really never slackened. Fleda fully assented. "I said of our disembodied friend here that she had suffered in proportion as she had been sure. But that's not always a source of suffering. It's Mona who must have been sure!" "She was sure of _you_!" Mrs. Gereth returned. But this didn't diminish the satisfaction taken by Fleda in showing how serenely and lucidly she could talk. XXII Her relation with her wonderful friend had, however, in becoming a new one, begun to shape itself almost wholly on breaches and omissions. Something had dropped out altogether, and the question between them, which time would answer, was whether the change had made them strangers or yokefellows. It was as if at last, for better or worse, they were, in a clearer, cruder air, really to know each other. Fleda wondered how Mrs. Gereth had escaped hating her: there were hours when it seemed that such a feat might leave after all a scant margin for future accidents. The thing indeed that now came out in its simplicity was that even in her shrunken state the lady of Ricks was larger than her wrongs. As for the girl herself, she had made up her mind that her feelings had no connection with the case. It was her pretension that they had never yet emerged from the seclusion into which, after her friend's visit to her at her sister's, we saw them precipitately retire: if she should suddenly meet them in straggling procession on the road it would be time enough to deal with them. They were all bundled there together, likes with dislikes and memories with fears; and she had for not thinking of them the excellent reason that she was too occupied with the actual. The actual was not that Owen Gereth had seen his necessity where she had pointed it out; it was that his mother's bare spaces demanded all the tapestry that the recipient of her bounty could furnish. There were moments during the month that followed when Mrs. Gereth struck her as still older and feebler, and as likely to become quite easily amused. At the end of it, one day, the London paper had another piece of news: "Mr. and Mrs. Owen Gereth, who arrived in town last week, proceed this morning to Paris." They exchanged no word about it till the evening, and none indeed would then have been uttered had not Mrs. Gereth irrelevantly broken out: "I dare say you wonder why I declared the other day with such assurance that he wouldn't live with her. He apparently _is_ living with her." "Surely it's the only proper thing for him to do." "They're beyond me--I give it up," said Mrs. Gereth. "I don't give it up--I never did," Fleda returned. "Then what do you make of his aversion to her?" "Oh, she has dispelled it." Mrs. Gereth said nothing for a minute. "You're prodigious in your choice of terms!" she then simply ejaculated. But Fleda went luminously on; she once more enjoyed her great command of her subject: "I think that when you came to see me at Maggie's you saw too many things, you had too many ideas." "You had none," said Mrs. Gereth: "you were completely bewildered." "Yes, I didn't quite understand--but I think I understand now. The case is simple and logical enough. She's a person who's upset by failure and who blooms and expands with success. There was something she had set her heart upon, set her teeth about--the house exactly as she had seen it." "She never saw it at all, she never looked at it!" cried Mrs. Gereth. "She doesn't look with her eyes; she looks with her ears. In her own way she had taken it in; she knew, she felt when it had been touched. That probably made her take an attitude that was extremely disagreeable. But the attitude lasted only while the reason for it lasted." "Go on--I can bear it now," said Mrs. Gereth. Her companion had just perceptibly paused. "I know you can, or I shouldn't dream of speaking. When the pressure was removed she came up again. From the moment the house was once more what it had to be, her natural charm reasserted itself." "Her natural charm!" Mrs. Gereth could barely articulate. "It's very great; everybody thinks so; there must be something in it. It operated as it had operated before. There's no need of imagining anything very monstrous. Her restored good humor, her splendid beauty, and Mr. Owen's impressibility and generosity sufficiently cover the ground. His great bright sun came out!" "And his great bright passion for another person went in. Your explanation would doubtless be perfection if he didn't love you." Fleda was silent a little. "What do you know about his 'loving' me?" "I know what Mrs. Brigstock herself told me." "You never in your life took her word for any other matter." "Then won't yours do?" Mrs. Gereth demanded. "Haven't I had it from your own mouth that he cares for you?" Fleda turned pale, but she faced her companion and smiled. "You confound, Mrs. Gereth, you mix things up. You've only had it from my own mouth that I care for _him_!" It was doubtless in contradictious allusion to this (which at the time had made her simply drop her head as in a strange, vain reverie) that Mrs. Gereth, a day or two later, said to Fleda: "Don't think I shall be a bit affected if I'm here to see it when he comes again to make up to you." "He won't do that," the girl replied. Then she added, smiling: "But if he should be guilty of such bad taste, it wouldn't be nice of you not to be disgusted." "I'm not talking of disgust; I'm talking of its opposite," said Mrs. Gereth. "Of its opposite?" "Why, of any reviving pleasure that one might feel in such an exhibition. I shall feel none at all. You may personally take it as you like; but what conceivable good will it do?" Fleda wondered. "To me, do you mean?" "Deuce take you, no! To what we don't, you know, by your wish, ever talk about." "The old things?" Fleda considered again. "It will do no good of any sort to anything or any one. That's another question I would rather we shouldn't discuss, please," she gently added. Mrs. Gereth shrugged her shoulders. "It certainly isn't worth it!" Something in her manner prompted her companion, with a certain inconsequence, to speak again. "That was partly why I came back to you, you know--that there should be the less possibility of anything painful." "Painful?" Mrs. Gereth stared. "What pain can I ever feel again?" "I meant painful to myself," Fleda, with a slight impatience, explained. "Oh, I see." Her friend was silent a minute. "You use sometimes such odd expressions. Well, I shall last a little, but I sha'n't last forever." "You'll last quite as long--" Here Fleda suddenly hesitated. Mrs. Gereth took her up with a cold smile that seemed the warning of experience against hyperbole. "As long as what, please?" The girl thought an instant; then met the difficulty by adopting, as an amendment, the same tone. "As any danger of the ridiculous." That did for the time, and she had moreover, as the months went on, the protection of suspended allusions. This protection was marked when, in the following November, she received a letter directed in a hand at which a quick glance sufficed to make her hesitate to open it. She said nothing, then or afterwards; but she opened it, for reasons that had come to her, on the morrow. It consisted of a page and a half from Owen Gereth, dated from Florence, but with no other preliminary. She knew that during the summer he had returned to England with his wife, and that after a couple of months they had again gone abroad. She also knew, without communication, that Mrs. Gereth, round whom Ricks had grown submissively and indescribably sweet, had her own interpretation of her daughter-in-law's share in this second migration. It was a piece of calculated insolence--a stroke odiously directed at showing whom it might concern that now she had Poynton fast she was perfectly indifferent to living there. The Morning Post, at Ricks, had again been a resource: it was stated in that journal that Mr. and Mrs. Owen Gereth proposed to spend the winter in India. There was a person to whom it was clear that she led her wretched husband by the nose. Such was the light in which contemporary history was offered to Fleda until, in her own room, late at night, she broke the seal of her letter. "I want you, inexpressibly, to have, as a remembrance, something of mine--something of real value. Something from Poynton is what I mean and what I should prefer. You know everything there, and far better than I what's best and what isn't. There are a lot of differences, but aren't some of the smaller things the most remarkable? I mean for judges, and for what they'd bring. What I want you to take from me, and to choose for yourself, is the thing in the whole house that's most beautiful and precious. I mean the 'gem of the collection,' don't you know? If it happens to be of such a sort that you can take immediate possession of it--carry it right away with you--so much the better. You're to have it on the spot, whatever it is. I humbly beg of you to go down there and see. The people have complete instructions: they'll act for you in every possible way and put the whole place at your service. There's a thing mamma used to call the Maltese cross and that I think I've heard her say is very wonderful. Is _that_ the gem of the collection? Perhaps you would take it, or anything equally convenient. Only I do want you awfully to let it be the very pick of the place. Let me feel that I can trust you for this. You won't refuse if you will think a little what it must be that makes me ask." Fleda read that last sentence over more times even than the rest; she was baffled--she couldn't think at all of what it might be. This was indeed because it might be one of so many things. She made for the present no answer; she merely, little by little, fashioned for herself the form that her answer should eventually wear. There was only one form that was possible--the form of doing, at her time, what he wished. She would go down to Poynton as a pilgrim might go to a shrine, and as to this she must look out for her chance. She lived with her letter, before any chance came, a month, and even after a month it had mysteries for her that she couldn't meet. What did it mean, what did it represent, to what did it correspond in his imagination or his soul? What was behind it, what was beyond it, what was, in the deepest depth, within it? She said to herself that with these questions she was under no obligation to deal. There was an explanation of them that, for practical purposes, would do as well as another: he had found in his marriage a happiness so much greater than, in the distress of his dilemma, he had been able to take heart to believe, that he now felt he owed her a token of gratitude for having kept him in the straight path. That explanation, I say, she could throw off; but no explanation in the least mattered: what determined her was the simple strength of her impulse to respond. The passion for which what had happened had made no difference, the passion that had taken this into account before as well as after, found here an issue that there was nothing whatever to choke. It found even a relief to which her imagination immensely contributed. Would she act upon his offer? She would act with secret rapture. To have as her own something splendid that he had given her, of which the gift had been his signed desire, would be a greater joy than the greatest she had supposed to be left to her, and she felt that till the sense of this came home she had even herself not known what burned in her successful stillness. It was an hour to dream of and watch for; to be patient was to draw out the sweetness. She was capable of feeling it as an hour of triumph, the triumph of everything in her recent life that had not held up its head. She moved there in thought--in the great rooms she knew; she should be able to say to herself that, for once at least, her possession was as complete as that of either of the others whom it had filled only with bitterness. And a thousand times yes--her choice should know no scruple: the thing she should go down to take would be up to the height of her privilege. The whole place was in her eyes, and she spent for weeks her private hours in a luxury of comparison and debate. It should be one of the smallest things because it should be one she could have close to her; and it should be one of the finest because it was in the finest he saw his symbol. She said to herself that of what it would symbolize she was content to know nothing more than just what her having it would tell her. At bottom she inclined to the Maltese cross--with the added reason that he had named it. But she would look again and judge afresh; she would on the spot so handle and ponder that there shouldn't be the shade of a mistake. Before Christmas she had a natural opportunity to go to London; there was her periodical call upon her father to pay as well as a promise to Maggie to redeem. She spent her first night in West Kensington, with the idea of carrying out on the morrow the purpose that had most of a motive. Her father's affection was not inquisitive, but when she mentioned to him that she had business in the country that would oblige her to catch an early train, he deprecated her excursion in view of the menace of the weather. It was spoiling for a storm; all the signs of a winter gale were in the air. She replied that she would see what the morning might bring; and it brought, in fact, what seemed in London an amendment. She was to go to Maggie the next day, and now that she had started her eagerness had become suddenly a pain. She pictured her return that evening with her trophy under her cloak; so that after looking, from the doorstep, up and down the dark street, she decided, with a new nervousness, and sallied forth to the nearest place of access to the "Underground." The December dawn was dolorous, but there was neither rain nor snow; it was not even cold, and the atmosphere of West Kensington, purified by the wind, was like a dirty old coat that had been bettered by a dirty brush. At the end of almost an hour, in the larger station, she had taken her place in a third-class compartment; the prospect before her was the run of eighty minutes to Poynton. The train was a fast one, and she was familiar with the moderate measure of the walk to the park from the spot at which it would drop her. Once in the country, indeed, she saw that her father was right: the breath of December was abroad with a force from which the London labyrinth had protected her. The green fields were black, the sky was all alive with the wind; she had, in her anxious sense of the elements, her wonder at what might happen, a reminder of the surmises, in the old days of going to the Continent, that used to worry her on the way, at night, to the horrid cheap crossings by long sea. Something, in a dire degree, at this last hour, had begun to press on her heart: it was the sudden imagination of a disaster, or at least of a check, before her errand was achieved. When she said to herself that something might happen she wanted to go faster than the train. But nothing could happen save a dismayed discovery that, by some altogether unlikely chance, the master and mistress of the house had already come back. In that case she must have had a warning, and the fear was but the excess of her hope. It was every one's being exactly where every one was that lent the quality to her visit. Beyond lands and seas and alienated forever, they in their different ways gave her the impression to take as she had never taken it. At last it was already there, though the darkness of the day had deepened; they had whizzed past Chater--Chater, which was the station before the right one. Off in that quarter was an air of wild rain, but there shimmered straight across it a brightness that was the color of the great interior she had been haunting. That vision settled before her--in the house the house was all; and as the train drew up she rose, in her mean compartment, quite proudly erect with the thought that all for Fleda Vetch then the house was standing there. But with the opening of the door she encountered a shock, though for an instant she couldn't have named it; the next moment she saw it was given her by the face of the man advancing to let her out, an old lame porter of the station, who had been there in Mrs. Gereth's time and who now recognized her. He looked up at her so hard that she took an alarm and before alighting broke out to him: "They've come back?" She had a confused, absurd sense that even he would know that in this case she mustn't be there. He hesitated, and in the few seconds her alarm had completely changed its ground: it seemed to leap, with her quick jump from the carriage, to the ground that was that of his stare at her. "Smoke?" She was on the platform with her frightened sniff: it had taken her a minute to become aware of an extraordinary smell. The air was full of it, and there were already heads at the window of the train, looking out at something she couldn't see. Some one, the only other passenger, had got out of another carriage, and the old porter hobbled off to close his door. The smoke was in her eyes, but she saw the station-master, from the end of the platform, recognize her too and come straight to her. He brought her a finer shade of surprise than the porter, and while he was coming she heard a voice at a window of the train say that something was "a good bit off--a mile from the town." That was just what Poynton was. Then her heart stood still at the white wonder in the station-master's face. "You've come down to it, miss, already?" At this she knew. "Poynton's on fire?" "Gone, miss--with this awful gale. You weren't wired? Look out!" he cried in the next breath, seizing her; the train was going on, and she had given a lurch that almost made it catch her as it passed. When it had drawn away she became more conscious of the pervading smoke, which the wind seemed to hurl in her face. "_Gone?_" She was in the man's hands; she clung to him. "Burning still, miss. Ain't it quite too dreadful? Took early this morning--the whole place is up there." In her bewildered horror she tried to think. "Have they come back?" "Back? They'll be there all day!" "Not Mr. Gereth, I mean--nor his wife?" "Nor his mother, miss--not a soul of _them_ back. A pack o' servants in charge--not the old lady's lot, eh? A nice job for care-takers! Some rotten chimley or one of them portable lamps set down in the wrong place. What has done it is this cruel, cruel night." Then as a great wave of smoke half choked them, he drew her with force to the little waiting room. "Awkward for you, miss--I see!" She felt sick; she sank upon a seat, staring up at him. "Do you mean that great house is _lost_?" "It was near it, I was told, an hour ago--the fury of the flames had got such a start. I was there myself at six, the very first I heard of it. They were fighting it then, but you couldn't quite say they had got it down." Fleda jerked herself up. "Were they saving the things?" "That's just where it was, miss--to get _at_ the blessed things. And the want of right help--it maddened me to stand and see 'em muff it. This ain't a place, like, for anything organized. They don't come up to a _reel_ emergency." She passed out of the door that opened toward the village and met a great acrid gust. She heard a far-off windy roar which, in her dismay, she took for that of flames a mile away, and which, the first instant, acted upon her as a wild solicitation. "I must go there." She had scarcely spoken before the same omen had changed into an appalling check. Her vivid friend, moreover, had got before her; he clearly suffered from the nature of the control he had to exercise. "Don't do that, miss--you won't care for it at all." Then as she waveringly stood her ground, "It's not a place for a young lady, nor, if you'll believe me, a sight for them as are in any way affected." Fleda by this time knew in what way she was affected: she became limp and weak again; she felt herself give everything up. Mixed with the horror, with the kindness of the station-master, with the smell of cinders and the riot of sound, was the raw bitterness of a hope that she might never again in life have to give up so much at such short notice. She heard herself repeat mechanically, yet as if asking it for the first time: "Poynton's _gone_?" The man hesitated. "What can you call it, miss, if it ain't really saved?" A minute later she had returned with him to the waiting-room, where, in the thick swim of things, she saw something like the disk of a clock. "Is there an up-train?" she asked. "In seven minutes." She came out on the platform: everywhere she met the smoke. She covered her face with her hands. "I'll go back." Henry James's Books. A PASSIONATE PILGRIM, AND OTHER TALES. TRANSATLANTIC SKETCHES. RODERICK HUDSON. A Novel. THE AMERICAN. A Novel. THE EUROPEANS. A Novel. CONFIDENCE. A Novel. THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY. THE AUTHOR OF BELTRAFFIO. Including also Pandora; Georgina's Reasons; The Path of Duty; Four Meetings. THE SIEGE OF LONDON. Including also The Pension Beaurepas; The Point of View. TALES OF THREE CITIES. Including The Impressions of a Cousin; Lady Barberina; A New England Winter. A LITTLE TOUR IN FRANCE. PORTRAITS OF PLACES. DAISY MILLER. A Comedy. THE TRAGIC MUSE. 2 vols. WATCH AND WARD. A Novel. THE SPOILS OF POYNTON. A Novel. 
41010	----	Transcriber's Note: Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. Italic text is denoted by _underscores_. A Colony of Girls By KATE LIVINGSTON WILLARD New York Dodd, Mead and Company Copyright, 1892, by DODD, MEAD & COMPANY. All rights reserved. CONTENTS. PAGE I. THE LAWRENCES AND OTHERS, 1 II. NAN'S SHIP ARRIVES, 11 III. A LEAF FROM HELEN'S PAST, 24 IV. A SAIL ON THE "CYCLONE," 38 V. SUNSET-HOUR ON THE CLIFFS, 51 VI. A DINNER AT THE MANOR, 59 VII. A WALK IN THE SHRUBBERY, 69 VIII. NAN REBELS, 88 IX. A FLYING MACHINE AND WHAT CAME OF IT, 97 X. MISS STUART'S ARRIVAL, 118 XI. DULL DAYS, 131 XII. EDDYING CURRENTS, 139 XIII. AN INVITATION, 156 XIV. A DANCE AT CRESCENT BEACH, 171 XV. HELEN IS PUZZLED, 184 XVI. "IT WAS ONLY MY IMAGINATION," 193 XVII. THE "VORTEX" DEPARTS, 206 XVIII. A RIFT IN THE CLOUDS, 224 XIX. A CABLEGRAM, 244 XX. "PEACE ON EARTH--GOOD WILL TO MEN," 259 A COLONY OF GIRLS. CHAPTER I. THE LAWRENCES AND OTHERS. "I cannot understand why the children do not return from the beach. They have been gone so long." "None too long," sighed Nathalie Lawrence, swinging lazily to and fro in a hammock which was hung across one end of the veranda. "What a heaven it is without them. I declare, Helen," she continued, addressing her sister in aggrieved tone, "we do get a lot of those children, somehow or other. For my part, I cannot see why you let them stay about with us all the time, when they are a thousand times better off with Mary," and she gave a vindictive tug at a rope fastened to the railing, which sent the hammock back and forth with the utmost rapidity. "Take care, Nat; you will be out next, and there will be a hubbub worse than the children would think of making in their wildest moments." The young girl who thus spoke laughed a low, musical laugh, and looked up from her book with a pair of wide-open blue eyes. "Nathalie, as usual, thinks only of herself," said Helen with a frown, as she walked away. "I never can say one word about those children without raising Helen's ire. She spoils them, and she might as well admit it." "In my short and uneventful career," responded Jean smiling, "I have not found that people are over-fond of admitting anything, least of all their weaknesses. I don't see how you can expect Helen to be superior to all the rest of the world--yourself and myself included. Now, imagine," she continued tantalizingly, "if anyone insisted upon your admitting your weakness for Mr. Church----" "Oh, keep quiet, Jean; you are too stupid." "Dear, dear," cried Jean, jumping up and closing her book, "of course I am, and that is my weakness; so now we are quits." Nathalie tossed her head as much as her position would permit. "Jean Lawrence," she said solemnly, "you bore me." "What a catastrophe!" Jean flung back her head with a merry laugh. "Good-by, dear; you are the picture of injured innocence." "Jean, come back," cried Nathalie, struggling to obtain an upright position. "I do think you are too bad. Ah, well, some day,"--then breaking into song: "Some day, some day, some day I shall meet you, Love, I know not when nor how; Love, I know not when nor how. Only this, Only this, only this, that once you loved me; Only this, I love you now----" "Rats!" called out a small voice from the lawn below. Nathalie raised herself on her elbow, and peered through the railing. "Larry, I am thunderstruck. What is the meaning of that weird expression?" "Nathalie singing a love song," cried Larry, scampering about on the lawn. "Oh, what fun!" "Larry," called Helen, coming out once more on to the veranda. "Where are Willie and Gladys? Why did you stay so long? I have been worrying about you." "Oh, they're coming along. Now, don't you worry, Helen, 'cause we was all right. You don't need never to send Mary with us," he added eagerly, "'cause we wouldn't get drownded, nor nothing, really." Jean strolled back from the other end of the veranda, and put her hand on Helen's shoulder. "Larry, love," she said, looking down at her little brother, "your grammar is something to be deplored." A fleeting smile lit up Helen's pale face and gentle brown eyes. "Ah, here come the little culprits," she cried, starting forward. "Gladys, my precious baby, I have been worried to death about you. What naughty chicks to have staid so long. Willie, I can never trust you." Willie was a grave little fellow, the eldest of the three children. "Why, Helen, we weren't gone long. Gladys was good, and so was Larry--that is pretty----" he added deprecatingly. "The moment I said 'Come on, children,' we all started; only Gladys, she couldn't walk very fast, so Larry wouldn't wait for us. Oh," sighed Willie, his grave little face in a pucker at the recollection, "I would rather Mary went along with Gladys another time." "Anyhow I was awful good, sister," lisped little Gladys, trying to frown on Willie, "only----" "Only your short little legs would not carry you any quicker. Is that not so, darling? Well, since you were all good, there is nothing to scold you about." "Helen's faith is sublime," laughed Jean, in an aside to Nathalie. Helen took little Gladys in her arms, and sat down in a large rocker, which stood close to the front door. She was a slender, frail-looking girl. Her soft, brown hair was arranged close to her head with the utmost simplicity, and her rather pale face would perhaps have been plain, had it not been redeemed by a pair of beautiful sad brown eyes. She was the eldest of the Lawrences, and it seemed to her only a brief time since the Angel of Death had, twice in one short year, visited their home, leaving them bereft of father and mother. Her father had been a physician of undoubted skill, a man of wide learning and great culture. Had the lash of poverty given an incentive to his somewhat lagging spirit, he might have commanded the attention and the admiration of his fellow-men; but his was a nature of great shyness and reserve, and when his father died, leaving him a comfortable fortune, he had, with an almost unconscious sigh of relief, turned his back on ambition and withdrawn to the old homestead in the sleepy little town of Hetherford, content with a small country practice which left him undisturbed hours among his books and in his laboratory. Mrs. Lawrence's inclinations were thoroughly social; but so unbounded was her faith in her husband's judgment that it never occurred to her to complain of the narrowness and isolation of their life in Hetherford. As her girls grew older, however, she reproached herself with the thought that she was hardly doing them justice in thus secluding them from the advantages of contact with the great world which lay beyond their own pretty village. She appeased her conscience by giving them occasional visits to town and one long, happy summer in Europe, which they had enjoyed to their hearts' content. The winter following this last delightful holiday, Dr. Lawrence had been stricken with a fatal illness and, after weeks of suffering, had passed away. Mrs. Lawrence survived this blow but two months, and at little Gladys' birth had turned to Helen with a weary, heartbroken sigh: "My darling, I am so lonely--your father. Take care of the little ones--this wee lamb. God bless you, my----" Helen had sunk speechless at her mother's bedside, until the sound of a wailing cry brought her once more to herself. "My dear," said gentle Aunt Helen, leaning over her, "won't you take the poor little baby? Perhaps she will help to comfort you." And Helen took her little sister in her arms, and made her way into the nursery, where, in two small cribs, side by side, lay her little brothers, fast asleep. Jean and Nathalie stood by the nursery window, looking out into the night. At Helen's entrance they turned sharply. "O Helen, how is mamma?" Jean stopped short, appalled at the change in her sister's face. "Helen," she cried, a sharp ring of pain in her voice, "mamma is not--" "Yes, Jean--Nathalie--mamma is gone. Oh, what shall we do," Helen moaned. "My poor children," said Aunt Helen tenderly, crossing the room and putting an arm around little Nathalie, and clasping Jean's hand tightly in hers; "your dear mamma is gone. She was so sad and lonely without papa. Oh, darlings! do not grieve, but think of her as happy and at rest. You, Helen, must learn to be a mother to these little sisters and brothers, and teach them all your dear mamma would have them know. And Jean and even little Nathalie, too, can help." "Auntie"--Helen's tears were falling fast--"I will do all I can. Poor baby," she whispered, and she kissed the soft little face, which was nestled in her arms, and then she turned toward the cribs, and looked with loving eyes at the sleeping children. "God bless them, and help me." Since that sad night six years had rolled by. Nathalie was now eighteen, Jean her elder by two years, and Helen's twenty-third birthday was close at hand. Larry and Willie were respectively eight and ten, and little Gladys was fast outgrowing her babyhood. Aunt Helen, Mrs. Dennis, had since Mrs. Lawrence's death made her permanent home with her nieces and nephews. She was a sweet, gentle woman, a widow and childless, and her lonely life had been thus gladdened by the love of this household of happy-go-lucky children. She had always been delicate, and during the past few years had become so great an invalid that she rarely left her room. Thus Helen Lawrence had been obliged to assume unusual cares and responsibilities for so young a girl, and these were not without their effect on her mind and character. For years the manor house of Hetherford had been in the possession of the Lawrences, and no family in the town was better known, or more universally loved. The manor itself was a charming old park, stretching out far enough to make it no small walk to compass its grounds. Grand old trees shaded the well-kept lawns, and pretty graveled paths, lined with box-wood, led hither and thither. The house was old-fashioned in the extreme, large, square, and commodious. A broad veranda ran around three sides of it, and across the front there was an upper balcony, which, in the season, was covered with trailing vines of roses, honeysuckles, and passion flowers. During the warm summer days this was a favorite retreat of the girls. A few rugs were thrown down, comfortable wicker chairs were scattered here and there, and on the low round table in the center there was always a motley collection of books, writing materials, and work-baskets. Through occasional openings in the vines were revealed pretty vistas of lawn and flowering rosebeds, beyond which stretched the blue waters of the sound, sparkling in the sunshine as if strewn with a thousand jewels. It was, indeed, an Arcadian spot. Within doors everything was equally old-fashioned and comfortable. Opening on to the broad hall, which ran through the middle of the house, were four large airy rooms, simply but substantially furnished, and with an unmistakable air of being lived in. Upstairs, in addition to the rooms occupied by the family, each one of which was bright and cheery, and clearly revealed the individuality of its occupant, were several guest chambers, with heavy four-post bedsteads and quaint mahogany dressing-tables, and during the summer season these were rarely untenanted, for the Lawrences' hospitality was as old-fashioned as their home. Quiet Hetherford was almost unknown as a summer resort, but the few people who had once found their way there came again and again, and with them all the Lawrences were on intimate and friendly terms. It was not strange that young men came but rarely to this out-of-the-way little village, but a colony of girls thrived and were happy there; happier, perhaps, for this very lack of the masculine element. The girls often laughed merrily over it, and no one of them seemed to take it very much to heart, save pretty little dark-eyed Emily Varian, who spent her summers with her uncle, Dr. Evelyn Birdsall, the Presbyterian minister. "It is deplorable," she sighed, "and if the girls were not selfishly lazy they could quite easily get some men to come out here. Certainly town is not so far off as to make us quite out of the world. It is nothing but stupid nonsense and vanity on the girls' part. They think it is something fine and independent never to see anything of men. For my part, I should think they would be ashamed of it." There was one girl who always laughed good-humoredly at Emily's grumbling, and she was none other than charming Eleanor Hill. However, she had less cause to complain, for while Emily went from her winter home in one little country town to sleepier Hetherford for the summer months, Miss Hill for more than half of every year led the gayest of lives in New York. When June came with its warm sunshine and long days, she and her mother gladly turned their face toward pretty, dreamy Hetherford; to them the dearest spot in the world. Mollie Andrews said that, for her part, she didn't care. Taking it all in all, she did not see but that they had a pretty good time. The Andrews had been coming to Hetherford for years, and were all deeply attached to the place; Mollie's handsome, scatterbrained brother Dick had set the seal of his approval on their choice of a summer resort, and thenceforth Mollie would have deemed it nothing short of heresy to call the place stupid. To be sure, Dick rarely turned up oftener than once a week, but then her cousin Clifford Archer, nicknamed "the fatal beauty," was wont to put in an appearance for a few days, frequently with his great chum Wendell Churchill, whose yacht was quite a familiar object in Hetherford Harbor. "It is perfectly absurd of Emily," Mollie would end, with a toss of her head. Emily always looked scornful, and Nan Birdsall, happy-go-lucky Nan, who rarely went away from Hetherford, would laugh gleefully. "Poor Em," she exclaimed one evening, after one of her cousin's tirades, "you are man-crazy. Never mind, dear; you wait. I know a thing or two, and by and by when my ship comes in," looking around at the girls, with a mischievous twinkle in her eye, "you will be surprised. Perhaps we will have more men here than we have bargained for." "What do you mean, Nan?" they cried in chorus; but not a bit of satisfaction would Nan give them. The parsonage adjoined the manor, and an opening in the hedge made intercourse between the two families an easy matter. Just across the road was the inn, where all the summer visitors stayed, and a quainter retreat could not be imagined. They formed only a small circle of people, but many were the happy times they had together. CHAPTER II. NAN'S SHIP ARRIVES. "I wonder why we couldn't have a swim this morning, Jean?" Nathalie stood before her mirror, arranging her pretty brown tresses which, in spite of vigorous efforts with brush and comb, would curl, and refuse to be orderly. "Of course, Aunt Helen will say it is too early in the season." "Well, I think that is absurd. It is warm enough. 'Afric's sunny clime' is not a circumstance to it. Look out, Jean, at the sunlight on the lawn. When it has that pinkish tinge, you may be sure it's hot." Jean peeped through the half-open shutters. "Oh! what a sweet day. Yes, it is going to be hot, and, unless Aunt Helen objects seriously, we will surely go in." She crossed the room and, opening the wardrobe door, took out a pretty striped cotton gown. "Warm enough for this, isn't it?" Nathalie nodded. In a few minutes more the girls were both in the dining room. Helen and the children were already at breakfast. "How late you are," cried Helen, looking up from an open letter. "I wish you----" "Never mind, dear," interrupted Nathalie. "It will all be the same a hundred years hence." "Oh, yes, I suppose so," sighed Helen. "Gladys, don't beat on the table with your spoon. The noise is distracting." "And although your tones are dulcet, my love, suppose you give us that little song after breakfast," and Jean slipped into her place at her little sister's side. Gladys turned and threw her arms around her. "I didn't see you come in, Jeanie." "That is because you have not eyes in the back of your head, pet." "Of course I haven't. Nobody has, 'cept fairies and princesses, I s'pose," and Gladys straightened herself up, and, in so doing, overturned her glass of milk into her lap. "Gladys," cried Helen sharply, "look at your nice, clean frock. It is a shame." The little girl's lips trembled, and her bright blue eye overflowed with tears. "You don't s'pose I did it a-purpose--for nothing." "No, no, dear. Of course not. Don't cry. I didn't mean to scold you. There, get down and run up to Mary, like a good little girl, and have your frock changed," for the sight of tears always put an end to Helen's best efforts at severity. But Gladys' feelings had been hurt, and now that she was mistress of the situation, she had no intention of drying her eyes. "I think you were unkind, Helen," she began plaintively. "Don't be a baby, Gladys," interposed Nathalie irritably. "I declare, I think it a perfect nuisance to have our breakfast spoiled in this way. If you can't behave, you had better have yours in the nursery." The child's tears were about to begin afresh when a pleasant voice was heard at the door. "Good-morning. Can I come in?" And without awaiting permission Miss Hill crossed the room. In her pretty flannel gown and garden hat she made a very pleasing picture. "How are you, puss?" And she stooped and kissed little Gladys' tear-stained cheek, smiling meanwhile at the girls, as she divined the situation. "All right," said the little girl, her face brightening perceptibly, for she dearly loved Miss Hill. "Helen, here is a rose," said Eleanor, "and when you smell it you will realize that June is here." Helen smiled her thanks. "Well, Eleanor, what started you so early?" asked Jean, as she buttered her roll. "Early? You girls don't know what early means. Why it is after nine and I had my breakfast a good hour ago." "Horror!" shuddered Nathalie. "The very thought is pain." "They are spoiled," spoke Helen, "and even I am getting into bad habits. I simply gave up struggling, and set the breakfast hour a half hour later, with the desperate hope that it might bring them down on time." "Girls, you ought to be ashamed," said Eleanor, with well-feigned reproach in her tone. "What nonsense! You would do exactly the same yourself if Mrs. Moffins were not such a disciplinarian. You can't make me think you are so superior," laughed Nathalie. Helen rose, and, pushing open the blind door, stepped out on the veranda. It was a beautiful June morning, bright and sunshiny. The air was soft and warm, and the gentle south wind felt like a caress. The fragrance of roses and honeysuckles was almost intoxicating. Every now and then the delicious stillness was broken by the soft plaintive song of a bird. The old manor looked more beautiful than ever to Helen, who loved every nook and cranny of it. She stood for a moment, shading her eyes with her hand from the sun. "What a pretty day," she murmured to herself. "Oh, I wish----" but then a voice called her, and she went back into the house. "Helen," said Jean, coming out from the dining room, "ask Auntie if we can go in bathing. It is so warm, and we are wild to go in." "Very well," nodded Helen, as she went upstairs. Mrs. Dennis was in her chair by the window, with her breakfast tray on a small table at her side. "Good-morning, darling," she said cheerily. "Where did these delicious strawberries come from?" glancing at the pretty cut-glass dish which was filled with them. "They are the first out of the garden, Auntie, and I was determined that no one should have them but your own dear self." "Thank you, my dear, it was just like you to think of Auntie first. I shall indeed enjoy them." "Do please; and oh, Auntie! the girls want to go bathing to-day. Are you willing they should?" "I am afraid the water will be cold." "Well, we have had a good deal of warm weather, and I think it can't be very frigid. I suppose we might as well say 'yes,' Auntie?" "Of course," replied Aunt Helen laughingly. "Past experience has taught us that when Jean and Nathalie have set their hearts on a thing, we might as well surrender at once. You won't go in, dear?" "No, indeed," and Helen shivered at the idea. "I must go and tell the girls, for they will want to know." When the roomy buckboard came to the door, Nathalie jumped into the front seat and gathered up the reins. "Hurry and get in, girls," she called. "The horses are very fresh this morning," and in a moment more they were bowling down the avenue. "Stop at the inn, Nat," said Jean, "and we will get the letters, and ask Mollie to go down to the beach with us." As they pulled up before the inn, Mollie Andrews came running out on to the porch, with a package of letters in her hand. "Don't get out, Jean; I have your mail. Have you got room enough for me?" "Certainly. Jump right in," cried Nathalie. "The tide is just right now, so we must hurry. Oh! isn't this jolly? I love the delicious sense of excitement one always feels at the first swim of the season. Say, Moll, will you go in?" "I don't know. Yes, I think I will." It was quite a pretty scene, this bright June morning, down on the little stretch of sands which Hetherford dignified by the name of "The Beach." Little children were digging in the sand and filling their pails, and some of the small boys were running up and down, now in the water, and now out. The girls were in a group in front of the bathing houses, all chattering at once, and discussing the momentous question as to whether to make the plunge or not. In a brief time Jean and Nathalie were swimming far out, and Mollie came creeping timidly to the water's edge. "Oh! how I dread it," she laughed. "Nonsense, Moll; go ahead. It will do you good." Mollie walked off, and Helen and Eleanor, who had found a sheltered nook, watched the bathers for a while in silence. By and by Helen's gaze strayed from the bathers to the stretch of blue water beyond, and a slightly troubled look crept into her eyes. A sudden, deep sigh recalled Eleanor's thoughts to her companion. "Why, Helen, what world of melancholy does that sigh proclaim?" "Oh, I don't know," evasively. "I am low-spirited this morning, somehow or other." "Can't you tell me the reason, dear?" Helen did not answer, and for a moment Eleanor watched her closely. Something in the delicate face and in the eyes, in which, of late, a shadow always lurked, touched her. "I would love your confidence, Helen," she said at last; "but unless you can give it to me freely, I would not wish to ask it of you." Helen stirred uneasily. "Ah, well, for a moment I thought to speak to you of something troublesome, but be glad, dear, that I have changed my mind. I am going to speak of something pleasant instead. Do you remember my friend Miss Stuart? She has visited me several times, but always in the winter." "Oh, yes! I remember Jean's writing me about her." Helen turned a questioning glance on Eleanor, but the girl's expression was perfectly non-committal. "Yes? Well, she is coming here to visit me later. The time is not set as yet, but I hope it will be early next month." "Indeed. How nice. But, Helen, I thought she was very gay and devoted to society. What will she do in this colony of girls, with scarcely a man to say a pretty thing to her?" "I don't know," replied Helen, a shade of annoyance crossing her face. "I think, perhaps, the girls may be mistaken about her. I feel quite sure she will be happy here." Just then Nan Birdsall came rushing down over the sands, warm but radiant. "Going in, Nan?" called Eleanor in greeting. "No, indeed," breathlessly. "I hate the water more than a cat does," and Nan dropped down on the sand at Eleanor's side, and, taking off her hat, fanned her flushed face. "Where is Em this morning?" queried Helen. "What a superfluous question," laughed Nan. "Don't you see that the _Sylph_ is in the harbor? Of course, Em has Mr. Churchill in tow." "How will Nathalie like that?" asked Eleanor with an amused smile. "Oh, Nat won't care," replied Nan, picking up a pebble and sending it skimming across the water. "She is far too sensible." "Look over your shoulder, Nan, and see your prediction verified;" and surely enough, strolling across the beach, in their direction, came Emily Varian, with Wendell Churchill at her side. "Isn't Em in her element?" said Nan, lowering her voice. Nothing could have been more characteristic than the welcome the three girls gave Mr. Churchill. Into Eleanor Hill's courteous greeting was thrown just enough of personal interest as to be slightly flattering. Helen's "How do you do" was both shy and reserved, and Nan just nodded indifferently, and continued her occupation of skipping stones. "We ought to be going home," announced Helen presently. "I wonder if the girls are not ready yet? Oh, yes! there they come!" as the three girls came down from the bathing house and joined the little group. Suddenly Nan dropped her pebbles and sprang to her feet with an exclamation: "Oh, girls, what fun! My ship has come in at last!" "Why, Nan, are you going out of your mind?" cried Jean. "What ship?" "Look, girls, look! Don't you see that big schooner just rounding the point?" "Yes, but what of it?" "Why, that's the U. S. Coast Survey schooner _Vortex_, and she's going to be stationed here for a long time, and Dick knows all the officers aboard. How is that for a piece of news?" "This must be your secret," laughed Eleanor. "Of course, and didn't I keep it well? Dick told me weeks ago that they were coming." "I say, it is jolly. We will have some fun, won't we?" It was Nathalie who spoke. "It is a perfect god-send," declared Emily Varian, solemnly. "Nan, your secret is a success, and I congratulate you." "I wonder," ruminated Jean, "who the men are, and whether we will really like them." "Time will tell," spoke Helen, a bit indifferently. "Come, girls, we must be going. Here is the carriage." Almost every evening the young people gathered together on the Lawrences' broad veranda, and to-night was no exception to the rule. When the girls strolled out from the dining room, they found Nan and Emily sitting on the steps. "Why, we never heard you at all," said Jean. "You must have come over the lawn like--oh dear, I can't think of a comparison. The night is too warm for one to exert one's brain unnecessarily." Nathalie seated herself on the railing. "Here come Eleanor and Wendell Churchill." "Ah!" laughed Jean teasingly. Her sister looked around at her with heightened color. "Don't be silly, Jean." "Do you know I have hardly seen you to-day, Miss Nathalie," said Churchill, finding a place on the railing at her side. "Where have you kept yourself?" "Everywhere--anywhere. I have not been hard to find." Nathalie's eyes were smiling wickedly into his, and his gave her back a smile. "Now, let me explain," he began. "Oh, don't let me put you to any unnecessary trouble," she interrupted with mock formality. "You are very cruel to-night," said Churchill laughing. "By the way, Dick and I went down to the _Vortex_ this afternoon, and there are some awfully good fellows aboard. I hope you girls will give them a good time." "It seems to me that the responsibility ought to rest with them," interposed Eleanor Hill. "Otherwise we should feel absolutely overwhelmed," said Nan comically. "Here comes Dick now," exclaimed Nathalie, "and he has a strange man with him." In a moment more Dick Andrews gained the veranda, and introduced his friend Beverly Dudley, of the _Vortex_. It was Jean who came forward and, extending her hand, bade him welcome. "Ah, Mr. Dudley, I fear you will feel yourself overwhelmed with such a bevy of girls, but let me help you. This is my sister Nathalie--my friends Miss Hill, Miss Birdsall, and Miss Varian. Unfortunately my elder sister is not here to receive you. She will join us presently. Emily, can't you make room for Mr. Dudley on the settle?" she added glancing about her. Emily smiled radiantly, and Dudley, who seemed to be a charming youth, made his way to her side. Leaving Nathalie and Em each happy in a _tête-à-tête_, the other girls formed a circle of which jolly Dick was the center, and much good-natured chaffing and light-hearted laughter were in order. After a while Helen appeared in the doorway with two mandolins in her hands. "What a good idea," exclaimed Eleanor enthusiastically. "Now we can have some singing." "I can't very well shake hands, Mr. Dudley," said Helen, in response to Jean's introduction. "Let me relieve you, Miss Lawrence." "Thanks. Will you give this mandolin to my sister Nathalie?" They all joined in a song, and their voices, with the mandolin accompaniment, sounded wondrously sweet in the soft night air. It was growing late when Nan at last jumped up. "I am sorry to break up the party, but Emily and I must be going. Father will have the town crier out pretty soon." There was a general move, and Mr. Dudley crossed to Helen's side. "I have had a charming evening, Miss Lawrence. I hope you will honor us with your presence on the _Vortex_ very soon." He spoke with the soft drawl peculiar to Southerners. "It will be a great pleasure, and indeed we will." "Won't you let me walk home with you, Miss Varian?" he asked. "It is rather late for you to go alone." Emily's answer was lost in a merry peal of laughter from Nan. "Mr. Dudley evidently appreciates the dangers lurking in that desolate stretch of lawn between here and the parsonage," she said with good-natured sarcasm. The girls joined in a general laugh, in spite of themselves, but Emily frowned portentously. After "good-night" had been said all around, and Helen found herself alone in her room, she took out from between the leaves of a book the letter she had received in the morning. As she re-read it she glanced up from time to time at a likeness which stood on the table close at hand. It was the face of a very beautiful woman--a face delicate, oval in shape, with straight eyebrows, from under which looked out a pair of eyes with a world of witchery in their depths; the whole crowned by a halo of soft hair. Helen dropped the letter in her lap, and folding her hands over it, fell into a deep reverie. Rousing herself at last, she slowly crossed the room, and opened a little drawer in her writing desk. There, hidden among some papers, lay another photograph--a man's face this time. As she looked at it steadily a heavy sigh escaped her lips, for it seemed to her that the grave eyes looked at her reproachfully. With a half-impatient exclamation she tossed it back into its hiding-place and closed the drawer sharply, and not until sleep claimed her did these two faces fade entirely from her mental vision. CHAPTER III. A LEAF FROM HELEN'S PAST. Many years before the opening of this story the Lawrence children counted among their dearest friends a certain pleasant-faced, sturdy little chap, Guy Appleton by name, who never considered a day quite complete unless at least a part of it was spent at the hospitable manor. His own pretty home, Rose Cottage, lay only a stone's throw away, and there the little Lawrence girls passed many a happy hour. Mrs. Appleton and Mrs. Lawrence had been schoolgirls together, and the flight of years had but strengthened their friendship. Mrs. Appleton was delighted that her shy little son had found such pleasant companions, and in every way encouraged his intercourse with them. The Lawrences were all dear to Guy's boyish heart, but none held quite the same place as Helen. She had been especially kind and friendly to him, and for her his affection was particularly deep and adoring. The years, as they rolled by, served but to increase his love for his little playmate, and from his allegiance to her he never swerved. When his college days were over and he was about to sail for Europe on an extended tour, he found it impossible to say farewell without speaking to her of the subject which lay nearest his heart. Helen was very young and inexperienced, and these were the first words of love to which she had ever listened. Her tender heart was deeply touched, and Guy went away gladdened by her shy expression of sorrow at his departure, and by the whispered "Yes" that her lips spoke falteringly. Helen had accepted her youthful lover, and many were the rejoicings among the small Hetherford circle over what they termed Helen's engagement; although the girl herself looked a little grave over so serious a term. At the manor the new relationship was accepted gladly, for it seemed only a fitting ending to Guy's long friendship in their family. Three years slipped by; years in which Guy bent every energy to the study of architecture, which he had chosen as his profession. He had decided talent, and by continued assiduity was making a name for himself among his colleagues. Little change had taken place in Hetherford except such as the flight of time must necessarily bring. Helen was now quite a woman, with a pretty air of gravity which the new cares had lent to her. When finally, one crisp October day, Guy walked in upon them, his face bronzed by the recent ocean trip, his slender figure grown broad and strong, his blue eyes beaming with happiness, he was welcomed with the greatest warmth of affection, and as they sat about the crackling flames in the manor hall his long absence seemed almost a dream. It was during the following winter that Helen had her first misgivings as to her real feeling for Guy. Indeed, sometimes, her engagement oppressed her strangely, and she was assailed by an overwhelming longing to be free. Women are indeed incomprehensible, and when the largess of their love is not given, it is rare, save through some sharp lesson, that they appreciate to the full the men whose hearts they possess. In this Helen was, perhaps, in nowise different from the rest of her sex. Be this as it may, Guy's unchanging love and devotion sometimes wearied her, and failed to call forth an answering love in her own heart. Yet the months glided by, and she had not the courage to tell her lover the truth. She was not always successful in hiding it from him, however, and once or twice a faint suspicion of her indifference came to him. The summer came and went, and almost a year had drifted by since his return. Guy finally broached the subject of marriage. At his first words Helen was filled with dismay, and as she listened with down-bent head and averted eyes, Guy was suddenly conscious of a great lack in her love for him, and a sense of foreboding swept over him. To his long and pleading request that a time might be set for their marriage, Helen put forth the children's claim upon her; and when he gently urged her to reconsider her determination, she answered him so sharply and curtly that he yielded, convinced that it would be unwise to press the matter any further. Helen's lips had almost formed the words "Guy, I do not love you as I should," but her lover's face, pale with grief at her all too evident reluctance, robbed her of the needful courage. Guy was not a man of half measures, and, having accepted Helen's decision, resolutely put out of his mind his painful doubts, and trusted to the future to strengthen her love for him. She was greatly touched by his generosity and half ashamed of the stand she had taken, and now that the question of marriage was indefinitely postponed, persuaded herself that she was deeply attached to him, and that it would have been both cruel and unwise to have broken her engagement. In September Guy took his vacation and, his mother having volunteered to go to the mountains with him, he induced Helen to accompany them. She had many qualms of conscience at leaving the children, but the invitation was a tempting one, and she had not the heart to disappoint her lover a second time. So, after strict injunctions to Mary, and urgent entreaties to Jean and Nathalie, she started off. It was a delightful holiday for all three. Mrs. Appleton, who had no thought for anyone but her son, was overjoyed to see him in such high spirits, for of late she had thought him both sad and depressed; and Guy felt that his happiness was quite complete, for never had he had Helen so much to himself, and never had she been so frankly affectionate and sweet with him. The days glided by like a dream, even to Helen. She had thrust all worry and anxiety from her, and entered with eager interest and zest into all the plans for their pleasant journeyings. If now and then she found herself a bit wearied by Guy's unceasing attentions, she strenuously hid the fact from him and called herself strictly to account for the unworthy thought. It was at a hotel on the borders of a beautiful lake that Helen first saw Lillian Stuart. One morning Guy had gone off fishing, and as Mrs. Appleton was writing letters in the seclusion of her room, Helen took her book and wandered out into the grounds in search of a cool, shady spot where she could read in peace. Coming at length upon a retired nook, she found herself forestalled, for, comfortably ensconced under the shade of a great willow, was a woman so beautiful that, as Helen caught sight of her, she could scarce repress an exclamation. The girl looked up, and their eyes met. Helen shyly dropped hers and passed quickly on, but that brief glimpse left a vivid impression upon her mind of a well-poised head, crowned with the most wonderful auburn hair, of a face dazzlingly fair, and a pair of deep violet eyes. All day long Helen's thoughts reverted to this vision, and that afternoon, when Guy returned from his fishing, she gave him a glowing description of her encounter. Just before dinner, while they were standing together in the corridor, the girl came toward them on her way to the dining room. Helen laid her hand impulsively on her lover's arm. "Please look, Guy," she whispered. "Here she comes. Isn't she beautiful? Why, Guy," excitedly, "do you know her? She is bowing to you." "Is that the woman you mean?" he asked, when he had gravely returned her bow. "Why, yes. Where did you ever know her?" "I met her at Baden, when I was over there." "How strange," said Helen musingly. "Why did you never tell me about her?" "Because I never liked her," he replied with decision, "and I trust you and she will not meet." A curiously unaccountable feeling of resentment swept across Helen. "I don't suppose there is much chance of it," she returned coldly. It is the unexpected that happens; for one afternoon, only a few days later, as Helen stood talking with some friends on the broad hotel veranda, Miss Stuart joined the group and, before Helen had hardly appreciated the situation, an introduction had ensued. In spite of Guy's protests a friendship sprang up between the two girls. It seemed to him that there was something almost pointed in the way Helen ignored his request, and followed up this acquaintance, to which he had so strenuously objected. Helen was not only fascinated and charmed by Miss Stuart's meteor-like brilliance, but felt, moreover, the keenest annoyance at the masterful way in which Guy had laid his injunctions upon her. He had maintained a strict reticence concerning his reasons, giving her no further explanation than that the friendship ran counter to his wishes. Helen's defiance was aroused, and perhaps a growing sense of _ennui_ in her lover's society increased the temptation to welcome eagerly any new interest. Meanwhile Miss Stuart had a well-defined motive in trying to secure Helen's friendship, and an even stronger desire to lessen Guy's influence with the girl. Whatever her past acquaintance with Guy had been, it would have been apparent to anyone less easily deceived than Helen, that she bore him no good will. The rest of the holiday time, which had begun so happily, was spoiled for Guy, and he was relieved when at length their faces were turned toward home, feeling sure that a separation from Miss Stuart was all that was necessary to awaken Helen's loyalty to him and to put an end to what he considered a most unfortunate episode in the girl's life. To his deep sorrow their return did not accomplish his expectations, for not only had a correspondence been begun between the girls, but Helen's whole bearing toward him changed completely, and her manner was both cold and distant. Finally, one evening, she came to him, and, after a few preliminaries, announced her intention of visiting Miss Stuart at her home in town. This brief announcement aroused Guy's quick temper, and before he realized what had happened, bitter words had been spoken, and Helen had swept out of the room. The following day she left for town. When a week had passed without a line from her, Guy could endure it no longer and sought an interview, battling with his indignation at the thought that it must take place under Miss Stuart's roof. Many a time afterward he tried to recall the exact words that were spoken on that memorable occasion, but everything seemed unreal to him, save Helen's face, pale with the determination not to accede to his wishes. Finally, he could recall asking her if she desired her freedom. Alas, poor Guy! The quick spontaneity of her response shattered his last hope. "Ah, yes, Guy, please. We will be so much better friends, then." "Friends!" he echoed bitterly; "after all these years." Helen put her hand on his shoulder, but he gently pushed her from him. "It is as well I should know the truth now as later. You do not love me, Helen. There is nothing left now, but for us to part." When he was leaving a sudden recollection came to him of the cause of all this unhappiness, and crushing down his own bitterness, he endeavored in quiet and carefully chosen words to dissuade her from a friendship which he feared she would rue, but she maintained an almost unbroken silence, and the expression of her face told him that his warning was of no avail. So they parted. Guy was more than justified in his distrust of Lillian Stuart. Had he been a man of less delicate sense of honor he could have righted himself in Helen's eyes by simply relating to her some incontrovertible facts; but the circumstances which had given him his knowledge sealed his lips. While at college, the name, Lillian Stuart, had grown familiar to him, through hearing her praises sounded by his chum Nelson Leonard. The year after their graduation they ran across each other at Baden, and their college friendship was resumed. Guy was not long in discovering that there was something radically wrong with his friend, and the cause, which all Baden apparently understood, was soon made clear to him. Among the most noted people frequenting Baden at this time, were a Mrs. Ogden-Stuart and her beautiful daughter. It had been understood on their arrival that Miss Stuart was engaged to the good-looking American, Mr. Leonard, who was traveling in their party. This fact, however, did not seem to stand in the way of her flirting openly with every eligible man in the place, nor prevent her from receiving their constant homage. Leonard was evidently wretched, and there was a touch of recklessness in his manner, which, Guy felt, boded no good to a man of his highly strung, sensitive nature. For a week after Guy's arrival things drifted on, but there was something in the air that seemed to foretell a crisis. Guy had been presented to Miss Stuart, but in spite of her beauty and fascination found nothing in her to like or respect. This Miss Stuart felt instinctively, and as she was accustomed to admiration, it stung her into a desire to win something more than indifference from Leonard's friend. Her efforts were totally unsuccessful, and, as her treatment of her lover became less and less loyal, Guy withdrew altogether from her society, showing her no further courtesy than an occasional bow of recognition. In the meantime Miss Stuart's latest affair, with a certain Frenchman of unenviable reputation, was giving Baden food for gossip and keeping it on the _qui vive_ for a scandal. Late one afternoon, while Guy sat on the veranda reading letters from home, Miss Stuart and Leonard passed him. The girl's face wore a mocking smile, her eyes a taunt; Leonard was white as death, and his lips twitched piteously. Guy's own face grew stern as he looked up at them, and when Miss Stuart threw him a careless word in salutation he could scarcely frame a civil reply. That evening Leonard went to Guy's room, and flinging himself down in a chair, gave voice for the first time to his misery. "I tell you, Appleton," he exclaimed, with a hard laugh, "I shall throw up the game pretty soon. I may be a coward; but it takes more courage than I have to face this thing any longer." Guy was more startled than he cared to reveal by his friend's passionate, despairing vehemence; and he made an effort to treat the matter lightly and to divert Leonard's thoughts, but his efforts were not crowned with success. When Leonard had left him he paced up and down the room, revolving in his mind what step he should take. At length he determined to go to Miss Stuart, and appeal to her, hoping that so direct a course would result favorably. He began the interview awkwardly, feeling that his presumption was almost unwarrantable, but when she met his earnest plea for his friend first with indifference, and then with undisguised amusement, he found his anger rising. "I do not think you can realize Leonard's condition of mind, Miss Stuart," he said darkly. "If you would only put an end to this once for all, I am sure that he is man enough to go away from you and try to live down his disappointment; but he has a peculiarly excitable and sensitive temperament, and if you continue to torture him in this way, I fear you will have his death at your door." "I am sorry to say," she replied lightly, "that our friend is a fool now," looking up at him with a glance strangely deep and subtle, "if he were half the man you are----" "I have nothing further to say," Guy interrupted, flushing with indignation and disgust, and without another word he abruptly left her. Two days later all Baden was shocked by the startling news that young Nelson Leonard had accidentally shot himself and was lying at the point of death. Those melancholy hours of watching by Leonard's bedside, in that dreary hotel room, lived in Guy's memory. When the doctor's sad verdict was pronounced, the dying man pleaded to be left alone with his friend. "Ah, dear old fellow," he said gently, when they were alone, "pretty well done--for an accident? Forgive me," he murmured, as he caught a sharp look of pain in Guy's face. "Forgive----" his voice faltered, and his head fell wearily back on the pillow. Then the poor boy's mind wandered, and Lillian Stuart's name was constantly on his lips. In broken, halting sentences a pitiful story of deception and disappointment was revealed to Guy--a story which would be sacred to him to his life's end, and, as he listened, his whole soul revolted against the woman who had so willfully trifled with this man's tender, loyal heart. Before morning dawned, Nelson Leonard's eyes had closed forever on a life which he had found too difficult for him. When the sad affair was over, Guy would fain have left Baden at once, but he was obliged to await there the arrival of Leonard's family from America. In the days that ensued Lillian Stuart was markedly subdued, but if she had any suspicion of the real truth concerning Leonard's death she never betrayed it by word or look. She did all in her power to overcome Guy's aversion for her, but he sternly repulsed her. To attempt conciliation was a new rôle for Miss Stuart, and his cold disregard of all her efforts was the severest wound her vanity had ever received. Such a slight is not readily forgiven or forgotten by a woman of her type. So when Guy Appleton once more crossed her path, and she found, in his deep love for Helen, his vulnerable point, she felt that her day of triumph had come. It had been an easy task to secure Helen's friendship, and then to so use her influence with the girl as to effect the annulling of the engagement. Miss Stuart knew Guy's nature well enough to feel almost sure that, however sorely he might be tempted, he would probably never betray his knowledge of that unpleasant episode in her past; so, trading on the man's very uprightness, she revenged herself for the bitter sting of wounded vanity that rankled in her memory. Her well-planned scheme had been marvelously successful, but one unlooked-for element had entered into it; for Helen's simplicity and purity of nature, her lack of vanity, coquetry, or duplicity, above all, her entire confidence and trust, had touched a tender chord in the heart of this cold and worldly woman, and were in themselves a power so great she felt herself held by them. Could she have foreseen the future, she would, perhaps, have struggled against this most disturbing element. Guy's return to Hetherford with the announcement that his engagement was at an end, and that he was going immediately abroad, created quite a ferment among the good people at the manor and Rose Cottage, and many were their fruitless conjectures as to the cause of Helen's sudden change of feeling. Across at the parsonage, happy-go-lucky Nan puckered up her jolly face, pondered long over this vexatious question, and hit at last upon the correct solution of it, but wisely kept her own counsel. Mrs. Appleton took her son's disappointment very much to heart, and when Helen came home again Rose Cottage was closed and its occupants once more gone abroad. When the buckboard rolled by the deserted little place Helen drew her breath sharply, then, catching Jean's reproachful eyes upon her, began hurriedly to speak of other things. The Lawrences frankly avowed to her their regret and disappointment, but not one word of explanation did the girl vouchsafe to them, so after a little they accepted the inevitable, and Guy's name was no longer spoken among them. And thus it was that of the Lawrence girls, Helen alone had the proud distinction of having had a genuine love affair, the memory of which, however, was tinged with deep regret, and caused her naught but pain. Perhaps she felt intuitively that she had done wrong. What was a pleasant friendship compared to the love of a true man's heart? Yet the thought of a marriage with Guy was out of the question. So the foolish girl reasoned. Time brings many changes, however, and perhaps what once seemed to Helen a catastrophe may one day seem to open the very gates of Paradise. And now that we have taken a leaf from Helen's past, let us resume our way. CHAPTER IV. A SAIL ON THE "CYCLONE." "They have hired the dear old _Cyclone_, Helen, because the men thought the wind was bound to be light to-day and we would have so much more sport in a small boat than on the _Vortex_." Nathalie stood in the doorway, gesticulating eagerly with her slender brown hands. Her pretty face was quite flushed with excitement, and her hurried words tripped over each other in their anxiety to be spoken. "You see we must make haste, for Dick says we must be at the dock at eleven, or we won't catch the tide." "But what about luncheon?" interposed Helen quietly. A comical expression of dismay crossed Nathalie's face. "Oh, dear, I suppose you will want to kill us; but Jean and I, in a sudden fit of enthusiasm, said we would attend to that, and not one thing have we done yet." "Did you think to provide any cold meat for sandwiches?" demanded the young housekeeper. "Oh, yes; there are three stout chickens, some cold corned beef, and a 'bit of ham bone,' as Bridget puts it, gracing your larder." "Well, we haven't a moment to spare, so call Jean, and let us get right to work." The pile of sandwiches grew rapidly under the girls' deft hands, and little Larry, wandering in from the veranda, looked longingly at these interesting preparations. "Wish I could go with you," he ventured, with sudden courage. "Don't speak of it," replied Helen emphatically, as she ran out of the room to get a fresh supply of bread. "Guess you'll all be drownded, anyway," and Larry eyed them with a superior and triumphant mien. "That's right, my cheerful little brother," laughed Jean. "Always look on the bright side of things." "Now, when shall we tell Aunt Helen we will be back?" asked Nathalie, as they were fitting the cover down on the well-filled hamper. "Not later than five, I should think." "Don't let's commit ourselves, Helen," suggested Jean. "It is such a bore, and we will be troubling about it all the afternoon." "We must be home by five; I am not willing to leave the children any longer than that." "Perhaps you can manage the wind to suit your own purposes. You know it generally plays more or less of a part in sailing," and Jean gave a vicious tug at the last unfastened strap. "Don't be impertinent, Jean," Nathalie called out, as she ran swiftly upstairs. "Never mind, Helen, her youth is her only excuse." "All the same, we shall be home on time if possible, dearie." Jean laughed good-humoredly. "I am always disagreeable," she admitted, "when anyone speaks with decision. I don't know why, but it sets my teeth on edge." Dudley met them at the wharf with the cutter from the _Vortex_, and soon they were pulling swiftly out to the _Cyclone's_ mooring. As they rounded the stern of the old oyster sloop, a young man was seen standing at the wheel, his slender figure held firmly erect, one hand shading his eyes as he scanned the blue waters of the sound. "Who is that?" whispered Mollie. "Up oars!" cried Dudley, intent on bringing the cutter up in good form, and in a moment more they were clambering up the gang-steps, and Mollie's question went unanswered. "Hullo, Farr," called Dick cheerfully, and thus addressed, Lieutenant Farr left the wheel and moved leisurely forward. "You will have to individualize for yourself, old fellow, for it would be impossible for me to name all these charming people." "Time enough," spoke Farr, in a well-modulated voice, as he raised his cap and glanced at the group before him. "Come, let us get off," he said, turning abruptly to the men, and soon the _Cyclone_ was sailing lazily away before a light breeze. "How delightful!" sighed Eleanor Hill, as she settled herself comfortably to windward. "This is my idea of bliss." Farr paused an instant on his way aft and glanced interestedly at the girl's earnest face, then proceeded to his place at the wheel. "For pity's sake, let somebody go and talk to that man," said Jean, dropping her voice. "I fancy he doesn't care much about it," replied Eleanor quietly. "You go, Em," Mollie suggested. "Certainly!" and, nothing daunted, Emily started up. "Who doubted her willingness?" laughed Nan saucily. Eleanor shook her head at the speaker. Dick threw himself down in the midst of the group of girls and kept up an incessant chatter. One voice was lacking in the general interchange of nonsense, for to-day Jean Lawrence, who was usually the merriest of them all, found her interest flagging strangely. Sitting somewhat apart from the others, her eyes wandered persistently to where Farr was courteously and patiently initiating Emily Varian into the art of steering. There was something about the man that caught her attention and held it almost against her will. She noted with what an air of distinction his rough yachting flannels were worn, and how beautifully shaped were the long slender hands which moved so lazily, yet with such a suggestion of strength. His cap was drawn down over his face, so that only the lines of a well-molded mouth and chin were revealed, and Jean found herself waiting with almost childish interest for a glimpse of the eyes so tantalizingly hid from view. A sudden shout of boisterous laughter from Dick brought her sharply to herself, and with a keen sense of shame, and a passionate hope that her defection might have passed unnoticed, she turned and plunged into the conversation. "Let us have some songs, girls," suggested Eleanor. "We are getting very much demoralized, and I don't know what that strange man will think of us." "Oh, if I were a little bird how happy I would be," began Jean, with more energy than correctness. "Hold on, Jeanie," interrupted Nathalie, catching up her mandolin, "the other words have lots more flavor." "Oh, the first that came a-courting was little Tommy Green, The finest young man that ever was seen, But the words of my grandmother ran in my head, And I would not listen to a word that he said." "There, that will do, Nathalie," interposed Helen with decision. "Not at all," cried Jean. "Says I to myself there must be some mistake, What a great fuss these old folks make, If the boys and the girls had all been so afraid, Why grandma herself would have been an old maid." Jean sang the foolish words recklessly, and when she had finished shot a half-defiant glance from under her long lashes in Farr's direction. His eyes met hers with a long, steady look. Somewhat disconcerted, Jean flushed hotly and turned hurriedly away. "That was a daisy, Jean," and Dick roared with laughter. When the merriment had subsided a little: "Farr," said Dudley, rising and making his way out of the circle, "I think you have had your turn at the wheel. Suppose I take your place for a while." "I hope you are not very much bored, Mr. Farr," ventured Jean shyly. "Quite the reverse--much entertained," he replied quietly. Jean wondered if there were a touch of sarcasm in this reply, but his face was impenetrable. "Charming accent he has," smiled Eleanor in an aside to Nan. "I wonder where he got it, don't you?" "Have you lived very much abroad, Mr. Farr?" queried Eleanor, turning politely to him. "And why do you ask?" "Why, your accent is so un-American." A broad smile crossed Dudley's face as he caught Miss Hill's words. It amused him not a little to hear reticent Farr thus catechized. "Where are you from?" asked Nathalie, coming to the front in her usual outspoken fashion. Farr glanced at her, and then, after an instant's hesitation, answered languidly. "From New Jersey." At this the little group, throwing manners to the winds, burst into merry laughter. "Doesn't look a bit like a mosquito," said Nan to Mollie in an audible whisper. Poor Mollie looked quite horror-struck, for she felt sure that the saucy words had reached Farr's ear. If the man felt any annoyance he was most successful in concealing it, for his expression remained quite unchanged. Not so with poor Jean, who had flushed hotly at what she considered Nan's unwarrantable impertinence. She made a swift, angry little movement, and the book she had been holding slipped to the deck. Farr leaned forward, and picked it up. As he returned it to her his eyes met hers with a quiet, reassuring smile, for he had been quick to notice the girl's silent championship, and it had greatly touched him. The color in Jean's face deepened, and with sudden shyness she dropped her eyes. "Have a cigar, Farr?" To these two Clifford Archer's question came almost like an interruption, although no word had been spoken between them. "No, thanks," taking from his pocket a silver case of curious design, "but, if no one objects, I will light a cigarette!" "I can't help it," cried Nathalie, laughing until the tears were in her eyes, "did you hear the way he said that word 'cigarette,'--with such a lingering over each syllable? I am sure you are a Spaniard, Mr. Farr, in spite of New Jersey." "I knew it," Nan put in, "the moment you spoke." "Ah," exclaimed Nathalie, drawing back in mock affright, "you are an exile." "How interesting," spoke Nan. "Do tell us all about it." "About what?" queried Farr coolly, and Nan subsided, feeling suddenly very much embarrassed. Eleanor Hill caught an expression half impatient in Farr's eyes, and turned warningly to Nathalie. "You will be sorry." "When I'm sober," interrupted the young girl merrily. "What a rowdy you are, Nat; Helen is looking at you most disapprovingly." A shrug of the shoulders was Nathalie's only answer, and starting up she crossed over, and stood before Farr, where he sat at Jean's side. "You have been very good and patient," she assured him with a mischievous twinkle in her brown eyes, "and now I am going to reward you by unpacking the luncheon hamper." "That's a good idea," cried Dick; "I am almost starved to death." "What delicious salad," exclaimed Churchill a few moments later, as they sat about the open hamper. "Miss Helen, you are a culinary artist." Helen smiled her thanks. "May I not sit by you, Eleanor," pleaded Clifford Archer, dropping down on the deck at her side. "With you near me I could never know hunger or thirst." "Nonsense," frowning on him in seeming disapproval. "I think your appetite is one which stands you in good stead." He was a handsome youth, graceful in the extreme. It was a constant source of annoyance to Eleanor Hill that she found him so charming, for, she often assured herself, there was nothing to the boy but his good looks and perfect manners. But who will dare to say that these are nothing? "I do hope there are plenty of sandwiches," sighed Nan, as she sat eating her fourth. Dick tipped up the plate, depositing a dozen or more in her lap. "That enough?" he asked innocently. "You idiot!" cried Nan. "Do say something new, Nan," called Mollie from the other side of the boat. "That is the third time to-day you have given Dick that appellation." "How can I help it," groaned Nan, "when it characterizes him so perfectly?" "You can't," said Nathalie consolingly, "and if I were you I would not attempt to." Dick looked at both girls with withering scorn, then glanced by them as if their existence were a matter of small import. "Helen, can I open the beer and ginger ale now?" "If it will be any comfort to you, Dick, you have my consent." "I think I will try another sandwich, if Miss Birdsall can spare me one." "Then catch, Mr. Farr," and Nathalie tossed him one, with unerring aim. "O Nathalie," protested Jean, with changing color. "Well, I am glad to know he is not a muff," said Nathalie, as Farr caught the sandwich. "What is the matter, Jean? I didn't know you were so easily shocked." "Look out for the boom," called Dudley most opportunely, and the _Cyclone_ came swiftly about. "What an unfortunate move. Now the sun is right in our eyes," and Jean looked up at Farr appealingly. "Won't you please have it removed?" "Why, certainly. Are not your wishes my law?" and even as he spoke the sun slipped under a cloud. "What a wonderful man," Eleanor Hill laughed softly. The afternoon sped away all too rapidly, and the hours were as minutes to the happy young people skimming the waters of the beautiful sound. Nature was at her very best this sunshiny summer afternoon. Light fleecy clouds scudded swiftly across the delicious blue of the vaulted sky above, and in the distance the low, far-stretching, Long Island shore was bathed in a soft, violet haze, broken here and there by patches of white, glistening sand. The _Cyclone_, with every yard of canvas set, was running gayly before the breeze, which since noon had grown strong and steady. The swash of the water against the boat, the slight straining and creaking of the rigging, the sighing of the wind in the sails, were sounds sweet as music to the ear of every true lover of the sea. And now the summer day began to wane, and in the western sky the sun was shining with a brilliant radiance. "Ah!" sighed Jean softly, as they dropped anchor in Hetherford Harbor, "why do all pleasant things come to an end?" "But they invariably do," and there was a touch of genuine regret in Farr's voice, which was quite sincere; for in this last pleasant hour, he had thoroughly enjoyed a delightful _tête-à-tête_ with his pretty companion, and had every reason, in spite of the merry chaffing of these gay young strangers, to vote the day a great success. CHAPTER V. SUNSET-HOUR ON THE CLIFFS. The following morning the girls were collected together in the upper balcony of the manor, where the clustering vines afforded a welcome shelter from the sun's hot rays. A wicker table, laden down with books and work baskets, occupied a central position, and the low rockers which surrounded it were tilted swiftly back and forth as the girls worked and chatted in an easy, desultory way. On the wide old-fashioned settle in the background sat Eleanor Hill and Nan Birdsall; Eleanor lounging lazily back among the cushions, her hands resting idly in her lap, Nan all curled up in a heap, her sketchbook on her knee, her deft fingers making rapid strokes with a long, well-sharpened pencil. "Do you know," spoke Eleanor Hill, "I fear we behaved very badly yesterday. I have had qualms of conscience ever since, and a growing conviction that we made perfect fools of ourselves in the eyes of those two strange men." "Better that than dullards," laughed Nan lightly. "Hobson's choice," said Jean dryly. Just then Helen, with a somewhat preoccupied air, pushed back her chair and passed into the house, her mind evidently intent on some domestic question. Nathalie's eyes followed the retreating figure, until it was quite lost from view in the shadowy hallway, and then were bent thoughtfully on her work again. "To change the subject, girls," she began, after a moment, devoting herself energetically to the threading of her needle, and tossing her head impatiently at every unsuccessful effort; "have you heard the news? Helen's friend, Miss Stuart, is coming down upon us for a visit." "Yes, indeed we have." Emily's sigh came from the depths of her heart. "I can't imagine what we will do with another girl here." "What she will do with us may be more to the point," and Jean raised her eyebrows expressively. "I don't know how it is, but I am apprehensive about this visit. I suppose," with a sort of honest protest in her voice, "that I have never really liked Miss Stuart." "Nor I," agreed Nathalie. "There is something about her that I do not trust. And the worst of it is," with a grimace, "that she winds Helen around her little finger. It always makes me so angry." "Nonsense, Nat. You do Helen an injustice," objected Eleanor pleasantly. "However, I frankly confess to a fear that the harmony of our own little circle will be somewhat marred by the advent of a stranger." "That's so, and then you know she is such a swell that she will probably look down upon us poor country girls with the utmost scorn," and Nathalie gave a vindictive tug at her knotted thread. "Of course she is devoted to men?" queried Emily lugubriously. "Oh, I should judge so, although I have never seen her with them. You know she has only stopped with us in the winter season, when we have been alone." "Let us do her the justice to suppose that the men are equally devoted to her," added Jean generously. "It amounts to about the same thing, whether she is devoted to men, or they to her," and there was in Emily's tone such a note of tragic melancholy that the girls could not refrain from laughing. "Oh, what a happy nook and cranny of the great world this dear old Hetherford is," cried Eleanor, clasping her hands behind her head, and looking out with dreamy eyes over the sweep of softly undulating lawn that stretched away toward the manor gates. "It all seems so idyllic to me. There is so much petty jealousy and miserable heartburning beyond the confines of this little haven of rest. People's motives are so often selfish that one grows strangely doubting, even of one's friends. Do you know," leaning forward impulsively and speaking with deeper earnestness, "I think we girls have found the secret of true friendship--mutual trust and respect. These are what have made our long intercourse such a happy one." "Indeed you are right, Eleanor, dear," Jean replied gently. "The bother of it all will be," interrupted Nathalie following out her own train of thought "that Mademoiselle will come here with trunks full of fine clothes, and we will be obliged to dress up." "I would like to see the girl who could make me discard my shirt and blazer," laughed Nan defiantly. "How would we look _en grande toilette_ with such hands as these," said Jean, thrusting forward her own little brown ones. "Attractive, but from a different standpoint," Nan asserted with a fine assumption of authority. "Everything depends upon your point of view, according to Henry James. Now, from my artistic pinnacle," tilting her head to one side, and surveying the group with critical, but approving eyes, "I declare I prefer brown hands to white ones." "By the way," asked Jean, with well-feigned indifference, "what did you think of the naval officers?" "To return to our muttons," murmured Nathalie, with a sidelong glance at her sister. "Mr. Dudley was very pleasant and agreeable," replied Emily, "but I thought Mr. Farr rather uninteresting." "Well," laughed Eleanor demurely, "Nan is right. Everything does depend upon one's point of view. Now I thought Mr. Farr decidedly attractive, and Mr. Dudley just a good-natured boy." "That reminds me of something I saw in the paper the other day," Jean observed smilingly. "To the question 'What is taste?' the answer was given, 'There is no such thing, except on the principle that some people haven't any.'" "That is a fine way of disposing of one," and there was an expression of quiet amusement in Eleanor's eyes. "Never mind, dear," leaning forward and pinching Jean's cheek, "I will forgive you. Besides," dropping her voice, "you know that you agree with me." "Now, what are you girls whispering about?" complained Nathalie. "Oh, bother this sewing," she went on irrelevantly; "I have had enough of it for to-day," and the bit of work was tossed impatiently into her basket. This was the signal for a general uprising, and then, as they were dispersing, Nathalie made the announcement: "Helen has asked Mr. Dudley and Mr. Farr to dinner to-morrow night." "Yes," answered Mollie, turning back from the open doorway, "and Captain Dodd and his wife, too. Dick says," with an air of profound conviction, "that they are delightful." "That settles it," laughed Nan, "Dick can't be wrong. Come on, Moll," linking her arm in Mollie's, "I am going to take you home to luncheon with me to-day." It was late that afternoon when Jean, who had been reading for hours on the quiet veranda, suddenly jumped to her feet, with a little sigh of weariness, and tossed her book into a neighboring chair. She was tired of sitting still so long and felt in the humor for a walk. Slowly she made her way down the broad steps and across the grounds of the manor. Strolling on in a reverie, and heeding but little in which way her steps were taking her, she came upon the great iron gates which opened out into the roadway. Passing through them she wandered listlessly on toward the water. It was the loveliest hour of the bright, sunny June day. Already the shadows were lengthening, and a little whiff of cooler air was stirring after the warmth of the noonday. The sun was nearing the western horizon, now shining out in bright radiance, now obscured by some light passing cloud. The murmur of a little brook which followed the roadside, and the whispering of the wind among the leaves, made a soft music. Now and then a bird darted by overhead, singing out a shrill note in some high key, then dropping into a soft coo. A squirrel ran out from the thicket, sped across the road, and disappeared over a low stone wall. "Oh, you foolish little chap," exclaimed Jean, half-aloud, as Master Squirrel gave her one glance from his bright eyes, before dropping out of sight. "You are the swiftest little fellow I have ever seen." It was growing rough and heavy underfoot now, and in a moment more Jean had reached the beach, and was strolling down toward the cliffs. The water was alive with boats, their white sails glimmering in the sunlight, as the dying breeze bore them slowly on their way. At the foot of the cliffs Jean paused a moment. The glory of the golden light fell on her slender, girlish figure, and illumined her wistful, upturned face. As her eyes rested lovingly on the beautiful scene that lay before her a deep sigh of pleasure escaped her slightly parted lips, for to-day the old familiar sights and sounds seemed strangely new and sweet. A narrow beaten track led temptingly to the summit of the cliffs whence a magnificent view could be obtained, and after an instant's hesitation she began the steep ascent. Turning the corner of a sharp rock, which reared itself boldly into the air, she came suddenly to a standstill, uttering a stifled exclamation, for almost at her feet, stretched at full length in a sheltered cranny of the rocks, lay Valentine Farr, his hat drawn down over his forehead, his eyes thoughtfully intent upon the distant horizon. As Jean's exclamation reached him, he glanced quickly up and sprang to his feet. "Why, Miss Lawrence, this is indeed an unexpected pleasure. You stole a march on me. I did not hear your approach at all." "Indeed, I am equally surprised, Mr. Farr, and I assure you you really startled me. I came upon you, so suddenly." Farr's eyes rested admiringly on the soft color in the girl's face as she went on: "And may I ask how you hit upon my particular retreat in these rocks? Let me warn you. You can only make yourself happy in it with my especial permission." "I had no idea I was trespassing. Pardon my curiosity, but by what right do you hold your title to this spot?" he queried with an amused smile. "By the right of priority. Do you know of any better, Mr. Farr?" with a pretty air of defiance. "When I was a little girl in pinafores I played here with my doll; when I was a schoolgirl I studied my lessons in this dear spot; and now that I am a grown woman," drawing herself up to her full height, and glancing at him merrily, "I come here to read, to ponder, and to think." "A sacred spot indeed," spoke Farr laughingly, but with just a little lowering of his voice. "I yield at once, for I see that no one could dispute your right." "No one." She threw out her hand with a pretty gracious gesture. "But won't you let me extend to you an invitation to occupy it whenever you feel inclined?" "Thanks, ever so much," he rejoined heartily, "You are very good. And now, can't I persuade you to rest a little after your climb, Miss Lawrence?" She slipped down on the rocks, and he threw himself at her side. "What delightful times you all seem to have here," he went on. "Do you know I think this is a most charming place, quite an Elysium." Jean's soft eyes lighted up with pleasure. "I am so glad you like it, but I fear you will find very little to interest you in so sleepy a place." Farr was about to make answer in words of conventional flattery, but something in the girl's tone of sincerity and good faith deterred him and impelled him to reply in kind. "But I assure you I am delighted with it. You know we knock about a good deal, and some of our stations are almost unendurable. We have been on the Sound for several months now, and this is to me by far the pleasantest place in which we have cast anchor." "It does my heart good to hear you say that," she rejoined naïvely, "for naturally Hetherford is very dear to us." "You have lived here all your life, Miss Lawrence?" "Ever since I was a wee little girl. Of course we have been away from time to time, but we are always glad to get back again." "I can well understand your feeling so, although I have had very little of home life myself." Farr sighed as he uttered these last words. Jean looked at him with gentle sympathy. "You say that sadly," she said. "Do I?" He turned on his elbow, and his grave eyes met hers. His next words were prompted by a sudden unwonted impulse. "Perhaps I will tell you about it some day." Then a silence fell between them. The sweet stillness held its sway o'er land and sea, its perfect harmony emphasized by the soft lapping of the waves against the shadowy sands below. The breeze was dying with the dying sun. Just off the shore a little white-sailed cat-boat was drifting in with the flowing tide. Jean drew a long breath and started swiftly to her feet. "Why, how late it is growing," she exclaimed. "I must be going, Mr. Farr." "Already?" he said, and then they made their way down the rugged cliff. "Take care, Miss Lawrence," he cried, as she missed her footing and slipped a little. "Please let me assist you," and he extended his hand. Jean put her hand in his with a demure uplifting of her eyebrows, and just a fleeting smile on her lips. There flashed through her mind the thought: "How unmercifully Nan would chaff me, if she could catch a glimpse of me now." The descent was a brief one, and soon they had crossed the sands and were strolling along the road in the direction of the manor. "You are coming to dine with us to-morrow night, are you not, Mr. Farr?" "Your sister was good enough to ask us, and I shall be only too delighted to avail myself of her kind invitation." "I really will not let you come any further with me," she declared as they reached the manor gates. "I fear, as it is, I have taken you very much out of your way, and it must be late." "It is close upon seven," he told her after looking at his watch. "And you dine?" "At seven, and let me warn you now that to be late is to meet with my sister's ire." "I shall remember," he answered, with his pleasant laugh. "And now can I not see you to your door?" "No, indeed. I must hurry away," she said as they shook hands, "for time, tide, and dinner at the manor wait for no man. Good-by." "Until to-morrow," he said, as he turned away. CHAPTER VI. A DINNER AT THE MANOR. It was the evening of the dinner given in honor of the naval officers, and even as the old Dutch clock in the corner of the manor hall struck the hour of seven, Farr was shaking hands with Mrs. Dennis. "I am so sorry," she said to him with a sweet smile, "that I shall be obliged to absent myself from the dinner table to-night, but my strength is not very great and I dare not overtax it. My niece Helen," with a proud accent, which was not lost upon Farr, "has taken my place for so long that I feel no hesitation in leaving everything in her hands." "Oh, Auntie," cried Helen, with shy deprecation, "Mr. Farr will begin to think me that most tiresome of all things, a paragon of household virtue." Farr made a gesture of dissent, and then as Clifford Archer presented himself, he turned and followed Helen with admiring eyes. Very fair and womanly she seemed to him, in her gown of pale lavender crepe, moving about among her guests, greeting one and all with gentle courtesy. His gaze wandered on to where, in a further corner of the drawing-room, Nathalie was keeping up a merry chatter with Wendell Churchill. In spite of her eighteen years, she looked a very child to-night, in her white mulle gown, with a broad white sash around her waist, and one red rose in her brown hair. A spoiled child, too, she undeniably was; unused to restraint, somewhat willful and quick-tempered, but with a heart so true and generous that one could always trust this small maiden and know that the good would predominate. Eleanor Hill, standing very erect, her slender figure clad in a severely simple gown of India silk, her hair brushed straight from her fair face, her blue eyes alight with intelligence, her sensitive mouth revealing every passing shade of feeling, held his attention for a moment, for there was something patrician in the girl's mien and bearing which greatly charmed him. Involuntarily Farr smiled as he caught sight of Nan's jolly face beaming with an unending fund of good humor, and he was man enough of the world for one glance at dainty Mollie Andrews to suffice to tell him that she was an adept in the truly feminine art of dressing, for her white gown, covered with lace and embroidery, was made in a mysterious Parisian fashion, not easily imitated. What an arrant little flirt was dark-eyed Emily Varian. The smile that Nan had evoked deepened as Farr noted the rapt expression on Dudley's face as he bent over her. Her yellow gown, while not as modish as Eleanor's and Mollie's, nor as artistic as the Lawrence girls', yet showed a fine sense of color, and lighted up her pretty, piquant face, which was surmounted by a smooth coil of hair the color of a raven's wing. They were an unusually lovely group of girls, and, beyond this, unusually pure-hearted and intelligent. Farr appreciated this the more keenly, perhaps, in that he had seen much of the world in his thirty years of life. Sometimes the old ideals of his boyhood had suffered sadly; but his faith in the gentler sex was too deep-rooted to be easily dispelled, and now all that was noblest and most chivalrous in his nature was awakened by the atmosphere of honesty and sweetness surrounding him. He was brought back to the starting-point of his observations by Helen's voice saying, apologetically: "I am so sorry my sister is so late," and even as she spoke a little hand pushed the portières hastily aside, and Jean stood in the doorway. She glanced impulsively across at Farr, and caught a wicked gleam from his eyes as he advanced to meet her. "'Time, tide, and dinner at the manor wait for no man,'" he quoted maliciously. "That is one advantage in being a woman," she promptly retorted. She was radiant to-night in a gown of silver and blue. From under level brows her eyes shone like stars, and some slight inward tremor of excitement flushed her sweet face with unusual color. Her soft yellow hair was gathered up in a simple coil, little tendrils of it curling upon her forehead and on her neck. "What a bonny little lass she is," thought Farr, surprised by the sudden feeling of tenderness which took possession of him. Then dinner was announced, and, with a half cynical smile at his own susceptibility, he pulled himself together, and offered her his arm. "Why, I am quite in the navy, am I not?" she asked archly, as she took her place between Farr and Dudley. "You honor it," Farr returned. Jean's brows contracted with a slight frown. "That savors of flattery, Mr. Farr." "I especially dislike your accusation, Miss Lawrence." "Then I must be more careful not to run counter to your prejudices hereafter." "If you would be so good," he said to her dryly; then their eyes met, and they both laughed light-heartedly. "I hope you enjoyed the sail the other day. I meant to ask you about it yesterday afternoon." "Thoroughly. Your songs were particularly delightful." Jean blushed, and answered in some confusion: "They were very foolish. I really hope you will forgive our absurd behavior." "Charming folly needs no apology," Jean found the glance he gave her a trifle disconcerting. "But pray, Mr. Farr, do not----" she began, and hesitated. "Do not what?" he interrogated, with a faint show of eagerness. "Do not allow your soup to grow cold," she finished, with a merry glance at him from under her long lashes. "While you are in Hetherford," spoke Nathalie across the table to Dudley, "you should make a point of going up to the cemetery. There are some epitaphs there a hundred years old, and they are so funny." "So Andrews was telling us. Speaking of epitaphs I was very much amused by one I saw in a magazine the other day. Let me see. How was it? "Here lies the body of Mary Ann, With her head on the bosom of Abraham; Pretty soft thing for Mary Ann, But very hard lines on Abraham." "Here is a good one," cried Dick, when he had partially recovered from his ebullition of mirth: "Here lies the body of Mary Bin, Who having had her little fling, Burst this outer shell of sin, And hatched herself a cherubim." Helen shook her head at Dick in gentle protest. "What will Captain and Mrs. Dodd think of us." she said. "Suppose I should recall one to you all," suggested the captain, with a merry twinkle in his eye. "Please do," they cried in chorus. "He heard the angels calling him, From that celestial shore, He flapped his wings and away he went, To make one angel more." "Splendid," exclaimed Nathalie, with enthusiasm. "Mr. Dudley and Dick are quite in the background." "Dick saw his in that charming novel 'Comin' thro' the Rye.'" "Guess I did, Nancy. By Jove, girls," he whispered mischievously, "you are all stunning to-night," and he drew himself up with an air of pride and satisfaction. "You shine in a kind of reflected glory; don't you, Dick?" laughed Nathalie. After dinner they gathered about the great wood fire burning cheerily in the drawing-room. The evening had grown suddenly chill. The wind had veered to the southeast, and the strong sea breeze lowered the temperature by many degrees; a not uncommon occurrence in our American summers. Helen seated herself at the open piano, and her music did much to enhance the charm of the hour. She felt a bit sad to-night and something of her feeling crept into her music, as she drifted into a plaintive melody, with an oft-recurring refrain almost like a spoken regret. As her eyes wandered about the fire-lit room, with its far-off corners half in mystic shadow, there were awakened within her memories of happy childhood days when the love of her father and mother had been the sunshine of their home. Interwoven with these thoughts came the recollection of one who, in those days, had been near at hand and who was now far away, in strange lands, separated from her by more than the mere expanse of restless waters. She sighed a little and, bringing her music abruptly to an end, rose and crossed the room. After a few words of courteous explanation to Mrs. Dodd, she ran away upstairs to assure herself that the children were safely in bed. Just as she was passing through the doorway, she caught a glimpse of Jean, who, with earnest upturned face, was talking interestedly with Farr, and something she saw in her sister's blue eyes made her start. What was there in that upturned face, in those eyes, which made Helen feel so strangely, as if something were going to happen? And Eleanor Hill chatting gayly with Cliff Archer found her thoughts traveling in much the same direction. In all these summers they had been a very happy little colony of girls, and they had entered into a sort of compact in true girl fashion that no lover should be allowed in their midst, to break the spell. Helen had been engaged, but that relation had existed previous to the making of the bond, and she had been so little absorbed that no one had thought much about it. One other exception had to be made, for there was no use in trying to hold Emily strictly to any such agreement, for flirt she would whenever the opportunity offered. However, her digressions had been few and far between, for Cliff Archer and Dick were almost the only men who came to Hetherford, and they were so like brothers to her that a sentimental attitude toward either of them would have seemed supremely ridiculous. So this summer had come around as many others had before, and already a new element had entered into their midst, and that naughty little Nathalie was at the root of the matter; for ever since one bright day in May, when the _Sylph_ had come sailing along these pleasant waters and Wendell Churchill had called at the manor to pay his respects, the old order of things had been changed. Until that day the _Sylph_ had been better known to Hetherford than her good-looking owner; for rarely had he cast anchor in the harbor without having aboard his yacht a party of gay and fashionable people, who urgently claimed his whole attention. But now he no longer brought strangers to Hetherford, and when, as now and then occurred, he was obliged to absent himself for a few days, the _Sylph_ lay at the disposal of the girls. And all this that little minx Nathalie had brought about, laughing while she disclaimed emphatically any disloyalty to the vows of their bond. The worst of it was the mischief was spreading, and Eleanor's eyes falling just then upon Jean, she experienced a sense of keen annoyance, for warm-hearted Jean had been the most whole-souled, the most valiant of them all. It was a great pity that the _Vortex_ had been stationed here, and doubly a pity that there was no immediate prospect of her departure. It would not do to be introducing all sorts of folly into their circle. Eleanor had quite worked herself up to a pitch of righteous indignation when, on surveying the ground that had brought her to this point, she became uncomfortably conscious of some slight changes within herself; for here before her, looking into her eyes and saying all sorts of pretty things, which of course were nonsensical, was the "fatal beauty" whom she had always looked upon as a boy. Half-vexed, half-amused she rose to go, and when Cliff, after helping her with her coat, gently pressed her hand, she felt immensely like boxing his ears. It was idiotic and sentimental, his looking at her in that way, and there was no occasion whatever for his saying good-night like a lover in a play. There was quite a little excitement and bustle of departure in the hall-way, as coats and cloaks were sought for, found, and donned. Jean stood by the large open fireplace, where a log lay smoldering, its red ashes still giving out a grateful heat, and at her side was Farr, hat in hand, a light summer overcoat on his arm. He spoke a few words to her as he took her hand in parting, and she looked up at him smiling and defiant. The girl's blue eyes were dark with unwonted excitement, her cheeks flushed with bright color, and Eleanor noted all this and found her impressions of the evening deepened. When the last guest had gone, Helen dropped down on the foot of the stairs. "Oh, how tired I am," she exclaimed. "Do put out the lamps in the drawing-room, Nat, like a good girl." Then she rose to her feet with a little sigh of weariness. "I think I am sleepy too," she said. "I wish I were," spoke Jean from before the fire, her whole expression eminently wide-awake. "Come to bed, Jeanie," laughed Helen, "and court sleep. Perhaps it will come to you if you do." Jean paused a moment by the hall table to select one from out of the mass of books and magazines collected there, and then followed Helen up the stairs. When she had reached her room she threw herself down in an easy-chair and opened her book. "You won't mind if I read for a while, will you, Nat? There is no use of thinking of going to sleep yet." Nathalie whistled very softly, at which Jean glanced swiftly up at her. "Eh, Jean? Love at first sight?" Jean blushed to the roots of her pretty hair, and there was an angry light in her eyes. "I wouldn't be a goose if I were you, Nathalie," she said scornfully. CHAPTER VII. A WALK IN THE SHRUBBERY. It was Sunday and Nan and Emily were sitting together on the vine-covered porch of the parsonage, trying to while away the long hour between church time and the midday dinner. Nan gave a prodigious yawn, and stretched herself out in the comfortable steamer chair. "Oh, dearie me," she sighed, "I wonder if it would be a crime for me to admit how bored I was in church this morning." "Well, I don't think it would be in very good taste, considering your father preached," replied Emily severely. "I can't help it if he did. I was tired, and moreover," crossly, "I am always bored." Emily raised her eyebrows. "I am afraid, Nan, your soul longs for Gregorian chants and tapering candles." "Of course it does; and acolytes, incense, and embroidered altar cloths. Yes, I admit it frankly, I should have belonged to The Church," she ended, with great emphasis. "I know, Em," she continued, after waiting a moment to observe the effect of her last words, "you will think it absurd; but, I tell you, I really envy the Lawrence girls. To think that they attend that dear, delightful Episcopal chapel, while I----" and the sentence ended with a laugh. "Why, Em, of course you won't sympathize with me, but I do think it is bad form." Emily looked really shocked. "Nan Birdsall, I am ashamed of you. What would uncle think of you?" "Well," replied Nan, with a perverse expression on her face, "I don't intend that the ministers' sons shall have it all their own way. I have just as good a right to live up to the old saying as any of them." Emily would not stay to listen to another word, and with a great air of dignity, she arose, and swept into the house. Very soon the soft tinkling of a bell told Nan that the noonday meal was ready. Old Mr. Birdsall stood at one end of the table, his hands folded on the back of the chair before him, waiting for Emily and Nan to appear. When they were come the long grace was spoken slowly and impressively, and no one watching Nan's demure face would have guessed at her outbreak of the morning. They were a somewhat incongruous trio, and what little conversation there was consisted chiefly of good-natured banter of Emily by the irrepressible Nan, to which Mr. Birdsall listened somewhat abstractedly. The dinner hour had not as yet assumed a position of importance to either of the girls, and as soon as possible they pushed back their chairs, and once more sought the shady porch. Emily gave one furtive glance over her shoulder to assure herself that her uncle was not following them, and then picked up a novel from a neighboring table, and opened it with a great show of interest. Nan watched the bit of deception, and a smile spread itself over her face. "Puss," she cried, stooping to lift up a little white kitten which was brushing against her skirt, "it is now our turn to be shocked and horrified." Her remark being received in contemptuous silence, for a while she played languidly with the little creature in her lap, then her hand dropped at her side, her head fell back against the cushions, and Nan was fast asleep. The air was heavy and drowsy, all about the insects hummed so lazily and the very atmosphere lulled one into forgetfulness. By and by, the crunching sound of footsteps on the graveled path roused Nan to sudden consciousness. "Oh! dear, Nan," Emily was whispering in a tone of suppressed excitement, "please wake up. Here comes Mr. Dudley. I forgot to tell you that I was going for a walk with him." "That's all right," Nan interrupted her sleepily. "I am going in so he won't see me," and lifting herself lazily from her chair, she slipped into the house through one of the French windows. Within the house there reigned the solemn stillness of the Day of Rest. The door of the study stood part-way open, and Nan could see her father lying on his lounge, his white head shining like silver against the dark leather of the cushion. She stole in on tip-toe to avoid awakening him, caught up a bright-colored afghan and threw it over him. "How sweet he looks," she thought with great tenderness, as she stooped and gently kissed him. She paused a moment by the large writing table to find, amid a litter of papers, an old hymnbook, shabby from long usage, and opening it marked the hymns selected for the evening service. Then she passed out and closed the door softly behind her. She waited a few moments until she heard Emily and Mr. Dudley leave the porch, then put on her hat, and started across the lawn to the manor. Coming out upon the drive-way she met Helen walking briskly along. "Well," she cried, "where are you going?" "To evening prayers, Nancy. Won't you come with me?" "Yes, indeed I will. I thought you never left the children Sunday afternoon." "I don't usually, but to-day I felt just in the humor for church." There was a note of sadness in Helen's tone, which ordinarily Nan would have readily detected, but to-day the girl was possessed by a sense of personal dissatisfaction and restlessness, and so, absorbed in her own mood, this was lost upon her. There was a pause of brief duration, then Helen drew a long breath, and resumed more lightly: "How sweet and sunny it is, isn't it, Nan? I love these first early days of summer when everything is so fresh and green. The country doesn't begin to look so lovely later in the season." "I suppose so," returned Nan laconically. "I am such a country girl that I don't half see the beauties about me. When you are so used to things I don't think you are apt to be so keenly alive to them." "I dare say that is true; you see I go away just enough to appreciate this dear place when I come back to it." "While I," grumbled Nan, "have never been away from Hetherford but two or three times in my whole life. One year is just like another. There is always father, deeply interested in church matters, and looking upon me as an enigma; and cross old Bridget who runs the house and disapproves of me. I often long to dance a jig before father and to throw something at Bridget's head, just to relieve the monotony." Helen laughed softly as Nan's grievances multiplied, knowing full well how it diminishes one's annoyances to be able to give voice to them. "Then Emily comes," continued Nan, with a scowl, "and tells me that my clothes are awful and that I look like a fright, and wonders why I can't cultivate a slight interest in men. I tell her," laughing dubiously, "that I would if I found them eager to do their share." "You silly child," and Helen squeezed Nan's arm affectionately. "I won't have you depreciate your dear self." But Nan was not to be so easily diverted. "I do hope that some day I shall see something of the world," she replied. "I would like to lead an exciting life, full of incident and adventure, and oh, dear me, who could lead one less so. I wish something new and interesting would happen." "O Nancy," Helen said to her gravely, "don't be so anxious to have things happen. It is so much better when they don't, little girl." Nan looked up at Helen and felt rebuked for her egotism, as she saw the shadow clouding her friend's pale face. Dissimilar as these two girls were in character, a very warm friendship existed between them. Helen dearly loved Nan for her ready wit, easy-going ways, warm heart, and sunny nature, and Nan simply adored Helen, looking up to her with the greatest admiration, and deferring readily to her judgment in all things. There was a very romantic side to Nan's nature, hidden away though it was, beneath so much nonsense and jollity, and Helen's love affair and its sad ending had touched her keenly. She thoroughly liked Guy, and he, on his part, had always shown a preference for her above the other girls. Perhaps he had guessed at her strong love for Helen and partisanship for himself, for to her alone had he spoken of Helen on his return from that last unhappy interview. His words had been few, but Nan had seen the real grief in his honest eyes, and her heart had ached for him. She made a pretty shrewd guess at the real state of affairs, and she found her firm belief, that Helen's heart belonged to Guy and that it would all come out right in the end, greatly strengthened by her friend's present unhappiness and discontent. To-day she was full of sympathy for Helen, but she respected her reticence too deeply to broach the subject, so she consoled herself with the thought that this mood scored a point in Guy's favor. Her reverie was broken in upon by Helen's voice saying gently: "I consider it a most fortunate thing, Nan, that I am carrying you off to church; I am sure the service will do us both good." "Well, there's room for improvement in me," laughed Nan. "You should have seen Em's face this morning when I told her that my one ambition was to imitate the proverbial minister's son." "Nancy, I am ashamed of you," Helen remonstrated, with a reluctant smile. "Come, be a good girl, for we are just at the church door. Let us give our hearts and minds to the service," she added with sweet gravity, "and we will see how much peace will come to us." "I will, dear," Nan whispered as they started up the aisle to the Lawrences' pew. The rector of St. Andrew's leaned somewhat toward ritualism, and no form nor observance that to his mind lent beauty and solemnity to the service was omitted. As the girls took their places the solemn chords of the Stabat Mater inclined their hearts to reverential prayer. In a moment more the doors of the vestry swung open and the organ took up the sweet strains of the soul-inspiring hymn, "Hark, hark, my soul." Slowly the choristers filed by; first the cross-bearer, his young face full of dignity, then the singers, two by two, and as their numbers swelled their fresh young voices filled the church. The grace and beauty of the Episcopal form of worship appealed to Nan. The rhythmic lines of the confessional, "We have erred and strayed from Thy ways like lost sheep," etc., moved her to a heartfelt penitence for her shortcomings, and inspired her with an earnest desire to live more nobly and unselfishly. One by one her petty trials took their flight, and only a sense of great peace remained. When the benediction had been pronounced and the girls had left the church, they were both somewhat subdued and silent. The slanting rays of the sun fell softly athwart the quaint old churchyard, and on the faintly stirring breeze was borne the sweet perfume of roses and honeysuckle which grew in such profusion against the low stone wall. Passing through the gateway they strolled side by side along the road. "I wish I could always attend St. Andrew's," mused Nan, slipping her hand within Helen's arm. "I really believe I would be a better girl. The ritual impresses me so deeply, and seems to bring religion home to me in such a convincing sort of way." "I don't think that is at all unnatural; but as time goes on, Nan, I believe you will find that your love for outside things will diminish, in proportion as your dependence upon what is deep and vital grows." "I would not fret about it in the least if it were not for my dear father," and Nan's face grew tender as she spoke, "but I know that this disposition of mine toward forms and symbols is a source of sorrow to him. He would have me a strong adherent to the old school of Presbyterianism, and he feels that my tendencies are leading me rapidly along the highway to Rome," and Nan's puzzled eyes met Helen's with a frank appeal for advice. Helen was silent for a moment, and then spoke slowly and meditatively. "Of course, Nan, each person has to decide such a question for himself, but it seems to me that when two people love each other dearly yet differ in their views, each should be willing to make some concessions and thus grow more generous and lenient with each other--Love is such a great power." "Indeed it is," cried big-hearted Nan, "and I know that the larger share of yielding should be mine, for dear father has grown old in his opinions, and it must be very hard for him to have me branch out for myself." They had reached a turn in the road where their paths diverged, and Nan asked: "You will come over and sing hymns this evening, won't you, Helen?" "Certainly. Are they coming over from the inn?" "I suppose so," and then with a friendly nod each went on her way. It was close upon eight o'clock that evening when Helen and Nathalie started out for the parsonage. The lovely twilight hour was almost over. High in the heavens rode the crescent moon, and, as the slowly fading daylight vanished, its white light penetrated the soft gloom which lay like a shroud over the manor park, and trees and lawns and winding paths came suddenly to life, as by the touch of a fairy wand. A sighing breeze stirred the leaves, from a fountain near at hand came the soft splash of falling waters and the night air vibrated gently with the myriad sounds of insect life. There was a rush and a scamper, and around the corner of the house the children raced and threw themselves upon Helen, with a shout of delight. "You naughty youngsters," chided their sister gently. "You ought to be in bed this minute, everyone of you." "We's going right off," cried Gladys breathlessly. "On'y we wants to be kissed first." Helen stooped down to fulfill their clamorous demand. "Now, be off," she laughed, straightening herself up and shaking a mildly reproachful finger at them, "and don't forget to go in and say good-night to Auntie," and then she and Nathalie proceeded leisurely on their way. They found the vine-covered porch of the parsonage quite overflowing with people. Wendell Churchill and Farr stepped hastily forward, and, after an interchange of cordial greetings, found seats for them. "How late you are," called Nan, from somewhere in the background. "I thought you were not coming." Helen left apologies and explanations to Nathalie, and turned to answer an inquiry from Farr in regard to Jean. "I am sorry to say she is deep in a book," she said, looking up at him with a smile, "and we could not persuade her to leave it. However, she promised to follow us shortly." "And does Miss Jean always keep her promises?" Farr asked lightly. "I think she does," Helen rejoined, meeting his eyes for an instant. "Come, Helen. Start some of the good old hymns." At Mollie's suggestion Helen's clear soprano took up the refrain of "Lead, kindly light," and the others joined in heartily. From long practice their voices blended beautifully. They had been singing for nearly an hour when Farr rose quietly to his feet. "Miss Lawrence," he said, bending over her chair, "don't you think Miss Jean should be brought to a realizing sense of her delinquencies and coerced into making some reparation?" "Indeed, I do," she assented with a frank laugh, "but what are we going to do about it?" "I don't think my desertion would be noticed if I should go in search of her," Farr suggested, lowering his voice. "Do you?" Helen gave him a swift glance of amusement. "'I would not hear thine enemy say so.' But go and see what your persuasive powers can do." "You have put me on my mettle now," he rejoined, as he stepped over the low railing and dropped noiselessly on to the grass below, and it was with a sense of amusement that he recognized his own impatience and eagerness as he set out for the manor. He paused to light a cigarette, then strode on over the soft turf, revolving many and varied thoughts in his mind. The brightness died out of his eyes, and the lines of the mouth were stern and compressed, for to-night the past with its perplexities and disappointments rose vividly before him. In his thirty years of life fortune had dealt him some severe blows and had set him adrift with more doubts than beliefs, more cynicism than sentiment. His was a very reserved and sensitive temperament, and under the garb of laziness and indifference his troubles were jealously hidden from curious eyes. The man's best self lay dormant, and some influence was sorely needed to rouse him to the necessity of facing his difficulties and conquering them before they should conquer him. He had left the hedge behind him, and, as he came out on the drive-way, a gleam of light from the manor house shot out through the trees and brightened his path. Involuntarily he started, and a vision of Jean Lawrence's face came between his mind and all painful memories and robbed them of their sting. Reaching the veranda steps, he threw away his cigarette, mounted them and crossed to where the outer door stood hospitably open, revealing the wide hall within, its shadowy recesses softly penetrated by the light from a quaint lamp swung from the low, studded ceiling. He lifted the hand knocker, and let it fall, then pushing his hat back on his head, stared meditatively before him, while waiting for a response to his summons. Not a sound broke the stillness, and at length he took his hat in his hand and stepped across the threshold, and made his way to the entrance of the drawing-room, across which the portières were partly drawn. His footfalls on the soft rugs scarce heralded his approach. The scene which met his eyes was indeed a pretty one, and for a brief space he stood motionless. On a low divan in a far corner of the room, Jean had thrown herself with unconscious grace of pose. The warm coloring of the Oriental rug and bright-colored cushions made a charming background for the slender white-clad figure. A tall lamp shed a bright light across the open page of her book, on which her eyes were riveted. Her face was flushed with interest, her soft hair in fine disorder. Farr noted everything, from the golden head, resting upon the silken cushions, to the dainty slippered foot, just peeping beneath the hem of her gown. A slight movement on his part discovered him to Jean, and she started up in dismay. "Well, Mr. Farr, you did give me a fright," she cried, laughing confusedly, for his steady gaze disconcerted her somewhat. "I should think you would be ashamed of yourself for having startled me so." "I am," recovering himself with a slight effort, for the swift change that had swept over Jean's expressive face at his unexpected appearance had set his heart to beating with unwonted emotion. "You will forgive me, will you not?" he finished, as he stood at her side and looked penitently down at her. "Why, yes, but I don't advise your making a practice of strolling into people's houses, and appearing suddenly in their drawing-rooms; you might be mistaken for a burglar, and I have heard," with a malicious little laugh, "that it is unpleasant to be shot." "Oh, come now, Miss Jean, you are very unfair to me; if you only knew the real facts of the case." But Jean was still a little resentful, for she felt that she had been taken at a disadvantage. "Really?" she answered incredulously, with a mischievous shrug of the shoulders. "Yes, very," he protested, with a glance of amusement into her upraised eyes. "I did everything I could to gain admission in the regulation way, but was quite unsuccessful." "What a shame," she said, interrupting him with softened voice. "I suppose the maids were all out in the garden for a stroll this fine night, and I was so absorbed in my book that I didn't hear the knocker." "And then," he resumed, with a valiant disregard of the truth, "I came in making as much ado as I conveniently could, without calling out or overturning the furniture." "Under the circumstances I see that you must be forgiven. Won't you be seated, Mr. Farr? I don't know what I have been thinking of, to allow you to remain standing all this while." "Thank you, no. On the other hand, I want to persuade you to arise." "Why?" "Because I am here on a mission. I have come to reproach you for not keeping your promise to join us at the parsonage." "And to whom am I indebted for this kind and flattering interest?" "None other than myself." "Oh, you are too good," she cried laughingly, springing to her feet, and making him a sweeping obeisance. "If that is your honest opinion, Miss Jean, suppose you prove it by going back with me." "I can't be a traitor to my words," and she tossed her book on to the table, and preceded him out into the hall-way. "Is it cool enough for a wrap?" Farr surveyed her muslin gown with a critical eye. "Indeed, it is." "All right," she yielded carelessly, "but I never take cold." She picked up a coat from the rack, and Farr helped her on with it, and then they wandered out into the night. "Is it not delicious?" Jean sighed, as they sauntered leisurely along. "It seems so to me," he returned, with a glance into the girl's eyes. "Miss Jean," he began, after a brief silence, "Did you not tell me once that there was a pretty walk through the shrubbery?" "Yes?" with a note of interrogation. "In which direction would it lead us, if we should take it now?" "To the parsonage, eventually, but," hesitatingly, "by a much longer way than by the path through the hedge." "The longer, the better--for me." "I don't know what they will think has become of us," she demurred. Farr laughed easily. "I never trouble myself too much about what people think." "I don't doubt that you are in no way different from the rest of your sex. I believe it is generally conceded that selfishness is its salient characteristic." "A popular fallacy. Do I not prove it to you, Miss Jean?" "Oh, of course you are the exception that proves the rule," she returned with gentle sarcasm. He stopped suddenly, midway in the path they were traversing, and looked straight down at her. There was a ring of deeper feeling in his voice as he spoke: "I want you to think just as well of me as you can, and I cannot imagine having a more earnest desire than that I might always prove worthy of your kindest thoughts." There was a tinge of defiance in Jean's manner as she answered him flippantly: "Don't you think I would be using my time rather aimlessly, Mr. Farr, were I to give it up to thoughts of you?" An expression of keen displeasure crossed Farr's face. "I beg your pardon," he said stiffly. Instantly Jean repented of her foolish words, and was heartily sorry to have wounded her companion, but the slight tremor at her heart warned her that to confess would be unwise. "I think of you quite as much as you deserve," she ventured with a nervous little laugh, and she began to walk on toward the shrubbery at a brisker pace. Farr made no immediate rejoinder, and when he spoke again it was in an altered tone. "There is quite a fragrance to this box-wood, is there not?" "Yes, indeed, and a very pleasant one. The perfume is heavy these warm nights after the sun has been shining on it all day." "You have no idea what a charm the country has for me. I have really been in it so little since I was a boy." "But your home is in the country, is it not?" "Yes, but my family spend the winters in Washington, and our country home is only open during the summer months. I don't often get a chance to go down there. My mother keeps the house pretty well filled, for my two married brothers live at home." "And have you no sisters?" Farr's voice, which had sounded a little cold when speaking of his home, changed to sudden tenderness. "Yes, one, and she is the dearest little girl in the world." "I suppose you love her dearly, and do your best to spoil her?" "Well, Clarisse and I are certainly great chums," he assented. "How nice it must be to have an older brother. We girls have always regretted so that we did not have one, although," with a sad little sigh, "we used to have a dear old friend who was just as good as a brother; but he has gone away now." "I suppose that there are times when they are of some use," said Farr, "although men are so hopelessly selfish." "I would not think of contradicting you," Jean laughingly averred. "Come, we are talking a great deal, and not making much headway, and it must be growing late." "I am all tangled up in this maze of by-paths. In which direction is the parsonage from here?" "If you don't mind climbing a stone wall, we can turn to our right, and take a short cut, and we will be there in no time." Farr agreed, and they walked on in silence until they had emerged from the shrubbery into a small clearing, skirted on the further side by a wall, its line broken at a certain point where some stones had been thrown down. Farr sprang lightly across, and turned back to assist Jean. Just then the moon, which had slipped under a cloud, shone out again, its soft rays falling directly on the girl's face. She had one foot already on the first stepping stone when he put up his hand to stay her. "Well," she asked, as he did not speak. "What is it? Are you not going to help me?" "Of course I am, but," leaning a little toward her, "this wall is a sort of a Rubicon. Once crossed we cannot go back, for we are then in the parsonage grounds. It has been a pleasant walk, and one to be remembered, has it not?" "Yes," she murmured, with a quick indrawing of her breath. "I wish----" he began impetuously. "Mr. Farr," she interposed with gentle decision, "will you please help me over." He gave her his hand, and gravely assisted her to the ground on the other side. They were nearing the porch, and already the sounds of gay voices reached them through the stillness of the summer night, when Jean turned abruptly to the man at her side. "By the way, Mr. Farr, we are to have a visitor shortly, and I hope you men will help us to make it pleasant for her." He uttered some polite commonplace, and Jean went on: "Perhaps you know Helen's friend, a Miss Stuart of New York." A sudden recollection flashed through Farr's mind. "Not one chance in a thousand that it should be the same," he thought, as he answered indifferently, "I think not." "I thought possibly you might have met," she said carelessly. "She seems to know almost everyone." He half turned to put a question to her, but already they were at the vine-covered porch, and Nan's jolly greeting lost him the opportunity. CHAPTER VIII. NAN REBELS. Into the days that followed were crowded more gay doings than the quiet village of Hetherford had ever seen before. Old Dr. Birdsall shook his head disapprovingly over all this unseemly frivolity, but Aunt Helen's gentle voice championed the young folks, and persuaded him to allow Nan to join in the good times. The naval officers were in constant demand whenever they were not on duty, and at the end of the week the other men came out from town, and their advent was the signal for a series of rides, drives, walks, tennis matches, and amusements of every description. Emily pronounced herself perfectly satisfied, and when Nan and Mollie grumbled over a few of the changes that had followed in the train of all these merry-makings, she declared them heretics and disdainfully turned her back upon them. It was after a day on the _Vortex_ that Eleanor, Nan, and Mollie sat together in Eleanor's box of a room in the inn, and held a council of war. They had had a beautiful sail. There was a "smoky sou'wester" blowing, and Uncle Sam's schooner, decked in holiday attire, had flown before the wind like a bird. Captain Dodd proved a genial, pleasant host, and Mrs. Dodd's heart had been quite won by Helen's notice of her three-year-old boy, a jolly little chap, whose tow-colored hair showed in strange contrast to his sunburned face. No stone had been left unturned to make the day successful, and as the girls were all good sailors, the stiff breeze and careening of the boat only added zest to their enjoyment. However, nothing in this world is quite perfect. Nan and Mollie scowled at the general tendency to wander off in pairs. Mollie termed it bad form, while Nan sniffed, and called it utterly ridiculous. Finally Nan was roused to action. She called to Jean, who, with Farr at her side, was leaning against the rail well up forward, and demanded a recitation. Jean complied somewhat reluctantly. She stood in the midst of the little group, one hand holding fast to the companion-way to steady herself, the other tucked away down into the pocket of her reefer. She hesitated a moment, searching about in her mind. Her choice at length fell upon one, dearly loved by all the girls, called "Sister Felicité." The beautiful lines were spoken with the greatest simplicity, but there was a depth of pathos in the girl's low voice that went straight to the hearts of her hearers. The short silence that followed her last words was more flattering in its import than would have been the loudest applause. There was a slight pallor in the girl's face when she had finished, and during the rest of the afternoon she was very subdued; and Farr, who had been deeply impressed by her rendering of this sad and beautiful poem, seemed to share her mood. Nan, and Mollie, who were both a little rebellious at the turn affairs were taking, noticed this incident, and so the council of war had been called. Nan's conscience was quite clear, and she plunged bluntly into the conversation. "Now that Jean has turned sentimental and emotional, I think it is high time for us to take matters in hand. Em always has been a backslider from the compact, but when Jean begins that sort of thing it is going a little too far." "Punning is sadly out of place, Nan, on such a serious subject," laughed Eleanor, not sorry for an excuse to interrupt the discussion. Nan was thoroughly in earnest, and beyond a chuckle at her own discomfiture, she took no notice of Eleanor's frivolity. "I don't think love affairs are much fun, anyway," sighed Mollie. "Surely Helen's was miserable, and only resulted in making everybody unhappy and uncomfortable." "That strikes me as a trifle pessimistic, Moll," said Eleanor. "Happy marriages may be rare, but it can't be denied that they exist." "Oh! dearie me," groaned Nan, "when you talk like that you make me feel as if the world were turning upside down. I never dreamed of it being a question of love affairs, and marriages." "I was not referring to anyone in particular," Eleanor protested hastily, "we were merely arguing in an abstract way. Weren't we, Moll?" "All I meant was," Nan went on in a dolorous voice, "that we have lost our originality when we begin to act just like other girls--flirting, and all that sort of rot. We used to have fun in the good old days when we all staid together. There were never any discussions as to how we should walk or drive for everybody was willing to go with everybody else. _Tête-à-têtes_ were unheard of, and nobody was ever silly." Mollie's sentiments chimed in with Nan, but Eleanor's assent was somewhat slower in coming. "I suppose it is only a question of time," she said, "for the _Vortex_ can't be here much longer, and Mr. Churchill always takes the _Sylph_ back to town in September. Then we can settle down, and have a good old-fashioned time during 'the autumn.'" "When will Cliff go?" Nan asked, with a sly laugh. Eleanor turned her head away to hide the tell-tale color that rose in her face. "Oh! come, Nancy, your imagination is running away with you. Nothing will satisfy you short of the banishment of the sex." "Qui s'excuse, s'accuse," quoted Mollie in an undertone. Eleanor laughed in spite of herself. She pushed back her chair, and crossed to the open window. Along the dusty highroad Cliff came sauntering. When he was just in front of the inn he looked up, and caught sight of Eleanor. He raised his hat, and called out to her to come down, and go for a stroll before supper. She gave him a curt refusal, and turned back into the room. "You shouldn't punish Cliff for my impertinence," reproved Nan. "It was not his fault." Eleanor frowned and spoke impatiently: "Cliff is only a boy, and a rather foolish one at that. But to continue. All this nonsense, as you call it, Nan, will be of brief duration, and my advice is to make the best of it." "There is a worse time coming," Mollie declared. "The _Vortex_ has wrought changes enough, but I don't suppose we will recognize the old place at all when the magnificent Miss Stuart arrives." "Sufficient unto the day," said Nan. "Well, good-by, girls I must be off." When the door had closed upon her two friends, Eleanor went back to the window, and leaning against the casement, looked abstractedly out. She thought of Cliff, and the disappointed look his face had worn when she spoke to him so rudely. Certainly Cliff had come under the spell that was over them all this eventful summer. She had striven to deter him, but in spite of her best efforts, he had found a moment in which to tell her of his love. To this she had lent the coldest ear, holding out to him no hope whatever. Cliff had listened very patiently, but there was something in his quiet refusal to accept this answer as final that had made Eleanor, woman of the world as she was, feel singularly helpless. They had taken up life again just where they had left it before Cliff spoke, and since then no reference had been made to the matter. The smile had quite died out of Eleanor's face. She went over to her writing table and picked up a little note which Cliff had written her on some trifling matter. She looked at it for a moment, then half raised it to her lips. With a shame-faced laugh she dropped it back among the letters on her table and turned impatiently away. * * * * * One sultry morning toward the end of July, as Helen sat sewing on the upper balcony, a maid came out through the French window with a small tray in her hand, on which lay a yellow envelope. Helen leaned forward and picked up the telegram. "Thank you, Susie. Is the boy waiting?" "Yes, Miss." "Well, you may go. I will bring the answer down myself when I have it ready." When the maid had withdrawn Helen tore open the envelope. The message read thus: "Can you come to town for the night? Want to see you. Please don't disappoint. L. S." Helen read it through twice. "Oh I should love to go," she thought. "I wonder if Auntie or the girls would object." She folded the telegram and fitted it into the envelope, and then sat looking absent-mindedly at the address, the while her face wore a puzzled look. Her indecision lasted for an instant only, and then she sprang up and ran through the hall-way to Mrs. Dennis' room. Aunt Helen met her request with a ready consent, and in a moment the little boy was riding off to the station with Helen's answer carefully stowed away in the pocket of his coat. As Helen entered her room a glance at the clock told her that a little celerity would enable her to catch the twelve forty-five express, and she went to work with a will to collect her traps. She was in the midst of packing when a knock came at the door, and Jean, without waiting for permission, entered. She looked around the disordered room with a questioning glance. "What is the matter?" she asked. Her sister answered from the depths of her closet: "I am going to town unexpectedly, and you are just the girl I want to see, Jeanie, for I have a lot of things to say to you before I leave." "Where are you going to stay?" "With Lillian." Jean's face fell, and she spoke coldly. "What train do you take?" "The twelve forty-five, and I haven't a moment to spare. It must be noon now." "It is. The village clock struck as I came in." "Oh, dear! Put those things in the valise, Jean, won't you, while I hunt for my hat and gloves. The carriage will be at the door in five minutes." Jean complied, and, as she was making room for the last few articles in the already crowded valise, Helen came and stood beside her. "Dearie," she said, as she drew on her gloves, "will you please be very attentive to Aunt Helen while I am away, and not leave her too much alone? And, oh, Jean, do look after the children. Don't have them off your mind for a moment. I am always so afraid that something will happen to them when I am not here." Jean laughed cheerily. "That is nonsense, Helen. Why in the world should you worry? Of course I will look after them." "I know you always do, dear; only I wanted to remind you." "Well, you need not be anxious. When will you return?" "To-morrow, I think. You might have the carriage meet the afternoon express. Now I must fly." Jean caught up the valise, and carried it downstairs, while her sister went to say good-by to Mrs. Dennis. The carriage was already at the door when Helen came out on the veranda. She stopped a moment to kiss the boys and charge them to be good, and caught Gladys up in her arms. "Do you want to go to the station with sister?" "Course I do," enthusiastically. Helen put the child in the carriage, and then stepped in beside her. "Is my valise in, Jean?" "Yes, dear. Good-by, and have a good time." "I will," replied Helen, as Nathalie took her place on the front seat and gathered up the reins. "Remember, Jean, you have the entire responsibility of the children, and do not let Gladys out of your sight." Jean nodded smilingly, and stood on the steps and watched the carriage until a turn in the road bid it from view. Then, as she slowly made her way into the house, the light died out of her face, and involuntarily she sighed. "I wish I did not distrust Lillian Stuart as I do," she thought. "It is so unfounded--as yet." CHAPTER IX. A FLYING MACHINE AND WHAT CAME OF IT. Early that same afternoon Eleanor and Nan dropped in at the manor and suggested a game of tennis. The Lawrences acquiesced, and after a search for balls and rackets they wandered down to the courts. Jean stopped behind for a moment to find the children and tell them to follow her, for nurse had begged a holiday and had gone off for the afternoon. The sun's hot rays beat down upon the unshaded courts, discouraging even Nan's enthusiasm; so, after one set played with flagging energy, they threw down their rackets and retired to a pretty little summerhouse, just at the foot of the terrace. By and by, when they were cool again, Eleanor arose and suggested that they should stroll down toward the station to meet Cliff and Dick, who were coming up early. Jean alone demurred. It was sweet and peaceful within the shelter of the little summerhouse, and the prospect of a long hot walk along the dusty road was not tempting. Most opportunely she remembered Helen's injunction in regard to the children, and pleading this excuse she sent the others off with a half-promise that she might join them at the inn later, if nurse should get home in good season. When Jean was alone, she leaned back in her comfortable corner with an air of great contentment. She rested her elbow on the ledge of the seat, and propping her chin in her hand gazed dreamily, unseeingly out across the sunlit lawn. The children were playing under the shade of a widespreading elm, and the clear treble of their young voices was a pleasant accompaniment to her happy thoughts. Now and again, as some look or gesture of Farr's recurred to her with peculiar distinctness, a shy and tremulous joy dawned in her face, and lingered there. Ah, Jean, such moments are indeed golden, when in your dreams all life seems sweet and fair. Do not hasten the inevitable awakening, for with the realization comes ever a sting to make the heart ache and throb. In after days this peaceful scene will live with you, the memory of its happiness haunt and mock you, until you fain would thrust it from you! Meanwhile Valentine Farr was making his way down the terraced pathway in search of Jean, his heart strangely stirred with the thought of the sweet voice that would speak to him, of the pair of blue eyes that would welcome him. Then, as he walked blithely on, there fell on him the shadow of a memory fraught with pain. He threw back his head and drew a deep breath, as he squarely faced the difficulties that lay before him. He knew that before he might dare to hope, before he might dare to speak to Jean, there was much that must be told her, and although his heart grew heavy within him, the look of resolution on his grave face betokened a strong determination to overcome all obstacles so far as lay within his power. He was descending the last terrace when little Gladys ran out from her shady playground and, holding out her arms to him, begged for a ride. He caught her up and swinging her on to his shoulder held her there securely as he hastened on toward the summerhouse, whence he had seen a flutter of Jean's white gown. Gladys was wild with excitement, and her shrill little cries of pleasure roused Jean from her reverie. She shifted her position a little to see what was going on, and then started up and moved forward to the arched doorway of the summerhouse and stood waiting for them. From her elevated position, Gladys waved frantically to her and then flung her arms tightly around Farr's neck. "That is hot work, little one," he declared with a laugh, as he deposited the child on the ground and raised his hat to Jean. "Oh, it was grand!" cried Gladys, capering around and shaking her golden curls into a tangled mass. Jean smiled and extended her hand to Farr, but her words were for Gladys. "I have not a doubt of it, darling," she said, "but I fear Mr. Farr found you a very heavy load to carry this hot day." Gladys' head drooped, and she gave Farr a shy glance from out of the corners of her eyes. "Was I vewy heavy?" she asked, in such a plaintive little voice that he had hard work to keep his face straight as he hastened to reassure her. "Is not this a sylvan retreat, and are you not glad you came?" Jean queried, looking over her shoulder at him as she led the way into the summerhouse. "Glad!" he echoed. "Glad does not begin to express it." "Wait until you see how sleepy and stupid I am before you make such a rash assertion. Evidently you are in no way disheartened," she added, as Farr, looking somewhat incredulous, took his place beside her on the low seat. "Not one whit," he replied softly. "It would be a very novel experience for me to find you stupid." Jean turned a quizzical glance upon him. "What an extravagant compliment. Where did you learn such gallantry?" "When first I saw you," he returned, and although he spoke lightly there was an undercurrent of earnestness in his tone. Gladys, who had been chasing a butterfly around and around the summerhouse, now stopped at the doorway and peeped in. She lingered a moment, tilting her head, first on one side and then on the other, and smiling encouragingly on the twain. Then, as neither Jean nor Farr took any notice of her, she twisted about and scampered off toward the playground. Larry and Willie hailed her with delight, and anyone watching the three little heads so close together would have known that there was mischief brewing. "I know some splendid fun," Willie was saying in a cautiously lowered voice. "I read lots about it in a book. It's all about flyin' machines an' human birds. Let's go over to the orchard, an' I'll tell you how to play it." "Me, too, Willie, please," piped Gladys. "Oh, yes. You can come along, 'cause you're just the person we might want," and Willie's air of importance was most impressive. "I guess Jean won't mind," said Larry. Willie was far too excited to vouchsafe a reply, and the children scurried along toward the orchard. Their route lay past the summerhouse, and when they were opposite it some pin-prick of conscience made them pause and look within. Jean and Farr were deeply absorbed in conversation, and it was quite apparent, even to their childish minds, that their sister would never notice their absence. Of one accord they broke into a run, and did not subside into a more demure pace until the shrubbery hid them from view. "You see," said Willie, when he had recovered his breath, "it is the greatest fun to play birds. All we've got to do is to use our arms right, an' then we can fly good enough. It said so in the book," he ended with a wise little nod of his head. Gladys' eyes grew big with wonder. "Can I fly, too?" she pleaded. "Course you can. You're just the most principal." Gladys beamed upon him, and her face wore a proud smile. To have Willie call her "the most principal" was a very deep and far-reaching compliment. Willie heaved a sigh of relief when, after scrambling over the stone wall, they were at last within the orchard. "Now, nobody can find us. We've all got to learn to fly. See, Larry, you just flop your arms so. They've got to be our wings." "Don't guess I'se got any wings," sighed Gladys, "'cause they don't f'y me a bit." Willie and Larry were racing around the orchard, swinging their arms in the air until they looked like animated wind-mills. Gladys trotted after them, striving to imitate their motions until her little legs and arms grew very weary. Then she stopped and stood watching them disconsolately. "I don't fink you games any fun at all," she exclaimed, in an aggrieved tone, as the boys ran up to her puffing and panting from their exertions. "You don't f'y a bit like birdies, any more nor I do." Willie eyed her with great scorn. "Oh, you're only a baby. Course you can't do anything." "You said I was most principal," Gladys reminded him, with quivering lips. "Oh, I say," Larry broke in, "I'll tell you what we'll do, Will. We'll play she's a baby bird, an' then we'll teach her to fly. We must put her up in a tree, an' then pretend to shove her out of the nest, just the way the mamma bird does." Gladys' face brightened, and she smiled sunnily. "P'r'aps," objected tender-hearted Willie, "she might tumble herself an' break her wings." Larry scouted the idea. "You're a regular muff, Will. Gladys ain't afraid; are you, Gladys?" "Course I aren't," cried Gladys stoutly. After an exciting and somewhat heated discussion, the boys finally arrived at a satisfactory decision as to the best way of getting Gladys up into a tree, and, in the midst of much chaffing and some wrangling, a rustic bench was drawn to the foot of a gnarled old apple tree, and the difficult task was begun. "Oh, dear!" ejaculated Willie, very red and very warm, "She's a terrible heavy bird." They were in a perilous position, and Gladys' burst of laughter nearly brought them all to the ground. "Guess I eated too many worms," she said. When at last she was safely perched on a projecting branch, Willie clambered down and drew away the bench, and Larry, sitting astride another branch, assumed the rôle of master of ceremonies. "Now, little bird," he said authoritatively, "I ain't goin' to bring you any more worms to eat, an' you just got to learn to fly yourself. You must flap your wings like this, an' when I count three you must fly away." Gladys' first attempt to follow these instructions nearly upset her, but she regained her balance and gripping tight hold of an overhanging limb turned a troubled face toward her brother. "I guess my wings is gwowed w'ong." "Cause there ain't any feathers on 'em, I s'pose," giggled Larry. This sally proved too much for Gladys, and flinging back her head she burst into a merry peal of laughter. In her sudden movement her little hands lost their hold on the limb, and plunging forward she fell heavily to the ground. One sharp cry and then the child lay still and silent, her little white face upturned. "Oh!" gasped Willie, "p'r'aps she's broke her wings." Larry slipped quickly down from the tree, and leaned anxiously over his little sister's prostrate form. "Get up, Gladys," he pleaded, and then, as the child did not stir, he began to cry piteously. For an instant Willie stood irresolute, his hands tightly clinched, his ruddy face grown pale with fear. "I'm going to find Jean," he said, and turned and started on a run toward the shrubbery. Larry caught hold of him and clung to him in an agony of fear. "I'm awfully scared, Willie. Please don't leave me." Willie shook him off impatiently, and pointed a reproachful finger to where Gladys lay in an unnatural stillness, and then, without another word, he was gone. * * * * * During all this time Jean had not once thought of the children, and Helen's injunctions had been completely forgotten. While Farr was waiting an opportunity to broach the subject that was uppermost in his mind, Jean herself opened the way for him. She had been telling him in her happiest vein of numberless incidents of her childish days; laughing outright at the memory of many a scrape and frolic, and speaking with a pathetic quiver in her voice as she showed him the reverse side of the picture, recalling those dreary days when to the poor little orphaned Lawrences, in their desolation, it seemed that the light of their lives had been forever darkened. As Farr listened to the innocent recital, told in Jean's own forceful dramatic way, he found his heart growing very tender, yet sad withal. It made him feel infinitely far away from her to hear her speak thus lovingly and trustfully of her family. Ah, yes, love was indeed the keynote of life at the manor. Farr had never realized this more strongly than he did to-day as he mentally contrasted the happy atmosphere, the tender relationships of Jean's home life, with his own unloved, unhappy boyhood. So deep was he in thought that he did not notice that Jean had ceased speaking, until she turned and called him by name. "Mr. Farr, I have been very egotistical and I want you to do me a great favor to prove that you have forgiven me." "I would find it hard to refuse you." "Do you remember that day down on the cliffs, so long ago?" Farr signified his assent, and she continued: "Well, that day you said that perhaps sometime you would tell me something of your life." Farr's face flushed with gratification, and he would have spoken but she stopped him almost imperiously. "I have thought that your 'perhaps' signified a great deal; that it was put in to save yourself in case, on further acquaintance with me, you felt that you did not want to give me your confidence, and I confess," looking up at him with a reproachful smile, "that I have been not a little hurt by your silence." "Please don't say that, Miss Jean; and do you know that, strangely enough, I came here to-day to tell you--to tell you that miserable story, but I scarcely knew how to begin it." He paused a moment, and then resumed bitterly: "I never knew half how miserable the story would sound to you until I listened to you this afternoon, and realized all that I had missed out of my life." Jean looked at him sympathetically, and her eyes urged him to continue, although she did not speak. "I am going to try not to bore you with any complaints, Miss Jean, and I must beg you not to be distressed if I speak plainly in regard to my family, with whom I am on exceedingly bad terms." "Surely that does not include Clarisse?" "Oh, no; not Clarisse, bless her heart. She and I have always stood faithfully by each other. My troubles began when my father died. I was quite a little chap at the time, but I loved my poor old governor dearly. My mother is a woman of great strength of character and with an unbounded love of power, and she and I were decidedly antagonistic. My father, who was the mildest of men, had the greatest admiration for her and in most things yielded readily to her stronger will, but where I was concerned he took a firm stand; so, although I was in great awe of my mother, I always had a refuge in my father. My older brothers, Lansing and Fred, never took to me at all. They were wise in their day and generation, and even when they were youngsters studied to please, and so in our quarrels and disputes my mother invariably took their part. I felt the injustice without being able to reason about it, and grew daily more surly and defiant. From the day my father died I had a very bad time of it, and was always in disgrace. I know I was by no means blameless, but there was something in my mother's cold disregard of me that roused a very demon of defiance in me. Clarisse was the only person in the world whom I honestly loved, and the first serious trouble with my mother was on her account," and even at this day Farr's face grew black at the remembrance. "It was a rainy day, and we children were all playing in the nursery. Clarisse was just recovering from an illness, and was not yet very strong. In some way she accidentally broke a new boat of Fred's. He was angry and, after scolding her until she began to cry, finally struck her across the face. I sprang toward him, my blind rage lending me unusual strength, and beat him unmercifully. Lansing, nurse, and Clarisse set up a great hue and cry, and in the midst of it all my mother walked into the room. Fred, who certainly did present a rather battered appearance, rushed to her and bawled out a garbled version of the affair and I slunk off into a corner, looking thoroughly guilty, I have not a doubt. My mother did not wait for any explanation, but summarily sent Clarisse and myself to Coventry. I might have forgiven her for the injustice to myself. I was so used to it as to have hardly noticed it, but I never forgave the unkindness to poor little Clarisse." There was a brief silence, broken at length by Jean. "I cannot understand it, Mr. Farr; surely a mother must love all her children." "I suppose my mother did in her way. I do not tell you this, Miss Jean, to prejudice you against her nor to exonerate myself, but only to, in a measure, explain subsequent events. There was never any sympathy between us. My manner, my character, my very looks were distasteful to her, and she made no attempt to conceal this from me. Up to the time of this occurrence I had had moments of feeling very contrite, when I had striven to overcome my faults; but from that time I hardened myself and never tried to break down the barrier that had been raised. Clarisse shared my feeling to a great extent, but she was far too gentle and loving to oppose my mother. She did her best to soften me and to prevent circumstances from embittering me. As I grew older my relationship with my family became more and more strained, and it was my great ambition to enter the navy and cut adrift from my home. When finally I broached the subject to my mother, I learned for the first time that my father had left his entire estate, which was a considerable one, to my mother, and that I was entirely dependent upon her. My mother was exceedingly generous in those matters, and in justice to her I must say that, however much she may have denied me her affection, she always treated me most liberally in a material way. I had been given every advantage without stint, and had been brought up in the greatest comfort and luxury, and without any adequate knowledge of the value of money. She did not favor the idea of my entering the navy, but I was troublesome at home, so she made a concession and I was allowed to go to Annapolis. In the meantime my brothers had obediently followed the careers my mother had marked out for them, and having furthermore married in accordance with her wishes, she provided each of them with a most liberal allowance, retaining, however, a controlling hand in their affairs. Those years at Annapolis were the happiest I had ever known. I had been very much touched by my mother's yielding, and when I was at home I did my best not to annoy or antagonize her in any way, and we really got along very smoothly." Farr had reached a difficult point in his story, and hesitated a moment to mentally review the past, and then began again in the same quiet voice that had characterized his telling of it so far. "The summer preceding my senior year I went home to find stopping in the house a distant cousin of mine, a very nice pretty girl, whom I shortly discovered my mother had selected to be her third daughter-in-law. Then I revolted. In the first place Carrie, poor girl, was quite ignorant of the scheme and felt no interest whatever in me, and----" He broke off undecidedly, and looked with thoughtful eyes out across the level tennis courts. There was one thing he could not quite make up his mind to recount to Jean. The memory of it was growing faint (he could not but smile a little grimly as he thus argued to himself), and why rake up that disagreeable part of his past. In truth, how could he tell clear-eyed, pure-hearted Jean of that other! "Well?" interrogated Jean, cutting short his brief reverie. His indecision was at an end. He straightened himself, squared his shoulders, and answered with almost a show of relief. "Well, the very fact that I was to be compelled to marry aroused such a tempest of resentment within me that I had no room for any other emotion. For several weeks the atmosphere was thunderous, and at the end of that time the storm broke. I boldly announced my determination to remain single. My mother--well, she did not spare me. She told me I had always been a most unnatural and ungrateful son; that I had deliberately and intentionally thwarted her in every possible way without once considering the duty that I owed to her. She gave me to understand most emphatically that, from the day I finished my course at Annapolis, she would consider her obligations to me at an end. That I might go where I pleased, do what I pleased; but, that her home was no longer mine." "Oh, how cruel!" escaped from Jean. Her little hands were tightly clenched, and her eyes flashed indignantly. "It did seem rather hard, especially just at that time," he returned slowly, some unexpected thought lending an expression peculiarly somber and grave in his face. "But since then I have often thought that I gave my mother a great deal of provocation." "By not marrying according to her desire?" asked Jean, a little quickly. Farr looked straight in her eyes for a moment before answering dryly: "That was certainly a great factor; you see Carrie was an heiress, and owned a lot of property adjoining ours." "Oh!" was all Jean said, but the monosyllable was most expressive. Farr laughed light-heartedly. He had been wrought up by this opening of a long-closed chapter in his life, and it was a relief to have the tension relaxed. "I have never for one instant regretted it, and certainly now----" "You haven't finished your story," Jean interrupted with but scant courtesy, "please go on." "There is not much more to tell, and I fear, too, that I am tiring you. No? well I took my mother at her word, and from that day to this I have never darkened her door. It came hardest on poor little Clarisse, I think," he went on sadly; "she had learned to depend upon me, and when she found that I was going to desert her she broke down completely. It wrung my heart to leave her, but it had to be done. I never like to think of that scene." "Poor Clarisse!" murmured Jean softly. "It was uphill work, at first," Farr resumed. "The lesson of poverty, with its grinding necessities, was bitter, and its bitterness redoubled by experiences that shook my faith in humanity." He flung back his head and drew a deep breath. "Somehow I lived through that first year, and then it grew easier; a maiden sister of my father's died and left me a legacy which, though small, is yet sufficient for all my needs. It is a good many years ago now, and I have only seen Clarisse once or twice, when I have happened to be in Washington in the winter. She is lonely, poor little girl; but we console each other by planning the good times we will have in some indefinite future." After a moment, he began speaking again: "I know how terrible this must seem to you, Miss Jean. A man at variance with his family is at a great disadvantage, and after all, you have only heard my side of the story. I almost dread," gloomily, "to have you tell me what you think of me now." "Oh, how unjust you are to me," cried Jean indignantly. "Do you think that your trouble could make any difference to me, except to make me sorry--oh, so sorry--for you, and to make me like you and want to be your friend more than ever." She stopped suddenly, half frightened by the look in Farr's eyes. He had grown very pale, and he spoke huskily. "You must not be so kind to me; you tempt me to tell you why----" "Jean! Jean!" This piercing cry, so fraught with terror, brought them to their feet. They started forward, and even as they did so Willie stumbled across the doorway and leaned up against the post, sobbing piteously. "Gladys, hurt," he panted, and then, his courage forsaking him, he burst into a storm of tears. Every bit of color faded from Jean's face. "What do you mean? O Willie, where is Gladys?" Farr put his hand on the boy's shoulder. "Come, little man," he said kindly, "don't cry, but take a long breath. There, that's a brave little chap. Now tell your sister where Gladys is, and what has happened." "We were playing birds in a tree, and Gladys fell, and she can't get up," faltered Willie. "Where?" Jean asked sharply. "In the orchard." Almost before the words had passed his lips, Jean pushed by him and was flying toward the orchard. Farr stopped a moment, to tell Willie to run up to the house and have them send down a couple of pillows to the orchard and to dispatch a man on horseback for the doctor; then he started in pursuit of Jean. He quickly overtook her, and they sped across the intervening space in silence. As they entered the orchard Larry's heartbreaking sobs indicated the scene of the accident, and in another instant Jean had fallen on her knees beside her little sister. The child's face was drawn, and the wide, distended eyes were strangely, unnaturally bright. "Gladys, precious, where does it hurt you?" But a moan was her only answer. "Oh, Mr. Farr, what can I do? How do you suppose she is hurt?" Farr bent tenderly over little Gladys, and laid his hand lightly on her arm. A wail of pain escaped from the child's white lips, and she again lost consciousness. Everything grew black to Jean and she swayed a little, leaning against the trunk of the tree for support. Farr's voice sounded very indistinct and strange to her. "Come, Miss Jean, you must not faint. Do you hear me? Now, take a mouthful of this," holding out his flask to her. Jean obeyed him unresistingly, and rallied at once, the color coming back into her face. "Gladys has broken her arm," he went on, in a quiet, even voice that somehow helped to steady her. "There, that is right. Now you look like yourself again." "Never mind me," she returned resolutely, straightening herself. "Is there nothing we can do for Gladys?" "I sent Willie to the house to tell nurse to come here with pillows and to send Barnes for the doctor. Now give me the flask and put your arm under her head and raise it a trifle, so that I can give her some brandy. There, she is coming to now." The white lids fluttered, and Gladys' eyes opened slowly. "Jeanie, I twied to f'y, but I was too little," she murmured weakly, and she smiled up at her sister, who was bending over her with so much tenderness. The sound of footsteps reached them, and nurse, a comfortable, motherly-looking woman, bustled up to them, her arms laden with pillows and restoratives. Her presence brought great reassurance to Jean. "Oh, nurse, I am so glad you are here. Gladys has been hurt." "My poor baby, Nana will make it all well. She shouldn't have left you at all. Whatever will Miss Helen say!" Jean's face contracted sharply, and she turned away to hide the tears that sprang to her eyes. Farr threw an angry glance at nurse, who, all unconscious of her offense, was petting and comforting Gladys. "This is no time for talking," he said. "We must get Gladys home as quickly as possible. Miss Jean, will you help me lift her?" Jean recognized the kindly intent in his words, and her eyes were eloquent with gratitude. "Little one," he went on to Gladys, "will you be a good, brave little girl and let me carry you? I will put you on this pillow, and I will be as gentle as possible. I can't promise that it won't hurt you some, but when you are once home you will be so comfortable." "All right," assented Gladys, looking up at him with touching confidence. But in spite of all their care, it was a very painful ordeal, and the poor child was quite spent before the manor was reached. As they mounted the steps of the veranda the doctor's gig drove up to the door. They carried Gladys up to the nursery, and Farr lingered there long enough to hear his opinion confirmed that the child had sustained no further injury than the breaking of her arm. "I will wait downstairs," he said in an undertone to Jean, and he went out and closed the door softly behind him. The moments dragged slowly, and he had almost renounced all hope of seeing Jean again, when he heard her footfall on the stair. She came down toward him, her white face showing the traces of tears. He sprang forward to meet her. "I can't stay but a moment," she said to him, "for I must go right back to Gladys. The doctor has set her arm and has given her something to make her sleep and he is going very soon now." He laid his hand on her shoulder and looked tenderly down at her. "You look worn out. Won't you try and rest a little?" She did not resent his action, but she moved a step away from him and his hand dropped at his side. Her lips quivered. "I don't care about myself. I shall never, never forgive myself for my wicked thoughtlessness. That poor baby's suffering haunts me." "I won't have you blame yourself," he declared vehemently. "I was more at fault than you, for I claimed your attention with my stupid story." "Don't talk nonsense," she returned gently, but, nevertheless, her face lost much of its misery. They were silent for a moment. The past hour had broken down the last barrier of reserve between them and had drawn them very close to each other. Of the two, Farr was perhaps the more conscious of the subtle change that had been wrought, and he was filled with unspeakable joy. "You must go now," Jean told him, "but you will come back to-morrow, won't you?" She was so sure of his answer that she did not wait for him to speak. "I don't know how to thank you for all you have done for Gladys--and me," she added very low. "If I have been the least help to you, Jean, it is more----" he began, when the outer door was pushed open, and Nathalie rushed in like a whirlwind. "What in the world has happened," she cried excitedly. "Larry says that Gladys is hurt, but he is too frightened to be clear about it." Jean hastened to give her an account of the accident, shrinking back a little from the light that streamed in from the open doorway, for fear of what her telltale face might reveal to Nathalie's keen eyes. Farr bade them good-by and went away, and then the two girls went directly to the nursery. CHAPTER X MISS STUART'S ARRIVAL. On this selfsame day, after a two hours' trip on the cars, Helen found herself at length at her destination. It was somewhat after three when she stood ringing the front-door bell of a substantial brown-stone house in a quiet side street. The city seemed hot indeed after the dewy freshness of the country, and the sun's rays beat relentlessly upon the stone flagging and cobblestones. The rumblings of carriages and wagons rolling by, the tinkling of the far off car-bells, the constant roar of the great city fell strangely upon the girl's ears so unaccustomed to the ceaseless din. Just then a street vender passed by, his shrill voice crying now and again, "Peaches! peaches! ten cents a quart!" Helen watched him pityingly until her attention was attracted by a hand-organ grinding away, "White wings, they never grow weary." Two poor little urchins sat on a neighboring doorstep pitching pennies, their small pale faces making her heart ache as she wondered what a glimpse of green fields and winding lanes would be to them. A feeling of sadness assailed her, as these sights and sounds, so familiar to city life, awakened within her a realization that outside of her sheltered life lay so many full of sorrow and suffering. Her reverie was cut short by the appearance of the maid, who immediately ushered her into the darkened drawing-room. Between the closed shutters crept a few rays of straggling sunlight which fell upon the furniture in its muslin slips, the bronzes and gas jets in their wrappings of tarlatan. Helen had hardly found a seat, when someone hastily descended the stairs, and pushing open the door, made a rush across the room and threw her arms about her. "You dear girl," Miss Stuart cried, "how glad I am to see you, and how good of you to come. You cannot imagine how overjoyed I was when I received your telegram." "But I wanted to come, Lillian. You do not seem to take that into consideration." Then, after a pause, "Ah! how lovely you look, but then it seems to me you invariably do." Helen was right, for Miss Stuart, gowned in a dainty peignoir of white silk covered with filmy lace, looked especially charming. At the compliment she laughed softly, and pinched Helen's cheek. "There is no curing you, is there, dear? I thought, perhaps, a separation from me might have improved you." "But you must not expect it," Helen maintained naïvely, "unless you grow less pretty." Miss Stuart kissed her warmly. "Let us talk sense now," she said reprovingly. "Were you surprised at my message? I must explain. I was obliged to come down for mamma on a matter of business, and as it was too long a trip to return again to Bar Harbor to-day, I thought it better to rest, and remain overnight in town." "And do you go back to-morrow?" "Well, no; not if you will take me to Hetherford with you." "Indeed I will, with the greatest pleasure." "And you are quite sure it is convenient now? I did not expect to be with you until the middle of August, but being obliged to come down at this time, I thought perhaps I had better go to you at once for my visit. Later I have several others to pay, and do not know that I could manage then to get to Hetherford at all." "I am delighted to have you at once, Lillian; you could not come too soon to please me, and you can always be sure of a welcome at the manor." "Yes, with you, but I am not so sure of those sisters of yours." Helen flushed. "Pray don't say that." "Ah, my dear, don't let it trouble you. I rest quite content in your affection." But whatever there was in Miss Stuart's words or tone, a shadow rested on Helen's face for some little while afterward. Perhaps Lillian Stuart saw it, for, by and by, she began to speak again of the manor. "You have no idea, Helen, how much I long to see your lovely home, nor with what pleasure I look forward to being with you, dearest." "You are good to say so, Lillian, and I will do all in my power to make you happy." "You will not have to try, dear, I am sure." Miss Stuart rose and touched a bell. A quiet middle-aged woman answered it. "Mrs. Perkins, Miss Lawrence remains with me overnight. See that dinner is prepared for us." "Yes, Miss." "Wait, Perkins. I want you to send Virginie to me." In a moment the French maid was knocking on the door. "Virginie, preparez la chambre voisine de la mienne, et portez-y le sac de Mlle. Lawrence." When the girls at length were seated in Miss Stuart's pretty boudoir, they fell into a long and pleasant chat, finding much to say to one another after several months' separation. By and by Miss Stuart presented a programme for the evening, saying. "Now, Helen, you little puritan, don't dare to find fault or criticise. My cousin, Harry Stuart, is going to take us to the theater, and it will be perfectly charming. He is almost like a brother to me, and there could not be the slightest impropriety in it." Helen did not demur then, but, after returning from the theater and in looking back over the evening, she felt some misgivings. "Harry" proved to be a gay, scatterbrained youth, more or less in love with his beautiful cousin. He stared a little curiously at Helen on being presented, and then devoted himself exclusively to Miss Stuart, whom he treated with a lack of deference, a familiarity, which Helen hotly resented. Miss Stuart, however, was apparently quite oblivious of it, and flirted with him openly, exchanging glances of amusement with him, as Helen's face grew graver and graver. A chance remark of his, which unfortunately reached Helen's ears, did not tend to soften her judgment of him. "Who is your little friend, coz? She is tremendously respectable, and doesn't approve of us at all." Helen retired to her room that night in a frame of mind to find serious fault with her fascinating friend. Miss Stuart realized that she had gone a little too far, and determined to overcome the impression she had made. She well knew the power that her great beauty exerted over Helen, blinding her to faults that he who ran might read, so she coiled her mass of auburn hair most becomingly, slipped on a dainty pale blue wrapper, encased her feet in slippers of the same hue and presented herself in Helen's room, and proceeded to make herself so charming and agreeable that in ten minutes Helen had completely forgotten her grievance. The following morning, at an early hour, they left for Hetherford. Helen neglected to wire Jean of their change of plan, so no carriage met them at the station, and they were obliged to rumble up to the manor in the old Hetherford stage. Helen's heart sank when Jean ran down to the veranda to tell her of Gladys' accident. "You cannot imagine how I felt, Helen, for I knew it was all my fault. I should not have forgotten her for one moment." "Indeed, I think you were very careless, Jean." Helen spoke sharply, for her anxiety made her nervous and irritable. Jean had gone forward and shaken hands with Miss Stuart, but at these words she turned abruptly away. She felt so reproached and woe-begone. It almost seemed to her that all the world must know how completely absorbed she had been in that sweet talk with Farr, to have allowed her mind to wander from the little sister. In this guilty and depressed state of mind, her welcome to Miss Stuart somewhat lacked cordiality, and the latter, who had never liked Jean, found herself no whit better pleased. Nathalie came flying down the stairs, making a fortunate diversion. "Now, Helen, don't scold Jean, for she is heartbroken. Gladys is doing splendidly and will be about in a few days. How do you do, Miss Stuart? I am very glad to see you, and so sorry that our anxiety about Gladys is making us forget to make you at home. Please let me take your bag, and come right up to your old quarters." Helen looked gratefully at her sister, and Miss Stuart's manner relaxed under this warm cordiality, and she followed Nathalie up to her room. Jean went out upon the veranda, and walked slowly up and down. Her thoughts, which for a moment had been diverted, flew swiftly back to Farr. He had not spoken the words, yet she knew he loved her. She trembled a little, startled at the depth of emotion this knowledge aroused in her. So this was love--this sudden wild beating of her heart, this passionate joy of living. "Poor fellow," she thought, with yearning tenderness, "how much he has suffered." It was a blessed comfort to feel that it lay within her power to help to brighten his lonely, loveless life. She stood quite still and clasped her hands tightly together. "I love him! I love him!" The unspoken words sent the blood to her cheeks, and she was filled with dismay. She roused herself abruptly from her dream and hastened upstairs to join Helen in the nursery. That day seemed interminable to Jean. When the long afternoon had worn away and Farr had not come, she consoled herself with the thought that the evening would surely bring him. She tried to curb her impatience by filling the slow-footed moments with manifold unnecessary duties, but it seemed to her that the happy time would never come. They were all very quiet at dinner, for Helen was listening for the slightest sound from the nursery, while Jean's absorbing thoughts held her tongue in chains. "Well, well," cried Nathalie at last, "what will Miss Stuart think of us? No doubt that this is the home of the Sphinx. Our silence is growing gruesome." Thus recalled to her duties as hostess, Helen glanced quickly at her friend, and was distressed to see the expression of cold disdain that rested on her face. "I beg your pardon, Lillian," she said penitently, leaning forward and taking Miss Stuart's hand. "I am so upset about Gladys that I have forgotten my manners." "Pray, don't apologize, Helen. It is of no consequence whatever." Miss Stuart spoke with studied indifference and withdrew her hand. She deemed it only her right to be first with her friends always and under all circumstances; and to have Helen, adoring, subservient Helen, relegate her to a position of secondary importance was an offense which merited instant punishment. Jean and Nathalie, on the alert for any slight to their sister, exchanged significant glances. Helen made no further demonstration of affection, but began to talk gently and courteously to her guest. Jean and Nathalie came valiantly to her assistance, until at last Miss Stuart was forced to respond to their friendly overtures. When they were leaving the dining room she slipped her hand into Helen's arm. It was the nearest approach to an apology of which her nature was capable, and Helen had fain to be content. All her life Miss Stuart had been in the habit of snubbing people at her own sweet will and had found it a diverting occupation; but somehow it hurt her to snub Helen, the girl was always so patient and generous about it. They drifted quite naturally out onto the veranda. The sky was overcast, and a faint wind sighed among the trees. The heavy clouds promised rain, and the earth, after reveling in days of sunshine and nights of brilliant beauty, seemed wrapped in melancholy submission. Before very long Nan and Emily came running across the lawn. Nan greeted Miss Stuart cordially, but Emily was very cool, and looked askance at this dangerously beautiful addition to their circle. When she had shaken hands, she faced the girls as solemn as a judge. "Girls, what do you suppose has happened? The _Vortex_ has gone away, and those miserable men never came to say good-by, and did not even send a line." "Now see here, Emily," Nan interposed warmly. "I don't believe in being unjust. It must have been a sudden move, and of course we will hear from them." "It is a great shame," complained Nathalie. "What shall we do with ourselves?" At Emily's first words Jean started forward, then fell back in her chair, dazed and stunned. She pressed her hand against her heart to stay its loud throbbing, passionately grateful that the kindly darkness sheltered her from view. She could not tell how long it might have been when she was aroused by a sentence from Emily which arrested her attention. "Yes, it is such a pretty stitch. I'll teach it to you some day, Helen." Had she heard aright? Could it be possible that the _Vortex_ was already forgotten--its officers banished to the indifferent past? Her sudden excitement died away and a dull feeling of pain tugged at her heart. Her hands dropped nervelessly into her lap, and her lids closed wearily over her aching eyes. The conversation drifted into local channels, and Miss Stuart was beginning to feel very much bored when Eleanor and Cliff sauntered up the driveway and joined the party. She awaked from her apathy to survey Cliff critically, and then proceeded to monopolize his attention. Cliff dropped into a chair beside her and lent himself readily to her plan. She was a charming woman, a beautiful woman, so he assumed his most devoted manner, and apparently succumbed at once to her gracious, subtle flattery. Eleanor cast an amused glance at him over her shoulder; she felt too sure of him to be disturbed; and pushing her way among the group until she reached Jean's side: "I met Johnnie Matthews at the gate, dear. He was on his way to the manor with a note for you, and, since it required no answer, I volunteered to bring it up." "Thanks, Eleanor. I suppose Mrs. Matthews wants me to take her class again next Sunday. She has been ill." Eleanor had dropped the note into Jean's lap and was moving away, but something in her friend's voice startled her. She looked at her curiously, but in that light she could not discern her expression. She hesitated a moment, and then sat down on the arm of Jean's chair. "How is Gladys to-night?" she asked. Jean made an effort to speak more naturally. "Very comfortable, thank you. The doctor says her arm is doing nicely, and so far she has not had any fever." "Eleanor, did you know the _Vortex_ had gone?" As Nathalie spoke Eleanor impulsively took Jean's hand in hers. It was very cold, and trembled in her clasp. Jean's unhappiness was explained, and at the same moment another idea flashed through her mind. She answered Nathalie with well-feigned lightness: "It can't be more than a temporary absence, I am sure." Then added in a lower tone to Jean, "Don't you want to read your note, dearie? It may not be from Mrs. Matthews." Jean gave a start, and, instinctively, her disengaged hand closed over the note in her lap. "I think I will take it to the light." She rose hurriedly and made her way to the doorway, where the light from the lamp fell upon her letter. The handwriting was unfamiliar, and Jean's heart seemed to stand still as she tore open the envelope. The opening words dispelled the last doubt; her whole expression changed, and she eagerly drank in the contents of the sheet, all unconscious of the pair of eyes that were watching her narrowly. Nothing escaped Miss Stuart. She saw plainly the sudden start, the rising color, the tremulous happiness in the young girl's face. Perhaps the sight stirred some strange memory, deep hidden in her heart, for she smiled bitterly, and answered some pleasantry of Cliff's with such stinging cynicism that even that languid youth was aroused to retort. But to Jean the whole world was forgotten, as she read the lines: MY DEAR MISS LAWRENCE: It is with deep regret I write you that the _Vortex_ has been ordered up the Sound to survey a certain locality. Most unfortunately, our orders came very late. We have only just time to catch the tide by weighing anchor at once. I do not know whether you realize how great is my disappointment at leaving Hetherford, or how great is my regret at not seeing you before I go. Our stay, I trust, will not extend beyond a week, and I look forward with great pleasure to the time when we once more cast anchor in your harbor. I shall be anxious for news of little Gladys, and if I did not fear to presume, I should ask you to write me. Perhaps your goodness of heart will prompt you to forgive and indulge me at the same time. My address will be F----, which is the post-office nearest to our anchorage. Yours faithfully, VALENTINE FARR. Jean raised her eyes and let them rest on the group of people outside the doorway. No one, apparently, had a thought for her; for Miss Stuart had discreetly withdrawn her gaze, and they one and all seemed absorbed in the merry conversation. She longed to slip away to her own room, that she might be alone with her happy thoughts, but paused, irresolute, wondering, as she crumpled the note in her hand, if it would be unpardonably rude to leave her guests thus abruptly. Helen came to her rescue. "Jean, will you please go up and see if Gladys is asleep?" Jean nodded her head in assent, and gladly disappeared. Eleanor looked after her with a kindly smile, yet she sighed a little, notwithstanding. "What would Nan do if she knew this?" she thought. Shortly afterward a servant came to the door, bringing word that Miss Gladys was sleeping soundly, and that Miss Jean begged to be excused, as she had a headache. In the night the rain fell heavily, and the rising wind sighed and sobbed like a child in pain, but Jean's dreams were sweet, and her last sleeping and first waking thoughts were of Valentine Farr. CHAPTER XI. DULL DAYS. The days that followed were the quietest that this summer had brought to Hetherford. Not only had the _Vortex_ gone, but Wendell and Churchill had carried the other men off on the _Sylph_ for a long-planned fishing excursion, and the girls were left to their own devices. This was too common an occurrence to be looked upon as a great hardship; yet it was quite obvious, even to Nan, that they did not revel so much in their once treasured independence, and that the old-time simple pleasures had somehow lost their zest. There was something strangely amiss in the little colony. Jean, who had always been depended upon to set the ball rolling, and to keep everyone in good spirits, failed them utterly. She was so quiet and absent-minded, so unlike her usual self, that Eleanor began to fear that her surmises in regard to the letter had been incorrect after all. Miss Stuart's presence at the manor acted as a great restraint upon everybody. She did not adapt herself in the least to their quiet, humdrum existence, and maintained a stoical silence that was especially irritating. The weather was very depressing. A fine drizzling rain fell persistently, the sky was gray and leaden, and the roads and lanes were almost impassable with the mud. The dampness retarded Gladys' recovery, and she was fractious and troublesome. Poor Helen was in despair, for Miss Stuart was unreasonable enough to resent her spending so much time in the nursery, and took small pains to conceal the fact that she was almost bored to death. By Friday Aunt Helen was seriously fretting over her niece, for Helen was looking pale and tired and seemed quite incapable of coping with the anxieties of housekeeping, Gladys, and the entertainment of her difficult friend. On the afternoon of this day the rain ceased and Nathalie, in despair of any more interesting amusement, declared her intention to drive to the station to see the express arrive. "Not that anyone ever comes here," she said dolorously as she drew on her driving gloves. An hour later she burst into the drawing-room, her face radiant, her eyes twinkling. Helen sat before the low tea-table serving tea, Miss Stuart lounged in a huge armchair, while Jean was on her way between the tea-table and Miss Stuart, with a dainty cup in her hand. She paused, and looked expectantly at Nathalie. "Well, cheer up, girls, for I have some news at last. Who do you think arrived to-day?" Even Miss Stuart leaned forward in her chair, and lost something of her air of languor. "Don't ask tiresome riddles, Nathalie," pleaded Jean, "but tell us." "Mrs. Archer." Miss Stuart looked blank; Helen laughed softly, and Jean handed Miss Stuart her cup of tea with a disgusted expression on her bonny face. "You must, indeed, be in the depths to call that good news," she said scornfully. "I didn't say good news. I said news," Nathalie retorted triumphantly, "and in any case I think Mrs. Archer is a godsend after the monotony of the last few days." Miss Stuart smiled faintly for Nathalie, but echoed her sentiments. "I think Cliff's mother is a charming woman," interposed Helen. "She is somewhat overbearing and imposing, but I know she does not mean to be disagreeable." "I like her," maintained Nathalie. "She is so worldly, so thoroughly magnificent." Jean laughed and meekly took her cup of tea from Helen. "I have not another word to say. I suppose the truth is that I am mortally afraid of Mrs. Archer. She completely subdues me." After a moment she spoke again, from the comfortable place she had taken on the divan: "Do you know, Nathalie, just for one moment I thought it might have been Guy of whom you were speaking." Helen set the teapot down suddenly, and there was a moment's uncomfortable silence. Miss Stuart let her glance travel slowly from Helen's flushed face to Jean's grave one. "Are you speaking of Mr. Appleton?" she asked lazily. "Yes," replied Jean, with perfect unconsciousness, "I suppose you met him at the same time you did Helen. I wish it had been he instead of Mrs. Archer." Miss Stuart shrugged her shoulders, and answered with insolent disregard of Jean's evident affection for Guy: "A nice enough man in his way, but so deadly uninteresting, so lacking in that knowledge of the world which alone makes a man worth talking to." Jean's eyes flashed, and her voice trembled with anger. "Mr. Appleton is a very dear friend of ours, Miss Stuart, and to none of us is it agreeable to hear him spoken ill of." She looked impulsively across at Helen, feeling sure that her sister would speak some word of vindication of Guy, but the girl's head was bent and she seemed wholly occupied in pushing the tea-cups aimlessly about on the polished surface of the mahogany tea-table. For the first time in her life Jean felt a contempt for her sister, and pressed her lips tightly together to keep down the bitter words that rose to them. Nathalie, who hated a scene above all things, and yet was too thoroughly in sympathy with Jean to feel equal to changing the conversation, sat down at the piano and began to drum. Miss Stuart looked from one to the other and laughed unpleasantly. "Mr. Appleton should be proud of such an ardent champion." Jean made no answer. She finished her tea in silence and then left the room, followed by a sneering glance from Miss Stuart's eyes. That evening Mrs. Andrews and her sister, Mrs. Archer, called at the manor. The young people had taken advantage of the first clear evening since Miss Stuart's arrival and had gone for a walk, so Mrs. Dennis asked her guests up to her room. During the conversation Mrs. Andrews said: "How badly Helen is looking lately." Aunt Helen agreed with her and related to Mrs. Archer the facts of Gladys' accident, and dilated upon Helen's untiring devotion to her little sister. "She is worn out," she sighed in conclusion, "and it is so hard for her to have Miss Stuart here just at present." "You don't mean Lillian Stuart, that beautiful girl about whom everyone is raving?" exclaimed Mrs. Archer, roused to a degree of interest she rarely felt when in Hetherford. "I suppose it is the same. She is certainly very beautiful, but somehow," and Aunt Helen's face grew puzzled, "she doesn't seem at all the kind of girl my Helen should care for. However, they are close friends, so I----" "Oh, she is a great belle," Mrs. Archer interrupted brusquely. "Poor girl! What in the world does she do with herself in this out-of-the-way place?" Mrs. Andrews replied with some heat: "She must be very hard to please if she cannot find anything to amuse or interest her here." A gleam of amusement flashed into Aunt Helen's eyes, but was instantly suppressed. Hetherford was the basis of an old feud between the sisters, and had been the cause of more than one bitter quarrel. Mrs. Archer was a fashionable woman to the tips of her fingers, and for years she had striven to impress her easy-going sister with the importance of society, and to persuade her at least to spend her summers in some resort more frequented by the world of society. Mrs. Andrews, however, stood out against her and stoutly maintained that she and her children were perfectly happy where they were, and Mrs. Archer had to content herself with an occasional visit from her niece Mollie, who was eminently unsatisfactory as a fashionable girl. To crown her displeasure, her only son Clifford, instead of finding pleasure in his charming home at Newport, insisted upon spending the summer at Hetherford Inn, and Mrs. Archer bore a great grudge against this small place. She was a very hospitable woman, and enjoyed keeping open house, but she found it a great drawback to have no young person at home. As she rose to leave, it suddenly occurred to her that it would be very delightful to take two of the girls back to Newport with her. Her choice fell upon Helen, because in that way she could include Miss Stuart in the invitation. Mrs. Dennis met the suggestion with approval, for she knew it would do Helen good to get away from home for a few days, and that so pleasant a change would please Miss Stuart. In the midst of the discussion, the two girls walked into the room. Mrs. Archer's shrewd, worldly eyes took in every detail of Miss Stuart's beautiful face and faultless gown, and she instantly dropped the somewhat patronizing tone she had used toward Helen, and urged their acceptance with great cordiality. Helen hesitated, for she was loath to leave Gladys again, but Aunt Helen and Miss Stuart overruled all her objections, and it was agreed that they should accompany Mrs. Archer. The quiet that settled down over the manor after their departure was very grateful to Jean, who during the past week had been disturbed and harassed. She knew that she was fast approaching the most serious crisis of her life. All during these joyous summer days she had drifted on so happily, evading self-questionings, living only for the day. Now she realized that the drifting was at an end. On his return Valentine Farr would speak to her, and although she had no doubt as to the answer she would give him, yet she trembled a little and would fain have been alone with her secret. And now, when she would have had her whole mind dominated by this one thought, Miss Stuart's unwelcome presence in the house thrust other and less pleasant thoughts upon her. Up to the time of this last visit Jean's dislike of Miss Stuart had been a vague, passing sentiment, which had concerned her but little. She had distrusted her always, but even that distrust was purely intuitive, for she had no idea of the part Miss Stuart had played in the severing of Helen's engagement. In that slight controversy about Guy, however, Jean had unwittingly pierced beneath the surface of Miss Stuart's suave manner, and had caught a glimpse of the girl's true nature. She could not understand why this should affect her so strongly. In vain she tried to account for it to herself. Miss Stuart, although so dear a friend of Helen's, occupied a comparatively unimportant position in their home life. In another fortnight she would be gone from among them, and for months they would know nothing of her, save what Helen might choose to communicate from her oft received letters. So Jean argued with herself, battling with a curious sense of apprehension that struggled within her. She longed to talk it all over with Aunt Helen, whose judgment was always to be trusted; but that seemed a kind of disloyalty to Helen, so she smothered the vague doubts and fears which threatened to overwhelm her usual good sense. Her thoughts flew off to Farr, and poised over that strange talk they had had on that last afternoon. She drew from her pocket a letter that had come from him, and read it over slowly, lingering over every sentence. But when she had finished and was folding it into its envelope again, she sighed a little, for even that dear missive could not quite dispel the vision which haunted her of Lillian Stuart's beautiful, cruel face. CHAPTER XII. EDDYING CURRENTS. Monday dawned bright and clear. When Jean awoke the sunlight was flooding the room, and through the open window came the sweet voices of the birds as they merrily chirped and sang. As she sprang out of bed she was filled with a sense of well-being and happiness. She could even find it in her heart to laugh a little scornfully at the fancies that had disturbed her, for they had vanished with the vanishing clouds. She dressed hurriedly and ran down to the dining room with a snatch of song upon her lips. By her plate on the breakfast table lay an envelope addressed in a man's legible handwriting. She flushed as she caught it up, and crossed to the window to read it. Farr had written in great haste to say that the _Vortex_ would be in Hetherford Harbor by noon on Monday. When Jean had reached that point in his note she read no further. She stood very still, her hands holding the bit of paper closely, her breath coming hurriedly through her slightly parted lips. For one moment thus--then the maid entered bearing the coffee urn, Larry clattered noisily into the room, and Jean turned back to the ordinary duties of everyday life. But her face was still illumined, and in the depths of her shining eyes lingered the reflection of her soul's great happiness. During the morning a telegram came from Helen saying that she and Miss Stuart would arrive by the afternoon express. Jean had just terminated a long interview with the cook, and was frowning portentously over her unusual duties as housekeeper, when Nathalie brought her the news. She made a grimace and then proceeded to inform Nathalie of the approaching arrival of the _Vortex_, subduing as best she could the tremor of excitement in her voice. Nathalie was jubilant. At last the dull days were at an end, and they would start on a new round of festivities. While she was chattering volubly it suddenly occurred to Jean that it would be a pleasant welcome to Helen and Miss Stuart to ask Mr. Dudley and Farr to dinner. She made the suggestion timidly, for she feared that Nathalie would divine the true motive which prompted her. Her mind was instantly set at rest, for Nathalie, overjoyed at the break in the monotony, gave her a friendly push toward the desk to hasten the writing of the notes. Jean laughingly reminded her that the _Vortex_ had not yet arrived, and then they put their two heads together to concoct a dinner which should quite equal one of Helen's ordering. That afternoon, as they were about starting for the station, Barnes brought back the answer from the _Vortex_. Farr's was of so grateful and rejoicing a nature that Jean laughed light-heartedly as she read it. It came to her suddenly, as they were bowling along the highroad, that in her note to him she had not mentioned the fact that Miss Stuart was with them, nor had she done so in the one letter she had written him during his absence. "It was just an oversight," she said to herself. "A mere chance." A mere chance, and yet chance sometimes means fate. Helen met them with so many questions about Gladys, the boys, and Aunt Helen, that Jean had no opportunity to unfold her plan for dinner until Miss Stuart had gone to her room, and she had followed her sister into the nursery. Helen was tired and travel-worn, but she was delighted by Jean's thoughtfulness for Lillian's pleasure, and listened interestedly while her sister anxiously submitted the menu for her approval. "Everything is perfect, dear," she said, putting Gladys down from her lap and making her way out into the hall, "but before I go to dress I must tell Lillian that we are to have guests to dinner," and she turned away without noting the shadow that crossed Jean's face at the mention of Miss Stuart's name. Miss Stuart stood before her dressing-table arranging the silver toilet articles which she had just taken from her trunk. She had thoroughly enjoyed her stay at Newport, and was feeling in a good humor with all the world. She turned a bright glance of inquiry as the door opened to admit Helen, and betrayed a ready interest in her friend's announcement. "Who are the men?" "Two officers from the Coast Survey schooner that is anchored here, Mr. Dudley and Mr. Farr; Valentine Farr." The little vinaigrette Miss Stuart held in her hand dropped on the dressing-table. Her face contracted sharply, and she made a quick instinctive movement away from the light. "Valentine Farr," she repeated slowly, keeping her voice well under control. "It must be the same of course." "Do you know him?" Helen asked the question absent-mindedly, for she was looking about her critically, to assure herself that everything in the room was as it should be. "Oh, yes. I have known him for a long while." She had quite recovered from her surprise, and spoke lightly, in her usual tone. "What a small world it is after all." "Dinner at seven, Lillian," Helen said to her as she closed the door; and then she was alone. "So Val is here," she murmured. "Val, of all people in the world." She flung back her head with a reckless laugh, and began to pace up and down the room. A flood of recollections swept over her; recollections which stirred her with a strange emotion. How long ago it seemed since sunny-tempered strong-willed Val Farr had wooed her in so masterful a way. What folly it had been, and yet a sweet folly withal! Miss Stuart paused midway in the room. Her face softened, and her beautiful mouth drooped tenderly. She had craved a splendid future which Val could not give her, so she had thrust his love out of her heart, and filled its place with the admiration and exactions of the gay world in which she moved. Val's misfortunes, his poverty, and his estrangement from his family gave her the opportunity which she sought to jilt him. She frowned with vexation as she recalled the look of scorn that he had cast at her when she had laid bare to him the aims and ambitions to which she had sacrificed their love. And after all, it had been a useless, needless exposure, for Val had come to her to give her her freedom. She told herself that she had acted wisely, she laughed to scorn the sentiment that was so hard to stifle--but no other man had ever taken Val's place. They had met from time to time in Washington, during the past few years, and at each fresh meeting Farr had found himself more and more disillusioned concerning the woman whom he had once loved. Something of this Lillian Stuart divined, with a bitterness of spirit which she could not quell. His indifference stung her to the quick, and she could not renounce the hope that she might win him back, if only circumstances would give her the opportunity. Miss Stuart's thoughts brought her back to the present. She drew her brows together and stared meditatively before her, with eyes that saw nothing of the room around her: "I wonder if Val is in love with one of these girls, and if so which one." Jean Lawrence's face flashed before her. She struck her hands sharply together, and an angry light gleamed in her eyes. "That would be a curious way of punishing me. I have always detested that sister of Helen's." She crossed to the mirror, and gazed critically at the picture presented there. A smile, slow and cruel, touched her lips, and with a satisfied air of triumph she turned away and began to dress for dinner. The hands of the little French clock on the mantel were close upon seven, when a knock came at the door and Helen entered. She started back with a faint gasp of admiration, as Miss Stuart turned from the dressing-table and swept across the room to meet her. "O Lillian," she cried, "how beautiful you look; but, my dear, you will take away my guests' breath. You know we are thoroughly informal at Hetherford." Miss Stuart raised her hands to clasp a string of pearls about her throat, with slow deliberation. "I am very sorry," she said distantly, "that my gown does not meet with your approval. I can easily change it." "Why Lillian, I find your gown charming, and would not have you change it for the world; I exclaimed simply because I did not expect to see you _en grande toilette_." "It did not occur to me that I was inappropriately dressed, but of course I am not conversant with your customs here." The covert sneer was not lost upon Helen, and she flushed painfully at the sharp words. With her usual self-depreciation she felt reproached for what she considered her lack of tact and courtesy. "I don't know how to tell you how sorry I am, Lillian," she murmured, with deep contrition, "for my inadvertent speech. I never knew you to look lovelier. Won't you please believe me when I tell you that?" The naïveté of the compliment touched Miss Stuart, and she smiled gayly into Helen's troubled eyes. "I admit that I did not understand you at first. I thought that I was guilty of a social error. However, it is all right now." Helen put her hand on her shoulder, and turned her gently around. "I want to really see your gown. It is exquisite. What perfect taste you have, Lillian." Miss Stuart's gown was of the palest shade of green velvet, made so simply as to be almost severe in its lines. The low-cut bodice was ornamented with some fine cut jet, and a little dagger of the same was thrust through the soft coil of auburn hair which crowned her small and shapely head. Her neck and arms shone dazzlingly fair, and the contour of the firm white throat would have delighted the eyes of an artist. The long straight lines of her gown accentuated her height, which was somewhat above the average, and she carried herself with regal grace. Helen gazed at her a moment in silent admiration. She absolutely worshiped beauty, and its power over her was very great. Had anyone hinted to her that it was chiefly this in Miss Stuart which so charmed her, she would have indignantly refuted the accusation, and yet in a great measure it was true. Many and many a time she had cause to puzzle over her friend--aye, almost to distrust and fear her; but the power of the girl's great beauty blinded her and left her helpless to condemn one who possessed such infinite attraction. The silence lasted but a moment, yet Miss Stuart had read Helen's verdict in her transparent face, and her pulses quickened with triumphant hope. "Well, well," she cried laughingly, at length, "are you spellbound, and have you forgotten your guests?" Helen cast a hurried glance at the clock. "Why, it is seven. I must run down at once. Follow me as soon as you can, dear." Down in the drawing-room, Jean was wandering restlessly about, too excited to keep still for one moment. She wore the simplest of her gowns, but one which Farr had once told her he liked. Jean was almost without vanity, but to-night, as she passed the long mirror over the mantel, she could not refrain from glancing therein. She was counting the slow-footed moments, and at every turn her eyes consulted the old Dutch clock in the corner. At last a carriage drove up the graveled road, there were steps upon the veranda, and the front door opened and closed again. She longed to run out into the hall, but an overwhelming shyness deterred her; and even as she halted, irresolute, the portières were pushed apart, and, as in a dream, she saw Farr coming toward her. Her heart beat so she could not trust her voice to speak him greeting. He caught both her hands in his, and held them closely. "Jean, do you know how glad I am to see you again?" he whispered. Slowly she raised her eyes to meet his. The depth of her emotion paled her cheek, and her young face wore a look of awe. Farr's heart bounded with joy, and he would have spoken, but suddenly she flushed crimson and, wrenching her hands from his, started forward to meet Dudley, who stood in the doorway, uncertain whether to advance or beat a retreat. Jean covered her embarrassment as best she could; although Dudley tried valiantly to put her at her ease, there was a merry twinkle in his blue eyes which she found very disconcerting. At that moment Helen and Nathalie made their entrance, and Jean moved a little apart from the others, struggling to regain her self-possession. Farr had turned to appeal to her for confirmation of some statement when a sudden lull fell upon the buzz of conversation. Miss Stuart stood in the doorway, her brilliant figure strikingly set against the dark background of the dimly lighted hall-way. She surveyed them for a brief instant with apparent nonchalance, but that brief glance told her that it was with Jean that Farr was talking. With slow grace she crossed the room and gained Helen's side. Farr's eyes followed Jean's, and as they reached Miss Stuart his expression underwent a sudden change. She was looking directly at him, and smiled faintly at the dismay in his face. "Well, Mr. Farr, is it so great a surprise to you to see such an old friend in Hetherford?" Farr recovered himself, instantly, and met her challenging glance with an impenetrable smile. "It is, indeed, an unexpected pleasure, Miss Stuart," he said with grave courtesy, and Miss Stuart was conscious of feeling curiously baffled. To Jean, watching them with dilating eyes, that apparently meaningless incident seemed fraught with significance. All the haunting doubts and fears, that not twelve hours ago she had scorned as morbid fancies, returned upon her with redoubled force. Love, which makes us strangely blind, makes us also strangely alert; and Jean's eyes had seen the change in Farr's face, and as he spoke those few conventional words, her quick ears had detected an unnatural ring in his voice. Miss Stuart had called herself an old friend, and yet Farr had never spoken of her. Jean searched her memory to see if it were possible that she had never mentioned Miss Stuart's name to him, and, as she thus pondered, a chance sentence of Nathalie's reached her: "You go through the shrubbery----" She heard no more. In an instant the scene was clear before her--the long stretch of lawn beyond the shrubbery, bright in the silver moonlight, the sound of voices from the parsonage, breaking softly upon the evening stillness, through which Farr and she walked slowly side by side. Then she had spoken of Miss Stuart, and he had certainly disclaimed any acquaintance with her. Her heart grew cold as her first doubt of her lover found lodgment there. As if in consummation of her thoughts, she looked up to see Farr offer Miss Stuart his arm. With a sense of foreboding she followed them slowly into the dining room, smiling a little drearily as she remembered with what eagerness she had anticipated this dinner. Farr's place at table was between Miss Stuart and Jean, and as they took their seats, he spoke to the latter in a carefully lowered tone: "You can't imagine how delightful it is to be here again. I was absolutely homesick for the manor while I was away." "Indeed? How unhappy you must have been." "I was," he replied gravely, observing for the first time the girl's air of disdain, and wondering at the cause thereof, "and I shall have a new cause for sorrow if you look at me as you are now doing." Jean's levity was somewhat forced as she replied: "I am very sorry you are not pleased. I do not find it easy to change my expression." "No?" He bent a very direct and earnest gaze upon her. "Why, Miss Jean," he said softly, "I thought we were friends when I went away; and only to-night you seemed glad at my return." The last spark of resentment died out of Jean's heart. Her distrust of him seemed suddenly both groundless and foolish. Ashamed and contrite, she was about to speak, when Miss Stuart's suave voice broke in upon them: "Mr. Farr, have you heard anything of the Saunders since you left Washington?" Farr had no alternative but to reply to so direct a question, and Jean, although annoyed at the unwelcome interruption, waited patiently, confident that he would seize upon the first opportunity to resume his conversation with her. As the moments passed, however, and his undivided attention was still given to Miss Stuart, she was first hurt, and then bitterly angry. A lump rose in her throat, and for one miserable moment she thought she was going to cry; then her pride came to her rescue, and under an almost reckless gayety of speech and manner she hid her momentary weakness. It was unjust and unreasonable to blame Farr, but Jean was in no frame of mind for logical argument. He had turned away from her to speak to Miss Stuart, and although she had given him ample time to take up the broken thread of their discourse, he had failed to do so. As she talked on excitedly with Dudley, her cheeks burning, her eyes dark and restless, she was mentally comparing herself with Miss Stuart, whom she had already almost unconsciously begun to regard as her rival. She had always known that Helen's friend was beautiful, but to-night her newly awakened jealousy caused her to lay great stress on the brilliancy and fascination of their guest. She recalled, with curious distinctness, the image of herself which the mirror had shown her while she awaited Farr's coming, and her heart contracted as she thought how colorless she must appear in contrast with Miss Stuart's rich and vivid beauty. When at length Farr was once more at liberty to address her, she had worked herself up to such a pitch of miserable jealousy that she would have none of him, and took an almost savage delight in thwarting his every attempt at speech with her. He was too reserved to let her see how deeply he was wounded by her flippancy and incivility, and, in his apparent indifference, Jean found an added proof of his disloyalty and of her own unpardonable folly. She had almost come to the end of her courage, when Helen rose, giving the signal to the ladies to withdraw. Helen sat down before the open piano, and Nathalie picked up her mandolin from the music stand and began to tune it. When she had finished she spoke in a low tone to her sister: "Let's play Guy's old favorite, will you, dear?" Helen complied, but not before she had cast a half-guilty glance across the room to where Miss Stuart was gracefully reclining in a huge armchair, to satisfy herself that the mention of her lover's name had escaped her friend's notice. The piano took up the accompanying strains of a soft _andante_, the mandolin carrying the air with its tremulous and strangely human wail. Jean leaned her face on her hand as she nestled down among the cushions on the divan. Her good angel was whispering to her in the sweet harmony of the music, and gentler thoughts of her lover were prevailing against the cruel doubts of him which her jealousy had taught her. After all, had not Miss Stuart been chiefly at fault, and had he not honestly striven to make amends? "It is entirely the result of my morbid dislike of that girl," she said to herself; and when the officers came out from the dining room, she gave Farr a bright glance of welcome, and when he had joined her, she talked to him until her persistent gentleness had completely melted away the barrier of reserve which had crept between them. Once or twice it was on the tip of her tongue to say, "Why did you never tell me that you knew Miss Stuart?" but the words, held back by a foolish sentiment of pride, never passed her lips. Meanwhile Farr, although touched by the sweet friendliness, was more disheartened than he quite cared to own. He had allowed his hope to grow too quickly, founded on that one honest glance from Jean's eyes, a glance so full of love and trust that he had felt he could not be deceived. Scarcely had he told himself that his happiness was assured when Jean's coldness had denied the love which her eyes had bespoken. No suspicion of the truth had crossed his mind, and as Jean had never been given to moods, he was left to the discouraging conclusion that he had been too hasty and that she was resenting it. She was willing now to treat him with her old-time cordial frankness, for having once clearly defined their relative positions, she was too courteous to continue a course of treatment which she must have seen had greatly pained him. Never until he had reached this unhappy decision had he realized how strong and deep-rooted was his love for Jean. As his eyes rested on her, a longing seized him to take her in his arms, and to bring back to her face that look which had given him such promise of joy. His unexpected meeting with Miss Stuart had brought back to his memory the foolish impetuosity, the passionate unrest of his boyish love for her, and he thanked God for the wholesome lesson he had learned, and prayed earnestly for the love of this young girl, whose truth and sincerity stirred all the dormant possibilities of his higher nature. With these thoughts in his mind his eyes wandered across the room to where Lillian Stuart sat talking with Dudley. He acknowledged the force and charm of her rare exotic beauty, but it moved him not at all. Her effective pose was studied and artificial. Her face, so perfect in contour, was lacking in any suggestion of tender womanliness, and her glorious eyes, now raised to Dudley's, although full of the power of expression, revealed no depth of soul. It was refreshing to him to turn once more to Jean, to meet the dear laughter-loving eyes, to watch the fleeting changes of expression on her bonny face, to mark the unconscious grace of every movement of her lithe, slender figure. Yet, the secret of Jean's strong hold on his heart lay not in these superficial attractions, nor in her frank simplicity of manner, nor yet in her girlish freshness, which was her greatest claim to beauty, but in the knowledge he had gained of her true nature; a nature so honest, so unfailing in loyalty, so unselfish, so charitable, so responsive in its sympathies, that both respect and reverence were blended with his love for her. And yet he was not wholly blind to her faults. He knew that she was impatient and hot-tempered, and that, in anger, she was often sarcastic and cutting; but he also saw that she made a brave effort to hold herself in check, and that, however she might be worsted, she never ceased to struggle for the mastery. His meditations had carried him far adrift of the conversation, but although Jean had observed his abstraction, she did not resent it. She was living in a day-dream herself, a dream that was all the happier for that miserable hour at the dinner-table. She rose with a regretful sigh when Helen asked her to go up with a message to Aunt Helen. She looked up at Farr as he held back the portière for her to pass, and impulsively put out her hand to him. "We are friends again, are we not?" she asked scarcely above her breath. Farr gripped the little hand so tightly it almost hurt her. "Only friends, Jean?" was all he said; but Jean was satisfied. Aunt Helen detained her for some few moments with questions about the dinner, and when at last she was free Mary called to her to please step into the nursery, for Larry was wakeful and naughty and would not be quiet. Quite a half-hour had passed before she re-entered the drawing-room. She paused on the threshold, attracted by Farr's voice. He was seated just within the doorway. His back was turned toward her and he faced Miss Stuart, who was leaning slightly forward in her chair. "You are mistaken," he was saying. "I remember everything about that evening, to the color of the gown you wore." Before the conclusion of this sentence Miss Stuart had detected Jean, half hidden by the heavy portière. "Those were pleasant days in Washington, Val," she said, accompanying the words with a faint sigh. Jean, never dreaming that she had been seen, retreated precipitately to a far corner of the hall, and when she once more entered the room her face was pale, but she held her head well up, and with a low "I beg your pardon," swept by the two, who still maintained their positions. That night Miss Stuart's light burned until a late hour, and in response to Helen's gentle inquiry as to the cause thereof she gave through the closed door, but a curt "Good-night." CHAPTER XIII. AN INVITATION. Wednesday brought the return of the _Sylph_ from her cruise. The men, tanned and burned by exposure to wind and sun, were in great spirits, and declared themselves ready for any sport that might be suggested. The girls rallied forces, and in solemn conclave bade them extend their vacation one more week, that Miss Stuart might be amused and entertained. They drew a pathetic picture of her first week in Hetherford, and maintained that it would be rank disloyalty to allow her to go away with such an impression of the beloved place. In the confusion of tongues two voices were silent. Emily and Jean each had her own reason for wishing Miss Stuart a thousand miles away, and both looked a little contemptuous at the excitement that was being made over her. However, their lack of interest did not dampen the enthusiasm of the others, and the day was carried. The men did not need a great deal of urging, for they had already met Miss Stuart, and were eloquent in their praises of her. Dick Andrews succumbed at once to the tender passion, much to everybody's amusement, for jolly Dick in the rôle of lovesick swain was a most diverting spectacle. Andrews did not have it all his own way, however, for Miss Stuart, with an exception in Farr's favor, treated them quite impartially. It was conceded that Farr, as an old friend, had a prior right, and no one marveled that Miss Stuart's manner toward him was particularly gracious and amiable. They were much in each other's society, and so diplomatic was Miss Stuart, that no one discerned that their frequent _tête-à-têtes_ were invariably of her planning. It must be said, however, that Farr made no resistance and appeared eminently at ease with her. He was sorely wounded, and as angry with Jean as it was possible for him to be; and in this dejected and unenviable frame of mind, he took small heed of what he did with his time. Monday night when, at Helen's request, Jean had left the drawing-room, she had distinctly bade him hope. One hour later, she had again veered round and had treated him with a contemptuous indifference which he felt he had in no way deserved. Even then he had tried to believe that his imagination was at fault, but when she had purposely overlooked the hand which he had extended to her in parting, he could no longer deceive himself. Unfortunately, Miss Stuart had seen the slight which Jean had put upon him, and the faint smile of amusement in her eyes when she had said, "good-night" to him but deepened the sting. In a tempest of rage he flung himself out of the house and strode furiously down the avenue, leaving poor Dudley far behind, to wonder what on earth was the matter. It was not easy for Farr with his nature to forgive a repulse, and on Tuesday he kept to the _Vortex_, nursing his wrongs, and vowing he would take no step to make matters right between them until Jean should show some sign of penitence. By Wednesday this determination was less firm, and during the hours of his work and leisure his heart was pleading for Jean. When evening came he gave up the struggle, and at nine o'clock presented himself at the manor. The light that streamed out through the open door and windows revealed quite a number of people on the veranda, and he remembered that he had observed the _Sylph_ riding at anchor in the harbor. They gave him a hearty welcome, and while Nathalie was rallying him for his unkind desertion of them, he vainly tried to discover Jean's whereabouts. His inability to do so was soon explained. "Where did Jean go?" Nathalie asked. Eleanor answered from the corner of the veranda: "She went in the house a little while ago." "Send Susie up for her, Nathalie," Helen requested. Farr took a seat on the railing at a point which commanded a view of the hall; and found himself face to face with Miss Stuart, who was tilting slowly back and forth in a deep rocker. They had interchanged one or two commonplace remarks when a maid tripped across the hall and stood in the doorway. "Miss Jean begs to be excused," she announced briefly, and disappeared into the darkened dining room beyond. Farr drew a quick breath, and a frown contracted his brows. He could scarcely believe that he had heard aright. With a characteristic gesture, he pulled his cap down over his eyes and set his teeth. Miss Stuart remembered the trick of old. She watched him furtively, with a curious light in her eyes. Suddenly he recalled her existence, but when he looked at her she had already averted her gaze and was apparently quite unconscious that anything of importance had taken place. She gave him a few moments in which to recover himself, and then addressed to him some passing observation on a subject quite alien to Hetherford or the Hetherford girls. Farr, animated by a strong desire to hide his pain and disappointment from every eye, braced himself and replied in a vein of lightness which satisfied her that she had been wise in the course which she had adopted. They drifted quite naturally into conventional small-talk, and every moment he gained more assurance and ease. He was positively grateful for Miss Stuart's presence, for it afforded him a refuge from intercourse with those simple-hearted Hetherford girls, which he felt would, just now, be very disastrous to his self-control. No thought of danger assailed him. He believed Miss Stuart's sentiment for him to be quite dead; and as for himself he had so completely outlived every trace of his boyish passion as to have even lost all feeling of resentment against her. He congratulated himself with true masculine density that he had probed the depths of Miss Stuart's nature, and could never be outwitted by her again. Some day, if things went well with him, he meant to tell Jean all about that affair; in fact, he would have done so Monday evening, had he not felt that it would scarcely be in good taste to discuss the subject with Miss Stuart almost within ear-shot. In the meantime it did not distress him in the least to defer the telling of the story; for Jean, of course, knew nothing whatever of the matter, and it was extremely improbable that Miss Stuart would ever take the pains to enlighten her. In justice to Farr it should be said that he had completely forgotten the incident of the shrubbery which had meant so much to Jean, and he was not aware of the words that she had overheard, and of the construction that she had not unnaturally put upon them. And all this while poor little Jean lay on the sofa, in her darkened room, sobbing as if her heart would break. She had waited so patiently on Tuesday, hoping against hope that he would come and explain everything to her. For, of course, there was something to explain, else why had he so distinctly avoided all mention of Miss Stuart, even when she had asked him if he knew her? "He has a right to his past," she said to herself, with quivering lips; "but, oh! if they were such old friends, if she calls him Val, if he remembers one evening with her even to the color of her gown, he might--oh! he might have remembered to speak of her to me." The more she thought it over the greater seemed the proofs of his deception. If he and Miss Stuart had been old friends and nothing more, it would have been his natural impulse to speak of his surprise and pleasure at meeting her at the manor. He had failed to do so, and, with despair in her heart, Jean told herself that he must have had some strong reason for his silence. Tuesday wore away, and still no word had come from him. She determined not to let Miss Stuart see how unhappy she was, so kept about with the others, and entered into all their plans with forced gayety. When half-past nine struck on Wednesday evening, she gave up all hope of seeing him, for they were very informal in Hetherford, and kept early hours. She went up to her room, and as she slipped on her wrapper, she fell to crying, and when Susie knocked and announced Farr, she was too disfigured by her tears to think of going down. The disappointment was very keen. "Please excuse me, Susie," she called through the closed door. "I am sorry, but I am lying down." As she heard the maid's retreating step she would fain have recalled her, and sent some other message, but it was too late. The next day, on the decks of the _Sylph_, Farr and Jean met for the first time since Monday. Jean came aboard fully resolved to tender an apology for having excused herself on the previous evening. She had never lacked self-confidence before, but to-day she could scarcely pluck up courage to speak to him. Timidly she made her first friendly overtures, only to be met with an unmistakable rebuff. Farr answered the questions she put to him, but with a studied indifference which made her cheeks tingle; to make matters worse he presently sauntered off from the group of which Jean made one, and joined Miss Stuart, who was seated a short distance away. Jean's face grew hard as she stifled the sob which rose in her throat, and she registered a vow that never again would she give him an opportunity to treat her so slightingly. It was unmanly and unmannerly, and she had done with him forever. She did not flinch from the path she laid out for herself, and so successfully did she play the part that Dick and Mollie, walking home in the cool of the evening, declared that it was like the good old days to have Jean so jolly and full of fun. Miss Stuart meanwhile was content to keep Farr at her side, despite the fact that he was a most morose and taciturn companion. She knew wherein lay her advantage, and although the knowledge was not flattering to her self-pride, it did not prevent her from making the best of her opportunities. It was galling to her that Jean had the power to make him so miserable, but the trouble between them served her purpose very well for the present. As she talked to him pleasantly, she did not seem to notice that his replies were monosyllabic, and that he watched Jean's every movement with gloomy eyes. She was a clever woman, with a rare gift of conversation, and ere long her tactful efforts were rewarded, and Farr, roused from his abstraction, shook himself out of his ill-humor. In the course of the day he made one or two attempts at a reconciliation with Jean, but as both she and Miss Stuart had concentrated their energies to prevent his accomplishing his purpose, he failed signally. As day followed day, the breach between Jean and her lover was not healed, and no hand was stretched forth to stay its ever-widening limits. * * * * * "Lillian!" Miss Stuart laid down her book, and looked expectantly up at Helen. "I have a suggestion to make for this afternoon. How would you like to drive over to Crescent Beach to call on Mrs. Maynard?" "I agree to the drive," replied Miss Stuart, stifling a yawn, "but why must we call on that stupid woman? She always bores me to death." There was a ring of annoyance in Helen's voice as she answered: "Oh, it is not at all necessary for you to go with me. One of my sisters would be delighted to do so." "So much the better, my dear," said Miss Stuart indifferently, as she picked up her book and resumed her reading. "Why are you so down on little Mrs. Maynard?" queried Wendell Churchill, emerging from a recess of the window where he and Nathalie had been whiling away the morning hours with mandolin and banjo. "I am not down on her in the least, but I think she is uninteresting to a degree." She paused until the portières had closed on Helen's retreating figure, and then met Churchill's eyes with a meaning smile. "It is not surprising, is it, that her husband should find Mrs. Desborough a pleasing contrast?" In her far-away corner hot-tempered Nathalie caught the words and flared up in defense of her friend: "Oh, I think it is a shame to speak so. Mrs. Maynard is unhappy, but no woman ever bore unhappiness with greater dignity. It seems to me incredible that everybody's sympathies are not enlisted on her side." "I am very unfortunate," returned Miss Stuart with thinly veiled sarcasm. "This is the second time I have erred in this way. I must be more careful in future not to give expression to my opinions." Churchill saw that some unpleasantness was imminent, and, manlike, rushed in only to make matters worse. "Don't you think Miss Nathalie looks very much like Mrs. Desborough? I have so often noticed the resemblance." With blazing eyes, Nathalie started up from the low window-seat. "From all I know of her, I cannot feel flattered by the compliment," and, with this parting shot, she thrust open the French windows and flew out on the veranda. "Dear, dear," murmured Miss Stuart in mock dismay, "what a tempest in a teapot. Those girls are terribly spoiled, and it is all Helen's fault. She is unpardonably weak with them." Churchill was very much embarrassed by the position in which he found himself. He extricated himself by muttering something barely intelligible, to the effect that the Lawrences were so much attached to each other, and then retreated hastily to find Nathalie and reinstate himself in her good graces. When afternoon came Miss Stuart relented and she and Helen, with little Gladys between them, started off in the buckboard for Crescent Beach. It was a beautiful drive. For a short distance the road wound through fragrant meadows and wooded lanes until it came out upon the beach, where for several miles it led straight away over the hardened sands. They bowled swiftly along, the fresh salt wind blowing in their faces, the soothing sound of the ebb and flow of the restless waters breaking softly on their ears. Miss Stuart, exhilarated by the clear air, the brilliant sunshine and the congenial companionship of this friend whom she really loved, had never appeared to a greater advantage. It was the Lillian Stuart who might have been whose cleverness and glancing wit held Helen's mind enthralled, as they talked of all the subjects dear to women's hearts. All too soon they reached their destination. As they drew up under the _porte-cochère_ of the hotel, Helen found herself wishing with all her heart that Lillian might continue in so charming a mood. Presently Mrs. Maynard joined them in the vast hotel parlor, and as Miss Stuart went forward to greet her with great cordiality, Helen had no fault to find with her manner. They chatted together for some few moments when Miss Stuart recognized some friends of hers in a party of people who had wandered in from the piazza. She excused herself, and as she joined them Mrs. Maynard turned to Helen. "Don't you want to come up to my room for a few moments, Helen? I am sure that Dorothy would be very glad to see Gladys." The child jumped instantly down from her chair, her chubby face beaming with eager anticipation. "Gladys has accepted for me," said Helen with an amused smile, and the two made their way upstairs. "What a lovely view you have!" exclaimed Helen as she dropped into a chair near the open window. "It is pretty," Mrs. Maynard assented, pushing open a door which led into the next room. A beautiful little child sat in the middle of the floor, hugging a big woolly lamb close to her heart. "Dorothy, will you please come here, and speak to little Gladys Lawrence, who has come to see you?" At her mother's bidding, Dorothy struggled to her feet, and clutching the lamb tightly in both hands, ran toward the open door. Then she caught sight of Helen, and the big violet eyes were swiftly veiled, and the little head with its tangled mass of golden curls was hidden in the folds of her mother's skirt. Mrs. Maynard smiled in gentle reproof as she lifted the child's face. "What a baby, darling! Please be a good little girl and say 'how-do-you-do' to Gladys." Dorothy still hung back, clinging fast to her mother's hand; but Gladys, who was the most friendly little creature in the world, soon succeeded in overcoming her shyness. Presently they were chattering together as happily as possible, and Dorothy went so far as to produce her box of paper dolls and to dress them for Gladys' benefit. Mrs. Maynard's face lighted up with sympathetic interest as Helen gave her a graphic account of the week's gayeties. She had known Miss Stuart for several years, and could well understand Helen's desire to make her visit enjoyable. Miss Stuart, bored, might be a very difficult companion. "I am so glad for you, Helen, dear, that you have had such pleasant times. I wish you would let me feel that I had contributed in a small way toward helping you to entertain Miss Stuart, and, if you would enjoy it, I would love to have you all come over here for the dance on Saturday evening. I believe they are to have very good music, and we will arrange to have a pleasant little supper together. My husband will be here, and I expect Mr. and Mrs. Endicott, whom you may remember." "Yes, indeed, I do, and I know that I can accept for all of us. It will be moonlight, so the drive over will be delightful." On the way home little else was talked of between the girls but the prospective dance. Miss Stuart expressed herself as very much pleased with the idea, and the plan having received the sanction of her approval, Helen forthwith determined that every arrangement should be as perfect as her careful forethought could make it. When they reached the manor, the girls were having tea on the upper porch. They joined them at once, and the question of the dance was laid before them. "Glorious!" exclaimed Nathalie, ecstatically, and her verdict was loudly echoed by the others. Helen drew a chair up close to the tea-table over which Jean was presiding, and pulling off her gloves smoothed them out on her knee with the palm of her hand. "I want to consult you in regard to the drive, Jeanie," she said in a lowered tone. Jean nodded, and leaned across her, to hand a cup of tea to Miss Stuart. "Nathalie," said Helen, "please give Lillian some of that hot toast." "Toast and jam!" exclaimed Nan in accents of scorn, as she helped herself generously to both. "What sordid considerations, when there is a _bona fide_ ball in view." "Leave a slice for me, Nancy," laughed Eleanor. "I must fortify myself if you are going to wax eloquent." "Stop your nonsense, girls," and Nathalie waved an imperious hand at them. "The question is, how shall we drive over?" Jean turned to Helen. "If it is a fine night we might go in the wagonette." "Why, Jean, it would not begin to hold us all," interposed Emily. "There are fourteen of us, counting the men from the _Vortex_." "I did not include them," Jean replied quietly. Miss Stuart stared curiously at her over the edge of her teacup. "It seems to me that a dance without men is rather a tame affair, and I don't imagine the hotel will yield a very plentiful supply." Jean lifted her chin defiantly. "I was not speaking of the dance but of the drive over." "Well, that is perfectly absurd," Emily broke in. "The idea of our going over in one conveyance, and those poor men in another. What are you thinking of, Jean?" Miss Stuart laughed softly, while Jean vouchsafed never a word. A glance of intelligence was flashed from Nan to Eleanor, and Nan spoke up in good-natured raillery. "Em, dear, have you ever heard that 'enough is as good as a feast.' Jean probably remembered that it it is fully twelve miles there and back and felt some qualms for fear her conversational ability would desert her." The laugh was general, for it was a joke of long standing that Jean could talk to anyone, at any time, and under any circumstances, however trying. Helen looked from one to the other with puzzled eyes. She had an uncomfortable consciousness that there was something in the air which she did not understand. She put an end to the discussion with quiet decision. "There will be quite time enough to talk this over later. We must wait and see how the weather turns out. Now, suppose we go downstairs and have some music before we break up." Later that evening she opened the subject again to Miss Stuart. "I will tell you what I have decided, Lillian. We will hire the Hetherford stage and all go over in that." And Miss Stuart answered, with a tinge of triumph in her voice: "That is certainly a most sensible plan, my dear." So it was settled. Jean accepted the decision without a protest. Deep in her heart she still cherished a strong hope that the misunderstandings between Farr and herself might one day be cleared away. She had acted contrary to her own wishes in excluding him from the drive to Crescent Beach, and she admitted to herself, shamefacedly, that she was glad the matter had been taken out of her hands. CHAPTER XIV. A DANCE AT CRESCENT BEACH. A very merry party of people assembled at the manor on Saturday evening. Nathalie flitted about among them with dancing feet and shining eyes, and one and all caught the spirit of her contagious enthusiasm. "Oh, what a lark it is," she cried. "It is full moon to-night, and everything has gone right from beginning to end." "The end is not yet, Miss Nathalie," Farr said to her with a faint smile. She shrugged her shoulders and laughed light-heartedly. "Don't be cynical. It is a bad habit." "The moon is rising," interposed Jean, turning about from the open doorway. "It is too lovely to stay indoors." A hush fell upon them as they followed her out upon the veranda. Sentences left unfinished, gay laughter checked on the lips, paid tribute to the impressive beauty of the scene. Far away in the east the moon, with slow and stately grace, lifted its splendor above the dark line of the horizon. Against its flaming glory were sharply defined the somber trunks of sturdy oaks and spreading elms. Seen between their leafy branches lay the Sound, obscured a moment since by an impenetrable veil of darkness, but reflecting now on its rippling surface the golden light of the rising orb. The night air pulsed with the cheery chirp of the cricket, the monotonous chant of the katy-did. Softly the south wind blew rustling among the trees and shrubs. Nathalie was the first to speak. Her quick ear had caught the sound of wheels. "Here comes the stage at last. Do let us get off right away." "Is everyone here?" queried Mrs. Andrews, looking around on the bevy of pretty girls with a smile of complacent satisfaction. "Everyone but Lillian," Helen answered. "We may as well begin to take our places. She will be down in a few moments." Already the stage had backed up before the door, and Jean was among the first to run lightly down the broad flight of steps. Farr stood at the foot, and as he held out his hand to assist her, she saw that he was regarding her sadly. There was no time for words, the others were flocking down the steps behind them. She turned her eyes to meet his with a plaintive, almost appealing smile. She thought they must have spoken for her, for ere he released her hand he gave it a quick pressure. It was some few moments before Miss Stuart made her appearance. She descended the steps slowly, with no suggestion of haste. Farr held open the door for her to enter. "Come up here by me, Lillian," Helen called to her from the other end of the stage, but she did not seem to hear the request, and slipped into a seat near the door. Farr sprang lightly in, but as he would have passed her she laid a detaining hand on his arm. "There is plenty of room here," she said, indicating the place beside her, and he had no alternative but to take it. The other men crowded past them, and as the stage lurched forward, Cliff Archer dropped into a seat between Jean and Eleanor. "A great deal of strength is wasted in undue haste," he observed lazily. "I find that laggards invariably prosper." "What heresy, Cliff," laughed Eleanor softly, with an expressive glance in Miss Stuart's direction. Cliff appealed to Jean. "Can you imagine anything more barefaced than that attempt to extort a compliment. From a sheer sense of duty I feel compelled to disappoint her." He stopped abruptly, struck by the expression of Jean's face. She had evidently not heard his words, for she was staring straight before her with strained, unseeing eyes. Her mouth was compressed with a look of suffering in the lines. Cliff was very fond of Jean. He knew her better than the other girls, for she and Eleanor were such fast friends. He did not stop to ponder on the cause of her unhappiness, but hastily resolved to shield her if possible. Eleanor leaned forward to speak to her across him, but he brought his slender figure between them. "You can talk to Jean all day, and every day. It is my turn to-night, my dear, and I intend to monopolize you to my heart's content." When Cliff spoke in that tone Eleanor knew there was no appeal to be made, so she yielded the point at once with very good grace. As the stage jolted lumberingly on its way, Jean saw nothing of the beauty of the night, heard nothing of the merry laughter, the gay snatches of song which reverberated around her. It was, perhaps, a trifling circumstance that Farr had seated himself quite at the other end of the stage, and at Miss Stuart's side, but to Jean, in her unhappy state of mind, it meant a great deal. To her the interchange of glances a few moments since had been tantamount to a truce between them. She had been so sure that Farr would make an effort to secure a place beside her that she had purposely crowded up in the corner, leaving a space for him between Eleanor and herself. Her humiliation was poignant, complete. The wound to vanity was beneficial in its effect, rousing all her self-respect, and determining her to hide the truth from Farr at all hazards. "I must be brave," she said to herself resolutely. "I must let him see that I am happy and light-hearted," and she closed her lips firmly to still their quivering. She was quite mistress of herself by the time the hotel was reached. The Maynards, with their friends the Endicotts, awaited them on the brilliantly lighted veranda, and as they descended from the stage with merry jest and laughter, Maynard left his wife's side and ran down the steps to welcome them. He was a good-looking man, with a particularly charming and cordial manner. He had never given much thought to the Hetherford girls; in his mind he stigmatized them as provincial and uninteresting; but to-night, as Jean, standing in the full glare of the hotel office, unwound the scarf from around her neck, and flung back her wrap, an exclamation of surprise rose to his lips. Jean was, indeed, looking very lovely. There were faint shadows under the deep blue eyes, the sweet mouth drooped slightly, lending new beauty and depth of expression to her face. Maynard hastened to offer her his arm, and they moved slowly down the long hall to the entrance of the ball-room. The music had just begun when Farr's voice fell on Jean's ears. At his first words she turned a startled face toward him: "Miss Lawrence, I believe this is our dance. Sorry to deprive you, Maynard," and before Jean could recover from her astonishment, Maynard had bowed himself away and Farr was smiling gravely down at her. "Please don't be angry, Miss Jean. 'Nothing venture nothing have,' you know, and I have had so little lately." Jean looked up at him helplessly at a loss for an answer. "I want the waltz very much," he added in a tone of pleading. She laughed a bit unsteadily. "Why, of course, I will dance with you, although I must confess your mode of asking me is very strange." "'All is fair in----' Which is it, Jean?" he asked softly as they fell into the measure of the waltz. She dropped her eyes, glad that at present no reply was required of her. When the last strain had died away, Farr drew her hand through his arm, and they threaded their way among the crowd out into the cool hall-way. "Is this your wrap?" he queried, selecting one from the number that were thrown across a chair. "Now let us go outside for a little stroll." They made their way out on to the little veranda, which on this side of the hotel was built on a ledge of rocks, and overhung the waters of Crescent Bay. Avoiding the rank and file of dancers, who were now promenading slowly up and down, they crossed to the railing and stood there gazing silently before them. In the harbor below myriads of boats lay at anchor, all gayly decorated in honor of the occasion. Further out the moon's bright radiance fell softly on the tremulous waves, and across its golden sheen a white-winged yacht sped silently on its way. By and by, Jean roused herself with a slight effort: "What Philistinism it is to illuminate the veranda with those ugly lanterns. Their flaring light quite spoils the effect of the moonlight." Her poor little commonplace attempt to open the conversation met with disastrous failure. Farr muttered inattentively "Yes, indeed," and relapsed into silence again. In the long pause that ensued the monotonous splash of the waves against the rocks below sounded deliciously cool and refreshing. A rowboat shot out from the pier, skimming the darkened waters under the lea of the shore. Farr drew nearer to Jean and spoke with deep earnestness: "We cannot take up the thread of the past, Miss Jean, with this constraint between us, but I am not willing to let it go without an attempt at an explanation. Will you not tell me what I have done to have forfeited your friendship?" Jean's head was bent, her few words of dissent almost inaudible. Farr interrupted her in a voice that was both pained and stern. "Please don't deny it. I cannot have forfeited the right to your honesty. Did I presume too much on your great kindness to me, Jean?" "No, oh no!" she cried hastily, with a little break in her voice. "Indeed you must not think that." A man's step approached them, and stopped at Jean's side. "Miss Lawrence," Maynard's voice said, "the next waltz is ours. Shall I find you here?" "Why, certainly," she replied with a forced laugh. "I shall not vanish." "I wanted to assure myself of the pleasure. One is easily lost among all these people," he answered lightly, as he turned away. Farr's face darkened. "What right has Maynard to monopolize you?" he demanded savagely. "He is a married man, and not a man----" It was an unwise speech, and he broke off abruptly convicted of his folly by the expression in Jean's unflinching eyes. "You forget that Mr. Maynard is our host, Mr. Farr," she said coldly. After a moment she added more gently: "I did not want you to say anything that you would regret. I should be sorry to hear you speak ill of a friend. It is not like you." The simple words touched Farr, and made him feel ashamed of himself. "I beg your pardon," he said contritely. "I was a brute to speak so. The truth is, I am not myself, and have not been during the whole of this miserable week. I seem never to have the chance to speak with you, and I have tortured myself with the thought that it has been your deliberate purpose to avoid me." The opening bars of the waltz, and Maynard's approach, cut short his words. Slowly the trio forced their way through the moving crowd until they had gained the entrance to the ball-room. Farr stood listlessly in the doorway as Maynard whirled Jean away from him across the polished floor. Some minutes later, someone touched his elbow and he turned with a start to meet Miss Stuart's eyes: "Val, let us dance together 'for auld lang syne.'" "With pleasure," he assented abstractedly, for as she spoke he had caught a glimpse of Jean disappearing through one of the long windows which gave on the veranda. Miss Stuart's glance followed his, and her eyes flashed. The carelessness of his reply hurt her cruelly. "I will make Jean suffer for this," she vowed, as with throbbing heart she took her place among the dancers. Later, as they passed through the doorway, they encountered Jean and Maynard re-entering the room. Miss Stuart first caught sight of them. She raised her glorious eyes to her companion's face, and spoke in a voice carefully pitched to reach Jean's ears: "Yes, indeed, Val, it is pleasant to dance together again. It brings back those bygone happy days so forcibly." They were abreast of the other couple now, and Farr halted. Miss Stuart's speech had quite escaped him, absorbed as he was in watching Jean, so he was entirely unprepared for her reception of him. As he spoke her name she flashed a light impenetrable smile at him, and then deliberately turned away, and he heard her say gayly to the man at her side: "Mr. Maynard, that waltz is divine. Don't let us miss another bar of it." And Maynard answered softly: "Your wish is my law, Miss Jean." Then the crowd surged between them, and with a somewhat unreasonable bitterness in his heart Farr blindly followed Miss Stuart to a secluded corner of the veranda. Jean's treatment of him was inexplicable. It seemed so much easier for things to go wrong than right that he felt it was well-nigh useless to struggle against the inevitable. Disappointed and dispirited he paid but small heed to his beautiful companion, who was exerting her rare tact and diplomacy to please and divert him. In the ensuing hour, Jean, all unsuspecting of the truth, was amply avenged. Never before had it come home to Lillian Stuart, with such convincing force, that against Farr's love for this young girl she was utterly powerless. In vain love taught her a new unselfishness, a womanly gentleness quite strange to her; in vain did she crush down the rising storm of jealousy within her breast. Farr saw none of these things, cared for her not at all. He sought her society because she made so few demands upon him and accepted his varying moods unquestioningly. If he thought on the subject at all he explained her kindness to him by the fact that he was possibly more in touch with her world than anyone else in Hetherford. The subtle charm of her personality which she had ever found so potent was quite lost on this man whose love she had once possessed, and had valued so lightly. Hope was dead in her heart, but one weapon of revenge--Jean's evident jealousy--lay within her grasp, and this she wielded with unerring skill. The music ceased, and soon the veranda was invaded by a host of flushed and heated dancers, and among their number Jean, with Maynard still at her side. There was a new elasticity in her step, a new light in her eyes, and she was flirting quite openly and markedly with her companion. As the stream bore them past Farr and Miss Stuart she did not apparently observe them, withdrawn as they were into the corner, and falling out of the line of people, selected seats at a short distance from them. Maynard, to whom a pretty woman was always irresistible, was carried away by the girl's _insouciance_, and fascination. He was the more delighted because so completely taken by surprise. He had pictured Jean always as a little puritan who would look upon a flirtation as the height of immorality, but to-night the little puritan had suddenly blossomed out in a totally unexpected and charming character. He was not a little flattered by her evident willingness to linger on in this quiet spot with him when the crowd had once more sought the ball-room, and into his manner he infused an added warmth of interest. Poor Jean, however, was invulnerable. She had never liked Mr. Maynard, although she had been forced to admit that he was charming, and agreeable as an acquaintance. The Hetherford girls were one and all too sincerely fond of Mrs. Maynard to have much patience with the man who could flagrantly neglect so sweet and lovely a wife. It had been an unwritten code of honor among them to treat him with polite indifference, and to promptly snub any attempt on his part to break down the barrier of reserve behind which they had entrenched themselves. Under ordinary circumstances Jean would have despised herself for the course she was now pursuing, but to-night the poor child was too utterly miserably to care what she did, or what became of her. She laughed and flirted recklessly with this man, of whom she strongly disapproved, to quell the ache at her heart, and when the remedy failed she but laughed and flirted the more. It was selfish, unworthy; but Jean was unversed in suffering, and seized upon the means within reach to enable her to cover up her pain and jealousy. Something of the same impulse that influenced Farr with Miss Stuart prompted her to keep this man at her side. Those old friends knew her too well, had seen too much of her with Farr, not to have their suspicions aroused by her feverish and exaggerated gayety. At last the evening was over, and they stood in the hotel office, awaiting the arrival of the stage. Jean was somewhat apart from the others, with Maynard bending over her and talking to her in lowered tones. Her little foot tapped the floor nervously, her cheeks burned hotly, and one unsteady little hand waved a big fan to and fro. Her courage was rapidly forsaking her, and she rallied all her strength in one last effort to appear naturally gay and at ease. She felt she must not break down now with Farr only a few paces away, for, although she never raised her eyes, yet she knew he was watching her. As pretty little Mrs. Maynard moved about among her guests, speaking to them in her softly modulated voice, she bent a glance of anxious intentness upon Jean. She was far too inured to her husband's indifference to be deeply hurt by this new flirtation carried on before her very eyes, but this new phase in Jean's character puzzled her. But her own sad experience had quickened her intuition of others' unhappiness, and so it was that in her gentle heart there was more of commiseration than anger. Her thoughts were interrupted by Dick's announcement that the stage was at the door. When Jean came to bid her good-night she looked into the strained, pathetic eyes with compassionate tenderness, and a sudden impulse made her lean forward and kiss the girl lovingly. Once more the old stage rumbled over the road between Hetherford and Crescent Beach. The wind had veered a point to the east, and blew damp and chill, driving before it a mist of clouds across the sky, obscuring the moon's bright light. The sudden change in the atmosphere was felt by everybody, and the conversation was spasmodic, broken by long intervals of silence. Jean, very white and still now that the tension was relaxed, shrank back into her corner clinging fast to Eleanor's hand. In a further corner Farr sat at Helen's side, silent during the whole of the long drive. CHAPTER XV. HELEN IS PUZZLED. Miss Stuart's visit was drawing to a close, and Nan was giving a luncheon in her honor. The little parlor of the parsonage was redolent with the fragrance of roses and mignonette, which were massed in every vase and bowl, and the arrangement of the simple, old-fashioned furniture bore evidence of Nan's artistic taste. A few good etchings and a half-dozen rare old prints adorned the walls, and scattered about on the low mantel were several valuable bits of _vertu_. Nan stood in the center of the room, and received her guests with outstretched hand and beaming face. "Now, I call this delightful," she said cheerily, as she shook hands with Miss Stuart. "Even father has gone away for the day, so we are a typical Hetherford party--all girls and no men. Em said you would be bored to death," she rattled on in a confidential undertone, "but for once in a way I thought you might find it amusing to have plenty of your own sex. It is no novelty to us, as Em will tell you with a face as long as the moral code." "I think it is charming," Miss Stuart affirmed, with a greater regard for amiability than for truth. Nan smiled mischievously. "Confess it is dull." "Indeed it is not, Miss Nan. The imp of dullness would never dare to show his surly face in your presence." "Ah, you do not know," and Nan shook her head in laughing protest. "Drop in here any Sunday between church-time and dinner, and you will find us boon companions." The door into the dining-room was opened, and a grim-visaged woman in a starched calico gown of uncompromising stiffness appeared on the threshold. For a moment she eyed Nan threateningly, and then announced: "Your lunch is on the table," and added, as she faced about and marched back into the dining room, "and it's getting cold." Nan, in no wise disconcerted, turned a wry face toward her guests: "Biddy and I had one of our most deadly affrays just before you arrived, so don't be surprised at anything she may give us for luncheon. I tried, for your sakes, to keep my temper until later in the day, but it wouldn't be kept." "It never will," sighed Emily ruefully, in the midst of the general laugh. Nan ushered them into the dining room: "Miss Stuart, will you sit here on my right? Girls, take any places you want." "You needn't have worried about luncheon, Nan. These biscuits are simply delicious," observed Helen, consolingly, as Bridget vanished into the kitchen. "Biddy is far too proud of her skill to disgrace you." "Oh, she would not mind me," laughed Nan airily. "Nothing would restrain her but her sense of importance, and her undying jealousy of your cook." "What a glorious time we had at the dance," Emily remarked irrelevantly. "It was about the most successful thing we have done this summer. It has made such a difference having the _Vortex_ here, hasn't it, Jean?" Jean, thus addressed, changed color rapidly, and then was furious with herself, for she caught Miss Stuart's eyes fixed on her with insolent directness. "Oh, bother the _Vortex_," cried Mollie petulantly. "Don't let us talk about men. There are dozens of subjects more interesting." "We will make it 'man,' and talk of Dick. Eh, Mollie?" and Nathalie laughed provokingly. "We couldn't do better," responded Mollie imperturbably. "Dick is lovely, is he not, Miss Stuart?" Miss Stuart flung back her head with a merry laugh; no whit embarrassed by the naïve question. Dick had been her shadow for the past week, and was sighing and pining like the most approved of lovers, yet she answered with a nonchalance which Nathalie would have given worlds to acquire. "He is truly charming, Miss Mollie. I quite share your enthusiasm." Then she dropped out of the conversation, listening with languid interest to the topics which the others fell to discussing with much animation. Their views of life differed materially from her own; their complete unworldliness called a half-contemptuous smile to her lips, and yet there was awakened within her a shadowy feeling of regret. She had lived a purely pleasure-loving life, without a thought beyond her own advancement along the line of her ambitions. To a certain extent she had been eminently successful. Her marvelous beauty, supplemented by a decided mental ability, had strewn her path with the admiration and adulation which she craved, and faults and failings, which in a less beautiful woman would have received harsh censure, were in her case overlooked and condoned. To-day, for the first time, the thought assailed her that perhaps she was the victim of an erroneous idea; that perhaps these young girls, living their lives so simply, actuated by a desire to act uprightly and to be honest and affectionate in every relationship in life, had found a happiness which had eluded her grasp. Nathalie, who vainly strove at times to be cynical, made some careless remark, and Miss Stuart listened wonderingly to a gentle remonstrance which Eleanor administered in accents of earnestness. "Ah! Nat, dear, don't say that, even in fun. Everything makes a difference." "Indeed, yes," added Helen. "No stream from its source flows seaward, How lonely soever its course, But what some land is gladdened. No star ever rose or set Without influence somewhere." She quoted the lines charmingly, despite the little shyness which was so characteristic of her. "I suppose that is true," said Mollie thoughtfully; "and in the large things in life we know that we can only be in harmony with God's plan by acting absolutely in accordance with our consciences. But it is hard to realize the importance of our decision in regard to the small daily occurrences. They seem almost too insignificant to exert any influence, either for good or evil." "Influence does not lie only in deeds, Mollie," Eleanor replied, "either small or great. It seems to me that it is what we are, not what we do, that is the essential thing. If one's heart is pure and true, purity and truth will be manifested in one's actions, however trivial. And remember, dear, for I am going to quote now: "No life can be strong in its purpose and pure in its strife, And all life not be stronger and purer thereby." Jean gave her friend's hand an affectionate squeeze. "I do believe you are the best girl living," she whispered softly, with an air of profound conviction. "You see, girls, what it is to have a friend like Jean." "You mean like Eleanor," Jean promptly retorted. "I suppose that is true friendship," mused Mollie. "Must friendship necessarily be as blind as love?" queried Nan, with a smile at the two girls which robbed the words of any sting. "Jean knows nothing of love," declared Emily, with an air of superiority which was eminently amusing. It was common parlance that Emily never saw the general aspect of things quite as clearly as most people. Jean joined somewhat constrainedly in the laugh that greeted these words, and wondered if it could be her imagination that Miss Stuart's smile held a covert sneer. It was late in the afternoon when Helen reached the manor and made her way up to the nursery. The room was dim, for heavy clouds shortened the summer day. A sharp east wind moaned through the trees outside, and nurse had wisely lighted a wood fire in the wide chimneyplace. Its fitful flickering light fell full on little Gladys kneeling before the hearth, her eyes big with excitement as her chubby hands shaped a wonderful house of blocks; while near her Larry, lying flat on his back, threw out occasional hints and suggestions as to its construction. Willie, curled up in one of the deep window-seats, was making the best of the fast-fading daylight to finish a story which, to judge from his absorbed expression, must have been of thrilling interest. As Helen pushed open the door and advanced toward the cheerful fire, three pairs of eyes looked up to greet her. "Well, chicks, you all look very happy and comfie." Gladys thrust out her hands in quick alarm to save her block house from dangerous contact with the skirt of Helen's gown. "P'ease take care, sister," she lisped. "Don't step on our b'ocks, 'cause Larry an' me is buildin' a big castle." "Baby, baby, 'Larry an' me is buildin'?'" Gladys shook her fluffy head impatiently. "I haven't got any time to bovver. I'm velly busy." Helen laughed, and dropping down upon the floor, began to lend a helping hand. Gladys sank back on her heels with a complacent sigh. "Build a booful one, sister, big as this," raising her arms high over her head. Helen nodded, but paused from her task, block in hand, to give a glance at Willie. "Put down your book, dearie," she said to him. "This is the worst possible light to read in. You will ruin your eyes." Willie heaved a sigh as he closed the precious book and, stretching himself after his cramped position, rose slowly to his feet, and joined the group before the fire. Flinging himself down near Helen, he laid his head in her lap. She patted his little round face affectionately, and went on with her castle-building. The setting sun had broken through the clouds, and a flood of yellow light streamed through the western windows. From the huge logs in the fireplace an increasing volume of flames roared up the chimney, its ruddy glow illuminating the eager faces of the children, intent on every movement of their sister's deft hands. The truly wonderful house of blocks was nearing completion when Jean came quietly into the room. For a moment she stood silent in the shadowy doorway contemplating the pretty scene with wistful eyes. As she approached more nearly she unconsciously echoed Helen's words of a few moments past. "Well, you look very happy, all of you." Helen laughed softly. "This is an exciting moment, Jeanie, so you must not marvel if we are not very talkative." Jean leaned against one side of the old-fashioned chimneyplace, and absently watched the placing of the last few blocks. "Gladys," she whispered, after a moment, "what do you think I saw just now?" "What, Jeanie?" lifting her flushed face to her sister's. "Mary on her way upstairs with your supper, and oh, what cookies!" "Goody!" cried Larry, springing to his feet with a bound which brought the beautiful castle tumbling to the ground. "You naughty boy!" scolded Gladys crossly. "See what you done!" Jean took the angry, pouting little face between her hands, and smiled tenderly down into the tearful eyes: "It is hard luck, baby, but you might as well get used to having your castles demolished." "It's a shame," grumbled Willie, who was almost as disappointed as his little sister. "Larry's always rough." "Never mind, dear," interrupted Helen, rising from the floor. "I am sure Larry didn't mean to upset the house, and in any case we could not leave it in Mary's way." "Bother Mary." "Hush, Willie, you must not speak so. Now run away and dress for dinner. Larry and Gladys must have their supper." Jean followed her sister out into the hall, and laid a detaining hand on her arm. "Helen," she said, very low, "are you ever really unhappy?" "Why yes, Jean, sometimes. But why do you ask? Surely you are always in good spirits." Jean smiled a little bitterly: "Oh, of course I am, and I suppose I must go on fulfilling my destiny until the end of the chapter. But even if one has a reputation for unending hilarity, there are times----" She broke off abruptly with a laugh which suggested tears, and rushed away in the direction of her room, leaving Helen sorely puzzled. CHAPTER XVI. "IT WAS ONLY MY IMAGINATION." "May I come in, Aunt Helen?" "Certainly, dear." Aunt Helen looked up from the open Bible on her knee, and welcomed Jean with a cheery smile. "Where were you all yesterday? I did not have a glimpse of you." The girl crossed the room, and dropping down into an easy-chair near the open window, gazed listlessly out across the sunlit lawn. "Oh, I was just here as usual." Aunt Helen closed her Bible and laid it carefully down on the table. "Are you tired already of so much pleasuring, Jeanie?" "I don't see that we have had a great deal of pleasuring lately," her niece replied perversely. "I think Hetherford is the stupidest place in the world, and I am tired of everything." Aunt Helen was far too wise to remonstrate just then. After a moment's silence, she opened a subject which had never failed to awaken an interest in Jean. "I had a nice letter from Mrs. Appleton to-day. They seem to be thoroughly enjoying themselves now, and she says Guy is working splendidly and expects to accomplish great things on his return." "Yes," was Jean's inattentive response, as her eyes marked the circling of a buzzing fly outside the window. "Miss Stuart is making quite a long visit," ventured Aunt Helen patiently. "I had thought that she would soon tire of Hetherford." "I am sure I don't see why she doesn't go away. The whole house is turned upside down to provide her with amusement. It is a perfect bore." "My dear," Aunt Helen objected, "that is surely not the spirit of true hospitality. We do not speak ill of our guests. _Noblesse oblige._" "I can't help it," and Jean, now thoroughly aroused, started up from her chair; "I am not going to pretend to like a person when I don't. She is insufferably patronizing, and I hate her." Aunt Helen looked up at her niece with real distress in her eyes. "Why, child," and she held out her hand, "come here. I want to speak to you." Jean stood irresolute, looking half ashamed, and wholly miserable. At that most inopportune moment Nathalie flung open the door. "Oh, here you are, Jean. I have been looking all over for you. Come on down and have a game of tennis before dinner. Why, what's the matter?" Jean hastily averted her face. "Nothing. I don't care to play tennis." "Oh, please do, I am just in the humor for it." "You may be, but I am not," Jean returned curtly. "What in the world has come over you?" asked Nathalie bluntly. "I never knew anyone's disposition to become as uncertain and irritable as yours has lately." "Why don't you let me alone, then? My temper may be growing bad, but yours has never been anything else." Nathalie shrugged her shoulders, and laughing shortly, went on her way without another word. When the door had closed on her, Jean slipped down on the floor and, burying her face in Aunt Helen's lap, sobbed convulsively. "I don't know what is the matter with me," she faltered. "I am so cross and irritable lately. Everything seems to set my nerves on edge. I never used to feel so." Aunt Helen passed her thin hand soothingly over the girl's bent head. "Don't worry about it, dearie. Of course you did not mean to speak so. You are tired and unstrung to-day." By and by Jean's sobs grew less frequent, then ceased altogether. She lifted her head, and, resting her arm on Aunt Helen's knee, dropped her chin in her hand, and stared absently before her. All trace of emotion had left her face, and it now wore an expression of utter weariness and dejection. Her aunt looked thoughtfully down at her. Had it been either Helen or Nathalie who had thus given way it would not have troubled her, but proud little Jean was too reserved and self-contained to break down unless she had been very sorely tried. The silence had lasted some few moments when Aunt Helen again spoke. "In spite of your denial, Jean, I fear that your playtime has lasted too long. Discontent never fails to creep in among us when we are idle. You see, dear, I am taking it for granted that it is nothing deeper than a feeling of discontent which makes you so unhappy. I know of nothing else unless----" She paused. Jean stirred uneasily under her direct glance. Aunt Helen instantly averted her eyes, and resumed: "I am sorry that my ill health forces me to lead my life so apart from you all. I am in ignorance of the many currents and eddies which would otherwise be apparent to me, but if ever you need my advice you know how gladly I will give it to you, and there are times when an old head is better than a young one." Still Jean did not speak. Aunt Helen sighed a little sadly: "Well, my child, I suppose I am mistaken, and that your trouble is only a surfeit of pleasure." "I am a great baby, Auntie, but I am glad I came here to you to have my cry out. You always help me so, and make me ashamed of being so impatient," and Jean looked lovingly up into the worn face which was bent above her. "Thank you, dearie. You must come to me whenever you feel discouraged and unhappy, and remember I always stand ready to give you whatever comfort or counsel lies within my power. But, Jean," and her voice was very grave, "I have learned from my own experience, both of petty annoyance and of great trials, that there is only one true source of strength." * * * * * At a late hour that night Lillian Stuart sat before the low dressing-table in her cozy room, reviewing the events of the past week. The face which the mirror reflected was clouded, the eyes somber and full of fire, for the consciousness of defeat was upon her. As yet, however, no thought of capitulation occurred to her. Farr's indifference, his evident love for another, but deepened her love for him, stinging it into a passion that was well-nigh overmastering her. The difficulties in her path lent new zest to the struggle, rousing within her heart an insatiable desire for conquest. Possession had ever palled upon her. She had loved Farr, but as an accepted lover he had wearied her, and her love for him was not strong enough to drown the voice of worldly wisdom and prudence. To be sure, in those days he was hardly more than a boy, poor and unknown, whereas to-day he was a man well versed in the world's ways, liberally supplied with the world's goods, and with the respect and esteem of his fellow-men, yet preserving the same sweet, magnetic personality which long ago had made such a deep impression on her somewhat fickle heart. These considerations naturally had weight with her, but the secret of her determination lay not in these, but in the obstacles to be surmounted, the flattering assurance that her power could not be foiled. Had she been quite honest with herself she must have acknowledged that once the victory gained the charm would be forever broken. As Farr's wife she would be a thoroughly wretched woman. Knowing full well his hatred of an untruth, his contempt for a deception, his passionate anger at an injustice, did she not dream what a death to his soul a union with her would have been? Alas! she herself had revealed to him the shallowness of her nature, the pettiness of her ambitions, the faithlessness of her heart. The lesson was a bitter one but he had learned it well, and, deep in her soul, Lillian Stuart knew that never again would he give his love unworthily. She hated Jean Lawrence, yet she appreciated her purity and gentleness, the fineness of her nature, the almost exalted bent of her mind. But this appreciation did not soften her heart, nor weaken her determination. Jean had balked her, and Jean must suffer. The face in the mirror before her grew hard; there were rigid lines about the mouth, the wonderful eyes gleamed strangely bright. "I love him. I have always loved him. She shall not have him. It is the one satisfaction that is left me if all else fails." Sharp upon these thoughts came a tap upon the door, and Helen Lawrence entered. A soft wrapper enveloped her slender frame, and her hair hung loose upon her shoulders. "I wanted to come in for a little chat, Lillian. Do you mind if I braid my hair here?" "Why, no, indeed. I am glad to have you. Sit down." Helen drew a chair up close to the dressing-table, and seating herself, began slowly to plait her long soft hair. She put aside some light topic which Miss Stuart suggested, and spoke at once of the subject which lay nearest her heart. "I am worried about Jean, Lillian. She does not seem like herself lately, and if it were not absurd, I should begin to think she was unhappy about something." "Indeed." The response was so brief as to be almost an ejaculation. Helen's words accorded strangely with Miss Stuart's thoughts. "Yes, and you don't know how unusual it is for Jean to be either irritable or moody. She has a very bright, sunny nature, and is particularly sweet-tempered." "Perhaps there is something troubling her which you have not perceived." Helen wrinkled her forehead thoughtfully. "I am afraid there must be." Miss Stuart darted a swift glance at her. "Have you ever thought what it might be?" Helen's attention was caught by a certain tone in her friend's voice. She raised her eyes questioningly: "No, dear; I wish I had a clew." "Suppose I should give you one?" There was genuine surprise in Helen's face. She answered with a tenderness in her voice which gave her companion a pang. "Why, Lillian, do you know of anything to make Jean unhappy?" Miss Stuart lifted her head as if to strengthen her purpose, wondering at the sudden weakness in herself which made the words so hard to say: "Your sister is in love with Mr. Farr." "Oh!" gasped Helen, staring blankly at her friend. "I only wonder you have not seen it before," added Miss Stuart coolly. "Don't you think he is in love with her?" blundered Helen, who had not sufficiently recovered from her astonishment to be very wise in Jean's behalf. The answer was incisive: "I do not." The hot tears rushed to Helen's eyes. "Oh, my poor little Jean!" Miss Stuart turned away and, to save herself, spoke harshly: "For Heaven's sake, Helen, don't cry. It is such a weak thing to do." The sharp words brought Helen suddenly to a realization of what she had done in thus accepting, without demur, Miss Stuart's statement in regard to Jean. Too late she remembered that it was little short of disloyalty to discuss the subject with an outsider; an outsider, moreover, who had never made any pretense of liking her sister. She resolved to retrieve herself if possible, and answered not a little proudly: "I am sorry I offended you, Lillian. We often differ in our opinions as to what is weak and what is not." "Not often, but always," Lillian broke in with a disagreeable laugh. "Where I was weak," continued Helen, ignoring utterly the interruption, "was, in laying too much stress on your verdict in regard to my sister. I am not authorized to contradict your statement, but I think it is more than probable that your perceptions have been at fault. In regard to Mr. Farr, he has certainly seemed to both like and admire Jean. Once or twice I have even thought him very much concerned about her. Why, at the dance----" "I imagine, my dear, that your perceptions are equally as faulty as my own. It may interest you to learn that Mr. Farr and I were at one time engaged; that he loved me madly, and that my breaking of the engagement was a terrible blow to him. It is possible, however, since in your opinion Mr. Farr has transferred his affections from me to your sister, that he has already confessed this to her." The taunting words were spoken lightly, but Miss Stuart's eyes searched Helen's face. What she saw there must have satisfied her, for she turned aside with an air of relief. There was a brief pause, which was broken by a question from Helen: "Does Mr. Farr still care for you, Lillian?" The clear truthful eyes met Miss Stuart's squarely, and under their steady gaze she moved restively. It was not easy to tell a direct lie to Helen. She bent her head, and a slow flush mounted to her face. "That is hardly fair, Helen. He certainly has not told me of any change in his feeling toward me." She flung back her head and her lustrous eyes held a challenge. "You have seen him with me. What do you think?" Her face was alight with power and magnetism; the scarlet lips were slightly parted, as the breath came hurriedly through them; one firm white hand on her breast held together the loose folds of her dressing-gown, which fell about her superb figure in long, graceful lines. At that moment she was regal, majestic. Helen gazed at her steadfastly, and her heart sank. "Poor little Jean," she thought hopelessly. "What could she do?" For Helen, as was her wont, laid too much stress upon her friend's great beauty of face and form, and overlooked the deeper beauty of her sister's soul. As she crept into bed that night she murmured to herself: "I must warn Jean, gently and lovingly. God grant it may not be too late." Her opportunity came the very next evening, for directly dinner was finished Nathalie and Miss Stuart started off on a long-planned ride with Churchill and Andrews. Jean stood on the veranda to watch them mount and ride away. Her eyes followed them until their four figures, swaying slightly with the motion of the horses, were no longer silhouetted against the evening sky, then descended the broad flight of steps, and wandered out into the garden. The sun had already set, but the earth was still wrapped in the mystic light of the purple after-glow. Once in the sweet old-fashioned garden Jean paced slowly up and down the trim paths, bordered by rows of fragrant mignonette and carnations, and flanked at the corners by tall hollyhocks and slender poppies, and into her sad heart stole something of the peace and quiet of the tranquil spot. "It is all so strange and incomprehensible," ran her thoughts, "but I am not going to worry about it. There must be some mistake somewhere. I believed in him so implicitly. I felt so sure of his love--oh, I cannot, I will not believe that he deliberately deceived me. If only he were here now, while she is away, I am sure that everything could be explained. Oh, he might come--he might be honest with me!" The garden gate clicked, and she looked up with startled eyes; but it was only Helen coming down the path to meet her. "Why did you run away?" her sister asked as she linked her arm in hers. "I didn't run very fast," smiled Jean. "I sauntered out when the girls started off for their ride. It is so restful here," she added in a lower tone. "That doesn't sound one bit like you, Jean," said Helen slowly. "I am afraid something must be troubling you, if you feel the need of a restful place where you can be alone." Jean laughed nervously. "Why, what an absurd idea, Helen. Why should I be unhappy?" "That is just what I don't know, dear, but I think you are." "Well, what if I am?" cried Jean, brought to bay. "One cannot always be perfectly contented and happy; I do not suppose that I am to be any more exempt than other people." Helen's eyes were bent on the ground, and she spoke with some hesitation. "Of course that is true enough, but there is usually some definite cause for unhappiness. I don't want to be impertinent, Jean, but is there not some one thing weighing on you at present? Has--" She paused, then went on desperately--"has Mr. Farr anything to do with it?" She felt the violent start that Jean gave, heard the sharp indrawing of her breath, and she did not dare to raise her eyes to her sister's face for fear of reading there still further confirmation of her surmises. She had need of all her courage yet to deal the cruel blow, and without pausing for breath, she hurried on. Her words were confused, incoherent, but they struck a chill as of death to Jean's tender heart. "It was only a foolish idea of mine, Jeanie. Of course there is no truth in it--there can't be--there must not be. He--that is, I have just discovered that he is deeply in love with Lillian. They have been engaged, and I fear the engagement is about to be renewed. Why, darling, he is not worthy of a thought of yours. Forget him, Jean, darling. It is only your imagination." Her voice choked, and she ended abruptly. For an instant not a sound broke the stillness, then Jean faced her sister with strained, wide-open eyes, and spoke to her in a voice that was quite steady, but curiously dull and unnatural. "I am very glad you have told me of this, Helen. Now that I think of it I am not greatly surprised. You need not worry about me. I am all right." They had ceased from their walking to and fro, and as they stood thus opposite each other Jean swayed a little. Helen flung both arms around her. "Oh, darling, what is it? Speak to me. It is only Helen. I love you so, dear." Jean suffered the embrace, but there was no responsive yielding in the slender, rigid figure. When Helen released her she drew away, and started toward the gate. Helen did not stir, and when Jean had gone a few steps she paused and turned her white, stricken face toward her sister. "You need not worry about me," she repeated, "I am all right." And then, with a pathetic outstretching of her hands, she added: "It was only my imagination." Helen sprang forward, but Jean waved her back, and in another moment the shadows of the gloaming hid the flitting figure from Helen's tearful eyes. CHAPTER XVII. THE "VORTEX" DEPARTS. "Let fall! Give way!" Two oars struck the water with a splash, and the dingey shot out from the gang steps of the _Sylph_ the steady strokes of two sturdy sailors sending the little craft swiftly on its way. The owner lounged lazily in the cushioned stern, one leg swung over the other, the tiller-ropes held loosely in his hands. They were sweeping under the stern of the _Vortex_ when a voice from the schooner's deck hailed them. The sailors held their oars suspended, and Churchill pushed back his cap and looked up, frowning slightly, for the sun was in his eyes. "Hello, Farr." "Hello, old man. Going ashore?" "Yes. Want a lift?" "Thanks, if you don't mind putting back." "Not a bit of it." The orders were given, and the dingey brought up to the gang steps. Farr sprang in and they pushed off, heading once more for land. Churchill pulled a cigar-case from his pocket and held it out to his companion, and then a brief silence ensued while each procured a light. "You've been something of a recluse for the last few days, Farr; I haven't seen you about. Been sticking close to your quarters?" "I've been grinding at the charts. Our stay here is about at an end, and Dodd is a little dissatisfied with the progress of our work. Through one cause and another we have been delayed, and the work has dragged." "That doesn't seem to concern Dudley at all. He's ashore most of the time." Farr laughed indulgently. "Oh! Dudley's a lazy Southerner. You can't hustle him. He's the salt of the earth, when you have plenty of time; but you can't impress him with the necessity of haste." "When do you go, old man?" Farr took his cigar from between his lips, and watched the cloud of smoke as the breeze bore it far astern. "I don't know exactly," he answered slowly. "Within the next week or ten days surely." "You will be very much missed," said Churchill heartily; "yet I suppose it has been slow work for you." Farr looked contemplatively down at the lighted end of his cigar. "No. I shall be sorry to go." After a slight pause he added: "What has been going on?" "Nothing much. Andrews has gone up to town. Miss Stuart is still at the manor; but, of course, that is no news to you." "I imagined she had not left," returned Farr indifferently. "I am going to call there this afternoon." "Suppose, then, you meet me here; say in a couple of hours," suggested Churchill, as he brought the dingey up to the float, "and go out and dine with me aboard the _Sylph_. I am by myself, for Andrews is away, and Archer is engaged." "Thanks. I will be delighted." Churchill turned to the sailor who stood erect in the boat, awaiting his orders. "At six sharp, Petersen, and tell the steward there will be two for dinner." Then the two men turned on their heels and strode briskly up the sandy road. Presently their paths diverged, and with a friendly nod they separated. Farr went along in the direction of the manor at a swinging gait. He had not seen Jean since the night of the dance. In the events of that evening his love for her had sustained a severe shock. He could not at once readjust himself to this new and unwelcome development in the nature of her to whom he had given his deepest and most loyal allegiance. Heretofore he had found his love for her intensified by her coldness and indifference, but her flirtation with Maynard was not the sort of thing he had expected from her, and it disappointed him bitterly. The world condoned many of Maynard's offenses because he possessed a certain charm and amiability of manner, but Farr was too clean-minded and upright to look lightly upon the man's selfish disregard of every moral obligation, and he was impatient of his ill-deserved popularity. That Jean should show this man so marked a preference was to him incomprehensible. It was possible that she did not know the full truth in regard to him, but even her innocence and unworldliness could not altogether shield her from blame, for she did know that he was a faithless husband, and, moreover, his wife was her friend. Under any other circumstances Farr would have been jealous, but now the sharpness of his disappointment in Jean outweighed every other consideration. She had been to him the embodiment of sweetness and purity, and as he paced up and down the white decks of the _Vortex_, he inveighed bitterly against this second overthrow of his faith. His anger was short-lived, however, for the tender little Jean of the early summer had twined herself closely about his heart; and now she rose, strong in the power and might of her love, denying valiantly that other self, pleading earnestly for more confidence and trust. So it happened this sunshiny day that, as Farr leaned against the rail, gazing seaward, and pondered on these strange and contradictory events, suddenly the bitterness died out of his heart, and in its place sprang up a passionate longing to see Jean, to hear her sweet voice tell him it was all a mistake, to put an end forever to this intolerable uncertainty. And even as he came to this conclusion, the dingey from the _Sylph_ hove in view, and, without pausing to reconsider, he hailed it. Now he had left the manor gates behind, and striking out across the lawn, increased his pace, for his impatience would not be curbed. The crunching sound of wheels on the gravel brought him to a standstill. On his right a clump of cedars hid the road from sight. He thrust aside the low-growing branches, and as he peered through the aperture a carriage flashed by. Jean was driving, and he had a tantalizing glimpse of her bonny face, as she turned to speak to Eleanor and Cliff, who were on the back seat. An involuntary exclamation escaped him, and he sprang forward, but his voice was unheard, his presence unheeded, and with a heavy heart he gazed after the rapidly retreating vehicle. With a savage little laugh he swung about, and retraced his steps. The joyousness of the summer day was darkened for him, and in his heart was a fierce resentment against Fate. His eyes were bent upon the ground as he plodded slowly along the road, and so he did not see Miss Stuart, driving alone in Helen's buckboard, until she was within a few yards of him. Miss Stuart scanned his face furtively as he stood beside the carriage. "Ah, Val," she said with an assumption of ease, "I suppose you have been at the manor?" "No, I met them driving." "How inhospitable of them not to have turned back," she exclaimed, with her eyes still on his face. Farr was too obtuse to appreciate the drift of her remark. "I was unfortunate. They did not see me." Miss Stuart's brows contracted in a frown, and she flicked the long lash of her whip. "You are not flattering, Val. I was at home." He looked up at her quickly, a vague surprise in his eyes. "I would not venture to inflict myself on you!" he replied with a careless laugh, and then he stood back a step, and raised his hat. Miss Stuart's face flushed angrily, but she had no alternative but to drive on. As she gathered up the reins she shot a glance over her shoulder at Farr, but already he had turned away, and was moving rapidly down the road. She cut the horse with the whip, and in her heart was a burning desire to revenge herself on Jean. As they took their places about the dinner-table at the manor that evening, Nathalie made some casual mention of the _Vortex_, thus giving Miss Stuart the pretext she sought. "By the way," she said, fixing her eyes on Jean's face, although her words were addressed to Helen, "on my way home this afternoon after I left you, I met Mr. Farr and had such a pleasant chat with him. He was on his way to call on us, but as he met me, I suppose----" She broke off with a charming air of embarrassment. Jean raised her head proudly, and met Miss Stuart's gaze with unflinching eyes. "You should have brought Mr. Farr back to tea," she said, so unconcernedly that even Helen was deceived, and Miss Stuart was stirred with a passing feeling of admiration. But the effort cost Jean a pang, and as she turned her eyes slowly away, there was a great coldness at her heart. The following afternoon the girls were having tea in the drawing-room, the long French windows were pushed wide open, and the soft west wind moved the curtains gently to and fro. The blinds were drawn, for the sun shone hotly, and the half-darkened room seemed deliciously cool and refreshing, after the sultry atmosphere of the outer world. Little Gladys danced in from the hall-way, waving a letter in the air. "I took it away from Susie, sister," she cried, in her clear, childish treble. "I don't know who it's for." Miss Stuart leaned forward in her chair, and caught the soft dimpled wrist in her firm white hand. "Let me read the address for you, baby." Gladys demurred, shaking her fluffy head, her blue eyes full of laughter, but Miss Stuart quietly possessed herself of the letter. Her face fell as she turned toward the light and read the address. The handwriting, familiar, yet half strange, awakened a host of memories within her; but the written name was not the one she had been wont to see. She read the address aloud, with a tinge of sarcasm in her smooth voice: "'Miss Jean Lawrence, The Manor House.' For you, Miss Jean." Jean crossed the room and took the envelope from Miss Stuart's hand. She could not repress a faint start of surprise as her eyes fell upon the superscription, but the scornful smile on Miss Stuart's lips lent her instant self-control. She slipped the letter into her pocket, and resuming her place at Eleanor's side, took up the thread of the conversation where it had been broken off, with apparent ease and facility. But her heart was beating wildly, and the hand that held the dainty teacup was far from steady. It was almost an hour later when she pushed aside the portières, and entered the music room. She glanced about her anxiously to assure herself that she was alone, then crossing to the further end and ensconsing herself in one of the deep window-seats, pulled the letter from her pocket. For an instant she held it in her hand, her brows drawn together, a wistful, questioning look in her eyes. She was forcing herself to recall every word that Helen had said to her that miserable evening in the garden. In the light of that talk, this letter to her from Valentine Farr both puzzled and troubled her. She looked down at the address, and with a sudden light of determination in her face, broke the seal: MY DEAR MISS JEAN: We have received our orders and leave Hetherford on Thursday. Will you not let me see you before we sail? I started for the manor yesterday, but from a distance saw you driving away. I seem to be most unfortunate, but I cannot turn my back on the place where I have found so much happiness, without an attempt to see you again, to assure myself, at least, that I carry with me your friendship and good will. You were very good to me in the early days of our sojourn here, Miss Jean, and in memory of those days I venture to ask you if I may call at the manor to-morrow about four o'clock. Yours, VALENTINE FARR. Once, twice Jean read it through, then mechanically folded the bit of paper, and fitted it into the envelope carefully. A tremulous, incredulous joy was dawning on her face. She felt oppressed, and started to her feet. It surprised her to find that she was trembling so she could not stand. She laughed, a little hysterically, as she sank back on the window-seat. Then, suddenly, she flung out her hands, and slipping down on her knees, buried her face in the soft cushions, and a storm of weeping shook the slender figure. In her despair she had been silent, tearless, but in this awakening of hope within her, her pent-up feelings found relief in tears. A wild, almost unreasonable, joy was growing in her heart, and her quivering lips were pressed passionately to her lover's letter. Her faith in him, which Helen's words had so cruelly crushed, was fast springing into life again. When at length the strength of her emotion had worn itself away, she lifted her head and, rising slowly to her feet, leaned against the casement, and looked thoughtfully out upon the peaceful scene. The sun was setting, and the western horizon was one blaze of golden glory. Jean's grave eyes seemed asking counsel of the far illumined sky. Once a deep sigh trembled through her lips, and the thought that prompted it almost formed itself in words. "Oh, if only my mother were here! I could not ask advice of anyone else, but I think I could speak to her." For a long time Jean stood there silent, motionless; and when at last she moved away the crimson light had quite faded, and a soft violet haze lingered in the western sky. She crossed the room, and seated herself at the open desk. For a moment she hesitated, holding her pen poised above the sheet of paper, then bent her head, and wrote rapidly: MY DEAR MR. FARR: I shall be at home to-morrow afternoon, and shall be very glad to see you. I am sorry to learn that you are about to leave Hetherford, and somewhat surprised also, as I had no idea that your departure was imminent. Yours very sincerely, JEAN LAWRENCE. The written words looked cold and formal, and with a tender feeling of compunction Jean raised the bit of paper to her lips. "I would be more kind, dear, if I dared," she murmured softly. The old Dutch clock in the corner of the hall-way was chiming the hour of three the following afternoon, when Jean opened the door of her room, and started to descend the wide staircase. From below voices floated up to her, and when she reached the landing she paused and, leaning over the banisters, looked down upon the girls who were standing near the open front door. Nathalie caught sight of her, and smiled blithely. "Don't you want to come with us, Jean? We are going over to the inn for a game of tennis." Jean shook her head. "I am going to be thoroughly domestic this afternoon," she announced with a conscious little laugh. At the sound of her voice Miss Stuart glanced sharply over her shoulder. There flashed into her mind the recollection of Farr's note to Jean the previous day. She closed her lips tightly as she followed Helen and Nathalie out upon the veranda, and was singularly silent as they sauntered leisurely across the lawn. When they were almost at the gates, she turned to Helen, a distressed expression on her lovely face. "Would you mind very much if I should turn back? I have had a slight headache all day, and the sun seems to make it so much worse." Helen looked sympathetically around at her. "Why no, indeed, dear. I was afraid you were not feeling well, you have been so quiet. By all means let us go right back." But Miss Stuart would not listen to such an arrangement, and declared, with quite the air of a martyr, that she should proceed to the inn, in spite of her headache, unless Helen would do as she desired. When at last she had succeeded in ridding herself of her companions, she drew a deep breath, and turning, walked hurriedly up the avenue. She did not quite see her way clear to prevent an interview between Farr and Jean, but she felt that if she were near at hand, fortune might throw some unlooked-for chance into her path. She had kept them apart so far. Surely she must not fail now at the very end, for the news of the _Vortex's_ departure had been spread abroad by Dudley with loud lamentations. A great stillness lay over the manor this warm August afternoon, and as she ascended the veranda steps she heard clearly Aunt Helen's soft voice calling to Jean from the floor above. "My dear, will you not come up and read to me for a while? My eyes are troubling me so, I dare not use them any more." Miss Stuart stood still and listened, as Jean came slowly out from the drawing-room. "Very well, Auntie," the girl responded half-heartedly, and with an impatient sigh started up the stairs. Miss Stuart waited a moment, then crossed the veranda noiselessly, and entered the house. After a cautious glance about the drawing-room, she stationed herself in one of the front windows which commanded the approach to the manor. The blinds were drawn to shut out the heat and glare, and she turned the slats slightly to afford a view of the driveway. A faint breeze rustled the vines that trailed over the veranda rail and climbed the graceful columns. The moments dragged slowly by. Even Miss Stuart's active mind began at length to yield itself to the drowsy influence of the lifeless atmosphere, the monotonous buzzing of the flies, and the lazy twittering of the birds as they rested idly on the branches of the elms, or sailed languidly through the haze which softly enveloped the earth. She flung one arm above her head, and leaned back in her chair. Her thoughts went back to those far-off happy days in Annapolis, and a faint smile curved the lines of her mouth. Dreamily her memories journeyed on toward the present, and then once more her jealous wrath was awakened. She started up the more effectually to shake off the torpor that was stealing over her, and, rising, took one or two short turns up and down the room, pausing frequently at her post, to peer out through the drawn blinds. Her vigil was a tedious one, the result of it uncertain, but the warring spirit within her was now thoroughly aroused and her patience did not flag. "What move can I make?" she asked herself again and again. "I can't very well insist on playing an unwelcome third to their _tête-à-tête_. They have been driven, and they would outwit me there. Ah! well, we shall see, we shall see." Then a sharp exclamation broke from her, for, as she halted at the window, she discovered Valentine Farr's erect figure swinging lightly across the lawn in the direction of the manor. She turned the slats softly and crossed hurriedly to the entrance of the drawing-room, and standing there, her hands holding the portières apart on either side, she tilted her head forward, straining every nerve to catch the faintest sound from the floor above. It was perfectly quiet, and her face cleared a little. Next her anxious eyes swept the half-darkened hall-way, as if in search of some suggestion, but the wide chimney-place with its brass andirons agleam where the light touched them, the old clock in the corner ticking slowly, steadily, offered her no help. The outer door stood ajar, and leaning a little further forward she could see that Farr was within a short distance of the veranda. Ah! what should she do? Her quick ear caught the sound of a heavy footfall ascending from the lower floor and while her eyes were riveted on the spot whence the sound issued, the swinging door in the rear of the hall was pushed open, and a woman toiled laboriously through, bearing in her arms a hamper of clean linen. Miss Stuart's ready mind sprang at once to the solution of the difficulty, and while the thought formed itself, she cleared the distance between them. Her voice shook a little as she spoke, for her heart was beating high in the hope of victory. "Please set your hamper right down here, and go to the front door. There is a gentleman just coming in. Say to him that Miss Jean begs to be excused, that she particularly wishes to be excused. Well," imperiously, for the good-natured woman was staring at her stupidly, with gaping mouth and astonished eyes. "Don't you understand me? Put your hamper down at once and do as I tell you." The woman obeyed her slowly, and wiping her hands on her apron, moved clumsily forward. Farr's foot was already on the step of the veranda, and Miss Stuart had barely time to push open the swinging door and conceal herself behind it, when his clear, quiet voice, addressing the strange servant, broke the stillness. "Will you please tell Miss Jean Lawrence that Mr. Farr wishes to see her. She is expecting me, I believe." The woman confused by her hurried orders, and embarrassed by the unusual duty of waiting upon the door, grew very red in the face, as she answered bluntly: "She says she won't see yer, sir." Farr stared blankly at her. "What? Oh, I think you must be mistaken. Just take my message up to Miss Jean, please." In her hiding-place Miss Stuart clutched tightly at the folds of her gown, and a look of desperation burned in her eyes. But her fears were unfounded. The woman's thickset figure barred the doorway, and she stood her ground stolidly. "It ain't no use, sir. She told me herself she pertick'ly wouldn't see you, sir." Farr's face went very white, and without another syllable he turned on his heel and strode away. "Sure I didn't say it just the same way yer told me, Miss," the woman said apologetically, as Miss Stuart opened the backdoor and confronted her, "but I sent him away for yer, well enough, I guess," and grinning broadly, she lifted her hamper, and proceeded heavily up the stairs. A moment later Miss Stuart quietly followed her, congratulating herself on the wonderful success of her maneuver. "It was a master-stroke," she said to herself triumphantly, as she closed the door of her room. "Susie will never know that he called, for I don't believe that stupid creature will mention the occurrence. Ah, how fortunate Mrs. Dennis's room is at the rear of the house," and she flung herself down on the lounge and closed her eyes wearily, for the excitement had worn upon her. At the same moment, Aunt Helen's door softly shut, and Jean, her face full of glad expectancy, ran lightly down the stairs. More than an hour later she crept slowly up again, all the joy gone out of her blanched face, her sensitive lips quivering piteously; despair and misery in her eyes. The following morning the _Vortex_ sailed. Captain Dodd and Dudley had called at the manor the evening before, and in the merry little party speculations were rife as to the cause of Farr's desertion, on this his last evening in Hetherford. Jean forced herself to sit quietly by and listen, and her heart grew numb and cold. Outwardly, however, her manner was so natural and self-possessed that Helen drew a deep breath of relief, and persuaded herself that Jean could not be so very unhappy. * * * * * In the morning, at an early hour, Jean is on the upper balcony. She crosses her arms on the rail, and her eyes are fastened on the place where the _Vortex_ lies at anchor. Already her sails are set, and in another moment the loud boom of her cannon announces her departure. The girl shivers a little, but does not stir from her position. Now the schooner is sailing gallantly along, the sun shining full on her white sails. Ah, how rapidly she nears the headland. She is rounding it. Now, only the top of her tall masts can be seen above the rocks. Ah, she is gone. Jean's face drops on her crossed arms, and a low cry breaks from her white lips. Scarcely had the _Vortex_ been an hour on her way, when Miss Stuart presented herself in Helen's room, and announced in tones of deepest regret that she would be obliged to leave them on the following day. "Mother has issued her commands," she said dolefully, and then, as a look of incredulity dawned in Helen's face, she made haste to add, "and there are many reasons why it is much better that I should go." Helen sighed, but did not attempt to alter her friend's decision. That evening, when the last farewell words had been spoken to the friends from the inn and the parsonage, Miss Stuart went up to her room followed by the three Lawrence girls. Helen and Nathalie went to work over her half-packed trunks, and Jean, leaning against the footboard of the bed, looked on with languid interest. Miss Stuart, who was complacently issuing orders to the two packers, leaned lazily back in an easy-chair, her white hands folded idly in her lap. Jean surveyed her gravely, but without bitterness. This was the woman whom Valentine Farr loved, and much as she had suffered, she was ready to do her full justice. Suddenly Miss Stuart looked up, and their eyes met. Jean moved forward and held out her hand. "Good-night and good-by, Miss Stuart. I am very tired and I fear I will not be up for the early train in the morning. I hope you have been happy at the manor." She broke off abruptly. She knew that she ought to add, "I am sorry you are going," but the words refused to pass her lips. Miss Stuart rose and took the outstretched hand, but she could not meet Jean's clear gaze. It was late when the door closed upon Helen and her kindly offices. Miss Stuart, possessed by an intense restlessness, paced up and down the room. Her thoughts were as accusing angels. What return had she made for the kindness and hospitality of these friends under whose roof she had spent the last three weeks? Her wicked pride and passion had indeed sown the seeds of misery in one heart. Of Jean she had thought with shrinking, but trusting, faithful Helen caused her the keener pang, the sharper suffering. It was not too late, however. With one word she could undo the mischief she had so deliberately wrought. Just for one moment Miss Stuart's better self held sway, softening her hard and jealous nature. Just for one moment--then the impulse died out, and with a reckless laugh she drowned the voice of conscience. CHAPTER XVIII. A RIFT IN THE CLOUDS. September with its bright, warm days and cool nights was at hand. The gayeties of the summer were a thing of the past, and the little colony of girls had settled down into the old routine of life, "exactly as we used to before the _Vortex_ came," Mollie Andrews said complacently. No voice was raised in contradiction, and yet, perhaps no heart quite echoed the sentiment. Jean faced her trouble bravely and without complaint, but the effort told on her as the days passed by, and she grew frail and slender, and an expression of deep sadness lingered in her soft eyes; but the change in her took place so slowly, so gradually, that no one seemed to be aware of it. As the days shortened, they would spend their evenings over the wood fire in the manor drawing-room, reading aloud from some favorite book of poetry or prose. Jean invariably found a place on the divan in the corner, and when someone rallied her on her lazy habit, she only smiled faintly and nestled down among the cushions. One cold, gusty evening, when the rain beat against the windowpanes and the wind howled dismally about the house, Eleanor took up a volume of poems from the table and began to read a poem called "Oenone." Helen's eyes unconsciously sought Jean's face. It was half turned away, and one little hand made shift to shield it, but Helen distinctly saw two great tears steal silently down from under the closed lids. This set her heart to aching, and alone in her room that night she pondered long what could be done for her poor little sister. In the end she penned a letter, which in the morning she carried herself to the post-office, and anxiously awaited the result. Before October had well-nigh come around, Jean was really ill; so ill that Aunt Helen, and even thoughtless Nathalie, were seriously concerned. All day long she would lie on the sofa in her room, scarcely speaking save in response to some direct question that was put to her, and all through the long hours of the night her tired eyes never closed. "I don't think she ever sleeps," Nathalie confided to Helen one day in a troubled voice. "Whenever I speak to her she is always wide-awake, and once or twice I have thought I heard her crying." Helen shook her head sadly, and watched the mails with an increasing impatience for the answer to her letter. It came at last, and when she had read it through hurriedly, she went at once to Jean's room, and sitting down beside her, took her cold little hands in hers. "Do you feel so badly to-day, dear?" she said tenderly. "No, Helen, only very tired." The sigh with which these words were spoken went right to Helen's heart. "Would you like to go away where you would have a complete change of scene?" Jean raised herself on her elbow, and turned an eager eye toward her sister. "Oh, yes. I want to go away. It's the only thing in the world I really want, and oh, I want it so very much. Helen, I--I can't stay here." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "Don't you see how hard it is for me?" Helen bent down and kissed her. "Well, darling, I have arranged it for you, and I have only been waiting for this letter to tell you that it was all right. You see, I didn't want to speak to you, dear, until everything was settled. Now, shall I read you what the letter says?" "Yes." Helen drew the letter from her pocket and unfolded it: "I am so sorry to hear that poor little Jean is not well. It is hard to imagine her otherwise than rosy and smiling. I think with you that probably a change of scene would do her more good than all the medicines in the world, and I see my way clear at once to carry out your proposition. My aunt, Mrs. Fay, crosses in the middle of October to join us here in Paris, and I want you to send Jean over with her. The ocean trip will be the first step toward recovery, and you must trust to our watchful care and the newness of her surroundings to complete the cure." Helen paused and Jean broke in hurriedly, a faint color rising in her pale cheeks: "Dear old Guy! how like him, always thoughtful, always tender. O Helen, yes; let me go. I would be so glad to, and I know it would do me good." "Would you be happy with Guy and his mother, Jean?" Jean's sad eyes met her sister's for a moment, and then were slowly averted. "I love them both dearly," she answered gently, "and I want above everything to go away from Hetherford. Please help me to do this, Helen. You will gain Auntie's consent." And with this reply Helen was fain to be content. She had refrained from reading aloud the closing lines of Guy's letter, which, running thus, had made her heart beat strangely: Our plans are somewhat indefinite. My aunt does not care to spend more than two months over here, and it is her intention to return home at Christmas time. If a stay of this duration should effect Jean's cure she might return with her, for there is a chance that she may be homesick so far away from you all. It would be very pleasant to return home at this sweet season. My own thoughts turn that way so often. Helen, can you never hold out any hope to me? Must this season of peace come and go, leaving my heart as lonely as ever? Must I wait forever, in strange lands, for one word from you? Forgive me if I do wrong to write you thus, but your letter has undone me. Faithfully yours, GUY APPLETON. In less than two weeks Jean Lawrence sailed for Europe under the care of Mrs. Fay. A sense of desolation inwrapped the manor. The weather was sharp and cold and the sweet warm summer seemed a dream, and every little thing that recalled it gave the girls a pang. Emily Varian had departed, and both the Hills and Andrews were about to turn their faces cityward. One crisp morning, when the wind blew fresh from the northwest, Eleanor came out from the inn with Cliff Archer at her side and started briskly forth in the direction of the parsonage. Eleanor's face wore an expression of deep dejection, and Cliff, observing this, made comment on it: "You are down on your luck." Eleanor smiled somewhat dubiously: "It is in the air, Cliff. I don't know what is the matter with us all. Our good spirits seem to have deserted us with Jean." There was a brief silence, broken by Archer. He spoke slowly, as if not quite sure of his ground: "It was in the air before Jean went away, I think. It strikes me that she was fully under its influence herself." Eleanor shot a glance at her companion: "Jean was not well, you know." "And there was a cause. Come, Eleanor, let us be frank. You may trust my affection for Jean to keep me from prying into her affairs, but some things this summer were quite too patent to be disregarded." "I don't know what you mean," Eleanor interposed hurriedly. "Oh, yes, you do. It is natural for you to shield Jean, because from your point of view, she has been badly treated. Well, I don't agree with you in that. If ever a man was honestly in love, that man was Valentine Farr. I don't pretend to know what the trouble was between them, but I have a suspicion, on general principles, that jealousy was at the bottom of it. I don't believe that Jean's was well founded and I wish she had a friend who felt at liberty to tell her so. I have kept silent for a long time, too long perhaps; but now I have set the ball rolling, and shall await results." They were in the parsonage grounds now, and Eleanor paused and laid her hand lightly on Cliff's arm. "I would do anything in the world for Jean, as you know, Cliff, but I feel too much in the dark to take any step at present. You may be right; indeed, I think you are; but remember neither you nor I are quite sure of Jean's feeling on the subject, and it is a very delicate matter to meddle with." "I would risk it," smiled Cliff. After a moment he spoke again, in a tone of deeper earnestness: "A very grave trouble can arise from a slight misunderstanding, Eleanor. I wish, dear, that you and I could put that possibility out of reach. I have tried to be patient, but when I see so much sorrow brought about undoubtedly by a lack of frankness and confidence, I tremble for our future. If you do care for me, dear, why will you not tell me so? Surely you cannot doubt the sincerity of my love for you." Eleanor raised her eyes to her lover's face. "I think you know, Cliff----" she began, when Nan's voice broke in upon them. "Hello! Now what are you two doing, philandering in this secluded spot?" "Talking of subjects quite beyond your ken, my dear," drawled Cliff lazily. "You won't catch your train if you don't come down to mother earth," laughed Nan. Archer consulted his watch, and then bade the girls a hurried good-by and started off for the station. Nan linked her arm in Eleanor's and they proceeded leisurely to the parsonage, talking as they went. One sentence remained in Nan's mind, awakening there a long train of thought. "The summer is over, Nan, and we are about to disband. We have, perhaps, had more gayety and less real happiness than in the years gone by. I think you know as well as I the reasons for this. You are the only one, I think, who could set some crooked matters straight. Suppose you see what you can do?" Enigmatical as the words were, Nan understood their purpose, and when, on the last evening before the Andrews and the Hills were to leave Hetherford, they assembled at the manor, she had quite determined to follow Eleanor's suggestion. It was a custom of long standing for Nan, Mollie, and Eleanor to spend the last night of the season with the Lawrence girls, to talk over the events of the summer and to anticipate the future. To-night, as they gathered around the wide fireplace in the drawing-room, a certain sadness hovered over them, subduing their voices, breaking the conversation with frequent spaces of silence. Their hearts were full of thoughts that were left unspoken. Jean's absence made itself strongly felt among them, so closely was she associated with every like occasion in the past. "Nothing seems real without her," said Eleanor drearily. "This parting is like no other." "I hate partings anyway," cried Mollie. "I am always so afraid that we will not come together again quite in the old way!" "All things must change To something new, to something strange!" quoted Helen. "Now, girls, this is nonsense," exclaimed Nathalie, struggling with the lump that would rise in her throat. "Jean is going to have a splendid time, and will come home as strong and well as ever, and at Christmas time you will all come up here and we will have a grand reunion." No answer to Nathalie's cheerful prediction suggested itself, and Helen made a welcome diversion by announcing that it was bedtime. "Nan, will you share my room?" she asked as they were on their way upstairs. "Well, I should think so. I particularly want to have a good talk with you alone." "That is nice. I am just in the humor for it, too." When they had donned their wrappers Helen threw herself down on the sofa before the open fire, and Nan knelt down on the hearthstone to stir the logs into a brighter blaze. "A cheerful fire is always inspiring to me," she said explanatorily. "I can talk so much better when I am thoroughly warm and cozy." Helen smiled indulgently. "All right, Nan; make yourself comfie, and then talk to me." The flames were crackling up the chimney now, and Nan settled herself on the hearthrug with a sigh of satisfaction. "Do you think Jean will be happy so far away from you all?" "She wanted very much to go," Helen replied evasively. "Yes, I know that. Helen, Jean was not happy before she went away. Did you not see it?" Helen did not speak, and after a moment Nan resumed quietly: "Yes, Jean was unhappy, and yet Mr. Farr loved her dearly." Helen sat up and looked at her friend in blank astonishment. "Why, Nan----" "Dear, I couldn't help guessing it. Indeed, I don't mean to be impertinent, but I believe Mr. Farr was in love with Jean, and I can't bear to see everything going wrong, when a little common sense would set it right." "I am afraid it would take more than that, Nan. Mr. Farr is in love with Lillian, I think, and probably he meant nothing by his attentions to Jean." "He may have been in love with Miss Stuart once, but he is not now," declared Nan in a tone of conviction. "You are mistaken, Nan. I am sure you are." "I think not," returned Nan stubbornly. "I have had my eyes wide open, and I believe I am right." "Then why did he treat Jean so?" demanded Helen. "Toward the end of his stay here he hardly ever came to the manor, and he went away without even calling to say good-by. In fact I don't think Jean knew the _Vortex_ was going." But Nan's opinion was quite unshaken. She dropped her chin in her hand and stared thoughtfully into the fire. "I will tell you something," she said impressively. "The afternoon before the _Vortex_ left, I was on my way to the inn, when from a distance I saw Mr. Farr turn in at the manor gates. You remember that shortly after Bridget came over for me, and I was so cross at having to leave our game of tennis?" Helen nodded, and Nan went on: "Well, on my way over I saw Mr. Farr come out from the manor grounds. His cap was drawn down over his eyes, and so lost was he in his own thoughts that he passed me on the other side of the road, and did not even see me. There was something in his whole figure and bearing expressive of disappointment and unhappiness. Oh, you needn't look incredulous," turning her head to scan Helen's face. "A person's carriage is often most expressive." "I wasn't looking incredulous, Nan, I was only wondering what point you were going to make out of all this." "That Mr. Farr did go to the manor to say good-by to Jean. I don't think he could have seen her, for from the time he went in the manor gates until he left them again, he could only have walked to the door and right back again without stopping." "I know he didn't," said Helen quietly, "for Jean told me so." She hesitated a moment, then added: "Lillian was at home that afternoon." Nan's face grew downcast. "I don't believe he went to see Miss Stuart," she persisted, somewhat unreasonably. "I believe that there was some great mistake somewhere. I knew," she went on, as Helen did not reply, "that Jean was surprised to find that he and Miss Stuart were old friends. He may not have told her, but that was probably accidental. At any rate that was the beginning of the difficulty, and every incident from there on served to widen the breach. Jean thought she had been willfully deceived, and Miss Stuart was not loath to lend herself to strengthen that conviction." "I don't see how you can blame Lillian," objected Helen irritably. "It was not her fault that Mr. Farr was in love with her. I think they were once engaged;" this last somewhat fearfully, for she did not know that she was doing right to betray her friend's secret. Nan shrugged her shoulders: "That may be, but it is only a greater reason why he is not in love with her now." This bit of worldly cynicism struck on deaf ears, for Helen was revolving many things in her mind. "There are, of course, many things that I cannot attempt to explain," Nan continued, "but I still hold to my belief that Mr. Farr cared for Jean. I like him, and I don't believe he would ever have deliberately deceived her." A brief pause ensued. "Nan," said Helen, "I wish the _Vortex_ had never come to anchor here. Everything has gone wrong since then." "Be fair, Helen. Are you sure the fault lay there? It seems to me that everything went happily until----" "Until when? Go on, Nan." "Until Miss Stuart came." Helen, who had been half-sitting up, with her head propped on her hand, dropped back among the cushions with a heavy sigh. "I don't know why you should think so. You are prejudiced against Lillian, and harsh in your thoughts of her. I am not at all sure that it is fair." Nan gained her feet, and looked gravely down at her friend: "Is it not true, dear? Think, Helen. Have not many things gone wrong since your acquaintance with Miss Stuart? Oh! I am sure of it, quite sure." Unbroken silence. "Are you angry with me, Helen?" Nan asked at length. "No, no." "May I say something still further, dear?" "Of course; I know you would never willfully be unkind." Nan sat down on the sofa: "Things have gone wrong since the day you met Miss Stuart, and the reason is that you persisted in a friendship of which Guy so strongly disapproved. Tell me, Helen, was it not Miss Stuart who separated you from Guy? Was it not on her account that you quarreled?" "I suppose so; but Guy was very strange and unreasonable, and I liked Lillian; her friendship was very sweet." "O Helen, you had known Guy all your life; you should have relied on his judgment, you should have trusted him. Do you think that for any light or insufficient reason he would have thwarted you? Had he not always shown himself thoroughly unselfish in everything that concerned you? You did him a very cruel wrong when you mistrusted him, Helen; and I don't see how you could have been so cold when he loved you so." For answer, Helen raised her eyes and looked at Nan through her tears. "I want to help you to see what a mistake you have made," Nan continued gently. "You had grown used to Guy, his devotion was such an old story that you thought you did not love him. Miss Stuart's great beauty fascinated you, and she soon found it easy to bend you to her will. Forgive me, darling, but this once I must speak bluntly. Many and many a time you would have gone back to your allegiance to Guy had she not willed it otherwise, and had he, poor fellow, not taken the worst course for his cause. It was foolish for him to go away, but Guy never could bear half-measures. Since then you have almost learned to know Lillian Stuart for yourself. Yet, even to this day, you blind yourself about her. I sometimes am tempted to think it is simply because she is so beautiful." Helen started up, her face ablaze. "Nan, Nan, you are unjust. You despise me because I gave Guy up, but I tell you I realized I did not love him before I ever saw Lillian Stuart. I do love her." "Pshaw," interrupted Nan indignantly. "Guy Appleton is the best and truest man in the world, and you must have loved him if you had not been unduly influenced. There, dear, don't be angry. You know how fond I am of Guy, and how keenly I took his disappointment to heart. He loved you so, Helen, and he was so miserable." "Please spare me, Nan," murmured Helen brokenly. "I can't spare you, dear. If your mistakes had simply made you suffer, I would never have said a word, but it is not so. Miss Stuart has crossed Jean's path, and for her sake I have spoken." "If it is true, if I were sure of it, I would want to die." "Dying would not do any good. Live, and some day it may be in your power to put an end to all this sorrow." "Nan, are you sure that Mr. Farr is in love with Jean?" "Not sure, Helen, but I think so." "What can I do?" "Nothing at present. We must wait, and see what happens. Oh! I am very hopeful for the future." When they were in bed and the lights were out, Nan ventured to ask: "Don't you think Guy will ever return to Hetherford?" "I don't know, dear," Helen replied, with a sound of tears in her voice. Nan longed to shake her, to say "You ought to know; it depends solely upon you; why don't you do something about it?" but she felt she had gone far enough for one night, and turning over on her pillow, fell fast asleep. Nan was only a country-bred lass, and yet not all her separation from the world and from her fellow-creatures could shut her out from an unerring comprehension of human nature. Her wide sympathies taught her to understand Helen's coldness toward a lover whose one fault was that he had demanded too little and yielded too much; and she was too thorough an artist not to fully appreciate the wonderful spell that beauty such as Miss Stuart's casts upon certain natures. The next day the rain came down in sheets, and nothing drearier could be imagined than the Hetherford station, where Helen and Nathalie awaited the arrival of their friends, who were to depart on the train which was now almost due. Presently the old omnibus backed up to the platform, and from its damp interior the Hills and Andrews slowly emerged, their faces as gloomy as the leaden sky above, as they went through the irksome task of buying tickets and checking trunks. Nan came rushing in upon the scene just as the train drew up at the station. There were a few hurried words of farewell, and then, with a clanging of bells and puffing of steam, the train sped on its way to the far-off city. When the three girls clambered into the Lawrences' great closed rockaway, they felt sorely tempted to give way to tears and lamentations. The horses splashed through the mud, the rain beat against the windowpanes, the east wind wailed and sighed through the trees. Nan got out at the parsonage, and in silence the two sisters drove on to the manor. Nathalie threw off her hat and coat, and seating herself at the big table in the center of the hall-way, began a long letter to Jean. From the fireside Helen watched her for a few moments and then mounted slowly to her room, feeling too dispirited for even Aunt Helen's society. By and by a soft little voice from without begged for admission, and she opened the door and gladly drew Gladys into the room. "Baby, you are just the little girlie I wanted. Sister feels very dull and lonely to-day." "Me too," echoed Gladys, as she climbed into her lap. "Well, well, that is too bad. We shall have to comfort each other." "What is comfort, sister?" "Comfort, Dolly? Why to comfort anyone is to try to make them happy when something is troubling them." "Auntie says I'se her comfort," Gladys affirmed, with a wise little nod of her head. "So you are, pet, and not only Auntie's, but mine too." The child nestled down contentedly in her sister's arms. Her big eyes, wandering about the room, rested at length upon a large folding frame of photographs which stood on the mantel. "I wish Jeanie didn't go 'way," she said in a pathetic little voice. "What made you think of Jean, dear?" "'Cause I just was lookin' at her picture." Helen lifted her eyes to the mantel. "So you were. We all miss Jean very much, don't we, darling?" "Who's that, sister?" asked Gladys, pointing to the photograph next to the one of Jean. "Don't you know?" "I kind of 'member, but I ain't sure." "Have you forgotten Mr. Appleton, Gladys--Guy Appleton?" queried Helen in a low tone. "Oh, now I 'member," cried Gladys gleefully. "Don't you know the little kitty he gave me? Larry harnessed her to my little wed cart, an' she wan up the willow tree with it." And at the recollection, the child burst into a merry peal of laughter. Helen laughed, too, in sympathy, and then it came back to her how nicely Guy had spoken to the children, telling them that what was fun to them was suffering to poor kitty, and impressing upon them how unkind and cowardly it was to be cruel to any living creature. They talked on thus, this big and little sister, until twilight had come. Then Helen put the child down from her lap, and sent her off to the nursery for her supper. As she turned back into the room, her eyes could just discern the outline of the frame upon the mantel, but although the photographs within it were quite obscured by the dusk, Guy's face rose before her with startling distinctness. She dropped into a chair, and a dismal little laugh broke from her. "Oh, dear, I wish Gladys and Nan had both kept still. Now I don't know what I do want." Week followed week monotonously, with little to mark the flight of time save the arrival of letters from Jean and the Appletons. Jean wrote cheerfully, declaring that she was much better and in excellent spirits, but Mrs. Appleton's reports were much less encouraging. "Jean never complains," she wrote, "and seems filled with a restless desire to keep constantly on the move, but she still looks very fragile, and I sometimes fear that all at once she will break down completely. However, you must not be anxious, about her, for perhaps I am needlessly so. Mrs. Fay expects to return home at Christmas time, and I imagine that by then Jean will be quite ready to accompany her." The last week in November Helen went to town to spend Thanksgiving with the Hills. "It seemed almost selfish to take you away from Nathalie," Eleanor said, as they drove rapidly away from the station through the noisy, crowded streets, "but I was longing for a sight of someone from Hetherford, and I thought it would be such fun to begin to do our Christmas shopping together. A little later the shops are so terribly overcrowded." The first few days of Helen's visit were passed chiefly in this wise, and partly because her time was so fully occupied, and partly because of a curiously uncomfortable feeling which she could not shake off, she neglected to let Miss Stuart know that she was in town. On the fourth evening after her arrival they dined at a famous restaurant with an uncle and aunt of Eleanor's and two youths of the _jeunesse dorée_. Helen had felt very shy at first, but this was fast wearing off, and she was talking quite naturally and pleasantly with her companion, when a party of two ladies and half a dozen men entered the room, and selecting a table at a short distance from where Eleanor and her friends were seated, grouped themselves about it; their loud talking and easy assurance attracting universal attention. Helen stared at them a little curiously, and then, as one of the ladies drew off her long tan gloves and let her gaze wander slowly around the room, she gave a sudden start. At the same instant the lady's glance met Helen's, and the recognition was mutual. Miss Stuart gracefully inclined her head, a certain surprise in her eyes, and Helen flushed crimson as she returned the bow. "Why, there is Miss Stuart," exclaimed Eleanor. "I can't imagine why she chooses such a companion as Mrs. Desborough." "And why should Miss Stuart be so particular?" laughed the man at her side. "It would be the pot calling the kettle black, wouldn't it?" Eleanor broke in hurriedly, with some totally irrelevant remark, but the words had reached Helen's ears. The color died out of her face, and from that moment her companion found her silent and absent-minded. As they passed out of the restaurant, Miss Stuart bowed smilingly to Eleanor and turned a steady level glance on Helen. "Who were you bowing to?" asked Mrs. Desborough from the other side of the table. "To Miss Hill and her friend Miss Lawrence," Miss Stuart replied a little stiffly. "What?" laughed the man at her side, "not that demure little girl who was dining with Miss Hill?" "The very same. She is a great friend of mine." "Oh, come now, don't tell me that. You two never hit it off together." Miss Stuart frowned. "You will oblige me by not discussing the subject," she returned, in a tone so unlike her usual careless, flippant one that her companion was impressed by it. "I like her infinitely better than any woman I have ever known." "By Jove, I believe you are in earnest!" "Don't believe anything," she answered sharply, and turning to the man on her left plunged at once into a reckless flirtation. CHAPTER XIX. A CABLEGRAM. The following morning a note came for Helen by a messenger. It was from Lillian Stuart and, without a word of upbraiding for having been kept in ignorance of Helen's presence in town, begged for a visit from her prior to her return to Hetherford. Helen was fully alive to the generous spirit thus shown toward her, but it did not alter her determination to decline the invitation. She worded her answer as kindly as possible, while making her meaning quite clear. It hurt her cruelly to take this step, and as she sealed the envelope there were tears in her eyes. It was Mrs. Hill's day at home, and when, after luncheon, Eleanor reminded Helen of this fact, the girl pleaded to be excused, for she felt far too depressed and out of sorts to meet people and to exert herself to entertain them. Mrs. Hill indulgently granted her request, and so she put on her hat and coat and started out for a walk. She strolled down a beautiful avenue, lined with fine residences, succeeded, as she proceeded, by richly and gayly ornamented shops. A crowd of people were passing up and down, and the street at times was almost blocked with an innumerable throng of equipages. When Helen had reached a point where this avenue is intersected by another, she crossed the street and entered a square, whose patches of grass and bare trees were a rest to her eyes after the rows of stately buildings all about her. Children were playing about on the smooth paths, and as Helen looked at them she found herself longing for a sight of dear little Gladys' round, chubby face. Across the street, on the block below, a swinging sign caught her attention. Its staring characters told her that an art exhibition was being held within, and she turned her steps in that direction. As she approached the showy and over-ornamented doorway, she glanced up at a man who was coming toward her. Something in his gait and general bearing struck her as familiar. As he gained her side he raised his hat, and she saw that he was Valentine Farr. "Why, Miss Lawrence," he exclaimed, "this is a very great and unexpected pleasure. I had no idea you were in town. How are you?" "Oh! very well, thank you, but," with a sympathetic glance at his arm, which she saw he carried in a sling, "have you been hurt, Mr. Farr?" "I had a fall aboard ship on our way to Fort Munroe, and broke my arm. It was badly attended to, so I got leave to come home and have Dr. ----," naming a well-known surgeon, "fix it up for me." "I am sorry," said Helen, looking at him with friendly eyes. "Where were you going, Miss Lawrence?" Farr asked, as the surging throng crowded them close to the railing of a near house. "I thought I would go in just above here, and see the pictures." "Will you let me accompany you? I would deem it a very great favor, I have so many questions I want to ask you. I want to know all about Hetherford and everyone there. "Indeed, I wish you would, and I will gladly satisfy your curiosity. There is not much to tell of Hetherford save that Jean has gone to Europe." She tried to mention her sister's name quite naturally, but the color rose to her face, and she could not bring herself to look at her companion. "To Europe?" he echoed, and could think of nothing further to say. "I will tell you all about it when we are inside," Helen said to him rather flurriedly. In a moment more they found themselves in a softly lighted room, the walls of which were lined with paintings. A few people, catalogue in hand, were slowly walking about or standing in groups of two or three before some painting of more than usual merit. Helen gained courage to raise her eyes to her companion's face, and something in its expression made her direct her steps at once toward a huge red ottoman which occupied the center of the room. "Shall we sit down here and have our talk first?" her voice softly interrogated. "You can show me the pictures afterward." Farr looked at her gratefully. "It would be my wish, Miss Helen, but you mustn't let me bore you." For answer, Helen seated herself and motioned him to take the place beside her. "Jean went to Europe in October. She had not been at all well, and----" "Not well?" he interrupted her with an anxious face. "In fact, she was quite ill," Helen went on gravely, "and she had an opportunity to join some friends of ours who were over there, so we sent her in the hope that the change would benefit her." "And how is she now?" "Somewhat better, I think, but not very strong yet." "I am deeply grieved," he answered, in a voice which his best efforts could not keep very steady. There was a brief silence, during which Farr's eyes were fixed moodily on the carpet. "I called to see your sister," he began at length, "the day before we left Hetherford, but she excused herself." "I don't think Jean knew of your visit." "You are mistaken," he returned bitterly. "The servant who admitted me had received orders that Miss Jean would not see me, and she made that fact patent to me beyond the possibility of any doubt." "I cannot help that," said Helen, her determination to pursue the subject struggling against a sudden timidity. "I am sure you are wrong. I remember the afternoon perfectly. Nathalie and I had been to the inn, and when we reached home I found Jean on the sofa in her room, and I asked her if anyone had called, and she said 'no.'" A puzzled expression crossed Farr's face. "It is very strange. Why, Miss Helen, I wrote and asked your sister if she would see me, and she replied that she would be at home at the hour I mentioned in my note." All at once there flashed through Helen's mind a recollection which suggested a most cruel suspicion. Farr was looking straight at her, his honest eyes demanding an honest answer. "I cannot explain it, Mr. Farr," she said slowly, "but I feel perfectly safe in answering you that it was all a mistake, and that Jean never knew of your call at the manor." "And what of the message the servant gave me? Forgive me, Miss Helen, if I seem to press you, but this is no light matter to me." "I am quite sure that Jean never gave that message, although I can give you no further explanation of the matter." Farr's face went very white, and, as Helen looked at him, she saw how much the past few months had changed him. There were deep lines about his mouth, and his grave eyes were immeasurably sad. Her heart went out to him in sudden sympathy, and she spoke to him with a touch of tenderness in her voice. "Jean will be with us again at Christmas time, I hope, and then you must see her and let her explain to you how such a mistake was made." Farr rested his elbow on his knee and dropped his head in his hand. "If I only felt sure you were right, Miss Helen." He paused a moment, then resumed with deep earnestness, "I cared so much for your sister that the sudden withdrawal of her friendship was a bitter blow to me." Helen's eyes were downcast, her lips refused to speak. The silence was broken by Farr. "I think at one time I dreamed she cared for me a little, but my illusion was quickly dispelled." Another pause of briefer duration, and then he turned to his companion with a question on his lips. "How was it, Miss Helen? Did I presume too much on your sister's kindness to me? I suppose I must have, although it seems to me that I hardly deserved her excessive coldness and dislike." Helen, thus put to the test, looked straight up at him, and answered a little tremulously: "Mr. Farr, Jean always liked you." He drew a quick sharp breath. "Why do you think so?" he asked. Then before Helen could reply, he went on in a strained voice, "I loved Jean with all my heart, and was about to ask her to be my wife. I love her now--I shall always love her." "And Jean cares for you," Helen whispered, so low he had to bend his head to catch the words. "Cares for me?" he repeated, a sudden light in his eyes, his voice grown very deep and tender. "Yes, oh yes. There must have been some wretched mistake which can be explained away. I don't know how it was," she went on with a plaintive smile. "Jean's heart was almost broken because of you, and she grew so ill we had to send her away." "Thank God!" he ejaculated solemnly. Helen broke into a little laugh, which was full of tears. "That Jean has gone away?" she queried. Farr lifted his head and drew a deep breath. "I can't thank you, Miss Helen. I seem to have no words to express to you what you have done for me to-day. Indeed, it seems as if Fate, for once, had chosen to do me a kind turn." After a little Helen said gently: "You must come to the manor for Christmas, Mr. Farr. I can think of no greater happiness for Jean than to have you there to welcome her on her return." "Miss Helen, I--I can't realize it. You----" His voice broke, but after a moment he resumed: "You are not holding out a vain hope to me--you are sure?" Helen met his eyes steadily, and he was reassured, even before she answered gravely: "Quite sure, Mr. Farr. Do you think I would have spoken else?" She turned away her head, and he saw a tear on her cheek. "I have tried to fill my mother's place to the girls, but I was blinded by personal interests, and did not understand about Jean until too late. I don't think I could have borne it if it had not been put in my power to retrieve my mistake." Farr looked at her curiously, a thoroughly puzzled expression on his face. He opened his lips to question her, but suddenly changed his mind, and closed them without having spoken. Helen rose from the ottoman. "We have not seen the pictures, have we?" she asked in a lighter tone. Farr stood looking down at her with earnest eyes. "Miss Helen, if God is good to me, if all goes well, is there a welcome for me at the manor?" She put out her hand to him, and he held it tightly for a moment. "God bless you." Some minutes later they descended the wide stairs, and, passing through the outer door, found themselves once more in the crowded thoroughfare. The short November day was drawing to a close, the wind was keen and sharp, and a flurry of snow filled the air. "Now, Mr. Farr, I want you to put me in an omnibus, please, and you must not come uptown with me." Then, as he demurred, she added, with a friendly smile: "My mind is so full of thoughts, I would really rather be alone for a while. You understand, don't you?" She turned on the steps of the omnibus to say: "I will let you know about Jean's return, and remember, you are to spend Christmas with us." "As if I could forget," Farr murmured to himself, as he strode away, his face alight with a great happiness. As Helen rang the bell of the Hills' cozy apartment, the door was opened from the inside, and she found herself face to face with Lillian Stuart. From the drawing-room came the buzz of tongues, and through the half-open portières she could see quite a number of people standing about. Miss Stuart answered her unspoken thought: "Don't go in there, Helen; take me to your room. I want to speak to you for a moment. I have already made my call on the Hills." Helen obediently led the way down the hall, but her heart was very heavy, for she had no courage for another scene this afternoon. She knew that the conversation must necessarily be painful, and she made every effort to put off the evil moment; but in vain. Almost before the door was closed Miss Stuart began: "Now, Helen, will you please explain to me why you must return to Hetherford in such haste? Surely your aunt can spare you to me for a few days. I can't imagine how you could have planned to be in town, and not to be with me for a little visit." Helen flushed guiltily. "I am so sorry, dear," she faltered. "Another time, perhaps, but now I must go home." Miss Stuart started up, loosening her fur boa impatiently. "That is absolute folly. There is nothing to stand in the way unless----" She broke off abruptly, and her eyes searched Helen's downcast face. "Do you want to put an end to our friendship," she cried sharply. "Is that why you act so strangely?" Helen lifted her hand with an imploring gesture of dissent. "Answer me, Helen. Am I not right?" Helen's head was bent still lower, and she made no attempt to speak. Miss Stuart watched her for a moment in silence, and a slight quiver passed over her face. She came a step nearer, and laid her hand on the girl's shoulder: "Who has influenced you against me, Helen? What has happened?" "Why, Lillian, what makes you say that? It is not fair, simply because in one instance I am unable to fulfill your wishes." Miss Stuart withdrew her hand, and her brow darkened. "Helen, Helen; you disappoint me. Let us have the truth at all hazards. Tell me frankly, would not your answer always be the same now, whenever I might ask you for a visit?" Helen shivered a little, and she could not bring herself to meet the girl's eyes. Presently Miss Stuart spoke again, the effort to subdue all emotion rendering her voice cold and stern. "I understand. You have withdrawn your friendship from me. Oh! no doubt you have discovered the depth of my unworthiness, and feel perfectly justified. Content in your own moral superiority, and in that of your friends in general, you have decided that it would be wiser to banish me from the inner circle. Of course," she went on with a bitter laugh, "you have not reached this conclusion alone. Would you mind telling me who has helped you to it?" The taunting question stung Helen into a response: "You told me an untruth, Lillian. You deliberately deceived me. You caused untold suffering to one who is very dear to me, to what end I cannot imagine. And this was your return for all the love and trust I had given you." Miss Stuart turned a startled glance on Helen. "What do you mean?" she asked breathlessly. "I have seen Mr. Farr to-day, and a good many things that have puzzled me have been made clear. I am not judging you, Lillian. I am completely in the dark as to your motives. I only know that you were not honest with me." "So you have seen Val Farr," murmured Miss Stuart. She flung back her head defiantly. "Well, what did he tell you of me? I thought he was too much of a man to speak ill of a woman." "Your name was never mentioned, Lillian. I am not prepared to tell you what Mr. Farr said to me. Suffice it to say, it proved the untruth of what you led me to believe last summer." Miss Stuart caught her breath. "I suppose that means that he is in love with your sister?" "We will not discuss that, please," replied Helen with quiet dignity. Her companion laughed, but there was no mirth in the sound. "Well, I could have told you that last summer. I did lie to you about it. The game is played out now, and I have lost, so there is no further reason why I should not tell you the truth. I was jealous of that little sister of yours, and I did everything in my power to keep her and Valentine Farr apart. Placed in the same position, I should undoubtedly repeat the offense." Cruel and unwomanly as the words were, there was something in her friend's voice which stirred Helen with a feeling of pity. She rose and laid a gentle hand on Miss Stuart's arm. "You must not try to make me think badly of you, dear. I would so much rather believe that you did not realize how much misery you were causing. Let us not speak any more of this, Lillian." A sudden rush of tears dimmed Miss Stuart's eyes. "The least I can do is to grant your last request, Helen. One thing more I can do for you, dear--I can go. You need never see me again." There was just a faint interrogation in the low-spoken words, but Helen remained quite silent. She was waging a bitter fight within herself. Everything pressed her into a renunciation of this friendship which had cost her so dear. Slowly there was awakening within her a deep knowledge of Guy Appleton's character, and with this knowledge came a great longing to win from him the love which she had so lightly sacrificed. While a vestige of this friendship remained Guy would never take her to his heart, and now her choice must be made. Then she thought of Jean and Valentine Farr, and the thought strengthened her conviction that only one path was open to her. Raising her tearstained face, she met Lillian's eyes smiling sadly on her. "So you find it hard to give me up, Helen? Are you sure it is necessary?" The critical moment had come, and involuntarily Helen put her hands before her eyes to shut out the beautiful face so close to her own: "Our paths must lie apart, Lillian, dear; but as long as I live I will remember you and pray for you." The silence that followed these words became oppressive, and Helen stirred uneasily and stole a timid glance at her friend. Miss Stuart's face was uplifted; her wonderful eyes, filled with unutterable sadness, gazed mournfully into space. If suffering can expiate a sin, in that moment she fully expiated the wrong she had done to Jean. After a while she turned and laid her hands on Helen's shoulders. "I understand, my dear, and I do not blame you. Good-by!" And stooping, she kissed her gently on the lips. * * * * * Helen stood before the fire in the hall-way of the manor, two letters in hand, a thoughtful expression in her eyes. In four days Jean and Mrs. Fay would sail for home, and Guy had written: "Will you not send for me, Helen? I will never return until you do." "Oh, dear," her thoughts ran, "why must it be left for me to decide! If Guy would only take it into his own hands and come, I would be so grateful." Poor weak little woman! It was hard for her to act for herself. How happy she would be to find shelter in some safe harbor, guided there by a stronger hand than her own. With one stroke of a pen she could recall Guy, but the strangest shyness overmastered her. She wandered restlessly about the house, her heart as heavy as lead; and not until daylight was waning, and the long winter evening closing in upon the manor, did she finally start out for the telegraph office, a bit of paper held closely in the hand that was tucked in her muff. * * * * * In a hotel in Paris a party of people was assembled in a small private sitting-room. Against the walls, their lids gaping, were a number of half-filled trunks, and in the paraphernalia that were scattered around was every indication of an imminent departure. Mrs. Fay and Jean bustled busily about, stowing away the many purchases which this city of shops had tempted them to make, stopping now and then to consult Guy as to some detail of the long journey which lay before them. Poor Mrs. Appleton watched them with homesick eyes. She was tired of wandering about in strange lands, hungry for a sight of the little vine-covered cottage which had been empty for so many weary months. Surely no mother had ever given her son a greater love, a more generous sacrifice. "I am a foolish old woman, my dear," she had said to him a few moments since, when he had looked up suddenly and had seen the tears in her eyes. "I suppose it is not unnatural that I should sometimes dream of spending the last years of my life in 'my own home.'" Guy did not answer then. It was a shock to him to discover how much this exile had cost his patient, uncomplaining mother; and, as he sat at the little table in the center of the room, apparently absorbed in straightening out accounts, he was facing the duty which had suddenly been made clear to him. "Poor mother!" he thought, with tender compunction, "I have been a selfish brute." Yet it was not easy for him to depart from the course he had marked out for himself, for, like many another man of strong character, Guy was very obstinate. One glance at his mother's face, however, made him ashamed of his hesitation, and he pushed away his papers and rose to his feet, while he framed the sentence which would determine their return home. Just at that moment there was a knock at the door, and in response to Jean's brisk, "_Entrez_," a servant handed her a cablegram in its blue wrapper, addressed "Appleton, Continental, Paris." Three simple words the message contained, but to the man who read them they made all the difference between light and darkness, between life and death. The message read: Please come home.--HELEN. CHAPTER XX. "PEACE ON EARTH--GOOD WILL TO MEN." On a most delicious day late in December there is an air of unusual bustle and excitement over the manor. Outside the ground is covered with a deep mantle of glistening snow, and overhead the winter's sun shines cold and clear from out a vault of deepest blue. Within the house wood fires are blazing on every hearth, and the atmosphere is filled with the fragrance of fresh flowers which Helen's deft hands have just arranged in every available vase and bowl. Only yesterday the travelers from the other side arrived; Mrs. Appleton supremely contented to be once more at home; Guy, with the anticipation of his happiness lighting his whole face, and Jean sweet and brave as ever, but with a deep sadness in her eyes, and looking such a frail and slender figure in her close-fitting gown. Helen and Nathalie had gone to town to meet them, and had brought them to Hetherford; for on the morrow all the old friends were to gather at the manor for Christmas, and the girls wanted one long quiet evening with Jean before the arrival of their guests. This home-coming was very hard for poor Jean; harder than she had anticipated; and when the first little excitement of her meeting with Aunt Helen and the children was over, it required all her courage to keep her face bright and smiling, her voice gay and cheery. Everything spoke to her of Farr, and she sighed a little wearily, as she realized that all her journeyings had lessened not one whit the pain at her heart. As they gathered before the blazing logs in the drawing-room, just after dinner, to talk over all that had happened since they parted, Helen's loving heart detected the undercurrent of pathos which ran through all Jean's spirited accounts of her travels and adventures; and she was tempted to speak just the few words which alone could bring back the sunny light-hearted expression to Jean's face. She resisted the temptation, however, for she had given Farr her promise that his coming on the morrow should be a complete surprise. He was to come out on an early train, so as to secure a quiet hour with Jean before the manor was invaded by its other guests. And now he is almost due, and Helen's heart beats fast, and her eyes watch Jean's every movement as if she feared to let her out of her sight. All the morning they have been dressing the house with Christmas greens, and Jean stands on tip-toe to fasten the last wreath over the fireplace, when a ringing of sleigh-bells breaks the stillness of the snowy winter's day. Then there is a stamping of a man's feet on the veranda, and Helen opens wide the door to admit Valentine Farr. Jean's back is toward him, and there is just a brief instant while she adjusts the last nail to secure the wreath, before she turns. "What a draught. Why don't you close the----" she begins; then, turning, the hammer she is holding falls to the ground with a crash, and, her hand on her heart, her eyes wide-open and startled, she stands facing Valentine Farr. In another instant Helen has closed the door and disappeared into the drawing-room, and Farr has taken Jean's hands in his own, and is speaking to her in a voice grown very deep and tender. "Jean, my little love, have you no word of welcome for me?" The blood rushes into her face, then ebbs away, leaving it even paler than before. "Ah, I have frightened you, sweetheart," Farr cries contritely, "and you are not very strong yet, are you, dear? But I have waited such a weary while; I have been so miserable for a sight of your sweet face; I could not wait to tell you that I love you. Surely you must have known it long ago, darling." Jean's head droops lower and lower, and she does not speak. "I want you to be my wife, dear," Farr's tender voice goes on. "Do you love me, Jean?" Still she is silent, and Farr's face grows very white. "What is it, Jean? Are you angry with me for speaking to you so abruptly? Oh, my love, my love, don't tell me that you cannot care for me." Then Jean raises her eyes, and though the tears are shining in them, they are full of a great happiness. "I do love you, dear, with all my heart and soul," she says very low, but quite steadily. Farr's face above her is eloquent, and for the moment they have no need of words. Then the tears brim over in Jean's eyes, and with a little tremulous cry she flings herself in his arms: "O Val, I have been so miserable!" And Farr, bending down, kisses her tenderly. "Please God, darling, no misery will ever again come to you through me." * * * * * A few hours later they all gather about the long dinner table and, in the pause that follows upon their being seated, old Mr. Birdsall's sweet and tremulous voice asks grace. In simple heartfelt words he thanks God for the safe return of the travelers, and asks his tender blessing for one and all. Every head is reverently bent, and every heart echoes the earnest prayer. This is a gala occasion, and in its honor Aunt Helen presides at the head of the table, and Willie and Larry and even little Gladys are present. With much ringing laughter and merriment the dinner hour passes. Jean's voice is as joyous as in the old days, and Helen, hearing the sweet sound, is filled with overwhelming gratitude. "I tell you, girls," Dick cries enthusiastically, "this is a proud day for me. I feel that it is entirely owing to my watchful care of you all that these pleasant things have come to pass. Jean, my child, did I not present Farr to you?" Jean laughs, and blushes. "Oh, I don't know, Dick. I am not quite clear about it. If you did I am deeply indebted," and she turns a shy soft glance toward her lover. "It was your humble servant. Now, there is a most appropriate way in which you may reward me," and Dick holds a sprig of mistletoe high above his head. "No, no. What nonsense," protests Jean. "You may," smiles Farr. "But I don't want to," she laughs saucily. "Poor Dick," exclaims Mollie sorrowfully, and she jumps up from the table to give him a sisterly hug and a kiss. "I declare it is a shame. I shan't see you so neglected." "Thank you, my dear," returns Dick, with a grin, "that isn't quite the same, but it is very sweet." "Oh, dear," sighs Nan, as they push back their chairs, and wander into the drawing-room, "how queer it seems to have Helen and Jean engaged. It is all very amusing now, but what will become of us next summer. I am afraid our compact is about at an end." Cliff, who is standing near Eleanor, bends down to whisper something to her, and then pushes her gently into the middle of the room. She faces the group before her with flaming cheeks, and looks about her helplessly. "Girls, I suppose I must confess. I, too, am a traitor to our compact." "O Eleanor," cries Jean, excitedly, and puts a tender arm about her. Cliff leans against the mantel, as nonchalant and languid as ever; but his eyes rest on Eleanor with infinite pride and content. The girl turns toward the others with a graceful gesture of appeal. "Am I forgiven?" They crowd about her with eager, loving words of congratulation; and then, when the confusion has subsided, Nan begs their attention for a moment. "I have some news for you." "O Nan! don't tell us you are engaged," implores Mollie dolorously. Nan burst into a merry laugh. "What an idea! No indeed. But, girls and boys what do you think? Emily is _married_!" "_Married?_" they cry in one breath. "Yes, married to a very rich widower, with gray hair, and three big children, and oh, lots of money!" and Nan almost chokes in her haste to enumerate all these virtues. "Now, Nan, be sensible, and take a long breath, and tell us all about it," says Nathalie. "Well, he owns a fine place at B----, where Em lives, and he knew her when she was a little bit of a girl. He married and went to England to live. About two years ago his wife died and this fall he returned to B----, renewed his acquaintance with Em, proposed to her, and yesterday they were married." "What unseemly haste!" Mollie exclaims. "No, not a bit of it. They didn't mean to be married until spring, but Mr. Hazletine was suddenly recalled to England on important business, which may keep him there several months, and he was so unhappy at leaving Em that she consented to be married at once and go with him." "To think of it! I suppose now Emily will roll by in her carriage, wear magnificent clothes, and completely dazzle us with her jewels of inestimable value." "So much the better, Mollie," rejoins Helen heartily. "Poor little Em has tasted of poverty all her life. Think what a relief it will be to her to have ample means." "It is fine," cries Eleanor. "And what in the world shall we do?" groans Nathalie with a comical glance at Nan and Mollie. "Laugh at their love-making, and, with the hansom driver, be glad we are not in it." "O Nan, you rowdy," laughs Jean. Helen rises, and makes her way to the door, closely followed by Guy. "I am going to say good-night to Aunt Helen," she whispers, her eyes drooping shyly under the steadfast gaze he bends upon her. "I will wait for you here, dear," he says, and takes her hand in his, but she blushes so painfully he lets it drop again. "Foolish little woman," he sighs to himself. "Shall I ever really possess her heart?" In a few moments she rejoins him, and Guy puts his arm about her, and leads her into the music room. No lamps are lighted, but the window-shades are up, and the moon's soft rays shine through the panes, illumining mysteriously the great empty room. Far away, across the snowclad landscape, the slender spire of St. Andrew's points heavenward, and through the windows of the church shines the red glow of a light within. The scene is one of infinite peace and beauty, and the magic of the hour casts its spell over Helen and her lover, as speechless, motionless, they stand within the recess of the window, gazing out at the marvelous beauty of the night. By and by, Helen moves a little closer to her companion. "I have something to tell you, Guy," she murmurs, "and I haven't the courage to say it." The old doubt, not yet dispelled, pales Guy's face. "Don't tell me you are going to send me from you again, Helen." The girl's heart throbs at the pain in his voice: "No, no, dear. I want to tell you something so different. I love you, Guy," her voice dropping to a whisper. "Please never leave me again." He holds her to his heart with a love the deeper for all the pain and waiting, finding a heaven in the sweet lips which meet his so frankly. And even as they stand there the bell of St. Andrew's, solemnly tolling the midnight hour, ushers in the glad Christmas tide. "Helen," says Eleanor's voice from the doorway, "may we all come in? We think it would be so sweet if you would play our Christmas hymn on the organ and let us sing it together." Helen pushes back the curtain, and steps forward, an expression of perfect rest on her gentle face. "Yes, indeed, I think it is a lovely idea." Guy opens the organ. Helen steps into her place, and Cliff brings a lamp from the hall, and places it nearby. "Val," Jean whispers to her lover, "there is just one sad thought in my heart to-night. I suppose it is the memory of Christ's message of peace and love, which makes me so sorrowful when I think of the bitter feeling between your mother and yourself. Do you think it will ever be in my power to help to overcome it?" "We will try together, sweetheart, and the great blessing of your love will make all life easier, and better for me." Then Helen's hands strike the opening chords of the hymn and a hush falls upon the little group, and with one accord they move nearer the organ, and as the last bell of St. Andrew's dies slowly away, their voices take up the glad refrain: It came upon the midnight clear, That glorious song of old, From angels bending near the earth, To touch their harps of gold: "Peace on the earth, good will to men, From heaven's all-gracious King." The world in solemn stillness lay, To hear the angels sing. FINIS. 
37243	----	http://www.archive.org/details/janeoglander00lown JANE OGLANDER by Mrs. Belloc Lowndes "Something even more imperious than reason admonishes us that life's inmost secret lies not in the slow adaptation of man to circumstance, but in his costly victories and splendid defeats." New York Charles Scribner's Sons 1911 Copyright, 1911, by Charles Scribner's Sons Published April, 1911 JANE OGLANDER PROLOGUE "Elle fut née pour plaire aux nobles âmes, Pour les consoler un peu d'un monde impur." Jane Oglander was walking across Westminster Bridge on a late September day. It was a little after four o'clock--on the bridge perhaps the quietest time of the working day--but a ceaseless stream of human beings ebbed to and fro. She herself came from the Surrey side of the river, and now and again she stayed her steps and looked over the parapet. It was plain--or so thought one who was looking at her very attentively--that she was more interested in the Surrey side, in the broken line of St. Thomas's Hospital, in the grey-red walls of Lambeth Palace and the Lollards' Tower, than in the mass of the Parliament buildings opposite. But though Miss Oglander stopped three times in her progress over the bridge, she did not stay at any one place for more than a few moments--not long enough to please the man who had gradually come up close to her. Having first noticed her in front of the bridge entrance of St. Thomas's Hospital, this man had made it his business to keep, if well behind, then in step with her. A human being--and especially a woman--may be described in many ways. For our purpose it was fortunate that on this eventful afternoon of her life Miss Oglander happened to attract the attention of an observer, who, if then living in great penury and solitude, was yet destined to become what a lover of literature has described as the greatest interpreter of the human side of London life since Dickens. When he was not writing, this man--whose name, by the way, was Ryecroft, and whose misfortune it was to be temperamentally incapable of sustained, wage-earning work--spent many hours walking about the London streets studying the human side of London's traffic, and especially that side which to a certain type of observer, of saunterer in the labyrinth, is full of ever recurring mystery and charm. He wrote of the depths, because the depths were all he knew, with an intimate and a terrible knowledge. But he had your true romancer's craving for romance, and his eager face with its curiously high, straight forehead crowned with a shock of rather long auburn hair, was the face and head of the idealist, of the humourist, and--now that he is dead, why not say so?--of the lover, of the man that is to whom the most interesting thing in the world remains, when all is said and done,--woman, and man's pursuit, not necessarily conquest, of the elusive creature. Ryecroft had been already on Westminster Bridge for some time before he became aware that a feminine figure of more than common distinction and interest, a young lady whose appearance and light buoyant step sharply differentiated her from those about her, was walking toward him. As he saw her his eyes lighted up with a rather pathetic pleasure, and in an instant he had become sensitively aware of every detail of her dress. She wore a plain grey coat and skirt, and a small hat of which the Mercury wings, to the whimsical fellow watching her, evoked the Hellas of his dreams. A black and white spotted veil, which, as was then the fashion, left the wearer's delicately cut sensitive mouth bare, shadowed her hazel eyes. Ryecroft noticed--he always saw such things--that the young lady wore odd gloves, the one on her right hand was light grey, that clothing her left moleskin in colour. The trifling fact pleased him. It showed, or so he argued with himself, that this sweet stranger had a soul above the usual pernickety vanities of young womanhood. For a moment their eyes met, and he admired the gentle, not unkind indifference with which she received his eager, measuring glance. In a sense, Jane Oglander never saw at all the man who was gazing at her so intently, and he never saw her again, but for some moments--perhaps for as long as half an hour--this singular and gifted being felt himself to be in sensitive, even close, sympathy with her, and in his emotional memory she henceforth occupied a niche labelled "The Lady of Westminster Bridge." Ryecroft allowed Miss Oglander to pass by him, and then quietly and very unobtrusively he followed her; stopping when she stopped, following the direction of her eyes, trying as far as might be to think her thoughts, and meanwhile weaving in his mind a portrait of her having as little relation to reality as has a woodland scene in tapestry to a real sun and shadow-filled glade. "Here," he said to himself, "is a girl who is assuredly not accustomed to walking the more populous thoroughfares of London by herself. Were she quite true to type she would be what they called 'chaperoned' by a lady's maid, that is by a woman who would be certainly aware that I was following them, and who would probably take my attention for herself. A dozen men might follow this young lady and she would not be aware of their proximity. There is something about her of Una, but Una so completely protected by a quality in herself, and by her upbringing and character, that she has no need of a lion. "For me she holds a singular appeal, because she is unlike the only woman I ever have the chance of meeting, and because we, that gentle, austerely attractive creature and I, have much in common. Effortless she has achieved all that I long for and that I know I shall never obtain--intellectual distinction in those she frequents, the satisfaction attendant on proper pride, and doubtless, in her daily life, refined beauty of surroundings. She is very plainly dressed, but that is because she has a delicate and elevated taste, and happily belongs to that small, privileged class which is able to pay the highest price, and so command the best type of gown, the prettiest shoes, the best fitting gloves--even if she wears them odd--and the most becoming hat. "But what has Una been doing on the Surrey side of the Thames?" Ryecroft smiled; he thought the answer to his question obvious. "She has been"--he went on, talking to himself, and forming the words with his lips, for he was a very lonely man--"to St. Thomas's Hospital, either to see some friend who is in the paying ward, or to visit a poor person in whom she is--to use the shibboleth of Mayfair--'interested.' It is a more or less new experience, and though she is evidently in a hurry, she cannot help lingering now and again, thinking over the strange, dreadful things with which she has, doubtless for the first time, now come in contact. She doesn't care for the Houses of Parliament--they represent to her the thing she knows, for she often takes part in that odd rite, 'Tea on the Terrace.' But she is timorously attracted to the other side--to the dark, to the pregnant side of life. And above all what fascinates her is the river--the river itself, at once so like and so unlike the Thames she knows above Richmond where she goes boating with her brothers' friends, with the young men with whom she seems on such intimate terms and of whom she knows so extraordinarily little, and who treat her, very properly, as something fragile, to be cared for, respected...." When she reached the end of the bridge, after looking to the right and to the left, the young lady walked across the roadway with an assured step, and Ryecroft's eager, sensitive face brightened. This was in the picture, the picture he had drawn and coloured with his own pigments. "For this kind of young Englishwoman the traffic stops instinctively of itself," he said to himself; "and she has no fear of being run over" (perhaps it should be added, that this little one-sided adventure of Henry Ryecroft's took place before the advent of the trams). And still he followed, keeping close behind her. Suddenly she turned toward the Underground Railway, and this annoyed him; he had hoped that she (and he) would walk down Great George Street, across the two parks, and so into old Mayfair. As an alternative he had promised himself the pleasure of seeing her get into a hansom-cab. Were she to disappear into the ugly gulf of the Underground it would disappoint him unreasonably. But stop! She had turned her back on the cavernous entrance to the station and she was gazing down at the posters of the evening papers. The placards were all emblazoned with the same piece of news, differently worded: "General Lingard in London," "Reception of Lingard at Victoria," "Return of a Famous Soldier." Ryecroft's lip curled. He had an intellectual contempt for the fighting man as such, and a horror, nay a loathing, of war. He knew what even a brief and successful war means to those among whom his own lot was cast, the London woman whose son, whose brother, whose lover is so often called Thomas Atkins. And now, at last, he heard his lady's voice. She beckoned to the smallest and most ragged of the lads selling newspapers:-- "I want all to-night's papers:" her voice fell with an agreeable cadence on Ryecroft's ears. He was singularly susceptible to the cadences of the human voice, and he thought he had never heard a sweeter. She took a shilling out of her purse, and, rather to his surprise, he saw that her purse was small, black and worn. "How much?" she asked gently. The boy hesitated, and then answered, "Five-pence halfpenny." She handed him a shilling. "You can keep the change," she said, and a very charming smile quivered across her face, "for yourself." The man who was watching her felt touched--unreasonably moved. "Thank God," he said to himself, "that, unlike many of her friends, she has nothing to do with the C.O.S.!" Then to Ryecroft's surprise, instead of going on as he expected her to do--he had already made up his mind that she was taking the papers home to an invalid father, or to a brother who had hurt himself in one of those mad games in which, as the watcher knew well, the young English oligarch delights to spend his spare time--the young lady turned, and crossed over again on to the bridge, but this time she chose the other side, the side which commands the more beautiful view of the London river. "Dear me," he said to himself, "the plot thickens!" and then he suddenly told himself that of course she was going back to the hospital. The person she was going to see had asked for an evening paper, and in her generosity she had bought them all. But on the bridge she stayed her steps, and, opening one of the papers, spread it out against the parapet, and began eagerly reading it, unheeding of the human stream flowing to and fro behind her. Ryecroft gently approached closer and closer to her, and at last he was able to see what it was she was bending over and reading with such intentness: "_General Lingard's Home-coming._" "_Splendid Reception at Victoria Station._" So was the column headed, and already her eyes had travelled down to the last paragraph: "To conclude: by his defeat of the great Mahomedan Emir of Bobo, General Lingard has added to the British Crown another magnificent jewel in the Sultanate of Amadawa." Then came a cross-head--"Pen Portrait." "Lingard is above all things a fighter. His eye is keen, alert, passionless. He is a tall man, and he dominates those with whom he stands. His life as a soldier has been from the beginning a wooing of peril, and as a result he has commanded a victorious expedition at an age when his seniors are hoping to command a regiment. He does not talk as other men talk--he is no teller of 'good stories.' He is a Man." Jane Oglander looked up, and there came a glow--a look of proud, awed gladness on her face. Then, folding the paper, she walked steadily on. But though she crossed over the bridge as if she were going to the hospital, to the side entrance where visitors are admitted, she walked on past the mass of buildings. Then she turned sharply to the left, Ryecroft still following, till she came to a small row of houses, respectable, but poor and mean in appearance, in a narrow street which was redeemed to a certain extent by the fact that there was a Queen Anne church at one end of it, and next to the church a substantial rectory or vicarage house. To Ryecroft's measureless astonishment, she opened her purse, took out a latch-key and let herself into the front-door of one of the small houses.... Three weeks later Henry Ryecroft happened to be in that same neighbourhood, and he suddenly remembered his Lady of Westminster Bridge. Greatly daring--but he ever loved such daring--he rang at the door of the house at which he had seen her go in. A typical Londoner of the hard-working, self-respecting class answered his ring. She stood for a moment looking at him, waiting for him to speak. "Is the lady in?" he asked, feeling suddenly ashamed and foolish. "I mean the young lady who lives here." "Miss Oglander?" said the woman. "No, she's away. But I'll give you her address." She handed him a piece of paper on which was written in what he thought was a singularly pretty handwriting:-- MISS OGLANDER, Rede Place, Redyford, Surrey. He took the little piece of paper and walked away. When he found himself on the bridge he dropped the paper into the river. "Oglander," he said to himself, "a curious, charming name, rhyming with Leander, philander----" he shook his head and smiled, "no, no, not philander," he said, speaking the words aloud. "Lavender, that's what her name should rhyme to,--Lavender...." Henry Ryecroft, in his way a philosopher, would have been at first gently amused, and then perhaps moved and interested, had he known both how right and how wrong had been the kitcat portrait he had evolved out of his inner consciousness. He had been right as to the type. He had even been successful in realizing something of Miss Oglander's inward mind and character from her outward appearance, but he had been quite wrong as to the present circumstances of her life. It was true that she belonged to the privileged class who alone in the seething world of London have the command of money, and also the command, materially speaking, of the best. But if born and bred in the west of London, she now belonged by deliberate choice to the south side of the Thames. At a moment when she desired to hide herself from the world, she had chosen that ugly, formless district of London which lies between Westminster Bridge and Vauxhall Bridge because a distant relation of her mother's had married a clergyman whose parish lay there, and he had offered to find her in that parish plenty of hard work to still her pain. As a young girl, Jane Oglander had lived the life that Ryecroft imagined her to be living now. While keeping house for a bachelor brother, she had seen, from a pleasantly sheltered standpoint, all that was most agreeable and amusing in the cultivated London world. Treated with the gentle gallantry and respect Ryecroft had supposed by her brother's friends, she was--as is so often the case with a young woman who has been almost entirely educated by men and surrounded with masculine influences--graver, less frivolous, more austerely refined than were most of her contemporaries. Her nature, the core of her, was happy, tender, sensitive, capable also of a depth of feeling--and feeling always implies a certain violence--unsuspected by those round her. Thanks to the circumstances of her birth and upbringing Jane Oglander might conceivably have lived a long beneficent life, and have finally slipped out of that life without becoming aware that there were such tragic things as sin, shame, and acute suffering in the world. Humility was not lacking to one endowed with many of the other endearing graces. Jane Oglander was very conscious of the lack in herself of those practical qualities which make their fortunate possessors ever punctual and unforgetful of the minor duties of life. She would forget to answer unimportant letters, mistake the hour of unessential invitations, arrive late for trains, and, as we have seen, tempt gifts her way by putting on odd articles of clothing which her wiser friends always wore in pairs. But she was never found lacking in that beautiful quality which the French call _la politesse du coeur_. Thus, her mental lapses were never of a nature to hurt the feelings or the pride of those whose feelings and whose pride are often regarded by people more fortunate in a material sense than themselves as so unimportant as to be probably non-existent. First her father, and then her brother, had been instinctively careful that she should only know the best of life. They had preserved her with firm decision from any of those influences which might have injured, thrown ever so small a speck or blemish, on her feminine delicacy. Her father's death, occurring when she was eighteen, had meant that the first year of her life as a grown-up girl had been spent in sincere mourning. Two very happy years had followed, and then on a certain thirteenth of September--that is, almost exactly five years ago--there had befallen Jane Oglander a thing which befalls daily, it might be said hourly, some unfortunate human being. There had cut right into and across her young, peaceful life a tragedy full of ignoble horror, of that horror which attracts the eager interest and attention of the morbid, the idle, and the vulgar. Jane Oglander's kind brother, some years older than herself, whom she had taken as completely on trust as all normal young women take those who are near and dear to them, had left the club where he had been dining, and hailing a cab, had driven to a distant quarter of the town, a quarter of which the very name was unknown to his sister and to those with whom she generally associated. There, in the space of a very few moments, he had killed, not only a man who was regarded as in a special sense his friend and as a peculiarly harmless individual, but also the woman with whom he had found this man. Certain circumstances of the affair, circumstances of quite an everyday nature, though they had appeared to the amazed and agonised sister incredible, had roused a good deal of public sympathy with Jack Oglander. Though the fact that he had taken a pistol with him, as well as some confidences he had made to yet another friend who had played a minor part in the sordid drama, pointed to premeditation, the verdict had been manslaughter. Fortunately, as everyone except his poor sister thought, Jack Oglander fell ill and died a normal death in the prison infirmary within two months of his trial. Friends had rallied--too many rather than too few--round the unfortunate girl; but her best friends, those to whom she felt she owed the greatest gratitude, were a certain Richard Maule, one of the trustees of her small fortune, and Richard Maule's wife, Athena. Mr. Maule, at the time of the tragedy already an invalid, had been able to do nothing in an active sense, but his country house, Rede Place, had immediately become, whenever she chose that it should be so, Miss Oglander's home. In this matter the husband and wife were one in a sense they had scarcely ever been, but in the happy, cloudless days which now seemed to have belonged to a former existence, Jane Oglander had already become as much as a young girl can be to a married woman some years older than herself, Mrs. Maule's closest friend. With these two dear friends was joined in the same wordless sense of deep gratitude Dick Wantele, Richard Maule's cousin, and in this affair his spokesman and representative. It was this young man who, shaking himself free of a constitutional lethargy, had become the indispensable adviser and friend of both brother and sister; it was he who had persuaded Jack Oglander to plead "not guilty"; it was he who had gone to great personal trouble in order that Miss Oglander might be spared, as much as was possible, the dreadful publicity into which each such tragic happening brings innocent victims. During the weeks which elapsed between the arrest and the trial, Miss Oglander learnt to lean on Dick Wantele, to ask for, and defer to, his advice, far more than she was at the time aware. Wantele's tact and good feeling, and his intelligent withholding of the sympathy with which she was at that time nauseated, were almost uncannily clever considering the end he had in view. An offer of marriage very seldom takes a woman by surprise, but twice Jane Oglander was so surprised immediately after her brother's arrest. The very next day a man much older than herself--whom she had regarded with the kindly affection and indifference with which girls so often regard one whom they unconsciously consider as a contemporary of their parents rather than their own--had come and implored her to marry him there and then. He was a member of the administration then in office, and he had hinted that by doing this--that is, by marrying him--she would almost certainly benefit her brother's cause. But though she was touched, and touched to tears, by the strangely worded proposal, it formed but an incident, to herself an unimportant incident, in days crowded with such pain and amazing unhappiness. Some weeks later, while driving back with Jane Oglander from her first interview with her brother in prison, during that long--it appeared to her that endless--drive from Holloway to Westminster, Dick Wantele also asked her to marry him, and this offer she also refused. But Wantele would not allow his disappointment to affect their apparently placid friendship. He it was who brought her the news that her brother was ill, and he was actually present at Jack Oglander's mournful deathbed in the prison infirmary. Rather ruefully aware that it was so, Dick Wantele now stood to Jane Oglander much in the position her dead brother had once stood. She had come to feel for him a deep unquestioning affection; it was to him she would have turned in any new distress. They met frequently, for though Miss Oglander had become absorbed in the work among the London poor to which she henceforth dedicated her life, her happiest, her only peaceful days--for she took keenly to heart the material cares and sorrows of those with whom she was brought in contact--were the weeks she spent each year at Rede Place. When there, the thrice welcome guest of Richard and Athena Maule, and of their kinsman and housemate Dick Wantele, Jane's content would have been absolute had her host and hostess been on the terms of amity Miss Oglander supposed all married people as noble as Richard and as good and beautiful as was Athena should be. But she had in this matter, as one so often has to do when dealing with a dual human relation, to compromise. She gave, that is, her grateful love to both these people who, if themselves on unhappy terms, were yet one in their affection for her. It was to her an added perplexity and pain that her friend Dick sided with his cousin Richard Maule rather than with Richard's wife Athena. Nay, he went further--he took no pains to conceal his contemptuous indifference to the beautiful woman who was perforce his housemate for much of the year. Small wonder that Mrs. Richard Maule generally absented herself from home when her friend Jane Oglander was there to take the place only a woman can fill in a country house of which the master is an invalid, his heir a bachelor. So it was that the two women only saw much of one another when Mrs. Maule was in London. CHAPTER I "A flag for those who go out to war, A flag for those who return, A flag for those who escape hell fire, And a flag for those who burn." In spite of many a proverb to the contrary, a plan or plot, when carefully imagined and carried out by an intelligent human being, does not often miscarry or go wrong. The fact that Mrs. Kaye was now sitting staring through the window of the little waiting-room of Selford Junction was the outcome of a plan--what she knew well the one most concerned would have called a plot--which had succeeded beyond her expectations. She had come there secretly in order that she might see the last, the very last, of her son now starting on his way to rejoin his regiment in India. She was here in direct disobedience to his wish, aware that had he known she would be there he would have found some way of eluding her vigilance. The plan she had made had succeeded by its very simplicity. After the quiet, measured "Good-bye and God bless you, Bayworth!" uttered by the father to his only son at the gate of the poverty-stricken garden of the vicarage; after the mother's more emotional farewell, Mrs. Kaye, leaving her husband to go out into the village, had hastened back to the house. There she had flung on her shabby bonnet, and waiting a moment till the trap in which her boy was driving to Selford Junction, some four miles off, had turned the corner, she had gone quickly out of the garden. Walking at a rapid pace, for she was still a vigorous woman, she had taken a short cut across the fields to the small station where she knew she would be able to catch the slow local train which was run in connection with the London express. Once at Selford Junction, it had been a comparatively easy matter for her to slip into the waiting-room and take up her station close to the grimy window commanding the platform alongside of which the express had already drawn up. Mrs. Kaye had had two motives in doing what she had done. Her first and very natural motive was that of seeing the last, the very last, of her son. Her second, which she hid even from herself, was to discover why he had refused, with a certain fierce decision, her company as far as Selford Junction, where, ever since he was a little boy bound for his first school, she--his mother--had always gone with him when there had come the hard moment of saying good-bye. To the tired labourer in the further corner of the waiting-room; to the sickly-looking, weary working woman, accompanied by two children, who had unwillingly made way for her, the sight of Mrs. Kaye was familiar, and, in an apathetic way, unpleasing. Each of them--even the children--had disagreeable associations with her tall, spare figure, her severe looking weather-beaten face, crowned with still abundant fair hair streaked with grey. They knew, with a long, contemptuous knowledge, her short black serge skirt and the old-fashioned beaded mantle, which formed her usual week-day, outdoor costume in any but the very hottest weather. The poor are better judges of character than the rich. Mrs. Kaye's hard good sense and intelligent idea of justice, secured her the grudging respect of her husband's parishioners, but her rigid closeness about money--which they argued must mean either exceptional poverty or else unusual meanness--alienated them. And yet the working woman, sitting there, looked at Mrs. Kaye with a certain furtive sympathy. She well knew that Bayworth Kaye--he had been christened Bayworth because it was his mother's maiden name--was leaving for India that day. Now Bayworth was in a sense part of the village. He had been born at the Vicarage. His father's parishioners had followed him through each of the stages of his successful young life, and they all liked him; partly because the kind of success Bayworth Kaye had achieved is not the kind which arouses dislike or envy, and even more because he was an open-handed and good-natured young gentleman, very unlike--so the villagers would have told you--either his gentle, unpractical father or his hard mother. Also, and this was very present to the woman now watching Mrs. Kaye, "th' parson's son" had been, during the last few months, the hero of one of those dramas which, because of certain elemental passions slumbering in all men and in most women, whatever their rank or condition, always arouse a certain uneasy, speculative interest and sympathy in the onlooker. All unconsciously the village was grateful to young Kaye for having provided them with something to talk about, something to laugh about, something, above all, to relieve the uneventful dullness of their lives. This was why the man and woman whom Mrs. Kaye--if she was conscious of their presence at all--regarded as merely of the earth, earthy, were keenly aware of the last act of the tragi-comedy being played before their eyes. They knew why their clergyman's wife was sitting here in the waiting-room, instead of standing out on the platform saying a last word to her son; and over each stolid face there came, when the eyes of these same faces thoroughly realised at what the lady sitting by the window was looking, an expression of cunning amusement, as well as of doubtful sympathy. Mrs. Kaye's eyes were fixed on a group composed of two people, a man and a woman. The man--her son Bayworth Kaye--was standing inside one of the first-class carriages of the London express; and below him on the platform, her right hand resting on the sash of the open carriage window, stood Mrs. Maule, the woman whom Mrs. Kaye had only half expected to see there. In coming to Selford Junction to see the last of Bayworth Kaye, Mrs. Maule was doing a very daring thing; those of her neighbours and acquaintances whose opinion counted in the neighbourhood would have said a very improper and shocking thing. To Mrs. Kaye--such being her nature--there was a certain cruel satisfaction in the knowledge that she had been right in her suspicion as to why her son had told her that he would far prefer, this time, to say good-bye at home. Given all that had gone before, it was not surprising that Mrs. Kaye had guessed the reason why her boy had refused her company at Selford Junction. And yet, now that the reason stood before her, embodied in a slim, gracefully posed figure which she and the two dumb spectators of the little scene knew to be that of the squire's wife, she felt a dull pang of resentful surprise. She had hoped against hope that Bayworth would be here alone, and that there might perhaps come her chance of a last word which would break down the high, gateless barrier which had risen during the last few months between herself and her son. Mrs. Kaye staring dumbly through the waiting-room window knew that last word would never now be uttered. Young Kaye's good-looking, fair face--the look of breeding derived from his mother's forebears crossed with the more solid good looks which had been his father's--was set in hard lines; yet he was making a gallant effort to bear himself well, and he was smiling the painful smile which is so far removed from mirth. The anguished pain of parting, the agony he was feeling had found refuge only in the eyes which were fixed on his companion's face. Mrs. Kaye tried to see if that beautiful face, into which her son was gazing with so strange and tragic a look of hungry pain, reflected any of his feeling. But the delicately pure profile, the perfect curve of cheek and neck, the tiny ear half concealed by carefully dressed masses of dark hair, in their turn covered by a long grey veil becomingly wound round the green deer-stalker hat, revealed nothing. Now and again she could see Mrs. Maule's red lips--lips that told of admirable physical fitness--move as if in answer to something the other said. Bayworth Kaye was leaning out, speaking earnestly. With a sudden gesture his lean, brown fingers closed on the little gloved hand resting on the window-sill. Mrs. Kaye could not hear what her son was saying, and she would have given the world to know, but in the composed, steady glance directed by her through the waiting-room window there was nothing to show the bitter, helpless anger which oppressed her. The excursion train for which the express had been waiting glided into the station. Mrs. Kaye reminded herself with a strange mixture of feelings that the time was growing very short; that not long would her eyes be offended, as they were now being offended. In five minutes the London train was due to start. And then there came over the mother an overmastering desire which swept everything before it. She must hear what it was her boy was saying; she must see him clearly once more; she must run the risk of his becoming aware that she had spied on him. Mrs. Kaye rose from the hard wooden seat, and she made what was for her a mighty effort to open the grimy waiting-room window; but it remained fast. Words were muttered behind her, words of which in her agitation she was quite unconscious. "Help the lady, can't ye!" The big labourer in the corner rose to his feet; he lumbered across the boarded floor, and laid his mighty shoulder against the sash; the flange gave way, and as the window opened there seemed to rush in a loud, confused wave of sound. A crowd of Saturday holiday-makers were streaming over the platform, and as they swayed backwards and forwards they completely hid for a moment the man and woman on whom Mrs. Kaye's eyes had been fixed. Then, as if the scene before her had been stage-managed by some master of his craft, the crowd thinned, divided in two, seeking on either side the few third-class carriages in the express, and Mrs. Kaye once more saw her son and Athena Maule; saw, with a sharp pang, that the look of strain and anguish had deepened on Bayworth Kaye's face, that his poor pretence at a smile had gone. The train groaned and moved a little forward, bringing the first-class carriages quite close to the waiting-room window. Putting out her hand, Mrs. Kaye could almost have touched Mrs. Maule on the shoulder; she shrank back, but the two on whom her whole attention was fixed were so far absorbed in each other as to be quite oblivious of everything round them. And at last Mrs. Kaye heard the voice she loved best in the world, nay the only voice she had ever really loved--asking the pitiful, futile little question: "Athena? Darling--say you're sorry I'm going!" There was a pause, and then the woman to whom the question had been put did in answer a very extraordinary thing. After having looked round, and with furtive, deliberate scrutiny noted that the platform was now practically deserted save for one man standing some way off, facing the bookstall and with his back to the express--she moved for a moment up on to the step of the railway carriage and turned her face, the lovely face now flushed with something like tenderness and pity, up to the young man. "Of course I'm sorry you're going----" Her clear, delicately modulated tones floated across the short space to where Mrs. Kaye was sitting. "Kiss me," breathed the beautiful lips; and then with a touch of impatience, "You can kiss me good-bye. Don't you understand?" His sudden response, the way his arm shot out and crushed her face, her slender shoulders, was far more than she had bargained for. She stepped back and shook herself like a bird whose plumage has been ruffled. And then the train began to move. Young Kaye leant out, dangerously far, but, in answer to a slight movement of Mrs. Maule's hand, he sank back quite out of his mother's sight. She heard his last hoarse cry of "good-bye," and for the moment it had a strange effect on her heart. It seemed to set a seal on her deep pain and wrath, to bring a certain fierce comfort in the knowledge that her boy was gone, that he had left the shameful joy of the last year, the tragic pain of the last few weeks, behind him. She even told herself that, in the years that must elapse before he came home again, he would have time to forget--as men do forget--the woman who had made such a fool and worse, such a traitor, of him. * * * * * Mrs. Maule stood for a while looking after the train. Things had not fallen out quite as she had expected them to do. She sometimes--not often--acted on sheer impulse, but she seldom did so without very soon repenting of it. She had been suddenly moved to do a daring thing,--one of those things which give a sharp edge to a blurred emotion. But she had not known how to allow, so she told herself, frowning, for the existence in the subject of her experiment of an unreasonably primitive violence of feeling. She moved back and looked about her with an uncomfortable, rather fearful, look in her eyes. As she did so, the man standing by the bookstall also moved, and she became aware, with the quick instinct she had for such things, that he had a striking, in fact, a very peculiar face. She hoped he had seen nothing of that foolish little scene with Bayworth Kaye. As she looked at the stranger--he was still unconscious of her presence--a wave of colour came over her face, or rather over as much of her face as the veil swathed about her hat allowed to be seen of it. With a curious, impulsive, un-English movement she pulled off one of her gloves and put up her hand to her hot cheek. Then she turned abruptly and began walking to the further end of the platform. Mrs. Kaye, looking grimly after her, believed that Athena Maule had seen her, and, having the grace to be ashamed, had blushed. But, in so thinking, the clergyman's wife made one of her usual mistakes concerning the men and women with whom her life brought her into unwilling contact. Mrs. Maule had not seen her, and had she done so it may be doubted whether she would have felt any more ashamed or annoyed than she did now. * * * * * With a feeling of infinite lassitude, of physical as well as mental fatigue, Mrs. Kaye turned her back on the window through which she had seen a sight which was to remain with her for ever. There were still some minutes to run before there would come into the station the local train in which she could return to her now empty home, and so drearily her mind went back, taking a rapid survey of the whole of her son's short life and hitherto most prosperous career. Mrs. Kaye came herself of a long line of distinguished soldiers, and even before her child's birth she had been determined that he should follow in the footsteps of her own people, not in those of his mild, kindly father's. From his cradle the lad had been dedicated to the god of battles, and only the mother herself knew what her intention had cost her in the way of self-denial and of incessant effort. Inadequate as had been their clerical income, supplemented by pitifully small private means, she and her husband had grudged nothing to Bayworth. Mrs. Kaye was a clever woman, cleverer than most; she had been at some pains to find out the best way in which to put a boy through the modern military mill, and everything had gone with almost fairy-like smoothness from first to last. From the preparatory school, where she had ascertained that he would have among his mates the sons of the then Minister for War, down to the day when he had won the Sword of Honour at Sandhurst, young Kaye had been everything that even his exacting mother had desired. Nay more, he had once or twice said a word--only a word, but still it had amply repaid Mrs. Kaye for all she had gone through--implying that he understood the sacrifices his father and mother had made for his sake. When he had been specially chosen to take part in a dangerous frontier expedition, it was his father who had appeared miserably anxious, but it was with his mother, softened, carried out of herself, that the whole neighbourhood had eagerly sympathised when there had come the glorious news that Bayworth Kaye had been mentioned in despatches for an act of reckless courage and gallantry, and recommended for the Victoria Cross. Then had followed the lad's happy home-coming, and quite suddenly, before--so it now seemed to his mother--Bayworth had been back a week, Mrs. Maule had thrown over him the web of her fascinations. Not content with having him constantly about her at Rede Place, she had procured for him invitations to the houses where she stayed, and made him her slave in a sense Mrs. Kaye had not known men could be enslaved. Mother and son had had one painful discussion in which the mother had been worsted. With terror she had plumbed for a moment the hidden depths of her boy's heart. "You tell me there has been talk," he said very quietly. "If you will give me the name of any man who has talked unbecomingly of Mrs. Maule, I will deal with him----" "Deal with him, Bayworth? What could you do?" "I could kill him." He had uttered the words almost indifferently, and Mrs. Kaye looking into his set face had said no more. It was well that his father had known and suspected nothing. The whole matter was to Mrs. Kaye the more amazing and iniquitous because she had hitherto always defended Mrs. Maule when that lady's conduct was discussed, as it constantly was discussed, in the neighbourhood of Rede Place. At Redyford Vicarage such talk had never been tolerated; and with a few stinging words of rebuke Mrs. Kaye had ever put the gossips in their places. It had suited her far better to have to deal with a brilliant, beautiful, rather reckless woman, who was much away from home, and who always treated her with the courtesy and indifferent good-humour due to an equal, rather than with the type of great lady to whom she knew some of the other clergy's wives were in subjection. CHAPTER II "L'opinion dispose de tout. Elle fait la beauté, la justice, et le bonheur qui est le tout du monde." To say that the most important events of life often turn on trifling incidents has become a truism, and yet it may be doubted if any of us realise how especially true this is concerning the greatest of human riddles, the riddle of sex. Had the man of whose presence on the platform of Selford Junction Mrs. Maule had become aware, turned round and watched the London express before it steamed out of the station, his own immediate future, to say nothing of that secret, inner life of memory which each human being carries as a burden, might have been considerably modified. But at the moment when Mrs. Maule had been engaged in trying her not very happy experiment with Bayworth Kaye, the only other occupant of the platform was staring with a good deal of interest and curiosity at a long row of illustrated newspaper pages pinned dado-wise round the top of the bookstall. The newsagent's clerk, when arranging his wares that morning, had had what he felt to be an unusually bright idea. Picking out what he considered the two most attractive items in the illustrated paper with which he was dealing, he had repeated these items alternately with what to most onlookers would have seemed an irritating regularity. The two pages he had selected for this honour were very different. The one consisted of a set of photographs, nine officers in uniform: _General Hew Lingard and his Staff, just returned home after the victorious Amadawa Expedition_. "Here," the bookstall clerk had probably argued unconsciously, and quite wrongly, to himself, "is a page that will interest gentlemen and boys. Now I must find something that will cause ladies to purchase the paper," and he had accordingly put next to the page of military portraits one consisting of a single illustration--the reproduction of a beautiful painting of a beautiful woman. The man staring up at the black and white pages was true to what the clerk took to be the masculine type of newspaper buyer and reader, for he devoted his whole attention to the group of military portraits. He had, however, a special reason for staring up as he was now doing at the rather absurd dado, for it was his own portrait which occupied the place of honour in the centre of the page. Being the manner of man he was, Hew Lingard felt at once elated and ashamed at seeing himself hung up in this queer pillory of fame. He was moved more than he would have cared to admit, even to himself, at seeing the honour paid to that old photograph taken some seven years before, at a time when he was out of love with life, having been, as he imagined, shelved by a small home appointment. The portraits of his staff were comparatively new; they had doubtless been supplied in haste by the happy mothers and sisters of the sitters, and his grey eyes, set under deep overhanging brows, rested on them proudly. It was to these eight comrades--so he would have been the first to admit, nay to insist--that he had owed much of the sudden overwhelming success which had now come to him. At last he resolutely concentrated his attention on the opposite illustration, and coming up a little closer to the stall, he read what was printed underneath: "This modern picture, only painted ten years ago, fetched ten thousand pounds at Christie's last week. It is a portrait of the beautiful Mrs. Richard Maule in the character of a Greek nymph. Mrs. Maule, before her marriage to the well-known owner of Rede Place, one of the show places of Surrey, was Miss Athena Durdon. Her father was British Consul at Athens, and her mother a Greek lady of rank; hence her interesting and unusual Christian name." "Why, it's Jane's friend," he said to himself. "How very odd that I should see it here and now!" General Lingard had glanced at the illustration, when his eye had first caught sight of it, with distaste. But now that he knew that this rather fantastic picture was a painting of the dearest friend of the woman who was going to be his wife, he looked with kind, considering, and even eager eyes at the Greek nymph. The famous soldier did not find it easy to adjust his imaginary portrait of Athena Maule, Jane Oglander's Athena, to this lovely embodiment of a pagan myth. But artists, or so he supposed, sometimes times take strange liberties with their sitters--besides, this was not in any sense a portrait.... "Your train's in, sir. Redyford is the second station from here." He turned away and walked quickly to the side-platform where the short local train was standing ready to start. * * * * * There were still some minutes to spare, and Mrs. Maule, on her way to the train, stopped and looked up with a curious sensation in which pleasure and anger both played a part, at the dado formed of the two pages taken from the _Illustrated London News_. Only one of those pages--that which was a reproduction of the picture sold the week before at Christie's--attracted her attention and aroused in her very mixed sensations: pleasure at the thought that her portrait should be displayed in a fashion so wholly satisfying to her own critical and now highly educated taste; anger at the knowledge that the splendid painting had been sold to an American, instead of taking its place in the picture-gallery of Rede Place. When the picture had suddenly come into the market, she had ardently desired that her husband should buy it, and she had even ventured to convey her wish to him through his cousin, Dick Wantele, but to her mortification Richard Maule had refused. Mrs. Maule now remembered with a sharp pang of self-pity the circumstances which had surrounded the painting of this picture. A portrait which her husband had commissioned the famous artist to paint of her was scarcely begun when the painter, who had taken an adjoining villa to theirs at Naples for the winter, had asked her whether she would sit to him in the character of a Greek nymph. Pleased and flattered, she had assented. Then, mentioning what she was about to do to her then indulgent and adoring husband, he, to her great astonishment, had disliked the idea: disliked it sufficiently to beg her as a personal favour to himself to make some excuse for not keeping her promise. But even in those malleable days Athena Maule was incapable of denying herself a fleeting gratification. While appearing to assent to her husband's wish she had secretly fulfilled her promise to the artist, and the picture had excited such keen admiration when it was first exhibited that it had made Mrs. Richard Maule's beauty famous even before she came to England. The episode had also resulted in her first serious quarrel with Richard Maule. When he had first seen the painting--for rather against her will the great artist had insisted on showing it to him--Mr. Maule had expressed an admiration it was impossible not to feel for the technical qualities of the work, but he had refused, with angry decision, any thought of commissioning a replica for Rede Place. * * * * * At last Mrs. Maule made her way to the train, and deliberately she chose a carriage which had, as its one occupant, the man she had noticed standing by the bookstall a quarter of an hour before. She had liked the look of him then, and she liked it even more now. She wondered where he was going to stay--whether with people she knew. As she sat down in the opposite corner, she glanced at him with instinctive interest and curiosity; he was lean and brown, and his face had the taut, tense look of the man who achieves--whose life is spent in combating forces greater than himself. She longed for something to distract her mind from the emotion--a mingling of impatient annoyance and self-pity--induced by her parting scene with Bayworth Kaye. She blamed herself for having come to Selford Junction; they, she and Bayworth, had said good-bye, in a real sense, yesterday. Why, acting on a good-natured impulse, had she been so foolish as to write him a last word saying she would come and see him off? He had not understood, poor fellow--men never did. Instead of having something touching, sentimental--in a word, soothing to look back to--there would only be a sad, painful memory. She was still, even now, haunted by young Kaye's desperate, unhappy eyes--and yet she had been so kind, so very kind to him! Yes, she had made a mistake in coming to Selford Junction. With a pettish movement she pulled down her veil yet further over her face. Three more travellers made sudden irruption into the railway carriage, and both Athena Maule and the man opposite to her turned round with frowning faces; they were one in their dislike of noise and vulgarity. But the man soon looked away, indifferent to his surroundings; he opened a German Service paper, and was soon reading it intently. Athena Maule glanced distastefully at the three people who had just come into the carriage. She knew them to be a Lady Barking and Lady Barking's married daughter, very wealthy people new to the neighbourhood. They had been pointed out to her by her husband's cousin, Dick Wantele, only a day or two before, driving past in one of the horseless carriages which were then becoming the fashion, but with which Richard Maule obstinately refused to supersede--or even allow them to be added to--his stables. She also knew, and in a more real sense, the man who was with the two ladies. He was a Major Biddell, one of those men only to be found, so Mrs. Maule now reminded herself, in hospitable England. Such men drift about from country house to country house, making themselves useful to the hostess; they are able to take part with modest success in any of the games and sports that may be going on; and with advancing years they endear themselves to the dowagers by an unceasing flow of malicious and often very unsavory gossip. Athena Maule had no use for this type of man, and as for the particular specimen who was now fussing round his two companions, thrusting illustrated papers into their hands, pulling up and down the window, and offering to change seats with them--she remembered that she had snubbed him once, cruelly. They had met at a moment when she was enjoying the new, the intoxicating experience of a suddenly acclaimed beauty. She turned her head away, for she did not wish to be recognised by Major Biddell; and then, as the train moved out of the station, she suddenly became aware, not without a certain amusement, that she was being discussed by the two ladies. The younger lady, "the vulgar married daughter," as Athena mentally described her, had opened the illustrated paper with which Major Biddell had provided her, and begun looking at the reproduction of the picture which had fetched a record price at Christie's. "If that is really like Mrs. Maule, then she's a very beautiful woman," she said thoughtfully. "Is she really very like that, Major Biddell? You know her, don't you?" "Oh yes. I know her quite well," he said promptly. "She often stays with the Kershaws of Cumberland, old friends of mine." He bent his sleek head over the page, and jerked his eyeglass in and out of his right eye. "H'm," he said, "rather a fancy portrait that! I doubt if the fair Athena was ever as lovely. Of course she may have been when she first married poor Maule, a matter of fifteen to sixteen years ago." "Has she been married as long as that?" said Lady Barking. "I _am_ surprised! I thought Mrs. Maule was still quite a young woman." "She's fairly young still--but then Maule married her when she was almost a child. She was Greek, you know, and the women blossom and fade very quickly out there. But still, I'm not denying that she's good-looking. In fact she's still an uncommonly handsome woman," he admitted generously. "I saw her at Ascot this year, and I was quite struck by the way she was wearing." The elder lady leant forward with sudden eagerness. "If you know her so well"--she hesitated--"I wonder if you would mind going over and seeing her, Major? Rede Place is the only house that hasn't called on us since we've been in the neighbourhood." Major Biddell shook his head very decidedly. "Oh no," he said, "you don't understand the kind, my dear lady! It's true that I do know her very well in a sense--but the likes of her doesn't condescend to look at the likes of me," he laughed uncomfortably. "She has no use for any one who isn't in love with her, or who hasn't been in love with her. The first time I saw her the whole crowd were at her feet. I was the only one who stood apart, so you can imagine whether she likes me or not!" "Do tell us, Major Biddell; is it really true that----" the voice dropped, but the two other silent, unknown occupants of the carriage caught a word or two which the young lady who spoke them had certainly not intended them to hear. "They're all like that in her particular set," declared Major Biddell briefly. He looked round uncomfortably. It is always a mistake to talk of people, especially women, by their names, in a railway carriage or any other semi-public place. Then the mother chimed in: "One does hear very peculiar stories about her, Major." The little man winced. "Well," he said, "there's a lot of excuse for her, isn't there? Think of the state Maule's in! There she is, a beautiful woman tied to a kind of mummy!" "I don't think a woman, however good-looking she may be, has any excuse for breaking her marriage vows," said the elder lady uncompromisingly. She felt that Major Biddell was not behaving very nicely to her. She had understood that he was a very useful man to know, but during the last two or three days it had begun to strike her that he was a selfish little man. Of course he could have contrived a meeting between herself and Mrs. Maule if he really had a mind to do so! She also felt indignant with him for pretending to her and to her daughter that there was nothing specially scandalous in the behaviour of Mrs. Maule. Why, everybody knew what Mrs. Maule was like! Even before she, Lady Barking, had become a part of Society, she had heard of the beautiful Mrs. Maule and her "goings on"; and in this part of the world the escapades of Mrs. Maule, the extraordinary things she had been known to do, were the standing gossip dish of the neighourhood. Even now, everyone was talking of the way in which she had bewitched young Bayworth Kaye, the Redyford clergyman's son, during the last few months. It was absurd for Major Biddell to pretend that Mrs. Maule was just like everybody else! Perhaps something of what she was feeling betrayed itself on her large, round face, for Major Biddell moved a little nearer to her. After all, Lady Barking was his hostess, and he desired to stay on at her comfortable, luxuriously appointed house for at least another ten days. "I see you know a good bit about her," he said, grinning. "I can tell you one really funny story about her," and then he proceeded to tell it, the two hanging on his lips, though the elder of his listeners felt uncomfortable, half-ashamed at listening so eagerly to what in another mood she would probably have described as "garbage." A hand was suddenly laid on Major Biddell's shoulder. He faced about quickly. A stranger of whose presence in the railway carriage he had scarcely been aware, was standing before him, tall, grim, formidable. "I must ask you, sir," the stranger spoke very clearly, "to withdraw every word that you have said concerning Mrs. Richard Maule. As for the story you have just told, you and I heard it at Undulah a good many years ago. It was told--I remember the fact, if you do not--of another lady, of, of--no matter--" he stopped himself abruptly. Major Biddell jumped up. If no gentleman in the higher sense of the word, he was also no coward. "I shall say exactly what I like," he said sharply, "and I question your right to interfere with me in any way. You say you met me at Undulah a good many years ago? If that's the case, you have the advantage of me!" There was a moment's pause; then it was broken by a nervous laugh and a whisper from daughter to mother, "Poor man, I suppose he's another of Mrs. Maule's victims!" "Perhaps I should add," said the stranger, his voice thick with anger and contempt, "that though I have never met Mrs. Maule, I know quite enough of her to be assured that this vile gossip, these--these foul allegations, are utterly, damnably untrue." Major Biddell felt very much relieved. For a horrible moment he had supposed, not unnaturally, that the man who had just administered so sharp a rebuke to him was nearly related to Mrs. Maule. He had at once realized that the speaker was a member of the profession he had once adorned, nay more, he was uncomfortably aware that the man's dark face had been seen by him before. The unpleasant stranger was eccentric--to say the least of it. But of course there are such men in the world--Major Biddell thanked God he hadn't hitherto met many such--who go through life breaking lances for the sex. The little scene was over in a very few moments, and, after one quick look round, the woman who sat in the furthest corner had apparently taken no interest in what was going on. Her face was turned away. She was staring out of the narrow window. Major Biddell, glancing at her apprehensively, could only see her slim, straight back, and the veil twisted round her small hat hiding the dark shining coils of hair. The train began to slow down. The two ladies got up with an air of rather ostentatious relief. Major Biddell opened the door and jumped out. He carefully helped his companions down the high steps. As all three moved away, Lady Barking's sonorous voice could be heard saying, "I should think that man was mad!" "Oh no, he wasn't, mother," said her daughter loudly. "He's an adorer of the lady--that's what it is. I expect he's on his way to stay there now!" "But they never have any visitors at Rede Place except that Miss Oglander." The train moved on. To the woman sitting in the corner the atmosphere of the railway carriage was still charged with a not unpleasing electricity. Very deliberately she raised her veil and subjected the man sitting opposite to a long, thoughtful scrutiny. She raked her memory in vain for the strongly-drawn dark face, the large, loosely-made figure. Suddenly he raised his eyes and met her full, considering glance. No, they had never met before. No man who had ever known Athena Maule, even for only a brief space of time, would look into her lovely, mobile face, meet the peculiar glance of her large heavy-lidded violet eyes, as this stranger was now doing, coldly, unchallengingly. Mrs. Maule reddened, and hurriedly pulled down her veil. She felt--and it was a disconcerting sensation--as if she had been snubbed. CHAPTER III "The world is oft to treason not unkind, But ne'er the traitor can admirers find." It was the evening of the same day. Two men were sitting together in what was called the Greek Room by the household of Rede Place. The elder of the two was close to the fireplace, his stiff, thin hands held out to the blue shooting flames of a wood fire. Although he was dressed for dinner, there was that about him which suggested invalidism. Cushions were piled behind him in the deep, capacious chair in which he seemed to crouch rather than to sit, and a light rug was thrown across his knees, although it was only the 1st of October. This was Richard Maule, whose name was known to the cosmopolitan world of scholars as a Hellenist, an authority on classical archæology, on the slowly excavated story of long-buried civilizations. To those who dwelt in the present, and who only cared for the things of to-day, he was enviable as the owner of a delightful and, in its way, a famous estate in Surrey. Rede Place! The enchanting, rather artificial pleasaunce created out of what had been a primeval stretch of woodland by an early Victorian millionaire! The banker _virtuoso_, Theophilus Joy, had committed what we should now consider the crime of pulling down a fine old Tudor manor-house in order to reproduce in the keener English climate and alien English soil those Palladian harmonies of form which have their natural home only beneath southern skies. There had been a time in the 'fifties and the 'sixties when Rede Place had been a synonym for all that was exquisite and perfect in art and life. But Richard Maule, though he shared many of the tastes, and had inherited all the wealth of his grandfather, was a recluse. Not even the possession of a singularly beautiful and attractive wife ever made him throw open Rede Place in the old, hospitable, magnificent way in which it had been thrown open during his own childhood and early youth. As far as was possible, he lived alone--alone, that is, with the companionship of his wife, when she was willing to favour him with her companionship, and fortunate in the constant society of his kinsman, Dick Wantele, whom all the world knew to be Richard Maule's ultimate heir, that is, the future owner of Rede Place. Each of the rooms of the long Italianate house was filled with curious, rare, and costly works of art, offering many points of interest to the collector and student, and this was specially true of the room in which now sat Richard Maule and Dick Wantele. In 1843 Theophilus Joy, the friend rather than the patron of Turner, had persuaded that eccentric and secretive genius to accompany him from Italy to Greece. The enduring result of this journey was a remarkable series of water-colours forming the decoration of what was henceforth called the Greek Room of Rede Place. Over the mantelpiece was a copy, by the artist, of "Ulysses deriding Polyphemus." Below the Turner water-colours, and forming a latticed dado round the room, were a row of lacquered bookcases containing Richard Maule's unique collection of books and pamphlets, in every language, dealing with the Greece of the past and of the present. * * * * * Dick Wantele sat as far from the fire as was possible, close to a window which he would have preferred to have open. His long, angular figure was bent almost in two over his knee, on which there lay propped up a block of drawing paper. He was drawing busily, sketching a small house, by the side of which was a rough plan of what was evidently to be the inside of the house. A heavily-shaded lamp left in shadow his pale, lantern-jawed face, only redeemed from real ugliness by its expression of alert intelligence. The two, unlike most men living in the difficult juxtaposition of owner and heir, were on the most excellent terms the one with the other. Theirs indeed was the happy kind of intimacy which requires no words, no futile exchange of small talk, to prove kindliness and understanding; and when at last Richard Maule spoke, he did not even turn round, for he was used to the other's instant comprehension and sympathy. "Then the Paches are bringing over General Lingard to dinner next Tuesday?" The younger man looked up quickly. "Yes, on Tuesday," he said. "Athena seems to think that will be the best day for them to come. You see, Jane Oglander will be here then." "I'm glad of that," said Richard Maule. "I hope their coming won't bore you, Richard. Athena couldn't get out of it. You see Pache practically asked her to ask them over. They want to show their lion, and they also want to entertain their lion! I confess I'm rather looking forward to seeing Lingard." "I've seen so many lions." Mr. Maule spoke with a touch of weary irritation. And then he added, after a rather long pause, "I never cared for soldiers, at any rate not for your modern man of war who goes out with a Gatling gun to kill a lot of poor niggers." "Lingard has done more than that, Richard. He succeeded where three other men had failed, and what is really wonderful, he did it on the cheap." "That I admit _is_ wonderful," said Richard Maule dryly, "but I don't suppose the people who are now fêting him are doing it as a reward for his economy. However, no matter, we'll entertain the Pachian hero." The mahogany door at the end of the long room opened, then it was closed quietly, and a woman came in, bringing with her a sudden impression of vitality, of youth, of buoyant strength into the shadowed, over-heated room. Athena Maule advanced with easy, graceful steps till she stood, a radiant figure, in the circle of warring light cast by the fire and by the shaded lamps. Her cheeks were flushed, tinted to an exquisite carmine that seemed to leave more white her low forehead and now heaving bosom. She stopped just between the two men, glancing quickly first at one and then at the other. And then at last, after a perceptible pause, she spoke, her clear accents, slightly foreign in their intonation, falling ominously on the ears of her small audience of two. "I've just had a letter from Jane Oglander." The younger of the two men wondered with a certain lazy amusement whether Athena was aware of how dramatic had been her announcement of a singularly insignificant fact. As to the older man--he who sat by the fireplace--he had turned and deliberately looked away as the door opened. But now it was he who spoke, and this to Dick Wantele was significant, for Richard Maule very seldom spoke of his own accord, to his wife. "Then isn't she coming to-morrow? It seems a long time since Jane left us--in August, wasn't it?" "Jane Oglander," said Mrs. Maule, her left hand playing with the tassel terminating the Algerian scarf which slipped below her bare dimpled shoulders, "Jane Oglander wishes me to tell you both that--that she is going to be married." Richard Maule fixed his stern, sunken eyes on his wife. It was a terrible look--a look of mingled contempt and hatred. "Anyone we know?" asked Dick Wantele quietly. Athena Maule looked at him with a grudging admiration. Dick was certainly what some of her English friends called "game," and her French friends "_crâne_." She had now lived in England for some eight years, but she did not yet understand Englishmen and their ways; and of all the strange Englishmen she had come across, there were few that struck her as so queer--queer was the word--as her husband's cousin, Dick Wantele. But he had long ceased really to interest her. Walking slowly down the long gallery upstairs, Mrs. Maule had thought deeply how she should make her startling announcement, how reveal the news which had hurt her so shrewdly as to make her wish--such being her nature--that others should share her pain. She had thought of coming in with Jane Oglander's letter open in her hand, but no, this she decided would be rather cheap, and would also in a measure prepare Dick--it was Dick whom she wished to hurt, whom she knew she would hurt. Richard Maule was incapable of being hurt by anything. But still it was very pleasant to know that even Richard would be irritated at the thought that Jane Oglander, who had now been for so long the one healing, soothing presence in their sombre household, and whom he had stupidly believed would end by marrying Dick Wantele was now going to disappear into the morass of British matronhood. "Anyone we know?" she repeated consideringly. "No, not exactly, but someone who is quite famous and whom we shall know very soon." Dick Wantele shrugged his shoulders with a nervous movement. His cousin's wife was fond of talking in enigmas, especially to him, and especially when she knew he desired to be told a simple fact simply and quickly. Then something unexpected happened. Richard Maule again spoke, and again addressed his wife. "I suppose," he said, "you mean General Lingard?" "How did you know? Has Jane written to you?" Mrs. Maule flashed the questions out. The one who looked on was vividly aware that this was the first time, so far as he knew, for years, that Athena Maule had asked direct questions of her husband, questions demanding answers. Even now Richard Maule did not vouchsafe his wife the courtesy of a reply. It seemed to him that her questions answered themselves, and in the negative. But Dick Wantele got up. "Is this true, Athena?" he asked abruptly. "Is Jane engaged to General Lingard? What an extraordinary thing! Why, he hasn't been back from West Africa more than a fortnight." She nodded. "Yes!--it's quite true. Apparently his parents were friends of her father ages ago. She knew him when she was a child. They met again quite by chance last time he was in England. Then he began to write to her. It all seems to have been arranged by letter. At least she says they corresponded all the time he was away, and then he appears to have gone straight to her on the evening of the day he arrived in London. I suppose," she concluded not very pleasantly, "that she could not dash his triumph--and so she accepted him. It is very difficult," she continued, "for a woman to say no to a hero." Dick Wantele smiled. His eyes met hers with a curious flash of rather cruel raillery. Her own dropped for a moment; then they seemed to dilate as she went on, "I really do know what I am talking about, for you see, Dick, Richard was a hero when I married him. In Greece we all looked upon the great, the noble, the famous Mr. Maule as quite a hero!" For a moment she allowed her full glance to rest on the unheroic figure crouching by the fire, and Dick Wantele felt keenly vexed with himself. He was not often so foolish as to wage war with Richard Maule's wife in Richard Maule's presence. All three hailed with relief the interruption caused by the announcement of dinner. Wantele got up with more alacrity than usual. He walked with a quick, sliding step to where Mrs. Maule was still standing. With a little bow he offered her his arm. As they left the room Mr. Maule's valet came in by another door. Quickly, noiselessly, he brought forward an invalid table and placed on it a tray. There was soup, some whole-meal bread, a little very fine fruit, and a small decanter of claret. Then after the man had asked, "Is there anything else you require, sir?" and had noted the scarcely perceptible shake of the head with which Mr. Maule answered him, the master of Rede Place was left alone. Richard Maule looked at the silver bowl containing his half-pint of soup--everything he ate was measured and weighed and prepared with the most scrupulous accuracy according to a great doctor's ordinance--with a kind of fastidious distaste. Since his illness he had grown particular about his food, and yet as youth and man no one had been more indifferent than he to the kind of luxury by which most men set such store. During the years which had immediately preceded his marriage, it had been his boast that he could live for days and even weeks on the rough, unpalatable fare dear to the Greek peasant. Steadying his right hand with his left, he ate a spoonful of soup, then pushed the bowl away. The news his wife had taken such malicious pleasure in telling had disturbed and pained him more than he thought anything could now disturb and pain him. He was attached to Jane Oglander; she was the only human being apart from Dick whose presence was, if not agreeable, at least not unpleasant to him. In the rare moments of kindly thought and musing on the future which sometimes visited him, he saw Jane mistress of Rede Place, bringing peace and, what is so much nearer the heart of life, love satisfied, to Dick Wantele. He had felt sure that Jane, with her tenderness, her simplicity of nature, would end where most women of her type end, by surrender. That she would marry anyone excepting Dick Wantele had seemed impossible. But in this life, as Richard Maule had learnt far too late, it is what would have seemed impossible which happens. * * * * * Dick Wantele and Mrs. Maule sat opposite one another at a round table set at one end of the great tapestry-hung dining-room. A stranger seeing them would have thought the plain young man singularly blessed in having so lovely a table-mate sitting with him at so perfectly cooked and noiselessly served a meal as they were now enjoying. But though there was a side of his nature peculiarly alive to certain sensuous forms of beauty, to-night Wantele only saw in Athena the malicious, almost the malignant, bearer of ill news. But civilized man, if eating in company, must also talk, and so at last, "One sees now," he said reflectively, "why the worthy Paches have been so greatly honoured." "What do you mean?" asked Mrs. Maule. It was, she found, sometimes easier to ask Dick to explain himself than to try and guess what he meant. "I mean," said Wantele, "that one can now understand why General Lingard accepted his dull relations' invitation. It was because he knew that his young woman would be in the neighbourhood, staying here with us." "Your choice of phrase," said Athena sharply, "is not very refined." "Isn't it?" he said mildly. "But then, Athena, I don't know that I ever set up to be a particularly refined person." And then, as they sat sparring and jarring as they so often did at their quickly-served meals, Dick Wantele gradually became aware that Mrs. Maule was eating nothing, nay more, that her short upper lip was trembling--large tears rolling down her cheeks. "Why!--Athena?" he exclaimed. "You mustn't allow this unexpected news to"--he hesitated for a word--"to upset you so much." He looked up across at her with a not very kind curiosity. His light observant eyes suddenly seized on what was to him an amazing sight, namely that a folded letter, covered with a fine clear handwriting he knew with a dear familiar knowledge, was working up out of Mrs. Maule's short bodice and forming a grey patch on her white neck. In spite of himself, Wantele was rather touched. "Of course I have always known that Jane was devoted to you," he said musingly, "but I didn't realise that the feeling was reciprocated to such an extent as it seems to be!" A flush of stormy anger reddened Mrs. Maule's face. "With Jane often here it has been bad enough!" she said passionately. "But what will my life be like henceforth?--I mean when I shan't even have her to look forward to? Richard will force me to be here more than ever now." "I think you will still manage to be a good deal away----" He had been right after all. Athena was only thinking of Jane Oglander's marriage as it affected herself. "Of course I shall stay away as much as I can!" she cried. "You and Richard much prefer my absence to my presence----" her look challenged a contradiction Wantele did not--could not utter. "And then--and then that isn't all, Dick! I didn't mind being here when Jane was here too to make things go well----" "Perhaps Jane will sometimes leave her hero during the very few weeks of the year that you are, as it were, in residence, Athena. He's going, it seems, to be given a home appointment. I suppose they will be married very soon?" Wantele did not look at her as he spoke. He was tracing an imaginary pattern on the tablecloth. The numbness induced by the horrible blow she had dealt him was beginning to give way to stinging stabs of pain. He longed to know more--to know everything--to turn as it were a jagged knife in his heart-wound. Mrs. Maule dabbed her eyes with her handkerchief, then she laughed. "No, no, Dick," she cried, "there's no such luck in store for you--I mean for us! We're going to lose Jane--once for all. Jane has taken it rather badly. I never thought that dear saint would fall in love!" She suddenly became aware that his eyes were fixed on the letter she had thrust into the bodice of her gown when walking down the long gallery upstairs. She took it out of her warm and scented bodice, and held it out to him. "I think you'd better read what she says." Wantele looked at the pretty hand holding Jane Oglander's letter, but he made no attempt to take the folded paper. "I should _like_ to read it--" he said lightly, "but I think I'd better not." "Yes, do read it, Dick. Why shouldn't you?" She added slowly, "There's something about you in it too----" Wantele hesitated, and then he fell. He leant over and took Jane Oglander's letter from her hand. His own was shaking, and that angered him. He turned his chair right round, and holding the two sheets of grey paper up close to his eyes deliberately read them slowly through. As at last he handed them back to her, he said quietly, "You told me a lie just now, Athena. I am not mentioned in Jane's letter." "Indeed you are!" She pointed to a thin line of writing across the top of the second sheet. "'I hope Dick won't mind much'--" she read aloud. "There's something else!" he cried quickly, and getting up strode round and took the letter again from her with a masterful hand. "'I hope Dick won't mind much'--" he read aloud, "'or dear Richard either.'" Then he let the letter drop on the cloth beside her. The numbness had all gone, the pain he felt had become almost intolerable. Mrs. Maule again tucked Jane Oglander's letter inside her bodice, then she got up. As he held the door open for her, Wantele put his hand, his cool, long-fingered, impersonal hand, on her arm. "Athena," he said softly. "I wonder how it is that you have always had the gift of making me do things of which I knew I should live to feel ashamed. A unique gift, dear cousin----" She turned and laughed mischievously up into his pale suffering face. "The woman tempted me, and so of course I ate!" she exclaimed. "You're not much of a man, Dick, but you have always been a thorough man in the matter of making excuses for yourself!" CHAPTER IV "He smarteth most who hides his smart And sues for no compassion." After he had closed the door behind his cousin, Dick Wantele did not go back to the little round table, its fruit and wine. Instead he began walking up and down the dining-room, his hands clasped behind his back. The reading of Jane Oglander's letter had brought with it sharp and instant punishment. Even to her dearest woman friend Jane had said little of her inmost feelings, but the man who knew her with a far more intimate knowledge than any other human being would ever know her, understood. Jane loved Lingard. Loved him in a way he, Wantele, had not thought her capable of loving, and the revelation hurt him horribly. Why had he failed where another had succeeded with such apparent ease? He felt a sudden hatred of the house he was in and of everything and everybody in it. Feeling pursued, accompanied by mocking demons, he hurried out of the dining-room and made his way into the square hall or atrium, as old Theophilus Joy had called it. Each of the marble figures there seemed alive to his humiliation and defeat. Passing into a vestibule which led directly out of doors he put on a light coat, for he was delicate, Mrs. Maule would have said over-careful of himself--then he jammed a wide-brimmed soft hat on his head, and quietly let himself out of the house. It was a still, warm night, but the moist fragrant air was heavy with the premonition of coming winter. Wantele walked a certain distance down the broad carriage way, then he cut sharply to the left, among the brambles and underwood, under high beech trees. Once there, he began to walk more slowly, keeping to the narrow path by a kind of instinct. He welcomed the tangible fact of solitude. Even were he urgently sought for, it would be a long time before they could find him unless he himself raised his voice and gave a hulloo. Richard, for once, must spend his evening solitary. Could she have seen Wantele's long thin face as it was now, serious with the seriousness born of distress, Athena Maule would have been satisfied that the news she had been at the pains to tell in so dramatic a fashion had struck at the heart of at least one of her hearers. Dick Wantele belonged to the type of man who achieves what he desires to achieve because his desire is generally well within the measure of his powers. He had been confident that in time he would wear down Jane Oglander's gentle resistance, and lately--all the very time she had been corresponding with General Lingard, certainly receiving and perhaps even writing love-letters--he had believed that she was making up her mind to reward him for what had become his long fidelity. He had even gone so far as to think that only Athena Maule's watchful antagonism stood between Jane Oglander and himself. To Wantele, the knowledge that he had been a fool stung intolerably. He had one poor consolation, the consolation of knowing that he had hidden successfully the various feelings provoked in him by the announcement, both from the cruel eyes and from the kind eyes which had watched to see how he took news which meant so much to him. But that, after all, was but an ignoble consolation in his great bereavement. Walking there in the darkness, with memory as his only companion, he realised all too shrewdly what the disappearance of Jane Oglander from his life would mean. Till to-night, Wantele had been wont to tell himself bitterly that the existence he was forced to lead was one by no means to be envied by other men of his age and standing. But he now looked back to yesterday with longing, for yesterday still held a future of which the major possibility was the fact that Jane might become his wife. He had first met Miss Oglander at a moment when he had just come through a terrible secret crisis, one which had left him free of all the familiar moorings of his early life. He had touched pitch, and to his own conscience and imagination he had been most vilely defiled. And yet circumstances had made it imperative that he should not only pretend to be clean, but also that he should affect complete ignorance of the pitch he had touched. Jane Oglander, then a young, clear-eyed girl, with a certain tender gaiety, a straightforward simplicity of nature which had strongly appealed to his own more complex character, had helped him and indeed made it possible for him to do this. Then had come Jack Oglander's mad act and its awful consequences, and even this had helped Dick Wantele further to obliterate the memory of his own ignominious secret. He had thrown himself, with his cousin, Richard Maule's, full assent, into the whole terrible business, and Jane Oglander had found his dry sense and quiet, efficient help an untold comfort. No wonder the ties of confidence and friendship between them had grown ever closer and closer, seeming to justify the young man in the hope that the time must come when Jane would become his wife. To-night the news flung at him by Athena Maule wiped out the immediate peaceful past, and phantoms which he believed himself to have banished for ever sprang into being--dread reminders that no man can ever hope to escape wholly from his past. At last, with a feeling of lassitude and relief he came to a broad low gate. The gate was locked, but he climbed over it, as he had often done before. The path went on still under trees and among underwood till it widened and became merged in a clearing, in the middle of which stood a long low building still called by its old name of the Small Farm, and now the home of one to whom Wantele often made his way in moments of depression and revolt. When Dick Wantele had first made Mabel Digby's acquaintance, she had been a plain, observant, self-reliant little girl of nine, whose most striking features were bright brown eyes set in a fair freckled face, and masses of light yellow hair worn by her in two long pigtails. The only child of a certain Colonel Digby, whose death had taken place when she was sixteen, Mabel Digby had elected to go on living in the place where her father had brought her motherless, seven years before, and Dick Wantele had been largely instrumental in her settlement in the old farmhouse which was on the edge of the Rede Place estate. At first the governess who had brought her up, and who had educated her in the old-fashioned, thorough, and perhaps rather limited way more usual forty years ago than now, had lived with her; but when Mabel was nineteen this lady had had to go back to her own people, and she had had no successor. To the scandal rather than to the surprise of the neighbourhood, Miss Digby decided that henceforth she would live alone. She was well aware, though those about her were not, that her father's old soldier servant and his wife were really more efficient and vigilant chaperons than the kind, gentle governess had been. With Wantele the relations of Mabel Digby had always been of a singularly close and sexless nature. She had naturally begun by looking at him with her father's, the old Indian Mutiny veteran's eyes; that is, she had been gently tolerant of his fads, while neither understanding nor sharing them. Then, as she grew older, as she read the books that he lent her and talked over with her, she had moved some way from her father's--the simple-minded soldier's--position, and she judged Dick Wantele rather hardly, half despising him for having so contentedly, or so she thought, sunk into the position of adopted son to his wealthy cousin. When she had become aware that he desired to marry Jane Oglander, a fact of which she had possessed herself by asking him the direct question, and receiving an equally direct answer, she had at once decided that he was not nearly good enough for the lady on whom he had fixed his affection, and time had in no sense modified her first view. Still, without her knowing it, Dick Wantele counted for much in Mabel Digby's life. She was proud of his friendship and believed herself to be the recipient of all his secrets. When he was attacked, as he often was in her presence--for she was on the whole liked, and he was regarded by the neighbourhood as "superior" and "supercilious"--she always took his part. Intimate as they were with one another, and with that comfortable intimacy which knows nothing of the doubts or recriminations which lead to what are significantly called "lovers' quarrels," there were subjects on which neither ever touched to the other. Never since the day on which Mabel Digby, at the time only fifteen, had asked him the indiscreet question which she was now ashamed to remember, had either made any allusion to Wantele's feeling for Jane Oglander. The other subject which was taboo between them was Mabel Digby's relation to young Kaye. Wantele was no schemer, but there was something in him which made him aware of the schemes of others, even against his own will and desire. He had become aware that Mrs. Kaye regarded Mabel Digby as a suitable daughter-in-law elect, almost on the day that the thought had first presented itself to the clergyman's wife and on Mabel's behalf he had at once said to himself, "Why not?" But during the last year he had been glad to believe that Mabel had so little suspected or assented to Mrs. Kaye's wishes as to ignore her one-time playfellow's infatuation for Athena. * * * * * His eyes had become accustomed to the star-lit darkness, and he could see the straight stone-flagged path which led to the porch of the Small Farm. As he walked up it a dog rushed out from its kennel and began barking. "Be quiet," said Wantele harshly. "Be quiet, old dog! Keep that sort of thing for your enemies and the enemies of your mistress--not for me." Then he walked on, the dog at his heels, till he got to the porch. There he waited for a moment, for it had suddenly occurred to him that Mabel Digby might not be alone; one of the tiresome people who lived in Redyford--the village which had now grown into a town--might be spending the evening with her. Before knocking at her door he must assure himself that she was alone. Old friends as he and she were, he had never come there before so late as this. He walked on past the porch, till he stood opposite the uncurtained window of the curious hall dining-room of the person he had come to see. He remembered that Colonel Digby had hated curtains, and that his daughter shared the prejudice. Mabel Digby was dressed in the rather old-fashioned looking high white muslin dress she generally wore in the evening when at home by herself. Her fair hair was drawn back very plainly from her forehead, and coiled in innumerable plaits. Colonel Digby had desired his girl to do her hair in that way when she had first turned it up, and by a queer little bit of sentiment in a nature which prided itself on its lack of sentiment, Mabel had always remained faithful to her father's fancy. Sitting on a low chair between the deep fireplace and the long narrow oak table which ran down the middle of the room, Mabel Digby was now engaged in burning packets of letters, and she was going through the disagreeable task in the rather precise way which made her do well whatever she took in hand. Her long and not very easy task was nearly at an end, and Wantele saw clearly the few letters that remained scattered on the table. He recognised the bold black handwriting, the large square envelopes, the blue Indian stamps. "How odd," he told himself, "that the child should have waited till to-night to burn these old letters of Bayworth Kaye!" Mabel had never made any secret of her correspondence with the young soldier. Still, when one came to think of it, it was odd that she had troubled to keep Bayworth's letters--odder still that now to-night, the day of Bayworth Kaye's departure, she should be burning them.... After all, why should he go in and see her now? People have to bear certain troubles alone. Mabel Digby had set him, in this matter, a good example. Wantele turned on his heel. He walked on to the grass and plunged into the herbaceous border which still formed a fragrant autumn hedge to the little lawn. His object was to get away without being seen or heard, by the gate which gave on to the country road and which formed the proper, orthodox entrance to the Small Farm. But as he was making his way to the gate the front door opened, and Mabel Digby came out into the darkness. "Aren't you coming in, Dick?" she called out. "I couldn't think what had happened to you! I saw you at the window, and then you disappeared suddenly. Why didn't you let yourself in? The door isn't locked, but the gate is." Mabel Digby had a loud, rather childish voice, but now Wantele was glad enough to turn and follow her into the low-pitched living room of the old farmhouse. As he walked through into the curious and charming room, at once so like and so unlike the living-rooms of the smaller farms on his cousin's estate, he saw that Mabel Digby had thrown a large, brightly-coloured Italian handkerchief over those of the letters which still remained on the table. "The women in the cottages do that," she said, following the direction of his eyes. "When they hear the step of a visitor at the door, they throw a dishcloth over whatever it is they want to hide, the little drop of comfort or what not, but it doesn't deceive the visitor--at least it never deceives me! I always know what there is under the dishcloth. And you know--I mean you saw, Dick, what there is under my dishcloth." She spoke quickly, a little defiantly. Her cheeks were burning, her brown eyes very bright. She also felt unhappy, moved out of her usual self to-night. Wantele walked over to the fireplace. He sat down in the ingle nook and held out his hands. He was a chilly creature, and though he had been walking fast he felt curiously cold. Poor little Mabel! This was interesting and--and rather sad. He wondered uncomfortably how much she had seen, guessed, of Bayworth's infatuation for Athena Maule. She must have seen something.... "Yes," he said at last. "It's never much use trying to prevent one's neighbours knowing what one's got under one's dishcloth. But there have never been any letters under mine. As a matter of principle I always burn any letters I receive, however temporarily precious they may be." "There's a great deal to be said for your plan," she said. Then she began tearing up each of the few letters which remained on the long oak table, and threw the pieces, one by one, into the heart of the fire. He watched her in uncomfortable silence. At last she came and sat down opposite Wantele. "I suppose you have heard the great news," he said abruptly. "I mean, the piece of good fortune which has befallen the Paches?" The girl looked up. Wantele was still staring into the fire, but his expression told her nothing. "No," she said indifferently, "what is it?" "They've got General Lingard staying with them, and they're bringing him over to dinner on Tuesday. Athena is going to ask you to meet him." "Lingard?" cried the girl. "Not Lingard of the Amadawa Expedition! D'you really mean that I'm going to meet him?" A ring of genuine pleasure had come into the young voice which a few moments before had only too plainly told a tale of dejection and bitterness. Wantele turned and looked at her. For the first time that evening he smiled broadly, and there came into his eyes the humorous light which generally dwelt there. "I suppose you know all about him," he said dryly. "I suppose you followed every step of the Expedition?" "Of course I did!" she exclaimed. "How father would have loved to meet General Lingard"--there came a touch of keen regret into her voice. "I expect you'll meet your hero very often before you've done with him, Mabel"--as he said the words he struck a match and lit a cigarette--"for he and Jane Oglander are going to be married." "General Lingard and Jane Oglander?" Mabel could not keep a measure of extreme surprise and excitement out of her voice, but she was, what her dead father's old soldier servant always described her as being, "a thorough little lady," and after hearing Wantele's quiet word of assent to her involuntary question, she refrained, without any seeming effort, from pursuing the subject. At last Wantele got up. "Well," he said. "Well, Mabel? This is a queer, 'unked' kind of world, isn't it?" She nodded her head, and without offering him her hand she unlatched the door. When she knew him to be well away, she came back and, laying her head on the table, burst into tears. She loved Jane Oglander--she rejoiced in Jane's good fortune--but the contrast was too great between Jane's fate and hers. But for Athena Maule, but for the spell Athena had cast over Bayworth Kaye, she, Mabel, would probably by now have been Bayworth's wife, on the way to India--India the land of her childish, of her girlish dreams. CHAPTER V "Nay, but the maddest gambler throws his heart." Richard Maule waited a while to see if his cousin would come to him, and then he went up to his bedroom. He soon dismissed his man-servant, and the book he had meant to read in the night--a book on the newly-revealed treasures of Cretan art--lay ready to his feeble hand on the table by the wide, low bed which was the only new piece of furniture placed there since the room had been the nursery of his happy childhood. But he felt unwontedly restless, and soon he began moving about the low-ceilinged, square room with dragging, heavy footsteps. When they had brought him back ill to death, as he had hoped, from Italy eight years before, it was here that he had insisted on being put; and there were good reasons for his choice, for the room communicated by easy shallow stairs with that part of the house where were the Greek Room, and the library which had been arranged for him by his grandfather as a delightful surprise on his seventeenth birthday. Mr. Maule's bedchamber was in odd contrast to the rest of Rede Place. The furnishings were frankly ugly, substantial veneered furniture had been chosen by the sensible, middle-aged woman to whom Theophilus Joy, after anxious consultation with the leading doctor of the day, had confided his precious orphan grandson. His old nurse's clean, self-respecting presence haunted, not unpleasantly, the room at times when Richard Maule only asked to forget the present in the past. His wife, Athena, had never been in this room. Even when he was lying helpless, scarcely able to make himself understood by his nurses, the stricken man had been able to convey his strong wish concerning this matter of his wife's banishment from his sick room to Dick Wantele, and Athena had quietly acquiesced.... As time had gone on, Richard Maule had become in a very real sense master of this one room; here at least none had the right to disturb him or to spy on his infirmities unless he gave them leave. He went across to the window which commanded a side view of the door by which the inmates of Rede Place generally let themselves in and out. Dick, so he felt sure, was out of doors--no doubt walking off, as the young and hale are able to do, his anger and his pain. A great yearning for his kinsman came over Richard Maule. Drawing the folds of his luxurious dressing-gown round his shrunken limbs, he painfully pushed a chair to a window and sat down there. And as he looked out into the October night, waiting for the sound which would tell him that Dick had come in, he allowed himself to do what he very seldom did--he thought of the past and surveyed, dispassionately, the present. To the majority of people there is something repugnant in the sight of an old man married to a lovely young woman, and this feeling is naturally intensified when the husband happens to be in any way infirm. Richard Maule was aware that these were the feelings with which he and his wife had long been regarded, both by their immediate neighbours and by the larger circle of the outer world where Mrs. Maule enjoyed the popularity so easily accorded to any woman who contributes beauty and a measure of agreeable animation to the common stock. But this knowledge, painful as it might have been to a proud and sensitive man, found Richard Maule almost indifferent. Had he been compelled to define his feeling in words, he would probably have observed that, after having brought his life to such utter shipwreck as he had done, this added mortification was not of a nature to trouble him greatly. Richard Maule, in his day, and still by courtesy, a noted Hellenist, had come to a sure if secret conclusion concerning human life. He believed that the old Greeks were right in thinking that Fate dogs the steps of the fortunate, and lies in ambush eager to deal those who are too happy stinging, and sometimes deadly, blows. How else account for that which had befallen himself? Till he had been forty-four, that is, till only ten years ago--for Richard Maule was by no means old as age counts now--his life had been, so he was now tempted to think looking back, ideal from every point of view. True, he had lost both his parents in childhood, but he had been adored and tenderly cherished by his mother's father, the cultivated, benignant Theophilus Joy, of whom he often thought with a vivid affection and gratitude seldom vouchsafed to the dead. He trusted that the old man in the Elysian Fields was ignorant of the strange gloom which now enwrapped Rede Place. The Fate in which Richard Maule believed had only dealt two backward blows at the cultivated hedonist whom Richard Maule now knew his grandfather to have been. One had been the premature death, by consumption, of the wife so carefully chosen, to whom there had never been a successor; and then, twenty-two years later, the death of his only child, Richard Maule's mother. But these two offerings had satisfied grim Nemesis, and perhaps it was open to question whether the creator of Rede Place had not spent a really happier old age in moulding and fashioning his grandson, as far as possible, to his own image, than if the beloved wife and only daughter had lived. In these latter days, when Richard Maule was enduring, not enjoying, life, he was apt to find a certain consolation in going back to the days of his delightful childhood. His grandfather had been the King, he the Heir Apparent, of a kingdom full of infinite delights and happy surprises to an imaginative and highly-strung little boy. Each of the ornate rooms of Rede Place, each of the grassy glades outside, was to him peopled with groups of agreeable ghosts--the ghosts of the clever men and witty women whom his grandfather delighted to bring there at certain times of each year, especially during the three summer months, when the beautiful pleasaunce he had created out of an equally exquisite wilderness was in glowing perfection. The only dark period of the boy's life--and that he would now have been unwilling to admit--was the two years spent at Eton--the Eton of the 'sixties. His grandfather, though worldly-wise enough not to wish the lad to grow up too singular a human being, had not realized that the life he had made his grandson lead up to the age of fourteen was not a fit preliminary to a public school. At the end of two years the boy was withdrawn from Eton and once more entrusted, as he had been before, to the care of an intelligent tutor, and to teachers of foreign tongues. Oxford proved more successful, but with Balliol, with which he had many pleasant memories, Richard Maule had one sad association. It was while he was sitting there in Hall that he had received the news of his grandfather's death. Then had begun for Richard Maule the second happy period of his life. He had become a wanderer, but a wanderer possessed of the carpet of Fortunatus, and with a youth, a vigour, a zest for life sharpened to finer issues than had been the nature of Theophilus Joy. Very soon Richard Maule made a real place for himself among that band of thinkers and lovers of the best which may always be found at the apex of every civilised society. His enthusiasm for the Greece of the past translated itself into an ardent love of modern Attica. He built a villa on Pentelicus, and there, within sight of the Ægean waters, he dreamed dreams with the Greek patriots to whose aspirations he showed himself willing to sacrifice, if need be, both blood and treasure. There also he would bring together each winter bands of young Englishmen, dowered with more romance than pence. The very brigands respected the rose-red marble villa and its English owner, and Greece for many years was his true country and his favourite dwelling-place. This being so, it was perhaps not so very strange that in time Richard Maule should have chosen an Ionian wife. His large circle--for in those days the owner of Rede Place was a man with admiring friends in every rank and condition of life, almost, it might be said, in every country and capital of Europe--were much interested to learn that if Mrs. Maule had borne before her marriage the respectable English name of Durdon, she was through her Greek mother a Messala, the representative of a house whose ancestors had borne titles transmitted to them from the days when Venice held sway over the seven islands. As was meet, the philo-Hellenist had met his future wife during a stay in Athens, and to him there had been something at once fragrant and austere in a courtship conducted in a rather humble villa reared on the cliff at Phaleron, from whose cramped verandah there lay unrolled the marvellous panorama of the plain of Athens, and eastwards, across the bay, Hymettus. It was there that Athena Durdon, her beauty made the more nymph-like and ethereal by the opalescent light of a May moon, consented to exchange the meagre life which had been led by her in the past as daughter of the British Vice-Consul at Athens, for the life she had only known--but known how well!--in dreams, that of the wife of an Englishman possessed of a limitless purse and the key to every world. Now, to-night, looking back on it all, stirred out of his usual apathetic endurance by the knowledge of what Dick Wantele was feeling, Richard Maule smiled, a grim inward smile, when he remembered how, even during their brief honeymoon, spent at his ardent desire at Corinth, Athena had made it quite clear that what she longed for was Paris, London, or perhaps it would be more true to say the Champs Elysées and Mayfair! They had been standing--he looking far younger than his forty-five years, she in one of the white gowns in which he loved to see her, but the simplicity of which she even then deplored--close to the Pierian spring, when she had, by a few playful, but very eager, words shown him what was in her heart. * * * * * And yet, whatever he might now believe, during the first two years which had followed his marriage Richard Maule had been a happy man--happier, he had been then wont to assure himself, than in the days before he had married his enchanting, wayward, and often tantalisingly mysterious Athena. In those days none had ever seemed to regard Richard Maule as unreasonably older than Athena, for he had retained an amazing look, as also an amazing feeling, of youth. Then in a day, an hour, nay a moment, he had been struck down. Not even his cousin, the young man whom he now trusted and loved as men only trust and love an only son, had ever received any explanation of what had happened. To that stroke--that act of the malicious gods, as Richard Maule believed--neither he nor his wife ever made any allusion; indeed, when Dick Wantele had once spoken of the matter to Athena she had shrunk from the subject with shuddering annoyance. The facts were briefly these. Richard Maule, walking in the garden of a villa he had taken close to Naples, had suddenly been seized with some kind of physical attack. He had lain in the hot sun till by a fortunate chance there had come up to where he was lying his wife, Athena herself. She had been accompanied by a young man, an Italian protégé of the Maules, who had discovered well-born musical genius starving in a garret of the paternal palace he had had to let out in suites of apartments to pay debts contracted not only by himself but by his brothers. This youth had been treated with the kindliest, most delicate generosity by the man whom he was wont to describe as his English saviour. The two, Mrs. Maule and the young Italian count, had been in a summer-house not many yards from where Mr. Maule must have fallen, but so absorbed had they been in a score on which the count was working that they had heard and seen nothing of what was happening in the garden outside. One curious effect of the change in Mr. Maule's physical condition was the sudden dislike, almost horror, he betrayed for the genius to whom he had been so kind. So it had finally been arranged by Mrs. Maule, with, it was understood, the full assent of her husband, that the young man whose friendship with his benefactor had been so strangely and sadly interrupted, should continue his musical studies at the latter's expense, the only stipulation being that he should never come to England when the Maules happened to be there. Since that time, that is eight years ago, Richard Maule had practically recovered, not his health, but what he was inclined to style with a twisted smile, his wits. * * * * * Suddenly Dick Wantele's dark figure emerged into the moonlight from under the trees which in the daytime now formed a ruddy wall round the formal gardens of Rede Place. Mr. Maule moved back from his window. He did not wish Dick to think he had been waiting, watching for him. And then the sight of the dark figure in the moonlight had recalled to the owner of Rede Place other vigils kept by him during the last year. Sometimes, very often of late, Bayworth Kaye, unthinking of the honour of the woman he loved, had tried to lengthen the precious moments he was to spend with her by striking across that piece of moonlit sward which could be seen so clearly from Richard Maule's window. But the young soldier had always left the house by a more secret way--Athena had seen to that--a way that led almost straight from her boudoir on the ground floor of the house into the Arboretum and so into the wider stretches of the wooded park. CHAPTER VI "Friendship, I fancy, means one heart between two." Dick Wantele opened the door of the drawing-room. Lined with panels of cedar-wood and sparsely furnished with fine examples of early French Empire furniture, the great room looked, as did so many of the apartments of Rede Place, foreign rather than English, and it was only used by Mr. and Mrs. Maule on the rare occasions when they gave a dinner-party. The master and mistress of Rede Place were awaiting their guests. Richard Maule, his figure looking thinner, more attenuated than ever, leant heavily with his right hand on a stick, his left lay on the mantelpiece. Dick noticed that he looked more alive than usual; there were two spots of red on his cheeks. Mrs. Maule was moving restlessly about the room: she disliked exceedingly finding herself alone with her husband, and she seldom allowed so untoward an accident to befall her. Wantele looked at her curiously. His cousin's wife had the power of ever surprising him anew. To-night it was her dress which surprised him. It was deep purple in tint, of a diaphanous material, and rendered opalescent, shot with gleams of pale blue and pale yellow, by some cunning arrangement of silk underneath. Made, as even he could see, with but slight regard to the fashion of the moment, Wantele realised that this gown, beautiful, even magnificent as was its effect, would not appear a proper evening dress to the conventional eye of Mrs. Pache and of Mrs. Pache's daughter. A fold of the thin shimmering stuff veiled Athena's dimpled shoulders, and swept up almost to her throat, and her arms gleamed whitely through cunningly arranged twists of the same transparent stuff carried down to the wrist. Her dark, naturally curling hair, instead of being puffed out stiffly as was the ugly fashion of the moment, was braided closely to her head, and on her head was placed a wreath made of bunches of small deep purple grapes unrelieved by leaves. The only ornament worn by her was a large burnt topaz--that stone which fire turns a rose red tint--attached to a seed pearl chain. Wantele told himself with rueful amusement that Mrs. Pache would probably take the opportunity of wearing this evening her ancient diamond tiara and her most _décolleté_ gown. "I suppose you'll come back here after dinner?" he addressed Athena, and as he spoke he could not help telling himself that she was really enchantingly lovely. Mrs. Maule looked to-night as if she had stepped down from one of the friezes of the Parthenon, or perhaps had leapt from a slender vase garlanded with nymphs dancing to the strains of celestial music. The Frenchman who had designed her dress was evidently, as are so many modern Parisians, a lover and a student of Greek art. "Yes, I suppose we must. It would be cruel to inflict Mrs. Pache and Patty on Richard." But she did not look at her husband while she spoke. She often conveyed messages, and even asked questions of him, by the oblique medium of Dick Wantele. Richard Maule gave no sign of having heard her words. "I suppose you will like to have a talk with General Lingard?" The young man turned to the silent, frail-looking figure standing by the mantelpiece. He was himself unaware of how much his tone changed and softened when he addressed his cousin. "Yes, I'd like a few words with General Lingard. I wonder if Jane has told him that I'm her trustee. Perhaps he won't mind coming in alone to me for a few moments." * * * * * "Miss Digby." The girl advanced into the room a little timidly. She had put on her best evening gown in honour of the famous soldier who was Jane Oglander's betrothed. It was a pale blue satin dress, touched here and there with pink. Wantele told himself regretfully that Mabel Digby's gown looked stiff, commonplace, in fact positively ugly, by contrast with Athena's beautiful costume. He liked Mabel best in the plain coats and skirts, the simple flannel or linen shirts, she always wore in the daytime. The door was again flung open, and a small crowd of people came into the room. Mrs. Pache was wearing, as Wantele noticed with concern, her tiara, and a mauve velvet dress which had done duty at one of the last of Queen Victoria's Drawing-rooms. Hard on her mother followed Patty Pache, looking as her type of young English womanhood so often looks, younger than twenty-seven, which was her age; and then Mr. Pache and his son Tom, the latter a neat young man with a pleasant job in the Board of Trade, whom his mother fondly believed to be one of the governing forces of the Empire. Lagging behind the others was a tall lean man wearing old-fashioned, not very well-cut evening clothes. This must of course be General Lingard, the guest of the evening. Richard Maule steadied himself on his stick and took a step forward. There was a moment of confused talking and of hand-shaking. Dick Wantele and Mabel Digby drew a little to one side. Mrs. Pache's face broke into a nervous smile. She was wondering whether high dresses were about to become the fashion, or whether Mrs. Maule had a cold. "May I introduce you," she said, "I mean may I introduce to you my husband's cousin, General Lingard? I think you must have heard us speak of him----" Athena Maule held out her little hand; it lay for a moment grasped in the strong fingers of her guest. She smiled up into his face, and instantly Lingard knew her for the woman in the railway carriage, the woman he had--snubbed; the woman he had--defended. "I have often heard of General Lingard--not only from you"--she hesitated a moment--"but also from others, dear Mrs. Pache." Tom Pache gave a sudden laugh, as if his hostess had made an extraordinarily witty joke, and Athena nodded at him gaily. He and she were excellent friends, though Tom had never, strange to say, fallen in love with her. For a moment the five men stood together on the hearthrug. No formal introduction had taken place between Wantele and Lingard, but each man looked at the other with a keen, measuring look. "My cousin never dines with us," Dick said in a low voice, "but we shall join him after dinner. He is looking forward to a talk with you." Then he turned to young Pache. "I'm afraid, Tom, you'll have to take in your sister. There's no way out of it!" Tom Pache made a little face of mock resignation. "Isn't Miss Oglander here?" he whispered. "Why isn't Miss Oglander here?" Then he drew the other aside. "I say, Dick, isn't this a _go_?" Wantele nodded his head; a wry smile came over his thin lips. "Yes, it _is_ rather a go," he answered dryly. "We didn't even know Hew Lingard knew Miss Oglander!" "And we only knew quite lately that you were related to General Lingard." Tom Pache grinned. "Father was his guardian, and would go on guardianing him after he was grown up. He and my father had a row--years ago. But of course we made it up with him when he blossomed out into a famous character. Mother wrote and asked him to stay with us last time he was in England. He wouldn't come then. But the other day he wrote her quite a decent letter telling her of his engagement. They don't want it announced--I can't think why----" "I suppose they both hate fuss," said Wantele briefly. "We tried to get Jane here before to-night--but she's nursing a sick friend, and she can't come for another week. By the way, I've forgotten to ask how you like your motor?" "Ripping!" said young Pache briefly. "Unluckily Patty insists on driving it, and father weakly lets her do it." Dinner was announced, and the four curiously assorted couples went into the dining-room. While avoiding looking at him across the round table, Wantele was intently conscious of the presence of the man who was to become Jane Oglander's husband. Hew Lingard was absolutely unlike what he had expected him to be. Wantele had never cared for soldiers, while admitting unwillingly that there must be in the great leaders qualities very different from those which adorned his few military acquaintances. He had thought to see a trim, well-groomed--hateful but expressive phrase!--good-looking man. He saw before him a loosely-built, powerful figure and a dark, clean-shaven face, of which the dominant features were the strong jaw and secretive-looking mouth, which seemed rather to recall the wild soldier of fortune of another epoch than the shrewd strategist and coldly able organiser Lingard had shown himself to be. Newspaper readers had been told how extraordinary was Lingard's personal influence over his men. An influence exerted not only over his own soldiers, but over the friendly native tribesmen. Wantele, who read widely and who remembered what he read, recalled a phrase which had caught his fancy, a phrase invented to meet a very different case: "They grow, like hounds, fond of the man who shows them sport, and by whose hallo they are wont to be encouraged." Lingard looked a man who could show sport.... Almost against his will, he could not help liking the look of Jane Oglander's lover. There was humour as well as keen intelligence in Hew Lingard's ugly face. When he smiled, his large mouth had generous curves which belied the strong, stern jaw. Wantele divined that he was half amused, half ashamed, at the honours which were now being heaped upon him, and certainly he was doing his best to make all those about him forget that he was in any sense unlike themselves. Wantele also became aware, with a satisfaction he would have found it hard to analyse, that General Lingard was paying no special attention to his hostess; or rather, while paying Mrs. Maule all the attention that was her due, there was quite wanting in his manner any touch of the ardent interest, the involuntary emotion, which most men showed when brought in contact for the first time with Athena. And yet how beautiful she looked to-night! How full of that subdued, eloquent radiance which is the dangerous attribute of a certain type of rare feminine loveliness! Mrs. Maule was making herself charming--charming, not only to the famous soldier who was her guest, but also to the dull old man who sat on her other side, and to his tiresome, pompous wife. She was also showing surprising knowledge of those local interests which she was supposed to despise. Wantele's mind travelled back to the last time a dinner-party had been given at Rede Place. Jane Oglander had been there, and on that occasion Athena had been in one of her ill moods, proclaiming with rather haughty irony her contempt for the dull neighbourhood in which she had perforce to live during certain portions of each year. Wantele remembered how he had watched her with a certain lazy annoyance, too content to feel really angry, for Jane Oglander had been divinely kind to him that day, and he had thought--poor fool that he had been!--that at last he was adventuring further than she had yet allowed him to do into her reserved, sensitive nature. How little we poor humans know of what the future holds for us! Till a few days ago Dick had always thought of himself as a young man. To-night he felt that youth lay behind him--so far behind as to be almost forgotten--as the three young people talked and laughed across him to one another. Athena was now talking to Mr. Pache, inclining her graceful head towards him with an air of amiable, placid interest; and, as Wantele noted with satirical amusement, Mr. Pache had the foolish, happy look that even the most sensible of elderly men assume when talking to a very pretty woman. Mrs. Pache did not look either happy or at ease. Even to a nimble mind it is difficult entirely to readjust one's views of a human being. Till a short time ago, in fact till his name began to be frequently mentioned in the _Morning Post_, the worthy lady had considered Hew Lingard the black sheep of her husband's highly respectable family. There had once been a great trouble about him. That was a good many years ago--perhaps as much as seventeen years ago, just at the time that dear Tom had had the measles. She had tried to pump her husband about it last night, but he had refused to say anything, which was very tiresome, and she couldn't remember much about it. Hew Lingard had got into a scrape with a woman; that static, dreadful fact of course Mrs. Pache remembered. Such things are never forgotten by the Mrs. Paches of this world. It was worse than a scrape, for Hew had nearly _married_ a most unsuitable person--in fact he would have married her if the person hadn't at the last moment made up her mind that he wasn't good enough. That was pretty well all Mrs. Pache could remember about it. She hadn't forgotten that rather vulgar phrase "not good enough," because her husband had come back from London to Norfolk, where they were then living, and had walked into the room with the words: "Well, it's all over and done with! She's gone and married another young fool whom she has had up her sleeve the whole time! She didn't think Hew Lingard good enough!" Hew had taken the business very hard, instead of rejoicing as he ought to have done at his lucky escape. And they, the Paches, had seen nothing of him for many years. Three years ago, however, dear Tom had made her write to Hew Lingard, and though Hew had refused her kind invitation, he had written quite a nice letter. This time both she and her husband had written to him, reminding him--strangely enough, they had both used the same phrase in their letters--that "blood is thicker than water," and urging their now creditable relative to pay them a _long_ visit. In accepting the invitation, Hew Lingard had announced his engagement to Jane Oglander--the Miss Oglander whom they all knew so well, the Jane Oglander who was often, for weeks at a time, one of their nearest neighbours, and who, everybody had thought, would end by marrying Dick Wantele! Still, to-night Mrs. Pache told herself that Hew Lingard's engagement to Miss Oglander was odd--odd was the word which Mrs. Pache had used in this connection, not once but many times, when discussing the matter with her sleepy husband on the night Hew Lingard's letter had come, and when eagerly talking it over with her daughter the next morning. It was so _odd_ that Jane Oglander had never spoken of General Lingard. Surely she must have known that they, the Paches, were closely related to him? It was to be hoped that now Hew Lingard had become a great man, he was not going to be ashamed of the relations who had always been so kind to him, and who in the past, when he was an unsatisfactory, eccentric young man, had always advised him for his good. What a pity it was that Hew had been in such a hurry! From what they could make out he must have gone and proposed to Miss Oglander the very day of his arrival in London. And then there was that disgraceful story about Miss Oglander's brother. It was indeed a pity Hew Lingard hadn't waited a bit! He might marry anybody now--a girl, for instance, whose people were connected with the Government, someone who could help on dear Tom, and get him promotion. Jane Oglander was very nice, thoroughly nice, but she would never be of any use to the Pache family. Such were the troubled and disconnected thoughts which hurried through Mrs. Pache's mind while she listened with apparent attention to her odd, but now celebrated kinsman. General Lingard was trying to make himself pleasant to his cousin Annie by telling her of a missionary expedition to Tibet. Mrs. Pache had always been interested in missionaries; she was a subscriber to the S.P.C.K. The Society's publications satisfied that passion for romance which sometimes survives in the most commonplace human being, especially if that human being be a woman. Just now General Lingard was speaking with kindling enthusiasm of a certain medical missionary's fine work in West Africa. But Mrs. Pache's face clouded distrustfully. She had suddenly remembered a scene in her school-room, her children, Tom and his sister, together with two little friends, sitting round Hew Lingard listening with breathless interest to the adventures of another missionary. This divine had sent home as relics the clothes he had worn when he had succeeded in converting a whole village in Africa, and Mrs. Pache vividly recalled the foolish verses which Lingard had declaimed to her young people with solemn face and twinkling eyes--verses which cruelly misinterpreted the missionary's intention. Against her will the jingling lines ran in her head-- "He preached--and did not bore them; Their chief, a hoary man, Replied, 'We are converted, But, to turn to other topics, Betrousered and beshirted, You're _outré_ in the Tropics.' The preacher is convinced in turn And dresses--like his flock...." She remembered with irritation how the children had insisted on making a copy of these absurd, most unbecoming, rhymes, and how they had continually sung them to the beautiful old tune of "She Wore a Wreath of Roses." Mrs. Pache allowed her eyes to wander round the table. How wizened and old Dick Wantele was beginning to look! If poor Mr. Maule lasted much longer, Wantele would be quite middle-aged before he came into this fine property. At one time--oh, long ago now, ten years ago, when they first moved into the neighbourhood, when Patty was only sixteen--Mrs. Pache had had a vague hope that Dick Wantele and her Patty might take a liking to one another. Oddly enough, quite the opposite had happened! Though thrown into the conventional intimacy induced by propinquity, Patty had disliked Dick from the first; she thought him priggish and affected, and he was never more than coldly civil; how odd now to think that till the other day, they had all vaguely supposed that he would end by marrying Miss Oglander.... Mrs. Pache looked fondly at her daughter. Patty didn't look as well as usual to-night--her gown showed too much red arm. No doubt high evening dresses were "coming in," for Mrs. Maule was generally in advance of the fashion. Patty was leaning forward trying to join in the conversation of Mrs. Maule and of her father. Mrs. Pache wished pettishly that Hew Lingard would stop talking. She wanted to hear what Patty was saying, and her wish became at last painted very legibly on her face. * * * * * "The Barkings? Oh, Mrs. Maule, they're such nice people! I do hope you will call on them"--Patty's voice was raised in unusual animation. And then her father's gruff voice broke in: "They were out when my wife called on them; but Lady Barking wrote a note asking Patty over to dinner. They have four men staying in the house just now, and only their married daughter to entertain them." "Wasn't it lucky? And I enjoyed myself so much!" Everyone looked at the fortunate Patty. Even Wantele felt a thrill of lazy interest. Newcomers in a country neighbourhood count for much, and rightly so, to the old inhabitants. "You remember what Halnaver House used to look like in the days of poor dear old Lady Morell? Well, now it's quite different! You remember the staircase, the famous old carved oak staircase?" Patty looked round the table eagerly, and Wantele nodded assent. "Well, they've taken the staircase away! They're building a most delightful house in town, right in the middle of London, and yet it's to be exactly like a country house! So they're going to put that oak staircase there, and they've installed a lift at Halnaver instead! You press a button and the lift takes you up to any floor--even right to the very top of the house, where the garrets have been turned into the most delightful bachelors' rooms----" "Oh Patty, you didn't tell me that," cried her mother. "What an extraordinary thing! Then where are the servants' quarters to be?" "I did tell you, mother--I know I did! Where the old stables used to be, of course! They've built a wing out there. It really has become a wonderful house," said Patty happily. It was not often that she was listened to with such respectful attention. "By simply pressing a button as you lie in bed you can lock and unlock the door of your room!" "The house must be all buttons"--observed Wantele thoughtfully. But Patty went on: "One of the men staying there, a Major Biddell, said he had never stayed in such a comfortable house! In fact he said--and he seems to know everybody and go everywhere--that it was as comfortable as the Paris Ritz Hotel. Indeed, he went further, and declared that not even the Ritz Hotel has a quarter of the clever contrivances that Lady Barking has managed to put into that poor old place!" "There can be no doubt at all," said Mrs. Pache, "that the Barkings will prove a most delightful addition to the neighbourhood." She looked insistently at Athena Maule. "I do hope you are going to call on them," she said. Athena looked down. Mrs. Pache noticed with some irritation that her hostess had extraordinarily long and silken eyelashes. She almost wondered if they could be real. "I think not," Mrs. Maule at last answered, very quietly. Lingard was struck by the purity of her enunciation. To Mrs. Maule her father's tongue was an acquired language. As a child she had only spoken modern Greek and French. "I have seen the Barkings. Dick and I passed them once when we were driving. And then last week I found myself, for a few minutes, in a railway carriage with Lady Barking and her daughter----" For a swift moment Athena, raising her eyes, looked straight at General Lingard; then her violet, dark fringed eyes dropped, and she added, "I dare say they are excellent people." "They're much--much more than that!" cried Patty, offended. "But surely a little noisy? I did not feel them to be of our sort--I mean Richard's and mine," said Athena. "We are very quiet folk. No," she threw her head back with the proud, graceful little gesture most of those present were familiar with--"I do not think it likely that we shall know the Barkings." "Oh, but, Mrs. Maule, do stretch a point"--Patty's voice was full of earnest entreaty. "They are so anxious to know you! They have heard so much about Rede Place!" She turned appealingly to Wantele, but he looked, as those about him so often saw him look, irritatingly indifferent, almost bored. Again Mrs. Maule smilingly shook her head. "If they entertain as much as they are going to do, I'm sure that friends of yours will often be staying with them," Patty said defiantly. "I do not think that very likely." Mrs. Maule spoke with a touch of scorn in her voice, and Patty Pache felt a wave of anger sweep through her. She had _promised_ her new friends that Mrs. Maule should call at Halnaver House. "Then you'll be rather surprised to hear that even now there is a man there, that Major Biddell--such an amusing, delightful man--who _does_ know you! Lady Barking wanted to send him over to call. He seemed rather shy about it, but I told him that you and Dick were always pleased to see people, even when Mr. Maule did not feel up to the exertion." "I hope, Miss Patty, that you do not often take my name in vain"--there was a touch of severity in Dick Wantele's voice. She blushed uncomfortably. "Oh, but it's true!" she cried. "You and Mrs. Maule often see people when Mr. Maule isn't well!" As the ladies walked out of the room, Athena lingered a moment at the door. "Please bring them all back to the drawing-room," she whispered hurriedly to Wantele. "I wish to take General Lingard in to Richard myself. Jane asked me to do so in her last letter." Wantele looked at her musingly. He felt certain Jane had done nothing of the kind. Athena was fond of telling little useful lies. It was a matter of no importance. * * * * * Twenty minutes later Athena Maule and Hew Lingard passed slowly across the square atrium, which formed the centre of Rede Place. Save for the white marble presences about them they were alone, alone for the first time since that brief moment of dual solitude in the railway carriage when Lingard had looked at her in cold, mute apology for the scene he had provoked, and which she had perforce witnessed. The door of the room they were approaching opened, and a man-servant came out with a covered dish in his hand. "My husband is not quite ready for us," Athena spoke a little breathlessly. She felt excited, wrought up to a high pitch of emotion. For once Chance, the fickle goddess, was on her side. "Shall we wait here a few moments?" She led him aside into a deep recess. Then, when the servant's footsteps had died away, she turned her face up to him and Lingard saw that her beautiful mouth was quivering with feeling, her eyes suffused with tears. So might Andromeda have stood before Perseus when at last unloosened from the cruel rock, the living, eloquent embodiment of passionate and innocent shame. "I want to thank you----" she whispered. "And--and--let me tell you this. Simply to know that there is in this base, hateful world a man who could do what you did for a woman unknown to him, has altered my life, given me courage to go on!" Mrs. Maule spoke the truth as far as the truth was in her to speak. The incident in the railway carriage had powerfully moved and excited her; she had thought of little else even after Jane Oglander's letter announcing her engagement had come to divert the current of her life. Nay, the news conveyed in Jane's letter had brought with it the explanation of what had happened. Athena had leapt instinctively on the truth. Her unknown friend--her noble defender--could have been no other than General Lingard himself, on his way to stay with the Paches. It was Athena Maule, in her character of Jane Oglander's dearest friend, who had made the quixotic stranger's sword spring from its scabbard. The knowledge had stung; but she was now engaged in drawing the venom out of the sting. It was surely her right to make this remarkable, this famous man value and respect her for herself--not simply for Jane's sake. "I wish I could have killed the cur!" Lingard's voice was low, but his face had become fierce, tense--the face of a fighter in the thick of battle. Mrs. Maule was filled with a feeling of exquisite satisfaction. Once more she found life worth living.... But General Lingard must not be allowed to forget Jane Oglander, Athena's friend--Athena's almost sister--the one woman who loved and admired her whole-heartedly, unquestioningly. "Because of what you did the other day, and--and because of Jane"--her voice shook with excitement--"we must be friends, General Lingard." She held out her hand, and Lingard, taking the slender fingers in his, wrung Athena's hand, and then with a sudden, rather awkward movement he raised it to his lips. "And now we must go on," she said quietly. "Richard is waiting for us." All emotion has a common denominator. The last time Lingard had been as moved as he was now was when he had parted from Jane Oglander in the little sitting-room in that shabby house on the south side of the Thames. There was in Jane a certain austerity, a delicate reserve of manner, which had made him feel that she was a creature to be worshipped from afar, rather than a woman responsive to the man she loves. Each happy day of the week they had spent together practically alone in London, Lingard had had to woo her afresh. But that, to a man of the great soldier's temperament, had been no matter for complaining. Her scruples and delicacies had been met by him with infinite indulgence and tenderness. Then on the last day, they had had their first lovers' quarrel. He had entreated her to come away with him, to accept, that is, the Maules' eager invitation. Was he not going to the Paches' simply because they lived near Rede Place? But Jane had promised to stay a week with a friend who was ill--and she would not break her word. Lingard had become suddenly angry, and in his anger had turned cold. For the first time in his knowledge of her, tears had sprung to Jane's eyes. Where is the man who does not early make the woman who loves him weep? But these tears, or so it had seemed to him, had unlocked a deep spring of poignant feeling in her heart, or perchance had made it possible for her to allow her lover to know that it was there. He had moved away from her side, and then, in a moment, had come from her a smothered cry, a calling of her whole being for and to him. She had thrown out her hands with the instinctive gesture of a child who wishes to turn one who has been unkind, kind. And when she was in his arms, there had come to her that sense of spiritual and physical response which had brought to him the moment of exultant triumph he had thought would never be his. How strange that after that she should still have held out, still have kept her word to the sick woman who needed her! It was of Jane Oglander--of Jane as she had been, all tenderness and fire, on that day when they had parted, that Lingard thought as he followed the woman whom he now called friend into the room where Richard Maule sat waiting for him. * * * * * The Paches' horseless carriage was proceeding through the park at a pace which two of the five sitting in it felt to be, if delightful, then rather dangerous. "Athena grows more beautiful every time I see her," said Tom Pache suddenly. He and Hew Lingard were sitting side by side opposite Mr. and Mrs. Pache. Patty was wedged in between her parents. "I thought her gown very odd and unsuitable," said his mother sharply. "It isn't as if she had a cold. I suppose she keeps her smart evening gowns for her smart visits." "Yes, I thought it a pity she should hide anything so good as her shoulders," answered her son thoughtfully. The man by his side made a restless movement, and increased the distance between himself and his young cousin. "I told you the Barkings had heard all about Athena Maule and Bayworth Kaye, mother," said Patty eagerly. "They probably know a great deal more than there is to know," said her father gruffly. "People talk of London as the home of scandal. I say I never heard as much scandal in my life as since we came to live in this neighbourhood." "But, father, you must admit Bayworth Kaye was quite cracked about Athena? I don't think anyone could deny that who ever saw them together. Why it made one feel quite uncomfortable!" Lingard felt as if he must get out, away from these horrible people. When he had last seen the Paches, Patty had been a pretty little girl, pert perhaps, but not too much so in the eyes of the young, indulgent soldier. He now judged her with scant mercy. "I don't think Athena could very well help what happened," said Tom Pache judicially. He and his father generally took the same side. "Bayworth Kaye had the run of Rede Place since he was born. And so--well, I don't suppose it took very long for the mischief to be done--so far as he was concerned, I mean." "Oh, but, Tom, it was much more than that! Athena could have helped it--of course she could!" Patty's voice rose. "Why, she got him asked to a lot of houses where she was staying herself, and they say in the village that she gave him her key of the Garden Room. He used to stay there fearfully late--long after Mr. Maule and Dick Wantele had gone to bed!" "It was very hard on Mabel Digby," said Mrs. Pache irrelevantly. She had a tepid liking for her young neighbour. "I don't think Mabel really cared for him, mother." There was a streak of thin loyalty in Patty Pache's nature. "You know she was almost a child when Bayworth Kaye first went to India." "She was seventeen," said Mrs. Pache, "very nearly eighteen. And I know they wrote to one another by every mail--his mother told me so." "It's rather hard on the women of the neighbourhood, when one comes to think of it," said Tom Pache, smiling in the darkness. "Athena's a formidable rival." His mother and his sister felt that he spoke more truly than he knew. "There's only one person," cried Patty suddenly, "who's never been in love with Athena! And it's so odd, because he's always with her--I mean Dick Wantele." "My dear child, how you let your tongue run on," said her mother reprovingly. "You seem to forget that Athena is a married woman!" In another, a more natural, tone she added: "And then Dick Wantele, as you know perfectly well, has always been attached to----" Her husband gave her a violent shove and she did not finish her sentence. They had all forgotten the large, silent, alien presence of Hew Lingard. CHAPTER VII "Who ever rigged fair ships to lie in harbours?" Dick Wantele was driving back to Rede Place from Selford Junction. He had been away for four days, and now he was very glad to be home again. He very seldom left Rede Place unless Jane Oglander was there,--in fact, this was the first time he had gone away leaving Richard Maule and Athena alone together since they had returned, eight years before, from what had proved so disastrous a winter in Italy. Wantele had grown accustomed to his servitude, but there came moments when the strain of the life he was leading became intolerable, and then, suddenly, he would go away for a few days, sometimes to an old friend, sometimes alone. This time both Richard and Athena had pressed him to keep an engagement he had made some weeks before. He had known Richard's motive--Jane was to arrive during his absence, and Richard had wished him to be spared certain difficult moments--those of bidding Jane welcome, of wishing Jane joy. As to Athena's motive in wishing him away, he had been less clear. None the less had he been sure that she had a motive. And so he had gone, this time to an old college friend, and he had enjoyed the desultory talking, the indifferent shooting, and the lazy reading, he had managed to cram into his short holiday. He had now come back, as he always did, after a thorough change of scene and of atmosphere, feeling, if not a new man, then patched in places, and once more facing life in his usual philosophical, slightly satirical, spirit. Now their old coachman was telling him all sorts of bits of news that amused him; for a great deal can happen, in fact a great deal always does happen, during four days, in a country neighbourhood. The most exciting bit of news was that of an accident to the Paches' new motor. The coachman told the tale with natural relish. "The hind wheel just sank down in that deep rut by that there Windy Common corner--you know, sir. The machine went over as gentle as a babby! But they had a rare job getting the queer thing righted again, so I'm told, sir." "I hope no one was hurt, Jupp?" "Miss Patty--she as caused all the mischief--escaped scot free. But Squire Pache, so they say, was shook something dreadful! And as for Mrs. Pache, why, her arm was quite twisted. There's some people as says she'll never get it right again." "Oh, but that's a dreadful thing!" exclaimed Wantele, rousing himself. He felt suddenly ashamed of his long and deep-seated dislike of Mrs. Pache and of poor Patty. He and Jane Oglander might drive over there this afternoon to enquire how they all were. Then the young man's fair, lined face became overcast. He reminded himself bitterly that Jane's time and thoughts now belonged to someone else. Lingard would naturally spend every moment he could escape from the afflicted Paches at Rede Place; and when he, her lover, was not there, Jane would be closeted with Athena, or occupied in amusing Richard. "They do say, sir, that Mrs. Pache is so bad that she says she'll never ride in that dratted motor-car again." "That's bad, Jupp, very bad! I'll go over and enquire to-morrow morning----By the way, when did the accident happen?" "The very day after you left, sir." They were now within the boundaries of Rede Place. The rather fantastic foreign-looking house lay before them, its whiteness softened by the ruddy autumn tints of the trees. Wantele, for the first time in his life, felt a sudden dislike of the place and of its artificial beauty sweep over him. His existence there had only been rendered tolerable, kept warmly human, by the coming and going of Jane Oglander. No doubt she would now be in the hall, waiting for him alone--she always did instinctively the kind, the tactful thing. But for the moment he had no wish to see her. There ran a tremor through him, and the young horse he was driving swerved violently. He flicked the horse sharply on the under side. How--how stupid, how absurd of him to feel like this! While he had been away he had tried to forget Jane, but whenever he was alone, and during the long wakeful hours of each night, his thoughts had enwrapped her more closely than ever. It seemed so strange that she would no longer be free to console him, to chide him, to laugh at and with him. From to-day everything in their relationship would be changed. Even now, Jane was probably with her lover. Wantele averted his thoughts quickly from the vision his morbid imagination forced upon him. Lingard looked the man to be a masterful, a happy wooer. In two or three days the famous soldier would be an inmate of Rede Place--his visit had been arranged just before Wantele had gone away. Richard Maule had himself suggested it. In fact, as Athena had observed on the day following their first acquaintance with Lingard, it seemed absurd that such a man should be staying with the Paches.... They were now close to the house, and the thought of an immediate meeting with Jane became suddenly intolerable to Wantele. "I'll get out here," he said hurriedly, throwing the reins to Jupp. "You can take my bag round while I walk up through the arboretum and let myself in by the Garden Room." In '51, when crystal houses, as they were called for a brief span, became a fashion, Theophilus Joy had built a large conservatory on to one end of his country house. Ugly though it was, the Garden Room, as it soon became called, had greatly added to the amenities of Rede Place. Fragrant and cool in summer, warm and scented in winter, it was considered a delightful novelty by the old banker's guests. Those had been the days when the boy Richard, moving among the amusing and amused worldlings who formed his grandfather's large circle of acquaintances, had not known that there were such things as disease, tragedy, and passion in the world. Let us eat and be merry--so much of his grandfather's philosophy young Richard had imbibed, and no more. The Garden Room was still a delightful place, with its marble fountain brought forty years before from Naples, its flowering creepers, and the rare plants which still made it the pride of the head-gardener of Rede Place. Yet it was but little used. Now and again on a rainy day Richard Maule would drag his feeble limbs along the warm moist stone pavement for the little gentle exercise recommended by his old friend and neighbour, Dr. Mannet. But he never did this when his wife was at Rede Place, for Athena's boudoir, the sitting-room which she had herself chosen and arranged to her fancy soon after her first coming to England, was the end room on the ground floor of the house, and so next to the Garden Room. Some years before, when a neighbouring country house had been burgled, new locks had been fitted to the various doors giving access to the gardens and the park, and now the door of the Garden Room was always kept locked. There were three keys--Wantele and Athena each had one, and the head-gardener kept the third. As Wantele passed through into the house, he heard the murmur of voices in the boudoir; Athena's clear voice dominated by a man's deep, vibrating tones. Yes, instinct born of jealous pain had served him truly--Lingard was now at Rede Place. They were there--Jane and Lingard--behind that door.... He hurried the quicker to escape from the sound of voices. The broad corridor which had been a concession to English taste was very airless, for in deference to Richard Maule's state of health the house was always over-heated. Athena, too, had a dread, a hatred of cold; in all essentials she was a southerner. Dick Wantele loved wild weather and chill winter. He hated the languor and heat in which he was condemned to spend so much of each day. At last, when in the hall, Wantele stayed his steps. During his brief absences from home letters were not sent on to him, for he was always glad to escape for a few days from his usual correspondence, letters connected with his cousin's affairs and with the estate, important to the senders if not to the recipient. But there was always a moment of reckoning when he came back, and now he knew that there must be many little matters waiting to be dealt with. He might as well find out what there was before going on to see Richard in the Greek Room. Then, while walking across to the marble table where his letters were always placed, the young man was astonished to see on the floor a large half-filled postman's sack. The label on it bore General Lingard's name; the Paches' address had been crossed out, and that of Rede Place substituted. Really, it was rather cool of Lingard to have his correspondence sent on in this fashion! It was also a proof that he must be spending the major part of each day at Rede Place. Heavens! what a correspondence the man must have. That was a privilege of fame he could well spare his successful rival. He turned to his own letters. There were many more than usual. And then, as he tore the envelopes rapidly open, it seemed to him that most of his acquaintances within a certain radius had written to him during the four days he had been away! Each letter he opened--and this both diverted and angered Wantele--ran on the same theme and contained the same request. "Dear Mr. Wantele--I am writing to you because Mrs. Maule may be away. We hear that General Lingard is staying with you for a few days. It would give us such pleasure if you would bring him over, either to lunch or dinner, whichever suits you best. It will be an honour as well as a pleasure to make General Lingard's acquaintance. If you will send me a line by return, we could manage to make any day convenient that would suit you and General Lingard." Old friends, new friends, people whom he had never met and whom he had no intention of meeting--were each and all in full cry. The last letter he opened was in Tom Pache's handwriting. The young man had written at his mother's dictation, and the note contained a long list of the people whom she had promised to invite, or had actually invited, to meet her famous relative. There was a postscript from Tom himself. "It is most awfully good of Mr. and Mrs. Maule to have asked Hew Lingard over a few days before they expected him. As you see, mother's plans are all upset, and she is dreadfully worried about it all." Then Lingard was already here? Wantele wondered how he was to answer those absurd letters--how to put off these people. He made a point of being on good, if not on very cordial, terms with his neighbours. He and Richard both acknowledged a certain duty to the neighbourhood. In spite of Mr. Maule's physical condition, Rede Place did its fair share of quiet, very quiet, entertaining, generally when Mrs. Maule happened to be away and when Jane Oglander happened to be there. Athena had long ago decided that her neighbours were the dullest set of people to be found in an English countryside, and that the receiving of them at lunch or dinner bored her to tears. Well! There was nothing for it now but to go and consult Athena as to what should be done. After all, she was the mistress of Rede Place, and Richard was in no state to be asked tiresome questions or required to make tiresome decisions. Holding the letters which had so perturbed him in his hand, Wantele slowly retraced his steps. He might as well meet Jane now as at any other time or in any other way. Wantele knocked at the door of the boudoir. Since her arrival at Rede Place, eight years ago, he had remained on very formal terms with his cousin's wife. There fell a sudden silence on the occupants of the room, and then, after a perceptible pause, Athena called out in her clear, exquisitely modulated voice, "Come in. Who is it?" Dick Wantele slowly turned the handle of the door, and in a flash he saw that Jane Oglander was not there. There were but two people in the room. One was Mrs. Maule; she was sitting on a low seat close to the fire, her lovely head bent over an embroidery frame; the other, General Lingard, was standing, looking down at her with an eager, absorbed expression on his face. Athena was wearing a white gown, fashioned rather like a monk's habit. It left the slender, rounded column of her neck bare. The intruder, feeling at once relieved and disappointed, stared doubtfully at the famous soldier. General Lingard looked a younger man than he had done the other night--younger and somehow different, far, far more vividly alive. Perhaps it was his clothes; rough morning clothes are more becoming to the type of man Wantele now took Lingard to be than is evening dress. Both he and Mrs. Maule looked most happily and intimately at ease. Wantele felt a pang of angry irritation. How like Athena to take General Lingard away from Jane! And to keep him with her while her friend was doubtless engaged in doing what should have been her own job--that is, in looking after Richard. But many years had gone by since Athena had even made a pretence of looking after Richard. Had Wantele been just, which he was at this moment incapable of being, he would have admitted to himself that Richard would have given Athena small thanks for her company. "Dick! Is that you? Why, I thought you weren't coming back till the afternoon! Have you seen Richard?" Athena had a subtle way with her of making a man feel an intruder. But Wantele held his ground. "I always meant to come back in the morning," he said shortly. "No, I haven't seen Richard." "I'm glad you've come, for Richard's worried about some tiresome letters he's had this morning." "Is Jane with Richard?" he asked abruptly. It was odd of General Lingard not to have come forward and shaken hands. The soldier had just nodded--that was all. He also seemed to feel the young man's presence an intrusion. "Jane hasn't come. Didn't you know? I thought she would have written to you. She is staying a week longer with that tiresome friend of hers. There's to be an operation now, it seems, and the woman's implored Jane to stay with her till it's over. Oh, but ever so many things have happened----" Athena put aside her work and got up. "The poor Paches have had a motor accident, and so we--I mean Richard and I--asked General Lingard to come here at once instead of waiting till the end of the week. I'm afraid he's had rather a dull time, though the Paches have very kindly allowed us to use their motor car--the car wasn't hurt in any way--" she turned to her guest and smiled. "But now that you're back, Dick, it will be all right." She sat down again, and again bent over the embroidery frame. Each of the men looking down at her felt himself dismissed. Together they left the room, and Dick Wantele could have laughed aloud to see General Lingard's air of discomfiture. He thought he could reconstitute the events of the last three days. No doubt Richard had insisted on Jane's lover being asked over to stay, and Athena, as was her way, had resented the trouble of entertaining Richard's guest. Mrs. Maule had no liking for a man on half terms. With her it must be all or nothing--too often it was all that she received; seldom, as in this case--nothing. Wantele felt a malicious pleasure in the knowledge that for once Athena's spells would be powerless, that in this unique instance there was stretched before her a gateless barrier. Hew Lingard was the lover of her friend, and Athena, so Wantele acknowledged, loved Jane Oglander with whatever truth was in her. Such were his disconnected thoughts as he walked silently by the other's side. Yes, Lingard seemed strangely unlike the man who had dined there a week ago. Dick Wantele possessed an almost feminine power of observation, of intuition. He would have been a happier man had he lacked it. "I must go and find my cousin," he said at last. "I haven't seen him yet. But he won't keep me long." "Please don't trouble about me. I've a lot of letters to write. Mrs. Maule has been good enough to give me a sitting-room." Lingard spoke with a touch of rather curt impatience. He had no wish to be entertained by this odd, idle young man. Mr. Maule's heir did not attract him; Dick Wantele took too much upon himself. Lingard was already on excellent terms with his host--his poor, feeble, afflicted host. As for Mrs. Maule--he thought of her as Athena, had she not already asked him to call her Athena?--she was, if only as Jane Oglander's intimate friend, already set apart on a pedestal. And then Athena had said a word--only a word--of the painful position she occupied in her husband's house, that of an occasional and not very welcome guest. It had made Lingard seethe with unspoken, but the more deeply felt, indignation. There is something moving, to a generous masculine mind something very pathetic, in the sight of a beautiful woman hardly used by fate. Lingard already suspected that in this case Dick Wantele played the ugly part of fate. True, Jane seemed very fond of the young man, and he had been good to her in the terrible affair of her brother; but the taste of women in the matter of men is not always to be trusted. General Lingard, in spite of the qualities which made him a successful leader of fighting men, had not troubled himself, indeed he had not had the time, to probe or question certain accepted axioms. As the two came into the hall, Lingard stepped aside and took up the heavy mail bag. "Please don't do that! It must be awfully heavy!" The host in Dick Wantele was roused. "It ought to have been put in your sitting-room long ago." Lingard gave a short, not very pleasant, laugh. He was very strong and Wantele looked delicate, languid--not the sort of man Lingard liked or was accustomed to meet. It was a pity Wantele had come back so soon. The three days alone with Richard Maule--and with Athena--had been very pleasant.... Dick went on, with his quick, light steps, into the Greek Room. He had again shouldered his burden, and it was pressing on him even more hardly than usual. If only Jane had been there! He now longed for her presence as a man longs for a lamp in dark subterranean places from which he knows no issue. With a shock of surprise he realised that the letters he had meant to show Athena were still in his hand, and that he had said nothing to her of their contents. He found Richard Maule sitting, as he always did sit in any but the hottest summer weather, crouched up in front of the fire; but when Dick came in Mr. Maule smiled as a man smiles at his own son, and the other saw that his cousin looked more vigorous, more alive, than usual. There was even a little colour in his white drawn cheeks. It was a long time since they had had any visitor, any man that is, staying at Rede Place; and Wantele now asked himself whether they were wise in leading so quiet a life. Richard was evidently enjoying General Lingard's visit. "He's a good fellow, Dick. He grows on one with acquaintance. I don't know but that Jane----" He stopped abruptly. The thought in his mind to which he had all but given utterance was that Jane Oglander, after all, had done well for herself. "He's not a bit spoilt. And yet there must be a lot of people running after him! Just look at these letters! We shall have to do something about them. Eh? Some of these people will have to be asked here to meet him, I suppose?" And Wantele, again with mingled annoyance and amusement, saw another pile of notes--far smaller, it was true, than his own--lying on the reading-desk which was always close to his cousin's hand. "The duke has written to me. They want to have him over there for a couple of nights--if we can spare him." Mr. Maule smiled, not unkindly. "It's evident we can't hope to keep the hero all to ourselves. It's lucky Jane Oglander isn't here! I thought it such a pity yesterday, but now I'm glad. We may be able to ask a few people over before she arrives--when she's here, Lingard won't want a crowd about. We might begin with the Sumners--you see they ask themselves, it's very good of them, for to-morrow!" he laughed outright, a thin, satirical and yet again not an unkindly laugh. Dick had never seen his cousin so animated, so interested, in a word, so amused, for years. He was rather surprised. "It'll be an awful bore," he said slowly, "and Richard--are you sure that you wish it? I think I could manage to put off most of these people--I mean without giving offence." "No, no, Dick! I know it'll give you a certain amount of trouble"--the older man looked attentively at the younger--"but I've felt lately that we didn't see enough people. I don't see why my state and Athena's selfishness"--he uttered the word very deliberately--"should force you to live such an unnatural life as you've now been leading for so long----" He waited a moment and then said, more lightly, "I'm afraid that we both, you and I, have grown to believe that Jane Oglander's the only young woman in the world." Wantele gave him a swift look. "She's the only woman in the world for me," he muttered. "Lingard may be a good fellow, Richard, but I wish--I would give a good deal to know what Jane sees in him." He also was trying to speak lightly. "Ah, one always feels that!" Richard Maule lay back in his chair. The short discussion had tired him. "Then will you see about it all, Dick?" "Yes," cried Wantele hastily, "of course I will! I agree that we've been too much shut up." He went back to Athena, and this time she welcomed him graciously. She also had received letters asking for a peep of their hero. Wantele looked at his cousin's wife with reluctant admiration. He had not seen her looking as animated, as radiant as--as seductive as she looked now for a very long time. "Don't you see the change in Richard?" she asked eagerly. "He's become quite another creature since General Lingard came here. I've always thought you kept Richard far too much shut up, Dick----" "You never said so before," he said sharply. She shrugged her shoulders. "It was none of my business." Her face clouded, and with hasty accord they changed the subject, and with exactly the same words: "Who had we better ask first?" And then they stopped, and laughed. For the moment these two, Richard Maule's heir and Richard Maule's wife, were on more cordial terms than they had been for years. "You have now got all the letters," she cried gaily--"Richard's, mine, and yours! Look them over, and make out a list--I'm sure you're much better at that sort of thing than I am!" He left her to carry out her behest. If there was anything like real entertaining to be done at Rede Place, all kinds of arrangements would have to be made, and the making of them must fall on Dick Wantele. Athena had told the truth when she had described herself to General Lingard as only a guest in her husband's house. But she had omitted to add that it was an arrangement which had hitherto suited her perfectly, and the only one she would have tolerated. CHAPTER VIII "To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance." During the days that followed Dick Wantele's return home, it seemed to him as though a magic wand had been waved over Rede Place. Mrs. Maule had no wish to keep her famous guest to herself. Even to the two men who watched her with a rather cruel scrutiny so much was clear. She seemed, indeed, to delight in exhibiting General Lingard to the neighbourhood, and the neighbourhood were only too willing to fall in with her pleasure. The gatherings were small, when one came to think of it--eight or ten people to lunch, ten or twelve people to dinner. How accustomed Dick grew to the formula which had at first so much surprised him! "Dear Mrs. Maule," or "Dear Mr. Wantele" (as the case might be) "We hear that General Lingard is staying at Rede Place. It would give us very great pleasure if you would bring him over to lunch or dinner, whichever suits you best." But there Athena wisely drew the line. No, she would not take General Lingard, or allow him to be taken, here and there and everywhere! He was at Rede Place for rest. But the agreeable people, the people who would amuse and interest him, and the people who if dull had, as it were, a right to meet the lion, were asked in their turn to come. They would arrive about half-past one, filling the beautiful rooms generally so empty of human sounds, with a pleasant bustle of talk and laughter. They would lunch in the tapestry dining-room, none too young or too old to enjoy the far-famed skill of Richard Maule's Corsican chef; and then, according to their fancy, or according to Athena's whim, they would wander about the house, looking at the pictures and fingering the curios which enjoyed an almost legendary reputation; or better still stream out into the formal gardens, now brilliant with strangely tinted autumn flowers, and fantastically peopled with the marble fauns and stone dryads brought from Italy and Greece by old Theophilus Joy. Finally they would go away, thanking Athena earnestly for the delightful time they had had and telling themselves and each other that Mrs. Maule was, after all, a very charming person, and that the stories of her heartless conduct to her husband, of her long absences from home, of her--well--her flirtations, were probably all quite untrue! The dinner-parties were slightly more formal affairs, but they also, thanks to all those concerned--and especially to Mrs. Maule--were quite successful, and very pleasant. For the first time for many years, Athena Maule and Dick Wantele were thrown into a curious kind of intimacy. They had constantly to consult each other, and to confer together. "You see, I want to get all this sort of thing over before Jane arrives!" she once exclaimed; and Wantele had looked at her musingly. After all, perhaps she spoke the truth. Strange ten days! No wonder that Dick Wantele was surprised, almost bewildered, by Athena in her new rôle--by Athena, that is, in the part of good-humoured, graceful, tactful hostess of Rede Place. Hitherto his imagination had never followed his cousin's wife on the long visits she paid to other people's houses. Now, with astonishment he realised that she must be, even apart from her singular beauty, and what had become to him her perverse, and most dangerous charm, an agreeable guest. She thought of everything, she thought of everybody, even of Mabel Digby. Mabel Digby was allowed to have her full share in the festivities, in the glorifications--for they were nothing else--of General Lingard, and that although Athena had never liked Mabel, and thought her a tiresome, priggish girl. Yes, all that fell to Mrs. Maule's share was managed with infinite tact, good humour, and good taste. The guests were not allowed to bother Richard, or to interfere with Richard's comfort and love of ease. Occasionally one or two old friends, who perchance had hardly seen him for years, would be taken into the Greek Room to talk to him for ten minutes.... Not the least strange thing was that General Lingard apparently enjoyed it all. Sometimes, nay often, he said a deprecating word or two to one or other of his hosts--a word or two implying that he saw the humour of the whole thing. But within the next hour he would be accepting rather shame-facedly the flattery lavished on him by some pretty, silly girl, or, what was more to his credit, listening patiently to an older woman's account of a son who was in "the service," and for whom the great man she was speaking to might "do something." * * * * * To the amateur soldier who in any capacity forms part of an army on active service, the most extraordinary thing, that which at once strikes his imagination and goes on doing so repeatedly until the campaign is over, is the fact that for most of the weary time, he and his fellows are fighting an invisible enemy. During each of these long, unreal days when he had scarce a moment to himself, for it fell to his share to see that everything ran smoothly, Dick Wantele found himself engaged in close watchful combat with an invisible foe. He would have given much to be convinced that he was pursuing a phantom bred of his own evil imagination, and sometimes he was so convinced. Then the mists with which he was surrounded would part, suddenly, and the fearsome thing was there, before him. Mabel Digby was the first lantern which lighted up the dark recess into which Wantele's mind was already glancing with such foreboding. It was the third day after his return home, and with the aid of telegrams and messengers a considerable party had been gathered together for what had been a really amusing and successful luncheon party. When the last guest--with the exception of Mabel, who hardly counted as a guest--had been duly sped, Mrs. Maule and General Lingard slipped away together; and Wantele offered to walk back with Mabel to the Small Farm. They were already some way from the house, when she told him a piece of news that was weighing very heavily on her heart. "Have you been told," she asked, "about Bayworth Kaye? He's at Aden, it seems, and seriously ill. They think it's typhoid. His parents only heard yesterday. They're awfully worried about him. Mrs. Kaye can't make up her mind whether she ought to go out to him or not." And then, as he turned to her, startled, genuinely sorry, he saw a look on her young face he had never seen there before; it was a terrible expression--one of aversion and of passionate contempt. Mrs. Maule and General Lingard were walking together, pacing slowly side by side. Though a turn of the path brought them very near, Lingard was so absorbed in what Athena was saying that he did not see Wantele and Miss Digby. But Athena saw them, and with a quick, skilful movement she guided her own and her companion's steps in a direction that made it impossible for the four to meet. Mabel Digby remained silent for some moments, and then she turned abruptly to Wantele. "Why isn't Jane Oglander here?" she asked. "I thought you expected her last week. Her friend must be a very selfish woman!" "I don't think Jane would care for the sort of thing we had to-day," Wantele said reflectively. Why had Mabel looked at Athena with so strange--so--so contemptuous a look? "Still, she'll have to get used to seeing him lionized." "Write and ask her to come as soon as she can, Dick. It's--it's stupid of her to stay away like that!" Wantele glanced round at the speaker; and then, to his concern and surprise, he saw that her face was flushed, her brown eyes soft with tears. "I was thinking of Bayworth," she faltered. "He looked so dreadfully unhappy when he went away, Dick, and--and I can't help knowing why." The hours and the days wore themselves away quickly--all too quickly for Athena Maule and Hew Lingard, slowly and full of acute discomfort and suspicion for Dick Wantele. Occasionally the young man tried to tell himself that perhaps the real reason of his discontent was their guest's attitude to himself. It was clear that the famous soldier did not like the younger of his hosts, in fact he hardly made any attempt to conceal his prejudice, and the two men, though of course forced into a kind of intimacy, saw as little as they could of one another. It was with his hostess that General Lingard spent every odd moment,--every moment that he could spare from the work on which he was engaged--a book he had promised to write by a certain date. And after a very few days Wantele discovered with amusement, discomfiture, amazement that Lingard was actually consulting Athena about his book, reading her passages as he wrote them. And then Wantele told himself with shame that the doing of this was not so foolish or so strange, after all,--for the book was to appeal to the general public, and Mrs. Maule might reasonably be supposed to belong to that public. But not even Wantele in his darkest, most suspicious moods suspected the depth, the reality of Lingard's peril. The exciting, exhilarating experiences which were now befalling him produced on one who was essentially a man of action, not a philosopher and thinker, an extraordinary mental and even physical effect. The absurd homage, the crude flattery, to which Lingard found himself subjected by the young and the foolish among Mrs. Maule's guests annoyed rather than pleased him, but he would be moved to the soul when a word said--often an awkward, shy word--showed how great was the place he had conquered in the estimation of those of his fellow-countrymen and countrywomen who were jealous for their country's glory. He had instinctively discounted the newspaper fame showered so freely upon him on his immediate arrival in England; he was humorously conscious that he owed it in a great measure to the absence of any other competing lion of the moment. True, he had at once received a number of invitations from hostesses of the kind who make it their business to secure the latest celebrity, and he had grudged the time he spent over the writing of coldly civil refusals. Lingard had also been plagued with innumerable letters from people who vaguely hoped he would be able to do something which would contribute in some way to their advancement, or that of their near relations. And then there had come absurd and painful communications from lunatics, begging-letter writers, and autograph hunters. Not till he came to Rede Place did the position he had won become really clear to him, though pride and good breeding made him appear to take his triumph lightly. And Athena Maule shared it all with him! The very letters he received were, at her entreaty, shown to, and discussed with her in a way which gave each of them a special value and importance. Athena was much more impressed with his triumph than he allowed himself to be; and when alone with her,--and they were very often alone together,--Lingard unconsciously moved in a delightful atmosphere of subtle, wordless sympathy and flattery. Jane Oglander, absorbed in the physical crisis through which was passing the friend with whom she was staying, became even to her lover infinitely remote; though Lingard liked to remind himself, now and again, that it was Jane who had given him his new, enchanting comrade and friend. Athena Maule appeared to Hew Lingard the most selfless human being he had ever known. And yet, each day, when the guests, the people she so kindly asked to meet him, were all gone, and when he and she were enjoying an hour of rest and solitude together, to which he had now learnt to look forward so eagerly, she was always ready to talk to him about herself. Soon there was no subject of conversation between them which held for Lingard so potent, so entrancing a lure. There came a day when the soldier, more moved, more secretly excited, more exhilarated than usual, was able to express to her something of what he felt. Among those who had been bidden to Rede Place was an old man, a Crimean veteran who in his day had enjoyed, though of course on a smaller scale, much the same kind of experience Hew Lingard was now passing through. The two had been allowed, by tacit consent, to have a considerable amount of talk together, and Lingard had been greatly touched and moved by the other's words of understanding praise, and appreciation, of the difficult, perilous task he had accomplished. Sure of her sympathy and understanding, he told Mrs. Maule all that the veteran's words had meant to him, and at once, as was her wont,--though he remained quite unconscious of it,--she brought the subject round to the personal, the intimate standpoint: "You don't know," she said softly, "what it means to me to know that you met that dear old man here." And that had given him his chance of saying what he felt each day more and more, namely that he owed everything, _everything_ to her,--to her thoughtful kindness and to her instinctive knowledge of what would at once please and move him. How amazed he would have been could he have seen into Athena's heart! She had thought it rather absurd that Lingard should care so much for praise uttered by such an unimportant person as the poor, broken old officer who led a quiet and rather eccentric existence on the edge of a lonely common some way from Rede Place. He had originally come into the neighbourhood in order to be near Mabel Digby's father, and Athena had never thought him to be of the slightest consequence,--indeed, she had only assented to his being asked to meet General Lingard because Mabel had earnestly begged that he might be. * * * * * Conscious hypocrisy is far rarer than the world is apt to believe, and only succeeds in its designs with those who are mentally ill-equipped. The women who work the most mischief in civilized communities are supreme egoists, and an egoist is never a conscious hypocrite. When dealing with a being of the opposite sex to her own, Athena Maule always held up to his enraptured gaze a magic mirror in which was reflected the beautiful and pathetic figure of a deeply injured woman: one who had made a gallant fight against the harsh fate which had married her to such a man as Richard Maule, and which placed her in subjection to so cruel and contemptible a creature as was Richard's kinsman and heir, Dick Wantele. Mrs. Maule was also affected, and very powerfully so, by all that took place during the ten days which elapsed between Dick Wantele's return and Jane Oglander's arrival. The people among whom she habitually lived knew nothing of such men as Hew Lingard. Rich and idle always, vicious or virtuous according to their temperament and the measure of their temptations, they had no use for the great workers of the world, unless indeed those workers' struggles, victories, and defeats lay in the world of finance. Thus it was that General Lingard presented to Athena Maule the attractive human bait of something new, untasted, unrehearsed. She did not mean to act ill by Jane Oglander; on the contrary, as the days went on, Lingard's betrothed became in Mrs. Maule's imagination a cruel, almost a pitiless rival. She could not help contrasting her own life with that which was now opening before her friend. Jane was about to be lifted, through no merit, no effort of her own, into a delightful, a passionately interesting and shifting atmosphere, that which surrounds a commanding officer's wife in one of the great military centres of the Empire at home or abroad. Athena longed to try her power--the power she knew to be almost limitless in one direction--on the type of man with whom Jane would henceforth be surrounded, a type of whose very presence Jane, she knew well, would scarcely be aware! It was strange, it--it was horrible to think that Jane would be leading a delightful and stimulating existence while she, Athena, would be going the same dreary round among the same selfish, stupid people of whom she had grown so tired. During those days when she was acting, for the first time, as the real mistress of Rede Place, and as hostess to a man whom all the world wished at that moment to meet and entertain, Mrs. Maule told herself again and again, with deep, wordless anger, that life was indeed using her hardly. How ironic the stroke of fate which made a Jane Oglander be chosen by a Hew Lingard! There was one consolation--but Athena was in no mood for finding consolation--in the thought that both General Lingard and Jane would ever regard Mrs. Richard Maule as the most welcome, the most honoured of their guests. Thanks to that fact, she would enter and doubtless achieve the social conquest of that official section of the English world into which her incursions had been few and seldom repeated. CHAPTER IX "FERDINAND.--I have this night digged up a mandrake. CARDINAL.--Say you? FERDINAND.--And I am grown mad with it." And now the evening of the last of their delightful days had come,--so at least Athena Maule thought of it, for Jane Oglander was arriving the next morning. Wantele and Athena had had a sharp difference that afternoon. She wished that the gay, the amusing doings of the last few days should continue, and she had made out a further list--a short list, so she assured herself,--of people who had been forgotten, and who might as well be asked now. To her anger and surprise, Dick Wantele had refused her reasonable request backing up his refusal with the authority of her husband, of Richard himself. "Richard thinks we've had enough of it, and that Jane would so hate it all," he said, having reminded her half jokingly that they had arranged everything of the kind should end with Jane Oglander's arrival. "I think we owe Jane some consideration. She would be miserable married to a man who was always being lionised in this absurd fashion----" He stopped, then added lightly, "You don't know England, my dear cousin: there will be a new lion soon, then our friend will have to take a back place. To do him justice I think he's already getting rather sick of it all!" Mrs. Maule remained silent for a moment, and then she exclaimed, with a rather curious look on her lovely face, "I don't agree! I think that he enjoys it, Dick, and surely it is good for his career that he should do so. Jane should understand that!" Wantele lifted his eyebrows. It was a trick of his when surprised or amused. "He will go on having plenty of that sort of thing after he's married--if Jane lets him!" Athena turned pettishly away. Thanks to Dick Wantele she was never allowed to forget the fact that her delightful, her famous guest was going to be married--and to her own dearest friend. Dick never spared her. He seemed to delight in "rubbing it in." It was the more irritating inasmuch as Hew Lingard never spoke to her of Jane. During those pleasant, exciting days Mrs. Maule had sometimes asked herself whether Lingard ever thought of Jane when--when he was with her, with Athena. She had taken the trouble to find out, by means not wholly creditable, that Lingard wrote to Jane every day; and there was always one letter from the many that reached him each morning which he picked out first and put in his pocket. The sight of his doing this gave Athena a little pang of jealous pain. It annoyed her that any man when with her should concern himself with another woman. And then something else on this last day added to Mrs. Maule's depression. Her husband was not well. He was feeling the effects of the excitement of the last few days. Just after her unpleasant little discussion with Dick, Richard Maule had addressed her directly--a thing he scarcely ever did. "Aren't you going away?" he asked ungraciously. "I thought you were going away as soon as Jane Oglander arrived." She had answered briefly that her plans were changed, that she would not be leaving Rede Place for nearly another month. But as, a moment later, she had swept out of the room, she had told herself with rage that her present life was intolerable,--that no woman had ever to put up with such insults as she had to put up with, from Dick on the one hand, and Richard on the other! Within an hour her feelings were assuaged. Lingard, seeking her as he had now fallen into the way of doing, had found her quivering with anger, and what he took to be bitter pain. She had told him of her husband's desire that she should leave Rede Place on her friend's arrival, and he had received her confidences with burning indignation and passionate sympathy. Nay more, the atmosphere between them became electric, almost oppressive. Then, to Athena's sharp surprise and annoyance, Lingard suddenly turned on his heel and left the room, muttering something about having work to do. * * * * * That evening, for the first time for many days, Athena, General Lingard, and Dick Wantele dined without the restraining presence of strangers. Dick, unlike the other two, was in good spirits, nay more, lively and, in his own rather caustic way, amusing. Jane Oglander would be here to-morrow! He dwelt on the thought with satisfaction and an almost malicious pleasure. Ten days ago the thought of seeing Jane at Rede Place had been painful, but now he would welcome her presence. It was time, high time, she were here. Now and again, while talking to Athena,--he could always compel her attention,--he stole a glance at Jane Oglander's lover. Lingard did not look as looks the man who is going to see his love on the morrow. His expression was one of deep gravity, almost of suffering. There was a strained look about his eyes, his mouth was set in grim lines, and unless directly addressed he remained silent. Mrs. Maule soon finished her more than usually frugal evening meal. She got up and left the table, and as she did so Lingard sprang to the door. He seemed to delight in rendering her the smallest personal service. Before leaving the room, she turned round and addressed Wantele: "Don't hurry," she said softly. "We won't go into the drawing-room to-night. I've got to write some notes. Quite a batch of letters came this afternoon. There were just one or two people I should have liked to have asked next week--" she looked at him pleadingly, reproachfully.... Wantele stared at her coldly. "Of course you can ask one or two people," he said, and, with a slight smile, "Don't make yourself out more of a martyr than you must, Athena!" Hew Lingard, standing aside, his hand still on the handle of the door, felt an overmastering impulse to go back to the table and strike Dick Wantele's sneering face across the mouth. How awful to think, to see, that such a woman as Athena Maule, so kind, so gentle, so generous, so--so lovely and so defenceless, was subject to this young man's insolence. But he could do nothing--nothing; and Jane, amazing thought, was actually fond of Wantele! He shut the door behind his hostess and walked slowly back to the table. There was a moment of awkward silence, and then Wantele broke it by speaking of Jane. It was the first time her name had passed his lips in Lingard's presence. "Since Miss Oglander lost her brother in the strange and terrible way you know," he said, "she has shrunk very much from seeing people, I mean from mixing in ordinary society. That is one reason why she has always enjoyed her visits here. The state of my cousin, Richard Maule's, health compels us to lead a very quiet life." He forced himself to go on: "Mrs. Maule, as you know, is a good deal away. She naturally does not care for the extreme dulness, the solitariness, of the life----" Lingard muttered a word of assent, but he made no other comment on the other man's words. He took them to mean that Dick Wantele felt rather ashamed of himself, as indeed he ought to do. Was it not pitifully clear that Mrs. Maule, poor beautiful Athena, had no part or place in her husband's house? All invalids tend to become self-absorbed and selfish; but he judged Wantele hardly for encouraging, nay for fostering, Mr. Maule's egoistic unkindness to his wife. Both men were glad when the time came for them to part. Dick, as always, went off to Richard, and Lingard, after a few unquiet moments in the smoking-room, made his way slowly to Athena's boudoir, the charming, restful room which, alone of the many rooms in the big quiet house, seemed to be in a real sense her territory, and where he and she had spent so many delightful hours together. But to-night he was met there with something very like a rebuff. Athena had been standing thinking, doing nothing, but when she heard Lingard's now familiar steps in the corridor she moved swiftly to her writing-table, and bent over it. As he came in she lifted her head: "I really must finish these notes," she said deprecatingly. "You see, I had hoped to soften, if not Richard's, then Dick's heart! Well, I failed, as I generally do fail with him. And I feel"--her voice quivered--"very much as poor Cinderella must have felt when the clock was about to strike twelve." As he stood, irresolute, before her, she added, "Take a book and sit down. I'll be as quick as I can." She got up with a swift movement and put a box of cigarettes and matches close to his hand. It was such a little thing, and yet, in the emotional state in which he was now, Lingard felt touched, inexpressibly touched. How extraordinarily kind and thoughtful she was! No wonder Jane was so fond of her. Mrs. Maule went back to her writing-table, intensely conscious that Lingard's ardent, melancholy gaze was fixed on her. Now and again, perhaps three or four times, she looked up for a moment and smiled, her glance full of confident friendliness. But she did not speak, and thus was spent one of the shortest and most poignant half-hours of Lingard's life. At last there came harsh, unwelcome interruption in the person of Dick Wantele. For a moment he stood between them, his back to Lingard, facing Athena. "I've only come to tell you," he exclaimed, rather breathlessly, "that Richard agrees that there are two or three more people we ought to ask. I suggested the Dight-Suttons." "I've just written, this moment, to say we can't have them," said Athena slowly. Dick shrugged his shoulders with what seemed to the man watching him an unmannerly gesture of irritation. "I'm sorry," he said curtly. "I had no idea that you would be writing to them to-night, or indeed to anyone to-night. Surely to-morrow morning will be time enough. However, there are one or two other people----" Lingard got up. "I think I'll go out of doors for a bit," he said abruptly. "I haven't walked enough to-day." It was horrible to him to stand by and see Mrs. Maule insulted in her own house, in her own room. He felt afraid that if he stayed there he would lose control of himself and say something he would regret having said to Dick Wantele. And Athena, moving to one side, saw his lowering face, and she felt a thrill of possessive pride. What a man Lingard seemed by the side of Dick Wantele! How well he must look in uniform. She wondered, jealously, if Jane had ever seen him in uniform.... "Yes--do go out. And take the key--you know--the key of the Garden Room off the mantelpiece. But you must get a coat. It's cold to-night." He shook hands with them both, and went out. Dick only stayed a very few moments,--long enough, however, to be told very plainly the names of the people whom Athena wished to be invited. He went off to Richard with her message. Mrs. Maule began moving about the boudoir aimlessly. It was tiresome of Lingard to stay out so long. She was used to another type of man,--one more civilised, who would have understood in a moment what her quick glance at him had tried to convey. That sort of man would have hung about in the Garden Room till Dick Wantele had left her, and then he would have come back at once. But the great soldier--and the fact, it must be admitted, was part of his attraction for Athena Maule--was not in the least like that. Lingard knew nothing of flirtation, as the word was understood in Mrs. Maule's circle. She supposed him, rightly, to be a man with but little knowledge of the world in which the pursuit of the tenderer emotions is carried to a fine art; she judged him, erroneously, to be a man strangely lacking in certain primitive instincts. But that made the state of bondage to which she had already reduced him the greater triumph. To a thinking mind there is something sombre, disturbing, in the thought that the attraction of a man to a woman, whatever be the quality of that attraction, manifests itself in much the same way. Athena knew the signs. To-night every omen pointed one way. She put the thought--the slightly insistent memory--of Jane away from her. Jane should have known how to guard what had perhaps never been really hers. She set her door ajar. It would be very annoying if General Lingard were to come in and, as she knew he had done some nights ago, creep up silently through the house.... At last there came the sounds of footfalls across the flags of the Garden Room. Athena began to experience that curious sensation which goes by the name of a beating heart. In other words, she felt strung up to a high pitch of emotion. Bayworth Kaye had given her some delicious moments, but she had never felt with him what she felt now. For the first time Athena--skilful huntress of men--had found a quarry worthy of pursuit. Was it possible that to-night her quarry would elude her? Was it conceivable that Lingard would push his scruples, his sense of absurd delicacy, as far as that? Athena had not yet learnt to reckon with Hew Lingard's conscience,--the conscience, perhaps it would be more true to say the honour, he had already deliberately thrust aside to-night, during those few unquiet moments in the smoking-room. She remained, however, absolutely still. Lingard advanced a few steps nearer to the partly open door. He was evidently hesitating, and Athena felt she could bear the suspense no longer. "Is anyone there?" she called out in a low voice. "Is it Hew?" She only called him by that name when they were alone together. He opened the door and came in. "You must be cold," she said tremulously. "Do come nearer the fire." Lingard came towards her. No, he was not cold. He had been walking, covering miles in the hour he had spent trying to tire, to deaden, himself out. It had been a terrible time of self-communion, self-reproach, self-abasement. The state he found himself in to-night recalled with piteous vividness that episode of his stormy youth which had led to his long break with the Paches. It was horrible that he should couple, even in thought, Athena Maule and that--that creature, over whom he had wasted, squandered, such treasures of adoring love. Rosie had been one of those young ladies who, to use a technical term, "walk on"; and because she was extraordinarily pretty, she was always placed in the front row of the foolish musical comedy of which he could still recall, not only every tune, but almost every word, so often had he been to the theatre after that first meeting. At the end of ten days,--he had known Athena Maule ten days, what a strange coincidence!--at the end of ten days he had asked Rosie to marry him. She had shilly-shallied for a while, and then, to his rapturous surprise, she had said "Yes." How angry, how scandalised, how shocked his relations had been! Tommy Pache--in those days old Mr. Pache had been "Tommy" to his relations--had hurried up to London and said all the usual things that one does say to a young fool on such an occasion, but even he had been struck by the girl's beauty, though of course Tommy had been careful not to let this out to the others when he had got back to them. How it all came back to him to-night! Lingard remembered the letters he had received, the letters he had written. It had gone on for some weeks--he couldn't quite remember how long now,--that time of anger, of impatience, of longing, of rapture. And then, within a very few days of that fixed for the quiet wedding which was to take place in a city church,--he had always avoided that part of London ever since,--Rosie had become the wife of another man, of a young idiot with a vacuous face and an enormous fortune, of whom he had not even troubled to be jealous, although his presence in the flat Rosie shared with another girl had often made him impatient. * * * * * Now Lingard felt desperately tired--tired in body, tired in spirit. But he was glad--glad that he had disregarded the promptings of his conscience, of his honour. It was delicious to be here indoors, with this kind, this enchanting, this angelically beautiful woman close, very close, to him. Athena held out her foot to the fire, and Lingard, staring down, saw that she was wearing a curious kind of slipper, one unlike any that he had ever noticed on a woman's foot before. A sandal rather than a shoe, it left visible the lovely lines of the arched instep and slender ankle. "You were out a long time," she said, and fixed her eyes on the clock. It was one of the curious costly toys of which Rede Place was full, and for which old Theophilus Joy had had a marked predilection. Fashioned like a tiny wall sundial, across its face was written in faded gold letters, "I only mark the sunny hours." The hands now pointed to three minutes to midnight. Lingard said no word. He went on staring down at Athena's little foot. He was wondering if she knew how exquisitely perfect she was physically, how unlike all other women. "Isn't it odd to think," she whispered, "that in a few moments another day will begin? I feel more like Cinderella than ever--now. You have given me such a good time," her voice trembled, and he looked up and stared at her strangely. "You've almost made me in love again with life," and she was sincere in what she said. "I?" said Lingard hoarsely. "I?" "Yes, you! You don't know--how could you know?--what it's been to me, what it would have been to any woman, to have a man for a friend, to feel at last that there is someone to whom one can say everything----" He looked away from her. At all costs he must prevent himself from showing what he felt--the violent, the primitive emotion her simple, touching words had called forth. How utterly she would despise him if she knew! He swore to himself she should never know that she had made him all unwittingly traitor to the woman she loved,--the woman alas! whom they both loved. Lingard, and that was part of the punishment he already had to endure, never left off loving Jane Oglander. Jane was always, in a spiritual sense, very near to him; it was her physical self which was remote. The tiny gong behind the little clock began to strike, quick precipitate strokes. "Isn't it in a hurry?" said Athena plaintively, "in such a hurry to end the last of my happy days." Her voice broke into a sob, and Lingard, at last looking straight into her face, saw that tears were rolling down her cheeks. He gave a hoarse inarticulate cry. Athena thought he said "My God!" She was filled with a sense of intoxicating happiness and triumph. Each of the wild, broken words--words of self-abasement, self-blame, self-rebuke, which Lingard uttered, holding both her hands in his firm grasp,--meant to her what fluttering white flags of surrender mean to besiegers. With downcast eyes, with beating heart she listened while Lingard, abasing himself and exalting her, took all the blame--and shame--on himself. His words fell very sweetly and comfortingly on her ears. Athena had no wish to act treacherously by Jane. Any other man but this strange man would have had her long ago in his arms, but Lingard, though he held her hands so tightly that his grasp hurt, made no other movement towards her, not even when with a sobbing sigh she admitted--and as she did so there came across her a slight feeling of shame--that she, too, had been a traitor, an unwilling, an unwitting traitor, to Jane these last few days. At last they made a compact--how often are such compacts made, and broken?--that Jane should never, never, know the strange madness which had seized them both. Lingard spoke of leaving the next day. Nothing would be easier than to urge important business in London. But again the tears sprang to Athena's eyes. "Don't go away," she murmured brokenly. "I couldn't bear it! I promise you that Jane shall never know. Don't leave me with Dick and Richard--they've both been kinder--indeed, indeed they have--since you've been here, Hew----" He eagerly assured her that he would stay. Flight was a cowardly expedient at best, and the feeling he intended henceforth to cherish for Athena Maule was nothing of which he need be ashamed. It was a high, a noble feeling of compassion and respect. It was well, nay most fortunate, that they had had this explanation; henceforth they would be friends. The very touch of her cool hands resting so confidingly in his, had driven forth certain black devils from his heart--made him indeed once more true to Jane,--Jane who, if she knew all, would understand. For there were things Athena had told him of her life with Richard which Jane did not know,--things which it was not desirable Jane should ever know, and which had filled him with an infinite compassion for Richard's young, beautiful wife. When Lingard bade her good-night, he resisted the temptation, the curiously strong temptation, of asking Mrs. Maule if she would allow him to kiss her feet. CHAPTER X "The passion of love has a danger for very sensitive, reserved and concentrated minds unknown to creatures of more volatile, expansive and unreflective dispositions." Dick Wantele walked with swinging nervous strides up and down the short platform of the little country station of Redyford. He had already been there some time, for the local train run in connection with the London express was late. But he was in no hurry--there would always be time to tell Jane that she would not see her lover for some hours. Mrs. Maule had taken General Lingard over to the Paches to lunch. It was a small matter, an altogether unimportant matter, and it was certainly no business of Wantele's to care about it one way or the other. And yet he did care. He was jealous for Jane in a way she never would be for herself. And then--and then Lingard had allowed himself to be bamboozled--no other word so well expressed it--as to the time of Jane's arrival. It had happened at breakfast. "Mrs. Pache is expecting us--you and me--over to lunch," Athena said to Lingard. And Wantele had cut in--"Jane is coming this morning." "No, indeed she isn't! We shall be back long before she arrives," and then Athena had gone on, addressing no one in particular, "Jane is the most casual person in the world----" Lingard, throwing back his head with a quizzical look on his face, had exclaimed, "Yes, that's one of the good things about her." He had shot out the words as a sword leaps from its scabbard. There had followed a moment of silence. And then Athena had broken out into eager praise of Jane--eager, inconsequent praise. But for once Hew Lingard had seemed indifferent, hardly aware of the sound of her voice. Instead he looked across to Wantele: "I wonder if you remember that curious phrase of George Herbert? 'There is an hour wherein a man might be happy all his life could he but find it--'" Athena had stared at Lingard--what did he mean by saying such an odd thing? Then she had reminded Dick that the last time Jane had been coming to Rede Place she had changed her mind not once but three times, and what Athena said had irritated Wantele the more because she spoke the truth. Jane was curiously uncertain and casual--women of her temperament often are. She only made an effort to be mindful of her engagements when dealing with those concerning whom most people would have said punctuality did not matter--with those forlorn men and women adrift on the dark sea of South London, to whose service she had given herself since her brother's death. For a moment he, Dick Wantele, and Hew Lingard, had been in that wordless sympathy which between men means friendship. Wantele was eager to be convinced that his suspicions were both base and baseless. If only Athena would remove her disturbing presence from Rede Place! But he knew her too well to hope that she would go--yet. * * * * * Here was the train at last, but where was Jane Oglander? Dick looked before and behind him. No, she was not there. She hadn't come after all. She had, as usual, changed her plans at the last moment. Athena was right, Jane was really too casual! When he reached home he would find a telegram from her explaining---- And then suddenly he saw her walking towards him from the extreme end of the platform. And the mere sight of her dispelled, not only the irritation of which he was now ashamed, but the anxieties, the suspicions of the last ten days. He had vaguely supposed that Jane would look unlike herself, that the fact that she was going to be Lingard's wife would have produced in her some outward change. But she looked as she always looked--set apart from the women about her, especially from those of her own age, by the greater simplicity, the almost austerity of her dress. An old cottage woman had once said to Wantele, "Grey is Miss Oglander's colour, and if she was 'appy perhaps light blue." And as she came up to him, smiling, he remembered what the old woman had said, for Miss Oglander was wearing a long grey cloak; it was open at the neck, and showed some kind of white vest with a touch of blue underneath. On her fair hair, framing her face, rested a Quakerish little cap-like hat with strings tied under her soft chin. "Dick," she said, "how kind of you to come and meet me! I'm so glad to see you!" And he saw with a queer feeling of mingled pleasure and jealous pain that she did indeed look glad; also that there had in very truth come a change over her face. Jane Oglander possessed that which is not always the attribute of beauty, a great and varying charm of expression, but Wantele had never seen her eyes filled, as they were to-day, with gladness. "I nearly came by the later train," she said. "For I had to see a child off to the country, to a convalescent home, and its train went at the same time as mine. But I found a kind, understanding porter, and so it was all right. Working people are so good to one another, Dick. The porter wouldn't take the sixpence I offered him for looking after the little boy----" And in her voice there was still that under-current of joyousness which was so new, and, to Wantele, so unexpected. Jane Oglander looked as if the six last years had been blotted out,--as if she were again a happy girl, pathetically, confidently ignorant of the ugly realities of life. They walked out of the station together, and with a simultaneous movement they turned into the field path which formed a short cut to Rede Place. Soon they fell into the easy, desultory talk of those who have many interests and occupations in common. The young man had saved up many little things to tell her--things that he thought would amuse Jane, things about which he wished to consult her. And as they walked side by side, Wantele kept reminding himself, with deep, voiceless melancholy, that this was the last time--the last time that Jane Oglander would be what she had been for so long, his chief friend and favourite companion. Lingard--happy Lingard had been right. More fortunate than Wantele, he had found that hour most men seek and never find, the hour wherein a man may be happy all his life. They were now close to the house, and as yet neither had spoken the name of Jane's lover. "Shall we go in by the Garden Room?" asked Wantele. Now had come the moment when he must tell her of Athena's and Lingard's absence; also, when he must, if he could bring himself to do so, wish her joy. "You'll have to put up with me for a bit longer, Jane. Athena has taken General Lingard to lunch at the Paches'. Of course you heard of the accident?" "Yes," she said. "Poor Patty!" And then, with a rather quizzical expression in her kind eyes, "It's odd, isn't it, Dick, that Hew should be related to the Paches----" With no answering smile on his face, he exclaimed, "Amazing!" He put the key in the lock, and turning it pushed open the glass door. Then he fell back so that she should pass in before him. "Jane," he muttered hoarsely, "Jane, you know what I would say to you--how truly I wish you joy----" She looked up, and then quickly cast down her eyes. Wantele had grown very pale, across his plain face was written suffering and renunciation. "I knew," she said in a low voice, "I knew that you would wish me joy." Neither spoke again till they reached the Greek Room. There Wantele left her, and then Richard Maule also said his word, his dry word, of congratulation. "I like your soldier, Jane! You know what I had hoped would happen--but things that I hope for never do happen----" But apart from these two interludes, the first afternoon of Jane Oglander's stay at Rede Place passed exactly as had passed innumerable other afternoons spent by her there in recent years. She took a walk with Dick round the walled gardens which were his special interest and pleasure; she read aloud for a while to Richard. Nothing was changed, and yet everything was different. Last time Miss Oglander had stayed at Rede Place, she had been almost daughter to Richard Maule, almost wife to Dick Wantele. Now she was about to pass for ever out of their lives, and on all three of them the knowledge lay heavy. * * * * * At four o'clock the Paches' motor returned with a message that Mrs. Maule and General Lingard were walking back and would not be home before five. Miss Oglander's first meeting with her lover at Rede Place took place in the Greek Room. It was six o'clock, she had given the two men their tea, and then, voicing what they were all thinking, "They're very late," said Richard Maule, and as he uttered the words the door opened and the truants walked in. Wantele, sitting in his favourite place, away from the fire, close under one of the high windows, noted with reluctant approval that Athena did not overdo her surprise. "Why, Jane, I didn't expect you till the six-twenty train!"--that was all she said as she came forward and warmly greeted her friend. Wantele went on looking dispassionately at his cousin's wife. To-day Athena had chosen the plainest of out-of-door costumes. A girl of seventeen might have worn the very short skirt and simple little coat, but like everything she wore, they made her, at the moment, look her best. The long walk, and the companionship in which she had taken the walk, had exhilarated her--intensified her superb vitality. She looked like some wild, lovely thing out of the woods, a nymph on whom Time would never dare lay his disfiguring touch. Lingard, hanging back behind her, showed himself no actor. He looked moody, preoccupied, almost sullen. "Has anything happened to-day?" asked Mrs. Maule. "Apart, I mean, from the happy fact of Jane's arrival----" she smiled radiantly at the other woman. Her husband's voice unexpectedly answered her, and as he spoke he cast on her a look of hate, and then his eyes rested with an air of rather malignant, speculative curiosity on Lingard's dark, gloomy face and restless eyes. "Yes, something did happen during your short absence. I had a call this morning from Mr. Kaye----" In an aside he muttered for Lingard's benefit, "Mr. Kaye is our excellent clergyman," and then he went on, "I'm sorry to say he brought bad news of his son." All the caressing glow died from Athena's face; it became suddenly watchful, wary. Mr. Maule went on, "Bayworth Kaye, it seems, is lying very ill at Aden." Mrs. Maule gave a slight sigh of relief. That was not what she had thought, with a sudden overwhelming fear, to hear Richard say. "The Kayes are thinking of going out to him, and they thought that I should be able to tell them something about the place--how to get there, and so on. But I advised them to wait a day or two for further news. "I heard about Bayworth Kaye's illness some days ago," said Wantele slowly. "But I forgot to tell you. I did, however, enquire about him yesterday. They seemed to know very little then----" * * * * * "I have been longing, longing, _longing_ to see you, Jane! Now, at last we can have a talk----" Putting both her hands on Jane's unresisting shoulders, Mrs. Maule gently pushed her friend down into a low chair, and then knelt down by her. They were in Jane's bedroom, and it still wanted three-quarters of an hour to dinner. Jane's eyes filled with happy tears. She was moved to the heart. How good they all were to her! She could still feel the clinging, the convulsive, grasp of Lingard's hand. She had not seen him alone, even for a moment, but now, at last, they were under the same roof, and each of his letters from Rede Place had been a cry of longing for her. "We ought not to have gone to the Paches'," cried Athena remorsefully. "But honestly it never occurred to me that you would come till the evening train, Jane." Jane laughed through her tears. "I'm very glad you went! I enjoyed my quiet day here. And oh I am so glad to see you, Athena! I was afraid that you might be away." "Do you really think I should leave Rede Place--now?" Athena looked searchingly into Jane's face. "I know we are none of us conventional, but still the proprieties have to be respected--sometimes!" Jane reddened uncomfortably. She had not thought of it in that way. She and Hew had been so happy together alone in London. But no doubt Athena was right. Athena rose slowly, gracefully, from her knees, and stood looking down at her friend with a rather inscrutable smile. Jane moved uneasily, she felt as if the other woman was gently, remorselessly stripping her soul of its wrappings.... "You look just the same," said Mrs. Maule, still smiling that probing, mysterious smile, "just as much a white and grey nun as you did before, Jane. But I think this is the first time I ever saw you blush. Go on blushing, dear--it makes you look quite pretty and worldly!" Jane flinched beneath the intent questioning gaze. She felt suddenly defenceless against a form of attack she had not expected from her friend. She could not bear the lightest touch of raillery, still less any laughing comment, on what was so deep and sacred a thing to herself as her relation to Lingard. She got up, walked over to a window, and pulled back the curtain. Athena moved swiftly after her, and with a gentle violence put her soft arms round Jane and pillowed the girl's head on her breast. "Jane!" she whispered, "do forgive me--I understand, indeed I do! But--but the sight of your happiness makes me a little bitter. Richard has been worse than ever this time. And Dick has been--well, Dick at his very worst. I can't think why he dislikes me so--but to be sure I have never liked him either!" Jane heard her in troubled silence. Her feelings of restful happiness, of exquisite content, had gone. "I'm sure that General Lingard must have noticed Richard's extraordinary manner to me," Athena spoke musingly. "Has he said anything about it in any of his letters to you?" "No, never." Jane released herself from Mrs. Maule's circling arms. "I like your man so much," went on Athena, stroking Jane's hair, "so very, very much! I think I like him more than I ever thought to like a man again. But then he's so unlike most men, Jane." Jane did not need Athena's words to convince her that Hew Lingard was unlike other men. But still her friend's words touched and pleased her. "He's been so awful good to me these last ten days! He's made everything easier. Fortunately Richard took a great fancy to him. And he and I--I know you won't be jealous, Jane--have become true friends. When Dick isn't looking, we call each other Hew and Athena!" "I am so glad," said Jane in a low voice; and indeed she was glad that the two had "made friends." But again she was touched with vague discomfort, again she shrank, when Mrs. Maule, leading her back into the room, rained eager, insistent questions on her---- "Do tell me all about it! How did it all begin? How did you ever come to know each other so well before he went away? What made him first write to you? Were they love letters, Jane? Come, of course you must know whether they were love letters or not! You're not so simple as all that comes to--no woman ever is!" But at last, driven at bay, her heart bruised by the other's indelicate curiosity, Jane said slowly, "I dare say I'm foolish--but I would rather not talk about it, Athena." A look of deep offence passed over Mrs. Maule's face. Later on--much later on--Jane wondered whether she had been wrong in saying those few words--words said feelingly, apologetically. "Of course we won't speak of your engagement if you would rather not. I'm sorry. I had no idea you would mind. I must go and dress now. But just one word more, Jane. Of course you and General Lingard will like to be a good deal alone together--I'll give Dick a hint." "No, no!" cried Jane. "Please don't do that, Athena. I don't want anything of the sort said to Dick." But Mrs. Maule went on as if she had not heard the other's words, "And you can always sit together in my boudoir. Mrs. Pache was saying to-day that it was a pity I didn't use the drawing-room more than I do. She thought--it was so like an Englishwoman to say so--that it smelt damp!" "As if we should think of turning you out of your own room! How can you imagine such a thing? I don't want you to make the slightest difference while I'm here. Hew and I will have plenty of opportunities of seeing one another when we get back to London. Please don't speak to Dick--I should be very, very sorry if you spoke to Dick, Athena." CHAPTER XI "Tu peux connaître le monde, tu peux lire à livre ouvert dans les plus caverneuses consciences, mais tu ne liras jamais, oh! pauvre femme, le coeur de ton ami." And then there came a short sequence of days, full of deep calm without, full of strife and disturbance within. Jane was ailing, and each day she fought with the knowledge of what ailed her as certain strong natures fight, and even for a while keep at bay, physical disease. But there came a moment when she had to face the truth; when she had to tell herself that the new, the agonising pain which racked her soul night and day, leaving her no moment of peace, was that base passion, jealousy. It was horrible to feel that it was of Athena she was jealous--Athena who seemed to be always there, between Lingard and herself. She could not think so ill of her friend as to suppose that this was Mrs. Maule's fault; still less would she accuse Lingard. Gradually the knowledge had come to her that when they three were together--Athena, Jane, and Lingard--it was as if she, Jane, was not, so entirely was Lingard absorbed in, possessed by, Athena. Jane Oglander could not fight with the weapons another woman in her place might have used. She could not, that is, make the most of such odd moments, of such scanty opportunities as she might have snatched from Athena Maule. How could the trifling events which made up the sum of five or six days have brought about such a change? She had thought to be so happy at Rede Place. She had come there filled with a sense of tremulous and yet certain gladness; in the mood to be sought by, rather than in that which seeks, the beloved. Athena, Richard, and Dick, if they did not love each other, surely each loved her sufficiently to understand, to respect her joy. The circumstances of her brother's death which had fallen like a pall on her young life had set Jane Oglander apart from happy, normal women. To her the world had only contained one lover--Hew Lingard; and those days they had spent together in a peopled solitude had taught her all she knew of the ways of love. It was instinct which had made her shrink, that first night of her stay at Rede Place, from Athena's insistent questioning; natural delicacy which had made her refuse, almost with disgust, the suggestion that she and Lingard should be set apart in an artificial solitude. As yet their engagement was secret from the world which seemed to take so great, so--so impertinent an interest in Hew Lingard, and she wished to keep it so as long as possible. Then there was another reason, one which she now told herself Athena should have divined, why Jane wished little notice to be taken of her engagement. She had no wish to flaunt her happiness before Dick Wantele. But now there was no happiness to flaunt--in its place only a dumb misery and a jealousy of which she felt an agonising shame. To Jane Oglander it was as if another entity had entered Hew Lingard's bodily shape--the bodily shape that was alas! so terribly dear to her. Lingard was not unkind, he was ever careful of her comfort in all little ways, but when they were alone together--and this happened strangely seldom--he would fall into long silences, as if unaware that she, his love, was there. From these abstracted moods Jane soon learnt that she could rouse him only in one way. He was ever ready to talk of Athena,--of their noble, lovely, and ill-used friend; and Jane, assenting, would tell herself that it was all true, and that only long familiarity with the strange conditions of existence at Rede Place had made her take as calmly as she did the tragedy of Athena Maule's life--that tragedy which now weighed so heavily on Lingard that it blotted out for him everything and everybody else. "I have told her she can always come and stay with us when things get intolerable here," he had exclaimed during one such talk, looking at Jane with eager, ardent eyes; and she had bent her head. Then it was with Athena he discussed their future, his and Jane's--the future in which Mrs. Maule was, it seemed, to have so great a share. * * * * * It was on the seventh day of Jane's stay at Rede Place that her lover for the first time, or so it seemed to her sore heart, sought her company. It fell about in this wise. Athena had been caught by Mrs. Pache, who, taking a drive in her old safe brougham for the first time since the motor accident, had naturally chosen Rede Place. Lingard and Dick Wantele at last escaped, leaving Mrs. Maule prisoned by her guest. They had gone out of doors, and chance had led them across Jane--Jane on her way back from the Small Farm where Mabel Digby, for the first time in her young life, lay ill in bed, unwilling to see anyone, excepting Jane. On hearing who had called, Miss Oglander had wished to hurry in, but Lingard had cried imperiously, "No! you shan't be made to endure Cousin Annie's congratulations! Come instead for a walk with me!" He had said the words in his old voice--the voice Jane knew, loved, obeyed. Dick Wantele looked quickly at them both. Was it possible that Lingard was working himself free of the fetters of which he was--Dick wished to think it possible--still unaware? "Take him to the Oakhanger," he said to Jane. "You can get there and back in an hour----" Side by side they hastened, walking not as lovers walk, but as do those who feel themselves to be escaping from some danger which lies close behind them. Jane was taking Lingard the shortest way out of the park. At last, at last she and Lingard would be alone, away from Athena as they had never yet been away from her during these long, to Jane these most miserable, days. For a while neither spoke to the other, then, as they turned into one of the narrow streets of the little country town, Lingard broke into hurried, disconnected speech, only to fall into moody silence as they again emerged into the lonely country lane leading to the large, enclosed piece of ground for which they were bound. The Hanger, as it was familiarly called in the neighbourhood of Redyford, was a huge natural mound rising from a low, undulating stretch of wild furze-covered common. Through the eighteenth century it had formed part of the estate of Rede Place, or rather it had been enclosed and appropriated, together with other common land. Thanks to the generosity, perhaps it should be said the sense of justice, of Theophilus Joy, The Hanger now belonged to the little town of Redyford. In warm weather it was used by the town folk as a picnic resort, though the nature and formation of the ground, and of the mountainous height which gave the place its name, made the playing of games there impossible. This was as well, for the huge mound remained unspoilt, and in its stark way beautiful. * * * * * Sharply the two breasted the rising ground. The wind swept athwart them in short, strong gusts. Now and then there fell a spot of rain. There was something in Jane Oglander's nature, something hidden from those about her, which responded to wild weather. She now welcomed the battle against wind and rain, and mounted with secret exhilaration the steep slippery path winding its way through and under the oak-trees which clothed the right flank of The Hanger. Once she tripped, and Lingard for a moment put his arm round her, but she sprang forward, away from its strong shelter; surprised, and a little piqued, he kept behind her, letting her lead the now darkling way, for twilight was falling. On they climbed, till at last, emerging from under the low oak branches, they stood, solitary figures, on a grassy ridge, bare save for a clump of high twisted fir-trees which swayed gauntly against the vast grey expanse of sky. Owing to its peculiar formation, The Hanger presented, especially at this time of the early evening, an impression of almost monstrous height and loneliness. Sheer down on the right from whence they had come lay the little town of Redyford, the grey and red roofs partly hidden by the thick-set oaks. On the left the ground sloped away more gently; but it looked to-night as if a leap over the edge would fling one down, down into the valley of meadowlands now white with curling mists. Slowly they turned and walked along the ridge, their feet sinking into the short soft turf growing in patches of pale green among the mauve-grey and brown heather. The path led up to a summer house, a curious circular building crowning the apex of the hill, and so wide open to wind, rain, and view that only the deep-eaved roof afforded any shelter to those under it. It was there that Lingard, after a moment of hesitation, led the way. "Jane," he said, "let us come and sit down for a moment. I have something to ask you." And she followed him into the poor shelter the summer house afforded. It had stopped raining; the high wind reigned alone, victorious. The bench on which they sat down was heavily scored with the initials of generations of Redyford lovers; for the little round building had ever been a temple of innocent courtship, and in the spring and summer evenings never lacked couples sitting in silent, inarticulate happiness. Lingard's bare hand involuntarily rested on the dented figures, the interlaced initials.... Three weeks ago he would have prayed Jane's leave to add a J. and an H. to these rude scores, for three weeks ago he had been one of the great company of the world's lovers, understanding and sympathising with all the absurdities of love. And now--even now, though he knew himself for a traitor to the woman sitting silent by his side, he yet felt in a strange way that the link between them was eternal--that in no way could it be broken. Each, so he assured himself fiercely, had a call on the other. He was about to put this belief, this instinctive certainty, to the test. "As I said just now, I've something to ask you, Jane----" His words came haltingly; to his listener they sounded very cold. "Yes, Hew?" She looked round at him. He was staring at the ground as if something lay there he alone could see. "I asked you to come out with me to-night, because--because"--and then in a voice so low, so hoarse, that she had to bend forward to catch the words--"I want to ask you, to implore you, Jane--to marry me at once." "At once?" she repeated. "When do you mean by at once, Hew?" She also spoke in a still, low voice. They seemed to be hatching a conspiracy of which one, if not both, should feel ashamed. And more than ever it seemed to Jane Oglander as if another man, a stranger, had taken possession of Hew Lingard's shape. "I mean at once!" he answered harshly. "To-morrow--or the day after to-morrow. There's no necessity why we should ever go back to Rede Place! Why shouldn't we walk down to the station now, from here? We should be in London in an hour and a half. People have often done stranger things than that. We could send a message from the station to----" His voice wavered, his lips refused to form Mrs. Maule's name. He thrust the thought of Athena violently from him; and with the muttered words, "Can't you understand? I love you--I want you, Jane----" he turned and gathered the woman sitting so stilly by his side into his arms. She gave a stifled cry of surprise; and then, as he kissed her fiercely once, twice, and then again, there broke from her a low, bitter sigh--the sigh of a woman who feels herself debased by the caresses for which she has longed, of which she has been starved. To Jane Oglander a kiss, so light, so willing a loan on the part of many women, was so intimate a gift as to be the forerunner of complete surrender. And to-night each of Hew Lingard's kisses was to her a profaned sacrament. Not so had they kissed on that day in London. Now his kisses told her, as no words could have done, of a divided allegiance. She lay unresponsive, trembling in his arms, her eyes full of a wild, piteous questioning.... With a sudden sense of self-loathing and shame he released her from his arms. "Well?" he said sullenly. "Well, Jane?" but he knew what her answer would and must be. "I can't do what you wish, Hew. I don't think that either of us would be happy now--if we did that." She spoke in a quiet, restrained voice. She was too miserable, too deeply humiliated, for tears. Together they walked out of the summer house and retraced their steps along the ridge. "As I cannot do what you wish, would you like me to end our engagement?" He turned on her fiercely. "I did not think," he cried, "that there lived a woman in the world who could be as cruel as you have been to me to-night!" "I did not mean to be cruel," she said mournfully. "Unless you wish to drive me to the devil, don't speak like that again," he said violently. "Promise me, I mean, that you won't think of breaking our engagement." She made no answer, and a few moments later in a gentler tone he asked, "Can't you understand, Jane?" She said humbly, "I try to understand." A great and a healing flood of tenderness filled her heart, and as if the spiritual tie between them was indeed of so close a nature that Lingard felt her softening for the first time put his hand in hers. "Jane," he said huskily, "forgive me. Try to forget to-night." So they walked in silence, hand in hand, through the solitary lane and the now lighted streets of Redyford, uncaring of the few passers-by. But when they came to the park gates Lingard withdrew his hand from hers, and at the door of the Garden Room he left her. "I won't come in yet," he said abruptly, and turning on his heel he disappeared into the night. * * * * * And with Jane's going something good and noble in Lingard went too, and as he walked into the darkness he lashed himself into a sea of deep injury and pain. His heart filled with anger rather than with shame when he evoked the look almost of aversion, of protesting anguish, which had come into her face while his lips had sought and found unresponsive her sweet, tremulous mouth. He had been longing, craving, for that which he had now only the right to demand from her, and she had cruelly repulsed him. How amazing that a fortnight--or was it three weeks?--could have so altered a woman! Even now the memory of those days they had spent together immediately on his return home was dear and sacred to him. Could he have been mistaken,--such was the question he asked himself to-night,--in his belief that Jane Oglander had been exquisitely sensitive, responsive as are few human beings to every high demand of love? Was it that his unspoken, unconfessed treachery had killed, obliterated in her the power of response? Nay, it was far more likely that he had made a mistake,--that the woman he loved was cold, as many tender women are cold, temperamentally incapable of that fusion of soul and body which is the essence of love between a man and a woman. Had he not discovered this lack in Jane through his contact with a very different nature--with one who was full of quick, warm-blooded, generous impulses? Athena Maule might do foolish things,--she had admitted to him that more than once she had been tempted to do wild, reckless things,--but it was only her heart that would lead her astray. The man in Lingard, knowing as he thought the hidden truth which underlay her story, felt full of burning sympathy. As he at last walked back to the house, it was pleasant to him to feel that he would be able to forget the painful, the humiliating hour he had gone through with the woman who was to be his wife, in the company of Athena Maule. * * * * * Athena was in her boudoir. She had been there alone for two hours, and they had been hours filled with impatient revolt and anxiety. After Mrs. Pache had gone Athena had tried to find first Jane, and then Lingard. Then Dick Wantele, meeting her, had casually observed that the two others had gone out for a long walk. Jane and Lingard out together beyond her ken and pursuit? The knowledge stabbed her. Athena was convinced, aye quite honestly convinced, that these two, her friends both of them, were ill-suited the one to the other. She felt the breach between herself and Jane, and it hurt her the more because she had done nothing--nothing to deserve that Jane should avoid her as she sometimes felt sure Jane was doing. It was not her fault if General Lingard was gradually coming to see the terrible mistake he had made. But to-night, while waiting, too excited, too impatient to do anything but sit and stare into the fire, she told herself that she was also disappointed in Lingard. What a strange, peculiar man he was! Since the night before Jane Oglander's arrival he had said nothing--nothing that is, that all the world might not have heard. And yet she could not mistake his thraldom. If nothing else had proved it, Dick Wantele's behaviour would have done so. Twice in the last few days Dick had made a strong, a meaning, appeal to Athena to leave Rede Place. Her heart swelled at the thought of Dick's discourtesy and unkindness. She even wondered if he had dared to say anything to Lingard. During the last two days Lingard had certainly avoided finding himself alone with her.... The only one of them all who seemed perfectly at ease, and who was as usual absorbed in his own selfish ills and in his dull books, was Richard. Fortunately he took up a great deal of Jane's time. * * * * * At last, when it was nearly seven o'clock, the door opened, and Lingard came in. He had instinctively made his way to her, without stopping to think whether he were wise or no in what he was doing. During the last two days, putting a strong restraint on himself, he had avoided Athena, and his strange request to Jane, his pleading for an immediate marriage, had been the outcome of the state in which he found himself. But now everything was changed. Jane had denied him, and he felt an imperative need of the kind, comfortable words Athena would lavish on him. He was sick of lies--of the lies he had told himself. He hungered for Athena's presence. What an unmannerly brute she must have thought him, to have avoided her as he had done, all that day and all the day before! Very gently she bade him sit down, and in some subtle fashion she ministered to Lingard in a way that restored to a certain extent his feeling of self-respect. And then at last, when secure that there would be no interruptions, for the dinner bell had rung some moments before, she leant forward and said slowly, "Is something the matter? Is anything troubling you, Hew? Is it a matter in which I can help?" She desired above all things that he should speak to her of Jane Oglander. But her wish was not to be gratified. "Everything is troubling me," he said sombrely. "Everything!" She moved a little nearer to him. Her hand lay close to his. Suddenly he took her hand and held it. "I loathe myself," he said in a low voice. "I needn't tell you the reason why, Athena,--you know, you understand----" "Ah! Yes--I understand," there was a thrill in her voice. "How often I have felt ashamed of my own longing--of my longing to be free!" It was a bow at a venture. He looked at her with dazed eyes. That was not what he had meant. Then suddenly he caught fire from her thin flame. "If you were free?" he repeated thickly. "I wish to God, Athena, that you were free----" She withdrew her hand from his, and got up. "It's nearly eight o'clock," she said quietly. "We must go up and dress now." CHAPTER XII "There's not a crime But takes its proper change still out in crime If once rung on the counter of this world." All that night Athena lay awake. Her brain was extraordinarily alive. She had not had so bad a bout of wakefulness for years. If only she were free! She lay wondering what Lingard had meant by those words--words which she had put into his mouth, and which he had uttered in the thick tones of a man who has lost control of himself, and who speaks scarce knowing what he says. In the world in which Mrs. Maule lived when she was not at Rede Place, it was a firmly-established belief that those unhappily or unsuitably married could, by making a determined effort, strike off their fetters. And in this connection it had been gradually borne in upon her that the good old proverb which declares that where there's a will there's a way is, in the England of to-day, peculiarly true of everything that pertains to the marital relations of men and women. The question had never before touched her nearly, and Athena as a rule only concerned herself with what did touch her nearly. However much she chafed against the bonds which bound her to Richard Maule, the thought that she, Mrs. Maule of Rede Place, should join the crowd of ambiguous women who are neither maids, nor wives, nor widows, was unthinkable. Her day, so she often secretly reasoned with herself, would come later--after Richard's death. At the time of their marriage he had made magnificent, absurdly magnificent settlements. He could do nothing to alter that fact; so much she had been at some pains to ascertain. Meanwhile, she made the best she could of life. But now, with a dramatic suddenness which strongly appealed to her calculating and yet undisciplined nature--an unlooked for piece of good fortune had come her way. Were she free, or within reasonable sight of freedom, the kind of life for which she now longed passionately was almost certainly within her grasp. Lingard the man roused in Athena Maule none of that indescribable sensation, part physical, part mental, which she had at first thought, nay hoped, he would do. But that, so she told herself with unconscious cynicism, was a fortunate thing. She had now set her whole heart on being Lingard's wife,--only to secure that end would she be Lingard's lover. Her wild oats were sown. Never more would she allow herself to become the prey of passion,--that "creature of poignant thirst and exquisite hunger...." She gave but a very fleeting thought to Lingard's engagement to Jane Oglander. Engagements are perpetually made and broken, and fortunately this particular engagement had not even been publicly announced. No; what deeply troubled her, what stood in the way of the fruition of her desire was--Richard, the man who had so slight a hold on life, and yet who seemed so tenacious of that which had surely lost all savour. In the darkness of the night, the pallid face of Athena's husband rose before her,--cruel, watchful, streaked, as it so often was when Richard looked her way, with contempt as well as hatred. How amazingly Richard had altered in the ten years she had known him, and in nothing more than in the expression of his face, which she now visioned with such horrible vividness! In old days Richard Maule had had a handsome, dreamy, placid face,--the kind of profile which looks to great advantage on a cameo or medal. Now, as Athena often told herself, it was the face of a suffering devil, and of a devil, alas! who looked as if he would never die. But the days when she had measured anxiously the span of Richard's life were past. Athena, now, could not afford to wait for her husband's death; she must find some other way to freedom. There was a story which had remained imprinted for two years--or was it three?--on the tablets of Mrs. Maule's memory, and this was the more strange, the more significant, because she had not come across the case in any direct way. All she could remember of the affair--luckily she had a very good memory for such things--had been told her by a certain Mrs. Stanwood, who was noted for her extraordinary knowledge of other people's business, and for whom Athena had never had any particular liking. But now the idle words of this casual acquaintance became tremendously significant, pregnant with vital issues. She sat up in the darkness and pressed her hands against her face in her effort to recapture every word of what had been at the time so unimportant a piece of gossip. The story had been told her at Ranelagh. She could still see the low-ceilinged entrance hall where the eagerly whispered words had been uttered. They were standing together, Athena and Maud Stanwood, waiting for the rest of their party, when there had swept by them a pretty, well-dressed, tired-looking woman. Suddenly, a man had come forward and the two for a moment met face to face. Then, with a muttered word of apology, the man passed on. Mrs. Stanwood clutched Athena's arm. "Do look at them!" she whispered. "How very dramatic! I wonder if this is the first time they have met since the case!" And Athena obediently stared at the pretty, tired-looking woman; the man had disappeared. "Who is she? Who are they? What case do you mean?" she asked. And the other answered provokingly, "Surely you remember all about it?" "But I don't remember. Please tell me? Was it a divorce case?" Athena spoke a little pettishly. "Divorce? Oh, _no_! Something quite different. Why, if she had been divorced she would not be here. No, no; their marriage was annulled. The case made quite a talk because they had been married so long--I believe fourteen years. I was at the wedding. She was such a pretty bride. Of course she married again--the other man. But it's rather bad taste of her to come here now, for she used to be here a good deal with him--I mean with her first husband." Athena, amused with the tale, had pressed the other to tell her all about it, and Mrs. Stanwood, nothing loth, had proceeded to do so, quoting similar cases, and intimating, with the shrewdness which always distinguished her, how odd it was that more childless women didn't have recourse to so easy, so reputable a way of ridding themselves of dull and undesirable husbands! A sensation of intense relief, nay more, of triumphant satisfaction, stole into Athena's heart. What that woman, that nervous, pretty, faded-looking woman, had done after fourteen years of marriage, Athena could certainly do now. No one looking at Richard--at that poor, miserable wreck of a man--could doubt that Mrs. Maule had a right to her freedom. "If only you were free!" She was not quite sure in what sense Lingard had uttered those memorable words, but it was enough for her that he could, if necessary, be reminded of having said them. Once she were indeed free, Lingard, so Athena felt comfortably sure, would not need to be so reminded. Nature, so unkind to woman, has given her one great advantage over man. She can, while herself remaining calm, rouse in him a whirlwind of tempestuous emotion. Many a time in the last few years Mrs. Maule had heard the cry, "If only you were free!" but, while listening with downcast eyes to the hopeless wish, she had known well that the speaker did not really mean what he said, or if he meant it--poor Bayworth Kaye had meant it--then he was, like Bayworth, ineligible, or if eligible as a lover, absurdly ineligible as a husband. Her acute, subtle mind, trained from childhood only to concentrate itself on those problems which affected, or might affect, herself, turned to the lesser problem of Jane Oglander. Jane Oglander was an obstacle. Far less an one than Richard, but still likely to be a formidable obstacle owing to Lingard's strained sense of honour. So much must be frankly admitted. But it would be a mistake to make too much of Jane. Once Jane realised how unsuited she was to become Hew Lingard's wife, she would draw back--of that Athena felt assured. But how could Jane be brought to understand? Would Lingard himself ever allow her to see the truth, or would the task fall to her--to Athena? If what the world now thought were true, Hew Lingard might hope to rise to almost any eminence in the delightful, the glorious career of arms. But for that, and again Athena was quite sincere with herself, he would need to have by his side a clever and brilliant woman, without whose help he might find himself shelved as many another man of action has been. It was this fact that someone ought to convey to poor Jane Oglander. Within the last few months, by merely saying a word to a distinguished personage at the War Office, Mrs. Maule had been able, so she quite believed, to advance Bayworth Kaye materially--to procure him, that is, a post on which he had set his heart, and for which he was eminently fitted. The official in question had been extremely cautious, not to say cold, during their little conversation, but a week or two later Athena had been gratified to receive from the great man a pretty little note in which he had informed her that her protégé--as he called poor Bayworth--was going, after all, to be given the post for which he was so admirably qualified. Athena had no reason to under-estimate her powers. The average man always, and the exceptional man generally, capitulated at once. Even politicians were indulgent to her ignorance, nay more, amused by her lack of knowledge of British public affairs. But Athena was now coming to see the value of such knowledge. Since the arrival of General Lingard, she had realised that there were all sorts of things which ordinary women--such women as Jane Oglander and Mabel Digby--know, but which she had never taken the trouble to learn. Lingard had already taught her a good deal. She had early adopted the excellent principle, when with a man, of allowing him to talk, especially when the subject was one about which she knew little or nothing. Lingard would have been amazed indeed had he known that a fortnight ago Athena Maule had scarcely heard of these subjects--so vitally interesting to those concerned with the expansion of our Empire in Africa--about which she now questioned him so intelligently. * * * * * The next day opened with very ill news--the news that Bayworth Kaye was dead. As is the way in the country, the servants heard the bare fact some time before it reached their betters. It formed the subject of discussion in the servants' hall on the previous evening, for the fatal telegram had reached the rectory at seven o'clock, and its contents had made their way, first to the stables of Rede Place, and from thence to the house half an hour later, at the very time Lingard was echoing Athena's words, "If only you were free!" "You'll 'ave to tell her when you go in with the cup of tea," observed Mr. Maule's valet to Mrs. Maule's French maid, Félicie. But the woman shrugged her shoulders, with a "Ma foi, non!" They had all wondered, with sighs and mysterious winks, how Mrs. Maule would take the news. The Corsican chef expressed great concern. "Ce pauvre jeune homme est mort d'amour!" he exclaimed to Félicie, and she nodded solemnly, explaining and expanding his remark to the others. "Gammon! An Englishman--an officer and a gentleman--don't die of such a thing as love," the butler said scornfully, and Félicie again had shrugged her shoulders. What did these unimaginative barbarians know of the tender passion?--nothing, save when it touched their own sluggish souls and bodies. Poor Monsieur Bayworth--so young, so gallant, always kindly and civil to Félicie herself. So unlike that prude, his mamma! Félicie had but one regret--that she had never seen Monsieur Bayworth in uniform. Wantele was told the next morning. Bayworth Kaye--Bayworth, whom he had known with an affectionate, kindly knowledge from his birth upwards--dead? He felt a sharp pang remembering how coldly he and the young man had said good-bye less than a month ago. After all, it was not Bayworth who had been to blame for all that had happened during the last year.... He came down to breakfast hoping that the news which he had himself learnt but a few moments before was already known to Athena. If that were the case, she would probably stay upstairs. Breakfast in bed is one of the many agreeable privileges civilised life offers woman. Only since General Lingard had been staying at Rede Place had Mrs. Maule come down each morning. She had evidently begun doing so during those three days which had laid so solid a foundation to her friendship with Lingard. But if Athena were still in ignorance of young Kaye's death, then to him, Wantele, must fall the painful, the odious, task of telling her. He could not be so cruel as to allow her to discover the fact from the morning papers. Of late--and again Dick traced a connection between the fact and Lingard's presence at Rede Place--Mrs. Maule generally glanced over one of the papers before opening her letters. Lingard came into the dining-room, and then, a moment after, Mrs. Maule and Jane Oglander together. Wantele glanced quickly at his cousin's wife. With relief he told himself that Athena had heard the melancholy news. She looked ill and tired, her eyelids were red, her beauty curiously obscured. She came up languidly to the breakfast table, and Lingard looked at her solicitously. She put out her hand and let it rest for a moment in his grasp. Her hand was cold, and he muttered a word of concern. "I couldn't sleep," she said. "I shall have to take chloral again--it's the only vice Richard and I ever had in common!" Lingard turned abruptly away. It had become disagreeable to him to hear her utter Richard Maule's name. And Athena felt suddenly discomfited. The plans she had made in the night became remote from reality. She sat down and her eyes began following Lingard. He was waiting on Jane, taking trouble to get Jane what he supposed she liked to eat--and leaving her, Athena, his hostess, to Dick Wantele's care. So far, she had never had the power to make Lingard neglect Jane in those small material things which mean so much to some women and so little to others. Personal service meant a great deal to Athena Maule. The sight of Lingard and Jane Oglander together was becoming unendurable to her. "D'ye know, Dick, if there's any more news of Bayworth Kaye?" It was Jane who spoke. She also felt ill and tired; she also had not slept that night; but Lingard's anxious look and muttered word of concern had not been for her. True, he was "looking after her" now, bringing her food she had no wish to eat, making her--and what a mockery it was--his special care. But what was this that Dick was saying in so hushed a voice, in answer to her idle question? "Yes, I'm sorry to say there is news--bad news." The speaker was intensely conscious of Athena's presence. Did she know, or did she not know, what he was about to say? He added slowly, "Poor Bayworth Kaye is dead." Jane uttered an exclamation of horror and concern. Athena said nothing; but she took a piece of toast out of the tiny rack in front of her plate, and began crumbling it in her hand. "Yes, it's a terrible thing"--Wantele was now speaking to Lingard. "The poor fellow was an only son--indeed, an only child. We've known him all his life. It will be a shock to Richard----" He talked on, and still Athena remained silent. But when at last Jane turned to her with, "I suppose you will be going down to the rectory this morning?" Mrs. Maule threw back her head and spoke with a touch of angry excitement in her voice:-- "Why did you tell me now, Dick, before breakfast? You've made me miserable--miserable! You know I hate being told of anyone's death. I hate death! No, I shan't go to the rectory--you can go, Jane, and say all that should be said from Richard and from me." Lingard looked severely at Wantele. How stupid, how heartless, the young man was always showing himself! Why had he hastened to tell sad news which he must have known would so much distress Athena and Jane Oglander? "I'm so sorry! I was afraid you would see it in one of the papers," Wantele spoke as if he did indeed repent of his cruel lack of thought. Athena accepted his apology in silence. After a while she turned to her guest:-- "I wish you had met poor Bayworth Kaye," she said musingly, "he was just the sort of man you would have liked. He was tremendously keen----" Then she stopped short; looking up she had met Dick Wantele's light-coloured eyes fixed on her face with an expression of--was it extreme surprise or angry disgust? She looked straight at him: "Don't you agree, Dick?" "Yes, yes," he said hastily, "I certainly agree," and his eyes wavered and fell before her frank, questioning gaze. CHAPTER XIII "L'amour et la douleur sont parallels Ces deux lignes-là vont à jamais ensemble." Owing to the peculiar conditions of his life, a life led almost entirely apart from the rest of his household, Richard Maule seldom had occasion to see Hew Lingard and Athena together. But the owner of Rede Place always realised a great deal more of what was going on than those about him credited him with doing, and on his wife he kept a constant, secret watch of which she alone became sometimes uncomfortably aware. As the fine autumn days--to the stricken man the pleasantest time of the year--wore themselves away, Richard Maule grew particularly kind and considerate to Jane Oglander. He was very susceptible to the physical condition of those about him, and he noticed that she had altered strangely during the short time she had been at Rede Place. She was pale and listless; and often when with him she sat doing nothing, saying nothing. Every time they were alone together--and that now was very often--the past came back to Richard Maule, especially that time of his life when he lay ill to death eight years ago in Italy. Looking furtively at her strained, unhappy face, he would recall the agony of rage and despair in which he had lain at a time when he had been supposed by those about him to be absorbed in his physical condition--if indeed conscious of anything at all. In those days Athena had still preserved a simulacrum of regard, of affection for her husband, and when she came into his room, when she stood at the bottom of his bed looking with mingled repugnance and pity at his distorted face, he longed to rise and destroy the wanton who had been so adoringly loved and so wholly trusted. * * * * * They were sitting together now, Jane Oglander and Richard Maule, on the afternoon of the day which had opened with the news of Bayworth Kaye's death. It was warm and sunny, and the three others had gone out of doors after luncheon--for Dick Wantele, Athena was well aware of it, had fallen into the way of never leaving the other two alone together if he could possibly prevent it. Wantele could not understand Jane's attitude. Did she suspect her friend's treachery? He found it impossible to make up his mind one way or the other. In any case Jane and Lingard were not like normal lovers--but Wantele had lived long enough in the world to know that there is every variety of lover. Sometimes he thought Jane trusted Lingard so implicitly as to be still blind. A letter addressed to Miss Oglander was brought in to her. "It's from Mrs. Kaye," she said quickly. "May I open it, Richard?" She glanced through it:-- "Dear Miss Oglander" (it ran), "My husband and myself thank you sincerely for your kind words of sympathy. Had I known you were the bearer of your letter I would have seen you. I am writing to ask if you will do me a kindness. I know that General Lingard is staying at Rede Place, and I write to ask if it would be possible for me to see him on a matter of business connected with my son. I venture to ask if he will kindly come at eleven o'clock on Thursday. I cannot fix any time before that day. I should have written to Mr. Wantele, but as I had to answer your note, I thought I would ask you to arrange this for me." She told herself with quivering lip that of course Hew should go and see poor Mrs. Kaye. Hew was always kind. He would be patient and understanding with the unhappy woman. Jane got up. Perhaps she could go and settle the matter at once. She looked at Richard Maule. He was turning over the leaves of a book. Richard would not miss her. There came over her a despairing feeling that no one now needed her, in any dear and intimate sense.... Once she had asked her small vicarious favour of Hew, she could write to Mrs. Kaye, and take the note to the rectory herself. It would give her something to do, and just now Jane Oglander was in desperate need of things to do. Athena had said something of showing General Lingard the walled gardens which were all that remained of the old Tudor manor house from which Rede Place took its name, and which had been left by Theophilus Joy as a concession to English taste. It was there, some way from the house, that Jane made her way, and there that she at last found those she sought. Mrs. Maule had suddenly become alive to the many and varied outdoor beauties of her country home. All the nice women she knew were fond of gardening. It was the feminine fad of the moment, and one with which she had hitherto had very little sympathy. Athena sincerely believed herself to be devoted to flowers, but she preferred those varieties that look best cut and in water. Still, to be interested in her garden, and in what grew there, belonged to the part which was, for the moment, so much herself that she was scarcely conscious of playing it. Perhaps one reason why Mrs. Maule had never cared for gardening was because her husband's cousin was so exceedingly fond of it. The old gardens of Rede Place were to Wantele an ever-recurring pleasure, and, what counted far more in the life he had to lead, an infinitely various, as well as a congenial occupation. As Jane walked through an arch leading to the pear orchard, she saw that Dick was giving instructions to one of the gardeners; a small sack of bulbs lay at their feet. Hew Lingard and Athena Maule stood a little back, and as Jane came down the path, Mrs. Maule, instead of coming forward, moved further away. Instinct told her that Jane was seeking Hew Lingard with some definite purpose in her mind--and she determined to thwart the other woman. To allow Hew Lingard to continue his anxious deference to Jane were but cruel kindness to them both. She put out her gloveless hand and laid a finger on Lingard's arm--it was the merest touch, but it produced an instant, a magical effect. He turned, and in a moment gave her his entire, his ardently entire, attention. Wantele welcomed Jane with an eager, "What would you think, Jane, of putting a mass of starch hyacinths over in that corner?" She tried obediently to give her mind to the question, but it was of no use, and she shook her head. "I don't know," she said. "I--I can't remember what was there before----" And then she called out, "Hew!" But Lingard did not hear the call. She moved a little nearer to where he and Athena were standing. Again she said her lover's name; but this time she uttered it in so low, so faltering a tone that Lingard might indeed have been excused for not hearing it. She waited a moment for the answer that did not come, and then she turned and walked slowly away, down to and through the arch in the wall. To Wantele, witness of the little scene, what had just happened seemed full of a profound and sinister significance. As he had heard Jane Oglander utter Lingard's name, he had told himself that he would have heard her voice--had it been calling "Dick"--across the world. But Lingard was deaf to everything, to everybody, but Athena. He had become her thrall. With a last muttered word of instruction to the gardener, Wantele turned and hurried out of the orchard. He glanced anxiously down each of the straight walks, and peered through the leafless fruit-trees. It was clear that Jane had already passed out of the walled gardens, and that she had taken the shortest way of escape. He started in pursuit, his one desire being--in some ways Wantele was very like a woman in his dealings with his beloved--to assuage her pain, to lighten her humiliation.... Suddenly he saw her. She was standing on a little pier which jutted rather far out into the lake. Her slight figure was reflected into the water, now dotted with yellow leaves, and she was staring down into the blue, golden-flecked depths. Wantele felt afraid to call out, so perilously near was she to the unguarded edge. He began walking quickly along the path which, circling round the oval piece of water, led to the pier, and Jane, looking up, became aware that he was there. Without speaking, she turned and made her way along the rough boards. Nothing was changed since yesterday, since this morning, and yet in a sense Wantele felt that everything was changed. Till now he had been doubtful as to what she knew--almost of what there was to know. He distrusted, with reason, his sharp, intolerable jealousy of Lingard. He had spent a miserable hour after he had himself speeded the two to the Oakhanger. There are no relations so difficult to probe as the relations of lovers--even of those who have been and are no longer lovers. Jane put out her hand as if they had not met before that day, and Dick took the poor cold hand in his and held it tightly for a moment before he dropped it. "D'you know what to-day is?" she asked abruptly. "I hadn't meant to remind you of it, Dick--dear, kind Dick. To-day is the twenty-fifth of October, the day my brother died." He uttered an exclamation of dismay, self-rebuke. How could he have forgotten? So well had he remembered the date last year that he had written and urged Jane to come to Rede Place, and on her refusal to do so he had gone up to London for two or three days; together they had made the long, the interminable, journey to the suburban churchyard where Jack Oglander had been buried. Wantele's mind went back six years to that melancholy, that sordid, scene in the prison infirmary. They had sent the sister away, reassured her, told her there was a change for the better. And then suddenly young Oglander had sunk--but he, Wantele, had been there, with him.... She was speaking again, in a low musing tone:-- "It's so strange----" she said, and then amended her words--"Isn't it strange that death is so material, so horribly real a thing? It seems so hard that there has to be so much fuss. If only one could slip away into nothingness how much better it would be, Dick--wouldn't it?" Her mind swung back to her brother. There came a gentler, a softer tone in her sad voice. "I wonder if you remember that you were the only one who did not bid me rejoice that Jack was dead. I have never forgotten that. And you were right, Dick. It was a great misfortune for me that he died. He would have been out of prison by now--and we should have been together, abroad----He was so clever, I think we should have been able to make some kind of life--and you would have come and stayed with us sometimes----But it's no use talking like that, is it? I know I'm foolish, unreasonable, to-day, and you are the only person to whom I ever talk of Jack." She was putting up her dead brother as a shield between herself and her distress, and Wantele respected the poor subterfuge. "I know, I know," he said feelingly. They walked on in silence for a while, then. "I think, Dick, that I had better go away." "No, no!" he cried. "Don't do that, Jane! Believe me, that would be a very unwise thing to do. I take it that you and General Lingard"--he brought out the name of her betrothed with an effort--"have other joint visits to pay?" She shook her head. "I haven't told anybody. Only the Paches know. He thought he ought to tell them." "If you go away, Jane, he will almost certainly stay on here. It would be a pity for him to do that," Wantele spoke with studied calmness. "Yes, I suppose it would," the colour rushed into her face. "I want to tell you something, Dick. Hew was very noble about my brother. I told him about it very soon after we first met one another. You see we became friends so soon----" She sighed. "Just friends, you know." Wantele turned and looked into her face with an indefinable expression of shamed curiosity--an expression that seemed to ask a thousand questions he had no right to ask. "And then he began to write to me," she went on rather breathlessly, as if answering some inward questioning of her own rather than of his. "I was amazed when I received his first letter--it seemed such a strange thing for him to write to me, and then he asked if he might come and see me before he went away." She waited a moment, and went on, "I was the only person to whom he wrote while he was away. He's had a very lonely life, Dick,--no brothers, no sisters, and his mother died when he was a little child." There was a world of anxious apology, of excuse, underlying her confidences. When, at last, they went back into the house, they found General Lingard sitting with his host, and it was in Richard Maule's presence that Jane made her request--a request to which Lingard gave eager assent. Of course he would go and see Mrs. Kaye, and bestir himself concerning her son's affairs! He had been very much struck by Mrs. Maule's account of Bayworth Kaye that morning. She had said other things of him to Lingard, but he naturally made no allusion to these when discussing his coming interview with Mrs. Kaye. Athena had told Lingard, with angry scorn, of the way certain people in the neighbourhood had talked of her friendship with the young soldier, and he had felt that inarticulate rage and disgust which any decent man would have felt on receiving Athena's confidences. Lingard's opinion of the world had altered, and greatly for the worse, since he had made Mrs. Maule's acquaintance. CHAPTER XIV "Opportunity creates a sinner: at least it calls him into action, and like the warming sun invites the sleeping serpent from its hole." The dramas of love, of jealousy, of hatred, which play so awful a part in human existence, only form eddies, perhaps it would be more true to say whirlpools, on the vast placid current of life. The owners of Rede Place were not allowed to forget for long that in General Lingard they were entertaining a guest who belonged to the world at large, rather than to them or to himself. It had been arranged that the next day, the twenty-sixth of October, Wantele was to take Lingard to a big shoot. Athena, when reminded of the fact by a casual word the night before, felt curiously pleased. The absence of the two men for a long day would relieve the strain, and make it possible for her to have a serious talk with Jane Oglander. Somehow, it seemed almost impossible to do so with Wantele and Lingard always about. Athena was no coward, and the time had come when she felt she must discover what her friend knew, or rather, what her friend suspected--for as yet there was very little to know. And if Jane suspected the truth--the little, that is, there was to suspect--she must discover what Jane meant to do. The men made an early start, and from one of her bedroom windows Mrs. Maule watched the dogcart spinning down the broad road through the park. Dick Wantele was driving; Hew Lingard sitting stiffly, with folded arms, by his side. At last they turned the corner at the end of the avenue, and Athena went back to bed with the feeling that it was pleasant to know that she need not get up for another two hours, and also that, after her talk with Jane Oglander, she would be free to do what she liked all day. As she lay back, feeling a little stupid and drowsy, for she had taken a dose of chloral the night before, Athena gave a regretful, kindly thought to Bayworth Kaye. Yes, though no one knew it but herself, the gods had shown the young man that kindness which is said to prove their love. His only fault as a lover--a serious one from Mrs. Maule's point of view--had been an almost insane jealousy. He would have taken badly, perhaps very badly, her marriage to such a man as General Lingard. It was well for Bayworth, and, in a lesser sense, well for her also, that he had died in this sad, sudden way. Death is the only final, as it is the only simple, solution of many a painful riddle. Athena had not allowed the thought of Bayworth Kaye to trouble her unduly; but she had been uncomfortably aware that he might remain, for a long time, a point of danger in her life. She acknowledged that in the matter of this young man she had been imprudent, but he had come across her at a moment when she was feeling dull and "under the weather." Poor Bayworth! He had taken the whole thing far too seriously. He had been so young, so ardent, so--so grateful. His death at this juncture was a relief. Athena paid his memory the tribute of a sigh. And then she turned her thoughts to Jane Oglander. During the last few years she had had many proofs of Jane's deep and loyal affection for herself; but the type of woman to which Mrs. Maule belonged can never form any true intimacy with a member of her own sex. Jane had always been ignorant of everything that concerned Athena's real inward life--the vivid, exciting, emotional life, which she lived when away from Rede Place. Bayworth Kaye had been the one exception to the wise rule she had made for herself very soon after her arrival in England. Jane Oglander, so Athena was quite convinced, knew nothing of the greatest of the great human games--had never fallen a victim to that jealous, compelling passion which plays so tragic a part in the lives of most of those sentient human beings who are not absorbed in one of the other master-passions. For Mrs. Maule had valued Jane's unquestioning love; she had rested in the knowledge that Jane believed her to be as spotless a being as herself. Why, Jane had not even suspected poor Bayworth Kaye's infatuation! Athena forgot that Jane had never seen Bayworth and herself together. But though Mrs. Maule told Jane Oglander nothing of her own intimate concerns, she had taken it for granted that she knew all Jane's innocent secrets. And now, when musing over her coming conversation with her friend, she felt a sharp pang of irritation when she remembered how little Jane had really trusted her concerning Lingard. Why, she hadn't even told her of the correspondence between them! Jane Oglander, Athena was sorry to think of such a thing of one whom she had always set apart in her mind as an exception, had been--sly. Since the night of Jane Oglander's arrival at Rede Place, the night when Jane had behaved, so Athena now reminded herself, so queerly, the two women had never discussed Jane and Lingard's engagement--indeed, they hardly ever found themselves alone together. This, of course, was Jane's fault quite as much as hers. Now at last had come the opportunity to--to "have it out" with Jane; to defend herself, if need be, from any charge of disloyalty. * * * * * It took Mrs. Maule a considerable time to find her friend. Miss Oglander was in none of the usual living-rooms, neither was she in her own room or with Richard. Was it possible that Jane had gone off for the day to the Small Farm in order to avoid the very explanation Athena wished to provoke? That was a disturbing thought. And then, unexpectedly, she ran Jane to earth in a corner of the large library which only Dick Wantele habitually used, and which was at the extreme end of the house, furthest away from Mrs. Maule's boudoir. "I've been looking for you everywhere," she exclaimed. "What made you hide yourself here, Jane?" "Dick wanted something copied out of a book, and I thought I would do it now." There was a look of fear, of painful constraint, in Jane Oglander's face; and as she came forward she kept the book she had been holding, a manual on practical cottage architecture, in her hand, open. "There are such heaps of things I want to say to you, Jane, and somehow we never seem to have a moment!" Jane looked into Athena's face--it was a penetrating, questioning look. Was it possible--perhaps it was possible--that Athena was speaking in good faith? The other hurried on, a little breathlessly: "Of course I want to hear all about your plans. I know you mean to be married quietly in London----" She vaguely remembered that Jane had said something to that effect during their one conversation together. "But what will you do afterwards? Hew is not obliged to take up his new appointment yet, is he?" There was a long pause--and then, "I don't know exactly what he means to do," Jane answered in a low voice. They were both standing before the fireplace; Jane Oglander was looking straight at Athena, but Athena's lovely head was bent down. "Haven't you thought about it? But I suppose you'll pay some visits first." There was a touch of sharp envy in Athena Maule's voice. It was absurd, it was irritating, to think that Jane, even if only for a short time longer, would be Hew Lingard's companion, sharer in his triumphal progress--unless of course something could bring about the end of their engagement--soon. "I meant I did not know about his appointment." In each of the letters he had written to Jane during the ten days they had been apart, Hew Lingard had discussed the possibility of his being offered an immediate appointment, but she was only now being made aware that the offer had actually been made. As a matter of fact, it had not been made. Jane tried to believe that her ignorance of a fact so vital to Lingard was not in any way Athena's fault--indeed, that it was nobody's fault except perchance her own. "You mean you don't know whether he will accept what will be offered him? But, Jane, forgive my interference--he and I have become such friends--you must _make_ him take it. It would be a splendid thing, a stepping-stone to something really big. You'll have to train yourself now to be a little worldly----" Athena spoke with forced lightness. It would be dreadful if Jane in her folly made Lingard do anything which would be irrevocable. "You can't always live with your head in the clouds, you know!" Jane felt as if the other had struck her; this flippant, hard-voiced woman was not the Athena she had always known. "I don't suppose," said Mrs. Maule, at last looking up, and smiling into Jane's face, "that you've even made up your mind where you will spend your honeymoon?" She was feeling slightly ashamed,--ashamed and yet exhilarated by this absurd, make-believe conversation. Jane shut the book she held in her hand, and put it down. "Athena," she said quietly, "I did not mean to tell you yet, but now I think I had better do so. I am going to break my engagement. I see--of course I can't help seeing--that it's been a mistake from the beginning." "He was not good enough for you, Jane," said Mrs. Maule impulsively. "What he wants is a wife who will help him. You did not understand. I saw that from the first----" Jane went on quickly: "After all, men--and women, too, I suppose,--often do make that sort of mistake. It's a good thing when they find it out in time--as I have done. But I would rather not talk about it." She changed the subject abruptly: "I feel rather worried about Mabel Digby. She's really quite ill. I thought of lunching there to-day, if you have no objection." "Yes, do go there! Surely you know I always want you to do just what you like when you're here?" Athena's voice sounded oddly loud in her own ears. It seemed to her as if she had lost control over its modulations.... As the door of the library closed behind Jane Oglander, Athena Maule sat down. She felt oppressed, almost scared, by this piece of good fortune. She had never thought things would be made so easy for her. How mistaken she had been in Jane's attitude, not only to Hew Lingard, but to life! And how mistaken Lingard had been! Athena could not help feeling a certain contempt for him; but all men, so she reminded herself, are vain where women are concerned. They always put a far higher value on themselves than does the woman on whom they are wasting their pity, their--their remorse. Why, Jane had shown herself more than reasonable just now. She had made no stupid "fuss," attempted no disagreeable accusations. She hadn't even cried! But then, Jane Oglander was just--Jane; that is a sensible, a thoughtful, to tell truth, a cold creature! Athena, to be sure, had seen her moved, terribly so, over that business of her brother, but all the emotional side of the girl's nature had been exhausted over that sad affair. What Athena was beginning to long for with all the strength of her being had now entered the domain of immediate possibility. There would be some disagreeable, difficult moments to go through before she could become Hew Lingard's wife. Mrs. Richard Maule, sitting there in the library of Rede Place, faced that fact with the cool, calculating courage which was perhaps her chief asset in the battle of life. But she was popular, well liked by a large circle of people; she had little doubt that many of them would take her part--again she reminded herself that it would be very difficult for anyone to do anything else who, knowing her, had ever seen Richard Maule as he now was. She had heard of women doing far stranger things than that she was about to do in order to attain their wish. She tried to remember the two or three names Mrs. Stanwood had uttered in a similar connection--but they were gone, irretrievably gone from her memory. No matter, the position of a woman whose marriage has been dissolved is quite other than that of a divorcée. Little as she really knew of English sentiment and prejudice, Mrs. Maule could be sure of that. Athena's violet eyes grew tender. Hew Lingard respected as well as worshipped her; and should her dream, the delightful dream which was now taking such living shape, become reality, should she, that is, become Lingard's wife, she would never, never allow him to regret it. She renewed, and most solemnly, the vow she had taken two nights ago. Ah! yes indeed--her wild oats were all sown! Athena Lingard would be a very different woman from Athena Maule. Besides, as Lingard's wife she would be free of England for a while. She remembered vividly the day that he had casually told her that he expected an appointment abroad, for it had been the first time she had realised how utterly unsuited Jane was to be Lingard's wife. Athena possessed the confident belief in herself and in her own powers that every beautiful woman is apt early to acquire in her progress through an admiring world. Such a wife as herself would be of immeasurable use to such a man as was Hew Lingard. Of that she could have no doubt. Hew was not exactly a man of the world, in fact he seemed astonishingly indifferent to other people's opinion. Well, that told two ways. Just now, it was a good thing that he cared so little what others might say or think. Instinct told her that as long as he was at peace with his own conscience, his own sense of honour, Lingard would care mighty little what the world said--besides, the world would have nothing to say. They, she and Lingard, would have to be careful till the legal matter was settled--that was all. During the long hour that she sat alone in the library of Rede Place, Athena Maule had time to think of many things, for she was no longer anxious or excited now--everything was going well. The rest, to such a woman as herself, presented no real difficulty. She dwelt with a feeling of exultation on the thought of the punishment she was going to inflict on Richard. She wondered idly whether the step she was about to take would affect her marriage settlements. They had been splendid--with none of those tiresome "if and if clauses" that she was told settlements often contain. Well, that was a matter of comparatively small consequence. From what she knew of Lingard, it was unlikely that he would allow her to continue in receipt of another man's money. From a practical point of view it was a pity, of course, that Hew was like that, but she liked him the better for it. She could not, as yet, form any very definite plan of action. There was plenty of time for that now that Jane was out of the way. She would go to London--London was very pleasant at this time of year--and once there she would get one of her clever friends to recommend her a really good lawyer. Constructive thought--thought such as Athena had now been indulging in for an hour--is a fatiguing mental process. She felt tired, and quite ready for lunch, the principal meal of her day, when the gong sounded. But before going off to her solitary meal, Mrs. Maule went over to that portion of the library where were kept several rows of old law books that had belonged to Dick Wantele's father. She marked the place where stood a solid volume inscribed, "A Digest of the Marriage Laws of England." When she had a quiet hour to spare, and when no one was likely to see her engaged on the task, she would take that book down, and study it carefully: it doubtless contained information as to several matters of which she was as yet ignorant, and which it now behoved her to know. CHAPTER XV "... that supreme disintegrant, the Tyranny of Love...." The Small Farm had become dear to Jane during the long miserable days she had lived through in the last fortnight. She had gone there whenever she wanted to escape from the intolerable pain of seeing Lingard's absorption in Athena Maule. Each of the familiar rooms of Rede Place now held for her some bitter, some humiliating association. She never took refuge in her own room upstairs without remembering the long, intimate talk with Athena the evening of her arrival when she had been compelled to reveal more of her inner self than she had ever done in response to the other woman's curiously insistent, eager questioning. Yes, no doubt Athena was right. Hew Lingard probably regarded a suitable marriage as a necessity of his career. She, Jane, had misunderstood him from the very first, proving herself, so she told herself with shamed anguish, a romantic fool. In the region of the emotions there are certain secret ordeals which must be faced in solitude. Hew Lingard had taught Jane Oglander what love between a man and woman can come to mean. She had been ready not only to give all--but to receive all. This being so, she could not bring herself to endure the marriage of convenience she now believed to be all he sought of her. She would have given all the exquisite happiness of the last two years--happiness the greater and the more intense because it was so largely bred of her imagination--to blot out the week she and Lingard had spent together in London. It was during those days she had learnt to love him in the simple human way which now made the thought of parting agony. Unwittingly Lingard had done her a terrible mischief during those enchanted days. She felt as if he had stolen her from herself, rifling all the hidden chambers of her heart. She had given everything in exchange for what she had believed to be the great, the sacred, treasure of his love. And now he was scattering the treasure which she had thought hers at the feet of another woman who, she believed, had not sought it and to whom it was dross. She had heard of such enthralments--a blunderer had so tried to excuse, to explain to her, her brother Jack Oglander's crime. Yes, Jack had been mad about that woman he had killed; that had been the word used--mad. Mad? Jane Oglander, walking to the Small Farm, repeated the word--yes, Lingard had been made mad by Athena in much the same way as Jack had been made mad. When Lingard had implored her to marry him at once, during that hour on The Hanger, he had really been beseeching her to help him to escape. She saw that now--and perhaps, had she loved him less, she would have yielded. But there are moments when love, though the most dissembling of the passions, cannot lie. Jane Oglander, when in her lover's arms, could not accept as gold the baser metal he, perhaps unknowingly, pressed upon her. One thing remained to her. Nothing could take away from her the two years which had gone before. She had not yet destroyed, she did not feel that she need be called upon to destroy--until Lingard married some other woman--the letters he had written to her in those two years. She told herself that they had not been love letters, although to her simple heart they had seemed strangely like it. Any day during the past two years she might have opened a paper containing the news of Lingard's death. But if that of which she had had so sick a dread had happened, she would have had something dear, something intimately secret and sacred, to bear about with her, locked in the inner shrine of her heart, for the rest of her life. The present and the immediate future must be considered, and, as she had now told Athena of her decision, they must be considered to-day. She remembered the many broken engagements of which she had heard--Jane wondered if those other women had suffered as she was suffering now. The one thing she felt she could not do would be to go back to that little house in London, which to her would ever be filled with Hew Lingard--not Lingard as he was now, gloomy, preoccupied, avoiding her presence and yet painfully eager to obey her slightest wish--but Lingard the happy, the masterful lover who yet had been so tender, so patient with her. What did other people do when they broke off an engagement or--or were jilted? Jane tried to remember what she had heard such people did. One girl had been sent on a voyage round the world--another had refused to leave home, she had stayed and "faced it out." Fortunately she was not compelled to consider either of these alternatives. She was mistress of her own life, and she had already learnt the hard lesson that to deaden pain--heart pain--there is nothing like incessant, unending work. She made up her mind to go to another part of London, and start once more the salvage work which lay on the edge of the great sea strewn with human wreckage. But before Jane could do this, she must put an end to what had become, certainly to herself, and probably to Lingard also, an intolerable mockery. * * * * * Jane found Mabel Digby in bed; and the girl, though but little given to caresses, drew her down and laid her head on the other's kind breast. "Yes, it's true," she said, "I'm ill, and I don't know what's the matter with me"--she lifted her face and pushed her hair back from her forehead with a tired gesture. "No, I won't lie. I don't see why I should pretend--with you! I'm ill, Jane, because Bayworth Kaye is dead. I lie here thinking--thinking only of Bayworth. It's all so horrible--I mean that he should have died when he was so unhappy. I burnt all his letters the day he went away. You can't think how sorry I am now that I did that, Jane. There was nothing in them, they weren't love letters--at least I don't think so----" Jane gave a muffled cry of pain. "Jane, come nearer, and I'll tell you something which may make you think a little less poorly of me. Bayworth did speak to me three years ago, before he first went to India. I have never told anybody--not even his mother, though she was always trying to find out. And when he came back I was so happy--just for a few days--and then, almost at once, he fell into Athena's clutches----" And as she saw the other make a restless movement of recoil she added, "I suppose you don't believe me, but it's true--horribly true. I saw it all happening, but I could do nothing except feel miserable. I used to think--poor fool that I was--that everything would come right at the last. I thought she would get tired of him, and that I would get what was left." She broke into hard sobs. "She did get tired of him--but too late--too late for me!" "I wonder, Mabel, whether you would like me to come and stay with you for a few days." Jane felt that the way was at last opening before her. The grief, the angry pain, of the poor child now lying here before her soothed her sore heart. "Jane! What an unselfish angel you are!" Mabel did not see the other's almost vehement gesture of denial. "Of course it would be the greatest comfort to have you here!" Then, as the girl was nervously afraid that Jane should imagine her unwilling to speak of her engagement: "If you come here, I suppose General Lingard will leave Rede Place?" "Yes, I suppose he will." Mabel looked up. It seemed to her as if her own suffering was reflected, intensified, in Jane Oglander's sad eyes. If only she could stay on here now to-day--and not see Lingard again! Such was Jane Oglander's thought, but she lacked the cruel courage. Richard Maule would be hurt and angered were she thus to disappear suddenly. More, it might even make him suspect the truth--the truth as to Lingard's infatuation--of which Jane thought him ignorant. And so, when the dusk began to fall, she got up. Athena would be annoyed if she were not back by tea-time. Athena disliked very much being alone with her husband. "Good-bye, Mabel. You'll see me some time to-morrow." She hurried along the path through the trees and the bushes now stripped of leaves. She was oppressed, haunted, by the thought of Bayworth Kaye. Could Mabel Digby's story be true? Was Athena Maule a cruel, devouring Circe, lacking mercy, honour, shame? Jane could not think so. To believe what Mabel Digby had told her would have required a readjustment of her whole view and conception of a nature and character she had humbly admired and loved from early girlhood. Jane had always unquestioningly accepted Athena's account of the humiliations and the trials which befall beauty bereft of the care and devotion of beauty's natural protector. Mrs. Maule, so Jane believed, made an unwilling conquest of almost every man who came within her magic ring, but till now Jane had never seen the spell working.... When more than halfway to the house, she heard the sound of wheels. Dick Wantele and Hew Lingard were coming back an hour sooner than they were expected. She was glad it was so dark--but for that they must see her. She waited till the dogcart flashed past within two or three yards of the path on which she stood. It looked as if Wantele was urging his eager horse, already within sight of his stable, to go faster. Jane drew further into the underwood. She saw, as if the scene were actually before her, what would happen if she continued her way on into the house. Tea was now served in Athena's boudoir instead of in the Greek Room. There the four of them, Jane, Athena, and the two men, came together each afternoon. Dick never stayed long. After a few minutes he would go to Richard, leaving the others--a strange unnatural trio,--till Jane also escaped, sometimes to sit with her host, oftener to some place where she could be alone. This was what happened every day; and now she suddenly made up her mind that it should never happen again. It was her heart, her mind, which was sick and tired, not her body. It would do her good to go on walking till the time came when she could creep quietly into the house and go up to her room. Athena and Hew would think, if they thought of her at all, that she had stayed on for tea with Mabel Digby.... All at once, out of the darkness, she heard a familiar voice: "Hullo, Jane! You've managed to travel a good way in ten minutes. I don't think it is ten minutes since we drove by. I thought I'd lost you!" It was Dick Wantele, a little breathless, a little excited by the chase. "Then you saw I was there?" "I always see you, Jane." He spoke quite lightly, but Jane Oglander felt touched--horribly touched. The tears came into her eyes for the first time that day. Dick, and Dick's friendship, was all that remained to her--now. "Did it all go off quite right? Had you a good time?" she made a valiant effort to control herself. "A very good time! The duchess is most anxious General Lingard should go on straight there after leaving here." She felt the underlying, criticising dislike of Lingard in the tone in which Wantele uttered the words, and she felt troubled. Suddenly she stumbled, and her companion, putting out his thin hand, grasped her arm. "Jane," he said quickly, "wait a moment! It's not cold. I want to say something to you, and I'd rather say it out here, where no one can interrupt us, than indoors." He took his hand from her arm. "I trust to your--your kindness not to take offence." "I shan't be offended, but--but must you speak to me, Dick? I've been so grateful to you for not speaking." "Yes, I must speak. It's been cowardly of me not to do it before. It's about Lingard, Jane." He waited a moment, but she made no movement. "We are both agreed--at least, I suppose we are both agreed--that Lingard is taking the sort of adulation, the--the rather ridiculous homage, to which he is now being subjected, very well. But I don't think you realise, my dear,----" he waited a moment; never had he called Jane Oglander his dear before--"the effect on the real man--the extraordinarily disturbing, upsetting effect such an experience as that he is now going through is bound to have on any human being." "I don't quite understand what you mean," her voice faltered; and yet what he said brought vague comfort with it. "Well, it isn't very easy to explain. But I can't help thinking that one ought to be very merciful to a man who's being subjected to such an ordeal. Athena hasn't made it easier," he tried, and failed, to make the mention of his cousin's wife casual, easy. "Doubtless, without meaning it, Athena intensifies everything--she never allows Lingard to forget for a moment that he is a great man--a hero. You must remember that we had ten days--ten days of incessant glorification of Lingard before you arrived. He took it awfully well, but----" "I do know what you mean," she said painfully. "Yet surely----" she stopped abruptly. Not even with Wantele could she discuss--not even with him could she admit Hew Lingard's attitude to Athena Maule. "I want to tell you--perhaps I ought to have told you before, Dick,--that I've made up my mind to end my engagement." They walked on in silence for a few moments. "I suppose you realise what the effect of your doing this now will be on Lingard?" he said. "Mind you, Jane, I don't say that he doesn't deserve it! But I do say that if you do this you will drive him straight to the devil----" he waited a moment, but she made no answer to his words. "Have you told Athena?" Wantele was ashamed of the question, but burning curiosity and jealous pain impelled him to ask it. "Yes, I told her this morning. But, Dick, I want to tell you, I think I ought to tell you, that I don't----" she hesitated, hardly knowing how to frame her sentence--"I don't blame Athena. I'm sure she couldn't help what's happened." "You press very hardly on Lingard, Jane." He spoke with a terrible irony, but Jane did not understand. "No, no!" she cried, distressed. "I press hard on nobody, least of all on Hew." CHAPTER XVI "Quand le coeur reste fidèle, les vilenies du corps sont peu de chose. Quand le coeur a trahi, le reste n'est plus rien." Athena, sitting alone in the boudoir, heard the return of the two men; but she waited in vain for Lingard to come to her, as he always did come to her, with that blind longing for her presence which he was only now, with dawning consciousness, beginning to resist. To-night instinct, the wise instinct which always stood her in good stead in all her dealings with men, warned her against seeking him out. Mrs. Maule had no wish to make Lingard either an unwilling or even a willing accomplice in the scheme which was to result in their ultimate happiness. She had gone quite as far as she dared to go with him the night before. Treachery is one of the few burdens which a human being can bear better alone than in company. Athena realised that Lingard now regarded his violent, unreasoning attraction to herself as a thing of which to be mortally ashamed. But she was convinced that, once his engagement to Jane Oglander was at an end, he would "let himself go," especially if he was convinced that she, Athena, had been blameless. And her instinct served her truly. Lingard, in spite of, or perhaps because of, the long day spent away from Rede Place, was in no mood for a renewal of the sentimental dalliance to which Athena had accustomed him. What had happened--the quick exchange of words, his echo of Mrs. Maule's longing for freedom from a tie which she had led him to believe had ever lacked reality, had brought him, and roughly, to his bearings. The evening which had followed, spent in company with the two women--the woman to whom he owed allegiance, and whom he had held but a few hours before in his arms, and that other woman who had provoked the unreal words of which he was now ashamed, had contained some of the most odious moments of his life. He had hailed with intense relief the engagement which took him away for a whole day; and on his return he had gone straight to the sitting-room set apart for his use, his supposed work, and where, after the first two days of his stay under Richard Maule's roof, he had spent so little of his time. The rather elaborate apparatus connected with the book he was engaged in writing, filled him with contempt for himself. There were the maps, the books, the reports of his staff, his own rough notes, and--in a locked despatch-box--the long diary-letters he had written to Jane Oglander during the course of the Expedition. The man who is all man, whose nature lacks, that is, any admixture of femininity, is almost always without the dangerous gift of self-analysis. Such a man was Hew Lingard. All through his life he had always known exactly what he wanted, and when denied he had suffered as suffers a child, with a dumb and hopeless anger. It was this want of knowledge of himself that had ever made him ready to embark blindly in those perilous adventures of the soul in which the body plays so great a sub-conscious part. Now, for the first time in his life, Lingard did not know what he wanted, and the state in which he found himself induced a terrible and humiliating disquietude. His was the miserable state of mind of a man who finds himself on the point of becoming unfaithful to a wife who is still loved. Jane Oglander, even now, seemed in a most intimate sense part of himself. When he had seen her the first time--it had been in summer, in a garden--he had experienced the strange sensation that he had at last found the woman for whom he had been always seeking, and whom he had always known to be somewhere waiting, could he but find her. Almost at once he had told Jane that he loved her, and almost, even then, had he convinced her that it was true. He had not tried to bind her by any formal engagement, and he had kept to the spirit as well as to the letter of the law. The long diary-letters which he had written to her day by day, and which had reached her at such irregular intervals, were not in any obvious sense love-letters. He had felt that wherever he was she was there too, and sometimes, when he was in danger, and he was often in danger during those two years, the sense of Jane Oglander's spiritual nearness became curiously intensified. Now that they were together, under the same roof, she often seemed infinitely remote. Could he now have analysed his own emotions--which, perhaps fortunately for himself, he was incapable of doing--he would have known that his chance of being faithful to Jane would have been increased rather than decreased had they not spent together that week in London. He had come to Rede Place in a state of spiritual and physical exaltation which had made him peculiarly susceptible to any and every emotion, and for a time he had believed the feeling he was lavishing on Athena Maule to be pity--a passion of pity for one who had been most piteously used by fate. The physical exercise of the day's shooting, spent in a place entirely lacking the emotional atmosphere induced by Athena, had restored Lingard's sense of perspective. With a rather angry discomfiture he realised that he had become afraid of Mrs. Maule and of her power over him. For the first time since he had known her he had been free of Athena, and then, as he and Dick Wantele got nearer and nearer to Rede Place, it had almost seemed as if she were beckoning to him, and he had longed to respond to her call.... It had required a strong effort of will on his part to go straight upstairs instead of to the room where he knew her to be. For the first time in his life Lingard did not know what he wanted, or, rather, he was grievously aware that one side of his nature was imperiously demanding of him something he was determined not to grant. Last night he had thrown a sop to the ravening, hungry beast, but that, so he now swore to himself, should not happen again. It was seven o'clock when Athena heard a key being turned in the lock of the Garden Room, and her eyes quickly sought the place where her own key was always kept. It was in its place; Lingard always returned it with scrupulous care immediately after having used it. Then it must be Dick Wantele who was coming into the house. She wondered where he had been--perhaps to the Small Farm to fetch Jane Oglander. What a fool Dick was! And yet--and yet not such a fool after all. Dick, if he were patient--Athena smiled a little to herself--and he certainly would be patient, might yet be granted the wish of his heart. Jane Oglander's marriage to Dick Wantele, so Mrs. Maule now admitted to herself, would be a most excellent thing for them all. Yes--the two she would fain see become lovers had come in together; she could hear their voices in the corridor. And then, to her surprise, the door opened, and Wantele came in alone. Athena felt suddenly afraid--afraid and uncomfortable. She told herself angrily that her nerves were playing her odious tricks, for as Dick came towards her she had the sensation, almost the knowledge, that he longed to strike her, and it was a very odd, a very unpleasant, sensation. He came up close to her. "You know that Jane Oglander intends to break her engagement?" he said abruptly, and there was an angry, a menacing expression on his face. Athena regained complete possession of herself. She felt quite cool, ready to parry any attack. "Yes," she said quietly; "Jane told me this morning. I was surprised, but--not sorry, Dick." He made no answer, dealt her none of those quick, sarcastic retorts of which he was master. She looked at him fixedly. He had no business to come in and speak to her like that! "No one who knows and--and likes them both can think them suited to one another. You know that as well as I do, Dick." "I deny it absolutely," he cried, "and even if it were true I shouldn't care! Our business in this matter--yours and mine--is to stand by Jane. I take it that you won't deny that Jane loves Lingard?" And then he went on, without waiting for her assent: "Do you remember the letter she wrote to you--the letter you showed me? That showed how Jane felt--how she now feels." Her lips framed a sentence in answer, but she changed her mind and did not utter it. There was no object in making Dick angry, angrier than he already was; for Athena was well aware that Wantele was very, very angry with her. "And what do you think we can do?" she said slowly. "Look here, Athena." He tried to make his voice pleasant, conciliating--and he actually succeeded. Then he wasn't angry, she thought, after all. "This matter is much too serious for you and me to fence about it. I asked you a few days ago to go away--I ask it of you again. After all, what you are doing now can lead to nothing. Lingard must give you but very poor sport, and what is sport to you--eh, what, Athena?" She remained silent, listening to him with an odd look on her face. He ventured further: "I feel sure that you had no idea that the matter would become serious, and I agree that if Jane were a different sort of woman she would understand----" "Understand what?" she said haughtily. "Are you accusing me of breaking off Jane's engagement? I did not think, Dick, that even your dislike of me could go so far. Till she told me this morning, I had no idea she thought of doing such a thing." Wantele shrugged his shoulders, but he was determined not to lose his temper. "I don't accuse you," he said slowly, "and I don't wish to be unfair. We'll put it in another way, Athena. Lingard came--saw--was conquered! It's no use our discussing it at this time of day. Still less is it any use for you to try to deny it; you and I both know what happened. I think--nay, I'm quite sure--that if you were to go away, everything would come right between these two people." "And do you really wish everything to come right between Hew Lingard and Jane Oglander?" Athena looked at the man standing before her in a very singular manner. Her voice was charged with significance. He met her challenging look quite coolly. "Yes, I do wish it to come right," he said, "because I believe that it would be for Jane's ultimate happiness. Come, Athena, make an effort!" He spoke good-humouredly, as a grown-up person speaks to a spoilt child, and a cruel little devil entered into Mrs. Maule's mind. "Isn't it funny," she said lightly, "how Jane the Good, and I, Athena the Bad, always attract the same man? They don't always like us at the same time, but----" She stopped speaking, for Dick Wantele had turned and left the room, leaving the door open behind him, a thing he very seldom did. CHAPTER XVII "Nous devrions baiser les pantoufles de certaines femmes du côté où les pantoufles touchent à la terre, car en dedans ce serait tout au plus digne des anges." The long day came to an end at last. Jane felt a sense of almost physical relief in the knowledge that to-morrow night she would no longer be there, and yet she had not spoken of her decision to the others. For Athena Maule the day was not yet over. She waited till the house was sunk into darkness and stillness, and then, dismissing her maid, she put on a dressing-gown and went downstairs to the library. The book she had mentally marked down that morning was found by her in a moment; but instead of looking at it there she took it to her boudoir. It was possible that Wantele--Wantele who had been so rude and unkind to her this afternoon--might, like herself, feel wakeful, and come down to the library. With the heavy old law book in her arms, she made her way through the now dark corridor which ran the whole length of Rede Place till she reached her own sitting-room, and there, before turning up the light, she locked the door. Then she sat down, and drawing forward a little table she spread the book out open before her. The dying wood fire suddenly burst into flame; Athena looked round her. She wondered if she would ever have so pretty a room again. There was no hurry; she knew all that it was really necessary for her to know, thanks to Maud Stanwood's idle words. Maud Stanwood? What would Maud Stanwood say of her when she heard what Mrs. Maule was about to do? So wondering, Athena suddenly made up her mind that there would be no necessity for her to go on knowing that lady. A woman who talked as Maud Stanwood talked would be no friend for General Lingard's wife! The important thing--the one thing she must find out, and that this book would doubtless tell her--was how long a period must elapse after the dissolution of her marriage to Richard Maule before any second marriage contracted by her would be legal. She was aware that after a divorce a full six months must elapse between the Nisi and the Absolute; also that it was actually left to the good feeling of the offended party--that was very unfair--as to whether the decree should be made absolute at all. Athena felt a tremor of fear. It would indeed be an awful thing if she put it into Richard's power to leave her in the disagreeable, the ridiculous, position of being neither married nor single. But thanks to the excellent index of this useful work on the marriage laws of England, it only took Mrs. Maule a very few moments to discover that in this important matter her fear was quite groundless. Once judgment was given--once, that is, a marriage was dissolved--there was no impediment to an immediate remarriage on the part of the injured party. She looked up and gave a long, unconscious sigh of relief. There had been a secret, unacknowledged terror in her heart, that she might find, now at the last moment, some hidden snag. Sitting back in her straight, carved Italian chair, she began to make a mental list of her large circle of acquaintances. Which of them would give her shelter during the weeks, nay the months, that must perhaps elapse before she would be free? Mrs. Maule had but one intimate friend--that friend was Jane Oglander. She had little doubt that as soon as the painful business of the engagement was over, she and Jane would return to their old terms of unquestioning affection. What a pity it was that Hew Lingard's rather absurd conscience and his--well, his sense of delicacy, would make any arrangement with Jane impossible! However, she knew several good-natured women who might help her through such a pass--especially if she could venture to whisper the truth as to what the future held for her.... But there were certain other facts it would be well for her to know before taking so important a step as that of consulting a lawyer. Athena Maule did not believe in trusting people too much. Bending once more over the table, she set herself seriously to study the sense of the dry and yet very clearly expressed chapter containing the information she sought. And then, as she read on, slowly mastering the legal phraseology, conning over the cases quoted in support of each assertion, it gradually became horribly, piteously plain to her that if her husband cared to defend the suit, she had but a very poor chance of obtaining what this work so rightly styled "relief." The knowledge brought with it a terrible feeling of revolt and of despair to Athena Maule. She pushed the book away, then got up and stared into a small Venetian looking-glass. She was frightened by what she saw there; the shock of her discovery had drained all the colour from her face, and, for the moment, destroyed her youth. She turned away from the mirror with a feeling of sick disgust. Her face, as reflected there, actually reminded her of Richard's face. It was absurd, disquieting, that such a notion should ever come into her mind, and it showed the state in which her nerves must be. She looked round her fearfully. The room on which she had wasted a regretful thought had become an airless cage in which she would have to spend all that remained to her of young life and of the wonderful beauty which had, so she now told herself bitterly, brought her so little happiness. She had actually believed--how Richard would grin if he knew it!--that if she only could make up her mind to a certain amount of "scandal" and "publicity," she could free herself of him. How could she have supposed that the law--a law framed and devised by men--would put such a power in a woman's hand?... And yet--and yet it was still true that nothing but Richard's will stood between herself and complete, honourable freedom--between her and the man who had in his gift everything that she longed for and believed herself specially fitted by nature to possess. So much, and surely it was a great deal, the book which was still lying open on the little table made quite clear. If only Richard Maule could be brought to that state of mind in which he would consent to be merciful and leave his wife's suit undefended, all would yet go well. Athena sat down again and began to concentrate her mind intensely. How could she bend, coerce Richard to her will?--that was the formidable problem which was now presented to her, and she set herself to consider it from every point of view. Mrs. Maule was afraid of her husband--it was an instinctive, involuntary fear; her whole being shrank from him with a dreadful aversion. When he had been hale and strong, adoring her with the rather absurd ardour of adoration a middle-aged man so often lavishes on a young wife, she had despised him. Now that he was stricken, old, and feeble, he inspired her with terror. It had amused her to deceive him when he had been the doting, lover-like husband, in days which seemed to belong to another life; but now, when his sunken eyes gleamed as they always gleamed when staring into hers, seeming full of a cruel knowledge of the pardonable weaknesses into which her heart betrayed her, then her body as well as her spirit quailed. Suddenly a great light came into the dark chamber of her mind. Athena Maule saw in a moment a way in which the problem might be solved. How amazing that she had not thought of it yesterday--even this morning! Jane Oglander should be her advocate with Richard. Richard would do for Jane what he would do for no one else. That had been proved many times. To take a recent instance--how harshly he had always resisted his wife's wish to ask people to Rede Place! But when General Lingard had come into the neighbourhood, it was Richard who had suggested that Jane Oglander's lover should be bidden to stay, and to stay a long time. Athena's face became flushed, fired with hope, with energy. She had been foolish to be so frightened. How fortunate it was that Jane had spoken to her--had told her of her intention to break the foolish engagement with Lingard! It made everything quite easy. She shut the book--the sinister old book which had given her so awful a shock. Why not go up and see Jane now--at once? It was still early, not much after midnight. Athena glanced at the tiny clock which had played its little part just before Jane's arrival at Rede Place in provoking Hew Lingard's avowal of--of weakness. Yes, it was only ten minutes past twelve. Jane was probably wide awake still. Athena went to the library and carefully put back the volume in its place among the other legal books which had belonged to Wantele's father. Then she made her way, in the deep, still darkness, to the door of Jane Oglander's room. Knocking lightly, and without waiting for an answer, she walked in. In old days this room had been known as "the White Room," now it went by the name of "Miss Oglander's Room." Only Jane Oglander ever occupied it. Jane was asleep--sleeping more soundly than she had done for many days, but as the door of her room opened she woke, and sitting up turned on, with an instinctive gesture, the electric light which swung over her bed. Athena came quickly across the room. She was wearing a rather bright blue silk wrapper, and her graceful form made a patch of brilliant colour against the varying whitenesses of the walls, of the curtains, and of the rugs which covered the floor. "I couldn't get to sleep," Athena's voice shook with excitement and emotion, for she was going to take a great risk--to stake her whole future life on one throw. "Somehow I guessed you were awake, like me." Jane looked at Athena without speaking; she was telling herself that Hew could not help being enthralled--that no man could have helped it. She had never seen her friend look as lovely as she looked to-night; and there was a pathetic, a very appealing expression on the beautiful face now bending over her. Mrs. Maule kissed Jane Oglander. Then she straightened herself. "I can't sleep because I keep thinking of all you told me this morning," she said at last. "I know you don't want to talk about it, and yet--and yet I feel I must tell you that what you told me is making me wretched, Jane. Are you sure that you really wish to break off your engagement?" Jane was very pale; she was spent with suffering, and yet, as Athena saw with a pang of envy, she looked very young; her fair hair lay in two long thick plaits, one on each side of her face. It was that perhaps which made her look so young, so placid--so defenceless. "It seems to me the only thing I can do," she spoke in a very low voice, but to the woman listening she seemed irritatingly calm. Athena climbed on to Jane's bed, as she had so often done in the days when she and Jane happened to be at Rede Place together--days which had come far oftener four and five years ago than recently. It hurt Jane to see Athena there. The contrast between the past and the present cut so shrewdly. She did not wish to judge her friend--or rather she did judge her, and very leniently. Athena could not help what had happened. Of that Jane felt sure. But still Athena must know the truth--she could not but be aware of the effect she had had on Lingard; she must know that without meaning it she had witched his heart away. But whatever Athena knew or did not know, any allusion to what had happened would be degrading to them both. Certain things slumber when left in peace; they leap into life if once discussed. Jane Oglander believed in the honour of the man she loved. Hew would go away, and in time he would batten down, fight and conquer his infatuation for Mrs. Maule. "Of course I wish to break my engagement. But I would rather not talk about it," she said, at last. "But I must talk about it!" cried Athena desperately. "You don't realise how I feel, Jane, how--how miserable, how ashamed I am about it all! Of course I know how you must be hating me." An expression of anguish came over the younger woman's face. She believed her friend. But deep in her heart was breathed the inarticulate prayer: "Oh God, do not let her mention Hew--do not let her speak of Hew!" Athena suddenly covered her face with her hands. "Oh, Jane, I could not help it," she wailed, in her low, vibrating voice. "Oh, Jane, tell me that you know I could not help it!" "I know you could not help it," repeated Jane mechanically. She was being tortured,--tortured with a singular refinement of cruelty. But even now she did not blame Athena. Athena had meant kindly by her in coming here to-night. But oh! if she would only go away. It was agony to Jane to see her there. "He respects you!" whispered Mrs. Maule, leaning forward. "He admires you! He esteems you! Oh, Jane, I should feel proud if any man spoke of me as he speaks of you----" But Jane did not feel proud. Jane felt humiliated to the dust. During the many miserable hours she had spent in the last fortnight, she had been spared the hateful suspicion that Hew Lingard ever spoke of her to Athena Maule. And indeed Lingard had never so spoken, yet the strange thing was that Athena, when uttering those lying words, half believed them to be true. In the first days of her acquaintance with Lingard, she had herself said many kind, warm, affectionate things of Jane Oglander, to which he had perforce assented. It now pleased her to imagine, and even more to say, that it was he who had spoken those words of praise, of liking, of warm but unlover-like affection.... "If you only knew how he feels," she went on rapidly, "you would feel sorry for him, Jane, deeply sorry; not, as you have a right to feel, angry--angry both with him and with me! I'm afraid--I know, that often he feels wretched--horribly wretched about it all." "I am very sorry," said Jane Oglander in a low voice, "sorry, not--not angry, Athena----" and then she stopped short. "Sorry" seemed a poor, inadequate word, but it was the only word she could find. Her heart was wrung with sorrow, with unavailing, useless sorrow for both these unhappy people, as well as for herself. Judging them by what she would have felt had she been either of them, she believed them to be very miserable. Athena was now huddled up on the bed. She was crying bitterly, her face hidden in her hands, the tears trickling through the fingers. She was dreadfully, dreadfully sorry for herself. Jane Oglander could not see anyone as unhappy and as abased as she believed her friend to be feeling, and make no attempt at consolation. Bending forward, she put out her arms and gathered to her the slender rounded shoulders, the beautiful dark head. "If only something could be done," she whispered, "if only there was a way out, Athena!" Athena Maule raised her tear-stained face. Her moment had at last come. "There is a way out," she said slowly, impressively. She put the palms of her hands on the other woman's breast--"Tell me, Jane, would it make you very unhappy, would you ever be able to forgive me--if I married Hew Lingard?" Jane looked at her with troubled eyes. "I don't understand," she faltered. "Do you mean when--when Richard is dead, Athena?" "No. Of course I don't mean that! What a horrible idea! But, Jane, there is a chance that I may become free. It is difficult to explain, but you may believe me when I tell you that if Richard were a different kind of man, if he was noble, if he was high-minded, as you are noble and high-minded----" Jane shook her head. "Yes, you are--you are----What was I saying? Yes: if Richard were different he could have given me my freedom long ago, and our marriage could be dissolved even now." As the younger woman made no movement, said no word, only went on looking at her in puzzled silence, Athena drew herself out of Jane's arms, and there came a look of impatience over her face. "You are not a child! Surely you know what I mean, Jane? You must have heard of marriages being annulled? Richard has kept me tied to him all these years--years that I might have been free." And, again, the strange thing was that Athena Maule, as she said those words, believed them--with certain mental reservations--to be true. It was certainly true that for the last eight years she, a passionate, living woman, had been tied to death in life. She would have been shocked, angered, had any still small voice reminded her that the scheme she was now determined to carry through was a new scheme, one that she had never considered seriously till now, though she had told the lie which was the keystone of her scheme so often that she had at last begun to believe it must be true. "Oh, Jane!" she cried, and then she slipped off the bed and threw herself on her knees. "Oh, Jane, there is only one person in the world to whom Richard will ever listen----No, I'm wrong--there are two--there's Dick as well as you. But Dick"--a look of hatred for a moment convulsed her face--"Dick loathes me," she said slowly, "even more than Richard does," and this was true. "You, Jane, are my only hope--mine and Hew's only hope----" "Do you mean," said Jane slowly, "that you want me to speak to Richard, Athena,--to suggest his taking this step?" For the first time Jane Oglander felt a touch of physical repulsion from Athena. It was a curious sensation, and one which troubled her exceedingly. "Richard would have to do nothing--nothing! Simply leave my suit undefended. And if you could bring yourself to speak to him, Jane, I honestly believe that he might do now what he ought to have done long ago--release me. Nothing can give me back the years--the long miserable years I have spent with him, but I should at least have the future----" She looked furtively at Jane. It would be so much more--well, comfortable, if she and Lingard could count on Jane's approval, on her blessing, as it were. Jane Oglander lay back and turned her face away, to the wall. Athena, with remarkable self-control, stilled her eager, impulsive tongue. But the moments of waiting seemed very long. At last Jane turned and once more sat up. She had made up her mind that it was her duty--her duty, not only to Athena, but also to Hew Lingard,--to do this difficult, this repulsive thing which was being required of her. "I will speak to Richard to-morrow, Athena--but if he is shocked, if he is hurt by what I shall say to him--and I fear he will be both--you must not expect me ever to come back to Rede Place." Mrs. Maule gave a little cry. It was only now that she realised how doubtful she had been of success. She might have known Jane better. Jane had always been her one loyal friend. Athena was fond of the word "loyal." "Oh, Jane," she said humbly, "I--I don't know how to thank you. Will you mind very much?" "You mustn't be surprised if I fail," Jane said slowly. Athena again sank on to her knees. But all the humility had gone from the voice in which she uttered her words. "Oh, but you mustn't fail, Jane! It would kill me." She hesitated--"You will be very careful what you say to Richard? You will not--you need not mention----" Jane put out her hand with a quick gesture as if to ward off the name Athena was about to utter. "No, no," she cried vehemently, and it was the first time she had spoken with any strength in her tones. "You need not be afraid. Of course I shall mention no one--I think you can trust me, Athena." CHAPTER XVIII "Il y a des hommes qu'on trompe, et d'autres qu'on trahit, en accomplissant le même acte." Richard Maule heard the door of his bedroom close behind Jane Oglander. He had been so ailing the last day or two that he had been obliged to stay upstairs with Dick's companionship as his only solace, and his cousin had persuaded him to say good-bye to Jane there. She was only going as far as the Small Farm, to look after Mabel Digby who was ill. She would still be at Rede Place every day, but she was old-fashioned and punctilious; she did not wish to leave Mr. Maule's house without thanking him for his hospitality, not only to herself but to General Lingard, who had been asked there for her sake. She had come upstairs about six, already dressed in her outdoor things, and Dick had left her for a few moments with Richard in order that she might say good-bye. The few moments had prolonged themselves into half an hour, only half an hour, though the time had seemed a great deal longer to them both, and then she had left him with a gentle "Good-bye, Richard." As he stared at the door which she had closed quietly behind her, Richard Maule wondered whether he would ever see her again. Indeed, he was not sure that he wished ever to see Jane Oglander again. He had stood up to bid his guest good-bye, but, though he felt weak and a little dazed, he did not sit down again in his padded armchair near the fire. Instead, he went over to a glass case where were kept a number of fine old snuff-boxes collected by Theophilus Joy before there was a craze for such things. Opening the case, he brought out from the back a snuff-box which had an interesting history. It was believed to have been a gift from Madame du Barri to Louis the Fifteenth. It was of dull gold, embossed with fleurs-de-lys. Richard Maule's faithful valet thought he knew everything about his master that there was to know, but there was one thing, a trifling thing, that Mr. Maule had managed to keep entirely secret over many years. It was an innocent, in fact a womanish secret; it was simply that sometimes, not very often, he used a little rouge. He kept the small supply he required, which lasted him a long time, in the snuff-box he now held in his hand. This box possessed the rare peculiarity of a false bottom. What the careful valet never suspected, had naturally never entered into Dick Wantele's mind. All he noted was that on certain occasions his cousin was more flushed, and so looked in better health than usual. Richard Maule's usual colouring was a curious chalky white, and those of his visitors whose breeding was perhaps not quite so perfect as it might have been, almost always commented, either to Mrs. Maule or to Dick Wantele, on Mr. Maule's peculiar complexion. He closed the glass case, and went over to a narrow mirror near the fireplace. There, in a few moments, he achieved his very rudimentary "make up" with the aid of a small piece of cotton-wool. Yes--now he looked better; placing the snuff-box on the table which was drawn up close to his chair, he rang, and then sat down. He wished his man would come. He felt physically very uncomfortable and oppressed. The talk with Jane Oglander had shaken him almost as much--he was quite honest about the matter--as it had shaken her. Poor Jane! Dick's pretty Jane! How strange that a woman like Athena should possess the power of putting such a creature as was Jane Oglander to torture. Modern medical science has standardised the body much as mechanical science has standardised the most intricate machinery. Richard Maule, fortunate in a physician who kept in touch with every new discovery and palliative, had it in his power to fit his physical self for any special effort, especially if that effort were mental rather than physical. The valet received careful instructions. Mr. Maule would rest both before and after his light dinner, till ten o'clock. Then, and not before, he would be glad to see Mr. Wantele. He felt, however, too far from well to receive General Lingard, as he so often did for a few moments in the evening. Everything fell out as the master of Rede Place had ordained it should do. With the help of certain colourless and odourless drops, he relieved the oppression which was troubling him. He forced himself to eat more than usual. He read with what seemed to him fresh zest an idyll of Theocritus, and then he waited, doing nothing, his eyes on the door, till he heard his kinsman's light, familiar step on the bare floor outside. * * * * * Dick Wantele came into his cousin's bedroom very unwillingly. He wondered why Jane had stayed so long with Richard. He feared she had told him of her intention of breaking her engagement. Wantele felt convinced that Richard Maule had seen nothing of the drama which had been going on round him--though never actually in his presence--during Lingard's long sojourn at Rede Place. Every day Lingard spent about an hour with his invalid host, and Wantele was aware that those hours had been very pleasant to Richard Maule. The Greek Room had become a place where they all, with the exception of Athena, had fled now and again as if into sanctuary. There Jane, so Wantele had soon divined, spent her only peaceful moments, for her host was very dependent on her; when with him, she played chess or read aloud, always doing, in a word, something which perforce distracted her mind from everything but the matter in hand. But Richard Maule had been very unwell during the last few days; compelled to take each night the opiate which was the one habit--the bad habit--he and his wife had in common. Conversation after half-past nine or ten o'clock, even of the mildest type, excited him, and gave him, even with the aid of a powerful opiate, a restless, bad night. Why then had he put off seeing Dick till ten o'clock? The young man was in no mood to control himself, to assume the quiet, equable manner he always assumed. The hour just spent with those two,--with Athena and Lingard alone,--had tried his nerves. Mr. Maule was dressed in the evening clothes he had put on early before saying good-bye to Jane Oglander. It was a little matter, but it surprised Wantele; his cousin, as a rule, was always eager to get into the dressing-gown in which he lived when upstairs. "I had an odd conversation with Jane this evening----" Wantele nodded his head. Then it was as he had feared,--she had told Richard. "----and I wish to talk the matter over with you, Dick." He motioned the younger man to sit down, and there was a long moment of silence between them before he spoke again. "Jane Oglander has got a very strange notion into her head; and I should like to know if she said anything of it to you. Perhaps"--a slight smile came over his unsmiling lips--"perhaps I ought not to call it Jane Oglander's notion, it is evidently the notion--plot would be the better name--of another person. Do you know anything of it, Dick?" He looked fixedly at Wantele. "No, Jane said nothing to me--nothing that could be described in the terms you have used, Richard." Wantele's face was overcast with an expression of anxiety and unease. "Are you quite sure of that, Dick? I beg of you not to spare me." "Quite sure, Richard." "Jane seems to think----" Richard Maule was still looking at his cousin intently, and Dick Wantele moved under that look uncomfortably in his chair. "Jane seems to think," Mr. Maule repeated deliberately, "that it would be possible for my marriage with Athena to be annulled. From what I could make out, but Jane was--well, I'm afraid she was very much distressed at proposing such a thing to me,--she evidently thinks I ought to free my wife, that is my duty to make it possible, in fact, for Athena to start afresh--to marry again." "Good God!" "Yes, it's an odd notion--a very odd suggestion to come from a nice young woman. And it gratifies me to see that you too are surprised, Dick." There was an edge of irony in his low, tired voice. "I was very much surprised myself--surprised, first, that the notion had never before presented itself to Athena's active brain; and even more surprised," he spoke more slowly and all the irony was gone, "that the suggestion should have come in any way through Jane Oglander." Dick Wantele turned deliberately away and stared into the fire. "I did not explain to her that what she was good enough to suggest was quite--well, impossible. That she had been, to put it crudely, misinformed." Dick Wantele stared at his cousin. "You did _not_ explain that to her, Richard?" "No, I wished to consult you about the matter, and hear what you had to say. The scheme of course originated with Athena. Our English marriage laws make life very difficult to the sort of woman I have the honour to have for my wife." The other made no answer. "You never even suspected that such a plot was in the hatching?" insisted Richard Maule. "I want a true answer, mind!" Dick Wantele got up from his chair. He put his hand on the back of it and stared down into his cousin's face. "Once, many years ago, Athena spoke to me as if such a thing would be possible," he said. He never lied, he never had lied--in words--to Richard Maule, and he was not going to begin now. "You mean in Italy, when I was ill?" Wantele nodded his head, and then he felt gripped--in the throes of a horrible fear. It was as if a pit had suddenly opened between his cousin and himself, between the man whom he loved,--whose affection and respect he wished above all things to retain, for they were all that remained to him,--and his miserable self. He wondered whether the secret thing he feared showed itself in his face. Richard Maule slowly got up. Wantele made an instinctive movement to help him, but the other waved him off, not unkindly, but a little impatiently. "Dick?" he said. "My boy, I want to ask you a question--an indiscreet question. You need not answer it, but if you answer it, please answer it truly." Wantele opened his mouth and then closed it again. He could not think of the words with which to entreat the other man to desist---- Richard Maule, looking at him, knew the answer to his question before he had uttered it, but even so he spoke, obsessed by the cruel wish _to know_. "In Italy----?" His voice sank to a muffled whisper, but he did not take his eyes, his suffering, sunken eyes, from Wantele's tortured face. Still the other did not--could not--speak. "I knew it. At least I felt sure of it." He sighed a quick convulsive sigh, and then in mercy averted his eyes. "But never here?" he muttered questioningly. "Everything was over by the time we came back here?" "Yes, Richard. I swear it." "I knew that too--at least I felt sure of it. I'm afraid you must have suffered a good bit, Dick?" The younger man nodded his head. "I have loathed and I have despised myself ever since." "I'm sorry you did that. I'm sorry I waited till now to tell you that I knew, that I understood." "How you must have hated me!" said Wantele sombrely. "Never, Dick. I--I knew her by then. If you had been the first"--he quickly amended his phrase--"if I had been fool enough to believe you were the first, I think it would have killed me. As it was," his voice hardened, "it only made me curse myself for my blind folly--folly which brought wretchedness and shame on you, Dick, and--and now, I fear, on Jane Oglander"--he saw the confirmation he sought on the other's face. "It's about Jane I wish to speak to you to-night. For a moment I ask of you to think of me as God----" Wantele stared at Richard Maule; it was the first time his cousin had ever uttered the word in his presence. "If I were God--Providence--Fate--and gave you your choice, would you choose that Lingard should marry Jane or that you should marry her?" And as Wantele still stared at him in amazement: "Take it from me--I have never deceived you--that the choice is open to you. I don't wish to hurry you. Take a few moments to think it over." "I--I don't understand," stammered Wantele. "There is no necessity for you to understand. In fact I hope that, after to-night, you will dismiss the whole of this conversation from your mind. But I repeat--the choice is open to you." And he added, musingly, "I think, Dick, that with the others out of the way you could make Jane happy--in time." But there was doubt--painful, deliberating doubt, in his tone. Wantele shook his head. "I don't agree," he said shortly. "You see, Richard, Jane"--he moistened his lips--"Jane's never loved me. She loves Lingard. And so, if God gave me the choice, I would give her to Lingard." "You think well of the man?" Maule spoke lightly, and as if he himself had no reason to dissent from any word commending the soldier. "You mustn't ask me to judge Lingard"--the words were difficult to utter, and he brought them out with difficulty. "I've been there, you see. I know what the poor devil's going through. I loved you, Richard--but that didn't save me. Lingard loved Jane, I believe he still loves her, and--and I should take him to be a man jealous of his honour--but neither his love nor his honour has saved him." Wantele began walking up and down the room with long nervous strides. Then he stopped short--"What is it you mean to do, Richard?" he asked. Richard Maule hesitated. He knew very well what he now meant to do, but he did not intend that his cousin should have any inkling, either now or hereafter, of his decision. And Dick, as he knew well, was not easily deceived. Still, he put his mind, the mind which was in some ways clearer, harder, than it had been before his illness, to the task. "There are three courses open to me," he said slowly. "The one is to allow matters to remain as they are, _in statu quo_; the second is to do what Jane Oglander suggests--allow my wife to bring a suit for the dissolution of our marriage, and to allow it to go undefended--it is that which I should have done, Dick, had your answer been other than it was." "And the third course?" Wantele was looking at his cousin fixedly. "The third course, which I may probably adopt, will be for me to begin proceedings for divorce. I take it that Lingard knows nothing of the real woman? I mean, he looks at Athena as she looks at herself?" Wantele nodded. That was certainly a good way in which to describe Lingard's mental attitude. "But I have not quite made up my mind as to the best course," said Richard Maule. "I shall think the matter over for a day or two. But I fear--and I don't mind telling you, Dick, that the thought isn't exactly a pleasant one to me--that it must be what I said just now." He beckoned to the other to come nearer, and Wantele did so, his pale face full of pain and anger. "I want you to understand," his cousin added, in a low voice, "that when I've said that I've said all. The business won't affect me as it would most men. I never gave a thought to the world's opinion in old days, and why should I do so now?" He spoke hesitatingly, awkwardly. It was disagreeable to him to be thus lying to his cousin--to be filling the heart of the man who loved him with a flood of indignant pity and pain. But the tragi-comedy had to be played out. "I shall really feel very much more comfortable when it's all over," he said. "I don't fancy even lawyers waste as much time as they used to do over this kind of thing. And this case is so simple, so straightforward. I shall be sorry for the Kayes. But they must have known it. I fancy everybody in this neighbourhood knew it. People will pity Athena; they will agree that she had every excuse----" He leant back in his chair. There was nothing more to say. "Shall I call Carver?" asked Wantele solicitously. "No. Not now. But I should be obliged if you will tell him that I shall want him in an hour. I shall try and read for a while by the fire." * * * * * Richard Maule waited till he heard the sounds of his cousin's quick footsteps die away. Then he rose feebly and walked over to the recess which had been fitted up as a medicine cupboard in the days of his childhood, when drugs were more the fashion than they are now. In a wide-necked, glass-stoppered bottle were the crystals of chloral which he had long used in preference to the more usual liquid form. He knew to a nicety the dose which he himself could take with safety, the dose which sometimes failed to induce sleep. He now measured out in his hand some three times his usual dose. Had Dick Wantele's answer been different, Richard Maule would have administered to himself the crystals he now held in his hand. But Dick's decision--what the man of average morality would have regarded as his noble and unselfish decision--had signed another human being's death-warrant. The thought that this was so suddenly struck Richard Maule as the most ironic of the many avenging things he had known to happen in our strange world. And, almost for the first time since he had formed his awful conception of the meaning of life, he knew the cruel joy of laughing with the gods, instead of writhing under their lash. As he shook the crystals into an envelope and slipped it into his waistcoat pocket, he told himself that revenge was at last to be his. The gods were yielding him one of their most cherished attributes. CHAPTER XIX "The fact that the world contains an appreciable number of wretches who ought to be exterminated without mercy when an opportunity occurs, is not quite so generally understood as it ought to be, and many common ways of thinking and feeling virtually deny it." Richard Maule turned the handle of his wife's bedroom door. A glance assured him that the beautiful room was empty. So far the gods whose sport he believed himself to be had been kind, for he had met no one during his slow, painful progress through the house, and Athena, as he knew well, would not be up for another hour. Standing just within the door, he looked round the room with a terrible, almost a malignant, curiosity. The fire had evidently just been built up; it threw dancing shafts of light over the rose-red curtains of the low First Empire bed, at once vivifying and softening the brilliant colouring of the room. Till to-night, the owner of Rede Place had never seen this oval bedchamber since it had been transformed nearly nine years before in view of the home-coming of his wife--the home-coming which had been delayed for two years after their marriage. He had planned out with infinite care and lingering delight every detail of the decoration, taking as his model the bedchamber of the Empress Josephine at Malmaison. He and the expert who had helped him in his labour of love had journeyed out--even now he remembered the journey vividly--to the country house near Paris where Napoleon spent his happiest hours. As for the room next door, the room which was to have been his, it had long ago been dismantled, and was now the sewing-room of his wife's maid. Athena had arranged her life in a way that exactly suited her. She had lived on unruffled by the thunder-bolt, hurled unwittingly by herself, which had destroyed him. But a tree blasted by lightning outstands the most radiant of living blossoms.... He felt a wave of hatred heat his blood. Stepping slowly over the garlanded Aubusson carpet, he moved across the room till he stood by the side of the low, wide bed. On a gilt-rimmed table was placed a crystal tray he well remembered, and on the tray were a decanter of water, a medicine glass, and a bottle of chloral. Above the wick of a spirit-lamp stood a tiny gold kettle filled with the chocolate which Mrs. Maule always heated and drank after she was in bed. Her intimate ways of life were very present to her husband's memory. It was not likely that time had modified any habit governing Athena's appearance and general well-being. He remembered the day they had first seen the gold kettle. It had been at a sale held in the house of one of those frail Parisian beauties who, following a fashion of the moment, had put up her goods to auction. The notion that his wife should possess anything that had once belonged to such a woman had offended Richard Maule's taste, and he had resisted longer than he generally did any wish of hers. But she had cajoled him, as she always in those days could cajole him into anything. He put out his thin hand and noted with satisfaction that it was shaking less than usual. Slowly he lifted back the lid of the gold kettle. Yes--there was the chocolate still warm, still in entire solution. Straightening himself, Richard Maule stood for a moment listening.... Silence reigned within and without Rede Place. Steadying his right hand with his left, he shook the crystals of chloral he had brought with him into the dark liquid. Then he turned, and walked languidly towards the fire. The emotion caused by his short conversation with Dick Wantele had wearied him. * * * * * Suddenly there fell on his listening ears the sound of footsteps in the corridor. He knew them for those of his wife. But it was hate, not fear, that heralded Athena. He turned round slowly, uncertain for a moment how to explain his presence there. She swept in--God! how superb, how radiantly alive--and then gave a swift cry. "Richard! You have frightened me!" But she faced him proudly. "I've come up to find something I wish to show General Lingard----" She turned on the lights, and Richard Maule, looking at her fixedly, found his first quick impression modified. Her lovely face was thin and strained. There were shadows under her dark, violet eyes. But even so, how strong she was, how full of vibrating vitality! By her side Richard Maule felt that he must appear dead, or worse, ill to death. Athena was dressed in the purple gown she had worn the night Lingard had first come to Rede Place. So had she looked when she had opened the door of the Greek Room and led in their--hers and Richard's--illustrious guest. There was something desperate, defiant in the look she now cast on him. She was telling herself how awful it was to know that this wreck of a man standing before her could hold the whole of her future in his weak and yet tenacious grasp! How cruel that this--this cripple should possess the right to grant or to deny what had become the crowning wish of her heart! Perhaps something of what was in her mind penetrated to Richard Maule's quick brain. "The ailing and the infirm," he said, staring at her fixedly, "are treated by the kind folk about them like children. They are never left alone. I do not choose that our household should know that I desire to have a private interview with you, and so I thought the simplest thing would be to come here and wait for you----" "What is it you wish to say to me?" Her voice shook with suspense. She clasped her hands together with an unconscious gesture of supplication. "I have brought you--I have brought us all--the order of release." A feeling of exultant joy--of relief which pierced so keenly that it was akin to pain, filled Athena Maule's soul. She had indeed been well inspired to tell Jane all that was in her heart--and Hew's. And here was Richard actually saying so! For, "You chose a most excellent Mercury," he observed dryly. "You mean Jane Oglander?" her voice again shook a little. "She was not my messenger. She asked my permission to speak to you----" "Yes, I mean Jane Oglander. She showed me where my duty lay. For a while I hesitated between two courses--for you know, Athena, there were two courses open to me." She looked at him without speaking. How cruel, how--how unmanly, of Richard to say this! And how futile. There was only one moment when he could have divorced her. Providence had stood her friend by choosing just that moment to make him ill. Since then--she thought she had learnt enough English law to know that--he would be held to have condoned. But her look made him feel ashamed. The javelin does not thus play with its victim. "I beg your pardon," he muttered almost inaudibly. "I know you have always hated me," she said passionately. "You have not known that always," he answered sombrely--and for a moment she hung her head. "Perhaps now, Richard, we may be better friends." She reminded herself that in old days--in the days when she had been his idol, his goddess--she had had a certain contemptuous fondness for her husband. She would be generous--now. Jane had taught her that it was good to be generous. How true a friend had Jane Oglander been to her! Athena felt a rush of warm gratitude to the woman who still--how strange, how absurd it seemed--was engaged to Lingard. Jane, like the angel she was, would help them--Athena and Hew Lingard--over what must be for some time to come very delicate ground. Their progress, albeit that of happy and, what was so satisfactory, of innocent lovers, would be hampered with small difficulties. How fortunate it was, how more than fortunate, that Lingard's engagement to Jane had not yet been publicly announced.... "Have you told Dick?" she asked nervously. Her husband--he was still her husband--had smiled strangely as only reply to her kindly words. "Was it about that you wished to see him to-night?" "No, I have not yet told Dick of my decision." "I suppose it can all be managed very quietly?" she said plaintively. "I hope I shan't have to go and appear before a judge--or shall I?" Richard Maule looked at her thoughtfully. "That is a thing I cannot tell you," he said slowly. "Many would say to you most confidently--yes, that you will have to appear before the Judge." "I thought there was a thing in England called taking evidence on commission. You yourself, Richard, could not possibly appear in person. And then--I want to know, it is rather important that I should know"--her husband bent his head gravely--"if there will be any delay?" "You mean any lapse of time before the decree can be obtained?" Her eyes dropped. "Yes, that is what I do mean." In old days it had always been better to be quite frank with Richard. "I think not. In this kind of case I think there is no delay. The legal procedure is quite simple." He waited a moment. "You of course will bring the suit, and I shall not oppose it. You see, Athena,--no doubt you have been at the pains to inform yourself of the fact, for to my surprise Jane Oglander was aware of it,--the dissolution of a marriage carries with it no stain--no stain, that is, on the wife who has been so poorly used." There came a look of raillery on his white face, and Athena again told herself that he was very cruel--cruel and heartless. "The wife, I repeat, goes out into the world unsullied, ready, if so the fancy takes her, to become another man's bride--his wife in reality as well as in name." He looked at her significantly, and added, more lightly, "The world has become more liberal since the days of my youth. I am sure there will be great sympathy felt for you, Athena. Such a marriage as ours is in truth a monstrous thing. I did not need Jane to tell me that, though it was odd of Jane to have thought of it." There came over him a terrible feeling of lassitude. "And now I'm afraid I must ask you to help me to get back to my room." This punishment he put on himself. He must not be met coming out of his wife's room alone. "Of course!" she cried eagerly. "You know I would have done much more for you--I mean since you became ill--if you had only allowed it! But Dick was always jealous--Dick has always hated me!" "Surely not always?" he said mildly. "Yes, always!" He would not take her arm, or lean on her. She simply walked by his side, her mind in a whirl of amazement, of gratitude, of almost hysterical excitement, till he dismissed her, curtly, at his door. * * * * * The hour that followed was perhaps the happiest hour of Athena Maule's not unhappy life. It bore a curious resemblance to that which had immediately followed Richard Maule's proposal of marriage, the proposal for which her father and mother, as well as herself, had watched and waited so anxiously. But now there was added what had been quite lacking before--a sufficiently strong feeling of attraction to the man who would place her in the position she longed feverishly to enjoy and adorn. That Lingard, in the throes of his passion for her, should go through moments of acute self-depreciation and remorse, only made her feel her power, her triumph, the more. She now came down to him gentle, subdued, as he had never yet seen her,--Nature provides such women with a wonderfully complex and full armoury--and Lingard, alas! once more under the spell, sprang towards her. The unexpected departure of Jane to the Small Farm had angered him. "I have seen Richard." The pregnant words were uttered solemnly. "I found him, for the first time in my life, in--in my room. Jane spoke to him to-day, and he is going to release me, to let me out of prison--at last!" and then, not till then, Athena allowed herself to fall on Lingard's breast, and feel the clasp of his strong arms about her. It mattered naught to her that the man who was now murmuring wild, broken words of love and passionate joy at her release from intolerable bonds, felt what the traitor feels--that his intoxication was even now seared with livid streaks of self-loathing and self-contempt. She knew well that he would not trouble her overmuch with his remorse. She could almost hear him, in his heart, say the words he had said the night before Jane Oglander had come to disturb and trouble the sunlit waters into which they two had already glided. "It is not your fault,--any fault there may be is mine." But just before they said good-night Lingard frightened Athena Maule, and sent her away from him cold, almost angry. "If I were the brave man men take me to be," he said suddenly, unclasping the hands which lay in his, "I should go out into the night and shoot myself." She had made him beg, entreat, her forgiveness for his wild, wicked words. But they frightened her--dashed her deep content. Athena Maule did not know Hew Lingard with the intimate knowledge she had known other men who had loved her. But there was this comfort--about this man she would be able to consult Jane--Jane who was so kind, so reasonable, and who only wished to do the best for them both. She reminded herself that men are always blind where women are concerned. If nothing else would convince Hew Lingard that Jane, after all, did not care so very much, then Jane must be persuaded, after a decent interval, to marry Dick Wantele. After what had happened to-day, everything was possible.... Athena, to-night, was "fey." She felt as if she held the keys of fate in her hands. But even so, she went on thinking of Lingard's bitter words long after they had parted, and when, having dismissed her maid, she was heating the cup of chocolate which sometimes sent her to sleep without an opiate. And then, as she lay down among her pillows, there came over Athena Maule the curious sensation that she was not alone. Bayworth Kaye--poor Bayworth, of whom she had thought so kindly, so regretfully, only two nights ago--seemed to be there, close to her, watching, waiting.... Athena did not believe in ghosts, and so she did not feel frightened, only surprised--very much surprised. She turned on the light and sat up in bed. This feeling of another presence close to her--how strong it still was!--must be a result of the emotion she had just gone through, of her exciting little scene with Hew Lingard. It was strange that she should think of Bayworth Kaye here, in this room where he had never been but once, and then only for a moment on a June night when they had both been more reckless than usual. It would have been so much more natural to have felt a survival of Bayworth's presence downstairs--when she had been in Lingard's arms.... Suddenly she was overwhelmed with an intense, an overmastering drowsiness, and, quite unconscious of what was happening to her, she fell back, asleep. The light above the low rose-red bed was still burning when they found her in the morning. CHAPTER XX "Who spake of Death? Let no one speak of Death. What should Death do in such a merry house? With but a wife, a husband, and a friend To give it greeting?..." Richard Maule sat up in bed. He had taken a rather larger dose of chloral than usual the night before, and he had over-slept himself. 'Twixt sleeping and waking he had seemed to hear a number of extraordinary sounds--they were, however, sounds to which he had become accustomed, for they were produced by the Paches' motor. Now his servant was drawing up the blinds, moving about the room with well-trained, noiseless steps. It seemed to him that the man avoided looking across at the bed; but when, at last, his persistent glance caused the servant to look round, nothing could be seen in the other's impassive face. "Is it a fine morning, Carver?" "No, sir--at least, yes, sir. But it's been raining." "I thought I heard a car drive away a few moments ago, or did I dream it?" The man hesitated. "Yes, sir--perhaps you did, sir. Mr. Wantele had the machine out to go for the doctor. Mrs. Maule is not very well, sir, and Mr. Wantele thought he'd better fetch the doctor as quickly as possible." Carver's voice gained confidence. His master was behaving "very sensible," and did not seem at all upset. The upsetting part was to be left to Dr. Mallet. "I was to say, sir, that the doctor would like to see you." "Who went for the doctor?" asked Richard Maule suddenly. "Mr. Wantele himself, sir. I heard him say he thought it would lose less time for him to go off at once, than to wait and send anyone." "And did Mr. Wantele bring the doctor back with him?" "Yes, sir, I think he did--I think they came back together." There was a knock at the door, and then the murmur of words outside. "Who's there?" called out Richard Maule in a strong voice. "What's all that whispering about?" He spoke querulously, as he sometimes did in the morning. "It's only I--Mallet!" The doctor came in. He and Richard Maule were old friends--in fact, contemporaries. But there was a great difference between the two men--the one was broad, ruddy, and did not look his years; the other was the wreck we know. "I'm sorry to say Mrs. Maule is very ill." The doctor plunged at once into the business which had brought him. Long experience had taught him the futility, the cruelty, of "breaking" bad news. "What's the matter with her? She's always enjoyed remarkably good health." Richard Maule moved a little in his bed. "Yes, I should have taken her to be a remarkably healthy woman, though of course as you know--we both know--she has always been very sleepless. Almost as if she caught insomnia from you, eh?" The doctor's courage was beginning to fail him, curiously. It was strange, it--it was horrible, the hatred, the contempt Richard Maule felt for his wife. "Mallet--come here, closer. I believe you are concealing something from me. If there's bad news I'd rather hear whatever it is from you than from Dick." Mr. Maule spoke in a hard, rather breathless tone. "There is something to hear. Your wife last night took an overdose of chloral----" The doctor said no word of sympathy. The words would have stuck in his throat. He knew too well the real relationship of the husband and wife. Richard Maule would receive plenty of condolences from others. But even so, to learn suddenly of the death of a human being with whom one has been associated over long years is always a shock, is always painful. Richard Maule straightened himself in bed. "An overdose of chloral," he repeated, "then she's--she's----" The other bent his head. "She thought she would outlive me many years." The doctor looked thoughtfully at his patient. He knew that illness of a certain type atrophies the memory and the affections, while leaving unaffected the mind and a certain fierce instinct of self-preservation. Dr. Mallet was not so much shocked or so much surprised by Richard Maule's remark as a layman would have been. Again the bereaved husband spoke, and this time questioningly. "A peaceful death, Mallet? A happy death?" "Yes--yes, certainly." Something impelled him to add, "But a terrible thing when it comes to one so young, so beautiful, as was your wife!" He compared the stillness, the equanimity, of the man lying before him, with the awful agitation of Dick Wantele--an agitation so terrible, a horror so overwhelming, that it had confirmed Dr. Mallet in a theory of his, a theory formed a good many years ago, and of which he had sometimes felt ashamed. But the mind of an intelligent medical man who has enjoyed for many years a large family practice becomes like one of those old manuals for the use of confessors. His mind perforce becomes a store-house of strange sins, of troubled, abnormal happenings, which belong, from the point of view of the happy and the sane, to a fifth dimension, unimagined, unimaginable. The wise physician, like the wise confessor, does not allow his mind to dwell on these things, but he does not make the mistake of telling himself--as so many of us do--that they are not there. The doctor had formed a suspicion, which had now become a certainty. Yet he was surprised by Richard Maule's next words. "It must have been an awful shock to Dick, Mallet. He was thrown so much more with Athena than I could be of late years, though to be sure she was a great deal away." He waited a moment, and as the doctor made no comment, "Although they didn't pull it off well together, still for my sake they both kept up a kind of armed truce, eh, Mallet?" He looked searchingly at the other man. "I am telling you nothing you do not know." The other nodded gravely. "Where's Dick now?" Mr. Maule asked abruptly; and the doctor saw that the thin hand holding the coverlet shook a little. "I sent him off to get Ricketts. I thought it better to give him something to do; for as you say, as you have guessed, he was very much over-wrought and upset. Of course Ricketts can do nothing, but I thought he had better be sent for. And to tell you the truth, I wanted to give Dick a job." "Has anyone told General Lingard, Mallet?" "No. He went out for a walk before breakfast--an odd thing to do, but it seems he generally does go out every morning. They're expecting him in in a few minutes. Would you like me to tell him?" "I should be grateful if you would. And after you've told him, Mallet, I should like to see him--just for a few moments. My poor wife was very fond of him. You know he's engaged to Jane Oglander?" "Yes. Dick told me. But I understood it was a secret?" "Yes--yes, so it is." * * * * * "Mrs. Maule? Dead? An overdose of chloral?" Lingard repeated what the doctor had just said very quietly, but he stammered out the words, and his face had gone an ashen grey colour. They were in the dining-room. Breakfast had only been laid for two. Dr. Mallet was surprised, that is as far as anything of this kind could surprise him. Here was a man used to facing death, and to seeing death dealt out to others--nay, he had doubtless in his time dealt out death to many. And yet now this famous soldier was unmanned--yes, unmanned was the word, by what was, after all, not a very unusual accident. "Yes, it's a terrible thing," the doctor said briefly, "a terrible thing!" Lingard walked over to the sideboard. He poured himself out some brandy, and drank it. "You must forgive me. I had a touch of fever yesterday--jungle fever," he said. "Your news has given me a great shock." "Yes, yes. Naturally." "Will you tell me again? I don't quite understand." He had come back and now stood facing Dr. Mallet. His face was set, expressionless, but he kept on opening and closing his right hand with a nervous movement. "It happened, as these things always do, in the most simple way in the world. I had a similar case six months ago. Poor Mrs. Maule took an overdose of chloral last night. When her husband first became ill in Italy many years ago, she had a very anxious time, and had to supervise, so I understand, very inadequate nurses. Her anxiety, and the strain generally, brought on insomnia, and the doctors there--very wrongly from my point of view--gave her chloral. It is a most insidious drug, as you probably know, General Lingard. She and Mr. Maule have both taken it for years." "Then there is no doubt as to its having been an accident?" Lingard's voice sank in a whisper. "No doubt at all," said the doctor emphatically, "I never saw a woman who, taking all things into consideration, enjoyed life more than did Mrs. Maule. The thought of suicide is out of the question. The maid who saw her the last thing tells me that she hadn't seen her so well or happy--gay was the word the Frenchwoman used--for many months. Before she went to bed, she wrote a letter addressed to Miss Oglander at the Small Farm which she gave orders should be taken over there this morning. It went by hand nearly a couple of hours before the sad truth was discovered." "And then they sent for you at once?" Lingard felt as if he was in an evil dream. He could not bring himself to believe, to face the fact that Athena was dead--gone, for ever, out of his life, out of all their lives. "Yes. Mr. Wantele came and fetched me without losing a moment," said the doctor gravely. "But of course I saw at once that there was nothing to be done. I have, however, sent for a colleague of mine. Mr. Wantele, who, as you can easily imagine, is very much--well, upset, went off to fetch him. I wonder they're not back yet." There was a long silence between the two men. Dr. Mallet looked at the famous soldier with interest and curiosity. General Lingard was a remarkable-looking man apart from his reputation. But there were lines on his seamed face that told of strain--an older strain than that induced by the shocking news which had just been told him. He had now pulled himself together; he was doubtless annoyed with himself for having been so terribly affected. But Mrs. Maule possessed a very compelling, vivid personality--even the doctor could not yet think of her as anything but living. "I'm afraid, General Lingard, that I must prepare you for a rather painful ordeal. Mr. Maule wishes to see you, and if possible at once." The other made an involuntary movement of recoil. "To see me?" he repeated. "Why should he wish to see me?" And then he added hurriedly, "But of course I'll go and see him. He and--and Mrs. Maule"--he brought out her name with an effort--"have both been most kind to me, though our acquaintance has been short." Again there was a pause. And then Lingard said abruptly, "Well--shall I go up and see him now? I--I suppose you will come with me?" If restrained, there was no less an appeal in his hushed voice. "I'll just go up with you, and then I'm afraid I shall have to leave you with him. Perhaps I ought to tell you that Mr. Maule took the news very quietly, General Lingard. He's in a sad state--a sad state. A man in that condition does not take things to heart in the same way that we who are hale and strong do." As they passed along the corridor, a housemaid was engaged in drawing down the blinds, and it was into a darkened room that Lingard was introduced by the doctor. Richard Maule did not rise to receive the condolences of his guest. He was up and in his dressing-gown, and he sat huddled in a deep invalid chair. To Lingard's eyes he looked pitifully broken. Various feelings--anger, contemptuous pity, and an unwilling respect for the man who had, only the day before, made up his mind to face the greatest humiliation open to manhood--all these jostled one another in the soldier's mind as he stood staring down at his host. Their hands just touched--Lingard's icy cold, Richard Maule's burning hot. "Thank you, thank you, General Lingard. I felt sure that I should have your sympathy." There was an odd gleam in the stricken man's eyes, but the other, intent on preserving his own self-command, saw nothing of it. "Do sit down. Yes, it's a strange, a most strange thing. She was always so strong, so well. Poor Athena! Thanks to you in a great measure, her last weeks of life were very bright and happy." He looked furtively at Lingard. The man was taking his punishment like a Stoic. But bah! what were his sufferings to those which Maule himself had endured eight years before? "I've troubled you to come to me," he continued, "not so much to receive your kind sympathy, as to speak to you of Jane--of Jane Oglander. She was, as you know, my poor wife's best friend--and in a very real sense. This will be a most terrible shock to her. She would naturally receive the news better from you than from anyone else, and I really asked to see you that I might beg you to go at once, as soon as possible, over to the Small Farm. Thanks to my good friend Dr. Mallet, we have managed to establish a cordon round the house. But of course the truth will be known very shortly in the village--if, indeed, it is not known there yet." Lingard rose from the chair on which he had reluctantly sat down in obedience to his host's wish. "Yes," he said in a low, firm voice. "I will certainly do as you wish. I know how truly, how devotedly, Jane and Mrs. Maule loved one another." "It would be idle for me to pretend to you, General Lingard, now that you have formed part of our household for nearly a month, that my poor wife and I were on close or sympathetic terms--" The other made a sudden restless movement. "It is, however, a comfort to me to feel that last night, for the first time for many years--" he was looking narrowly at his victim, and Lingard fell into the trap. "I know--I know," he exclaimed hastily. "It must be a comfort to you now, Mr. Maule, to feel that you--that you--" he stopped awkwardly. Richard Maule smiled a curious smile, and Lingard felt inexpressibly shamed, humiliated. But what was this Richard Maule was saying? "Ah, so she told you! Strange--strange are the ways of the modern woman, General Lingard. But I suppose that to Athena you and Jane Oglander were as good as husband and wife. She thought that what she could say without impropriety to the one she could say to the other. Well, I won't keep you now. I should be sorry indeed if Jane heard what has happened from anyone but yourself." CHAPTER XXI "It is my life; I bring it torn and stained Out of the battles I have lost and gained; Once captured, won back from the enemy At a great loss; yet here I hold it still, My own to render up as now I do; I render it up joyfully to you, Choosing defeat: do with it as you will." To be out of doors, away from that strange, unreal house of mourning, brought with it a sensation of almost physical relief. Lingard walked rapidly along, on his way to the Small Farm. He was pursued, obsessed, by the horror of the fact. He felt as if he had never before realised the awful obliteration of death. Many a mother, wife, sister, kept among the most precious of her treasures letters signed "Hew Lingard"--letters speaking in high terms of a dead son, of a dead husband, of a dead brother. But those men and lads on whose dead faces he had gazed had died the death which to Lingard and his like puts the crown on a soldier's life. He had lost comrades who had been dear to him and whose loss he had lamented sorely. But never, never had the sudden cancelling, so to speak, of a human being brought with it this sense of chilling horror, of nothingness where so much had been. And then there was something else--something which at once revolted and distressed him inexpressibly. The immediate past, the events of the last four weeks, became, in so far as they concerned the woman who was now lying dead, both fantastic and shameful. Last night, for the first time, something of Athena's ruthless egotism had forced itself upon Lingard's perception. Hitherto he had been too deeply concerned with his own egotism, his own cruelty, his own remorse, to give thought to hers. That she should have used Jane Oglander as her ambassador to Richard Maule had shocked, nay more, had disgusted him, as soon as he had found himself away from the magic of her presence. Wholly absorbed in the future, Athena, after her first words of eager gratitude for Jane's intervention, had dismissed Jane from her mind, expelled her from her mental vision. Nay, she had gone further, for in answer to a muttered word from Lingard, she had at last said something which had jarred his taste, as well as roused that instinctive dog-in-the-manger attitude which slumbers in all men with regard to any woman who has been beloved. "Jane," Athena had said impatiently, "will end by marrying Dick Wantele. But for me she would have done it long ago!" And angrily the listener's heart, his memory, had given Athena the lie. After Mrs. Maule had left him the night before, Lingard had gone out of doors, and now chance brought him to the spot where he had stood for a long time staring at the long low house which now sheltered Jane Oglander, driven there, as he knew well, by his base, it now seemed his inconceivable, cruelty. How clearly he had visualised her last night! Imagining her as widely awake as he was himself, but denied by a thousand scruples from the relief of being able to go out, alone, into the darkness and solitude. If they had met there last night, he might at least have told Jane of his fight--of his losing fight for his lost honour. Now she would always believe that he had surrendered without a struggle. He walked on and into the curious, formal little garden of the Small Farm, even now gay with late autumn blossoms. The beams of a wintry sun lay athwart the picturesque old house. From the first,--nay, not quite at first, but very soon,--Lingard had disliked Mabel Digby. He had thought of her as an ally of Dick Wantele, and at a time when he was still trying to lie to himself as to the nature of his attraction to Athena, he had often seen her clear brown eyes fixed on him with a puzzled, troubled expression. Even now he could not be sorry she was ill. He felt that to-day he could not have faced those honest, questioning eyes. Lingard walked up to the porch, and rang the bell. By an odd twist, he began to think, as he stood there, how it would have been with him had it been Jane who was lying dead. Clearly he realised that Jane, dead, would still in a sense have been to him alive. But Athena? Athena was gone--gone into nothingness. He felt a tremor run through him, a touch of the old fever.... "Miss Oglander? I think she's upstairs with Miss Digby, sir. But I'll fetch her down. Will you come into the drawing-room?" Lingard went through the hall into the long sitting-room which he remembered, as men remember a place to which they have been in dreams. Jane had brought him there on the first morning after her arrival at Rede Place. They had not had a very pleasant walk, for each seemed to have so curiously little to say to the other, and Lingard, at least, had hailed with pleasure the moment when they had gone into the house. He remembered that he had been amused and touched by the many mementoes of the Indian Mutiny the room contained--quaint coloured prints and amateurish drawings of Delhi, before and during the great epic struggle, curious engraved portraits of the various Mutiny veterans under whom Mabel Digby's father had fought,--signs of a hero-worship the old soldier had transmitted to his daughter. He also recalled the feeling of acute irritation with which he had noticed Mabel Digby's look of shy congratulation at Jane and at himself. She had been at once too shy and too well-bred to make any allusion to an engagement which was not yet announced, but there had been no mistaking her glance, her smile. How long ago all that seemed! It might have been years--instead of only weeks. He went and stood by the fireplace, and then stared up at Outram's portrait. Was that man, and were that man's comrades and contemporaries, whose virtues as well as whose courage have become famous as the virtues and the courage of ancient legendary heroes--were they untouched by the failings and weaknesses of our poor common humanity? It was certainly not true of their own immediate predecessors, or--or of their successors. * * * * * A click of the latch--and Jane came into the room. She was pale, but her manner had regained its old quietude and gentleness. As she came towards him and saw his ravaged face, a feeling of great concern, of pity so maternal in texture that it swept away every other feeling from her heart, almost broke down her new, unnatural composure. She wished ardently--and Jane was full of hidden fire--to make everything easy for him. But oh! she could not bear him to look as he now looked. It was not in order that Hew Lingard should look, should feel, as he was now looking and feeling that she had made the great renouncement--the renouncement which Wantele had implored her with such fierce, passionate energy to refrain from making. Was it possible that Wantele had been right, and that she was doing an evil thing by the man she loved?--such was the agonised question which went through Jane Oglander's mind as she advanced quietly towards him. Only a few moments ago she had destroyed Athena's note of wild joy, of gratitude to herself. As she had watched the paper burn, as she had seen Athena's delicate, graceful monogram vanish in the flame, Jane had felt as if her heart was shrivelling up with it. She had been in the room but a very few moments, and already her presence was bringing peace to Lingard's seared unhappy soul. There was nothing on her face to show the conflicting emotions with which she was being shaken, and to him she breathed renunciation, serenity. How amazing to remember that only yesterday her nearness had brought him intolerable unease, as well as keen shame. Now he felt as if a touch from her hand would cure him of all his shameful ills. Jane Oglander's pity, and he knew that she was very pitiful, had the divine quality of raising, instead of debasing, as does so much of the pity lavished on others in this sad, strange world. She held out her hand; he felt it fluttering for a moment in his strong grasp, but alas! it was her unease, her miserable misgiving that she now bestowed on him. There came over her eyes and brow a look of suffering, and Lingard dropped her hand quickly. No--he could not tell now, at once, what he had come to tell her. "Will you come out with me, Jane?" he asked abruptly. "Yes. Of course I will." It seemed a long, long time since he had asked her to do anything--with him. They went out into the little hall. As he helped her on with her coat, she made a slight shrinking movement which cut him shrewdly; he reminded himself that she had the right to hate, as well as to despise, him. With common consent they turned into the lonely country road, instead of under the beeches of Rede Place, and as they walked, each kept rather further from the other than do most people walking side by side. Jane respected his moody silence, and her memory went back to the first walk he and she had taken together on the day of his triumphant return home. It had been a clear starry London night in autumn, and they had crossed from the shabby, quiet little street where she lived to that portion of the Embankment which lies between the river and St. Thomas's Hospital,--a stone-flagged pavement open only to walkers. There Lingard had linked his arm through hers, and the movement had given her a delicious thrill of joy, deepening in her that protective instinct which makes every woman long for the man she loves to cling to her. As they had paced up and down, so happily alone in the peopled solitude London offers to her lovers, Jane's tender heart could not forget what lay so near, and she had compared her blest lot with that meted out to the suffering and the forlorn, who lie in their serried ranks in the wards she so often visited. How gladly now she would have changed places with the one among them who was nearest to death. They were close to the Rectory gate, and Jane suddenly remembered that Lingard had promised to go in and see Mrs. Kaye this morning. She had forced herself to ask him to do so, and she remembered now that he had assented to her wish with almost painful eagerness. Perhaps he thought she meant him to go there with her. That would explain his coming to the Farm so early. "Mr. Maule asked me to come to you," he said at last, breaking the long oppressive silence. "He thought--God knows why he thought it!--that a certain terrible thing which has happened--which happened last night--would reach you best from me." "Something which happened last night?" Jane repeated in a low voice. "I know it already. Athena wrote to me." She turned and faced him steadily. "Don't look like that, Hew. I--I can't bear it. I know you couldn't help what's happened. I know you never loved me in the way a man ought to love a woman whom he is going to marry." "I did," he said hoarsely. "I swear to God I did!" She shook her head. "We both made a mistake," she answered steadily--"and it is fortunate that we discovered it in time. After all, engagements are often broken off, and we were engaged such a little--little while. I am glad Mr. Maule has made up his mind to do what is right." She flushed for the first time a deep red. The discussion was hateful to her. "You are going to the Rectory to see Mrs. Kaye? I won't go in with you, but I will wait here till you come out; and then we will walk together to Rede Place. I am going away to-day, back to London, and I can't go away without saying good-bye to them. I promised Athena I would come for a few moments----" The emotion she was restraining, the tears she kept from falling, stained her face with faint patches of red, and thickened her eyelids. The measure of beauty which was hers, that beauty which owed so much to her ever-varying expression, was wholly obscured to-day. Lingard felt intolerably moved. It was horrible to him to feel that he had bartered the right, the right he had owned for so short a time and had yielded so lightly, of taking Jane into his arms, and yet he felt he had never loved her as he loved her now, defenceless, before him. He could not wound and shock her by telling her of the terrible thing which had happened. Mr. Maule had asked too much of him. His mind turned with relief to the task Jane had set him to do. In this matter of comforting the mother of a dead soldier son he would be able surely to bear himself in the old way. He opened the Rectory gate and walked up, alone, the winding path which led to the front door. Yes--Kaye was the name of the poor young fellow who had died at Aden. What were his disagreeable associations with the name of Bayworth Kaye? He remembered. For the first time since the doctor had told Lingard of what had happened the night before, it seemed as if Athena, her actual physical presence, was close to him again. He could almost hear the sound of her melodious voice as it had sounded when, thrilling with anger and scorn, she had told him of the gossip there had been about herself and this very man, this young Kaye, whose subsequent death seemed to arouse so much pity and concern in the neighbourhood. * * * * * Mrs. Kaye had been watching and waiting for General Lingard since ten o'clock. She had spent the hour in her shabby drawing-room going and coming from one window to the other, a tall, gaunt figure, clad in the deepest black. When she saw him walking through the garden she retreated far back into the room, and there came into her face a look of fierce relief. She had so greatly feared that Mrs. Maule would prevent the fulfilment of his promise. She was, as we know, a woman who made plans, and who carried out her plans to a successful issue. The rector, in his own way as bereaved, as heartbroken as was his wife, was in his study. She had told him curtly that he must stay there until she came and fetched him. The cook had been sent into the market town four miles away, and the village girl, who was being trained with a kind of hard efficient care into a parlourmaid, had received her instructions. General Lingard was to be shown straight into the drawing-room on his arrival; and then the girl was to start immediately on an errand to the village. There was to be no eavesdropper at the interview Mrs. Kaye intended to have with the great soldier who was coming to offer his condolences on the death of her only son. Strange rumours had reached the rectory, or rather Mrs. Kaye, for the rector had known nothing of them--rumours which she had drunk in with cruel avidity, rumours of General Lingard's extraordinary absorption in his beautiful hostess, of the long walks and drives they took together, of the many hours they spent alone in her sitting-room. As yet, however, not even village gossip had linked together the names of Lingard and Jane Oglander. That secret had been well kept, as are most innocent secrets. At last the young servant announced, in a nervous, fluttered voice, "General Lingard, please, ma'am." As Lingard walked in, as he saw the figure in deep mourning, his face relaxed and softened. He himself came of clerical stock. His grandfather had been one of the Golden Canons of Durham, and as a child, as a youth, he had lived much in the more prosperous section of the Church of England. Often in the holidays he had accompanied relations on calls to rectories and vicarages which were as poverty-stricken, as full of self-respecting economy, as was this house. In those days all Lingard's instinct had stood up in rebellion against the clerical atmosphere in which he was being bred. But with years there came across him a queer feeling of loyalty to the cloth, to what had been his father's cloth. Poor young Kaye! And yet most fortunate young Kaye. Such was Lingard's involuntary thought as he glanced round the homely room--for the lad whose mother stood there mourning him had known that a devoted father and mother watched with solicitude, with pride, with anxiety, every step of his career. How different from Lingard's own case!--deprived of his parents in babyhood, and with none to care whether he did well in his profession or whether he went to the devil--as he had so very nearly gone to the devil some twenty years ago. As he shook hands with the grey-haired woman who stood there with so tragic, so oppressed, a look on her face, there came across him the thought of his own long dead mother, and for a moment he was freed of the terrible happenings of the last few hours. With an effort he set himself to remember all that he had heard to Bayworth Kaye's credit. Those who had mentioned him had nearly all of them alluded to his reckless bravery, to his indifference to physical danger, to his Victoria Cross.... Ah! it was easy to utter a eulogy of such a son when speaking to the bereaved mother. It was so strange, so tragic, too, that he should have died in the way he had died, of fever. Lingard remembered hearing of the alternate hours of anxiety, of hope, and lastly of despair, through which the unfortunate parents had passed between the time they had first heard of their son's illness and of his lonely death. Mrs. Kaye listened to the kind, heartfelt words of condolence, of respectful pity for herself and for her husband, in silence; and the eyes which she kept fixed on Lingard's face were tearless and very bright. Lingard, moving a little uneasily under their fixed scrutiny, asked himself whether she really heard and understood what he was saying? So far, she had not asked him to sit down. He remembered a long interview of this kind he had had with another mother. That poor lady had received him surrounded by mementoes of a son who had been a trusty and sure comrade to himself. He recalled the photographs which had been brought out for his inspection, the floods of tears which had punctuated each of his words. But Mrs. Kaye was far more truly stricken than that other mother had been--Mrs. Kaye required no photograph of her son to remind her of his face. She had not yet been granted the relief of tears. Hers was evidently grief of a terrible, a passionate intensity. "It is good of you to say these things to me, General Lingard--and to spare the time to come and see me," she said at last. "But I should not have troubled you--I should not have presumed to trouble you, were it not that I wish to consult you about what is to me a very important matter." He bowed his head gravely, and sat down in the shabby armchair to which she rather imperiously motioned him. "I am entirely at your service," he said quietly. No doubt she wanted some message transmitted to the War Office. "I have no one else to ask or to consult," she said in low, rapid tones. "It is not a matter about which I desire to trouble my husband, and I am glad to think that he knows, as yet, nothing of what I am going to say to you. Whether he has to learn it or not will depend, General Lingard, on your advice." Lingard looked at her attentively. He was puzzled and rather disturbed by her words. "When they told my son he was not likely to live," she said, "he persuaded the doctor to allow him to write a letter to me, his mother." She stopped a moment, then went on steadily: "In it he made a certain request. It is about that request I wish to consult you, General Lingard. I wish to know whether you consider that I ought to be bound by his wishes. My son desired that his Victoria Cross and one or two other things which he greatly valued, and which we, his parents, naturally value even more than he valued them, should be handed over, given by us to--to a lady." Lingard felt a sudden feeling of recoil from the woman who sat opposite to him, watching for his answer. Then it was jealousy, pathetic but rather ignoble jealousy, that was making poor Mrs. Kaye look as she looked now--jealousy rather than grief.... There came the sound of a motor-car in the road which was above the level of the rectory garden. It stopped, and Lingard saw through the window Wantele jump out and cross over to where Jane Oglander was walking up and down. They spoke together for some moments, and Lingard felt a great lightening of his heart. Wantele must be telling Jane the awful thing which had happened, and he, Lingard, would be spared the dreadful task. Jane came up close to the car. Lingard could not see the expression on her face. At last, or so it seemed to him, they both got in under the hood. So Jane, breaking her promise to wait for him, had gone on to the house? Making a determined effort over himself, Lingard forced himself to return to the matter--the painful, the rather absurd matter--in hand. "I suppose you know all the circumstances," he began awkwardly. "The circumstances, General Lingard, are perfectly simple." The fingers of Mrs. Kaye's thin right hand plucked nervously at the buttons which fastened her black woollen bodice. "The lady in question is a married woman. She got hold of my boy, and she bewitched him into forgetting the meaning of what I thought he valued more than life itself--his honour." She rose up and stared down at Lingard, and there was a terrible look on her face. "Having amused herself for the best part of a year--having got from him all she wanted--she threw my son aside like a squeezed orange. His heart was broken, General Lingard. I cannot doubt he allowed himself to die. And it is to this woman that he desires I should give all that he has left me to remember him by----" Lingard had also risen to his feet. "You are bringing a very serious accusation," he said coldly, "against a lady for whom, as you yourself admit, Mrs. Kaye, your son entertained a great regard. Young men--forgive me for reminding you of what you must know as well as I--sometimes form strange, secret attachments which are, believe me, often as entirely unprovoked as--as--they are unrequited. I have known more than one such instance." She drew from her breast a piece of paper. "I ask you, nay, after what you have just said I implore you, to read what is written here----" She almost thrust it into his reluctant hand. "I don't wish to trouble you with my private concerns, but read this--read these lines," her shaking finger drew his troubled eyes to the words: "Do not be hurt, mother. You've never understood. In the sight of God Athena is my wife. She was nothing--she was never anything, to that wretched, cruel old man whose name she bears--and to whom she is so good when he allows her to be." Lingard read the words over twice very deliberately. Then he folded the letter, and handed it back to its owner. "This letter," he said firmly, "should be destroyed. I am sorry you showed it me, Mrs. Kaye. It was meant for no eyes but yours." "Ah!" she cried, and tears at last welled up into her eyes. "You blame my poor boy! But he told me nothing I did not already know----" She went to the fire and, stooping down, held the piece of paper over the tongues of shooting flame till he thought her hand must surely be scorched. She turned on him. "There! It's gone!" she exclaimed. "No one but you, General Lingard, and I, his mother, will ever know that my son wrote that letter. Perhaps I was wrong to have shown it to you. But what you said--but what you said"--she gave a hard, short sob--"hurt me, made me angry. I did not know how else to make you understand. And now, if you say I ought to do what my son asks, I will abide by your decision." "In your place," he said quietly, "I should certainly carry out your son's wishes." But as the mother looked into Lingard's fiercely set face, she told herself, with sombre triumph, that her boy was avenged. At the door he turned and faced her. "I cannot help wondering," he said in measured tones, "whether you have heard what has happened at Rede Place? Mrs. Maule took an overdose of chloral last night. She was found dead this morning." Mrs. Kaye was for a moment utterly astounded by the news. Then, quickly gathering herself together, she said in a low dry tone, "I will ask you to believe, General Lingard, that I was ignorant of this--this judgment when I spoke to you just now." Lingard made no answer; he looked all round him like a man who seeks some way of escape. Suddenly there came into his view the figure of Jane Oglander, moving patiently up and down on the road beyond the gate. So she had waited for him.... * * * * * As Mrs. Kaye went down the passage leading to her husband's study, she murmured once or twice, "Vengeance is mine!" It was a comfortable thought that she was alone in the house. She did not consider her husband anyone. "Vengeance is mine!" she repeated the words in a louder tone. And then she went into the rector's study and very quietly told him what she had just heard. Mr. Kaye was truly shocked and grieved. He had always liked Athena. She had always been quite civil to him, and so kind, so remarkably kind, to his dear dead son. He got up and began looking for his hat. He hoped his wife would not interfere, and prevent his doing what he thought right. It was surely his place, as the clergyman of the parish, to go up to Rede Place and offer his sincere condolences to the bereaved husband. 
41228	----	COLLECTION OF BRITISH AUTHORS. VOL. 803. GUY DEVERELL BY J. S. LE FANU. IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. I. * * * * * GUY DEVERELL. BY J. S. LE FANU, AUTHOR OF "UNCLE SILAS," ETC. _COPYRIGHT EDITION._ IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. I. LEIPZIG BERNHARD TAUCHNITZ 1865. _The Right of Translation is reserved._ * * * * * TO THAT WRITER, SO GENIAL, SO BRILLIANT, SO PHILOSOPHIC, WHOM ALL THE WORLD READS AS HARRY LORREQUER AND AS CORNELIUS O'DOWD, AND TO THAT FRIEND HOW LOVED AND HONOURED! KNOWN TO THE PRIVILEGED AS CHARLES LEVER, THIS STORY, HOW UNWORTHY AN OFFERING ALL BUT HE WILL PERCEIVE, IS DEDICATED BY THE AUTHOR. CONTENTS OF VOLUME I. I. Sir Jekyl Marlowe at the Plough Inn 1 II. The Baronet visits Wardlock Manor 12 III. Concerning two Remarkable Persons who appeared in Wardlock Church 25 IV. The Green Chamber at Marlowe 35 V. Sir Jekyl bethinks him of Pelter and Crowe 46 VI. Sir Jekyl's Room is visited 56 VII. The Baronet pursues 63 VIII. The House begins to fill 71 IX. Dinner 79 X. Inquiries have been made by Messrs. Pelter and Crowe 88 XI. Old Gryston Bridge 97 XII. The Strangers appear again 106 XIII. In the Drawing-room 114 XIV. Music 122 XV. M. Varbarriere converses with his Nephew 131 XVI. Containing a Variety of Things 141 XVII. The Magician draws a Diagram 150 XVIII. Another Guest prepares to come 159 XIX. Lady Alice takes Possession 167 XX. An Altercation 174 XXI. Lady Alice in Bed 182 XXII. How Everything went on 191 XXIII. The Divan 200 XXIV. Guy Strangways and M. Varbarriere converse 208 XXV. Lady Alice talks with Guy Strangways 215 XXVI. Some talk of a Survey of the Green Chamber 223 XXVII. M. Varbarriere talks a little more freely 230 XXVIII. Some private Talk of Varbarriere and Lady Alice at the Dinner-table 238 XXIX. The Ladies and Gentlemen resume Conversation in the Drawing-room 243 XXX. Varbarriere picks up Something about Donica Gwynn 250 XXXI. Lady Jane puts on her Brilliants 259 XXXII. Conciliation 266 XXXIII. Lady Jane and Beatrix play at Croquet 274 XXXIV. General Lennox receives a Letter 281 XXXV. The Bishop at Marlowe 290 XXXVI. Old Scenes recalled 296 XXXVII. In which Lady Alice pumps the Bishop 304 GUY DEVERELL. CHAPTER I. Sir Jekyl Marlowe at the Plough Inn. The pretty little posting station, known as the Plough Inn, on the Old London Road, where the Sterndale Road crosses it, was in a state of fuss and awe, at about five o'clock on a fine sharp October evening, for Sir Jekyl Marlowe, a man of many thousand acres, and M.P. for the county, was standing with his back to the fire, in the parlour, whose bow-window looks out on the ancient thoroughfare I have mentioned, over the row of scarlet geraniums which beautify the window-stone. "Hollo!" cried the Baronet, as the bell-rope came down in answer to an energetic but not angry pull, and he received Mrs. Jones, his hostess, who entered at the moment, with the dismantled bell-handle still in his hand. "At my old tricks, you see. I've been doing you a mischief, hey? but we'll set it right in the bill, you know. How devilish well you look! wonderful girl, by Jove! Come in, my dear, and shut the door. Not afraid of me. I want to talk of ducks and mutton-chops. I've had no luncheon, and I'm awfully hungry," said the comely Baronet in a continued chuckle. The Baronet was, by that awful red-bound volume of dates, which is one of the melancholy drawbacks of aristocracy, set down just then, and by all whom it might concern, ascertainable to be precisely forty-nine years and three months old; but so well had he worn, and so cleverly was he got up, that he might have passed for little more than forty. He was smiling, with very white teeth, and a gay leer on pretty Mrs. Jones, an old friend, with black eyes and tresses, and pink cheeks, who bore her five-and-thirty years as well almost as he did his own burthen. The slanting autumnal sun became her, and she simpered and courtesied and blushed the best she could. "Well, you pretty little devil, what can you do for me--hey? You know we're old friends--hey? What have you got for a hungry fellow? and don't stand at the door there, hang it--come in, can't you? and let me hear what you say." So Mrs. Jones, with a simpering bashfulness, delivered her bill of fare off book. The Baronet was a gallant English gentleman, and came of a healthy race, though there were a 'beau' and an archbishop in the family; he could rough it good-humouredly on beefsteak and port, and had an accommodating appetite as to hours. "That will do very nicely, my dear, thank you. You're just the same dear hospitable little rogue I remember you--how long is it, by Jove, since I stopped here that day, and the awful thunderstorm at night, don't you recollect? and the whole house in such a devil of a row, egad!" And the Baronet chuckled and leered, with his hands in his pockets. "Three years, by Jove, I think--eh?" "Four years in August last, Sir Jekyl," she answered, with a little toss of her head and a courtesy. "Four years, my dear--four devils! Is it possible? why upon my life it has positively improved you." And he tapped her cheek playfully with his finger. "And what o'clock is it?" he continued, looking at his watch, "just five. Well, I suppose you'll be ready in half-an-hour--eh, my dear?" "Sooner, if you wish, Sir Jekyl." "No, thank you, dear, that will do very nicely; and stay," he added, with a pluck at her pink ribbon, as she retreated: "you've some devilish good port here, unless it's all out--old Lord Hogwood's stock--eh?" "More than two dozen left, Sir Jekyl; would you please some?" "You've hit it, you wicked little conjurer--a bottle; and you must give me a few minutes after dinner, and a cup of coffee, and tell me all the news--eh?" The Baronet, standing on the threadbare hearthrug, looked waggishly, as it were, through the panels of the shut door, after the fluttering cap of his pretty landlady. Then he turned about and reviewed himself in the sea-green mirror over the chimneypiece, adjusted his curls and whiskers with a touch or two of his fingers' ends, and plucked a little at his ample silk necktie, and shook out his tresses, with his chin a little up, and a saucy simper. But a man tires even of that prospect; and he turned on his heel, and whistled at the smoky mezzotint of George III. on the opposite wall. Then he turned his head, and looked out through the bow-window, and his whistling stopped in the middle of a bar, at sight of a young man whom he espied, only a yard or two before the covered porch of the little inn. This young gentleman was, it seemed, giving a parting direction to some one in the doorway. He was tall, slender, rather dark, and decidedly handsome. There were, indeed, in his air, face, and costume, that indescribable elegance and superiority which constitute a man "distinguished looking." When Sir Jekyl beheld this particularly handsome young man, it was with a disagreeable shock, like the tap on a big drum, upon his diaphragm. If anyone had been there he would have witnessed an odd and grizzly change in the pleasant Baronet's countenance. For a few seconds he did not move. Then he drew back a pace or two, and stood at the further side of the fire, with the mantelpiece partially between him and the young gentleman who spoke his parting directions, all unconscious of the haggard stare which made Sir Jekyl look a great deal less young and good-natured than was his wont. This handsome young stranger, smiling, signalled with his cane, as it seemed, to a companion, who had preceded him, and ran in pursuit. For a time Sir Jekyl did not move a muscle, and then, with a sudden pound on the chimneypiece, and a great oath, he exclaimed-- "I could not have believed it! What the devil can it mean?" Then the Baronet bethought him--"What confounded stuff one does talk and think, sometimes! Half the matter dropt out of my mind. Twenty years ago, by Jove, too. _More_ than that, egad! How could I be such an ass?" And he countermarched, and twirled on his heel into his old place, with his back to the fire, and chuckled and asked again-- "How the plague _could_ I be such a fool?" And after some more of this sort of catechism he began to ruminate oddly once more, and, said he-- "It's plaguy _odd_, for all that." And he walked to the window, and, with his face close to the glass, tried in vain to see the stranger again. The bow-window did not command the road far enough to enable him to see any distance; and he stuck his hat on his head, and marched by the bar, through the porch, and, standing upon the road itself, looked shrewdly in the same direction. But the road makes a bend about there, and between the hedgerows of that wooded country the vista was not far. With a cheerful air of carelessness, Sir Jekyl returned and tapped on the bar window. "I say, Mrs. Jones, who's that good-looking young fellow that went out just now?" "The gentleman in the low-crowned hat, sir, with the gold-headed cane, please?" "Yes, a tall young fellow, with large dark eyes, and brown hair." "That will be Mr. Strangers, Sir Jekyl." "Does he sleep here to-night?" "Yes, sir, please." "And what's his business?" "Oh, dear! No business, Sir Jekyl, please. He's a real gentleman, and no end of money." "I mean, how does he amuse himself?" "A looking after prospects, and old places, and such like, Sir Jekyl. Sometimes riding and sometimes a fly. Every day some place or other." "Oh! pencils and paint-boxes--eh?" "I aven't seen none, sir. I can't say how that will be." "Well, and what is he about; where is he gone; where is he now?" demanded the Baronet. "What way did Mr. Strangers go, Bill, just now?" the lady demanded of boots, who appeared at the moment. "The Abbey, ma'am." "The Abbey, please, Sir Jekyl." "The Abbey--that's Wail Abbey--eh? How far is it?" "How far will it be, Bill?" "'Taint a mile all out, ma'am." "Not quite a mile, Sir Jekyl." "A good ruin--isn't it?" asked the Baronet. "Well, they do say it's _very_ much out of repair; but I never saw it myself, Sir Jekyl." "Neither did I," said Sir Jekyl. "I say, my good fellow, you can point it out, I dare say, from the steps here?" "Ay, please, Sir Jekyl." "You'll have dinner put back, Sir--please, Sir Jekyl?" asked Mrs. Jones. "Back or forward, _any_ way, my dear child. Only I'll have my walk first." And kissing and waving the tips of his fingers, with a smile to Mrs. Jones, who courtesied and simpered, though her heart was perplexed with culinary solicitudes "how to keep the water from getting into the trout, and prevent the ducks of overroasting," the worthy Baronet, followed by Bill, stept through the porch, and on the ridge of the old high-road, his own heart being oddly disturbed with certain cares which had given him a long respite; there he received Bill's directions as to the route to the Abbey. It was a clear frosty evening. The red round sun by this time, near the horizon, looked as if a tall man on the summit of the western hill might have touched its edge with his finger. The Baronet looked on the declining luminary as he buttoned his loose coat across his throat, till his eyes were almost dazzled, thinking all the time of nothing but that handsome young man; and as he walked on briskly toward the Abbey, he saw little pale green suns dancing along the road and wherever else his eyes were turned. "I'll see this fellow face to face, and talk a bit with him. I dare say if one were near he's not at all so like. It _is_ devilish odd though; twenty-five years and not a relation on earth--and dead--hang him! Egad, its like the Wandering Jew, and the what do you call 'em, _vitæ_. Ay, here it is." He paused for a moment, looking at the pretty stile which led a little pathway across the fields to the wooded hollow by the river, where the ruin stands. Two old white stone, fluted piers, once a doorway, now tufted with grass, and stained and worn by time, and the stile built up between. "I know, of course, there's nothing in it; but it's so odd--it _is_ so _devilish_ odd. I'd like to know all about it," said the Baronet, picking the dust from the fluting with the point of his walking-cane. "Where has he got, I wonder, by this time?" So he mounted the stile, and paused near the summit to obtain a commanding view. "Well, I suppose he's got among the old walls and rubbish by this time. I'll make him out; he'll break cover." And he skipped down the stile on the other side, and whistled a little, cutting gaily in the air with his cane as he went. But for all he could do the same intensely uncomfortable curiosity pressed upon him as he advanced. The sun sank behind the distant hills, leaving the heavens flooded with a discoloured crimson, and the faint silver of the moon in the eastern sky glimmered coldly over the fading landscape, as he suddenly emerged from the hedged pathway on the rich meadow level by the slow river's brink, on which, surrounded by lofty timber, the ruined Abbey stands. The birds had come home. Their vesper song had sunk with the setting sun, and in the sad solitude of twilight the grey ruins rose dimly before him. "A devilish good spot for a picnic!" said he, making an effort to recover his usual agreeable vein of thought and spirits. So he looked up and about him, and jauntily marched over the sward, and walked along the line of the grey walls until he found a doorway, and began his explorations. Through dark passages, up broken stairs, over grass-grown piles of rubbish, he peeped into all sorts of roofless chambers. Everything was silent and settling down into night. At last, by that narrow doorway, which in such buildings so oddly gives entrance here and there into vast apartments, he turned into that grand chamber, whose stone floor rests on the vaults beneath; and there the Baronet paused for a moment with a little start, for at the far end, looking towards him, but a little upward, with the faint reflected glow that entered through the tall row of windows, on the side of his face and figure, stood the handsome young man of whom he was in pursuit. The Baronet being himself only a step or two from the screw stairs, and still under the shadow of the overhanging arch in the corner, the stranger saw nothing of him, and to announce his approach, though not much of a musician, he hummed a bar or two briskly as he entered, and marched across and about as if thinking of nothing but architecture or the picturesque. "Charming ruin this, sir," exclaimed he, raising his hat, so soon as he had approached the stranger sufficiently near to make the address natural. "Although I'm a resident of this part of the world, I'm ashamed to say I never saw it before." The young man raised his hat too, and bowed with a ceremonious grace, which, as well as his accent, had something foreign in it. "While I, though a stranger, have been unable to resist its fascination, and have already visited it three times. You have reason to be proud of your county, sir, it is full of beauties." The stranger's sweet, but peculiar, voice thrilled the Baronet with a recollection as vivid and detested. In fact this well-seasoned man of the world was so much shocked that he answered only with a bow, and cleared his voice, and chuckled after his fashion, but all the time felt a chill creeping over his back. There was a broad bar of a foggy red light falling through the ivy-girt window, but the young man happened to stand at that moment in the shadow beside it, and when the Baronet's quick glance, instead of detecting some reassuring distinction of feature or expression, encountered only the ambiguous and obscure, he recoiled inwardly as from something abominable. "Beautiful effect--beautiful sky!" exclaimed Sir Jekyl, not knowing very well what he was saying, and waving his cane upwards towards the fading tints of the sky. The stranger emerged from his shadow and stood beside him, and such light as there was fell full upon his features, and as the Baronet beheld he felt as if he were in a dream. CHAPTER II. The Baronet Visits Wardlock Manor. In fact Sir Jekyl would have been puzzled to know exactly what to say next, so odd were his sensations, and his mind so pre-occupied with a chain of extremely uncomfortable conjecture, had not the handsome young gentleman who stood beside him at the gaping window with its melancholy folds of ivy, said-- "I have often tried to analyse the peculiar interest of ruins like these--the mixture of melancholy and curiosity. I have seen very many monasteries abroad--perhaps as old as this, even older--still peopled with their monks, with very little interest indeed, and no sympathy; and yet here I feel a yearning after the bygone age of English monasticism, an anxiety to learn all about their ways and doings, and a sort of reverence and sadness I can't account for, unless it be an expression of that profound sympathy which mortals feel with every expression of decay and dissolution." The Baronet fancied that he saw a lurking smile in the young man's face, and recoiled from psychologic talk about mortality. "I dare say you're right, sir, but I am the worst metaphysician in the world." He thought the young man smiled again. "In your liking for the picturesque, however, I quite go with you. Do you intend extending your tour to Wales and Scotland?" "I can hardly call this little excursion a tour. The fact is, my curiosity is pretty much limited to this county; there are old reasons which make me feel a very particular interest in it," said the young man, with a very pointed carelessness and a smile, which caused the Baronet inwardly to wince. "I should be very happy," said Sir Jekyl, "if you would take Marlowe in your way: there are some pictures there, as well as some views you might like to see. I am Sir Jekyl Marlowe, and own two or three places in this county, which are thought pretty--and, may I give you my card?" The snowy parallelogram was here presented and accepted with a mutual bow. The stranger was smiling oddly as Sir Jekyl introduced himself, with an expression which he fancied he could read in spite of the dark, as implying "rather old news you tell me." "And--and--what was I going to say?--oh!--yes--if I can be of any use to you in procuring access to any house or place you wish to see, I shall be very happy. You are at present staying at my occasional quarters, the 'Plough.' I'm afraid you'll think me very impertinent and intrusive; but I should like to be able to mention your name to some of my friends, who don't usually allow strangers to see their places." This was more like American than English politeness; but the Baronet was determined to know all about the stranger, commencing with his name, and the laws of good breeding, though he knew them very well, were not likely to stand long in his way when he had made up his mind to accomplish an object. "My name is Guy Strangways," said the stranger. "O--ho--it's very odd!" exclaimed the Baronet, in a sharp snarl, quite unlike his previous talk. I think the distance between them was a little increased, and he was looking askance upon the young gentleman, who made him a very low foreign bow. There was a silence, and just then a deep metallic voice from below called, "Guy--hollo!" "Excuse me--just a moment," and the young man was gone. The Baronet waited. "He'll be back," muttered Sir Jekyl, "in a minute." But the Baronet was mistaken. He waited at that open window, whistling out upon the deepening twilight, till the edges of the ivy began to glitter in the moonbeams, and the bats to trace their zigzags in the air; and at last he gave over expecting. He looked back into the gloomy void of that great chamber, and listened, and felt rather angry at his queer sensations. He had not turned about when the stranger withdrew, and did not know the process of his vanishing, and for the first time it struck him, "who the plague could the fellow who _called_ him be?" On the whole he wished himself away, and he lighted a cigar for the sake of its vulgar associations, and made his way out of the ruins, and swiftly through darkened fields toward the Old London Road; and was more comfortable than he cared to say, when he stepped through the porch into the open hall of the "Plough," and stopped before the light at the bar, to ask his hostess once more, quite in his old way, whether Mr. Strangways had returned. "No, not yet; always uncertain; his dinner mostly overdone." "Has he a friend with him?" "Yes, sir, sure." "And what is he like?" "Older man, Sir Jekyl, a long way than young Mr. Guy Strangways; some relation I do think." "When do they leave you?" "To-morrow evening, with a chaise and pair for Aukworth." "Aukworth? why, that's another of my properties!--ha, ha, ha, by Jove! Does he know the Abbey here is mine?" "I rayther think not, Sir Jekyl. Would you please to wish dinner?" "To be sure, you dear little quiz, dinner by all means; and let them get my horses to in half-an-hour; and if Mr. Strangways should return before I go, I'd like to see him, and don't fail to let me know--do ye see?" Dinner came and went, but Mr. Strangways did not return, which rather vexed Sir Jekyl, who, however, left his card for that gentleman, together with an extremely polite note, which he wrote at the bar with his hat on, inviting him and his companion to Marlowe, where he would be at home any time for the next two months, and trusted they would give him a week before they left the country. It was now dark, and Sir Jekyl loitered under the lamplight of his chaise for a while, in the hope that Mr. Strangways would turn up. But he did not; and the Baronet jumped into the vehicle, which was forthwith in motion. He sat in the corner, with one foot on the cushion, and lighted a cigar. His chuckling was all over, and his quizzing, for the present. Mrs. Jones had not a notion that he was in the least uneasy, or on any but hospitable thoughts intent. But anyone who now looked in his face would have seen at a glance how suddenly it had become overcast with black care. "Guy Strangways!" he thought; "those two names, and his wonderful likeness! Prowling about this county! Why this more than another? He seemed to take a triumphant pleasure in telling me of his special fancy for this county. And his voice--a tenor they call it--I hate that sweet sort of voice. Those d---- singing fellows. I dare say he sings. They never do a bit of good. It's very odd. It's the same voice. I forgot that odd silvery sound. The _same_, by Jove! I'll come to the bottom of the whole thing. D---- me, I will!" Then the Baronet puffed away fast and earnestly at his cigar, and then lighted another, and after that a third. They steadied him, I dare say, and helped to oil the mechanism of thought. But he had not recovered his wonted cheer of mind when the chaise drew up at a pair of time-worn fluted piers, with the gable of an old-fashioned dwelling-house overlooking the road at one side. An iron gate admitted to a courtyard, and the hall door of the house was opened by an old-fashioned footman, with some flour on the top of his head. Sir Jekyl jumped down. "Your mistress quite well, hey? My daughter ready?" inquired the Baronet. "Where are they? No, I'll not go up, thank you; I'll stay here," and he entered the parlour. "And, do you see, you just go up and ask your mistress if she wishes to see me." By this time Sir Jekyl was poking up the fire and frowning down on the bars, with the flickering glare shooting over his face. "Can the old woman have anything to do with it? Pooh! no. I'd like to see her. But who knows what sort of a temper she's in?" As he thus ruminated, the domestic with the old-fashioned livery and floured head returned to say that his mistress would be happy to see him. The servant conducted him up a broad stair with a great oak banister, and opening a drawing-room door, announced-- "Sir Jekyl Marlowe." He was instantly in the room, and a tall, thin old lady, with a sad and stately mien, rose up to greet him. "How is little mamma?" cried the Baronet, with his old chuckle. "An age since we met, hey? How well you look!" The old lady gave her thin mittened hand to her son-in-law, and looked a grim and dubious sort of welcome upon him. "Yes, Jekyl, an age; and only that Beatrix is here, I suppose another age would have passed without my seeing you. And an old woman at my years has not many ages between her and the grave." The old lady spoke not playfully, but sternly, like one who had suffered long and horribly, and who associated her sufferings with her visitor; and in her oblique glance was something of deep-seated antipathy. "Egad! you're younger than I, though you count more years. You live by clock and rule, and you show it. You're as fresh as that bunch of flowers there; while I am literally knocking myself to pieces--and I know it--by late hours, and all sorts of nonsense. So you must not be coming the old woman over me, you know, unless you want to frighten me. And how is Beatrix? How do, Beatrix? All ready, I see. Good child." Beatrix at this moment was entering. She was tall and slightly formed, with large dark eyes, hair of soft shadowy black, and those tints of pure white and rich clear blush, scarlet lips, and pearly teeth, and long eyelashes, which are so beautiful in contrast and in harmony. She had the prettiest little white nose, and her face was formed in that decided oval which so heightens the charm of the features. She was not a tragic heroine. Her smile was girlish and natural--and the little ring of pearls between her lips laughed beautifully--and her dimples played on chin and cheek as she smiled. Her father kissed her, and looked at her with a look of gratification, as he might on a good picture that belonged to him; and turning her smiling face, with his finger and thumb upon her little dimpled chin, toward Lady Alice, he said-- "Pretty well, this girl, hey?" "I dare say, Jekyl, she'll do very well; she's not formed yet, you know,"--was stately Lady Alice's qualified assent. She was one of that school who are more afraid of spoiling people than desirous of pleasing them by admiration. "She promises to be like her darling mother; and that is a melancholy satisfaction to me, and, of course, to you. You'll have some tea, Jekyl?" The Baronet was standing, hat in hand, with his outside coat on, and his back to the fire, and a cashmere muffler loosely about his throat. "Well, as it is here, I don't mind." "May I run down, grandmamma, and say good-bye to Ellen and old Mrs. Mason?" "Surely--you mean, of course to the parlour? You may have them there." "And you must not be all night about it, Beatrix. We'll be going in a few minutes. D'ye mind?" "I'm quite ready, papa," said she; and as she glided from the room she stole a glance at her bright reflection in the mirror. "You are always in a hurry, Jekyl, to leave me when you chance to come here. I should be sorry, however, to interfere with the pleasanter disposition of your time." "Now, little mother, you mustn't be huffed with me. I have a hundred and fifty things to look after at Marlowe when I get there. I have not had a great deal of time, you know--first the session, then three months knocking about the world." "You never wrote to me since you left Paris," said the old lady, grimly. "Didn't I? That was very wrong! But you knew those were my holidays, and I detest writing, and you knew I could take care of myself; and it is so much better to tell one's adventures than to put them into letters, don't you think?" "If one could tell them all in five minutes," replied the old lady, drily. "Well, but you'll come over to Marlowe--you really must--and I'll tell you everything there--the truth, the whole truth, and as much more as you like." This invitation was repeated every year, but like Don Juan's to the statue, was not expected to lead to a literal visit. "You have haunted rooms there, Jekyl," she said, with an unpleasant smile and a nod. "You have not kept house in Marlowe for ten years, I think. Why do you go there now?" "Caprice, whim, what you will," said the Baronet, combing out his favourite whisker with the tips of his fingers, while he smiled on himself in the glass upon the chimneypiece, "I wish _you'd_ tell me, for _I_ really don't know, except that I'm tired of Warton and Dartbroke, as I am of all monotony. I like change, you know." "Yes; you _like change_," said the old lady, with a dignified sarcasm. "I'm afraid it's a true bill," admitted Sir Jekyl, with a chuckle, "So you'll come to Marlowe and see us there--won't you?" "No, Jekyl--certainly _not_," said the old lady, with intense emphasis. A little pause ensued, during which the Baronet twiddled at his whisker, and continued to smile amusedly at himself in the glass. "I wonder you could think of asking me to Marlowe, considering all that has happened there. I sometimes wonder at myself that I can endure to see you at all, Jekyl Marlowe; and I don't think, if it were not for that dear girl, who is so like her sainted mother, I should ever set eyes on you again." "I'm glad we have that link. You make me love Beatrix better," he replied. He was now arranging the elaborate breast-pin with its tiny chain, which was at that date in vogue. "And so you are going to keep house at Marlowe?" resumed the lady, stiffly, not heeding the sentiment of his little speech. "Well, so I purpose." "I don't like that house," said the old lady, with a subdued fierceness. "Sorry it does not please you, little mother," replied Sir Jekyl. "You know I don't like it," she repeated. "In that case you need not have told me," he said. "I choose to tell you. I'll say so as often as I see you--as often as I like." It was an odd conference--back to back--the old lady stiff and high--staring pale and grimly at the opposite wall. The Baronet looking with a quizzical smile on his handsome face in the mirror--now plucking at a whisker--now poking at a curl with his finger-tip--and now in the same light way arranging the silken fall of his necktie. "There's nothing my dear little mamma can say, I'll not listen to with pleasure." "There is much I might say you could not listen to with pleasure." The cold was growing more intense, and bitter in tone and emphasis, as she addressed the Italian picture of Adonis and his two dogs hanging on the distant wall. "Well, with _respect_, _not_ with pleasure--no," said he, and tapped his white upper teeth with the nail of his middle finger. "Assuming, then, that you speak truth, it is high time, Jekyl Marlowe, that you should alter your courses--here's your daughter, just come out. It is ridiculous, your affecting the vices of youth. Make up as you will--you're past the middle age--you're an elderly man now." "You can't vex me that way, you dear old mamma," he said, with a chuckle, which looked for the first time a little vicious in the glass. "We baronets, you know, are all booked, and all the world can read our ages; but you women manage better--you and your two dear sisters, Winifred and Georgiana." "They are _dead_," interrupted Lady Alice, with more asperity than pathos. "Yes, I know, poor old souls--to be sure, peers' daughters die like other people, I'm afraid." "And when they do, are mentioned, if not with sorrow, at least with decent respect, by persons, that is, who know how to behave themselves." There was a slight quiver in Lady Alice's lofty tone that pleased Sir Jekyl, as you might have remarked had you looked over his shoulder into the glass. "Well, you know, I was speaking not of deaths but births, and only going to say if you look in the peerage you'll find all the men, poor devils, pinned to their birthdays, and the women left at large, to exercise their veracity on the point; but you need not care--you have not pretended to youth for the last ten years I think." "You are excessively impertinent, sir." "I _know_ it," answered Sir Jekyl, with a jubilant chuckle. A very little more, the Baronet knew, and Lady Alice Redcliffe would have risen gray and grim, and sailed out of the room. Their partings were often after this sort. But he did not wish matters to go quite that length at present. So he said, in a sprightly way, as if a sudden thought had struck him-- "By Jove, I believe I _am devilish_ impertinent, without knowing it though--and you have forgiven me so often, I'm sure you _will_ once more, and I am really so much obliged for your kindness to Beatrix. I am, indeed." So he took her hand, and kissed it. CHAPTER III. Concerning two Remarkable Persons who appeared in Wardlock Church. Lady Alice carried her thin Roman nose some degrees higher; but she said-- "If I say anything disagreeable, it is not for the pleasure of giving you pain, Jekyl Marlowe; but I understand that you mean to have old General Lennox and his artful wife to stay at your house, and if so, I think it an arrangement that had better be dispensed with. I don't think her an eligible acquaintance for Beatrix, and you know very well she's _not_--and it is not a respectable or creditable kind of thing." "Now, what d--d fool, I beg pardon--but who the plague has been filling your mind with those ridiculous stories--my dear little mamma? You know how ready I am to confess; you _might_ at least; I tell you everything; and I do assure you I _never_ admired her. She's good looking, I know; but so are fifty pictures and statues I've seen, that don't please me." "Then it's true, the General and his wife are going on a visit to Marlowe?" insisted Lady Alice, drily. "No, they are not. D---- me, I'm not thinking of the General and his wife, nor of any such d--d trumpery. I'd give something to know who the devil's taking these cursed liberties with my name." "Pray, Jekyl Marlowe, command your language. It can't the least signify who tells me; but you see I do sometimes get a letter." "Yes, and a precious letter too. Such a pack of lies did any human being ever hear fired off in a sentence before? I'm _épris_ of Mrs. General Lennox. Thumper number one! She's a lady of--I beg pardon--easy virtue. Thumper number two! and I invite her and her husband down to Marlowe, to make love of course to her, and to fight the old General. Thumper number three!" And the Baronet chuckled over the three "thumpers" merrily. "Don't talk slang, if you please--gentlemen don't, at least in addressing ladies." "Well, then, I won't; I'll speak just as you like, only you must not blow me up any more; for really there is no cause, and we here only two or three minutes together, you know; and I want to tell you something, or rather to ask you--do you ever hear anything of those _Deverells_, you know?" Lady Alice looked quite startled, and turned quickly half round in her chair, with her eyes on Sir Jekyl's face. The Baronet's smile subsided, and he looked with a dark curiosity in hers. A short but dismal silence followed. "You've heard from them?" "No!" said the lady, with little change in the expression of her face. "Well, _of_ them?" "No," she repeated; "but _why_ do you ask? It's _very_ strange!" "_What's_ strange? Come, now, you _have_ something to say; tell me what it is." "I wonder, Jekyl, you ask for them, in the first place." "Well--well, of course; but what next?" murmured the Baronet, eagerly: "why is it so strange?" "Only because I've been thinking of them--a great deal--for the last few days; and it seemed very odd your asking; and in fact I fancy the same thing has happened to us both." "Well, may be; but what _is_ it?" demanded the Baronet, with a sinister smile. "I have been startled; most painfully and powerfully affected; I have seen the most extraordinary resemblance to my beautiful, _murdered_ Guy." She rose, and wept passionately, standing with her face buried in her handkerchief. Sir Jekyl frowned with closed eyes and upturned face, waiting like a patient man bored to death, for the subsidence of the storm which he had conjured up. Very pale, too, was that countenance, and contracted for a few moments with intense annoyance. "I saw the same fellow," said the Baronet, in a subdued tone, so soon as there was a subsidence, "this evening; he's at that little inn on the Sterndale Road. Guy Strangways he calls himself; I talked with him for a few minutes; a gentlemanly young man; and I don't know what to make of it. So I thought I'd ask you whether _you_ could help me to a guess; and that's all." The old lady shook her head. "And I don't think you need employ quite such hard terms," he said. "I don't want to speak of it at all," said she; "but if I do I can't say less; nor I won't--no, never!" "You see it's very odd, those two names," said Sir Jekyl, not minding; "and as you say, the likeness so astonishing--I--I--what do _you_ think of it?" "Of course it's an accident," said the old lady. "I'm glad you think so," said he, abruptly. "Why, what could it be? you don't believe in apparitions?" she replied, with an odd sort of dryness. "I rather think not," said he; "I meant he left no very near relation, and I fancied those Deverell people might have contrived some trick, or intended some personation, or something, and I thought that you, perhaps, had heard something of their movements." "Nothing--what could they have done, or why should they have sought to make any such impression? I don't understand it. It is very extraordinary. But the likeness in church amazed and shocked me, and made me ill." "In church, you say?" repeated Sir Jekyl. "Yes, in church," and she told him in her own way, what I shall tell in mine, as follows:-- Last Sunday she had driven, in her accustomed state, with Beatrix, to Wardlock church. The church was hardly five hundred yards away, and the day bright and dry. But Lady Alice always arrived and departed in the coach, and sat in the Redcliffe seat, in the centre of the gallery. She and Beatrix sat face to face at opposite sides of the pew. As Lady Alice looked with her cold and steady glance over the congregation in the aisle, during the interval of silence that precedes the commencement of the service, a tall and graceful young man, with an air of semi-foreign fashion, entered the church, accompanied by an elderly gentleman, of whom she took comparatively little note. The young man and his friend were ushered into a seat confronting the gallery. Lady Alice gazed and gazed transfixed with astonishment and horror. The enamelled miniature on her bosom was like; but there, in that clear, melancholy face, with its large eyes and wavy hair, was a resurrection. In that animated sculpture were delicate tracings and touches of nature's chisel, which the artist had failed to represent, which even memory had neglected to fix, but which all now returned with the startling sense of identity in a moment. She had put on her gold spectacles, as she always did on taking her seat, and opened her "Morning Service," bound in purple Russia, with its golden clasp and long ribbons fringed with the same precious metal, with the intent to mark the proper psalms and lessons at her haughty leisure. She therefore saw the moving image of her dead son before her, with an agonizing distinctness that told like a blight of palsy on her face. She saw his elderly companion also distinctly. A round-shouldered man, with his short caped cloak still on. A grave man, with a large, high, bald forehead, a heavy, hooked nose, and great hanging moustache and beard. A dead and ominous face enough, except for the piercing glance of his full eyes, under very thick brows, and just the one you would have chosen out of a thousand portraits, for a plotting high-priest or an old magician. This magus fixed his gaze on Lady Alice, not with an ostentation of staring, but sternly from behind the dark embrasure of his brows; and leaning a little sideways, whispered something in the ear of his young companion, whose glance at the same moment was turned with a dark and fixed interest upon the old lady. It was a very determined stare on both sides, and of course ill-bred, but mellowed by distance. The congregation were otherwise like other country congregations, awaiting the offices of their pastor, decent, listless, while this great stare was going on, so little becoming the higher associations and solemn aspect of the place. It was, with all its conventional screening, a fierce, desperate scrutiny, cutting the dim air with a steady congreve fire that crossed and glared unintermittent by the ears of deceased gentlemen in ruffs and grimy doublets, at their posthumous devotions, and brazen knights praying on their backs, and under the eyes of all the gorgeous saints, with glories round their foreheads, in attitudes of benediction or meekness, who edified believers from the eastern window. Lady Alice drew back in her pew. Beatrix was in a young-lady reverie, and did not observe what was going on. There was nothing indeed to make it very conspicuous. But when she looked at Lady Alice, she was shocked at her appearance, and instantly crossed, and said-- "I am afraid you are ill, grandmamma; shall we come away?" The old lady made no answer, but got up and took the girl's arm, and left the seat very quietly. She got down the gallery stairs, and halted at the old window on the landing, and sate there a little, ghastly and still mute. The cold air circulating upward from the porch revived her. "I am better, child," said she, faintly. "Thank Heaven," said the girl, whose terror at her state proved how intensely agitated the old lady must have been. Mrs. Wrattles, the sextoness, emerging at that moment with repeated courtesies, and whispered condolence and inquiries, Lady Alice, with a stiff condescension, prayed her to call her woman, Mason, to her. So Lady Alice, leaning slenderly on Mason's stout arm, insisted that Beatrix should return and sit out the service; and she herself, for the first time within the memory of man, returned from Wardlock church on foot, instead of in her coach. Beatrix waited until the congregation had nearly disgorged itself and dispersed, before making her solitary descent. When she came down, without a chaperon, at the close of the rector's discourse, the floured footman in livery, with his gold-headed cane, stood as usual at the coach door only to receive her, and convey the order to the coachman, "home." The churchyard gate, as is usual, I believe, in old places of that kind, opens at the south side, and the road to Wardlock manor leads along the churchyard wall and round the corner of it at a sharp angle just at the point where the clumsy old stone mausoleum or vault of the Deverell family overlooks the road, with its worn pilasters and beetle-browed cornice. Now that was a Sunday of wonders. It had witnessed Lady Alice's pedestrian return from church, an act of humiliation, almost of penance, such as the memory of Wardlock could furnish no parallel to; and now it was to see another portent, for her ladyship's own gray horses, fat and tranquil beasts, who had pulled her to and from church for I know not how many years, under the ministration of the careful coachman, with exemplary sedateness, on this abnormal Sabbath took fright at a musical performance of two boys, one playing the Jew's harp and the other drumming tambourine-wise on his hat, and _suadente diabolo_ and so forth, set off at a gallop, to the terror of all concerned, toward home. Making the sharp turn of the road, where the tomb of the Deverells overhangs it from the churchyard, the near-gray came down, and his off-neighbour reared and plunged frightfully. The young lady did not scream, but, very much terrified, she made voluble inquiries of the air and hedges from the window, while the purple coachman pulled hard from the box, and spoke comfortably to his horses, and the footman, standing out of reach of danger, talked also in his own vein. Simultaneously with all this, as if emerging from the old mausoleum, there sprang over the churchyard fence, exactly under its shadow, that young man who had excited emotions so various in the Baronet and in Lady Alice, and seized the horse by the head with both hands, and so cooperated that in less than a minute the two horses were removed from the carriage, and he standing, hat in hand, before the window, to assure the young lady that all was quite safe now. So she descended, and the grave footman, with the Bible and Prayer-book, followed her steps with his gold-headed rod of office, while the lithe and handsome youth, his hat still in air which stirred his rich curls, walked beside her with something of that romantic deference which in one so elegant and handsome has an inexpressible sentiment of the tender in it. He walked to the door of Wardlock Manor, and I purposely omit all he said, because I doubt whether it would look as well in this unexceptionable type as it sounded from his lips in Beatrix Marlowe's pretty ear. If the speaker succeed with his audience, what more can oratory do for him? Well! he was gone. There remained in Beatrix's ear a music; in her fancy a heaven-like image--a combination of tint, and outline, and elegance, which made every room and scene without it lifeless, and every other object homely. These little untold impressions are of course liable to fade and vanish pretty quickly in absence, and to be superseded even sooner. Therefore it would be unwarranted to say that she was in love, although I can't deny that she was haunted by that slightly foreign young gentleman. This latter portion of the adventure was not divulged by old Lady Alice, because Beatrix, I suppose, forgot to tell her, and she really knew nothing about it. All the rest, her own observation and experience, she related with a grim and candid particularity. CHAPTER IV. The Green Chamber at Marlowe. So the Baronet, with a rather dreary chuckle, said:-- "I don't think, to say truth, there is anything in it. I really can't see why the plague I should bore myself about it. You know your pew in the middle of the gallery, with that painted hatchment thing, you know...." "Respect the dead," said Lady Alice, looking down with a dry severity on the table. "Well, yes; I mean, you know, it is so confoundedly conspicuous, I can't wonder at the two fellows, the old and young, staring a bit at it, and, perhaps, at _you_, you know," said Sir Jekyl, in his impertinent vein. "But I agree with you they are no ghosts, and I really shan't trouble my head about them any more. I wonder I was such a fool--hey? But, as you say, you know, it is unpleasant to be reminded of--of those things; it can't be helped now, though." "Now, nor ever," said Lady Alice, grimly. "Exactly; neither now, nor ever," repeated Sir Jekyl; "and we both know it can't possibly be poor--I mean anyone concerned in that transaction; so the likeness must be accidental, and therefore of no earthly significance--eh?" Lady Alice, with elevated brows, fiddled in silence with some crumbs on the table with the tip of her thin finger. "I suppose Beatrix is ready; may I ring the bell?" "Oh! here she is. Now, bid grandmamma good-night," said the Baronet. So slim and pretty Beatrix, in her cloak, stooped down and placed her arms about the neck of the old lady, over whose face came a faint flush of tender sunset, and her old grey eyes looked very kindly on the beautiful young face that stooped over her, as she said, in a tone that, however, was stately-- "Good-bye, my dear child; you are warm enough--you are certain?" "Oh! yes, dear grandmamma--my cloak, and this Cashmere thing." "Well, darling, good-night. You'll not forget to write--you'll not fail? Good-night, Beatrix, dear--good-bye." "Good-night," said the Baronet, taking the tips of her cold fingers together, and addressing himself to kiss her cheek, but she drew back in one of her whims, and said, stiffly, "There, not to-night. Good-bye, Jekyl." "Well," chuckled he, after his wont, "another time; but mind, you're to come to Marlowe." He did not care to listen to what she replied, but he called from the stairs, as he ran down after his daughter-- "Now, mind, I won't let you off this time; you really must come. Good-night, _au revoir_--good-night." I really think that exemplary old lady hated the Baronet, who called her "little mamma," and invited her every year, without meaning it, most good-naturedly, to join his party under the ancestral roof-tree. He took a perverse sort of pleasure in these affectionate interviews, in fretting her not very placid temper--in patting her, as it were, wherever there was a raw, and in fondling her against the grain; so that his caresses were cruel, and their harmony, such as it was, amounted to no more than a flimsy deference to the scandalous world. But Sir Jekyl knew that there was nothing in this quarter to be gained in love by a different tactique; there was a dreadful remembrance, which no poor lady has ostrich power to digest, in the way; it lay there, hard, cold, and irreducible; and the morbid sensation it produced was hatred. He knew that "little mamma," humanly speaking, ought to hate him. His mother indeed she was not; but only the step-mother of his deceased wife. Mother-in-law is not always a very sweet relation, but with the prefix "step" the chances are, perhaps, worse. There was, however, as you will by-and-by see, a terrible accident, or something, always remembered, gliding in and out of Wardlock Manor like the Baronet's double, walking in behind him when he visited her, like his evil genius, and when they met affectionately, standing by his shoulder, black and scowling, with clenched fist. Now pretty Beatrix sat in the right corner of the chariot, and Sir Jekyl, her father, in the left. The lamps were lighted, and though there was moonlight, for they had a long stretch of road always dark, because densely embowered in the forest of Penlake. Tier over tier, file behind file, nodding together, the great trees bent over like plumed warriors, and made a solemn shadow always between their ranks. Marlowe was quite new to Beatrix; but still too distant, twelve miles away, to tempt her to look out and make observations as she would on a nearer approach. "You don't object to my smoking a cigar, Beatrix? The smoke goes out of the window, you know," said the Baronet, after they had driven about a mile in silence. What young lady, so appealed to by a parent, ever did object? The fact is, Sir Jekyl did not give himself the trouble to listen to her answer, but was manifestly thinking of something quite different, as he lighted his match. When he threw his last stump out of the window they were driving through Penlake Forest, and the lamplight gleamed on broken rows of wrinkled trunks and ivy. "I suppose she told you all about it?" said he, suddenly pursuing his own train of thought. "Who?" inquired Beatrix. "I never was a particular favourite of her's, you know--grandmamma's, I mean. She does not love me, poor old woman! And she has a knack of making herself precious disagreeable, in which I try to imitate her, for peace' sake, you know; for, by George, if I was not uncivil now and then, we could never get on at all." Sir Jekyl chuckled after his wont, as it were, between the bars of this recitative, and he asked-- "What were the particulars--the adventure on Sunday--that young fellow, you know?" Miss Beatrix had heard no such interrogatory from her grandmamma, whose observations in the church-aisle were quite as unknown to her; and thus far the question of Sir Jekyl was a shock. "Did not grandmamma tell you about it?" he pursued. "About what, papa?" asked Beatrix, who was glad that it was dark. "About her illness--a young fellow in a pew down in the aisle staring at her. By Jove! one would have fancied that sort of thing pretty well over. Tell me all about it." The fact was that this was the first she had heard of it. "Grandmamma told me nothing of it," said she. "And did not you see what occurred? Did not you see him staring?" asked he. Beatrix truly denied. "You young ladies are always thinking of yourselves. So you saw nothing, and have nothing to tell? That will do," said Sir Jekyl, drily; and silence returned. Beatrix was relieved on discovering that her little adventure was unsuspected. Very little was there in it, and nothing to reflect blame upon her. From her exaggeration of its importance, and her quailing as she fancied her father was approaching it, I conclude that the young gentleman had interested her a little. And now, as Sir Jekyl in one corner of the rolling chariot brooded in the dark over his disappointed conjectures, so did pretty Beatrix in the other speculate on the sentences which had just fallen from his lips, and long to inquire some further particulars, but somehow dared not. Could that tall and handsome young man, who had come to her rescue so unaccountably--the gentleman with those large, soft, dark eyes, which properly belong to heroes--have been the individual whose gaze had so mysteriously affected her grandmamma? What could the associations have been that were painful enough so to overcome that grim, white woman? Was he a relation? Was he an outcast member of that proud family? Or, was he that heir-at-law, or embodied Nemesis, that the yawning sea or grave will sometimes yield up to plague the guilty or the usurper? For all or any of these parts he seemed too young. Yet Beatrix fancied instinctively that he could be no other than the basilisk who had exercised so strange a spell over her grim, but withal kind old kinswoman. Was there not, she thought, something peculiar in the look he threw across the windows of old stone-fronted Wardlock manor--reserved, curious, half-smiling--as if he looked on an object which he had often heard described, and had somehow, from personal associations or otherwise, an interest in? It was but a momentary glance just as he took his leave; but there was, she thought, that odd character in it. By this time the lamps were flashing on the village windows and shop-fronts; and at the end of the old gabled street, under a canopy of dark trees, stood the great iron gate of Marlowe. Sir Jekyl rubbed the glass and looked out when they halted at the gate. The structures of his fancy had amused him, rather fearfully indeed, and he was surprised to find that they were entering the grounds of Marlowe so soon. He did not mind looking out, or speaking to the old gamekeeper, who pulled open the great barriers, but lay back in his corner sullenly, in the attitude of a gentleman taking a nap. Beatrix, however, looked out inquisitively, and saw by the misty moonlight a broad level studded with majestic timber--singly, in clumps, and here and there in solemn masses; and soon rose the broad-fronted gabled house before them, with its steep roofs and its hospitable clumps of twisted chimneys showing black against the dim sky. Miss Marlowe's maid, to whom the scene was quite as new as to her mistress, descended from the back seat, in cloaks and mufflers, and stood by the hall-door steps, that shone white in the moonlight, before their summons had been answered. Committing his daughter to her care, the Baronet--who was of a bustling temperament, and never drank tea except from motives of gallantry--called for Mrs. Gwynn, the housekeeper, who presently appeared. She was an odd-looking woman--some years turned of fifty, thin, with a longish face and a fine, white, glazed skin. There was something queer about her eyes: you soon discovered it to arise from their light colour and something that did not quite match in their pupils. On entering the hall, where the Baronet had lighted a candle, having thrown his hat on the table, and merely loosed his muffler and one or two buttons of his outside coat, she smiled a chill gleam of welcome with her pale lips, and dropped two sharp little courtesies. "Well, old Donica, and how do ye do?" said the Baronet, smiling, with a hand on each thin grey silk shoulder. "Long time since I saw you. But, egad! you grow younger and younger, you pretty old rogue;" and he gave her pale, thin cheek a playful tap with his fingers. "Pretty well, please, Sir Jekyl, thank ye," she replied, receding a little with dry dignity. "Very welcome, sir, to Marlowe. Miss Beatrix looks very well, I am happy to see; and you, sir, also." "And you're glad to see us, I know?" "Certainly, sir, glad to see you," said Mrs. Gwynn, with another short courtesy. "The servants not all come? No, nor Ridley with the plate. He'll arrive to-morrow; and--and we shall have the house full in little more than a week. Let us go up and look at the rooms; I forget them almost, by Jove--I really do--it's so long since. Light you another, and we'll do very well." "You'll see them better by daylight, sir. I kept everything well aired and clean. The house looks wonderful--it do," replied Mrs. Gwynn, accompanying the Baronet up the broad oak stairs. "If it looks as fresh as you, Donica, it's a miracle of a house--egad! you're a wonder. How you skip by my side, with your little taper, like a sylph in a ballet, egad!" "You wear pretty well yourself, Sir Jekyl," drily remarked the white-faced sylph, who had a sharp perpendicular line between her eyebrows, indicative of temper. "So they tell me, by Jove. We're pretty well on though, Donnie--eh? Everyone knows my age--printed, you know, in the red book. You've the advantage of me there--eh, Don?" "I'm just fifty-six, sir, and I don't care if all the world knewd it." "All the world's curious, I dare say, on the point; but I shan't tell them, old Gwynn," said Sir Jekyl. "Curious or no, sir, it's just the truth, and I don't care to hide it. Past that folly now, sir, and I don't care if I wor seventy, and a steppin' like a--" "A sylph," supplied he. "Yes--a sylph--into my grave. It's a bad world, and them that's suffered in it soon tires on it, sir." "_You_ have not had a great deal to trouble you. Neither chick, nor child, nor husband, egad! So here we are." They were now standing on the gallery, at the head of the great staircase. "These are the rooms your letter says are not furnished--eh? Let us come to the front gallery." So, first walking down the gallery in which they were, to the right, and then entering a passage by a turn on the left, they reached the front gallery which runs parallel to that at the head of the stairs. "Where have you put Beatrix?" "She wished the room next mine, please, sir, up-stairs," answered the housekeeper. "Near the front--eh?" "The left side, please, sir, as you look from the front," replied she. "_From_ the front?" he repeated. "From the front," she reiterated. "Over there, then?" he said, pointing upward to the left. "That will be about it, sir," she answered. "How many rooms have we here in a row?" he asked, facing down the gallery, with its file of doors at each side. "Four bed-rooms and three dressing-rooms at each side." "Ay, well now, I'll tell you who's coming, and how to dispose of them." So Sir Jekyl quartered his friends, as he listed, and then said he-- "And the large room at the other end, here to the right--come along." And Sir Jekyl marched briskly in the direction indicated. "Please, sir," said the slim, pale housekeeper, with the odd leer in her eye, overtaking him quietly. "Ay, here it is," said he, not minding her, and pushing open the door of a dressing-room at the end of the gallery. "Inside this, I remember." "But that's the green chamber, sir," continued Mrs. Gwynn, gliding beside him as he traversed the floor. "The room we call Sir Harry's room, I know--capital room--eh?" "I don't suppose," began the pale lady, with a sinister sharpness. "Well?" he demanded, looking down in her face a little grimly. "It's the green chamber, sir," she said, with a hard emphasis. "You said so before, eh?" he replied. "And I did not suppose, sir, you'd think of putting anyone there," she continued. "Then you're just as green as the chamber," said Sir Jekyl, with a chuckle. And he entered the room, holding the candle high in air, and looking about him a little curiously, the light tread and sharp pallid face of Donica Gwynn following him. CHAPTER V. Sir Jekyl bethinks him of Pelter and Crowe. The Baronet held his candle high in air, as I have said, as he gazed round him inquisitively. The thin housekeeper, with her pale lips closed, and her odd eyes dropped slantingly toward the floor, at the corner of the room, held hers demurely in her right finger and thumb, her arms being crossed. The room was large, and the light insufficient. Still you could not help seeing at a glance that it must be, in daylight, a tolerably cheerful one. It was roomy and airy, with a great bow-window looking to the front of the building, of which it occupied the extreme left, reaching about ten feet from the level of the more ancient frontage of the house. The walls were covered with stamped leather, chiefly green and gold, and the whole air of the room, even in its unarranged state, though somewhat quaint and faded, was wonderfully gay and cozy. "This is the green chamber, sir," she repeated, with her brows raised and her eyes still lowered askance, and some queer wrinkles on her forehead as she nodded a sharp bitter emphasis. "To be sure it is, damme!--why not?" he said, testily, and then burst into a short laugh. "You're not a going, I suppose, Sir Jekyl, to put anyone into it?" said she. "I don't see, for the life of me, why I should not--eh? a devilish comfortable room." "Hem! I can't but suppose you are a joking me, Sir Jekyl," persisted the gray silk phantom. "Egad! you forget how old we're growing; why the plague should I quiz you! I want the room for old General Lennox, that's all--though I'm not bound to tell you for whom I want it--am I?" "There's a plenty o' rooms without this one, Sir Jekyl," persevered the lady, sternly. "Plenty, of course; but none so good," said he, carelessly. "No one ever had luck that slept in it," answered the oracle, lifting her odd eyes and fixing them on Sir Jekyl. "I don't put them here for luck. We want to make them comfortable," answered Sir Jekyl, poking at the furniture as he spoke. "You know what was your father's wish about it, sir?" she insisted. "My father's wish--egad, he did not leave many of his wishes unsatisfied--eh?" he answered, with another chuckle. "And your poor lady's wish," she said, a good deal more sharply. "I don't know why the devil I'm talking to you, old Gwynn," said the Baronet, turning a little fiercely about. "_Dying_ wishes," emphasised she. "It is time, Heaven knows, all that stuff should stop. You slept in it yourself, in my father's time. I remember you, here, Donica, and I don't think I ever heard that you saw a ghost--did I?" he said, with a sarcastic chuckle. She darted a ghastly look to the far end of the chamber, and then, with a strange, half-frozen fury, she said-- "I wish you good-night, Sir Jekyl," and glided like a shadow out of the room. "Saucy as ever, by Jupiter," he ejaculated, following her with his glance, and trying to smile; and as the door shut, he looked again down the long apartment as she had just done, raising the candle again. The light was not improved of course by the disappearance of Mrs. Gwynn's candle, and the end of the room was dim and unsatisfactory. The great four-poster, with dark curtains, and a plume at each corner, threw a vague shadow on the back wall and up to the ceiling, as he moved his candle, which at the distance gave him an uncomfortable sensation, and he stood for a few seconds sternly there, and then turned on his heel and quitted the room, saying aloud, as he did so-- "What a d--d fool that old woman is--always _was_!" If there was a ghost there, the Baronet plainly did not wish it to make its exit from the green chamber by the door, for he locked it on the outside, and put the key in his pocket. Then, crossing the dressing-room I have mentioned, he entered the passage which crosses the gallery in which he and Mrs. Gwynn, a few minutes before, had planned their dispositions. The dressing-room door is placed close to the window which opens at the end of the corridor in the front of the house. Standing with his back to this, he looked down the long passage, and smiled. For a man so little given to the melodramatic, it was a very well expressed smile of mystery--the smile of a man who knows something which others don't suspect, and would be surprised to learn. It was the Baronet's fancy, as it had been his father's and his grandfather's before him, to occupy very remote quarters in this old house. Solitary birds, their roost was alone. Candle in hand, Sir Jekyl descended the stairs, marched down the long gaunt passage, which strikes rearward so inflexibly, and at last reaches the foot of a back staircase, after a march of a hundred and forty feet, which I have measured. At top of this was a door at his left, which he opened, and found himself in his own bed-room. You would have said on looking about you that it was the bed-room of an old campaigner or of a natty gamekeeper--a fellow who rather liked roughing it, and had formed tastes in the matter like the great Duke of Wellington. The furniture was slight and plain, and looked like varnished deal; a French bed, narrow, with chintz curtains, and a plain white coverlet, like what one might expect in a barrack dormitory or an hospital; a little strip of carpet lying by the bed, and a small square of Turkey carpet under the table by the fire, hardly broke the shining uniformity of the dark oak floor; a pair of sporting prints decorated the sides of the chimneypiece, and an oil-portrait of a grey hunter hung in the middle. There were fishing-rods and gun-cases, I dare say the keys were lost of many, they looked so old and dingy. The Baronet's luggage, relieved of its black japanned casings, lay on the floor, with his hat-case and travelling-desk. A pleasant fire burnt in the grate, and a curious abundance of wax-lights, without which Sir Jekyl, such was his peculiarity, could not exist, enlivened the chamber. As he made his toilet at his homely little dressing-table, he bethought him suddenly, and rang the bell in his shirt-sleeves. "My letters." "Yes, sir." And up came a salver well laden with letters, pamphlets, and newspapers, of all shapes and sizes. "And tell Miss Beatrix I shan't have any tea, and get some brandy from Mrs. Gwynn, and cold water and a tumbler, and let them leave me alone--d'ye see?--and give me that." It was a dressing-gown which Tomlinson's care had already liberated from its valise, and expanded before the fire. The Baronet's tastes, as we might see, were simple. He could dine on a bit of roast mutton, and a few glasses of sherry. But his mutton was eight years old, and came all the way from Dartbroke, and his sherry cost more than other men's Madeira, and he now lighted one of those priceless cigars, which so many fellows envied, and inhaled the disembodied aroma of a tobacco which, perhaps, Jove smokes in his easy chair on Olympus, but which I have never smelt on earth, except when Sir Jekyl dispensed the inestimable treasures of his cigar-case. Now, the Baronet stood over his table, with a weed between his lips, tall in his flowered silk dressing-gown, his open hands shoving apart the pile of letters, as a conjurer at an exhibition spreads his pack of cards. "Ha! poor little thing!" he murmured, with a sly simper, in a petting tone, as he plucked an envelope, addressed in a lady's hand, between two fingers, caressingly, from the miscellaneous assortment. He looked at it, but reserved it as a _bon-bouche_ in his waistcoat pocket, and pursued his examination. There were several from invited guests, who were either coming or not, with the customary expressions, and were tossed together in a little isolated litter for conference with Mrs. Gwynn in the morning. "Not a line from Pelter and Crowe! the d--d fellows don't waste their ink upon me, except when they furnish their costs. It's a farce paying fellows to look after one's business--no one ever does it but yourself. If those fellows were worth their bread and butter, they'd have known all about this thing, whatever it is, and I'd have had it all _here_, d---- it, to-night." Sir Jekyl, it must be confessed, was not quite consistent about this affair of the mysterious young gentleman; for, as we have seen, he himself had a dozen times protested against the possibility of there being anything in it, and now he was seriously censuring his respectable London attorneys for not furnishing him with the solid contents of this "windbag." But it was only his talk that was contradictory. Almost from the moment of his first seeing that young gentleman, on the open way under the sign of the "Plough," there lowered a fantastic and cyclopean picture, drawn in smoke or vapour, volcanic and thunderous, all over his horizon, like those prophetic and retrospective pageants with which Doree loves to paint his mystic skies. It was wonderful, and presaged unknown evil; and only cowed him the more that it baffled analysis and seemed to mock at reason. "Pretty fellows to keep a look-out! It's well I can do it for myself--who knows where we're driving to, or what's coming? Signs enough--whatever they mean--he that runs may read, egad! Not that there's anything in it _necessarily_. But it's not about drawing and ruins and that stuff--those fellows have come down here. Bosh! looking after my property. I'd take my oath they are advised by some lawyer; and if Pelter and Crowe were sharp, they'd know by whom, and all about it, by Jove!" Sir Jekyl jerked the stump of his cigar over his shoulder into the grate as he muttered this, looking surlily down on the unprofitable papers that strewed the table. He stood thinking, with his back to the fire, and looking rather cross and perplexed, and so he sat down and wrote a short letter. It was to Pelter and Crowe, but he began, as he did not care which got it, in his usual way-- "MY DEAR SIR,--I have reason to suspect that those ill-disposed people, who have often threatened annoyance, are at last seriously intent on mischief. You will be good enough, therefore, immediately to set on foot inquiries, here and at the other side of the water, respecting the movements of the D---- family, who, I fancy, are at the bottom of an absurd, though possibly troublesome, demonstration. I don't fear them, of course. But I think you will find that some members of that family are at present in this country, and disposed to be troublesome. You will see, therefore, the urgency of the affair, and will better know than I where and how to prosecute the necessary inquiries. I do not, of course, apprehend the least _danger_ from their machinations; but you have always thought _annoyance_ possible; and if any be in store for me, I should rather not have to charge it upon our supineness. You will, therefore, exert your vigilance and activity on my behalf, and be so good as to let me know, at the earliest possible day--which, I think, need not be later than Wednesday next--the result of your inquiries through the old channels. I am a little disappointed, in fact, at not having heard from you before now on the subject. "Yours, my dear sir, very sincerely, "JEKYL M. MARLOWE." Sir Jekyl never swore on paper, and, as a rule, commanded his temper very creditably in that vehicle. But all people who had dealings with him knew very well that the rich Baronet was not to be trifled with. So, understanding that it was strong enough, he sealed it up for the post-office in the morning, and dropped it into the post-bag, and with it the unpleasant subject for the present. And now, a little brandy and water, and the envelope in the well-known female hand; and he laughed a little over it, and looked at himself in the glass with a vaunting complacency, and shook his head playfully at the envelope. It just crossed his sunshine like the shadow of a flying vapour--"that cross-grained old Gwynn would not venture to meddle?" But the envelope was honestly closed, and showed no signs of having been fiddled with. He made a luxury of this little letter, and read it in his easy chair, with his left leg over the arm, with the fragrant accompaniment of a weed. "Jealous, by Jove!" he ejaculated, in high glee; "little fool, what's put that in your head?" "Poor, little, fluttering, foolish thing!" sang the Baronet, and then laughed, not cynically, but indulgently rather. "How audacious the little fools are upon paper! Egad, it's a wonder there is not twice as much mischief in the world as actually happens. We must positively burn this little extravagance." But before doing so he read it over again; then smiling still, he gallantly touched it to his lips, and re-perused it, as he drew another cigar from the treasury of incense which he carried about him. He lighted the note, but did not apply it to his cigar, I am bound to say--partly from a fine feeling, and partly, I am afraid, because he thought that paper spoiled the flavour of his tobacco. So, with a sentimental smile, a gentle shrug, and a sigh of the Laurence Sterne pattern, he converted that dangerous little scrawl into ashes--and he thought, as he inhaled his weed-- "It is well for you, poor little fanatics, that we men take better care of you than you do of yourselves, sometimes!" No doubt; and Sir Jekyl supposed he was thinking only of his imprudent little correspondent, although there was another person in whom he was nearly interested, who might have been unpleasantly compromised also, if that document had fallen into other hands. CHAPTER VI. Sir Jekyl's Room is Visited. It was near one o'clock. Sir Jekyl yawned and wound his watch, and looked at his bed as if he would like to be in it without the trouble of getting there; and at that moment there came a sharp knock at his door, which startled him, for he thought all his people were asleep by that time. "Who's there?" he demanded in a loud key. "It's me, sir, please," said Donica Gwynn's voice. "Come in, will you?" cried he; and she entered. "Are you sick?" he asked. "No, sir, thank you," she replied, with a sharp courtesy. "You look so plaguy pale. Well, I'm glad you're not. But what the deuce can you want of me at this hour of night? Eh?" "It's only about that room, sir." "Oh, curse the room! Talk about it in the morning. You ought to have been in your bed an hour ago." "So I was, sir; but I could not sleep, sir, for thinking of it." "Well, go back and think of it, if you must. How can I stop you? Don't be a fool, old Gwynn." "No more I will, sir, please, if I can help, for fools we are, the most on us; but I could not sleep, as I said, for thinking o't; and so I thought I'd jist put on my things again, and come and try if you, sir, might be still up." "Well, you see I'm up; but I want to get to bed, Gwynn, and not to talk here about solemn bosh; and you must not bore me about that green chamber--do you see?--to-night, like a good old girl; it will do in the morning--won't it?" "So it will, sir; only I could not rest in my bed, until I said, seeing as you mean to sleep in this room, it would never do. It won't. I can't stand it." "Stand what? Egad! it seems to me you're demented, my good old Donica." "No, Sir Jekyl," she persisted, with a grim resolution to say out her say. "You know very well, sir, what's running in my head. You know it's for no good anyone sleeps there. General Lennox, ye say; well an' good. You know well what a loss Mr. Deverell met with in that room in Sir Harry, your father's time." "And you slept in it, did not you, and saw something? Eh?" "Yes, I _did_" she said, in a sudden fury, with a little stamp on the floor, and a pale, staring frown. After a breathless pause of a second or two she resumed. "And you know what your poor lady saw there, and never held up her head again. And well you know, sir, how your father, Sir Harry, on his death-bed, desired it should be walled up, when you were no more than a boy; and your good lady did the same many a year after, when _she_ was a dying. And I tell ye, Sir Jekyl, ye'll sup sorrow yourself yet if you don't. And take a fool's counsel, and shut up that door, and never let no one, friend or foe, sleep there; for well I know it's not for nothing, with your dead father's dying command, and your poor dear lady's dying entreaty against it, that you put anyone to sleep there. I don't know who this General Lennox may be--a good gentleman or a bad; but I'm sure it's for no righteous reason he's to lie there. You would not do it for nothing." This harangue was uttered with a volubility, which, as the phrase is, took Sir Jekyl aback. He was angry, but he was also perplexed and a little stunned by the unexpected vehemence of his old housekeeper's assault, and he stared at her with a rather bewildered countenance. "You're devilish impertinent," at last he said, with an effort. "You rant there like a madwoman, just because I like you, and you've been in our family, I believe, since before I was born; you think you may say what you like. The house is mine, I believe, and I rather think I'll do what I think best in it while I'm here." "And you going to sleep in this room!" she broke in. "What else can it be?" "You mean--what the devil do you mean?" stammered the Baronet again, unconsciously assuming the defensive. "I mean you know very well _what_, Sir Jekyl," she replied. "It was my father's room, hey?--when I was a boy, as you say. It's good enough for his son, I suppose; and I don't ask _you_ to lie in the green chamber." "_I'll_ be no party, sir, if you please, to any one lying there," she observed, with a stiff courtesy, and a sudden hectic in her cheek. "Perhaps you mean because my door's a hundred and fifty feet away from the front of the house, if any mischief should happen, I'm too far away--as others were before me--to prevent it, eh?" said he, with a flurried sneer. "What I mean, I mean, sir--you ought not; that's all. You won't take it amiss, Sir Jekyl--I'm an old servant--I'm sorry, sir; but I'a made up my mind what to do." "You're not thinking of any folly, surely? You seemed to me always too much afraid, or whatever you call it, of the remembrance, you know, of what you _saw_ there--eh?--_I_ don't know, of course, _what_--to speak of it to me. I never pressed you, because you seemed--you know you did--to have a horror; and surely you're not going now to talk among the servants or other people. You can't be far from five-and-thirty years in the family." "Four-and-thirty, Sir Jekyl, next April. It's a good while; but I won't see no more o' that; and unless the green chamber be locked up, at the least, and used no more for a bed-room, I'd rather go, sir. Nothing may happen, of course, Sir Jekyl--it's a hundred to one nothing _would_ happen; but ye see, sir, I've a feeling about it, sir; and there has been these things ordered by your father that was, and by your poor lady, as makes me feel queer. Nothing being done accordingly, and I could not rest upon it, for sooner or later it would come to this, and stay I could not. I judge no one--Heaven forbid,--Sir Jekyl--oh, no! my own conscience is as much as I can look to; so sir, if you please, so soon as you can suit yourself I'll leave, sir." "Stuff! old Gwynn; don't mind talking to-night," said the Baronet, more kindly than he had spoken before; "we'll see about it in the morning. Good-night. We must not quarrel about nothing. I was only a school-boy when you came to us, you know." But in the morning "old Gwynn" was resolute. She was actually going, so soon as the master could suit himself. She was not in a passion, nor in a panic, but in a state of gloomy and ominous obstinacy. "Well, you'll give me a little time, won't you, to look about me?" said the Baronet, peevishly. "Such is my intention, sir." "And see, Gwynn, not a word about that--that green chamber, you know, to Miss Beatrix." "As you please, sir." "Because if you begin to talk, they'll all think we are haunted." "Whatever you please to order, sir." "And it was not--it was my grandfather, you know, who built it." "Ah, so it was, sir;" and Gwynn looked astonished and shook her head, as though cowed by the presence of a master-spirit of evil. "One would fancy you saw his ghost, Gwynn; but he was not such a devil as your looks would make him, only a bit wild, and a favourite with the women, Gwynn--always the best judge of merit--hey? Beau Marlowe they called him--the best dressed man of his day. How the devil could such a fellow have any harm in him?" There is a fine picture, full length, of Beau Marlowe, over the chimneypiece of the great hall of Marlowe. He has remarkably gentlemanlike hands and legs; the gloss is on his silk stockings still. His features are handsome, of that type which we conventionally term aristocratic; high, and smiling with a Louis-Quatorze insolence. He wears a very fine coat of cut velvet, of a rich, dusky red, the technical name of which I forget. He was of the gilded and powdered youth of his day. He certainly was a handsome fellow, this builder of the "green chamber," and he has not placed his candle under a bushel. He shines in many parts of the old house, and has repeated himself in all manner of becoming suits. You see him, three-quarters, in the parlour, in blue and silver; you meet him in crayon, and again in small oil, oval; and you have him in half a dozen miniatures. We mention this ancestor chiefly because when his aunt, Lady Mary, left him a legacy, he added the green chamber to the house. It seems odd that Sir Jekyl, not fifty yet, should have had a grandfather who was a fashionable and wicked notoriety of mature years, and who had built an addition to the family mansion so long as a hundred and thirty years ago. But this gentleman had married late, as rakes sometimes do, and his son, Sir Harry, married still later--somewhere about seventy; having been roused to this uncomfortable exertion by the proprietorial airs of a nephew who was next in succession. To this matrimonial explosion Sir Jekyl owed his entrance and agreeable sojourn upon the earth. "I won't ask you to stay now; you're in a state. I'll write to town for Sinnott, as you insist on it, but you won't leave us in confusion, and you'll make her _au fait_--won't you? Give her any hints she may require; and I know I shall have you back again when you cool a little, or at all events when we go back to Dartbroke; for I don't think I shall like this place." So Donica Gwynn declared herself willing to remain till Mrs. Sinnott should arrive from London; and preparations for the reception of guests proceeded with energy. CHAPTER VII. The Baronet Pursues. Sir Jekyl Marlowe was vexed when the letters came, and none from Pelter and Crowe. There are people who expect miracles from their doctors and lawyers, and, in proportion to their accustomed health and prosperity, are unreasonable when anything goes wrong. The Baronet's notion was that the legal firm in question ought to think and even dream of nothing else than his business. It was an impertinence their expecting _him_ to think about it. What were _they_ there for? He knew that London was a pretty large place, and England still larger; and that it was not always easy to know what everybody was about in either, and still less what each man was doing on the Continent. Pelter and Crowe had some other clients too on their hands, and had hitherto done very satisfactorily. But here was a serious-looking thing--the first really uncomfortable occurrence which had taken place under his reign--the first opportunity for exhibiting common vigilance--and he ventured to say those fellows did not know these Strangways people were in these kingdoms at all! Sir Jekyl, though an idle fellow, was a man of action, so he ordered his horse, and rode nine miles to the "Plough Inn," where he hoped to see Mr. Strangways again, improve his intimacy, and prevail with the gentlemen to return with him to Marlowe, and spend a fortnight there, when, or the devil was in it, he should contrive to get at the bottom of their plans. He looked shrewdly in at the open door as he rode up, and halloed for some one to take his horse. The little porch smiled pleasantly, and the two gables and weather-cock, in the sunlight; and the farmer on the broad and dingy panel, in his shirt-sleeves, low-crowned, broad-leafed hat, crimson waistcoat, canary-coloured shorts, and blue stockings, and flaxen wig, was driving his plump horses, and guilding his plough undiscouraged, as when last he saw him. Boots and Mrs. Jones came out. Sir Jekyl was too eager to wait to get down; so from the saddle he accosted his buxom hostess, in his usual affable style. The Baronet was not accustomed to be crossed and thwarted as much as, I have been told, men with less money sometimes are; and he showed his mortification in his face when he learned that the two gentlemen had left very early that morning. "This morning! Why you said yesterday they would not go till _evening_. Hang it, I wish you could tell it right; and what the d--l do you mean by Strangers? Call him Strangways, can't you. It's odd people can't say names." He must have been very much vexed to speak so sharply; and he saw, perhaps, how much he had forgotten himself in the frightened look which good Mrs. Jones turned upon him. "I don't mean you, my good little soul. It's _their_ fault; and where are they gone to? I wanted to ask them both over to Marlowe. Have you a notion?" "They took our horses as far as the 'Bell and Horns,' at Slowton." She called shrilly to Boots, "They're not stoppin' at the 'Bell and Horns,' sure. Come here, and tell Sir Jekyl Marlowe about Mr. Strangers." "You said last night they were going to Awkworth;" and Sir Jekyl chuckled scornfully, for he was vexed. "They changed their minds, sir." "Well, we'll say so. You're a wonderful fascinating sex. Egad! if you could only carry anything right in your heads for ten minutes, you'd be too charming." And at this point Boots emerged, and Sir Jekyl continued, addressing him-- "Well, where are the gentlemen who left this morning?" asked he. "They'll be at the 'Bell and Horns,' sir." "Where's that?" "Slowton, sir." "I know. What hour did they go?" "Eight o'clock, sir." "Just seven miles. The Sterndale Road, isn't it?" "Yes, sir." And that was all Boots had to tell. "Will ye please to come in, sir?" inquired Mrs. Jones. "No, my good creature. I haven't time. The old gentleman--what's his name?" "I don't know, Sir, please. He calls the young gentleman Guy, and the young gentleman calls him _sir_." "And both the same name?" "We calls 'em both Strangers, please, sir." "I know. Servants, had they?" "Yes, sir, please. But they sent 'em on." "Rich--don't want for money, I suppose. Eh?" "Oh! plenty money, sir." "And the servants called the men Strangways, I suppose, eh?" "Yes, Sir Jekyl, please; and so the letters came." "You never happened to hear any other name?" "No, Sir Jekyl." "_Think._" Mrs. Jones did think, but could recall nothing. "Nothing with a D?" "D, sir! What, sir?" "No matter what," said the Baronet. "No name beginning with D--eh?" "No, sir. You don't think they're going by a false name?" inquired the lady, curiously. "What the devil puts that in your head? Take care of the law; you must not talk that way, you foolish little rogue." "I did not know, sir," timidly answered Mrs. Jones, who saw in Sir Jekyl, the Parliament-man, Deputy-Lieutenant, and Grand Juror, a great oracle of the law. "I only wanted to know whether you had happened to hear the name of the elder of the two gentlemen, and could recollect what letter it begins with." "No, sir, please." "So you've no more to tell me?" "Nothing, sir." "If they come back tell them I rode over to offer them some shooting, and to beg they'd remember to come to Marlowe. You won't forget?" "No sir." "Do they return here?" "I think not, sir." "Well, I believe there's nothing else," and the Baronet looked up reflectively, as if he expected to find a memorandum scribbled on the blue sky, leaning with his hand on the back of his horse. "No, nothing. You won't forget my message, that's all. Good-bye, my dear." And touching the tips of his gloves to his lips, with a smile and a nod he cantered down the Sterndale Road. He pulled up at the "Bell and Horns," in the little town of Slowton, but was disappointed. The entire party, servants and all, had taken the train two hours before, at the station three miles away. Now Sir Jekyl was blooded, and the spirit of the chase stirred within him. So he rode down in his jack-boots, and pulled up his steaming horse by the station, and he went in and made inquiry. A man like him is received even at one of these cosmopolitan rallying-points within his own county with becoming awe. The station-master was awfully courteous, and the subaltern officials awfully active and obliging, and the resources of the establishment were at once placed at his sublime disposal. Unhappily, two branch lines converge at this point, causing the usual bustle, and there was consequently a conflict and confusion in the evidence; so that Sir Jekyl, who laughed and chatted agreeably amidst all the reverential zeal that surrounded him, could arrive at nothing conclusive, but leaned to the view that the party had actually gone to Awkworth, only by rail, instead of by road. Sir Jekyl got on his horse and walked him through the town, uncertain what to do next. This check had cooled him; his horse had his long trot home still. It would not do to follow to Awkworth; to come in, after a four-and-twenty miles' ride, bespattered like a courier, merely to invite these gentlemen, _vivâ voce_, who had hardly had his note of invitation a score hours. It would be making too much of them with a vengeance. As he found himself once more riding under the boughs of Marlowe, the early autumnal evening already closing in, Sir Jekyl experienced one of those qualms and sinkings of the heart, which overcome us with a vague anticipation of evil. The point of the road which he had now gained, commands a view of the old hall of Marlowe, with that projecting addition, and its wide bow-window, every pane of which was now flaming in the sunset light, which indicated the green chamber. The green chamber! Just at that moment the glare of its broad window flashed with a melancholy and vengeful light upon his brain, busied with painful retrospects and harassing conjecture. Old Gwynn going away! It was an omen. Marlowe without old Gwynn. Troy without its palladium. Old Gwynn going with something like a denunciation on her lips! That stupid old woman at Wardlock, too, who really knew nothing about it, undertaking also to prophesy! Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings! There was no sense in it--scarcely articulation. Still it was the croak of the raven--the screech of the owl. He looked across the gentle slope at the angle of the inauspicious room. Why should old General Lennox be placed within the unhallowed precincts of that chamber? The image of old Gwynn as she gabbled her grim protest on the preceding night, rose before him like a ghost. What business was it of hers, and how could she divine his motives? Still, if there was anything wrong, did not this vehement warning make the matter worse. An old man he felt himself on a sudden that evening, and for the first time. There was some failure of the electric fire, and a subsidence of the system. His enterprise was gone. Why should he take guilt, if such it were, on his soul for vanity and vexation of spirit? If guilt it were, was it not of a kind inexcusably cold-blooded and long-headed. Old Gwynn, he did not like to lose you on those terms--just, too, as those unknown actors were hovering at the wing, and about to step upon the stage, this old man and young, who, instinctively he felt, were meditating mischief against him. Mischief--_what_? Such, perhaps, as might shatter the structure of his greatness, and strew its pinnacles in the dust. Perhaps all this gloom was but the depression of a long ride, and still longer fast. But he was accustomed to such occasional strains upon his strength without any such results. Ah, no! He had come within the edge of the shadow of judgment, and its darkness was stealing over him, and its chill touched his heart. These were the dreamy surmisings with which he rode slowly toward the house, and a few good resolutions in a nebulous state hovered uncomfortably about him. No letter of any interest had come by the early post, and Sir Jekyl sat down _tête-à-tête_ with his pretty daughter, in very dismal spirits, to dinner. CHAPTER VIII. The House begins to Fill. Beatrix was fond of her father, who was really a good-natured man, in the common acceptance of the term, that is to say, he had high animal spirits, and liked to see people pleasant about him, and was probably as kind as a tolerably selfish and vicious man can be, and had a liking, moreover, for old faces, which was one reason why he hated the idea of his housekeeper's leaving him. But Beatrix was also a little in awe of him, as girls often are of men of whom they see but little, especially if they have something of the masculine decision of temper. "You may all go away now," said the Baronet suddenly to the servants, who had waited at dinner; and when the liveried phantoms had withdrawn, and the door had closed on the handsome calves of tall and solemn Jenkins, he said-- "Nothing all day--no adventure, or visitor, Trixie--not a word of news or fun, I dare say?" "Nothing--not a creature, papa; only the birds and dogs, and some new music." "Well, it is not much worse than Wardlock, I suppose; but we shall have a gay house soon--at all events plenty of people. Old General Lennox is coming. His nephew, Captain Drayton, is very rich; he will be Lord Tewkesbury--that is, if old Tewkesbury doesn't marry; and, at all events, he has a very nice property, and does not owe a guinea. You need not look modest, Trixie. You may do just as you please, only I'd be devilish glad you liked one another--there, don't be distressed, I say; I'll mention it no more if you don't like; but he'll be here in a few days, and you mayn't think him so bad." After this the Baronet drank two glasses of sherry in silence, slowly, and with a gloomy countenance, and then, said he-- "I think, Trixie, if you were happily placed, I should give the whole thing up. I'm tired of that cursed House of Commons. You can't imagine what a bore it is, when a fellow does not want anything from them, going down there for their d----d divisions. I'm not fit for the hounds either. I can't ride as I used--egad! I'm as stiff as a rusty hinge when I get up in the morning. And I don't much like this place, and I'm tired to death of the other two. When you marry I'll let them, or, at all events, let them alone. I'm tired of all those servants. I know they're robbing me, egad! You would not believe what my gardens cost me last year, and, by Jove, I don't believe all that came to my table was worth two hundred pounds. I'll have quite a different sort of life. I haven't any time to myself, looking after all those confounded people one must keep about them. Keepers, and gardeners, and devil knows who beside. I don't like London half as well as the Continent. I hate dinner-parties, and the season, and all the racket. It doesn't pay, and I'm growing old--you'll not mind if I smoke it?" (he held a cigar between his fingers)--"a complaint that doesn't mend by time, you know. Oh! yes, I _am_ old, you little rogue. Everybody knows I'm just fifty; and the fact is I'm tired of the whole thing, stock, lock, and barrel; and I believe what little is to be got of life is best had--that is, if you know how to look for it--abroad. A fellow like me who has got places and properties--egad! they expect him to live _pro bono publico_, and not to care or think twopence about himself--at least it comes to that. How is old Gwynn?" "Very well, I think." "And what has she to say for herself; what about things in general?" "She's not very chatty, poor old Gwynn, and I think she seems a little--just ever so little--cross." "So she does--damnably cross. She was always a bit of a vixen, and she isn't improving, poor old thing; but don't be afraid, I like old Donnie for all that, though I don't think I ever quite understood her, and I don't expect either." These observations concluded the conversation subsided, and a long silence supervened. "I wonder who the devil he is," said the Baronet abruptly, as he threw the stump of his cigar into the fire. "If it's a fluke, it's as like a miracle as anything I ever saw." He recollected that he was talking without an interlocutor, and looked for a moment hesitatingly at his daughter. "And your grandmamma told you nothing of her adventure in church?" "No, papa--not a word." "It seems to me, women can hold their tongues sometimes, but always in the wrong places." Here he shook the ashes of his cigar into the grate. "Old Granny's a fool--isn't she, Trixie, and a little bit vicious--eh?" Sir Jekyl put his question dreamily, in a reverie, and it plainly needed no answer. So Beatrix was spared the pain of making one; which she was glad of, for Lady Alice was good to her after her way, and she was fond of her. "We must ask her to come, you know. You write. Say I thought _you_ would have a better chance of prevailing. She won't, you know; and so much the better." So as the Baronet rose, and stood gloomily with his back to the fire; the young lady rose also, and ran away to the drawing-room and her desk; and almost at the same moment a servant entered the room, with a letter, which had come by the late post. Oddly enough, it had the Slowton postmark. "Devilish odd!" exclaimed Sir Jekyl, scowling eagerly on it; and seating himself hastily on the side of a chair, he broke it open and read at the foot the autograph, "Guy Strangways." It was with the Napoleonic thrill, "I have them, then, these English!" that Sir Jekyl read, in a gentlemanlike, rather foreign hand, a ceremonious and complimentary acceptance of his invitation to Marlowe, on behalf both of the young man and of his elder companion. His correspondent could not say exactly, as their tour was a little desultory, where a note would find them; but as Sir Jekyl Marlowe had been so good as to permit them to name a day for their visit, they would say so and so. "Let me see--what day's this--why, that will be"--he was counting with the tips of his fingers, pianowise, on the table--"Wednesday week, eh?" and he tried it over again with nature's "Babbage's machine" and of course with an inflexible result. "Wednesday week--Wednesday," and he heaved a great sigh, like a man with a load taken off him. "Well, I'm devilish glad. I hope nothing will happen to stop them now. It can't be a _ruse_ to get quietly off the ground? No--that would be doing it too fine." He rang the bell. "I want Mrs. Gwynn." The Baronet's spirit revived within him, and he stood erect, with his back to the fire, and his hands behind him, and when the housekeeper entered, he received her with his accustomed smile. "Glad to see you, Donnie. Glass of sherry? No--well, sit down--won't take a chair!--why's that? Well, we'll be on pleasanter terms soon--you'll find it's really no choice of mine. I can't help using that stupid green room. Here are two more friends coming--not till Wednesday week though--two gentlemen. You may put them in rooms beside one another--wherever you like--only not in the garrets, of course. _Good_ rooms, do ye see." "And what's the gentlemen's names, please, Sir Jekyl," inquired Mrs. Gwynn. "Mr. Strangways, the young gentleman; and the older, as well as I can read it, is Mr. Varbarriere." "Thank ye, sir." The housekeeper having again declined the kindly distinction of a glass of sherry, withdrew. In less than a week guests began to assemble, and in a few days more old Marlowe Hall began to wear a hospitable and pleasant countenance. The people were not, of course, themselves all marvels of agreeability. For instance, Sir Paul Blunket, the great agriculturist and eminent authority on liquid manures, might, as we all know, be a little livelier with advantage. He is short and stolid; he wears a pale blue muslin neck-handkerchief with a white stripe, carefully tied. His countenance, I am bound to say, is what some people would term heavy--it is frosty, painfully shaven, and shines with a glaze of transparent soap. He has small, very light blue round eyes, and never smiles. A joke always strikes him with unaffected amazement and suspicion. Laughter he knows may imply ridicule, and he may himself possibly be the subject of it. He waits till it subsides, and then talks on as before on subjects which interest him. Lady Blunket, who accompanies him everywhere, though not tall, is stout. She is delicate, and requires nursing; and, for so confirmed an invalid, has a surprising appetite. John Blunket, the future baronet, is in the Diplomatic Service, I forget exactly where, and by no means young; and lean Miss Blunket, at Marlowe with her parents, though known to be older than her brother, is still quite a girl, and giggles with her partner at dinner, and is very _naïve_ and animated, and sings arch little chansons discordantly to the guitar, making considerable play with her eyes, which are black and malignant. This family, though neither decorative nor entertaining, being highly respectable and ancient, make the circuit of all the good houses in the county every year, and are wonderfully little complained of. Hither also they had brought in their train pretty little Mrs. Maberly, a cousin, whose husband, the Major, was in India--a garrulous and good-humoured siren, who smiled with pearly little teeth, and blushed easily. At Marlowe had already assembled several single gentlemen too. There was little Tom Linnett, with no end of money and spirits, very good-natured, addicted to sentiment, and with a taste for practical joking too, and a very popular character notwithstanding. Old Dick Doocey was there also, a colonel long retired, and well known at several crack London clubs; tall, slight, courtly, agreeable, with a capital elderly wig, a little deaf, and his handsome high nose a little reddish. Billy Cobb--too, a gentleman who could handle a gun, and knew lots about horses and dogs--had arrived. Captain Drayton had arrived: a swell, handsome, cleverish, and impertinent, and, as young men with less reason will be, egotistical. He would not have admitted that he had deigned to make either plan or exertion with that object, but so it happened that he was placed next to Miss Beatrix, whom he carelessly entertained with agreeable ironies, and anecdotes, and sentiments poetic and perhaps a little vapid. On the whole, a young gentleman of intellect, as well as wealth and expectations, and who felt, not unnaturally, that he was overpowering. Miss Beatrix, though not quite twenty, was _not_ overpowered, however, neither was her heart pre-occupied. There was, indeed, a shadow of another handsome young gentleman--only a shadow, in a different style--dark, and this one light; and she heart-whole, perhaps fancy-free, amused, delighted, the world still new and only begun to be explored. One London season she had partly seen, and also made her annual tour twice or thrice of all the best county-houses, and so was not nervous among her peers. CHAPTER IX. Dinner. Of the two guests destined for the green chamber, we must be permitted to make special mention. General and Lady Jane Lennox had come. The General, a tall, soldier-like old gentleman, who held his bald and pink, but not very high forehead, erect, with great grey projecting moustache, twisted up at the corners, and bristling grey eyebrows to correspond, over his frank round grey eyes--a gentleman with a decidedly military bearing, imperious but kindly of aspect, good-natured, prompt, and perhaps a little stupid. Lady Jane--everybody knows Lady Jane--the most admired of London belles for a whole season. Golden brown hair, and what young Thrumly of the Guards called, in those exquisite lines of his, "slumbrous eyes of blue," under very long lashes and exquisitely-traced eyebrows, such brilliant lips and teeth, and such a sweet oval face, and above all, so beautiful a figure and wonderful a waist, might have made one marvel how a lady so well qualified for a title, with noble blood, though but a small _dot_, should have wrecked herself on an old general, though with eight thousand a year. But there were stories and reasons why the simple old officer, just home from India, who knew nothing about London lies, and was sure of his knighthood, and it was said of a baronetage, did not come amiss. There were people who chose to believe these stories, and people who chose to discredit them. But General Lennox never had even heard them; and certainly, it seemed nobody's business to tell him now. It might not have been quite pleasant to tell the General. He was somewhat muddled of apprehension, and slow in everything but fighting; and having all the old-fashioned notions about hair-triggers, and "ten paces," as the proper ordeal in a misunderstanding, people avoided uncomfortable topics in his company, and were for the most part disposed to let well alone. Lady Jane had a will and a temper; but the General held his ground firmly. As brave men as he have been henpecked; but somehow he was not of the temperament which will submit to be bullied even by a lady; and as he was indulgent and easily managed, that tactique was the line she had adopted. Lady Jane was not a riant beauty. Luxurious, funeste, sullen, the mystery and melancholy of her face was a relief among the smirks and simpers of the ball-room, and the novelty of the style interested for a time even the _blazé_ men of twenty seasons. Several guests of lesser note there were; and the company had sat down to dinner, when the Reverend Dives Marlowe, rector of the succulent family living of Queen's Chorleigh, made his appearance in the parlour, a little to the surprise of his brother the Baronet, who did not expect him quite so soon. The Rector was a tall man and stalwart, who had already acquired that convex curve which indicates incipient corpulence, and who, though younger than his brother, looked half a dozen years his senior. With a broad bald forehead, projecting eyebrows, a large coarse mouth, and with what I may term the rudiments of a double chin--altogether an ugly and even repulsive face, but with no lack of energy and decision--one looked with wonder from this gross, fierce, clerical countenance to the fine outlines and proportions of the Baronet's face, and wondered how the two men could really be brothers. The cleric shook his brother's hand in passing, and smiled and nodded briefly here and there, right and left, and across the table his recognition, and chuckled a harsher chuckle than his brother's, as he took his place, extemporized with the quiet legerdemain of a consummate butler by Ridley; and answered in a brisk, abrupt voice the smiling inquiries of friends. "Hope you have picked up an appetite on the way, Dives," said the Baronet. Dives generally carried a pretty good one about with him. "Good air on the way, and pretty good mutton here, too--my friends tell me." "Capital air--capital mutton--capital fish," replied the ecclesiastic, in a brisk, business-like tone, while being a man of nerve, he got some fish, although that esculent had long vanished, and even the entrées had passed into history, and called over his shoulder for the special sauces which his soul loved, and talked, and compounded his condiments with energy and precision. The Rector was a shrewd and gentlemanlike, though not a very pretty, apostle, and had made a sufficient toilet before presenting himself, and snapped and gobbled his fish, in a glossy, single-breasted coat, with standing collar; a ribbed silk waistcoat, covering his ample chest, almost like a cassock, and one of those transparent muslin dog-collars which High Churchmen affect. "Well, Dives," cried Sir Jekyl, "how do the bells ring? I gave them a chime, poor devils" (this was addressed to Lady Blunket at his elbow), "by way of compensation, when I sent them Dives." "Pretty well; they don't know how to pull 'em, I think, quite," answered Dives, dabbing a bit of fish in a pool of sauce, and punching it into shape with his bit of bread. "And how is old Parson Moulders?" continued the Baronet, pleasantly. "I haven't heard," said the Hector, and drank off half his glass of hock. "Can't believe it, Dives. Here's Lady Blunket knows. He's the aged incumbent of Droughton. A devilish good living in my gift; and of course you've been asking how the dear old fellow is." "I haven't, upon my word; not but I ought, though," said the Rev. Dives Marlowe, as if he did not see the joke. "He's very severe on you," simpered fat Lady Blunket, faintly, across the table, and subsided with a little cough, as if the exertion hurt her. "Is he? Egad! I never perceived it." The expression was not clerical, but the speaker did not seem aware he had uttered it. "How dull I must be! Have you ever been in this part of the world before, Lady Jane?" continued he, turning towards General Lennox's wife, who sat beside him. "I've been to Wardlock, a good many years ago; but that's a long way from this, and I almost forget it," answered Lady Jane, in her languid, haughty way. "In what direction is Wardlock," she asked of Beatrix, raising her handsome, unfathomable eyes for a moment. "You can see it from the bow-window of your room--I mean that oddly-shaped hill to the right." "That's from the green chamber," said the Rector. "I remember the view. Isn't it?" "Yes. They have put Lady Jane in the haunted room," said Beatrix, smiling and nodding to Lady Jane. "And what fool, pray, told you that," said the Baronet, perhaps just a little sharply. "Old Gwynn seems to think so," answered Beatrix, with the surprised and frightened look of one who fancies she has made a blunder. "I--of course we know it is all folly." "You must not say that--you shan't disenchant us," said Lady Jane. "There's nothing I should so like as a haunted room; it's a charming idea--isn't it, Arthur?" she inquired of the General. "We had a haunted room in my quarters at Puttypoor," observed the General, twiddling the point of one of his moustaches. "It was the store-room where we kept pickles, and olives, and preserves, and plates, and jars, and glass bottles. And every night there was a confounded noise there; jars, and bottles, and things tumbling about, made a devil of a row, you know. I got Smith--my servant Smith, you know, a very respectable man--uncommon steady fellow, Smith--to watch, and he did. We kept the door closed, and Smith outside. I gave him half-a-crown a night and his supper--very well for Smith, you know. Sometimes he kept a light, and sometimes I made him sit in the dark with matches ready." "Was not he very much frightened?" asked Beatrix, who was deeply interested in the ghost. "I hope you gave him a smelling-bottle?" inquired Tom Linnett, with a tender concern. "Well, I don't suppose he was," said the General, smiling good-humouredly on pretty Beatrix, while he loftily passed by the humorous inquiry of the young gentleman. "He was, in fact, on dooty, you know; and there were occasional noises and damage done in the store-room--in fact, just the same as if Smith was not there." "Oh, possibly Smith himself among the bottles!" suggested Linnett. "He always got in as quick as he could," continued the General; "but could not see anyone. Things were broken--bottles sometimes." "How very strange," exclaimed Beatrix, charmed to hear the tale of wonder. "We could not make it out; it was very odd, you know," resumed the narrator. "_You_ weren't frightened, General?" inquired Linnett. "_No_, sir," replied the General, who held that a soldier's courage, like a lady's reputation, was no subject for jesting, and conveyed that sentiment by a slight pause, and a rather alarming stare from under his fierce grey eyebrows. "No one was frightened, I suppose; we were all men in the house, sir." "At home, I think, we'd have suspected a rat or a cat," threw in the Rector. "Some did, sir," replied the General; "and we made a sort of a search; but it wasn't. There was a capital tiled floor, not a hole you could put a ramrod in; and no cat, neither--high windows, grated; and the door always close; and every now and then something broken by night." "Delightful! That's what Mrs. Crowe, in that charming book, you know, "The Night Side of Nature," calls, I forget the name; but it's a German word, I think--the noisy ghost it means. Racket--something, isn't it, Beet?" (the short for Beatrix). "I do so _devour_ ghosts!" cried sharp old Miss Blunket, who thought Beatrix's enthusiasm became her; and chose to exhibit the same pretty fanaticism. "I didn't _say_ it was a ghost, mind ye," interposed the General, with a grave regard for his veracity; "only we were puzzled a bit. There _was_ something there we all knew; and something that could reach up to the high shelves, and break things on the floor too, you see. We had been watching, off and on, I think, some three or four weeks, and I heard one night, early, a row in the store-room--a devil of a row it was; but Smith was on dooty, as we used to say, that night, so I left it to him; and he could have sung out, you know, if he wanted help--poor fellow! And in the morning my native fellow told me that poor Smith was dead in the store-room; and, egad! so he was, poor fellow!" "How awful!" exclaimed Beatrix. And Miss Blunket, in girlish horror, covered her fierce black eyes with her lank fingers. "A bite of a cobra, by Jove! above the knee, and another on the hand. A fattish fellow, poor Smith, the natives say they go faster--that sort of man; but no one can stand a fair bite of a cobra--I defy you. We killed him after." "What! _Smith?_" whispered Linnett in his neighbour's ear. "He lay in a basket; you never saw such a brute," continued the General; "he was very near killing another of my people." "So _there_ was your ghost?" said Doocey, archly. "Worse than a ghost," observed Sir Paul Blunket. "A dooced deal," acquiesced the General gravely. "You're very much annoyed with vermin out there in India?" remarked Sir Paul. "So we are, sir," agreed the General. "It's very hard, you see, to meet with a genuine ghost, Miss Marlowe; they generally turn out impostors," said Doocey. "I should like to think my room was haunted," said Lady Jane. "Oh! _dear_ Lady Jane, how _can_ you be so _horribly_ brave?" cried Miss Blunket. "We have no cobras here, at all events," said Sir Paul, nodding to Sir Jekyl, with the gravity becoming such a discovery. "No," said Sir Jekyl, gloomily. I suppose he was thinking of something else. The ladies now floated away like summer clouds, many-tinted, golden, through the door, which Doocey held gracefully open; and the mere mortals of the party, the men, stood up in conventional adoration, while the divinities were translated, as it were, before their eyes, and hovered out of sight and hearing into the resplendent regions of candelabra and mirrors, nectar and ambrosia, tea and plum-cake, and clouds of silken tapestry, and the musical tinkling of their own celestial small-talk. CHAPTER X. Inquiries have been made by Messrs, Pelter and Crowe. Before repairing to bed, such fellows, young or old, as liked a talk and a cigar, and some sherry--or, by'r lady, brandy and water--were always invited to accompany Sir Jekyl to what he termed the back settlement, where he bivouacked among deal chairs and tables, with a little camp-bed, and plenty of wax candles and a brilliant little fire. Here, as the Baronet smoked in his homely little "hut," as he termed it, after his guests had dispersed to their bed-rooms, the Rev. Dives Marlowe that night knocked at the door, crying, "May I come in, Jekyl?" "Certainly, dear Dives." "You really mean it?" "Never was parson so welcome." "By Jove!" said the Rector, "it's later than I thought--you're sure I don't bore you." "Not sure, but you _may_, Dives," said Sir Jekyl, observing his countenance, which was not quite pleasant. "Come in, and say your say. Have a weed, old boy?" "Well, well--a--we're alone. I don't mind--I don't generally--not that there's any harm; but some people, very good people, object--the weaker brethren, you know." "Consummate asses, we call them; but weaker brethren, as you say, does as well." The Rector was choosing and sniffing out a cigar to his heart's content. "Milk for babes, you know," said the Rector, making his preparations. "Strong meats--" "And strong cigars; but you'll find these as mild as you please. Here's a match." The Rector sat down, with one foot on the fender, and puffed away steadily, looking into the fire; and his brother, at the opposite angle of the fender, employed himself similarly. "Fine old soldier, General Lennox," said the cleric, at last. "What stay does he make with you?" "As long as he pleases. Why?" said Sir Jekyl. "Only he said something to-night in the drawing-room about having to go up to town to attend a Board of the East India Directors," answered the parson. "Oh, did he?" "And I think he said the day after to-morrow. I thought he told you, perhaps." "Upon my life I can't say--perhaps he did," said Sir Jekyl, carelessly. "Lennox is a wonderful fine old fellow, as you say, but a little bit slow, you know; and his going or staying would not make very much difference to me." "I thought he told his story pretty well at dinner--that haunted room and the cobra, you remember," said the Rector. The Baronet grunted an assent, and nodded, without removing his cigar. The brothers conducted their conversation, not looking on one another, but each steadily into the grate. "And, apropos of haunted rooms, Lady Jane mentioned they are in the green chamber," continued the Rector. "Did she? I forgot--so they are, I think," answered the Baronet. Here they puffed away in silence for some time. "You know, Jekyl, about that room? Poor Amy, when she was dying, made you promise--and you did promise, you know--and she got me to promise to remind you to shut it up; and then, you know, my father wished the same," said the Rector. "Come, Dives, my boy, somebody has been poking you up about this. You have been hearing from my old mother-in-law, or talking to her, the goosey old shrew!" "Upon my honour!" said the Rector, solemnly resting the wrist of his cigar-hand upon the black silk vest, and motioning his cheroot impressively, "you are quite mistaken. One syllable I have not heard from Lady Alice upon the subject, nor, indeed, upon any other, for two months or more." "Come, come, Dives, old fellow, you'll not come the inspired preacher over me. Somebody's been at you, and if it was not poor old Lady Alice it was stupid old Gwynn. You need not deny it--ha! ha! ha! your speaking countenance proclaims it, my dear boy." "I'm not thinking of denying it. Old Donica Gwynn did write to me," said the pastor. "Let me see her note?" said Sir Jekyl. "I threw it in the fire; but I assure you there was nothing in it that would or could have vexed you. Nothing, in fact, but an appeal to me to urge you to carry out the request of poor Amy, and not particularly well spelt or written, and certainly not the sort of thing I should have liked anyone to see but ourselves, so I destroyed it as soon as I had read it." "I'd like to have known what the plague could make you come here two days--of course I'm glad to see you--two days before you intended, and what's running in your mind." "Nothing in particular--nothing, I assure you, but this. I'm certain it will be talked about--it will--the women will talk. You'll find there will be something very unpleasant; take my advice, my dear Jekyl, and just do as you promised. My poor father wished it, too--in fact, directed it, and--and it ought to be done--you know it ought." "Upon my soul I know no such thing. I'm to pull down my house, I suppose, for a sentiment? What the plague harm does the room to anybody? It doesn't hurt me, nor you." "It may hurt _you_ very much, Jekyl." "I can't see it; but if it does, that's my affair," said Sir Jekyl, sulkily. "But, my dear Jekyl, surely you ought to consider your promise." "Come, Dives, no preaching. It's a very good trade, I know, and I'll do all I can for you in it; but I'm no more to be humbugged by a sermon than you are. Come! How does the dog I sent you get on? Have you bottled the pipe of port yet, and how is old Moulders, as I asked you at dinner? Talk of shooting, eating and drinking, and making merry, and getting up in your profession--by-the-bye, the Bishop is to be here in a fortnight, so manage to stay and meet him. Talk of the port, and the old parson's death, and the tithes small and great, and I'll hear you with respect, for I shall know you are speaking of things you understand, and take a real interest in; but pray don't talk any more about that stupid old room, and the stuff and nonsense these women connect with it; and, once for all, believe me when I say I have no notion of making a fool of myself by shutting up or pulling down a room which we want to use--I'll do no such thing," and Sir Jekyl clenched the declaration with an oath, and chucking the stump of his cigar into the fire, stood up with his back to it, and looked down on his clerical Mentor, the very impersonation of ungodly obstinacy. "I had some more to say, Jekyl, but I fancy you don't care to hear it." "Not a word of it," replied the Baronet. "That's enough for me," said the parson, with a wave of his hand, like a man who has acquitted himself of a duty. "And how soon do you say the Bishop is to be here?" he inquired, after a pause. "About ten days, or _less_--egad! I forget," answered Sir Jekyl, still a good deal ruffled. The Rector stood up also, and hummed something like "Rule Britannia" for a while. I am afraid he was thinking altogether of himself by this time, and suddenly recollecting that he was not in his own room, he wished his brother good-night, and departed. Sir Jekyl was vexed. There are few things so annoying, when one has made up his mind to a certain course, as to have the unavowed misgivings and evil auguries of one's own soul aggravated by the vain but ominous dissuasions of others. "I wish they'd keep their advice to themselves. What hurry need there be? Do they want me to blow up the room with old Lennox and his wife in it? I don't care twopence about it. It's a gloomy place." Sir Jekyl was charging the accidental state of his own spirits upon the aspect of the place, which was really handsome and cheerful, though antique. "They're all in a story, the fools! What is it to me? I don't care if I never saw it again. They may pull it down after Christmas, if they like, for me. And Dives, too, the scamp, talking pulpit. He thinks of nothing but side-dishes and money. As worldly a dog as there is in England!" Jekyl Marlowe could get angry enough on occasion, but he was not prone to sour tempers and peevish humours. There was, however, just now, something to render him uncomfortable and irritable, and that was that his expected guests, Mr. Guy Strangways and M. Varbarriere had not kept tryste. The day appointed for their visit had come and gone, and no appearance made. In an ordinary case a hundred and fifty accidents might account for such a miscarriage; but there was in this the unavowed specialty which excited and sickened his mind, and haunted his steps and his bed with suspicions; and he fancied he could understand a little how Herod felt when he was mocked of the wise men. Next morning's post-bag brought Sir Jekyl two letters, one of which relieved, and the other rather vexed him, though not very profoundly. This latter was from his mother-in-law, Lady Alice, in reply to his civil note, and much to his surprise, accepting his invitation to Marlowe. "Cross-grained old woman! She's coming, for no reason on earth but to vex me. It shan't though. I'll make her most damnably welcome. We'll amuse her till she has not a leg to stand on; we'll take her an excursion every second day, and bivouac on the side of a mountain, or in the bottom of a wet valley. We'll put the young ponies to the phaeton, and Dutton shall run them away with her. I'll get up theatricals, and balls, and concerts; and I'll have breakfast at nine instead of ten. I'll entertain her with a vengeance, egad! We'll see who'll stand it longest." A glance at the foot of the next letter, which was a large document, on a bluish sheet of letter-paper, showed him what he expected, the official autograph of Messrs. Pelter and Crowe; it was thus expressed-- "MY DEAR SIR JEKYL MARLOWE,-- "Pursuant to yours of the --th, and in accordance with the instructions therein contained, we have made inquiries, as therein directed, in all available quarters, and have received answers to our letters, and trust that the copies thereof, and the general summary of the correspondence, which we hope to forward by this evening's post, will prove satisfactory to you. The result seems to us clearly to indicate that your information has not been well founded, and that there has been no movement in the quarter to which your favour refers, and that no member--at all events no prominent member--of that family is at present in England. In further execution of your instructions, as conveyed in your favour as above, we have, through a reliable channel, learned that Messrs. Smith, Rumsey, and Snagg, have nothing in the matter of Deverell at present in their office. Nor has there been, we are assured, any correspondence from or on the part of any of those clients for the last five terms or more. Notwithstanding, therefore, the coincidence of the date of your letter with the period to which, on a former occasion, we invited your attention, as indicated by the deed of 1809--" "What the plague is that?" interpolated Sir Jekyl. "They want me to write and ask, and pop it down in the costs;" and after a vain endeavour to recall it, he read the passage over again with deliberate emphasis. "Notwithstanding, therefore, the coincidence of the date of your letter with the period to which, on a former occasion, we invited your attention, as indicated by the deed of 1809, we are clear upon the evidence of the letters, copies of which will be before you as above by next post, that there is no ground for supposing any unusual activity on the part or behalf of the party or parties to whom you have referred. "Awaiting your further directions, "I have the honour to remain, "My dear Sir Jekyl Marlowe, "Your obedient servant, "N. CROWE. "For PELTER and CROWE. "Sir Jekyl Marlowe, Bart. "Marlowe, Old Swayton." When Sir Jekyl read this he felt all on a sudden a dozen years younger. He snapped his fingers, and smiled, in spite of himself. He could hardly bring himself to acknowledge, even in soliloquy, how immensely he was relieved. The sun shone delightfully: and his spirits returned quite brightly. He would have liked to cricket, to ride a steeple-chase--anything that would have breathed and worked him well, and given him a fair occasion for shouting and cheering. CHAPTER XI. Old Gryston Bridge. Very merry was the Baronet at the social breakfast-table, and the whole party very gay, except those few whose natures were sedate or melancholic. "A tremendous agreeable man, Sir Jekyl--don't you think so, Jennie?" said General Lennox to his wife, as he walked her slowly along the terrace at the side of the house. "I think him intolerably noisy, and sometimes absolutely vulgar," answered Lady Jane, with a languid disdain, which conveyed alike her estimate of her husband's discernment and of Sir Jekyl's merits. "Well, I thought he was agreeable. Some of his jokes I think, indeed, had not much sense in them. But sometimes I don't see a witty thing as quick as cleverer fellows do, and they were all laughing, except you; and I don't think you like him, Jennie." "I don't dislike him. I dare say he's a very worthy soul; but he gives me a headache." "He _is_ a little bit noisy, maybe. Yes, he certainly _is_," acquiesced the honest General, who in questions of taste and nice criticism, was diffident of his own judgment, and leaned to his wife's. "But I thought he was rather a pleasant fellow. I'm no great judge; but I like to see fellows laughing, and that sort of thing. It looks good-humoured, don't you think?" "I hate good-humour," said Lady Jane. The General, not knowing exactly what to say next, marched by her side in silence, till Lady Jane let go his arm, and sat down on the rustic seat which commands so fine a view, and, leaning back, eyed the landscape with a dreamy indolence, as if she was going to "cut" it. The General scanned it with a military eye, and his reconnoitering glance discerned, coming up the broad walk at his right, their host, with pretty Mrs. Maberly on his arm, doing the honours plainly very agreeably. On seeing the General and Lady Jane, he smiled, quickened his pace, and raised his hat. "So glad we have found you," said he. "Charming weather, isn't it? _You_ must determine, Lady Jane, what's to be done to-day. There are two things you really ought to see--Gryston Bridge and Hazelden Castle. I assure you the great London artists visit both for studies. We'll take our luncheon there, it's such a warm, bright day--that is, if you like the plan--and, which do you say?" "My husband always votes for me. What does Mrs. Maberly say?" and Lady Jane looked in her face with one of her winning smiles. "Yes, what does Mrs. Maberly say?" echoed the General, gallantly. "So you won't advise?" said the Baronet, leaning toward Lady Jane, a little reproachfully. "I won't advise," she echoed, in her indolent way. "Which is the best?" inquired Mrs. Maberly, gleefully. "What a charming idea!" "For my part, I have a headache, you know, Arthur--I told you, dear; and I shall hardly venture a long excursion, I think. What do you advise to-day?" "Well, I think it might do you good--hey? What do _you_ say, Sir Jekyl?" "So very sorry to hear Lady Jane is suffering; but I really think your advice, General Lennox--it's so very fine and mild--and I think it might amuse Lady Jane;" and he glanced at the lady, who, however, wearing her bewitching smile, was conversing with Mrs. Maberly about a sweet little white dog, with long ears and a blue ribbon, which had accompanied her walk from the house. "Well, dear, Sir Jekyl wants to know. What do you say?" inquired the General. "Oh, pray arrange as you please. I dare say I can go. It's all the same," answered Lady Jane, without raising her eyes from silvery little Bijou, on whom she bestowed her unwonted smiles and caresses. "You belong to Beatrix, you charming little fairy--I'm sure you do; and is not it very wicked to go out with other people without leave, you naughty little truant?" "You must not attack her so. She really loves Beatrix; and though she has come out just to take the air with me, I don't think she cares twopence about me; and I know I don't about her." "What a cruel speech!" cried pretty Mrs. Maberly, with a laugh that showed her exquisite little teeth. "The _fact_ is cruel--if you will--not the speech--for she can't hear it," said Sir Jekyl, patting Bijou. "So they _act_ love to your face, poor little dog, and say what they please of you behind your back," murmured Lady Jane, soothingly, to little Bijou, who wagged his tail and wriggled to her feet. "Yes, they do, poor little dog!" "Well, I shall venture--may I? I'll order the carriages at one. And we'll say Gryston Bridge," said Sir Jekyl, hesitating notwithstanding, inquiry plainly in his countenance. "Sir Jekyl's waiting, dear," said General Lennox, a little imperiously. "I really don't care. _Yes_, then," she said, and, getting up, she took the General's arm and walked away, leaving Mrs. Maberly and her host to their _tête-à-tête_. Gryston Bridge is one of the prettiest scenes in that picturesque part of the country. A river slowly winds its silvery way through the level base of a beautifully irregular valley. No enclosure breaks the dimpling and undulating sward--for it is the common of Gryston--which rises in soft pastoral slopes at either side, forming the gentle barriers of the valley, which is closed in at the further end by a bold and Alpine hill, with a base rising purple and domelike from the plain; and in this perspective the vale of Gryston diverges, and the two streams, which at its head unite to form the slow-flowing current of the Greet, are lost to sight. Trees of nature's planting here and there overhang its stream, and others, solitarily or in groups, stud the hill-sides and the soft green plain. A strange row of tall, gray stones, Druidic or monumental, of a bygone Cyclopean age, stand up, time-worn and mysterious, on a gentle slope, with a few bending thorn and birch trees beside them, in the near distance; and in the foreground, the steep, Gothic bridge of Gretford, or Gryston, spans the river, with five tall arches, and a loop-holed gate-house, which once guarded the pass, now roofless and ruined. In this beautiful and sequestered scene the party from Marlowe had loitered away that charming afternoon. The early sunset had been rapidly succeeded by twilight, and the moon had surprised them. The servants were packing up hampers of plates and knives and forks, and getting the horses to for the return to Marlowe; while, in the early moonlight a group stood upon the bridge, overlooking from the battlement the sweet landscape in its changing light. Sir Jekyl could see that Captain Drayton was by Beatrix's side, and concluded, rightly, I have no doubt, that his conversation was tinted by the tender lights of that romantic scenery. "The look back on this old bridge from those Druidic stones there by moonlight is considered very fine. It is no distance--hardly four hundred steps from this--although it looks so misty," said the Baronet to Lady Jane, who leaned on his arm. "Suppose we make a little party, will you venture?" I suppose the lady acquiesced, for Sir Jekyl ordered that the carriages should proceed round by the road, and take them up at the point where these Druidic remains stand. The party who ventured this little romantic walk over the grass, were General Lennox, in charge of the mature Miss Blunket, who loved a frolic with all her girlish heart; Sir Jekyl, with Lady Jane upon his arm; and Captain Drayton, who escorted Beatrix. Marching gaily, in open column, as the General would have said, they crossed the intervening hollow, and reached the hillock, on which stand these ungainly relics of a bygone race; and up the steep bank they got, each couple as best they could. Sir Jekyl and Lady Jane, for he knew the ground, by an easy path, were first to reach the upper platform. Sir Jekyl, I dare say, was not very learned about the Druids, and I can't say exactly what he was talking about, when on a sudden he arrested both his step and his sentence, for on one of these great prostrate stones which strew that summit, he saw standing, not a dozen steps away, well illuminated by the moon, the figure of that very Guy Strangways, whom he so wished and hated to see--whom he had never beheld without such strange sensations, and had not expected to see again. The young man took no note of them apparently. He certainly did not recognise Sir Jekyl, whose position placed his face in the shade, while that of Mr. Strangways was full in the white light of the moon. They had found him almost in the act of descending from his pedestal; and he was gone in a few moments, before the Baronet had recovered from his surprise. The vivid likeness which he bore to a person whom the Baronet never wished to think of, and the suddenness of his appearance and his vanishing, had reimpressed him with just the same secret alarms and misgivings as when first he saw him; and the serene confidence induced by the letter of Messrs. Pelter and Crowe was for a moment demolished. He dropped Lady Jane's arm, and forgetting his chivalry, strode to the brow of the hillock, over which the mysterious young man had disappeared. He had lost sight of him, but he emerged in a few seconds, about fifty yards away, from behind a screen of thorn, walking swiftly toward the road close by, on which stood a chaise, sharp in the misty moonlight. Just in time to prevent his shouting after the figure, now on the point of re-entering the vehicle, he recollected and checked himself. Confound the fellows, if they did not appreciate his hospitality, should he run after them; or who were they that he should care a pin about them? Had he not Pelter and Crowe's letter? And suppose he did overtake and engage the young rogue in talk, what could he expect but a parcel of polite lies. Certainly, under the circumstances, pursuit would have been specially undignified; and the Baronet drew himself up on the edge of the eminence, and cast a haughty half-angry look after the young gentleman, who was now stepping into the carriage; and suddenly he recollected how very ill he had treated Lady Jane, and he hastened to rejoin her. But Sir Jekyl, in that very short interval, had lost something of his spirits. The sight of that young man had gone far to undo the tranquillising effect of his attorneys' letter. He would not have cared had this unchanged phantom of the past and his hoary mentor been still in England, provided it were at a distance. But here they were, on the confines of his property, within a short drive of Marlowe, yet affecting to forget his invitation, his house, and himself, and detected prowling in its vicinity like spies or poachers by moonlight. Was there not something insidious in this? It was not for nothing that so well-bred a person as that young man thus trampled on all the rules of courtesy for the sake of maintaining his incognito, and avoiding the obligations of hospitality. So reasoned Sir Jekyl Marlowe, and felt himself rapidly relapsing into that dreamy and intense uneasiness, from which for a few hours he had been relieved. "A thousand apologies, Lady Jane," cried he, as he ran back and proffered his arm again. "I was afraid that fellow might be one of a gang--a very dangerous lot of rogues--poachers, I believe. There were people robbed here about a year ago, and I quite forgot when I asked you to come. I should never have forgiven myself--so selfishly forgetful--never, had you been frightened." Sir Jekyl could, of course, tell fibs, especially by way of apology, as plausibly as other men of the world. He had here turned a negligence skilfully into a gallantry, and I suppose the lady forgave him. The carriages had now arrived at the bend of this pretty road; and our Marlowe friends got in, and the whole cortège swept away merrily towards that old mansion. Sir Jekyl had been, with an effort, very lively all the way home, and assisted Lady Jane to the ground, smiling, and had a joke for General Lennox as he followed; and a very merry party mustered in the hall, prattling, laughing, and lighting their candles, to run up-stairs and dress for a late dinner. CHAPTER XII. The Strangers appear again. Sir Jekyl was the last of the party in the hall; and the last joke and laugh had died away on the lobby above him, and away fled his smiles like the liveries and brilliants of Cinderella to the region of illusions, and black care laid her hand on his shoulder and stood by him. The bland butler, with a grave bow, accosted him in mild accents-- "The two gentlemen, sir, as you spoke of to Mrs. Sinnott, has arrived about five minutes before you, sir; and she has, please sir, followed your directions, and had them put in the rooms in the front, as you ordered, sir, should be kept for them, before Mrs. Gwynn left." "_What_ two gentlemen?" demanded Sir Jekyl, with a thrill. "Mr. Strangways and M. Varbarriere?" "Them, sir, I think, is the names--Strangways, leastways, I am sure on, 'aving lived, when young, with a branch of the Earl of Dilbury's family, if you please, sir--which Strangways is the name." "A good-looking young gentleman, tall and slight, eh?" "Yes, sir; and a heavy gentleman haccompanies him--something in years--a furriner, as I suppose, and speaking French or Jarmin; leastways, it is not English." "Dinner in twenty minutes," said Sir Jekyl, with the decision of the Duke of Wellington in action; and away he strode to his dressing-room in the back settlements, with a quick step and a thoughtful face. "I shan't want you, Tomlinson, you need not stay," said he to his man; but before he let him go, he asked carelessly a word or two about the new guests, and learned, in addition to what he already knew, nothing but that they had brought a servant with them. "So much the worse," thought Sir Jekyl; "those confounded fellows hear everything, and poke their noses everywhere. I sometimes think that rascal, Tomlinson, pries about here." And the Baronet, half-dressed, opened the door of his study, as he called it, at the further end of his homely bedchamber, and looked round. It is or might be a comfortable room, of some five-and-twenty feet square, surrounded by bookshelves, as homely as the style of the bed-room, stored with volumes of the "Annual Register," "Gentleman's Magazine," and "Universal History" sort--long rows in dingy gilding--moved up here when the old library of Marlowe was broken up. The room had a dusty air of repose about it. A few faded pieces of old-fashioned furniture, which had probably been quartered here in genteel retirement, long ago, when the principal sitting-rooms were undergoing a more modern decoration. Here Sir Jekyl stood with a sudden look of dejection, and stared listlessly round on the compact wall of books that surrounded him, except for the one door-case, that through which he had entered, and the two windows, on all sides. Sir Jekyl was in a sort of collapse of spirits. He stepped dreamily to the far shelf and took down a volume of Old Bailey Reports, and read the back of it several times, then looked round once more dejectedly, and blew the top of the volume, and wondered at the quantity of dust there, and replacing it, heaved a deep sigh. Dust and death are old associations, and his thoughts were running in a gloomy channel. "Is it worth all this?" he thought. "I'm growing tired of it--utterly. I'm half sorry I came here; perhaps they are right. It might be a devilish good thing for me if this rubbishy old house were burnt to the ground--and I in it, by Jove! 'Out, out, brief candle!' What's that Shakspeare speech?--'A tale told by an idiot--a play played by an idiot'--egad! I don't know why I do half the things I do." When he looked in the glass he did not like the reflection. "Down in the mouth--hang it! this will never do," and he shook his curls, and smirked, and thought of the ladies, and bustled away over his toilet; and when it was completed, as he fixed in his jewelled wrist-buttons, the cold air and shadow of his good or evil angel's wing crossed him again, and he sighed. Capricious were his moods. Our wisdom is so frivolous, and our frivolities so sad. Is there time here to think out anything completely? Is it possible to hold by our conclusions, or even to remember them long? And this trifling and suffering are the woof and the warp of an eternal robe--wedding garment, let us hope--maybe winding-sheet, or--toga molesta. Sir Jekyl, notwithstanding his somewhat interrupted toilet, was in the drawing-room before many of his guests had assembled. He hesitated for a moment at the door, and turned about with a sickening thrill, and walked to the table in the outer hall, or vestibule, where the post-bag lay. He had no object in this countermarch, but to postpone for a second or two the meeting with the gentlemen whom, with, as he sometimes fancied, very questionable prudence, he had invited under his roof. And now he entered, frank, gay, smiling. His eyes did not search, they were, as it were, smitten instantaneously with a sense of pain, by the image of the young man, so handsome, so peculiar, sad, and noble, the sight of whom had so moved him. He was conversing with old Colonel Doocey, at the further side of the fireplace. In another moment Sir Jekyl was before him, his hand very kindly locked in his. "Very happy to see you here, Mr. Strangways." "I am very much honoured, Sir Jekyl Marlowe," returned the young gentleman, in that low sweet tone which he also hated. "I have many apologies to make. We have arrived two days later than your note appointed; but an accident--" "Pray, not a word--your appearance here is the best compensation you can make me. Your friend, Monsieur Varbarriere, I hope--" "My uncle--yes; he, too, has the honour. Will you permit me to present him? Monsieur Varbarriere," said the young man, presenting his relative. A gentleman at this summons turned suddenly from General Lennox, with whom he had been talking; a high-shouldered, portly man, taller a good deal when you approached him than he looked at first; his hair, "all silvered," brushed up like Louis Philippe's, conically from his forehead; grey, heavily projecting eyebrows, long untrimmed moustache and beard; altogether a head and face which seemed to indicate that combination of strong sense and sensuality which we see in some of the medals of Roman Emperors; a forehead projecting at the brows, and keen dark eyes in shadow, observing all things from under their grizzled pent-house; these points, and a hooked nose, and a certain weight and solemnity of countenance, gave to the large and rather pallid aspect, presented suddenly to the Baronet, something, as we have said, of the character of an old magician. Voluminous plaited black trousers, slanting in to the foot, foreshadowed the peg-top of more recent date; a loose and long black velvet waistcoat, with more gold chain and jewellery generally than Englishmen are accustomed to wear, and a wide and clumsy black coat, added to the broad and thick-set character of his figure. As Sir Jekyl made his complimentary speech to this gentleman, he saw that his steady and shrewd gaze was attentively considering him in a way that a little tried his patience; and when the stranger spoke it was in French, and in that peculiar metallic diapason which we sometimes hear among the Hebrew community, and which brings the nasals of that tongue into sonorous and rather ugly relief. "England is, I dare say, quite new to you, Monsieur Varbarriere?" inquired Sir Jekyl. "I have seen it a very long time ago, and admire your so fine country very much," replied the pallid and bearded sage, speaking in French still, and in those bell-like tones which rang and buzzed unpleasantly in the ear. "You find us the same foggy and tasteless islanders as before," said the host. "In art, indeed, we have made an advance; _there_, I think, we have capabilities, but we are as a people totally deficient in that fine decorative sense which expresses itself so gracefully and universally in your charming part of the world." When Sir Jekyl talked of France, he was generally thinking of Paris. "We have our barbarous regions, as you have; our vineyards are a dull sight after all, and our forest trees you, with your grand timber, would use for broom-sticks." "But your capital; why every time one looks out at the window it is a fillip to one's spirits. To me, preferring France so infinitely, as I do," said Sir Jekyl, replying in his guest's language, "it appears a mystery why any Frenchman, who can help it, ever visits our dismal region." The enchanter here shrugged slowly, with a solemn smile. "No wonder our actions are mysterious to others, since they are so often so to ourselves." "You are best acquainted with the south of France?" said Sir Jekyl, without any data for such an assumption, and saying the reverse of what he suspected. "Very well with the south; pretty well, indeed, with most parts." Just at this moment Mr. Ridley's bland and awful tones informed the company that dinner was on the table, and Sir Jekyl hastened to afford to Lady Blunket the support of his vigorous arm into the parlour. It ought to have been given to Lady Jane; but the Blunket was a huffy old woman, and, on the score of a very decided seniority, was indulged. Lady Blunket was not very interesting, and was of the Alderman's opinion, that conversation prevents one's tasting the green fat; Sir Jekyl had, therefore, time, with light and careless glances, to see pretty well, from time to time, what was going on among his guests. Monsieur Varbarriere had begun to interest him more than Mr. Guy Strangways, and his eye oftener reviewed that ponderous and solemn face and form than any other at the table. It seemed that he liked his dinner, and attended to his occupation. But though taciturn, his shrewd eyes glanced from time to time on the host and his guests with an air of reserved observation that showed his mind was anything but sluggish during the process. He looked wonderfully like some of those enchanters whom we have seen in illustrations of Don Quixote. "A deep fellow," he thought, "an influential fellow. That gentleman knows what he's about; that young fellow is in his hands." CHAPTER XIII. In the Drawing-Room. Sir Jekyl heard snatches of conversation, sometimes here, sometimes there. Guy Strangways was talking to Beatrix, and the Baronet heard him say, smiling-- "But you don't, I'm sure, believe in the elixir of life; you only mean to mystify us." He was looking more than ever--identical with that other person, whom it was not pleasant to Sir Jekyl to be reminded of--horribly like, in this white waxlight splendour. "But there's another process, my uncle, Monsieur Varbarriere, says, by slow refrigeration: you are first put to sleep, and in that state frozen; and once frozen, without having suffered death, you may be kept in a state of suspended life for twenty or thirty years, neither conscious, nor growing old; arrested precisely at the point of your existence at which the process was applied, and at the same point restored again whenever for any purpose it may be expedient to recall you to consciousness and activity." One of those restless, searching glances which the solemn, portly old gentleman in black directed, from time to time, as he indulged his taciturn gulosity, lighted on the Baronet at this moment, and Sir Jekyl felt that they exchanged an unintentional glance of significance. Each averted his quickly; and Sir Jekyl, with one of his chuckles, for the sake merely of saying something, remarked-- "I don't see how you can restore people to life by freezing them." "He did not speak, I think, of restoring life--did you, Guy?" said the bell-toned diapason of the old gentleman, speaking his nasal French. "Oh, no--suspending merely," answered the young man. "To restore life, you must have recourse, I fancy, to a higher process," continued the sage, with an ironical gravity, and his eye this time fixed steadily on Sir Jekyl's; "and I could conceive none more embarrassing to the human race, _under certain circumstances_," and he shrugged slowly and shook his head. "How delightful!--no more death!" exclaimed enthusiastic Miss Blunket. "Embarrassing, of course, I mean, to certain of the survivors." This old gentleman was hitting his tenderest points rather hard and often. Was it by chance or design? Who was he? So thought the Baronet as he smiled and nodded. "Do you know who that fat old personage is who dresses like an undertaker and looks like a Jew?" asked Captain Drayton of Beatrix. "I think he is a relative of Mr. Strangways." "And who is Mr. Strangways?" "He's at my right, next me," answered she in a low tone, not liking the very clear and distinct key in which the question was put. But Captain Drayton was not easily disconcerted, being a young gentleman of a bold and rather impertinent temperament, and he continued leaning back in his chair and looking dreamily into his hock-glass. "Not a friend of yours, is he?" "Oh, no." "Really--not a friend. You're _quite_ certain?" "Perfectly. We never saw either--that is, papa met them at some posting place on his way from London, and invited them; but I think he knows nothing more." "Well, I did not like to say till I knew, but I think him--the old fellow--I have not seen the young man--a most vulgar-looking old person. He's a wine-jobber, or manager of a factory, or something. You never saw--I know Paris by heart--you _never saw_ such a thing in gentlemanly society there." And the young lady heard him say, _sotto voce_, "Brute!" haughtily to himself, as an interjection, while he just raised the finger-tips of the hand which rested on the table, and let them descend again on the snowy napery. The subject deserved no more troublesome gesture. "And where is the young gentleman?" asked Captain Drayton, after a little interval. Beatrix told him again. "Oh! _That's_ he! Isn't his French very bad--did it strike you? Bad _accent_--I can tell in a moment. That's not an accent one hears anywhere." Oddly enough, Sir Jekyl at the same time, with such slight interruptions as his agreeable attentions to Lady Blunket imposed, was, in the indistinct way in which such discussions are mentally pursued, observing upon the peculiarities of his two new guests, and did not judge them amiss. The elder was odd, take him for what country you pleased. Bearded like a German, speaking good French, with a good accent, but in the loud full tones of a Spaniard, and with a quality of voice which resounds in the synagogue, and a quietude of demeanour much more English than continental. His dress, such as I have described it, fine in material, but negligent and easy, though odd. Reserved and silent he was, a little sinister perhaps, but his bearing unconstrained and gracious when he spoke. There was, indeed, that odd, watchful glance from under his heavy eyebrows, which, however, had nothing sly, only observant, in it. Again he thought, "Who could he be?" On the whole, Sir Jekyl was in nowise disposed to pronounce upon him as Captain Drayton was doing a little way down the table; nor yet upon Guy Strangways, whom he thought, on the contrary, an elegant young man, according to French notions of the gentlemanly, and he knew the French people a good deal better than the youthful Captain did. The principal drawing-room of Marlowe is a very large apartment, and people can talk of one another in it without any risk of detection. "Well, Lady Jane," said the Baronet, sitting down before that handsome woman, and her husband the General, so as to interrupt a conjugal _tête-à-tête_, probably a particularly affectionate one, for he was to leave for London next day. "I saw you converse with Monsieur Varbarriere. What do you think of him?" "I don't think I conversed with him--did I? He talked to me; but I really did not take the trouble to think about him." The General laughed triumphantly, and glanced over his shoulder at the Baronet. He liked his wife's contempt for the rest of the sex, and her occasional--_only_ occasional--enthusiasm for him. "Now you are much too clever, Lady Jane, to be let off so. I really want to know something about him, which I don't at present; and if anyone can help me to a wise conjecture, you, I am certain, can." "And don't you really know who he is?" inquired General Lennox, with a haughty military surprise. "Upon my honour, I have not the faintest idea," answered Sir Jekyl. "He may be a cook or a rabbi, for anything I can tell." The General's white eyebrows went some wrinkles up the slanting ascent of his pink forehead, and he plainly looked his amazement that Lady Jane should have been subjected at Marlowe to the risk of being accosted on equal terms by a cook or a rabbi. His lips screwed themselves unconsciously into a small o, and his eyes went in search of the masquerading menial. "We had a cook," said the General, still eyeing M. Varbarriere, "at Futtychur, a French fellow, fat like that, but shorter--a capital cook, by Jove! and a very gentlemanly man. He wore a white cap, and he had a very good way of stewing tomatas and turkeys, I think it was, and--yes it was--and a monstrous gentlemanlike fellow he was; rather too expensive though; he cost us a great deal," and the General winked slyly. "I had to speak to him once or twice. But an uncommon gentlemanlike man." "He's not a cook, my dear. He may be a banker, perhaps," said Lady Jane, languidly. "You have exactly hit my idea," said Sir Jekyl. "It was his knowing all about French banking, General, when you mentioned that trick that was played you on the Bourse." At this moment the massive form and face of M. Varbarriere was seen approaching with Beatrix by his side. They were conversing, but the little group we have just been listening to dropped the discussion of M. Varbarriere, and the Baronet said that he hoped General Lennox would have a fine day for his journey, and that the moon looked particularly bright and clear. "I want to show Monsieur Varbarriere the drawings of the house, papa; they are in this cabinet. He admires the architecture very much." The large enchanter in black made a solemn bow of acquiescence here, but said nothing and Beatrix took from its nook a handsome red-leather portfolio, on the side of which, in tall golden letters, were the words-- VIEWS AND ELEVATIONS OF MARLOWE MANOR HOUSE. PAULO ABRUZZI, ARCHITECT. 1711. "Capital drawing, I am told. He was a young man of great promise," said Sir Jekyl, in French. "But the style is quite English, and, I fear, will hardly interest an eye accustomed to the more graceful contour of southern continental architecture." "Your English style interests me very much. It is singular, and suggests hospitality, enjoyment, and mystery." Monsieur Varbarriere was turning over these tinted drawings carefully. "Is not that very true, papa--hospitality, enjoyment, mystery?" repeated Beatrix. "I think that faint character of mystery is so pleasant. We have a mysterious room here." She had turned to M. Varbarriere. "Oh, a dozen," interrupted Sir Jekyl. "No end of ghosts and devils, you know. But I really think you excel us in that article. I resided for five weeks in a haunted house once, near Havre, and the stories were capital, and there were some very good noises too. We must get Dives to tell it by-and-by; he was younger than I, and more frightened." "And Mademoiselle says you have a haunted apartment here," said the ponderous foreigner with the high forehead and projecting brows. "Yes, of course. We are very much haunted. There is hardly a crooked passage or a dark room that has not a story," said Sir Jekyl. "Beatrix, why don't you sing us a song, by-the-bye?" "May I beg one other favour first, before the crowning one of the song?" said M. Varbarriere, with an imposing playfulness. "Mademoiselle, I am sure, tells a story well. Which, I entreat, is the particular room you speak of?" "We call it the green chamber," said Beatrix. "The green chamber--what a romantic title!" exclaimed the large gentleman in black, graciously; "and where is it situated?" he pursued. "We must really put you into it," said Sir Jekyl. "Nothing I should like so well," he observed, with a bow. "That is, of course, whenever it is deserted. You have not been plagued with apparitions, General? Even Lady Jane--and there are no ghost-seers like ladies, I've observed--has failed to report anything horrible." His hand lay on the arm of her chair, and, as he spoke, for a moment pressed hers, which, not choosing to permit such accidents, she, turning carelessly and haughtily toward the other speakers, slipped away. CHAPTER XIV. Music. "And pray, Mademoiselle Marlowe, in what part of the house is this so wonderful room situated?" persisted the grave and reverend signor. "Quite out of the question to describe to one who does not already know the house," interposed Sir Jekyl. "It is next the six-sided dressing-room, which opens from the hatchment gallery--that is its exact situation; and I'm afraid I have failed to convey it," said Sir Jekyl, with one of his playful chuckles. The Druidic-looking Frenchman shrugged and lifted his fingers with a piteous expression of perplexity, and shook his head. "Is there not among these drawings a view of the side of the house where this room lies?" he inquired. "I was looking it out," said Beatrix. "I'll find it, Trixie. Go you and sing us a song," said the Baronet. "I've got them both, papa. Now, Monsieur Varbarriere, here they are. This is the front view--this is the side." "I am very much obliged," said Monsieur examining the drawings curiously. "The room recedes. This large bow-window belongs to it. Is it not so?--wide room?--how long? You see I want to understand everything. Ah! yes, here is the side view. It projects from the side of the older building, I see. How charming! And this is the work of the Italian artist? The style is quite novel--a mixture partly Florentine--really very elegant. Did he build anything more here?" "Yes, a very fine row of stables, and a temple in the grounds," said Sir Jekyl. "You shall see them to-morrow." "The chamber green. Yes, very clever, very pretty;" and having eyed them over again carefully, he said, laying them down-- "A curious as well as a handsome old house, no doubt. Ah! very curious, I dare say," said the sage Monsieur Varbarriere. "Are there here the ground plans?" "We have them somewhere, I fancy, among the title-deeds, but none here," said Sir Jekyl, a little stiffly, as if it struck him that his visitor's curiosity was a trifle less ceremonious than, all things considered, it might be. Pretty Beatrix was singing now to her own accompaniment; and Captain Drayton, twisting the end of his light moustache, stood haughtily by her side. The music in his ear was but a half-heard noise. Indeed, although he had sat out operas innumerable, like other young gentlemen, who would sit out as many hours of a knife-grinder's performance, or of a railway whistle, if it were the fashion, had but an imperfect recollection of the airs he had paid so handsomely to hear, and was no authority on music of any sort. Now Beatrix was pretty--more than pretty. Some people called her lovely. She sang in that rich and plaintive contralto--so rare and so inexplicably moving--the famous "Come Gentil," from Don Pasquale. When she ceased, the gentleman at her other side, Guy Strangways, sighed--not a complimentary--a real sigh. "That is a wonderful song, the very spirit of a serenade. Such distance--such gaiety--such sadness. Your Irish poet, Thomas Moore, compares some spiritual music or kind voice to sunshine spoken. This is _moonlight_--moonlight _sung_, and _so_ sung that I could dream away half a life in listening, and yet sigh when it ceases." Mr. Guy Strangway's strange, dark eyes looked full on her, as with an admiring enthusiasm he said these words. The young lady smiled, looking up for a moment from the music-stool, and then with lowered eyes again, and that smile of gratification which is so beautiful in a lovely girl's face. "It is quite charming, really. I'm no musician, you know; but I enjoy good music extravagantly, especially singing," said Captain Drayton. "I don't aspire to talk sentiment and that kind of poetry." He was, perhaps, near using a stronger term--"a mere John Bull; but it _is_, honestly, charming." He had his glass in his eye, and turned back the leaf of the song to the title-page. "Don Pasquale--yes. Sweet opera that. How often I have listened to Mario in it! But never, Miss Marlowe, with more real pleasure than to the charming performance I have just heard." Captain Drayton was not making his compliment well, and felt it somehow. It was clumsy--it was dull--it was meant to override the tribute offered by Guy Strangways, whose presence he chose, in modern phrase, to ignore; and yet he felt that he had, as he would have expressed it, rather "put his foot in it;" and, with just a little flush in his cheek and rather angry eyes, he stooped over the piano and read the Italian words half aloud. "By-the-bye," he said, suddenly recollecting a topic, "what a sweet scene that is of Gryston Bridge? Have you ever been to see it before?" "Once since we came, we rode there, papa and I," answered Miss Marlowe. "It looked particularly well this evening--quite beautiful in the moonlight." "Is it possible, Miss Marlowe, that _you_ were there this evening? I and my uncle stopped on our way here to admire the exquisite effect of the steep old bridge, with a wonderful foreground of Druidic monuments, as they seemed to me." "Does your father preserve that river?" asked Captain Drayton, coolly pretermitting Mr. Strangways altogether. "I really don't know," she replied, in a slight and hurried way that nettled the Captain; and, turning to Guy Strangways, she said, "Did you see it _from_ the bridge?" "No, Mademoiselle; from the mound in which those curious stones are raised," answered Mr. Strangways. Captain Drayton felt that Miss Marlowe's continuing to talk to Mr. Strangways, while _he_ was present and willing to converse, was extremely offensive, choosing to entertain a low opinion in all respects of that person. He stooped a little forward, and stared at the stranger with that ill-bred gaze of insolent surprise which is the peculiar weapon of Englishmen, and which very distinctly expresses, "who the devil are you?" Perhaps it was fortunate for the harmony of the party that just at this moment, and before Captain Drayton could say anything specially impertinent, Sir Jekyl touched Drayton on the shoulder, saying-- "Are you for whist?" "No, thanks--I'm no player." "Oh! Mr. Strangways--I did not see--do _you_ play?" Mr. Strangways smiled, bowed, and shook his head. "Drayton, did I present you to Mr. Strangways?" and the Baronet made the two young gentlemen technically known to one another--though, of course, each knew the other already. They bowed rather low, and a little haughtily, neither smiling. I suppose Sir Jekyl saw something a little dangerous in the countenance of one at least of the gentlemen as he approached, and chose to remind them, in that agreeable way, that he was present, and wished them acquainted, and of course friendly. He had now secured old Colonel Doocey to make up his party--the sober old Frenchman and Sir Paul Blunket making the supplementary two; and before they had taken their chairs round the card-table, Captain Drayton said, with a kind of inclination rather insolent than polite-- "You are of the Dilbury family, of course? I never knew a Strangways yet--I mean, of course, a Strangways such as one would be likely to meet, you know--who was not." "You know one now, sir; for I am not connected ever so remotely with that distinguished family. My family are quite another Strangways." "No doubt quite as respectable," said Captain Drayton, with a bow, a look, and a tone that would have passed for deferential with many; but which, nevertheless, had the subtle flavour of an irony in it. "Perhaps more so; my ancestors are the Strangways of Lynton; you are aware they had a peerage down to the reign of George II." Captain Drayton was not as deep as so fashionable and moneyed a man ought to have been in extinct peerages, and therefore he made a little short supercilious bow, and no answer. He looked drowsily toward the ceiling, and then-- "The Strangways of Lynton are on the Continent or something--one does not hear of them," said Captain Drayton, slightly but grandly. "We are the Draytons of Drayton Forest, in the same county." "Oh! then my uncle is misinformed. He thought that family was extinct, and lamented over it when we saw the house and place at a distance." Captain Drayton coloured a little above his light yellow moustache. He was no Drayton, but a remotely collateral Smithers, with a queen's letter constituting him a Drayton. "Aw--yes--it is a fine old place--quite misinformed. I can show you our descent if you wish it." If Drayton had collected his ideas a little first he would not have made this condescension. "Your descent is high and pure--_very_ high, I assume--mine is only respectable--presentable, as you say, but by no means so high as to warrant my inquiring into that of other people." "Inquiry! of course. I did not say inquiry," and with an effort Captain Drayton almost laughed. "Nothing more dull," acquiesced Mr. Strangways slightly. Both gentlemen paused--each seemed to expect something from the other--each seemed rather angrily listening for it. The ostensible attack had all been on the part of the gallant Captain, who certainly had not been particularly well bred. The Captain, nevertheless, felt that Mr. Strangways knew perfectly all about Smithers, and that Smithers really had not one drop of the Drayton blood in his veins; and he felt in the sore and secret centre of his soul that the polished, handsome young gentleman, so easy, so graceful, with that suspicion of a foreign accent and of foreign gesture, had the best of the unavowed battle. He had never spoken a word or looked a look in the course of this little dialogue which could have suggested an idea of altercation, or any kind of mutual unpleasantness, to the beautiful young girl; who, with one hand on the keys of the piano, touched them so lightly with her fingers as to call forth a dream of an air rather than the air itself. To her Guy Strangways turned, with his peculiar smile--so winning, yet so deep--an enigmatic smile that had in it a latent sadness and fierceness, and by its very ambiguousness interested one. "I upbraid myself for losing these precious moments while you sit here, and might, perhaps, be persuaded to charm us with another song." So she was persuaded; Captain Drayton still keeping guard, and applauding, though with no special goodwill toward the unoffending stranger. The party broke up early. The ladies trooped to their bed-room candles and ascended the great staircase, chatting harmoniously, and bidding mutual sweet goodnights as in succession they reached their doors. The gentlemen, having sat for awhile lazily about the fire, or gathered round the tray whereon stood sherry and seltzer water, repaired also to the cluster of bedchamber candlesticks without, and helped themselves, talking together in like sociable manner. "Would you like to come to my room and have a cigar, Monsieur Varbarriere?" asked the Baronet in French. Monsieur was much obliged, and bowed very suavely, but declined. "And you, Mr. Strangways?" He also, with many thanks, a smile and a bow, declined. "My quarters are quite out of reach of the inhabited part of the house--not very far from two hundred feet from this spot, by Jove! right in the rear. You must really come to me there some night; you'll be amused at my deal furniture and rustic barbarism; we often make a party there and smoke for half an hour." So, as they were not to be persuaded, the Baronet hospitably accompanied them to their rooms, at the common dressing-room door of which stood little Jacque Duval with his thin, bronzed face, candle in hand, bowing, to receive his master. CHAPTER XV. M. Varbarriere converses with his Nephew. Here then Sir Jekyl bid them good-night, and descended the great staircase, and navigated the long line of passage to the back stairs leading up to his own homely apartment. The elder man nodded to Jacque, and moved the tips of his fingers towards the door--a silent intimation which the adroit valet perfectly understood; so, with a cheerful bow, he withdrew. There was a gay little spluttering fire in the grate, which the sharpness of the night made very pleasant. The clumsy door was shut, and the room had an air of comfortable secrecy which invited a talk. It was not to come, however, without preparation. He drew a chair before the fire, and sat down solemnly, taking a gigantic cigar from his case, and moistening it diligently between his lips before lighting it. Then he pointed to a chair beside the hearth, and presented his cigar-case to his young companion, who being well versed in his elder's ways, helped himself, and having, like him, foreign notions about smoking, had of course no remorse about a cigar or two in their present quarters. Up the chimney chiefly whisked the narcotic smoke. Over the ponderous features and knotted forehead of the sage flushed the uncertain light of the fire, revealing all the crows' feet--all the lines which years, thought, passion, or suffering had traced on that large, sombre, and somewhat cadaverous countenance, reversing oddly some of its shadows, and glittering with a snakelike brightness on the eyes, which now gazed grimly into the bars under their heavy brows. The large and rather flat foot, shining in French leather, of the portly gentleman in the ample black velvet waistcoat, rested on the fender, and he spoke not a word until his cigar was fairly smoked out and the stump of it in the fire. Abruptly he began, without altering his pose or the direction of his gaze. "You need not make yourself more friendly with any person here than is absolutely necessary." He was speaking French, and in a low tone that sounded like the boom of a distant bell. Young Strangways bowed acquiescence. "Be on your guard with Sir Jekyl Marlowe. Tell him _nothing_. Don't let him be kind to you. He will have no kind motive in being so. Fence with his questions--don't answer them. Remember he is an artful man without any scruple. I know him and all about him." M. Varbarriere spoke each of these little sentences in an isolated way, as a smoker might, although he was no longer smoking, between his puffs. "Therefore, not a word to him--no obligations--no intimacy. If he catches you by the hand, even by your little finger, in the way of friendship, he'll cling to it, so as so impede your _arm_, should it become necessary to exert it." "I don't understand you, sir," said the young man, in a deferential tone, but looking very hard at him. "You _partly_ don't understand me; the nature of my direction, however, is clear. Observe it strictly." There was a short silence here. "I don't understand, sir, what covert hostility can exist between us; that is, why I should, in your phrase, keep my hand free to exert it against him." "No, I don't suppose you do." "And I can't help regretting that, if such are our possible relations, I should find myself as a guest under his roof," said the young man, with a pained and almost resentful look. "You can't help regretting, and--you can't help the circumstance," vibrated his Mentor, in a metallic murmur, his cadaverous features wearing the same odd character of deep thought and apathy. "I don't know, with respect to _him_--I know, however, how it has affected me--that I have felt unhappy, and even guilty since this journey commenced, as if I were a traitor and an impostor," said the young man, with a burst of impatience. "Don't, sir, use phrases which reflect back upon _me_," said the other, turning upon him with a sudden sternness. "All you have done is by my direction." The ample black waistcoat heaved and subsided a little faster than before, and the imposing countenance was turned with pallid fierceness upon the young man. "I am sorry, uncle." "So you should--you'll see one day how little it is to me, and how much to you." Here was a pause. The senior turned his face again toward the fire. The little flush that in wrath always touched his forehead subsided slowly. He replaced his foot on the fender, and chose another cigar. "There's a great deal you don't see now that you will presently. I did not want to see Sir Jekyl Marlowe any more than you did or do; but I did want to see this place. You'll know hereafter why. I'd rather not have met him. I'd rather not be his guest. Had he been as usual at Dartbroke, I should have seen all I wanted without that annoyance. It is an accident his being here--another, his having invited me; but no false ideas and no trifling chance shall regulate, much less stop, the action of the machine which I am constructing and will soon put in motion." And with these words he lighted his cigar, and after smoking for a while he lowered it, and said-- "Did Sir Jekyl put any questions to you, with a view to learn particulars about you or me?" "I don't recollect that he did. I rather think not; but Captain Drayton did." "I know, _Smithers_?" "Yes, sir." "With an object?" inquired the elder man. "I think not--merely impertinence," answered Guy Strangways. "You are right--it is nothing to him. I do not know that even Marlowe has a suspicion. Absolutely impertinence." And upon this M. Varbarriere began to smoke again with resolution and energy. "You understand, Guy; you may be as polite as you please--but no friendship--nowhere--you must remain quite unembarrassed." Here followed some more smoke, and after it the question-- "What do you think of the young lady, Mademoiselle Marlowe?" "She sings charmingly, and for the rest, I believe she is agreeable; but my opportunities have been very little." "What do you think of our fellow Jacque--is he trustworthy?" "Perfectly, so far as I know." "You never saw him peep into letters, or that kind of thing?" "Certainly not." "There is a theory which must be investigated, and I should like to employ him. You know nothing against him, nor do I." "Suppose we go to our beds?" resumed the old gentleman, having finished his cigar. A door at either side opened from the dressing-room, by whose fire they had been sitting. "See which room is meant for me--Jacque will have placed my things there." The young man did as he was bid, and made his report. "Well, get you to bed, Guy, and remember--no friendships and no follies." And so the old man rose, and shook his companion's hand, not smiling, but with a solemn and thoughtful countenance, and they separated for the night. Next morning as the Rev. Dives Marlowe stood in his natty and unexceptionable clerical costume on the hall-door steps, looking with a pompous and, perhaps, a somewhat forbidding countenance upon the morning prospect before him, his brother joined him. "Early bird, Dives, pick the worm--eh? Healthy and wise already, and wealthy to be. Slept well, eh?" "Always well here," answered the parson. He was less of a parson and more like himself with Jekyl than with anyone else. His brother was so uncomfortably amused with his clerical airs, knew him so well, and so undisguisedly esteemed him of the earth earthy, that the cleric, although the abler as well as the better read man, always felt invariably a little sheepish before him, in his silk vest and single-breasted coat with the standing collar, and the demi-shovel, which under other eyes he felt to be imposing properties. "You look so like that exemplary young man in Watt's hymns, in the old-fashioned toggery, Dives--the fellow with the handsome round cheeks, you know, piously saluting the morning sun that's rising with a lot of spokes stuck out of it, don't you remember?" "I look like something that's ugly, I dare say," said the parson, who had not got up in a good temper. "There never was a Marlowe yet who hadn't ugly points about him. But a young man, though never so ugly, is rather a bold comparison--eh? seeing I'm but two years your junior, Jekyl." "Bitterly true--every word--my dear boy. But let us be pleasant. I've had a line to say that old Moulders is very ill, and really dying this time. Just read this melancholy little bulletin." With an air which seemed to say, "well, to please you," he took the note and read it. It was from his steward, to mention that the Rev. Abraham Moulders was extremely ill of his old complaint, and that there was something even worse the matter, and that Doctor Winters had said that morning he could not possibly get over this attack. "Well, Dives, there is a case of 'sick and weak' for you; you'll have prayers for him at Queen's Chorleigh, eh?" "Poor old man!" said Dives, solemnly, with his head thrown back, and his thick eyebrows elevated a little, and looking straight before him as he returned the note, "he's very ill, indeed, unless this reports much too unfavourably." "Too favourably, you mean," suggested the Baronet. "But you know, poor old man, it is only wonderful he has lived so long. The old people about there say he is eighty-seven. Upon my word, old Jenkins says he told him, two years ago, himself, he was eighty-five; and Doctor Winters, no chicken--just sixty--says his father was in the same college with him, at Cambridge, nearly sixty-seven years ago. You know, my dear Jekyl, when a man comes to that time of life, it's all idle--a mere pull against wind and tide, and everything. It is appointed unto all men once to die, you know, and the natural term is threescore years and ten. All idle--all in vain!" And delivering this, the Rev. Dives Marlowe shook his head with a supercilious melancholy, as if the Rev. Abraham Moulders' holding out in that way against the inevitable was a piece of melancholy bravado, against which, on the part of modest mortality, it was his sad duty to protest. Jekyl's cynicism was tickled, although there was care at his heart, and he chuckled. "And how do you know you have any interest in the old fellow's demise?" The Rector coughed a little, and flushed, and looked as careless as he could, while he answered-- "I said nothing of the kind; but you have always told me you meant the living for me. I've no reason, only your goodness, Jekyl." "No goodness at all," said Jekyl, kindly. "You shall have it, of course. I always meant it for you, Dives, and I wish it were better, and I'm very glad, for I'm fond of you, old fellow." Hereupon they both laughed a little, shaking hands very kindly. "Come to the stable, Dives," said the Baronet, taking his arm. "You must choose a horse. You don't hunt now?" "I have not been at a cover for _ten_ years," answered the reverend gentleman, speaking with a consciousness of the demi-shovel. "Well, come along," continued the Baronet. "I want to ask you--let's be serious" (everybody likes to be serious over his own business). "What do you think of these foreign personages?" "The elder, I should say, an able man," answered Dives; "I dare say could be agreeable. It is not easy to assign his exact rank though, nor his profession or business. You remarked he seems to know something in detail and technically of nearly every business one mentions." "Yes; and about the young man--that Mr. Guy Strangways, with his foreign accent and manner--did anything strike you about him?" "Yes, certainly, could not fail. The most powerful likeness, I think, I ever saw in my life." They both stopped, and exchanged a steady and anxious look, as if each expected the other to say more; and after a while the Rev. Dives Marlowe added, with an awful sort of nod-- "Guy Deverell." The Baronet nodded in reply. "Well, in fact, he appeared to me something _more_ than like--the same--identical." "And old Lady Alice saw him in Wardlock Church, and was made quite ill," said the Baronet gloomily. "But you know he's gone these thirty years; and there is no necromancy now-a-days; only I wish you would take any opportunity, and try and make out all about him, and what they want. I brought them here to pump them, by Jove; but that old fellow seems deuced reserved and wary. Only, like a good fellow, if you can find or make an opportunity, you must get the young fellow on the subject--for I don't care to tell you, Dives, I have been devilish uneasy about it. There are things that make me confoundedly uncomfortable; and I have a sort of foreboding it would have been better for me to have blown up this house than to have come here; but ten to one--a hundred to one--there's nothing, and I'm only a fool." As they thus talked they entered the gate of the stable-yard. CHAPTER XVI. Containing a Variety of Things. "Guy Deverell left no issue," said Dives. "No; none in the world; neither chick nor child. I need not care a brass farthing about any that can't inherit, if there were any; but there isn't one; there's no real danger, you see. In fact, there _can't_ be _any_--eh? _I_ don't see it. Do _you_? You were a sharp fellow always, Dives. _Can_ you see anything threatening in it?" "_It! What?_" said the Rev. Dives Marlowe. "I see _nothing--nothing whatever--absolutely_ nothing. Surely you can't fancy that a mere resemblance, however strong, where there can't possibly be identity, and the fact that the young man's name is Guy, will make a case for alarm!" "Guy _Strangways_, you know," said Sir Jekyl. "Well, what of Strangways? I don't see." "Why, Strangways, you remember, or _don't_ remember, was the name of the fellow that was always with--with--that cross-grained muff." "With Guy Deverell, you mean?" "Ay, with him that night, and constantly, and abroad I think at those German gaming-places where he played so much." "I forgot the name. I remember hearing there _was_ a person in your company that unlucky night; but you never heard more of him?" "No, of course; for he owed me a precious lot of money;" and from habit he chuckled, but with something of a frown. "He could have given me a lot of trouble, but so could I him. My lawyers said he could not seriously affect me, but he might have annoyed me; and I did not care about the money, so I did not follow him; and, as the lawyers say, we turned our backs on one another." "Strangways," murmured the Rector, musingly. "Do you remember him now?" asked Sir Jekyl. "No; that is, I'm not sure. I was in orders then though, and could hardly have met him. I am sure I should recollect him if I had. What was he like?" "A nasty-looking Scotch dog, with freckles--starved and tall--a hungry hound--large hands and feet--as ugly a looking cur as you ever beheld." "But Deverell, poor fellow, was a bit of a dandy--wasn't he? How did he come to choose such a companion?" "Well, maybe he was not quite as bad as he describes, and his family was good, I believe; but there must have been something more, he hung about him so. Yes, he _was_ a most objectionable-looking fellow--so awkward, and not particularly well dressed; but a canny rascal, and knew what he was about. I could not make out what use Deverell made of him, nor exactly what advantage he made of Deverell." "I can't for the life of me, see, Jekyl, anything in it except a resemblance, and that is positively nothing, and a Christian name, that is all, and Guy is no such uncommon one. As for Strangways, he does not enter into it at all--a mere accidental association. Where is that Strangways--is he living?" "I don't know now; ten years ago he was, and Pelter and Crowe thought he was going to do me some mischief, a prosecution or something, they thought, to extort money; but I knew they were wrong. I had a reason--at least it was unlikely, because I rather think he had repaid me that money about then. A year or so before a large sum of money was lodged to my account by Herbert Strangways, that was his name, at the International Bank in Lombard Street; in fact it was more than I thought he owed me--interest, I suppose, and that sort of thing. I put Pelter and Crowe in his track, but they could make out nothing. The bank people could not help us. Unluckily I was away at the time and the lodgment was two months old when I heard of it. There were several raw Scotch-looking rascals, they said, making lodgments about then, and they could not tell exactly what sort of fellow made this. I wanted to make out about him. What do you think of it?" "I don't see anything suspicious in it. He owed you the money and chose to pay." "He was protected by the Statute of Limitations, my lawyer said, and I could not have recovered it. Doesn't it look odd?" "Those Scotch fellows." "He's not Scotch, though." "Well, whatever he is, if he has good blood he's proud, perhaps, and would rather pay what he owes than not." "Well, of course, a fellow's glad of the money; but I did not like it; it looked as if he wanted to get rid of the only pull I had on him, and was going to take steps to annoy me, you see." "That's ten years ago?" "Yes." "Well, considering how short life is, I think he'd have moved before now if he had ever thought of it. It is a quarter of a _century_ since poor Deverell's time. It's a good while, you know, and the longer you wait in matters of that kind the less your chance;" and with a brisk decision the Rector added, "I'll stake, I think, all I'm worth, these people have no more connection with poor Deverell than Napoleon Bonaparte, and that Strangways has no more notion of moving any matter connected with that unhappy business than he has of leading an Irish rebellion." "I'm glad you take that view--I know it's the sound one. I knew you _would_. I think it's just a little flicker of gout. If I had taken Vichy on my way back I'd never have thought of it. I've no one to talk to. It's a comfort to see you, Dives. I wish you'd come oftener." And he placed his hand very kindly on his brother's shoulder. "So I will," said Dives, not without kindness in his eyes, though his mouth was forbidding still. "You must not let chimeras take hold of you. I'm very glad I was here." "Did you remark that fat, mountainous French fellow, in that cursed suit of black, was very inquisitive about the green chamber?" asked Sir Jekyl, relapsing a little. "No, I did not hear him mention it; what was it?" asked Dives. "Well, not a great deal; only he seemed to want to know all about that particular room and its history, just as if there was already something in his head about it." "Well, I told you, Jekyl," said Dives, in a subdued tone and looking away a little, "you ought to do something decisive about that room, all things considered. If it were mine, I can tell you, I should pull it down--not, of course, in such a way as to make people talk and ask questions, but as a sort of improvement. I'd make a conservatory, or something; you _want_ a conservatory, and the building is positively injured by it. It is not the same architecture. You might put something there twice as good. At all events I'd get rid of it." "So I will--I _intend_--I think you're right--I really do. But it was brought about by little Beatrix talking about haunted rooms, you know, and that sort of nonsense," said Sir Jekyl. "Oh! then she mentioned it? He only asked questions about what she told him. Surely you're not going to vex yourself about that?" Sir Jekyl looked at him and laughed, but not quite comfortably. "Well, I told you, you know, I do believe it's great; and whatever it is, I know, Dives, you've done me a great deal of good. Come, now, I've a horse I think you'll like, and you shall have him; try him to-day, and I'll send him home for you if he suits you." While the groom was putting up the horse, Sir Jekyl, who was quick and accurate of eye, recognised the dark-faced, intelligent little valet, whom he had seen for a moment, candle in hand, at the dressing-room door, last night, to receive his guests. With a deferential smile, and shrug, and bow, all at once, this little gentleman lifted his cap with one hand, removing his German pipe with the other. He had been a courier--clever, active, gay--a man who might be trusted with money, papers, diamonds. Beside his native French, he spoke English very well, and a little German. He could keep accounts, and write a neat little foreign hand with florid capitals. He could mend his own clothes, and even his shoes. He could play the flute a little, and very much the fiddle. He was curious, and liked to know what was taking place. He liked a joke and the dance, and was prone to the tender passion, and liked, in an honest way, a little bit of intrigue, or even espionage. Such a man he was as I could fancy in a light company of that marvellous army of Italy, of which Napoleon I. always spoke with respect and delight. In the stable-yard, as I have said, the Baronet found this dark sprite smoking a German pipe; and salutations having been exchanged, he bid him try instead two of his famous cigars, which he presented, and then he questioned him on tobacco, and on his family, the theatres, the railways, the hotels; and finally Sir Jekyl said, "I wish you could recollect a man like yourself--I want one confoundedly. I shall be going abroad in August next year, and I'd give him five thousand francs a year, or more even, with pleasure, and keep him probably as long as he liked to stay with me. Try if you can remember such a fellow. Turn it over in your mind--do you see? and I don't care how soon he comes into my service." The man lifted his cap again, and bowed even lower, as he undertook to "turn it over in his mind;" and though he smiled a great deal, it was plain his thoughts were already seriously employed in turning the subject over, as requested by the Baronet. Next morning M. Varbarriere took a quiet opportunity, in the hall, of handing to his host two letters of introduction, as they are called--one from the Baronet's old friend, Charteris, attached to the embassy at Paris--a shrewd fellow, a man of the world, amphibious, both French and English, and equally at home on either soil--speaking unmistakably in high terms of M. Varbarriere as of a gentleman very much respected in very high quarters. The other was equally handsome. But Charteris was exactly the man whose letter in such a case was to be relied upon. The Baronet glanced over these, and said he was very glad to hear from his friend Charteris--the date was not a week since--but laughed at the formality, regretting that he had not a note from Charteris to present in return, and then gracefully quoted an old French distich, the sentiment of which is that "chivalry proclaims itself, and the gentleman is no more to be mistaken than the rose," and proceeded to ask his guest, "How is Charteris--he had hurt his wrist when I saw him last--and is there any truth in the report about his possible alliance with that rich widow?" and so forth. When Sir Jekyl got into his sanctum I am afraid he read both letters with a very microscopic scrutiny, and he resolved inwardly to write a very sifting note to Charteris, and put it upon him, as an act of friendship, to make out every detail of the past life and adventures of M. Varbarriere, and particularly whether he had any young kinsman, nephew or otherwise, answering a certain description, all the items of which he had by rote. But writing of letters is to some people a very decided bore. The Baronet detested it, and his anxieties upon these points being intermittent, the interrogatories were not so soon despatched to his friend Charteris. Old General Lennox was away for London this morning; and his host took a seat beside him in the brougham that was to convey him to the station, and was dropped on the way at the keeper's lodge, when he bid a kind and courteous adieu to his guest, whom he charged to return safe and soon, and kissed his hand, and waved it after the florid smiling countenance and bushy white eyebrows that were protruded from the carriage-window as it glided away. "You can manage it all in a day or two, can't you?" said the Baronet, cordially, as he held the General's wrinkled hand, with its knobby and pink joints, in his genial grasp. "We positively won't give you more than three days' leave. Capital shooting when you come back. I'm going to talk it over with the keeper here--that is, if you come back before we've shot them all." "Oh! yes, hang it, you must leave a bird or two for me," laughed the General, and he bawled the conclusion of the joke as the vehicle drove away; but Sir Jekyl lost it. Sir Jekyl was all the happier for his morning's talk with his brother. An anxiety, if only avowed and discussed, is so immensely lightened; but Dives had scouted the whole thing so peremptorily that the Baronet was positively grateful. Dives was a wise and clear-headed fellow. It was delightful his taking so decided a view. And was it not on reflection manifestly, even to him, the sound view? CHAPTER XVII. The Magician Draws a Diagram. The Baronet approached Marlowe Manor on the side at which the stables and out-offices lie, leaving which to his left, he took his way by the path through the wood which leads to the terrace-walk that runs parallel to the side of the old house on which the green chamber lies. On this side the lofty timber approaches the walks closely, and the green enclosure is but a darkened strip and very solitary. Here, when Sir Jekyl emerged, he saw M. Varbarriere standing on the grass, and gazing upward in absorbed contemplation of the building, which on the previous evening seemed to have excited his curiosity so unaccountably. He did not hear the Baronet's approaching step on the grass. Sir Jekyl felt both alarmed and angry; for although it was but natural that his guest should have visited the spot and examined the building, it yet seemed to him, for the moment, like the act of a spy. "Disappointed, I'm afraid," said he. "I told you that addition was the least worth looking at of all the parts of this otherwise ancient house." He spoke with a sort of sharpness that seemed quite uncalled for; but it was unnoticed. M. Varbarriere bowed low and graciously. "I am much interested--every front of this curious and handsome house interests me. This indeed, as you say, is a good deal spoiled by that Italian incongruity--still it is charming--the contrast is as beautiful frequently as the harmony--and I am perplexed." "Some of my friends tell me it spoils the house so much I ought to pull it down, and I have a great mind to do so. Have you seen the lake? I should be happy to show it to you if you will permit me." The Baronet, as he spoke, was, from time to time, slyly searching the solemn and profound face of the stranger; but could find there no clue to the spirit of his investigation. There was no shrinking--no embarrassment--no consciousness. He might as well have looked on the awful surface of the sea, in the expectation of discovering there the secrets of its depths. M. Varbarriere, with a profusion of gratitude, regretted that he could not just then visit the lake, as he had several letters to write; and so he and his host parted smiling at the hall-door; and the Baronet, as he pursued his way, felt some stirrings of that mental dyspepsia which had troubled him of late. "The old fellow had not been in the house two hours," such was his train of thought, "when he was on the subject of that green chamber, in the parlour and in the drawing-room--again and again recurring to it; and here he was just now, alone, absorbed, and gazing up at its windows, as if he could think of nothing else!" Sir Jekyl felt provoked, and almost as if he would like a crisis; and half regretted that he had not asked him--"Pray can I give you any information; is there anything you particularly want to know about that room? question me as you please, you shall see the room--you shall sleep in it if you like, so soon as it is vacant. Pray declare yourself, and say what you want." But second thoughts are said to be best, if not always wisest; and this brief rehearing of the case against his repose ended in a "dismiss," as before. It was so natural, and indeed inevitable, that he should himself inspect the original of those views which he had examined the night before with interest, considering that, being a man who cared not for the gun or the fishing-rod, and plainly without sympathies with either georgics or bucolics, he had not many other ways of amusing himself in these country quarters. M. Varbarriere, in the meantime, had entered his chamber. I suppose he was amused, for so soon as he closed the door he smiled with a meditative sneer. It was not a fiendish one, not even moderately wicked; but a sneer is in the countenance what irony is in the voice, and never pleasant. If the Baronet had seen the expression of M. Varbarriere's countenance as he sat down in his easy-chair, he would probably have been much disquieted--perhaps not without reason. M. Varbarriere was known in his own neighbourhood as a dark and inflexible man, but with these reservations kind; just in his dealings, bold in enterprise, and charitable, but not on impulse, with a due economy of resource, and a careful measurement of desert; on the whole, a man to be respected and a little feared, but a useful citizen. Instead of writing letters as, of course, he had intended, M. Varbarriere amused himself by making a careful little sketch on a leaf of his pocket-book. It seemed hardly worth all the pains he bestowed upon it; for, after all, it was but a parallelogram with a projecting segment of a circle at one end, and a smaller one at the side, and he noted his diagram with figures, and pondered over it with a thoughtful countenance, and made, after a while, a little cross at one end of it, and then fell a-whistling thoughtfully, and nodded once or twice, as a thought struck him; and then he marked another cross at one of its sides, and reflected in like manner over this, and as he thought, fiddling with his pencil at the foot of the page, he scribbled the word "hypothesis." Then he put up his pocket-book, and stood listlessly with his hands in the pockets of his vast black trowsers, looking from the window, and whistled a little more, the air hurrying sometimes, and sometimes dragging a good deal, so as to come at times to an actual standstill. On turning the corner of the mansion Sir Jekyl found himself on a sudden in the midst of the ladies of his party, just descending from the carriages which had driven them round the lake. He was of that gay and gallant temperament, as the reader is aware, which is fired with an instantaneous inspiration at sight of this sort of plumage and flutter. "What a fortunate fellow am I!" exclaimed Sir Jekyl, forgetting in a moment everything but the sunshine, the gay voices, and the pretty sight before him. "I had laid myself out for a solitary walk, and lo! I'm in the midst of a paradise of graces, nymphs, and what not!" "We have had such a charming drive round the lake," said gay little Mrs. Maberly. "The lake never looked so well before, I'm sure. So stocked, at least, with fresh-water sirens and mermaids. Never did mirror reflect so much beauty. An instinct, you see, drew me this way. I assure you I was on my way to the lake; one of those enamoured sprites who sing us tidings in such tiny voices, we can't distinguish them from our own fancies, warbled a word in my ear, only a little too late, I suppose." The Baronet was reciting his admiring nonsense to pretty Mrs. Maberly, but his eye from time to time wandered to Lady Jane, and rested for a moment on that haughty beauty, who, with downcast languid eyes, one would have thought neither heard nor saw him. This gallant Baronet was so well understood that every lady expected to hear that kind of tender flattery whenever he addressed himself to the fair sex. It was quite inevitable, and simply organic and constitutional as blackbird's whistle and kitten's play, and, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, I am sure, meant absolutely nothing. "But those sprites always come with a particular message; don't they?" said old Miss Blunket, smiling archly from the corners of her fierce eyes. "Don't you think so, Mr. Linnett?" "You are getting quite above me," answered that sprightly gentleman, who was growing just a little tired of Miss Blunket's attentions. "I suppose it's spiritualism. I know nothing about it. What do you say, Lady Jane?" "I think it very heathen," said Lady Jane, tired, I suppose, of the subject. "I like to be heathen, now and then," said Sir Jekyl, in a lower key; he was by this time beside Lady Jane. "I'd have been a most pious Pagan. As it is, I can't help worshipping in the Pantheon, and trying sometimes even to make a proselyte." "Oh! you wicked creature!" cried little Mrs. Maberly. "I assure you, Lady Jane, his conversation is quite frightful." Lady Jane glanced a sweet, rather languid, sidelong smile at the little lady. "You'll not get Lady Jane to believe all that mischief of me, Mrs. Maberly. I appeal for my character to the General." "But he's hundreds of miles away, and can't hear you," laughed little Mrs. Maberly, who really meant nothing satirical. "I forgot; but he'll be back to-morrow or next day," replied Sir Jekyl, with rather a dry chuckle, "and in the meantime I must do without one, I suppose. Here we are, Mr. Strangways, all talking nonsense, the pleasantest occupation on earth. Do come and help us." This was addressed to Guy Strangways, who with his brother angler, Captain Doocey, in the picturesque negligence and black wide-awakes of fishermen, with baskets and rods, approached. "Only too glad to be permitted to contribute," said the young man, smiling, and raising his hat. "And pray permit me, also," said courtly old Doocey. "I could talk it, I assure you, before he was born. I've graduated in the best schools, and was a doctor of nonsense before _he_ could speak even a word of sense." "Not a bad specimen to begin with. Leave your rods and baskets there; some one will bring them in. Now we are so large a party, you must come and look at my grapes. I am told my black Hamburgs are the finest in the world." So, chatting and laughing, and some in other moods, toward those splendid graperies they moved, from which, as Sir Jekyl used to calculate, he had the privilege of eating black Hamburg and other grapes at about the rate of one shilling each. "A grapery--how delightful!" cried little Mrs. Maberly. "I quite agree with you," exclaimed Miss Blunket, who effervesced with a girlish enthusiasm upon even the most difficult subjects. "It is not the grapes, though they are so pretty, and a--bacchanalian--no, I don't mean that--why do you laugh at me so?--but the atmosphere. Don't you love it? it is so like Lisbon--at least what I fancy it, for I never was there; but at home, I bring my book there, and enjoy it so. I call it mock Portugal." "It has helped to dry her," whispered Linnett so loud in Doocey's ear as to make that courteous old dandy very uneasy. It was odd that Sir Jekyl showed no sort of discomfort at sight of Guy Strangways on his sudden appearance; a thrill he felt indeed whenever he unexpectedly beheld that handsome and rather singular-looking young man--a most unpleasant sensation--but although he moved about him like a resurrection of the past, and an omen of his fate, he yet grew in a sort of way accustomed to this haunting enigma, and could laugh and talk apparently quite carelessly in his presence. I have been told of men, the victims of a spectral illusion, who could move about a saloon, and smile, and talk, and listen, with their awful tormentor gliding always about them and spying out all their ways. Just about this hour the clumsy old carriage of Lady Alice Redcliffe stood at her hall-door steps, in the small square courtyard of Wardlock Manor, and the florid iron gates stood wide open, resting on their piers. The coachman's purple visage looked loweringly round; the footman, with his staff of office in hand, leaning on the door-post, gazed with a peevish listlessness through the open gateway across the road; the near horse had begun to hang his head, and his off-companion had pawed a considerable hole in Lady Alice's nattily-kept gravel enclosure. From these signs one might have reasonably conjectured that these honest retainers, brute and human, had been kept waiting for their mistress somewhat longer than usual. CHAPTER XVIII. Another Guest Prepares to Come. Lady Alice was at that moment in her bonnet and ample black velvet cloak and ermines, and the rest of her travelling costume, seated in her stately parlour, which, like most parlours of tolerably old mansions in that part of the country, is wainscoted in very black oak. In her own way Lady Alice evinced at least as much impatience as her dependants out of doors; she tapped with her foot monotonously upon her carpet; she opened and shut her black shining leather bag, and plucked at and rearranged its contents; she tattooed with her pale prolix fingers on the table; sometimes she sniffed a little; sometimes she muttered. As often as she fancied a sound, she raised her chin imperiously, and with a supercilious fixity, stared at the door until expectation had again expired in disappointment, when she would pluck out her watch, and glancing disdainfully upon it, exclaim-- "Upon my life!" or, "Very pretty behaviour!" At last, however, the sound of a vehicle--a "fly" it was--unmistakably made itself heard at the hall-door, and her ladyship, with a preparatory shake of her head, as a pugnacious animal shakes its ears, and a "hem," and a severe and pallid countenance, sat up, very high and stiffly, in her chair. The door opened, and the splendid footman inquired whether her ladyship would please to see Mrs. Gwynn. "Show her in," said Lady Alice with a high look and an awful quietude. And our old friend, Donica, just as thin, pallid, and, in her own way, self-possessed, entered the room. "Well, Donica Gwynn, you've come at _last_! you have kept my horses standing at the door--a thing I never do myself--for three-quarters of an hour and four minutes!" Donica Gwynn was sorry; but she could not help it. She explained how the delay had occurred, and, though respectful, her explanation was curt and dry in proportion to the sharpness and dryness of her reception. "Sit down, Donica," said the lady, relenting loftily. "How do you do?" "Pretty well, I thank your ladyship; and I hope I see _you_ well, my lady." "As well as I can ever be, Donica, and that is but poorly. I'm going, you know, to Marlowe." "I'm rayther glad on it, my lady." "And I wish to know _why_?" said Lady Alice. "I wrote the why and the wherefore, my lady, in my letter," answered the ex-house-keeper, looking askance on the table, and closing her thin lips tightly when she had spoken. "Your letter, my good Donica, it is next to impossible to read, and quite impossible to understand. What I want to know distinctly is, why you have urged me so vehemently to go to Marlowe." "Well, my lady, I thought I said pretty plain it was about my Lady Jane, the pretty creature you had on visits here, and liked so well, poor thing; an' it seemed to me she's like to be in danger where she is. I can't explain how exactly; but General Lennox is gone up to London, and I think, my lady, you ought to get her out of that unlucky room, where he has put her; and, at all events, to keep as near to her as you can yourself, at _all_ times." "I've listened to you, Donica, and I can't comprehend you. I see you are hinting at something; but unless you are explicit, I don't see that I can be of any earthly use." "You can, my lady--that is, you _may_, if you only do as I say--I _can't_ explain it more, nor I _won't_," said Donica, peremptorily, perhaps bitterly. "There can be no good reason, Donica, for reserve upon a point of so much moment as you describe this to be. Wherever reserve exists there is mystery, and wherever mystery--_guilt_." So said Lady Alice, who was gifted with a spirit of inquiry which was impatient of disappointment. "Guilt, indeed!" repeated Gwynn, in an under-key, with a toss of her head and a very white face; "there's secrets enough in the world, and no guilt along of 'em." "What room is it you speak of--the green chamber, is not it?" "Yes, sure, my lady." "I think you are all crazed about ghosts and devils over there," exclaimed Lady Alice. "Not much of ghosts, but devils, maybe," muttered Gwynn, oddly, looking sidelong over the floor. "It is that room, you say," repeated Lady Alice. "Yes, my lady, the green chamber." "Well, what about it--come, woman, did not you sleep for years in that room?" "Ay, my lady, a good while." "And what did you see there?" "A deal." "_What_, I say?" "Well, supposin' I was to say devils," replied Donica. Lady Alice sneered. "What did poor Lady Marlowe see there?" demanded Donica, looking with her odd eyes askance at Lady Alice's carpet, and backing her question with a nod. "Well, you know I never heard exactly; but my darling creature was, as you remember, dying of a consumption at the time, and miserably nervous, and fancied things, no doubt, as people do." "Well, she did; I knew it," said Donica. "You may have conjectured--every one can do that; but I rather think my poor dear Amy would have told _me_, had she cared to divulge it to any living being. I am persuaded she herself suspected it was an illusion--fancy; but I know she had a horror of the room, and I am sure my poor girl's dying request ought to have been respected." "So it ought, my lady," said Donica, turning up her eyes, and raising her lean hands together, while she slowly shook her head. "So I said to him, and in like manner his own father's dying _orders_, for such they was, my lady; and they may say what they will of Sir Harry, poor gentleman! But he was a kind man, and good to many that had not a good word for him after, though there may a' been many a little thing that was foolish or the like; but there is mercy above for all, and the bishop that is now, then he was the master of the great school where our young gentlemen used to go to, was with him." "When he was dying?" said Lady Alice. "Ay, my lady, a beautiful summer it was, and the doctor, nor I, thought it would be nothing to speak of; but he was anxious in his mind from the first, and he wrote for Doctor Wyndale--it was the holidays then--asking him to come to him; and he did, but Sir Harry had took an unexpected turn for the worse, and not much did he ever say, the Lord a' mercy on us, after that good gentleman, he's the bishop now, came to Marlowe, and he prayed by his bed, and closed his eyes; and I, in and out, and wanted there every minute, could not but hear some of what he said, which it was not much." "He said something about that green chamber, as you call it, I always understood?" said Lady Alice, interrogatively. "Yes, my lady, he wished it shut up, or taken down, or summat that way; but 'man proposes and God disposes,' and there's small affection and less gratitude to be met with now-a-days." "I think, Donica Gwynn, and I always thought, that you knew a good deal more than you chose to tell me. Some people are reserved and secret, and I suppose it is your way; but I don't think it could harm you to treat me more as your friend." Donica rose, and courtesied as she said-- "You have always treated me friendly, I'm sure, my lady, and I hope I am thankful; and this I know, I'll be a faithful servant to your ladyship so long as I continue in your ladyship's service." "I know that very well; but I wish you were franker with me, that's all--here are the keys." So Donica, with very little ceremony, assumed the keys of office. "And pray what _do_ you mean exactly?" said Lady Alice, rising and drawing on her glove, and not looking quite straight at the housekeeper as she spoke; "do you mean to say that Lady Jane is giddy or imprudent? Come, be distinct." "I can't say what she is, my lady, but she may be brought into folly some way. I only know this much, please my lady, it will be good for her you should be nigh, and your eye and thoughts about her, at least till the General returns." "Well, Gwynn, I see you don't choose to trust me." "I have, my lady, spoke that free to you as I would not to any other, I think, alive." "No, Gwynn, you don't trust me; you have your reasons, I suppose; but I think you are a shrewd woman--shrewd and mean well. I don't suppose that you could talk as you do without a reason; and though I can't see any myself, not believing in apparitions or--or--" She nearly lost the thread of her discourse at this point, for as she spoke the word apparition, the remembrance of the young gentleman whom she had seen in Wardlock Church rose in her memory--handsome, pale, with sealed lips, and great eyes--unreadable as night--the resurrection of another image. The old yearning and horror overpowered the train of her thoughts, and she floundered into silence, and coughed into her handkerchief, to hide her momentary confusion. "What was I going to say?" she said, briskly, meaning to refer her break-down to that little fit of coughing, and throwing on Gwynn the onus of setting her speech in motion again. "Oh! yes. I _don't_ believe in those things not a bit. But Jennie, poor thing, though she has not treated me quite as she might, is a young wife, and very pretty; and the house is full of wicked young men from London; and her old fool of a husband chooses to go about his business and leave her to her devices--_that's_ what you mean, Gwynn, and that's what I _understand_." "I have said all I can, my lady; you can help her, and be near her night and day," said Donica. "Sir Jekyl in his invitation bid me choose my own room--so I shall. I'll choose that oddly-shaped little room that opens into hers--if I remember rightly, the room that my poor dear Amy occupied in her last illness." "And, my lady, do you take the key of the door, and keep it in your bag, please." "Of the door of communication between the two rooms?" "Yes, my lady." "_Why_ should I take it; you would not have me lock her up?" "Well, no, to be sure, my lady." "Then _why_?" "Because there is no bolt to her door, inside or out. You will see what I mean, my lady, when you are there." "Because she can't secure her door without it, I'm to take possession of her key!" said Lady Alice, with a dignified sneer. "Well, my lady, it may seem queer, but you'll see what I mean." Lady Alice tossed her stately head. "Any commands in particular, please, my lady, before you leave?" inquired Donica, with one of her dry little courtesies. "No; and I must go. Just hand this pillow and bag to the man; and I suppose you wish your respects to Miss Beatrix?" To all which, in her own way, Donica Gwynn assented; and the old lady, assisted by her footman, got into the carriage, and nodded a pale and silent farewell to her housekeeper; and away drove the old carriage at a brisk pace toward Marlowe Manor. CHAPTER XIX. Lady Alice takes Possession. What to the young would seem an age; what, even in the arithmetic of the old, counts for something, about seventeen years had glided into the eternal past since last Lady Alice had beheld the antique front and noble timber of Marlowe Manor; and memory was busy with her heart, and sweet and bitter fancies revisiting her old brain, as her saddened eyes gazed on that fair picture of the past. Old faces gone, old times changed, and she, too, but the shadow of her former self, soon, like those whom she remembered there, to vanish quite, and be missed by no one. "Where is Miss Beatrix?" inquired the old lady, as she set her long slim foot upon the oak flooring of the hall. "I'll rest a moment here." And she sat down upon a carved bench, and looked with sad and dreaming eyes through the open door upon the autumnal landscape flushed with the setting sun, the season and the hour harmonising regretfully with her thoughts. Her maid came at the summons of the footman. "Tell her that granny has come," said the old woman gently. "_You_ are quite well, Jones?" Jones made her smirk and courtesy, and was quite well; and so tripped up the great stair to apprise her young mistress. "Tell the new housekeeper, please, that Lady Alice Redcliffe wishes very much to see her for a moment in the hexagon dressing-room at the end of the hatchment-gallery," said the old lady, names and localities coming back to her memory quite naturally in the familiar old hall. And as she spoke, being an active-minded old lady, she rose, and before her first message had reached Beatrix, was ascending the well-known stairs, with its broad shining steps of oak, and her hand on its ponderous banister, feeling strangely, all in a moment, how much more she now needed that support, and that the sum of the seventeen years was something to her as to others. On the lobby, just outside this dressing-room door, which stood open, letting the dusky sunset radiance, so pleasant and so sad, fall upon the floor and touch the edges of the distant banisters, she was met by smiling Beatrix. "Darling!" cried the girl, softly, as she threw her young arms round the neck of the stately and thin old lady. "Darling, darling, I'm so glad!" She had been living among strangers, and the sight and touch of her true old friend was reassuring. Granny's thin hands held her fondly. It was pretty to see this embrace, in the glow of the evening sun, and the rich brown tresses of the girl close to the ashen locks of old Lady Alice, who, with unwonted tears in her eyes, was smiling on her very tenderly. She was softened that evening. Perhaps it was her real nature, disclosed for a few genial moments, generally hidden under films of reserve or pride--the veil of the flesh. "I think she does like her old granny," said Lady Alice, with a gentle little laugh; one thin hand on her shoulder, the other smoothing back her thick girlish tresses. "I do love you, granny; you were always so good to me, and you are so--so _fond_ of me. Now, you are tired, darling; you must take a little wine--here is Mrs. Sinnott coming--Mrs. Sinnott." "No, dear, no wine; I'm very well. I wish to see Mrs. Sinnott, though. She's your new housekeeper, is not she?" "Yes; and I'm so glad poor, good old Donnie Gwynn is with you. You know she would not stay; but our new housekeeper is, I'm told, a very good creature too. Grandmamma wants to speak to you, Mrs. Sinnott." Lady Alice by this time had entered the dressing-room, three sides of which, projecting like a truncated bastion, formed a great window, which made it, for its size, the best lighted in the house. In the wall at the right, close to this entrance, is the door which admits to the green chamber; in the opposite wall, but nearer the window, a door leading across the end of the hatchment-gallery, with its large high window, by a little passage, screened off by a low oak partition, and admitting to a bed-room on the opposite side of the gallery. In the middle of the Window dressing-room stood Lady Alice, and looked round regretfully, and said to herself, with a little shake of the head-- "Yes, yes, poor thing!" She was thinking of poor Lady Marlowe, whom, with her usual perversity, although a step-daughter, she had loved very tenderly, and who in her last illness had tenanted these rooms, in which, seventeen years ago, this old lady had sat beside her and soothed her sickness, and by her tenderness, no doubt, softened those untold troubles which gathered about her bed as death drew near. "How do you do, Mrs. Sinnott?" said stately Lady Alice, recovering her dry and lofty manner. "Lady Alice Redcliffe, my grandmamma," said Beatrix, in an undertoned introduction, in the housekeeper's ear. Mrs. Sinnott made a fussy little courtesy. "Your ladyship's apartments, which is at the other end of the gallery, please, is quite ready, my lady." "I don't mean to have those rooms, though--that's the reason I sent for you--please read this note, it is from Sir Jekyl Marlowe. By-the-bye, is your master at home?" "No, he was out." "Well, be so good as to read this." And Lady Alice placed Beatrix's note of invitation in Mrs. Sinnott's hand, and pointed to a passage in the autograph of Sir Jekyl, which spoke thus:-- "P.S.--Do come, dearest little mamma, and you shall command everything. Choose your own apartments and hours, and, in short, rule us all. With all my worldly goods I thee endow, and place Mrs. Sinnott at your orders." "Well, Mrs. Sinnott, I choose _these_ apartments, if you please," said Lady Alice, sitting down stiffly, and thereby taking possession. "Very well, my lady," said Mrs. Sinnott, dropping another courtesy; but her sharp red nose and little black eyes looked sceptical and uneasy; "and I suppose, Miss," here she paused, looking at Beatrix. "You are to do whatever Lady Alice directs," said the young lady. "This here room, you know, Miss, is the dressing-room properly of the green chamber." "Lady Jane does not use it, though?" replied the new visitor. "But the General, when he comes back," insinuated Mrs. Sinnott. "Of course, he shall have it. I'll remove then; but in the meantime, liking these rooms, from old remembrances, best of any, I will occupy them, Beatrix; _this_ as a dressing-room, and the apartment _there_ as bed-room. I hope I don't give you a great deal of trouble," added Lady Alice, addressing the housekeeper, with an air that plainly said that she did not care a pin whether she did or not. So this point was settled, and Lady Alice sent for her maid and her boxes; and rising, she approached the door of the green chamber, and pointing to it, said to Beatrix-- "And so Lady Jane has this room. Do you like her, Beatrix?" "I can't say I know her, grandmamma." "No, I dare say not. It is a large room--too large for my notion of a cheerful bed-room." The old lady drew near, and knocked. "She's not there?" "No, she's in the terrace-garden." Lady Alice pushed the door open, and looked in. "A very long room. That room is longer than my drawing-room at Wardlock, and that is five and thirty feet long. Dismal, I say--though so much light, and that portrait--Sir Harry smirking there. What a look of duplicity in that face! He was an old man when I can remember him; an old beau; a wicked old man, rouged and whitened; he used to paint under his eyelashes, and had, they said, nine or ten sets of false teeth, and always wore a black curled wig that made his contracted countenance more narrow. There were such lines of cunning and meanness about his eyes, actually crossing one another. Jekyl hated him, I think. I don't think anybody but a fool could have really liked him; he was so curiously selfish, and so contemptible; he was attempting the life of a wicked young man at seventy!" Lady Alice had been speaking as it were in soliloquy, staring drearily on the clever portrait in gold lace and ruffles, stricken by the spell of that painted canvas into a dream. "Your grandpapa, my dear, was not a good man; and I believe he injured my poor son irreparably, and your _father_. Well--these things, though never forgotten, are best not spoken of when people happen to be connected. For the sake of others we bear our pain in silence; but the heart knoweth its own bitterness." And so saying, the old lady drew back from the threshold of Lady Jane's apartment, and closed the door with a stern countenance. CHAPTER XX. An Altercation. Almost at the same moment Sir Jekyl entered the hexagon, or, as it was more pleasantly called, the Window dressing-room, from the lobby. He was quite radiant, and, in that warm evening light, struck Lady Alice as looking quite marvellously youthful. "Well, Jekyl Marlowe, you see you have brought me here at last," said the old lady, extending her hand stiffly, like a wooden marionette, her thin elbow making a right angle. "So I have; and I shall always think the better of my eloquence for having prevailed. You're a thousand times welcome, and not tired, I hope; the journey is not much after all." "Thanks; no, the distance is not much, the fatigue nothing," said Lady Alice, drawing her fingers horizontally back from his hospitable pressure. "But it is not always distance that separates people, or fatigue that depresses one." "No, of course; fifty things; rheumatism, temper, hatred, affliction: and I am so delighted to see you! Trixie, dear, would not grandmamma like to see her room? Send for--" "Thank you, I mean to stay here," said Lady Alice. "_Here!_" echoed Sir Jekyl, with a rather bewildered smile. "I avail myself of the privilege you give me; your postscript to Beatrix's note, you know. You tell me there to choose what rooms I like best," said the old lady, drily, at the same time drawing her bag toward her, that she might be ready to put the documents in evidence, in case he should dispute it. "Oh! did I?" said the Baronet, with the same faint smile. Lady Alice nodded, and then threw back her head, challenging contradiction by a supercilious stare, her hand firmly upon the bag as before. "But this room, you know; it's anything but a comfortable one--don't you think?" said Sir Jekyl. "I like it," said the inflexible old lady, sitting down. "And I'm afraid there's a little difficulty," he continued, not minding. "For this is General Lennox's dressing-room. Don't you think it might be awkward?" and he chuckled agreeably. "General Lennox is absent in London, on business," said Lady Alice, grim as an old Diana; "and Jane does not use it, and there _can_ be no _intelligible_ objection to my having it in his absence." There was a little smile, that yet was not a smile, and a slight play about Sir Jekyl's nostrils, as he listened to this speech. They came when he was vicious; but with a flush, he commanded himself, and only laughed slightly, and said-- "It is really hardly a concern of mine, provided my guests are happy. You don't mean to have your bed into this room, do you?" "I mean to sleep _there_," she replied drily, stabbing with her long forefinger toward the door on the opposite side of the room. "Well, I can only say I'd have fancied, for other reasons, these the very last rooms in the house you would have chosen--particularly as this really belongs to the green chamber. However, you and Lady Jane can arrange that between you. You'd have been very comfortable where we would have put you, and you'll be very _un_comfortable here, I'm afraid; but perhaps I'm not making allowance for the affection you have for Lady Jane, the length of time that has passed since you've seen her, and the pleasure of being so near her." There was an agreeable irony in this; for the Baronet knew that they had never agreed very well together, and that neither spoke very handsomely of the other behind her back. At the same time, this was no conclusive proof of unkindness on Lady Alice's part, for her goodwill sometimes showed itself under strange and uncomfortable disguises. "Beatrix, dear, I hope they are seeing to your grandmamma's room; and you'll want candles, it is growing dark. Altogether I'm afraid you're very uncomfortable, little mother; but if _you_ prefer it, you know, of course I'm silent." With these words he kissed the old lady's chilly cheek, and vanished. As he ran down the darkening stairs the Baronet was smiling mischievously; and when, having made his long straight journey to the foot of the back stairs, he re-ascended, and passing through the two little ante-rooms, entered his own homely bedchamber, and looked at his handsome and wonderfully preserved face in the glass, he laughed outright two or three comfortable explosions at intervals, and was evidently enjoying some fun in anticipation. When, a few minutes later, that proud sad beauty, Lady Jane, followed by her maid, sailed rustling into the Window dressing-room--I call it so in preference--and there saw, by the light of a pair of wax candles, a stately figure seated on the sofa at the further end in grey silk draperies, with its feet on a boss, she paused in an attitude of sublime surprise, with just a gleam of defiance in it. "How d' y' do, Jenny, my dear?" said a voice, on which, as on the tones of an old piano, a few years had told a good deal, but which she recognised with some little surprise, for notwithstanding Lady Alice's note accepting the Baronet's invitation, he had talked and thought of her actually coming to Marlowe as a very unlikely occurrence indeed. "Oh! oh! Lady Alice Redcliffe!" exclaimed the young wife, setting down her bed-room candle, and advancing with a transitory smile to her old kinswoman, who half rose from her throne and kissed her on the cheek as she stooped to meet her salutation. "You have only arrived a few minutes; I saw your carriage going round from the door." "About forty minutes--hardly an hour. How you have filled up, Jane; you're quite an imposing figure since I saw you. I don't think it unbecoming; your _embonpoint_ does very well; and you're quite well?" "_Very_ well--and you?" "I'm pretty well, dear, a good deal fatigued; and so you're a wife, Jennie, and very happy, I hope." "I can't say I have anything to trouble me. I am quite happy, that is, as happy as other people, I suppose." "I hear nothing but praises of your husband. I shall be so happy to make his acquaintance," continued Lady Alice. "He has had to go up to town about business this morning, but he's to return very soon." "How soon, dear?" "In a day or two," answered the young wife. "To-morrow?" inquired Lady Alice, drily. "Or next day," rejoined Lady Jane, with a little stare. "Do you _really_, my dear Jane, expect him here the day after to-morrow?" "He said he should be detained only a day or two in town." Old Lady Alice shook her incredulous head, looking straight before her. "I don't think he can have said that, Jane, for he wrote to a friend of mine, the day before yesterday, mentioning that he should be detained by business at least a week." "Oh! did he?" "Yes, and Jekyl Marlowe, I dare say, thinks he will be kept there _longer_." "I should fancy _I_ am a better opinion, rather, upon that point, than Sir Jekyl Marlowe," said Lady Jane, loftily, and perhaps a little angrily. The old lady, with closed lips, at this made a little nod, which might mean anything. "And I can't conceive how it can concern Sir Jekyl, or even you, Lady Alice, what business my husband may have in town." It was odd how sharp they were growing upon this point. "Well, Sir Jekyl's another thing; but _me_, of course, it does concern, because I shall have to give him up his room again when he returns." "What room?" inquired Lady Jane, honestly puzzled. "_This_ room," answered the old lady, like one conscious that she drops, with the word, a gage of battle. "But this is _my_ room." "You don't use it, Lady Jane. _I_ wish to occupy it. I shall, of course, give it up on your husband's return; in the meantime I deprive you of nothing by taking it. Do I?" "That's not the question, Lady Alice. It is _my_ room--it is _my dressing_-room--and I don't mean to give it up to _any_ one. You are the last person on earth who would allow _me_ to take such a liberty with _you_. I don't _understand_ it." "Don't be excited, my dear Jenny," said Lady Alice--an exhortation sometimes a little inconsistently administered by members of her admirable sex when they are themselves most exciting. "I'm not in the least excited, Lady Alice; but I've had a note from you," said Lady Jane, in rather a choking key. "You have," acquiesced her senior. "And I connect your extraordinary intrusion here, with it." Lady Alice nodded. "I do, and--and I'm right. You mean to insult me. It is a shame--an _outrage_. What do you mean, madam?" "I'd have you to remember, Jane Chetwynd (the altercation obliterated her newly-acquired name of Lennox), that I am your relation and your senior." "Yes, you're my cousin, and my senior by fifty years; but an old woman may be very impertinent to a young one." "_Compose_ yourself, if you please, _compose_ yourself," said Lady Alice, in the same philosophic vein, but with colour a little heightened. "I don't know what you mean--you're a disgraceful old woman. I'll complain to my husband, and I'll tell Sir Jekyl Marlowe. Either you or I must leave this house to-night," declaimed Lady Jane, with a most beautiful blush, and eyes flashing lurid lightnings. "You forget yourself, my dear," said the old lady, rising grimly and confronting her. "No, I don't, but _you_ do. It's perfectly disgusting and intolerable," cried Lady Jane, with a stamp. "One moment, if you please--you can afford to listen for one moment, I suppose," said the old lady, in a very low, dry tone, laying two of her lean fingers upon the snowy arm of the beautiful young lady, who, with a haughty contraction and an uplifted head, withdrew it fiercely from her touch. "You forget your maid, I think. You had better tell her to withdraw, hadn't you?" "I don't care; why should I?" said Lady Jane, in a high key. "Beatrix, dear, run into my bed-room for a moment," said "Granny" to that distressed and perplexed young lady, who, accustomed to obey, instantly withdrew. CHAPTER XXI. Lady Alice in Bed. "We may be alone together, if _you_ choose it; if not, _I_ can't help it," said Lady Alice, in a very low and impressive key. "Well, it's nothing to me," said Lady Jane, more calmly and sullenly--"nothing at all--but as you insist--Cecile, you may go for a few minutes." This permission was communicated sulkily, in French. "Now, Jane, you shall hear me," said the old lady, so soon as the maid had disappeared and the doors were shut; "you must hear me with patience, if not with respect--_that_ I don't expect--but remember you have no mother, and I am an old woman and your kinswoman, and it is my duty to speak--" "I'm rather tired standing," interrupted Lady Jane, in a suppressed passion. "Besides, you say you don't want to be overheard, and you can't know who may be on the _lobby there_," and she pointed with her jewelled fingers at the door. "I'll go into my bed-room, if you please; and I have not the slightest objection to hear everything you can possibly say. Don't fancy I'm the least afraid of you." Saying which Lady Jane, taking up her bed-room candle, rustled out of the room, without so much as looking over her shoulder to see whether the prophetess was following. She did follow, and I dare say her lecture was not mitigated by Lady Jane's rudeness. That young lady was lighting her candles on her dressing-table when her kinswoman entered and shut the door, without an invitation. She then seated herself serenely, and cleared her voice. "I live very much out of the world--in fact, quite to myself; but I learn occasionally what my relations are doing; and I was grieved, Jane, to hear a great deal that was very unpleasant, to say the least, about you." Something between a smile and a laugh was her only answer. "Yes, extremely foolish. I don't, of course, say there was anything wicked, but very foolish and reckless. I know perfectly how you were talked of; and I know also why you married that excellent but old man, General Lennox." "I don't think anyone talked about me. Everybody is talked about. There has been enough of this rubbish. I burnt your odious letter," broke in Lady Jane, incoherently. "And would, no doubt, burn the writer, if you could." As there was no disclaimer, Lady Alice resumed. "Now, Jane, you have married a most respectable old gentleman; I dare say you have nothing on earth to conceal from him--remember I've said all along I don't suppose there is--but as the young wife of an old man, you ought to remember how very delicate your position is." "What do you mean?" "I mean, _generally_," answered the old lady, oracularly. "I do declare this is perfectly insufferable! What's the meaning of this lecture? I'm as little likely, madam, as _you_ are to disgrace myself. You'll please to walk out of my room." "And how dare you talk to me in that way, young lady; how dare you attempt to hector me like your maid there?" broke out old Lady Alice, suddenly losing her self-command. "You know what I mean, and what's more, _I_ do, too. We _both_ know it--you a young bride--what does Jekyl Marlowe invite you down here for? Do you think I imagine he cares twopence about your stupid old husband, and that I don't know he was once making love to you? Of course I do; and I'll have nothing of the sort here--and that's the reason I've come, and that's why I'm in that dressing-room, and that's why I'll write to your husband, so sure as you give me the slightest uneasiness; and you had better think well what you do." The old lady, in a towering passion, with a fierce lustre in her cheeks, and eyes flashing lightning over the face of her opponent, vanished from the room. Lady Alice had crossed the disputed territory of the Window dressing-room, and found herself in her elected bed-room before she had come to herself. She saw Lady Jane's face still before her, with the lurid astonishment and fear, white and sharp, on it, as when she had threatened a letter to General Lennox. She sat down a little stunned and confused about the whole thing, incensed and disgusted with Lady Jane, and confirmed in her suspicion by a look she did not like in that young lady's face, and which her peroration had called up. She did not hear the shrilly rejoinder that pursued her through the shut door. She had given way to a burst of passion, and felt a little hot and deaf and giddy. When the party assembled at dinner Lady Jane exerted herself more than usual. She was agreeable, and even talkative, and her colour had not been so brilliant since her arrival. She sat next to Guy Strangways, and old Lady Alice at the other side of the table did not look triumphant, but sick and sad; and to look at the two ladies you would have set her down as the defeated and broken-spirited, and Lady Jane as the victrix in the late encounter. The conversation at this end of the table resembled a dance, in which sometimes each man sets to his partner and turns her round, so that the whole company is frisking and spinning together; sometimes two perform; sometimes a _cavalier seul_. Thus was it with the talk of this section of the dinner-table, above the salt, at which the chief people were seated. "I've just been asked by Lady Blunket how many miles it is to Wardlock, and I'm ashamed to say I can't answer her," cried Sir Jekyl diagonally to Lady Alice, so as to cut off four people at his left hand, whose conversation being at the moment in a precarious way, forthwith expired, and the Baronet and his mother-in-law were left in possession of this part of the stage. The old lady, as I have said, looked ill and very tired, and as if she had grown all at once very old; and instead of answering, she only nodded once or twice, and signed across the table to Lady Jane. "Oh! I forgot," said Sir Jekyl; "you know Wardlock and all our distances, don't you, Lady Jane--can you tell me?" "I don't remember," said Lady Jane, hardly turning toward him; "ten or twelve miles--is not it? it may be a good deal more. I don't really recollect;" and this was uttered with an air which plainly said, "I don't really care." "I generally ride my visits, and a mile or two more or less does not signify; but one ought to know all the distances for thirty miles round; you don't know otherwise who's your neighbour." "Do you think it an advantage to know that any particular person _is_ your neighbour?" inquired impertinent Drayton, with his light moustache, leaning back and looking drowsily into his glasses after his wont. "Oh! Mr. Drayton, the country without neighbours--how dreadful!" exclaimed Miss Blunket. "Existence without friends." "Friends--bosh!" said Drayton, confidentially, to his wine. "There's Drayton scouting friendship, the young cynic!" cried Sir Jekyl. "Do call him to order, Lady Jane." "I rather incline to agree with Mr. Drayton," said Lady Jane, coldly. "Do you mean to say you have no friends?" said Sir Jekyl, in well-bred amazement. "Quite the contrary--I have too many." "Come--that's a new complaint. Perhaps they are very new friends?" inquired the Baronet. "Some of them very old, indeed; but I've found that an old friend means only an old person privileged to be impertinent." Lady Jane uttered a musical little laugh that was very icy as she spoke, and her eye flashed a single insolent glance at old Lady Alice. At another time perhaps a retort would not have been wanting, but now the old woman's eye returned but a wandering look, and her face expressed nothing but apathy and sadness. "Grandmamma, dear, I'm afraid you are very much tired," whispered Beatrix when they reached the drawing-room, sitting beside her after she had made her comfortable on a sofa, with cushions to her back; "you would be better lying down, I think." "No, dear--no, darling. I think in a few minutes I'll go to my room. I'm not very well. I'm tired--_very_ tired." And poor old granny, who was speaking very gently, and looking very pale and sunken, sighed deeply--it was almost a moan. Beatrix was growing very much alarmed, and accompanied, or rather assisted, the old lady up to the room, where, aided by her and her maid, she got to her bed in silence, sighing deeply now and then. She had not been long there when she burst into tears; and after a violent paroxysm she beckoned to Beatrix, and threw her lean old arms about her neck, saying-- "I'm sorry I came, child; I don't know what to think. I'm too old to bear this agitation--it will kill me." Then she wept more quietly, and kissed Beatrix, and whispered--"Send her out of the room--let her wait in the dressing-room." The maid was sitting at the further end of the apartment, and the old lady was too feeble to raise her voice so as to be heard there. So soon as her maid had withdrawn Lady Alice said-- "Sit by me, Beatrix, darling. I am very nervous, and tell me who is that young man who sat beside Jane Lennox at dinner." As she ended her little speech Lady Alice, who, though I dare say actually ill enough, yet did not want to lose credit for all the exhaustion she fancied beside, closed her eyelids, and leaned a little back on her pillow motionless. This prevented her seeing that if she were nervous Beatrix was so also, though in another way, for her colour was heightened very prettily as she answered. "You mean the tall, slight young man at Lady Jane's right?" inquired Beatrix. "That beautiful but melancholy-looking young man whom we saw at Wardlock Church," said Lady Alice, forgetting for the moment that she had never divulged the result of her observations from the gallery to any mortal but Sir Jekyl. Beatrix, who forgot nothing, and knew that her brief walk at Wardlock with that young gentleman had not been confessed to anyone, was confounded on hearing herself thus, as she imagined, taxed with her secret. She was not more secret than young ladies generally are; but whom could she have told at Wardlock? which of the old women of that time-honoured sisterhood was she to have invited to talk romance with her? and now she felt very guilty, and was blushing in silent confusion at the pearl ring on her pretty, slender finger, not knowing what to answer, or how to begin the confession which she fancied her grandmamma was about to extort. Her grandmamma, however, relieved her on a sudden by saying-- "I forgot, dear, I told you nothing of that dreadful day at Wardlock Church, the day I was so ill. I told your papa _only_; but the young man is here, and I may as well tell you now that he bears a supernatural likeness to my poor lost darling. Jekyl knew how it affected me, and he never told me. It was so like Jekyl. I think, dear, I should not have come here at all had I known that dreadful young man was here." "Dreadful! How is he dreadful?" exclaimed Beatrix. "From his likeness to my lost darling--my dear boy--my poor, precious, murdered Guy," answered the old lady, lying back, and looking straight toward the ceiling with upturned eyes and clasped hands. She repeated--"Oh! Guy--Guy--Guy--my poor child!" She looked like a dying nun praying to her patron saint. "His name is Strangways--Mr. Guy Strangways," said Beatrix. "Ah, yes, darling! Guy was the name of my dear boy, and Strangways was the name of his companion--an evil companion, I dare say." Beatrix knew that the young man whom her grandmamma mourned had fallen in a duel, and that, reasonably or unreasonably, her father was blamed in the matter. More than this she had never heard. Lady Alice had made her acquainted with thus much; but with preambles so awful that she had never dared to open the subject herself, or to question her "Granny" beyond the point at which her disclosure had stopped. That somehow it reflected on Sir Jekyl prevented her from inquiring of any servant, except old Donica, who met her curiosity with a sound jobation, and told her if ever she plagued her with questions about family misfortunes like that, she would speak to Sir Jekyl about it. Thus Beatrix only knew how Guy Deverell had died--that her grandmamma chose to believe he had been murdered, and insisted beside in blaming her father, Sir Jekyl, somehow for the catastrophe. CHAPTER XXII. How Everything went on. "Go down, dear, to your company," resumed Lady Alice, sadly; "they will miss you. And tell your father, when he comes to the drawing-room, I wish to see him, and won't detain him long." So they parted, and a little later Sir Jekyl arrived with a knock at the old lady's bed-room door. "Come in--oh! yes--Jekyl--well, I've only a word to say. Sit down a moment at the bedside." "And how do you feel now, you dear old soul?" inquired the Baronet, cheerfully. He looked strong and florid, as gentleman do after dinner, with a genial air of contentment, and a fragrance of his wonderful sherry about him; all which seemed somehow brutal to the nervous old lady. "Wonderfully, considering the surprise you had prepared for me, and which might as well have killed me as not," she made answer. "I know, to be sure--Strangways, you mean. Egad! I forgot. Trixie ought to have told you." "_You_ ought to have told me. I don't think I should have come here, Jekyl, had I known it." "If I had known _that_," thought Sir Jekyl, with a regretful pang, "I'd have made a point of telling you." But he said aloud-- "Yes. It was a _sottise_; but _I_'ve got over the likeness so completely that I forgot how it agitated you. But I ought to tell you they have no connexion with the family--none in the world. Pelter and Crowe, you know--devilish sharp dogs--my lawyers in town--they are regular detectives, by Jove! and know everything--and particularly have had for years a steady eye upon them and their movements; and I have had a most decided letter from them, assuring me that there has not been the slightest movement in that quarter, and therefore there is, absolutely, as I told you from the first, nothing in it." "And what Deverells are now living?" inquired the old lady, very pale. "Two first cousins, they tell me--old fellows now; and one of them has a son or two; but not one called Guy, and none answering this description, you see; and neither have a shadow of a claim, or ever pretended; and as for that unfortunate accident--" "Pray _spare_ me," said the old lady, grimly. "Well, they did not care a brass farthing about the poor fellow, so they would never move to give me trouble in that matter; and, in fact, people never do stir in law, and put themselves to serious expense, purely for a sentiment--even a bad one." "I remember some years ago you _were_ very _much_ alarmed, Jekyl." "No, I was not. Who the plague says that? There's nothing, thank Heaven, I need fear. One does not like to be worried with lawsuits--that's all--though there is and can be no real danger in them." "And was it from these cousins you apprehended lawsuits?" inquired Lady Alice. "No, not exactly--no, not at all. I believe that fellow Strangways--that fellow that used to live on poor Guy--I fancy he was the mover of it--indeed I know he was." "What did they proceed for?" asked the old lady. "You never told me--you are so secret, Jekyl." "They did not proceed at all--how could I? Their attorneys had cases before counsel affecting me--that's all I ever heard; and they say now it was all Strangways' doing--that is, Pelter and Crowe say so. I wish I _were_ secret." Old Lady Alice here heaved a deep groan, and said, not with asperity, but with a fatigued abhorrence-- "Go away; I wonder I can bear you near me." "Thank you very much," said the Baronet, rising, with one of his pleasant chuckles. "I can't tell you how glad I am to see you here, and I know you'll be very glad to see me in the morning, when you are a little rested." So he kissed the tips of his fingers and touched them playfully to the back of her thin hand, which she withdrew with a little frown, as if they chilled her. And by her direction he called in her maid, whom he asked very smilingly how she did, and welcomed to Marlowe; and she, though a little _passé_, having heard the fame of Sir Jekyl, and many stories of his brilliant adventures, was very modest and fluttered on the occasion. And with another little petting speech to Lady Alice, the radiant Baronet withdrew. It is not to be supposed that Lady Alice's tremors communicated themselves to Beatrix. Was it possible to regard that handsome, refined young man, who spoke in that low, sweet voice, and smiled so intelligently, and talked so pleasantly, and with that delicate flavour of romance at times, in the light of a goblin? The gentlemen had made their whist-party. The Rev. Dives Marlowe was chatting to, not with, Lady Jane, who sat listlessly on an ottoman. That elderly girl, Miss Blunket, with the _naïve_ ways, the animated, smiling, and rather malevolent countenance, had secured little Linnett, who bore his imprisonment impatiently and wearily it must be owned. When Miss Blunket was enthusiastic it was all very well; but her playfulness was wicked, and her satire gaily vitriolic. "Mr. Marlowe is fascinated, don't you think?" she inquired of harmless little Linnett, glancing with an arch flash of her fierce eyes at the Rev. Dives. "She's awfully handsome," said Linnett, honestly. "Oh, dear, you wicked creature, you can't think I meant that. She is some kind of cousin, I think--is not she? And her husband has that great living--what's its name?--and no relation in the Church; and Lady Jane, they say, rules him--and Sir Jekyl, some people say, rules her." Linnett returned her arch glance with an honest stare of surprise. "I had no idea of that, egad," said he. "She thinks him so wise in all worldly matters, you know; and people in London fancied she would have been the second Lady Marlowe, if she had not met General Lennox just at a critical time, and fallen in love with him;" and as she said this she laughed. "Really!" exclaimed Linnett; and he surveyed Lady Jane in this new light wonderingly. "I really don't know; I heard it said merely; but very likely, you know, it is not true," she answered with an artless giggle. "I knew you were quizzing--though, by Jove, you did sell me at first; but I really think Sir Jekyl's a little spoony on that pretty little Mrs. Maberly. Is she a widow?" "Oh, dear, no--at least, not quite; she has a husband in India, but then, poor man, he's so little in the way she need hardly wish him dead." "I _see_," said Linnett, looking at Mrs. Maberly with a grave interest. While Miss Blunket was entertaining and instructing little Linnett with this sort of girlish chatter, and from the whist-table, between the deals, arose those critical discussions and reviews, relieved now and then by a joke from the Baronet, or from his partner, Colonel Doocey, at the piano, countenanced by old Lady Blunket, who had come to listen and remained to doze, Beatrix, her fingers still on the keys, was listening to young Strangways. There are times, lights, accidents, under which your handsome young people become incredibly more handsome, and this Guy Strangways now shared in that translated glory, as he leaned on the back of a tall carved chair, sometimes speaking, sometimes listening. "It is quite indescribable, Miss Marlowe, how your music interests me--I should say, haunts me. I thought at first it was because you loved ballad music, which I also love; but it is not that--it is something higher and more peculiar." "I am sure you were right at first, for I _know_ I am a very indifferent musician," said Beatrix, looking down under her long lashes on the keys over which the jewelled fingers of her right hand wandered with hardly a tinkle, just tracing dreamily one of those sweet melancholy airs which made in fancy an accompaniment to the music of that young fellow's words. How beautiful she looked, too, with eyes lowered and parted lips, and that listening smile--not quite a smile--drinking in with a strange rapture of pride and softness the flatteries which she refused and yet invited. "It _is_ something higher and mysterious, which, perhaps, I shall never attempt to explain, unless, indeed, I should risk talking very wildly--too wildly for you to understand, or, if you did, perhaps--to forgive." "You mentioned a Breton ballad you once heard," said Beatrix, frightened, as girls will sometimes become whenever the hero of their happy hours begins on a sudden to define. "Yes," he said, and the danger of the crisis was over. "I wish so much I could remember the air, you would so enter into its character, and make its wild unfathomable melancholy so beautifully touching in your clear contralto." "You must not flatter me; I want to hear more of that ballad." "If flattery be to speak more highly than one thinks, who can flatter Miss Marlowe?" Again the crisis was menacing. "Besides, I did not tell you we are leaving, I believe, in a day or two, and on the eve of so near a departure, may I not improve the few happy moments that are left me, and be permitted the privilege of a leave-taking, to speak more frankly, and perhaps less wisely than one who is destined to be all his life a neighbour?" "Papa, I am sure, will be very sorry to hear that you and Monsieur Varbarriere are thinking of going so soon; I must try, however, to improve the time, and hear all you can tell me of those interesting people of Brittany." "Yes, they are. I will make them another visit--a sadder visit, Mademoiselle--for me a far more interesting one. You have taught me how to hear and see them. I never felt the spirit of Villemarque, or the romance and melancholy of that antique region, till I had the honour of knowing you." "My friends always laughed at me about Brittany. I suppose different people are interested by different subjects; but I do not think anyone could read at all about that part of the world and not be fascinated. You promised to tell all you remember of that Breton ballad." "Oh, yes; the haunted lady, the beautiful lady, the heiress of Carlowel, now such a grand ruin, became enamoured of a mysterious cavalier who wooed her; but he was something not of flesh and blood, but of the spirit world." "There is exactly such a legend, _so_ far, at least, of a castle on the Rhine. I must show it to you. Do you read German?" "Yes, Mademoiselle." "And does the ballad end tragically?" "Most tragically. You shall hear." "Where are you, Guy?" in French, inquired a deep ringing voice. And on the summons, Guy glanced over his shoulder, and replied. "Oh," exclaimed the same voice, "I demand pardon. I am disturbing conversation, I fear; but an old man in want of assistance will be excused. I want my road book, Guy, and you have got it. Pray, run up-stairs and fetch it." With great pleasure, of course, Guy Strangways ran up-stairs to tumble over block-books, letters, diaries, and the general residuum of a half-emptied valise. Miss Beatrix played a spirited march, which awoke Lady Blunket, whom she had forgotten; and that interesting woman, to make up for lost time, entertained her with a history of the unreasonableness of Smidge, her maid, and a variety of other minute afflictions, which, she assured Beatrix seriously, disturbed her sleep. CHAPTER XXIII. The Divan. That night Sir Jekyl led the gentlemen in a body to his outpost quarters, in the rear of civilisation, where they enjoyed their cigars, brandy and water, and even "swipes," prodigiously. It is a noble privilege to be so rich as Sir Jekyl Marlowe. The Jewish price for frankincense was thrice its own weight in gold. How much did that aromatic blue canopy that rolled dimly over this Turkish divan cost that off-handed Sybarite? How many scruples of fine gold were floating in that cloud? Varbarriere was in his way charmed with his excursion. He enjoyed the jokes and stories of the younkers, and the satiric slang and imperturbable good-humour of their host. The twinkle of his eye, from its deep cavern, and the suavity of his solemn features, testified to his profound enjoyment of a meeting to which he contributed, it must be owned, for his own share, little but smoke. In fact, he was very silent, very observant--observant of more things than the talk perhaps. All sorts of things were talked about. Of course, no end of horse and dog anecdote--something of wine, something of tobacco, something of the beauties of the opera and the stage, and those sad visions, the fallen angelic of the demimonde--something, but only the froth and sparkle, of politics--light conjecture, and pungent scandal, in the spirit of gay satire and profligate comedy. "He's a bad dog, St. Evermore. Did not you hear that about the duel?" said Drayton. "What?" asked the Baronet, with an unconscious glance at Guy Strangways. "He killed that French fool--what's his name?--unfairly, they say. There has been a letter or something in one of the Paris papers about it. Fired before his time, I think, and very ill feeling against the English in consequence." "Oh!" said the Baronet. "But you know," interposed Doocey, who was an older clubman than Drayton, and remembering further back, thought that sort of anecdote of the duel a little maladroit just then and there, "St. Evermore has been talked about a good deal; there were other things--that horse, you know; and they say, by Jove! he was licked by Tromboni, at the wings of the opera, for what he called insulting his wife; and Tromboni says he's a marquess, and devil knows what beside, at home, and wanted to fight, but St. Evermore wouldn't, and took his licking." "He's not a nice fellow by any means; but he's devilish good company--lots of good stories and capital cigars," said Drayton. At this point M. Varbarriere was seized with a fit of coughing; and Sir Jekyl glanced sharply at him; but no, he was not laughing. The conversation proceeded agreeably, and some charming stories were told of Sir Paul Blunket, who was not present; and in less than an hour the party broke up and left Sir Jekyl to his solitary quarters. The Baronet bid his last guest good-night at the threshold, and then shut his door and locked himself in. It was his custom, here, to sleep with his door locked. "What was that fellow laughing at--Varbarriere? I'm certain he was laughing. I never saw a fellow with so completely the cut of a charlatan. I'll write to Charteris to-night. I _must_ learn all about him." Then Sir Jekyl yawned, and reflected what a fool Drayton was, what a fellow to talk, and what asses all fellows were at that age; and, being sleepy, he postponed his letter to Charteris to the next morning, and proceeded to undress. Next morning was bright and pleasant, and he really did not see much good in writing the letter; and so he put it off to a more convenient time. Shortly after the ladies had left the drawing-room for their bed-rooms, Beatrix, having looked in for a moment to her grandmamma's room, and, with a kiss and a good-night, taken wing again, there entered to Lady Alice, as the old plays express it, then composing herself for the night, Lady Jane's maid, with-- "Please, my lady, my lady wants to know if your ladyship knows where her ladyship's key may be?" "_What_ key?" "The key of her bedchamber, please, my lady." "Oh! the key of my dressing-room. Tell Lady Jane that I have got the key of the Window dressing-room, and mean to keep it," replied the old lady, firmly. The maid executed a courtesy, and departed; and Lady Alice sank back again upon her pillow, with her eyes and mouth firmly closed, and the countenance of an old lady who is conscious of having done her duty upon one of her sex. About two minutes later there came a rustle of a dressing-gown and the patter of a swift-slippered tread through the short passage from the dressing-room, and, without a knock, Lady Jane, with a brilliant flush on her face, ruffled into the room, and, with her head very high, and flashing eyes, demanded-- "Will you be so good, Lady Alice Redcliffe, as to give me the key of my bed-room?" To which Lady Alice, without opening her eyes, and with her hands mildly clasped, in the fashion of a mediæval monument, over her breast, meekly and firmly made answer-- "If you mean the key of the Window dressing-room, Jane, I have already told your maid that I mean to _keep_ it!" "And I'll not leave the room till I get it," cried Lady Jane, standing fiercely beside the monument. "Then you'll not leave the room to-night, Jane," replied the statuesque sufferer on the bed. "We shall _see_ that. Once more, will you give me my key or not?" "The key of my dressing-room door is in my possession, and I mean to keep it," repeated the old lady, with a provoking mildness. "You shan't, madam--you'll do no such thing. You shall give up the key you have stolen. I'll lose my life but I'll make you." "Jane, Jane," said the old lady, "you are sadly changed for the worse since last I saw you." "And if _you're_ not, it's only because there was no room for it. Sadly changed indeed--very true. I don't suffer you to bully me as you used at Wardlock." "May Heaven forgive and pardon you!" ejaculated the old lady, with great severity, rising perpendicularly and raising both her eyes and hands. "Keep your prayers for yourself, madam, and give me my key," demanded the incensed young lady. "I'll do no such thing; I'll do as I said; and I'll pray how I please, ma'am," retorted the suppliant, fiercely. "Your prayers don't signify twopence. You've the temper of a fiend, as all the world knows; and no one can live in the same house with you," rejoined Lady Jane. "That's a wicked lie: my servants live all their days with me." "Because they know no one else would take them. But you've the temper of a fury. You haven't a friend left, and everyone hates you." "Oh! oh! oh!" moaned Lady Alice, sinking back, with her hand pressed to her heart piteously, and closing her eyes, as she recollected how ill she was. "Ho! dear me!" exclaimed Lady Jane, in high disdain. "Had not you better restore my key before you die, old lady?" "Jane!" exclaimed Lady Alice, recovering in an instant, "have you no feeling--you know the state I'm in; and you're bent on killing me with your unfeeling brutality?" "You're perfectly well, ma'am, and you look it. I wish I was half as strong; you oblige me to come all this way, this bitter night, you odious old woman." "I see how it is, and why you want the key. A very little more, and I'll write to General Lennox." "Do; and he'll horsewhip you." Lady Jane herself was a little stunned at this speech, when she heard it from her own lips; and I think would have recalled it. "Thank you, Jane; I hope you'll _remember_ that. Horsewhip me! No doubt you wish it; but General Lennox is a gentleman, I hope, _although_ he has married you; and I don't suppose he would murder a miserable old woman to gratify you." "You know perfectly what I mean--if you were a _man_ he would horsewhip you; you have done nothing but insult me ever since you entered this house." "Thank you; it's quite plain. I shan't forget it. I'll ask him, when he comes, whether he's in the habit of beating women. It is not usual, I believe, among British officers. It _usen't_ at least; but everything's getting on--young ladies, and, I suppose, old men--all getting on famously." "Give me my key, if you please; and cease talking like a fool," cried Lady Jane. "And what _do_ you want of that key? Come, now, young lady, what is it?" "I don't choose to have my door lie open, and I won't. I've no bolt to the inside, and I _will_ have my key, madam." "If that's your object, set your mind at ease. I'll lock your door myself when you have got to your bed." "So that if the house takes fire I shall be burnt to death!" "Pooh! nonsense!" "And if I am they'll hang _you_, I hope." "Thank you. Flogged and hanged!" And Lady Alice laughed an exceeding bitter laugh. "But the wicked violence of your language and _menaces_ shan't deter me from the duty I've prescribed to myself. I'll define my reasons if you like, and I'll write as soon as you please to General Lennox." "I think you're _mad_--I do, I assure you. I'll endure it for once, but depend on it I'll complain to Sir Jekyl Marlowe, in my husband's absence, in the morning; and if this sort of thing is to go on, I had better leave the house forthwith--that's all." And having uttered these dignified sentences with becoming emphasis, she sailed luridly away. "Good-night, Jane," said Lady Alice, with a dry serenity. "Don't dare, you insupportable old woman, to wish me good-night," burst out Lady Jane, whisking round at the threshold. With which speech, having paused for a moment in defiance, she disappeared, leaving the door wide open, which is, perhaps, as annoying as clapping it, and less vulgar. CHAPTER XXIV. Guy Strangways and M. Varbarriere converse. When M. Varbarriere and his nephew this night sat down in their dressing-room, the elder man said-- "How do you like Sir Jekyl Marlowe?" "A most agreeable host--very lively--very hospitable," answered Guy Strangways. "Does it strike you that he is _anxious_ about anything?" The young man looked surprised. "No; that is, I mean, he appears to me in excellent spirits. Perhaps, sir, I do not quite apprehend you?" "Not unlikely," said the old gentleman. "He does not question you?" "No, sir." "Yet he suspects me, and I think suspects you," observed M. Varbarriere. The young man looked pained, but said nothing. "That room where poor Lady Marlowe was--was so shocked--the green chamber--it is connected with the misfortunes of your family." "How, sir?" "Those papers you have heard my lawyer mention as having been lost at Dubois' Hotel in London, by your grandfather, it is my belief were lost in this house and in that room." A gentleman smoking a cigar must be very much interested indeed when he removes his weed from his lips and rests the hand whose fingers hold it upon his knee, to the imminent risk of its going out while he pauses and listens. "And how, sir, do you suppose this occurred--by what agency?" inquired the handsome young gentleman. "The ghost," answered M. Varbarriere, with a solemn sneer. Guy Strangways knew he could not be serious, although, looking on his countenance, he could discern there no certain trace of irony as he proceeded. "Many years later, poor Lady Marlowe, entering that room late at night--her maid slept there, and she being ill, for a change, in the smaller room adjoining (you don't know those rooms, but I have looked in at the door)--beheld what we call the ghost, and never smiled or held up her head after," said the portly old gentleman between the puffs of his cigar. "Beheld the ghost!" "So they say, and I believe it--what they _call_ the ghost." "Did she make an alarm or call her husband?" "Her husband slept in that remote room at the very back of the house, which, as you see, he still occupies, quite out of hearing. You go down-stairs first, then up-stairs; and as he slept the greater part of two hundred feet away from the front of the house, of course he was out of the question;" and M. Varbarriere sneered again solemnly. "A housekeeper named Gwynn, I am told, knows all about it, but I believe she is gone." "And do you really think, sir, that my grandfather lost those deeds _here_?" "I always thought so, and so I told your father, and my information got him into a bad scrape." "You don't, I know, think it occurred supernaturally?" said Guy, more and more bewildered. "Supernaturally; of course it was--how else could it be?" answered the old gentleman, with a drowsy irony. "That room has been haunted, as I have heard, by a devil from the time it was built, in the reign of George II. Can you imagine why General Lennox was put to sleep there?" The young man shook his head. The old one resumed his smoking, leaving his problem unsolved. "It shall be my business to evoke and to lay that devil," said the elderly gentleman, abruptly. "Ought not Lady Jane Lennox to be warned if you really think there is any--any _danger_?" "The danger is to _General_ Lennox, as I suppose." "I don't understand, sir." "No, you don't--better not. I told your poor father my belief once, and it proved fatal knowledge to him. In the day that he ate thereof he died. Bah! it is better to keep your mind to yourself until you have quite made it up--you understand?--and even then till the time for action has come, and not even then, unless you want help. Who will sum up the mischief one of those prating fellows does in a lifetime?" The gentlemen were silent hereupon for a period which I may measure by half a cigar. "That green chamber--it is a hypocrite," said the solemn old man, looking drowsily on the smoke that was ascending the chimney, into which he threw the butt-end of his cigar--"mind you, a hypocrite. I have my theory. But we will not talk; no--_you_ will be less embarrassed, and _I_ more useful, with this reserve. For the purpose I have in view I will do fifty things in which you could and would have no partnership. Will you peep into that letter, Monsieur?" The ponderous gentleman grew dramatic here. "Will you place your ear to that door, _s'il vous plait_--your eye to that keyhole? Will you oblige me by bribing that domestic with five pounds sterling? Bah! I will be all ear, all eye--omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent!--by _all_ means for this END--ay, all means--what _you_ call secret, shabby, blackguard;" and the sonorous voice of the old man, for the first time since his arrival, broke into a clangorous burst of laughter, which, subsiding into a sort of growl, died, at last, quite away. The old gentleman's countenance looked more thoughtful and a shade darker than he had seen it. Then rising, he stood with his back to the fire, and fumbled slowly at the heavy links of his watch-chain, like a ghostly monk telling his beads, while he gazed, in the abstraction of deep thought, on the face of the young man. Suddenly his face grew vigilant, his eyes lighted up, and some stern lines gathered about them, as he looked down full upon his nephew. "Guy," said he, "you'll keep your promise--your word--your oath--that not one syllable of what passes between us is divulged to mortal, and that all those points on which I have enjoined reserve shall be held by you scrupulously secret." Guy bowed his acquiescence. "What nonsense was that going on at the piano to-night? Well, you need not answer, but there must be no more of it. I won't burden you with painful secrets. You will understand me hereafter; but no more of _that_--observe me." The old gentleman spoke this injunction with a lowering nod, and that deliberate and peremptory emphasis to which his metallic tones gave effect. Guy heard this, leaning in an unchanged attitude on his elbow over the chimneypiece, in silence and with downcast eyes. "Yes, Guy," said the old man, walking suddenly up to him, and clapping his broad hand upon his shoulder, "I will complete the work I have begun for you. Have confidence in me, don't mar it, and you shall know all, and after I am gone, perhaps admire the zealous affection with which I laboured in your interest. Good-night, and Heaven bless you, dear Guy;" and so they parted for the night. Guy Strangways had all his life stood in awe of this reserved despotic uncle--kind, indulgent in matters of pleasure and of money, but habitually secret, and whenever he imposed a command, tyrannical. Yet Guy felt that even here there was kindness; and though he could not understand his plans, of his motives he could have no doubt. For M. Varbarriere, indeed, his nephew had a singular sort of respect. More than one-half of his character was enveloped in total darkness to his eyes. Of the traits that were revealed some were positively evil. He knew, by just one or two proofs, that he was proud and vindictive, and could carry revenge for a long time, like a cold stone, in his sleeve. He could break out into a devil of a passion, too, on occasion; he could be as unscrupulous, in certain ways, as Machiavel; and, it was fixed in Guy's mind, had absolutely no religion whatsoever. What were the evidences? M. Varbarriere led a respectable life, and showed his solemn face and person in church with regularity, and was on very courteous relations with the clergy, and had built the greater part of a church in Pontaubrique, where prayers are, I believe, still offered up for him. Ought not all this to have satisfied Guy? And yet he knew quite well that solemn M. Varbarriere did not believe one fact, record, tradition, or article of the religion he professed, or of any other. Had he denounced, ridiculed, or controverted them?--Never. On the contrary, he kept a civil tongue in his head, or was silent. What, then, were the proofs which had long quite settled the question in Guy's mind? They consisted of some half-dozen smiles and shrugs, scattered over some fifteen years, and delivered impressively at significant moments. But with all this he was kindly. The happiness of a great number of persons depended upon M. Varbarriere, and they were happy. His wine-estates were well governed. His great silk-factory in the south was wisely and benevolently administered. He gave handsomely to every deserving charity. He smiled on children and gave them small coins. He loved flowers, and no man was more idolised by his dogs. Guy was attached by his kindness, and he felt that be his moral system exactly what it might, he had framed one, and acted under it, and he instinctively imbibed for him that respect which we always cherish for the man who has submitted his conduct consistently to a code or principle self-imposed by intellect--even erring. CHAPTER XXV. Lady Alice talks with Guy Strangways. When Guy had bid this man good-night and entered his chamber, he threw himself into his easy-chair beside the fire, which had grown low and grey in the grate. He felt both sad and alarmed. He now felt assured that M. Varbarriere was fashioning and getting together the parts of a machine which was to work evil against their host and his family. His family? His _daughter_ Beatrix. He had no other. Already implicated in deception, the reasons for which he knew not, the direction of which he only suspected--bound as he was to secrecy by promises the most sacred, to his stern old kinsman and benefactor, he dared not divulge the truth. Somehow the blow meditated, he was confident, against this Baronet, was to redound to _his_ advantage. What a villain should he appear when all was over! Sir Jekyl his host, too, frank and hospitable--how could he have earned the misfortune, be it great or small, that threatened? And the image of Beatrix--like an angel--stood between her father and the unmasked villain, Guy, who had entered the house in a borrowed shape, ate and drank and slept, talked and smiled, and, he now feared, _loved_, and in the end--struck! When Mr. Guy Strangways came down next morning he looked very pale. His breakfast was a sham. He talked hardly at all, and smiled but briefly and seldom. M. Varbarriere, on the contrary, was more than usually animated, and talked in his peculiar vein rather more than was his wont; and after breakfast, Sir Jekyl placed his hand kindly on Guy Strangways' arm as he looked dismally from the window. The young man almost started at the kindly pressure. "Very glad to hear that Monsieur Varbarriere has changed his mind," said Sir Jekyl, with a smile. What change was this? thought Guy, whose thoughts were about other plans of his uncle's, and he looked with a strange surprise in Sir Jekyl's face. "I mean his ill-natured idea of going so soon. I'm so glad. You know you have seen nothing yet, and we are going to kill a buck to-day, so you had better postpone the moor to-morrow, and if you like to take your rod in the afternoon, you will find--Barron tells me--some very fine trout, about half a mile lower down the stream than you fished yesterday--a little below the bridge." Guy thanked him, I fancy, rather oddly. He heard him in fact as if it was an effort to follow his meaning, and he really did feel relieved when his good-natured host was called away, the next moment, to settle a disputed question between the two sportsmen, Linnett and Doocey. "How is grandmamma this morning?" inquired Sir Jekyl of Beatrix, before she left the room. "Better, I think. She says she will take a little turn up and down the broad walk, by-and-by, and I am to go with her." "Very pleasant for you, Trixie," said her papa, with one of his chuckles. "So you can't go with your ladies to Lonsted to-day?" "No--it can't be helped; but I'm glad poor granny can take her little walk." "Not a bit of you, Trixie." "Yes, _indeed_, I am. Poor old granny!" The incredulous Baronet tapped her cheek with his finger, as he chuckled again roguishly, and with a smile and a shake of his head, their little talk ended. In the hall he found Guy Strangways in his angling garb, about to start on a solitary excursion. He preferred it. He was very much obliged. He did not so much care for the chase, and liked walking even better than riding. The Baronet, like a well-bred host, allowed his guests to choose absolutely their own methods of being happy, but he could not but perceive something in the young gentleman's manner that was new and uncomfortable. Had he offended him--had anything occurred during the sitting after dinner last night? Well, he could not make it out, but his manner was a little odd and constrained, and in that slanting light from above, as he had stood before him in the hall, he certainly did look confoundedly like that other Guy whose memory was his chief spoil-sport. But it crossed him only like a neuralgic pang, to be forgotten a minute later. And so the party dispersed--some mounted, to the park; others away with the keeper and dogs for the moor; and Strangways, dejected, on his solitary river-side ramble. His rod and fly-book were but pretexts--his object was solitude. It was a beautiful autumnal day, a low sun gilding the red and yellow foliage of wood and hedgerow, and the mellow songs of birds were quivering in the air. The cheer and the melancholy of autumn were there--the sadness of a pleasant farewell. "It is well," thought Strangways, "that I have been so startled into consciousness, while I yet have power to escape my fate--that beautiful girl! I did not know till last night how terrible I shall find it to say farewell. But, cost what it may, the word must be spoken. She will never know what it costs me. I may call it a dream, but even dreams of paradise are forgotten; my dream--never! All after-days dark without her. All my future life a sad reverie--a celestial remembrance--a vain yearning. These proud English people--and those dark designs, what are they? No, they shan't hurt her--never. I'll denounce him first. What is it to me what becomes of me if I have saved her--in so few days grown to be so much to me--my idol, my darling, though she may never know it?" Guy Strangways, just five-and-twenty, had formed, on the situation, many such tremendous resolutions as young gentlemen at that period of life are capable of. He would speak to her no more; he would think of her no more; he would brave his uncle's wrath--shield her from all possibility of evil--throw up his own stakes, be they what they might--and depart in silence, and never see Beatrix again. The early autumn evening had begun to redden the western clouds, as Guy Strangways, returning, approached the fine old house, and passing a thick group of trees and underwoods, he suddenly found himself before Beatrix and Lady Alice. I dare say they had been talking about him, for Beatrix blushed, and the old lady stared at him from under her grey brows, with lurid half-frightened eyes, as she leaned forward, her thin fingers grasping the arms of the rustic chair, enveloped in her ermine-lined mantle. Lady Alice looked on him as an old lady might upon a caged monster--with curiosity and fear. She was beginning to endure his presence, though still with an awe nearly akin to horror--though that horror was fast disappearing--and there was a strange yearning, too, that drew her towards him. He had seen Beatrix that morning. The apparition had now again risen in the midst of his wise resolutions, and embarrassed him strangely. The old lady's stare, too, was, you may suppose, to a man predisposed to be put out, very disconcerting. The result was that he bowed very low indeed before the ladies, and remained silent, expecting, like a ghost, to be spoken to. "Come here, sir, if you please," said the old lady, with an odd mixture of apprehension and command. "How d'ye do, Mr. Strangways? I saw you yesterday you know, at dinner; and I saw you some weeks since at Wardlock Church. I have been affected by a resemblance. Merciful Heaven, it is miraculous! And things of that sort affect me now more than they once might have done. I'm a sickly old woman, and have lost most of my dearest ties on earth, and cannot expect to remain much longer behind them." It was odd, but the repulsion was still active, while at the same time she was already, after a fashion, opening her heart to him. It was not easy to frame an answer, on the moment, to this strange address. He could only say, as again he bowed low-- "I do recollect, Lady Alice, having seen you in Wardlock Church. My uncle, Monsieur Varbarriere--" At this point the handsome young gentleman broke down. His uncle had whispered him, as they sat side by side-- "Look at that old lady costumed in mourning, in the seat in the gallery with the marble tablet and two angels--do you see?--on the wall behind. That is Lady Alice Redcliffe. I'll tell you more about her by-and-by." "By-and-by," as Guy Strangways had come to know, indicated in M. Varbarriere's vocabulary that period which was the luminous point in his perspective, at which his unexplained hints and proceedings would all be cleared up. The sudden rush of these recollections and surmises in such a presence overcame Guy Strangways, and he changed colour and became silent. The old lady, however, understood nothing of the causes of his sudden embarrassment, and spoke again. "Will you forgive an old woman for speaking with so little reserve?--your voice, too, sir, so wonderfully resembles it--wonderfully." Old Lady Alice dried her eyes a little here, and Guy, who felt that his situation might soon become very nearly comical, said very gently-- "There are, I believe, such likenesses. I have seen one or two such myself." And then to Beatrix, aside, "My presence and these recollections, I fear, agitate Lady Alice." But the old lady interposed in a softened tone--"No, sir; pray don't go; pray remain. You've been walking, fishing. What a sweet day, and charming scenery near here. I know it all very well. In my poor girl's lifetime I was a great deal here. She was very accomplished--she drew beautifully--poor thing; my pretty Beatrix here is very like her. You can't remember your poor mamma? No, hardly." All this time Lady Alice was, with aristocratic ill-breeding, contemplating the features of Guy Strangways, as she might a picture, with saddened eyes. She was becoming accustomed to the apparition. It had almost ceased to frighten her; and she liked it even, as a help to memory. Five minutes later she was walking feebly up and down the plateau, in the last level beams of the genial sunset, leaning on the arm of the young man, who could not refuse this courtesy to the garrulous old lady, although contrary to his prudent resolutions--it retained him so near to Beatrix. "And, Mr. Strangways, it is not every day, you know, I can walk out; and Trixie here will sometimes bring her work into the boudoir--and if you would pay me a visit there, and read or talk a little, you can't think what a kindness you would do me." What could he do but hear and smile, and declare how happy it would make him? Although here, too, he saw danger to his wise resolutions. But have not the charities of society their claims? These were their parting words as they stood on the stone platform, under the carved armorial bearings of the Marlowes, at the hall-door; and old Lady Alice, when she reached her room, wept softer and happier tears than had wet her cheeks for many a year. CHAPTER XXVI. Some Talk of a Survey of the Green Chamber. The red sunset beam that had lighted the group we have just been following, glanced through the windows of M. Varbarriere's dressing-room, and lighted up a letter he was at that moment reading. It said-- "The woman to whom you refer is still living. We heard fully about her last year, and, we are informed, is now in the service of Lady Alice Redcliffe, of Wardlock, within easy reach of Marlowe. We found her, as we thought, reliable in her statements, though impracticable and reserved; but that is eight years since. She was, I think, some way past fifty then." M. Varbarriere looked up here, and placed the letter in his pocket, beholding his valet entering. "Come in, Jacques," exclaimed the ponderous old gentleman, in the vernacular of the valet. He entered gaily bowing and smiling. "Well, my friend," he exclaimed good-humouredly, "you look very happy, and no wonder--you, a lover of beauty, are fortunate in a house where so much is treasured." "Ah! Monsieur mocks himself of me. But there are many beautiful ladies assembled here, my faith!" "What do you think of Lady Jane Lennox?" "Oh, heavens! it is an angel!" "And only think! she inhabits, all alone, that terrible green chamber!" exclaimed the old gentleman, with an unwonted smile, "I have just been wondering about that green chamber, regarding which so many tales of terror are related, and trying from its outward aspect to form some conjecture as to its interior, you understand, its construction and arrangements. It interests me so strangely. Now, I dare say, by this time so curious a sprite as you--so clever--so potent with that fair sex who hold the keys of all that is worth visiting, there is hardly a nook in this house, from the cellar to the garret, worth looking at, into which you have not contrived a peep during this time?" "Ah, my faith! Monsieur does me too much honour. I may have been possibly, but I do not know to which of the rooms they accord that name." Now upon this M. Varbarriere described to him the exact situation of the apartment. "And who occupies the room at present, Monsieur?" "Lady Jane Lennox, I told you." "Oh! then I am sure I have not been there. That would be impossible." "But there must be no impossibility here," said the old gentleman, with a grim "half joke and whole earnest" emphasis. "If you satisfy me during our stay in this house I will make you a present of five thousand francs--you comprehend?--this day three weeks. I am curious in my way as you are in yours. Let us see whether your curiosity cannot subserve mine. In the first place, on the honour of a gentleman--your father was a Captain of Chasseurs, and his son will not dishonour him--you promise to observe the strictest silence and secrecy." Jacques bowed and smiled deferentially; their eyes met for a moment, and Monsieur Varbarriere said-- "You need not suppose anything so serious--_mon ami_--there is no tragedy or even _fourberie_ intended. I have heard spiritual marvels about that apartment; I am inquisitive. Say, I am composing a philosophy and writing a book on the subject, and I want some few facts about the proportions of it. See, here is a sketch--oblong square--that is the room. You will visit it--you take some pieces of cord--you measure accurately the distance from this wall to that--you see?--the length; then from this to this--the breadth. If any projection or recess, you measure its depth or prominence most exactly. If there be any door or buffet in the room, beside the entrance, you mark where. You also measure carefully the thickness of the wall at the windows and the door. I am very curious, and all this you shall do." The courier shrugged, and smiled, and pondered. "Come, there may be difficulties, but such as melt before the light of your genius and the glow of this," and he lifted a little column of a dozen golden coins between his finger and thumb. "Do you think that when we, the visitors, are all out walking or driving, a chamber-maid would hesitate for a couple of these counters to facilitate your enterprise and enable you to do all this? Bah! I know them too well." "I am flattered of the confidence of Monsieur. I am _ravi_ of the opportunity to serve him." There was something perhaps cynical in the imposing solemnity of gratitude with which M. Varbarriere accepted these evidences of devotion. "You must so manage that she will suppose nothing of the fact that it is _I_ who want all these foolish little pieces of twine," said the grave gentleman; "she would tell everybody. What will you say to her?" "Ah, Monsieur, please, it will be Margery. She is a charming rogue, and as discreet as myself. She will assist, and I will tell her nothing but fibs; and we shall make some money. She and I together in the servants' hall--she shall talk of the ghosts and the green chamber, and I will tell how we used to make wagers who would guess, without having seen it, the length of such a room in the Chateau Mauville, when we were visiting there--how many windows--how high the chimneypiece; and then the nearest guesser won the pool. You see, Monsieur--you understand?--Margery and I, we will play this little trick. And so she will help me to all the measurements before, without sharing of my real design, quite simply." "Sir, I admire your care of the young lady's simplicity," said M. Varbarriere, sardonically. "You will procure all this for me as quickly as you can, and I shan't forget my promise." Jacques was again radiantly grateful. "Jacques, you have the character of being always true to your chief. I never doubted your honour, and I show the esteem I hold you in by undertaking to give you five thousand francs in three weeks' time, provided you satisfy me while here. It would not cost me much, Jacques, to make of you as good a gentleman as your father." Jacques here threw an awful and indescribable devotion into his countenance. "I don't say, mind you, I'll do it--only that if I pleased I very easily might. You shall bring me a little plan of that room, including all the measurements I have mentioned, if possible to-morrow--the sooner the better; that to begin with. Enough for the present. Stay; have you had any talk with Sir Jekyl Marlowe--you must be quite frank with me--has he noticed you?" "He has done me that honour." "Frequently?" "Once only, Monsieur." "Come, let us hear what passed." M. Varbarriere had traced a slight embarrassment in Jacques' countenance. So with a little effort and as much gaiety as he could command, Jacques related tolerably truly what had passed in the stable-yard. A lurid flush appeared on the old man's forehead for a moment, and he rang out fiercely-- "And why the devil, sir, did you not mention that before?" "I was not aware, Monsieur, it was of any importance," he answered deferentially. "Jacques, you must tell me the whole truth--did he make you a present?" "No, Monsieur." "He gave you nothing then or since?" "_Pas un sous, Monsieur_--nothing." "Has he _promised_ you anything?" "Nothing, Monsieur." "But you understand what he means?" "Monsieur will explain himself." "You understand he has made you an offer in case you consent to transfer your service." "Monsieur commands my allegiance." "You have only to say so if you wish it." "Monsieur is my generous chief. I will not abandon him for a stranger--never, while he continues his goodness and his preference for me." "Well, you belong to _me_ for a month, you know, by our agreement. After that you may consider what you please. In the meantime be true to me; and not one word, if you please, of me or my concerns to anybody." "Certainly, Monsieur. I shall be found a man of honour now as always." "I have no doubt, Jacques; as I told you, I know you to be a gentleman--I rely upon you." M. Varbarriere looked rather grimly into his eye as he uttered this compliment; and when the polite little gentleman had left the room, M. Varbarriere bethought him how very little he had to betray--how little he knew about him, his nephew, and his plans; and although he would not have liked his inquiries to be either baulked or disclosed, he could yet mentally snap his fingers at Monsieur. CHAPTER XXVII. M. Varbarriere talks a little more freely. After his valet left him, M. Varbarriere did not descend, but remained in his dressing-room, thinking profoundly; and, after a while, he opened his pocket-book, and began to con over a number of figures, and a diagram to which these numbers seemed to refer. Sometimes standing at the window, at others pacing the floor, and all the time engrossed by a calculation, like a man over a problem in mathematics. For two or three minutes he had been thus engaged when Guy Strangways entered the room. "Ho! young gentleman, why don't you read your prayer-book?" said the old man, with solemn waggery. "I don't understand," said the young gentleman. "No, you don't. I am the old sphynx, you see, and some of my riddles I can't make out, even myself. My faith! I have been puzzling my head till it aches over my notebook; and I saw you walking with that old lady, Lady Alice Redcliffe, up and down so affectionately. _There_ is another riddle! My faith! the house itself is an enigma. And Sir Jekyl--what do you think of _him_; is he going to marry?" "To marry!" echoed Guy Strangways. "Ay, to marry. I do not know, but he is so sly. We must not let him marry, you know; it would be so cruel to poor little Mademoiselle Beatrix--eh?" Guy Strangways looked at him doubtingly. "He is pretty old, you know, but so am I, and _older_, my faith! But I think he is making eyes at the _married_ ladies--eh?" "I have not observed--perhaps so," answered Guy, carelessly. "He does walk and talk a great deal with that pretty Madame Maberly." "Madame Maberly? Bah!" And M. Varbarriere's "bah" sounded like one of those long sneering slides played sometimes on a deep chord of a double bass. "No, no, it is that fine woman, Miladi Jane Lennox." "Lady Jane! I fancied she did not like him. I mean that she positively _dis_liked him; and to say truth, I never saw, on his part, the slightest disposition to make himself agreeable." "I do not judge by words or conduct--in presence of others those are easily controlled; it is when the eyes meet--you can't mistake. Bah! I knew the first evening we arrived. Now see, you must have your eyes about you, Guy. It is _your_ business, not mine. Very important to you, mon petit garçon; of no sort of imaginable consequence to me, except as your friend; therefore you shall watch and report to me. You understand?" Guy flushed with a glow of shame and anger, and looked up with gleaming eyes, expecting to meet the deep-set observation of the old man. Had their eyes encountered, perhaps a quarrel would have resulted, and the fates and furies would have had the consequences in their hands; but M. Varbarriere was at the moment reading his attorney's letter again. Guy looked out of the window, and thought resolutely. "One duplicity I have committed. It is base enough to walk among these people masked, but to be a spy--_never_." And he clenched his hand and pressed his foot upon the floor. It was dreadful to know that these moral impossibilities were expected of him. It was terrible to feel that a rupture with his best, perhaps his only friend, was drawing slowly but surely on; but he was quite resolved. Nothing on earth could tempt him to the degradation of which his kinsman seemed to think so lightly. Happily, perhaps, for the immediate continuance of their amicable relations, the thoughts of M. Varbarriere had taken a new turn, or rather reverted to the channel from which they had only for a few minutes diverged. "You were walking with that old woman, Lady Alice Redcliffe. She seemed to talk a great deal. How did she interest you all that time?" "To say truth, she did _not_ interest me all that time. She talked vaguely about family afflictions, and the death of her son; and she looked at me at first as if I were a brigand, and said I was very like some one whom she had lost." "Then she's a friendly sort of old woman, at least on certain topics, and garrulous? Who's there? Oh! Jacques; very good, you need not stay." The old gentleman was by this time making his toilet. "Did she happen to mention a person named Gwynn, a housekeeper in her service?" "No." "I'm glad she is an affable old lady; we shall be sure to hear something useful," said the old gentleman, with an odd smile. "That housekeeper I must see and sift. They tell me she's impracticable; _they_ found her so. I shall see. While you live, Guy, do your own business; no one else will do it, be sure. I did mine, and I've got on." The old gentleman, who was declaiming before the looking-glass in his shirt-sleeves and crimson silk suspenders, brushing up that pyramid of grizzled hair which added to the solemnity of his effect, now got into his black silk waistcoat. The dressing-bell had rung, and the candles had superseded daylight. "You'll observe all I told you, Guy. Sir Jekyl shan't marry--he would grow what they call impracticable, like Madame Gwynn; Miss Beatrix, _she_ shan't marry either--it would make, perhaps, new difficulties; and you, I may as well tell you, _can't_ marry her. When you know the reasons you will see that such an event _could not be contemplated_. You understand?" And he dropped his haircomb, with which he had been bestowing a last finish on his spire of hair, upon his dressing-table, with a slight emphasis. "Therefore, Guy, you will understand you must not be a fool about that young lady; there are many others to speak to; and if you allow yourself to like her, you will be a miserable stripling till you forget her." "There is no need, sir, to warn me; I have resolved to avoid any such feeling. I have sense enough to see that there are obstacles insurmountable to my ever cherishing that ambition, and that I never could be regarded as worthy." "Bravo! young man, that is what I like; you are as modest as the devil; and _here_, I can tell you, modesty, which is so often silly, is as wise as the serpent. You understand?" The large-chested gentleman was now getting into his capacious coat, having buttoned his jewelled wrist-studs in; so he contemplated himself in the glass, with a touch and a pluck here and there. "One word more, about that old woman. Talk to her all you please, and let _her_ talk--and talk _more_ than you, so much the better; but observe, she will question you about yourself and your connections, and one word you shall not answer; observe she learns nothing from you, that is, in the spirit of your solemn promise to me." M. Varbarriere had addressed this peremptory reminder over his shoulder, and now retouched his perpendicular cone of hair, which waved upwards like a grey flame. "Guy, you will be late," he called over his shoulder. "Come, my boy; we must not be walking in with the entremets." And he plucked out that huge chased repeater, a Genevan masterpiece, which somehow harmonised, with his air of wealth and massiveness, and told him he had hut eight minutes left; and with an injunction to haste, which Guy, with a start, obeyed, this sable and somewhat mountainous figure swayed solemnly from the room. "Who _is_ that Monsieur Varbarriere?" inquired Lady Alice of her host, as the company began to assemble in the drawing-room, before that gentleman had made his appearance. "I have not a notion." "Are you serious? No, you're _not_ serious," served Lady Alice. "I'm _always_ serious when I talk to you." "Thank you. I'm sure that is meant for a compliment," said the old lady, curtly. "And I assure you I mean what I say," continued Sir Jekyl, not minding the parenthesis. "I really don't know, except that he comes from France--rather a large place, you know--_where_ he comes from. I have not a notion what his business, calling, or trade may be." "_Trade!_" replied Lady Alice, with dry dignity. "Trade, to be sure. _You're_ a tradesman yourself, you know--a miner--_I_ bought twenty-two shares in that for you in June last; you're an iron ship-builder--you have fifteen in that; you're a 'bus-man--you have ten there; and you were devilish near being a brewer, only it stopped." "Don't talk like a fool--a joint-stock company I hope is one thing, and a--a--the other sort of thing quite another, I fancy." "You fancy, yes; but it is not. It's a firm--Smith, Brown, Jones, Redcliffe, and Co., omnibus drivers, brewers, and so forth. So if he's not a rival, and doesn't interfere with _your_ little trade, I really don't care, my dear little mamma, what sort of shop my friend Varbarriere may keep; but as I said, I don't know; maybe he's too fine a fellow to meddle, like us, with vats and 'busses." "It appears odd that you should know absolutely nothing about your own guests," remarked Lady Alice. "Well, it would be odd, only I do," answered Sir Jekyl--"all one needs to know or ask. He presented his papers, and comes duly accredited--a letter from old Philander the Peer. Do you remember Peery still? I don't mind him; he was always a noodle, though in a question of respectability he's not quite nothing; and another from Bob Charteris--you don't know him--Attaché at Paris; a better or more reliable quarter one could not hear from. I'll let you read them to-morrow; they speak unequivocally for his respectability; and I think the inference is even that he has a soul above 'busses. Here he is." M. Varbarriere advanced with the air of a magician about to conduct a client to his magic mirror, toward Lady Alice before whom he made a low bow, having been presented the day before, and he inquired with a grave concern how she now felt herself and expressed with a sonorous suavity his regrets and his hopes. Lady Alice, having had a good account of him, received him on the whole very graciously; and being herself a good Frenchwoman, the conversation flowed on agreeably. CHAPTER XXVIII. Some private Talk of Varbarriere and Lady Alice at the Dinner-table. At dinner he was placed beside the old lady. He understood good cookery, and with him to dine was to analyse and contemplate. He was usually taciturn and absorbed during the process; but on this occasion he made an effort, and talked a good deal in a grave, but, as the old lady thought, an agreeable and kindly vein. Oddly enough, he led the conversation to his nephew, and found his companion very ready indeed to listen, as perhaps he had anticipated, and even to question him on this theme with close but unavowed interest. "He bears two names which, united, remind me of some of my bitterest sorrows--Guy was my dear son's Christian name, and Mr. Strangways was his most particular friend; and there is a likeness too," she continued, looking with her dim and clouded eyes upon Guy at the other side, whom fate had placed beside Miss Blunket--"a likeness so wonderful as to make me, at times, quite indescribably nervous; at times it is--how handsome! don't you consider him wonderfully handsome?--at times the likeness is so exact as to become all but insupportable." She glanced suddenly as she spoke, and saw an expression on the countenance of M. Varbarriere, who looked for no such inspection at that moment, which she neither liked nor understood. No, it was _not_ pleasant, connected with the tone in which she spoke, the grief and the agitation she recounted, and above all with the sad and horrible associations connected indissolubly in her mind with those names and features. It was a face both insincere and mocking--such a countenance as has perhaps shocked us in childhood, when in some grief or lamentation, looking up for sympathy, we behold a face in which lurks a cruel enjoyment, or a sense of an undivulged joke. Perhaps he read in the old lady's face something of the shock she experienced; for he said, to cover his indiscretion, "I was, at the moment, reminded of a strange mistake which once took place in consequence of a likeness. Some of the consequences were tragic, but the rest so ridiculous that I can never call the adventure to mind without feeling the comedy prevail. I was thinking of relating it, but, on recollection, it is too vulgar." M. Varbarriere, I am certain, was telling fibs; but he did it well. He did not hasten to change his countenance, but allowed that expression to possess his features serenely after she had looked, and only shifted it for a grave and honest one when he added-- "You think then, perhaps, that, my nephew had formerly the honour of being a companion of Mr. Redcliffe, your son?" "Oh, dear, no. He was about Jekyl's age. I dare say I had lost him before that young man was born." "Oh! that surprises me very much. Monsieur Redcliffe--your son--is it possible he should have been so much older?" "My son's name was Deverell," said the old lady, sadly. "Ah! that's very odd. He, Guy, then, had an uncle who had a friend of that name--Guy Deverell--long ago, in this country. That is very interesting." "_Is_ not it?" repeated Lady Alice, with a gasp. "I feel, somehow, it must be he--a tall, slight young man." "Alas! madam, he is much changed if it be he. He must have been older than your son, madam. He must be, I think, near sixty now, and grown rather stout. I've heard him talk at times of his friend Guy Deverell." "And with affection, doubtless." "Well, yes, with affection, certainly, and with great indignation of his death--the mode of it." "Ah! yes," said Lady Alice, flushing to the roots of her grey hair, and looking down on her plate. Here there was silence for the space of a minute or more. "Yes, Monsieur Varbarriere; but you know, even though we cannot always forget, we must forgive." "Champagne, my lady?" inquired the servant over her shoulder. "_No_, thank you," murmured Lady Alice. M. Varbarriere took some and sipped it, wondering how Sir Jekyl contrived to get such wines, and mentally admitting that even in the champagne countries it would task him--M. Varbarriere--to find its equal. And he said-- "Yes, Lady Alice, divine philosophy, but not easy to practise. I fear it is as hard to do one as the other." "And how _is_ Mr. Strangways?" inquired Lady Alice. They were talking very confidentially and in a low tone, as if old Strangways' health was the subject of conspiracy. "Growing old, Lady Alice; he has not spared himself; otherwise well." "And this, you say, is his nephew?" continued the old lady. "And you?" "I am Guy's uncle--his _mother's_ brother." "And his mother, is _she_ living?" "No, poor thing! gone long ago." Lady Alice looked again unexpectedly into M. Varbarriere's face, and there detected the same unreliable expression. "Monsieur Varbarriere," said old Lady Alice a little sternly in his ear, "you will pardon me, but it seems to me that you are trifling, and not quite sincere in all you tell me." In a moment the gravity of all the Chief Justices that ever sat in England was gathered in his massive face. "I am shocked, madam, at your thinking me capable of trifling. How have I showed, I entreat, any evidences of a disposition so contrary to my feelings?" "I tell you frankly--in your countenance, Monsieur Varbarriere; and I observed it before, Monsieur." "Believe me, I entreat, madam, when I assure you, upon the honour of a gentleman, every word I have said is altogether true. Nor would it be easy for me to describe how profound is my sympathy with you." From this time forth Lady Alice saw no return, of that faint but odious look of banter that had at first shocked and then irritated her; and fortified by the solemn assurance he had given, she fell into a habit of referring it to some association unconnected with herself, and tried to make up for her attack upon him by an increased measure of courtesy. Dwelling on those subjects that most interested Lady Alice, he and she grew more and more confidential, and she came, before they left the parlour, to entertain a high opinion of both the wisdom and the philanthropy of M. Varbarriere. CHAPTER XXIX. The Ladies and Gentlemen resume Conversation in the Drawing-room. "Dives, my boy," said the Baronet, taking his stand beside his brother on the hearthrug, when the gentlemen had followed the ladies into the drawing-room, and addressing him comfortably over his shoulder, "the Bishop's coming to-morrow." "Ho!" exclaimed Dives, bringing his right shoulder forward, so as nearly to confront his brother. They had both been standing side by side, with their backs, according to the good old graceful English fashion, to the fire. "Here's his note--came to-night. He'll be here to dinner, I suppose, by the six o'clock fast train to Slowton." "Thanks," said Dives, taking the note and devouring it energetically. "Just half a dozen lines of three words each--always so, you know. Poor old Sammy! I always liked old Sammy--a good old cock at school he was--great fun, you know, but always a gentleman." Sir Jekyl delivered these recollections standing with his hands behind his back, and looking upwards with a smile to the ceiling, as the Rev. Dives Marlowe read carefully every word of the letter. "Sorry to see his hand begins to shake a little," said Dives, returning the interesting manuscript. "Time for it, egad! He's pretty well on, you know. We'll all be shaky a bit before long, Dives." "How long does he stay?" "I think only a day or two. I have his first note up-stairs, if I did not burn it," answered the Baronet. "I'm glad I'm to meet him--_very_ glad indeed. I think it's five years since I met his lordship at the consecration of the new church of Clopton Friars. I always found him very kind--very. He likes the school-house fellows." "You'd better get up your parochial experiences a little, and your theology, eh? They say he expects his people to be alive. You used to be rather good at theology--usen't you?" Dives smiled. "Pretty well, Jekyl." "And what do you want of him, Dives?" "Oh! he could be useful to me in fifty ways. I was thinking--you know there's that archdeaconry of Priors." Dives replied pretty nearly in a whisper. "By Jove! yes--a capital thing--I forgot it;" and Sir Jekyl laughed heartily. "Why do you laugh, Jekyl?" he asked, a little drily. "I--I really don't know," said the Baronet, laughing on. "I don't see anything absurd or unreasonable in it. That archdeaconry has always been held by some one connected with the county families. Whoever holds it must be fit to associate with the people of that neighbourhood, who won't be intimate, you know, with everybody; and the thing really is little more than a feather, the house and place are expensive, and no one that has not something more than the archdeaconry itself can afford it." The conversation was here arrested by a voice which inquired-- "Pray, can you tell me what day General Lennox returns?" The question was Lady Alice's. She had seemed to be asleep--probably was--and opening her eyes suddenly, had asked it in a hard, dry tone. "_I?_" said Sir Jekyl. "I don't know, I protest--maybe to-night--maybe to-morrow. Come when he may, he's very welcome." "You have not heard?" she persisted. "No, I have not," he answered, rather tartly, with a smile. Lady Alice nodded, and raised her voice-- "Lady Jane Lennox, you've heard, no doubt--pray, when does the General return?" If the scene had not been quite so public, I dare say this innocent little inquiry would have been the signal for one of those keen encounters to which these two fiery spirits were prone. "He has been detained unexpectedly," drawled Lady Jane. "You hear from him constantly?" pursued the old lady. "Every day." "It's odd he does not say when you may look for him," said Lady Alice. "Egad, you want to make her jealous, I think," interposed Sir Jekyl. "Jealous? Well, I think a young wife may very reasonably be jealous, though not exactly in the vulgar sense, when she is left without a clue to her husband's movements." "You said you were going to write to him. I wish you would, Lady Alice," said the young lady, with an air of some contempt. "I can't believe he has not said how soon his return may be looked for," observed the old lady. "I suppose he'll say whenever he can, and in the meantime I don't intend plaguing him with inquiries he can't answer." And with these words she leaned back fatigued, and with a fierce glance at Sir Jekyl, who was close by, she added, so loud that I wonder Lady Alice did not hear her--"Why don't you stop that odious old woman?" "Stop an odious old woman!--why, who ever did? Upon my honour, I know no way but to kill her," chuckled the Baronet. Lady Jane deigned no reply. "Come here, Dives, and sit by me," croaked the old lady, beckoning him with her thin, long finger. "I've hardly seen you since I came." "Very happy, indeed--very much obliged to you, Lady Alice, for wishing it." And the natty but somewhat forbidding-looking Churchman sat himself down in a prie-dieu chair vis-à-vis to the old gentlewoman, and folded his hands, expecting her exordium. "Do you remember, Sir Harry, your father?" "Oh, dear, yes. I recollect my poor father very well. We were at Oxford then or just going. How old was I?--pretty well out of my teens." It must be observed that they sat in a confidential proximity--nobody listened--nobody cared to approach. "You remember when he died, poor man?" "Yes--poor father!--we were at home--Jekyl and I--for the holidays--I believe it _was_--a month or so. The Bishop, you know, was with him." "I know. He's coming to-morrow." "Yes; so my brother here just told me--an excellent, exemplary, pious prelate, and a true friend to my poor father. He posted fifty miles--from Doncaster--in four hours and a half, to be with him. And a great comfort he was. I shall never forget it to him." "I don't think you cared for your father, Dives; and Jekyl positively disliked him," interposed Lady Alice agreeably. "I trust there was no feeling so unchristian and monstrous ever harboured in my brother's breast," replied Dives, loftily, and with a little flush in his cheeks. "You can't believe any such thing, my dear Dives; and you know you did not care if he was at the bottom of the Red Sea, and I don't wonder." "Pray don't, Lady Alice. If you think such things, I should prefer not hearing them," murmured Dives, with clerical dignity. "And what I want to ask you now is this," continued Lady Alice; "you are of course aware that he told the Bishop that he wanted that green chamber, for some reason or another, pulled down?" Dives coughed, and said-- "Well, yes, I _have_ heard." "What was his reason, have you any notion?" "He expressed none. My father gave, I believe, no reason. I never heard any," replied the Reverend Dives Marlowe. "You may be very sure he had a reason," continued Lady Alice. "Yes, very likely." "And why is it not done?" persisted Lady Alice. "I can no more say why, than you can," replied Dives. "But why don't you see to it?" demanded she. "See to it! Why, my dear Lady Alice, you must know I have no more power in the matter than Doocey there, or the man in the moon. The house belongs to Jekyl. Suppose you speak to him." "You've a tongue in your head, Dives, when you've an object of your own." Dives flushed again, and looked, for an apostle, rather forbidding. "I have not the faintest notion, Lady Alice, to what you allude." "Whatever else he may have been, Dives, he was your father," continued Lady Alice, not diverted by this collateral issue; "and as his son, it was and is your business to give Jekyl no rest till he complies with that dying injunction." "Jekyl's his own master; what can I do?" "Do as you do where your profit's concerned; tease him as you would for a good living, if he had it to give." "I don't press my interests much upon Jekyl. I've never teased him or anybody else, for anything," answered Dives, grandly. "Come, come, Dives Marlowe; you have duties on earth, and something to think of besides yourself." "I trust I don't need to be reminded of that, Lady Alice," said the cleric, with a bow and a repulsive meekness. "Well, speak to your brother." "I _have_ alluded to the subject, and an opportunity _may_ occur again." "_Make_ one--make an opportunity, Dives." "There are rules, Lady Alice, which we must all observe." "Come, come, Dives Marlowe," said the lady, very tartly, "remember you're a clergyman." "I hope I _do_, madam; and I trust _you_ will too." And the Rector rose, and with an offended bow, and before she could reply, made a second as stiff, and turned away to the table, where he took up a volume and pretended to read the title. "Dives," said the old lady, making no account of his huff, "please to tell Monsieur Varbarriere that I should be very much obliged if he would afford me a few minutes here, if he is not better engaged; that is, it seems to me he has nothing to do there." M. Varbarriere was leaning back in his chair, his hands folded, and the points of his thumbs together; his eyes closed, and his bronzed and heavy features composed, as it seemed, to deep thought; and one of his large shining shoes beating time slowly to the cadences of his ruminations. The Reverend Dives Marlowe was in no mood just at that moment to be trotted about on that offensive old lady's messages. But it is not permitted to gentlemen, even of his sacred calling, to refuse, in this wise, to make themselves the obedient humble servants of the fair sex, and to tell them to go on their own errands. Silently he made her a slight bow, secretly resolving to avail himself sparingly of his opportunities of cultivating her society for the future. Perhaps it was owing to some mesmeric reciprocity, but exactly at this moment M. Varbarriere opened his eyes, arose, and walked towards the fireplace, as if his object had been to contemplate the ornaments over the chimneypiece; and arriving at the hearthrug, and beholding Lady Alice, he courteously drew near, and accosted her with a deferential gallantry, saving the Reverend Dives Marlowe, who was skirting the other side of the round table, the remainder of his tour. CHAPTER XXX. Varbarriere picks up something about Donica Gwynn. Drawing-room conversation seldom opens like an epic in the thick of the plot, and the introductory portions, however graceful, are seldom worth much. M. Varbarriere and Lady Alice had been talking some two or three minutes, when she made this inquiry. "When did you last see the elder Mr. Strangways, whom you mentioned at dinner?" "Lately, very lately--within this year." "Did he seem pretty well?" "Perfectly well." "What does he think about it all?" "I find a difficulty. If Lady Alice Redcliffe will define her question----" "I mean--well, I should have asked you first, whether he ever talked to you about the affairs of that family--the Deverell family--I mean as they were affected by the loss of a deed. I don't understand these things well; but it involved the loss, they say, of an estate; and then there was the great misfortune of my life." M. Varbarriere here made a low and reverential bow of sympathy; he knew she meant the death of her son. "Upon this latter melancholy subject he entirely sympathises with you. His grief of course has long abated, but his indignation survives." "And well it may, sir. And what does he say of the paper that disappeared?" "He thinks, madam, that it was stolen." "Ha! So do I." The confidential and secret nature of their talk had drawn their heads together, and lowered their voices. "He thinks it was abstracted by one of the Marlowe family." "Which of them? Go on, sir." "Well, by old Sir Harry Marlowe, the father of Sir Jekyl." "It certainly _was_ he; it could have been no other; it was stolen, that is, I don't suppose by his hand; I don't know, perhaps it was; he was capable of a great deal; _I_ say nothing, Monsieur Varbarriere." Perhaps that gentleman thought she had said a good deal; but he was as grave on this matter as she. "You seem, madam, very positive. May I be permitted to inquire whether you think there exists proof of the fact?" "I don't speak from proof, sir." Lady Alice sat straighter, and looked full in his face for a moment, and said-- "I am talking to you, Monsieur Varbarriere, in a very confidential way. I have not for ever so many years met a human being who cared, or indeed knew anything of my poor boy as his friend. I have at length met you, and I open my mind, my conjectures, my suspicions; but, you will understand, in the strictest confidence." "I have so understood all you have said, and in the same spirit I have spoken and mean to speak, madam, if you permit me, to you. I do feel an interest in that Deverell family, of whom I have heard so much. There was a servant, a rather superior order of person, who lived as housekeeper--a Mrs. Gwynn--to whom I would gladly have spoken, had chance thrown her in my way, and from whom it was hoped something important might be elicited." "She is my housekeeper now," said Lady Alice. "Oh! and--" "I think she's a sensible person; a respectable person, I believe, in her rank of life, although they chose to talk scandal about her; as what young woman who lived in the same house with that vile old man, Sir Harry Marlowe, could escape scandal? But, poor thing! there was no evidence that ever I could learn; nothing but lies and envy: and she has been a very faithful servant to the family." "And is now in your employment, madam?" "My housekeeper at Wardlock," responded Lady Alice. "Residing there now?" inquired M. Varbarriere. Lady Alice nodded assent. I know not by what subtle evidences, hard to define, seldom if ever remembered, we sometimes come to a knowledge, by what seems an intuition, of other people's intentions. M. Varbarriere was as silent as Lady Alice was; his heavy bronzed features were still, and he looking down on one of those exquisite wreaths of flowers that made the pattern of the carpet; his brown, fattish hands were folded in his lap. He was an image of an indolent reverie. Perhaps there was something special and sinister in the composure of those large features. Lady Alice's eye rested on his face, and instantly a fear smote her. She would have liked to shake him by the arm, and cry, "In God's name, do you mean us any harm?" But it is not permitted even to old ladies such as she to explode in adjuration, and shake up old gentlemen whose countenances may happen to strike them unpleasantly. As people like to dispel an omen, old Lady Alice wished to disturb the unpleasant pose and shadows of those features. So she spoke to him, and he looked up like his accustomed self. "You mentioned Mr. Herbert Strangways just now, Monsieur. I forget what relation you said he is to the young gentleman who accompanies you, Mr. Guy Strangways." "Uncle, madam." "And, pray, does he perceive--did he ever mention a most astonishing likeness in that young person to my poor son?" "He has observed a likeness, madam, but never seemed to think it by any means so striking as you describe it. Your being so much moved by it has surprised me." Here Lady Alice's old eyes wandered toward the spot where Guy Strangways stood, resting them but a moment; every time she looked so at him, this melancholy likeness struck her with a new force. She sighed and shuddered, and removed her eyes. On looking again at M. Varbarriere, she saw the same slightly truculent shadow over his features, as again he looked drowsily upon the carpet. She had spent nearly a quarter of a century in impressing her limited audience with the idea that if there were thunderbolts in heaven they ought to fall upon Sir Jekyl Marlowe. Yet, now that she saw in that face something like an evil dream, a promise of judgment coming, a feeling of compunction and fear agitated her. She looked over his stooping shoulders and saw pretty Beatrix leaning on the back of her father's chair, the young lady pleading gaily for some concession, Sir Jekyl laughing her off. "How pretty she looks to-night--poor Trixie!" said Lady Alice, unconsciously. M. Varbarriere raised his head, and looked, directed by her gaze, toward father and daughter. But his countenance did not brighten. On the contrary, it grew rather darker, and he looked another way, as if the sight offended him. "Pretty creature she is--pretty Beatrix!" exclaimed the old lady, looking sadly and fondly across at her. No response was vouchsafed by M. Varbarriere. "Don't you think so? Don't you think my granddaughter very lovely?" Thus directly appealed to, M. Varbarriere conceded the point, but not with effusion. "Yes, Mademoiselle is charming--she is very charming--but I am not a critic. I have come to that time of life, Lady Alice, at which our admiration of mere youth, with its smooth soft skin and fresh tints, supersedes our appreciation of beauty." In making this unsatisfactory compliment, he threw but one careless glance at Beatrix. "That girl, you know, is heiress of all this--nothing but the title goes to Dives, and the small estate of Grimalston," said Lady Alice. "Of course I love my grandchild, but it always seems to me wrong to strip a title of its support, and send down the estates by a different line." "Miss Beatrix Marlowe has a great deal too much for her own happiness. It is a disproportioned fortune, and in a young lady so sensible will awake suspicions of all her suitors. 'You are at my feet, sir,' she will think, 'but is your worship inspired by love or by avarice?' She is in the situation of that prince who turned all he touched into gold; while it feeds the love of money, it starves nature." "I don't think it has troubled her head much as yet. If she had no dot whatever, she could not be less conscious," said the old lady. "Some people might go through life and never feel it; and even of those who do, I doubt if there is one who would voluntarily surrender the consequence or the power of exorbitant wealth for the speculative blessing of friends and lovers more sincere. I could quite fancy, notwithstanding, a lady, either wise or sensitive, choosing a life of celibacy in preference to marriage under conditions so suspicious. Miss Marlowe would be a happier woman with only four or five hundred pounds a-year." "Well, maybe so," said the old lady, dubiously, for she knew something of the world as well as of the affections. "She will not, most likely, give it away; but if it were taken, she would be happier. Few people have nerve for an operation, and yet many are the more comfortable when it is performed." "Beatrix has only been out one season, and that but interruptedly. She has been very much admired, though, and I have no doubt will be very suitably married." "There are disadvantages, however." "I don't understand," said Lady Alice, a little stiffly. "I mean the tragedy in which Sir Jekyl is implicated," said M. Varbarriere, rising, and looking, without intending it, so sternly at Lady Alice, that she winced under it. "Yes, to be sure, but you know the world does not mind that--the world does not choose to believe ill of fortune's minions--at least, to remember it. A few old-fashioned people view it as you and I do; but Jekyl stands very well. It is a wicked world, Monsieur Varbarriere." "It is not for me to say. Every man has profited, more or less, at one time or another, by its leniency. Perhaps I feel in this particular case more strongly than others; but, notwithstanding the superior rank, wealth, and family of Sir Jekyl Marlowe, I should not, were I his equal, like to be tied to him by a close family connexion." Lady Alice did not feel anger, nor was she pleased. She did not look down abashed at discovering that this stranger seemed to resent on so much higher ground than she the death of her son. She compressed her thin lips, looking a little beside the stern gentleman in black, at a distant point on the wall, and appeared to reflect. CHAPTER XXXI. Lady Jane puts on her Brilliants. That evening, by the late post, had arrived a letter, in old General Lennox's hand, to his wife. It had come at dinner-time, and it was with a feeling of _ennui_ she read the address. It was one of those billets which, in Swift's phrase, would "have kept cool;" but, subsiding on the ottoman, she opened it--conjugal relations demanded this attention; and Lady Jane, thinking "what a hand he writes!" ran her eye lazily down those crabbed pages in search of a date to light her to the passage where he announced his return; but there was none, so far as she saw. "What's all this about? 'Masterson, the silkmercer at Marlowe--a very'--something--'fellow--_honest_.' Yes, that's the word. So he may be, but I shan't buy his horrid trash, if that's what you mean," said she, crumpling up the stupid old letter, and leaning back, not in the sweetest temper, and with a sidelong glance of lazy defiance through her half-closed lashes, at the unconscious Lady Alice. And now arrived a sleek-voiced servant, who, bowing beside Lady Jane, informed her gently that Mr. Masterson had arrived with the parcel for her ladyship. "The parcel! what parcel?" "I'm not aware, my lady." "Tell him to give it to my maid. Ridiculous rubbish!" murmured Lady Jane, serenely. But the man returned. "Mr. Masterson's direction from the General, please, my lady, was to give the parcel into your own hands." "Where is he?" inquired Lady Jane, rising with a lofty fierceness. "In the small breakfast-parlour, my lady." "Show me the way, please." When Lady Jane Lennox arrived she found Mr. Masterson cloaked and muffled, as though off a journey, and he explained, that having met General Lennox yesterday accidentally in Oxford Street, in London, from whence he had only just returned, he had asked him to take charge of a parcel, to be delivered into her ladyship's own hands, where, accordingly, he now placed it. Lady Jane did not thank him; she was rather conscious of herself conferring a favour by accepting anything at his hands; and when he was gone she called her maid, and having reached her room and lighted her candles, she found a very beautiful set of diamonds. "Why, these are really superb, beautiful brilliants!" exclaimed the handsome young lady. The cloud had quite passed away, and a beautiful light glowed on her features. Forthwith to the glass she went, in a charming excitement. "Light all the candles you can find!" she exclaimed. "Well, my eyes, but them is beautiful, my lady!" ejaculated the maid, staring with a smirk, and feeling that at such a moment she might talk a little, without risk, which, indeed, was true. So with bed-room and dressing-table candles, and a pair purloined even from old Lady Alice's room, a tolerably satisfactory illumination was got up, and the jewels did certainly look dazzling. The pendants flashed in her ears--the exquisite collar round her beautiful throat--the tiara streamed livid fire over her low Venus-like forehead, and her eager eyes and parted lips expressed her almost childlike delight. There are silver bullets against charmed lives. There are women from whose snowy breasts the fire-tipped shafts of Cupid fall quenched and broken; and yet a handful of these brilliant pellets will find their way through that wintry whiteness, and lie lodged in her bleeding heart. After I know not how long a time spent before the glass, it suddenly struck Lady Jane to inquire of the crumpled letter, in which the name of Masterson figured, and of whose contents she knew, in fact, nothing, but that they named no day for the General's return. She had grown curious as to who the donor might be. Were those jewels a gift from the General's rich old sister, who had a splendid suit, she had heard, which she would never put on again? Had they come as a bequest? How was it, and whose were they? And now with these flashing gems still dangling so prettily in her ears, and spanning her white throat, as she still stood before the glass, she applied herself to spell out her General's meaning in better temper than for a long time she had read one of that gallant foozle's kindly and honest rigmaroles. At first the process was often interrupted by those glances at the mirror which it is impossible under ordinary circumstances to withhold; but as her interest deepened she drew the candle nearer, and read very diligently the stiffly written lines before her. They showed her that the magnificent present was from himself alone. I should be afraid to guess how many thousand pounds had been lavished upon those jewels. An uxorious fogey--a wicked old fool--perhaps we, outside the domestic circle, may pronounce him. Lady Jane within that magic ring saw differently. The brief, blunt, soldier-like affection that accompanied this magnificent present, and the mention of a little settlement of the jewels, which made them absolutely hers in case her "old man" should die, and the little conjecture "I wonder whether you would sometimes miss him?" smote her heart strangely. "What a gentleman--what an old darling!"--and she--how heinously had she requited his manly but foolish adoration. "I'll write to him this moment," she said, quite pale. And she took the casket in her hands and laid it on her bed, and sat down on the side of it, and trembled very much, and suddenly burst into tears, insomuch that her maid was startled, and yielding forthwith to her sympathy, largely leavened with curiosity, she came and stood by her and administered such consolation as people will who know nothing of your particular grief, and like, perhaps, to discover its causes. But after a while her mistress asked her impatiently what she meant, and, to her indignation and surprise, ordered her out of the room. "I wish he had not been so good to me. I wish he had ever been unkind to me. I wish he would beat me, Good Heaven! is it all a dream?" So, quite alone, with one flashing pendant in her ear, with the necklace still on--incoherently, wildly, and affrighted--raved Lady Jane, with a face hectic and wet with tears. Things appeared to her all on a sudden, quite in a new character, as persons suddenly called on to leave life, see their own doings as they never beheld them before; so with a shock, and an awakening, tumbled about her the whole structure of her illusions, and a dreadful void with a black perspective for the first time opened round her. She did not return to the drawing-room. When Beatrix, fearing she might be ill, knocked at the door of the green chamber, and heard from the far extremity Lady Jane's clear voice call "Come in," she entered. She found her lying in her clothes, with the counterpane thrown partially over her, upon the funereal-looking old bed, whose dark green curtains depended nearly from the ceiling. "Well!" exclaimed Lady Jane, almost fiercely, rising to her elbow, and staring at Beatrix. "I--you told me to come in. I'm afraid I mistook." "Did I? I dare say. I thought it was my maid. I've got such a bad headache." "I'm very sorry. Can I do anything?" "No, Beatrix--no, thank you; it will go away of itself." "I wish so much, Lady Jane, you would allow me to do anything for you. I--I sometimes fear I have offended you. You seemed to like me, I thought, when I saw you this spring in London, and I've been trying to think how I have displeased you." "_Displeased_ me! _you_ displease _me_! Oh! Beatrix, Beatrix, dear, you don't know, you can never know. I--it is a feeling of disgust and despair. I hate myself, and I'm frightened and miserable, and I wish I dare cling to you." She looked for a moment as if she would have liked to embrace her, but she turned away and buried her face in her pillow. "Dear Lady Jane, you must not be so agitated. You certainly are not well," said Beatrix, close to the bedside, and really a good deal frightened. "Have you heard--I hope you have not--any ill news?" If Lady Jane had been dead she could not have seemed to hear her less. "I hope General Lennox is not ill?" inquired she timidly. "Ill? No--I don't know; he's very well. I hope he's very well. I hope he is; and--and I know what I wish for myself." Beatrix knew what her grandmamma thought of Lady Jane's violence and temper, and she began to think that something must have happened to ruffle it that evening. "I wish you'd go, dear, you _can_ do nothing for me," said Lady Jane, ungraciously, with a sudden and sombre change of manner. "Well, dear Lady Jane, if you think of anything I can do for you, pray send for me; by-and-by you might like me to come and read to you; and would you like me to send your maid?" "Oh! no--no, no, _no_--nothing--good-night," repeated Lady Jane, impatiently. So Beatrix departed, and Lady Jane remained alone in the vast chamber, much more alone than one would be in a smaller one. CHAPTER XXXII. Conciliation. That night again, old Lady Alice, just settling, and having actually swallowed her drops, was disturbed by a visit from Lady Jane, who stood by her dishevelled, flushed, and with that storm-beaten look which weeping leaves behind it. She looked eager, even imploring, so that Lady Alice challenged her with-- "What on earth, Jane, brings you to my bedside at this hour of the night?" "I've come to tell you, Lady Alice, that I believe I was wrong the other night to speak to you as I did." "I thought, Jane," replied the old lady with dignity, "you would come to view your conduct in that light." "I thought you were right all the time; that is, I thought you meant kindly. I wished to tell you so," said Lady Jane. "I am glad, Jane, you can now speak with temper." "And I think you are the only person alive, except poor Lennox, who really cares for me." "I knew, Jane, that reflection and conscience would bring you to this form of mind," said Lady Alice. "And I think, when I come to say all this to you, you ought not to receive me so." "I meant to receive you kindly, Jane; one can't always in a moment forget the pain and humiliation which such scenes produce. It will help me, however, your expressing your regret as you do." "Well, I believe I am a fool--I believe I deserve this kind of treatment for lowering myself as I have done. The idea of my coming in here, half dressed, to say all this, and being received in this--in this indescribable way!" "If you don't feel it, Jane, I'm sorry you should have expressed any sorrow for your misconduct," replied Lady Alice, loftily. "Sorrow, madam! I never said a word about sorrow. I said I thought you cared for me, and I don't think so now. I am sure you don't, and I care just as little for you, not a pin, madam, with your ridiculous airs." "Very good, dear--then I suppose you are quite satisfied with your former conduct?" "Perfectly--of _course_ I am, and if I had had a notion what kind of person you are I should not have come near you, I promise you." Lady Alice smiled a patient smile, which somehow rather provoked the indignant penitent. "I'd as soon have put my hand in the fire, madam. I've borne too much from you--a great deal too much; it is you who should have come to me, madam, and I don't care a farthing about you." "And I'm still under sentence, I presume, when General Lennox, returns with his horsewhip," suggested Lady Alice, meekly. "It would do you nothing but good." "You are excessively _impertinent_," said Lady Alice, a little losing her self-command. "So are you, madam." "And I desire you'll leave my room," pursued Lady Alice. "And don't you address me while we remain in this house," exclaimed Lady Jane, with flaming cheeks. "Quit the room!" cried Lady Alice, sitting up with preternatural rigidity. "Open the door!" exclaimed Lady Jane, fiercely, to the scared maid, "and carry this candle." And the maid heard her mutter forcibly as she marched before her through the passage--"wicked old frump." I am afraid it was one of those cases of incompatibility of temper, or faults on both sides, in which it is, on the whole, more for the interests of peace and goodwill that people should live apart, than attempt that process under the same roof. There was a smoking party that night in Sir Jekyl's room. A line had reached him from General Lennox, regretting his long stay in town, and fearing that he could hardly hope to rejoin his agreeable party at Marlowe before a week or possibly ten days. But he hoped that they had not yet shot all the birds--and so, with that mild joke and its variations, the letter humorously concluded. He had also had a letter from the London legal firm--this time the corresponding limb of the body was Crowe--who, in reply to some fresh interrogatories of the Baronet's, wrote to say that his partner, Mr. Pelter, being called to France by legal business connected with Craddock and Maddox, it devolved on him to "assure Sir Jekyl that, so far as they could ascertain, everything in the matter to which he referred was perfectly quiet, and that no ground existed for apprehending any stir whatsoever." These letters from Pelter and Crowe, who were shrewd and by no means sanguine men of business, had always a charming effect on his spirits--not that he quite required them, or that they gave him any new ideas or information, but they were pleasant little fillips, as compliments are to a beauty. He was, therefore, this evening, more than usually lively, and kept the conversation in a very merry amble. Guy Strangways was absent; but his uncle, M. Varbarriere, was present, and in his solemn, sly, porcine way, enjoyed himself with small exertion and much unction, laughing sometimes sardonically and without noise, at things which did not seem to amuse the others so much; but, in all he said, very courteous, and in his demeanour suave and bowing. He was the last man to take leave of his host, on the threshold, that night. "I always lock myself in," said Sir Jekyl, observing his guest's eye rest for a moment on the key, on which his own finger rested, "and I can't think why the plague I do," he added, laughing, "except that my father did so before me." "It makes your pleasant room more a hermitage, and you more of a recluse," said Monsieur Varbarriere. "It is very well to be a recluse at pleasure, and take monastic vows of five hours' duration, and shut yourself up from the world, with the key of the world, nevertheless, in your pocket," said Sir Jekyl. Monsieur Varbarriere laughed, and somehow lingered, as if he expected more. "You don't mean that you assert your liberty at capricious hours, and affright your guests in the character of a ghost?" said Monsieur Varbarriere, jocosely. Sir Jekyl laughed. "No," said he, "on the contrary, I make myself more of a prisoner than you imagine. My man sleeps in the little room in which you now stand, and draws his little camp-bed across the door. I can't tell you the least why I do this, only it was my father's custom also, and I fancy my throat would be cut if my guard did not lie across the threshold. The world is a mad tree, and we are branches, says the Italian proverb. Good-night, Monsieur Varbarriere." "Good-night," said the guest, with a bow and a smile; and both, with a little laugh, shook hands and parted. Monsieur Varbarriere was a tolerably early riser, and next morning was walking in the cheering morning sun, under the leaves of the evergreens, glittering with dew. A broad walk, wide enough for a pony-carriage, sweeps along a gentle wooded elevation, commanding a wide prospect of that rich country. He leaned on the low parapet, and with his pocket field-glass lazily swept the broad landscape beneath. Lowering his telescope, he stood erect, and looked about him, when, to his surprise, for he did not think that either was an early riser, he saw Sir Jekyl Marlowe and Lady Jane Lennox walking side by side, and approaching. Monsieur Varbarriere was blessed with very long and clear sight, for his time of life. There was something in the gait of these two persons, and in the slight gesture that accompanied their conversation, as they approached, which struck M. Varbarriere as indicating excitement, though of different kinds. In the pace of the lady, who carried her head high, with a slight wave sometimes to this side, sometimes to that, was as much of what we term swagger as is compatible with feminine grace. Sometimes a sudden halt, for a moment, and a "left face" movement on her companion. Sir Jekyl, on the other hand, bore himself, he thought, like a gentleman a good deal annoyed and irritated. All this struck M. Varbarriere in a very few seconds, during which, uncertain whether he ought to come forward or not, he hesitated where he stood. It was plain, however, that he was quite unobserved standing in a recess of the evergreens; so he leaned once more upon the parapet, and applied his glass to his eye. Now he was right in his conjecture. This had been a very stormy walk, though the cool grey light of morning is not the season for exciting demonstrations. We will take them up in the midst of their conversation, a little before Monsieur Varbarriere saw them--just as Sir Jekyl said with a slight sneer-- "Oh, of course, it was very kind." "More, it's _princely_, sir," cried Lady Jane. "Well, princely--very princely--only, pray, dear Jane, do not talk so very loud; you can't possibly wish the keepers and milkmaids to hear every word you say." "I don't care, Jekyl. I think you have made me mad." "You _are_ a bit mad, Jane, but it is not I who made you so." "Yes, Jekyl, you've made me mad--you have made me a fiend; but, bad as I am, I can never face that good man more." "Now don't--now don't. What _can_ be the matter with you?" urged Sir Jekyl in a low tone. "This, sir--I'll see him no more--you must. You _shall_ take me away." "Now, now, now--_come_! Are you talking like a sane person, Jane? What the devil can have come over you about these trumpery diamonds?" "You shan't talk that way." "Come! I venture to say they are nothing like as valuable as you fancy, and whatever they are, Lennox got them a devilish good bargain, rely on it. He knows perfectly well what he's about. Everyone knows how rich he is, and the wife of a fellow like that ought to have jewels; people would talk--I give you my honour they would, if you had not; and then he is in town, with nothing to keep him there--no business, I mean--an old military man, and he wants to keep you in good-humour." "It's a lie. I know what you mean." "Upon my soul, it's fact," he laughed, looking very pale. "Surely you don't mistake an old East Indian general for a Joseph!" "Talk any way but that, you wretch! I know him. It's no use--he's the soul of honour. Oh Jekyl, Jekyl! why did not you marry me when you might, and save me from all this?" "Now, Janet, _is_ this reasonable--you know you never thought of it--you know it would not have done--would you have liked Beatrix? Besides, you have really done better--a great _deal_ better--he's not so old as he looks--I dare say not much older than I--and a devilish deal richer, and--a--what the devil you want, for the life of me, I can't see." It was about at this point in their conversation that, on a sudden, they came upon Monsieur Varbarriere, looking through his field-glass. Lady Jane moved to turn short about, but Sir Jekyl pressed his arm on hers impatiently, and kept her straight. CHAPTER XXXIII. Lady Jane and Beatrix play at Croquet. "Good morning, Monsieur Varbarriere," cried the Baronet, who divined truly that the fattish elderly gentleman with the bronzed features, and in the furred surtout, had observed them. "Ah!" cried Monsieur Varbarriere, turning toward them genially, his oddly shaped felt hat in one hand, and his field-glass still extended in the other. "What a charming morning! I have been availing myself of the clear sunlight to study this splendid prospect, partly as a picture, partly as a map." Lady Jane with her right hand plucked some wild flowers from the bank, which at that side rises steeply from the walk, while the gentlemen exchanged salutations. "I've just been pointing out some of our famous places to Lady Jane Lennox. A little higher up the walk the view is much more commanding. What do you say to a walk here after breakfast? There's a capital glass in the hall, much more powerful than that can be. Suppose we come by-and-by?" "You are very good--I am so obliged--my curiosity has been so very much piqued by all I have seen." Monsieur Varbarriere was speaking, as usual, his familiar French, and pointed with his telescope toward a peculiarly shaped remote hillock. "I have just been conjecturing could that be that Gryston which we passed by on our way to Marlowe." "Perfectly right, by Jove! what an eye for locality you must have!" "Have I? Well, sometimes, perhaps," said the foreign gentleman, laughing. "The eye of a general. Yes, you are quite right--it is Gryston." Now Sir Jekyl was frank and hearty in his talk; but there was an air--a something which would have excited the observation of Monsieur Varbarriere, even had he remarked nothing peculiar in the bearing of his host and his companion as they approached. There was a semi-abstraction, a covert scrutiny of that gentleman's countenance, and a certain sense of uneasiness. Some more passed--enough to show that there was nothing in the slightest degree awkward to the two pedestrians in having so unexpectedly fallen into an ambuscade while on their route--and then Sir Jekyl, with a word of apology to Lady Jane, resumed his walk with her towards the pleasure-grounds near the house. That day Lady Jane played croquet with Beatrix, while Sir Jekyl demonstrated half the country, from the high grounds, to Monsieur Varbarriere. The croquet-ground is pretty--flowerbeds lie round it, and a "rockery," as they called it, covered with clambering flowers and plants, and backed by a thick grove of shrubs and evergreens, fenced it in to the north. Lady Jane was kind, ill-tempered, capricious; played wildly, lazily, badly. "Do you like people in spite of great faults ever, Beatrix?" she asked, suddenly. "Every one has great faults," said Trixie, sporting a little bit of philosophy. "No, they have not; there are very good people, and I hate them," said Lady Jane, swinging her mallet slowly like a pendulum, and gazing with her dark deep eyes full into her companion's face. "Hate the good people!" exclaimed Beatrix; "then how do you feel towards the bad?" "There are some whose badness suits me, and I like them; there are others whose badness does not, and them I hate as much as the good almost." Trixie was puzzled; but she concluded that Lady Jane was in one of her odd moods, and venting her ill temper in those shocking eruptions of levity. "How old are you, Beatrix?" "Nineteen." "Ha! and I am five-and-twenty--six years. There is a great deal learned in those six years. I don't recollect what I was like when I was nineteen." She did not sigh; Lady Jane was not given to sighing, but her face looked sad and sullen. "It all came of my having no friend," she said, abruptly. "Not one. That stupid old woman might have been one, but she would not. I had no one--it was fate; and here I am, such as I am, and I don't blame myself or anything. But I wish I had one true friend." "I am sure, Lady Jane, you must have many friends," said Beatrix. "Don't be a little hypocrite, Beatrix; why should I more than another? Friends are not picked up like daisies as we walk along. If you have neither mother nor sisters, nor kith nor kin to care about you, you will find it hard to make strangers do so. As for old Lady Alice, I think she always hated me; she did nothing but pick holes in everything I said or did; I never heard anything from her but the old story of my faults. And then I was thrown among women of the world--heartless, headless creatures. I don't blame them, they knew no better--perhaps there is no better; but I do blame that egotistical old woman, who, if she had but controlled her temper, might have been of so much use to me, and _would_ not. Religion, and good principles, and all that, whether it is true or false, is the safest plan; and I think if she had been moderately kind and patient, she might have made me as good as others. Don't look at me as if I had two heads, dear. I'm not charging myself with any enormity. I only say it is the happiest way, even if it be the way of fools." "Shall we play any more?" inquired Beatrix, after a sufficient pause had intervened to soften the transition. "Yes, certainly. Which is my ball?" "The red. You are behind your hoop." "Yes; and--and it seems to me, Beatrix, you are a cold little stick, like your grandmamma, as you call her, though she's no grandmamma of yours." "Think me as stupid as you please, but you must not think me cold; and, indeed, you wrong poor old granny." "We'll talk no more of her. I think her a fool and a savage. Come, it's your turn, is not it, to play?" So the play went on for a while in silence, except for those questions and comments without which it can hardly proceed. "And now you have won, have not you?" said Lady Jane. "Should you like another game?" asked Beatrix. "Maybe by-and-by; and--I sometimes wish you liked me, Beatrix; but I don't know you, and you are little better than a child still; and--no--it could not be--it never could--you'd be sure to hate me in a little while." "But I do like you, Lady Jane. I liked you very much in London, you were so kind; and I don't know why you were so changed to me when you came here; you seem to have taken a positive dislike to me." "So I had, child--I detested you," said Lady Jane, but in a tone that had something mocking in it. "Everything has grown--how shall I express it?--disgusting to me--yes, _disgusting_. You had done nothing to cause it; you need not look so contrite. I could not help it either. I am odious--and I can't love or like anybody." "I am sure, Lady Jane, you are not at all like what you describe." "You think me faultless, do you?" Beatrix smiled. "Well, I see you don't. What _is_ my fault?" demanded Lady Jane, looking on her not with a playful, but with a lowering countenance. "It is a very conceited office--pointing out other people's faults, even if one understood them, which I do not." "Well, I give you leave; tell me one, to begin with," persisted Lady Jane Lennox. Beatrix laughed. "I wish, Lady Jane, if you insist on my telling your faults, that you would not look so stern." "Stern--do I?" said Lady Jane; "I did not intend; it was not with you, but myself, that I was angry; not angry either, for my faults have been caused by other people, and to say truth, I don't very much wish to mend them." "No, Lady Jane," said Beatrix, merrily. "I won't say in cold blood anything disagreeable. I don't say, mind, that I really could tell you any one fault you may fancy you have--but I won't try." "Well, let us walk round this oval; I'll tell you what you think. You think I am capricious--and so I may appear--but I am not; on the contrary, my likings or aversions are always on good grounds, and last very long. I don't say people always know the grounds, but they know it is not whim; they know--those that have experienced either--that my love and aversion are both very steady. You think I am ill-tempered, too, but I am not--I am isolated and unhappy; but my temper is easy to get on with--and I don't know why I am talking to you," she exclaimed, with a sudden change in her looks and tone, "as if you and I could ever by any possibility become friends. Good-bye, Beatrix; I see your grandmamma beckoning." So she was--leaning upon the arm of her maid, a wan lank figure--motioning her toward her. "Coming, grandmamma," cried Beatrix, and smiled, and turning to say a parting word to Lady Jane, she perceived that she was already moving some way off toward the house. CHAPTER XXXIV. General Lennox receives a Letter. Monsieur Varbarriere was charmed with his host this morning. Sir Jekyl spent more than an hour in pointing out and illustrating the principal objects in the panorama that spread before and beneath them as they stood with field-glasses scanning the distance, and a very agreeable showman he made. Very cheery and healthful among the breezy copse to make this sort of rural survey. As they parted in the hall, Monsieur Varbarriere spoke his eloquent appreciation of the beauties of the surrounding country; and then, having letters to despatch by the post, he took his leave, and strode up with pounding steps to his dressing-room. Long before he reached it, his smile had quite subsided, and it was with a solemn and stern countenance that he entered and nodded to his valet, whom he found awaiting him there. "Well, Jacques, any more offers? Does Sir Jekyl still wish to engage you?" "I can assure Monsieur there has not been a word since upon that affair." "_Good!_" said Monsieur Varbarriere, after a second's scrutiny of the valet's dark, smirking visage. The elderly gentleman unlocked his desk, and taking forth a large envelope, he unfolded the papers enclosed in it. "Have we anything to note to-day about that apartment verd? Did you manage the measurement of the two recesses?" "They are three feet and a half wide, two feet and a half deep, and the pier between them is, counting in the carved case, ten feet and six inches; and there is from the angle of the room at each side, that next the window and that opposite, to the angle of the same recesses, counting in, in like manner, the carved case, two feet and six inches exactly. Here Monsieur has the threads of measurement," added Jacques, with a charming bow, handing a little paper, containing certain pieces of tape cut at proper lengths and noted in pen and ink, to his master. "Were you in the room yourself since?" "This afternoon I am promised to be again introduced." "Try both--particularly that to your right as you stand near the door--and rap them with your knuckles, and search as narrowly as you can." Monsieur Jacques bowed low and smiled. "And now about the other room," said Monsieur Varbarriere; "have you had an opportunity?" "I have enjoyed the permission of visiting it, by the kindness of Sir Jekyl's man." "He does not suppose any object?" inquired Monsieur Varbarriere. "None in the world--nothing--merely the curiosity of seeing everything which is common in persons of my rank." Monsieur Varbarriere smiled dimly. "Well, there is a room opening at the back of Sir Jekyl's room--what is it?" "His study." Varbarriere nodded--"Go on." "A room about the same size, surrounded on all sides except the window with books packed on shelves." "Where is the door?" "There is no door, visible at least, except that by which one enters from Sir Jekyl Marlowe's room," answered Monsieur Jacques. "Any sign of a door?" Monsieur Jacques smiled a little mysteriously. "When my friend, Monsieur Tomlinson, Sir Jekyl's gentleman, had left me alone for a few minutes, to look at some old books of travels with engravings, for which I had always a liking, I did use my eyes a little, Monsieur, upon other objects, but could see nothing. Then, with the head of my stick I took the liberty to knock a little upon the shelves, and one place I did find where the books are not real, but made of wood." "Made of wood?" repeated Monsieur Varbarriere. "Yes--bound over to imitate the tomes; and all as old and dingy as the books themselves." "You knew by the sound?" "Yes, Monsieur, by the sound. I removed, moreover, a real book at the side, and I saw there wood." "Whereabout is that in the wall?" "Next to the corner, Monsieur, which is formed by the wall in which the windows are set--it is a dark corner, nearly opposite the door by which you enter." "That's a door," said Monsieur Varbarriere, rising deliberately as if he were about to walk through it. "I think Monsieur conjectures sagely." "What more did you see, Jacques?" demanded Monsieur Varbarriere, resuming his seat quietly. "Nothing, Monsieur; for my good friend returned just then, and occupied my attention otherwise." "You did not give him a hint of your discovery?" "Not a word, sir." "Jacques, you must see that room again, quietly. You are very much interested, you know, in those books of travel. When you have a minute there to yourself again, you will take down in turn every volume at each side of that false bookcase, and search closely for hinge or bolt--there must be something of the kind--or keyhole--do you see? Rely upon me, I will not fail to consider the service handsomely. Manage that, if possible, to-day." "I will do all my possible, Monsieur." "I depend upon you, Jacques. Adieu." With a low bow and a smirk, Jacques departed. Monsieur Varbarriere bolted his dressing-room door, and sat down musing mysteriously before his paper. His large, fattish, freckled hand hung down over the arm of the low chair, nearly to the carpet, with his heavy gold pencil-case in its fingers. He heaved one deep, unconscious sigh, as he leaned back. It was not that he quailed before any coming crisis. He was not a soft-hearted or nervous general, and had quite made up his mind. But he was not without good nature in ordinary cases, and the page he was about to open was full of terror and bordered all round with black. Lady Jane Lennox was at that moment seated also before her desk, very pale, and writing a few very grateful and humble lines of thanks to her General--vehement thanks--vehement self-abasement--such as surprised him quite delightfully. He read them over and over, smiling with all his might, under his stiff white moustache, and with a happy moisture in his twinkling grey eyes, and many a murmured apostrophe, "Poor little thing--how pleased she is--poor little Janet!" and resolving how happy they two should be, and how much sunshine was breaking into their world. Monsieur Varbarriere was sitting in deep thought before his desk. "Yes, I think I _may_," was the result of his ruminations. And in his bold clear hand he indited the following letter, which we translate:-- _Private and Confidential._ Marlowe Manor, --th October, 1849. General Lennox. SIR,--I, in the first place, beg you to excuse the apparent presumption of my soliciting a private audience of a gentleman to whom I have the honour to be but so slightly known, and of claiming the protection of an honourable secrecy. The reason of my so doing will be obvious when I say that I have certain circumstances to lay before you which nearly affect your honour. I decline making any detailed statement by letter, nor will I explain my meaning at Marlowe Manor; but if, without _fracas_, you will give me a private meeting, at any place between this and London, I will make it my business to see you, when I shall satisfy you that I have not made this request without the gravest reasons. May I entreat that your reply may be addressed to me, _poste restante_, Slowton. Accept the assurance, &c., &c., &c., H. VARBARRIERE. Thus was the angelic messenger, musical with silvery wings, who visited honest General Lennox in his lodgings off Piccadilly, accompanied all the way, in the long flight from Slowton to the London terminus, by a dark spirit of compensation, to appal him with a doubt. Varbarriere's letter had been posted at Wardlock by his own servant Jacques--a precaution he chose to adopt, as he did not care that anyone at the little town of Marlowe, far less at the Manor, should guess that he had anything on earth to say to General Lennox. When the two letters reached that old gentleman, he opened Lady Jane's first; for, as we know, he had arrived at the amorous age, and was impatient to read what his little Jennie had to say; and when he had read it once, he had of course to read it all over again; then he kissed it and laughed tremulously over it, and was nearer to crying than he would have confessed to anyone--even to her; and he read it again at the window, where he was seen by seedy Captain Fezzy, who was reading _Bell's Life_, across, the street, in the three-pair-of-stairs window, and by Miss Dignum, the proprietress, from the drawing-room, with a countenance so radiant and moved as to interest both spectators from their different points of view. Thus, with many re-perusals and pleasant castle-buildings, and some airs gently whistled in his reveries, he had nearly forgotten M. Varbarriere's letter. He was so gratified--he always knew she cared for her old man, little Jennie--she was not demonstrative, all the better perhaps for that; and here, in this delightful letter, so grateful, so sad, so humble, it was all confessed--demonstrated, at last; and old General Lennox thought infinitely better of himself, and far more adoringly of his wife than ever, and was indescribably proud and happy. Hitherto his good angel had had it all his own way; the other spirit was now about to take his turn--touched him on the elbow and presented Monsieur Varbarriere's letter, with a dark smile. "Near forgetting this, by Jove!" said the old gentleman with the white moustache and eyebrows, taking the letter in his gnarled pink fingers. "What the devil can the fellow mean? I think he's a fool," said the General, very pale and stern, when he had read the letter twice through. If the people at the other side had been studying the transition of human countenance, they would have had a treat in the General's, now again presented at his drawing-room window, where he stood leaning grimly on his knuckles. Still oftener, and more microscopically, was this letter spelled over than the other. "It can't possibly refer to Jane. It _can't_. I put that out of my head--_quite_," said the poor General energetically to himself, with a short wave of his hand like a little sabre-cut in the air. But what could it be? He had no kinsman near enough in blood to "affect his honour." But these French fellows had such queer phrases. The only transaction he could think of was the sale of his black charger in Calcutta for two hundred guineas, to that ill-conditioned fellow, Colonel Bardell, who, he heard, had been grumbling about that bargain, as he did about every other. "I should not be surprised if he said I cheated him about that horse!" And he felt quite obliged to Colonel Bardell for affording this hypothesis. "Yes, Bardell was coming to England--possibly at Marlowe now. He knows Sir Jekyl. Egad, that's the very thing. He's been talking; and this officious old French bourgeois thinks he's doing a devilish polite thing in telling me what a suspected dog I am." The General laughed, and breathed a great sigh of relief, and recalled all the cases he could bring up in which fellows had got into scrapes unwittingly about horse-flesh, and how savagely fellows sometimes spoke when they did not like their bargains. CHAPTER XXXV. The Bishop at Marlowe. So he laboured in favour of his hypothesis with an uneasy sort of success; but, for a few seconds, on one sore point of his heart had there been a pressure, new, utterly agonising, and there remained the sense of contusion. The General took his hat, and came and walked off briskly into the city a long way, thinking he had business; but when he reached the office, preferring another day--wishing to be back at Marlowe--wishing to see Varbarriere--longing to know the worst. At last he turned into a city coffee-house, and wrote a reply on a quarto sheet of letter-paper to Monsieur Varbarriere. He was minded first to treat the whole thing with a well-bred contempt, and simply to mention that as he expected soon to be at Marlowe, he would not give Monsieur Varbarriere the trouble of making an appointment elsewhere. But, seated in his box, he read Monsieur Varbarriere's short letter over again before committing himself, and it struck him that it was _not_ an intimation to be trifled with--it had a certain gravity which did not lose its force by frequent reading. The gentleman himself, too--reserved, shrewd, with an odd mixture of the unctuous and the sardonic--his recollection of this person, the writer, came unpleasantly in aid of the serious impression which his letter was calculated to make; and he read again-- "I have certain circumstances to lay before you which nearly affect your honour." The words smote his heart again with a tremendous augury; somehow they would not quite fit his hypothesis about the horse, but it might be something else. Was there any lady who might conceive herself jilted? Who could guess what it might be? Jennie's letter he read then again in his box, with the smell of beef-steaks, the glitter of pewter pots, and the tread of waiters about him. Yes, it was--he defied the devil himself to question it--an affectionate, loving, grateful letter. And Lady Alice had gone to Marlowe, and was staying there--Lady Alice Redcliffe, that stiff, austere duenna--Jane's kinswoman. He was glad of it, and often thinking of it. But, no--oh! no--it could not possibly refer to Jane: upon that point he had perfectly made up his mind. Well, with his pen between his fingers, he considered when he could go, and where he should meet this vulgar Frenchman. He could not leave London to-morrow, nor next day, and the day following he had to give evidence on the question of compensation to that native prince, and so on: so at last he wrote, naming the nearest day he could command, and requesting, in a postscript which he opened the letter to add, that Monsieur Varbarriere would be so very good as to let him know a little more distinctly to what specific subject his letter referred, as he had in vain taxed his recollection for the slightest clue to his meaning; and although he was perfectly satisfied that he could not have the smallest difficulty in clearing up anything that could possibly be alleged against him as a soldier or a gentleman--having, he thanked Heaven, accomplished his career with honour--he yet could not feel quite comfortable until he heard something more explicit. As the General, with this letter in his pocket, was hurrying to the post-office, the party at Marlowe were admiring a glorious sunset, and Monsieur Varbarriere was describing to Lady Jane Lennox some gorgeous effects of sunlight which he had witnessed from Lisbon on the horizon of the Atlantic. The Bishop had already arrived, and was in his dressing-room, and Dives was more silent and thoughtful than usual. Yes, the Bishop had arrived. He was venerable, dignified, dapper, with, for his time of life, a wonderfully shapely leg in his black silk stocking. There was in his manner and tones that suavity which reminds one at the same time of heaven and the House of Lords. He did not laugh. He smiled and bowed sometimes. There was a classical flavour in his conversation with gentlemen, and he sometimes conversed with ladies, his leg crossed horizontally, the ankle resting on his knee, while he mildly stroked the shapely limb I have mentioned, and murmured well-bred Christianity, to which, as well as to his secular narratives, the ladies listened respectfully. Don't suppose he was a hypocrite or a Pharisee. He was as honest as most men, and better than many Christians. He was a bachelor, and wealthy; but if he had amassed a good deal of public money, he had also displayed a good deal of public spirit, and had done many princely and even some kind actions. His family were not presentable, making a livelihood by unmentionable practices, such as shop-keeping and the like. Still he cut them with moderation, having maintained affable though clandestine relations with his two maiden aunts, who lived and died in Thames Street, and having twice assisted a nephew, though he declined seeing him, who was a skipper of a Russian brig. He was a little High-Church. But though a disciplinarian in ecclesiastical matters, and with notions about self-mortification, his rule as master of the great school he had once governed had been kindly and popular as well as firm. I do not know exactly what interest got him his bishopric. Perhaps it was his reputation only; and that he was thinking of duty, and his fasts, and waked in his cell one morning with a mitre on instead of his nightcap. The Trappist, mayhap, in digging his grave had lighted on a pot of gold. "I had no idea," exclaimed Miss Blunket, when the Bishop's apron and silk stockings had moved with the Rev. Dives Marlowe to the opposite extremity of the drawing-room, where the attentive Rector was soon deep in demonstrations, which evidently interested the right reverend prelate much, drawn from some manuscript notes of an ancestor of Dives's who had filled that see, which had long known him no more, and where he had been sharp in his day in looking up obscure rights and neglected revenues. "I had no idea the Bishop was so young; he's by _no means_ an old-looking man; and so very admirable a prelate--is not he?" "He has neglected one of St. Paul's conditions though," said Sir Jekyl; "but you will not think the worse of him for that. It may be mended, you know." "What's that?" inquired Miss Blunket. "Why, he's not the husband of one wife." "Nonsense, you wretch!" cried Miss Blunket, with a giggle, jerking a violet which she was twiddling between her fingers at the Baronet. "He has written a great deal, has not he?" continued Miss Blunket. "His tract on mortification has gone to fifteen thousand copies, I see by the newspaper." "I wonder he has never married," interposed Lady Blunket, drowsily, with her usual attention to the context. "I wonder he never tried it as a species of mortification," suggested Sir Jekyl. "You horrid Vandal! Do you hear him, mamma?" exclaimed Miss Blunket. Lady Blunket rather testily--for she neither heard nor understood very well, and her daughter's voice was shrill--asked-- "_What_ is it? You are always making mountains of molehills, my dear, and _startling_ one." Old Lady Alice Redcliffe's entrance at this moment made a diversion. She entered, tall, grey, and shaky, leaning on the arm of pretty Beatrix, and was encountered near the door by the right reverend prelate, who greeted her with a dignified and apostolic gallantry, which contrasted finely with Sir Jekyl's jaunty and hilarious salutation. The Bishop was very much changed since she had seen him last. He, no doubt, thought the same of her. Neither intimated this little reflection to the other. Each estimated, with something of wonder and pity, the other's decay, and neither appropriated the lesson. "I dare say you think me very much altered," said Lady Alice, so soon as she had made herself comfortable on the ottoman. "I was about putting the same inquiry of myself, Lady Alice; but, alas! why should we? 'Never continueth in one stay,' you know; change is the universal law, and the greatest, last." The excellent prelate delivered this _ex cathedrâ_, as an immortal to a mortal. It was his duty to impress old Lady Alice, and he courteously included himself, being a modest priest, who talked of sin and death as if bishops were equally subject to them with other men. CHAPTER XXXVI. Old Scenes recalled. At dinner the prelate, who sat beside Lady Alice, conversed in the same condescending spirit, and with the same dignified humility, upon all sorts of subjects--upon the new sect, the Huggletonians, whom, with doubtful originality, but considerable emphasis, he likened to "lost sheep." "Who's lost his sheep, my lord?" inquired Sir Paul Blunket across the table. "I spoke metaphorically, Sir Paul. The Huggletonians, the sheep who should have been led by the waters of comfort, have been suffered to stray into the wilderness." "Quite so--I see. Shocking name that--the Huggletonians. I should not like to be a Huggletonian, egad!" said Sir Paul Blunket, and drank some wine. "Lost sheep, to be sure--yes; but that thing of bringing sheep to water--you see--it's a mistake. When a wether takes to drinking water, it's a sign he's got the rot." The Bishop gently declined his head, and patiently allowed this little observation to blow over. Sir Paul Blunket, having delivered it, merely added, after a decent pause, as he ate his dinner-- "Dartbroke mutton this--five years old--eh?" "Yes. I hope you like it," answered his host. Sir Paul Blunket, having a bit in his mouth, grunted politely-- "Only for your own table, though?" he added, when he'd swallowed it. "That's all," answered Sir Jekyl. "Never pay at market, you know," said Sir Paul Blunket. "I consider any sheep kept beyond two years as lost." "A lost sheep, and sell him as a Huggletonian," rejoined Sir Jekyl. "It is twenty years," murmured the Bishop in Lady Alice's ear, for he preferred not hearing that kind of joke, "since I sate in this parlour." "Ha!" sighed Lady Alice. "Long _before_ that I used, in poor Sir Harry's time, to be here a good deal--a hospitable, kind man, in the main." "I never liked him," croaked Lady Alice, and wiped her mouth. They sat so very close to Sir Jekyl that the Bishop merely uttered a mild ejaculation, and bowed toward his plate. "The arrangements of this room--the portraits--are just what I remember them." "Yes, and you were here--let me see--just thirty years since, when Sir Harry died--weren't you?" "So I was, my dear Lady Alice--very true," replied the Bishop in his most subdued tones, and he threw his head back a little, and nearly closed his eyes; and she fancied he meant, in a dignified way, to say, "I should prefer not speaking of those particular recollections while we sit so near our host." The old lady was much of the same mind, and said to him quietly-- "I'll ask you a few questions by-and-by. You remember Donica Gwynn. She's living with me now--the housekeeper, you know." "Yes, perfectly, a very nice-looking quiet young woman--how is she?" "A dried-up old woman now, but very well," said Lady Alice. "Yes, to be sure; she must be elderly now," said he, hastily; and the Bishop mentally made up one of those little sums in addition, the result of which surprises us sometimes in our elderly days so oddly. When the party transferred themselves to the drawing-room, Lady Alice failed to secure the Bishop, who was seized by the Rev. Dives Marlowe and carried into a recess--Sir Jekyl having given his clerical brother the key of a cabinet in which were deposited more of the memoranda, and a handsome collection of the official and legal correspondence of that episcopal ancestor whose agreeable MSS. had interested the Bishop so much before dinner. Jekyl, indeed, was a good-natured brother. As a match-making mother will get the proper persons under the same roof, he had managed this little meeting at Marlowe. When the ladies went away to the drawing-room, he had cried-- "Dives, I want you here for a moment," and so he placed him on the chair which Lady Jane Lennox had occupied beside him, and what was more to the purpose, beside the Bishop; and, as Dives was a good scholar, well made up on controversies, with a very pretty notion of ecclesiastical law and a turn for Latin verse, he and the prelate were soon in a state of very happy and intimate confidence. This cabinet, too, was what the game of chess is to the lovers--a great opportunity--a seclusion; and Dives knowing all about the papers, was enabled really to interest the Bishop very keenly. So Lady Alice, who wanted to talk with him, was doomed to a jealous isolation, until that friend, of whom she was gradually coming to think very highly indeed, Monsieur Varbarriere, drew near, and they fell into conversation, first on the recent railway collision, and then on the fruit and flower show, and next upon the Bishop. They both agreed what a charming and venerable person he was, and then Lady Alice said-- "Sir Harry Marlowe, I told you--the father, you know, of Jekyl there," and she dropped her voice as she named him, "was in possession at the time when the deed affecting my beloved son's rights was lost." "Yes, madame." "And it was the Bishop there who attended him on his death-bed." "Ho!" exclaimed M. Varbarriere, looking more curiously for a moment at that dapper little gentleman in the silk apron. "They said he heard a great deal from poor wretched Sir Harry. I have never had an opportunity of asking him in private about it, but I mean to-morrow, please Heaven." "It may be, madame, in the highest degree important," said Monsieur Varbarriere, emphatically. "How can it be? My son is dead." "Your son is"----and M. Varbarriere, who was speaking sternly and with a pallid face, like a man deeply excited, suddenly checked himself, and said-- "Yes, very true, your son is dead. Yes, madame, he is dead." Old Lady Alice looked at him with a bewildered and frightened gaze. "In Heaven's name, sir, what do you mean?" "Mean--mean--why, what have I said?" exclaimed Monsieur Varbarriere, very tartly, and looking still more uncomfortable. "I did not say you had said anything, but you do mean something." "No, madame, I _forgot_ something; the tragedy to which you referred is not to be supposed to be always as present to the mind of another as it naturally is to your own. We forget in a moment of surprise many things of which at another time we need not to be reminded, and so it happened with me." Monsieur Varbarriere stood up and fiddled with his gold double eye-glasses, and seemed for a while disposed to add more on that theme, but, after a pause, said-- "And so it was to the _Bishop_ that Sir Harry Marlowe communicated his dying wish that the green chamber should be shut up?" "Yes, to him; and I have heard that more passed than is suspected, but of that I know nothing; only I mean to put the question to him directly, when next I can see him alone." Monsieur Varbarriere again looked with a curious scrutiny at the Bishop, and then he inquired-- "He is a prelate, no doubt, who enjoys a high reputation for integrity?" "This I know, that he would not for worlds utter an untruth," replied Lady Alice. "What a charming person is Lady Jane Lennox!" exclaimed Monsieur Varbarriere, suddenly diverging. "H'm! do you think so? Well, yes, she is very much admired." "It is not often you see a pair so unequal in years so affectionately attached," said Monsieur Varbarriere. "I have never seen her husband, and I can't, therefore, say how they get on together; but I'm glad to hear you say so. Jane has a temper, you know, which _every_ one might not get on with; that is," she added, fearing lest she had gone a little too far, "sometimes it is not quite pleasant." "No doubt she was much admired and much pursued," observed Varbarriere. "Yes, I said she was admired," answered Lady Alice, drily. "How charming she looks, reading her book at this moment!" exclaimed Varbarriere. She was leaning back on an ottoman, with a book in her hand; her rich wavy hair, her jewels and splendid dress, her beautiful braceleted arms, and exquisitely haughty features, and a certain negligence in her _pose_, recalled some of those voluptuous portraits of the beauties of the Court of Charles II. Sir Jekyl was seated on the other side of the cushioned circle, leaning a little across, and talking volubly, and, as it seemed, earnestly. It is one of those groups in which, marking the silence of the lady and the serious earnestness of her companion, and the flush of both countenances, one concludes, if there be nothing to forbid, that the talk is at least romantic. Lady Alice was reserved, however; she merely said-- "Yes, Jane looks very well; she's always well got up." Monsieur Varbarriere saw her glance with a shrewd little frown of scrutiny at the Baronet and Lady Jane, and he knew what was passing in her mind; she, too, suspected what was in his, for she glanced at him, and their eyes met for a moment and were averted. Each knew what the other was thinking; so Lady Alice said-- "For an old gentleman, Jekyl is the most romantic I know; when he has had his wine, I think he'd flirt with any woman alive. I dare say he's boring poor Jane to death, if we knew but all. She can't read her book. I assure you I've seen him, when nobody better was to be had, making love to old Susan Blunket--Miss Blunket there--after dinner, of course: and by the time he has played his rubber of whist he's quite a sane man, and continues so until he comes in after dinner next evening. We all know Jekyl, and never mind him." Having thus spoken, she asked Monsieur Varbarriere whether he intended a long stay in England, and a variety of similar questions. CHAPTER XXXVII. In which Lady Alice pumps the Bishop. Lady Jane Lennox, who complained of a headache, departed early for her room. The Baronet's passion for whist returned, and he played with more than his usual spirit and hilarity; Monsieur Varbarriere, his partner, was also in great force, and made some very creditable sallies between the deals. All went, in fact, merry as a marriage-bell. But in that marriage-bell booms unmarked the selfsame tone which thrills in the funeral-knell. There was its somewhat of bitter rising probably in each merry soul in that gay room. Black care walked silently among those smiling guests, and on an unseen salver presented to each his sprig of rue or rosemary. Another figure also, lank, obsequious, smirking dolorously, arrayed in the Marlowe livery, came in with a bow, and stood with an hour-glass in his long yellow claw at the back of Sir Jekyl's chair; you might see the faint lights of his hollow eyes reflected on the Baronet's cards. "A little chilly to-night, is not it?" said Sir Jekyl, and shook his shoulders. "Have we quite light enough, do you think?" In that serene company there were two hearts specially sore, each with a totally different anguish. In Lady Alice's old ears continually beat these words, "Your son is"----ending, like an interrupted dream, in nothing. Before her eyes was Varbarriere's disturbed countenance as he dropped the curtain over his meaning, and affected to have forgotten the death of Guy Deverell. "Your son is"----Merciful Heaven! could he have meant living? Could that shape she had seen in its coffin, with the small blue mark in its serene forehead, where the bullet had entered, been a simulacrum--not her son--a cast--a fraud? Her reason told her loudly such a thought was mere insanity; and yet what could that sudden break in Varbarriere's sentence have been meant to conceal, and what did that recoiling look imply? "Your son is"----It was for ever going on. She knew there was something to tell, something of which M. Varbarriere was thoroughly cognisant, and about which nothing could ever induce him to open his lips. If it was not "your son is living," she cared not what else it might be, and _that_--could it?--no, it could not be. A slight hectic touched each thin cheek, otherwise she looked as usual. But as she gazed dreamily over the fender, with clouded eyes, her temples were throbbing, and she felt sometimes quite wild, and ready to start to her feet and adjure that awful whist-player to disclose all he knew about her dead boy. Beatrix was that evening seated near the fireplace, and Drayton making himself agreeable, with as small trouble as possible to himself. Drayton! Well, he was rather amusing--cleverish--well enough up upon those subjects which are generally supposed to interest young ladies; and, with an affectation of not caring, really exerting himself to be entertaining. Did he succeed? If you were to judge by her animated looks and tones, you would have said very decidedly. Drayton's self-love was in a state of comfort, even of luxury, that evening. But was there anything in the triumph? A pale face, at the farther end of the room, with a pair of large, dark, romantic eyes, a face that had grown melancholy of late, she saw every moment, though she had not once looked in that direction all the evening. As Drayton saw her smile at his sallies, with bright eyes and heightened colour, leaning back in her cushioned chair, and looking under her long lashes into the empty palm of her pretty hand, he could not see that little portrait--painted on air with the colours of memory--that lay there like a locket;--neither his nor any other eyes, but hers alone. Guy Strangways was at the farther end of the room, where were congregated Lady Blunket and her charming daughter, and that pretty Mrs. Maberly of whom we have spoken; and little Linnett, mounted straddlewise on his chair, leaning with his elbows on the back, and his chin on his knuckles, helped to entertain them with his inexhaustible agreeabilities. Guy Strangways had indeed very little cast upon him, for Linnett was garrulous and cheerful, and reinforced beside by help from other cheery spirits. Here was Guy Strangways undergoing the isolation to which he had condemned himself; and over there, engrossed by Drayton, the lady whose peer he had never seen. Had she missed him? He saw no sign. Not once even casually had she looked in his direction; and how often, though she could not know it, had his eyes wandered toward her! Dull to him was the hour without her, and she was engrossed by another, who, selfish and shallow, was merely amusing himself and pleasing his vanity. How is it that people in love see so well without eyes? Beatrix saw, without a glance, exactly where Guy Strangways was. She was piqued and proud, and chose perhaps to show him how little he was missed. It was his presence, though he suspected it so little, that sustained that animation which he resented; and had _he_ left the room, Drayton would have found, all at once, that she was tired. Next day was genial and warm, one of those days that bygone summer sometimes gives us back from the past to the wintry close of autumn, as in an old face that we love we sometimes see a look, transitory and how pathetic, of the youth we remember. Such days, howsoever pleasant, come touched with the melancholy of a souvenir. And perhaps the slanting amber light nowhere touched two figures more in harmony with its tone than those who now sat side by side on the rustic seat, under the two beech trees at the farther end of the pleasure-ground of Marlowe. Old Lady Alice, with her cushions disposed about her, and her cloaks and shawls, had one arm of the seat; and the Bishop, gaitered and prudently buttoned up in a surtout of the finest black cloth, and with that grotesque (bequeathed of course by the Apostles) shovel-hat upon his silvery head, leaned back upon the other, and, with his dapper leg crossed, and showing the neat sole of his shoe to Lady Alice, stroked and patted, after his wont, the side of his calf. "Upwards of three-and-thirty years," said the Bishop. "Yes, about that--about three-and-thirty years; and what did you think of him? A very bad man, I'm sure." "Madam, _de mortuis_. We have a saying, 'concerning the dead, nothing but good.'" "Nothing but _truth_, say I," answered Lady Alice. "Praise can do them no good, and falsehood will do us a great deal of harm." "You put the point strongly, Lady Alice; but when it is said, 'nothing but good,' we mean, of course, nothing but the good we may _truly_ speak of them." "And that, as you know, my lord, in his case was not much. You were with him to the moment of his death--nearly a week, was it not?" "Three days precisely." "Did he know from the first he was dying?" inquired Lady Alice. "He was not aware that his situation was desperate until the end of the second day. Nor was it; but he knew he was in danger, and was very much agitated, poor man; very anxious to live and lead a better life." "And you prayed with him?" "Yes, yes; he was very much agitated, though; and it was not easy to fix his thoughts, poor Sir Harry! It was very sad. He held my hand in his--my hand--all the time I sat by the bed, saying, 'Don't you think I'll get over it?--I feel that I shall--I feel quite safe while I hold your hand.' I never felt a hand tremble as his did." "You prayed for him, and read with him?" said Lady Alice. "And you acted, beside, as his confessor, did not you, and heard some revelation he had to make?" "You forget, my dear Lady Alice, that the office of confessor is unknown to the Church. It is not according to our theory to extract a specific declaration of particular sins." "H'm! I remember they told me that you refused at school to read the Absolution to the boys of your house until they had made confession and pointed out an offender they were concealing." The Bishop hemmed and slightly coloured. It might have amused an indifferent auditor to see that eminent and ancient divine taken to task, and made even to look a little foolish, by this old woman, and pushed into a corner, as a wild young curate might be by him on a question of Church doctrine. "Why, as to that, the fact may be so; but it was under very special circumstances, Lady Alice. The Church refuses even the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper to an intending communicant who is known to be living in wilful sin; and here was a wilful concealment of a grave offence, to which all had thus made themselves, and were continuing to make themselves, accessory. It is, I allow, a doubtful question, and I do not say I should be prepared to adopt that measure now. The great Martin Luther has spoken well and luminously on the fallacy of taking his convictions at any one period of his life as the measure of his doctrine at a later one. The grain of mustard-seed, the law of perpetual expansion and development, applies to faith as well as to motive and action, to the Christian as a spiritual individual as well as to the Church as an aggregate." This apology for his faith did the Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of Queen's Copely urge in his citation before old Lady Alice Redcliffe, whom one would have thought he might have afforded to despise in a Christian way; but for wise purposes the instincts of self-defence and self-esteem, and a jealousy of even our smallest neighbour's opinion, is so deeply implanted, that we are ready to say a good word for ourselves to anyone who misconceives the perfect wisdom of our words, or the equally perfect purity of our motives. END OF VOL. I. PRINTING OFFICE OF THE PUBLISHER. 
41229	----	COLLECTION OF BRITISH AUTHORS. VOL. 803. GUY DEVERELL BY J. S. LE FANU. IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. II. * * * * * GUY DEVERELL. BY J. S. LE FANU, AUTHOR OF "UNCLE SILAS," ETC. _COPYRIGHT EDITION._ IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. II. LEIPZIG BERNHARD TAUCHNITZ 1865. _The Right of Translation is reserved._ CONTENTS OF VOLUME II. I. Lady Alice and Varbarriere tête-à-tête in the Library 1 II. M. Varbarriere orders his Wings 8 III. Monsieur Varbarriere talks with Donica Gwynn 16 IV. A Story of a Magician and a Vampire 26 V. Farewell 37 VI. At the Bell and Horns 44 VII. M. Varbarriere's Plans 51 VIII. Tempest 58 IX. Guy Deverell at Slowton 66 X. Uncle and Nephew 73 XI. In Lady Mary's Boudoir 81 XII. The Guests together 88 XIII. A Visitor in the Library 97 XIV. Pelter opens his Mind 106 XV. The Pipe of Peace 112 XVI. A Rencontre in the Gallery 120 XVII. Old Donnie and Lady Jane 127 XVIII. Alone--Yet not alone 135 XIX. Varbarriere the Tyrant debates with the weaker Varbarrieres 142 XX. M. Varbarriere decides 150 XXI. At the Green Chamber 158 XXII. In the Green Chamber 167 XXIII. The Morning 174 XXIV. The Doctor's Visit 180 XXV. The Patient interrogated 188 XXVI. General Lennox appears 196 XXVII. Lady Alice Redcliffe makes General Lennox's Acquaintance 203 XXVIII. The Bishop sees the Patient 211 XXIX. In the Yard of the Marlowe Arms 219 XXX. About Lady Jane 227 XXXI. Lady Jane's Toilet 234 XXXII. The two Doctors consult 239 XXXIII. Varbarriere in the Sick-room 246 XXXIV. Guy Deverell arrives 253 XXXV. I am Thine and Thou art Mine, Body and Soul, for ever 261 XXXVI. In the Chaise 269 XXXVII. Old Lady Alice talks with Guy 278 XXXVIII. Something more of Lady Jane Lennox 285 XXXIX. The Last 291 GUY DEVERELL. CHAPTER I. Lady Alice and Varbarriere tête-à-tête in the Library. "Well, he told you something, did not he?" persisted Lady Alice. "In the sense of a distinct disclosure, nothing," said the Bishop, looking demurely over his horizontal leg on the neatly-shorn grass. "He did speak to me upon subjects--his wishes, and I have no doubt he intended to have been much more explicit. In fact, he intimated as much; but he was overtaken by death--unable to speak when I saw him next morning." "He spoke to you, I know, about pulling down or blowing up that green chamber," said Lady Alice, whose recollections grew a little violent in proportion to the Bishop's reserve and her own impatience. "He did not suggest quite such strong measures, but he did regret that it had ever been built, and made me promise to urge upon his son, as you once before mentioned you were aware, so soon as he should come of age, to shut it up." "And you did urge him?" "Certainly, Lady Alice," said the Bishop, with dignity. "I viewed it in the light of a duty, and a very sacred one, to do so." "He told you the reason, then?" inquired Lady Alice. "He gave me no reason on earth for his wish; perhaps, had he been spared for another day, he would have done so; but he expressed himself strongly indeed, with a kind of horror, and spoke of the Italian who built, and his father who ordered it, in terms of strong disapprobation, and wished frequently it had never been erected. Perhaps you would like to take a little turn. How very pretty the flowers still are!" "Very. No, thank you, I'll sit a little. And there was something more. I know perfectly there was, my lord; what was it, pray?" answered the old lady. "It was merely something that I took charge of," said the Bishop, cautiously. "You need not be so reserved with me, my lord; I'm not, as you very well know, a talking old woman, by any means. I know something of the matter already, and have never talked about it; and as the late Lady Marlowe was my poor daughter by marriage, you may talk to me, I should hope, a little more freely than to a total stranger." The Bishop, I fancy, thought there was something in this appeal, and was, perhaps, amused at the persistency of women, for he smiled sadly for a second or two on his gaiter, and he said, looking before him with his head a little on one side-- "You give me credit, my dear Lady Alice, for a great deal more reserve than I have, at least on this occasion, exercised. I have very little to disclose, and I am not forbidden by any promise, implied or direct, to tell you the very little I know." He paused. "Well, my lord, _pray_ go on," insisted Lady Alice. "Yes, on the whole," said the Bishop, thoughtfully, "I prefer telling you. In the room in which he died, in this house, there is, or was, a sort of lock-up place." "That was the room in which Jekyl now sleeps," interrupted Lady Alice. "I am not aware." "The room at the extreme back of the house. You go through a long passage on the same level as the hall, and then, at the head of the far back-stair, into a small room on your left, and through that into the bed-room, I mean. It was there, I know, his coffin lay, for I saw him in it." "As well as I recollect, that must have been the room. I know it lay as you describe. He gave me some keys that were placed with his purse under his pillow, and directed me to open the press, and take out a box, resembling a small oak plate-chest, which I did, and, by his direction, having unlocked it, I took out a very little trunk-shaped box, covered with stamped red leather, and he took it from me, and the keys, and that time said no more." "Well?" "In the evening, when I returned, he said he had been thinking about it, and wished to place it and the key in my care, as his boy was not of age, and it contained something, the value of which, as I understood, might be overlooked, and the box mislaid. His direction to me was to give it to his son, the present Sir Jekyl, on his coming of age, and to tell him from him that he was to do what was right with it. I know those were his words, for he was exhausted, and not speaking very distinctly; and I repeated them carefully after him, and as he said, 'correctly;' after a short time he added, 'I think I shall tell you more about it to-morrow;' but, as I told you, he was unable to speak next morning." "And what did that red box contain?" asked Lady Alice. "I can't tell. I never unlocked it. I tied it round with a tape and sealed it, and so it remained." "Then, Jekyl got it when he came of age?" "I had him, about that time, at my house. He examined the box, and, when he had satisfied himself as to its contents, he secured it again with his own seal, and requested me to keep it for him for some short time longer." "Have you got it still in your possession?" "No. I thought it best to insist at last on his taking it into his own keeping. I've brought it with me here--and I gave it to him on the day of my arrival." "Very heavy, was it?" "On the contrary, very light." "H'm! Thank you, my lord; it is very good of you to converse so long with an old woman such as I." "On the contrary, Lady Alice, I am much obliged to you. The fact is, I believe it is better to have mentioned these circumstances. It may, perhaps, prove important that some member of the family should know exactly what took place between me and the late Sir Harry Marlowe during his last illness. You now know everything. I have reminded him, as I thought it right, of the earnest injunction of his father, first with respect to that room, the green chamber; and he tells me that he means to comply with it when his party shall have broken up. And about the other matter, the small box, I mentioned that he should do what is right with it. He asked me if I had seen what the box contained; and on my saying no, he added that he could not tell what his father meant by telling him to do what was right with it--in fact, that he could do nothing with it." "Quite an Italian evening!" exclaimed the Bishop, after a pause, rising, and offering his arm to Lady Alice. And so their conference ended. Next day, contrary to her secluded custom, and for the first time, Lady Alice glided feebly into the new library of Marlowe, of which all the guests were free. Quite empty, except of that silent company in Russia leather and gold, in vellum, and other fine suits; all so unobtrusive and quiet; all so obsequiously at her service; all ready to speak their best, their brightest, and wisest thoughts, or to be silent and neglected, and yet never affronted; always alert to serve and speak, or lie quiet. Quite deserted! No, not quite. There, more than half hidden by that projection and carved oak pilaster, sate Monsieur Varbarriere, in an easy-chair and a pair of gold spectacles, reading easily his vellum quarto. "Pretty room!" exclaimed Lady Alice in soliloquy, so soon as she had detected the corpulent and grave student. Monsieur Varbarriere laid down his book with a look of weariness, and seeing Lady Alice, smiled benignly, and rose and bowed, and his sonorous bass tones greeted her courteously from the nook in which he stood framed in oak, like a portrait of a rich and mysterious burgomaster. "What a pretty room!" repeated the old lady; "I believe we are _tête-à-tête_." "Quite so; I have been totally alone; a most agreeable surprise, Lady Alice. Books are very good company; but even the best won't do always; and I was beginning to weary of mine." M. Varbarriere spoke French, so did Lady Alice; in fact, for that gentleman's convenience, all conversations with him in that house were conducted in the same courtly language. Lady Alice looked round the room to satisfy herself that they were really alone; and having made her commendatory criticisms on the apartment once more, "Very pretty," echoed Monsieur Varbarriere; "I admire the oak, especially in a library, it is so solemn and contemplative. The Bishop was here to-day, and admired the room very much. An agreeable and good man the Bishop appears to be." "Yes; a good man; an excellent man. I had a very interesting conversation with him yesterday. I may as well tell you, Monsieur Varbarriere--I know I may rely upon you--I have not come to my time of life without knowing pretty well, by a kind of instinct, whom I may trust; and I well know how you sympathise with me about my lost son." "Profoundly, madame;" and Monsieur Varbarriere, with his broad and brown hand on his breast, bowed slowly and very deep. CHAPTER II. M. Varbarriere orders his Wings. In her own way, with interjections, and commentary and occasional pauses for the sake of respiration, old Lady Alice related the substance of what the Bishop had communicated to her. "And what do you suppose, Monsieur Varbarriere, to have been the contents of that red leather box?" asked Lady Alice. Monsieur Varbarriere smiled mysteriously and nodded. "I fancy, Lady Alice, I have the honour to have arrived at precisely the same conclusion with yourself," said he. "Well, I dare say. You see now what is involved. You understand now why I should be, for his own sake, more than ever grieved that my boy is gone," she said, trembling very much. Monsieur Varbarriere bowed profoundly. "And why it is, sir, that I do insist on your explaining your broken phrase of the other evening." Monsieur Varbarriere in his deep oak frame stood up tall, portly, and erect. A narrow window, with stained heraldic emblazonry, was partly behind him, and the light from above fell askance on one side of his massive countenance, throwing such dark downward bars of shadow on his face, that Lady Alice could not tell whether he was scowling or smiling, or whether the effect was an illusion. "What phrase, pray, does your ladyship allude to?" he inquired. "You spoke of my boy--my poor Guy--as if you knew more of him than you cared to speak--as if you were on the point of disclosing, and suddenly recollected yourself," replied Lady Alice. "You mean when I had the honour to converse with you the night before last in the drawing-room," said he, a little brusquely, observing that the old lady was becoming vehemently excited. "Yes; when you left me under the impression that you thought my son still living," half screamed Lady Alice, like a woman in a fury. "Bah!" thundered the sneering diapason of Monsieur Varbarriere, whose good manners totally forsook him in his angry impatience, and his broad foot on the floor enforced his emphasis with a stamp. "What do you mean, you foreign masquerader, whom nobody knows? What _can_ it be? Sir, you have half distracted me. I've heard of people getting into houses--I've heard of magicians--I've heard of the devil--I have heard of charlatans, sir. I'd like to know what right, if you know nothing of my dear son, you have to torture me with doubts--" "Doubts!" repeated Varbarriere, if less angrily, even more contemptuously. "Pish!" "You may say _pish_, sir, or any rudeness you please; but depend upon this, if you do know _anything_ of any kind, about my darling son, I'll have it from you if there be either laws or men in England," shrieked Lady Alice. Varbarriere all at once subsided, and looked hesitatingly. In tones comparatively quiet, but still a little ruffled, he said-- "I've been, I fear, very rude; everyone that's angry is. I think you are right. I ought never to have approached the subject of your domestic sorrow. It was not my doing, madame; it was _you_ who insisted on drawing me to it." "You told me that you had seen my son, and knew Mr. Strangways intimately." "I did _not_!" cried Varbarriere sternly, with his head thrown back; and he and Lady Alice for a second or two were silent. "That is, I beg pardon, you _misapprehended_ me. I'm sure I never could have said I had seen your son, Mr. Guy Deverell, or that I had a particularly intimate acquaintance with Mr. Strangways." "It won't do," burst forth Lady Alice again; "I'll not be fooled--I won't be fooled, sir." "Pray, then, pause for one moment before you have excited an alarm in the house, and possibly decide me on taking my leave for ever," said Varbarriere, in a low but very stern tone. "Whatever I may be--charlatan, conjurer, devil--if you but knew the truth, you would acknowledge yourself profoundly and everlastingly indebted to me. It _is_ quite true that I am in possession of facts of which you had not even a suspicion; it is true that the affairs of those nearest to you in blood have occupied my profoundest thoughts and most affectionate care. I believe, if you will but exercise the self-command of which I have no doubt you are perfectly capable, for a very few days, I shall have so matured my plans as to render their defeat impracticable. On the other hand, if you give me any trouble, or induce the slightest suspicion anywhere that I have taken an interest of the kind I describe, I shall quit England, and you shall go down to your grave in _darkness_, and with the conviction, moreover, that you have blasted the hopes for which you ought to have sacrificed not your momentary curiosity only, but your unhappy life." Lady Alice was awed by the countenance and tones of this strange man, who assumed an authority over her, on this occasion, which neither of her deceased lords had ever ventured to assert in their lifetimes. Her fearless spirit would not, however, succumb, but looked out through the cold windows of her deep-set eyes into the fiery gaze of her _master_, as she felt him, daringly as before. After a short pause, she said-- "You would have acted more wisely, Monsieur Varbarriere, had you spoken to me on other occasions as frankly as you have just now done." "Possibly, madame." "Certainly, monsieur." M. Varbarriere bowed. "Certainly, sir. But having at length heard so much, I am willing to concede what you say. I trust the delay may not be long.--I think you ought to tell me soon. I suppose we had better talk no more in the interim," she added, suddenly turning as she approached the threshold of the room, and recovering something of her lofty tone--"upon that, to me, terrible subject." "_Much_ better, madame," acquiesced M. Varbarriere. "And we meet otherwise as before," said the old lady, with a disdainful condescension and a slight bow. "I thank you, madame, for that favour," replied M. Varbarriere, reverentially, approaching the door, which, as she drew near to withdraw, he opened for her with a bow, and they parted. "I hope she'll be quiet, that old grey wildcat. I must get a note from her to Madame Gwynn. The case grows stronger; a little more and it will be irresistible, if only that stupid and ill-tempered old woman can be got to govern herself for a few days." That evening, in the drawing-room, Monsieur Varbarriere was many degrees more respectful than ever to that old grey wildcat, at whom that morning he had roared in a way so utterly ungentlemanlike and ferocious. People at a distance might have almost fancied a sexagenarian caricature of a love-scene. There had plainly been the lovers' quarrel. The lady carried her head a little high, threw sidelong glances on the carpet, had a little pink flush in her cheeks, and spoke little; listened, but smiled not; while the gentleman sat as close as he dare, and spoke earnestly and low. Monsieur Varbarriere was, in fact, making the most of his time, and recovering all he could of his milder influence over Lady Alice, and did persuade and soften; and at length he secured a promise of the note he wanted to Mrs. Gwynn, pledging his honour that she would thoroughly approve the object of it, so soon as he was at liberty to disclose it. That night, taking leave of Sir Jekyl, Monsieur Varbarriere said-- "You've been so good as to wish me to prolong my visit, which has been to me so charming and so interesting. I have ventured, therefore, to enable myself to do so, by arranging an absence of two days, which I mean to devote to business which will not bear postponement." "Very sorry to lose you, even for the time you say; but you must leave your nephew, Mr. Strangways, as a hostage in our hands to secure your return." "He shall remain, as you are so good as to desire it, to enjoy himself. As for me, I need no tie to hold me to my engagement, and only regret every minute stolen for other objects from my visit." There was some truth in these complimentary speeches. Sir Jekyl was now quite at ease as to the character of his guests, whom he had at first connected with an often threatened attack, which he profoundly dreaded, however lightly he might talk of its chances of success. The host, on the whole, liked his guests, and really wished their stay prolonged; and Monsieur Varbarriere, who silently observed many things of which he did not speak, was, perhaps, just now particularly interested in his private perusal of that little romance which was to be read only at Marlowe Manor. "I see, Guy, you have turned over a new leaf--no fooling now--you must not relapse, mind. I shall be away for two days. If longer, address me at Slowton. May I rely on your good sense and resolution--knowing what are our probable relations with this family--to continue to exercise the same caution as I have observed in your conduct, with much satisfaction, for the last two evenings? Well, I suppose I may. If you cannot trust yourself--fly. Get away--pack. You may follow me to Slowton, make what excuse you please; but don't loiter here. Good-night." Such was the farewell spoken by Varbarriere to his nephew, as he nodded his good-night on the threshold of their dressing-room. In the morning Monsieur Varbarriere's place knew him no more at the breakfast-table. With his valise, despatch-box, and desk, he had glided away, in the frosty sunlight, in a Marlowe post-chaise, to the "Plough Inn," on the Old London Road, where, as we know, he had once sojourned before. It made a slight roundabout to the point to which his business really invited his route; and as he dismissed his vehicle here, I presume it was done with a view to mystify possible inquirers. At the "Plough Inn" he was received with an awful bustle and reverence. The fame of the consideration with which he was entertained at Marlowe had reached that modest hostelry, and Monsieur Varbarriere looked larger, grander, more solemn in its modest hall, than ever; his valise was handled with respect, and lifted in like an invalid, not hauled and trundled like a prisoner; and the desk and despatch-box, as the more immediate attendants on his person, were eyed with the respect which such a confidence could not fail to inspire. So Monsieur Varbarriere, having had his appetising drive through a bright country and keen air, ate his breakfast very comfortably; and when that meal was over, ordered a "fly," in which he proceeded to Wardlock, and pulled up at the hall-door of Lady Alice's reserved-looking, but comfortable old redbrick mansion. CHAPTER III. Monsieur Varbarriere talks with Donica Gwynn. The footman opened the door in deshabille and unshorn, with a countenance that implied his sense of the impertinence of this disturbance of his gentlemanlike retirement. There was, however, that in the countenance of Monsieur Varbarriere, as well as the intangible but potent "aura" emitted by wealth, which surrounded him--an influence which everybody feels and no one can well define, which circumambiates a rich person and makes it felt, nobody knows how, that he _is_ wealthy--that brought the flunky to himself; and adjusting his soiled necktie hastily with one hand, he ran down to the heavy but commanding countenance that loomed on his from the window of the vehicle. "This is Wardlock?" demanded the visitor. "Wardlock Manor?--yes, sir," answered the servant. "I've a note from Lady Alice Redcliffe, and a few words to Mrs. Gwynn the housekeeper. She's at home?" "Mrs. Gwynn?--yes, sir." "Open the door, please," said Monsieur Varbarriere, who was now speaking good frank English with wonderful fluency, considering his marked preference for the French tongue elsewhere. The door flew open at the touch of the footman; and Monsieur Varbarriere entered the staid mansion, and was shown by the servant into the wainscoted parlour in which Lady Alice had taken leave of the ancient retainer whom he was about to confer with. When Mrs. Gwynn, with that mixture of curiosity and apprehension which an unexpected visit is calculated to inspire, entered the room, very erect and natty, she saw a large round-shouldered stranger, standing with his back toward her, arrayed in black, at the window, with his grotesque high-crowned hat on. Turning about he removed this with a slight bow and a grave smile, and with his sonorous foreign accent inquired-- "Mrs. Gwynn, I suppose?" "Yes, sir, that is my name, if you please." "A note, Mrs. Gwynn, from Lady Alice Redcliffe." And as he placed it in the thin and rather ladylike fingers of the housekeeper, his eyes rested steadily on her features, as might those of a process-server, whose business it might be hereafter to identify her. Mrs. Gwynn read the note, which was simply an expression of her mistress's wish that she should answer explicitly whatever questions the gentleman, M. Varbarriere, who would hand it to her, and who was, moreover, a warm friend of the family, might put to her. When Mrs. Gwynn, with the help of her spectacles, had spelled through this letter, she in turn looked searchingly at Monsieur Varbarriere, and began to wonder unpleasantly what line his examination might take. "Will you, Mrs. Gwynn, allow me the right to sit down, by yourself taking a chair?" said Monsieur Varbarriere, very politely, smiling darkly, and waving his hand toward a seat. "I'm very well as I am, I thank you, sir," replied Gwynn, who did not very much like the gentleman's looks, and thought him rather like a great roguish Jew pedlar whom she had seen long ago at the fair of Marlowe. "Nay, but pray sit down--I can't while you stand--and our conversation may last some time--pray do." "I can talk as well, sir, one way as t'other," replied she, while at the same time, with a sort of fidgeted impatience, she did sit down and fold her hands in her lap. "We have all, Mrs. Gwynn, a very high opinion of you; I mean Lady Alice and the friends of her family, among whom I reckon myself." "It's only of late as I came to my present misses, you're aware, sir, 'aving been, from, I may say, my childhood in the Marlowe family." "I know--the Marlowe family--it's all one, in fact; but I may say, Mrs. Gwynn, that short, comparatively, as has been your time with Lady Alice, you are spoken of with more respect and liking by that branch of the family than by Sir Jekyl." "I've done nothing to disoblege Sir Jekyl, as Lady Alice knows. Will you be so kind, sir, as to say what you want of me, having business to attend to up-stairs?" "Certainly, it is only a trifle or two." Monsieur Varbarriere cleared his voice. "Having ascertained all about that _secret door_ that opens into the green chamber at Marlowe, we would be obliged to you to let us know at what time, to your knowledge, it was first used." His large full eyes, from under his projecting brows, stared full upon her shrinking gaze as he asked this question in tones deep and firm, but otherwise as civil as he could employ. It was vain for Mrs. Gwynn to attempt to conceal her extreme agitation. Her countenance showed it--she tried to speak, and failed; and cleared her throat, and broke down again. "Perhaps you'd like some water," said Varbarriere, rising and approaching the bell. "No," said Donica Gwynn, rising suddenly and getting before him. "Let be." He saw that she wished to escape observation. "As you please, Mrs. Gwynn--sit down again--I shan't without your leave--and recover a little." "There's nothing wrong with me, sir," replied Donica, now in possession of her voice, very angrily; "there's nothing to cause it." "Well, Mrs. Gwynn, it's quite excusable; I know all about it." "What _are_ you, a builder or a hartist?" "Nothing of the kind; I'm a gentleman without a profession, Mrs. Gwynn, and one who will not permit you to be compromised; one who will protect you from the slightest suspicion of anything unpleasant." "I don't know what you're a-driving at," said Mrs. Gwynn, still as white as death, and glancing furiously. "Come, Mrs. Gwynn, you're a sensible woman. You _do_ know _perfectly_. You have maintained a respectable character." "Yes, sir!" said Donica Gwynn, and suddenly burst into a paroxysm of hysterical tears. "Listen to me: you have maintained a respectable character, I know it: nothing whatever to injure that character shall ever fall from my lips; no human being--but two or three just as much interested in concealing all about it as you or I--shall ever know anything about it; and Sir Jekyl Marlowe has consented to take it down, so soon as the party at present at Marlowe shall have dispersed." "Lady Alice--I'll never like to see her again," sobbed Donica. "Lady Alice has no more suspicion of the existence of that door than the Pope of Rome has; and what is more, never shall. You may rely upon me to observe the most absolute silence and secrecy--nay, more, if necessary for the object of concealment--so to mislead and mystify people, that they can never so much as surmise the truth, _provided_--pray observe me--_provided_ you treat me with the most _absolute candour_. You must not practise the least reserve or concealment. On tracing the slightest shadow of either in your communication with me, I hold myself free to deal with the facts in my possession, precisely as may seem best to myself. You understand?" "Not Lady Alice, nor none of the servants, nor--nor a creature living, please." "_Depend_ on me," said Varbarriere. "Well, sure I may; a gentleman would not break his word with such as me," said Donica, imploringly. "We can't spend the whole day repeating the same thing over and over," said Varbarriere, rather grimly; "I've said my say--I know everything that concerns _you_ about it, without your opening your lips upon the subject. You occupied that room for two years and a half during Sir Harry's lifetime--you see I know it all. _There!_ you are perfectly safe. I need not have made you any promise, but I do--perfectly safe with me--and the room shall vanish this winter, and no one but ourselves know anything of that door--do you understand?--_provided_--" "Yes, sir, please--and what do you wish to know more from me? I don't know, I'm sure, why I should be such a fool as to take on so about it, as if _I_ could help it, or was ever a bit the worse of it myself. There's been many a one has slep' in that room and never so much as knowd there was a door but that they came in by." "To be sure; so tell me, do you recollect Mr. Deverell's losing a paper in that room?" "Well, I do mind the time he said he lost it there, but I know no more than the child unborn." "Did Sir Harry never tell you?" "They said a deal o' bad o' Sir Harry, and them that should a' stood up for him never said a good word for him. Poor old creature!--I doubt if he had pluck to do it. I don't think he had, poor fellow!" "Did he ever _tell_ you he had done it? Come, remember your promise." "No, upon my soul--never." "Do you _think_ he took it?" Their eyes met steadily. "Yes, I do," said she, with a slight defiant frown. "And _why_ do you think so?" "Because, shortly after the row began about that paper, he talked with me, and said there was something a-troubling of him, and he wished me to go and live in a farm-house at Applehythe, and keep summat he wanted kep safe, as there was no one in all England so true as me--poor old fellow! He never told me, and I never asked. But I laid it down in my own mind it was the paper Mr. Deverell lost, that's all." "Did he ever show you that paper?" "No." "Did he tell you where it was?" "He never said he had it." "Did he show you where that thing was which he wanted you to take charge of?" "Yes, in the press nigh his bed's head." "Did he open the press?" "Ay." "Well?" "He showed me a sort of a box, and he said that was all." "A little trunk of stamped red leather--was that like it?" "That was just it." "Did he afterwards give it into anybody's charge?" "I know no more about it. I saw it there, that's all. I saw it once, and never before nor since." "Is there more than one secret door into that room?" pursued Varbarriere. "More than one; no, never as I heard or thought." "Where is the door placed with which _you_ are acquainted?" "Why? Don't you know?" "Suppose I know of two. We have discovered a second. Which is the one you saw used? _Come!_" Parenthetically it is to be observed that no such discovery had been made, and Varbarriere was merely fishing for information without disclosing his ignorance. "In the recess at the right of the bed's head." "Yes; and how do you open it? I mean from the green chamber?" "I never knowd any way how to open it--it's from t'other side. There's a way to bolt it, though." "Ay? How's that?" "There's an ornament of scrowl-work, they calls it, bronze-like, as runs down the casing of the recess, shaped like letter esses. Well, the fourteenth of them, reckoning up from the bottom, next the wall, turns round with your finger and thumb; so if anyone be in the green chamber, and knows the secret, they can stop the door being opened." "I see--thank you. You've been through the passage leading from Sir Harry's room that was--Sir Jekyl Marlowe's room, at the back of the house, to the secret door of the green chamber?" "No, never. I know nothink o' that, no more nor a child." "No?" "No, nothink at all." Varbarriere had here been trying to establish another conjecture. There was a pause. Varbarriere, ruminating darkly, looked on Donica Gwynn. He then closed his pocket-book, in which he had inscribed a few notes, and said-- "Thank you, Mrs. Gwynn. Should I want anything more I'll call again; and you had better not mention the subject of my visit. Let me see the pictures--that will be the excuse--and do _you_ keep _your_ secret, and I'll keep mine." "No, I thank you, sir," said Donica, drily, almost fiercely, drawing back from his proffered douceur. "Tut, tut--pray do." "No, I thank you." So he looked at the pictures in the different rooms, and at some old china and snuff-boxes, to give a colour to his visit; and with polite speeches and dark smiles, and a general courtesy that was unctuous, he took his leave of Donica Gwynn, whom he left standing in the hall with a flushed face and a sore heart. CHAPTER IV. A Story of a Magician and a Vampire. The pleasant autumn sun touched the steep roofs and mullioned windows of Marlowe Manor pleasantly that morning, turning the thinning foliage of its noble timber into gold, and bringing all the slopes and undulations of its grounds into relief in its subdued glory. The influence of the weather was felt by the guests assembled in the spacious breakfast-parlour, and gay and animated was the conversation. Lady Jane Lennox, that "superbly handsome creature," as old Doocey used to term her, had relapsed very much into her old ways. Beatrix had been pleased when, even in her impetuous and uncertain way, that proud spirit had seemed to be drawn toward her again. But that was past, and that unruly nature had broken away once more upon her own solitary and wayward courses. She cared no more for Beatrix, or, if at all, it was plainly not kindly. In Lady Jane's bold and mournful isolation there was something that interested Beatrix, ungracious as her ways often were, and she felt sore at the unjust repulse she had experienced. But Beatrix was proud, and so, though wounded, she did not show her pain--not that pain, nor another far deeper. Between her and Guy Strangways had come a coldness unintelligible to her, an estrangement which she would have felt like an insult, had it not been for his melancholy looks and evident loss of spirits. There is a very pretty room at Marlowe; it is called (_why_, I forget) Lady Mary's boudoir; its door opens from the first landing on the great stair. An oak floor, partly covered with a Turkey carpet, one tall window with stone shafts, a high old-fashioned stone chimneypiece, and furniture perhaps a little incongruous, but pleasant in its incongruity. Tapestry in the Teniers style--Dutch village festivals, with no end of figures, about half life-size, dancing, drinking, making music; old boors, and young and fair-haired maidens, and wrinkled vraus, and here and there gentlemen in doublets and plumed hats, and ladies, smiling and bare-headed, and fair and plump, in great stomachers. These pleasant subjects, so lifelike, with children, cocks and hens, and dogs interspersed, helped, with a Louis Quatorze suit of pale green, and gold chairs cushioned with Utrecht velvet, to give to this room its character so mixed, of gaiety and solemnity, something very quaint and cheery. This room had old Lady Alice Redcliffe selected for her sitting-room, when she found herself unequal to the exertion of meeting the other ladies in the drawing-room, and hither she had been wont to invite Guy Strangways, who would occasionally pass an hour here wonderfully pleasantly and happily--in fact, as many hours as the old lady would have permitted, so long as Beatrix had been her companion. But with those self-denying resolutions we have mentioned came a change. When Beatrix was there the young gentleman was grave and rather silent, and generally had other engagements which at least shortened his visit. This was retorted by Beatrix, who, a few minutes after the arrival of the visitor whom old Lady Alice had begun to call her secretary, would, on one pretence or another, disappear, and leave the old princess and her secretary to the uninterrupted enjoyment of each other's society. Now since the night on which Varbarriere in talking with Lady Alice had, as we have heard, suddenly arrested his speech respecting her son--leaving her in uncertainty how it was to have been finished--an uncertainty on which her morbid brain reflected a thousand horrid and impossible shapes, the old lady had once more conceived something of her early dread of Guy Strangways. It was now again subsiding, although last night, under the influence of laudanum, in her medicated sleep her son had been sitting at her bedside, talking incessantly, she could not remember what. Guy Strangways had just returned from the Park for his fishing-rod and angler's gear, when he was met in the hall by the grave and courteous butler, who presented a tiny pencilled note from Lady Alice, begging him to spare her half an hour in Lady Mary's boudoir. Perhaps it was a bore. But habitual courtesy is something more than "mouth honour, breath." Language and thought react upon one another marvellously. To restrain its expression is in part to restrain the feeling; and thus a well-bred man is not only in words and demeanour, but inwardly and sincerely, more gracious and noble than others. How oddly things happen sometimes! Exactly as Guy Strangways arrived on the lobby, a little gloved hand--it was Beatrix's--was on the door-handle of Lady Mary's boudoir. It was withdrawn, and she stood looking for a second or two at the young gentleman, who had evidently been going in the same direction. He, too, paused; then, with a very low bow, advanced to open the door for Miss Marlowe. "No, thank you--I--I think I had better postpone my visit to grandmamma till I return. I'm going to the garden, and should like to bring her some flowers." "I'm afraid I have arrived unluckily--she would, I know, have been so glad to see you," said Guy Strangways. "Oh, I've seen her twice before to-day. You were going to make her a little visit now." "I--if you wish it, Miss Marlowe, I'll defer it." "She would be very little obliged to me, I'm sure; but I must really go," said Beatrix, recollecting on a sudden that there was no need of so long a parley. "It would very much relieve the poor secretary's labours, and make his little period of duty so much happier," said Guy, forgetting his wise resolutions strangely. "I am sure grandmamma would prefer seeing her visitors singly--it makes a great deal more of them, you know." And with a little smile and such a pretty glow in her cheeks, she passed him by. He bowed and smiled faintly too, and for a moment stood gazing after her into the now vacant shadow of the old oak wainscoting, as young Numa might after his vanished Egeria, with an unspoken, burning grief and a longing at his heart. "I'm sure she can't like me--I'm sure she _dis_likes me. So much the better--Heaven knows I'm glad of it." And with an aching heart he knocked, turned the handle, and entered the pretty apartment in which Lady Alice, her thin shoulders curved, as she held her hands over the fire, was sitting alone. She looked at him over her shoulder strangely from her hollow eyes, without moving or speaking for a time. He bowed gravely, and said-- "I have this moment received your little note, Lady Alice, and have hastened to obey." She sat up straight and sighed. "Thanks--I have not been very well--so nervous--so very nervous," she repeated, without removing her sad and clouded gaze from his face. "We all heard with regret that you had not been so well," said he. "Well, we'll not talk of it--you're very good--I'm glad you've come--very nervous, and almost wishing myself back at Wardlock--where indeed I should have returned, only that I should have been wishing myself back again before an hour--miserably nervous." And Lady Alice sniffed at her smelling-salts, and added-- "And Monsieur Varbarriere gone away on business for some days--is not he?" "Yes--quite uncertain--possibly for two, or perhaps three, he said," answered Guy. "And he's very--he knows--he knows a great deal--I forget what I was going to say--I'm half asleep to-day--no sleep--a very bad night." And old Lady Alice yawned drearily into the fire. "Beatrix said she'd look in; but everyone forgets--you young people are so selfish." "Mademoiselle Marlowe was at the door as I came in, and said she would go on instead to the garden first, and gather some flowers for you." "Oh! h'm!--very good--well, I can't talk to-day; suppose you choose a book, Mr. Strangways, and read a few pages--that is, if you are quite at leisure?" "Perfectly--that is, for an hour--unfortunately I have then an appointment. What kind of book shall I take?" he asked, approaching one of the two tall bookstands that flanked an oval mirror opposite the fireplace. "Anything, provided it is old." Nearly half an hour passed in discussing what to read--the old lady not being in the mood that day to pursue the verse readings which had employed Guy Strangways hitherto. "This seems a curious old book," he said, after a few minutes. "Very old French--I think upon witchcraft, and full of odd narratives." "That will do very well." "I had better try to translate it--the language is so antiquated." He leaned the folio on the edge of the chimneypiece, and his elbow beside it, supporting his head on his hand, and so read aloud to the _exigeante_ old lady, who liked to see people employed about her, even though little of comfort, amusement, or edification resulted from it. The narrative which Lady Alice had selected was entitled thus:-- "CONCERNING A REMARKABLE REVENGE AFTER SEPULTURE. "In the Province of Normandy, in the year of grace 1405, there lived a young gentleman of Styrian descent, possessing estates in Hungary, but a still more opulent fortune in France. His park abutted on that of the Chevalier de St. Aubrache, who was a man also young, of ancient lineage, proud to excess, and though wealthy, by no means so wealthy as his Styrian neighbour. "This disparity in riches excited the wrath of the jealous nobleman, who having once admitted the passions of envy and hatred to his heart, omitted no opportunity to injure him. "The Chevalier de St. Aubrache, in fact, succeeded so well--" Just at this point in the tale, Beatrix, with her flowers, not expecting to find Guy Strangways still in attendance, entered the room. "You need not go; come in, dear--you've brought me some flowers--come in, I say; thank you, Beatrix, dear--they are very pretty, and very sweet too. Here is Mr. Strangways--sit by me, dear--reading a curious old tale of witchcraft. Tell her the beginning, pray." So Strangways told the story over again in his best way, and then proceeded to read as follows:-- "The Chevalier de St. Aubrache, in fact, succeeded so well, that on a point of law, aided by a corrupt judge in the Parliament of Rouen, he took from him a considerable portion of his estate, and subsequently so managed matters without committing himself, that he lost his life unfairly in a duel, which the Chevalier secretly contrived. "Now there was in the household of the gentleman so made away with, a certain Hungarian, older than he, a grave and politic man, and reputed to have studied the art of magic deeply. By this man was the corpse of the deceased gentleman duly coffined, had away to Styria, and, it is said, there buried according to certain conditions, with which the Hungarian magician, who had vowed a terrible revenge, was well acquainted. "In the meantime the Chevalier de St. Aubrache had espoused a very beautiful demoiselle of the noble family of D'Ayenterre, by whom he had one daughter, so beautiful that she was the subject of universal admiration, which increased in the heart of her proud father that affection which it was only natural that he should cherish for her. "It was about the time of Candlemas, a full score of years after the death of his master, that the Hungarian magician returned to Normandy, accompanied by a young gentleman, very pale indeed, but otherwise so exactly like the gentleman now so long dead, that no one who had been familiar with his features could avoid being struck, and indeed, affrighted with the likeness. "The Chevalier de St. Aubrache was at first filled with horror, like the rest; but well knowing that the young man whom he, the stranger, so resembled, had been actually killed as aforesaid, in combat, and having never heard of vampires, which are among the most malignant and awful of the manifestations of the Evil One, and not recognising at all the Hungarian magician, who had been careful to disguise himself effectually; and, above all, relying on letters from the King of Hungary, with which, under a feigned name, as well as with others from the Archbishop of Toledo in Spain, he had come provided, he received him into his house; when the grave magician, who resembled a doctor of a university, and the fair-seeming vampire, being established in the house of their enemy, began to practise, by stealth, their infernal arts." The old lady saw that in the reader's countenance, as he read this odd story, which riveted her gaze. Perhaps conscious of her steady and uncomfortable stare, as well as of a real parallel, he grew obviously disconcerted, and at last, as it seemed, even agitated as he proceeded. "Young man, for Heaven's sake, will you tell me who you are?" said Lady Alice, her dark old eyes fixed fearfully on his face, as she rose unconsciously from her chair. The young man, very pale, turned a despairing and almost savage look from her to Beatrix, and back to her again. "You are not a Strangways," she continued. He looked steadily at her, as if he were going to speak, then dropped his glance suddenly and remained silent. "I say, I know your name is not Strangways," said the old lady, in increasing agitation. "I can tell you nothing about myself," said he again, fixing his great dark eyes, that looked almost wild in his pallid face, full upon her, with a strange expression of anguish. "In the Almighty's name, are you Guy Deverell?" she screamed, lifting up her thin hands between him and her in her terror. The young man returned her gaze oddly, with, she fancied, a look of baffled horror in his face. It seemed to her like an evil spirit detected. He recovered, however, for a few seconds, something of his usual manner. Instead of speaking, he bowed twice very low, and, on the point of leaving the room, he suddenly arrested his departure, turning about with a stamp on the floor; and walking back to her, he said, very gently-- "Yes, yes, why should I deny it? My name _is_ Guy Deverell." And was gone. CHAPTER V. Farewell. "Oh! grandmamma, _what_ is it?" said Beatrix, clasping her thin wrist. The old lady, stooping over the chair on which she leaned, stared darkly after the vanished image, trembling very much. "_What_ is Deverell--why should the name be so dreadful--is there anything--oh! grandmamma, _is_ there anything very bad?" "I don't know--I am confused--did you ever see such a face? My gracious Heaven!" muttered Lady Alice. "Oh! grandmamma, darling, tell me what it is, I implore of you." "Yes, dear, everything; another time. I can't now. I might do a mischief. I might prevent--you must promise me, darling, to tell no one. You must not say his name is Deverell. _You_ say nothing about it. That dreadful, dreadful story!" The folio was lying with crumpled leaves, back upward, on the floor, where it had fallen. "There is something plainly fearful in it. _You_ think so, grandmamma; something discovered; something going to happen. Send after him, grandmamma; call him back. If it is anything you can prevent, I'll ring." "Don't _touch_ the bell," cried granny, sharply, clutching at her hand, "don't _do_ it. See, Beatrix, you promise me you say nothing to anyone of what you've witnessed--_promise_. I'll tell you all I know when I'm better. He'll come again. I _wish_ he'd come again. I'm sure he will, though I hardly think I could bear to see him. I don't know what to think." The old lady threw herself back in her chair, not affectedly at all, but looking so awfully haggard and agitated that Beatrix was frightened. "Call nobody, there's a darling; just open the window; I shall be better." And she heaved some of those long and heavy sighs which relieve hysterical oppression; and, after a long silence, she said-- "It is a long time since I have felt so ill, Beatrix. Remember this, darling, my papers are in the black cabinet in my bed-room at home--I mean Wardlock. There is not a great deal. My jointure stops, you know; but whatever little there is, is for you, darling." "You're not to talk of it, granny, darling, you'll be quite well in a minute; the air is doing you good. May I give you a little wine?--Well, a little water?" "Thanks, dear; I _am_ better. Remember what I told you, and particularly your promise to mention what you heard to no one. I mean the--the--strange scene with that young man. I think I will take a glass of wine. I'll tell you all when I'm better--when Monsieur Varbarriere comes back. It is important for a time, especially having heard what I have, that I should wait a little." Granny sipped a little sherry slowly, and the tint of life, such as visits the cheek of the aged, returned to hers, and she was better. "I'd rather not see him any more. It's all like a dream. I don't know what to make of it," muttered granny; and she began audibly to repeat passages, tremblingly and with upturned eyes, from her prayer-book. Perplexed, anxious, excited, Beatrix looked down on the collapsed and haggard face of the old lady, and listened to the moaned petition, "Lord, have mercy upon us!" which trembled from her lips as it might from those of a fainting sinner on a death-bed. Guy Deverell, as I shall henceforward call him, thinking of nothing but escape into solitude, was soon a good way from the house. He was too much agitated, and his thoughts too confused at first, to estimate all the possible consequences of the sudden disclosure he had just made. What would Varbarriere, who could be stern and violent, say or do, when he learned it? Here was the one injunction on which he had been ever harping violated. He felt how much he owed to the unceasing care of that able and disinterested friend through all his life, and how had he repaid it all! "Anything but deception--anything but that. I could not endure the agony of my position longer--yes, agony." He was now wandering by the bank of the solitary river, and looked back at the picturesque gables of Marlowe Manor through the trees; and he felt that he was leaving all that could possibly interest him in existence in leaving Marlowe. Always was rising in his mind the one thought, "What does she think of my deception and my agitation--what can she think of _me_?" It is not easy, even in silence and alone, when the feelings are at all ruffled, to follow out a train of thought. Guy thought of his approaching farewell to his uncle: he sometimes heard his great voice thundering in despair and fury over his ruined schemes--schemes, be they what they might, at least unselfish. Then he thought of the effect of the discovery on Sir Jekyl, who, no doubt, had special reasons for alarm connected with this name--a secret so jealously guarded by Varbarriere. Then he thought of his future. His commission in the French army awaited him. A life of drudgery or listlessness? No such thing! a career of adventure and glory--ending in a baton or death! Death is so romantic in the field! There are always some beautiful eyes to drop in secret those tears which are worth dying for. It is not a crowded trench, where fifty corpses pig together in the last noisome sleep--but an apotheosis! He was sure he had done well in yielding to the impulse that put an end to the tedious treachery he had been doomed to practise; and if well, then _wisely_--so, no more retrospection. All this rose and appeared in fragments like a wreck in the eddies of his mind. One thing was clear--he must leave Marlowe forthwith. He could not meet his host again. He stood up. It is well to have hit upon anything to be done--anything quite certain. With rapid steps he now returned to Marlowe, wondering how far he had walked, as it seemed to him, in so mere a moment of time. The house was deserted; so fine a day had tempted all its inmates but old Lady Alice abroad. He sent to the village of Marlowe for a chaise, while Jacques, who was to await where he was the return of his master, Monsieur Varbarriere, got his luggage into readiness, and he himself wrote, having tried and torn up half a dozen, a note to Sir Jekyl, thanking him for his hospitality, and regretting that an unexpected occurrence made his departure on so short notice unavoidable. He did not sign it. He would not write his assumed name. Sir Jekyl could have no difficulty in knowing from which of his guests it came, perhaps would not even miss the signature. The chaise stood at the door-steps, his luggage stowed away, his dark short travelling cloak about his shoulders, and his note to Sir Jekyl in his fingers. He entered the great hall, meaning to place it on the marble table where Sir Jekyl's notes and newspapers usually awaited him, and there he encountered Beatrix. There was no one else. She was crossing to the outer door, and they almost met before they came to a stop. "Oh! Mr. Strangways." "Pray call me by my real name, Deverell. Strangways was my mother's; and in obedience to those who are wiser than I, during my journey I adopted it, although the reasons were not told me." There was a little pause here. "I am very glad I was so fortunate as to meet you, Miss Marlowe, before I left. I'm just going, and it would be such a privilege to know that you had not judged me very hardly." "I'm sure papa will be very sorry you are going--a break-up is always a sad event--we miss our guests so much," she said, smiling, but a little pale. "If you knew my story, Miss Marlowe, you would acquit me," he said, bursting forth all at once. "Misfortune overtook me in my early childhood, before I can remember. I have no right to trouble you with the recital; and in my folly I superadded this--the worst--that madly I gave my love to one who could not return it--who, perhaps, ought not to have returned it. Pardon me, Miss Marlowe, for talking of these things; but as I am going away, and wished you to understand me, I thought, perhaps, you would hear me. Seeing how hopeless was my love, I never told it, but resolved to see her no more, and so to the end of my days will keep my vow; but this is added, that for her sake my life becomes a sacrifice--a real one--to guard her from sorrows and dangers, which I believe _did_ threaten her, and to save her from which I devote myself, as perhaps she will one day understand. I thought I would just tell you so much before I went, and--and--that _you_ are that lady. Farewell, dear Miss Marlowe, most beautiful--beloved." He pressed her hand, he kissed it passionately, and was gone. It was not until she had heard the vehicle drive rapidly away that she quite recovered herself. She went into the front hall, and, through the window, standing far back, watched the receding chaise. When it was out of sight, humming a gay air, she ran up-stairs, and into her bed-room, when, locking the door, she wept the bitterest tears, perhaps, she had ever shed, since the days of her childhood. CHAPTER VI. At the Bell and Horns. With the reader's permission, I must tell here how Monsieur Varbarriere proceeded on his route to Slowton. As he mounted his vehicle from the steps of Wardlock, the flunky, who was tantalised by the very unsatisfactory result of his listening at the parlour-door, considered him curiously. "Go on towards the village," said M. Varbarriere to the driver, in his deep foreign accents. And so soon as they were quite out of sight of the Wardlock flunky, he opened the front window of his nondescript vehicle, and called-- "Drive to Slowton." Which, accordingly, was done. M. Varbarriere, in profound good-humour, a flood of light and certainty having come upon him, sat back luxuriously in a halo of sardonic glory, and was smiling to himself, as men sometimes will over the chess-board when the rest of their game is secure. At the Bell and Horns he was received with a reverential welcome. "A gentleman been inquiring for Monsieur Varbarriere?" asked the foreign gentleman in black, descending. "A gentleman, sir, as has took number seven, and expects a gentleman to call, but did not say who, which his name is Mr. Rumsey?" "Very good," said Monsieur Varbarriere. Suddenly he recollected that General Lennox's letter might have reached the post-office, and, plucking a card from his case, wrote an order on it for his letters, which he handed to Boots, who trudged away to the post-office close by. Varbarriere was half sorry now that he had opened his correspondence with old General Lennox so soon. He had no hope that Donica Gwynn's reserves would have melted and given way so rapidly in the interview which had taken place. He was a man who cared nothing about penal justice, who had embraced the world's ethics early, and looked indulgently on escapades of human nature, and had no natural turn for cruelty, although he could be cruel enough when an object was to be accomplished. "I don't think I'd have done it, though he deserves it richly, and has little right to look for quarter at my hands." And whichever of the gentlemen interested he may have alluded to, he cursed him under his breath ardently. In number seven there awaited him a tall and thin man of business, of a sad countenance and bilious, with a pale drab-coloured and barred muslin cravat, tied with as much precision as a curate's; a little bald at the very top of his head; a little stooped at his shoulders. He did not smile as Monsieur Varbarriere entered the room. He bowed in a meek and suffering way, and looked as if he had spent the morning in reading Doctor Blewish's pamphlet "On the Ubiquity of Disguised Cholera Morbus," or our good Bishop's well-known tract on "Self-Mortification." There was a smell of cigars in the room, which should not have been had he known that Monsieur Varbarriere was to be here so early. His chest was weak, and the doctors ordered that sort of fumigation. Monsieur Varbarriere set his mind at ease by preparing himself to smoke one of the notable large cigars, of which he carried always a dozen rounds or so in his case. "You have brought the cases and opinions with you?" inquired Varbarriere. The melancholy solicitor replied by opening a tin box, from which he drew several sheafs of neatly labelled papers tied up in red tape; the most methodical and quiet of attorneys, and one of the most efficient to be found. "Smoke away; you like it, so do I; we can talk too, and look at these," said Varbarriere, lighting his cigar. Mr. Rumsey bowed, and meekly lighted his also. Then began the conference on business. "Where are Gamford's letters?--these?--ho!" And as Monsieur Varbarriere read them, puffing away as fast as a furnace, and threw each down as he would play a card, in turn, he would cry "Bah!"--"Booh!"--or, "Did you ever read such Galamathias?"--and, at last-- "Who was right about that _benet_--you or I? I told you what he was." "You will perceive just now, I think, sir, that there are some things of value there notwithstanding. You can't see their importance until you shall have looked into the enlarged statement we have been enabled by the result of some fresh discoveries to submit to counsel." "Give me that case. Fresh discoveries, have you? I venture to say, when you've heard my notes, you'll open your eyes. No, I mean the cigar-case; well, you may give me that too." So he took the paper, with its bluish briefing post pages, and broad margin, and the opinions of Mr. Serjeant Edgeways and Mr. Whaulbane, Q.C., copied in the same large, round hand at the conclusion. "Well, these opinions are stronger than I expected. There is a bit here in Whaulbane's I don't like so well--what you call fishy, you know. But you shall hear just now what I can add to our proofs, and you will see what becomes of good Mr. Whaulbane's doubts and queries. You said always you did not think they had destroyed the deed?" "If well advised, they did not. I go that length. Because the deed, although it told against them while a claimant in the Deverell line appeared, would yet be an essential part of their case in the event of their title being attacked from the Bracton quarter; and therefore the fact is, they could not destroy it." "They are both quite clear upon the question of secondary evidence of the contents of a lost deed, I see," said Varbarriere, musingly, "and think our proof satisfactory. Those advocates, however--_why_ do they?--always say their say with so many reserves and misgivings, that you begin to think they know very little more of the likelihoods of the matter, with all their pedantry, than you do yourself." "The glorious uncertainty of the law!" ejaculated Mr. Rumsey, employing a phrase which I have heard before, and with the nearest approach to a macerated smile which his face had yet worn. "Ay," said Varbarriere, in his metallic tones of banter, "the glorious uncertainty of the law. That must be true, for you're always saying it; and it must be pleasant too, if one could only see it; for, my faith! you look almost cheerful while you say it." "It makes counsel cautious, though it does not cool clients when they're once fairly blooded," said Mr. Rumsey. "A client is a wonderful thing sometimes. There would not be half the money made of our profession if men kept their senses when they go into law; but they seldom do. Lots of cool gamblers at every other game, but no one ever keeps his head at law." "That's encouraging; thank you. Suppose I take your advice, and draw stakes?" said Varbarriere. "You have no notion," said Mr. Rumsey, resignedly. "Well, I believe you're right, monsieur; and I believe _I_ am right too; and if you have any faith in your favourite oracles, so must you; but, have you done your cigar? Well, take your pen for a moment and listen to me, and note what I say. When Deverell came down with his title-deeds to Marlowe, they gave him the Window dressing-room for his bed-room, and the green chamber, with the bed taken down, for his dressing-room; and there he placed his papers, with the key turned in the door. In the morning his attorney came. It was a meeting about a settlement of the mortgage; and when the papers were overhauled it was found that that deed had been abstracted. Very good. Now listen to what I have to relate concerning the peculiar construction of that room." So Monsieur Varbarriere proceeded to relate minutely all he had ascertained that day, much to the quiet edification of Mr. Rumsey, whose eyes brightened, and whose frontal wrinkles deepened as he listened. "I told you I suspected some legerdemain about that room long ago; the idea came to me oddly. When on a visit to the Marquis de Mirault he told me that in making alterations in the chateau they had discovered a false door into one of the bed-rooms. The tradition of this contrivance, which was singularly artful, was lost. It is possible that the secret of it perished with its first possessor. By means of this door the apartment in question was placed in almost immediate conjunction with another, which, except through this admirably concealed door, could not be reached from it without a long circuit. The proximity of the rooms, in fact, had been, by reason of the craft with which they were apparently separated, entirely overlooked." The attorney observed, sadly-- "The French are an ingenious people." "The curiosity of my friend was excited," continued Varbarriere, "and with some little search among family records he found that this room, which was constructed in the way of an addition to the chateau, had been built about the beginning of the eighteenth century, during the marquisate of one of the line, who was celebrated as _un homme à bonnes fortunes_, you understand, and its object was now quite palpable." "A man, no doubt, of ability--a long-headed gentleman," mused the melancholy attorney. "Well, at Marlowe I saw a collection of elevations of the green chamber, as it is called, built only two or three years later--and, mind this, by the same architect, an Italian, called Paulo Abruzzi, a remarkable name, which I perfectly remembered as having been mentioned by my friend the Marquis as the architect of his ancestral relic of Cupid's legerdemain. But here is the most remarkable circumstance, and to which my friend Sir Jekyl quite innocently gave its proper point. The room under this chamber, and, of course, in the same building, was decorated with portraits painted in the panel, and one of them was this identical Marquis de Mirault, with the date 1711, and the Baronet was good enough to tell me that he had been a very intimate friend, and had visited his grandfather, at Marlowe." CHAPTER VII. M. Varbarriere's Plans. Varbarriere solemnly lighted a cigar, and squinted at its glowing point with his great dark eyes, in which the mild attorney saw the lurid reflection. When it was well lighted he went on-- "You may suppose how this confirmed my theory. I set about my inquiries quietly, and was convinced that Sir Jekyl knew all about it, by his disquietude whenever I evinced an interest in that portion of the building. But I managed matters very slyly, and collected proof very nearly demonstrative; and at this moment he has not a notion who I am." "No. It will be a surprise when he does learn," answered the attorney, sadly. "A fine natural hair-dye is the air of the East Indies: first it turns light to black, and then black to grey. Then, my faith!--a bronzed face with plenty of furrows, a double chin, and a great beard to cover it, and eleven stone weight expanded to seventeen stone--_Corpo di Bacco!_--and six pounds!" And Monsieur Varbarriere laughed like the clang and roar of a chime of cathedral bells. "It will be a smart blow," said the attorney, almost dreamily. "Smash him," said Varbarriere. "The Deverell estate is something over five thousand a-year; and the mesne rates, with four per cent. interest, amount to 213,000_l._" "He'll defend it," said the knight of the sorrowful countenance, who was now gathering in his papers. "I hope he will," growled Varbarriere, with a chuckle. "He has not a leg to stand on--all the better for _you_, at all events; and then I'll bring down that other hammer on his head." "The criminal proceedings?" murmured the sad attorney. "Ay. I can prove that case myself--he fired before his time, and killed him, I'm certain simply to get the estate. I was the only person present--poor Guy! Jekyl had me in his pocket then. The rascal wanted to thrust me down and destroy me afterwards. He employed that Jew house, Röbenzahl and Isaacs--the villain! Luck turned, and I am a rich fellow now, and his turn is coming. Vive la justice éternelle! Vive la bagatelle! Bravo! Bah!" Monsieur Varbarriere had another pleasant roar of laughter here, and threw his hat at the solemn attorney's head. "You'll lunch with me," said Varbarriere. "Thanks," murmured the attorney. "And now the war--the campaign--what next?" "You'll make an exact note," the attorney musingly replied, "of what that woman Wynn or Gwynn can prove; also what the Lord Bishop of what's-his-name can prove; and it strikes me we shall have to serve some notice to intimidate Sir Jekyl about that red-leather box, to prevent his making away with the deed, and show him we know it is there; or perhaps apply for an order to make him lodge the deed in court; but Tom Weavel--he's always in town--will advise us. You don't think that woman will leave us in the lurch?" "No," said Varbarriere, as if he was thinking of something else. "That Donica Gwynn, you mean. She had that green chamber to herself, you see, for a matter of three years." "Yes." "And she's one of those old domestic Dianas who are sensitive about scandal--you understand--and she knows what ill-natured people would say; so I quieted her all I could, and I don't think she'll venture to recede. No; she certainly won't." "How soon can you let me have the notes, sir?" "To-morrow, when I return. I've an appointment to keep by rail to-night, and I'll make a full memorandum from my notes as I go along." "Thanks--and what are your instructions?" "Send back the cases with copies of the new evidence." "And assuming a favourable opinion, sir, are my instructions to proceed?" "Certainly, my son, forthwith--the grass it must not grow under our feet." "Of course subject to counsel's opinion?" said the attorney, sadly. "To be sure." "And which first--the action or the indictment? or both together?" asked Mr. Rumsey. "_That_ for counsel too. Only my general direction is, let the onset be as sudden, violent, and determined as possible. You see?" The attorney nodded gently, tying up his last bundle of papers as softly as a lady might knot her ribbon round the neck of her lap-dog. "You see?" "Yes, sir; your object is destruction. Delenda est Carthago--that's the word," murmured Mr. Rumsey, plaintively. "Yes--ha, ha!--what you call double him up!" clanged out Varbarriere, with an exulting oath and a chuckle. The attorney had locked up his despatch-box now, and putting the little bunch of keys deep into his trowsers pocket, he said, "Yes, that's the word; but I suppose you have considered--" "_What?_ I'm tired considering." "I was going to say whether some more certain result might not be obtainable by negotiation; that is, if you thought it a case for negotiation." "_What_ negotiation? What do you mean?" "Well, you see there are materials--there's something to yield at both sides," said the attorney, very slowly, in a diplomatic reverie. "But why should you think of a compromise?--the worst thing I fancy could happen to _you_." There was a general truth in this. It is not the ferryman's interest to build a bridge, nor was it Mr. Rumsey's that his client should walk high and dry over those troubled waters through which it was his privilege and profit to pilot him. But he had not quite so much faith in this case as Monsieur Varbarriere had, and he knew that his wealthy and resolute client could grow savage enough in defeat, and had once or twice had stormy interviews with him after failures. "If the young gentleman and young lady liked one another, for instance, the conflicting claims might be reconciled, and a marriage would in that case arrange the difference." "There's nothing very deep in that," snarled Varbarriere, "but there is everything impracticable. Do you think Guy Deverell, whose father that _lache_ murdered before my eyes, could ever endure to call _him_ father? Bah! If I thought so I would drive him from my presence and never behold him more. No, no, no! There is more than an estate in all this--there is justice, there is _punishment_." Monsieur Varbarriere, with his hands in his pockets, took a turn up and down the room, and his solemn steps shook the floor, and his countenance was agitated by violence and hatred. The pale, thin attorney eyed him with a gentle and careworn observation. His respected client was heaving with a great toppling swagger as he to-ed and fro-ed in his thunderstorm, looking as black as the Spirit of Evil. This old-maidish attorney was meek and wise, but by no means timid. He was accustomed to hear strong language, and sometimes even oaths, without any strange emotion. He looked on this sort of volcanic demonstration scientifically, as a policeman does on drunkenness--knew its stages, and when it was best left to itself. Mr. Rumsey, therefore, poked the fire a little, and then looked out of the window. "You don't go to town to-night?" "Not if you require me here, sir." "Yes, I shall have those memoranda to give you--and tell me now, I think you know your business. Do you think, as we now stand, success is _certain_?" "Well, sir, it certainly is very strong--very; but I need not tell you a case will sometimes take a queer turn, and I never like to tell a client that anything is absolutely certain--a case is sometimes carried out of its legitimate course, you see; the judges may go wrong, or the jury bolt, or a witness may break down, or else a bit of evidence may start up--it's a responsibility we never take on ourselves to say that of any case; and you know there has been a good deal of time--and that sometimes raises a feeling with a jury." "Ay, a quarter of a century, but it can't be helped. For ten years of that time I could not show, I owed money to everybody. Then, when _I_ was for striking on the criminal charge for _murder_, or _manslaughter_, or whatever you agreed it was to be, you all said I must begin with the civil action, and first oust him from Guy Deverell's estate. Well, _there_ you told me I could not move till he was twenty-five, and now you talk of the good deal of time--_ma foi!_--as if it was I who delayed, and not _you_, messieurs. But enough, past is past. We have the present, and I'll use it." "We are to go on, then?" "Yes, we've had to wait too long. Stop for nothing, drive right on, you see, at the fastest pace counsel can manage. If I saw the Deverell estate where it should be, and a judgment for the mesne rates, and Sir Jekyl Marlowe in the dock for his crime, I don't say I should sing _nunc dimittis_; but, _parbleu_, sir, it would be very agreeable--ha! ha! ha!" CHAPTER VIII. Tempest. "Does Mr. Guy Deverell know anything of the measures you contemplate in his behalf?" inquired the attorney. "Nothing. Do you think me a fool? Young men _are_ such asses!" "You know, however, of course, that he will act. The proceedings, you know, must be in his name." "Leave that to me." Varbarriere rang the bell and ordered luncheon. There were grouse and trout--he was in luck--and some cream cheese, for which rural delicacy he had a fancy. They brew very great ale at Slowton, like the Welsh, and it was a novelty to the gentleman of foreign habits, who eat as fastidiously as a Frenchman, and as largely as a German. On the whole it was satisfactory, and the high-shouldered, Jewish-looking sybarite shook hands in a very friendly way with his attorney in the afternoon, on the platform at Slowton, and glided off toward Chester, into which ancient town he thundered, screaming like a monster rushing on its prey; and a victim awaited him in the old commercial hotel; a tall, white-headed military-looking man, with a white moustache twirled up fiercely at the corners; whose short pinkish face and grey eyes, as evening deepened, were pretty constantly presented at the window of the coffee-room next the street door of the inn. From that post he saw all the shops and gas-lamps, up and down the street, gradually lighted. The gaselier in the centre of the coffee-room, with its six muffed glass globes, flared up over the rumpled and coffee-stained morning newspapers and the almanac, and the battered and dissipated-looking railway guide, with corners curled and back coming to pieces, which he consulted every ten minutes through his glasses. How many consultations he had had with the waiter upon the arrival of trains due at various hours, and how often the injunction had been repeated to see that no mistake occurred about the private room he had ordered; and how reiterated the order that any gentleman inquiring for General Lennox should be shown at once into his presence, the patient waiter with the bilious complexion could tell. As the time drew near, the General having again conferred with the waiter, conversed with the porter, and even talked a little with Boots--withdrew to his small square sitting-room and pair of candles up-stairs, and awaited the arrival of Monsieur Varbarriere, with his back to the fire, in a state of extreme fidget. That gentleman's voice he soon heard upon the passage, and the creaking of his heavy tread; and he felt as he used, when a young soldier, on going into action. The General stepped forward. The waiter announced a gentleman who wished to see him; and Varbarriere's dark visage and mufflers, and sable mantle loomed behind; his felt hat in his hand, and his wavy cone of grizzled hair was bowing solemnly. "Glad you're come--how d'ye do?" and Varbarriere's fat brown hand was seized by the General's pink and knotted fingers in a very cold and damp grasp. "Come in and sit down, sir. What will you take?--tea, or dinner, or what?" "Very much obliged. I have ordered something, by-and-by, to my room--thank you very much. I thought, however, that you might possibly wish to see me immediately, and so I am here, at all events, as you soldiers say, to report myself," said Varbarriere, with his unctuous politeness. "Yes, it _is_ better, I'd rather have it now," answered the General in a less polite and more literal way. "A chair, sir;" and he placed one before the fire, which he poked into a blaze. "I--I hope you are not fatigued,"--here the door shut, and the waiter was gone; "and I want to hear, sir, if you please, the--the meaning of the letter you favoured me with." The General by this time had it in his hand open, and tendered it, I suppose for identification, to M. Varbarriere, who, however, politely waved it back. "I quite felt the responsibility I took upon myself when I wrote as I did. That responsibility of course I accept; and I have come all this way, sir, for no other purpose than to justify my expressions, and to invite you to bring them to the test." "Of _course_, sir. Thank you," said the General. Varbarriere had felt a momentary qualm about this particular branch of the business which he had cut out for himself. When he wrote to General Lennox he was morally _certain_ of the existence of a secret passage into that green room, and also of the relations which he had for some time suspected between Sir Jekyl and his fair guest. On the whole it was not a bad _coup_ to provide, by means of the old General's jealousy, such literal proof as he still required of the concealed entrance, through which so much villany had been accomplished--and so his letter--and now its consequences--about which it was too late to think. General Lennox, standing by the table, with one candle on the chimneypiece and his glasses to his eyes, read aloud, with some little stumbling, these words from the letter of Monsieur Varbarriere:-- "The reason of my so doing will be obvious when I say that I have certain circumstances to lay before you which nearly affect your honour. I decline making any detailed statement by letter; nor will I explain my meaning at Marlowe Manor. But if, without _fracas_, you will give me a private meeting, at any place between this and London, I will make it my business to see you, when I shall satisfy you that I have not made this request without the gravest reasons." "Those are the passages, sir, on which you are so good as to offer me an explanation; and first, there's the phrase, you know, 'certain circumstances to lay before you which nearly affect your _honour_;' that's a word, you know, sir, that a fellow _feels_ in a way--in a way that can't be triffled with." "Certainly. Put your question, General Lennox, how you please," answered Varbarriere, with a grave bow. "Well, how--how--exactly--I'll--I will put my question. I'd like to know, sir, in what relation--in--yes--in what relation, as a soldier, sir, or as a gentleman, sir, or as--_what_?" "I am very much concerned to say, sir, that it is in the very nearest and most sacred interest, sir--as a _husband_." General Lennox had sat down by this time, and was gazing with a frank stern stare full into the dark countenance of his visitor; and in reply he made two short little nods, clearing his voice, and lowering his eyes to the table. It was a very trifling way of taking it. But Varbarriere saw his face flush fiercely up to the very roots of his silver hair, and he fancied he could see the vessels throbbing in his temples. "I--very good, sir--thank you," said the General, looking up fiercely and shaking his ears, but speaking in a calm tone. "Go on, pray--let me know--I say--in God's name, don't keep me." "Now, sir, I'll tell it to you briefly--I'll afterwards go into whatever proof you desire. I have reason, I deeply regret it, to believe--in fact to know--that an immoral intimacy exists between Sir Jekyl Marlowe and Lady Jane Lennox." "It's a lie, sir!" screamed the General--"a damned lie, sir--a damned lie, sir--a _damned_ lie, sir." His gouty claw was advanced trembling as if to clutch the muffler that was folded about Monsieur Varbarriere's throat, but he dropped back in his seat again shaking, and ran his fingers through his white hair several times. There was a silence which even M. Varbarriere did not like. Varbarriere was not the least offended at his violence. He knew quite well that the General did not understand what he said, or mean, or remember it--that it was only the wild protest of agony. For the first time he felt a compunction about that old foozle, who had hitherto somehow counted for nothing in the game he was playing, and he saw him, years after, as he had shrieked at him that night, with his claw stretched towards his throat, ludicrous, and also terrible. "My God! sir," cried the old man, with a quaver that sounded like a laugh, "do you tell me so?" "It's true, sir," said Varbarriere. "Now, sir, I'll not interrupt you--tell all, pray--hide nothing," said the General. "I was, sir, accidentally witness to a conversation which is capable of no other interpretation; and I have legal proof of the existence of a secret door, connecting the apartment which has been assigned to you, at Marlowe, with Sir Jekyl's room." "The damned villain! What a fool," and then very fiercely he suddenly added, "You can prove all this, sir? I hope you can." "All this, and more, sir. I suspect, sir, there will hardly be an attempt to deny it." "Oh, sir, it's terrible; but I was such a fool. I had no business--I deserve it all. Who'd have imagined such villains? But, d---- me, sir, I can't believe it." There was a tone of anguish in the old man's voice which made even his grotesque and feeble talk terrible. "I say there can't be such devils on earth;" and then he broke into an incoherent story of all his trust and love, and all that Jane owed him, and of her nature which was frank and generous, and how she never hid a thought from him--open as heaven, sir. What business was it of his, d---- him! What did he mean by trying to set a man against his wife? No one but a scoundrel ever did it. Varbarriere stood erect. "You may submit how you like, sir, to your fate; but you shan't insult me, sir, without answering it. My note left it optional to you to exact my information or to remain in the darkness, which it seems you prefer. If you wish it, I'll make my bow--it's nothing to me, but two can play at that game. I've fought perhaps oftener than you, and you shan't bully _me_." "I suppose you're right, sir--don't go, pray--I think I'm half _mad_, sir," said General Lennox, despairingly. "Sir, I make allowance--I forgive your language, but if you want to talk to me, it must be with proper respect. I'm as good a gentleman as you; my statement is, of course, strictly true, and if you please you can test it." CHAPTER IX. Guy Deverell at Slowton. "Come, sir, I have a right to know it--have you not an object in fooling me?" said General Lennox, relapsing all on a sudden into his ferocious vein. "In telling you the truth, sir, I _have_ an object, perhaps--but seeing that it _is_ the truth, and concerns you so nearly, you need not trouble yourself about _my_ object," answered Varbarriere, with more self-command than was to have been expected. "I _will_ test it, sir. I will try you," said the General, sternly. "By -- -- I'll sift it to the bottom." "So you ought, sir; that's what I mean to help you to," said Varbarriere. "How, sir?--say _how_, and by Heaven, sir, I'll shoot him like a dog." "The way to do it I've considered. I shall place you _probably_ in possession of such proof as will thoroughly convince you." "Thank you, sir, go on." "I shall be at Marlowe to-morrow--you must arrive late--on no account earlier than half-past twelve. I will arrange to have you admitted by the glass door--through the conservatory. Don't bring your vehicle beyond the bridge, and leave your luggage at the Marlowe Arms. The object, sir, is this," said Varbarriere, with deliberate emphasis, observing that the General's grim countenance did not look as apprehensive as he wished, "that your arrival shall be unsuspected. No one must know anything of it except myself and another, until you shall have reached your room. Do you see?" "Thanks, sir--yes," answered the General, looking as unsatisfactorily as before. "There are two recesses with shelves--one to the right, the other to the left of the bed's head as you look from the door. The secret entrance I have mentioned lies through that at the right. You must not permit any alarm which may be intended to reach Sir Jekyl. Secure the door, and do you sit up and watch. There's a way of securing the secret door from the inside--which I'll explain--that would _prevent_ his entrance--don't allow it. The whole--pardon me, sir--_intrigue_ will in that case be disclosed without the possibility of a prevarication. You have followed me, I hope, distinctly." "I--I'm a little flurried, I believe, sir; I have to apologise. I'll ask you, by-and-by, to repeat it. I think I should like to be alone, sir. She wrote me a letter, sir--I wish I had died when I got it." When Varbarriere looked at him, he saw that the old East Indian was crying. "Sir, I grieve with you," said Varbarriere, funereally. "You can command my presence whenever you please to send for me. I shall remain in this house. It will be absolutely necessary, of course, that you should see me again." "Thank you, sir. I know--I'm sure you mean kindly--but God only knows all it is." He had shaken his hand very affectionately, without any meaning--without knowing that he had done so. Varbarriere said-- "Don't give way, sir, too much. If there is this sort of misfortune, it is much better discovered--_much_ better. You'll think so just now. You'll view it quite differently in the morning. Call for me the moment you want me--farewell, sir." So Varbarriere was conducted to his bed-room, and made, beside his toilet, conscientious inquiries about his late dinner, which was in an advanced state of preparation; and when he went down to partake of it, he had wonderfully recovered the interview with General Lennox. Notwithstanding, however, he drank two glasses of sherry, contrary to gastronomic laws, before beginning. Then, however, he made, even for him, a very good dinner. He could not help wondering what a prodigious fuss the poor old fogey made about this little affair. He could not enter the least into his state of mind. She was a fine woman, no doubt; but there were others--no stint--and he had been married quite long enough to sober and acquire an appetite for liberty. What was the matter with the old fellow? But that it was insufferably comical, he could almost find it in his heart to pity him. Once or twice as he smoked his cigar he could not forbear shaking with laughter, the old Philander's pathetics struck him so sardonically. I really think the state of that old gentleman, who certainly had attained to years of philosophy, was rather serious. That is, I dare say that a competent medical man with his case under observation at that moment would have pronounced him on the verge either of a fit or of insanity. When Varbarriere had left the room, General Lennox threw himself on the red damask sofa, which smelled powerfully of yesterday's swell bagman's tobacco, never perceiving that stale fragrance, nor the thinness of the cushion which made the ribs and vertebræ of the couch unpleasantly perceptible beneath. Then, with his knees doubled up, and the "Times" newspaper over his face, he wept, and moaned, and uttered such plaintive and hideous maunderings as would do nobody good to hear of. A variety of wise impulses visited him. One was to start instantaneously for Marlowe and fight Sir Jekyl that night by candlelight; another, to write to his wife for the last time as his wife--an eternal farewell--which perhaps would have been highly absurd, and affecting at the same time. About two hours after Varbarriere's departure for dinner, he sent for that gentleman, and they had another, a longer, and a more collected interview--if not a happier one. The result was, that Varbarriere's advice prevailed, as one might easily foresee, having a patient so utterly incompetent to advise himself. The attorney, having shaken hands with Monsieur Varbarriere, and watched from the platform the gradual disappearance of the train that carried him from the purlieus of Slowton, with an expression of face plaintive as that with which Dido on the wild sea banks beheld the receding galleys of Æneas, loitered back again dolorously to the hostelry. He arrived at the door exactly in time to witness the descent of Guy Deverell from his chaise. I think he would have preferred not meeting him, it would have saved him a few boring questions; but it was by no means a case for concealing himself. He therefore met him with a melancholy frankness on the steps. The young man recognised him. "Mr. Rumsey?--How do you do? Is my uncle here?" "He left by the last train. I hope I see you well, sir." "Gone? and where to?" "He did not tell me." That was true, but the attorney had seen his valise labelled "Chester" by his direction. "He went by the London train, but he said he would be back to-morrow. Can _I_ do anything? Your arrival was not expected." "Thank you. I think not. It was just a word with my uncle I wished. You say he will be here again in the morning?" "Yes, so he said. I'm waiting to see him." "Then I can't fail to meet him if I remain." The attorney perceived, with his weatherwise experience, the traces of recent storm, both in the countenance and the manner of this young man, whose restiveness just now might be troublesome. "Unless your business is urgent, I think--if you'll excuse me--you had better return to Marlowe," remarked the attorney. "You'll find it more comfortable quarters, a good deal, and your uncle will be very much hurried while here, and means to return to Marlowe to-morrow evening." "But I shan't. I don't mean to return; in fact, I wish to speak to him here. I've delayed you on the steps, sir, very rudely; the wind is cold." So he bowed, and they entered together, and the attorney, whose curiosity was now a little piqued, found he could make nothing of him, and rather disliked him; his reserve was hardly fair in so very young a person, and practised by one who had not yet won his spurs against so redoubted a champion as the knight of the rueful countenance. Next morning, as M. Varbarriere had predicted, General Lennox, although sleep had certainly had little to do with the change, was quite a different man in some respects--in no wise happier, but much more collected; and now he promptly apprehended and retained Monsieur Varbarriere's plan, which it was agreed was to be executed that night. More than once Varbarriere's compunctions revisited him as he sped onwards that morning from Chester to Slowton. But as men will, he bullied these misgivings and upbraidings into submission. He had been once or twice on the point of disclosing this portion of the complication to his attorney, but an odd sort of shyness prevented. He fancied that possibly the picture and his part in it were not altogether pretty, and somehow he did not care to expose himself to the secret action of the attorney's thoughts. Even in his own mind it needed the strong motive which had first prompted it. Now it was no longer necessary to explore the mystery of that secret door through which the missing deed, and indeed the Deverell estate, had been carried into old Sir Harry's cupboard. But what was to be done? He had committed himself to the statement. General Lennox had a right to demand--in fact, _he_ had promised--a distinct explanation. Yes, a distinct explanation, and, further, a due corroboration by proof of that explanation. It was all due to Monsieur Varbarriere, who had paid that debt to his credit and conscience, and behold what a picture! Three familiar figures, irrevocably transformed, and placed in what a halo of infernal light. "The thing could not be helped, and, whether or no, it was only right. Why the devil should I help Jekyl Marlowe to deceive and disgrace that withered old gentleman? I don't think it would have been a pleasant position for me." And all the respectabilities hovering near cried "hear, hear, hear!" and Varbarriere shook up his head, and looked magisterial over the havoc of the last livid scene of the tragedy he had prepared; and the porter crying "Slowton!" opened the door, and released him. CHAPTER X. Uncle and Nephew. When he reached his room, having breakfasted handsomely in the coffee-room, and learned that early Mr. Rumsey had accomplished a similar meal in his own sitting-room, he repaired thither, and entered forthwith upon their talk. It was a bright and pleasant morning; the poplar trees in front of the hotel were all glittering in the mellow early sunlight, and the birds twittering as pleasantly as if there was not a sorrow or danger on earth. "Well, sir, true to my hour," said Monsieur Varbarriere, in his deep brazen tones, as smiling and wondrously he entered the attorney's apartment. "Good morning, sir--how d'ye do? Have you got those notes prepared you mentioned?" "That I have, sir, as you shall see, pencil though; but that doesn't matter--no?" The vowel sounded grandly in the upward slide of Varbarriere's titanic double bass. The attorney took possession of the pocket-book containing these memoranda, and answered-- "No, I can read it very nicely. Your nephew is here, by-the-bye; he came last night." "Guy? What's brought him here?" M. Varbarriere's countenance was overcast. What had gone wrong? Some chamber in his mine had exploded, he feared, prematurely. Varbarriere opened the door, intending to roar for Guy, but remembering where he was, and the dimensions of the place, he tugged instead at the bell-rope, and made his summons jangle wildly through the lower regions. "Hollo!" cried Varbarriere from his threshold, anticipating the approaching waiter; "a young gentleman--a Mr. Guy Strangways, arrived last evening?" "Strangways, please, sir? Strangways? No, sir, I don't think we 'av got no gentleman of that name in the 'ouse, sir." "But I know you _have_. Go, make out where he is, and let him know that his uncle, Monsieur Varbarriere, has just arrived, and wants to see him--_here_, may I?" with a glance at the attorney. "Certainly." "There's some mischief," said Varbarriere, with a lowering glance at the attorney. "It looks uncommon like it," mused that gentleman, sadly. "Why doesn't he come?" growled Varbarriere, with a motion of his heel like a stamp. "What do you think he has done? Some cursed sottise." "Possibly he has proposed marriage to the young lady, and been refused." "Refused! I hope he has." At this juncture the waiter returned. "Well?" "No, sir, please. No one hin the 'ouse, sir. No such name." "Are you sure?" asked Varbarriere of the attorney, in an under diapason. "Perfectly--said he'd wait here for you. I told him you'd be here this morning," answered he, dolorously. "Go down, sir, and get me a list of the gentlemen in the house. I'll pay for it," said Varbarriere, with an imperious jerk of his hand. The ponderous gentleman in black was very uneasy, and well he might. So he looked silently out of the window which commands a view of the inn yard, and his eyes wandered over a handsome manure-heap to the chicken-coop and paddling ducks, and he saw three horses' tails in perspective in the chiaro-oscuro of the stable, in the open door of which a groom was rubbing a curb chain. He thought how wisely he had done in letting Guy know so little of his designs. And as he gloomily congratulated himself on his wise reserve, the waiter returned with a slate, and a double column of names scratched on it. Varbarriere having cast his eye over it, suddenly uttered an oath. "Number 10--that's the gentleman. Go to number 10, and tell him his uncle wants him here," roared Varbarriere, as if on the point of knocking the harmless waiter down. "Read there!" he thundered, placing the slate, with a clang, before the meek attorney, who read opposite to number 10, "Mr. G. Deverell." He pursed his mouth and looked up lackadaisically at his glowering client, saying only "Ha!" A minute after and Guy Deverell in person entered the room. He extended his hand deferentially to M. Varbarriere, who on his part drew himself up black as night, and thrust his hands half way to the elbows in his trowsers pockets, glaring thunderbolts in the face of the contumacious young man. "You see _that_?" jerking the slate with another clang before Guy. "Did _you_ give that name? Look at number _ten_, sir." Varbarriere was now again speaking French. "Yes, sir, Guy Deverell--my own name. I shall never again consent to go by any other. I had no idea what it might involve--never." The young man was pale, but quite firm. "You've broken your word, sir; you have ended your relations with me," said Varbarriere, with a horrible coldness. "I am sorry, sir--I _have_ broken my promise, but when I could not keep it without a worse deception. To the consequences, be they what they may, I submit, and I feel, sir, more deeply than you will ever know all the kindness you have shown me from my earliest childhood until now." "Infinitely flattered," sneered Varbarriere, with a mock bow. "You have, I presume, disclosed your name to the people at Marlowe as frankly as to those at Slowton?" "Lady Alice Redcliffe called me by my true name, and insisted it was mine. I could not deny it--I admitted the truth. Mademoiselle Marlowe was present also, and heard what passed. In little more than an hour after this scene I left Marlowe Manor. I did not see Sir Jekyl, and simply addressed a note to him saying that I was called away unexpectedly. I did not repeat to him the disclosure made to Lady Alice. I left that to the discretion of those who had heard it." "Their _discretion_--very good--and now, Monsieur Guy Deverell, I have _done_ with you. I shan't leave you as I took you up, absolutely penniless. I shall so place you as to enable you with diligence to earn your bread without degradation--that is all. You will be so good as to repair forthwith to London and await me at our quarters in St. James's Street. I shall send you, by next post, a cheque to meet expenses in town--no, pray don't thank me; you might have thanked me by your obedience. I shan't do much more to merit thanks. Your train starts from hence, I think, in half an hour." Varbarriere nodded angrily, and moved his hand towards the door. "Farewell, sir," said Guy, bowing low, but proudly. "One word more," said Varbarriere, recollecting suddenly; "you have not arranged a correspondence with any person? answer me on your honour." "No, sir, on my honour." "Go, then. Adieu!" and Varbarriere turned from him brusquely, and so they parted. "Am I to understand, sir," inquired the attorney, "that what has just occurred modifies our instructions to proceed in those cases?" "Not at all, sir," answered Varbarriere, firmly. "You see the civil proceedings must all be in the name of the young gentleman--a party who is of age--and you see what I mean." "I undertake personally the entire responsibility; you are to proceed in the name of Guy Deverell, and what is more, use the utmost despatch, and spare no cost. When shall we open the battle?" "Why, I dare say next term." "That is less than a month hence?" "Yes, sir." "By my faith, his hands will be pretty full by that time," said Varbarriere, exultingly. "We must have the papers out again. I can give you all this day, up to half-past five o'clock. We must get the new case into shape for counsel. You run up to town this evening. I suspect I shall follow you to-morrow; but I must run over first to Marlowe. I have left my things there, and my servant; and I suppose I must take a civil leave of my enemy--there are courtesies, you know--as your prize-fighters shake hands in the ring." The sun was pretty far down in the west by the time their sederunt ended. M. Varbarriere got into his short mantle and mufflers, and donned his ugly felt hat, talking all the while in his deep metallic tones, with his sliding cadences and resounding emphases. The polite and melancholy attorney accompanied his nutritious client to the door, and after he had taken his seat in his vehicle, they chatted a little earnestly through the window, agreeing that they had grown very "strong" indeed--anticipating nothing but victory, and in confidential whispers breathing slaughter. As Varbarriere, with his thick arm stuffed through one of the upholstered leathern loops with which it is the custom to flank the windows of all sorts of carriages, and his large varnished boot on the vacant cushion at the other side, leaned back and stared darkly and dreamily through the plate glass on the amber-tinted landscape, he felt rather oddly approaching such persons and such scenes--a crisis with a remoter and more tremendous crisis behind--the thing long predicted in the whisperings of hope--the real thing long dreamed of, and now greeted strangely with a mixture of exultation and disgust. There are few men, I fancy, who so thoroughly enjoy their revenge as they expected. It is one of those lusts which has its _goût de revers_--"sweet in the mouth, bitter in the belly;" one of those appetites which will allow its victim no rest _till_ it is gratified, and no peace _afterward_. Now, M. Varbarriere was in for it, he was already coming under the solemn shadow of its responsibilities, and was chilled. It involved other people, too, besides its proper object--people who, whatever else some of them might be, were certainly, as respected him and his, innocent. Did he quail, and seriously think of retiring _re infectâ_? No such thing! It is wonderful how steadfast of purpose are the disciples of darkness, and how seldom, having put their hands to the plough, they look back. All this while Guy Deverell, in exile, was approaching London with brain, like every other, teeming with its own phantasmagoria. He knew not what particular danger threatened Marlowe Manor, which to him was a temple tenanted by Beatrix alone, the living idol whom he worshipped. He was assured that somehow his consent, perhaps cooperation, was needed to render the attack effectual, and here would arise his opportunity, the self-sacrifice which he contemplated with positive pleasure, though, of course, with a certain awe, for futurity was a murky vista enough beyond it. Varbarriere's low estimate of young men led _him_ at once to conclude that this was an amorous escapade, a bit of romance about that pretty wench, Mademoiselle Beatrix. Why not? The fool, fooling according to his folly, should not arrest wisdom in her march. Varbarriere was resolved to take all necessary steps in his nephew's name, without troubling the young man with a word upon the subject. He would have judgment and execution, and he scoffed at the idea that his nephew, Guy, would take measures to have him--his kinsman, guardian, and benefactor--punished for having acted for his advantage without his consent. CHAPTER XI. In Lady Mary's Boudoir. The red sunset had faded into darkness as M. Varbarriere descended from his carriage at the door-steps of Marlowe. The dressing-bell had not yet rung. Everyone was quite well, the solemn butler informed him graciously, as if _he_ had kept them in health expressly to oblige M. Varbarriere. That gentleman's dark countenance, however, was not specially illuminated on the occasion. The intelligence he really wanted referred to old Lady Alice, to whom the inexcusable folly and perfidy of Guy had betrayed his name. Upon this point he had grown indescribably uncomfortable as he drew near to the house. Had the old woman been conjecturing and tattling? Had she called in Sir Jekyl himself to counsel? How was he, Varbarriere, to meet Sir Jekyl? He must learn from Lady Alice's lips how the land lay. "And Lady Alice," he murmured with a lowering countenance, "pretty well, I hope? Down-stairs to-day, eh?" The butler had not during his entire visit heard the "foreign chap" talk so much English before. "Lady Halice was well in 'ealth." "In the drawing-room?" "No, sir, in Lady Mary's boudoir." "And Sir Jekyl?" "In 'is hown room, sir." "Show me to the boudoir, please; I have a word for Lady Alice." A few moments more and he knocked at the door of that apartment, and was invited to enter with a querulous drawl that recalled the association of the wild cat with which in an irreverent moment he had once connected that august old lady. So Varbarriere entered and bowed and stood darkly in the door-frame, reminding her again of the portrait of a fat and cruel burgomaster. "Oh! it's you? come back again, Monsieur Varbarriere? Oh!--I'm very glad to see you." "Very grateful--very much flattered; and your ladyship, how are _you_?" "Pretty well--ailing--always ailing--delicate health and _cruelly_ tortured in mind. What else can I expect, sir, but sickness?" "I hope your mind has not been troubled, Lady Alice, since I had the honour of last seeing you." "Now, _do_ you really hope that? Is it _possible_ you _can_ hope that my mind, in the state in which you left it has been one minute at ease since I saw you? Beside, sir, I have heard something that for reasons quite inexplicable _you_ have chosen to conceal from me." "May I ask what it is? I shall be happy to explain." "Yes, the name of that young man--it is _not_ Strangways, that was a falsehood; his name, sir, is Guy Deverell!" And saying this Lady Alice, after her wont, wept passionately. "That is perfectly true, Lady Alice; but I don't see what value that information can have, apart from the explanatory particulars I promised to tell you; but not for a few days. If, however, you desire it, I shall postpone the disclosure no longer. You will, I am sure, first be so good as to tell me, though, whether anyone but you knows that the foolish young man's name is Deverell?" "No; no one, except Beatrix, not a creature. She was present, but has been, at my request, perfectly silent," answered Lady Alice, eagerly, and gaped darkly at Varbarriere, expecting his revelation. M. Varbarriere thought, under the untoward circumstances, that a disclosure so imperfect as had been made to Lady Alice was a good deal more dangerous than one a little fuller. He therefore took that lady's hand very reverentially, and looking with his full solemn eyes in her face, said-- "It is not only true, madam, that his name is Guy Deverell, but equally true that he is the lawful son, as well as the namesake, of that Guy Deverell, your _son_, who perished by the hand of Sir Jekyl Marlowe in a duel. Shot down foully, as that Mr. Strangways avers who was his companion, and who was present when the fatal event took place." "Gracious Heaven, sir! My son married?" "Yes, madam, _married_ more than a year before his death. All the proofs are extant, and at this moment in England." "Married! my boy married, and never told his mother! Oh, Guy, Guy, _Guy_ is it credible?" "It is not a question, madam, but an absolute certainty, as I will show you whenever I get the papers to Wardlock." "And to whom, sir, pray, was my son married?" demanded Lady Alice, after a long pause. "To my sister, madam." Lady Alice gaped at him in astonishment. "Was she a person at all his equal in life?--a person of--of any education, I mean?" inquired Lady Alice, with a gasp, sublimely unconscious of her impertinence. "As good a lady as you are," replied Varbarriere, with a swarthy flush upon his forehead. "I should like to _know_ she was a _lady_, at all events." "She was a lady, madam, of pure blood, incapable of a mean thought, incapable, too, of anything low-bred or impertinent." His sarcasm sped through and through Lady Alice without producing any effect, as a bullet passes through a ghost. "It is a great surprise, sir, but _that_ will be satisfactory. I suppose you can show it?" Varbarriere smiled sardonically and answered nothing. "My son married to a Frenchwoman! Dear, dear, _dear!_ Married! You can feel for me, monsieur, knowing as I do nothing of the person or family with whom he connected himself." Lady Alice pressed her lean fingers over her heart, and swept the wall opposite, with dismal eyes, sighing at intervals, and gasping dolorously. The old woman's egotism and impertinence did not vex him long or much. But the pretence of being absolutely above irritation from the feminine gender, in any extant sage, philosopher, or saint, is a despicable affectation. Man and woman were created with inflexible relations; each with the power in large measure or in infinitesimal doses, according to opportunity, to infuse the cup of the other's life with sweet or bitter--with nectar or with poison. Therefore great men and wise men have winced and will wince under the insults of small and even of old women. "A year, you say, before my poor boy's death?" "Yes, about that; a little more." "Mademoiselle Varbarriere! H'm," mused Lady Alice. "I did not say Varbarriere was the name," sneered he, with a deep-toned drawl. "Why, you said, sir, did not you, that the Frenchwoman he married was your sister?" "I said the lady who accepted him was my sister. I never said her name was Varbarriere, or that she was a Frenchwoman." "Is not your name Varbarriere, sir?" exclaimed Lady Alice, opening her eyes very wide. "Certainly, madam. A _nom de guerre_, as we say in France, a name which I assumed with the purchase of an estate, about six years ago, when I became what you call a naturalised French subject." "And pray, sir, what _is_ your name?" "_Varbarriere_, madam. I did bear an English name, being of English birth and family. May I presume to inquire particularly whether you have divulged the name of my nephew to anyone?" "No, to no one; neither has Beatrix, I am certain." "You now know, madam, that the young man is your own grandson, and therefore entitled to at least as much consideration from you as from me; and I again venture to impress upon you this fact, that if prematurely his name be disclosed, it may, and indeed _must_ embarrass my endeavours to reinstate him in his rights." As he said this Varbarriere made a profound and solemn bow; and before Lady Alice could resume her catechism, that dark gentleman had left the room. As he emerged from the door he glanced down the broad oak stair, at the foot of which he heard voices. They were those of Sir Jekyl and his daughter. The Baronet's eye detected the dark form on the first platform above him. "Ha! Monsieur Varbarriere--very welcome, monsieur--when did you arrive?" cried his host in his accustomed French. "Ten minutes ago." "Quite well, I hope." "Perfectly; many thanks--and Mademoiselle Beatrix?" The large and sombre figure was descending the stairs all this time, and an awful shadow, as he did so, seemed to overcast the face and form of the young lady, to whom, with a dark smile, he extended his hand. "Quite well, Beatrix, too--_all_ quite well--even Lady Alice in her usual health," said Sir Jekyl. "_Better_--I'm glad to hear," said Varbarriere. "Better! Oh dear, no--that would never do. But her temper is just as lively, and all her ailments flourishing. By-the-bye, your nephew had to leave us suddenly." "Yes--business," said Varbarriere, interrupting. Beatrix, he was glad to observe, had gone away to the drawing-room. "He'll be back, I hope, immediately?" continued the Baronet. "He's a fine young fellow. Egad, he's about as good-looking a young fellow as I know. I should be devilish proud of him if I were you. When does he come back to us?" "Immediately, I hope; business, you know; but nothing very long. We are both, I fear, a very tedious pair of guests; but you have been so pressing, so hospitable----" "Say rather, so selfish, monsieur," answered Sir Jekyl, laughing. "Our whist and cigars have languished ever since you left." M. Varbarriere laughed a double-bass accompaniment to the Baronet's chuckle, and the dressing-bell ringing at that moment, Sir Jekyl and he parted agreeably. CHAPTER XII. The Guests Together. Varbarriere marched slowly up, and entered his dressing-room with a "glooming" countenance and a heavy heart. Everything looked as if he had left it but half an hour ago. He poked the fire and sat down. He felt like a surgeon with an operation before him. There was a loathing of it, but he did not flinch. Reader, you think you understand other men. Do you understand yourself? Did you ever quite succeed in defining your own motives, and arriving at the moral base of any action you ever did? Here was Varbarriere sailing with wind and tide full in his favour, right into the haven where he would be--yet to look in his face you would have said "_there_ is a sorrowful man," and had you been able to see within, you would have said, "_there_ is a man divided against himself." Yes, as every man _is_. Several spirits, quite distinct, not blending, but pleading and battling very earnestly on opposite sides, all in possession of the "house"--but one dominant, always with a disputed sway, but always carrying his point--always the prosperous bully. Yes, every man is a twist of many strands. Varbarriere was compacted of several Varbarrieres--one of whom was the stronger and the most infernal. His feebler associates commented upon him--despised him--feared him--sought to restrain him but knew they could not. He tyrannised, and was to the outer world the one and indivisible Varbarriere. Monsieur Varbarriere the tyrant was about to bring about a _fracas_ that night, against which the feebler and better Varbarrieres protested. Varbarriere the tyrant held the knife over the throat of a faithless woman--the better Varbarrieres murmured words of pity and of faint remonstrance. Varbarriere the tyrant scrupled not to play the part of spy and traitor for his ends; the nobler Varbarrieres upbraided him sadly, and even despised him. But what were these feeble angelic Varbarrieres? The ruler is the state, _l'état c'est moi!_ and Varbarriere the tyrant carried all before him. As the dark and somewhat corpulent gentleman before the glass adjusted his necktie and viewed his shirt-studs, he saw in his countenance, along with the terrible resolution of that tyrant, the sorrows and fears of the less potent spirits; and he felt, though he would not accept, their upbraidings and their truth; so with a stern and heavy heart he descended to the drawing-room. He found the party pretty nearly assembled, and the usual buzz and animation prevailing, and he smiled and swayed from group to group, and from one chair to another. Doocey was glad, monstrous glad to see him. "I had no idea how hard it was to find a good player, until you left us--our whist has been totally ruined. The first night we tried Linnett; he thinks he plays, you know; well, I do assure you, you never _witnessed_ such a thing--such a _caricature_, by Jupiter--forgetting your lead--revoking--_every_thing, by Jove. You may guess what a chance we had--_my_ partner, I give you my honour, against old Sir Paul Blunket, as dogged a player as there is in England, egad, and Sir Jekyl there. We tried Drayton next night--the most conceited fellow on earth, and _no head_--Sir Paul had him. I never saw an old fellow so savage. Egad, they were calling one another names across the table--you'd have _died_ laughing; but we'll have some play now you've come back, and I'm very glad of it." Varbarriere, while he listened to all this, smiling his fat dark smile, and shrugging and bowing slightly as the tale required these evidences, was quietly making his observations on two or three of the persons who most interested him. Beatrix, he thought, was looking ill--certainly much paler, and though very pretty, rather sad--that is, she was ever and anon falling into little abstractions, and when spoken to, waking up with a sudden little smile. Lady Jane Lennox--she did not seem to observe him--was seated like a sultana on a low cushioned seat, with her rich silks circling grandly round her. He looked at her a little stealthily and curiously, as men eye a prisoner who is about to suffer execution. His countenance during that brief glance was unobserved, but you might have read there something sinister and cruel. "I forget--_had_ the Bishop come when you left us?" said Sir Jekyl, laying his hand lightly from behind on the arm of Varbarriere. The dark-featured man winced--Sir Jekyl's voice sounded unpleasantly in his reverie. "Ah! Oh! The Bishop? Yes--the Bishop was here when I left; he had been here a day or two," answered Varbarriere, with a kind of effort. "Then I need not introduce you--you're friends already," said Sir Jekyl. At which moment the assembled party learned that dinner awaited them, and the murmured arrangements for the procession commenced, and the drawing-room was left to the click of the Louis Quatorze clock and the sadness of solitude. "We had such a dispute, Monsieur Varbarriere, while you were away," said Miss Blunket. "About me, I hope," answered the gentleman addressed, in tolerable English, and with a gallant jocularity. "Well, no--not about you," said old Miss Blunket, timidly. "But I so wished for you to take part in the argument." "And why wish for me?" answered the sardonic old fellow, amused, maybe the least bit in the world flattered. "Well, I think you have the power, Monsieur Varbarriere, of putting a great deal in very few words--I mean, of making an argument so clear and short." Varbarriere laughed indulgently, and began to think Miss Blunket a rather intelligent person. "And what was the subject, pray?" "Whether life was happier in town or country." "Oh! the old debate--country mouse against town mouse," replied Varbarriere. "Ah, just so--so true--I don't think _any_one said that, and--and--I do wish to know which side you would have taken." "The condition being that it should be all country or all town, of course, and that we were to retain our incomes?" "Yes, certainly," said Miss Blunket, awaiting his verdict with a little bit of bread suspended between her forefinger and thumb. "Well, then, I should pronounce at once for the country," said Varbarriere. "I'm so glad--that's just what I said. I'm sure, said I, I should have Monsieur Varbarriere on my side if he were here. I'm so glad I was right. Did not you hear me say that?" said she, addressing Lady Jane Lennox, whose steady look, obliquely from across the table a little higher up, disconcerted her. Lady Jane was not thinking of the debate, and asked in her quiet haughty way-- "What is it?" "Did I not say, yesterday, that Monsieur Varbarriere would vote for the country, in our town or country argument, if he were here?" "Oh! did you? Yes, I believe you did. I was not listening." "And which side, pray, Lady Jane, would you have taken in that ancient debate?" inquired Varbarriere, who somehow felt constrained to address her. "Neither side," answered she. "What! neither town nor country--and how then?" inquired Varbarriere, with a shrug and a smile. "I think there is as much hypocrisy and slander in one as the other, and I should have a new way--people living like the Chinese, in boats, and never going on shore." Varbarriere laughed--twiddled a bit of bread between his finger and thumb, and leaned back, and looked down, still smiling, by the edge of his plate; and was there not a little flush under the dark brown tint of his face? "That would be simply prison," ejaculated Miss Blunket. "Yes, prison; and is not anything better than liberty with its liabilities? Why did Lady Hester Stanhope go into exile in the East, and why do sane men and women go into monasteries?" Varbarriere looked at her with an odd kind of interest, and sighed without knowing it; and he helped himself curiously to sweetbread, a minute later, and for a time his share in the conversation flagged. Lady Jane, he thought, was looking decidedly better than when he left--very well, in fact--very well indeed--not at all like a person with anything pressing heavily on her mind. He glanced at her again. She was talking to old Sir Paul Blunket in a bold careless way, which showed no sign of hidden care or fear. "Have you been to town since?" inquired Sir Jekyl, who happened to catch Varbarriere's eye at that moment, and availed himself of a momentary lull in what we term the conversation, to put his question. "No; you think I have been pleasuring, but it was good honest business, I assure you." "Lady Alice here fancied you might have seen the General, and learned something about his plans," continued Sir Jekyl. "What General?--Lennox--eh?" inquired Varbarriere. "Yes. What's your question, Lady Alice?" said the Baronet, turning to that lady, and happily not observing an odd expression in Varbarriere's countenance. "No question; he has not been to London," answered the old lady, drawing her shawl which she chose to dine in about her, chillily. "Is it anything _I_ can answer?" threw in Lady Jane, who, superbly tranquil as she looked, would have liked to pull and box Lady Alice's ears at that moment. "Oh no, I fancy not; it's only the old question, when are we to see the General; is he coming back at all?" "I wish anyone could help me to an answer," laughed Lady Jane, with a slight uneasiness, which might have been referred to the pique which would not have been unnatural in a handsome wife neglected. "I begin to fear I shall leave Marlowe without having seen him," said Lady Alice, peevishly. "Yes, and it is not complimentary, you know; he disappeared just the day before you came, and he won't come back till you leave; men are such mysterious fellows, don't you think?" said Sir Jekyl. "It doesn't look as if he liked her company. Did he ever meet you, Lady Alice?" inquired Sir Paul Blunket in his bluff way, without at all intending to be uncivil. "_That_, you think, would account for it; much obliged to you, Sir Paul," said Lady Alice, sharply. Sir Paul did not see it, or what she was driving at, and looked at her therefore with a grave curiosity, for he did not perceive that she was offended. "Sir Paul has a way of hitting people very hard, has not he, Lady Alice? and then leaving them to recover of themselves," said Sir Jekyl. "There's not a great deal of civility wasted among you," observed Lady Alice. "I only meant," said Sir Paul, who felt that he should place himself right, "that I could not see why General Lennox should avoid Lady Alice, unless he was acquainted with her. There's nothing in that." "By-the-bye, Lady Alice," said Sir Jekyl, who apprehended a possible scene from that lady's temper, and like a good shepherd wished to see his flock pasture peaceably together--"I find I can let you have any quantity you like of that plant you admired yesterday. I forget its name, and the Bishop says he has got one at the Palace with a scarlet blossom; so, perhaps, if you make interest with him--what do you say, my lord?" So having engaged the good Bishop in floral conversation with that fiery spirit, the Baronet asked Sir Paul whether he believed all that was said about the great American cow; and what he thought of the monster parsnip: and thus he set him and Lady Alice ambling on different tracts, so that there was no risk of their breaking lances again. CHAPTER XIII. A Visitor in the Library. The company were now pecking at those fruits over which Sir Jekyl was wont to chuckle grimly, making pleasant satire on his gardener, vowing he kept an Aladdin's garden, and that his greengages were emeralds, and his gooseberries rubies. In the midst of the talk, the grave and somewhat corpulent butler stood behind his master's chair, and murmured something mildly in his ear. "What's his name?" inquired Sir Jekyl. "Pullet, please, sir." "Pullet! I never heard of him. If he had come a little earlier with a knife and fork in his back, we'd have given a good account of him." His jokes were chuckled to Lady Alice, who received them drowsily. "Where have you put him?" "In the library, please, sir." "What kind of looking person?" "A middlish sort of a person, rayther respectable, I should say, sir; but dusty from his journey." "Well, give him some wine, and let him have dinner, if he has not had it before, and bring in his card just now." All this occurred without exciting attention or withdrawing Sir Jekyl from any sustained conversation, for he and Lady Alice had been left high and dry on the bank together by the flow and ebb of talk, which at this moment kept the room in a rattle; and Sir Jekyl only now and then troubled her with a word. "Pullet!" thought Sir Jekyl, he knew not why, uneasily. "Who the devil's Pullet, and what the plague can Pullet want? It can't be Paulett--can it? There's nothing on earth Paulett can want of me, and he would not come at this hour. Pullet--Pullet--let us see." But he _could_ not see, there was not a soul he knew who bore that name. "He's eating his dinner, sir, the gentleman, sir, in the small parlour, and says you'll know him quite well, sir, when you see him," murmured the butler, "and more--" "Have you got his card?" "He said, sir, please, it would be time enough when he had heat his dinner." "Well, so it will." And Sir Jekyl drank a glass of claret, and returned to his ruminations. "So, I shall know Pullet quite well when I see him," mused the Baronet, "and he'll let me have his card when he has had his dinner--a cool gentleman, whatever else he may be." About this Pullet, however, Sir Jekyl experienced a most uncomfortable suspense and curiosity. A bird of ill omen he seemed to him--an angel of sorrow, he knew not why, in a mask. While the Baronet sipped his claret, and walked quite alone in the midst of his company, picking his anxious steps, and hearing strange sounds through his valley of the shadow of death, the promiscuous assemblage of ladies and gentlemen dissolved itself. The fair sex rose, after their wont, smiled their last on the sable file of gentlemen, who stood politely, napkin in hand, simpering over the backs of their chairs, and, some of them majestically alone, others sliding their fair hands affectionately within the others' arms, glided through the door in celestial procession. "I shall leave you to-morrow, Sir Jekyl," began the Bishop, gravely, changing his seat to one just vacated beside his host, and bringing with him his principal chattels, his wine-glasses and napkin. "I do hope, my lord, you'll reconsider that," interrupted Sir Jekyl, laying his fingers kindly on the prelate's purple sleeve. A dismal cloud in Sir Jekyl's atmosphere was just then drifting over him, and he clung, as men do under such shadows, to the contact of good and early friendship. "I am, I assure you, very sorry, and have enjoyed your hospitality much--_very_ much; but we can't rest long, you know: we hold a good many strings, and matters won't wait our convenience." "I'm only afraid you are overworked; but, of course, I understand how you feel, and shan't press," said Sir Jekyl. "And I was looking for you to-day in the library," resumed the Bishop, "anxious for a few minutes, on a subject I glanced at when I arrived." "I--I _know_," said Sir Jekyl, a little hesitatingly. "Yes, the dying wish of poor Sir Harry Marlowe, your father," murmured the Bishop, looking into his claret-glass, which he slowly turned about by the stem; and, to do him justice, there was not a quarter of a glassful remaining in the bottom. "I know--to be sure. I quite agree with your lordship's view. I wish to tell you that--quite, I assure you. I don't--I _really_ don't at all understand his reasons; but, as you say, it is a case for implicit submission. I intend, I assure you, actually to take down that room during the spring. It is of no real use, and rather spoils the house." "I am happy, my dear Sir Jekyl, to hear you speak with so much decision on the subject--truly happy;" and the venerable prelate laid his hand with a gentle dignity on the cuff of Sir Jekyl's dress-coat, after the manner of a miniature benediction. "I _may_ then discharge _that_ quite from my mind?" "Certainly--quite, my lord. I accept your views implicitly." "And the _box_--the other wish--you know," murmured the Bishop. "I must honestly say, I can't the least understand what can have been in my poor father's mind when he told me to--to do what was right with it--was not that it? For I do assure you, for the life of me, I can't think of anything to _be_ done with it but let it _alone_. I pledge you my honour, however, if I ever do get the least inkling of his meaning, I will respect it as implicitly as the other." "Now, now, that's exactly what I wish. I'm perfectly satisfied you'll do what's right." And as he spoke the Bishop's countenance brightened, and he drank slowly, looking up toward the ceiling, that quarter of a glass of claret on which he had gazed for so long in the bottom of the crystal chalice. Just then the butler once more inclined his head from the back of Sir Jekyl's chair, and presented a card to his master on the little salver at his left side. It bore the inscription, "Mr. Pelter, Camelia Villa," and across this, perpendicularly, after the manner of a joint "acceptance" of the firm, was written--"Pelter and Crowe, Chambers, Lincoln's Inn Fields," in bold black pencilled lines. "Why did not you tell me that before?" whispered the Baronet, tartly, half rising, with the card in his hand. "I was not haware, Sir Jekyl. The gentleman, said his name exactly like Pullet." "In the library? Well--tell him I'm coming," said Sir Jekyl; and his heart sank, he knew not why. "Beg your pardon, my lord, for a moment--my man of business, all the way from London, and I fancy in a hurry. I shall get rid of him with a word or two--you'll excuse me? Dives, will you oblige me--take my place for a moment, and see that the bottle does not stop; or, Doocey, will you?--Dives is doing duty at the foot." Doocey had hopes that the consultation with the butler portended a bottle of that wonderful Constantia which he had so approved two days before, and took his temporary seat hopefully. Sir Jekyl, with a general apology and a smile glided away without fuss, and the talk went on much as before. When the parlour-door shut behind Sir Jekyl, his face darkened. "I know it's some _stupid_ thing," he thought, as he walked down the gallery with rapid steps, toward the study, the sharp air agitating, as he did so, his snowy necktie and glossy curls. "How d'ye do, Mr. Pelter?--very happy to see you. I had not a notion it was you--the stupid fellow gave me quite another name. Quite well, I hope?" "Quite well, Sir Jekyl, I thank you--a--quite well," said the attorney, a stoutish, short, wealthy-looking man, with a massive gold chain, a resolute countenance, and a bullet head, with close-cut greyish hair. Pelter was, indeed, an able, pushing fellow, without Latin or even English grammar, having risen in the office from a small clerkship, and, perhaps, was more useful than his gentlemanlike partner. "Well--a--well, and what has brought you down here? Very glad to see you, you know; but you would not run down for fun, I'm afraid," said Sir Jekyl. "Au--no--au, well, Sir Jekyl, it has turned out, sir--by gad, sir, I believe them fellows _are_ in England, after all!" "What do you mean by them fellows?" said Sir Jekyl, with a very dark look, unconsciously repeating the attorney's faulty grammar. "Strangways and Deverell, you know--I mean them--Herbert Strangways, and a young man named Deverell--they're in England, I've been informed, very private--and Strangways has been with Smith, Rumsey, and Snagg--the office--you know; and there is something on the stocks there." As the attorney delivered this piece of intelligence he kept his eye shrewdly on Sir Jekyl, rather screwed and wrinkled, as a man looks against a storm. "Oh!--is that all? There's nothing very alarming, is there, in that?--though, d---- me, I don't see, Mr. Pelter, how you reconcile your present statement with what you and your partner wrote to me twice within the last few weeks." "Very true, Sir Jekyl; perfectly true, sir. Our information misled us totally; they have been devilish sharp, sir--devilish sly. We never were misled before about that fellow's movements--not that they were ever of any real importance." "And why do you think them--but maybe you don't--of more consequence now?" Pelter looked unpleasantly important, and shook his head. "What _is_ it--I suppose I may _know_?" said Sir Jekyl. "It looks queerish, Sir Jekyl, there's no denying that--in fact, very queerish indeed--both me and my partner think so. You recollect the deed?" "No--devil a deed--d---- them all!--I don't remember one of them. Why, you seem to forget it's nearly ten years ago," interrupted the Baronet. "Ah!--no--not _ten_--the copy of the deed that we got hold of, pretending to be a marriage settlement. It was brought us, you know, in a very odd way, but quite fair." "Yes, I do remember--yes, to be sure--that thing you thought was a forgery, and put in our way to frighten us. Well, and do you fancy that's a genuine thing now?" "I always thought it might--I think it _may_--in fact, I think it _is_. We have got a hint they rely on it. And here's a point to be noted: the deed fixes five-and-twenty as the period of his majority; and just as he attains that age, his father being nearly that time dead, they put their shoulders to the wheel." "Put their d--d numbskulls under it, you mean. How can they move--how can they stir? I'd like to know how they can touch my title? I don't care a curse about them. What the plague's frightening you and Crowe _now_? I'm blest if I don't think you're growing old. Why can't you stick to your own view?--you say one thing one day and another the next. Egad, there's no knowing where to have you." The Baronet was talking bitterly, scornfully, and with all proper contempt of his adversaries, but there's no denying he looked very pale. "And there certainly is activity there; cases have been with counsel on behalf of Guy Deverell, the son and heir of the deceased," pursued Mr. Pelter, with his hands in his pockets, looking grimly up into the Baronet's face. "Won't you sit down?--do sit down, Pelter; and you haven't had wine?" said Sir Jekyl. "Thanks--I've had some sherry." "Well, you must have some claret. I'd like a glass myself." He had rung the hell, and a servant appeared. "Get claret and glasses for two." The servant vanished deferentially. "I'm not blaming you, mind; but is it not odd we should have known nothing of this son, and this pretended marriage till now?" "Odd!--oh dear, no!--you don't often know half so much of the case at the other side--nothing at all often till it's on the file." "Precious satisfactory!" sneered Sir Jekyl. "When we beat old Lord Levesham, in Blount and Levesham, they had not a notion, no more than the man in the moon, what we were going on, till we produced the release, and got a direction, egad." And the attorney laughed over that favourite recollection. CHAPTER XIV. Pelter opens his mind. "Take a glass of claret. This is '34. Maybe you'd like some port better?" "No, thanks, this will do very nicely," said the accommodating attorney. "Thirty-four? So it is, egad! and uncommon fine too." "I hope you can give me a day or two--not business, of course--I mean by way of holiday," said Sir Jekyl. "A little country air will do you a world of good--set you up for the term." Mr. Pelter smiled, and shook his head shrewdly. "Quite out of the question, Sir Jekyl, I thank you all the same--business tumbling in too fast just now--I daren't stay away another day--no, no--ha, ha, ha! no rest for us, sir--no rest for the wicked. But this thing, you know, looks rather queerish, we thought--a little bit urgent: the other party has been so sly; and no want of money, sir--the sinews of war--lots of tin there." "Yes, of course; and lots of tin here, too. I fancy fellows don't like to waste money only to hold their own; but, egad, if it comes to be a pull at the long purse, all the worse for them," threw in the Baronet. "And their intending, you know, to set up this marriage," continued the attorney without minding; "and that Herbert Strangways being over here with the young pretender, as we call him, under his wing; and Strangways is a deuced clever fellow, and takes devilish sound view of a case when he lays his mind to it. It was he that reopened that great bankruptcy case of Onslow and Grawley, you remember." Sir Jekyl assented, but did not remember. "And a devilish able bit of chess-play that was on both sides--no end of concealed property--brought nearly sixty thousand pounds into the fund, egad! The creditors passed a vote, you remember--spoke very handsomely of him. Monstrous able fellow, egad!" "A monstrous able fellow he'll be if he gets my property, egad! It seems to me you Pelter and Crowe are half in love with him," said Sir Jekyl, flushed and peevish. "We'll hit him a hard knock or two yet, for all that--ha, ha!--or I'm mistaken," rejoined old Mr. Pelter. "Do you know him?" inquired Sir Jekyl; and the servant at the same time appearing in answer to his previous summons, he said-- "Go to the parlour and tell Mr. Doocey--you know _quietly_--that I am detained by business, but that we'll join them in a little time in the drawing-room." So the servant, with a reverence, departed. "I say, _do_ you?" "Just a little. Seven years ago, when I was at Havre, he was stopping there too. A very gentlemanlike man--sat beside him twice at the table d'hôte. I could see he knew d--d well who I was--wide awake, very agreeable man, very--wonderful well-informed. Wonderful ups and downs that fellow's had--clever fellow--ha, ha, ha!--I mentioned you, Sir Jekyl; I wanted to hear if he'd say anything--fishing, hey? Old file, you know"--and the attorney winked and grinned agreeably at Sir Jekyl. "Capital claret this--cap-i-tal, by Jupiter! It came in natural enough. We were talking of England, you see. He was asking questions; and so, talking of country gentlemen, and county influence, and parliamentary life, you know, I brought in _you_, and asked him if he knew Sir Jekyl Marlowe." Another wink and a grin here. "I asked, a bit suddenly, you know, to see how he'd take it. Did not show, egad! more than that decanter--ha, ha, ha!--devilish cool dog--monstrous clever fellow--not a bit; and he said he did not know you--had not that honour; but he knew a great deal of you, and he spoke very handsomely--upon my honour--quite au--au--handsomely of you, he did." "Vastly obliged to him," said Sir Jekyl; but though he sneered I think he was pleased. "You don't recollect what he said, I dare say?" "Well, I can_not_ exactly." "Did he mention any unpleasantness ever between us?" continued Sir Jekyl. "Yes, he said there had, and that he was afraid Sir Jekyl might not remember his name with satisfaction; but he, for his part, liked to forget and forgive--that kind of thing, you know, and young fellows being too hot-headed, you know. I really--I don't think he bears you personally any ill-will." "There has certainly been time enough for anger to cool a little, and I really, for my part, never felt anything of the kind towards him; I can honestly say _that_, and I dare say he knows it. I merely want to protect myself against--against madmen, egad!" said Sir Jekyl. "I think that copy of a marriage settlement you showed me had no names in it," he resumed. "No, the case is all put like a moot point, not a name in it. It's all nonsense, too, because every man in my profession knows a copying clerk never has a notion of the meaning of anything--letter, deed, pleading--nothing he copies--not an iota, by Jove!" "Finish the bottle; you must not send it away," said Sir Jekyl. "Thanks, I'm doing very nicely; and now as they may open fire suddenly, I want to know"--here the attorney's eyes glanced at the door, and his voice dropped a little--"any information of a confidential sort that may guide us in--in----" "Why, I fancy it's _all_ confidential, isn't it?" answered Sir Jekyl. "Certainly--but aw--but--I meant--you know--there was aw--a--there was a talk, you know, about a deed. Eh?" "I--I--_yes_, I've heard--I know what you mean," answered Sir Jekyl, pouring a little claret into his glass. "They--those fellows--they lost a deed, and they were d--d impertinent about it; they wanted--you know it's a long time ago--to try and slur my poor father about it--I don't know exactly how, only, I think, there would have been an action for slander very likely about it, if it had not stopped of itself." Sir Jekyl sipped his claret. "I shan't start till three o'clock train to-morrow, if you have anything to say to me," said the attorney, looking darkly and expectingly in Sir Jekyl's face. "Yes, I'll think over everything. I'd like to have a good talk with you in the morning. You sleep here, you know, of course." "Very kind. I hope I shan't be in your way, Sir Jekyl. Very happy." Sir Jekyl rang the bell. "I shan't let you off to-morrow, unless you really can't help it," he said; and, the servant entering, "Tell Mrs. Sinnott that Mr. Pelter remains here to-night, and would wish--_do_ you?--to run up to your room. Where's your luggage?" "Precious light luggage it is. I left it at the hotel in the town--a small valise, and a----" "Get it up here, do you mind, and let us know when Mr. Pelter's room is ready." "Don't be long about dressing; we must join the ladies, you know, in the drawing-room. I wish, Pelter, there was no such thing as business; and that all attorneys, except you and Crowe, of course, were treated in this and the next world according to their deserts," an ambiguous compliment at which Pelter nodded slyly, with his hands in his pockets. "You'll have to get us all the information you can scrape together, Sir Jekyl. You see they may have evidence of that deed--I mean the lost one, you know--and proving a marriage and the young gentleman legitimate. It may be a serious case--upon my word a _very_ serious case--do you see? And term begins, you know, immediately so there really is no time to lose, and there's no harm in being ready." "I'll have a long talk with you about it in the morning, and I am devilish glad you came--curse the whole thing!" The servant here came to say that Mr. Pelter's room was ready, and his luggage sent for to the town. "Come up, then--we'll look at your room." So up they went, and Pelter declared himself charmed. "Come to my room, Mr. Pelter--it's a long way off, and a confoundedly shabby crib; but I've got some very good cigars there," said Sir Jekyl, who was restless, and wished to hear the attorney more fully on this hated business. CHAPTER XV. The Pipe of Peace. Sir Jekyl marched Mr. Pelter down the great stair again, intending to make the long journey rearward. As they reached the foot of the stairs, Monsieur Varbarriere, candle in hand, was approaching it on the way to his room. He was walking leisurely, as large men do after dinner, and was still some way off. "By Jove! Why did not you tell me?" exclaimed the attorney, stopping short. "By the law! you've _got_ him here." "Monsieur Varbarriere?" said the Baronet. "Mr. Strangways, sir--_that's_ he." "_That_ Strangways!" echoed the Baronet. "Herbert Strangways," whispered Mr. Pelter, and by this time M. Varbarriere was under the rich oak archway, and stopped, smiling darkly, and bowing a little to the Baronet, who was for a moment surprised into silence. "How do you do, Mr. Strangways, sir?" said the attorney, advancing with a shrewd resolute smile, and extending his hand. M. Varbarriere, without the slightest embarrassment, took it, bowing with a courtly gravity. "Ah, Monsieur Pelter?--yes, indeed--very happy to meet you again." "Yes, sir--very happy, Mr. Strangways; so am I. Did not know you were in this part of the world, Mr. Strangways, sir. You remember Havre, sir?" "Perfectly--yes. You did not know me by the name of Varbarriere, which name I adopted on purchasing the Varbarriere estates shortly after I met you at Havre, on becoming a naturalised subject of France." "Wonderful little changed, Monsieur Barvarrian--fat, sir--a little stouter--in good case, Mr. Strangways; but six years, you _know_, sir, does not _count_ for _nothing_--ha, ha, ha!" "You have the goodness to flatter me, I fear," answered Varbarriere, with a smile somewhat contemptuous, and in his deep tones of banter. "This is my friend, Mr. Strangways, if he'll allow me to call him so--Mr. Herbert Strangways, Sir Jekyl," said the polite attorney, presenting his own guest to the Baronet. "And so, Monsieur Varbarriere, I find I have an additional reason to rejoice in having made your acquaintance, inasmuch as it revives a very old one, so old that I almost fear you may have forgotten it. You remember our poor friend, Guy Deverell, and--" "Perfectly, Sir Jekyl, and I was often tempted to ask you the same question; but--but you know there's a _melancholy_--and we were so very happy here, I had not courage to invite the sadness of the retrospect, though a very remote one. I believe I was right, Sir Jekyl. Life's true philosophy is to extract from the present all it can yield of happiness, and to bury our dead out of our sight." "I dare say--I'm much of that way of thinking myself. And--dear me!--I--I suppose I'm very much altered." He was looking at Varbarriere, and trying to recover in the heavy frame and ponderous features before him the image of that Herbert Strangways whom, in the days of his early coxcombry, he had treated with a becoming impertinence. "No--you're wonderfully little changed--I say honestly--quite wonderfully like what I remember you. And I--I know what a transformation I am--perfectly," said Varbarriere. And he stood before Sir Jekyl, as he would display a portrait, full front--Sir Jekyl held a silver candlestick in his hand, Monsieur Varbarriere his in his--and they stood face to face--in a dream of the past. Varbarriere's mystic smile expanded to a grin, and the grin broke into a laugh--deep and loud--not insulting--not sneering. In that explosion of sonorous and enigmatic merriment Sir Jekyl joined--perhaps a little hesitatingly and coldly, for he was trying, I think, to read the riddle--wishing to be quite sure that he might be pleased, and accept these vibrations as sounds of reconciliation. There was nothing quite to forbid it. "I see," said Monsieur Varbarriere, in tones still disturbed by laughter, "in spite of your politeness, Sir Jekyl, what sort of impression my metamorphosis produces. Where is the raw-boned youth--so tall and gawky, that, egad! London bucks were ashamed to acknowledge him in the street, and when they did speak could not forbear breaking his gawky bones with their jokes?--ha, ha, ha! Now, lo! here he stands--the grand old black swine, on hind legs--hog-backed--and with mighty paunch and face all draped in fat. Bah! ha, ha, ha! What a magician is Father Time! Look and laugh, sir--you cannot laugh more than I." "I laugh at your fantastic caricature, so utterly unlike what I see. There's a change, it's true, but no more than years usually bring; and, by Jove! I'd much rather any day grow a little full, for _my_ part, than turn, like some fellows, into a scarecrow." "No, no--no scarecrow, certainly," still laughed Varbarriere. "Egad, no," laughed the attorney in chorus. "No corners there, sir--ribs well covered--hey? nothing like it coming on winter;" and grinning pleasantly, he winked at Sir Jekyl, who somehow neither heard nor saw him, but said-- "Mr. Pelter, my law adviser here, was good enough to say he'd come to my room, which you know so well, Monsieur Varbarriere, and smoke a cigar. You can't do better--pray let me persuade you." He was in fact tolerably easily persuaded, and the three gentlemen together--Sir Jekyl feeling as if he was walking in a dream, and leading the way affably--reached that snuggery which Varbarriere had visited so often before. "Just _one_--they _are_ so good," said he. "We are to go to the drawing-room--aren't we?" "Oh, certainly. I think you'll like these--they're rather good, Mr. Pelter. You know them, Monsieur Varbarriere." "I've hardly ever smoked such tobacco. Once, by a chance, at Lyons, I lighted on a box very like these--that is, about a third of them--but hardly so good." "We've smoked some of these very pleasantly together," said Sir Jekyl, cultivating genial relations. Varbarriere, who had already one between his lips, grunted a polite assent with a nod. You would have thought that his whole soul was in his tobacco, as his dark eyes dreamily followed the smoke that thinly streamed from his lips. His mind, however, was busy in conjecturing what the attorney had come about, and how much he knew of his case and his plans. So the three gentlemen puffed away in silence for a time. "Your nephew, Mr. Guy Strangways, I hope we are soon to see him again?" asked Sir Jekyl, removing his cigar for a moment. "You are very good. Yes, I hope. In fact, though I call it business, it is only a folly which displeases me, which he has promised shall end; and whenever I choose to shake hands, he will come to my side. There is no real quarrel, mind," and Varbarriere laughed, "only I must cure him of his nonsense." "Well, then we may hope very soon to see Mr. Strangways. I _call_ him Strangways, you know, because he has assumed that name, I suppose, permanently." "Well, I think so. His real name is Deverell--a very near relation, and, in fact, representative of our poor friend Guy. His friends all thought it best he should drop it, with its sad associations, and assume a name that may be of some little use to him among more affluent relatives," said M. Varbarriere, who had resolved to be frank as day and harmless as doves, and to disarm suspicion adroitly. "A particularly handsome fellow--a distinguished-looking young man. How many things, Monsieur Varbarriere, we wish undone as we get on in life!" The attorney lay back in his chair, his hands in his pockets, his heels on the carpet, his cigar pointing up to the ceiling, and his eyes closed luxuriously. He intended making a note of everything. "I hope to get him on rapidly in the French service," resumed Varbarriere, "and I can make him pretty comfortable myself while I live, and more so after I'm gone; and in the meantime I am glad to put him in a field where he must exert himself, and see something of labour as well as of life." There was a knock at the door, and the intelligence that Mr. Pelter's luggage was in his room. He would have stayed, perhaps, but Sir Jekyl, smiling, urged haste, and as his cigar was out, he departed. When he was quite gone, Sir Jekyl rose smiling, and extended his hand to Varbarriere, who took it smiling in his own way; also, Sir Jekyl was looking in the face of the large man who stood before him, and returning his gaze a little cloudily; and laughing, both shook hands for a good while, and there was nothing but this low-toned laughter between them. "At all events, Herbert, I'm glad we have met, very glad--very, very. I did not think I'd have felt it quite this way. I've your forgiveness to ask for a great deal. I never mistook a man so much in my life. I believe you are a devilish good fellow; but--but I fancied, you know, for a long time, that you had taken a hatred to me, and--and I have done you great injustice; and I wish very much I could be of any use to--to that fine young fellow, and show any kindness worth the name towards you." Sir Jekyl's eyes were moist, he was smiling, and he was shaking Varbarriere's powerful hand very kindly. I cannot analyse his thoughts and feelings in that moment of confusion. It had overcome him suddenly--it had in some strange way even touched Varbarriere. Was there dimly seen by each a kindly solution of a life-long hatred--a possibility of something wise, perhaps self-sacrificing, that led to reconciliation and serenity in old days? Varbarriere leaned his great shoulders to the wall, his hand still in Sir Jekyl's, still smiling, and looked almost sorrowfully, while he uttered something between a long pant and a sigh. "Wonderful thing life is--terrible battle, life!" murmured Varbarriere, leaning against the wall, with his dark eyes raised to the far cornice, and looking away and through and beyond it into some far star. There are times when your wide-awake gentlemen dream a little, and Sir Jekyl laughed a pensive and gentle little laugh, shaking his head and smiling sadly in reply. "Did you ever read Vathek?" asked the Baronet, "rather a good horror--the fire, you know--ah, ha!--that's a fire every fellow has a spark of in him; I know I have. I've had everything almost a fellow wants; but this I know, if I were sure that death was only rest and darkness, there's hardly a day I live I would not choose it." And with this sentiment came a sincere and odd little laugh. "My faith! I believe it's true," said Varbarriere with a shrug, and a faint smile of satiety on his heavy features. "We must talk lots together, Herbert--talk a great deal. You'll find I'm not such a bad fellow after all. Egad, I'm _very_ glad you're here!" CHAPTER XVI. A Rencontre in the Gallery. It was time now; however, that they should make their appearance in the drawing-room; so, for the present, Varbarriere departed. He reached his dressing-room in an undefined state--a sort of light, not of battle fires, but of the dawn in his perspective; when, all on a sudden, came the image of a white-moustached, white-browed, grim old military man, glancing with a clear, cold eye, that could be cruel, from the first-class carriage window, up and down the platform of a gas-lit station, some hour and a half away from Slowton, and then sternly at his watch. "The stupid old fogey!" thought Varbarriere, with a pang, as he revised his toilet hurriedly for the drawing-room. "Could that episode be evaded?" There was no time to arrive at a clear opinion on this point, nor, indeed, to ascertain very clearly what his own wishes pointed at. So, in a state rather anarchic, he entered the gallery, _en route_ for the drawing-room. Monsieur Varbarriere slid forth, fat and black, from his doorway, with wondrous little noise, his bulk considered, and instantly on his retina, lighted by the lamp at the cross galleries, appeared the figure of a tall thin female, attired in a dark cloak and bonnet, seated against the opposite wall, not many steps away. Its head turned, and he saw Donica Gwynn. It was an odd sort of surprise; he had just been thinking of her. "Oh! I did not think as you were here, sir; I thought you was in Lunnon." "Yet here I am, and you too, both unexpectedly." A suspicion had crossed his mind. "How d'ye do, Mrs. Gwynn?" "Well, I thank you, sir." "Want _me_ here?" "No, sir; I was wrote for by missus please." "Yes," he said very slowly, looking hard at her. "Very good, Mrs. Gwynn; have you anything to say to me?" It would not do, of course, to protract this accidental talk; he did not care to be seen _tête-à-tête_ with Donica Gwynn in the gallery. "No, sir, please, I han't nothing to say, sir," and she courtesied. "Very well, Mrs. Gwynn; we're quite secret, hey?" and with another hard look, but only momentary, in her face, he proceeded toward the head of the staircase. "Beg parding, sir, but I think you dropt something." She was pointing to a letter, doubled up, and a triangular corner of which stuck up from the floor, a few yards away. "Oh! thank you," said Varbarriere, quickly retracing his steps, and picking it up. A terrible fact for the world to digest is this, that some of our gentlemen attorneys are about the most slobbering men of business to be found within its four corners. They will mislay papers, and even lose them; they are dilatory and indolent--quite the reverse of our sharp, lynx-eyed, energetic notions of that priesthood of Themis, and prone to every sort and description of lay irregularity in matters of order and pink tape. Our friend Pelter had a first-rate staff, and a clockwork partner beside in Crowe, so that the house was a very regular one, and was himself, in good measure, the fire, bustle, and impetus of the firm. But every virtue has its peccant correspondent. If Pelter was rapid, decided, daring, he was also a little hand-over-hand. He has been seen in a hurry to sweep together and crunch like a snowball a drift of banknotes, and stuff them so impressed into the bottom of his great-coat pocket! What more can one say? This night, fussing out at his bed-room door, he plucked his scented handkerchief from his pocket, and, as he crossed his threshold, with it flirted forth a letter, which had undergone considerable attrition in that receptacle, and was nothing the whiter, I am bound to admit, especially about the edges, for its long sojourn there. Varbarriere knew the handwriting and I. M. M. initials in the left-hand lower angle. So, with a nod and a smile, he popped it into his trowsers pocket, being that degree more cautious than Pelter. Sir Jekyl was once more in high spirits. To do him justice, he had not affected anything. There had been an effervescence--he hardly knew how it came about. But his dangers seemed to be dispersing; and, at the worst, were not negotiation and compromise within his reach? Samuel Pelter, Esq., gentleman attorney and a solicitor of the High Court of Chancery, like most prosperous men, had a comfortable confidence in himself; and having heard that Lady Alice Redcliffe was quarrelling with her lawyer, thought there could be no harm in his cultivating her acquaintance. The old lady was sitting in a high-backed chair, very perpendicularly, with several shawls about and around her, stiff and pale; but her dusky eyes peered from their sunken sockets, in grim and isolated observation. Pelter strutted up. He was not, perhaps, a distinguished-looking man--rather, I fear, the contrary. His face was broad and smirking, with a short, broad, blue chin, and a close crop of iron-grey on his round head, and plenty of crafty crow's-feet and other lines well placed about. He stood on the hearthrug, within easy earshot of Lady Alice, whom he eyed with a shrewd glance, "taking her measure," as his phrase was, and preparing to fascinate his prey. "Awful smash that, ma'am, on the Smather and Sham Junction," said Pelter, having fished up a suitable topic. "Frightful thing--fourteen killed--and they say upwards of seventy badly hurt. I'm no chicken, Lady Alice, but by Jove, ma'am, I can't remember any such casualty--a regular ca-tas-trophe, ma'am!" And Pelter, with much feeling, gently lashed his paunch with his watch-chain and bunch of seals, an obsolete decoration, which he wore--I believe still wears. Lady Alice, who glowered sternly on him during this speech, nodded abruptly with an inarticulate sound, and then looked to his left, at a distant picture. "I trust I see you a great deal better, Lady Alice. I have the pleasure, I believe, to address Lady Alice Redcliffe--aw, haw, h'm," and the attorney executed his best bow, a ceremony rather of agility than grace. "I had the honour of seeing you, Lady Alice Redcliffe, at a shower-flow--flower-show, I mean--in the year--let me see--egad, ma'am, twelve--no--no--_thirteen_ years ago. How time does fly! Of course all them years--_thirteen_, egad!--has not gone for nothing. I dare say you don't perceive the alterations in yourself--no one does--I wish no one else did--that was always my wish to Mrs. P. of a morning--_my_ good lady, Mrs. Pelter--ha, ha, ha! Man can't tether time or tide, as the Psalm says, and every year scribbles a wrinkle or two. You were suffering, I heard then, ma'am, chronic cough, ma'am--and all that. I hope it's abated--I know it will, ma'am--my poor lady is a martyr to it--troublesome thing--very--awful troublesome! Lady Alice." There was no reply, Lady Alice was still looking sternly at the picture. "I remember so well, ma'am, you were walking a little lame then, linked with Lord Lumdlebury--(we have had the honour to do business occasionally for his lordship)--and I was informed by a party with me that you had been with Pincendorf. I don't think much of them jockeys, ma'am, for my part; but if it was anything of a callosity--" Without waiting for any more, Lady Alice Redcliffe rose in solemn silence to her full height, beckoned to Beatrix, and said grimly-- "I'll change my seat, dear, to the sofa--will you help me with these things?" Lady Alice glided awfully to the sofa, and the gallant Mr. Pelter instituted a playful struggle with Beatrix for possession of the shawls. "I remember the time, miss, I would not have let you carry your share; but, as I was saying to Lady Alice Redcliffe--" He was by this time tucking a shawl about her knees, which, so soon as she perceived, she gasped to Beatrix-- "Where's Jekyl?--I can't have _this_ any longer--call him here." "As I was saying to you, Lady Alice, ma'am, our joints grow a bit rusty after sixty; and talking of feet, I passed the Smather and Slam Junction, ma'am, only two hours after the collision; and, egad! there were three feet all in a row cut off by the instep, quite smooth, ma'am, lying in the blood there, a pool as long as the passage up-stairs--awful sight!" Lady Alice rose up again, with her eyes very wide, and her mouth very close, apparently engaged in mental prayer, and her face angry and pink, and she beckoned with tremulous fingers to Sir Jekyl, who was approaching with one of his provoking smiles. "I say, Mr. Pelter, my friend Doocey wants you over there; they're at logger-heads about a law point, and I can't help them." "Hey! if it's _practice_ I can give them a wrinkle maybe;" and away stumped the attorney, his fists in his pockets, smirking, to the group indicated by his host. "Hope I haven't interrupted a conversation? What can I do for you?" said Sir Jekyl, gaily. "What do you _mean_, Jekyl Marlowe--what _can_ you mean by bringing such persons here? What pleasure can you _possibly_ find in low and _dreadful_ society?--none of your family liked it. Where did you find that man? How on earth did you procure such a person? If I _could_--if I had been well enough, I'd have rung the bell and ordered your servant to remove him. I'd have gone to my bed-room, sir, only that even there I could not have felt safe from his intrusions. It's utterly intolerable and preposterous!" "I had no idea my venerable friend, Pelter, could have pursued a lady so cruelly; but rely upon me, I'll protect you." "I think you had better cleanse your house of such persons; at all events, I insist they shan't be allowed to make their horrible sport of me!" said Lady Alice, darting a fiery glance after the agreeable attorney. CHAPTER XVII. Old Donnie and Lady Jane. "Can you tell me, child, anything about that horrible fat old Frenchman, who has begun to speak English since his return?" asked Lady Jane Lennox of Beatrix, whom she stopped, just touching her arm with the tip of her finger, as she was passing. Lady Jane was leaning back indolently, and watching the movements of M. Varbarriere with a disagreeable interest. "That's Monsieur Varbarriere," answered Beatrix. "Yes, I know that; but who is he--what is he? I wish he were gone," replied she. "I really know nothing of him," replied Beatrix, with a smile. "Yes, you do know something about him: for instance, you know he's the uncle of that handsome young man who accompanied him." This Lady Jane spoke with a point which caused on a sudden a beautiful scarlet to tinge the young girl's cheeks. Lady Jane looked at her, without a smile, without archness, with a lowering curiosity and something of pain, one might fancy, even of malignity. Lady Jane hooked her finger in Beatrix's bracelet, and lowering her eyes to the carpet, remained silent, it seemed to the girl undecided whether to speak or not on some doubtful subject. With a vague interest Beatrix watched her handsome but sombre countenance, till Lady Jane appearing to escape from her thoughts, with a little toss of her beautiful head and a frown, said, looking up-- "Beatrix, I have such frightful dreams sometimes. I am ill, I think; I am horribly nervous to-night." "Would you like to go to your room? Maybe if you were to lie down, Lady Jane--" "By-and-by, perhaps--yes." She was still stealthily watching Varbarriere. "I'll go with you--shall I?" said Beatrix. "No, you shan't," answered Lady Jane, rudely. "And why, Lady Jane?" asked Beatrix, hurt and surprised. "You shall never visit my room; you are a good little creature. I could have loved you, Beatrix, but now I can't." "Yet I like you, and you meet me so! why is this?" pleaded Beatrix. "I can't say, little fool; who ever knows why they like or dislike? I don't. The fault, I suppose, is mine, not yours. I never said it was yours. If you were ever so little wicked," she added, with a strange little laugh, "perhaps I could; but it is not worth talking about," and with a sudden change from this sinister levity to a seriousness which oscillated strangely between cruelty and sadness, she said-- "Beatrix, you like that young man, Mr. Strangways?" Again poor Beatrix blushed, and was about to falter an exculpation and a protest; but Lady Jane silenced it with a grave and resolute "_Yes--you like him_;" and after a little pause, she added--"Well, if you don't marry _him_, marry no one else;" and shortly after this, Lady Jane sighed heavily. This speech of hers was delivered in a way that prevented evasion or girlish hypocrisy, and Beatrix had no answer but that blush which became her so; and dropping her eyes to the ground, she fell into a reverie, from which she was called up by Lady Jane, who said suddenly-- "What can that fat Monsieur Varbarriere be? He looks like Torquemada, the Inquisitor--mysterious, plausible, truculent--what do you think? Don't you fancy he could poison you in an ice or a cup of coffee; or put you into Cardinal Ballue's cage, and smile on you once a year through the bars?" Beatrix smiled, and looked on the unctuous old gentleman with an indulgent eye, comparatively. "I can't see him so melodramatically, Lady Jane," she laughed. "To me he seems a much more commonplace individual, a great deal less interesting and atrocious, and less like the abbot." "What abbot?" said Lady Jane, sharply, "Now really that's very odd." "I meant," said Beatrix, laughing, "the Abbot of Quedlinberg, in Canning's play, who is described, you know, as very corpulent and cruel." "Oh, I forgot; I don't think I ever read it; but it chimed in so oddly with my dreams." "How, what do you mean?" cried Beatrix, amused. "I dreamed some one knocked at night at my door, and when I said 'come in,' that Monsieur Varbarriere put in his great face, with a hood on like a friar's, smiling like--like an assassin; and somehow I have felt a disgust of him ever since." "Well, I really think he would look rather well in a friar's frock and hood," said Beatrix, glancing at the solemn old man again with a little laugh. "He would do very well for Mrs. Radcliff's one-handed monk, or Schedone, or some of those awful ecclesiastics that scare us in books." "I think him positively odious, and I hate him," said Lady Jane, quietly rising. "I mean to steal away--will you come with me to the foot of the stair?" "Come," whispered Beatrix; and as Lady Jane lighted her candle, in that arched recess near the foot of the stair, where, in burnished silver, stand the files of candles, awaiting the fingers which are to bear them off to witness the confidences of toilet or of dejection, she said-- "Well, as you won't take me with you, we must part here. Good-night, Lady Jane." Lady Jane turned as if to kiss her, but only patted her on the cheek, and said coldly-- "Good-bye, little fool--now run back again." When Lady Jane reached the gallery at the top of the staircase, she, too, saw Donica Gwynn seated where Varbarriere had spoken to her. "Ha! Donica," cried she suddenly, in the accents of early girlhood, "I'm so glad to see you, Donica. You hardly know me now?" And Lady Jane, in the light of one transient, happy smile, threw her jewelled arms round the neck of the old housekeeper, whose visits of weeks at a time to Wardlock were nearly her happiest remembrances of that staid old mansion. "You dear old thing! you were always good to me; and I such a madcap and such a fury! Dull enough now, Donnie, but not a bit better." "My poor Miss Jennie!" said old Donica Gwynn, with a tender little laugh, her head just a little on one side, looking on her old pet and charge with such a beautiful, soft lighting up of love in her hard old face as you would not have fancied could have beamed there. Oh! most pathetic mystery, how in our poor nature, layer over layer, the angelic and the evil, the mean and the noble, lie alternated. How sometimes, at long intervals, in the wintriest life and darkest face, the love of angels will suddenly beam out, and show you, still unwrecked, the eternal capacity for heaven. "And grown such a fine 'oman--bless ye--I allays said she would--didn't I?" "You always stood up for me, old Donnie Don. Come into my room with me now, and talk. Yes--come, and talk, and talk, and talk--I have no one, Bonnie, to talk with now. If I had I might be different--I mean better. You remember poor mamma, Donnie--don't you?" "_Dear!_ to be sure--yes, and a nice creature, and a pretty--there's a look in your face sometimes reminds me on her, Miss Jennie. And I allays said you'd do well--didn't I?--and see what a great match, they tell me, you a' made! Well well! and how you _have_ grown!--a fine lady, bless you," and she laughed so softly over those thin, girlish images of memory, you'd have said the laugh was as far away and as sad as the remembrance. "Sit down, Donnie Don," she said, when they had entered the room. "Sit down, and tell me everything--how all the old people are, and how the old place looks--you live there now? _I_ have nothing to tell, only I'm married, as you know--and--and I think a most good-for-nothing creature." "Ah, no, pretty Miss Jane, there was good in you always, only a little bit hasty, and _that_ anyone as had the patience could see; and I knowed well you'd be better o' that little folly in time." "I'm not better, Donnie--I'm worse--I _am_ worse, Donnie. I know I am--not better." "Well, dear! and jewels, and riches, and coaches, and a fine gentleman adoring you--not very young, though. Well, maybe all the better. Did you never hear say, it's better to be an old man's darling than a young man's slave?" "Yes, Donnie, it's very well; but let us talk of Wardlock--and he's _not_ a fine man, Donnie, who put that in your head--he's old, and ugly, and"--she was going to say stupid, but the momentary bitterness was rebuked by an accidental glimpse of the casket in which his splendid present was secured--"and tell me about Wardlock, and the people--is old Thomas Jones there still?" "No, he's living at Glastonhowe now, with his grandson that's married--very happy; but you would not believe how old he looks, and they say can't remember nothink as he used to, but very comfortable." "And Turpin, the gardener?" "Old Turpin be dead, miss, two years agone; had a fit a few months before, poor old fellow, and never was strong after. Very deaf he was of late years, and a bit cross sometimes about the vegetables, they do say; but he was a good-natured fellow, and decent allays; and though he liked a mug of ale, poor fellow, now and then, he was very regular at church." "Poor old Turpin dead! I never heard it--and _old_? he used to wear a kind of flaxen wig." "Old! dearie me, that he was, miss, you would not guess how old--there's eighty-five years on the grave-stone that Lady Alice put over him, from the parish register, in Wardlock churchyard, bless ye!" "And--and as I said just now about my husband, General Lennox, that he was old--well, he _is_ old, but he's a good man, and kind, and such a gentleman." "And you love him--and what more is needed to make you both happy?" added Donica; "and glad I am, miss, to see you so comfortably married--and such a nice, good, grand gentleman; and don't let them young chaps be coming about you with their compliments, and fine talk, and love-making." "What do you mean, woman? I should hope I know how to behave myself as well as ever Lady Alice Redcliffe did. It is _she_ who has been talking to you, and, I suppose, to every one, the stupid, wicked hag." "Oh, Miss Jennie, dear!" CHAPTER XVIII. Alone--Yet not alone. "Well, Donnie, don't talk about _her_; talk about Wardlock, and the people, and the garden, and the trees, and old Wardlock church," said Lady Jane, subsiding almost as suddenly as she flamed up. "Do you remember the brass tablet about Eleanor Faukes, well-beloved and godly, who died in her twenty-second year, in the year of grace sixteen hundred and thirty-four? See how I remember it! Poor Eleanor Faukes! I often think of her--and do you remember how you used to make me read the two lines at the end of the epitaph? 'What you are I was; what I am you shall be.' Do you remember?" "Ay, miss, that I do. I wish I could think o' them sorts o' things allays--it's very good, miss." "Perhaps it is, Donnie. It's very sad and very horrible, at all events, death and judgment," answered Lady Jane. "Have you your old Bible yet, miss?" "Not here," answered Lady Jane, colouring a little; but recollecting, she said, "I _have_ got a very pretty one, though," and she produced a beautiful volume bound in velvet and gold. "A deal handsomer, Miss Jennie, but not so well read, I'm afeared," said Donica Gwynn, looking at the fresh binding and shining gilt leaves. "There it is, Donnie Don; but I feel like you, and I _do_ like the old one best, blurred and battered; poor old thing, it looked friendly, and this like a fashionable chaplain. I have not seen it for a long time, Donnie; perhaps it's lost, and this is only a show one, as you see." And after a few seconds she added, a little bitterly, almost angrily, "I never read my Bible now. I never open it," and then came an unnatural little laugh. "Oh! Miss Jennie, dear--I mean my Lady Jane--don't say that, darling--_that_ way, anyhow, don't say it. Why should not you read your Bible, and love it, better now nor ever, miss--the longer you live the more you'll want it, and when sorrow comes, what have you but that?" "It's all denunciation, all hard names, and threats, Donnie. If people believed themselves what they _say_ every Sunday in church, miserable sinners, and I dare say they are, they'd sicken and quake at sight of it. I hope I may come to like it some day, Donnie," she added, with a short sigh. "I mind, Miss Jennie--I mean my Lady Jane." "No, you're to call me Jennie still, or I'll drop Donnie Don, and call you Mrs. Gwynn," said Lady Jane, with her hands on Donica's thin shoulders, playfully, but with a very pensive face and tone. Donica smiled for a moment, and then her face saddened too, and she said-- "And I mind, Miss Jennie, when it was the same way with me, only with better reason, for I was older than you, and had lived longer than ever you did without a thought of God; but I tell you, miss, you'll find your only comfort there at last; it is not much, maybe, to the like o' me, that can't lay her mind down to it, but it's _some_think; ay, I mind the time I durst not open it, thinking I'd only meet summat there to vex me. But 'tisn't so: there's a deal o' good nature in the Bible, and ye'll be sure to stumble on somethink kind whenever you open it." Lady Jane made no answer. She looked down with a careworn gaze on her white hand, the fleeting tenement of clay; jewelled rings glimmered on its fingers--the vanities of the world, and under it lay the Bible, the eternal word. She was patting the volume with a little movement that made the brilliants flash. You would have thought she was admiring her rings, but that her eyes were so sad and her gaze so dreamy. "And I hear the mistress, Lady Alice, a-coming up--yes, 'tis her voice. Good-night, Miss Jennie, dear." "Good-night, dear old Donnie." "And you'll promise me you'll read a bit in it every night." "Where's the use in promising, Donnie? Don't we promise everything--the whole Christian religion, at our baptism--and how do we keep it?" "You must promise you'll read, if 'twas only a verse every night, Miss Jennie, dear--it may be the makin' o' ye. I hear Lady Alice a-calling." "You're a good old thing--I like you, Donnie--you'd like to make me better--happier, that is--and I love you--and I promise for this night, at all events, I will read a verse, and maybe more, if it turns out good-natured, as you say. Good-night." And she shook old Gwynn by both hands, and kissed her; and as she parted with her, said-- "And, Donnie, you must tell my maid I shan't want her to-night--and I _will_ read, Donnie--and now, good-night again." So handsome Lady Jane was alone. "It seems to me as if I had not time to think--God help me, God help me," said Lady Jane. "Shall I read it? That odious book, that puts impossibilities before us, and calls eternal damnation eternal justice!" "Good-night, Jane," croaked Lady Alice's voice, and the key turned in the door. With a pallid glance from the corners of her eyes, of intense contempt--_hatred_, even, at the moment, she gazed on the door, as she sate with her fingers under her chin; and if a look could have pierced the panels, hers would have shot old Lady Alice dead at the other side. For about a minute she sat so, and then a chilly little laugh rang from her lips; and she thought no more for a while of Lady Alice, and her eyes wandered again to her Bible. "Yes, that odious book! with just power enough to distract us, without convincing--to embitter our short existence, without directing it; I _hate_ it." So she said, and looked as if she would have flung it into the farthest corner of the room. She was spited with it, as so many others are, because it won't do for us what we must do for ourselves. "When sorrow comes, poor Donnie says--_when_ it comes--little she knows how long it has been here! Life--such a dream--such an agony often. Surely it pays the penalty of all its follies. Judgment indeed! The all-wise Creator sitting in judgment upon creatures like us, living but an hour, and walking in a dream!" This kind of talk with her, as with many others, was only the expression of a form of pain. She was perhaps in the very mood to read, that is, with the keen and anxious interest that accompanies and indicates a deep-seated grief and fear. It was quite true what she said to old Donica. These pages had long been sealed for her. And now, with a mixture of sad antipathy and interest, as one looks into a coffin, she did open the book, and read here and there in a desultory way, and then, leaning on her hand, she mused dismally; then made search for a place she wanted, and read and wept, wept aloud and long and bitterly. The woman taken, and "set in the midst," the dreadful Pharisees standing round. The Lord of life, who will judge us on the last day, hearing and _saving_! Oh, blessed Prince, whose service is perfect freedom, how wise are thy statutes! "More to be desired are they than gold--_sweeter_ also than honey." Standing between thy poor tempted creatures and the worst sorrow that can befall them--a sorrow that softens, not like others, as death approaches, but is transformed, and stands like a giant at the bedside. May they see thy interposing image--may they see thy face now and for ever. Rest for the heavy-laden! The broken and the contrite he will not despise. Read and take comfort, how he dealt with that poor sinner. Perfect purity, perfect mercy. Oh, noblest vision that ever rose before contrite frailty! Lift up the downcast head--let the poor heart break no more--you shall rise from the dust an angel. Suddenly she lifted up her pale face, with an agony and a light on her countenance, with hands clasped, and such a look from the abyss, in her upturned eyes. Oh! was it possible--could it be true? A _friend_--such a _friend_! Then came a burst of prayer--wild resolutions--agonised tears. She knew that in all space, for her, was but one place of safety--to lie at the wounded feet of her Saviour, to clasp them, to bathe them with her tears. An hour--more--passed in this agony of stormy hope breaking in gleams through despair. Prayer--cries for help, as from the drowning, and vows frantic--holy, for the future. "Yes, once more, thank God, I can dare with safety--here and now--to see him for the last time. In the morning I will conjure old Lady Alice to take me to Wardlock. I will write to London. Arthur will join me there. I'd like to go abroad--never into the world again--never--never--never. He will be pleased. I'll try to make amends. He'll never know what a wretch I've been. But he shall see the change, and be happier. Yes, yes, yes." Her beautiful long hair was loose, its rich folds clasped in her strained fingers--her pale upturned face bathed in tears and quivering--"The Saviour's feet!--No happiness but there--wash them with my tears--dry them with this hair." And she lifted up her eyes and hands to heaven. Poor thing! In the storm, as cloud and rack fly by, the momentary gleam that comes--what is it? Do not often these agitations subside in darkness? Was this to be a lasting sunshine, though saddened for her? Was she indeed safe now and for ever? But is there any promise that repentance shall arrest the course of the avenger that follows sin on earth? Are broken health or blighted fame restored when the wicked man "turneth away from the wickedness that he hath committed;" and do those consequences that dog iniquity with "feet of wool and hands of iron," stay their sightless and soundless march so soon as he begins to do "that which is lawful and right?" It is enough for him to know that he that does so "shall save his soul alive." CHAPTER XIX. Varbarriere the Tyrant debates with the weaker Varbarrieres. "May I see you, Monsieur Varbarriere, to-morrow, in the room in which I saw you to-day, at any hour you please after half-past eleven?" inquired Lady Alice, a few minutes after that gentleman had approached her. "Certainly, madam; perhaps I can at this moment answer you upon points which cause you anxiety; pray command me." And he sate like a corpulent penitent on a low prie-dieu chair beside her knee, and inclined his ear to listen. "It is only to learn whether my--my poor boy's son, my grandson, the young man in whom I must feel so deep an interest, is about to return here?" "I can't be quite certain, madam, of that; but I can promise that he will do himself the honour to present himself before you, whenever you may please to appoint, at your house of Wardlock." "Yes, that would be better still. He could come there and see his old grandmother. I would like to see him soon. I have a great deal to say to him, a great deal to tell him that would interest him; and the pictures; I know you will let him come. Do you really mean it, Monsieur Varbarriere?" M. Varbarriere smiled a little contemptuously, and bowed most deferentially. "Certainly madam, I mean what I say; and if I did _not_ mean it, still I would say I do." There was something mazy in this sentence which a little bewildered old Lady Alice's head, and she gazed on Varbarriere with a lack-lustre frown. "Well, then, sir, the upshot of the matter is that _I may_ rely on what you say, and expect my grandson's visit at Wardlock?" "Certainly, madam, you _may_ expect it," rejoined Varbarriere, oracularly. "And pray, Monsieur Varbarriere, are you married?" inquired the old lady, with the air of a person who had a right to be informed. "Alas, madam, may I say Latin?--Infandum, regina, jubes renovare dolorem; you stir up my deepest grief. I am, indeed, what you call an old bachelor." "Well, so I should suppose; I don't see what business you would have had to marry." "Nor I either," he replied. "And you are very rich, I suppose." "The rich man never says he is rich, and the poor man never says he is poor. What shall I say? Pretty well! Will that do?" "H'm, yes; you ought to make a settlement, Monsieur Varbarriere." "On your grandson, madam?" "Yes, my grandson, he's nothing the worse of that, sir--and your nephew." "Madam, the idea is beneficent, and does honour to your heart. I have, to say truth, had an idea of doing something for him by my will, though not by settlement; you are quite in advance of me, madam--I shall reflect." Monsieur Varbarriere was, after his wont, gravely amusing himself, so gravely that old Lady Alice never suspected an irony. Old Lady Alice had in her turn taken up the idea of a solution of all family variance, by a union between Guy Deverell and Beatrix, and her old brain was already at the settlements. "Lady Alice, you must positively give us up our partner, Monsieur Varbarriere, our game is arrested; and, egad, Pelter, poor fellow, is bursting with jealousy!" Lady Alice turned disdainfully from Sir Jekyl. "Monsieur Varbarriere, pray don't allow me to detain you now. I should be very glad to see you, if you had no particular objection, to-morrow." "Only too happy; you do me, madam, a great deal of honour;" and with a bow and a smile Monsieur Varbarriere withdrew to the whist-table. He did not play that night by any means so well as usual. Doocey, who was his partner, was, to say the least, disappointed, and Sir Jekyl and Sir Paul made a very nice thing of it, in that small way which makes domestic whist-players happy and serene. When they wound up, Doocey was as much irritated as a perfectly well-bred gentleman could be. "Well, Sir Paul; we earned our winnings, eh? Four times the trick against honours, not bad play, I think," said Sir Jekyl, as they rose. "Captain Doocey thinks our play had nothing to do with it," observed Sir Paul, with a faint radiance of complacent banter over his bluff face, as he put his adversary's half-crowns into his trowsers pocket. "I never said _that_, Sir Paul, of course; you mistake me, but _we_ might, don't you think, Monsieur Varbarriere, have played a little better? for instance, we should have played our queen to the lead of spades. I'm sure that would have given us the trick, don't you see, and you would have had the lead, and played diamonds, and forced Sir Jekyl to ruff with his ace, and made my knave good, and that would have given us the lead and trick." "Our play goes for nothing, you see, Sir Paul," said Sir Jekyl. "No; Captain Doocey thinks play had nothing to do with it," said Sir Paul Blunket. "'Gad, I think play had everything to do with it--not _yours_, though," said Doocey, a little tartly. "I must do you _all_ justice," interposed Varbarriere, "you're all right--everyone played well except me. I do pretty well when I'm in the vein, but I'm not to-night; it was a very bad performance. I played execrably, Captain Doocey." "Oh! no, I won't allow that; but you know once or twice you certainly did not play according to your own principles, I mean, and I couldn't therefore see exactly what you meant, and I dare say it was as much my fault as yours." And Doocey, with his finger on Varbarriere's sleeve, fell into one of those _resumés_ which mysteriously interest whist-players, and Varbarriere listened to his energetic periods with his hands in his pockets, benignant but bored, and assented with a good grace to his own condemnation. And smothering a yawn as he moved away, again pleaded guilty to all the counts, and threw himself on the mercy of the court. "What shall we do to-morrow?" exclaimed Sir Jekyl, and he heard a voice repeat "to-morrow," and so did Varbarriere. "I'll turn it over, and at breakfast I'll lay half a dozen plans before you, and you shall select. It's a clear frosty night; we shall have a fine day. You don't leave us, Mr. Pelter, till the afternoon, d'ye see? and mind, Lady Alice Redcliffe sits in the boudoir, at the first landing on the great stair; the servant will show you the way; don't fail to pay her a visit, d'ye mind, Pelter; she's huffed, you left her so suddenly; don't mind her at first; just amuse her a little, and I think she's going to change her lawyer." Pelter, with his hands in his pockets, smiled shrewdly and winked on Sir Jekyl. "Thanks; I know it, I heard it; you can give us a lift in that quarter, Sir Jekyl, and I shan't forget to pay my respects." When the ladies had gone, and the gentlemen stood in groups by the fire, or sat listless before it, Sir Jekyl, smiling, laid his hand on Varbarriere's shoulder, and asked him in a low tone-- "Will you join Pelter in my room, and wind up with a cigar?" "I was going, that is, tempted, only ten minutes ago, to ask leave to join your party," began Varbarriere. "It is not a party--we should be only three," said Sir Jekyl, in an eager whisper. "All the more inviting," continued Varbarriere, smiling. "But I suddenly recollected that I shall have rather a busy hour or two--three or four letters to write. My people of business in France never give me a moment; they won't pay my rent or cork a bottle, my faith! without a letter." "Well, I'm sorry you can't; but you must make it up to me, and see, you must take two or three of these to your dressing-room," and he presented his case to M. Varbarriere. "Ha! you are very good; but, _no_; I like to connect them with your room, they must not grow too common, they shall remain a treat. No, no, I won't; ha, ha, ha! Thank you very much," and he waved them off, laughing and shaking his head. Somehow he could not brook accepting this trifling present. To be sure, here he was a guest at free quarters, but at this he stuck; he drew back and waved away the cigar-case. It was not logical, but he could not help it. When Pelter and Sir Jekyl sat in the Baronet's chamber, under their canopy of tobacco-smoke over their last cigar, "See, Pelter," said Sir Jekyl, "it won't do to _seem_ anxious; the fact is I'm _not_ anxious; I believe he has a lot of money to leave that young fellow. Suppose they marry; the Deverells are a capital old family, don't you see, and it will make up everything, and stop people talking about--about old nonsense. I'll settle all, and I don't care a curse, and I'll not be very long in the way. I can't keep always young, I'm past fifty." "Judging by his manner, you know, I should say any proposition you may have to make he'd be happy to listen to," said Mr. Pelter. "You're sleepy, Pelter." "Well, a little bit," said the attorney, blinking, yawning, and grinning all together. "And, egad, I think you want to be shaved," said Sir Jekyl, who did not stand on ceremony with his attorney. "Should not wonder," said Mr. Pelter, feeling his chin over sleepily with his finger and thumb. "My shave was at half-past four, and what is it now?--half-past eleven, egad! I thought it was later. Good-night, Sir Jekyl--those _are_ cigars, magnificent, by Jove!--and about that Strangways' business, I would not be in too great a hurry, do you see? I would not open anything, till I saw whether they were going to move, or whether there was anything in it. I would not put it in his head, d'ye see, hey?" and from habit Pelter winked. And with that salutation, harmless as the kiss apostolic, Mr. Pelter, aided by a few directions from Sir Jekyl, toddled away to his bedchamber yawning, and the Baronet, after his wont, locked himself into his room in very tolerable spirits. There was a sofa in Varbarriere's dressing-room, on which by this time, in a great shawl dressing-gown, supine lay our friend; like the painted stone monument of the Chief Justice of Chester in Wardlock church, you could see on the wall sharply defined in shadow the solemn outline of his paunch. He was thinking--not as we endeavour to trace thought in narrative, like a speech, but crossing zigzag from point to point, and back and forward. A man requires an audience, and pen and paper, to think in train at all. His ideas whisked and jolted on somewhat in this fashion:-- "It is to be _avoided_, if possible. My faith! it is now just twelve o'clock! A dangerous old block-head. I must avoid it, if only for time to think in. There was nothing this evening to imply such relations--Parbleu! a pleasant situation if it prove all a mistake. These atrabilious countrymen and women of mine are so odd, they may mislead a fellow accustomed like me to a more intriguing race and a higher _finesse_. Ah! no; it is certainly true. The _fracas_ will end everything. That old white monkey will be sure to blunder me into it. Better reconsider things, and wait. What shall I tell him? No excuse, I must go through with it, or I suppose he will call for pistols--curse him! I'll give Sir Jekyl a hint or two. He must see her, and make all ready. The old fool will blaze away at me, of course. Well! I shall fight him or not, as I may be moved. No one in this country need fight now who does not wish it. Rather a comfortable place to live in, if it were not for the climate. I forgot to ask Jacques whether Guy took all his luggage! What o'clock now? Come, by my faith! it is time to decide." CHAPTER XX. M. Varbarriere decides. Varbarriere sat up on the side of his sofa. "Who brought that woman, Gwynn, here? What do they want of her?" It was only the formula by which interrogatively to express the suspicion that pointed at Sir Jekyl and his attorney. "Soft words for me while tampering with my witnesses, then laugh at me. Why did not I ask Lady Alice whether she really wrote for her?" Thus were his thoughts various as the ingredients of that soup called harlequin, which figures at low French taverns, in which are floating bits of chicken, cheese, potato, fish, sausage, and so forth--the flavour of the soup itself is consistent, nevertheless. The tone of Varbarriere's ruminations, on the whole, was decided. He wished to avert the exposure which his interference alone had invited. He looked at his watch--he had still a little more than half an hour for remedial thought and action--and now, what is to be done to prevent _ce vieux singe blanc_ from walking into the green chamber, and keeping watch and ward at his wife's bedside until that spectre shall emerge through the wall, whom with a curse and a stab he was to lay? Well, what precise measures were to be taken? First he must knock up Sir Jekyl in his room, and tell him positively that General Lennox was to be at Marlowe by one o'clock, having heard stories in town, for the purpose of surprising and punishing the guilty. Sir Jekyl would be sharp enough to warn Lady Jane; or should he suggest that it would be right to let her know, in order to prevent her from being alarmed at the temper and melodramatics of her husband, and to secure that coolness and preparation which were necessary? It required some delicacy and tact, but he was not afraid. Next, he must meet General Lennox, and tell him in substance that he had begun to hope that he had been himself practised upon. Yes, that would do--and he might be as dark as he pleased on the subject of his information. Varbarriere lighted his bed-room candle, intending to march forthwith to Sir Jekyl's remote chamber. Great events, as we all know, turn sometimes upon small pivots. Before he set out, he stood for a moment with his candle in one hand, and in his reverie he thrust the other into the pocket of his voluminous black trowsers, and there it encountered, unexpectedly, the letter he had that evening picked up on the floor of the gallery. It had quite dropped out of his mind. Monsieur Varbarriere was a Jupiter Scapin. He had not the smallest scruple about reading it, and afterwards throwing it into the fire, though it contained other men's secrets, and was another man's property. This was a letter from Sir Jekyl Marlowe to Pelter and Crowe, and was in fact upon the special subject of Herbert Strangways. Unlucky subject! unlucky composition! Now there was, of course, here a great deal of that sort of communication which occurs between a clever attorney and his clever client, which is termed "privileged," and is not always quite fit to see the light. Did ever beauty read letter of compliment and adoration with keener absorption? Varbarriere's face rather whitened as he read, and his fat sneer was not pleasant to see. He got through it, and re-commenced. Sometimes he muttered and sometimes he thought; and the notes of this oration would have read nearly thus:-- "So the question is to be opened whether the _anonymous payment_--he lies, it was in _my name_!--through the bankers protects me technically from pursuit; and I'm to be 'run by the old Hebrew pack from cover to cover,' over the Continent--bravo!--till I vanish for seven years more." Here Monsieur Varbarriere laughed in lurid contempt. The letter went on in the same vein--contemptuous, cruel, he fancied. Everyone _is_ cruel in self-defence; and in its allusions and spirit was something which bitterly recalled the sufferings which in younger and weaker days that same Baronet, pursuing the same policy, had inflicted upon him. Varbarriere remembered when he was driven to the most ignominious and risky shifts, to ridiculous disguises; he remembered his image in the cracked shaving-glass in the garret in his lair near Notre Dame--the red wig and moustache, and the goggles. How easily an incautious poke will re-awake the dormant neuralgia of toothache; and tooth, cheek, ear, throat, brain, are all throbbing again in the re-induced anguish! With these sharp and vivid recollections of humiliation, fear, and suffering, all stirred into activity by this unlucky letter, that savage and vindictive feeling which had for so long ruled the life of Herbert Strangways, and had sunk into an uneasy doze under the narcotic of this evening's interview, rose up suddenly, wide awake and energetic. He looked at his watch. The minute-hand showed him exactly how long he had been reading this confidence of client to attorney. "You will, will you?" murmured Varbarriere, with his jaw a little fiercely set, and a smile. "He will _checkmate_ me, he thinks, in two or three moves. He does not see, clever fellow, that I will checkmate him in _one_!" Now, this letter had _preceded_ all that had occurred this evening to soften old animosities--though, strictly examined, that was not very much. It did not seem quite logical then, that it should work so sudden a revolution. I cannot, however, say positively; for in Varbarriere's mind may have long lain a suspicion that Sir Jekyl was not now altogether what he used to be, that he did not quite know all he had inflicted, and that time had made him wiser, and therefore gentler of heart. If so, the letter had knocked down this hypothesis, and its phrases, one or two of them, were of that unlucky sort which not only recalled the thrill of many an old wound, but freshly galled that vanity which never leaves us, till ear and eye grow cold, and light and sound are shut out by the coffin-lid. So Varbarriere, being quite disenchanted, wondered at his own illusions, and sighed bitterly when he thought what a fool he had been so near making of himself. And thinking of these things, he stared grimly on his watch, and by one of those movements that betray one's abstraction, held it to his ear, as if he had fancied it might have gone down. There it was, thundering on at a gallop. The tread of unseen fate approaching. Yes, it was time he should go. Jacques peeped in. "You've done as I ordered?" "Yes Monsieur." "Here, lend me a hand with my cloak--very good. The servants, the butler, have they retired?" "So I believe, Monsieur." "My hat--thanks. The lights all out on the stairs and lobbies?" "Yes, Monsieur." "Go before--is that lighted?" "Yes, sir." This referred to one of those little black lanterns which belong to Spanish melodrama, with a semi-cylindrical horn and a black slide. We have most of us seen such, and handled if not possessed them. "Leporello! hey, Jacques?" smiled Varbarriere sardonically, as he drew his short black cloak about him. "Monsieur is always right," acquiesced the man, who had never heard of Leporello before. "Get on, then." And the valet before, the master following, treading cautiously, they reached the stair-head, where Varbarriere listened for a moment, then descended and listened again at the foot, and so through the hall into the long gallery, near the end of which is a room with a conservatory. This they entered. The useful Jacques had secured the key of the glass door into the conservatory, which also opened the outer one; and Varbarriere, directing him to wait there quietly till his return, stepped out into the open air and faint moonlight. A moment's survey was enough to give him the lie of the ground, and recognising the file of tufted lime-trees, rising dark in the mist, he directed his steps thither, and speedily got upon the broad avenue, bordered with grass and guarded at either side by these rows of giant limes. On reaching the carriage-way, standing upon a slight eminence, Varbarriere gazed down the misty slope toward the gate-house, and then toward Marlowe Manor, in search of a carriage or a human figure. Seeing none, he strolled onward toward the gate, and soon _did_ see, airy and faint in the haze and distance, a vehicle approaching. It stopped some two hundred yards nearer the gate than he, a slight figure got out, and after a few words apparently, the driver turned about, and the slim, erect figure came gliding stiffly along in his direction. As he approached Varbarriere stood directly before him. "Ha! here I am waiting, General," said Varbarriere, advancing. "I--I suppose we had better get on at once to the house?" General Lennox met him with a nod. "Don't care, sir. Whatever you think best," answered the General, as sternly as if he were going into action. "Thanks for your confidence, General. I think so;" and side by side they walked in silence for a while toward the house. "Lady Alice Redcliffe here?" "Yes, sir." "That's well. And, sir," he continued, suddenly stopping short, and turning full on Varbarriere--"for God's sake, _do_ you think it is _certainly true_?" "You had better come, sir, and judge for yourself," pursued Varbarriere. "D---- you, sir--you think I'll wait over your cursed riddles. I'd as soon wait in hell, sir. You don't know, sir--it's the tortures of the damned. Egad, no man has a right--no man could stand it." "I think it _is_, sir. I think it's _true_, sir. I _think_ it's true. I'm nearly _sure_ it's true," answered Varbarriere, with a pallid frown, not minding his anathema. "How _can_ I say more?" General Lennox looked for a while on the ground, then up and about dismally, and gave his neck a little military shake, as if his collar sat uneasily. "A lonely life for me, sir. I wish to God the villain had shot me first. I was very fond of her, sir--desperately fond--madness, sir. I was thinking I would go back to India. Maybe you'll advise with me, sir, to-morrow? I have no one." CHAPTER XXI. At the Green Chamber. As they approached the house, Jacques, who sat awaiting M. Varbarriere's return, behind the door facing the conservatory, was disagreeably surprised by a visit from the butler. "Here I am!" exclaimed Jacques very cheerfully, feeling that he could not escape. "Ow! haw! Mr. Jack, by gad!" exclaimed the butler, actually jumping back in panic, and nearly extinguishing his candle on his breast. It was his custom, on hearing a noise or seeing a light, to make a ceremonious reconnoissance in assertion of his character, not of course in expectation of finding anything; and here at length he thought he had lighted on a burglar, and from the crown of his head to his heels froze thrills of terror. "And what the devil, Mr. Jack, are you doing here, please, sir?" "Waiting, my friend, to admit Monsieur, my master," answered Jacques, who was adroit enough to know that it is sometimes cunning to be frank. In fact it was the apparition of M. Varbarriere, in his queer hat and cloak, crossing a window, which had inspired the butler with a resolution to make his search. "Haw! dear me! yes, I saw him, Mr. Jack, I did; and what, Mr. Jack, is the doors opened for at these hours, unbeknown to me?" "My most dear friend, I am taking every care, as you see; but my master, he choose to go out, and he choose to come in. Jacques is nothing but what you call the latch-key." "And what is he a-doing hout o' doors this time o' night, Mr. Jack? I never knowd afore sich a think to 'appen. Why it looks like a stragethim, that's what it does, Mr. Jack--a stragethim." And the butler nodded with the air of a moral constable. "It's a folly, Monsieur. My faith! a little _ruse_ of love, I imagine." "You don't mean to say he's hout a-larkin?" Jacques, who only conjectured the sense of the sentence, winked and smiled. "Well, I don't think it's not the way he should be." "My master is most generous man. My friend, you shall see he shall know how kind you have been. Monsieur, my master, he is a _prince_!" murmured Jacques, eloquently, his fingers on the butler's cuff, and drew back to read in his countenance how it worked. "It must not hoccur again, Mr. Jack, wile ere," replied the butler, with another grave shake of his head. "Depend yourself on me," whispered Jacques again in his ear, while he squeezed the prudent hand of the butler affectionately. "But you must go way." "I do depend on you, Mr. Jack, but I don't like it, mind--I don't like it, and I won't say nothink of it till I hear more from you." So the butler withdrew, and the danger disappeared. "You will please to remember, sir," said Varbarriere, as they approached the house, "that this is of the nature of a military movement--a surprise; there must be no sound--no alarm." "Quite so," whispered old Lennox, with white lips. He was clutching something nervously under the wide sleeve of his loose drab overcoat. He stopped under the shadow of a noble clump of trees about fifty steps away from the glass door they were approaching. "I--I almost wish, sir--I'll go back--I don't think I can go on, sir." Varbarriere looked at his companion with an unconscious sneer, but said nothing. "By ----, sir, if I find it true, I'll kill him, sir." The old man had in his gouty grip one of those foolish daggers once so much in vogue, but which have now gone out of use, and Varbarriere saw it glimmer in the faint light. "Surely, Colonel Lennox, you don't mean--you can't mean--you're not going to resort to violence, sir?" "By ----, sir, he had best look to it." Varbarriere placed his hand on the old man's sleeve, he could feel the tremor of his thin wrist through it. "General Lennox, if I had fancied that you could have harboured such a thought, I never should have brought you here." The General, with his teeth clenched, made him no reply but a fierce nod. "Remember, sir, you have the courts of law, and you have the code of honour--either or both. One step more I shall not take with you, if you mean that sort of violence." "What do you mean, sir?" asked the General, grimly. "I mean this, sir, you shall learn nothing by this night's procedure, unless you promise me, upon your honour as a soldier, sir, and a gentleman, that you will not use that dagger or any other weapon." General Lennox looked at him with a rather glassy stare. "You're right, sir, I dare say," said Lennox, suddenly and helplessly. "You promise?" "Ay, sir." "Upon your honour?" "Upon my honour; ay, sir, my honour." "I'm satisfied, General. Now observe, you must be silent, and as noiseless as you can. If Sir Jekyl be apprised of your arrival, of course the--the experiment fails." General Lennox nodded. Emerging into the moonlight, Varbarriere saw how pale and lean his face looked. Across the grass they pace side by side in silence. The glass door opened without a creak or a hitch. Jacques politely secured it, and, obeying his master's gesture, led the way through the gallery to the hall. "You'll remember, General, that you arrived late; you understand? and having been observed by me, were admitted; and--and all the rest occurred naturally." "Yes, sir, any d--d lie you like. All the world's lying--why should not I?" At the foot of the staircase Jacques was dismissed, having lighted bed-room candles for the two gentlemen, so that they lost something of their air of Spanish conspirators, and they mounted the stairs together in a natural and domestic fashion. When they had crossed the lobby, and stood at the door of the dressing-room, Varbarriere laid his hand on General Lennox's arm-- "Stop here a moment; you must knock at Lady Alice's door over there, and get the key of your room. She locks the door and keeps the key at night. Make no noise, you know." They had been fortunate hitherto in having escaped observation; and Varbarriere's strategy had, up to this point, quite succeeded. "Very quietly, mind," whispered he, and withdrew behind the angle of the wall, toward the staircase. Old Lennox was by this time at the door which he had indicated, and knocked. There was a little fuss audible within, but no answer. He knocked again more sharply, and he heard the gabble of female voices; and at last a rather nervous inquiry, "Who's there, please?" "General Lennox, who wants the key of his room," answered he, in no mood to be trifled with. The General was standing, grim as fate, and stark as Corporal Trim, bed-room candle in hand, outside her door. "He's _not_ General Lennox--send him about his business," exclaimed an imperious female voice from the state bed, in which Lady Alice was sitting, measuring some mysterious drops in a graduated glass. "My lady says she's sorry she can't find it to-night, sir, being at present in bed, please, sir." "Come, child--no nonsense--I want my key, and I'll have it," replied the General, so awfully that the maid recoiled. "I think, my lady, he'll be rude if he doesn't get it." "What's the man like?" "A nice-spoken gentleman, my lady, and dressed very respectable." "You never _saw_ General Lennox?" "No, my lady, please." Neither had Lady Alice; but she had heard him minutely described. "A lean ugly old man is he, with white bristly whiskers, you know, and a white head, and little grey eyes, eh?" They had no notion that their little confidence was so distinctly audible to the General without, who stood eyeing the panel fiercely as a sentry would a suspicious figure near his beat, and with fingers twitching with impatience to clutch his key. "What sort of nose?" demanded the unseen speaker--"long or short?" "Neither, please, my lady; bluish, rayther, I should say." "But it is either long or short, _decidedly_, and I forget which," said Lady Alice--"'_Tis_n't he!" The General ground his teeth with impatience, and knocked so sharp a signal at the door that Lady Alice bounced in her bed. "Lord bless us! How dare he do that?--tell him how dare he." "Lady Alice, sir, would be much obliged if you'd be so good not knock so loud, sir, please," said the maid at the door, translating the message. "Tell your mistress I'm General Lennox, and must have my key," glared the General, and the lady's-maid, who was growing nervous, returned. "He looks, my lady, like he'd beat us, please, if he does not get the key, my lady." "Sha'n't have it, the brute! We don't know he is--a robber, maybe. Bolt the door, and tell him to bring Monsieur Varbarriere to the lobby, and if _he_ says he's General Lennox he shall have the key." With trembling fingers the maid _did_ bolt the door, and once more accost the soldier, who was chafing on the threshold. "Please, sir, my lady is not well, having nervous pains, please sir, in her head to-night, and therefore would be 'appy if you would be so kind to bring Mister Barvarrian" (the name by which our corpulent friend was known in the servants' hall) "to her door, please, when she'll try what she may do to oblige you, sir." "They don't know me," said the General, accosting Varbarriere, who was only half a dozen steps removed, and whom he had rejoined. "You must come to the door, they say, and tell them it's all right." Perhaps with some inward sense of the comic, Varbarriere presented himself at the door, when, his voice being recognised, and he himself reconnoitred through the keyhole and reported upon, the maid presented herself in an extemporised drapery of cloaks and shawls, like a traveller in winter, and holding these garments together with one hand, with the other presented the key, peering anxiously in the General's face. "Key, sir, please." "I thank you," said the General, with a nod, to which she responded with such a courtesy as her costume permitted. The door shut, and as the gentlemen withdrew they heard the voices of the inmates again busy with the subject. "Good-night," whispered Varbarriere, looking in the General's blue eye with his own full and steady gaze. "I know you'll remember your promise," said he. "Yes--what?" "No _violence_" replied Varbarriere. "No, of course, I said so. Good-bye." "You must appear--your _manner_, mind--just as usual. Nothing to alarm--you may defeat all else." "I see." Varbarriere pressed his hand encouragingly. It felt like death. "Don't fear me," said General Lennox. "We'll see--we'll see, sir; good-bye." He spoke in a low, short, resolute tone, almost defiant; but looked very ill. Varbarriere had never taken leave of a man on the drop, but thought that this must be like it. He beckoned to him as the General moved toward the dressing-room door, and made an earnest signal of silence. Lennox nodded, applied the key, and Varbarriere was gone. CHAPTER XXII. In the Green Chamber. General Lennox opened the door suddenly, and stood in the green chamber, holding his candle above his temple, and staring with a rather wild countenance and a gathered brow to the further end of the room. A candle burned on the table, and the Bible lay beside it. No one was there but the inmate of the bed, who sat up with a scared face. He locked the door in silence, and put the key in his pocket. "Who's there?--who is it? O my God! Arthur, is it you?" she cried. It was not a welcome. It was as if she had seen a ghost--but she smiled. "You're well? quite well? and happy? no doubt happy?" said Lennox, setting down his candle on the table near the bed, "and glad to see me?" "Yes, Arthur; Arthur, what's the matter? You're ill--_are_ you ill?" "Ho! no, very well, quite well--very well indeed." There was that in his look and manner that told her she was ruined. She froze with a horror she had never dreamed of before. "There's something, Arthur--there is--you won't tell me." "That's strange, and _you_ tell _me_ everything." "What do you _mean_, sir? Oh, Arthur, what _do_ you mean?" "Mean! Nothing!" "I was afraid you were angry, and I've done nothing to vex you--nothing. You looked so angry--it's so unreasonable and odd of you. But I am glad to see you, though you don't seem glad to see me. You've been a long time away, Arthur, in London, very long. I hope all your business is settled, I hope. And I'm very glad to hear you're not ill--indeed I am. Why are you vexed?" "Vexed! ho! I'm vexed, am I? that's odd." She was making a desperate effort to seem as usual, and talked on. "We have had old Lady Alice Redcliffe here, my chaperon, all this while, if you please, and takes such ridiculous care of me, and locks me into my room every night. She means kindly, but it is very foolish." "Yes, it is, d--d foolish." "We have been employed very much as usual--walking, and driving, and croquet. Beatrix and I have been very much together, and Sir Paul and Lady Blunket still here. I don't think we have had any arrival since you left us. Mr. Guy Strangways has gone away, and Monsieur Varbarriere returned to-day." She was gabbling as merrily as she could, feeling all the time on the point of fainting. "And the diamonds came?" the General said, suddenly, with a sort of laugh. "Oh! yes, the diamonds, so beautiful. I did not thank you in my letter--not half enough. They are beautiful--so exquisitely beautiful--brilliants--and so becoming; you have no idea. I hope you got my letter. Indeed I felt it all, every word, Arthur, only I could not say half what I wished. Don't you believe me, Arthur?" "Lie down, woman, and take your sleep; you sleep _well_? you _all_ do--of course you sleep? Lie down." "You are angry, Arthur; you are excited; something has happened--something bad--what is it? For God's sake, Arthur, tell me what it is. Why won't you tell me?" "Nothing--nothing strange--quite common." "Oh! Arthur, tell me at once, or kill me. You look as if you hated me." "_Hate_ you!--There's a hereafter. God sees." "I can't understand you, Arthur; you wish to distract me. I'd rather know anything. For mercy's sake speak out." "Lie you down, and wait." She did lie down. The hour of judgment had come as a thief in the night. The blood in her temples seemed to drum on the pillow. There was not a clear thought in her brain, only the one stunning consciousness. "He knows all! I am ruined." Yet the feminine instinct of _finesse_ was not quite overpowered. Having placed the candle on the chimneypiece, so that the curtain at the foot of the bed throw its shadow over that recess in which the sorcerer Varbarriere had almost promised to show the apparition, old Lennox sat down at the bedside, next this mysterious point of observation. Suddenly it crossed him, as a break of moonlight will the blackest night of storm, that he must act more wisely. Had he not alarmed his wife?--what signal might not be contrived to warn off her guilty accomplice? "Jennie," said he, with an effort, in a more natural tone, "I'm tired, very tired. We'll sleep. I'll tell you all in the morning. Go to sleep." "Good-night," she murmured. "That will do; go to sleep," he answered. Gently, gently, she stole a peep at that pretty watch that stood in its little slanting stand at her bedside. There was still twenty minutes--Heaven be praised for its mercy!--and she heard old Lennox at the far side of this "great bed of Ware," making an ostentation of undressing. His boots tumbled on the floor. She heard his watchguard jingle on the stand, and his keys and purse dropped in turn on the table. She heard him adjust the chair, as usual, on which he was wont to deposit his clothes as he removed them; she fancied she even heard him yawn. Her heart was throbbing as though it would choke her, and she was praying as she never prayed before--for a reprieve. And yet her respiration was long and deep, as if in the sleep she was counterfeiting. Lennox, at the other side, put off his muffler, his outer coat, the frock-coat he wore, the waistcoat. She dared not look round to observe his progress. But at last he threw himself on the bed with a groan of fatigue, and pulled the coverlet over him, and lay without motion, like a man in need of rest. Lady Jane listened. She could not hear him breathe. She waited some five minutes, and then she murmured, "Arthur." No answer. "_Arthur._" Again no answer; and she raised herself on her elbow, cautiously, and listened; and after a little pause, quick as light she got out of bed, glided to the chimneypiece, and lighted a taper at the candle there, listened again for a moment, and on tiptoe, in bare feet, glided round the foot of the bed, and approached the recess at the other side of the bed's head, and instantly her fingers were on one of those little flowers in the ormolu arabesque that runs along the edge of the wooden casing. Before she could turn it a gouty hand over her shoulder took hold of hers, and, with a low sudden cry, she saw her husband. "Can't I do that for you? What is it?" said he. Her lips were white, and she gazed in his face without saying a word. He was standing there unbooted, in his trowsers, with those crimson silk suspenders on, with the embroidery of forget-me-nots, which she had described as "her work"--I am afraid inaccurately--a love-token--hypocrisy on hypocrisy. Asmodeus, seated on the bed's head, smirked down sardonically on the tableau, and clapped his apish hands. "Get to your bed there. If you make a sign, by ----, I'll kill you." She made no answer. She gazed at him dumbly. He was not like himself. He looked like a villain. He did not lie down again. He sat by the little table, on which his watch, his keys, and loose shillings lay. The night was chill, but he did not feel it then. He sat in his shirt-sleeves, his chin on his breast, eyeing from under his stern white brows the shadowy arch through which the figure was to emerge. Suddenly he heard the swift steps of little, naked feet on the carpet come round the foot of the bed, and his wife wildly threw herself at his feet, and clasped them in an agony. He could feel every sinew in her arms vibrate in the hysterical strain of her entreaty. "Oh, Arthur! oh, darling, take me away from this, for God's sake. Come down with me; come to the drawing-room, or to the dressing-room; take me away; you'll be happier, indeed you will, than ever you were; you'll never repent it, darling; do what I say. I'll be the best wife, indeed I will. See, I've been reading my Bible; look at it. I'm quite changed--quite changed. God only knows how changed. Oh, Arthur, Arthur, if you ever loved me, take me away; come from this room--come, you'll never repent it. Oh, Arthur, be wise, be merciful! The more you forgive the more you'll be loved. It is not I, but God says that. I'm praying to you as I would to Him, and He forgives us when we implore: take pity on me; you'll never be sorry. Have mercy, Arthur, have mercy--you are kind, I know you're kind, you would not ruin your wretched Jennie. Oh, take pity before it is too late, and take me from this dreadful room. You'll be glad, indeed you will; there never was such a wife as I'll be to you, the humblest, the most loving, and you'll be happier than ever you were. Oh, Arthur, Arthur, I'm praying to you as if you were God, for mercy; don't say no! Oh, can you; can you; can you?" General Lennox was moved, but not from his course. He never saw before such a face of misery. It was like the despairing pleading of the last day. But alas! in this sort of quarrel there can be no compromise; reconciliation is dishonour. "Go and lie down. It's all over between us," said he in a tone that left her no room for hope. With a low, long cry, and her fingers clasped over her forehead, she retraced her steps, and lay down, and quietly drew her icy feet into the bed, awaiting the inevitable. Lennox resumed his watch. CHAPTER XXIII. The Morning. Monsieur Varbarriere was standing all this while with his shadow to the door-post of the Window dressing-room, and his dark eyes fixed on the further door which admits to the green chamber. His bed-room candle, which was dwindling, stood on the table at his elbow. He heard a step crossing the lobby softly toward his own room, and whispered, "Who's there?" "Jacques Duval, at Monsieur's service." Monsieur took his candle, and crossed the floor to meet Jacques, who was approaching, and he signed to him to stop. He looked at his watch. It was now twenty minutes past one. "Jacques," said he, in a whisper, "there's no mistake about those sounds?" "No, Monsieur, not at all." "Three nights running, you say?" "Monsieur is perfectly right." "Steps, you say?" "Yes, sir, footsteps." "It could not have been the wind, the shaking or creaking of the floor or windows?" "Ah no, Monsieur, not at all as that." "The steps quick, not slow; wasn't it?" "Quick, sir, as one in haste and treading lightly would walk." "And this as you sat in the butler's room?" "Monsieur recollects exactly." Varbarriere knew that the butler's room exactly underlay that dingy library that abutted on Sir Jekyl's bedchamber, and on that account had placed his sentinel to watch there. "Always about the same time?" he asked. "Very nearly, Monsieur, a few minutes, sometimes before, sometimes after; only trifle, in effect _nothing_," answered Jacques. "Jacques, you must leave my door open, so that, should I want you, you can hear me call from the door of that dressing-room; take care you keep awake, but don't move." So saying, Varbarriere returned to his place of observation. He set down his candle near the outer door, and listened, glowering as before at the far one. The crisis was near at hand, so near that, on looking at his watch again, he softly approached the door of the green chamber, and there, I am sorry to say, he listened diligently. But all was disappointingly silent for a while longer. Suddenly he heard a noise. A piece of furniture shoved aside it seemed, a heavy step or two, and the old man's voice exclaim "Ha!" with an interrogatory snarl in it. There was a little laugh, followed by a muffled blow or a fall, and a woman's cry, sharp and momentary--"Oh, God! oh, God!" and a gush of smothered sobs, and the General's grim voice calling "silence!" and a few stern words from him, and fast talking between them, and Lady Jane calling for light, and then more wild sobbing. There had been no sound of a struggle. Varbarriere stood, stooping, scowling, open-mouthed, at the door, with his fingers on the handle, hardly breathing. At last he gasped-- "That d---- old ape! has he hurt her?" He listened, but all was silent. Did he still hear smothered sobs? He could not be certain. His eyes were glaring on the panel of the door; but on his retina was a ghostly image of beautiful Lady Jane, blood-stained, with glazing eyes, like Cleopatra dying of her asps. After a while he heard some words from the General in an odd ironical tone. Then came silence again--continued silence--half an hour's silence, and then a sound of some one stirring. He knew the tread of the General about the room. Whatever was to occur _had_ occurred. That was his conclusion. Perhaps the General was coming to _his_ room to look for him. It was time he should withdraw, and so he did. "You may get to your bed, Jacques, and come at the usual hour." So, with his accustomed civilities, Monsieur Jacques disappeared. But old Lennox did not visit Varbarriere, nor even emerge from his room. After an hour Varbarriere revisited the dressing-room next the green chamber. He waited long without hearing anything, and at length he heard a step--was it the General's again, or Sir Jekyl's?--whoever it was, he seemed to be fidgeting about the room, collecting and packing his things, Varbarriere fancied, for a journey; and then he heard him draw the writing-table a little, and place a chair near it, and as the candle was shining through the keyhole, he supposed the General had placed himself to write at it. Something had happened, he felt sure. Had Lennox despatched Sir Jekyl, or Sir Jekyl wounded the General? Or had Lady Jane been killed? Or was all right, and no one of the actors stretched on the green baize carpet before the floats? He would believe that, and got quickly to his bed, nursing that comfortable conclusion the while. But when he shut his eyes, a succession of pale faces smeared with blood came and looked at him, and would not be ordered away. So he lighted his candle again, and tried to exorcise these visitors with the pages of a French Review, until very late sleep overtook him. Jacques was in his room at the usual hour, eight o'clock; and Varbarriere started up in his bed at the sound of his voice, with a confused anticipation of a catastrophe. But the cheerful squire had nothing to relate except how charming was the morning, and to hand a letter to Monsieur. Varbarriere's mind was not upon letters that morning, but on matters nearer home. "General Lennox has not been down-stairs yet?" "No, Monsieur." "Nor Sir Jekyl?" "No, Monsieur." "Where's my watch? there--yes--eight o'clock. H'm. When does Lady Jane's maid go to her?" "Not until the General has advanced himself pretty well in his toilet, the entrance being through his dressing-room." "The General used to be down early?" "Yes, Monsieur, half-past eight I remember." "And Sir Jekyl?" "About the same hour." "And Lady Jane is called, I suppose, a little before that hour?" "Yes, about a quarter past eight, Monsieur. Will Monsieur please to desire his cup of coffee?" "Yes, everything--quickly--I wish to dress; and what's this? a letter." It was from Guy Deverell, as Varbarriere saw at a glance, and not through the post. "My nephew hasn't come?" sternly demanded Varbarriere, with a kind of start, on reading the signature, which he did before reading the letter. "No, Monsieur, a young man has conveyed it from Slowton." Whereupon Varbarriere, with a striped silk nightcap of many colours pending over his corrugated forehead, read the letter through the divided bed-curtains. His nephew, it appeared, had arrested his course at Birmingham, and turned about, and reached Slowton again about the hour at which M. Varbarriere had met old Lennox in the grounds of Marlowe. "What a fanfaronnade! These young fellows--what asses they are!" sneered Varbarriere. It was not, in truth, very wise. This handsome youth announced his intention to visit Marlowe that day, to see Monsieur Varbarriere for, perhaps, the last time before setting forth for Algeria, where he knew a place would at once be found for him in the ranks of those brave soldiers whom France had sent there. His gratitude to his uncle years could never abate, but it was time he should cease to task his generosity, and he was quite resolved henceforward to fight his way single-handed in the world, as so many other young fellows did. Before taking his departure he thought he should present himself to say his adieux to M. Varbarriere--even to his host, Sir Jekyl Marlowe; and there was a good deal more of such stuff. "Sir Jekyl! stuff! His uncle! lanterns! He wants to see that pretty Miss Beatrix once more! _voila tout!_ He has chosen his time well. Who knows what confusion may be here to day? No matter." By this time he had got his great quilted dressing-gown about him, in the folds of which Varbarriere looked more unwieldy still than in his drawing-room costume. "I must read about that Algeria; have they got any diseases there? plague--yellow fever--ague! By my faith! if the place is tolerably healthy, it would be no such bad plan to let the young fool take a turn on that gridiron, and learn thoroughly the meaning of independence." So Monsieur Varbarriere, with a variety of subjects to think over, pursued his toilet. CHAPTER XXIV. The Doctor's Visit. Sir Jekyl's hour was eight o'clock, and punctually his man, Tomlinson, knocked at his door. "Hollo! Is that Tomlinson?" answered the voice from within. "Yes, sir, please." "See, Tomlinson, I say, it's very ridiculous; but I'm hanged if I can stir, that confounded gout's got hold of my foot again. You'll have to force the door. Send some one down to the town for Doctor Pratt--d'ye see?--and get me some handkerchiefs, and don't be all day." The faithful Tomlinson listening, with a snowy shirt and a pair of socks on his arm and the tips of his fingers fiddling with the door-handle, listening at the other side of the panel, with forehead inclined forward and mouth open, looked, I am sorry to say, a good deal amused, although he answered in a concerned tone; and departed to execute his orders. "Guv'nor took in toe again," he murmured, with a solemn leer, as he paused before the butler's broad Marseilles waistcoat. "As how?" inquired he. "The gout; can't stir a peg, and he's locked hisself in, as usual, over night." "Lawk!" exclaimed the butler, and I dare say both would have liked to laugh, but neither cared to compromise himself. "Chisel and mallet, Mr. Story, we shall want, if you please, and some one to go at once for the doctor to the town." "I know--yes--hinstantly," ejaculated the butler. So things proceeded. Pratt, M. D., the medical practitioner of the village, whose yellow hall door and broad brass plate, and shop window round the corner, with the two time-honoured glass jars, one of red the other of green fluid, representing physic in its most attractive hues, were not more widely known than his short, solemn, red face, blue chin, white whiskers, and bald pate, was roused by the messenger's summons, at his toilet, and peeped over his muslin blind to discover the hand that was ringing so furiously among his withered hollyhocks; and at the same time Tomlinson and the butler were working with ripping chisel, mallet, and even a poker, to effect an entrance. "Ha! Dives," said the Baronet, as that divine, who had heard the sad news, presented himself at the now open door. "I sent for you, my dear fellow. A horrid screw in my left toe this time. Such a spoil-sport! curse it, but it won't be anything. I've sent for Pratt, and you'll tell the people at breakfast, you know, that I'm a prisoner; only a trifle though, I hope--down to dinner maybe. There's the gong--run down, like a dear fellow." "Not flying--well fixed in the toe, eh?" said Dives, rather anxiously, for he did not like Sir Jekyl's constrained voice and sunken look. "Quite fixed--blazing away--just the thing Pratt likes--confounded pain though. Now run down, my dear fellow, and make my excuses, but say I hope to be down to dinner, mind." So, with another look, Dives went down, not quite comfortable, for on the whole he liked Jekyl, who had done a great deal for him; he did not like tragedies, he was very comfortable as he stood, and quite content to await the course of nature. "Is that d--d doctor _ever_ coming?" asked Sir Jekyl, dismally. "He'll be here, sir, please, in five minutes--so he said, sir." "I know, but there's been _ten_ since, curse him." "Shall I send again, sir?" asked Tomlinson. "Do; say I'm in pain, and can't think what the devil's keeping him." Beatrix in a moment more came running up in consternation. "How do you feel now, papa? Gout, is it not?" she asked, having obtained leave to come in; "not very bad, I hope." The Baronet smiled with an effort. "Gout's never very pleasant, a hot thumb-screw on one's toe, my dear, but that's all; it will be nothing. Pratt's coming, and he'll get me right in a day or two--only the great toe. I beg pardon for naming it so often--very waspish though, that's all. Don't stay away, or the people will fancy something serious; and possibly I may be down, in a slipper though, to dinner. So run down, Trixie, darling." And Trixie, with the same lingering look that Dives had cast on him, only more anxious, betook herself to the parlour as he had desired. In a little while Doctor Pratt had arrived. As he toddled through the hall he encountered the Rev. Dives on his way to the breakfast-parlour. Pratt had suffered some rough handling and damage at the hands of Time, and Dives was nothing the better of the sarcastic manipulations of the same ancient god, since they had last met. Still they instantly recognised, and shook hands cordially, and when the salutation was over-- "Well, and what's wrong with the Baronet?" "Gout; he drinks two glasses of port, I've observed, at dinner, and it always disagrees with him. Pray do stop it--the port, I mean." "Hand or foot?" "The great toe--the best place, isn't it?" "No better, sir. There's nothing, nothing of the stomach?--I brought this in _case_," and he held up a phial. "No, but I don't like his looks; he looks so haggard and exhausted." "H'm, I'd like to see him at once; I don't know his room though." So Dives put him in charge of a guide, and they parted. "Well, Sir Jekyl, how d'ye do, hey? and how's all this? Old enemy, hey--all in the foot--fast in the toe--isn't he?" began the Doctor as he entered the Baronet's room. "Ay, in the toe. Sit down there, Pratt, beside me." "Ah, ha! nervous; you think I'll knock him, eh? Ha, ha, ha! No, no, no! Don't be afraid. Nothing wrong in the stomach--no chill--retching?" "No." "_Head_ all right, too; nothing queer there?" "Nothing." "Nothing in the knuckles--old acquaintance, you know, when you meet, sometimes a squeeze by the hand, eh? Ha, ha, ha!" "No, nothing in the hand," said the Baronet, a little testily. "Nor any wandering sensations here, you know, and there, hey?" said the little fellow, sitting down briskly by his patient. "No; curse it." "Troublesome to talk, hey?" asked Pratt, observing that he seemed faint, and talked low and with effort. "No--yes--that is, _tired_." "I see, no pain; all nicely fixed in the toe; _that_ could not be better, and what do you refer it to? By Jove, it's eighteen, _nineteen_ months since your last! When you came down to Dartbroke, for the Easter, you know, and wrote to me for the thing with the ether, hey? You've been at that d--d bin, I'm afraid, the forbidden fruit, hey? Egad, sir, I call it fluid gout, and the crust nothing but chalk-stone." "_No--I haven't_," croaked the Baronet savagely. "Ha, ha, ha!" laughed the Doctor, drumming on his fat knee with his stethoscope. "Won't admit--won't allow, hey?" As he spoke he was attempting to take him by the wrist. "Pulse? How are we there, eh?" "Turn that d--d fellow out of the room, and bolt the door, will you?" muttered Sir Jekyl, impatiently. "Hey? I see. How are _you_, Mr. Tomlinson--no return of that bronchial annoyance, eh? I'll ask you just now--we'll just make Sir Jekyl Marlowe a little more comfortable first, and I've a question or two--we'd be as well alone, you see--and do you mind? You'll be in the way, you know; we may want you, you know." So the docile Tomlinson withdrew with a noiseless alacrity, and Doctor Pratt, in deference to his patron, bolted the mangled door. "See, Pratt, you're tiring me to death, with your beastly questions. Wait, will you? Sit down. You'll promise me you won't tell this to anyone." "What?" "Do hold your tongue, like a dear fellow, and listen. Upon your honour, you don't tell, till I give you leave, what's the matter with me. Come--d---- you; yes or no?" "Well, you know I must, if you insist; but I'd rayther not." "You _must_. On your honour you won't tell, and you'll call it gout?" "Why--why, if it _is_ not gout, eh? don't you see? it would not _do_." "Well, good morning to you, Doctor Pratt, for I'm hanged if you prescribe for me on any other terms." "Well, don't you see, I say I must, if you insist, don't you see; it may be--it may be--egad! it might be very serious to let you wait." "You promise?" "Yes, I _do_. _There!_" "Gout, mind, and nothing else; all gout, upon your honour." "Aw, well! _Yes._" "Upon your _honour_; why the devil can't you speak!" "Upon my honour, of course." "You kill me, making me talk. Well, 'tisn't in the toe--it's up here," and he uncovered his right shoulder and chest, showing some handkerchiefs and his night-shirt soaked in blood. "What the devil's all this?" exclaimed the Doctor, rising suddenly, and the ruddy tints of his face fading into a lilac hue. "Why--why, you're _hurt_; egad, you're hurt. We must examine it. What is it with--how the plague did it all come about?" "The act of God," answered Sir Jekyl, with a faint irony in his tone. "The--ah!--well, I don't understand." "I mean the purest accident." "Bled a lot, egad! These things seem pretty dry--bleeding away _still_? You must not keep it so hot--the sheet only." "I think it's stopped--the things are sticking--I feel them." "So much the better; but we must not leave it this way--and--and I daren't disturb it, you know, without help, so we'll have to take Tomlinson into confidence." "'Gad, you'll do no such thing." "But, my dear sir, I _must_ tell you, this thing, whatever it is, looks very serious. I can _tell_ you, it's not to be trifled with, and this sort of nonsense may be as much as your life's worth, egad." "You shan't," said Sir Jekyl. "You'll allow me to speak with your brother?" "No, you shan't." "Ho, now, Sir Jekyl, really now--" "Promised--your honour." "'Tisn't a fair position," said the practitioner, shaking his head, with his hands stuffed in his pockets, and staring dismally at the blood-stained linen. "I'll tell you what we must do--there are two supernumeraries I happen to know at the county hospital, and Hicks is a capital nurse. I'll write a line and they'll send her here. There's a room in there, eh? yes, well, she can be quartered _there_, and talk with no one but you and me; in fact, see no one except in your presence, don't you see? and egad, we _must_ have her, or I'll give up the _case_." "Well, yes; send for her." CHAPTER XXV. The Patient interrogated. So Doctor Pratt scribbled a few lines on the back of his card, and Tomlinson was summoned to the door, and told to expedite its despatch, and "send one of the men in a dog-cart as hard as he could peg, and to be sure to see Doctor Hoggins," who had been an apprentice once of honest Pratt's. "Tell her not to wait for dressing, or packing, or anything. She'll come just as she is, and we'll send again for her things, d'ye mind? and let him drive quick. It's only two miles, he must not be half an hour about it;" and in a low whisper, with a frown and a nod, he added to Tomlinson on the lobby, "I _want_ her here." So he sat down very grave by Sir Jekyl, and took his pulse, very low and inflammatory, he thought. "You lost a good deal of blood? It is not all here, eh?" "No; I lost some beside." "Mind, now, don't move. You may bring it on again; and you're not in a condition to spare any. How did it happen?" "A knife or something." "A thrust, eh? Not a _cut_; I mean a _stab_?" "Yes." "About how long ago? What hour?" Sir Jekyl hesitated. "Oh! now come, Sir Jekyl, I beg pardon, but I really must know the _facts_." "Remember your promise--awfully tired." "Certainly. What o'clock?" "Between one and two." "You must have some claret;" and he opened the door and issued orders accordingly. The Doctor had his fingers on his pulse by this time. "Give me some water; I'm dying of thirst," said the patient. The Doctor obeyed. "And there's no gout at all, then?" said he. "Not a bit," answered Sir Jekyl, pettishly; his temper and his breath seemed to be failing him a little. "Did you feel faint when it happened, or after?" "Just for a moment, when it happened, then pretty well; and when I got here, in a little time, worse, very faint; I think I did faint, but a little blood always does that for me. But it's not deep, I know by the feel--only the muscle." "H'm. I shan't disturb these things till the nurse comes; glad there's no gout, no complication." The claret-jug was soon at the bedside, and the Doctor helped his patient to a few spoonfuls, and felt his pulse again. "I must go home for the things, d'ye see? I shan't be long away though. Here, Tomlinson, you'll give Sir Jekyl a spoonful or a glassful of this claret, d'ye mind, as often as he requires it. About every ten minutes a little to wet his lips; and mind, now, Sir Jekyl, drink any quantity rather than let yourself go down." As he went from the room he signed to Tomlinson, who followed him quietly. "See, now, my good fellow, this is rather a serious case, you understand me; and he must not be let down. Your master, Sir Jekyl, I say, he must be kept up. Keep a little claret to his lips, and if you see any pallor or moisture in his face, give it him by a glassful at a time; and go on, do you mind, till he begins to look natural again, for he's in a very critical state; and if he were to faint, d'ye see, or anything, it might be a very serious thing; and you'd better ring for another bottle or two; but don't leave him on any account." They were interrupted here by a tapping in Sir Jekyl's room. Lying on his back, he was rapping with his penknife on the table. "Why the plague don't you come?" he muttered, as Tomlinson drew near. "Where's Pratt? tell him I want him." "Hey--no--no _pain_?" asked the Doctor. "No; I want to know--I want to know what the devil you've been saying to him out there." "Nothing; only a direction." "Do you think--do you think I'm in _danger_?" said Sir Jekyl. "Well, _no_. You needn't be if you mind, but--but don't refuse the claret, mind, and don't be afraid of it if you feel a--a sinking, you know, any quantity; and I'll be back before the nurse comes from the hospital; and--and don't be excited, for you'll do very well if you'll only do as I tell you." The Doctor nodded, standing by the bed, but he did not look so cheerfully as he spoke. "I'll be back in twenty minutes. Don't be fidgety, you know; don't stir, and you'll do very nicely, I say." When the Doctor was gone, Sir Jekyl said-- "Tomlinson." "Yes, sir, please." "Tomlinson, come here; let me see you." "Yes, Sir Jekyl; sir--" "I say, Tomlinson, you'll tell the truth, mind." "Yes, sir, please." "Did that fellow say anything?" "Yes, sir, please." "Out with it." "'Twas claret, Sir Jekyl, please, sir." "None of your d--d lies, sir. I heard him say 'serious.' What _was_ it?" "Please, sir, he said as how you were to be kep up, sir, which it might be serious if otherwise. So he said, sir, please, it might be serious if you was not properly kep up with claret, please, sir." "Come, Tomlinson--see I _must_ know. Did he say I was in a bad way--likely to die?--come." His face was certainly hollow and earthy enough just then to warrant forebodings. "No, sir; certainly not, sir. No, sir, please, nothing of the kind." The Baronet looked immeasurably more like himself. "Give me some wine--a glass," said he. The Doctor, stumping away rapidly to his yellow door, and red and green twin bottles, in the village, was thinking how the deuce this misadventure of Sir Jekyl's had befallen. The Baronet's unlucky character was well known wherever he resided or had property. "Who the devil did it, I wonder?" conjectured the Doctor. "Two o'clock at night. Some pretty fury with a scissors, maybe. We'll know time enough; these things always come out--always come out, egad! It's a shame for him getting into scrapes at his time of life." In the breakfast-parlour, very merry was the party then assembled, notwithstanding the absence of some of its muster-roll. Lady Jane Lennox, an irregular breakfaster, stood excused. Old Lady Alice was no more expected than the portrait of Lady Mary in her bed-room. General Lennox had business that morning, and was not particularly inquired after. Sir Jekyl, indeed, was missed--bustling, good-natured, lively--his guests asked after him with more than a conventional solicitude. "Well, and how is papa now?" inquired Sir Paul, who knew what gout was, and being likely to know it again, felt a real interest in the Baronet's case. "No _acute_ pain, I hope?" "I'm afraid he _is_ in pain, more than he admits," answered Beatrix. "Tomlinson told me it's all in the--the extremity, though that's well. Intelligent fellow, Tomlinson. Mine is generally what they call atonic, not attended with much pain, you know;" and he illustrated his disquisition by tendering his massive mulberry knuckles for the young lady's contemplation, and fondling them with the glazed fingers of the other hand, while his round blue eyes stared, with a slow sort of wonder, in her face, as if he expected a good deal in the way of remark from the young lady to mitigate his astonishment. Lady Blunket, who was beside her, relieved this embarrassment, and nodding at her ear, said-- "Flannel--_flannel_, chiefly. Sir Paul, there, his medical man, Doctor Duddle, we have great confidence in _him_--relies very much on warmth. My poor father used to take Regent's--Regent's--I forget what--a _bottle_. But Doctor Duddle would not hear of Sir Paul there attempting to put it to his lips. Regent's--_what_ is it? I shall forget my own name soon. _Water_ is it? At all events he won't hear of it--diet and flannel, that's his method. My poor father, you know, died of gout, quite suddenly, at Brighton. Cucumber, they said." And Lady Blunket, overcome by the recollection, touched her eyes with her handkerchief. "Cucumber and salmon, it was, _I_ recollect," said Sir Paul, with a new accession of intelligence. "But he passed away most happily, Miss Marlowe," continued Lady Blunket. "I have some verses of poor mamma's. _She_ was _very_ religious, you know; they have been very much admired." "Ay--yes," said Sir Paul, "he was helped _twice_--very im_pru_dent!" "I was mentioning dear mamma's verses, you remember." Sir Paul not being quite so well up in this aspect of the case, simply grunted and became silent; and indeed I don't think he had been so loquacious upon any other morning or topic since his arrival at Marlowe. "They are beautiful," continued Lady Blunket, "and so resigned. I was most anxious, my dear, to place a tablet under the monument, you know, at Maisly; a mural tablet, just like the Tuftons', you know; they are very reasonable, inscribed with dear mamma's verses; but I can't persuade Sir Paul, he's so poor, you know; but certainly, some day or other, I'll do it myself." The irony about Sir Paul's poverty, though accompanied by a glance from her ladyship's pink eyes, was lost on that excellent man, who was by this time eating some hot broil. Their judicious conversation was not without an effect commensurate with the rarity of the exertion, for between them they had succeeded in frightening poor Beatrix a good deal. In other quarters the conversation was proceeding charmingly. Linnett was describing to Miss Blunket the exploits of a terrier of his, among a hundred rats let loose together--a narrative to which she listened with a pretty girlish alternation of terror and interest; while the Rev. Dives Marlowe and old Doocey conversed earnestly on the virtues of colchicum, and exchanged confidences touching their gouty symptoms and affections; and Drayton, assisted by an occasional parenthesis from that prodigious basso, Varbarriere, was haranguing Beatrix and Mrs. Maberly on pictures, music, and the way to give agreeable dinners; and now Beatrix asked old Lady Blunket in what way she would best like to dispose of the day. What to do, where to drive, an inquiry into which the other ladies were drawn, and the debate, assisted by the gentlemen, grew general and animated. CHAPTER XXVI. General Lennox appears. In the midst of this animation the butler whispered in the ear of the Rev. Dives Marlowe, who, with a grave face, but hardly perceived, slid away, and met the Doctor in the hall. "Aw--_see_--this is a--rather nasty case, I am bound to tell you, Mr. Marlowe; he's in a rather critical state. He'll see you, I dare say, by-and-by, and I hope he'll get on satisfactorily. I hope he'll _do_; but I must tell you, it's a--it's a--serious _case_, sir." "Nothing since?" asked Dives, a good deal shocked. "Nothing since, sir," answered the Doctor, with a nod, and his eyebrows raised as he stood ruminating a little, with his fists in his pockets. "But--but--you'll do _this_, sir, if you please--you'll call in some physician, in whom you have confidence, for I'll tell you frankly, it's not a case in which I'd like to be alone." "It's very sudden, sir; whom do you advise?" said Dives, looking black and pallid. "Well, you know, it ought to be _soon_. I'd like him at once--you can't send very far. There's Ponder, I would not desire better, if you approve. Send a fellow riding, and don't spare horse-flesh, mind, to Slowton. He'll find Ponder there if he's quick, and let him bring him in a chaise and four, and pay the fellows well, and they'll not be long coming. They'd better be quick, for there's something must be done, and I can't undertake it alone." Together they walked out to the stable-yard, Dives feeling stunned and odd. The Doctor was reserved, and only waited to see things in train. Almost while Dives pencilled his urgent note on the back of a letter, the groom had saddled one of the hunters and got into his jacket, and was mounted and away. Dives returned to the house. From the steps he looked with a sinking heart after the man cantering swiftly down the avenue, and saw him in the distance like a dwindling figure in a dream, and somehow it was to him an effort to remember what it was all about. He felt the cold air stirring his dark locks, streaked with silver, and found he had forgot his hat, and so came in. "You have seen a great deal of art, Monsieur Varbarriere," said Drayton, accosting that gentleman admiringly, in the outer hall, where they were fitting themselves with their "wide-awakes" and "jerries." "It is so pleasant to meet anyone who really understands it and has a feeling for it. You seem to me to lean more to painting than to statuary." "Painting is the more popular art, because the more literal. The principles of statuary are abstruse. The one, you see, is a repetition--the other a translation. Colour is more than outline, and the painter commands it. The man with the chisel has only outline, and must render nature into white stone, with the _natural_ condition of being inspected from every point, and the _unnatural_ one, in solid anatomy, of immobility. It is a greater triumph, but a less effect." Varbarriere was lecturing this morning, according to his lights, more copiously and _ex cathedrâ_ than usual. Perhaps his declamations and antithesis represented the constraint which he placed on himself, like those mental exercises which sleepless men prescribe to wrest their minds from anxious and exciting preoccupations. "Do you paint, sir?" asked Drayton, who was really interested. "Bah! never. I can make just a little scratching with my pencil, enough to remind. But paint--oh--ha, ha, ha!--no. 'Tis an art I can admire; but should no more think to practise than the dance." And the ponderous M. Varbarriere pointed his toe and made a mimic pirouette, snapped his fingers, and shrugged his round shoulders. "Alas! sir, the more I appreciate the dance, the more I despair of figuring in the ballet, and so with painting. Perhaps, though, _you_ paint?" "Well, I just draw a little--what you call scratching, and I have tried a little tinting; but I'm sure it's very bad. I don't care about fools, of course, but I should be afraid to show it to anyone who knew anything about it--to you, for instance," said Drayton, who, though conceited, had sense enough at times to be a little modest. "What is it?" said Miss Blunket, skipping into the hall, with a pretty little basket on her arm, and such a coquettish little hat on, looking so naïve and girlish, and so remarkably tattooed with wrinkles. "Shall I run away--is it a secret?" "Oh, no; we have no secrets," said Drayton. "No secrets," echoed Varbarriere. "And won't you tell? I'm such a curious, foolish, wretched creature;" and she dropped her eyes like a flower-girl in a play. What lessons, if we only could take them, are read us every hour! What a giant among liars is vanity! Here was this withered witch, with her baptismal registry and her looking-glass, dressing herself like a strawberry girl, and fancying herself charming! "Only about my drawings--nothing." "Ah, I know. Did Mr. Drayton show them to you?" "No, Mademoiselle; I've not been so fortunate." "He showed them to me, though. It's not any harm to tell, is it? and they really _are_--Well, I won't say all I think of them." "I was just telling Monsieur Varbarriere, it is not everyone I'd show those drawings to. Was not I, Monsieur?" said Drayton, with a fine irony. "So he was, upon my honour," said Varbarriere, gravely. "He did not mean it, though," simpered Miss Blunket, "if _you_ can't--_I_'ll try to induce him to show them to you; they are----Oh! here is Beatrix." "How is your papa now, Mademoiselle?" asked Varbarriere, anxious to escape. "Just as he was, I think, a little low, the Doctor says." "Ah!" said Varbarriere, and still his dark eyes looked on hers with grave inquiry. "He always _is_ low for a day or two; but he says this will be nothing. He almost hopes to be down this evening." "Ah! Yes. That's very well," commented Varbarriere, with pauses between, and his steady, clouded gaze unchanged. "We are going to the garden; are you ready, darling?" said she to Miss Blunket. "Oh, quite," and she skipped to the door, smiling this way and that, as she stood in the sun on the step. "Sweet day," and she looked back on Beatrix and the invitation, glanced slightly on Drayton, who looked loweringly after them unmoved, and thought-- "Why the plague does she spoil her walks with that frightful old humbug? There's no escaping that creature." We have only conjecture as to which of the young ladies, now running down the steps, Mr. Drayton's pronouns referred to. "You fish to-day?" asked Varbarriere, on whose hands time dragged strangely. "We were thinking of going down to that pretty place Gryston. Linnett was there on Saturday morning. It was Linnett's trout you thought so good at luncheon." And with such agreeable conversation they loitered a little at the door, and suddenly, with quick steps, there approached, and passed them by, an apparition. It was old General Lennox. He had been walking in the park--about the grounds--he knew not where, since daybreak. Awfully stern he looked, fatigued, draggled he well might be, gloveless, one hand in his pocket, the other clenched on his thumb like a child's in a convulsion. His thoughts were set on something remote, for he brushed by the gentlemen, and not till he had passed did he seem to hear Drayton's cheery salutation, and stopping and turning towards them suddenly, he said, very grimly-- "Beg your pardon--" "Nothing, General, only wishing you good-morning," answered Drayton. "Yes, charming morning. I've been walking. I've been out--a--thank you," and that lead-coloured and white General vanished like a wicked ghost. "'Gad, he looks as if he'd got a licking. Did you ever see a fellow look so queer?" "He's been overworking his mind--business, you know--wants rest, I suspect," said Varbarriere, with a solemn nod. "They say fellows make themselves mad that way. I wonder has he had any breakfast; did you see his trowsers all over mud?" "I half envy your walk to Gryston," said Varbarriere, glancing up towards the fleecy clouds and blue sky, and down again to the breezy landscape. "It's worth looking at, a very pretty bit, that steep bridge and glen." "No notion of coming; maybe you will?" Varbarriere smiled and shook his head. "No angler, sir, never was," he said. "A bad day, rather, at all events," said Drayton; "a grey day is the thing for us." "Ah, yes, a grey day; so my nephew tells me; a pretty good angler, I believe." Varbarriere did not hear Drayton's answer, whatever it was; he was thinking of quite other things, and more and more feverishly every minute. The situation was for him all in darkness. But there remained on his mind the impression that something worse even than a guilty discovery had occurred last night, and the spectre that had just crossed them in the hall was not a sight to dissipate those awful shadows. CHAPTER XXVII. Lady Alice Redcliffe makes General Lennox's Acquaintance. Old General Lennox stopped a servant on the stairs, and learned from the staring domestic where Lady Alice Redcliffe then was. That sad and somewhat virulent old martyr was at that moment in her accustomed haunt, Lady Mary's boudoir, and in her wonted attitude over the fire, pondering in drowsy discontent over her many miseries, when a sharp knock at the door startled her nerves and awakened her temper. Her "come in" sounded sharply, and she beheld for the first time in her life the General, a tall lean old man, with white bristles on brow and cheek, with his toilet disordered by long and rather rapid exercise, and grim and livid with no transient agitation. "Lady Alice Redcliffe?" inquired he, with a stiff bow, remaining still inclined, his eyes still fixed on her. "_I_ am Lady Alice Redcliffe," returned that lady, haughtily, having quite forgotten General Lennox and all about him. "My name is Lennox," he said. "Oh, _General_ Lennox? I was told you were here last night," said the old lady, scrutinising him with a sort of surprised frown; his dress and appearance were a little wild, and not in accordance with her ideas on military precision. "I am happy, General Lennox, to make your acquaintance. You've just arrived, I dare say?" "I arrived yesterday--last night--last night late. I--I'm much obliged. May I say a word?" "Certainly, General Lennox," acquiesced the old lady, looking harder at him--"certainly, but I must remind you that I have been a sad invalid, and therefore very little qualified to discuss or advise;" and she leaned back with a fatigued air, but a curious look nevertheless. "I--I--it's about my wife, ma'am. We can--we can't live any longer together." He was twirling his gold eyeglass with trembling fingers as he spoke. "You have been quarrelling--h'm?" said Lady Alice, still staring hard at him, and rising with more agility than one might have expected; and shutting the door, which the old General had left open, she said, "Sit down, sir--quarrelling, eh?" "A quarrel, madam, that can never be made up--by ----, _never_." The General smote his gouty hand furiously on the chimneypiece as he thus spake. "Don't, General Lennox, _don't_, pray. If you can't command yourself, how can you hope to bear with one another's infirmities? A quarrel? H'm." "Madam, we've separated. It's worse, ma'am--all over. I thought, Lady--Lady--I thought, madam, I might ask you, as the only early friend--a friend, ma'am, and a kinswoman--to take her with you for a little while, till some home is settled for her; _here_ she can't stay, of course, an hour. That villain! May ---- damn him." "Who?" asked Lady Alice, with a kind of scowl, quite forgetting to rebuke him this time, her face darkening and turning very pale, for she saw it was another great family disgrace. "Sir Jekyl Marlowe, ma'am, of Marlowe, Baronet, Member of Parliament, Deputy Lieutenant," bawled the old General, with shrill and trembling voice. "I'll drag him through the law courts, and the divorce court, and the House of Lords." He held his right fist up with its trembling knuckles working, as if he had them in Sir Jekyl's cravat, "drag him through them all, ma'am, till the dogs would not pick his bones; and I'll shoot him through the head, by ----, I'll shoot him through the head, and his family ashamed to put his name on his tombstone." Lady Alice stood up, with a face so dismal it almost looked wicked. "I see, sir; I see there's something very bad; I'm sorry, sir; I'm very sorry; I'm _very_ sorry." She had a hand of the old General's in each of hers, and was shaking them with a tremulous clasp. Such as it was, it was the first touch of sympathy he had felt. The old General's grim face quivered and trembled, and he grasped _her_ hands too, and then there came those convulsive croupy sobs, so dreadful to hear, and at last tears, and this dried and bleached old soldier wept loud and piteously. Outside the door you would not have known what to make of these cracked, convulsive sounds. You would have stopped in horror, and fancied some one dying. After a while he said-- "Oh! ma'am, I was very fond of her--I _was_, desperately. If I could know it was all a dream, I'd be content to die. I wish, ma'am, you'd advise me. I'll go back to India, I think; I could not stay here. You'll know best, madam, what she ought to do. I wish everything the best for her--you'll see, ma'am--you'll know best." "Quite--quite; yes, these things are best settled by men of business. There are papers, I believe, drawn up, arranged by lawyers, and things, and I'm sorry, sir--" And old Lady Alice suddenly began to sob. "I'll--I'll do what I can for the poor thing," she said. "I'll take her to Wardlock--it's quite solitary--no prying people--and then to--perhaps it's better to go abroad; and you'll not make it public sooner than it must be; and it's a great blow to me, sir, a terrible blow. I wish she had placed herself more under direction; but it's vain looking back--she always refused advice, poor, poor wretched thing! Poor Jennie! We must be resigned, sir; and--and, sir, for God's sake, no fighting--no pistoling. That sort of thing is never heard of now; and if you do, the whole world will be ringing with it, and the unfortunate creature the gaze of the public before she need be, and perhaps some great crime added--some one killed. Do you promise?" "Ma'am, it's hard to promise." "But you _must_, General Lennox, or I'll take measures to stop it this moment," cried Lady Alice, drying her eyes and glaring at him fiercely. "Stop it! _who'll_ stop it?" holloed the General with a stamp. "_You'll_ stop it, General," exclaimed the old lady; "your own common sense; your own compassion; your own self-respect; and not the less that a poor old woman that sympathises with you implores it." There was here an interval. "Ma'am, ma'am, it's not easy; but I will--I _will_, ma'am. I'll go this moment; I will, ma'am; I can't trust myself here. If I met him, ma'am, by Heaven I _couldn't_." "Well, thank you, _thank_ you, General Lennox--_do_ go; there's not much chance of meeting, for he's ill; but go, don't stay a moment, and write to me to Wardlock, and you shall hear everything. There--go. Good-bye." So the General was gone, and Lady Alice stood for a while bewildered, looking at the door through which he had vanished. It is well when these sudden collapses of the overwrought nerves occur. More dejected, more broken, perhaps, he looked, but much more like the General Lennox whom his friends remembered. Something of the panic and fury of his calamity had subsided, too; and though the grief must, perhaps, always remain pretty much unchanged, yet he could now estimate the situation more justly, and take his measures more like a sane man. In this better, if not happier mood, Varbarriere encountered him in that overshadowed back avenue which leads more directly than the main one to the little town of Marlowe. Varbarriere was approaching the house, and judged, by the General's slower gait, that he was now more himself. The large gentleman in the Germanesque felt hat raised that grotesque head-gear, French fashion, as Lennox drew nigh. The General, with two fingers, made him a stern, military salute in reply, and came suddenly to a standstill. "May I walk a little with you, General Lennox?" inquired Varbarriere. "Certainly, sir. _Walk?_ By all means; I'm going to London," rejoined the General, without, however, moving from the spot where he had halted. "Rather a long stretch for me," thought Varbarriere, with one of those inward thrills of laughter which sometimes surprise us in the gravest moods and in the most unsuitable places. He looked sober enough, however, and merely said-- "You, know, General, there's some one ill up there," and he nodded mysteriously toward the house. "Is there? Ay. Well, yes, I dare say," and he laughed with a sudden quaver. "I was not sure; the old woman said something. I'm glad, sir." "I--I think I _know_ what it is, sir," said Varbarriere. "So do I, sir," said the General, with another short laugh. "You recollect, General Lennox, what you promised me?" "Ay, sir; how can I help it?" answered he. "How can you help it! I don't quite see your meaning," replied Varbarriere, slowly. "I can only observe that it gives me new ideas of a soldier's estimate of his promise." "Don't blame me, sir, if I lost my head a little, when I saw that villain there, in _my_ room, sir, by ----" and the General cursed him here parenthetically through his clenched teeth; "I felt, sir, as--as if the sight of him struck me in the face--mad, sir, for a minute--I suppose, _mad_, sir; and--it occurred. I say, sir, I can't help it--and I couldn't help it, by ---- I couldn't." Varbarriere looked down with a peevish sneer on the grass and innocent daisies at his feet, his heel firmly placed, and tapping the sole of his boot from that pivot on the sward, like a man beating time to a slow movement in an overture. "Very good, sir! It's your own affair. I suppose you've considered consequences, if anything should go wrong?" And without awaiting an answer, he turned and slowly pursued his route toward the house. I don't suppose, in his then frame of mind, the General saw consequences very clearly, or cared about them, or was capable, when the image of Sir Jekyl presented itself, of any emotions but those of hatred and rage. He had gone now, at all events; the future darkness; the past irrevocable. CHAPTER XXVIII. The Bishop sees the Patient. In the hall Varbarriere met the Reverend Dives Marlowe. "Well, sir, how is Sir Jekyl?" asked he. The parson looked bilious and lowering. "To say truth, Monsieur, I can't very well make out what the Doctor thinks. I suspect he does not understand very well himself. _Gout_, he says, but in a very sinking state; and we've sent for the physician at Slowton; and altogether, sir, I'm very uneasy." I suppose if the blow had fallen, the reverend gentleman would in a little while have become quite resigned, as became him. There were the baronetcy and some land; but on the whole, when Death drew near smirking, and offered on his tray, with a handsome black pall over it, these sparkling relics of the late Sir Jekyl Marlowe, Bart., the Rev. Dives turned away; and though he liked these things well enough, put them aside honestly, and even with a sort of disgust. For Jekyl, as I have said, though the brothers could sometimes exchange a sharp sally, had always been essentially kind to him; and Dives was not married, and, in fact, was funding money, and in no hurry; and those things were sure to come to him if he lived, sooner or later. "And what, may I ask, do you suppose it _is_?" inquired Varbarriere. "Well, _gout_, you know--he's positive; and, poor fellow, he's got it in his foot, and a very nasty thing it is, I know, even _there_. We all of us have it hereditarily--our family." The apostle and martyr did not want him to suppose he had earned it. "But I am very anxious, sir. Do _you_ know anything of gout? May it be _there_ and somewhere else at the same time? Two members of our family died of it in the stomach, and one in the head. It has been awfully fatal with us." Varbarriere shook his head. He had never had a declared attack, and had no light to throw on the sombre prospect. The fact is, if that solemn gentleman had known for certain exactly how matters stood, and had not been expecting the arrival of his contumacious nephew, he would have been many miles on his way to London by this time. "You know--you know, _sinking_ seems very odd as a symptom of common gout in the great toe," said Dives, looking in his companion's face, and speaking rather like a man seeking than communicating information. "We must not frighten the ladies, you know; but I'm very much afraid of something in the stomach, eh? and possibly the heart." "After all, sir," said Varbarriere, with a brisk effort, "Doctor--a--what's his name?--he's but a rural practitioner--an apothecary--is not it so?" "The people here say, however, he's a very clever fellow, though," said Dives, not much comforted. "We may hear a different story when the Slowton doctor comes. I venture to think we shall. I always fancied when gout was well out in the toe, the internal organs were safe. Oh! there's the Bishop." "Just talking about poor Jekyl, my lord," said Dives, with a sad smile of deference, the best he could command. "And--and how _is_ my poor friend and pupil, Sir Jekyl?--better, I trust," responded the apostle in gaiters and apron. "Well, my lord, we hope--I trust everything satisfactory; but the Doctor has been playing the sphinx with us, and I don't know exactly what to make of him." "I saw Doctor Pratt for a moment, and expressed my wish to see his patient--my poor pupil--before I go, which must be--yes--within an hour," said the Bishop, consulting his punctual gold watch. "But he preferred my postponing until Doctor--I forget his name--very much concerned, _indeed_, that a second should be thought necessary--from Slowton--should have arrived. It--it gives me--I--I can't deny, a rather serious idea of it. Has he had many attacks?" "Yes, my lord, several; never threatened seriously, but once--at Dartbroke, about two years ago--in the stomach." "Ah! I forgot it was the stomach. I remember his illness though," said the Bishop, graciously. "Not _actually_ the stomach--only threatened," suggested Dives, deferentially. "I have made acquaintance with it myself, too, slightly; never so sharply as poor Jekyl. I _wish_ that other doctor would come! But even at best it's not a pleasant visitor." "I dare say--I can well suppose it. _I_ have reason to be _very_ thankful. I've _never_ suffered. My poor _father_ knew what it was--suffered horribly. I remember him at Buxton for it--horribly." The Bishop was fond of this recollection, people said, and liked it to be understood that there was gout in the family, though he could not show that aristocratic gules himself. At this moment Tomlinson approached, respectfully--I might even say religiously--and with such a reverence as High-Churchmen make at the creed, accosted the prelate, in low tones like distant organ-notes, murmuring Sir Jekyl's compliments to "his lordship, and would be very 'appy to see his lordship whenever it might be his convenience." To which his lordship assented, with a grave "_Now_, certainly, I shall be most happy," and turning to Dives-- "This, I hope, looks well. I fancy he must feel better. Let us hope;" and with slightly uplifted hand and eyes, the good Bishop followed Tomlinson, feeling so oddly as he threaded the same narrow half-lighted passages, whose corners and panelling came sharply on his memory as he passed them, and ascended the steep back stair with the narrow stained-glass slits, by which he had reached, thirty years ago, the sick-chamber of the dying Sir Harry Marlowe. The Bishop sighed, looking round him, as he stood on the lobby outside the little ante-room. The light fell through the slim coloured orifice opposite on the oak before him, just as it did on the day he last stood there. The banisters, above and below, looked on him like yesterday's acquaintances; and the thoughtful frown of the heavy oak beams overhead seemed still knit over the same sad problem. "_Thirty_ years ago!" murmured the Bishop, with a sad smile, nodding his silvery head slightly, as his saddened eyes wandered over these things. "What is man that thou art mindful of him, or the son of man that thou so regardest him?" Tomlinson, who had knocked at the Baronet's door, returned to say he begged his lordship would step in. So with another sigh, peeping before him, he passed through the small room that interposed, and entered Sir Jekyl's, and took his hand very kindly and gravely, pressing it, and saying in the low tone which becomes a sick-chamber-- "I trust, my dear Sir Jekyl, you feel better." "Thank you, pretty well; very good of you, my lord, to come. It's a long way, from the front of the house--a journey. He told me you were in the hall." "Yes, it is a large house; interesting to me, too, from earlier recollections." "You were in this room, a great many years ago, with my poor father. He died here, you know." "I'm afraid you're distressing yourself speaking. Yes; oddly enough, I recognised the passages and back stairs; the windows, too, are peculiar. The _furniture_, though, that's changed--is not it?" "So it is. I hated it," replied Sir Jekyl. "Balloon-hacked blue silk things--faded, you know. It's curious you should remember, after such a devil of a time--such a great number of years, my lord. I hated it. When I had that fever here in this room--thirteen--fourteen years ago--ay, by Jove, it's _fifteen_--they were going to write for _you_." "Excuse me, my dear friend, but it seems to me you _are_ exerting yourself too much," interposed the prelate again. "Oh dear no! it does me good to talk. I had all sorts of queer visions. People fancy, you know, they see things; and I used to think I saw him--my poor father, I mean--every night. There were six of those confounded blue-backed chairs in this room, and a nasty idea got into my head. I had a servant--poor Lewis--then a very trustworthy fellow, and liked me, I think; and Lewis told me the doctors said there was to be a crisis on the night week of the first consultation--seven days, you know." "I really fear, Sir Jekyl, you are distressing yourself," persisted the Bishop, who did not like the voluble eagerness and the apparent fatigue, nevertheless, with which he spoke. "Oh! it's only a word more--it doesn't, I assure you--and I perceived he sat on a different chair, d'ye see, every night, and on the fourth night he had got on the fourth chair; and I liked his face less and less every night. You know he hated me about Molly--about _nothing_--he always hated me; and as there were only six chairs, it got into my head that he'd get up on my bed on the seventh, and that I should die in the crisis. So I put all the chairs out of the room. They thought I was raving; but I was quite right, for he did not come again, and here I am;" and with these words there came the rudiments of his accustomed chuckle, which died out in a second or two, seeming to give him pain. "Now, you'll promise me not to talk so much at a time till you're better. I am glad, sir--very glad, Sir Jekyl, to have enjoyed your hospitality, and to have even this opportunity of thanking you for it. It is very delightful to me occasionally to find myself thus beholden to my old pupils. I have had the pleasure of spending a few days with the Marquis at Queen's Dykely; in fact, I came direct from him to you. You recollect him--Lord Elstowe he was then? You remember Elstowe at school?" "To be sure; remember him very well. We did not agree, though--always thought him a cur," acquiesced Sir Jekyl. The Bishop cleared his voice. "He was asking for you, I assure you, very kindly--very kindly indeed, and seems to remember his school-days very affectionately, and--and pleasantly, and quite surprised me with his minute recollections of all the boys." "They all hated him," murmured Sir Jekyl. "I did, I know." "And--and I think we shall have a fine day. I drive always with two windows open--a window in front and one at the side," said the Bishop, whose mild and dignified eyes glanced at the windows, and the pleasant evidences of sunshine outside, as he spoke, "I was almost afraid I should have to start without the pleasure of saying good-bye. You remember the graceful farewell in Lucretius? I venture to say your brother does. I made your class recite it, do you remember?" And the Bishop repeated three or four hexameters with a look of expectation at his old pupil, as if looking to him to take up the recitation. "Yes, I am sure of it. I think I remember; but, egad! I've quite forgot my Latin, any I knew," answered the Baronet, who was totally unable to meet the invitation; "I--I don't know how it is, but I'm sorry you have to go to-day, very sorry;--sorry, of course, any time, but particularly I feel as if I should get well again very soon--that is, if you were to stay. Do you think you can?" "Thank you, my dear Marlowe, thank you very much for that feeling," said the good Bishop, much gratified, and placing his old hand very kindly in that of the patient, just as Sir Jekyl suddenly remembered his doing once at his bedside in the sick-house in younger days, long ago, when he was a school-boy, and the Bishop master; and both paused for a moment in one of those dreams of the past that make us smile so sadly. CHAPTER XXIX. In the Yard of the Marlowe Arms. The Bishop looked at his watch, and smiled, shaking his head. "Time flies. I must, I fear, take my leave." "Before you go," said Sir Jekyl, "I must tell you I've been thinking over my promise about that odious green chamber, and I'll pledge you my honour I'll fulfil it. I'll not leave a stone of it standing; I won't, I assure you. To the letter I'll fulfil it." "I never doubted it, my dear Sir Jekyl." "And must you really leave me to-day?" "No choice, I regret." "It's very unlucky. You can't think how your going affects me. It seems so odd and unlucky, so depressing just now. I'd have liked to talk to you, though I'm in no danger, and know it. I'd like to hear what's to be said, clergymen are generally so pompous and weak; and to be sure," he said, suddenly recollecting his brother, "there's Dives, who is neither--who is a good clergyman, and learned. I say so, of course, my lord, with submission to you; but still it isn't quite the same--you know the early association; and it makes me uncomfortable and out of spirits your going away. You don't think you could possibly postpone?" "No, my dear friend, quite impossible; but I leave you--tell him I said so--in excellent hands; and I'm glad to add, that so far as I can learn you're by no means in a dying state." The Bishop smiled. "Oh! I know that," said Sir Jekyl, returning that cheerful expansion; "I know that very well, my Lord: a fellow always knows pretty well when he's in anything of a fix--I mean his life at all in question; it is not the least that, but a sort of feeling or fancy. What does Doctor Pratt say it _is_?" "Oh! gout, as _I_ understand." "Ah! yes, I have had a good deal in my day. Do you think I could tempt you to return, maybe, when your business--this particular business, I mean--is over?" The Bishop smiled and shook his head. "I find business--mine at least--a very tropical plant; as fast as I head it down, it throws up a new growth. I was not half so hard worked, I do assure you, when I was better able to work, at the school, long ago. You haven't a notion what it is." "Well, but you'll come back some time, not very far away?" "Who knows?" smiled the Bishop. "It is always a temptation. I can say that truly. In the meantime, I shall expect to hear that you are much better. Young Marlowe--I mean Dives," and the Bishop laughed gently at the tenacity of his old school habits, "will let me hear; and so for the present, my dear Sir Jekyl, with many, many thanks for a very pleasant sojourn, and with all good wishes, I bid you farewell, and may God bless you." So having shaken his hand, and kissing his own as he smiled another farewell at the door, the dignified and good prelate disappeared mildly from the room, Jekyl following him with his eyes, and sighing as the door closed on him. As Sir Jekyl leaned back against his pillows, there arrived a little note, in a tall hand; some of the slim l's, b's, and so on, were a little spiral with the tremor of age. "Lady Halice Redcliffe, Sir Jekyl, please sir, sends her compliments and hopes you may be able to read it, and will not leave for Warlock earlier than half-past one o'clock." "Very well. Get away and wait in the outer room," said Sir Jekyl, flushing a little, and looking somehow annoyed. "I hate the sight of her hand. It's sealed, too. I wish that cursed old woman was where she ought to be; and she chooses _now_ because she knows I'm ill, and can't bear worry." Sir Jekyl twirled the little note round in his fingers and thumb with a pinch. The feverish pain he was suffering did not improve his temper, and he was intemperately disposed to write across the back of the unopened note something to this effect:--"Ill and suffering; the pleasure of your note might be too much for me; pray keep it till to-morrow." But curiosity and something of a dread that discovery had occurred prompted him to open it, and he read-- "Having had a most painful interview with unhappy General Lennox, and endured mental agitation and excitement which are too much for my miserable health and nerves, I mean to return to Wardlock as early to-day as my strength will permit, taking with me, at his earnest request, _your victim_." "D--n her!" interposed Sir Jekyl through his set teeth. "I think you will see," he read on, "that this house is no longer a befitting residence for your poor innocent girl. As I am charged for a time with the care of the ruined wife of your friend and guest, you will equally see that it is quite impossible to offer my darling Beatrix an asylum at Wardlock. The Fentons, however, will, I am sure, be happy to receive her. She must leave Marlowe, of course, before I do. While here, she is under _my care_; but this house is no home for her; and you can hardly wish that _she_ should be _sacrificed_ in the ruin of the poor wife whom you have made an _outcast_." "Egad! it's the devil sent that fiend to torture me so. It's all about, I suppose," exclaimed Sir Jekyl, with a gasp. "Unlucky! The stupid old fribble, to think of his going off with his story to that Pharisaical old tattler!" The remainder of the letter was brief. "I do not say, Jekyl Marlowe, that I regret your illness. You have to thank a merciful Providence that it is unattended with danger; and it affords an opportunity for reflection, which may, if properly improved, lead to some awakening of conscience--to a proper estimate of your past life, and an amendment of the space that remains. I need hardly add, that an amended life involves reparation, so far as practicable, to _all_ whom you or, in your interest, _yours_ may have injured. "In deep humiliation and sorrow, "Alice Redcliffe." "I wish you were in a deep pond, you plaguy old witch. That fellow, Herbert Strangways--Varbarriere--he's been talking to her. I know what she means by all that cant." Then he read over again the passages about "your victim," and "General Lennox," your "friend and guest." And he knocked on the table, and called as well as he could--"Tomlinson," who entered. "Where's General Lennox?" "Can't say, Sir Jekyl, please, sir--'avn't saw him to-day." "Just see, please, if he's in the house, and let him know that I'm ill, but very anxious to see him. You may say _very_ ill, do you mind, and only wish a word or two." Tomlinson bowed and disappeared. "Don't care if he strikes me again. I've a word to say, and he _must_ hear it," thought Sir Jekyl. But Tomlinson returned with the intelligence that General Lennox had gone down to the town, and was going to Slowton station; and his man, with some of his things, followed him to the Marlowe Arms, in the town close by. In a little while he called for paper, pen, and ink, and with some trouble wrote an odd note to old General Lennox. "GENERAL LENNOX, "You must hear me. By ----," and here followed an oath and an imprecation quite unnecessary to transcribe. "Your wife is innocent as an angel! I have been the fiend who would, if he could, have ruined her peace and yours. From your hand I have met my deserts. I lie now, I believe, on my death-bed. I wish you knew the whole story. The truth would deify her and make you happy. I am past the age of romance, though not of vice. I speak now as a dying man. I would not go out of the world with a perjury on my soul; and, by ----, I swear your wife is as guiltless as an angel. I am ill able to speak, but will see and satisfy you. Bring a Bible and a pistol with you--let me swear to every answer I make you; and if I have not convinced you before you leave, I promise to shoot myself through the head, and save you from all further trouble on account of "JEKYL MARLOWE." "Now see, Tomlinson, don't lose a moment. Send a fellow running, do you mind, and let him tell General Lennox I'm in pain--_very_ ill--mind and--and all that; and get me an answer; and he'll put this in _his_ hand." Sir Jekyl was the sort of master who is obeyed. The town was hardly three-quarters of a mile away. His messenger accomplished the distance as if for a wager. The waiter flourished his napkin in the hall of the Marlowe Arms, and told him-- "No General, _nothing_ was there, as he heerd." "Who do you want?" said the fat proprietress, with a red face and small eyes and a cap and satin bow, emerging from a side door, and superseding the waiter, who said--"A hofficer, isn't it?" as he went aside. "Oh! from the Manor," continued the proprietress in a conciliatory strain, recognising the Marlowe button, though she did not know the man. "Can I do anything?" And she instinctively dropped a courtesy--a deference to the far-off Baronet; and then indemnifying herself by a loftier tone to the menial. "A note for General Lennox, ma'am." "General Lennox?--I know, I think, a millentery man, white-'aired and spare?" "I must give it 'im myself, ma'am, thankee," said he, declining the fat finger and thumb of the curious hostess, who tossed her false ringlets with a little fat frown, and whiffled-- "Here, tell him where's the tall, thin gemm'n, with white mistashes, that's ordered the hosses--that'll be him, I dessay," she said to the waiter, reinstated, and waddled away with a jingle of keys in her great pocket. So to the back yard they went, the thin, little, elderly waiter skipping in front, with a jerk or two of his napkin. "Thankee, that's him," said the messenger. CHAPTER XXX. About Lady Jane. The General was walking up and down the jolty pavement with a speed that seemed to have no object but to tire himself, his walking-stick very tightly grasped, his lips occasionally contracting, and his hat now and then making a vicious wag as he traversed his beat. "Hollo!" said the General, drawing up suddenly, as the man stood before him with the letter, accosting him with his hand to his cap. "Hey! _well_, sir?" "Letter, please, sir." The General took it, stared at the man, I think, without seeing him, for a while, and then resumed his march, with his cane, sword-fashion, over his shoulder. The messenger waited, a little perplexed. It was not until he had made a third turn that the General, again observing the letter in his hand, looked at it, and again at the messenger, who was touching his cap, and stopping short, said-- "Well--ay! _This?_--aw--you _brought_ it, didn't you?" So the General broke it open--he had not his glasses with him--and, holding it far away, read a few lines with a dreadful glare, and then bursting all on a sudden into such a storm of oaths and curses as scared the sober walls of that unmilitary hostelry, he whirled his walking-stick in the air, with the fluttering letter extended toward the face of the astounded messenger, as if in another second he would sweep his head off. At the sound of this hoarse screech the kitchen-wench looked open-mouthed out of the scullery-window with a plate dripping in her hand. "Boots," with his fist in a "Wellington," held his blacking-brush poised in air, and gazed also; and the hostler held the horse he was leading into the stable by the halter, and stood at the door gaping over his shoulder. "Tell your master I said he may go to _hell_, sir," said the General, scrunching the letter like a snowball in his fist, and stamping in his fury. What more he said I know not. The man withdrew, and, once or twice, turned about, sulkily, half puzzled and half angered, perhaps not quite sure whether he ought not to "lick" him. "What'll be the matter now?" demanded the proprietress, looking from under her balustrade of brown ringlets from the back door. "'Drat me if I know; he's a rum un, that he be," replied the man with the Marlowe button. "When master hears it he'll lay his whip across that old cove's shouthers, I'm thinking." "I doubt he's not right in his head; he's bin a-walkin' up an' down the same way ever since he ordered the chaise, like a man beside himself. _Will_ ye put _them_ horses to?" she continued, raising her voice; "why, the 'arniss is on 'em this half-hour. Will ye put 'em to or _no_?" and so, in something of an angry panic, she urged on the preparations, and in a few minutes more General Lennox was clattering through the long street of the town, on his way to Slowton, and the London horrors of legal consultations, and the torture of the slow processes by which those whom God hath joined together are sundered. "Send Donica Gwynn to me," said Lady Alice to the servant whom her bell had summoned to Lady Mary's boudoir. When Donica arrived-- "Shut the door, Donica Gwynn," said she, "and listen. Come a little nearer, please. Sir Jekyl Marlowe is ill, and, of course, we cannot all stay here." Lady Alice looked at her dubiously. "Fit o' the gout, my lady, I'm told." "Yes, an attack of gout." "It does not hold long with him, not like his poor father, Sir Harry, that would lie six months at a time in flannel. Sir Jekyl, law bless you, my lady! He's often 'ad his toe as red as fire overnight, and before supper to-morrow walking about the house. He says, Tomlinson tells me, this will be nothink at all; an' it might fret him sore, my lady, and bring on a worse fit, to see you all go away." "Yes, very true, Gwynn; but there's something more at present," observed Lady Alice, demurely. Donica folded her hands, and with curious eyes awaited her mistress's pleasure. Lady Alice continued in a slightly altered tone-- "It's not altogether _that_. In fact, Gwynn, there has been--you're not to talk, d'ye see,--I know you _don't_ talk; but there has been--there has been a _something_--a _quarrel_--between Lady Jane and her husband, the General; and for a time, at least, she will remain with me at Wardlock, and I may possibly go abroad with her for a little." Donica Gwynn's pale sharp face grew paler and sharper, as during this announcement she eyed her mistress askance from her place near the door; and as Lady Alice concluded, Donica dropped her eyes to the Turkey carpet, and seemed to read uncomfortable mysteries in its blurred pattern. Then Donica looked up sharply, and asked-- "And, please, my lady, what is your ladyship's orders?" "Well, Gwynn, you must get a 'fly' now from the town, and go on before us to Wardlock. We shall leave this probably in little more than an hour, in the carriage. Tell Lady Jane, with my compliments, that I hope she will be ready by that time--or no, you may give her my love--don't say compliments--and say, I will either go and see her in her room, or if she prefer, I will see her here, or anywhere else; and you can ask her what room at Wardlock she would like best--do you mind? Whatever room she would like best she shall have, except _mine_, of course, and the moment you get there you'll set about it." "Yes, ma'am, please, my lady." Donica looked at her mistress as if expecting something more; and her mistress looked away darkly, and said nothing. "I'll return, my lady, I suppose, and tell you what Miss Jane says, ma'am?" "Do," answered Lady Alice, and, closing her eyes, she made a sharp nod, which Donica knew was a signal of dismissal. Old Gwynn, mounting the stairs, met Mrs. Sinnott with those keys of office which she had herself borne for so many years. "Well, Mrs. Sinnott, ma'am, how's the master now?" she inquired. "Doctor's not bin yet from Slowton, Mrs. Gwynn; we don't know nothink only just what you heard this morning from Mr. Tomlinson." "Old Pratt, baint _he_ here neither?" "No, but the nurse be come." "Oh! _respeckable_, I hope? But no ways, Mrs. Sinnott, ma'am, take my advice, and on no account don't you give her her will o' the bottle; there's none o' them hospital people but likes it--jest what's enough, and no more, I would say." "Oh! no! no!" answered Mrs. Sinnott, scornfully. "I knows somethink o' them sort, too--leave 'em to me." "Lady Alice going away this afternoon." "And what for, Mrs. Gwynn?" asked the housekeeper. "Sir Jekyl's gout." "Fidgets! Tiresome old lass, baint she? law," said Mrs. Sinnott, who loved her not. "She don't know Sir Jekyl's constitution like I does. Them little attacks o' gout, why he makes nothink o' them, and they goes and comes quite 'armless. I'm a-going back to Wardlock, Mrs. Sinnott, this morning, and many thanks for all civilities while 'ere, lest I should not see you when a-leavin'." So with the housekeeper's smiles, and conventional courtesies, and shaking of hands, these ladies parted, and Mrs. Gwynn went on to the green chamber. As she passed through the Window dressing-room her heart sank. She knew, as we are aware, a good deal about that green chamber, more than she had fancied Lady Jane suspected. She blamed herself for not having talked frankly of it last night. But Lady Jane's _éclat_ of passion at one period of their interview had checked her upon any such theme; and after all, what could the green chamber have to do with it? Had not the General arrived express very late last night? It was some London story that sent him down from town in that hurry, and Sir Jekyl laid up in gout too. Some o' them jealous stories, and a quarrel over it. It will sure be made up again--ay, ay. And so thinking, she knocked, and receiving no answer, she opened the door and peeped in. There was but a narrow strip of one shutter open. "Miss Jennie, dear," she called. Still no answer. "Miss Jennie, darling." No answer still. She understood those sulky taciturnities well, in which feminine tempest sometimes subsides, and was not at all uneasy. On the floor, near the foot of the bed, lay the General's felt hat and travelling coat. Standing, there, she drew the curtain and saw Lady Jane, her face buried in the pillow, and her long hair lying wildly on the coverlet and hanging over the bedside. "Miss Jennie, dear--Miss Jennie, darling; it's me--old Donnie, miss. Won't you speak to me?" Still no answer, and Donica went round, beginning to feel uneasy, to the side where she lay. CHAPTER XXXI. Lady Jane's Toilet. "Miss Jennie, _darling_, it's _me_," she repeated, and placed her fingers on the young lady's shoulder. It was with an odd sense of relief she saw the young lady turn her face away. "Miss Jennie, dear; it's me--old Donnie--don't you know me?" cried Donica once more. "Miss, dear, my lady, what's the matter you should take on so?--only a few wry words--it will all be made up, dear." "Who told you--who says it will be made up?" said Lady Jane, raising her head slowly, very pale, and, it seemed to old Gwynn, grown so thin in that one night. "Don't mind--it will _never_ be made up--no, Donnie, never; it oughtn't. Is my--is General Lennox in the house?" "Gone down to the town, miss, I'm told, in a bit of a tantrum--going off to Lunnon. It's the way wi' them all--off at a word; and then cools, and back again same as ever." Lady Jane's fingers were picking at the bedclothes, and her features were sunk and peaked as those of a fever-stricken girl. "The door is shut to--outer darkness. I asked your God for mercy last night, and see what he has done for me!" "Come, Miss Jennie, dear, you'll be happy yet. Will ye come with me to Wardlock?" "That I will, Donnie," she answered, with a sad alacrity, like a child's. "I'll be going, then, in half an hour, and you'll come with me." Lady Jane's tired wild eyes glanced on the gleam of light in the half-open shutter with the wavering despair of a captive. "I wish we were there. I wish we were--you and I, Donnie--just you and I." "Well, then, what's to hinder? My missus sends her love by me, to ask you to go there, till things be smooth again 'twixt you and your old man, which it won't be long, Miss Jennie, dear." "I'll go," said Lady Jane, gliding out of her bed toward the toilet, fluttering along in her bare feet and night-dress. "Donnie, I'll go." "That water's cold, miss; shall I fetch hot?" "Don't mind--no; very nice. Oh, Donnie, Donnie, Donnie! my heart, my heart! what is it?" "Nothink, my dear--nothink, darlin'." "I wish it was dark again." "Time enough, miss." "That great sun shining! They'll all be staring. Well, _let_ them." "Won't you get your things on, darling? I'll dress you. You'll take cold." "Oh, Donnie! I wish I could cry. My head! I don't know what it is. If I could cry I think I should be better. I must see him, Donnie." "But he's gone away, miss." "_Gone!_ _Is_ he?" "Ay, sure I told ye so, dear, only this minute. To Lunnon, I hear say." "Oh! yes, I forgot; yes, I'll dress. Let us make haste. I wish I knew. Oh! Donnie, Donnie! oh! my heart, Donnie, Donnie--my heart's breaking." "There, miss, dear, don't take on so; you'll be better when we gets into the air, you will. What will ye put on?--here's a purple mornin' silk." "Yes; very nice. Thank you. Oh! Donnie, I wish we were away." "So we shall, miss, presently, please God. Them's precious bad pins--Binney and Clew--bends like lead; _there's_ two on 'em. Thompson's mixed shillin' boxes--them's the best. Miss Trixie allays has 'em. Your hair's beautiful, miss, allays was; but dearie me! what a lot you've got! and so beautiful fine! I take it in handfuls--floss silk--and the weight of it! Beautiful hair, miss. Dearie me, what some 'id give for that!" Thus old Gwynn ran on; but fixed, pale, and wild was the face which would once have kindled in the conscious pride of beauty at the honest admiration of old Donnie, who did not rise into raptures for everyone and on all themes, and whose eulogy was therefore valuable. "I see, Donnie--nothing bad has happened?" said Lady Jane, with a scared glance at her face. "Bad? Nonsense! I told you, Miss Jennie, 'twould all be made up, and so it will, please God, miss." But Lady Jane seemed in no wise cheered by her promises, and after a silence of some minutes, she asked suddenly, with the same painful look-- "Donnie, tell me the truth, for God's sake; how is he?" Donica looked at her with dark inquiry. "The General is gone, you know, ma'am." "_Stop_--you _know_," cried Lady Jane, seizing her fiercely by the arm, with a wild fixed stare in her face. "Who?" said Donica. "Not he. I mean--" "Who?" repeated Gwynn. "How is Sir Jekyl?" It seemed as if old Donica's breath was suspended. Shade after shade her face darkened, as with wide eyes she stared in the gazing face of Lady Jane, who cried, with a strange laugh of rage-- "Yes--Sir Jekyl--how _is_ he?" "Oh, Miss Jane!--oh, Miss Jane!--oh, Miss Jane!--and is _that_ it?" Lady Jane's face was dark with other fiercer passions. "Can't you answer, and not talk?" said she. Donica's eyes wandered to the far end of the room to the fatal recess, and she was shaking her head, as if over a tale of horror. "Yes, I see, you know it all, and you'll _hate_ me now, as the others will, and I don't care." Suspicions are one thing--faint, phantasmal; certainties quite another. Donica Gwynn looked appalled. "Oh! poor Miss Jennie!" she cried at last, and burst into tears. Before this old domestic Lady Jane was standing--a statue of shame, of defiance--the fallen angelic. "You're doing that to make me mad." "Oh! no, miss; I'm sorry." There was silence for a good while. "The curse of God's upon this room," said Donica, fiercely, drying her eyes. "I wish you had never set foot in it. Come away, my lady. I'll go and send at once for a carriage to the town, and we'll go together, ma'am, to Wardlock. Shall I, ma'am?" "Yes, I'll go," said Lady Jane. "Let us go, you and I. I won't go with Lady Alice. I won't go with her." "Good-bye, my lady; good-bye, Miss Jennie dear; I'll be here again presently." Dressed for the journey, with her cloak on and bonnet, Lady Jane sat in an arm-chair, haggard, listless, watching the slow shuffling of her own foot upon the floor, while Donica departed to complete the arrangements for their journey. CHAPTER XXXII. The two Doctors consult. The doctor from Slowton had arrived at last. The horses, all smoking with the break-neck speed at which they had been driven, stood at the hall-door steps. The doctor himself, with Pratt and the nurse, were up-stairs in the patient's room. The Rev. Dives Marlowe, looking uncomfortable and bilious, hovered about the back stairs that led to Sir Jekyl's apartment, to waylay the doctors on their way down, and listened for the sound of their voices, to gather from their tones something of their spirits and opinions respecting his brother, about whose attack he had instinctive misgivings. The interview was a long one. Before it was over Dives had gradually ascended to the room outside the Baronet's, and was looking out of the window on the prospect below with the countenance with which one might look on a bad balance-sheet. The door opened, the doctors emerged--the Slowton man first, Pratt following, both looking grave as men returning from the sacrament. "Oh! Mr. Dives Marlowe--the Rev. Dives Marlowe," murmured Pratt as the door was shut. The lean practitioner from Slowton bowed low, and the ceremony over-- "Well, gentlemen?" inquired the Rev. Dives Marlowe. "We are about to compare notes, and discuss the case a little--Doctor Pratt and I--and we shall then, sir, be in a position to say something a--a--definite, we hope." So the Rev. Dives withdrew to the stair-head, exchanging bows with the priests of Æsculapius, and there awaited the opening of the doors. When that event came, and the Rev. Dives entered-- "Well, Mr. Marlowe," murmured the Slowton doctor, a slight and dismal man of five-and-fifty--"we think, sir, that your brother, Sir Jekyl Marlowe, is not in immediate danger; but it would not be right or fair to conceal the fact that he is in a very critical state--highly so, in fact; and we think it better on the whole that some member of his family should advise him, if he has anything to arrange--a--a will, or any particular business, that he should see to it; and we think that--we are quite agreed upon this, Doctor Pratt?" Pratt bowed assent, forgetful that he had not yet heard what they were agreed on. "We think he should be kept very quiet; he's very low, and must have claret. We have told the nurse in what quantities to administer it, and some other things; she's a very intelligent woman, and your servants can take their directions from her." Dives felt very oddly. We talk of Death all our lives, but know nothing about him until he stands in our safe homesteads suddenly before us, face to face. He is a much grizzlier object than we had fancied when busied with a brother or a child. What he is when he comes for ourselves, the few who have seen him waiting behind the doctor and live can vaguely remember. "Good Lord, sir!" said Dives, "is he really in that state? I had no idea." "Don't mis_take_ us, sir. We don't say he may not, if everything goes right, do very well. Only the case is critical, and we should deceive you if we shrank from telling you so; is not that your view, Doctor--Dr. Pratt?" Dr. Pratt was of course quite clear on the point. "And you are in very able hands here," and the Slowton doctor waved his yellow fingers and vouchsafed a grave smile and nod of approbation toward Pratt, who wished to look indifferent under the compliment, but simpered a little in spite of himself. The Rev. Dives Marlowe accompanied the two doctors down-stairs, looking like a man going to execution. "You need not be afraid, sir," said Dives, laying his hand on the Slowton leech's sleeve. The grave gentleman stopped and inclined his ear to listen, and the three stood huddled together on the small landing, Dives' nervous fingers in the banister. "I don't quite see, sir," observed the doctor. "I give him up, sir; you need not be afraid to tell me." "You are right, perhaps, to give him up; but I always say exactly what I think. Doctor--a--_Pratt_ and I--we tell you frankly--we think him in a very critical state; but it's quite on the cards he may recover; and we have given very full directions to the nurse, who appears to be a very intelligent person; and don't let him shift his attitude unnecessarily, it may prejudice him, and be in fact attended with danger--very _serious_ danger; and Doctor Pratt shall look in at five o'clock--you were so good as to say, Doctor Pratt, you would look in at five. Doctor Pratt will look in _then_, and do anything that may be necessary; and if there should be the slightest symptom of hæmorrhage send for him instantly, and the nurse knows what to do; and I think--I think I have said everything now." "Hæmorrhage, sir! But _what_ hæmorrhage? Why, what hæmorrhage is apprehended?" asked Dives, amazed. "Internal or external it may occur," said the doctor; and Pratt, coughing and shaking his chops, interposed hurriedly and said-- "Yes, there may be a bleeding, it may come to that." "He has bled a great deal already, you are aware," resumed the Slowton doctor, "and in his exhausted state a return of that might of course be very bad." "But I don't understand," persisted Dives. "I beg pardon, but I really must. What _is_ this hæmorrhage? it is not connected with gout, is it?" "Gout, sir! no; who said gout? A bad wound, that seems to run toward the lung," answered the Slowton man. "Wound! how's this? I did not hear," and Dives looked frightened, and inquiringly on Pratt, who said-- "Not hear, didn't you? Why, Sir Jekyl undertook to tell you, and would not let me. He took me in for a while, poor fellow, quite, and said 'twas gout, that's all. I'm surprised he did not tell you." "No--_no_--not a word; and--and you think, sir, it may begin bleeding afresh?" "That's what we chiefly apprehend. Farewell, sir. I find I have not a moment. I must be at Todmore in three quarters of an hour. A sad case that at Todmore; only a question of a few days, I'm afraid; and a very fine young fellow." "Yes," said Dives--"I--I--it takes me by surprise. Pray, Dr. Pratt, don't go for a moment," and he placed his hand on his arm. "Farewell, sir," said the Slowton doctor, and putting up his large gold watch, and bowing gravely, he ran at a quiet trot down the stairs, and jumped into his chaise at the back entrance, and vanished. "You did not tell me," began Dives. "No," said Pratt, promptly, "he said he'd tell _himself_, and did not choose me." "And you think--you think it's very bad?" "Very bad, sir." "And you think he'll not get over it?" "He may not, sir." "It's frightful, Doctor, frightful. And how was it, do you know?" "No more than the man in the moon. You must not tease him with questions, mind, to-day. In a day or two you may ask him. But he said, upon his honour, no one was to blame but himself." "Merciful Heavens! sir. To think of his going this way!" "Very sad, sir. But we'll do all we can, and possibly may pull him through." With slow steps Dives began to ascend the stairs toward his brother's room. He recollected that he had not bid Pratt good-bye, and gave him his adieux over the banister; and then, with slow and creaking steps, mounted, and paused on the lobby, to let his head clear and to think how he should accost him. Dives was not a Churchman to pester people impertinently about their sins; and out of the pulpit, where he lashed the vice but spared the man, he was a well-bred divine, and could talk of sheep, and even of horses, and read everything from St. Paul to Paul de Kock; and had ridden till lately after the hounds, and gave _recherché_ little dinners, such as the New Testament character whose name, with a difference in pronunciation, he inherited might have praised, and well-iced champagne, which, in his present uncomfortable state, that fallen gentleman would have relished. And now he stood in a sombre mood, with something of panic at the bottom of it, frightened that the ice upon which men held Vanity Fair, and roasted oxen, and piped and danced, and gamed, should prove so thin; and amazed to see his brother drowning among the fragments in that black pool, and no one minding, and he unable to help him. And it came to him like a blow and a spasm. "The special minister of Christ!--am I what I'm sworn to be? Can I go in and talk to him of those things that concern eternity with any effect? Will he mind me? Can I even now feel the hope, and lead the prayer as I ought to do?" And Dives, in a sort of horror, as from the pit, lifted up his eyes, and prayed "have mercy on me!" and saw a misspent hollow life behind, and judgment before him; and blamed himself, too, for poor Jekyl, and felt something of the anguish of his namesake in the parable, and yearned for the safety of his brother. Dives, in fact, was frightened for himself and for Jekyl, and in those few moments, on the lobby, his sins looked gigantic and the vast future all dismay; and he felt that, bad as poor Jekyl might be, _he_ was worse--a false soldier--a Simon Magus--chaff, to be burnt up with unquenchable fire! "I wish to God the Bishop had stayed over this night," said Dives, with clasped hands, and again turning his eyes upward. "We must send after him. I'll write to implore of him. Oh, yes, he'll come." Even in this was a sense of relief; and treading more carefully, he softly turned the handle of the outer door, and listened, and heard Jekyl's cheerful voice say a few words to the nurse. He sighed with a sense of relief, and calling up a sunnier look, he knocked at Jekyl's half-open door, and stepped to his bedside. CHAPTER XXXIII. Varbarriere in the Sick-room. "Well, Jekyl, my dear fellow--and how do you feel now? There, don't; you must not move, they told me," said Dives, taking his brother's hand, and looking with very anxious eyes in his face, while he managed his best smile. "Pretty well--nothing. Have they been talking? What do they say?" asked Sir Jekyl. "Say? Well, not much; those fellows never do; but they expect to have you all right again, if you'll just do what you're bid, in a week or two." "Pratt's coming at five," he said. "What is it now?" Dives held his watch to Jekyl, who nodded. "Do you think I'll get over it, Dives?" he asked at length, rather ruefully. "Get over? To be sure you will," answered Dives, doing his best. "It might be better for you, my dear Jekyl, if it _were_ a little more serious. We all need to be pulled up a little now and then. And there's nothing like an alarm of--of that kind for making a man think a little; for, after all, health is only a long day, and a recovery but a reprieve. The sentence stands against us, and we must, sooner or later, submit." "Yes, to be sure. We're all mortal, Dives--is not that your discovery?" said Sir Jekyl. "A discovery it is, my dear fellow, smile as we may--a discovery to me, and to you, and to all--whenever the truth, in its full force, opens on our minds." "That's when we're going to die, I suppose," said Sir Jekyl. "_Then_, of course; but often, in the mercy of God, long before it. That, in fact, is what we call people's growing serious, or religious; their perceiving, as a fact, that they _are_ mortal, and resolving to make the best preparation they can for the journey." "Come, Dives, haven't those fellows been talking of me--eh?--as if I were worse than you say?" asked the Baronet, oddly. "The doctors, you mean? They said exactly what I told you. But it is not, my dear Jekyl, when we are sick and frightened, and maybe despairing, that these things are best thought on; but when we are, like you and me, likely to live and enjoy life--_then_ is the time. I've been thinking myself, my dear Jekyl, a good deal for some time past. I have been living too much in the spirit of the world; but I hope to do better." "To do better--to be sure. You've always been hoping to do better; and I've given you a lift or two," said the Baronet, who, in truth, never much affected his brother's pulpit-talk, as he called it, and was falling into his old cynical vein. "But, seriously, my dear fellow, I do. My mind has been troubled thinking how unworthy I have been of my calling, and how fruitless have been my opportunities, my dear brother, with you. I've never improved them; and I'd be so glad--now we are likely to have a few quiet days--if you'll let me read a little with you." "Sermons, do you mean?" interposed the Baronet. "Well, what's better?--a little of the Bible?" "Come now, Dives, those doctors _have_ been shaking their heads over me. I say, you must tell me. Do they say I'm in a bad way?" "They think you'll recover." "Did they tell you what it is?" "Yes. A wound." "They had no business, d---- them," said Sir Jekyl, flushing. "Don't, don't, my dear Jekyl; they could not help it. I pressed that doctor--I forget his name--and he really could not help saying." "Well, well, it doesn't much signify; I'd have told you myself by-and-by. But you must not tell--I've a reason--you must not tell anyone, mind. It was my fault, and I'm greatly to blame; and I'll tell you in a little while--a day or two--all about it." "Yes, so you can. But, my dear Jekyl, you look much fatigued; you are exerting yourself." Here the nurse interposed with the claret-jug, and intimated that the Rev. Dives was making her patient feverish, and indeed there was an unpleasantly hot hectic in each cheek. But the Baronet had no notion of putting himself under the command of the supernumerary, and being a contumacious and troublesome patient, told her to sit in the study and leave him alone. "I've a word to say, Dives. I must see that fellow Herbert Strangways." "_Who?_" said Dives, a good deal alarmed, for he feared that his brother's mind was wandering. "Herbert--that fellow Varbarriere. I forgot I had not told you. Herbert Strangways, you remember; they're the same. And I want to see him. Better now than to-morrow. I may be feverish then." "By Jove! It's very surprising. Do you really mean--" "Yes; he is. I do; they are the same. You remember Herbert, of course--Herbert Strangways--the fellow I had that long chase after all over Europe. He has things to complain of, you know, and we might as well square the account in a friendlier way, eh?--don't you think?" "And was it he--was there any altercation?" stammered Dives. "That did _this_, you mean," said Sir Jekyl, moving his hand toward the wound. "Not a bit--no. He seems reasonable; and I should like--you know they are very old blood, and there's nothing against it--that all should be made up. And if that young fellow and Beatrix--don't you see? Is Tomlinson there?" "In the outer room," said Dives. "Call him. Tomlinson, I say, you take my compliments to Monsieur Varbarriere, and say, if he has no objection to see me for a few minutes here, I should be very happy. Try and make him out, and bring me word." So Tomlinson disappeared. "And, Dives, it tires me;--so will you--I'm sure you will--see Pelter, after we've spoken with that fellow Herbert, and consult what we had best do, you know. I dare say the young people would come to like one another--he's a fine young fellow; and that, you know, would be the natural way of settling it--better than law or fighting." "A great deal--a great deal, certainly." "And you may tell him I have that thing--the deed, you know--my poor father--" "I--I always told you, my dear Jekyl, I'd rather know nothing of all that--in fact, I _do_ know nothing; and I should not like to speak to Pelter on that subject. You can, another time, you know," said Dives. "Well, it's in the red trunk in there." "Pray, dear Jekyl, don't--I assure you I'd rather know nothing--I--I can't; and Pelter will understand you better when he sees you. But I'll talk to him with pleasure about the other thing, and I quite agree with you that any reasonable arrangement is better than litigation." "Very well, be it so," said Sir Jekyl, very tired. "I'm always drinking claret now--give me some--the only quick way of making blood--I've lost a lot." "And you must not talk so much, Jekyl," said Dives, as he placed the glass at his lips; "you'll wear yourself out." "Yes, I _am_ tired," said the Baronet; "I'll rest till Strangways comes." And he closed his eyes, and was quiet for a time. And Dives, leaning back in his chair at the bedside, felt better assured of Jekyl's recovery, and his thoughts began to return to their wonted channel, and he entertained himself with listlessly reading and half understanding a tedious sculling match in a very old copy of "Bell's Life," which happened to lie near him. A tap at the outer door called up Dives from Sandy Dick's sweep round a corner, and Jekyl said-- "Tell him to come in--and stay--you're not to say I'm hurt--do you mind?" "My dear Jekyl, I--I shan't say anything. There he's knocking again." "Well, tell him--come in!" "Come in!" echoed Dives, in a louder key. And Monsieur Varbarriere entered with that mysterious countenance and cautious shuffle with which men enter a sick-chamber. "Very sorry to hear you've been suffering," began Varbarriere, in a low tone. "Thanks--you're very good, I'm sure," said Sir Jekyl, with a faint smile. "I--I wished very much to see you. I expect to be better very soon, and I thought I might have a word, as you are so good, in the meantime." "Very happy, indeed--most happy, as long as you please; but you must not try too much. You know they say you may disturb gout if you try too much, particularly at first," said Varbarriere, knowing very well how little gout really had to do with it. "Oh! no danger--doing very nicely," said Sir Jekyl. "That's well--that's very good," said Varbarriere, with a leisurely sympathy, looking on him all the time, and calling to mind how the Comte de Vigny looked after he received the sword-thrust of which he died in Varbarriere's house, to which he had been carried after his duel with young D'Harnois. And he came to the conclusion that Sir Jekyl looked a great deal better than the Comte had done--and, in fact, that he would do very well. CHAPTER XXXIV. Guy Deverell arrives. "Sit down, Herbert, I shan't keep you long. _There_, I've just been saying to Dives I think it's a pity we should quarrel any more--that is, if we can help it; and I don't see why we should not be friendly--I mean more friendly than, in fact, we have ever been--I don't; do you?" "Why, I see no reason--none; that is, of course, with the reservations that are--that are always assumed--I don't see any." Varbarriere was answering plausibly, politely, smiling. But it was not like last night, when for a few transient moments he had seemed moved from his equilibrium. There was no emotion now. It was diplomatic benignity. Still it was something. Here was his foe willing to hear reason. "It was just in my mind--Dives and I talking--I think I've seen some signs of liking between the young people--I mean your nephew and Beatrix." "Indeed!" interrupted Varbarriere, prolonging the last syllable after his wont, and raising his thick eyebrows in very naturally acted wonder. "Well, yes--only a sort of conjecture, you know--haven't you?" "Well, I--ha, ha! If I ever observed anything, it hasn't remained in my mind. But she is so lovely--Miss Marlowe--that I should not wonder. And you think--" "I think," said Sir Jekyl, supplying the pause, "if it be so, we ought not to stand in the way; and here's Dives, who thinks so too." "I--in fact, my brother, Jekyl, mentioned it, of course, to me--it would be a very happy mode of--of making matters--a--_happy_; and--and that, I think, was all that passed," said Dives, thus unexpectedly called into the debate. "This view comes on me quite by surprise. That the young fellow should adore at such a shrine is but to suppose him mortal," said Varbarriere, with something of his French air. "But--but you know the young lady--that's quite another thing--quite. Young ladies, you know, are not won all in a moment." "No, of course. We are so far all in the clouds. But I wished to say so much to you; and I prefer talking face to face, in a friendly way, to sending messages through an attorney." "A thousand thanks. I value the confidence, I assure you--yes, much better--quite right. And--and I shall be taking my leave to-morrow morning--business, my dear Sir Jekyl--and _greatly_ regret it; but I've outstayed my time very considerably." "Very sorry too--and only too happy if you could prolong it a little. _Could_ you, do you think?" Varbarriere shook his head, and thanked him with a grave smile again--but it was impossible. "It is a matter--such an arrangement, should it turn out practicable--on which we should reflect and perhaps consult a little. It sounds not unpromisingly, however; we can talk again perhaps, if you allow it, before I go." "So we can--you won't forget, and I shall expect to see you often and soon, mind." And so for the present they parted, Dives politely seeing him to the head of the stairs. "I think he entertains it," said Sir Jekyl to his brother. "Yes, certainly, he does--yes, he entertains it. But I suspect he's a cunning fellow, and you'll want all the help you can get, Jekyl, if it comes to settling a bargain." "I dare say," said Sir Jekyl, very tired. Meanwhile our friend Varbarriere was passing through the conservatory, the outer door of which stood open ever so little, tempering the warmth of its artificial atmosphere. He stopped before a file of late exotics, looking at them with a grave meaning smile, and smelling at them abstractedly. "Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? Selfish rogue! Could it be? A wedding, in which Guy, the son of that murdered friend, should act bridegroom, and the daughter of his murderer, bride; while he, the murderer, stood by smiling, and I, the witness, cried 'Amen' to the blessing! _Disgusting!_ Never, _never_--bah! The proposition shows weakness. Good--_very_ good! A come-down for you, Master Jekyl, when you sue for an alliance with Herbert Strangways! Oh! ho! ho! _Never!_" A little while later, Varbarriere, who was standing at the hall-door steps, saw a chaise approaching. He felt a presentiment of what was coming. It pulled up at the door. "No melodrama--no _fracas_--no foolery. Those young turkeys, my faith! they will be turkeys still. Here he comes, the hero of the piece! Well, what does it matter?" This was not articulated, spoken only in thought, and aloud he said-- "Ha!--Guy?" And the young man was on the ground in a moment, pale and sad, and hesitated deferentially, not knowing how his uncle might receive him. "So, here you are," said Varbarriere, coolly but not ill-humouredly. "Those rambles of yours are not much to the purpose, my friend, and cost some money--don't you see?" Guy bowed sadly, and looked, Varbarriere saw, really distressed. "Well, never mind--the expense need not trouble us," said Varbarriere, carelessly extending his hand, which Guy took. "We may be very good friends in a moderate way; and I'm not sorry you came, on the whole. Don't mind going in for a few minutes--you're very well--and let us come this way for a little." So side by side they turned the corner of the house, and paced up and down the broad quiet walk under the windows. "We must leave this immediately, Guy, Sir Jekyl is ill--more seriously I believe, than they fancy; not dangerously, but still a tedious thing. They call it gout, but I believe there is something more." "Indeed! How sudden!" exclaimed Guy. And to do him justice, he seemed both shocked and sad, although perhaps all his sorrow was not on Sir Jekyl's account. "And I'll be frank with you, Guy," continued Varbarriere. "I think I can see plainly, maybe, what has drawn you here. It is not I--it is not business--it is not Sir Jekyl. Who or what can it be?" "I--I thought, sir, my letter had explained." "And I am going away in the morning--and some of the party probably to-day; for there's no chance of Sir Jekyl's coming down for some time," continued Varbarriere, not seeming to hear Guy's interruptions. "_Very_ sorry!" said Guy, sincerely, and his eyes glanced along the empty windows. "And so, you see, this visit here leads pretty much to nothing," continued Varbarriere. "And it might be best to keep that carriage for a few minutes--eh?--and get into it, and drive back again to Slowton." "Immediately, sir?" "Immediately--yes. I'll join you there in the morning, and we can talk over your plans then. I do not know exactly--we must consider. I don't want to part in unkindness. I wish to give you a lift, Guy, if you'll let me." So said Varbarriere in his off-hand way. Guy bowed deferentially. "And see, nephew; there's a thing--_attend_, if you please," said Varbarriere, lowering his voice. "I attend, sir." "See--you answer upon your honour--do you hear?" "I do, sir. You hear nothing but truth from me." "Well, yes--very good. Is there--have you any correspondence in this house?" demanded the ponderous uncle, and his full dark eyes turned suddenly on the young man. "No, sir, no correspondence." "No one writes to you?" "No, sir." "Nor you to anyone?" "No, sir." "There must be no nonsense of that kind, Guy--I've told you so before--put it quite out of your head. You need not speak--I am merely discussing a hypothesis--quite out of your head. Nothing could ever come of it but annoyance. You know, of course, to whom all this relates; and I tell you it can't be. There are reasons you shall hear elsewhere, which are final." What Guy might have answered does not appear, for at that moment old Doocey joined them. "Oh! come back--how d'ye do?--going to break up here, I fancy;" this was to Varbarriere; "Sir Jekyl's in for a regular fit of it evidently. Old Sir Paul Blunket was talking to Pratt, their doctor here--and old fellows, you know, go into particulars" (Doocey, of course, was rather a young fellow), "and generally know more about things of this sort--and he says Dr. Pratt thinks he'll not be on his legs for a month, egad. So he says he's going either to-night or to-morrow--and I'm off this evening; so is Linnett. Can I do anything for you at Llandudno? Going there first, and I want to see a little of North Wales before the season grows too late." Varbarriere was grateful, but had nothing to transmit to Llandudno. "And--and Drayton--_he's_ going to stay," and he looked very sly. "An attraction, you know, _there_; besides, I believe he's related--is not he?--and, of course, old Lady Alice Redcliffe stays for chaperon. A great chance for Drayton." There was a young man at his elbow who thought Doocey the greatest coxcomb and fool on earth, except, perhaps, Drayton, and who suffered acutely and in silence under his talk. "Drayton's very spoony on her--eh?--the young lady, Miss Marlowe--haven't you observed?" murmured old Doocey, with a sly smile, to Varbarriere. "Very suitable it would be--fine estate, I'm told," answered Varbarriere; "and a good-looking young fellow too." "A--_rather_," acquiesced Doocey. "The kind of fellow that pays very well in a ball-room; he's got a lot to say for himself." "And good family," contributed Varbarriere, who was not sorry that old Doocey should go on lowering his extinguisher on Guy's foolish flame. "Well--well--_family_, you know--there's nothing very much of that--they--they--there was--it's not the family name, you know. But no one minds family now--all money--_we_'re a devilish deal better family, and so is Mr. Strangways here--all to nothing. I was telling him the other day who the Draytons are." Precisely at this moment, through a half-open upper window, there issued a sudden cry, followed by sobs and women's gabble. All stopped short--silent, and looking up-- "Some one crying," exclaimed Doocey, in an under-key. And they listened again. "Nothing bad, I hope," muttered Varbarriere, anxiously looking up like the rest. A maid came to the window to raise the sash higher, but paused, seeing them. "Come away, I say--hadn't we better?" whispered Doocey. "Let's go in and ask how he is," suggested Varbarriere suddenly, and toward the hall-door they walked. Was it something in the tone and cadence of this cry that made each in that party of three feel that a dreadful tragedy was consummated? I can't say--only they walked faster than usual, and in silence, like men anticipating evil news and hastening to a revelation. CHAPTER XXXV. I am Thine and Thou art Mine, Body and Soul, for ever. In order to understand the meaning of this cry, it will be necessary to mention that so soon as the corpulent and sombre visitor had left the bed-room of Sir Jekyl Marlowe, Dives lent his reverend aid to the nurse in adjusting his brother more comfortably in his bed; and he, like Varbarriere, took instinctively a comfortable and confident view of Sir Jekyl's case, so that when the officious handmaid of Æsculapius assumed her airs of direction he put aside her interference rather shortly. At all events, there was abundance of time to grow alarmed in, and certainly no need for panic just now. So Dives took his leave for the present, the Baronet having agreed with him that his visitors had better be allowed to disperse to their own homes, a disposition to do so having manifested itself here and there among them. Sir Jekyl, a little more easy in consequence of these manipulations, was lying back on pillows, with that pleasant confidence in his case at which a sanguine man so easily arrives, and already beginning to amuse himself with pictures in the uncertain future. The hospital nurse, sitting by a fire in that dim and faded study which opened from the sick-room, now and then rose, and with soundless steps drew near the half-open door, and sometimes peeped, and sometimes only listened. The patient was quiet. The woman sat down in that drowsy light, and ruminated, looking into the fire, with her feet on the fender, and a good deal of stocking disclosed; when, all on a sudden, she heard a rustling of a loose dress near her, and looking over her shoulder, surprised, still more so, saw a pale and handsome lady cross the floor from near the window to the door of Sir Jekyl's room, which she closed as she entered it. With her mouth open, the nurse stood up and gazed in the direction in which she had disappeared. Sir Jekyl, on the other hand, witnessed her entrance with a silent amazement, scarcely less than the nurse's. A few hurried steps brought her to his bedside, and looking down upon him with great agony, and her hands clasped together, she said, with a kind of sob-- "Thank God, thank God!--alive, alive! Oh, Jekyl, what hours of torture!" "Alive! to be sure I'm alive, little fool!" said the Baronet, with an effort, smiling uncomfortably. "They have not been telling you it's anything serious?" "They told me nothing. I've heard nothing. I've seen no one but Gwynn. Oh, Jekyl! tell me the truth; what do they say?--there's so much blood on the floor." "Why, my precious child, don't worry yourself about it; they evidently think it's nothing at all. I know it's nothing, only what they call, just, the muscles--you know--a little sore. I'll be on my legs again in a week." "I'm going to Wardlock, Jekyl; you'll hear news of me from there." Had the tone or the look something ineffably ominous? I know not. "Come, Jennie, none of that," he answered. "No folly. I've behaved very badly. _I_'ve been to blame; altogether _my_ fault. Don't tease yourself about what can't be helped. We must not do anything foolish, though. I'm tired of the world; so are you, Jennie; we are both sick of it. If we choose to live out of it, what the plague do we really lose?" At this moment the nurse, slowly opening the door a little, said, with a look of quiet authority-- "Please, sir, the doctor said particular you were not to talk, sir." "D--n you and the doctor--get out of that, and shut the door!" cried the Baronet; and the woman vanished, scared. "Give me your hand, Jennie darling, and don't look as if the sky had fallen. I'm not going to make my bow yet, I promise you." "And then, I suppose, a duel," said Lady Jane, wringing her hands in an agony. "Duel, you little fool! Why, there's no such thing now, that is, in these countries. Put fighting quite out of your head, and listen to me. You're right to keep quiet for a little time, and Wardlock is as good a place as any. I shall be all right again in a few days." "I can look no one in the face; no--never again--and Beatrix; and--oh, Jekyl, how will it be? I am half wild." "To be sure, everyone's half wild when an accident happens, till they find it really does not signify two pence. Can't you listen to me, and not run from one thing to another? and I'll tell you everything." With a trembling hand he poured some claret into a tumbler and drank it off, and was stronger. "He'll take steps, you know, and I'll help all I can; and when you're at liberty, by--I'll marry you, Jane, if you'll accept me. Upon my honour and soul, Jennie, I'll do exactly whatever you like. _Don't_ look so. _What_ frightens you? I tell you we'll be happier than you can think or imagine." Lady Jane was crying wildly and bitterly. "Fifty times happier than ever we could have been if this--this annoyance had not happened. We'll travel. I'll lay myself out to please you, every way, and make you happy; upon my soul I will, Jennie. I owe you everything I can do. We'll travel. We'll not try pharisaical England, but abroad, where people have common sense. Don't, don't go on crying, darling, that way; you can't hear me; and there's really nothing to tease yourself about--quite the contrary, you'll see; you'll like the people abroad much better than here--more common sense and good nature; positively better people, and a devilish deal more agreeable and--and cleverer. And why do you go on crying, Jennie? You must not; hang it! you'll put me in the dumps. You don't seem to hear me." "Yes, I do, I do; but it's all over, Jekyl, and I've come to bid you farewell, and on earth we'll never meet again," said Lady Jane, still weeping violently. "Come, little Jennie, you shan't talk like a fool. I've heard you long enough; you must listen to me--I have more to say." "Jekyl, Jekyl, I am sorry--oh! I'm sorry, for your sake, and for mine, I ever saw your face, and sorrier that I am to see you no more; but I've quite made up my mind--nothing shall change me--nothing--never. Good-bye, Jekyl. God forgive us. God bless you." "Come, Jane, I say, don't talk that way. What do you mean?" said the Baronet, holding her hand fast in his, and with his other hand encircling her wrist. "If you really do want to make me ill, Jennie, you'll talk in that strain. I know, of course, I've been very much to blame. It was all my fault, I said--I _say_--everything; but now you will be free, Jennie. I wish I had been worthy of you; I wish I had. No, you must not go. Wait a moment. I say, Jennie, I wish to Heaven I had made you marry me when you might; but I'll not let you go now; by Heaven, I'll never run a risk of losing you again." "No, Jekyl, no, I've made up my mind; it is all no use, I'll go. It is all over--quite over, for ever. Good-bye, Jekyl. God bless you. You'll be happier when we have parted--in a few days--a great deal happier; and as for me, I think I'm broken-hearted." "By ----, Jennie, you shan't go. I'll make you swear; you shall be my wife--by Heaven, you shall; we'll live and die together. You'll be happier than ever you were; we have years of happiness. I'll be whatever you like. I'll go to church--I'll be a Puseyite, or a Papist, or anything you like best. I'll--I'll--" And with these words Sir Jekyl let go her hand suddenly, and with a groping motion in the air, dropped back on the pillows. Lady Jane cried wildly for help, and tried to raise him. The nurse was at her side, she knew not how. In ran Tomlinson, who, without waiting for directions, dashed water in his face. Sir Jekyl lay still, with waxen face, and a fixed deepening stare. "Looks awful bad!" said Tomlinson, gazing down upon him. "The wine--the claret!" cried the woman, as she propped him under the head. "My God! what is it?" said Lady Jane, with white lips. The woman made no answer, but rather shouldered her, as she herself held the decanter to his mouth; and they could hear the glass clinking on his teeth as her hand trembled, and the claret flowed over his still lips and down upon his throat. "Lower his head," said the nurse; and she wiped his shining forehead with his handkerchief; and all three stared in his face, pale and stern. "Call the doctor," at last exclaimed the nurse. "He's not right." "Doctor's gone, I think," said Tomlinson, still gaping on his master. "_Send_ for him, _man_! I tell ye," cried the nurse, scarce taking her eyes from the Baronet. Tomlinson disappeared. "Is he better?" asked Lady Jane, with a gasp. "He'll never be better; I'm 'feared he's gone, ma'am," answered the nurse, grimly, looking on his open mouth, and wiping away the claret from his chin. "It can't be, my good Lord! it can't--quite well this minute--talking--why, it can't--it's only weakness, nurse! for God's sake, he's not--it is not--it can't be," almost screamed Lady Jane. The nurse only nodded her head sternly, with her eyes still riveted on the face before her. "He ought 'a bin let alone--the talkin's done it," said the woman in a savage undertone. In fact she had her own notions about this handsome young person who had intruded herself into Sir Jekyl's sick-room. She knew Beatrix, and that this was not she, and she did not like or encourage the visitor, and was disposed to be sharp, rude, and high with her. Lady Jane sat down, with her fingers to her temple, and the nurse thought she was on the point of fainting, and did not care. Donica Gwynn entered, scared by a word and a look from Tomlinson as he passed her on the stair. She and the nurse, leaning over Sir Jekyl, whispered for a while, and the latter said-- "Quite easy--off like a child--all in a minute;" and she took Sir Jekyl's hand, the fingers of which were touching the table, and laid it gently beside him on the coverlet. Donica Gwynn began to cry quietly, looking on the familiar face, thinking of presents of ribbons long ago, and school-boy days, and many small good-natured remembrances. CHAPTER XXXVI. In the Chaise. Hearing steps approaching, Donica recollected herself, and said, locking the room door-- "Don't let them in for a minute." "Who is she?" inquired the nurse, following Donica's glance. "Lady Jane Lennox." The woman looked at her with awe and a little involuntary courtesy, which Lady Jane did not see. "A relation--a--a sort of a niece like of the poor master--a'most a daughter like, allays." "Didn't know," whispered the woman, with another faint courtesy; "but she's better out o' this, don't you think, ma'am?" "Drink a little wine, Miss Jennie, dear," said Donica, holding the glass to her lips. "Won't you, darling?" She pushed it away gently, and got up, and looked at Sir Jekyl in silence. "Come away, Miss Jennie, darling, come away, dear, there's people at the door. It's no place for you," said Donica, gently placing her hand under her arm, and drawing her toward the study door. "Come in here, for a minute, with old Donnie." Lady Jane did go out unresisting, hurriedly, and weeping bitterly. Old Donica glanced almost guiltily over her shoulder; the nurse was hastening to the outer door. "Say nothing of us," she whispered, and shut the study door. "Come, Miss Jennie, darling; do as I tell you. They must not know." They crossed the floor; at her touch the false door with its front of fraudulent books opened. They were now in a dark passage, lighted only by the reflection admitted through two or three narrow lights near the ceiling, concealed effectually on the outside. The reader will understand that I am here describing the architectural arrangements, which I myself have seen and examined. At the farther end of this room, which is about twenty-three feet long, is a niche, in which stands a sort of cupboard. This swings upon hinges, secretly contrived, and you enter another chamber of about the same length. This room is almost as ill-lighted as the first, and was then stored with dusty old furniture, piled along both sides, the lumber of fifty years ago. From the side of this room a door opens upon the gallery, which door has been locked for half a century, and I believe could hardly be opened from without. At the other end of this dismal room is a recess, in one side of which is fixed an open press, with shelves in it; and this unsuspected press revolves on hinges also, shutting with a concealed bolt, and is, in fact, a door admitting to the green chamber. It is about five years since I explored, under the guidance of the architect employed to remove this part of the building, this mysterious suite of rooms; and knowing, as I fancied, thoroughly the geography of the house, I found myself with a shock of incredulity thus suddenly in the green chamber, which I fancied still far distant. Looking to my diary, in which I that day entered the figures copied from the ground plan of the house, I find a little column which explains how the distance from front to rear, amounting to one hundred and seventy-three feet, is disposed of. Measuring from the western front of the house, with which the front of the Window dressing-room stands upon a level, that of the green chamber receding about twelve feet:-- ft. in. Window dressing-room or hexagon 12 0 Green chamber 38 0 Recess 2 0 First dark room 23 0 Recess 1 6 Second dark room 23 0 Recess 1 6 Study 25 0 Wall 1 0 Sir Jekyl's bed-room 27 0 Ante-room 10 0 Stair, bow-window of which forms part of the eastern front 9 0 ------- 173 0 I never spoke to anyone who had made the same exploration who was not as much surprised as I at the unexpected solution of a problem which seemed to have proposed bringing the front and rear of this ancient house, by a "devilish cantrip slight," a hundred feet at least nearer to one another than stone mason and foot-rule had ordained. The rearward march from the Window dressing-room to the foot of the back stair, which ascends by the eastern wall of the house, hardly spares you a step of the full distance of one hundred and seventy-three feet, and thus impresses you with an idea of complete separation, which is enhanced by the remote ascent and descent. When you enter Sir Jekyl's room, you quite forget that its great window looking rearward is in reality nineteen feet nearer the front than the general line of the rear; and when you stand in that moderately proportioned room, his study, which appears to have no door but that which opens into his bed-room, you could not believe without the evidence of these figures, that there intervened but two rooms of three-and-twenty feet in length each, between you and that green chamber, whose bow-window ranks with the front of the house. Now Lady Jane sat in that hated room once more, a room henceforward loathed and feared in memory, as if it had been the abode of an evil spirit. Here, gradually it seemed, opened upon her the direful vista of the future; and as happens in tales of magic mirrors, when she looked into it her spirit sank and she fainted. When she recovered consciousness--the window open--eau de cologne, sal volatile, and all the rest around her, with cloaks about her knees, and a shawl over her shoulders, she sat and gazed in dark apathy on the floor for a time. It was the first time in her life she had experienced the supernatural panic of death. Where was Jekyl now? All irrevocable! Nothing in this moment's state changeable for ever, and ever, and ever! This gigantic and inflexible terror the human brain can hardly apprehend or endure; and, oh! when it concerns one for whom you would have almost died yourself! "Where is he? How can I reach him, even with the tip of my finger, to convey that one drop of water for which he moans now and now, and through all futurity?" Vain your wild entreaties. Can the dumb earth answer, or the empty air hear you? As the roar of the wild beast dies in solitude, as the foam beats in vain the blind cold precipice, so everywhere apathy receives your frantic adjuration--no sign, no answer. Now, when Donica returned and roused Lady Jane from her panic, she passed into a frantic state--the wildest self-upbraidings; things that made old Gwynn beat her lean hand in despair on the cover of her Bible. As soon as this frenzy a little subsided, Donica laid her hand firmly on the young lady's arm. "Come, Lady Jane, you must stop that," she said, sternly. "What _I_ hear matters nothing, but there's others that must not. The house full o' servants; _think_, my darling, and don't let yourself _down_. Come away with me to Wardlock--this is no place any longer for you--and let your maid follow. Come along, Miss Jennie; come, darling. Come by the glass door, there is no one there, and the chaise waiting outside. Come, miss, you must not lower yourself before the like o' them that's about the house." It was an accident; but this appeal did touch her pride. "Well, Donnie, I will. It matters little who now knows everything. Wait one moment--my face. Give me a towel." And with feminine precaution she hastily bathed her eyes and face, looking into the glass, and adjusted her hair. "A thick veil, Donnie." Old Gwynn adjusted it, and Lady Jane gathered in its folds in her hand; and behind this mask, with old Donnie near her, she glided down-stairs without encountering anyone, and entered the carriage, and lay back in one of its corners, leaving to Gwynn, who followed, to give the driver his directions. When they had driven about a mile, Lady Jane became strangely excited. "I must see him again--I _must_ see him. Stop it. I _will_. Stop it." She was tugging at the window, which was stiff. "Stop him, Gwynn. Stop him, woman, and turn back." "Don't, Miss Jennie; don't, darling. Ye could not, miss. Ye would not face all them strangers, ma'am." "Face them! What do you mean? _Face_ them! How dare they? I despise them--I _defy_ them! What is their staring and whispering to me? I'll go back. I'll return. I _will_ see him again." "Well, Miss Jennie, where's the good? He's cold by this time." "I must see him again, Donnie--I _must_." "You'll only see what will frighten you. You never saw a corpse, miss." "Oh! Donnie, Donnie, Donnie, don't--you mustn't. Oh! Donnie, yes, he's gone, he is--he's _gone_, Donnie, and _I_'ve been his ruin. I--I--my wicked, wretched vanity. He's gone, lost for ever, and it's _I_ who've done it all. It's _I_, Donnie. I've destroyed him." It was well that they were driving in a lonely place, over a rough way, and at a noisy pace, for in sheer distraction Lady Jane screamed these wild words of unavailing remorse. "Ah! my dear," expostulated Donica Gwynn. "_You_, indeed! Put that nonsense out of your head. _I_ know all about him, poor master Jekyl; a wild poor fellow he was always. _You_, indeed! Ah! it's little you know." Lady Jane was now crying bitterly into her handkerchief, held up to her face with both hands, and Donica was glad that her frantic fancy of returning had passed. "Donnie," she sobbed at last--"Donnie, you must never leave me. Come with me everywhere." "Better for you, ma'am, to stay with Lady Alice," replied old Donnie, with a slight shake of her head. "I--I'd rather die. She always hated him, and hated me. I tell you, Gwynn, I'd swallow poison first," said Lady Jane, glaring and flushing fiercely. "Odd ways, Miss Jane, but means kindly. We must a-bear with one another," said Gwynn. "I hate her. She has brought this about, the dreadful old woman. Yes, she always hated me, and now she's happy, for she has ruined me--quite ruined--for nothing--all for nothing--the cruel, dreadful old woman. Oh, Gwynn, is it all true? My God! is it true, or am I mad?" "Come, my lady, you must not take on so," said old Gwynn. "'Tisn't nothing, arter all, to talk so wild on. Doesn't matter here, shut up wi' me, where no one 'ears ye but old Gwynn, but ye must not talk at that gate before others, mind; there's no one talking o' ye yet--not a soul at Marlowe; no one knows nor guesses nothing, only you be ruled by me; you _know_ right well they can't guess nothink; and you must not be a fool and put things in people's heads, d'ye _see_?" Donica Gwynn spoke this peroration with a low, stern emphasis, holding the young lady's hand in hers, and looking rather grimly into her eyes. This lecture of Donica's seemed to awaken her to reflection, and she looked for a while into her companion's face without speaking, then lowered her eyes and turned another way, and shook old Gwynn's hand, and pressed it, and held it still. So they drove on for a good while in silence. "Well, then, I don't care for one night--just one--and to-morrow I'll go, and you with me; we'll go to-morrow." "But, my lady mistress, _she_ won't like that, mayhap." "Then _I_'ll go alone, that's all; for another night I'll not stay under her roof; and I think if I were like myself nothing could bring me there even for an hour; but I am not. I am quite worn out." Here was another long silence, and before it was broken they were among the hedgerows of Wardlock; and the once familiar landscape was around her, and the old piers by the roadside, and the florid iron gate, and the quaint and staid old manor-house rose before her like the scenery of a sick dream. The journey was over, and in a few minutes more she was sitting in her temporary room, leaning on her hand, and still cloaked and bonneted, appearing to look out upon the antique garden, with its overgrown standard pear and cherry trees, but, in truth, seeing nothing but the sharp face that had gazed so awfully into space that day from the pillow in Sir Jekyl's bed-room. CHAPTER XXXVII. Old Lady Alice talks with Guy. As Varbarriere, followed by Doocey and Guy, entered the hall, they saw Dives cross hurriedly to the library and shut the door. Varbarriere followed and knocked. Dives, very pallid, opened it, and looked hesitatingly in his face for a moment, and then said-- "Come in, come in, pray, and shut the door. You'll be--you'll be shocked, sir. He's gone--gone. Poor Jekyl! It's a terrible thing. He's gone, sir, quite suddenly." His puffy, bilious hand was on Varbarriere's arm with a shifting pressure, and Varbarriere made no answer, but looked in his face sternly and earnestly. "There's that poor girl, you know--my niece. And--and all so unexpected. It's awful, sir." "I'm very much shocked, sir. I had not an idea there was any danger. I thought him looking very far from actual danger. I'm _very_ much shocked." "And--and things a good deal at sixes and sevens, I'm afraid," said Dives--"law business, you know." "Perhaps it would be well to detain Mr. Pelter, who is, I believe, still here," suggested Varbarriere. "Yes, certainly; thank you," answered Dives, eagerly ringing the bell. "And I've a chaise at the door," said Varbarriere, appropriating Guy's vehicle. "A melancholy parting, sir; but in circumstances so sad, the only kindness we can show is to withdraw the restraint of our presence, and to respect the sanctity of affliction." With which little speech, in the artificial style which he had contracted in France, he made his solemn bow, and, for the last time for a good while, shook the Rev. Dives, now Sir Dives Marlowe, by the hand. When our friend the butler entered, it was a comfort to see one countenance on which was no trace of flurry. _Nil admirari_--his manner was a philosophy, and the convivial undertaker had acquired a grave suavity of demeanour and countenance, which answered all occasions--imperturbable during the comic stories of an after-dinner sederunt--imperturbable now on hearing the other sort of story, known already, which the Rev. Dives Marlowe recounted, and offered, with a respectful inclination, his deferential but very short condolences. Varbarriere in the meanwhile looked through the hall vestibule and from the steps, in vain, for his nephew! He encountered Jacques, however, but he had not seen Guy, which when Varbarriere, who was in one of his deep-seated fusses, heard, he made a few _sotto voce_ ejaculations. "Tell that fellow--he's in the stable-yard, I dare say--who drove Mr. Guy from Slowton, to bring his chaise round this moment; we shall return. If his horses want rest, they can have it in the town, Marlowe, close by; I shall send a carriage up for you; and you follow, with all our things, immediately for Slowton." So Jacques departed, and Varbarriere did not care to go up-stairs to his room. He did not like meeting people; he did not like the chance of hearing Beatrix cry again; he wished to be away, and his temper was savage. He could have struck his nephew over the head with his cane for detaining him. But Guy had been summoned elsewhere. As he walked listlessly before the house, a sudden knocking from the great window of Lady Mary's boudoir caused him to raise his eyes, and he saw the grim apparition of old Lady Alice beckoning to him. As he raised his hat, she nodded at him, pale, scowling like an evil genius, and beckoned him fiercely up with her crooked fingers. Another bow, and he entered the house, ascended the great stair, and knocked at the door of the boudoir. Old Lady Alice's thin hand opened it. She nodded in the same inauspicious way, pointed to a seat, and shut the door before she spoke. Then, he still standing, she took his hand, and said, in tones unexpectedly soft and fond-- "Well, dear, how have you been? It seems a long time, although it's really nothing. Quite well, I hope?" Guy answered, and inquired according to usage; and the old lady said-- "Don't ask for me; never ask. I'm _never_ well--always the same, dear, and I hate to think of myself. You've heard the dreadful intelligence--the frightful event. What _will_ become of my poor niece? Everything in distraction. But Heaven's will be done. I shan't last long if this sort of thing is to continue--quite impossible. There--don't speak to me for a moment. I wanted to tell you, you must come to me; I have a great deal to say," she resumed, having smelt a little at her vinaigrette; "but not just now. I'm not equal to all this. You know how I've been tried and shattered." Guy was too well accustomed to be more than politely alarmed by those preparations for swooning which Lady Alice occasionally saw fit to make; and in a little while she resumed-- "Sir Jekyl has been taken from us--he's gone--awfully suddenly. I wish he had had a little time for preparation. Ho, dear! _poor_ Jekyl! Awful! But we all bow to the will of Providence. I fear there has been some dreadful mismanagement. I always said and knew that Pratt was a quack--positive infatuation. But there's no good in looking to secondary causes, Won't you sit down?" Guy preferred standing. The hysterical ramblings of this selfish old woman did not weary or disgust him. Quite the contrary; he would have prolonged them. Was she not related to Beatrix, and did not this kindred soften, beautify, glorify that shrivelled relic of another generation, and make him listen to her in a second-hand fascination? "You're to come to me--d'ye see?--but not immediately. There's a--there's some one there at present, and I possibly shan't be at home. I must remain with poor dear Beatrix a little. She'll probably go to Dartbroke, you know; yes, _that_ would not be a bad plan, and I of course must consider her, poor thing. When you grow a little older you'll find you must often sacrifice yourself, my dear. I've served a long apprenticeship to that kind of thing. You must come to Wardlock, to my house; I have a great deal to say and tell you, and you can spend a week or so there very pleasantly. There are some pictures and books, and some walks, and everybody looks at the monuments in the church. There are two of them--the Chief Justice of Chester and Hugo de Redcliffe--in the "Gentleman's Magazine." I'll show it to you when you come, and you can have the carriage, provided you don't tire the horses; but you must come. I'm your kinswoman--I'm your relation--I've found it all out--very near--your poor dear father." Here Lady Alice dried her eyes. "Well, it's time enough. You see how shattered I am, and so pray don't urge me to talk any more just now. I'll write to you, perhaps, if I find myself able; and _you_ write to _me_, mind, directly, and address to Wardlock Manor, Wardlock. Write it in your pocket-book or you'll forget it, and put "to be forwarded" on it. Old Donica will see to it. She's very careful, I _think_; and you promise you'll come?" Guy did promise; so she said-- "Well, dear, till we meet, good-bye; _there_, God bless you, dear." And she drew his hand toward her, and he felt the loose soft leather of her old cheek on his as she kissed him, and her dark old eyes looked for a moment in his, and then she dismissed him with-- "There, dear, I can't talk any more at present; there, farewell. God bless you." Down through that changed, mysterious house, through which people now trod softly, and looked demure, and spoke little on stair or lobby, and that in whispers, went Guy Deverell, and glanced upward, involuntarily, as he descended, hoping that he might see the beloved shadow of Beatrix on the wall, or even the hem of her garment; but all was silent and empty, and in a few seconds more he was again in the chaise, sitting by old Varbarriere, who was taciturn and ill-tempered all the way to Slowton. By that evening all the visitors but the Rev. Dives Marlowe and old Lady Alice, who remained with Beatrix, had taken flight. Even Pelter, after a brief consultation with Dives, had fled Londonwards, and the shadow and silence of the chamber of death stole out under the door and pervaded all the mansion. That evening Lady Alice recovered sufficient strength to write a note to Lady Jane, telling her that in consequence of the death of Sir Jekyl, it became her duty to remain with her niece for the present at Marlowe. It superadded many religious reflections thereupon; and offering to her visitor at Wardlock the use of that asylum, and the society and attendance of Donica Gwynn, it concluded with many wholesome wishes for the spiritual improvement of Lady Jane Lennox. Strangely enough, these did not produce the soothing and elevating effect that might have been expected; for when Lady Jane read the letter she tore it into strips and then into small squares, and stamped upon the fragments more like her fierce old self than she had appeared for the previous four-and-twenty hours. "Come, Donica, you write to say I leave this to-morrow, and that you come with me. You said you'd wish it--you must not draw back. You would not desert me?" I fancy her measures were not quite so precipitate, for some arrangements were indispensable before starting for a long sojourn on the Continent. Lady Jane remained at Wardlock, I believe, for more than a week; and Donica, who took matters more peaceably in her dry way, obtained, without a row, the permission of Lady Alice to accompany the forlorn young wife on her journey. CHAPTER XXXVIII. Something more of Lady Jane Lennox. "See, Doctor Pratt--how do you do?--you've been up-stairs. I--I was anxious to see you--most anxious--this shocking, dreadful occurrence," said the Reverend Dives Marlowe, who waylaid the Doctor as he came down, and was now very pale, hurrying him into the library as he spoke, and shutting the door. "The nurse is gone, you know, and all quiet; and--and the quieter the better, because, you know, that poor girl Beatrix my niece, she has not a notion there was any hurt--a wound, you see, and knows nothing in fact. I'll go over and see that Slowton doctor--a--a gentleman. I forget his name. There's no need--I've considered it--none in the world--of a--a--that miserable ceremony, you know." "I don't quite follow you, sir," observed Doctor Pratt, looking puzzled. "I mean--I mean a--a coroner--that a----" "Oh! I see--I--I see," answered Pratt. "And I went up, poor fellow; there's no blood--nothing. It may have been apoplexy, or any natural cause, for anything I know." "Internal hæmorrhage--an abrasion, probably, of one of the great vessels; and gave way, you see, in consequence of his over-exerting himself." "Exactly; a blood-vessel has given way--I see," said the Reverend Dives; "internal hæmorrhage. I see, exactly; and I--I know that Slowton doctor won't speak any more than you, my dear Pratt, but I may as well see him, don't you think? And--and there's really no need for all that terrible misery of an inquest." "Well, you know, it's not for me; the--the family would act naturally." "The family! why, look at that poor girl, my niece, in hysterics! I would not stake that--that _hat_ there, I protest, on her preserving her wits, if all that misery were to be gone through." "Does Lady Alice know anything of it?" "Lady Alice Redcliffe? Quite right, sir--very natural inquiry;--not a syllable. She's, you know, not a--a person to conceal things; but she knows and suspects nothing; and no one--that nurse, you told me, thought the hurt was an operation--not a soul suspects." And thus the Reverend Dives agreed with himself that the scandal might be avoided; and thus it came to pass that the county paper, with a border of black round the paragraph, announced the death of Sir Jekyl Marlowe, Baronet, at the family residence of Marlowe Manor, in this county, the immediate cause of his death being the rupture of a blood-vessel in the lungs, attended by internal hæmorrhage. By the death of Sir Jekyl Marlowe, it further stated, "a seat in Parliament and a deputy lieutenancy for this county become vacant." Then came a graceful tribute to Sir Jekyl's value as a country gentleman, followed by the usual summary from the "Peerage," and the fact that, leaving no male issue, he would be succeeded in his title and the bulk of his estates by his brother, the Reverend Dives Marlowe. So in due course this brother figured as the Reverend Sir Dives Marlowe, and became proprietor of Marlowe Manor, where, however, he does not reside, preferring his sacred vocation, and the chance of preferment--for he has grown, they say, very fond of money--to the worldly life and expensive liabilities of a country gentleman. The Reverend Sir Dives Marlowe, Bart., is still unmarried. It is said, however, that he was twice pretty near making the harbour of matrimony. Lady Bateman, the relict of Sir Thomas, was his first object, and matters went on satisfactorily until the stage of business was arrived at; when unexpectedly the lovers on both sides were pulled up and thrown on their haunches by a clause in Sir Thomas's will, the spirit of which is contained in the Latin words, _durante viduitate_. Over this they pondered, recovered their senses, shook hands, and in the name of prudence parted good friends, which they still are. The second was the beautiful and accomplished Miss D'Acre. In earlier days the Reverend Dives would not have dreamed of anything so imprudent. Time, however, which notoriously does so much for us, if he makes us sages in some particulars, in others, makes us spoonies. It is hard to say what might have happened if a more eligible bridegroom had not turned up in George St. George Lighton, of Seymour Park, Esq. So that Dives' love passages have led to nothing, and of late years he has attempted no further explorations in those intricate ways. I may as well here mention all I know further about Lady Jane Lennox. I cannot say exactly how soon she left Wardlock, but she did not await Lady Alice's return, and, I think, has never met her since. Sir Jekyl Marlowe's death was, I suppose, the cause of the abandonment of General Lennox's resolution to proceed for a divorce. He remained in England for fully four months after the Baronet's death, evidently awaiting any proceedings which the family might institute, in consequence, against him. Upon this point he was fiercely obstinate, and his respectable solicitor even fancied him "cracked." With as little _fracas_ as possible, a separation was arranged--no difficult matter--for the General was open-handed, and the lady impatient only to be gone. It was a well-kept secret; the separation, of course, a scandal, but its exact cause enveloped in doubt. A desperate quarrel, it was known, had followed the General's return from town, but which of the younger gentlemen, then guests at Marlowe, was the hero of the suspicion, was variously conjectured. The evidence of sojourners in the house only deepened the mystery. Lady Jane had not shown the least liking for anyone there. It was thought by most to have a reference to those old London stories which had never been quite proved. A few even went the length of conjecturing that something had turned up about the old General, which had caused the explosion. With an elderly female cousin, Donica Gwynn, and her maid, she went abroad, where she has continued nearly ever since, living rather solitarily, but not an outcast--a woman who had been talked about unpleasantly, but never convicted--perhaps quite blameless, and therefore by no means excluded. But a secret sorrow always sat at her heart. The last look of that bad man, who, she believed, had loved her truly though guiltily--summoned as he talked with her--irrevocably gone. Where was he now? How was it with him? "Oh, Jekyl! Jekyl! If I could only know if we are ever to meet again--forgiven!" With fingers clasped together under her cloak, and eyes upturned to the stars in the beautiful Italian skies, she used, as she walked to and fro alone on the terrace of her villa, to murmur these agonised invocations. The heedless air received them; the silent stars shone cold above, inexorably bright. But Time, who dims the pictures, as well as heals the wounds of the past, spread his shadows and mildews over these ghastly images; and as her unselfish sorrow subsided, the sense of her irrevocable forfeiture threw its everlengthening shadow over her mind. "I see how people think--some wonder at me, some accept me, some flatter me--all suspect me." So thought she, with a sense of sometimes nearly insupportable loneliness, of resentment she could not express, and of restlessness--dissatisfied with the present, hopeless of the future. It was a life without an object, without a retrospect--no technical compromise, but somehow a fall--a fall in which she bitterly acquiesced, yet which she fiercely resented. I don't know that her Bible has yet stood her in stead much. She has practised vagaries--Tractarian sometimes, and sometimes Methodist. But there is a yearning, I am sure, which will some day lead her to hope and serenity. It is about a year since I saw the death of General Lennox in the "Times," an event which took place rather suddenly at Vichy. I am told that his will contains no allusion to Lady Jane. This, however, was to have been expected, for the deed of separation had amply provided for her; so now she is free. But I have lately heard from old Lady Alice, who keeps her memory and activity wonderfully, and maintains a correspondence with old Donnie Gwynn, that she shows no symptom of a disposition to avail herself of her liberty. I have lived long enough to be surprised at nothing, and therefore should not wonder if hereafter she should do so. CHAPTER XXXIX. The Last. Old Lady Alice, who liked writing and reading letters, kept up an active correspondence with her grandson, and that dutiful young gentleman received them with an interest, and answered them with a punctuality that did him honour. Shortly after Lady Jane Lennox's departure from Wardlock, Lady Alice Redcliffe and her fair young charge, Beatrix, arrived at that discreet old dower house. Old Lady Alice, who, when moved, could do a good-natured thing, pitying the solitariness of her pretty guest, so soon as she thought her spirits would bear it, invited first the Miss Radlowes, and afterwards the Miss Wynkletons--lively young ladies of Beatrix's time of life--who helped to make Wardlock less depressing. These hospitalities led to "invites;" and so the time passed over without the tedium that might have been looked for, until the period drew near when Beatrix was to make the Italian tour she had arranged with that respectable and by no means disagreeable family, the Fentons of Appleby. A rumour reached Guy that Drayton was to be one of the party. This certainly was not pleasant. He alluded to it in his next letter, but Lady Alice chose to pass the subject by. There had been no step actually taken in the threatened lawsuit since the death of Sir Jekyl. But there were unpleasant rumours, and Pelter and Crowe were in communication with the Rev. Sir Dives Marlowe on the subject, and he occasionally communicated his peevish sense of poor Jekyl's unreasonableness in having died just when everything was at sixes and sevens, and the unfairness of his having all the trouble and so little of the estates. Varbarriere, I suppose, was on good terms once more with his nephew. There was no more talk of Algeria, and they were now again in London. That corpulent old gentleman used to smile with an unctuous scorn over the long letters with which Lady Alice occasionally favoured him. "My faith! she must suppose I have fine leisure, good eyes also, to read all that. I wish, Guy, she would distinguish only you with her correspondence. I suppose if I answer her never, she will cease some time." He had a letter from her while in London, on which he discoursed in the above vein. I doubt that he ever read it through. Guy received one by the same post, in the conclusion of which she said-- "Beatrix Marlowe goes in a few days, with the Fentons, to Paris, and thence to Italy. My house will then be a desert, and I miserably solitary, unless you and your uncle will come to me, as you long since promised, and as you well know there is nothing to prevent. I have written to him, naming Wednesday week. I shall then have rooms in which to place you, and you positively must not refuse." Under this hospitable pressure, Varbarriere resolved to make the visit to Wardlock--a flying visit of a day and night--rather to hear what she might have to say than to enjoy the excellent lady's society. From Slowton, having there got rid of their railway dust and vapour, the gentlemen reached Wardlock at the approach of evening. In the hall they found old Lady Alice, her thin stooping figure cloaked and shawled for a walk, and her close bonnet shading her hollow and wrinkled face. Hospitable in her way, and really glad to see her guests, was the crone. She would have dismantled and unbonneted, and called for luncheon, and would have led the way into the parlour; but they would not hear of such things, having refreshed at Slowton, and insisted instead on joining the old lady in her walk. There is a tall glass door in the back hall, which opens on the shorn grass, and through it they passed into the circumscribed but pretty pleasure-ground, a quadrangle, of which the old house, overgrown with jessamine and woodbine, formed nearly one side; the opposite garden wall, overtopped with ancient fruit-trees, another; and screens of tall-stemmed birch and ash, and an underwood of juniper and evergreens, the others; beds of brilliant verbena here and there patterned the green sod; and the whole had an air so quaint and cloister-like, as drew forth some honest sentences of admiration from old Varbarriere. They strolled among these flowers in this pleasant seclusion for a time, until Lady Alice pronounced herself fatigued, and sat down upon a rustic seat, with due ceremony of adjustment and assistance. "Sit down by me, Mr. Strangways. Which am I to call you, by-the-bye?" "Which you please, madam," answered Varbarriere, with the kind of smile he used with her--deferential, with, nevertheless, a suspicion of the scornful and amused in it, and as he spoke he was seated. "As for you, grandson," she continued, "you had better take a walk in the garden--you'll find the door open;" she pointed with her parasol to the old-fashioned fluted door-case of Caen stone in the garden wall; "and I want to talk a little to my friend, M. de Varbarriere--Mr. Strangways, as I remember him." And turning to that sage, she said-- "You got my letter, and have well considered it, I trust?" "I never fail to consider well anything that falls from Lady Alice Redcliffe." "Well, sir, I must tell you----" These were the last words that Guy heard as he departed, according to orders, to visit her ladyship's old-fashioned garden. Could a young fellow fancy a duller entertainment? Yet to Guy Deverell it was not dull. Everything he looked on here was beautified and saddened by the influence that had been there so recently and was gone. Those same roses, whose leaves were dropping to the earth, she had seen but a day or two ago in their melancholy clusters; under these tall trees she had walked, here on this rustic seat she had rested; and Guy, like a reverent worshipper of relics, sat him down in the same seat, and, with a strange thrill, fancied he saw a pencilled word or two on the arm of it. But no, it was nothing, only the veining of the wood. Why do ladies use their pencils so much less than we men, and so seldom (those I mean whose relics are precious) trace a line by chance, and throw this bread upon the waters, where we poor devils pull cheerless against wind and tide? Here were flowers, too, tied up on tall sticks. He wondered whether Beatrix ever tended these with her delicate fingers, and he rose and looked at the bass-mat with inexpressible feeling. Then, on a sudden, he stopped by a little circle of annuals, overgrown, run into pod, all draggled, but in the centre a split stick and a piece of bleached paper folded and stuck across it. Had she written the name of the flower, which perhaps she sowed? and he plucked the stick from the earth, and with tender fingers unfolded the record. In a hideous scrawl, evidently the seedsman's, "Lupines" sprawled across the weather-beaten brown paper. He raised his eyes with a sigh, and perceived that the respectable gardener, in a blue body-coat with brass buttons, was at hand, and eyed him with a rather stern inquisitiveness. Guy threw the stick down carelessly, feeling a little foolish, and walked on with more swagger than usual. And now he had entered that distant part of the garden where dark and stately yew hedges, cut here and there in arches, form a meditative maze. With the melancholy yearnings of a lover he gazed on these, no doubt the recent haunts of that beautiful creature who was his day-dream. With a friendly feeling he looked on the dark wall of yew on either side; and from this solemn walk he turned into another, and--saw Beatrix! More beautiful than ever he thought her--her features a little saddened. Each gazed on the other, as the old stories truly say in such cases, with changing colour. Each had imagined the other more than a hundred miles away. Neither had fancied a meeting likely, perhaps possible. The matter hung upon the wills of others, who might never consent until too late. A few days would see Beatrix on her way to Italy with the Fentons; and yet here were she and Guy Deverell, by the sleight of that not ill-natured witch, old Lady Alice, face to face. I don't know exactly what Guy said. I don't know what she answered. The rhetoric was chiefly his; but he held her hand in his, and from time to time pleaded, not quite in vain, for a word from the goddess with glowing cheeks and downcast eyes, by whose side he walked. Low were those tones, and few those words, that answered his impetuous periods; yet there was a magic in them that made him prouder and more blessed than ever his hopes had dared to promise. Sometimes they stopped, sometimes they walked slowly on, quite unconscious whether they moved or paused--whether the birds sang or were silent--of all things but their love--in a beautiful dream. They had surprised one another, and now in turn both were surprised by others; for under one of those airy arches cut so sharply in the yew hedge, on a sudden, stood old Lady Alice and Monsieur Varbarriere--the Enchanter and the Fairy at the close of a tale. Indulgently, benevolently, the superior powers looked on. The young people paused, abashed. A sharp little nod from Lady Alice told them they were understood. Varbarriere came forward, and took the young lady's hand very kindly, and held it very long, and at the close of his salutation, stooping towards her pretty ear, murmured something, smiling, which made her drop her eyes again. "I think you both might have waited until I had spoken to you; however, it does not signify much. I don't expect to be of any great consequence, or in any great request henceforward." Her grandson hastened to plead his excuses, which were received, I must allow, with a good grace. In matters of true love, I have observed, where not only Cupid applauds, but Plutus smiles, Hymen seldom makes much pother about his share in the business. Beatrix did _not_ make that tour with the Fentons. They, on the contrary, delayed their departure for rather more than a month; and I find Miss Fenton and Miss Arabella Fenton among the bridesmaids. Drayton did not attend the wedding, and oddly enough, was married only about three weeks after to Lady Justina Flynston, who was not pretty, and had but little money; and they say he has turned out rather cross, and hates the French and all their products, as "utter rot." Varbarriere has established two great silk-factories, and lives in France, where they say gold pours in upon him in streams before which the last editor of "Aladdin" and Mr. Kightley of the "Ancient Mythology" hang their heads. His chief "object" is the eldest son of the happy union which we have seen celebrated a few lines back. They would have called the boy Herbert, but Varbarriere would not hear of anything but Guy. They say that he is a prodigy of beauty and cleverness. Of course, we hear accounts of infant phenomena with allowance. All I can say is, "If he's not handsome it's very odd, and he has at least as good a right to be clever as most boys going." And as in these pages we have heard something of a father, a son, and a grandson, each bearing the same name, I think I can't do better than call this tale after them--GUY DEVERELL. THE END. PRINTING OFFICE OF THE PUBLISHER. 
45749	----	A CHANGE OF AIR [Illustration: ANTHONY HOPE HAWKINS.] A CHANGE OF AIR. BY ANTHONY HOPE AUTHOR OF "THE PRISONER OF ZENDA," ETC. [Illustration] NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 1894 COPYRIGHT, 1894, BY HENRY HOLT & CO. THE MERSHON COMPANY PRESS, RAHWAY, N. J. CONTENTS. CHAPTER PAGE "ANTHONY HOPE", vii I. A MISSION TO THE HEATHEN, 1 II. THE NEW MAN AT LITTLEHILL, 7 III. DENBOROUGH DETERMINES TO CALL, 16 IV. A QUIET SUNDAY AFTERNOON, 26 V. THE NECESSARY SCAPEGOAT, 36 VI. LITTLEHILL GOES INTO SOCIETY, 47 VII. "TO A PRETTY SAINT," 57 VIII. AN INDISCREET DISCIPLE, 67 IX. DALE'S OWN OPINION, 77 X. A PREJUDICED VERDICT, 87 XI. A FABLE ABOUT BIRDS, 98 XII. A DEDICATION--AND A DESECRATION, 106 XIII. THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF GENIUS, 114 XIV. MR. DELANE LIKES THE IDEA, 123 XV. HOW IT SEEMED TO THE DOCTOR, 132 XVI. "NO MORE KINGS," 141 XVII. DALE TRIES HIS HAND AT AN ODE, 153 XVIII. DELILAH JOHNSTONE, 161 XIX. A WELL-PAID POEM, 169 XX. AN EVENING'S END, 177 XXI. "THE OTHER GIRL DID," 183 XXII. THE FITNESS OF THINGS, 191 XXIII. A MORBID SCRUPLE, 200 XXIV. THE HEROINE OF THE INCIDENT, 208 XXV. THE SCENE OF THE OUTRAGE, 219 XXVI. AGAINST HER BETTER JUDGMENT, 229 XXVII. A VILLAIN UNMASKED, 237 XXVIII. A VISION, 245 "ANTHONY HOPE." In his speech at the annual banquet of the Royal Academy in 1894, among many other good things, Mr. Andrew Lang said: "The thrifty plan of giving us sermons, politics, fiction, all in one stodgy sandwich, produces no permanent literature, produces but temporary 'tracts for the times.' Fortunately we have among us many novelists--young ones, luckily--who are true to the primitive and eternal, the Fijian canons of fiction. We have Oriental romance from the author of 'Plain Tales from the Hills.' We have the humor and tenderness--certainly not Fijian, I admit--which produces that masterpiece 'A Window in Thrums'; we have the adventurous fancy that gives us 'A Gentleman of France,' 'The Master of Ballantrae,' 'Micah Clarke,' 'The Raiders,' 'The Prisoner of Zenda.'" The last of these books was by Anthony Hope Hawkins, whom Mr. Lang thus classed among potential immortals. This romance has made him within the last three months fairly famous. Walter Besant, too, has stamped it with his high approval, and the English and American press have been unusually unanimous in their praise. Its hero is a rare and striking figure, and thoroughly represents the ideal soldier of our Anglo-Saxon race. He faces great dangers and does brave deeds, quietly and quickly. He suffers and loves deeply, but says little. In his portrayal, the possibilities of "repressed emotion" have been startlingly indicated. He appeals to Americans and English far more than the swaggering and loquacious, though more historic heroes of Dumas and his school ever can. Much curiosity has been excited regarding "Anthony Hope." The author's methods of composition and what may have suggested the very original plot are as yet unknown. Besides what we may get from his portrait, we are told that he is "a tall, thin, dark man, with a face that would be ascetic if it were not bubbling with humor." He is a lawyer, as other good romancers have been before him, and has chambers in the Middle Temple, a place made famous in fiction by Thackeray and on the stage by Pinero. His profession and politics are his chief concerns, and literature a diversion in his leisure hours. He is an extremely modest man, and in response to a request from his American publishers for autobiographical matter, gave the barest facts of his life. He expressed absolutely no opinion on literary canons or on his own work. There was, however, a rare sincerity and cordiality in his letters. Anthony Hope Hawkins was born in 1863, his father being the Rev. E. C. Hawkins of St. Brides, Fleet Street, London. He was educated at Marlborough, and at Balliol College, Oxford, of which he was a scholar. At Oxford, he was a hard worker and obtained first classes in Classical Moderations and in the School of Litteræ Humaniores, commonly known as "Greats." At this university, where he attained the degree of M. A. some eight years ago, he began to show an aptitude for public life, was a striking figure among his contemporaries, and became president of the Union. In 1892 he stood as a Liberal candidate for a seat in Parliament from the southern division of Buckinghamshire, but was defeated by Viscount Curzon. His first book, "A Man of Mark," was published in 1890, and was followed next year by "Father Stafford," an interesting study of an Anglican priest's struggles between love and sense of obligation to his vow of celibacy. The pictures of his cheerless ascetic life are marked by the sincerity conspicuous in Mr. Hawkins' later books. Some very thoughtful conversations on art and on religion are introduced. In 1892 appeared "Mr. Witt's Widow, a Frivolous Tale" of a lady who had "harmonious contrasts," such as dark eyes and golden hair. It foreshadows the power in plot-making that characterizes our author's later works. In the spring of 1893 appeared "Sport Royal," a collection of Mr. Hawkins' short stories, mostly from the _St. James' Gazette_. In "Half a Hero," published last year, there are several foreshadowings of "The Prisoner of Zenda." In both stories the scene is imaginary, but given realism by characteristics respectively of New Zealand and of Germany; in both intrigues and heroism are conspicuous, though in the latter the author did not adopt the old device of giving his hero some bad qualities to make him human. "Half a Hero" contains much firm, crisp character-drawing, and a strong love interest, but has the slight taint of the "purpose novel," already noted in Father Stafford; in this case, the discussion being politics, especially the "labor" element. Anthony Hope inherited refinement through a father in an exalted calling; he used his college advantages to the utmost, and now his interests are in living public affairs, and in his chosen calling as a lawyer, he has good opportunities to study life, and seems already to have well mastered the best elements of Anglo-Saxon character. From his work, he appears to have read widely and with a sympathetic eye for the merits of markedly diverse writers, which he seems to make his own. His style has the terseness and suggestiveness characteristic of Kipling, but without his harshness, and at times he shows a sense of beauty almost worthy of our own Hawthorne, and withal the military dash and snap of Lever. It would be strange if the foundation for the remarkably life-like colonists of "Half a Hero," and the German officers of "The Prisoner of Zenda," had had not been laid by travel and the observation of their more or less remote prototypes. "A Change of Air," while containing much of its humor and snap, furnishes a marked contrast to "The Prisoner of Zenda," and is in a more serious vein, having a strong and tragic undercurrent, and not without an element of peril. Confining its occurrences pretty severely to the possible and generally probable, it nevertheless is highly original. Dale Bannister, the wild young poet, who commences by thoroughly scandalizing Market Denborough, is a most picturesque and uncommon character. The effect of his early principles on his later life is deftly indicated. The story moves on steadily, and while it teaches a lesson of moderation and charity, it does so entirely by the acts and thoughts of the characters without any sermonizing on the part of the author. Some good authorities that have seen this book place it even above "The Prisoner of Zenda," which we probably shall see on the stage next year, as the author has a friend busily engaged on its dramatization. R. H. _July, 1894._ A CHANGE OF AIR. CHAPTER I. =A Mission to the Heathen.= When the Great King, that mirror of a majesty whereof modern times have robbed the world, recoiled aghast from the threatened indignity of having to wait, he laid his finger with a true touch on a characteristic incident of the lot of common men, from which it was seemly that the state of God's Vicegerents should be free. It was a small matter, no doubt, a thing of manners merely, and etiquette; yet manners and etiquette are first the shadowed expression of facts and then the survival of them; the reverence once paid to power, and now accorded, in a strange mixture of chivalry and calculation, to mere place whence power has fled. The day of vicegerents is gone, and the day of officers has come; and it is not unknown that officers should have to wait, or even--such is the insolence, no longer of office, but of those who give it--should altogether go without. Yet, although everybody has now to wait, everybody has not to wait the same length of time. For example, a genius needs not wait so long for what he wants as a fool--unless, as chances now and then, he be both a genius and a fool, when probably his waiting will be utterly without end. In a small flat in Chelsea, very high toward heaven, there sat one evening in the summer, two young men and a genius; and the younger of the young men, whose name was Arthur Angell, said discontentedly to the genius: "The brute only sent me ten and sixpence. What did you get for yours?" The genius blushed and murmured apologetically: "That agent chap I've sold myself to got twenty pounds for it." The second young man, who was not so young, being, in fact, well turned of thirty, and growing bald, took his pipe out of his mouth, and, pointing the stem first at the genius, then at Arthur Angell, and lastly, like a knife, at his own breast, said: "Pounds--shillings--and pence. He sent me nothing at all." A pause followed, and the genius began: "Look here, you fellows----" But Philip Hume went on: "Ten and sixpence is a good sum of money, a comfortable sum of money, and, my dear Arthur, I should say the full value of your poem. As to Dale's poem, who knows the value of Dale's poem? By what rod shall you measure----" He broke off with a laugh at Dale's gesture of protest. "I'm making the deuce of a lot of money," said Dale in an awestruck tone. "It's rolling in. I don't know what to do with it." "Littlehill will swallow it," said Philip. "You don't mean that he sticks to that idea?" exclaimed Arthur. "You don't, do you, Dale?" "I do," answered Dale. "I'm not going permanently. I'm not going to forsake our old ways or our old life. I'm not going to turn into a rich man." "I hope not, by Jove!" cried Arthur. "But I want to see the country--I've not seen it for years. And I want to see country people, and--and----" "It'll end in our losing you," prophesied Arthur gloomily. "Nonsense!" said Dale, flushing a little. "It'll end in nothing of the sort. I've only taken the house for a year." "A gentleman's residence," said Philip; "five sitting rooms, twelve bedrooms, offices, stabling, and three acres of grounds." Arthur groaned. "It sounds a villa all over," he said. "Not at all," said Dale sharply; "it's a country house." "Is there any difference?" asked Arthur scornfully. "All the difference," said Philip; "as you would know if you moved in anything approaching respectable circles." "I'm glad I don't," said Arthur. "What will respectable circles say to 'The Clarion,' eh, Dale?" "Who cares what they say?" laughed Dale. "They seem to buy it." Arthur looked at him with revengeful eye, and suddenly inquired. "What about Nellie?" "That's just the delightful part of it," answered Dale eagerly. "Nellie's been seedy ever so long, you know. She was ordered perfect rest and country air. But it didn't run to it." "It never ran to anything here," said Philip in a tone of dispassionate acquiescence in facts, "till you became famous." "Now I can help!" pursued Dale. "She and Mrs. Hodge are coming to pay me a long visit. Of course, Phil's going to be there permanently. You'll come too, Arthur?" At first Arthur Angell said he would not go near a villa; he could not breath in a villa; or sleep quiet o' nights in a villa; but presently he relented. "I can't stand it for long, though," he said. "Still, I'm glad you're going to have Nellie there. She'd have missed you awfully. When do you go?" "Actually, to-morrow. I'm not used to it yet." Arthur shook his head again, as he put on his hat. "Well, good-night," said he. "I hope it's all right." Dale waited till the door was closed behind his guest, and then laughed good-humoredly. "I like old Arthur," he said. "He's so keen and in earnest about it. But it's all bosh. What difference can it make whether I live in London or the country? And it's only for a little while." "He begins to include you in the well-to-do classes, and suspects you accordingly," replied Philip. There was a knock at the door, and a pretty girl came in. "Oh, I ran up," she said, "to ask whether this hat would do for Denshire. I don't want to disgrace you, Dale;" and she held up a hat she carried in her hand. "It would do for Paradise," said Dale. "Besides, there isn't going to be any difference at all in Denshire. We are going to be and do and dress just as we are and do and dress here. Aren't we, Phil?" "That is the scheme," said Philip. "We shall care for no one's opinion," pursued Dale, warming to his subject. "We shall be absolutely independent. We shall show them that their way of living is not the only way of living. We----" "In fact, Nellie," interrupted Philip, "we shall open their eyes considerably. So we flatter ourselves." "It's not that at all," protested Dale. "You can't help it, Dale," said Nellie, smiling brightly at him. "Of course they will open their eyes at the great Mr. Bannister. We all open our eyes at him, don't we, Mr. Hume? Well, then, the hat will do--as a week-day hat, I mean?" "A week-day hat?" repeated Philip. "Dear old phrase! It recalls one's happy church-going youth. Have you also provided a Sunday hat?" "Of course, Mr. Hume." "And, Dale, have you a Sunday coat?" Dale laughed. "It's a pretty excuse for pretty things, Phil," he said. "Let Nellie have her Sunday hat. I doubt if they'll let me into the church." Philip stretched out his hand and took up a glass of whisky and water which stood near him. "I drink to the success of the expedition!" said he. "To the success of our mission!" cried Dale gayly, raising his glass. "We will spread the light!" "Here's to Dale Bannister, apostle _in partibus_!" and Philip drank the toast. CHAPTER II. =The New Man at Littlehill.= Market Denborough is not a large town. Perhaps it is none the worse for that, and, if it be, there is compensation to be found in its picturesqueness, its antiquity, and its dignity; for there has been a town where it stands from time immemorial; it makes a great figure in county histories and local guidebooks; it is an ancient corporation, an assize town, and quarter-sessions borough. It does not grow, for country towns, dependent solely on the support of the rural districts surrounding, are not given to growing much nowadays. Moreover, the Delanes do not readily allow new houses to be built, and if a man lives in Market Denborough, he must be a roofless vagrant or a tenant of Mr. Delane. It is not the place to make a fortune; but, on the other hand, unusual recklessness is necessary to the losing of one there. If the triumphs of life are on a small scale, the struggle for existence is not very fierce, and a wise man might do worse than barter the uncertain chances and precarious joys of a larger stage, to play a modest, easy, quiet part on the little boards of Market Denborough. It must not, however, be supposed that the lion and the lamb have quite sunk their differences and lain down together at Market Denborough. There, as elsewhere, the millennium tarries, and there are not wanting fierce feuds, personal, municipal, nay, even, within the wide limits of Mr. Delane's tolerance, political. If it were not so, the Mayor would not have been happy, for the Mayor loved a fight; and Alderman Johnstone, who was a Radical, would have felt his days wasted; and the two gentlemen would not have been, as they continually were, at loggerheads concerning paving contracts and kindred subjects. There was no want of interests in life, if a man were ready to take his own part and keep a sharp eye on the doings of his neighbor. Besides, the really great events of existence happened at Market Denborough much as they do in London; people were born, and married, and died; and while that rotation is unchecked, who can be seriously at a loss for matter of thought or topic of conversation? As Mr. James Roberts, member of the Royal College of Surgeons, a thin young man, with restless eyes and tight-shut lips, walked down High Street one hot, sunny afternoon, it never entered his head that there was not enough to think about in Market Denborough. Wife and child, rent, rates and taxes, patients and prescriptions, the relation between those old enemies, incomings and outgoings, here was food enough for any man's meditations. Enough? Ay, enough and to spare of such distasteful, insipid, narrow, soul-destroying stuff. Mr., or, to give him the brevet rank all the town gave him. Dr. Roberts, hated these sordid, imperious interests that gathered round him and hemmed him in, shutting out all else--all dreams of ambition, all dear, long-harbored schemes, all burning enthusiasms, even all chance of seeking deeper knowledge and more commanding skill. Sadly and impatiently the doctor shook his head, trying to put his visions on one side, and nail his mind down to its work. His first task was to turn three hundred pounds a year into six hundred pounds. It was hard it should be so, and he chafed against necessity, forgetting, as perhaps he pardonably might, that the need was the price he paid for wife and child. Yes, it was hard; but so it was. If only more people would be--no, but if only more people who were ill would call in Dr. Roberts! Then he could keep two horses, and not have to "pad the hoof," as he phrased it to himself, about sweltering streets or dusty lanes all the long afternoon, because his one pony was tired out with carrying him in the morning to Dirkham, a village five miles off, where he was medical officer at a salary of forty pounds by the year. That was forty, and Ethel had a hundred, and the profits from his paying patients (even if you allowed for the medicine consumed by those who did not pay) were about a hundred and fifty. But then the bills---- Oh, well, he must go on. The second horse must wait, and that other dream of his, having an assistant, that must wait, too. If he had an assistant, he would have some leisure for research, for reading, for studying the political and social questions where his real and engrossing interest lay. He could then take his part in the mighty work of rousing---- Here his meditations were interrupted. He had reached, in his progress down the street, a large plate-glass-windowed shop, the shop of a chemist, and of no less a man than Mr. James Hedger, Mayor of Market Denborough. The member of the lower branch of their common art was a richer man than he who belonged to the higher, and when Mr. Hedger was playfully charged with giving the young Doctor his medicines cheap, he never denied the accusation. Anyhow, the two were good friends, and the Mayor, who was surveying his dominions from his doorstep, broke in on Dr. Roberts' train of thought with a cheerful greeting. "Have you heard the news?" he asked. "No; I've no time for the news. I always look to you for it, Mr. Mayor." "It mostly comes round to me, being a center, like," said the Mayor. "It's natural." "Well, what is it this time?" asked the Doctor, calling up a show of interest. He did not care much for Denborough news. "Littlehill's let," replied the Mayor. Littlehill, the subject of Philip Hume's half-ironical description, was a good house, standing on rising ground about half a mile outside the town. It belonged, of course, to Mr. Delane, and had stood empty for more than a year. A tenant at Littlehill meant an increase of custom for the tradespeople, and perchance for the doctors. Hence the importance of the Mayor's piece of news. "Indeed?" said Roberts. "Who's taken it?" "Not much good--a young man, a bachelor," said the Mayor, shaking his head. Bachelors do not require, or anyhow do not take, many chemist's drugs. "Still, I hear he's well off, and p'r'aps he'll have people to stop with him." "What's his name?" "Some name like Bannister. He's from London." "What's he coming here for?" asked Roberts, who, if he had been a well-to-do bachelor, would not have settled at Market Denborough. "Why shouldn't he?" retorted the Mayor, who had never lived, or thought of living, anywhere else. "Well, I shouldn't have thought he'd have found much to do. He wouldn't come in the summer for the hunting." "Hunting? Not he! He's a literary gentleman--writes poetry and what not." "Poetry? Why, it's not Dale Bannister, is it?" "Ay, that's the name." "Dale Bannister coming to Littlehill! That is an honor for the town!" "An honor? What do you mean, sir?" "Why, he's a famous man, Mr. Mayor. All London's talking of him." "I never heard his name in my life before," said the Mayor. "Oh, he's a genius. His poems are all the rage. You'll have to read them now." "He's having a lot done up there," remarked the Mayor. "Johnstone's got the job. Mr. Bannister don't know as much about Johnstone as some of us." "How should he?" said Roberts, smiling. "Johnstone's buildin' 'im a room. It'll tumble down." "Oh, come, Mr. Mayor, you're prejudiced." "No man can say that of me, sir. But I knows--I know Johnstone, Doctor. That's where it is!" "Well, I hope Johnstone's room won't fall on him. We can't spare Dale Bannister. Good-day, Mr. Mayor." "Where are you goin'?" "To Tom Steadman's." "Is he bad again?" inquired the Mayor, with interest. "Yes. He broke out last week, with the usual result." "Broke out? Yes! He had two gallons of beer and a bottle o' gin off the 'Blue Lion' in one day, the landlord told me." "They ought to go to prison for serving him." "Well, well, a man drinks or he don't," said the Mayor tolerantly; "and if he does, he'll get it some'ow. Good-day, sir." The Doctor completed his rounds, including the soothing of Tom Steadman's distempered imagination, and made his way home in quite a flutter of excitement. Hidden away in his study, underneath heavy medical works and voluminous medical journals, where the eye of patients could not reach, nor the devastations of them that tidy disturb, lay the two or three little volumes which held Dale Bannister's poems. The Doctor would not have admitted that the poems were purposely concealed, but he certainly did not display them ostentatiously, and he undoubtedly told his wife, with much decision, that he was sure they would not prove to her taste. Yet he himself almost worshiped them; all the untamed revolt, the recklessness of thought, the scorn of respectability, the scant regard to what the world called propriety, which he had nourished in his own heart in his youth, finding no expression for them, and from which the binding chains of fate seemed now forever to restrain his spirit, were in those three slim volumes. First came "The Clarion and other Poems," a very small book, published by a very small firm--published for the author, though the Doctor did not know this, and circulated at the expense of the same; then "Sluggards," from a larger firm, the source of some few guineas to Dale Bannister, of hundreds more if he had not sold his copyright; and lastly, "The Hypocrite's Heaven," quite a lengthy production, blazoning the name of the leading house of all the trade, and bearing in its train a wealth of gold, and praise, and fame for the author: yes, and of rebuke, remonstrance, blame, and hands uplifted in horror at so much vice united to so much genius. Praise and rebuke alike brought new bricks to build the pyramid of glory; and on the top of it, an object of abhorrence and of worship, stood the young poet, prodigally scattering songs, which, as one critic of position said of them, should never have been written, but being written, could never die. Certainly the coming of such a man to settle there was an event for Market Denborough; it was a glorious chance for the poet's silent, secret disciple. He would see the man; he might speak with him; if fortune willed, his name might yet be known, for no merit of his, but as that of Dale Bannister's friend. Women have very often, and the best of women most often, a provoking sedateness of mind. Mrs. Roberts had never read the poems. True, but she had, of course, read about them, and about their author, and about their certain immortality; yet she was distinctly more interested in the tidings of Tom Steadman, a wretched dipsomaniac, than in the unparalleled news about Dale Bannister. In her heart she thought the Doctor a cleverer, as she had no doubt he was a better, man than the poet, and the nearest approach she made to grasping the real significance of the situation was when she remarked: "It will be nice for him to find one man, at all events, who can appreciate him." The Doctor smiled; he was pleased--who would not be?--that his wife should think first of the pleasure Dale Bannister would find in his society. It was absurd, but it was charming of her, and as she sat on the edge of his chair, he put his arm round his waist and said: "I beat him in one thing, anyhow." "What's that, Jim?" "My wife. He has no wife like mine." "Has he a wife at all?" asked Mrs. Roberts, with increased interest. A wife was another matter. "I believe not, but if he had----" "Don't be silly. Did you leave Tom quiet?" "Hang Tom! he deserves it. And give me my tea." Then came the baby, and with it an end, for the time, of Dale Bannister. CHAPTER III. =Denborough Determines to Call.= "I will awake the world," Dale Bannister had once declared in the insolence of youth and talent and the privacy of a gathering of friends. The boast was perhaps as little absurd in his mouth as it could ever be; yet it was very absurd, for the world sleeps hard, and habit has taught it to slumber peacefully through the batterings of impatient genius at its door. At the most, it turns uneasily on its side, and, with a curse at the meddlesome fellow, snores again. So Dale Bannister did not awake the world. But, within a month of his coming to Littlehill, he performed an exploit which was, though on a smaller scale, hardly less remarkable. He electrified Market Denborough, and the shock penetrated far out into the surrounding districts of Denshire--even Denshire, which, remote from villas and season-tickets, had almost preserved pristine simplicity. Men spoke with low-voiced awe and appreciative twinkling of the eye of the "doings" at Littlehill: their wives thought that they might be better employed; and their children hung about the gates to watch the young man and his guests come out. There was disappointment when no one came to church from Littlehill; yet there would have been disappointment if anyone had: it would have jarred with the fast-growing popular conception of the household. To the strictness of Denborough morality, by which no sin was leniently judged save drunkenness, Littlehill seemed a den of jovial wickedness, and its inhabitants to reck nothing of censure, human or divine. As might be expected by all who knew him, the Mayor had no hand in this hasty and uncharitable judgment. London was no strange land to him; he went up four times a year to buy his stock; London ways were not Denshire ways, he admitted, but, for all that, they were not to be condemned offhand nor interpreted in the worst light without some pause for better knowledge. "It takes all sorts to make a world," said he, as he drank his afternoon draught at the "Delane Arms," where the civic aristocracy was wont to gather. "He's free enough and to spare with 'is money," said Alderman Johnstone, with satisfaction. "You ought to know, Johnstone," remarked the Mayor significantly. "Well, I didn't see no 'arm in him," said Mr. Maggs, the horse-dealer, a rubicund man of pleasant aspect; "and he's a rare 'un to deal with." Interest centered on Mr. Maggs. Apparently he had spoken with Dale Bannister. "He's half crazy, o' course," continued that gentleman, "but as pleasant-spoken, 'earty a young gent as I've seen." "Is he crazy?" asked the girl behind the bar. "Well, what do you say? He came down a day or two ago, 'e and 'is friend, Mr. 'Ume----" "Hume," said the Mayor, with emphasis. The Mayor, while occasionally following the worse, saw the better way. "Yes, 'Ume. Mr. Bannister wanted a 'orse. 'What's your figger, sir?' says I. He took no notice, but began looking at me with 'is eyes wide open, for all the world as if I'd never spoke. Then he says, 'I want a 'orse, broad-backed and fallen in the vale o' years.' Them was 'is very words." "You don't say?" said the girl. "I never knowed what he meant, no more than that pint-pot; but Mr. 'Ume laughed and says, 'Don't be a fool, Dale,' and told me that Mr. Bannister couldn't ride no more than a tailor--so he said--and wanted a steady, quiet 'orse. He got one from me--four-and-twenty years old, warranted not to gallop. I see 'im on her to day--and it's lucky she is quiet." "Can't he ride?" "No more than"--a fresh simile failed Mr. Maggs, and he concluded again--"that pint-pot. But Mr. 'Ume can. 'E's a nice set on a 'orse." The Mayor had been meditating. He was a little jealous of Mr. Maggs' superior intimacy with the distinguished stranger, or perhaps it was merely that he was suddenly struck with a sense of remissness in his official duties. "I think," he announced, "of callin' on him and welcomin' him to the town." There was a chorus of approbation, broken only by a sneer from Alderman Johnstone. "Ay, and take 'im a bottle of that cod-liver oil of yours at two-and-three. 'E can afford it." "Not after payin' your bill, Johnstone," retorted the Mayor, with a triumphant smile. A neat repartee maketh glad the heart of the utterer. The establishment at Littlehill and the proper course to be pursued in regard to it were also the subject of consideration in circles more genteel even than that which gathered at the "Delane Arms." At Dirkham Grange itself the topic was discussed, and Mr. Delane was torn with doubts whether his duty as landlord called upon him to make Dale Bannister's acquaintance, or his duty as custodian-general of the laws and proprieties of life in his corner of the world forbade any sanction being given to a household of which such reports were on the wing. People looked to the Squire, as he was commonly called, for guidance in social matters, and he was aware of the responsibility under which he lay. If he called at Littlehill, half the county would be likely enough to follow his example. And perhaps it might not be good for half the county to know Dale Bannister. "I must consider the matter," he said at breakfast. "Well, one does hear strange things," remarked Mrs. Delane. "And aren't his poems very odd, George?" The Squire had not accorded to the works referred to a very close study, but he answered offhand: "Yes, I hear so; not at all sound in tone. But then, my dear, poets have a standard of their own." "Of course, there was Byron," said Mrs. Delane. "And perhaps we mustn't be too hard on him," pursued the Squire. "He's a very young man, and no doubt has considerable ability." "I dare say he has never met anybody." "I'm sure, papa," interposed Miss Janet Delane, "that it would have a good effect on him to meet us." Mr. Delane smiled at his daughter. "Would you like to know him, Jan?" he asked. "Of course I should! He wouldn't be dull, at all events, like most of the men about here, Tora Smith said the Colonel meant to call." "Colonel Smith is hardly in your father's position, my dear." "Oh, since old Smith had his row with the War Office about that pension, he'll call on anybody who's for upsetting everything. It's enough for him that a man's a Radical." "Tora means to go, too," said Janet. "Poor child! It's a pity she hasn't a mother," said Mrs. Delane. "I think I shall go. We can drop him if he turns out badly." "Very well, my dear, as you think best." "I'll walk over on Sunday. I don't suppose he objects to Sunday calls." "Not on the ground that he wants to go to church, at all events," remarked Mrs. Delane. "Perhaps he goes to chapel, mamma." "Oh, no, my dear, he doesn't do that." Mrs. Delane was determined to be just. "Well, he was the son of a Dissenting minister, mamma. The _Critic_ said so." "I wonder what his father thinks of him," said the Squire, with a slight chuckle, not knowing that death had spared Dale's father all chance of trouble on his son's score. "Mrs. Roberts told me," said Janet, "that her husband had been to see him, and liked him awfully." "I think Roberts had better have waited," the Squire remarked, with a little frown. "In his position he ought to be very careful what he does." "Oh, it will be all right if you call, papa." "It would have been better if he had let me go first." Mr. Delane spoke with some severity. Apart from his position of overlord of Denborough, which, indeed, he could not but feel was precarious in these innovating days, he thought he had special claims to be consulted by the Doctor. He had taken him up; his influence had gained him his appointment at Dirkham and secured him the majority of his more wealthy _clientèle_; his good will had opened to the young unknown man the doors of the Grange, and to his wife the privilege of considerable intimacy with the Grange ladies. It was certainly a little hasty in the Doctor not to wait for a lead from the Grange, before he flung himself into Dale Bannister's arms. All these considerations were urged by Janet in her father's defense when his title to approve, disapprove, or in any way concern himself with Dr. Roberts' choice of friends and associates was vigorously questioned by Tora Smith. Colonel Smith--he had been Colonel Barrington-Smith, but he did not see now what a man wanted with two names--was, since his difference with the authorities, a very strong Radical; on principle he approved of anything of which his friends and neighbors were likely on principle to disapprove. Among other such things, he approved of Dale Bannister's views and works, and of the Doctor's indifference to Mr. Delane's opinion. And, just as Janet was more of a Tory than her father, Tora--she had been unhappily baptized in the absurd names of Victoria Regina in the loyal days before the grievance; but nothing was allowed to survive of them which could possibly be dropped--was more Radical than her father, and she ridiculed the Squire's pretensions with an extravagance which Sir Harry Fulmer, who was calling at the Smiths' when Janet came in, thought none the less charming for being very unreasonable. Sir Harry, however, suppressed his opinion on both these points--as to its being charming, because matters had not yet reached the stage when he could declare it, and as to its being unreasonable, because he was by hereditary right the head of the Liberal party in the district, and tried honestly to live up to the position by a constant sacrifice of his dearest prejudices on the altar of progress. "I suppose," he said in reply to an appeal from Tora, "that a man has a right to please himself in such things." "After all papa has done for him! Besides, Sir Harry, you know a doctor ought to be particularly careful." "What is there so dreadful about Mr. Bannister?" asked Tora. "He looks very nice." "Have you seen him, Tora?" asked Janet eagerly. "Yes; we met him riding on such a queer old horse. He looked as if he was going to tumble off every minute; he can't ride a bit. But he's awfully handsome." "What's he like?" "Oh, tall, not very broad, with beautiful eyes, and a lot of waving auburn hair; he doesn't wear it clipped like a toothbrush. And he's got a long mustache, and a straight nose, and a charming smile. Hasn't he, Sir Harry?" "I didn't notice particularly. He's not a bad-looking chap. Looks a bit soft, though." "Soft? why, he's a tremendous genius, papa says." "I didn't mean that; I mean flabby and out of training, you know." "Oh, he isn't always shooting or hunting, of course," said Tora contemptuously. "I don't suppose," remarked Janet, "that in his position of life,--well, you know, Tora, he's of quite humble birth,--he ever had the chance." "He's none the worse for that," said Sir Harry stoutly. "The worse? I think he's the better. Papa is going to ask him here." "You're quite enthusiastic, Tora." "I love to meet new people. One sees the same faces year after year in Denshire." Sir Harry felt that this remark was a little unkind. "I like old friends," he said, "better than new ones." Janet rose to go. "We must wait and hear papa's report," she said, as she took her leave. Tora Smith escorted her to the door, kissed her, and, returning, said, with a snap of her fingers: "I don't care that for 'papa's report.' Jan is really too absurd." "It's nice to see her----" "Oh, delightful. I hate dutiful people!" "You think just as much of your father." "We happen to agree in our opinions, but papa always tells me to use my own judgment. Are you going to see Mr. Bannister?" "Yes, I think so. He won't hurt me, and he may subscribe to the hunt." "No; he may even improve you." "Do I want it so badly, Miss Smith?" "Yes. You're a weak-kneed man." "Oh, I say! Look here, you must help me." "Perhaps I will, if Mr. Bannister is not too engrossing." "Now you're trying to draw me." "Was I? And yet you looked pleased. Perhaps you think it a compliment." "Isn't it one? It shows you think it worth while to----" "It shows nothing of the kind," said Tora decisively. Thus, for one reason or another, from one direction and another, there was converging on Littlehill a number of visitors. If your neighbor excites curiosity, it is a dull imagination that finds no plausible reason for satisfying it. Probably there was more in common than at first sight appeared between Mr. Delane's sense of duty, the Mayor's idea of official courtesy, Colonel Smith's contempt for narrowness of mind, Sir Harry Fulmer's care for the interests of the hunt, and Dr. Roberts' frank and undisguised eagerness to see and speak with Dale Bannister face to face. CHAPTER IV. =A Quiet Sunday Afternoon.= To dissolve public report into its component parts is never a light task. Analysis, as a rule, reveals three constituents: truth, embroidery, and mere falsehood; but the proportions vary infinitely. Denborough, which went to bed, to a man, at ten o'clock, or so soon after as it reached home from the public house, said that the people at Littlehill sat up very late; this was truth, at least relative truth, and that is all we can expect here. It said that they habitually danced and sang the night through; this was embroidery; they had once danced and sung the night through, when Dale had a party from London. It said that orgies--if the meaning of its nods, winks, and smiles may be summarized--went on at Littlehill; this was falsehood. Dale and his friends amused themselves, and it must be allowed that their enjoyment was not marred, but rather increased, by the knowledge that they did not command the respect of Denborough. They had no friends there. Why should they care for Denborough's approval? Denborough's approval was naught, whereas Denborough's disapproval ministered to the pleasure most of us feel in giving gentle shocks to our neighbors' sense of propriety. No doubt an electric eel enjoys itself. But, after all, if the mere truth must be told, they were mild sinners at Littlehill, the leading spirits, Dale and Arthur Angell, being indeed young men whose antinomianism found a harmless issue in ink, and whose lawlessness was best expressed in meter. A cynic once married his daughter to a professed atheist, on the ground that the man could not afford to be other than an exemplary husband and father. Poets are not trammeled so tight as that, for, as Mrs. Delane remarked, there was Byron, and perhaps one or two more; yet, for the most part, she who marries a poet has nothing worse than nerves to fear. But a little lawlessness will go a long way in the right place,--for example, lawn-tennis on Sunday in the suburbs,--and the Littlehill party extorted a gratifying meed of curiosity and frowns, which were not entirely undeserved by some of their doings, and were more than deserved by what was told of their doings. After luncheon on Sunday, Mr. Delane had a nap, as his commendable custom was. Then he took his hat and stick and set out for Littlehill. The Grange park stretches to the outskirts of the town, and borders in part on the grounds of Littlehill, so that the Squire had a pleasant walk under the cool shade of his own immemorial elms, and enjoyed the satisfaction of inspecting his own most excellent shorthorns. Reflecting on the elms and the shorthorns, and on the house, the acres, and the family that were his, he admitted that he had been born to advantages and opportunities such as fell to the lot of a few men; and, inspired to charity by the distant church-bell sounding over the meadows, he acknowledged a corresponding duty of lenient judgment in respect of the less fortunate. Thus he arrived at Littlehill in a tolerant temper, and contented himself with an indulgent shake of the head when he saw the gravel fresh marked with horses' hoofs. "Been riding instead of going to church, the young rascals," he said to himself, as he rang the bell. A small, shrewd-faced man opened the door and ushered Mr. Delane into the hall. Then he stopped. "If you go straight on, sir," said he, "through that baize door, and across the passage, and through the opposite door, you will find Mr. Bannister." Mr. Delane's face expressed surprise. "Mr. Bannister, sir," the man explained, "don't like visitors being announced, sir. If you would be so kind as walk in----" It was a harmless whim, and the Squire nodded assent. He passed through the baize door, crossed the passage, and paused before opening the opposite door. The sounds which came from behind it arrested his attention. To the accompaniment of a gentle drumming noise, as if of sticks or umbrellas bumped against the floor, a voice was declaiming, or rather chanting, poetry. The voice rose and fell, and Mr. Delane could not distinguish the words, until it burst forth triumphantly with the lines: "Love grows hate for love's sake, life takes death for guide; Night hath none but one red star--Tyrannicide." "Good gracious!" said Mr. Delane. The voice dropped again for a few moments, then it hurled out: "Down the way of Tsars awhile in vain deferred, Bid the Second Alexander light the Third. How for shame shall men rebuke them? how may we Blame, whose fathers died and slew, to leave us free?" The voice was interrupted and drowned by the crash of the pianoforte, struck with remorseless force, and another voice, the voice of a woman, cried, rising even above the crash: "Now, one of your own, Dale." "I think I'd better go in," thought Mr. Delane, and he knocked loudly at the door. He was bidden to enter by the former of the two voices, and, going in, found himself in a billiard room. Five or six people sat round the wall on settees, each holding a cue, with which they were still gently strumming on the floor. A stout, elderly woman was at the piano, and a young man sat cross-legged in the middle of the billiard-table, with a book in one hand and a cigar in the other. There was a good deal of tobacco smoke in the room, and Mr. Delane did not at first distinguish the faces of the company. The young man on the table uncoiled himself with great agility, jumped down, and came forward to meet the newcomer with outstretched hands. As he outstretched them, he dropped the book and the cigar to the ground on either side of him. "Ah, here you are! Delightful of you to come!" he cried. "Now, let me guess you!" "Mr. Bannister?--Have I the pleasure?" "Yes, yes. Now let's see--don't tell me your name." He drew back a step, surveyed Mr. Delane's portly figure, his dignified carriage, his plain solid watch-chain, his square-toed strong boots. "The Squire!" he exclaimed. "Mr. Delane, isn't it?" "I am Mr. Delane." "Good! You don't mind being guessed, do you? It's so much more amusing. What will you have?" "Thank you, I've lunched, Mr. Bannister." "Have you? We've just breakfasted--had a ride before, you know. But I must introduce you." He searched the floor, picked up the cigar, looked at it regretfully, and threw it out of an open window. "This," he resumed, waving his hand toward the piano, "is Mrs. Ernest Hodge. This is Miss Fane, Mrs. Hodge's daughter--no, not by a first marriage; everybody suggests that. Professional name, you know--she sings. Hodge really wouldn't do, would it, Mrs. Hodge? This is Philip Hume. This is Arthur Angell, who writes verses--like me. This is--but I expect you know these gentlemen?" Mr. Delane peered through the smoke which Philip Hume was producing from a long pipe, and to his amazement discerned three familiar faces: those of Dr. Roberts, the Mayor, and Alderman Johnstone. The Doctor was flushed and looked excited; the Mayor was a picture of dignified complacency; Johnstone appeared embarrassed and uncomfortable, for his bald head was embellished with a flowery garland. Dale saw Mr. Delane's eyes rest on this article. "We always crown anybody who adds to our knowledge," he explained. "He gets a wreath of honor. The Alderman added to our knowledge of the expense of building a room. So Miss Fane crowned him." An appreciative chuckle from the Mayor followed this explanation; he knocked the butt of his cue against the floor, and winked at Philip Hume. The last-named, seeing that Mr. Delane was somewhat surprised at the company, came up to him and said: "Come and sit down; Dale never remembers that anybody wants a seat. Here's an armchair." Mr. Delane sat down next to Miss Fane, and noticed, even in his perturbation, that his neighbor was a remarkably pretty girl, with fair hair clustering in a thick mass on the nape of her neck, and large blue eyes which left gazing on Dale Bannister when their owner turned to greet him. Mr. Delane would have enjoyed talking to her, had not his soul been vexed at the presence of the three Denborough men. One did not expect to meet the tradesmen of the town; and what business had the Doctor there? To spend Sunday in that fashion would not increase his popularity or his practice. And then that nonsense about the wreath! How undignified it was! it was even worse than yelling out Nihilistic verses by way of Sabbath amusement. "I shall get away as soon as I can," he thought, "and I shall say a word to the Doctor." He was called from his meditations by Miss Fane. She sat in a low chair with her feet on a stool, and now, tilting the chair back, she fixed her eyes on Mr. Delane, and asked: "Are you shocked?" No man likes to admit that he is shocked. "I am not, but many people would be." "I suppose you don't like meeting those men?" "Hedger is an honest man in his way of life. I have no great opinion of Johnstone." "This is your house, isn't it?" "Yes." "All the houses about here are yours, aren't they?" "Most of them are, Miss Fane." "Then you are a great man?" The question was put so simply that Mr. Delane could not suspect a sarcastic intent. "Only locally," he answered, smiling. "Have you any daughters?" she asked. "Yes; one." "What is she like?" "Fancy asking her father! I think Janet a beauty." "Fair or dark?" "Dark." "Dale likes dark girls. Tall or short?" "Tall." "Good eyes?" "I like them." "Oh, that'll do. Dale will like her;" and Miss Fane nodded reassuringly. Mr. Delane had not the heart to intimate his indifference to Dale Bannister's opinion of his daughter. "Do you know this country?" he asked, by way of conversation. "We've only been here a week, but we've ridden a good deal. We hold Dale on, you know." "You are on a visit to Mr. Bannister?" "Oh, yes, mother and I are here." Mr. Delane could not help wondering whether their presence was such a matter of course as her tone implied, but before he could probe the matter further, he heard Dale exclaim: "Oh, it's a wretched thing! Read it yourself, Roberts." "Mount him on the rostrum," cried the young man who had been presented to Mr. Delane as Arthur Angell, and who had hitherto been engaged in an animated discussion with the Doctor. Laughing, and only half resisting, the Doctor allowing himself to be hoisted on to the billiard-table, sat down, and announced in a loud voice: "'Blood for Blood': by Dale Bannister." The poem which bore this alarming title was perhaps the most outrageous of the author's works. It held up to ridicule and devoted to damnation every person and every institution which the Squire respected and worshiped. And the misguided young man declaimed it with sparkling eyes and emphasizing gestures, as though every wicked word of it were gospel. And to this man's charge were committed the wives and families of the citizens of Denborough! The Squire's self-respect demanded a protest. He rose with dignity, and went up to his host. "Good-by, Mr. Bannister." "What? you're not going yet? What? Does this stuff bore you?" "It does not bore me. But I must add--excuse an old-fashioned fellow--that it does something worse." "What? Oh, you're on the other side? Of course you are!" "Whatever side I was, I could not listen to that. As an older man, let me give you a word of advice." Dale lifted his hands in good-humored protest. "Sorry you don't like it," he said. "Shut up, Roberts! If I'd known, we wouldn't have had it. But it's true--true--true." The Doctor listened with sparkling eyes. "I must differ utterly; I must indeed. Good-by, Mr. Bannister. Hedger?" The Mayor started. "I am walking into the town. Come with me." The Mayor wavered. The Squire stood and waited for him. "I didn't think of goin' yet, Mr. Delane, sir." Dale watched the encounter with a smile. "Your wife will expect you," said the Squire. "Come along." The Mayor rose, ignoring Johnstone's grin and the amusement on the faces of the company. "I'll come and look you up," said Dale, pressing the Squire's hand warmly. "Oh, it's all right. Tastes differ. I'm not offended. I'll come some day this week." He showed them out, and, returning, said to the Doctor, "Roberts, you'll get into trouble." "Nonsense!" said the Doctor. "What business is it of his?" Dale had turned to Johnstone. "Good-by," said he abruptly. "We close at five." "I've 'ad a pleasant afternoon, sir." "It will be deducted from your bill," answered Dale. After ejecting Johnstone, he stood by the table, looking moodily at the floor. "What's the matter, Dale?" asked Miss Fane. "I suppose he thought we were beasts or lunatics." "Probably," said Philip Hume. "What then?" "Well, yes," answered Dale, smiling again. "You're quite right, Phil. What then?" CHAPTER V. =The Necessary Scapegoat.= If men never told their wives anything, the condition of society would no doubt be profoundly modified, though it is not easy to forecast the precise changes. If a guess may be hazarded, it is probable that much less good would be done, and some less evil said: the loss of matter of interest for half the world may be allowed to sway the balance in favor of the present practice--a practice so universal that Mr. Delane, the Mayor, and Alderman Johnstone, one and all, followed it by telling their wives about their Sunday afternoon at Littlehill. Dr. Roberts, it is true, gave a meager account to his wife, but the narratives of the other three amply filled the gaps he left, and, as each of them naturally dwelt on the most remarkable features of their entertainment, it may be supposed that the general impression produced in Market Denborough did not fall short of the truth in vividness of color. The facts as to what occurred have been set down without extenuation and without malice: the province of Market Denborough society was to supply the inferences arising therefrom, and this task it fulfilled with no grudging hand. Before eight-and-forty hours had passed, there were reports that the Squire had discovered a full-blown Saturnalia in process at Littlehill--and that in these scandalous proceedings the Mayor, Alderman Johnstone, and Dr. Roberts were participators. Then ensued conduct on the part of the Mayor and the Alderman deserving of unmeasured scorn. They could not deny that dreadful things had been done and said, though they had not seen the deeds nor understood the words: their denial would have had no chance of credit. They could not venture to say that Squire Delane had done anything except manfully protest. They began by accusing one another in round terms, but each found himself so vulnerable that by an unholy tacit compact they agreed to exonerate one another. The Mayor allowed that Johnstone was not conspicuous in wickedness; Johnstone admitted that the Mayor had erred, if at all, only through weakness and good-nature. Public opinion demanded a sacrifice; and the Doctor was left to satisfy it. Everybody was of one mind in holding that Dr. Roberts had disgraced himself, and nobody was surprised to hear that the Squire's phaeton had been seen standing at his door for half an hour on Wednesday morning. The Squire was within, and was understood to be giving the Doctor a piece of his mind. The Doctor was stiff-necked. "It is entirely a private matter," said he, "and no one has a right to dictate to me." "My dear Roberts, I spoke merely in your own interest. It would ruin you if it became known that you held those atrocious opinions; and become known it must, if you openly ally yourself with this young man." "I am not the servant of the people I attend. I may choose my own opinions." "Yes, and they may choose their own doctor," retorted the Squire. The two parted, almost quarreling. Perhaps they would have quite quarreled had not the Squire thought of Mrs. Roberts and the baby. He wondered that the Doctor did not think of them, too, but he seemed to Mr. Delane to be under such a spell that he thought of nothing but Dale Bannister. It was not as if Roberts were the only medical man in the place. There was young Doctor Spink--and he was a real M. D.--up the street, ready and eager to snap up stray patients. And Doctor Spink was a churchwarden. The Squire did not like him overmuch, but he found himself thinking whether it would not be well to send for him next time there was a case of illness at the Grange. The Squire meditated, while others acted. On her walk the same afternoon, Ethel Roberts heard news which perturbed her. The Vicar's wife was ill and Dr. Spink had been sent for. The Vicar was a well-to-do man. He had a large family, which yet grew. He had been a constant and a valuable client of her husband's. And now Dr. Spink was sent for. "Jim," she said, "did you know that Mrs. Gilkison was ill?" "Ill?" said the Doctor, looking up from "Sluggards." "No, I've heard nothing of it." She came and leaned over his chair. "They've sent for Dr. Spink," she said. "What?" he exclaimed, dropping his beloved volume. "Mrs. Hedger told me." "Well, they can do as they like. I suppose his 'Doctor' is the attraction." "Do you think it's that, dear?" "What else can it be?--unless it's a mere freak." "Well, Jim, I thought--I thought perhaps that the Vicar had heard about--about--Littlehill. Yes, I know it's very stupid and narrow, dear--but still----" The Doctor swore under his breath. "I can't help it if the man's an ass," he said. Ethel smiled patiently. "It's a pity to offend people, Jim, dear, isn't it?" "Are you against me too, Ethel?" "Against you? You know I never would be, but----" "Then do let us leave Denborough gossip alone. Fancy Denborough taking on itself to disapprove of Dale Bannister! It's too rich!" Ethel sighed. Denborough's disapproval was no doubt a matter of indifference to Dale Bannister: it meant loss of bread and butter to James Roberts and his house. Meanwhile Dale Bannister, all unconscious of the dread determinations of the Vicar, pursued his way in cheerful unconcern. People came and went. Arthur Angell returned to his haunts rather dissatisfied with the quiet of Littlehill, but rejoicing to have found in the Doctor one thorough-going believer. Mrs. Hodge, her daughter, and Philip Hume seemed to be permanent parts of the household. Riding was their chief amusement. They would pass down High Street, Dale on his ancient mare, with Nellie and Philip by his side, laughing and talking merrily, Dale's own voice being very audible as he pointed out, with amusement a trifle too obvious to be polite, what struck him as remarkable in Denborough ways of life. Philip, however, whom Mr. Delane had described to his wife as the only apparently sane person at Littlehill, was rather uneasy in his mind about Roberts. "You'll get that fellow disliked, Dale," he said one morning, "if you don't take care." "I? What have I to do with it?" asked Dale. "They'll think him unsafe, if they see him with you." "He needn't come unless he likes. He's not a bad fellow, only he takes everything so precious seriously." "He thinks you do, judging by your books." "Oh, I do by fits. By the way, I have a fit now! Behold, I will write! Nellie! Where's Nellie?" Nellie Fane came at his call. "Sit down just opposite me, and look at me. I am going to write. The editor of the _Cynosure_ begs for twenty lines--no more; twenty lines--fifty pounds! Now, Nellie, inspire me, and you shall have a new hat out of it. No, look at me!" Nellie sat down and gazed at him, obediently. "Two pound ten a line; not bad for a young 'un," he pursued. "They say Byron wrote on gin and water. I write on your eyes, Nellie--much better." "You're not writing at all--only talking nonsense." "I'm just beginning." "Look here, Dale, why don't you keep the Doctor----" began Philip. "Oh, hang the Doctor! I'd just got an idea. Look at me, Nellie!" Philip shrugged his shoulders, and Dr. Roberts dropped out of discussion. The twenty lines were written, though they were never considered one of his masterpieces, then Dale rose with a sigh of relief. "Now for lunch, and then I'm going to return Mr. Delane's call." "I thought we were to ride," said Nellie disappointedly. "Well, won't you come?" "Don't be absurd!" "Mightn't she come, Phil?" "Mrs. Delane has not called, has she?" inquired Philip, as though for information. "Of course I shan't go, Dale. You must go alone." "What a nuisance! I shall have to walk. I daren't trust myself to that animal alone." After luncheon he started, walking by the same way by which Mr. Delane had come. He reached the lodge of the Grange; a courtesying child held open the gate, and he passed along under the immemorial elms, returning a cheery good-day to the gardeners, who paused in their work to touch their hats with friendly deference. The deference was wrong, of course, but the friendliness pleased him, and even the deference seemed somehow in keeping with the elms and with the sturdy old red-brick mansion, with its coat of arms and defiant Norman motto over the principal door. Littlehill was a pleasant house, but it had none of the ancient dignity of Dirkham, and Dale's quick brain was suddenly struck with a new understanding of how such places bred the men they did. He had had a fancy for a stay in the country; it would amuse him, he thought, to study country life; that was the meaning of his coming to Littlehill. Well, Dirkham summed up one side of country life, and he would be glad to study it. Mr. Delane was not at home--he had gone to Petty Sessions; and Dale, with regret, for he wanted to see the inside of the house, left his name--as usual he had forgotten to bring a card--and turned away. As he turned, a pony carriage drew up and a girl jumped out. Dale drew back to let her pass, raising his hat. The servant said a word to her, and when he had gone some ten or fifteen yards, he heard his name called. "Oh, Mr. Bannister, do come in! I expect papa back every minute, and he will be so sorry to miss you. Mamma is up in London; but I hope you'll come in." Dale had no idea of refusing the invitation given so cordially. He had been sorry to go away before, and the sight of Janet Delane made him more reluctant still. He followed her into the oak-paneled hall, hung with pictures of dead Delanes and furnished with couches and easy-chairs. "Well," she said, after tea was brought, "and what do you think of us?" "I have not seen very much of you yet." "As far as you have gone? And be candid." "You are very restful." She made a little grimace. "You mean very slow?" "Indeed I don't! I think you very interesting." "You find us interesting, but slow. Yes, you meant that, Mr. Bannister, and it's not kind." "Have your revenge by telling me what you think of me." "Oh, we find you interesting, too. We're all talking about you." "And slow?" "No, certainly not slow," she said, with a smile and a glance: the glance should be described, if it were describable, but it was not. Dale, however, understood it, for he replied, laughing: "They've been prejudicing you against me." "I don't despair of you. I think you may be reformed. But I'm afraid you're very bad just now." "Why do you think that? From what your father said?" "Partly. Partly also because Colonel Smith and Tora--do you know them?--are so enthusiastic about you." "Is that a bad sign?" "Terrible. They are quite revolutionary. So are you, aren't you?" "Not in private life." "But of course," she asked, with serious eyes, "you believe what you write?" "Well, I do; but you pay writers a compliment by saying 'of course.'" "Oh, I hope not! Anything is better than insincerity." "Even my opinions?" "Yes. Opinions may be changed, but not natures, you know." She was still looking at him with serious, inquiring eyes. The eyes were very fine eyes. Perhaps that was the reason why Dale thought the last remark so excellent. He said nothing, and she went on: "People who are clever and--and great, you know, ought to be so careful that they are right, oughtn't they?" "Oh, a rhymer rhymes as the fit takes him," answered he, with affected modesty. "I wouldn't believe that of you. You wouldn't misuse your powers like that." "You have read my poetry?" "Some of it." She paused and added, with a little blush for her companion: "There was some papa would not let me read." A man may not unreasonably write what a young girl's father may very reasonably not like her to read. Nevertheless, Dale Bannister felt rather uncomfortable. "Those were the shocking political ones, I suppose?" he asked. "No; I read most of those. These were against religion and----" "Well?" "Morality, papa said," she answered, with the same grave look of inquiry. Dale rose and held out his hand, saying petulantly: "Good-by, Miss Delane. You evidently don't think me fit to enter your house." "Oh, now I have made you angry. I have no right to speak about it, and, of course, I know nothing about it. Only----" "Only what?" "Some things are right and some are wrong, aren't they?" "Oh, granted--if we could only agree which were which." "As to some we have been told. And I don't think that about you at all--I really don't. Do wait till papa comes." Dale sat down again. He had had his lecture; experience told him that a lecture from such lecturers is tolerably often followed by a petting, and the pettings were worth the lectures. In this instance he was disappointed. Janet did not pet him, though she displayed much friendliness, and he took his leave (for the Squire did not appear) feeling somewhat put out. Approbation and applause were dear to this man, who seemed to spend his energies in courting blame and distrust; whatever people thought of his writings, he wished them to be fascinated by him. He was not sure that he had fascinated Miss Delane. "I should like to see more of her," he thought. "She's rather an odd girl." CHAPTER VI. =Littlehill Goes into Society.= Mr. Delane's late return from his public duties was attributable simply to Colonel Smith's obstinacy. He and the Colonel sat together on the bench, and very grievously did they quarrel over the case of a man who had been caught in the possession of the body of a fresh-killed hare. They differed first as to the policy of the law, secondly as to its application, thirdly as to its vindication; and when the Vicar of Denborough, who was a county justice and present with them, sided with the Squire on all these points, the Colonel angrily denounced the reverend gentleman as a disgrace, not only to the judicial bench, but even to his own cloth. All this took time, as did also the Colonel's cross-examination of the constable in charge of the case, and it was evening before the dispute was ended, and a fine imposed. The Colonel paid the fine, and thus everyone, including the law and the prisoner, was in the end satisfied. Mr. Delane and the Colonel, widely and fiercely as they differed on every subject under the sun, were very good friends, and they rode home together in the dusk of a September evening, for their roads lay the same way for some distance. Presently they fell in with Sir Harry Fulmer, who had been to see Dale Bannister, and, in his absence, had spent the afternoon with Nellie Fane and Philip Hume. "Hume's quite a good fellow," he declared; "quiet, you know, and rather sarcastic, but quite a gentleman. And Miss Fane--I say, have you seen her, Colonel?" "By the way, who is Miss Fane?" asked the Squire. "Oh, she acts, or sings, or something. Awfully jolly girl, and uncommon pretty. Don't you think so, Squire?" "Yes, I did, Harry. But why is she staying there?" "Really, Delane," said the Colonel, "what possible business is that of yours?" "I've called on Bannister, and he's going to return my call. I think it's a good deal of business of mine." "Well!" exclaimed the Colonel; "for sheer uncharitableness and the thinking of all evil, give me a respectable Christian man like yourself, Delane." "Oh, it's all right," said Sir Harry cheerfully. "The old lady, Mrs. What's-her-name, is there." "I hope it is," said the Squire. "Bannister has himself to thank for any suspicions which may be aroused." "Suspicions? Bosh!" said the Colonel. "They are all coming to dine with me to-morrow. I met Bannister and asked him. He said he had friends, and I told him to bring the lot. Will you and Mrs. Delane come, Squire?" "My wife's away, thanks." "Then bring Janet." "Hum! I think I'll wait." "Oh, as you please. You'll come, Harry?" Sir Harry was delighted to come. "Tora was most anxious to know them," the Colonel continued, "and I hate ceremonious ways. There'll be nobody else, except the Doctor and his wife." "You haven't asked Hedger and Johnstone, have you?" inquired the Squire. "They're friends of Bannister's. I met them at his house." "I haven't, but I don't know why I shouldn't." "Still you won't," said Sir Harry, with a laugh. The Colonel knew that he would not, and changed the subject. * * * * * "This is a great occasion," said Philip Hume at afternoon tea next day. "To-night we are to be received into county society." "Is Colonel Smith 'county society'?" asked Nellie. "Yes. The Mayor told me so. The Colonel is a Radical, and a bad one at that, but the poor man comes of good family and is within the toils." "I expect he really likes it," said Nellie, "I should." "Are you nervous?" inquired Philip. Nellie laughed and colored. "I really am a little. I hope I shall behave properly. Mother is in a dreadful state." "Where is Mrs. Hodge?" "Putting some new lace on her gown." "And Dale?" "He's writing. Mr. Hume, has he told you anything about his visit yesterday?" "Yes. He says he met an angel." "Oh, that accounts for the title." "What title?" "Why, I went and looked over his shoulder, and saw he was beginning some verses, headed, 'To a Pretty Saint.' I always look, you know, but this time he snatched the paper away." "'To a Pretty Saint'? Dear, dear! Perhaps he meant you, Nellie." Miss Fane shook her head. "He meant Miss Delane, I'm sure," she said dolefully. "I hope Miss Smith is just exactly a county young lady--you know what I mean. I want to see one." "Do you contemplate remodeling yourself?" "I'm sure Dale will like that sort of girl." Philip looked at her sideways. He thought of telling her that "county young ladies" did not proclaim all their thoughts. But then he reflected that he would not. The Littlehill party arrived at Mount Pleasant, the Colonel's residence, in the nick of time; and Mrs. Hodge sailed in to dinner on her host's arm in high good humor. Dale, as the great man and the stranger, escorted Tora, Philip Hume Mrs. Roberts, and Sir Harry fell to Nellie's lot. Mrs. Hodge was an amusing companion. She did not dally at the outworks of acquaintance, but closed at once into intimacy, and before half an hour was gone, she found herself trying hard not to call the Colonel "my dear," and to remember to employ the usual prefixes to the names of the company. The Colonel was delighted; was he at last escaping from the stifling prison of conventionality and breathing a freer air? Unhappily, just in proportion as good cheer and good fellowship put Mrs. Hodge at her ease, and made her more and more to the Colonel's taste, her daughter's smothered uneasiness grew more intense. Nellie had borne herself with an impossible dignity and distance of manner toward Sir Harry, in the fear lest Sir Harry should find her wanting in the characteristics of good society, and her frigidity was increased by her careful watch on her mother's conduct. Sir Harry was disappointed. As he could not sit by Tora Smith, he had consoled himself with the prospect of some fun with "little Miss Fane." And little Miss Fane held him at arms'-length. He determined to try to break down her guard. "How did you manage to shock the Squire so?" he asked. "Was he shocked? I didn't know." "You were there, weren't you?" "Oh, yes. Well, I suppose it was Mr. Bannister's poetry." "Why should that shock him?" asked Sir Harry, who knew very well. "By Jove, I wish I could write some like it!" She turned to him with sudden interest. "Do you admire Dale's writings?" "Awfully," said Sir Harry. "Don't you?" "Of course _I_ do, but I didn't know whether you would. Do you know Miss Delane?" "Yes, very well." "Do you like her?" "Oh, yes. I have known her all my life, and I like her. She frightens me a little, you know." "Does she? How?" "She expects such a lot of a fellow. Have you met her?" "No. D--Mr. Bannister has. He likes her." "I expect she blew him up, didn't she?" "Oh, I shouldn't think so. Dale wouldn't like that." "Depends how it's done," observed Sir Harry. "Don't you ever blow him up?" "Of course not. I'm much too--I look up to him too much." They were interrupted by the Colonel's voice. He was saying, with much energy: "Ability we don't expect in a Government office, but honesty one might hope for." "Just what Hodge used to say of old Pratt," said Mrs. Hodge. "I beg pardon?" said the Colonel. "Pratt was his manager, you know--my husband's." "Oh, yes, of course." "Nellie, you remember your father throwing down that two pound ten on the table, and saying, 'Well, I'm----'" "No, mother, I don't. Do you think I could learn to hunt, Sir Harry?" "Of course you could, in no time." "Does Miss Delane?" "And Pratt said that if Hodge couldn't play the king at two pound ten a week,--though that's hard living, my dear,--I beg pardon--Colonel----" The Colonel bowed courteously. Nellie grew very red. "Why, bantam-cocks had risen since his day, and that was all about it." And Mrs. Hodge emptied her glass and beamed pleasantly on the company. Suddenly Dale Bannister began to laugh gently. Tora Smith turned an inquiring look in his direction. "What is it, Mr. Bannister?" "I saw your father's butler looking at my friend Mrs. Hodge." "What nonsense! Simmons is not allowed to look at anyone." "Isn't he? Why not?" "No good servant does." Dale smiled. "I know what you mean," Tora continued; "but surely while they're actually waiting, Mr. Bannister, we can't treat them quite like ourselves? At any other time, of course----" "You'd take a walk with them?" "They'd be horribly uncomfortable if I did," she answered, laughing. "That's the worst of it," said he. "Do you think us great shams?" "I have come to learn, not to criticise." "We want a leader," said Tora, with pretty earnestness. "Haven't you one?" "Sir Harry Fulmer is our leader, but we're not contented with him. He's a very mild Radical. Won't you come to our help?" "I expect I should be too extreme the other way." "Oh, I love people who are extreme--in my direction, I mean." "Well, then, try the Doctor." "Mr. Roberts? Oh, he's hardly prominent enough; we must have somebody of position. Now, what are you laughing at, Mr. Bannister?" The gentleman to whom they referred sat looking on at them with no great pleasure, though they found one another entertaining enough to prevent them noticing him. Dale Bannister said that his new friend took life seriously, and the charge was too true for the Doctor's happiness. Dale Bannister had taken hold of his imagination. He expected Dale to do all he would give his life to see done, but could not do himself. The effect of Dale was to be instantaneous, enormous, transforming Denborough and its inhabitants. He regarded the poet much as a man might look upon a benevolent volcano, did such a thing exist in the order of nature. His function was, in the Doctor's eyes, to pour forth the burning lava of truth and justice, wherewith the ignorance, prejudice, and cruelty of the present order should be consumed and smothered; let the flood be copious, scorching, and unceasing! The Doctor could do little more than hail the blessed shower and declare its virtues; but that he was ready to do at any cost. And the volcano would not act! The eruptions were sadly intermittent. The hero, instead of going forth to war, was capering nimbly in a lady's chamber, to the lascivious pleasing of a lute; that is to say, he was talking trifles to Tora Smith, with apparent enjoyment, forgetful of his mission, ignoring the powers of darkness around. No light-spreading saying, no swordflash had come from him all the evening. He was fiddling while Rome was--waiting for the burning it needed so badly. Perhaps it was a woebegone look about the Doctor that made Philip Hume take the chair next him after dinner, while Dale was, still as if in play, emitting anarchist sparks for the Colonel's entertainment. "Is it possible," asked the Doctor in low, half-angry tones, "that he thinks these people are any good--that they are sincere or thorough in the matter? He's wasting his time." "Well, well, my dear fellow, we must all dine, whatever our opinions." "Oh, yes; we must dine, while the world starves." "The bow can't be always stretched," said Philip, with a slight smile. "You don't think, Hume, do you, that he's getting any less--less in earnest, you know?" "Oh, he wrote a scorcher this very morning." "Did he? That's good news. Where is it to appear?" "I don't know. He didn't write it on commission." "His poems have such magnificent restlessness, haven't they? I can't bear to see him idle." "Poor Dale! You must give him some holidays. He likes pleasure like the rest of us." The Doctor sighed impatiently, and Philip looking at him anxiously, laid a hand on his arm. "Roberts," he said, "there is no need that you should be ground to powder." "I don't understand." "I hope you never will. Your wife doesn't look very strong. Why don't you give her a change?" "A change? How am I to afford a change? Besides, who wants a change? What change do most workers get?" "Hang most workers! Your wife wants a change." "I haven't got the money, anyhow." "Then there's an end of it." The Colonel rose, and they made for the drawing room. Philip detained his companion for a moment. "Well?" said the Doctor, feeling the touch on his arm. "For God's sake, old fellow, go slow," said Philip, pressing his arm, and looking at him with an appealing smile. CHAPTER VII. ="To a Pretty Saint."= When Mrs. Delane came back from London, she was met with a question of the precise kind on which she felt herself to be no mean authority. It was a problem of propriety, of etiquette, and of the usages of society, and Mrs. Delane attacked it with a due sense of its importance and with the pleasure of an expert. It arose out of Dale Bannister's call at the Grange. Dale had been accustomed, when a lady found favor in his eyes, to inform her of the gratifying news through the medium of a set of verses, more or less enthusiastic and rhapsodic in their nature. The impulse to follow his usual practice was strong on him after meeting Janet Delane, and issued in the composition of that poem called "To a Pretty Saint," the title of which Nellie had seen. He copied it out fair, and was about to put it in the post when a thought suddenly struck him. Miss Delane was not quite like most of his acquaintances. It was perhaps possible that she might think his action premature, or even impertinent, and that she might deem it incumbent on her to resent being called either a saint or pretty by a friend of one interview's standing. Dale was divided between his newborn doubt of his own instinct of what was permissible and his great reluctance to doom his work to suppression. He decided to consult Philip Hume, who was, as he knew, more habituated to the social atmosphere of places like Denshire. "Eh? what?" said Philip, who was busily engaged in writing a newspaper article. "Written a poem to a girl? All right. I'll listen presently." "I don't want you to listen. I want your advice as to whether to send it or not." "If you've wasted your time writing the thing,--by the way, take care the Doctor doesn't hear of it,--you may as well send it." "The question is, whether she'll be offended." "I'm glad it isn't more important, because I'm busy." "Look here! Stop that anonymous stabber of yours and listen. It's to Miss Delane." Philip stopped in the middle of a particularly vicious paragraph of the "stabber," and looked up with amusement on his face. "It's a perfectly--you know--suitable poem," pursued Dale. "The only question is, will she think it a liberty?" "Oh, send it. They like getting 'em;" and Philip took up his pen again. "You don't know the sort of girl she is." "Then what the deuce is the good of asking me? Ask Nellie." "No, I shan't," said Dale shortly. Thus thrown, by his friend's indifference, on his own judgment, Dale made up his mind to send the verses,--he could not deny himself the pleasure,--but, half alarmed at his own audacity, which feeling was a new one in him, he "hedged" by inclosing with them a letter of an apologetic character. Miss Delane was not to suppose that he took the liberty of referring to her in the terms of his title: the little copy of verses had merely been suggested by a remark she made. He had failed to find an answer on the spot. Would she pardon him for giving his answer now in this indirect way?--and so forth. The verses, with their accompanying letter, were received by Janet, and Janet had no doubt of what she did feel about them, but some considerable doubt as to what she ought to feel; so she carried them to her mother. Mrs. Delane put on her _pince-nez_ and read the documents in the case. "I'm sure he didn't mean to be--anything but what's nice, mamma," said Janet. "I dare say not, my dear. The question is, whether the young man knows his manners. Let's see." After careful perusal, during which Janet watched her mother's face with some anxiety, Mrs. Delane delivered judgment. "There's no positive harm in them," she said, "and I don't think we need take any actual steps. Still, Janet, he is evidently to be treated with discretion." "How do you mean, mamma?" "Well, he isn't in need of encouragement, is he? He's not backward in making friends." "I suppose not. May I keep them?" "Keep them? Do you want to keep them?" "Not particularly, dear," answered Janet. "I--I thought he meant me to." "No doubt. Write a civil note, dear, thank him for letting you see them, and return them inclosed." Janet was a little reluctant to part with her autograph manuscript,--not because of its pecuniary value, though that was more than a trifle, had she known, but because such things are pleasant possessions to show to envious friends,--but she did as she was told. She did not, however, feel herself bound altogether to smother her pride or to make a secret of the tribute she had received. Tora Smith heard the story with evident amusement, and, thinking that others would share her appreciation of it, relieved the somewhat uphill course of Mrs. Hodge's call by a repetition of it: whereby it happened that Nellie Fane came to know, not only that Dale had written verses to Miss Delane and sent them, but also that Miss Delane had returned the offering. She told Philip the latter fact, and the two ventured to rally the poet on the occurrence. Dale took their action very badly, and his displeasure soon reduced Nellie to apologies. Philip was less sensitive. "D. W. T., by Jove!" he remarked. "Quite like old times, Dale!" Dale muttered something about "infernal chatter." "You will soon be in a position to publish a volume of 'Rejected Addresses.'" "Not at all," said Dale. "It's simply that she didn't understand I meant her to keep them." "Oh, that's her delicate way of snubbing you, my boy." "What the deuce do you know about it, Phil? You never wrote verses in your life. Don't you agree with me, Nellie?" "Miss Smith said Miss Delane thought she had better not keep them." "I knew that girl was a gossip directly I set eyes on her." "You're naturally hurt, old fellow, but----" "Go to the deuce! Look here, I'll bet you a fiver she takes them back and keeps them." "Done!" said Philip, and Dale seized his hat. "Why does he want her to take them?" asked Nellie. "Vanity, my dear, vanity. I suppose he's accustomed to having his verses laid up in lavender. Is that what you do with yours?" "He never wrote me any," answered Nellie in a tone of superlative indifference. It being only two o'clock, Dale felt he could not yet go to the Grange. He made a detour by the town, on pretense of buying stamps; and, the stars fighting with him, outside the Mayor's shop he saw Janet talking to the Mayor himself. "Thank you, Miss Delane, miss," said the Mayor. "Mrs. Hedger is doin' nicely. She had a bit of feverishness about her, but Dr. Spink's treated her wonderful." "Dr. Spink? I thought you went to Dr. Roberts?" "I did, miss, but---- Well, things come round to me, miss, being a center like." "What things?" "Well, you may not have heard, miss, of the things that---- Good-mornin', Mr. Bannister, sir, good-mornin'. A fine day. Anything in our line, sir?" "Good-morning, Mr. Mayor," said Dale. "Ah, Miss Delane, how do you do?" His coming interrupted Janet's investigations into the affairs of the Doctor, and she took her leave of the Mayor, Dale assuming permission to walk with her. He ought to have asked, no doubt, thought Janet, but it would be making too much of it to tell him so. They had hardly started when he turned to her: "Why did you send back my verses?" "I could hardly venture to keep them, could I?" "Why not?" "On so slight an acquaintance! It was very kind of you to let me see them before they were published." "They're not going to be published." "Oh, you must publish them. They're so very pretty." "Didn't you think I meant you to keep them?" "I should have been very conceited if I had, shouldn't I?" "Well, they were for you--not to be published. If you don't like them, they'll be burned, that's all." Janet stole a glance at his face; he looked like a petulant Apollo--so she thought. "That would be a pity," she said gravely; "but I don't think I ought to keep them." "Why not?" Socrates is reported to have said that nothing is reasonable which cannot be stated in a reasonable form. Miss Janet Delane would have dissented. "Of course I like them very much. But--well, we haven't known each other very long, Mr. Bannister." "You mean it was impertinent?" "Oh, no. I thought your letter perfect--I did really. But mamma thought----" "Oh!" said Dale, with brightening face. "You would have kept them?" "That's not the question," said Janet, smiling. It was pleasant to see Apollo looking less petulant. "But what would people say if they heard I had poems of Mr. Dale Bannister's about me? I should be thought a dangerous person." "I'll write some which you would like to have." "I am sure you could, if you only would. Fancy, if you wrote really noble verses--worthy of you!" "Well, I will, if it will please you." "Nonsense, Mr. Bannister! There's no question of pleasing me: it doesn't matter--well, I mean, then, the great thing is to do justice to yourself." "I ought to have some encouragement in well-doing," said Dale plaintively. She shook her head with a smile, and he went on: "I wish you'd come to Littlehill and see the house. I've improved it tremendously." "Oh, you must invite mamma." "Would Mrs. Delane come?" This question was a little awkward, for Mrs. Delane, after cross-examining Tora Smith closely as to Mrs. Hodge and her daughter, had announced that she would not go. "A bachelor doesn't entertain ladies, does he?" "I should like to; and there are some ladies----" A sudden thought struck him, and he stopped. He looked so pointedly at Janet that, to her intense annoyance, she felt herself blushing. She made the grave mistake of changing the conversation abruptly. "How did you like the Smiths?" "Oh, pretty well." "I should have thought you would have got on tremendously well together." "Oh, I don't know. I think I like people to be one thing or the other, and the Smiths are halfway housers." "You're very ungrateful." "Oh, they only asked us as a demonstration," said Dale, who had some acuteness. Janet laughed, but her companion was moodily prodding the ground with his stick as he walked along. They reached a cottage where she had a visit to pay, and she bade him good-by. "Then you won't have the verses?" "I think not." "Very well, then, here goes;" and he took the paper out of his pocket and tore it to bits. The fragments fluttered to the ground. "How foolish!" she said. "I dare say they were worth a lot of money--but, then, you can write them out again." "Do you think I shall?" he asked, grinding the fragments into the mud. "I'm afraid you will do nothing wise," she said, giving him her hand. Yet the extravagance rather pleased her. Until Dale reached his own house it did not strike him that he had lost his bet. Philip quickly reminded him, and laughed mercilessly when a crumpled five-pound note was thrown at his head by his angry friend. "I tell you she wanted to keep them," said Dale unjustifiably. "Then why didn't she?" asked Nellie. "Mrs. Delane didn't approve of it." "I expect Mrs. Delane doesn't approve of you at all," remarked Philip. "No, nor of my friends either," answered Dale, flinging himself into a chair. "Well, my dear," said Mrs. Hodge, who sat by, "her opinion will neither make us nor mar us." "How have we had the misfortune to offend the lady?" inquired Philip. "She has never seen us." "Here's your tea, Dale," said Nellie. "Are you tired?" "Yes, a little. Thanks, Nellie." "Was she looking nice, Dale?" "I didn't see her." "I mean Miss Delane." "Oh, yes, I suppose so. I didn't look much." CHAPTER VIII. =An Indiscreet Disciple.= Summer wore away, and autumn came in brief, calm radiance, and passed; winter began to threaten. At Denborough one quiet day followed another, each one noticeable for little, but in the aggregate producing some not unimportant changes at Littlehill. Dale Bannister had begun to work hard and to work in solitude; the inspiration of Nellie's eyes seemed either unnecessary or ineffectual. Moreover, his leisure hours were now largely spent in visiting at houses in the neighborhood. He did not neglect his guests, but whenever their engagements occupied them, instead of wandering about alone or enjoying the humors of the High Street, as he had been prone to do in the early days of his sojourn, he would go over to Mount Pleasant, or to the Grange, or to Sir Harry Fulmer's, and he was becoming learned in country lore and less scornful of country ways. The Doctor was a rare visitor now, and, when he came, it generally fell to Philip Hume's lot to entertain him. Philip did his duty loyally, but it was dreary work, for Roberts' conversation, at their meetings, consisted, in the main, of diatribes against Dale Bannister. He would declare that Dale's conduct, in maintaining friendly relations with the gentry of the neighborhood, was in flagrant contradiction to the views he had proclaimed in his writings. Philip shrugged his shoulders, and said that some men were better than their writings, some worse, but no man the same as his writings; the prose must ever be allowed for: and at this the angry man often turned his back on the house with an imprecation on half-heartedness. For the rest, Philip's hands were not very full, and he and Nellie Fane found time for long expeditions together, which would have been more cheerful had it not been for Nellie's scrupulous determination to ignore the absence of the third member of the old trio. One day Philip's idle steps led him through the town on the search for matter of amusement. He was caught in a shower, and took refuge in the Mayor's shop, knowing that his Worship always had time for a gossip. He was not disappointed. The Mayor entertained him with a graphic account of the last assault on Mr. Delane's position as member for the Denborough division, and of his own recent re-election to his high office. Philip congratulated him on the latter event, and asked in curiosity: "And what are your politics, Mr. Mayor?" "I hold as a man in my position should have no politics, not party politics, Mr. Hume, sir." "Well, there's something to be said for that." "After all, we know what they are, sir. One out and the other in--that's what they are, sir." "But you said Mrs. Hedger canvassed for the Squire." "So she did, sir. Now, my daughter is on the Liberal side; she and Miss Smith used to go a-drivin' round together." "A sad division of opinion, Mr. Mayor." "Well, we can differ without disagreein', sir. Besides," he added, with something like a wink, "customers differ too." "Most true." "Business is business, sir, especially with a growin' fam'ly. I always think of my fam'ly, Mr. Hume, and how I should leave 'em if I was took--taken." "A man's first duty, Mr. Mayor." "You wouldn't catch me goin' on like this young Roberts." "Why, what's he been up to now?" asked Philip uneasily. "You aint seen the _Standard_, sir?" The Mayor, of course, meant the _East Denshire Standard_, not the London paper of the same name. "No." "Well, last week they printed the Vicar's sermon on 'The Work of Christianity in the World.' A fine sermon it was, sir. I heard it, being a Church of England man. Mrs. Hedger goes to Chapel." "'Customers differ too,'" thought Philip, smiling. "Well, as I was sayin', Jones of the _Standard_ got the Vicar to give it 'im, and it came out, with a leadin' article of Jones' crackin' it up." "But how does the Doctor----" "This week, sir," continued the Mayor, shaking an impressive forefinger, "in the _Chronicle_--that's the Liberal paper, sir--there's a letter from the Doctor--two columns--just abusin' the Church and the parsons, and the 'ole--whole thing, fit to--well, I never did!" "Hum! Rather rash, isn't it?" "Rash, Mr. Hume, sir? It's madness, that's what it is, sir. He talks about 'pestilent priests,' and I don't know what all, sir, and ends with quotin' thirty or forty lines from a poem called, I think, 'The Arch Apostates'--would that be it, sir?--by Mr. Bannister." "No! does he, by Jove?" said Philip, slapping his thigh. "And the po'try, sir, is worse than the Doctor's own stuff, sir, beggin' your pardon as a friend of Mr. Bannister." "I know the lines. They're some of the hottest he's ever done." "Mr. Bannister, of course, can afford it, sir,--his opinions are what he pleases,--but the Doctor, sir!" "So the fat's in the fire?" "Just the very worst time it could ha' come out, sir. The Guardians over at Dirkham meet to-morrow to elect their medical officer. I'm afraid as they won't re-elect Dr. Roberts, sir, and there was more than one down at the Delane Arms sayin' they'd had the last to do with him." Philip parted from his informant in much concern for Roberts, and in no small amusement at the public placarding of "The Arch Apostates." "_Surtout, point de zele_," he could imagine Dale saying to his infatuated disciple. On returning home, however, he found the poet saying much harder things of, if not to, Mr. Roberts. Dale had been calling at the Smiths'. The Colonel, while shaking his head over Roberts' impudence, had applauded his opinions, and was, above all, enchanted with the extract from Dale's poem, which he had never hitherto read. His pleasure was, as he told Dale, greatly increased by finding that the letter and the quotation had fallen like a bombshell on the Grange household. "The Squire was furious. Mrs. Delane said she had no idea you had done anything so bad as that; and little Janet sat and looked as if someone had knocked down the Archbishop of Canterbury. It was splendid! Gad, sir, you've waked 'em up." These congratulations had the effect of reducing the poet almost to a frenzy. "What business," he demanded, "has the fellow to quote me in support of his balderdash without my leave?" "My dear fellow, your works are the possession of the nation," said Philip, smiling, as he lit a cigar. "It's an infernal liberty!" fumed Dale. "You light the fire, and blame it for blazing," said Philip. "One doesn't want to shove one's views down people's throats." "Doesn't one? One used to." "I shall write and disclaim any responsibility." "For the poem?" "For its publication, of course." "That won't do you much good." The Mayor's forecast, based on a lifelong observation of his neighbors, proved only too correct. Dr. Spink entered the lists against Roberts, and was elected by every vote save one. Sir Harry Fulmer, in blind and devoted obedience to Tora Smith, voted for Roberts; the rest, headed by the Squire, installed his rival in his place; and the Squire, having sternly done his duty, sat down and wrote a long and friendly letter of remonstrance and explanation to his erring friend. As misfortune followed misfortune, the Doctor set his teeth, and dared fate to do her worst. He waited a few days, hoping to be comforted by a word of approval from his master; none came. At last he determined to seek out Dale Bannister, and was about to start when his wife came in and gave him the new issue of the _Chronicle_. Ethel Roberts was pale and weary-looking, and she glanced anxiously at her husband. "I am going up to Littlehill," he said. "Have you done your round, dear?" "My round doesn't take long nowadays. Maggs will give me fifteen pounds for the pony: you know we don't want him now." "No, Jim, and we do want fifteen pounds." "What's that?" "The _Chronicle_, dear. There's--a letter from Mr. Bannister." "Is there? Good! Let's see what Bannister has to say to these bigoted idiots." He opened the paper, and in the middle of the front page read: A DISCLAIMER FROM MR. BANNISTER. SIR: I desire to state that the use made by Mr. James Roberts of my poem in your last issue was without my authority or approbation. The poem was written some years ago, and must not be assumed to represent my present view on the subject of which it treats. I am, sir, your obedient servant, DALE BANNISTER. The Doctor stared at the letter. "Bannister--Dale Bannister wrote that!" and he flung the paper angrily on the floor. "Give me my hat." "You're not going----" "Yes, I am, Ethel. I'm going to find out what this means." "Hadn't you better wait till you're less----" "Less what, Ethel? What do you mean?" "Till the rain stops, Jim, dear; and it's just baby's time for coming down." "Hang--no, I beg your pardon, Ethel. I'm very sorry, but I must see the end of this." He rushed out, and the baby found a dull, preoccupied, almost tearful, very unamusing mother to play with that day. The Doctor marched into Dale's room with a stern look on his face. "Well, Roberts, how are you?" asked Dale, not graciously. "What does this mean, Bannister?" "It means, my dear fellow, that you took my name in vain, and I had to say so." "I'm not thinking of myself, though it would have been more friendly to write to me first." "Well, I was riled, and didn't think of that." "But do you mean to deny your own words?" "Really, Roberts, you seem to forget that I don't enjoy setting the place by the ears, although you seem to." "You wrote that poem?" "Of course I wrote the damned thing," said Dale peevishly. "And now--Bannister, you're not going to--to throw us over?" "Nonsense! I like to publish my views at my own time and place, that's all." "A man like you belongs to his followers as much as to himself." "More, it seems." The Doctor looked at him almost scornfully. Dale did not like scorn from anyone. "I was particularly anxious," he began apologetically, "not to get into a shindy here. I wanted to drop politics and so on, and be friendly----" "Do you know what you're saying, or the meanness of it?" "Meanness? What do you mean?" "You know very well. All I want to know is if you wrote this thing?" "Of course I wrote it." "And you stand to it?" "Yes. I think you ought to have asked me before you did it." "The Squire is shocked, eh?" asked the Doctor, with a sneer. "The Squire's views are nothing to me," answered Dale, flushing very red. The Doctor laughed bitterly. "Come, come, old fellow," said Dale, "don't let us quarrel." "Quarrel? Well, we won't. Only look here, Bannister." "Well?" "If you throw us over now, you'll be----" "There, don't abuse me any more." "Oh, I wasn't going to abuse you. If you leave us,--you, the leader we trusted,--where are we, where are we?" "Give me another chance," said Dale, holding out his hand. "You won't withdraw this?" "How the deuce can I now?" The Doctor shook his hand, saying: "Don't betray us, don't betray us;" and thus the very uncomfortable interview came to a desired end. That night at dinner Dale was cross and in low spirits. His friends, perceiving it, forbore to express their views as to his last public utterance, and the repast dragged its weary length along amid intermittent conversation. When the dessert was on the table, a note was brought for Dale. It was from the Squire. DEAR BANNISTER: I was very glad to see your letter in the _Chronicle_. Mrs. Delane joins me in hoping you will dine with us to-morrow _en famille_. Excuse short notice. The man waits for an answer--don't write one. Yours truly, GEORGE DELANE. "Say I'll come with great pleasure," said Dale, his face growing brighter. "Where will he go with great pleasure?" asked Philip of Nellie Fane. "Where is it, Dale?" "Oh, only to the Grange, to dinner to-morrow. I think I had better write a note, though--don't you think so, Phil? More--more attentive, you know." "Write, my son," answered Philip, and, as Dale left the room, he looked round with a smile and exclaimed, "One!" "One what, my dear?" asked Mrs. Hodge. "Piece of silver, ma'am," replied Philip. "You're sneering again," said Nellie in a warning tone. "Why shouldn't he like to dine at the Grange?" and she looked marvelously reasonable and indifferent. "I was speaking with the voice of Doctor Roberts, Nellie, that's all. For my own part, I think a dinner is one of those things one may accept even from the enemy." CHAPTER IX. =Dale's Own Opinion.= If ever our own fortune would allow us to be perfectly happy, the consumation is prevented and spoiled by the obstinately intruding unhappiness of others. The reverend person who was of opinion that the bliss of the blessed would be increased and, so to say, vivified by the sight of the tortures of the damned, finds few supporters nowadays, perhaps because our tenderer feelings shrink from such a ruthless application of the doctrine that only by contemplating the worse can we enjoy the better; perhaps also because we are not so sure as he was that we should not be the onlooked rather than the onlookers if ever his picture came to be realized. So sensitive are we to the ills that others suffer that at times we feel almost a grudge against them for their persistence--however unwilling it be--in marring our perfect contentment; surely they could let us forget them for once in a way. This last was Dale Bannister's frame of mind as he lay, idly and yet not peacefully, on his sofa next morning. This Doctor, with his unflinching logic and unrestrained zeal, was a nuisance. His devotion had not been sought, and certainly, if it entailed scenes like yesterday's, was not desired. Dale never asked him to ruin his practice, as Philip Hume said he was doing, in order to uphold Dale's principles; Dale did not want a starving family to his account, whose hungry looks should press him to a close questioning of his conscience. Any man with an ounce of common sense would understand that there was a time for everything, and a place. It was one thing to publish your views in a book, addressed to the world of thinkers and intelligent readers; it was quite another to brandish them in the face of your neighbors, and explode them, like shells, in the innocent streets of Denborough. And yet, because he recognized this obvious distinction, because he had some sense of what was suitable and reasonable, and because he refused to make enemies of people simply because they were well off, the Doctor stormed at him as if he were a traitor and a snob. And Philip Hume had taken to smiling in an aggravating way when the Grange was mentioned; and even Nellie---- But Dale, alert as he was in his present mood to discover matter of complaint, found none against Nellie, unless it might be some falling off in her old cheerfulness and buoyancy. Dale lit his pipe and set himself to consider with impartiality whether Roberts had in fact any grievance against him. He wanted to satisfy himself that there was no basis for the Doctor's indignation; his self-esteem demanded that the accusation should be disproved. But really it was too plain. What had he done? Refused to acquiesce in being made a fool of, refused to meet civility with incivility, to play the churl, to shut his eyes to intelligence and culture and attractiveness because they happened to be found among people who did not think as he did or as Roberts was pleased to think. He knew what those sneers meant, but he would go his own way. Things had come to a pretty pass if a man might not be civil and seek to avoid wholly unnecessary causes of offense without being treated as a renegade to all his convictions. That was not his idea of breadth of mind or toleration, or of good feeling either. It was simple bigotry, as narrow as--aye, narrower than--anything he at least had found on the other side. Dale disposed of this question, but he still lay on the sofa and thought. It had been a gain to him, he said to himself, to see this new side of life; the expedition to Littlehill was well justified. It is good for a man to take a flag of truce and go talk with the enemy in the gate. He may not change his own views,--Dale was conscious of no change in his,--but he comes to see how other people may hold different ones, and the reason, or anyhow the naturalness, of theirs. A man of Roberts' fierce Puritan temper could not feel nor appreciate what appealed to him so strongly in such a life as they lived, for instance, at the Grange. It had a beauty so its own, that unquestioned superiority, not grasped as a prize or valued as an opportunity, but gravely accepted as the parent of duties--the unbroken family life, grasping through many hands the torch undimmed from reverend antiquity--the very house, which seemed to enshrine honorable traditions, at which he could not bring himself to sneer. The sweetness of it all broke back baffled from the wall of the Doctor's stern conviction and iron determination. Yet how sweet it all was! And these people welcomed into their circle any man who had a claim to welcome, freely, ungrudgingly, cordially. All they asked was a little gentleness to their--he supposed they were prejudices, a little deference to their prepossessions, a little smoothing off of the rougher edges of difference. It was not much to ask. Was he churlishly to deny the small concession, to refuse to meet them any part of the way, to intrench himself in the dogmatic intolerance of his most vehement utterances, to shut his mind off from this new source of inspiration? That was what Roberts wanted. Well, then--Roberts be hanged! The course of these reflections produced in Dale a return to his usual equanimity. It was plainly impossible to please everybody. He must act as seemed right to himself, neglecting the frowns of unreasonable grumblers. No doubt Roberts was devoted to him, and Arthur Angell too. Yet Roberts abused him, and Arthur bothered him with imploring letters, which warned him against the subtle temptations of his new life. It was a curious sort of devotion which showed itself mainly in criticism and disapproval; it was very flattering of these good friends to set him on a pedestal and require him to live up to the position; only, unfortunately, the pedestal was of their choosing, not his. All he asked was to be allowed to live a quiet life and work out his own ideas in his own way. If they could not put up with that, why---- Dale refilled his pipe and opened a story by Maupassant. It may be asserted that every man is the victim of a particular sort of follies, the follies engendered by his particular sort of surroundings; they make a fool's circle within which each of us has a foot planted; for the rest, we may be, and no doubt generally are, very sensible people. If we set aside Squire Delane's special and indigenous illusions, he was very far indeed from a fool, and after dinner that evening he treated his distinguished guest with no small tact. The young man was beyond question a force; was it outside of ingenuity to turn him in a better direction? "Everybody approves of your letter," he said. "Roberts had no business to drag your name in." "Of course one is exposed to that sort of thing." "It's a penalty of greatness. But the case is peculiar when you're actually living in the place." "That's exactly what I feel. It's making me a party in a local quarrel." "That's what he wanted to do; he wanted to fight under your shield." "I didn't come here to fight at all." "I should think not; and you haven't found us thirsting for battle, have you?" "I have found a kinder welcome than I had any right to expect." "My dear fellow! Much as we differ, we're all proud of counting you as a Denshire man. And I don't suppose we shall quarrel much about Denshire affairs. Oh, I know you think the whole system of country life an iniquity. I don't go so deep myself. I say, there it is. Perhaps it might be changed, but, pending that, sensible men can work together to make the best of it. At any rate, they can avoid treading on one another's corns." "I want to avoid everybody's corns, if they'll avoid mine." "Well, we'll try. I dare say we shall pull together. At any rate, it's very pleasant dining together. Shall we go upstairs and ask Janet for a song?" Mrs. Delane had evidently caught her cue from her husband, and she treated Dale not as a sinner who repenteth,--a mode of reception which, after all, requires great tact to make it acceptable,--but as one who had never been a sinner at all. She asked Dale if he had been overwhelmed by callers. He replied that he had not suffered much in that way. "I knew it," she said. "You have frightened them, Mr. Bannister; they think you came in search of studious retirement." "Oh, I hate both study and retirement, Mrs. Delane." "Well, I shall tell people that--may I? Now, when I was at the Cransfords' yesterday,--he's our Lord Lieutenant, you know,--they were wondering whether they might call." "I am delighted to see anyone." "From the Mayor upward--or, I suppose, Hedger would think I ought to say downward. We heard what fun you made of the poor man." "Mr. Bannister will be more respectful to the Lord Lieutenant," said Janet, smiling. "I suppose I disapprove of Lord Lieutenants," remarked Dale, with a laugh. "You'll like Lady Cransford very much, and she'll like you. She gives so many balls that a bachelor household is a godsend." "Bannister hardly depends on that for a welcome, my dear," said the Squire from the hearthrug. "Now I declare, meeting him just as a friend like this, I'm always forgetting that he's a famous man." "Please go on, Mrs. Delane. It's a capital exchange. But when are you going to give me the pleasure of seeing you at Littlehill?" Mrs. Delane paused for just a second. "I should like to visit your hermit's cell. But I'm so busy just now, and I dare say you are. When your guests forsake you, perhaps we will come and relieve your solitude. Janet, will you give us some music?" Dale followed Janet to the piano, with a little frown on his brow. Why wouldn't she come now? Was it---- Janet's voice dispersed the frown and the reflection. She sang a couple of songs, choosing them out of a book. As she turned over the leaves, Dale saw that some of the airs were set to words of his own writing. When Janet came to one of these, she turned the leaf hastily. The Squire had gone out, and Mrs. Delane, with the privilege of near relationship, was absorbed in a novel. "Will you do me a great favor?" he said. "What, Mr. Bannister?" "I should like to hear you sing words of mine. See, here are two or three." She glanced through them; then she shut the book and made as though to rise. "You won't do it?" Janet blushed and looked troubled. "I'm so sorry, Mr. Bannister; but I can't sing those words. I--I don't like them." "I am sorry they are so bad," he answered in an offended tone. "Oh, of course, so far as power and--and beauty goes, everything in the book is trash compared to them. But I can't sing them." "I won't press you." "I know you are angry. Please don't be angry, Mr. Bannister. I can't do what I think wrong, can I?" "Oh, I have no right to be angry." "There, you wouldn't say that unless you were angry. People never do." "You have such a wretchedly bad opinion of me, Miss Delane." "Do you mind that?" "You know I do." "Then one would think you would try to change it." "Ah, how can I?" "Write something I should delight in singing." "If I do, may I dedicate it to you?" "I'm afraid that wouldn't be allowed." "But if it were allowed, would you allow it?" "You know how proud any girl would be of it--of course you know." "You don't do justice to my humility." "Do justice to yourself first, Mr. Bannister." "What sort of songs do you like?" "Oh, anything honest, and manly, and patriotic, and--and nice in feeling." "A catholic taste--and yet none of mine satisfy it." "I will not be quarreled with," declared Janet. "My only wish is to propitiate you." "Then you know now how to do it." It must be allowed that conversations of this nature have a pleasantness of their own, and Dale left the Grange with a delightful feeling of having been treated as he ought to be treated. He found Philip Hume writing and smoking in the study. "Well, been stroked the right way, old man?" asked Philip, throwing down his pen. Dale helped himself to whisky and soda water, without replying. "I've been having a talk with Nellie," pursued Philip. "What's wrong with Nellie?" "She's got some notion in her head that she and her mother ought to go." Dale was lighting a cigar. "Of course I told her it was all nonsense, and that you meant them to stay as long as they liked. She's got some maggot in her head about propriety--all nonsense, when her mother's here." "I don't want them to go, if they like staying," said Dale. "Well, we should be slow without Nellie, shouldn't we? You must blow her up for thinking of it. She only wants to be persuaded." "She can do as she likes." "You don't seem very enthusiastic about it, one way or the other." "Well, my dear Phil, I can't be expected to cry at the idea of little Nellie Fane leaving us." "Yet you made rather a point of her coming--but that was two months ago." "Really, you might leave Nellie and me to settle it." "What I told her was right, I suppose?" "Well, you don't suppose I wanted you to tell her to pack up?" "I don't know what you want, old man," said Philip; "and I doubt if you do." CHAPTER X. =A Prejudiced Verdict.= It has been contumeliously said by insolent Englishmen--a part of our population which may sometimes seem to foreign eyes as large as the whole--that you might put any other of the world's capitals, say Paris or New York, down in London, and your cabman would not be able to find it. However this may be,--and there is no need in this place either for assertions or admissions,--it is certain that you might unload a wagonful of talents in Piccadilly, and they would speedily be absorbed and leave little obvious trace of the new ingredient. Hence the advantage, for a man who does not dislike the _digito monstrari et dicier_ "_hic est_," of dwelling in small places, and hence, a cynic might suggest, the craving for quieter quarters displayed by some of our less conspicuous celebrities. It is better, says a certain authority, to reign in hell than serve in heaven; and a man may grow weary of walking unrecognized down the Strand, when he has only, to be the beheld of all beholders, to take up his residence in--perhaps it will be more prudent to say Market Denborough, and not point the finger of printed scorn at any better known resort. This very ungenerous explanation was the one which Miss Victoria Smith chose to adopt as accounting for Dale Bannister's coming to Littlehill. Such an idea had never crossed her mind at first, but it became evident that a man who could leave his friend in the lurch and palter with his principles, as Dale's letter to the _Chronicle_ showed him to be doing, could only be credited with any discoverable motive less bad and contemptible than the worst through mere hastiness and ill-considered good nature. For her part, she liked a man to stick to his colors and to his friends, and not be ashamed before the tea tables of Denshire. No, she had never read his poems, she had no time, but papa had, and agreed with every word of them. "Gad! does he?" said Sir Harry Fulmer, to whom these views were expressed. "Well played the Colonel!" "What do you mean?" "Well, some of them made me sit up rather," remarked Sir Harry. "Oh, anything would make you 'sit up,' as you call it. I don't consider you a Radical." "I voted for your friend the Doctor anyhow." "Yes, that was good of you. You were the only one with an elementary sense of justice." Sir Harry's sense of justice, elementary or other, had had very little to do with his vote, but he said with honest pride: "Somebody ought to stand by a fellow when he's down." "Especially when he's in the right." "Well, I don't quite see, Miss Smith, what business it was of Roberts' to cut up the Vicar's sermon. Naturally the Vicar don't like it." "So he takes his medicine from Dr. Spink!" "Rather awkward for him to have Roberts about the place." "Oh, of course you defend him." "The Vicar's a very good fellow, though he's a Tory." "You seem to think all Tories good fellows." "So they are, most of them." "I suppose you think Mr. Bannister's right too?" "I shouldn't be so down on him as you are." "You like people who lead their friends on and then forsake them?" "Bannister never asked him to write the letter." "Well, it's not my idea of friendship. I wouldn't have a friend who thought that conduct right." "Then I think it deuced wrong," said Sir Harry promptly. "It's no compliment to a woman to treat her like a baby," remarked Tora with dignity. Sir Harry perceived that it would be to his advantage to change the subject. "Are you going skating?" he asked. "There's nothing else to do in this beastly frost." "Does the ice bear?" "Yes, they're skating on the Grange lake. I met Hume, Bannister's friend, and he told me Bannister was there." "Wasn't he going? I rather like him." "No, he was walking with Miss Fane. I believe I rather put my foot in it by asking her if she wasn't going." "Why shouldn't you?" "She said she didn't know Mrs. Delane, and looked confused, don't you know." "Hasn't Mrs. Delane called?" "It seems not," said Sir Harry. "I wonder how long they are going to stay at Littlehill?" "Forever, apparently. Shall you come to the lake?" "Perhaps in the afternoon." Tora returned to the house, still wondering. She was very angry with Dale, and prepared to think no good of him. Was it possible that she and the Colonel had been hasty in stretching out the hand of welcome to Mrs. Hodge and her daughter? For all her independence, Tora liked to have Mrs. Delane's _imprimatur_ on the women of her acquaintance. She thought she would have a word with the Colonel, and went to seek him in his study. He was not there, but it chanced that there lay on the table a copy of Dale's first published volume, "The Clarion." Three-quarters of the little book were occupied with verses on matters of a more or less public description--beliefs past and future, revolutions effected and prayed for, and so forth; the leaves bore marks of use, and evidently were often turned by the Colonel. But bound up with them was a little sheaf of verses of an amatory character: where these began, the Colonel's interest appeared to cease, for the pages were uncut; he had only got as far as the title. It was not so with his daughter. Having an idle hour and some interest in the matters and affairs of love, she took a paper-knife and sat down to read. Poets are, by ancient privilege, _legibus soluti_, and Dale certainly reveled in his freedom. Still, perhaps, the verses were not in reality so very, very atrocious as they unhappily appeared to the young lady who now read them. Tora was accustomed to consider herself almost a revolutionary spirit, and her neighbors, half in earnest, half in joke, encouraged the idea; but her revolutions were to be very strictly confined, and the limits of her free-thought were marked out by most unyielding metes and bounds--bounds that stopped very short at the church door and on the domestic threshold. This frame of mind is too common to excite comment, and it had been intensified in her by the social surroundings against which she was in mock revolt. Dale's freedom knew no trammels, or had known none when he wrote "The Clarion"; nothing was sacred to him except truth, everything as nothing beside reason, reason the handmaid of passion, wherein the spirit and individuality of each man found their rightful expression. This theory, embodied in a poet's fancy and enlivened by a young man's ardor, made fine verses, but verses which startled Tora Smith. She read for half an hour, and then, flinging the book down and drawing a long breath, exclaimed: "I can believe anything of him now!" And she had had this man to dinner! And that girl! Who was that girl? The Colonel came home to luncheon in very good spirits. He had just succeeded, in the interests of freedom, in stirring up a spirit of active revolt in Alderman Johnstone. The Alderman had hitherto, like his father before him, occupied his extensive premises on a weekly tenancy; he had never been threatened with molestation or eviction; but he felt that he existed on sufferance, and the consciousness of his precarious position had been irksome to him. A moment had come when the demand for houses was slack, when two or three were empty, and when the building trade itself was nearly at a standstill. The Colonel had incited Johnstone to seize the opportunity to ask from the Squire a lease, and Johnstone had promised to take nothing less than "seven, fourteen, or twenty-one." If refused, he declared he would surrender the premises and build for himself on some land of the Colonel's just outside the town. "Delane must grant it," said the Colonel, rubbing his hands, "and then we shall have one house anyhow where our bills can be put up. Bannister will be delighted. By the way, Tora, he wants us to go in to tea to-day, after skating. I suppose you're going to skate?" "I am going to skate, but I am not going to Mr. Bannister's," said Tora coldly. "Why not?" The Colonel was told why not with explicitness and vehemence. He tugged his white whisker in some perplexity: he did not mind much about the poems, though, of course, no excess of scrupulousness could be too great in a girl like Tora; but if she were right about the other affair! That must be looked into. The Colonel was one of those people who pride themselves on tact and _savoir faire_; he aggravated this fault by believing that tact and candor could be combined in a happy union, and he determined to try the effect of the mixture on Dale Bannister. It would go hard if he did not destroy this mare's nest of Tora's. All the neighborhood was skating on the Grange lake under a winter sun, whose ruddy rays tinged the naked trees, and drew an answering glitter from the diamond-paned windows of the house. The reeds were motionless, and the graze of skaters on the ice sounded sharp in the still air, and struck the ear through the swishing of birch brooms and the shuffle of sweepers' feet. From time to time a sudden thud and a peal of laughter following told of disaster, or there grated across the lake a chair, carrying one who preferred the conquest of men to the science of equilibrium. Rosy cheeks glowed, nimble feet sped, and lissom figures swayed to and fro as they glided over the shining surface, till even the old and the stout, the cripples and the fox hunters, felt the glow of life tingling in their veins, and the beauty of the world feeding their spirits with fresh desire. "It is not all of life to live," but, at such a moment, it is the best part of it. Dale Bannister was enjoying himself; he was a good skater, and it gave him pleasure that, when people turned to look at the famous poet, they should see an athletic youth: only he wished that Janet Delane would give him an opportunity of offering his escort, and not appear so contented with the company of a tall man of military bearing, who had come down to the water with the Grange party. He was told that the newcomer was Captain Ripley, Lord Cransford's eldest son, and he did not escape without witnessing some of the nods and becks which, in the country, where everybody knows everybody, accompany the most incipient stages of a supposed love affair. Feeling, under these circumstances, a little desolate, for Philip was engrossed in figures and would not waste his time talking, he saw with pleasure Tora Smith and Sir Harry coming toward him. He went to meet them, and, at a distance of a few yards from them, slackened his pace and lifted his hat, not doubting of friendly recognition. Sir Harry returned his salute with a cheery "How are you?" but did not stop, for Tora swept on past Dale Bannister, without a glance at him. In surprise, he paused. "She must have seen me," he thought, "but why in the world----" Bent on being sure, he put himself right in her path as she completed the circle and met him again. There was no mistaking her intention; she gave him the cut direct, as clearly and as resolutely as ever it was given. Sir Harry had remonstrated in vain. In Tora's uncompromising mind impulse did not wait on counsel, and her peremptory "I have my reasons" refused all information and prevented all persuasion. He felt he had done enough for friendship when he braved her disapproval by declining to follow her example. He did not pretend to understand the ways of women, and Dale Bannister might fight his own battles. While Dale was yet standing in angry bewilderment,--for who had received him with more cordiality than she who now openly insulted him?--he saw the Colonel hobbling toward him across the slippery expanse. The Colonel fell once, and Dale heard him swear testily at the sweeper who helped him to rise. He thought it kind to meet him halfway; perhaps the Colonel would explain. The Colonel was most ready to do so; in fact, he had come for the very purpose of warning Bannister that some silly idea was afloat, which it only needed a word to scatter. "Is there?" said Dale. "Possibly that is why Miss Smith failed to see me twice just now?" "Your poems have shocked her, my boy," said the Colonel, with a knowing look--the look that represented tact and _savoir faire_. "Is that all? She takes rather severe measures, doesn't she?" "Well," answered the Colonel, with the smile which brought candor into play, "that isn't quite all." "What in the world else is there?" "You know how censorious people are, and how a girl takes alarm at the very idea of anything--you know?" Dale chafed at these diplomatic approaches. "If there's anything said against me, pray let me know." "Oh, it's nothing very definite," said the Colonel uneasily. He did not find what he had to say so simple as it had seemed. "Indefinite things are most hopeless." "Yes, yes, quite so. Well, if you really wish it--if you won't be offended. No doubt it's all a mistake." "What do they say?" "Well, we're men of the world, Bannister. The fact is, people don't quite understand your--your household." "My household It consists of myself alone and the servants." "Of course, my dear fellow, of course! I knew it was so, but I am glad to be able to say so on your own authority." The aim of speech is, after all, only to convey ideas; the Colonel had managed, however clumsily, to convey his idea. Dale frowned, and pretended to laugh. "How absurd!" he said. "I should resent it if it were not too absurd." "I'm sure, Bannister, you'll acquit me of any meddling." "Oh, yes. I'm sorry my guests have given rise, however innocently, to such talk." "It's most unfortunate. I'm sure nothing more is needed. I hope the ladies are well?" "Yes, thanks." "I don't see them here." "No, they're not here," answered Dale, frowning again. "I hope we shall see some more of them?" "You're very kind. I--I don't suppose they--will be staying much longer." As Dale made his way to the bank to take off his skates, Janet and Tora passed him together. Tora kept her eyes rigidly fixed on the chimneys of the Grange. He made no sign of expecting recognition, but Janet, as she drew near, looked at him, blushing red, and bowed and smiled. "That girl's a trump," said Dale Bannister. "She sticks to her friends." CHAPTER XI. =A Fable about Birds.= Mrs. Hodge and Nellie, being left to their own resources, had employed the afternoon in paying a visit to Ethel Roberts, and nothing was wanting to fill Dale's cup of vexation to overflowing, unless it were to have Nellie flying open-mouthed at him, as he grumblingly expressed it, with a tale of the distress in the Doctor's household. Ethel Roberts had the fortitude to bear her troubles, the added fortitude to bear them cheerfully, but not the supreme fortitude which refuses to tell a tale of woe to any ear, however sympathetic. She did not volunteer information, but she did allow it to be dragged out of her, and the barriers of her reserve broke down before Mrs. Hodge's homely consolations and Nellie's sorrowful horror. They were reduced, she admitted, in effect to living on little else than her own wretched income; the practice brought in hardly more than it took out, for, while the rich patients failed, the poor remained; the rent was overdue, bills were unpaid, and the butcher, the milkman, and the coal merchant were growing sulky. "And while," said Mrs. Hodge, "that poor young creature is pinching, and starving, and crying, the man's thinking of nothing but Nihilists and what not. I'd Nihilist him!" Dinner was served to Dale with sauce of this sort. "Can I prevent fools suffering for their folly?" he asked. "The baby looks so ill," said Nellie, "and Mrs. Roberts is worn to a shadow." "Did you see Roberts?" asked Philip. "For a minute," said Nellie, "but he was very cold and disagreeable." "Thought you were tarred with the same brush as Dale, I suppose?" "Can't you do anything for 'em, Dale?" asked Mrs. Hodge. "I can send him a check." "He'll send it back," remarked Philip. "I wish he'd get out of the place." "Yes, he might as well be miserable somewhere else, mightn't he?" Dale glared at his friend, and relapsed into silence. Nevertheless, in spite of Philip's prediction, he sat down after dinner and wrote to Roberts, saying that he had heard that he was in temporary embarrassment, and urging him to allow Dale to be his banker for the moment; this would, Dale added, be the best way of showing that he bore no malice for Dale's letter. He sent a man with the note, ordering him to wait for an answer. The answer was not long in coming; the man was back in half an hour, bringing the Doctor's reply: Three months ago I should have thought it an honor to share my last crust with you, and no shame to ask half of all you had. Now I will not touch a farthing of your money until you come back to us. If your friends pay my wife further visits, I shall be obliged if they will look somewhat less keenly at my household arrangements. JAMES ROBERTS. "There is the snub you have brought on me!" exclaimed Dale angrily, flinging the letter to Nellie. "I might have known better than to listen to your stories." "Dale, Dale, it was every word true. How selfish he is not to think of his wife!" "Many people are selfish." "Is anything the matter, Dale?" "Oh, I'm infernally worried. I never get any peace." "Hadn't you a good time skating?" "No. I'm beginning to hate this place." "Oh, Dale, I've enjoyed my visit so much!" "Very glad to hear it, I'm sure." "You must have seen it; we've stayed so long. I've often told mamma we ought to be going." Dale lit a cigarette. "Indeed we have had no mercy on you, Dale; but the country and the rest are so delightful." "Hum--in some ways." "But I must be back at work. Mamma thought next Saturday would do." "As soon as that?" said Dale, with polite surprise. "Think how long we have been here." "Oh, don't go on Saturday!" Nellie's face brightened. "Don't you want us to?" she asked, with an eager little smile. Dale was going to be kind after all. "No. Why shouldn't you stay till Monday?" The face fell, the smile disappeared; but she answered, saving her self-respect: "Saturday is more convenient for--for arriving in town. I think we had better fix Saturday, Dale." "As you like. Sorry to lose you, Nell." He sauntered off to the smoking room to join Philip. When Philip came into the drawing room half an hour later in search of a book, he found Nellie sitting before the fire. He took his stand on the hearthrug, and looked steadily down on her. "Once upon a time," he said, "there was a very beautiful bird who, as it chanced, grew up with a lot of crows. For a long while he liked the crows, and the crows liked him--very much, some of them. Both he and the crows were pleased when the eagles and all the swell birds admired him, and said nice things about him, and wanted to know him--and the crows who liked him most were most pleased. Presently he did come to know the eagles and the other swell birds, and he liked them very much, and he began to get a little tired of the old crows, and by and by he left their company a good deal. He was a polite bird and a kind bird, and never told them that he didn't want them any more. But they saw he didn't." There was a little sob from the armchair. "Whereupon some of them broke their hearts, and others--didn't. The others were wisest, Nellie." He paused, gazing down at the distressful little heap of crumpled drapery and roughened gleaming hair. "Much wisest. He was not a bad bird as birds go--but not a bird to break one's heart about, Nellie: what bird is?" There was another sob. Philip looked despairingly at the ceiling and exclaimed under his breath: "I wish to God she wouldn't cry!" He took his book from the mantelpiece where he had laid it and moved toward the door. But he came back again, unable to leave her like that, and walked restlessly about the room, stopping every now and then to stand over her, and wonder what he could do. Presently he took a feverish little hand in his, and pressed it as it lay limp there. "The old crows stood by one another, Nellie," he said, and he thought he felt a sudden grip of his hand, coming and timidly in an instant going. It seemed to comfort her to hold his hand. The sobs ceased, and presently she looked up and said, with a smile: "I always used to cry at going back to school." "Going back to work," said Philip, "is one of the few things in the world really worth crying about." "Yes, isn't it?" she said, unblushingly availing herself of the shelter of his affected cynicism. She was afraid he might go on talking about crows, a topic which had been all very well, and even a little comforting, when she was hidden among the cushions, but would not do now. "And London is so horrid in winter," she continued. "Are you going back soon?" "Oh, I shall wait a little and look after Dale." "Dale never tells one what is happening." "I'll keep you posted, in case there's a revolution in Denborough, or anything of that sort." A step was heard outside. With a sudden bound Nellie reached the piano, sat down, and began to play a lively air. Dale came in, looking suspiciously at the pair. "I thought you'd gone to bed, Nellie." "Just going. Mr. Hume and I have been talking." "About the affairs of the nation," said Philip. "But I'm off now. Good-night, Dale." Dale looked closely at her. "What are your eyes red for? Have you been crying?" "_Crying_, Dale? What nonsense! I've been roasting them before the fire, that's all; and if they are red, it's not polite to say so, is it, Mr. Hume?" "Rightly understood, criticism is a compliment, as the reviewers say when they slate you," remarked Philip. "He might not have noticed your eyes at all." "Inconceivable," said Dale politely, for he was feeling very kindly disposed to this pretty girl, who came when he wanted her, and went when--well, after a reasonably long visit. "Good-night, Dale. I'm so sorry about--Mr. Roberts, you know." Dale, having no further use for this grievance, was graciously pleased to let it be forgotten. "Oh, you couldn't know he'd be such a brute. Good-night, Nellie." The two men returned to the smoking room. Philip, looking for a piece of paper wherewith to light his pipe, happened to notice a little bundle of proof-sheets lying on the table. "Ah, the spring bubbling again?" he asked. Dale nodded. "My dear fellow, how are the rest of us to get our masterpieces noticed? You are a monopolist." "It's only a little volume." "What's it about? May I look?" "Oh, if you like," answered Dale carelessly; but he kept his eye on his friend. Philip took up the first sheet, and read the title-page; he smiled, and, turning over, came to the dedication. "You call it 'Amor Patriæ?'" "Yes. Do you like the title?" "Hum! There was no thought of pleasing me when it was christened, I presume. And you dedicate it----" "Oh, is that there?" "Yes, that's there--'_To her that shall be named hereafter._'" Dale poked the fire before he answered. "Yes," he said, "that's the dedication." "So I see. Well, I hope she'll like them. It is an enviable privilege to confer immortality." "I'll confer it on you, if you like." "Yes, do. It will be less trouble than getting it for myself." "Under the title of 'The Snarler.'" Philip stood on the hearthrug and warmed himself. "My dear Dale," he said, "I do not snarl. A wise author pleases each section of the public in turn. Hitherto you have pleased me and my kind, and Roberts and his kind, and Arthur Angell and his kind--who are, by the way, not worth pleasing, for they expect presentation copies. Now, in this new work, which is, I understand, your tribute to the nation which has the honor to bear you, you will please----" He paused. "I always write to please myself," said Dale. "Yourself," continued Philip, "this mysterious lady, and, I think we may add, the Mayor of Market Denborough." "Go to the devil!" said the poet. CHAPTER XII. =A Dedication--and a Desecration.= A few weeks later the Mayor stood at his door, one bright morning in January, holding a parley with Alderman Johnstone. "I dessay, now," said the Mayor, "that you aint been in the way of seein' the Squire lately?" "I see him last when he signed my lease," answered the Alderman, with a grim smile, "and that's a month come to-morrow." "I had a conversation with him yesterday, and after touchin' on the matter of that last pavin' contract,--he'd heard o' your son-in-law gettin' it, Johnstone,--he got talkin' about Mr. Bannister." "Aye? did he?" "And about his noo book. 'It's a blessin',' he says, 'to see a young man of such promise shakin' himself free of that pestilential trash.' He meant your opinions by that, Johnstone." "Supposing 'e did, what then? I don't label my opinions to please the customers like as some do their physic." The Mayor was not in a fighting mood; his mind was busy with speculations, and he ignored the challenge. "Queer start Mr. Bannister showin' up at the church bazaar, eh? Spent a heap o' money, too. I met Mr. Hume, and asked him about it, and he said----" "It wan't no business o' yours, didn't he?" "Mr. Hume--he's a gentleman, Johnstone," remarked the Mayor in grave rebuke. "Well, what did 'e say?" "That where the carcass was, the eagles 'ud be gathered together." Mr. Johnstone smiled a smile of pity for the Mayor's density. "Well, what do you suppose he meant?" asked the Mayor in reply to the smile. "Where the gells is, the lads is," said the Alderman, with a wink, as he passed on his way. This most natural, reasonable, and charitable explanation of Dale's conduct in identifying himself with the Vicar's pastoral labors had, oddly enough, suggested itself to no one else, unless it might be to Captain Gerard Ripley. His presence had been hailed on the one side, and anathematized on the other, as an outward sign of an inward conversion, and his lavish expenditure had been set down to a repentant spirit rather than a desire to gratify any particular stall-holder. The Vicar had just read "Amor Patriæ," and he remarked to everyone he met that the transition from an appreciation of the national greatness to an adhesion to the national church was but a short step. Unhappily, in a moment of absence, he chanced to say so to Colonel Smith, who was at the bazaar for the purpose of demonstrating his indifferent impartiality toward all religious sects. "You might as well say," answered the Colonel in scorn, "that because a man stands by the regiment he's bound to be thick with the chaplain." Captain Ripley alone, with the penetration born of jealousy, attributed Dale's presence simply and solely to the same motive as had produced his own, to wit, a desire to be where Miss Delane was. The Captain was a little sore; he had known Janet from childhood, they had exchanged many children's vows, and when he was sixteen and she thirteen she had accepted a Twelfth Night cake ring from him. The flirtation had always proceeded in its gentle, ambling course, and the Captain had returned on long leave with the idea that it was time to put the natural termination in the way of being reached. Janet disappointed him; she ridiculed his tender references to bygone days, characterizing what had passed as boy-and-girl nonsense, and perseveringly kept their intercourse on a dull level of friendliness. On the other hand, whatever might be the nature of her acquaintance with Dale Bannister, it was at least clear that it was marked by no such uneventful monotony. Sometimes she would hardly speak to him; at others she cared to speak to no one else. The Captain would have profited ill by the opportunities a residence in garrison towns offers if he had not recognized that these changeful relations were fraught with peril to his hopes. At the bazaar, for example, he was so much moved by a long conversation between Janet and Dale, which took place over the handing of a cup of tea, that he unburdened himself to his friend Sir Harry Fulmer. Now Sir Harry was in a bad temper; he had his object in attending as the Captain had, and Colonel Smith had just told him that Tora was not coming. "Who is the fellow?" demanded Captain Ripley. "Writes poetry." "I never heard of him." "I dare say not. It's not much in your line, is it?" "Well, he's a queer-looking beggar." "Think so? Now I call him a good-looking chap." "Why the deuce doesn't he get his hair cut?" "Don't know. Perhaps Janet Delane likes it long." "I hate that sort of fellow, Harry." "He's not a bad chap." "Does the Squire like him?" "I don't know, and I don't care. How beastly hot this room is! I shall go." "I say, Harry, I've only just come back, you know. Is there anything on?" "Well, if you want to take a hand, I should cut in pretty sharp," said Sir Harry, elbowing his way to the door. Captain Ripley, impatiently refusing to buy a negro doll which the Vicar's daughter pressed on his favorable notice, leaned against the wall and grimly regarded Dale Bannister. The latter was just saying: "Have you looked at the verses at all, Miss Delane?" "I have read every one, over and over. They are splendid." "Oh, I'm new to that sort of thing." "Yes, but it's so--such a joy to me to see you doing what is really worthy of you." "If there is any credit, it's yours." "Now why do you say that? It isn't true, and it just spoils it." "Spoils it?" said Dale, who thought girls liked compliments. "Yes. If you had really only done it to please--an individual, it would be worth nothing. You couldn't help doing it. I knew you couldn't." "At any rate, you must accept the responsibility of having put it into my head." "Not even that, Mr. Bannister." "Oh, but that's the meaning of the dedication." No one is quite free from guile. Janet answered: "The dedication is rather mysterious, Mr. Bannister." "I meant it to be so to all the world." "Oh, did you?" "Except you." Janet blushed and smiled. "I wonder," pursued Dale, "if I shall ever be allowed to name that lady?" "That will depend on whether she wishes it." "Of course. Do you think she will--hereafter?" "Won't you have another cup? It's only half a crown." "Yes, two more, please. Do you think she will?" "How thirsty you seem to be!" "Will she?" "Now, Mr. Bannister, I mustn't neglect all my customers. See, Mrs. Gilkison is selling nothing." "But will she?" "Certainly not--unless you go and buy something from Mrs. Gilkison." Now whether Janet were really concerned for Mrs. Gilkison, or whether she had caught sight of Captain Ripley's lowering countenance, or whether she merely desired to avoid pledging herself to Dale, it is immaterial, and also impossible to say. Dale felt himself dismissed, with the consolation of perceiving that his dedication had not been unfavorably received in the quarter to which it was addressed. Accordingly it was in a cheerful frame of mind that he set out for home, scattering most of his purchases among the children before he went. He was in a kindly mood, and when he saw James Roberts coming up High Street, he did not, as he had once or twice lately, cross the road to avoid meeting him, but held on his path, determined to offer a friendly greeting. When the Doctor came up, he stopped and took from his breast pocket the little green volume which contained Dale's latest poems. He held it up before the author's eyes. "Ah, Roberts, I see you have the new work. How do you like it?" He tried to speak easily, but the Doctor did not appear to be in a conciliatory temper. "Are these things really yours?" he asked. "Of course they are." "This wretched jingo doggerel yours?" Dale felt this unjust. The verses might not express the Doctor's views, but an immortal poet's works are not lightly to be called doggerel. "What a narrow-minded beggar you are!" he exclaimed. The Doctor answered nothing. Buttoning up his threadbare coat, so as to leave his arms free, with an effort he tore the leaves from their cover, rent them across, flung them on the road, and trod them into the mud. Then, without a word, he passed on his way, while Dale stood and stared at the dishonored wreck. "He's mad--stark mad!" he declared at last. "How ill the poor chap looks, too!" The Doctor hurried down the street, with a strange malicious smile on his face. Every now and then his hand sought his breast pocket again, and hugged a check for a hundred pounds which lay there. It was his last money in the world; when that was gone, his banking account was exhausted, and nothing remained but his wife's pittance--and nothing more was coming. Yet he had devoted that sum to a purpose, and now he stopped at Alderman Johnstone's door, and asked for the master of the house, still grimly smiling at the thought of what he was preparing for Dale Bannister, if only Johnstone would help him. Johnstone had a lease now, he was independent--if only he would help him! The Alderman listened to the plan. "It's a new trade for me," said he, with a grin. "I find the stock--I have it ready. And----" He held up the check. The Alderman's eyes glistened. "They can't touch me," he said, "and I should like to 'ave a shy at the Squire. 'Ere's my 'and upon it." A day or two afterward Dale heard that the sale of "Sluggards" was increasing by leaps and bounds. A single house had taken five hundred copies. "Amor Patriæ" had evidently given a fresh impetus to the earlier work, in spite of the remarkable difference of tone which existed between them. "It shows," said Dale complacently to Philip Hume, "that most people are not such intolerant idiots as that fellow Roberts." But what it really did show will appear in due season. Dale did not know; nor did Philip, for he said, with a fine sneer: "It shows that immorality doesn't matter if it's combined with sound political principles, old man." CHAPTER XIII. =The Responsibilities of Genius.= Dr. Spink sat in his comfortable dining room with his after-dinner glass of wine before him. The snow was falling and the rain beating against the windows, but the Doctor had finished his work, and feared only that some sudden call would compel him to face the fury of the weather again. A few months back he would have greeted any summons, however unreasonable the hour, and thought a new patient well bought at the price of a spoiled evening. But of late the world had smiled upon him, the hill which had looked so steep was proving easy to climb, and he was already considering whether he should not take a partner, to relieve him of the more irksome parts of his duty. He pulled his neatly trimmed whisker and caressed his smooth-shaven chin, as he reflected how the folly of that mad fellow, Roberts, had turned to his advantage. No man could say that he had deviated an inch from professional propriety, or pressed his advantage the least unfairly. He had merely persevered on the lines he laid down for himself on his first arrival. The success, which astonished even himself, had come to him, partly no doubt, because merit must make its way, but mainly because his rival had willfully flung away his chances, preferring--and to Dr. Spink it seemed a preference almost insane--to speak his mind, whatever it might be, rather than, like a wise man, hold his tongue and fill his pockets. So Roberts had willed, and hence the Vicarage, the Grange, and many other houses now knew his footstep no more, and Spink filled his place. As he pondered on this, Dr. Spink spared a pang of pity for his beaten competitor, wondering what in the world the man meant to live upon. The door bell rang. He heard it with a sigh--the half-pleased, half-weary, resigned sigh that a man utters when fortune gives him no rest in getting gain. A moment later he was on his way to the surgery to see a lady who would not send in her name or business. He recognized Ethel Roberts with surprise, when she raised her veil. They had known one another to bow to, but he could not imagine what brought her to his surgery. "Mrs. Roberts! Is there anything----" "Oh, Dr. Spink, you must forgive me for coming. I am in great trouble, and I thought you might help me." "Pray sit down. Is anyone ill--your little boy?" "No, he's not ill. It's--it's about my husband." "I hope Mr. Roberts is not ill?" "I don't know," she said nervously. "That's what I want to ask you. Have you seen him lately?" "No, not very; I passed him in the street the other day." "He's gone to London, suddenly, I don't know why. Oh, he's been so strange lately!" "I thought he looked worried. Tell me about it," said Dr. Spink, moved now with genuine pity for the pale haggard face before him. "Ever since--but you mustn't tell I came to you--or spoke to anybody, I mean--will you?" He reassured her, and she continued: "Ever since his quarrel with Mr. Bannister--you know about it?--there is something the matter with him. He is moody, and absent-minded, and--and hasty, and he settles to nothing. And now he is gone off like this." "Come, Mrs. Roberts, you must compose yourself. I suppose he has let these politics worry him." "He seems to care nothing for--for his home or the baby, you know; he does nothing but read, or wander up and down the room." "It sounds as if he wanted a rest and a change. You say he has gone away?" "Yes; but on business, I think." "I'm afraid I can't tell you much, unless he calls me in and lets me have a look at him." "He'll never do that!" she exclaimed, before she could stop herself. Dr. Spink took no notice of her outburst. "If he comes back no better, send me a line, Mrs. Roberts, and we'll see. And mind you let me know if you or the baby want any advice." "You're very kind, Dr. Spink. I--I'm sorry James is so----" "Oh, that's a symptom. If he gets right, he won't be like that. Your jacket's too thin for such a night. Let me send you home in the brougham." Ethel refused the offer, and started on her return, leaving Dr. Spink shaking a thoughtful head in the surgery doorway. "It really looks," he said, "as if he was a bit queer. But what can I do? Poor little woman!" And, not being able to do anything, he went back and finished his glass of port. Then, for his dinner had been postponed till late by business, and it was half-past ten, he went to bed. Ethel beat her way down the High Street against the wind and snow, shutting her eyes in face of the blinding shower, and pushing on with all her speed to rejoin her baby, whom she had left alone. When, wet and weary, she reached her door, to her surprise she saw a man waiting there. For a moment she joyously thought it was her husband, but as the man came forward to meet her, she recognized Philip Hume. "Out on such a night, Mrs. Roberts!" She murmured an excuse, and he went on: "Is the Doctor in? I came to look him up." "No, he's away in London, Mr. Hume." "In London? What for?" "I don't know." "May I come in for a moment?" asked Philip, who had been looking at her closely. "If you like," she answered in some surprise. "I'm afraid there's no fire." Philip had followed her in and seen the grate in the sitting room with no fire lighted. "No fire?" he exclaimed. "There is one in my room where baby is," she explained. "There ought to be one here too," said he. "You're looking ill." "Oh, I'm not ill, Mr. Hume--I'm not indeed." Philip had come on an errand. There are uses even in gossips, and he had had a talk with his friend the Mayor that day. "Where are the coals?" he asked. "There are some in the scuttle," she said. He looked and found a few small pieces. The fire was laid with a few more. Philip lit them and threw on all the rest. Then he went to the door, and shouted: "Wilson!" The small shrewd-faced man who waited on Dale Bannister appeared. He was pushing a wheelbarrow before him. "Wheel it into the passage," said Philip; "and then go. And, mind, not a word!" Wilson looked insulted. "I don't talk, sir," said he. Philip returned to the room. "Mrs. Roberts," he said, "listen to me. I am a friend of your husband's. Will you let me help you?" "Indeed, I need no help." "I know you are frozen," he went on; "and--where is the servant?" "She has left. I--I haven't got another yet," she faltered. "In the passage," Philip went on, "there is a wheelbarrow. It holds coals, food, and drink. It's for you." She started up. "I can't--indeed I can't! Jim wouldn't like it." "Jim be hanged! I'll settle with him. You're to take them. Do you hear?" She did not answer. He walked up to her and put a little canvas bag in her hands. "There's money. No, take it. I shall keep an account." "I really don't need it." "You do--you know you do. How much money has he left you?" She laid her hand on his arm. "He's not himself, he isn't indeed, Mr. Hume, or he wouldn't----" "No, of course he isn't. So I do what he would, if he were himself. You were going to starve." "He will be angry." "Then don't tell him. He'll never notice. Now, will he?" "He notices nothing now," she said. "And you'll take them? Come, think of what's-his-name--the baby, you know." "You're too kind to me." "Nonsense! Of course we look after you, Mrs. Roberts." "Mr. Hume, do you think--what do you think is the matter with Jim?" "Oh, I think he's an old fool, Mrs. Roberts, and you may tell him so from me. No, no, he'll be all right in a week or two. Meanwhile, we're going to make you and Tommy--oh, Johnny, is it?--comfortable." He did not leave her till she had consented to accept all he offered; then he went back to Littlehill. "I think, Dale," he said, "Roberts must be mad. He left his wife and child starving." "Did she take the things?" "Yes; I made her." "That's all right. What a strange beggar he is! He can't be quite right in his head." "Fancy that poor little woman left like that!" "Horrible!" said Dale, with a shudder. "At any rate we can prevent that. I'm so glad you thought of it." "Old Hedger told me they had ordered nothing for three days." "How the deuce does Hedger know everything?" "It's lucky he knew this, isn't it?" "By Jove, it is! Because, you know, Phil, I feel a kind of responsibility." "Nonsense, Dale! Not really?" "Oh, you needn't laugh. Of course I couldn't know the man was a sort of lunatic. One doesn't write for lunatics." "Perhaps they ought to be considered, being so numerous." "However, it's all right now. Awfully obliged to you, Phil." "I wonder if he'll come back." "Roberts? Why shouldn't he?" "I don't know, but he's quite capable of just cutting the whole concern." "I think he's capable of anything." "Except appreciating 'Amor Patriæ,' eh?" Dale, having got the Roberts family off his mind, drifted to another topic. "I say, Phil, old chap, will you stop playing the fool for once, and give me your advice?" "What about?" asked Philip, throwing himself into an armchair. "What," said Dale gravely, filling his pipe, "do you think about getting married?" "Are you thinking of it?" "Discuss marriage in the abstract." "It is a position of greater responsibility and less freedom." "Yes, I know that. But a lot depends on the girl, doesn't it?" "I expect so." "I say, Phil, what do you think of Ripley?" "He seemed a decent enough fellow." "Do you think--I mean, do you call him an attractive fellow?" "Oh, uncommonly!" "Really?" "Well, why not?" Dale fidgeted in his chair, and relit the pipe, which had gone out. He was much too perturbed to give to the filling of it the attention that operation needs. "I suppose he'll be rich, and a swell, and all that," he went on. "No doubt--but not a Victorian poet." "Don't be a fool!" "I meant it kindly. Some girls like poets." "They were awfully kind about 'Amor Patriæ' at the Grange to-night." "Oh, you've been there?" "You know I have. Ripley was there. I don't think I care much about him, Phil." "Don't you? Does he like you?" Dale laughed as he rose to go to bed. "Not much, I think," said he. Philip also, being left companionless, got up and knocked out his pipe. Then he stood looking into the dying embers for a minute or two, and thinking, as he warmed his hands with the last of the heat. "Poor little Nellie!" he said. After a pause, he said it again; and once again after that. But then, as saying it was no use at all, he sighed and went to bed. CHAPTER XIV. =Mr. Delane Likes the Idea.= On a bright morning, when February was in one of its brief moods of kindliness, Janet Delane was in the garden, and flitting from it into the hothouses in search of flowers. It was half-past eleven, and Captain Ripley had kept her gossiping long after breakfast; that was the worst of idle men staying in a house. So she hastened to and fro in a great parade of business-like activity, and, as she went, she would sing blithely and stop and smile to herself, and break into singing again, and call merrily to her dog, a rotund, slate-colored bundle of hair that waddled after her, and answered, if he were given time to get within earshot, to the name of Mop. Mop was more sedate than his mistress: she only pretended to be on business bent, while he had been dragged out to take a serious constitutional on account of his growing corpulence, and it made him sulky to be called here and beckoned there, and told there were rats, and cats, and what not--whereas in truth there was no such thing. But Janet did not mind his sulkiness; she smiled, and sang, and smiled, for she was thinking--but is nothing to be sacred from a prying race? It is no concern of anyone's what she was thinking, and no doubt she did not desire it to be known, or she would have told Captain Ripley in the course of that long gossip. The Captain stood gazing at her out of the window, with his hands in his pockets and a doleful look of bewilderment on his face. He stared out into the garden, but he was listening to Mrs. Delane, and wondering uneasily if he were really such a dolt as his hostess seemed to consider. "You know, Gerard," said Mrs. Delane in her usual tone of suave sovereignty, "that I am anxious to help you all I can. I have always looked forward to it as an event which would give us all pleasure, and I know my husband agrees with me. But really we can't do anything if you don't help yourself." The Captain gnawed his mustache and thrust his hands deeper into his pockets. "I can't make her out," said he. "I can't get any farther with her." "It's not the way to 'get farther,'" answered Mrs. Delane, marking the quotation by a delicate emphasis, "with any girl to stand on the other side of the room and scowl whenever she talks to another man." "You mean Bannister?" "I mean anybody. I don't care whether it's Mr. Bannister or not. And it's just as useless to pull a long face and look tragic whenever she makes fun of you." "She didn't use to be like that last time I was home." "My dear boy, what has that got to do with it? She was a child then." "She's always blowing me up. This morning she asked me why I didn't go to India instead of wasting my time doing nothing in London." This was certainly unfeeling conduct on Janet's part. Mrs. Delane sighed. "I don't know that I quite understand her either, Gerard. There's the Squire calling you. He's ready to ride, I expect." When Janet came, she found her mother alone. "Where's Gerard?" she asked. "He's gone for a ride." "Is he staying to-night?" "Yes; two or three days, I think." "Well, dear, I am glad we amuse him. There doesn't seem much for a man to do here, does there?" "Don't you like him to be here?" "Oh, I don't mind; only he wastes my time." "I begin to think he's wasting his own too," remarked Mrs. Delane. "Oh, he's got nothing else to do with it--or at least he does nothing else with it." "You know what I mean, Janet, dear." "I suppose I do, but how can I help it? I do all I can to show him it's no use." "You used to like him very much." "Oh, so I do now. But that's quite different." The world goes very crooked. Mrs. Delane sighed again. "It would have pleased your father very much." "I'm so sorry. But I couldn't care for a man of that sort." "What's the matter with the man, my dear?" "That's just it, mamma. Nothing--nothing bad--and nothing good. Gerard is like heaps of men I know." "I think you underrate him. His father was just the same, and he was very distinguished in the House." Janet's gesture betrayed but slight veneration for the High Court of Parliament, as she answered: "They always say that about dull people." "Well, if it's no use, the sooner the poor boy knows it the better." "I can't tell him till he asks me, can I, dear? Though I'm sure he might see it for himself." Mrs. Delane, when she made up her mind to sound her daughter's inclinations, had expected to find doubt, indecision, perhaps even an absence of any positive inclination toward Captain Ripley. She had not been prepared for Janet's unquestioning assumption that the thing was not within the range of consideration. A marriage so excellent from a material point of view, with one who enjoyed all the advantages old intimacy and liking could give, seemed to claim more than the unhesitating dismissal with which Janet relegated it to the limbo of impossibility, with never a thought for all the prospects it held out, and never a sigh for the wealth and rank it promised. Of course the Delanes needed no alliances to establish their position; still, as the Squire had no son, it would have been pleasant if his daughter had chosen a husband from the leading family in the county. The more Mrs. Delane thought, the more convinced she became that there must be a reason; and if there were, it could be looked for only in one direction. She wondered whether the Squire's _penchant_ for his gifted young neighbor was strong enough to make him welcome him as a son-in-law. Frankly, her own was not. Mr. Delane came in to luncheon, but Captain Ripley sent a message of excuse. He had ridden over to Sir Harry Fulmer's, and would spend the afternoon there. Mrs. Delane's reception of the news conveyed delicately that such conduct was only what might be expected, if one considered how Janet treated the poor fellow, but the Squire was too busy to appreciate the subtleties of his wife's demeanor. Important events were in the way to happen. Denshire, like many other counties, had recently made up its mind that it behooved it to educate itself, and a building had arisen in Denborough which was to serve as an institute of technical education, a school of agriculture, a center of learning, a home of instructive recreation, a haven for the peripatetic lecturer, and several things besides. Lord Cransford had consented to open this temple of the arts, which was now near completion, and an inauguration by him would have been suitable and proper. But the Squire had something far better to announce. The Lord Lieutenant was, next month, to be honored by a visit from a Royal Duke, and the Royal Duke had graciously consented to come over and open the Institute. It would be an occasion the like of which Denborough had seldom seen, and Lord Cransford and Mr. Delane might well be pardoned the deputy-providential air with which they went about for the few days next following on the successful completion of this delicate negotiation. "Now," said the Squire, when he had detailed the Prince's waverings and vacillations, his he-woulds and he-would-nots, and the culmination of his gracious assent, "I have a great idea, and I want you to help me, Jan." "How can I help?" asked Janet, who was already in a flutter of loyalty. "When the Duke comes, I want him to have a splendid reception." "I'm sure he will, my dear," said Mrs. Delane; "at least I hope that we are loyal." "We want," continued the Squire, "to show him all our resources." "Well, papa, that won't take him very long. There's the old Mote Hall, and the Roman pavement and----Oh, but will he come here, papa--to the Grange?" "I hope he will take luncheon here." "How delightful!" exclaimed Janet joyfully. "Goodness!" said Mrs. Delane anxiously. "But, Jan, I want to show him our poet!" "Papa! Mr. Bannister?" "Yes. I want Bannister to write a poem of welcome." "My dear," remarked Mrs. Delane, "Mr. Bannister doesn't like princes;" and she smiled satirically. "What do you say, Jan?" asked the Squire, smiling in his turn. "Oh, yes, do ask him, papa. I wish he would." "Well, will you ask him to?" "Really, George, you are the person to suggest it." "Yes, Mary. But if I fail? Now, Jan?" "Oh, don't be foolish papa. It's not likely----" "Never mind. Will you?" But Janet had, it seemed, finished her meal; at least she had left the room. Mrs. Delane looked vexed. The Squire laughed, for he was a man who enjoyed his little joke. "Poor Jan!" he said. "It's a shame to chaff her on her conquests." Mrs. Delane's fears had been confirmed by her daughter's reception of the raillery. She would have answered in the same tone, and accepted the challenge, if the banter had not hit the mark. "It's a pity," said Mrs. Delane, "to encourage her to think so much about this young Bannister." "Eh?" said the Squire, looking up from his plate. "She thinks quite enough about him already, and hears enough, too." "Well, I suppose he's something out of the common run, in Denshire at all events, and so he interests her." "She'll have nothing to say to Gerard Ripley." "What? Has he asked her?" "No; but I found out from her. He's quite indifferent to her." "I'm sorry for that, but there's time yet. I don't give up hope." "Do you think you help your wishes by asking her to use her influence to make Dale Bannister write poems?" The Squire laid down his napkin and looked at his wife. "Oh!" he said, after a pause. "Yes," said Mrs. Delane. "Are you surprised?" "Yes, I am, rather." He got up and walked about the room, jangling the money in his pocket. "We know nothing about young Bannister," he said. "Except that he's the son of a Dissenting minister and has lived with very queer people." The Squire frowned; but presently his face cleared. "I dare say we're troubling ourselves quite unnecessarily. I haven't noticed anything." "I dare say not, George," said Mrs. Delane. "Come, Mary, you know it's a weakness of yours to find out people's love affairs before they do themselves." "Very well, George," answered she in a resigned tone. "I have told you, and you will act as you think best. Only, if you wouldn't like him for a son-in-law----" "Well, my dear, you do go ahead." "Try to put him out of Janet's head, not in it;" and Mrs. Delane swept out of the room. The Squire went to his study, thinking as he went. He would have liked the Ripley connection. Lord Cransford was an old friend, and the match would have been unimpeachable. Still---- The Squire could not quite analyze his feelings, but he did feel that the idea of Dale Bannister was not altogether unattractive. By birth, of course, he was a nobody, and he had done and said, or at least said he had done, or would like to do,--for the Squire on reflection softened down his condemnation,--wild things; but he was a distinguished man, a man of brains, a force in the country. One must move with the times. Nowadays brains opened every front door, and genius was a passport everywhere. He was not sure that he disliked the idea. Women were such sticklers for old notions. Now, he had never been a--stick-in-the-mud Tory. If Dale went on improving as he was doing, the Squire would think twice before he refused him. But there! very likely it was only Mary's match-making instincts making a mountain out of a molehill. "I shall keep at Jan about that poem," he ended by saying. "It would be a fine facer for the Radicals." CHAPTER XV. =How It Seemed to the Doctor.= James Roberts made to himself some excuse of business for his sudden expedition to London, but in reality he was moved to go by the desire for sympathy. There are times and moods when a man will do many strange things, if thereby he may gain the comfort of an approving voice. It was not so much his straitened means and impoverished household, with the silent suppressed reproach of his wife's sad face, which made Denborough for the time uninhabitable to the Doctor. The selfishness engendered by his absorption in outside affairs armed him against these; he was more oppressed, and finally overcome and routed to flight, by the universal, unbroken, and unhesitating condemnation and contempt that he met with. The severe banned him as wicked, the charitable dubbed him crazy; even Johnstone, whom he had bought, gave him no sympathy. He could not share his savage sneers, or his bitter mirth, or his passionate indignation, with a man to whom the whole affair was a matter of business or of personal grudge. He felt that he must escape for a time, and seek society in which he could unbosom himself and speak from his heart without stirring horror or ridicule. Arthur Angell at least, who, in regard to Dale and Dale's views, had always been a better royalist than the King, would share his anger and appreciate his meditated revenge. The lesson he meant to give the backslider was so appropriate and of such grim humor that Arthur must be delighted with it. On Dale's departure, Arthur Angell had moved into the little flat at the top of the tall building in Chelsea, and there he cultivated the Muses with a devotion which was its own ample reward. Though to be passing rich on forty pounds a year is, with the best will, impossible in London as it is to-day, yet to be passing happy on one hundred and fifty is not beyond the range of youth and enthusiasm, when the future still provides a gorgeous setting and background, wherein the sordid details of the present are merged and lose their prominence, and all trials are but landmarks by which the hopeful grub counts his nearer approach to butterflydom. The little room, the humble chop, the occasional pit, the constant tobacco, the unending talks with fellows like-minded and like-pursed--all these had the beauty of literary tradition, and if not a guarantee, seemed at least a condition of future fame. So Arthur often said to Mrs. Hodge, who lived in the same block, a couple of floors lower down; and Mrs. Hodge heartily agreed as she instanced, in confirmation of the doctrine, how the late Mr. Hodge had once played the King at two pound ten, _consule Pratt_, and had lived to manage his own theater. This was to compare small things with great, felt Arthur, but the truth is true in whatever sphere it works. Into his happy life there broke suddenly the tempestuous form of the Denborough Doctor. He arrived with but a pound or two in his pocket with wild ideas of employment on ultra-Radical newspapers; above all, with the full load of his rage against Dale Bannister, the traitor. He strode up and down the little room, tugging his beard and fiercely denouncing the renegade, while Arthur looked at his troubled eyes and knitted brows, and wondered if his mind were not unhinged. Who could talk like that about Dale, if he were sane? Arthur would have chaffed his friend, laughed at him, ridiculed him, perhaps slyly hinted at the illicit charms of rank and wealth, for which the poet's old mistress mourned deserted. But to speak in hate and rancor! And what was he plotting? But when he heard the plot, his face cleared, and he laughed. "I think you're hard on Dale," he said; "but, after all, it will be a good joke." "Johnstone will do it," exclaimed the Doctor, pausing in his stride. "His shop window will be full of them. He'll have sandwich-men all over the place. Bannister won't be able to go out without being met by his own words--the words he denies. I'll cram them down his throat." Arthur laughed again. "It will be awkward when he's walking with old Delane." "Aye, and with that girl who's got hold of him. He shan't forget what he wrote--nor shall a soul in Denborough either. I'll make his treachery plain, if I spend my last farthing." "When are you going back?" "In a week. It will all be ready in a week. He'll know who did it. Curse him!" "My dear Doctor, aren't you a little----" "Are you like that, too?" burst out Roberts. "Have none of you any sincerity? Is it sham with all of you? You laugh as if it were a joke." "I can't be angry with old Dale. I expect he'll only laugh himself, you know. It will be good fun." Roberts looked at him in hopeless wrath. It seemed to him that these men, who wrote the words and proclaimed the truths which had turned his life and reformed his soul, were themselves but playing with what they taught. Were they only actors--or amusing themselves? "You are as bad as he is," he said angrily, and stalked out of the room. Arthur, puzzled with his unmanageable guest, went down, as he often did, to his neighbors, and laid the whole case before Mrs. Hodge and Nellie Fane. He found them both in, Nellie having just returned from an afternoon concert where she had been singing. "I believe the fellow's half mad, you know," said Arthur. "If he isn't, he ought to be ashamed of himself," said Mrs. Hodge, and she launched on a description of Mrs. Robert's pitiable state. "Well, I don't think that he's got more than five pounds in the world," responded Arthur. "And he's got no chance of making any money. Nobody dares publish what he wants to write." "He used to be pleasant at Littlehill," Nellie remarked, "when we were first there." "Yes, wasn't he? But he's gone quite wild over Dale. Do you know what his next move is?" And Arthur disclosed the Johnstone conspiracy. "It will be rather sport, won't it?" he asked. "Poor old Dale!" But no; Miss Fane did not see the "sport." She was indignant; she thought that such a trick was mean, malicious, and odious in the highest degree, and she was surprised that Arthur Angell could be amused at it. "Women never see a joke," said Arthur huffily. "Where's the joke in making Dale unhappy and--and absurd? And you call yourself his friend!" "It's only a joke. Old Dale does deserve a dig, you know." "And pray, why? You choose your friends, why mayn't he choose his? I dare say you would be glad enough to know that sort of people if you could." "Oh, come, Nellie! I'm not like that. Besides, it's not the people; it's what he's written." "I've read what he's written. It's beautiful. No, I call the whole thing horrid, and just like Dr. Roberts." "I suppose you think, just like me, too?" "If you don't write and warn Dale, I shall." "I say, you mustn't do that. I told you in confidence. Roberts will be furious." "What do I care for Dr. Roberts' fury? I shall write at once;" and she sat down at the table. Arthur glanced in despair at Mrs. Hodge, but that discreet lady was entirely hidden in the evening paper. "Well, I'll never tell you anything again, Nellie," he said. "You'll never have the chance, unless you behave something like a gentleman," retorted Nellie. Arthur banged the door as he went out, exclaiming: "Damn Roberts! What does he want to make a row for?" Meanwhile, the Doctor, who was angry enough with Arthur Angell to have rejoiced had he known that he had embroiled him in a quarter where Arthur was growing very anxious to stand well, was pacing the streets, nursing his resentment. His head ached, and fragments of what he had read, and half-forgotten conversations, mingling in his whirling brain, fretted and bewildered him. He could think of nothing but his wrongs and his revenge, returning always to hug himself on his own earnestness, and angrily to sneer at the weakness and treachery of his friends. Whatever it cost him or his, the world should see that there was one man ready to sacrifice himself for truth and right--and punish "that hound Dale Bannister." As he walked, he bought the special edition of the paper, and, in hastily glancing at it, his eye was caught by the announcement that His Royal Highness the Duke of Mercia was to visit Lord Cransford, and would open the Institute at Market Denborough. The paragraph went on to describe the preparations being made to give the Prince a loyal reception, and ended by saying that it was hoped that the eminent poet, Mr. Dale Bannister, who was resident at Denborough, would consent to write a few lines of welcome to the illustrious visitor. The writer added a word or two of good-natured banter about Mr. Bannister's appearance in a new character, and the well-known effect which the proximity of royalty was apt to have on English republicanism. "Who knows," he concluded, "that Mr. Bannister may not figure as Sir Dale before long?" The Doctor read the paragraph twice, the flush of anger reddening his pale face. Then he crumpled up the paper and flung it from him, resuming his hasty, restless walk. He could imagine the sickening scene, the rampant adulation, the blatant snobbishness. And, in the midst, a dishonored participator, the man who had been his leader, his liberator, the apostle of all he loved and lived by. Had the man been a hypocrite from the first? Impossible! No hypocrite could have written those burning lines which leaped to his memory and his lips. Or was he merely a weak fool? That could not be either. It was a barter, a deliberate barter of truth and honor against profit--as sordid a transaction as could be. He wanted a position in society, money, a rich wife, petting from great people--perhaps even, as that scribbler said, a ribbon to stick in his coat or a handle to fasten to his name. How could he? how could he? And the Doctor passed his hand across his hot, throbbing brow in the bewilderment of wrath. For an hour and more he ranged the streets aimlessly, a prey to his unreasoning fury. For this man's sake he had ruined himself; led on by this man's words, he had defied the world--his world. At all hazards he had joined the daring band. Now he was forsaken, abandoned, flung aside. He and his like had served their turn. On their backs Dale Bannister had mounted. But now he had done with them, and their lot was repudiation and disdain. Roberts could not find words for his scorn and contempt. His head racked him more and more. Connected thought seemed to become impossible; he could do nothing but repeat again and again, "The traitor! The traitor!" At last he turned home to his humble lodgings. The short hush of very early morning had fallen on the streets; he met no one, and the moon shone placidly down on the solitary figure of the maddened man, wrestling with his unconquerable rage. He could not stem it; yielding to its impulse, with quivering voice and face working with passion, he stretched his clenched fist to the sky and cried: "By God, he shall pay for it!" CHAPTER XVI. ="No More Kings."= After her father's report and the departure of Nellie Fane, Miss Tora Smith had been pleased to reconsider her judgment of Dale Bannister, and to modify it to some extent. The poems and the suspicion, taken in conjunction, each casting a lurid light on the other, had been very bad indeed; but when Tora's mind was disabused of the suspicion, she found it in her heart to pardon the poems. Although she treated Sir Harry Fulmer with scant ceremony, she had no small respect for his opinion, and when he and the Colonel coincided in the decision that Dale need not be ostracized, she did not persist against them. She was led to be more compliant by the fact that she was organizing an important Liberal gathering, and had conceived the ambition of inducing Dale to take part in the proceedings. "Fancy, if he would write us a song!" she said; "a song which we could sing in chorus. Wouldn't it be splendid?" "What would the Squire say?" asked Sir Harry. Tora smiled mischievously. "Are you," she demanded, "going to stand by and see him captured by the Grange?" "He ought to be with us, oughtn't he?" said Sir Harry. "Of course. And if our leader had an ounce of zeal----" "I'll write to him to-day," said Sir Harry. "Yes; and mind you persuade him. I shall be so amused to see what Jan Delane says, if he writes us a song." "He won't do it." "He won't, if you go in that despairing mood. Now write at once. Write as if you expected it." The outcome of this conversation, together with the idea which had struck the Squire, was, of course, that Dale received, almost by the same post, an urgent request for a militant Radical ditty, and a delicate, but very flattering, suggestion that it would be most agreeable to His Royal Highness--indeed he had hinted as much in response to Lord Cransford's question--to find the loyalty of Denborough, as it were, crystallized in one of Mr. Bannister's undying productions. For the first time in his life, Dale felt a grudge against the Muses for their endowment. Could not these people let him alone? He did not desire to put himself forward; he only asked to be let alone. It was almost as repugnant to him--at least, he thought it would be--to take part in Lord Cransford's pageant, as it certainly would be to hear the Radicals of Denborough screeching out his verses. He was a man of letters, not a politician, and he thought both requests very uncalled for. It might be that the Grange folks had some claim on him, but his acquaintance with Sir Harry Fulmer was of the slightest; and what did the man mean by talking of his "well-known views"? He was as bad as the Doctor himself. Presently Philip Hume came in, and Dale disclosed his perplexities. "I want to please people," he said, "but this is rather strong." "Write both," suggested Philip. "That will enrage both of them." "Then write neither." "Really, Phil, you might show some interest in the matter." "I am preoccupied. Have you been in the town to-day, Dale?" "No." "Then you haven't seen Johnstone's window?" "Johnstone's window? What does Johnstone want with a window?" "Put on your hat and come and see. Yes, come along. It concerns you." They walked down together in the gathering dusk of the afternoon, and when they came near Johnstone's, they saw his window lighted with a blaze of gas, and a little knot of curious people standing outside. The window was full of Dale's books, and the rows of green volumes were surmounted by a large placard--"Dale Bannister, the poet of Denborough--Works on Sale Here. Ask for 'The Clarion,' 'The Arch Apostates,' 'Blood for Blood'"; and outside, a file of men carried boards, headed, "The Rights of the People. Read Dale Bannister! No more Kings! No more Priests! Read Dale Bannister!" A curse broke from Dale. Philip smiled grimly. "Who's done this?" Dale asked. Philip pointed to a solitary figure which stood on the opposite side of the road, looking on at the spectacle. It was James Roberts, and he smiled grimly in his turn when he saw the poet and his friend. "He put Johnstone up to it," said Philip. "Johnstone told me so." Dale was aflame. He strode quickly across the road to where the Doctor stood, and said to him hotly: "This is your work, is it?" The Doctor was jaunty and cool in manner. "No, your works," he answered, with a foolish, exasperating snigger. "Aren't you pleased to see what notice they are attracting? I was afraid they were being forgotten in Denborough." "God only knows," said Dale angrily, "why you take pleasure in annoying me; but I have borne enough of your insolence." "Is it insolent to spread the sale of your books?" "You will make your jackal take those books down and stop his infernal posters, or I'll thrash you within an inch of your life." "Ah!" said Roberts, and his hand stole toward his breast-pocket. "What do you say?" "I say that if I can make a wretched snob like you unhappy, it's money well spent, and I'll see you damned before I take the books down." Dale grasped his walking-cane and took a step forward. The Doctor stood waiting for him, smiling and keeping his hand in his pocket. "Jim!" The Doctor turned and saw his wife at his side. Dale fell back, lifting his hat, at the sight of the pale distressed face and clasped hands. "Do come home, dear!" she said, with an appealing glance. Philip took Dale's arm. "Come," he said, "let's reason with Johnstone." Dale allowed himself to be led away, not knowing that death had stared him in the face; for it was a loaded revolver that Roberts let fall back into the recesses of his pocket when his wife's touch recalled for a moment his saner sense. The reasoning with Johnstone was not a success. Dale tried threats, abuse, and entreaties, all in vain. At last he condescended to bribery, and offered Johnstone twice the sum, whatever it might be, which he had received. He felt his degradation, but the annoyance was intolerable. The Alderman's attitude, on receiving this offer, was not without pathos. He lamented in himself an obstinate rectitude, which he declared had often stood in his way in business affairs. His political convictions, engaged as they were in the matter, he would have sacrificed, if the favor thereby accorded to Mr. Bannister were so great as to be measured by two hundred pounds; but he had passed his word; and he concluded by beseeching Dale not to tempt him above that which he was able. "Take it away, take it away, sir," he said when Dale held a pocketbook before his longing eyes. "It aint right, sir, it aint indeed--and me a family man." Dale began to feel the guilt of the Tempter, and fell back on an appeal to the Alderman's better feelings. This line of argument elicited only a smile. "If I won't do it for two hundred sovereigns, does it stand to reason, sir, as I should do it to obleege?" Dale left him, after a plain statement of the estimation in which he held him, and went home, yielding, only after a struggle, to Philip's representation that any attempt to bribe the sandwich-men must result in his own greater humiliation and discomfiture. Angry as Dale was, he determined not to allow this incident to turn him from the course he had marked out for himself. It confirmed his determination to have nothing to do with Sir Harry's Radical song, but it did not make him any the more inclined to appear as a eulogist of royalty. Neutrality in all political matters was his chosen course, and it appeared to him to be incomparably the wisest under all the circumstances. This view he expressed to the family at the Grange, having walked over for that purpose. He expected to meet with some opposition, but to his surprise the Squire heartily acquiesced. "After this scandalous business," he said, "you must cut the Radicals altogether. Of course, Harry Fulmer will object to it as much as we do, but he must be responsible for his followers. And I think you're quite right to let us alone, too. Why should you literary men bother with politics?" Dale was delighted at this opinion, and at Janet's concurrence with it. "Then I dare say you will be so kind as to express my feelings to Lord Cransford; if he thinks fit, he can let the Duke know them." The Squire's face expressed surprise, and his daughter's reflected it. "But, my dear fellow," said Mr. Delane, "what has Cransford's suggestion to do with politics? The throne is above politics." "Surely, Mr. Bannister," added Janet, "we are all loyal, whatever our politics? I'm sure Sir Harry himself is as loyal as papa." "Come, Bannister, you press your scruples too far. There are no politics in this." Dale was staggered, but not convinced. "I'd rather not put myself forward at all," he said. The Squire assumed an air of apologetic friendliness. "I know you'll excuse me, Bannister. I'm twice your age or more, and I--well--I haven't been so lucky as you in escaping the world of etiquette. But, my dear fellow, when the Duke sends a message--it really comes to that--it's a strongish thing to say you won't do it. Oh, of course, you can if you like--there's no beheading nowadays; but it's not very usual." "I wish Lord Cransford had never mentioned me to the Duke at all." "Perhaps it would have been wiser," the Squire conceded candidly, "but Cransford is so proud of anything that brings _kudos_ to the county, and he could no more leave you out than he could the Institute itself. Well, we mustn't force you. Think it over, think it over. I must be off. No, don't you go. Stay and have tea with the ladies;" and the Squire, who, as has been previously mentioned, was no fool, left his daughter to entertain his guest. Janet was working at a piece of embroidery, and she went on working in silence for a minute or two. Then she looked up and said: "Tora Smith was here this morning. She'll be very disappointed at your refusal to write for her meeting." "Miss Smith has no claim on me," said Dale stiffly. He had not forgotten Tora's injurious suspicions. "Besides, one doesn't do such things simply for the asking--not even if it's a lady who asks." "You know, I don't think anybody ought to ask--no, not princes; and I hope you won't do what Lord Cransford wants merely because you're asked." "Your father says I ought." "Papa wants you to do it very much." "And I should like to do what he wants." "I should like you to do what he wants, but not because he wants it," said Janet. Dale turned round to her and said abruptly: "I'll do it, if you want me to." Now this was flattering, and Janet could not deny that it gave her pleasure; but she clung to her principles. "I don't want it--in that sense," she answered. "I should be glad if it seemed to you a right thing to do; but I should be sorry if you did it, unless it did." "You will not let me do it for you?" "No," she answered, smiling. "You have no pleasure in obedience?" "Oh, well, only in willing obedience," said she, with a smile. "It would be very willing--even eager." "The motive would not be right. But how absurd! I believe----" "Well, what?" "That you mean to do it, and are trying to kill two birds with one stone." "You don't really think that, Miss Delane?" "No, of course not. Only you were becoming so serious." "May I not be serious?" "It isn't serious to offer to take important steps because it would please a girl." "Aren't you rather contradicting yourself? You called that becoming serious just now." "If I am, it is a privilege we all have." "Girls, you mean? Well, you refuse to help me?" "Entirely." "Even to counteract Miss Smith's illicit influence?" "I shall trust to your own sense of propriety." Dale walked home, grievously puzzled. A small matter may raise a great issue, and he felt, perhaps without full reason, that he was at the parting of the ways. "No more Kings! No more Priests!" Or "An Ode to H. R. H. the Duke of Mercia on his visit to Denborough"! Dale ruefully admitted that there would be ground for a charge of inconsistency. Some would talk of conversion, some of tergiversation; he could not make up his mind which accusation would be the more odious. There was clearly nothing for it but absolute neutrality; he must refuse both requests. Janet would understand why; of course she would, she must; and even if she did not, what was that to him? The throne above politics!--that must be a mere sophism; there could not be anything in that. No doubt this young Prince was not morally responsible for the evils, but he personified the system, and Dale could not bow the knee before him. If it had been possible--and as he went he began idly to frame words for an ode of welcome. An idea or two, a very happy turn, came into his head; he knew exactly the tone to take, just how far to go, just the mean that reconciles deference to independence. He had the whole thing mapped out before he recalled to himself the thought that he was not going to write at all, and as he entered his own garden he sighed at the necessary relinquishing of a stately couplet. There was no doubt that work of that class opened a new field, a hitherto virgin soil, to his genius. It was a great pity. In the garden, to his surprise, he came on Arthur Angell. "What brings you here, Arthur?" he said. "Delighted to see you, though." Arthur explained that he had run down at Nellie Fane's bidding. Nellie had written her letter of warning about the Doctor's conspiracy, but, having thus relieved her mind, had straightway forgotten all about her letter, and it had lain unposted in her pocket for a week. Then she found it, and sent Arthur off in haste to stop the mischief. "It's awfully kind of Nellie," said Dale; "but I don't suppose it would have been of any use, and anyhow it's too late now." "Yes, so Phil told me." "A dirty trick, isn't it?" "Well, I suppose it's rather rough on you," said Arthur, struggling between principles and friendship, and entirely suppressing his own privity to the said dirty trick. "You'll stay?" "I've got no clothes." "Oh, Wilson will see to that. Come in." Philip met them at the door. "I've a message for you, Dale," he said. "The Mayor has been here." "And what may the Mayor want?" "The Mayor came as an ambassador. He bore a resolution from the Town Council, a unanimous resolution (_absente_ Johnstone owing to pressure in the bookselling trade), begging you to accede to the Lord Lieutenant's request and write a poem for the Duke." "Hang the Town Council!" exclaimed Dale. "I wonder why nobody will let me alone!" Then he remembered that Miss Delane had been almost ostentatious in her determination to let him alone. If he wrote, they could not say that he had written to please her. But he was not going to write. True, it would have been a good revenge on the Doctor, and it would have pleased---- "Shall you do the ode?" asked Philip Hume. "Certainly not," answered Dale in a resolute tone. CHAPTER XVII. =Dale tries His Hand at an Ode.= Dale's preoccupations with his new friends had thrown on Philip Hume the necessity of seeking society for himself, if he did not wish to spend many solitary evenings at Littlehill. The resources of Denborough were not very great, and his dissipation generally took the form of a quiet dinner, followed by a rubber of whist, at Mount Pleasant. The Colonel and he suited one another, and, even if Philip had been less congenial in temper, the Colonel was often too hard put to it for a fourth player to be nice in scrutinizing the attractions of anyone who could be trusted to answer a call and appreciate the strategy of a long suit. Even with Philip's help the rubber was not a brilliant one; for Tora only played out of filial duty, and Sir Harry came in to join because it was better to be with Tora over a whist-table than not to be with her at all. That he thought so witnessed the intensity of his devotion, for to play whist seemed to Sir Harry to be going out of one's way to seek trouble and perplexity of mind. On the evening of Arthur Angell's arrival the usual party had dined together and set to work. Things were not going well. At dinner they had discussed the royal visit, and the Colonel had been disgusted to find that his daughter, unmindful of her, or rather his, principles, was eager to see and, if it might be, to speak with "this young whippersnapper of a Prince." The Colonel could not understand such a state of feeling, but Tora was firm. All the county would be there in new frocks; she had ordered a new frock, of which she expected great things, and she meant to be there in it; it would not do, she added, for the Duke to think that the Radicals had no pretty girls on their side. The Colonel impatiently turned to Sir Harry; but Sir Harry agreed with Tora, and even Philip Hume announced his intention of walking down High Street to see, not the Prince of course, but the people and the humors of the day. "Really, Colonel," he said, "I cannot miss the Mayor." "Are we going to have a rubber or not?" asked the Colonel with an air of patient weariness. They sat down, Sir Harry being his host's partner. Now, Sir Harry was, and felt himself to be, in high favor, owing to his sound views on the question of the day, and he was thinking of anything in the world rather than the fall of the cards. Consequently his play was marked by somewhat more than its ordinary atrociousness, and the Colonel grew redder and redder as every scheme he cherished was nipped in the bud by his partner's blunders. Tora and Philip held all the cards, and their good fortune covered Tora's deficiency in skill, and made Philip's sound game seem a brilliant one. At last the Colonel could bear it no longer. He broke up the party, and challenged Philip to a game of piquet. "At any rate, one hasn't a partner at piquet," he said. Sir Harry smiled, and followed Tora to the drawing room. With such rewards for bad play, who would play well? He sat down by her and watched her making spills. Presently he began to make spills too. Tora looked at him. Sir Harry made a very bad spill indeed, and held it up with a sigh. "That's the sort of thing," he said, "I have to light my pipe with at home!" "As you've been very good to-night," answered Tora, "I'll give you some of mine to take with you. Let me show you how to do them for yourself." Then ensued trivialities which bear happening better than they do recording--glances and touches and affectations of stupidity on one side and impatience on the other--till love's ushers, their part fulfilled, stand by to let their master speak, and the hidden seriousness, which made the trifles not trifling, leaps to sudden light. Before her lover's eager rush of words, his glorifying of her, his self-depreciation, Tora was defenseless, her raillery was gone, and she murmured nothing but: "You're _not_ stupid--you're _not_ dull. Oh, how can you!" Before he set out for home Philip Hume was privileged to hear the fortunate issue, and to wonder how much happiness two faces can manage to proclaim. Kindly as the little family party took him into their confidence, he hastened away, knowing that he had no place there. Such joys were not for him, he thought, as he walked slowly from the door, remembering how once he had challenged impossibility, and laid his love at a girl's feet; and she, too, had for a moment forgotten impossibility; and they were very happy--for a moment; then they recollected--or had it recollected for them--that they were victims of civilization. And hence an end. Philip recalled this incident as he walked. He had not thought of it for a long time, but the air of Denborough seemed so full of love and love-making that he spared a sigh or two for himself. Well born and well educated, he wrung from the world, by painful labor, some three or four hundred pounds a year. It was enough if he had not been well born or well educated; but his advantages turned to disabilities, and he saw youth going or gone, and the home and the love which had been so confidently assumed as his lot, that even as a boy he had joked and been joked about them, faded away from his picture of the future, and he was only kept from a sigh of self-pity by reminding himself of the ludicrous commonplaceness of his grievance against fate. He knew men so situated by dozens, and nobody thought them ill used. No more they were, he supposed; at least, it seemed nobody's fault, and, in view of sundry other sad things in the world, not a matter to make a fuss about. He found Dale in high spirits; for Dale had conceived a benevolent scheme, by which he was to make two of his friends happy--as happy as Tora Smith and Harry Fulmer, the news of whom he heard with the distant interest to which Tora's bygone hostility restricted him. He and Arthur Angell had dined together, smoked together, and drunk whisky and water together, and the floodgates of confidence had been opened; a thing prone to occur under such circumstances, a thing that seems then very natural, and reserves any appearance of strangeness for next morning's cold meditations. Dale had chanted Janet's charms, and Arthur had been emboldened to an antistrophe in praise of Nellie Fane. It was a revelation to Dale--a delightful revelation. It would be ideally suitable, and it was his pleasure that the happy issue should be forwarded by all legitimate means. "Arthur's going to stay," he said; "and I've written to Nellie to tell her to come down with her mother." "Ah!" "Of course, I've said nothing about Arthur. I've put it on the royal visit. She'd like to be here for that anyhow; and when she's here, Arthur must look out for himself." "Why couldn't he do it in London? They live on the same pair of stairs," objected Philip. "Oh, London! who the deuce could make love in London?" asked Dale in narrow-minded ignorance. "People's faces are always dirty in London." Philip smiled, but this new plan seemed to him a bad one. It was one of Dale's graces to be unconscious of most of his triumphs, and it had evidently never struck him that Nellie's affections would offer any obstacle to the scheme, or cause her fatally to misinterpret what the scheme was. "I don't see," said Philip, "that she is more likely to be captivated by our young friend here than in London." "My dear fellow, he's at work there, and so is she. Here they'll have nothing else to do." While Dale chattered over his great idea, Philip pondered whether to interfere or not. He was certain that Nellie had been fond, not of Arthur Angell, but of Dale himself; he feared she would think her invitation came from Dale's own heart, not in favor to a friend, and he suspected the kindness would end in pain. But, on the other hand, affections change, and there is such a thing as falling back on the good when the better is out of reach; and, finally, there is a sound general principle that where it is doubtful whether to hold one's tongue or not, one's tongue should be held. Philip held his. He shrugged his shoulders and said: "If this goes on, a bachelor won't be safe in Denborough. What have you been doing?" and he pointed at some scribbling which lay on the table. Dale flushed a little. "Oh, I've just been trying my hand at that little thing they want me to do--you know." "For the Radical meeting?" "No, no. For the Duke of Mercia's visit." "Oh! So you're going to do it?" Dale assumed a candid yet judicial air. "If I find I can say anything gracious and becoming, without going back on my principles, Phil, I think I shall. Otherwise not." "I see, old fellow. Think you will be able?" "I don't intend to budge an inch from my true position for anybody." "Don't be too hard on the Duke. He's a young man." Dale became suspicious that he was being treated with levity; he looked annoyed, and Philip hastened to add: "My dear boy, write your poem, and never mind what people tell you about your principles. Why shouldn't you write some verses to the young man?" "That's what I say," replied Dale eagerly. "It doesn't compromise me in the least. I think you're quite right, Phil." And he sat down again with a radiant expression. Philip lit his pipe, and drew his chair near the fire, listening idly to the light scratchings of the writing and the heavy scratchings of the erasures. "You seem to scratch out a lot, Dale," he remarked. "A thing's no good," said Dale, without turning round, "till you've scratched it all out twice at least." "It's a pity, then," said Philip, pulling at his pipe and looking into the fire, "that we aren't allowed to treat life like that." His words struck a chord in Dale's memory. He started up, and repeated: "The moving Finger writes, and having writ Moves on, nor all your piety nor wit Can lure it back to cancel half a line, Nor all your tears wash out a word of it." "And yet," said Philip, stretching out a hand to the flickering blaze, "we go on being pious and wise--some of us; and we go on crying--all of us." CHAPTER XVIII. =Delilah Johnstone.= When it became known to Mr. Delane that the ode of welcome would be forthcoming,--a fact which, without being definitely announced, presently made its way into general knowledge,--he felt that he owed Dale Bannister a good turn. The young man was obviously annoyed and hurt at the aspect of Alderman Johnstone's window, and the Squire could not, moreover, conceal from himself that the parade of the Alderman's sandwich-men on the day of the royal visit would detract from the unanimity of loyalty and contentment with Queen and Constitution which he felt Denborough ought to display. Finally, his wife and his daughter were so strongly of opinion that something must be done that he had no alternative but to try to do something. Intimidation had failed; the Alderman intrenched himself behind his lease; and Colonel Smith's open triumph was hardly needed to show the Squire that in this matter he had been caught napping. Bribery of a direct and pecuniary sort was apparently also of no avail, and the Squire was driven to play his last card at the cost of great violence to his own feelings. A week before the great day he sent for the Mayor and was closeted with him for half an hour. The Mayor came out from the conference with an important air, and, on his way home, stopped at Alderman Johnstone's door. The poems, placards, and posters were still prominently displayed, and over the way James Roberts, in his well-worn coat, paced up and down on his unwearying patrol. He would wait days rather than miss Dale, in case the poet might chance to pass that way. He had nothing to do, for no one sent for him now; he had no money, and could earn none; therefore his time was his own, and he chose to spend it thus, forgetting his wife and his child, forgetting even to ask how it happened that there was still food and fuel in his house, or to suspect what made him so often see Philip Hume walk past with an inquiring gaze, indifferently concealed, and so often meet Dale's servant, Wilson, carrying baskets up and down the street on his way to and from Littlehill. The Mayor went in and fell into conversation with Johnstone. He spoke of the glories of the coming day, of his own new gown, and of Mrs. Hedger's; and as he raised his voice in enthusiastic description Mrs. Johnstone stole in from the back parlor and stood within the door. The Alderman affected scorn of the whole affair, and chuckled maliciously when the Mayor referred to Dale Bannister. "Then," said the Mayor, "after the Institoot's opened, there's a grand luncheon at the Grange, with the Duke, and his Lordship, and the Squire, and all." He paused: the Alderman whistled indifferently, and his wife drew a step nearer. The Mayor proceeded, bringing his finest rhetoric into play. "The Crown," he said, "the County, and the Town will be represented." "What, are you going, Hedger?" asked the Alderman, with an incredulous laugh. "The Squire and Mrs. Delane are so good as to make a point of me and Mrs. Hedger attendin'--in state, Johnstone." "My!" said Mrs. Johnstone, moving a step within the door. "That'll be a day for Susan." "His Lordship gives Susan his arm," said the Mayor. "Aint there any more going from the town?" asked Mrs. Johnstone, while the Alderman ostentatiously occupied himself with one of his posters. "The Squire," replied the Mayor, "did want another,--there's no room but for two,--but he thinks there's no one of sufficient standin'--not as would go." "Well, I'm sure!" said Mrs. Johnstone. "You see, ma'am," pursued the Mayor, "we must consider the lady. The lady must be asked. Now would _you_ ask Mrs. Maggs, or Mrs. Jenks, or Mrs. Capper, or any o' that lot, ma'am?" "Sakes, no!" said Mrs. Johnstone scornfully. "'There is a lady,' I says to the Squire, 'as would do honor to the town, but there--the man's wrong there!'" Mrs. Johnstone came nearer still, glancing at her husband. "When I mentioned the party I was thinkin' of," the Mayor went on, "the Squire slapped his thigh, and, says he, 'The very man we want, Hedger,' he says; 'all parties ought to be represented. He's a Liberal--a prominent Liberal; so much the better. Now, won't he come?' 'Well,' says I, 'he's an obstinate man;' and Mrs. Delane says, 'You must try, Mr. Mayor. Say what pleasure it 'ud give me to see him and Mrs. Johnstone----' There, I've let it out!" A pause followed. The Mayor drew a card from his pocket. It was headed, "To have the honor of meeting H. R. H. the Duke of Mercia." The Mayor laid it on the counter. "There!" he said. "You must do as you think right, Johnstone. Of course, if you like to go on like this, worryin' the Squire's friends, why, it isn't for you to put your legs under the Squire's ma'ogany. So the Squire says. He says, 'Let him drop that nonsense, and come and be friendly--he may think what he likes.'" There was another pause. "There'll have been nothin' like it in my day," said the Mayor. "And only me and Susan from the town!" "There'll be plenty ready to go," said Johnstone. "Aye, that they will, but they won't have the askin'. Mrs. Delane says there aint a soul she'll have, except me and Susan, and you and Mrs. Johnstone. You see, ma'am, it isn't everyone who can sit down with the county." The heart of Mrs. Johnstone was alight with pride and exultation and longing. She looked at her husband and she looked at the Mayor. "You and me and the Recorder 'ud drive up in the coach," said the Mayor, with the air of one who regretfully pictures an impossible ideal; "and the ladies--Mrs. Hedger and you, ma'am--was to follow in a carriage and pair with a postilion--his Lordship 'ud send one for ye." "I'd wear my ruby velvet," murmured Mrs. Johnstone in the voice of soliloquy, "and my gold earrings." "Well, I must be goin'," said the Mayor. "It's a cryin' shame you won't come, Johnstone. What's that mad feller Roberts to you?" "A dirty villain as starves his wife!" ejaculated Mrs. Johnstone, with sudden violence. The Alderman looked up with a start. "Take a day to think it over," said the Mayor. "Take a day, ma'am;" and he disappeared with a smile on his shrewd, good-tempered face. There was silence for a moment after he went. The Alderman sat in his chair, glancing at his wife out of the corner of his eye. Mrs. Johnstone gazed fixedly at the shop-window. The Alderman looked at her again: she was, he thought (with much justice), a fine woman; she would look well in the ruby velvet and the gold earrings, and the swells would wonder where old Johnstone picked up that strapping young woman--for she was his junior by twenty years. The Alderman sighed, and looked down again at his poster. Presently Mrs. Johnstone stole quietly toward the window, the Alderman covertly watching her. When she reached it, she threw a coquettish glance over her shoulder at her elderly husband: did she not know, as well as he, that she was a fine young woman? Then she began to take Dale Bannister's books out of their place, piling them behind the counter, and to tear down the bills and placards. The Alderman sat and watched her, till she had finished her task. Then he rose and thundered: "Put them things back, Sally! Do you 'ear _me_? I aint going to be made a fool of." Probably Mrs. Johnstone was not so sure. She burst into tears and flung her arms round the Alderman's neck. "There! what's there to cry about?" said he, drawing her on to his knee. While the Mayor was still in the shop, James Roberts had gone home to his midday meal. He ate it with good appetite, not knowing who had paid for it, and not noticing his wife's terror lest he should ask her. After the meal he went to his study and read some of Dale's poetry, declaiming it loudly and with fury, while Ethel listened with the horror that had begun to gain on her increasing and increasing as she listened. She was afraid of him now--afraid most for him, but also for the child and herself; and she thanked Heaven every time he went out peacefully, and again when he came back unhurt. It was about four when the Doctor took his hat and walked down the street to resume his patrol. To his amazement, the window was bare, the books gone, the placards and posters all torn down. With an oath he rushed into the shop, and found the Alderman sitting behind a pile of volumes, on the top of which lay an envelope addressed to himself. "What's the meaning of this?" gasped the Doctor, and as he spoke the glass door which led to the parlor opened a little way. "It means, Doctor, that I've had enough of it." "Enough of it?" "Yes. Mr. Bannister aint done me any 'arm, and I'm not going to fret him any more." "You scoundrel!" shrieked the maddened man; "you thief! you took my money--you----" "There's your books, and there in the envelope you'll find your 'undred pound. Take 'em and get out." "So Bannister has been at you?" sneered Roberts. "I aint seen 'im." "Ah!" He was quiet now, the cold fit was on him. He took no notice of the books, but put the envelope in his pocket and turned to go, saying: "You think you can stop my revenge, you pitiful fool; you'll see." Johnstone gave himself a shake. "I'm well out of that," he said. "I b'lieve he's crazy. Sally, where are you?" Sally came, and no doubt the Alderman gained the reward of the righteous, in whose house there is peace. When the Squire received an acceptance of his invitation from Alderman and Mrs. Johnstone, he became more than ever convinced that every Radical was at heart a snob. Perhaps it would have been fair to remember that most of them are husbands. Be that as it may, his scheme had worked. The posters, the books, and the sandwich-men were gone. There was nothing now to remind Denborough that it harbored a revolutionist. What was more important still, there was nothing to remind Dale Bannister of the indiscretions of his past. He might now read his ode, unblushing, in High Street, and no placard would scream in ill-omened reminder: "No more Kings!" CHAPTER XIX. =A Well-Paid Poem.= Among the quieter satisfactions of life must be ranked in a high place the peace of a man who has made up his mind. He is no longer weighing perplexing possibilities, but, having chosen his path, feels that he has done all that can be done, and that this conviction will enable him to bear with patience the outcome of his determination, whatever it may be. Of course he is wrong, and if misfortune comes, his philosophy will go to the wall, but for the moment it seems as if fate cannot harm him, because he has set his course and bidden defiance to it. Dale had made up his mind to disregard cavilers, not to write the Radical ditty, to write the ode of welcome, and, lastly, to follow whither his inclination led. And, on the top of these comforting resolutions, came the removal of his thorn in the flesh--Johnstone's be-placarded shop window--and the glow of well-rewarded benevolence with which he had witnessed Nellie Fane's ill-concealed delight in her return to Littlehill and Arthur Angell's openly declared pleasure in greeting her. Dale began to think that he had too easily allowed himself to be put out, and had been false to his poetic temperament by taking trifles hardly. He was jocund as he walked, and nature responded to his mood: the sun shone bright and warm on him, and the spring air was laden with pleasant hints of coming summer. He wondered how and why, a few weeks ago, he had nearly bidden a disgusted farewell to Market Denborough. Now, when a man sets out in such a mood, being a young man, and a man, as they used to say, of sensibility, next to anything may happen. From his contented meditations on the happy arrangement he had made for his friends, Dale's thoughts traveled on to his own affairs. He was going to the Grange--he was always going to the Grange now, and he seemed always welcome there. Mrs. Delane was kind, the Squire was effusive, and Janet---- Here his thoughts became impossible to record in lowly prose. The goddess had become flesh for him; still stately and almost severe in her maiden reserve to all others, as she had once been to him, now for him she smiled and blushed, and would look, and look away, and look again, and vainly summon her tamed pride to hide what her delight proclaimed. It was sudden. Oh, yes; anything worth having was sudden, thought lucky Dale. Fame had been sudden, wealth had been sudden. Should not love be sudden too? "If I get a chance----" said Dale to himself, and he smiled and struck at the weeds with his stick, and hummed a tune. Anything might happen. The Prince was due in three days, and already flags and triumphal arches were beginning to appear. It is to be hoped that the demand for drugs was small, for Mr. Hedger was to be found everywhere but behind his own counter, and Alderman Johnstone, having once taken the plunge, was hardly less active in superintending the preparations. The men who had carried those obnoxious boards were now more worthily earning their bread by driving in posts and nailing up banners, and Dale saw that Denborough was in earnest, and meant to make the reception a notable testimony to its loyalty. He loitered to watch the stir for a little while, for it was early afternoon, and he must not arrive at the Grange too soon. Not even the ode itself, which he carried in his pocket, could excuse an intrusion on the Squire's midday repose. As he stood looking on he was accosted by Dr. Spink. "I have just been to see Roberts," he said. "Is he ill?" "Yes. His wife sent for me. As you may suppose, she would not have done so for nothing." "What's the matter?" "I don't like his state at all. He took no notice of me, but lay on his bed, muttering to himself. I think he's a little touched here;" and the doctor put a finger just under the brim of his well-brushed hat. "Poor chap!" said Dale. "I should like to go and see him." Spink discouraged any such idea. "You're the very last person he ought to see. I want him to go away." "Has he got any money?" "Yes, I think so. His wife told me he had now." "And won't he go?" "He says he must stay till after the 15th"--the 15th was the great day--"and then he will go. That's the only word I could get out of him. I told his wife to let me know at once if there was any change for the worse." "It's hard on her, poor little woman," said Dale, passing on his way. He found Tora Smith and Sir Harry at the Grange. Rather to his surprise, Tora greeted him with friendly cordiality, accepting his congratulations very pleasantly. He had expected her to show some resentment at his refusal to write a song for her, but in Tora's mind songs and poets, Liberal meetings, and even royal visits, had been, for the time at least, relegated to a distant background of entire unimportance. Captain Ripley was there also, with the ill-used air that he could not conceal, although he was conscious that it only aggravated his bad fortune. He took his leave a very few minutes after Dale arrived; for what pleasure was there in looking on while everybody purred over Dale, and told him his ode was the most magnificent tribute ever paid to a youthful Prince? Dale, in his heart, thought the same,--so does a man love what he creates,--but he bore his compliments with a graceful outward modesty. The afternoon was so unseasonably fine--such was the reason given--that Janet and he found themselves walking in the garden, she talking merrily of their preparations, he watching her fine, clear-cut profile, and, as she turned to him in talk, the gay dancing of her eyes. "Your doing it," she said, "just makes the whole thing perfect. How can we thank you enough, Mr. Bannister?" "The Captain did not seem to care about my verses," Dale remarked, with a smile. Janet blushed a little, and gave him a sudden glance--a glance that was a whole book of confidences, telling what she never could have told in words, what she never would have told at all, did not the eyes sometimes outrun their mandate and speak unbidden of the brain. Dale smiled again--this time in triumph. "You like them?" he asked softly, caressing the little words with his musical, lingering tones. "Oh, yes, yes," she said, looking at him once more for a moment, and then hastily away. "I'll write you a volume twice as good, if--I may." "Twice as good?" she echoed, with a laugh. "Now, honestly, don't you think these perfect yourself?" "They are good--better than any I wrote before"--he paused to watch her face, and went on in a lower voice: "I knew you; but I shall do better the more I know you and the better." Janet had no light answer ready now. Her heart was beating, and she had much ado not to bid him end her sweet, unbearable excitement. They had reached the end of the terrace and passed into the wood that skirted it to the west. Suddenly she made a movement as if to turn and go back. "No, no," he whispered in her ear; and, as she wavered, he caught her by the arm, and, without words of asking or of doubt, drew her to him and kissed her. "My beauty, my queen, my love!" he whispered. "You love me, you love me!" She drew back her head, straightening the white column of her neck, while her hands held his shoulders. "Ah, I would die for you!" she said. Mrs. Delane was a woman of penetration. Though Janet told her nothing of what had occurred,--for she and Dale agreed to let the matter remain a secret till the impending festivities were over,--yet Mrs. Delane saw something in her daughter's air which made her, that same evening, express to the Squire her doleful conviction that the worst had happened. "I shall say nothing to Janet," she said, "till she speaks to me. I can trust her absolutely. But I am afraid of it, George. Poor Gerard Ripley!" "My dear, I'm not going to break my heart about Gerard Ripley. I think more of Jan." "Well, of course, so do I. And I don't at all like it. He's not--well, not our _sort_, as the young people say." "Mary, you're talking slang. What's the matter with him? The match will make Jan famous." "Well, well, I don't like it, but you must have your way." "It's not my way. It's Jan's way. Is she fond of him?" "Terribly, I'm afraid, poor child!" The Squire became a little irritated at this persistently sorrowful point of view. "Really, my dear, why shouldn't she be fond of him? It's not a bad thing when people are going to marry." "I wish I'd seen it in time to stop it." "On the whole, Mary, I'm rather glad you didn't. I like the young fellow." In this state of things--with the lady eagerly consenting, and a father all but ready to urge her on--well might Captain Ripley ride recklessly home from Dirkham Grange, cursing the ways of women and the folly of men, and promising himself to go to India and there be killed, to the end that his tragic fate might bring a pang to Janet's heart in future days. Well might he discover a sudden recall, and return to his regiment, escaping the Denborough celebrations, and risking offense in exalted quarters. So he went; and nobody at Denborough thought any more about him--not even Janet, for joy swallows up pity, and the best of humanity are allowed, without reproach, to be selfish once or twice in life. That same night, at dinner at Littlehill, Nellie Fane thought Dale had never been so bright, so brilliant, or so merry. Under his leadership, the fun and mirth waxed fast and furious, till it carried away her doubts and fears, and Angell's sore wonderings why she looked always at Dale and never at him, and Philip's troubled forebodings of sorrows no friendly hand could avert. Dale's high spirits bore no check and suffered no resistance, and there was a tumult in Littlehill, such as had not been heard since its early indecorous days. Suddenly, into this scene, followed hastily by Wilson, there broke, hatless and cloakless, Ethel Roberts, her face pale and her eyes wide with fear. Running to Philip Hume, she cried: "My husband! He has gone, he has gone! We cannot find him. He has gone, and taken the pistol with him. What shall I do? Oh, what shall I do?" CHAPTER XX. =An Evening's End.= The next morning, Roberts' friends held an anxious conference. The Doctor, being left alone while his wife went out on household affairs, had, it seemed, risen from bed, dressed himself, and left the house. He had taken a few pounds, part of what Johnstone had returned to him, but no luggage. Nothing was gone except his revolver, which had lain on the mantelpiece, his wife having feared to take it away. In the absence of other explanation, it seemed most probable that he had suddenly determined to return to London, and Dr. Spink thought London the best place to look for him. Accordingly, Philip Hume at once started in pursuit; for all felt, though none of them liked to express the feeling, that Roberts was not in a state in which he could safely be trusted to look after himself. His wife was helpless with grief and bewilderment, and kindly Mrs. Hodge determined to spend the day with her, and return to Littlehill only late in the evening; thus at least proper attention would be secured to the helpless child and its hardly less helpless mother. Not even these troubles could keep Dale from the Grange, and after dinner, with an apology to Nellie and Arthur, he announced his intention of strolling over to ask the Squire at what point in the proceedings his ode was to come. Nellie had a letter to write, or said she had, and Arthur Angell offered to bear Dale company part of the way, with a cigar. The two men set out together, and Arthur did not leave his friend till they were at the Grange drive. Then he sauntered back, humming snatches of song between his puffs of smoke, and rejoicing in the glory of a full moon. He had almost reached the gate of Littlehill, when, to his surprise, he saw, a few yards from him, a figure that seemed familiar. He caught sight of it only for a moment, for the trees then came between; and yet he felt almost sure that the stealthily moving form was that of James Roberts. He stood watching to see him again, but he did not; and, going into the house, he told Nellie what he thought he had seen. "Dr. Roberts going toward the Grange!" she exclaimed. "You must be mistaken." "I don't think so. It looked like him." Nellie was not inclined to think he could be right, but she agreed that Arthur had better go and tell Dr. Spink of his suspicions. Arthur went off on his errand, and she sat by the fire alone. Abandoning herself to reverie, she idly and sadly reviewed the events of the days since her return. How joyfully she had come! But it had hardly been as good as she hoped. Dale was very kind, when he was there. But why did he leave her so much--leave her to Arthur Angell? And ah, why did he go so much to the Grange? It was all far pleasanter before he came to Denborough, before he knew these great people--yes, and before this Dr. Roberts was there to worry them. The thought of Roberts carried her mind in a new direction. What a strange man he was! And his poor wife! She could not think why he had become so odd and so unfriendly. Yet it was so. He seemed absolutely to hate Dale; she had seen him look at him so fiercely. Dale had not ruined him; he had ruined himself. He was mad to blame Dale. Ah, wasn't he mad?--She sat up suddenly in her chair. What if Arthur were right? What if it were he? Why was he going to the Grange! Dale was there. What was that they said about a pistol? Ah--if---- Without another thought she rose, and as she was, in her evening dress and thin shoes, she ran out of the house and along the wooded road toward the Grange. A terrible idea was goading her on. He was mad; he hated Dale; he had a revolver with him. Oh, could she be in time? They would wonder at her. What did that matter? Her love, her lord was--or might be--in danger. She pressed on, till she panted and had to pause; then, with breath but half recovered, over rough and smooth ground, knowing no difference, she sped on her way. Dale's talk with the Squire was not long; but the Squire's daughter came to the door to bid him good-night, and was easily persuaded to walk a little way down the drive with him. She went farther than she meant, as was natural enough; for she was leaning on his arm, and he was telling her, in that caressing voice of his, that all his life and heart and brain and power were hers, and lavishing sweet words on her. "I must go back, Dale," she said. "They will wonder what has become of me." "Not yet." "Yes, I must." "Ah, my darling, how soon will it be when we need never part? How soon? I mean how long, till then! Do you love me?" "You know, Dale." "What was it you said the other day--was it only yesterday?--that you would die for me?" "Yes." "Ah, Jan, my sweetest Jan, that you should say that to me!" They said no more, but did not part yet. At last he suffered her to tear herself away. "I shall run back through the shrubbery," she whispered. "I shall wait." "Yes, wait. When I get in, I will show you a light from my window. A good-night light, Dale." She sped away down a side-path, and Dale leaned against a tree, in the moonlight, fixing his lovelorn eyes on the window. As Janet turned down her path, she rushed, in her rapid flight, against a man who stood there in lurking. Dale's side was to him, but he was watching Dale, with a sneering smile on his lips. When she saw him, she started back. In a moment he seized her shoulder with one hand, and pressed a pistol to her head. "If you make a sound, I'll kill you," he hissed. "Don't stir--don't scream." She was paralyzed with surprise and fright. It was Roberts, and--what did he mean? He pushed her slowly before him, the revolver still at her head, till they reached the drive. Dale's eyes were set on his mistress' window, and their feet made no noise on the grass-edges of the drive. Roberts gave a low laugh, and whispered in her ear. "He came to see you, did he? The traitor! Not a sound! Wait till he turns! wait till he turns! I want him to see me. When he turns, I shall shoot him." At last she understood. The madman meant to kill Dale. He would kill him, before Dale could defend himself. She must warn him--at any cost, she must warn him. If it cost her---- "Not a sound," hissed Roberts. "A sound and you are dead; your head blown to bits--blown to bits!" And again he laughed, but noiselessly. It was her life against his. Ah, she must warn him--she must cry out! But the cold barrel pressed against her temple, and the madman's voice hissed in her ear: "Blown to bits--blown to bits!" She couldn't die, she couldn't die! not like that--not blown to bits! Perhaps he would miss; Dale might escape. She couldn't die! He advanced a little nearer, keeping on the grass-edge and pushing her before him, still whispering to her death and its horrors, if she made a sound. It was too horrible; she could not bear it. Ah! he was measuring the distance. She must cry out! She opened her lips. Quick as thought, he pressed the barrel to her head. She could not, could not do it; and, with a groan, she sank, a senseless heap, on the ground at his feet. Suddenly a shot rang out, and a woman's cry. Dale started from his reverie, to see a woman a step or two from him; a woman, tottering, swaying, falling forward on her face, as he rushed to support her in his arms. There was a shout of men's voices, and, following on it, another report, and James Roberts fell beside Janet Delane, his head, as he had said, blown to bits; and two panting men, who had run all the way from Denborough, were raising Janet and looking if she were dead, and then laying her down again and turning to where Nellie Fane lay in lifeless quiet in Dale's arms. "A minute sooner and we should have been in time," said Arthur Angell to Dr. Spink, as the Doctor pushed Dale aside and knelt over Nellie. And Dale, relieved, ran at all his speed to where Janet lay and threw himself on his knees beside her. "My love, open your eyes," he cried. CHAPTER XXI. ="The Other Girl Did."= On the afternoon of the morrow, Philip Hume, who, summoned by a telegram from Dr. Spink, had come down to Denborough by the first train he could catch, put on his hat, and, lighting his pipe, took a turn up and down the road that ran by Littlehill. Since his coming he had been in the house, and the house had seemed almost to stifle him. He had a man's feeling of uselessness in the face of a sick room; he could do nothing to help Nellie Fane in her struggle for life; he only hindered the people who could do something. Nor did he succeed much better with those whose ailments were of the mind. Arthur Angell sat in one room, suspecting now that, whether Nellie lived or died, his dearest hopes were dead. Dale, in another room, strode unrestingly to and fro, waiting for Wilson to come back from the messages he kept sending him on, now upstairs to Nellie's door, now down the town to Ethel Roberts', now, and most often, to the Grange; and always Wilson, his forehead wet and his legs weary, came back and said: "Please, sir, there is no change." Once Nellie had been conscious, had asked "Is he safe?" and, receiving her answer, had closed her eyes again. Ethel Roberts was in no danger; the shock would pass. Of Janet there came no news, save that she was alone with her mother, and cried to be alone even from her mother. James Roberts, in his frenzy, had indeed wrought havoc, and Philip, as he walked and smoked, vehemently, though silently, cursed the ways of this world. Presently Mrs. Hodge came out in her bonnet. "Nellie is well looked after," she said. "I am going down to see how that poor little Roberts is." Philip did not offer to go with the good woman. He watched her heavy figure hastening down the hill, wondering that she seemed almost happy in her busy services of kindness. He could do nothing but fret, and smoke, and try to keep out of the way. A smart brougham drove up. It stopped by him, and Tora Smith jumped out. "How is she?" she cried. "Spink thinks she will pull through," answered Philip; "but of course she's in great danger still." "May I go to her?" asked Tora. "She sees no one," he replied in surprise. "Oh, I don't mean to see her. I mean to stay and help--to nurse her, you know." "It is very kind of you: she has her mother and a nurse." "Oh, won't you let me?" "It does not rest with me. But why should you?" "I--I once thought such horrid things of her. And--wasn't it splendid?" Philip looked kindly at her. "That will please her," he said, "and her friends." "Mayn't I help?" "I tell you what: poor Mrs. Roberts has no one but a hired nurse. Mrs. Hodge has run down for a minute, but of course she can't leave her daughter long." "You mean I ought to go to her?" "One can't even be kind in the way one likes best," said Philip. "Well, I will. But I should have loved to be with Miss Fane. I can't tell you how I feel about her. I think people who think evil things of other people ought to be _beaten_, Mr. Hume." "Doubtless, but justice flags. You can't expect me to beat you, Miss Smith." Tora smiled for a minute; then she wiped her eyes again, and asked gravely: "Are you never serious?" "Yes; I am serious now. Go to that poor woman; consider doing that in the light of a beating." "You'll let Miss Fane know I--I----" "Yes; and Dale. What a terrible facer for our celebrations, isn't it?" "Oh, yes. Harry has ridden over to see Lord Cransford about it. Mr. Delane wants the thing put off, if possible." "Can you put off a Prince? But I suppose he'll be only too glad not to be bored with it." "You know Janet is in a dreadful state? Poor girl! It must have been awful for her. The man had hold of her! Well, I shall go. Good-by. I shall run up here again to-morrow." The putting off of the Prince, in spite of Philip's doubt of its constitutional possibility, was managed: for the ceremony could hardly take place without Mr. Delane's presence, as he had been the inspiring force of the whole movement which had resulted in the Institute; and Mr. Delane felt it utterly out of the question for him to take any part in such festivities, in view of the dreadful occurrence in his grounds and of his daughter's serious condition. The doctors, indeed, told him that she had stood the shock remarkably well; they would not have been surprised to find her much worse. Her reason was unshaken, and, after the first night anyhow, the horror of the madman's grip and voice had left her. She did not, waking or sleeping, for she slept sometimes, dream that she was again in his hands, face to face with death; and Dr. Spink congratulated the Squire and Mrs. Delane on a good prospect of a total recovery. Yet Mrs. Delane and the Squire were not altogether comforted. For Janet lay from morning to evening on her bed, almost motionless and very quiet, whenever anyone was in the room. She asked once or twice after her fellow-sufferers, but, except for that, and answering questions, she never spoke but to say: "I think I could sleep if I were alone." Then Mrs. Delane would go away, trying to believe the excuse. There are not many of us who would feel warranted in being very hard on a man who had failed in such a trial as had befallen Janet Delane: in a woman, failure would seem little other than a necessary consequence of her sex. Death, sudden, violent, and horrible, searches the heart too closely for anyone to feel sure that his would be found sound to the core--not risk of death, for that most men will, on good cause and, even more cheerfully, in good company, meet and face. It is certainty that appalls; and it had been certain death that had awaited Janet's first cry. And yet she would not be comforted. She had stopped to think how certain it was; then she failed. The mistake was in stopping to think at all. The other girl--the girl he did not love, but who, surely, loved him with a love that was love indeed--had not stopped to think whether the bullet could or might or must hit her. She had not cared which; it had been enough for her that it might hit the man she loved, unless she stood between to stop it, and she had stood between. How could Janet excuse her cowardice by telling herself of the certainty of death, when, had she not been a coward, she would never have stayed to know whether death were certain or not? If she ever could have deluded herself like that, what the other girl did made it impossible. The other girl--so she always thought of Nellie--held up a mirror wherein Janet saw her own littleness. And yet he had loved her, not the other; her life belonged to him, the other's did not; she had proclaimed proudly, but an instant before, that she would die for him, and he had praised her for saying it. He would know now what her protestations were worth. He would be amused to think that it was not Janet Delane--the Janet who was always exhorting him to noble thoughts--who was proud in the pride of her race--not she who had dared death for him; but that other, so far beneath her, whom she had not deigned to think a rival. Ah, but why, why had she not called? Surely God would have given her one moment to be glad in, and that would have been enough. She sat up in bed, the coverings falling from her, and her black hair streaming over her white night-dress. Clasping her hands over her knees, she looked before her out of the window. She could see the tree where Dale had stood and the spot where she had fallen; she could see the fresh red gravel, put down to hide the stains, and the gardener's rake, flung down where he had used it. He must have gone to tea--gone to talk it all over with his wife and his friends, to wonder why Miss Janet had not called out, why she had left it to the other girl, why she had fainted, while the other had saved him. They would talk of "poor Miss Janet," and call the other a "rare plucked 'un"--she knew their way. Nobody would ever call her that--not her father again, who used to boast that Janet, like all his house, feared nothing but dishonor, and would make as good a soldier as the son he had longed for in vain. Her mother had come and called her "a brave girl." Why did people think there was any good in lies? She meant it kindly, but it was horrible to hear it. Lies are no use. Let them call her a coward, if they wanted to speak the truth. They all thought that. Dale thought it; Dale, who must be admiring that other girl's gallantry, and wondering why he had not loved her, instead of loving a girl who talked big, and, when danger came, fainted--and stood by to see him die. Of course he could not go on loving her after this. He would feel, everybody must feel, that he owed his life to the girl who had saved him, and must give it to her. Very likely he would come and pretend to want her still. He would think it right to do that, though it would really be kinder just to let her drop. She would understand. Nobody knew he had spoken to her; perhaps nobody need; it would not seem so bad to people who did not know she had promised to be his wife. Not that it mattered much what people thought. She knew what she was, and--she must let him go, she must let him go. And here, for the first time, she buried her head in her pillow and sobbed. Mrs. Delane came in. "Why, Janet dearest, you've nothing over you! You'll catch cold. What's the matter, darling? Are you frightened?" There it was! Everybody thought she was frightened now. "There is a message from Mr. Bannister, darling. He wants so much to see you, and the doctor thinks it would do you no harm. Do you think you could dress and see him?" "He wants to see me?" "Why, yes, dear. Of course, Jan. I know, my dear." "To leave her and come and see me?" "Miss Fane? Oh, she's going on very well. There's no reason he shouldn't come over here. You would like to see him, Jan?" "Tell him to go away--tell him to go to her--tell him to leave me alone." "But, Jan, dearest----" "Oh, mamma, mamma, do leave me alone!" Mrs. Delane went and told the messenger that Miss Delane might see no one for a day or two; she was still too agitated. Then she sought her husband and told him of their daughter's words. "She must be a little queer still," said the Squire, with anxiety. "Don't be worried, Mary. She's a strong girl, and she'll soon throw it off." But she could not throw it off--not that thought which had burned into her breast; and all night, by the light of the moon, she sat and looked at the tree and the fresh gravel, the spot where her honor and her love had called on her, and called in vain. CHAPTER XXII. =The Fitness of Things.= If anything could have consoled Market Denborough for the certain postponement and possible loss of the Duke of Mercia's visit, it would have been the cause of these calamities. Its citizens were not more hard-hearted than other people, and they bestowed much sympathy on Nellie Fane, who, out of the competitors, was easily elected the heroine of the incident; but neither were they more impervious to the charms of excitement, of gossip, and of notoriety. The reporters and the artists who had been told off to describe and depict the scene of the royal visit did not abandon their journey, but substituted sketches of the fatal spot, of the Grange, of Littlehill, and of the actors in the tragedy; while interviews with the Mayor, and anybody else who knew, or knew someone who knew about the circumstances, or professed to do either, amply supplied the place which the pageant and the speeches had been destined to fill. And if the occurrence excited such interest in the great London papers, the broadsheets and columns of the local journals were a sight to behold. The circulation of the _Standard_ went up by more than a hundred; while the _Chronicle_ announced, it must be admitted to a somewhat skeptical world, that its weekly issue had exhausted three editions, and could no longer be obtained at the booksellers' or the office. The assertion, however, being untested, passed, and everyone allowed that young Mingley's detailed account of poor Roberts' last words to Dale Bannister, before he fired, were perfect in verisimilitude, which, under the regrettable circumstance of Mingley's absence, and of no such words having been uttered, was all that could be expected. Mingley was puffed up, demanded a rise of salary, got it, and married Polly Shipwright, the young lady at the "Delane Arms." So the ill wind blew Mingley good. Yet the editor of the _Chronicle_ was not satisfied, and as a further result of Mingley's activity, he inserted an article the following week, in which he referred, with some parade of mystery, to the romantic character of the affair. It was not only in fiction, he remarked, that love had opportunities for displaying itself in heroism, nor, it was to be earnestly hoped, only in the brains of imaginative writers that affection and gratitude found themselves working together toward a joyful consummation. Denborough knew and admired its gifted fellow-townsman, and Denborough had been a witness of the grace and charm of the young lady who had shed such luster on her sex. Accordingly, Denborough waited the result with some confidence. Into this personal side of the matter the _Standard_ did not try to follow its rival. Mr. Delane controlled the _Standard_, and he forbade any such attempt, on grounds of careful generality. But the article in the _Chronicle_ was quite enough; it expressed what everyone had been thinking, and very soon the whole town was expecting to hear, simultaneously, that Nellie was out of danger, and that she had given her hand to Dale Bannister. The theory was so strongly and unhesitatingly accepted that the two or three who, mainly out of a love of paradox, put their heads on one side and asked how Miss Delane came to be out in the garden with Dale Bannister, were pooh-poohed and told that they merely showed their ignorance of the usages of society; whereupon they went home and grumbled to their wives, but were heard no more in public places. Dale Bannister flung the _Chronicle_ down on the table with a muttered oath, asking the eternally-asked, never-to-be-answered question, why people could not mind their own business--an unjust query in this case, for it is a reporter's business to mind other people's business. He had just come down from his first interview with Nellie. She was mending rapidly, and was now conscious, although any reference to the events of the fatal night was sternly forbidden; he was not even allowed to thank the friend who, happily, had only risked, not lost, her life for him. He had whispered his joy at finding her doing well, and she had pressed his hand in answer; more than that vigilant attendants prevented. Then he had come downstairs, picked up the _Chronicle_ in the hall, read the article, and gone into the smoking room, where he had found Arthur Angell sitting by the fire, his hands deep in his pockets and his shoulders up to his ears, a picture of woe. "What infernal nonsense!" said Dale, with a vexed laugh. "Do you see how this fellow disposes of us, Arthur?" "Yes, I saw," said Arthur gloomily. "I suppose they're bound to say that. The public loves romance." "I think it's very natural they should say it. Why did she follow you? Why did she risk her life? Why did she ask after you the first moment she was conscious?" "No one but me was being murdered," suggested Dale, with a rather uneasy smile. "We left her here. Why did she go out at all? But it's too plain. I saw it before I had been here a day." "Saw what, man?" asked Dale, passing by Arthur's questionable assertion. "Why, that Nellie--you know. I don't know what you feel, but I know what she feels. It's rough on me having me down----" "I never thought of such a thing," said Dale quickly. "Oh, I suppose not; though how you didn't---- I say, now, before you came to Denborough, didn't you?" "I--I don't think so. We were great friends." Arthur shook his head, and Dale poked the little bit of fire in an impatient way. "How damned crooked things go!" he said. Arthur rose and said in a decided tone: "Well, I'm out of it. She saved your life, and she's in love with you. It seems to me your duty's pretty plain. You must drop your other fancy." "My other fancy?" exclaimed Dale in horror. Lived there a man who could call his love for Janet a "fancy"? "You'd break her heart," said Arthur, who thought of no one but his lady-love in his unselfish devotion. It crossed Dale's mind to say that the situation seemed to involve the breaking of one heart at least, if Arthur were right; but he thought he had no right to speak of Janet's feelings, well as he knew them. He threw the poker down with a clang. "Take care--you'll disturb her." This annoyed Dale. "My good fellow," he remarked, "we're not all, except you, entirely indifferent whether she lives or dies. I might throw pokers about all day--and I feel inclined to--without her hearing me in the blue room." "Oh, I beg pardon," said Arthur, turning to the window and looking out. He saw a stout man coming up the hill. It was the Mayor of Denborough, and he was evidently making for Littlehill. When he was ushered into the smoking room, he explained that he had come to ask after Miss Fane's progress. "The town, Mr. Bannister, sir," he said, "is takin' a great interest in the young lady." "I am glad to say she has, we think, turned the corner," said Dale. "That's happy news for all--and you first of all, sir." The Mayor might merely have meant that Dale's feelings would be most acute, as Nellie had received her wound in his service; but there was a disconcerting twinkle in the Mayor's eye. "Mrs. Roberts," the Mayor continued, "is doin' first rate. After all, it's a riddance for her, sir. Have you any news from the Grange?" "I hear there is no change in Miss Delane. She still suffers from the shock." "Poor young lady! I hear the Captain's back at the Warren, sir." "What?" "Captain Ripley, sir. Back at home." "Oh!" The Mayor was bursting with suppressed gossip on this point also, but the atmosphere was most repressive. He looked round in despair for another opening, and his eye fell on Arthur Angell. "Seen the _Chronicle_, sir?" he asked. "That Mingley's a sharp young chap. Still I don't 'old--hold with all that talk about people. Did you say you'd seen it, sir?" "Yes, I've seen it. It's mostly lies." "He, he!" chuckled the Mayor. "You're right, sir." A long pause ensued before the Mayor very reluctantly took his hat. "I hope we shall see Miss Fane about soon, sir?" he said. "Oh, I hope so. I think so, if nothing goes wrong." "She must be proud and happy, that young lady, sir. As I said to my daughters, says I: 'Now, girls, which of you is goin' to save your young man's life?' And my wife, Mrs. Hedger, sir, she put in: 'None of you, I'll be bound, if you don't----'" The anecdote was lost, for Dale interrupted: "Let me see you as far as the gate," and pushed the Mayor's walking-stick into his hand. Having got rid of the Mayor, Dale did not hasten to return to Arthur Angell. At this moment, exasperated as he was, everything about his friend annoyed him--his devotion, his unselfishness, his readiness to accept defeat himself, his indiscreet zeal on behalf of his mistress. His despair for himself, and his exhortation to Dale, joined in manifesting that he neither possessed himself nor could understand in another what a real passion was. If he did or could, he would never have used that word "fancy." How could people speak of friendship or gratitude, or both together, as if they were, or were in themselves likely to lead to, love? You did not love a woman because you esteemed her. If you loved her, you might esteem her--or you might not; anyhow, you worshiped her. Yet these peddling Denborough folk were mapping out his course for him. And Arthur Angell croaked about broken hearts. Suddenly a happy thought struck him, a thought which went far to restore his equanimity. These people, even that excellent Arthur, spoke in ignorance. At the most, they--those who knew anything--supposed that he had a "fancy" for Janet. They had no idea that his love had been offered and accepted, that he was plighted to her by all the bonds of honor and fidelity. This exacting gratitude they harped upon might demand a change of nascent inclinations; it would not require, nor even justify, broken promises, and the flinging back of what a man had asked for and received. Dale's step grew more elastic and his face brighter as he realized that, in reality, on a sane view of the position, duty and pleasure went hand in hand, both pointing to the desired goal, uniting to free him from any such self-sacrifice as Arthur Angell had indicated. If Arthur were right about Nellie's feelings, and if he had been a free man, he might have felt some obligation on him, or at least have chosen, to make the child happy, but as it was---- "I must be just before I'm generous," he said to himself, and added, with a shamefaced laugh, "and I happen to like justice best." At this moment a servant in the Grange livery rode up, touching his hat, and handed him a note. It was from Janet, though her writing was so tremulous as to be scarcely recognizable. He tore it open and read: You can never wish to see me again, but come once more. It was not quite as bad as it seemed. J. In bewilderment he turned to the man. "Miss Delane sent this?" "Yes, sir." "Say I'll come over to the Grange to-morrow morning." The man rode off, and Dale stood, fingering and staring at his note. "What does the dear girl mean?" he asked. "What wasn't so bad? Why don't I wish to see her again? Has that ruffian driven her out of her senses?" When Dr. Spink came that evening, Dale seized the opportunity of sounding him. The Doctor laughed at the idea of any serious mental derangement. "Miss Delane's very much upset, of course, very much, but her mind is as right as yours or mine." "She's got no delusions?" "Oh, dear, no. She's nervous and over-strained, that's all. She'll be all right in a few days." "Then," said Dale to himself, as the Doctor bustled off, "all I can say is that I don't understand women." CHAPTER XXIII. =A Morbid Scruple.= Mrs. Delane had ceased to struggle against the inevitable, and she hailed her daughter's desire to see Dale Bannister as an encouraging sign of a return to a normal state of mind. Strange as Janet's demeanor had been since that fearful evening, there could not be anything seriously wrong with her when her wishes and impulses ran in so natural a channel. Mrs. Delane received Dale with an approach to enthusiasm, and sent him up to the little boudoir where Janet was with an affectionate haste which in itself almost amounted to a recognition of his position. "You must be gentle with her, please, Mr. Bannister," she said. "She wanted so much to see for herself that you were really alive that we could not refuse to allow her, but the Doctor is most strict in ordering that she should not be excited." Dale promised to be careful, and went upstairs without a word about the strange note he had received; that was a matter between Janet and himself. Janet was sitting, propped up with cushions, on a low chair, and she waved Dale to a seat near her. When, before sitting down, he came to her and kissed her, she did not repel his caress, but received it silently, again motioning him to the chair. Dale knelt down on the floor beside her. "How pale you are, poor dear!" he said. "And why do you write me such dreadful things?" "I wanted," she began in a low voice, "to tell you, Dale, that I did try, that I really did try, to call out. I did not forsake you without trying." "What do you mean, darling? How have you forsaken me?" "When he caught hold of me, there was plenty of time to call out. I might have warned you--I might have warned you. I might have done what she did. But I couldn't. I tried, but I couldn't. I was afraid. He said he would blow my head to bits. I was afraid, and I left her to save you." "My dearest girl," he said, taking her hand, "you did the only thing. If you had cried out, he would have murdered you first and me afterward; all the chambers of the revolver were loaded. I would have died a thousand times sooner than have one of your dear hairs roughened; but, as it was, your death wouldn't have saved me." She had looked at him for a moment as if with sudden hope, but, as he finished, she shook her head and said: "I didn't think anything about that. I was just afraid, and I should have let you be killed." "My sweet, who ever expected you to condemn yourself to certain death on the chance of saving me? It would be monstrous!" "She did it," said Janet in low tones. Dale paused for a minute. "She was not in his clutches," he said. "He might have missed her." "Ah, no, no!" she broke out suddenly. "You run down what she did to spare me! That's worst of all." "Why, Jan, I don't say a word against her; but there was a difference." "She thought of no difference. She only thought of you. I thought of my own life." "Thank God if you did, dearest!" "I'm glad you came. I wanted to tell you I had tried." "I need nothing to make me love you more, my beauty and delight," he said, pressing her to him. She looked at him with a sort of amazement, making a faint effort to push him away. "It was so lucky," he went on, "that I didn't see you, or I should have rushed at him, and he would most likely have killed you. As it was----" He paused, for it seemed impossible to speak of poor Nellie's hurt as a happy outcome. "Come," he resumed, "let's think no more about it. The wretched man is dead and Nellie Fane is getting better, and we--why, we, Jan, have one another." With sudden impatience she rose, unlacing his arms from about her. "Who is she?" she cried. "Who is she? Why should she give her life for you? I loved you, and I was afraid. She wasn't afraid." Dale thought that he began to understand a little better. Jealousy was a feeling he had read about, and seen, and written about. If Jan were jealous, he could undertake to reassure her. "She's a very old and good friend of mine," he said, "and it was just like her brave, unselfish way to----" "What had you done to make her love you so?" "My sweetest Jan, surely you can't think I----" "Oh, no, no, no! I don't mean that. I'm not so mean as that." Dale wondered whether this passionate disclaimer of jealousy did not come in part from self-delusion, though he saw that Janet made it in all genuineness. "You have made her love you--oh, of course you have! Why did she follow you? why did she come between you and the shot? I loved you, too, Dale. Ah! how I loved--how I thought I loved you! But her love was greater than mine." "Come, Jan, come; you exaggerate. You must be calm, dearest. Nellie and I are very fond of one another, but----" "You know she loves you--you know she loves you to death." "My darling, I don't know anything of the sort. But supposing she did--well, I am very sorry, very deeply grieved if she is unhappy; but I don't love her--or any other woman in the world but you, Jan. If she had saved my life a thousand times, it would make no difference. You, Jan, you are the breath of my life and the pulse of my blood." He spoke with passion, for he was roused to combat this strange idea that threatened all his joy. As she stood before him, in her fairness and distress, he forgot his searchings of heart, his tenderness for Nellie, everything, except that she, and she alone, was the woman to be his, and neither another nor she herself should prevent it. Looking at him, she read this, or some of it, in his eyes, for she shrank back from him, and, clasping her hands, moaned: "Don't, don't! You must go to her--you belong to her. She saved you, not I. You are hers, not mine." "Jan, this is madness! She is nothing to me; you are all the world." "You must despise me," she said in a wondering way, "and yet you say that!" "If I did despise you, still it would be true. But I worship you." "I must not! I must not! You must go to her. She saved you. Leave me, Dale, and go back. You must not come again." He burst out in wrath: "Now, by God, I will not leave you or let you go! Mine you are, and mine you shall be!" and he seized her by the wrist. She gave a startled cry that recalled him to gentleness. "Did I frighten you, my beauty? But it is so, and it must be. It is sweet of you to offer--to make much of what she did, and little of yourself. I love you more for it. But we have done with that now. Come to me, Jan." "I can't! I can't! She would always be between us; I should always see her between us. O Dale, how can you leave her?" "I have never loved her. I have never promised her," he replied sternly. "It is all a mere delusion. A man's love is not to be turned by folly like this." She answered nothing, and sank back in her chair again. "If it's jealousy," he went on, "it is unworthy of you, and an insult to me. And if it's not jealousy, it's mere madness." "Can't you understand?" she murmured. "How can I take what is hers?" "I can take what is mine, and I will. You gave yourself to me, and I will not let you go." Still she said nothing, and he tried gentleness once more. "Come, Jan, sweetest, you have made your offering--your sweet, Quixotic self-sacrifice--and it is not accepted! Say that's my want of moral altitude, if you like. So be it. I won't sacrifice myself." "It's for her to take, not for you. I offer it to her, not to you." "But I don't offer it to her. Would she care for such an offer? She may love me or not--I don't know; but if she does, she will not take my hand without my heart." "You must love her. If you could love me, how much more must you love her?" "You are mad!" he answered, almost roughly, "mad to say such a thing! I know you love me, and I will not listen to it. Do you hear? I shall come back and see you again, and I will not listen to this." She heard his imperious words with no sign but a little shiver. "There," he went on, "you are still ill. I'll come back." "No use," she murmured. "I can't, Dale." "But you will, and you shall!" he cried. "You shall see----" The door opened, and the nurse came in to forbid his further lingering. With a distant good-by, he left Janet motionless and pale, and, hastening downstairs, went to the Squire's room. "I have come," he said abruptly, "to ask your sanction to my engagement with your daughter." The Squire laid down his book. "I'm not much surprised," he said, smiling. "What does Jan say?" Dale launched out into a history of the sweet things Janet had said, and of the strange, wild things she said now. The Squire heard of the latter with raised eyebrows. "Very odd," he commented. "But it seems, my dear fellow, that, for good reasons or bad, at present she says No." "She said Yes; she can't say No now," declared Dale. "Do you consent, Mr. Delane?" "If she does, my dear fellow. But I can't help you in this matter." "I want no help. She is not in her senses now. I shall make an end of this folly. I will not have it." He went out as abruptly as he had rushed in, leaving the Squire in some perplexity. "A man of decision," he commented; "and, altogether, a couple of rather volcanic young people. They must settle it between themselves." CHAPTER XXIV. =The Heroine of the Incident.= After Dale's visit to the Grange a few days elapsed in a quiet that was far from peaceful. Dale had gone to the Grange the next day, and the day after that: the sight of Janet had been denied to him. He was told that his visit had left her very agitated and upset, and the doctor was peremptory in forbidding any repetition of it. He had sent her a note, and she had returned a verbal message by her mother that she did not feel equal to writing. Was it possible that she meant to abide by her insane resolve to break off their engagement? At Littlehill things were hardly more happy. Nellie was recovering, but very slowly, and she also remained invisible. Arthur Angell manifested all the symptoms of resentment and disappointed love, and only Philip Hume's usual placid cheerfulness redeemed the house from an atmosphere of intolerable depression. Philip had discovered a fund of amusement in the study of Mrs. Hodge. As soon as that good lady's first apprehensions were soothed, she was seized with an immense and exuberant pride in her daughter, which found expression both in her words and her bearing. Though ignorant of the historical precedent, she assumed the demeanor of a mother of the Gracchi, and pointed out to all who would listen to her--and Philip never thought of refusing her this kindness--small incidents and traits of character which had marked out Nellie from her very cradle as one of heroic mold and dauntless courage. "I should be astonished, if I did not know her mother," said Philip politely. "Ah, you must be chaffing, of course. But it's not me she takes it from. My heart goes pit-a-pat at a mouse." "Oh, then it's Mr. Hodge." "You couldn't," said Mrs. Hodge with emphasis, "catch Hodge at a loss. He was ready for anything. He'd have been proud to see Nellie to-day. Look what the papers are saying of her!" "I'm sure she deserves it all." "Aye, that she does: she deserves all Dale Bannister can do for her." Philip scented danger in this topic, and changed the subject. "When are we to see her?" he asked. "In a day or two, I expect. She's much better this morning. She's asked to see the papers, and I'm going to take her the _Chronicle_." "How delightful to read of one's heroic actions! I have never enjoyed the sensation." "Nor ever will, young man, if you spend all your time loafing," said Mrs. Hodge incisively. "Well, there must be some ordinary people," protested Philip. "The _rôle_ is unappreciated, so it's the more creditable in me to stick to it." "A parcel of nonsense! Where's that paper?" She took it, went upstairs, and gave it to Nellie. "There, read that. See what they say about you, my dearie. I'm going to see little Roberts, and I shall be back in an hour. You've got the bell by you, and the nurse'll hear you." Nellie, left alone, began to read the _Chronicle_. She read the whole account from beginning to end, the article in praise of her, and, in the later edition, the editor's romantic forecast. Then she put the papers aside, exclaiming: "Oh, if it could be true!" and lay back with closed eyes. A few days later she made her first appearance in the drawing room, where she held a little court. Her mother hung over all, anticipating far more wants than the patient was likely to feel, and by constant anxious questions almost producing the fatigue she wished to guard against. Tora Smith was there, in a state of gleeful adoration; and Arthur Angell, his sorrows temporarily laid aside, ready with a mock heroic ode; and Philip Hume, new come from Mrs. Roberts' with good news and a high eulogy on Dr. Spink's most marked and assiduous attention. "I really believe," he said, with a laugh, "that Mrs. Roberts will have another chance of being a Denborough doctor's wife, if she likes." "That would be an ideal ending," said Tora. "Therefore it will not happen," Arthur remarked. "Poets are allowed to be pessimistic," rejoined Tora. "But you're wrong, Mr. Angell. Ideal things do happen." "To Sir Harry Fulmer, for instance," put in Philip. "Nonsense, Mr. Hume! I wasn't thinking of that. Don't you agree with me, Nellie?" "Nellie has made an ideal thing happen," said Philip, and Nellie blushed. "Thanks, Phil," said Dale. "It's complimentary to describe the prolongation of my poor existence in that way." "The deed is good, however unworthy the object, Dale." Dale took Nellie's hand and patted it gently. "Good child," he said, and Nellie flushed again with an almost strange intensity of embarrassment. Tora rose abruptly, and, in spite of opposition, insisted on departure. Dale escorted her to her carriage. "I have asked Nellie to come and stay with me," said she, "as soon as she is well enough to move." "She will like that. I hope she is going?" "She said," Tora went on, speaking with emphasis, "that she would ask you." Dale made a little gesture of protest, partly against Nellie's reported saying, more against the reporter's inquiring gaze. He began to be astonished at the interest he was so unfortunate as to inspire in his affairs. "I shall advise her to go," he said. "I think a change will be good for her." "I incline to think so too," said Tora with sudden coldness; "but I thought you might not like to part with her." "Mount Pleasant is not inaccessible," responded Dale with equal coldness. Returning to the house, he found Nellie gone, the company dispersed, and Mrs. Hodge in his smoking room, apparently expecting him. "Well, mother," he said,--he had used to call her "mother" when he was always running in and out of her house in London,--"Nellie looks quite blooming." "She's mending nicely." "I hear she's to go to the Smiths'." "Well, I thought of taking her to Brighton." "Oh, it will be more amusing at the Smiths'; unless, of course, she needs the sea." "She thought, or I thought rather, that you might like to come with us for a while?" said Mrs. Hodge in a tentative tone. "I can't get away," answered Dale decisively. Nothing would have taken him away from the Grange gates. Mrs. Hodge took her courage in both hands. "Look here, Dale," she said. "You know I'm not one of those women that lay hold of a man if he as much as looks at a girl, and asks him what he means by it. That's not my way. Hodge used to say girls could take care of themselves mostly--p'r'aps he wasn't far out. But Nellie's not that sort, and her father's gone, good man, and----" and the excellent lady came to a full stop. Dale loved this honest old woman for long acquaintance' sake and much kindness. He laid his hand on her shoulder and said: "It's a sad world, mother." "The child's fond of you, Dale. She's shown that." "I'm a crossed lover too, mother. We can only weep together." "What, you mean that Grange girl?" asked Mrs. Hodge, her love for her own making her tone tart. "Yes, that Grange girl," answered Dale, with a rueful smile. "And just at present that Grange girl won't have anything to say to me." Mrs. Hodge pressed his hand and whispered: "Don't you tell Nellie what I say, but let her go, dearie, and take my girl. She's sick for you, Dale, though she'd kill me if she heard me say it." "Aye, but I'm sick for the Grange girl, mother." "You don't take it ill of me, Dale? But there! a kind word from you is more than the doctors to her. She'd say nothing of what she's done, and I say nothing, but she's a good girl, and a pretty girl." "That she is, and she deserves a better man than I am." "Well, there it is! Talking mends no holes," said Mrs. Hodge, with a heavy sigh. Then she added, in an outburst of impatience: "Why did you ever come to this miserable little place?" Dale raised inquiring hands to heaven and shrugged his shoulders. "What they call fate, mother," said he. "Come, cheer up. She'll get over this little idea. She'll be all right." "Please God," said Mrs. Hodge. "It's time for her beef-tea." The phrase Please God is as a rule expressive of the speaker's desire, but not of his expectation. So it was with Mrs. Hodge, but Dale could not bring himself to take so gloomy a view. A man's own passion assumes a most imposing appearance of permanence, but he finds it easy to look with incredulity on a like assumption in the feelings of others. He had keen sympathy for Nellie in the moment or the period of pain which seemed to lie before her, but experience told him that all probabilities were in favor of her escaping from it at no distant time. Love like his for Janet--and, till this unhappy day, he would have added, Janet's for him--was exceptional; change, recovery, oblivion--these were the rule, the happy rule whose operation smoothed love's rough ways. Nevertheless, be this wide philosophical view as just as it might, the present position came nigh to being intolerable, and it was hard to blame him if he looked forward to Nellie's departure with relief. Her presence accused him of cruelty, for it seems cruel to refuse what would give happiness, and it increased every day it continued the misunderstanding which already existed as to their future relations. Even now, in spite of Janet's protest, Dale was convinced he had detected an undercurrent of jealousy, flowing in to re-enforce the stream of that higher, but stranger and wilder, feeling which had made her drive him away. If she heard that Nellie remained at his house, and what conclusion was universally drawn from the fact, he was afraid that, when restored health carried away the morbid idea which was now most prominent, the jealousy might remain, and, if it did, Janet's proud nature was ground on which it would bear fruit bitter for him to taste. He could not and did not for a moment blame Mrs. Hodge for her action. It was the natural outcome of her love, and she had performed her difficult task, as it seemed to him, with a perfect observance of all the essential marks of good breeding, however homely her method had been. But she could not understand even his love for Janet, much less another feeling in him, which aided to make her intercession vain. For he did not deny now that, besides the joy he had in Janet as a woman merely, there was also the satisfaction he derived from the fact that she was Miss Delane of Dirkham Grange. Fools and would-be cynics might dismiss this as snobbery; but Dale told himself that he was right and wise in clinging to the place in this new world which his sojourn at Denborough had opened to him, and which a marriage with Janet would secure for him in perpetuity. Setting aside altogether questions of sentiment, he felt it useless not to recognize that, if he married Nellie Fane, he would drift back into his old world, the gates would close again, and the fresh realms of life and experience, which had delighted his taste and stimulated his genius, would be his to wander in no more. He had grown to love this world, this old world so new to him; and he loved Janet not least because all about her, her face, her speech, her motions, her every air, were redolent to him of its assured distinction and unboastful pride. Nay, even these fantastic scruples of hers were but a distortion of a noble instinct born in her blood, and witnessed to a nature and qualities that he could look for only in the shade of some such place as Dirkham Grange. He felt as if he too belonged to her race, and had been all his life an exile from his native land, whither at last a happy chance had led back his wandering feet. What would dear old Mother Hodge understand of all that? What even would Nellie herself, for all her ready sympathies? It was a feeling that, not vulgar in itself, seemed to become vulgar in the telling; and, after all, he had no need of other justification than his love and his pledged word. He looked out of the window and saw Arthur Angell walking moodily up and down. Putting on his hat, he joined him, passing his arm through his. Arthur turned to him with a petulant look. "A lot of miserables we are, old boy," said Dale, pressing the arm he held. "I am often tempted to regret, Arthur, that the state has not charged itself with the control of marriages. It would relieve us all of a large amount of trouble, and I really don't see that it would hurt anyone except novelists. I am feeling badly in need of a benevolent despotism." "I'm going back to town," Arthur announced abruptly. "I'm very sorry. But I don't know that it's any use asking you to stay. Nellie goes to the Smiths' in a day or two----" "It makes no difference to me where she goes," interrupted the unhappy young man. "I--I mean----" "I know what you mean." Philip came up, and glanced keenly at Arthur. Then he smiled good-humoredly and said: "Shall I prophesy unto you?" "No," said Arthur. "I know you're going to say it'll be all the same six months hence." "I was. I can't deny it, Arthur. You forget that I have seen you like this many times before. We may have a tragedy or we may not, Arthur, but I shall take leave to eliminate you from the cast." "I'm going to pack," said Arthur angrily, and he went into the house. "When there are real troubles about," said Philip, "it is well to clear the ground. There's not much the matter with him." "I think he feels it rather, you know." "Oh, yes; it's worth a set of verses." "I'm glad to hear it's no worse; for, to tell you the truth, Phil, there's enough to worry about without Arthur. I'm glad our party is breaking up." "Why?" "We know too much about one another to live together comfortably." "True. Shall I go?" "No," said Dale, with a smile; "you may stay and keep watch over the razors." CHAPTER XXV. =The Scene of the Outrage.= The excitement and bustle which attended and followed on the attempted murder, the suicide, the inquest, the illnesses, and the true and false reports concerning each and all of these incidents, had hardly subsided before the Mayor of Market Denborough, with the perseverance that distinguished him, began once more to give his attention to the royal visit. For reasons which will be apparent to all who study the manner in which one man becomes a knight while another remains unhonored, the Mayor was particularly anxious that the Institute should not lose the _éclat_ which the Duke of Mercia had promised to bestow on its opening, and that its opening should take place during his mayoralty. The finger of fame pointed at Mr. Maggs the horse-dealer as Mr. Hedger's successor, and the idea of the waters of the fountain of honor flowing on to the head of Maggs, instead of on to his own, spurred the Mayor to keen exertion. He had interviews with the Squire, he wrote to the Lord Lieutenant, he promoted a petition from the burgesses, and he carried a resolution in the Town Council. Mr. Delane was prevailed upon to use his influence with the Lord Lieutenant; the Lord Lieutenant could not, in view of Mr. Delane's urgent appeal, refuse to lay the question before his Royal Highness; and his Royal Highness was graciously pleased to say that he could not deny himself the pleasure of obliging Lord Cransford, knowing not that he was in fact and in truth, if it may be spoken without _lèse-majesté_, merely an instrument in the clever fingers of a gentleman who, when the Prince was writing his reply, was rolling pills in the parlor behind his shop in the town of Market Denborough. Now, Colonel Smith had never concealed his opinion that, however much evil that unhappy man James Roberts had to answer for, yet he deserved a scrap of grateful memory, inasmuch as he had by his action averted the calamity that was threatening the town, and, furthermore, robbed Dale Bannister of the chance of prostituting his genius. Accordingly, when it was announced in the _Standard_, three or four weeks after James Roberts had shot at Dale Bannister and wounded Nellie Fane, that the Duke had given a conditional promise to pay his deferred visit in June, the Colonel laid down the paper and said to the rest of the breakfast party at Mount Pleasant--and the Colonel must bear the responsibility for the terms he thought proper to employ: "That old fool Cransford has nobbled the whippersnapper again! We're to have him after all! Good Lord!" Tora at once appreciated his meaning. "Papa means the Prince is coming, Nellie!" cried she. "How splendid!" "Bannister will have a chance of blacking his boots now," pursued the Colonel, trying to impose a malignant sneer on his obstinately kindly countenance. "You are not to say such things," said Nellie emphatically. "You know you don't mean them." "Not mean them?" exclaimed the Colonel. "No. You're not horrid, and it's no use trying to make yourself horrid. Is it, Tora?" Tora's thoughts were far away. "In June," she said meditatively. "I hope it won't be the first week, or we shall have to come back early." The Colonel's face expressed concentrated scorn. "You would cut short your honeymoon in order to come back?" "Of course, dear. I wouldn't miss it. Oh, and, Nellie, I shall go in next after Lady Cransford!" This was too much for the Colonel; he said nothing himself, but his joy was great when Sir Harry pointed out that Mrs. Hedger would have official precedence over the new Lady Fulmer. The Colonel chuckled, and Tora pretended that she had remembered about Mrs. Hedger all the time. "Johnstone will probably take you in, Tora," said Sir Harry, who had lately found himself able to treat Tora with less fearful respect. "I don't care. I shall talk to the Prince. Now, Nellie, you must come down for it." Nellie would not give any promise, and Tora forbore to press her, for she confessed to herself and to Sir Harry that she did not quite understand the position of affairs. Janet Delane remained in strict seclusion; doctor's orders were alleged, but Tora was inclined to be skeptical, for she had seen Janet out driving, and reported that she looked strong and well. Dale was at Littlehill, and he was there alone, Philip having gone back to London with Arthur Angell. He often came over to Mount Pleasant, to see Nellie, no doubt; and when he came, he was most attentive and kind to her. Yet he resolutely refused to stay in the house, always returning in an hour or two to his solitary life at Littlehill. He seemed never to see Janet, and to know not much more about her than the rest of the world did. He never referred to her unquestioned, and when he spoke of Nellie's share in the scene in the garden, he appeared pointedly to avoid discussing Janet's. Tora concluded that there was some break in his relations with Janet, and, led on by her sympathies, had small difficulty in persuading herself that he was by degrees being induced by affection and gratitude to feel toward Nellie as everybody expected and wished him to feel. Only, if so, it was hard to see why Nellie's pleasure in his visits seemed mingled with a nervousness which the increased brightness of her prospects did not allay. Evidently she also was puzzled by Janet's conduct; and it was equally clear that she did not yet feel confident that Dale had renounced his fancy for Janet and given his heart to her. In after-days Dale was wont to declare that the fortnight he passed alone at Littlehill was the most miserable in his life, and people given to improving the occasion would then tell him that he had no experience of what real misery was. Yet he was very miserable. He was sore to the heart at Janet's treatment of him; she would neither see him, nor, till he absolutely insisted, write to him, and then she sent three words: "It's no use." In face of this incredible delusion of hers he felt himself helpless; and the Squire, with all the good will in the world to him, could only shrug his shoulders and say that Jan was a strange girl; while Mrs. Delane, knowing nothing of the cause of her daughter's refusal to see Dale, had once again begun to revive her old hopes, and allowed herself to hint at them to her favorite Gerard Ripley. Of course this latter fact was not known to Dale, but he was aware that Captain Ripley had called two or three times at the Grange, and had seen Janet once. The "doctor's orders" applied, it seemed, to him alone; and his bitterness of heart increased, mingling with growing impatience and resentment. Nellie could never have acted like this: she was too kind and gentle; love was real in her, a mastering power, and not itself the plaything of fantastic scruples--unless a worse thing were true, unless the scruples themselves were the screen of some unlooked-for and sudden infidelity of heart. The thought was treason, but he could not stifle it. Yet, even while it possessed him, while he told himself that he had now full right to transfer his allegiance, that no one could blame him, that every motive urged him, all the while in his inmost mind he never lost the knowledge that it was Janet he wanted; and when he came to see Nellie, he was unable, even if he had been willing--and he told himself he was--to say anything but words of friendship and thanks, unable to frame a sentence distantly approaching the phrases of love he knew she longed to hear. Matters were in this very unsatisfactory condition when Philip Hume returned to Littlehill, and straightway became the unwilling recipient of Dale's troubled confidences. A fortnight's solitude had been too much for Dale, and he poured out his perplexities, saying, with an apologetic laugh: "I'm bound to tell someone. I believe, if you hadn't come, I should have made a clean breast of it to the Mayor." "You might do worse. The Mayor is a man of sagacity. This young woman seems very unreasonable." "What young woman?" "Why, Miss Delane." "Well, Phil, you must allow for the delicacy of her----" "You called it infernal nonsense yourself just now." "I wish, Phil, you'd call at the Grange and see her, and tell me what you think about her." "I can't do any good, but I'll go, if you like." Accordingly he went, and did, as he expected, no good at all. Janet had resumed her ordinary manner, with an additional touch or two of vivacity and loquaciousness, which betrayed the uneasiness they were meant to hide. The only subjects she discussed were the last new novel and Tora Smith's wedding, and Philip took his leave, entirely unenlightened. The Squire offered to walk part of the way with him and they set out together. The Squire stopped at the scene of the disaster. Pointing with his toe to a spot by the side of the drive: "That's where that mad wretch stood, holding my poor girl," he said. Philip nodded. "And where was Dale?" he asked, for it was his first visit to the spot. The Squire was delighted to be _cicerone_. "He was standing with his back to that tree yonder, about fifteen yards off, looking due north, toward the house, thinking of a poem or some nonsense, I suppose." "I shouldn't wonder." "Well, then," pursued the Squire, "you see he was almost in a straight line with Roberts--Roberts' barrel must have pointed straight toward Denborough church spire. After the first shot Bannister sprang forward--the gravel was soft, and we saw every footprint--to where Miss Fane fell, and----" "Where did she fall?" The Squire's toe indicated a spot about three yards from the tree. "She was running up from behind Bannister, you know, and had just got across the line of fire when the bullet caught her. She fell forward on her face,--she was bound to, Spink said, from the way she was hit,--and Bannister just got his arm under her, to break her fall." "She was running toward him, I suppose, to warn him?" "To get between him and Roberts, like the noble girl she is, no doubt; but she seemed to have turned round on hearing the shot, because, to judge from the way she was lying, she was, at the moment she fell, heading almost south." "What, toward the house?" "Yes, in a slanting line, from the tree toward the house." "That's away from Bannister?" "Yes, and from Roberts too. You see, she must have turned. It was a fine thing. Well, I must get back; I'm busy with all the preparations for this affair. Good-day, Mr. Hume. Very kind of you to come and see us." "I'm so glad to find Miss Delane better." "Yes, she's better, thanks, but not herself yet, by any means. Good-day." Philip went home, lit a pipe, and drew a neat little plan of the scene which had just been so carefully described to him. By the time the drawing was made the pipe was finished, and he was obliged to light another, which he consumed while he sat gazing at his handiwork. He was still pondering over it when Dale came in, and flung himself into an armchair with a restless sigh. "What's up now?" asked Philip. "Only that I'm the most miserable dog alive. I tell you what, Phil, I'm going to settle this affair one way or the other. I won't be played with any more. I shall go up to the Grange to-morrow." "You can't--it's Fulmer's wedding." "Hang his wedding! Well, then, next day--and get a definite answer from Janet. It's too bad of her. Did you have any talk with her to-day?" "Only general conversation. She gave me no chance." "I don't understand her, but I'll have it settled. I've been at Mount Pleasant, and--by God, Phil, I can't stand the sort of anxious, beseeching way Nellie looks. I know it sounds absurd to hear a man talk like that, but it's a fact." "Then why do you go?" "Well, considering what she's done, I don't see how I can very well stay away." "Oh! No, I suppose not," said Philip, touching up his plan; "but if I were you, Dale, I should wait a bit before I bothered Miss Delane again. Give her time, man." "No, I won't. She's not treating me fairly." "What's that got to do with it? You want to marry her, don't you?" "Of course I do." "Then give her time. Give her a week at all events. You can sound her at the wedding to-morrow, but don't present your ultimatum." And Dale agreed, on much persuasion, to give her a week. "That's more sensible. And, Dale, may I ask Arthur Angell down for a day or two?" "Of course, but I don't know whether he'll come." "Oh, he'll come, fast enough." "What do you want him for?" "To consult him about a little work of mine," answered Philip, regarding his sketch critically. "Going to publish something?" "I don't know. That depends." "On the publishers? _Ça va sans dire._ But how can Arthur help you?" "He was there." "Where?" "Now, Dale, I can understand your impatience--but you must wait. If I publish it, you shall see it." "Is it my sort? Shall I like it?" "I think your feelings would be mixed," said Philip, delicately filling in Nellie Fane's figure on the ground. CHAPTER XXVI. =Against her Better Judgment.= It is never well to vie with experts in their own subjects; humiliation surely attends the audacious attempt, and a humiliation which receives and deserves no softening sympathy. Moreover, even if the technical difficulties could be overcome, the description of a wedding must be either florid or cynical, assuming impossible happiness, or insinuating improbable catastrophe. Wherefore this narrative, which abhors either of these extremes, takes leave to resume its course at the moment when Sir Harry and Lady Fulmer have been driven away for their honeymoon, and the guests at Mount Pleasant are engaged in looking at one another's presents, one another's clothes, and their own watches, while a group of men have sought retirement and cigars in the garden. The Lord Lieutenant was paying compliments of alarming elaboration and stateliness to Nellie Fane; and Janet Delane, having discharged her duty in that line with generous graciousness, was looking with despair at Captain Ripley's puzzled face and betugged mustache, and wondering why men could not or would not understand plain English, and why--why above all--they had no more sense of dignity or of timeliness than to renew useless entreaties in a roomful of people, and--to descend to the particular case--with Dale Bannister only a few yards away, paying obvious inattention to a rhapsodic bridesmaid. "Wasn't it a pretty wedding?" asked the bridesmaid. "You know I'm a stranger to Denborough, and I never knew you had so many beautiful girls. It might have been St. Peter's." "Might it?" said Dale, with an absent smile, entirely unappreciative of the compliment. He did not know what or where St. Peter's was. "Oh, it was lovely. Well, dear Tora herself is very pretty. And then, Miss Delane! I do _love_ that severe, statuesque style, don't you? How pale she is, though! she doesn't look very happy, does she? Oh, and Miss Fane! Isn't she lovely? She sings, doesn't she? I think people of that kind are so nice. Oh, and I've heard all about her. How nice it was of her to be so brave, wasn't it?" "Naturally, I think so." "Oh, of course, I forgot. It's so nice when people are good and pretty too, isn't it? After all, good looks do go for something, don't they?" and she fixed a pair of large and unnaturally innocent eyes on Dale. "You must tell me about that," he said with labored politeness. "How do you find it?" "Oh, nonsense, Mr. Bannister! But, seriously, did you ever see anything so lovely as the way Sir Harry looked at Tora when they were----" Dale had gone--without a word of excuse. He had seen Janet rise abruptly, with an impatient wave of her hand, and Captain Ripley turn on his heel and disappear into the eddying throng that was circling round the wedding presents. He darted across to Janet, and held out his hand. "I must see you here," he said, "since you will not see me at the Grange." The bridesmaid marked their greeting. She rose with offended dignity and returned to her mother. She says to this day that she has only known one poet, and he was not at all nice, and concludes, after the manner of a certain part of humanity, that none of the rest are nice either. Janet looked at Dale doubtfully, then she led the way to a little room which was free from the crowd. Then she sat down. "I'm very tired," she said, "and I want to stay here and rest. Will you let me?" "I know what you mean, Jan. How can I, when I never have a chance of saying what I want to say to you? You talk to Ripley----" "I don't comfort Gerard Ripley much." "I'm glad to hear it," said Dale heartlessly. "I'm not much troubled about him. I'm only a habit to him." "I don't care twopence about him. Jan, when is this sort of thing to end? Don't you like seeing me?" Janet had made up her mind to treat Dale at first with simple friendliness; if this recipe failed, it was to be followed by distant civility. She answered collectedly enough, in spite of a quiver in her voice: "I thought I had better not see you just now." "Why, in Heaven's name?" "I can't go through it all again. Indeed I can't, Dale." "Do you seriously expect me to be content with what you said then--to go away and never come near you again?" Dale spoke vehemently. It was obvious that the distant civility would be called into play. Perhaps silence was Janet's idea of it, for she said nothing. "Because that's what it comes to," pursued Dale. "Do you imagine, Jan, I could see you now--after it all--except as your lover? What do you want me to do?" "Miss Fane----" began Janet in a very small voice. "I'll never see Nellie Fane again if she robs me of you," Dale declared with great energy, and probably perfect, though unintentional, untruth. Janet looked up and met his eyes. Then she dropped hers, and said, in tones quite unlike those of distant civility: "I wonder how you care for such a mean-spirited creature as I am. If I told you I loved you still--how could you believe me? I told you before, and then I----" "Behaved like a sensible girl." "Oh, no, no. It was a lie when I said----" "Tell me another, then," said Dale. "I like them." Janet's resistance, like Bob Acres' courage, was oozing out of her finger tips. "I know what it will be," she faltered plaintively. "You'll always be thinking about her, and so shall I--and it will be horrible. No, I won't do it. I have some resolution, Dale; it wasn't mere nonsense. I did mean it." "Oh, no," said Dale persuasively; "you never did, Jan. You had no idea how bored you would be without me. Now, had you?" "I can never respect myself again." "It's quite unnecessary, dear; I'll do all that." "Are you really quite--quite sure, Dale, that you will never----" "Oh, hang it all!" said Dale, and he kissed her. "Dale! the door's open." Dale shut it, and the rest of the conversation became inaudible, and remains unknown. The guests had gone. Mrs. Hodge and Nellie, who were to keep the Colonel company for a little while, had walked down to Denborough to tell Mrs. Roberts all about the event of the day; and the Colonel was bustling about, getting the presents packed up, and counting, with some surprise, the empty champagne bottles. He was thus engaged when the door of the little room opened, to let Janet and Dale out. "Dear me! I thought you'd gone. Nellie asked me, and I told her so." "I am just going, Colonel Smith," said Janet. "So am I," said Dale. The Colonel watched them go together. "There's another man going to lose his daughter," he said. "By Jove, I thought it was to be Nellie Fane!" When Janet left Dale at the Grange gates, she went to her father's study. "Lord, child," said the Squire, "are you only just back?" "I stayed to see them off." "Your mother did that, and she's been back two hours. She couldn't find you." "Papa," said Janet, sitting on the arm of his chair, "I'm very much ashamed of myself." "What have you been, doing now? Ill treating that poor young man again?" "No." "He's not a bad fellow, you know, after all--honest and good--not brilliant, of course." "Not brilliant, papa?" "I don't mean he's a fool; I believe he's an efficient officer----" "Officer? Why, you're talking of Gerard!" "Of course I am." "How can you imagine I was thinking of Gerard? I meant Mr. Bannister." "Bannister? Why, you told me only the other day----" "Yes. That's why." "Why what, child?" "Why I'm ashamed." The Squire raised himself and looked severely at his daughter. "A precious fuss you've made about nothing." "I can't help it, papa. I don't want to, but he insists." "He seems to know how to manage you, which is more than I do. There, go and tell your mother. And, Jan!" "Yes." "If ever you say you won't have him again----" "Yes, papa." "By Jove, you shan't!" said the Squire with emphasis, and he added, as his daughter fled after a hasty kiss, "Perhaps that'll keep her quiet." Dale found nobody but Philip Hume to congratulate him, and Philip was, as usual now, busy over his little plan. "Oh, she's come round, has she?" he asked, with no sign of surprise. Dale said she had, and Philip meditatively took up his little plan. "Have you told Nellie?" he asked. "No. I haven't seen her." "She never knew you had asked Miss Delane before?" "No. Nobody knew but her people and you. I think she had an idea I liked Jan." "Yes, but not more?" "No. I don't think so." Philip whistled gently, and twisted the little plan in his fingers. Dale, in his good humor, said: "Why the deuce, Phil, do you go on fidgeting with that thing? You're like an old hen over an egg." "Yes; I don't know that it is any good. I think I'll destroy it." And he tore it slowly in two, and threw it in the fire. "The vindictive theory of punishment," he remarked, with apparent irrelevance, "does not commend itself to me. If no evil consequences exist to be averted, why should we punish?" and he pushed the plan farther into the blaze with the poker. "If you want to argue that sort of thing, old fellow, you must ring for Wilson. I'm going to have a try at some verses." "Going to write your own epitaph, like Swift?" Dale shook his head and smiled, with the impenetrable, hopeless happiness of successful love. CHAPTER XXVII. =A Villain Unmasked.= A few days after Dale's love affairs had begun to flow in a more peaceful channel the Mayor of Market Denborough had an interview with Mr. Philip Hume, and Philip emerged from the conversation with a smile of mingled amusement and perplexity on his face. The Mayor had been to the Grange; the Squire fully approved of the scheme; a hundred pounds was subscribed already, and another twenty or thirty expected. Philip was requested to act as an intermediary, and find out from Miss Fane what form she would prefer that the testimonial which Denborough intended to offer to her, in recognition of her signal gallantry, should take. "I wanted to wait and make it a wedding present," said the Mayor, with a wink, "but the Squire thinks we had better not wait for that." "Ah, does he?" said Philip. "Though what Mr. Bannister's waitin' for I can't see; and I said as much to Miss Janet when I met her in the garden." "What did she say?" asked Philip in some curiosity. "Well, sir, now you ask me, I don't think she said anything. She seemed a bit put-out like about something." "It couldn't have been anything you said?" "Why, no, sir. I only said as I shouldn't be slow to move if a young lady like Miss Fane was waitin' for me--and her havin' saved my life, too." "Good Lord!" "Beggin' your pardon, sir?" "Nothing, Mr. Mayor, nothing." "You'll see Miss Fane about it? She hasn't left the Colonel's." "Oh, yes, I suppose so. Yes, I'll see her." Dale had gone to London, alleging that he had shopping to do, and hardly denying that his business would lie chiefly at the jeweler's. Philip was glad that he was away, for he thus could start on his mission unquestioned. He found Nellie at home, and at once plunged into the matter. Directly Nellie understood what was proposed, she jumped up, crying: "Oh, no, they mustn't. You must stop them." "Why, it's a very natural tribute----" "I won't have it! I can't have it! You must tell them, Mr. Hume." "It'll look rather ungracious, won't it? Why shouldn't you take their present?" he asked, looking at her in a half-amused way. "Oh, no, no! You don't understand. Oh, what a wretched girl I am!" and Nellie, flinging herself in a chair, began to cry. He sat and watched her with a grim smile, which he made an effort to maintain. But the sobs were rather piteous, and the smile gradually became very mildly ferocious, and presently vanished altogether. Presently, also, Nellie stopped crying, sat up, and stared in front of her with a dazed look and parted lips. "Well?" said Philip. "I won't receive the testimonial." "Is that all you have to say?" he asked in a tone of disappointment. "Yes," she answered, plucking nervously at her handkerchief, "that's all." "No reason to give?" "Tell them that there's nothing to give me a testimonial for." "Shall I?" he asked. Nellie glanced at him with a start, but in an instant she recovered herself. "I mean that I would much rather no more fuss was made about what I did." "As you please," he said coldly. "I will tell the Mayor, and get him to stop the thing." "Is Dale at home?" she asked, as Philip rose. "He's gone to town. Do you want to see him about anything?" "No--nothing in particular--only--I haven't seen him for three or four days." "Are you staying here long?" "I am staying till Tora comes home, and then I go to her." "Well, good-by. I'll tell the Mayor." "Thank you so much. Good-by." She was quite calm again by now; her sudden fit of agitation was over, and apparently she felt nothing more than a distaste for the parade of a public presentation. So easy and natural had her bearing become that Philip Hume, as he walked away, wondered if he had been on a wrong scent after all. If so, he had behaved in a very brutal---- He broke off his thoughts abruptly, to recognize and bow to Janet Delane, who whirled by in her victoria, on the way to Mount Pleasant. She seemed to be going to pay a visit to Nellie Fane. Philip, who liked to hear how things happen, regretted that he had cut his own visit short and missed Janet's entry. Janet whirled on. Her balance of mind, delicately poised between her love and her pride, had suffered a new and severe shock from the Mayor's jocose remarks. She could not rest. She felt that she must see for herself--must see Nellie and find out why everybody thought what they did--yes, and what Nellie thought. She was full of things which she had to say to Nellie; she was prepared, if need be, again to sacrifice herself for Nellie, but the truth about it all at least she was determined to hear; on what it was, Dale's uncertain happiness again hung suspended. With her usual frankness and candor, she straightway began to tell Nellie all her story. Nellie listened in almost stony stillness. "It's so hard to speak of," said Janet, "but yet I think we must. It is wretched to let things go on like this. At least I am wretched, and I fear he is, and----" "I'm sure I am," said Nellie, with a forlorn laugh. Janet came and knelt by her and took her hands. "You too? you whom we all admire so? Oh, what a world it is! Why did I ever love him?" "Ah, you do love him?" "Yes. And why did I ever make him love me? Ah, Nellie, if only----" Nellie had sprung up. "How do you know he loves you?" she cried. "How do I know, dear? Why, he told me." "When? when?" "Why, before--the day before it all happened. But since then I have felt, and I told him, that he belonged to you--I mean, dear, that it must be you now whom he must really love, and that I----" Nellie was not listening. "He told you before?" she asked in a low voice. "Yes, the day before. But afterward----" "You were actually engaged then?" "Yes, we were." "I never knew it. I didn't know that. Oh, how wicked I have been!" "Wicked? What do you mean?" asked Janet, puzzled at her companion's strange behavior. Nellie stood silent, and Janet went on. "But I feel, I can't help feeling, that it is to you he owes his life--to you----" "Be quiet!" cried Nellie. "Are you engaged now?" "I--I don't know." "Does he still love you?" "Yes, I think so." "Why didn't you tell me? Why did you keep me in the dark? Why did you tempt me?" "Indeed, I don't understand." "I didn't know he had told you. I only thought he had a fancy---- Oh, and I loved him too! I did indeed!" "I know, dear," said Janet; "and so, when you had been so brave, and I so cowardly----" "Stop!" cried Nellie again, and as she spoke the door opened and Dale Bannister came in. He was fresh back from London, and had ridden over to see Nellie. He stood and looked in surprise from one to the other. There was evidently something more than an afternoon call going on. Nellie greeted his coming almost gladly. "Ah, you are here? Then I can tell you. I can't bear it any longer. O Dale, I didn't know you had told her. Indeed I didn't, or I would never have done it;" and, carried away by her emotion, she fell on her knees before him. "Why, Nellie, what in the world's the matter?" "I have been wicked," she went on quickly, clinging to his hand. "I have deceived you. I have told you lies. Oh, how wicked I have been!" Dale looked inquiringly at Janet, but she shook her head in bewilderment. "Well, Nellie, let's sit down quietly and hear the villainy. What is it?" She refused to let him raise her, and went on, as she was, on her knees. "I didn't mean it at first. I didn't think of it, but when I found you all thought it, and--and you were pleased, Dale, I couldn't help it." Dale saw the only chance of arriving at the truth was not to interrupt. He signed to Janet to keep silence. "I came up meaning to warn you. I was afraid for you. I saw you standing by the tree, and I was running toward you, and all of a sudden I saw him, and the pistol, and----" She paused and drooped her head. Dale pressed her hand and said: "Well, Nellie?" "I was afraid," she said, "and I turned and began to run away, and as I was running, it hit me." And, her confession ended, she sank into a little woebegone heap on the floor at his feet. Dale understood now. She had been tempted by the hope of winning his love through his gratitude, and had not refused the false glory they all thrust upon her. Now she had heard her hopes were vain, that they had been vain even before that night, and in the misery of sin, and useless sin, she lay crying at his feet, not daring to look up at him. He stood there awkwardly, as a man stands when he feels more moved than he allows himself to show. "Poor child!" he said, with a break in his voice. "Poor child!" Janet caught him by the arm. "What does she say? That she didn't save you?" she whispered eagerly. "That she was running away?" Dale nodded, and Janet fell down beside Nellie, embracing her, and saying, half laughing, half crying: "O Nellie, how sweet, how sweet of you to have been a coward too!" CHAPTER XXVIII. =A Vision.= The lawn at Dirkham Grange was a gay scene. The Institute was opened, the luncheon consumed, the Royal Duke gone, full to the last of graciousness, though the poor fellow was hungry for solitude and cigars; and now the society of the county was unbending in friendly condescension to the society of the town, and talking the whole thing over under the trees and beside the bright flower-beds. Lord Cransford, between Janet and Dale, mingled praises of the ode with congratulations on the engagement; no one would have guessed that he shared a son's disappointment. The Mayor indifferently dissembled his exultation over the whisper of a knighthood which a hint from his Royal Highness had set running through the company. Mrs. Johnstone sat placidly in an armchair, the ruby velvet spread in careful folds, while Sir Harry Fulmer paid her compliments, and wondered where his wife was, and how soon they might go; and his wife walked with the Squire, declaring in her impetuous way that Nellie Fane's deceit was the most beautiful and touching thing she had ever heard of, whereat the Squire tugged his whisker, and said that nobody was disposed to be hard on her. Mrs. Roberts had made her first public appearance, diligently attended by Dr. Spink, who said, but was disbelieved in saying, that she still needed constant care. Nellie Fane herself had been persuaded to come, on a promise that the Mayor should not be allowed to reopen the subject of the testimonial; and Arthur Angell, in whose breast hope was once more a sojourner, had led her to a retired walk, and was reading to her a set of verses, called "Love's Crime"; and Nellie shook her head, saying that there was no inducement to be good if everyone conspired to pet and pamper the wicked. Philip Hume sat alone under a spreading tree, looking on, and talking to nobody. The bustle of the morning, and the sumptuous midday meal worked together with the warm afternoon air and the distant sounds of the yeomanry band to make him a little drowsy, and he watched the people walking to and fro, and heard their chatter in a half-wakeful, half-sleeping state. And, strange as it seems in this workaday, skeptical age, he fell into a sort of trance, and visions of what should be were vouchsafed to him, and if the visions were not true, at least they had a look of truth. He saw a man, handsome still, for all that his thick hair was a little thinned by time and his waistcoat was broadening, and the man read in a mellow voice lines, which Philip did not hear very plainly, about the greatness of England, the glory of the Throne, and the calmer judgment of circling years tempering the heat of youth. Then a stately dame touched him gently on the shoulder, saying that the verses were magnificent, but the carriage waited to take him to the _levée_; and he rose to go with a smile, not seeming to notice a pale ghost, that clenched impotent shadowy hands in wrath and with a scowl shrank away. Suddenly, across this vision came the form of Mrs. Hodge, white-haired, but cheerful and buxom as of yore, and she said: "Well, Hume, she's made Arthur a happy man at last;" and the Mayor, who somehow happened to be there, wearing on his breast a large placard, inscribed "Sir James Hedger, Knight," added, quite in his old way: "We were all wrong, Mr. Hume, sir, except you, sir, beggin' your pardon." Then the Squire's voice broke in, as though in the course of an argument, and declared that it was nonsense to attribute Dale's change of views to anything except growing wisdom; and the phantom of Colonel Smith, a copy of "The Clarion" in his hand, answered: "Bosh!" And a crowd of quite indistinguishable, well-dressed shades gathered round the Colonel, and Philip heard them talking about the inevitable gravitation of culture and intelligence. But the Colonel still answered "Bosh!" and Philip did not hear the end of the matter, nor where the truth of it lay; for presently all the forms passed away, and he saw a little room, a little dingy room, and a gray-haired, slouching fellow in an old coat, smoking an old pipe and scribbling on foolscap, scribbling away far into the night, and then sitting and musing for a solitary half hour in front of his dying fire before he went to bed. There was something in this figure that made Philip curious, and he went nearer and looked. Hush! It was himself, and---- He awoke with a start. Dale was smiling down on him with his old friendly smile, and saying to Janet Delane: "We shall never let this old chap leave us for long, shall we, Jan?" THE END. _Twelfth Edition._ THE PRISONER OF ZENDA. By ANTHONY HOPE. 16mo, buckram, gilt top, with frontispiece, 75 cents. "The ingenious plot, the liveliness and spirit of the narrative, and its readable style."--_Atlantic Monthly._ "A glorious story, which cannot be too warmly recommended to all who love a tale that stirs the blood. Perhaps not the least among its many good qualities is the fact that its chivalry is of the nineteenth, not of the sixteenth century; that it is a tale of brave men and true, and of a fair woman of to-day. The Englishman who saves the king ... is as interesting a knight as was Bayard.... The story holds the reader's attention from first to last."--_Critic._ "The dash and galloping excitement of this rattling story."--_London Punch._ "A more gallant, entrancing story has seldom been written."--_Review of Reviews._ "It is not often that such a delightful novel falls into the reviewer's hands."--_London Athæneum._ "A rattling good romance."--_N. Y. Times._ "The plot is too original and audacious to be spoiled for the reader by outlining it. 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Times._ "['A Suburban Pastoral'] so devoid of pretension or effort, so freshly and frankly written, so quiet in its humor, and with its suggestion of pathos so latent in the emotions it awakens ... hereafter we shall remember him among the sweetest, tenderest, and gravest of our story-tellers."--_Mail and Express._ "'A Midwinter Night's Dream' is a beautiful example of writing which is permeated with delicate fancy.... 'Split Zephyrs' discusses many of those problems which you will hear debated almost every night in June under the elms and in old college haunts."--_Life._ "A skill and delicacy worthy of Mr. Henry James."--_Kate Field's Washington._ "Marked by powerful but artistically suppressed feeling."--_Dial._ "Effective and thoroughly readable."--_Outlook._ "Its ['A Suburban Pastoral'] description is realistic, its dialogue vivacious, and its situations dramatic. 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Next come the _Ante-Bellum Letters_, which occupy about a third of the book and make an excellent foil to the more demure tales which they interrupt like a sort of vigorous interlude. The Quakeress who writes them is suddenly plunged into the comparative dissipations of Boston, into the lively society of Harvard undergraduates, and into gay raiment that distresses her; but this lively intermezzo ends with a graver strain. The figures of the great Abolitionists are faintly seen, and at the trial of a poor negro boy, who is demanded as a fugitive slave, Lucretia Mott appears and sits by the prisoner, cheering him through the long night session of the court. The frontispiece represents this scene. The book closes with a quaint old story, way back in 1815, in which a romantic French boy, escaped from jail, and a Quakeress, more beautiful than her parents care to have her, figure prominently. There is a deep note of pathos in this tale, and the good influence of the Quakers in prison reform is shown, as their brave work for abolition has been in the _Ante-Bellum Letters_. Here and there a few lines give remarkable nature-pictures, as in the following: "The midsummer heat was upon the land. The red sun set in splendor, and the blood-red moon rose as in wrath." Jerome's John Ingerfield; =The Woman of the Saeter, Silhouettes, Variety Patter=, and =The Lease of the Cross-keys=. The title-story (half the book) and the two that follow are in serious vein. With portrait of Jerome and illustrations. Small 16mo. 75 cents. "This dainty little volume, contrived to look like a tall folio in miniature ... the creepy Norwegian ghost story (_The Woman of the Saeter_) ... the vague but picturesque sketch called _Silhouettes_.... 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The book will not be put down until all are finished."--_Baltimore American._ HENRY HOLT & CO., 29 West 23d Street, New York. TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES -Plain print and punctuation errors fixed. 
434	----	THE CIRCULAR STAIRCASE By MARY ROBERTS RINEHART CONTENTS I I TAKE A COUNTRY HOUSE II A LINK CUFF-BUTTON III MR. JOHN BAILEY APPEARS IV WHERE IS HALSEY? V GERTRUDE'S ENGAGEMENT VI IN THE EAST CORRIDOR VII A SPRAINED ANKLE VIII THE OTHER HALF OF THE LINE IX JUST LIKE A GIRL X THE TRADERS BANK XI HALSEY MAKES A CAPTURE XII ONE MYSTERY FOR ANOTHER XIII LOUISE XIV AN EGG-NOG AND A TELEGRAM XV LIDDY GIVES THE ALARM XVI IN THE EARLY MORNING XVII A HINT OF SCANDAL XVIII A HOLE IN THE WALL XIX CONCERNING THOMAS XX DOCTOR WALKER'S WARNING XXI FOURTEEN ELM STREET XXII A LADDER OUT OF PLACE XXIII WHILE THE STABLES BURNED XXIV FLINDERS XXV A VISIT FROM LOUISE XXVI HALSEY'S DISAPPEARANCE XXVII WHO IS NINA CARRINGTON? XXVIII A TRAMP AND THE TOOTHACHE XXIX A SCRAP OF PAPER XXX WHEN CHURCHYARDS YAWN XXXI BETWEEN TWO FIREPLACES XXXII ANNE WATSON'S STORY XXXIII AT THE FOOT OF THE STAIRS XXXIV THE ODDS AND ENDS THE CIRCULAR STAIRCASE CHAPTER I I TAKE A COUNTRY HOUSE This is the story of how a middle-aged spinster lost her mind, deserted her domestic gods in the city, took a furnished house for the summer out of town, and found herself involved in one of those mysterious crimes that keep our newspapers and detective agencies happy and prosperous. For twenty years I had been perfectly comfortable; for twenty years I had had the window-boxes filled in the spring, the carpets lifted, the awnings put up and the furniture covered with brown linen; for as many summers I had said good-by to my friends, and, after watching their perspiring hegira, had settled down to a delicious quiet in town, where the mail comes three times a day, and the water supply does not depend on a tank on the roof. And then--the madness seized me. When I look back over the months I spent at Sunnyside, I wonder that I survived at all. As it is, I show the wear and tear of my harrowing experiences. I have turned very gray--Liddy reminded me of it, only yesterday, by saying that a little bluing in the rinse-water would make my hair silvery, instead of a yellowish white. I hate to be reminded of unpleasant things and I snapped her off. "No," I said sharply, "I'm not going to use bluing at my time of life, or starch, either." Liddy's nerves are gone, she says, since that awful summer, but she has enough left, goodness knows! And when she begins to go around with a lump in her throat, all I have to do is to threaten to return to Sunnyside, and she is frightened into a semblance of cheerfulness,--from which you may judge that the summer there was anything but a success. The newspaper accounts have been so garbled and incomplete--one of them mentioned me but once, and then only as the tenant at the time the thing happened--that I feel it my due to tell what I know. Mr. Jamieson, the detective, said himself he could never have done without me, although he gave me little enough credit, in print. I shall have to go back several years--thirteen, to be exact--to start my story. At that time my brother died, leaving me his two children. Halsey was eleven then, and Gertrude was seven. All the responsibilities of maternity were thrust upon me suddenly; to perfect the profession of motherhood requires precisely as many years as the child has lived, like the man who started to carry the calf and ended by walking along with the bull on his shoulders. However, I did the best I could. When Gertrude got past the hair-ribbon age, and Halsey asked for a scarf-pin and put on long trousers--and a wonderful help that was to the darning.--I sent them away to good schools. After that, my responsibility was chiefly postal, with three months every summer in which to replenish their wardrobes, look over their lists of acquaintances, and generally to take my foster-motherhood out of its nine months' retirement in camphor. I missed the summers with them when, somewhat later, at boarding-school and college, the children spent much of their vacations with friends. Gradually I found that my name signed to a check was even more welcome than when signed to a letter, though I wrote them at stated intervals. But when Halsey had finished his electrical course and Gertrude her boarding-school, and both came home to stay, things were suddenly changed. The winter Gertrude came out was nothing but a succession of sitting up late at night to bring her home from things, taking her to the dressmakers between naps the next day, and discouraging ineligible youths with either more money than brains, or more brains than money. Also, I acquired a great many things: to say lingerie for under-garments, "frocks" and "gowns" instead of dresses, and that beardless sophomores are not college boys, but college men. Halsey required less personal supervision, and as they both got their mother's fortune that winter, my responsibility became purely moral. Halsey bought a car, of course, and I learned how to tie over my bonnet a gray baize veil, and, after a time, never to stop to look at the dogs one has run down. People are apt to be so unpleasant about their dogs. The additions to my education made me a properly equipped maiden aunt, and by spring I was quite tractable. So when Halsey suggested camping in the Adirondacks and Gertrude wanted Bar Harbor, we compromised on a good country house with links near, within motor distance of town and telephone distance of the doctor. That was how we went to Sunnyside. We went out to inspect the property, and it seemed to deserve its name. Its cheerful appearance gave no indication whatever of anything out of the ordinary. Only one thing seemed unusual to me: the housekeeper, who had been left in charge, had moved from the house to the gardener's lodge, a few days before. As the lodge was far enough away from the house, it seemed to me that either fire or thieves could complete their work of destruction undisturbed. The property was an extensive one: the house on the top of a hill, which sloped away in great stretches of green lawn and clipped hedges, to the road; and across the valley, perhaps a couple of miles away, was the Greenwood Club House. Gertrude and Halsey were infatuated. "Why, it's everything you want," Halsey said "View, air, good water and good roads. As for the house, it's big enough for a hospital, if it has a Queen Anne front and a Mary Anne back," which was ridiculous: it was pure Elizabethan. Of course we took the place; it was not my idea of comfort, being much too large and sufficiently isolated to make the servant question serious. But I give myself credit for this: whatever has happened since, I never blamed Halsey and Gertrude for taking me there. And another thing: if the series of catastrophes there did nothing else, it taught me one thing--that somehow, somewhere, from perhaps a half-civilized ancestor who wore a sheepskin garment and trailed his food or his prey, I have in me the instinct of the chase. Were I a man I should be a trapper of criminals, trailing them as relentlessly as no doubt my sheepskin ancestor did his wild boar. But being an unmarried woman, with the handicap of my sex, my first acquaintance with crime will probably be my last. Indeed, it came near enough to being my last acquaintance with anything. The property was owned by Paul Armstrong, the president of the Traders' Bank, who at the time we took the house was in the west with his wife and daughter, and a Doctor Walker, the Armstrong family physician. Halsey knew Louise Armstrong,--had been rather attentive to her the winter before, but as Halsey was always attentive to somebody, I had not thought of it seriously, although she was a charming girl. I knew of Mr. Armstrong only through his connection with the bank, where the children's money was largely invested, and through an ugly story about the son, Arnold Armstrong, who was reported to have forged his father's name, for a considerable amount, to some bank paper. However, the story had had no interest for me. I cleared Halsey and Gertrude away to a house party, and moved out to Sunnyside the first of May. The roads were bad, but the trees were in leaf, and there were still tulips in the borders around the house. The arbutus was fragrant in the woods under the dead leaves, and on the way from the station, a short mile, while the car stuck in the mud, I found a bank showered with tiny forget-me-nots. The birds--don't ask me what kind; they all look alike to me, unless they have a hall mark of some bright color--the birds were chirping in the hedges, and everything breathed of peace. Liddy, who was born and bred on a brick pavement, got a little bit down-spirited when the crickets began to chirp, or scrape their legs together, or whatever it is they do, at twilight. The first night passed quietly enough. I have always been grateful for that one night's peace; it shows what the country might be, under favorable circumstances. Never after that night did I put my head on my pillow with any assurance how long it would be there; or on my shoulders, for that matter. On the following morning Liddy and Mrs. Ralston, my own housekeeper, had a difference of opinion, and Mrs. Ralston left on the eleven train. Just after luncheon, Burke, the butler, was taken unexpectedly with a pain in his right side, much worse when I was within hearing distance, and by afternoon he was started cityward. That night the cook's sister had a baby--the cook, seeing indecision in my face, made it twins on second thought--and, to be short, by noon the next day the household staff was down to Liddy and myself. And this in a house with twenty-two rooms and five baths! Liddy wanted to go back to the city at once, but the milk-boy said that Thomas Johnson, the Armstrongs' colored butler, was working as a waiter at the Greenwood Club, and might come back. I have the usual scruples about coercing people's servants away, but few of us have any conscience regarding institutions or corporations--witness the way we beat railroads and street-car companies when we can--so I called up the club, and about eight o'clock Thomas Johnson came to see me. Poor Thomas! Well, it ended by my engaging Thomas on the spot, at outrageous wages, and with permission to sleep in the gardener's lodge, empty since the house was rented. The old man--he was white-haired and a little stooped, but with an immense idea of his personal dignity--gave me his reasons hesitatingly. "I ain't sayin' nothin', Mis' Innes," he said, with his hand on the door-knob, "but there's been goin's-on here this las' few months as ain't natchal. 'Tain't one thing an' 'tain't another--it's jest a door squealin' here, an' a winder closin' there, but when doors an' winders gets to cuttin' up capers and there's nobody nigh 'em, it's time Thomas Johnson sleeps somewhar's else." Liddy, who seemed to be never more than ten feet away from me that night, and was afraid of her shadow in that great barn of a place, screamed a little, and turned a yellow-green. But I am not easily alarmed. It was entirely in vain; I represented to Thomas that we were alone, and that he would have to stay in the house that night. He was politely firm, but he would come over early the next morning, and if I gave him a key, he would come in time to get some sort of breakfast. I stood on the huge veranda and watched him shuffle along down the shadowy drive, with mingled feelings--irritation at his cowardice and thankfulness at getting him at all. I am not ashamed to say that I double-locked the hall door when I went in. "You can lock up the rest of the house and go to bed, Liddy," I said severely. "You give me the creeps standing there. A woman of your age ought to have better sense." It usually braces Liddy to mention her age: she owns to forty--which is absurd. Her mother cooked for my grandfather, and Liddy must be at least as old as I. But that night she refused to brace. "You're not going to ask me to lock up, Miss Rachel!" she quavered. "Why, there's a dozen French windows in the drawing-room and the billiard-room wing, and every one opens on a porch. And Mary Anne said that last night there was a man standing by the stable when she locked the kitchen door." "Mary Anne was a fool," I said sternly. "If there had been a man there, she would have had him in the kitchen and been feeding him what was left from dinner, inside of an hour, from force of habit. Now don't be ridiculous. Lock up the house and go to bed. I am going to read." But Liddy set her lips tight and stood still. "I'm not going to bed," she said. "I am going to pack up, and to-morrow I am going to leave." "You'll do nothing of the sort," I snapped. Liddy and I often desire to part company, but never at the same time. "If you are afraid, I will go with you, but for goodness' sake don't try to hide behind me." The house was a typical summer residence on an extensive scale. Wherever possible, on the first floor, the architect had done away with partitions, using arches and columns instead. The effect was cool and spacious, but scarcely cozy. As Liddy and I went from one window to another, our voices echoed back at us uncomfortably. There was plenty of light--the electric plant down in the village supplied us--but there were long vistas of polished floor, and mirrors which reflected us from unexpected corners, until I felt some of Liddy's foolishness communicate itself to me. The house was very long, a rectangle in general form, with the main entrance in the center of the long side. The brick-paved entry opened into a short hall to the right of which, separated only by a row of pillars, was a huge living-room. Beyond that was the drawing-room, and in the end, the billiard-room. Off the billiard-room, in the extreme right wing, was a den, or card-room, with a small hall opening on the east veranda, and from there went up a narrow circular staircase. Halsey had pointed it out with delight. "Just look, Aunt Rachel," he said with a flourish. "The architect that put up this joint was wise to a few things. Arnold Armstrong and his friends could sit here and play cards all night and stumble up to bed in the early morning, without having the family send in a police call." Liddy and I got as far as the card-room and turned on all the lights. I tried the small entry door there, which opened on the veranda, and examined the windows. Everything was secure, and Liddy, a little less nervous now, had just pointed out to me the disgracefully dusty condition of the hard-wood floor, when suddenly the lights went out. We waited a moment; I think Liddy was stunned with fright, or she would have screamed. And then I clutched her by the arm and pointed to one of the windows opening on the porch. The sudden change threw the window into relief, an oblong of grayish light, and showed us a figure standing close, peering in. As I looked it darted across the veranda and out of sight in the darkness. CHAPTER II A LINK CUFF-BUTTON Liddy's knees seemed to give away under her. Without a sound she sank down, leaving me staring at the window in petrified amazement. Liddy began to moan under her breath, and in my excitement I reached down and shook her. "Stop it," I whispered. "It's only a woman--maybe a maid of the Armstrongs'. Get up and help me find the door." She groaned again. "Very well," I said, "then I'll have to leave you here. I'm going." She moved at that, and, holding to my sleeve, we felt our way, with numerous collisions, to the billiard-room, and from there to the drawing-room. The lights came on then, and, with the long French windows unshuttered, I had a creepy feeling that each one sheltered a peering face. In fact, in the light of what happened afterward, I am pretty certain we were under surveillance during the entire ghostly evening. We hurried over the rest of the locking-up and got upstairs as quickly as we could. I left the lights all on, and our footsteps echoed cavernously. Liddy had a stiff neck the next morning, from looking back over her shoulder, and she refused to go to bed. "Let me stay in your dressing-room, Miss Rachel," she begged. "If you don't, I'll sit in the hall outside the door. I'm not going to be murdered with my eyes shut." "If you're going to be murdered," I retorted, "it won't make any difference whether they are shut or open. But you may stay in the dressing-room, if you will lie on the couch: when you sleep in a chair you snore." She was too far gone to be indignant, but after a while she came to the door and looked in to where I was composing myself for sleep with Drummond's Spiritual Life. "That wasn't a woman, Miss Rachel," she said, with her shoes in her hand. "It was a man in a long coat." "What woman was a man?" I discouraged her without looking up, and she went back to the couch. It was eleven o'clock when I finally prepared for bed. In spite of my assumption of indifference, I locked the door into the hall, and finding the transom did not catch, I put a chair cautiously before the door--it was not necessary to rouse Liddy--and climbing up put on the ledge of the transom a small dressing-mirror, so that any movement of the frame would send it crashing down. Then, secure in my precautions, I went to bed. I did not go to sleep at once. Liddy disturbed me just as I was growing drowsy, by coming in and peering under the bed. She was afraid to speak, however, because of her previous snubbing, and went back, stopping in the doorway to sigh dismally. Somewhere down-stairs a clock with a chime sang away the hours--eleven-thirty, forty-five, twelve. And then the lights went out to stay. The Casanova Electric Company shuts up shop and goes home to bed at midnight: when one has a party, I believe it is customary to fee the company, which will drink hot coffee and keep awake a couple of hours longer. But the lights were gone for good that night. Liddy had gone to sleep, as I knew she would. She was a very unreliable person: always awake and ready to talk when she wasn't wanted and dozing off to sleep when she was. I called her once or twice, the only result being an explosive snore that threatened her very windpipe--then I got up and lighted a bedroom candle. My bedroom and dressing room were above the big living-room on the first floor. On the second floor a long corridor ran the length of the house, with rooms opening from both sides. In the wings were small corridors crossing the main one--the plan was simplicity itself. And just as I got back into bed, I heard a sound from the east wing, apparently, that made me stop, frozen, with one bedroom slipper half off, and listen. It was a rattling metallic sound, and it reverberated along the empty halls like the crash of doom. It was for all the world as if something heavy, perhaps a piece of steel, had rolled clattering and jangling down the hard-wood stairs leading to the card-room. In the silence that followed Liddy stirred and snored again. I was exasperated: first she kept me awake by silly alarms, then when she was needed she slept like Joe Jefferson, or Rip,--they are always the same to me. I went in and aroused her, and I give her credit for being wide awake the minute I spoke. "Get up," I said, "if you don't want to be murdered in your bed." "Where? How?" she yelled vociferously, and jumped up. "There's somebody in the house," I said. "Get up. We'll have to get to the telephone." "Not out in the hall!" she gasped; "Oh, Miss Rachel, not out in the hall!" trying to hold me back. But I am a large woman and Liddy is small. We got to the door, somehow, and Liddy held a brass andiron, which it was all she could do to lift, let alone brain anybody with. I listened, and, hearing nothing, opened the door a little and peered into the hall. It was a black void, full of terrible suggestion, and my candle only emphasized the gloom. Liddy squealed and drew me back again, and as the door slammed, the mirror I had put on the transom came down and hit her on the head. That completed our demoralization. It was some time before I could persuade her she had not been attacked from behind by a burglar, and when she found the mirror smashed on the floor she wasn't much better. "There's going to be a death!" she wailed. "Oh, Miss Rachel, there's going to be a death!" "There will be," I said grimly, "if you don't keep quiet, Liddy Allen." And so we sat there until morning, wondering if the candle would last until dawn, and arranging what trains we could take back to town. If we had only stuck to that decision and gone back before it was too late! The sun came finally, and from my window I watched the trees along the drive take shadowy form, gradually lose their ghostlike appearance, become gray and then green. The Greenwood Club showed itself a dab of white against the hill across the valley, and an early robin or two hopped around in the dew. Not until the milk-boy and the sun came, about the same time, did I dare to open the door into the hall and look around. Everything was as we had left it. Trunks were heaped here and there, ready for the trunk-room, and through an end window of stained glass came a streak of red and yellow daylight that was eminently cheerful. The milk-boy was pounding somewhere below, and the day had begun. Thomas Johnson came ambling up the drive about half-past six, and we could hear him clattering around on the lower floor, opening shutters. I had to take Liddy to her room up-stairs, however,--she was quite sure she would find something uncanny. In fact, when she did not, having now the courage of daylight, she was actually disappointed. Well, we did not go back to town that day. The discovery of a small picture fallen from the wall of the drawing-room was quite sufficient to satisfy Liddy that the alarm had been a false one, but I was anything but convinced. Allowing for my nerves and the fact that small noises magnify themselves at night, there was still no possibility that the picture had made the series of sounds I heard. To prove it, however, I dropped it again. It fell with a single muffled crash of its wooden frame, and incidentally ruined itself beyond repair. I justified myself by reflecting that if the Armstrongs chose to leave pictures in unsafe positions, and to rent a house with a family ghost, the destruction of property was their responsibility, not mine. I warned Liddy not to mention what had happened to anybody, and telephoned to town for servants. Then after a breakfast which did more credit to Thomas' heart than his head, I went on a short tour of investigation. The sounds had come from the east wing, and not without some qualms I began there. At first I found nothing. Since then I have developed my powers of observation, but at that time I was a novice. The small card-room seemed undisturbed. I looked for footprints, which is, I believe, the conventional thing to do, although my experience has been that as clues both footprints and thumb-marks are more useful in fiction than in fact. But the stairs in that wing offered something. At the top of the flight had been placed a tall wicker hamper, packed, with linen that had come from town. It stood at the edge of the top step, almost barring passage, and on the step below it was a long fresh scratch. For three steps the scratch was repeated, gradually diminishing, as if some object had fallen, striking each one. Then for four steps nothing. On the fifth step below was a round dent in the hard wood. That was all, and it seemed little enough, except that I was positive the marks had not been there the day before. It bore out my theory of the sound, which had been for all the world like the bumping of a metallic object down a flight of steps. The four steps had been skipped. I reasoned that an iron bar, for instance, would do something of the sort,--strike two or three steps, end down, then turn over, jumping a few stairs, and landing with a thud. Iron bars, however, do not fall down-stairs in the middle of the night alone. Coupled with the figure on the veranda the agency by which it climbed might be assumed. But--and here was the thing that puzzled me most--the doors were all fastened that morning, the windows unmolested, and the particular door from the card-room to the veranda had a combination lock of which I held the key, and which had not been tampered with. I fixed on an attempt at burglary, as the most natural explanation--an attempt frustrated by the falling of the object, whatever it was, that had roused me. Two things I could not understand: how the intruder had escaped with everything locked, and why he had left the small silver, which, in the absence of a butler, had remained down-stairs over night. Under pretext of learning more about the place, Thomas Johnson led me through the house and the cellars, without result. Everything was in good order and repair; money had been spent lavishly on construction and plumbing. The house was full of conveniences, and I had no reason to repent my bargain, save the fact that, in the nature of things, night must come again. And other nights must follow--and we were a long way from a police-station. In the afternoon a hack came up from Casanova, with a fresh relay of servants. The driver took them with a flourish to the servants' entrance, and drove around to the front of the house, where I was awaiting him. "Two dollars," he said in reply to my question. "I don't charge full rates, because, bringin' 'em up all summer as I do, it pays to make a special price. When they got off the train, I sez, sez I, 'There's another bunch for Sunnyside, cook, parlor maid and all.' Yes'm--six summers, and a new lot never less than once a month. They won't stand for the country and the lonesomeness, I reckon." But with the presence of the "bunch" of servants my courage revived, and late in the afternoon came a message from Gertrude that she and Halsey would arrive that night at about eleven o'clock, coming in the car from Richfield. Things were looking up; and when Beulah, my cat, a most intelligent animal, found some early catnip on a bank near the house and rolled in it in a feline ecstasy, I decided that getting back to nature was the thing to do. While I was dressing for dinner, Liddy rapped at the door. She was hardly herself yet, but privately I think she was worrying about the broken mirror and its augury, more than anything else. When she came in she was holding something in her hand, and she laid it on the dressing-table carefully. "I found it in the linen hamper," she said. "It must be Mr. Halsey's, but it seems queer how it got there." It was the half of a link cuff-button of unique design, and I looked at it carefully. "Where was it? In the bottom of the hamper?" I asked. "On the very top," she replied. "It's a mercy it didn't fall out on the way." When Liddy had gone I examined the fragment attentively. I had never seen it before, and I was certain it was not Halsey's. It was of Italian workmanship, and consisted of a mother-of-pearl foundation, encrusted with tiny seed-pearls, strung on horsehair to hold them. In the center was a small ruby. The trinket was odd enough, but not intrinsically of great value. Its interest for me lay in this: Liddy had found it lying in the top of the hamper which had blocked the east-wing stairs. That afternoon the Armstrongs' housekeeper, a youngish good-looking woman, applied for Mrs. Ralston's place, and I was glad enough to take her. She looked as though she might be equal to a dozen of Liddy, with her snapping black eyes and heavy jaw. Her name was Anne Watson, and I dined that evening for the first time in three days. CHAPTER III MR. JOHN BAILEY APPEARS I had dinner served in the breakfast-room. Somehow the huge dining-room depressed me, and Thomas, cheerful enough all day, allowed his spirits to go down with the sun. He had a habit of watching the corners of the room, left shadowy by the candles on the table, and altogether it was not a festive meal. Dinner over I went into the living-room. I had three hours before the children could possibly arrive, and I got out my knitting. I had brought along two dozen pairs of slipper soles in assorted sizes--I always send knitted slippers to the Old Ladies' Home at Christmas--and now I sorted over the wools with a grim determination not to think about the night before. But my mind was not on my work: at the end of a half-hour I found I had put a row of blue scallops on Eliza Klinefelter's lavender slippers, and I put them away. I got out the cuff-link and went with it to the pantry. Thomas was wiping silver and the air was heavy with tobacco smoke. I sniffed and looked around, but there was no pipe to be seen. "Thomas," I said, "you have been smoking." "No, ma'm." He was injured innocence itself. "It's on my coat, ma'm. Over at the club the gentlemen--" But Thomas did not finish. The pantry was suddenly filled with the odor of singeing cloth. Thomas gave a clutch at his coat, whirled to the sink, filled a tumbler with water and poured it into his right pocket with the celerity of practice. "Thomas," I said, when he was sheepishly mopping the floor, "smoking is a filthy and injurious habit. If you must smoke, you must; but don't stick a lighted pipe in your pocket again. Your skin's your own: you can blister it if you like. But this house is not mine, and I don't want a conflagration. Did you ever see this cuff-link before?" No, he never had, he said, but he looked at it oddly. "I picked it up in the hall," I added indifferently. The old man's eyes were shrewd under his bushy eyebrows. "There's strange goin's-on here, Mis' Innes," he said, shaking his head. "Somethin's goin' to happen, sure. You ain't took notice that the big clock in the hall is stopped, I reckon?" "Nonsense," I said. "Clocks have to stop, don't they, if they're not wound?" "It's wound up, all right, and it stopped at three o'clock last night," he answered solemnly. "More'n that, that there clock ain't stopped for fifteen years, not since Mr. Armstrong's first wife died. And that ain't all,--no MA'M. Last three nights I slep' in this place, after the electrics went out I had a token. My oil lamp was full of oil, but it kep' goin' out, do what I would. Minute I shet my eyes, out that lamp'd go. There ain't no surer token of death. The Bible sez, LET YER LIGHT SHINE! When a hand you can't see puts yer light out, it means death, sure." The old man's voice was full of conviction. In spite of myself I had a chilly sensation in the small of my back, and I left him mumbling over his dishes. Later on I heard a crash from the pantry, and Liddy reported that Beulah, who is coal black, had darted in front of Thomas just as he picked up a tray of dishes; that the bad omen had been too much for him, and he had dropped the tray. The chug of the automobile as it climbed the hill was the most welcome sound I had heard for a long time, and with Gertrude and Halsey actually before me, my troubles seemed over for good. Gertrude stood smiling in the hall, with her hat quite over one ear, and her hair in every direction under her pink veil. Gertrude is a very pretty girl, no matter how her hat is, and I was not surprised when Halsey presented a good-looking young man, who bowed at me and looked at Trude--that is the ridiculous nickname Gertrude brought from school. "I have brought a guest, Aunt Ray," Halsey said. "I want you to adopt him into your affections and your Saturday-to-Monday list. Let me present John Bailey, only you must call him Jack. In twelve hours he'll be calling you 'Aunt': I know him." We shook hands, and I got a chance to look at Mr. Bailey; he was a tall fellow, perhaps thirty, and he wore a small mustache. I remember wondering why: he seemed to have a good mouth and when he smiled his teeth were above the average. One never knows why certain men cling to a messy upper lip that must get into things, any more than one understands some women building up their hair on wire atrocities. Otherwise, he was very good to look at, stalwart and tanned, with the direct gaze that I like. I am particular about Mr. Bailey, because he was a prominent figure in what happened later. Gertrude was tired with the trip and went up to bed very soon. I made up my mind to tell them nothing; until the next day, and then to make as light of our excitement as possible. After all, what had I to tell? An inquisitive face peering in at a window; a crash in the night; a scratch or two on the stairs, and half a cuff-button! As for Thomas and his forebodings, it was always my belief that a negro is one part thief, one part pigment, and the rest superstition. It was Saturday night. The two men went to the billiard-room, and I could hear them talking as I went up-stairs. It seemed that Halsey had stopped at the Greenwood Club for gasolene and found Jack Bailey there, with the Sunday golf crowd. Mr. Bailey had not been hard to persuade--probably Gertrude knew why--and they had carried him off triumphantly. I roused Liddy to get them something to eat--Thomas was beyond reach in the lodge--and paid no attention to her evident terror of the kitchen regions. Then I went to bed. The men were still in the billiard-room when I finally dozed off, and the last thing I remember was the howl of a dog in front of the house. It wailed a crescendo of woe that trailed off hopefully, only to break out afresh from a new point of the compass. At three o'clock in the morning I was roused by a revolver shot. The sound seemed to come from just outside my door. For a moment I could not move. Then--I heard Gertrude stirring in her room, and the next moment she had thrown open the connecting door. "O Aunt Ray! Aunt Ray!" she cried hysterically. "Some one has been killed, killed!" "Thieves," I said shortly. "Thank goodness, there are some men in the house to-night." I was getting into my slippers and a bath-robe, and Gertrude with shaking hands was lighting a lamp. Then we opened the door into the hall, where, crowded on the upper landing of the stairs, the maids, white-faced and trembling, were peering down, headed by Liddy. I was greeted by a series of low screams and questions, and I tried to quiet them. Gertrude had dropped on a chair and sat there limp and shivering. I went at once across the hall to Halsey's room and knocked; then I pushed the door open. It was empty; the bed had not been occupied! "He must be in Mr. Bailey's room," I said excitedly, and followed by Liddy, we went there. Like Halsey's, it had not been occupied! Gertrude was on her feet now, but she leaned against the door for support. "They have been killed!" she gasped. Then she caught me by the arm and dragged me toward the stairs. "They may only be hurt, and we must find them," she said, her eyes dilated with excitement. I don't remember how we got down the stairs: I do remember expecting every moment to be killed. The cook was at the telephone up-stairs, calling the Greenwood Club, and Liddy was behind me, afraid to come and not daring to stay behind. We found the living-room and the drawing-room undisturbed. Somehow I felt that whatever we found would be in the card-room or on the staircase, and nothing but the fear that Halsey was in danger drove me on; with every step my knees seemed to give way under me. Gertrude was ahead and in the card-room she stopped, holding her candle high. Then she pointed silently to the doorway into the hall beyond. Huddled there on the floor, face down, with his arms extended, was a man. Gertrude ran forward with a gasping sob. "Jack," she cried, "oh, Jack!" Liddy had run, screaming, and the two of us were there alone. It was Gertrude who turned him over, finally, until we could see his white face, and then she drew a deep breath and dropped limply to her knees. It was the body of a man, a gentleman, in a dinner coat and white waistcoat, stained now with blood--the body of a man I had never seen before. CHAPTER IV WHERE IS HALSEY? Gertrude gazed at the face in a kind of fascination. Then she put out her hands blindly, and I thought she was going to faint. "He has killed him!" she muttered almost inarticulately; and at that, because my nerves were going, I gave her a good shake. "What do you mean?" I said frantically. There was a depth of grief and conviction in her tone that was worse than anything she could have said. The shake braced her, anyhow, and she seemed to pull herself together. But not another word would she say: she stood gazing down at that gruesome figure on the floor, while Liddy, ashamed of her flight and afraid to come back alone, drove before her three terrified women-servants into the drawing-room, which was as near as any of them would venture. Once in the drawing-room, Gertrude collapsed and went from one fainting spell into another. I had all I could do to keep Liddy from drowning her with cold water, and the maids huddled in a corner, as much use as so many sheep. In a short time, although it seemed hours, a car came rushing up, and Anne Watson, who had waited to dress, opened the door. Three men from the Greenwood Club, in all kinds of costumes, hurried in. I recognized a Mr. Jarvis, but the others were strangers. "What's wrong?" the Jarvis man asked--and we made a strange picture, no doubt. "Nobody hurt, is there?" He was looking at Gertrude. "Worse than that, Mr. Jarvis," I said. "I think it is murder." At the word there was a commotion. The cook began to cry, and Mrs. Watson knocked over a chair. The men were visibly impressed. "Not any member of the family?" Mr. Jarvis asked, when he had got his breath. "No," I said; and motioning Liddy to look after Gertrude, I led the way with a lamp to the card-room door. One of the men gave an exclamation, and they all hurried across the room. Mr. Jarvis took the lamp from me--I remember that--and then, feeling myself getting dizzy and light-headed, I closed my eyes. When I opened them their brief examination was over, and Mr. Jarvis was trying to put me in a chair. "You must get up-stairs," he said firmly, "you and Miss Gertrude, too. This has been a terrible shock. In his own home, too." I stared at him without comprehension. "Who is it?" I asked with difficulty. There was a band drawn tight around my throat. "It is Arnold Armstrong," he said, looking at me oddly, "and he has been murdered in his father's house." After a minute I gathered myself together and Mr. Jarvis helped me into the living-room. Liddy had got Gertrude up-stairs, and the two strange men from the club stayed with the body. The reaction from the shock and strain was tremendous: I was collapsed--and then Mr. Jarvis asked me a question that brought back my wandering faculties. "Where is Halsey?" he asked. "Halsey!" Suddenly Gertrude's stricken face rose before me the empty rooms up-stairs. Where was Halsey? "He was here, wasn't he?" Mr. Jarvis persisted. "He stopped at the club on his way over." "I--don't know where he is," I said feebly. One of the men from the club came in, asked for the telephone, and I could hear him excitedly talking, saying something about coroners and detectives. Mr. Jarvis leaned over to me. "Why don't you trust me, Miss Innes?" he said. "If I can do anything I will. But tell me the whole thing." I did, finally, from the beginning, and when I told of Jack Bailey's being in the house that night, he gave a long whistle. "I wish they were both here," he said when I finished. "Whatever mad prank took them away, it would look better if they were here. Especially--" "Especially what?" "Especially since Jack Bailey and Arnold Armstrong were notoriously bad friends. It was Bailey who got Arnold into trouble last spring--something about the bank. And then, too--" "Go on," I said. "If there is anything more, I ought to know." "There's nothing more," he said evasively. "There's just one thing we may bank on, Miss Innes. Any court in the country will acquit a man who kills an intruder in his house, at night. If Halsey--" "Why, you don't think Halsey did it!" I exclaimed. There was a queer feeling of physical nausea coming over me. "No, no, not at all," he said with forced cheerfulness. "Come, Miss Innes, you're a ghost of yourself and I am going to help you up-stairs and call your maid. This has been too much for you." Liddy helped me back to bed, and under the impression that I was in danger of freezing to death, put a hot-water bottle over my heart and another at my feet. Then she left me. It was early dawn now, and from voices under my window I surmised that Mr. Jarvis and his companions were searching the grounds. As for me, I lay in bed, with every faculty awake. Where had Halsey gone? How had he gone, and when? Before the murder, no doubt, but who would believe that? If either he or Jack Bailey had heard an intruder in the house and shot him--as they might have been justified in doing--why had they run away? The whole thing was unheard of, outrageous, and--impossible to ignore. About six o'clock Gertrude came in. She was fully dressed, and I sat up nervously. "Poor Aunty!" she said. "What a shocking night you have had!" She came over and sat down on the bed, and I saw she looked very tired and worn. "Is there anything new?" I asked anxiously. "Nothing. The car is gone, but Warner"--he is the chauffeur--"Warner is at the lodge and knows nothing about it." "Well," I said, "if I ever get my hands on Halsey Innes, I shall not let go until I have told him a few things. When we get this cleared up, I am going back to the city to be quiet. One more night like the last two will end me. The peace of the country--fiddle sticks!" Whereupon I told Gertrude of the noises the night before, and the figure on the veranda in the east wing. As an afterthought I brought out the pearl cuff-link. "I have no doubt now," I said, "that it was Arnold Armstrong the night before last, too. He had a key, no doubt, but why he should steal into his father's house I can not imagine. He could have come with my permission, easily enough. Anyhow, whoever it was that night, left this little souvenir." Gertrude took one look at the cuff-link, and went as white as the pearls in it; she clutched at the foot of the bed, and stood staring. As for me, I was quite as astonished as she was. "Where did--you--find it?" she asked finally, with a desperate effort at calm. And while I told her she stood looking out of the window with a look I could not fathom on her face. It was a relief when Mrs. Watson tapped at the door and brought me some tea and toast. The cook was in bed, completely demoralized, she reported, and Liddy, brave with the daylight, was looking for footprints around the house. Mrs. Watson herself was a wreck; she was blue-white around the lips, and she had one hand tied up. She said she had fallen down-stairs in her excitement. It was natural, of course, that the thing would shock her, having been the Armstrongs' housekeeper for several years, and knowing Mr. Arnold well. Gertrude had slipped out during my talk with Mrs. Watson, and I dressed and went down-stairs. The billiard and card-rooms were locked until the coroner and the detectives got there, and the men from the club had gone back for more conventional clothing. I could hear Thomas in the pantry, alternately wailing for Mr. Arnold, as he called him, and citing the tokens that had precursed the murder. The house seemed to choke me, and, slipping a shawl around me, I went out on the drive. At the corner by the east wing I met Liddy. Her skirts were draggled with dew to her knees, and her hair was still in crimps. "Go right in and change your clothes," I said sharply. "You're a sight, and at your age!" She had a golf-stick in her hand, and she said she had found it on the lawn. There was nothing unusual about it, but it occurred to me that a golf-stick with a metal end might have been the object that had scratched the stairs near the card-room. I took it from her, and sent her up for dry garments. Her daylight courage and self-importance, and her shuddering delight in the mystery, irritated me beyond words. After I left her I made a circuit of the building. Nothing seemed to be disturbed: the house looked as calm and peaceful in the morning sun as it had the day I had been coerced into taking it. There was nothing to show that inside had been mystery and violence and sudden death. In one of the tulip beds back of the house an early blackbird was pecking viciously at something that glittered in the light. I picked my way gingerly over through the dew and stooped down: almost buried in the soft ground was a revolver! I scraped the earth off it with the tip of my shoe, and, picking it up, slipped it into my pocket. Not until I had got into my bedroom and double-locked the door did I venture to take it out and examine it. One look was all I needed. It was Halsey's revolver. I had unpacked it the day before and put it on his shaving-stand, and there could be no mistake. His name was on a small silver plate on the handle. I seemed to see a network closing around my boy, innocent as I knew he was. The revolver--I am afraid of them, but anxiety gave me courage to look through the barrel--the revolver had still two bullets in it. I could only breathe a prayer of thankfulness that I had found the revolver before any sharp-eyed detective had come around. I decided to keep what clues I had, the cuff-link, the golf-stick and the revolver, in a secure place until I could see some reason for displaying them. The cuff-link had been dropped into a little filigree box on my toilet table. I opened the box and felt around for it. The box was empty--the cuff-link had disappeared! CHAPTER V GERTRUDE'S ENGAGEMENT At ten o'clock the Casanova hack brought up three men. They introduced themselves as the coroner of the county and two detectives from the city. The coroner led the way at once to the locked wing, and with the aid of one of the detectives examined the rooms and the body. The other detective, after a short scrutiny of the dead man, busied himself with the outside of the house. It was only after they had got a fair idea of things as they were that they sent for me. I received them in the living-room, and I had made up my mind exactly what to tell. I had taken the house for the summer, I said, while the Armstrongs were in California. In spite of a rumor among the servants about strange noises--I cited Thomas--nothing had occurred the first two nights. On the third night I believed that some one had been in the house: I had heard a crashing sound, but being alone with one maid had not investigated. The house had been locked in the morning and apparently undisturbed. Then, as clearly as I could, I related how, the night before, a shot had roused us; that my niece and I had investigated and found a body; that I did not know who the murdered man was until Mr. Jarvis from the club informed me, and that I knew of no reason why Mr. Arnold Armstrong should steal into his father's house at night. I should have been glad to allow him entree there at any time. "Have you reason to believe, Miss Innes," the coroner asked, "that any member of your household, imagining Mr. Armstrong was a burglar, shot him in self-defense?" "I have no reason for thinking so," I said quietly. "Your theory is that Mr. Armstrong was followed here by some enemy, and shot as he entered the house?" "I don't think I have a theory," I said. "The thing that has puzzled me is why Mr. Armstrong should enter his father's house two nights in succession, stealing in like a thief, when he needed only to ask entrance to be admitted." The coroner was a very silent man: he took some notes after this, but he seemed anxious to make the next train back to town. He set the inquest for the following Saturday, gave Mr. Jamieson, the younger of the two detectives, and the more intelligent looking, a few instructions, and, after gravely shaking hands with me and regretting the unfortunate affair, took his departure, accompanied by the other detective. I was just beginning to breathe freely when Mr. Jamieson, who had been standing by the window, came over to me. "The family consists of yourself alone, Miss Innes?" "My niece is here," I said. "There is no one but yourself and your niece?" "My nephew." I had to moisten my lips. "Oh, a nephew. I should like to see him, if he is here." "He is not here just now," I said as quietly as I could. "I expect him--at any time." "He was here yesterday evening, I believe?" "No--yes." "Didn't he have a guest with him? Another man?" "He brought a friend with him to stay over Sunday, Mr. Bailey." "Mr. John Bailey, the cashier of the Traders' Bank I believe." And I knew that some one at the Greenwood Club had told. "When did they leave?" "Very early--I don't know at just what time." Mr. Jamieson turned suddenly and looked at me. "Please try to be more explicit," he said. "You say your nephew and Mr. Bailey were in the house last night, and yet you and your niece, with some women-servants, found the body. Where was your nephew?" I was entirely desperate by that time. "I do not know," I cried, "but be sure of this: Halsey knows nothing of this thing, and no amount of circumstantial evidence can make an innocent man guilty." "Sit down," he said, pushing forward a chair. "There are some things I have to tell you, and, in return, please tell me all you know. Believe me, things always come out. In the first place, Mr. Armstrong was shot from above. The bullet was fired at close range, entered below the shoulder and came out, after passing through the heart, well down the back. In other words, I believe the murderer stood on the stairs and fired down. In the second place, I found on the edge of the billiard-table a charred cigar which had burned itself partly out, and a cigarette which had consumed itself to the cork tip. Neither one had been more than lighted, then put down and forgotten. Have you any idea what it was that made your nephew and Mr. Bailey leave their cigars and their game, take out the automobile without calling the chauffeur, and all this at--let me see certainly before three o'clock in the morning?" "I don't know," I said; "but depend on it, Mr. Jamieson, Halsey will be back himself to explain everything." "I sincerely hope so," he said. "Miss Innes, has it occurred to you that Mr. Bailey might know something of this?" Gertrude had come down-stairs and just as he spoke she came in. I saw her stop suddenly, as if she had been struck. "He does not," she said in a tone that was not her own. "Mr. Bailey and my brother know nothing of this. The murder was committed at three. They left the house at a quarter before three." "How do you know that?" Mr. Jamieson asked oddly. "Do you KNOW at what time they left?" "I do," Gertrude answered firmly. "At a quarter before three my brother and Mr. Bailey left the house, by the main entrance. I--was--there." "Gertrude," I said excitedly, "you are dreaming! Why, at a quarter to three--" "Listen," she said. "At half-past two the downstairs telephone rang. I had not gone to sleep, and I heard it. Then I heard Halsey answer it, and in a few minutes he came up-stairs and knocked at my door. We--we talked for a minute, then I put on my dressing-gown and slippers, and went down-stairs with him. Mr. Bailey was in the billiard-room. We--we all talked together for perhaps ten minutes. Then it was decided that--that they should both go away--" "Can't you be more explicit?" Mr. Jamieson asked. "WHY did they go away?" "I am only telling you what happened, not why it happened," she said evenly. "Halsey went for the car, and instead of bringing it to the house and rousing people, he went by the lower road from the stable. Mr. Bailey was to meet him at the foot of the lawn. Mr. Bailey left--" "Which way?" Mr. Jamieson asked sharply. "By the main entrance. He left--it was a quarter to three. I know exactly." "The clock in the hall is stopped, Miss Innes," said Jamieson. Nothing seemed to escape him. "He looked at his watch," she replied, and I could see Mr. Jamieson's snap, as if he had made a discovery. As for myself, during the whole recital I had been plunged into the deepest amazement. "Will you pardon me for a personal question?" The detective was a youngish man, and I thought he was somewhat embarrassed. "What are your--your relations with Mr. Bailey?" Gertrude hesitated. Then she came over and put her hand lovingly in mine. "I am engaged to marry him," she said simply. I had grown so accustomed to surprises that I could only gasp again, and as for Gertrude, the hand that lay in mine was burning with fever. "And--after that," Mr. Jamieson went on, "you went directly to bed?" Gertrude hesitated. "No," she said finally. "I--I am not nervous, and after I had extinguished the light, I remembered something I had left in the billiard-room, and I felt my way back there through the darkness." "Will you tell me what it was you had forgotten?" "I can not tell you," she said slowly. "I--I did not leave the billiard-room at once--" "Why?" The detective's tone was imperative. "This is very important, Miss Innes." "I was crying," Gertrude said in a low tone. "When the French clock in the drawing-room struck three, I got up, and then--I heard a step on the east porch, just outside the card-room. Some one with a key was working with the latch, and I thought, of course, of Halsey. When we took the house he called that his entrance, and he had carried a key for it ever since. The door opened and I was about to ask what he had forgotten, when there was a flash and a report. Some heavy body dropped, and, half crazed with terror and shock, I ran through the drawing-room and got up-stairs--I scarcely remember how." She dropped into a chair, and I thought Mr. Jamieson must have finished. But he was not through. "You certainly clear your brother and Mr. Bailey admirably," he said. "The testimony is invaluable, especially in view of the fact that your brother and Mr. Armstrong had, I believe, quarreled rather seriously some time ago." "Nonsense," I broke in. "Things are bad enough, Mr. Jamieson, without inventing bad feeling where it doesn't exist. Gertrude, I don't think Halsey knew the--the murdered man, did he?" But Mr. Jamieson was sure of his ground. "The quarrel, I believe," he persisted, "was about Mr. Armstrong's conduct to you, Miss Gertrude. He had been paying you unwelcome attentions." And I had never seen the man! When she nodded a "yes" I saw the tremendous possibilities involved. If this detective could prove that Gertrude feared and disliked the murdered man, and that Mr. Armstrong had been annoying and possibly pursuing her with hateful attentions, all that, added to Gertrude's confession of her presence in the billiard-room at the time of the crime, looked strange, to say the least. The prominence of the family assured a strenuous effort to find the murderer, and if we had nothing worse to look forward to, we were sure of a distasteful publicity. Mr. Jamieson shut his note-book with a snap, and thanked us. "I have an idea," he said, apropos of nothing at all, "that at any rate the ghost is laid here. Whatever the rappings have been--and the colored man says they began when the family went west three months ago--they are likely to stop now." Which shows how much he knew about it. The ghost was not laid: with the murder of Arnold Armstrong he, or it, only seemed to take on fresh vigor. Mr. Jamieson left then, and when Gertrude had gone up-stairs, as she did at once, I sat and thought over what I had just heard. Her engagement, once so engrossing a matter, paled now beside the significance of her story. If Halsey and Jack Bailey had left before the crime, how came Halsey's revolver in the tulip bed? What was the mysterious cause of their sudden flight? What had Gertrude left in the billiard-room? What was the significance of the cuff-link, and where was it? CHAPTER VI IN THE EAST CORRIDOR When the detective left he enjoined absolute secrecy on everybody in the household. The Greenwood Club promised the same thing, and as there are no Sunday afternoon papers, the murder was not publicly known until Monday. The coroner himself notified the Armstrong family lawyer, and early in the afternoon he came out. I had not seen Mr. Jamieson since morning, but I knew he had been interrogating the servants. Gertrude was locked in her room with a headache, and I had luncheon alone. Mr. Harton, the lawyer, was a little, thin man, and he looked as if he did not relish his business that day. "This is very unfortunate, Miss Innes," he said, after we had shaken hands. "Most unfortunate--and mysterious. With the father and mother in the west, I find everything devolves on me; and, as you can understand, it is an unpleasant duty." "No doubt," I said absently. "Mr. Harton, I am going to ask you some questions, and I hope you will answer them. I feel that I am entitled to some knowledge, because I and my family are just now in a most ambiguous position." I don't know whether he understood me or not: he took of his glasses and wiped them. "I shall be very happy," he said with old-fashioned courtesy. "Thank you. Mr. Harton, did Mr. Arnold Armstrong know that Sunnyside had been rented?" "I think--yes, he did. In fact, I myself told him about it." "And he knew who the tenants were?" "Yes." "He had not been living with the family for some years, I believe?" "No. Unfortunately, there had been trouble between Arnold and his father. For two years he had lived in town." "Then it would be unlikely that he came here last night to get possession of anything belonging to him?" "I should think it hardly possible," he admitted. "To be perfectly frank, Miss Innes, I can not think of any reason whatever for his coming here as he did. He had been staying at the club-house across the valley for the last week, Jarvis tells me, but that only explains how he came here, not why. It is a most unfortunate family." He shook his head despondently, and I felt that this dried-up little man was the repository of much that he had not told me. I gave up trying to elicit any information from him, and we went together to view the body before it was taken to the city. It had been lifted on to the billiard-table and a sheet thrown over it; otherwise nothing had been touched. A soft hat lay beside it, and the collar of the dinner-coat was still turned up. The handsome, dissipated face of Arnold Armstrong, purged of its ugly lines, was now only pathetic. As we went in Mrs. Watson appeared at the card-room door. "Come in, Mrs. Watson," the lawyer said. But she shook her head and withdrew: she was the only one in the house who seemed to regret the dead man, and even she seemed rather shocked than sorry. I went to the door at the foot of the circular staircase and opened it. If I could only have seen Halsey coming at his usual hare-brained clip up the drive, if I could have heard the throb of the motor, I would have felt that my troubles were over. But there was nothing to be seen. The countryside lay sunny and quiet in its peaceful Sunday afternoon calm, and far down the drive Mr. Jamieson was walking slowly, stooping now and then, as if to examine the road. When I went back, Mr. Harton was furtively wiping his eyes. "The prodigal has come home, Miss Innes," he said. "How often the sins of the fathers are visited on the children!" Which left me pondering. Before Mr. Harton left, he told me something of the Armstrong family. Paul Armstrong, the father, had been married twice. Arnold was a son by the first marriage. The second Mrs. Armstrong had been a widow, with a child, a little girl. This child, now perhaps twenty, was Louise Armstrong, having taken her stepfather's name, and was at present in California with the family. "They will probably return at once," he concluded "sad part of my errand here to-day is to see if you will relinquish your lease here in their favor." "We would better wait and see if they wish to come," I said. "It seems unlikely, and my town house is being remodeled." At that he let the matter drop, but it came up unpleasantly enough, later. At six o'clock the body was taken away, and at seven-thirty, after an early dinner, Mr. Harton went. Gertrude had not come down, and there was no news of Halsey. Mr. Jamieson had taken a lodging in the village, and I had not seen him since mid-afternoon. It was about nine o'clock, I think, when the bell rang and he was ushered into the living-room. "Sit down," I said grimly. "Have you found a clue that will incriminate me, Mr. Jamieson?" He had the grace to look uncomfortable. "No," he said. "If you had killed Mr. Armstrong, you would have left no clues. You would have had too much intelligence." After that we got along better. He was fishing in his pocket, and after a minute he brought out two scraps of paper. "I have been to the club-house," he said, "and among Mr. Armstrong's effects, I found these. One is curious; the other is puzzling." The first was a sheet of club note-paper, on which was written, over and over, the name "Halsey B. Innes." It was Halsey's flowing signature to a dot, but it lacked Halsey's ease. The ones toward the bottom of the sheet were much better than the top ones. Mr. Jamieson smiled at my face. "His old tricks," he said. "That one is merely curious; this one, as I said before, is puzzling." The second scrap, folded and refolded into a compass so tiny that the writing had been partly obliterated, was part of a letter--the lower half of a sheet, not typed, but written in a cramped hand. "----by altering the plans for----rooms, may be possible. The best way, in my opinion, would be to----the plan for----in one of the----rooms----chimney." That was all. "Well?" I said, looking up. "There is nothing in that, is there? A man ought to be able to change the plan of his house without becoming an object of suspicion." "There is little in the paper itself," he admitted; "but why should Arnold Armstrong carry that around, unless it meant something? He never built a house, you may be sure of that. If it is this house, it may mean anything, from a secret room--" "To an extra bath-room," I said scornfully. "Haven't you a thumb-print, too?" "I have," he said with a smile, "and the print of a foot in a tulip bed, and a number of other things. The oddest part is, Miss Innes, that the thumb-mark is probably yours and the footprint certainly." His audacity was the only thing that saved me: his amused smile put me on my mettle, and I ripped out a perfectly good scallop before I answered. "Why did I step into the tulip bed?" I asked with interest. "You picked up something," he said good-humoredly, "which you are going to tell me about later." "Am I, indeed?" I was politely curious. "With this remarkable insight of yours, I wish you would tell me where I shall find my four-thousand-dollar motor car." "I was just coming to that," he said. "You will find it about thirty miles away, at Andrews Station, in a blacksmith shop, where it is being repaired." I laid down my knitting then and looked at him. "And Halsey?" I managed to say. "We are going to exchange information," he said "I am going to tell you that, when you tell me what you picked up in the tulip bed." We looked steadily at each other: it was not an unfriendly stare; we were only measuring weapons. Then he smiled a little and got up. "With your permission," he said, "I am going to examine the card-room and the staircase again. You might think over my offer in the meantime." He went on through the drawing-room, and I listened to his footsteps growing gradually fainter. I dropped my pretense at knitting and, leaning back, I thought over the last forty-eight hours. Here was I, Rachel Innes, spinster, a granddaughter of old John Innes of Revolutionary days, a D. A. R., a Colonial Dame, mixed up with a vulgar and revolting crime, and even attempting to hoodwink the law! Certainly I had left the straight and narrow way. I was roused by hearing Mr. Jamieson coming rapidly back through the drawing-room. He stopped at the door. "Miss Innes," he said quickly, "will you come with me and light the east corridor? I have fastened somebody in the small room at the head of the card-room stairs." I jumped! up at once. "You mean--the murderer?" I gasped. "Possibly," he said quietly, as we hurried together up the stairs. "Some one was lurking on the staircase when I went back. I spoke; instead of an answer, whoever it was turned and ran up. I followed--it was dark--but as I turned the corner at the top a figure darted through this door and closed it. The bolt was on my side, and I pushed it forward. It is a closet, I think." We were in the upper hall now. "If you will show me the electric switch, Miss Innes, you would better wait in your own room." Trembling as I was, I was determined to see that door opened. I hardly knew what I feared, but so many terrible and inexplicable things had happened that suspense was worse than certainty. "I am perfectly cool," I said, "and I am going to remain here." The lights flashed up along that end of the corridor, throwing the doors into relief. At the intersection of the small hallway with the larger, the circular staircase wound its way up, as if it had been an afterthought of the architect. And just around the corner, in the small corridor, was the door Mr. Jamieson had indicated. I was still unfamiliar with the house, and I did not remember the door. My heart was thumping wildly in my ears, but I nodded to him to go ahead. I was perhaps eight or ten feet away--and then he threw the bolt back. "Come out," he said quietly. There was no response. "Come--out," he repeated. Then--I think he had a revolver, but I am not sure--he stepped aside and threw the door open. From where I stood I could not see beyond the door, but I saw Mr. Jamieson's face change and heard him mutter something, then he bolted down the stairs, three at a time. When my knees had stopped shaking, I moved forward, slowly, nervously, until I had a partial view of what was beyond the door. It seemed at first to be a closet, empty. Then I went close and examined it, to stop with a shudder. Where the floor should have been was black void and darkness, from which came the indescribable, damp smell of the cellars. Mr. Jamieson had locked somebody in the clothes chute. As I leaned over I fancied I heard a groan--or was it the wind? CHAPTER VII A SPRAINED ANKLE I was panic-stricken. As I ran along the corridor I was confident that the mysterious intruder and probable murderer had been found, and that he lay dead or dying at the foot of the chute. I got down the staircase somehow, and through the kitchen to the basement stairs. Mr. Jamieson had been before me, and the door stood open. Liddy was standing in the middle of the kitchen, holding a frying-pan by the handle as a weapon. "Don't go down there," she yelled, when she saw me moving toward the basement stairs. "Don't you do it, Miss Rachel. That Jamieson's down there now. There's only trouble comes of hunting ghosts; they lead you into bottomless pits and things like that. Oh, Miss Rachel, don't--" as I tried to get past her. She was interrupted by Mr. Jamieson's reappearance. He ran up the stairs two at a time, and his face was flushed and furious. "The whole place is locked," he said angrily. "Where's the laundry key kept?" "It's kept in the door," Liddy snapped. "That whole end of the cellar is kept locked, so nobody can get at the clothes, and then the key's left in the door? so that unless a thief was as blind as--as some detectives, he could walk right in." "Liddy," I said sharply, "come down with us and turn on all the lights." She offered her resignation, as usual, on the spot, but I took her by the arm, and she came along finally. She switched on all the lights and pointed to a door just ahead. "That's the door," she said sulkily. "The key's in it." But the key was not in it. Mr. Jamieson shook it, but it was a heavy door, well locked. And then he stooped and began punching around the keyhole with the end of a lead-pencil. When he stood up his face was exultant. "It's locked on the inside," he said in a low tone. "There is somebody in there." "Lord have mercy!" gasped Liddy, and turned to run. "Liddy," I called, "go through the house at once and see who is missing, or if any one is. We'll have to clear this thing at once. Mr. Jamieson, if you will watch here I will go to the lodge and find Warner. Thomas would be of no use. Together you may be able to force the door." "A good idea," he assented. "But--there are windows, of course, and there is nothing to prevent whoever is in there from getting out that way." "Then lock the door at the top of the basement stairs," I suggested, "and patrol the house from the outside." We agreed to this, and I had a feeling that the mystery of Sunnyside was about to be solved. I ran down the steps and along the drive. Just at the corner I ran full tilt into somebody who seemed to be as much alarmed as I was. It was not until I had recoiled a step or two that I recognized Gertrude, and she me. "Good gracious, Aunt Ray," she exclaimed, "what is the matter?" "There's somebody locked in the laundry," I panted. "That is--unless--you didn't see any one crossing the lawn or skulking around the house, did you?" "I think we have mystery on the brain," Gertrude said wearily. "No, I haven't seen any one, except old Thomas, who looked for all the world as if he had been ransacking the pantry. What have you locked in the laundry?" "I can't wait to explain," I replied. "I must get Warner from the lodge. If you came out for air, you'd better put on your overshoes." And then I noticed that Gertrude was limping--not much, but sufficiently to make her progress very slow, and seemingly painful. "You have hurt yourself," I said sharply. "I fell over the carriage block," she explained. "I thought perhaps I might see Halsey coming home. He--he ought to be here." I hurried on down the drive. The lodge was some distance from the house, in a grove of trees where the drive met the county road. There were two white stone pillars to mark the entrance, but the iron gates, once closed and tended by the lodge-keeper, now stood permanently open. The day of the motor-car had come; no one had time for closed gates and lodge-keepers. The lodge at Sunnyside was merely a sort of supplementary servants' quarters: it was as convenient in its appointments as the big house and infinitely more cozy. As I went down the drive, my thoughts were busy. Who would it be that Mr. Jamieson had trapped in the cellar? Would we find a body or some one badly injured? Scarcely either. Whoever had fallen had been able to lock the laundry door on the inside. If the fugitive had come from outside the house, how did he get in? If it was some member of the household, who could it have been? And then--a feeling of horror almost overwhelmed me. Gertrude! Gertrude and her injured ankle! Gertrude found limping slowly up the drive when I had thought she was in bed! I tried to put the thought away, but it would not go. If Gertrude had been on the circular staircase that night, why had she fled from Mr. Jamieson? The idea, puzzling as it was, seemed borne out by this circumstance. Whoever had taken refuge at the head of the stairs could scarcely have been familiar with the house, or with the location of the chute. The mystery seemed to deepen constantly. What possible connection could there be between Halsey and Gertrude, and the murder of Arnold Armstrong? And yet, every way I turned I seemed to find something that pointed to such a connection. At the foot of the drive the road described a long, sloping, horseshoe-shaped curve around the lodge. There were lights there, streaming cheerfully out on to the trees, and from an upper room came wavering shadows, as if some one with a lamp was moving around. I had come almost silently in my evening slippers, and I had my second collision of the evening on the road just above the house. I ran full into a man in a long coat, who was standing in the shadow beside the drive, with his back to me, watching the lighted windows. "What the hell!" he ejaculated furiously, and turned around. When he saw me, however, he did not wait for any retort on my part. He faded away--this is not slang; he did--he absolutely disappeared in the dusk without my getting more than a glimpse of his face. I had a vague impression of unfamiliar features and of a sort of cap with a visor. Then he was gone. I went to the lodge and rapped. It required two or three poundings to bring Thomas to the door, and he opened it only an inch or so. "Where is Warner?" I asked. "I--I think he's in bed, ma'm." "Get him up," I said, "and for goodness' sake open the door, Thomas. I'll wait for Warner." "It's kind o' close in here, ma'm," he said, obeying gingerly, and disclosing a cool and comfortable looking interior. "Perhaps you'd keer to set on the porch an' rest yo'self." It was so evident that Thomas did not want me inside that I went in. "Tell Warner he is needed in a hurry," I repeated, and turned into the little sitting-room. I could hear Thomas going up the stairs, could hear him rouse Warner, and the steps of the chauffeur as he hurriedly dressed. But my attention was busy with the room below. On the center-table, open, was a sealskin traveling bag. It was filled with gold-topped bottles and brushes, and it breathed opulence, luxury, femininity from every inch of surface. How did it get there? I was still asking myself the question when Warner came running down the stairs and into the room. He was completely but somewhat incongruously dressed, and his open, boyish face looked abashed. He was a country boy, absolutely frank and reliable, of fair education and intelligence--one of the small army of American youths who turn a natural aptitude for mechanics into the special field of the automobile, and earn good salaries in a congenial occupation. "What is it, Miss Innes?" he asked anxiously. "There is some one locked in the laundry," I replied. "Mr. Jamieson wants you to help him break the lock. Warner, whose bag is this?" He was in the doorway by this time, and he pretended not to hear. "Warner," I called, "come back here. Whose bag is this?" He stopped then, but he did not turn around. "It's--it belongs to Thomas," he said, and fled up the drive. To Thomas! A London bag with mirrors and cosmetic jars of which Thomas could not even have guessed the use! However, I put the bag in the back of my mind, which was fast becoming stored with anomalous and apparently irreconcilable facts, and followed Warner to the house. Liddy had come back to the kitchen: the door to the basement stairs was double-barred, and had a table pushed against it; and beside her on the table was most of the kitchen paraphernalia. "Did you see if there was any one missing in the house?" I asked, ignoring the array of sauce-pans rolling-pins, and the poker of the range. "Rosie is missing," Liddy said with unction. She had objected to Rosie, the parlor maid, from the start. "Mrs. Watson went into her room, and found she had gone without her hat. People that trust themselves a dozen miles from the city, in strange houses, with servants they don't know, needn't be surprised if they wake up some morning and find their throats cut." After which carefully veiled sarcasm Liddy relapsed into gloom. Warner came in then with a handful of small tools, and Mr. Jamieson went with him to the basement. Oddly enough, I was not alarmed. With all my heart I wished for Halsey, but I was not frightened. At the door he was to force, Warner put down his tools and looked at it. Then he turned the handle. Without the slightest difficulty the door opened, revealing the blackness of the drying-room beyond! Mr. Jamieson gave an exclamation of disgust. "Gone!" he said. "Confound such careless work! I might have known." It was true enough. We got the lights on finally and looked all through the three rooms that constituted this wing of the basement. Everything was quiet and empty. An explanation of how the fugitive had escaped injury was found in a heaped-up basket of clothes under the chute. The basket had been overturned, but that was all. Mr. Jamieson examined the windows: one was unlocked, and offered an easy escape. The window or the door? Which way had the fugitive escaped? The door seemed most probable, and I hoped it had been so. I could not have borne, just then, to think that it was my poor Gertrude we had been hounding through the darkness, and yet--I had met Gertrude not far from that very window. I went up-stairs at last, tired and depressed. Mrs. Watson and Liddy were making tea in the kitchen. In certain walks of life the tea-pot is the refuge in times of stress, trouble or sickness: they give tea to the dying and they put it in the baby's nursing bottle. Mrs. Watson was fixing a tray to be sent in to me, and when I asked her about Rosie she confirmed her absence. "She's not here," she said; "but I would not think much of that, Miss Innes. Rosie is a pretty young girl, and perhaps she has a sweetheart. It will be a good thing if she has. The maids stay much better when they have something like that to hold them here." Gertrude had gone back to her room, and while I was drinking my cup of hot tea, Mr. Jamieson came in. "We might take up the conversation where we left off an hour and a half ago," he said. "But before we go on, I want to say this: The person who escaped from the laundry was a woman with a foot of moderate size and well arched. She wore nothing but a stocking on her right foot, and, in spite of the unlocked door, she escaped by the window." And again I thought of Gertrude's sprained ankle. Was it the right or the left? CHAPTER VIII THE OTHER HALF OF THE LINE "Miss Innes," the detective began, "what is your opinion of the figure you saw on the east veranda the night you and your maid were in the house alone?" "It was a woman," I said positively. "And yet your maid affirms with equal positiveness that it was a man." "Nonsense," I broke in. "Liddy had her eyes shut--she always shuts them when she's frightened." "And you never thought then that the intruder who came later that night might be a woman--the woman, in fact, whom you saw on the veranda?" "I had reasons for thinking it was a man," I said remembering the pearl cuff-link. "Now we are getting down to business. WHAT were your reasons for thinking that?" I hesitated. "If you have any reason for believing that your midnight guest was Mr. Armstrong, other than his visit here the next night, you ought to tell me, Miss Innes. We can take nothing for granted. If, for instance, the intruder who dropped the bar and scratched the staircase--you see, I know about that--if this visitor was a woman, why should not the same woman have come back the following night, met Mr. Armstrong on the circular staircase, and in alarm shot him?" "It was a man," I reiterated. And then, because I could think of no other reason for my statement, I told him about the pearl cuff-link. He was intensely interested. "Will you give me the link," he said, when I finished, "or, at least, let me see it? I consider it a most important clue." "Won't the description do?" "Not as well as the original." "Well, I'm very sorry," I said, as calmly as I could, "I--the thing is lost. It--it must have fallen out of a box on my dressing-table." Whatever he thought of my explanation, and I knew he doubted it, he made no sign. He asked me to describe the link accurately, and I did so, while he glanced at a list he took from his pocket. "One set monogram cuff-links," he read, "one set plain pearl links, one set cuff-links, woman's head set with diamonds and emeralds. There is no mention of such a link as you describe, and yet, if your theory is right, Mr. Armstrong must have taken back in his cuffs one complete cuff-link, and a half, perhaps, of the other." The idea was new to me. If it had not been the murdered man who had entered the house that night, who had it been? "There are a number of strange things connected with this case," the detective went on. "Miss Gertrude Innes testified that she heard some one fumbling with the lock, that the door opened, and that almost immediately the shot was fired. Now, Miss Innes, here is the strange part of that. Mr. Armstrong had no key with him. There was no key in the lock, or on the floor. In other words, the evidence points absolutely to this: Mr. Armstrong was admitted to the house from within." "It is impossible," I broke in. "Mr. Jamieson, do you know what your words imply? Do you know that you are practically accusing Gertrude Innes of admitting that man?" "Not quite that," he said, with his friendly smile. "In fact, Miss Innes, I am quite certain she did not. But as long as I learn only parts of the truth, from both you and her, what can I do? I know you picked up something in the flower bed: you refuse to tell me what it was. I know Miss Gertrude went back to the billiard-room to get something, she refuses to say what. You suspect what happened to the cuff-link, but you won't tell me. So far, all I am sure of is this: I do not believe Arnold Armstrong was the midnight visitor who so alarmed you by dropping--shall we say, a golf-stick? And I believe that when he did come he was admitted by some one in the house. Who knows--it may have been--Liddy!" I stirred my tea angrily. "I have always heard," I said dryly, "that undertakers' assistants are jovial young men. A man's sense of humor seems to be in inverse proportion to the gravity of his profession." "A man's sense of humor is a barbarous and a cruel thing, Miss Innes," he admitted. "It is to the feminine as the hug of a bear is to the scratch of--well;--anything with claws. Is that you, Thomas? Come in." Thomas Johnson stood in the doorway. He looked alarmed and apprehensive, and suddenly I remembered the sealskin dressing-bag in the lodge. Thomas came just inside the door and stood with his head drooping, his eyes, under their shaggy gray brows, fixed on Mr. Jamieson. "Thomas," said the detective, not unkindly, "I sent for you to tell us what you told Sam Bohannon at the club, the day before Mr. Arnold was found here, dead. Let me see. You came here Friday night to see Miss Innes, didn't you? And came to work here Saturday morning?" For some unexplained reason Thomas looked relieved. "Yas, sah," he said. "You see it were like this: When Mistah Armstrong and the fam'ly went away, Mis' Watson an' me, we was lef' in charge till the place was rented. Mis' Watson, she've bin here a good while, an' she warn' skeery. So she slep' in the house. I'd bin havin' tokens--I tol' Mis' Innes some of 'em--an' I slep' in the lodge. Then one day Mis' Watson, she came to me an' she sez, sez she, 'Thomas, you'll hev to sleep up in the big house. I'm too nervous to do it any more.' But I jes' reckon to myself that ef it's too skeery fer her, it's too skeery fer me. We had it, then, sho' nuff, and it ended up with Mis' Watson stayin' in the lodge nights an' me lookin' fer work at de club." "Did Mrs. Watson say that anything had happened to alarm her?" "No, sah. She was jes' natchally skeered. Well, that was all, far's I know, until the night I come over to see Mis' Innes. I come across the valley, along the path from the club-house, and I goes home that way. Down in the creek bottom I almost run into a man. He wuz standin' with his back to me, an' he was workin' with one of these yere electric light things that fit in yer pocket. He was havin' trouble--one minute it'd flash out, an' the nex' it'd be gone. I hed a view of 'is white dress shirt an' tie, as I passed. I didn't see his face. But I know it warn't Mr. Arnold. It was a taller man than Mr. Arnold. Beside that, Mr. Arnold was playin' cards when I got to the club-house, same's he'd been doin' all day." "And the next morning you came back along the path," pursued Mr. Jamieson relentlessly. "The nex' mornin' I come back along the path an' down where I dun see the man night befoh, I picked up this here." The old man held out a tiny object and Mr. Jamieson took it. Then he held it on his extended palm for me to see. It was the other half of the pearl cuff-link! But Mr. Jamieson was not quite through questioning him. "And so you showed it to Sam, at the club, and asked him if he knew any one who owned such a link, and Sam said--what?" "Wal, Sam, he 'lowed he'd seen such a pair of cuff-buttons in a shirt belongin' to Mr. Bailey--Mr. Jack Bailey, sah." "I'll keep this link, Thomas, for a while," the detective said. "That's all I wanted to know. Good night." As Thomas shuffled out, Mr. Jamieson watched me sharply. "You see, Miss Innes," he said, "Mr. Bailey insists on mixing himself with this thing. If Mr. Bailey came here that Friday night expecting to meet Arnold Armstrong, and missed him--if, as I say, he had done this, might he not, seeing him enter the following night, have struck him down, as he had intended before?" "But the motive?" I gasped. "There could be motive proved, I think. Arnold Armstrong and John Bailey have been enemies since the latter, as cashier of the Traders' Bank, brought Arnold almost into the clutches of the law. Also, you forget that both men have been paying attention to Miss Gertrude. Bailey's flight looks bad, too." "And you think Halsey helped him to escape?" "Undoubtedly. Why, what could it be but flight? Miss Innes, let me reconstruct that evening, as I see it. Bailey and Armstrong had quarreled at the club. I learned this to-day. Your nephew brought Bailey over. Prompted by jealous, insane fury, Armstrong followed, coming across by the path. He entered the billiard-room wing--perhaps rapping, and being admitted by your nephew. Just inside he was shot, by some one on the circular staircase. The shot fired, your nephew and Bailey left the house at once, going toward the automobile house. They left by the lower road, which prevented them being heard, and when you and Miss Gertrude got down-stairs everything was quiet." "But--Gertrude's story," I stammered. "Miss Gertrude only brought forward her explanation the following morning. I do not believe it, Miss Innes. It is the story of a loving and ingenious woman." "And--this thing to-night?" "May upset my whole view of the case. We must give the benefit of every doubt, after all. We may, for instance, come back to the figure on the porch: if it was a woman you saw that night through the window, we might start with other premises. Or Mr. Innes' explanation may turn us in a new direction. It is possible that he shot Arnold Armstrong as a burglar and then fled, frightened at what he had done. In any case, however, I feel confident that the body was here when he left. Mr. Armstrong left the club ostensibly for a moonlight saunter, about half after eleven o'clock. It was three when the shot was fired." I leaned back bewildered. It seemed to me that the evening had been full of significant happenings, had I only held the key. Had Gertrude been the fugitive in the clothes chute? Who was the man on the drive near the lodge, and whose gold-mounted dressing-bag had I seen in the lodge sitting-room? It was late when Mr. Jamieson finally got up to go. I went with him to the door, and together we stood looking out over the valley. Below lay the village of Casanova, with its Old World houses, its blossoming trees and its peace. Above on the hill across the valley were the lights of the Greenwood Club. It was even possible to see the curving row of parallel lights that marked the carriage road. Rumors that I had heard about the club came back--of drinking, of high play, and once, a year ago, of a suicide under those very lights. Mr. Jamieson left, taking a short cut to the village, and I still stood there. It must have been after eleven, and the monotonous tick of the big clock on the stairs behind me was the only sound. Then I was conscious that some one was running up the drive. In a minute a woman darted into the area of light made by the open door, and caught me by the arm. It was Rosie--Rosie in a state of collapse from terror, and, not the least important, clutching one of my Coalport plates and a silver spoon. She stood staring into the darkness behind, still holding the plate. I got her into the house and secured the plate; then I stood and looked down at her where she crouched tremblingly against the doorway. "Well," I asked, "didn't your young man enjoy his meal?" She couldn't speak. She looked at the spoon she still held--I wasn't so anxious about it: thank Heaven, it wouldn't chip--and then she stared at me. "I appreciate your desire to have everything nice for him," I went on, "but the next time, you might take the Limoges china It's more easily duplicated and less expensive." "I haven't a young man--not here." She had got her breath now, as I had guessed she would. "I--I have been chased by a thief, Miss Innes." "Did he chase you out of the house and back again?" I asked. Then Rosie began to cry--not silently, but noisily, hysterically. I stopped her by giving her a good shake. "What in the world is the matter with you?" I snapped. "Has the day of good common sense gone by! Sit up and tell me the whole thing." Rosie sat up then, and sniffled. "I was coming up the drive--" she began. "You must start with when you went DOWN the drive, with my dishes and my silver," I interrupted, but, seeing more signs of hysteria, I gave in. "Very well. You were coming up the drive--" "I had a basket of--of silver and dishes on my arm and I was carrying the plate, because--because I was afraid I'd break it. Part-way up the road a man stepped out of the bushes, and held his arm like this, spread out, so I couldn't get past. He said--he said--'Not so fast, young lady; I want you to let me see what's in that basket.'" She got up in her excitement and took hold of my arm. "It was like this, Miss Innes," she said, "and say you was the man. When he said that, I screamed and ducked under his arm like this. He caught at the basket and I dropped it. I ran as fast as I could, and he came after as far as the trees. Then he stopped. Oh, Miss Innes, it must have been the man that killed that Mr. Armstrong!" "Don't be foolish," I said. "Whoever killed Mr. Armstrong would put as much space between himself and this house as he could. Go up to bed now; and mind, if I hear of this story being repeated to the other maids, I shall deduct from your wages for every broken dish I find in the drive." I listened to Rosie as she went up-stairs, running past the shadowy places and slamming her door. Then I sat down and looked at the Coalport plate and the silver spoon. I had brought my own china and silver, and, from all appearances, I would have little enough to take back. But though I might jeer at Rosie as much as I wished, the fact remained that some one had been on the drive that night who had no business there. Although neither had Rosie, for that matter. I could fancy Liddy's face when she missed the extra pieces of china--she had opposed Rosie from the start. If Liddy once finds a prophecy fulfilled, especially an unpleasant one, she never allows me to forget it. It seemed to me that it was absurd to leave that china dotted along the road for her to spy the next morning; so with a sudden resolution, I opened the door again and stepped out into the darkness. As the door closed behind me I half regretted my impulse; then I shut my teeth and went on. I have never been a nervous woman, as I said before. Moreover, a minute or two in the darkness enabled me to see things fairly well. Beulah gave me rather a start by rubbing unexpectedly against my feet; then we two, side by side, went down the drive. There were no fragments of china, but where the grove began I picked up a silver spoon. So far Rosie's story was borne out: I began to wonder if it were not indiscreet, to say the least, this midnight prowling in a neighborhood with such a deservedly bad reputation. Then I saw something gleaming, which proved to be the handle of a cup, and a step or two farther on I found a V-shaped bit of a plate. But the most surprising thing of all was to find the basket sitting comfortably beside the road, with the rest of the broken crockery piled neatly within, and a handful of small silver, spoon, forks, and the like, on top! I could only stand and stare. Then Rosie's story was true. But where had Rosie carried her basket? And why had the thief, if he were a thief, picked up the broken china out of the road and left it, with his booty? It was with my nearest approach to a nervous collapse that I heard the familiar throbbing of an automobile engine. As it came closer I recognized the outline of the Dragon Fly, and knew that Halsey had come back. Strange enough it must have seemed to Halsey, too, to come across me in the middle of the night, with the skirt of my gray silk gown over my shoulders to keep off the dew, holding a red and green basket under one arm and a black cat under the other. What with relief and joy, I began to cry, right there, and very nearly wiped my eyes on Beulah in the excitement. CHAPTER IX JUST LIKE A GIRL "Aunt Ray!" Halsey said from the gloom behind the lamps. "What in the world are you doing here?" "Taking a walk," I said, trying to be composed. I don't think the answer struck either of us as being ridiculous at the time. "Oh, Halsey, where have you been?" "Let me take you up to the house." He was in the road, and had Beulah and the basket out of my arms in a moment. I could see the car plainly now, and Warner was at the wheel--Warner in an ulster and a pair of slippers, over Heaven knows what. Jack Bailey was not there. I got in, and we went slowly and painfully up to the house. We did not talk. What we had to say was too important to commence there, and, besides, it took all kinds of coaxing from both men to get the Dragon Fly up the last grade. Only when we had closed the front door and stood facing each other in the hall, did Halsey say anything. He slipped his strong young arm around my shoulders and turned me so I faced the light. "Poor Aunt Ray!" he said gently. And I nearly wept again. "I--I must see Gertrude, too; we will have a three-cornered talk." And then Gertrude herself came down the stairs. She had not been to bed, evidently: she still wore the white negligee she had worn earlier in the evening, and she limped somewhat. During her slow progress down the stairs I had time to notice one thing: Mr. Jamieson had said the woman who escaped from the cellar had worn no shoe on her right foot. Gertrude's right ankle was the one she had sprained! The meeting between brother and sister was tense, but without tears. Halsey kissed her tenderly, and I noticed evidences of strain and anxiety in both young faces. "Is everything--right?" she asked. "Right as can be," with forced cheerfulness. I lighted the living-room and we went in there. Only a half-hour before I had sat with Mr. Jamieson in that very room, listening while he overtly accused both Gertrude and Halsey of at least a knowledge of the death of Arnold Armstrong. Now Halsey was here to speak for himself: I should learn everything that had puzzled me. "I saw it in the paper to-night for the first time," he was saying. "It knocked me dumb. When I think of this houseful of women, and a thing like that occurring!" Gertrude's face was still set and white. "That isn't all, Halsey," she said. "You and--and Jack left almost at the time it happened. The detective here thinks that you--that we--know something about it." "The devil he does!" Halsey's eyes were fairly starting from his head. "I beg your pardon, Aunt Ray, but--the fellow's a lunatic." "Tell me everything, won't you, Halsey?" I begged. "Tell me where you went that night, or rather morning, and why you went as you did. This has been a terrible forty-eight hours for all of us." He stood staring at me, and I could see the horror of the situation dawning in his face. "I can't tell you where I went, Aunt Ray," he said, after a moment. "As to why, you will learn that soon enough. But Gertrude knows that Jack and I left the house before this thing--this horrible murder--occurred." "Mr. Jamieson does not believe me," Gertrude said drearily. "Halsey, if the worst comes, if they should arrest you, you must--tell." "I shall tell nothing," he said with a new sternness in his voice. "Aunt Ray, it was necessary for Jack and me to leave that night. I can not tell you why--just yet. As to where we went, if I have to depend on that as an alibi, I shall not tell. The whole thing is an absurdity, a trumped-up charge that can not possibly be serious." "Has Mr. Bailey gone back to the city," I demanded, "or to the club?" "Neither," defiantly; "at the present moment I do not know where he is." "Halsey," I asked gravely, leaning forward, "have you the slightest suspicion who killed Arnold Armstrong? The police think he was admitted from within, and that he was shot down from above, by someone on the circular staircase." "I know nothing of it," he maintained; but I fancied I caught a sudden glance at Gertrude, a flash of something that died as it came. As quietly, as calmly as I could, I went over the whole story, from the night Liddy and I had been alone up to the strange experience of Rosie and her pursuer. The basket still stood on the table, a mute witness to this last mystifying occurrence. "There is something else," I said hesitatingly, at the last. "Halsey, I have never told this even to Gertrude, but the morning after the crime, I found, in a tulip bed, a revolver. It--it was yours, Halsey." For an appreciable moment Halsey stared at me. Then he turned to Gertrude. "My revolver, Trude!" he exclaimed. "Why, Jack took my revolver with him, didn't he?" "Oh, for Heaven's sake don't say that," I implored. "The detective thinks possibly Jack Bailey came back, and--and the thing happened then." "He didn't come back," Halsey said sternly. "Gertrude, when you brought down a revolver that night for Jack to take with him, what one did you bring? Mine?" Gertrude was defiant now. "No. Yours was loaded, and I was afraid of what Jack might do. I gave him one I have had for a year or two. It was empty." Halsey threw up both hands despairingly. "If that isn't like a girl!" he said. "Why didn't you do what I asked you to, Gertrude? You send Bailey off with an empty gun, and throw mine in a tulip bed, of all places on earth! Mine was a thirty-eight caliber. The inquest will show, of course, that the bullet that killed Armstrong was a thirty-eight. Then where shall I be?" "You forget," I broke in, "that I have the revolver, and that no one knows about it." But Gertrude had risen angrily. "I can not stand it; it is always with me," she cried. "Halsey, I did not throw your revolver into the tulip bed. I--think--you--did it--yourself!" They stared at each other across the big library table, with young eyes all at once hard, suspicious. And then Gertrude held out both hands to him appealingly. "We must not," she said brokenly. "Just now, with so much at stake, it--is shameful. I know you are as ignorant as I am. Make me believe it, Halsey." Halsey soothed her as best he could, and the breach seemed healed. But long after I went to bed he sat down-stairs in the living-room alone, and I knew he was going over the case as he had learned it. Some things were clear to him that were dark to me. He knew, and Gertrude, too, why Jack Bailey and he had gone away that night, as they did. He knew where they had been for the last forty-eight hours, and why Jack Bailey had not returned with him. It seemed to me that without fuller confidence from both the children--they are always children to me--I should never be able to learn anything. As I was finally getting ready for bed, Halsey came up-stairs and knocked at my door. When I had got into a negligee--I used to say wrapper before Gertrude came back from school--I let him in. He stood in the doorway a moment, and then he went into agonies of silent mirth. I sat down on the side of the bed and waited in severe silence for him to stop, but he only seemed to grow worse. When he had recovered he took me by the elbow and pulled me in front of the mirror. "'How to be beautiful,'" he quoted. "'Advice to maids and matrons,' by Beatrice Fairfax!" And then I saw myself. I had neglected to remove my wrinkle eradicators, and I presume my appearance was odd. I believe that it is a woman's duty to care for her looks, but it is much like telling a necessary falsehood--one must not be found out. By the time I got them off Halsey was serious again, and I listened to his story. "Aunt Ray," he began, extinguishing his cigarette on the back of my ivory hair-brush, "I would give a lot to tell you the whole thing. But--I can't, for a day or so, anyhow. But one thing I might have told you a long time ago. If you had known it, you would not have suspected me for a moment of--of having anything to do with the attack on Arnold Armstrong. Goodness knows what I might do to a fellow like that, if there was enough provocation, and I had a gun in my hand--under ordinary circumstances. But--I care a great deal about Louise Armstrong, Aunt Ray. I hope to marry her some day. Is it likely I would kill her brother?" "Her stepbrother," I corrected. "No, of course, it isn't likely, or possible. Why didn't you tell me, Halsey?" "Well, there were two reasons," he said slowly. "One was that you had a girl already picked out for me--" "Nonsense," I broke in, and felt myself growing red. I had, indeed, one of the--but no matter. "And the second reason," he pursued, "was that the Armstrongs would have none of me." I sat bolt upright at that and gasped. "The Armstrongs!" I repeated. "With old Peter Armstrong driving a stage across the mountains while your grandfather was war governor--" "Well, of course, the war governor's dead, and out of the matrimonial market," Halsey interrupted. "And the present Innes admits himself he isn't good enough for--for Louise." "Exactly," I said despairingly, "and, of course, you are taken at your own valuation. The Inneses are not always so self-depreciatory." "Not always, no," he said, looking at me with his boyish smile. "Fortunately, Louise doesn't agree with her family. She's willing to take me, war governor or no, provided her mother consents. She isn't overly-fond of her stepfather, but she adores her mother. And now, can't you see where this thing puts me? Down and out, with all of them." "But the whole thing is absurd," I argued. "And besides, Gertrude's sworn statement that you left before Arnold Armstrong came would clear you at once." Halsey got up and began to pace the room, and the air of cheerfulness dropped like a mask. "She can't swear it," he said finally. "Gertrude's story was true as far as it went, but she didn't tell everything. Arnold Armstrong came here at two-thirty--came into the billiard-room and left in five minutes. He came to bring--something." "Halsey," I cried, "you MUST tell me the whole truth. Every time I see a way for you to escape you block it yourself with this wall of mystery. What did he bring?" "A telegram--for Bailey," he said. "It came by special messenger from town, and was--most important. Bailey had started for here, and the messenger had gone back to the city. The steward gave it to Arnold, who had been drinking all day and couldn't sleep, and was going for a stroll in the direction of Sunnyside." "And he brought it?" "Yes." "What was in the telegram?" "I can tell you--as soon as certain things are made public. It is only a matter of days now," gloomily. "And Gertrude's story of a telephone message?" "Poor Trude!" he half whispered. "Poor loyal little girl! Aunt Ray, there was no such message. No doubt your detective already knows that and discredits all Gertrude told him." "And when she went back, it was to get--the telegram?" "Probably," Halsey said slowly. "When you get to thinking about it, Aunt Ray, it looks bad for all three of us, doesn't it? And yet--I will take my oath none of us even inadvertently killed that poor devil." I looked at the closed door into Gertrude's dressing-room, and lowered my voice. "The same horrible thought keeps recurring to me," I whispered. "Halsey, Gertrude probably had your revolver: she must have examined it, anyhow, that night. After you--and Jack had gone, what if that ruffian came back, and she--and she--" I couldn't finish. Halsey stood looking at me with shut lips. "She might have heard him fumbling at the door he had no key, the police say--and thinking it was you, or Jack, she admitted him. When she saw her mistake she ran up the stairs, a step or two, and turning, like an animal at bay, she fired." Halsey had his hand over my lips before I finished, and in that position we stared each at the other, our stricken glances crossing. "The revolver--my revolver--thrown into the tulip bed!" he muttered to himself. "Thrown perhaps from an upper window: you say it was buried deep. Her prostration ever since, her--Aunt Ray, you don't think it was Gertrude who fell down the clothes chute?" I could only nod my head in a hopeless affirmative. CHAPTER X THE TRADERS BANK The morning after Halsey's return was Tuesday. Arnold Armstrong had been found dead at the foot of the circular staircase at three o'clock on Sunday morning. The funeral services were to be held on Tuesday, and the interment of the body was to be deferred until the Armstrongs arrived from California. No one, I think, was very sorry that Arnold Armstrong was dead, but the manner of his death aroused some sympathy and an enormous amount of curiosity. Mrs. Ogden Fitzhugh, a cousin, took charge of the arrangements, and everything, I believe, was as quiet as possible. I gave Thomas Johnson and Mrs. Watson permission to go into town to pay their last respects to the dead man, but for some reason they did not care to go. Halsey spent part of the day with Mr. Jamieson, but he said nothing of what happened. He looked grave and anxious, and he had a long conversation with Gertrude late in the afternoon. Tuesday evening found us quiet, with the quiet that precedes an explosion. Gertrude and Halsey were both gloomy and distraught, and as Liddy had already discovered that some of the china was broken--it is impossible to have any secrets from an old servant--I was not in a pleasant humor myself. Warner brought up the afternoon mail and the evening papers at seven--I was curious to know what the papers said of the murder. We had turned away at least a dozen reporters. But I read over the head-line that ran half-way across the top of the Gazette twice before I comprehended it. Halsey had opened the Chronicle and was staring at it fixedly. "The Traders' Bank closes its doors!" was what I read, and then I put down the paper and looked across the table. "Did you know of this?" I asked Halsey. "I expected it. But not so soon," he replied. "And you?" to Gertrude. "Jack--told us--something," Gertrude said faintly. "Oh, Halsey, what can he do now?" "Jack!" I said scornfully. "Your Jack's flight is easy enough to explain now. And you helped him, both of you, to get away! You get that from your mother; it isn't an Innes trait. Do you know that every dollar you have, both of you, is in that bank?" Gertrude tried to speak, but Halsey stopped her. "That isn't all, Gertrude," he said quietly; "Jack is--under arrest." "Under arrest!" Gertrude screamed, and tore the paper out of his hand. She glanced at the heading, then she crumpled the newspaper into a ball and flung it to the floor. While Halsey, looking stricken and white, was trying to smooth it out and read it, Gertrude had dropped her head on the table and was sobbing stormily. I have the clipping somewhere, but just now I can remember only the essentials. On the afternoon before, Monday, while the Traders' Bank was in the rush of closing hour, between two and three, Mr. Jacob Trautman, President of the Pearl Brewing Company, came into the bank to lift a loan. As security for the loan he had deposited some three hundred International Steamship Company 5's, in total value three hundred thousand dollars. Mr. Trautman went to the loan clerk and, after certain formalities had been gone through, the loan clerk went to the vault. Mr. Trautman, who was a large and genial German, waited for a time, whistling under his breath. The loan clerk did not come back. After an interval, Mr. Trautman saw the loan clerk emerge from the vault and go to the assistant cashier: the two went hurriedly to the vault. A lapse of another ten minutes, and the assistant cashier came out and approached Mr. Trautman. He was noticeably white and trembling. Mr. Trautman was told that through an oversight the bonds had been misplaced, and was asked to return the following morning, when everything would be made all right. Mr. Trautman, however, was a shrewd business man, and he did not like the appearance of things. He left the bank apparently satisfied, and within thirty minutes he had called up three different members of the Traders' Board of Directors. At three-thirty there was a hastily convened board meeting, with some stormy scenes, and late in the afternoon a national bank examiner was in possession of the books. The bank had not opened for business on Tuesday. At twelve-thirty o'clock the Saturday before, as soon as the business of the day was closed, Mr. John Bailey, the cashier of the defunct bank, had taken his hat and departed. During the afternoon he had called up Mr. Aronson, a member of the board, and said he was ill, and might not be at the bank for a day or two. As Bailey was highly thought of, Mr. Aronson merely expressed a regret. From that time until Monday night, when Mr. Bailey had surrendered to the police, little was known of his movements. Some time after one on Saturday he had entered the Western Union office at Cherry and White Streets and had sent two telegrams. He was at the Greenwood Country Club on Saturday night, and appeared unlike himself. It was reported that he would be released under enormous bond, some time that day, Tuesday. The article closed by saying that while the officers of the bank refused to talk until the examiner had finished his work, it was known that securities aggregating a million and a quarter were missing. Then there was a diatribe on the possibility of such an occurrence; on the folly of a one-man bank, and of a Board of Directors that met only to lunch together and to listen to a brief report from the cashier, and on the poor policy of a government that arranges a three or four-day examination twice a year. The mystery, it insinuated, had not been cleared by the arrest of the cashier. Before now minor officials had been used to cloak the misdeeds of men higher up. Inseparable as the words "speculation" and "peculation" have grown to be, John Bailey was not known to be in the stock market. His only words, after his surrender, had been "Send for Mr. Armstrong at once." The telegraph message which had finally reached the President of the Traders' Bank, in an interior town in California, had been responded to by a telegram from Doctor Walker, the young physician who was traveling with the Armstrong family, saying that Paul Armstrong was very ill and unable to travel. That was how things stood that Tuesday evening. The Traders' Bank had suspended payment, and John Bailey was under arrest, charged with wrecking it; Paul Armstrong lay very ill in California, and his only son had been murdered two days before. I sat dazed and bewildered. The children's money was gone: that was bad enough, though I had plenty, if they would let me share. But Gertrude's grief was beyond any power of mine to comfort; the man she had chosen stood accused of a colossal embezzlement--and even worse. For in the instant that I sat there I seemed to see the coils closing around John Bailey as the murderer of Arnold Armstrong. Gertrude lifted her head at last and stared across the table at Halsey. "Why did he do it?" she wailed. "Couldn't you stop him, Halsey? It was suicidal to go back!" Halsey was looking steadily through the windows of the breakfast-room, but it was evident he saw nothing. "It was the only thing he could do, Trude," he said at last. "Aunt Ray, when I found Jack at the Greenwood Club last Saturday night, he was frantic. I can not talk until Jack tells me I may, but--he is absolutely innocent of all this, believe me. I thought, Trude and I thought, we were helping him, but it was the wrong way. He came back. Isn't that the act of an innocent man?" "Then why did he leave at all?" I asked, unconvinced. "What innocent man would run away from here at three o'clock in the morning? Doesn't it look rather as though he thought it impossible to escape?" Gertrude rose angrily. "You are not even just!" she flamed. "You don't know anything about it, and you condemn him!" "I know that we have all lost a great deal of money," I said. "I shall believe Mr. Bailey innocent the moment he is shown to be. You profess to know the truth, but you can not tell me! What am I to think?" Halsey leaned over and patted my hand. "You must take us on faith," he said. "Jack Bailey hasn't a penny that doesn't belong to him; the guilty man will be known in a day or so." "I shall believe that when it is proved," I said grimly. "In the meantime, I take no one on faith. The Inneses never do." Gertrude, who had been standing aloof at a window, turned suddenly. "But when the bonds are offered for sale, Halsey, won't the thief be detected at once?" Halsey turned with a superior smile. "It wouldn't be done that way," he said. "They would be taken out of the vault by some one who had access to it, and used as collateral for a loan in another bank. It would be possible to realize eighty per cent. of their face value." "In cash?" "In cash." "But the man who did it--he would be known?" "Yes. I tell you both, as sure as I stand here, I believe that Paul Armstrong looted his own bank. I believe he has a million at least, as the result, and that he will never come back. I'm worse than a pauper now. I can't ask Louise to share nothing a year with me and when I think of this disgrace for her, I'm crazy." The most ordinary events of life seemed pregnant with possibilities that day, and when Halsey was called to the telephone, I ceased all pretense at eating. When he came back from the telephone his face showed that something had occurred. He waited, however, until Thomas left the dining-room: then he told us. "Paul Armstrong is dead," he announced gravely. "He died this morning in California. Whatever he did, he is beyond the law now." Gertrude turned pale. "And the only man who could have cleared Jack can never do it!" she said despairingly. "Also," I replied coldly, "Mr. Armstrong is for ever beyond the power of defending himself. When your Jack comes to me, with some two hundred thousand dollars in his hands, which is about what you have lost, I shall believe him innocent." Halsey threw his cigarette away and turned on me. "There you go!" he exclaimed. "If he was the thief, he could return the money, of course. If he is innocent, he probably hasn't a tenth of that amount in the world. In his hands! That's like a woman." Gertrude, who had been pale and despairing during the early part of the conversation, had flushed an indignant red. She got up and drew herself to her slender height, looking down at me with the scorn of the young and positive. "You are the only mother I ever had," she said tensely. "I have given you all I would have given my mother, had she lived--my love, my trust. And now, when I need you most, you fail me. I tell you, John Bailey is a good man, an honest man. If you say he is not, you--you--" "Gertrude," Halsey broke in sharply. She dropped beside the table and, burying her face in her arms broke into a storm of tears. "I love him--love him," she sobbed, in a surrender that was totally unlike her. "Oh, I never thought it would be like this. I can't bear it. I can't." Halsey and I stood helpless before the storm. I would have tried to comfort her, but she had put me away, and there was something aloof in her grief, something new and strange. At last, when her sorrow had subsided to the dry shaking sobs of a tired child, without raising her head she put out one groping hand. "Aunt Ray!" she whispered. In a moment I was on my knees beside her, her arm around my neck, her cheek against my hair. "Where am I in this?" Halsey said suddenly and tried to put his arms around us both. It was a welcome distraction, and Gertrude was soon herself again. The little storm had cleared the air. Nevertheless, my opinion remained unchanged. There was much to be cleared up before I would consent to any renewal of my acquaintance with John Bailey. And Halsey and Gertrude knew it, knowing me. CHAPTER XI HALSEY MAKES A CAPTURE It was about half-past eight when we left the dining-room and still engrossed with one subject, the failure of the bank and its attendant evils Halsey and I went out into the grounds for a stroll Gertrude followed us shortly. "The light was thickening," to appropriate Shakespeare's description of twilight, and once again the tree-toads and the crickets were making night throb with their tiny life. It was almost oppressively lonely, in spite of its beauty, and I felt a sickening pang of homesickness for my city at night--for the clatter of horses' feet on cemented paving, for the lights, the voices, the sound of children playing. The country after dark oppresses me. The stars, quite eclipsed in the city by the electric lights, here become insistent, assertive. Whether I want to or not, I find myself looking for the few I know by name, and feeling ridiculously new and small by contrast--always an unpleasant sensation. After Gertrude joined us, we avoided any further mention of the murder. To Halsey, as to me, there was ever present, I am sure, the thought of our conversation of the night before. As we strolled back and forth along the drive, Mr. Jamieson emerged from the shadow of the trees. "Good evening," he said, managing to include Gertrude in his bow. Gertrude had never been even ordinarily courteous to him, and she nodded coldly. Halsey, however, was more cordial, although we were all constrained enough. He and Gertrude went on together, leaving the detective to walk with me. As soon as they were out of earshot, he turned to me. "Do you know, Miss Innes," he said, "the deeper I go into this thing, the more strange it seems to me. I am very sorry for Miss Gertrude. It looks as if Bailey, whom she has tried so hard to save, is worse than a rascal; and after her plucky fight for him, it seems hard." I looked through the dusk to where Gertrude's light dinner dress gleamed among the trees. She HAD made a plucky fight, poor child. Whatever she might have been driven to do, I could find nothing but a deep sympathy for her. If she had only come to me with the whole truth then! "Miss Innes," Mr. Jamieson was saying, "in the last three days, have you seen a--any suspicious figures around the grounds? Any--woman?" "No," I replied. "I have a houseful of maids that will bear watching, one and all. But there has been no strange woman near the house or Liddy would have seen her, you may be sure. She has a telescopic eye." Mr. Jamieson looked thoughtful. "It may not amount to anything," he said slowly. "It is difficult to get any perspective on things around here, because every one down in the village is sure he saw the murderer, either before or since the crime. And half of them will stretch a point or two as to facts, to be obliging. But the man who drives the hack down there tells a story that may possibly prove to be important." "I have heard it, I think. Was it the one the parlor maid brought up yesterday, about a ghost wringing its hands on the roof? Or perhaps it's the one the milk-boy heard: a tramp washing a dirty shirt, presumably bloody, in the creek below the bridge?" I could see the gleam of Mr. Jamieson's teeth, as he smiled. "Neither," he said. "But Matthew Geist, which is our friend's name, claims that on Saturday night, at nine-thirty, a veiled lady--" "I knew it would be a veiled lady," I broke in. "A veiled lady," he persisted, "who was apparently young and beautiful, engaged his hack and asked to be driven to Sunnyside. Near the gate, however, she made him stop, in spite of his remonstrances, saying she preferred to walk to the house. She paid him, and he left her there. Now, Miss Innes, you had no such visitor, I believe?" "None," I said decidedly. "Geist thought it might be a maid, as you had got a supply that day. But he said her getting out near the gate puzzled him. Anyhow, we have now one veiled lady, who, with the ghostly intruder of Friday night, makes two assets that I hardly know what to do with." "It is mystifying," I admitted, "although I can think of one possible explanation. The path from the Greenwood Club to the village enters the road near the lodge gate. A woman who wished to reach the Country Club, unperceived, might choose such a method. There are plenty of women there." I think this gave him something to ponder, for in a short time he said good night and left. But I myself was far from satisfied. I was determined, however, on one thing. If my suspicions--for I had suspicions--were true, I would make my own investigations, and Mr. Jamieson should learn only what was good for him to know. We went back to the house, and Gertrude, who was more like herself since her talk with Halsey, sat down at the mahogany desk in the living-room to write a letter. Halsey prowled up and down the entire east wing, now in the card-room, now in the billiard-room, and now and then blowing his clouds of tobacco smoke among the pink and gold hangings of the drawing-room. After a little I joined him in the billiard-room, and together we went over the details of the discovery of the body. The card-room was quite dark. Where we sat, in the billiard-room, only one of the side brackets was lighted, and we spoke in subdued tones, as the hour and the subject seemed to demand. When I spoke of the figure Liddy and I had seen on the porch through the card-room window Friday night, Halsey sauntered into the darkened room, and together we stood there, much as Liddy and I had done that other night. The window was the same grayish rectangle in the blackness as before. A few feet away in the hall was the spot where the body of Arnold Armstrong had been found. I was a bit nervous, and I put my hand on Halsey's sleeve. Suddenly, from the top of the staircase above us came the sound of a cautious footstep. At first I was not sure, but Halsey's attitude told me he had heard and was listening. The step, slow, measured, infinitely cautious, was nearer now. Halsey tried to loosen my fingers, but I was in a paralysis of fright. The swish of a body against the curving rail, as if for guidance, was plain enough, and now whoever it was had reached the foot of the staircase and had caught a glimpse of our rigid silhouettes against the billiard-room doorway. Halsey threw me off then and strode forward. "Who is it?" he called imperiously, and took a half dozen rapid strides toward the foot of the staircase. Then I heard him mutter something; there was the crash of a falling body, the slam of the outer door, and, for an instant, quiet. I screamed, I think. Then I remember turning on the lights and finding Halsey, white with fury, trying to untangle himself from something warm and fleecy. He had cut his forehead a little on the lowest step of the stairs, and he was rather a ghastly sight. He flung the white object at me, and, jerking open the outer door, raced into the darkness. Gertrude had come on hearing the noise, and now we stood, staring at each other over--of all things on earth--a white silk and wool blanket, exquisitely fine! It was the most unghostly thing in the world, with its lavender border and its faint scent. Gertrude was the first to speak. "Somebody--had it?" she asked. "Yes. Halsey tried to stop whoever it was and fell. Gertrude, that blanket is not mine. I have never seen before." She held it up and looked at it: then she went to the door on to the veranda and threw it open. Perhaps a hundred feet from the house were two figures, that moved slowly toward us as we looked. When they came within range of the light, I recognized Halsey, and with him Mrs. Watson, the housekeeper. CHAPTER XII ONE MYSTERY FOR ANOTHER The most commonplace incident takes on a new appearance if the attendant circumstances are unusual. There was no reason on earth why Mrs. Watson should not have carried a blanket down the east wing staircase, if she so desired. But to take a blanket down at eleven o'clock at night, with every precaution as to noise, and, when discovered, to fling it at Halsey and bolt--Halsey's word, and a good one--into the grounds,--this made the incident more than significant. They moved slowly across the lawn and up the steps. Halsey was talking quietly, and Mrs. Watson was looking down and listening. She was a woman of a certain amount of dignity, most efficient, so far as I could see, although Liddy would have found fault if she dared. But just now Mrs. Watson's face was an enigma. She was defiant, I think, under her mask of submission, and she still showed the effect of nervous shock. "Mrs. Watson," I said severely, "will you be so good as to explain this rather unusual occurrence?" "I don't think it so unusual, Miss Innes." Her voice was deep and very clear: just now it was somewhat tremulous. "I was taking a blanket down to Thomas, who is--not well to-night, and I used this staircase, as being nearer the path to the lodge. When--Mr. Innes called and then rushed at me, I--I was alarmed, and flung the blanket at him." Halsey was examining the cut on his forehead in a small mirror on the wall. It was not much of an injury, but it had bled freely, and his appearance was rather terrifying. "Thomas ill?" he said, over his shoulder. "Why, _I_ thought I saw Thomas out there as you made that cyclonic break out of the door and over the porch." I could see that under pretense of examining his injury he was watching her through the mirror. "Is this one of the servants' blankets, Mrs. Watson?" I asked, holding up its luxurious folds to the light. "Everything else is locked away," she replied. Which was true enough, no doubt. I had rented the house without bed furnishings. "If Thomas is ill," Halsey said, "some member of the family ought to go down to see him. You needn't bother, Mrs. Watson. I will take the blanket." She drew herself up quickly, as if in protest, but she found nothing to say. She stood smoothing the folds of her dead black dress, her face as white as chalk above it. Then she seemed to make up her mind. "Very well, Mr. Innes," she said. "Perhaps you would better go. I have done all I could." And then she turned and went up the circular staircase, moving slowly and with a certain dignity. Below, the three of us stared at one another across the intervening white blanket. "Upon my word," Halsey broke out, "this place is a walking nightmare. I have the feeling that we three outsiders who have paid our money for the privilege of staying in this spook-factory, are living on the very top of things. We're on the lid, so to speak. Now and then we get a sight of the things inside, but we are not a part of them." "Do you suppose," Gertrude asked doubtfully, "that she really meant that blanket for Thomas?" "Thomas was standing beside that magnolia tree," Halsey replied, "when I ran after Mrs. Watson. It's down to this, Aunt Ray. Rosie's basket and Mrs. Watson's blanket can only mean one thing: there is somebody hiding or being hidden in the lodge. It wouldn't surprise me if we hold the key to the whole situation now. Anyhow, I'm going to the lodge to investigate." Gertrude wanted to go, too, but she looked so shaken that I insisted she should not. I sent for Liddy to help her to bed, and then Halsey and I started for the lodge. The grass was heavy with dew, and, man-like, Halsey chose the shortest way across the lawn. Half-way, however, he stopped. "We'd better go by the drive," he said. "This isn't a lawn; it's a field. Where's the gardener these days?" "There isn't any," I said meekly. "We have been thankful enough, so far, to have our meals prepared and served and the beds aired. The gardener who belongs here is working at the club." "Remind me to-morrow to send out a man from town," he said. "I know the very fellow." I record this scrap of conversation, just as I have tried to put down anything and everything that had a bearing on what followed, because the gardener Halsey sent the next day played an important part in the events of the next few weeks--events that culminated, as you know, by stirring the country profoundly. At that time, however, I was busy trying to keep my skirts dry, and paid little or no attention to what seemed then a most trivial remark. Along the drive I showed Halsey where I had found Rosie's basket with the bits of broken china piled inside. He was rather skeptical. "Warner probably," he said when I had finished. "Began it as a joke on Rosie, and ended by picking up the broken china out of the road, knowing it would play hob with the tires of the car." Which shows how near one can come to the truth, and yet miss it altogether. At the lodge everything was quiet. There was a light in the sitting-room down-stairs, and a faint gleam, as if from a shaded lamp, in one of the upper rooms. Halsey stopped and examined the lodge with calculating eyes. "I don't know, Aunt Ray," he said dubiously; "this is hardly a woman's affair. If there's a scrap of any kind, you hike for the timber." Which was Halsey's solicitous care for me, put into vernacular. "I shall stay right here," I said, and crossing the small veranda, now shaded and fragrant with honeysuckle, I hammered the knocker on the door. Thomas opened the door himself--Thomas, fully dressed and in his customary health. I had the blanket over my arm. "I brought the blanket, Thomas," I said; "I am sorry you are so ill." The old man stood staring at me and then at the blanket. His confusion under other circumstances would have been ludicrous. "What! Not ill?" Halsey said from the step. "Thomas, I'm afraid you've been malingering." Thomas seemed to have been debating something with himself. Now he stepped out on the porch and closed the door gently behind him. "I reckon you bettah come in, Mis' Innes," he said, speaking cautiously. "It's got so I dunno what to do, and it's boun' to come out some time er ruther." He threw the door open then, and I stepped inside, Halsey close behind. In the sitting-room the old negro turned with quiet dignity to Halsey. "You bettah sit down, sah," he said. "It's a place for a woman, sah." Things were not turning out the way Halsey expected. He sat down on the center-table, with his hands thrust in his pockets, and watched me as I followed Thomas up the narrow stairs. At the top a woman was standing, and a second glance showed me it was Rosie. She shrank back a little, but I said nothing. And then Thomas motioned to a partly open door, and I went in. The lodge boasted three bedrooms up-stairs, all comfortably furnished. In this one, the largest and airiest, a night lamp was burning, and by its light I could make out a plain white metal bed. A girl was asleep there--or in a half stupor, for she muttered something now and then. Rosie had taken her courage in her hands, and coming in had turned up the light. It was only then that I knew. Fever-flushed, ill as she was, I recognized Louise Armstrong. I stood gazing down at her in a stupor of amazement. Louise here, hiding at the lodge, ill and alone! Rosie came up to the bed and smoothed the white counterpane. "I am afraid she is worse to-night," she ventured at last. I put my hand on the sick girl's forehead. It was burning with fever, and I turned to where Thomas lingered in the hallway. "Will you tell me what you mean, Thomas Johnson, by not telling me this before?" I demanded indignantly. Thomas quailed. "Mis' Louise wouldn' let me," he said earnestly. "I wanted to. She ought to 'a' had a doctor the night she came, but she wouldn' hear to it. Is she--is she very bad, Mis' Innes?" "Bad enough," I said coldly. "Send Mr. Innes up." Halsey came up the stairs slowly, looking rather interested and inclined to be amused. For a moment he could not see anything distinctly in the darkened room; he stopped, glanced at Rosie and at me, and then his eyes fell on the restless head on the pillow. I think he felt who it was before he really saw her; he crossed the room in a couple of strides and bent over the bed. "Louise!" he said softly; but she did not reply, and her eyes showed no recognition. Halsey was young, and illness was new to him. He straightened himself slowly, still watching her, and caught my arm. "She's dying, Aunt Ray!" he said huskily. "Dying! Why, she doesn't know me!" "Fudge!" I snapped, being apt to grow irritable when my sympathies are aroused. "She's doing nothing of the sort,--and don't pinch my arm. If you want something to do, go and choke Thomas." But at that moment Louise roused from her stupor to cough, and at the end of the paroxysm, as Rosie laid her back, exhausted, she knew us. That was all Halsey wanted; to him consciousness was recovery. He dropped on his knees beside the bed, and tried to tell her she was all right, and we would bring her around in a hurry, and how beautiful she looked--only to break down utterly and have to stop. And at that I came to my senses, and put him out. "This instant!" I ordered, as he hesitated. "And send Rosie here." He did not go far. He sat on the top step of the stairs, only leaving to telephone for a doctor, and getting in everybody's way in his eagerness to fetch and carry. I got him away finally, by sending him to fix up the car as a sort of ambulance, in case the doctor would allow the sick girl to be moved. He sent Gertrude down to the lodge loaded with all manner of impossible things, including an armful of Turkish towels and a box of mustard plasters, and as the two girls had known each other somewhat before, Louise brightened perceptibly when she saw her. When the doctor from Englewood--the Casanova doctor, Doctor Walker, being away--had started for Sunnyside, and I had got Thomas to stop trying to explain what he did not understand himself, I had a long talk with the old man, and this is what I learned. On Saturday evening before, about ten o'clock, he had been reading in the sitting-room down-stairs, when some one rapped at the door. The old man was alone, Warner not having arrived, and at first he was uncertain about opening the door. He did so finally, and was amazed at being confronted by Louise Armstrong. Thomas was an old family servant, having been with the present Mrs. Armstrong since she was a child, and he was overwhelmed at seeing Louise. He saw that she was excited and tired, and he drew her into the sitting-room and made her sit down. After a while he went to the house and brought Mrs. Watson, and they talked until late. The old man said Louise was in trouble, and seemed frightened. Mrs. Watson made some tea and took it to the lodge, but Louise made them both promise to keep her presence a secret. She had not known that Sunnyside was rented, and whatever her trouble was, this complicated things. She seemed puzzled. Her stepfather and her mother were still in California--that was all she would say about them. Why she had run away no one could imagine. Mr. Arnold Armstrong was at the Greenwood Club, and at last Thomas, not knowing what else to do, went over there along the path. It was almost midnight. Part-way over he met Armstrong himself and brought him to the lodge. Mrs. Watson had gone to the house for some bed-linen, it having been arranged that under the circumstances Louise would be better at the lodge until morning. Arnold Armstrong and Louise had a long conference, during which he was heard to storm and become very violent. When he left it was after two. He had gone up to the house--Thomas did not know why--and at three o'clock he was shot at the foot of the circular staircase. The following morning Louise had been ill. She had asked for Arnold, and was told he had left town. Thomas had not the moral courage to tell her of the crime. She refused a doctor, and shrank morbidly from having her presence known. Mrs. Watson and Thomas had had their hands full, and at last Rosie had been enlisted to help them. She carried necessary provisions--little enough--to the lodge, and helped to keep the secret. Thomas told me quite frankly that he had been anxious to keep Louise's presence hidden for this reason: they had all seen Arnold Armstrong that night, and he, himself, for one, was known to have had no very friendly feeling for the dead man. As to the reason for Louise's flight from California, or why she had not gone to the Fitzhughs', or to some of her people in town, he had no more information than I had. With the death of her stepfather and the prospect of the immediate return of the family, things had become more and more impossible. I gathered that Thomas was as relieved as I at the turn events had taken. No, she did not know of either of the deaths in the family. Taken all around, I had only substituted one mystery for another. If I knew now why Rosie had taken the basket of dishes, I did not know who had spoken to her and followed her along the drive. If I knew that Louise was in the lodge, I did not know why she was there. If I knew that Arnold Armstrong had spent some time in the lodge the night before he was murdered, I was no nearer the solution of the crime. Who was the midnight intruder who had so alarmed Liddy and myself? Who had fallen down the clothes chute? Was Gertrude's lover a villain or a victim? Time was to answer all these things. CHAPTER XIII LOUISE The doctor from Englewood came very soon, and I went up to see the sick girl with him. Halsey had gone to supervise the fitting of the car with blankets and pillows, and Gertrude was opening and airing Louise's own rooms at the house. Her private sitting-room, bedroom and dressing-room were as they had been when we came. They occupied the end of the east wing, beyond the circular staircase, and we had not even opened them. The girl herself was too ill to notice what was being done. When, with the help of the doctor, who was a fatherly man with a family of girls at home, we got her to the house and up the stairs into bed, she dropped into a feverish sleep, which lasted until morning. Doctor Stewart--that was the Englewood doctor--stayed almost all night, giving the medicine himself, and watching her closely. Afterward he told me that she had had a narrow escape from pneumonia, and that the cerebral symptoms had been rather alarming. I said I was glad it wasn't an "itis" of some kind, anyhow, and he smiled solemnly. He left after breakfast, saying that he thought the worst of the danger was over, and that she must be kept very quiet. "The shock of two deaths, I suppose, has done this," he remarked, picking up his case. "It has been very deplorable." I hastened to set him right. "She does not know of either, Doctor," I said. "Please do not mention them to her." He looked as surprised as a medical man ever does. "I do not know the family," he said, preparing to get into his top buggy. "Young Walker, down in Casanova, has been attending them. I understand he is going to marry this young lady." "You have been misinformed," I said stiffly. "Miss Armstrong is going to marry my nephew." The doctor smiled as he picked up the reins. "Young ladies are changeable these days," he said. "We thought the wedding was to occur soon. Well, I will stop in this afternoon to see how my patient is getting along." He drove away then, and I stood looking after him. He was a doctor of the old school, of the class of family practitioner that is fast dying out; a loyal and honorable gentleman who was at once physician and confidential adviser to his patients. When I was a girl we called in the doctor alike when we had measles, or when mother's sister died in the far West. He cut out redundant tonsils and brought the babies with the same air of inspiring self-confidence. Nowadays it requires a different specialist for each of these occurrences. When the babies cried, old Doctor Wainwright gave them peppermint and dropped warm sweet oil in their ears with sublime faith that if it was not colic it was earache. When, at the end of a year, father met him driving in his high side-bar buggy with the white mare ambling along, and asked for a bill, the doctor used to go home, estimate what his services were worth for that period, divide it in half--I don't think he kept any books--and send father a statement, in a cramped hand, on a sheet of ruled white paper. He was an honored guest at all the weddings, christenings, and funerals--yes, funerals--for every one knew he had done his best, and there was no gainsaying the ways of Providence. Ah, well, Doctor Wainwright is gone, and I am an elderly woman with an increasing tendency to live in the past. The contrast between my old doctor at home and the Casanova doctor, Frank Walker, always rouses me to wrath and digression. Some time about noon of that day, Wednesday, Mrs. Ogden Fitzhugh telephoned me. I have the barest acquaintance with her--she managed to be put on the governing board of the Old Ladies' Home and ruins their digestions by sending them ice-cream and cake on every holiday. Beyond that, and her reputation at bridge, which is insufferably bad--she is the worst player at the bridge club--I know little of her. It was she who had taken charge of Arnold Armstrong's funeral, however, and I went at once to the telephone. "Yes," I said, "this is Miss Innes." "Miss Innes," she said volubly, "I have just received a very strange telegram from my cousin, Mrs. Armstrong. Her husband died yesterday, in California and--wait, I will read you the message." I knew what was coming, and I made up my mind at once. If Louise Armstrong had a good and sufficient reason for leaving her people and coming home, a reason, moreover, that kept her from going at once to Mrs. Ogden Fitzhugh, and that brought her to the lodge at Sunnyside instead, it was not my intention to betray her. Louise herself must notify her people. I do not justify myself now, but remember, I was in a peculiar position toward the Armstrong family. I was connected most unpleasantly with a cold-blooded crime, and my niece and nephew were practically beggared, either directly or indirectly, through the head of the family. Mrs. Fitzhugh had found the message. "'Paul died yesterday. Heart disease,'" she read. "'Wire at once if Louise is with you.' You see, Miss Innes, Louise must have started east, and Fanny is alarmed about her." "Yes," I said. "Louise is not here," Mrs. Fitzhugh went on, "and none of her friends--the few who are still in town--has seen her. I called you because Sunnyside was not rented when she went away, and Louise might have, gone there." "I am sorry, Mrs. Fitzhugh, but I can not help you," I said, and was immediately filled with compunction. Suppose Louise grew worse? Who was I to play Providence in this case? The anxious mother certainly had a right to know that her daughter was in good hands. So I broke in on Mrs. Fitzhugh's voluble excuses for disturbing me. "Mrs. Fitzhugh," I said. "I was going to let you think I knew nothing about Louise Armstrong, but I have changed my mind. Louise is here, with me." There was a clatter of ejaculations at the other end of the wire. "She is ill, and not able to be moved. Moreover, she is unable to see any one. I wish you would wire her mother that she is with me, and tell her not to worry. No, I do not know why she came east." "But my dear Miss Innes!" Mrs. Fitzhugh began. I cut in ruthlessly. "I will send for you as soon as she can see you," I said. "No, she is not in a critical state now, but the doctor says she must have absolute quiet." When I had hung up the receiver, I sat down to think. So Louise had fled from her people in California, and had come east alone! It was not a new idea, but why had she done it? It occurred to me that Doctor Walker might be concerned in it, might possibly have bothered her with unwelcome attentions; but it seemed to me that Louise was hardly a girl to take refuge in flight under such circumstances. She had always been high-spirited, with the well-poised head and buoyant step of the outdoors girl. It must have been much more in keeping with Louise's character, as I knew it, to resent vigorously any unwelcome attentions from Doctor Walker. It was the suitor whom I should have expected to see in headlong flight, not the lady in the case. The puzzle was no clearer at the end of the half-hour. I picked up the morning papers, which were still full of the looting of the Traders' Bank, the interest at fever height again, on account of Paul Armstrong's death. The bank examiners were working on the books, and said nothing for publication: John Bailey had been released on bond. The body of Paul Armstrong would arrive Sunday and would be buried from the Armstrong town house. There were rumors that the dead man's estate had been a comparatively small one. The last paragraph was the important one. Walter P. Broadhurst, of the Marine Bank, had produced two hundred American Traction bonds, which had been placed as security with the Marine Bank for a loan of one hundred and sixty thousand dollars, made to Paul Armstrong, just before his California trip. The bonds were a part of the missing traction bonds from the Traders' Bank! While this involved the late president of the wrecked bank, to my mind it by no means cleared its cashier. The gardener mentioned by Halsey came out about two o'clock in the afternoon, and walked up from the station. I was favorably impressed by him. His references were good--he had been employed by the Brays' until they went to Europe, and he looked young and vigorous. He asked for one assistant, and I was glad enough to get off so easily. He was a pleasant-faced young fellow, with black hair and blue eyes, and his name was Alexander Graham. I have been particular about Alex, because, as I said before, he played an important part later. That afternoon I had a new insight into the character of the dead banker. I had my first conversation with Louise. She sent for me, and against my better judgment I went. There were so many things she could not be told, in her weakened condition, that I dreaded the interview. It was much easier than I expected, however, because she asked no questions. Gertrude had gone to bed, having been up almost all night, and Halsey was absent on one of those mysterious absences of his that grew more and more frequent as time went on, until it culminated in the event of the night of June the tenth. Liddy was in attendance in the sick-room. There being little or nothing to do, she seemed to spend her time smoothing the wrinkles from the counterpane. Louise lay under a field of virgin white, folded back at an angle of geometrical exactness, and necessitating a readjustment every time the sick girl turned. Liddy heard my approach and came out to meet me. She seemed to be in a perpetual state of goose-flesh, and she had got in the habit of looking past me when she talked, as if she saw things. It had the effect of making me look over my shoulder to see what she was staring at, and was intensely irritating. "She's awake," Liddy said, looking uneasily down the circular staircase, which was beside me. "She was talkin' in her sleep something awful--about dead men and coffins." "Liddy," I said sternly, "did you breathe a word about everything not being right here?" Liddy's gaze had wandered to the door of the chute, now bolted securely. "Not a word," she said, "beyond asking her a question or two, which there was no harm in. She says there never was a ghost known here." I glared at her, speechless, and closing the door into Louise's boudoir, to Liddy's great disappointment, I went on to the bedroom beyond. Whatever Paul Armstrong had been, he had been lavish with his stepdaughter. Gertrude's rooms at home were always beautiful apartments, but the three rooms in the east wing at Sunnyside, set apart for the daughter of the house, were much more splendid. From the walls to the rugs on the floor, from the furniture to the appointments of the bath, with its pool sunk in the floor instead of the customary unlovely tub, everything was luxurious. In the bedroom Louise was watching for me. It was easy to see that she was much improved; the flush was going, and the peculiar gasping breathing of the night before was now a comfortable and easy respiration. She held out her hand and I took it between both of mine. "What can I say to you, Miss Innes?" she said slowly. "To have come like this--" I thought she was going to break down, but she did not. "You are not to think of anything but of getting well," I said, patting her hand. "When you are better, I am going to scold you for not coming here at once. This is your home, my dear, and of all people in the world, Halsey's old aunt ought to make you welcome." She smiled a little, sadly, I thought. "I ought not to see Halsey," she said. "Miss Innes, there are a great many things you will never understand, I am afraid. I am an impostor on your sympathy, because I--I stay here and let you lavish care on me, and all the time I know you are going to despise me." "Nonsense!" I said briskly. "Why, what would Halsey do to me if I even ventured such a thing? He is so big and masterful that if I dared to be anything but rapturous over you, he would throw me out of a window. Indeed, he would be quite capable of it." She seemed scarcely to hear my facetious tone. She had eloquent brown eyes--the Inneses are fair, and are prone to a grayish-green optic that is better for use than appearance--and they seemed now to be clouded with trouble. "Poor Halsey!" she said softly. "Miss Innes, I can not marry him, and I am afraid to tell him. I am a coward--a coward!" I sat beside the bed and stared at her. She was too ill to argue with, and, besides, sick people take queer fancies. "We will talk about that when you are stronger," I said gently. "But there are some things I must tell you," she insisted. "You must wonder how I came here, and why I stayed hidden at the lodge. Dear old Thomas has been almost crazy, Miss Innes. I did not know that Sunnyside was rented. I knew my mother wished to rent it, without telling my--stepfather, but the news must have reached her after I left. When I started east, I had only one idea--to be alone with my thoughts for a time, to bury myself here. Then, I--must have taken a cold on the train." "You came east in clothing suitable for California," I said, "and, like all young girls nowadays, I don't suppose you wear flannels." But she was not listening. "Miss Innes," she said, "has my stepbrother Arnold gone away?" "What do you mean?" I asked, startled. But Louise was literal. "He didn't come back that night," she said, "and it was so important that I should see him." "I believe he has gone away," I replied uncertainly. "Isn't it something that we could attend to instead?" But she shook her head. "I must do it myself," she said dully. "My mother must have rented Sunnyside without telling my stepfather, and--Miss Innes, did you ever hear of any one being wretchedly poor in the midst of luxury? "Did you ever long, and long, for money--money to use without question, money that no one would take you to task about? My mother and I have been surrounded for years with every indulgence everything that would make a display. But we have never had any money, Miss Innes; that must have been why mother rented this house. My stepfather pays our bills. It's the most maddening, humiliating existence in the world. I would love honest poverty better." "Never mind," I said; "when you and Halsey are married you can be as honest as you like, and you will certainly be poor." Halsey came to the door at that moment and I could hear him coaxing Liddy for admission to the sick room. "Shall I bring him in?" I asked Louise, uncertain what to do. The girl seemed to shrink back among her pillows at the sound of his voice. I was vaguely irritated with her; there are few young fellows like Halsey--straightforward, honest, and willing to sacrifice everything for the one woman. I knew one once, more than thirty years ago, who was like that: he died a long time ago. And sometimes I take out his picture, with its cane and its queer silk hat, and look at it. But of late years it has grown too painful: he is always a boy--and I am an old woman. I would not bring him back if I could. Perhaps it was some such memory that made me call out sharply. "Come in, Halsey." And then I took my sewing and went into the boudoir beyond, to play propriety. I did not try to hear what they said, but every word came through the open door with curious distinctness. Halsey had evidently gone over to the bed and I suppose he kissed her. There was silence for a moment, as if words were superfluous things. "I have been almost wild, sweetheart,"--Halsey's voice. "Why didn't you trust me, and send for me before?" "It was because I couldn't trust myself," she said in a low tone. "I am too weak to struggle to-day; oh, Halsey, how I have wanted to see you!" There was something I did not hear, then Halsey again. "We could go away," he was saying. "What does it matter about any one in the world but just the two of us? To be always together, like this, hand in hand; Louise--don't tell me it isn't going to be. I won't believe you." "You don't know; you don't know," Louise repeated dully. "Halsey, I care--you know that--but--not enough to marry you." "That is not true, Louise," he said sternly. "You can not look at me with your honest eyes and say that." "I can not marry you," she repeated miserably. "It's bad enough, isn't it? Don't make it worse. Some day, before long, you will be glad." "Then it is because you have never loved me." There were depths of hurt pride in his voice. "You saw how much I loved you, and you let me think you cared--for a while. No--that isn't like you, Louise. There is something you haven't told me. Is it--because there is some one else?" "Yes," almost inaudibly. "Louise! Oh, I don't believe it." "It is true," she said sadly. "Halsey, you must not try to see me again. As soon as I can, I am going away from here--where you are all so much kinder than I deserve. And whatever you hear about me, try to think as well of me as you can. I am going to marry--another man. How you must hate me--hate me!" I could hear Halsey cross the room to the window. Then, after a pause, he went back to her again. I could hardly sit still; I wanted to go in and give her a good shaking. "Then it's all over," he was saying with a long breath. "The plans we made together, the hopes, the--all of it--over! Well, I'll not be a baby, and I'll give you up the minute you say 'I don't love you and I do love--some one else'!" "I can not say that," she breathed, "but, very soon, I shall marry--the other man." I could hear Halsey's low triumphant laugh. "I defy him," he said. "Sweetheart, as long as you care for me, I am not afraid." The wind slammed the door between the two rooms just then, and I could hear nothing more, although I moved my chair quite close. After a discreet interval, I went into the other room, and found Louise alone. She was staring with sad eyes at the cherub painted on the ceiling over the bed, and because she looked tired I did not disturb her. CHAPTER XIV AN EGG-NOG AND A TELEGRAM We had discovered Louise at the lodge Tuesday night. It was Wednesday I had my interview with her. Thursday and Friday were uneventful, save as they marked improvement in our patient. Gertrude spent almost all the time with her, and the two had grown to be great friends. But certain things hung over me constantly; the coroner's inquest on the death of Arnold Armstrong, to be held Saturday, and the arrival of Mrs. Armstrong and young Doctor Walker, bringing the body of the dead president of the Traders' Bank. We had not told Louise of either death. Then, too, I was anxious about the children. With their mother's inheritance swept away in the wreck of the bank, and with their love affairs in a disastrous condition, things could scarcely be worse. Added to that, the cook and Liddy had a flare-up over the proper way to make beef-tea for Louise, and, of course, the cook left. Mrs. Watson had been glad enough, I think, to turn Louise over to our care, and Thomas went upstairs night and morning to greet his young mistress from the doorway. Poor Thomas! He had the faculty--found still in some old negroes, who cling to the traditions of slavery days--of making his employer's interest his. It was always "we" with Thomas; I miss him sorely; pipe-smoking, obsequious, not over reliable, kindly old man! On Thursday Mr. Harton, the Armstrongs' legal adviser, called up from town. He had been advised, he said, that Mrs. Armstrong was coming east with her husband's body and would arrive Monday. He came with some hesitation, he went on, to the fact that he had been further instructed to ask me to relinquish my lease on Sunnyside, as it was Mrs. Armstrong's desire to come directly there. I was aghast. "Here!" I said. "Surely you are mistaken, Mr. Harton. I should think, after--what happened here only a few days ago, she would never wish to come back." "Nevertheless," he replied, "she is most anxious to come. This is what she says. 'Use every possible means to have Sunnyside vacated. Must go there at once.'" "Mr. Harton," I said testily, "I am not going to do anything of the kind. I and mine have suffered enough at the hands of this family. I rented the house at an exorbitant figure and I have moved out here for the summer. My city home is dismantled and in the hands of decorators. I have been here one week, during which I have had not a single night of uninterrupted sleep, and I intend to stay until I have recuperated. Moreover, if Mr. Armstrong died insolvent, as I believe was the case, his widow ought to be glad to be rid of so expensive a piece of property." The lawyer cleared his throat. "I am very sorry you have made this decision," he said. "Miss Innes, Mrs. Fitzhugh tells me Louise Armstrong is with you." "She is." "Has she been informed of this--double bereavement?" "Not yet," I said. "She has been very ill; perhaps to-night she can be told." "It is very sad; very sad," he said. "I have a telegram for her, Mrs. Innes. Shall I send it out?" "Better open it and read it to me," I suggested. "If it is important, that will save time." There was a pause while Mr. Harton opened the telegram. Then he read it slowly, judicially. "'Watch for Nina Carrington. Home Monday. Signed F. L. W.'" "Hum!" I said. "'Watch for Nina Carrington. Home Monday.' Very well, Mr. Harton, I will tell her, but she is not in condition to watch for any one." "Well, Miss Innes, if you decide to--er--relinquish the lease, let me know," the lawyer said. "I shall not relinquish it," I replied, and I imagined his irritation from the way he hung up the receiver. I wrote the telegram down word for word, afraid to trust my memory, and decided to ask Doctor Stewart how soon Louise might be told the truth. The closing of the Traders' Bank I considered unnecessary for her to know, but the death of her stepfather and stepbrother must be broken to her soon, or she might hear it in some unexpected and shocking manner. Doctor Stewart came about four o'clock, bringing his leather satchel into the house with a great deal of care, and opening it at the foot of the stairs to show me a dozen big yellow eggs nesting among the bottles. "Real eggs," he said proudly. "None of your anemic store eggs, but the real thing--some of them still warm. Feel them! Egg-nog for Miss Louise." He was beaming with satisfaction, and before he left, he insisted on going back to the pantry and making an egg-nog with his own hands. Somehow, all the time he was doing it, I had a vision of Doctor Willoughby, my nerve specialist in the city, trying to make an egg-nog. I wondered if he ever prescribed anything so plebeian--and so delicious. And while Doctor Stewart whisked the eggs he talked. "I said to Mrs. Stewart," he confided, a little red in the face from the exertion, "after I went home the other day, that you would think me an old gossip, for saying what I did about Walker and Miss Louise." "Nothing of the sort," I protested. "The fact is," he went on, evidently justifying him self, "I got that piece of information just as we get a lot of things, through the kitchen end of the house. Young Walker's chauffeur--Walker's more fashionable than I am, and he goes around the country in a Stanhope car--well, his chauffeur comes to see our servant girl, and he told her the whole thing. I thought it was probable, because Walker spent a lot of time up here last summer, when the family was here, and besides, Riggs, that's Walker's man, had a very pat little story about the doctor's building a house on this property, just at the foot of the hill. The sugar, please." The egg-nog was finished. Drop by drop the liquor had cooked the egg, and now, with a final whisk, a last toss in the shaker, it was ready, a symphony in gold and white. The doctor sniffed it. "Real eggs, real milk, and a touch of real Kentucky whisky," he said. He insisted on carrying it up himself, but at the foot of the stairs he paused. "Riggs said the plans were drawn for the house," he said, harking back to the old subject. "Drawn by Huston in town. So I naturally believed him." When the doctor came down, I was ready with a question. "Doctor," I asked, "is there any one in the neighborhood named Carrington? Nina Carrington?" "Carrington?" He wrinkled his forehead. "Carrington? No, I don't remember any such family. There used to be Covingtons down the creek." "The name was Carrington," I said, and the subject lapsed. Gertrude and Halsey went for a long walk that afternoon, and Louise slept. Time hung heavy on my hands, and I did as I had fallen into a habit of doing lately--I sat down and thought things over. One result of my meditations was that I got up suddenly and went to the telephone. I had taken the most intense dislike to this Doctor Walker, whom I had never seen, and who was being talked of in the countryside as the fiance of Louise Armstrong. I knew Sam Huston well. There had been a time, when Sam was a good deal younger than he is now, before he had married Anne Endicott, when I knew him even better. So now I felt no hesitation in calling him over the telephone. But when his office boy had given way to his confidential clerk, and that functionary had condescended to connect his employer's desk telephone, I was somewhat at a loss as to how to begin. "Why, how are you, Rachel?" Sam said sonorously. "Going to build that house at Rock View?" It was a twenty-year-old joke of his. "Sometime, perhaps," I said. "Just now I want to ask you a question about something which is none of my business." "I see you haven't changed an iota in a quarter of a century, Rachel." This was intended to be another jest. "Ask ahead: everything but my domestic affairs is at your service." "Try to be serious," I said. "And tell me this: has your firm made any plans for a house recently, for a Doctor Walker, at Casanova?" "Yes, we have." "Where was it to be built? I have a reason for asking." "It was to be, I believe, on the Armstrong place. Mr. Armstrong himself consulted me, and the inference was--in fact, I am quite certain--the house was to be occupied by Mr. Armstrong's daughter, who was engaged to marry Doctor Walker." When the architect had inquired for the different members of my family, and had finally rung off, I was certain of one thing. Louise Armstrong was in love with Halsey, and the man she was going to marry was Doctor Walker. Moreover, this decision was not new; marriage had been contemplated for some time. There must certainly be some explanation--but what was it? That day I repeated to Louise the telegram Mr. Warton had opened. She seemed to understand, but an unhappier face I have never seen. She looked like a criminal whose reprieve is over, and the day of execution approaching. CHAPTER XV LIDDY GIVES THE ALARM The next day, Friday, Gertrude broke the news of her stepfather's death to Louise. She did it as gently as she could, telling her first that he was very ill, and finally that he was dead. Louise received the news in the most unexpected manner, and when Gertrude came out to tell me how she had stood it, I think she was almost shocked. "She just lay and stared at me, Aunt Ray," she said. "Do you know, I believe she is glad, glad! And she is too honest to pretend anything else. What sort of man was Mr. Paul Armstrong, anyhow?" "He was a bully as well as a rascal, Gertrude," I said. "But I am convinced of one thing; Louise will send for Halsey now, and they will make it all up." For Louise had steadily refused to see Halsey all that day, and the boy was frantic. We had a quiet hour, Halsey and I, that evening, and I told him several things; about the request that we give up the lease to Sunnyside, about the telegram to Louise, about the rumors of an approaching marriage between the girl and Doctor Walker, and, last of all, my own interview with her the day before. He sat back in a big chair, with his face in the shadow, and my heart fairly ached for him. He was so big and so boyish! When I had finished he drew a long breath. "Whatever Louise does," he said, "nothing will convince me, Aunt Ray, that she doesn't care for me. And up to two months ago, when she and her mother went west, I was the happiest fellow on earth. Then something made a difference: she wrote me that her people were opposed to the marriage; that her feeling for me was what it had always been, but that something had happened which had changed her ideas as to the future. I was not to write until she wrote me, and whatever occurred, I was to think the best I could of her. It sounded like a puzzle. When I saw her yesterday, it was the same thing, only, perhaps, worse." "Halsey," I asked, "have you any idea of the nature of the interview between Louise Armstrong and Arnold the night he was murdered?" "It was stormy. Thomas says once or twice he almost broke into the room, he was so alarmed for Louise." "Another thing, Halsey," I said, "have you ever heard Louise mention a woman named Carrington, Nina Carrington?" "Never," he said positively. For try as we would, our thoughts always came back to that fatal Saturday night, and the murder. Every conversational path led to it, and we all felt that Jamieson was tightening the threads of evidence around John Bailey. The detective's absence was hardly reassuring; he must have had something to work on in town, or he would have returned. The papers reported that the cashier of the Traders' Bank was ill in his apartments at the Knickerbocker--a condition not surprising, considering everything. The guilt of the defunct president was no longer in doubt; the missing bonds had been advertised and some of them discovered. In every instance they had been used as collateral for large loans, and the belief was current that not less than a million and a half dollars had been realized. Every one connected with the bank had been placed under arrest, and released on heavy bond. Was he alone in his guilt, or was the cashier his accomplice? Where was the money? The estate of the dead man was comparatively small--a city house on a fashionable street, Sunnyside, a large estate largely mortgaged, an insurance of fifty thousand dollars, and some personal property--this was all. The rest lost in speculation probably, the papers said. There was one thing which looked uncomfortable for Jack Bailey: he and Paul Armstrong together had promoted a railroad company in New Mexico, and it was rumored that together they had sunk large sums of money there. The business alliance between the two men added to the belief that Bailey knew something of the looting. His unexplained absence from the bank on Monday lent color to the suspicion against him. The strange thing seemed to be his surrendering himself on the point of departure. To me, it seemed the shrewd calculation of a clever rascal. I was not actively antagonistic to Gertrude's lover, but I meant to be convinced, one way or the other. I took no one on faith. That night the Sunnyside ghost began to walk again. Liddy had been sleeping in Louise's dressing-room on a couch, and the approach of dusk was a signal for her to barricade the entire suite. Situated as its was, beyond the circular staircase, nothing but an extremity of excitement would have made her pass it after dark. I confess myself that the place seemed to me to have a sinister appearance, but we kept that wing well lighted, and until the lights went out at midnight it was really cheerful, if one did not know its history. On Friday night, then, I had gone to bed, resolved to go at once to sleep. Thoughts that insisted on obtruding themselves I pushed resolutely to the back of my mind, and I systematically relaxed every muscle. I fell asleep soon, and was dreaming that Doctor Walker was building his new house immediately in front of my windows: I could hear the thump-thump of the hammers, and then I waked to a knowledge that somebody was pounding on my door. I was up at once, and with the sound of my footstep on the floor the low knocking ceased, to be followed immediately by sibilant whispering through the keyhole. "Miss Rachel! Miss Rachel!" somebody was saying, over and over. "Is that you, Liddy?" I asked, my hand on the knob. "For the love of mercy, let me in!" she said in a low tone. She was leaning against the door, for when I opened it, she fell in. She was greenish-white, and she had a red and black barred flannel petticoat over her shoulders. "Listen," she said, standing in the middle of the floor and holding on to me. "Oh, Miss Rachel, it's the ghost of that dead man hammering to get in!" Sure enough, there was a dull thud--thud--thud from some place near. It was muffled: one rather felt than heard it, and it was impossible to locate. One moment it seemed to come, three taps and a pause, from the floor under us: the next, thud--thud--thud--it came apparently from the wall. "It's not a ghost," I said decidedly. "If it was a ghost it wouldn't rap: it would come through the keyhole." Liddy looked at the keyhole. "But it sounds very much as though some one is trying to break into the house." Liddy was shivering violently. I told her to get me my slippers and she brought me a pair of kid gloves, so I found my things myself, and prepared to call Halsey. As before, the night alarm had found the electric lights gone: the hall, save for its night lamp, was in darkness, as I went across to Halsey's room. I hardly know what I feared, but it was a relief to find him there, very sound asleep, and with his door unlocked. "Wake up, Halsey," I said, shaking him. He stirred a little. Liddy was half in and half out of the door, afraid as usual to be left alone, and not quite daring to enter. Her scruples seemed to fade, however, all at once. She gave a suppressed yell, bolted into the room, and stood tightly clutching the foot-board of the bed. Halsey was gradually waking. "I've seen it," Liddy wailed. "A woman in white down the hall!" I paid no attention. "Halsey," I persevered, "some one is breaking into the house. Get up, won't you?" "It isn't our house," he said sleepily. And then he roused to the exigency of the occasion. "All right, Aunt Ray," he said, still yawning. "If you'll let me get into something--" It was all I could do to get Liddy out of the room. The demands of the occasion had no influence on her: she had seen the ghost, she persisted, and she wasn't going into the hall. But I got her over to my room at last, more dead than alive, and made her lie down on the bed. The tappings, which seemed to have ceased for a while, had commenced again, but they were fainter. Halsey came over in a few minutes, and stood listening and trying to locate the sound. "Give me my revolver, Aunt Ray," he said; and I got it--the one I had found in the tulip bed--and gave it to him. He saw Liddy there and divined at once that Louise was alone. "You let me attend to this fellow, whoever it is, Aunt Ray, and go to Louise, will you? She may be awake and alarmed." So in spite of her protests, I left Liddy alone and went back to the east wing. Perhaps I went a little faster past the yawning blackness of the circular staircase; and I could hear Halsey creaking cautiously down the main staircase. The rapping, or pounding, had ceased, and the silence was almost painful. And then suddenly, from apparently under my very feet, there rose a woman's scream, a cry of terror that broke off as suddenly as it came. I stood frozen and still. Every drop of blood in my body seemed to leave the surface and gather around my heart. In the dead silence that followed it throbbed as if it would burst. More dead than alive, I stumbled into Louise's bedroom. She was not there! CHAPTER XVI IN THE EARLY MORNING I stood looking at the empty bed. The coverings had been thrown back, and Louise's pink silk dressing-gown was gone from the foot, where it had lain. The night lamp burned dimly, revealing the emptiness of the place. I picked it up, but my hand shook so that I put it down again, and got somehow to the door. There were voices in the hall and Gertrude came running toward me. "What is it?" she cried. "What was that sound? Where is Louise?" "She is not in her room," I said stupidly. "I think--it was she--who screamed." Liddy had joined us now, carrying a light. We stood huddled together at the head of the circular staircase, looking down into its shadows. There was nothing to be seen, and it was absolutely quiet down there. Then we heard Halsey running up the main staircase. He came quickly down the hall to where we were standing. "There's no one trying to get in. I thought I heard some one shriek. Who was it?" Our stricken faces told him the truth. "Some one screamed down there," I said. "And--and Louise is not in her room." With a jerk Halsey took the light from Liddy and ran down the circular staircase. I followed him, more slowly. My nerves seemed to be in a state of paralysis: I could scarcely step. At the foot of the stairs Halsey gave an exclamation and put down the light. "Aunt Ray," he called sharply. At the foot of the staircase, huddled in a heap, her head on the lower stair, was Louise Armstrong. She lay limp and white, her dressing-gown dragging loose from one sleeve of her night-dress, and the heavy braid of her dark hair stretching its length a couple of steps above her head, as if she had slipped down. She was not dead: Halsey put her down on the floor, and began to rub her cold hands, while Gertrude and Liddy ran for stimulants. As for me, I sat there at the foot of that ghostly staircase--sat, because my knees wouldn't hold me--and wondered where it would all end. Louise was still unconscious, but she was breathing better, and I suggested that we get her back to bed before she came to. There was something grisly and horrible to me, seeing her there in almost the same attitude and in the same place where we had found her brother's body. And to add to the similarity, just then the hall clock, far off, struck faintly three o'clock. It was four before Louise was able to talk, and the first rays of dawn were coming through her windows, which faced the east, before she could tell us coherently what had occurred. I give it as she told it. She lay propped in bed, and Halsey sat beside her, unrebuffed, and held her hand while she talked. "I was not sleeping well," she began, "partly, I think, because I had slept during the afternoon. Liddy brought me some hot milk at ten o'clock and I slept until twelve. Then I wakened and--I got to thinking about things, and worrying, so I could not go to sleep. "I was wondering why I had not heard from Arnold since the--since I saw him that night at the lodge. I was afraid he was ill, because--he was to have done something for me, and he had not come back. It must have been three when I heard some one rapping. I sat up and listened, to be quite sure, and the rapping kept up. It was cautious, and I was about to call Liddy. "Then suddenly I thought I knew what it was. The east entrance and the circular staircase were always used by Arnold when he was out late, and sometimes, when he forgot his key, he would rap and I would go down and let him in. I thought he had come back to see me--I didn't think about the time, for his hours were always erratic. But I was afraid I was too weak to get down the stairs. "The knocking kept up, and just as I was about to call Liddy, she ran through the room and out into the hall. I got up then, feeling weak and dizzy, and put on my dressing-gown. If it was Arnold, I knew I must see him. "It was very dark everywhere, but, of course, I knew my way. I felt along for the stair-rail, and went down as quickly as I could. The knocking had stopped, and I was afraid I was too late. I got to the foot of the staircase and over to the door on to the east veranda. I had never thought of anything but that it was Arnold, until I reached the door. It was unlocked and opened about an inch. Everything was black: it was perfectly dark outside. I felt very queer and shaky. Then I thought perhaps Arnold had used his key; he did--strange things sometimes, and I turned around. Just as I reached the foot of the staircase I thought I heard some one coming. My nerves were going anyhow, there in the dark, and I could scarcely stand. I got up as far as the third or fourth step; then I felt that some one was coming toward me on the staircase. The next instant a hand met mine on the stair-rail. Some one brushed past me, and I screamed. Then I must have fainted." That was Louise's story. There could be no doubt of its truth, and the thing that made it inexpressibly awful to me was that the poor girl had crept down to answer the summons of a brother who would never need her kindly offices again. Twice now, without apparent cause, some one had entered the house by means of the east entrance: had apparently gone his way unhindered through the house, and gone out again as he had entered. Had this unknown visitor been there a third time, the night Arnold Armstrong was murdered? Or a fourth, the time Mr. Jamieson had locked some one in the clothes chute? Sleep was impossible, I think, for any of us. We dispersed finally to bathe and dress, leaving Louise little the worse for her experience. But I determined that before the day was over she must know the true state of affairs. Another decision I made, and I put it into execution immediately after breakfast. I had one of the unused bedrooms in the east wing, back along the small corridor, prepared for occupancy, and from that time on, Alex, the gardener, slept there. One man in that barn of a house was an absurdity, with things happening all the time, and I must say that Alex was as unobjectionable as any one could possibly have been. The next morning, also, Halsey and I made an exhaustive examination of the circular staircase, the small entry at its foot, and the card-room opening from it. There was no evidence of anything unusual the night before, and had we not ourselves heard the rapping noises, I should have felt that Louise's imagination had run away with her. The outer door was closed and locked, and the staircase curved above us, for all the world like any other staircase. Halsey, who had never taken seriously my account of the night Liddy and I were there alone, was grave enough now. He examined the paneling of the wainscoting above and below the stairs, evidently looking for a secret door, and suddenly there flashed into my mind the recollection of a scrap of paper that Mr. Jamieson had found among Arnold Armstrong's effects. As nearly as possible I repeated its contents to him, while Halsey took them down in a note-book. "I wish you had told me that before," he said, as he put the memorandum carefully away. We found nothing at all in the house, and I expected little from any examination of the porch and grounds. But as we opened the outer door something fell into the entry with a clatter. It was a cue from the billiard-room. Halsey picked it up with an exclamation. "That's careless enough," he said. "Some of the servants have been amusing themselves." I was far from convinced. Not one of the servants would go into that wing at night unless driven by dire necessity. And a billiard cue! As a weapon of either offense or defense it was an absurdity, unless one accepted Liddy's hypothesis of a ghost, and even then, as Halsey pointed out, a billiard-playing ghost would be a very modern evolution of an ancient institution. That afternoon we, Gertrude, Halsey and I, attended the coroner's inquest in town. Doctor Stewart had been summoned also, it transpiring that in that early Sunday morning, when Gertrude and I had gone to our rooms, he had been called to view the body. We went, the four of us, in the machine, preferring the execrable roads to the matinee train, with half of Casanova staring at us. And on the way we decided to say nothing of Louise and her interview with her stepbrother the night he died. The girl was in trouble enough as it was. CHAPTER XVII A HINT OF SCANDAL In giving the gist of what happened at the inquest, I have only one excuse--to recall to the reader the events of the night of Arnold Armstrong's murder. Many things had occurred which were not brought out at the inquest and some things were told there that were new to me. Altogether, it was a gloomy affair, and the six men in the corner, who constituted the coroner's jury, were evidently the merest puppets in the hands of that all-powerful gentleman, the coroner. Gertrude and I sat well back, with our veils down. There were a number of people I knew: Barbara Fitzhugh, in extravagant mourning--she always went into black on the slightest provocation, because it was becoming--and Mr. Jarvis, the man who had come over from the Greenwood Club the night of the murder. Mr. Harton was there, too, looking impatient as the inquest dragged, but alive to every particle of evidence. From a corner Mr. Jamieson was watching the proceedings intently. Doctor Stewart was called first. His evidence was told briefly, and amounted to this: on the Sunday morning previous, at a quarter before five, he had been called to the telephone. The message was from a Mr. Jarvis, who asked him to come at once to Sunnyside, as there had been an accident there, and Mr. Arnold Armstrong had been shot. He had dressed hastily, gathered up some instruments, and driven to Sunnyside. He was met by Mr. Jarvis, who took him at once to the east wing. There, just as he had fallen, was the body of Arnold Armstrong. There was no need of the instruments: the man was dead. In answer to the coroner's question--no, the body had not been moved, save to turn it over. It lay at the foot of the circular staircase. Yes, he believed death had been instantaneous. The body was still somewhat warm and rigor mortis had not set in. It occurred late in cases of sudden death. No, he believed the probability of suicide might be eliminated; the wounds could have been self-inflicted, but with difficulty, and there had been no weapon found. The doctor's examination was over, but he hesitated and cleared his throat. "Mr. Coroner," he said, "at the risk of taking up valuable time, I would like to speak of an incident that may or may not throw some light on this matter." The audience was alert at once. "Kindly proceed, Doctor," the coroner said. "My home is in Englewood, two miles from Casanova," the doctor began. "In the absence of Doctor Walker, a number of Casanova people have been consulting me. A month ago--five weeks, to be exact--a woman whom I had never seen came to my office. She was in deep mourning and kept her veil down, and she brought for examination a child, a boy of six. The little fellow was ill; it looked like typhoid, and the mother was frantic. She wanted a permit to admit the youngster to the Children's Hospital in town here, where I am a member of the staff, and I gave her one. The incident would have escaped me, but for a curious thing. Two days before Mr. Armstrong was shot, I was sent for to go to the Country Club: some one had been struck with a golf-ball that had gone wild. It was late when I left--I was on foot, and about a mile from the club, on the Claysburg road, I met two people. They were disputing violently, and I had no difficulty in recognizing Mr. Armstrong. The woman, beyond doubt, was the one who had consulted me about the child." At this hint of scandal, Mrs. Ogden Fitzhugh sat up very straight. Jamieson was looking slightly skeptical, and the coroner made a note. "The Children's Hospital, you say, Doctor?" he asked. "Yes. But the child, who was entered as Lucien Wallace, was taken away by his mother two weeks ago. I have tried to trace them and failed." All at once I remembered the telegram sent to Louise by some one signed F. L. W.--presumably Doctor Walker. Could this veiled woman be the Nina Carrington of the message? But it was only idle speculation. I had no way of finding out, and the inquest was proceeding. The report of the coroner's physician came next. The post-mortem examination showed that the bullet had entered the chest in the fourth left intercostal space and had taken an oblique course downward and backward, piercing both the heart and lungs. The left lung was collapsed, and the exit point of the ball had been found in the muscles of the back to the left of the spinal column. It was improbable that such a wound had been self-inflicted, and its oblique downward course pointed to the fact that the shot had been fired from above. In other words, as the murdered man had been found dead at the foot of a staircase, it was probable that the shot had been fired by some one higher up on the stairs. There were no marks of powder. The bullet, a thirty-eight caliber, had been found in the dead man's clothing, and was shown to the jury. Mr. Jarvis was called next, but his testimony amounted to little. He had been summoned by telephone to Sunnyside, had come over at once with the steward and Mr. Winthrop, at present out of town. They had been admitted by the housekeeper, and had found the body lying at the foot of the staircase. He had made a search for a weapon, but there was none around. The outer entry door in the east wing had been unfastened and was open about an inch. I had been growing more and more nervous. When the coroner called Mr. John Bailey, the room was filled with suppressed excitement. Mr. Jamieson went forward and spoke a few words to the coroner, who nodded. Then Halsey was called. "Mr. Innes," the coroner said, "will you tell under what circumstances you saw Mr. Arnold Armstrong the night he died?" "I saw him first at the Country Club," Halsey said quietly. He was rather pale, but very composed. "I stopped there with my automobile for gasolene. Mr. Armstrong had been playing cards. When I saw him there, he was coming out of the card-room, talking to Mr. John Bailey." "The nature of the discussion--was it amicable?" Halsey hesitated. "They were having a dispute," he said. "I asked Mr. Bailey to leave the club with me and come to Sunnyside over Sunday." "Isn't it a fact, Mr. Innes, that you took Mr. Bailey away from the club-house because you were afraid there would be blows?" "The situation was unpleasant," Halsey said evasively. "At that time had you any suspicion that the Traders' Bank had been wrecked?" "No." "What occurred next?" "Mr. Bailey and I talked in the billiard-room until two-thirty." "And Mr. Arnold Armstrong came there, while you were talking?" "Yes. He came about half-past two. He rapped at the east door, and I admitted him." The silence in the room was intense. Mr. Jamieson's eyes never left Halsey's face. "Will you tell us the nature of his errand?" "He brought a telegram that had come to the club for Mr. Bailey." "He was sober?" "Perfectly, at that time. Not earlier." "Was not his apparent friendliness a change from his former attitude?" "Yes. I did not understand it." "How long did he stay?" "About five minutes. Then he left, by the east entrance." "What occurred then?" "We talked for a few minutes, discussing a plan Mr. Bailey had in mind. Then I went to the stables, where I kept my car, and got it out." "Leaving Mr. Bailey alone in the billiard-room?" Halsey hesitated. "My sister was there?" Mrs. Ogden Fitzhugh had the courage to turn and eye Gertrude through her lorgnon. "And then?" "I took the car along the lower road, not to disturb the household. Mr. Bailey came down across the lawn, through the hedge, and got into the car on the road." "Then you know nothing of Mr. Armstrong's movements after he left the house?" "Nothing. I read of his death Monday evening for the first time." "Mr. Bailey did not see him on his way across the lawn?" "I think not. If he had seen him he would have spoken of it." "Thank you. That is all. Miss Gertrude Innes." Gertrude's replies were fully as concise as Halsey's. Mrs. Fitzhugh subjected her to a close inspection, commencing with her hat and ending with her shoes. I flatter myself she found nothing wrong with either her gown or her manner, but poor Gertrude's testimony was the reverse of comforting. She had been summoned, she said, by her brother, after Mr. Armstrong had gone. She had waited in the billiard-room with Mr. Bailey, until the automobile had been ready. Then she had locked the door at the foot of the staircase, and, taking a lamp, had accompanied Mr. Bailey to the main entrance of the house, and had watched him cross the lawn. Instead of going at once to her room, she had gone back to the billiard-room for something which had been left there. The card-room and billiard-room were in darkness. She had groped around, found the article she was looking for, and was on the point of returning to her room, when she had heard some one fumbling at the lock at the east outer door. She had thought it was probably her brother, and had been about to go to the door, when she heard it open. Almost immediately there was a shot, and she had run panic-stricken through the drawing-room and had roused the house. "You heard no other sound?" the coroner asked. "There was no one with Mr. Armstrong when he entered?" "It was perfectly dark. There were no voices and I heard nothing. There was just the opening of the door, the shot, and the sound of somebody falling." "Then, while you went through the drawing-room and up-stairs to alarm the household, the criminal, whoever it was, could have escaped by the east door?" "Yes." "Thank you. That will do." I flatter myself that the coroner got little enough out of me. I saw Mr. Jamieson smiling to himself, and the coroner gave me up, after a time. I admitted I had found the body, said I had not known who it was until Mr. Jarvis told me, and ended by looking up at Barbara Fitzhugh and saying that in renting the house I had not expected to be involved in any family scandal. At which she turned purple. The verdict was that Arnold Armstrong had met his death at the hands of a person or persons unknown, and we all prepared to leave. Barbara Fitzhugh flounced out without waiting to speak to me, but Mr. Harton came up, as I knew he would. "You have decided to give up the house, I hope, Miss Innes," he said. "Mrs. Armstrong has wired me again." "I am not going to give it up," I maintained, "until I understand some things that are puzzling me. The day that the murderer is discovered, I will leave." "Then, judging by what I have heard, you will be back in the city very soon," he said. And I knew that he suspected the discredited cashier of the Traders' Bank. Mr. Jamieson came up to me as I was about to leave the coroner's office. "How is your patient?" he asked with his odd little smile. "I have no patient," I replied, startled. "I will put it in a different way, then. How is Miss Armstrong?" "She--she is doing very well," I stammered. "Good," cheerfully. "And our ghost? Is it laid?" "Mr. Jamieson," I said suddenly, "I wish you would do one thing: I wish you would come to Sunnyside and spend a few days there. The ghost is not laid. I want you to spend one night at least watching the circular staircase. The murder of Arnold Armstrong was a beginning, not an end." He looked serious. "Perhaps I can do it," he said. "I have been doing something else, but--well, I will come out to-night." We were very silent during the trip back to Sunnyside. I watched Gertrude closely and somewhat sadly. To me there was one glaring flaw in her story, and it seemed to stand out for every one to see. Arnold Armstrong had had no key, and yet she said she had locked the east door. He must have been admitted from within the house; over and over I repeated it to myself. That night, as gently as I could, I told Louise the story of her stepbrother's death. She sat in her big, pillow-filled chair, and heard me through without interruption. It was clear that she was shocked beyond words: if I had hoped to learn anything from her expression, I had failed. She was as much in the dark as we were. CHAPTER XVIII A HOLE IN THE WALL My taking the detective out to Sunnyside raised an unexpected storm of protest from Gertrude and Halsey. I was not prepared for it, and I scarcely knew how to account for it. To me Mr. Jamieson was far less formidable under my eyes where I knew what he was doing, than he was of in the city, twisting circumstances and motives to suit himself and learning what he wished to know, about events at Sunnyside, in some occult way. I was glad enough to have him there, when excitements began to come thick and fast. A new element was about to enter into affairs: Monday, or Tuesday at the latest, would find Doctor Walker back in his green and white house in the village, and Louise's attitude to him in the immediate future would signify Halsey's happiness or wretchedness, as it might turn out. Then, too, the return of her mother would mean, of course, that she would have to leave us, and I had become greatly attached to her. From the day Mr. Jamieson came to Sunnyside there was a subtle change in Gertrude's manner to me. It was elusive, difficult to analyze, but it was there. She was no longer frank with me, although I think her affection never wavered. At the time I laid the change to the fact that I had forbidden all communication with John Bailey, and had refused to acknowledge any engagement between the two. Gertrude spent much of her time wandering through the grounds, or taking long cross-country walks. Halsey played golf at the Country Club day after day, and after Louise left, as she did the following week, Mr. Jamieson and I were much together. He played a fair game of cribbage, but he cheated at solitaire. The night the detective arrived, Saturday, I had a talk with him. I told him of the experience Louise Armstrong had had the night before, on the circular staircase, and about the man who had so frightened Rosie on the drive. I saw that he thought the information was important, and to my suggestion that we put an additional lock on the east wing door he opposed a strong negative. "I think it probable," he said, "that our visitor will be back again, and the thing to do is to leave things exactly as they are, to avoid rousing suspicion. Then I can watch for at least a part of each night and probably Mr. Innes will help us out. I would say as little to Thomas as possible. The old man knows more than he is willing to admit." I suggested that Alex, the gardener, would probably be willing to help, and Mr. Jamieson undertook to make the arrangement. For one night, however, Mr. Jamieson preferred to watch alone. Apparently nothing occurred. The detective sat in absolute darkness on the lower step of the stairs, dozing, he said afterwards, now and then. Nothing could pass him in either direction, and the door in the morning remained as securely fastened as it had been the night before. And yet one of the most inexplicable occurrences of the whole affair took place that very night. Liddy came to my room on Sunday morning with a face as long as the moral law. She laid out my things as usual, but I missed her customary garrulousness. I was not regaled with the new cook's extravagance as to eggs, and she even forbore to mention "that Jamieson," on whose arrival she had looked with silent disfavor. "What's the matter, Liddy?" I asked at last. "Didn't you sleep last night?" "No, ma'm," she said stiffly. "Did you have two cups of coffee at your dinner?" I inquired. "No, ma'm," indignantly. I sat up and almost upset my hot water--I always take a cup of hot water with a pinch of salt, before I get up. It tones the stomach. "Liddy Allen," I said, "stop combing that switch and tell me what is wrong with you." Liddy heaved a sigh. "Girl and woman," she said, "I've been with you twenty-five years, Miss Rachel, through good temper and bad--" the idea! and what I have taken from her in the way of sulks!--"but I guess I can't stand it any longer. My trunk's packed." "Who packed it?" I asked, expecting from her tone to be told she had wakened to find it done by some ghostly hand. "I did; Miss Rachel, you won't believe me when I tell you this house is haunted. Who was it fell down the clothes chute? Who was it scared Miss Louise almost into her grave?" "I'm doing my best to find out," I said. "What in the world are you driving at?" She drew a long breath. "There is a hole in the trunk-room wall, dug out since last night. It's big enough to put your head in, and the plaster's all over the place." "Nonsense!" I said. "Plaster is always falling." But Liddy clenched that. "Just ask Alex," she said. "When he put the new cook's trunk there last night the wall was as smooth as this. This morning it's dug out, and there's plaster on the cook's trunk. Miss Rachel, you can get a dozen detectives and put one on every stair in the house, and you'll never catch anything. There's some things you can't handcuff." Liddy was right. As soon as I could, I went up to the trunk-room, which was directly over my bedroom. The plan of the upper story of the house was like that of the second floor, in the main. One end, however, over the east wing, had been left only roughly finished, the intention having been to convert it into a ball-room at some future time. The maids' rooms, trunk-room, and various store-rooms, including a large airy linen-room, opened from a long corridor, like that on the second floor. And in the trunk-room, as Liddy had said, was a fresh break in the plaster. Not only in the plaster, but through the lathing, the aperture extended. I reached into the opening, and three feet away, perhaps, I could touch the bricks of the partition wall. For some reason, the architect, in building the house, had left a space there that struck me, even in the surprise of the discovery, as an excellent place for a conflagration to gain headway. "You are sure the hole was not here yesterday?" I asked Liddy, whose expression was a mixture of satisfaction and alarm. In answer she pointed to the new cook's trunk--that necessary adjunct of the migratory domestic. The top was covered with fine white plaster, as was the floor. But there were no large pieces of mortar lying around--no bits of lathing. When I mentioned this to Liddy she merely raised her eyebrows. Being quite confident that the gap was of unholy origin, she did not concern herself with such trifles as a bit of mortar and lath. No doubt they were even then heaped neatly on a gravestone in the Casanova churchyard! I brought Mr. Jamieson up to see the hole in the wall, directly after breakfast. His expression was very odd when he looked at it, and the first thing he did was to try to discover what object, if any, such a hole could have. He got a piece of candle, and by enlarging the aperture a little was able to examine what lay beyond. The result was nil. The trunk-room, although heated by steam heat, like the rest of the house, boasted of a fireplace and mantel as well. The opening had been made between the flue and the outer wall of the house. There was revealed, however, on inspection, only the brick of the chimney on one side and the outer wall of the house on the other; in depth the space extended only to the flooring. The breach had been made about four feet from the floor, and inside were all the missing bits of plaster. It had been a methodical ghost. It was very much of a disappointment. I had expected a secret room, at the very least, and I think even Mr. Jamieson had fancied he might at last have a clue to the mystery. There was evidently nothing more to be discovered: Liddy reported that everything was serene among the servants, and that none of them had been disturbed by the noise. The maddening thing, however, was that the nightly visitor had evidently more than one way of gaining access to the house, and we made arrangements to redouble our vigilance as to windows and doors that night. Halsey was inclined to pooh-pooh the whole affair. He said a break in the plaster might have occurred months ago and gone unnoticed, and that the dust had probably been stirred up the day before. After all, we had to let it go at that, but we put in an uncomfortable Sunday. Gertrude went to church, and Halsey took a long walk in the morning. Louise was able to sit up, and she allowed Halsey and Liddy to assist her down-stairs late in the afternoon. The east veranda was shady, green with vines and palms, cheerful with cushions and lounging chairs. We put Louise in a steamer chair, and she sat there passively enough, her hands clasped in her lap. We were very silent. Halsey sat on the rail with a pipe, openly watching Louise, as she looked broodingly across the valley to the hills. There was something baffling in the girl's eyes; and gradually Halsey's boyish features lost their glow at seeing her about again, and settled into grim lines. He was like his father just then. We sat until late afternoon, Halsey growing more and more moody. Shortly before six, he got up and went into the house, and in a few minutes he came out and called me to the telephone. It was Anna Whitcomb, in town, and she kept me for twenty minutes, telling me the children had had the measles, and how Madame Sweeny had botched her new gown. When I finished, Liddy was behind me, her mouth a thin line. "I wish you would try to look cheerful, Liddy," I groaned, "your face would sour milk." But Liddy seldom replied to my gibes. She folded her lips a little tighter. "He called her up," she said oracularly, "he called her up, and asked her to keep you at the telephone, so he could talk to Miss Louise. A THANKLESS CHILD IS SHARPER THAN A SERPENT'S TOOTH." "Nonsense!" I said bruskly. "I might have known enough to leave them. It's a long time since you and I were in love, Liddy, and--we forget." Liddy sniffed. "No man ever made a fool of me," she replied virtuously. "Well, something did," I retorted. CHAPTER XIX CONCERNING THOMAS "Mr. Jamieson," I said, when we found ourselves alone after dinner that night, "the inquest yesterday seemed to me the merest recapitulation of things that were already known. It developed nothing new beyond the story of Doctor Stewart's, and that was volunteered." "An inquest is only a necessary formality, Miss Innes," he replied. "Unless a crime is committed in the open, the inquest does nothing beyond getting evidence from witnesses while events are still in their minds. The police step in later. You and I both know how many important things never transpired. For instance: the dead man had no key, and yet Miss Gertrude testified to a fumbling at the lock, and then the opening of the door. The piece of evidence you mention, Doctor Stewart's story, is one of those things we have to take cautiously: the doctor has a patient who wears black and does not raise her veil. Why, it is the typical mysterious lady! Then the good doctor comes across Arnold Armstrong, who was a graceless scamp--de mortuis--what's the rest of it?--and he is quarreling with a lady in black. Behold, says the doctor, they are one and the same." "Why was Mr. Bailey not present at the inquest?" The detective's expression was peculiar. "Because his physician testified that he is ill, and unable to leave his bed." "Ill!" I exclaimed. "Why, neither Halsey nor Gertrude has told me that." "There are more things than that, Miss Innes, that are puzzling. Bailey gives the impression that he knew nothing of the crash at the bank until he read it in the paper Monday night, and that he went back and surrendered himself immediately. I do not believe it. Jonas, the watchman at the Traders' Bank, tells a different story. He says that on the Thursday night before, about eight-thirty, Bailey went back to the bank. Jonas admitted him, and he says the cashier was in a state almost of collapse. Bailey worked until midnight, then he closed the vault and went away. The occurrence was so unusual that the watchman pondered over it an the rest of the night. What did Bailey do when he went back to the Knickerbocker apartments that night? He packed a suit-case ready for instant departure. But he held off too long; he waited for something. My personal opinion is that he waited to see Miss Gertrude before flying from the country. Then, when he had shot down Arnold Armstrong that night, he had to choose between two evils. He did the thing that would immediately turn public opinion in his favor, and surrendered himself, as an innocent man. The strongest thing against him is his preparation for flight, and his deciding to come back after the murder of Arnold Armstrong. He was shrewd enough to disarm suspicion as to the graver charge?" The evening dragged along slowly. Mrs. Watson came to my bedroom before I went to bed and asked if I had any arnica. She showed me a badly swollen hand, with reddish streaks running toward the elbow; she said it was the hand she had hurt the night of the murder a week before, and that she had not slept well since. It looked to me as if it might be serious, and I told her to let Doctor Stewart see it. The next morning Mrs. Watson went up to town on the eleven train, and was admitted to the Charity Hospital. She was suffering from blood-poisoning. I fully meant to go up and see her there, but other things drove her entirely from my mind. I telephoned to the hospital that day, however, and ordered a private room for her, and whatever comforts she might be allowed. Mrs. Armstrong arrived Monday evening with her husband's body, and the services were set for the next day. The house on Chestnut Street, in town, had been opened, and Tuesday morning Louise left us to go home. She sent for me before she went, and I saw she had been crying. "How can I thank you, Miss Innes?" she said. "You have taken me on faith, and--you have not asked me any questions. Some time, perhaps, I can tell you; and when that time comes, you will all despise me,--Halsey, too." I tried to tell her how glad I was to have had her but there was something else she wanted to say. She said it finally, when she had bade a constrained good-by to Halsey and the car was waiting at the door. "Miss Innes," she said in a low tone, "if they--if there is any attempt made to--to have you give up the house, do it, if you possibly can. I am afraid--to have you stay." That was all. Gertrude went into town with her and saw her safely home. She reported a decided coolness in the greeting between Louise and her mother, and that Doctor Walker was there, apparently in charge of the arrangements for the funeral. Halsey disappeared shortly after Louise left and came home about nine that night, muddy and tired. As for Thomas, he went around dejected and sad, and I saw the detective watching him closely at dinner. Even now I wonder--what did Thomas know? What did he suspect? At ten o'clock the household had settled down for the night. Liddy, who was taking Mrs. Watson's place, had finished examining the tea-towels and the corners of the shelves in the cooling-room, and had gone to bed. Alex, the gardener, had gone heavily up the circular staircase to his room, and Mr. Jamieson was examining the locks of the windows. Halsey dropped into a chair in the living-room, and stared moodily ahead. Once he roused. "What sort of a looking chap is that Walker, Gertrude?" he asked! "Rather tall, very dark, smooth-shaven. Not bad looking," Gertrude said, putting down the book she had been pretending to read. Halsey kicked a taboret viciously. "Lovely place this village must be in the winter," he said irrelevantly. "A girl would be buried alive here." It was then some one rapped at the knocker on the heavy front door. Halsey got up leisurely and opened it, admitting Warner. He was out of breath from running, and he looked half abashed. "I am sorry to disturb you," he said. "But I didn't know what else to do. It's about Thomas." "What about Thomas?" I asked. Mr. Jamieson had come into the hall and we all stared at Warner. "He's acting queer," Warner explained. "He's sitting down there on the edge of the porch, and he says he has seen a ghost. The old man looks bad, too; he can scarcely speak." "He's as full of superstition as an egg is of meat," I said. "Halsey, bring some whisky and we will all go down." No one moved to get the whisky, from which I judged there were three pocket flasks ready for emergency. Gertrude threw a shawl around my shoulders, and we all started down over the hill: I had made so many nocturnal excursions around the place that I knew my way perfectly. But Thomas was not on the veranda, nor was he inside the house. The men exchanged significant glances, and Warner got a lantern. "He can't have gone far," he said. "He was trembling so that he couldn't stand, when I left." Jamieson and Halsey together made the round of the lodge, occasionally calling the old man by name. But there was no response. No Thomas came, bowing and showing his white teeth through the darkness. I began to be vaguely uneasy, for the first time. Gertrude, who was never nervous in the dark, went alone down the drive to the gate, and stood there, looking along the yellowish line of the road, while I waited on the tiny veranda. Warner was puzzled. He came around to the edge of the veranda and stood looking at it as if it ought to know and explain. "He might have stumbled into the house," he said, "but he could not have climbed the stairs. Anyhow, he's not inside or outside, that I can see." The other members of the party had come back now, and no one had found any trace of the old man. His pipe, still warm, rested on the edge of the rail, and inside on the table his old gray hat showed that its owner had not gone far. He was not far, after all. From the table my eyes traveled around the room, and stopped at the door of a closet. I hardly know what impulse moved me, but I went in and turned the knob. It burst open with the impetus of a weight behind it, and something fell partly forward in a heap on the floor. It was Thomas--Thomas without a mark of injury on him, and dead. CHAPTER XX DOCTOR WALKER'S WARNING Warner was on his knees in a moment, fumbling at the old man's collar to loosen it, but Halsey caught his hand. "Let him alone?" he said. "You can't help him; he is dead." We stood there, each avoiding the other's eyes; we spoke low and reverently in the presence of death, and we tacitly avoided any mention of the suspicion that was in every mind. When Mr. Jamieson had finished his cursory examination, he got up and dusted the knees of his trousers. "There is no sign of injury," he said, and I know I, for one, drew a long breath of relief. "From what Warner says and from his hiding in the closet, I should say he was scared to death. Fright and a weak heart, together." "But what could have done it?" Gertrude asked. "He was all right this evening at dinner. Warner, what did he say when you found him on the porch?" Warner looked shaken: his honest, boyish face was colorless. "Just what I told you, Miss Innes. He'd been reading the paper down-stairs; I had put up the car, and, feeling sleepy, I came down to the lodge to go to bed. As I went up-stairs, Thomas put down the paper and, taking his pipe, went out on the porch. Then I heard an exclamation from him." "What did he say?" demanded Jamieson. "I couldn't hear, but his voice was strange; it sounded startled. I waited for him to call out again, but he did not, so I went down-stairs. He was sitting on the porch step, looking straight ahead, as if he saw something among the trees across the road. And he kept mumbling about having seen a ghost. He looked queer, and I tried to get him inside, but he wouldn't move. Then I thought I'd better go up to the house." "Didn't he say anything else you could understand?" I asked. "He said something about the grave giving up its dead." Mr. Jamieson was going through the old man's pockets, and Gertrude was composing his arms, folding them across his white shirt-bosom, always so spotless. Mr. Jamieson looked up at me. "What was that you said to me, Miss Innes, about the murder at the house being a beginning and not an end? By jove, I believe you were right!" In the course of his investigations the detective had come to the inner pocket of the dead butler's black coat. Here he found some things that interested him. One was a small flat key, with a red cord tied to it, and the other was a bit of white paper, on which was written something in Thomas' cramped hand. Mr. Jamieson read it: then he gave it to me. It was an address in fresh ink-- LUCIEN WALLACE, 14 Elm Street, Richfield. As the card went around, I think both the detective and I watched for any possible effect it might have, but, beyond perplexity, there seemed to be none. "Richfield!" Gertrude exclaimed. "Why, Elm Street is the main street; don't you remember, Halsey?" "Lucien Wallace!" Halsey said. "That is the child Stewart spoke of at the inquest." Warner, with his mechanic's instinct, had reached for the key. What he said was not a surprise. "Yale lock," he said. "Probably a key to the east entry." There was no reason why Thomas, an old and trusted servant, should not have had a key to that particular door, although the servants' entry was in the west wing. But I had not known of this key, and it opened up a new field of conjecture. Just now, however, there were many things to be attended to, and, leaving Warner with the body, we all went back to the house. Mr. Jamieson walked with me, while Halsey and Gertrude followed. "I suppose I shall have to notify the Armstrongs," I said. "They will know if Thomas had any people and how to reach them. Of course, I expect to defray the expenses of the funeral, but his relatives must be found. What do you think frightened him, Mr. Jamieson?" "It is hard to say," he replied slowly, "but I think we may be certain it was fright, and that he was hiding from something. I am sorry in more than one way: I have always believed that Thomas knew something, or suspected something, that he would not tell. Do you know how much money there was in that worn-out wallet of his? Nearly a hundred dollars! Almost two months' wages--and yet those darkies seldom have a penny. Well--what Thomas knew will be buried with him." Halsey suggested that the grounds be searched, but Mr. Jamieson vetoed the suggestion. "You would find nothing," he said. "A person clever enough to get into Sunnyside and tear a hole in the wall, while I watched down-stairs, is not to be found by going around the shrubbery with a lantern." With the death of Thomas, I felt that a climax had come in affairs at Sunnyside. The night that followed was quiet enough. Halsey watched at the foot of the staircase, and a complicated system of bolts on the other doors seemed to be effectual. Once in the night I wakened and thought I heard the tapping again. But all was quiet, and I had reached the stage where I refused to be disturbed for minor occurrences. The Armstrongs were notified of Thomas' death, and I had my first interview with Doctor Walker as a result. He came up early the next morning, just as we finished breakfast, in a professional looking car with a black hood. I found him striding up and down the living-room, and, in spite of my preconceived dislike, I had to admit that the man was presentable. A big fellow he was, tall and dark, as Gertrude had said, smooth-shaven and erect, with prominent features and a square jaw. He was painfully spruce in his appearance, and his manner was almost obtrusively polite. "I must make a double excuse for this early visit, Miss Innes," he said as he sat down. The chair was lower than he expected, and his dignity required collecting before he went on. "My professional duties are urgent and long neglected, and"--a fall to the every-day manner--"something must be done about that body." "Yes," I said, sitting on the edge of my chair. "I merely wished the address of Thomas' people. You might have telephoned, if you were busy." He smiled. "I wished to see you about something else," he said. "As for Thomas, it is Mrs. Armstrong's wish that you would allow her to attend to the expense. About his relatives, I have already notified his brother, in the village. It was heart disease, I think. Thomas always had a bad heart." "Heart disease and fright," I said, still on the edge of my chair. But the doctor had no intention of leaving. "I understand you have a ghost up here, and that you have the house filled with detectives to exorcise it," he said. For some reason I felt I was being "pumped," as Halsey says. "You have been misinformed," I replied. "What, no ghost, no detectives!" he said, still with his smile. "What a disappointment to the village!" I resented his attempt at playfulness. It had been anything but a joke to us. "Doctor Walker," I said tartly, "I fail to see any humor in the situation. Since I came here, one man has been shot, and another one has died from shock. There have been intruders in the house, and strange noises. If that is funny, there is something wrong with my sense of humor." "You miss the point," he said, still good-naturedly. "The thing that is funny, to me, is that you insist on remaining here, under the circumstances. I should think nothing would keep you." "You are mistaken. Everything that occurs only confirms my resolution to stay until the mystery is cleared." "I have a message for you, Miss Innes," he said, rising at last. "Mrs. Armstrong asked me to thank you for your kindness to Louise, whose whim, occurring at the time it did, put her to great inconvenience. Also--and this is a delicate matter--she asked me to appeal to your natural sympathy for her, at this time, and to ask you if you will not reconsider your decision about the house. Sunnyside is her home; she loves it dearly, and just now she wishes to retire here for quiet and peace." "She must have had a change of heart," I said, ungraciously enough. "Louise told me her mother despised the place. Besides, this is no place for quiet and peace just now. Anyhow, doctor, while I don't care to force an issue, I shall certainly remain here, for a time at least." "For how long?" he asked. "My lease is for six months. I shall stay until some explanation is found for certain things. My own family is implicated now, and I shall do everything to clear the mystery of Arnold Armstrong's murder." The doctor stood looking down, slapping his gloves thoughtfully against the palm of a well-looked-after hand. "You say there have been intruders in the house?" he asked. "You are sure of that, Miss Innes?" "Certain." "In what part?" "In the east wing." "Can you tell me when these intrusions occurred, and what the purpose seemed to be? Was it robbery?" "No," I said decidedly. "As to time, once on Friday night a week ago, again the following night, when Arnold Armstrong was murdered, and again last Friday night." The doctor looked serious. He seemed to be debating some question in his mind, and to reach a decision. "Miss Innes," he said, "I am in a peculiar position; I understand your attitude, of course; but--do you think you are wise? Ever since you have come here there have been hostile demonstrations against you and your family. I'm not a croaker, but--take a warning. Leave before anything occurs that will cause you a lifelong regret." "I am willing to take the responsibility," I said coldly. I think he gave me up then as a poor proposition. He asked to be shown where Arnold Armstrong's body had been found, and I took him there. He scrutinized the whole place carefully, examining the stairs and the lock. When he had taken a formal farewell I was confident of one thing. Doctor Walker would do anything he could to get me away from Sunnyside. CHAPTER XXI FOURTEEN ELM STREET It was Monday evening when we found the body of poor old Thomas. Monday night had been uneventful; things were quiet at the house and the peculiar circumstances of the old man's death had been carefully kept from the servants. Rosie took charge of the dining-room and pantry, in the absence of a butler, and, except for the warning of the Casanova doctor, everything breathed of peace. Affairs at the Traders' Bank were progressing slowly. The failure had hit small stock-holders very hard, the minister of the little Methodist chapel in Casanova among them. He had received as a legacy from an uncle a few shares of stock in the Traders' Bank, and now his joy was turned to bitterness: he had to sacrifice everything he had in the world, and his feeling against Paul Armstrong, dead, as he was, must have been bitter in the extreme. He was asked to officiate at the simple services when the dead banker's body was interred in Casanova churchyard, but the good man providentially took cold, and a substitute was called in. A few days after the services he called to see me, a kind-faced little man, in a very bad frock-coat and laundered tie. I think he was uncertain as to my connection with the Armstrong family, and dubious whether I considered Mr. Armstrong's taking away a matter for condolence or congratulation. He was not long in doubt. I liked the little man. He had known Thomas well, and had promised to officiate at the services in the rickety African Zion Church. He told me more of himself than he knew, and before he left, I astonished him--and myself, I admit--by promising a new carpet for his church. He was much affected, and I gathered that he had yearned over his ragged chapel as a mother over a half-clothed child. "You are laying up treasure, Miss Innes," he said brokenly, "where neither moth nor rust corrupt, nor thieves break through and steal." "It is certainly a safer place than Sunnyside," I admitted. And the thought of the carpet permitted him to smile. He stood just inside the doorway, looking from the luxury of the house to the beauty of the view. "The rich ought to be good," he said wistfully. "They have so much that is beautiful, and beauty is ennobling. And yet--while I ought to say nothing but good of the dead--Mr. Armstrong saw nothing of this fair prospect. To him these trees and lawns were not the work of God. They were property, at so much an acre. He loved money, Miss Innes. He offered up everything to his golden calf. Not power, not ambition, was his fetish: it was money." Then he dropped his pulpit manner, and, turning to me with his engaging smile: "In spite of all this luxury," he said, "the country people here have a saying that Mr. Paul Armstrong could sit on a dollar and see all around it. Unlike the summer people, he gave neither to the poor nor to the church. He loved money for its own sake." "And there are no pockets in shrouds!" I said cynically. I sent him home in the car, with a bunch of hot-house roses for his wife, and he was quite overwhelmed. As for me, I had a generous glow that was cheap at the price of a church carpet. I received less gratification--and less gratitude--when I presented the new silver communion set to St. Barnabas. I had a great many things to think about in those days. I made out a list of questions and possible answers, but I seemed only to be working around in a circle. I always ended where I began. The list was something like this: Who had entered the house the night before the murder? Thomas claimed it was Mr. Bailey, whom he had seen on the foot-path, and who owned the pearl cuff-link. Why did Arnold Armstrong come back after he had left the house the night he was killed? No answer. Was it on the mission Louise had mentioned? Who admitted him? Gertrude said she had locked the east entry. There was no key on the dead man or in the door. He must have been admitted from within. Who had been locked in the clothes chute? Some one unfamiliar with the house, evidently. Only two people missing from the household, Rosie and Gertrude. Rosie had been at the lodge. Therefore--but was it Gertrude? Might it not have been the mysterious intruder again? Who had accosted Rosie on the drive? Again--perhaps the nightly visitor. It seemed more likely some one who suspected a secret at the lodge. Was Louise under surveillance? Who had passed Louise on the circular staircase? Could it have been Thomas? The key to the east entry made this a possibility. But why was he there, if it were indeed he? Who had made the hole in the trunk-room wall? It was not vandalism. It had been done quietly, and with deliberate purpose. If I had only known how to read the purpose of that gaping aperture what I might have saved in anxiety and mental strain! Why had Louise left her people and come home to hide at the lodge? There was no answer, as yet, to this, or to the next questions. Why did both she and Doctor Walker warn us away from the house? Who was Lucien Wallace? What did Thomas see in the shadows the night he died? What was the meaning of the subtle change in Gertrude? Was Jack Bailey an accomplice or a victim in the looting of the Traders' Bank? What all-powerful reason made Louise determine to marry Doctor Walker? The examiners were still working on the books of the Traders' Bank, and it was probable that several weeks would elapse before everything was cleared up. The firm of expert accountants who had examined the books some two months before testified that every bond, every piece of valuable paper, was there at that time. It had been shortly after their examination that the president, who had been in bad health, had gone to California. Mr. Bailey was still ill at the Knickerbocker, and in this, as in other ways, Gertrude's conduct puzzled me. She seemed indifferent, refused to discuss matters pertaining to the bank, and never, to my knowledge, either wrote to him or went to see him. Gradually I came to the conclusion that Gertrude, with the rest of the world, believed her lover guilty, and--although I believed it myself, for that matter--I was irritated by her indifference. Girls in my day did not meekly accept the public's verdict as to the man they loved. But presently something occurred that made me think that under Gertrude's surface calm there was a seething flood of emotions. Tuesday morning the detective made a careful search of the grounds, but he found nothing. In the afternoon he disappeared, and it was late that night when he came home. He said he would have to go back to the city the following day, and arranged with Halsey and Alex to guard the house. Liddy came to me on Wednesday morning with her black silk apron held up like a bag, and her eyes big with virtuous wrath. It was the day of Thomas' funeral in the village, and Alex and I were in the conservatory cutting flowers for the old man's casket. Liddy is never so happy as when she is making herself wretched, and now her mouth drooped while her eyes were triumphant. "I always said there were plenty of things going on here, right under our noses, that we couldn't see," she said, holding out her apron. "I don't see with my nose," I remarked. "What have you got there?" Liddy pushed aside a half-dozen geranium pots, and in the space thus cleared she dumped the contents of her apron--a handful of tiny bits of paper. Alex had stepped back, but I saw him watching her curiously. "Wait a moment, Liddy," I said. "You have been going through the library paper-basket again!" Liddy was arranging her bits of paper with the skill of long practice and paid no attention. "Did it ever occur to you," I went on, putting my hand over the scraps, "that when people tear up their correspondence, it is for the express purpose of keeping it from being read?" "If they wasn't ashamed of it they wouldn't take so much trouble, Miss Rachel," Liddy said oracularly. "More than that, with things happening every day, I consider it my duty. If you don't read and act on this, I shall give it to that Jamieson, and I'll venture he'll not go back to the city to-day." That decided me. If the scraps had anything to do with the mystery ordinary conventions had no value. So Liddy arranged the scraps, like working out one of the puzzle-pictures children play with, and she did it with much the same eagerness. When it was finished she stepped aside while I read it. "Wednesday night, nine o'clock. Bridge," I real aloud. Then, aware of Alex's stare, I turned on Liddy. "Some one is to play bridge to-night at nine o'clock," I said. "Is that your business, or mine?" Liddy was aggrieved. She was about to reply when I scooped up the pieces and left the conservatory. "Now then," I said, when we got outside, "will you tell me why you choose to take Alex into your confidence? He's no fool. Do you suppose he thinks any one in this house is going to play bridge to-night at nine o'clock, by appointment! I suppose you have shown it in the kitchen, and instead of my being able to slip down to the bridge to-night quietly, and see who is there, the whole household will be going in a procession." "Nobody knows it," Liddy said humbly. "I found it in the basket in Miss Gertrude's dressing-room. Look at the back of the sheet." I turned over some of the scraps, and, sure enough, it was a blank deposit slip from the Traders' Bank. So Gertrude was going to meet Jack Bailey that night by the bridge! And I had thought he was ill! It hardly seemed like the action of an innocent man--this avoidance of daylight, and of his fiancee's people. I decided to make certain, however, by going to the bridge that night. After luncheon Mr. Jamieson suggested that I go with him to Richfield, and I consented. "I am inclined to place more faith in Doctor Stewart's story," he said, "since I found that scrap in old Thomas' pocket. It bears out the statement that the woman with the child, and the woman who quarreled with Armstrong, are the same. It looks as if Thomas had stumbled on to some affair which was more or less discreditable to the dead man, and, with a certain loyalty to the family, had kept it to himself. Then, you see, your story about the woman at the card-room window begins to mean something. It is the nearest approach to anything tangible that we have had yet." Warner took us to Richfield in the car. It was about twenty-five miles by railroad, but by taking a series of atrociously rough short cuts we got there very quickly. It was a pretty little town, on the river, and back on the hill I could see the Mortons' big country house, where Halsey and Gertrude had been staying until the night of the murder. Elm Street was almost the only street, and number fourteen was easily found. It was a small white house, dilapidated without having gained anything picturesque, with a low window and a porch only a foot or so above the bit of a lawn. There was a baby-carriage in the path, and from a swing at the side came the sound of conflict. Three small children were disputing vociferously, and a faded young woman with a kindly face was trying to hush the clamor. When she saw us she untied her gingham apron and came around to the porch. "Good afternoon," I said. Jamieson lifted his hat, without speaking. "I came to inquire about a child named Lucien Wallace." "I am glad you have come," she said. "In spite of the other children, I think the little fellow is lonely. We thought perhaps his mother would be here to-day." Mr. Jamieson stepped forward. "You are Mrs. Tate?" I wondered how the detective knew. "Yes, sir." "Mrs. Tate, we want to make some inquiries. Perhaps in the house--" "Come right in," she said hospitably. And soon we were in the little shabby parlor, exactly like a thousand of its prototypes. Mrs. Tate sat uneasily, her hands folded in her lap. "How long has Lucien been here?" Mr. Jamieson asked. "Since a week ago last Friday. His mother paid one week's board in advance; the other has not been paid." "Was he ill when he came?" "No, sir, not what you'd call sick. He was getting better of typhoid, she said, and he's picking up fine." "Will you tell me his mother's name and address?" "That's the trouble," the young woman said, knitting her brows. "She gave her name as Mrs. Wallace, and said she had no address. She was looking for a boarding-house in town. She said she worked in a department store, and couldn't take care of the child properly, and he needed fresh air and milk. I had three children of my own, and one more didn't make much difference in the work, but--I wish she would pay this week's board." "Did she say what store it was?" "No, sir, but all the boy's clothes came from King's. He has far too fine clothes for the country." There was a chorus of shouts and shrill yells from the front door, followed by the loud stamping of children's feet and a throaty "whoa, whoa!" Into the room came a tandem team of two chubby youngsters, a boy and a girl, harnessed with a clothes-line, and driven by a laughing boy of about seven, in tan overalls and brass buttons. The small driver caught my attention at once: he was a beautiful child, and, although he showed traces of recent severe illness, his skin had now the clear transparency of health. "Whoa, Flinders," he shouted. "You're goin' to smash the trap." Mr. Jamieson coaxed him over by holding out a lead-pencil, striped blue and yellow. "Now, then," he said, when the boy had taken the lead-pencil and was testing its usefulness on the detective's cuff, "now then, I'll bet you don't know what your name is!" "I do," said the boy. "Lucien Wallace." "Great! And what's your mother's name?" "Mother, of course. What's your mother's name?" And he pointed to me! I am going to stop wearing black: it doubles a woman's age. "And where did you live before you came here?" The detective was polite enough not to smile. "Grossmutter," he said. And I saw Mr. Jamieson's eyebrows go up. "German," he commented. "Well, young man, you don't seem to know much about yourself." "I've tried it all week," Mrs. Tate broke in. "The boy knows a word or two of German, but he doesn't know where he lived, or anything about himself." Mr. Jamieson wrote something on a card and gave it to her. "Mrs. Tate," he said, "I want you to do something. Here is some money for the telephone call. The instant the boy's mother appears here, call up that number and ask for the person whose name is there. You can run across to the drug-store on an errand and do it quietly. Just say, 'The lady has come.'" "'The lady has come,'" repeated Mrs. Tate. "Very well, sir, and I hope it will be soon. The milk-bill alone is almost double what it was." "How much is the child's board?" I asked. "Three dollars a week, including his washing." "Very well," I said. "Now, Mrs. Tate, I am going to pay last week's board and a week in advance. If the mother comes, she is to know nothing of this visit--absolutely not a word, and, in return for your silence, you may use this money for--something for your own children." Her tired, faded face lighted up, and I saw her glance at the little Tates' small feet. Shoes, I divined--the feet of the genteel poor being almost as expensive as their stomachs. As we went back Mr. Jamieson made only one remark: I think he was laboring under the weight of a great disappointment. "Is King's a children's outfitting place?" he asked. "Not especially. It is a general department store." He was silent after that, but he went to the telephone as soon as we got home, and called up King and Company, in the city. After a time he got the general manager, and they talked for some time. When Mr. Jamieson hung up the receiver he turned to me. "The plot thickens," he said with his ready smile. "There are four women named Wallace at King's none of them married, and none over twenty. I think I shall go up to the city to-night. I want to go to the Children's Hospital. But before I go, Miss Innes, I wish you would be more frank with me than you have been yet. I want you to show me the revolver you picked up in the tulip bed." So he had known all along! "It WAS a revolver, Mr. Jamieson," I admitted, cornered at last, "but I can not show it to you. It is not in my possession." CHAPTER XXII A LADDER OUT OF PLACE At dinner Mr. Jamieson suggested sending a man out in his place for a couple of days, but Halsey was certain there would be nothing more, and felt that he and Alex could manage the situation. The detective went back to town early in the evening, and by nine o'clock Halsey, who had been playing golf--as a man does anything to take his mind away from trouble--was sleeping soundly on the big leather davenport in the living-room. I sat and knitted, pretending not to notice when Gertrude got up and wandered out into the starlight. As soon as I was satisfied that she had gone, however, I went out cautiously. I had no intention of eavesdropping, but I wanted to be certain that it was Jack Bailey she was meeting. Too many things had occurred in which Gertrude was, or appeared to be, involved, to allow anything to be left in question. I went slowly across the lawn, skirted the hedge to a break not far from the lodge, and found myself on the open road. Perhaps a hundred feet to the left the path led across the valley to the Country Club, and only a little way off was the foot-bridge over Casanova Creek. But just as I was about to turn down the path I heard steps coming toward me, and I shrank into the bushes. It was Gertrude, going back quickly toward the house. I was surprised. I waited until she had had time to get almost to the house before I started. And then I stepped back again into the shadows. The reason why Gertrude had not kept her tryst was evident. Leaning on the parapet of the bridge in the moonlight, and smoking a pipe, was Alex, the gardener. I could have throttled Liddy for her carelessness in reading the torn note where he could hear. And I could cheerfully have choked Alex to death for his audacity. But there was no help for it: I turned and followed Gertrude slowly back to the house. The frequent invasions of the house had effectually prevented any relaxation after dusk. We had redoubled our vigilance as to bolts and window-locks but, as Mr. Jamieson had suggested, we allowed the door at the east entry to remain as before, locked by the Yale lock only. To provide only one possible entrance for the invader, and to keep a constant guard in the dark at the foot of the circular staircase, seemed to be the only method. In the absence of the detective, Alex and Halsey arranged to change off, Halsey to be on duty from ten to two, and Alex from two until six. Each man was armed, and, as an additional precaution, the one off duty slept in a room near the head of the circular staircase and kept his door open, to be ready for emergency. These arrangements were carefully kept from the servants, who were only commencing to sleep at night, and who retired, one and all, with barred doors and lamps that burned full until morning. The house was quiet again Wednesday night. It was almost a week since Louise had encountered some one on the stairs, and it was four days since the discovery of the hole in the trunk-room wall. Arnold Armstrong and his father rested side by side in the Casanova churchyard, and at the Zion African Church, on the hill, a new mound marked the last resting-place of poor Thomas. Louise was with her mother in town, and, beyond a polite note of thanks to me, we had heard nothing from her. Doctor Walker had taken up his practice again, and we saw him now and then flying past along the road, always at top speed. The murder of Arnold Armstrong was still unavenged, and I remained firm in the position I had taken--to stay at Sunnyside until the thing was at least partly cleared. And yet, for all its quiet, it was on Wednesday night that perhaps the boldest attempt was made to enter the house. On Thursday afternoon the laundress sent word she would like to speak to me, and I saw her in my private sitting-room, a small room beyond the dressing-room. Mary Anne was embarrassed. She had rolled down her sleeves and tied a white apron around her waist, and she stood making folds in it with fingers that were red and shiny from her soap-suds. "Well, Mary," I said encouragingly, "what's the matter? Don't dare to tell me the soap is out." "No, ma'm, Miss Innes." She had a nervous habit of looking first at my one eye and then at the other, her own optics shifting ceaselessly, right eye, left eye, right eye, until I found myself doing the same thing. "No, ma'm. I was askin' did you want the ladder left up the clothes chute?" "The what?" I screeched, and was sorry the next minute. Seeing her suspicions were verified, Mary Anne had gone white, and stood with her eyes shifting more wildly than ever. "There's a ladder up the clothes chute, Miss Innes," she said. "It's up that tight I can't move it, and I didn't like to ask for help until I spoke to you." It was useless to dissemble; Mary Anne knew now as well as I did that the ladder had no business to be there. I did the best I could, however. I put her on the defensive at once. "Then you didn't lock the laundry last night?" "I locked it tight, and put the key in the kitchen on its nail." "Very well, then you forgot a window." Mary Anne hesitated. "Yes'm," she said at last. "I thought I locked them all, but there was one open this morning." I went out of the room and down the hall, followed by Mary Anne. The door into the clothes chute was securely bolted, and when I opened it I saw the evidence of the woman's story. A pruning-ladder had been brought from where it had lain against the stable and now stood upright in the clothes shaft, its end resting against the wall between the first and second floors. I turned to Mary. "This is due to your carelessness," I said. "If we had all been murdered in our beds it would have been your fault." She shivered. "Now, not a word of this through the house, and send Alex to me." The effect on Alex was to make him apoplectic with rage, and with it all I fancied there was an element of satisfaction. As I look back, so many things are plain to me that I wonder I could not see at the time. It is all known now, and yet the whole thing was so remarkable that perhaps my stupidity was excusable. Alex leaned down the chute and examined the ladder carefully. "It is caught," he said with a grim smile. "The fools, to have left a warning like that! The only trouble is, Miss Innes, they won't be apt to come back for a while." "I shouldn't regard that in the light of a calamity," I replied. Until late that evening Halsey and Alex worked at the chute. They forced down the ladder at last, and put a new bolt on the door. As for myself, I sat and wondered if I had a deadly enemy, intent on my destruction. I was growing more and more nervous. Liddy had given up all pretense at bravery, and slept regularly in my dressing-room on the couch, with a prayer-book and a game knife from the kitchen under her pillow, thus preparing for both the natural and the supernatural. That was the way things stood that Thursday night, when I myself took a hand in the struggle. CHAPTER XXIII WHILE THE STABLES BURNED About nine o'clock that night Liddy came into the living-room and reported that one of the housemaids declared she had seen two men slip around the corner of the stable. Gertrude had been sitting staring in front of her, jumping at every sound. Now she turned on Liddy pettishly. "I declare, Liddy," she said, "you are a bundle of nerves. What if Eliza did see some men around the stable? It may have been Warner and Alex." "Warner is in the kitchen, miss," Liddy said with dignity. "And if you had come through what I have, you would be a bundle of nerves, too. Miss Rachel, I'd be thankful if you'd give me my month's wages to-morrow. I'll be going to my sister's." "Very well," I said, to her evident amazement. "I will make out the check. Warner can take you down to the noon train." Liddy's face was really funny. "You'll have a nice time at your sister's," I went on. "Five children, hasn't she?" "That's it," Liddy said, suddenly bursting into tears. "Send me away, after all these years, and your new shawl only half done, and nobody knowin' how to fix the water for your bath." "It's time I learned to prepare my own bath." I was knitting complacently. But Gertrude got up and put her arms around Liddy's shaking shoulders. "You are two big babies," she said soothingly. "Neither one of you could get along for an hour without the other. So stop quarreling and be good. Liddy, go right up and lay out Aunty's night things. She is going to bed early." After Liddy had gone I began to think about the men at the stable, and I grew more and more anxious. Halsey was aimlessly knocking the billiard-balls around in the billiard-room, and I called to him. "Halsey," I said when he sauntered in, "is there a policeman in Casanova?" "Constable," he said laconically. "Veteran of the war, one arm; in office to conciliate the G. A. R. element. Why?" "Because I am uneasy to-night." And I told him what Liddy had said. "Is there any one you can think of who could be relied on to watch the outside of the house to-night?" "We might get Sam Bohannon from the club," he said thoughtfully. "It wouldn't be a bad scheme. He's a smart darky, and with his mouth shut and his shirt-front covered, you couldn't see him a yard off in the dark." Halsey conferred with Alex, and the result, in an hour, was Sam. His instructions were simple. There had been numerous attempts to break into the house; it was the intention, not to drive intruders away, but to capture them. If Sam saw anything suspicious outside, he was to tap at the east entry, where Alex and Halsey were to alternate in keeping watch through the night. It was with a comfortable feeling of security that I went to bed that night. The door between Gertrude's rooms and mine had been opened, and, with the doors into the hall bolted, we were safe enough. Although Liddy persisted in her belief that doors would prove no obstacles to our disturbers. As before, Halsey watched the east entry from ten until two. He had an eye to comfort, and he kept vigil in a heavy oak chair, very large and deep. We went up-stairs rather early, and through the open door Gertrude and I kept up a running fire of conversation. Liddy was brushing my hair, and Gertrude was doing her own, with a long free sweep of her strong round arms. "Did you know Mrs. Armstrong and Louise are in the village?" she called. "No," I replied, startled. "How did you hear it?" "I met the oldest Stewart girl to-day, the doctor's daughter, and she told me they had not gone back to town after the funeral. They went directly to that little yellow house next to Doctor Walker's, and are apparently settled there. They took the house furnished for the summer." "Why, it's a bandbox," I said. "I can't imagine Fanny Armstrong in such a place." "It's true, nevertheless. Ella Stewart says Mrs. Armstrong has aged terribly, and looks as if she is hardly able to walk." I lay and thought over some of these things until midnight. The electric lights went out then, fading slowly until there was only a red-hot loop to be seen in the bulb, and then even that died away and we were embarked on the darkness of another night. Apparently only a few minutes elapsed, during which my eyes were becoming accustomed to the darkness. Then I noticed that the windows were reflecting a faint pinkish light, Liddy noticed it at the same time, and I heard her jump up. At that moment Sam's deep voice boomed from somewhere just below. "Fire!" he yelled. "The stable's on fire!" I could see him in the glare dancing up and down on the drive, and a moment later Halsey joined him. Alex was awake and running down the stairs, and in five minutes from the time the fire was discovered, three of the maids were sitting on their trunks in the drive, although, excepting a few sparks, there was no fire nearer than a hundred yards. Gertrude seldom loses her presence of mind, and she ran to the telephone. But by the time the Casanova volunteer fire department came toiling up the hill the stable was a furnace, with the Dragon Fly safe but blistered, in the road. Some gasolene exploded just as the volunteer department got to work, which shook their nerves as well as the burning building. The stable, being on a hill, was a torch to attract the population from every direction. Rumor had it that Sunnyside was burning, and it was amazing how many people threw something over their night-clothes and flew to the conflagration. I take it Casanova has few fires, and Sunnyside was furnishing the people, in one way and another, the greatest excitement they had had for years. The stable was off the west wing. I hardly know how I came to think of the circular staircase and the unguarded door at its foot. Liddy was putting my clothes into sheets, preparatory to tossing them out the window, when I found her, and I could hardly persuade her to stop. "I want you to come with me, Liddy," I said. "Bring a candle and a couple of blankets." She lagged behind considerably when she saw me making for the east wing, and at the top of the staircase she balked. "I am not going down there," she said firmly. "There is no one guarding the door down there," I explained. "Who knows?--this may be a scheme to draw everybody away from this end of the house, and let some one in here." The instant I had said it I was convinced I had hit on the explanation, and that perhaps it was already too late. It seemed to me as I listened that I heard stealthy footsteps on the east porch, but there was so much shouting outside that it was impossible to tell. Liddy was on the point of retreat. "Very well," I said, "then I shall go down alone. Run back to Mr. Halsey's room and get his revolver. Don't shoot down the stairs if you hear a noise: remember--I shall be down there. And hurry." I put the candle on the floor at the top of the staircase and took off my bedroom slippers. Then I crept down the stairs, going very slowly, and listening with all my ears. I was keyed to such a pitch that I felt no fear: like the condemned who sleep and eat the night before execution, I was no longer able to suffer apprehension. I was past that. Just at the foot of the stairs I stubbed my toe against Halsey's big chair, and had to stand on one foot in a soundless agony until the pain subsided to a dull ache. And then--I knew I was right. Some one had put a key into the lock, and was turning it. For some reason it refused to work, and the key was withdrawn. There was a muttering of voices outside: I had only a second. Another trial, and the door would open. The candle above made a faint gleam down the well-like staircase, and at that moment, with a second, no more, to spare, I thought of a plan. The heavy oak chair almost filled the space between the newel post and the door. With a crash I had turned it on its side, wedging it against the door, its legs against the stairs. I could hear a faint scream from Liddy, at the crash, and then she came down the stairs on a run, with the revolver held straight out in front of her. "Thank God," she said, in a shaking voice. "I thought it was you." I pointed to the door, and she understood. "Call out the windows at the other end of the house," I whispered. "Run. Tell them not to wait for anything." She went up the stairs at that, two at a time. Evidently she collided with the candle, for it went out, and I was left in darkness. I was really astonishingly cool. I remember stepping over the chair and gluing my ear to the door, and I shall never forget feeling it give an inch or two there in the darkness, under a steady pressure from without. But the chair held, although I could hear an ominous cracking of one of the legs. And then, without the slightest warning, the card-room window broke with a crash. I had my finger on the trigger of the revolver, and as I jumped it went off, right through the door. Some one outside swore roundly, and for the first time I could hear what was said. "Only a scratch. . . . Men are at the other end of the house. . . . Have the whole rat's nest on us." And a lot of profanity which I won't write down. The voices were at the broken window now, and although I was trembling violently, I was determined that I would hold them until help came. I moved up the stairs until I could see into the card-room, or rather through it, to the window. As I looked a small man put his leg over the sill and stepped into the room. The curtain confused him for a moment; then he turned, not toward me, but toward the billiard-room door. I fired again, and something that was glass or china crashed to the ground. Then I ran up the stairs and along the corridor to the main staircase. Gertrude was standing there, trying to locate the shots, and I must have been a peculiar figure, with my hair in crimps, my dressing-gown flying, no slippers, and a revolver clutched in my hands I had no time to talk. There was the sound of footsteps in the lower hall, and some one bounded up the stairs. I had gone Berserk, I think. I leaned over the stair-rail and fired again. Halsey, below, yelled at me. "What are you doing up there?" he yelled. "You missed me by an inch." And then I collapsed and fainted. When I came around Liddy was rubbing my temples with eau de quinine, and the search was in full blast. Well, the man was gone. The stable burned to the ground, while the crowd cheered at every falling rafter, and the volunteer fire department sprayed it with a garden hose. And in the house Alex and Halsey searched every corner of the lower floor, finding no one. The truth of my story was shown by the broken window and the overturned chair. That the unknown had got up-stairs was almost impossible. He had not used the main staircase, there was no way to the upper floor in the east wing, and Liddy had been at the window, in the west wing, where the servants' stair went up. But we did not go to bed at all. Sam Bohannon and Warner helped in the search, and not a closet escaped scrutiny. Even the cellars were given a thorough overhauling, without result. The door in the east entry had a hole through it where my bullet had gone. The hole slanted downward, and the bullet was embedded in the porch. Some reddish stains showed it had done execution. "Somebody will walk lame," Halsey said, when he had marked the course of the bullet. "It's too low to have hit anything but a leg or foot." From that time on I watched every person I met for a limp, and to this day the man who halts in his walk is an object of suspicion to me. But Casanova had no lame men: the nearest approach to it was an old fellow who tended the safety gates at the railroad, and he, I learned on inquiry, had two artificial legs. Our man had gone, and the large and expensive stable at Sunnyside was a heap of smoking rafters and charred boards. Warner swore the fire was incendiary, and in view of the attempt to enter the house, there seemed to be no doubt of it. CHAPTER XXIV FLINDERS If Halsey had only taken me fully into his confidence, through the whole affair, it would have been much simpler. If he had been altogether frank about Jack Bailey, and if the day after the fire he had told me what he suspected, there would have been no harrowing period for all of us, with the boy in danger. But young people refuse to profit by the experience of their elders, and sometimes the elders are the ones to suffer. I was much used up the day after the fire, and Gertrude insisted on my going out. The machine was temporarily out of commission, and the carriage horses had been sent to a farm for the summer. Gertrude finally got a trap from the Casanova liveryman, and we went out. Just as we turned from the drive into the road we passed a woman. She had put down a small valise, and stood inspecting the house and grounds minutely. I should hardly have noticed her, had it not been for the fact that she had been horribly disfigured by smallpox. "Ugh!" Gertrude said, when we had passed, "what a face! I shall dream of it to-night. Get up, Flinders." "Flinders?" I asked. "Is that the horse's name?" "It is." She flicked the horse's stubby mane with the whip. "He didn't look like a livery horse, and the liveryman said he had bought him from the Armstrongs when they purchased a couple of motors and cut down the stable. Nice Flinders--good old boy!" Flinders was certainly not a common name for a horse, and yet the youngster at Richfield had named his prancing, curly-haired little horse Flinders! It set me to thinking. At my request Halsey had already sent word of the fire to the agent from whom we had secured the house. Also, he had called Mr. Jamieson by telephone, and somewhat guardedly had told him of the previous night's events. Mr. Jamieson promised to come out that night, and to bring another man with him. I did not consider it necessary to notify Mrs. Armstrong, in the village. No doubt she knew of the fire, and in view of my refusal to give up the house, an interview would probably have been unpleasant enough. But as we passed Doctor Walker's white and green house I thought of something. "Stop here, Gertrude," I said. "I am going to get out." "To see Louise?" she asked. "No, I want to ask this young Walker something." She was curious, I knew, but I did not wait to explain. I went up the walk to the house, where a brass sign at the side announced the office, and went in. The reception-room was empty, but from the consulting-room beyond came the sound of two voices, not very amicable. "It is an outrageous figure," some one was storming. Then the doctor's quiet tone, evidently not arguing, merely stating something. But I had not time to listen to some person probably disputing his bill, so I coughed. The voices ceased at once: a door closed somewhere, and the doctor entered from the hall of the house. He looked sufficiently surprised at seeing me. "Good afternoon, Doctor," I said formally. "I shall not keep you from your patient. I wish merely to ask you a question." "Won't you sit down?" "It will not be necessary. Doctor, has any one come to you, either early this morning or to-day, to have you treat a bullet wound?" "Nothing so startling has happened to me," he said. "A bullet wound! Things must be lively at Sunnyside." "I didn't say it was at Sunnyside. But as it happens, it was. If any such case comes to you, will it be too much trouble for you to let me know?" "I shall be only too happy," he said. "I understand you have had a fire up there, too. A fire and shooting in one night is rather lively for a quiet place like that." "It is as quiet as a boiler-shop," I replied, as I turned to go. "And you are still going to stay?" "Until I am burned out," I responded. And then on my way down the steps, I turned around suddenly. "Doctor," I asked at a venture, "have you ever heard of a child named Lucien Wallace?" Clever as he was, his face changed and stiffened. He was on his guard again in a moment. "Lucien Wallace?" he repeated. "No, I think not. There are plenty of Wallaces around, but I don't know any Lucien." I was as certain as possible that he did. People do not lie readily to me, and this man lied beyond a doubt. But there was nothing to be gained now; his defenses were up, and I left, half irritated and wholly baffled. Our reception was entirely different at Doctor Stewart's. Taken into the bosom of the family at once, Flinders tied outside and nibbling the grass at the roadside, Gertrude and I drank some home-made elderberry wine and told briefly of the fire. Of the more serious part of the night's experience, of course, we said nothing. But when at last we had left the family on the porch and the good doctor was untying our steed, I asked him the same question I had put to Doctor Walker. "Shot!" he said. "Bless my soul, no. Why, what have you been doing up at the big house, Miss Innes?" "Some one tried to enter the house during the fire, and was shot and slightly injured," I said hastily. "Please don't mention it; we wish to make as little of it as possible." There was one other possibility, and we tried that. At Casanova station I saw the station master, and asked him if any trains left Casanova between one o'clock and daylight. There was none until six A.M. The next question required more diplomacy. "Did you notice on the six-o'clock train any person--any man--who limped a little?" I asked. "Please try to remember: we are trying to trace a man who was seen loitering around Sunnyside last night before the fire." He was all attention in a moment. "I was up there myself at the fire," he said volubly. "I'm a member of the volunteer company. First big fire we've had since the summer house burned over to the club golf links. My wife was sayin' the other day, 'Dave, you might as well 'a' saved the money in that there helmet and shirt.' And here last night they came in handy. Rang that bell so hard I hadn't time scarcely to get 'em on." "And--did you see a man who limped?" Gertrude put in, as he stopped for breath. "Not at the train, ma'm," he said. "No such person got on here to-day. But I'll tell you where I did see a man that limped. I didn't wait till the fire company left; there's a fast freight goes through at four forty-five, and I had to get down to the station. I seen there wasn't much more to do anyhow at the fire--we'd got the flames under control"--Gertrude looked at me and smiled--"so I started down the hill. There was folks here and there goin' home, and along by the path to the Country Club I seen two men. One was a short fellow. He was sitting on a big rock, his back to me, and he had something white in his hand, as if he was tying up his foot. After I'd gone on a piece I looked back, and he was hobbling on and--excuse me, miss--he was swearing something sickening." "Did they go toward the club?" Gertrude asked suddenly, leaning forward. "No, miss. I think they came into the village. I didn't get a look at their faces, but I know every chick and child in the place, and everybody knows me. When they didn't shout at me--in my uniform, you know--I took it they were strangers." So all we had for our afternoon's work was this: some one had been shot by the bullet that went through the door; he had not left the village, and he had not called in a physician. Also, Doctor Walker knew who Lucien Wallace was, and his very denial made me confident that, in that one direction at least, we were on the right track. The thought that the detective would be there that night was the most cheering thing of all, and I think even Gertrude was glad of it. Driving home that afternoon, I saw her in the clear sunlight for the first time in several days, and I was startled to see how ill she looked. She was thin and colorless, and all her bright animation was gone. "Gertrude," I said, "I have been a very selfish old woman. You are going to leave this miserable house to-night. Annie Morton is going to Scotland next week, and you shall go right with her." To my surprise, she flushed painfully. "I don't want to go, Aunt Ray," she said. "Don't make me leave now." "You are losing your health and your good looks," I said decidedly. "You should have a change." "I shan't stir a foot." She was equally decided. Then, more lightly: "Why, you and Liddy need me to arbitrate between you every day in the week." Perhaps I was growing suspicious of every one, but it seemed to me that Gertrude's gaiety was forced and artificial. I watched her covertly during the rest of the drive, and I did not like the two spots of crimson in her pale cheeks. But I said nothing more about sending her to Scotland: I knew she would not go. CHAPTER XXV A VISIT FROM LOUISE That day was destined to be an eventful one, for when I entered the house and found Eliza ensconced in the upper hall on a chair, with Mary Anne doing her best to stifle her with household ammonia, and Liddy rubbing her wrists--whatever good that is supposed to do--I knew that the ghost had been walking again, and this time in daylight. Eliza was in a frenzy of fear. She clutched at my sleeve when I went close to her, and refused to let go until she had told her story. Coming just after the fire, the household was demoralized, and it was no surprise to me to find Alex and the under-gardener struggling down-stairs with a heavy trunk between them. "I didn't want to do it, Miss Innes," Alex said. "But she was so excited, I was afraid she would do as she said--drag it down herself, and scratch the staircase." I was trying to get my bonnet off and to keep the maids quiet at the same time. "Now, Eliza, when you have washed your face and stopped bawling," I said, "come into my sitting-room and tell me what has happened." Liddy put away my things without speaking. The very set of her shoulders expressed disapproval. "Well," I said, when the silence became uncomfortable, "things seem to be warming up." Silence from Liddy, and a long sigh. "If Eliza goes, I don't know where to look for another cook." More silence. "Rosie is probably a good cook." Sniff. "Liddy," I said at last, "don't dare to deny that you are having the time of your life. You positively gloat in this excitement. You never looked better. It's my opinion all this running around, and getting jolted out of a rut, has stirred up that torpid liver of yours." "It's not myself I'm thinking about," she said, goaded into speech. "Maybe my liver was torpid, and maybe it wasn't; but I know this: I've got some feelings left, and to see you standing at the foot of that staircase shootin' through the door--I'll never be the same woman again." "Well, I'm glad of that--anything for a change," I said. And in came Eliza, flanked by Rosie and Mary Anne. Her story, broken with sobs and corrections from the other two, was this: At two o'clock (two-fifteen, Rosie insisted) she had gone up-stairs to get a picture from her room to show Mary Anne. (A picture of a LADY, Mary Anne interposed.) She went up the servants' staircase and along the corridor to her room, which lay between the trunk-room and the unfinished ball-room. She heard a sound as she went down the corridor, like some one moving furniture, but she was not nervous. She thought it might be men examining the house after the fire the night before, but she looked in the trunk-room and saw nobody. She went into her room quietly. The noise had ceased, and everything was quiet. Then she sat down on the side of her bed, and, feeling faint--she was subject to spells--("I told you that when I came, didn't I, Rosie?" "Yes'm, indeed she did!")--she put her head down on her pillow and-- "Took a nap. All right!" I said. "Go on." "When I came to, Miss Innes, sure as I'm sittin' here, I thought I'd die. Somethin' hit me on the face, and I set up, sudden. And then I seen the plaster drop, droppin' from a little hole in the wall. And the first thing I knew, an iron bar that long" (fully two yards by her measure) "shot through that hole and tumbled on the bed. If I'd been still sleeping" ("Fainting," corrected Rosie) "I'd 'a' been hit on the head and killed!" "I wisht you'd heard her scream," put in Mary Anne. "And her face as white as a pillow-slip when she tumbled down the stairs." "No doubt there is some natural explanation for it, Eliza," I said. "You may have dreamed it, in your 'fainting' attack. But if it is true, the metal rod and the hole in the wall will show it." Eliza looked a little bit sheepish. "The hole's there all right, Miss Innes," she said. "But the bar was gone when Mary Anne and Rosie went up to pack my trunk." "That wasn't all," Liddy's voice came funereally from a corner. "Eliza said that from the hole in the wall a burning eye looked down at her!" "The wall must be at least six inches thick," I said with asperity. "Unless the person who drilled the hole carried his eyes on the ends of a stick, Eliza couldn't possibly have seen them." But the fact remained, and a visit to Eliza's room proved it. I might jeer all I wished: some one had drilled a hole in the unfinished wall of the ball-room, passing between the bricks of the partition, and shooting through the unresisting plaster of Eliza's room with such force as to send the rod flying on to her bed. I had gone up-stairs alone, and I confess the thing puzzled me: in two or three places in the wall small apertures had been made, none of them of any depth. Not the least mysterious thing was the disappearance of the iron implement that had been used. I remembered a story I read once about an impish dwarf that lived in the spaces between the double walls of an ancient castle. I wondered vaguely if my original idea of a secret entrance to a hidden chamber could be right, after all, and if we were housing some erratic guest, who played pranks on us in the dark, and destroyed the walls that he might listen, hidden safely away, to our amazed investigations. Mary Anne and Eliza left that afternoon, but Rosie decided to stay. It was about five o'clock when the hack came from the station to get them, and, to my amazement, it had an occupant. Matthew Geist, the driver, asked for me, and explained his errand with pride. "I've brought you a cook, Miss Innes," he said. "When the message came to come up for two girls and their trunks, I supposed there was something doing, and as this here woman had been looking for work in the village, I thought I'd bring her along." Already I had acquired the true suburbanite ability to take servants on faith; I no longer demanded written and unimpeachable references. I, Rachel Innes, have learned not to mind if the cook sits down comfortably in my sitting-room when she is taking the orders for the day, and I am grateful if the silver is not cleaned with scouring soap. And so that day I merely told Liddy to send the new applicant in. When she came, however, I could hardly restrain a gasp of surprise. It was the woman with the pitted face. She stood somewhat awkwardly just inside the door, and she had an air of self-confidence that was inspiring. Yes, she could cook; was not a fancy cook, but could make good soups and desserts if there was any one to take charge of the salads. And so, in the end, I took her. As Halsey said, when we told him, it didn't matter much about the cook's face, if it was clean. I have spoken of Halsey's restlessness. On that day it seemed to be more than ever a resistless impulse that kept him out until after luncheon. I think he hoped constantly that he might meet Louise driving over the hills in her runabout: possibly he did meet her occasionally, but from his continued gloom I felt sure the situation between them was unchanged. Part of the afternoon I believe he read--Gertrude and I were out, as I have said, and at dinner we both noticed that something had occurred to distract him. He was disagreeable, which is unlike him, nervous, looking at his watch every few minutes, and he ate almost nothing. He asked twice during the meal on what train Mr. Jamieson and the other detective were coming, and had long periods of abstraction during which he dug his fork into my damask cloth and did not hear when he was spoken to. He refused dessert, and left the table early, excusing himself on the ground that he wanted to see Alex. Alex, however, was not to be found. It was after eight when Halsey ordered the car, and started down the hill at a pace that, even for him, was unusually reckless. Shortly after, Alex reported that he was ready to go over the house, preparatory to closing it for the night. Sam Bohannon came at a quarter before nine, and began his patrol of the grounds, and with the arrival of the two detectives to look forward to, I was not especially apprehensive. At half-past nine I heard the sound of a horse driven furiously up the drive. It came to a stop in front of the house, and immediately after there were hurried steps on the veranda. Our nerves were not what they should have been, and Gertrude, always apprehensive lately, was at the door almost instantly. A moment later Louise had burst into the room and stood there bareheaded and breathing hard! "Where is Halsey?" she demanded. Above her plain black gown her eyes looked big and somber, and the rapid drive had brought no color to her face. I got up and drew forward a chair. "He has not come back," I said quietly. "Sit down, child; you are not strong enough for this kind of thing." I don't think she even heard me. "He has not come back?" she asked, looking from me to Gertrude. "Do you know where he went? Where can I find him?" "For Heaven's sake, Louise," Gertrude burst out, "tell us what is wrong. Halsey is not here. He has gone to the station for Mr. Jamieson. What has happened?" "To the station, Gertrude? You are sure?" "Yes," I said. "Listen. There is the whistle of the train now." She relaxed a little at our matter-of-fact tone, and allowed herself to sink into a chair. "Perhaps I was wrong," she said heavily. "He--will be here in a few moments if--everything is right." We sat there, the three of us, without attempt at conversation. Both Gertrude and I recognized the futility of asking Louise any questions: her reticence was a part of a role she had assumed. Our ears were strained for the first throb of the motor as it turned into the drive and commenced the climb to the house. Ten minutes passed, fifteen, twenty. I saw Louise's hands grow rigid as they clutched the arms of her chair. I watched Gertrude's bright color slowly ebbing away, and around my own heart I seemed to feel the grasp of a giant hand. Twenty-five minutes, and then a sound. But it was not the chug of the motor: it was the unmistakable rumble of the Casanova hack. Gertrude drew aside the curtain and peered into the darkness. "It's the hack, I am sure," she said, evidently relieved. "Something has gone wrong with the car, and no wonder--the way Halsey went down the hill." It seemed a long time before the creaking vehicle came to a stop at the door. Louise rose and stood watching, her hand to her throat. And then Gertrude opened the door, admitting Mr. Jamieson and a stocky, middle-aged man. Halsey was not with them. When the door had closed and Louise realized that Halsey had not come, her expression changed. From tense watchfulness to relief, and now again to absolute despair, her face was an open page. "Halsey?" I asked unceremoniously, ignoring the stranger. "Did he not meet you?" "No." Mr. Jamieson looked slightly surprised. "I rather expected the car, but we got up all right." "You didn't see him at all?" Louise demanded breathlessly. Mr. Jamieson knew her at once, although he had not seen her before. She had kept to her rooms until the morning she left. "No, Miss Armstrong," he said. "I saw nothing of him. What is wrong?" "Then we shall have to find him," she asserted. "Every instant is precious. Mr. Jamieson, I have reason for believing that he is in danger, but I don't know what it is. Only--he must be found." The stocky man had said nothing. Now, however, he went quickly toward the door. "I'll catch the hack down the road and hold it," he said. "Is the gentleman down in the town?" "Mr. Jamieson," Louise said impulsively, "I can use the hack. Take my horse and trap outside and drive like mad. Try to find the Dragon Fly--it ought to be easy to trace. I can think of no other way. Only, don't lose a moment." The new detective had gone, and a moment later Jamieson went rapidly down the drive, the cob's feet striking fire at every step. Louise stood looking after them. When she turned around she faced Gertrude, who stood indignant, almost tragic, in the hall. "You KNOW what threatens Halsey, Louise," she said accusingly. "I believe you know this whole horrible thing, this mystery that we are struggling with. If anything happens to Halsey, I shall never forgive you." Louise only raised her hands despairingly and dropped them again. "He is as dear to me as he is to you," she said sadly. "I tried to warn him." "Nonsense!" I said, as briskly as I could. "We are making a lot of trouble out of something perhaps very small. Halsey was probably late--he is always late. Any moment we may hear the car coming up the road." But it did not come. After a half-hour of suspense, Louise went out quietly, and did not come back. I hardly knew she was gone until I heard the station hack moving off. At eleven o'clock the telephone rang. It was Mr. Jamieson. "I have found the Dragon Fly, Miss Innes," he said. "It has collided with a freight car on the siding above the station. No, Mr. Innes was not there, but we shall probably find him. Send Warner for the car." But they did not find him. At four o'clock the next morning we were still waiting for news, while Alex watched the house and Sam the grounds. At daylight I dropped into exhausted sleep. Halsey had not come back, and there was no word from the detective. CHAPTER XXVI HALSEY'S DISAPPEARANCE Nothing that had gone before had been as bad as this. The murder and Thomas' sudden death we had been able to view in a detached sort of way. But with Halsey's disappearance everything was altered. Our little circle, intact until now, was broken. We were no longer onlookers who saw a battle passing around them. We were the center of action. Of course, there was no time then to voice such an idea. My mind seemed able to hold only one thought: that Halsey had been foully dealt with, and that every minute lost might be fatal. Mr. Jamieson came back about eight o'clock the next morning: he was covered with mud, and his hat was gone. Altogether, we were a sad-looking trio that gathered around a breakfast that no one could eat. Over a cup of black coffee the detective told us what he had learned of Halsey's movements the night before. Up to a certain point the car had made it easy enough to follow him. And I gathered that Mr. Burns, the other detective, had followed a similar car for miles at dawn, only to find it was a touring car on an endurance run. "He left here about ten minutes after eight," Mr. Jamieson said. "He went alone, and at eight twenty he stopped at Doctor Walker's. I went to the doctor's about midnight, but he had been called out on a case, and had not come back at four o'clock. From the doctor's it seems Mr. Innes walked across the lawn to the cottage Mrs. Armstrong and her daughter have taken. Mrs. Armstrong had retired, and he said perhaps a dozen words to Miss Louise. She will not say what they were, but the girl evidently suspects what has occurred. That is, she suspects foul play, but she doesn't know of what nature. Then, apparently, he started directly for the station. He was going very fast--the flagman at the Carol Street crossing says he saw the car pass. He knew the siren. Along somewhere in the dark stretch between Carol Street and the depot he evidently swerved suddenly--perhaps some one in the road--and went full into the side of a freight. We found it there last night." "He might have been thrown under the train by the force of the shock," I said tremulously. Gertrude shuddered. "We examined every inch of track. There was--no sign." "But surely--he can't be--gone!" I cried. "Aren't there traces in the mud--anything?" "There is no mud--only dust. There has been no rain. And the footpath there is of cinders. Miss Innes, I am inclined to think that he has met with bad treatment, in the light of what has gone before. I do not think he has been murdered." I shrank from the word. "Burns is back in the country, on a clue we got from the night clerk at the drug-store. There will be two more men here by noon, and the city office is on the lookout." "The creek?" Gertrude asked. "The creek is shallow now. If it were swollen with rain, it would be different. There is hardly any water in it. Now, Miss Innes," he said, turning to me, "I must ask you some questions. Had Mr. Halsey any possible reason for going away like this, without warning?" "None whatever." "He went away once before," he persisted. "And you were as sure then." "He did not leave the Dragon Fly jammed into the side of a freight car before." "No, but he left it for repairs in a blacksmith shop, a long distance from here. Do you know if he had any enemies? Any one who might wish him out of the way?" "Not that I know of, unless--no, I can not think of any." "Was he in the habit of carrying money?" "He never carried it far. No, he never had more than enough for current expenses." Mr. Jamieson got up then and began to pace the room. It was an unwonted concession to the occasion. "Then I think we get at it by elimination. The chances are against flight. If he was hurt, we find no trace of him. It looks almost like an abduction. This young Doctor Walker--have you any idea why Mr. Innes should have gone there last night?" "I can not understand it," Gertrude said thoughtfully. "I don't think he knew Doctor Walker at all, and--their relations could hardly have been cordial, under the circumstances." Jamieson pricked up his ears, and little by little he drew from us the unfortunate story of Halsey's love affair, and the fact that Louise was going to marry Doctor Walker. Mr. Jamieson listened attentively. "There are some interesting developments here," he said thoughtfully. "The woman who claims to be the mother of Lucien Wallace has not come back. Your nephew has apparently been spirited away. There is an organized attempt being made to enter this house; in fact, it has been entered. Witness the incident with the cook yesterday. And I have a new piece of information." He looked carefully away from Gertrude. "Mr. John Bailey is not at his Knickerbocker apartments, and I don't know where he is. It's a hash, that's what it is. It's a Chinese puzzle. They won't fit together, unless--unless Mr. Bailey and your nephew have again--" And once again Gertrude surprised me. "They are not together," she said hotly. "I--know where Mr. Bailey is, and my brother is not with him." The detective turned and looked at her keenly. "Miss Gertrude," he said, "if you and Miss Louise would only tell me everything you know and surmise about this business, I should be able to do a great many things. I believe I could find your brother, and I might be able to--well, to do some other things." But Gertrude's glance did not falter. "Nothing that I know could help you to find Halsey," she said stubbornly. "I know absolutely as little of his disappearance as you do, and I can only say this: I do not trust Doctor Walker. I think he hated Halsey, and he would get rid of him if he could." "Perhaps you are right. In fact, I had some such theory myself. But Doctor Walker went out late last night to a serious case in Summitville, and is still there. Burns traced him there. We have made guarded inquiry at the Greenwood Club, and through the village. There is absolutely nothing to go on but this. On the embankment above the railroad, at the point where we found the machine, is a small house. An old woman and a daughter, who is very lame, live there. They say that they distinctly heard the shock when the Dragon Fly hit the car, and they went to the bottom of their garden and looked over. The automobile was there; they could see the lights, and they thought someone had been injured. It was very dark, but they could make out two figures, standing together. The women were curious, and, leaving the fence, they went back and by a roundabout path down to the road. When they got there the car was still standing, the headlight broken and the bonnet crushed, but there was no one to be seen." The detective went away immediately, and to Gertrude and me was left the woman's part, to watch and wait. By luncheon nothing had been found, and I was frantic. I went up-stairs to Halsey's room finally, from sheer inability to sit across from Gertrude any longer, and meet her terror-filled eyes. Liddy was in my dressing-room, suspiciously red-eyed, and trying to put a right sleeve in a left armhole of a new waist for me. I was too much shaken to scold. "What name did that woman in the kitchen give?" she demanded, viciously ripping out the offending sleeve. "Bliss. Mattie Bliss," I replied. "Bliss. M. B. Well, that's not what she has on he suitcase. It is marked N. F. C." The new cook and her initials troubled me not at all. I put on my bonnet and sent for what the Casanova liveryman called a "stylish turnout." Having once made up my mind to a course of action, I am not one to turn back. Warner drove me; he was plainly disgusted, and he steered the livery horse as he would the Dragon Fly, feeling uneasily with his left foot for the clutch, and working his right elbow at an imaginary horn every time a dog got in the way. Warner had something on his mind, and after we had turned into the road, he voiced it. "Miss Innes," he said. "I overheard a part of a conversation yesterday that I didn't understand. It wasn't my business to understand it, for that matter. But I've been thinking all day that I'd better tell you. Yesterday afternoon, while you and Miss Gertrude were out driving, I had got the car in some sort of shape again after the fire, and I went to the library to call Mr. Innes to see it. I went into the living-room, where Miss Liddy said he was, and half-way across to the library I heard him talking to some one. He seemed to be walking up and down, and he was in a rage, I can tell you." "What did he say?" "The first thing I heard was--excuse me, Miss Innes, but it's what he said, 'The damned rascal,' he said, 'I'll see him in'--well, in hell was what he said, 'in hell first.' Then somebody else spoke up; it was a woman. She said, 'I warned them, but they thought I would be afraid.'" "A woman! Did you wait to see who it was?" "I wasn't spying, Miss Innes," Warner said with dignity. "But the next thing caught my attention. She said, 'I knew there was something wrong from the start. A man isn't well one day, and dead the next, without some reason.' I thought she was speaking of Thomas." "And you don't know who it was!" I exclaimed. "Warner, you had the key to this whole occurrence in your hands, and did not use it!" However, there was nothing to be done. I resolved to make inquiry when I got home, and in the meantime, my present errand absorbed me. This was nothing less than to see Louise Armstrong, and to attempt to drag from her what she knew, or suspected, of Halsey's disappearance. But here, as in every direction I turned, I was baffled. A neat maid answered the bell, but she stood squarely in the doorway, and it was impossible to preserve one's dignity and pass her. "Miss Armstrong is very ill, and unable to see any one," she said. I did not believe her. "And Mrs. Armstrong--is she also ill?" "She is with Miss Louise and can not be disturbed." "Tell her it is Miss Innes, and that it is a matter of the greatest importance." "It would be of no use, Miss Innes. My orders are positive." At that moment a heavy step sounded on the stairs. Past the maid's white-strapped shoulder I could see a familiar thatch of gray hair, and in a moment I was face to face with Doctor Stewart. He was very grave, and his customary geniality was tinged with restraint. "You are the very woman I want to see," he said promptly. "Send away your trap, and let me drive you home. What is this about your nephew?" "He has disappeared, doctor. Not only that, but there is every evidence that he has been either abducted, or--" I could not finish. The doctor helped me into his capacious buggy in silence. Until we had got a little distance he did not speak; then he turned and looked at me. "Now tell me about it," he said. He heard me through without speaking. "And you think Louise knows something?" he said when I had finished. "I don't--in fact, I am sure of it. The best evidence of it is this: she asked me if he had been heard from, or if anything had been learned. She won't allow Walker in the room, and she made me promise to see you and tell you this: don't give up the search for him. Find him, and find him soon. He is living." "Well," I said, "if she knows that, she knows more. She is a very cruel and ungrateful girl." "She is a very sick girl," he said gravely. "Neither you nor I can judge her until we know everything. Both she and her mother are ghosts of their former selves. Under all this, these two sudden deaths, this bank robbery, the invasions at Sunnyside and Halsey's disappearance, there is some mystery that, mark my words, will come out some day. And when it does, we shall find Louise Armstrong a victim." I had not noticed where we were going, but now I saw we were beside the railroad, and from a knot of men standing beside the track I divined that it was here the car had been found. The siding, however, was empty. Except a few bits of splintered wood on the ground, there was no sign of the accident. "Where is the freight car that was rammed?" the doctor asked a bystander. "It was taken away at daylight, when the train was moved." There was nothing to be gained. He pointed out the house on the embankment where the old lady and her daughter had heard the crash and seen two figures beside the car. Then we drove slowly home. I had the doctor put me down at the gate, and I walked to the house--past the lodge where we had found Louise, and, later, poor Thomas; up the drive where I had seen a man watching the lodge and where, later, Rosie had been frightened; past the east entrance, where so short a time before the most obstinate effort had been made to enter the house, and where, that night two weeks ago, Liddy and I had seen the strange woman. Not far from the west wing lay the blackened ruins of the stables. I felt like a ruin myself, as I paused on the broad veranda before I entered the house. Two private detectives had arrived in my absence, and it was a relief to turn over to them the responsibility of the house and grounds. Mr. Jamieson, they said, had arranged for more to assist in the search for the missing man, and at that time the country was being scoured in all directions. The household staff was again depleted that afternoon. Liddy was waiting to tell me that the new cook had gone, bag and baggage, without waiting to be paid. No one had admitted the visitor whom Warner had heard in the library, unless, possibly, the missing cook. Again I was working in a circle. CHAPTER XXVII WHO IS NINA CARRINGTON? The four days, from Saturday to the following Tuesday, we lived, or existed, in a state of the most dreadful suspense. We ate only when Liddy brought in a tray, and then very little. The papers, of course, had got hold of the story, and we were besieged by newspaper men. From all over the country false clues came pouring in and raised hopes that crumbled again to nothing. Every morgue within a hundred miles, every hospital, had been visited, without result. Mr. Jamieson, personally, took charge of the organized search, and every evening, no matter where he happened to be, he called us by long distance telephone. It was the same formula. "Nothing to-day. A new clue to work on. Better luck to-morrow." And heartsick we would put up the receiver and sit down again to our vigil. The inaction was deadly. Liddy cried all day, and, because she knew I objected to tears, sniffled audibly around the corner. "For Heaven's sake, smile!" I snapped at her. And her ghastly attempt at a grin, with her swollen nose and red eyes, made me hysterical. I laughed and cried together, and pretty soon, like the two old fools we were, we were sitting together weeping into the same handkerchief. Things were happening, of course, all the time, but they made little or no impression. The Charity Hospital called up Doctor Stewart and reported that Mrs. Watson was in a critical condition. I understood also that legal steps were being taken to terminate my lease at Sunnyside. Louise was out of danger, but very ill, and a trained nurse guarded her like a gorgon. There was a rumor in the village, brought up by Liddy from the butcher's, that a wedding had already taken place between Louise and Doctor Walkers and this roused me for the first time to action. On Tuesday, then, I sent for the car, and prepared to go out. As I waited at the porte-cochere I saw the under-gardener, an inoffensive, grayish-haired man, trimming borders near the house. The day detective was watching him, sitting on the carriage block. When he saw me, he got up. "Miss Innes," he said, taking of his hat, "do you know where Alex, the gardener, is?" "Why, no. Isn't he here?" I asked. "He has been gone since yesterday afternoon. Have you employed him long?" "Only a couple of weeks." "Is he efficient? A capable man?" "I hardly know," I said vaguely. "The place looks all right, and I know very little about such things. I know much more about boxes of roses than bushes of them." "This man," pointing to the assistant, "says Alex isn't a gardener. That he doesn't know anything about plants." "That's very strange," I said, thinking hard. "Why, he came to me from the Brays, who are in Europe." "Exactly." The detective smiled. "Every man who cuts grass isn't a gardener, Miss Innes, and just now it is our policy to believe every person around here a rascal until he proves to be the other thing." Warner came up with the car then, and the conversation stopped. As he helped me in, however, the detective said something further. "Not a word or sign to Alex, if he comes back," he said cautiously. I went first to Doctor Walker's. I was tired of beating about the bush, and I felt that the key to Halsey's disappearance was here at Casanova, in spite of Mr. Jamieson's theories. The doctor was in. He came at once to the door of his consulting-room, and there was no mask of cordiality in his manner. "Please come in," he said curtly. "I shall stay here, I think, doctor." I did not like his face or his manner; there was a subtle change in both. He had thrown off the air of friendliness, and I thought, too, that he looked anxious and haggard. "Doctor Walker," I said, "I have come to you to ask some questions. I hope you will answer them. As you know, my nephew has not yet been found." "So I understand," stiffly. "I believe, if you would, you could help us, and that leads to one of my questions. Will you tell me what was the nature of the conversation you held with him the night he was attacked and carried off?" "Attacked! Carried off!" he said, with pretended surprise. "Really, Miss Innes, don't you think you exaggerate? I understand it is not the first time Mr. Innes has--disappeared." "You are quibbling, doctor. This is a matter of life and death. Will you answer my question?" "Certainly. He said his nerves were bad, and I gave him a prescription for them. I am violating professional ethics when I tell you even as much as that." I could not tell him he lied. I think I looked it. But I hazarded a random shot. "I thought perhaps," I said, watching him narrowly, "that it might be about--Nina Carrington." For a moment I thought he was going to strike me. He grew livid, and a small crooked blood-vessel in his temple swelled and throbbed curiously. Then he forced a short laugh. "Who is Nina Carrington?" he asked. "I am about to discover that," I replied, and he was quiet at once. It was not difficult to divine that he feared Nina Carrington a good deal more than he did the devil. Our leave-taking was brief; in fact, we merely stared at each other over the waiting-room table, with its litter of year-old magazines. Then I turned and went out. "To Richfield," I told Warner, and on the way I thought, and thought hard. "Nina Carrington, Nina Carrington," the roar and rush of the wheels seemed to sing the words. "Nina Carrington, N. C." And I then knew, knew as surely as if I had seen the whole thing. There had been an N. C. on the suit-case belonging to the woman with the pitted face. How simple it all seemed. Mattie Bliss had been Nina Carrington. It was she Warner had heard in the library. It was something she had told Halsey that had taken him frantically to Doctor Walker's office, and from there perhaps to his death. If we could find the woman, we might find what had become of Halsey. We were almost at Richfield now, so I kept on. My mind was not on my errand there now. It was back with Halsey on that memorable night. What was it he had said to Louise, that had sent her up to Sunnyside, half wild with fear for him? I made up my mind, as the car drew up before the Tate cottage, that I would see Louise if I had to break into the house at night. Almost exactly the same scene as before greeted my eyes at the cottage. Mrs. Tate, the baby-carriage in the path, the children at the swing--all were the same. She came forward to meet me, and I noticed that some of the anxious lines had gone out of her face. She looked young, almost pretty. "I am glad you have come back," she said. "I think I will have to be honest and give you back your money." "Why?" I asked. "Has the mother come?" "No, but some one came and paid the boy's board for a month. She talked to him for a long time, but when I asked him afterward he didn't know her name." "A young woman?" "Not very young. About forty, I suppose. She was small and fair-haired, just a little bit gray, and very sad. She was in deep mourning, and, I think, when she came, she expected to go at once. But the child, Lucien, interested her. She talked to him for a long time, and, indeed, she looked much happier when she left." "You are sure this was not the real mother?" "O mercy, no! Why, she didn't know which of the three was Lucien. I thought perhaps she was a friend of yours, but, of course, I didn't ask." "She was not--pock-marked?" I asked at a venture. "No, indeed. A skin like a baby's. But perhaps you will know the initials. She gave Lucien a handkerchief and forgot it. It was very fine, black-bordered, and it had three hand-worked letters in the corner--F. B. A." "No," I said with truth enough, "she is not a friend of mine." F. B. A. was Fanny Armstrong, without a chance of doubt! With another warning to Mrs. Tate as to silence, we started back to Sunnyside. So Fanny Armstrong knew of Lucien Wallace, and was sufficiently interested to visit him and pay for his support. Who was the child's mother and where was she? Who was Nina Carrington? Did either of them know where Halsey was or what had happened to him? On the way home we passed the little cemetery where Thomas had been laid to rest. I wondered if Thomas could have helped us to find Halsey, had he lived. Farther along was the more imposing burial-ground, where Arnold Armstrong and his father lay in the shadow of a tall granite shaft. Of the three, I think Thomas was the only one sincerely mourned. CHAPTER XXVIII A TRAMP AND THE TOOTHACHE The bitterness toward the dead president of the Traders' Bank seemed to grow with time. Never popular, his memory was execrated by people who had lost nothing, but who were filled with disgust by constantly hearing new stories of the man's grasping avarice. The Traders' had been a favorite bank for small tradespeople, and in its savings department it had solicited the smallest deposits. People who had thought to be self-supporting to the last found themselves confronting the poorhouse, their two or three hundred dollar savings wiped away. All bank failures have this element, however, and the directors were trying to promise twenty per cent. on deposits. But, like everything else those days, the bank failure was almost forgotten by Gertrude and myself. We did not mention Jack Bailey: I had found nothing to change my impression of his guilt, and Gertrude knew how I felt. As for the murder of the bank president's son, I was of two minds. One day I thought Gertrude knew or at least suspected that Jack had done it; the next I feared that it had been Gertrude herself, that night alone on the circular staircase. And then the mother of Lucien Wallace would obtrude herself, and an almost equally good case might be made against her. There were times, of course, when I was disposed to throw all those suspicions aside, and fix definitely on the unknown, whoever that might be. I had my greatest disappointment when it came to tracing Nina Carrington. The woman had gone without leaving a trace. Marked as she was, it should have been easy to follow her, but she was not to be found. A description to one of the detectives, on my arrival at home, had started the ball rolling. But by night she had not been found. I told Gertrude, then, about the telegram to Louise when she had been ill before; about my visit to Doctor Walker, and my suspicions that Mattie Bliss and Nina Carrington were the same. She thought, as I did, that there was little doubt of it. I said nothing to her, however, of the detective's suspicions about Alex. Little things that I had not noticed at the time now came back to me. I had an uncomfortable feeling that perhaps Alex was a spy, and that by taking him into the house I had played into the enemy's hand. But at eight o'clock that night Alex himself appeared, and with him a strange and repulsive individual. They made a queer pair, for Alex was almost as disreputable as the tramp, and he had a badly swollen eye. Gertrude had been sitting listlessly waiting for the evening message from Mr. Jamieson, but when the singular pair came in, as they did, without ceremony, she jumped up and stood staring. Winters, the detective who watched the house at night, followed them, and kept his eyes sharply on Alex's prisoner. For that was the situation as it developed. He was a tall lanky individual, ragged and dirty, and just now he looked both terrified and embarrassed. Alex was too much engrossed to be either, and to this day I don't think I ever asked him why he went off without permission the day before. "Miss Innes," Alex began abruptly, "this man can tell us something very important about the disappearance of Mr. Innes. I found him trying to sell this watch." He took a watch from his pocket and put it on the table. It was Halsey's watch. I had given it to him on his twenty-first birthday: I was dumb with apprehension. "He says he had a pair of cuff-links also, but he sold them--" "Fer a dollar'n half," put in the disreputable individual hoarsely, with an eye on the detective. "He is not--dead?" I implored. The tramp cleared his throat. "No'm," he said huskily. "He was used up pretty bad, but he weren't dead. He was comin' to hisself when I"--he stopped and looked at the detective. "I didn't steal it, Mr. Winters," he whined. "I found it in the road, honest to God, I did." Mr. Winters paid no attention to him. He was watching Alex. "I'd better tell what he told me," Alex broke in. "It will be quicker. When Jamieson--when Mr. Jamieson calls up we can start him right. Mr. Winters, I found this man trying to sell that watch on Fifth Street. He offered it to me for three dollars." "How did you know the watch?" Winters snapped at him. "I had seen it before, many times. I used it at night when I was watching at the foot of the staircase." The detective was satisfied. "When he offered the watch to me, I knew it, and I pretended I was going to buy it. We went into an alley and I got the watch." The tramp shivered. It was plain how Alex had secured the watch. "Then--I got the story from this fellow. He claims to have seen the whole affair. He says he was in an empty car--in the car the automobile struck." The tramp broke in here, and told his story, with frequent interpretations by Alex and Mr. Winters. He used a strange medley, in which familiar words took unfamiliar meanings, but it was gradually made clear to us. On the night in question the tramp had been "pounding his ear"--this stuck to me as being graphic--in an empty box-car along the siding at Casanova. The train was going west, and due to leave at dawn. The tramp and the "brakey" were friendly, and things going well. About ten o'clock, perhaps earlier, a terrific crash against the side of the car roused him. He tried to open the door, but could not move it. He got out of the other side, and just as he did so, he heard some one groan. The habits of a lifetime made him cautious. He slipped on to the bumper of a car and peered through. An automobile had struck the car, and stood there on two wheels. The tail lights were burning, but the headlights were out. Two men were stooping over some one who lay on the ground. Then the taller of the two started on a dog-trot along the train looking for an empty. He found one four cars away and ran back again. The two lifted the unconscious man into the empty box-car, and, getting in themselves, stayed for three or four minutes. When they came out, after closing the sliding door, they cut up over the railroad embankment toward the town. One, the short one, seemed to limp. The tramp was wary. He waited for ten minutes or so. Some women came down a path to the road and inspected the automobile. When they had gone, he crawled into the box-car and closed the door again. Then he lighted a match. The figure of a man, unconscious, gagged, and with his hands tied, lay far at the end. The tramp lost no time; he went through his pockets, found a little money and the cuff-links, and took them. Then he loosened the gag--it had been cruelly tight--and went his way, again closing the door of the box-car. Outside on the road he found the watch. He got on the fast freight east, some time after, and rode into the city. He had sold the cuff-links, but on offering the watch to Alex he had been "copped." The story, with its cold recital of villainy, was done. I hardly knew if I were more anxious, or less. That it was Halsey, there could be no doubt. How badly he was hurt, how far he had been carried, were the questions that demanded immediate answer. But it was the first real information we had had; my boy had not been murdered outright. But instead of vague terrors there was now the real fear that he might be lying in some strange hospital receiving the casual attention commonly given to the charity cases. Even this, had we known it, would have been paradise to the terrible truth. I wake yet and feel myself cold and trembling with the horror of Halsey's situation for three days after his disappearance. Mr. Winters and Alex disposed of the tramp with a warning. It was evident he had told us all he knew. We had occasion, within a day or two, to be doubly thankful that we had given him his freedom. When Mr. Jamieson telephoned that night we had news for him; he told me what I had not realized before--that it would not be possible to find Halsey at once, even with this clue. The cars by this time, three days, might be scattered over the Union. But he said to keep on hoping, that it was the best news we had had. And in the meantime, consumed with anxiety as we were, things were happening at the house in rapid succession. We had one peaceful day--then Liddy took sick in the night. I went in when I heard her groaning, and found her with a hot-water bottle to her face, and her right cheek swollen until it was glassy. "Toothache?" I asked, not too gently. "You deserve it. A woman of your age, who would rather go around with an exposed nerve in her head than have the tooth pulled! It would be over in a moment." "So would hanging," Liddy protested, from behind the hot-water bottle. I was hunting around for cotton and laudanum. "You have a tooth just like it yourself, Miss Rachel," she whimpered. "And I'm sure Doctor Boyle's been trying to take it out for years." There was no laudanum, and Liddy made a terrible fuss when I proposed carbolic acid, just because I had put too much on the cotton once and burned her mouth. I'm sure it never did her any permanent harm; indeed, the doctor said afterward that living on liquid diet had been a splendid rest for her stomach. But she would have none of the acid, and she kept me awake groaning, so at last I got up and went to Gertrude's door. To my surprise, it was locked. I went around by the hall and into her bedroom that way. The bed was turned down, and her dressing-gown and night-dress lay ready in the little room next, but Gertrude was not there. She had not undressed. I don't know what terrible thoughts came to me in the minute I stood there. Through the door I could hear Liddy grumbling, with a squeal now and then when the pain stabbed harder. Then, automatically, I got the laudanum and went back to her. It was fully a half-hour before Liddy's groans subsided. At intervals I went to the door into the hall and looked out, but I saw and heard nothing suspicious. Finally, when Liddy had dropped into a doze, I even ventured as far as the head of the circular staircase, but there floated up to me only the even breathing of Winters, the night detective, sleeping just inside the entry. And then, far off, I heard the rapping noise that had lured Louise down the staircase that other night, two weeks before. It was over my head, and very faint--three or four short muffled taps, a pause, and then again, stealthily repeated. The sound of Mr. Winters' breathing was comforting; with the thought that there was help within call, something kept me from waking him. I did not move for a moment; ridiculous things Liddy had said about a ghost--I am not at all superstitious, except, perhaps, in the middle of the night, with everything dark--things like that came back to me. Almost beside me was the clothes chute. I could feel it, but I could see nothing. As I stood, listening intently, I heard a sound near me. It was vague, indefinite. Then it ceased; there was an uneasy movement and a grunt from the foot of the circular staircase, and silence again. I stood perfectly still, hardly daring to breathe. Then I knew I had been right. Some one was stealthily-passing the head of the staircase and coming toward me in the dark. I leaned against the wall for support--my knees were giving way. The steps were close now, and suddenly I thought of Gertrude. Of course it was Gertrude. I put out one hand in front of me, but I touched nothing. My voice almost refused me, but I managed to gasp out, "Gertrude!" "Good Lord!" a man's voice exclaimed, just beside me. And then I collapsed. I felt myself going, felt some one catch me, a horrible nausea--that was all I remembered. When I came to it was dawn. I was lying on the bed in Louise's room, with the cherub on the ceiling staring down at me, and there was a blanket from my own bed thrown over me. I felt weak and dizzy, but I managed to get up and totter to the door. At the foot of the circular staircase Mr. Winters was still asleep. Hardly able to stand, I crept back to my room. The door into Gertrude's room was no longer locked: she was sleeping like a tired child. And in my dressing-room Liddy hugged a cold hot-water bottle, and mumbled in her sleep. "There's some things you can't hold with hand cuffs," she was muttering thickly. CHAPTER XXIX A SCRAP OF PAPER For the first time in twenty years, I kept my bed that day. Liddy was alarmed to the point of hysteria, and sent for Doctor Stewart just after breakfast. Gertrude spent the morning with me, reading something--I forget what. I was too busy with my thoughts to listen. I had said nothing to the two detectives. If Mr. Jamieson had been there, I should have told him everything, but I could not go to these strange men and tell them my niece had been missing in the middle of the night; that she had not gone to bed at all; that while I was searching for her through the house, I had met a stranger who, when I fainted, had carried me into a room and left me there, to get better or not, as it might happen. The whole situation was terrible: had the issues been less vital, it would have been absurd. Here we were, guarded day and night by private detectives, with an extra man to watch the grounds, and yet we might as well have lived in a Japanese paper house, for all the protection we had. And there was something else: the man I had met in the darkness had been even more startled than I, and about his voice, when he muttered his muffled exclamation, there was something vaguely familiar. All that morning, while Gertrude read aloud, and Liddy watched for the doctor, I was puzzling over that voice, without result. And there were other things, too. I wondered what Gertrude's absence from her room had to do with it all, or if it had any connection. I tried to think that she had heard the rapping noises before I did and gone to investigate, but I'm afraid I was a moral coward that day. I could not ask her. Perhaps the diversion was good for me. It took my mind from Halsey, and the story we had heard the night before. The day, however, was a long vigil, with every ring of the telephone full of possibilities. Doctor Walker came up, some time just after luncheon, and asked for me. "Go down and see him," I instructed Gertrude. "Tell him I am out--for mercy's sake don't say I'm sick. Find out what he wants, and from this time on, instruct the servants that he is not to be admitted. I loathe that man." Gertrude came back very soon, her face rather flushed. "He came to ask us to get out," she said, picking up her book with a jerk. "He says Louise Armstrong wants to come here, now that she is recovering." "And what did you say?" "I said we were very sorry we could not leave, but we would be delighted to have Louise come up here with us. He looked daggers at me. And he wanted to know if we would recommend Eliza as a cook. He has brought a patient, a man, out from town, and is increasing his establishment--that's the way he put it." "I wish him joy of Eliza," I said tartly. "Did he ask for Halsey?" "Yes. I told him that we were on the track last night, and that it was only a question of time. He said he was glad, although he didn't appear to be, but he said not to be too sanguine." "Do you know what I believe?" I asked. "I believe, as firmly as I believe anything, that Doctor Walker knows something about Halsey, and that he could put his finger on him, if he wanted to." There were several things that day that bewildered me. About three o'clock Mr. Jamieson telephoned from the Casanova station and Warner went down to meet him. I got up and dressed hastily, and the detective was shown up to my sitting-room. "No news?" I asked, as he entered. He tried to look encouraging, without success. I noticed that he looked tired and dusty, and, although he was ordinarily impeccable in his appearance, it was clear that he was at least two days from a razor. "It won't be long now, Miss Innes," he said. "I have come out here on a peculiar errand, which I will tell you about later. First, I want to ask some questions. Did any one come out here yesterday to repair the telephone, and examine the wires on the roof?" "Yes," I said promptly; "but it was not the telephone. He said the wiring might have caused the fire at the stable. I went up with him myself, but he only looked around." Mr. Jamieson smiled. "Good for you!" he applauded. "Don't allow any one in the house that you don't trust, and don't trust anybody. All are not electricians who wear rubber gloves." He refused to explain further, but he got a slip of paper out of his pocketbook and opened it carefully. "Listen," he said. "You heard this before and scoffed. In the light of recent developments I want you to read it again. You are a clever woman, Miss Innes. Just as surely as I sit here, there is something in this house that is wanted very anxiously by a number of people. The lines are closing up, Miss Innes." The paper was the one he had found among Arnold Armstrong's effects, and I read it again: "----by altering the plans for----rooms, may be possible. The best way, in my opinion, would be to----the plan for----in one of the----rooms----chimney." "I think I understand," I said slowly. "Some one is searching for the secret room, and the invaders--" "And the holes in the plaster--" "Have been in the progress of his--" "Or her--investigations." "Her?" I asked. "Miss Innes," the detective said, getting up, "I believe that somewhere in the walls of this house is hidden some of the money, at least, from the Traders' Bank. I believe, just as surely, that young Walker brought home from California the knowledge of something of the sort and, failing in his effort to reinstall Mrs. Armstrong and her daughter here, he, or a confederate, has tried to break into the house. On two occasions I think he succeeded." "On three, at least," I corrected. And then I told him about the night before. "I have been thinking hard," I concluded, "and I do not believe the man at the head of the circular staircase was Doctor Walker. I don't think he could have got in, and the voice was not his." Mr. Jamieson got up and paced the floor, his hands behind him. "There is something else that puzzles me," he said, stepping before me. "Who and what is the woman Nina Carrington? If it was she who came here as Mattie Bliss, what did she tell Halsey that sent him racing to Doctor Walker's, and then to Miss Armstrong? If we could find that woman we would have the whole thing." "Mr. Jamieson, did you ever think that Paul Armstrong might not have died a natural death?" "That is the thing we are going to try to find out," he replied. And then Gertrude came in, announcing a man below to see Mr. Jamieson. "I want you present at this interview, Miss Innes," he said. "May Riggs come up? He has left Doctor Walker and he has something he wants to tell us." Riggs came into the room diffidently, but Mr. Jamieson put him at his ease. He kept a careful eye on me, however, and slid into a chair by the door when he was asked to sit down. "Now, Riggs," began Mr. Jamieson kindly. "You are to say what you have to say before this lady." "You promised you'd keep it quiet, Mr. Jamieson." Riggs plainly did not trust me. There was nothing friendly in the glance he turned on me. "Yes, yes. You will be protected. But, first of all, did you bring what you promised?" Riggs produced a roll of papers from under his coat, and handed them over. Mr. Jamieson examined them with lively satisfaction, and passed them to me. "The blue-prints of Sunnyside," he said. "What did I tell you? Now, Riggs, we are ready." "I'd never have come to you, Mr. Jamieson," he began, "if it hadn't been for Miss Armstrong. When Mr. Innes was spirited away, like, and Miss Louise got sick because of it, I thought things had gone far enough. I'd done some things for the doctor before that wouldn't just bear looking into, but I turned a bit squeamish." "Did you help with that?" I asked, leaning forward. "No, ma'm. I didn't even know of it until the next day, when it came out in the Casanova Weekly Ledger. But I know who did it, all right. I'd better start at the beginning. "When Doctor Walker went away to California with the Armstrong family, there was talk in the town that when he came back he would be married to Miss Armstrong, and we all expected it. First thing I knew, I got a letter from him, in the west. He seemed to be excited, and he said Miss Armstrong had taken a sudden notion to go home and he sent me some money. I was to watch for her, to see if she went to Sunnyside, and wherever she was, not to lose sight of her until he got home. I traced her to the lodge, and I guess I scared you on the drive one night, Miss Innes." "And Rosie!" I ejaculated. Riggs grinned sheepishly. "I only wanted to make sure Miss Louise was there. Rosie started to run, and I tried to stop her and tell her some sort of a story to account for my being there. But she wouldn't wait." "And the broken china--in the basket?" "Well, broken china's death to rubber tires," he said. "I hadn't any complaint against you people here, and the Dragon Fly was a good car." So Rosie's highwayman was explained. "Well, I telegraphed the doctor where Miss Louise was and I kept an eye on her. Just a day or so before they came home with the body, I got another letter, telling me to watch for a woman who had been pitted with smallpox. Her name was Carrington, and the doctor made things pretty strong. If I found any such woman loafing around, I was not to lose sight of her for a minute until the doctor got back. "Well, I would have had my hands full, but the other woman didn't show up for a good while, and when she did the doctor was home." "Riggs," I asked suddenly, "did you get into this house a day or two after I took it, at night?" "I did not, Miss Innes. I have never been in the house before. Well, the Carrington woman didn't show up until the night Mr. Halsey disappeared. She came to the office late, and the doctor was out. She waited around, walking the floor and working herself into a passion. When the doctor didn't come back, she was in an awful way. She wanted me to hunt him, and when he didn't appear, she called him names; said he couldn't fool her. There was murder being done, and she would see him swing for it. "She struck me as being an ugly customer, and when she left, about eleven o'clock, and went across to the Armstrong place, I was not far behind her. She walked all around the house first, looking up at the windows. Then she rang the bell, and the minute the door was opened she was through it, and into the hall." "How long did she stay?" "That's the queer part of it," Riggs said eagerly. "She didn't come out that night at all. I went to bed at daylight, and that was the last I heard of her until the next day, when I saw her on a truck at the station, covered with a sheet. She'd been struck by the express and you would hardly have known her--dead, of course. I think she stayed all night in the Armstrong house, and the agent said she was crossing the track to take the up-train to town when the express struck her." "Another circle!" I exclaimed. "Then we are just where we started." "Not so bad as that, Miss Innes," Riggs said eagerly. "Nina Carrington came from the town in California where Mr. Armstrong died. Why was the doctor so afraid of her? The Carrington woman knew something. I lived with Doctor Walker seven years, and I know him well. There are few things he is afraid of. I think he killed Mr. Armstrong out in the west somewhere, that's what I think. What else he did I don't know--but he dismissed me and pretty nearly throttled me--for telling Mr. Jamieson here about Mr. Innes' having been at his office the night he disappeared, and about my hearing them quarreling." "What was it Warner overheard the woman say to Mr. Innes, in the library?" the detective asked me. "She said 'I knew there was something wrong from the start. A man isn't well one day and dead the next without some reason.'" How perfectly it all seemed to fit! CHAPTER XXX WHEN CHURCHYARDS YAWN It was on Wednesday Riggs told us the story of his connection with some incidents that had been previously unexplained. Halsey had been gone since the Friday night before, and with the passage of each day I felt that his chances were lessening. I knew well enough that he might be carried thousands of miles in the box-car, locked in, perhaps, without water or food. I had read of cases where bodies had been found locked in cars on isolated sidings in the west, and my spirits went down with every hour. His recovery was destined to be almost as sudden as his disappearance, and was due directly to the tramp Alex had brought to Sunnyside. It seems the man was grateful for his release, and when he learned some thing of Halsey's whereabouts from another member of his fraternity--for it is a fraternity--he was prompt in letting us know. On Wednesday evening Mr. Jamieson, who had been down at the Armstrong house trying to see Louise--and failing--was met near the gate at Sunnyside by an individual precisely as repulsive and unkempt as the one Alex had captured. The man knew the detective, and he gave him a piece of dirty paper, on which was scrawled the words--"He's at City Hospital, Johnsville." The tramp who brought the paper pretended to know nothing, except this: the paper had been passed along from a "hobo" in Johnsville, who seemed to know the information would be valuable to us. Again the long distance telephone came into requisition. Mr. Jamieson called the hospital, while we crowded around him. And when there was no longer any doubt that it was Halsey, and that he would probably recover, we all laughed and cried together. I am sure I kissed Liddy, and I have had terrible moments since when I seem to remember kissing Mr. Jamieson, too, in the excitement. Anyhow, by eleven o'clock that night Gertrude was on her way to Johnsville, three hundred and eighty miles away, accompanied by Rosie. The domestic force was now down to Mary Anne and Liddy, with the under-gardener's wife coming every day to help out. Fortunately, Warner and the detectives were keeping bachelor hall in the lodge. Out of deference to Liddy they washed their dishes once a day, and they concocted queer messes, according to their several abilities. They had one triumph that they ate regularly for breakfast, and that clung to their clothes and their hair the rest of the day. It was bacon, hardtack and onions, fried together. They were almost pathetically grateful, however, I noticed, for an occasional broiled tenderloin. It was not until Gertrude and Rosie had gone and Sunnyside had settled down for the night, with Winters at the foot of the staircase, that Mr. Jamieson broached a subject he had evidently planned before he came. "Miss Innes," he said, stopping me as I was about to go to my room up-stairs, "how are your nerves tonight?" "I have none," I said happily. "With Halsey found, my troubles have gone." "I mean," he persisted, "do you feel as though you could go through with something rather unusual?" "The most unusual thing I can think of would be a peaceful night. But if anything is going to occur, don't dare to let me miss it." "Something is going to occur," he said. "And you're the only woman I can think of that I can take along." He looked at his watch. "Don't ask me any questions, Miss Innes. Put on heavy shoes, and some old dark clothes, and make up your mind not to be surprised at anything." Liddy was sleeping the sleep of the just when I went up-stairs, and I hunted out my things cautiously. The detective was waiting in the hall, and I was astonished to see Doctor Stewart with him. They were talking confidentially together, but when I came down they ceased. There were a few preparations to be made: the locks to be gone over, Winters to be instructed as to renewed vigilance, and then, after extinguishing the hall light, we crept, in the darkness, through the front door, and into the night. I asked no questions. I felt that they were doing me honor in making me one of the party, and I would show them I could be as silent as they. We went across the fields, passing through the woods that reached almost to the ruins of the stable, going over stiles now and then, and sometimes stepping over low fences. Once only somebody spoke, and then it was an emphatic bit of profanity from Doctor Stewart when he ran into a wire fence. We were joined at the end of five minutes by another man, who fell into step with the doctor silently. He carried something over his shoulder which I could not make out. In this way we walked for perhaps twenty minutes. I had lost all sense of direction: I merely stumbled along in silence, allowing Mr. Jamieson to guide me this way or that as the path demanded. I hardly know what I expected. Once, when through a miscalculation I jumped a little short over a ditch and landed above my shoe-tops in the water and ooze, I remember wondering if this were really I, and if I had ever tasted life until that summer. I walked along with the water sloshing in my boots, and I was actually cheerful. I remember whispering to Mr. Jamieson that I had never seen the stars so lovely, and that it was a mistake, when the Lord had made the night so beautiful, to sleep through it! The doctor was puffing somewhat when we finally came to a halt. I confess that just at that minute even Sunnyside seemed a cheerful spot. We had paused at the edge of a level cleared place, bordered all around with primly trimmed evergreen trees. Between them I caught a glimpse of starlight shining down on rows of white headstones and an occasional more imposing monument, or towering shaft. In spite of myself, I drew my breath in sharply. We were on the edge of the Casanova churchyard. I saw now both the man who had joined the party and the implements he carried. It was Alex, armed with two long-handled spades. After the first shock of surprise, I flatter myself I was both cool and quiet. We went in single file between the rows of headstones, and although, when I found myself last, I had an instinctive desire to keep looking back over my shoulder, I found that, the first uneasiness past, a cemetery at night is much the same as any other country place, filled with vague shadows and unexpected noises. Once, indeed--but Mr. Jamieson said it was an owl, and I tried to believe him. In the shadow of the Armstrong granite shaft we stopped. I think the doctor wanted to send me back. "It's no place for a woman," I heard him protesting angrily. But the detective said something about witnesses, and the doctor only came over and felt my pulse. "Anyhow, I don't believe you're any worse off here than you would be in that nightmare of a house," he said finally, and put his coat on the steps of the shaft for me to sit on. There is an air of finality about a grave: one watches the earth thrown in, with the feeling that this is the end. Whatever has gone before, whatever is to come in eternity, that particular temple of the soul has been given back to the elements from which it came. Thus, there is a sense of desecration, of a reversal of the everlasting fitness of things, in resurrecting a body from its mother clay. And yet that night, in the Casanova churchyard, I sat quietly by, and watched Alex and Mr. Jamieson steaming over their work, without a single qualm, except the fear of detection. The doctor kept a keen lookout, but no one appeared. Once in a while he came over to me, and gave me a reassuring pat on the shoulder. "I never expected to come to this," he said once. "There's one thing sure--I'll not be suspected of complicity. A doctor is generally supposed to be handier at burying folks than at digging them up." The uncanny moment came when Alex and Jamieson tossed the spades on the grass, and I confess I hid my face. There was a period of stress, I think, while the heavy coffin was being raised. I felt that my composure was going, and, for fear I would shriek, I tried to think of something else--what time Gertrude would reach Halsey--anything but the grisly reality that lay just beyond me on the grass. And then I heard a low exclamation from the detective and I felt the pressure of the doctor's fingers on my arm. "Now, Miss Innes," he said gently. "If you will come over--" I held on to him frantically, and somehow I got there and looked down. The lid of the casket had been raised and a silver plate on it proved we had made no mistake. But the face that showed in the light of the lantern was a face I had never seen before. The man who lay before us was not Paul Armstrong! CHAPTER XXXI BETWEEN TWO FIREPLACES What with the excitement of the discovery, the walk home under the stars in wet shoes and draggled skirts, and getting up-stairs and undressed without rousing Liddy, I was completely used up. What to do with my boots was the greatest puzzle of all, there being no place in the house safe from Liddy, until I decided to slip upstairs the next morning and drop them into the hole the "ghost" had made in the trunk-room wall. I went asleep as soon as I reached this decision, and in my dreams I lived over again the events of the night. Again I saw the group around the silent figure on the grass, and again, as had happened at the grave, I heard Alex's voice, tense and triumphant: "Then we've got them," he said. Only, in my dreams, he said it over and over until he seemed to shriek it in my ears. I wakened early, in spite of my fatigue, and lay there thinking. Who was Alex? I no longer believed that he was a gardener. Who was the man whose body we had resurrected? And where was Paul Armstrong? Probably living safely in some extraditionless country on the fortune he had stolen. Did Louise and her mother know of the shameful and wicked deception? What had Thomas known, and Mrs. Watson? Who was Nina Carrington? This last question, it seemed to me, was answered. In some way the woman had learned of the substitution, and had tried to use her knowledge for blackmail. Nina Carrington's own story died with her, but, however it happened, it was clear that she had carried her knowledge to Halsey the afternoon Gertrude and I were looking for clues to the man I had shot on the east veranda. Halsey had been half crazed by what he heard; it was evident that Louise was marrying Doctor Walker to keep the shameful secret, for her mother's sake. Halsey, always reckless, had gone at once to Doctor Walker and denounced him. There had been a scene, and he left on his way to the station to meet and notify Mr. Jamieson of what he had learned. The doctor was active mentally and physically. Accompanied perhaps by Riggs, who had shown himself not overscrupulous until he quarreled with his employer, he had gone across to the railroad embankment, and, by jumping in front of the car, had caused Halsey to swerve. The rest of the story we knew. That was my reconstructed theory of that afternoon and evening: it was almost correct--not quite. There was a telegram that morning from Gertrude. "Halsey conscious and improving. Probably home in day or so. GERTRUDE." With Halsey found and improving in health, and with at last something to work on, I began that day, Thursday, with fresh courage. As Mr. Jamieson had said, the lines were closing up. That I was to be caught and almost finished in the closing was happily unknown to us all. It was late when I got up. I lay in my bed, looking around the four walls of the room, and trying to imagine behind what one of them a secret chamber might lie. Certainly, in daylight, Sunnyside deserved its name: never was a house more cheery and open, less sinister in general appearance. There was not a corner apparently that was not open and above-board, and yet, somewhere behind its handsomely papered walls I believed firmly that there lay a hidden room, with all the possibilities it would involve. I made a mental note to have the house measured during the day, to discover any discrepancy between the outer and inner walls, and I tried to recall again the exact wording of the paper Jamieson had found. The slip had said "chimney." It was the only clue, and a house as large as Sunnyside was full of them. There was an open fireplace in my dressing-room, but none in the bedroom, and as I lay there, looking around, I thought of something that made me sit up suddenly. The trunk-room, just over my head, had an open fireplace and a brick chimney, and yet, there was nothing of the kind in my room. I got out of bed and examined the opposite wall closely. There was apparently no flue, and I knew there was none in the hall just beneath. The house was heated by steam, as I have said before. In the living-room was a huge open fireplace, but it was on the other side. Why did the trunk-room have both a radiator and an open fireplace? Architects were not usually erratic! It was not fifteen minutes before I was up-stairs, armed with a tape-measure in lieu of a foot-rule, eager to justify Mr. Jamieson's opinion of my intelligence, and firmly resolved not to tell him of my suspicion until I had more than theory to go on. The hole in the trunk-room wall still yawned there, between the chimney and the outer wall. I examined it again, with no new result. The space between the brick wall and the plaster and lath one, however, had a new significance. The hole showed only one side of the chimney, and I determined to investigate what lay in the space on the other side of the mantel. I worked feverishly. Liddy had gone to the village to market, it being her firm belief that the store people sent short measure unless she watched the scales, and that, since the failure of the Traders' Bank, we must watch the corners; and I knew that what I wanted to do must be done before she came back. I had no tools, but after rummaging around I found a pair of garden scissors and a hatchet, and thus armed, I set to work. The plaster came out easily: the lathing was more obstinate. It gave under the blows, only to spring back into place again, and the necessity for caution made it doubly hard. I had a blister on my palm when at last the hatchet went through and fell with what sounded like the report of a gun to my overstrained nerves. I sat on a trunk, waiting to hear Liddy fly up the stairs, with the household behind her, like the tail of a comet. But nothing happened, and with a growing feeling of uncanniness I set to work enlarging the opening. The result was absolutely nil. When I could hold a lighted candle in the opening, I saw precisely what I had seen on the other side of the chimney--a space between the true wall and the false one, possibly seven feet long and about three feet wide. It was in no sense of the word a secret chamber, and it was evident it had not been disturbed since the house was built. It was a supreme disappointment. It had been Mr. Jamieson's idea that the hidden room, if there was one, would be found somewhere near the circular staircase. In fact, I knew that he had once investigated the entire length of the clothes chute, hanging to a rope, with this in view. I was reluctantly about to concede that he had been right, when my eyes fell on the mantel and fireplace. The latter had evidently never been used: it was closed with a metal fire front, and only when the front refused to move, and investigation showed that it was not intended to be moved, did my spirits revive. I hurried into the next room. Yes, sure enough, there was a similar mantel and fireplace there, similarly closed. In both rooms the chimney flue extended well out from the wall. I measured with the tape-line, my hands trembling so that I could scarcely hold it. They extended two feet and a half into each room, which, with the three feet of space between the two partitions, made eight feet to be accounted for. Eight feet in one direction and almost seven in the other--what a chimney it was! But I had only located the hidden room. I was not in it, and no amount of pressing on the carving of the wooden mantels, no search of the floors for loose boards, none of the customary methods availed at all. That there was a means of entrance, and probably a simple one, I could be certain. But what? What would I find if I did get in? Was the detective right, and were the bonds and money from the Traders' Bank there? Or was our whole theory wrong? Would not Paul Armstrong have taken his booty with him? If he had not, and if Doctor Walker was in the secret, he would have known how to enter the chimney room. Then--who had dug the other hole in the false partition? CHAPTER XXXII ANNE WATSON'S STORY Liddy discovered the fresh break in the trunk-room wall while we were at luncheon, and ran shrieking down the stairs. She maintained that, as she entered, unseen hands had been digging at the plaster; that they had stopped when she went in, and she had felt a gust of cold damp air. In support of her story she carried in my wet and muddy boots, that I had unluckily forgotten to hide, and held them out to the detective and myself. "What did I tell you?" she said dramatically. "Look at 'em. They're yours, Miss Rachel--and covered with mud and soaked to the tops. I tell you, you can scoff all you like; something has been wearing your shoes. As sure as you sit there, there's the smell of the graveyard on them. How do we know they weren't tramping through the Casanova churchyard last night, and sitting on the graves!" Mr. Jamieson almost choked to death. "I wouldn't be at all surprised if they were doing that very thing, Liddy," he said, when he got his breath. "They certainly look like it." I think the detective had a plan, on which he was working, and which was meant to be a coup. But things went so fast there was no time to carry it into effect. The first thing that occurred was a message from the Charity Hospital that Mrs. Watson was dying, and had asked for me. I did not care much about going. There is a sort of melancholy pleasure to be had out of a funeral, with its pomp and ceremony, but I shrank from a death-bed. However, Liddy got out the black things and the crape veil I keep for such occasions, and I went. I left Mr. Jamieson and the day detective going over every inch of the circular staircase, pounding, probing and measuring. I was inwardly elated to think of the surprise I was going to give them that night; as it turned out, I DID surprise them almost into spasms. I drove from the train to the Charity Hospital, and was at once taken to a ward. There, in a gray-walled room in a high iron bed, lay Mrs. Watson. She was very weak, and she only opened her eyes and looked at me when I sat down beside her. I was conscience-stricken. We had been so engrossed that I had left this poor creature to die without even a word of sympathy. The nurse gave her a stimulant, and in a little while she was able to talk. So broken and half-coherent, however, was her story that I shall tell it in my own way. In an hour from the time I entered the Charity Hospital, I had heard a sad and pitiful narrative, and had seen a woman slip into the unconsciousness that is only a step from death. Briefly, then, the housekeeper's story was this: She was almost forty years old, and had been the sister-mother of a large family of children. One by one they had died, and been buried beside their parents in a little town in the Middle West. There was only one sister left, the baby, Lucy. On her the older girl had lavished all the love of an impulsive and emotional nature. When Anne, the elder, was thirty-two and Lucy was nineteen, a young man had come to the town. He was going east, after spending the summer at a celebrated ranch in Wyoming--one of those places where wealthy men send worthless and dissipated sons, for a season of temperance, fresh air and hunting. The sisters, of course, knew nothing of this, and the young man's ardor rather carried them away. In a word, seven years before, Lucy Haswell had married a young man whose name was given as Aubrey Wallace. Anne Haswell had married a carpenter in her native town, and was a widow. For three months everything went fairly well. Aubrey took his bride to Chicago, where they lived at a hotel. Perhaps the very unsophistication that had charmed him in Valley Mill jarred on him in the city. He had been far from a model husband, even for the three months, and when he disappeared Anne was almost thankful. It was different with the young wife, however. She drooped and fretted, and on the birth of her baby boy, she had died. Anne took the child, and named him Lucien. Anne had had no children of her own, and on Lucien she had lavished all her aborted maternal instinct. On one thing she was determined, however: that was that Aubrey Wallace should educate his boy. It was a part of her devotion to the child that she should be ambitious for him: he must have every opportunity. And so she came east. She drifted around, doing plain sewing and keeping a home somewhere always for the boy. Finally, however, she realized that her only training had been domestic, and she put the boy in an Episcopalian home, and secured the position of housekeeper to the Armstrongs. There she found Lucien's father, this time under his own name. It was Arnold Armstrong. I gathered that there was no particular enmity at that time in Anne's mind. She told him of the boy, and threatened exposure if he did not provide for him. Indeed, for a time, he did so. Then he realized that Lucien was the ruling passion in this lonely woman's life. He found out where the child was hidden, and threatened to take him away. Anne was frantic. The positions became reversed. Where Arnold had given money for Lucien's support, as the years went on he forced money from Anne Watson instead until she was always penniless. The lower Arnold sank in the scale, the heavier his demands became. With the rupture between him and his family, things were worse. Anne took the child from the home and hid him in a farmhouse near Casanova, on the Claysburg road. There she went sometimes to see the boy, and there he had taken fever. The people were Germans, and he called the farmer's wife Grossmutter. He had grown into a beautiful boy, and he was all Anne had to live for. The Armstrongs left for California, and Arnold's persecutions began anew. He was furious over the child's disappearance and she was afraid he would do her some hurt. She left the big house and went down to the lodge. When I had rented Sunnyside, however, she had thought the persecutions would stop. She had applied for the position of housekeeper, and secured it. That had been on Saturday. That night Louise arrived unexpectedly. Thomas sent for Mrs. Watson and then went for Arnold Armstrong at the Greenwood Club. Anne had been fond of Louise--she reminded her of Lucy. She did not know what the trouble was, but Louise had been in a state of terrible excitement. Mrs. Watson tried to hide from Arnold, but he was ugly. He left the lodge and went up to the house about two-thirty, was admitted at the east entrance and came out again very soon. Something had occurred, she didn't know what; but very soon Mr. Innes and another gentleman left, using the car. Thomas and she had got Louise quiet, and a little before three, Mrs. Watson started up to the house. Thomas had a key to the east entry, and gave it to her. On the way across the lawn she was confronted by Arnold, who for some reason was determined to get into the house. He had a golf-stick in his hand, that he had picked up somewhere, and on her refusal he had struck her with it. One hand had been badly cut, and it was that, poisoning having set in, which was killing her. She broke away in a frenzy of rage and fear, and got into the house while Gertrude and Jack Bailey were at the front door. She went up-stairs, hardly knowing what she was doing. Gertrude's door was open, and Halsey's revolver lay there on the bed. She picked it up and turning, ran part way down the circular staircase. She could hear Arnold fumbling at the lock outside. She slipped down quietly and opened the door: he was inside before she had got back to the stairs. It was quite dark, but she could see his white shirt-bosom. From the fourth step she fired. As he fell, somebody in the billiard-room screamed and ran. When the alarm was raised, she had had no time to get up-stairs: she hid in the west wing until every one was down on the lower floor. Then she slipped upstairs, and threw the revolver out of an upper window, going down again in time to admit the men from the Greenwood Club. If Thomas had suspected, he had never told. When she found the hand Arnold had injured was growing worse, she gave the address of Lucien at Richfield to the old man, and almost a hundred dollars. The money was for Lucien's board until she recovered. She had sent for me to ask me if I would try to interest the Armstrongs in the child. When she found herself growing worse, she had written to Mrs. Armstrong, telling her nothing but that Arnold's legitimate child was at Richfield, and imploring her to recognize him. She was dying: the boy was an Armstrong, and entitled to his father's share of the estate. The papers were in her trunk at Sunnyside, with letters from the dead man that would prove what she said. She was going; she would not be judged by earthly laws; and somewhere else perhaps Lucy would plead for her. It was she who had crept down the circular staircase, drawn by a magnet, that night Mr. Jamieson had heard some one there. Pursued, she had fled madly, anywhere--through the first door she came to. She had fallen down the clothes chute, and been saved by the basket beneath. I could have cried with relief; then it had not been Gertrude, after all! That was the story. Sad and tragic though it was, the very telling of it seemed to relieve the dying woman. She did not know that Thomas was dead, and I did not tell her. I promised to look after little Lucien, and sat with her until the intervals of consciousness grew shorter and finally ceased altogether. She died that night. CHAPTER XXXIII AT THE FOOT OF THE STAIRS As I drove rapidly up to the house from Casanova Station in the hack, I saw the detective Burns loitering across the street from the Walker place. So Jamieson was putting the screws on--lightly now, but ready to give them a twist or two, I felt certain, very soon. The house was quiet. Two steps of the circular staircase had been pried off, without result, and beyond a second message from Gertrude, that Halsey insisted on coming home and they would arrive that night, there was nothing new. Mr. Jamieson, having failed to locate the secret room, had gone to the village. I learned afterwards that he called at Doctor Walker's, under pretense of an attack of acute indigestion, and before he left, had inquired about the evening trains to the city. He said he had wasted a lot of time on the case, and a good bit of the mystery was in my imagination! The doctor was under the impression that the house was guarded day and night. Well, give a place a reputation like that, and you don't need a guard at all,--thus Jamieson. And sure enough, late in the afternoon, the two private detectives, accompanied by Mr. Jamieson, walked down the main street of Casanova and took a city-bound train. That they got off at the next station and walked back again to Sunnyside at dusk, was not known at the time. Personally, I knew nothing of either move; I had other things to absorb me at that time. Liddy brought me some tea while I rested after my trip, and on the tray was a small book from the Casanova library. It was called The Unseen World and had a cheerful cover on which a half-dozen sheeted figures linked hands around a headstone. At this point in my story, Halsey always says: "Trust a woman to add two and two together, and make six." To which I retort that if two and two plus X make six, then to discover the unknown quantity is the simplest thing in the world. That a houseful of detectives missed it entirely was because they were busy trying to prove that two and two make four. The depression due to my visit to the hospital left me at the prospect of seeing Halsey again that night. It was about five o'clock when Liddy left me for a nap before dinner, having put me into a gray silk dressing-gown and a pair of slippers. I listened to her retreating footsteps, and as soon as she was safely below stairs, I went up to the trunk-room. The place had not been disturbed, and I proceeded at once to try to discover the entrance to the hidden room. The openings on either side, as I have said, showed nothing but perhaps three feet of brick wall. There was no sign of an entrance--no levers, no hinges, to give a hint. Either the mantel or the roof, I decided, and after a half-hour at the mantel, productive of absolutely no result, I decided to try the roof. I am not fond of a height. The few occasions on which I have climbed a step-ladder have always left me dizzy and weak in the knees. The top of the Washington monument is as impossible to me as the elevation of the presidential chair. And yet--I climbed out on to the Sunnyside roof without a second's hesitation. Like a dog on a scent, like my bearskin progenitor, with his spear and his wild boar, to me now there was the lust of the chase, the frenzy of pursuit, the dust of battle. I got quite a little of the latter on me as I climbed from the unfinished ball-room out through a window to the roof of the east wing of the building, which was only two stories in height. Once out there, access to the top of the main building was rendered easy--at least it looked easy--by a small vertical iron ladder, fastened to the wall outside of the ball-room, and perhaps twelve feet high. The twelve feet looked short from below, but they were difficult to climb. I gathered my silk gown around me, and succeeded finally in making the top of the ladder. Once there, however, I was completely out of breath. I sat down, my feet on the top rung, and put my hair pins in more securely, while the wind bellowed my dressing-gown out like a sail. I had torn a great strip of the silk loose, and now I ruthlessly finished the destruction of my gown by jerking it free and tying it around my head. From far below the smallest sounds came up with peculiar distinctness. I could hear the paper boy whistling down the drive, and I heard something else. I heard the thud of a stone, and a spit, followed by a long and startled meiou from Beulah. I forgot my fear of a height, and advanced boldly almost to the edge of the roof. It was half-past six by that time, and growing dusk. "You boy, down there!" I called. The paper boy turned and looked around. Then, seeing nobody, he raised his eyes. It was a moment before he located me: when he did, he stood for one moment as if paralyzed, then he gave a horrible yell, and dropping his papers, bolted across the lawn to the road without stopping to look around. Once he fell, and his impetus was so great that he turned an involuntary somersault. He was up and off again without any perceptible pause, and he leaped the hedge--which I am sure under ordinary stress would have been a feat for a man. I am glad in this way to settle the Gray Lady story, which is still a choice morsel in Casanova. I believe the moral deduced by the village was that it is always unlucky to throw a stone at a black cat. With Johnny Sweeny a cloud of dust down the road, and the dinner-hour approaching, I hurried on with my investigations. Luckily, the roof was flat, and I was able to go over every inch of it. But the result was disappointing; no trap-door revealed itself, no glass window; nothing but a couple of pipes two inches across, and standing perhaps eighteen inches high and three feet apart, with a cap to prevent rain from entering and raised to permit the passage of air. I picked up a pebble from the roof and dropped it down, listening with my ear at one of the pipes. I could hear it strike on something with a sharp, metallic sound, but it was impossible for me to tell how far it had gone. I gave up finally and went down the ladder again, getting in through the ball-room window without being observed. I went back at once to the trunk-room, and, sitting down on a box, I gave my mind, as consistently as I could, to the problem before me. If the pipes in the roof were ventilators to the secret room, and there was no trap-door above, the entrance was probably in one of the two rooms between which it lay--unless, indeed, the room had been built, and the opening then closed with a brick and mortar wall. The mantel fascinated me. Made of wood and carved, the more I looked the more I wondered that I had not noticed before the absurdity of such a mantel in such a place. It was covered with scrolls and panels, and finally, by the merest accident, I pushed one of the panels to the side. It moved easily, revealing a small brass knob. It is not necessary to detail the fluctuations of hope and despair, and not a little fear of what lay beyond, with which I twisted and turned the knob. It moved, but nothing seemed to happen, and then I discovered the trouble. I pushed the knob vigorously to one side, and the whole mantel swung loose from the wall almost a foot, revealing a cavernous space beyond. I took a long breath, closed the door from the trunk-room into the hall--thank Heaven, I did not lock it--and pulling the mantel-door wide open, I stepped into the chimney-room. I had time to get a hazy view of a small portable safe, a common wooden table and a chair--then the mantel door swung to, and clicked behind me. I stood quite still for a moment, in the darkness, unable to comprehend what had happened. Then I turned and beat furiously at the door with my fists. It was closed and locked again, and my fingers in the darkness slid over a smooth wooden surface without a sign of a knob. I was furiously angry--at myself, at the mantel door, at everything. I did not fear suffocation; before the thought had come to me I had already seen a gleam of light from the two small ventilating pipes in the roof. They supplied air, but nothing else. The room itself was shrouded in blackness. I sat down in the stiff-backed chair and tried to remember how many days one could live without food and water. When that grew monotonous and rather painful, I got up and, according to the time-honored rule for people shut in unknown and ink-black prisons, I felt my way around--it was small enough, goodness knows. I felt nothing but a splintery surface of boards, and in endeavoring to get back to the chair, something struck me full in the face, and fell with the noise of a thousand explosions to the ground. When I had gathered up my nerves again, I found it had been the bulb of a swinging electric light, and that had it not been for the accident, I might have starved to death in an illuminated sepulcher. I must have dozed off. I am sure I did not faint. I was never more composed in my life. I remember planning, if I were not discovered, who would have my things. I knew Liddy would want my heliotrope poplin, and she's a fright in lavender. Once or twice I heard mice in the partitions, and so I sat on the table, with my feet on the chair. I imagined I could hear the search going on through the house, and once some one came into the trunk-room; I could distinctly hear footsteps. "In the chimney! In the chimney!" I called with all my might, and was rewarded by a piercing shriek from Liddy and the slam of the trunk-room door. I felt easier after that, although the room was oppressively hot and enervating. I had no doubt the search for me would now come in the right direction, and after a little, I dropped into a doze. How long I slept I do not know. It must have been several hours, for I had been tired from a busy day, and I wakened stiff from my awkward position. I could not remember where I was for a few minutes, and my head felt heavy and congested. Gradually I roused to my surroundings, and to the fact that in spite of the ventilators, the air was bad and growing worse. I was breathing long, gasping respirations, and my face was damp and clammy. I must have been there a long time, and the searchers were probably hunting outside the house, dredging the creek, or beating the woodland. I knew that another hour or two would find me unconscious, and with my inability to cry out would go my only chance of rescue. It was the combination of bad air and heat, probably, for some inadequate ventilation was coming through the pipes. I tried to retain my consciousness by walking the length of the room and back, over and over, but I had not the strength to keep it up, so I sat down on the table again, my back against the wall. The house was very still. Once my straining ears seemed to catch a footfall beneath me, possibly in my own room. I groped for the chair from the table, and pounded with it frantically on the floor. But nothing happened: I realized bitterly that if the sound was heard at all, no doubt it was classed with the other rappings that had so alarmed us recently. It was impossible to judge the flight of time. I measured five minutes by counting my pulse, allowing seventy-two beats to the minute. But it took eternities, and toward the last I found it hard to count; my head was confused. And then--I heard sounds from below me, in the house. There was a peculiar throbbing, vibrating noise that I felt rather than heard, much like the pulsing beat of fire engines in the city. For one awful moment I thought the house was on fire, and every drop of blood in my body gathered around my heart; then I knew. It was the engine of the automobile, and Halsey had come back. Hope sprang up afresh. Halsey's clear head and Gertrude's intuition might do what Liddy's hysteria and three detectives had failed in. After a time I thought I had been right. There was certainly something going on down below; doors were slamming, people were hurrying through the halls, and certain high notes of excited voices penetrated to me shrilly. I hoped they were coming closer, but after a time the sounds died away below, and I was left to the silence and heat, to the weight of the darkness, to the oppression of walls that seemed to close in on me and stifle me. The first warning I had was a stealthy fumbling at the lock of the mantel-door. With my mouth open to scream, I stopped. Perhaps the situation had rendered me acute, perhaps it was instinctive. Whatever it was, I sat without moving, and some one outside, in absolute stillness, ran his fingers over the carving of the mantel and--found the panel. Now the sounds below redoubled: from the clatter and jarring I knew that several people were running up the stairs, and as the sounds approached, I could even hear what they said. "Watch the end staircases!" Jamieson was shouting. "Damnation--there's no light here!" And then a second later. "All together now. One--two--three--" The door into the trunk-room had been locked from the inside. At the second that it gave, opening against the wall with a crash and evidently tumbling somebody into the room, the stealthy fingers beyond the mantel-door gave the knob the proper impetus, and--the door swung open, and closed again. Only--and Liddy always screams and puts her fingers in her ears at this point--only now I was not alone in the chimney room. There was some one else in the darkness, some one who breathed hard, and who was so close I could have touched him with my hand. I was in a paralysis of terror. Outside there were excited voices and incredulous oaths. The trunks were being jerked around in a frantic search, the windows were thrown open, only to show a sheer drop of forty feet. And the man in the room with me leaned against the mantel-door and listened. His pursuers were plainly baffled: I heard him draw a long breath, and turn to grope his way through the blackness. Then--he touched my hand, cold, clammy, death-like. A hand in an empty room! He drew in his breath, the sharp intaking of horror that fills lungs suddenly collapsed. Beyond jerking his hand away instantly, he made no movement. I think absolute terror had him by the throat. Then he stepped back, without turning, retreating foot by foot from The Dread in the corner, and I do not think he breathed. Then, with the relief of space between us, I screamed, ear-splittingly, madly, and they heard me outside. "In the chimney!" I shrieked. "Behind the mantel! The mantel!" With an oath the figure hurled itself across the room at me, and I screamed again. In his blind fury he had missed me; I heard him strike the wall. That one time I eluded him; I was across the room, and I had got the chair. He stood for a second, listening, then--he made another rush, and I struck out with my weapon. I think it stunned him, for I had a second's respite when I could hear him breathing, and some one shouted outside: "We--Can't--get--in. How--does--it--open?" But the man in the room had changed his tactics. I knew he was creeping on me, inch by inch, and I could not tell from where. And then--he caught me. He held his hand over my mouth, and I bit him. I was helpless, strangling,--and some one was trying to break in the mantel from outside. It began to yield somewhere, for a thin wedge of yellowish light was reflected on the opposite wall. When he saw that, my assailant dropped me with a curse; then--the opposite wall swung open noiselessly, closed again without a sound, and I was alone. The intruder was gone. "In the next room!" I called wildly. "The next room!" But the sound of blows on the mantel drowned my voice. By the time I had made them understand, a couple of minutes had elapsed. The pursuit was taken up then, by all except Alex, who was determined to liberate me. When I stepped out into the trunk-room, a free woman again, I could hear the chase far below. I must say, for all Alex's anxiety to set me free, he paid little enough attention to my plight. He jumped through the opening into the secret room, and picked up the portable safe. "I am going to put this in Mr. Halsey's room, Miss Innes," he said, "and I shall send one of the detectives to guard it." I hardly heard him. I wanted to laugh and cry in the same breath--to crawl into bed and have a cup of tea, and scold Liddy, and do any of the thousand natural things that I had never expected to do again. And the air! The touch of the cool night air on my face! As Alex and I reached the second floor, Mr. Jamieson met us. He was grave and quiet, and he nodded comprehendingly when he saw the safe. "Will you come with me for a moment, Miss Innes?" he asked soberly, and on my assenting, he led the way to the east wing. There were lights moving around below, and some of the maids were standing gaping down. They screamed when they saw me, and drew back to let me pass. There was a sort of hush over the scene; Alex, behind me, muttered something I could not hear, and brushed past me without ceremony. Then I realized that a man was lying doubled up at the foot of the staircase, and that Alex was stooping over him. As I came slowly down, Winters stepped back, and Alex straightened himself, looking at me across the body with impenetrable eyes. In his hand he held a shaggy gray wig, and before me on the floor lay the man whose headstone stood in Casanova churchyard--Paul Armstrong. Winters told the story in a dozen words. In his headlong flight down the circular staircase, with Winters just behind, Paul Armstrong had pitched forward violently, struck his head against the door to the east veranda, and probably broken his neck. He had died as Winters reached him. As the detective finished, I saw Halsey, pale and shaken, in the card-room doorway, and for the first time that night I lost my self-control. I put my arms around my boy, and for a moment he had to support me. A second later, over Halsey's shoulder, I saw something that turned my emotion into other channels, for, behind him, in the shadowy card-room, were Gertrude and Alex, the gardener, and--there is no use mincing matters--he was kissing her! I was unable to speak. Twice I opened my mouth: then I turned Halsey around and pointed. They were quite unconscious of us; her head was on his shoulder, his face against her hair. As it happened, it was Mr. Jamieson who broke up the tableau. He stepped over to Alex and touched him on the arm. "And now," he said quietly, "how long are you and I to play OUR little comedy, Mr. Bailey?" CHAPTER XXXIV THE ODDS AND ENDS Of Doctor Walker's sensational escape that night to South America, of the recovery of over a million dollars in cash and securities in the safe from the chimney room--the papers have kept the public well informed. Of my share in discovering the secret chamber they have been singularly silent. The inner history has never been told. Mr. Jamieson got all kinds of credit, and some of it he deserved, but if Jack Bailey, as Alex, had not traced Halsey and insisted on the disinterring of Paul Armstrong's casket, if he had not suspected the truth from the start, where would the detective have been? When Halsey learned the truth, he insisted on going the next morning, weak as he was, to Louise, and by night she was at Sunnyside, under Gertrude's particular care, while her mother had gone to Barbara Fitzhugh's. What Halsey said to Mrs. Armstrong I never knew, but that he was considerate and chivalrous I feel confident. It was Halsey's way always with women. He and Louise had no conversation together until that night. Gertrude and Alex--I mean Jack--had gone for a walk, although it was nine o'clock, and anybody but a pair of young geese would have known that dew was falling, and that it is next to impossible to get rid of a summer cold. At half after nine, growing weary of my own company, I went downstairs to find the young people. At the door of the living-room I paused. Gertrude and Jack had returned and were there, sitting together on a divan, with only one lamp lighted. They did not see or hear me, and I beat a hasty retreat to the library. But here again I was driven back. Louise was sitting in a deep chair, looking the happiest I had ever seen her, with Halsey on the arm of the chair, holding her close. It was no place for an elderly spinster. I retired to my upstairs sitting-room and got out Eliza Klinefelter's lavender slippers. Ah, well, the foster motherhood would soon have to be put away in camphor again. The next day, by degrees, I got the whole story. Paul Armstrong had a besetting evil--the love of money. Common enough, but he loved money, not for what it would buy, but for its own sake. An examination of the books showed no irregularities in the past year since John had been cashier, but before that, in the time of Anderson, the old cashier, who had died, much strange juggling had been done with the records. The railroad in New Mexico had apparently drained the banker's private fortune, and he determined to retrieve it by one stroke. This was nothing less than the looting of the bank's securities, turning them into money, and making his escape. But the law has long arms. Paul Armstrong evidently studied the situation carefully. Just as the only good Indian is a dead Indian, so the only safe defaulter is a dead defaulter. He decided to die, to all appearances, and when the hue and cry subsided, he would be able to enjoy his money almost anywhere he wished. The first necessity was an accomplice. The connivance of Doctor Walker was suggested by his love for Louise. The man was unscrupulous, and with the girl as a bait, Paul Armstrong soon had him fast. The plan was apparently the acme of simplicity: a small town in the west, an attack of heart disease, a body from a medical college dissecting-room shipped in a trunk to Doctor Walker by a colleague in San Francisco, and palmed off for the supposed dead banker. What was simpler? The woman, Nina Carrington, was the cog that slipped. What she only suspected, what she really knew, we never learned. She was a chambermaid in the hotel at C--, and it was evidently her intention to blackmail Doctor Walker. His position at that time was uncomfortable: to pay the woman to keep quiet would be confession. He denied the whole thing, and she went to Halsey. It was this that had taken Halsey to the doctor the night he disappeared. He accused the doctor of the deception, and, crossing the lawn, had said something cruel to Louise. Then, furious at her apparent connivance, he had started for the station. Doctor Walker and Paul Armstrong--the latter still lame where I had shot him--hurried across to the embankment, certain only of one thing. Halsey must not tell the detective what he suspected until the money had been removed from the chimney-room. They stepped into the road in front of the car to stop it, and fate played into their hands. The car struck the train, and they had only to dispose of the unconscious figure in the road. This they did as I have told. For three days Halsey lay in the box car, tied hand and foot, suffering tortures of thirst, delirious at times, and discovered by a tramp at Johnsville only in time to save his life. To go back to Paul Armstrong. At the last moment his plans had been frustrated. Sunnyside, with its hoard in the chimney-room, had been rented without his knowledge! Attempts to dislodge me having failed, he was driven to breaking into his own house. The ladder in the chute, the burning of the stable and the entrance through the card-room window--all were in the course of a desperate attempt to get into the chimney-room. Louise and her mother had, from the first, been the great stumbling-blocks. The plan had been to send Louise away until it was too late for her to interfere, but she came back to the hotel at C-- just at the wrong time. There was a terrible scene. The girl was told that something of the kind was necessary, that the bank was about to close and her stepfather would either avoid arrest and disgrace in this way, or kill himself. Fanny Armstrong was a weakling, but Louise was more difficult to manage. She had no love for her stepfather, but her devotion to her mother was entire, self-sacrificing. Forced into acquiescence by her mother's appeals, overwhelmed by the situation, the girl consented and fled. From somewhere in Colorado she sent an anonymous telegram to Jack Bailey at the Traders' Bank. Trapped as she was, she did not want to see an innocent man arrested. The telegram, received on Thursday, had sent the cashier to the bank that night in a frenzy. Louise arrived at Sunnyside and found the house rented. Not knowing what to do, she sent for Arnold at the Greenwood Club, and told him a little, not all. She told him that there was something wrong, and that the bank was about to close. That his father was responsible. Of the conspiracy she said nothing. To her surprise, Arnold already knew, through Bailey that night, that things were not right. Moreover, he suspected what Louise did not, that the money was hidden at Sunnyside. He had a scrap of paper that indicated a concealed room somewhere. His inherited cupidity was aroused. Eager to get Halsey and Jack Bailey out of the house, he went up to the east entry, and in the billiard-room gave the cashier what he had refused earlier in the evening--the address of Paul Armstrong in California and a telegram which had been forwarded to the club for Bailey, from Doctor Walker. It was in response to one Bailey had sent, and it said that Paul Armstrong was very ill. Bailey was almost desperate. He decided to go west and find Paul Armstrong, and to force him to disgorge. But the catastrophe at the bank occurred sooner than he had expected. On the moment of starting west, at Andrews Station, where Mr. Jamieson had located the car, he read that the bank had closed, and, going back, surrendered himself. John Bailey had known Paul Armstrong intimately. He did not believe that the money was gone; in fact, it was hardly possible in the interval since the securities had been taken. Where was it? And from some chance remark let fall some months earlier by Arnold Armstrong at a dinner, Bailey felt sure there was a hidden room at Sunnyside. He tried to see the architect of the building, but, like the contractor, if he knew of the such a room he refused any information. It was Halsey's idea that John Bailey come to the house as a gardener, and pursue his investigations as he could. His smooth upper lip had been sufficient disguise, with his change of clothes, and a hair-cut by a country barber. So it was Alex, Jack Bailey, who had been our ghost. Not only had he alarmed--Louise and himself, he admitted--on the circular staircase, but he had dug the hole in the trunk-room wall, and later sent Eliza into hysteria. The note Liddy had found in Gertrude's scrap-basket was from him, and it was he who had startled me into unconsciousness by the clothes chute, and, with Gertrude's help, had carried me to Louise's room. Gertrude, I learned, had watched all night beside me, in an extremity of anxiety about me. That old Thomas had seen his master, and thought he had seen the Sunnyside ghost, there could be no doubt. Of that story of Thomas', about seeing Jack Bailey in the footpath between the club and Sunnyside, the night Liddy and I heard the noise on the circular staircase--that, too, was right. On the night before Arnold Armstrong was murdered, Jack Bailey had made his first attempt to search for the secret room. He secured Arnold's keys from his room at the club and got into the house, armed with a golf-stick for sounding the walls. He ran against the hamper at the head of the stairs, caught his cuff-link in it, and dropped the golf-stick with a crash. He was glad enough to get away without an alarm being raised, and he took the "owl" train to town. The oddest thing to me was that Mr. Jamieson had known for some time that Alex was Jack Bailey. But the face of the pseudo-gardener was very queer indeed, when that night, in the card-room, the detective turned to him and said: "How long are you and I going to play our little comedy, MR. BAILEY?" Well, it is all over now. Paul Armstrong rests in Casanova churchyard, and this time there is no mistake. I went to the funeral, because I wanted to be sure he was really buried, and I looked at the step of the shaft where I had sat that night, and wondered if it was all real. Sunnyside is for sale--no, I shall not buy it. Little Lucien Armstrong is living with his step-grandmother, and she is recovering gradually from troubles that had extended over the entire period of her second marriage. Anne Watson lies not far from the man she killed, and who as surely caused her death. Thomas, the fourth victim of the conspiracy, is buried on the hill. With Nina Carrington, five lives were sacrificed in the course of this grim conspiracy. There will be two weddings before long, and Liddy has asked for my heliotrope poplin to wear to the church. I knew she would. She has wanted it for three years, and she was quite ugly the time I spilled coffee on it. We are very quiet, just the two of us. Liddy still clings to her ghost theory, and points to my wet and muddy boots in the trunk-room as proof. I am gray, I admit, but I haven't felt as well in a dozen years. Sometimes, when I am bored, I ring for Liddy, and we talk things over. When Warner married Rosie, Liddy sniffed and said what I took for faithfulness in Rosie had been nothing but mawkishness. I have not yet outlived Liddy's contempt because I gave them silver knives and forks as a wedding gift. So we sit and talk, and sometimes Liddy threatens to leave, and often I discharge her, but we stay together somehow. I am talking of renting a house next year, and Liddy says to be sure there is no ghost. To be perfectly frank, I never really lived until that summer. Time has passed since I began this story. My neighbors are packing up for another summer. Liddy is having the awnings put up, and the window boxes filled. Liddy or no Liddy, I shall advertise to-morrow for a house in the country, and I don't care if it has a Circular Staircase. 
62516	----	available by Internet Archive (https://archive.org) Note: Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See https://archive.org/details/agathasaunt00smitiala AGATHA'S AUNT by HARRIET LUMMIS SMITH Author of Other People's Business [Illustration] Indianapolis The Bobbs-Merrill Company Publishers Copyright 1920 The Bobbs-Merrill Company Printed in the United States of America Press of Braunworth & Co. Book Manufacturers Brooklyn, N. Y. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I Boarders Wanted 1 II The Curtain Rises 18 III A Social Secretary 29 IV Complications 42 V Company Manners 57 VI Hephzibah Comes to Life 78 VII Day Dreams 94 VIII The Rescue 109 IX An Embarrassment of Riches 124 X A Confession 140 XI A Wilful Man Must Have His Way 155 XII Hephzibah Turns the Tables 170 XIII Congratulations Are in Order 184 XIV Confidences 196 XV Underneath the Bough 210 XVI Miss Finch Follows a Classic Example 221 XVII The Day of Judgment 235 XVIII Warren Gets a Tip 249 XIX The Worm Turns 264 XX The Day After 276 XXI Enlightenment 292 XXII Fellow Travelers 305 XXIII An Introduction 324 AGATHA'S AUNT AGATHA'S AUNT CHAPTER I BOARDERS WANTED It was too early in the season for lowered shades or closed shutters. The spring sunshine had taken possession of the big, many-windowed room, repaying the hospitality as other uninvited guests have been known to do, by its indiscreet revelations. In rooms much lived in, a rather endearing shabbiness is a familiar characteristic, suggestive, like a thumbed book, of homely comfort. The room in question had passed this stage and reached the shabbiness eloquent of poverty. The paper on the walls was faded, and stained from a leak in the roof. The original carpet had been transformed into a rug that shrank annually and now showed threadbare areas, prophetic of gaping holes in the near future. The furniture, too, though of expensive make, had arrived at a point where a series of surgical operations seemed imperative. Yet with it all, a certain plucky defiance was evident in the shabby room. Pictures or calendars hung over the discolored spots on the wall, furniture arranged to conceal the weak spots of the carpet, a crocheted shawl thrown carelessly over the exposed entrails of a veteran armchair, a general air of putting the best foot foremost inevitably suggested that the dilapidated building sheltered youth, ardent and unconquered. In the smallest chair the room contained, a rocking chair that creaked protestingly under its light burden, sat Miss Zaida Finch, darning a pink silk stocking. Miss Finch's print dress modestly concealed her diminutive lower limbs, her extremely small shoes scarcely peeping from beneath its hem. For all that the eye discerned, her anatomical structure might have been modeled after that of Mrs. Shem in a Noah's ark. Yet with no evidence to substantiate his certainty, any observer would have vowed that Miss Finch's painstaking toil was wholly disinterested. It was impossible to believe that the much-mended pink silk hosiery formed part of her wardrobe. The industry of Miss Finch was spasmodic. One moment she plied her needle with an intentness indicating that her task absorbed her. And again she let the stocking drop into her lap, and lost herself listening to sounds overhead, footsteps, doors opening and closing, the murmur of voices. Once, rising, she tiptoed to the window and gazed for a long breathless moment at the touring car before the gate, the chauffeur puffing a cigarette with an arrogance characteristic of the driver of a seven-passenger Packard, who knows that at any moment a Ford roadster may round the curve ahead. Despite occasional lapses Miss Finch was darning industriously when the voices overhead sharpened noticeably. A light staccato of high heels tapping the uncarpeted staircase was followed by the slamming of a door violently enough to shake the building. Miss Finch, groping vainly for the interpretation of these sounds, found her gaze drawn to the window as the Packard swept along the highway, its horn bleating an impassioned farewell. The door at the rear of Miss Finch's chair opened emphatically, with such emphasis indeed, that the door-knobs parted company, one falling into the hall, the other projecting itself in the direction of Miss Finch as if with hostile intent. And close upon this demonstration a girl entered the room and flung herself into one of the ragged armchairs. The owner of the pink silk stocking was revealed. It was all in keeping with her audacious color scheme. Her hair was obviously red, and instead of modestly disguising the fact, it used every known artifice to attract attention to itself, curling and crinkling and brazenly thrusting out tendril-like locks to catch the beholder's gaze. Her eyes should have been blue, according to all precedent, but instead they matched her hair, a daring reddish-brown, with yellow flecks like floating gold-leaf. Ordinarily her skin was creamy till the multiplying freckles of summer temporarily disguised its fairness, but at this moment some intense emotion dyed her crimson from her throat to the roots of her hair. Over a blue house dress she wore a sweater of vivid green, assumed, if the truth be told, not for the sake of warmth but to conceal her patched elbows. Her entrance into the room accentuated its faded dinginess and bleached Miss Finch to the color of ashes. Even the spring sunshine paled before her rainbow effect. "Well, Fritz!" The girl used the incongruous nickname with the carelessness of long custom. "It's all over." "All over!" Miss Finch echoed in alarm. The darning egg dropped from her lap and spun dizzily upon the floor, while its owner blinked rapidly as if the radiant presence in the armchair dazzled her eyes. "Yes. That was Mrs. Leavett, the one who saw my advertisement in the _Onlooker_, and wrote and engaged board for herself and two children." Miss Finch rolled her eyes heavenward. Under the matter-of-fact statement she scented calamity. "It occurred to her that she'd like to see the place before she came. And now she's seen it, she's not coming. She says my ad was misleading." "It was a very good advertisement, I'm sure," protested Miss Finch. "I didn't know myself how pleasant the place was till you read me what you'd written." The girl laughed out. The naive defense had the effect of partly dissipating her anger and bringing an evasive dimple into view. "I leave it to you, Fritz, if I told a single whopper. I said the rooms were large and airy, and I didn't state that the paper was peeling off the walls. I mentioned the lawn and the shade trees, and failed to add that the house needed painting. It is not the business of the seller, Fritzie dear, to call attention to any little defects in the article he is trying to dispose of. Mrs. Leavett overlooked that point. Not a business woman, evidently." "The vines cover a good bit of the house anyway," commented Miss Finch resentfully. "What does a little paint more or less matter to a summer boarder?" "Mrs. Leavett seemed under the impression that it mattered to her. She was so very snippy that at last I asked her if she didn't think that to be _un_painted in these days was rather a mark of distinction. Since you didn't see the lady, Fritz, you can hardly appreciate the insinuating cleverness of that inquiry. The red, red rose has nothing on her. Such a lovely, fast-color carmine, warranted to go through a fainting fit without fading." "If you're going to have boarders, Agatha," Miss Finch remonstrated, "you've got to keep a tight rein on your temper." "I did, Fritz; I was preternaturally amiable till I saw that the game was up. Then I thought I might as well relieve my feelings. The woman seemed to take it as an affront that I wasn't my own grandmother. She said for a girl of my age to advertise for boarders was a piece of presumption, and she wanted to know if I didn't have a guardian--as if I were weak-minded." Miss Finch's contemptuous sniff breathed sympathetic scorn. "I'm not ashamed of being only nineteen. Everybody has to be nineteen some time, except the people who die in infancy. As I said to Mrs. Leavett, if you're too young, time will mend it. But being too old isn't so easily remedied." "Was _she_ old?" inquired Miss Finch suspiciously. "Older than she wants any one to think, Fritz. She's the sort of woman who talks about her little son when he's a sophomore in college, smoking an enormous meerschaum." Agatha's angry color had subsided to a becoming pink, and her eyes were luminous with mischief. "I'm going to try the frank, open style in ads, since the other doesn't seem to work. I shall want your opinion on it, Fritz, so prepare to give me your undivided attention." She flitted to the writing desk and began scribbling on the back of a convenient envelope and Miss Finch utilized the pause to recover her elusive darning egg, dropping her thimble in the process. Before she could capture the latter runaway, Agatha was ready for her services as critic. "Boarders wanted. A spinster aged nineteen, of uncertain temper, will accommodate a limited number of boarders at her country place, Oak Knoll. Rooms large and airy, special ventilation secured through openings in the roof. In case of rain, guests will be furnished with tubs to catch the drippings, without extra charge. Fine lawn kept in excellent order by the untiring efforts of two horses and a cow. View unsurpassed. Meals excellent provided the cook is kept in good humor by considerate treatment." She nipped the handle of her pen reflectively. "Do you think it necessary to mention that the cook and the proprietor are one and the same?" "Agatha," cried Miss Finch with the agonized earnestness of a literal mind, "you mustn't think of sending that to the paper. Taking boarders is a good deal like getting married. There's a whole lot you've got to keep dark, or you might as well give up first as last." Her outburst terminated in a sniff. Immediately the tip of her pale, seemingly bloodless little nose became as red as a cherry, the instantaneous sequel of tears, with Miss Finch. "You're so smart, Agatha," she quavered. "If only you'd sell this house and wash your hands of Howard and me, who haven't the least claim on you, you could go to the city and look around and like enough find a husband. There's plenty of men who don't mind red hair." Agatha ignored the encouragement. "Howard is my brother." "Just like children pretend in play. He's your stepma's son. There's not a drop of Kent blood in him, and not a mite of Sheldon in you. But instead of giving your mind to getting married like a girl needs to do in these days, you're all the time worrying about educating that boy." "I'm going to send Howard to college if I live, I'd rather do that than have twenty husbands." "Then if that wasn't enough," lamented Miss Finch tearfully, "here I am, a good-for-nothing cumberer of the ground, for you to fuss and plan for. Don't tell me! All the reason you keep this place is to have a home for me and Howard. And it ain't right or fair." Agatha crumpled the advertisement inspired by the visit of Mrs. Leavett into an inky wad, and took aim at the spider-like blotch on the ceiling. Then crossing the room swiftly, she hugged the limp little woman to her heart. "You'll make me cry myself if you're not careful. You want to deprive me of my family and my chaperon at one swoop, and turn me out into the world a solitary orphan, you heartless creature." She silenced Miss Finch's gurgled protests with a kiss. "Hush!" she said authoritatively. "There comes Howard on the pony. He mustn't know anything about this." The beat of hoofs ceased abruptly and a boy's swinging step sounded on the porch. To save the trouble of walking ten feet to the door, Howard raised the nearest window of the living-room, and made an unconventional entry. He was a handsome lad of sixteen, and Agatha's idol. She had been as ready as most young girls to resent her father's second marriage, but all her childish hostility vanished at the sequel, the chubby little boy who was her stepmother's contribution to the family circle. She had longed for a brother with the passionate yearning of a lonely child, and just when she had given up hope, a brother was hers. Agatha's sense of proprietorship had grown with the years. Nothing irritated her more than the suggestion that the tie between Howard and herself was less binding than that of blood. The boy drew three letters from his pocket, slapping them down on the table. "You're getting to be pretty popular, Aggie. Every time I go to the village there's mail for you. Two letters yesterday and three to-day." "How warm you look, Howard." Agatha pushed the boy's heavy hair back from his moist forehead. "You mustn't get overheated and take cold." She was deliciously maternal in her solicitude for the sturdy youngster who already topped her by an inch or two. "I'll look warmer before the day's over. I'm going to tackle the garden now. If you'd ever seen summer boarders eat new green peas you'd know 'twas time to get busy." Howard departed as he had come, and his sister, her face overcast, gave her attention to her mail. The first letter opened was flung petulantly to the floor. "Woman wants to know how many bathrooms we have, and will I please send her the names of several former patrons as references. Worse than Mrs. Leavett." "They're an unreasonable lot, summer boarders," acquiesced Miss Finch. The second letter was as unsatisfactory, judging from the impetuosity of its flight across the room. "She's the widow of a missionary and wants board at half rates, and the younger children not to count." "I don't believe you've got the temper for running a boarding-house," commented Miss Finch. "You're as fiery as red pepper and next to the married state, keeping boarders calls for a saintly disposition." Agatha prying open the third communication with a hairpin, vouchsafed no reply. But her perturbed air changed magically to breathless attention. Her eyes moved slowly down the typewritten page, her air of stupefaction increasingly in evidence. Checking herself with an impatient gesture, she started again at the beginning and read the letter aloud: "'My Dear Miss Kent: "'My attention has just been called to your advertisement in the current _Onlooker_. I can hardly hope that you remember me, for it is over twenty years since our last meeting, and at that time I was an insignificant urchin of twelve--'" "Over twenty years," Miss Finch interjected, "and you nineteen last week." "'I remember you distinctly, however, and your beautiful old place with its fine grounds and noble trees. When I explain that I am the son of John Forbes you will understand that my visit with my father was a memorable occasion. He died soon after, as you remember, but he often spoke of our week at Oak Knoll and his affectionate admiration for yourself.'" A flicker of understanding illumined Miss Finch's blank face. "I'm beginning to see daylight," she interrupted. "The man's fooled by the likeness of names. He thinks he's writing to your great-aunt, Agatha Kent. She'd be between sixty and seventy if she were living." Agatha had already solved the puzzle. She nodded and read on, too interested to pause for discussion: "'I have played in rather hard luck recently. I contracted a severe form of malaria in my South American trip last year which has resulted, strangely enough, in a loss of eyesight, only temporary, the doctors hope. For six months I have gone about with my eyes bandaged. At present the building up of my general health seems the most important step in my recovery and I wish to secure board in some retired country place with a bracing climate, like that of Bridgewater. "'In case you were willing to burden yourself with a blind boarder, I should, of course, insist on paying more than the moderate rates mentioned in your ad. I should also wish to engage the services of some youth in the neighborhood who could serve as valet and companion. I could bring an attendant from the city but would prefer a country boy, who would not be continually pining for roof gardens and like diversions. His work will be exacting, of course, for no child is as helpless as I, but I will pay well in addition to his board and will try to make his labors as agreeable as possible. "'I have written at length because I wish you to understand just what you are letting yourself in for, if you admit me to Oak Knoll. The remembrance of your benevolent face which even to my unobservant boy self seemed to express your kindly nature, is my only reason for thinking that possibly your answer will be favorable. "'Yours very truly, "'Burton Forbes.'" Mechanically Agatha folded the letter and returned it to its envelope. She spoke in a rapturous half whisper. "A blind man. If it had been planned on purpose, it couldn't have been more perfect. Please don't tell me I'm dreaming, Fritz." Miss Finch rubbed her nose fretfully, a sign of perturbation. "Have you thought--" "He can't see that the paper is peeling off the wall," Agatha continued ecstatically. "But he'll appreciate the rooms being large and airy. He won't worry because the house needs painting, but he can enjoy sitting under the shade of the trees. I can even feed him fried chicken while the rest of us are eating cod-fish gravy. It's an interposition of Providence." Miss Finch was hectoring her nose again. "But how are you going to manage--" "He wants a boy as an attendant," persisted Agatha jubilantly. "Howard is the boy. He'll pay him well, and pay me for his board. If only I'm not delirious. Oh, I want to jump and scream. Howard's next year in school is all provided for. And if Mr. What's-his-name would only stay blind till--" "I guess you're forgetting one thing." Miss Finch raised her voice challengingly. "You ain't your great-aunt." Agatha regarded the interruption with irritation. "Well!" "It's her he wants to board with. He imagines she's a nice, motherly old soul, who'll pet him up and feed him up. It ain't likely he'd think of engaging board with a flighty young girl. I don't say you're not as competent as though you were sixty. But he wouldn't believe it." The glow illuminating the girl's face flickered defiantly under this chilling blast of common sense, and went out, like a candle in the wind. She drew her arched brows into a meditative pucker and sat musing while Miss Finch, humanly complacent over having suggested a difficulty, gave her whole attention to her darning, leaving Agatha to wrestle with the solution. "Fritz," the girl breathed at last, "do you believe in reincarnation?" Miss Finch tried to look as if she understood the meaning of the word. With an adroitness for which few would have given her credit, she replied, "I won't say I do, and I won't say I don't." "Well, it's true, Fritz. I am my own great-aunt." "Land alive!" cried Miss Finch, startled into close attention. "Mr. Burton Forbes wants to engage board for the summer with Miss Agatha Kent. Well, I'm Agatha Kent. He imagines that I'm a nice comfortable old lady with white hair and a double chin. Very well. It would be a hard heart that would disappoint a blind man in such a trifle." "You mean," gasped Miss Finch, "that you're going to deceive him?" "Heaven forbid. But I'm not going to _un_deceive him, Fritz. He assumed certain things about me. Let him keep his illusions, poor soul. He'll spend a happy summer with his father's old friend, and then go away and recover, I hope." No trace of Agatha's shadowing perplexity remained. Her eyes had the mischievous brightness of a naughty child's. Miss Finch gazed aghast. "He's bound to find out sooner or later. And no good comes of cheating anybody, least of all a blind man." "You're not the stuff for a conspirator, I can see that," Agatha laughed. "You look positively frightened. But Howard will be delighted. He'll feel like the hero of a detective story." The window by which her brother had made his exit was still open and Agatha took her departure in the same informal fashion. But little Miss Finch sat bowed in her chair, as if the responsibility for this newly hatched plot rested upon her narrow shoulders, and crushed her under its weight. CHAPTER II THE CURTAIN RISES The composition of a suitable reply to Burton Forbes' request proved unexpectedly difficult. Agatha did not lack appreciation of the histrionic demands of her rôle. She suspected the late John Forbes of something more than a platonic admiration for her imaginary self and it was out of the question to write his son the matter-of-fact letter which would have sufficed for another blind man, desiring board in the country. As she composed laborious missives only to destroy them on the second reading, Agatha thanked heaven that the hardships of her lot had not included the adoption of a literary career. The completed letter, however, so far met her exacting requirements that in satisfied contemplation of her intellectual offspring, she forgot the pangs attending its birth. With a naive complacency not unfamiliar among the craft, she read the masterpiece to Miss Finch: "My Dear Mr. Forbes: "Your letter, just received, both surprised and touched me. Your memory must, indeed, be tenacious if you recall me, for in the twenty years which have passed since your visit to Oak Knoll you have, I am sure, seen much better worth remembering than a quiet, old country woman the best of whose life is now its golden memories. "I hardly need tell you that my door would be open to your father's son under any circumstances, and the fact of your blindness--which I sincerely trust will prove temporary--only makes you doubly welcome. Fortunately I know exactly the person for your attendant, a young friend of mine named Howard Sheldon. He is thoroughly reliable and the salary will be a great help to him, as he is ambitious for an education. "Please let me know when to expect you. I am looking forward to renewing the friendship begun so long ago that it almost seems as if it must have been in another state of existence. "Very truly yours, "Agatha Kent." Miss Finch did not share Agatha's enthusiasm. Her pinched little face was wan and worried as she conscientiously did her best to dampen the satisfaction of the proud author. "That letter gives me a dreadful upset feeling, Agatha. I don't know as I could put my finger on a downright lie, but it certainly ain't true." "It is the truth and nothing but the truth, Fritzie. It is ridiculous for a little four-page letter to claim to be the whole truth. Take, for instance, the fact about his being doubly welcome because he is blind. That's truer than he has any idea of." "'Golden memories,'" quoted Miss Finch with severity. "A young girl like you!" "That's the best thing in the letter," cried Agatha, enraptured. "I don't know how I ever came to think of anything so clever. 'Golden memories,'" she repeated with the sentimental inflection she deemed appropriate. "Do you know, Fritz, I don't believe it's as hard to write books as the authors make out." Disappointing as Miss Finch proved in the rôle of conspirator, Howard's enthusiasm largely compensated for her deficiencies. Howard was in his element. To share in a plot of this character was rapture beyond words. The only drawback to his happiness was the fact that Agatha had described him to his prospective employer as a reliable boy, ambitious for an education. Howard felt that to live up to such a character promised an insipid summer. It would have added a tang to existence had he been cast for a refugee or a cowboy. It was with difficulty that Agatha brought him to relinquish his determination to play some sort of part. "I could pretend to be an awfully ignorant cuss, don't you know, Aggie. I could say 'betcher life' instead of 'yes,' and, 'not on your tintype' for 'no.'" Yielding to his sister's eloquent representations, Howard reluctantly consented to confine himself to his normal mode of expression during Mr. Forbes' stay and bend all his energy toward furthering his sister's success in the impersonation fate demanded of her. His suggestions proved an almost startling range of ingenuity. Agatha was to complain frequently of rheumatic pains in her knees, and keep a cane handy for strolling about the grounds. Another point on which Howard placed great emphasis was the necessity of frequently mislaying her supposedly indispensable spectacles. "He'll be sure to suspect something," insisted Howard, "if you don't keep losing your spectacles. Old folks always do. And when I find them and bring them to you, you must always say that they are the ones you use for looking far off and you want your reading glasses." The exchange of several letters between Burton Forbes and his prospective hostess resulted in an arrangement entirely satisfactory from Agatha's standpoint. Her boarder was to make the trip from the city without an attendant. Howard would meet him at the station with the carryall and convey him to Oak Knoll, where Agatha would make him welcome as the son of a friend long dead. The possibility of Mr. Forbes' enlightenment through the interference of neighbors she had met with characteristic decision by disseminating the information that her home was to serve as temporary asylum for a blind gentleman, broken in health and with an unconquerable aversion to society. Without definitely reflecting on Mr. Forbes' mental condition, Agatha succeeded in conveying the impression that any one attempting to interview her blind boarder would do so at his own risk. Youthful audacity, together with a daring peculiar to herself, carried Agatha triumphantly through the successive stages of preparation. It was not until Howard had actually driven to the station to meet the expected arrival that she began to appreciate her own temerity in committing herself to so reckless a scheme. To be an old lady for an entire summer, to be discreet and dignified--sufficiently so at least to deceive a blind man--began to seem to her a contract impossible to carry out. Her knees weakened under her. An abnormal acceleration of her pulses convinced her that she was more frightened than she was willing to admit. As the time approached for Howard's return, she was almost on the point of offering a prayer that Mr. Forbes had suddenly decided on a summer in Canada. The carryall drawn by the leisurely bays came in sight just when apprehension was reaching the point of panic. Agatha strained her eyes. Howard occupied the driver's place and in the comparative obscurity of the back seat the outlines of a masculine figure were visible. Her throat dry and her forehead unpleasantly moist, Agatha went out upon the piazza to receive her guest. Under ordinary circumstances Howard's passenger would not have seemed a formidable personage. In spite of the disfiguring blue goggles, his clear-cut features were distinctly prepossessing. Moreover, his air of helplessness would have appealed to the maternal instinct of any female five years old, and led her to constitute herself his protector. Only a guilty conscience accounted for the shrinking with which Agatha advanced to welcome him. "How do you do, Mr. Forbes." She spoke in the repressed tones she imagined befitting age, and her fluttering heart imparted a suitable _tremolo_ to the greeting. Forbes snatched off his hat and put out a groping hand. His abundant brown hair, cut severely close, showed a well-shaped head. His voice, too, was in his favor. "Have I the pleasure--" "I am Miss Kent." Agatha took his hand and quickly released it. "Bring Mr. Forbes' suit-case, Howard. I suppose you'd like to go to your room, Mr. Forbes. Shall I help you?" She put her hand through his arm to guide him, her face aflame. Yet her youthful zest for adventure was asserting itself and there was something contagious in Howard's delight over actually embarking on the anticipated conspiracy. Agatha's breathing steadied. She caught Howard's eye and flashed a smile at him. The experience was like a plunge into a mountain stream, exhilarating after the first shock was over. "This is very good of you, Miss Kent," Forbes was saying as they ascended the wide staircase, side by side. "I shan't be quite so helpless as this when I've once got my bearings." His voice took on an interrogative note. "I hardly suppose you would have known me?" Agatha threw him an appreciative glance. "I think it would be out of the question for any one who had known you to forget you." "Really?" He seemed pleased. "But surely I have changed." "In twenty years? Certainly. Even I"--she smiled in enjoyment of her own daring--"even I have changed since your last visit." Howard, on the stairs behind them, coughed loudly by way of applause, but Agatha's complacency was destined to be jarred. "Don't make rash claims," the new arrival said severely, "I feel you're nothing but a girl." "I--I--" "At least that is how you impressed me the first time I saw you--the only time I've seen you," Forbes corrected, "as if you would never grow old." Agatha made a quick recovery. "I try to keep a young heart," she replied demurely. "Now, Mr. Forbes, remember that when you get to the top of the stairs you turn toward the front of the house, and the door of your room is the first on your right." The big front room for all its appalling shabbiness, was deliciously airy. Forbes stood between the open windows and drew deep breaths. "This is what I've been pining for without knowing it," he burst out. "I have a presentiment that this air is going to be just the tonic I need, and that I'll be seeing again in a week or two." "I hope--so," lied Agatha with the jerkiness of one unused to falsehood. "Howard, get Mr. Forbes everything he needs and bring him down to the porch when he is ready, unless he would like to lie down." She withdrew sedately and then atoned for her unnatural repression by galloping down the stairs and falling upon Miss Finch, who, having viewed the arrival from a convenient window, had withdrawn to her own little rocking chair, a prey to lugubrious forebodings. The panting Agatha revealed no traces of her late misgivings. "It's ridiculously easy, Fritz, and the greatest fun. I believe I'd have made a star actress. I honestly felt as old as the hills, exactly as if he were a young fellow I'd known years ago, when he was a little boy. I was almost tempted to smooth back his hair from his forehead--he has such a nice thoughtful forehead, Fritz--and imprint a benevolent kiss above his nose." "Yes, I saw he was nice-looking," sighed Miss Finch. "Such a pity he can't see. I've often thought I wouldn't mind marrying a blind man or a cripple and sacrificing my entire life to making him happy. But I'm afraid you'd tire of it, Agatha." "I'm sure I should. It makes me tired even to think of such a thing," admitted Agatha shamelessly. "But you don't get my point of view, Fritz. The kiss was to have been maternal or even grandmotherly. He thinks I am an old lady and in spite of everything, I regard myself from his standpoint. I never looked forward to a summer so much in all my life. It'll be like going to a play morning, noon and night." Voices sounded on the stairs, a man's deep notes blending pleasantly with the fresh tones of a growing lad. Agatha seized Miss Finch's arm. "Come out and meet him, Fritz. And I believe I'll begin calling you Zaida. You're considerably younger than I, you know. Why, what's the matter?" Terror in her eyes, Miss Finch was resisting the friendly propulsion. "I'm afraid to go near him. I'll be letting the cat out of the bag, and I'm not going to have lies on my conscience even for you, Agatha." With a laugh the girl released her. "Poor old Fritz, you never were intended for a diplomatic career. But you'll get used to it. Train yourself to think of me as some one venerable and stately, long, long past the follies of youth." She advanced to the door with a dancing step borrowed from Mrs. Vernon Castle as depicted on the screen, turned to kiss her hand to the crushed Miss Finch, and disappeared in the direction of the kitchen. And presently, mingling with the composite fragrance of the garden and distant hay-fields, the appreciative nostrils of Mr. Burton Forbes differentiated the less esthetic but equally delectable odor of frying chicken. CHAPTER III A SOCIAL SECRETARY In nineteen observant years Agatha had noted a business man's invariable interest in the local telegraph service, and the tendency of lovers to be dissatisfied with the mail facilities of the neighborhood. The concern manifested by Burton Forbes on learning that the Rural Free Delivery called at Oak Knoll but once a day, classified him definitely, in Agatha's estimation. "You can always send Howard to the village for the afternoon mail," she suggested, the new warmth in her voice an unconscious demonstration of the truth that all the world loves a lover. "Thanks, that's fine!" The brightening of Forbes' face quite offset his immediate conscientious warning that she was not to spoil him just because she was sorry for him. As the Rural Free Delivery brought nothing of consequence on the morning following Forbes' arrival, Howard was despatched to the village after the mid-day meal, leaving Forbes in Agatha's care. Agatha conducted her charge to a creaking rocking chair, in the shadiest angle of the porch, and shoved a foot-stool near. "Now I'll get my knitting," she said blithely, "and we'll talk." Forbes seemed delighted. "It's too good to be true," he murmured. "I thought they were extinct, the old ladies who sat knitting. It's like stepping into the heart of an old-fashioned story." Agatha smiled tolerantly. "It's clear you're just back from South America. Up here everybody's knitting, young and old." "But not like you," he insisted. "I am sure you have an air about it that differentiates your knitting from all this kittenish frolicking with balls of yarn." He turned his wistful face toward her as if it helped to visualize the picture, and then added, "Just the hour for confidences, isn't it?" Agatha smiled at the dun colored wool in her lap. "A warm day, a cool porch, an old lady knitting, and a young man in love. Of course it's ideal for confidences." He did not seem in any hurry to take advantage of the opening he had asked for. "I'm afraid I'm going to impose on you," he said, after so long a pause that she wondered whether he were planning to deny her charge. "Howard is a bright kid, and I'm sure he'll prove a satisfactory secretary, but there are a few letters I'd hate to dictate to a boy." He laughed with rather an engaging air of shyness as he added, "I imagine it won't be particularly easy to dictate them even to you." "Of course not," agreed Agatha, with ready sympathy. "Love-letters seem one's own business more than almost anything in the world." His artless confidences had brought a lovely color to her cheeks. Practical as Agatha believed herself, she was romance-hungry, and it did not matter in the least that in this particular love-affair she was cast for a minor rôle. "And I'll read you her letters, too," she offered joyously. "It will save Howard some trying experiences. Howard's just at the age when he's horribly embarrassed by anything in the shape of sentiment." "Thank you. I'd any amount rather you read them," returned Forbes gratefully. "But they won't be sentimental letters, at all. Howard could read them without finding a word that would bring a blush to his maiden cheek." "Oh!" observed Agatha blankly, and knitted to the end of her needle without speaking. Apparently the path that had seemed so plain led nowhere, after all. Forbes, too, seemed in no haste to speak. "Of course," he explained at last, "I'm very hopeful. If I make a complete recovery as the doctors tell me I'm likely to do, there's no reason why things shouldn't be as they were before." Agatha laid down her knitting and regarded him fixedly, an upright crease between her brows. The tranquillity of his unconscious face gave the impression that she must have misunderstood him. "How were they before?" she asked bluntly. Apparently he did not question her right to a categorical answer. "We had planned to be married in January till this came up. But of course I couldn't hold a girl like Julia when there's a possibility of my having to grope my way through life." "No, of course not," agreed Agatha, with misleading calm. "But if she were enough in love with you to plan to marry you in January, I should suppose something would hold her, something you had nothing to do with." There was a moment of rather tense silence. Then Forbes laughed out boyishly: "You dear old soul," he cried, "you don't know how mid-Victorian that sounds. When you were a girl, women took all that sentimental stuff seriously; about sacrificing themselves for love, I mean. But you don't understand the modern girl. She's beyond that." "I don't pretend to understand your Julia," agreed Agatha, her eyes aflame, "I don't want to." Forbes laughed again, this time with a reservation in his mirth. "Look here," he said, "you mustn't criticize Julia, for then I can't talk to you about her, and that would be a deuced bore. And she's a queen. A girl of that sort is bound to know her value. Julia was really fond of me, not desperately in love as I was--as I am--that wasn't to be expected, but really fond of me and inclined to exaggerate ridiculously my small achievements. But of course it's out of the question for her to marry me if the rest of my life is to be a game of Blind Man's Buff." "Per--perhaps so," Agatha stammered. One of her ready rages was coming on. She felt it distinctly. One familiar symptom was that her blood seemed boiling in her veins, and her ears felt hot and swollen. She had seen them before when she was angry, flaming like two danger signals, and tempering the redness of her hair. Her shaking hands made knitting quite impossible. "Of course people can't marry if they haven't the money to marry on," she succeeded in saying finally, in an unsteady voice, "but there's nothing to keep them from loving each other till they die, and having that comfort, anyway." She had succeeded in making him very uncomfortable. She would have known that by the way the rocking chair was creaking as he squirmed, even if his astonished face had not borne witness to the facts in the case. "It--it is not a question of money," he explained stiffly. "I have plenty, and so has she. We're not extravagant in our tastes, either of us. The thing that's out of the question--" He seemed to find a little difficulty in making it clear, after all, and floundered at this point. "You can't think of it," he protested angrily, "tying a girl like Julia, a beautiful, queenly creature, to a man who has to be led around like a poodle dog. God! I couldn't be coward enough to accept such a sacrifice." "Oh, I understand, now." Agatha's anger was past the inarticulate stage. She pulled a needle from her knitting, and brandished it dangerously as she talked. "You mean that you wouldn't _let_ her be engaged to you." The affected innocence of her voice was flatly contradicted by the bitterness of her eyes. "You just insisted that there shouldn't be anything more between you two till you were sure that your eyes were going to be all right again. Well, I tell you frankly that I think you've treated Julia brutally, and that she has a right to detest you." Apparently Mr. Forbes was losing confidence in his ability to make the matter clear. He sighed patiently as he tried again. "No, that isn't it. We were agreed perfectly on the subject. Love isn't quite so reckless a passion as it was when you were young, Miss Kent. Julia and I belong to a reasonable generation, tremendously matter-of-fact. She was really cut up over the whole affair, but she felt she owed it to herself to break the engagement since my future was so uncertain, and I felt I owed it to her to release her. So we were perfectly agreed, you see." "Yes, I see." Agatha was glaring at him with the expression of a vixen. "Just as businesslike as if you had been planning to go into partnership to raise chickens, weren't you? And so that's what the modern girl is like. Dear me!" The edge to her voice made her irritation sufficiently plain, and Forbes, with a gentle deference that touched her, changed the topic to one unlikely to combat her old-fashioned prejudices. They were discussing Thackeray and George Eliot when Howard returned. Swinging himself from his pony, the boy came clattering along the porch, and deposited a package of mail on his employer's knees. "It's lucky I went over," Howard declared. "You've got a regular windfall, five or six letters beside the things with one-cent stamps." In spite of Mr. Forbes' assumption of ultra-modern reasonableness, his countenance betrayed a boyish ardor that added to Agatha's resentment against the recreant Julia. She took possession of the letters, saying to her brother, "You'd better put the pony up, hadn't you, Howard? I'll attend to Mr. Forbes' mail." Her boarder only waited for the beat of the pony's hoofs to tell that Howard was out of hearing, before he leaned toward her, his face pathetically eager. "Is there one from her?" "What's the post-mark?" "She's probably at the Briercliff Manor, this week. She writes a striking hand, not the old-time idea of feminine, but full of character and strength. You'll always recognize it after you've seen it once." Unfortunately it appeared that Agatha's education in this important branch of knowledge was not to begin immediately. There was no letter from Julia. This fact established, the light went out of Forbes' face, and it remained blank during the reading of several communications of varying degrees of interest. For the first time he seemed an embodiment of all the pitiful helplessness of the blind. "I suppose," he ventured hesitatingly, when she had finished, "that you're too busy to take a letter for me to-day. Got to go on with that knitting, haven't you?" Agatha longed to say yes. In her present mood, to transcribe an impassioned letter to the object of Forbes' regard, seemed well-nigh intolerable. Inexorably she forced herself to reply that she was not in the least busy. "I'll get Howard out of the way by sending him to the garden," she added. "He'll be perfectly willing to change jobs with me." Howard, who had the average boy's aversion to the use of a pen, bore out her statement and joyfully agreed to picking peas in place of acting as an amanuensis. He went his way, favoring her with an almost ribald wink, a natural reaction from the profound respect he was now required to show her. With an expression that would have befitted Queen Elizabeth, when signing the death-warrant of Lady Jane Grey, Agatha began her task. Forbes' mood, though disappointed, was not reproachful. His pale face flushing slightly at the novel experience of giving voice to such tender sentiments in the presence of a third person, he dictated the letter with only those pauses necessary to enable Agatha to keep pace with him. "My Dearest Girl. "The afternoon mail has just been brought from the village, and I was disappointed at not receiving a letter from you. Disappointed I am, but not surprised, for I am sure that wherever you are, you will have little time to yourself unless you take it by main force, so to speak. That is the penalty I pay for being in love with one so charming. "I wish you could look in on me here, at the home of my father's old friend, Miss Agatha Kent. Oak Knoll is a fine old place. The house is spacious, comfortable and homelike, the last characteristic doubtless due to the personality of the owner. As Miss Kent is good enough to write this for me, I must wait some other opportunity to tell you how delightful I find her. Her type is disappearing, unluckily, which makes me all the more ready to congratulate myself on this chance of renewing a friendship which might almost be regarded as an inheritance. "The troublesome eyes pained me a little last night, but lying awake was not altogether fruitless, as in the stillness I could bring your dear face before me almost as vividly as if I saw it in the flesh. To-day I feel much better. I am convinced that this wonderful air is going to make me over, and then in a few weeks I shall again have a right to indulge myself in the dreaming of those dreams which need no Daniel to interpret them." Forbes' deep voice came to a halt at this point. He turned his face toward Agatha, the involuntary movement showing that his blindness was not of long duration, and smiled with that winsome boyishness which made it impossible to believe him past thirty. "I believe I'll take my pen in hand for the wind-up, if you please, Miss Kent. I think I can manage a line or two, without making it illegible." She brought the sheet to him, put the pen in his hand, and indicated where he was to begin to write. And then suddenly as she watched him, the outline of his fine profile was blurred by angry tears. Something in his expression gave her an inkling of the tenderness compressed in those few straggling lines, and all for the girl who had "owed it to herself" to break her engagement because of his misfortune. "She owes it to herself to break with him," reflected Agatha, "but she doesn't owe it to him to make it final, and give him a chance to get over it Oh, no! He can go on to the end of his life dreaming about her, and making love to her, and feeding her vanity by his devotion. And then he calls that deliberate heartlessness reasonable, and makes himself believe that she's the type of the modern girl. The cat!" Agatha's righteous indignation was getting the best of her. She said the last two words aloud. "Beg pardon!" Forbes turned, showing a puzzled face. "The cat is rather near the chickens," Agatha explained. "If you'll excuse me, I'll run down and drive her away." She started at a pace which would have been reckless for rheumatic knees, recalled herself, and slowed down till beyond his hearing. Then she stood quite still and stamped her foot upon the gravel like a restive horse, till she felt better. When she returned, flushed but calm, the letter was completed and folded. "Haven't any asbestos envelopes, have you?" questioned Forbes, trying to make a joke out of his bit of sentiment. "I've made it hot stuff, I assure you." And then he acknowledged that an ordinary envelope would probably retain his ardent effusion without bursting into flame, and Agatha wrote the name she already hated, eying each letter malevolently, as she set it down: Miss Julia Studley Briercliff Manor Briercliff, New York Howard took her aside that night to thank her for relieving him of an obnoxious task. "It's the only part of the work I mind, writing those darned letters. Does he make 'em long?" "A great deal too long," said Agatha, "and I don't blame you for hating that job. It's rotten." CHAPTER IV COMPLICATIONS For a week Forbes' spirits were fitful. Morning after morning, the Rural Free Delivery brought a variety of offerings, and disappointment along with the rest. Each afternoon Howard rode to the village, and though he never returned empty-handed, he might as well have done so, since he failed to bring the right letter. Had it not been for Agatha, Forbes' depression might easily have become serious. She spent with him all the time she could spare, even shelling peas and whipping cream upon the porch within arm's length of his chair. Whatever opinion he expressed, she promptly disagreed. She railed at modern institutions. She professed unbounded contempt for the modern girl. She was as prickly as a chestnut burr, as puckery as an unripe persimmon, as ruffling as a January gale. But she gained her point. Forbes did not mope. In that week of waiting, she wrote at his dictation three letters to Julia, all of them ardently tender, and quite uncomplaining. Though he confessed to disappointment over not hearing from her, he did not seem to question that it was her privilege to keep him waiting her pleasure. His humility aroused Agatha to a fury of protest. She dotted her "i's" as if she were stabbing the paper, and crossed her "t's" with a sweep, like the slash of a knife. Her valorous instinct to champion the cause of the under dog had never been so constantly in evidence. The table at Oak Knoll was extremely good that week. In addition to distracting Forbes' thoughts by continually opposing him, Agatha concentrated her attention on making him eat. The fundamental common sense, underlying like granite her girlish caprices and audacity, assured her that an aching heart was in some mysterious fashion relieved by a full stomach. The price Forbes had insisted on paying for his board had seemed to her excessive, and now it justified her in trying her choicest recipes. And while Forbes' mood would have made it easy for him to be quite indifferent to what was set before him, thanks to these tactics he ate with a rather shamefaced relish, and assured Agatha that cooks of her sort had all been born before the Civil War. At the end of a trying week, the looked-for letter arrived. Agatha herself took it from the mail box at the end of the long drive, and she eyed it as if it had been a new species of noxious insect. Though she had never seen Julia's chirography, she instantly recognized it, even without the aid of the post-mark. The letter was a long one, evidently, for it had called for double postage. Agatha walked rapidly back to the house, congratulating herself that her duties would be less onerous, at least till the stimulating effect of this letter had worn away. She beckoned to Howard, who was escorting Forbes about the grounds on his morning constitutional, and despatched him on some unnecessary errand, while she took his place at Forbes' side. "It's come," she said briefly. Though terse, the statement was quite intelligible. Forbes put out his hand eagerly, and she saw it was trembling. She gave him the letter, conscious of a pity that had a mixture of contempt. "Shall I read it to you?" she asked. "Why, of course. What am I thinking of! Shall we go to the porch? It seems like a fat fellow, and I don't want to keep you standing." Agatha put her hand through his arm and steered him in the direction of the house. She noticed the shadow on his face had lifted. A little color had come to his cheeks, and his sensitive mouth seemed on the point of smiling. She felt that she despised his weakness in letting himself be played upon by the caprices of a heartless girl, but at the same time, she wanted to cry. And Forbes, as if suspecting her mood, entertained her as they walked, by making fun of himself and of the rapture he could not hide. "What do you think, Miss Kent? Will you be equal to reading this to me every day till the next one comes?" "I suppose," said Agatha with resignation, "that I can stand it if you can." "Oh, there won't be any difficulty as far as I'm concerned. In fact, if my eyes were normal, I should probably read it several times a day, whenever I had a minute to spare. But I haven't the nerve to impose on you to that extent." "Heaven forbid!" cried Agatha devoutly, and he broke into hilarious laughter. Agatha reflected that if this was the result of falling in love, the longer that catastrophe was postponed, the better. Forbes had been quite correct in saying that Julia's letter would not be sentimental. Howard could have read it without the slightest embarrassment. She apologized casually for not having written earlier, and by way of explanation gave a list of her engagements for the past two weeks, a device which lent her letter the effect of the society column in a Sunday newspaper, and accounted for the double postage. The names of several men appeared frequently in her record, and it was evident that Forbes was not the only one of his sex to recognize her charm. She even quoted one or two compliments she had received, as if certain of his sympathetic pleasure in her popularity, and his expression as he listened seemed to justify her confidence. On the last page of the fifteen, Julia detached herself from this fascinating theme, and touched on his affairs. She was glad he was better and she was sure he must enjoy Oak Knoll. She thought those old colonial houses simply lovely and from his description, Miss Kent was a perfect dear. It was good of him to write so often for she was always glad to hear, and she was very cordially his friend, Julia. Agatha laid down the letter, hardly able to keep back the scornful comment that rushed to her lips like a hemorrhage. She was rather in hopes Forbes would say it himself. The shallowness of the missive, its unabashed vanity, its colossal selfishness were so apparent to her intelligence that she half expected to have Forbes break the silence by congratulating himself on his escape from marrying Julia in January. With this thought in her mind, the fatuous complacency indicated by Forbes' tone came in the nature of a shock. "She's a bit irregular as a correspondent, but when she does write, you see it's some letter." Agatha digested this in silence. "You can gather from this," continued the unconscious Mr. Forbes, "how popular she is. Wherever she goes, she's the center of attention." Since it gave him pleasure to continue in this strain, and Agatha was not really hard-hearted, she composed herself to listen till Howard's return. But the sight of her brother's slender figure in the distance was peculiarly welcome. By dint of vehement gestures, she induced him to exchange his sauntering gait for a run, and so shortened her ordeal perceptibly. Howard looked from the frowning girl to the smiling young man with perplexity. For several days Forbes' depression had weighed on the boy's spirits. And now Mr. Forbes was grinning like a chessy cat, and Aggie looked mad enough to bite a nail in two. Howard continued to stare till by a sweeping gesture Agatha indicated her wish to be left to herself. For some time Forbes had gone through the program of exercise his physician had outlined with a listlessness which proved his lack of interest. Now as Howard suggested continuing their interrupted walk, he clapped the boy on the shoulder, seized his arm and the two went off laughing. And Agatha, recalling his boast that he was a representative of a generation remarkable for its reasonableness, smiled sourly and significantly after his departing figure, and asked herself whether all men were fools, or only the nice ones. In her valiant effort to sustain Forbes' spirits, Agatha had for some days neglected her household duties, and she profited by his temporary accession of cheerfulness to despatch a number of pressing duties, aided by Phemie Tidd, the daughter of a neighboring farmer. The most notable characteristic of Phemie was her stupidity, and though Agatha had sometimes found this trying, in the present emergency she derived satisfaction from the certainty that nature had rendered it impossible for Phemie to find out anything on her own initiative. Whether she was positively weak-minded or not was a question on which the community did not agree, but under careful supervision she accomplished rather more work than would have seemed possible, considering her mental equipment. As there was no immediate prospect of another letter from Julia, Howard was excused from his afternoon trips to the village, and left to discharge his secretarial duties unassisted. For this reason Agatha was several hours late in learning an important bit of news. It was approaching noon on Friday when she came out upon the porch flushed and weary, after a strenuous morning, and dropped into a chair near that which Forbes was occupying. Though the young man was alone, his mood was evidently cheerful. As she approached him, his smile challenged her attention, and she pondered with frank amazement on the extraordinary effect of Julia's inane letter. "It's Miss Kent, isn't it?" Forbes looked boyishly pleased over having guessed correctly. "I am beginning to enjoy some of the perquisites of blindness. I can recognize the footsteps of all of you. Do you know you walk with wonderful lightness for a woman of your age?" Agatha immediately resolved to begin wearing a pair of Howard's slippers, which could be kept on only by dragging her feet. "I've been wanting to see you all the morning," continued Forbes light-heartedly. "I've great news for you. We're going to have company." "Company!" Had Forbes' sense of hearing reached the stage of acuteness he fondly imagined, he would have recognized instantly a note of wildness in Agatha's exclamation. "Had a letter this morning from a pal of mine, fellow I knew in college. He's coming to-morrow to spend Sunday with me." "To spend Sunday!" Even though Forbes was unable to perceive the frozen horror of Agatha's countenance, her appalled tone convinced him that something was wrong. His smile gave way to an expression of anxiety. "It won't inconvenience you to put him up, will it, Miss Kent?" Agatha found herself unable to reply. Her castle in the air was about to topple. A friend of Forbes was coming, and his would be as eyes to the blind. Through him Forbes would learn that the house was in need of painting and shingling and papering, that the furniture was in all stages of dilapidation, and that she herself was not an elderly lady with a motherly interest in youth, but a mere girl with a surprising facility in falsehood. And while these agonized forebodings flitted through her brain, Forbes was offering dismayed apologies. "I beg your pardon a thousand times. I should have realized--Of course, this isn't a boarding-house, but the fact that you advertised for boarders, misled me, don't you see? If Warren's coming is going to put you out at all, I'll have Howard telegraph him at once." Agatha came to herself. There was risk, of course, in granting permission for his friend's visit, yet anything was better, even discovery, than that she should appear inhospitable. Her cheeks grew hot as she recalled his generosity and saw him confused and apologetic over having asked a friend to solace his loneliness for a week-end. "Indeed you shall do nothing of the kind," she said with authority. "You didn't understand me. I'm only sorry not to meet your friend. I expect to be away over Sunday." "Oh, but that's bad. I particularly wanted Warren to see you. We might telegraph him to make it Sunday week." Agatha vetoed the suggestion. It was better that Mr. Warren should come as he had planned. "And besides," she added with swift return of her normal audacity, "if he is here you won't miss me so much." "I shall miss you under any and all circumstances, dear lady." Forbes' air of animation had returned, and it was so great a relief to see him smiling again, that she resolutely shut her eyes to the pitfalls ahead. "I shall get a girl from the neighborhood to do the cooking," explained Agatha. "And Miss Finch will mother you all in my place." "But not in your way." Forbes had a confused but unflattering impression of Miss Finch, due to the fact that she never dared trust herself to converse with him for more than a minute at a time, for fear of making some unfortunate revelation. "And I'm sorry," he ended regretfully, "that Warren's not to taste your cooking." "Oh, Hephzibah is exactly as good. I trained her." "Good Heavens! You don't mean there's a living woman with a name like that." "Oh, do you think Hephzibah an odd name? It wasn't uncommon when I was a girl." Agatha felt that she had taken leave of reason as well as of principle. "Hephzibah Diggs," she repeated thoughtfully. "I suppose it would have rather a quaint sound to any one not used to it." "It's a name for the vaudeville stage," said Mr. Forbes with conviction. He returned to the subject of Agatha's other substitute. "I suppose Warren will have a chance to get more of an impression of Miss Finch than I have succeeded in doing, for he'll have his eyes to help him out. All I have been able to discover is that she never finishes her sentences." "She's shy with men, poor girl," said Agatha, and then as he looked puzzled, "Of course she seems quite elderly to you, but to me she's only a girl." Forbes whistled softly, shaking his head. "A blind man would credit you with immortal youth, and convict her of never having been less than middle-aged. I begin to believe that eyesight is misleading." Agatha broke away from him before her mood of reprehensible recklessness should have implicated her still further. Then in the seclusion of her own room, she wept. "It's bad enough to stretch the truth when I positively can't help it," she told herself, "but this morning I simply wallowed in falsehood. And now I must live up to Hephzibah Diggs. Why couldn't I have called her Mamie Thompson? It's all the fault of that atrocious Warren person, and I wish something would happen to him on the way down. I suppose it's too much to hope for a railway accident, with only one passenger killed, but that would serve him exactly right." Agatha's courage did not revive until she undertook to prepare Miss Finch for the responsibilities which would devolve upon her in the absence of the mistress of the house. Her pale eyes became unnaturally prominent as Agatha explained. "Agatha, I can't. I'd go through fire and water for you, but I can't have a lie on my conscience. At my age I've got to prepare for death, any day, and I can't be loading my soul down with mortal sin." "Oh, Fritz, don't be so foolish. It's not necessary to lie." Agatha's conscience gave a twinge like an uneasy tooth, as she recalled her entirely gratuitous inventions of the morning. "All you have to do is to keep from telling the truth." "You can do it all right, you're so quick-witted, but I have to have time." Agatha had an inspiration. "If he says anything you don't know how to answer, pretend you're hard of hearing. And make him keep repeating it over till he gets tired, or you've thought of something to say." Miss Finch showed no inclination to rejoice over this simple solution of her difficulty. Her thin nose reddened as abruptly as if it had been pinched, and her eyes filled. "I know I'm going to make a mess of things. I've felt from the start that no good could come of cheating a blind man. And after you go to-morrow--" "But I'm not really going, Fritz. Somebody must do the cooking. I shall be in the kitchen, and my name will be Hephzibah Diggs." "Hephzibah Diggs!" Miss Finch repeated, appalled. "You're going to be somebody else?" "Only till Mr. Warren gets out of the house." "And you picked out that name yourself, just for the fun of it?" Agatha reddened under her old friend's accusing gaze. "I had to have some name," she protested weakly. "You didn't have to have that. It almost looks to me as if you were getting where you took pleasure in deception." As this only echoed Agatha's self-accusation, she exclaimed, "The idea!" with an air of indignant protest. "It keeps me awake nights," Miss Finch continued mournfully, "the way things are in this house. It seems as if there might be an explosion any minute. You're young and light-hearted, Agatha, and you can't understand my feelings." "Can't I, though," mused Agatha, as her old friend tottered toward the house. "And what's more, I shouldn't wonder if the explosion came off in just about twenty-four hours." CHAPTER V COMPANY MANNERS Agatha took leave of Forbes about two hours before Warren's train was due. She had worked valiantly most of the morning to render the room he was to occupy approximately presentable. She had patched the worst places in the carpet, provided two chairs with seats of cretonne, and brought all the pictures from her own quarters to help disguise the defaced condition of the guest-room walls. Her feeling of dissatisfaction with the result, rather than her labors, had tired her, and she had no heart for making the most of the dramatic possibilities of the farewell. In her faded print dress, with a dusting cap drooping limply over one ear, she presented herself on the porch, hastily drawing on a kid glove, her sole make-up for her rôle. "Well, good-by, Mr. Forbes. I'm going now." Forbes took her gloved hand in both his. "I hope you'll have a delightful week-end," he said cordially. "Nobody deserves it more." "I'm not anxious to get my deserts," Agatha assured him with truth, and then to head off inconvenient questionings, "Give my apologies to Mr. Warren, and say that if it had been possible I would have been here to receive him myself. But I am sure that Miss Finch and Hephzibah between them will make you perfectly comfortable." She released her hand and pulling off her glove as she went, betook herself to the kitchen, where Phemie was still washing the dishes from the mid-day meal. Left to herself, Phemie could be trusted to stretch that uninspiring task over the better part of the afternoon. Thanks to Agatha's presence, the splashing at once became animated. Deprived of the stimulating companionship of his elderly hostess, Forbes decided to accompany Howard to the station. From the kitchen window Agatha watched the carryall pass and recalled the sensations with which she had first seen Forbes approaching in the same shabby vehicle. Perhaps her present apprehensions would prove as groundless as those. Agatha whistled a martial tune, as she beat up her cake, and sought diversion in addressing Phemie with that disregard of grammatical precedent to be expected from a girl named Hephzibah Diggs. * * * * * The usual number of loungers was in evidence at the Bridgewater station, and the approach of Howard and his passenger was the signal for animated comment. The rumors Agatha had been at such pains to disseminate had taken on new and startling details as the village gossips rolled them under their tongues. It was stated on indisputable authority that Forbes had been the victim of sunstroke during his South American sojourn, and that this had left him blind and with his mind permanently affected. Another equally authoritative version pictured him the slave of an appetite for liquor and accounted for his presence at Oak Knoll by the fact that the village was "bone dry." All the rumors agreed, however, in emphasizing Forbes' aversion to society, and though Howard was surrounded and questioned as soon as he stepped on the platform, it was not till the train was in sight that any one ventured to approach the vehicle where Forbes sat alone. Howard, absorbed in the responsibilities connected with the recognition of Mr. Warren, failed to notice the intrusion on Forbes' privacy, but a number of other people were more observant. For once the arrival of the four o'clock express had a rival in the public interest. The unconscious Forbes was the target for a dozen pair of curious eyes, as Jim Doolittle slouched toward him. Jim paused by the carryall and looked Forbes over with the agreeable certainty that he could make his scrutiny as prolonged and insolent as he pleased, without being called to account. Then as the noise of the approaching train warned him to make the most of his conversational opportunities, he ventured a remark: "How do you find yourself to-day?" Forbes' face showed no change of expression. Though Jim's nasal tones reached him distinctly, it did not occur to him that he was the object of solicitude. Jim waited vainly for a reply, and then, spurred to persistence by his grinning audience, he tried again, this time lifting his voice to a bellow, as if Forbes were deaf as well as blind. "Air they treatin' you right out to Kent's?" Forbes turned with a start. "Beg pardon! I didn't know you were speaking to me." "You're stayin' out to Kent's ain't you, for the summer? Folks say you came for your health." "Yes." Forbes spoke stiffly, sharing the impression of most men who have always been robust, that illness is a disgrace. "The doctors advised a change of air." "And does Aggie Kent take good care of you?" The formality of Mr. Forbes' manner became more pronounced. "Miss Kent," he replied, with marked emphasis on the prefix, "has made me most comfortable." "Glad to hear it, glad to hear it," Mr. Doolittle assured him affably. "Seems as if takin' boarders was pretty risky for anybody of her age." Forbes' irritation deepened. "Miss Kent is perfectly capable and extremely vigorous. I believe she could tire me out." "Yes, I shouldn't wonder," Jim agreed, rather to Forbes' annoyance. "And I guess Zaida Finch steadies her down when there's a chance of her doin' something flighty." As this suggested to Forbes the weakening of his hostess' intellect through age, necessitating the guardianship of Miss Finch, he contented himself by a disdainful silence. The approach of Howard with a stranger in tow checked further conversational angling on Jim's part He tore himself away with a genial, "See you later," to which Forbes responded by a non-committal grunt. But he forgot his annoyance as Warren shouted his name, coupled with those abusive epithets with which his sex are wont to disguise sentiment toward one another. Mr. Ridgeley Warren took an unaffected pleasure in his own society, which as a rule proved contagious. He was an inveterate talker, noisy, slangy, in every way Forbes' antithesis. Warren admired Forbes' dignity, and Forbes found diversion in Warren's flow of spirits. And beneath this mutual admiration was one of those steadfast affections which springing up between two men is more lasting, in nine cases out of ten, than the love between men and women. It was fortunate that the staid bays knew the way home, for though Howard sat with the lines in his hands, he left to the horses all responsibility for keeping to the road, and turning at the right crossing. Warren told stories steadily all the way, and roared his appreciation of each. Howard laughed too, and Forbes shared their amusement, though less boisterously. Though the horses moved with deliberation, the five-mile drive seemed short. As they turned up the driveway at Oak Knoll, Forbes said with the pride of a proprietor, "Fine old place, isn't it?" "You bet," agreed Warren, his eyes upon one of the splendid oaks which had given the place its name. Then beyond, he caught sight of the house, and he leaned forward for a better look. "House been standing for some time, from appearances." "Built by Miss Kent's grandfather," Forbes replied boastfully, "and she's well on to seventy. I imagine the house is a hundred years old." Warren, staring at the sagging roof of the old building, looked as if he could easily believe it, but unaware of his lack of enthusiasm, Forbes continued: "I'm sorry you're not going to see Miss Kent, as she's away for over Sunday. You'd fall in love with her on sight." Warren shrugged his shoulders. "Seventeen is nearer my style than seventy. Can't you trot out some pretty girls for me to fall in love with?" "I'm afraid Miss Finch is all we can offer you in the way of feminine society, old man, and I've found her 'uncertain, coy and hard to please.' But you always had a way with the ladies. You might do better." The carriage stopped at the door. Howard alighted and possessed himself of the visitor's suit-case. Miss Finch, who from the window of the living-room had watched their leisurely progress along the driveway, appeared on the porch, prepared to do her duty as hostess if it killed her. Miss Finch's nose was red and her lips were blue. Despite the warmth of the mild summer day, her teeth chattered. Warren's hilarious air had disappeared with his first view of the dilapidated country house where his friend was spending the summer. His introduction to Miss Finch completed his undoing. He stared at the tremulous little figure in silent stupefaction. What on earth was Forbes doing in this tumbledown building with two old women for company? And the extraordinary part was that Forbes seemed contented with his quarters. Warren ascended the stairs to his room, trying to make up his mind how to handle the situation. He had an uneasy feeling that his friend was being imposed on. The appearance of his quarters confirmed his worst apprehensions. Warren looked around him, shook his head, and rejoined Forbes on the porch, feeling the necessity of immediate action. But Forbes' air of tranquillity made him hesitate. After all, if Forbes himself were satisfied, that was the main thing. He broached the topic cautiously. "I judge your friend, Miss Kent, isn't what you'd call opulent." "Hardly, or I shouldn't be here. She advertised for boarders. Some one was reading me a few of the promising ads from the _Onlooker_, and I recognized her name. You see I visited her once when I was a boy, and I've always remembered the beauty of the place." "Trees are fine," agreed Warren with reserve. "But the buildings all seem rather seedy. Need paint badly." "Do they?" Forbes spoke indifferently. "Paint is the least of my troubles." "I suppose so. But say, Forbes, are you sure it's a good thing for you to be cooped up here all summer with two old hens?" He had fancied he was being tactful, but to his surprise Forbes seemed irritated. "You haven't seen Miss Kent. If you had, you'd know that she's a regular beef, iron and wine combination." "If she's like Miss Finch," Warren was beginning, when Forbes interrupted him with such spontaneous laughter that he dropped his sentence unfinished. "She's about as much like Miss Finch as a collie pup is like those Teddy bears the kids lug around. She's an old lady in years, but otherwise she's as young as you or I. She's so full of vitality that you can't be near her ten minutes without feeling braced up. She's like a mountain breeze." "Pity a woman of that sort didn't marry," commented Warren dryly. "That's what my old dad thought. Miss Kent was his first love, and he stayed single on her account till he was well on to forty." "Maybe that's why you're ace high with the old lady. She's trying to make up to the son for turning down the father." "Can't say, I'm sure. I imagine it's her disposition to be kind to the crippled and disabled and generally good-for-nothing." His tone was suddenly bitter, and Warren's look sharpened. "How's Julia?" he asked with seeming irrelevance. "Julia's well and enjoying herself." Forbes' manner seemed to defy his friend to criticize, and Warren, who would have enjoyed nothing better than expressing his opinion of Julia, changed the subject abruptly. If Forbes liked this gone-to-seed place and the society of old women it was no concern of his. Queer how differently men were affected when their love-affairs went wrong. Some took to drink and some were women-haters. With Forbes it had developed a craving for the atmosphere of an Old Ladies' Home. Every man to his taste. Supper partly dissipated Warren's concern. The dining-room was as rusty as the rest of the house. Miss Finch at the head of the table looked tinier and more frightened than ever. The girl who waited on the table was, without exception, Warren decided, the most unattractive specimen of youthful femininity he had ever come across. But the supper was unique. As Warren ate, his high spirits returned. Old Forbes knew what he was about, after all. A homely waitress need not trouble a blind man. Warren was almost inclined to believe that he himself could put up with the sight of Phemie's vacant face for the rest of his life, if he could be sure of three such meals every day. In the relief from his anxiety regarding Forbes, Warren turned his attention to Miss Finch. She looked so helpless over all his jokes, that he realized the necessity of strict literalness in dealing with her. "I suppose you've known Miss Kent for a long time," he said by way of beginning. Miss Finch paled over the shock of being addressed, but answered with unusual promptness, "Yes, ever since she was a teething baby." In an instant she knew what she had done even before Forbes, turning a perplexed face in her direction, asked, "But you're the younger of the two, are you not?" Miss Finch opened her mouth like a newly-landed fish, and closed it again without speaking. The device Agatha had suggested and which she had mentally dismissed as "acting a lie," thrust itself upon her recollection, and she clutched it with the avidity of the desperate. Putting her hand to her ear with the immemorial gesture of the deaf, she quavered, "What did you say?" "I asked if you weren't the younger of the two. Miss Kent said to me the other day that she thought of you as a mere girl." "I didn't quite catch what you said," faltered Miss Finch, but before Forbes could again repeat his inquiry, Phemie created a diversion. She had taken the water pitcher to refill it, and as she advanced to the kitchen door, her tray extended before her, she looked back. It was characteristic of Phemie to walk in one direction and look in another. Agatha was beginning to congratulate herself on having at last eradicated this tendency, but she had not reckoned on the effect of a handsome and lively young man on Phemie's susceptible temperament. As she turned for another look at Warren, Phemie's tray came into collision with the door and the pitcher, overturning, broke in fragments. As was inevitable, every one turned to look. Warren, who was in range of the door, saw it open, apparently of its own accord. A figure stood in the passageway, fairly dazzling in its effect after the gray tints of Miss Finch, the subdued tan and tow of Phemie. His eyes drank in the colorful apparition for some ten seconds and then a rounded arm closed the door. Phemie picked up the fragments of the broken pitcher, and tearfully withdrew. Miss Finch sat through the remainder of the meal without tasting a morsel, waiting in an agony of apprehension for Forbes to ask her again whether she was older or younger than Miss Kent. She might have spared her anxiety, for Warren's flow of conversation gave no chance for settling such minor perplexities. Warren was one of the men to whom the propinquity of a pretty woman is as stimulating as champagne. He did not think it probable that the apparition in the kitchen could hear his witticisms, but he assumed that she must realize who was responsible for the hilarity at the supper table. And even without this confidence, he would probably have talked and jested in the same breezy fashion, this form of responsiveness to beauty being instinctive with him rather than deliberate. The moment he was alone with Forbes, Warren broached the subject engrossing his thoughts. "Burton, you have my sympathy. You don't know what you're missing. Under this roof there's as pretty a bit of flesh and blood as ever wore petticoats. Take it from me, she's a peach." "Phemie?" exclaimed Forbes. "The waitress?" Warren's derisive yell effectually settled Phemie's claims. "Gosh, no! That girl would stop a clock. This one was out in the kitchen, but I could see her peeking through after the smash-up." "Oh, yes," exclaimed Forbes, recollecting. "I know. That's Hephzibah." Warren positively staggered. "Lord, forbid," he ejaculated piously, "she can't be." "She is, though, Hephzibah Diggs." Again Warren's stentorian tones shattered the peace of the night. He used his first spare breath in announcing his intention to get a nearer view and see if a girl named Hephzibah Diggs could possibly be the beauty she had seemed. The announcement of this intention rendered Forbes uneasy. "You let Hephzibah alone," he warned his friend. "These self-respecting country girls think themselves as good as anybody--they _are_ as good as anybody. And I'm responsible to Miss Kent for your behavior." "I don't want anything of the girl except to see her by daylight. She's not too self-respecting for that, is she?" And then seeing that Forbes was really annoyed, Warren dropped the subject of Hephzibah, though without the least alteration in his intentions. It did not prove so easy as he had anticipated to get a satisfactory view of the girl whose face, glimpsed in the half-light of the previous evening, had seemed so alluring. At breakfast time Phemie met with no accident, and though Warren watched the swinging door that led to the kitchen with the alertness of a cat at a rat hole, it swung open and shut without revealing anything more seductive than a corner of the kitchen table. The day was warm, but the outside kitchen door remained obstinately closed, and on the rare occasions when it opened, it was Phemie who emerged. Warren was not a man who readily surrendered. Indeed, difficulties were likely to stiffen a careless desire into adamantine resolution. When his watch showed noon and Hephzibah Diggs continued invisible, he decided it was time to take matters into his own hands. He rose from his chair on the porch stretching his sinewy length lazily. "I believe I'll walk about a bit," he said, "and work up an appetite for dinner. With meals like these, a man wants to be able to do himself full justice every time he sits down to the table." "You ought to try Miss Kent's cooking," boasted Forbes. "She trained this girl, and she does well, but she's not a patch on her teacher." Warren's stroll took him no farther than the kitchen door. He ascended the steps jauntily and knocked. After waiting vainly for an invitation to enter, he decided to assume that it had been spoken, and pushing the door ajar, he walked in. Over in the corner Phemie was chopping something in a wooden bowl, but in spite of the insistent tapping of the knife upon the wood, he was hardly conscious of her existence. A girl stood at the table rolling out biscuit, and her sleeve turned back almost to the shoulders, revealed a faultless arm, white and rounded and tapering to the finger-tips. She turned her head at his step and he thrilled with amazed pleasure. His glimpse of the previous evening had not been misleading. Indeed his impression had fallen short of the actuality. He was looking at the handsomest young woman he had ever seen. Mr. Ridgeley Warren did not lack self-confidence. His momentary silence was due to wondering admiration, not to any doubt of his power to please. With smiling self-possession he advanced into the room. In her corner Phemie chopped on steadily, without removing her fascinated eyes from his face. Hephzibah--it was preposterous that this radiant creature should be encumbered with such a name--continued to roll biscuit. "You seem busy here," remarked Warren in his most ingratiating manner. "Don't you want an assistant?" He was sorry to discover that the voice of Hephzibah Diggs was not in accord with her bodily perfection. She talked through her nose and that fact impressed him so painfully he almost lost the force of her reply, "Guess me and Phemie kin manage." "I'm quite a little cook myself," continued Warren, saddened but not discouraged. "In my last place they said my parboiled cauliflower beat anything they had ever tasted. And my string-bean _parfait_ has become popular in the best New York restaurants." Phemie's delighted gasp was his sole applause. Hephzibah Diggs gave her attention to her biscuits. Warren seated himself on one corner of the immaculate table and began to talk with his customary volubility. His remarks took the form he imagined would please a country farmer's daughter, lacking the rudiments of education. He soon realized, and with some irritation, that he was making an impression on the wrong girl. Phemie chortled joyfully over her chopping. Hephzibah Diggs listened as if it were against her principles to smile. She brought three eggs from the pantry presently and broke them in a workmanlike manner, whites in one bowl, and yolks in another. "Got to have three more," she said to Phemie in that unpleasant nasal voice which helped to reconcile Warren to her continued silence. A little flicker of triumph crossed Warren's face. Her sending Phemie for eggs was obviously a ruse to be alone with him. When Phemie had departed on her errand, with obvious reluctance, he leaned toward Hephzibah, his smile so confident that it was almost a smirk. She looked up with a directness rather disconcerting and he reflected that her eyes even in a face like Phemie's, would have given her a certain claim to beauty. "I don't like men folks hangin' 'round when I'm busy." Her speech, it appeared, was as direct as the gaze of those adorable, reddish brown eyes. "Then what do you say to a little walk when you've finished your work?" "I ain't got the time." "You mean you've got another fellow up your sleeve, don't you? Say, let's give him the slip. You ought to be nice to me after I've come so far to see you." She turned her attention again to the cooking, drawing her arched brows into a frown. He noticed with approval that her beauty lost nothing of its distinction by her look of ill temper. But perhaps that was because the ill temper was a make-believe. He leaned toward her persuasively, losing his head a little in her proximity. His pulses quickened. He thought he had never seen anything prettier than the way her hair crinkled away from her creamy neck. It occurred to him that he would like to kiss the cheek whose vivid freshness seemed an invitation to such temerity. Country people were primitive and direct. With a girl of the type of Hephzibah Diggs, a kiss was simply a natural expression of admiration. As his lips brushed that blooming cheek, she reached for the bowl containing the egg yolks. She did not look in his direction as she flung the contents in his face, but her aim was true. He sprang to his feet with a gasp and a sputter. There was an incredible quantity of that sticky yellow stuff, matting his hair, dripping from his eyebrows, trickling in sickening streams down his neck. "You little vixen. Does this stuff spot?" Hephzibah ignored his inquiry. Warren backed away, laughing nervously, his mood divided between anger with her and shame for himself. Then panic seized him at the thought of encountering Phemie and he took a hasty departure, mopping himself with his handkerchief as he ran. Howard had driven Miss Finch to church and Forbes was alone on the porch. "You didn't walk far," he said, recognizing his friend's step. "No--o. Had an encounter with a wasp. I'll be down in a minute when I repair damages." He hoped Hephzibah would not tell Miss Kent of the episode, but he decided to take the chance, and suggested to Forbes his coming up again in two or three weeks. To his surprise Forbes was not enthusiastic. "It was awfully good of Miss Kent to take me in," he explained, apparently forgetful of the advertisement which was responsible for his presence at Oak Knoll. "And I don't want to bother her with too much company. I think she finds it upsetting to have strangers around, and it's not singular when you come to think of it. For all she's so wonderful, she's really getting to be an old lady." CHAPTER VI HEPHZIBAH COMES TO LIFE Miss Kent's company at breakfast Monday morning was an agreeable surprise to Forbes, his pleasure chastened only by his regret that Warren had left on the late train the previous evening. "I particularly wanted you to meet him," Forbes complained. "If I'd known you were to be back so early I should have insisted on his staying over." "It's only the young who can make a good impression at breakfast," Agatha responded. "Old people need twilight and candles." She raised her eyebrows in the direction of Howard, who was indicating his approval of her answer by a soundless show of spirited applause. "I'd risk the impression you'd make any hour in the twenty-four," rejoined Forbes gallantly. "But it is too late now. Serves Warren right for being in such a rush to get back to his confounded business. Tell us all about your good time, Miss Kent." "I didn't have one." Agatha felt the statement to be indiscreet, but her imagination was not equal to lending any glamour to her nightmare of a Sunday. "You didn't enjoy yourself?" Forbes' voice indicated sympathetic surprise. "Why, what was wrong?" "I didn't say I was going away to enjoy myself. I didn't expect to. You took that for granted." "I see. One of those formal visits that are even more deadly than formal calls, because they're longer." "And it turned out worse than I expected." Agatha was finding a certain melancholy pleasure in speaking her real sentiments. "Because I had a disagreeable encounter with a perfectly obnoxious person. But it's over, thank heaven, and I don't want to talk about it." This topic being tabooed by mutual consent, it was natural that Forbes should begin to talk about Julia, as a theme eminently calculated to cheer the despondent, and lend interest to the most tedious hour. Agatha, listening, realized that her week was to be a hard one. It was time for Forbes to expect another letter from Julia, and of course Julia would not write so promptly as he expected, and it would be increasingly difficult to keep him in good spirits. Over her coffee Agatha laid plans for distracting her boarder's thoughts from his elusive correspondent. Her apprehension proved correct. That afternoon Howard was sent to the village to do one or two little errands for his employer, and incidentally to get the mail. The next day the same program was followed and the third brought no change. And meanwhile the arrival of the Rural Free Delivery wagon was daily awaited with an anticipation not justified by results. Agatha starting down the long driveway one morning, as the fateful hour approached, saw Forbes and Howard on ahead, evidently bound on the same errand. Before she could turn back, Howard caught sight of her and abandoning his charge, he came toward her on the run. "You were starting for the mail, weren't you, Aggie? Would you mind taking him along while I see if I've got a rat in my trap?" Then dropping his voice to a scornful undertone, "He's got to go himself because he's expecting a letter from his girl, and can't wait for it to be brought up. See?" Agatha accepted the commission without comment. She joined Forbes, and taking his arm, guided him the length of the shaded drive. Neither had much to say. Forbes was evidently bracing himself for possible disappointment and Agatha was not in a talkative mood. They had hardly reached the main road before Agatha's observant eyes detected in the distance a significant cloud of dust. "He's coming," she said with a reservation in her tone intended to warn her companion not to be over-sanguine. "We won't have long to wait." The wagon approached and halted. The driver produced a miscellaneous assortment of letters and one good-sized package, the latter he scrutinized as if reluctant to part with it. "Do you know anybody around here," he brought out with irritating deliberation, "by the name of Diggs--Hep--Hephzibah Diggs? Ain't that a name for your life?" Agatha gazed at him wild-eyed, incapable for the moment of speech. "It's addressed to Oak Knoll," the speaker continued. "But I thought mebbe there was some mistake. I never knew any Diggses in these parts." Agatha recovered herself and extended her hand. "Yes," she said hurriedly. "It's all right. I'll take it." The mail-carrier surrendered the collection. "You're getting to have quite a raft of boarders," he commented affably. "Feller has to have his wits about him to keep track of so many new names." He clucked to his horses and the wagon rattled on. Oblivious to her responsibilities as temporary post-mistress, Agatha stood quaking. To her guilty conscience the significance of the mail-carrier's inquiry was unmistakable. He had never heard of a family in the vicinity named Diggs. He assumed that Hephzibah was a summer boarder. Agatha did not doubt that Forbes was pondering these extraordinary facts, and that his first words would demand an explanation. With hanging head she waited for him to begin his cross-examination, but his voice when he spoke was anxious rather than peremptory. "Well?" Agatha gasped. "I--why--you see--" "You know her handwriting, don't you?" asked the lover. "I'm not sure where this letter will be posted." Agatha reflected that love is sometimes deaf as well as blind. So engrossed was Forbes in his own anticipations that the compromising conversation with the mail-carrier had made no impression on his consciousness. After a hasty survey of the handful of letters, Agatha announced in a stifled voice that there were two letters for Forbes, but neither seemed to be from Julia. Her face betrayed an emotion due not to the tragedy of Forbes' disappointment, but to the discovery that there was a letter as well as a package, addressed to Hephzibah Diggs. That young woman, the fantasy of a day, had taken on a terrifying vitality. There was no way of estimating her possible activities. Agatha's emotions were those of Frankenstein when he discovered that his monster was alive. They made their way back to the house, Forbes valiantly explaining why it was foolish to have expected a letter before afternoon, and Agatha making irrelevant replies. She turned her companion over to Howard and escaped to her room with the mail addressed to Hephzibah Diggs. An absurd scruple regarding the opening of other people's letters temporarily paralyzed her efficient right arm, and she stood staring at the address of the communication without coming any nearer a knowledge of its contents. It was impossible to rid herself of the feeling that she was on the point of attempting something dishonorable. "What a fool I am," she groaned in exasperation. "Hephzibah Diggs isn't anybody, but if she were anybody, she'd be me." She tore open the letter without giving herself a chance to evade the inevitable conclusion of this bit of logic. It was from Warren, of course. She had been prepared for that, even without the testimony of his bold signature. With a curiosity that momentarily made her oblivious to the menacing aspects of the situation, Agatha read the brief communication: "My Dear Miss Diggs: "I am writing you a line to apologize for my conduct Sunday. You were all right, and I was all wrong. At the same time, you'll have to take a little share of the blame for being so distractingly pretty that a man's likely to lose his head when he comes near you. "I am sending you by this mail a package which I hope you will accept as indicating my regret for having offended you, and my sincere wish to be "Your friend, "Ridgeley Warren." Agatha turned her thoughtful attention to the package which bore Hephzibah's name. She proceeded to strip off the wrapping paper with a haste indicating that her scruples were finally set at rest. Then as she took the cover from the five-pound box of chocolates, and gazed enraptured at the triumph of the confectioner's art, she temporarily laid aside the feeling of age due to the faithful impersonation of her great-aunt, and became nineteen or a trifle less. "Chocolates," murmured Agatha. "And millions of them. In the person of Hephzibah Diggs I accept the apology." When she reappeared upon the porch, her manner was cheerful, and a number of yawning cavities marred the symmetrical arrangement of the topmost layer of chocolates in the box up-stairs. Forbes greeted her with more animation than she had looked for, considering his recent crushing disappointment. "That's you, isn't it, Miss Kent?" "Yes." "Here's a letter Howard has just read me. I want you to look it over and tell me what you think of it." "Very well." Agatha seated herself comfortably and took the letter from his extended hand. But Forbes was evidently desirous of preparing her for its contents. "It will be a surprise to you, I imagine, Miss Kent. What is your opinion of Hephzibah? Is she really such a stunning beauty?" "I suppose she would be considered fairly good-looking if anyone liked the type." Agatha flattered herself that she had spoken with a creditable lack of prejudice. "According to Warren she's considerably more than that. The fact is, he--but you'd better read the letter. That makes it plain enough." With a return of her previous misgivings, Agatha followed his suggestion. "My Dear Forbes: "If you had shown a little more enthusiasm over my suggestion of dropping in on you again soon, I should have run down at the end of the week, and had a good talk with you. Owing to your inhospitable reluctance I'm obliged to trust to writing, which I sometimes think was invented, as somebody said about speech, for the purpose of concealing thought. "To come straight to the point, I must confess that I had a short and not wholly satisfactory interview with the fair Hephzibah on Sunday, in the course of which my earlier impression of her beauty was more than confirmed. By jove, Burton, she positively is a dream. And the idea that a creature of that sort should spend her days amid pots and kettles is obnoxious to any right-thinking man. We've got to do something about it, Forbes. What do you think of sending her to school somewhere, and having her educated? It would be virgin soil, I imagine, for the poor girl can't open her mouth without taking a bite out of the king's English, and her voice is like a guinea hen's. But that could be trained out of her. For all her ignorance, she's nobody's fool. You can see that by looking at her. "Now I'm putting the thing up to you because I suppose it would be better to have Miss Kent act for us in the matter. Judging from my brief experience Hephzibah--can't we find some euphonic substitute for that name?--is as self-respecting as the devil. Explain to Miss Kent that I'm a respectable man of philanthropic tendencies--hitherto unrecognized--and ask her what would be the best way to go about taking the girl in hand, and giving her an education, or enough of one so she can make a reasonably good appearance. And then we can decide on the next step. A few hundred a year will be enough to do the job properly, and if you feel like going into it with me, it might help to reassure Miss Kent as to the impeccability of my motives. "Lord! What a letter! I haven't written so much with my own fist since I was in college, and at the same time I feel as if fifteen minutes of chinning would have made the matter a heap clearer. If the girl should prove to have enough head for the legitimate stage she ought to make a hit as Katharine, in _Taming the Shrew_. She's exactly the type, red hair and all. "Regards to the voluble Miss Finch, to Howard, and of course to Miss Kent. Yours, "R.W." Agatha was glad the letter was a long one, as this gave her time to think. And yet the result of her thinking was but a confused jumble of varying apprehensions. Her recollection of Warren's face as he leaned toward her, was that of a man not easily turned aside from a purpose. But somehow or other he must be forced to surrender his absurd philanthropic intentions in behalf of Hephzibah Diggs. Forbes was waiting for her verdict. "Well?" he said at last, when she showed no inclination to speak. "What do you think of it?" Agatha cleared her throat. "It's out of the question," she shot at him so violently that he looked startled. "I'm ready to vouch for Warren," he hastened to say. "I don't mean that he would be as ready to help a plain girl as a pretty one, but I assure you that your protégée would be perfectly safe as far as he's concerned. And I suppose he's right in thinking that beauty is one of the talents, and it's hardly fair to keep it wrapped in a napkin." "But she doesn't want to be educated," Agatha protested. "She's perfectly satisfied just as she is." Again Forbes seemed to find her vehemence perplexing. "Perhaps her ignorance explains her indifference," he suggested. "Do you think she's capable of learning?" "I suppose she's capable enough." "If she's really a strikingly handsome young woman with a fair mind, and Warren is sufficiently interested in her to give her an education, doesn't it seem that she should be encouraged to accept his offer? Surely if she is what he thinks, she is capable of something better than the work she is doing at present. Unless you have some good reason for feeling that it would not do--" "But I have," flashed Agatha. "I have." "Oh, indeed!" He seemed to be waiting for her to explain, and she floundered on with a horrible sensation of being caught in a quicksand. "She doesn't wish to be educated. She doesn't wish any notice taken of her; she only asks to be let alone." "To be let alone." He said the words over as if they had a hidden, mysterious meaning. "Oh, I think I begin to see." Agatha sighed her satisfaction. She had no idea what explanation had presented itself to the perspicacious Mr. Forbes, but she perceived that at length her protests had taken effect and he was prepared to relinquish the argument. So great was her relief that the processes of his mind failed to interest her. Unluckily Forbes was one of the people who insist on certainty. "I suppose," he said, a note of sympathy in his deep voice, "that the poor girl has been unfortunate." Agatha blanched. He waited for her avowal, then tried again: "You mean, I suppose, there's some unhappy episode in her past life and she doesn't want to attract attention for fear of its bobbing up again." Agatha stared at him aghast. Her first impulse to defend the character of Hephzibah Diggs at any cost yielded to a less worthy caution. If she gave Hephzibah a clean bill of health, figuratively speaking, what other reason could she invent for her invincible repugnance to attracting attention? With fascinated horror she realized that Forbes' conjecture exactly filled the requirements of the case. There was no help for it. The fair name of the blameless Hephzibah must be sacrificed to that most merciless of the divinities, the exigency of the moment. "You have expressed it," faltered Agatha with an unnerving sense of rank injustice, "as well as I could have myself." "Poor girl!" Forbes repeated, "and so young, too. At least I suppose she's young, from Warren's idea of educating her." Again he waited for an answer, and Agatha stammered, "Ni-nineteen." "And all this happened some time ago, I suppose." "Oh, a long time." Agatha was crimson to her ears. "It seems a shame," mused Forbes aloud. "Her whole life to be sacrificed for one step aside from the straight and narrow path. You and I know the world, Miss Kent. And we know--" "Oh, please," protested Agatha faintly, "I don't know anything about it." He leaned toward her quickly, touched by the appeal in her voice. "Excuse me, Miss Kent. I know you belong to a generation whose women were trained to shut their eyes to a great many things. I don't believe in that theory of life, but I haven't any intention of violating your prejudices. All I wanted to say was that you and I have lived long enough to know that thousands of our respected citizens, prominent socially and otherwise, are every bit as guilty as that poor girl. And since this is the case, isn't it a pity that her morbid sensitiveness should shut her out of making something of herself?" It was unbelievable. Hephzibah's reputation had been blackened in vain. Even now he was unwilling to leave her in the seclusion her sensitiveness craved. He was determined to drag her into a garish publicity. Iphigenia had been sacrificed and still the winds were unfavorable. "Oh, I wish you would not talk of this any more," cried Agatha, the intensity of her feeling showing in her moved voice. "I understand Hephzibah's case a great deal better than you do, better than you ever can. And I know that the thing you're talking about is out of the question." His face reflected her agitation in the shape of profound sympathy. "You're sure that if we talked it over, we wouldn't find a way out? Two heads are better than one, you know?" "I'm absolutely certain." "Then I won't distress you any further. Of course Warren has barely seen the girl, and it's evident that his head was a little turned by her beauty. You know her, and I'm sure you appreciate the responsibility of deciding a question that concerns her so closely, without even consulting her." "I can speak for her as I would for myself." "Then I'm sorry if the suggestion has worried you. I'll see you're not bothered again." He spoke confidently, and Agatha hoped he did not overestimate his influence where Ridgeley Warren was concerned. When she remembered the square chin of the last-named young man, she did not feel sure. In her heart she gave Forbes credit for having done his best. Later in the day Howard showed her a letter he had written to Mr. Ridgeley Warren at Forbes' dictation. Without explanation but in the most emphatic manner possible, Warren was assured that his scheme was impracticable. "I can not very well go into details," the letter ran, "but Miss Kent, who knows the case thoroughly, has convinced me that the kindest thing, as far as the girl is concerned, is to leave her alone." And to this sentiment Agatha sighed a tremulous amen. CHAPTER VII DAY DREAMS For the first time since she could remember, Miss Finch felt herself living in an atmosphere of romance. If a young man's fancy turns to thoughts of love only under the allurements of spring weather, Zaida Finch surpassed the average youth by full three seasons. Love and matrimony occupied her thoughts twelve months in the year, and to an extent inconceivable in view of her general colorless and withered aspect. Though as far as possible removed from the designing spinster of the comic stage, Miss Finch had not as yet surrendered the hope of changing her name. From her point of view the unmarried woman was a self-advertised failure. Husbands, as far as she had been able to observe, were always disappointing, and not infrequently obnoxious, yet to lack one somehow proved one's self less than a woman. In those dreams which never passed the bounds of maidenly reserve, she sometimes imagined herself addressed by the prefix which indicates the dignity of wifehood--she would have died sooner than have coupled it with the name of any man of her acquaintance--and then in the words of a simpler and more direct age, she felt that her reproach among men had been taken away. The secret weighing heaviest on her heart was the knowledge that no man had ever indicated that he wanted her. Needless to say, Miss Finch's present mood of sentiment was entirely vicarious. Agatha's prospects absorbed her almost to the exclusion of her own timid dreams. Miss Finch was constitutionally incapable of realizing Agatha's vivid beauty, though she sometimes told herself that if it were not for her red hair, which she innocently assumed to be a misfortune, Agatha would be a really pretty girl. Forbes had no sooner made his appearance than Miss Finch had inventoried his qualifications for Agatha's future husband, and had not found him altogether wanting. His blindness was a misfortune largely offset by his amiability, and free use of money, and in her association with him, Agatha had developed a sympathetic patience her old friend could not regard as characteristic. "And it looks to me as if he were taken with her," Miss Finch had congratulated herself. "He chirks up as soon as she comes near him. If he likes her so well when he thinks she's an old woman, he ought to like her better when he finds she's a young one." There was, to be sure, one serious difficulty to be met in the readjustment of Forbes' ideas on the important subject of Agatha's identity. At this point Miss Finch's dreams ended in chaotic confusion and with her oft-repeated lament, "There's no good going to come from cheating a blind man." After Warren's visit, Miss Finch's match-making tendencies took another direction. If Warren had failed to make an impression on the unsusceptible Hephzibah, he had nothing to complain of as far as Phemie and Miss Finch were concerned. In spite of the agitation induced by her unwonted responsibilities on the occasion of Warren's visit, Miss Finch had been keenly alive to the young man's cheerful good humor, and his naive self-enjoyment had communicated itself to the one of his audience who seemed least responsive. "Exactly the one for dear Agatha," declared Miss Finch. With the discovery of the source of the box of chocolates, Miss Finch's smoldering hopes leaped into flame. Caution had dictated Agatha's concealment of Warren's tangible apology, but to a girl of her temperament the solitary consumption of a five-pound box of confectionery was a moral impossibility. Her innate generosity forced her to share the sweets with Forbes and Miss Finch and Howard and even with Phemie. Three of her beneficiaries accepted their shares as unthinkingly as the lilies of the field, but Miss Finch showed a troublesome tendency to ask questions. "Agatha, you don't mean you've been wasting your money on candy? A box of that size must have cost something awful." "No, Fritz, I didn't buy it." Experience had taught Miss Finch to be on her guard when Agatha wore that look of wide-eyed innocence. She pondered the seemingly straight-forward reply. "Having things charged is the same as buying 'em, Agatha. You've got to pay for 'em some time." "But these were given me, Fritz dear. They were an apology." "Mr. Forbes!" gasped Miss Finch, and at once the strains of the wedding march rang in her ears. "Mr. Forbes! The very idea! The only trouble with him is that he never did anything in his life to apologize _for_. He's so perfect that people mistake him for a worm and trample on him." "I didn't mean to make you mad, Agatha," Miss Finch protested timidly, shrinking from the flame in Agatha's eyes. The inexplicable girl stared for a moment and then to Miss Finch's great relief, burst into a laugh. "Fritz, you're funnier than a box of monkeys. If you must know, Mr. Warren sent the chocolates." "To you?" Miss Finch almost screamed it. And forthwith the summer breeze brought to her nostrils the odor of orange blossoms. "That's the question that's troubling me, Fritz. The box was addressed to Hephzibah. But as I am her nearest living relative--you might almost say her mother--" Miss Finch swept these fine points aside. "I didn't know he'd ever seen you." "He walked into the kitchen while you were at church. That's exactly his style, I imagine. And when he saw me there rolling biscuits, he talked a lot of nonsense and ended by kissing me." "Agatha!" gasped Miss Finch. Her emotions were confused. She was under the impression that this recital confirmed her wildest hopes and at the same time outraged her finer sensibilities. Possibly her reprehensibly exultant feeling was due to an overwhelming certainty that this at least was life. Her face aflame as if she and not Agatha had been the recipient of that kiss, Miss Finch attempted to discharge her responsibilities as mentor of youth. "Agatha, I can't understand it. I'm afraid you must have acted bold. I never heard of a gentleman's walking into a kitchen, and kissing a young lady he'd never seen before." "Nor I, Fritz. And that leads me to the conclusion that Mr. Warren isn't exactly a gentleman. At the same time," Agatha added, helping herself to another chocolate, "he apologized very sweetly." "Is he coming to see you?" demanded Miss Finch, who in her ignorance of the ways of the great world assumed that so spontaneous a tribute must be merely preliminary to an ardent courtship. "He had an idea of taking my education in hand." Agatha briefly outlined Warren's philanthropic scheme in behalf of Hephzibah Diggs, and Miss Finch turned all colors as she listened. Now at last she knew that the romantic novels with which she solaced her leisure hours had not misled her. There really _was_ such a thing as love at first sight. "Agatha!" she ventured tremulously, "you could marry that man to-morrow if you liked. It's as plain as the nose on your face that he's dead in love with you." "If it were as plain as the nose on _his_ face, that would settle it. But as nothing would induce me to marry him to-morrow or any other day, the state of his feelings doesn't matter." "But I'm sure, Agatha," remonstrated Miss Finch, "that you wouldn't want to break his heart." Agatha's reply was a paroxysm of laughter that left her gasping and tearful. "Oh, Fritz," she half sobbed, as she wiped her eyes, "I'm so glad you didn't die when you were little." Miss Finch was on her dignity. "I know you're making fun of me, Agatha. But it's no laughing matter to wreck a man's life." Again Agatha yielded to mirth. "You've seen Mr. Warren and yet you say that." "I can't see why you take that tone, Agatha. I'm sure he's a nice young man and so lively." "I'll admit the liveliness but not the heart, at least not the broken heart. That young man owns a good, tough, thoroughly seasoned organ, take it from me." Miss Finch sighed but with less dejection than her manner indicated. Little as she had learned of the ways of men and women in her guileless spinsterhood, she had somehow gathered the impression that girls occasionally abused the admirers who stood highest in their maidenly affections, for the pleasure of hearing them defended. And though she could not be sure that this explained Agatha's slighting references to a most agreeable young man, Miss Finch resolved to lose no opportunity of sounding Warren's praises. In his case, too, there was an unfortunate confusion of identity to be cleared up, but from Miss Finch's point of view, a young man who could give a kiss and a mammoth box of chocolates to a pretty girl, under the impression that she was a servant, would not hesitate to lay his heart at her feet when he discovered that her blood was as good as his own. Developments convinced Miss Finch of the wisdom of her chosen tactics. She overlooked no opportunity to speak a good word for the absent Warren, acquiring a certain irrelevant eloquence on the theme. And though Agatha gave no indication of agreeing with her, it was evident that she enjoyed her earnestness and was more inclined to lead her on than to check her fluency. Whether because of Miss Finch's judicious opposition or some less obvious reason, Agatha was in noticeably high spirits. She entered into playing her rôle with a whimsical abandon that at times moved even Miss Finch to laughter, in spite of her conscientious misgivings. Indeed the spirit of cheerful animation pervaded the entire household. Whether because Forbes had at length resigned himself to hearing from Julia only once in two or three weeks, or whether the improvement in his health furnished the necessary elasticity for resisting disappointment, his moods of depression were becoming very infrequent. He spent less time on the porch and more on long jaunts with Howard. The two went fishing frequently and sometimes Agatha made a third, in which case the pace was regulated strictly according to Forbes' view of what was due her advanced years. Agatha was sure she would find more enjoyment on the occasions when the two males went as fast and as far as they pleased, undeterred by consideration for the aged. One exhilarating morning Forbes and Howard left soon after breakfast, taking their luncheon with them, and advising Agatha to expect them only when she saw them. With her customary knack for utilizing the moments, Agatha improved their absence to despatch a number of tasks awaiting her attention, and wound up by washing her hair. She made her appearance on the lawn in the early afternoon, her splendid mane falling almost to her waist and reflecting the sunshine like burnished copper. Already the little tendrils were beginning to curl about her face while the water dropped from the long ends. Agatha seated herself in the sun, lifting the coppery mass strand by strand, that it might dry more quickly. Had Miss Finch been versed in classical lore, she might have been reminded of the golden fleece for which men risked so much. As it was she said chidingly, "Agatha, you will freckle terribly if you're not careful." "This sun is worth a peppering of freckles," Agatha answered recklessly, but she pulled her hair over her face and then she resembled Danäe veiled by a shower of gold. It was several minutes before she made a peek-hole in the screen, and looked at Miss Finch apprehensively. "Fritz, I hear wheels. Don't tell me that in spite of my repeated warnings, we're going to have callers." Miss Finch stood up. The very slight advantage due to an upright position was sufficient to enable her to recognize the occupant of the approaching vehicle. "It looks to me like Jim Doolittle." "Jim Doolittle!" exclaimed Agatha, amazed. "Why, what can he want? He must be coming to see you, Fritz." "Agatha!" quavered Miss Finch, and flushed a painful purple. "Well, he certainly isn't coming to see me, and I find it hard to believe that Phemie is the magnet. He doesn't know Mr. Forbes and Howard is a trifle young to attract him. Please see what he wants, Fritz." "I--I'd rather not, Agatha." "Why, Fritz, what ails you? You can see for yourself that I'm in no condition to interview Mr. Doolittle. His modesty would never survive the shock. Send him away as soon as you can. It won't do to have all the busybodies of the neighborhood dropping in whenever they feel like it." Reluctantly Miss Finch departed on her inhospitable mission. But it seemed that Agatha had done Mr. Doolittle an injustice. He had come on an entirely altruistic errand. "There was a telegram at the office for Aggie's boarder, and I offered to bring it out, being as I was driving by." "A telegram for Mr. Forbes!" fluttered Miss Finch, forgetting her shyness in sympathetic concern. "I hope there's no more trouble in store for that poor young man." "Wal, the Bible says to him that hath shall be given, and I've noticed that's likely to come true, as far as trouble's concerned. How's the poor feller getting on? I had a little talk with him one day, and I made up my mind he warn't the June-bug sort of crazy, just the glum, hold-your-tongue kind." "I guess Mr. Forbes' brains would hold their own alongside yours or mine!" Miss Finch spoke with some heat and realized her mistake in time to add, "Though of course he thinks a lot of things that aren't so." It soothed her conscience to realize the absolute truth of her closing statement. "I know, hallucinations they call 'em," said Mr. Doolittle, proud of his mastery of the polysyllable. Miss Finch was not sure whether Agatha could be reckoned a hallucination or not and she evaded the issue by adding pointedly, "He's got quite an aversion to company." "I could see that. You'd have thought it would be a real relief to him to talk with me, man to man, after being shut up with a passel of women-folks, but no! I couldn't scarcely get a word out of him." Mr. Doolittle shook his head in sad wonder over the vagaries of a mind distraught, and then his attention wandered to a patch of color on the lawn. "Is that Aggie Kent in the brown dress with her hair hanging?" "Yes." "Looks like a haycock struck by lightning." Again Mr. Doolittle shook his head. "Aggie's a lucky girl to have you on hand to steady her and keep her acting sensible. I guess everybody 'round here knows who's the backbone in this house." "Agatha's an awful capable girl," said Miss Finch. She was aware that she did not deserve the compliment, yet because of that contrary twist in human nature from which the most exemplary are not altogether free, it gave her pleasure. "Agatha don't need any backbone but her own," she insisted. Mr. Doolittle straightened his sagging figure and tightened his lines. "Wal, if the young man should get vi'lent any time just call on me." He clucked to his horse and the ramshackle buggy creaked away. The great moments of life come and go while we remain oblivious. As Mr. Doolittle jogged down the shaded drive, he said to himself that Zaida Finch would make some man a good wife. He even turned his head to look back, and the prim little figure hurrying across the grass seemed to his elderly eyes to radiate a certain maidenly charm. All unconscious of this momentous occurrence, Miss Finch carried the telegram to Agatha, and that young woman shared her apprehension, though for a somewhat different reason. "It's not so likely to mean trouble for him as for me. Perhaps some more of his city friends are coming to visit him. If they do, I think I'll have an attack of smallpox and quarantine the place." She stood up extending her hand for the message. "I must hunt him up right away and find out." "You're not going that way, are you, Agatha, with your hair all down? You look like a crazy girl." "What's the difference? Mr. Forbes won't be scandalized, because he can't see me. And the birds and the squirrels won't mind. It's not dry enough to put up yet." Telegram in hand, she started up the slope behind the house. Miss Finch's faded, troubled eyes saw her silhouetted in glowing relief against the intense blue of the summer sky, and then lost her as she passed out of sight over the brow of the hill. CHAPTER VIII THE RESCUE Forbes and Howard had spent the morning in the open. They had tramped miles under the genial sun, had eaten a luncheon which disproved the accepted theory as to the capacity of the human stomach, and at the conclusion of the meal had rested in the shade, Forbes smoking, and Howard sprawled upon the turf, idly watching the woolly clouds that like a flock of sheep grazed across a pasture of luminous blue. Suddenly Howard leaped to his feet, and the next moment the report of his shotgun shattered the lazy hush of the summer day. To Forbes' secret annoyance, his nerves betrayed him into a violent start. He had not been aware that firearms were included among his young companion's impedimenta. "Hello!" he exclaimed disapprovingly. "What are you shooting at this time of year, boy? You'll get yourself into trouble if you're not careful." "It's a chicken hawk. They're awful thick around here. Much as ever Ag--Miss Kent raised any chickens this spring." "Oh!" Forbes subsided, with a smile. "Every season's open for chicken hawks, I suppose." "Well, there's one robber out of the way," Howard boasted. "He went down like a stone. Say, Mr. Forbes, would you mind staying alone a few minutes while I run down the hill and see if I can find him?" "Go ahead, my boy." Forbes smiled again, as Howard's headlong rush told how promptly he had acted on the permission. Forbes' mood was hopeful, and therefore indulgent. There was something tranquillizing in the atmosphere of the summer day. It was easy to believe in his ultimate and complete recovery, and even that Julia would wait for him instead of engaging herself to one of the men who were helping to make her summer enjoyable. Young Prendergast was the rival he had most reason to fear, and that was a sore spot with him, for Murray Prendergast had his father's money to recommend him, and little besides. Forbes was ready to defend Julia for breaking their engagement, but though tortures could not have elicited the avowal, in his heart he was humiliated by the possibility that Julia might turn from him, to throw herself into Murray Prendergast's arms. Eyes or no eyes, Forbes knew himself the better man. Yet to-day in the sunny peace of this Arcadia, the thought of Prendergast had lost its power to sting him. He could reflect on Julia's love of admiration with a tolerant smile. Flirtation was the feminine equivalent of masculine wild oats, and he would be a fool to put an exaggerated importance on a beautiful girl's innocent coquetries. Miss Kent was hard on Julia. That was the way with the best of women. They did not know how to be fair to one another. "Bless her dear heart!" Forbes was not thinking of Julia now. His smile had become tender. "What a champion she is! She never can see but one side, and that's yours--if you happen to be the fellow she likes." His fancies, tenuous as the smoke of his cigar, wove themselves into pictures as he sat dreaming. He saw himself restored to health, and in a home of his own. He saw Julia beautiful as ever, but with matronly dignity replacing her girlish charm. And there were little shapes whisking in and out of that dreamland, creatures half sprite, half human, and his cigar went out as he watched their capers. An observer would have noted a hint of pathos in his smile as well as a whimsical humor. He roused himself from his long reverie to wonder what had become of Howard. Making all due allowance for the ardor of the chase, Howard's absence had been protracted beyond all reason. Forbes whistled long and shrilly, shouted Howard's name, and waited with growing uneasiness. He could only make a rough estimate of the time that had elapsed since the boy's departure, but he knew it must be nearer an hour than the few minutes Howard had asked for. And it was not like Howard to forget him. He had no way of measuring the time as it dragged on, but he ceased at length to assure himself that he was becoming a fidgety old woman, and frankly admitted he had reason for alarm. It was impossible to explain Howard's continued absence on the ground of boyish thoughtlessness. There was another and possibly a sinister explanation. His heart sickened as he realized that Howard might be seriously injured and with no aid near. As the thought suggested itself, he sprang to his feet in furious rebellion against his helplessness. "I've got to get to the road somehow. Then I can hail the first wagon that passes, and send some one over here to look for that boy." He realized that the thing was simpler in the statement than in the doing. The last road they had crossed was at least half a mile from where he stood, and to grope his way unguided over half a mile of open country was a desperate undertaking. He was not even sure of the points of the compass. Forbes was angry to find himself trembling. He took a stronger grip upon his self-control, and racked his brain for any information that would be of service. Howard had spoken of a south wind that morning and Forbes was under the impression that when they returned home from their jaunts up into the hills, they walked toward the setting sun. He wet his finger and held it up to test the direction of the breeze. He was likely to go wrong, he knew, but anything was better than inactivity. Stumblingly and with his hands outstretched, he started on his way. His progress was slow. At first he was continually halted by imaginary obstacles from which he shrank till his groping hands convinced him that the way was clear. Resolving on bolder tactics, he marched along at a swinging pace till a collision with a stalwart pine sent him reeling back, gasping and half stunned. Again he tried caution and after an interminable half-hour abandoned it, as intolerably slow. He picked up a rotting branch over which he had stumbled, and waving this before him to make sure that no tree barred his way, he found himself making very creditable speed for a blind man without a guide. After a little, again he halted, thinking he heard a faint, wailing cry. He strained his ears, his heart thumping. "Howard!" he shouted. "Howard!" He wondered if his nerves were playing him a trick, or whether he really did hear a second time, that faint sound of distress. He started on at a reckless pace, brandishing his stick before him, and occasionally shouting Howard's name. So utterly had the thought of his own safety passed from his mind that a second collision was only to be expected. But this time it was not a tree, whose impact sent him staggering backward, but a human form. Involuntarily he dropped his stick, catching at the nearest object to save himself, and was aware that two hands had seized him in a clutch as desperate as his own. For a moment they clung together in an embrace like the locked clasp of two drowning swimmers. Then a voice deep down in Forbes' consciousness said, "Good God, it's a woman." As his head steadied he knew he was not mistaken. There was a smothering quantity of hair for one thing and it seemed to be everywhere at once. When he moved just a little to get away from it, he put his cheek against another cheek of exquisite smoothness. Surprise rendered him incapable of moving, and standing like a statue, he made other interesting discoveries. The woman in his arms was breathing in long-drawn gasps like sobs. He could feel the convulsive straining of her chest against his, as her breath came and went. Under his hand her heart plunged like some frantic creature in a trap. Then he realized that she was trying to speak. "You fool," she could only whisper it, with that strange sobbing breath. "You fool! Oh, you fool!" "My dear girl!" Forbes remonstrated. He could not have told why he was so sure of the fitness of this form of address, except that the curves of the pliant body, that lay limp against his heart, were somehow eloquent of youth. "I don't understand you." His protest had an immediate and in some respects an unwelcome effect. At once her relaxed form stiffened and withdrew from his arms. A strand of hair rasped across his cheek producing a curious tingling like a mild electric shock. But she had not gone far, for he could distinctly hear her difficult breathing. "You were walking to your death. In another minute you would have been over the cliff." "Is it possible!" No normal man can escape death by a hair's breadth and remain unmoved. Forbes' face paled. For a moment he was intensely conscious of the myriad fragrances steeped in the sunny air, of the myriad sounds, significant of teeming life. But he had no time to waste on himself. "I knew I ran a risk but it was necessary. As you see I am blind, and my attendant, a young fellow named Sheldon, left me for a few minutes while he hunted for a hawk he had shot. That must have been two hours ago. I'm afraid the boy is hurt." She murmured something he failed to understand and he did not ask her to repeat it. "As soon as you are able to walk, please go somewhere and get help. He may be seriously injured." "I said he was coming--I see--him coming." She still whispered but her breathing was obviously less painful. "Howard coming? Do you mean Howard?" "Yes." "Are you sure you know him?" "Yes." "Does he seem to be hurt?" "Not that I can see--he's running." "Thank God!" Forbes exclaimed. He had time now to think of himself and his deliverer. He took a step nearer her, and it seemed to him, though he could not be sure, that she drew back a little. "As I understand it, you saw me from a distance, and realized I was in danger. And you ran to help me." "Yes." The monosyllable was hardly more than a breath. "I thought I heard a cry once. Did you call?" "I tried--to. Running up hill--I didn't--have breath." There was a hysterical catch in her voice. Forbes seized her by the arm. "Oh, you're crying. Please don't." "I'm not." She sobbed aloud as she denied the charge and continued to sob to his immense distress. He found her hand and patted it soothingly as if she had been a child. "Poor girl! I can see how unnerving all this has been. But won't it help a little if you remember that you've saved my life?" "Oh, don't! Don't!" "I'm afraid you'll have to let me say it, but I'll wait till another time if you'd rather. Please tell me your name." "It d--doesn't matter." "It matters a great deal to me. It isn't every day, you know, that a man has his life saved by a beautiful girl." He felt singularly secure regarding his adjective. "And of course I want to know who you are." She trenched her hand away with disconcerting energy. "It--doesn't matter about me," she said as well as she could for weeping. "But don't take such risks again. Good-by." "Now this is positively absurd," exclaimed Forbes in real annoyance. "You've done me a tremendous service, the biggest one human being can do another, and I'm not the sort of man to remain ignorant of my benefactress. I want a chance to show that I'm not unappreciative." Silence! "Are you there?" Forbes demanded sharply. So vivid and illuminating were his recollections of the woman his arms had enfolded that it seemed preposterous he should never know how to address her. Continued silence. Forbes bit his lip and waited. And behind his back, a singular pantomime was being enacted. A young woman whose heavy red hair fell about her like a cloak, ran into the arms of a breathless boy approaching from the opposite direction. She put her lips to his ear and whispered, "Don't tell him who I am." "All right, but what's the matter, Aggie? What are you crying for?" "Never mind. Nothing. Don't tell him my name." "But what if he asks me?" "Don't tell him, that's all." She drew herself away from him and started by a circuitous route for home. Howard approached his waiting employer with a new perplexity superimposed on his former perturbation. "Mr. Forbes, I don't know what you'll think of me--but down there I ran into the game warden." "Oh, did you!" Forbes' attitude was a trifle absent-minded. "Then you weren't hurt." "No, sir, I'm all right. But he'd got hold of a partridge some one had shot and he was bound I'd done it. And he made me go along with him and I thought I would never get away." Howard's voice showed strain. Forbes' groping hand found his shoulder and patted it. "All right, old man. No harm's done. I own I was anxious when you didn't show up, but no harm's done." "Are you ready to go home now, Mr. Forbes? It's nearly four o'clock." "Yes, we'd better go." Forbes took the boy's arm. "By the way, Howard, did you see a girl talking with me a few minutes ago?" "Ye--es, I saw her." Howard's manner betrayed reluctance. "What is her name?" An incomprehensible silence followed. Forbes repeated the question with more than his customary peremptoriness. "I--I don't think I can tell you, Mr. Forbes." "Do you mean you don't know?" Howard was a truthful boy. "Yes, I know it," he replied hesitatingly. "But she"--a sudden inspiration came to his aid--"Miss Kent don't want me to talk about her." "I shall ask Miss Kent myself," Forbes rejoined coldly. "Yes, sir," said Howard, brightening. "That would be better." He felt that it really was up to Aggie to get out of the difficulty as best she could. It was all very well to say to a fellow that he was not to tell a certain thing, but she didn't take into account that he would feel like a fool when he was asked a plain question. As it proved, however, Forbes did not appeal to Miss Kent for enlightenment. As they neared the house Howard proved the youthful resilience of his spirits by making a little joke. "It's a good thing you're not married, Mr. Forbes." Forbes did not agree with him, but he forced himself to smile amiably, and ask the reason for the conjecture. "Because there's a long red hair on your coat collar." Forbes saw the point and much besides. Understanding came in a flood. The girl was Hephzibah, of course, poor unfortunate Hephzibah, ashamed even to give her name and yet more sinned against than sinning, he was strangely sure. Without seeing it, he had felt the spell of her beauty, that beauty that had enthralled Warren. As he thought of his friend, Forbes was instantly convinced that he had too readily yielded to Miss Kent's insistence, regarding Warren's offer. He even felt a certain tempered irritation with his old friend for having taken on herself the responsibility of deciding for another so vital a matter. Now that the girl had saved his life it was unthinkable that he should leave her to her fate just because of an old-fashioned theory that there was no future for a woman who had once gone wrong. He felt so strongly on the subject that he might have spoken his mind to Miss Kent on reaching home had he been given the opportunity. But Zaida Finch met him with the information that Miss Kent had gone to bed with a severe headache, and that a telegram had come for him about the middle of the afternoon. She hoped it was not bad news. The telegram proved to be from Forbes' physician, who was going away for his vacation, and wished to look his patient over before leaving. It gave him his choice of coming to the city on Wednesday or Thursday, and Forbes chose Wednesday. He had decided to waste no time before having a talk with Warren. CHAPTER IX AN EMBARRASSMENT OF RICHES No human being expects to die and all expect to marry. Observation continually proves the groundlessness of one or both of these anticipations, without altering the attitude of the survivors. In the background of the consciousness of the most confirmed bachelor or spinster, stands the shadowy form of the possible wife or the possible husband. Mr. James Doolittle, at fifty-five, had no idea of escaping the matrimonial yoke. He thought of himself always as an eligible young fellow, waiting for the right girl to come along. On two or three occasions earlier in life he had temporarily congratulated himself on finding the right girl, but as the ladies in question had disagreed with him, there had been no escape from the conclusion that he was mistaken. These disappointments he had accepted with an edifying equanimity, reminding himself that there were still as good fish in the sea as had ever graced a frying pan. Just why, on a certain summer afternoon, Jim's vague and groping expectations should suddenly have focused upon Zaida Finch, and why her familiar, faded features and diminutive, gnome-like body should have taken on the quality of allurement, is one of the mysteries which will remain a mystery when the riddle of perpetual motion has been solved. As the memory of Miss Finch hurrying across the grass continually recurred to him, Jim said to himself that though a trifle more flesh would not hurt her, she was a cute little thing. And forthwith he was conscious of a feeling of youthful irresponsibility, flatly contradicting the testimony of the family Bible. Yet it was with no very definite purpose in his mind that on the Wednesday following his brief call at Oak Knoll, Mr. Doolittle resolved on a second visit. Even incipient love is fertile in excuses. He argued that the most elementary sense of courtesy demanded his ascertaining the nature of the telegram of which he had been the bearer, and extending his sympathy in case it had brought bad news. With the lack of candor with himself, frequently manifested by wiser men in his condition, Mr. Doolittle failed to explain the fact that he assumed for the call the necktie which for thirty years he had worn on dress occasions, hand-painted daisies on a pink background. The silk was faded now and the daisies had lost much of their original perky luster, but with the hand-painted necktie tied under his chin, Mr. Doolittle felt himself a figure to appeal to the exacting feminine taste. His state of mind pleasantly indeterminate, Mr. Doolittle jogged through the dust in the direction of Oak Knoll. As yet his ardor had not reached the point where the leisurely pace of the gray nag got on his nerves. The droning peace of the mid-summer world was reflected in the serenity of his spirit. But as he neared Oak Knoll, the sound of wheels halted him at the foot of the long driveway, and waiting there, some intuition ruffled the placidity of his mood, and left him alert and uneasy. Jim knew his suspicion justified when suddenly upon his startled and hostile vision emerged another buggy, smarter than his own, and newly washed. The driver, Deacon Wiggins, looked up from the contemplation of his sorrel mare to bark a gruff greeting, "Afternoon, Jim." Deacon Wiggins was eminently a marrying man. He had married early, and as often as a complacent Providence, assisted by pneumonia, heart disease and typhoid, had permitted. A rather rusty band of crêpe around his hat, preserved with commendable thrift from one bereavement to another, bore witness to his latest loss some three months earlier. And with a lover's quick suspicion, Mr. Doolittle leaped to the conclusion that the deacon's errand to Oak Knoll was the same as his own, that in his eyes, too, Zaida Finch had found favor. His voice rasping as he realized the insatiable greed of some of his sex, Jim Doolittle returned the deacon's greeting with a sneering, "Wasn't looking to see you here." Deacon Wiggins at once drew rein. His errand had not been a sentimental one. He had called to collect from Miss Finch the amount of her very modest subscription to the cause of foreign missions, and had been met by Phemie with the news that the blind boarder and Howard had gone to the city on the early train, and that the ladies of the family were celebrating by spending the day with friends. Whereupon the deacon had replied that he would call again, and had gone his way unruffled, till halted by Doolittle's challenge. Though Deacon Wiggins was well past fifty and had been thrice married, he had not outgrown that instinct which impels two young cockerels to assault each other with murderous intent. "You wasn't looking to see me, eh?" repeated Deacon Wiggins, ponderously sarcastic. "Well, I don't know as that matters, Jim, as long as I didn't come for the sake of seeing you." Doolittle reddened violently. "No, it's plain enough what you've come for." The note of unreasonable jealousy was unmistakable. And while the deacon was quite in the dark as to the other's meaning, all his masculine dignity was in arms over the realization that another man was attempting interference with his doing as he pleased. "Whether I came for one thing or another," he retorted, "I don't have to ask your leave." "Must make Zaida Finch feel terrible proud to know you are thinking of her for Number Four." The introduction of Miss Finch's name into the conversation took the deacon by surprise, but he made no attempt to allay the groundless suspicion. Instead he replied, "A good many women would rather be Number Four with some men than Number One with others I could mention." The magnanimity which kept him from giving names was clearly a pretense, for his significant smile pointed his meaning unmistakably. "There's no accounting for tastes," acknowledged Mr. Doolittle, transformed by his fury to an unbecoming turkey red. "But sometimes folks have better taste than we give 'em credit for." The deacon's smile was as belligerent as a blow. "You're right there, Jim. You're right. I've always said that the sort of men who die old bachelors show the women ain't such fools as some folks take 'em to be." He clucked to his horse and drove on. Doolittle, breathing hard and unable to think of a sufficiently crushing rejoinder to this final insult, waited till the deacon was out of sight before turning up the drive. To him Phemie repeated her story of the blind boarder's departure for the city, escorted by Howard, and the consequent gadding of the ladies of the family. Mr. Doolittle drew a long breath as he realized that the fell designs of Deacon Wiggins had been temporarily foiled. He was not the man, however, to underestimate the gravity of the situation. His rival was notable for prompt action, as his previous marriages had abundantly proved. Left to himself, Doolittle might have meandered through several years of more or less ardent courtship, before reaching the point of asking Miss Finch to change her name, if indeed, he ever reached it. But the certainty that Deacon Wiggins would waste no time in such preliminaries forced him to realize that he, too, must act with promptness, or resign himself to loss. Jim's vague intention became definite in view of the purposes with which he credited the deacon. With mingled sorrow and indignation he wondered at the man's grasping nature. Meanwhile Deacon Wiggins, jogging homeward, was undergoing a very similar psychological experience. The most pronounced trait in the deacon's character was his obstinacy. He was an ardent Democrat, for the reason, it was generally believed, that he lived in a community of devout Republicans. He had been drawn irresistibly to the Congregationalist body because, as his acquaintances were certain, he sprang from Methodist stock. In all his dealings Deacon Wiggins could be safely counted on to take the off-side. But it had been long, indeed, since anything had so whetted his native stubbornness as his brief interview with James Doolittle. In a general sense it might be said that Deacon Wiggins was looking for a wife. He was always looking for a wife in those interruptions to his marital bliss, whose brevity shocked the finer sensibilities of Mr. Doolittle. But at present his attitude was one of critical observance rather than active search. Mentally he had inventoried the attractions of several unattached females of the community, though the thought of Zaida Finch, as designed by Providence to solace his loneliness, had never crossed his mind. But now that Doolittle's indiscreet opposition had turned his thoughts in her direction, Deacon Wiggins said to himself that he might go further and fare worse. Miss Finch was a fine woman, a little undersized and scrawny for his taste, but a woman of good temper and good principles, eminently qualified to make a satisfactory wife. Seemingly the newly-awakened ardor of Jim Doolittle was like a searchlight, illuminating virtues hitherto unnoticed. The deacon reached for his whip and surprised the sorrel mare by a cut across the flank. Mentally he had crossed his Rubicon. Miss Finch, placidly ignorant of the designs of Destiny, had passed a pleasant day. She had found it an immense relief to have Mr. Forbes away, even for twenty-four hours, for she never lost the sense of walking amid pitfalls while he was in the house. Agatha, in the rebound from the necessity of acting the rôle of an elderly maiden lady, had been more whimsically childish than usual, and had imparted to her faded little friend something of her own irresponsibility. Accordingly Miss Finch passed a pleasant day, and a peaceful night, and woke in the morning quite unprepared for what fate had in store. In Forbes' absence, the arrival of the Free Delivery was only an ordinary incident in the day's routine. Miss Finch went down the drive to get the mail a half-hour or so after the wagon had passed. And when in another half-hour it occurred to Agatha to inquire as to the results of that expedition, it took her a good five minutes to locate Miss Finch. At length her search brought her to a weather-beaten bench under the trees, where Miss Finch had seated herself as if to rest from the fatigue of the walk up the drive. At her feet were scattered various items of mail, which had slid off her lap in the stress of her emotions and lay on the grass unnoticed. "Well, Fritz, you must have found some absorbing reading," Agatha began. "I've screamed myself hoarse calling you." She paused, regarding her old friend with sudden concern. Miss Finch's face was singularly flushed and her pupils dilated like those of a sleep-walker. In either hand she clutched a letter. "Fritz, what it is?" Agatha exclaimed in real alarm. "Aren't you feeling well?" Much to her relief, Miss Finch's head turned in her direction. Up to this time she had seemed oblivious to her presence. "Yes, I feel all right, Agatha," she replied, her voice dreamy and unnatural. "I--I'm going to be married." The violence of Agatha's start indicated an almost uncomplimentary incredulity. "You are--what did you say, Fritz?" "I'm--I'm going to be married." "For heaven's sake! Who is it?" Miss Finch's manner lost something of its assurance. "I haven't quite--made up my mind." Agatha's expression of astonishment changed quickly to consternation. She came close to the little lady, slipping a hand through her arm. "Fritz, dear, hadn't you better come to the house and lie down? The sun is awfully hot, and you shouldn't have gone out without a hat." She studied Miss Finch's unnatural color with a sinking heart. Was it a touch of the sun or something worse? Miss Finch, though perfectly aware of the nature of Agatha's apprehensions, showed no resentment. Indeed the difficulty she had experienced in combating her own incredulity enabled her to sympathize with her young friend's perplexity. "When I say I haven't made up my mind, I mean I haven't decided which one to marry." "Yes, I see, Fritz. Now let's go to the house. Just lean on me." Phemie would have to go for the doctor, Agatha decided. She herself would not dare to leave. "If you don't believe me," exclaimed Miss Finch, a sense of injury at last making itself manifest in her voice, "you can read the letters for yourself." Agatha snatched the extended missive, thankful for anything that would throw light on Miss Finch's singular hallucination. Her stubborn incredulity received its first shock when she saw Miss Finch's name written across the yellow envelope in an unmistakably masculine hand. The contents of the letter completed her undoing. "Miss Zaida Finch: "Dear Friend--I have always believed the truth of those words of Scripture that it is not good for man to be alone. (Gen. 2:18.) Three dear companions have I taken to myself only to yield them to the cold and silent tomb. Have you ever thought of changing your state? You are so much in my thoughts that it seems a leading to show that it is you who should fill the place of my three lost companions, till you, too, shall be called from battle to reward. "I hope you will make this matter a subject of prayer, and will see your way clear to accept me as your husband. Write me how you feel about it. I enclose stamp. "Yours truly, "Hiram L. Wiggins." Agatha read the unusual document breathlessly, too relieved by the discovery that Miss Finch's mind was not seriously affected to appreciate to the full the unique literary quality of the composition. Deacon Wiggins actually was proffering Miss Finch his hand and so much of his heart as had not been consigned to the tomb along with the three deceased ladies who had borne his name. Agatha's impressions of the deacon were vaguely hostile, yet she realized that from Miss Finch's standpoint, the occasion called for congratulations. Agatha was not unaware of the little spinster's attitude of wistful anticipation where matrimony was concerned. And though it was difficult to think of Deacon Wiggins as the realization of a romantic dream, she warned herself that she must not be a kill-joy. "I'm sure, Fritz," Agatha said, with no trace of her usual mischief, "that the deacon will be very fortunate if you decide--" She checked herself, for Miss Finch was extending a second letter. "For the love of Mike," Agatha gasped, borrowing from Howard's vocabulary as her own seemed inadequate. "You don't mean there's another?" "Yes, there are two, Agatha," said Miss Finch, and under the circumstances her flitting expression of complacency was quite excusable. The dreadful suspicion flashing through Agatha's mind, that the guileless Miss Finch had been made the butt of a peculiarly obnoxious practical joke, vanished as she read Jim Doolittle's letter. It was too characteristic for her to doubt its authorship. "Dear Zaida: "Please excuse me calling you Zaida, for as Zaida you are enshrined in my thoughts, and I think of you very often when I am sad and lonely and I wish I had a wife like you to cheer me, and to be a help-meet to me like the Bible says, and while I have not married again and again like some people I could name it has not been because I do not have a high opinion of women. And if I should be left alone I should not go looking for some one to take your place right away, for with me to love once is to love always, and, dear Zaida, my heart beats for you alone. Yours truly, "James Doolittle." Agatha was seized with a paroxysm of coughing, the businesslike conclusion of the letter seeming decidedly inconsistent with its impassioned prelude. Then, recovering herself, she went over to Miss Finch and kissed her. "Well, Fritz, you're a lot too good for either one, but women are, as a rule. Which is it to be?" Miss Finch looked down at her first love-letters with an anxious expression, hardly befitting the occasion. "Well, Agatha, I'm not sure. There is a great deal of sentiment in Mr. Doolittle's letter. It's almost poetical in spots. I wouldn't have thought he had so much poetry in him?" "Nor I," admitted Agatha. "But the deacon's letter shows a beautiful religious spirit, and when you are choosing a husband you have to think of the things that are really important." "The deacon is better off than Mr. Doolittle," suggested Agatha. "Though I've always heard he was inclined to be close." "I wouldn't let such things weigh with me, Agatha. I can't imagine marrying a man because he had more money than somebody else. It's what a man is himself that counts with me." "Then I suppose it's the deacon," said Agatha, with youth's characteristic readiness to jump at conclusions. "I don't know, I'm sure. Don't hurry a body so, Agatha." Miss Finch spoke more sharply than was her wont. "If you were picking out a husband at my time of life, you wouldn't want to be rushed so that, like enough, you'd pick the wrong man." Agatha shook her head. "No, Fritz, if I ever became such a heart-breaker that I had a batch of proposals in a single mail, I'd take as long as I could to make up my mind. I'd make the sweetness last like an all-day sucker." Miss Finch's brief irritation vanished as she heard herself referred to as a heart-breaker. She blushed not unbecomingly. "The names might help you in making up your mind," continued Agatha, bent on giving all the assistance in her power. "Which is the more--what is that word--mellifluous in your ears, Mrs. Wiggins, Mrs. Deacon Wiggins, or Mrs. James Doolittle?" "I'm afraid you're not as serious-minded as you ought to be, Agatha," chided Miss Finch. "Marriage is 'most anything you like except a joke, and you can't make a joke of it, no matter how hard you try." As she moved toward the house with her two letters, leaving Agatha to collect the widely scattered mail, her face wore a troubled, anxious look, as if the fateful solemnity of the married state already had reached out from the future and enveloped her. CHAPTER X A CONFESSION Because of her absorption in Miss Finch's engrossing problem, Agatha gave the travelers of the household less of her attention on their return that afternoon than those rather spoiled individuals had reason to expect. Not till the following morning when she read Forbes a letter from Julia, even more egotistic than the average communication of that self-centered young woman, did Agatha realize that something was amiss with her boarder. He seemed tired and low-spirited, disinclined to conversation, in decided contrast to Howard, who was bubbling over with items of interest relating to their brief trip. Clearly the jaunt had been too much for the convalescent's strength. A little conscience-stricken that she had not earlier made the discovery, Agatha set herself resolutely to the task of reviving Forbes' drooping spirits, though with less than her usual success. And when late in the afternoon she suggested a walk, pleading that her knees were growing stiff from lack of exercise, he turned the tables on her unexpectedly by insisting that she go for a stroll with Howard as an escort, leaving him at home. And as her protest stirred him to a most uncharacteristic irritation, she yielded the point without further argument. "Of course, if you really want to get rid of us, we'll go. Only I hate to leave you alone." "I'm better company for myself than for others, dear lady. I'd rather be alone for a little. I'll try to sleep and perhaps I'll wake in a better humor." Her only thought an impatient haste to have the ordeal over, Agatha started out, Howard in attendance. But her dejection yielded by degrees to the magic of the summer afternoon. It vanished completely when she challenged her brother to a race across a green stretch of pasture. They reached their goal laughing and breathless, Agatha in the lead, and climbing the low stone wall they dropped panting in the shade of a guardian elm. Agatha snuggled back against the huge trunk, tucking her feet under her, while Howard sprawled happily at her side, laying his head in her lap. Agatha's contented sigh as she ran her fingers through his hair, told of relaxed nerves. "What a pity Mr. Forbes wouldn't come! It's so restful here. What did he do yesterday to tire him so?" "He didn't do much of anything. Saw the doctor and Mr. Warren and then--" "Warren? Did he see him?" "Sure. Telephoned the first thing when we got to the city and Mr. Warren came up to the hotel for lunch. They let me go out and look around for a couple of hours while they talked. Say, Aggie, I wish you knew Mr. Warren. He's a dandy." Agatha's expressive face betrayed no especial impatience to meet the object of Howard's eulogy. Indeed a grim tightening of her lips indicated that on this theme her brother and herself were far from agreement. But before the boy had time to be impressed by her lack of responsiveness, his attention was distracted by a cough from the direction of the road, eminently a stagey cough, due not to a tickling in the throat, but to some one's desire to announce his presence. Howard turned sharply, then sprang to his feet with a shout of mingled pleasure and astonishment. "Why, hello, Mr. Warren! Did you come out to find us? It's the funniest thing but I was talking about you this very minute." Warren, immaculate in a gray business suit and spotless panama, gave no indication of sharing the boy's pleasure in the unexpected encounter. He looked at him with disconcerting steadiness, and Howard, turning to his sister, saw her unconcealed consternation and realized that the game was up. He had momentarily forgotten the necessity of explaining Aggie. Mr. Warren would have to know the truth and undoubtedly would take it on himself to acquaint Mr. Forbes with the surprising state of affairs. Yet after all, Mr. Warren was a good sport. Perhaps if the thing were put up to him-- Warren's peremptory speech broke in on the boy's confused thoughts. "Chase along, Howard. I don't want you at present." "What do you want me to do, Mr. Warren?" "I don't care what you do as long as you don't stay here." "I--but I--" Without understanding his sense of discomfiture, Howard blushed an angry scarlet, and faced the intruder with instinctive defiance. Then Agatha spoke wearily. "It's all right, Howard. Run along, please." She was not easily daunted, but something in Warren's manner was accountable for a singular chill at her heart that was like fear. She had forgotten how big the man was, and his nose was so unexpectedly long and his chin so heavy, and his eyes bored into her like augers and were of a steely gray besides, which made the figure more impressive. He seemed quite another person from the silly young man who had talked nonsense in the kitchen that Sunday morning and ended by kissing her cheek. She heard Howard stumble away, muttering angrily to himself. Very deliberately Warren moved toward her. She forced herself to lift her eyes. He was looking down at her with the air of one who has the whip-hand and knows it. For some undefined reason she felt herself at a tremendous disadvantage. "Look here," said Warren with the same hardness in his voice she had noticed when he spoke to Howard, "this won't do, you know." Agatha remembered that she was Hephzibah Diggs just in time to drawl the inquiry through her nose. "What won't do?" "You mustn't be putting ideas into the kid's head. He's a nice kid. Forbes is tremendously interested in him and so is Miss Kent. On Miss Kent's account if there were no other reason, you ought to let the boy alone." She glared at him, fury growing with understanding. Her baleful gaze fought its way to him through tears of pure rage. Her unexpected emotion softened him perceptibly. He laid aside his air of judicial sternness as easily as he would have removed his coat. "Come now," he said, seating himself beside her. "We mustn't quarrel. And I dare say you meant no particular harm. Only keep in mind that it's hands off where the boy is concerned." "Have you got anything to say to me?" "You bet I have. I've come clear from town to say it, Hephzibah. By the way, isn't there something I could call you for short?" "Yes, Miss Diggs." He eyed her approvingly. A tear had splashed upon her burning cheek, and was making its leisurely way toward her chin, but tears with Agatha seldom gave the impression of feminine softness. Warren had the usual masculine horror of weepy women. It was a relief to perceive that for all her tears, Agatha's mood was murderous. "No indeed, we mustn't quarrel," he repeated. "Because I've come on purpose to see you, and do you a good turn. I'm interested in you, and want to help you." "I don't want none of your help." "That's because you don't understand, little girl. This world is a pretty big place and so far you've seen only a measly little corner." "It suits me." He saw an added enmity in her eyes, over this aspersion on her native village, and smiled tolerantly. "I wouldn't waste any loyalty on this burg if I were in your place. I asked half a dozen people where I could find you and every one pretended he'd never heard of you." Agatha's look showed her taken aback and Warren was not slow to follow up his advantage. "Of course I knew they were lying. Even in this unobservant community, my dear Hephzibah, you could hardly escape notice any more than on Broadway. I assume these young men were protecting their reputations by denying the pleasure of your acquaintance." "Oh," murmured Agatha, "I never thought I could hate anybody the way I hate you." "You shouldn't feel that way, my child. I'm not trying to hurt your feelings. I'm perfectly ready to let bygones be bygones and give you a hand up. I only mentioned this to show the narrowness of these little country places. They never forget, Hephzibah, and believe me, they never forgive." The fire of her wrath had dried her tears. Her eyes bright with hate, she met his gaze in silence. "There's something about you, Hephzibah," continued Warren, a slight uneasiness of manner showing that his _sang froid_ was not quite proof against her silent hostility, "something which makes me certain that it would pay to educate you. You could learn, I'm positive of it. And you'll take on polish. You say you're satisfied with things as they are. That only shows your ignorance, my dear child. Instead of being a poor little drudge, slighted and snubbed by a lot of country jays, you could make a place for yourself in the big world. I can't tell you now just what will open up for you, but at the least it would be like fairyland compared with what you have to expect here." Her anger seemed to have moderated to tranquil contempt. She sat aloof and disdainful, waiting for him to finish and take his departure. "I own you don't know me well enough to feel sure of my motives in making this offer," Warren went on almost humbly. "But you can ask Miss Kent about the blind man who's boarding with her this summer, and see what sort of reputation she gives him. And he's in this thing with me. In fact it was at his suggestion that I came down here to-day." At last he had succeeded in interesting her. Although she did not speak she turned with a quickness that had the effect of an interruption, and the recent disdainful calm of her expression was replaced by a rather wistful look. "Yes, Forbes is in for this, tooth and nail." Warren was pleased at the altered demeanor of his audience. "When I first suggested it to him, he talked it over with Miss Kent, and the old lady discouraged him. I imagine she's a good sort but about as broad as a knitting needle. She insisted that it was better for you to be let alone, and she talked old Forbes over, and I thought the whole thing was settled. But after you saved Forbes' life--" "Why," cried Agatha. "How--how--." Her usually ready tongue failed her, and in her blushing confusion Warren thought her adorable. "I suppose you wonder how he knew you were his rescuer," Warren continued, enjoying to the full the pleasing effect of his revelation. "It came to him by a sort of intuition. He quizzed the kid, but Howard wouldn't tell. It simply goes to show how strait-laced the old lady is. She'd forbidden him even to talk about you. But something you said or did fitted in with what I had told Forbes about you, and he decided that he couldn't rest easy under such an obligation." "It's only a guess." Agatha had found her voice. "You don't know anything about it." "It was a safe bet, even before I told you and watched your face. Now it's a dead certainty. Listen! Forbes came to see me yesterday and we cocked up this scheme. See how it strikes you." He had her attention now, close and serious, with no suggestion of disdain. Painstakingly he explained the plan. They had selected a woman both knew to act as Hephzibah's tutor. They would send her to some quiet place where there would be little to distract the girl's thoughts from her work. Her tutor, an impoverished gentlewoman, would undertake the cultivation of manners befitting the best society, and would mold her literary taste by reading to her from the English classics, in addition to her regular instruction. "I don't say it will be so very much fun for six months," Warren owned frankly. "But we both think it would be a good idea for you to work for all you are worth at the start, and make all the progress possible. And when once you--well, when the rough edges are smoothed off a little, you can come to town and mix in a little fun with the day's work. What do you think of the idea?" Agatha's answer was a shake of her head. "Too strenuous a program, is it?" Warren looked disappointed at her lack of ambition. "Well, it isn't necessary to travel at such a pace. Both Forbes and I felt it would be more encouraging to you in the long run, if your advancement was so rapid that you couldn't help realizing it." "Yes, that would be better if--but it won't work. Thank you. It's kind of you, but I--I can't go away." "Away? Do you mean away from this hole in the woods?" Agatha nodded with no attempt to defend her native place against his sneers. "This home of yours, where a nice kid like Howard is forbidden to speak of you, and where older men look scared when your name is mentioned and say they never heard of you?" "You said all that before." Agatha had turned rather white. "And it won't do any good to say it again." Warren studied her averted face, a pensive face at that moment. He had a confused certainty that he had been too hard on her. He had only spoken the truth and for her good, but he had overdone it. He had been brutal. "Hephzibah," he said suddenly, a new gentleness in his voice, "I know what's the matter with you. You're in love." There was something so virginal in her protesting recoil that he had to stop a moment for breath. Yet a quality in the movement gave him an odd conviction of her innate fineness, in spite of that chapter in her past he found it hard to forget. "There's no other explanation, Hephzibah." He tried to speak lightly without any great degree of success. "When a girl of your sort sticks to a place of this sort, like a barnacle to a ship's bottom, it's as sure as shooting that there's a man in the case. Come, Hephzibah, own up." She lifted her chin in a regal way she had--an incongruous motion in a country girl who "worked out"--and looked at him squarely. With a little thrill he saw that her eyes had filled again. And though she did not speak, those brimming eyes seemed a brave, frank avowal that his surmise had hit the mark. "Well, Hephzibah, I'm glad you aren't going to need our help--Forbes' and mine--in order to be happy. I hope your young man knows he's lucky." He was astonished at the keenness of the pang which marked this formal renunciation. "When is it to be, Hephzibah?" "Why, it's not--you don't understand--I'm not going to be married." Warren sat up straight. "The devil, you're not," he said, his voice harshly cynical. The girl rose and stamped her foot on the grass. The soft turf swallowed the sound, but the passionate gesture was not less impressive because noiseless. "You hush!" she said. "Don't you dare to think things like that about him. He's perfect. He never harmed anybody, never! And for you to dare to blacken him with your beastly thoughts just because I've been fool enough to care." Swayed by unprecedented emotion, Warren rose to his feet. In her earlier anger the girl had been merely a lovely virago. Now, in her furious defense of the man he had apparently misjudged, she was superb. Warren felt himself swept from his moorings. "Very well, Hephzibah. I'll take your word for it that he's all right." "He doesn't know. He doesn't even dream. There's--He loves some one else." "Don't, Hephzibah. Poor little girl! What a damned muddle life is." He was fumbling for his card. "Can you write, dear?" "After a fashion." All in a minute she was another woman, with radiant mischief peering out of her eyes. "Here's my address on this card. If you should change your mind, write me. I hope and believe you will. Just because one man is blind, it doesn't follow that there's nothing else in life." She gave a slight start, looking at him obliquely, the mischief quite gone from her eyes. But she accepted his card, and then of her own accord gave him her hand. "You have been good to take so much trouble," she said. "Thank you." The two had changed markedly since the dialogue under the elm tree began. The girl's hostility had vanished as completely as the man's condescension. On his way back to the city that night, Warren evolved the theory that Hephzibah was originally of gentle blood. That accounted for the quality of her beauty, for something in her manner suggesting one accustomed to homage rather than to service. Warren was inclined to believe it also explained a singular fact which impressed him more as he thought over the events of the afternoon than it had at the time. There could be no question but that in moments of extreme excitement, a certain uncouthness disappeared from her speech and manner, and she lapsed, so to speak, into the idioms of her presumably cultured forebears. In Warren's opinion this cast a most interesting side-light on the subject of heredity. CHAPTER XI A WILFUL MAN MUST HAVE HIS WAY Though there was no likelihood of another letter from Julia for a week at least, Forbes showed an abnormal interest in the contents of the mail bag, and Agatha guessed he was expecting to hear from Warren. She, too, found herself anxiously anticipating the arrival of the letter addressed in the vigorous hand which in some obscure way was so suggestive of the man's personality. When it came four days after that unique dialogue under the elm tree, and the duty of reading it devolved upon herself, Agatha's heart beat suffocatingly. But as it proved, all her thrills were anticipatory. The letter itself contained nothing she did not already know, and that little was told tersely and obscurely, evidently with the intention of preventing Miss Kent, the probable reader, from learning that her counsel had been ignored. With businesslike brevity Warren stated that he attended to the matter they had discussed the previous week. He, Forbes, was correct in his conjecture as to the identity of the party who had done him the service he had spoken of, but said party had turned his proposition down flat. "And now that our consciences are clear," Warren wrote, "the only thing left is to drop the whole matter. Hope the unpleasant effect of your treatments has worn off and that your eyes are feeling better. "R.W." It was plain from the expression of Forbes' face that he shared Agatha's uncomplimentary opinion of the communication in question. The remainder of the day he was frowningly contemplative, resisting all efforts to draw him into conversation. For the first time Agatha saw in his face lines suggesting a determination akin to stubbornness. By morning his manner showed the relief of having reached a decision. Agatha was not unprepared to have him say at the conclusion of the morning meal, "Miss Kent, when you have a little time I would like to have a talk with you." "I can come now." "There's no hurry--no especial hurry, that is. Any time this forenoon." But Agatha's curiosity was awakened. She conducted him out upon the porch, ensconced him in a comfortable chair, and seated herself beside him. As a preliminary, he took her hand and kissed it. "I must begin with a confession, my dear lady. I have been keeping a secret from you, in fact more than one." "Dear me! And I thought you had accepted me as mother confessor." "So I have. I decided not to tell you for fear of worrying you. But the truth is that I came near walking over the cliff one afternoon, when I was out with Howard, and ending my troubles by breaking my neck." Agatha succeeded in expressing a sufficient degree of shocked horror in her exclamation. Forbes patted her hand reassuringly. "But I didn't, you see. My life was saved in a conventionally romantic way. A beautiful girl flung herself into my arms, and when she could get her breath, gave me a terrific scolding." "Oh!" Agatha looked at him with unfeigned interest. "How did you know she was beautiful? Did Howard tell you?" "No, Warren." "Oh!" She seemed a little disappointed. "But he wasn't there, was he?" "No, but he'd told me about her. And I think I should have known anyway." "How?" Again he noted the animation in her tone. "I'm not quite sure. Perhaps a blind man develops a sort of sixth sense. Anyway, as I stood there with my arms about her--it was necessary in the circumstances, and you needn't look shocked as I suspect you're doing--I had as vivid an impression of youth and beauty as if I'd seen her." "More so, probably," amended Agatha joyously. "No, not if Warren's right. He says she's something extraordinary. Can't you guess who it was?" "I believe that Mr. Warren"--Agatha seemed to be searching her memory for details--"talked rather extravagantly about Hephzibah." "Yes, Hephzibah was the girl. And that puts quite a new light on Warren's plan for educating her, don't you see?" "No, I don't." Agatha's brevity implied distaste for the subject. "Well, I do. A man's chance interest in a pretty girl may be perfectly innocent and unobjectionable, but you can't compare it with what one feels for the woman who has saved one's life." "I told you that she wanted to be left alone. I told you that it would be kinder." "Wait, please." Under the deference of his manner, she perceived a resolution that was adamant. "I've told you only one of the secrets that I have kept from you. Here's the other. When I was in town I saw Warren and we laid plans for taking Hephzibah's case in hand, regular uplift proposition, don't you know. Warren was to see her and arrange matters. We had everything settled. We had a governess selected and had decided on a little sea-side place for them to stay until she was presentable. Warren was going to ask a girl he knows to buy her a suitable outfit." "I don't wonder you've been blue," Agatha said in tones of soft reproach. "Planning all this out and not a word to me." To her surprise he blushed high. "No," he said after a moment, "I've been down in the depths, God knows, but not for that reason. I thought--well, you seemed to feel so strongly on the subject of not interfering with Hephzibah, that I didn't want to bother you." "And now you do? Is that why you're telling me about it?" "I'm telling you because I want your help." He set his jaw grimly as he faced her. "I left Warren to engineer the thing and he's bungled it." "It wasn't his fault." Agatha evinced a commendable eagerness not to be unjust to the absent. "When Hephzibah has made up her mind, trying to change it is like going against a stone wall." "Possibly. But I shan't feel satisfied till I've tried my persuasive powers on her." Forbes sat waiting for some comment from Agatha, and when none was offered, explained firmly, "I want an interview with her." Still Agatha did not speak. She was beginning to feel an aversion to Hephzibah Diggs which amounted to positive hatred. That talk with Warren had been trying enough, with his repeated references to some scandalous episode in her past. But for reasons perfectly clear to Agatha herself, the interview with Forbes promised to be vastly worse. "Well?" Forbes was puzzled by her silence. "Had she better come here? Or shall I have Howard take me to her home?" "Oh, no." The dismay in Agatha's voice negatived the last suggestion conclusively. Forbes found her tremors a trifle irritating. He had to remind himself that she was an old lady, and that for many years her will had been supreme in her little circle. He found her hand and patted it affectionately. He was beginning to think that these sentimental attentions counted more with elderly women than with younger ones. "Well, then, we'll have her here. Will you send her word, some time to-day?" "I'm not sure she'll come." "Then I'll go to her." His obstinacy showed in his voice. "I tell you I'm going to talk to that girl. She's got a chance at last. She's young and it's inconceivable that she should turn down such an offer if she really understood it." "That's the sort of girl she is. Worthless, trifling." Forbes withdrew his hand from hers. To her amazement Agatha saw she had really offended him. And now to her dislike of Hephzibah was added a preposterous jealousy. She, Agatha Kent, had devoted herself to Forbes all summer only to have him act like a spoiled child when she ventured a criticism of a girl he had met only on one occasion, a girl with a past, at that. What was Hephzibah to him or he to Hephzibah, that for her sake he was ready to affront his father's old friend and his own? "I shan't need Howard this morning," remarked Forbes pleasantly but with a relentless holding to his purpose which forced her to realize the hopelessness of altering his intention. "So if you please, ask him to take the message. The girl may be all that you say, and my interest and effort may all be wasted, but I prefer to see for myself." "Very well," said Agatha swallowing. She perceived that he considered her a narrow-minded old person, who thought it impossible for a woman to return to the paths of rectitude, after once stepping aside. He would not take her word for Hephzibah. He was determined to interview her for himself. Agatha looked at him with narrowing eyes. Very well! Let him take the consequences. "I'll see that Hephzibah gets the message," she said with dignity. "I can't answer for results." "Of course not." Now that he had gained his point, his manner was thoroughly friendly. "I'll take the entire responsibility for the outcome." Agatha realized that she was dismissed. She went up-stairs feeling out of sorts with Forbes and positively murderous where Hephzibah was concerned. She even played with the thought of having that obtrusive young woman smitten with mortal illness, too sick for the interview Forbes insisted on, and in a few days reaching the end of her brief and troubled life. She dismissed the thought when she realized that Forbes was capable of summoning a physician from the city to attend the patient. The door of Miss Finch's room was ajar. Miss Finch sat at the table with a sheet of paper spread out before her and a pen in hand. The seriousness of her expression suggested that she was on the point of making her last will and testament. "Fritz," exclaimed Agatha, appearing in the doorway, "I have a message for you to give Hephzibah Diggs." Miss Finch looked at her wildly. "Will you please say that Mr. Forbes would like to see her some time to-day. Say it's very important." As Miss Finch continued to stare, Agatha showed signs of impatience. "Well, why don't you begin?" "Begin what, Agatha?" "Why, say what I've just told you, that Mr. Forbes wants to see me this afternoon." Miss Finch groaned and shook her head. "Oh, Agatha, it seems so wicked." "Wicked! If that's not unreasonable. Here I am taking all the pains to come up-stairs to you, to have you give me the message so I won't need to stretch the truth the least little bit, and then you talk as if I were an ordinary prevaricator, without a conscience." Miss Finch quailed before Agatha's simulated indignation. "Oh, if you look at it that way," she replied feebly and made an effort to recall the message. "Hephzibah, Mr. Forbes wants to see you to-day." "Tell me it's very important," prompted Agatha. "It's very important," Miss Finch repeated, and looked on the point of bursting into tears. "I'll be there at three o'clock," replied Agatha in the person of Hephzibah. Then her gaze fell on the letters lying open on the table and she temporarily forgot her own perplexities in the perennial feminine interest in a love-affair. "Oh, Fritz," she exclaimed, coming closer. "You're writing the letter, aren't you? Which one is it to be?" Miss Finch looked at the blank sheet before her with an expression equally blank. "Agatha," she hesitated, "it almost seems to me--at least don't you think Mr. Doolittle is rather the best-looking?" Agatha pondered the question with the seriousness its importance deserved. "I rather think he is, Fritz. The deacon is much too fat. My ideal of manly beauty isn't broad enough to include a fat man. It's surprising how some people thrive on bereavement." Miss Finch fidgeted with her pen. "But perhaps the deacon is a little more careful about his appearance." Again Agatha acquiesced. "Mr. Doolittle is far from particular. I've seen him in the village with only one suspender, and the usefulness of that dependent on one anemic-looking safety-pin. I've honestly trembled for fear of what might happen. The deacon's away in the lead in the matter of clothes." Again Miss Finch looked nervously at the paper before her and then surprised Agatha by laying down her pen. "I rather thought I'd write them to-day," she said. "It's been--well, not long, but quite a time since their letters came, and I thought--" She fell into an indeterminate silence, and Agatha finished the sentence for her. "Of course they're getting impatient. It's cruel to keep them on the rack this way. Why don't you put them out of their misery, Fritz?" "Why, I don't want to hurry, Agatha. I must wait to be sure. There's some nice things about each one and some that aren't so nice. I'll have to think it over a while yet." Agatha was watching the little woman keenly. "Fritz," she asked with unusual, gentle gravity, "are you sure you want either of them? Don't you think you'd be happier just to stay on with me?" Miss Finch regarded her interrogator with evident amazement. "Why, Agatha, I might never have another chance." This was too true to question. Agatha remained silent. "I sometimes can't help wishing," Miss Finch owned plaintively, "that there hadn't been two. That's what makes it so puzzling--having to choose. And there seems so much to be said on both sides. But to refuse them both--why, Agatha, it would be flying in the face of Providence." Agatha said no more. Leaving Miss Finch to her dreams, she went up to the garret to find an appropriate costume for Hephzibah in her forthcoming momentous interview. She felt she could act her rôle with more spirit if dressed appropriately to the part. Agatha did not underestimate the difficulty of her proposed masquerade. It was an easy matter to evolve a personality sufficiently consistent to deceive Warren, for Warren had never met the dignified and elderly spinster, Miss Agatha Kent. Forbes, on the contrary, had spent hours in that lady's company nearly every day through the summer, and knew every inflection of her voice. The forthcoming interview with Forbes presented any number of terrifying possibilities. She had a word with him at a suitable interval after their late conversation. "She's coming." "Good!" he cried triumphantly. "Did Howard go?" "No. Miss Finch was going to see her, anyway. She'll be here at three." "Good!" said Forbes again. He turned to her with that mingled gentleness and resolution which somehow revealed him in a new light. "Now, my dear friend, I'm going to ask a favor of you. Promise me you won't misunderstand." "I'll try not," she said faintly, and her heart misgave her. "Promise me that you'll leave us to ourselves when we have our little talk. I know your interest in Hephzibah's future--" In her relief Agatha became jocular. "No, you don't know. You can't. Her welfare means as much to me as my own." "I'm not doubting that. Please don't misunderstand me. But sometimes I think these sensitive natures can open up better to a stranger than to a friend. And the fact that I'm blind may be a help to her." "Yes," agreed Agatha with unmistakable sincerity, "I'm pretty sure it will be." "There's something mysterious about that girl," Forbes continued. "The way she refuses to listen to propositions that are all clearly for her good, puzzles me. I'm convinced that if I can have her to myself an hour or so, I'll get at the root of the trouble. Anyway it's worth trying." Relieved from the terrifying certainty that he was about to ask her to chaperon them during the interview, Agatha had almost ceased to dread the prospective ordeal. But prudence suggested the advisability of seeming a little hurt. "I shouldn't have interfered in any way," she assured him plaintively. "Since you've set your heart on talking to Hephzibah, I should have sat quietly in the background and not said a word." "Better not," Forbes interposed hastily. "Let me have my way this time. And when we talk it over afterward, I'll tell you every word that was said as nearly as I can remember." CHAPTER XII HEPHZIBAH TURNS THE TABLES Hephzibah Diggs was prompt. As the grandfather's clock in the hall struck three, Agatha advanced to the French window opening on the porch, and said in her natural voice, "She's here, Mr. Forbes." Forbes smiled approval. "Send her around, please, Miss Kent." His manner suggested that the difficulties in the way of his philanthropic plan were now a thing of the past. The clumping footsteps that presently announced the approach of his visitor took him back a trifle. There was no particular reason why Hephzibah should not be an ordinary clumsy country girl, in heavy shoes that clattered noisily as she moved, but somehow he had not expected it. He rose and stood awaiting her. The voice was more unexpected than her heavy tread. It made him wince. He remembered that Warren likened it to the melodious notes of a guinea fowl and he appreciated the aptness of the comparison. There was no reason why Hephzibah Diggs should not talk through her nose, and in a harsh, strident, generally unpleasant tone. But the fact that she did so, though he had been abundantly forewarned, took him by surprise. "Miss Kent says you've got something to say to me." Thus Hephzibah announced her presence. And Forbes, hastily summoning a smile, and resolutely excluding his pain from his voice, extended a cordial hand. "I'm very glad to meet you, Miss Hephzibah. Won't you sit down? I think there's a chair near." "I'll wait on myself, don't you bother none." A grating noise indicated that a chair was being dragged across the floor of the porch into convenient nearness to his own. A plumping sound gave evidence that Hephzibah had seated herself. The picture in the rustic chair deserved a more appreciative audience than a blind man. Hephzibah wore a costume best described as a medley, since garments originally the property of Miss Finch and Howard, as well as her own, contributed to the startling effect. A pair of Howard's outgrown shoes accounted for her clumsy tread. She wore a little bonnet which Miss Finch had discarded after some dozen years of service, and which seemed genuinely scandalized at finding itself atop Agatha's brazenly assertive mass of hair. A very short calico skirt, also the property of Miss Finch, and a sky-blue silk waist, evidently designed for festive wear, completed the grotesque costume. Just why it should have given Agatha confidence in playing her rôle, she knew as little as any one. Forbes commented pleasantly on the weather as some such preliminary skirmishing seemed necessary before coming to the point. He had resolved on establishing a friendly understanding between Hephzibah and himself, before making the offer which, he realized, might readily arouse the suspicion of a girl who knew by bitter experience that men are not always to be trusted. He was inclined to suspect Warren of lacking tact, startling her by his failure to employ _finesse_. He did not take himself into his own confidence fully enough to admit that he was also sparring for time in the effort to recover his poise. It was singular that he had received so different an impression of Hephzibah in the brief, bewildering interview which had opened by his clasping her in his arms, and ended by her refusal to tell her name. He had to remind himself that on the springy turf her clumsy tread would be soundless, and that the gasping whisper in which she spoke gave him no clue as to the quality of her voice. Still, if Warren's letter had not expressly assured him that Hephzibah was his mysterious rescuer, he would have felt sure that he had been mistaken. Hephzibah was in full accord with his favorable opinion of the weather. She expressed her agreement so heartily that he winced again, and conquered an impulse to tell her that it was unnecessary to speak so loud. "I suppose," he began, deciding that after all it would be better to waive further introductory remarks, "that you must have wondered why I wanted to see you." "I didn't bother about that none," replied Hephzibah. "I've had a lot to do with sick folks, and I know they're likely to take 'most any sort of notion into their heads." Forbes reddened smartly. He felt as if he had been slapped. Clearly tact was not in Hephzibah's line. "I've heard a good deal about you, first and last," he assured her pleasantly. "And of course my interest in you was increased by what happened near Indian Rock the other afternoon. I'm not going to talk about that for I know you would rather I wouldn't." "Oh, don't mind me," Hephzibah returned comfortably. "You can say anything you like. You can't make me mad." Forbes hesitated. There is no doubt that on the moment he acquitted Miss Kent of a certain charge to which she had been given no chance to plead guilty. He realized that women sometimes understood one another better than a mere man might hope to do. But he had put his hand to the plow with the intention of proving Warren's unfitness in matters requiring diplomacy, and he had no intention of turning back. Deliberately and with carefully chosen words, Forbes explained to Hephzibah the plan he had evolved for her regeneration. He went more into detail than Warren had done. He traced her future years from the present modest start, up to the time when she should bear the stamp of culture, and be able to hold her own in the best society. The picture that he drew seemed to him an attractive one. He showed himself not altogether lacking in a knowledge of the opposite sex, by the emphasis he placed upon the friend of Warren's to whom had been assigned the responsibility of selecting a suitable wardrobe for Hephzibah. He did not pause till he was pleasantly confident that he had done the subject justice. He turned his sightless eyes upon her expectantly. Hephzibah said nothing. There was a chilling quality in her protracted silence. "Well?" questioned Forbes, and though he had been so favorably impressed by his putting of the case, he spoke a little anxiously. "What do you think of it all?" Hephzibah laughed unmusically. "Well, I let you go on, just so's to get it off your chest. There ain't nothing to it, not so far as I can see. The clothes would be nice enough, but if I had to study all the time and have some dame bossing me my days off and all, I'd pay for 'em dear." "But wouldn't you like to be educated?" "Laws, no. I never hankered to be a school-teacher. I'd rather cook any day in the week." By this time Forbes was convinced that Miss Kent was right. Something was lacking in Hephzibah. He realized that he himself had been influenced more than he knew by Warren's extravagance, and Warren, it was apparent, had been swept off his feet by the girl's fresh beauty. Just how to explain the impression he himself had formed of her that day when she swung her lithe body between him and mortal peril, Forbes did not know. She had said little, and that with difficulty, because of her breathless condition, and yet the impression he had formed of her was infinitely removed from the truth. He felt now that he had made a mistake, and that Hephzibah was not of the fiber to take on polish readily. He would show his gratitude in some more appropriate way than by attempting her education. But since he had blundered into this rather absurd situation, there was nothing left but to go through with it. "You do not have to use your education in teaching school, unless you wish to," he explained patiently. "But it will fit you for a better social position." He realized that this was over her head and kindly simplified it. "I mean that the more you learn, the nicer friends you will have and the more things you will find to interest you." "I know enough now," Hephzibah insisted calmly, "for anybody that ain't a teacher. When I went to district school I learned to read and write and figure, and I 'most always stood up till near the last when we had spelling matches. Oh, I've got an education all right." "Possibly, my child, it would be better to rely on the judgment of some one else." His manner was patiently paternal. Hephzibah Diggs shuffled her feet noisily. "I guess I know enough to 'tend to my own affairs," she said, her tone truculent. "I'm not so sure about that, Hephzibah. I think you would do much better to take advice." "How'd you like it yourself if folks you didn't know came butting in, telling you how to manage your business?" "If it was meant kindly, I should be grateful." "Oh, very well." He could hear that she was breathing hard. "Then I'll tell you that for a sensible man you're making as big a botch of your affairs as anybody I ever knew of." Forbes was unfeignedly astonished. "Why, Hephzibah, you don't know what you're talking about." "Don't I, though. I know about that girl of yours, and what a fool she's making of you." Forbes caught his breath. Then he realized that it was beneath his dignity to be angry. "I think it is hardly necessary," he said stiffly, "to discuss that subject, Hephzibah." "Oh, no! you can stick your finger into my pie all you want to. You can tell me I ought to go to some place I never heard of, with somebody I never knew, and do everything I hate for years and years, but when I say one thing about your girl, it's hardly necessary to discuss that subject." The last words were given with what he realized was an excellent imitation of his own air of dignified aloofness. This amused him and had the additional effect of mollifying his irritation. "But I am interfering in your affairs, because I have your interests at heart," he said very kindly. "Same here. I hate like the mischief to see a nice gentleman made a fool of by a vain, silly girl with about as much brains as a cockroach, and as much heart as a pancake." This description of Julia, though he would have indignantly denied that it had the remotest resemblance to truth, roused him to the realization that this uncouth young woman knew more of his personal affairs than she had any right to know. "Hephzibah," he said sternly, "I don't understand where you could have secured information about any friends of mine. Surely Miss Kent--" For all her faults, Hephzibah was capable of magnanimity. On one critical occasion Miss Kent had sacrificed Hephzibah's reputation to save herself, and Hephzibah was under no obligation to spare hers. Yet without hesitation she threw herself into the breach. "I listened," she explained quickly. "You mean when Miss Kent was reading me my letters?" His flushed face told that he was not disposed to belittle her eavesdropping. "Yes, and when you talked things over. I heard enough to know that you'd better use the brains the Lord gave you to manage your own affairs. Why don't you put it up to that girl of yours that she can take you or leave you?" "Really, Hephzibah--" "Oh, it's all right for you to come along and pry into my business, and tell me what _I'm_ to do. But when I turn the tables you squirm. Funny what a difference it makes whose foot the shoe's on." Forbes subsided. Under his feeling of bewilderment was a vague suspicion that perhaps there was something in Hephzibah's point of view. "In the first place," continued this intrepid young woman, "she showed she was no good when she throwed you down like she did. She was going to marry you, wasn't she? And if she cared enough about you for that, it was up to her to stand by you when trouble came. Pretty kind of wife she'd have made if she turned her back the minute hard luck struck you." Forbes remembered vaguely that Miss Kent had once said something similar. He wondered that two human beings so unlike should have the same view-point. "You got off easy," Hephzibah continued. "You might have married her. When she showed herself up for what she was, you'd ought to have got down on your marrow-bones and thanked the Lord. But look at you! Instead, you keep on telling her how much you love her and that a yellow streak don't matter--in a woman." Forbes suddenly realized that he could endure no more. He could not listen longer to these preposterous statements. But underneath his panic of anger, something whispered that he shrank from listening longer to Hephzibah's frantic speech, not because she was uttering slanders against Julia, but because what she said was true. He struck the arm of his chair with his clenched fist. "Stop!" he said in a voice unlike his own. "I won't listen." "All right," said Hephzibah Diggs. "But what's sauce for the goose--" She stopped, starting to her feet. The blow from Forbes' fist had loosened the arm of the chair in which he sat. It had bounced out of place and then slipped back again, catching his finger as it returned to base. It was his sudden startling pallor that checked Hephzibah's fluency. "Can you help me a little--Hephzibah?" Forbes' voice was faint, his lips blue. "My hand--seems caught." Hephzibah's clattering haste was too late to save him from ignominious faintness. He had not been well since his trip to the city, and the shock of the pain was too much for his nerves. She caught the arm of the chair and wrenched it savagely away, just as his head fell over against her shoulder. She released the imprisoned hand, and slipping her arm about him kept his limp body from sliding to the floor. Upon his white face, she saw, conscience-stricken, there seemed to rest an expression of piteous bewilderment. Forbes reviving found himself indoors. He was stretched on the couch in the living-room. The odor of camphor was much in evidence and his hair felt damp, as if he had been taking a dip in the surf. Some one was chafing his hand. "Hephzibah," he said faintly. The voice of Miss Kent answered him, speaking in a muffled fashion, as if she had a cold in her head. "She's gone. That horrible girl is gone. She shall never come near you again." Even after his late experience the adjective seemed to indicate prejudice. But he did not press the point, as there was another matter he wished cleared up. "Did I frighten you terribly?" "Yes--I was frightened." Her voice shook as if she wanted to cry again. "You're not so strong as I thought. I shall have to take better care of you. I blame myself--terribly." This was unreasonable, but he did not stop to argue the case. "Was that why you kissed me?" he asked. "I didn't seem to come to all at once; consciousness came in waves and receded, you know, and once I felt sure some one kissed my cheek, and a big tear splashed down--" Miss Kent spoke hastily. "Oh, that was only part of your dreaming. Fainting people often have such fancies." "Very likely," Forbes agreed. "You see, I don't know much about fainting. It never happened to me but once before." He turned his head on his damp pillow and lapsed into silence. It was the part of discretion, perhaps, to leave Miss Kent under the impression that the kiss was an illusion, due to his semi-conscious state, but he knew better. It was as real as music, or flame, or electricity. It had certain characteristics of all three. It must have been Hephzibah. CHAPTER XIII CONGRATULATIONS ARE IN ORDER Murray Prendergast had proposed. The summer sport had become dead earnest. Julia wrote Forbes the full details, explaining that the young man was awaiting her answer, and that she had asked two weeks in which to come to a decision. Apparently Julia, like Miss Finch, felt that to refuse Prendergast would be flying in the face of Providence, even though accepting him seemed a harsh necessity. "'It's not what you and I dreamed of in the dear old days,'" wrote Julia. "'Oh, Burton, how far away those happy times seem when we sat hand in hand and planned our future. How merciless life is, Burton! Is there some dark fate in whose hands we are only puppets?'" Agatha broke off in her reading to lift a scarlet face. "Must I go on with this?" "Do you mean that you're tired?" Forbes' voice was self-controlled but in his pale cheeks a pulse beat like a trip hammer. Even his tears would not have hurt her like that palpitating spot over which his will was powerless. "Yes, I _am_ tired. I'm terribly tired of the people who talk about fate when it's all their own cowardice, and pity themselves for losing what they deliberately threw away." "It's a matter of view-point," said Forbes tonelessly. "If that's all, I'm afraid I must ask you to go on. I--I could hardly have Howard read it." All at once his white cheek showed a stain of red, as if the mere thought that any eyes but his own should see that letter was humiliating beyond endurance. Julia's letter was as long as usual and decidedly more sentimental. She surrendered herself with abandon to the luxury of heart-break. She recalled a number of tender episodes, and wondered pathetically why fate could not have spared lovers so fond. To Agatha, Julia's melancholy was a theatrical make-believe on the face of it, as much a pose as her pretense of affection. Agatha did her best to spoil the effect of the letter by reading rapidly, and in a monotonous sing-song, but she could not keep her eyes from the face of the man before her, and she saw that every tender memory the missive evoked found response in his tortured heart. She wound up breathless and hot and trembling uncontrollably. Forbes thanked her with a formal courtesy that added to her pain, for it seemed to set her at a distance. She wanted to put her arms about him, and cry over him, and tell him that the hurt would not last. Then she remembered with bitterness that she was a withered old woman in whose heart the fires of love had burned to ashes, long, long before, if indeed they had ever been kindled. "I'd like a sheet of paper, please," Forbes said with the same laborious politeness. "I'll scrawl a line myself." "What are you going to tell her?" His air of surprise at the question indicated that there was but one answer. "What is there to say, except to wish her all happiness?" "You're not going to blame her, then?" "God forbid." He took the sheet she gave him, wrote upon it rapidly and folding it across, handed it back to her. "I'll have to ask you to direct the envelope for me," he said, still heart-breakingly patient. "I can write well enough for Julia's eyes, but not for Uncle Sam's." Agatha did not reply. The breeze, always fresh upon the porch, had parted the folded sheet, and her reluctant gaze caught the signature, "Always yours, B.F." She turned away her eyes and caught her breath. "Always yours." That was the cruelty of it. Julia would marry Murray Prendergast and yet keep her hold on the heart of the man she had abandoned in his need. Her selfishness could not alter his loyalty. If the letter just read did not reveal her to him in her incomparable egotism, nothing ever would. Agatha's heart bled for him in his white resignation. If he had done anything but sit there like a man under sentence of death, she would have felt equal to the occasion. But this white suffering terrified her. She dared not trust herself to look at him, for her eyes ran over at the sight of his drawn face. She stared out over the serene landscape as she said unsteadily, "Did you ask her to wait?" "Wait? Why wait?" "For you to get well, of course. If she's so fond of you, she ought to be able to wait a year or two until you've recovered your sight." He shrugged his shoulders without replying, but the gesture revealed more than hopelessness, something alarmingly akin to indifference. And though Agatha knew that in the nature of the case, this mood could not last, it added fuel to her hatred of the shallow, selfish woman who was responsible. In her serener moments Agatha comforted herself by the reflection that however unhappy Forbes might be without Julia, he was bound to be more unhappy with her. But in the present crisis that consolation failed her. She was swayed by the desire to give him, at all costs, the thing he wanted. Her plan was formed in an instant. Agatha was aware that with many women as with all men, undisputed possession tends to indifference. Forbes' one chance with Julia, she implicitly believed, was to awaken in the mind of that complacent young woman a doubt as to whether her unfortunate lover was in reality hers always, as he declared himself. Forbes, who scorned to ask even for a few months' delay, could not be expected to lend himself to the scheme unfolding in Agatha's fancy. Some friend must do for him what he would not stoop to do for himself. As Agatha walked to the writing-desk, holding the folded sheet pinched shut with thumb and finger, for fear of again reading the assurance of Forbes' unalterable devotion, there was something oddly gallant in her bearing. Her keen common sense was temporarily quiescent. Her heart had things all its own way. Since the prospect of losing Julia irrevocably had graven that terrible look upon Forbes' face, she must find some way of making Julia hesitate to engage herself to Prendergast There was but one chance, as far as Agatha could see. She resolved to take it. No one could consider it singular, Agatha decided, as she seated herself, if an amiable old lady should send a note of congratulation to the girl to whom she had penned so many communications. Agatha almost snatched the stationery from the drawer. She had a most unnatural fear of losing her courage by delay. At the moment she lacked neither courage nor inspiration. "My Dear Miss Studley: "I'm sure you will pardon a line from a woman old enough to be your grandmother." Agatha paused, bit her pen and frowned. "I am, of course," she told herself, with that odd impression of dual identity, which at times made it difficult for her to remember whether she was nineteen or sixty-seven. "But it isn't worth while to make her feel so youthful." She reached for a fresh sheet of paper and made a new start. "My Dear Miss Studley: "I am sure you will pardon a line from a woman old enough to be your mother, who has come to feel right well acquainted with you through Mr. Forbes, and through reading your letters aloud to him. I want to be one of the first to congratulate you, and to wish you all the happiness you deserve." Her pen poised in air, Agatha combated the temptation to underline the last two words. "It's exactly what I _do_ wish her," she mused. "All the happiness she deserves, not a bit more nor a bit less. Poor wretch, it's an inhuman sort of wish but I can't help it, and I'm afraid she won't realize that I'm consigning her to Purgatory." The pen resumed its hurried scratching. It was not necessary for Agatha to wait for inspiration. Words came in a flood. "Some people might blame you for your engagement, so soon after breaking with Mr. Forbes, but I assure you I do not feel that way. I am unmarried myself, and I know that when a woman loses one chance, she may never get another. Mr. Forbes might die or change his mind. I think you are very sensible to make sure of Mr. Prendergast while he is in the mood. Whatever ill-natured people may say about you, I for one will always take this view." Agatha drew a long breath of pure satisfaction. She had undertaken the letter with the sole thought of rushing to Forbes' assistance in his extremity. But virtue was proving its own reward. She was enjoying herself immensely. Her sense of satisfaction made her reckless. When again the pen began moving down the sheet, it wrote more than Agatha had originally intended. "I suppose you sometimes feel a little anxious about Mr. Forbes and his future. It is hard for us women to get rid of a feeling of responsibility for the men who love us. And I am glad I can set your natural misgivings at rest. It would not be a great surprise to me if you should hear of another engagement in the near future. Yet Mr. Forbes is a very honorable gentleman, I need not assure you, and as long as you were unmarried, or at least not engaged, he would not have permitted himself to become entangled with any other woman. But this summer he has spent a great deal of time with a girl who lives in the neighborhood. She is considered extremely pretty and though that does not mean anything to him at present, it is evident that he finds her company most enjoyable. Indeed I believe he is more interested in her than he himself realizes, while the fact that she has devoted practically her entire summer to him, seems to indicate that it would not be difficult to bring her to think of him as something more than a friend. And I've noticed that she seems quite responsive when he pats her hand or holds it, as he has a way of doing. I suppose he feels that an invalid has a right to some little privileges. On one occasion he did so far forget himself as to take her in his arms, but the circumstances were quite unusual, and I saw to it that the indiscretion was never repeated. I always manage to be around when the young people are together, for, as our beloved Longfellow expresses it, 'Man is fire and woman is tow.' "I'm afraid I am a poor one to talk about discretion when I am writing you all this. I'm sure if Mr. Forbes knew he would be very much put out with me, and so I am going to ask you not to speak of this if you should happen to write again. Very likely Mr. Prendergast will not approve of your corresponding with an old flame, and who can blame him, for as Will Carlton says so ably, 'She that is false to one can be the same with two,' or words to that effect. I'm afraid my memory is not what it once was. "Excuse this garrulous letter. How I have run on about Mr. Forbes instead of merely carrying out my first intention, and wishing you the future you so richly deserve. "Very truly yours, "Agatha Kent." Agatha re-read the closely written sheets with growing delectation. In every respect they measured up to her anticipations. She had expressed her sentiments toward Julia with a plainness she would hardly have believed possible in a letter superficially observing the amenities of civilized life. She had planted some barbed suggestions where she flattered herself they would render the reader most uncomfortable. But that was not all. It is a thoroughly human weakness to wish to eat one's cake and have it too, and Agatha suspected Julia of having more than her share of this familiar characteristic. Julia, so Agatha argued, saw herself the irreproachable wife of a wealthy man, enjoying all the dignities incident to the Prendergast social sphere, and at the same time the object of another man's hopeless adoration. The doubt Agatha's letter suggested, that she could continue without a rival to rule in Forbes' affections, was, in Agatha's opinion, Forbes' one chance to keep her from the decisive step. Agatha enclosed Forbes' brief communication with her own lengthy one and despatched it by Howard before qualms could assail her as to the advisability of dropping this particular bomb into the enemy's camp. She knew vaguely that a host of suggestions stood marshaled at the back of her brain, ready to demonstrate conclusively her lack of wisdom. If Julia did not choose to consider the letter confidential, trouble would ensue. The fact that Agatha saw all Forbes' letters, and that he knew only what she chose to tell him, gave her but slight advantage, since she confessed to scruples in the matter of other people's letters. And if it had the result she believed possible, and Julia refused to engage herself to Prendergast till Forbes' recovery was certain or proved impossible, Agatha could not congratulate herself on having assured her friend's happiness. "I'm afraid I'm a good deal like a mother who gives the baby the scissors to play with because he cries for them. Only with a baby you can distract its attention, and make it think that something else is just as good, and with Burton Forbes that wouldn't work." And then having satisfied herself by peering through the window that Forbes' face still wore the dazed look of a creature incomprehensibly wounded, Agatha threw herself upon the couch and sought the relief of tears. She wept as she did everything else. Hot tears rained down upon the pillow. Sobs shook her. Every now and then mirth got the upper hand and she laughed hysterically, interrupting, though briefly, the Niobe-like activities. The storm was over as suddenly as it had begun. Agatha rose and regarded her swollen features in the mirror with much disfavor. "I suppose it's no use to put powder on my nose. It would only look like a strawberry sprinkled with sugar. And anyway, Mr. Forbes can't see what a fright I am." As if that thought had a miraculously sustaining power, Agatha drew a long breath and passed into the kitchen to help Phemie with the dinner. CHAPTER XIV CONFIDENCES Agatha had reached the conclusion that Julia was more venal than vain. A full week she had awaited a sign that her ruse had succeeded. For seven creeping days, dry-lipped and with unsteady pulses, she had scanned the mail for a letter directed in Julia's familiar, hateful hand, and in the beginning she could not have told whether there was more of hope or of apprehension in her expectancy. But now she knew by the way her heart was singing. Her insane attempt to give Forbes the thing he wanted, whatever the consequences, had gloriously failed. She had played a friend's part, if a fool's part, and had not been punished by success. Naturally Forbes' numerous letters had never made the slightest reference to an attractive young girl, who was devoting her summer to rendering his exile tolerable, and such an omission would have awakened doubt in the least suspicious nature. To Agatha, Julia's continued silence, in the face of such facts, was convincing proof that she had thrown up her hand and was out of the game. Agatha had fought Forbes' depression stubbornly while the week was young, and then as hope strengthened, with an audacious, irresistible gaiety that occasionally swept him off his feet. Never had it seemed so difficult to simulate age. A score of times a day she found it necessary to strangle a peal of girlish laughter, or tone it down to the subdued quaver appropriate to her years. It was incredibly irksome to subject her buoyant feet to the yoke of decorum. Never had she so courted exposure as now when the lightening of her heart impelled her to all sorts of foolish youthful pranks. Miss Finch watched her in dumb fascinated terror. And Forbes despite his abysmal gloom, found himself responding with astonishing frequency to her whirlwind spirits. She woke early the morning of the eighth day and lay musing, too pleasurably excited to fall asleep again. Julia was out of the way. She had engaged herself deliberately to another man, and now it was not Julia but a radiant memory against which she must pit her wit and beauty. Had Agatha been older she might have questioned whether this were an occasion for self-congratulation, since the unfading, perfect dream has an undeniable advantage over fading and faulty beauty. But thanks to her inexperience, the removal of Julia from her path left her with a reckless confidence in her star. There was a tangled web to be unraveled, to be sure, before matters were established on a satisfactory footing, but her blithe hopefulness hurdled these grim preliminaries, and busied itself with a future all rose-color. A sound in the next room roused Agatha from her sanguine self-communion, the plaintive little whine of Miss Finch's creaking rocking chair. Agatha sprang out of bed, and carried her watch to the window. The faint light showed the hour hand still plodding on toward four o'clock, no hour surely for Zaida Finch to be indulging her propensity for rocking chairs. A white-clad figure, censoriously erect, appeared in Miss Finch's doorway. Miss Finch gasped, jumped, and made a rush for her bed, as if with the hope of persuading her youthful visitor that the sound of footsteps had roused her from peaceful slumbers. Then realizing the futility of evasion, she stopped short, and stood with hanging head, her air of confusion together with her diminutive figure, giving her the appearance of a naughty child. "Fritz," began Agatha impressively, "why on earth aren't you asleep?" As she came closer her judicial air changed to consternation. Miss Finch's pale little eyes showed red even in the dim light. Her small nose was redder still. Her thin cheeks were wet with tears. "Fritz, dear," cried the girl, her voice vibrant with tenderness, "are you sick? Does your head ache? Get into bed and let me make you comfortable. Why didn't you call me? I've been awake an age." This affectionate concern was too much for Miss Finch's self-control. As she climbed into bed, she gave way to loud sobs. Agatha hung over her, distressed and vaguely self-reproachful, because she had not discovered earlier the urgent need of her presence. "Don't cry, Fritzie! Shall I get you the hot water bottle, or is it the camphor that you need? Where does it hurt?" She patted the little sob-shaken figure with a motherly hand. Even when not impersonating her great-aunt, Agatha frequently felt years older than Zaida Finch. It took a minute to elicit an answer. It came finally in a little sniffly whisper. "My head's all right, Agatha." "Probably that short-cake disagreed with you. I wondered at the time, if two helps weren't too many, with the whipped cream." "My stomach's all right, too," declared Miss Finch, a trifle pettishly. "Then where's the pain?" Miss Finch deliberated. Her tears gushed afresh. "I--guess it's in my heart. I'm worried, Agatha." Agatha sat down on the side of the bed, and sighed remorsefully. "I know it's been a hard summer for you, Fritz. All this deception is very trying for one of your candid temperament. I should mind it frightfully myself if it wasn't for the fun of the thing. But I adored amateur theatricals when I was in boarding-school, and this is exactly the same, except that you have to make up your part as you go along. I knew that you'd been worrying, but I didn't dream how dreadfully you'd taken it to heart." Miss Finch opened one swollen eye. She looked rather taken aback. "I don't deny all this deception has worried me, Agatha. But just now--I was thinking of something else. I'm worried about my own affairs." For a moment Agatha was nonplused. Miss Finch was one of the people who seem to be without personal "affairs." She had no relatives to die, no money to lose, no friends to disappoint her, no prospects to be overcast. She was painfully immune against loss, by comprehensive lack. Then on Agatha's incredulity flashed the recollection of Deacon Wiggins and James Doolittle. In her absorption with her own concerns she had forgotten that Miss Finch stood at a cross-roads, doubtful which turning to take. "Oh, Fritzie," she cried self-reproachfully, "I hope nothing's gone wrong with your love-affairs." Miss Finch's grief lost something of its poignancy. Agatha's exclamation seemed to establish her status. It was something to know love's pangs, even though ignorant of its joys. Her husky voice was controlled as she replied, "The trouble is that they haven't gone at all, right or wrong." "Oh!" Agatha became meditative and Miss Finch's confidences trickled on plaintively, like a sad-hearted brook. "I got another letter from Deacon Wiggins yesterday. He said he guessed his first must have gone astray since he hadn't heard from me. He went over about the same ground as he did in the first letter and he put in a lot of Scripture. It gives one a feeling that a man can be depended on, when he's got so much of the Bible at his tongue's end." "Well?" Agatha interrupted hopefully. "Then I met Mr. Doolittle on the road this afternoon and he looked at me real reproachful, and said he was coming to see me in a day or two. I thought he seemed," faltered Miss Finch in conscience-stricken accents, "kind of thin and pale." Agatha suppressed a smile. "You're keeping them dangling a rather long time, Fritz. I never suspected you before of being a flirt." Then as Miss Finch groaned aloud, the girl repented of her little witticism and hastened to ask, "Aren't you any nearer to making up your mind?" "The trouble is, Agatha," sighed Miss Finch, "that there's so many good reasons on both sides, for and against. I've thought and thought till it's seemed as if my head was spinning 'round on my shoulders. You see there was a cousin of my mother's who was a second wife. She married a man named Flagg, and I've heard her tell Ma that she got so sick of hearing about the way the first Mrs. Flagg did things, that if she'd risen up out of her grave, she'd have given her back her husband as quick as she'd have turned her hand over. She said he was always talking about his first wife's mince meat and her mustard pickles and how saving she was, till it seemed as if there wasn't any use in her trying to do things right." "Well?" Agatha prompted, more to afford Miss Finch the relief of unburdening her mind than because she failed to see the application of the tragedy of the second Mrs. Flagg. "Deacon Wiggins has been married three times. It's likely that some one of those three women could do pretty near everything better than I can," explained Miss Finch, with characteristic humility. "If it was hard for Cousin Caroline Flagg to have one wife held up to her for an example day and night, I don't know how I'm going to stand three of them." Agatha patted the limp hand clutching the damp pocket handkerchief. "I'm sure _I_ should find three predecessors a drawback. That's where Mr. Doolittle has the advantage." "Yes, he seems to have, Agatha. But there's no denying that a man who's lived fifty years without being married to anybody gets dreadfully set in his ways. My father's sister married a man when he was along about fifty, and she was twenty years younger. He was a nice man, but stubborn. For one thing he always kept a pair of extra boots standing under the bed, with the toes sticking out, so he could change quick if he came in. Aunt Hannah was one of the nervous kind and she had looked under the bed for a burglar all her life. When she'd come into the room and see the toes of those boots, it always gave her a turn, and she'd feel sure she'd found him at last. Anybody'd have supposed she'd get used to it after a time, but she never did. She tried her hardest to get him to keep his boots in the closet, and she'd make shoe-bags for him, all bound around with tape and real pretty-looking, but it wasn't any use. He said he'd always kept his boots under the bed, and he'd feel lost if they was anywhere else. Seems as if when a man lives single long enough, he gets to think there ain't but one way of doing things and that's his." "Deacon Wiggins should be adaptable, then," hazarded Agatha. "He's accommodated himself to the ways of three women." "There's another thing," Miss Finch continued, ignoring Agatha's tentative encouragement. "And that's the first wife's relations. I remember Cousin Caroline used to say she didn't mind his folks dropping in, and of course she didn't mind her folks, but when his first wife's folks came to Sunday dinner, or to spend the day, she was on pins and needles. And she said if ever the bread wasn't as light as usual, or the roast got overdone, it would be when some of the first Mrs. Flagg's relations stopped for a meal. She'd been a member of the Methodist church from the time she was thirteen, Cousin Caroline had, and she was president of the Women's Foreign Missionary Society, but I've heard her say with my own ears that she'd rather see the devil coming up the walk any day, than one of the Sawyer tribe--the first Mrs. Flagg was a Sawyer. And she had one set of wife's relations to worry her. I--I--if I took Deacon Wiggins, I'd have three." "If you married James Doolittle," contributed Agatha cheeringly, "you wouldn't be troubled in that way." "No, I wouldn't. But I'm not sure that too little company wouldn't be worse than too much. Mr. Doolittle ain't ever been what you'd call a social man, and except for that sister of his who lives out west, he hasn't any folks to speak of. And as long as I haven't any, I don't see how between us we could scare up enough mourners for a respectable funeral." "Oh, come, Fritz, you're talking of weddings, not funerals. It certainly is a pity that these lovers of yours have their advantages--or disadvantages--so evenly balanced. It's like a see-saw, first one's down and then the other, and that makes it hard to come to a decision." Miss Finch took the banter seriously. "Yes, Agatha, it seems a wicked thing, but I almost wish I'd find out something dreadful about one or the other, like drinking or Sabbath-breaking, and then I'd know what to do. But this weighing things and trying to make up my mind is just wearing me out. Agatha, it ain't what I expected. I supposed it would be an awful pleasant feeling to know that two men wanted you, but the way it's turned out, I don't believe I ever was so worried in my life." "Perhaps proposals are like wisdom teeth, Fritz, and the slower they are coming, the more trouble they make. But don't forget that you aren't under any obligations to take either of these men. We were getting along fine before they thought of wanting to marry you, and if you say no to both of them, you and I will keep Old Maids' Hall and be happy ever after." "I don't believe you're likely to remain single," objected Miss Finch with perfect simplicity. "It's a pity that nice Mr. Warren never came again. You could have had that man if you'd tried. Look at the chocolates he sent you, after only seeing you once, and that in your kitchen clothes." "If my name must be either Kent or Warren, I'll stay an old maid to the end of my days." "I don't see why you don't like the name Warren, Agatha, and I think Mrs. Ridgeley Warren sounds awfully nice. But you're the one to be pleased. It's a pity Mr. Forbes is so afflicted. If it wasn't for that he'd make a grand husband." "Mr. Forbes' worst affliction at present," pronounced Agatha tartly, "is being very much in love with an absolutely heartless and generally despicable young woman named Julia." "My gracious," lamented Miss Finch. "Nice prospect for him, ain't it?" "Not so bad as you'd think. She's going to marry another man." "Oh!" Miss Finch's limp hand came suddenly to life, found Agatha's fingers and squeezed them. "Maybe he'll get over it," she hinted. "Maybe." Something in Agatha's tone suggested she was smiling. "And then if he'd get his eyesight back, the way he expects to--" "Then he'd have to be introduced to me all over again. You know he thinks I'm a kittenish old lady of seventy." "If he doesn't like you better when he finds you're not quite twenty, he's different from most men, that's all." There was a new authority in Miss Finch's pronouncement. She spoke as one who knew the sex, to whom its little idiosyncrasies were an open book. And hardly less significant than the change in herself was the fact that Agatha accepted her altered attitude without surprise. At the same time the girl's impulsive kiss on her old friend's tear-stained cheek was irrelevantly tender. "I must go back to bed," said Agatha. "It'll soon be time to get up. And don't worry over those adorers of yours. It'll do them good to be kept waiting. Men--most men--need to have the conceit taken out of them." Though she paused in the doorway to charge Miss Finch to go to sleep immediately, she did not act on her own counsel. Instead she ensconsed herself on the broad sill of the east window and swinging her dangling bare feet, watched the face of the sky slowly brighten, flushing pink at last, like the cheek of a girl. Overhead little rosy clouds floated, like cherubs, listening to the chorus of bird song which grew in volume moment by moment. Another day was beginning, a good day, Agatha was ready to believe. For though between herself and her heart's desire a tortuous deception lay, to be explained and forgiven, the prospect no longer seemed hopeless. It was an eminently satisfactory world, Agatha decided, with Julia out of the running. CHAPTER XV UNDERNEATH THE BOUGH The kind-hearted Miss Kent had decreed a holiday for Howard. With characteristic thoughtfulness she had volunteered to take Forbes off his hands, and suggested they fill in the time by a long walk with a picnic lunch in some shady place, dinner to be postponed until a convenient hour after their return. Howard showed hilarious approval of the plan, and Forbes aroused himself from his melancholy abstraction sufficiently to agree, whereupon Agatha fell to making sandwiches, giving directions to Phemie as she worked. Nature in the raw did not appeal to Miss Finch. She hated long walks. She hated sitting on the grass; while sandwiches, without an accompanying cup of tea, were as ashes to her taste. The others accepted her excuses with fortitude, and left her at home to see that Phemie did not set the house afire, and to grope wearily toward a solution of her vexing problem. Howard, having stuffed his pockets with a generous proportion of the sandwiches, shouldered his fishing rod and departed to make the most of his holiday. And while the fragrant freshness of the night still lingered in the air, Forbes and Agatha set out in the direction of the woods. The serene confidence of her morning vigil still enfolded Agatha. She walked as if keeping time to music, inaudible to all ears but her own. Forbes had insisted on carrying the basket of lunch which also contained a book or two, in case their mood should take a literary turn. Agatha kept fast hold of his arm, the better to steer his steps, and he thought there was a hint of friendliness in the firm clasp. The lonely and unhappy man felt a disproportionate sense of gratitude. They walked and rested, strolled on and rested again. Neither was inclined to talk. Forbes had plenty to occupy his thoughts, and Agatha, too, was reflective. She realized that the time was at hand when she must confess to Forbes the deception she had practised on him, or else allow him to go out of her life altogether. Neither alternative was agreeable, but the latter was unthinkable. A scheme occurred to her so in harmony with her native audacity that she dallied with it lovingly, before reluctantly renouncing it as impracticable. She could tell Forbes that she expected a visit from her grand-niece, Agatha Kent, and prejudice him in favor of the newcomer by assuring him of the extraordinary likeness existing between the twentieth-century Agatha and her girlhood self. After the new Agatha's arrival, she could leave him more and more to the society of the younger woman, withdrawing by degrees into the background until her sudden demise would hardly shock him, though he would naturally feel more or less responsible for consoling her namesake and heir. Agatha's final rejection of the plan was due less to doubt of her ability to act the dual rôle, or to manage the embarrassing details of her own interment, than to the realization that if her intimacy with Forbes was to continue, it must be established on a foundation of absolute truth. This deception on which she had entered so light-heartedly, had its sole excuse in the impermanence of their relationship. Before their friendship could become real there must be perfect understanding between them. They ate their sandwiches shortly after noon, washing them down with deliciously cool water from a convenient spring. The day had grown warm and very still. "It feels as if a thunder-storm might be brewing," Forbes remarked, breaking one of the periods of friendly silence. "I think not," Agatha answered in a dreamy voice. "Don't you love this stillness here in the shade? It's perfect, perfect!" "'A book of verses underneath the bough, A loaf of bread, a jug of wine--and thou,'" quoted Forbes inevitably. He was laughing but the lines stirred her, and to disguise the fact she spoke nonchalantly. "There _is_ a book of poems in the basket, but I don't care for reading to-day, do you? It's one of the times when you feel everything that has ever been written and more too. You simply want to sit and think how wonderful it is to be alive." "By jove, it's you that's wonderful," Forbes exclaimed. "That sensitiveness wears off with most people long before they're my age, to say nothing of yours. But you feel the thrill of life and the mystery and the adventure, as if you were a girl." "Yes," Agatha acquiesced, "I do." "I'd have known it without your telling me. It's been a continual marvel all through our acquaintance, that ardent freshness of yours. It's confirmed my faith in immortality." Agatha had no answer ready. He groped for her hand and took possession of it with becoming masterfulness. "I've got something to say to you, something very important. I've meant to say it for an age, but I've been too much of a coward to risk a no." Agatha was obliged to remind herself that she was almost seventy years of age. Otherwise she might have suspected she was listening to a proposal. "Before I can explain my plan, I want to ask you something. Aren't you ever lonely here in winter?" The question was less formidable than she had anticipated. Her quick assent showed relief. "And aren't you going to miss me a little when I go back to the city?" "Of course I shall," she said faintly, and instinctively tried to withdraw her hand. He tightened his hold, laughing. "Please don't take it away. It does me good, and I'm sure it can't do you any harm. Now you've given me just the encouragement I needed. If you're lonely here, and if you're going to miss me, why shouldn't you and I set up housekeeping together?" "I--I don't understand." Again Agatha steadied herself with the recollection of her three-score years and seven. "I'm afraid you've spoiled me," Forbes continued with sudden seriousness. "I've grown shamefully dependent on you. It isn't altogether or chiefly that you've looked after my physical comfort so wonderfully, though, of course, that counts. But you've been so interested in all that concerns me, so sympathetic, such a good pal--" He broke off, apparently at a loss for words. "You're as bracing as an October breeze," he said. "God knows what I should have done without you, this damnable summer." The thought crossed her mind that this was her opportunity. Now that they were alone, now that he had acknowledged his indebtedness, she could safely throw herself upon his mercy. Her lips parted for her confession, and an overmastering cowardly fear paralyzed the organs of speech. Suppose he refused to forgive her. Then he would go away and she would never see him again. She must make herself still more indispensable. She must foster that feeling of dependence before she risked self-accusation. "Of course I must be in town next winter," Forbes went on. "Why shouldn't I take a furnished apartment and have you as a sort of mother confessor? We can get some good servants so you will be relieved of all responsibility as far as the establishment is concerned, and your sole duty will be to keep me content with life. How does that appeal to you?" Agatha heard herself faltering something about Miss Finch. "Oh, we'll find a place for Miss Finch," Forbes said tolerantly. "I took it for granted Miss Finch would come along, just as I assumed that your shadow would accompany you." "It may be that Zaida will be married by fall," exclaimed Agatha, seizing the opportunity to postpone the necessity of answering him. She would not have risked the story on Warren, but she trusted Forbes to understand that even while her voice broke with uncontrollable laughter, she was not holding her old friend up to ridicule. As she described Miss Finch's singular quandary, Forbes joined in her laughter, more spontaneously than for many weeks, though he made no effort to conceal his amazement. "Miss Finch! I begin to feel that I haven't done justice to the lady's charms. She has impressed me as colorless, not faded, you know, but colorless from the start." "It's well we don't all see alike," Agatha said demurely, though a little startled by his perspicacity. His next remark took her by surprise. "It's a thousand pities you never married." Her impertinent retort that there was still time for that, was checked before it left her lips, and replaced by the less hazardous rejoinder, "In that case, probably I shouldn't be sitting here with you." "True. But my good luck has meant loss to so many. You would have been an incomparable mother. It's a shame you didn't have a dozen children. Do you know I've never in my life felt such a sense of being mothered as I have since I came to Oak Knoll. My own mother was an invalid when I first remember her." A little confused, but gallantly striving to live up to her maternal rôle, Agatha patted his arm with her disengaged hand. He showed his filial appreciation by kissing the other. "It wasn't my father's fault, anyway, that you didn't fulfil your destiny. He took me into his confidence the last few months of his life, not in any formal way, you understand, just a word dropped here and there. He was the tenderest of husbands to my mother, but at the last of his life, his thoughts were all with his first love." He turned toward her with a gesture plainly interrogative. "He must have been rather an attractive young fellow." "He was." Agatha spoke with conviction. "And still you turned him down. I suppose it would be presumptuous to hazard a guess that there was another man." "Yes, I think it would be rather presumptuous," Agatha said breathlessly. "Anyway, it's foolish, dragging up old love-affairs. 'Let the dead past bury its dead,' you know, though you modern young folks don't hold Longfellow in such esteem as my generation did." "I was only thinking that if there was a man who might have married you and didn't, he's probably putting in his time in the next world cursing his luck. But you're not going to be as hard on the son as you were on the father, are you?" "I--I--do you mean--" "You're not going to blast all my hopes by saying no. How am I going to get along without you; tell me that?" "You must give me a little time to think," Agatha protested faintly. She had vowed that morning to avoid all references in the future to her advanced age, but the habit of acting a part was too strong to be overcome by a single resolution. She heard herself continuing mechanically, "Old people don't like to be hurried into important decisions. Leaving the home of so many years and going away with a young man may seem a very little thing to you, but to me it's a real adventure." "Take all the time you want for reflection," he conceded generously. "Only understand, you must end by saying yes!" "You might change your mind and not want me," Agatha said. The playfulness oozed out of her tone as she voiced her haunting dread. "You might find out something about me, some trait you had never suspected. I might be any number of awful things--deceitful, for instance." Again the impulse to confession took her by the throat. Again she fought it off almost with terror. It was too soon. She was not ready. She did not know what to say, and moreover the moment was too sweet to spoil. Forbes laughed tolerantly. "Oh, I'll take the risk. Shall we shake hands on the bargain?" He was amused by the fervor of her refusal, but his instinct warned him he was carrying his teasing too far. He had a strong conviction that she would end by accepting his proposition, but nothing would be gained by hurrying her to a decision. Though in most things she was strangely younger than her years, her age manifested itself in her reluctance to change the established order. He congratulated himself on broaching the subject early enough to give her time for accustoming herself to the idea. A comfortable silence fell between them. Forbes stretched himself on the pine needles, and presently dropped off to sleep. He had held to her hand throughout their talk with seeming playfulness, though perhaps underneath was the instinct of the blind man to establish a link between himself and his kind, to touch what he can not see. In his sleep he moved nearer the imprisoned hand, and lay with his cheek touching it. And though her arm grew very tired from staying in one position so long, passing through the various stages from prickles to excruciating pain, and finally to a numbness which made her wonder if she could ever use it again, Agatha did not move. Indeed as she sat listening to his quiet breathing, feeling through the torture of her cramped muscles the touch of his cheek against her hand, her only quarrel with the hour was that it could not last. CHAPTER XVI MISS FINCH FOLLOWS A CLASSIC EXAMPLE Zaida Finch was not ill-pleased at the prospect of a day to herself. Agatha's personality was distracting. It was next to impossible to concentrate your thoughts on your own affairs, however urgent the need, when Agatha was darting about like a bright-plumaged bird, saying things that interested you, even though you frequently found them shocking. "She's a dear girl," Miss Finch reflected, "but upsetting; and I need quiet." She seated herself upon the broad porch, with the inevitable mending, and wearily began weighing the advantages of one suitor against those of his rival. There was the matter of health to be considered, an important factor in reaching a decision. Zaida remembered a spinster of forty married to a man considerably her senior, who had been a bride three weeks to a day when the bridegroom was smitten with paralysis. "And poor Linda was nothing but a sick-nurse from that on," mused Miss Finch. "He must have lasted a good twenty years. I never was much of a hand in the sick-room. Nursing would wear me out in no time." But though caution sharpened her natural acuteness, Miss Finch was unable to award to either of the gentlemen who had honored her, any advantage over the other in the matter of health. She could not remember that Deacon Wiggins had ever been ill, though sickness and death had been familiar guests in his household. James Doolittle frequently walked with a limp due to rheumatic trouble, but James came from long-lived stock, and gave a reassuring impression of toughness. As far as human judgment could play the prophet, she would not be called on to act as nurse to either aspirant, at least for a number of years. Miss Finch's mending suffered. She found it difficult to employ her brain and her fingers in synchronous activities, and as selecting a husband naturally took precedence over stopping the holes in Howard's socks, she sat much of the morning with her hands lying idle in her lap, her countenance expressing a concentration almost tragic. By noon she was fairly limp from the strain and she went to the kitchen to ask Phemie for a cup of tea. The sound of wheels recalled her to the porch before her modest luncheon was disposed of. Her first apprehension that either the deacon or James Doolittle was coming to insist on an immediate answer, vanished as she caught sight of two unmistakably feminine figures on the rear seat of the rickety vehicle approaching. But her feeling of reassurance was of brief duration. Almost immediately the conviction seized her that the women were strangers. Miss Finch stood quaking. Her constitutional shyness had been so cultivated by a lifetime of keeping herself in the background that the prospect of an interview with the unknown women presented itself as an ordeal. It was probable, Miss Finch reflected, that they were city people looking for board. In that case it was only necessary to tell them that they did not wish any additional boarders, and they would have no alternative but to go away. Nevertheless she wished with illogical heartiness that Agatha were at home to assume the responsibility of the interview. The creaking carryall came to a halt in front of the house. Miss Finch saw that of the two passengers, one was young and one elderly, while both were smartly dressed and formidable. It was the older woman who addressed her, eying her disapprovingly through her lorgnette, and speaking in a tone of incredulity that somehow was offensive. "My good woman, kindly tell me whether this is Oak Knoll." "Yes, it is," said Miss Finch, reduced by the lorgnette to abject helplessness. The driver growled something from the front seat. Miss Finch understood him to say, "Next time maybe you'll believe me." "And is Mr. Forbes, Mr. Burton Forbes, spending the summer here?" The incredulity was as marked as before and as disagreeable. "Yes'm," replied Miss Finch faintly. "He is." The driver growled again. The substance of his remark, as far as Miss Finch could grasp it in her confusion, seemed to be, "What did I tell you?" But it mattered little to Miss Finch what the driver had to say. A deplorable certainty absorbed her. The women were preparing to alight. There was a trifling delay, owing to the fact they seemed to expect the driver to assist them, while he assured them that he did not dare to leave his horses. As the dejected steeds stood with hanging heads, apparently resigned to the prospect of dying in their traces, the indignation of the two passengers was amply justified. They were out at last, and while the elderly lady haughtily paid the driver, Miss Finch's distended eyes were taking a rapid inventory of the younger. She was extremely handsome, Miss Finch saw, tall and slender and tremendously striking in her black and white costume. She stood looking about her with an evident disdain which the little spinster might have resented, had she not been chilled by an indefinable fear. When the beautiful stranger spoke, her remark was a complete surprise. "Miss Kent, I suppose." Zaida Finch became aware of an inexplicable hostility in the other's manner, of an arrogance that bordered on insolence. She found she was being scrutinized contemptuously. The little drab nonentity felt in her veins an unprecedented stirring of resentment. "No, I'm not," she said with a flatness that seemed deliberately contradictive. "I'm Miss Finch." "Be so kind as to call Miss Kent." "She's out, I'm sorry to say," replied Miss Finch, and her regret was heart-felt. If only Agatha were on hand to give back this presumptuous girl stare for stare, to inquire her errand, in the chilling tone of which Agatha knew the secret, and finally to send her about her business. "Call Mr. Forbes, then." "Mr. Forbes is out, too," Miss Finch explained, and a little chill ran down her spine. She had forgotten how imperative it was that Agatha should not encounter any of Forbes' friends. If their unwelcome guests lingered, it would be necessary for Agatha to become Hephzibah again with all the inconveniences attendant on that incarnation. "I've got to get rid of 'em somehow," thought Miss Kent distractedly. But apparently for the younger of the two strangers, Miss Finch had ceased to exist. She turned to her companion impatiently. "It's dreadfully boring, Aunt Estelle, but Burton is out at present. We'll have to sit on the porch and wait. Fortunately it is shady." "Yes, it seems to be _shady_," admitted Aunt Estelle, with an emphasis indicating that as far as the porch was concerned, she could make no further concessions. She climbed the steps looking about her with multiplying evidences of disquiet. "Ask her when Burton will be back," she enjoined, exactly as if Miss Finch had spoken a foreign tongue, and could be addressed only through an interpreter. Miss Finch did not wait to have the inquiry translated. "I don't know _when_ he'll be back," she said quickly. "Probably he'll be gone all day." "He'll return for luncheon, I suppose," said Aunt Estelle, grudgingly acknowledging Miss Finch's ability to speak English, but apparently liking her no better on that account. "No, he won't," declared Miss Finch, with unaccustomed positiveness. "They took sandwiches." The two women exchanged glances. "Who is with Mr. Forbes?" asked the younger. Her manner implied her right to know. "Ag--well, Miss Kent went with him." And to herself Miss Finch added wildly, "I can't have a lie on my conscience, even for Agatha." "Who else was in the party, please?" The young woman in black and white had become a judge, and Miss Finch, the prisoner at the bar. "There wasn't anybody else," gasped Miss Finch, with every indication of uttering a deliberate and premeditated falsehood. "Where were they going?" "I don't know exactly. They were going for a picnic somewhere, but I didn't hear 'em say where. I don't know as they knew themselves." The judicial sternness became more marked as the prisoner's embarrassment increased. "You mean that Mr. Forbes and Miss Kent have gone off for the day with--sandwiches?" Something in her inflection made the mention of sandwiches the crowning insult to her intelligence. "Yes," faltered Miss Finch guiltily. "They often take long walks, and carry a picnic lunch." The older lady spoke with asperity. "It's a preposterous situation. I'm sorry to remind you, Julia, that I said at the start it would be better to telegraph." Miss Finch started violently. She recalled Agatha's confidential assurance that Forbes was in love with a despicable young woman named Julia, but that the aforesaid Julia was to marry another man. Yet here she was, undeniably handsome, terrifyingly elegant, and worst of all, with no apparent doubt as to her right to be demanding the immediate producing of Mr. Forbes. The two women had seated themselves, Aunt Estelle ostentatiously dusting the rocker she trusted with her ample person. Miss Finch proffered a belated and reluctant hospitality. "If you're thinking of sitting here long, I'll see about getting you something to eat." Julia brushed the offer aside without thanks. "We shall wait for Mr. Forbes." "It is really absurd, you know," Aunt Estelle contributed, "for us to sit waiting indefinitely. Burton must be somewhere about. A blind man and an old woman can not possibly walk very far. Why are they not sent for?" As her inquiry was addressed to Julia, Julia passed it on to Miss Finch, her extremely frigid tone indicating that Miss Finch should have thought of that herself. "There's nobody to send except the hired girl," Miss Finch explained despairingly. "And she never was known to find anything, even if it was right under her nose. If only Howard--" Miss Finch checked herself abruptly. A thought had flashed across her mind so dazzling in its brilliancy she could hardly believe herself capable of originating it. Indeed, the probability is that she had not done so, but that some extravagant fancy of Agatha's, falling like seed into her subconsciousness, had lain there dormant till the emergency brought it to swift germination. Zaida Finch had never heard of Victor Hugo's saintly nun, crowning a lifetime of sanctity by a devout and holy lie, but unconsciously she was inspired to emulate her example. With Miss Finch veracity was almost a mania. She was one of the tiresome people who are continually suspecting themselves of exaggeration or of misrepresentation of something absolutely without importance, and then bore their associates by insisting on their attention while they painstakingly correct their statements. Yet now she forgot her habitual dread of falsehood. If a lie were necessary to save Agatha, lie she must. She resumed her interrupted sentence, pale but resolute. "If only Howard was well, he could look for 'em. He could find 'em if anybody could. But it'll be a good while before he does much running around, I guess." The two visitors regarded her stonily. In her simplicity she had assumed their cooperation to the extent of a question or two. They would surely ask her who Howard was, or why he was incapacitated. But apparently these matters did not interest them in the slightest degree. It was necessary for Miss Finch to continue her career of mendacity unaided by so much as the lifting of an interrogative eye-brow. Miss Finch rose to the occasion. "He's sick, you know," she confided to the two pairs of indifferent ears. "High fever, and considerable of a rash--if you'd call it a rash." Aunt Estelle showed a slight uneasiness. "You've consulted a physician, I suppose." "We're trying a kind of mental cure first," replied Miss Finch as glibly as if she had practised perjury from her childhood. "And then if that don't work, Ag--Miss Kent is going to call in the doctor. But she don't like to do it till she has to, for it would be awful inconvenient to be quarantined." "Quarantined," exclaimed Aunt Estelle with fresh evidences of perturbation. "Have you any reason to think that it may be contagious?" "Most of these rashy diseases are," Miss Finch replied. And though there was no malice in her composition, she was conscious of relishing Aunt Estelle's air of agitation. "I'm hoping it's nothing worse than scarlet fever, though there's been a good many cases of smallpox around here lately. And I don't know that Howard's ever been vaccinated." Aunt Estelle rose from her chair with a little cry. In her palpitating pallor she reminded Miss Finch irresistibly of blanc-mange. "Smallpox, Julia," she exclaimed. "Do you hear what the woman says--smallpox! Even if we escape with our lives, one's complexion--oh, my God! Why did I ever listen to this mad idea of yours!" Julia's composure was in refreshing contrast to her aunt's excitement. She rose, it is true, but only to advance to the older woman's side and whisper in her ear. And having whispered, she calmly resumed her seat, and looked away toward the hills, apparently intensely interested in the scenery. Aunt Estelle stood irresolute. "Do you really think so?" "I'm absolutely sure of it," said Julia. "I think I noticed a little wildness in the eye myself," Aunt Estelle conceded, with a return of her earlier conviction of Miss Finch's inability to understand English. "Unmistakable," opined Julia. Miss Finch looked blankly from one to the other and hope was at low ebb. They were going to stay. She had thrilled with childlike pride at the discovery of her own inventiveness, culpable though it might be. Complacency had whispered that Agatha herself could not have done better. And now she realized that her effort had failed. She had sacrificed her conscience to friendship, and the sacrifice had been in vain. Though not so quick-witted as many another, she had no difficulty in recognizing the conclusion these strangers had reached. To herself she said, "They think I'm crazy." Miss Finch was not at the end of her resources. Her lapse from the path of rectitude had proved strangely stimulating to the imagination. She meant to get rid of these women before Agatha returned. Agatha would be equal to the emergency provided she were not taken by surprise. If Julia and her aunt were not afraid of smallpox, it was possible that they might be afraid of a crazy woman who showed signs of becoming violent. "G-r-r-r-r--" said Miss Finch menacingly. Aunt Estelle jumped and took another chair. For the first time in her life, Miss Finch felt herself at no disadvantage because of her insignificant proportions. "G-r-r-r-r-r--" she said again. "Julia," exclaimed Aunt Estelle nervously, "do you really think it's safe--" The intrepidity of the modern young woman passes comprehension. "Harmless, I imagine," Julia said with nonchalance. "Otherwise Burton would hardly have remained." "Why he should have remained in this place under any circumstances," declared Aunt Estelle, "passes my comprehension." "There must be some reason we know nothing about. Burton will explain." Something in Julia's tone implied that Forbes would not find explanations altogether easy. She added with evident relief, "Here he comes now." "Thank heaven!" cried Aunt Estelle piously. Miss Finch looked wildly in the direction of Julia's steadfast gaze. All was over. Arm in arm across the grass, so absorbed in each other that the girl was as blind as the man to the audience on the porch, came Agatha and Forbes. CHAPTER XVII THE DAY OF JUDGMENT Forbes woke refreshed from his sylvan nap, and sat for a little discoursing on the invigorating effect of contact with mother earth, while Agatha, by drastic massage, restored the circulation to her temporarily paralyzed arm. The sun had dipped but little toward the western horizon when they turned their faces homeward, and they walked slowly. Agatha exulted in heat. A temperature of ninety stimulated her both physically and mentally. But Forbes found the warmth of the day relaxing, and she set the pace with that fact in mind. Toward the last of their long leisurely walk, Forbes brought up the subject he had introduced earlier in the day. Though he made no effort to hurry her to a decision, he sketched entertainingly some of the diversions she might anticipate, if she accepted his invitation for the winter. The program was planned with due regard for the infirmities of age, but Agatha listened raptly. They were but a few rods from their destination, Forbes talking earnestly, and Agatha hanging on his words, when some mysterious sixth sense warned her of danger. She looked ahead and instantly halted. Forbes felt her figure stiffen against his arm, and instinct told him she was frightened. "What is the matter?" he cried, sickening with a new realization of his helplessness. Agatha did not answer, but as she stared ahead she understood that doomsday had arrived unheralded. A young woman was tripping toward them, a handsome young woman, who even without beauty would have attracted all eyes by the distinction of her dress and bearing. It could be no other than Julia. The ample lady in the background, following with a haste that empurpled her complexion, that she might not be left tête-à-tête with a maniac, failed to attract Agatha's attention. Julia's graceful figure dominated the landscape. "What _is_ the matter?" Forbes again demanded. He laid his hand reassuringly over the fingers trembling upon his arm. And at that moment a voice subtly reproachful, suggestively tender, spoke his name. "Burton!" "Julia!" Forbes shouted. His dear old friend, Miss Kent, and her mysterious perturbation, were instantly forgotten. He started forward, remembered that he was blind, stood irresolute, his hands outstretched. "Julia!" he cried again, this time with entreaty as well as rapture. Agatha was ready to believe that then and there she had amply atoned for her sins, past and present. Even the certainty that the hour of her humiliation was at hand could not hurt worse than the joy ringing through his voice as he spoke another woman's name. She wondered dully at her own folly. She had been warned and had not heeded. She had known all the time of his love for Julia, and yet had foolishly assumed that since Julia's selfish decision had put her out of his reach, he would turn to her for consolation. Her pride had not rebelled over taking what Julia had thrown away. Indeed she had thought very little about herself. Her one desire was to be light to his blind eyes, balm to his wounded heart. But her castle of dreams was in ruins, as soon as he spoke the name she had hated from the first day she had heard it on his lips. Julia approached him as swiftly as was consistent with grace, a rather insolent triumph in the glance she shot over his shoulder toward the pale girl standing in the background. "Yes, Burton," she said gently, "it is Julia," and extended both hands. He caught them ardently and held them fast, his eager face questioning her dumbly, though he only said, "What a wonderful surprise! How good of you, how very good of you!" "My aunt, Mrs. Knox, is with me, Burton," continued Julia, the pensiveness of her tone flatly contradicted by her air of elation. "I think you have met Mr. Forbes, Aunt Estelle." Aunt Estelle, still panting, brought herself into hand-shaking distance and this formality helped to recall Forbes to the realization that there were other people in the world besides Julia and himself. He turned toward Agatha. "This is a pleasure I have been promising myself," he said. "Julia, I want you to know my dear friend, Miss Kent. Miss Kent, let me present Mrs. Knox and Miss Studley." The blankness of the silence that ensued was as definite as a blow. Forbes stood awaiting the conventional formula, but his quick ear could detect only the sound of hurried breathing. Again he turned toward Agatha, but for the first time she failed him. "Miss Kent is still here, is she not?" queried Forbes. He remembered his ideas had been chaotic after discovering Julia's presence. His late companion might easily have withdrawn without attracting his attention. For so simple a question, the effect was startling. "Burton," Julia cried, her voice sharp to the point of shrillness, "what are you talking about?" Aunt Estelle caught her sleeve. "Can't you understand, Julia?" she hissed. "This place is a private asylum. That crazy old creature on the porch, and now him. It's perfectly plain. Let us go away at once." Forbes caught most of this sibilant outburst. He turned white with anger. "Miss Kent?" he pleaded, and Agatha pulled herself together. Her voice was steady if slightly unnatural, as she answered, "Yes, I am here." Forbes tried to laugh. The consciousness of being enveloped in baffling mystery made his blindness doubly intolerable. There was a bewilderment in his voice that wrung Agatha's heart. "This is what I have been hoping for all summer. You know how often I've wished you and Miss Studley might know each other." "Burton," Julia screamed, "who and what is this person?" The contempt in her tone, even more than her disdainful phrasing, brought the blood racing to his forehead. "Julia!" He seemed to defy her to go on. "If you have read my letters at all," he said in a vibrant voice, "you know both who Miss Kent is and how much I am in her debt." "Miss Kent! Your father's friend!" "And mine as well, Julia." There was no ecstatic tenderness now in his use of her name, but indignant sternness. "Burton, either you are insane or the woman is an impostor. She is not old. She is young, hardly more than a girl." Forbes attempted to reply, but for a moment no words came. He put his hand to his forehead with a confused gesture. "I have been off in the woods with Miss Kent all day," he stammered. "I supposed--I had not noticed--" Again he turned in Agatha's direction. "Who are you, please?" There was no trace of emotion in her composed answer. "I am Agatha Kent." "Do you dare to say," shrieked Julia, "that you were the friend of Mr. Forbes' father?" "I never saw Mr. Forbes' father." Forbes took a step ahead, then halted, and stood with his feet a little apart, like one who balances himself on the deck of a heaving ship in a high sea. "But where," he stammered, "where is the other Miss Kent?" "There is no other. My Great-aunt Agatha, for whom I was named, died twelve years ago." There was a momentary palpitating silence which Julia was the first to break. "And you mean," she arraigned her, "that all this summer you have been a deliberate impostor, palming yourself off on Mr. Forbes as an old woman, allowing him to think--oh, it's too shameful. I can't believe any girl would be so base." "It is quite true, nevertheless," Agatha assured her gently. Her steady eyes met Julia's, and even that intrepid young woman drew back a step. Her momentary shrinking was not unreasonable for could concentrated hate smite like a lightning bolt, her life would have been measured by seconds. Instinct taught Julia how to repay that level look by the deadliest hurt. She turned on Forbes furiously. "Do you mean to tell me that you have been the victim of a hoax all summer, that this girl has passed herself off on you for an old woman? But, no, it isn't possible. You've contrived this outrageous story between you to cover up something disgraceful. You couldn't have been such a dupe as you pretend. It's incredible!" Forbes' color came and went during this attack. "It seems incredible," he owned when she gave him opportunity. "I don't blame you for questioning the truth of such a story. I can only remind you that it is easy to deceive a blind man." Something in Agatha's stony whiteness convinced Julia that she had made no mistake in her choice of retribution. She gave the screws another turn. "You mean for me to believe, Burton, that you've been only the gullible victim of a swindle, that this impostor has tricked you successfully all these months?" There was a rather long silence. "Yes," said Forbes tonelessly, "that is what I mean." Julia's first sense of being at a disadvantage had passed. She was thoroughly enjoying herself. "I begin to understand your strange letter," she said, addressing Agatha. "Your letter of congratulation, you know. I suppose you are the young woman to whom you referred, the one with whom Mr. Forbes had spent so much time, you no doubt remember." There was such malicious satisfaction in her tone that Forbes turned as if to interfere. Then his uplifted arm dropped rather heavily to his side. "You'll laugh when I tell you, Burton," exclaimed Julia, setting him the example by laughing herself, most unpleasantly. "But she insinuated in this letter that you might marry her. That is at the bottom of this outrageous plot. She actually thought she could compromise you in some dreadful way and force you to marry her. Shocking as it is, one can't help being amused." Forbes' only answer was again to lift his hand to his head. It was Agatha who spoke. Unmasked adventuress as she was, her dignity was in rather agreeable contrast to Julia's vindictive shrillness. "It is hardly necessary to trouble Mr. Forbes with any further details," she said, "since, thanks to you, my plot against his peace has been exposed. I suppose you will want to take him away as soon as possible." "Oh, at once." Julia showed signs of becoming hysterical. "The very first train. I feel as if I couldn't breathe in this atmosphere of deceit." "I'm afraid there is no train before five o'clock, but I'll have the carriage ready in plenty of time. And now, if you will excuse me, I shall see about getting you some luncheon." "Luncheon! Good heavens, I couldn't eat a mouthful. It would choke me." Mrs. Knox seconded her niece admirably. "It would not be safe, Julia. A person capable of all this would not hesitate to poison our food." Agatha accepted this tribute without comment. "Will you pack Mr. Forbes' things yourself?" she said, addressing Julia. Again Mrs. Knox intervened. "Julia, I forbid you to go into that house, with this girl, and that dreadful, crazy creature--" Forbes interrupted with signs of irritation. "You said that once before. There is no insane woman here." "I am afraid you are not a very good judge of what _is_ or is _not_ here, Mr. Forbes," replied Aunt Estelle, scoring again. "We had a most unpleasant encounter with a woman clearly insane. She positively gibbered." "Yes, Burton," Julia cried with shrewish enjoyment, "you have been made a laughing-stock all summer, poor dear. You've kept writing about this fine old place. I wish you could see it. It's simply in the last stages of dilapidation." "It's ready to fall to pieces," corroborated Aunt Estelle. "I didn't venture inside, but the glimpses of the interior I got from the window showed that everything was fairly moth-eaten." "Yes," Agatha admitted quietly. "We are very poor, so poor that a blind boarder seemed providential. Won't you sit on the porch till the carriage is ready?" she added politely. "I'm sure Mr. Forbes is tired after his long walk." "Oh, please," protested Julia, her self-control shaken by the other's calm, "please drop this pretext of being so interested in Mr. Forbes' welfare. After the fraud you have practised on him all summer you can hardly expect him to believe anything you say." "Oh, no," said Agatha. "I don't expect that for a moment. And now if you're sure you won't eat a little luncheon, I'll bid you all good afternoon." She went across the grass to the house, carrying herself with her chin high, moving deliberately. No one could have guessed the fact of which she was so certain, that during the encounter she had ceased to be a girl, that she had leaped without any intervening stages of maturity and middle life, straight to old age, that dreadful old age, beyond hope or joy, the age that is death in life. Agatha remembered wonderingly that once the mere flicker of sunshine through leaves, the mere fragrance of a flower, had a magic to quicken her pulses. A little after three the carryall appeared. Howard was driving, and Forbes' suit-case and other impedimenta lay on the seat beside him. As he helped his passengers in, he explained that the trunk would be sent by express next day. This announcement was received in frigid silence whereupon Howard, too, became sulkily silent and used the whip on the fat bays with such effect that they covered the five miles between Oak Knoll and the village station at an unprecedented rate of speed. Forbes thawed a little when Howard helped him to alight, and stood for a moment beside him. "Good-by, Mr. Forbes," the boy said huskily. "I'm awfully sorry you're going." He put out his hand and after an instant's hesitation Forbes gripped it. He had grown fond of the boy. "Oh, Howard," he said, his voice betraying his hurt, "I wouldn't have believed it of you." He heard Howard gulp and then burst out sobbing. Fortunately for the boy's pride, the hour was early and the station platform lacked its customary contingent of loafers. "We didn't mean anything, Mr. Forbes," Howard choked. "Aggie wanted to take boarders, so she could send me to school, but when they saw how old and shabby the house was, they wouldn't come." "Is she your sister?" "Kind of one. Her father married my mother. She's better than a thousand real sisters." "Burton," said Julia's voice beside them, "I wouldn't encourage the boy by listening to him. Probably that young woman has coached him in a new series of lies." "Aggie never tells lies," Howard challenged her hotly. "This was like a charade or something. Mr. Forbes thought she was old and so she pretended to be. We had lots of fun and it didn't do anybody any harm." He appealed to Forbes. "She took good care of you anyway, didn't she, Mr. Forbes?" "Really, Burton," expostulated Julia, "I can not allow this to go on. These people evidently regard you as fair game. It's dreadful that your blindness should put you so at the mercy of the unscrupulous, but I shall see that you are not imposed on while I am with you. Send this boy away." "He doesn't need to send me away," Howard exploded indignantly. "I'm going." He seized Forbes' hand again. "Good-by, Mr. Forbes. Come and see us some time." Julia gasped. "Did any one ever imagine such impertinence!" she asked of high heaven. "Such people seem to be without natural shame. I suppose they are so accustomed to being found out in falsehood and fraud that they take it as a matter of course. In the interest of justice there should be some way of punishing them. Couldn't they be prosecuted, Burton, for obtaining money under false pretenses?" Forbes made no reply. Apparently he did not share Julia's lofty enthusiasm for abstract justice. His air of bewildered dejection suggested a lost child, rather than a man rescued from a false and intolerable position by the lady of his heart. CHAPTER XVIII WARREN GETS A TIP Ridgeley Warren had been to the station to bid a friend _bon voyage_. He presented himself armed with a box of chocolates, the latest novel and three brand-new witticisms culled from a roof-garden program the previous evening. The pretty girl had accepted his offerings with marked graciousness and had laughed convulsively at each of the jokes, thereby intensifying Warren's habitual sense of being on good terms with himself and all the world. His spirits unclouded by the pang of parting, he strolled toward the exit, trying to decide where to dine, when his own name reached his ears coupled with a fervent ejaculation, "Mr. Warren! Thank heaven!" Warren spun on his heel to encounter Julia advancing with extended hand. Julia was not one of Warren's favorites, but her pleasure at the sight of him was contagious. "Gosh!" he exclaimed agreeably, "this _is_ luck." It was while shaking hands with Julia that Warren became aware of Mrs. Knox's imposing figure in the background. And scarcely had he lifted his hat in recognition of her presence, when his eye fell on Forbes, a pale and woebegone object, committed to the clumsy guardianship of a station porter. Warren turned on Julia blithely. "Don't tell me you've sprung a surprise on us. Don't say that I should have come with my pockets full of rice." "Oh, Mr. Warren, be serious, please." There was gentle reproach in Julia's uplifted eyes. "It seems really providential meeting you here. Now you can take charge of Burton till he finds some suitable person to look after him." "What's become of the nice little chap who has been on the job all summer?" "Oh, Mr. Warren!" Julia's gesture indicated the futility of attempting immediate explanations. "It's a long, a dreadful story, and it will take time to make you understand." "Hm! I'm not usually considered so dense." "But this isn't like anything else. It's incredible. I can hardly believe it myself. Let's go to some quiet place where we can have dinner and talk things over." "Yes, for heaven's sake, let us have dinner," snapped Mrs. Knox. An unusually early hour of rising, together with a mid-day fast, had reduced her to an unwonted state of nervous irritability. Forbes, too, seemed wrapped in impenetrable gloom. It was not a cheerful party. Warren's curiosity was aroused. He found a taxi, bundled the dejected trio inside and gave the driver directions. He was rather shocked to see how ill Forbes looked on nearer view, but he concealed that emotion under his usual cloak of levity, and told humorous stories all the way to their destination, covering the lack of responsiveness on the part of his audience by roars of appreciative laughter. The staid hotel which Warren had selected, though yielding to modern demands sufficiently to institute a roof dining-room, discouraged such innovations as would be likely to attract the light-minded, and Warren's party had no difficulty in securing a table. Warren assumed the prerogative of host and ordered with a lavishness productive of a marked unbending on the part of Mrs. Knox. Julia, too, was hungry enough to look forward to a good dinner with unwonted anticipation, and she smiled on him appreciatively. Only Forbes remained moodily aloof. It was over the soup that Warren said cheerily, "Well, now, what's it all about?" He was beginning to realize that something unusual must have occurred to bring Julia and her aunt to town in August, as well as to account for Forbes' strange, dispirited silence. Mrs. Knox immediately protested. "Oh, Mr. Warren, don't spoil a good meal by bringing up that abominable affair." "Oh, yes, let it wait, please, Mr. Warren," sighed Julia. "Actually when one realizes what wickedness there is in the world--deceit and imposture and things of that sort--it seems fairly heartless to enjoy one's self." "Then we'll wait for explanations till dinner is over," Warren conceded, with undiminished buoyancy. But although he made himself entertaining in his usual fashion, his mind was busy with the problem Julia had suggested. Who was the girl hitting, with her talk of deceit and imposture? She could not refer to Miss Kent, naturally, and Howard was equally out of the question. Could it be that Hephzibah's existence had come to her attention? Was it possible that Forbes had been playing a lone hand and had thereby become involved in an entanglement from which his betrothed had magnanimously rescued him? The unrelieved melancholy of Forbes' face and manner rendered this explanation entirely plausible. When the coffee was brought on and the men lighted cigarettes, Warren felt, not unnaturally, that his hungry curiosity had a right to satisfaction. "Well, I'm as ready to be shocked as I ever shall be," he said. "Let's hear what has happened. Don't tell me that the staid Miss Kent was on the point of eloping with old Forbes." To Warren's surprise, this apparently innocent witticism caused Forbes to flush darkly. He noticed, too, that Julia's expression lost something of its pensive sweetness, but even then he was unprepared for the acidity of the tone with which she answered him. "There is no Miss Kent." "Eh?" Warren looked rather stupid. "Strictly speaking," admitted Julia, "there is a person who calls herself by that name. But the nice old lady who was Burton's father's friend has been dead a dozen years." Warren knocked the ashes from his cigarette with painstaking deliberation. "Must be a rather lively old ghost," he commented, striving to live up to his principle of never showing surprise, "according to all Forbes tells." "Oh, poor Burton," Julia cried, with a glance of angelic commiseration in the direction of her grimly silent lover. "Wouldn't you have thought that Burton's misfortune would have appealed to the better instincts of the most depraved? But instead, they take advantage of his blindness to trick him in the most infamous fashion. The person who calls herself Agatha Kent--I suppose it really is her name, though any one so absolutely deceitful is as likely to lie about one thing as another--" "Well?" trumpeted Warren, his strained patience showing itself in the unnecessary loudness of his challenge. "Do hush, Mr. Warren, everybody's looking at us. This Kent woman isn't a nice motherly person. She isn't old at all, not a bit older than I am." Warren sucked at his cigarette for a moment and blew the smoke through his nose. He needed a little time in order to preserve the imperturbable demeanor on which he prided himself. He looked at Julia to be sure she was in earnest, looked at Forbes to see if he were not going to deny this incredible story, and then expressed his feelings by a low whistle. "Not a nice motherly person," he repeated inanely. "About as old as you are." "She may even be a little younger," Julia admitted generously. Warren's air of incredulity deepened. He threw the uncommunicative Forbes a challenging glance. "Do you mean that Forbes has been spending all his time with her for the past three months and never suspected that she wasn't an old woman?" "So he claims." Julia's inflection was decidedly tart. Forbes made one of his rare contributions to the conversation. "I wouldn't have believed such a thing possible myself, but blindness makes one an easy victim." "Poor Burton!" murmured Julia, melting at once. "To think that any girl should have the heart to take such advantage of another's misfortune." "But I can't see what she was getting at," Warren demurred. "I've heard that occasionally ladies represent themselves as younger than they really are, and the reason for that seems plain enough. But why the devil should a young girl want to make herself out an old maid of seventy?" "Purely mercenary at the start," Julia opined. "As I understand it, Burton saw her advertisement for a boarder, and wrote her, supposing she was his father's old friend. And she decided to pass herself off as her great-aunt so as to get as much out of Burton as she could." "That young woman must have plenty of nerve. It's plain she needed the money, as far as that goes. Place is terribly run-down." "Oh, shockingly," Mrs. Knox corroborated him, in her deepest tones. "All the furniture I could see through the windows seemed mere wrecks." "On its last legs," Warren agreed. He waited for a moment and then asked casually, "Well, what's the fuss about? What harm did it do?" The two women uttered a simultaneous ejaculation of horror. "A piece of barefaced fraud," cried Mrs. Knox. "She has been getting money under false pretenses," flared Julia. "I believe she can be arrested like any other swindler, and punished." Warren shrugged his shoulders. "I can't see where the harm comes in," he persisted stubbornly. "She made Forbes comfortable all summer, so comfortable that now he looks like a baby that's being weaned. She took his money, but judging from the meals I ate there, she gave him his money's worth. If she'd been an old party, passing herself off as a youthful beauty, Forbes would have a right to kick. But under the circumstances is seems to me you're making a mountain out of a mole-hill." Warren's amiable defense of the guilty was not well received. Aunt Estelle regarded him with open hostility, and Julia seemed pained by his moral obtuseness. A flicker of interest lighted Forbes' impassive face and suggested to Warren that his line of argument appealed more strongly to his masculine listener than to the women. Although he held no brief for Agatha Kent, he pressed his advantage. "We don't know, any of us, what we might do if we were up against it. I've often thought I would commit highway robbery if I were hungry enough. I'll say this for the girl, anyway: She must be a peach of an actress. If she could knock around with a man all summer, walk with him and talk with him and pet him a little, when he was down in the mouth, and yet never let him suspect that she wasn't old enough to be his grandmother--" "Really, Mr. Warren," Julia said with asperity, "I can't see any point in continuing this conversation. I had hoped you might be able to make some helpful suggestions regarding Burton, for of course I understand that you can't be burdened with him for more than a few days. But if you are going to spend the evening defending that brazen, red-haired--" "What!" roared Warren. This time he _had_ done it. The head waiter looked in his direction apprehensively. Aunt Estelle took the protest from Julia's lips. "Pardon me, Mr. Warren, but I must remind you that my niece and I dislike to be made conspicuous by such demonstrations." Warren ignored the reproof. "What did you call her?" he demanded of Julia, whose only answer was an offended stare. "Did you say she was red-haired?" "I--I did. Though why you should attach any importance to anything so trivial, I confess I don't understand." Warren did not attempt to enlighten her. He indicated to the waiter that he was ready for his check and his manner was offensively jubilant. "I'm afraid," he said genially, "that you'll have to make some plan for disposing of old Forbes besides committing him to my tender mercies. I've just remembered that I'm going out of town in the morning, early train." Julia looked startled. "But what is Burton to do, then?" "Just what he would have done if you hadn't run across me. Though if you'd like my candid advice--" "Yes, please," said Julia, and tried to look winning. It did not suit her that Warren should slip away in this cavalier fashion, leaving her with a blind man on her hands. She had important plans for the remainder of the week. Twenty-four hours was all she could possibly spare for Forbes. "Then I advise you to marry him offhand. You have taken him away from one young woman who was devoting herself to making him comfortable. I should say that the least you could do was to follow her example." Julia's gasp of rage made Warren think of a cat whose tail has been trodden on. From across the table Forbes promptly requested him to mind his own business. "Just a bit of good advice, old man," Warren soothed him. "Take it or leave it, as you please. Anything more I can do for you people before I go?" A frigid silence indicated that any service he could offer would be unwelcome, whereupon Warren, having tipped the waiter with a liberality indicative of a jocund spirit, took his smiling departure, leaving dejection behind him. After a talk with the night clerk, it was arranged that Forbes should remain at the hotel, an adaptable bell-boy agreeing to act as his valet in the morning. Before Mrs. Knox and Julia took refuge in another hostelry, the lovers had a moment to themselves. Julia was in an unpleasant mood. The emphasis Warren had laid on Miss Kent's histrionic powers had awakened her ready suspicion. As she found herself alone for a moment with her lover, his look of weary dejection aroused her resentment. "It's most extraordinary, Burton," she complained, "that you should never have suspected her of being younger than she pretended. I could see that Mr. Warren didn't believe it for a minute." Forbes replied with perfect conviction that Warren was an ass. "I should have thought that if you didn't find it out when you were holding her hands, you would have realized it the moment you took her in your arms." "Damnation!" Forbes was goaded beyond endurance. "I never took her in my arms." "She said you did," insisted Julia, eying him suspiciously. "In that preposterous letter she wrote me, you know. She said you often held her hands and patted them and that sort of thing." "I did, I admit it. I supposed her a contemporary of my father's, you remember." "And she said that once, under rather unusual circumstances, you took her in your arms." "An absolute lie!" blazed Forbes. "But of course if you are going to doubt my word, Julia--" Julia said no, that she did not doubt him. She added that when a person had lived a lie for months, one more little falsehood would not mean much. Then she gave him her hand to kiss, and was annoyed when he only pressed it and said good night. She had to remind herself that though there was no one near to witness the act of devotion, Burton could not know that he was unobserved, and his undemonstrative demeanor was undoubtedly due to his unwillingness to compromise her. It was while the adaptable bell-boy was conducting his charge to his room, that enlightenment came. Forbes gave a convulsive start. "Damnation!" he exclaimed, for the second time in fifteen minutes. "Yes, sir, our floor, sir!" The bell-boy eyed him expectantly. He had an adventurous spirit, though condemned to carry suit-cases and bring ice-water on request. It looked as if there might be something doing with a gentleman who jumped so high and swore so roundly in a public elevator. Forbes had only realized that the letter Julia had quoted had contained no falsehood. He understood Warren's excitement over the discovery that Agatha Kent was red-haired. Agatha and Hephzibah were one and the same. The circumstances which led to his taking her in his arms were unusual, indeed. In the close corridors of the city hotel he seemed to smell again the scent of sun-kissed fields. As the bell-boy gripped his arm, he felt against his heart the pressure of that lithe young body, shaken by sobs. His cheek had brushed another, smooth and fragrant. His pulses had answered the indefinable challenge of youth and beauty. They thrilled again at the mere memory. Forbes did not fall asleep till nearly morning. He lay awake, trying to decide how far the situation was altered by the fact that Agatha Kent had saved his life. CHAPTER XIX THE WORM TURNS In the hour or two of troubled sleep closing his wakeful night, Forbes dreamed vividly and woke with Agatha's voice echoing in his ears. He started up, his lips parted to speak her name, then dropped back upon his pillows with a sense of desolate loss that tried his powers of self-control. So faithfully had his memory reproduced every intonation of the familiar voice that it had seemed to bring the living woman to his side. He recognized the maternal note which had appealed to him the more because of his unmothered boyhood, the undertone of indulgent humor which was characteristic of the friend on whom he had learned to lean. Only there was no such friend. Her place had been taken by a stranger, capable of bewildering changes of identity, Miss Kent, Hephzibah, and now this newcomer, Agatha, self-confessed impostress who could, even when unmasked and flouted, preserve the dignity which is the heritage of race. He found himself thrilled by an inexplicable pride as he remembered the even voice with which she had answered Julia's shrillness. The adaptable bell-boy presented himself in due time and awkwardly assisted him with his dressing. After visiting the barber, he was conducted to the hotel dining-room, and here the realization was brought home to him that for many a month Agatha's tact had stood between him and embarrassment. She had prepared his food so that he ate without any especial sense of being at a disadvantage. His fork was always at hand when he wanted it. His glass of water and his cup of coffee were magically present to his need. In the hotel dining-room he heard whispers at his back, and once a sound like smothered laughter, and he tingled with the shamed consciousness of being a show for curious eyes. His face burned throughout the meal, and his eating was largely pretense. Forbes' engagement with Julia was for ten o'clock. At quarter before the hour, the bell-boy who had taken him in charge conducted him to a stiff little parlor on the second floor, and left him after a whispered explanation to the maid. Time is proverbially slow-footed from the standpoint of lovers, but as Forbes sat waiting he felt sure that his impatience did not explain the seemingly endless duration of those fifteen minutes. The maid came to him at last to ask if there was anything she could do. "I'd like to know the time, please." "Half past eleven, sir." "Half past eleven," Forbes repeated. Oddly his first emotion was a feeling of relief that Agatha did not know. The parlor maid was offering encouragement. "Prob'ly something's happened to detain the young lady, sir. But I don't believe she'll be much longer." "Let us hope not," Forbes replied dryly. The proudest of men, he winced at the unmistakable sympathy of the woman's tone. It was not fair that he should be subjected to such humiliation. Julia arrived upon the stroke of noon, voluble over some undeniable bargains in blouses. She had stopped at one of the exclusive little shops, preferred by the knowing to the big emporiums, only intending, she explained vivaciously, to make one small purchase. But the woman had kept showing her the loveliest things, and all so reasonable. There was practically no one in the place, so that it had seemed like shopping in some strange city. And it was worth coming to town in the hot weather just to pick up such bargains. "I'm glad your effort was not thrown quite away," Forbes remarked with an irony that glanced harmless from Julia's armor. "Oh, no, Burton, I don't grudge any sacrifice I have made. Getting you out of the clutches of that harpy was worth it all." She waited for a suitable expression of gratitude from the gentleman she had rescued. After a pause which Forbes failed to fill appropriately, she spoke again, and this time with grave seriousness. "Now, Burton, it's only two hours before my train leaves and I must have luncheon, so we'd better lose no time deciding on the wisest course to take in this affair." Again Forbes failed to respond. Julia eyed him suspiciously. "I hope you haven't an idea of passing this outrage over without taking any action, Burton. It's that sort of laxity that makes criminals." "Perhaps you have decided on the punishment appropriate to this particular crime," said Forbes, his voice rich in ironic inflections, which again passed harmlessly over Julia's head. "To tell the truth, I have. There's only one point on which these mercenary people are really susceptible, and that's money. My advice is to write her that unless she returns every penny you paid her, you will prosecute her for swindling." "She might not be able to do that, Julia. I judge from what you all say that she must be poor." "Oh, she's evidently that. Everything about the place is poverty-stricken, and the gown she wore that day was so faded that you could hardly tell the original color. But I believe she has all that money put aside, for don't you remember, the boy said she wanted to send him to school." "I remember. And you advise me to demand the money she has saved for his schooling, and ask her to charge up my board for those months to charity?" Julia held to her point. "It's the sort of thing she'd feel, because it's evident there's nothing she wouldn't do for money. I confess I can't comprehend that temperament. Money means so little to me that I simply don't understand how it's possible for people to worship it as they do." He listened with growing irritation. That this girl who had never earned a dollar, and had never denied herself anything she wanted, should assume so superior an attitude, offended his sense of justice. "Perhaps if you knew more of the value of money," he cut in crisply, "you might respect it more." "Oh, I know I'm impractical, Burton. Dad was always making fun of me for that." The pensiveness of her tone was still evident as she added, "Perhaps you'd like to have me write the letter before I go." "What letter?" "To that woman, of course, threatening to prosecute her unless she returns the money." His pause was long enough to give the idea that he was considering her suggestion. His tone when at length he spoke, implied nothing of the sort. "Thank you, Julia. I shall not need your services. And when I write Miss Kent, I shall enclose a check to cover my board till the first of November." He heard her catch her breath. "You mean you are going to pay a premium for being tricked and deceived?" "She deceived me and that's not easy for me to forgive. But I'm hardly ready to sponge my living from a girl who is making a hand-to-hand fight with poverty." "Dear, it's dreadful the way you men let your chivalry run away with you. I suppose if you were on a jury, you couldn't bring yourself to convict a woman of murder." "I hardly think Miss Kent's offense can be classed in that category," Forbes said stiffly. "I suffered chiefly through the jolt to my sense of dignity. That's always been a sensitive point with me." Julia sighed. "I can't bear to have you talk that way, Burton. It's bad enough for Mr. Warren to make light of falsehood and treachery. But it seems to me a person capable of that, is capable of anything." She laid her hand lightly on his. "Trust a woman's intuition, Burton. Let me write that letter." Her touch not only left him cold, but roused his antagonism. He felt an irritated certainty that he was being played upon. "Thank you, but I have nothing to say to Miss Kent that I can not entrust to a public stenographer." She did not take away her hand. "Let's not talk of that dreadful woman any more," she said, in a lowered voice. "Fate has given us this little hour out of the years, and we mustn't waste it." Her words brought back something Agatha had said, her scathing scorn of those who took the easy way, and then held fate accountable. The remembrance steeled him against the insidious tenderness of her voice. "You made your choice, Julia, as you had a right to do. And I wish you every happiness." The fragrance of a delicate perfume he had always associated with her enveloped him. He felt the pressure of her body against his arm. "What a queer, quiet hotel this is, Burton. Right in the heart of the city and yet we're as much alone as if we were off somewhere in the woods." Had she been sensitive, she might have perceived a curious rigidity in the arm against which she leaned, an ominous tightening of the obstinately silent lips. Her vanity felt the challenge of his failure to respond. She flung prudence to the winds. "Burton! Burton!" she murmured, and whether her emotion was real or assumed, he did not know, "why don't you kiss me?" His fastidious recoil was strengthened by the suspicion that she was attempting by playing on his passion to mold him to her will in the matter of Agatha's punishment. He moved away a little. "Excuse me," he said, "I shouldn't dream of taking such a liberty with the fiancée of Murray Prendergast." "Oh, don't!" He felt her shudder, and again wondered if it were real, or a pretense. "All the years ahead belong to him, and just this little moment is yours and mine." "I lay no claim even to a moment of your time, Julia. I asked from you all or nothing." "Tell me just once that you love me, Burton." At his continued silence, she drew herself away. "You're different. You don't care for me as you did." She waited vainly for him to deny the accusation. Then again she caught his hand. She might have been a loyal wife, fearing that her husband's heart was slipping from her grasp and longing to be reassured. "Burton," she implored, "tell me whether you love me." "I thank God--no." She fell back, and he could hear her stormy breathing. Well as he knew every inflection of her voice, he hardly recognized it when she spoke again. "That wretched woman! That creature! She's to blame. She's stolen your heart from me." "Don't be a fool." The brutality, foreign as it was to Forbes' training and temperament, seemed demanded by the occasion. "My heart and all the rest of me was yours while you chose to keep me. You threw me away like a worn glove when my trouble came, and looked about for a more fitting match." "Burton, you said yourself--" "I own I made your way easy for you, Julia. I was fool enough to be satisfied to have you yourself and made no inconvenient demands in the way of loyalty and truth. And the fate you are so fond of invoking was kinder to me than I deserved." "You love her. You love that abandoned--" "Stop!" he commanded. "Don't dare finish." But he himself went on talking rapidly. "As far as Miss Kent is concerned, of course I have made it impossible for her ever to think well of me again, since after her months of uninterrupted kindness, I could listen to your venomous attack upon her, and not speak a word in her defense." "How dare you! How dare you speak like that to me!" "Whether I love her or not, I don't know. It's too bewildering for me to be sure. But I know she's the most loyal friend, and the dearest comrade and the bravest, most unselfish--" Julia sprang from her place beside him with a cry. His face was toward her, and at the sound of her voice, an extraordinary thing happened. He saw her for an instant quite distinctly, though the face he had loved had undergone as hideous a change as if death and decay had done their devastating work upon it. Secure in the knowledge of his blindness, she faced him with the mask thrown aside. He saw her features distorted by hate, her eyes narrowed malignantly, her lips drawn back from the teeth. Something Hephzibah Diggs had said in their memorable interview flashed across his mind. "When she showed herself up for what she was, you'd ought to have got down on your marrow bones and thanked the Lord." Darkness shut down over the unwelcome vision. There was a rushing in his ears so that he heard only faintly Julia's farewell, "I hate you! Oh, how I hate you!" He leaned back against the cushions, realizing that he was a sick man, but enveloped in a strange serenity. When next the parlor maid proffered her services, he sent her to telephone for his physician. An hour later he was comfortably ensconced in a private hospital on the outskirts of the city, and sick as he felt, his mood was increasingly cheerful, for the doctor considered the momentary return of vision, elusive and disappointing as it had been, most encouraging. It was a week before Forbes was equal to dictating a letter to Agatha. He passed over the peculiar circumstances of their parting, expressed rather formally his sense of gratitude and enclosed a generous check. His acknowledgment came with gratifying promptness. But the nurse on opening the envelope was puzzled. "It doesn't seem a letter at all, just bits of paper. Why, it looks like a check, torn into little pieces." "You can't find the number of the check among the scraps, can you?" asked Forbes. The nurse could and did and Forbes' suspicion became certainty. He turned on his pillow, unreasonably wounded. The Agatha Kent he had loved and trusted had never been, and this stranger who called herself by the familiar name had rejected his overture of friendship. CHAPTER XX THE DAY AFTER The day of judgment has its drawbacks, but it is the day after that really hurts. The first shock numbs. It is when the nipping pain begins, the remorseless pain too cruel to kill, that the sinner takes the full measure of his punishment. On the day of Forbes' departure, Agatha ate her evening meal as usual and went to bed at eight o'clock. She slept heavily till midnight, roused and speedily dozed off again, but now to be the victim of torturing dreams. Years before a pet dog of Howard's had become old and sickly and Agatha's father had decided it must be killed. He had attempted to shoot the animal in its sleep, but his nervousness had caused him to miss his aim. It had taken three shots to finish the business. Agatha had come upon the scene just in time to see the look the dying brute turned on its idolized master, and the incident had stamped itself on her memory as the supreme tragedy in her experience. She invariably dreamed of it when feverish and ill. This night she underwent the familiar agony with a difference. In the grotesque necromancy of the dream-world, the wounded dog had become Forbes, turning his stricken gaze upon the friend who had done him to death. She woke in a cold sweat and did not sleep again. At four o'clock she was up and cleaning house as the one adequate antidote for the remorseful thoughts that threatened to wreck her reason. She worked furiously all the morning, barely stopping to eat. Miss Finch watched her from a distance, heart-wrung and afraid, but knowing from experience that at certain crises Agatha was best left to herself. Howard, with the characteristic masculine reluctance to witness suffering out of his power to relieve, took his fishing rod and departed for a day of his favorite sport. About two o'clock in the afternoon, Ridgeley Warren came strolling up the driveway between the rows of stately trees which made the battered old house at the end of the avenue appear an anti-climax, and so reached her unheralded. Agatha had thrown a braided rug across the clothes-line and was beating it as if she had a personal spite against each individual rag. The sun was full on her hair and despite her menial occupation, she seemed to him a splendid figure, furiously vital, crowned with light. Excitement whipped up his pulses as he left the driveway and walked across the grass in her direction, but when near enough to make his voice heard above the volley of blows, he only said nonchalantly, "Good afternoon, Hephzibah." Agatha turned and stood panting. She had been working at high pressure since daybreak, and close inspection revealed not a masquerading goddess but a tired, bedraggled girl. Her hair had slipped from the restraining pins and a wayward coil partly extinguished one eye. Her fair skin was clouded by successive layers of dirt. A disfiguring smudge successfully effaced the dimple in her chin. With quickening admiration Warren realized that this soiled and disheveled apparition still had a distinct claim to beauty. "Hard at work, I see, Hephzibah." He stood with his hands in his pockets, immaculate in his light summer clothing, and as always he roused her to defiance. "My name is Kent. Please use it." "I'm ready to call you anything you please, my dear spitfire. Only remember that it's not my fault that I've always thought of you as Hephzibah." Agatha glared at him. His presence restored her poise. She realized that as an antidote Warren was better than a thousand years of house-cleaning. "I don't know why you should think of me as Hephzibah or anything else. I don't know why you shouldn't dismiss me from your mind altogether as I should like to dismiss you." "Out of the question, Hephzibah, or Miss Agatha Kent, if you like that better. You see, you interest me." "I'm sorry I can't return the compliment, but you bore me--excruciatingly." "To begin with," Warren explained analytically, "you are the prettiest girl I know, bar none. And in the second place, I'm inclined to believe you're the brainiest. If what they told me last night is true, you ought to make your fortune on the stage." Agatha regarded him silently and the antagonism died out of her face. He was almost sorry, for it left her white and wan and rather pitiful. "You know what a fraud I am, then?" she said wistfully. "I know you're the cleverest girl of my acquaintance, if you could get by with a thing like that." "I suppose he simply despises me." Into Agatha's mind had flashed the preposterous hope that possibly Warren's tolerant attitude toward her escapade was shared by the only man who counted. "Who? Forbes? Why the devil should you care what he thinks? Old Forbes was always a bit of a prig." Positive hatred looked out of Agatha's eyes. "Oh, I don't know. I shouldn't call a man a prig simply because he objected to being tricked and deceived and lied to. I suppose he has a high enough ideal of women so that he expects a girl to tell the truth, just as much as if she were a man. I consider that attitude a compliment, myself." Warren was somewhat staggered. "Then I suppose I'm insulting you by thinking you are a darned clever kid, and the rest of them a pack of fools for making a fuss over nothing." Agatha left him in doubt on this delicate point. The little hope that had stirred in her heart had died almost as soon as it was born, and the resulting anguish seemed out of all proportion to its brief existence. Forbes did not share Warren's leniency toward her summer's masquerade. He was one of the fools who condemned her. She looked away toward the hills and suddenly her face twisted in passionate weeping. "Don't do that, Hephzibah. For God's sake, don't cry. Can't you let me help you, little girl? You need a friend I'm sure, and there's nothing I'd like better than to help you. You've bewitched me, Hephzibah. I lost my head over you when I thought you were an ignorant little country girl, murdering the king's English every time you opened your mouth. And the more I know of you, the more wonderful you seem. I'm crazy about you." Agatha's sobs quieted as she listened. When a woman has been humiliated beyond a certain point, nothing can restore her self-esteem like being made love to by a personable man. Warren's irreproachable costume, his good looks, his convincing air of prosperity all helped in her struggle against intolerable mortification. Yet though she dried her eyes at his agitated request, and favored him with a faint, watery smile, she thought of him, if the truth be told, less as a lover than as a life-preserver. Warren sat upon the porch and smoked while Agatha made herself presentable. It took her some time and he was not sorry, for he wanted a chance to get himself in hand. He had said very much more than he had intended to say when he bought his ticket that morning, and though he did not exactly regret his indiscretion, he told himself that he had better go slow. Twenty-four hours earlier the name Agatha Kent had suggested to him a benevolent old lady with a double chin, the chin an entirely gratuitous contribution of his active imagination. Hephzibah Diggs was a beautiful but deplorably ignorant country girl who had got herself into trouble, like many another ignorant beauty. It was too soon to propose to either. Yet as he glanced impatiently at his watch, Warren realized that the charm of Agatha was her unexpectedness. You never knew what she was going to do. You never could tell what she might make you do, in spite of your better judgment. Agatha's delay gave him the time he needed. She presented herself in a faded gingham which nevertheless had the advantage of being freshly laundered, her heavy hair wound about her head with a negligence a woman would have interpreted to mean that to Agatha, her caller mattered very little. Now that her face was clean he saw how pale she was, and how dark the circles under her eyes, and this discovery was responsible for an unwonted gentleness in his manner. He talked as a big brother might have talked, and the instinctive, virginal defiance which his unconcealed admiration had always roused in her, changed by imperceptible degrees to confidence. He asked her bluntly about her finances and she told him without hesitation or evasion. He hinted at monetary assistance and she stopped him midway, with an imperious tilt of her chin and a haughty stare. "You are not talking to Hephzibah Diggs," she reminded him. Warren sighed and changed his tactics. "Did you ever think of selling your place?" "I'm afraid nobody would want it, it's so dreadfully old and tumbledown. And besides we've got to have a roof over our heads." "You couldn't sell it here, of course. But there are possibilities in this place. A small summer hotel ought to do well. Magnificent old trees, fine view, convenient to the city." He studied his surroundings with an appraising eye. "It should bring at least fifteen thousand if you found the right purchaser." She caught her breath and the sound brought his eyes back to her face. What he saw touched him profoundly. Indeed he felt the smart of tears under his drooping lids. "My God," he said to himself, "to have her look like that over a paltry fifteen thousand." "Then I could send Howard to college," Agatha was saying, breathlessly. "Sure you could." "And there would be enough to take care of Fritz--Miss Finch, as long as she lives." "I hope you'd do something for Hephzibah Diggs," said Warren gruffly, to hide his emotion. "That girl has something coming to her, believe me!" Warren spent most of his leisure entertaining people, but he seldom felt better repaid than when Agatha greeted this jest with a quiver of laughter. "I promise you she shall have a new gingham, perhaps a party dress if the money holds out." "Yes, that's what Hephzibah would want, a party dress," said Warren. "And I speak for the first dance the first time she wears it." He went on to discuss sales and investments, and Agatha hung upon his words. He perceived that the practical line appealed to her. His tentative love-making bored and angered her. When he talked of gilt-edged first mortgages, bringing six per cent., she leaned toward him, her reddish-gold eyes melting into his, and seemed ready to leap into his arms. The carriage he had ordered came for him at what he considered a ridiculously early hour and he kept it waiting while he explained that he would immediately take up the matter of the sale of her property with several people who might possibly be interested. She let him hold her hand while he protracted his good-by to an unconscionable length, and he argued well from this, till she disconcerted him by saying faintly, "Shall you see Mr. Forbes soon?" "I can't say. The fair Julia may have hustled him away before I'm back." "If--if you should see him," said Agatha, her lips white, "try to make him think kindly of me. Try to make him understand that I didn't realize that I was doing anything wrong." "To be sure I will," replied Warren with misleading heartiness. "But if a man is such a blasted fool as to need that assurance, it's not worth troubling your little head about him, don't you see?" And then he said good-by again and went off in an unprecedentedly bad humor, damning Forbes whole-heartedly all the way to town. Warren's call left Miss Finch pleasurably excited. For a man to come out from the city for a few hours' talk with a girl, argued his intentions serious. And Agatha's abstraction, the dreamy look in her eyes, the irrelevant nature of her replies to the simplest questions, seemed to imply a gratifying responsiveness in her mood. Little did the innocent spinster dream that Agatha's absorption was due to calculating the wisest expenditure of an income derived from an investment of fifteen thousand dollars in first mortgages at six per cent. But Miss Finch's elation was short-lived, for Howard came home with a startling piece of news. "Heard the funniest thing to-day. Who do you suppose has been getting married?" To please him Agatha hazarded a guess. Howard shook his head. "It's the last one you'd ever think of. Old Billy-goat Wiggins. He married a widow out on the Jericho pike and I guess he's had six or seven wives already." Without attempting to correct her brother's exaggeration, Agatha cast an apprehensive glance in Miss Finch's direction. Miss Finch met her look with an air of resolute calm. At last the matter was settled. Now that one of her lovers was out of the running, the only thing left was to take the other. Her days of anxious deliberation, due to weighing one man against his rival, were over, and it was a great relief. "Mrs. James Doolittle," said Miss Finch to herself and blushed high. Well, Doolittle was as good a name as Wiggins. "I b'lieve if anything, it's a little more aristocratic," Miss Finch decided. But as the evening wore on, she found herself disquieted. In her thoughts of James Doolittle there was little of roseate illusion. She saw him mentally as she had seen him uncounted times in reality, his trousers patched and bagging at the knees, his shirt soiled and faded, his hat suggesting that some predatory animal had taken frequent bites out of the rim. "I do like a man to look neat," sighed Miss Finch. She recalled too, the tumbledown cottage where James Doolittle had kept bachelor's hall since his mother's death six years earlier, and compared it disadvantageously with her present quarters. Romance had spread her wings, and taken flight. Marriage had become a very drab, prosaic affair. But there was no help for it. Miss Finch retired to her room rather early and wrote Mr. Doolittle accepting the offer of marriage made nearly two months before. It was a prim little note and if her delay had been unflattering, there was nothing in her formula of acceptance to restore the masculine _amour propre_. She said that marriage was a very serious matter, and she hoped they were making no mistake. She signed her name Zaida Finch, and realizing that the compact signature would soon be replaced by that of an unknown female, Zaida Doolittle, she shed some agitated tears. The letter was sealed and stamped on the table beside her and Miss Finch was lying awake wondering whether the tongue of slander would be set wagging if she should decide on giving the Doolittle cottage a thorough cleaning before taking the step that would make her its permanent mistress, when Phemie came blundering up the stairs. Miss Finch sprang out of bed and, candle in hand, appeared in the doorway. She shook a chiding finger at the girl. "Don't make such a racket," she hissed. "Everybody's been in bed for hours. You oughtn't to stay out so late, Phemie. It don't look right in a young girl." Phemie did not seem aware that she was being scolded. She was full of silly giggles and pleased to find a confidante to share her amusement. She pushed her way uninvited into Miss Finch's room. "I never had so much fun in my life," wheezed Phemie in what she mistakenly supposed to be a whisper. "Oh, my goodness, I've laughed fit to bust myself." "Where've you been?" demanded Miss Finch, eying her disapprovingly. "I've been to a shivaree. Whole crowd of us went. We had horns and tin pans and Ernie Cox took a cow-bell along. Oh, my goodness!" Phemie placed her hands on her hips, and rocked back and forth in an ecstasy of mirth. Miss Finch's severity became more pronounced. "I think you might have been in better business. Deacon Wiggins has been married quite a few times, I know, but he's a good citizen and a pillar of the church." "'Twarn't Deacon Wiggins. 'Twas Jim Doolittle. He just got married to that cross-eyed old maid who used to work at Phelps' store." When Miss Finch could get rid of Phemie she tore the letter she had so painstakingly composed into the minutest fragments, promising herself to burn them in the morning before any one was up. Innocent as her intentions had been, the fact remained that she had written a compromising letter to a married man, and she could not feel safe till the sole evidence of her indiscretion had been reduced to ashes. As she climbed back into bed she might perhaps have been excused for indulging in pessimistic reflections on masculine perfidy, and the hollowness of lovers' vows, but in point of fact her mood was eminently Christian. To her own secret amazement she was chiefly conscious of overwhelming relief. The critical relatives of Deacon Wiggins' three deceased partners were nothing to her. Mr. Doolittle's tendency to wear his trousers with only one frail suspender as a support was no concern of hers, except as any respectable spinster might venture to hope that his rashness would not carry him too far. That good old name Finch, which had been identified with her personality for half a century, would not be exchanged for any unfamiliar polysyllable. Without knowing it, she had been shrinkingly apprehensive of coming changes, and now everything was going on exactly as it had before. "If Agatha marries Mr. Warren and has a family of children," thought Miss Finch, "she'll need somebody reliable in the house. And if she doesn't get a husband, I ought to be around to look after her. And anyway, nobody can ever say that the reason I never married is that I never had a chance." And so comforting was that concluding thought that even after sleep claimed her as its own, a complacent, almost a triumphant smile, hovered about Miss Finch's parted lips. CHAPTER XXI ENLIGHTENMENT Warren stamped the snow from his feet, shook himself like a wet dog, and entering the apartment hotel, passed at a step from the frigid zone to the tropics. At the desk he gave his name to a businesslike young woman who ascertained over the telephone that Mr. Forbes was in, and forthwith Warren was shot to the fifth floor. A smiling Japanese boy opened the door of Forbes' rooms, and Forbes himself came forward and gripped his friend's hand. For a moment neither man found speech possible. "Congratulations, old fellow," Warren got out at last. "Best news I've heard for many a moon." He gave his snowy coat to the waiting servant, seated himself and lighted a cigarette as a preliminary to conversation. "Well, how does it seem to have two eyes again? A bit intoxicating, I fancy. Rather like too much champagne." "You know when a man has suffered enough, his idea of perfect happiness is to have the pain stop," Forbes answered. "I suppose the only way to size up a blessing at its real value is to have to do without it for a time." His words seemed to meet the requirements in the case, but Warren's quick ear detected in his voice a note of melancholy, and he thought he knew the explanation. Not being remarkable for tact, he promptly broached the delicate subject. "Well, the fair Julia has done it. I got her cards week before last. Gosh, when you see the fellows the dear girls marry, it almost seems a compliment when they turn you down. You'd think it would take more than the Prendergast money and family connections and all that, to sugarcoat a pill like Murray." "I wish her more happiness than she's likely to have, I'm afraid." Forbes spoke formally, his manner implying that it might be as well for Warren to change the subject, but his visitor took his time. "Oh, well, Julia isn't capable of real unhappiness. She could be uncomfortable, or disappointed, or humiliated, or anything that doesn't go too deep, but unhappiness is beyond her. That other little girl now, she's different." Forbes did not ask what girl was referred to. He kept his eyes on the floor. "Julia looks as soft as a ripe plum," Warren continued. "Most of the dear creatures do, as if a rough word would crush them. But believe me, she's made of the same hard, calculating stuff as her old man. You never heard of old Studley's losing any sleep over the men he'd ruined on the street, did you? Julia won't have a wrinkle when she's sixty. If anybody is going to marry Murray Prendergast it ought to be that kind of woman." If Forbes agreed with this frank expression of opinion, he gave no sign. He had the appearance of waiting patiently for the other to finish. "Our little friend Hephzibah," continued Warren, "is the sort whose hair turns white in a single night, you know. Not that hers has--God forbid. You never saw that hair, my boy. You've got something to live for." Forbes made a gesture of impatience. "Do you happen to know Miss Kent's address at the present time?" "Do you happen to _want_ Miss Kent's address at the present time?" mocked Warren truculently. Forbes hesitated. "Yes," he said with a seeming effort at frankness, "I do. Some of the things that were said, Warren, about her poverty, you remember, caused me considerable uneasiness. I felt that my leaving as I did when she had counted on having me until the cold weather, might have embarrassed her, and whatever ground I may have had for resentment, I had no wish to add to her financial worries. And so I sent her a check for the full amount I would have paid for board, up to the first of November." Warren laughed sardonically. "Oh, you did, did you?" "Yes, I did." Forbes' manner was a trifle aggrieved. "She returned it." "Of course!" "Perhaps you are in her confidence," Forbes said in a tone of annoyance. "She never mentioned that particular matter to me. But I am glad to believe that she repays my friendship by a degree of trust." Forbes waited a moment before continuing his explanation. "I did not write her again for some time. I was rather put out by the return of the check, foolishly, I suppose. But the last of November I sent her a rather long letter. You know, Ridgeley, when all is said and done, the girl saved my life." "Well?" "The letter came back to me from the Dead Letter Office. I thought it was a trick of some sort. It seemed incredible, you know, that when her family has been living at Oak Knoll for generations, she should drop out of sight and leave no more trace than an extinguished candle flame. I sent Evans down to look her up, and he reported that the three of them, Miss Kent, her foster brother, Howard, and Miss Finch, had all left town, and none of the old neighbors could give him any information as to their whereabouts. The old place has been sold to some one who is planning to build a summer hotel on the site." Warren nodded. "I engineered that deal. It's a good location for such an enterprise. She sold for twelve thousand. I think I could have got her two or three thousand more, if she had been willing to wait, but she wasn't." Forbes tried to appear relieved. "Twelve thousand! Well, I am glad to know she is not in immediate need. At the same time, Ridgeley, I should like her address." Warren eyed him with malevolence. "It looks to me as if she wasn't particularly anxious for you to have it." Forbes reddened. "Nonsense! Don't be an ass, Warren. It's quite important that I should have a talk with Miss Kent." "I suppose you want to be sure that she's sufficiently penitent for the deception she practised on you." "Really, my dear fellow, I can hardly see that it is any of your business what I have to say to her." "Simply that I'm a friend of the lady's. And the only reason that I'm not her husband is that she's refused me, by letter and word of mouth, just eleven times by actual count. A singularly consistent character, our Hephzibah." Forbes sat biting his lips. "I'm very sorry, Warren. I needn't say I had no idea--" "Of course you had no idea. You took her devotion as a matter of course. You let your Julia insult her without speaking a word in her defense. And it never occurred to you that another man might think her unselfishness and her courage and her beauty and her wit made her a woman in a million." "I must correct you on one point," Forbes said stiffly. "It is true the discovery that Miss Kent was not what I supposed her took me by surprise and I was both hurt and angry. But the engagement between Miss Studley and myself was broken finally and irrevocably because I defended--partly at least--the course Miss Kent had taken." He hesitated before adding, "If you really wish to marry her--" "Oh, to hell with your '_ifs!_' I've been on my knees to her from the first minute I saw her. I'd marry her if she were Hephzibah Diggs." "I was only going to say, Ridgeley, that if you are in earnest, you are pretty sure to win out. I can hardly imagine any woman's continuing to turn you down." Warren did not appear touched by the obvious sincerity of this tribute. He glowered at the other man ill-naturedly. "I dare say she would have married me but for one thing. I came on the scene too late." "Too late?" "Another man got ahead of me. She couldn't love me because she loved him." "Do you mean that she's engaged?" "Damn you!" Warren shouted furiously. "Don't put on those unconscious airs with me. You know well enough what man I mean, and you know whether you're engaged to her or not." "You're out of your mind, Warren. You're talking like an insane man." "Let it go at that, then. Call it that I'm crazy." "If you will remember that I thought Miss Kent an elderly woman, you will realize that I--" "Oh, your immaculate skirts are clean," exclaimed Warren, with preposterous bitterness. "You didn't make love to the nice old lady who was your father's boyhood flame. But you were so helpless and so darned pathetic and so dependent on her that you didn't have to. She's not like Julia, looking for an easy berth and a through ticket. Her idea of love is giving, giving without keeping count." "You don't know what you're talking about," said Forbes, but with less conviction. "Don't I, though! Do you remember the scheme we hatched to send Hephzibah to school?" Forbes nodded. "I came up and had a talk with her. Of course she was playing a part, but it wasn't all play-acting. She practically told me there was somebody she cared for. She--hang it all, Forbes, she's not always the audacious little devil who can palm herself off on an intelligent man as her own great-aunt, and never miss a cog. There was a look on her face when she spoke of that man--she was all angel, then." "But what possible reason have you for thinking--why, you make me feel an ass for listening." Forbes' humility was so obvious as to be disarming. "I know you're the man. She was always at me to have a talk with you and plead her cause, you know." "But surely that wouldn't mean--" "Yes, if you'd seen her eyes. You know how a dog looks when his master kicks him. Like that." "Good God, Warren--" "Oh, I don't suppose you like it," said Warren grimly. "But let me remind you that if it's unpleasant for you to listen, it's hell for me to tell you. I suppose you know what brought Julia to Oak Knoll to rescue you by force of arms." "I believe Miss Kent wrote a letter." "Yes, under pretense of congratulating Julia on her prospective engagement, she wrote her that you had been spending the most of your summer in the company of an attractive young girl. She'd sized up Julia's disposition pretty cleverly and she reckoned that if anything would hold her back, it would be a suspicion that there was a flaw in her title to your life-long devotion." "But surely if she had felt as you imagine--" "We're talking of Hephzibah, you know," growled Warren. "She was thinking of _your_ happiness, not of hers. Of course she knew she was taking a long shot. She was too smart to miss that little point. She risked exposure to give you what you wanted. That's the sort she is." He added gloomily, "I don't know why I'm such a fool as to tell you all this. I suppose it's because I know I haven't the ghost of a chance." There was a long, depressing silence. "Well," said Forbes at length, his voice curiously shaken, "where shall I find her?" "Good God, man, I don't know." "You don't know?" "The last word I had from her was a Christmas card and the blasted post-mark was so blurred that I couldn't make out where it was mailed. And in November I had this letter. You might as well read it, I suppose." He took the worn missive from his pocket, handed it to Forbes, and began to smoke furiously. Forbes, his face very pale, read without comment. "My Dear Mr. Warren: "Well, the thing is accomplished. I am a capitalist, a woman of wealth, and also a wanderer on the face of the earth. But I'm not worrying about that side of it, it's so delicious to feel that all this money is mine and that I can have a trunk full of new clothes if I feel like it. "Howard left for school yesterday. He will be a little behind his class, but the principal thinks he will have no difficulty in catching up if he is willing to work. Howard is so ambitious and eager that I know he is going to make me proud of him. "You see I am sending you a check. It was awfully good of you to want to put this deal through because of your interest in me, but I can't help thinking it's better to be businesslike in business and friendly in friendship. So this check is for the celebrated lawyer, Mr. Warren, who has managed this affair so wonderfully, and my heart-felt gratitude is for my dear friend, Ridgeley Warren, whose kindness and generosity have been so much more than I deserved. I shall never forget it. When I am a wrinkled old woman, and can smile at some of the things that hurt now, it will warm my heart to remember your goodness. "Dear Mr. Warren, I am not going to write you again at present. I have a feeling that if you keep on seeing me, you are more likely to keep on wishing for something it is better for you to forget. I am sure your generosity has more to do with your feeling than you have any idea of, and that when I am no longer at hand to make a continual appeal to your sympathy, you will soon be your usual self. I hope you will love the most beautiful and noblest girl in the world and marry her, and if you ever have reason to think that she doesn't appreciate the fact that she has drawn a prize, just send for me and I'll open her eyes. "Words seem such inadequate things, don't they, when one's heart is full? I wish you could know all I mean when I say, Thank you. "Gratefully yours, "Agatha Kent. "P.S. You will, I am sure, be seeing Mr. Forbes soon. The greatest favor you can do me is to make him understand how thoughtlessly I entered on the deception he so naturally resents. You see we were such good friends in a way--he really liked me and trusted me while he thought I was somebody else--it hurts to realize how completely I have forfeited his good opinion. You seem to understand so well that perhaps you may influence him to think of me a little more kindly." Forbes folded the letter and gave it to its owner. "You deserve her if any man does, Ridgeley," he said with proper humility. "I deserve her more than you do, if that's what you're trying to say," barked Warren. "And now you see what we're up against. Between us we've lost all trace of her." "We must find her again," Forbes said firmly. Warren's hostile gaze challenged him. "What for? Do you want to rub it in how she's outraged the sacred name of truth and all that rot?" "No." "Perhaps you're going to be magnanimous enough to forgive her?" "Possibly," Forbes offered quietly, "I want to ask her to forgive me." Warren's unhappy eyes met his full. "I suppose I'm in a rotten humor, old man. I do think you're a damned sight luckier than you deserve to be. But let it go. The question is, how are we to find her?" As one result of the deliberations protracted over several hours, the following advertisement appeared in the leading newspapers of a dozen large cities: "Information wanted. Any person acquainted with the present whereabouts of Hephzibah Diggs will confer a favor by communicating at once with the undersigned." The anxious weeks went by. The two men consulted almost daily, with growing perplexity and diminishing hope. And Agatha made no sign. CHAPTER XXII FELLOW TRAVELERS The hat Agatha was adjusting before the mirror was a black toque with a quill at the side. On most heads it would have possessed no more individuality than a clover blossom. It was one of the hats which apparently are planned with a view to being inconspicuous. But as Agatha pinned it in place it seemed to assume a certain provocative quality. It became a challenge to the masculine eye. The same was true of the blue serge suit she wore. Nothing can be imagined more innocuous than a suit of blue serge, embellished with narrow black braid. Miss Finch could have worn one of the identical cut and material and it would have looked as if it had been designed for her. Yet on Agatha the blue serge was alluring. It captured the eye as though striped with scarlet. Mrs. Van Horne, a stout, middle-aged woman who occupied a swivel chair at a businesslike desk, watched the operation of adjusting the black toque and rubbed her nose with a flourish indicating mental perturbation. It had occurred to her that Agatha was a somewhat colorful person for the task to which she had been assigned, that she looked undeniably youthful for so responsible an errand, that some one grayer in tone and of an aspect radiating propriety and decorum, would have been better fitted for the duty in hand. Mrs. Van Horne looked at the clock, saw it lacked but thirty-seven minutes to train time, and brushed aside her scruples. It was now too late to change. "You are sure you feel equal to taking charge of the four, Miss Kent?" she said, more for the reassuring effect of Agatha's self-confident answer than because she had the slightest doubt what that answer would be. Agatha turned a vivacious face. "I'm really looking forward to the trip. It'll be such fun." "I should hardly use that term to describe traveling in charge of four children," observed Mrs. Van Horne, with a grim smile. "And one of them a teething baby. You will naturally attract a good deal of attention." "Not a bit," said Agatha briskly. "You think not?" "Every one will take it for granted that I am a young mother, coming home with my little family to visit grandpa and grandma." Mrs. Van Horne's brow cleared. As the representative of a serious-minded organization, with an established reputation for prudence and sagacity, she had been accusing herself of indiscretion in entrusting this important commission to a young woman of such butterfly aspect, even though in self-defense she insisted that of her assistants, Miss Kent was easily the most resourceful and capable. Agatha's suggestion brought relief. Without doubt she was right. The traveling public would assume her to be a matron of extraordinarily youthful appearance. No one would question the discretion of the head of the Hamilton Orphanage for committing four children to the care of one who, whatever her capacity, looked a fly-away girl. "I imagine you are right, Miss Kent," she said. "And if I were you, I should take no pains to correct the impression. It will save you a great many annoying questions." A maid appeared with news that the taxi had arrived. A nurse brought in the baby, hooded and cloaked for its journey. Outside on the steps waited the three older children, about to be placed in homes which had been duly inspected and approved by authorized representatives of the orphanage. As Agatha assembled her charges and led the way to the cab, little faces appeared at the windows, small hands waved farewells and a chorus of shrill voices called good-by. An irrepressible little orphan of a plainness which so far had defied the efforts of the society to place her in a desirable home, came running to the curb as Agatha was arranging her charges about her. "I don't want anybody to 'dopt you, Miss Kent," she quavered. "Bless your heart!" Agatha leaned out and kissed her squarely. "No one's going to adopt me. I'll be back by Saturday." As the cab rattled down the street, Agatha turned for a look at the square, uncompromising building where she had found a haven six months before. Despite the opulent tone of her letter to Warren, Agatha had fully realized that twelve thousand dollars does not constitute wealth. Howard's education was provided for, and that was an enormous relief, but her responsibility for Miss Finch still lay heavy on her heart and she was determined not to draw on her principal any more than was absolutely necessary. The opening at the Hamilton Orphanage had come to her through a series of fortunate accidents, and Agatha had flung herself into the work with an enthusiasm which had insured her immediate success. Agatha loved the orphanage and the orphans. The maternal instinct, always strong in her, exulted in the swarm of children on whom she could lavish herself. There was no urchin so refractory that Agatha could not find excuses for him, no little face so plain that she could not discern in it something of winsomeness. She saw the humor in the naughtiness of some unruly youngster where most of her associates perceived only irrefutable confirmation of the doctrine of original sin. Mrs. Van Horne, accustomed to aids who did their duty with automatic faithfulness, found Agatha too good to be true. Miss Finch boarded in the vicinity of the orphanage and Agatha spent with her all the time she was not on duty. It had been hard to reconcile Miss Finch to being in the same city with Warren and not acquainting him with the fact. The sudden termination of her own double romance had intensified her passionate interest in Agatha's love-affairs. She thought of the subject continually. She dreamed of Agatha as a bride lovely in creamy silk and floating veil. She harped on the subject till Agatha's nerves suffered and sometimes she betrayed her irritation in speech. Agatha was not thinking either of Warren or Forbes as she was bounced to the station, the baby in her arms and the three other children mixed in indistinguishably with the luggage. Children are an admirable antidote to unprofitable thinking, because of their capacity for demanding one's entire attention. There were two little girls between three and four years, who looked rather like twins, but were not even sisters, and there was a boy soon to be five. The baby was just getting old enough to be afraid of strangers and was fretful because of teething. It did not look as if Agatha would have many minutes for meditating on the hardships of her own lot. At the station, with the aid of two sympathetic porters, Agatha got her charges aboard the Pullman and settled herself comfortably some minutes in advance of the other passengers. As they entered by ones and twos, she was aware of interested glances in her direction, in some cases the interest blended with apprehension. "Horrors!" she heard one woman say to her husband as she passed. Agatha looked after her darkly. She was instantly convinced that the speaker was the owner of a toy poodle. A moment before the train pulled out, a man came into the Pullman and took his seat in the section opposite hers, glancing amiably at the promising little family across the aisle. Agatha shrank away from the look, feeling faint and sick. There was an ominous ringing in her ears. So strong was her sense of panic that if she had had another moment in which to act, she might have marshalled her brood off the train and trusted to finding some excuse that would satisfy Mrs. Van Horne. But before her impulse toward flight had time to crystallize, the last "All aboard" had been shouted. The train shuddered, groaned and moved out. As the clear daylight replaced the semi-darkness of the terminal station, Agatha blushed furiously. She sat huddled in her corner, awaiting the outcome like a criminal who anticipates arrest. Gradually her unreasoning alarm was replaced by coherent thinking. If Forbes were still blind, she might travel as his fellow passenger to the Pacific coast without his being the wiser. But he had come on board unattended, moving freely and fearlessly. If his sight had been restored, she was still safe, for he had never seen her face. After a time she brought her courage to the point of stealing a glance at him. A newspaper lay upon his knee, and though he was not reading at the moment, its presence confirmed the impression she had formed as he entered. He could see again. She found herself trembling for gladness and swallowing hard at an obstinate lump in her throat. The dark spectacles he had worn throughout his sojourn at Oak Knoll had been replaced by a pair of eye-glasses, which, to her prejudiced judgment, added to his air of distinction. Now that her first unreasonable terror had subsided, she found his proximity delightfully exhilarating. The next thought brought a pang. If he could see again there was no longer a barrier between himself and Julia. Agatha's duties at the Hamilton Orphanage left her little time for perusing the society columns, so prominent a feature of the city journals, and she had missed the detailed accounts of Julia's wedding, with their emphasis on the beauty of the bride and the family connections of the groom. If he were about to marry Julia, Agatha reasoned, he should look very happy. She peered interrogatively in his direction to settle this important point, encountered his eyes unexpectedly, and looked away in crimson confusion. Forbes found the domestic group in such close proximity more entertaining than his newspaper. He thought he had never seen a prettier picture of radiant motherhood than this lovely young creature with her little ones around her. It was a pity, he reflected, that none of the children had inherited her rare beauty. They were all wholesome little youngsters, bidding fair to grow to commonplace maturity as far as externals were concerned. He found himself forming a somewhat uncomplimentary picture of the father of the quartet, a rather heavy, gross individual with a muddy skin. Other people than Forbes found an irresistible attraction in the family group. The woman Agatha had branded as the owner of a poodle, an overfed blonde, came down the aisle and paused to settle some points on which she was uncertain. Agatha, mindful of Mrs. Van Horne's injunction, gave the desired information as to the sex of the baby and the brand of artificial food she favored, without any hint that her sense of responsibility was less than maternal. "Are the little girls twins?" quizzed the stout woman, with an arrogant assumption of having every right to know. "No, the curly-haired one is the older." "They must have come very close," said the stout woman disapprovingly. "There is about six months' difference," replied Agatha unthinkingly. The stout woman's start told her too late what she had done, but as no satisfactory explanation occurred to her, she sat stolidly making a pretense of being absorbed in soothing the fretful baby. Her late interrogator, assuming the reply to be an impertinent substitute for telling her to mind her own business, stalked away, her manner implying that she washed her hands of Agatha and her family. Agatha had no time for unavailing grief. Four children under five are capable of providing abundant occupation for the most strenuous nature. She was rising for the third time in twenty minutes to minister to the wants of the oldest boy who had announced emphatically that he was "fursty," when Forbes stepped across the aisle. "Just let me wait on him," he said. "At this rate you will be worn out before you reach the end of your journey." The sound of his clear voice was almost her undoing. She wanted to laugh; she wanted to cry. She wanted most of all to put her head down on his broad shoulder and cling to him till he had forgiven her. As none of these things appeared feasible, she contented herself with saying, "Thank you," in a voice so faint as hardly to be audible. Forbes gave the restless lad a drink of water and took him into his section. Agatha heard her charge announcing in a penetrating voice that his name was Charlie Briggs, whether in answer to a question or not, she was not sure. Then the small boy nestled close to the big man, and listened raptly. She judged that Forbes must be telling him a story, and after the manner of her kind, she found this additional ground for worship. As a matter of fact Forbes was giving in detail the life-history of a pony he had owned when a boy. This chronicle concluded, he went on to describe a bear hunt in which he had once participated, and found his reward in the admiring gaze his listener fastened upon him. Presently Charlie Briggs felt constrained to be entertaining in turn. "I'm going to get a new papa, pretty soon," he announced. Forbes felt an uncomfortable sense of shock. If the woman in the opposite section were a widow, the age of the child in her arms indicated that her bereavement was extremely recent. It seemed more probable that it was one of the cases which prove the frailty of the marriage bond in America. He did not know why this conjecture should be responsible for so marked a feeling of discomfort. He changed the subject abruptly and proceeded to entertain Charlie with an imaginary incident in the life of a gray squirrel, taking Thompson Seton as his model. In the course of the narrative the baby had an attack of crying and its shrieks distracted Forbes' attention. He hesitated, lost the thread of his story, became hopelessly entangled. Charlie understood his friend's confusion. He looked across the aisle, scowling darkly. "She's going to get rid of the baby pretty soon," he informed his companion. "To-morrow it won't be 'round to bother." Again Forbes was conscious of a feeling of revulsion. The child's remark was capable of several interpretations, but to his thinking the meaning was obvious. This pretty little woman was about to marry for the second time, and the husband-to-be objected to the size of the ready-made family. Evidently she planned to give the baby away. Rather absurdly Forbes found himself thinking that he would not have believed it of her. The baby was behaving outrageously, almost justifying its mother's unnatural intention. Agatha had become sadly disheveled. Her hair--she really had wonderful hair, Forbes owned, for all his disapproval--was gradually slipping down. Her face was crimson from her exertions. The shirt-waist, immaculate when she boarded the Pullman, was mussed, and one shoulder damp, due to the baby's repeated experiments to ascertain whether it possessed nutritive qualities. As Forbes involuntarily looked at the opposite section, the ear-splitting sounds compelling his reluctant attention, Agatha transferred the baby's head to the other shoulder, cuddling the little form close to her heart. There was such divinely patient tenderness in the gesture that Forbes underwent an instant revulsion of feeling. He did not understand it in the least, but he suddenly felt sure of the woman. Whatever the shortcomings of Mr. Briggs or his probable successor, the girlish wife did not lack womanly qualities. He was unjust enough to feel decidedly vexed with the little boy. Probably he had listened to discussions of matters he did not understand, and mixed things up. Forbes told himself that he had never liked precocious children. The baby suddenly decided to go to sleep. Its squalls ceased magically. Its little body, stiffened in unavailing protest against all the injustice of the world, relaxed in complete forgetfulness. The feverish flush receded from Agatha's brow. She sat with drooping eyelids, a pensive madonna. Forbes' wilful gaze would not observe the bounds of propriety. Again and again it sought her, and when at length his eyes encountered hers, he smiled his congratulations. She gave him back a timid smile with a curious underlying wistfulness. It needed only that smile to clinch his faith in her. When the call for luncheon was given, he crossed the aisle. "Won't you let me stay with the children while you eat? With the baby asleep, I think I can safely make the offer." In a voice hardly above a whisper, Agatha explained that they had brought sandwiches. "But you'll let me bring you in a cup of tea or coffee, won't you? You've had a very strenuous morning and you certainly need something in the way of a stimulant." Perversely Agatha declined the offer, though she was longing to say yes. It was not that she felt the need of tea or coffee or of anything so gross as food or drink, but there was something ineffably refreshing in his solicitude for her comfort. His good offices declined, Forbes touched his hat and was turning away, when Charlie Briggs plunged into the aisle and seized his coat. "I don't want you to go," he howled. Forbes came back, boyishly eager. "Let me take him with me, won't you? You will have your hands full enough with the three and I promise not to give him anything a child of his age ought not to eat." Agatha had already regretted her obduracy. She gave the desired permission with a radiant smile, impelling Forbes to think excusingly how very young she must have been when she married Mr. Briggs. As he went toward the dining-car, Charlie clinging to his hand, the owner of the poodle expressed to her husband the conviction that something or somebody was shameless. She would have characterized herself as possessing a forgiving disposition but would have added that there are some things nobody can be expected to overlook. The case of the two children, six months apart, was one of them. Forbes returned from the dining-car looking at his watch. The porter appeared without warning and brushed him off obsequiously. Agatha's heart contracted. It needed no prophet to foretell what was about to happen. He came to her side, addressing her pleasantly. "I leave you at the next station. I expect to meet a friend there. I wish I might have gone farther and relieved you a little of your responsibilities." He checked himself suddenly, thinking that this rather silent young woman was about to speak. She was looking up at him with a strange, disconcerting earnestness. Nor had his intuition been at fault. For a moment Agatha did battle with an almost irresistible temptation to shout at him, "I am Agatha Kent." Almost at once she realized the folly of her momentary purpose. He was about to leave the train. There was no time for explanations, to say nothing of coming to an understanding. Moreover it was possible that the friend he was to meet was Julia herself. This last thought completed the paralysis of her passing impulse. In a stifled voice she told him that he had been very kind. "You are a very courageous young woman," Forbes replied. "I hope you won't be too tired when you reach your destination." He patted Charlie's shoulder and turned away. The obsequious porter was removing his grips. With a last smile to Agatha he went down the aisle. Agatha leaned back in her seat and closed her eyes. The tears ran down her cheeks unchecked. Probably this was the last time she would ever see him and that was no cause for regret since the pleasure of such encounters was so over-balanced by the pain. And moreover he must be on the point of marrying Julia, if he had not already made her his wife. It was better that he should go his way, unaware that again their paths had crossed. Forbes, stepping to the station platform, gave his grips to a station porter and looked about for Warren. A minute or two passed before he could distinguish him in the crowd and he was beginning to think his friend was late, when his eye fell upon him standing at the edge of the platform and gazing idly at the train which had been a little behind-hand, and was already beginning to pull out. Forbes approached him briskly, the porter at his heels. His lips were parted to speak the other's name, when Warren started violently and took a step forward. "Hephzibah!" he shouted. Forbes spun on his heel. The coach he had just quitted was passing. From the window a girl looked out, a girl with disheveled red-gold hair and tear-stained cheeks. In an instant he understood. The girl in charge of the four children was Agatha. It could be nobody but Agatha. He knew now what she had wanted to say when she had looked up at him. He understood the wistfulness of her smile, the entreaty in her eyes. He had searched for her vainly all winter, and a moment before he had talked to her face to face and had not known. Forbes' reason was in abeyance. The last car of the long vestibuled-train was just abreast him, moving with considerable velocity. With a spring he gained the lower step, seizing the railings on either side. He was vaguely aware of a shout from the receding platform and he almost thought he could distinguish Warren's voice lifted in a bellow of astonishment. But for the time being all other emotions were submerged by an overwhelming satisfaction in the realization that Agatha and he were still fellow travelers. CHAPTER XXIII AN INTRODUCTION Forbes waited for the door to be opened with sensations approximating those of a naughty boy, caught in mischief. Man of the world as he was, he recoiled from the prospect before him. He had never been of the temperament to ignore precedent and defy regulations, and the necessary explanations to outraged authority were no more attractive because they were something new in his experience. Hardly more agreeable than his anticipations of an interview with the conductor was the realization of the probable comments of his fellow passengers, the smiles that would be exchanged, the curious conjectures passed from one to another, as to the occasion for his act. As Forbes reflected ruefully on the coming ordeal, his hat was lifted lightly from his head and sent whirling on an independent journey. His impulse to snatch after it was checked by the discovery that he needed both hands for another purpose, needed them imperatively, for the lurch of the train had nearly thrown him off his balance. He tightened his grip and gave himself up to irritated reflection. Like most men, Forbes was pathetically dependent on his hat. He never so much as crossed the street without it. Now it would be necessary to make the rest of his journey hatless and leave the train in some unfamiliar city, stared at by the crowd who would mistake him for a faddist, demonstrating a protest against conventional garb. Forbes' annoyance gave vent in a profane ejaculation. The next to go were his eye-glasses. Again Forbes' inclination to clutch for his vanishing possessions was conquered just in time to save him from following in their wake. The narrow margin by which he had missed death did not prevent him from grieving over his glasses. He had no others with him. He would not be able to read till he reached home, and the strain on his eyes would probably bring on a severe headache. His hat could be replaced at the first shop, but not his glasses. He found it hard to be reconciled to such ill luck. It was several minutes before the realization was brought home to Forbes that the loss of these belongings was a very trifling matter. By that time his feeling of reluctance to have the door opened had entirely vanished. In his boyhood he had frequently played "crack the whip." His sensations when the line of runners suddenly halted, and he, a little fellow bringing up the rear, was sent sprawling over the grass, were being duplicated in this memorable ride. The express was playing "crack the whip" with himself as snapper. Once as the train rounded a curve, both feet flew from under him, and the unexpected jerk upon his arms almost broke his hold. He could hardly believe in his good fortune when he found himself still standing on the step, holding on literally for dear life. For now he knew that in his desperate determination to see Agatha again, he had taken his life in his hands. Oddly enough it was not the likelihood of a sudden and violent death which presented itself most forcibly to his imagination. The opportunities he had missed with Agatha were infinitely more disturbing. If only he had spoken in her defense the day Julia had exhausted her ingenuity in wounding and insulting the rival she instinctively feared. But he had stood silent while Julia's malice spent itself. And later when time had revealed the affair in a truer perspective, if he had but gone to her and said to her all that was in his heart, she might have been his wife by now. One inevitably gets down to realities when life flickers like a candle in the wind, and Forbes no longer debated the question of Agatha's love for him. In addition to Warren's testimony, he had the memory of a kiss, a dream kiss, pressed on his cheeks as he struggled back to consciousness after the stormy interview with Hephzibah, a kiss salt with tears and sweet with ineffable promise. Forbes heard his bitter laughter above the roar of the train. "God!" his voice said, "what a mess I've made of things." Forbes had never had a high opinion of the intelligence of that portion of the traveling public which puts its head out of the window of a moving train. Indeed he had always classified it with the people who maim or kill their best friends by playful maneuvers with guns that are not loaded. From this time on, his ideas on the subject were to be revolutionized. He was destined to think of the above-named individuals as philanthropists of a high order. A man in the smoking-car, thrusting his head out of the window at a time when the curving of the track brought the rear coach into full view, made a discovery which he promptly imparted to the conductor. That official, properly incredulous, extended his own head from the window and verified the passenger's astonishing statement. And at the moment when Forbes' imagination was busy with the gruesome details relating to the discovery of his lifeless body lying beside the tracks, the vestibule door suddenly opened and the face of indignant authority looked down at him. They dragged Forbes inside after unclenching his hands for him, his stiffened muscles refusing that simple service. The conductor failing to recognize in this disheveled individual with the unsteady knees, the respectable passenger whose ticket he had punched earlier in the trip, not unnaturally assumed that Forbes was drunk and acting on that supposition, proceeded to make himself very disagreeable. As Forbes regained his shaken dignity, and paid his fare, the man in uniform became less truculent and in the end, positively congratulatory. Forbes' grips were in the possession of an unknown porter at a station some thirty miles back, and he made as satisfactory a toilet as was possible without the aid of their contents, before returning to the coach where lately he had devoted himself to entertaining Charlie Briggs, unaware that the door of Paradise stood ajar just across the aisle. Here disappointment awaited him. Agatha, having learned from bitter experience that activity is the best of balms for a sore heart, had resolved on washing the hands and faces of her charges and giving their hair proper attention. To make the toilet of four children in the limited accommodations of a Pullman, with the certainty that at any moment the lurch of the train may precipitate you into the wash basin, or through the hanging curtains out into the aisle, is a process requiring time and patience. Forbes sat in his former place, biting his lips for three-quarters of an hour before he saw the little procession slowly making its way down the aisle. Forbes' uncomfortable uncertainty as to whether he had made a fool of himself or not, vanished at the sight of Agatha. Worn and weary as she looked, her eyes still reddened from weeping, she had never seemed to him so infinitely dear and desirable. Such trivial things as corrugated palms and lost eye-glasses and a narrow escape from death, no longer mattered. Charlie Briggs was the first to discover him. "My man's come back," he shouted jubilantly and ran into Forbes' arms. Agatha's eyes followed him, and she stopped short, her flushed cheeks paling. For a moment Forbes thought her about to faint and started to his feet to assist her, but immediately she had regained her self-control and walked steadily to her seat, though as a matter of fact she did not feel the floor beneath her feet and was scarcely conscious of the child in her arms. He had come back and intuition told her why. Forbes rose and crossed the aisle. "Charlie," he said in a voice of authority, "take your little sisters to my seat and play with them for a while." Charlie Briggs demurred. "Run along," Forbes insisted. "And when I get a chance to buy you some candy you shall have enough to make you sick for a month." "Us too?" asked the curly-haired girl, ready to oppose any unfair sex-discrimination. "Yes, you, too," Forbes promised recklessly. "Enough so all three of you will need a doctor." It was not in human nature to resist such a bribe. The three crossed immediately to the opposite section. Forbes took the seat at Agatha's side. A silence at once inevitable and ridiculous fell between them. There was so much to be said that there seemed no rational starting point. He wanted to ask what she was doing with all those children, but the query seemed to put her on the defensive. She was longing to know how after leaving the train, he could possibly be aboard again, but she left the first move to him. Presently a mutual attraction drew their eyes together and Forbes lost no more time. "Have you had long enough," he said a trifle unsteadily, "to decide on that proposition I made you nine months ago to a day?" "I--I--What proposition do you mean?" "That we should set up housekeeping together?" Agatha seemed trying to remember. "Wasn't that for last winter only?" "No. It's for this summer and next winter and for all the summers and winters that ever will be." She regarded him amazedly. "You're not--you can't be--" "But I am, exactly that. Will you marry me, Agatha?" "Listen!" A little flutter of laughter escaped her and he loved the sound of it. "Do you realize those are the first words you've ever spoken to me--the real _me_, that we've just been introduced? Of course we had any number of good talks when I was Great-aunt Agatha Kent." "Bless her dear heart!" Forbes interjected gratefully. "And we had one rather exciting interview when I was Hephzibah." "Yes, I have reason to remember that interview." He looked at her meaningly and gloated over her blush. "And now I'm just Agatha," she went on bravely, ignoring her scarlet cheeks. "And the very first words you say to me are to ask me to marry you." "And they're the words I shall keep saying till you promise." She shot him a side-long glance. "But what--what about Julia?" "She was married early in January. They have been spending the winter in Palm Beach, I understand." "Oh!" There was such compassion in her voice, such pitying tenderness in her eyes that she had a narrow escape from being kissed on the spot. He compromised by taking her hand. "Listen, dear girl. Let's clear this thing up once for all. I've had a narrow escape. The Julia I loved was no more real than your Hephzibah. I knew my mistake that day when she attacked you at Oak Knoll. The cruelty of it was a revelation. I can't understand now why I listened without protest, but you must remember that I had received a staggering surprise." "Staggering and cruel!" Her fingers tightened about his. "I tried so hard to tell you everything that day in the woods and I was such a coward that the words wouldn't come. How can you ever forgive me?" "Hush, dear love! I shall shock this train-load of people if you are not careful. I was too dazed and bewildered that first day to be quite responsible for what I did or left undone. But within twenty-four hours I spoke my mind so plainly as to terminate the friendship between Miss Studley and myself. I have never seen nor heard from her since." The look she turned on him made him hang his head. The certainty that elates most men, humbles those of finer mold. "Agatha, my dearest, you talk of my forgiving you. Can you ever forgive me?" The train was slowing for a stop before they had settled that delicate question. Agatha argued that it was preposterous to talk of forgiving one who in every relation of life was absolute perfection. Forbes insisted that her attitude proved her an angel. The baby, with a discretion beyond its years, refrained from offering any interruption to this absorbing conversation, though occasionally its toothless gums were revealed in what might have impressed the unprejudiced on-looker as a derisive smile. After the brief stop, a train boy appeared shouting Forbes' name. He proved to be the bearer of a telegram from Warren. Forbes and Agatha read it together: "If enough is left of you to make the marriage ceremony valid advise clenching matter at the first stop run no risk of letting her get away from us again." "Warren seems to be laboring under the impression," frowned Forbes, "that he comes in on this. Except for that slight error--" Agatha interpolated irrelevantly that Warren was a dear. "He's not half bad," Forbes admitted generously. "And apart from his erroneous impression that this is a partnership affair, the message impresses me favorably. What do you think?" "How do you know," questioned Agatha interestedly, "that I'm not already married to a widower with four small children?" "I'll own the thought crossed my mind. But I wouldn't consider it. You looked too sad for a bride." Agatha put her hand into his quite shamelessly. "Of course I would look sad if I had been so silly as to marry somebody else." "Who are these children anyway?" Forbes asked, as if he had just thought of it. "Orphans. Orphans who are going to be adopted. The homes have been investigated and they're all right. Now I'm going to leave the children for a six months' trial, and if at the end of that time everybody is satisfied, they will be legally adopted." Agatha added casually that they would reach the baby's future home at five o'clock and that she would be rather glad to get him off her hands before nightfall. Forbes recalled a statement of Charlie Briggs much to the same effect, and was man enough to apologize mentally to the youngster. Agatha's next remark had to Forbes a delicious suggestion of wifely authority. "Why aren't you wearing your glasses?" He explained the fate of those cherished belongings and did his best to make light of the whole affair. But Agatha was not to be deceived. Her eyes widened to surprising proportions. Her face grew white. "You might have been killed. It's a miracle you weren't killed." His distress over the discovery that she was crying was spiced with ecstasy. She interrupted his clumsy efforts at comfort with self-accusation. "And if you had been killed, I would have been to blame." "Why, in heaven's name, dearest? My own folly would have been solely responsible. But when I realized that I had actually spoken face to face with you, and that you were escaping me again, I lost my head completely." "If I'd told you who I was, you wouldn't have had any reason to risk your life. And so if anything had happened it would have been all my fault." He took a rather base advantage of her self-reproach. "I'll forgive you on one condition. As I understand it, after you have made arrangements about the baby you will spend the night at a hotel and take the train to-morrow." "Yes, that's my plan." "And my plan is that you marry me to-morrow morning." "I had intended," Agatha answered reflectively, "to take an eight o'clock train." "I suppose a later one will do." "Very likely. But a wedding without a trousseau! I am equal to a trousseau now, you know. I have--or did have a little while ago--a fortune of twelve thousand dollars." "I can't think," Forbes murmured, "of anything I should enjoy better than helping to select a trousseau--a little later." "You know I'm responsible for Miss Finch," Agatha said breathlessly. "She's not going to be married after all." "Miss Finch is a member of my family from now on." "And Howard! It was all make-believe that he was a young friend of mine. He's really my darling brother." "And mine as soon as you say the word. Dear little Miss Proteus," cried Forbes with a laugh that did not disguise the tenderness of his voice, "I'm afraid to let you out of my sight for fear you'll change into something else, a mermaid or a fairy, and be lost to me forever." "I'm sure it will disappoint Mrs. Van Horne if I come back with a husband," mused Agatha. "It will seem such a childish performance. And yet--when you've made up your mind that all that's left in life for you is to go on doing your duty and trying to be kind to everybody, and then happiness comes back and knocks at your door, you--you--oh, Burton--it's not in human nature to keep her waiting." After a party, consisting of a smiling gentleman, a radiant girl and four tired children, had left the train, one of the people who always know the details of everybody's business, sketched their history for the benefit of the owner of the poodle. "They had a dreadful quarrel, you know, the way young people will, and she was going home to her father's. Somehow or other he learned what train she was to take and got aboard just at the last minute." The listener knitted blonde brows. "I didn't really feel sure the woman was in her right mind. She made some absurd statement about those two little girls. Said there was six months' difference in their ages." "She was so excited she didn't know what she was saying," explained the omniscient traveler. "He sent her messages by the little boy and when she wouldn't pay any attention, he brought her to time by standing on the steps of the rear coach for more than an hour. It was a wonder he wasn't killed." The stout blonde expressed the opinion that it was woman's place to forgive. "Well, that melted her, and you can't wonder. The porter in the rear coach told our porter that when they dragged him aboard he hardly had strength to stand on his feet. It didn't take them long to get things fixed up after that. I went for a drink of water after they'd been talking for half an hour or so, and he'd picked up the baby, and I'm pretty sure from the way he held that child, he was using it just as a screen and kissing the mother behind it." "Awful fretful baby," commented the stout blonde. "I'm glad it won't be on the train to-night." "Looks as if they'd started out to have a real old-fashioned family," said the omniscient narrator. "None of the children looks like her but the curly-haired girl and the boy are the image of their papa." 
61246	----	available by Internet Archive (https://archive.org) Note: Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See https://archive.org/details/prisonersofhartl00bereuoft/mode/2up THE PRISONERS OF HARTLING * * * * * * BY J. D. BERESFORD THE JERVAISE COMEDY AN IMPERFECT MOTHER * * * * * * THE PRISONERS OF HARTLING by J. D. BERESFORD 'There is a sore evil which I have seen under the sun, namely, riches kept for the owners thereof to their hurt.' _Ecclesiastes_ v. 13. New York The Macmillan Company 1922 All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Copyright, 1922, by the Macmillan Company. Set up and printed. Published February, 1922. Press of J. J. Little & Ives Company New York, U. S. A. To H. H. BASHFORD THE PRISONERS OF HARTLING I "Dog's life, old man, a dog's life; you can't get away from that." Arthur Woodroffe's voice was quite cheerful as he framed this indictment of the life of a general practitioner in a poor neighbourhood, but his companion frowned and shook his head impatiently. "You are still re-acting to the pernicious influences of that damnable war," he said. "You're hankering after the intoxication of saving wounded under fire; exciting stunts of that sort; Sbana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus. You've got to learn to be content with Jordan. Risk your life in more homely ways saving the sick in Peckham. Same thing, really; only you don't get orders for it. And of course ..." he hesitated, pushed up his gold-rimmed spectacles, and stared hard at his friend and paid assistant. "Any way, what is it you're hankering after, my good chap?" he concluded. Woodroffe looked critically round the little room, and then at Somers glowering down at him from the hearthrug. "More space," he said briefly; "and more...." He seemed to jib at the word that was obviously in his mind. "More beauty," Somers suggested. "If you like," Woodroffe agreed carelessly. "Something of that sort. I'd like to get about the world a bit, too." "As medical attendant to a hypochondriac millionaire?" "Or some job abroad; or...." "What you really want, my lad, is an independent income and lots of leisure," Somers commented. "You can't say I've ever been a slacker, Bob," Woodroffe said. "No, but you'd soon pick it up if you had got enough to live on without worrying." Woodroffe considered that before he replied. "Don't believe I should. Go in for research or something. Hate having nothing to do." "There's always hunting and golf, and bridge and billiards, and cricket, and so on," Somers said. "Life of a country gentleman. Also, you might marry and beget a family, and go in for politics. Quite a strenuous life it seems, for a lot of 'em." "Bit of a change wouldn't it, after the life of a panel doctor in Peckham," Woodroffe remarked; "but I don't think it's my style all the same. I'd like to _do_ something, something useful. And by the way, old thing, if you're taking on Nellie Mason, I'd advise you to turn in. I saw her this morning, and she's pretty near her time. Rotten job it'll be, too. But I'll take her on if you like. A fat primip like her would be good for my character." "No, I'll take it," Somers said. "I promised her I would. She thinks you're a bit young. All the same, I'm not going to bed yet. I want to have this out with you. It's interesting, for one thing. I suppose nothing particular has upset you lately, has it? Nothing that's set your mind roving." "I don't know. Yes. In a way. Had a letter this morning asking me to spend a week-end with a wealthy sort of connection of mine in Sussex--or Surrey, is it? Hartling's the name of the place." "Never heard of it, nor of your connection with wealth," Somers said. "It's a bit distant," Woodroffe explained. "My aunt, my mother's sister that is, married the old man's son. His name's Garvice Kenyon. Ever heard of _him_?" Somers shook his head. "It'd be a bit before your time," Woodroffe acknowledged. "The old chap must be about ninety. I've only seen him once. I went there to stay with my mother when I was a kid of about nine or ten. Some idea of keeping up the connection, I suppose. But after my father got that living in Yorkshire, we dropped out. I don't remember much about the place or the people. General impression of grandeur, and so on, that's all. Mighty fine place, I believe." "How did you pick 'em up again?" Somers asked. "Well, I haven't picked 'em up again yet," Woodroffe said. "But I sat next to old Beddington at that public dinner you took me to a fortnight ago, and in the course of conversation--the sort of tosh one does talk to your next door neighbour on those occasions--he happened to mention that he was going down to see old Kenyon. So I claimed the connection for the sake of something to say. After that Beddington talked a lot about Kenyon; in fact he told me more than I had ever heard before. And, well, I suppose in much the same sort of way he must have talked to old Kenyon about me, when he was down there. Anyhow, this morning I got a letter from my aunt--forwarded from Holt's--Beddington probably told 'em I'd been in the R.A.M.C.--asking me to go down there the week-end after next. She says the old man would be 'very interested to hear some of my war experiences.' Bright old bird, apparently, for ninety. Beddington said he was as fit as a flea, still, but a bit absent-minded." "And the thought of going down there has unsettled you, has it?" Somers asked. "Don't know that I am going," Woodroffe said. "My togs are a bit rusty for that kind of show." "I'd almost forgotten that one felt like that at twenty-eight," commented Somers. "After the war, too. Accept the wisdom of forty-five, my dear boy, and believe me that rusty togs are quite distinguished these days." "Makes you feel rotten, all the same," Woodroffe thought. "But you still avoid the real issue," Somers persisted; "why this invitation has unsettled you." "I don't know," Woodroffe said, settling himself a little deeper in his arm-chair. "I suppose if one analyses it, the thing set me thinking of--of the differences between Kenyon's position and mine. Here I am with no decent clothes, and no money; sweating myself thin over a dirty job like trying to mitigate the sickness of Peckham, while old Kenyon's got more money than he knows what to do with." "Incipient socialism, this," Somers confided to the wall opposite. "It isn't," Woodroffe said. "I've no sympathy with the greasy proletariat; not my line at all. It is that the whole thing has just set me wondering how I'm going to get out of it. It's no damned good pretending, my dear Bob, that I wouldn't sooner be lying snug in a clean comfortable bed than delivering women like Nellie Mason. And, oh! Lord, the accent is on the _clean_ all the time." "You don't mean to imply ..." Somers began. "My dear chap, of course I don't," Woodroffe cut in. "My bed here is clean enough for any one, but for about twelve hours of the day I am mixing with dirtiness of every sort and kind, and I had more than my fill of it in the war--lice by the yard and every sort of filth. You blooming base-wallahs never knew your blessings. Well, all I know is that I used to tell myself stories of getting clean, fantasy hot baths in exquisite surroundings, and picture myself going straight from them into brand new clothes and that sort of thing. Instead of which I've dropped straight into this. I know I'm clean all right, Bob, but I can't _feel_ clean. You've got to admit now, haven't you, that ours is a dirty job, take it all round?" Somers put his hand under his coat and scratched his left shoulder vigorously. "Oh! damn," he remarked, after a thoughtful interval. "I might come back to it, after a couple of years or so," Woodroffe began again apologetically. "But it's becoming almost an obsession with me just now. I expect these psycho-analysis Johnnies would say I was suffering from some suppression or shock or something." "You've definitely made up your mind to chuck this job, then?" Somers asked. "I hadn't when we began," Woodroffe replied. "But talking to you about it seems to have cleared my mind. Honestly I'd no idea of chucking it when we started this jaw, and now it seems the only possible thing to do." "What are you going to live on?" Somers asked. "I've saved between four and five hundred pounds," Woodroffe said. "Carry me on for a bit, though I suppose it isn't worth two hundred these days. And then I might have a look round one of the colonies, Canada or New Zealand, or somewhere. It'd be cleaner than Peckham." Somers sighed, and made a gesture of renunciation. "I'm sorry about this, Arthur," he said; "very sorry--not only because I shall lose you--though that's bad enough, but also, because, well, your attitude disappoints me." Woodroffe hunched himself in his chair and began to fidget, touching various marks here and there on the hearthrug with the toe of his slipper. "You've always said we ought to express ourselves," he grumbled, "and here I'm going contrary to my inclinations all the time. I haven't forgotten your yarns on that subject at the hospital eight years ago." "My dear old chap, that's the very point," Somers replied. "That's what disappoints me. I thought you had something better to express than these calf-like yearnings for change and luxury." Woodroffe's handsome face had taken on the expression of a sulky schoolboy. He was still intent on tracing some ideal pattern in the design of the hearthrug as he said: "Had nearly five years of it. Over four years in the Army and six months here. Don't see why in the name of God I shouldn't at least get out into some clean, decent country like Canada." "I shan't try to stop you," Somers replied. "All the same you're making me feel perfectly rotten about it," Woodroffe said. "Making me feel as if I were a deserter, slinking off and leaving you here. Might just as well say at once that you won't let me go. Of course I shan't, now I know how you feel about it." Somers stared hard at the opposite wall, tucked his hands under his short coat-tails, and as he spoke alternately raised himself on his toes, and let himself down on his heels with an effect of emphasising his points. "I stand reproved, Arthur," he said. "I was wrong--quite wrong. Purely selfish. I've been a bit tired lately and bad-tempered." "Not you," Woodroffe mumbled. "I have," Somers insisted. "I'm in a nasty mood to-night." "I wish you'd let me take Nellie Mason," Woodroffe put in. "I can't. I promised her, five months ago. Never mind that. We're talking about you. And I want you to go. Yes; I mean it. You ought to go. I'm a short-sighted old fool; much too wrapped up in myself and my own affairs; but now that I've heard the case stated I can see the truth. You'd only stultify and repress yourself by staying here. I know how loyal you are, and I know that at a word from me you'd go on. You mustn't. You'd do harm to yourself and to the practice by denying your impulse. As you reminded me, that's a well-established principle of mine, though I haven't thought much about it for the last five years--there's been too much to do. The point is, however, that you'll do no good to yourself or any one while you're working against the grain. _Fay ce que voudra._ It's possible that you may come a tremendous cropper, and that might do you all the good in the world. But go you must. I wouldn't keep you now if you wanted to stay." Woodroffe had stopped fidgeting. "But look here, Bob, old man," he said. "As a matter of fact, I can't go yet, not for a month or two." "You can go to-morrow if you want to," Somers replied. "Bates wants a job and he'd be glad to come." "Oh! Lord! Bates!" interjected Woodroffe. "Yes, ohlordbates!" Somers corroborated him. "Dear old wooden-headed, persistent, patient, uninspired Bates. He's just the man I want. The panel patients'll love him, because he'll take so much trouble over 'em. It's true that he'll have to work eighteen hours a day to get through, but he likes that sort of thing. Makes him feel as if he were being some use in the world, poor chap. Oh! yes, I can do with Bates, but God! I'll miss you, Arthur." "I'm damned if I'll go," Woodroffe announced, getting up. "Everlastingly damned if I will." "You will, my son, because I won't keep you," Somers said. "But I don't say that I won't ever have you back. That depends, of course, on how you return to me. If you _want_ to come back in two, or three, or five years' time; just turn up and say, 'Bob, I think I'd like to take up the old work again! and we'll go into partnership.' You'll be ripe for it. Now you've got to go and find out what you are fit for. You're not just now fit for this job or you wouldn't be feeling as you do about it. I know you'd stay out of friendship for me, but that's no good--no good at all. I'd sooner have ohlordbates trying to be some use in the world." Woodroffe sat down again and stared rather gloomily at the pattern of the hearthrug. "I feel rather a swine, all the same, Bob," he said. "You won't in a month's time," Somers assured him. Woodroffe contemplated that remark for a moment and then smiled rather grimly. "In a way I hope I will," he said, "and in another way I hope I won't. You needn't think it'll be a case of 'out of sight, out of mind,' Bob; but I shouldn't care to live permanently with the thought of myself as being a swine for having left you." "You're not leaving me, my dear man, I'm sending you away for your own good and that of the practice," Somers returned. "Comes to the same thing. It means I've failed you." "It means that you've failed yourself," Somers corrected him. "Now I want you to go out into the world and find out where and why. You'll do it. I shall expect you back sometime." Woodroffe sighed and got up, but his face had cleared. "I'll come back," he said; "but I'll admit it's a relief to go in a lot of ways. I--good Lord, I want more space," and he stretched out his arms as if to demonstrate how very little space there was in that small room. Somers nodded. "That's settled," he said. "And I don't know that you could make a better beginning, Arthur, than by accepting that invitation of your rich connections for a week-end." "Oh! ah! I'd forgotten that," Woodroffe said, looked down at the knees of his trousers, and added with a faint blush: "Might get myself some new togs out of capital? I'm sure to want 'em sooner or later. Only things are such a filthy price just now. They rook you about thirty quid for a dress suit." "I should certainly get some new togs," Somers advised him. "Treat it as an investment." "Of course, if you put it like that," Woodroffe said, with a grin. "I'll take the responsibility of letting you squander your capital," Somers replied gravely. "Facetious old dog, you!" Woodroffe returned. "Like to pretend I'm still in leading strings, don't you?" "Lord, you're not ready for leading strings yet," Somers said. "Wait till you're weaned before you try to walk." Woodroffe thumped him playfully on the chest. "Oh! go to bed," Somers growled. "I'm going to try and snatch an hour before I'm fetched for Nellie Mason; if I am fetched. Personally, I shouldn't be surprised if it wasn't for another week yet." "Dog's life, old man, a dog's life," Woodroffe commented as he left the room. When he had gone Somers threw himself down with a groan into the arm-chair. "I wonder how long it'll be before he comes back?" he thought. "If he'll ever come back?" In his mind's eye he had a disgustingly clear image of the solemn, earnest face of young Bates. II Arthur Woodroffe's true defence of his action in leaving Peckham did not occur to him until after he had parted with Somers. In the course of the ten days that had passed since his sudden arrival at a decision, he had fallen into a perfect intoxication of spending. In that time he had spent over two hundred pounds. And with that expenditure he had broken another habit of thought. His early life had always been overshadowed by the cares and threats of respectable poverty, and when his last financial responsibility had been closed by his mother's death, eighteen months earlier, he had continued to save money, with the prudent thought that he might presently need capital. But just as he had suddenly and surprisingly realised that there was no compelling reason why he should stay on as Somers' assistant at Peckham, so, also, he had realised when he began his shopping, that he might, if he wished, do the thing in style. He was beginning a new life. He was young and competent, and he had a profession. He would let the future take care of itself. And here was one of his fantasies coming true; he would have everything new and clean. He remembered his dream of stripping naked and plunging into a deep wide river, a sweet and rapid flood of purifying water; of swimming many miles until he came to a new land where vermin were unknown; and of walking out of the river, cool, and refreshed, to dress--he had never told any one that--in white silk from head to foot. Nothing but the smoothest silk would do. He had seen that silk in imagination glimmering with the sheen of a fine pearl. He smiled now at the extravagance of that fancy, but the temptation to buy an entirely new outfit was too strong to be resisted. He had deserved it. The impulse marked his real recovery from the effects of the war. The world owed him five years of youth! That was the true defence of his action in leaving Peckham. He saw his justification with astounding clearness as he stood on Westminster Bridge looking up the river, half an hour before his train was timed to leave Charing Cross--the train that was to take him to Hartling for his promised week-end. In a re-action against his orgie of spending, he had come as far as that by tram, lugging his new kit-bag and dressing-case. The tram would have taken him on to Charing Cross, but when it had stopped close to his old hospital, he had felt an urgent desire to see the river from the old standpoint. The thought of his bags had not deterred him. He was bursting with vigour and energy that morning. Society, the World, Life owed him five years for those he had given. The years from twenty-two to twenty-seven. He had joined up in August, 1914, had been sent down to Salisbury Plain for his training, and had been in France by the summer of next year. He had been lucky in some ways. He had not been wounded or gassed or suffered from shell-shock, and in the following winter he had been combed out and sent back to the hospital for two years to finish his training, before returning to France as a Lieutenant in the R.A.M.C. But looking back now, it seemed to him that he had had no relaxation in all that time. He had taken the war too seriously and the shadow of it had lain over him. If it had not been for that, he would not have joined dear old Bob Somers on the very day that he had been demobilised. He had got the habit of being strenuous and self-sacrificing and all the rest of it, and the habit, or whatever it was, had apparently dropped from him almost miraculously in the course of that conversation. It was unquestionably gone. He felt himself, unexpectedly and delightfully, not only free but also young again. He must write to Bob and explain that theory of the lost years of youth and the world's debit account. He would not be hard on his debtor. He would not exact a full repayment of the original loan. He would take only two years. After that he would go back to the strenuous habit of self-sacrifice and leave his youth behind. He could recover the very spirit of it in this place. How often he had glanced down from the end of a ward and taken back to his work a picture of the river, of the bridge, or of the Gothic dignities of the Houses of Parliament. In retrospect those pictures were all coloured with the vivid emotions of youth. He could place some of them with the distinctness of a clearly remembered dream. There was, for instance, that wonderful morning in February, mild and clear as a day in April, associated with the thought that he was playing for his hospital in one of the "Rugger" cup ties that afternoon. Great days, those were; and in effect, he was physically little older now than he was then. He was splendidly fit. He laid hold again of his two bags, and strode triumphantly across the bridge. And that mood held, even mounted, unchecked by the deliberations of the South-Eastern and Chatham train service. Indeed, the semi-torpid movements of the railway servants on the branch line to which he changed at the junction afforded a pleasant contrast to his own exuberance. He was beginning life again. Everything was coming right. He had visions of some delightful, improbable enlargement of his condition. Old Kenyon might take a fancy to him. Some one in the house, some special favourite of the old man's, might be taken seriously ill, and Arthur Woodroffe, the brilliant young general practitioner from Peckham, would work a miracle at the eleventh hour. Old Mr Kenyon's gratitude would take a practical form, and the thing was done. There were other variants of the dream, but this seemed to be the most promising. A car was waiting for him at Hartling Station, but neither his aunt nor any of his connections by marriage had come to meet him. Arthur had his bags put into the tonneau and sat in front. He wanted to talk to some one, and found the chauffeur quite willing for conversation. They began with the obvious subject of motors and presently the chauffeur volunteered the statement that the Vauxhall in which they were riding was not their best car. "Use this for station work and short trips mostly, sir," he said. "But Mr Kenyon always has the Rolls-Royce for going up to town. Never goes any other way. Wonderful old gentleman, Mr Kenyon, sir." "I haven't seen him for twenty years," Arthur said. "He's getting on for ninety, isn't he?" "Ninety-one last October, sir," the chauffeur told him, "and he'd make a good seventy in a manner of speaking. A bit absent-minded sometimes, he don't always hear you when you speak to him; but no doubt that's because he's thinking o' something else. He's not what you call deaf, not in the least." "Good Lord. Wonderful!" Arthur commented. His mind was engaged in framing a tentative essay on the causes of disability in old age, more particularly with reference to arterio-sclerosis, but he reserved that as being a shade too technical. "Though there's no real reason, you know," he said, "why we shouldn't live to be a hundred or even a hundred and twenty. There's a fellow in Asia Minor who is supposed to be a hundred and fifty." "I suppose not, sir," the chauffeur replied without enthusiasm, and added, apparently as an afterthought, "You're a doctor, I was told, sir." Arthur nodded. "I haven't come down here professionally, though," he said. "No, sir; I shouldn't say as Mr Kenyon had much faith in doctors...." The chauffeur's sentence tailed off on a high note, with an effect of there being more to come; also he reduced the pace of the car as if he had something of importance to add before they reached the house. "I've wondered sometimes, sir," he continued, after a short pause, "whether he oughtn't to--to take advice, as they say. Them fits of absent-mindedness I was telling you about, for instance, come on very queer sometimes. It's like as if he was sound asleep with his eyes wide open. Scared me once or twice he has. I thought perhaps being a doctor you might be able to say if it was anything serious. Of course, being ninety-one...." Arthur would have liked to give a ready diagnosis of this abnormal condition, but his expertise was not equal to the task, and he fell back on the usual defence of his profession. "Couldn't possibly say without examining him," he said. "It might be due to one of several conditions." The car running down a slight incline with a free engine had almost stopped. The chauffeur appeared to be deep in thought. "At Mr Kenyon's age ..." he began tentatively "One would not expect him to be quite the man he was at twenty-eight," Arthur supplied. "Exactly, sir, one wouldn't," the chauffeur replied in the tone of one aroused to a consciousness of his immediate duties; and he let in the clutch and speeded up the car with an effect of turning his attention to more pressing affairs. For the last quarter of a mile they had been running alongside a high brick wall, and as they now swerved in between a pair of wide-open iron gates, Arthur realised that the rather ugly wall was the boundary of Mr Kenyon's property. The contrast between the outside and the inside was, as perhaps it was designed to be, sudden and startling. From the dusty side road flanked on one side by that erection of crude brickwork, he was transported without any kind of preparation into a finished and extensively cultivated garden of unusual extent and beauty. Seen from that entrance by the little lodge, the garden wonderfully displayed itself. It lay on a moderate slope, lifting up in a steady rise from the entrance gates to the climax of the house, that spread itself along the crest of the hill with an effect of dignified watchfulness. And the designer of that garden had had fine natural material to work upon other than the slope that provided the excuse for that triple tier of terraces with their shallow stone steps and low balustrading. He had had, for example, a fine selection of forest trees, elm, oak, and beech, with as a contrast a plantation of larches and silver birch bounding the estate on the east side. Also he had had an abundance of running water. A little river, its point of entrance hidden by the close shrubberies and plantations that shut out all sight of the ugly boundary wall on the garden side, cascaded not too artificially, out of obscurity into the sunlight, ran as a decently restrained little river for a hundred yards or so between close-cut lawns, the upper one of which was bordered by a row of graceful wych elms; and then spread itself into an irregular lake, over which the main drive to the house was carried by the spring of a slender bridge. But any catalogue of that garden's innumerable "features" must inevitably convey a false impression. Whoever had planned it, had had the genius to conceive his effect as a whole. It was arranged, composed, to display itself from the entrance lodge as a broad mass that was presented to the mind as a miniature park, abounding with natural opportunities, which had for many years been scrupulously kept, planted, and mown. And seen thus on the broad, it could not be classified as belonging either to the formal or the landscape type; rather it had the air of a diligently cultivated suburban garden enormously enlarged. There was something new, bright, almost deliberately factitious in its pretensions. The chauffeur had but one comment to offer as they spun up the long curve of the gravel drive to the house. As they crossed the stone bridge over the pond, he pointed to the right, indicating a rough-cast and half-timbered building nearly hidden by the trees of the larch plantation into which the little river plunged out of sight. "Power house, sir," he explained. "We do all our own lighting and pumping by water-power. Pleased to show you over, sir, if you have time. Nice little plant we've got." Arthur found a sense of satisfaction in the thought of the completeness of the place. III Arthur remembered the bridge and the lake now that he saw them again. He had had some vague recollection of an immense sheet of water and an equally immense bridge that he had vaguely connected--he thought, mistakenly--with his boyhood visits to Hartling. The only other thing he remembered was a colossal elephant's pad in the hall. He found it still there, and in the interval of twenty years, it had diminished less than the lake. The detail of the house itself had apparently left little impression on his boyish mind. As he glanced round the hall, he had an uncertain feeling of being familiar with that massive staircase, but he had no idea how the rooms were placed. His bags had gone round to some other entrance with the car; and as he gave his keys to the butler Arthur realised the splendid support of his expensive outfit. It made a difference, gave him assurance, a sense of being at home in these surroundings. That outfit was worth the money if only for the one week-end. It would have been absolutely rotten to have spent his whole time in trying to live down shabby clothes. There seemed to be a perfect crowd of people in the room into which he was shown by the butler after having elected to go straight in to tea. He presumed it was a regular week-end party. His aunt got up when he was announced and came across the room to greet him. She was a little tired-looking woman with a distinct likeness to his own mother, who had died in the first year of the war. He had always attributed that gray, pinched, slightly distracted air, in his mother's case, to the difficulties of life in a country parish on insufficient means; but as his aunt had the same air it was probably a family characteristic. Mrs Kenyon's voice and manner also reminded him of his mother. "How you've altered, Arthur," she said in a low, even voice. "In twenty years, aunt," he reminded her cheerfully, "one grows a certain amount." "I've seen you since then," she said quietly, "in town. Your poor mother brought you to see me off at Charing Cross: your first year at the hospital, I think it was. Now, come and have some tea." She led him towards the tea-table as she spoke, and introduced him in passing to her husband, a bald, rather untidy man, who was lying back in an arm-chair. "How're you?" he said indifferently to the newly recovered nephew. "Little chap in knickerbockers, about three foot nothing, last time I saw you." Arthur smiled his acknowledgment of this reminiscence with, he hoped, an effect of not caring whether he was remembered or not. These people were certainly not effusive; but probably this was their usual manner. The more money you had the less you troubled about manners and personal appearance. His uncle had been wearing a soft, rather crumpled collar and old flannel bags. Miss Kenyon, the eldest of the family, was presiding at the tea-table. She was a tall, white-haired woman of sixty or so, with what Arthur mentally described to himself as a "domineering expression." She hardly smiled as she shook hands with him. "I remember your first visit here very well," she said, and he grasped at the opportunity to avoid the usual futilities of an opening conversation. "Only the vaguest recollection of it myself, Miss Kenyon," he replied brightly, as he accepted the tea she offered him. "I dare say that's because my earlier memories have been rather overlaid by the experiences of the last six years." He felt that he had taken rather a sound line. He could see chances of quite good talking ahead, supported by a backing of medical and psychological authority. Miss Kenyon, however, cut him off by saying in her cold, clear voice, "One wouldn't expect you to remember much, you were only five." He couldn't believe it. "Oh! surely a lot more than that," he protested. "About nine or ten, I thought." "Jubilee year," Miss Kenyon affirmed quietly, but with an air of final authority. "In August." Arthur did not care to contradict her again, but he was still unconvinced. "Was it really?" he asked. "Astonishing how one forgets!" Miss Kenyon was not to be deceived by this simulation of agreement. "Don't you remember, Hannah?" she asked, turning to her sister-in-law, who had sat down near them, and was apparently brooding over the emptiness of life. Mrs Kenyon started. "Remember, Esther? Oh! when Arthur came before," she said. "Not very distinctly, I am afraid. But he was quite a little fellow, in a holland tunic. I remember that because he got himself very dirty one morning, and poor Emily hadn't got a change for him." Miss Kenyon nodded calmly. "In any case," she remarked, "we can verify the date without difficulty. I shall have a note of it in my diary." "Esther is always accurate in her facts," her sister-in-law murmured. "Her memory is simply wonderful." Miss Kenyon did not acknowledge this compliment. She was looking out through the great bay-window that was one of the principal features of the room in which they were sitting. Her expression was one of conscious authority--supreme, unquestionable. Arthur felt snubbed, and, for the moment could think of no other suitable topic of conversation. Perhaps it would be advisable to admit that he was wrong, before he tried another subject. "Stupid of me," he tried. "But as I was saying just now, the experiences of the past few years have rather altered one's scale of values. I probably mixed up my visit here with some other visit I paid with my mother when I was a bit older. One does that, sometimes." He paused. Miss Kenyon was regarding him with a quiet, detached interest. It was evident that she had no further intention of interrupting him if he cared to go on talking, but that he must not expect any sort of response. Arthur dropped his thesis with a slight sense of irritation and turned to his aunt. "Aren't there some cousins of mine I ought to know?" he asked. She indicated her two children with what Arthur thought to be a singular lack of enthusiasm. "That is Hubert by the fireplace. Elizabeth is over there in the window. I will introduce you to them when you have finished your tea." Arthur took stock of his two cousins with attention. He was beginning to wonder if he were not in for an uncommonly depressing week-end. His observations of the third generation did little to reassure him. Hubert was a young man of about twenty-five, with a long, melancholy face. He was dressed in rough tweeds, and wearing cloth gaiters, that gave him the look of a man whose interests lay among horses. And in Arthur's experience men who talked about horses were quite unable to talk about anything else. Elizabeth, a rather pretty girl, probably two or three years younger than her brother, was more interesting, but she, too, had the same expression of lassitude. Arthur, still brightly aware of his newly recovered youth, felt as if he would like to take her by the arm and run with her out into the sunlight; shake her, make her sing and dance, force her to show some signs of enjoying her consciousness of life. "And the little man talking to Hubert, who is he?" Arthur had no urgent desire to hurry the introduction to his cousins, and he was thoroughly enjoying the various cakes provided for tea. He had not tasted cakes like these since the war. Also, Miss Kenyon had now gone from the table and left the room, and he felt more free to talk. Aunt Hannah might be rather dull but she was at least reasonably polite. "That's Charles Turner," she told him. "He married Mr Kenyon's second daughter, Katherine--she's over there in the window by Elizabeth. Charles is the uncle of the present Lord Greening, you know." Arthur did not know, but he nodded as he replied, "Are they staying here for the week-end?" "Oh! no," Mrs Kenyon said. "We all live here. There is no one from outside here this week-end--except yourself." Was that the reason for their tepidity? Arthur reflected. He was some one "from the outside" intruding upon the family circle. Perhaps, in spite of their wealth, the Kenyon family mixed very little with the outside world. They were a complete group living within the enceinte of that ten-foot brick wall, self-sufficient, and it might be a little self-conscious in the presence of a stranger. That general air of lassitude and of--there was some other element in it that he could not quite define--might be the effect of shyness which, as he knew, often took strange forms. Not that Miss Kenyon had appeared to suffer from any known form of shyness. She was evidently an overbearing woman. "You're quite a large family party, aunt," he commented to keep the conversation going. Mrs Kenyon blinked as if he had in some way touched upon a sore subject. She gave, however, no hint of that in her reply. "And there's Eleanor, whom you haven't seen yet," she said. "She acts as a sort of secretary to Mr Kenyon. She's the daughter of James, the second son. He and his wife are both dead, and so is their elder daughter Margery." She looked at her son as she added, "Charles and Katherine have a son too, but he does not live with us. He is acting as a clerk to a stockbroker. Quite a good position, I believe. Have you finished your tea? I am sure Hubert is waiting to talk to you." "All but, aunt," Arthur said. "Sorry to bother you with all these questions, but I want to know who's who to begin with. And Mr Kenyon? He isn't down here of course." "He never takes tea," Mrs Kenyon said; "and we don't see a great deal of him at any time. I don't mean that he is in any way an invalid or a recluse, you know, but at his age...." "Oh! precisely," Arthur agreed. His aunt's sentence had tailed out into nothing, in much the same tone as that of the chauffeur when he had hesitated over precisely the same words. At his age.... The inference undoubtedly was that anything might happen when a man reaches the age of ninety-one. "He keeps awfully fit, though, doesn't he?" Arthur went on. "Yes. He's remarkably well and active ..." his aunt replied, paused again, and then concluded firmly, "but you will see him at dinner." Arthur noted again that effect of some unstated contingent. Possibly his aunt, also, was a trifle uneasy about the old man's health. "I've really finished at last, Aunt Hannah," he said, with a smile. She did not return the smile, but rose at once with an appearance of relief. Arthur felt as if he ought to apologise for having bored her. His cousin Hubert greeted him, as Arthur had expected, without enthusiasm. He turned almost at once to the Hon. Charles Turner, hoping that there he might perhaps find some kind of response. Turner was a small man whose age might have been anything between sixty and seventy, but he at least, obviously took trouble over his dress, and his rather elvish face was crinkled into an expression that gave promise of a rather satirical humour. Once or twice Arthur had caught Turner's gaze resting upon him with a slightly quizzical look. "You've gone in for medicine, I hear," Turner began, and without waiting for a reply, continued: "Depressing kind of profession, isn't it? Always listening to other people's complaints?" Arthur had never considered that aspect of the doctor's life. "Oh! I don't know," he said. "There are other things besides diagnosis. I mean...." "Oh! quite," Turner cut in; "but you're always with sick people. That's what you're for. Don't you find yourself getting in the way of looking at every one as a possible patient?" "Lord, no," Arthur replied, laughing. "You don't get so wrapped up in it as all that." "_You_ don't, perhaps," Turner said. "You're young yet, and I dare say you can drop your work when you are away from it. But I know a fellow, a Harley Street specialist, great authority on the heart...." "Sir Stephen Hunt?" Arthur put in. "That's the chap," Turner agreed. "Well, he's a terrible fellow. You'll see him looking round a dinner table and spotting symptoms. I remember sitting near him at dinner one night, and after the women had gone, he leant over to me and said, 'D'you know how long Lady Spendale has been suffering from'--let's see what did he call it--some sort of goitre?" "Exophthalmic, possibly," Arthur supplied. "I believe it was. She had rather protuberant eyes, I remember." "That's it," Arthur confirmed him. "Well, naturally I didn't even know she'd got it, if she had," Turner continued. "But what I mean is--ghastly sort of life to lead, always trying to spot something wrong with people's hearts or what not. Now, d'you mean to tell me honestly that you can help looking out for symptoms like that, more or less? Supposing I'd got protuberant eyes, for instance?" "That's such a frightfully obvious thing," Arthur objected. "As a matter of fact, there aren't so many diseases that can be diagnosed like that at sight. And--and--well, one rather gets out of the way of looking for them when one's off duty. As a student, I'll admit, one did a certain amount of showing off; kind of a game, you know, trying to spot the symptoms you'd just been reading up. But one soon dropped that." "H'm! Well! And so you like doctoring, do you? Got a practice, or what?" Turner asked. "No, nothing at the moment," Arthur said. "I've been helping a friend down in Peckham, but I've chucked that for the time being." "Loose end? What?" Turner inquired. "Got some notion of going to Canada," Arthur said. Turner pursed his mouth and looked down at his neat patent-leather shoes. "Fine climate and splendid opportunities there," he commented softly. "Free, open-air life and all that sort of thing. Just suit a vigorous young chap like you, I should say." Hubert Kenyon, who had been gloomily listening to the conversation without attempting to join in it, drew a long breath and exhaled it in a deep sigh. "That how you feel about it?" Arthur inquired. "I? Oh! How d'you mean?" Hubert asked. "Blowing a bit, weren't you, at the mention of Canada?" Arthur said. "Oh! That! I don't know," Hubert replied, without throwing much light on the meaning of his sigh. The conversation was dropping again. Arthur felt the silence coming, and did not care. He was a guest and it was the family's duty to entertain him. But what was the matter with them all? Or with him? He looked down the room. Miss Kenyon had come back, and they were all sitting about, reading or working in an uninterested kind of way--doing something or other as if it did not matter whether the thing was done or not. What was it the place and the people reminded him of? Yes! It was that boarding-house he had stayed in at Scarborough one winter. He had been there for a week with his mother. But that was a very different kind of place, and those were very different people. This room was beautifully designed and furnished, and these relations and connections of his were all rich and presumably care-free. Nevertheless there was something that reminded him of that Scarborough boarding-house. Something in the pose of those indifferently diligent women, perhaps? The voice of Hubert broke in on his meditations. "I don't know what we're waiting here for?" he said. "Care to come and have a look at the garden?" "Thanks. Yes, I should," Arthur replied cheerfully. He had it now. They all had the effect of waiting for something; for some climax, or change, or interruption; of waiting interminably for some known or unknown crisis that might never develop. Mr Turner was politely yawning as he stooped to pick up the _Times_. IV The garden was certainly wonderful. The modern house, although it had a well-designed south elevation, in which effective use had been made of mullioned oriel windows corbelled out from the first floor, was less successful inside--if the architect's intention had been to give the impression of age and dignity. The decoration and arrangement conveyed the effect of a really first-class hotel rather than that of an Elizabethan Manor, or even of a gentleman's country-house. This may have been due to the fact that it had been built in the late 'seventies of the last century, a bad period for country-house architecture; or it may have been a result of the exercise of old Mr Kenyon's domestic taste in furniture arrangement. No such indictment could be brought against the garden. It was unique in its variety--full of contrasts and surprises; a place to explore, and to get lost in, but more particularly a place that had a dozen settings from which the seeker might choose a mood. Arthur, finding new cause for astonishment and rapture at every turn, was enthusiastic in his expressions of admiration. After French battlefields, base hospitals, and Peckham, this garden seemed to him a true fairyland. Even the melancholy Hubert became a trifle more cheerful. "Yes, it is pretty good, isn't it?" he agreed. "'Course it has been worked at, day and night almost, you might say, for forty years." "What happened to it during the war?" Arthur asked. "Four of our gardeners were over age," Hubert said, "and we got boys to work under them. At first, that is. We had some wounded Tommies afterwards." "You weren't in it yourself?" Arthur asked. Hubert coloured faintly. "No, my grandfather got me a job in a Government office," he said. "I wanted to join up, but he wouldn't let me. I'm sort of steward to this place, you know. There are a couple of farms and so on to look after. Not that I have much to do. However, what I mean is that my grandfather made a tremendous point of keeping me out of the Army, and it was rather difficult for me to disobey him right out. He's--he's not altogether easy to handle." "Bit of an autocrat in his way?" Arthur suggested. Hubert looked uneasy. "In a way, yes," he agreed; and Arthur inferred that a tactful change of subject was advisable. "Have you got names for all these different parts of the garden?" he asked, choosing the most obvious topic. Hubert did not appear to have heard the question. He was frowning and fidgeting; he had the look of a weak man trying to make an important decision. "You don't know him, do you?" he said. "What I mean is, you've never been here since you came as a boy, and you've never kept in with us or anything?" "No, he's to all intents and purposes an utter stranger to me," Arthur agreed. "Just come down to have a look at us, then?" Hubert continued, with a feeble affectation of sprightliness. "Well, you and my aunt are about the only relations I've got," Arthur replied. "And as Aunt Hannah wrote out of the blue, as it were, and invited me to come down, I was glad of the opportunity." "Oh! yes, exactly," Hubert said. "I can understand that all right." Arthur was aware again of that sense of irritation that had come to him when he had been trying to talk to Miss Kenyon. He felt as if his cousin, in another manner, was also opposing him, was in some way suspicious and inimical. "Well what is it you don't understand?" he asked curtly. Hubert smiled, with the placatory air of a dog that has been threatened. He was standing with his feet crossed and rocked slowly from one to the other as he spoke. "Nothing," he said. "Nothing, I was just wondering if you wanted the old man's influence for anything, get you a job as medical attendant to anyone or something of that sort." "Good Lord, no," Arthur returned brusquely. "Never entered my head for a moment. Didn't I tell you that I thought of going out to Canada for a year or two?" So that was why these Kenyons had been unfriendly. They believed that he had come down there cadging for influence. He grew warm at the thought of that implication, and raised his voice slightly as he continued:-- "Pretty rotten aspersion to make that, wasn't it, Hubert? After Aunt Hannah had written and invited me to come down?" "Don't see anything rotten in it. Natural enough," Hubert replied, still rocking gently and looking down at his crossed ankles. "However--sorry. There's no need to get excited about it." He looked up and added: "Here's Eleanor. You haven't met her yet." They had been standing in a little cloister of formal garden, shut in by a sturdy box hedge, pierced only by two openings at the opposite corners, and Arthur's back had been presented to the opening through which they had entered. He turned with a touch of impatience at the indication of Hubert's introduction, to meet this new Kenyon connection--the orphan who acted as secretary to her grandfather. He was not predisposed in her favour. Hubert had put a new idea into his head by accusing him of cadging for influence. Was it not probable that all these descendants of the old man were, in some sense, at least, trying to "keep in" with him, trying to win his special favour for their own ends? But at his first sight of her, Arthur saw that Eleanor was different from the others. There was something alive and individual about her, she had not that effect of a slight staleness which the other members of the family seemed to convey. "This is Arthur Woodroffe," Hubert said, completing the introduction. She gave Arthur her hand, regarding him, he thought, with a strangely intent look of anxiety. "I heard you quarrelling as I came," she said. "Rather soon, isn't it?" She had a pleasant voice, with a musical, soothing tone; the voice of a woman who would make a good nurse, Arthur thought. "I don't know that we'd got as far as a quarrel," he said. "I confess that my new-found cousin, Hubert, annoyed me rather." Hubert raised his eyebrows. He had not moved when Eleanor joined them, and still stood in that uneasy looking pose of his. "Can't imagine why," he said. "Only asked him if he wanted grandfather's influence to get a job anywhere." Eleanor frowned faintly and shrugged her shoulders. "Oh! my good Hubert, how unoriginal of you," she said. Arthur was faintly perplexed by the adjective. "As a matter of fact," he said, "I was just telling Hubert that what I want to do is to go out to Canada." Eleanor's expression perceptibly brightened. She might have been the recipient of good news. "How splendid," she said warmly, "to go to a new and _free_ country like that." Arthur accepted that statement as a true expression of feeling. There had been a warmth, an air of admiring congratulation in her tone, that enchanted him after the chilliness of his reception in the drawing-room. "It would be rather a jolly adventure," he said. "I've got enough money for my passage, and outfit, and all that, and I don't suppose I should have any difficulty in getting a post of some kind out there." She was about to reply when Hubert unhitched himself and remarking that he had something to do before dinner, wandered aimlessly away in the direction of the lower garden. For a moment the thread of the conversation was broken. Both Arthur and Eleanor were watching the departing figure of their cousin, and, as often happens when a third person leaves a group, the other two were aware of an impulse to speak of him. "Poor old Hubert," Eleanor murmured in an undertone. "There's probably nothing in the world he would like better than to go to Canada." Arthur was surprised. He had already made some sort of estimate of his cousin's character, and sized him up roughly as a "feeble sort of rotter." "Well, then, why doesn't he?" he asked. "I shouldn't be surprised if he did," Eleanor replied, looking thoughtfully across the formal garden. "However, I dare say he'll tell you about it himself when he knows you a little better. You're--you're rather _new_ to us just at present. We're so secluded here. We don't very often see people from the outside." Arthur marked that repetition of his aunt's phrase with a slight sense of uneasiness. "Queer thing to say," he remarked. "Why from the 'outside'? Aunt Hannah used the same expression at tea. Sounds rather as if you were all confined in a prison or an asylum." Eleanor blushed and bit her lip. "Yes, it's a stupid phrase," she said quickly. "I didn't mean it the least in that way. Only we are so--what shall I say?--so self-sufficient. We've everything we want, nearly; and--oh! never mind. Is this as much of the garden as you've seen?" She led him across the little quadrangular enclosure as she continued: "I should like to show you my favourite place, if you haven't been there yet. It's just a little lower down, on the terrace, overlooking the stream and the lake. And I want you to tell me about Canada. You're a full-fledged doctor, aren't you? Aunt Hannah said you wrote from Peckham. Were you practising there?" As they made their way to the terrace she had indicated, Arthur told her something of his work in Peckham and of his reasons for wishing to leave it. He expected sympathy from her, but he found none. "I dare say it was dirty," was her comment--his insistence on that aspect had demanded a reply--"but it was work, real work. You _were_ doing some good in the world." They had reached the terrace now, and from where they stood they overlooked a croquet lawn--flush and smooth as a green carpet--bounded on its further side by the row of wych elms and the stream. Beyond, they could see the falling slope of the garden down to the shrubberies that hid the wall; but from this point there was no vista of the rich Sussex landscape without. Arthur sighed. "I had had six years of it," he said, "and I had a sort of feeling that I wanted to--to recover my youth for a bit. I wanted to try something of this sort for a change." "Of _this_ sort?" she repeated on a note of perplexity. "I suppose it's impossible for you to realise what it means to me," he replied. "You've had it always. You think just because this is what you're used to and perhaps tired of, that it's very splendid and exhilarating to work in the slums. If you had had my experience, you'd understand that to me this garden seems a sort of Paradise. You can't appreciate the attractions of this sort of life unless you come in, as I do--from the outside." She was obviously troubled by that outburst. "And how long do you think you could stand being shut in here?" she asked, after a pause. "At this moment, it seems to me that I could stand quite a lot of it," Arthur said. He knew that he was not saying the things she wanted him to say. He could feel her longing to hear him disparage the delights of Hartling and enlarge upon those of what she had called "real work." But her very urgency made it impossible for him to respond in his present mood. Also, he was aware of a curious desire to contradict her, even to hurt her. It was, as he put it to himself, all very well for her to talk about things she knew nothing about. He looked at her with a new criticism, and her youth and freshness seemed almost an offence. The whiteness of her hands, the spotlessness of her pale gray linen dress, the clearness of her complexion and of her blue eyes, even the lines of her firm, well-nourished young figure were all effects of the protected life she had lived. It was not for her to find fault with him for wanting some share of the luxury that to the Kenyons had become commonplace. "You surely don't mean that you would care to stay--to _live_ here?" she was saying. The little bark of laughter with which he replied held a note of derision. "Does it seem so extraordinary," he said, "that after five years of dirt and disease and unmentionable minor tortures, a man should hanker after a little cleanliness and comfort?" She shook her head. "No, no, of course not," she said. "I didn't in the least mean that. I'd like you to have a rest. You've earned it. It's just that ... this sort of thing can't go on always. You wouldn't like, would you, to stay here indefinitely, even if you could?" He knew that he was being a trifle perverse as he answered that. "Too good to be true," he said. She looked at him again with that look of earnest inquiry with which she had first greeted him. "If you really think that ..." she began, and then stopped abruptly. "We ought to be getting back," she went on in another tone. "Dinner is at eight. We shall only have half an hour to dress. You'll see my grandfather this evening. He sent you a message and I came out to give it to you, but.... However, he told me to ask you if you couldn't stay on for a day or two; whether you need go back to town on Monday? I'll tell him what you've said. Do you mind if I go on? I have one or two things to see to before dinner." Before he had time to answer, she was running back towards the house. She ran lightly and gracefully, with the ease and vigour of an active girl of twenty. Arthur following, kept her in sight as long as he could. "Rather a 'ripper,'" was the comment that came first to his mind. It was followed by the determination to stay at Hartling as long as they could put up with him--or he with them. In his thought of "them" he was picturing the "crowd" he had met at tea-time. Dressing for dinner was a delightful experience. Eleanor, whether deliberately or not, had made a mistake in the time, and when Arthur had found his room with the help of the butler, he had a full thirty-five minutes in which to dress. The first five of them were spent in a blissful revel in his surroundings. He had a bathroom all to himself--a perfect bathroom with white walls above a tiled dado of pale green that curved round smoothly at its base to form a tiled floor of the same colour. The bath and lavatory basin were of white porcelain with nickel-silver taps, and the ample bossy towel rails heated by hot water, were also of nickel silver. And his bedroom was so bright and exquisitely clean. It was done in the modern style with simple effective furniture almost devoid of mouldings. The motive of the colour scheme was an unobtrusive blue, taken up in the carpet, the faintly patterned wallpaper and the linen curtains at the window. And from the window itself, the approach to which was not encumbered by furniture, he could look out above the shrubberies and the wall and catch glimpses between the trees of the great swelling lines of Sussex, of the immense background and setting of this jewelled Hartling garden. He leaned out and sniffed the sweetness of the evening air. Twenty-four hours ago, he had been in the midst of London foulness, irritable with the grit and dust of a hot evening in late May. Now he had this freshness and sweetness to savour and delight in. The contrast was that between Hell and Heaven. Already his skin felt cleaner. With a sudden whoop of joy he came back into the room and began to strip himself. He would have a bath at once, and another when he came to bed. Lovely hot water, nice soap, and splendid warm towels. Ripping house! Would he stay as long as he could? Wouldn't he rather! He would stay altogether if he had the chance. Lord, what fools these people were downstairs, not to know when they were well off. He was putting on his dinner jacket as the second gong sounded, and he tore down the stairs just in time to join the straggling procession that was crossing the hall. They had not waited for him. He caught his uncle looking at him with a smile, and ranged himself beside him. "Feel pretty young, what?" his uncle said with a chuckle. "Fairly fresh," Arthur agreed. "Jolly place, this." "Yes, fine place," his uncle admitted. Arthur, remembering that his uncle was the eldest son, and would probably inherit the property, decided that he was a person to be propitiated. Also, he seemed, on the whole, to be less inimical than the others. When they reached the dining-room, Arthur had his first sight of the founder and head of the House of Kenyon. He was already seated at the far end of the long, narrow table, and as the family went to their places he watched them with a calm paternal smile of satisfaction. Then, almost by chance it seemed, his glance rested on the new-comer, and his expression changed to one of more vivid interest. He made a slight inclination of the head in Arthur's direction, and turning to his daughter-in-law said in a clear, thin voice:-- "Hannah! Bring Arthur Woodroffe up and introduce him to me." He called it an introduction, but there was, Arthur thought, a dignity about the formal request that gave the function almost the air of a presentation. But here, at least, was no sign of that aloofness which had marked his reception by the rest of the family. The old man was gracious and friendly. "Eleanor gave me your message," he said. "I'm so glad that you will be able to stay with us for a few days. We must have a talk. I want to hear something of your experiences in the war. But not to-night." His smile had again that gentle, paternal quality as he concluded with a nod of dismissal. "You must indulge the humours of a very old man, and let me choose my own time." Arthur went back to his place at the other end of the table, with a faint sense of awe. Mr Kenyon was certainly a wonderful old man. Arthur's mind reverted continually to that thought in the fairly long intervals between the snatches of polite conversation he held with Miss Kenyon, who was on his right at the foot of the table, or with his pretty but uninteresting Cousin Elizabeth on his other side. Hubert, who was immediately opposite, was plunged in a melancholy silence. But in what, precisely, the wonder of Mr Kenyon lay, Arthur was a little uncertain. His appearance was certainly striking. He had abundant white hair, not dead white like his eldest daughter's, but with the smooth sheen like the gloss of a pearl, and with something too of an old pearl's cream in the colour. His eyes were a pale blue, with a hint of brilliance that was lacking in his daughter, who greatly resembled him in many ways. But the queer thing that Arthur presently disentangled from his analysis was that the old man, in spite of his alertness and vigour, looked his age; looked, indeed, as if he might have been any age. His skin was not so much lined as crinkled. There were no deep furrows in his face, but the skin had the appearance of a piece of paper that had been crushed into a tight ball and then partly smoothed out. He seemed to have arrived at a stage in which he might remain indefinitely. He had achieved a physical type of the old man. He might very well look precisely as he did now, in ten, twenty, or fifty years' time. Yet, when all the effect of his appearance had been allowed for, there remained a cause for wonder about him that had not been explained. He was so amazingly self-confident and serene. With all his air of gentleness and affection, he had some quality of supremacy. Two things Arthur noted in the course of dinner, that gave him still further material for reflection. The first, in so far as its immediate consequences were concerned, he could not understand. The older generation at the further end of the table had been talking about Italy, and Arthur's uncle had apparently come to life and began an enthusiastic account of the beauties of a North Italian spring. He was talking, Arthur thought, surprisingly well. He had evidently the eyes of an artist for colour. Moreover, there was an emotional undertone in his descriptions that made them peculiarly vivid. And then old Mr Kenyon, who had been listening with a kind, approving smile, said gently:-- "I have often wondered, Joe, why you don't live in Italy. I feel that, in many ways, you would be more at home there than here." It seemed such a friendly, fatherly speech, but the effect of it was as if his son had been brutally reproved. He coloured slightly, hung his head, and went on with his dinner in an embarrassed silence. He had the look of a man who was thoroughly cowed. His sister, Mrs Turner, who was sitting on his right, also looked rather embarrassed. The second observation was of another kind. The entrée had just been removed when Arthur became aware of a curious hush that had fallen upon the room. The service throughout had been quiet, unostentatiously efficient, but now the butler and his two attendant parlour-maids were moving about on tip-toe, and every sound of conversation had ceased. Instinctively Arthur looked up the table at Mr Kenyon. He was leaning back in his chair, his hands clasping the arms, his eyes were wide open, but stared unseeingly down the room. He looked like a man in a trance; it flashed into Arthur's mind that he looked like a dreaming god. The servants were standing now by the sideboard, doing nothing. And for perhaps a couple of minutes the progress of the dinner was suspended. Every one sat in silence and waited until the dreaming god smiled and leaned forward again in his chair. He came back to his world with no sign of disturbance or shock. He was to all appearances unaware of the interval that had passed. And immediately, with a quiet inevitableness the subdued sounds of footsteps and low conversation crept back into the room. Arthur remembered the remark of the chauffeur who had driven him from the station. What was it he had said? "It's as if he were sound asleep with his eyes wide open." That explanation did not satisfy Arthur's feeling for physiological probability. He wondered if it might be a case of _petit mal_, minor epilepsy? He looked round the table and thought that he could detect a general air of demure resignation in the bowed faces around him. Ninety-one! They were all remembering that the old man was ninety-one. Anything might happen at that age! He glanced across the table again and saw that Eleanor was watching him. He smiled at her, but the smile with which she answered him had no warmth in it. It was nothing but a polite response. How jolly she looked in that soft white dress! He returned to the enjoyment of his dinner, which seemed to him to be the best he had ever eaten. It was a simple dinner: soup, entrée, a saddle of mutton, sweet, savory, and dessert; but it was perfectly cooked and served. The clear soup had had wine in it, and a flavour that was at once delicate and strong; the entrée had had just that touch of piquancy that gave one an appetite for the joint. And the saddle was a joint to remember, so firm and tender, its richness nicely mitigated by the new potatoes and green peas that accompanied it. Arthur had a palate and could appreciate these good things. Also, although he had had a limited experience of wine, he knew that the claret was no ordinary vintage. It had an aroma like fruit. At dessert there were magnificent strawberries. Arthur found a justification for the theory that such things as new peas, potatoes, and strawberries taste better in the third week of May than at the end of June. It was, he decided, because they brought a foretaste of summer, and the anticipation has always some exquisite flavour that is lacking in the present reality. He was pleased with this conceit and tried it on Miss Kenyon. She regarded him thoughtfully. "It may be true when one is under forty," she said. "After that, one prefers to live in the present." He was emboldened by the claret to press the old psychological truism to its conclusion. "And later still there comes a time, I believe, when one lives chiefly in the past," he hazarded. "It may come to some people," Miss Kenyon said, and glanced at her father down the length of the table. She had an unimpeded sight of him above the low silver dishes of fruit, that with their reflection in the rich dark mirror of the polished mahogany were an ample decoration. Arthur had not enough courage to name the exception she so obviously had in her mind. Over the dessert and the coffee and cigarettes that followed before Miss Kenyon rose from the table, Arthur at last discovered a subject for discussion with his cousin Elizabeth. She was, it seemed, an expert croquet player, and wanted to play in tournaments. She grew quite animated in her talk of the game, although her technicalities were beyond his knowledge. "I'll teach you, if you like," she said. "It'll be jolly to have some one new to play with. None of the others are any good really." "I expect I'd pick it up pretty quickly," Arthur replied with a touch of pique. "I'm fairly good at those sort of games, billiards, and golf, and so on, you know." Elizabeth smiled the condescending smile of the expert. "It's chiefly a matter of constant practice, of course," she said. "I generally put in a couple of hours every day." In his heart Arthur thought that croquet was rather a piffling game, and had an inner conviction that he would very soon be able to give his cousin a good match. He made an appointment with her to take his first lesson the next morning. The Kenyons were not Sabbatarians. "No one goes to church, hardly, except mother," Elizabeth told him. Later he discovered another example of expertise in the family. Old Mr Kenyon did not accompany his family to the drawing-room, and after a few aimless minutes, in the course of which most of the family settled themselves down to the same occupations that had engaged them after tea, Mr Turner came across the room and asked if he would "care for a game of billiards." Arthur assented with enthusiasm. He rather fancied himself as a billiard player, and in any case there was nothing else to do. Presently he might get up a flirtation with Elizabeth, but the beginning of that could very well wait until the croquet lesson. She had looked up at him and smiled as he was leaving the drawing-room, and he had returned the smile and waved his hand. Eleanor, presumably, was with her grandfather. His evening's billiards served him as an object-lesson, in how the game ought to be played. After the first game, Turner gave him two hundred start in three hundred up; a handicap that produced a fairly close finish. Turner admitted that he kept himself in practice. "Nothing much else to do," he explained, "except get licked by Elizabeth at croquet." "And what's your game?" Arthur asked Hubert, who had strolled in while they were playing and had been marking for them. "Play golf a bit," Hubert said. "There's quite a decent course about a mile from here. I go over most days. Give you a game any time you like." "Well, I didn't bring any clubs down," Arthur replied. "Had no practice to speak of, you see, in the last six years, but I used to be rather keen." "Hubert is hot stuff," Turner commented. "Plus two, isn't it, now, Hubert?" "Three, since I won the last medal," was his nephew's reply. "Good Lord! Why that's Amateur Championship form," Arthur exclaimed. "Oh! hardly that!" Hubert thought. He appeared to be quite indifferent to Arthur's admiration. When he was alone in his delightful bedroom, Arthur made a reflective audit of his day's experience. The balance he arrived at was that he would thoroughly enjoy his visit to Hartling. Miss Kenyon was rather a dragon--a cold, practical woman, probably a very good manager, was his estimate of her--and none of them had been particularly cordial to him, although old Turner had relaxed to a certain extent when they were playing billiards. But there were overwhelming compensations to set against this small discouragement. He looked round his bedroom and drew a deep breath of contentment, then went into the bathroom and turned on the hot water. The window was open and he drew back the curtain and leaned out. What a comfort it was not to be overlooked, to know that there was nothing out there but the sweetness and serenity of the night! It gave him a sense of freedom and cleanliness, of being in touch with Nature. But when he was in his bath his thoughts turned back to less æsthetic compensations. The great and essential question of what he was going to _do_ at Hartling, had been solved for him. There would be games, a succession of games of various kinds, to be played with skill against opponents from whom he would be learning all the time. (That old chap Turner was a fair nailer at billiards! He played all his shots with "drag" like a professional!) He would not, of course, be able to improve his own game appreciably in three or four days, but with luck he might be asked to stay a week. He would accept like a bird if they did ask him.... He must try to entertain the old man when that promised talk came off. He was evidently the boss still, in spite of his age. The invitation to stay had come straight from him. He was an impressive old fellow too, with a remarkable air of dignity and what one spoke of vaguely as "personality." He gave you the feeling that he would get his own way about things.... His eldest son did not take after him. Rather a sloppy chap, Uncle Joe. His tie had been all round his neck by the end of dinner. Funny the way he had shut up about Italy. He was probably only a gasser, and did not in the least want to live there. He would certainly let the property down when he came into it, unless he had some one to look after it for him. Arthur had a contempt for slackness. His opinion of his cousin had gone up a hundred per cent. since he had learnt that Hubert's handicap was "plus three." That was a form of efficiency. Melancholy-looking devil, though. They were all a bit on that side for some reason or another; looked depressed and bored, as if they were tired of waiting for something ... except Eleanor. She was different from the others. Different, but not necessarily nicer. There was a touch of the schoolmistress about her. She wanted to do what she thought were the right things. Elizabeth might be amusing when one got to know her better. V Arthur saw very little of Eleanor and old Mr Kenyon in the course of the next few days. They had lunch and dinner with the family, and once or twice he caught sight of them in the garden while he was playing croquet with Elizabeth; but on none of these occasions did he find an opportunity of speaking to either of them. Meanwhile, he was improving his acquaintance with the other members of the party permanently assembled at Hartling; although further than that he was unable to go. He had revised his first impression of them as being definitely inimical, but they remained acquaintances. His uncle and Mr Turner had come nearest to passing beyond the limitations of polite intercourse; and the latter had shown an interest in Arthur's plans for the future; had, indeed, discussed with him the prospects of getting an appointment in Canada, and promised him two or three introductions. But the point at which he and all the others had drawn back, had been the returning of any sort of confidence. They offered none, and put him off if he attempted any question. They left him with the impression of some important reserve behind all their treatment of him. It was as if they all shared some secret that he could never know. When he was with them he could never forget that he was an outsider, not one of the family. He had even been aware of that reserve as a check upon the development of his flirtation with Elizabeth. She at once encouraged him and kept him at a distance. She might have been a princess of the blood, amusing herself with a member of the nobility whom she might know but could never marry. He had been definitely piqued by that attitude in his own first cousin, and had tried to break down her defence, to claim her as an equal and a contemporary. So far, however, that attempt had been a failure. She had not apparently resented his overtures, but they had not advanced his intimacy with her. There was some invisible barrier always between them, a barrier that seemed to be essential and permanent. He was sorry because he believed that he was ready to fall in love with her if she would let him. She was certainly pretty in a general sort of way, with brown eyes, rather dark hair, and a fair skin that had freckled over the bridge of her snub nose. And her mastery of the game of croquet had been a revelation to him. He had realised on that first Sunday morning how scientific a game croquet could be, played on that perfect lawn. She was as much his superior, hopelessly beyond rivalry in her own game as Charles Turner or Hubert were in theirs. Her tennis was fairly good, too; quite as good as his own, but she complained that she got no practice. Hubert played, but none of the others, except Eleanor, who seldom had any time for games. Arthur was taking a lesson from Mr Turner in the billiard-room at a quarter to seven on Tuesday evening when Eleanor came in to him with a message. She waited while her uncle played his shot and then turning to Arthur said:-- "Would you mind dressing early to-night, Mr Woodroffe? My grandfather thought he might find a chance of talking to you before dinner." "Ah! yes, of course," Arthur agreed. "I'll go now." He could have no doubt that this was a command. Turner had put down his cue as if he had been prepared for some such development as this, and took no further interest in the game. Nevertheless there must have been still something that he did not know, for he looked at Eleanor with raised eyebrows, plainly hinting a question the nature of which she, presumably, could guess; although the slight shrug of her shoulders with which she replied intimated that she did not, as yet, know the answer. Arthur pondered that exchange of signals as he dressed. He had begun to wonder whether he might not find an explanation of various things that had puzzled him at Hartling; in the desire of the Kenyons to conceal a family secret. Was it not possible that the head of the house was slightly insane? If that were so, everything could be accounted for: their references to people coming in "from the outside"; their half-suspicious reception of himself; the separation of the old man from the family-life except at lunch and dinner; the constant attendance of Eleanor.... Arthur was inclined to believe that he had guessed the riddle, and resolved to be very observant during the coming interview. He was tying his bow when some one knocked at his bedroom door. He guessed that it was Eleanor come to fetch him, and snatching at his waistcoat, called out, "One minute! I won't be a moment." But when he opened the door a few seconds later, he was amazed to find old Mr Kenyon himself standing outside. "I'm sorry, sir, I didn't realise ..." Arthur began. The old man waved aside his apology. "I quite understand," he said. "Naturally you were not expecting me. May I come in?" "Oh! please. Yes, do," Arthur responded. He felt embarrassed by this strange mark of favour. He had pictured the promised interview as likely to be something of a function. Was it possible that the old man had temporarily escaped from his keeper? Mr Kenyon had seated himself in a little chintz-covered arm-chair and appeared quite at his ease. "We shall be quieter here," he said with a smile. "Smoke if you want to. I haven't smoked now for fifty years, but I don't at all dislike it." Arthur took advantage of this indulgence with a faint smile at the whimsical reflection that the old man had abandoned the habit of smoking more than twenty years before Arthur himself had been born. Mr Kenyon apparently read the young man's thought, for he went on:-- "Yes, there is a long gap between you and me, Woodroffe. I was born in the reign of George the Fourth. And I have no doubt that you find it a little difficulty to realise that I still keep in touch with present-day affairs." Arthur, with his new suspicion fresh in his mind, was watching the old man with a more or less informed eye, and although he could find at present no least confirmation of his theory, he thought there would be no harm in attempting a leading question. "Do you really, sir?" he commented. "You mean that you can still take a pleasure in reading about modern life, and hearing about it?" "And in living it," Mr Kenyon said, with his gentle smile. "You must not suppose that I keep myself shut in here. I often go to town in the car. More often, in fact, than any other member of the family." "You must have a perfectly marvellous constitution, sir," Arthur said. Mr Kenyon slightly shrugged his shoulders. "It seems a commonplace to me," he returned. "Perhaps because I have always had it. I have never been ill. But I did not come here to talk about myself. I am more interested in you. I want you to tell me something of your experiences in the war; and then...." He broke off suddenly. His keen blue eyes were intently watching Arthur's face. "And then, sir?" Arthur prompted him. Mr Kenyon's expression of watchfulness relaxed. "And then," he said graciously, "something of what you intend to do in the future." Arthur would have preferred to take the second point first. He had already abandoned his theory of insanity. And it had come to him with an exhilarating sense of certainty that Mr Kenyon intended to "do something for him." When the old man had concluded his sentence, he had worn the benign, generous air of patron. "Well, you see, sir, I joined up in August, '14," Arthur began, meaning to get the history done with as quickly as possible; but Mr Kenyon pulled him up before he had gone very far with the brief outline he had intended to draw of the main facts of his experience. "Then you saw service in the trenches?" he put in, and when Arthur admitted that he had, began to pose some very shrewd questions as to the effect that terrible experience might have on a young man's nerves and temperament. "But you, yourself, came through without any permanent disaffection?" he continued, after Arthur had let himself go a little on the pathology of war-shock. "Absolutely, as far as one can judge, sir," Arthur replied. Mr Kenyon nodded. "I believe it is true, is it not," he asked, "that the really normal man was not subject to these nerve troubles?" "As far as we know, sir," Arthur replied. "It's the general theory that in the bad cases of psychoneurosis, there was always a predisposition before the man went out." He would have gone on with a youthful pride in his knowledge to elaborate the theory, but Mr Kenyon switched him off by saying, with a change of tone that suddenly quickened Arthur's interest:-- "You are, now, a fully qualified medical man, I understand?" "Oh! yes, fully qualified," Arthur said promptly. Mr Kenyon nodded, and then rose and began to walk slowly up and down the room. He had a silver-headed, ebony stick with him, but he hardly leaned upon it, his back was not bowed, and his step was perfectly firm. His figure and general activity might have been that of a man of sixty. Arthur watched him with admiration. It was almost incredible to him that the old man could be ninety-one. And it crossed his mind that his uncle might have to wait many years yet before he came into the property. Mr Kenyon continued to walk up and down the room as he went on:-- "I have thought once or twice lately that I should like to have some one living here in the house who might ..." he paused before he added, "who would be competent in an emergency. There is a doctor in the village--an able, pleasant man, for whom I have considerable respect--but he lives two miles from us, and...." He let the sentence die away without completing it, beginning again in a firmer voice, "At my age, Arthur--I must call you that! we are, after all, connected--one has fancies. I don't deceive myself with any foolish idea that I can live for ever. And one of my fancies, a fairly common one, I believe, is a fear of premature burial. I should like to have some one permanently here whom I could trust. Moreover, I have felt that a competent medical man with whom I was in touch, would be in a position to give me--shall I say--warning. You may be surprised to learn that I--a business man by training and inclination--have been so unbusinesslike as to have left my own affairs unsettled. There are reasons, of course, family reasons that I need not trouble you with, but you must think it very lax in a man of ninety-one not to have completed his testamentary dispositions. I have, it is true, made a will, but not a final one. I have an eccentric inclination--a touch of superstition perhaps--to postpone that duty, although my present will," he turned and faced Arthur with an expression of humorous despair, "is nothing more or less than an untidy mass of codicils. In my opinion, it is dangerously contestable in its present state. Fleet, my lawyer, thinks otherwise, but I have had more experience than he has. "In any case, I mean to make a new one, and since you have been here it has occurred to me that I might indulge my little eccentricity more safely if I had some competent and experienced person on whom I could rely, permanently in the household; some one who would be with me for an hour or so every day, an expert who would be in a position to say to me: "Kenyon, I must warn you that your days are running out and it is time for you to put your affairs in order." Also, as I have said, I should prefer to trust the matter of my death certificate to a medical man in whose integrity I could have perfect confidence. These are the fancies of a very old man, no doubt, but after all why should I not indulge them if I can? I may tell you quite frankly, Arthur, that I am not of those who make a virtue of self-sacrifice." He broke off abruptly, stood staring in front of him for a moment, as if he reflected on that last statement, and then sat down again in the chintz-covered arm-chair. Arthur realised that the time had come for him to reply, and that he was not ready with an answer. If the arrangement that was now suggested had been hypothecated while he was dressing, he would have laughed at the idea of refusing it; but as Mr Kenyon had been speaking, Arthur had seen a vision of his own future that had been vaguely repellent--a vision of idle, satisfied days spent in perfecting himself at various games, waiting for something that he could not precisely define. What was there to wait for in such a life as that--except death? Marriage and the begetting of children would only be incidents, comparable, perhaps, to the making of his first hundred break or doing the course in "bogey." And yet, what else had life, any life, to offer him? He had no peculiar gifts. He would never become famous. The end of him would almost certainly be a small practice somewhere and a perpetual struggle to live within his income. Nevertheless, his spirit drooped at the prospect of the life he anticipated if he accepted this offer. There was no adventure in it. "Frightfully flattered, sir, by your--your confidence in me and so on," he muttered, "and, of course, in many ways, almost every way...." Mr Kenyon stopped him. "No, no, Arthur," he said, "I haven't even made my proposal yet; and in any case I do not want you to give me an answer to-night. I understand that at your age you naturally have ambitions, that the future has romantic possibilities for you. I have not forgotten that. But," he leant forward, dropping his forehead on to the ivory handle of the stick he held between his knees, "I have a feeling that your service would not be a very long one--six months, a year perhaps, at the outside." His voice was so low that Arthur could hardly follow him as he concluded: "And then you would have ... opportunity, greater opportunity ... pecuniary advantages ... I would provide for that." Six months, a year at the outside! He probably knew as well as any one. He looked as sound as a bell, but he might go to pieces all at once. Those queer trances of his were no doubt symptomatic of some deep-seated trouble. Would it be very rotten to take on a job like that with the idea of having money left to you? Arthur fancied that he could make out a good case for himself on that score. And beyond all that personal issue there was a greater one. Putting that hypothetical legacy out of the question, would he not be doing this old man a real service by accepting his offer? He undoubtedly felt the need of some one to perform the two offices he had indicated. "If I might consider ..." Arthur began, and was interrupted by the sound of the second gong booming through the house. Mr Kenyon raised his head. "Well, well, Arthur, think it over, think it over," he said, getting to his feet. "I will only add now that it would be a great relief to me if you saw your way to accept my offer. Do not forget that side of it. And--we will have another talk to-morrow." Arthur was aware of a new atmosphere at the dinner-table that night. For the first time since he had been in the house, the Kenyons were wide-awake and curious; the object of their curiosity was unquestionably himself. They seemed to be watching him. Whenever he looked up the table, he had the impression that one of them had just averted his or her eyes, and when he was talking to Elizabeth or Miss Kenyon, he was conscious of being under steady observation from every part of the table. Only Eleanor kept her eyes down, and to the best of his knowledge never once looked in his direction. Yet this new attitude towards him had no effect of being hostile. It was merely as if he had suddenly become an object of peculiar interest. Even Miss Kenyon's manner was changed, although it was not until they were half-way through dinner that she put a direct question to him. "You had your little talk with my father this evening?" she said then in a tone that sounded, he thought, a faint note of propitiation. "Yes, I did; quite a long talk," he replied, feeling no inclination to make a confidante of Miss Kenyon. "Has he asked you to prolong your visit to us?" she went on, making a more direct attack. "I hope you may be able to stay over the next week-end in any case." "Thanks very much, I should like to immensely," Arthur returned. "Yes, Mr Kenyon did suggest something of the sort. In fact...." "Well!" Miss Kenyon prompted him with a touch of asperity. "Oh! well, in fact he made a kind of proposal to me that we are going to discuss again to-morrow," Arthur admitted. Miss Kenyon stared at him thoughtfully for a moment. "One more or less doesn't after all make much difference in a family like this," she said, with a touch of resignation. "But I haven't decided yet," Arthur began. "You will," she interrupted him dryly, and at once devoted her attention to Hubert on the other side. "Does that mean that you're staying on indefinitely?" Elizabeth asked. Arthur shrugged his shoulders. "It seems as if you all knew more about it than I do myself," he said. "I really don't know yet." "But he wants you to?" Elizabeth pressed him. "Apparently," Arthur admitted. Elizabeth sighed thoughtfully. "You're a kind of grand-nephew, I suppose," she remarked, addressing no one in particular, and then added, "Are you going to be a sort of tame medical attendant?" "If I stay," Arthur agreed. "You'll stay all right," Elizabeth replied, echoing her aunt's tone. "Why shouldn't you?" "Don't you want me to stay?" Arthur asked. "Might teach you to play croquet in time," she replied pertly. "Is that all?" he inquired. He felt as if he were at last getting past that barrier she had set up against him. She met his eyes frankly and pursed her undoubtedly pretty mouth. "Oh, wait and see," she said. "I can see now, and I don't want to wait," Arthur returned boldly. Her smile was not one of encouragement. She had suddenly ceased to flirt with him. "Even puppies don't get their eyes open for nine days," she said coldly, "and you haven't been here four yet. You haven't the least idea what you're talking about." Arthur frowned impatiently. He was not vexed by the snub he had received--girls of Elizabeth's type thought it "smart" to be rude--but by the reintroduction of that suggestion of a family secret which separated the Kenyons from the outside world. There was an air of arrogance about the thing that annoyed him. "Is there so much for me to learn here?" he asked dryly. Elizabeth told him to "shut up." This was the way in which she always treated him; and as he rather sulkily continued his dinner he asked himself if it was "good enough." If she were willing to be decent, he might possibly fall in love with her, but he was not going to stand being treated like a schoolboy. Elizabeth might go and hang herself. She made no attempt to entice him out of the silence he was thus too easily able to maintain for the rest of the meal. But in the drawing-room after dinner, he found that the family as a whole seemed inclined to put him on a new footing. Even Mrs Turner, who had so far almost ignored him, came up and began to talk about the gardens. She was a rather stout woman with something of her brother's carelessness in the matter of dress, and Arthur had wondered how her husband had ever managed to fall in love with her. To-night, however, it occurred to him for the first time that she might in her youth have been the very prototype of her niece Elizabeth. They had only been talking for a few minutes when her brother joined them. As usual, after dinner, his face was flushed and puffy--an effect due, Arthur judged, to the food rather than to the wine he had taken. "So you're thinking of joining the family party for a time, I hear?" he began in a friendly voice. "Well, I haven't decided anything yet," Arthur replied, and waited to see if his uncle would echo his sister's and his daughter's "You will." He did not. He was fidgeting with his cigar, the ash of which he had dropped and smeared all over his dinner-jacket and waistcoat. "Giving up the Canada idea, any way?" was his response. "It was never more than an idea," Arthur said. "Not a bad one, all the same," his uncle murmured, and then apparently feeling that he was making a mess of what he had to say, he went on, "However, it's not for me to advise you. I can't boast that I'm any sort of example for you, eh, Catherine?" Mrs Turner kept her eyes on the bead bag she was making, an occupation that certainly necessitated close attention. "Don't you think, Joe ..." she began, and then stopped, picking up a bead on the point of her needle with a slightly exaggerated intentness. "No, no, of course not," her brother said. "It was only that I thought, as Arthur's uncle, he might care to know--to hear, that is...." "Oh! rather. I should," Arthur put in, as the sentence failed to get itself completed. "I should be very glad of your advice." "I was only going to say," his uncle responded, "speaking from my own experience, you know, that the life here, jolly enough as it is in many ways, does not offer much scope for a young fellow with any ambition. There's Hubert, for instance--he's--he's getting lazy--can't blame him; got nothing much to do except play golf--but it's hardly the life one would have chosen for him, eh?" Arthur smiled. "But I'm not proposing to stay here _permanently_, uncle," he said. "Six months or a year at the outside. I've been having rather a strenuous time you see, and I thought a rest of sorts might do me good." Joe Kenyon and his sister exchanged a glance that Arthur could not interpret; they might have been recalling some old and rather terrible reminiscence. "My father said that, did he?" Kenyon said. "Six months or a year at the outside?" Arthur nodded. He could not possibly tell them why that limit had been assigned. Mrs Turner sighed and returned to her niggling beads. He brother leaned back in his chair and blew a cloud of smoke. Arthur longed to warn him that the ash was again in danger of falling. "I've been here over thirty years," his uncle remarked thoughtfully. Arthur failed to see the relevance of this statement. "Have you really?" he commented politely. "And in the first instance," his uncle continued, "I came back on the understanding that it was to be for twelve months, at the outside. However," he went on more briskly, sitting up and incidentally dropping another large instalment of cigar ash down his shirt front and waistcoat, "that's nothing to do with you; nothing whatever, and I shouldn't like you to be influenced by anything I've said. Your case is entirely different in every way." He had the air of a man who has been tempted into an indiscretion and wanted to cover it without delay. "Oh, yes! obviously," Arthur agreed. "You could hardly be called a relation of Mr Kenyon's, could you?" Mrs Turner added, by way of giving point to her brother's retraction of his instance. "Oh! if I came here, it wouldn't be in any way as a relation," Arthur explained. "I should come as a medical man for--for a certain purpose." Enlightenment had come to him at last, he believed. These people were jealous of his possible share in the Kenyon fortune. They, too, no doubt knew of that untidy will and its projected supersession; and they were afraid of his having too great an interest in it. They wanted to get rid of him. All this talk of his uncle's had been designed to prevent him from accepting the appointment that had been offered. Arthur blushed with shame at the thought of their suspicion, the more readily in that the anticipation of some legacy had been already in his mind. "As a matter of fact, I don't think I _shall_ stay on here," he said, getting up. He felt that he could not tolerate the company of these two Kenyons for another moment. They were like all rich people, mean and grasping. They had lived in comfort all their lives and yet hated to part with a single penny. What difference would a few thousands out of the Kenyon fortune make to them? He looked round for Turner, but he was not to be seen. And then he saw that Eleanor had come in while he had been talking and was sitting alone, reading, on the far side of the room. She looked up at the same moment and let her book fall in her lap, with a gesture that was an invitation to him to join her. As he crossed the room he reflected that Eleanor at least would give him an unprejudiced opinion. There was something honest and straightforward about her. She was, for instance, utterly unlike Elizabeth. She rose to meet him, anticipating, it seemed, what he had to say, for before he could speak the polite sentence with which he was prepared, she said,-- "It's rather hot in here to-night, isn't it? Would you care to come out into the garden?" "Love to," Arthur responded eagerly. He drew a deep breath of enjoyment as they came out into the open. It was not yet ten o'clock, twilight still lingered in the garden, and the air was sweet with the aftermath of the perfumes that lilac and pinks and honeysuckle had been giving out so generously during the day, and that were now being refined by the fresh, cool scents of the night. To Arthur it seemed that in such a garden as this was attained the ultimate triumph of the liaison between nature and cultivation. Everything that grew here was the result of the sympathetic collaboration between man and the wild, of art using the natural forces of the world itself in the technique of its design. And the design was a sketch of man's ideal for the perfected earth; the setting for the more orderly, leisured life that he might live when the elemental forces were subdued. After all, riches served a great purpose. Might it not be said that old Mr Kenyon had made a worthy use of his wealth in creating this garden? "I suppose you want to ask my advice," the clear voice of Eleanor broke in upon his meditations, recalling him rather unpleasantly to the realisation that he had been five minutes before announcing his intention of leaving this pleasance in order to take up the primitive struggle with the wild. It was strange how different everything appeared to him out here, away from the influences of that luxurious house and its bored inhabitants. "Yes, I do," he said. "I very much want your advice. Shall we go to that place where you found me with Hubert the day I came? It's sort of shut in, gives one a feeling of seclusion." She assented quietly, and they descended the shallow steps of the upper terrace in silence, and did not speak again until they were pacing the rectangular lawn of the "cloister." "Will you let me explain my case to you in the first instance?" Arthur began, and then went on apologetically, "It is frightfully good of you to listen to me at all. I don't know why you should. We've only met once before practically. But you said one or two things on that occasion, didn't you, that made me feel you understand better than any of the others? I can't help guessing in a sort of way that they're rather prejudiced against my accepting the appointment, and I feel that you...." "Why should they be prejudiced?" Eleanor broke in. Arthur was embarrassed by that direct question. He saw, now, that he had had no right to make any insinuation against the motives of the family to which his companion belonged. For the moment he had been tempted to regard her, also, as being an outsider. "I didn't mean that," he said; "at least I only meant that they all seem so bound up in a kind of clique, rather suspicious of strangers." Within that enceinte of box hedges it was too dark now for him to see her face, but the tone of her voice was appreciably colder as she said:-- "And you want to join the clique?" "No! I don't!" he protested with a touch of temper. "That's what they all seem to think; and as a matter of rather brutal fact, that doesn't tempt me in the very least. I wanted to explain to you, I thought you'd understand, that the only thing that tempts me in the offer your grandfather made me, was the prospect of a little rest and quiet. I feel that I've earned it. I've had my youth stolen from me and I want to get a little of it back--six months or a year isn't too much return to ask surely? And when this miraculous opportunity drops out of the skies, as it were, you want to deny it me. Why? I can understand the others. They've got no imagination. They have always had everything they want and they cannot see what this rest would mean for me. But I thought, I don't know why, that you were different. I didn't expect you to accuse me of wanting to join the clique." She ignored his reference to herself; taking up a single sentence in his speech by the half-whispered comment: "'They've always had everything they want!' To any one from outside, I suppose they do seem to have had everything." He overlooked the possible implications of that. "Oh! well; you know what I mean," he said impatiently; "everything that money can buy." He was afraid that she was going, as he put it, to preach. "But you've evidently made up your mind to stay and have your rest," she replied, going off at another angle. "I can't see why you should bother to ask my advice." "I haven't made up my mind," he asserted, "and I do want your advice. I only thought you might as well know first just why it tempts me so frightfully to stay." "And there's Elizabeth," she put in, "you rather like her, don't you?" "She's quite a jolly girl," Arthur replied coldly. Jolly? he questioned that the moment he had spoken, but made no effort to retract the adjective. He had an inclination to depreciate Elizabeth now that he was with Eleanor, an inclination that he repressed as being in bad taste, even a trifle vulgar. Nevertheless, he would have liked to make it quite clear that he was not in love with Elizabeth. When Eleanor spoke again, however, Elizabeth had fallen out of the conversation. "I do see that it looks like hard lines on you," she said more gently; "but as you want to know what I really think, I must tell you. And all that I can say is," she paused, and there was a thrill of passion in her voice as she concluded: "that if I were you I would get away from here, now, at once, to-night...." "But, why?" he protested, half amused at the fantastic suggestion of his leaving Hartling that night. "There must be some reason, I mean, for--well--such an extravagant remedy as that." "I can't give you any reasons," she said. He groaned with an intentional effect of exaggeration. "Have you all got some terrible secret that you're hiding?" he asked. "I assure you one really gets that impression. I had begun to wonder whether perhaps Mr Kenyon was a dangerous lunatic or something, before I saw him this evening. Now, I wonder if he's the only one of you that's perfectly sane. Or is it just this beastly money of yours? Are they afraid up at the house that I want some of it, because if they are you can tell them that I don't. They all seem to think I'm cadging. Hubert began it the first afternoon I was here. I tell you it's simply incomprehensible to me--the whole attitude." Eleanor did not appear to be in the least offended by this outbreak, but her voice had a new note of agitation in it as she said,-- "Didn't my grandfather offer to do anything for you, when you were talking this evening? Didn't he say anything to you about his will?" Arthur was glad that she could not see the blush that again burnt his face. "What made you ask that?" he said in what he congratulated himself was a non-committal tone. "I guessed," she replied quietly. "Was I right?" "He did mention it," Arthur admitted. "But that doesn't weigh with you?" "Not a scrap; not the least little bit in the world." "Bet it might presently." "I don't think so." "Think how you might feel in six months' time," she persisted; "after living here in a sort of luxury, at the prospect of having to rough it again, when by simply going on you might never have to bother about money any more. Think of the temptation to take life easily, with the probability of having quite enough money to live on when my grandfather dies. And that would always seem to be a possibility only just ahead. He'll be ninety-two in October, you know. Even if you did begin to want work again for its own sake, you'd put off going because it would seem silly to risk losing that legacy just for the sake of staying on for another month or two. Can't you put yourself in that position and see what a temptation it would be?" Her speech had been delivered in a level, weary voice, the voice of one who speaks out of experience rather than from the stimulus of imagination; and for a moment Arthur was impressed by her earnestness. She was, he supposed, in her modern way, what one called "pious." She believed in the great gospels of work and self-sacrifice. She wanted to save him from the snares of wealth as his own mother had once wanted to save him from the snares of the devil. And just as he had always been tender and forbearing with his mother when she had preached to him of the dangers of the world, so now he must be tender to this preacher of the new gospel of.... Perhaps she was a Socialist? "Really, you needn't be afraid," he said gently. "There isn't the least fear of that. As a matter of fact I'm too keen on adventure." (He had told his mother in precisely the same way, he remembered, that he had been too keen on his work to want to go to music-halls.) "Perhaps that's why this offer attracts me so much. It'll be a sort of adventure to stay here for a month or two--a sort of experience anyway. So, honestly, Miss Kenyon, if that's all you've got against it, I don't see why I shouldn't accept. I think, in any event, I shall tell your grandfather that I couldn't pledge myself in any way; that I could only agree, at the most, to stay for three months." He heard her sigh deeply, and her reply when it came was unexpected. "Oh, well," she said, "nothing that any of us could say is likely to make the least difference. He means to have you. I'm going in now, good-night." She had slipped away into the darkness almost before he was aware of her intention, and he was unable to find her again. There were still many secrets in that garden which he had not explored, and he caught no glimpse of her as he made his way back to the house. He was annoyed. He wanted to cross-examine her, make her give him some kind of explanation of her minatory attitude, and especially of that last cryptic speech. What did she mean by saying, "He means to have you?" There was, certainly, a fairly obvious interpretation, namely that old Mr Kenyon had set his mind on getting his own way in this matter of having a resident medical attendant at Hartling--a perfectly reasonable wish. But she had not meant that, or at least not in a reasonable way. Was it possible that Eleanor also was poisoned by this degrading love of wealth; that all this talk and admiration for work and independence was nothing more than an assumption to hide her own fear of another rival for her grandfather's testamentary favour? Indeed, was not that the explanation of the pretended secret of Hartling? The explanation was that there was no secret--unless it were that the whole Kenyon family were vultures, crouched in a horrible group about this one aged man; waiting gluttonously for his death in order to divide the spoil; determined that their share should not be decreased by the addition of a single new member to that gloating circle. That might be called a secret; it was certainly a detestable fact that every one of them would wish to hide. Arthur straightened his back and lifted his chin with a gesture of disgust, but he no longer felt any desire to leave Hartling. It had come to him that he had an honourable purpose to serve by remaining: he might be a true help and support to the aged head of the house. Old Kenyon was so pitiably isolated from his family. He must always be aware that he was marked down, that the circle of harpies was forever closing more tightly about him, that the only interest that his descendants took in him was in the search for symptoms of his approaching death. He would surely welcome some one coming from the outside, who would have no selfish object in view, who would give him real sympathy and understanding. Arthur felt a glow of self-satisfaction at the thought. He would make it quite clear, of course, in the coming interview, that no question of any legacy must complicate the arrangement. That should be absolutely definite; and yet--it was just a whimsical fancy, and he shrugged his shoulders--what fun it would be to cut out the rest of the family, to be made one of the principal heirs and disappoint those ghastly birds of prey! Their disappointment would be only momentary. He would take the fortune solely in order to hand it back to them, but in doing that what an admirable lesson he might read them; what contempt he might show for the pitiful gaud of wealth. (He might possibly retain just enough to give him a small--a very small independent income?) Above all, he would like to show Eleanor how miserable a vice was this love of money, begetting as it did every kind of sham, insincerity and pretence. In her, at least, the vice could not be deep-seated, and she would be worth saving. She would look back on the worship of riches with horror once she were away from the influence of this house. He paused on the terrace and looked up at the perpendicular lines of the imitation Tudor facade, dim and impressive in the half-darkness. Yet, the very house itself was a sham, an anachronism. The Tudors had been autocrats and the principles of autocracy were out of date. Even wealth was no longer the power it had once been. The rich were threatened on every side, by taxation from above and the increasing clamour and power of labour from below. They had lost prestige and influence.... Arthur Woodroffe felt remarkably full of vigour that evening, confident in the knowledge of his own abilities, and delightfully aware of his glorious independence. When he reflected on the lives of the Kenyons he at once despised and pitied them for their insane worship of wealth. He thought of them as poor trammelled creatures, as vultures that had lost the power of flight. VI When Arthur had been five weeks at Hartling, he believed that he knew the other inmates of the house as well as he would ever know them, although he had to admit to himself that he knew none of them any better, now, than he had after he had been there three days. His social relations with some of the Kenyons had lost formality. He was familiar in his treatment of Hubert, on terms of impudence with Elizabeth, and of occasional persiflage with Joe Kenyon and Charles Turner. But these intimacies were only such as he might have developed in a month's stay with them at the same hotel. On both sides there was an effect of enforced toleration, of making the best of a casual temporarily unavoidable proximity. He was still some one who had come in from the "outside." The Kenyons never snubbed him, but he could not be quite at his ease with them; he knew that if for any reason he left Hartling, the whole family would become for him the chance acquaintances of a prolonged visit. He could see himself, a few months hence, meeting one of them in the street, pausing to exchange a few conventional inquiries, and passing on with no more than a whimsical smile at a recollection of an old adventure. There was, however, one exception. If the descendants of old Mr Kenyon had not emerged from the indeterminate background of humanity in general, the old man himself stood out as a distinctive, even a slightly impressive figure. Arthur's original inclination, to pity the head of the house, had been gradually diverted; he was not on closer acquaintance, a figure that called for pity; and once or twice Arthur had had a strange sensation that was almost akin to fear. There was, indeed, something about old Kenyon that was not quite human, something more than that indescribable appearance of immortal old age. He appeared so intimidatingly detached from the common cares and interests of human life. He had boasted of his power to keep in touch with contemporary movements and affairs, but he was never disturbed by them. Nearly every morning Arthur spent an hour in the old man's company, and in that time he usually discussed the morning's news, but never as yet, had Arthur seen him display the least emotion with regard to any question of politics or finance. He would speak of the Irish situation, the starvation of Austria, the threat of labour troubles, the cost of living, or the burden of the Income Tax as if they were incidents in the reign of George IV. rather than in that of George V. And if Arthur himself gave any sign of heat or partisanship the old man would regard him with the cold speculative eye of one who watches the lives and furies of infusoria under a microscope. He seemed to have completely lost the warm-blooded human passion for interference in other people's affairs. There was another aspect of him also that was giving Arthur an occasional qualm of uneasiness. He had found that the old man was not dependable in such things as the consideration of one's natural needs in the matter of ready money. In that second interview when Arthur had put his position quite plainly, acknowledged himself willing to accept the post offered him for three months on trial, and hinted more or less indirectly, but as he believed quite plainly, that he would greatly prefer that there should be no question of any posthumous gratitude, the essential point of present remuneration in the form of salary had not been mentioned. Nor had any reference been made to it since that occasion. And the truth was that Arthur had been spending quite a lot of money in the last five weeks. His original outfit had only been intended to carry him over a glorified week-end, and he had found it necessary to add to it. Also, he had paid his entrance fee, and a year's subscription to the golf club, bought himself some new clubs, a croquet-mallet, a new racket, and a billiard cue, and although he still had a balance at his bank, it had begun to appear rather inadequate when regarded as capital for starting a new life in Canada. The thought of his shrinking resources had begun to embarrass him, but he had felt a strong disinclination to approach the subject in his conversations with Mr Kenyon, moreover, the very fact that he was being paid nothing held a kind of implicit promise that he would be "remembered" later. A man of old Kenyon's wealth and position would not expect a qualified medical man, who was at best quite a distant connection to give his services, to say nothing of his immediate chances, and receive no sort of compensation. For in the course of those five weeks Arthur had lost some of his scruples with regard to figuring in Mr Kenyon's will. The atmosphere of the house may have had its influence on him. Living, as he presumed he did, among the people who had no other ideal other than that of inheriting as capital what they now enjoyed as interest, he had come by unnoticed degrees to think of that way of life as being more or less normal and reasonable. And when he thought of the future he had already begun to anticipate the probability of his staying on at Hartling until old Kenyon died. It was so easy to find reasons for planning that mode of life, so difficult to contemplate any other; more particularly when it seemed probable that only by staying could he hope to be rewarded for his services. He still fidgeted occasionally at the thought that he was wasting his time, perhaps his life; but he was steadily accustoming himself to luxury, and the thought of Peckham grew more and more repulsive every day. He had not written to Bob Somers for nearly a month. He had a definite disinclination even to think of Somers. The life at Hartling was very easy. He was enormously improving his game at golf, croquet, and billiards; and, take it all round, he got on quite well with the family--with all the family--except Eleanor. For some reason, he and she were still strangers to one another. If there was a barrier between him and the rest of the Kenyons, there was a gulf between him and Eleanor; although, in the first instance, she had seemed to be the only one of them who was prepared to come out and greet him as a friend. But, since he had made his decision to stay on at Hartling for a trial period of three months, there had been little intercourse between them, and never once had he been alone with her. She treated him with a calm aloofness, and he on his side had made no overtures. He supposed that, for some reason she disliked him, and had decided that he, also, disliked her. The first break in the general stagnation in the Hartling mode of life came with the intrusion of another member of the family, young Kenyon Turner, the budding stockbroker. He came down for a week-end, and Arthur detested him from the outset. He had been playing golf with Hubert until six o'clock, and his first sight of the new arrival was in the garden. He was walking up and down the middle of the terrace with Eleanor, deep in what appeared to be a very engrossing conversation. He was an almost deliberately handsome young man, just too well-dressed in Arthur's estimation. His own Conduit Street tailor had never been able to produce that, perhaps too noticeable effect of absolute correctitude. It was probably not the tailor's fault, he was too careless, or the wrong figure or something. And in any case, he despised a man who took too much trouble with his clothes. He decided on the spur of the moment to interrupt the _tête-à-tête_; an intrusion that young Turner quite obviously resented. "Been playin' golf?" he asked, with a supercilious air when Eleanor had made the introduction. "Not my game. Don't get enough time for it." Arthur noted that Turner's eyes were those of a man who was making too great demands on his vitality; tired eyes, shadowed with dark lines, and already thinly creased at the outer corners. "Good, healthy game," he commented, staring rather contemptuously. "Keeps you in the open air." "Oh! do you play for medical reasons?" Turner replied. "'Fraid I haven't the determination for that." And as he spoke he turned back to Eleanor intimating as plainly as he could that he had no further use for Arthur's company. Eleanor's tone had a faint note of apology as she said: "Kenyon was asking my advice about something." Arthur could not resist that chance. "You're rather great on giving advice, aren't you?" he asked, and was surprised to see that she winced as if he had hurt her. "Am I?" was all she said, and Arthur instantly regretted his rudeness. "I only meant," he began, "that you.... I'm sorry. I didn't mean it that way." She smiled sadly. "It's an ungrateful task in any case," she said, "and I'm afraid that in this case, too, my advice will not be taken." Arthur excused himself and went on towards the house, wondering if she were advising young Turner, as she had advised himself, to fly the temptation of Hartling. Why had she done that? He was still unable to find any satisfactory reason for her recommendation of so drastic a course. He could not now believe that she had been jealous of his influence with her grandfather, and the theory that she had conceived so strong an aversion for his personality that she had desired to scare him away, was foolishly improbable. Eleanor was not like that. In some ways he rather admired her. Even Elizabeth always spoke nicely about her. He was surprised to find an air of disturbance up at the house. Most of the Kenyons were in the drawing-room, but instead of sitting about their familiar occupations, they were gathered together in a group, engaged in what appeared to be a somewhat anxious conference. Their talk ceased abruptly as he came in, and both Mr and Mrs Turner faced round with an expression that was at once expectant and apprehensive. Arthur would have gone out again at once, but Turner hailed him by saying:-- "Hallo! Arthur. Seen my son anywhere?" "Yes, he's on the middle terrace with Eleanor," Arthur said. "I was just introduced to him, but as they obviously did not want me, I came on up." Turner looked at his brother-in-law, Kenyon, who shrugged his shoulders, but made no further comment; and they had returned to their discussion with an effect of rather desperate resignation before Arthur was fairly out of the room. He wondered if there were some sort of affair, perhaps an engagement, between Eleanor and young Turner; and if the family as a whole objected on account of the nearness of the relationship? He decided that if they consulted him, as they generally did on any matter presumed to be within his province as a medical man, he would make it clear that a marriage of first cousins was not necessarily dangerous. Nevertheless, he despised Eleanor for her choice. The function of dinner was even more formal than usual that night, and old Mr Kenyon had a prolonged lapse of consciousness that kept them all waiting for more than five minutes. These solemn intervals of suspense always produced in Arthur an effect of being present at some religious observance, and to-night he was more aware of it than usual. He remembered how, as a youth, he had been half-awed and half-exasperated when he attended the Sacrament at home by the ceremonial deliberation of his father. He had had an evangelical tendency, but in this service he had favoured quite an elaborate ritual of his own, and his bearing of the chalice and the paten from the ambry to the altar, and the subsequent presentation consecration, and personal acceptance of the elements had been conducted in a low, scarcely audible voice, and with an air of almost exaggerated reverence. Once or twice Arthur had sacrilegiously wondered if his father had found an unusual satisfaction in being the sole human instrument and representative of this mystery of the consecration, and had unduly prolonged the periods of silence involved? And to-night, the same thought crossed his mind with regard to old Kenyon. Was he, perhaps, extending the interval of waiting after he had recovered consciousness, exulting in the exercise of his power? Instinctively Arthur glanced across the table at Eleanor. She was sitting very still, her hands in her lap, her eyes downcast, but he fancied that her expression conveyed something of impatience and revolt. Did she know? he asked himself. Was she inclined to be critical of her grandfather's whims? Was she, perhaps, desperately ready to marry young Turner in order to escape from Hartling? As soon as the service was released again, he turned for information to Elizabeth. "Is anything up?" he asked in an undertone. "Anything out of the ordinary?" She looked at him out of the corners of her eyes and softly blew her relief. "We got a good dose to-night," she whispered, and continued, "That means there's going to be a fuss." "About young Turner and Eleanor?" he tried. "Eleanor? Where does Eleanor come in?" was her surprised response. "I don't know. I thought possibly...." He hesitated, finding an unexpected difficulty in putting his guess into words. "Nothing whatever to do with Eleanor," Elizabeth said, without waiting for him to finish his sentence. "What is it, then?" he insisted. "About him," she said, indicating Kenyon Turner. "I can't possibly tell you now." But after dinner he received enlightenment as to the cause of the impending "fuss" from the prime disturber of the peace himself. "Care to have a game of pills?" he asked, coming over to Arthur as they were leaving the dining-room. His first instinct was to refuse. The conceit of the fellow annoyed him--he had two lines of braid down his dress trousers--but Arthur was on the top of his form just then, and was spurred by a desire to beat him at what was, no doubt, his own game. He had been so cursedly supercilious about playing golf for "medical reasons." "Don't mind," he said in the true Hartling manner of one condescending to a casual visitor from the outside. But although he did, in fact, beat young Turner, he realised that his victory was due to the fact that his opponent was "off his game," and could probably give him twenty in a hundred on ordinary occasions. Young Turner's touch was almost as delicate as his father's. "I'm no earthly good to-night," he said, putting down his cue at the conclusion of the game. "All this business is such an infernal worry." As he spoke he looked at Hubert--who had been exercising his predestinate function of marker--rather than at Arthur. "You're not the only one," Hubert commented morosely. Arthur, who had been continuing a break that had not been completed when he reached game, straightened his back and faced his cousin. "What is this business?" he asked. Hubert, who had got into that uneasy-looking pose of his, looked down at his crossed ankles. "The old man's so infernally difficult," he said. "So cursedly tight with the money-bags," Turner explained. "Have you been trying to milk him, then?" Arthur asked. "Oh, well! the fact is I'm in a hole, on the rocks," Turner admitted. "I've put it off as long as I can, but something has cursedly well _got_ to be done now." Hubert smiled contemptuously. "_Got_ to be done," he repeated. "Who's going to make him? What it'll end in 'll be your coming to live down here!" "I'm damned if it will," Turner declared vehemently, but there was a note of fear in his voice as he continued: "It's out of the question. I mean I'm not doing so badly at the office and all that. If only the old man allowed me a decent screw, I should be all right. In an office like ours you simply have to be in everything that's going. Sometimes one of the partners 'll put you in to what he thinks is a good thing, for instance, and you're practically bound to have a fiver on. There's a lot of that sort of thing anyhow you can't keep out of." "And how much notice d'you think the old man'll take of that?" Hubert asked, without looking up. Turner almost whimpered. "He's _got_ to put me right," he protested, "absolutely _got_ to." Hubert rocked silently from foot to foot. "He hasn't," he said quietly, "and you can't make him. You know that well enough. What did Eleanor say?" "She promised to do all she could," Turner replied unhopefully, and added: "I'd sooner emigrate than come to live down here." "Got the money for your passage?" Hubert inquired. "I suppose I could get that somehow," Turner said. "Trouble'd be to dodge my creditors. Besides, some of the money must be paid--fellows in the office and so on. I couldn't let them down." "You'll be living here before you're a week older," Hubert decided. "Safe as houses." Turner began to pace up and down the billiard room. There was possibly a touch of the histrionic in his manner of doing it, but he was without question genuinely distressed. "Oh, I'll be double damned if I do!" he repeated. "It's all very well for you--you seem to like this sort of life--but I'd be a raving lunatic in a month. I simply couldn't stand it. I--oh! God! I'll make the old man pay. Why the devil shouldn't he? He's got more money than he knows what to do with." Hubert was quite unmoved by his cousin's emotion; indeed he seemed to take a melancholy pleasure in watching him. "When are you going to see him?" he asked. "To-morrow morning," Turner said. "And, by the Lord, if he refuses I'll give him a piece of my mind." Hubert smiled sadly. "Not you," he commented. Arthur had not attempted to interrupt this conversation. Once more he had a sense of some curious mystery behind the commonplace situation. Both Hubert's dismal resignation and young Turner's too violent asseverations hinted at some quality in their grandfather's treatment of them that Arthur found it difficult to associate with the old man himself. It was true, certainly, that he had overlooked or forgotten to offer his medical attendant a salary, but he had none of the signs of the miser. Arthur knew that he gave freely to charities, and spent money without stint on the upkeep of Hartling. And did he not keep his whole family in idleness from one year's end to another? "Why are you so sure that your grandfather will refuse?" Arthur now broke in, looking at Hubert. Hubert exchanged a glance with young Turner, and it was the latter who answered. "He's not sure," he protested. "Anyway, I'm not." Hubert pursed his mouth and stared thoughtfully at the billiard table. "Do you think he'll have a down on you for gambling?" Arthur asked. Turner laughed brusquely. "Well, hardly," he said. "Been a pretty good gambler himself in his day. That was the way he made most of his money. Jolly shady some of his business was too, I've heard. He happened to bring it off, so it was all right. If he hadn't he'd have found himself on the wrong side of the big door." "You _are_ a pretty damned fool, Ken, to talk like that," Hubert put in softly. "Oh, well! it makes me so _wild_," Turner protested. "You know the whole amount's under fifteen hundred, and what's that to a man worth over half a million? The pater told me this evening that the old chap's worth _all_ that. Quite likely a heap more." Hubert solemnly closed his left eye, and continued to stare at the billiard table with the other. "If you come to live down here, he'll put you in the will," he remarked. Turner snorted impatiently. "It isn't _good_ enough," he said crossly. "Besides, it's a rotten game waiting for dead men's shoes." "Specially if you can't damned well help yourself," Hubert agreed, without the least sign of being offended. Arthur's general perplexity was not enlightened by this conversation, although he had now no further doubts as to the reason for Kenyon Turner's visit. There still remained that old suggestion of something taken for granted, something that was hidden from Arthur himself. The two men had apparently spoken quite frankly before him, and Turner, at least, had verged upon the indiscreet until Hubert had pulled him up. But behind all their talk lay the hint of an assumption that violated Arthur's feeling for common sense. This particular refusal of money could be accounted for. Old Mr Kenyon, if he had been a successful gambler himself, might feel a contempt for the failure, or he might, very reasonably, dislike young Turner. But why should he, in either case, want him to come and live at Hartling? Unless that alternative was being held over him as a kind of threat? Nor did the temporary solution of the immediate problem elucidate the general situation. Kenyon Turner had his interview with his grandfather on Sunday morning, and left for town half an hour later in the Vauxhall. Arthur, burning with curiosity, made an opportunity to get Hubert alone after lunch. "Well, what happened this morning?" he asked. "Given him a month," Hubert replied. "How do you mean?" Arthur said. "Month to think it over," Hubert elaborated. "If he'll chuck the city and come to live down here, the old man'll put him straight." "And if he won't?" "Then he can jolly well look out for himself." "But, good Lord, why does Mr Kenyon want him to come and live here?" Arthur broke out. "Thinks he'll be company for you and me, perhaps?" Hubert suggested. "Oh! rot! He must have some reason," Arthur protested. Hubert scratched his eyebrow. "Don't you know what it is?" Arthur persisted. Hubert seemed to purse not only his mouth but his whole face. "Can't say I do," he said, paused, and then continued in another voice: "I'm up against it too. You know Miss Martin, don't you? Didn't you meet her up at the club-house? Well--it's a case with her and me. And what the devil I'm going to do about it, I don't know." VII Arthur was instantly aware of a change of relationship between himself and Hubert. His cousin's statement constituted a confidence, the first he had received since he had been at Hartling. And it seemed that the mere offer of such a confidence revealed Hubert in a new light. At the moment he was no longer the "plus three" golfer, or the holder of a sinecure waiting for dead men's shoes, but a man with a personal history; he had ceased to be a type and had become an individual. Arthur responded without hesitation. "Does the old man know?" he asked. "Not yet; I haven't dared to tell him," Hubert said. "But you think he'll object?" "Sure to." "Why. Doesn't he approve of Miss Martin for some reason?" Arthur asked. He remembered her now--a jolly, brown-eyed, brown-haired girl of twenty or so, who had chaffed him for his devotion to golf. "You're all so dreadfully serious over it," she had said, or words to that effect. Odd that she should fall in love with the melancholy Hubert! "He has never seen her--or heard of her probably," was Hubert's answer. "But, good Lord, why are you so sure that he'll object then," Arthur said. "Well, the truth is that we aren't too keen on staying here--afterwards--after we're married, I mean," Hubert admitted. "And you don't think the old man could do without you?" "Oh! it isn't that. I don't do anything, really," Hubert said. "Rankin runs the place. I'm only a figurehead." Arthur had already suspected this fact, but he was surprised to hear his cousin state the case so frankly. "I thought you seemed to have plenty of time on your hands," he commented. "Simply nothing to do," Hubert agreed. "All the same, you know that your grandfather wants to keep you here?" "He wants to keep us all here, you included," Hubert said. Arthur knew now that that was true. But this calm acknowledgment of the old man's peculiarity seemed to imply a comprehension of motive that was as yet quite beyond his own understanding. They had been walking down through the spinney towards the power-house, and Arthur stopped in the quietness of the wood and laid his hand on his cousin's shoulder. "I say," he said, "I can see that. He _does_ want to keep us here. But _why_ does he? Do you know? Is there some secret about it?" "Lord, no--secret? Why should there be?" Hubert returned with perfect candour. "Seems so damned rum," Arthur said, frowning. "Doesn't it to you?" And then a queer analogy flitted across his mind and he added: "It's like Pharaoh and the Israelites. I never could make out why he wanted to keep them." "Oh! he's like that, always has been," Hubert replied, ignoring the uncomplimentary parallel. "And he gets worse. He's been frightfully difficult lately." He paused and warming to a closer confidence, went on, "The devil of it is that you never know what he's really after. If he got into a fearful pad, you'd know where you were, more or less. But he's always as cool as a cucumber. Makes you feel such an infernal ass." "But suppose," Arthur suggested, "that you simply _didn't_ do what he wanted you to? Suppose, for instance, that you stuck it out you were going to marry Miss Martin and be damned to him. What could he do?" The mere suggestion seemed to make Hubert uneasy. "Couldn't _do_ anything in a way," he grumbled. "But--well--no more could I. Her people aren't well off and I simply haven't got a bean of my own." "You might get a job somewhere else as an estate agent?" Arthur put in. Hubert shook his head. "Those jobs are jolly hard to get," he said. "I have thought about it. But I've had no experience really, not to count. And naturally I shouldn't get any testimonial from the old man, if I chucked this. Rankin would have ten times the chance I've got of a job like that, and you should hear him let himself go when he gets cold feet about anything. He's got five kids, you know, and he'd do any mortal thing not to offend the old man. And then, of course, he guesses that he's down for a bit in the will. They all do--all the servants, I mean. They're all hanging on on low wages." He gave a little bark of laughter as he concluded: "Like the rest of us." "Rotten," Arthur agreed sympathetically. He had begun to like Hubert. It was not his fault that he had no backbone. He had never had a chance to develop one. And this affair with the jolly Miss Martin was quite the worst kind of luck. They were still standing in the spinney wrapped about by the peace of the Sunday afternoon. It was a dull, windless day, threatening rain; and the very sounds of the wood served to emphasise the repose of humanity. The wheel at the generating station was not working, and except for the distant splash of the overfall and the faint humming of undistinguishable insects, the whole of Hartling seemed to be plunged in sleep. Hubert took his cousin's arm and they walked on slowly toward the power-house. "I expect you'll think it perfectly rotten of me to ask," he said in a low confidential voice; "but--you don't think there is any chance of his breaking up, do you?" Arthur sincerely wished at the moment that he could give an encouraging reply, but he could find none. "Don't see any signs of it," he said almost apologetically. "He's tremendously sound, lungs and heart and so on." "But what about those fits of his?" Hubert asked. "Well, I'm not sure," Arthur said. "They're a bit hard to diagnose. But I'm pretty sure they're not a sign of impending death." "And he might go on like he is--perhaps for years." Arthur hesitated. Desire was urging his thought, but he believed that he was giving a carefully weighed opinion when he replied: "Well, it wouldn't surprise me, as a matter of fact, if he went to pieces all at once. Physically, I can't find anything the matter with him, but I've never made a thorough examination. And, in a case like his, there's much more than the actual physical condition of the principal organs to be considered. I've wondered if he isn't held up, in a way, by his will-power. He keeps himself so aloof--if you know what I mean? Never lets himself get excited about any mortal thing; hardly seems interested, really...." "Well, but is there any reason why he shouldn't go on holding himself up?" Hubert inquired, as Arthur paused. "It might break him down if he were badly crossed," Arthur said. They walked on in silence for a few yards, pondering the significance of that last pronouncement before Hubert said,---- "Couldn't do that, though, not on purpose. Be pretty much like murder, wouldn't it?" "Pretty much," Arthur agreed. "And anyway, it's pure speculation on my part." "I can't afford to cross him," Hubert went on, as though he had finally dismissed the thought of his cousin's speculations in pathology. "I expect you'll think I'm jolly soft, but I couldn't face being chucked out of here without a penny and no prospect of getting a job." "But surely Uncle Joe would help you," Arthur put in. "The pater! Good Lord! what could _he_ do?" Hubert said. "He hasn't got a red cent of his own. I don't suppose he could lay his hands on a fiver to save his life." Once or twice in the course of the last few weeks Arthur had had a faint suspicion that ready money was rather scarce among the Kenyons, but he was shocked by this plain statement. "Doesn't the old man allow them anything?" he asked. "Not a bean--in cash," Hubert said. "Of course we can get anything we want in reason, but the old man pays all the bills. He isn't a bit mean that way. Never grumbles. Draws the line at jewellery, though, as you've probably noticed." Arthur had not noticed that omission, but he instantly remembered it, and he saw now that the absence of jewellery gave some air of distinction to the Kenyon women. He approved the old man's taste in this particular. He hated to see women smothered in diamonds. "Why's that?" he asked, passing by the admission of his failure to observe the phenomenon. "Hates jewellery; always has," Hubert explained. "One of his fads. Says he'd as soon see women wear a ring in their nose as in their ears." Arthur nodded. He had no inclination to enter into any discussion of the æsthetic value of jewellery as an aid to the enhancing of woman's beauty. And he was intrigued for the moment by the new aspect of Hartling that Hubert's confidences had unexpectedly revealed to him. The Kenyons seemed to be living a sort of communistic life, he reflected. They had goods, everything they wanted in reason, but no money. Well, it was an easy life--for the elderly and middle-aged. They had no responsibilities, no anxieties. He could understand now why they had all got into such slack habits. After all, why shouldn't they? They had no incentive to do anything but what they were doing. Indeed, it seemed that they had no power to alter their way of life. They were the slaves of a benevolent autocrat who demanded no service from them except respect. Hartling was a Utopia, a Thelema in which there was no necessity for work; and one soon forgot that it was also a prison. He realised at the same time that he might have drawn these inferences for himself, and was slightly annoyed with his own obtuseness. He was, he thought, too much inclined to take things for granted. He had come down to Hartling with ready-made opinions and formal judgments. He had certainly been far too willing to judge the Kenyons, without knowing any of the facts of the case. But he condemned them no longer. It is true that they were not, as Eleanor might say, doing any good in the world, but they were no worse in that respect than the majority of rich people, and the Kenyons had the valid excuse that they could not help themselves. Abruptly his thoughts returned to Hubert's troubles. "I'll admit it's rotten luck about Miss Martin," he said, as if he were continuing their conversation. "But you do get a good time down here." "If I'd the money to emigrate and she'd come with me, I'd go to-morrow," Hubert said, "and be damned to the good time." Hubert was in love, Arthur reflected. Also, he had never known any other condition and could not realise the horrible realities of dirt and disease. "Feel a bit uplifted, I expect, just now," he remarked casually. Hubert stopped and faced him. "Do I look uplifted?" he asked. He certainly did not. He had an air of settled melancholy at the best of times, and at this moment he had apparently abandoned himself to the deepest gloom. Five weeks earlier Arthur would have advised his cousin to take his courage in his hands and break away from Hartling at any cost--even as Eleanor had once advised himself--but now he could appreciate to the full Hubert's difficulty. And then it occurred to him that he had still just enough money to solve the present problem. If that expression of the wish to emigrate had been sincere, he might free his cousin by offering him the loan of, say two hundred pounds. It would, in any case, be interesting to see whether or not he would accept the chance if it were given to him. But he knew, even as the will to help Hubert rose up in him, that he was afraid. Old Kenyon would surely find out who had advanced that money and then he would.... Arthur was not quite sure what he would do, but he feared the consequences. He might be turned out of Hartling; he would certainly lose any hope of that future remuneration for which he was now working. The thought of making an offer flashed through his mind and was rejected. He must, at least, have his three months. "Oh! cheer up, old man," he advised the gloomy Hubert with an assumption of hopefulness. "Things are never as bad as you think they're going to be. Something will happen, right enough." "There's only one thing that'll help me," Hubert muttered, as they once more continued their walk. "And that's bound to happen sooner or later," Arthur returned. "I dare say you won't have to wait much longer." Hubert gave a little snort of impatience. "Jolly fine," he said; "but the pater, for instance, has been practically waiting all his life." Arthur was stirred to candour. "In a way," he said, "but I don't suppose it has worried him much." "Hasn't it? You ask him," retorted Hubert. Arthur thought over that for a moment before he said, "If I did, he probably wouldn't tell me. You're a secretive lot down here, you know. You're absolutely the first person who has given me any sort of confidence." "We can't," Hubert replied. "It isn't safe. You never know what the old man'll find out--he's damnably sharp in some things, and he's got us all as tight as wax. If he chose to cut up rough, he could turn any of us out of here without a blessed penny. I don't suppose he'd like it, for instance, if he knew that I was talking like this to you. But--I don't know--I wanted to tell you, and that affair of Ken's makes you think a bit, doesn't it? He's in a cleft stick all right now--like the rest of us." Arthur had a memory of his first night at Hartling, and of the way in which his uncle had suddenly dropped out of the conversation after his father had, with apparent gentleness, expressed surprise that his son did not go to live in Italy. Was it possible that that quiet expression veiled a threat? "But the old man's a good sort, surely," Arthur protested. "He wouldn't do anything absolutely rotten, I mean." "You never know what he'll do," Hubert said. "You ask the pater about Uncle Jim, Eleanor's father. I don't suppose he'd mind telling you. You're practically one of us now, aren't you?" But some spirit in Arthur rebelled furiously against that suggestion. "Good Lord, no; not in that way," he asserted vigorously. "I'm perfectly free to go whenever I want to. Even if I haven't got a cent, I could always get a job as a doctor." "Yes, you score there," Hubert agreed, without enthusiasm. "Wish to God I'd got a profession." Their conversation was interrupted at this point by their arrival at the little power-house in which Scurr, the engineer-chauffeur, was busily engaged on a minor repair to one of the temporarily dismantled dynamos. And as they returned to the house half an hour later, Arthur determinedly discussed certain alterations the Committee were proposing in connection with the thirteenth and fourteenth holes of the golf course. He had definitely quashed the assertion that he was now to be numbered among those who were waiting for a certain long deferred event, and chose to think no more about that subject at present. He was, as he had asserted, free to leave Hartling whenever he wished. He was not tied in any way, he never could be. And there was no reason why he should not enjoy his three months' holiday. He was sorry for Hubert, but if he had that £200, he probably would not dare to break away. It would not be worth while for one thing, and for another he was too "soft," spoilt by the ease of a luxurious life. And Hubert, on his side, made but one further reference to his love affair. No doubt he was afraid that he had already been rather indiscreet, for just before they reached the house he said,-- "Absolutely between you and me, of course, what I told you this afternoon." "Rather. Absolutely," Arthur assured him. It was impossible not to have a slight feeling of contempt for them all, Arthur thought, even though he had began to pity them. Congratulating himself anew on his own magnificent independence, he was inclined, just then, to regard the Kenyons as parasitic, bloodless creatures. He had once pictured them as vultures; now he saw them rather as jackals. After dinner that evening, however, he was influenced to modify once again the continually fluctuating impression he received of the Hartling household. He was warm with the comfort of good food and good wine, and inclined to be generous and a trifle sentimental when this new record was laid before him. His uncle apparently knew something of the confidences his son had given that afternoon, for it was with a new, a more intimate manner that he came across to Arthur in the drawing-room after dinner. "Having your usual game to-night?" he asked. "Oh! I don't know. Why?" Arthur said. Of all the Kenyons, his uncle was, he considered, the most to be despised. He was so confounded sloppy. Joe Kenyon made a vague gesture with the hand that held his cigar and the long ash fell and broke on the carpet. He frowned impatiently, looked down at the ash and apparently decided to forget it. "Didn't know if you'd come for a stroll in the garden," he said. "Right you are. Come along," Arthur agreed, in a spasm of pity for the futility of the man. The Kenyons always sought the garden if they had anything of the least importance to say, and he inferred that his uncle had some admission to make now concerning Hubert's unfortunate engagement. Was it possible that they wanted him to be a sort of intermediary between them and the old man? But when they were in the garden and out of earshot of the house, Mr Kenyon displayed no immediate anxiety to discuss his son's affairs. Instead of that he began to give Arthur what seemed to be rather paternal advice. "Can't think why you go off to the billiard-room directly after dinner," he said, "when you've got this. Billiards are all right after dark, but you miss the best hour of daylight going in there at nine o'clock this time o' year." "Well, I'm out of doors all day," was Arthur's excuse. "Playing golf or croquet or tennis," his uncle commented. Arthur was startled. This was the last quarter from which he had expected a criticism of his way of life. "Didn't know you objected to games," he said curtly. Joe Kenyon did not appear to hear that. The gray sky of the afternoon had broken, the sun was setting among a tangled mass of cloud, and he was watching the spectacle with the entranced eyes of a dreamer. "I'll admit," he murmured half apologetically, "that it's a trifle too dramatic. But at my age one wants the broad effects. However, I suppose you don't _see_ these things." Arthur turned his attention to the sunset. "Looks uncommonly like rain," he said. His uncle laughed. "We all have our different compensations," he said. "Yours is games and mine the ability to see things. However, I don't know what we should do without 'em." "Compensations?" Arthur repeated. "I don't know that I'd thought of games in that light." "You will in time, if you stay here," was his uncle's answer, given a little sadly. "But I don't mean to," Arthur asserted. Joe Kenyon turned reluctantly from the contemplation of the sunset and looked at his nephew. "Then you'd better break away while you have the chance," he said. "I'm a fool to say this to you, but Hubert told me of your talk this afternoon, and I--well, I'm sorry for you." Arthur raised his eyebrows. "You're getting drawn in, though you mayn't know it," his uncle continued, "and if you do your life will be wasted. You'll be sucked dry like the rest of us. Damn it, I can't say more than that. I shouldn't have said as much if you hadn't been so decent to Hubert this afternoon." Arthur's conscience pricked him, and at the same moment he had a warm sense of friendship for his cousin. "Did he tell you that?" he said. "I'm glad he thought so anyhow. I thought I'd been rather rotten to him as a matter of fact." "I gathered that you'd been very friendly," Joe Kenyon replied, his attention returning to the sunset. "Not that you can be of any help in his case." "I don't know, I might," Arthur blurted out on the impulse of the moment. "Look here, I've got a couple of hundred pounds he's welcome to, if he'd care to have it. He said something about trying his luck in Canada if he could raise the money." His uncle made no answer for a few seconds, then he definitely resigned himself to the loss of the sunset, drew his nephew's arm through his own, and began to walk slowly up and down the length of the broad gravel walk upon which they had been standing. "Good of you, Arthur, very good and generous of you," he said; "but it's no use. Hubert's in love and he's a bit above himself, but he'd never do anything in Canada. He's too soft and ignorant. We only guess what the world's like outside this place, but the things we do guess don't tempt us to explore it." He paused a moment before he continued: "We don't talk about ourselves, of course, but you must know the truth pretty well by this time--besides, you're practically one of us now." Arthur was keenly interested. "I'm not sure that I do know the truth, Uncle Joe," he said. "Except--well, Hubert told me this afternoon that your father--er--keeps you pretty short of cash and so on; makes it jolly difficult for you to sort of--well--break away." Joe Kenyon smiled grimly. "Difficult!" he repeated, and then, "I suppose you haven't got a cigar on you? All right, never mind. I smoke too much: that's another compensation." "Couldn't you tell me how things are, a bit more?" Arthur ventured. "You know I might be able to help." "It isn't easy to tell you, you see," Joe Kenyon said, after a short pause. "Let's sit down. But ..." he hesitated, grunting and sighing, before he blurted out, "But you might just run up to the house and get me a couple of cigars, there's a good fellow. Then, I'll--I'll tell you a story. Only you needn't, that is, I shouldn't say anything to the others about our being down here." While his uncle had been talking, Arthur's heart had warmed to him, but in the ten minutes that now intervened while he went to the house for the cigars, he had a brief reaction. As he entered the house, the habit of mind that had been growing upon him for the past five weeks strangely reasserted itself. He was aware again of the futility and weakness of the Kenyons, their laziness, their self-indulgence, and what he could only regard as the meanness of their attitude towards the expected inheritance. And his uncle seemed to be the very type of all these aspects of the family--a man so idle and weak that he could not exist without his cigar for half an hour. He might have endless excuses, but there must be a horribly lax strain in him somewhere. He was afraid even of his own sisters and his brother-in-law. He had not wanted them to know where he was and what he was saying. In deference to that wish, however, Arthur went to the smoking-room for the desired cigars--a room that was used as a store and in which no one ever sat. There was more or less realisable wealth there, he reflected, as he opened a box of his uncle's cigars. Why, these cigars must have cost over five pounds a hundred before the war. He was crossing the hall on his return to the garden, when the drawing-room door opened and Miss Kenyon came out. Arthur had a feeling that she had deliberately tried to catch him. He had always disliked and rather feared her. She was different from the other Kenyons, more decided and more efficient. He had not modified his original opinion of her as a hard woman. "Going out?" she asked coldly. "Yes; it's jolly in the garden," Arthur said. "Is my brother out there?" she continued. Arthur hesitated on the edge of an implied untruth, but she gave him no opportunity to prevaricate, adding almost immediately,-- "I wish you would tell him I want to speak to him." "I will, if I can find him," Arthur said. "Oh! You'll know where to find him," Miss Kenyon replied, and re-entered the drawing-room. It was almost certain, then, Arthur reflected, that she had heard him and had come out to give him that message. She had probably seen him coming up the garden, and had some purpose in putting an end to his conversation with her brother. He was annoyed by the interruption. He felt bound now to deliver her message and had no doubt that it would put an end to his uncle's confidences. "I met Miss Kenyon in the hall as I was coming out," he said, as he rejoined his uncle. "At least, I think she must have seen me coming up from the drawing-room window. She came out and told me to tell you that she wanted to speak to you, and went back again." Joe Kenyon was leaning back in one of the comfortable wicker chairs that were scattered about the garden, and gave no sign of being perturbed by the message. "Got the cigars?" he asked, stretching out his hand, and then after an interval in the course of which he had got the cigar satisfactorily going, he went on: "Esther's so cautious. She thinks I'm indiscreet. Perhaps I am, but I can't really see what difference it can make, so long as we don't say anything against the old man. And in any case, I trust you, Arthur. I can trust you, can't I?" There was a wistful note in the last sentence that robbed it of any offence, and Arthur was touched by it. The effect of his brief visit to the house was being dissipated already by the surroundings of the garden. "Rather. Yes, absolutely," he said gently. "I mean what possible reason could I have for giving you away?" Joe Kenyon sighed. "Reason?" he reflected. "Well, reason enough in all conscience." Arthur was puzzled. "What?" he asked. "Oh! there you are," his uncle replied. "Either you know too little or too much, and one has to trust you in either case. But surely, my dear boy, you can at least see that you've got it in your power to give any of us away to the old man?" "Oh, good Lord!" Arthur ejaculated in an undertone. He had a horrible picture of the Kenyons living a life of eternal suspicion and distrust, fearing that one or other of them might by some trick or disloyalty obtain an unfair hold on the old man's affection. His uncle's next speech, however, destroyed that picture even as it began to take shape. "That doesn't apply to us, of course," he said. "We've got a sort of unspoken agreement between ourselves. Had to have. We _hadn't_ at first though, you know," he continued, looking round and changing his voice as if he were making an unexpected announcement. "Hadn't you?" Arthur murmured encouragingly. "By Jove, no," his uncle went on reminiscently. "But that was nearly forty years ago, of course; just after this place was built; at the time when I tried to break away." He paused a moment and then went on: "I wanted to be an artist. I've got portfolios of stuff upstairs if you'd ever care to look at 'em. I dare say I shouldn't have been any good, not really first-class, but I can see things, and now and again I can get something down. There was a note of the wood I made when we first came here, that was rather good. I'll show it to you sometime. The wood was pretty nearly all pines then. The old man planted those larches--said the pines were too gloomy. I dare say he was right." "And he wouldn't let you become an artist?" Arthur put in. "He didn't actually forbid it," Joe Kenyon said. "But he made it simply impossible. He--well"--he lowered his tone almost to a whisper--"we used to believe in those days that he had some insidious disease or other. I suppose he must have started the idea himself. I can't remember. But I know that my poor mother used to be very depressed about it at times. She died in '83, you know, a year or two after we came here to live. However, what with one thing and another, there seemed to be no alternative except to put off my going to Paris--from month to month at first, and afterwards from year to year." He gave a grim laugh as he added. "In a way of speaking you may say it's going on still. Not long ago at dinner I was talking about Italy and the old man asked me why I didn't go there." "Yes, it was after I came. I heard him," Arthur said. "But--I didn't understand...." "Oh, well! if I'd said I would, I shouldn't have got the money to go with in the first place," his uncle explained, "and in the second it would have been all up with me so far as the old man's will was concerned. He never threatens one, not directly, but we _know_. And, well, I can't face the thought of the workhouse. They don't allow you cigars there, I'm told," he concluded whimsically. Arthur thought that he could realise the old situation fairly accurately. His uncle's original weakness showed so clearly through his narration. He had, no doubt, procrastinated, and bargained with himself, continually shirking the immediate necessity to take definite action. All that side of the affair was comprehensible enough, but what of that other point from which the narrative had so casually rambled away? "Yes, I see," Arthur agreed sympathetically; "but what was it you were going to say about your having some agreement among yourselves, uncle? It was apropos of my being an outsider, you know." "We got to understand it wouldn't do, that's all," Joe Kenyon said, "not to quarrel among ourselves, that is. Esther was inclined to make mischief in the old days. I don't know whether I ought to be telling you all this. Anyhow, we soon saw that it would never do for us to be jealous of one another. We had to find a _modus vivendi_ and--and take our chance. That was after Catherine married Charles and they had come to live with us. The idea at that time was that Charles was going into the Diplomatic later on." Kenyon paused, but made no movement to rise and go up to the house in obedience to his sister's summons. His next sentence, however, apparently referred to that issue. "Seems to me," he said, "that there can't be any harm, now, in telling you these things. I don't mind admitting that we've discussed it among ourselves--Esther, Catherine, Charles, and myself, that is. Of course what Esther says is that you might go behind us, as it were, but I know there's no sort of fear of that." Arthur had never liked Miss Kenyon; but now he began quite actively to hate her. "She must have a disgustingly low opinion of me if she could think a thing like that," he said bitterly. "Oh, well," his uncle replied calmly, "you get like that when you've lived here long enough. Can't trust any one from outside. Never know, that after all these years, we mayn't be left in the lurch. But, as I've pointed out to 'em, you're different." Nevertheless he was, without doubt, distinctly uneasy. He knew that he had been indiscreet, and now was anxious for reassurance. Twice in the last minute he had ended with an assertion of belief in his nephew's trustworthiness. And it was with a strong feeling of desire to confirm that belief both for his uncle's sake and his own, that Arthur now said,-- "I wish I could do something to help--to help Hubert, I mean. Don't you think I might say something to Mr Kenyon about it? Reason with him? I wouldn't mind doing it in the least. He always seems reasonable enough when we're talking together. A bit hard, perhaps, rather--what shall I say?--not really interested in life, and so on; but not a bit--well--unkind--cruel, if you know what I mean?" He had expected an almost scornful refusal of his offer to act as an intermediary, but his uncle appeared ready, at least to consider the proposal. "That's good of you, Arthur," he said, "but there's another thing to be thought of, too; Esther's dead against the engagement." That announcement instantly stiffened Arthur in his resolve. The thing was worth doing in any case, but the possibility of inflicting defeat upon Miss Kenyon afforded an immense additional inducement. "I'd like to do it," he said, with sudden ardour. Joe Kenyon sat up in his chair and turned to face his nephew with an effect of new interest. "I don't for a moment believe your embassy will make the least difference, my dear boy," he said earnestly; "but I, personally, should be grateful if you'd undertake it. For Hubert's sake. It would be a--a tremendous compensation for him if he were married, and--well, we don't know yet that the old man will oppose the idea. At the same time I suppose you realise what it may mean for you?" "Mean? Yes. Well, I suppose ..." Arthur began, uncertain of his uncle's precise intention. "Mean that you may be turned out of the place at an hour's notice," Joe Kenyon interrupted him. "If you get on the old man's wrong side he'll have no scruples. That's what happened with my brother James, Eleanor's father, you know. He wanted to marry a girl, such a charming girl she was too--Eleanor takes after her--and somehow or other he put the old man's back up. Poor old Jim, he had an awful time--married Eleanor--Eleanor's mother, you understand--out of hand, and they practically starved. He used to write, but we couldn't help him, of course not to count; and the old man wouldn't. He was as hard as nails--hard as nails. They were in South America somewhere, Rio, I think it was, when Jim's wife died, and he only survived her about six months. We heard all about it from a fellow called Payne and his wife. Payne was in the Cable Company out there, and Jim knew them and asked them to bring Eleanor home. She was only seven or eight then, a dark, solemn little chit as ever you saw, poor dear. By God! you could tell she'd been through it. I can see them all standing in the hall now. Payne was a great stout chap with a grayish beard. His wife was a big woman too. They had Lord knows how many children of their own, I believe. And that little solemn elf Eleanor looked like a midget beside them. Thin as a herring she was, but as pretty as a fairy. She was always graceful, even as a bit of a child--sure in her movements--it was a pleasure to watch her...." Joe Kenyon paused as if savouring his recollection, taking reflective pride, perhaps, in his power of "seeing," and then continued with a chuckle, "And this chap Payne was all taken aback. He hadn't expected a place like this evidently. Jim hadn't told him anything, I suppose, and Payne probably thought we weren't much better off than Jim. He put it in a bit thick, I remember, about Jim's poverty over there. Nice, decent sort of people. We heard from 'em once or twice afterwards, inquiring after Eleanor, and then they went back to South America and we lost touch with them; though I believe Eleanor still hears from them occasionally. However, what I was going to say was that we didn't know, of course, whether the old man would have Eleanor or not. Esther wouldn't have anything to do with it, so in the end your aunt and I took Eleanor up to show her to the old man, and as luck would have it he took a tremendous fancy to her. She's been his favourite ever since." He hesitated a moment before he added: "But there's never been any question of our being jealous of her, of course. She has told us that if by any chance the old man left her the bulk of his property, she wouldn't keep it. She wouldn't, either. In fact I shouldn't be at all sorry if it was that way. You could trust Eleanor to be absolutely fair--and generous." Joe Kenyon stopped speaking, but for a time Arthur made no comment on the story he had just heard. His attention seemed to be following two strands at the same moment. One side of his mind was attempting to weigh his uncle's motives in making all these confidences. Had he and his sister been quarrelling? There had been more than one reference to Miss Kenyon that had sounded distinctly bitter, and the emphasis he had laid on his last sentence might have implied that he hoped that if in some moment of aberration his father made an unjust will, he might be at the mercy of Eleanor rather than be dependent on the goodwill of his sister. The other side of Arthur's mind was engaged in the contemplation of a desolate little fairy standing in the hall of Hartling House solemnly awaiting her fate. Even now, she had sometimes a look of desolation, of loneliness. He wondered if she still remembered her early troubles, if she occasionally grieved for her father and mother? "I hope I haven't bored you with all this?" his uncle's voice murmured. "It is--to tell you the truth--a relief to let oneself go a little to some one who doesn't know. I dare say you can't understand that?" "I can. Rather," Arthur said, suddenly appreciating the fact that his uncle's motive was the purely personal one of relief. "I can quite understand now you must get fed up with all this sometimes." Joe Kenyon sighed, but he did not otherwise comment on this expression of sympathy. "I've been yarning so, we've got rather away from the point," he said. "But you know, Arthur, I don't want you to go into this affair of Hubert's without knowing what you are doing. There it is, my boy. You may be cutting your own throat. I assure you the old man will put you out at an hour's notice if you happen to get on his wrong side." "Honestly, uncle, I don't care a little hang about that," Arthur affirmed bravely. "I never meant to stay here and I've had a jolly six weeks." "Of course we shall have to say something to Esther first," his uncle replied. "Oh, of course," Arthur agreed readily, but for a moment his heart sank. Miss Kenyon's influence was probably very considerable, he reflected. A few minutes earlier he had been eager to come to a clash of wills with her. He was still ready to do that. But it might be that, even if he defeated her in this, she would work against him afterwards, and that he would have to leave Hartling. And when he faced that possibility he was sure that, after all, he did not want to go. The world outside was an uncomfortable, unprotected place, in which there would be no luxuries for him, and he would have to work very hard in uncongenial circumstances in order to make a bare living. Also, he would be sorry to go now that he was just beginning to know these relations of his a little better. Hubert was a good chap, and so was Uncle Joe. He had not properly understood them until to-day. And now that he knew her story, he would like to know something more of Eleanor. There was something fine about her, and the thought of that "dark, solemn little chit" in the hall made him feel oddly tender towards her. The darkness had fallen, and the clouds had reassembled in tremendous masses that were moving with strange swiftness across the sky. Leaning back and looking upward it was interesting to contrast the windless quiet of the garden in which they were sitting with the evidences of the tumult above. "It's beginning to rain," his uncle suddenly exclaimed, breaking a long silence. "We'd better go." Arthur was prepared for some display of temper on the part of Miss Kenyon when he and his uncle entered the drawing-room, and was disappointed to find that she displayed her habitual air of cold reserve. He was a trifle nervous and apprehensive now, about this projected embassy of his, and would have been glad to have been stiffened by some show of active opposition. Miss Kenyon had, he thought, something of the same awful detachment that her father exhibited towards every-day affairs. All the older members of the party were there. Turner had a novel in his hand, the three women were busy with their usual fancy-work, but to-night they had drawn together in a group by one of the windows, with an effect of being in conference. Joe Kenyon's action in pulling up a chair and joining the group held a faint suggestion of bravado. He had the uneasy air of a man coming to a confession of his own weakness. Arthur preferred to stand, leaning against the jamb of the window. It gave him a physical sense of superiority to look down upon his antagonist. Joe Kenyon plunged at once into what Arthur judged to be relatively a side issue. "Arthur and I have been talking about Hubert's engagement," he said. "Hubert had been telling him all about it this afternoon; and Arthur has suggested that he should say something to my father." If he had deliberately intended an effect of surprise he had attained his object. They were undoubtedly startled by this announcement, and not less obviously puzzled. It was not, however, Arthur's part in the affair that seemed to perplex them. None of them looked up at him, they were all staring at Joe Kenyon, with an expression that seemed, Arthur thought, to be seeking for a private sign. But so far as he could see, none was given. Joe Kenyon was leaning back in his chair and wiping his forehead. "This rain ought to cool the air a bit," he interjected in an undertone. "Beastly hot in here." "Very friendly of Arthur," Turner commented, turning slightly towards the young man as he spoke. "No reason, after all, why he should bother himself about our affairs." "I suppose he understands ..." his wife began, and then stopped abruptly. She was still looking anxiously at her brother as if inviting further confidences. Joe Kenyon nodded. "Oh, of course, of course," he said. "Hubert told him all about it this afternoon." "About what, Joe?" Miss Kenyon put in, speaking for the first time. She gave him no indication of perturbation or anxiousness, but she was reading her brother's face as if she sought some evidence of his secret motive. "Well, about the engagement, and having no money and so on," Joe Kenyon rather desperately explained. "No money?" his sister returned, with a lift of her eyebrows. "What do you mean, by having no money?" "Well, Hubert hasn't any, not of his own," her brother replied. "And he was saying, I gather, that he would like--well--a change of air if he were married. About enough of us here, without him, perhaps. That sort of thing. And Arthur very generously offered through me to lend him a couple of hundred pounds if he wanted it." Whether or not he had intended to create a diversion by this further announcement, he had certainly achieved that object. Turner gave an exclamation of surprise, but it was Mrs Kenyon who answered. "Oh, but we couldn't _possibly_ accept that," in an agitated voice; and Arthur, looking down, saw that her hands were trembling. She was, he realised then, by far the most nervous of the five, and he recognised in her at that moment a strong likeness to his own mother. She, too, had been a timid woman, apprehensive not only of danger, but also of change. Miss Kenyon had let her work fall in her lap, and was sitting, plunged, apparently, in a fit of deep abstraction. "No, no, of course not," Joe Kenyon replied. "I have already refused that." "On what grounds?" Miss Kenyon put in sharply. "Er--I don't think--I suggested, Esther, that Hubert would be--well, rather lost if he were to find himself in a new country with a wife to support on a capital of £200." Miss Kenyon gave a short impatient sniff, and turned to Arthur. "A little strange, isn't it," she asked, "for you to offer to finance us?" "Only Hubert, you know," Arthur explained. "Hubert has a father and mother alive, to say nothing of uncles and aunts," she returned. "I don't know why he should need help from a comparative stranger." "He seemed to need it," Arthur said dryly, "or I shouldn't have made the offer." Miss Kenyon shrugged her shoulders and turned back to her brother. "Are we to understand, Joe," she said, "that Arthur Woodroffe knows all about us now? Have you told him everything?" "Damn it, Esther, what do you mean by everything?" Joe Kenyon exploded defensively. "I--it seems to me--Hubert had pretty well told him all that mattered, before I said a word. I told him about Jim, if that's what you mean?" Miss Kenyon began to drum her fingers on the arm of her chair. "And what good do you expect to do to yourself or anybody else by speaking to my father about Hubert's engagement?" she asked Arthur. Turner leant back in his chair and crossed his legs. "Precisely, that's the real point," he agreed. "Well, naturally, I hope to persuade Mr Kenyon to sanction the engagement," Arthur said. "Why?" snapped Miss Kenyon. "Friendship for Hubert," Arthur said. "I wasn't aware that you and he were such great friends," was Miss Kenyon's criticism of that explanation. "Oh, well, pretty fair," Arthur compromised. "Anyhow, I'll be glad to help him if I can." "I can't imagine that anything you could say to my father would carry the least weight," Miss Kenyon said dryly. "Perhaps not," Arthur agreed. "No harm in trying, though, is there?" "I think that's quite true, you know, Esther," Mrs Kenyon put in, "and it would be rather a relief if--that is, I hope, for Hubert's sake at all events, something can be done to smooth things over." Miss Kenyon turned from her sister-in-law with a slight suggestion of contempt. "Do you know this girl, Dorothy Martin?" she asked, looking at her brother. "Slightly," he said. "Met her twice, I think. Seemed a jolly girl, I thought. Full of life." "Quite a nice girl," his wife put in eagerly. "Oh! you've met her too, have you?" Miss Kenyon commented coldly. "At the Club House. Hubert took me up there to tea, the day before yesterday, on purpose to introduce me," Mrs Kenyon explained, with a pathetic air of apology. Arthur had drawn many false inferences about the affairs at Hartling, but it was quite clear to him now that although there might, as his uncle had said, be some tacit agreement as to the Kenyons' attitude toward the head of the house, Miss Kenyon had certainly not been given any confidences concerning Hubert's engagement. "She has no money of her own, I suppose?" was the next question. Joe Kenyon and his wife looked at each other rather helplessly, and it seemed that no further answer was needed, for Miss Kenyon at once continued, "Folly, absurd folly, and you know it. If Arthur Woodroffe likes to make a fool of himself, he can. What he does or does not do is neither here nor there. But I shall have no hand in it, and any influence I have with my father...." She had risen to her feet as she spoke, and now stood with her hands clenched, an erect and dominating figure. She was over sixty, but she was still a handsome woman, full of vitality and energy; and at that moment Arthur could not but concede her a grudging measure of admiration. He felt as if he had seen her fully awake for the first time. Her rather pale blue eyes were suddenly keen and alert, and there was an air of mastery about her that reminded him of her father. By the side of her, Mrs Turner and her brother with their sandy-gray hair and their tendency to an untidy corpulence, seemed to belong to another race. Esther, if the head of the house was to be taken as the standard, was the only true Kenyon of the second generation, unless Eleanor's father, the errant, independent James, had been of his sister's breed? Had he, perhaps, had his sister's hands also; those white, strong managing hands that were now so threateningly clenched? She stood there for a moment, dominating them all, while she allowed the threat of her unfinished sentence to take effect; then she turned and left the room with a quiet dignity that was in itself a menace. Nevertheless, Arthur at least had not been intimidated by her outburst, and her contemptuous reference to himself had provided him with the very stimulant he desired. Moreover, he had now a fierce desire to humiliate his handsome opponent, a desire that arose from a new source. He had seen her as a woman for the first time, and he was aware in himself of a hitherto unrealised impulse to cruelty. He wanted to break and dominate that proud, erect figure. However sneeringly she had challenged him, and in the zest of his unsatisfied youth, he longed to conquer her, although his victory could be but the barren victory of the intellect. He took the seat Miss Kenyon had just vacated with a pleasant sense of mastery. He felt that he could do anything he liked with the other four. They were all of them looking, just then, so completely cowed and depressed. Joe Kenyon and his sister were crumpled into their chairs, with an air of rather absurd dejection. Mrs Kenyon had resumed her fancy work and was bending over it in an attitude that suggested the possibility of hidden tears; and Turner, nervously twisting his exquisitely neat little moustache, was staring thoughtfully at his own reflection in the darkened window. "I don't see why _we_ shouldn't help Hubert, all the same," Arthur tried, by way of making a beginning. Little Turner withdrew his gaze from the window and regarded the intrepid youth with an expression of half-amused pity. "You don't _know_," was his only comment. "Well, I think I do, to a certain extent," Arthur said boldly. "Uncle Joe told me a good many things to-night, one way and another. More than he cared to admit, perhaps, before Miss Kenyon." He had made a deliberate bid for inclusion into their secret counsels by that last sentence, and he had at least succeeded in stimulating their interest. "Oh, well, well," his uncle said, sitting up with an effect of reinflation, "perhaps I did. Esther's got a queer temper, now and then. And possibly I told you more than was altogether discreet." He looked at his brother-in-law as he added, "I'll admit to being a bit down in the mouth about the whole affair." "But do you really think," Mrs Kenyon began unhopefully, "that it would be any _good_ for you to come into the affair at all?" "Well, I'm perfectly free, you know," Arthur said, and instantly realised that he had said the forbidden thing. They could not bear that admission of bondage in a full company. "Can't see that that's anything to do with it," Turner replied. "We're all free enough, so far as that goes. Point is, whether your interference is advisable; whether you might not put Mr Kenyon's back up and make things a hundred times worse for Hubert." Arthur chose to overlook the snub. "Well, I don't see that it could do any harm," he said. He felt pleasantly young and capable among those four old people; he believed that they were too inert to oppose him, that they would accept any leader capable of taking the initiative. "Anything I did," he continued, "would only react on me, and I--don't care. Uncle Joe has warned me that Mr Kenyon may sling me out of the house at an hour's notice, but I'm perfectly willing to take that risk." No one answered him. For the second time in two minutes he had all too clearly displayed their weakness with his youthful boast of freedom, and this time they had no defence but to ignore him. For a few seconds there was a painful, uneasy silence, and then Turner looked at Mrs Kenyon and said, in a confidential tone,-- "What does Eleanor say about it all? I suppose you've asked her advice?" "She thinks he'll be against it," Mrs Kenyon said timidly. "But nothing has been said to him as yet. She--she would like Hubert to go away--but I can't see how--even if we accepted...." She glanced at Arthur as she concluded. "Oh, well," Turner replied, standing up, "we'll have to leave it at that presumably. No good in our interfering, obviously." And he looked at his wife, who began to fumble her work into an untidy bundle, preparatory to getting to her feet. "With our own trouble hanging over us," she remarked allusively, and added, "What's going to happen to poor Ken, I don't know. He's determined that he won't come to live here." They were all standing now, saying good-night, but Joe Kenyon lagged behind with Arthur as they trailed across the spaces of the drawing-room. "I'm afraid it's no good, you know," he murmured, "very generous of you to make the offer, all the same." When he was alone in his own delightful bedroom, Arthur stood at the open window, listening to the sound of the rain and inhaling the welcome scents of the grateful earth. Already his mood of resentment against these four impotent old people had passed. They had snubbed and checked him, given him to understand that though he might, indeed, know something of the facts of their position, he knew nothing of the spirit. But he could not cherish anger against them, nor even contempt. They had been in shackles too long; he could not reasonably expect them to enter with him into any kind of conspiracy against the old man. They were so helpless, so completely dependent upon his goodwill. Nevertheless, although they had given him no authority, he meant to persist in his endeavour although he risked expulsion from this Paradise of comfort and well-being. He was genuinely anxious to help his uncle, aunt, and cousin, and he thrilled at the thought of crossing swords with Miss Kenyon. If he defeated her, it would, indeed, be a glorious victory. And, possibly, Eleanor would be on his side? He had an amazingly clear picture of her in his mind, a forlorn, independent child, in the midst of the splendours of the Hartling hall. He could see her standing by the side of the colossal elephant's pad; an amazing contrast between the slender and the gross. What was it his uncle had called her? "A lovely, solemn little chit?" Yes, she was lovely. He had hardly realised it until now. Perhaps she would change her opinion of him after to-morrow. VIII Arthur's usual hour for his morning interview with old Mr Kenyon was 11 o'clock, but two or three times a week he received a message either at breakfast or immediately after, releasing him from attendance. He had been prepared for such a reprieve this morning, imagining that the old man might be a trifle exhausted by his passage of arms with Kenyon Turner the day before, but as no message arrived he went into the library to read the morning papers for an hour and a half before going upstairs. All the important journals were taken at Hartling, most of them in duplicate; and Arthur was probably the only member of the household who had ever considered the expense involved. He had calculated once that, including magazines and other periodicals, more than a hundred pounds a year were spent under this head alone. But the expenditure of the place was all on the same magnificent scale. Arthur remembered his uncle's whimsical comment that cigars were not provided in the workhouse, and smiled grimly at the thought that the inmates of Hartling were the most pampered paupers in the world. The library was empty that morning. Arthur generally found Hubert there at that time, but he had presumably had breakfast even earlier than usual and gone out. Nor did Mr Turner, who came in half an hour later, settle himself down there to his customary study of the _Times_. Instead he nodded a curt good-morning to Arthur, selected half a dozen papers, and immediately retired with them to some other room. After that Arthur was left severely alone. The inference was clear enough: the Kenyons did not wish to appear in the cause he was going to plead. They might approve his intention but they preferred not to influence it. If he failed, they would deny any kind of responsibility for what he had said. Their attitude had been foreshadowed in the course of their conversation the previous night. "No good _our_ interfering," Turner had said. They were afraid of being dismissed from their luxurious almshouse. Arthur put down his paper, walked across to the window, and stood there looking out into the gardens. It had rained heavily in the night and there was more rain coming. Low wisps of ashen gray cloud were travelling intently across the dark purples of the heavy background, and the horizon was hidden by the mist of an approaching downpour. It was not a day, he reflected, remembering many such days, to spend in going from house to house through fountains of London mud; nor in receiving poor patients at the surgery. How their wet clothes reeked! They brought all the worst of the weather in with them, the mud and the wet invaded the consulting room; one was never dry or clean on such days as these. Instinctively he rubbed his hands together, and then looked down at them. They were better kept than when he had first come to Hartling; it had been impossible to keep his hands like that in Peckham. He liked the brown of their tan, deeper on the back than at the finger tips, and his nails were rather good. It was worth while now to spend a little time on them. Were the Kenyons to be pitied? They were not free, of course, but no one was free. They were certainly more free living their life here than he would be if he went back to Peckham. It was a dog's life that, even Somers couldn't deny it. The tall trees in the garden were bent by a rush of wind, and the rain suddenly spattered furiously against the plate glass of the window. How protected one was here! Hartling windows did not rattle in the gale, nor let in the wet. A day such as this gave a zest to the comfort of it all. And although one could not go out there was plenty to do, any amount of books to read, billiards with Turner, and probably they would play bridge in the afternoon--his uncle, Turner, and Elizabeth all played quite a good game.... If the old man turned him out for interfering in a matter in which he was not concerned, he would have to go back to Somers for a night or two. If he was not very careful with the little money still left to him, he would have to give up the idea of Canada altogether. Living in a place like this for five weeks changed one's scale of values. He did not look forward to "roughing it" so much as he had before he came away from Peckham. Was he pledged in any way to plead Hubert's cause with his grandfather? Would it not be better from every point of view to leave it alone? If Hubert's own family would not put in a word for him, why should a comparative stranger interfere? The old man would almost certainly be annoyed. How on earth could one open the subject to him without impertinence? That offer last night had been made in a moment of sentimental benevolence. He had been worked up by that pathetic story Uncle Joe had told him, and they--he bunched the whole Kenyon family together in this thought of them--could not blame him if he backed out at the last minute. _They_ could not put on airs in that connection. His only regret would be that Miss Kenyon would score. He would have liked to have beaten _her_, but what possible chance had he of doing that? The fact was that he was standing it all to nothing. He would be a damned fool to risk being turned out of Hartling just now, for the sake of a romantic notion of generosity. It was not as if his pleading were likely to help Hubert; it would probably make things ten times worse for him by putting the old man's back up.... He heard the mellow chime of the hall clock striking eleven, and reluctantly turned to the door. He passed through the main drawing-room on his way, and found all the family except Hubert and Eleanor, sitting there engrossed in their usual occupations. None of them spoke to him as he passed through. Miss Kenyon looked up at him for a moment as he came in, but he could not decide whether her expression was one of challenge or confidence in her own ability to get what she wanted. As he slowly mounted the wide staircase he still saw them all in imagination, waiting with a rather pleasurable excitement for the news of his interview. No doubt they knew well enough that he was going to sign the order for his own exile. Had they waited in just the same way when James Kenyon had defied his father twenty-five years earlier? He paused half-way up the stairs and looked down into the hall. He could see the great elephant's pad standing there, with an effect of gross and imperturbable solidity. Since last night, he had come in some odd way to associate that clumping thing with Eleanor. He could almost see her now, a slender, solemn child, dusty with recent travel, waiting to learn her destiny.... And it was Eleanor whom he saw first when he entered Mr Kenyon's suite of apartments. She had answered his knock--no one went into those rooms without knocking--and he found her standing near the door with an effect of impatience. "Are you going to say anything to him about Hubert?" she asked at once in a low voice. Arthur hesitated before he said, "I've been thinking that perhaps, on the whole, it would be better if I didn't. It might make it worse for him. I've no sort of influence with Mr Kenyon, I mean." She looked at him suspiciously. He could not mistake the doubt in her eyes. She did not believe in the excuse that he had put forward. She had always mistrusted him for some reason or other. "Well, have I?" he persisted feebly. "None whatever, I should imagine," she said; "only, I thought...." She paused and looked towards the closed door of the inner room. "You're ten minutes late now," she added inconsequently. He was irated by her attitude towards him, her dismissal of him as a person of no importance. He longed to show her that he was not a man to be lightly despised. But all he could find to say was a foolish, petulant accusation of her own motives. Had she not impugned his? "No doubt you would be glad enough to see me turned out," he said, with an almost childlike sullenness. "You've always disliked me." She stood quite still, staring past him towards the door of her grandfather's room. She was again wearing the dress of pale gray linen in which he had first seen her; and she looked exquisitely sweet, fresh, and young. But he was glad that he had been rude to her. By that rudeness he had shown that he thought of her, and that he resented her opinion of him. He would sooner that she hated him than that she should be indifferent. "You think, then," she said, after what seemed to be a long pause, "that you might get--turned out, if you said anything to my grandfather about Hubert? You know enough for that?" "I suppose I know pretty nearly everything there is to know now," he replied sulkily. She looked at him quickly, and then turned her eyes away again. "Uncle Joe told you?" she asked. With some vague idea of loyalty in his mind, Arthur tried to exculpate his uncle by saying, "Partly, yes; but he had nothing to do with the suggestion of my speaking to Mr Kenyon about Hubert." "No, of course not," Eleanor said; "and in any case you've decided not to." He thought there was still a hint of question in her tone, as if she still hoped that he might be persuaded to champion his cousin's cause; and he grasped the opportunity to get back to the point she had, as he believed, deliberately passed by. "You admit that I shan't do any good to Hubert," he said. "Why are you so anxious that I should get myself into trouble by interfering--unless it is that you want to be rid of me? Because if that's all, I can go at any time of my own free will." "I don't want you to go," she said coldly. "Then why are you so keen on--on my taking the chance of offending Mr Kenyon?" he insisted. She faced him with a cool, steady stare. "You can't seriously believe," she said, "that I should be so mean and small as to persuade you into this for any purely selfish purpose of my own? Why, none of them would be as paltry as that." He blushed, but he would not drop his eyes from hers. "I'm to respect _your_ motives, of course," he said defiantly; "but you're at liberty to impute any sort of cowardice to me?" "Isn't it cowardice then?" she asked, returning his stare without flinching. "Haven't you changed your mind because you're afraid of having to leave here?" She had defeated him; and realising that he dared not answer that question truthfully, he sought refuge in a youthful petulance. "Oh! very well," he said, turning his back on her, and crossing the room towards the inner door. "Have it your own way. You can think anything you like about me. _I_ don't care." He knocked and then entered Mr Kenyon's room, without looking back to see what effect this speech might have on her. He was persuaded that he did not care any longer what she thought of him. She was so confoundedly self-sufficient and superior. Mr Kenyon was reading the _Times_, a thing he could do without the aid of glasses. His sight and hearing were apparently as good as Arthur's own. But he dropped the paper on his knees as Arthur came in. "You've been having a talk with Eleanor?" he remarked in his usual friendly tone. "What a wonderful girl she is, isn't she? I'm surprised that you and she don't get on better together. I had hoped you might be friends." Arthur was slightly taken aback. It had never occurred to him that the old man might wish him to be on more friendly terms with Eleanor. He had never before referred to the subject in any way. Had he, perhaps, heard or guessed at the quarrel between them in the next room? "I'm afraid she doesn't like me," he explained. "Oh! in that case there's nothing more to be said," the old man replied quietly. "Well, you needn't stay this morning, if you've anything else to do. I had meant to send you a message." Arthur understood that he was dismissed, that he might now go back and explain to the people downstairs that he had been given no opportunity to act as the family's catspaw that morning. For twenty-four hours at least he was relieved from any kind of obligation, and in the meantime he could re-discuss the whole question with Hubert and his father. There was but one objection to this plan; he would have to tell Eleanor as he returned through the next room. He sighed and stood irresolute. Mr Kenyon had returned to his study of the _Times_. No encouragement could be hoped from that quarter. The old man had an amazing gift of detaching his interest from his surroundings. He had probably forgotten that his attendant was still in the room. Why could not Eleanor have undertaken this mission herself? Oh! obviously because she knew that it was futile, purposeless, utterly foolish. Nevertheless, he was not going to be accused of cowardice, nor of trying to propitiate the old man for the sake of being remembered in his will. "Might I speak to you a minute, sir?" Arthur made his opening curtly, almost contemptuously. By the very act of asking the question he had regained his freedom. He saw that his fear and respect of the old man before him were based on nothing but the longing for comfort and luxury, for abundance and idleness. Now that he had resolved to leave Hartling rather than endure the accusation of cowardice, all his fears had slipped from him. Mr Kenyon put down his paper and looked up. His pale blue eyes were suddenly intent, the eyes of a hunting animal or a bird of prey, in sight but not yet sure of its quarry. "Sit down, Arthur," he said quietly, pointing to a chair nearly opposite to his own. "You may speak for an hour if you wish. I have nothing to do this morning." "It was about Hubert," Arthur said, accepting the invitation to sit down. He did not care now, so far as he himself was concerned, what was the upshot of this conversation, but while he was about it he might as well do his best for poor old Hubert. Mr Kenyon nodded, gravely attentive. "No doubt, sir, you'll wonder what concern it is of mine," Arthur continued, "but the truth is that I like Hubert, and I'm rather sorry for him...." "_Sorry_ for him?" Mr Kenyon repeated with a faint surprise. "We young men of the present generation, sir," Arthur explained, revelling now in his sense of liberty, "think a great deal of our freedom. I don't mean to say that _Hubert_ has any particular ambition in that direction. He was brought up in a different atmosphere. But from my point of view, you see, his life seems dreadfully confined and limited, though perhaps it _is_ a trifle presumptuous for me to be sorry for him on that account." "And you wish ...?" Mr Kenyon suggested, without the least sign of displeasure. "Oh, well! that's another matter," Arthur said. "The fact is, sir, that Hubert has fallen in love, and for some reason that I can't pretend to understand, neither he nor my uncle seem to care about coming to ask your consent to his marriage. So--so I've come to plead his cause for him." "Who is the girl he wants to marry?" Mr Kenyon put in. A change had come over him in the course of Arthur's last sentences. He sat less stiffly in his chair; he had the air of a man re-confronted by some familiar trouble with which he had often battled in the past. "Her name is Dorothy Martin," Arthur began. "She...." Mr Kenyon interrupted him with a gesture of his hand. "I know," he said, "her father is Lord Massey's agent--a homely fellow and rather stupid. So Hubert wants to marry Miss Martin, does he?" His head drooped a little forward and he began to slide his hands slowly backward and forward along his knees. Arthur felt suddenly sorry for him. Neither Hubert nor his father had told him that Miss Martin's father was, to put it bluntly, not in the Kenyons' class. He understood better now why they had hesitated to approach the old man. And how decently he had taken it! Without any sign of anger, even of vexation. "I believe he's very much in love with her," Arthur murmured. Mr Kenyon sighed and sat up. "As you remarked just now, Arthur," he said, "you naturally can't be expected to understand, and I wonder if it would be indiscreet of a very, very old man to enlighten you?" His expression as he spoke was pathetic, wistful; he looked at Arthur as if he besought him to approve the offered confidence. "You may be absolutely sure, sir, that I shall not repeat anything you care to tell me," Arthur assured him. "Nor let it affect your relations with my family?" the old man added, and then while Arthur still sought a convincing reply to that rather difficult question, went on: "We are necessarily lonely in our old age, my boy, but I sometimes wonder if my case is not in some ways unusual. Or is it that I have suffered for overstepping the reasonable limit of mortality?" He rose from his chair as he spoke and began to pace slowly up and down the room. "I have taken a peculiar fancy to you, Arthur," he continued after a brief pause, "and I need not be ashamed to tell you why; it is because I admire the independence of your spirit. I liked the way you spoke to me just now; your disregard of what might have been against your own interests; your championship of Hubert. I could wish--I have often wished--that there was more of the same spirit in my own family." Arthur flushed with pleasure. But it seemed to him that he understood now, finally, conclusively, the secret of the Kenyons. They were all cowards, and the old man despised them for their cowardice; not one of them had ever had the courage to stand up to him. If he had, in a sense, bullied them, it was because he had tried to stimulate them into some show of active response. Nevertheless, Arthur attempted an excuse for them. "Perhaps, sir," he said, "if they had had to face the world as I have...." Mr Kenyon had paused in his walk and now stood in front of him, gravely attentive. But as Arthur hesitated, trying to frame a statement that should not sound too boastful, the old man held up his hand. "Well, well," he said, "I don't wish to discuss my family with you. My purpose is more selfish than that. I only want you not to misjudge me, as you might very reasonably do, in the circumstances. Downstairs, no doubt, I may sometimes appear in the light of an autocrat." And he lifted his head with a little jerk that wonderfully expressed his own awareness of the absurdity of that accusation. "You see, my boy," he went on, resuming his deliberate pacing of the room, "I have long been aware that none of my children, unless it be Esther, resemble me in character. They are not," he smiled with an air of excusing his choice of a metaphor, "not fighters. There was my poor boy James, Eleanor's father. I don't know if they have told you anything about him?" "I have heard something," Arthur admitted. "Oh, well! then you will understand what a grief his career was to me," Mr Kenyon said with a sigh. "I knew his weakness better than he knew it himself," he continued reflectively, "but he would not listen to me. I've been forced to take care of them all, because they are none of them able to take care of themselves. I would have saved James, too, if he would have let me. And all I insist upon, in return, is that they should stay here with me, where I can, in a sense, watch over them. Perhaps I'm getting senile. The old habit of thought is too strong in me. If I let them go out into the world, at their age, they would surely be safe enough; but the thought of it arouses all my old uneasiness. But in any case it can't be long now." He had fallen into a brooding monotone, as if he spoke his thoughts aloud; and now he raised himself with an effort and stared at Arthur as though he had become suddenly aware of his presence in the room. "So Hubert wants to marry Miss Martin, does he?" he asked, returning to the point at issue; "and has sent you to plead for him." "No, he didn't send me, sir," Arthur explained. "It was entirely my own idea." Mr Kenyon smiled paternally. "Rash youth! rash youth!" he said. "Have you no battles of your own to fight?" "Well, at the moment, no sir," Arthur replied, "I have been having a very easy time here for the last five weeks." "And now you're pining to get back into the struggle again, eh?" Mr Kenyon said, with a lift of his eyebrows. "Well, youth and senility are the ages of selfishness, and when there comes a clash between them it is senility that always must give way. And yet, Arthur, I should be so glad if you _could_ stay with me--till the end. I gave you my reasons when we first talked the matter over together. I can add still another, now; I've taken a great liking for you. Are you absolutely determined to go?" "I? No, sir. I didn't mean ..." Arthur stammered. The old man was watching him keenly. "But you don't deny that you had that in your mind, when you began to speak to me about Hubert?" he said, and then, reading confirmation of that statement in Arthur's embarrassment, he came up to him and laid his hands on his shoulders. "Natural enough; natural enough, my boy," he said, "there's nothing to be ashamed of. And I wouldn't ask you to make the sacrifice if I were a younger man. But as it is what difference will a year, two years at most, make to you at your time of life? Come, now," he smiled with a flash of roguery, "let's make a bargain! Your friend Hubert shall have his Miss Martin, if you'll promise to stay with me and perform those little duties I mentioned when I'm gone." "Oh, of course, sir, rather," Arthur said, blushing with pleasure and embarrassment. "I would promise that in any case. There's no need for any--any _quid pro quo_, I mean." Mr Kenyon still had his hands on the young man's shoulders, and he gave him a gentle shake as he said, "Very well, that's a bargain then; and I may tell you that you've taken a great weight off my mind. Now, go and tell Hubert to come up to me. I'll promise to let him off more lightly than he deserves." Arthur strode out of the room with the conscious pride of one who has all life at his feet. Eleanor rose from the desk at which she was writing as he entered. "So you did speak to him after all?" she said, searching his face with an eager, inquiring stare. "Yes, I did. It's all right," Arthur returned, disciplining his expression of triumph to a becoming modesty. "He wants to see Hubert now. He has promised to let him off lightly," he said. "And you're staying on?" Eleanor inquired. "Yes. He--he made me promise that." Arthur found himself inexplicably dropping into apology. "I couldn't possibly refuse him, could I? You see he wants me to be here--at the end." "I understand," Eleanor said coldly, turning her back on him and reseating herself at the desk. "Will you give Hubert the message or shall I send some one?" "I'll go," Arthur replied curtly. He was suddenly vexed and disheartened. She had dispersed all the glamour of his achievement; had made him feel as if he had done a mean rather than a splendid thing. There could be but one explanation of her attitude--she suspected him of working on her grandfather's affections. No doubt she knew that he had become a special favourite; had known it probably before he knew it himself. Yet even so, if there were no jealousy on her part--and Uncle Joe had made it certain last night that her motives were above suspicion--why should she be so annoyed? Was she afraid that he might be designing to cut out the rest of the family? He had reached the hall when that explanation came to him, and he paused there, burnt with shame by the bare thought of such a suspicion. It was degrading, infamous. He felt that he could not endure that she should hold such an opinion of him for another moment. He turned back towards the staircase with the intention of instantly challenging her, and then a better means of vindication occurred to him, and he went on into the drawing-room. They were all there now, except Eleanor; and they made no attempt to disguise their interest and excitement. They faced the door with what seemed to be a concerted movement as he entered--and at once misread the signs of his still evident emotion. Miss Kenyon, indeed, made so sure of the correctness of her inference that she acted upon it without further consideration. Arthur saw her then, he believed, in her true character. She rose and came towards him across the room with an effect of vindictive triumph. Her pale blue eyes were bright, the pupils contracted almost to a pin-point; they were the eyes of some fierce bird that is at last within sight of the kill. "Well?" she said in a clear, cold voice, "so you've seen my father." Arthur made no attempt to prevaricate. "Yes, he wants to see Hubert," he said, and looked across the room at his cousin as he added, "I understand that he won't raise any objection." He saw, as he spoke, the lift of Hubert's head and the quick change of his expression, before his attention was snatched back to Miss Kenyon. "And you?" she asked sharply. There was no need to put the question more plainly. He knew they all knew what she meant. "Your father has asked me to stay on--indefinitely," he said quietly. She made no reply, but she instantly veiled her eyes, lowering her glance to the simple brooch she was wearing at her breast, at the same time putting up a hand as if to adjust it. And when she looked up again her expression betrayed no sign of anger or resentment. He was disappointed. He had expected, even hoped, for some indication of defeat from her. Vaguely he had pictured her going up to her father to enter a violent protest. This apparently meek submission annoyed him. "I'm sorry to disappoint you," he said provocatively. "I have forgotten the meaning of the word disappointment," she returned gravely, looked him full in the eyes for a moment, and then passed on towards the door. Her self-control was superb, but the picture that remained in Arthur's mind was of her advance towards him across the room. For one instant he had been afraid of her. "I say! is it all right, do you think?" Hubert eagerly asked, as Arthur joined the group at the farther end of the room. "Perfectly all right, old chap--I believe," Arthur replied. "Hadn't you better toddle up and see him at once?" "But what did you tell him?" Hubert persisted. "Everything I knew," Arthur said. "Cut along." "I suppose you're very proud of yourself?" Elizabeth put in demurely as her brother went out. "I'm very glad for Hubert's sake," was Arthur's amendment. "Only for his sake?" Elizabeth commented carelessly. Turner, with the _Times_ on his knees, was thoughtfully twisting his neat little moustache. "So you're going to stay on indefinitely?" he remarked. "Well, yes; that's to say Mr Kenyon said he would like me to," Arthur replied rather lamely. He was aware of a sense of antagonism between him and the others. None of them so far had shown the least inclination to thank him for acting as their catspaw. All they thought about apparently was the fact that he was going to remain permanently at Hartling. And he knew that the time had come to vindicate his motives, to express that purpose which had come to him in the hall when he relinquished the idea of confronting and, if possible, confounding Eleanor. He drew up a chair and sat down, with an air that he felt claimed his right to be included in the family conclave. "I wonder if you'll let me say something to you all about a rather delicate matter?" he asked, looking at his uncle. Joe Kenyon raised himself uneasily in his chair and glanced round the faces of the little circle. They were all alert now. There could be no question that they correctly anticipated the nature of the "matter" the new-comer was going to discuss, although they were uncertain what precisely he might have to say about it. "Yes, Arthur, yes. Say anything you like," Joe Kenyon replied rather doubtfully. "Now we know that you've come to stay for good, of course, there's no reason why you shouldn't have--well--our confidence." "I don't want that," Arthur said. "I want to give you mine. I feel, you know, in a confoundedly awkward position, and I'd like to clear it up if I could. I do want you all to understand more particularly that I'm--that I'm not 'on the make' in this business." He paused a moment, but no one made any comment--unless Turner's slight nod of the head could be regarded as an invitation for him to continue. "I feel, you see, for one thing," Arthur went on, "that I am in a sense at least an outsider, not one of the family anyhow, and I do realise too that the circumstances are pretty well unique. So what I thought of proposing was that I should make some sort of undertaking--I'd put it in writing--that if by any extraordinary chance I should be--be specially favoured later, if you know what I mean, I would hand most of anything I got, back to the family. I should think we could get some sort of binding deed drawn up to that effect, couldn't we?" Not until he stopped speaking did Arthur see how terribly he had embarrassed them by thus naming the secret thing in public. Mrs Turner was fumbling with her work; her husband leaned back in his chair, staring up at the ceiling; and Elizabeth, flushing slightly, got up and walked over to the window. It was his aunt who answered him, however, indirectly. "Perhaps we'd better go into another room, Catherine," she said, addressing her sister-in-law. "I've never been able to understand legal affairs, and this proposal of Arthur's, so far as I understand it, seems to be something of the kind." Mrs Turner grabbed her work and got up with a nod of agreement, but then some purpose seemed to stiffen her. She hesitated, nearly dropped the bead bag she was making, and said in a scarcely audible voice, "But we do appreciate the spirit of it all the same." "Oh, rather! of course," her brother echoed her. Turner returned to that as an opening, when the three men were left alone to discuss the proposition that had been vaguely indicated. "Very decent of you, Woodroffe," he said; "and you put the thing quite delicately too; but you understand, don't you, that it would never do to have any kind of formal agreement?" "I don't. I should prefer it to be as formal and binding as possible," Arthur protested. Joe Kenyon shook his head. "No, no, it would never do," he said. "You see, my boy, the old man might think we'd been influencing you." "Good Lord! I'd make that clear enough to him," Arthur exclaimed. The two older men exchanged a smile that pitied his innocence. "You don't know him," Turner remarked caustically. Arthur was a trifle disgusted. He was still warm with gratitude to the old man who had treated him so delightfully that morning, and he resented the bitter note of aspersion in Turner's voice. "He has been most frightfully decent to me," he said coldly. Joe Kenyon began to drum on the arm of his chair. "Well, no need to go into that, eh, Charles?" he asked nervously. "The point is--what we've got to make clear to Arthur comes to this, that we're quite glad, what! to trust his word without any damned deeds and so on?" "Oh, quite! quite!" Turner agreed. "But you know ..." Arthur began to protest. "My dear chap," Turner interrupted him, "if we can trust you to do the straight thing that's surely all that's necessary. Shake hands on it, if you like; but no parchments, for the Lord's sake." "Very good of you," Arthur mumbled, a little overwhelmed by this evidence of their faith in him. "If we hadn't trusted you, I couldn't have said what I did last night," his uncle put in. "And I for one am very grateful to you for interfering in Hubert's affair." He sighed profoundly as he concluded: "It will help him in some ways, I don't doubt." There was apparently nothing more to be said, and Arthur was on his feet preparing to go when Turner remarked casually to his brother-in-law, "Totting 'em up pretty fast just now, isn't he? That'll make three more of us if poor old Ken has to come in." Joe Kenyon's only reply was to draw down the corners of his mouth and raise his eyebrows. Arthur did not want to hear any more. He was sorry that he had heard so much. These petty criticisms of old Kenyon made him despise Turner and his uncle; they represented another aspect of their cowardice. Damn it, the old man was worth the lot of them, if you excluded Eleanor. He supposed that she would hear of his agreement with the family, and wondered if she would apologise to him. IX Arthur received a letter from Somers by the second post. It was still raining, and he was playing billiards with Turner when the letter arrived, so he did not open it until after tea. Somers had written in a mood of depression. Bates, Arthur's successor at the Peckham surgery, was not a success. "The fool means well, too well," Somers wrote; "but I was wrong in anticipating that the panel patients would like him. They don't. They have taken his measure, and all his good intentions can't disguise the fact that he is pudden-headed. When are you going to Canada? If you _are_ going? Isn't that visit of yours being amazingly protracted? I suppose you're lapped in luxury and can't tear yourself away. Or have you got a permanent job there as tame medico to the old man? Or is it a girl? I wish to God you would write and tell me in any case. I can't keep Bates (he has got on my nerves) and I should like to know for certain if there is the least hope of your coming back. I can't see you marrying for money, and if the hypothecated girl is the right sort, she would face the world with you on five hundred a year. I might make it up to that. The private practice is better than it was. Sackville, who has been here so long, is getting too old. You and I between us would get pretty nearly all the new people. And if my first guess was the right one and you've got some sort of sinecure in the Hartling household, the sooner you chuck it the better, my son. For one thing you'll get soft, and for another you'll get no experience. If you were doing hospital work (which you ought to be), I should not try to tempt you away, but if you are just letting your mind rot, I shall think it is my duty to save you at any cost." As he read, Arthur lost the sense of his surroundings. He visualised the narrow sitting-room of the little Peckham house, and heard Somers's voice telling him that he ought to be doing hospital work or getting varied experience in a general practice; that he was becoming soft, going to pieces from a professional point of view. He blushed like a student under the rebuke of the demonstrator. Then he looked up and the illusion vanished. He saw that all his circumstances were now changed. All that advice would be sound enough if he were forced to return to such a general practice as Peckham. But if the old man left him, say £10,000, he might have a shot for his Fellowship; try for a registrarship at one of the bigger hospitals; perhaps get on the staff of one and set up in Wimpole Street. With a certain amount of capital, this would be so much easier, and the war had given him a taste for minor surgery. Indeed, it had always appealed to him more than medicine. Meanwhile, it was true that he must not let himself get rusty. He ought to go on reading, order some books from town; or at least have the _Lancet_ sent to him every Friday. He must keep himself up to date while he was waiting. At the outside, he could not have to wait more than five years. He would only be thirty-three then.... He paused doubtfully on that thought, but just then Hubert came in, and the moment of uneasiness passed and was forgotten. It had stopped raining and Hubert thought that they might put in nine holes before dinner. It was made clear on the way up to the links, however, that golf was not Hubert's goal on this occasion. He had a wild hope that Miss Martin might be found at the Club House. He had wanted, naturally enough, to tell her at once that the engagement was to be permitted, but his grandfather had sent him up to the farm on a job that had kept him busy all the afternoon. "Probably did it just to tantalise me a bit," Hubert complained; "teach me that I couldn't have everything my own way." "Oh, surely not!" Arthur protested. He was offended, again, by this imputation of unworthy motives to old Mr Kenyon. "I don't believe any of you understand him," he continued warmly. "We had quite a long talk this morning and he rather came out of his shell. He may seem a bit hard and inhuman at times, you know, but underneath, I'm certain he's trying to do the best for everybody." Hubert looked faintly surprised. "Oh! that was the way he took you, was it?" he remarked. "There you go again," Arthur said. "You, all of you, seem to have made up your minds that--that--I don't know----" He could not complete his sentence. He could see that they all feared the old man, but they never brought any explicit charge against him unless it were that he bullied them into staying on at Hartling. And all that had been explained. Arthur, remembering his conversation of the morning, was strongly inclined now to take the old man's side. He knew their weaknesses. They were a poor lot obviously. They lacked independence of spirit; if they were allowed to go out into the world they would come awful croppers like the unfortunate, hot-headed James, Eleanor's father. The old man had learnt a lesson in the course of that affair. He was a bit of an autocrat, no doubt; but he had good reason to be, with a family that could not be trusted. Hubert appeared either unwilling or unable to provide a definition of the family's attitude. "Oh, well," he said, "no good discussing that, is it? Here we are and we've got to put up with it. And, personally, you know, I don't care much now--partly thanks to you, old man." Only "partly," Arthur reflected, but he made no comment on that. "That's all right, then," was all he said. Hubert was in luck, for Miss Martin was at the Club House, drawn thither, no doubt, by the same hope that had stimulated her lover, and although they cheerfully proposed a foursome, Arthur knew that they would sooner be alone, and declined. The proposed fourth player in the case was Fergusson, the general practitioner from the village, to whom reference had been made when the post of medical attendant had been first offered to Arthur. He and Fergusson had met once or twice on the links, but their brief conversations had so far been limited to golf. The doctor was a man of sixty or so, with thick gray hair and moustache and a strong, clumsy figure. Arthur had formed the opinion that he was rather a surly fellow. "Care to take me on for nine holes--haven't time for more?" Arthur asked him. Fergusson nodded. "Not that I'm particularly anxious to play," he said. "The ground will be very wet, I'm thinking, after all the rain we've had to-day. I just looked in on my way home, without much idea of getting a game. Indeed, to be honest, I've had a very long day and am not so anxious to exert myself." "Scattered sort of practice, I expect," Arthur commented. "Have a cigar." Fergusson accepted the cigar with a nod of thanks. "One of your perquisites?" he asked, smiling rather grimly. Arthur stiffened. "Never thought of it like that," he said. "They're all over the shop up there. You just take 'em as you want 'em." "No need to get ruffled," Fergusson replied quietly. "I know. I used to be up there once a week or so before you came. Nice little sinecure." "But I say, look here," Arthur said, suddenly conscious for the first time that he might have been guilty of a breach of medical etiquette, "you don't mean to tell me that I've taken away one of your cases?" Fergusson laughed dryly. "Well, you have and you haven't," he said. "But your conscience is no doubt clear enough and everything was done in proper form. The old man wrote to me and explained, and I went up and talked it all over with him. You were playing golf on that occasion, I'm thinking. However, it'll be a soft job for you." Arthur still looked uneasy. "I never once thought about you in that connection, you know," he said. "I ought, anyhow, to have come and seen you." "Oh, no need to fash yourself," Fergusson returned. "Mr Kenyon was very considerate about the affair. I'm not complaining." "Yes, he is very considerate," Arthur agreed, automatically. Had Fergusson been promised a place in that untidy will as compensation? was the thought that flashed across his mind, a thought that was in some indefinable way unpleasant. He did not grudge the doctor his possible legacy, he sincerely hoped that it might be a big one, but he had a feeling of vague distaste for the principle involved. Why should the old man trade on these rather equivocal promises of future reward? He had given convincing reasons with regard to his own family, but they did not apply to Fergusson, nor to Scurr, the chauffeur, and the other servants. Arthur decided to try a "feeler." "But hang it," he said, "I've done you out of a certain amount of income. All the consideration in the world doesn't make up for that." Fergusson, looking slightly self-conscious, studied the ash of his cigar. "He's a queer old customer in some respects," he remarked illusively. Arthur chose to overlook that comment. "I think you ought to know," he said, "that I'm not being paid any salary for my job. There's my keep, of course, but in a house like that one person more or less can't make any difference." "Eh! Is that so?" Fergusson said. "And are you staying on indefinitely?" "Well ..." Arthur explained, with a wave of his hand. "I take you," Fergusson acknowledged. "I was on much the same terms. And how d'you think the old man's looking? I've known him for twenty-five years, and he has hardly changed a hairsbreadth in that time. He'll be ninety-two this year, I'm told; but it wouldn't surprise me to learn that he was seventy or a hundred and ten. Indeed, it's come to me lately that I'd have been better advised to have sent him in a whacking account when he turned me off, for it's likely enough that he'll outlive me. However, you stand a better chance than I do, for I presume you can give me thirty years." Arthur shivered slightly. His suspicion had been fully confirmed, and the thought of it troubled him. Still, from one point of view, it was reasonable enough that Mr Kenyon should have this particular eccentricity. All his life he had been wrestling with a family that could not be trusted with money, and the habit had possibly grown into an obsession. He looked at Fergusson, who was somewhat grimly enjoying his cigar. He had all the appearance of an honest man. "Known him twenty-five years, have you?" he commented. "Ay!" Fergusson said. "I came to this damned place when I was thirty-seven, and I thought I was in luck to get hold of a rich patient like Kenyon. Well, as you can judge from what I told you, he looked an oldish man then. Not so withered naturally, but if he was only sixty-six at that time I should say that he looked more than his age. But there you are. I knew an old chap of the name of Simon--he has been dead God knows how long--who was a contemporary of Kenyon's, used to do business with him in the 'sixties, and he has told me that Kenyon was always a dry stick--one of those men who look old at forty and never change afterwards. "And there's another queer thing he told me," Fergusson went on, after a slight pause, "a thing you'll be disinclined to credit, which is, that Kenyon was never a good business man--not really able or far-sighted, that is." "But he made a pile of money," Arthur put in. "He did," Fergusson said, "but Simon used to say that he got it by sheer luck; that he never touched an investment that didn't go right by some fluke or another, though by all the laws of probability, it ought to have gone just the other way. Maybe Simon was a bit jealous, but he had a mighty poor opinion of Kenyon as a business man--though begob, I'm inclined to differ from him, myself." "He has been most frightfully decent to me," Arthur commented uneasily; and remembered that he had made the same remark to Turner a few hours earlier. "Ay, he would be that," Fergusson said. "There have been times when I have liked him very well myself; but I always had the feeling that there was something queer about him--a trifle uncanny, if you know what I mean." "Oh, well! Perhaps. I don't know," Arthur said. "He seems sometimes to be extraordinarily detached; as if he were living a sort of life of his own." "Hm! Likely enough," Fergusson agreed. "Simon told me that Kenyon had a hell of a time when he was a young man. His father, who was in the business before him, was one of your old-fashioned bullies. Used to treat his son like a dog, Simon said. So no doubt Kenyon got the habit of keeping things to himself then, and it stuck to him after his father was dead." "Yes, that might account for it, in a way," Arthur admitted. Arthur's thoughts went back to that conversation as he dressed for dinner. He was inclined to trust Fergusson. Fergusson had been very decent about his supersession at Hartling, and it did not seem likely that his rather disparaging attitude had been designed to frighten his rival out of the field. Indeed, a few weeks ago such a suspicion would not have crossed Arthur's mind; but there was some influence in the air of Hartling that bred suspicions of that kind, and he put them from him now with a just perceptible sense of self-approval. The trouble that still faced him was that even when he had deliberately cleared his mind of any doubts concerning the good-faith of all the many potential legatees, he was thrust back upon a doubt of the man who appeared in the rôle of his benefactor. A few hours ago he had whole-heartedly advised and trusted him. When he had come away from his interview that morning, he had definitely ranged himself on the old man's side, had, as he believed, learnt at last to understand and approve the old man's motives. But then, as always, he had been induced by various influences to doubt again. It seemed so impossible in this place to arrive at any certainty. No theory he had been able to formulate accounted for all the facts, not even the far-reaching, comfortable theory that there was a certain amount of right--and wrong--on both sides. There appeared to be some secret, some key to the whole situation, that was as yet beyond his reach. Could Eleanor put it in his hands? His thought turned towards her with a leap of hopeful anticipation. She had given him no sign so far that she had repented her manifest disapproval of him that morning. She, too, perhaps, was being continually swayed by the uncertainties bred of the Hartling condition. But it might be that she had not yet heard of the unsigned agreement that he had made in imitation of her own method? In any case, he had an excuse for asking her to have a little quiet talk with him. She owed him an explanation. He could even demand it.... He might be able to judge by her expression at dinner whether she had changed her opinion of his motives since the morning, and if he found the least evidence of her softening towards him, he would ask her to listen to what he had to say; to the reasons that had decided him to stay on at Hartling until her grandfather died. But he received no sign from Eleanor in the course of dinner. She would not look at him. Though he persistently stared at her, trying to attract her attention, she managed to avoid his glance with a steadiness which could not have been accidental. She talked more than usual both to Hubert and his father who sat on her other side, but so far as he was able to overhear her conversation, the subject of it had no relation to his own plans or doings. Most of her talk seemed to be concerned with Hubert's fiancée, Dorothy Martin. And Arthur's own attention was continually being distracted by Elizabeth. Never before had she been so ready to flirt with him. It seemed that she had dressed for the part. She was wearing a gown that he had not seen before, and that was something too elaborate for a family dinner. Her plump, well-developed bust and shoulders emerging with an effect of challenge from a foam of pink chiffon, looked almost startlingly naked. Nevertheless, if it were a trifle theatrical, the dress suited her brunette prettiness, and gave value to the air of vivacity that she had, also, assumed. This was one of Elizabeth's most effective moods. He had seen her pert and rather forward on other occasions but never quite so daring as she was to-night. Yet he lacked the least inclination to flirt with her. He recognised her feminine attractions, but they failed to arouse him. Indeed, when he compared her with her cousin, dressed as usual in a soft, simple white frock, he found Elizabeth's forwardness vulgar, almost to him in his present mood repulsive. He responded to the best of his ability, he had no wish to snub her, but he felt that she must be distressingly conscious of her failure to strike fire from him. Miss Kenyon on his other side gave no indication of cherishing any ill-will against him for having defeated her that morning. He and she rarely talked to each other at the dinner table. They had nothing to say. And to-night her manner discovered no shade of difference from her habitual attitude towards him. Nevertheless, it was Miss Kenyon who, whether deliberately or not, thwarted him as they were leaving the table. She addressed some unnecessary remark to him as they were getting up, and thus gave Eleanor time to leave the room in front of them. When he was able to escape and follow her into the hall, she was half-way up the stairs. He paused in the hall, staring after her, and when she reached the second landing he caught her eye for an instant looking down at him. But she turned away again at once, and he had not the courage either to attempt to address her from that distance, or to follow her upstairs. He avoided Elizabeth when he went into the drawing-room and almost immediately haled Turner out into the billiard-room. Elizabeth did not follow them. No doubt she believed that her attractions had no power over him in his present mood. Arthur himself would have declared that they had not at that moment, and yet little more than an hour later he was seriously debating whether he would or would not propose to her. Billiards was a failure so far as he was concerned that evening. He could not get a shot himself and Turner's slick facility began to irritate him. He had to keep himself firmly in hand in order to hide his annoyance. And as the game went on his spirits sank lower and lower into a mood of profound depression. "You're off your game to-night," Turner commented jauntily, when Arthur rather impatiently refused to play again. "Anything the matter?" They were alone in the billiard-room--Hubert had not joined them to-night as usual--and Turner suddenly dropped into a mood of confidence. "Feel a bit doubtful about settling down here?" he went on. "You needn't. We've all passed through that stage, but you soon become reconciled; why shouldn't you? Get everything you can possibly want here except a certain measure of freedom, and no one's really free. It's one sort of slavery or another for every one of us. If I were you, my boy, I'd marry Elizabeth and make up my mind to it. Then you won't be continually on tenterhooks as to whether the old man's going to last one year more or ten." "Oh! Good Lord!" Arthur gesticulated. "It isn't that. I'm a bit out of sorts, that's all, touch of indigestion, I expect. No need to resort to desperate remedies for that." Turner smiled. "I won't tell Elizabeth," he commented dryly. "And if you take my advice you'll think it over. Coming back into the other room?" "No, I've got a letter to write," Arthur said, remembering that Somers would expect an answer to his main question. "I'll go upstairs, I think, good-night." He had wanted, savagely, to get away from Turner just then, but when he was upstairs in his bedroom he was oppressed by a sense of loneliness. There was not a single human being in that house in whom he could confide. He had, for instance, to write to Somers; he had to say that there was no chance of his returning to Peckham, and although he had given his promise and had really no option, he would have liked to talk it over with some one before making an irrevocable decision. Had not Turner been right after all? If Elizabeth was willing to marry him, would not her companionship alleviate the occasional tediousness and loneliness of life at Hartling? If they were married they might become friends. It was impossible to be on terms of real confidence with a girl of that sort until you were married to her. She was always too conscious of her sex and doubtful about your intentions. Now that he came to think of it, she had certainly looked very tempting in that pink frock. She was one of the prettiest girls he had ever known--though she might run to flesh in a few years' time. He got up from the table at which he had been sitting before a still virgin sheet of Hartling note-paper, and began to walk up and down the room. How familiar, even commonplace, that room had become to him, he reflected. A few weeks ago it had been a delicious enticement, a thing ardently desired. But he would have missed it horribly if he had had to go back to Peckham. Would his marriage with Elizabeth produce a like development of sensation, beginning with enticements and ardent luxuries that would gradually become familiar, a matter of habit? He was not in love with her, but he might be when he knew her better. At present he knew absolutely nothing about her inner life. They had never talked about anything but games for more than a minute at a time.... One thing was certain, he must write that letter and announce his decision. No other had been possible. Apart from his promise to Mr Kenyon, no sane man would hesitate a moment between the alternatives of Hartling and Peckham. He would ask Somers to recommend him some modern works on surgery. He would not allow himself to rust, although it was the practical experience that was most useful. Still, he would get that in hospital--later. No one could say how long he would have to wait, but Fergusson had been talking through his hat when he had said that the old man would probably outlive him. Fergusson was good for at least another ten or fifteen years, probably more; and people did not live to over a hundred. Give the old man five years at the outside. He would probably collapse quite suddenly at the end. But suppose, just for the sake of argument, that the old man left him, Arthur, nothing after all? No! he would not consider that. It was disloyal. He had had what amounted to a promise from him, and in common justice some compensation would have to be made for taking the best years of his life. The very fact that he was getting no salary was a guarantee--an absolute guarantee. Old Kenyon might have various eccentricities, they were only to be expected at his age, but he was a good sort, and if anything a shade too impartial in his administration of justice. And then, what about the idea of marrying Elizabeth if she would have him? He walked over to the window and leaned out. It was raining again, a light, steady rain. It looked as if they might be in for a lot of rain. Getting engaged to and marrying Elizabeth would be something to do, an excitement that would be a pleasant change from golf, billiards, croquet, and tennis. Should he go down now and try his luck? She had looked rather ripping in that pink frock. He would be able to put more ardour into his proposal when she was dressed like that. And, unless she had changed since dinner, she was in just the right mood. Still leaning out of the window, he began to picture the proposal. He saw himself alone with Elizabeth somewhere--he might make some excuse to take her into the library--and then, beginning to overcome her levity and caprice by his earnestness--he would say that he had been in love with her from the first, but that he had been afraid to tell her--no prospects--that sort of thing. He imagined her becoming suddenly serious, reciprocating his seriousness, confessing that she, too, had always--liked him. They would be quite close together when she admitted that, and he would put his arms round her waist or over her shoulders--she had lovely shoulders--and kiss her.... He came back into the room at that point of his dream and began to walk impatiently up and down. It was very queer, he couldn't in any way account for it; but he did not in the least want to kiss Elizabeth. He had just done the thing in imagination, very vividly and realistically, and it had not stirred him in the least degree. On the contrary, it had produced a sense of being mean and contemptible. He had often kissed girls in the past, and had always liked doing it. Did he feel like that now because Elizabeth was in a different class of life, or because that kiss would be the seal of his engagement to her? He conjured up the image of her as he had seen her that night at dinner, held it before him and studied it. No, the whole truth of the matter was that he did not want to kiss her, and that was the end of it. She was not, for some reason or other, his sort. He would now write his letter to Somers, and then go to bed. To-morrow he might make an opportunity to have that talk with Eleanor. He would like her to understand his reasons for staying on at Hartling. She ought to know that, as he had just written to Somers, he meant to go in for a serious course of study.... He could not conjure up the image of Eleanor at will, for some reason, but sometimes it came unexpectedly with amazing vividness when he was not thinking of her--some such picture of her as her swift glance down at him in the hall when she had been going upstairs that evening. X The arrangements for breakfast at Hartling were in keeping with Arthur's early estimate of the place as a first-class hotel. The members of the family came down when they chose, and between eight and ten o'clock there were rarely more than two people in the breakfast-room at the same time. Miss Kenyon and Hubert came first. Hubert had a habit of getting up at six in the summer, and Miss Kenyon was a precisian. Arthur succeeded them between half-past eight and nine and sometimes had his aunt for a companion. The other four straggled in uncertainly--Joe Kenyon or his sister was always the last--and occasionally their meals overlapped. So much Arthur knew from experience, and as he had never seen Eleanor in the morning, he had inferred that she probably breakfasted with her grandfather upstairs. He was greatly surprised, therefore, to find her at the table when he entered the room at half-past eight the next morning, surprised and for a minute or two distinctly embarrassed. He was never now in the mood for conversation so early in the day. Until he had come to Hartling he had always been fresh and eager in the morning, but the Kenyons were taciturn and inclined to be irritable at that time, and by degrees their example had influenced him. He presumed that it was their example, but he was not sure whether or not he could attribute to the same source the sense of dissatisfaction with himself that commonly haunted him now when he first woke; dissatisfaction and a strange feeling of staleness and of disinclination to begin his easy, amusing day. He addressed her as he might have addressed a casual acquaintance in a hotel. "Don't often see you down here in the morning," he remarked vapidly, as he rang the bell. "I've been given a holiday to-day," she said, without looking up. "And I was to tell you that you needn't go up this morning. My grandfather says he's feeling a little tired." "He had rather an exciting day," Arthur agreed; investigated the cold dishes on the sideboard, and then crossed the room and sat down opposite her. Eleanor went on quietly with her breakfast. She seemed prepared, he thought, to sit there in silence for the rest of the meal, while he on his part could think of no reasonably intelligent conversation. After the interval provided by the entrance of the butler, however, an opening presented itself to him. "What are you going to do with your holiday?" he asked. "It'll be rather too wet for tennis, won't it?" "I'm going for a long walk into Sussex," she said. His first thought was that he would now find no opportunity for a quiet talk alone with her that day. "All alone?" he asked. "I long to be alone, sometimes," she murmured. "It seems to me that you spend most of your time alone," he said. "We don't see much of you." She looked up at him with an expression that seemed to indicate both surprise and disappointment. "One can never be alone in the house," she said. He did not understand. "Are you always with your grandfather?" he asked. She shook her head and looked down again at her plate, as she said, "I meant that I couldn't think my own thoughts here." "And what do you think about when you're out all by yourself in Sussex?" he inquired. He felt that his tone was not right, that it held a suggestion of the jocular; but he felt shy and ill at ease, afraid of being too serious. "Just my own thoughts," she said quietly. He wanted to say something rather profound to show that he understood and sympathised, but every sentence he tried over in his mind appeared trivial and banal. He kept his head down as he muttered finally. "I've often wondered what you think about things." She made no reply to that, and he was afraid to look at her. His speech had sounded rather surly, he thought, and with the idea of amending it, he continued, "I mean that every one seems to take things for granted here, except you." "What sort of things?" she asked in a low voice. "Oh, well! speculations about life in general," he tried. "Yes, I don't think any of us are much given to that sort of thing," she replied. There had been some effect of a smile in her tone as she spoke, and he looked up and saw that she was indeed smiling, if a trifle ruefully. "Not even you?" he asked. She disregarded the implied flattery that distinguished her from all the other members of the family. "Have you done much speculating about life in general since _you've_ been here?" she returned. He had hardly begun his breakfast yet, but he laid his napkin on the table and pushed back his chair. "I wish you would let me come with you to-day," he said. "There are a heap of things I want to talk to you about. I know you don't like me, but it would be a real kindness if you would let me talk to you a little sometimes. There's simply no one here I can explain things to." "Why me?" she replied. "You're so different from all the others," he said. "And are you?" she asked. "Different from the others?" he repeated, staggered by the suggestion that he could be thought to resemble, in any particular, the other members of the Hartling circle. "Yes," she prompted him quietly. He stared at her frowning. "Am I the least like them?" he inquired with a faint trepidation in his voice. "Not yet, perhaps; but you will be," she said. "But they aren't like each other," he remonstrated. "Which of them shall I be like if I stay long enough, Uncle Joe, or Mr Turner, or Hubert ...?" "Aren't they all rather alike in one way?" she asked. He saw at once that they were; that there was some characteristic common to every one of them, even Miss Kenyon. Seen as individuals they were as different from each other as are the ears of wheat in a cornfield, but they all bowed the same way to the prevailing wind. In their attitude towards the head of the house they could all be relied upon to present the same face. "But you've been here fourteen years," he said, "and you're still different. Or do you think it takes longer than that to get assimilated?" "I'm not different," she replied. "Or I shouldn't be here still." "Of course, I don't know you," he said. "I've hardly seen you since the first three or four days I was here. But--well--I can't agree with you about that." She just perceptibly shrugged her shoulders. "You haven't said whether you will let me come with you on your walk," he began again, after a short pause. "I would sooner you didn't," she told him. "It can't do any good. There can be nothing new that you want to ask my advice about. I said all I had to say to you about that five weeks ago, and you took no notice. I can only repeat what I said then." "But I can't go now," he protested. "I've given my promise. I made a sort of bargain in fact." She shook her head impatiently. "You needn't keep it," she said. "That's absurd," he remonstrated, getting to his feet. "Of course I must keep my promise in any circumstances." "I suppose you do really believe that?" she asked, looking up at him. "Would you keep it just the same, for instance, if you knew for certain that it meant staying on here for ten years and getting nothing, absolutely nothing, at the end of it? Would you, honestly? Or don't you think you'd ask to be let off?" "I might ask to be let off," he admitted, after a few seconds' thought. "Then you'll only be keeping your promise or bargain or whatever it is because you want to stay--or because you've got to," she said. "Perhaps," he agreed. "But I've never said that I _didn't_ want to stay. I do." She sighed. "Precisely, and now we're back again to what I said just now. Whatever is the good of talking to _me_ about it?" "We might talk about other things," he suggested. "I should very much like to get away, too, for a few hours." She hid her face in her hands, leaning her elbows on the table, and he waited patiently for her answer. "Why don't you finish your breakfast?" she asked, when she looked up after what seemed to him a long interval of silence. "I have. I don't want anything more," he said. She got up then, and he thought she was going to leave him without deigning to take any further notice of his request, but when she was half-way across the room, she looked back and said, "Can you be ready in ten minutes?" He started forward with the eagerness of a dog beckoned by its mistress. "Do you really mean that?" he asked, hardly understanding his own excitement. She stood still regarding him with an expression that was half-amused and half-disdainful. "I didn't know you were so keen on long walks," she remarked, "or on getting away from here. Isn't this rather a new departure for you?" The look of eagerness left his face. "Perhaps it is," he said stiffly. "And it's hardly likely to be much of a success if--if you're going to take that sort of tone." "I told you that I didn't want you to come," she replied, and there was something of defiance in her tone and in the pose of her firm, upright figure. "I should at least like to know why you have taken such a dislike to me," he said. "But you might not feel inclined to tell me that in any case." "Oh! dislike," she responded, almost contemptuously. "That's much too strong a word." He had a sense of hopeless frustration. All her half-unwilling responses appeared now to have been nothing more than a condescension to his ineptitude. And he was all too horribly conscious of the fact that he deserved nothing better than her contemptuous opinion of him. He was just an average young man of twenty-eight. He had done nothing that thousands of other young men had not done as well or better. The only boast he could have made would have been that of ambition, a boast that was no longer possible for him after his recent admission that he meant to stay on at Hartling and liked being there. He knew intuitively what her reply would be, if he told her that he meant to study, to prepare himself for the work of a specialist. Indeed, he himself saw that project, now, as little more than a fatuous piece of self-deception. Practice was what he wanted: book-work would be no good without that. And in five years he would be soft and over-fed; his nerve would be gone. He looked down and began to trace the pattern of the carpet with his toe. "Yes, I'm not worth hating," he muttered. She turned away with a gesture of impatience. "Well, shall you be ready in ten minutes?" she threw at him over her shoulder. "But if you would so much sooner I didn't come ..." he conceded humbly. "I'll meet you in the hall," she said, as she went out. He hesitated again while he was putting on his shoes. If she merely despised him, as she obviously did, what was the use of trying to win her confidence? Nothing he could say or do would alter her opinion of him. He had nothing to say. There was nothing he could do. The most he could hope for would be to defend his position by argument. He had little doubt that her contempt for him was based on the fact that he had consented to stay on at Hartling; and it might be well that she had not, as yet, a proper understanding of his reasons. She might not have heard of his verbal compact with the family made the previous day? Was it worth while attempting his own defence? He was still weighing that question when she joined him in the hall. He continued to weigh it as they walked together in silence down the length of the garden. The clouds were lifting, and before they reached the big gates the sun broke through. He looked up, noted the promise of a hot, fine day, and his spirits began to rise. What did it matter whether or not she despised him? He was a free man. He was not in any way dependent upon her opinion. If she chose to snub him, he could leave her to continue her walk alone. He could be perfectly happy without her. He was twenty-eight, in perfect health, and without a care in the world. Why shouldn't he enjoy life in his own way? If he had a regret at that moment, it was that he had eaten hardly any breakfast. He began to whistle softly under his breath. He had no intention of beginning the conversation. He was content to enjoy the day and the adventure of this walk--the first he had undertaken since he had come to Hartling. Except for the path to the links and the links themselves, he knew nothing of the country round about. None of the family ever seemed to bother about going outside the grounds. They had this amazing garden and were, presumably, satisfied with that. How little Eleanor was satisfied with it, however, was shown the moment they passed through the gates into the dusty high-road. She set back her shoulders, lifted her head, and gave a sigh of relief. "It's going to be fine, after all," she said. "I think we'll strike across country to a place I know where we can look right over to the South Downs. It's so big and open there." There was no hint of embarrassment or restraint in her manner. She might have forgotten everything that had passed between them that morning; and Arthur, on his side, was quite willing to postpone his arguments and explanations, or even to omit them altogether. If she were going to treat him decently for the time being, that was all he asked. "Sounds jolly," he said. "It's seven or eight miles," she warned him. "Oh! that's nothing," he returned. "_I'm_ good for all that and more. But are _you_?" "I've done it twice in the last ten days," she said. "This holiday of yours is not altogether an exception to the general rule, then?" he asked. "I've been out several times--lately," she admitted. He thought he detected the suggestion of some reservation in her answer, and said, "Only lately? Do you mean that this is a new freedom for you?" She manifestly hesitated before she replied to that, and her "Oh, no! not new exactly," still left him in doubt as to what was in her mind. They had left the main road now, and were walking in an olive-green twilight along a deep, narrow lane, its banks lush with fern luxuriating in the warm shade afforded by high banks, topped by hornbeam and hazel hedges that nearly met overhead. Arthur lifted his hat, and wiped his forehead. "It's exactly like being in a hothouse down here," he said. "Rather ripping though." "We shall come out on to the common a few yards farther on," Eleanor replied. "It's almost too hot to talk here, isn't it?" He conceded that, but when they had walked on in silence for fifty yards or so she suddenly said, "I know I'm not being honest with you, but I will be presently, even if it does mean talking about things I would so much sooner forget. Forgetting isn't being honest, even with oneself. Only not till we're right out in the open if you don't mind." "Of course I don't mind," Arthur responded warmly. "And I'd like you to do exactly what you want to about--being honest. If you'd sooner not talk about the other affair, we won't." She nodded her agreement, but he was uncertain whether or not she meant to revert to Hartling as a topic of conversation when they were "in the open." And, when presently they came out on to the common, it seemed that she was still skirting that topic, for she began to talk about the war. "I was only fifteen when it began," she said, in answer to some comment of Arthur's. "And I really didn't understand all that it meant until it was nearly over. My grandfather used to keep the papers away from me, and told my governess--Elizabeth and I shared a governess then--not to tell us about it. But we all shirked it; tried to pretend that we couldn't do anything. And in a way it never touched us. Hubert would have gone if my grandfather had let him, and at that time I thought Hubert was being silly about it." She paused and drew in her breath with an effect of lamenting her own blindness. "But you couldn't have helped if you'd known, you, personally, I mean," Arthur said. "I might have been a nurse," she protested. "If you had you couldn't have come in till right at the end," he returned, "and, Lord, we had quite enough amateurs at that game as it was. Though, as it happens, it crossed my mind that you would make a good nurse the first time I saw you." "_I_ believe I should, too," she agreed. "I hope I may be some day." He made no comment on that though he was aware that something within him resented the thought of her ever becoming a professional nurse. "You _did_ go through the war, at all events," she went on, rather as if she sought an excuse for him. "I, and about five million other men," he put in, determined to take no credit on that score. "It makes a difference, all the same," she returned. "To what?" he asked. "Oh! everything comes back to the same place," she said, looking out straight in front of her. "I knew it would, when you asked to come with me. When I'm alone I'm dishonest enough to forget--deliberately. I can--generally. I lose myself in other thoughts." "Meaning that I'm spoiling your day," he put in. "But I don't see why we should talk about--_that_--if you'd sooner not. I can forget too." "No, no, we _must_ talk about it," she said, "only I find it so difficult to begin. There are some things--one thing at all events that you don't know and that I find it very hard to tell you. But let's wait until after lunch. You had no breakfast, and I know a funny little lost place on our way, where we can get something to eat. It won't be anything but ham and eggs, and bread and cheese, of course." Arthur felt that he wanted nothing better just then, and said so. "Afterwards," she concluded, "we will go to that place where you look across to the South Downs, and--and--have it all out." He was quite content with that. Whatever "having it all out" might portend, she was treating him now frankly and with a certain confidence. Her manner since they had left Hartling behind them, had completely changed. She might presently criticise him in a way that he would find intolerable. They might openly quarrel. But anything would be better to endure than that air of contempt and reserve she had displayed at breakfast. He would, at least, be given the opportunity to defend himself. He felt sure that she had not understood his attitude, as yet. Their immediate difficulty was to find a topic of conversation that would avoid any kind of reference to the affairs of Hartling, and a few experiments further demonstrated how the thought of those affairs was, just then, obsessing them to the exclusion of all other interests. All that seemed possible were disjointed scraps of comment upon the scenery, or the wild flowers and ferns of that luxuriant Sussex country--until they reached Eleanor's little wayside inn, and could drop into the familiar interchanges of two rather hungry young people awaiting the inevitable fried ham and eggs that was being prepared for them. The inn lay in a valley, and as soon as they finished their meal, Eleanor pointed to the hill in front of them. "We have to climb that and then we are there," she said. "Shall we go now?" Arthur agreed willingly enough. He was both eager and apprehensive; at once anxious to hear what she had to say and a little fearful of the effect. So long as they could walk together in silence he had a pleasant feeling of content in her company. Surely she liked him better since they had been alone together? She had not given the least sign of despising him in the course of the past two hours. Yet even when they had reached the summit of the hill that marked the limit of their journey, Eleanor still hesitated. She was sitting on the grass, leaning a little backward and supporting herself on the out-thrown struts of her arms and hands. Arthur lay on the ground a few feet away from her. Both of them were looking out across the weald to the broad, blue contours of the South Downs that determined their horizon, and hid the foundations of the massed and shining range of cumulus, slowly setting beyond. A light, cool wind was blowing up from the invisible sea, and the heat of the early July sun was screened by a thin veil of haze that trailed an immense scarf of almost transparent cloud across the sky. Arthur was enjoying a sense of great comfort. He wanted neither to move nor to speak, and he seemed to be aware that Eleanor's inclination ran with his own. Yet he knew that the crisis could not be much longer postponed. If they merely enjoyed their pleasant idleness and returned to Hartling without having approached the important issue that had been impending ever since he had made his decision on the previous day, they would only continue in their present impossible relations. What the alternative might be he could not guess, though he had a premonition that it would not, in any case, be entirely agreeable. Some conflict was inevitable, and it must be faced. It might well be, he thought, that here on this Sussex hill, he would be confronted with a choice that would prove the turning point of his whole life. They had sat there in absolute silence for more than ten minutes when Arthur at last said,-- "Well, shall we talk now and--and get it over?" She did not change her position nor turn her gaze from the distances of the South Downs as she replied,-- "We will talk, but you mustn't think that we can ever 'get it over.' It will go on just the same--perhaps for years and years." "In one sense, perhaps," he admitted, his eyes admiringly intent on her steady profile; "but it will get over this--this misunderstanding between you and me, I hope." "It may," she said; "but you don't in the least understand yet. You don't understand, for instance, that after this, either you or I will have to leave Hartling." He sat up with a start of surprise, and moved a little nearer to her. "But, good Lord; _why_?" he asked in a voice that sufficiently expressed the depth of his incomprehension. "Because of that thing you don't know," she said, still without turning her head; "because my grandfather wants to--to throw us together." And then, having unburdened herself of this difficult essential, she continued quickly before he had time to reply, "That's why I've been given so many holidays lately, though that isn't my chief reason for knowing. Not that that matters, does it? I do know for certain; never mind how. And I have known, oh! for a month or more, though he has never said a word to me directly. So you see now, don't you, that that's a fact which makes all the difference to our talk, and how impossible it was for me to say anything to you until you knew it too?" He waited for a few seconds after she had finished before he said quietly, "I ought to have guessed really; but I didn't. He said something to me about it yesterday morning--that he had hoped you and I would be friends, or something of the sort." "And you, what did you say?" she put in. "I told him that I was afraid you didn't like me, and then he said that in that case there was nothing more to be done. We didn't mention it again. It was before I told him about Hubert." "Though, whether I like you or not has nothing whatever to do with it, of course," she commented thoughtfully. "Hasn't it?" he asked, as if he doubted that inference. "Nothing whatever," she insisted. "Still if--I mean--it seems to me that ..." he began; but she cut him short by saying with an impatient lift of her chin,-- "I know what you mean, perfectly well. You needn't try to put it into words. That isn't really the point at all." "What is the point then?" he asked in bewilderment. "I may be frightfully stupid, but I can't quite see...." She turned her face still farther away from him as she said in a scarcely audible voice, "Nothing should ever induce me to be a bait for you." A bait! He saw in a flash the peculiar implications of the word she had used, but hesitated to accept them. "You can't mean that Mr Kenyon has deliberately tried to--throw us together, in order to keep me in the house?" he urged, his tone apologising for the unlikelihood of such a wild deduction. "Of course I mean that," she returned bitterly. "But why?" he pressed her. "Why should he want to keep me as much as all that?" "He does," she said, and then as he was manifestly still doubtful, continued, "I can't tell you why. I don't know. I only know that he wants to keep us all there till he dies. But you--you were different. I wondered when he first invited you what he meant to do. There was something I disliked, instinctively, in the way he asked about you. It was just as if he--he was trying to catch you then. And when I saw you that first night I tried to warn you. I daren't say very much. We none of us dare because we know that he's--oh! inhuman in a way; that he would turn any one of us out to-morrow without a penny if he thought that we were working against him. "Oh! surely not," Arthur protested. She laughed scornfully. "He seems to have made you believe in him," she said. "He has been most frightfully decent to me, you see," Arthur replied emphatically. "Did he say anything to you about my father yesterday?" she asked, turning to face him for the first time. "Something," he acknowledged. "Did he tell you how my father pleaded with him, offered to do or to be anything, if only he might be allowed to marry my mother?" Arthur shook his head. "No, he didn't tell me that. What was his objection?" he said. "My father never knew--unless it was that my mother had no money of her own. I only know what Uncle Joe told me, of course, but he heard all about it at the time. I don't believe that he had any real objection. You can never be sure whether he will say yes or no to anything, but you may be quite certain whichever it is, that he will stick to it afterwards whatever happens. And he said 'No' to my father, and turned him out of the house because he was willing to give up anything in the world rather than my mother. And when he had been gone about a month he sent that elephant's foot that stands in the hall. He meant it as an insult. Uncle Joe says that they were afraid to tell him. They all knew what it meant, of course; that it was a sort of symbol of his methods. But he wasn't the least bit insulted. He seemed to be proud of it, and had it put where it is now, for every one to see." She had been speaking rapidly, almost fiercely, with an excitement completely unlike her usual rather staid manner. "But why have you gone on staying there if you feel like that?" Arthur asked. She put her hands up to her face for a moment and then looked at him with a whimsical smile. "You aren't the only person who has been blind," she said. "Do you mean that you have only been feeling like that just lately?" he asked. "I was only seven when I came," she said, "and I was brought up there. I never went to school. And you take things for granted when you're brought up in a place because it's the only world you know, and you think the others must be much about the same. I did begin to wake up a little in the last year of the war, but even then it all seemed natural enough in a way. He was so old, and one made all sorts of excuses for him. And then, of course, for months or even years at a time he seems to be as sweet and gentle as any one could be. He can be most awfully kind to people...." She paused on a reflective note, as if she still sought excuses for him. "But what happened to make you change your mind just lately?" Arthur prompted her. She blushed vividly, and again turned her eyes towards the lavender distances of the downs. "I've really seen the thing happening for myself," she said in a low voice. "I'd had hints from Uncle Joe before, plenty of them; but like you I didn't believe them. There was more excuse for me. I had been brought up with it. I believed he was odd, eccentric. He might seem rather cruel sometimes; but I thought, as I suppose you do still, that he was really trying to do the best for every one." "But you don't now?" Arthur asked. "I've been watching him--and thinking--since you came," she said slowly, hesitating between her phrases. "And it has seemed--as if I had got the key of a puzzle that had been worrying me. It--it worked. It accounted for so much that had been just a little mysterious. I have had, sometimes, a horrid feeling of uneasiness and have been angry with myself for doubting him. But after you came--I suppose it was just an accident that it was connected with you, more particularly; it would have been just the same with any one else, of course--well after that, as I said just now, I saw it all happening." She paused, but Arthur made no reply. He was leaning on his elbow looking down over the broken sweep of the weald. For him, the "key" of which she had spoken was not yet plain. There were traits in the character of the old man, that Arthur believed were not consistent with Eleanor's judgment of him as "inhuman." His mind was busy with the search for excuses and extenuations, when Eleanor began in a new voice, "I suppose you think it very rotten of me to have said all that about him, and, in any case, you don't believe me." "I do; I do," Arthur protested, rousing himself from his abstraction. "I don't think it's rotten of you in the very least. What I'm doubting is whether your deductions are sound." She appeared now to have given up any hope of persuading him, and looked at him with a frank smile as she said, "Well, I suppose we ought to be setting our faces towards home?" "Oh, no! not yet," Arthur replied, with such evident distress in his voice that she laughed outright. "But surely you must be pining to get back to your golf and billiards and croquet?" she suggested. "Or, if we start now, we might get in some tennis after tea." "I don't believe I have ever heard you laugh before to-day," was Arthur's answer. "It isn't exactly a gay house, is it?" she replied. "My Lord, no, it isn't," Arthur agreed, after a moment's reflection; "though I don't think I'd thought of it like that before. Elizabeth always laughs as if she had been wound up inside and set going, and none of the others really laugh at all. Certainly Hubert doesn't. I wonder if Miss Martin will?" Eleanor's face grew grave again. "Oh! the poor dear," she exclaimed. "She'll probably get my job." "Your job?" Arthur ejaculated. "But you're not going to give it up, are you?" She smiled tolerantly. "Didn't I begin by saying that?" she reminded him. "Either you or I will have to go, and it's quite clear that you can't." "Can't?" he repeated "If _you_ go...." She gave him no time to complete his sentence. "As you pointed out this morning," she put in quickly, "you've promised to stay. My conscience is clear of promises, at any rate." "But, good Lord, where could you _go to_? What could you do?" he remonstrated. "I could go to the Paynes," she said, "the people who brought me over from Rio. He has retired from the Cable Company and they're living at a place called Northwood, somewhere near London, I think. I couldn't stay with them indefinitely, of course, but they would help me to get something to do. I'm quite well educated for a commercial career. Grandfather didn't want me to learn typewriting and shorthand, but he's glad now, because they're so useful to him. _My_ job isn't a sinecure, you know. I do really work quite hard. You'd be surprised what a big correspondence my grandfather has about his money affairs. And then I've got French, and I can read German, though I write it rather badly. I should think I ought to be worth about three pounds a week." "Oh, no!" Arthur exclaimed in despair. He could not endure the thought of her working in a city office. "But oh, yes!" she said. "I was thinking about it all before you came. The war made me dissatisfied. We none of us did anything, and I couldn't help feeling what empty, useless lives we were living here." "I don't see that you'd be doing anything more by working for a millionaire in the city than by working for Mr Kenyon," Arthur put in. "I know. That weighed with me," she agreed. "What I really want is to be a nurse. Only I don't quite know how to begin. But you can tell me about that, can't you?" He pushed her inquiry on one side. "I can't see," he said, "why either you or I have to leave. I can't really." She had been talking to him freely, almost gaily, but now her manner took on the air of constraint with which she had begun the conversation. "Need we go back to that?" she asked. "Why, of course we must," he said in an aggrieved tone. "As far as I can see that's what we came out to talk about." "But we settled it," she returned. "I'm going!" "And if I went? If I broke my promise and went instead, would you stay?" "I might for the sake of the others," she said. "I do help them a little. And in spite of everything, I'm sorry for him--for that wicked old man upstairs." She dropped her voice and looked down at her clasped hands as she concluded, "He _is_ wicked, although you may not believe it." "Even so," Arthur argued, choosing to ignore that point for the moment, "I don't in the least understand why my going should make any difference one way or the other." She bent her head a little lower as she said, "No doubt it's very quixotic and sentimental of me, but I can't bear to watch your life being ruined. It's different with the others. They're so helpless. Hubert is not fit to earn his own living, and Ken--if he comes--would probably be safer there than he would in town. He is very wild. If he comes, he'll probably marry Elizabeth and settle down." Arthur saw that at last the time had come to set out his defence. "Yes, but why take it for granted that I should be wasting my life?" he began, and then, with one or two pauses at first, but gathering confidence in his own argument as he went on, he laid before her his plans for studying at Hartling and his hope for the future. She listened to him attentively, attempting no comment, either by word or gesture until he had finished. He believed that he had convinced her, until she said gently,-- "And if my grandfather lives more than five years? What then?" "He can't," Arthur expostulated. "People don't live as long as that." "A few do," she said, "I saw in one of the papers a day or two ago, that Miss Spurgeon, the preacher's aunt, would be one hundred and one next month." Arthur shrugged his shoulders. "Frightfully exceptional case," he muttered. "This might be a frightfully exceptional case, too," she insisted. "You don't find anything wrong with him, do you? And he lives such a sheltered, detached sort of life. Nothing ever upsets him. He hasn't altered the least little bit, all the years I have known him. And you know, don't you, that thirty years ago it began in just the same way with the others? They thought that he wouldn't live more than five years, or ten at the outside." She could not look at him, as she concluded gently, "Don't waste your life as they've done. Anything would be better than that." He saw it all quite clearly. He knew that she was right. But something within him continued to protest fiercely against her advice. He could no longer doubt that she was entirely disinterested. He was consoled, even a trifle flattered, by the fact that she so evidently desired his welfare. But he didn't want to leave Hartling, and he feverishly sought excuses for staying. He could find half a dozen that would satisfy himself, but he knew them for sophistries and dared not put them into words. She, on her side, seemed disinclined to add anything to what she had already said, and for some minutes they sat in silence. Eleanor returned to her study of the distant downs and Arthur, with his head in his hands, furiously sought an escape from the dilemma imposed by her two alternatives. It was Eleanor who at last broke the long silence. "I must be going now," she said--sighed, rose to her feet, and began to brush and shake the grass from her skirt. "There is absolutely nothing more to be said," she continued, "and in any case we shall have plenty of time to say it on the way back." He nodded rather resentfully and followed a pace or two behind her as they made their way down the hill. He could not as yet overcome the feeling that it was "hard lines" on him to be sent away from Hartling. For that was what it all amounted to. _He_ would have to go--promise or no promise. He could not possibly allow her to get work in some city office, or enter herself as probationer at a hospital, while he idled away his time at Hartling. Also he hated the thought of her mixing either with city clerks or young medical students. They were a coarse lot, and she would certainly meet with all kinds of beastly advances. In imagination he could hear the men at the hospital talking about her among themselves, and his face burnt with anger, first at the intolerable familiarities of his hypothetical students, and then with himself for thinking these thoughts in connection with her. Still she would know how to protect herself. No one could be more aloof and cold than she was sometimes. If that warm generosity of hers did not betray her? Those silly young fools at the hospital would not understand. They.... He found a relief in mentally cursing the particular type of young medical student he had all too vividly pictured. He saw himself taking one of them by the throat and choking the life out of him. No, it was obvious that in no circumstances whatever, could she be permitted to face that kind of life. Plenty of nice girls did, of course; but she was different. And a city office would be just as bad, or worse. It was impossible to imagine her mixing with a crowd of dirty little Cockney clerks or greasy business men. Damn them. After all, Peckham would not be so bad. Somers was one of the best and would be tremendously glad to hear that he was coming back. Only--that would be the end, so far as any hope of seeing Eleanor was concerned--until the old man died--and it was perfectly true, as she had said, that he might be an example of one of those exceptional cases of longevity. He saw the probability more clearly now that his interest was more detached. Up there at the house, they were compelled to cheat themselves with the belief that it could not last much longer. Life would not be endurable without that hope. They had been living on it, some of them, for forty years.... He suddenly awoke to the fact that this might be the last time he would be alone with Eleanor and that he was wasting it in these perfectly detestable reflections, when he might be talking to her. "I've made up my mind," he said, quickening his pace to catch her up. "I'll go. You're quite right. I can't stay there now." She looked up at him with a hint of question in her face. "I couldn't stand the thought of your going into a hospital or an office," he continued. "You've no idea of the sort of thing that you have to put up with and the people that you have to mix with; no idea." "Oh! but I don't want you to go in order to save _me_," she exclaimed. "But _you'd_ go to save _me_," he returned. She gave a little protesting laugh. "No, I shouldn't save you if I went," she said. "You would stay on here then. All I said was that I would not be used as an influence to make you stay. You remember what I told you about my grandfather's plans. Well, sooner than that, I'd do anything. It's purely selfish, I admit that. I don't mind your being ruined, you see, but I won't take any sort of responsibility for it." "But in that case," he submitted. "I might stop on for a time at all events, if it was quite certain that _you_ weren't the case of my staying. "No, no; don't begin like that," she broke out passionately. "Once you begin to procrastinate and find excuses there'll be no end to it. That must have been how they all began." "You're evidently most frightfully anxious to get rid of me," he grumbled. He had seen a ray of hope and resented her instant extinction of it. "Oh! don't be so babyish!" she said petulantly. "You must know that it hasn't anything to do with getting rid of you." "I don't see what else it can be," he returned sulkily. She shrugged her shoulders but attempted no other answer, and they did not speak again until they were back in the deep, overhung lane and within half a mile of Hartling. It was there that he made his last effort. "Would it be risking too much if I stayed on for just one more week?" he asked. His spurt of temper had evaporated and he was once more humble, conciliating. "Why a week?" she replied doubtfully. He braced himself to make the test he had been considering for the last half-hour. "I should like to have one more talk with you before I go." "And you wouldn't say anything to my grandfather in the meanwhile?" "No. If I did he might sling me out." "You believe he'd do that, then?" "Oh, yes! I believe that." "But not that he is--inhuman?" "I find it difficult. No, I can't credit that." "But you _would_ stick to your idea of going at the end of a week from now?" "Absolutely." "I wonder if it's wise to let you stay a week?" she murmured half to herself. "Seven days surely can't make any difference," he pleaded. "Exactly; so why have them?" she returned. "No difference so far as my prospects are concerned," he said. "Oh, no!" she replied quickly, as if she were afraid that he might go on to elaborate his reasons for wanting his week's grace. "But are you quite sure of yourself? Are you sure that at the end of the week you won't want to put it off again?" "I give you my word of honour," he said solemnly, and went on, "I've made up my mind. I'll write to Somers as soon as I get in and tell him to expect me next Tuesday." They reached the gates of Hartling as he was speaking, and automatically they both paused as if this agreement were one that must necessarily be made outside that enclosure. "Very well," she said, and gave him her hand. He took it and held it as he replied. "And that other favour? You haven't granted it yet. Will you give me at least one more chance to talk to you alone before I go?" "Oh! you're sure to have that," she said lightly. "But will you promise?" "If you like," she agreed. It was as they were walking up the garden that they decided upon the necessity for keeping the news of his departure from the rest of the family. Some sense of freedom had left them as they passed through the gates, and already Arthur was beginning to wonder at the comparative ease with which he had made his decision to leave Hartling. Now that he was back again in the garden that had become so familiar to him in the course of the last five weeks he felt again the lure of its shelter. The place was so secure, so rich with the promise of comfort and rest, of freedom from all the struggles and responsibilities of the world. Probably none of the Kenyons had ever wanted to leave it (Hubert was happy enough now that he was going to marry Dorothy Martin. If he were offered £5000 to go to Canada with her, he probably would not take it). They pretended to be imprisoned, played with the idea of having ambitions. It was a sort of boasting. No doubt they wanted their jailor to die. He stood between them and the semblance of freedom. But when he was dead and they were independent, they would almost certainly go on living there just as they were doing now. They wouldn't want to change their habits after all these years. It was amazing how differently he saw the problem, now that he was back again within the enclosure of those protecting walls. Nevertheless, he wrote to Somers, even giving him the time of the train by which he might be expected on the following Tuesday. He was, he thought, being rather quixotic, but he meant to keep his promise to Eleanor, and ask to be released from the one he had made to the old man. And if that release were denied, what could he do? Insist? Say calmly that he meant to go whether he were released or not? Allow the old man to regard him as an ungrateful cad? Or make Eleanor bear witness? Make a clean breast of everything and say that one or the other of them had to go, and he preferred that it should be himself, for excellent reasons? It was just possible that they might both be turned out if the old man knew that they had been plotting against him as it were. On the other hand, he might suggest that the difficulty could be overcome--in another way. Arthur jumped to his feet and began to pace fiercely up and down his bedroom. Lord, if only that had been possible, what a difference it might have made. She had been kind enough to him while they were out together. He had some reason to believe that she did not, after all, really dislike him. But it was absolutely futile to hope that she would ever marry him. He was not good enough for her. She was the sort of woman who would love with all her heart and soul, if she ever loved at all. Probably she never would. There were not any men good enough for her.... He seemed to know her infinitely better since that walk. Before that he had had a vision of her as a forlorn little child of seven, but what she had told him this afternoon gave him the material to follow her development up to the present day. He could see her as a girl of sixteen, having lessons with her governess, and being kept in comparative ignorance of the war; and again a year or two later, beginning to guess at the true significance of that great catastrophe. He had a new sense of having known her all her life. It was difficult to imagine life without her. Yet, if this affair turned out as he had every reason to expect it would, he might never see her again.... A man was so impotent. If she did not care for him, that was the end of it. He could not make her care for him. The root of the whole trouble probably was that she despised him for staying on there in the first instance. She had classed him in her mind with all the others, a hanger-on, a weak fool who preferred to inherit money rather than to earn it! And, good God, she had been right! That was what he had been, a cursed parasite, living on a friendly host. Commensalism. Somers had guessed it too. Any one who had not been perverted by this infernal Hartling atmosphere could see it. And Eleanor, who had not been perverted, the one exception in that place, had judged him without bias, had seen him as he was. Little wonder that she had despised him. His one hope now was to prove that she had in effect misjudged him. He must tell her that he had realised, however tardily, the kind of weak fool that he had been, and he would support his confession by action. He would not wait for a week, he would go the next day. He would see her for a minute after dinner, and just announce his determination, ask her to make sure of his appointment with the old man next morning.... Before he went, he would make an opportunity to say good-bye to her. It was a heroic measure, but the only way by which he could hope to recover her esteem. In his bath, and while he was dressing for dinner, he deliberately took his leave of luxury. He had lived the life of a millionaire for more than five weeks; might live it, if he chose, for perhaps another five years. But he was willing, eager, to renounce it all in order that he might recover Eleanor's esteem. He would make still greater sacrifices if he could win that reward. And, oddly enough, there was another compensation which he had not consciously sought, but which he was instantly aware of as a result of his decision--he was a free man again. As he stood and looked at his reflection in the glass before going down to dinner, he was aware of that same feeling of release that had come to him when he had made his petition on behalf of Hubert, the day before. He lifted his head with a touch of arrogance and squared his shoulders. Good God! what a damned fool he had been ever to dally with the thought of staying on indefinitely at Hartling. He was an independent man now, in a kingdom of slaves. The Kenyons, after all, were to be pitied rather than condemned. What was the good of all this luxury if you were not the captain of your own soul? Ambition, work, and independence were the only things worth living for--if you could not have love. But if it had not been for _her_.... He was so full of his new resolve and so anxious to tell Eleanor, that he completely overlooked the unusually chastened air of the dinner-table that evening. He was trying to make an appointment with Eleanor by some almost invisible signal, and she persistently avoided his eloquent stare. Only twice did she meet his eyes, and on both occasions she turned away her head almost immediately. It seemed that he had lost all that he believed he had gained at the conclusion of their walk. Yet it was impossible that anything could have happened since, to change her new opinion of him. In any case, he would see her after dinner, even if he had to follow her upstairs. She would forgive him when she heard what he had to say. He hardly noticed that Elizabeth--who was dressed in black that evening, a colour that did not suit her--was moody and depressed, or that Miss Kenyon seemed to have temporarily lost something of her autocratic, self-contained manner. And he was far too engrossed with his own affairs to attempt any inferences from the slight indications that he could not altogether overlook. He merely assumed that they were a little duller than usual--and pitied them. He looked up once or twice at the head of the table, turning over in his mind the various approaches by which he might most gently break his news the next morning, but the old man showed no sign of any unusual disturbance. The moment Miss Kenyon gave her sister-in-law the signal to rise, Arthur jumped to his feet. He meant to allow no interference with his plans on this occasion. He was ready, if Miss Kenyon spoke to him, to pretend that he had not heard her. But no one intervened between him and Eleanor. They actually left the dining-room together. She turned towards the staircase as they entered the hall, and afraid that she might run away, he began at once, "Could I speak to you for one minute? It's important. I...." "Yes, I saw your signals at dinner," she interrupted him, none too graciously. "Oh! did you? I'm sorry. I thought you didn't understand," he apologised. "You see, the fact is that I have decided to go, to leave here, to-morrow. I wanted to tell you, because I must see Mr Kenyon before I go." They had reached the foot of the staircase now and she went up two stairs before she turned and looked at him, their eyes almost on a level. Her forehead was puckered into a little anxious frown. "Why have you changed your mind?" she asked. He was warmed to a boldness that he had not dared hitherto. "I've been thinking over all our talk this afternoon," he said, "particularly yours, and I realised how absolutely right you were in despising me for hanging on here, and I felt that I could not stay another twenty-four hours." She stretched out her arm and rested her fingers on the magnificent width of the mahogany handrail. "Why?" she asked. "I could not bear the thought that you despised me," he said. "I never did," she replied gently; "only I was sorry." He was too drunk with the vapours of his own resolve to catch the finer significance of her answer. "It's frightfully kind of you to say that," he said, "but you've made me despise myself, and anyhow I'm going. So will you ask Mr Kenyon if he can see me to-morrow morning?" She smiled faintly at the impetuosity of his boasting. "I'm afraid he can't," she said. "He won't be here to-morrow." "Not here?" he repeated in astonishment, and then as the implications of that unexpected news became clearer to him, he added, "Then it's possible that I might--that we could have another walk or something?" She smiled more openly now. "It is, just possible," she said. "If you feel that you can, after all, put off your departure for another day." "Oh, of course, in that case!" he said eagerly, and added, "Besides, I must see him before I go. How long will he be away?" "He'll be back to-morrow afternoon," she told him. "He's only going up to town in the car for the day. Haven't you heard?" "Heard? What? No, I don't believe I've spoken to any one hardly since we came in. Has anything happened?" "One of the periodical rumblings of the earthquake," she said. He was alive now to this new issue. "Can't you tell me?" he asked. She glanced round the hall and up the stairs before she said in a low voice, "He had a letter from Ken by the second post, a defiant letter, and rather rude. Ken's going to break away, he has borrowed the money to pay the worst of his debts, and leave enough over to pay his passage to South Africa. He knows some one who has a farm there and he's going to join him. Uncle Charles and Aunt Catherine are fearfully upset, of course, and it's one of those rare occasions when the foundations of the house begin to shake. I've only seen it happen before in the case of servants who have--well--broken away, but the effect is much the same, though the rumblings are deeper this time." "Is he very annoyed?" Arthur asked. "He didn't seem upset at dinner." "He? Oh, no! He's as calm as Fate," Eleanor said, "and as cruel." "But why is he going up to town? Is he going to see Ken himself?" She shook her head, glanced once more round the hall, and then bending towards him, whispered, "He's going to see his lawyer and alter the will. He hasn't said so, but every one knows." Arthur pursed his mouth. "Pity I couldn't see him before he goes," he remarked. "Might save him another journey." She looked at him with a frank approval, smiling her appreciation of his humour. "You're not afraid of him, are you?" she said. He was afraid of nothing, as long as he could win her smiles, but he didn't brag. "There's no reason why I should be, is there?" he replied. "Absolutely none," she said confidently. "But you may find him difficult, harder to deal with than you think. It was different with Ken. He didn't want to keep Ken. He does want to keep you. I must go now. I've a heap of letters to do for him." "But shall I see you to-morrow?" he said, as she turned and began to ascend the shallow stairs. She did not answer that, but when she was half-way up the second flight she looked back at him and waved her hand. He was more than content. That last glance of hers had again approved him. He had won a measure of admiration from her by his decision. And to-morrow, he would have her to himself--possibly for the whole day.... He was still standing at the foot of the stairs, and after a moment's hesitation he went on up to his own room. He could not stand that crowd downstairs to-night. They would be depressingly gloomy, full of horrible forebodings about the impending alterations to that untidy will. He wanted to be alone with his own glorious thoughts. XI Arthur hoped that he might meet Eleanor at the breakfast-table again the next morning, but although he put in an appearance before Miss Kenyon and Hubert had finished, and waited until after his aunt had come down, he saw nothing of Eleanor. He consoled himself with the reflection that she was probably busy with some preparation for her grandfather's visit to town. He was awake now to the effect that the visit was having on the household. They were all uneasy, even Miss Kenyon, all as it seemed to him, unnecessarily nervous about their future. He inferred something of this attitude from the preoccupation of the three members of the family he met at the breakfast-table; and later, his inference was fully confirmed. They were momentarily shaken out of the belief into which they habitually lulled themselves, the belief that eventually they must all be decently provided for. The security of Hartling itself was threatened. Who knew what the old man might do in some fit of eccentricity? He might devise the estate to be used as a convalescent home or as a country house for the Chancellor of the Exchequer, if he chose. No one had the power to stop him or dispute his testament afterwards. For all legal purposes he was sane enough. Joe Kenyon, Turner, and Hubert were all in the library at ten o'clock, but it was certainly not their interest in the morning papers that kept them there. Yet, although they were manifestly unable to keep their attention on what they were reading, they appeared disinclined to talk. Arthur was not less fidgety than the other three. He could not decide whether it would be better to wait for Eleanor after the old man had gone, or to go and find her. She might have a certain amount of work still to do that morning, and if so, might prefer to remain undisturbed until she had done it. On the other hand, she might expect him to come and fetch her. "What time is Mr Kenyon going?" he asked at last, addressing his question vaguely to the company at large. Neither Turner nor Hubert took any notice, but after a slight hesitation Joe Kenyon pulled out his watch, stared at it absent-mindedly, and then said, "Oh, I don't know! About half-past ten or eleven probably. He generally does." Arthur put down his paper and walked over to the window. From there he could see the car already drawn up at the front door, but the attitude of Scurr, comfortably reclining in the driver's seat, seemed to imply that he was well accustomed to waiting. Waiting was an art in which one acquired proficiency at Hartling. Those who could not acquire it, like Ken Turner, had no place there. Eleanor was the single exception to all rules. She worked.... So did Miss Kenyon, for that matter. She ran the house amazingly well. But she waited, just as much as the others. She had been disturbed by the "rumblings of the earthquake"--was doubtful of her security. Eleanor did not care. She would be glad to go. The front door opened soon after eleven o'clock, and Arthur saw the head of the house come out with Eleanor in attendance. "He's just going," Arthur announced to the other occupants of the library, and they dropped their papers at once and came over to the window. The old man was just getting into the car. He needed no help. Eleanor stood by with a despatch case, which she gave to him after he was seated, but she did not offer to assist him in any other way. He was quite capable of looking after himself. He stepped into the car like a man of sixty. Then Scurr closed the door, and touched his cap, and in another minute they were slipping down the drive. None of the family had gone to the door to see him off. Not once, since he had been at Hartling, had Arthur seen any sign of filial affection displayed by the family. The old man patronised them with his gentle smile, but apparently he never looked for any return other than obedience and respect. He did not expect gratitude. Joe Kenyon stretched himself in a prodigious yawn as the car vanished over the bridge. "Reminds me of the day poor old Jim went," he said. Little Turner had begun to pace the width of the room under the windows. He had his hands on his hips, slowly smoothing them as he walked. He looked even neater and sleeker than usual this morning, but he was manifestly agitated. That odd, mechanical rubbing of his hands up and down his hips was the action of a man unconsciously seeking some relief. "Well, it didn't so far as we know, make any difference to us, then," he commented, in reply to his brother-in-law's remark. "So far as we know," Joe Kenyon repeated, awkwardly settling himself down in the window-seat. "All U.P. with Ken, of course," Turner went on. "I hope to God he'll make some sort of a do of it in South Africa. He might--one never knows. I wish I could have done more to help him." "Absolutely impossible to do anything," Joe Kenyon said, looking out of the window. "Fact was he didn't really want Ken. Got a strong streak of Jim in him. I've noticed it before. He'll do all right, I expect. Jim would have, in time. He had bad luck, that was all. Damned sorry for you and Catherine all the same." "Wish to God I could go with him," Turner said. His brother-in-law thrust out his under-lip and shook his head. "Too soft for that kind of life," he murmured, still staring out of the window. Turner chose to overlook that remark. "It's this cursed lack of ready money that beats you every time," he grumbled, as he paced up and down. "No getting round that anyway. We couldn't raise five hundred pounds between us to save our eternal souls." Hubert, leaning against the end of the massive oak table that stood in the centre of the room, solemnly nodded his head. "Not three hundred," he said judicially. Turner looked at him for an instant, but made no reply. "Nothing whatever to be done," he went on. "We know that by this time. No need for him to show his fangs again to teach us that." "Glad to have the opportunity all the same," Joe Kenyon put in. Arthur, despite his immense preoccupation with the thought of Eleanor, could not help listening. They had never hitherto spoken as frankly as this before him. "Do you mean," he put in, "that he is sort of intimidating you by going up to town?" He did not realise until he had spoken that by saying "you" instead of "us" he had implied the separateness of his own interest in the affair. Turner stopped his walk and the nervous movement of his hands and stared at Arthur with a look that was not quite free from suspicion. "What else?" he jerked out, frowned impatiently, and then resumed his pacing, but this time with more deliberation. Joe Kenyon, huddled into an ungainly heap in the window seat, was more honest or less discreet. "We're all in the same boat, my boy," he said, a remark that might have been addressed either to his brother-in-law or his nephew, and continued: "Of course it's done to intimidate us. We've seen that trick played too often to doubt it. Any excuse'll do. It hasn't been one of the family since Jim went, so this is a very special occasion; but even if it's only been one of the servants going to leave, he has never missed the chance of underlining the fact that he can alter his will whenever he feels like it." Turner had come to rest in front of Arthur while this explanation was being made, and now prodded him gently in the chest with an elegant forefinger. "All the same, my lad," he said on a note of warning, "you'd better keep quiet about what you know or think you know. We've been a trifle upset this morning; it isn't altogether pleasant for a father to see his son turned adrift without a penny in his pocket, but getting excited won't make matters better for any of us." "Well, as a matter of fact," Arthur began, and stopped abruptly. He had been on the verge of telling them that they need have no more doubts about him, since this was almost certainly his last day at Hartling, but as he began to speak a doubt of his prudence in making that announcement overtook him. Once they knew he was going, they would again look upon him as an outsider and cease to have the least regard for him. Turner or Miss Kenyon--he trusted the others--might use him as a pawn in their own interests and anticipate him in conveying the news to old Kenyon--an eventuality that he wished to avoid, for despite all the evidence that was being presented to him, he still believed that they did the old man less than justice, and it was his disappointment rather than his anger that Arthur feared at the coming interview. "As a matter of fact?" Turner repeated, with raised eyebrows, after a decent pause. "Well, I've no personal interest to serve, have I?" Arthur said. "I made it quite clear to you, I hope, that I have no--no expectations, and shouldn't accept any legacy if it were left to me." "You wouldn't accept _anything_, not even a thousand pounds, for instance?" Turner asked. "Not a red cent," Arthur returned with decision. He could say that now, he reflected, with perfect safety. "Then why stay?" Turner said. Arthur blushed vividly, the blush of a naturally honest man caught in an equivocation, but Turner misread its origin. "No need to be embarrassed," he went on. "We guessed it would be like that, and the old man seems favourable. But doesn't it strike you as probable that if the affair comes off you may change your mind about those possible expectations? I'm not talking without something to go on, my boy. I've been through precisely the same experience myself." He sighed and looked out of the window as he concluded. "And a damned dirty mess I've made of it." Arthur's blush had been restimulated by Turner's misconception as to its cause, and still burnt his face as he replied, "There's no earthly chance of that, if you mean ... what I presume you do. And in any case, I'm not _going_ to stay. I've made up my mind about that. I shall be leaving here, for good, fairly soon." Joe Kenyon looked up hopefully. "Wise man," he commented, and Hubert nodded a melancholy agreement. "Fairly soon?" Turner rolled the words over with a rather impish enjoyment. "Ah, well! we can re-discuss the precise intention of 'fairly soon' in a month's time." Ever since Mr Kenyon had gone Arthur had been fretting intermittently over the problem of whether he should take the initiative or leave it to Eleanor, and this indirect talk of her was increasing his impatience. It was nearly a quarter to twelve now, and the morning was slipping away. He had hoped that she might either come to look for him or send him a message but every minute that possibility grew less probable. Yet he did not care to leave the library at this point in the conversation. It would look as if he were trying to shirk the issue. "I certainly shan't be here a month," he said, addressing little Turner; "almost certainly not another week." "Does the old man know that?" Turner asked. "Not yet," Arthur said. "But I'm going to tell him at once. To-morrow morning at latest." Turner was reflectively twisting the ends of his neat moustache. "Oh, well! my boy," he remarked, "we'll wait to settle that point of _when_ you'll go until after you've seen him. He may have a card or two to play that you haven't guessed at so far. Eh, Joe?" Joe Kenyon pursed his mouth. His expression was not hopeful. "I've quite made up my mind," Arthur said, with what he hoped was an effect of complete finality. He had settled his problem now. He would go and find Eleanor. All the day, his last day, might be lost if he waited for her. She might be angry with him, but he would risk that. He could not endure this suspense any longer. He could hear the hall clock striking twelve. Little Turner with a knowing, half-whimsical look of doubt on his face, still stood in front of him. "Well, it's no good arguing that, is it?" Arthur continued irritably. "You'll know for certain to-morrow." Turner turned away with a shrug of his neat shoulders. "Wonderful house for to-morrows, this," he said. "Always has been." Arthur, inspired to pretend that he considered himself insulted, walked out of the room. By that little piece of chicane he escaped from all his dilemmas at a stroke. He had been horribly afraid that if he attempted some excuse to get away, Hubert might offer to accompany him. The suggestion of golf had hung in the air as a way of passing the afternoon, and some sort of untruthful evasion would have been necessary to avoid it. He went first to the drawing-room on the off-chance that Eleanor might have come as far as that in search of him, but no one was there except his aunt and Mrs Turner; the latter, sitting with her hands in her lap staring fixedly out of the window. She had obviously been crying. His aunt did not look up from her fancy-work as he passed through with an air of having accidentally intruded upon a private ceremony. Poor old Mrs Turner; it had not occurred to him that she would be so upset by her son's departure for South Africa. He was, as a matter of fact, lucky to have broken away; but to the Kenyons, no doubt, the evils of the outer world appeared altogether monstrous compared with the securities of Hartling. He had no hesitation now as to where he should seek Eleanor. Unless she had gone out without him--a ghastly alternative that he refused to believe--she must be upstairs somewhere in old Mr Kenyon's private suite. But when he knocked at the door of the little room whose chief use appeared to be that of a lobby, no one answered. He had never before entered the suite unannounced, and he opened the door and went in with a faint sense of trepidation. The room was empty and the door to the next room closed, but this time he entered without knocking. He was now in the apartment in which he had always been received when he paid his morning visit, and farther than this he had never penetrated. Obviously, however, there were other rooms beyond. He remembered that he had seen Eleanor go through that way sometimes when he had been engaged with the old man, and as he stood hesitating he thought he heard very remotely the clicking of a typewriter. He went over to the farther door and knocked, and was answered faintly from within. He discovered then that there were double doors, four feet apart, between him and the next room. When he had opened the second he found himself in what appeared to be a perfectly appointed office. The walls were nearly hidden by white-lettered deed-boxes, pedestals of standard letter-files, a tremendous nest of card-index drawers, and a bookcase containing four or five hundreds works of reference: law-books, encyclopædias, directories, gazetteers, registers and official reports. Flush with the face of the wall that divided this office from the room through which he had just passed was the door of what was, no doubt, an enormous safe. The centre of the room was occupied by an extensive solid oak table, at which, seated with her back to him, Eleanor was engaged with a typewriter. She did not turn round as he came in, and said, without stopping her work or looking up, "Shut both doors behind you, and sit down over there. I shan't be very long." So she was expecting him, was his thought as he followed her instructions, and she was not presumably altogether displeased with him for coming. He sat down on the seat of one of those oriel windows that were the most pleasing feature of Hartling's south elevation. He did not, however, turn his attention to the panorama of the gardens that stretched out below him, nor to the glimpses of the rolling Sussex country visible as an effect of blue mysterious freedoms beyond the wardenship of that stiff, enclosing wall. He had no eyes, no thought for anything but Eleanor. From here, he could watch her earnest, intent profile, bent a little forward over the typewriter. She looked, he thought a trifle flushed, and something in her intense concentration on her work gave her the air of being faintly embarrassed, an air that was not less marked when she whirled the letter off the roller and having glanced at it said in a formal voice, "This is our office, the heart of the house. Don't you think it looks very orderly and business-like?" He agreed without enthusiasm. His mind was still obsessed with the idea that they were again going out together to the hill that had the view of the South Downs. He felt no inclination just then to discuss the business affairs of old Kenyon. "This is the mainspring of the whole machine," Eleanor went on, looking at the range of deed boxes in front of her; "and I don't think there is the least fear of the machine breaking down. We are very methodical and very safe. We never gamble. We don't pretend to be far-sighted or ingenious, we're just plodders, adding a few thousands to our capital every year. Do you know that there are securities in this room worth well over half a million? I can't give you exact figures because there are one or two secrets into which the private secretary is not admitted. But I do know that even after we've paid the enormous sums demanded from us in taxes, our income considerably exceeds our disbursements." She looked round at him as she added, "Aren't you dazzled? Don't you feel exalted by being in the presence of all this wealth?" He was puzzled, uncertain of her mood. Her speech had had a strong flavour of irony, but there was no trace of it in her manner. "Oh! confound the beastly money," he said, "I came up to see if we were going for another walk." "Not to-day," she said. "I have far too much to do. Perhaps this letter I've just written will explain why." She held it out towards him, and he jumped up and took it from her and then read it, leaning against the edge of the table. It was addressed to Mrs Payne, and after a few opening phrases, continued: "I want to come and stay with you for a week or two if you could possibly manage to have me. I can't tell you why till I see you, but I should like to come on Friday, the day after to-morrow. I know it is dreadfully short notice...." He broke off there and looked at her in bewilderment. His mind had leapt back to their talk on the hill. Was she doing this, he wondered, in order that he might stay on? "But I don't in the least understand why you have written this," he said frowning. "Why are you going? Do you mean that you're leaving here for good?" She nodded gravely. "But why?" he persisted. "I thought that we agreed...." "Don't you want me to go?" she asked. "No. I don't," he said emphatically. "Would you stay on if I went?" she returned. "No, I wouldn't. Nothing on earth should induce me to," he declared vehemently, still regarding her departure as an alternative to his own. "Then what's your objection?" she said. His eyes were suddenly opened then to a new prospect. He would not lose sight of her if they both left Hartling. He hated the thought of her working in a London office, but she would be within his reach there. He could, in a sense, look after her. They could meet quite often--if she were willing. "You mean," he said, "that we might both go?" "I know of no reason why your going should affect me one way or the other." Her tone was cold, even a trifle disdainful. He was slightly taken aback. "No, no, of course not. It has nothing to do with me," he agreed. "But what has made you change your mind? Or don't you want to tell me that?" She got up from her chair and walked over to the window. "There's one thing I want you to tell me first," she said. "Will my going have the least effect on your own plans?" He considered that for a moment before he replied with perfect sincerity. "Absolutely none. Whatever happens, I'm going back to Somers to-morrow afternoon." She had turned her back on him and was looking out over the prospect that had so recently failed to interest him. "It isn't altogether that," she said over her shoulder, making a gesture with her hand that may have indicated the distant weald of Sussex. "I shouldn't go if it were only that I wanted to be free and independent." She paused so long after this statement that he was emboldened to prompt her by saying, "You seem to have made up your mind so suddenly." "The truth is that I can't stand it any longer," she said in a low voice. "I simply can't stand it." He waited patiently this time for her to continue. He saw that she had something to say which she found difficult to put into words. The pose of her upright figure suggested a certain tensity of motion and when after another silent interval she turned and faced him, her hands were clenched. "And I'm haunted by the fear that I may be wrong after all," she said, looking at him as if for help. "And you are the last person in the world, I suppose, who can tell me whether I am wrong or not." "I don't quite understand yet. Is it about him--Mr Kenyon?" he asked. She did not deign to answer his question directly. "You're supposed to know something about psychology, aren't you?" she went on. "Well, is it possible for a man to lose all decent, human feeling even for his own family?" "Lord, yes," Arthur replied. "Speaking generally, of course, misers, for instance. Some of them seem to lose all human feeling." "He isn't the least a miser," she put in. "He's often extraordinarily generous outside his own family." "I only instanced that as a well-known type," he said. "But drink or drugs will do the same thing." "Yes, but in all those cases there is always a definite _vice_ of some sort," she complained. "Something that you can take hold of, understand more or less, as a cause for it all. But he hasn't any vices, unless you can call it a vice to be deliberately cruel to your own children and grandchildren without any apparent reason." "But is he actually cruel?" Arthur remonstrated. "Doesn't he perhaps really mean it all for their own good. He may be deluded--he almost said as much to me--into thinking that they are weaker and less capable than they actually are; but that would be a natural delusion enough in a man of his age." Eleanor threw out her hands with a gesture of confutation. "And you!" she exclaimed. "Does he believe that you aren't capable of looking after your own interests too?" "Why me?" Arthur objected. "Because he has been trying to _get_ you. Oh! manifestly trying to--to add you to his collection," she exclaimed passionately. "It was that that opened my eyes. Until you came, I had hardly a doubt of _him_. I didn't like the life we lead here. It bored me. I believe I've always hated money--it must have been born in me, if that's possible. But I believed more or less what you do now, that he--looked after them, that his only fault, if anything, was that he looked after them too much. "And then there was the suggestion of your coming here for a week-end visit. That was something rather exceptional. We'd had old Mr Beddington not long before--it was he who told my grandfather about you--and I remember wondering whether he was beginning to pine for more company or something. And I--I was rather interested in what I heard of you; we talked a little about you once or twice, and one day, after you had accepted the invitation, he threw out a kind of hint that he'd like to keep you here. That bothered me somehow. I'd made some sort of picture of you in my mind, and I--it's difficult to explain exactly--but I didn't like the idea of your--getting like the others. Some silly, romantic school-girl notion or other. I don't know quite why." She paused and turned back to the window. Her colour had risen again, and Arthur believed that she was embarrassed by her thought of him as the hero of her old dream. How bitterly disappointed she must have been when she had found that her imagined hero had been a mere idler, like the others, willing to slack about and play games, in the hope of a place in the old man's will! Good God, what a poor thing she must have thought him! He looked down and began aimlessly to smooth the carpet with his foot. He felt utterly humiliated and miserable. Without a word of reproach she had exposed the weakness and unworthiness of him; and he could only acknowledge that she was right. He did not look up at once when she turned back to him and went on. "It was the first time that I had seen the thing happening, if you know what I mean. I could follow all the stages of it. I saw how he let you enjoy the easiness of the life here before he made any sort of offer, and then just dangled it in front of you and tried to make it look as if you would be doing him a favour. Well, that was true enough in a way--you were. But the horrible thing, to me, was that he never paid you any salary. That really opened my eyes more than anything. He believed that you had given up your work at Peckham; that what would mostly likely tempt you away from here was the idea of going to Canada, and he wanted to make that impossible. I know that was it. I'm perfectly certain of it. And on the top of it there came that affair about Hubert's engagement and this fuss over Ken. That finished it for me. Ken isn't really bad. Most young men in his place would have got into debt, and I don't believe that he was the least angry about that. Of course the money to put the debts straight was nothing at all to him. He wouldn't have thought twice about that, but he has just turned Ken out without the least thought for poor Aunt Catherine, who is simply heartbroken about it. I believe Uncle Charles is really more upset, too, than he cares to admit." "I know. I was talking to him this morning," Arthur put in. "Well, will you tell me why he does these things if he is not an inhuman, heartless brute?" Eleanor concluded. Arthur could find no answer to that. "But you still believe in him?" she asked. "It's so--so incredible," he said. "Oh! and this morning!" Eleanor broke out, with a passion of resentment in her voice. "All this petty, silly, detestable business of his going up to town to alter his will. Why? I don't believe for a moment that he ever left Ken anything. He never liked him. Ken was too independent to please him. No; I believe that he has gone to see Mr Fleet to-day, just to make them feel his power over them. He was glad of the opportunity...." "That's exactly what they were saying downstairs just now," Arthur admitted. "That he was glad of the opportunity to shake them up a bit. But I suppose I'm prejudiced; I'm so new to it all; only it doesn't seem to me, somehow, as if he were that kind of a man." "He has been nice to you, of course," Eleanor commented. "He would be, just yet. And you've only seen one side of him. But doesn't it strike you that this is a queer household? I don't remember any other; but I've read novels, and if they're anything like life, it must be very unusual for a man to live with his family and never receive any sign of affection from them. Doesn't it seem to you as if he were their master rather than their father?" "Yes. I was thinking something of the kind this morning," Arthur agreed. "But I wondered if there weren't faults on both sides in a way." Eleanor looked at him doubtfully. "I don't know; it's beyond me," she said. "But now you know why I'm going, don't you? It isn't as if I could help any of them by staying. No one has the least influence with him, not the very least. It may have looked as if you had helped Hubert about that engagement. You did in one way, but it was all because he was trying to get a tighter hold of you. Oh, well!" she sighed, and half turned away from him, before adding unexpectedly, "I'm glad you're going." "You despised me for wanting to stay, didn't you?" he said. "I was sorry," she admitted. "More than that, you despised me," he insisted. "You were right, too, absolutely right. I really only saw it properly when you said just now that you were interested in me, in a way, before I came. And then, of course, you were bitterly disappointed. I can see all that now." She was looking out of the window again, and the fact that he could not see her face gave him courage. He came a little nearer to her, as he went on, "I haven't any excuse to offer. None at all. I was a silly, weak fool, and I should have gone on being a fool if it hadn't been for you. But now I _have_ come to my senses, and I'm going back to work, and it would help me frightfully if--when I'm in Peckham--if you're ever up in town--if I could see you now and again. You've only seen me here and I've been a different person since I've been here. Would it be possible for me to see you ever, after you go to stay with those people?" She was kneeling up on the window seat now, leaning her forehead against the glass, and she did not move her position as she said, in the tone of one who quietly weighs a proposition, "Oh, yes. Why not?" "It would help me tremendously," he submitted. She was silent for a few seconds before she suddenly said in a light conversational tone, "It was all bosh, of course, what you said just now." "What was?" he asked in surprise. "All that about your being a weak fool and my despising you for it," she said, still with her forehead pressed against the glass of the window. "Do you mean that you didn't despise me?" he asked eagerly, and then as an afterthought, "But in that case why were you so fearfully down on me?" "I didn't want you to waste your life here," she murmured, "I know it wasn't any business of mine, but I simply couldn't stand the thought of your becoming one of--them." He could not mistake the implication of those last two sentences. She had confessed to an interest in his welfare that deeply stirred and aroused him. Something of his humility began to fall from him, his recent passion of self-condemnation assuaged by her belief in the promise of his life. And with that reaction all those phases of his admiration which had for so long been secretly merging into love, were suddenly tinged by an ecstasy of gratitude. She appeared infinitely more to him at the moment than either friend or possible lover. She was the supreme miracle of creation embodied in that graceful form, outlined against the window. The benefactor, the giver, the maker of himself. By her simple expression of belief in him, she had given him a soul. He wanted to kneel before her in adoration.... Intrigued and a little embarrassed by his prolonged silence, she slipped off the window seat and turned to him with the beginning of a conversational commonplace that was checked by the adoring intensity of his gaze. "It must be nearly ..." she had begun, and then stopped and put her hands to her face to hide the flood of colour that leapt to her cheeks. And still he could not speak. All the love and poetry that surged within him could find no expression in his modern phrase. At the mere thought of any gesture, movement, or word, he was frozen by his self-consciousness; all too aware of himself as a product of his own time, of the little conventional self that he had always presented as a representative of the authentic Arthur Woodroffe. And yet he knew that this was his moment, that if he let it slip he might never again find an opportunity to say what he knew, now, was within him, and so he grasped at an opening, however conventional, in order to anticipate some slipping back into the everyday manner, on her part or his own, that might release the fatuities of the manikin. "There is something I must say to you," he broke out. "Please don't interrupt me. It's--oh! necessary. I...." He found that he could not lose himself, standing there in stark inaction with her before him, and began to pace up and down the room, keeping his eyes on the ground. "To begin with, I must thank you," he went on, trying not to think of himself in any future relation to her. "I want to go on thanking you. I can't possibly tell you what you've done for me. Everything, all life, is different now that I've got just the hope that you believe in me. It has given me a hope of--myself. If you can believe in me, nothing can ever be the same again. Oh! I wish I could tell you all that it has done for me, just knowing you. But I can't. I can't say it, but I can live it, and you know that I will. I'm sure you know that. I can feel it. If...." He paused and looked up. She was sitting in the window-seat, her head bent and her hands in her lap. And with that he forgot his self-consciousness, plunged across the room, and went down on his knees before her. "Eleanor," he said. "Do you know how I worship you?" She did not answer him in words, but it seemed as if by a series of infinitely delicate movements they came slowly together, until her hands, with his own clasping them, were on his breast and they were looking into each other's eyes. There was no need then for them to say that they had loved from their first meeting, but now that the pressure of that first overpowering urgency had weakened, words came more easily. It was not, however, until some time later that he found one essential explanation. "But the first time that I really _knew_ how much I loved you," he said, "was when I saw you in imagination, as a solemn little chit of seven standing by the elephant's pad in the hall. You seemed so precious then." XII They had their afternoon together--free from embarrassment, for they constrained themselves to conceal their happiness during the ordeal of lunch in order that they might enjoy for an hour or two the sacred reserves of their precious secret. After that, as they well understood, the family would have to know, and more than the fact of their engagement. They would have to be told, also, that Hartling was to lose two of its members. They debated that last decision before they were agreed. Arthur, still suspicious of the good faith of Miss Kenyon and Charles Turner, was for postponing what he regarded as the lesser announcement until after his interview with the old man. Eleanor saw more clearly. "They would never dare to anticipate us," she said. "It would be too risky. Haven't you realised that they never interfere with him? For one thing they are agreed that there shan't be any kind of competition between them, for favours and so on--which is awfully wise of them, if you come to think of it. And for another, they would not like to be the bearer of bad news or even disturbing news. Their fear of him goes as deep as that." "And yet he never loses his temper with them, does he? Or threatens them in any way?" Arthur asked. "He threatens them all the time, indirectly," she said. "But I've never seen him lose his temper. He doesn't seem to care enough for that." They had found a delightfully secluded spot in the larch plantation for their talk, and it was from there that they saw the car return a little before five o'clock. By that time, however, their plans were settled. The fact of their engagement was to be whispered to some member of the family when they went in to tea, in the certain hope that thereafter the news would instantly spread through the household. The second, and, for the Kenyons, the more important announcement was to follow, with the warning that the head of the house was to be told nothing until the next morning, when it should be Arthur's duty to inform him. And so far as the future was concerned they were content to await the day. If the expected explosion took place, Eleanor was to go to the Paynes; she had sent her letter and seemed to have no doubt that they would receive her. Arthur was prepared in any case to return to Peckham the next afternoon. They rose reluctantly when they saw the car softly running up the drive. No caresses had been exchanged between them as yet, but they had been exquisitely content in each other's company. Arthur asked for nothing better than to sit at her feet, and enjoy the bliss of her favour. And they had so much to say that had so far been impeded by the necessity for making their immediate plans. They wanted to tell one another the stories of their lives. He knew more of her life than she knew of his, Eleanor complained, and made it clear that every detail of his youth and young manhood must be told to her. Moreover, for those two hours they had been temporarily emancipated from every restraint of Hartling, and now they had to face the task of finally cutting themselves free. And Eleanor knew that that task would not be performed without effort. Her grandfather would exert himself to the utmost to keep them both, and she had an uneasy fear that he might discover some form of suasion which might appear morally to bind them. She had never yet seen him exert himself in any connection of this kind. Until now he had always been so easily and so disinterestedly master of the situation. She had been present when he had dismissed Ken Turner's request for the payment of his debts, and had seen her grandfather refuse that petition with the emotional indifference of a man who decided between his investments. He had not shown a spark of temper, and his refusal, however final, had been almost gentle. She hoped that he would display the same methods on this occasion. But she was afraid that he might draw upon some hitherto untouched reserve of power. He had so much the air of a man with immense hidden reserves. Also, she expected a chorus of remonstrance and dissuasion from the rest of the family. She knew that they all, with the exception of Miss Kenyon, were genuinely fond of her--it was impossible to picture Miss Kenyon as being _fond_ of any one--and she guessed that their pleading might be hard to resist. Indeed, if anything could have altered her decision, it would have been her sense of compassion for them. If she could have helped them, she might have stayed. But she knew that her departure would make no real difference to their lives. Only one event could do that. The announcement of the engagement created only a mild stir in the Hartling drawing-room. Evidently the thing had been expected; no opposition was anticipated in this instance from the ruler of destinies, and the affair was amply justified by precedent. Mrs Turner was still very depressed, and the news seemed to add another melancholy to her very depressed thoughts. No doubt she was reflecting that if her son had fallen in love with his Cousin Elizabeth, he too might now be settling down with the others to await the inevitable event that must finally determine their period of bondage. And if he had done that, the family would have been complete, with no further fear of any intrusion from the outside. Hubert gave the fullest expression to his congratulations. He appeared genuinely pleased, and went as far as suggesting that his own marriage and Arthur's might take place on the same day. And Elizabeth was at least outwardly complacent; although Arthur wondered if her almost incessant chatter, that afternoon, concealed a faint chagrin. Probably she would have married him if he had asked her. Not because she was in love with him, but because he happened to be the only man available. Joe Kenyon alone exhibited any signs of uneasiness, glancing across at Arthur more than once over the tea-table with a look that conveyed a hint of doubt and suspicion. Arthur himself was far from confident. He was unhappily aware of the fact that he was accepting their congratulations under false pretences. And he could not bring himself to announce his further plans to the full company. If Eleanor had been present they might have dared it together. But she had gone straight up to her grandfather after confiding the news of the engagement to Mrs Kenyon, and had not come down again. It was inevitably his uncle that Arthur chose as his first confidant. There was a certain honesty and heartiness about him that the others lacked, and from him alone, perhaps, could be expected disinterested encouragement and advice. Moreover, Arthur was a trifle curious about that look of suspicion he had caught on his uncle's face. "Care to come for a stroll down the garden," he asked, going up to him before the meal was actually finished. "Eh? Oh! Wait till I get a cigar on," Joe Kenyon replied. "I'd like to have a talk with you." As usual all essentials were deferred until they were out of earshot of the house, and then Joe Kenyon began somewhat abruptly by saying,-- "Changed your mind, I suppose, about what you said to Charles this morning. You won't be leaving us now, I take it." "I shall," Arthur said. "She's coming too." Joe Kenyon stopped in his walk and stared his surprise. "Good God!" he ejaculated on a note of alarm. "Surely you don't mean it?" "I do," Arthur affirmed. "That was what I wanted to talk to you about. We settled it all between us this afternoon. It is quite possible that we may both go to-morrow." Joe Kenyon again sought refuge in his "Good God!" He appeared to be completely staggered for the moment, looked back at the house, down towards the iron gates, then threw back his head and gently blew a thin wreath of cigar smoke into the air. "What you going to live on?" he asked abruptly. "I'm going into partnership with the man I was working with before I came here," Arthur said. "We shall have about five hundred a year, I expect, to begin with." "Is it possible to live on that, in these days?" his uncle asked. "Oh, yes! rather. It isn't much, of course," Arthur said. "Both of you?" "For a time. I hope to make more--in a year or two." "Then why doesn't Eleanor wait until you've felt your feet a bit?" "She won't. She wants to get away quite as much as I do--more, I think." "But where's she going to--to-morrow? If she goes to-morrow?" "To the Paynes. The people who brought her over from South America." "Seem to have worked it all out," Joe Kenyon commented, with a deep sigh. "How long have you been making these plans?" "Only this afternoon." Arthur said. "But she had written to the Paynes before we--before I said anything to her, you know. She meant to go in any case." "The old man doesn't know yet, of course," his uncle continued. "Going to tell him to-morrow morning." Joe Kenyon considered that thoughtfully for a few seconds before he said, "Can't do anything to _you_, of course. You may have a pretty stiff time, both of you, but damn it, you're free. He's got no hold on _you_. Can't _do_ anything--except chuck you out, which is all you're asking for." "Quite," Arthur agreed, and then added: "This won't affect you in any way, will it, uncle?" Joe Kenyon pursed his mouth. "Can't put it down to us. Can he?" he inquired. "You'll make that plain enough, between you. What I mean is, this'll be a knock for him, worst in twenty-five years, and he may be spiteful, work off his annoyance on one of us after you've gone, if there's the least excuse." "Oh! there can't be the least question of involving any one but our two selves," Arthur assured him. "Damn it, I wish it hadn't been Eleanor," his uncle grumbled, adding inconsequently, "Pretty stiff coming the day after the other affair. If anything'll upset him this will. He'll put up a devil of a fight for Eleanor. She's damned useful to him. But, Good Lord! what can he _do_, when it comes to the point? If you're determined to go, there's the end of it. He can't _make_ you stay." He looked apologetically at Arthur as he continued: "It's different for you. You've got a profession, prospects. None of _us_ have. And then we'd been brought up to it. So has Hubert.... All the same, we'd thought you'd stay. We shouldn't have blamed you either if you had. Very glad in a way. Oh, well! Good Lord; I don't know. Honestly, Arthur, how long do you think it's _possible_ he might hang on?" Arthur shook his head. "You can't tell," he admitted. "He's as sound as a bell physically, and he has got the will to live. And so long as a man has that, you know, and there's nothing organically wrong...." "Might easily live another ten years?" Joe Kenyon said. "Quite easily," Arthur replied. He realised later in the evening that in his conversation his uncle had summarised the family opinion. Their attitude towards himself was marked by that same discretion which had characterised it immediately before his championship of Hubert. They were afraid of the least appearance of complicity; and avoided too direct a reference to the subject that must have been uppermost in their thoughts. Turner's casual, "Hear you're going to take up your work again. Pretty dull for you down here, I suppose, without any settled employment," was a mere acknowledgment of the fact, and manifestly deprecated any further elaboration of the topic. And Hubert contented himself with spasms of melancholy gazing, as if he were trying to intimate as tactfully and safely as possible his personal sorrow and regret. Miss Kenyon was more nearly affable than Arthur had ever known her to be, and talked to him at dinner about his profession with every sign of interest. The meal had an unprecedented air of informality that night owing to the absence of the head of the house, who dined in his own room. Eleanor, also, was absent from the table--to Arthur's great disappointment. He hoped to have another talk with her before his interview with the old man, and had fully expected to see her in the dining-room and be able to make some appointment with her afterwards. About half-past nine, however, this particular anxiety was relieved, if none too satisfactorily, by a note that was brought down to him by one of the maids. "No hope this evening," Eleanor had written, "but I will see you upstairs before you go in to him to-morrow. Come up at half-past ten. I have told him about our engagement and he seemed to be pleased--chiefly, I think, because he believes it will give him a greater hold over you. It's rather awful, somehow. I'm not a bit happy about your seeing him. I'm afraid of something, though I don't in the least know what. Sleep well." Arthur cherished that little letter for its first sentence. "No hope this evening" thrilled him by its sweet familiarity and its quiet acceptance of the fact that they wanted to be together. It said so much more than any stereotyped term of endearment. Her final note of foreboding did not disturb him. He had no fear for the future, since the only future he saw was life with Eleanor. He had begun to plan the possibility of a small flat somewhere, if one could be found. There was no reason why they should not be married quite soon. He looked up to find the eye of little Turner fixed upon him with a half-whimsical smile. "What about a last game?" he asked, making a daring reference to the forbidden topic. "Rather," Arthur agreed cheerfully. "I'll come and mark," Hubert volunteered in much the tone he might have used if he had been offering his services as chief mourner. Arthur found no difficulty in following Eleanor's advice to sleep well. He lay awake for half an hour or so thinking of her, but after that he slept soundly and his sleep was undisturbed. He did not even remember his dreams when he woke. And he had no sinking of the heart, no sick qualms of anticipation the following morning. His waking thoughts were all of Eleanor, the incident of the necessary interview with old Kenyon appeared to him as no more than one of the many necessary steps that he must take before he could enter the Paradise of his life with her. He was, for the time being, obsessed with a single idea, and his one annoyance was the fact that two and a half hours must elapse before he would see her again. His uncle misread his evident abstraction when they met in the library after breakfast. "Worried, Arthur?" he asked in a confidential voice behind the shield of the _Times_, although there was no one in the room just then but himself and his nephew. "Worried? Lord, no," Arthur replied frankly. "Quite the contrary." "All right for you, my boy, but you'll have a rare trouble to make him give up Eleanor," his uncle said. "He can't keep her if she wants to go," Arthur returned, but Joe Kenyon refused to commit himself any further. "Oh, well! Wait and see," he said. Arthur's peace of mind was in no way disturbed by that hint of the possible difficulties ahead of him. His uncle's warning seemed to him nothing more than a symptom of the characteristic Kenyon weakness. They were timid, apprehensive creatures, sapped and enfeebled by their life of comfort and seclusion. He was, however, suddenly startled into doubt by Eleanor's reception of him in the little ante-room. He had expected to find her as confident and self-reliant as he was himself. He had hoped that their half-hour's talk would be all of their own delightful future. He found her anxious, trembling, on the verge of tears. "Sit down," she said, when Arthur came in. "I want to talk to you first. It's quite safe. He's in the office, and in any case you can't hear what's said from the next room." But after he had obeyed her, she could not come at once to what she had to say. She turned her back on him and began to arrange some papers on a side table, standing, he thought, less erectly than she usually stood. And when she faced him, there was in her expression the reluctance of one who has to admit defeat. "Do you think, after all, that we had better go?" she asked. He was too astonished to reply directly. He got up and took a step towards her. "Why? What's the matter?" he said. She backed away from him and held up her hands, as if to defend herself. "There's no reason why you shouldn't go--alone," she said. "Go alone?" he repeated in a voice of such dismay that any repetition of that suggestion would have been ridiculous. "Very well," she continued, soothing him with a faint smile. "If that's quite out of the question, is it possible that we might both stay?" "Indefinitely?" "Or for a time." "Like the rest of them? Isn't that how they all began?" he asked. She sighed and clasped her hands together. "Oh, Arthur, I'm afraid," she confessed. "I don't know _what_ I'm afraid of. It isn't of him or of anything he can do to us. I've been arguing with myself, but it's no good. It just comes down to the one fact that I'm afraid." Almost instinctively Arthur put out his hand and laid a finger on her pulse. "Since when have you been afraid?" he asked her. "Ever since he came in yesterday," she told him. "He was just as usual, not overtired as far as I could see, or put out, or anything. But directly I began to talk to him this queer feeling of fear came over me. It was ... Arthur, it was just as if I knew something terrible was going to happen." She slipped her pulse from his fingers, thrust her hand into his, and clung to it tightly as she continued, "And I've been thinking that perhaps I may have been wrong about him. I don't believe I slept an hour last night. I kept going over it all again and again until I nearly persuaded myself that he had always meant well--underneath. And if he has, and I desert him now, and the shock of it made him ill--it might, mightn't it?--I should feel so awful about it. Oh! what do you think we ought to do? You know we might be--be married--here--and go on much as we have been--with that difference." For a moment Arthur was tempted, realising in his own feelings something of what the other dwellers in the house must have gone through before they descended to their present level of fatalistic acceptance. And if he had not been so deeply in love with Eleanor he would almost certainly have yielded as the others had done before him. He was saved by the memory of his own abasement the previous morning. He had known then that he could never be worthy of her so long as he was too inert to face the struggle of life. He put his arm round her and drew her close to him--the first caress he had dared. "No," he said. "Quite definitely no! I should hate myself if we did that. You have cured me of the least wish to slack my life away. I shouldn't be good enough for you, if I did. I don't mean to say that I'm good enough in any case, but I shall try to be...." He paused, and with the lingering fondness of one who murmurs the tenderest of all endearments, added softly, "Eleanor." Her only answer was to press a little nearer to him, and he felt that she was now leaning upon his strength; she who had given him that strength in the first instance. "It was you who made me see everything so clearly, yesterday," he went on. "I saw myself as I was, a detestable parasite. I could have hated myself for daring to love you. And whatever happens, I could not face that feeling again. It has gone absolutely. I don't believe I should ever have had it if it hadn't been for the influences and temptations of this place. It undermines one's will--though it has never undermined yours." She hid her face. "It has, it has," she whispered. "I didn't know it until last night. I thought I was strong." He was seized with a momentary panic. "You mean that you're afraid to face life with me on five hundred a year?" he asked. She lifted her head and smiled at him. "I'd face life with you on a hundred a year, cheerfully," she said. "It isn't that." He was infinitely relieved by that assurance, for he had had a glimpse of a condition that might still defeat him. If she had been afraid of the life he had had to offer her, he might have been forced to compromise. "What is it, then?" he asked tenderly. "My grandfather," she said. "He--he paralyses my will, I think. I can feel his power over me here, this very minute. I'm afraid of him now that I'm going to oppose him, just as they are all afraid of him. It's like the fear one has in a dream, the fear of something with an unearthly power that you can't escape from--something--something evil. I--do you know I meant to tell him last night, that I--that we were going? And I couldn't. He was sitting there perfectly quiet and good-tempered--we were having dinner together--and I thought, why shouldn't I break it to him--at once--about us? But as soon as that idea came into my mind I began to tremble. It was like--oh! like having to plunge your hand down into some horrible dark hole, not knowing what ghastly unclean thing you might find there. And I couldn't do it. I _couldn't_, I _couldn't_." Her voice had risen to a slightly hysterical note as she concluded, and he held her to him and gently fondled and soothed her as he said reassuringly, "It's only because he has been your employer and master all these years. And in any case he has no power over me. I have never been the least afraid of him." "Oh, Arthur! you're strong," she murmured, and then recovered herself almost as quickly as she had given way. "I'm a fool," she said, with a sudden effect of briskness, drawing herself away from him, and putting her hands up to her hair. "However, you know now the sort of hysterical creature you'll have to put up with." "I'm glad," he said, with a fond smile. "You were almost too wonderful before. I don't believe I should be afraid to kiss you now." She blushed and turned away. "I suppose you know that it's ten minutes past eleven," she said, and added with a sudden return of agitation, "Oh! go--at once. And get it over." Then as though she doubted her own powers of resolution, she went quickly over to the door of her grandfather's room and opened it. "Can you see Arthur now? He's here," she said coldly; and having received her reply she looked at Arthur and formally beckoned him to go in. But as he passed her in the doorway she momentarily clasped his arm with her two hands as if she were loath, even now, to let him go. Yet, despite all this ominous introduction, it was pity and not fear that Arthur felt as he sat down by the old man, who had, so mysteriously it seemed, terrified his own family. He looked even less intimidating than usual this morning. He was obviously pleased by the news of the engagement, and his first words were almost roguish. "Well, well, Arthur: I mustn't keep you long to-day," he said. "And I suppose, after this, that I shall have to reconcile myself to seeing rather less of Eleanor. However...." He completed his sentence with a gesture of his delicate, shrivelled hand. Arthur knew the inference that he was expected to draw: in a few months--a year or two, at longest--all these little cares and troubles would have ceased for ever. And it crossed his mind that he might open his extraordinarily difficult announcement by some well-considered professional assurance that his patient might quite conceivably live another ten or fifteen years. He rejected that as being clumsy and tactless--although every form of approach seemed to him, just then, to be either clumsy or cruel. And it was in desperation, alarmed by the growing significance of his own silence, that he at last said,-- "Yes, sir, I'm afraid you'll miss her--rather--at first." The old man appeared to be unaware that this sentence held any unusual suggestion. "Have you had it in your mind that you might be married quite soon?" he asked. "I think so, sir; yes, quite soon," Arthur replied, and then frowning and keeping his eyes averted from the old man's face--he went on quickly. "As soon as ever we can find somewhere to live, in fact. Flats and so on are fearfully difficult to get just now. And in Peckham, where I shall be practising...." He paused and looked up. The old man had changed neither his position nor his expression. "But I know of no reason why you shouldn't be married while you are still here," he said, apparently missing all the implications of Arthur's speech. "We--we thought of leaving here--at once," he replied, making an effort that even as he made it seemed gross and brutal. "In fact I meant--that is, I'm leaving to-day." Mr Kenyon's keen blue eyes slowly concentrated their gaze with an effect of extraordinary attention on Arthur's face; and as they did so, their lids, which commonly drooped so that the iris was partly hidden, were lifted until the pupils, completely ringed by white, stared with the cold, intense watchfulness of a great bird. "But that's impossible," he said very quietly. And indeed it seemed to Arthur quite impossible at that moment to give any _reason_ for his going at such foolishly short notice. Downstairs, or talking to Eleanor, the situation appeared so entirely different. Then, this quiet old man, with his deliberate movements, took the shape of a tyrant, cruel, and malignant. Here, in this room, he was a stately old gentleman, naturally affronted by what was almost an insult. Arthur blushed vividly. "You see, sir," he blurted out, with the gaucheness of a peccant schoolboy, "I feel rather--as if--if I were wasting my time here--in a way. I don't really want to be ungrateful, you know, although I suppose it must seem like it, but--I'd be awfully glad if you could see your way to letting me off." "And your promise?" Mr Kenyon asked, still in the same cool, formal voice. "Does that count for nothing with you?" "I'm sorry, sir. I feel that I can't stay," Arthur looked down again as he spoke. He found it difficult to meet the stare of those fierce hunting eyes. "You realise, of course," Mr Kenyon continued, "that this will put an end to your engagement? I could not spare Eleanor." "She--she wants to go too, sir," Arthur said. "But she can't," Mr Kenyon replied, in the tone of a man who pronounces an unimpeachable judgment. "If you go, Arthur, you will go alone." Then, with a change of voice, he went on, "But you will alter your mind about this, I am sure. When you come to think it over, you will realise, I hope, how dishonourable it would be for you to leave me, after the bargain we made and the promise you gave me. In any case, take a week to think it all over. Take a month if you like." Arthur sat in silence for what seemed to him a considerable time after the old man had finished speaking. He was thinking of the rest of the Kenyons downstairs. He had blamed them many times for their weakness, but he understood now how nearly impossible it must have been for them to have done anything but wait, postponing any decision from month to month. He himself, with all their experience behind him, was faltering; though surely he could not be mistaken now in assuming that all this effect of persuasion was nothing more than a method. When he was bound--fairly caught in the meshes of the net--he would become as all the others had become, an object of indifference, subject now and again to subtle forms of intimidation, but never to any form of affection. In ten years, he would become like them, and Eleanor.... "No," he said, with sudden determination, jumping to his feet and almost forgetting the person of the old man in front of him. "No! I'm going to-day, and Eleanor goes with me. You have no power to keep her, no sort of authority over her. We have made up our minds." He had taken a couple of steps up the room as he spoke, and as he concluded he turned and faced his antagonist, prepared for an outburst, for some tremendous call upon those immense reserves of personality that had hitherto been hidden from him. But Mr Kenyon was still sitting quietly in his chair, his hands resting on the arms, and the wide-open eyes that had recently gazed with such furious attention at Arthur were now fixed unseeingly upon the opposite wall. He was in one of his "trances," the dreaming god calm, powerful, detached, above all unapproachable, existing in his own world remote from all opposition and argument. Arthur, tensely braced for an encounter, found himself surprisingly without a purchase. The influence of habit made him pause, he stood stock still, waiting tensely for the first signs of the old man's return to consciousness. But as the minutes passed his professional curiosity was aroused. He had never before had an opportunity to observe one of these "trances" at close quarters, and he quietly approached the dreamer, looked keenly at him, and began to pass his hand slowly up and down before the staring eyes. And then in a moment, in one amazing flash of enlightenment, the truth was made clear to him. These "trances" were nothing more than a pose, a deliberate well-practised piece of acting, brilliant enough to stand any test except this cool, professional observation. For it was clear enough to Arthur that the old man before him was making an effort to keep his gaze fixed on some object beyond the interference of that deliberate testing hand. And that the effort became increasingly difficult to maintain. The effect of rapt contemplation began to break. The old withered face suddenly puckered into an expression of fierce indignation, his hands first trembled, and then gripped the arms of his chair, and his eyes turned upon Arthur with a look of desperate malignity. He was roused at last from his indifference. He was obviously shaking with rage. And, amazingly, he was impotent. The effect of calm power was stripped from him. He was nothing more than a pitiable old man in a furious, senile temper. He tried to speak and could only splutter. He grasped the stick that lay always ready to his hand, and had not the strength to strike more than the feeblest blow with it. Arthur did not even wince as that futile stroke fell upon his shoulders. "G-get away--get away," the old man stuttered. "Get out of my house...." With a great effort he raised himself from his chair, his face working, his knees trembling. Again he lifted his stick and feebly struck with it at Arthur. Then his knees gave way, and he crumpled pitifully, collapsing like a broken doll without making the least effort to save himself. Arthur bent over him, lifted him, laid him out on his back, and rapidly unfastened his collar.... There was nothing to be done but get him to bed. He knew that perfectly well. But first he must have help. He jumped up and flung open the door into the ante-room. "Eleanor," he said in a voice that he found difficult to control, "he has had a stroke. Send some one at once in the car for Fergusson. If he's not at the surgery they must go after him; find him somehow." Clear and suddenly familiar in his mind, as if it were a tune that he had been trying to recall, was a sentence that he had spoken to Hubert a few days earlier:-- "It might break him down if he were badly crossed," he had said. XIII The gates were standing open. They may have been opened in expectation of the coming of the specialist who might arrive at any minute, but even the garden wore a new aspect that morning. It was as if the wide airs of Sussex were creeping in and subtly perverting the seemly splendour of that suburban super-garden. Old Kenyon had been unconscious for twenty-four hours. Both Arthur and Fergusson knew with almost absolute certainty what was the matter with him. A cerebral artery had been ruptured and the area of damaged tissue appeared to be slowly extending. No remedy was possible. The chances were that within another twenty-four hours he would die without recovering consciousness. But he had trained nurses in constant attendance and a specialist had been sent for. Scurr had gone with Fergusson to fetch him in the big car. Arthur had been up with the unconscious man all night, and had come out into the garden now for a breath of fresh air. When he came downstairs he had found himself a centre of burning interest. All the family, except the one he most wanted to be with, were drawn towards him as if he were the newly found vortex of a whirlpool. They tried desperately hard to be casual and decorous, but they found it impossible to keep their eyes off him. It seemed to Arthur that they almost gaped. They were all extraordinarily wide-awake and feverishly inactive. The women's fancy-work had not been taken out, nor the daily papers opened. The news they desired to learn that morning was not to be found in the _Times_. They drifted about the drawing-room and library, and held brief, useless conversations with one another. But when Arthur had passed through the suite a little after eleven o'clock looking for Eleanor, they had suddenly found a focus. He had seen the look of expectancy on their faces and had thrown them a crumb of news. "He is still unconscious," he had said, and had understood that they asked more from him than that. Then, feeling that he could not endure the greediness of their attention, he had beckoned Joe Kenyon to come out with him into the garden. They had come within sight of the open gates before either of them spoke. "No hope, I suppose?" his uncle said then, as if released by the sight of the Sussex lane. "I should say absolutely none," Arthur replied. "Not likely to recover consciousness before the end?" "Extremely unlikely," Arthur said. "In fact, scarcely possible, I think." Joe Kenyon began to whistle softly between his teeth and abruptly checked himself. "If this property comes to me, I shall have that blasted wall taken down," he remarked, and continued, "You know, Arthur, I'm not going to play the hypocrite, especially to you. This isn't an occasion for mourning. It's as if we'd been living in the dark for half a lifetime and some one had taken the roof off and let the air and light in. I--I feel as if I can see the sky again for the first time in thirty years. It'd be loathsome, crawling hypocrisy to pretend that I'm the least sorry." "Oh, obviously," Arthur agreed. "But I say, how did it happen?" his uncle asked. "We haven't the shakiest notion you know--and...." "I just murdered him," Arthur said quietly. "Eh! What's that?" Joe Kenyon ejaculated. "For all intents and purposes," Arthur explained. "I opposed him, and he tried to take cover--went into one of his 'trances.' Did you know they weren't trances, by the way?" "No. What the devil were they, then?" "Pretences, pieces of acting, fantasies of his own making. He used to hide himself in them, as it were. Dream what a great and powerful being he was, able to keep you all in attendance, keep you waiting for ten minutes in the middle of dinner if he liked, while he enjoyed the sense of holding you there. And when he was in danger of losing his temper with me, he tried to get under that cover, to shelter himself, rehabilitate his own pride." "And you? What did you do?" "Treated him as if he were a case in a clinic. Began to test his reactions. And--and--well, he couldn't keep it up." "And then?" "Couldn't control himself. Lost his temper--frightfully. Whacked at me with his stick--and collapsed. It was losing his temper did it--first time he has done it probably for forty years. Had you ever seen him lose his temper?" Joe Kenyon considered that question for a moment or two before he said, "No! That was something he always had in reserve, something we were afraid of. He was always terrible to us, in a way, and we felt that if he went one step further he'd be--oh! devastating." "He wasn't, you know," Arthur said. "He wasn't terrible, I mean. Not in the least. He was essentially a weak man and not even clever. I sat up with him all last night, and everything came to me as clearly as if I'd read it somewhere. He has altered, you see, in face and expression since he became unconscious. His chin seems to have retreated and all the lines round his mouth have changed. I couldn't keep the idea of a _rat_ out of my mind when I looked at him. I got that effect somehow--something horribly intent and voracious but essentially weak. I remember looking at a dead rat in the stables when I was a boy. It was lying on its back with its feeble little front paws stuck up and the feet dangling.... And he had just the same expression on his face--ineffectual and yet cruel--as if his one regret was that he couldn't hurt any one again. I was almost sorry that he couldn't--especially as I had murdered him." "Oh, nonsense, Arthur; nonsense," his uncle interposed. "Don't say that." "True, though, in a way, isn't it?" Arthur said. "Truer than you guess, because I had known that it might kill him if he had a great shock. I'd even said so to Hubert, a few days ago--Sunday, I think it was. But I'd forgotten it. When I was telling him that I meant to go and take Eleanor with me whatever he did, I never once considered that it might be too much for him. And that was criminal carelessness in a medical man. I've been thinking about it more or less ever since." He paused and looked ahead of him, out through the gate into the Sussex lane, and it was manifest that he was confessing to himself rather than to Joe Kenyon as he continued: "Not that I propose to take any responsibility for his death. That wouldn't help any one. It happened so, and I shan't forget it, but that's all. Fergusson knows. There's no need to worry about it. Only--I've grown up. I'm not quite the same man I was twenty-four hours ago. I came down here to get back some of the years of youth that I'd lost in the war. Well, they're gone for good and all. I shall never be able to recover them now." "Oh, nonsense!" his uncle repeated, taking his arm. "You've got a thundering good time ahead of you." Arthur smiled. "I've got the best time any man could have ahead of me," he said, "but I shall enjoy it as a man, not as a boy. I didn't say that I regretted the passing of my youth, uncle." "No, no, of course not," Joe Kenyon agreed. "And look here, old boy, we've been talking about you since yesterday morning, about you and Eleanor, that is; and Turner and I--and Hubert, of course--are quite agreed that if the old man has, after all, overlooked you in his will, that we shall take it for granted that it was just an oversight--though probably Eleanor will be left pretty well off. If he had a favourite, it was Eleanor." "Good of you, uncle," Arthur replied warmly. "Awfully good and generous of you, but you must see that I couldn't take a farthing, even if the old man left it to me." "I don't see why not," Joe Kenyon began, but Arthur stopped him by saying. "No! Absolutely! In no circumstances whatever! It isn't simply that I could not bear to profit now by his death--though that counts. But--well--perhaps it needn't apply to you and the rest of them--but last night, while I was watching that poor thing on the bed, I realised so profoundly that his one source of power had been his money. I assure you that he was a weak man and not clever. If you can't believe me, go upstairs and look at him. And without his money he would have had no authority, no power over you of any sort. It was just his money that gave him the chance to spoil all your lives. Oh, Lord! I'm talking like a father to you. Honestly, uncle, I feel nearly old enough for that, this morning. Want of sleep, perhaps. It does clear the head in a queer way sometimes." "Hm! I dare say you're right, Arthur, about the money," Joe Kenyon mumbled. "I--I hope we shall make a better use of it. I don't think any of us has got the old man's cruelty--he was damned cruel, that's true enough." "Not even Miss Kenyon?" Arthur put in. "Esther? Oh, well! I don't know. Perhaps a little. But she has suffered like all the rest of us, and learnt her lesson." There was no time to reply to that; for while Joe Kenyon was still speaking, the car turned in at the front gates, and they both hurried forward to meet it. When it stopped at their signal to Scurr, the specialist was introduced, and then both Arthur and his uncle got into the car, and they all went on together up to the house. The conference in the old man's bedroom was a very short one, and the specialist had nothing to add to what they already knew, save the prestige of his authority. He was a tired, gray-looking little man of fifty or so, with an absent-minded manner, but when his anticipated acceptance of the diagnosis had been given, he looked keenly at Fergusson and said,-- "Made a lot of money, didn't he? All by his own efforts." "It's more than half a million I've been told," Fergusson answered. The specialist faintly shrugged his shoulders. "Wouldn't think it to look at him now. What?" he commented, and with the indifference of his profession he carelessly pinched the retreating chin of the little lax figure in the great bed. "The predatory type, I presume," he added thoughtfully. "Ay; he was that," Fergusson agreed. "More cunning than clever, though he had eyes that made you think of the eyes of a kite when he was roused. But he has altered greatly since this seizure. Maybe you'd hardly credit it now, but he has been a rare autocrat with his family." "You see," Arthur put in, "he had them so absolutely in his power. He could leave his money as he liked, and they were all dependent upon him." "And yet he must have had a certain generosity," Fergusson added, "for he kept the whole lot of them." The specialist looked shrewdly at Arthur and slightly pursed his mouth. "That was his one interest and amusement, perhaps," he said. "The love of power of a naturally weak man. It's common enough if you care to look for it. Who succeeds?" "We don't know yet," Arthur replied. "His lawyer is coming down by train this afternoon, and will stay here until the end--in case of a possible return to consciousness. But I suppose he'll tell us nothing until the old man's dead." "You interested?" the specialist asked. "No," Arthur said. "Not even to the extent of a five-pound note." "You know that much, then?" "I know that for certain," Arthur affirmed. Fergusson whistled softly under his breath, but made no other comment. They were quite a large party at dinner that night. Ken Turner had been telephoned for, and had come down by the same train as Mr Fleet, the solicitor. Joe Kenyon had taken his father's place at the head of the table, but occupied it as deputy only, for his sister and not his wife faced him from the other end. They had nearly finished, when one of the trained nurses entered the room and made a sign across the table to Arthur. He jumped up at once and followed her. He knew even before she spoke to him just outside the dining-room door why she had fetched him. There was nothing more to be done, but he sat for a few minutes beside the dead, remembering that he had promised some kind of autopsy to insure the body against premature burial. He would keep that promise, although he knew that the precaution was quite unnecessary. Also he thought again of the dead rat in the stable at home. The likeness was more pronounced than ever. He found them all collected in the drawing-room when he returned to make his expected announcement. "Yes! It's all over. He is dead," he said gravely, in answer to the look of inquiry they thrust at him. And with that statement his function in the household ceased. They had eyes for him no longer. The centre of interest had shifted from the doctor to the lawyer.... His head drooped, he was very tired, and he went over and sat down by Eleanor. They had made no new plans, but he did not want to discuss their future just then. He wanted nothing but to be near her, to rest in his confidence of her love for him. She alone could give him peace and quietness, and he felt worn out. They sat close together in silence, happy in each other's company, and attentive to nothing that was going on around them until their interest was aroused by the voice of Mr Fleet, speaking in a raised tone that was evidently meant to carry. He was a tall, spare man, almost completely bald, with a long thin nose and an expression of careworn good nature. He looked, Arthur thought, rather like a benevolent old stork, and he kept clearing his throat as he spoke with a queer little croak that was curiously birdlike. It seemed that he was painfully aware at this moment of the importance of what he had to say and that the knowledge embarrassed him. Whether by accident or design, a certain grouping had been effected that gave him the centre of the stage. He was standing with his back to the great carved stone mantelpiece that was one of the features of the Hartling drawing-room, with a clear space between him and the eight people who in their characteristic ways were exhibiting the various indications of the intense excitement that was stirring them. After all those years of waiting and uncertainty they were about to learn the truth, at last. They had awakened from their long nightmare of impalpable, inoppugnable resistances to the grateful sanity of everyday life. And they hoped. They had good cause for hope. After all, it could not be so bad for them now. The old man had never had any spite against them. He had been generous in his own quiet way. He would have done the right thing by them. Only Miss Kenyon, Arthur thought, looked doubtful and uneasy. She sat a little apart from the others and something of her habitual resolution and confidence had gone from her. For the first time since he had known her, Arthur saw her truly as her father's daughter. She too, perhaps, suffered from some intrinsic weakness of character, a weakness that had been hidden by the commanding office she had held in the household.... "No need in this case," the embarrassed lawyer was saying, "to await any formal occasion. I have, as a matter of fact, the will in my bag upstairs. But it is so unusually simple and--and I might almost say drastic, that no direct reference to it is necessary." Arthur and Eleanor looked at each other with a little start of surprise. They had never before doubted the legend of that untidy will. "Er--er--er--in short," Mr Fleet continued, wiping his forehead, "the will could, in this case, certainly have been written on a half-sheet of note-paper. Er--er--it was made in '84, thirty-six years ago, soon after Mrs Kenyon's death. And--er--er--" his hesitation and distress became positively painful--"er--in short--he--he left everything absolutely to Miss Kenyon--to Miss Esther Kenyon--at her absolute disposal--er--there were no legacies of any other kind, and Miss Kenyon is the sole executrix." Eleanor's hand had crept into Arthur's and at this announcement clasped his with such a sudden grip of anguish that he almost cried out. Then his heart seemed to miss a beat as realisation burst on him, and his eyes turned as the eyes of every other person in the room inevitably turned, to stare at Miss Kenyon. She was sitting very upright in her chair, gazing out before her with a look of rapt contemplation. Her right hand was lightly clenched as if she grasped a sceptre, and her widely opened eyes had the cruel, predatory stare of a hawk. And clear and bright, a text from the Old Testament leapt into Arthur's mind. How did it go? "Whereas my father did lade you with a heavy yoke, I will add to your yoke: my father hath chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions." Eleanor had suddenly leaned upon him and the grasp of her hand was relaxed. +-------------------------------------------------+ |Transcriber's note: | | | |Obvious typographic errors have been corrected. | | | +-------------------------------------------------+ 
57690	----	THE LUCK OF THE VAILS BY E. F. BENSON. * * * * * The Luck of the Vails. 12mo. Cloth, $1.50. This romance of modern life is characterized by intense and culminating interest and remarkable dramatic power. The reader's attention is absorbed at the outset, and he is held in suspense to the last of these vivid and fascinating pages. Mammon and Co. 12mo. Cloth, $1.50. This novel by a popular author deals with personages living in the same society that was characterized by "Dodo" and "The Rubicon." Mr. Benson is thoroughly acquainted with the society in which he places the scenes of his novels of London life. In "Mammon & Co." the good genius of the tale is an American girl. The book will be found to be one of exceeding interest throughout. Dodo. _A Detail of the Day._ 12mo. Cloth, $1.00; paper, 50 cents. "'Dodo' is a delightfully witty sketch of the 'smart' people of society.... The writer is a true artist."--_London Spectator._ The Rubicon. 12mo. Cloth, $1.00; paper, 50 cents. "The anticipations which must have been formed by all readers of 'Dodo' will in no wise be disappointed by 'The Rubicon.' The new work is well written, stimulating, unconventional, and, in a word, characteristic. Intellectual force is never absent, and the keen observation and knowledge of character, of which there is abundant evidence, are aided by real literary power."--_Birmingham Post._ D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, NEW YORK. THE LUCK OF THE VAILS * * * * * _A NOVEL_ * * * * * By E. F. BENSON AUTHOR OF DODO, MAMMON AND CO. ETC. [Illustration] * * * * * NEW YORK D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 1901 COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY D. APPLETON and COMPANY. CONTENTS PART I CHAPTER PAGE I. THE SHADOWS DANCE 1 II. THE COMING OF THE LUCK 13 III. THE SPELL BEGINS TO WORK 25 IV. THE STORY OF MR. FRANCIS 42 V. A POINT IN CASUISTRY 53 VI. THE POINT SOLVED--THE MEETING 63 VII. THE POINT IN CASUISTRY SOLVES ITSELF 81 VIII. THE SECOND RETURN TO VAIL 95 IX. CARDIAC 109 X. MR. FRANCIS IS BETTER 124 XI. MR. FRANCIS SEES HIS DOCTOR 141 XII. THE MEETING IN THE WOOD 154 XIII. HARRY ASKS A QUESTION 177 XIV. LADY OXTED'S IDEA 193 PART II XV. FROST 209 XVI. FIRE 234 XVII. A BIRD OF NIGHT 255 XVIII. RAIN 284 XIX. GEOFFREY LEAVES VAIL 302 XX. DR. ARMYTAGE ARRIVES 321 XXI. GEOFFREY MEETS THE DOCTOR 335 XXII. LADY OXTED HAS A BAD NIGHT 357 XXIII. THE MEETING IN GROSVENOR SQUARE 376 XXIV. JIM GOES TO BED 393 XXV. MR. FRANCIS SLEEPS 424 EPILOGUE 439 THE LUCK OF THE VAILS * * * * * PART I CHAPTER I THE SHADOWS DANCE The short winter's day was drawing to its close, and twilight, the steel and silver twilight of a windless frost, falling in throbs of clear dusk over an ice-bound land. The sun, brilliant but cold as an electric lamp, had not in all the hours of its shining been of strength sufficient to melt the rime congealed during the night before, and each blade of grass on the lawns, each spray and sprig on the bare hedgerows, had remained a spear of crystals minute and innumerable. The roofs of house and cottage sparkled and glimmered as with a soft internal lustre in the light of the moon, which had risen an hour before sunset, and the stillness of great cold, a thing more palpably motionless than even the stricken noonday of the south, gripped all in its vice. Silent, steadfast lights had sprung up and multiplied in the many-windowed village, but not a bird chirped nor dog barked. Labourers were home from the iron of the frozen fields, doors were shut, and the huge night was at hand. This sequestered village of Vail lies in a wrinkle of the great Wiltshire downs, and is traversed by the Bath road. The big inn, the Vail Arms, seems to speak of the more prosperous days of coach and horn, but now its significance to the shrill greyhounds of the railway is of the smallest, and they pass for the most part without even a shriek of salute. About a mile beyond it to the outward-bound traveller stands the big house, screened by some ten furlongs of park, and entering the gate he will find himself in a noble company of secular trees, beech in the majority, and of stately growth. Shortly before the house becomes visible a spacious piece of meadow land succeeds to the park; thence the road, passing over a broad stone bridge which spans the chalk stream flowing from the sheet of water above, is bounded on either side by terraced lawns of ancient and close-napped turf, intersected at intervals by gravel walks, and turning sharply to the right, follows a long box hedge once cut into tall and fantastic shapes. But it seems long to have lacked the shears and pruning hand, for all precision of outline has been lost, and what were once the formal figures of bird and beast have swelled into monstrous masses of deformed shape, wrought, you would think, by the imagination of a night hag into things inhuman. Here, as seen in the dim light, a thin neck would bulge into some ghastliness of a head, hydrocephalous or tumoured with long-standing disease; here a bird with dwindled body and scarecrow wings stood on the legs of a colossus; here conjecture would vainly seek for a reconstruction. The end of one of the wings of the house, which was built round three sides of a quadrangle, abutted on to this hedge so closely that a peacock with thick, bloated tail, peered into the gun-room window; in the centre of the gravel sweep rose a bronze Triton fountain bearded, like an old man, with long dependence of icicle. A bitter north wind had accompanied the early days of the frost, and this icy fringe had grown out sideways from the lip of the basin, blown aside even as it congealed. Flower beds, a ribbon of dark, untenanted earth, ran underneath the windows, which rose in three stories, small-paned and Jacobean. As dark fell, lights sprang out in the walls as the stars in the field of heaven, but to right and left of the front door there came through a row of windows, yet uncurtained, a redder and less constant gleam than the shining of oil or wax, now growing, now diminishing, leaping out at one moment to a great vividness, at the next suddenly dying down again, so that in the corners of the room there was a continual battle of shadows. Now, as the flames from the wood burning on the great open hearth grew dim, whole battalions of them would collect and gather again; with the kindling of some fresh stuff, they would be routed and disappear. This fitfulness of illumination played also strange tricks with the tapestries that hung on two of the four sides of the hall; figures started suddenly into being and were blotted out before the eye had clearly visualized them, and in the inconstancy of the light a nervous man might say to himself that stir and movement were going on among them; again they rode to hounds, or took the jesses off the hawk. The present is the heir of all the achievement of former ages, and while this great house with its mile-long avenue, its tapestries, its pictures, its air of magnificent English stability, finely represented all that had gone before, all that was going on now was inclosed in the two large arm-chairs drawn close to this ideal fire, in each of which sat a young man. They talked, but in desultory fashion, with frequent but not awkward pauses of some length, for any social duty of keeping the conversation going was to them quite outside a practical call. They had been shooting all this superb, frosty day, and the return to warmth and indoors, though productive of profound content, does not conduce to loquacity. "Yes, a bath would be a very good thing," said one; "but it is perhaps a question whether in the absolutely immediate future tea would not be a better!" This was too strong a suggestion to be merely called a hint, and the other rose. "Sorry, Geoffrey," he said, "I never ordered tea. I was thinking--no, I don't think I was thinking. Tea first, bath afterward," he added, meditatively. Geoffrey Langham stroked an imperceptible mustache. "That's what I was thinking," he said; "and I am glad to see you appreciate the importance of little things, Harry. Little things like tea and baths matter far the most." "Anyhow they occur much the oftenest," said Lord Vail. "I was beginning to be afraid tea wasn't going to occur at all," said Geoffrey. Harry Vail appeared to consider this. "You were wrong then," he said, "and you are on the way to become a sensuous voluptuary." "On the way?" said Geoffrey. "I have arrived. Ah! and tea is following my excellent example." The advent of lamps banished the mustering and dispersal of the leaping shadows and threw the two figures seated on either side of the tea table into strong light, and, taken together, into even stronger contrast. The birthright of a good digestion, you would say, had been given to each, and for no mess of pottage had either bartered the clear eye and firm leanness of perfect health; but apart from this, and a certain lithe youthfulness, it would have been hard at first sight even, when resemblances are more obvious than differences, to see a single point of likeness between the two. Geoffrey Langham, that sensuous voluptuary, seemed the seat and being of serene English cheerfulness, and his face, good-looking from its very pleasantness, contrasted strongly with that of the other, which was handsome in spite of a marked and grave reserve, that a stranger might easily have mistaken for sullenness. Indeed, many who might soon have ceased to be strangers had done so; and though Harry Vail had perhaps no enemies, he was in the forlorner condition of having very few friends. Indeed, had he been made to enumerate them, his list would have begun with Geoffrey, and it is doubtful whether it would not also have ended with him. But these agreeable influences of tea and light seemed to produce a briskening effect on the two, and their talk, which, since they came in, had touched a subject only to dismiss it, settled down into a more marked channel. "Yes, it is a queer sort of coming-of-age party for me," said Lord Vail, "and it really was good of you to come, Geoffrey. I wonder whether any one has ever come of age in so lonely a manner. I have only one relative in the world who can be called even distantly near. He comes this evening--oh, I told you that." "Your uncle," said Geoffrey. "Great-uncle, to be accurate. He is my grandfather's youngest brother, and, what is so odd, he is my heir. One always thinks of heirs as being younger than one's self." "Cut him off with a shilling," said Geoffrey. "Well, there isn't much more in any case, except this great barrack of a house. What there is, however, goes to him. And it can hardly be expected that he will marry and have children now." "How old is he?" asked Geoffrey. "Something over seventy." "And after him?" "The Lord knows! Anybody; the first person you meet if you walk down Piccadilly perhaps; perhaps you, perhaps the prime minister. Honestly, I haven't any idea." "Marry then, at once," said Geoffrey, "and disappoint the man in the street, and the prime minister, your uncle, and me." Harry Vail got up and stood with his back to the fire, stretching out his long-fingered hands to the blaze behind him. "What advice!" he said. "You might as well advise me to have a Greek nose. Some people have it, some do not; it is fate." "Marriage is a remarkably common fate," remarked Geoffrey, "commoner than a Greek nose. I have seen many married people without it." "It is commoner for certain sorts of people," said Harry; "but you know I----" and he stopped. "Well?" asked the other. "I am not of those sorts--the sorts who go smiling through the world and are smiled on in return. It was always the same with me. I am not truculent, or savage, or sulky, I believe, but somehow I remain friendless. I should be a hermit if there were any nowadays." "Liver!" said Geoffrey decidedly. "The fellow of twenty-one who says that sort of thing about himself has got liver. 'Self-Analysis, or the Sedentary Life,' a tract by Geoffrey Langham. Here endeth the gospel." Harry smiled. "I don't think about my character, as a rule," he said. "I don't lead a sedentary life, and I haven't got liver. But if one is a recluse it is as well to recognise the fact. I haven't got any real friends like everybody else." "Thank you," said Geoffrey; "don't apologize." "I shall if I like; indeed, I think I will. No one but a friend would have come down here." "Oh, I don't know about that," said the other; "I would stay with people I positively loathed for shooting no worse than we had to-day. In the matter of friends, what you said was inane. You might have heaps of friends if you chose. But you don't find friends by going into a room alone and locking the door behind you." "Ah! I do that, do I?" said Harry, with a certain eager interest in his tone. "Just a shade. You might have heaps of friends." "That may be, or may not. It is certain that I have not. Oh, well, this is unprofitable. Take a cigarette from the recluse." They smoked in silence a minute or two. "Your uncle?" asked Geoffrey; "he comes to-night, you said." "Yes; I expect him before dinner. You've never seen him?" "Never. What is he like?" Harry pointed to a picture that hung above the fireplace. "Like that," he said--"exactly like that." Geoffrey looked at it a moment, shading his eyes from the lamp. "Fancy-dress ball, I suppose?" he said. "No; the costume of the period," said Harry. "It is not my uncle at all, but an ancestor of sorts. The picture is by Holbein, but, oddly enough, it is the very image of Uncle Francis." "Francis Vail, second baron," spelled out Geoffrey, from the faded lettering on the frame. "Yes, his name was Francis, too." "What is that great cup he is holding?" asked the other. "Ah! I wondered whether you would notice that. I will show it you this evening. At least, I am certain that what I have found is it." "It looks rather a neat thing," said Geoffrey. "But I can't say as much for the second baron, Harry. He seems to me a wicked old man." "There is no doubt that he was. Among other charming deeds, he almost certainly killed his own father. He was smothered in debt, came down here to try to get his father to pay up for him, and met with a pretty round refusal, it appears. That night the house was broken into, and the old man was found murdered in his bed. The burglar seems to have been a curious man; he took nothing--not a teaspoon." "Good Lord! I am glad I'm not of ancestral family. Which is the room, _the_ room?" Harry laughed. "The one at the end of the passage upstairs. Shall I tell them to move your things there?" "That is true hospitality," said Geoffrey; "but I won't bother you. Do either of them walk?" "Francis does. So if you meet that gentleman about, and find he is unsubstantial, you will know that you have seen a ghost." "And if substantial, it will only be your uncle." "Exactly; so you needn't faint immediately." Geoffrey got up and examined the picture with more attention. "If your uncle is like that," he said, "I'm not so sure that I wouldn't sooner meet the ghost." "I'm afraid it is too late to put him off now," said Harry; "and, unless there is a railway accident, you will certainly meet him at dinner. But I don't understand your objection to my poor old ancestor's portrait. I have always wondered that such an awful old wretch could be made to look so charming." "There is hell in his eyes!" said Geoffrey. Harry left his chair and leaned on the chimney-piece also, looking up at the picture. "Certainly, if you think he looks wicked," he said, "you will see no resemblance between him and my uncle. Uncle Francis is a genial, pink-faced old fellow, with benevolent white hair. When I used to come down here, years ago, before my father's death, for the holidays, he always used to be awfully good to me. But he has been abroad the last three years, and I haven't seen him. But I remember him as the most charming old man." "Then, in essentials, he is not like that portrait," said Geoffrey, turning away. "Well, I'm for the bath." "After you. Turn on the hot water when you're out, Geoff." Harry did not immediately sit down again when his friend left him, but continued for a little while to look at the second baron, trying to see in it what Geoffrey had seen, what he himself had always failed to see. He moved from where he stood to where Geoffrey had been standing, still looking at it, when suddenly, no doubt by some curious play of light on the canvas, there flitted across the face for a moment some expression indefinably sinister. It was there but for a flash, and vanished again, and by no change in his point of view could he recapture it. Soon he gave up the attempt, and, with only an idle and fleeting wonder at the illusion, he sat down, took up a book and yawned over a page that conveyed nothing to him. Then frankly and honestly he shut it up, and lay comfortably back in his chair, looking at the fire. He must even have dropped into a doze, for, apparently without transition, in the strange unformulated fashion of dreams, he thought that his uncle had come, dressed (and this did not seem remarkable) in the fashion of the Holbein portrait, and having greeted him with his well-remembered, hearty manner, had sat down in the other of the two arm-chairs; and, though unconscious of having gone to sleep, he certainly came to himself with a start, to find the chair opposite untenanted, and the sound of his own name ringing in his ears. Immediately afterward it was repeated, and, looking up to the gallery that ran across one side of the hall and communicated with certain of the bedrooms, he saw Geoffrey leaning over in his dressing-gown. "Bath's ready," he said; "and the portrait is looking at you." "Thanks. I've been to sleep, I think. Did you call me more than once, Geoff?" "No; the other time it was the second baron." Harry was still a little startled. "You really only called once?" he asked again. "Yes; only once. Why?" "Nothing. Halloo! I hear wheels. That must be my uncle. Turn the hot water off, there's a good chap. I must just see him before I come upstairs." CHAPTER II THE COMING OF THE LUCK The dining room at Vail was of the same antique spaciousness as the hall, and, as there on the lounger, so here on the diner, looked down a spacious company of ancestors. For so small a party it had been thought by the butler that conviviality would be given a better chance if, on this frosty night, he laid them a small table within range of the fire rather than that the three should be cut off, as it were, on a polar island in the centre of that vast sea of floor. And, indeed, though naturally a modest man, Templeton felt a strong self-approval at the success of his kind thought, for, from the moment of sitting down, a cheerful merriness had held the table, rising sometimes into loud hilarity, and never sinking into the content of growing repletion, which is held in England to be the proper equivalent for joviality. But if it was Templeton in part who was responsible for so desirable an atmosphere, there was credit to be given to at least one of the diners. Pleasant and pink was Mr. Francis's face; his hair, though silver, still crisp and vigorous, his mouth a perpetual smile. In absolute repose even a sunshine lingered there, as in a bottle of well-matured wine, and its repose left it but to give place to laughter. All dinner through he had been the mouthpiece of delightful anecdote, of observations shrewd but always kindly, rising sometimes almost to the dry levels of wit, and never failing in that genial humour without which all conversation, not directed to a definite end, becomes intolerable. Though talking much, he was no usurper of the inalienable right of the others to wag the tongue; and though his own wagged to vibration, he was never tedious. Even in the matter of riddles, introduced by Geoffrey, he had a contribution or two to make, of so extravagant a sort that this ordinarily dismal mode of entertainment was for the moment rendered delightful. He unbent to the level of the young men, to the futility of most disconnected conversation, without ever seeming to unbend; you would have said that his narrow, clerically opening shirt, with its large cravat and massive gold studs, covered the heart of a boy, that the brains of a clever youth lay beneath that silver hair, prematurely white, indeed, yet not from grief or the conduct of a world long unkind. In person he was somewhat short, "without the inches of a Vail," as he himself said, and pleasantly inclined to stoutness, but to the stoutness which may come early to a healthy appetite and a serene digestion, for it was not accompanied either by pallid flabbiness or colour unduly high, and by the artificial light scarcely a wrinkle could be scrutinized on his beaming face. His dress was precise and scrupulous, yet with a certain antique touch about it, as of one who had been something of a buck in the sixties; his linen far more than clean and fresh, and of a snowiness which certainly implied special injunction to the washerwoman. His trouser pockets were cut, we may elegantly say, not at the side of those indispensable coverings, but toward the front of the bow window, and there dangled from the lip of one a fob of heavy gold seals. His watch chain he wore round his neck, and at the bottom of his waistcoat pocket there reposed, you may be sure, a yellow-faced watch, large and loud-ticking--an unerring timekeeper. They had now approached the end of dinner; decanters glowed on the table, and a silver cigarette box, waiting untouched, at Mr. Francis's request, till the more serious business of wine was off the palate, stood by Harry's dessert plate. Already, even in this second hour of their acquaintance, the three felt like old friends, and as the wine was on its first round, the two young men were bent eagerly forward to hear the conclusion of a most exciting little personal anecdote told them by Mr. Francis. He had to perfection that great essential of the narrator--intense interest and appreciation of what he was himself saying, and the climax afforded him the most obvious satisfaction. In his right hand he held his first glass of untasted port, and, after an interval accorded to laughter, he suddenly rose. "And," he said, "comes the pleasantest moment of our delightful evening. Harry, my dear boy, here is long life and happiness to you, from the most sincere of your well-wishers. And for myself I pray that a very old man may some time dance your children on his knee. God bless you, my dearest fellow!" He drank the brimming glass honestly to the last drop, and held out his hand to the young man with a long and hearty grasp. Then, with quick tact, seeing the embarrassment of remark-making in Harry's face, he sat down again, and without pause enticed the subject off the boards. "How well I remember your dear father coming of age!" he said. "Dear me, it must be forty years ago, nearly twice as long a time as you have lived; there's a puzzle for Mr. Langham, like the one he gave me to do. It was this very port, I should say, in which we drank his health. The yellow seal, is it not, Harry? Yes, yes; your grandfather laid it down in the year forty-five, and we used to drink it only on very great occasions, for he would say to me that it was a gift he had put in entail for his grandchildren, and was not for us. And so it has turned out! He was very fond of port, too, was dear old Dennis; it was not a gift that cost him nothing. You would scarcely remember your grandfather, Harry?" "I just remember him, Uncle Francis," said the lad, "but only as a very old man. I don't think he liked children for whenever he saw me he would have no more than a word or two to say, and then he would send for you." "Yes, yes, so he would, so he would," said Mr. Francis; "and we used to have great games together, did we not, Harry? Games, did I say? Indeed, we seemed to be real red Indians in the wilderness, and Crusaders, with paper lances. Dear me! I could play such games still. Hide-and-seek, too, a grand business. It requires, as poor Antrobus used to say, all the strategy of a general directing a campaign, combined with the unflinching courage of the private who has to go straight forward, expecting artillery to open on him every minute. Yes, and the old man felt it, too; I have seen him playing it with his grandchildren when he was prime minister, and, upon my word, he was more earnest about it than the young people!" Coffee had come in, and after a few minutes the three passed out into the hall. At the door, however, Harry paused, and stayed behind in the dining room. Mr. Francis took Geoffrey's arm in his affectionate way and the two strolled into the hall. "It has been so pleasant to me to meet you, my dear boy," he was saying; "for years ago I knew some of your people well. No, I do not think I ever knew your father. But, you must know, I am bad at surnames: one only calls the tradespeople Mr. So-and-so, and I shall call you Geoffrey. You are Harry's best friend; I have a claim upon you. Fine hall, is it not? And the pictures--well, they are a wonderful set. There is nothing like them for completeness in England, if one excepts the royal collections; and, indeed, I think there is less rubbish here." The portraits were lit by small shaded lamps which stood beneath each, so that the whole light was thrown on to the picture and the beholder left undazzled. Mr. Francis had strolled up to the fireplace, still retaining Geoffrey's arm, and together they looked at the picture of Francis, second baron. "A wonderful example of Holbein," said Mr. Francis; "I do not know a finer. They tried hard to get it for the exhibition a few years ago, but it couldn't leave Vail. I should have been quite uncomfortable at the thought of it out of the house. Now, some people have told me--Ah! I see you have noticed it, too." "Surely there is an extraordinary likeness between you and it," said Geoffrey. "Harry just pointed to it when I asked him what you were like." Mr. Francis's eyes pored on the picture with a sort of fascination. "A wonderful bit of painting," he said. "And how clearly you see not only the man's body, but his soul! That is the true art of the portrait painter." "But not always pleasant for the sitter," remarked Geoffrey. "I am not so sure. You imply, no doubt, that it was not pleasant for this old fellow." "I should not think his soul was much to be proud of," said Geoffrey. "You mean he looks wicked?" said Mr. Francis, still intent on the canvas. "Well, God forgive him! I am afraid he must have been. But that being so, I suspect he was as much in love with his own soul as a good man is for he does not look to me a weak man--one who is forever falling and repenting. There is less of Macbeth and more of his good lady in old Francis. Infirm of purpose? No, no, I think not!" He turned abruptly away from the picture, and broke out into a laugh. "He was a wicked old man, we are afraid," he said, "and I am exactly like him." "Ah! that is not fair," cried Geoffrey. "My dear boy, I was only chaffing. And here is Harry; what has he got?" Harry had come after them as they spoke thus together, carrying in his hand a square leather case. The thing seemed to be of some weight. "I wanted to show you and Geoff what I have found, Uncle Francis," he said. "I thought perhaps you could tell me about it. It was in one of the attics--of all places in the world--hidden, it seemed, behind some old pictures. Templeton and I found it." Mr. Francis whisked round with even more than his accustomed vivacity of movement at Harry's words. "Yes, yes," he said, with some impatience. "Open it, then, my dear boy, open it!" An old lock of curious work secured the leather strap which fastened the case, but this dangled loose from it, attached to its hasp. "We could find no key for it," explained Harry, "and had to break it open." As he spoke, he drew from the case an object swathed in wash leather, but the outline was clearly visible beneath its wrappings. "Ah! it is so," said Mr. Francis, below his breath, and as Harry unfolded the covering they all stood silent. This done, he held up to the light what it contained. It was a large golden goblet with two handles, of a size perhaps to hold a couple of quarts of liquor, and even by lamplight it was a thing that dazzled the eye and made the mouth to water. But solid gold as it was, and of chaste and exquisite workmanship, there was scarce an inch of it that was not worth more than the whole value of the gold and the craft bestowed thereon, so thickly was it incrusted with large and precious stones. Just below the lip of the cup ran a ring of rubies of notable size and wonderful depth of colour; and below, at a little interval, six emerald stars, all clear-set in the body of the cup. The lower part was chased with acanthus leaves, each outlined in pearls, and up the fluted stem climbed lordly sapphires. Sapphires again traced the rim of the foot, and in each handle was clear-set a row of diamonds--no chips and dust, but liquid eyes and lobes of light. Halfway down the bowl of the cup, between the emerald stars and the points of the acanthus leaves, ran a plain panel of gold on which was engraved, in small, early English characters, some text that encircled the whole. Harry was standing close under the lamp as he took off the covering, and remained there a moment, holding in his hand the gorgeous jewel, and looking at it with a curiously fixed attention, unconscious of the others. Then he handed it to his uncle. "Tell me about it; what is it, Uncle Francis?" he asked; and involuntarily, as the old man took it, he glanced at the picture of Francis, second baron, who in the portrait held, beyond a doubt, the same treasure that they were now examining. Mr. Francis did not at once reply, but handled the cup for a little while in silence, with awe and solemnity in his attitude and expression. As he turned it this way and that in his grasp, jewel after jewel caught the light and shone refracted in points of brilliant colour on his face. The burnished band on which was engraved the circling of the text cut a yellow line of reflection across his nose and cheeks, which remained steady, but over the rest of his face gleams of living colour shone and passed; and now as a ruby, now an emerald, sent their direct rays into his eyes, they would seem lit inside by a gleam of red or green. At length he looked up. "Hear what the thing says of itself," he said. "I will read it you." Then, turning the cup till he had found the beginning of the text, he read slowly, the cup revolving to the words: "When the Luck of the Vails is lost, Fear not fire nor rain nor frost; When the Luck is found again, Fear both fire and frost and rain." "Very pretty," said Geoffrey, with a critical air, but Mr. Francis made no reply. His eyes were still fixed on the jewel. "But what is it?" asked Harry. "This? The cup?" he said. "It is what I have read to you. It is the Luck of the Vails." Geoffrey laughed. "You've got it, Harry, anyhow," he said, "for weal or woe. How does it run? Fear fire and frost and rain. Take care of yourself, old man, and don't smoke in bed, and don't skate over deep water." Mr. Francis turned to him quickly, with a sudden recovery of his briskness. "You and I would risk all that, would we not, Geoffrey," he said, "to have found such a beautiful thing?--Yes, Harry, I see you have noticed it. There it is in old Francis's hand in the picture. Where else should it be if not there? Whether he made it or not I can't tell you, but that is its first appearance, as far as we know." Still holding it, he looked at the portrait, then stretched it out to Harry. "There, take it," he said quickly. "But tell us all about it," said Harry. "What happened to it afterward? How is it I never heard of it?" "Your father would never speak of it," said Mr. Francis; "nor your grandfather either. Your father never saw it, and your grandfather only once, when he was quite a little boy. Neither could bear to speak of it when it was lost. And so it was in the attic all the time!" Harry's eyes were sparkling; a sudden animation seemed to possess him. "Tell us from the beginning," he said. He was already wrapping the goblet up again, and Mr. Francis looked greedily at it till the last jewel had been hidden in the wash leather. "Well, it is a strange story, and a short one," he said, "for so little is known of it. It has appeared and disappeared several times since Holbein painted it there, as unaccountably as it has appeared again now. In the attic all the time!" he exclaimed again. "But the legend; what does the legend mean?" asked Harry. "I have no idea. Perhaps it is some old rhyme, perhaps it is a mere conceit of the goldsmith. But, be that as it may, those of your house who have possessed the Luck always seemed to think that it brought them luck. It was in old Francis's time, you know, that coal was found on your Derbyshire estate, which so enriched him for a while. In his son's time certainly the Luck disappeared, for we have a letter of his about it, and as certainly the field of coal came to an end. It appeared again some eighty years later, and again disappeared; and then the grandfather of your grandfather found it. He, you know, married the wealthy Barbara Devereux, and it was he who showed the Luck to your grandfather. Then it was lost for the last time, and with it all his money, in the South-Sea Bubble." Harry looked a shade disappointed at this bald narrative. "Is that all?" he asked. "Where do the fire, and frost, and rain come in?" Mr. Francis laughed. "Well, oddly enough, old Francis was burned to death in his bed, and Mark Vail was drowned. Harry Vail, the last holder of it, was frozen to death in his travelling carriage crossing the St. Gothard. But a man must die somehow; is it not so? Poor, wicked old Francis, he thought to bring a curse on the house, if it was indeed he who made the Luck, but how futile, how futile! Did he think that the elements were in league with some occult power of magic and darkness that he possessed? Ah! no; beneficent Nature is not controlled by such a hand. He knows that well maybe now, and perhaps therein is his chastisement, for, indeed, he was a man of devilish mind." CHAPTER III THE SPELL BEGINS TO WORK Mr. Francis was by choice an early riser, and next morning, before either of the young men were awake, he had been splashing and gasping in his cold tub, had felt with the keenest enjoyment the genial afterglow produced on his braced and invigorated skin by the application of the rough towel, and was now out on the terrace, pacing briskly along the dry gravel walk on this adorable winter morning, waiting cheerfully for his desired breakfast. Now and then he would break into a nimble trot for fifty paces, or even give a little skip in the air as a child does, from the sheer exhilaration of his pulses. His thoughts, too, must have been as sparkling as the morning itself, as brisk and cheery as his own physical economy, for from time to time he would troll out a bar or two of some lusty song, or stop to chirrup with pursed lips to the stiff, half-frozen birds, and his pleasant, close-shaven face was continually wreathed in smiles. Here was one at least in whom old age had brought no spell of freezing to laggard blood, no dulling of that zest of life which is so often and so erroneously considered as an attribute of youth only; life was still immensely enjoyable, and all things were delightful to his sympathetic eye. Such a buoyancy of spirits is a most engaging thing, provided only it be natural and unforced. But too often the old, who remain young, have the aspect as of grizzly kittens; their spirits are but a parody of youthfulness, their antics broken-winded and spasmodic. In a moment they fall from the heights of irresponsible gaiety to an equally unwarrantable churlishness; they maintain no level way; their tempers are those of jerking marionettes, a performance of jointed dolls. But how different was the joyousness of Mr. Francis! Nothing could be more native to him than his morning exhilaration. Authentic was the merriment that sparkled in his light-blue eyes, authentic the lightness of his foot as it tripped along the gravel walk; and none could doubt that his fine spirits were effortless and unaffected. To reach so ripe an age as that to which Mr. Francis had attained means, even to those whose life has lain in the pleasantest lines, to have had to bear certain trials, sorrows, misunderstandings, necessarily incident to the mere passage of years. To bear these bravely and without bitterness is the part of any robust nature; to bear them with unabated cheerfulness and without any loss of the zest for life is a rarer gift; and the silver-haired old gentleman who paced so gaily up and down the terraced walks, while he waited for young men to have their fill of sleep and make a tardy appearance, was a figure not without galantry. Here were no impatient gestures; he was hungry, but the time of waiting would not be shortened by fretfulness, nor had he any inclination to so unamiable a failing, and for nearly half an hour he pursued his cheery walk up and down. At length the welcome booming of the gong sounded distantly, and he tripped toward the house. Harry was down, the clock pointing to an indulgent half past nine, but the youthful moroseness of morning sat on his brow. To so old a traveller through life as his uncle, the ways of weaning this were manifold, and he broke into speech. "Splendid morning, my dear boy," he said; "and the ice, they tell me, bears. What will you do? What shall we do? Are you shooting to-day, or skating? And will you like to take a tramp round the old place with me, as you suggested last night?" Harry was examining dishes on the side-table with a supercilious air. "Very cold, is it not?" he said. "We were thinking of shooting. Do you shoot, Uncle Francis?" "I will shoot with pleasure, if you will let me," he said. "Yes, it is cold--too cold for pottering about, as you say. Fish cakes, eggs and bacon, cold game. Yes, I'll begin with a fish cake. What a hungry place Vail is! I am famished, literally famished. And where is Geoffrey?" "Geoffrey was going to his bath when I came down," said Harry. "It is to be hoped he will be more nearly awake after it. He had one eye open only when I saw him." "Fine gift to be able to sleep like that," said Mr. Francis; "I heard you two boys go up to bed last night, and sat an hour reading after that. But I awoke at eight, as I always do, and got up." Harry's morose mood was on the thaw. "And have you been waiting for us since then, Uncle Francis?" he said. "Really, I am awfully sorry. We'll have breakfast earlier to-morrow. It was stupid of me." "Not a bit, not a bit, Harry. I like a bit of a walk before breakfast. Wonderful thing for the circulation after your bath. Ah, here's Geoffrey.--Good-morning, my dear boy!" "We'll shoot, to-day, Geoff, as we settled," said Harry. "Uncle Francis will come with us. Wake up, you pig." Geoffrey yawned. "How's the Luck?" he said. "Lord! I had such a nightmare, Harry! You, and the Luck, and Mr. Vail, and the picture of the wicked baron all mixed up together somehow. I forget how it went." "Very remarkable!" said Harry. "I dreamed of the Luck, too, now you mention it. We must have dreamed the same thing, Geoff, because I also have forgotten how it went." "And I," said Mr. Francis, "dreamed about nothing at all, very pleasantly, all night. And what a morning I awoke to! Just the day for a good tramp in the woods. Dear me, Harry, what a simpleton your dear father used to think me! 'What are you going to do?' he would ask me, and I would only want a pocketful of cartridges, a snack of cold lunch, and leave to prowl about by myself without a keeper, no trouble to anybody." "Yes, that's good fun," said Geoffrey. "Now it's a rabbit, or over the stubble a partridge. Then a bit of cover, and you put up a pheasant. Let's have a go-as-you-please day, Harry." "The poetry of shooting," said Mr. Francis. "Cold partridge for any one but me? No? You lads have no appetites!" The keeper had been given his orders the day before, and very soon after breakfast the three shooters were ready to start. They went out by a garden door which gave on a flight of some dozen stone steps leading to the lawn; Mr. Francis, leading the way, nearly fell on the topmost of them, for they were masked with ice, and half turned as he recovered himself, to give a word of warning to the others. But he was too late, and Harry, who followed him, not looking to his feet, but speaking to Geoffrey over his shoulder at the same moment almost, had slipped on the treacherous stone and fallen sprawling, dropping his gun, and clutching ineffectually at the railing to save himself. Mr. Francis gave one exclamation of startled dismay, and ran to his assistance. "My dear fellow," he cried, "I hope you are not hurt?" Harry lay still a moment, his mouth twisted with pain; then, taking hold of the railing, pulled himself to his feet, and stood with bowed head, gripping hard on the banister. "All sideways on my ankle," he said.--"Just see if my gun's all right, Geoff.--Yes, I've twisted it, I'm afraid." He paused another moment, faint and dizzy, with a feeling of empty sickness, and then hobbled up the steps again. "An awful wrench," he said. "Just give me your arm, Uncle Francis, will you? I can hardly put my foot to the ground." Leaning on him, he limped back into the hall and dragged off his boot. "Yes, it feels pretty bad," he said; "I came with my whole weight on to it. I shall be as lame as a tree." Mr. Francis was on his knees, and in a moment had stripped off Harry's stocking with quick, deft fingers. "What bad luck! what awfully bad luck!" he said. "Put a cold-water compress on it at once, my dear boy. It is already swelling!" Harry lifted his leg on to a chair opposite. "It's just a sprain," he said. "Go out, Uncle Francis, you and Geoffrey. I'll put a bandage on." Templeton had answered Mr. Francis's ringing of the bell, and was dismissed again with orders for cold water and linen. "Not till I have seen you comfortable, my dear fellow," said Mr. Francis. "Dear me, what bad luck! Does it hurt you, Harry?" "No, no, it is nothing," said the boy rather impatiently, irritated both by the pain and the fussing. "Do go out, Uncle Francis, with Geoffrey, and leave me. The men are waiting by the home cover. I can look after myself perfectly." Mr. Francis still seemed half loath to leave him, and, had he followed his inclinations, he would have instituted himself as sick-nurse, to change the bandage or read to him. But it was the part of wisdom to humour the patient, who quite distinctly wished to be left alone; and as even the most solicitous affection could not find grounds for anxiety in the sprain, with a few more sympathetic words, he followed Geoffrey, who was chafing to be gone. The latter, indeed, might have appeared somewhat cold and unsympathetic in contrast with Mr. Francis and his repeated lamentations; but his "Bad luck, Harry!" and Harry's grunt in reply, had something of telegraphic brevity, not misunderstood. In spite of his protestations that he was no more than an indifferent shot, it soon appeared that Mr. Francis was more than a decently capable performer with the gun, and his keenness and accuracy as a sportsman were charmingly combined with the knowledge and observation of a naturalist. He pointed out to his companion several rare and infrequent birds which they saw during the morning, and implored the keeper that they might not be shot for curiosities. "Half the time I am shooting," he said to Geoffrey, "I am of a divided mind. Is it not a shame to kill these beautiful and innocent things? I often wonder--ah!" up went his gun, and a high pheasant was torn from the sky, leaving a few light neck feathers floating there. "And even while the words are in my mouth, I go and contradict my sentiments," he said, ejecting the smoking cartridge. "What a bundle of incongruous opposites is a man!" They shot for not more than a couple of hours after lunch, for the sun set early, and Mr. Francis confessed to a certain unreasonable desire to get home quickly and see how Harry had fared. "Indeed, I was half minded to stay with him in spite of his wish," he said, "for the hours will have been lonely to him. But he is like all the Vails--self-reliant, and beholden to no one." They were crossing the last meadow before they should again reach the garden, and, even as he spoke, a hare got up from its form in the tussocky grass not more than ten yards from them and scuttled noiselessly, head down, across the field. Geoffrey had already taken the cartridges from his barrel, and Mr. Francis raised his gun to his shoulder, hesitated a moment, and then fired. He hit the beast just as it gained the fence of the cover from which they had come; they saw it bowled over, and drag on a pace or two into cover; then suddenly, from where it had disappeared, there came a screaming horribly human. Mr. Francis paused, then turned quite pale, and Geoffrey, seeing his stricken face, imagined he thought that he had wounded a beater. "It is only the hare," he said; "the men were all out two minutes ago." Mr. Francis turned to him. "Only the hare!" he cried; "yes, only the hare! How dreadful, how dreadful! I have wounded it," and he started off running to where the beast had been last seen, and disappeared in the cover. Geoffrey sent a couple of beaters to assist in the search, but himself went on to the house, wondering a little at the inconsistency which would allow a man to shoot at a hare running straight away in a bad light, and yet send him hot foot after it when wounded. Yet the inconsistency was pleasing; keenness was responsible for the doubtful shot, an indubitable horror of causing an animal pain prompted the pursuit of it. He found Harry lying up, his ankle somewhat severely sprained, but it no longer pained him, and he asked after his uncle. "Just at the last moment he shot a hare, wounding it," he said, "and ran back to try to recover it. He will be in at once, I should think." But half an hour passed, yet still he did not come, and Harry was already wondering what could have happened, when he appeared, all smiles again. "Dear lad, have you had a very tedious day?" he asked. "The thought of you has been constantly in my mind. I should have been in half an hour ago with Geoffrey, but I wounded a hare, and had to go and look for it. Thank God, I found it. The poor beast was quite dead. But it screamed: it was terrible, terrible!" There was a good piano, by Bechstein, standing in the hall, and that evening, after dinner, as Harry lay on the sofa nursing his injury, while his uncle sitting by him recalled a hundred little reminiscences of his own young years which he had spent here, Geoffrey, who was an accurate performer of simple tunes, played idly and softly to himself, listening half to his own music, half to the talk of the others. Now he would indicate some graceful, inevitable fragment of Bach, now a verse of some chevalier song, all with a tinkling, elementary technic, but with a certain facility of finger and decided aptitude for the right notes. By degrees, as this went on, a kind of restlessness gained on Mr. Francis; he would break off in the middle of a story to hum a bar of the tune Geoffrey was playing, beating time to it with a waving hand, or turn round in his chair to say over his shoulder: "A graceful melody, my dear boy; please play us that again." But before long this restlessness grew more emphatic, and at last he jumped nimbly out of his chair. "I must fetch my flute," he exclaimed, "I must positively fetch my flute. I play but indifferently, as you will hear, but it is such a pleasure to me! What a charming instrument is the flute, so pastoral; the nearest thing we know to the song of birds! Be indulgent, my dear Geoffrey, to the whim of an old fellow, and play some easy accompaniments for me. I have a quantity of little pieces for the flute by Corelli and Baptiste." He hurried to the door, and they heard his step quickly crossing the gallery above. In a few moments he reappeared again, a little out of breath, but with a beaming face. He fitted his flute together with affectionate alacrity, turned to the piano, and opened a volume of easy minuets and sarabands. "There, this one," he said; "it is a breath of heaven, a real breath of heaven. You have two bars of introduction. Ah! a shade slower, my dear boy; it is an antique measure, you must remember. Graceful, leisurely. Yes, that is exactly right." He knew the music by heart, and when once they were fairly started, turned from the piano toward Harry. His cheerful, ruddy face composed itself into an expression of beatific content, his eyes were half closed, the eyebrows a little raised, and his body swayed gently to the rhythm of the tune. The formal delicacy of the composition enthralled him; perhaps it brought with it the aroma of his youth, the minuets he had danced fifty years ago, perhaps it was only the sweet and certain development of the melody which so moved him. At the end, in any case, he could not quite command his voice, and he patted Geoffrey gently on the shoulder by way of thanks. "The next," he said; "we can not pass by the next. The two are complete only together." They played then some half dozen little pieces, ending with a quick ripple of a gavotte, to put them in good spirits again, so said Mr. Francis; and at the last he lovingly packed up his flute again and left it on the piano, saying that they must be very indulgent to him and let him play again. Two or three days after this, Harry was sufficiently recovered to be able to go out again, though still limpingly, and it was arranged that they should shoot certain of the covers near the house which might be expected to furnish them with a good day's sport, and at the same time would entail but little walking. The frost had, twenty-four hours ago, completely broken before a warm and violent wind from the southwest, and the dead leaves which had lain in glued and compacted heaps were once more driven about in scurrying multitudes. The sky was low and ominous, a rack of torn and flying cloud, and scudding showers fell ever and again. But the sport was excellent, and they little heeded the angry fretfulness of the heavens. Their beats took them at no time far from the house, and they returned there for lunch, but by this time the weather had grown so vastly more inclement that Mr. Francis cried off the resumption of the day; but Harry, eager for out-of-doors after his two days' imprisonment, persuaded Geoffrey to come out again. The rain was a steady downpour in the slackened wind, but his argument that they were not made of paper carried weight. They returned, drenched indeed, but with a satisfactory report of themselves and the birds, to find Mr. Francis performing very contentedly on his flute before the hall fire. But he jumped up briskly as they appeared. "Dear boys, how wet you are!" he cried. "Of course, you will change your clothes at once, will you not? and I should recommend a glass of hot whisky and water. Shall I ring the bell? I told Templeton to see that there was abundance of hot water for your baths." This incessant solicitude of his uncle, however clearly arising from affection, was on the way to get on Harry's nerves and arouse opposition. At any rate, the suggestion that he should guard against a chill predisposed him not to be in any hurry to go upstairs. "Oh, tea first," he said, not meaning it; "one can change afterward.--Are you going now, Geoff? Ring the bell as you pass, will you?" A positive cloud dimmed the brightness of Mr. Francis's face. "Dear boy, you are being horribly imprudent," he said; "do let me persuade you to change at once." This drove determination home. Harry was unpleasantly conscious of the clinging flabbiness of soaking clothes, but had their touch shaken him with an ague it would not have moved him from his chair. He intended to do that which he chose to do. "Oh, I'm all right, Uncle Francis," he said. "I never catch cold." Tea came, and Harry ate and drank with studied leisure, and conversed politely to his uncle. Already he felt the premonitory prickling of the skin which precedes a chill, but it was nearly half an hour before he lounged upstairs. He did not intend to be fussed over and treated like a child; the advice to go and change had been so obviously sensible that it should never have been offered, and to the contrariness of youth was impossible to accept. Thus the well-meant but ill-timed counsel drove him into an opposite. Again, after dinner, the evening was melodious with the breathings of Mr. Francis's flute, but the childlike pleasure which the performer had taken before in his own performance was sensibly dimmed. He played with a wandering attention and an uncertain finger, without the gusto of the artist, and his eye ever rested anxiously on Harry, who had more than once complained of the cold, and now sat huddled up by a mountainous fire, bright-eyed and with a burning skin, which seemed to him to cover an interior of ice. At last Mr. Francis could stand it no longer, and laying down his flute came across to where he sat, and with an extraordinary amenity of voice, yet firmly---- "I insist on your going to bed, Harry," he said. "You have caught a chill; it is idle to deny it. Dear lad, do not be so foolish. I have troubled and worried you, I am afraid, with my fussy care for you, and I am very sorry for it. But do not make a bad matter worse, and do not punish me, I ask you, as well as yourself, for my ill-timed suggestions. I have apologized; be generous." Harry got up. It was impossible that a mere superficial boyish obstinacy, of which he was already ashamed, should stand out against this, and besides he felt really unwell. "Yes, I am afraid I have caught a chill," he said. "It was foolish of me not to change as you advised me when I came in. It was even more foolish of me to have been annoyed at your excellent suggestion that I should." Mr. Francis's face brightened. "Now get to bed at once, my dear boy," he said, "and I have no doubt you will be all right in the morning. You have plenty of blankets? Good-night." But Harry was by no means all right in the morning, and it seemed that for his uncle the joy of life was dead. There was no brisk early walk for him to-day. Vail was no longer a hungry place, and his breakfast was but the parody of a meal. Unreasonably, he blamed himself for his nephew's indisposition, and the morning passed for him in blank turnings over of the leaves of undecipherable books, in reiterated visits to the kitchen with suggestions as to a suitable invalid diet, and disconnected laments to Geoffrey over this untoward occurrence. "Ah! this will teach a foolish old man to hold his tongue," he said. "It will teach him, also, that old fellows can not understand the young. How excellent were my intentions, but how worse than impotent, how disastrous! It is a cold job to grow old, Geoffrey; it is even colder to grow old and still feel young. Poor Harry simply thought me a meddling old fogy when I wanted him to take precautions against catching a chill, and I ought to have known that he would think me so. I forget my white hairs. How are you, my dear boy, this morning? I hope you have not a chill, too? I am anxious and unsettled to-day." "Oh, Harry was an ass," said the other. "But there's nothing at all to be anxious about. He has a chill, rather a sharp one, and, with greater Wisdom than he showed yesterday, he stops in bed. Is that Punch there? Thank you very much." Mr. Francis walked to the window, lit a cigarette, and threw it away, barely tasted. "I wonder if Harry would like me to read to him," he said. Geoffrey looked up with an arrested smile. "I think I should leave him quite alone," he said. "I've just been up to him. He's as cross as a bear, and wouldn't speak to me. So I came away." "But that is so unlike him!" said Mr. Francis. "He must be ill, he must be really ill." Geoffrey began to understand Harry's feelings the day before. "If I were you I wouldn't fuss either him or myself," he said. "People don't die of a cold in the head." "Shall I send for the doctor?" asked Mr. Francis. "We might tell Harry that he happened to call about some case of distress in the village, and wished to consult him about it. Then we could get his opinion. I think, under the circumstances, one might venture on so small an equivocation." Geoffrey closed his Punch. "I shouldn't do anything of the kind if I were you," he said. "What an abominable morning! I'll play some accompaniments for you, if you like." "Thank you, my dear boy," said Mr. Francis, "but I haven't the heart to play this morning. Besides, Harry might be dozing; we should run the risk of disturbing him." CHAPTER IV THE STORY OF MR. FRANCIS Harry Vail owned a plain, gloomy house in Cavendish Square, forbidding to those who looked at it from the street, chilling to those who looked at the street from it. It was furnished in the heavy and expensive early Victorian style, and solid mahogany frowned at its inmates. During his minority it had been let for a term of years, but on his coming of age he had taken it again himself, and here, when the gloom and darkness of February and swollen waters made Vail more suitable for the amphibious than the dry-shod, he came to receive in exchange the more sociable fogs of London. Parliament had assembled, the roadways were no longer depleted, and Harry was beginning to find that, in spite of the friendlessness which he had been afraid was his, there were many houses which willingly opened their doors and welcomed him inside. Friends of his father, acquaintances of his own, were all disposed to be pleasant toward this young man, about whom there lingered a certain vague atmosphere of romance--a thing much valued by a prosaic age. He was young, attractive to the eye; he stood utterly alone in the world, with the burden or the glory of a great name on his shoulders, and people found in him a charming, youthful modesty, mixed with an independence of the sturdiest, which, while accepting a favour from none, seemed to cry aloud for friendliness and bask therein when it was found, with the mute, unmistakable gratitude of a dumb animal. His own estimate of his loneliness had probably been accentuated by the year he had spent just before he came of age in studying languages in France and Germany, but in the main it was, when he made it, correct. But at his time of life change comes quickly; the young man who does not rapidly expand and enlarge, must, it may be taken for certain, be as rapidly closing up. Within a month of his arrival in London it was beyond question that the latter morbid process was not at operation in Harry. He and Geoffrey were seated one night in the smoking room in the Cavendish Square house talking over a glass of whisky and soda. They had dined with a friend, and Harry had inveigled Geoffrey out of his way to spend an hour with him before going home. "No, I certainly am not superstitious," he was saying, "but if I were, I really should be very much impressed by what has happened. I never heard of a stranger series of coincidences. You remember the lines engraved round the Luck: "'When the Luck is found again, Fear both fire and frost and rain.' "Well, as you know, two days after I found the Luck, I slipped on the steps as we were going out shooting, and sprained my ankle--in consequence of not looking where I was going, say you, and I also, for that matter. The Luck, say the superstitious: that is the frost. As soon as I get right, I go out shooting again, get wet through, and catch a pretty bad chill--because I didn't go and change, say you. The Luck, say the superstitious: that is the rain. Finally, the very day you left, I tripped over the hearthrug, fell into the fire, and burned half my hair off. Well, if that isn't fire I don't know what is. 'Fear both fire and frost and rain,' you see. Certainly I have suffered from all three, but if old Francis could only give me a cold, and a sprained ankle, and a burn, I don't think much of his magic. Well, I've paid the price, and now there is the Luck to look forward to. Dear me, I'm afraid I've been jawing." "I wonder if you believe it at all," said Geoffrey. "For myself, I should chuck the beastly pot into the lake, not because I believed it, but for fear that I some day might. If you get to believe that sort of thing, you are done." "I am sure I don't believe it," said the other, "and so I shall not chuck the beastly pot into the lake. Nor would you if it were yours. But, if I did believe it, Geoff, there would be all the more reason for keeping it. Don't you see, I've been through the penalties, now let me have the prizes. That's the way to look at it. I don't look at it, I must remind you, in that way; I only say, what a strange series of coincidences! You can hardly deny that that is so." "What have you done with it?" asked Geoffrey. "The beastly pot? It's down at Vail. Uncle Francis is there, too. I wanted him to come up to London with me, but he wouldn't. Now, there's a cruel thing, Geoff. My God, it makes my blood boil when I think of it!" "Think of what?" "Of the persistent ill luck which has dogged my uncle throughout his life. Of the odious--well, not suspicion, it is not so definite as that--which seems to surround him. I was at Lady Oxted's the other night, and mentioned him casually, but she said nothing and changed the subject. Oh, it was not a mere chance; the thing has happened before." Geoffrey squirted some soda water into his glass. "Suspicion! what do you mean?" he asked. "No; suspicion is the wrong word. Uncle Francis told me all about his life on the last evening that I was at Vail, and I never heard anything so touching, so cruel, or so dignified. All his life he has been the victim of an ill luck so persistent that it looks as if some malignant power must have been pursuing him. Well, I am going to try to make it up to him. I wonder if a rather long and very private story about his affairs would interest you at all?" "Rather. I should like to hear it." "Well, this is almost exactly as he told it me, from the beginning. He was a twin of my grandfather's; there's a piece of bad luck to start with, and being just half a minute late about coming into the world, he is a younger son, which is no fun, I can tell you, in our impoverished family." "That may happen to anybody," said Geoffrey; "I'm a younger son myself, but I don't scream over that." Harry laughed. "Nor does he. Don't interrupt, Geoff. Then he married a very rich girl, who died three years afterward, childless, leaving all her money back to her own relatives. It was a most unhappy marriage from the first; but don't aim after cheap cynicism, and say that the real tragedy there was not her death, but the disposition of her property. I can tell you beforehand that this was not the case. He was devoted to her." "Well?" Harry's voice sank. "And then, twenty-two years ago, came that awful affair of young Harmsworth's death. Did you ever hear it spoken of?" Geoffrey was silent a moment. "Yes, I have heard it spoken of," he said at length. Harry flushed. "Ah! in connection with my uncle, I suppose?" he said. "Yes; his name was mentioned in connection with it." "It is a crying shame!" said Harry hotly. "And so people talk of it still, do they? I never heard of it till he told me all about it the other night. That is natural: people would not speak of it to me." "I only know the barest outline," said Geoffrey. "Tell me what Mr. Francis told you." "Well, it was this way: He was staying down at our house in Derbyshire, which was subsequently sold, for my grandfather had made him a sort of agent there after his wife's death, and he would be there for months together. Next to our place was a property belonging to some people called Harmsworth, and at this time, twenty-two or twenty-three years ago, young Harmsworth--his name was Harold--had only just come into it, having had a very long minority like me. Uncle Francis used to be awfully good to him, and two years before he had got him out of a scrape by advancing to him a large sum of money. It was his own, and it was this loan which had crippled him so much on his wife's death. The arrangement had been that it should be paid immediately Harold Harmsworth came of age. Well, he was not able to do this at once, for his affairs were all upside down, and he asked for and received a renewal of it. For security, he gave him the reversion of his life-insurance policy." Again Harry's voice sank to near a whisper. "Two days after this arrangement had been made, young Harmsworth and Uncle Francis were pottering about the hedgerows alone, just with a dog, to get a rabbit or two, or anything that came in their way, and, getting over a fence, Harmsworth's gun went off, killing him instantly. Think how awful!" "Why people will get over fences without taking their cartridges out is more than I could ever imagine," said Geoffrey; "but they will continue to do so till the end of time. I beg pardon." "Well, here comes the most terrible part of the whole affair," went on the other. "There was an inquest, and though my uncle was scarcely fit to attend, for he says he was almost off his head with so dreadful a thing happening, he had to go. He gave his account of the matter, and said that he himself was nearly hit by some of the shot. That, he tells me, was his impression, but he is willing to believe that it was not so, for, as he says, your imagination may run riot at so ghastly a time. But it was a most unfortunate thing to have said, for it seemed to be quite incompatible with the other evidence. Then, when it was known about the insurance policy, horrible, sinister rumours began to creep about. He was closely questioned as to whether he knew for what purpose young Harmsworth wanted the money he had advanced him, and he would not say. Neither would he tell me, but I understood that there was something disgraceful; blackmail, I suppose. He had an awful scene with Mrs. Harmsworth, Harold's mother. His friends, of course, scouted the idea of the possibility of such a possibility, but others, acquaintances, cooled toward him, though not exactly believing what was in the air; others cut him direct. It was only the medical evidence at the inquest, which showed that the injury of which Harmsworth died could easily have been inflicted by himself, that saved my uncle, in all probability, from being brought to trial. He said to me that it would have been better if he had, for then he would have been completely cleared, whereas now the matter will never be reopened." "What an awful story!" said Geoffrey. "Yes, and that was not the end of his trouble. Ten years later he had to declare bankruptcy, and my father gave him an annuity. But since his death it has not been paid; I never knew anything about it, and he would not allow that I should be told, and he has lived in horrible _pensions_ abroad. That seems to me such extraordinary delicacy, not letting me know. I never found out till I came of age." "You have continued it?" "Of course. I hope, also, he will live with me for the main part. I have offered him a couple of permanent rooms at Vail, for he would not come to London. O Geoffrey, it was the most pitiful story! And to think of him, bright, cheery, as we saw him down there, and know what an appalling load of undeserved misery he has supported so long! Now, it seems to me to be a brave man's part to bear misfortune calmly, without whimpering, but one would think it required a courage of superhuman kind to be able to remain sociable, cheerful, merry, even. But, oh, how bitter he is when he shows one all his thoughts! He warned me to rely on nobody; he said there was not a man in the world, even less a woman, who would stick to you if you were in trouble. Trouble comes; they are vanished like melting snow; a heap of dirt is left behind. Then he suddenly burst into tears and told me to forget all he had said, for he had given me the outpourings of a disappointed, soured man. I was young; let me trust every one as long as I could, let me make friends right and left; only, if trouble came, and they fell away, then, if I could find consolation therein, I might remember that the same thing had happened to others also." Geoffrey was staring absently into the fire; his cigarette had gone out, and his whisky was untasted. "By Gad!" he said. "Poor old beggar!" And Harry, knowing that the British youth does not express sympathy in verbose paragraphs, or show his emotion by ejaculatory cries, was satisfied that the story had touched his friend. Day by day and week by week Harry moved more at his ease in the world of people of whom hitherto he had known so little. The wall of the castle which he had erected round himself, compacted of his own diffidence and a certain _hauteur_ of disposition, fell like the fortifications of Jericho at the blast of the trumpet, and it was a young man, pleasant in body and mind, pleased with little, but much anxious to please, that came forth. His dinner invitation to some new house would be speedily indorsed by the greater intimacy of a Saturday till Monday, and the days were few on which he sat down to a cover for one in Cavendish Square. Among these more particular friends with whom previous acquaintance soon ripened into intimacy, Lady Oxted, an old friend of Harry's father, stood pre-eminent. Here he soon became _ami de la maison_, dropping in as he chose, well knowing he was welcome; and such a footing, speedily and unquestioningly gained, was to one of a life previously so recluse a pleasure new and altogether delightful; for Lady Oxted had the power of creating the atmosphere of home, and home was one of those excellent things which Harry had hitherto lacked. He had not consciously missed it, because he had never yet known it, but his gradual understanding of it made him see how large an empty room there had been in his heart. To come uninvited, and to linger unconscionably long; to say firmly that he must be going, and yet to linger, he found to be an index to certain domestic and comfortable joys of life, not lightly to be placed low in that delightful miscellany. His nature, from his very youth, was not yet enough formed to be labelled by so harsh an epithet as austere, but hitherto he had not known the quiet monotonies which can be the cause of so much uneventful happiness. Even for those whose bulk of enjoyment is flavoured with the thrill of adventure and the frothier joys of living, who most need excitement and crave for stimulus, there yet are times for the unbending of the bow, when the child within them cries out for mere toys and companionship, and the soul longs to sit by the meditative fire rather than do battle with winds and stern events. And Harry was not one of those who need home least; simply, he had been frozen, but now, for the first time, the genial warmth of living began to touch him; he was like a plant put in some sunned and watered place, and its appropriate buds began to appear in this time of the singing bird. Here, too, he met romance with tremulous mouth and the things of which poets have sung. CHAPTER V A POINT IN CASUISTRY One evening, toward the end of June, Lady Oxted was driving home from Victoria Station, where she had gone to meet the arrival of the Continental express. By her side sat a girl of little more than twenty, who, by the eager, questioning glances which she cast at that inimitable kaleidoscope of life as seen in the London streets, must probably have been deprived of this admirable spectacle for some time, for her gaze was quickened to an interest not habitual to Londoners, however deep is their devotion to the town of towns. The streets were at their fullest, in this height of the season and the summer, and the time of day being about half past five, the landau could make but a leisurely progress through the glittering show. The girl's cheek was flushed with the warm, healthy tinge which is the prerogative of those who prefer the air as God made it to the foul gases which men shut up in their houses, and, as they drove, she poured out a rapid series of questions and comments to Lady Oxted. "Oh, I just love this stuffy old London!" she said; "but what have they done with the Duke of Wellington on his horse? The corner looks quite strange without it. Oh! there's a policeman keeping everybody back. Do you think it's the Queen? I hope it is. Why, it's only a fat little man with a beard in a brougham! Who is he, Aunt Violet, and why aren't we as good as he? Just fancy, it is three years since I have been in London--that's not grammar, is it?--and I had the greatest difficulty in making mother let me come. Indeed, if it hadn't been for your letter, saying that you would let me stay with you, I never should have come. And then the difficulties about the time I should stop! It wasn't worth while going for a month, and two months was too long. So I made it three." "Well, it is delightful to have you, anyhow, dear Evie," said Lady Oxted. "And it really was time you should see London again. Your mother is well?" "Very--as well as I am; and that means a lot. But she won't come to England, Aunt Violet, except for that one day every year, and I am beginning to think she never will now. It is twenty-one, nearly twenty-two years ago, that she settled at Santa Margarita--the year I was born." "Yes, dear, yes," said Lady Oxted, a little hurriedly, and she would seemingly have gone on to speak of something else, but the girl interrupted her. "You know her reason, of course, Aunt Violet," she said quietly, but with a certain firm resolve to speak. "No, let me go on: she told me about it only the other day. Of course, poor Harold's death must have been terrible for her, but it is awful, it is awful, I think, to take it the way she does. She still thinks that he died by no accident, but that he was intentionally shot by some man with whom he was out shooting. I asked her what his name was, but she would not tell me. And for all this time, once a year, on the day of Harold's death, she comes to England, puts red flowers on his grave, and returns. Oh, it is awful!" Lady Oxted did not reply at once. "She still thinks so about it?" she asked at length. "Yes; she told me herself. But I hope, perhaps, that her refusing to tell me the man's name--I asked only the evening before I left--may mean that she is beginning to wish to forget it. She wished, at any rate, that I should not know. Do you think it may be so?" "I can't tell, Evie. Your mother----" and she stopped. "Yes?" "Only this. Your mother is hard to get at, inaccessible. It is almost impossible to know what she feels on subjects about which she feels deeply. I once tried to talk to her about it, but she would not. She heard what I had to say, but that was all." The girl assented, then paused a moment. "Poor mother, what an awful year for her!" she said. "She had only married my father, you know, a few months before Harold's death, and before the year was out Harold, her only son, was dead, and she was left twice a widow and childless. I was not born for six months after my father's death. How strange never to have seen one's father!" They drove in silence for a space. Then the girl said suddenly: "Aunt Violet, promise me that you will never tell me the name of the man who was out shooting with Harold. You see my mother would not tell me when I asked her; surely that means she wishes that I should not know." Lady Oxted felt herself for the moment in great perplexity. She had the rational habit, now growing rare, of thinking what she was saying, and meaning something by what she said, and, as her answer was conceivably a matter of some importance, she paused, thinking intently. "I am not sure that I had better promise you that," she said at last. Evie looked surprised. "Why not?" she asked. "I can't quite tell you," she said. "Give me time, dear--I will either make you the promise you ask, or tell you why I do not make it, this evening. In the meantime, Evie, I ask you, as a favour, to avoid thinking about it as far as you are able. Ah! here we are." Indeed, the sight of Grosvenor Square was very welcome to Lady Oxted, for just now she had no clearness of mind on the question which the girl had put to her, but very great clearness as to the fact that there were delicate though remote issues possibly at stake. Here was she with a three months' charge of Evie Aylwin, the half sister of poor Harold Harmsworth, daughter of his mother, whose attitude toward Mr. Francis admitted of no dubiety, while the most constant visitor at their house was the nephew of the man to whom so terrible a suspicion attached. That the two should not meet verged on impossibilities; and was it fair, either on one or the other, that they should run the ordinary chances of an attractive girl and a handsome boy together, without knowing in what curious and sombre prenatal ordination of Fate they were cast? It would be like indicating summer rain in hard lines of ink to say that Lady Oxted expected them to fall in love with each other, but among the possibilities such a contingency could not be reckoned very remote or unlikely. Probable, the most hardened matchmaker could not call it, but where was the celibate who would say it was impossible? The sudden, unexpected demand of the girl, "Promise me you will never tell me his name," had been, unknown to her, a request which presupposed the solution of a problem of a most complicated kind. Lady Oxted, it is true, had asked for time--already, she was afraid, unwisely; that, however, was done, and she had until the evening the power of making or refusing to make that promise. If she made it, she shouldered herself with the responsibility of countenancing the free intercourse of the two, and the mutual attraction to which it might easily give rise, and of seeing it pursue its course to its possible evolution in love and marriage. The girl was staying with her; Harry Vail was so assiduous in his presence that he could scarcely be called a visitor; both were supremely eligible. It was clearly idle to overlook the possibility. Given that these things occurred, she foresaw a moment, possibly very unpleasant, and certainly to be laid to her door, when Mrs. Aylwin heard of the engagement of her daughter to the man on whose name, in her mind, rested the stain of so intimate a bloodguiltiness. But this unwelcome conclusion brought with it a sudden reaction of hopefulness. Evie Aylwin had asked her mother the name of Harold's companion on that fatal morning, and had been denied the information. Did not that argue a loophole of encouraging amplitude? Surely, to the weaving feminine mind it meant that the mother, though perhaps neither repenting nor regretting the black influence which this suspicion, founded or unfounded, had had on herself, yet wished her daughter to move in absolute freedom, avoiding none, open to all; to conduct her life with perfect liberty, not knowing more, being prevented by her own mother from knowing anything with definite label of that tragic affair. Else how was it conceivable that she should not have said those two words, "Francis Vail"? Mrs. Aylwin, so reasoned this acute lady, must have known--for who did not know?--the strange, solitary history of the last, and the head of the house, and was not her refusal to mention the uncle's name a silent recognition, if rightly interpreted, that the two might meet? The thought was a pleasant one, for she was much attached to both Harry and the girl, and for a moment she let her fancy build a fantastic dome in air. If Mrs. Aylwin had recognised this, and the inference was not unreasonable, did not the recognition imply a hope, though of the faintest and most unformulated, that now she saw her long, bitter suspicion to have been a mistake? Then her silence would amount even to a wish that the two might meet, and that one of her blood might, in the remote possibilities, wipe away by this union that of her blood which had been shed. To take the other side, if she did not make this promise, she had to refuse, with what softenings and limitations you will, to bind herself. In case, then, of what event, to meet what contingency, would she make the reservation--under what circumstances, that is to say, did she desire to leave herself free? Clearly, in case of the possible happening, of the two falling under the spell of each other. But in that case (clearly, also, she was afraid) it would be far better to tell the girl now, at once, and save her the greater shock. To hear the name Vail now, this moment, would be nothing to her. To hear the name Vail in its more sinister connection, when already it had a vital sound to her ear, was a pang that might be saved her now, but not hereafter. Again, still dealing with these remote possibilities, in which connection alone her decision had any significance, was it conceivably fair to Harry to reveal, though in the most intimate way and the most pain-sparing words, the stain that hung over his name? Long ago Lady Oxted had settled with herself that the affair was dead and buried. At the time, even, it had been no more than an unproved and dark suspicion, though endowed with all the mysterious vitality of evil; but was she, of all women, who held that to repeat an evil tale is only one degree removed from inventing it, to stir, for any purpose, that coiled worm of suspicion? The thought was an abhorrence to her, and Evie's mother, it seemed, in her own dealings with her own child, had indorsed her unwillingness. But it was certain that, if the name had to be told, it must be told now, for, supposing the two remained strangers to intimacy, there would be no greater harm done now than afterward; but if intimacy was otherwise to be, it was better to kill it in the womb than to let it live and destroy it afterward. A third alternative remained: to write to Mrs. Aylwin, saying quite simply that Harry Vail was an intimate friend of hers, that he was attractive and of unblemished character and reputation (so much she was bound to say for the young man's sake), and what did the mother want done? But such a letter, she felt, would be a thing to blush over, even when alone. How demented a matchmaker she would appear! Back swung the balance. She was in the position of mother to the girl, and the mother, out of her own mouth, had desired that she should not know the name. That desire had reached Lady Oxted casually, not knowing to whom it journeyed; but it had arrived, and she was bound to respect it. The promise was as good as made. Evie had gone to her room after tea, and these various fences faced Lady Oxted on all sides till the ringing of the dressing bell. But that sound suggested the dinner table to her, and at the thought of the dinner table she suddenly felt the conclusions wrested from her, for she remembered for the first time that Harry dined with them that night. And though she did not expect that, on entering the drawing-room, he would immediately throw himself on his knees at Evie's feet, it seemed to her that, as a controlling power, she was put on the shelf; that the issues of things were in younger and stronger hands than hers. She found a letter or two for her in the hall, and taking these in her hand she went upstairs. "'The Luck of the Vails,'" she said to herself, and the phrase shaped itself to her steps, a step to a syllable. Still, with her letters in her hand, she looked in at Evie's room, and, finding her "betwixt and between," went on to her own; and, as her maid did her hair, she opened them. The first was from Harry. "The greatest luck," it ran. "The Grimstones have influenza in the house, and have put me off. So I can and will and shall come to you for Sunday at Oxted. I shall see you this evening, but I can't resist writing this." "Kismet!" murmured Lady Oxted, "or something very like it." CHAPTER VI THE POINT SOLVED--THE MEETING Dinner was over, and of Lady Oxted's party there only remained by eleven o'clock but a couple of her guests. There was a ball at one house, an evening party at another, a concert at a third, and each claimed its grilling quota, leaving even at this hour only Harry Vail and Geoffrey Langham. Lord Oxted, as was his wont, had retired to his study, as soon as his duties as host would permit, without positively violating decency, but the two young men still lingered, making an intimate party. During the last few months Harry had continued to so expand that it would have been difficult to recognise in him the hero of that recluse coming-of-age party but half a year ago. But this change was the result of no violent revolution; his nature had in no way been wrested from its normal development, merely that development had been long retarded, and was now proportionately rapid. For years his solitary home had ringed him with frost, the want of kindly fireside interests had led him on the path that leads to the great, unexplored deserts of the recluse; but the impulse given, the plunge into the world taken, he had thriven and grown with marvellous alacrity. Indeed, the stunted habit of his teens remained in him now only as shown in a certain impression he produced of holding himself still somewhat in reserve; in a disposition, notable in an age which loves to expose its internal organism to the gaze of sympathizing friends, to be his own master; to retain, if he wished, a privacy of his own, and to guard, as a sacred trust, his right to his own opinion in matters which concerned himself. Lady Oxted, however, on this as on many other occasions, felt herself obliged to find fault with him, and the presence of her niece, it would appear, did not impose bounds on her candour. "You are getting lazy and self-contented, Harry," she remarked on this particular evening. "You are here in London professing to lead the life of the people with whom you associate, and you are shirking it." Harry looked up with mild wonder at this assault, and drew his chair a little closer up to the half circle they made round the open window, for the night was stifling, and the candles had drooped during fish. "I never professed anything of the kind," he said; "and I don't yet understand in the slightest degree what you mean. But, no doubt, I soon shall." "I will try to make it plain to you," said Lady Oxted. "You have chosen to come to London and lead the silly, frivolous life we all lead. That, to begin with, is ridiculous of you. There is no need for you to be in London, and why any fairly intelligent young man ever is, unless he has business which takes him there, passes my understanding. You might be down at Vail, looking after your property, or you might be travelling." "I still don't understand about my professing to lead the life of the people among whom I move," said Harry. "I am coming to that. You have chosen to spend these three months in London without any better reason for it than that everybody else does so. That being so, you ought to behave like everybody else. For instance, when Mrs. Morris wanted to take you to her sister's dance to-night, you ought to have gone; also Lady Wraysbury asked you to go to the concert at the Hamiltons'. Again you refused." "She wanted you to come too," said Harry, "at least, she asked you," he added, getting in a back-hander. "I'm an old woman, and I choose to sit by my own fire." "Won't you have it lit?" asked Harry. "And I chose to sit there too. But I will go away, if you like." "And will you go to the dance?" "Not in the least; if you send me away, I shall go to bed." "You speak as if you were all the six great powers, sending an ultimatum to Heligoland," said Lady Oxted. "Not in the least; if you send me away, I shall go." Lady Oxted laughed. "Heligoland replies that the six great powers may wait ten minutes," she said. Harry turned to Evie Aylwin. "Yes, I feel just as you do," he said eagerly, reverting at once to the conversation which had been interrupted by Lady Oxted's strictures. "I love the sense of being in the middle of millions of people, each of whom, just like you and me, have their own private paradise and joy of life, which the world probably never guesses." Evie looked at him quickly. "Have you a private joy, Lord Vail?" she asked. "Do tell me what it is. A thing that is private is always interesting." Harry laughed. "It is called the Luck," he said; "the Luck of the Vails." "Are you really beginning to believe in that nonsense, Harry?" asked Lady Oxted. "I have begun," said he. "O Aunt Violet, how horrid you are!" cried Evie. "Do let Lord Vail tell me about it. It is private: I am dying to know." "Shall I? I will make it short, then," said Harry, "for Lady Oxted's sake." "I would rather that you made it long for mine," said the girl; "but that is as you please." Lady Oxted gave a loud and quite voluntary sigh. "Poor, dear Harry!" she said. "Geoffrey, let us talk about something extremely tangible the while. You are on the Stock Exchange. Speak to me of backwardation and contango. That may counteract the weakening effect of Harry's nonsense. Are you a bear?" Harry smiled, and drew his chair closer to the girl's. "I will talk low," he said, "so that we shall not offend Lady Oxted, and you must promise to stop me if you get bored. Anyhow, you brought it on yourself, for you asked me about my private joy. This is it." Blue eyes, deepened by the shaded light to violet, looked into his as he began his tale; into hers looked brown eyes, which seemed black. He told her of the ancient history of the cup, and she listened with interest to a story that might have claimed attention even from a stranger. Then he came to his own finding of it in an attic upon a winter's day; to the three accidents to himself, each trivial, which had followed the finding; and her eyes--which up till now had been at one time on his, at another had strayed with a certain consciousness and purpose (for he never looked elsewhere than at hers) now this way, now that, had superintended the disentangling of a piece of lace which had caught in her bracelet, or had guided her finger as it traced the intricate ivory of her fan handle--became absorbed. They saw only Harry's big, dark eyes, or, at their widest circuit, his parted lips, from which the words came. Her own mouth, thin, finely lipped, drooped a little at the centre with interest and expectation, and the even line of teeth showed in the red a band of ivory set in pomegranate. Once she impatiently swept back a tress of hair which drooped over her ear, but the playing of her fingers with her fan had become unconscious, and her eyes no longer followed them. And it would seem that Harry had forgotten his promise to make the story short for Lady Oxted's sake, and had rather acceded silently to the girl's request to make it long for hers, for the startling revelations about backwardations and bears had long languished before the tale was done. At last Harry's voice stopped, and there was silence a moment, though both still looked at the other. Then Evie gave a little sharp, involuntary sigh, and her eyebrows met in a frown. "Throw it away, Lord Vail," she said sharply. "Throw it away at once, where it will be lost, lost. It is a terrible thing! And yet, and yet, how can one believe it? The thing is gold and gems, that is all. Ah! how I should like to see it! It must be magnificent, this Luck of yours. All the same, it is terrible. How can it be your private joy?" Harry rose. If he was not in earnest, it was an admirable counterfeit. "Do you not see?" he said. "'Fear both fire and frost and rain,' runs the rhyme. But think what the cup is called: it is the Luck of the Vails, and the Vails are--well, they are I and my uncle at least. Ah! I forget one more thing. Only two days ago my uncle found the key of its case. It was locked when I found it; it had to be broken open. Well, I fell into the fire; I caught a chill in the rain; I sprained my ankle, owing to the frost. I have paid the penalties of the Luck. Now, don't you see I am waiting for the Luck itself? Indeed, perhaps it has begun," he added. "How so?" asked the girl with security, for she knew he was not the kind of man to pay inane compliments. "Since I found it, I have begun to become human," he said gravely. "Indeed, six months ago I had no friend in the world except Geoffrey." "What's that about me?" asked Geoffrey, who was playing piquet with Lady Oxted. "I was only saying you weren't such a brute as you appeared," said Harry, without looking round; "I'm a true friend, Geoff." Then, dropping his voice again, "Then, on the finding of the Luck, I became--oh, I don't know what I became--what I am, anyhow!" He leaned back again in his chair, blushing a little at his own unpremeditated burst of egotism. "Of course, soberly, and in the light of 9 A.M., I don't believe in it," he continued. "But my having those three little accidents was a very curious coincidence, following as they did on the heels of my finding the Luck. Anyhow, it pleases me to think that there may be one coincidence more--that those three little bits of bad luck will be followed by a piece of very good luck. That is my private joy--the thought of some great, good thing happening to me. And then, oh, then, won't I just take the Luck, and stamp on it, and throw the rent pieces to the four winds of heaven!" There was a moment's silence as his voice, slightly raised, gave out the blindly spoken words, which had yet a certain ring of truth about them. But as soon as they were spoken Evie's mood changed. "Oh, you mustn't!" she cried; "you could not bring yourself to destroy such a lovely thing. Those stars of emeralds, those clear-set diamond handles, oh! it makes my mouth water to think of them. I love jewels!" Lady Oxted at this point was deep in the heavily swollen waters of Rubicon, and her tone was of ill-suppressed acidity. "Is the nursery rhyme nearly finished?" she asked. Harry advanced to her and held out his hand. "Make it up, Lady Oxted," he said. "My fault entirely!" Evie followed him. "Dear Aunt Violet," she said, "shake hands with Lord Vail this moment. He has given me the most exciting half hour; and you may die in the night, and then you'll be sorry you spoke unkindly to him. And now we'll talk about liquidation as much as you please. Oh! you are playing bezique.--Really, Lord Vail, your story was one of the most interesting I have ever heard; you see it isn't over yet; you still have the Luck. That makes all the difference; one is never told a ghost story till the house is pulled down, or all the people who have seen the ghost are in lunatic asylums. But your story is now only at the beginning. Upon my word, I can't make up my mind what you ought to do with the Luck. But I'll tell you some day, when I feel certain. Oh! I shall never feel certain," she cried. "You must act as you please!" "I have your leave?" he said, quite gravely and naturally. "Yes." At that again their eyes met, but though they had looked at each other so long and so steadily on this first evening of their acquaintance, on this occasion neither of them prolonged the glance. Presently after, the two young men left and strolled back to Geoffrey's rooms in Orchard Street, on the way to Cavendish Square. Both were of the leisurely turn of mind that delights in observation and makes no use whatever of that which it has observed; and scorning the paltry saving of time and shoe leather to be secured by a cab, they went on foot through the night bright with lamps of carriages and jingling with bells of hansoms. "Well, I've had an awfully nice evening," said Harry. "Extra nice, I mean, though it is always jolly at the Oxteds." "I thought you were enjoying yourself," said the other, "when you refused to go to the concert, for which, as you remember, only this afternoon you were wishing for an invitation. Afterward, also, I thought you were enjoying yourself." "Oh, for God's sake don't try to be sly!" exclaimed Harry. "I wish I was a better hand at telling a story. But all the same I think it didn't bore Miss Aylwin. After all, the Luck is a very curious thing," he added. "You are going to Oxted for the Sunday, are you not?" asked Geoffrey. "Yes; the Grimstones have the flue in the house, bless them! And you go home, don't you? Oh, I never saw such wonderful eyes in my life!" he cried. "You are alluding to mine, apparently?" said Geoffrey. "Yes, of course I am. Deep violet by candlelight, and soft somehow like velvet." "Very handsome of you. I'll look to-night when I go to bed. My hair, too, soft and fluffy, and the colour of the sun shining through a mist." Harry laughed. "The habit of being funny is growing on you, Geoff," he said. "Take it in time, old chap, and see some good man about it. Oh! it's rot going to bed now; let's come to the club; it's only just down Park Lane. I'm not feeling like bed just yet." Meantime, at the house they had just left, Evie had gone up to bed, leaving Lady Oxted to do what she called "write two notes," a simple diplomatic method of stating that she did not herself mean to come upstairs immediately. These written, she announced, she would come to talk for five minutes, and they would take, perhaps, a quarter of an hour to write. In other words, as soon as Evie had gone, she went downstairs to seek her husband in his room, where she would be sure to find him sitting by a green reading lamp in mild exasperation at anything which the Government might happen to have done with regard either to a kindly old President of a South African republic or the second standard for board schools. "Violet, it is really too bad," said he, as she entered. "Have you read the Home Secretary's speech at Manchester? He says--let me see, where is it?" "Dear Bob," said his wife, "whatever he said, you would quite certainly disagree with it. But never mind showing it me this minute. I want your advice about another matter." A faint smile came over Lord Oxted's thin, sharp face; he usually smiled when his wife came to him for advice. He put down his paper and crossed one leg over the other. "What sort of advice?" he asked. "Be far more explicit before you consult me. Do you want to tell me of some decision you have made, and wish me to agree with you, or is it possible that you have not yet made your decision? It is as well to know, Violet, and it may save me from misunderstanding you." Lady Oxted laughed. "I am not yet sure which it is," she said. "Let me tell you my story, and by that time, you see, I may have made up my mind, in which case I shall want the first sort of advice; but if I have not, the second." "That sounds fair," he assented. In a few words she told him all that had passed between her and Evie. "And now," she concluded, "am I to promise or not?" Lord Oxted was a cynic in a certain mild and kindly fashion. "Certainly promise," he said. "And, being a woman, you will probably at the very back of your mind--the very back, I say--reserve to yourself the right to break it if it becomes inconvenient to keep it." "Don't be rude, Bob. I think I shall promise, but at the same time write to Mrs. Aylwin." Her husband chuckled quietly. "That is precisely what I meant," he said, "only I did not put the reservation quite so far forward in your mind. Did the two young people get on well together?" "Too well. Harry has developed an amazing knack of getting on well with people. And he is coming to us for the Sunday." "Then most likely you are already too late. You should have thought of these things before, Violet. Your after-thoughts, it is true, are often admirable, but, so to speak, they never catch the train. Bear this also in mind: if anything happens, if the two get engaged, we shall be liable at any moment to a crushing descent from Mrs. Aylwin. If she comes, I go. That is all." "But she is charming." "And completely overpowering. I will not be made to feel like a child in my own house. Dear me, you have probably got into a mess, Violet. Good-night, dear." "You agree with me, then?" she asked. "Completely, entirely, fervently, for it is clear to me that you want the first sort of advice." Lady Oxted went slowly upstairs and to Evie's room. Her maid had already left her, and the two settled themselves down for a talk. The night was hot, and Evie, in a white dressing gown with a touch of blue ribbon, lounged coolly by the open window. The hum of ambient London came up to them like the sound of drowsy, innumerable bees, and the girl listened in a sort of ecstasy. "Hark! hark!" she cried; "hundreds and thousands and millions of people are there! Lord Vail felt just as I do about it. Oh, what a host of pleasant things there are in the world!" she cried, stretching out her arms as if to take the whole swarming town to her breast. Then she turned quickly away into the room again. "Now, dear aunt," she said, "before we settle down to talk, and I have lots to say, let me know that one thing. Do you promise never to tell me the name of that man?" Lady Oxted did not pause. "Yes, I promise," she said. "Thank you. So that is all right. It would be dreadful, would it not, if I had been obliged to be afraid that every particularly delightful person that I met was the son, or the nephew, or the cousin of that man, or even the man himself? But now that is all right; mother would not tell me, and you (knowing her wish, is it not so?) also will not. O Aunt Violet, I intend to enjoy myself so! What a jolly world it is, to be sure! I am so glad God thought of it! Is that profane? No, I think not." Lady Oxted, it has been said, had anticipated one unpleasant moment. This, she considered, made two. And though it was not her habit to question the decrees of Providence, she wondered what she had done to deserve a position where the converse of candour was so sorely in demand. But she had not much time for thought, for Evie continued: "Only one evening gone," she said, "and that not yet gone, and what pleasure I have already had! Aunt Violet, how could you want Lord Vail not to tell me the story of the Luck? It was the most exciting thing I have ever heard, and, as I told him, he is only at the beginning of it. Italy, the South, is supposed to be the home of romance, but I do not find it there. Then I come to England, and in London, in Grosvenor Square, I hear within an hour or two of my arrival that story. I think----" She stopped suddenly, got up, and sat down on the sofa by Lady Oxted. "Lord Vail--who is he?" she asked. "What pleasant people you have at your house, Aunt Violet! He is so nice. So is his friend--Mr. Langton, is it not? So was the man who took me in to dinner. What was his name? I did not catch it." There was not much comfort here. The girl had forgotten, or not heard, the name of the man who took her in to dinner; she had got Geoffrey Langham's name wrong, and out of all these "nice people" there was only one name right. "Langham, dear--not Langton," said Lady Oxted, "and the man who took you in to dinner was Mr. Tresham. Surely you must have heard his name. He is in the Cabinet. Really, Evie, you do not appreciate the fine people I provide for your entertainment." The girl laughed lazily, but with intense enjoyment. "Not appreciate?" she said. "Words fail me to tell you how I appreciate them all. Mr. Tresham was simply delightful. We talked about dachshunds, which I love, and what else--oh! diamonds. I love them also. Aunt Violet, I should like to see the Luck: it must be a wonderful thing. So Mr. Tresham is a Conservative?" "It is supposed so," said Lady Oxted, with slight asperity. "When the Conservatives are in power, dear, the Cabinet is rarely composed of Liberals." The girl laughed again. "Dear Aunt Violet, you are a little hard on us poor innocents this evening. You blew up Lord Vail in the most savage manner, and now you are blowing me up. What have we done? Well, now, tell me about Mr. Langham." "Geoffrey is a younger son of Lord Langham," said the other. "He is on the stock exchange, and is supposed to know nothing whatever about stock-broking." "How very good-looking he is!" said Evie. "If I wanted to exchange stock, I should certainly ask him to do it for me. Somehow, people with nice faces inspire me with much more confidence than those whom I am assured have beautiful minds. One can see their faces: that makes so much difference!" Lady Oxted assented, and waited with absolute certainty for the next question. This tribute to Geoffrey's good looks did not deceive her for a moment: it was a typical transparency. And when the next question came, she only just checked herself from saying, "I thought so." "And now tell me about Lord Vail," said Evie, after a pause. "Well, he seemed to be telling you a good deal himself," said Lady Oxted. "What can I add? He is not yet twenty-two; he is considered pleasant; he is poor; he is the head of what was once a great family." "But his people?" asked Evie. "He has no father, no mother, no brothers or sisters." "Poor fellow!" said Evie, thoughtfully. "But he doesn't look like a person who need be lonely, or who was lonely, for that matter. Has he no relations?" "Of his name only one," said Lady Oxted, feeling that Providence was really treating her with coarse brutality; "that is his uncle, his great-uncle, rather, Francis Vail," and, as she spoke, she thought to herself in how widely different a connection she might have had to use those two words. "Do you know him?" "I used to, but never intimately. He has not lived in the world lately. For the last six months he has been down at Harry's place in Wiltshire. The boy has been exceedingly good to him." "Is he fond of him?" "Very, I believe," said Lady Oxted. "He often speaks of him, and always with affection and a tenderness that is rather touching." "That is nice of him," said the girl with decision, "for I suppose he can not be expected to have much in common with him. And so the old man lives with him. He is old, I suppose, as he is Lord Vail's great-uncle." "He is over seventy," said Lady Oxted, turning her back to the storm. "And Harry Vail is poor, you say?" "Considering what the Vails have been, very poor," said Lady Oxted. "But you probably know as much about that as I, since Harry took so very long telling you the story of the Luck. It was lost once in the reign of Queen Anne, and during the South-Sea Bubble----" "Yes, he told me about that," said Evie. "It is strange, is it not?" Suddenly she sat up as if with an effort. "Oh! to-morrow, and to-morrow, and lots more of them!" she cried. "Tell me what we shall do to-morrow, Aunt Violet. I am sure it will all be delightful, and for that very reason I want to think about it beforehand. I am a glutton about pleasure. Will you take me somewhere in the morning, and will delightful people come to lunch? Then in the afternoon we go to Oxted, do we not? I love the English country. Who will be coming? Is it a beautiful place? What is the house like? Tell me all about everything." "Including about going to bed and going to sleep, Evie?" asked the other. "It is long after twelve, do you know?" The girl got up. "And you want to go to bed," she said. "I am so sorry, Aunt Violet! I ought to have seen you were tired. You look tired." "And you--don't you want to go to sleep? You were travelling all last night." The girl looked at the smooth pillow and sheet folded back. "Ah! it does look nice," she said. "But, indeed, I don't feel either sleepy or tired. Anyhow, Aunt Violet, I am not going to keep you up. Oh, I am so glad you got mother to let me come and stay with you! I shall have a good time. Good-night." "Good-night, dear. You have everything?" "Everything--more than everything." CHAPTER VII THE POINT IN CASUISTRY SOLVES ITSELF Lady Oxted always breakfasted in her own room, and before she appeared next morning she had spent a long hour in wrestling over her letter to Mrs. Aylwin. She had been desirous to tell the unvarnished truth, and yet to steer clear of a production by a demented matchmaker, and her letter, it must be confessed, was an admirable performance. Evie had told her, so she wrote, of her mother's refusal to let her know the name of the man at whose door she laid, or used to lay, Harold's death, and, taking this to mean that Mrs. Aylwin, for any reason, did not wish Evie to know it, the writer had, at Evie's request, promised on her own part not to tell her. The present Lord Vail, she must add, Mr. Francis's nephew, was a constant visitor at her house, and he and Evie had already met. Mrs. Aylwin, she was bound to understand, put no prohibition on their meeting in the way they were sure to meet during the season. Lord Vail was a young man, pleasant, attractive, and of excellent disposition. Lady Oxted laid down her pen for a moment at this point, then hurriedly took it up to add an amiable doxology, and sign it. She felt convinced she could not do better; convinced, also, that if she gave the matter further consideration, it would end in her doing much worse. Then she took Evie out with a warm and approving conscience. That afternoon they left London, as had been originally planned, to spend the Sunday at their country house in Sussex. During the hours of the night, Lady Oxted had sternly interrogated herself as to whether she ought, on any lame or paltry excuse, to put Harry off; but on the strength of her promise given to Evie, and the letter she was about to write to Mrs. Aylwin, she felt she could not take any step in the matter till she received her answer. To put him off, argued the inward voice, was to act contrary to the spirit of her promise, which entailed not only silence of the lips, but abstinence from any manoeuvring or outflanking movement of this kind. This reasoning seemed sound, and as it went in harness with her instinct, she obeyed it without question. The house stood high on a broad ridge of the South Downs, commanding long views of rolling fields alternating with the more sombre green of the woods. To the east lay the heathery heights of Ashdown Forest, peopled with clumps and companies of tall Scotch fir; southward the smooth austerity of the hills behind Brighton formed the horizon line. Thatched roofs nestled at cosy intervals beside the double hedgerows which indicated roads; a remote church spire pricked the sky, or an occasional streamer of smoke indicated some train burrowing distantly at the bottom of valleys, before it again plunged with a shriek into the bases of the tunnelled hills; but, except for these, the evidences of humanity were to be sought in vain. The house itself was partly Elizabethan, in part of Jacobean building, picturesquely chimneyed, and high in the pitch of its outside roofs; inside, it was panelled and oaken-beamed, spacious of hearth, and open of fireplace. Round it ran level lawns, fringed with flower beds, wall-encompassed, which as they receded farther from the house gradually lost formality, and merged by imperceptible steps into untutored Nature. Here, for instance, you would pass from the trim velvet of the nearer lawns into the thick lush grass of an orchard planted with apples and the Japanese cherry; but the grass was thick in spring, with the yellow of the classical daffodil; and scarlet of the anemone was spilled thereon, and the dappled heads of the fritillary rose, bell-shaped. Here, again, in a different direction the lawn farther from the house was invaded by a band of lilac bushes, and to the wanderer here a Scotch fir would suddenly stand sentinel at a turn of the grassy path, while, if his walk took him but fifty yards more remote, the lilacs would have ceased, and he would be treading the brown, silent needles of the fir grove, exchanging for the sweet, haunting smell of the garden shrubs the clean odour of the pine. In a word, it was a place apt to reflect the moods of the inhabitants: the sombrely disposed might easily see in the pines a mirror of their thought; the lilacs, whose smell is ever a host of memories, would call up a hundred soft images in hearts otherwise disposed; while, for the lover of pointed conversation, what _milieu_ could be more suitable than the formality of the lawns nearer the house, which, clean and trim cut as French furniture, irresistibly gave to those who sat and talked there a certain standard of precision? Beyond, again, the orchard was every evening a singing contest of nightingales, and through the soft foliage of fruitful trees, moon and stars cast deep shadows and diapers of veiled light into grassy alleys. The party was but a small one, for influenza had for the last month been pursuing its pleasant path of decimation through London, and, as Mr. Tresham remarked, while they drank their coffee in the tent on the lawn after lunch next day: "Those of us who are not yet dead are not yet out of its clutches." Lady Oxted sighed. "I had it once a week throughout last summer," she said. "It is such a consolation, when it is about, to know that the oftener you have it the more liable you become to it!" Mrs. Antrobus finished her coffee, and tried to feel her pulse. "I never can find it," she said, "and that is so frightening! It may have stopped, for all I know." "Dear lady," said Mr. Tresham, "I will promise to tell you whether it has stopped or not, not more than a minute after it has done so. Alas! it will then be too late." "Ah! there it is," said Mrs. Antrobus at length. "One, two. It _has_ stopped now. Take the time, Mr. Tresham, and tell me when a minute has gone." "Your mother is the only really healthy person I know," said Lady Oxted to Evie. "Whether she is ill or not, she always believes that she is perfectly well. And as long as one fully believes that, as she does, it really matters little how ill one is!" Lord Oxted got slowly out of his chair. "Some doctor lately analyzed a cubic inch of air in what we should call a clean London drawing-room," he said. "He found that it contained over two hundred bacilli, each of which, if they lived carefully and married, would, with its family, be soon able to kill the strongest man. I surrendered as soon as I heard it!" "Quite the best thing to do," said Mr. Tresham, "for otherwise they would kill you. It is better to give yourself up, and be taken alive!" "It is certainly better to remain alive," said Mrs. Antrobus. "That is why we all go to bed now when we get the influenza. We surrender, like Lord Oxted, and so the bacilli do not kill us, but only send us away to the seaside. It is the people who will not surrender who die. Personally I should never dream of going about with a high temperature. It sounds so improper!" Evie was sitting very upright in her chair, listening to this surprising conversation. She had seen Mrs. Antrobus for the first time the evening before, and had made Lady Oxted laugh by asking whether she was a little mad. It had been almost more puzzling to be told that she was not, than if she had been told that she was. And at this remark about her temperature, Evie suddenly looked round, as if for a sympathizing eye. An eye there certainly was, and she felt as if, in character of a hostess, she had looked for and caught Harry Vail's. At any rate, he instantly rose, she with him, and together they strolled out of the Syrian tent on the lawn, and down toward the cherry-planted orchard. For a few paces they went in silence, each feeling as if a preconcerted signal had passed between them. Then Evie stopped. "I wonder if it is rude to go away?" she said. "Do you think we ought to go back?" "It is never any use going back," said Harry. "Certainly, in this case it would not do. They would think----" and a sudden boldness came over him; "they would think we had quarrelled." Evie laughed. "That would never do," she said, "for I feel just now as if you were an ally, my only one. What strange things Mrs. Antrobus says! Perhaps they are clever?" She made this suggestion hopefully, without any touch of sarcasm. "Most probably," said Harry. "That would be an excellent reason, anyhow, for my finding them quite impossible to understand." "Don't you understand them? Then we certainly are allies. You know I asked my aunt last night whether she was at all mad, and she seemed surprised that I should think so. But, really, when a woman says that she wishes she had been her own mother, because she would have been so much easier to manage than her daughter--what does it all mean?" she asked. "Oh, she's not mad," said Harry. "It is only a way she has. There are lots of people like her. I don't mind it myself: you only have to laugh; there is no necessity for saying anything." "And as little opportunity," remarked Evie. She paused, then pulled a long piece of feathery grass from its sheath. "England is delightful," she said with decision. "I find it simply delightful, from Mrs. Antrobus upward or downward. Just think, Lord Vail, I have not been here for three years! What has happened since then?" "To whom?" "To anybody. You, for example." "Have I not told you? I have come of age. I have found the Luck." Evie threw the grass spearwise down wind. She had not exactly meant to speak so personally. "Ah, the Luck!" she exclaimed. "Lord Vail, do promise to show it me!" Thereat Harry again grew bold. "Nothing easier," he said. "I have to go down to Vail next week. Persuade Lady Oxted to bring you down for a day or two. The Luck is the only inducement, I am afraid; it and some big, bare, Wiltshire downs." "Big, large, and open?" she asked. "All that. Does it please you?" "Immensely. I should love to come. And the Luck is there? You must know that I am horribly inquisitive; perhaps, if you were indulgent, you would say interested, and leave out the horribly, in other people's concerns. So, tell me, what do you hope the Luck will bring you?" "I don't dare to hope. I am inclined to wait a little." Evie frowned. "That would be all very well for a woman," she said, "but it won't do for a man. It is a woman's part to sit at home and wait for the luck. But it is a man's to go and seek it." "I am on the lookout for it. I am always on the lookout for it," he said. Some shadow passed across the brightness of Evie's eyes; again the personal note had been a little too distinct in her speech, and she replied quickly: "That is right. I should go for the highest if I were you. I think I should plot a revolution, and make myself King of England. Something big of that sort!" "I had not thought of that," said Harry; "and I sometimes wonder--it is all nonsense, you know, about the Luck, and of course I don't really believe in it--but I sometimes wonder----" He paused a moment. "I wonder whether you would care to hear some more family history?" he said at length. "Is it as exciting as the Luck?" asked the girl. "I don't know if you will find it so. It is certainly more tragic." "Do tell me!" she said. "Promise me to exercise your right of stopping me, as before." "I never stopped you!" she exclaimed. Harry laughed. "No. I meant that you had the right to," he said. "Do you really want to hear it? It is intimate stuff." "Indeed I do," she said. Harry paused a moment, then began his story. "There lives at Vail," he said, "a man whom I honour as much as any one in the world, my great-uncle, Francis Vail. He is old, he has led the most unhappy life, yet, if you met him casually, you would say he was a man who had never seen sorrow, so cheerful is he, so full of kindly spirits." "He is your only relation, is he not?" asked the girl. "He is. Who told you?" "Lady Oxted. I beg your pardon. I did not mean to interrupt." "He has led a life of continuous and most unmerited misfortune," said Harry, "and when I began just now 'I wonder,' I was going to say, I wonder whether the Luck will come to him? You see it is a family thing. He, one would think, might get the good, not I. And I honestly assure you that I should be more than delighted if he did." "It is about him you would tell me?" asked Evie. "About him. I need not give you the smaller details. His unhappy marriage, his sudden poverty, his bankruptcy even, for there is one thing in his life so terrible that it seems to me to overshadow everything else." They had come to a garden seat at the far end of the orchard, and here Evie sat down. Harry stood beside her, one foot on the bench, looking not at her, but out over the creamy, sleeping landscape. "It is nearly twenty-two years ago," he said, "that my uncle was staying down at an estate we used to have in Derbyshire, which has since been sold. The place next us belonged to some people called Harmsworth-- What?" An involuntary exclamation had come to Evie's lips, but she checked it before it was speech. "Nothing," she said, quietly. "Please go on. "And young Harmsworth," continued Harry, "who had just come of age, was a great friend with my uncle, who was as kind to him as he is to all young people, as kind as he always is, and that I hope you will soon know for yourself. Well, one day the two were out shooting together----" Evie made a sudden, quick movement. "And Harold Harmsworth accidentally shot himself," she said. Harry paused in utter surprise. "You know the story?" he said. "Yes, I know it." "You, too!" he cried. "Good God, the thing is past this more than twenty years; and people still talk of it. Oh, it is monstrous! So I need not tell you the rest." "No," said Evie quietly. "Your uncle was unjustly--for so I fully believe--unjustly suspected of having shot him. It is monstrous, I quite agree with you. But I am not so monstrous as you think," she added, rather faintly. In a moment Harry's heightened colour died from his face. "Miss Aylwin, I did not say that!" he exclaimed earnestly. "Forgive me if I have said anything that hurt you. But, indeed, I did not say that." Evie looked at him a moment. She knew the thing which she had so much desired not to know, but the knowledge, strangely enough, did not frighten or affect her. "No; in justice to you, I will say that you did not. But you broke out, 'It is monstrous,' when I told you I knew the story." Again the colour rose to his face, but now not vehement, only ashamed. "I did," he said; "it is quite true. I spoke violently and unjustifiably. But if you knew my poor uncle, Miss Aylwin, I do not think you would find it hard to forgive me; you would see at once why I spoke so hastily. He is the kindest and best of men, and the most soft-hearted. Think what that suspicion must have been to him, the years, so many of them and all so bitter, in which it has never been cleared up!" "I do think," she said softly, "and I like you for your violence, Lord Vail. You are loyal; it is no bad thing to be loyal. But----" and she looked up at him, "but you must not think that I am a willing listener to gossip and old scandal that does not concern me." "I do not think that," cried Harry. "Indeed, I never thought that." His words rang out and died on the hot air, and still the girl made no answer. This way and that was her mind divided: should she tell him all, should she tell him nothing? The latter was the easier path, for his last words had the ring of truth in them, convincing, unmistakable, and she, so to speak, was acquitted without a stain on her character, did she decide not to speak. But something within her, intangible and imperative, urged other counsels. Her reason gave her no account of these, but simple instinct only called to her. What prompted that instinct, from what deep and vital source it rose, she did not pause to consider. Simply, it was there, with reason warring on the other side. The battle was brief and momentous. Immediately, almost, she spoke. "I am sure you never thought that," she said, "but I wish"--and her pulse ticked full and rapid--"I wish to prove to you how it was not through gossip that the knowledge came to me, for this is how I heard it: My mother was Harold Harmsworth's mother." Harold drew a long breath which hung suspended in his lungs. His eye was fixed on the eyes of the girl in a long glance of sheer astonishment, and hers were not withdrawn. At last-- "God forgive us all!" he said. "And do you forgive me?" Evie got up quickly, with a glowing face. "Forgive you? What is there for which I can forgive you, Lord Vail?" she said. "And I honour you for your championship of your kinsman, who has suffered, as I believe, unmeritedly and most cruelly," and her heart spoke the words which her lips framed. They walked back in silence toward the house, for to each the moment was too good to spoil by further speech, and the silence was spontaneous and desired, the distance of the poles away from awkwardness. To Harry, at any rate, it seemed too precious to risk of it the loss of a moment; he would not have opened his lips, except that one word should issue therefrom, for all his Luck could bring him, and that word he dared not utter yet; he scarcely even knew if, so to speak, it was there yet. And in Evie the triumph of her just speech over a more conventional reticence filled her with a deep and secret joy. She ought to have said what she had said, she could have said no less, and she felt it in every beat and leaping pulse of her body. The recognised and proper reserve of a girl to a young man meant to her at that moment less than nothing; her words, she knew, had put her on to a new and more intimate footing with him, but she could not have spoken otherwise, or have spoken not at all. She had said what was due from one human being, be he boy or girl, or man or woman, to another human being, king or peasant. She had said no more than she need, but, humanly speaking, she could not have said less. The thing had been well done. But just before they reached the lawn again she spoke. "My mother, of course, told me the story," she said. "I asked her for the name of--for your uncle's name, but she would not tell me. It is better," and again her blood spoke, "it is better thus." Next moment they turned the corner, and found the party as they had left it, for they had been gone scarcely ten minutes. Mrs. Antrobus was lighting one cigarette from the stump of another. CHAPTER VIII THE SECOND RETURN TO VAIL It was the day following Lady Oxted's return to London from the Sunday in the country that she received the expected letter from Mrs. Aylwin, in answer to her own. The opening of it, it would be idle to deny, was made with an anxious and apprehensive hand. Already it was plain to her with how swift and strong a movement, as of flood water hastening toward sluice-gates, the first attraction between the two was speeding into intimacy; and had she known what had passed between them in the orchard, she would have guessed that its swiftness had outrun her eye. Already it would have been far better that, if the girl was to know the name her mother had refused to tell her, she should have known it on the night of her arrival. But these things were past prayer, and Lady Oxted drew the sheet of paper from its envelope and found, at any rate, that the communication was short. "I leave it entirely to your judgment," wrote Mrs. Aylwin, "whether you tell Evie or not. You say that you have promised not to: in that case, supposing at some future time you consider it advisable, and you can accept this quibble, tell it her not in your name, but in mine. My reason for not telling it her you may easily have guessed: the knowledge, or so I thought it, that Harold was murdered, has poisoned my life, and now I question myself as to whether I have been certainly right about it. But remember this: if there arises between the two--the thing is possible, as evidently you foresee--a friendship which develops, as is natural between a man and a maid, it is certain that some time Evie will know. I leave it to you to decide whether it is better that she should know now or later. I thank you, dear Violet, for your care for her." "Dear Violet" heaved a sigh of relief. Mrs. Aylwin had been known to stagger those who were dear to her by sending them letters which partook of the nature of an ultimatum. But there was no ultimatum here; she was willing to treat, and this letter, though couched with the precision of an official despatch, was not without amenity. She hurried downstairs to join Evie, for they were going out to lunch, with the sense of a burden removed. Such being the attitude of Mrs. Aylwin, she determined that her own promise to the girl should certainly stand; and she thought, with scornful wonder of her husband's diagnosis, that at the very back of her mind she would reserve to herself the right to break it. Men's idea of women, she told herself, was incredibly crude and elementary. They reserved for themselves a monopoly of certain qualities, like courage, justice, and honour, and simply took it for granted that such things did not exist for women. Poor, dear Bob, and after so many years, too! Evie was somewhat silent as they drove down Bond Street, and though her gaze at the jostling crowds was not less intent than usual, it seemed to have lost the sparkle of its avidity, and to dwell rather than alight and be gone again. She looked this morning at the seedy toy sellers and flower vendors more than at their fragrant or painted wares, and, instead of finding fascination in the little tin figures that moved their scythes over the surface of an absolutely smooth pavement, with the industry of those who reap the whirlwind, or commenting on the phenomenal cheapness of collar studs, it was rather the tragic meanness of their exhibitors which to-day attracted her. "How do you suppose they live, Aunt Violet?" she asked. "Look at that man with studs: six a penny. I know, because I bought six on Saturday. Well, supposing he sold sixty a day, which I imagine he does not, and that they cost him absolutely nothing, in the evening he would have tenpence. Yet they are not beggars; they work for their bread. Now, in Italy, we have nothing like them; their place is taken by the smiling, picturesque _lazzaroni_, who would not stir a finger to help themselves. They just sit in the sun and smile, and get fed. Oh, dear!" "What is it now, Evie?" asked Lady Oxted. "Nothing. I suppose I am just realizing that it takes all sorts to make a world, and that extremes meet, and so on. Look at me now: here am I in this comfortable victoria, much more like the _lazzaroni_ than the toy sellers, and who shall say how far the toy sellers are above the _lazzaroni_? I sit in the sun, and if there is no sun I sit by the fire, and, to do me justice, I generally smile. Yet, supposing I had to work for my bread, should I do it cheerfully, do you think? Should I maintain even a low average of industry? Supposing there came some great call on me for courage or resolution, should I respond to it? I have no reason whatever for assuring you, or myself either, that I should." Lady Oxted's mind flew back with an inward smirk of satisfaction to her own heroic determination to keep the promise she had made to Evie. "Probably you would," she said. "Probably we are not so bad, when it comes to--when we have an opportunity for behaving abominably, as we thought we were going to be. The thought of the dentist poisons my life for days beforehand, yet I go all the same, and ring the dreary bell, and behave, I believe, with average courage under the wheel. Morally, too, I suspect, we are better when a thing has to be done than we were afraid we were going to be. Also, on the whole, one is more honourable than one thinks--more honourable certainly," she added, with a sudden, irrepressible spurt of indignation against her husband--"than those who know us best believe us to be." Evie laughed. "Dear aunt, have you been very honourable lately?" she asked. "Or has Uncle Bob been doubting your fine qualities?" "Cynicism always ends in disappointment," remarked Lady Oxted, leaping a conversational chasm, "but since it is cynical, I suppose it expects it." "Is Uncle Bob a cynic?" asked Evie, dragging her back over the chasm again. "Well, I made a promise the other day," said Lady Oxted, "and asked him his advice about it. He told me that I should probably reserve to myself the right to break it." Evie sat up suddenly, and toy makers and _lazzaroni_ were swept from her mind. "A promise?" she said. "Not the promise you made me?" Lady Oxted looked up in surprise. "Yes, the same. Why, dear?" Evie deliberated with herself for a moment. "For this reason," she said slowly: "because I now know what I asked you not to tell me. Your promise has had the kernel taken out of it." "You know? Who told you?" "Lord Vail," she replied. Lady Oxted looked at the girl's heightened colour, wondering what emotion flew that beautiful standard there. "I will never waste a dram of resolution again in determining to abide by my word," she announced. Evie laughed again, with a great ring of happiness in the note. "Then you will confirm Uncle Bob in his cynicism," she replied, "and disappoint him of all his pleasant little disappointments." It was not long before Lady Oxted found that to be chaperon to a very considerable heiress could not be regarded, even by the most negligent, as a sinecure, while to fulfil its duties at all adequately cost a vast deal of time and thought. Had the girl been dull, heavy, serious, or plain, her task would have been lighter; but as it was, Lady Oxted became, before a fortnight was past, a really hard-worked woman. Evie's appetite for gaiety was insatiable; she took to London like a bird to the air; found everybody charming, and everybody returned the compliment. Indeed, the girl seemed to bring, wherever she went, a breath of spring and morning, so utterly sincere and spontaneous was the pleasure that bubbled from her; and, since nothing pleases people so much as to find themselves pleasing, London in general was exceedingly glad that Santa Margarita was the poorer for Evie's presence here. With the eager avidity of youth, and with youth's serene digestion, she gathered and devoured the heaped-up feast of daily and nightly gaiety. Self-consciousness for once seemed to have been left out of the composition of a human being, and she played, and laughed, and enjoyed herself among these crowds as a child may play with daisies by itself in some spring meadow, not brooding and reflecting on its happiness, but simply happy. Parsifal with the flower maidens was not more unreflective than she, surrounded by the well-dressed hosts, her charm in the mouths of all. It might have been hoped, thought Lady Oxted, that since so large a ring was always assembled to see her smile, the smiles would have been, considering the number and variety of the circle, distributed with moderate evenness. In this she was not disappointed, but a thing far more disconcerting to the responsible chaperon. Evie's seriousness certainly was not impartial. For all the world but one she seemed to have no seriousness, but about that one there could be no mistake. For already, between her and Harry, there existed a relation, clear and indefinable, to be dwelt on with silent wonder. Some alchemy, secret and subtle, untraceable as the curves of the swallow's flight, was at work; an effervescence already had begun to stir, brightening the dark well of destiny within them by a hundred points of light; a mysterious luminosity was growing in tremulous flame. Until the receipt of Mrs. Aylwin's letter, Lady Oxted had felt a little uncertain as to whether she could accept Harry's invitation for herself and the girl to Vail. In any case the next two Sundays were impossible, and the matter had been left undecided. But now that all restriction was withdrawn, she arranged to take Evie down in three weeks' time, at the end of the month. Harry himself, however, had business at his home which could not be postponed, and toward the end of the week he went down there with the intention of clearing it off as quickly as might be, and returning again to London. Mr. Francis had been at Vail almost continuously since the winter, and Harry found him in the enjoyment of his usual merry spirits. He looked even better in health and younger to the eye than when his nephew had seen him last, and the briskness of his movements, the clear, scarcely wrinkled skin of his face, were indeed surprising in one of his years. He had driven to the station to meet Harry, and the train being stopped on an inside curve just before reaching the platform, the lad, leaning out of the window, saw him standing there. Mr. Francis caught sight of the face, and pulling out his handkerchief continued to wave it till the train finally drew up at the platform. "And how are you, my dearest boy?" he cried effusively, before Harry was out of the carriage. "How late your train is! It is scandalous and abominable! I should have found two sharp words for the station-master, I suspect, if I had not been so happy to think you were coming. How well you look, Harry! London seems to suit you as much as the country suits me." "Indeed, that is saying a great deal," said Harry, looking at that cheerful, healthy face. "I have never seen you looking better, Uncle Francis." A smile of great tenderness played round the old man's mouth. "And for that I have to thank you, my dear boy," he said, "in that it is to you I owe my quiet retreat, my days of busy tranquility. Ah, Harry, it has been worth while to grow old, if at the end you find such peace as is mine." They drove briskly up the mile of deep country lane which separated the station from the high road, and Harry found an unlooked-for pleasure in the wreaths of honeysuckle which embowered the hedge in their fragrant curves, and in the clean, vigorous tendrils of the dog-rose starred with the delicacy of its pink blossom. Something in that young unfolding of simple loveliness, which had never really struck him before, now smote on his heart with a pang of exquisite pleasure. How wonderful was youth and the growth of young things; how like, in some subtle and intimate way, were the springing sprigs of blossoms to a girl on the verge of womanhood! For instance--and he turned to his uncle again. "Yes, London suits me," he said, the thrill and surprise of his thoughts glowing in his handsome face. "People are so kind, so friendly! Oh, it is a warm, nice world!" and his hand shook the two horses to a swifter trot. "You will always find people kind and friendly to you, Harry," said Mr. Francis, "if you look at them as you looked at me just now. Men and women know nothing so attractive as happiness. My dear boy, what have you been doing to yourself? You are more radiant than Apollo!" Harry laughed. "I would not change places with him," he said; "I will take my chance as Harry Vail. I have done nothing to myself, if you ask, but I have found many friends. But I do not forget, Uncle Francis, that the first friend I found was you, and I do not think I shall find a better." They turned into the blare of the white high road, and Mr. Francis, who, while they were in the shadow of the deep lane banks, had carried his hat on his knee, letting the wind blow refreshingly through his thick white hair, put it on again. "Ah, Harry, I hope you will some time, and soon, find a friend, and dearer than a friend, for life," he said, "who will speedily make you forget your old uncle. But give him a seat in the chimney corner, that he asks, though he asks no more, and let him nurse your children on his knee. He has a way with children; they never cry with him. I pray, I often pray," he said, lifting his hat as he spoke, with a gesture touching and solemn, "that I may do that. That, dear Harry, would be the crowning happiness of many happy days." The words died gently on the air; no direct reply was needed. For a moment Harry was half determined to tell his uncle of his dream and his hope--longing, with the generous warmth of youth, for the sympathy which he knew would so fully be his; and the words were even on the threshold of his lips, when Mr. Francis suddenly straightened himself from his attitude of musing and plunged into less intimate talk. "I have not been idle, dear Harry," he said, "while you have been away, charging about the world, as youth should. I think you will find--I may say it without undue complacence--that the home farm is in better order and is more profitable than it has ever been. There is no credit due to me; it is simply the work of a bailiff I had the luck to find an invaluable man; and in the autumn I can promise you better pheasant-shooting than there has been for many years." "I am sure it is so," said Harry, "and we will prove it together, Uncle Francis. Really I can not thank you enough; it is too good of you to devote yourself as you have been doing to the estate. Dear me, it is four months since I was here! I am an absentee landlord, but a better landlord than I has been on the spot, and I am not afraid that I shall be shot at." They turned in at the lodge gates and bowled swiftly along under the huge trees. The hay was standing high in the fields to the left; on the right the pasturage of the park was grazed by sleek kine, already beginning to leave the midday shadows of the trees for their evening feed in the cool; and the senses of smell and sight alike drank deep of the plentiful and luxuriant summer. Rooks held parliament in their debating houses in the high elms, round the coops of the pheasant-rearing hens cheeped innumerable young birds, and the breeze that should blow at sundown was already stirring to try its wings. Extraordinarily pleasant to Harry was the sense that all this was his, yet there was neither vainglory nor selfishness in his delight, for he valued his own not for the thought of what it was to him, but for the joy another, perhaps, should take in it. Then, emerging from the mile-long avenue, they came to the shining lake, and the sound of coolness from the splashing sluice. Swans and water lily repeated themselves on the surface, and, as they turned the corner, a moor-hen made its water-legged scurry to the cover of the reed beds. Then, with a hollow note from the wheels, they rolled over the bridge and turned in under the monstrous shapes of the cut-box hedge to the gravel sweep in front of the house. There it stood, the shadow of one of the wings fallen half across the courtyard, stately and grave, full of dignity and grave repose, surely no unworthy gift to offer to any. And at that thought a sudden pulse leaped within him. "It is all unworthy," Harry said to himself, banishing with an effort that irrepressible thrill of joy, "and I the unworthiest of all." He lingered a moment at the door, and then followed Mr. Francis into the house. Again the joy of possession seized him: his were the tall, faint tapestries of armoured knights and garlanded lovers, his the rows of serious portraits which seemed to-day to his eye to have a freshness and welcome for him which had never been there before. He contrasted, with keen relish of the change, his last home-coming and this. What a curious, dreamlike month that had been which he had spent here at his coming-of-age. How gray and colourless life seemed then if looked at in the light of all that had passed since! He had pictured himself, he remembered, slowly putting spadeful after spadeful of time, heaped gradually from month to year, on the grave of his youth, spending a quiet, often solitary existence here in the house of his fathers. Uncle Francis--so he had planned it in those days when he had been alone here, before his arrival and Geoffrey's--no doubt would be glad to come here sometimes; Geoffrey, too, would very likely spend a week with him now and again in the shooting season. Otherwise, it would be natural for him to be much alone, and the prospect had called up in him no emotion even so lively as dislike. He would be out of doors a good deal, pottering and poking about the woods; he would read a good deal, and no doubt the years would slip away not unpleasantly. In course of time the portrait of Henry Vail, twelfth baron, and of seemingly morose tendencies, would gloom from the wall, for that series must not be broken; a little longer, and moss would be green in the lettering of his tombstone. But now he could scarcely believe that the lad who had meditated thus six months ago, not dismally but without joy, could be the same as he who stood with a kindled eye beneath old Francis's picture. He looked at his own hand as he raised his teacup, he looked at his boots and his trousers. Yes, they were certainly his, and he it had been who had drunk tea here before. What then had happened, he asked himself? He had discovered the world, that was all; and Columbus had only discovered America. And the world was quite full of charming things and people in particular; to descend to details, or to generalize on the whole, he hardly knew which was which; it was full of one person. CHAPTER IX CARDIAC Mr. Francis soon joined him for tea, and, after proposing a stroll in ten minutes' time, had gone to his room to answer an urgent letter. Harry was well content to wait, for nothing could come amiss to a mood so harmonious as his, and, lighting a cigarette, he strolled round the walls, beholding his forbears. Opposite the portrait of old Francis, second baron, he stood long, and his eye sought and dwelt on the Luck as a familiar object. The sun, streaming through the western windows, fell full on to the picture, and the jewels, so cunning and exact was their portrayal, sparkled with an extraordinary vividness in the gleam. The Luck! Was it the Luck which had given him these days of wonderful happiness, with so great and unspeakable a hope for the days to come? Was this the huge reward it granted him, for which he had paid but with a cold in the head, a burn on the hand, a sprain of the foot? How curious, at the least, those three coincidences following so immediately on the finding of the Luck had been. How curious, also, this awakening of his (dating from the same time) from the solitary lethargy of his first twenty-one years! For the awakening had come with the coming of Uncle Francis, and his own instant attachment to him. It was indeed he--he and Geoffrey, at any rate, between them on their visit here--who had started him on the voyage which had already resulted in the discovery of the world. It was then that his potential self had begun to rustle and stir in the chrysalis of isolation which had grown up round it, very feebly and tentatively indeed at first, but by degrees cracking and bursting its brown bark, then standing with quivering and momently expanding wings, which gradually unfolded and grew strong for flight. The Luck! Was it indeed the gems and the gold which had done this for him? It was much, it was very much, but to him now how infinitely more than he had, did he desire! Six months ago he had desired nothing, for he was dead; but now, being alive, how he yearned for more, one thing more! A sudden idea seized him, and he rang the bell, and, until it was answered, looked again at the picture. Old Francis's face, he thought, and old Francis's hands, did not fare so well in the sunlight as the glorious jewel which he held. The hands clutched rather than held the cup; the lines of them were greedy and grasping, they gripped the treasure with nervous tension, and in the face there were ugly lines which he had never noticed before, but which bore out the evidence of the hands; avarice sat on that throne, and cunning as deep as the sea, and cruelty and evil mastery. Still looking and wondering, he suddenly saw the face in a different light; it was no longer a vile soul that looked from those eyes, but the kind, cheerful spirit of his own uncle. He started, for the change had the vividness of actuality, and at the moment the bell was answered by the old butler. "Ah, Templeton," he cried, "I am glad to see you. All well? That's right. I rang to say that I wanted you to get out the Luck--the big cup, you know, which you and I found in the attic last Christmas, and put it on the table to-night as a centrepiece." "Mr. Francis has the key, my lord," said Templeton. "It is on his private bunch." "Ask him to give it you, then. Say it was by my order. Oh, here he is!--Uncle Francis, I want the key of the case in which is the Luck. I want to have it on the table to-night." "Dear boy, is it wise?" said Mr. Francis. "Supposing the house was broken into: you know the thing is priceless." "But burglars can not take it from under our noses while we sit at dinner," said Harry, "and, as soon as dinner is over, even before we leave the room, it shall be put back again.--See to that, Templeton. That is the key, is it?--Why, it is gold, too! Old Francis knew how to do things thoroughly." Uncle and nephew strolled out together, Harry with his head high and leading the way. An extraordinary elation was on him. "I have a feeling that the Luck is bringing me luck," he said. "Oh, I don't seriously believe it, but think how strange the coincidences have been! Fire, and frost, and rain! I had a turn with all of them. And you know, Uncle Francis, since I found it, I have had more happiness than in the whole of my life before." "What happiness, Harry?" "Friends, you the first; the joy of my life; the conscious feeling that one is alive, which I suppose is the same thing. All, all," he cried, "the world, men, women, things--all!" Mr. Francis did not reply at once, but went forward a few steps, his eyes on the ground. "Don't believe it, Harry," he said. "I would never have told you about the foolish old tale if I had thought that there was the slightest chance of your paying more attention to it than one gives to a fairy story. My dear boy, you are really quite silly. You caught cold because you would not listen to my excellent advice and change your clothes when you got in from shooting; you sprained your ankle because you did not look where you were going, and see that the steps were covered with ice; you burned yourself because a careless housemaid had forgotten to tack down the carpet! I do not believe in magic at all; there is, I assert, no such thing; but even if one did, it would be a very childish, weak kind of spell that could only bring curses of that sort." "That is just what I think," said Harry; "the evil, perhaps, has run down, so to speak; it is nearly impotent. Oh, I am only joking. But if that is the price I have paid for my present happiness, I consider it dirt cheap. And if the Luck can give me more happiness, I hereby declare to the powers that work it that I will take any amount more on the same scale of charges." Mr. Francis laughed, and took Harry's arm affectionately. "Dear lad, you were only jesting, I know," he said. "But it is not well to dwell on such fantastic things too much, though we constantly remind ourselves that they are nonsense. The human mind is a very wonderful and delicate piece of mechanism, and if once we begin playing experiments with a thing of which we understand so little, it may get out of order, and strike the wrong hour, and fail to keep time. Lead your wholesome, honourable life, dear boy, and take gratefully what happiness comes in your way, and do not forget where it comes from. Then you will have nothing to fear from the Luck." "No, and nothing to gain from it," said Harry, "for I suspect magic can not touch those who do not believe in it." "Dear boy, enough," said Mr. Francis, with a certain earnestness. "You have told me you do not believe in it. Ah, what a wonderful evening! Look at those pink fleeces of cloud in the west, softer than sleep, softer than sleep, as Theocritus says. How I wish I was a painter! Think of the privilege of being able to show those sunset glories; to show, too, as the true artist can, the feelings, infinite and subtle, which those rose clouds against the pale blue of the sky produce in one, to show them to the toiler of the London streets. Ah, Harry, what a wealth of senses has been given us, what diverse-facing windows to our souls, and how little we trouble to look out of any, or to keep bright and clean even one! The gourmet even, the man who eats his dinner, using his palate with intelligence, is a step above most people. He has trained a sense, and what exquisite pleasure that sense, even though it be the most animal of all, gives him! And who can say that each sense was not given us in order that we should cultivate it to the fullest?" Suddenly he raised his hat, and in a low, clear voice he cried: "O world as God has made it, all in beauty, And knowing this is love, and love is duty, What further can be sought for or declared?" For a long moment he stood there, his face irradiated by the fires of sunset, his eyes soft with gentle, unshed tears, his hair stirred by the caress of the evening breeze, with who knows what early dreams and cool reveries of boyhood reminiscent within him? His harsh, untoward past had gone from him; he had lived backward in that moment to the days before troubles and darkness came about his path; aspirations seemed to have taken the place of memory; he was a youth again, and Harry's face, as he looked at him, was loving and reverent. It was already deep dusk when they turned back, and only the faint reflections of the fires of sunset lingered in the sky. The green of grass and tree had faded to a sombre gray, and the green of the fantastically cut box hedge had deepened to black when they again passed under its misshapen shapes and monstrous prodigies. Somehow the look of it, cut out against the unspeakable softness and distance of the sky, struck Harry with something of an ominous touch. "That must be seen to," he said, pointing to it. "Look at the horror of its shapes; it is like a collection of feverish dreams!" "The old box hedge?" asked Mr. Francis. "If I were you I should not have it touched. See how Nature is striving to obliterate the intruding hand of man. How grotesque and quaint it appears in this light! How delightfully horrible!" "Horrible, certainly," said Harry, "but I do not find delight there. Come, Uncle Francis, let us go in. It is already close upon dinner time, and one has to dress." But the box hedge seemed to have a strange fascination for Mr. Francis, and he still lingered there, standing in the road, with his eye wandering down the lines of that nightmare silhouette. "Indeed, I would not touch it, dear Harry," he said; "it is so grotesque and Gothic. What a thickness the hedge must be--eight feet at the least!" "But it is hideous," replied the lad. "It is enough to frighten anybody." "But it does not frighten you and me, or the gardeners either, we may suppose. At least, I have heard of no hysterics." "That is probably true, but---- Well, come in, Uncle Francis. We shall be so late for dinner, and I am dying for it." An hour later the two had finished dinner, and were waiting for coffee to be brought. Harry, after finishing his wine, had lit a cigarette, which had been the occasion of some playful strictures from his uncle, who still held his unkindled in his soft, plump fingers. "One sip, only one sip of coffee, first, Harry," he said. "It is almost wicked to light your cigarette till you have had one sip of coffee. That is the psychological moment. Ah, that dazzling thing! How it sparkles! It was a good idea of yours to have it on the table, Harry. It makes a noonday in the room. How the Luck welcomes you home, my dear boy! But though I can not sparkle like that, not less do I welcome you." Indeed, that winking splendour in the centre of the table was enough to strike sight into blind eyeballs. The candles that lit the table, though shaded from the eye of the diner, poured their unobtruded rays on to it from fifty angles, and each stone glowed with an inward and ever-varying light. The slightest movement of the head was sufficient to turn the blue lights of the diamonds into an incandescent red; again, a movement, and the burning danger signals were changed to a living green. The pearls shone with a steady lustre, like moons through mist; but even the sober emeralds caught something of the madness of the diamond-studded handles, and glowed with colours not their own. The thing had fascinated Harry all dinner time, and the spell seemed to grow, for suddenly he filled his glass again. "The Luck," he said; "I drink to the Luck," and he put down an empty glass. An affectionate remonstrance with his folly was on Mr. Francis's lips, when the servants entered with coffee. Behind the footman, who carried it, walked a man with liqueurs, whom Harry could not remember having seen before. He looked at him a moment, wondering who he was, when he recollected that his uncle had spoken to him about his own man, whom he proposed should wait on him at Vail. Last came Templeton, carrying the leather case of the Luck. Harry took coffee and liqueur, and had another look at his uncle's valet. The man wore the immovable mask of the well-trained servant; he was no more than a machine for handing things. "Yes, take the cup, Templeton," said Harry. "Have you the key of it?" "No, my lord; it is on Mr. Francis's bunch." "Would you give me the key, Uncle Francis? I will lock it myself, and keep the key." Mr. Francis did not at once answer, but continued sipping his coffee, and Harry, thinking he had not heard, repeated his request. On the repetition, Mr. Francis instantly took the key off his bunch. "By all means, dear boy," he said. "It is much better so, that you should have it." Templeton packed the jewel in its case, and Harry turned the key on it. "Lock it up yourself, Templeton," he said, "in one of the chests. I must have a new case made for it, I think. This is very old, and it would be much too easily carried away--eh, Uncle Francis?" and he swung the locked case lightly in his hand. "It is the original case, Harry," he said. "I should be sorry to change it." The men left the room, Templeton going last, with the case containing the Luck. The candles still burned brightly, but half the light seemed to have been withdrawn from the room, now that the great jewel no longer gleamed on the table; it was as if a cloud had hidden the sun. Harry still held the key in his hand, looking curiously at its chased and intricate wards, and for a few moments neither spoke. Then he put it into his pocket, and, pushing his chair a little farther from the table, flung one leg over the other. "I propose to stop here four or five days, Uncle Francis," he said, "but not more, unless we can not get through our business. But, indeed, I can not see what there is to do. The place looks in admirable order, thanks to you. There is the box hedge; that is positively all I can see that wants looking to." Mr. Francis laughed gaily. "Dear Harry," he said, "if you are not careful you will become as absurd on the subject of this box hedge as you are in danger of becoming about the Luck. The dear, quaint, picturesque thing! How can you want it trimmed and cut?" Harry laughed. "As you say, it does not frighten you or me, or the gardeners," he said; "but, as I was about to tell you as we drove from the station, when something put it out of my head, I shall have to consider others as well." Suddenly he stopped. In the intense pleasure with which he had looked forward to the visit of Evie and Lady Oxted--which should be, so he had figured it, hardly less welcome to his uncle, as a sign, visible and pertinent, of how utterly dead and discredited was the lying rumour which at one time had so blackened him--he had not consciously reckoned with the moment of telling him. But he went on almost without a pause: "At the end of the month Lady Oxted has promised to come and spend a Sunday here, and with her will come--O Uncle Francis, how long this or something of the sort has been delayed, and how patiently you have waited for it!--with her will come her niece, Miss Aylwin, who has just come to England from Italy." He looked not at his uncle as he spoke, but, with a delicacy unconscious and instinctive, kept his eyes on the ground. Such an announcement as the visit of Harold Harmsworth's sister must, he knew, be momentous to the old man, and perhaps would give rise to an emotion which it was not fit that other eyes should see. His uncle would know that in the mind of one at least most intimately connected with the tragedy, suspicion was not. This visit would be a reconciliation, formal though silent. It was right that the hearer should have as great a privacy as might be, and so, both when he spoke and after he had finished speaking, Harry kept his eyes on the ground. There was a moment's silence, broken by the crash of breaking china, and, looking quickly up, Harry saw the coffee cup fallen from his uncle's hand, and the brown stains leaping over the white tablecloth. The spoon clattered metallic in the shattered saucer and jumped to the floor, and Mr. Francis's hand dropped like lead on the edge of the table. The candles were between him and his uncle; he could see no more; and he sprang up with a sudden pang of horror insurgent within him. There, with his head fallen over the back of the chair, lay Mr. Francis, sprawling and inert. His face was of a deadly, strangled white, the wholesome colour had fled his cheeks, and only on the lips and below the eyes lingered a mottled purple. His breathing was heavy and stertorous; you would have said he snored, and from the corner of the slack mouth lolled the protruding tongue. His hands lay limp upon his lap, gray and purple. Harry made one step of it to the bell, and rang peal after violent peal, scarce daring to look, yet scarce able not to look at that masklike horror of a face at the end of the table. "What had he done? What if he had killed him? Death could not be more ghastly!" ran the shrill voice of terror-stricken thought through his head. His instinct was to go to him, though his flesh shrank and shivered at the thought of approaching that, to do something, but he knew not what, yet meddling might only cause damage irreparable, instead of giving relief. Still he did not cease ringing, and it seemed to him that the muffled clanging of the bell he rang had sounded for years, when steps came along the passage and burst into the room. "There, there! look to him! What is the matter?" cried Harry, still working on the bell like a man demented. "Send for the doctor. Send for his servant; perhaps he knows what to do. Ah, there he is!" and he dropped the bell handle. Mr. Francis's valet, of the masklike face, had gone straight to his master, and, lifting him bodily from the chair, laid him flat on the floor. Then with deft fingers he untied his cravat and collar, and told them to open all doors and windows wide. He tore open his shirt and vest so as to leave his breathing absolutely free, and then paused. The great rush of warm summer air that poured in gently stirred the hair on Mr. Francis's head, and rustled the folds of the tablecloth, yet, in spite of this, and the heavy, stertorous breathing of the stricken man, it seemed to Harry that an immense silence reigned everywhere--the silence of waiting. Maid servants had gathered in the doorway, but Templeton, with a guttural word, sent them scurrying down the passages, and the three watched and waited round the one. Then, by blessed degrees, the breathing grew less drawn and laboured, and by the light of the candles which Mr. Francis's man had placed on the floor near the body it was possible to see that the colour of the face was less patched. Then the valet turned to Harry, who, white-faced and awe-struck, stood at his shoulder. "He will do well now, my lord," said Sanders. "It was lucky you did not touch him. Mr. Francis has had these fits before; cardiac, the doctors say; but the right thing is to lay him flat." "He is not dead? He will not die?" cried Harry, shaking the man by the shoulder, as if to make him hear. "Lord bless you! no, my lord," he said. "As like as not he'll be dressed to-morrow before you are awake. Cardiac weakness," he repeated, as if the words were a prescription, "and all agitation to be avoided." "Oh, my God! I never meant to agitate him," cried Harry. "I told him something which I should have thought he would have given his right hand to hear." The man smiled. "Just the sort of thing which would agitate him, my lord," he said, "if you'll excuse my saying so.--And now, Mr. Templeton, if you'll be so kind as to get a shutter or something, we'll move him up to bed, keeping him flat. I'll sit up with him to-night." "You're a good fellow, an awfully good fellow!" cried Harry. "And there is no further anxiety. Shall I not send for the doctor?" "Quite unnecessary, my lord. See how quiet his breathing has become. As like as not he will sleep like a child. He's had these attacks before, and I know well when the danger is over--cardiac. You can go to sleep yourself, my lord, as if nothing had happened." CHAPTER X MR. FRANCIS IS BETTER The cheerful optimism of Sanders was borne out by events, if not in letter at any rate in spirit, and Harry, on waking, received the most encouraging reports from the sick-room. Mr. Francis had slept well for the greater part of the night, and though he would take his breakfast in bed, he expected to be down by the middle of the morning. He particularly desired that Harry should be told, as soon as he woke, how completely he had recovered from his attack, and sent him his dear love. Here, at any rate, was great good news. Again and again during the night Harry had woke from anxious, feverish dreams of that ghastly, masklike face and sonorous breathing; all the earlier hours seemed a constant succession of agonized awakenings. Now it would be the white, mottled face which grew ever larger and nearer to his own, that tore him almost with a shriek from his uneasy slumber, after long, paralyzed attempts to move; now it would be the breathing that got louder and yet more guttural till the air reverberated with it. Again and again he had sat up in bed with flying pulse and damp forehead, and lit a match to see how much more of the night there was still to run; or looking for any sound of movement from his uncle's room at the end of the passage, he would think he heard steps along the corridor, and a stealthy opening or shutting of midnight doors. Once it was a spray of jasmine tapping at his window which woke him with a start, and thinking that some evil news was knocking at his door, it was with an effort that he controlled his throat sufficiently to bid the knocker enter. But about the time of the first hint of the mid-summer dawn, when birds were beginning to tune their notes for the day, and the bushes and eaves grew merry with chirrupings, he fell into a more peaceful sleep, and woke only on the rattle of his blinds being rolled up. His heart leaped as he received his uncle's message, and he got up immediately, and putting on only a dressing gown and slippers, went out with a rough towel over his arm for a dip in the lake before breakfast. The sluice at the lower end of it, where a cool ten feet of water invited him, lay not more than a couple of hundred yards from the house, across a stretch of nearly level lawn, and hidden from both road and house by a screen of bushes. Sleep still lingered like cobwebs in drowsy corners of his brain, but all the horror of the evening and its almost more horrible repetitions during the earlier hours of the night had been swept away by the news of the morning, and it was with a thrill of pleasure, as indescribable as the scent itself of this clean morning, that he drank deep of the freshness of the young day. The sun was already high, but the grass that lay in the shadow of house and bush was still not dry of its night dews, and a thousand liquid gems brushed his bare ankle. The gentle thunder of the sluice made a soft low bass to the treble of birds and the hum of country sounds, that summer symphony which pauses only for the solo of the nightingale during the short, dark hours. The lightest of breezes ruffled the lake, scarcely shattering the mirrored trees and sky that leaned over it, and Harry stood for a moment, white and bare to the soft wind, with the sun warm on his shoulders, wondering at the beauty of his bath. Then, with arms shot out above his head, and his body braced to a line, he sprang off the stone slab of the sluice and disappeared in a soda water of bubbles and flying spray. Surely that moment, he thought, as he rose again to the surface, was the crown and acme of bodily sensation. The sleep had been swept from him; house, bed, pillows, and darkness had gone; he was renewed, starting fresh again, cool and clean, with all the beautiful round world waiting for him. Expectancy and hope of happiness, interest, awakening love, were all strung to their highest pitch in his completeness of bodily well-being; his soul was moulded in every part to its environment, freed of its bodily burden, and with a song in his mouth he stepped out of the water for the glow of the towel. He sauntered leisurely back to the house, purring to himself at the delight which the moment gave him. How could there be men who found their pleasure in eating and drinking, in the life of crowded rooms and smoky towns, when in half the acres of all England and round all its coasts were such possibilities? How, above all, was it possible to exist for a moment, if one had not the privilege of being violently in love? Then, with a laugh at himself, he suddenly found that he was hungry, ravenous, and his step quickened. Half an hour later he was seated at breakfast, but already the first mood of the day was past. He had for an hour gone free, untrammelled by all the obligations which events and circumstances entail, but now he was captured again. One thing in particular wove a heavy chain round him. He had seen with amazed horror the effect on his uncle of that news that he had thought would be so welcome. Was it reasonable to suppose, then, that if a name alone produced so ill-starred a result, he could bear the sight of the girl? After the catastrophe of the night before it would be cruelty of a kind not to be contemplated to return again to the subject. The disappointment was grievous. That visit of Lady Oxted's and Evie's, so bright in anticipation that his mind's eye could scarcely look on it undazzled, must be given up. Plain, simple duty, the ordinary, incontrovertible demands of blood and kinship, compelled him to it. His own happiness could not be purchased at the cost of suffering to that kindly old man; and who knew how much he might be suffering even now? Then, with the mercurial fluctuation of those in love, he fell from the sky-scraping summits into a black, bottomless gulf of despondency. Evie could not come here, she could never come here, he told himself. And at that, and all which that implied, he pushed his chair quickly back from the table, and left a half-eaten breakfast. His reasonable mind could not make itself heard; it told him that he was pushing things comically far; that he was imagining an inconceivable situation, when he concluded that a young man must not marry because of the feeling of his great-uncle on the subject; but his mood was not amenable to reason. The world had gone as black as an east wind, and all the flowers were withered. He heaved a lover's sigh, and, going out of the glass door into the garden, walked moodily up and down the lawn for a space, consumed with pity, half for himself, half for his uncle. Directly above were the windows of his own bedroom, wide open, and a housemaid within was singing at her work. Farther on were the two rooms in which his uncle chiefly lived, a big-sized dressing room in which he slept, and next door the bedroom which he had turned into a sitting room. These windows were also open, and Harry, even on the noiseless grass, trod gently as he passed them, with that instinct for hushed quiet which all feel in the presence of suffering. "Poor old fellow! poor, dear old fellow!" he thought to himself, with a pang of compunction at the shock he had so unwittingly caused that cheerful, suffering spirit. Then, suddenly, as he passed softly below, there came from the windows, mingling in unspeakable discord with the housemaid's song, a quick shower of notes from a flute. Harry paused. The player was evidently feeling his fingers in the execution of a run, and a moment afterward the dainty, tripping air of "La Donna é mobile" came dancing out into the sunlight like a summer gnat. Twice the delicate tune was played with great precision and admirable light-heartedness, which contrasted vividly with the listener's mood, and was instantly succeeded by some other Italian air, unknown to the lad, but as gay as a French farce. Harry had paused, open-mouthed, with astonishment. His own thoughts about his kinsman, sombre and full of tenderness, were all sent flying by the cheerful measure which the kinsman was executing so delightfully. A smile began to dawn in the corners of his mouth, enlightenment returned to his eye, and, standing out on the gravel path, he shouted up. "Uncle Francis!" he cried; "Uncle Francis!" The notes of the flute wabbled and ceased. "Yes, my dearest fellow," came cheerfully from above. "I am so glad you are so much better! May I come up and see you?" "By all means, by all means. I was just on the point of sending Sanders down to see if you would." Harry went up the stairs three at a time, and fairly danced down the corridor. Sanders, faithful and foxlike, was outside, his hand on the latch. "You will be very careful, my lord," he said. "We mustn't have Mr. Francis agitated again." "Of course not," said Harry, and was admitted. Mr. Francis was lying high in bed, propped up on pillows. The remains of his breakfast, including a hot dish, of which no part remained, stood on a side table; on his bed lay the case of the beloved flute. "Ah, my dear boy!" he cried, "I owe you a thousand and one apologies for my conduct last night. Sanders tells me I gave you a terrible fright. You must think no more of it, you must promise me to think no more of it, Harry. I have had such seizures many times before, and of late, thank God, they have become much rarer. I had not told you about them on purpose. I did not see the use of telling you." "Dear Uncle Francis, it is a relief to find you so well," said Harry. "Sanders told me last night that he knew how to deal with these attacks, which was a little comfort. But I insist on your seeing a really first-rate doctor from town." Mr. Francis shook his head. "Quite useless, dear Harry;" he said, "though it is like you to suggest it. Before now I have seen an excellent man on the subject. It is true that the attack itself is dangerous, but when it passes off it passes off altogether, and during it Sanders knows very well what to do. Besides, in all ordinary probability, it will not recur. But now, my dear boy, as you are here, I will say something I have got to say at once, and get it off my mind." Harry held up his hand. "If it will agitate you in the least degree, Uncle Francis," he said, "I will not hear it. Unless you can promise me that it will not, you open your mouth and I leave the room." "It will not, it will not," said the old man; "I give you my word upon it. It is this: That moment last night when you told me what you told me was the happiest moment I have had for years. What induced my wretched old cab horse of a constitution to play that trick I can not imagine. The news was a shock to me, I suppose--ah! certainly it was a shock, but of pure joy. And I wanted to tell you this at once, because I was afraid, you foolish, unselfish fellow, that you might blame yourself for having told me; that you might think it would pain or injure me to speak of it again. You might even have been intending to tell Miss Aylwin that you must revoke your invitation. Was it not so, Harry?" and he waited for an answer. Harry was sitting on the window sill playing with a tendril of intruding rose, and his profile was dark against the radiance of the sky outside. But when on the pause he turned and went across to the bedside, Mr. Francis was amazed, for his face seemed, like Moses's, to have drunk of some splendour, and to be visibly giving it out. He bent over the bed, leaning on it with both hands. "Ah! how could I do anything else?" he cried. "I could not bear to be so happy at the cost of your suffering. But now, oh, now----" And he stopped, for he saw that he had told his secret, and there was no more to say. Mr. Francis, seeing that the lad did not go on with the sentence, the gist of which was so clear, said nothing to press him, for he understood, and turned from the seriousness of the subject. "So that is settled," he said, "and they are coming, you tell me, at the end of the month. That is why you want the box hedge cut, you rascal. You are afraid of the ladies being frightened. I almost suspected something of the kind. And now, my dear boy, you must leave me. I shall get up at once and be down in half an hour. Ah, my dear Harry, my dear Harry!" and he grasped the hand long and firmly. Harry left him without more words, and strolled out again into the sunlight, which had recaptured all its early brilliance. Had ever a man been so ready and eager to spoil his own happiness, he wondered. Half an hour ago he had blackened the world by his utterly unfounded fears, all built on a fabric of nothingness, and in a moment reared to such a height that they had blotted the very sun from the sky, and like a vampire sucked the beauty from all that was fair. A thought had built them, a word now had dispelled them. He went round to the front of the house, where he found a gardener busy among the flower beds, and they went together to examine the great hedge. It would be a week's work, the man said, to restore it to its proper shape, and Harry answering that it must therefore be begun without delay, he went off after a ladder and pruning tools. Then, poking idly at its compacted wall with his stick as he walked along it, Harry found that after overcoming the first resistance, the stick seemed to penetrate into emptiness, though the whole hedge could not have been less than six or eight feet thick. This presented points of interest, and he walked up to the end, far away from the house, and, pushing through a belt of trees into which the hedge ran, proceeded to examine it from the other side. Here, at once, he found the key to this strange thing, for, half overgrown with young shoots, stood an opening some five feet high, leading into the centre of the hedge, down which ran a long passage. More correctly speaking, indeed, the hedge was not one, but two, planted some three feet apart, and this corridor of gloomy green lights led straight down it toward the house. At the far end, again, was a similar half-overgrown door, coming out of which one turned the corner of the hedge and emerged on to the gravel sweep close by the house, immediately below the windows of the gun room. To Harry there was something mysterious and delightful about this discovery, which gave him a keen, childlike sense of pleasure. To judge from the growth over the entrances to the passage, it must have been long undiscovered, and he determined to ask his uncle whether he remembered it. Then, suddenly and unreasonably, he changed his mind; the charm of this mystery would be gone if he shared it with another, even if he suspected that another already knew it, and, smiling at himself for his childish secrecy and reserve, he strolled back again to meet the gardener to whom he had given orders to clip it. There must be no possibility of his discovery of the secret doors; the box hedge should be clipped only with a view to the road; the other side should not be touched--a whited sepulchre. These orders given, he went back to the house to wait for the appearance of Mr. Francis. The latter soon came downstairs, with a great Panama hat on his head, round which was tacked a gaudy ribbon; he hummed a cheerful little tune as he came. "Ah, Harry!" he said, "I did not mean you to wait in for me on this glorious morning, for I think I will not go fast or far. Long-limbed, lazy fellow," he said, looking at him as he sat in the low chair. Harry got up, stretching his long limbs. "Lazy I am not," he said; "I have done a world full of things this morning. I have bathed, I have breakfasted, I have listened to your music, I have given a hundred orders to the gardeners, at least I gave one, and I have read the papers. Where shall we go, Uncle Francis?" "Where you please, as long as we go together, and you will consent to go slowly and talk to me. I am a little shaky still, I find, now that I try my legs; but, Harry, there is a lightness about my heart from your news of last night." "It is good to hear you say that, for I can not convey to you how I looked forward to telling you. And you feel, you really feel, all you said to me?" Mr. Francis paused. "All, all," he said earnestly. "The past has been expunged with a word. That burden which so long I have carried about is gone, like the burden of Christian's. Ah! you do not know what it was! But now, if she--Miss Aylwin--believed it, she would not come within a mile of me; if her mother still believed it, she would not let her, and Lady Oxted would not let her. A hard, strange woman, was Mrs. Aylwin, Harry. I told you, I remember, what passed between us. But it is over, over. Yes, yes, the healing comes late, and the recompense; but it comes--it has come." "I do not know Mrs. Aylwin," said Harry. "I have never ever seen her. But I can answer for it that Miss Aylwin believes utterly and entirely in your innocence." "How is that? How is that?" asked Mr. Francis. "She told me so herself," said Harry. "How strange it all is, and how it all works together! I told her, you must know, the first evening I met her, about the Luck, and last week, when I was down with the Oxteds, I told her, Uncle Francis, about the awful troubles you had been through, particularly--particularly that one. At the moment I did not know that she was in any way connected with the Harmsworths. I knew of her only what I had seen of her. And then, in the middle, she stopped me, saying she knew all, saying also that she entirely believed in you." Mr. Francis walked on a few steps in silence, and Harry spoke again. "Perhaps I ought not to have told her," he said, "but the Luck held. She was the right person, you see. And somehow, you will agree with me, I think, when you see her, she is a person to whom it is natural to tell things. She is so sympathetic--I have no words--so eager to know what interests and is important to her friends. Yes, already I count myself a friend of hers." "Then her mother had not told her all?" asked Mr. Francis, with the air of one deliberating. "Not all; not your name. She had no idea that she was talking to the nephew of the man about whom she had heard from her mother." Mr. Francis quickened his pace, like a man who has made up his mind. "You did quite right to tell her, Harry," he said, "quite right. It would come to her better from you than from any one else. Also, it is far better that she should know before she came here, and before you get to know each other better. I have always a dread of the chance word, so dear to novelists, which leads to suspicion or revelations. How intolerable the fear of that would have been! We should all have been in a false position. But now she knows; we have no longer any fear as to how she may take the knowledge; and thank you, dear Harry, for telling her." The next two or three days passed quietly and busily. There were many questions of farm and sport to be gone into, many balancings of expenditure and income to be adjusted, and their talk, at any rate, if not their more secret thoughts, was spread over a hundred necessary but superficial channels. Among such topics were a host of businesses for which Mr. Francis required Harry's sanction before he put them in hand; a long section of park paling required repair, some design of planting must be constructed in order to replace the older trees in the park, against the time that decay and rending should threaten them. All these things and many more, so submitted Mr. Francis, were desirable, but it would be well if Harry looked at certain tables of estimates which he had caused to be drawn up before he decided, as he was inclined to do, that everything his uncle recommended should be done without delay. Items, inconsiderable singly, he would find, ran to a surprising total when taken together, and he must mention a definite sum which he was prepared to spend, say, before the end of the year, on outdoor improvements. Things in the house, too, required careful consideration; the installation of the electric light, for instance, would run away with no negligible sum. How did Harry rank the urgency of indoor luxuries with regard to outdoor improvements? If he intended to entertain at all extensively during the next winter, he would no doubt be inclined to give precedence to affairs under the roof; if not, there were things out of doors which could be mended now at a less cost than their completer repair six months hence would require. Mr. Francis put these things to his nephew with great lucidity and patient impartiality, and Harry, heavily frowning, would wrestle with figures that continually tripped and threw him, and in his mind label all these things as sordid. But the money which he could immediately afford to spend on the house and place was limited, and he had the sense to apply himself to the balancing. At length, after an ink-stained and arithmetical morning, he threw down his pen. "Electric light throughout, Uncle Francis," he said, "and hot water laid on upstairs. There is the ultimatum. The house is more behindhand than the park. Therefore the house first." "You see exactly what that will come to?" asked Mr. Francis. "Yes; according to the estimates you have given me, I can afford so much, and the park palings may go to the deuce. One does not live in the park palings, and, since you mention it, I daresay I shall ask people here a good deal next winter. Let's see; this is mid-June. Let them begin as soon as Lady Oxted and Miss Aylwin have been, and they should be out of the house again by October; though the British workman always takes a longer lease than one expects. I shall want to be here in October. Oh, I wish it were October. Pheasant-shooting, you know," he added, in a tone of apology. He tore up some sheets of figures, then looked up at his uncle. "You will like to have people here, will you not, Uncle Francis?" he asked. "There shall be young people for you to play with, and old people for me to talk to. And we'll shoot, and, oh, lots of things." He got off his chair, stretching himself slowly and luxuriously. "Thank goodness, I have made up my mind," he said. "I thought I was never going to. Come out for a stroll before lunch." Whether it was that the multiplicity of these arithmetical concerns came between the two, or, as Harry sometimes fancied, his uncle was not disposed to return to that intimacy of talk which had followed his strange seizure on the first night, did not certainly appear. The upshot, however, admitted of no misunderstanding, and, engrossed in these subjects, the two did not renew their conversation about Miss Aylwin and all that bordered there. As far as concerned his own part, Harry did not care to speak of what was so sacred to him, and so near and far; she was the subject for tremulous, solitary visions; to discuss was impossible, and to trespass near that ground was to make him silent and awkward. No great deal of intuition was necessary on Mr. Francis's part to understand this, and he also gave a wide berth to possible embarrassments. The Sunday afternoon following, Harry left again for London, for he was dining out that night. He said good-bye to his uncle immediately after lunch, for at the country church there was a children's service which Mr. Francis had to attend, since he was in charge of a certain section of the congregation--those children, in fact, who attended his class in the village Sunday school. CHAPTER XI MR. FRANCIS SEES HIS DOCTOR Harry had held long sessions in his mind as to whether he should or should not ask other people to Vail to meet Lady Oxted and Miss Aylwin at the end of the month. It was but a thin hospitality, he was afraid, to bring two ladies down to Wiltshire to spend a country Sunday, and provide for their entertainment only the society of himself and his uncle; and this fear gradually deepening to certainty, he hurriedly asked four or five other guests, only two days before the projected visit, in revolt all the time at the obligations of a host. All of these, however, as was not unnatural at this fullest time in the year, were otherwise engaged, and he opened each letter of regret with increasing satisfaction. He had been balked in the prosecution of his duty; it was no use at this late hour trying again. There were also other reasons against having a party. His uncle's health, for instance, so he wrote to him, had not been very good since his attack. He had been left rather weak and shattered by it, and though his letter was full of that zest and cheerfulness which was so habitual a characteristic with him, Harry felt that it might be better, particularly since his first meeting with Miss Aylwin would of necessity be somewhat of an emotional strain to him, not to tax him further, either with the arrangements incidental to a larger party or with their entertainment. These dutiful considerations, it must be confessed, though perfectly genuine, all led down the paths of his own desires, for it was just the enforced intimacy of a _partie carrée_ in the country from which he promised himself such an exquisite pleasure. With a dozen people in the house, his time would not be his own; he would have to look after people, make himself agreeable to everybody, and be continually burdened with the hundred petty cares of a host. But, the way things were, all that Sunday they would be together, if not in fours then in pairs, and the number of possible combinations of four people in pairs he could see at once was charmingly limited. But, though to him personally the refusal of others to come to his feast was not an occasion of regret, an excuse to the two ladies as to the meagreness of the entertainment he was providing for them, however faltering and insincere, was still required. This he made with a marvellously radiant face, a few evenings before their visit, as he sat with them in Lady Oxted's box at the opera. "I have to make a confession," he said, drawing his chair up at the end of the second act of Lohengrin, "and, as you are both so delighted with the music, I will do so now, in the hopes that you may let me off easily. There is absolutely no one coming to meet you at Vail; there will be my Uncle Francis and myself, and that is all." Evie turned to him. "That is charming of you," she said, "and you have paid us a compliment. It is nothing to be asked as merely one of a crowd, but your asking us alone shows that you don't expect to get bored with us. Make your courtesy, Aunt Violet!" "But there's the Luck," said Lady Oxted. "I gathered that the Luck was the main object of our expedition, though how it was going to amuse us I don't know, any more than I know how Dr. Nansen expected the north pole to amuse him. And why, if you wanted to see it, Evie, Harry could not send for it by parcel post, I never quite grasped." "Or luggage train, unregistered," said Evie. "Why did you not give it to the first tramp you met, Lord Vail, and ask him to take it carefully to London, for it was of some value, and leave it at a house in Grosvenor Square the number of which you had forgotten? How stupid of you not to think of that! And did you see the Luck when you were down last week?" "Yes; it came to dinner every night. I used to drink its health." "Good gracious! I shall have to take my very smartest things," cried Evie. "Fancy having to dress up to the Luck every evening!" "Give it up, dear, give it up," said Lady Oxted. "The Luck will certainly make you look shabby, whatever you wear. Oh! those nursery rhymes!--Ah! here's Bob.--Bob, what can have made you come to the opera?" Lord Oxted took his seat, and gazed round the house before replying. "I think it was your absolute certainty that I should not," he replied. "I delight in confuting the infallible; for you are an infallible, Violet. It is not your fault; you can not help it." Lady Oxted laughed. "My poor man," she said, "how shallow you must be not to have seen that I only said that in order to make you come!" "I thought of that," he said, "but rejected the suspicion as unworthy. You laid claim, very unconvincingly I allow, the other day to a passion for truth and honour. Indeed, I gave you the benefit of a doubt which never existed.--And you all go down to Vail on Saturday. I should like to come, only I have not been asked." "No, dear," said Lady Oxted. "I forbade Harry to ask you." "Oh! you didn't," began Harry. "I quite understand," said Lord Oxted; "you refrained from asking me on your own account, and if you had suggested such a thing, my wife would have forbidden you. One grows more and more popular, I find, as the years pass." "Dear Uncle Bob, you are awfully popular with me," said Evie. "Shall I stop and keep you company in London?" "Yes; please do," said he. "But won't it be rather rude to Lord Vail?" "Yes, but he will forgive you," said Lord Oxted. "Indeed, I sha'n't, Miss Aylwin," said Harry. "Don't think it. But will you then come to Vail, Lord Oxford? I thought it would be no use asking you." "I may not be popular," said he, "but I have still a certain pride." Here the orchestra poised and plunged headlong into the splendid overture of the third act; and Lady Oxted, whose secret joy was the hope that she might, in the fulness of time, grow to tolerate Wagner by incessant listening to him, glared furiously at the talkers and closed her eyes. Lord Oxted, it was observed by the others, thereupon stole quietly out of the box. The curtain rose with the Wedding March, and that done, and the lovers alone, that exquisite duet began, rising, like the voices of two larks, from height to infinite height of passion, as clear and pure as summer heavens. Then into the soul of that feeblest of heroines began to enter doubt and hesitation, the desire to know what she had promised not to ask grew in the brain, until it made itself words, undermining and unbuilding all that on which love rests. Thereafter, the woman having failed, came tumult and death, the hopeless lovers were left face to face with the ruin that want of trust will bring upon all that is highest, and with the drums and the slow, measured rhythm of despair, the act ended. "The hopeless, idiotic fool of a girl!" remarked Evie, with extreme precision, weighing her words. "Oh! I lose my patience with her." "I thought your tone sounded a little impatient," said Lady Oxted. "A little? Why, if Lohengrin had said he wanted to write a letter, she could have looked round the corner to see that he was not flirting with one of the chorus, and have opened his letter afterward. If there is one thing I despise, it is a suspicious woman." "You must find a great many despicable things in this world," remarked Lady Oxted. "Dear aunt, if you attempt to be cynical, I shall go home in a hansom by myself," said Evie. "Do, dear; and Harry and I will follow in the brougham. Do you want to stay for the last act?" "No; I would sooner go away. I am rather tired, and Elsa has put me in a bad temper. Good-bye, Lord Vail, and expect us on Saturday afternoon; please order good weather. It will be enchanting; I am so looking forward to it!" Harry himself went down to Vail on Friday afternoon, for he wished both to satisfy himself that everything was arranged for the comfort of his visitors, and also to meet them himself when they came. The only train he could conveniently catch did not stop at his nearest station, and he telegraphed home that they should meet him at Didcot. This implied a ten-mile drive, and his train being late on arrival, he put the cobs to their best pace in order to reach Vail in time for dinner. Turning quickly and rather recklessly into the lodge gates, he had to pull up sharply in order to avoid collision with one of his own carriages which was driving away from the house. A stable helper not in livery held the reins, and by his side sat a man of dark, spare aspect, a stranger to him. As soon as they had passed, he turned round to the groom who sat behind. "Who was that?" he asked. "I don't know his name, my lord," said he, "but I drove him from the station last Monday. He has been staying with Mr. Francis since then." Harry was conscious of a slight feeling of vexation, arising from several causes. In the first place (and here a sense of his dignity spoke), any guest, either of his or his uncle's, ought to be driven to the station properly, not by a man in a cap and a brown coat. In the second place, though he was delighted that Uncle Francis should ask any friend he chose to stay with him, Harry considered that he ought to have been told. He had received a long letter from his uncle two days ago, in which he went at some length into the details of his days, but made no mention of a guest. In the third place, the appearance of the man was somehow grossly and uncomfortably displeasing to him. These things simmered in his mind as he drove up the long avenue, and every now and then a little bubble of resentment, as it were, would break on the surface. He half wondered at himself for the pertinacity with which his mind dwelt on them, and he determined, with a touch of that reserve and secrecy which still lingered in corners and angles of his nature, that if his uncle did not choose of his own initiative to tell him about this man, he would ask no questions, but merely not forget the circumstance. This reticence on his own part, so he told himself, was in no way to be put down to secretiveness, but rather to decency of manners. His uncle might have the Czar of all the Russias, if he chose, to stay with him, and if he did not think fit to mention that autocrat's visit, even though it was in all the daily papers, it would be rude even for his nephew to ask him about it. But he knew, if he faced himself quite honestly, that though good manners were sufficient excuse for the reticence he preferred to employ, secretiveness and nothing else was the reason for it. Certainly he wished that the man had not been so disrelishing to the eye; there was something even sinister about the glance he had got of him. Mr. Francis was in the most cheery and excellent spirits, and delighted to see him. He was employed in spudding plantains from the lawn as the carriage drove up. But, abandoning this homely but useful performance as soon as he heard the wheels on the road, he ran almost to meet him. "Ages, it seems literally ages, since you were here, dear boy!" he said. "And see, Harry, I have not been idle in preparing for our charming visitors. Croquet!" and he pointed to a large deal box that lay underneath the clipped yew hedge. "Templeton and I found the box in a gardener's shed," he said, "and we have been washing and cleaning it up. Ah! what a fascinating game, and how it sets off the ingenuity of the feminine mind! I was a great hand at it once, and I think I can strike the ball still. Come, dear boy, let us get in; it is already dinner time. Ah! my flute; it would never do to leave that," and he tripped gaily off to a garden seat near, on which lay the case containing the favourite instrument. It happened that at dinner the same night Mr. Francis passed Harry through a sort of affectionate catechism, asking him to give an exhaustive account of the manner in which he had spent the hours since he left Vail a fortnight ago. Harry complied with his humour, half shy, half proud of the number that had to be laid inside Lady Oxted's door, and when this was finished: "Now it is my turn, Uncle Francis," he said. "Begin at the beginning, and tell me all as fully as I have to you." "Well, dear Harry, if I have not galloped about like you, taking ditch and fence, I have trotted along a very pleasant road," he said. "All the week after you left me I was much employed in writing about estimates and details with regard to the electric light. You must look at those to-morrow; they will be rather more expensive than we had anticipated, unless you have fewer lights of higher power. However, that business was finished, I remember, on Saturday; on Sunday I had my class, and dawdled very contentedly through the day. And all this week I have been busy in little ways--one day will serve for another; at the books all the morning, and in the afternoon pottering about alone, doing a bit of gardener's work here, feeding the pheasants there--and they are getting on capitally--or down at the farm. Then very often a nap before dinner, and a blow on the flute afterward. A sweet, happy, solitary time." The servants had left the room, and as Mr. Francis said these words, he looked closely at Harry, and saw his face, so he thought, harden. The lips were a little compressed, the arch of the eyebrows raised ever so little; something between surprise and a frown contracted them. He had already thought it more than possible that Harry might have met the other trap driving away from the house, and he thought he saw confirmation of it in his face. He sighed. "Ah, Harry," he said, "can you not trust me?" Mr. Francis's voice was soft, almost broken; his blue eyes glistened in the candlelight, but still looking intently at his nephew. And, at the amenity and affection in his tone, the boy's reserve and secretiveness, which he had labelled good manners, utterly broke down. "You have read my thoughts," he said, "and I apologize. But why, why not have told me, Uncle Francis? You could not have thought I should mind your having who you liked here?" Mr. Francis sighed again. "I will tell you now," he said, slightly accentuating the last word. "I did not tell you before; I purposely concealed it now; yes, I even used the word solitary about my life during the last week, in order to save you anxiety." "Anxiety?" asked Harry. "Yes; you met, probably somewhere near the lodge gates, one of your carriages going to the station. A man out of livery drove it; a man of middle age sat by him. He was my doctor, Harry, and he came here on Monday last. I wished"--and his tone was frankness to the core--"I wished to get him out of the house before you came; I did not know you were coming till this afternoon, and I saw he could just catch the train to town. I ordered the carriage to take him instantly, and the man had not time to get into livery. That is all." At once Harry was all compunction and anxiety; he left his chair at the end of the table, and drew it close beside his uncle. "Dear Uncle Francis," he said, "what was his opinion of your health? He was satisfied?" "Fairly well satisfied," said Mr. Francis. "The upshot was that I must live very quietly, and take no great exertion, and guard against quick movements. I might then hope, I might certainly hope, to live several more years yet. At my age, he said, one must not go hurdle-racing. Seventy-three! Well, well, I am getting on for seventy-three!" Harry was tongue-tied with a sort of vague contrition--for what, he could hardly tell. He had been put in the wrong, but so generously and kindly that he could not resent it. He had had no suspicions of any kind, and his uncle's simple frankness had made him wear the aspect of the suspector. Indeed, where could suspicion look in? Suspicions--what of? The gist of his feeling had been that he should have been told, and here was the considerable reason why he had not--a reason sensible, conclusive, and dictated by thoughtful affections. Yet he felt somehow ashamed of himself, and his shame was too ill-defined for speech. But there was no long pause, for Mr. Francis almost immediately got up from his chair, with a nimbleness of movement which perhaps his doctor would not have liked. "Well! a truce to these sombrenesses, Harry," he said. "Indeed, I am brisk enough yet. Ah, what a pleasure to have you here instead of that excellent, kind, unsociable fellow! I have such a good story for you; let us go to the billiard room; I could not tell you before the servants, though I have had it on the tip of my tongue all the evening. The doctor recommended me billiards after dinner; gentle, slow exercise like that was just the thing, he said. Well, that story----" Harry rose too. "One word more," he said. "Is your doctor a really first-rate man? You remember, I wanted you to see a good man. What is his name?" "Dr. Godfrey," said Mr. Francis, "32 Half-Moon Street. He is a first-rate man. I have known him since he was a boy." CHAPTER XII THE MEETING IN THE WOOD The two ladies were to arrive about tea time next day, and, as the hour drew on, a lively restlessness got hold of Harry. He could neither sit, nor stand, nor read, but after a paragraph of a page, the meaning of which slipped from his mind even as his eyes hurried over the lines, he would be off on an aimless excursion to the dining room, forget what he had gone about, and return with the same haste to his book. Then he would remember that he wanted the table to-night in the centre of the room, not pushed, as they had been having it, into the window; and there must be a place left for the Luck in the middle of the table. Again he would be off to the dining room; there was the table in the centre of the room, and in the centre of the table a place for the Luck, for he had given twenty repetitions of the order to Templeton, which was exactly twenty repetitions more than were necessary. Harry, in fact, was behaving exactly like the cock sparrow in mating time, strutting before its lady--an instinct in all young males. But there were not enough flowers; there must be more flowers and less silver. How could Dutch silver be ornamental in the neighbourhood of that gorgeous centrepiece, and how, said his heart to him, could the Luck be ornamental, considering who should sit at his table? He went back again to the hall, after giving these directions, where tea was laid. Mr. Francis was out on the lawn; he could see his yellow Panama hat like a large pale flower under the trees; the windows were all open, and the gentle hum of the warm afternoon came languidly in. Suddenly a fuller note began to overscore these noises in gradual _crescendo_, the crisp gravel grated underneath swift wheels, and next moment he was at the door. And, at sight of the girl, all his Marthalike cares, the Dutch silver, the position of the table, slipped from him. Here was the better part. "Welcome!" he said; "and welcome and welcome!" and he held the girl's hand far longer than a stranger would; and it was not withdrawn. A little added colour shone in her cheeks, and her eyes met his, then fell before them. "So you have not stayed to keep Lord Oxted company," he said. "I can spare him pity.--How are you, Lady Oxted?" "Did you think I should?" asked Evie. "No; I felt quite certain you would not," said Harry, with the assurance which women love. "Do come in; tea is ready." "And I am ready," said Evie. "And this is the hall," continued Harry, as they entered, "where every one does everything. Oh! there is a drawing-room: if you wish we will be grand and go to the drawing-room. I had it made ready; but let us stop here.--Will you pour out tea, Lady Oxted." Lady Oxted took a rapid inventory of the tapestry and portraits. "I rather like drinking tea in a cow shed," she remarked. In a few moments Mr. Francis entered with his usual gay step, and in his hand he carried his large hat. "How long since we met last, Lady Oxted!" he said. "And what a delight to see you here!" "Miss Aylwin, Uncle Francis," said Harry, unceremoniously. The old man turned quickly. "Ah! my dear Miss Aylwin," he said--"my dear Miss Aylwin," and they shook hands. Harry gave a little sigh of relief. Ever since his uncle's attack, a fortnight ago, he had felt in the back of his mind a little uneasiness about this meeting. It seemed he might have spared himself the pains. Nothing could have been simpler or more natural than Mr. Francis's manner; yet the warmth of his hand-shake, the form of words, more intimate than a man would use to a stranger, were admirably chosen--if choice were not a word too full of purpose for so spontaneous a greeting--to at once recognise and obliterate the past. The meeting was, as it were, a scene of reconciliation between two who had never set eyes on each other before, and between whom the horror of their vicarious estrangement would never be mentioned or even be allowed to be present in the mind. And Mr. Francis's words seemed to Harry to meet the situation with peculiar felicity. The old man seated himself near Lady Oxted. "This is an occasion," he said, "and both Harry and I have been greatly occupied with his house-warming. But the weather--there was little warming there to be done; surely we have ordered delightful weather for you. Harry told me that Miss Aylwin wished for a warm day. Indeed, his choice does not seem to me, a poor northerner, a bad one; but Miss Aylwin has perhaps had too much Italian weather to care for our poor imitation." "Lord Vail refused to promise," said Evie; "at least he did not promise anything about the weather. I was afraid he would forget." "Ah! but I told my uncle," said Harry. "He saw about it: you must thank him." Evie was sitting opposite the fireplace, and her eye had been on the picture of old Francis which hung above it. At these words of Harry's she turned to Mr. Francis with a smile, and her mouth half opened for speech. But something arrested the words, and she was silent; and Harry, who had been following every movement of hers, tracing it with the infallible minute intuition of a lover to its desiring thought, guessed that the curious resemblance between the two had struck with a force that for the moment took away speech. But, before the pause was prolonged, she answered. "I do thank you very much," she said. "And have you arranged another day like this for to-morrow?" She looked, as she spoke, out of the open windows and into the glorious sunshine, and Harry rose. "Shall we not go out?" he said. "Uncle Francis will think we do not appreciate his weather if we stop in." Evie rose too. "Yes, let us go out at once," she said. "But let me first put on another hat. I am not in London, and my present hat simply _is_ London. O Lord Vail, I long to look at that picture again, but I won't; I will be very self-denying, for I am sure--I am sure it is the Luck in the corner of it." She put up her hand so as to shield the picture from even an accidental glance. "Will you show me my way?" she asked. "I will be down again in a minute." Harry took her up the big staircase, lit by a skylight, and lying in many angles. "Yes, you have guessed," he said. "It is the Luck: you will see the original to-night at dinner. Did anything else strike you in the picture? Oh, I saw it did." "Yes, a curious false resemblance. I feel sure it is false, for I think that portrait represents not a very pleasant old gentleman. But your uncle, Lord Vail--I never saw such a dear, kind face!" Harry flushed with pleasure. "So now you understand," he said, "what your coming here must mean to him. Ah! this is your maid, is she not? I will wait in the hall for you." The two elder folk had already strolled out, when Harry returned to the hall, a privation which he supported with perfect equanimity, and in a few minutes he and his companion followed. As they crossed the lawn, Harry swept the points of the compass slowly with his stick. "Flower garden, kitchen garden, woods, lake, farm, stables," he said. Evie's eye brightened. "Stables, please," she said. "I am of low horsey tastes, you must know, and I was afraid you were not going to mention them. We had the two most heavenly cobs I ever saw to take us from the station." "Yes, Jack and Jill," said Harry. "But not cobs--angels. Did you drive them?" "No, but I longed to. May I, when we go back on Monday?" "Tuesday is their best day," said Harry; "except Wednesday." They chattered their way to the stables, where the two angels were even then at their toilets. "There is not much to show you," said Harry. "There are the cobs that brought you.--Good-evening, Jim." The man who was grooming them looked up, touched his bare head, and without delay went on with the hissing toilet, as a groom should. Evie looked at him keenly, then back to her companion, and at the man again. "Yes, they are beautiful," she said, and as they turned, "is Vail entirely full of doubles?" she asked. Harry smiled, and followed her into the stables of the riding horses. "Jim is more like me than that picture of old Francis is like my uncle," he said. "I really think I shall have to get rid of him. The likeness might be embarrassing." "I wouldn't do that," said Evie. "Our Italian peasants say it is good luck to have a double about." "Good luck for which?" "For both. Really, I never saw such an extraordinary likeness." They spent some quarter of an hour looking over the horses, and returned leisurely toward the house, passing it and going on to the lake. The sun was still not yet set, and the glory of the summer evening a thing to wonder at. Earth and sky seemed ready to burst with life and colour; it was as if a new world was imminent to be born, and from the great austere downs drew a breeze that was the breath of life, but dry, unbreathed. Evie appropriated it in open draughts, with head thrown back. "Aunt Violet was quite right, Lord Vail, when she said you should never come to London," she exclaimed. "How rude she was to you that night, and how little you minded! Even now, when I have been here only an hour, I can no longer imagine how one manages to breathe in that stuffy, shut-in air. Winter, too, winter must be delicious here, crisp and bracing." "So it would seem this evening," said Harry, "but you must see it first under a genuine November day. A mist sometimes spreads slowly from the lake, so thick that even I could almost lose my way between it and the house. It does not rise high, and I have often looked from the windows of the second story into perfectly clear air, while if you went out at the front door you would be half drowned in it. Higher up the road again you will be completely above it, and I have seen it lying below as sharply defined as the lake itself, and if you walk down from that wood up there, it is like stepping deeper and deeper into water. A bad one will rise as high as the steps of those two buildings you see to the right of the house, like kiosks, standing on a knoll, under which the road winds in front of the trees." "And the house is all surrounded like an island? What odd buildings! What are they?" "One is a summerhouse; I couldn't now tell you which. We used to have tea in it sometimes, I remember, when I was quite little. The other is the ice house--a horrible place: it used to haunt me. I remember shrieking with terror once when my nurse took me in. It was almost completely dark, and I can hear now the echo one's step made; and there was a great black chasm in the middle of the floor with steps leading down, as I thought, to the uttermost pit. Two chasms I think there were; one was a well. But the big one was that which terrified me, though I dare say it was only ten or twelve feet deep. Things dwindle so amazingly as one grows up! I wish I could see this lake, for instance, as I saw it when I was a child. It used to appear to me as large as the sea seems now; and as for the sluice, it might have been the Iron Gates of the Danube." "I know: things do get smaller," said Evie, "but, after all, this lake and the sluice are not quite insignificant yet. What a splendid rush of water! And I dare say the ice-house chasm is still sufficient to kill any one who falls in. That, after all, is enough for practical purposes. But then, even if they grow smaller, how much more beautiful they become! When you were little, you never saw half the colour or half the shape you see now. The trees were green, the sky was blue, but they gave one very surface impressions to what they give one now." "Oh, I rather believe in the trailing clouds of glory," said Harry. "Then make an effort to disbelieve in them every day," said Evie. "Shades of the prison house begin to grow around the growing boy, do they? What prison house does the man mean, if you please? Why, the world, this beautiful, delightful world. Indeed, we are very fortunate convicts! And Wordsworth called himself a lover of Nature!" she added, with deep scorn. "Certainly the world has been growing more beautiful to me lately," said Harry. "Of course it has. Please remind me that I have to cut my throat without delay if ever you hear me say that the world is growing less beautiful. But just imagine a person who loved Nature talking of the world as a prison house! Who was it said that Wordsworth only found in stones the sermons he had himself tucked under them, to prevent the wind blowing them away?" "I don't know. It sounds like the remark of an unindolent reviewer." Evie laughed. "Fancy talking about reviewers on an evening like this!" she said. "Oh, there's a Canadian canoe. May we go in it?" The far end of the lake was studded with little islands only a few yards in circumference for the most part, but, as Evie explained, large enough for the purpose. And then, like two children together, they played at red Indians and lay in wait for a swan, and attempted to stalk a moor hen with quite phenomenal ill success. No word of any tender kind was spoken between them; they but laughed over the nonsense of their own creating, but each felt as they landed that in the last hour their intimacy had shot up like the spike of the aloe flower. For when a man and a maid can win back to childhood again, and play like children together, it is certain that no long road lies yet to traverse before they really meet. Lady Oxted was doomed that night to a very considerable dose--a dose for an adult, in fact--of what she had alluded to as nursery rhymes, for the Luck seemed absolutely to fascinate the girl, and Harry, seeing how exclusively it claimed her eyes, more than once reconsidered the promise he had made her to have it to dinner the next evening as well. She would hardly consent to touch it, and Harry had positively to put it into her hands, so that she might read for herself its legend of the elements. They drank their coffee while still at table, and Evie's eye followed the jewel till Templeton had put it into its case. Then, as the last gleam vanished: "I am like the Queen of Sheba," she said, "and there is no more spirit left in me. If you lose the Luck, Lord Vail, you may be quite sure that it is I who have stolen it; and when I am told that two men in plain clothes are waiting in the drawing-room, I shall know what they have come about. Now for some improving conversation about facts and actualities, for Aunt Violet's sake." Sunday afternoon was very hot, and Lady Oxted, Evie, and Harry lounged it away under the shade of the trees on the lawn. Mr. Francis had not been seen since lunch time, but it was clear that he was busy with his favourite diversion, for brisk and mellow blowings on the flute came from the open window of his sitting room. Harry had mentioned this taste of his to the others, and it had been received by Lady Oxted with a short and rather unkind laugh, which had been quite involuntary, and of which she was now slightly ashamed. But Evie had thought the thing pleasant and touching, rather than absurd, and had expressed a hope that he would allow her to play some accompaniments for him after dinner. If Aunt Violet, she added incisively, found the sound disagreeable, no doubt she would go to her own room. Harry was in the normal Sunday afternoon mood, feeble and easily pleased, and the extreme and designed offensiveness of the girl's tone made him begin to giggle hopelessly. Evie thereupon caught the infection, for laughter is more contagious than typhus, and her aunt followed. The hysterical sounds apparently reached Mr. Francis's ears, in some interval between tunes, for in a moment his rosy face and white hair appeared framed in the window, and shortly afterward he came briskly across the grass to them. "It is getting cooler," he said gaily, "and I am going to be very selfish and ask Miss Aylwin to come for a stroll with me. My lazy nephew, I find, has not taken her through the woods, and I insist on her seeing them.--Will you be very indulgent to me, Miss Evie, and accept a devoted though an aged companion?" Evie rose with alacrity. "With the greatest pleasure," she said.--"Are you coming, too, Aunt Violet?" "Not for the wide, wide world," said Lady Oxted, "will I walk one yard!--Harry, stop where you are, and keep me company." The two walkers went up under the knoll on which stood the ice house, talking and laughing in diminuendo. Harry saw Mr. Francis offer the girl his arm for the steep ascent, and it pleased him in some secret fashion to see that, though her light step was clearly in no need of exterior aid, she accepted it. With this in his mind he turned to Lady Oxted. "It is a great success," he said. "They are delighted with each other. Think what it must mean to my uncle!" Lady Oxted stifled a yawn. "Who are delighted?" she asked. Harry pointed at the two figures halfway up the slope. "You knew whom I meant perfectly," he remarked. "I did. I really don't know why I asked. By the way, Harry, I apologize for laughing just now. Your uncle is the most charming and courteous old gentleman. And he is devoted to you. In fact, I got just a little tired of your name yesterday evening before dinner." Harry did not reply; he was still watching the two. They had surmounted the knoll, and in another moment the iron gate leading into the ride through the wood closed behind them, and they passed out of sight among the trees. Mr. Francis was, as has been indicated, very fond of young people, and those who had the pleasure of his acquaintance always found him a delightful companion. He had an intimate knowledge of natural history, and this afternoon, as he walked with the girl, he would now pick some insignificant herb from the grass, with a sentence or two on its notable medicinal qualities, now with a face full of happy radiance hold up his hand while a bird trilled in the bushes in rapt and happy attention. "A goldfinch, Miss Evie," he whispered; "there is no mistaking that note. Let us come very quietly, and perhaps we shall catch sight of the beauty. That lazy nephew of mine," he went on, when they had seen the gleam of the vanishing bird, "he was saying the other day that there were no goldfinches in Wiltshire. I dare say he will join us here soon. He almost always comes up here on Sunday afternoon. It used to be his father's invariable Sunday walk." They strolled quietly along for some half hour, up winding and zigzag paths which would lead them presently to the brae above the wood, and disclose to them, so Mr. Francis said, a most glorious prospect. Below them, down the steep hillside up which they had circuitously made their way, lay the blue slate roof of the stables; in the yard they could see a retriever sleeping, and the sound of a man whistling came up very clear through the stillness of the afternoon. Then they turned a corner--the last, so Mr. Francis said--and the path which had hitherto been all loops and turns straightened itself out as it gained the end of the ridge up which the wood climbed. But here they were no longer alone, for not fifty yards in front of them they saw a girl in a pink dress, and with her a young man in straw hat and dark blue serge, of strangely familiar figure; his arm was about her waist. On the instant the man turned, and Evie, to her indescribable amazement, saw that it was Lord Vail. He said a word hurriedly to the girl, and turned off down a side path, while the girl walked quickly on. The glance had been momentary. A short, stifled exclamation came from Mr. Francis. "Ah, the foolish fellow!" he cried; and then, without a pause: "Yes, as I told you, there are only beeches up here, Miss Evie. Those oaks which you were admiring so much seem to stop as suddenly as if you had drawn a line of demarcation halfway up the hill. Now why is that, I wonder? The oak is the harder of the two, yet it is the beeches that prefer the colder situation. Strange, is it not? There used to be oaks here, but they have all died." They soon came out at the top of the hill, where the glorious prospect which Mr. Francis had promised Evie spread largely round them. But he had grown silent and distrait, quite unlike himself, and instead of rhapsodizing over the magnificence of the rolling hills, he gazed for a moment but sadly, pointed out to his companion various distant landmarks, as if he did not expect her to be interested, and remarked that it was time for them to turn. Nor was Evie much more talkative; the sight of Harry with that girl had strangely wounded her. Little had she thought, when Mr. Francis said he often spent his Sunday afternoons here, that she would see him thus! She told herself that he was perfectly at liberty to walk in his own woods with any one he pleased, but that he had availed himself of that liberty she felt like an insult offered to her. Her quick eye had taken in the girl in a moment; her dress, the way she put her feet down when she walked, all spoke of a certain class. Ten to one she was the daughter of the gamekeeper or butler. Ah, how disgusting men were! Mr. Francis walked by her in silence, with a frown on his usually serene brow, and, it would seem, some matter in debate. Suddenly he turned to her. "Dear Miss Evie," he said, "will you allow a very old man to take a very great liberty? Do not think too hardly of Harry, poor fellow, I beg of you! He has been much alone, without companions, and young men will be young men, you know. And I would stake--yes, I would stake all I have--that what you and I have seen was a mere harmless little flirtation, a few words said on either side, not meant by either, a kiss or two perhaps changing owners. Harry is young, but he is a good fellow, and an honest. You are disgusted, naturally, but I have never known--believe me, I have never known--these little foolishnesses of his mean anything. They are altogether superficial and innocent." He spoke with a very kind and serious voice, and with much of entreaty in his tone. But Evie's eyes were still hard and angry; she thought she had never heard so tame a defence. "This sort of thing has gone on before, then?" she asked. "Ah! do not force me," pleaded Mr. Francis. "I will go bail, I tell you, on Harry's honesty." "Certainly I will not force you," she said. "Come, Mr. Francis, this is not a nice subject. Let us have no more of it. That was really Oxford we saw just now, was it? How wonderfully clear the air must be here!" They passed down through the wood and to the house, where they both turned in. But in a minute or two Evie found she had left a book on the lawn, and went out to fetch it. Tea was laying there, and under the trees, where she had left them an hour ago, were Lady Oxted and Harry, at full length in their garden chairs, both, it would seem, fast asleep. And at that sight a sudden question asked itself in the girl's mind: How could it possibly be Harry they had seen in the wood? And before the question was asked the answer came, and she said softly to herself, "Jim." Her book was lying close to the sleepers, but she had already forgotten about it, and she turned quietly away, casting one glance at Harry, whose straw hat was lying on the grass, and noticing with a faint, unconvincing sense of justification that his clothes were also of dark-blue serge. But habitually honest, even with herself, she knew that her self-judged case would be summed up dead against her, and she set her teeth for a lonely and most humiliating ten minutes. Without definite purpose in her mind, except that association should be an added penance, she went to the lake, and sat down in the Canadian canoe in which they had played red Indians the evening before. How could she, she asked herself, have been so distrustful, so malicious, so ready to blacken? She had seen a young man walking with a girl, and she had been knave enough, and also fool enough (which was bitter), to accept the shallow evidence of her eyes when they told her that he was Harry. Had she not been warned against such wicked credulity, even as Elsa had been warned by Lohengrin, by the sight of that slim, handsome groom last night in the stable yard? Had she not said to Harry, "Is Vail full of doubles?" Out of her own mouth should she be judged. A worse than Elsa was sitting in the Canadian canoe. For half an hour at least she had believed that Harry was flirting with a servant girl, that he was capable of leaving her to suppose that he was going to keep Lady Oxted company under the trees, and as soon as her back was turned set off to meet his village beauty. Loyalty! a feeling she professed to admire! How would any girl in her position, who had an ash of what had once been loyalty, have acted? She would have flatly refused to believe any evidence; sight, hearing, every sense would have been powerless to touch her. Harry could not do such a thing. How did she know that? For the present that was beside the point; she knew it, and that was enough. Perhaps--and the warm colour came to her face--perhaps she would come to that presently. She sat up, and beat the water with the flat of the paddle. "Fool, fool, base little fool!" she whispered, a syllable to a stroke. Suddenly she stopped, the paddle poised. "I have never known these little foolishnesses of his mean anything," rang in her ears. So! This sort of thing had happened before.... What? Was she again skulking and suspecting, even after the lesson she had received? She had believed, though only for half an hour, the evidence of her own eyes, and she had suffered for it. Was she now to believe the evidence of somebody else's tongue? Yet Mr. Francis had said it, that dear old fellow, who was evidently so devoted to Harry, so pained at what they had seen. No, it did not matter if the four major prophets had said it. She knew better than all the stained glass in Christendom, and again she belaboured the water to the rhythm of "Fool, fool, base little fool!" For a few moments her thoughts flew off to Mr. Francis. He must have known that Harry's twin brother was a groom in the stables, yet he had been as certain as she that it was Harry they had surprised in the wood. He had been at pains to persuade her that the fault was venial, to assure her that young men would be young men, that Harry was honest. Why had he felt so certain on so slight a glance that it was Harry? What did it mean? Then she whisked Mr. Francis from her mind. He was as despicable as she, neither more nor less. He was as great a fool as she. Was he? Was he? Did he know Harry as well as she--he who had known him all his life, she who had known him a month, no more? Certainly he did not, could not. She, who knew him so well, had rightly accused herself of disloyalty to him, compared herself to Elsa, and him.... Did she then owe him loyalty? Ah! a big word. She put the dripping paddle back in the boat, for she was in wider fields than self-reproach has ever hedged about, and leaned forward, hearing the ripples lap and cluck on the sides. Supposing any one else--Geoffrey Langham, for instance--had chosen to walk in a wood with a dairymaid, would she have cared? would it have stung her? Not a jot. Then why---- At this she rose, slipped out of the boat, and for a moment looked at the wavering outline of her reflection in the lake. Then she stood upright, her arms fallen by her side, and a little voice spoke within her, which she tried to tell herself was not she. "I surrender," it said. She walked back to the lawn, proud and shy of the revelation she had made to herself, and with a mind once more unshadowed. Lady Oxted apparently had just awoke, and was looking distractedly round, as if she found herself in a strange bedroom. Harry, with one arm thrown behind his head, still slumbered. "Unconscious innocent, tea!" said Lady Oxted, truculently poking him in the ribs with her parasol. Harry opened both his eyes very wide, like a mechanical doll awaking. "Why did you do that?" he said; "I have been lying here quietly, thinking. Have they come back from their walk?" "No," said Lady Oxted, "they are lost. A search party went out about three hours ago to look for them. Rockets and other signals of distress have been seen intermittently from the downs." Harry sat up and saw Evie, and instantly turned his back on Lady Oxted. "Did you have a nice walk?" he asked. "I wish I had come with you. I"--and he looked round to see whether the parasol was within range--"I have been terribly bored this afternoon. Lady Oxted has positively no conversation." Evie looked first at him, then at her aunt. "Well, you both look all the better for your--your silence," she said. "Yes, Lord Vail, we had a charming walk. And we surprised your double love-making in the wood." "Oh, yes, the dairymaid," said Harry. "She's as pretty as a picture." "I always wonder where the lower orders get their good looks from," said Lady Oxted, parenthetically. Harry picked up his straw hat. "Probably from the lower orders," he remarked. "Let's have tea. Sleeping is such hungry work, is it not, Lady Oxted? I am sure you must be famished." "Elephantine wit," sighed that lady. "When Harry is so kind as to make a joke, which is unfortunately not so rare as one might wish, I always feel as if heavy feet were trampling about directly overhead." "And when Lady Oxted makes a joke," said the lad, "which is not so often as her enemies would wish, she always reminds me of a sucking spring directly under foot. I give one water-logged cry, and am swallowed up. Do pour out tea for us, Lady Oxted. You are such an excellent tea-maker!" "The score is fifteen all," remarked Evie. "When did Harry score?" demanded Lady Oxted, seating herself at the urn. "Just now, dear aunt.--And so Jim is to marry the dairymaid, Lord Vail." "And who is Jim?" asked Lady Oxted. "My double. I wish I knew as much about horses as he. Yes, Jim is walking out with the dairymaid." "I have heard enough about Jim," said Lady Oxted decisively. "Here is Mr. Francis.--Mr. Francis, take my side: there is a league against me. "A charming one," said Mr. Francis, directing his gay glance to Evie. But the girl did not meet it; she looked quite gravely and deliberately away. CHAPTER XIII HARRY ASKS A QUESTION Harry was leaving next morning with the two women, being unable to induce Lady Oxted to stop another day, and in consequence he sat up late that night after they had gone to bed, looking over the details of the expense of putting in the electric light. The cheapest plan, it appeared, would be to utilize the power supplied by the fall of water from the lake, for this would save the cost of engines to drive the dynamos. In this case it would be necessary to build the house for them over the sluice; but this, so wrote the engineer, would not interfere with the landscape, for the roof would only just be seen above the belt of trees. Or, if Lord Vail did not mind a little extra expense, a tasteful erection might be made, which, instead of diminishing, would positively add to the beauty of the view from the house. Then followed a horrific sketch of Gothic style. Harry's thoughts were disposed to go wandering that night, and he gave but a veiled and fugitive attention to the figures. The lake suggested other things to him brighter than all the thirty-two-power lamps of this electric light. The latter, it appeared, could be in the house by September, but the other was in the house now. In any case there should be no horrors, ornamental or otherwise, over the sluice; and he turned to the second estimate, which included engines, with a great determination to think of nothing else. The scene of this distracted vigil was his uncle's sitting room, where all the papers were to hand. Mr. Francis had sat up with him for half an hour or so, but Harry had then persuaded him to go to bed, for all the evening he had appeared somewhat tired and worried. Then from the next door there came, for some half hour, the faint sounds of brushings and splashings, that private orchestra of bedtime, and after that the house was still. Harry settled down again to his work, and before long his mind was made up. He would have, he saw, to screw and pinch a little, but on no account should anything, Gothic or not, spoil the lower end of the lake; then pouring himself out some whisky and soda, he took a last cigarette. The table where he worked was fully occupied, but orderly. A row of reference books--Bradshaw, The Peerage, Whitaker's Almanac, and others--stood in a green morocco case to the left of the inkstand; to the right, in a silver frame, a large photograph of himself. Among other books, he was amused to see a Zadkiel's Almanac, and he drew it from its place and turned idly over a leaf or two. There was a cross in red ink opposite the date of January 3d, on which day, so said this irresponsible seer, a discovery of gold would be made. Harry thought vaguely for a moment of South Africa and the Klondike, then suddenly gave a little gasp of surprise. That had been the day on which he had found the Luck. The coincidence was strange, but stranger was the fact that his uncle, who had so often remonstrated with him on his half-laughing, half-serious notice of the coincidences which had followed its discovery, should have a Zadkiel at all; strangest that he should have noted this date. Then suddenly a wave of superstitious fear came over him, and he shut Zadkiel hastily up, for fear of seeing other dates marked. Two minutes later he was already laughing at himself, though he did not reopen Zadkiel, and as he took his candle to go to bed his eye fell on a red morocco "Where is it?" which lay on the table. He knew that there was some address he wanted to verify, but it was a few minutes before he had turned to G. There was the name "Dr. Godfrey, 32 Wimpole Street," and on each side of it minute inverted commas. He looked at it in some astonishment, for he would have been ready to swear that his uncle had told him 32 Half Moon Street. He went straight to his room, however, without wasting conjecture or surmise over this, undressed and blew out his candle. Outside, a great moon was swung high in heaven, no leaf trembled on the trees, but through the summer night the songs of many nightingales bubbled liquidly. A few nights afterward he and Geoffrey were sitting alone in the house in Cavendish Square. Harry had been full of figures, wondering what was the least sum on which this London house could be made decently habitable. One room wanted a fresh paper, distemper was essential to another, most required fresh carpets, and stamped leather was imperatively indicated for the hall. Geoffrey listened with quiet amusement, for Harry was talking with such pellucid transparency that it was difficult not to smile. Then the question of electric light at Vail was touched upon, and suddenly he stopped, rose, and beat the ashes of his pipe out into the grate. "By the way, Geoff," he said, "supposing you looked out the name of a man whom you did not know, and had only once heard of, in a 'Where is it?' belonging to a friend, and found the name in inverted commas, what inference, if any, would you draw? No, it is not a riddle; purely a matter of curiosity." Geoffrey yawned. "Even Sherlock Holmes would not infer there," he said; "and even his friend Watson could not fail in such a perfectly certain conclusion." "What conclusion?" "Wait a moment; let us be an obtuse detective. Is the person from whom you have heard the name the same as the person to whom the 'Where is it?' belongs? Lord, I give points to Watson!" "It happens that it is so. Does that influence your conclusion?" "It only makes it even surer; no, it can't do that, but it leaves it as sure as it was. Of course, the name in the 'Where is it?' is not the man's real name; not the name he goes by, anyhow." "So it seemed possible to me." "Then you were wrong. There is no question of possibility. It is dealing with absolute certainties. Now satisfy my curiosity. I have not much, but I have some." "Bit by bit," said Harry. "Have you ever heard of a Dr. Godfrey, heart specialist, I take it, who lives at 32 Wimpole Street?" "Never. But Wimpole Street is just round the corner. I imagine he will have a plate on his door. I thought your heart was in a parlous state." "Oh, don't be funny," said Harry, "but come along." Geoffrey got up. "Shall I have to hold your hand?" he asked. "No; I am not going to consult him. Indeed, there is no mystery about the whole matter. Simply Dr. Godfrey is my uncle's doctor, and he consulted him the other day about his heart. I happened to look out the doctor's address in his 'Where is it?' and found the name in inverted commas. Oh! by the way, there is a red book by you. Look out 32 Half Moon Street. Does Dr. Godfrey live there?" Geoffrey turned up the street. "Certainly not," he said. "But why?" "Nothing," said Harry, unwilling to mention the different address. "Come, Geoff." They were there in less than a couple of minutes: Harry had not even put on a hat for the traversing of so few paving stones. An incandescent gas lamp stood just opposite the door, and both number and plate were plainly visible. On the plate in large square capitals was "Dr. G. Armytage." They read it in silence, and turned home again. Geoffrey had pursed up his lips for a whistle, but refrained. "We spell it Armytage, and pronounce it Godfrey," he said at length. "Sometimes we even spell it Godfrey. Or perhaps G. stands for Godfrey. Not that it makes any difference." Harry laughed, but he was both puzzled and a little troubled. Then the remembrance of the evening when he had seen the strange and distasteful man--Dr. Armytage it must now be supposed--driving away from the house, came to his mind. How excellent and kindly on that occasion had been the reasons for which his uncle had desired that the visit should remain unknown to Harry! And after that lesson, should not the pupil give him credit for some motive, unguessable even as that had been, but equally thoughtful? He had given him a wrong name and a wrong address; in his own reference book that same wrong name, but with inverted commas, appeared. Harry, being human and of discreet years, did not relish being misled in this manner, but he told himself there might be admirable reason for it, which he could not conjecture. He had intended, it is true, to see Dr. Godfrey privately, so as to get his first-hand opinion on his uncle's condition; but he was not at all sure that he would ring Dr. Armytage's door-bell. * * * * * Lady Oxted, a few days after this, fell a victim to influenza, and after a decent interval, Geoffrey, who for the remainder of the summer had let his own rooms in Orchard Street and lived with Harry, called on the parts of both to ask how she was, was admitted, and taken upstairs to her sitting room. Her voice was very hoarse, a temperature thermometer lay on the table by her, and he felt himself a very foolhardy young man. "It is no use your being afraid of it," said that lady to him by way of greeting, "because on the one hand the certain way to get it is to be afraid of it, and on the other you have to stop and talk to me. I have seen no one all day; not even Bob, as I don't want fresh cases in the house, and of course I haven't allowed Evie near me. Oh, I am reeking of infection: make up your mind to that." "But I don't matter," said Geoffrey. "Not the least scrap. Really, it is too provoking getting it again. I believe every doctor in Wimpole Street has seen me through at least one attack. I shall begin on Cavendish Square soon. Now talk." The thought of Dr. Armytage and the strange confusion of names and addresses had often been present in Geoffrey's mind since he and Harry had made that short and inconclusive expedition to number 32 Wimpole Street, and here, perhaps, was an opportunity for adding a brick to that vague structure that was in outline only in his mind. "Have you tried Dr. Godfrey?" he asked. "I never heard of him. Otherwise I should have tried him. Where does he live?" "It is not quite certain," said Geoffrey; "personally I believe at 32 Wimpole Street." "Is this supposed to be bright and engaging conversation?" asked Lady Oxted, "which will interest the depressed influenza patient?" "It may interest you in time," said Geoffrey. "To continue, have you ever heard of a Dr. G. Armytage, heart specialist, of 32 Wimpole Street?" The effect of this was instantaneous. Lady Oxted sat up on her sofa, and her shawl whisked the temperature thermometer to the ground, smashing the ball. "Yes, of course I have," she said; "so have you, I imagine. Or perhaps you were not born. How detestably young, young men are!" "They get over it," said Geoffrey. "Yes, and become middle-aged, which is worse. Now tell me all you know, categorically, about Dr. Armytage." "I don't know that there is one for certain," said Geoffrey. "True, his plate is on the door. I don't know if I have a right to tell you. In any case, really, I know nothing." Lady Oxted made an impatient gesture. "It concerns Francis Vail, of course," she said. Geoffrey stared. "How did you know that?" he asked. "I will tell you when you have finished your story," she said, "which, I may remind you, you have not yet begun." Harry had told his friend about his chance encounter at the lodge gates with the doctor, and Geoffrey could pass on the story complete; Mr. Francis's silence about his visit there; his excellent reason for silence; the false name given to Harry, and, so he thought, the false address; the false name in his reference book with the Wimpole Street address; and finally their visit to the door. Lady Oxted heard him with gathering interest, it would appear, and long before the end she was off her sofa and walking up and down the room. "And now for your story," said he. "How did you know that it concerned Mr. Francis?" Lady Oxted sat down again. "G. Armytage is Godfrey Armytage," she said, "a side point only. You have told your tale very clearly, Geoffrey. But there is one weak point in the evidence." "Evidence? What evidence?" asked Geoffrey. "Yes; evidence is the wrong word--chain of circumstance, if you will. The weak point is that there is no certain proof of the identity of Dr. Godfrey with Dr. Armytage. It is certain to you and me, I grant you, but still-- Did Harry say what this man he met driving to the station was like?" "'Not a canny man' were his words," said Geoffrey; "'dark, clean-shaven, forty, and distasteful.'" "That is on all fours," said Lady Oxted. "You haven't answered my question," Geoffrey reminded her. "No--I will. Did you ever hear of the Harmsworth case--the death of Harold Harmsworth?" "Yes. Harry told me about it." "All? The evidence of the doctors?" "No, not that." "Harold Harmsworth was shot, you will remember. At the coroner's inquest the whole question naturally turned on the distance from his head at which the gun which killed him was fired. This, you will easily understand, was of the utmost importance, for if the muzzle of the gun was not more than, say, a yard or four feet off, it was certainly possible that he had shot himself accidentally. But imagine the gun to have been ten feet off, it becomes certain that some gun not his own shot him. Now, his head was shattered; it looked to the ordinary mind as if the injury must have been done by shot that had already begun to spread--I can not speak technically. But the doctor who maintained that the shot might easily have been fired within the shorter distances--who was responsible, in fact, for the case not going beyond the coroner--was Dr. Godfrey Armytage." Geoffrey was silent a moment. "Well, it is all natural enough," he said at length, "Mr. Francis, on your own showing, has probably known the man for a long time; it is natural also that he did not wish to tell Harry his real name, for it was connected with that dreadful tragedy. It is also natural, if Dr. Armytage is an eminent man, that he should wish to consult a doctor he knew about his condition. Why not?" "For this reason," said Lady Oxted: "Dr. Armytage is not a heart specialist any more than you or I. He is a surgeon, and not a very reputable one. I needn't go into details. But it would be as sensible to go to him, if you suffered from the heart, as to go to a cabinetmaker." Geoffrey frowned. "What does it all mean?" he asked sharply. "I have no idea at all," said Lady Oxted. "Probably it means nothing. Things seldom do. In any case, say nothing to Harry." Tea came in at this moment, and they talked of other matters till the man had left the room. Then: "One thing more," said Lady Oxted, "and the last. I hardly like to say to you that I suspect nothing and nobody, because that sounds as if there was possibly something to suspect. There is nothing. But this is a curious circumstance, and it has interested me." Geoffrey walked back to Cavendish Square, feeling vaguely sombre and depressed. A tepid drizzle of rain was falling, making the pavement slippery; the air was hot and thundery, suggestive of expectancy and unrest, and this accentuated his mood. He had no clew of any kind as to what these secret dealings could possibly mean, and nothing that his ingenuity could suggest was even a faintly satisfactory solution. Every moment the sky seemed to be pressing more heavily on to the earth, and it was as if the very tightness of the air prevented the breaking of the storm. By the time he had reached Cavendish Square a faint, thick twilight showed overhead, the drizzle of rain had ceased, and only a few large drops fell sparingly. He let himself in with his latchkey, and found himself immediately face to face with Harry, who was just coming out. And at the sight of him he suddenly felt that his vague fear was going to be at once realized, for in his eyes sat a miserable despair. "Harry! Harry! what is the matter?" he cried. Harry did not look at him. "Nothing," he said. "Where have you been?" "Sitting with Lady Oxted." "Then perhaps she will see me. She is better, I suppose. Tell me, Geoff," and he fidgeted with the door handle, "did you see Miss Aylwin?" "No. Lady Oxted does not allow her to come to her room, for fear of her getting the influenza." "Thanks. I shall be back for dinner, I expect. But don't wait," and he opened the door. Geoffrey laid his hand on his arm. "You are not going to do anything foolish, Harry?" he asked, in a sudden vague spasm of alarm. "No, you idiot! Let me go." "Is there nothing I can do?" he asked. "Nothing, thanks." Geoffrey went into the smoking room and sat down in a bewilderment of distress and anxiety. What could possibly have happened? he asked himself. If anything had gone wrong at Vail, if Mr. Francis, to imagine the worst, had even died suddenly, surely Harry would have told him. Then why did he wish to see Lady Oxted, but apparently not wish to see Miss Aylwin? For the moment he thought there might be a light here: it was conceivable that he had proposed to her and been refused. But when, where? For Geoffrey had left him not two hours ago in his accustomed good spirits. Again, if he had ever felt certain of anything, it was that, unless the girl was the most infernal and finished flirt ever made for the undoing of man, the attraction between the two was deep and mutual. And no girl had ever seemed to him less like a flirt than Evie. Even if this was so, why should Harry at once wish to go to Lady Oxted? These things had no answer; there was nothing to do but wait, wait drearily, and listen to the hiss of the faster-falling rain. Harry drove to Grosvenor Square through the blinking lightning, and was shown up. Like Geoffrey, Lady Oxted was appalled at that drawn and haggard face; like Geoffrey, too, the question whether Evie had refused him suggested itself to her, but was instantly rejected. "My dear boy, what is the matter?" she cried. "Have you bad news from Vail?" Harry took a letter from his pocket, and folded it down so as to leave some ten lines of large, legible hand for her to read. "Will you read that?" he said, giving it her. She took it from him, and he sat down in the window. "... must prepare yourself," it ran, "for a great shock. I saw with such pleasure your intimacy with Miss Aylwin, and I know--I am afraid I know--what you hoped. Harry, dear boy, you must not allow yourself any fond feelings there. She is already engaged, so I heard this morning, from a friend near Santa Margarita, to a young Italian marchese. So make a great effort, and cut her out of your life with a brave and unfaltering hand. She has treated you ..." and the exposed page ended. Lady Oxted read it through, and tossed it back to Harry. "There is not a word of truth in it," she said; "though it is true enough that a certain Italian marchese, not very young, fell in love with her last winter, and was refused. I suppose your correspondent has got hold of some muddled version of that." Harry was white to the lips, but a gleam had returned to his eye. "Are you sure?" he asked tremulously. "Are you quite sure? I trust very deeply the person who wrote this letter." "I don't pretend not to guess whom it is from," said Lady Oxted, "but I am quite sure. If you don't believe me, ask Evie herself. Indeed," she added, looking suddenly at him, "I think that would be a most excellent plan, Harry." Harry got up. There was no mistaking this, and Lady Oxted had not meant that there should be. Only last night she had told her husband that the two had been philandering quite long enough, and announced her intention of pushing Harry over the edge as quickly as possible. Her opportunity had not delayed its coming, and she meant to use it. "Where is she?" asked Harry, almost in a whisper; "perhaps, perhaps----" "She has just come in," said Lady Oxted, feeling a violent desire to take Harry by the scruff of the neck and hurl him into Evie's presence; "she is in the drawing-room." "Alone?" asked Harry. "I don't know. Go and see." Harry hesitated no longer, but left the room. Lady Oxted heard his step first of all slow on the stairs, then gradually quickening, and it would seem that he took the last six steps in a jump. Evie was alone when he entered, seated at the far end of the room--ten miles away, it seemed to him. He felt his head swim, his knees were unloosed, his mouth was dry, and his heart hammered creakily in his throat. Then he raised his eyes again, and met her glance. And at that his courage coursed back like wine in his veins; she flooded and overflowed his heart; he was lost in an amazement of love, a man again. In two steps he covered those ten miles. "You told me to aim at being the King of England," he said. "I have aimed far higher, and I have come to you for the crown." Then no word was said at all about the Italian marchese, no longer young. CHAPTER XIV LADY OXTED'S IDEA Lady Oxted, in spite of her husband's general reflections upon her character, could not reasonably be called an ungenerous woman; and when, ten days after these last occurrences, it was her painful duty to visit the convalescent sofa of Geoffrey Langham, she said without circumlocution, or any attempt to shirk due responsibility, that she supposed it was she from whom he had caught the influenza. Geoffrey, on his side, did not regard this as anything but a certain conclusion, but added, with the irritable resignation which accompanies convalescence, that he did not suppose she had done it on purpose. The effect of this was to make Lady Oxted wonder whether she had really given it him at all. "You speak as if it was quite certain," she said. "But when one comes to think of it, Harry came to see me the same day, in great depression, which predisposes you to catch it, and he hasn't, so to speak, blown his nose since." "Very well, then; you did not give it me," said Geoffrey. "Please have it your own way. It was my own idea: I evolved influenza for myself. Besides, Harry was deeply in love. You can't do two things at once." "Hush-a-bye, baby," said Lady Oxted. "Geoffrey, I didn't come here to be contradict----" "No, to contradict, it appears." "Primarily, not even that, but to propose that you and I and Bob should go down to Oxted to-morrow, or rather to tell you that Bob and I are going, and propose that you should join us; we shall get well in half the time down there." "Are you not well?" asked Geoffrey. "You look a picture." "A picture of a boiled rag," said Lady Oxted, "treated, with extreme realism. Well, will you come?" "Of course I will, with pleasure. I long to get out of this frouzy town. What does Miss Aylwin do?" "She will go to the Arbuthnots while I am away, poor dear!" "She might do worse. And Harry?" "Harry will probably go to the Arbuthnots too, a good deal," remarked Lady Oxted. She got up. "I am glad you promised to come without any hesitation," she said, "because otherwise I should have had to press you, which is degrading. Harry's engagement has given me a lot to think about, and I want to express my thoughts to some very slow, ordinary person like you, in the same way as Molière used to read his plays to his housekeeper. I have got a sort of idea in my head, and I wish to see how it impresses the completely average mind." "I hope it is a nice idea," said Geoffrey. "But one can't tell with you. You have such an inconvenient sort of mind!" "It isn't nice," said Lady Oxted; "in fact, it is just the opposite. However, you will hear more of it to-morrow evening. Here's Harry. I shall go. Dear me, I wonder whether Bob looked as idiotic as that when we were engaged? I don't think he can have, or I should have broken it off." Harry's face in fact wore a smile of intensely inane radiance, but his desire to score off his aunt, as he now called her, caused it to fade off like the breath off a razor. "No, dear aunt," he replied, "but you see he wasn't engaged to a person of--well, of the same class as Evie.--Ah! fifteen love, Geoff, old boy. That will rankle by-and-bye in the mind of our aunt." Lady Oxted put her nose in the air, as if she had caught the whiff of a bad smell. "Can you explain the idiocy of your smile when you entered?" she asked. "Rather. I was just going to, when you began to be personal. Three Sundays ago, when Evie was down at Vail, she went out walking, after lunch, with Uncle Francis. Do you remember, dear aunt, and you snored loud and long under the trees on the lawn all that blessed afternoon? Yes, I see you remember. Well, they met--O Lord! you can't beat this--they met Jim and the dairymaid walking out all properly in the wood, and Evie thought, until she came back and found me on the lawn, she seriously thought Jim was me. She was furious: I got her to confess that she was furious. Great Scott! she thought I was flirting with the dairymaid. I knew a maid worth two of her!" Lady Oxted began to attend suddenly in the middle of this. "And what did Mr. Francis say?" she asked. "Did he also think it was you?" "I don't know. Evie didn't mention him, and then we began talking--well, we began talking about something else.--Poor old Geoff, how goes it? If you give me the flue, I'll poison your beef-tea, and you may lay it to that. It's all the Luck." Lady Oxted sighed. "Jack and Jill went up the hill," she remarked. "Yes, you may laugh if you like," said Harry, "but I'm beginning to believe in the Luck. I paid my penalty, and now I'm getting the reward. Oh, a big one! Did anybody ever hear of such Luck?" he demanded. "Laugh?" cried Lady Oxted. "Who talked of laughing? Of course, if Evie chooses to marry a man with unmistakable signs of incipient mania, and Mrs. Aylwin doesn't object, it's her own affair. But I wish I was her mother." "Yes, that would be something," said Harry, in a tone of extreme indulgence. "It would be charming for you, as you can't be her husband. Poor aunt!" "Thirty love," said Geoffrey. Lady Oxted gathered up her card case and parasol. "You just wait, my boy, till I get you to Oxted," she said truculently. "Is Geoff going to Oxted?" asked Harry, throwing himself extravagantly on the sofa by him. "Geoff, Geoff, would you leave me alone, alone in London, like Jessica's first prayer? I will follow you, if it be on foot and begging my bread. I can not live without you. See Wilson Barrett," he explained, sitting upright again, and smoothing his tumbled hair. Lady Oxted shrugged her shoulders, and shook a despairing head. "Poor Evie!" she said. "Poor, dear Evie!" Harry sprang up and stood with his back to the door. "Now why 'Poor Evie'?" he asked. "Explain precisely why. You don't leave the room until you have explained." "If you don't come away from that door and let me out," said Lady Oxted, "I shall ring the bell, Harry, continuously. This sort of bully-ragging is so good for a man with a splitting headache, and shattered by influenza! I always tell everybody how considerate you are." "Geoff, have you got a headache?" asked Harry. "No. Fight it out." Lady Oxted cast one baleful glance at him, advanced to the bell, and made an awkward, unconvincing movement to indicate that she was pressing it. Harry burst into loud, rude laughter. "Try again," he said. "You have to press the button in the centre of the bell, not a spot on the wall paper. More to your left." "Forty love," said Geoffrey. Lady Oxted turned away from the bell with dignity. "I don't understand the difficulty some people feel about apologizing," she said. "I apologize fully for all I have said." "Explain it," said Harry. "There is no explanation known to me. I spoke at random; I have not the slightest idea what I meant. Let me out, Harry." At this he granted her liberty, saw her to the door, and ran upstairs again. "O Geoff!" he said. "She had on a big, broad-brimmed hat and little yellow shoes. I saw them." "That all?" said Geoffrey. "Rather South-Sea islander for the park." Harry sighed. "Yes, I once used to think that sort of thing funny, too," he said. "Never mind; you can't know. However, there was the hat, and her face was underneath it." "Now that is really extraordinary," said Geoffrey. "The face? I should just think it was. It's the most extraordinary thing in the world. And it's mine, and mine is hers. Lord! whatever can she do with such an ugly mug?" "Is that the end?" asked Geoffrey, without any show of impatience. "No, you blamed idiot; that's only the beginning. She was walking, do you understand, with Mrs. Arbuthnot. So I thought, 'None of that now, woman!' and I just said so flat. At least I didn't say so, but they understood what I meant, and so we sat down on two little green chairs, and I paid twopence for them. Dirt cheap!" "You and Mrs. Arbuthnot and she. I quite follow." "Of course; oh! I'm not sure what happened to Mrs. Arbuthnot. She didn't go to heaven; at least I didn't see her there, so I suppose--oh, well, I suppose she stopped where she was. I dare say she's there now. So I said, 'Evie.'" "And she said 'Harry,'" remarked Geoffrey. Long brown fingers stole round his neck. "Now, tell me the truth, like George Washington," said Harry, "were you listening?" "No; I guessed. Take your hand away." "Devilish smart of you, then! She did say 'Harry,' and I won't deny it. My name, I tell you, you malingering skunk; she meant me! She called me Harry. O Lord!" "Well, it's altogether the most remarkable thing I ever heard," said Geoffrey. "And as the bell for lunch sounded ten minutes ago, I propose that you should tell me the rest afterward." It was Geoffrey's first attempt at stairs since he had gone to bed, and he threw an arm round Harry's neck, and leaned his weight on him. "And ten days ago," he said, "I met death and despair in the hall, and that was you. 'This is what comes of the Luck' thought I. O Harry, if I wasn't so shaky I'd fetch you such a whack in the ribs!" And after the manner of the British youth, they quite understood each other. The influenza party left London next day after lunch. Lord Oxted had brought a whole library of blue-books with him, out of which he hoped to establish an array of damaging facts against the Government, and his red pencil, as they sped out of London, had no sinecure. Mile after mile of the inconceivable meanness of house-backs fell behind them, and at last Lady Oxted consented to the partial opening of one of the carriage windows. "There, that is a proper breath of air," she said. "Sniff it in, Geoffrey. But I will have no suburban microbes flying into my face. Oh, we are wrecks, we are wrecks, but we will stop at Oxted till we are refloated." Lord Oxted frowned heavily, and scored the offending page. "Is the man Colonial Secretary," he asked, "or is he the autocrat of all the Englands? And it never occurred to any of them, apparently, that there might be something in those grand pianos. I should have thought that somebody might have guessed that this immense importation of huge cases implied something. But I am wrong; nobody guessed it. They said they could not be expected to see through stone walls. Stone walls, indeed! They couldn't see through plate-glass windows." "So the pianos turned out to be stone walls," said his wife. "Yes; they were put up round Pretoria." The heat in London had been intense; perhaps it was not less at Oxted; but there was a difference in its quality unnoticed by the thermometer, and after tea the two wrecks made themselves exceedingly comfortable on the lawn, and Lady Oxted, without warning, began the statement of her idea to the very ordinary person. "Harry's marriage is fixed for the middle of November," she said. "Evie will have to go back to Santa Margarita first, and I hope she may persuade her mother to come over for it. It is now the middle of July; there are four months before he will be married. Much may happen in four months." "As a rule very little does," remarked Geoffrey. "In this case I sincerely hope that very little will," said she. "Geoffrey, I am not altogether happy about it." "Why not?" he asked. "You told me you pushed Harry till he went and asked her. Did you mean him to be refused? Or are you afraid that either of them will think they have made a mistake? Of course, they are both young." Lady Oxted laughed. "You funny old maid!" she said. "No, I am not afraid of that." "Never mind me," he said. "What are you afraid of, then?" Lady Oxted was silent so long that Geoffrey would have repeated his question had he not felt quite certain that she had heard it. As it was, it was a full half minute, an aeon of a pause in conversation, before she replied. Then: "Of Mr. Francis," she said. Geoffrey had just lit a match for his cigarette, but he held it so long that it burned down, and he threw it hastily away, as the flame scorched his finger-tips. The cigarette he put very carefully and absently back in his case. "What on earth do you mean?" he asked. "It was to tell you that--that I particularly wanted you to come down here. Listen." Lady Oxted felt herself suddenly nervous, even when her only audience was the very ordinary person. She had thought the matter over in her own mind so constantly that she hoped she was familiarized with it, but when it came to speaking of it, she found she was not. Thus it was that she began very haltingly, and with frequent pauses. "I feel sure that he is essentially opposed to the marriage," she said, "for reasons which I will soon tell you; and when he professes to be so much delighted with it I conclude he is acting a part. Now one has always to be cautious in dealing with a man who is acting, until you know both what his part is and what he himself is. As regards Mr. Francis I know neither. I feel sure, however, that he is a very clever old man. Well?" "But is it not pure assumption that he is acting a part?" asked Geoffrey. "No; it is reasoned truth. I will tell you how I know it. The Sunday that Evie and I were down at Vail, Mr. Francis and Evie (Evie told me this, and Harry, as you heard yesterday, corroborated a part of it) walked in the afternoon in the wood just above the house, and suddenly came on one of the grooms--Jim, yes, his name was Jim--walking out with his young woman, who is dairymaid. Now, Jim, in appearance--you have seen him many times probably--is the very spit and image of Harry. Evie (they only had the most momentary glance of him) thought it actually was Harry, till she saw him half an hour later sleeping under a tree on the lawn. But it appears that Mr. Francis also thought it was Harry, for he said to himself half aloud, 'Ah, the foolish boy!' Now you, Geoffrey, have known Harry some time, and, well--have you ever known him behave as many young men do behave: talk to barmaids, flirt with waitresses, all that kind of thing?" "Never; he never did such a thing. At Oxford we used to call him the womanthrope." "Then explain to me what follows. Mr. Francis begged Evie not to be too hard on him. He said that Harry was honest, that his 'previous foolishnesses'--the exact expression, Evie tells me--had never been anything serious. Now you say there never were any." "No, never," said Geoffrey, "not to my knowledge at least. Oh, I can go much further than that: I know there can not have been. Harry simply is not that kind of fellow." "Then it appears to me that Mr. Francis only alluded to the harmless nature of Harry's previous foolishnesses in order to set Evie against him. A nice girl, you know, does not like that sort of thing. And how was it that it never occurred to Mr. Francis that the two figures they saw were Jim and his young woman? It is impossible that it should not, it seems to me. The two are engaged, Harry tells me; they often walk out together. Mr. Francis must have known that; he must also have known of Jim's extraordinary likeness to Harry." "But the likeness deceived Miss Aylwin. By the way, had she ever seen Jim?" "Yes; the evening before only." "Yet she was deceived. Why not Mr. Francis also?" Lady Oxted paused. "It is very unlikely, but I grant you that it is possible. Take what I have told you alone, and it proves nothing. But there is more." She was speaking less lamely now; the words had begun to come. "You met Harry in the hall when you came back from having tea with me a fortnight ago," she said. "How did his face strike you? Was it very happy? And do you know the cause of it?" "No; Harry did not tell me, though I asked him." "Then I shall tell you," said Lady Oxted. "I know how his face struck me, for he came to see me immediately afterward. I thought all was over between him and Evie. Harry thought so, too, and his reason for it was a letter he had just received, of which he showed me a piece. In it Mr. Francis--I know it was he, Harry told me so afterward--said that Evie was engaged to an Italian marchese. Here again there was a certain foundation for his thinking so. It was true at any rate that last winter an Italian in Rome fell very violently in love with her, that he proposed to her. But Evie refused him point blank. The thing was talked about, for it was a very good match. But Mr. Francis tells Harry she is engaged. He may have been told so; again it is just possible, though not more than possible. Now take these two incidents together; in each Mr. Francis made, let us say, a mistake: on one occasion he mistook the groom for Harry; on the other he says that Evie is engaged to an Italian, whereas that was never true; she refused him. Now does a common motive seem to lie behind those two mistakes? Supposing for a moment that these mistakes were--well--deliberate mistakes, very cleverly founded on fact, I grant--can you account for both of them by supposing one desire in Mr. Francis's mind?" "I see what you mean," said Geoffrey. "Say it, then; I want it said." "You mean that Mr. Francis wished to prevent their engagement. Is that bald enough?" "Yes; that will do. It is a possibility which must not be overlooked. He has failed, but I see no reason to suppose that anything has since happened which reconciles him to their marriage. His letter to Harry in answer to the announcement of his engagement was charming, perfectly charming. But so was his letter, in which he urged him to be brave and cut Evie out of his life with a firm hand. So also, no doubt, was his manner when he begged Evie to overlook Harry's Platonic little walk with a dairymaid." Geoffrey felt vaguely uneasy. Now that these things were said to him, he knew that somewhere in the very inmost recesses of his brain there had lurked for some time a feeling of which he was ashamed--a secret, unaccountable distrust of this kind old man. It had been emphasized by the curious adventure of Dr. Armytage's door, and since then it had grown more alert, more ready to put up its head. "Now why," continued Lady Oxted, speaking rapidly, "should he wish to separate the two? You would have thought--Harry thought and still thinks--that by this marriage Mr. Francis will feel that the old stain of suspicion that for so long had been on his name, ever since the Harmsworth affair, will be removed. And Harry has good reason for thinking so: Mr. Francis himself told him that Evie's coming to Vail was the happiest thing that had happened to him for years. Why, then, should they not marry?" "Perhaps Mr. Francis finds that the continual revival of those memories, which Miss Aylwin calls up, is too painful," said Geoffrey. "Does that seem to you reasonable?" asked Lady Oxted, "and if reasonable, can mortal mind invent a more awful piece of selfishness?" Geoffrey considered a moment. "No, it does not seem to me reasonable," he said; "I recant that." "Can you think of any other motive?" "Ah! you are monstrous," said Geoffrey suddenly; "you suggest monstrous things." "I have suggested nothing. I want to hear your suggestion. What is it, Geoffrey?" "You mean that Mr. Francis does not want Harry to marry at all. You remember that he is Harry's heir. Do you not see how absurd such an idea is? Who ever heard of an old man, over seventy, trying to make his grand-nephew a celibate? You might as well hope to rear a child who should never see a fire or a book." "Ah! you are shocked," said Lady Oxted, "but wait a moment. Do you remember what you told me about Dr. Godfrey and Dr. Armytage? Geoffrey, what is that sinister man doing at Vail? He is appalling, I tell you. He is one of the black spots on the medical profession. Heart specialist! He is a surgeon of terrible dexterity--unscrupulous, venal. What does Mr. Francis want with him?" Geoffrey got up in great excitement. "I will hear no more," he said, in a tremulous voice. "It is you who suggest things that I have to put into words. Tell me what you mean; say straight out what you suspect?" Lady Oxted rose too. "If I knew what I suspected, I would tell you," she said. "But I can't make out what it is. At any rate we have talked long enough for the present." She paused a moment, then broke out again, her own anxiety--how deep she had never known till this minute--breaking all bounds. "Promise me this," she cried. "Promise me you will be a good friend to Harry. Be much with him, be observant--not suspicious, but observant. Remember that I am afraid, though I do not know what of. See if you can not find out what it is that I fear. There, that is enough. You promise me that, Geoffrey?" "I will not play detective," said he. "I both like and honour that old man." "I do not ask you to play detective," she said. "I pray that your liking and honour for Mr. Francis may never be diminished. But be much with Harry, and be full of common sense. Come!" "Yes, I will promise that," said he. PART II CHAPTER XV FROST Harry left London at the end of the month, paid a couple of visits in England, then went to Scotland for the remainder of August, and loitered there, since he was at the same two houses as Evie till September had reached its second decade of days, and then travelled south again with her. She was on her way straight to Santa Margarita to spend the remainder of the month of months with her mother, and Harry saw her off by the boat express from Victoria, she having sternly and absolutely refused to let him do anything so foolish as to travel to Dover with her. "You would propose coming to Calais next," she said, "and Calais is but a step to Paris. I know you, Harry. And--and how I hate the journey, and how I should love it if you were with me!" "Oh, let me come!" said he. "Not even to Herne Hill," and the train slid out of the vaulted gloom of the station. Geoffrey joined him late on the same day, and next afternoon they set off together down to Vail. Stock brokering, it appeared, was like pheasants, quite impossible in September, and he was going to spend the remainder of the month with Harry, unless some unforeseen urgency called him back. This, he considered, was not in the least degree likely to happen, for the unforeseen so seldom occurs. "The house is all upside down, Geoff," said Harry to him as they drove from the station; "and all the time which you do not employ in getting severe electric shocks over unprotected wires, you will probably spend in falling into hot and cold water alternately upstairs. The housemaids' closets seem to me just now the only really important thing in England. I thought it better not to tell you all this before we started, for fear of your not coming." "Oh, I can always go back," said Geoffrey. "Is Mr. Francis there?" "Just now he is, but he is going away in a few days," said Harry. "In fact, he is only waiting till I come, to put the unprotected wires into my hands." "Is he well?" "Yes, extraordinarily well, and he asked after you in his last letter to me. Also he seems wonderfully happy at the thought of my marriage. So we are both pleased. Well, I'm sure I don't wonder; it will be a sort of death blow to that tragedy twenty years old and more now, a sort of seal and attestation of the vileness of the suspicion. Besides, you know, it's pretty nice for any one to have Evie in the house always." "Is he going to continue being with you, then?" asked Geoffrey. "Certainly; as much as he will. Evie and I settled all that without any disagreement, thank you. He is also thinking of having a little _ventre à terre_, as somebody said, in town, a sort of little independence of his own. I am delighted that he will; six months ago he couldn't bear the thought of going about among people again, but now it is all changed: he will begin to live again, after all these years. Dear old fellow, what a good friend he has been to me! Fancy caring about people of twenty or so, when you are over seventy. What wonderful vitality!" Whatever shadow of approaching cloud, so thought Geoffrey, might darken Lady Oxted's view of the future, it was clear that to Harry there could not have been a more serene horizon. Since that first afternoon down at Oxted he had not exchanged a further word with her or any one else on the subject, and by degrees that ghastly conversation had grown gradually fainter in his mind, and it was to him now more of the texture of a remembered nightmare than an actual experience. For several days afterward, it is true, it had remained very unpleasantly vivid to him; she had been so ingenious in her presentation of undeniable facts that at the time, and perhaps for a fortnight afterward, it had nearly seemed to him that Mr. Francis had been plotting with diabolical ingenuity against this match. If such were the case, his apparent delight at it assumed an aspect infinitely grave and portentous; his smiles would have been creditable to a fiend. But as the sharper edge of memory grew dulled, these thoughts, which had never been quite sufficiently solid to be called sober suspicions, became gradually nebulous again. Two circumstances had been the foundation of Lady Oxted's theory, each separately capable of explanation, and in making a judgment so serious it was the acme of unfairness, so it seemed to him now, to put the two together and judge. Each must be weighed and considered on its separate merits, and if neither had weight alone, then neither had weight together. There had been darker insinuations to follow; at these Geoffrey now laughed, so baseless appeared their fabric. Dr. Armytage might or might not be a reputable man, but the idea of connecting his visit to Vail, when one remembered how long he had known Mr. Francis, with something sinister and unspoken with regard to Harry, was really a triumph for the diseased imagination which is one of the sequelæ of influenza. Oddly enough, as if by thought transference, Harry's next words bore some relation to this train of ideas which had been passing through Geoffrey's mind. "Do you remember that evening when we went to find Dr. Godfrey, Geoff?" he said. "Well, I have so often thought about it since that I have determined to tell Uncle Francis about it, and ask him to explain it all." This appeared an excellent plan to Geoffrey, for, little as he believed in the solidity of Lady Oxted's bubbles of imagination, it would still be a good thing to have them pricked. "Do," he said. "Ask him some time when I am there. I should like to see his face when his little _ruse_ is exposed. It might be a useful lesson. Personally, I never know how to look when my little _ruses_ are discovered." Harry laughed. "There's an excellent explanation behind, you may be sure of that," he said. Accordingly, at dinner that night, in a pause in the conversation, Harry suddenly asked: "Seen Dr. Godfrey again, Uncle Francis?" "No, I have had no occasion to send for him, I am thankful to say," he answered. "I have been wonderfully well these last two months." "Geoff and I went to see him one night at 32 Wimpole Street," continued Harry. "Oh, we were not going to consult him. But we just went to his house." It would have been hard to say whether a pause followed this speech. In any case it was but a moment before Mr. Francis broke out into his hearty, cheerful laugh. "And I'll be bound you didn't go in!" he cried. "Dear Godfrey, he would have been delighted to see you, though. Ah, Harry! what a good thing you and I are friends! We are always finding each other out. So you actually went to 32 Wimpole Street, and found not Dr. Godfrey on the plate, but Dr. Armytage. How did you get his address, you rascal?" "Your 'Where is it?' was lying on your table the last night I was here, when I worked at the electric-light estimates. I turned to G." "Simple," said Mr. Francis. "Everything is simple when you know all about it. And my explanation is simple too. I didn't want you to go to Armytage, and fuss yourself about me, so, when you asked me for his name, I told you, if you remember, his Christian name--Godfrey--and I am afraid I gave you the wrong address. He is a dear fellow, a dear good fellow, but the sort of man who warns you against tetanus, if you cut yourself shaving. He would certainly have alarmed you, how unnecessarily look at me now and judge. He knows too much; I am always telling him so. He knows how many things may go wrong, and he bears them all in mind. Yes, my dear boy, I deceived you purposely. Do you acquit me? I throw myself on your mercy, but I beg you to bear in mind how kindly were my intentions." "Without a stain on your character," said Harry. Coffee was brought in at this moment, Templeton as usual bearing the case of the Luck, which had been the centrepiece at dinner. "Ah! they are going to put the Luck to bed," said Harry. "I drink to the Luck. Get up, Geoff." Geoffrey rose in obedience to the toastmaster, and, looking across at Mr. Francis, saw that his hand trembled a little. His genial smile was there, but it seemed to Geoffrey, in that momentary glance he had of him over the flowers, that it was a smile rather of habit than happiness. His glass was full, and a few drops were spilled as he raised it to his mouth. The thing, trivial as it was, struck him with a curious sense of double consciousness: it seemed to him that this was a repetition of some previous experience, exact in every particular. But it passed off immediately, and the vague, rather uncomfortable impression it made on him sank below the surface of his mind. It was already dim as soon as it was made. "So we are together again, we three," said Mr. Francis, when he had drunk to the Luck, and carefully watched its stowage in its case. "It is like those jolly times we had last Christmas, when this dear fellow came of age. What a chapter of little misfortunes he had too! When he was not slipping on the steps, he was falling into the fire; when he was not falling into the fire, he was catching a severe chill!" "Not my fault," said Harry. "It was all the Luck!" "Dear boy, you are always jesting about the Luck! Do be careful, Harry; if you do not take care, some day you will find that you have fancied yourself into believing it. Six, eight months have passed since then; what have you suffered since at the hands of fire and frost and rain?" "Ah! don't you see?" cried Harry. "The curse came first; then the Luck itself. I met Evie. Is not that stupendous? Perhaps the curse will wake up again, and I shall sprain my ankle worse than before, and burn my hand more seriously, before--before the middle of November. I don't care; it's cheap, and I wonder they can turn out happiness at such a trifling cost. I suspect there's no sweating commission at the place where the old scoundrel who made the Luck has gone!" Mr. Francis looked really pained. "Come, come, Harry," he said gravely. "Let us go, boys. They will be wanting to clear away." This implication of rebuke nettled Harry. He was a little excited, a little intoxicated with his joy of life, a little headstrong with youth and health, and he did not quite relish being pulled up like this, even though only before Geoffrey. But he did not reply, and with a scarcely perceptible shrug of his shoulders followed Mr. Francis out. Shortly after, his uncle got out his flute, and melodies of Corelli and Baptiste tinkled merrily under the portraits of the race. Next day uncle and nephew had estate business to occupy them; "their work," Mr. Francis gaily declared, 'twould, like topmost Jargarus, take the morning, and Geoffrey was given a dog and a keeper and a gun to amuse himself till lunch time. He wanted nothing better, and soon after breakfast he was off and away for all he could find in wood and hedgerow. The stubbles only and the small brown bird were dedicated for to-morrow. Mr. Francis and Harry worked on till one, but on the striking of that hour the latter revolted. "I can't go on any more," he said. "I simply can't. Come out till lunch, Uncle Francis; it is only an hour." Mr. Francis smiled and shook his head. "Not to-day, dear boy," he replied; "there is this packet of letters I have to get through before the post. But do you get out, Harry, and sweep the cobwebs away." Harry stood up, stretching himself after the long session. "Cobwebs--what cobwebs?" he asked. "Those in your curly head." "There are no such cobwebs. O Uncle Francis, as we are talking of cobwebs, I want to get that summerhouse on the knoll put in order--the one close to the ice house, I mean. Have you the keys? By the way, which is which?" Mr. Francis was writing, and, as Harry spoke, though he did not look up, his pen ceased travelling. "Yes, a very good idea," he said, after a moment. "The keys are in the cabinet there; two of the same, the same key fits both. Indeed"--and his pen began slowly moving again--"indeed, you will find plenty of cobwebs there. The summerhouse is the one on the left as you ascend the knoll going from the house. Don't go plunging into the ice house by mistake. They are both shuttered on the inside; it would be a good thing if you were to open all the windows, and let them get a good blow out. Shall I--oh, no! I must stick to my work." Harry found the keys, and as he turned to leave the room-- "The one on the left is the summerhouse?" he asked again. "Yes, the one on the left," said Mr. Francis, again fully absorbed in his writing. Harry, key in hand, went out whistling and hatless. The morning was a page out of heaven, and as he strolled slowly up the steep, grassy bank, where the two outhouses stood, with the scents and sounds of life and summer vivid in eye and nostril, he felt that his useful occupation of the hours since breakfast had been a terrible waste, when he might have been going quietly and alert with Geoffrey through cover and up hedgerow, to the tapping of sticks and the nosing of the spaniels. However, he had been through the farm accounts with minute care; there would be no call for such another morning till the closing of the next quarter. The two buildings toward which he went were exactly alike, of a hybrid kiosk sort of appearance, fantastic and ridiculous, yet vaguely pleasing. Each was octagonal, with three blank sides, four windows, and a door. Still whistling and full of pleasant thoughts, he fitted the key into the lock of the one to the left hand, and turning it, walked in. The interior was dark, for, as Mr. Francis had told him, all the windows were shuttered inside, and coming out of the bright sunlight, for a moment or two he saw nothing. For the same reason, no doubt, it struck him as being very cold. He had taken three or four rather shuffling steps across the paved floor when suddenly he stopped. Somehow, though he saw nothing, his ear instinctively, hardly consciously, warned him that the sound of his steps was not normal. There should have been--the whole feeling was not reasoned, but purely automatic and instinctive--no echo to them in so circumscribed a building, but an echo there was, faint, hollow, and remote, but audible. At this his whistling stopped, his steps also, and drawing a loose match from his trousers pocket he struck a match. Less than another pace in front of him was a black space, on which the match cast no illumination; it remained black. Harry felt a little beady dew break out on his forehead and on the short down of his upper lip, but his nerves did not tell him that he was afraid. He waited exactly where he was, till the match had burned more bravely, and then he chucked it forward over the blackness. It went through it, and for two or three seconds no sound whatever came to him. Then he heard a little expiring hiss. Still not conscious of fright, he went back, with the light of another match, for the door had swung shut behind him, and in another moment was out again, with the sweet, soft sunshine round him and the firm grass beneath his feet. He looked round; yes, he had gone to the left-hand building, the one his uncle had told him was the summerhouse. He had nearly, also, not come out again. At this sobering reflection a belated spasm of fear, for he had felt none at the moment of danger, seized him, but laying violent hold of himself he marched up to the other door, unlocked it, and throwing it open, waited on the threshold till his eyes had got accustomed to the darkness. Then seeing a couple of wicker tables and some garden chairs peer through the gloom, he went in turn to each window, unshuttered it, and threw it open. At this moment the iron gate leading into the woods close behind clanged suddenly, and with a jump that testified to his jangled nerves he looked out. It was Geoffrey, gun on shoulder, coming back to the house. Harry leaned out of the window. "Come in here, Geoff," he said. Geoffrey looked round. "Halloo; have you been opening the old summerhouse?" he asked. "Yes," said Harry, very deliberately, "I've been opening the old summerhouse." Geoffrey handed his gun to the keeper, who was close behind him, and vaulted in through one of the open windows. "Rare good morning we've had," he said. "You should have come, Harry. Why, you look queer! What's the matter?" Harry had sat down in one of the garden chairs, and was leaning back, feeling suddenly faint. "I've had the devil of a fright," he said. "I went gaily marching into the ice house by mistake, and only just stopped on the lip of the ice tank or the well--I don't know which it was. Either would probably have done." "Lord! how can you be such an ass?" cried Geoffrey. "You knew that one of the two was an ice house, and yet you go whistling along out of the sunshine into pit-mirk, and never reflect that the chances are exactly even that next moment you will be in Kingdom Come." "Give me a cigarette, and don't jaw," said Harry, and he smoked a minute or two without speaking. "Say nothing about this to my uncle," he said at length. "I believe it would frighten him to death. I asked him just before I came out which was the summerhouse, and he told me the left-hand one of the two as you go up from the house. Well, he made a mistake. It turns out that the left-hand one is the ice house." "What?" shouted Geoffrey, his whole talk with Lady Oxted suddenly springing into his mind like a Jack-in-the-box. "Can't you hear what I say?" asked Harry, rather irritable from his fright. "Uncle Francis had forgotten which was which, and I nearly went, as you put it, in Kingdom Come in consequence. There's nothing to shout about. For God's sake, don't let him know what happened! I really believe it might be the death of him." "It was nearly the death of you," said Geoffrey. "Well, it wasn't quite, and so there's the end of it. Anyhow, don't tell him; I insist on your not telling him. Come, let's go down to the house. I'm steadier now; I don't remember being frightened at the moment, but when there was no longer any reason to be frightened my knees withered under me." As they approached the house across the upper lawn, they saw Mr. Francis, some distance off, in one of the shady alleys going down to the lake, walking away from them. The Panama hat with its bright ribbon was on his head, at his mouth was the flute, and quick trills and runs of some light-hearted southern dance floated toward them. Suddenly, it would seem, the gaiety of his own music took irresistible hold on him, for, with a preliminary pirouette and a little cut in the air, his feet were taken by the infection, and the two lads lost sight of him round a bend in the path, performing brisk impromptu steps to his melody. They looked at him, then at each other a moment, in silence, Harry with a dawning smile, Geoffrey with a deepening frown. "I wouldn't tell him about the ice-house affair for ten thousand pounds!" said Harry. "Geoff, I wonder if you and I will be as gay as that when we are over seventy years old?" "It is highly improbable," said Geoffrey. It still wanted a quarter of an hour to lunch time, and Harry went indoors to finish up. Geoffrey, however, remained outside, and, as soon as Harry was gone, began playing a very curious and original game by himself. This consisted in stalking Mr. Francis, and was played in the following manner: He hurried over the grass to the entrance of the path where they had last seen him, and followed cautiously from bush to bush. Soon he had the sound of the flute again to guide him, but after a little, hearing that it was getting louder, he retired on his own steps, and from the shade of certain rhododendrons observed the cheery old gentleman coming back again along the path he had taken. Mr. Francis passed not thirty yards from the stalker; then the music ceased, and he crossed the lawn in the direction of the two kiosks. At that a sudden nameless thrill of horror took hold of Geoffrey, and creeping after him till both kiosks had cleared the angle of the house, he observed his doings with a fascinated attention. Mr. Francis went first to the ice house and turned the handle of the door, but apparently found it locked. He stood there a few seconds, flute in hand, and, taking off his Panama hat, passed a handkerchief over his forehead, for the day was very warm. Then it would seem that the open windows of the summerhouse caught his eye, and in turn trying that door, he found it open. He did not, however, enter, but merely held the door open, standing on the threshold. Then he turned, and rather slowly--for the grass, maybe, was slippery from a long drought--began to descend again toward the house. Geoffrey, on his part, made a wide circuit through the shrubbery, and emerged on to the gravel in front of the house just as Mr. Francis entered. The latter saw him, but apparently had no word for him, and on the moment the bell for lunch rang. Their meals usually were merry and talkative: lunch to-day, perhaps, only proved the rule, for it was eminently silent. Geoffrey was gloomy and preoccupied, his mind in an endless tangle of indecision, shocked, horrified, yet ever telling himself that this nightmare of a morning could not be true. Harry also, his nerves still on edge with the experience of the last hour, was inclined to brevity of question and answer; while the brisk cheerfulness of Mr. Francis, which as a rule would cover the paucity of two, seemed replaced by a kind of dreamy tenderness; he sighed, ate little; it was as if his mind dwelt on some regret of what might have been. Perhaps the weather was in part responsible for this marked decay of elasticity, for the clear warmth of the morning had given place to a dead sultriness of heat; the atmosphere had grown heavy and full of thunder. At last, as they rose from a very silent meal-- "I went up to the summerhouse this morning, Uncle Francis," said Harry, with the air of a man who had thought carefully over what he was going to say. "It wants putting in order, for it is damp and very cobwebby, as you warned me. But it would be worth while to do it; there is a charming view from the windows. I shall send a couple of servants up to clean it, and make it a bit more habitable." "Do, dear boy, do," said Mr. Francis. "Dear old place, dear old place! Your father used to be so fond of it!" The threatening of a storm grew every moment more imminent, and the two young men, who had intended to ride over the downs, decided to postpone their expedition. They stood together at the window of the smoking room, watching the awful and mysterious mobilization of cloud, the hard black edges of thunder, ragged as if bitten off some immense pall, coming up against what wind there was, and rising higher every moment toward the zenith, ready to topple and break. Once a scribble of light, some illegible, gigantic autograph was traced against the blackness, and the gongs of thunder, as yet remote, testified its authenticity. Before long a few large drops of rain jumped like frogs on the gravel path below the windows, and a hot local eddy of unaccountable wind, like a grappling iron let down from the moving vapours above, scoured across the lawn, stirring and rattling the dry-leaved laurels in the shrubbery, and expunging as it passed the reflections on the lake. It died away; the little breeze there had been drooped like a broken wing; the willows by the water were motionless as in a picture; a candle on the lawn would have burned with as steady a flame as in a glass shade within a sealed room. The fast-fading light was coppery in colour, and the darkness came on apace as the great bank of congested cloud shouldered its way over the sky, but, despite the gloom, there was a great precision of outline in hill and tree. Harry turned from the window. "We shall have to light the lamps," he said. "It is impossible to see indoors. Really, it looks like the day of judgment! Shall we have a game of billiards, Geoff?" As he spoke, the door was opened with hurried stealth, and Mr. Francis, pale and strangely shrunken to the appearance, came in. "Ah! here you are," he said; "I was afraid you had gone out, and that I was alone. Is it not horrible? We are going to have a terrific storm. What a relief to find you here! I--I should have been so anxious if you had been out in this!" "We were just going to the billiard room," said Harry. "Come with us, Uncle Francis; we will play pool, or cut in and out." "Thank you, dear Harry, but I could not possibly play with the storm coming on," he said. "Thunder always affects me horribly. But if you will let me, I will come with you, and perhaps mark for you. I can not bear being alone in a thunderstorm." They went to the billiard room, and Harry lit the lamps, while Mr. Francis, creeping like a mouse round the walls, and taking advantage of the cover of the curtains, began hurriedly closing the shutters. "Oh, why do you do that?" asked Harry. "We shall not see the lightning." Even as he spoke a swift streamer of violet light shot down, bisecting the square of window where Mr. Francis was nervously tugging at a shutter, and for a moment showing vividly the dark and stagnant shapes of the drooping trees. Mr. Francis's hand fell from the shutter as if it had been struck, and with a little moaning sigh he covered his face with his hands. Almost simultaneously a reverberating crash, not booming or rumbling, but short and sharp, answered the lightning, and Mr. Francis hurried with crouching steps to the sofa. "Put up all the shutters, I implore you, Harry!" he said in a stifled voice. "Shut them quickly, and draw the curtains over them. Ah!" he cried, with a whistling intake of breath, "there it is again!" His terror was too evident and deep-seated not to be pitied, and the two young men hastily closed all the shutters, drawing the curtains over them, as Mr. Francis had requested. "Is it done? is it done?" he asked in a muffled voice, his face half buried in a sofa cushion. "Be quick--oh, be quick!" For an hour he sat there with closed eyes and finger-muffled ears, while the storm exploded overhead, the picture of cowering terror, while the other two played a couple of games. From time to time, if there had been a comparatively long interval of quiet, he would begin to take a little interest in the play, and once, even when for some five minutes the steady tattoo of the rain on the leads overhead had continued unbroken by any more violent sound, he went to the marking board. But next moment a dirling peal made the rest drop from his hand, and at a shuffling run he went back to the sofa, and again hid ears and eyes. The storm passed gradually away, the sharp crack of the overhead thunder gave place to distant and yet more distant rumblings; and the afternoon was not over when Mr. Francis, cautiously opening a chink of shutter, let in a long, dusty ray of sunshine. The heavens were clear again, washed by the rain, and of a most pellucid blue, and Mr. Francis, recovering with mercurial rapidity, went gaily from window to window, unshuttering. "What a relief, what a blessed relief!" he cried. "How delicious is this freshness after the storm! Ah, the beauty of the world! I drink it in; it is meat and drink to me." He nodded to the others. "I must go out," he said; "I must go out and see if this horrible storm that is past has done any damage. I am afraid some trees may have been struck by that cruel lightning, in all their strength and beauty. It is terrible to think of, that exquisite, delicate life, rent, shattered in a moment by the flame!" He went out, and the two others looked at each other like augurs. "Nerves," said Harry. "Bad conscience," said Geoffrey, and these were all the comments made by either on Mr. Francis's hour of purgatory. It was too late when the storm was over to go the intended ride, and after tea Harry and Geoffrey sauntered aimlessly out, played red Indians again among the islands of the lake (a game which, on the present occasion, was far less delightful to Harry than when he had played it last), and finally came homeward as dusk fell. As they passed down the box hedge, it suddenly occurred to Harry (so imaginative had been the realism with which his friend had played red Indians) that Geoffrey was perhaps capable of seeing the secret of the inside passage in a suitably romantic light, and he took him round to the back of the hedge. "A mystery, Geoff, a deep, dark mystery," he said, and shutting his eyes against the springing twigs which had overgrown the door, jumped into the hedge. The elastic fibres of the box flew back like a spring into their normal position; and Geoffrey, who for the moment had been intent, with back turned, on the lighting of a cigarette, looked up when that operation was over, and found that Harry had vanished as suddenly and as completely as any lady in the cabinet trick. In the dusk it was impossible, except to any one who knew where to look, to see any difference of uniformity in the texture of the hedge, and the illusion of his vanishing was complete. "Here, Geoff, come in," said Harry, still invisible, "and don't put out that match. It is darker than the plague of Egypt!" "Come where--how? Where are you?" Harry laughed, and held back the twigs. "That was a great success," he said. "And--O Geoffrey--if you have a spark of the romantic left in you, and I think you have, for you were a masterly red Indian, this ought to make it blaze. Look! a tunnel right down the hedge. Isn't that secret and heavenly? Think how many plots we might overhear, if people were only kind enough to make them as they went down the road! Think of the stirring rescues you could make, hiding here till the pursuit went by!" Geoffrey was quite suitably impressed. "I call this really ancestral," he said. "Talk low, Harry; we may be overheard. Where does it lead to?" "Right down to the house, and comes out by another door like the one we went in by, just opposite the gun-room window. Geoff, if you'll conceal yourself here all to-morrow I'll bring your meals when I can slip away without attracting attention. You mustn't smoke, I'm afraid." "Oh, if only there was the smallest cause for doing so!" said Geoff. "Does no one know it, except you and me?" "I don't think so. I daren't ask Uncle Francis if he does, for fear he does. I shall tell Evie, but no one else. Lord! what a baby one is! Why does this give me pleasure? There! just peep out at the end, Geoffrey, so that if you are pursued from the house you will know where the door is; but be cautious. Now we'll walk up again inside, and steal softly out where we came in, else some one from the house might see us. No, I think not another match. It's too risky." "I should like to give one low whistle," said Geoffrey. "Just as a signal. All right." Even as the whistle was on his lips, there came from somewhere close at hand a sudden gush of notes from a flute, and the two stood there huddled against each other in the narrow passage, petrified into sudden silence and immobility, but shaken with inward laughter. Peering, on tiptoe as it were, through the hedge, they could just make out the figure of Mr. Francis, walking airily along the grass border by the edge of the drive, on his way to the house. Soon his feet sounded crisp and distant on the gravel, and the two idiots breathed again. "A near thing," said Harry. "Let us go back. Geoff, if you had lit that match, we should almost certainly have been discovered." Mr. Francis left early the next morning for London, to see two or three little flats, one of which he thought might perhaps be compassable by the modest sum he was prepared to give for a _pied-à-terre_ in town. None of them were in very fashionable districts; the one which seemed to him most promising was in Wigmore Street, and this held forth the additional advantage of being near Cavendish Square. Harry had telegraphed to the care-taker there to get a couple of rooms ready for his uncle, and without his knowledge (for he would certainly have deprecated such a step) he had sent up from Vail a kitchen maid, who was also a very decent cook, in order to make him more comfortable. Mr. Francis had breakfasted, and the trap to take him to the station was already at the door when the two young men came down, and he hailed them genially from the threshold as his luggage was put up. "Good-morning, dear boys!" he cried. "You will have a lovely day for your shoot. It is perfect after yesterday's storm. Yes, I am just off, I am sorry to say. I shall stop at least a week in town, I expect, Harry; but I will let you know when I am thinking of coming back." Harry went out just as his uncle climbed nimbly up into the dogcart; Geoffrey had stayed in the hall, and was glancing at the paper. "Uncle Francis," he said, "do take that more expensive flat in De Vere Gardens, if you find it suits you better. Don't consider the extra expense at all; I can manage that for you perfectly." "You are too generous to me, dear Harry," said the other, stretching down and grasping his hand. "But no, dear boy, I could not think of it. I shall be immensely comfortable in that one in Wigmore Street. But thank you, thank you.--Luggage all in? Drive on, Jim," he said abruptly. Harry turned indoors and went across the hall to the dining room. But Mr. Francis, after having driven not more than a couple of hundred yards, stopped the cart, and descending, began to walk toward the house. Halfway there he stopped, and stood for a moment lost in thought; then, with an air of a taken decision, went on more quickly. On the threshold again he stopped, biting his lip, and frowning heavily. At that moment Geoffrey got up from his paper, and crossing the door into the entrance hall, on his way to join Harry in the dining room, saw him through the glass door, standing like this, and went to see why he had come back. And the face that met him was the face of old Francis--a wicked, malignant mask, even as Harry had seen it that day when the sun shone brightly on the picture. But next moment it changed and melted. "I thought you had gone," said Geoffrey. "Have you forgotten something?" "Yes, my flute," said Mr. Francis, not looking at him; and picking it up from where it lay on the piano, he went out again, and walked quickly up the drive to where the dogcart was waiting. "That was not what he came for," thought Geoffrey to himself. CHAPTER XVI FIRE Harry was in the most extravagantly high spirits this morning, and at breakfast the two laughed over the most indifferent trivialities like schoolboys. Stories without wit and of the bluntest kind of point, rude personal remarks, repartees of the most obvious and futile kind, were enough to make one or other, and usually both, fit to choke with meaningless laughter. To Geoffrey, at least, there was great and conscious cause for a mounting spiritual barometer in the departure of Mr. Francis. All yesterday, since he had seen him tripping up to the ice house after Harry's escape, he had grown increasingly aware of a creepiness of the flesh which his neighbourhood or the thought of him produced. He had not slept well during the night, and had kept awaking from snatches of nightmare dozing, in which sometimes Mr. Francis, sometimes the figure of the portrait of old Francis, would be enticing Harry on to some dim but violent doom. Now, like some infernal piper of Hamelin, Mr. Francis would precede Harry, playing on his flute and drawing him ever nearer to a bank of lurid cloud, out of which from time to time leaped crooked lightning; now he would have him affectionately by the arm, and walk with him chatting and laughing toward a little house that stood on rising ground. The house, to the tongue-tied dreamer who longed to warn his friend, but could not, kept changing in form: now it would stand alone, now it would be but one in a countless row of houses all alike, stretching to left and right, from horizon to horizon, but whether solitary or among a hundred identical with it, he knew that there lurked there a danger of vague and fatal kind. Sometimes it was the beams and very stones of it that were ready to fall as soon as the door was opened; sometimes every window of it he knew would bristle with shooting flames as soon as Harry set foot within it; sometimes he could see that it was in reality no house at all, but a black pit, infinite in depth, from which rose an icy miasma. Yet, in whatever form Harry's companion appeared, and in whatever form the house, when they were close to it Mr. Francis would push Harry suddenly forward with an animal cry of gratified hate, and Geoffrey would start from his dream in a sweat of terror. Then there was another shocking point: the man who walked with Harry was indefinite and changeable; he would start with him in the image of Mr. Francis, and they would yet be but a stone's throw on their walk, when it was Mr. Francis no more, but the old baron of the Holbein picture. Sometimes, Evie's face would look out in panic terror from an upper window, and the dreamer could see her wave her hands and hear her scream a warnings but the two apparently could neither see nor hear her, and drew steadily nearer that house of death. But the sanity of the morning sun, the crisp chill of his bath, above all, the departure of Mr. Francis, restored Geoffrey to his normal level, and the normal once reached, the pendulum swung over to the other side by as much as it had fallen short during these nervous terrors of the night; and he ate with a zest and appetite more than ordinary, and a keen and conscious relish for the day. Even at the end of this ridiculous meal, when he had already laughed to exhaustion, a fresh spasm suddenly seized him, and Harry paused, teacup in hand, to know the worst. "Oh, it is nothing," said Geoffrey; "indeed, it didn't strike me as at all funny at the time. But as I came across the hall, there was Mr. Francis at the door, though I had heard the dogcart start. He had come back for something he had forgotten. Guess what it was--I only give you one guess." Harry's hand began to tremble and the corners of his mouth to break down. "His fl--flute!" he said in quivering tones. "Right!" shouted Geoffrey. "And I wonder--oh, oh, I hurt!--I wonder whether he will do steps round Cavendish Square to-night, playing on it!" Harry had begun to drink his tea a moment too soon. They smoked a cigarette in the hall, Geoffrey eager to be off; Harry, contrary to his habit, strangely inclined to loiter. Their talk had veered to the more serious subject of shooting, and Harry was expressing his old-fashioned preference for a gun with hammers to the more usual hammerless. "I can't think why I do prefer it," he said, "but there it is. I put a gun at half cock instinctively if I have to jump a ditch, but I do not feel quite at home with that little disk uncovering 'safe.' Supposing it shouldn't be? Come along, Geoff; we'll start, as you are in such a hurry. The men meet us at the lodge: we'll just get our guns and go!" They went down the stone-flagged passage to the gun room, which looked out on the box hedge. There were two guns lying on the table, and Geoffrey, after looking at the other, took up his own. "You're a consistent chap," he said to Harry. "After all you tell me of your preference for hammers, you shoot apparently with a hammerless." Harry picked up the gun and looked at it. "Not mine," he said; "Uncle Francis's. Ah! there's mine." Another gun with hammers was leaning nearly upright in a rough gun stand, more like a stand for sticks, in the corner. Harry took hold of it some halfway up the barrels, and then seemed to Geoffrey to give a little jerk as if it had stuck. On the moment there was a loud explosion, a horrible raking scratch was torn in the wooden panelling of the wall, and an irregular hole opened in the ceiling. The charge could not have missed Harry by more than three inches, but he stood there, the smoking gun in his hand, without a tremor. Then he turned to Geoffrey. "The Luck is waking up," he said. "Frost yesterday--that was the ice house; and this looks awfully like fire." Several panes of glass in the window had been shattered by the concussion, and Harry pointed the gun out. "Now for the second barrel," he said, and the click of the falling trigger was the only answer. He opened the breech, and took out the smoking cartridge case. "One cartridge only," he said; then, looking down the barrels, "and the left barrel is clean. It looks rather as if the gun had been cleaned, and a cartridge put in afterward. Odd thing to happen. Now we'll go shooting, Geoff!" But Geoffrey was holding on to the table, trembling violently. "You're not hurt?" he said. "No. I shouldn't go shooting if I were. Come, old chap, pull yourself together: there's no harm done. I shall make inquiries about this. Don't you say anything, Geoff. I am going to look into it thoroughly, detective fashion." "But--but aren't you frightened?" asked Geoffrey feebly. "No, funnily enough, I'm not. It's the Luck: I firmly believe it's the Luck, and the poor old devil who put the curse in it is doing things in a thoroughly futile manner. I am ashamed of him." "Ah, destroy the beastly thing!" cried Geoffrey. "Burn it, smash it, chuck it away!" "Not I. Oh, it's cheap, it's awfully cheap! A hole in the ceiling, and a penny for the cartridge, and November coming closer." "Do you mean to say you believe in it all?" asked Geoffrey. "Yes, I believe in it all." "But, good God, man! somebody put the cartridge there. Somebody told you that the summerhouse was on the left----" and he stopped suddenly. "Yes--Uncle Francis told me that," said Harry, "and who made him forget which was which of the two houses? Why, the Luck, the blessed Luck!" he cried almost exultantly. At this all the nightmares of the last twelve hours swarmed round Geoffrey, flapping about his head. "And who put the cartridge in that gun?" he cried, not thinking how direct an accusation he was making. Harry's face grew suddenly grave; the smile was struck from it. A flash of anger and intense surprise flamed in his eyes, and his upper lip curled back in an ugly way. Then seeing Geoffrey holding on to the table, still dazed and white, he recovered himself. "Come, old boy," he said, "don't be so much upset. Yet, Geoff, you shouldn't say that sort of thing even in jest. Have a whisky and soda before going out; you're all shaky. Believe in the Luck, like me, and you'll take things more calmly. Yes, I mean it; at last I really mean it. I am the inheritor of a curse and a blessing. So I take the good with the bad, and, oh, how much the one outweighs the other! By the way, the painters are in the house; they must patch up the paper here, and mend that hole in the ceiling. Shall I order a whisky for you at the same time?" "No; I'm all right," said Geoffrey, and he followed the other out. Harry was at all times a good shot, to-day he verged on brilliancy. Geoffrey, on the other hand, who as a rule was more than good, to-day was worse than bad. His gun was a laggard; he shot behind crossing game, below anything that was flying straight away from him; he was not certain about the easiest shots, and he was only certain to miss the more difficult ones. It seemed indeed that the two had divided between them the accident in the gun room; the infinitely short moment in which Harry had felt the hot breath of the fire, sharp and agonizing like a pulled tooth, was his, but the reaction, the retarded fear, the subsequent effect on nerve and brain, were entered to Geoffrey. He was utterly unstrung by this double escape; twice during the last twenty-four hours, in this peaceful country house, had Harry looked in the very face of death; yesterday stepping gaily toward the lip of the ice tank; to-day by as little a margin escaping this shattering extinction. A foot more, a foot less--and as he thought of it, Geoffrey bit his lip for fear of screaming--and brain and bone would have been shredded over the gun-room floor. Accidents would happen; there had always been accidents and there always would be, but, unlike misfortunes, they nearly always came singly. What was this malignancy that haunted Harry, dogging his steps? What dim figure, deadly and full of hate, hovered on the wing by him, ready to strike? Cartridges do not automatically find their way to guns that are cleaned and placed in the stand, as dust collects in corners. They have to be placed there, a human hand has to open the breech, stuff it with death, close it, and put the gun down again. These things must inevitably happen before a gun goes off. Who in this case did them? They came by one o'clock to one of the prettiest pieces of rough shooting on the ground--a long, very narrow strip of moorland country bounded on both sides by reclaimed fields, tufted thickly with heather, diversified by young clumps of fir and dense, low-growing bushes, and honey-combed with rabbit burrows. It was scarcely more than sixty yards across, but full half a mile in length, and the sport it afforded was most varied and unconjecturable. On warm days partridges would be here, covey after covey, sunning in the sandy little hollows bare of growth, or busy among the heather, and from the thickness of the cover and the undulations of the ground, a big covey would seldom take the air together, but rise one by one, or in couples, without general alarm being given, to right or left of the guns, or even behind them, so close had the birds lain in the long grasses. Here and there attempts had at one time been made to bring the land into cultivation, and as you tramped through heather, you would suddenly come on a vague-edged square of potato-planting, the vegetable run riot with great wealth of thick leaf; or a strip of corn already half wild, and with a predominant ingredient of tares, would make you go slowly on the certainty of the break of brown wings, or the delayed and head-down scurry of a hare. To those happily old-fashioned enough to care for the sober joys of walking up, it was the very poetry of sport, but to-day it appeared to Geoffrey a barren and unprofitable place. For the last hour the questions that tormented him had been volleying even more insistently; horrible doubts and suspicions, no longer quite vague, flocked round his head like a flight of unclean birds, and he desired one thing only--to get to the gun room alone and clear up a certain point. They had to walk over a bare and depopulated stubble to get to this delectable ground, and Harry, as they neared it, looked first at Geoffrey's lacklustre face, then at his watch. "I had no idea it was so late, Geoff," he said; "I think we'll take the rough after lunch. We're only half a mile from the house, and you look as if lunch would do you good." He took the cartridges carefully out of his gun. "No mistake this time," he said. "We'll start over the rough at two--Kimber, meet us here. Oh, by the way, come up to the house; I want to ask you something." Geoffrey gave up his gun with a sigh of relief. "Yes; let's do that piece afterward," he said; "I can't hit a sitting haystack this morning, Harry." "There's one; have a shot at it," said Harry. "O Geoff, don't look so awful! What has happened? There is a hole in the gun-room ceiling. You didn't do it, and I'm not going to send the bill to you." "But aren't you frightened?" asked Geoffrey. "Are you made of flesh and blood?" "I believe so. But haven't you ever had a shave of being shot? I'll bet you didn't give it a thought half an hour afterward." "I know; but it's more cold-blooded indoors, happening the way it did. And coming on the top of your ice-house affair yesterday!" "It's the Luck!" cried Harry; "that's the explanation of it, and it's proved to the hilt. Fire and frost: they are done; scratch them out; and now there remains the rain. I'm afraid we shall not get the rain to-day, though. If one has to go through a thing--and I certainly have--it is better to get it over quick, as I, to do me justice, am getting it over. And, O Geoff, there's a good time coming!" Harry had to see the foreman who was in charge of the electric light, as well as the keeper, when he got in, and Geoffrey, after seeing him go upstairs, went quickly through the baize door at the end of the passage from the hall, and down to the gun room. He wanted to find out what had caused Harry to give a jerk to the gun when he took it up. He had consciously seen him, the moment before it went off, put his hand to lift it out of the stand, then give an additional effort, as if it had stuck. All the morning he had been wondering about that. The obstacle, whatever it was, must, he felt certain, have been in connection with the trigger, for it was that jerk which had caused the gun to go off. The men had already been at work over the damage, but they had gone to their dinner, and the room was empty. He went to the rack where the gun had stood, and next moment he gave a sudden little gasp, though not of surprise, for he had found only what he expected he should find, or something like it. Round the post at the corner of the rack was tied a piece of cotton. Two ends, each some six inches long, came out from it; the extremities were ragged, as if the piece had been broken. Another gun with hammers stood in a glazed cupboard at one side of the room; Geoffrey took it out, and leaned it in the rack as nearly as possible in the position in which he remembered Harry's gun to have stood. Then kneeling down, he stretched the two broken ends of cotton in its direction. They just went round the right trigger. He had a momentary impulse to call Harry and show him this, but decided not to. Harry, as he had said, was going to investigate the mysterious presence of a cartridge in a cleaned gun, and if he could trace how it got there, then would be the time to throw on this fresh evidence. Till then it was far better that he should not know, for at present he was inclined to treat the affair as an accident, due no doubt to some gross negligence, but nothing worse. This matter of the looped cotton, however, gave a far more sinister aspect to the affair, and the knowledge that there was foul work here was a burden that could be spared him at any rate till further light was cast. So, very carefully he unknotted the cotton from the post of the rack and put it in his pocket. The knot, he noticed, was the ordinary reef so familiar to the fly-fisher. Somehow the certainty of what he had feared and suspected, even though the worst of his suspicions was confirmed, served to steady him. He knew now exactly what was to be faced--a deliberate and very cunningly devised attempt on Harry's life. Look at it which way you would, this could not conceivably be an accident. Taken alone, the presence of a cartridge in a cleaned gun had been a difficult mouthful even for an imagination in favour of accident to swallow; taken in conjunction with the piece of looped cotton, it could not be tackled. He went over all the circumstances slowly and carefully, as he put the piece of cotton in his cigarette case. There had been two guns on the table--his, and, as it turned out, not Harry's, but Mr. Francis's. Harry's gun, loaded, a trap of nearly certain death to any one who took it up, was leaning in the gun rack. Here were the thoughts of the brain which had contrived these things. The bell for lunch made him hurry out of the room, and in the hall he found Harry. "Our reporter has been visiting the scene of the dastardly attempt," he said; "something spicy for the evening papers, Geoff? Oh, by the way, I asked Kimber what he could tell me about that gun of mine. He could tell me a lot. Come in to lunch." "And what could he tell you?" asked Geoffrey. Harry looked at the servants a moment. "Later," he said. "Oh, how I bless the man who invented lunch! Do you remember saying to me once that little things like baths and tea were much more important than anything else?" "Yes, and you called me a sensuous voluptuary," said Geoffrey. "I believe I did. So you are. So am I." The sensuous voluptuaries went out again as soon as lunch was over, to shoot the rough, and as they walked Harry told his friend what he had learned from the keeper. "I asked him first," he said "(without telling him what had happened), who put those two guns, yours and my uncle's, on the table, and he didn't know. He had come in early to get cartridges and put the guns out, and found them there. So he took the cartridges and went. Now, until this morning, I haven't shot here since last February, and I didn't take the gun that behaved so--so prematurely to-day, to Scotland. So I asked whether any one had used it since I went away, and it appeared that Uncle Francis had several times, for his own gun, the hammerless one which we found on the table, had gone to the maker's to have a rust hole taken out. Do you follow?" "Perfectly." "Well, two days ago, the day we came down here, Kimber was feeding the pheasants, and he heard a shot near at hand, and a moment afterward a wounded hare ran across the clearing, followed immediately by Uncle Francis. He was almost crying, said Kimber: do you remember how he wounded a hare last Christmas, and was out for an hour trying to recover it? Well, the same thing had happened, and it was his first shot, remember that; Kimber was certain there had been only one. But this time the hare had run into thick cover, and there was really no chance of getting it, for it had been hit, Kimber saw, only in one leg. Now attend, Geoff, very closely; it's quite a detective story. As they stood there, Kimber saw Uncle Francis take the discharged cartridge case out of the right barrel and slip the unused cartridge from the left into it. Now that bears all the stamp of truth on it. I have seen Uncle Francis do just that a dozen times, when he had killed with his first barrel, and does not immediately expect another shot. To continue. Then he drew another cartridge from his pocket, but suddenly said, 'I can shoot no more with that poor wounded thing unfound.' And he snapped the breech to, and went home. Now do you see?" "But didn't Kimber clean the gun afterward?" "No," said Harry. "Uncle Francis's man always cleans his gun, and he probably, seeing him return to the house almost immediately after he had set out, and go into the garden, naturally thought that he had decided not to shoot, and did not clean the gun. That is why the second barrel was clean; no shot had been fired from it, and Uncle Francis simply forgot that he had left one cartridge in. The whole thing hangs completely together. Then came I, picked up the gun quickly, no doubt hitting the trigger against something, and there is a hole in the ceiling." Once again Geoffrey thought of the looped cotton, and once again decided not to tell Harry. There was no use, at present, especially since Mr. Francis was not here, in giving him so sinister a piece of information. "That certainly clears up a lot," he said, conscious of the deadly-double meaning of his words. "It clears it all up," said Harry, "and I'll tell you now that I felt horribly uncomfortable about it all morning, though I was not frightened. Of course it was awfully careless of Uncle Francis to leave that cartridge in, and awfully careless of his man not to look to the gun. He thought Uncle Francis had not been shooting, for he must have returned to the house not more than a quarter of an hour after he set out, but he would have saved some lath and plaster if he had made sure. Here we are. Now for the rough!" Mr. Francis, Geoffrey now believed beyond doubt, in his secret mind, was no less accountable for this gun-room explosion than for the mistake about the ice house; and Harry's story, proof to the other of his direct hand, was in a way a relief to him. All the morning he had feared and dreaded indications of a second hand, of a gamekeeper privy to the deed, of a servant suborned, and in particular his fancy had fixed on that dark man of Mr. Francis's, him with the foxlike face and tread of a cat. About him there was something secret and stealthy, so said his imagination, heated by the horrid occurrences of these two days; yet his secrecy and stealth were less abominable than the smiles of his master, his sunny cheerfulness, his playings on the flute. So lately as this morning Geoffrey had laughed when he thought of that flute; flutes in connection with white hairs and old age had seemed to him amusing, ridiculous. But now the memory of his own merriment amazed him; no tears were bitter enough for the contemplation of this deadliness of hypocrisy and hate; and he thought of the Italian airs and the tripping step of the performer with a bewilderment of horror. He had not known how finished an article could be turned out of the workshops of Satan. But at this the full relief occasioned by Mr. Francis's absence came upon him with a great taste of sweetness. True, this last attempt had been made when the old man was not actually in the house; but so long as he was away, Geoffrey did not fear another trap. It would not be like a man of that infernal cunning to leave lying about, as it were, a series of nooses into which any one might step; his desire would not so far outstrip his prudence. It had been by the merest chance that Geoffrey had noticed that slight check to the lifting of the gun from the rack, by the merest chance that he had found the looped cotton; but apart from this, had either attempt succeeded, no evidence of any kind to implicate anybody would have remained. And not the least of his cunning was shown in the way that he took advantage of Harry's credulity in the power of the Luck. By frost and by fire he had schemed his death, and Geoffrey would have laid odds that if either by the arrow by day or the terror by night Harry's life again stood in jeopardy, in some manner, vague perhaps, but simple to trace, rain would be the agent. Here, then, he told himself was a clew of a kind. To guard against rain, it is true, was a vast and ill-defined project, for such an agency might be held to include many forms of death, from drowning to pneumonia, but it was, he felt sure, through the supposed potencies of the Luck that Mr. Francis was striking. They spent a most rewarding hour that afternoon over the rough, and the evening passed, as is the privilege of shooters, in lazy, dozing content. One game of billiards had been succeeded by a nominal reading of the evening papers, and Harry had gone upstairs to bed at eleven, yawning fit to wrench off a jaw not firmly muscle-knit, but Geoffrey, on the excuse of being too comfortable in his big chair to move just yet, had sat on in the hall, not ill pleased to be alone, for he had many things to ponder, and he had not yet made up his mind what he ought to do. Conclusive as the evidence seemed to him, Harry, he well knew, would not possibly listen to it; to tell Harry what he believed, meant simply that he left the house. Something far more conclusive must occur before he told Harry, and Geoffrey prayed silently that nothing more conclusive should ever be on foot: he was quite satisfied with the demonstration as it stood. And he curled himself more closely in his chair and began to think. What, after all, if this series of events was due to the Luck? Certainly, immediately after its finding, three accidents, by fire and frost and rain, had happened to Harry, for none of which could Mr. Francis be held remotely responsible. What if, now, these more serious accidents were to be referred to the same agency? Geoffrey found himself smiling at the absurdity of the thought, yet he still continued to consider it. He did not believe it, so he told himself; his reasonable mind entirely rejected the possibility that a thing inanimate, the work of men's hands, be it made of wood and stone, or gold and precious stones, could control destiny. It mattered not, as far as the Luck was concerned, how one thought of destiny: it was the laws of Nature, if you will, unalterable, of an inexorable logic, or, to refer the matter one step back, it was the will of God, who had set these natural laws at work. Yet were not the sins of the fathers visited on the children? Was it not possible, though ever so dimly and unconjecturably, that some subtle law of this hereditary kind governed the destinies of the Vails, and that without supposing that a cup of gold could be responsible for danger, sudden death, and, on the other hand, for the meting out of great happiness and prosperity, yet that the belief in some man's mind as he watched the chasing of the legend on that plaque of gold was true? He had observed, let us suppose, and correctly observed, some tide in the affairs of the Vails; he had embodied it allegorically in that rhyme on the cup, and the allegory was true, because that which it illustrated was true. Indeed, he had put his allegory into a form extraordinarily vivid. Night after night the gorgeous goblet had stood before the diners in the light of the candles, and night after night it had seemed to grow more and more alive. What if some occult force lurked there? if some unsleeping presence dwelt in those diamonds? From immemorial time men had believed that certain powers and qualities dwelt in precious stones. There was danger in opals, and warning; they turned stale and dim in the presence of an enemy, and no opal, he remarked, was set in bowl or handle or foot of the cup. Else--here his thought was confused, for the Luck was the potency--it might have sickened and paled when Mr. Francis ate his dinner near it. The amethyst drove away the fumes of wine; in diamonds there was sovereignty; sapphires conferred judgment deep and clear as themselves on their possessor. What if there was truth, however small a residuum, in these tales, and how might the potency of the stones be increased if they were put in their appointed settings with a blessing and a curse? He sat up in his chair, conscious that he had been half dozing, for the chime of a clock lingered on the vibrating air, yet he had not heard the hour strike, and, still sleepy, he leaned back again with a strong determination to go to bed instantly. Suddenly and without cause, so far as he knew, he became broad and staring awake; his eye might unconsciously have seen something, or his ear unconsciously heard a movement, yet not have forwarded it in full to the brain. But every sense told him that he was not alone. He sat up hurriedly and looked around. Peering cautiously into the room, round the door leading to the stairs, and barely visible in the shadow, was the face of Mr. Francis. CHAPTER XVII A BIRD OF NIGHT For a moment neither spoke. "Dear boy, how late you sit up!" said Mr. Francis, coming into the room; "it has already struck one. You were asleep, I think, when I came in, and I was unwilling to awake you. But now tell me, is Harry all right?" Geoffrey by this time had every sense alert: he felt perfectly cool and collected, and saw his policy stretching away in front of him like a level, well-defined road. "Yes, Harry, by a miracle almost, is alive and unhurt," he said. "Ah! I knew it, I knew it," said Mr. Francis below his breath. Geoffrey paused a moment. "You knew what?" he asked very deliberately. "I knew he had been in great danger," said the other; "I had the strongest premonition of it. You remember seeing me this morning come back after I had started? I came back to warn Harry. Yet how absurd he would think it! I was deliberating about that when you saw me at the door, and wondering what I could say to him. Then I told myself it was a ridiculous fancy of mine, which would pass off. But all day it has clung to me; do what I would, I could not shake it off; and this evening I came down here to see if all was well. You spoke of Harry having been in great danger. Tell me what happened, my dear boy." "He nearly shot himself in the gun room this morning," said Geoffrey. "He took up his gun, which was standing in a rack close to the window, and it went off, narrowly missing him!" "But it missed him completely?" asked Mr. Francis. "He was not touched?" "If he had been touched he would not be alive," said Geoffrey, lighting a cigarette, and looking at Mr. Francis very intently. "The velocity of shot at such very short range is considerable." Mr. Francis made a very slight movement in his chair, more of a tremor than a voluntary motion. "Terrible, terrible!" he said. "What awful fate is it that dogs poor Harry?" Geoffrey paused with mouth half open, a little wreath of smoke curling from the corner of it. "In what other way has an awful fate dogged Harry?" he asked. Mr. Francis replied almost immediately. "Those three accidents he had last spring," he said. "How strange they were! They quite unnerved me." "He was thinking of the ice house," said Geoffrey to himself with absolute certainty. "That was a mistake." Then, aloud. "They were not so very serious," he said. "No, but uncomfortable. And then to-day!" "Yesterday, you mean," said Geoffrey, trying to trap him. Mr. Francis looked up inquiringly. "True, yesterday. How exact you are, my dear fellow! I had forgotten that it was, as the Irish say, to-morrow already. But how awful, how awful! That was what my strange premonition meant." "It is odd that your premonition should have lasted all day," said Geoffrey, "when the danger was over by half past ten this morning." For half a second Mr. Francis's face altered. The perturbed, anxious look which he had worn throughout the interview gave place, though but for a moment, to a trouble of a different type. Annoyance, you would have said, became more poignant than his anxiety. "Yes; the whole feeling I had was unaccountable," he said. "But poor Harry! What an awful moment for the dear lad! But how could a cartridge have been in the gun? What frightful carelessness on Kimber's part! He can not have cleaned it after Harry used it last." Again Geoffrey paused with his mouth slightly open. Mr. Francis, he considered, was on dangerous ground. "That was in February," he said; "eight months ago. I can not imagine, somehow, the cartridge being there all this time." "He was shooting in Scotland, was he not?" asked Mr. Francis. "Yes; but a man would not carry a loaded gun in the parcel rack," said Geoffrey. "It is more usual for a gun to be taken to bits, and put in its case when one goes by train. Besides, as a matter of fact, Harry didn't take that gun to Scotland. There are other circumstances as well which lead me, at any rate, to a different conclusion--a different way of accounting for the accident," he corrected himself. "What circumstances?" asked Mr. Francis. "Do get on, my dear boy: I am in dreadful anxiety to learn all about this awful thing. Oh, thank God, there was no harm done!" Before the words were out of his mouth Geoffrey, who for the moment had hesitated what to tell him, made up his mind. He stifled a yawn, and splashed some whisky and soda into his glass. "Oh, various circumstances," he said in a slow, well-balanced tone of indifference, as if the subject were wearisome. "One, of course, must be well known to you. You had used Harry's gun yourself two days ago--the day we came down here. You wounded a hare, do you not remember, close to the pheasant feed, and returned home after firing only one shot? You also, unconsciously no doubt, transferred the second cartridge from the left barrel to the right. You will hardly remember that? But it explains, at least, why the left barrel was clean. Then your idle rascal of a man, who I am told always cleans your gun, omitted to do it, and there remained a cartridge in it. That, at least, is how Harry and I put the thing together!" Mr. Francis's hands went suddenly to his head, as if they had been on wires, and he clutched despairingly at his hair. "It is true--it is all too true!" he moaned. "I did use Harry's gun. I did fire one shot only two days ago. Can I have left the other cartridge in? It is possible, it is terribly possible. Ah, my God! what an awful punishment for a little piece of carelessness! Ah, what a lesson, what a lesson! Supposing he had shot himself--oh! supposing----" Geoffrey watched him for some few moments in silence, as he rocked himself backward and forward in his chair. "Well, well," he said at length, "there is no harm done. A few shillings' worth of lath and plaster will pay for the damage; oh, yes, and an extra penny for the cartridge, as Harry said. But it nearly filled the bag and something more at one shot, like Mr. Winkle." This very cold and unsympathetic consolation had an astonishing effect on Mr. Francis. His rockings ceased, his hands left his head, and by degrees his face again assumed a sad smile. "Dear lad," he said, "you have such invaluable common sense! There is certainly no use in crying over milk which is not spilt. What you said was like a douche of cold water over an aching head; yes, and an aching heart. But, tell me, is Harry very angry with me? Does he blame me, as he has every right to do, very severely?" "No, he is inclined to laugh at the whole thing," said Geoffrey. "He knows, of course, what a simple and in a way a natural accident it all was. He is no more angry than he was yesterday, when----" and he stopped suddenly, remembering his promise to Harry not to tell Mr. Francis of the ice-house occurrence. But dearly would he have liked to have broken his word. Again a remarkable change took place in Mr. Francis's face; and Geoffrey, even in the middle of this midnight fencing match, thought what a marvellous quick-change artist he would have made if only he had decided to devote his undeniable talents to that innocuous branch of art. His smile was not: a frightened man sat there, moving his lips as if his mouth were dry. "Yesterday--what of yesterday?" he asked. "Nothing," said the other shortly. "I, like yourself just now, had forgotten that it was already to-morrow. Do you know, I am very sleepy?" This was not ill done, for Mr. Francis could scarcely refuse to accept an excuse which he had himself offered, and Geoffrey could scarcely prevent smiling. But as soon as Mr. Francis spoke again, he was again absolutely intent on their conversation. "It is too bad to keep you up," said he, "but positively you must tell me more about this dreadful accident. What else, what else?" "There is nothing more--to tell," said Geoffrey, pausing designedly, for his immediate object was now to thoroughly frighten Mr. Francis, and he meant to do it slowly and firmly. "What more, indeed, could there be? It was over in a moment. Partly, I am afraid, by your fault, partly by your man's, a cartridge was left in Harry's gun. Oh! by the way, since you are anxious for minutiæ, there is one more tiny point that might conceivably interest you. There seemed to me--I happened to be looking at Harry--some slight resistance somewhere when he took the gun up. He took hold of it, you understand, and then gave it a jerk. It has occurred to me, very forcibly in fact, that this resistance, whatever it was, was the cause of the gun going off." "The trigger perhaps caught in the edge of the carpet," suggested Mr. Francis. "I don't think so," said Geoffrey carelessly. "Well, something of the kind," said Mr. Francis. "Or, again, it may have been pure imagination on your part." "I don't think that either," said Geoffrey. "A gun even when loaded and at full cock, as this one must have been, does not naturally go off when handled. Besides, I found, when I examined the place----" He stopped suddenly, and looked up at Mr. Francis. Quick as a lizard, fear unmistakable and shaking leaped there for a moment, and was as quickly gone. "You found--?" he asked, under his breath. "Ah! you remind me: I found a little thing, a very little thing, which may, however, turn out to be important. Oh, it is ridiculous! I can not really tell you. I will keep it to myself, please." "Really, my dear Geoffrey," said Mr. Francis, "you tell a story, and stop when you come to the point." "I know," said Geoffrey, "and I apologize. Anyhow, I have made a scrupulous examination of the place, and have taken note of a small circumstance. Again I apologize." Suddenly this nocturnal visit began to show in a different light in Geoffrey's mind. Mr. Francis had come here, it is true, at an hour when he might reasonably expect the house to be in bed, but it was still unlikely that he had taken this trouble, and run even so small a risk of detection, simply to learn the result of the morning's accident. What if he had come here for something more reasonable--to destroy, perhaps, some little piece of evidence, the evidence it might be which lay even now in Geoffrey's cigarette case? "Of course I will not press you, my dear Geoffrey," he replied. "But consider whether it would not be better to tell me." Geoffrey paused, this time because he really wanted to think. "Why?" he said at length. "Either this occurrence was pure accident, or it was a foul attempt on Harry's life. Yes, that sounds horrible, does it not? But certainly it was either the one or the other. Now, carelessness seems to account very largely for it. You left a cartridge in the gun, your servant did not clean it. But supposing one had reason to think that there was foul play, I should take this evidence to the police; and you may be sure, at whatever cost to Harry's feelings, and of course yours, at making the affair public, I will do so at once, the moment I can form, or that I think they can form, a conclusive series of evidence." He got up on these words and turned to light a bedroom candle. "Well, good-night," he said; "we shall see you at breakfast." "No, my dear boy, you will not," said Mr. Francis; "and, Geoffrey, you must not tell Harry I have been here. I am almost ashamed of my foolishness in coming, but that presentiment of evil, which was so strong in me all day, drove me. No, I shall be gone again, before any one is stirring, and breakfasting in town while you lazy fellows are still dressing, I dare say." Geoffrey thought a moment. "As you will," he said. "By the way, how did you get in?" "I got in by the front door," said Mr. Francis. "It was left unlocked; very careless of the servants." "Very, indeed. Did you lock it?" "Yes, and I was just stealing upstairs when you awoke. I had meant to go very quietly to Harry's room, and just look at the dear lad, to satisfy myself he was all right. If I had not had the good fortune to find the door open, I should have passed the night in the summerhouse, and just seen that all was well in the morning. I hope Harry will speak to Templeton about the door." "But how will Harry know, unless he knows of your coming?" "Ah!" Mr. Francis paused a moment. "I will leave it unlocked; indeed I must, when I go out. You can then call his attention to it. Good-night, my dear boy; I shall go to my room too. I will sleep on the sofa very comfortably." Geoffrey turned into his room with slow and sleepy steps, shut the door and locked it. Then he undressed very quickly, and over his nightshirt put on a dark coat. He was too full of this appearance of Mr. Francis, and of wonder what it really meant, to waste time in mere idle contemplation of it, and he sat on his bed, following out end after end of tangled conjecture. Harry's safety during the hours which had to pass before morning was his first thought, but that he speedily dismissed. "I have frightened the old man," he said to himself with strong satisfaction. "I have made him tremble in his wicked shoes. No, he dare do nothing to-night. There is a witness that he is here, that he arrived secretly after dark, and left before morning. No, Harry is all safe for to-night, but I am glad I woke." Geoffrey lay back on his bed, keenly interested in what lay before him, but astounded by the possibly imminent issues. Hitherto his life had always run very easily, a pleasant, light business; but now suddenly there were thrust into his young and inexperienced hands the red reins of life and death, reins that governed or governed not horses that he could but indistinctly guess at. But the reins were in his hands; it was his business, and now, to steer as well as he could between God knew what devils and deep seas. A thousand directions were open to him; in all but one, as far as he could forecast the future, lay disaster. A solution and a rescue he felt there must be, but in what direction did it lie? To go now to Harry's room, what risk was there, what fear of eyes behind curtains; and once there, what sort of reception would he meet? Harry had gone to bed nearly three hours ago, and must he be plucked from his sleep to hear this wild tale--a tale so full of conjecture, so scant in certainties? And if he heard it, what, to judge by Geoffrey's previous knowledge of him, his only guide in this lonely hour, would be his manner of taking it? One only, he knew it well: bewildered surprise and scorn that one whom he had accounted friend should bring him so monstrous a tale. That he must certainly expect, indignant speech, or silence even more indignant, and a rupture that could not easily be healed. No, to go to Harry now would in all probability mean to sever himself from him, and this in the hour of dark need and danger. Geoffrey got up from where he was lying and walked silently with bare feet up and down the room. Then he stripped off coat and nightshirt, and sluiced head and neck with cold water. He felt awake enough, but stupid from sheer perplexity, and he was determined to give his faculties, such as they were, every opportunity for lively and wise decision. There had been, for instance, some train of instinctive thought in his mind when he had shut the door, but dressed himself for possible action. His brain had told him that he did not mean to go to bed yet; had it not told him something more? His action in putting on dark coverings had been perhaps involuntary; it was his business now to account for it. Ah! the door by which Mr. Francis had entered--that was it. He did not believe that he had come in, as he said, by the front door, for the noise of its opening and shutting--the noise, too, of the lock which he said he had turned after he had come in--must have awoke him from a sleep that had never quite become unconsciousness. A clock had struck, it is true, the moment before he was completely roused, and he had not heard it; but how often, he reflected, do one's ears hear the clock strike, yet never convey the message to the brain! It was far more likely that the slight stir of movement made by Mr. Francis as he peeped round the inner door leading to the staircase had awoke him. How, then, was it possible that he should have opened, shut, and locked the heavy front door, have crossed the hall, and yet never have broken in upon his doze? Besides, the face that looked at him was that of a man peeping into a room, not of one leaving it. It seemed then very likely that Mr. Francis had not entered by the front door; it was also hardly possible that it should not have been locked at nightfall by the servant who put up the shutters. Then another difficulty occurred. Since Mr. Francis had by his own account locked the front door when he came in, it would be locked now. But he intended to leave the house before the servants were up, and would unlock it then, leaving it unlocked when he left. On the other hand, supposing that Geoffrey's suspicions were correct, and he had not come in by the front door, nor intended to leave the house that way, he would certainly unlock it before any one was about in the morning. This, then, was the first point: Would Mr. Francis unlock the front door before morning, and would he leave the house that way? If not, how had he got in, and how would he get out? It was likely also, more than likely, that if Geoffrey's darker suspicions were well founded, Mr. Francis would pay a visit to the gun room, for there was no question that "the little circumstance" which he had hinted at had been of more than common interest to the other. At this moment, in his soft pacings and thoughts, there came a little gentle tap at his door. He stood exactly where he was, frozen to immobility, a step half taken, in his hand the towel with which he had been mopping his hair. A second or two later the tap was repeated, very softly. Geoffrey was in two minds what to do. It was possible that this small-hour intruder was Harry, some nameless terror at his heart; it was possible, again, that Mr. Francis was outside, ascertaining whether he was asleep, with some specious excuse on his lips in case he was awake. But if it was Harry, whatever he needed, some louder and more urgent summons was sure to follow--a rattling of his door handle, his own name called. But after the second tap there was silence. Geoffrey knew how long a waiting minute seems to the watcher, and deliberately he looked at the hands of the clock on his mantelpiece till two full minutes had passed. Then he slipped on his coat again, little runnels of water still streaming from the short hair above the neck, put the matches in his pocket, blew out his candle, and with one turn of each hand held his door unlatched and unlocked. The wards were well oiled, the noise less than a scratching mouse, and he stood on the rug of the threshold warm and curly to his bare feet. Next moment he had closed the door behind him, though without latching it, and was in the long, dark corridor running from the top of the main stairs by the hall to the far end of the house where were Mr. Francis's two rooms. Geoffrey's bedroom was close to the head of the stairs, and the faint glimmer of the starry night filtering through the skylight by which they were lit made it easily possible to find his way down. These stairs lay in short flights, with many angles sufficiently luminous, but on getting to the first corner he stopped suddenly, for on the wall in front of him was a pattern of strong light and shade: the many-knobbed banister was imprinted there, cast by a candle. But in a moment the shadow began to march from left to right; the light therefore was moving from right to left; some one else, and well he knew who, was also going downstairs at this dead hour, three turns of the staircase ahead of him. Silently moved the shadow; no sound of the candle-bearer reached him, and he might reasonably hope that his own barefooted step was as inaudible to the night-walker as the night-walker to him. Then the shadow of the banister was suddenly turned off, another corner had been passed by the other stealthy tread, and Geoffrey moved on again and down. This staircase at its lower end gave on to a corridor parallel and similar to the one upstairs from which the row of bedrooms opened. Immediately on the right was the door into the hall, round which, but an hour ago, Mr. Francis's face had peered; to the left were drawing-room and dining room, and at the far end the baize door leading into the flagged passage to the gun room. Two panes of glass formed the upper panels of this door, and Geoffrey, having reached the bottom of the stairs, saw two squares of light cast through these on to the ceiling of the corridor. They lengthened to oblongs, diminished again to vanishing point, and disappeared, leaving him once more in the dim filter of starlight. Mr. Francis, it was clear, had gone to the gun room. Here was the first point. Opposite the foot of the stairs, but on the other side of this corridor, stood a tall verd-antique pedestal, on the top of which was a bust of Harry's father. A dark curtain hung behind this, setting off the whiteness of the Carrara bust, and Geoffrey was just considering the value of this curtain as a hiding place in case Mr. Francis (the other point) went through the hall for any purpose of juggling with the front door, when the square of light through the glass panels again reappeared, silent as a dream, but growing very rapidly brighter. In two steps he was across the corridor, but he had not yet got behind the curtain when the baize door opened again, and Mr. Francis reappeared. But now his step was quick and careless of noise, and Geoffrey, casting one glance at him before he stepped behind the curtain, saw rage and hunted fear in his face. And at that the thrill of the tracker awoke in him, and he hugged himself to think of the little piece of cotton in his cigarette case; its value, to judge by the baffled hate that came up the passage, was immeasurably increased. Then he slid behind the curtain. The steps came nearer very quickly, muffled but audible, and paused opposite Geoffrey's hiding place. Then for a moment his heart stood still, for they turned not toward the hall, but pattered swiftly upstairs. He had thought Harry safe for the night, at any rate, but what could be safe from that mask of rage and hatred he had just seen? In another moment he would have followed at all costs, when light again shone round the corner of his curtain, and the unseen steps passed where he stood and into the hall. Instantly Geoffrey slipped from his hiding place, stepped silently across the corridor, and mounted a few stairs. From there he could see Mr. Francis's movements in the hall; from there also he had a good start of him to the upper floor again. The snap of a lock, the grating jar of a bolt, drawn or withdrawn, followed, and having heard that he waited no more, but went swiftly up again to his room and closed the door behind him quickly but with elaborate noiselessness. Soon light footsteps came along the passage outside; they went by his door, by Harry's, and grew fainter. The closing of a distant latch was just audible, then all was darkness and silence. The first part of the night's work was over. Geoffrey lit his candle again, smiling with a certain grimness to himself. His next move, evolved during this last half hour of waiting and listening, had a simple ingenuity about it which pleased him. It meant another journey to the hall, after a precautionary pause, and the only apparatus required was a little piece of stamp paper. So at the end of a quarter of an hour he went downstairs again and examined the front door. Bolt and lock were undrawn: Mr. Francis's visit, then, had been to undo them, so that they should be found unlocked in the morning. This was on all fours with his private theory, and after a little consideration he secured the door again, partly for the safety of the house, partly for the sake of giving Mr. Francis something to think about, if he did leave the house that way. Then, standing on a chair and reaching up to his full height, he stuck the piece of stamp paper across the meeting of the door and jamb. Thus no one could open it without tearing the paper. One thing more remained, and that for the sake of his own peace of mind. At risk of waking him he went to Harry's room and looked in. Harry was lying on his side fast asleep, and, shading his candle, Geoffrey waited till he heard two evenly-taken breaths. So far, then, all was well. He slept but lightly and in broken snatches after the excitements of these hours, and it required no great deed of violence on his inclinations to enable him to get up early. In the cool, accustomed daylight the things of the night seemed to have more of the texture of dream than reality, but proof of them awaited him when he went to the front door, for the little piece of stamp paper was whole and unbroken, the door still locked and bolted. Then, to make doubly sure of the reliability of his experiment, he himself undid the door and opened it, and the stamp paper was torn in half. It was not by this exit, then, that Mr. Francis had left the house. Harry made his appearance at an hour not unusually late, with a perfectly normal face and manner; no sound of last night's excursions had reached him. They talked in their usual desultory fashion, but Geoffrey's mind was preoccupied with the yet unsolved problem. He felt certain that Mr. Francis had some secret way in and out of the house, and it should be the next piece of business to discover what that was. Had he come in by some back door, or through an unbolted window, he would have told him so last night; but he had said he came through the front door, a thing impossible. But the subject of a secret door was easy to approach. "I'm working all the morning, Geoff," said Harry; "what will you do with yourself? Poke and potter with a gun, if you like. We'll ride this afternoon." "I'll poke and potter," said he, "but without a gun, I think. I feel yew-hedgy this morning." "I thought you did," said Harry cordially, "but I have no idea what you mean." "That is just a little slow of you," said Geoffrey. "It means that I shall look behind tapestry and tap panelling, and find a secret staircase." "Do. I'll give you a shilling for every secret stair you find." "Done. Anything extra for a secret door?" "Door is two," said Harry; "concealed will be ten, skeleton fifteen; Other objects will be valued by arbitration. Baron von Vail has kindly consented to be arbitrator," he added, in a burst of futility. "Fifteen is a little too low for a skeleton," said Geoffrey. "It would fetch more than that at a medical shop." "Well, twenty, if you like, but you don't raise me again. Well, I'm off." "Where to?" "To work, you lazy cow." "Yes, but where?" "Smoking room. If you want to do any panel-knocking there, come and do it at once. What a baby you are!" Geoffrey rose. "The search is going to be exhaustive," he said. "I'll begin with the smoking room." There ensued a couple of dusty and hope-deferred hours. From the smoking room, which yielded no results at all, he went to Mr. Francis's rooms, which he had fixed upon as being the most likely place for the conjectured passage to communicate with, but the strictest scrutiny of the panelling revealed nothing. He tapped every foot of it, and every foot sounded promisingly hollow, yet nothing of any sort could he discover which should yield him even a sixpence. There were cupboards of the most alluring probability; all wore the aspect of concealment, yet all declined to yield their secret. Geoffrey had never been in this room before, and after a fruitless search he took a look round before leaving it. Orderly and industrious were the indications of its master; docketed papers lay neatly in little heaps, and the appurtenances of its stationery were finished and complete. Each set of papers had its elastic band, each its note of contents in red ink; two sets of penholders lay in separate trays, and the examination of the nibs showed that Mr. Francis was of that rare type of man who dedicated without violation certain pens to black ink, certain others to red. The pencils were all well sharpened, ink eraser was there as well as India rubber, and a taper of green wax was ready for the sealing of important envelopes. All this had a curdling fascination for Geoffrey, but at present he was on the hunt for shillings, and a detailed examination of a writing table brought him no nearer them. The whole of the second floor he searched without success, except in so far that the discovery of gaunt, chilly bedrooms, in which a lively imagination might conjure up a pleasing thrill, could be reckoned a reward to his labours. Over most was the trail of the plumber; electric bells and light had been newly introduced, and these modern improvements jostled strangely with the faded mediæval discomfort of large, gloomy beds and tapestried hangings. Like the poor lion with no early Christian, these seemed to mourn the absence of murderous deeds; a suitable stage was set, but no actor trod the boards. It was a somewhat disheartened adventurer who began his search on the ground floor, for the ground floor, he could not but remember, would bring but a small bill of steps to swell his revenues, unless, indeed, the yet undiscovered staircase proved to lead into the basement, and that possibility lent him fresh vigour. But dining room, billiard room, and both drawing-rooms were searched without result, and the hall was become practically the last cover. Here, indeed, something might be expected; tapestry covered two sides, the other two carried portraits, and again his search became minute. But half an hour was fruitlessly spent, and there remained only the fireplace side, where hung the portrait of old Francis. Geoffrey looked at this a moment for inspiration. "He knew all about it, I'll be bound," he said to himself. "Why can't the old brute speak?" Looking at it thus, he noticed for the first time that the panel in which this picture hung was different from the panelling over the rest of the hall, which was all of linen pattern. But this one panel was plain, except for a row of small circular bosses which ran round it at wide intervals; and Geoffrey, goaded by the thought of his last good chance, mounted a chair and handled each of these in turn. The second he tried moved to the touch, and as, with a sudden upleap of hope, he turned it, something clicked within, and the whole panel, portrait and all, swung slowly out on a hinge. There seemed to be a narrow passage in the wall, continuing to right and left of the picture. Geoffrey stood a moment on the chair, holding the panel from swinging farther, puzzled. "He can't have jumped down from there," he said to himself. "Perhaps there is another door somewhere else. Anyhow he has his exits and his entrances," and the quotation seemed to him extraordinarily apt. He got down, after securing the panel again, and started to tell Harry. But after a few paces his legs literally refused to carry him in that direction. The secret was his by right of trove, he must make the first joyful exploration alone. Again he turned the knob, and from his chair vaulted easily into the panel. The passage led right and left into darkness, and he would have jumped down again to get matches, when he saw in a little recess in the wall a candle with matches by it. This was eminently convenient, and due no doubt to Mr. Francis's thoughtfulness, and after lighting up he pulled the panel ajar, and, after satisfying himself that the catch was of the simplest kind, latched it back into its place. Two thoughts were in his mind as he waited for the red wick of the candle to grow black again: the one, the further tracking of the game he had definitely roused during the night; the other, sheer childish pleasure in a story of adventure come true. Alas for the stockbroker! he cared no more for the shillings; there was a dark passage in the wall, and the imperishable child within him trembled and smiled; Mr. Francis, the man felt sure, had used this passage last night. Here was double cause for excitement and joy. The candle burned more bravely, and two ways were open. Like all right-handed folk, his impulse was to turn to the left, and, obeying it, he travelled six yards or so of a level, rough-floored passage. On his right ran the courses of bricks in the main wall, a little dark and mildewy, on his left the panelling of the hall. A turn at right angles, at the corner no doubt of the hall, disclosed a flight of wooden steps leading downward. Here the stockbroker awoke; he greedily counted them, and ten shillings were his. But the stockbroker, it seemed, was a gentleman of second-rate vitality; he awoke from his torpor but to count, and slumbered again, leaving the child and the hunter to go their way. At the bottom of these steps Geoffrey paused a moment to recollect his bearings. He had entered the secret way on the short side of the hall; the steps therefore were on the long side of it, and on the garden side of the house. But inasmuch as the passage, when he entered it, was some six feet above the ground level of the hall, these ten downward steps would bring him back to ground level again. He was therefore walking in the outer wall of the hall on a level with the floor. This clear, he went slowly on. Suddenly he was confronted by a blank brick wall, straight in front. But on the right hand the regular courses of the brick were interrupted by a panelled wooden oblong, some five feet high; beyond this, up to the wall that ended the passage, the courses went on again. In the middle of it was a round wooden handle; straight below it on the floor ran two flanged metal lines. Laying hold of this handle, he pulled at it, and on each side of the wooden panel opened a jagged edge of light, irregular and full of angles. It drew inward some three feet till it reached the end of the metal lines, running smoothly but with a sense of great weight. Sunlight poured in, and Geoffrey stepped on to the lawn outside and regarded his discovery. Indeed, it had been a cunning brain and hand that had devised this. The house wall outside here ran in courses of small brick, and the opening of this door drew these inward irregularly. The top of the door, for instance, was four bricks in length, but the second row of bricks detached numbered six; below that again was a course of four withdrawn, then one of five, then one of six again. The joining was fitted with extreme accuracy; here the interspace of mortar between the bricks would move with the withdrawn piece of wall, here it would remain on the wall in place; detection of the line of the door to one who did not know where to look, even to one who did, would be nearly impossible. Regarding it more closely, another thing struck him: halfway down the withdrawn portion was a broken edge of brick, and taking hold of this he drew the door back into its place again. Seen thus, as part of the whole wall, detection appeared impossible; there was no line to follow, and, though he had closed it but a moment before, he could not trace the junctures. The thing fitted as well as a jaw full of good teeth. But he surveyed it only for a moment; then with an effort pushing it back again, he re-entered, closed it behind him, and took up his candle to explore the branch of the passage that led to the right of the picture. Again he mounted the ten steps, again came opposite the hinged panel, and passed on. Ten similar steps again led down to the ground level of the hall, and at the bottom of these the passage ended in a wooden panel, by the side of which was a latch exactly resembling that by which the picture-panel was shut and opened. He turned it, and the hinged woodwork opened, giving on the short space between the stairs where he had watched last night and the door into the hall round which Mr. Francis's face had first appeared to him when he awoke from his doze. This, then, explained all; it was here, not from behind the picture, that the old man had entered; from here, seeing a light in the hall, he had peeped round the corner. Geoffrey stepped out into the corridor, and examined the hinged panel from outside; it was in deep shadow, but round it ran bossed circles similar to those in that which held the portrait over the mantelpiece; the second on the right in the same manner raised and lowered the latch. He blew out the candle, leaving it on the bottom step of the secret way, closed the door, and went to the smoking room. Harry was still at work, ill at ease with figures. "And seven," he observed truculently, as Geoffrey entered. "Twenty," said the other, "and two secret doors--I beg your pardon, three. Twenty-six bob, Harry. Stump up." Harry raised a malevolent face for a moment, and finished his column. "Any skeletons?" he asked, with pungency. "No; no skeletons. Will you come and see it now?" Harry sprang up. "Look here, Geoff, are you playing the fool?" he said. "If so, are you prepared to die?" "Neither," said Geoffrey, "but don't let me interrupt you. Better get on with your work; the passage won't run away." "Nor will the work. I wish it would. Do you really mean it, Geoff? There is a holy awe about your face." "Come and see," said Geoffrey. They went together to the panel by the staircase, and entered. Geoffrey lit the candle he had left there, and preceding Harry, who made no comment beyond unintelligible mutterings, stopped opposite the back of old Francis's portrait. "The second secret door," he said, opening it; "the door I discovered first. I'll show you afterward how to get in from the outside. And here," he said, pointing to the recess, "here I found this candle and the matches. Convenient." "That candle," said Harry; "why, it is nearly new; it is not dusty, and the matches, too--used they to use matches----" and he stopped suddenly. "Give me the candle a minute, Geoff," he said. He looked at the crest and monogram on it, and returned it. "Come on," he said, with something of an effort. "Let's see where the passage leads." "What's the matter?" asked the other. "Nothing; get on." They went down to the outer door, and looked at it again from the outside. Though he had been through it twice that morning, yet, when it was closed, Geoffrey could not see where it was, so perfect was the joining of it. "And the bit of broken brick is the handle to pull it to," said Harry, with interest. But he was visibly preoccupied, and his delight was clouded; there was no childish joy in him. Geoffrey guessed the reason for it, and at lunch afterward Harry spoke. "That was a candle of Uncle Francis's, Geoff," he said. "It was his monogram," and he looked up as if expecting that his information was surprising. But Geoffrey went on eating quite calmly. "So I supposed," he said. "Then you think he knows of the secret passage?" "I feel sure he does." Harry's face clouded a little more; it was dark already. "Are you weighing your words?" he asked. "Do you mean exactly what you say?" "Exactly. Is not the new candle and the matches proof enough for you?" "It ought to be. Yet I don't know. I suppose you mean that you have further proof." "I don't suppose anything would convince you if that candle doesn't," said Geoffrey, not yet wishing to tell Harry of Mr. Francis's nocturnal visit. Harry pondered this awhile. "No, I don't suppose it would," he observed at length. "Anyhow, Geoff, if he didn't tell us he knew of the passage, we won't tell him that we do. You used to call me secretive, I remember. I dare say you were right." "It seems to run in the family," said the other. "You mean that Uncle Francis is secretive, too. Well, I think he might have told me of the passage. Halloo! there are the horses. Just wait; I must go through it again. The candle spoiled all my pleasure this morning, and it is heavenly, simply heavenly. Twenty-six bob, you say. Dirt cheap, too." CHAPTER XVIII RAIN Two mornings after this discovery of the passage, as they were sitting at breakfast, a telegram was brought in for Harry. "Brougham to meet the evening train," he said to the man, after reading it, "and tell them to get Mr. Francis's rooms ready." "He comes to-night?" asked Geoffrey. "Yes; I did not expect him so soon. But he is only coming for a couple of days, he says. He has taken the flat in Wimpole Street; I suppose he means to go back there." "What is he coming here for?" "Can't say--to get some furniture and things, I suspect. Then the passage is to be a secret, eh, Geoff?" "Why, surely," said Geoffrey; "like a box hedge. I shouldn't take the slightest pleasure in it if I thought other people knew----" "But you said you were sure that Uncle Francis did know," interrupted Harry. "Let me finish my sentence, if you don't mind. I was about to say that I shouldn't take the slightest pleasure in it if I thought that other people knew that I knew." Harry broke a piece of toast meditatively. "I'm not sure about it," he said. "Personally I felt rather aggrieved that Uncle Francis had not told me anything about it. Well, wouldn't he as naturally feel aggrieved if I don't tell him?" "It is superfluous to tell him," said Geoffrey, "because he knows already. Secondly, it will spoil all my pleasure if he knows we know, and I shall wish I hadn't found the thing at all. Fifthly and lastly, you never paid me that twenty-six bob; and, thirdly, it is your house, after all." Harry was silent. Then suddenly: "Geoffrey," he said, "tell me what further proof you have, apart from the candle, that Uncle Francis does know about it. I'll draw you a cheque after breakfast; haven't got any money." "Is that a bribe?" asked Geoffrey. "Yes." "And you really wish to know?" "Yes, I ask you," said Harry. "No, it is not a bribe. If soberly you would rather not tell me, don't." For a moment Geoffrey could not make up his mind whether he wished Harry to know or not. If only the tale would have put him on his guard, he would have had no hesitation about telling him all--his conversation with Lady Oxted, the looped cotton, the midnight visit. But he felt that the right time had not come, though it might come any day. On the other hand, it was difficult to speak merely of Mr. Francis's visit without betraying some hint of his suspicions, and this he did not want to do. But the balance of advantage seemed to incline toward telling him; for if he did not, in answer to so direct an invitation, Harry would not unnaturally accuse him, though silently no doubt, of unfounded suspicions against a man whom he himself honoured very highly. So he determined to speak. "Three nights ago," he said, "on the evening of the gun-room affair, you went to bed early, and I sat in the hall and dozed. I awoke suddenly and saw Mr. Francis's face looking round the corner by the staircase." Harry pushed back his chair. "What!" he said. "Oh, I was not dozing then. We talked for some time, and he told me why he had come with this secrecy. He also asked me not to tell you. But I don't mind." "And why had he come?" asked Harry. "All day, he said, he had been haunted by a strong premonition of evil, and he had come to make sure you were safe." "That's odd," said Harry. "On the day of the gun-room affair--well?" "For one reason and another," continued Geoffrey, "I felt sure he had not come in by the front door. At any rate, I proved that he did not leave by it, for I put some stamp paper over the joining, and in the morning it was still untorn. And then, if you remember, I said I felt yew-hedgy, and found the passage." Harry got up, and began pacing up and down the dining room. "But how ridiculous!" he said. "Why couldn't he have told me? Was he ashamed of his premonition?" "He told me he was." Harry felt unreasonably annoyed. "I won't have my house burglariously entered by anybody," he said, "Uncle Francis or another. I shall tell him so." "As you will," said Geoffrey, inwardly anxious that he should not. "Then I shall not tell him so," said Harry, "and I sha'n't tell him that I know about the secret passage. But next time he tries to use it, he shall find no candle there. I've a good mind to block the place up, Geoff." "Oh, don't do that! 'Tisn't fair on me." "I shall do exactly as I damn please!" said Harry. "We'll be finding it full of kitchen maids next. No, I can't block it up before I've shown it Evie. But I shall go there every day and take away his candle if he puts fresh ones. Lord, I got quite heated about it!" "That's right," said Geoffrey; "don't be sat upon by anybody." "Anyhow you'd better not try," said Harry viciously. He continued quarter-decking about the room for a few times in silence, and his annoyance subsided. "And the old fellow really came down because he had a presentiment about me," he went on. "Geoff, that's an odd thing now. It looks as if the Luck touched more than me; it gave Uncle Francis a hint of what it was doing. You know the Luck's getting on; it is making more reasonable attempts on me. Do you think I've been encouraging it too much? Perhaps I have; we won't drink its health to-night." "I would if I were you," said Geoffrey. "Perhaps in that way you have put the old thing in a good temper. Well, keep it up; it can't avoid having shots at you, but it always manages to miss." "Ah, you are beginning to believe in it too." "Not a bit. All the effect the Luck has is to make you talk arrant nonsense about it. I believe in it, indeed! I was just humouring you." "Your notions of the humorous are obscure," observed Harry. Mr. Francis arrived late that night, full of little anecdotes about his house-hunting, and loud in praises of his flat. He had only come, as he had said, for a couple of days, to collect some books and sticks of furniture, and by the end of the month at the outside he hoped to have it completely habitable. His pleasure in it was that of a child with a new toy, delightful to hear, and they sat up late, listening to his fresh, cheerful talk, and hearkening between whiles to an extraordinary heavy rain which had come on before sunset and was beating at the windows. This deluge was continuous all night, and next morning they woke to the same streaming heavens; the sky was a lowering arch of deluge, the rain relentless. Harry and Geoffrey, who regarded the sky and the open heavens as the proper roof for man, and houses merely as a shelter for unusual inclemency, had felt not the smallest inclination to stir abroad, but Mr. Francis at lunch announced his intention of walking, rain or no rain. "It doesn't hurt me," he said; "a brisk walk, whatever the weather. So neither of you will come?" Harry looked out on to the soupy, splashing gravel. "Geoff, shall we go for a swim?" he said. "Thank you, no. I'm too old for mud pies." Mr. Francis laughed heartily. "So am not I," he said.--"Well, Harry?" "It certainly is raining," said the lad. "Not a doubt of it," assented Mr. Francis. Geoffrey turned to Harry suddenly. "Fear both fire and frost and rain," he said, in a low tone. Harry went briskly toward the door. "Thanks, Geoff, that settles it," he said. "An excellent reason for going, and getting it over to-day if possible.--Yes, Uncle Francis, I'll put on my boots and come. I'm not made of paper any more than you." Geoffrey followed him into the hall, a sudden vague foreboding filling him. "Don't go, Harry!" he said. "You are beginning to believe in it, you know," said Harry. "Indeed I am not." "Looks like it," and Mr. Francis joining them, he went off whistling. Very much rain must have fallen during the night, for yesterday the lake was not notably higher than its normal limits, whereas now, so few hours afterward, it had swollen so as to over-top the stonework of the sluice, and a steady rush of water fell over the ledge into the outlet below. This, ordinarily a smooth-flowing chalk stream, was now a riotous race of headlong water, sufficient to carry a man off his feet, and, as they paused a minute or two to watch the grand rush of it, they could see that, even in so short a space, the flow of water over the stonework was increasing in volume, showing that the lake was rising every minute. The gate walls of the sluice were not very thick, and seemed hardly built for such a press of water; in one or two places Mr. Francis observed that there appeared to be cracks right through them, for water spurted out as from a hose. The sluice itself seemed to have got somewhat choked with the _débris_ of branches and leaves with which the storm had covered the surface of the lake, and a Saragossa Sea of drift stretched out to a considerable radius from it. Adjoining the main lock was a small wooden water gate, designed, no doubt, for the relief in time of flood, but this was shut down, and Harry, splashing through the water, tried to pull it up, in order to give an additional outlet, but the wood was swollen with the wet, and he could not stir it. Mr. Francis observed his actions with some attention; his feet were firmly planted on the stone slab that covered the sluice, and the water rose like a frill over his boots, as, with bent and straining figure, he exerted his utmost force to raise the gate. Once, as for firmer purchase he wedged his right foot against the side of the water channel and bowed to a final effort, the block of stonework on which he stood seemed to tremble. A cry of warning rose to Mr. Francis's lips, but it remained unuttered; only his face wore an expression of intense conflicting expectation. But Harry's efforts were fruitless, and soon desisting, he splashed his way back. Elsewhere the lake was rapidly encroaching on the outskirts of the lawn; pools of rain lay in the lower undulations of it, and these, joining with its swollen waters, formed long, liquid tongues and bays. Here a clump of bushes stood out like an island in a lagoon, here an outlying flower bed was altogether submerged, and the dark soil was floated by the water in a spreading stain over the adjoining grass. "This will never do," said Harry; "the place will be in a mess for months if we don't get the water off somehow. It is that choked sluice which is doing all the mischief. We had better go up to the farm, Uncle Francis, and send some men to clear it. Lord, how it rains!" "Yes, that will be the best plan," said he. "Stay, Harry, I will go, and do you run back to the sluice, my dear fellow, and see if it is raised quite to the top; we never looked at that. You might get a big stick also, and begin clearing away the stuff that chokes it. And have another pull at the wooden gate. If you can get that open, it is all right. Go and break your back over it, my dear boy; it seemed to yield a little that last pull you gave. What muscles, what muscles!" he said, feeling his arm. "Try again at the wooden sluice, and be quick. There is no time to lose; we shall have the water up to the house in less than an hour if this goes on." Mr. Francis went off at a rapid amble in the direction of the farm, and Harry returned to wrestle with the wooden sluice. Even in the few minutes that they had been away the water had risen beyond belief, and when again he splashed across the stone slab of the sluice to the smaller gate, the swift-flowing stream over the top of it was half knee-deep, and pressed against him like a strong man. It was no longer possible to see the spouting escape beneath, for the arch of turbid water was continuous and unbroken from side to side. He wrapped his handkerchief round the ring which raised the gate, and again putting shoulder and straining back into it, bent to his task. One foot he had braced against the stone coping of the side, the other he pressed to the ironwork of the main sluice, and, pulling firmly and strongly till he felt the muscles of his spine stand out like woven cords, he knew that something stirred. At that he paused a moment, the strong flood pouring steadily round him, and collecting himself, bent down again and called on every sinew for one sudden effort. On the instant he felt the stone slab on which he stood reel under his left foot, and half guessing, for the moment was too brief for conscious conclusion, that the sluice had given way bodily, sprang for all he was worth from the overturning mass. But the effort was an effort made in air; his right foot slipped from the edge of the coping, and the whole sluice wall turned under him, throwing him, as luck would have it, clear of the toppling mass, but full into the stream below. As he fell he caught at the masonry of the sides of the channel, to prevent himself being carried down. For one half second his grasp was firm; at the next, with an incredible roar of water, the released flood poured down from the lake, brushing his hand from its grasp as lightly as a man whisks a settling fly from sugar, and rolled him over and over among the screaming _débris_, now tossing him into mid stream, now burying him in the yellow, turbulent flood, now throwing him up on the top of a wave like chaff in a high wind, as helpless as a suckling child in the grip of some wild beast. Impotently and without purpose he snatched at hurrying wreckage, even at the twisted ropes of water that hurled him along, conscious only of the wild excitement of this foregone battle, without leisure to be afraid. He seemed to himself to be motionless, while the banks and lawns shot by him with an inconceivable swiftness, but bearing toward him, as he suddenly remembered, with the same giddy speed, the bridge over which the road to the lodge passed. How often had he stood there, watching the trout poise and dart in the clear, flowing water! A turn in the stream bed, and he saw it rushing up toward him like an approaching train, the water already nearly on a level with its arch, and soon to be how vastly higher with the wave of the flood that carried him, he in the van of the torrent from the broken sluice. His first instinct was a resolve to clutch at it, in order to stop himself; but in a moment realizing that, if he wished to make death certain, this was the way of it, he huddled himself together, burying his head in the water. He just saw the first of the flood strike against the bridge in a huge feather of broken turbulence, and then came a darkness full of loud chucklings and suckings, as if the water laughed inwardly with evil merriment. Once, in that blind moment, his shoulder was banged against the gorged arch, once he felt his coat catch against some projecting stone, and it was as if the weight of the whole world was pressed against him, as for a half second he checked the stream, the next he was torn free again, and out into daylight once more. Not till then did the chance of his possible ultimate escape strike him with a sense that he might possibly have a share in that matter; hitherto the wild pace had given a certain bewilderment to his thoughts not unpleasant in itself. All reasoning power, all remembrance of what had gone before, all realization of what might follow after had been choked; his consciousness, a mere pin point, did not do more than receive the sensation of the passing moment. But after the bridge had been passed it sprouted and grew, he became Harry Vail again, a man with wits and limbs that were meant to be used, and therewith the will to use them. But the power to use them was a thing arbitrarily directed by the flood; breath was the prime necessity, and it was a matter requiring both effort and an ebb of the encircling wave to fling his face free from that surging and broken van of water and get air. Only with this returning increase of consciousness was he aware that he was out of breath with his prolonged ducking, for, broadly speaking, he had not decently breathed once since he had tumbled with the tumbling sluice. So with a downward and backward kick, the instinct of treading water, he raised his head from the yellow race, and felt the air sweet and essential. Three long breaths he took, throat-filling, lung-filling, like a man half dead with drought, and, as he struggled to overlook the water for the fourth time, it was for the purpose of using eyes as well as lungs; and what he saw caused hope to leap high in his heart, though he had not known he had been hopeless. For here the stream had already widely overflowed its banks, now no longer held in by the masonry of the first stretch below the sluice, and every gallon of water that came down spread itself over a widely increased area; speed and the concentrated volume were even now diminishing. The sense that he was bound and helpless, a swathed child, passed from him, and, pushing steadily with his arms and feet (so random a stroke could scarcely be called swimming), he soon saw that he was appreciably leaving the main rush of the stream. Before long he was brought up with a violent jerk; his foot had struck the ground, and the water stood up over his head like a yellow frill. But that was no more than a playful buffet, after the grimness of his struggle; he staggered to his feet again, and, now no longer swimming, after a few more splashing efforts, stood firm and upright in waist-high water, leaning with all his weight against the press of the flood. Then step by plunging step he got to land, and at last stood utterly free on the good safe earth. He stood and dripped for a moment, the water running from all points of himself and his clothes, as if off the ribs of an umbrella; then wringing out the baggier folds with his hands, he tried to start running toward the house. But twenty paces told him he was dead beat, and dropping to a soberer pace, he made his splashing way across the fields. Suddenly he stopped. "The Luck," he cried aloud to the weeping sky; "it was the rain that did it! Blooming old, futile old Luck! It couldn't kill a bluebottle." This was an inspiring thought, and he went the more lightly for it, taking note, with a delightful sense of danger past, of the distance of his water journey. And what was that spouting column of yellowness and foam three hundred yards farther up, standing like a fountain in mid stream? And with a sudden gasp of reasoned recognition he knew it to be the bridge over which the road passed, under which so few minutes ago he had himself been whirled. Cold and shivering as he was, he could not resist a moment's pause when he came opposite it, and he turned away again with a sense of respect for the Luck which his last words, shouted to the streaming heavens, had lacked. Under that he had blindly burrowed, helpless as a baby in an express, to stop his headlong course. "Not such a bad attempt of the Luck, after all," he said to himself. Five minutes later he had cast his water trail over the gravel and into the hall. Geoffrey was deep in an armchair, reading. "Geoffrey, old chap, the Luck's been having another go," he cried, almost triumphantly. "But it can't pull it off, it simply can't. Get me some hot whisky and water, will you, and come to my room. I'm going to get between blankets a bit. Nothing like taking care of one's self, and running no risks. I'll tell you all about it. Can't stop now." Geoffrey's book flew on to the floor as he sprang out of his chair. "O Harry, what has happened?" he cried; "what has he done now?" "Old Francis?" asked Harry, pointing at the picture. "He's used the rain this time. Penny squirt, you know. Hurry up, and come to my room. Whisky rather strong, please." Harry was out of his clinging clothes in a couple of minutes, and, dropping them into an empty hip bath where they could lie innocuous to carpets, got into blankets, and sipping his whisky, told Geoffrey all his story from the moment of the dismemberment of the sluice to his staggering landing half a mile downstream. "And if ever you want to travel expeditiously by water," he said, in conclusion, "I recommend you a six-foot flood in a narrow channel. But avoid a water-choked bridge ahead of you. Man, it gives you a wambling inside, and no mistake. All the same it makes you feel an A-1 hero afterward, I can tell you that for cert. Why, I'm choking with pride, just choking, though what the particular achievement is I can't tell you. I had to go underneath it, and there were no two words to it. Well, I went." "But what had happened to Mr. Francis?" asked Geoffrey. "Couldn't he see that the thing was tottery?" "No, of course not, you dolt; he'd gone trotting off to the farm. Oh, I didn't tell you that part, so you're not a dolt. We went out together, as you saw, and I took a haul on that old stricken sluice, but I couldn't make it budge. So we began walking away, to get men from the farm, but the water was rising so fast that he went on there alone, and I went back to have another pull at it--which I did, with this blessed result; and, O Geoffrey, how dry and warm the rain felt when I had got out of that flood race! Lord! I thought I was done; no, I didn't think it, I only knew I was. But not till I got out did the blessed solution strike me: it was the Luck having another shot. And again it has failed--fire and frost and rain. We've had the whole trio again, and be damned to them! But there's a hitch somewhere; old Francis can't pull it off. Really, I am almost sorry for him!" Harry's voice was resonant with conviction and triumph; it was as if he had won a battle that was inevitable between him and a subtle foe. The danger he had been through was swallowed up in the victory he had gained. But this lightness of heart found no echo in Geoffrey. "I don't like it, Harry," he said; "I don't like it one bit. I do not believe in the Luck; it is childish, and you do not believe in the Luck. We have played at make-believe like children, as we played with the discovery of the passage in the yew hedge. And the passage in the yew hedge is far the more real of the two. But it is time to stop all that. Why should these things come to you in such damnable continuity? Why within a few days should you nearly fall into an ice house, then go within an ace of blowing your head off, and finally be carried down in that mill-race of death? There is no use also in saying it is coincidence. Things do not happen like that." "No, you are right, not by mere coincidence," said Harry; "but they do happen; they have happened to me." The windows of the room looked out straight over the lawn on to the lower end of the lake, where the sluice lay, and Geoffrey, as Harry divested himself of the blankets he had swathed round him and rubbed himself down with a rough towel, went and sat in the window-seat, looking out. "And it's no use saying that I don't believe in the Luck," he went on; "I do believe in it, at least I think I do, which, as far as I am concerned, comes to exactly the same thing. Oh, it is nonsense!" he cried suddenly. "I don't think I really believe in it, but I like to think I do. There is the truth as near as I can get it. And yet, perhaps, that isn't the truth; perhaps I do believe in it. Oh, who knows whether I believe in it or not? I'm sure I don't." Geoffrey did not reply for a moment. He had felt morally certain after the gun-room accident that, if danger of death again looked into Harry's face, it would be Mr. Francis who brought it there; he had even said to himself that it would be by rain that danger would come. By rain, indeed, it had been, but where, taxing ingenuity to the utmost, did Mr. Francis come in? Harry had been alone, Mr. Francis halfway to the farm. What if Harry was right?--and the thought challenged his reasonable self. "How can you talk such utter nonsense?" he said angrily. "How can that pewter pot break down a sluice, and put a cartridge in your gun, and make you go to the ice house instead of the summerhouse?" "'Tain't pewter!" said Harry's voice, muffled in the shirt he was putting on. At that moment Geoffrey's eye caught sight of the figure of Mr. Francis trotting gaily through the rain down the side of the lake, from the direction of the farm, and he disappeared behind the bushes that screened the sluice from the house. Almost immediately he reappeared again, this time coming toward the house with the same lightness of step. He must have seen, thought Geoffrey, that the flood had carried away the sluice. Harry, he must have known, was probably there when it was carried away. What reconstruction of facts would fit these factors? At present none, but perhaps Mr. Francis could supply them. He rose. "Mr. Francis is just coming in," he said, "but I do not see the farm men." Harry came across to the window. "They are probably following," he said. "Go down to him, Geoff, and tell him I'm all right." "You will be down soon?" "Yes, in a couple of minutes. You might order tea, too." CHAPTER XIX GEOFFREY LEAVES VAIL Geoffrey went slowly downstairs, reciting to himself exactly all he knew. One point was salient: Mr. Francis had certainly seen the broken sluice. And he entered the hall. Mr. Francis had taken off his waterproof, and was sitting comfortably in a chair. He looked up with his cheery smile when Geoffrey came in. "Ah! my dear boy," he said, "you were quite right not to come out. The weather was odious; I have never seen such rain. But one feels better, after all, for a breath of air." "I preferred the house," said Geoffrey. "Was the water in the lake very high?" "Yes, it was a good deal swollen. In fact, it has carried away a considerable portion of the sluice. It must be seen to." "A dangerous moment," observed Geoffrey, picking up a magazine and turning over the pages. "Yes, I wish I had seen it go. A fine sight it must have been, six feet of water in that narrow channel. But we were on the way to the farm, I suppose, when it happened. I must talk--I must talk to Harry about it this evening. It will want mending at once." At this moment Geoffrey heard Harry's foot on the stairs just outside the hall. Though he knew nothing of psychology, he believed this to be a psychological moment. "Is he out still?" he asked, seeing out of the corner of his eye that he was even now entering the hall. "I suppose so," said Mr. Francis. "He left me on the way up to the farm." Harry had now entered the hall, and his step was noiseless on the thick carpet. Mr. Francis, with his chair facing the fire, could not see him, but another half-dozen paces would bring him close. "You are wrong," said Geoffrey slowly, "for he seems to have come in. This is he, is it not? Or his ghost?" Mr. Francis, contrary to the doctor's orders, made an exceedingly brisk movement, springing to his feet and facing about. He saw Harry; he cast one brief look at Geoffrey, to which fear and a devilish enmity contributed largely, and turned to his nephew again in perfect control of himself and without further hesitation. Geoffrey had scarce time to tell himself that there was an awkward choice he had to make. "Ah! my dear boy," he cried, "so you are all right. I felt sure you would be. But for a moment, for one moment, I was anxious, when I came back from the farm with the men and we found the sluice broken." Geoffrey stared in sheer astonishment at the man's glibness. "With the men?" he asked. "Surely not." "Dear fellow," said Mr. Francis, with the most natural manner, "how pedantically exact you are! I must be exact, too, it seems. I was a little ahead of them, for I ran back from the farm, being just a little uneasy about the weight of water that I knew must be pressing on the sluice. I thought, indeed, that when Harry made his first attempt to pull it up, it was a little unsafe for any one to stand there." Suddenly all his doubts and certainties surged up in Geoffrey's mind. "Did you warn him?" he asked. Geoffrey saw Harry's eyebrows knit themselves together in a frown of perplexity which he could not decipher. But Mr. Francis turned to him with the eagerness of a boy anxious to confess. "I did not," he said, "and all the time that I was going to the farm the thing weighed on me. I ought to have--I ought to have given way to my old-maid feeling of insecurity. But I was afraid--yes, dear lad, I was afraid Harry would laugh at me. Ah, how I repented my silence when I came back and found the sluice gone--gone!" he repeated. "Yes, it went," said Harry. "I went too." Mr. Francis looked at him a moment with eyes of horror diminishing to a pin point; then he gave a little low cry and sank down in his chair again. "What do you say? what do you say?" he murmured. "You were there; you were----" "Oh, the sluice broke as I was standing on it, having another pull at the wooden gate, as you suggested, and down I went," said Harry. "The flood took me right under the bridge, rather a difficult matter, and a quarter of a mile farther down. Then I got out." Mr. Francis lifted up his hands in a weary, uncertain manner. "Under the bridge--under the bridge!" he said hoarsely. "It would not take him over," remarked Geoffrey. Mr. Francis seemed not to hear this comment. "What can I say?" he cried. "What can I say or do? And to think that it was my fault! I ought to have warned you; I ought to have been on the safe side. I did not with my reasonable mind think that there was any danger, but I was uneasy. Harry, do not blame me too much: I remember advising you one day last winter when you came in wet from shooting, to go and change, and indeed, my dear boy, you did not receive my advice very patiently. I thought of that; I thought I would not weary you with my meddling misgivings." "I don't blame you in the least, Uncle Francis," said Harry. "You didn't think the sluice looked sufficiently unsafe to make it better that you should warn me. I also did not realize that it was in a dangerous condition. There is no harm done." "I can not forgive myself," said Mr. Francis. Harry laughed. "Ah! there I can not help you," he said. "For my own part I can only assure you that there is nothing to forgive. There, that's all right," he added rather gruffly, desiring to have no scene. Geoffrey had listened to this with a look of pleased attention, as a man may regard a little scene in a play, which he knows well. Mr. Francis had been through his part with great dexterity: here another actor--himself--should appear. "And now for your story, Mr. Francis," he said very cheerfully, "as Harry will not give us curdling details. Let me see: you went to the farm, and ran back again, and I saw you go to the sluice. You found it gone. Dear, dear, how terrible for you! So you came quietly back to the house and sat yourself down in front of the fire, where I found you ten minutes ago." Mr. Francis looked up with a scared eye. "I hoped and trusted no accident had happened to him," he said. "I came to the house to make sure that he was safe. Ah! I can not talk of it, I can not talk of it," he cried suddenly. "But ten minutes ago you told me that you supposed that Harry was still out," persisted Geoffrey. "What a strange thing is the human mind! Here, for instance, I do not follow your thoughts at all. You were uneasy for Harry's safety, for fear of the sluice giving way, and as soon as you saw for certain that it had given way, you felt no further anxiety. You sat here in front of the fire, though, as you told me, you supposed Harry was out still." Mr. Francis rose from his chair in great agitation. "What do you mean? What are you saying?" he cried in a high, tremulous voice. "Do you know what your words mean?" "My words mean exactly what they appear to mean," said Geoffrey quietly, feeling that the signal had been given and the time was come. "Hear me: how curious a thing, I said, is the human mind! The sluice you thought looked a little unsafe, and you were uneasy for Harry's safety as you went to the farm, for he was making at your suggestion an attempt to raise the wooden gate. You come back, and find symptoms of the confirmation of your fears: the sluice is broken. Harry is not there. Then you walk quietly back to the house, and tell me you suppose that Harry is out still. I repeat that I do not follow your train of thought. It is curious.--Harry, does not this seem to you also to be curious?" Harry looked from one to the other a moment, puzzled and bewildered. Geoffrey spoke so quietly and collectedly that it was impossible not to listen calmly to what he said, impossible also not to understand what he meant. On the other hand, he was saying things that were absolutely incredible. From Geoffrey he looked to Mr. Francis, who was standing between them. The old man's mouth quivered, his agitation was momentarily increasing. Then suddenly he recollected the doctor's warning that all agitation was bad for him, and he was his uncle, his friend, and an old man. "Stop, Geoffrey!" he cried; "don't speak.--Uncle Francis, don't listen to him: he doesn't mean what you think he means. There is some ghastly misunderstanding.--Geoff, you damned idiot!" Mr. Francis's face grew paler and more mottled, his breathing was growing short and laboured, and Harry was in an agony of terror that another of those awful seizures would come upon him. But in a moment he spoke, slowly, and with little pauses for breath. "Harry," he said, "either your friend--apologizes unreservedly for--what he has said--or one of us--leaves the house--now, this evening. It will be for you--to decide--which of us leaves it." At these words another terror seized Harry--the terror of the precipice at the edge of which all three of them stood. Whatever happened now, it seemed to him, a catastrophe must be: one friend or the other (and as he thought of the two, his mind veered backward and forward like a shifting weathercock) must go. But the primary necessity was, by any means in his power, to stop further words just now, for he feared each moment that Mr. Francis would be seized as he stood. "Uncle Francis, come away," he said, taking his arm, "you are agitated; so is Geoffrey; so am I. It is no use talking about a thing in heat. Wait, just wait.--Geoffrey, if you say another word I'll knock your silly head off!" But Mr. Francis regarded his nephew no more than he regarded the fly that buzzed in the pane. "What do you mean?" he said, coming closer to Geoffrey and shaking off Harry's hand; "what do you mean by what you have just said? Apologize for it instantly; do you hear? Indeed, it seems to me that I am very good-natured to be willing to accept an apology." Harry put in a word he knew to be hopeless. "Go on, Geoff," he said, impatiently, anxious for the moment only about his uncle. "Uncle Francis has understood what you said in some different way from what you meant. I don't know what it's all about, but let's have no more nonsense." Geoffrey turned on that eager face but an absent and staring eye, hardly hearing his words, for they called up nothing whatever in his mind which answered to them--only collecting himself to speak fully and without excitement. He hardly gave a thought to how Harry might take it, so large and immediate was the need of speaking, so tremendous the part in this horrible nightmare inevitably his. "I do not apologize," he said, "not only because I do not wish to, but because I am simply unable. I indorse every word I have said. I have also more to say. Will you hear it, Harry? I should prefer to tell you alone, but I suppose that is impossible." "Quite impossible, I assure you, you young viper!" said Mr. Francis, in a voice so cool and self-contained that Harry looked at him in utter surprise. The bursting agitation of a few minutes ago had passed; his voice, horrid and cold, was the faithful index of his face. And at his words Harry suddenly saw the futility of trying to interfere. The thing was gone beyond his reach; it was as impossible now to stop what was coming as it would have been to stop that hustling flood from the lake by a word to it. He waited, frozen almost to numbness with dread and nauseous misgiving for what should follow, till Geoffrey, in response to Mr. Francis's assurance, spoke. "Your uncle," he said, "has for months past been plotting and scheming against you, your happiness, your life. He tried in the first place, by every means in his power, to prevent your marriage with Miss Aylwin. On the Sunday last June when she was down here they walked in the wood together, and saw----" "I know all about that," said Harry. "I doubt it. Do you know, for instance, that Mr. Francis tried to persuade Miss Aylwin to overlook the fact that she had seen you walking with a dairymaid? Do you know that he never suggested to her that the supposed 'you' might be Jim, that he told her that all 'your previous little foolishness'--the exact phrase--had been quite innocent? I think you did not know that." The whole scene still seemed utterly unreal to Harry; he could not believe that it was going on. He turned to his uncle. "Well?" he said. "Ah, I am on my trial then!" said Mr. Francis, very evilly. "Harry, my dear boy, it is only because this fellow has been your friend that I stop and listen to these monstrous insinuations. I am asked, I believe, what I have to say to this. Well, what has been said is literally true. I mistook the groom for you. So did Miss Aylwin. We both made a mistake. As for 'previous little foolishnesses,' that of course is a pure invention on the part of some imaginative person." "Miss Aylwin told Lady Oxted; Lady Oxted told me," said Geoffrey, as quietly as if he was giving a reference to some small point of business. Mr. Francis just shrugged his shoulders. "I remember last winter," he said, "that we used to play a very diverting game called Russian scandal." "The next move you know, Harry," continued Geoffrey, still taking the smallest notice of Mr. Francis. "He wrote to tell you that Miss Aylwin was already engaged." Harry wore an inscrutable face. "Go on," he said. "That also did not come off," said Geoffrey, "and you were engaged. Ten days ago we came down here. On the first morning you asked Mr. Francis which of the two houses on the knoll was the ice house and which the summerhouse----" "Ah, you have broken your word to me!" cried Harry. "You promised to keep that secret from my uncle." A violent trembling had seized Mr. Francis. "What! What!" he murmured, half rising from his chair. "I have broken my word to you," said Geoffrey, still seemingly unconscious of the presence of a third person. "I am sorry, but I can not help it. You followed the directions he gave you, and nearly met your death. We came back together, and found him playing the flute in the garden, dancing to it as he played. Then you went into the house. I remained outside and watched him. He went up the knoll to the two houses, and tried the door of the ice house. He found it locked, opened the summerhouse and looked in. Try to reconstruct what was in his mind. He made no allusion to his mistake. Had he already forgotten that he had given you a direction that nearly sent you to your death? Or was the mistake yours? He told you to go to the left hand of the two houses, so you said to me. Is that the case?" Harry did not at once reply; he looked eagerly, imploringly at his friend, but he could find no words to express a feeling he could not comprehend; he did not know, ever so vaguely, what he thought. In despair and utter perplexity he faced quickly round to his uncle. Mr. Francis was sitting with half-closed eyes; his hands, like the hands of a blind man, groped and picked at the buttons in the arm of his chair, stricken, helpless. Suddenly, as if with a drowning effort, he threw his head back and saw Harry. "No, no," he said, "not the left hand, not the left hand! I never said that. Oh, the Luck, the cursed, cursed Luck! I could not--indeed, I could not have said the left hand. 'Do not go to the left hand by mistake'; I can hear myself saying the words now. Oh, weary, weary day! But you went there, you went to the ice house instead of the summerhouse; you went from the brightness of God's sunshine into the dark--to that edge--to the edge of the well. O my God! my God! Eli! Eli!" and the cry was wrung from him like water from a twisted cloth. The old man buried his face in his hands, collapsing like a broken doll. He regarded neither Harry nor his accuser; the anguish of his spirit covered him like a choking wave, and into it he went down without a struggle, but only that moaning sob, a sight and a sound to stagger the unbelief of an infidel. And Harry--no infidel, but a lad of kindly heart and generous impulse, quick to believe good, a laggard to impute harm--could not but be moved. Geoffrey neither looked at the bowed figure nor wavered, and his face was flint. But though that moaning cry, that passionate incoherence did not move him, yet the sight of Harry's face, with its bewilderment of perplexity and compassionate trouble, filled him with a sudden fear. To himself, that bent and venerable head was a mockery of grief, a fraud finished and exquisite, and he was more afraid of Harry's divided mind, on which Mr. Francis played as on an instrument of music, than he had been of the evil and hunted face that had come down from the gun room, as he stood behind the curtain, in those dead hours ten days ago. Mr. Francis sat huddled in his chair, his face invisible, his fingers clasped in his white head, and long, dry sobs lifted and relaxed his figure, like the pulsation of a wave. And though Geoffrey, so few minutes ago, had turned himself to steel, he could not go on speaking with that silent stricken figure in front of him. The low, heart-broken murmuring, the silent sobs, filched resolution from him. Once and twice he began to speak, but no sentence would come. As many times he told himself that he must go on, that he knew that this feigned anguish was a thing to awake horror or laughter, but never pity. Yet it affected him as a scene in the play affects the stalls. It was all unreal, he knew it was unreal, yet he could not immediately speak. Suddenly, and long before--it seemed while he was still cursing his infirmity of purpose--Harry came to his side. "Go away, Geoff; go away," he whispered. "Leave me with him. Whatever you have to say, you can not and must not say it now. Look there and judge! It may kill him. Go away, there's a good fellow!" He got up at once: that was enough. Harry was still willing to hear him, now or at another time, it did not matter. All he wanted was that Harry should hear him to the end, and then his part was done. Exposure--there was no pleasure in the act of it; he only wanted that it should be there. Truly the man was vile, and an enemy, but he did not covet the post of executioner as such. By him, it is true, justice was done, the murderer was put out of a world with the welfare of which his presence was incompatible, and a man to do it there must be, but who did not shudder at the shadow of the hangman? That dry, inarticulate sobbing, which he had no need to tell himself was but a counterfeit grief, yet wore the respectable semblance of woe. What, again, if remorse had at length touched Mr. Francis? What if the imminence of his exposure had at last revealed to him his immeasurable enormity? If such a possibility was within the range of the most distant horizon, how contemptible would be his own part in trampling in a truth that was realized! All that was generous within him, and there was nothing that was not, revolted from so despicable a rôle. But against that possibility how large and near loomed the probability that these grovelling pangs were but of the same texture as the rest! No, he was not taken in; he registered privately the unalterable conviction that Mr. Francis was Mr. Francis still, for no opprobrious word conveyed to him half the horror of all which that canonized name implied. Yet Harry was by him, asking him, not bidding him to go. That was sufficient; and even as he told himself it was sufficient, back swung the balance again. What duty could be more obvious, more staring than to finish now, at once, with that ineffable old man? Yet he sat there sobbing. And without another word Geoffrey turned and went, leaving uncle and nephew together. It was not long before Harry joined him in the smoking room. "Uncle Francis has gone to his room," he said. "He is quieter now; I could leave him safely. But I have telegraphed for the doctor; I daren't take the responsibility of not sending for him. He kept asking me one question, Geoff; he kept repeating and repeating it: Which of you two is to go. He says he will not stop here another night if you remain here. God knows whether I have decided right!" "It is I who go, you mean?" said Geoffrey. "Yes, it is you." Harry sat down wearily, as if tired out; that, too, was his prevailing feeling; body and mind were dead beat. Geoffrey rose. "Since that is so," he said, "I ask you, before I go, to hear the rest of my story--indeed, I must tell it you. Then I shall have done all I can. Oh, it will not take long," he added, with a sudden inexpressible bitterness. "In half an hour I shall be gone!" Harry sprung up as if he had been stung. "I do not deserve that from you, Geoff," he said. "Do you think I want to get rid of you? Do you think it is fine fun for me to tell you to go? I am not conscious of any great pleasure in it." "No, I am sorry," said Geoffrey. "I had no business to say that or to think that. But--O Harry, before I go, for the dear Lord's sake, hear me! I have not been speaking idly. Do you think, in turn, that it is fine fun for me to get up and bring these awful accusations against Mr. Francis?" "Of course I don't. But the whole thing I have to put on one side for the present. Uncle Francis will not stop in the house while you are here, Geoff, and I can not let him go, whatever the truth may be, while he is like this. I dreaded every moment that a seizure might come on him again. Besides, he is an old man; he is my uncle. For the present, then, I am like this: I neither believe what you have told me nor do I disbelieve it; I put it aside; though, before long, when my uncle is recovered, I shall have to do the one or the other. Either I shall believe, be convinced you are right, and then God knows what I shall do, or I shall think your accusations wild and incredible, and, I warn you, too infinitely base for words. And then, too," he added, suddenly, "God knows what I shall do! But at present, as I tell you, there is no question of that. My certain and immediate duty is to look after Uncle Francis." "I ask you then, before I go," said Geoffrey, "to hear the remainder of what I have to say." "Certainly; but whatever you tell me, I shall not attempt to judge of it now. You had just spoken about the confusion which came in somewhere between the ice house and the summerhouse." So Geoffrey told him of the loop of cotton he had found round the post of the gun rack; of Mr. Francis's visit to the gun room, and finally of his own finding him in the afternoon, after the breaking of the sluice, sitting before the fire in the hall "supposing" that Harry had not yet come in. And Harry heard in silence and without comment. "That is all?" he asked, when Geoffrey had finished. "You are sure there is nothing more? You are sure, also, you have been exact throughout?" "That is all," said Geoffrey, "and I have been exact." "Then, dear old boy," said Harry, "let us for the present put it from our minds. Your carriage will be round in ten minutes; I told them to pack for you. And tell me that you agree with me when I have to ask you to go. I feel--I know--that I can not do otherwise." "Yes, you are right, and God guard you!" said Geoffrey. Then suddenly the whole flood of fears and suspicions and certainties surged in his mind together and overflowed it. He was leaving Harry alone with that hellish man. Who knew what he might not attempt next? Every fibre in his being cried aloud to him that danger of subtle and deadly sort hung suspended over Harry, imminent to fall so long as that white-haired old man was under the same roof. But what could he do? He could not force Harry to see the clearness of that which was so clear to him; he could not even make him exercise his judgment upon it. And his anxiety for him broke bounds. "Yes, you are right," he said. "But I can not persuade myself that I am right to go. O Harry! I ask you once again, Do you tell me to go?" Harry got up and leaned his head on the chimney-piece. "Don't make it harder for me, Geoff," he said. Here was a ray of hope. "I will make it as hard as I can," said Geoffrey. "I appeal to anything that will move you. We are old friends, Harry. Wiser and better friends you will find, but none more faithful. You are doing a cruel thing." Harry turned round suddenly. "Stop," he said. "I tell you to go. O Geoff! who is doing the cruel thing? You know--O my God! won't this nightmare cease?" Geoffrey saw his lips quivering; his own also were not steady. He came close to him, and laid his hands on his shoulders. "What have we done, Harry," he said, "that this should happen to us? You have answered me. But promise me one thing. I insist on that." "I will promise you anything you think right to ask me, Geoff," said he, "and you know it, provided only it does not make me cancel what I have said, and what I have decided to do." "It does not. It is simply this: Three times within the last ten days you have been in imminent danger. God knows what it all means, but it is certain that many dangers surround you on all sides. I ask you to promise to be careful. I don't ask you to consider all I have told you now; you must do that when you feel that you can. You promise me this?" "Willingly." "And let it be soon that you consider what I have said. Judge the thing as you would judge for another, and God send you the right judgment! That is all I want." "Amen to that," said Harry. CHAPTER XX DR. ARMYTAGE ARRIVES Dr. Armytage, for whom Harry had telegraphed, arrived about nine that night. He had left London immediately on receipt of the summons without dining, and having seen his patient, came downstairs to join Harry in a belated meal. In appearance he was a dark man and spare, his chin and upper lip blue-black from a strong crop of hair close shaven; heavy eyebrows nearly met over his aquiline nose; his mouth had a certain secrecy and tightness about it. But his manner was that of a man reserved but competent; his thin, delicate hands were neat and firm in their movements; and Harry, torn and distracted by a world of bewilderment, found it an unutterable relief to have put one out of all his perplexities, the care of his uncle, into such adequate hands. For the moment, at least, the boon of the doctor's arrival quite overscored that sinister impression he had formed of him when, in the summer, he had passed him driving to the station. With regard to his patient he was grave, but not alarming. Grave, however, one felt he would always be, and Harry remembered Mr. Francis's criticism of him, that he knew too much, and had always in his mind the most remote consequences of any lesion, however insignificant. "I can give you no certain account of him to-night, Lord Vail," he said. "I found Mr. Francis in a lethargic state, the natural reaction from, so I understand, an agitating scene that took place this afternoon. I did not even speak to him, for I thought it better not to rouse him, as he seemed in a fair way to get a good night's rest. But I spoke to his man, who told me that he thought something agitating and painful had taken place. May I ask you if this is the case?" "Yes," said Harry, "a friend of mine, Mr. Francis, and I, had a terrible scene this afternoon." "Can you tell me about it; the merest outline only? You see, if Mr. Francis experiences any return of this agitation, which is, to put it frankly, so dangerous, it might be very likely useful that I should know about it, and be able to soothe him with something more specific than wide generalities." Harry paused; they were alone over dessert. "It is all very horrible," he said at length, "and I can hardly speak of it. But I can tell you this: Within the last ten days I have had three very narrow escapes from a violent and sudden death." Dr. Armytage put down with neat haste the glass he was raising to his lips, and gave Harry one quick glance from below his bushy eyebrows. Startling though the words were, you would hardly have expected such sudden alertness and interest from so self-contained a man. "Yes?" he said. "Well, for one at least of these my uncle blames himself," said Harry. "That certainly was one of the causes of his agitation, though perhaps not the greatest immediate cause. Oh, it is awful to speak of it!" he cried. "Tell me what you advise. Had I better tell you everything?" "I repeat, it may possibly be of use to me," said the doctor. "All you say, of course, will be under the seal of my profession." The servants had entered the room with coffee, and Harry did not immediately reply. Templeton, as usual, carried the case of the Luck, and even as he took the jewel into his hand, Harry hurriedly filled a wineglass. "The Luck," he said in no very cordial tone. Then turning to the doctor. "Please excuse me," he said. "It is a custom I have got into. Yes, that is the Luck; my uncle may have spoken to you about it. You would like to look at it?" The doctor waved it away. "Another time, another time," he said, and waited till the servants had left the room. Then: "Yes," he continued, "I have heard Mr. Francis speak of it. An extraordinary delusion in so clear-headed a man, is it not? He thinks--I hope I am not intruding into family secrets, Lord Vail--he soberly thinks that the Luck brings blessings and curses on your house. I may say the idea almost possesses him." "Surely you are mistaken," said Harry. "He is always laughing, sometimes even he is distressed at my believing--ah! not believing, but thinking I believe in it. But very curious things have happened," he added. "There is doubtless some mistake," said the doctor. "But to return: All you tell me will be under the seal of my profession." "You mean that I speak to one who is necessarily as silent as the grave," said Harry. "You will pardon my insistence on this." "I give you my word on it," said the doctor. "Well, it is a strange, dark story," said Harry, "and if I speak a little incoherently, you will know by the end what perplexities I am in. Now there are two kiosks--sort of places near the house; one is a summerhouse, one an ice house. I got the keys one morning, and asked my uncle which was which. He told me quite distinctly that the left-hand one was the summerhouse. He made a mistake, and I went whistling into the ice house--they were both shuttered and quite dark inside--and came within an ace of falling into the big tank. I am quite sure I went to the one he told me was the summerhouse." "Number one," said the doctor. "Next morning he went up to London," continued Harry, "and I and Geoffrey Langham, this friend of mine who left to-day, were going out for a day's shooting. My gun was standing in the rack, and as I took it up it went off, narrowly missing me. The last person who had used that gun and who had left the cartridge in it was my uncle." "Number two," said the doctor. "To-day he and I went out together and looked at the flooded lake. I tried to raise an extra sluice that we have, and finding that I could not make it move, we went up toward the farm to get men to help. But, again at his suggestion, he went on to the farm, and I went back to have another try at it. As I was standing on the main sluice, pulling, the whole thing gave way, and I went down with the flood-water, as near to being drowned as any one can wish to be. My uncle had thought the sluice not very safe, but he had not thought it worth mentioning." The doctor was silent awhile. "You bear a charmed life, Lord Vail," he said at length. "But I think you have more to tell me." Harry gave him one dumb, appealing glance, and met eyes which were grave but not unkind, firm and deeply interested. He had the impression that they had long been watching him. "Yes, I have more--I have more," he said, with agitation, "and it is horribly painful! Dr. Armytage, I have two great friends--or so I think--my uncle, and this Geoffrey Langham, a fellow of my own age or thereabouts. This afternoon, to my uncle's face, though I am bound to say he would have preferred to tell me privately, Geoffrey made horrible insinuations--accusations. He said that Uncle Francis had long been my enemy; that he had tried to prevent my engagement; that he had failed there, and that in this affair, for instance, my uncle had intentionally--had intentionally----" and a strangling knot tied itself in his throat, choking utterance. The doctor pushed the water-bottle gently a little closer to Harry, and he poured himself out some and drank it, unconscious that any suggestion had been made to him. "Then there was an awful scene," he went on. "My uncle was nearly off his head, I believe, with remorse and horror for those words which had so nearly sent me to my death, and this was aggravated, I must suppose, by black, ungovernable rage against Geoffrey. I felt that I had never seen an angry man before. He refused to stay another night in the house with him; he asked me continually which of them it was who should go. He could not, of that I was convinced, in that state, and I sent Geoff off. Besides, I can not--simply I can not--believe in Geoff's accusations. It is flatly impossible that Uncle Francis should be guilty of the least intention which Geoff attributed to him. Do I not know him? There must be some other explanation. And if you want to know what my other explanation is, it has stood in front of you at dinner. It was the Luck: fire and frost and rain--the ice house, the gun, the sluice. Oh, it has happened once before like that." "Yes, Mr. Francis told me," said the doctor, still looking very intently at him. Harry flicked the ash off his cigarette. "Here am I, then," he said. "Of my two best friends, one lies upstairs; the other, God knows if I shall ever see the other again! I have to tell him whether I believe what he said. And I can not believe it. It is monstrous; he is monstrous to have thought it. Yet I see why he thought it; to any one not believing in the Luck, there was no other explanation. There are other things too. I need not trouble you with them. He came to the conclusion, for instance, that my uncle wished to stop my engagement--prevent it rather, for I was not engaged then. They were specious--good Lord! they were specious enough. But I have been considering them all, and I simply can not believe them. It is not that I wilfully shut my eyes; I hold them open with pincers and chisels, so to speak, but I am unable--that is clear--to believe anything of this. How could it be possible? God does not allow such things, I tell you." "That is your verdict, then. You believe nothing against your uncle," said the other with an intonation absolutely colourless. "I can not." "May I tell your uncle this, Lord Vail?" asked the doctor presently. "If his agitation returns, I can think of nothing which would so much tend to soothe it as the assurance that these accusations are to you absolutely void and empty. These vile accusations," he added in a moment. "Yes, they are vile," said Harry, half to himself. "May I then use my discretion to tell him so, if I think it desirable?" asked the doctor, pressing his point. "It would be better, I think, for me to tell him than you. That would be agitating work for both of you," he said, watching the lad closely. "Oh, you may tell him whatever you damn please!" cried Harry, with the sudden petulance of nerves utterly overwrought. Instantly the doctor's face changed. The symptom for which he had been waiting had come. "Now, then, Lord Vail," he said, with a peremptoriness which startled Harry, "I do not want two patients instead of one. You were on the verge of hysterics, let me tell you. We will have none of that, please." This treatment was shrewd and prompt. Judging rapidly and correctly, he saw that any word of sympathy or kindness would be likely to throw Harry altogether off the balance, and he was justified when, in answer to this rough speech, he saw an angry flush spring to his face. "I am not accustomed to be spoken to like that," he said hotly. "No, it was a liberty on my part," said the doctor. "Please excuse it. But I think you will acknowledge that I was right. You are your own man again now." Harry considered this a moment, then smiled. "Yes, you were perfectly right," he said candidly. "But I have had rather a trying time to-day." "Indeed you have, and I may say now that I am very sorry for you. I recommend you therefore to go to bed, and not to write to your friend to-night, nor to think what you will say to him when you do." "And to go to sleep very quietly and soundly till morning," said Harry. "Excellent advice, Dr. Armytage." "Oh, you will do all these things if you follow my directions," said the doctor. "I should like to hear them, then." "To drink the dose I will send you up to your room," he said quietly. At that moment, as if by a flash-light suddenly turned on, Harry saw himself again meeting at the lodge gates this man for whom, at first sight, he had conceived so violent and instinctive an antipathy, and simultaneously the curious adventure in the search for Dr. Godfrey shone in his mind. What if, after all, Geoffrey was right, and he himself was alone in this house with a man such as his friend had pictured Mr. Francis to be, and his mysterious confederate physician, whose ways were so dark? The suspicions which had seemed to him so utterly beyond the horizon of credibility leaped suddenly nearer. And when he spoke, though he tried to make no alteration in his tone, even to himself his voice sounded unusual. "I don't think I shall require any doses," he said. "I dare say I shall sleep all right. Thanks all the same." "Ah, you don't trust me," said the doctor in the same quiet tone. This exceeding frankness both pleased and offended Harry. "Is it not a pity to say a thing like that?" he asked, "when you really have no warrant for it? To show you how wrong you are, I will take your dose with pleasure." The doctor's grave face relaxed. "That is right, Lord Vail," he said. "But do you think that your now consenting to take it proves that I was wrong? Might not a man consider that it showed I was right?" Harry smiled also. "A man of sufficient ingenuity can make plausible the most extravagant conclusions," he said, rather enjoying this tiny fencing match. "True; we will not draw any at all, since there is no need," he said. "And now, with your leave, I will go up and see Mr. Francis again. I hope and trust I shall find him asleep." "I shall be in the hall," said Harry; "please give me your report as soon as you have seen him." Dr. Armytage went upstairs, and Harry lit a cigarette and waited his return. Dinner and the presence of this capable man had to a large extent quieted his jangled nerves, and he was conscious, more than anything, of a great weariness. The acuteness of his perplexities had for the moment worn off a little, and though their aching weight was no less, they pressed on him, so it seemed, without the fret of sharp edges. He resolutely set himself not to think of them, but rather of that exquisite point of happiness which was day by day coming nearer to him. Evie would be in England in less than a fortnight now; five weeks brought him to that day to which his whole life hitherto seemed to have been leading up. But suddenly the claws and teeth again recaptured him: Geoffrey was to have been his best man, and now-- And with that his feverish mill-race of bewildering possibilities began again, and it was a relief when the doctor reappeared. "Mr. Francis is sleeping, I am glad to tell you," he said. "Thanks. I will smoke one cigarette before I go upstairs; and when I go, you go too, if you please, Lord Vail. I have put your dose in your bedroom." "Thanks. I am dead tired; one cigarette will see me." The doctor settled himself in a chair. "Yes, that tiredness is exactly what my dose will give a chance to," he said. "You are tired and excited--a horrible combination; and your excitement would certainly keep you awake. That I hope to remove by this sedative draught, and let your tiredness act naturally. But I must really congratulate you on your nerves. In the last ten days you have had enough escapes to last a lifetime, and, upon my word, you don't look used up. A very fine nervous constitution. Mr. Francis also used to have the same power of going through things that would have caused most men to break down utterly." "Yes, he has been through awful trouble," said Harry, "and really he does not seem more than a man of sixty." "Trouble of the most horrible kind," said the doctor. "May I ask you, Lord Vail, if Miss Aylwin is any relation to----" "Yes," interrupted Harry; "her mother was Mrs. Harmsworth." "I see you know the story. I was associated somewhat closely with it; I was, in fact, the doctor who gave evidence at the coroner's inquest." Again Harry forgot his own perplexities. "Ah, tell me about that," he said. "There is little to tell. The conclusion I arrived at was that the death of Mr. Harmsworth might easily have been accidental or self-inflicted; that it was, in fact, the gun he carried which killed him. That, of course, was the crucial point. The nature of the wound appeared to me compatible with that interpretation." "I knew that you were an old friend of my uncle's," said Harry. "But I did not know that your association with him was so intimate as that." The doctor was silent a moment, and threw his smoked-out cigarette away. "I tell you this," he said at last, "as a sort of testimonial, recommendation, what you will: I came here as a stranger to you; you have received me with very cordial hospitality, and I present," he added, "my credentials." Harry rose, and held out his hand. "They are extremely satisfactory," he said. "And now for my dose and bed. You sleep in my uncle's sitting room, I think you said. I hope they have made you comfortable." "I have everything," said the doctor. "By the way, speaking of your friend Mr. Langham, I may tell Mr. Francis that he has left, if I think it wise?" "Certainly, if you wish." "That he has gone to London?" suggested the doctor casually. "As a matter of fact he has gone to his father's house for a few days, down near Sevenoaks. Lord Langham, you know." "Ah, yes," said Dr. Armytage. "Good-night, my dear Lord Vail. I am convinced you will sleep well." * * * * * Half an hour afterward the house was dark and quiet. Harry had drained his dose, and was sleeping deeply and dreamlessly; Mr. Francis was not more wakeful. The night was warm and mellow after the heavy rain, and Dr. Armytage sat long at his window looking out with fixed, undeviating eyes into the blackness. At intervals, some real or fancied stir from the sick room would make him rise mechanically, and, crossing the floor, look in on his patient; once Mr. Francis in his sleep called out, "Harry, Harry! take care!" in a strangling, agonized voice. But even then he did not wake, and the doctor returned again to his seat in the window and still gazed out into the night. The rain had ceased soon after sunset, and now the sky was nearly clear, and star in-wrought; in the east the moon would soon be rising. But he regarded not nor saw either stars or the climbing crescent. At length a striking clock aroused him, and he got up. "No, no, and a thousand times no!" he said to himself. CHAPTER XXI GEOFFREY MEETS THE DOCTOR Dr. Armytage, despite Lady Oxted's round and uncompromising definition of him as a dexterous surgeon of sinister repute, proved himself during the next day or two to be far more intimately acquainted with the vital structure of the animal called man than is at all necessary for one who only concerns himself with dissection of artery and muscle, and the severing of bones. Under his wise and beneficent care Mr. Francis rapidly rose again to his accustomed surface, and, no less testimony to his skill, Harry once more looked the world squarely and courageously in the face. These inner and spiritual lesions require for their healing not only a skilful diagnosis, but a mind of delicate and certain touch, and of his two patients the doctor was inclined to think that Harry made the more flattering recovery. During these days he kept uncle and nephew studiously apart; he would allow no visits to the sick room, and communication was limited to messages passed to and fro by the doctor himself. Mr. Francis, on the one hand, was bidden to keep his bed for three days, and quiet was insisted on; quiet, on the other hand, was sternly forbidden to Harry. For him the prescription was to go out as much as possible, and busy himself with any employment--all were good--which he found congenial, and when indoors to apply himself slavishly to all the businesses which Mr. Francis had hitherto managed for him. "Oh, you have plenty to do," said the doctor to this harassed young gentleman; "go and do some of it." But among these things which had to be done was an affair of difficulty, the letter which must be written to Geoffrey. This, when he put his hand to it, Harry found to be a black, bitter business, and sheet after sheet was begun and abandoned. Had he realized it, he was attempting the impossible, for he had set himself to write a letter which should at once be thoroughly friendly, and yet spit on the allegations which his friend had made. The writer alone did not see that such a letter could not be written even by Solomon, Shakespeare, and the original serpent in conjunction. Thus, for a couple of hours one evening Harry wrote and tore, reducing wooden penholders to match wood, and quires of fair white paper to grist for the housemaid in her fire-lighting, yet still the envelope was no nearer to its postage stamp; and the dressing bell indeed showed him only a brimming waste-paper basket. He could not write this letter; here was the flat truth. At this juncture the doctor entered the smoking room, which Harry had chosen to be the arena of these futile endeavours, and a glance at his clouded face seemed enough for him. "It is difficult, I admit," he said. "Ah, you must not be offended with me, Lord Vail. I have guessed right. I know: we doctors have to be thought-readers. You have been making"--and his eye fell on the paper-basket--"many unsuccessful attempts to write to your friend. Perhaps I ought to have saved you that trouble." Harry turned a dark face on him. "I'm sure there is no secret about it," he said. "As like as not I should have told you. I can't write this letter, I just can't write it. Yet I must. But when I begin to tell Geoff the truth, that he has done a dastardly thing, and that I can never see him again, and that I love him just as much as ever--well--the whole thing becomes unreal at once." "Yes, those are hard words to a friend," said the doctor. "I know, and I'm not hard. I love that chap, I tell you. You don't know him; so much the worse for you, for you don't know the best old fool God ever made. I'm just hungry to see him, and I've got to tell him that he is a base cad. Oh, confound the whole round world! By the way, you said you should have spared me this trouble. What do you mean?" Dr. Armytage took a chair close to the table where Harry was failing to write. "Three days ago, Lord Vail, when I first arrived," he said, "I offered you a sleeping-draught, which you refused. I suggested that you refused it because you distrusted me. Tell me now, was I right in suggesting that?" Harry looked straight, as his wont was, at the dark, secret face he had once thought so sinister. To him now it appeared only sad. "What has that got to do with it?" he asked. "Was that suggestion right?" repeated the doctor. "Yes, quite," said the other frankly. "Just so. Eventually you did trust me, or, at any rate, behaved as if you did, and you found your confidence not misplaced. You awoke, in fact, after a good night's rest. And now, if you grant that, you owe me the benefit of a doubt." "Well?" "I ask you to trust me again," said the doctor, "for the fact is I have already written to your friend myself, telling him not to expect a letter from you yet. I knew, I was completely certain, that you would find it impossible to write to him, and it seemed to me that if I wrote at once, as I did, it would save him some anxious hours. That is my confession." Again Harry tried to feel what he told himself was a just resentment, but the sentiment that he raised in his mind was but a phantom. He ought, so he considered, to feel that his liberty was being tampered with, but this curiously self-possessed man appeared to have the gift of impeccable meddling. Then he laughed outright. "I simply do not know what to say to you," he said. "You take it upon yourself to interfere with affairs of mine that do not in the least concern you, and yet I don't really resent it." "In that you are quite wise," remarked the doctor. Harry threw down his pen. "And not content with that, you patronize me, and pat me on the back," he said. "I am not at all sure that I intend to stand it. Pray, if I may so far interfere in your concerns, what did you say to Geoffrey?" he asked, with a show of spirit. "I told him not to expect a letter from you yet," said the doctor. "I told him not to be impatient and wish for knots to be cut as long as there was the faintest hope of their being unravelled." "Ah, there is not the faintest," broke in Harry. "You too, then, acquiesce in the cutting. I hope your friend is more reasonable; less he can not be. You have no right to say, while the thing is yet so recent, that a reconciliation of your friend with Mr. Francis is impossible. And if that were possible it would comprehend, I take it, a reconciliation with you." "Oh, you don't know Geoff, I tell you," said Harry. "He will never apologize. He is not given to rush at conclusions; but when he has concluded, he is more obstinate than all the beasts that perish. You waste your trouble if you expect him to recant." The doctor rose. "I repeat, it is too early to expect anything," he said. "A difficult situation takes time. If it does not take time, it is not difficult. Be sure of that. One thing alone I was certain of: that any letter from you, believing as you do so utterly in your uncle's absolute innocence--if I could put your feelings more strongly I would--could not tend to mend matters. It would only accentuate your estrangement--temporary, I hope--with your friend. And now have I your pardon for doing what I have done?" "Not yet," said Harry. "What else did you say?" "I said that you were as safe here as in the Bank of England. I asked him to be reasonable. Supposing his wild surmise was true, and that you had a very bitter enemy of your own blood in this house, how could he be so foolhardy as to make another attempt on you just now, when three had so conspicuously miscarried, and such suspicious circumstances were in Mr. Langham's knowledge? For the circumstances," he said, looking gravely at Harry, "were suspicious." "I know they were," said Harry. "Poor old Geoff! Well, I couldn't have written that letter if I had tried till midnight." He got up also, as the dinner gong sounded. "That's dinner, and we are not yet dressed," he said. "But you were quite right to do it for me, Dr. Armytage," and frankness became him infinitely better than reserve. "And you might have added that I have a very good friend here, who looks after both my uncle and myself." Dr. Armytage smiled rather grimly. "I came to the conclusion that such a statement would not have increased his confidence," he said, "either in me or in your safety. There is no sense in gushing, particularly if one gushes about one's self." That night, when the doctor made his last visit to Mr. Francis, he brought him as usual some small, affectionate message from Harry, and Mr. Francis yawned, for he was sleepy, and made no immediate reply. But in a moment or two he roused himself. "My love, my very best love," he said, "and any convincing tenderness you please. By the way, how do you and he get on together? Is it very trying? I am afraid so. But it is of the utmost importance that you should gain Harry's confidence, that you should make him trust you." "So you told me, and, without boasting, I think I may say that I have been fairly successful. I made a good beginning, you know, the first night I was here." "Ah, yes, that sleeping-draught," said Mr. Francis appreciatively. "A little bromide of potassium you told me; quite simple and harmless. A charming drug, and an ingenious idea. Yes, Harry's consenting to take a sleeping-draught from your hands certainly showed that if he was disposed not to trust you, he was fighting that inclination. And you have improved your advantage, dear Godfrey?" "Yes, we are on excellent terms. And, to tell you the truth, I do not find it trying at all. Your nephew is both amiable and intelligent." "Poor Harry!" said Mr. Francis softly. "Yes, his very simplicity has a certain charm, has it not? It is also a very convenient quality. Well, I am to go to sleep I suppose: I sleep so well now! And you intend to take me to London at the end of the week?" "That was the proposal," said the doctor. "And you, being an autocrat--for, indeed, doctors are the only autocrats we have left--insist on it. I assure you it will be the best plan. That young cub who left the other day has wits of a kind; he is rather sharp. It will quiet his outrageous suspicions, I think, if I leave Vail soon. I hope Harry will not be very dull alone," he added. "He may not choose to stop here," said the doctor. "It does not matter," said Mr. Francis. "He is certain to come back here before his marriage, to see that the house is quite ready to receive them after their honeymoon--'honeymoon! honeymoon!'" he repeated. "I count on that. By the way, do you call him Harry yet?" "No." "Dear Godfrey, how short and glum you are! I do not suppose I have had a monosyllabic reply for ten years: they are so unnecessarily curt. But try to call him by his Christian name: it produces an admirable effect, and so cheaply. Practise saying, 'Harry, Harry,' when you are alone. You will find it makes it easier. Ah, well, I must go to sleep. Good-night, my dear man." It was therefore definitely settled and announced to Harry that Mr. Francis and the doctor would leave for London at the end of the week. He would be the better, so said the doctor, for a change, for the very dark and autumnal weather which had settled down on Vail during the last day or two was a depressing influence, and he strongly recommended a week in London, where the little arrangements and excitements incident to settling into the flat would keep him agreeably occupied. Mr. Francis dined downstairs on the last night before he left, and seemed his buoyant self again. During the afternoon incessant bubblings from the flute had come from his room, and that sound had been to Harry like the voice of some familiar friend returned. His uncle indeed had playfully prefaced his own entry into the hall, after the gong had sounded, with the tune of "See, the conquering Hero comes," a little thin on this solo instrument, but he had marched in time to it with an incomparable gaiety, with foot high-lifted and a pointed toe. "And you, dear Harry," he asked, as they had seated themselves, after Mr. Francis had said grace, "what are your plans? I was half inclined to rebel when our dear autocrat gave me my marching orders, and I heard that you, perhaps, would be left here alone, but my disaffection was quelled by a look. Has Godfrey given you any of his quelling looks, I wonder? But how long do you stop here?" "Three or four days only, now," said Harry. "Then I go to the Oxteds' for a week, and come back here again by the beginning of November for ten days. After that, London till the 15th." "Dear fellow, so near as that, so near as that, is it?" said Mr. Francis. "Ah, Harry!"--and he held out his hand to him. Then, seeing that the serious note was slightly embarrassing to the young man: "Ah! good Templeton has given us the Luck again!" he cried, changing the subject abruptly. "Upon my word, the thing seems to grow brighter and more dazzling each time I see it.--This nephew of mine, I must tell you, my dear Godfrey, is a very foolish fellow in some ways. He almost--I may say almost, Harry--believes in that old legend. Really, a remarkable survival of superstition among the educated classes. I shall write to the Psychical Research about it. That amiable society collects nightmares and superstitions, I am told. A quaint hobby." "I have drunk obediently to the Luck, night after night, have I not, Harry?" said the doctor. "Of course. It is a rule of the house. By the way, let us set that point at rest. Dr. Armytage told me that you believed in the Luck, Uncle Francis. I simply couldn't credit it. You have always ridiculed me for even pretending to." Mr. Francis laughed. "Harry, that medical man can not keep a secret," he said. "No, my dear boy, I am only joking, but it is quite true that I have found myself wondering, after your extraordinary series of accidents early in this year, whether it were possible that there could be anything in it." He paused a moment, and then went on quite naturally. "And these last three horrible escapes of yours," he said. "How strange! The ice house, frost; the gun, fire; the sluice, rain. There are more things in heaven and earth-- Well, well!" Here was proof, at any rate, that Mr. Francis knew how entirely Harry trusted him, and though at the thought of that awful scene between Geoffrey and his uncle the lad was startled for the moment at so direct a mention of that which had caused it, it was something of a relief to know that the subject did not cause Mr. Francis pain. "Yes, taken all round, it would be sufficient to convince the most hardened sceptic," he said. "Poor old Luck! What an abominably futile business it has made of it all!" Mr. Francis suddenly covered his face with his hand. "Ah! it won't do to jest about," he said. "I spoke lightly, without thinking, but I find I can not quite stand it, dear Harry. It is too recent, too terrible!" At this the talk veered to less intimate subjects, and before a couple of minutes were passed Mr. Francis was again in that exuberance of spirits which had made him play "See, the conquering Hero comes." He had always some contribution apposite and gay to make to the conversation, capable of fantastic development and garnished with pleasant conceits. But for him the meal would have somewhat languished, for, whether it was that Harry's old habit of reserve had returned to him, or that his thoughts were again a prey to the perplexities which his uncle's words might have recalled, he was unwontedly silent; while on the part of the doctor it seemed that a somewhat absent assent or dissent, and that only when directly appealed to, was all he had to give. But Mr. Francis was the man for the moment; he rose to the social emergency, and he told a hundred little anecdotes, diversified and amusing, and the growing silence of the other two was but a foil to the amazing agility of his tongue. But the most capacious measure is emptied at last, and about the time of dessert, spent and dropping shots, without effect, were the only remnant of that loquacious artillery. And it was in silence that the first glasses of port were poured out, and to break a notable hush that Harry rose. "The Luck," he said. "I drink to the Luck." The doctor and Mr. Francis rose to the toast, the latter with too eager an alacrity. His napkin, which he had flung on the table, caught his glass, and the wine was spilled. On the same day that the doctor and Mr. Francis were travelling up from Vail, Geoffrey was also going to London, in consequence of a strangely unexpected summons. He had duly received the doctor's letter a week ago, and this had been followed three days later by a shorter note, informing him that he and Mr. Francis were leaving Vail for London on the Thursday following, and asking if Geoffrey would give the writer an opportunity of seeing him on a matter the importance of which could not be estimated. Dr. Armytage would be at his house that evening between five and seven, or, if these hours would not suit, he asked Geoffrey to name any time which was convenient to him after their arrival in London, and he would make a point of being in then, laying any other engagement he might have aside. Then followed a notable sentence: "It occurs to me," wrote the doctor, "that you, following the thread of the suspicions of which Lord Vail has spoken to me, may see in this request a deep-laid scheme for insuring your presence in London on a given day and hour, and your certain absence from any other place. But I beg you to ask yourself why, if such were the case, I should have written to you at all. I may add that Mr. Francis Vail and I reach Paddington at 12.37 (midday) on Thursday. Be at the station, if you will, and assure yourself that we have left Vail." So far the letter ran with the precision and orderliness of a despatch. Then followed the signature, and after the signature a strange postscript: "I must see you--I must see you," read Geoffrey, and the writer's pen had spluttered with the underlining of the words. No very long consideration was necessary, but knowing from Lady Oxted what he did of the doctor's antecedents, it was clearly possible that he might be placing himself in a position of some personal danger. To attempt to form any accurate idea of the scheme which might conceivably lie latent behind this letter was an idle task; but what he saw, and that without shadow of doubt, but with a certain exultation, was, that it was he above all men whom Mr. Francis had most reason to fear, and as long as he was at large with all the circumstantial evidence that he held, it was clearly very unlikely that any further attempt could be immediately contemplated against Harry, for the risk would be prodigious. So far, then, it looked that this letter might be a bold and cunning scheme to get him too into the power of this hellish man. On the other hand, he could not neglect the possible chance: the letter might conceivably be genuinely inspired. Looking at it coolly, as was his habit of mind, he thought that the balance of probability dipped to the sinister side: this Dr. Armytage was far more likely to be Mr. Francis's confederate than a disinterested doctor, or a foe. Yet there was a certain touch of truth about the spluttering pen of the postscript, and Geoffrey's debate was but of short duration. Then, with wonderment at his own slowness of wit, next moment the obvious safeguard struck him, and he telegraphed to the doctor at 32 Wimpole Street, saying that he would meet him at five o'clock at the junction of Orchard Street with Oxford Street. This was conveniently near to his own lodgings, where they could retire to hold conference if it appeared that there was reason for it, while it would be scarcely possible for any one, even with the legions of hell to back him, to spirit away an active young man from that populous thoroughfare without attracting public attention. Geoffrey arrived in London late in the forenoon, and spent a couple of hours in writing out with the most minute particulars the account of all those incidents on which his suspicions were founded, and which had led to his scene with Mr. Francis. This he sealed up in an envelope, and wrote directions on the outside that, in case nothing more was heard from him till Monday, midday, it was to be opened. He put this into a larger envelope, addressed it with a short note to his father, and posted it. Finally, before he set out for his rendezvous at the corner of Orchard Street, he slipped a loaded revolver into his breast pocket, to guard against the very remote possibility of his being attacked in his own rooms. Its presence there, though not unattended with qualms, for he was something of a stranger to this branch of firearms, yet filled him with a secret glee of adventure. Punctually at five he arrived at the appointed corner, and a few moments' observation of the shifting and changing crowd was enough to enable him to single out a man spare and dark who also lingered there. It was evident, too, that he had observed Geoffrey, no less than Geoffrey had observed him, and, on the third or fourth occasion that their eyes met, the man crossed the street to him. "Mr. Geoffrey Langham?" he asked, and to Geoff's silent gesture of assent, "I am Dr. Armytage." They turned and walked a little way down Oxford Street before either spoke again. Then said the doctor: "Your plan was reasonable, that we should meet in some public place: it was natural that you should not wish to trust yourself to my house. But I would suggest that if we are to talk in public, we get into a hansom, or I should prefer a four-wheeler." "Why?" asked Geoffrey. "Because we are dealing, or I hope shall soon be dealing, with a very subtle man, who for aught I know may be watching either you or me." Geoffrey wheeled round quickly. "Come to my rooms in Orchard Street," he said--"No. 12. I will walk on the other side of the road." The distance was but a few dozen yards, and three minutes later the two were in the sitting room, which overlooked the street. Geoffrey pointed to a seat, and waited for the other to open the conversation. "I repeat," said the doctor, "that your amendment of our plan was reasonable, for you have little reason to trust me." "It seems to me so," said Geoffrey. "I thought it wise to take that and other precautions. But it was you who asked for this interview. Kindly tell me what you have to say." "It is told in two words," said Dr. Armytage. "Your friend Lord Vail has, by almost a miracle of luck, escaped from three well-devised schemes against his life. Thrice has Mr. Francis failed. We can not expect such luck to continue." Not a muscle of Geoffrey's face moved. "You mean he will make another attempt," he said. "He will certainly make another attempt." Geoffrey's hands were playing with a box of cigarettes on the table, opening and shutting the lid in a careful and purposeless manner. "Here, smoke," he said, "and give me a minute to think." The doctor took a cigarette, lit it, and waited. He had smoked it half down before Geoffrey spoke again. "You see my position," he said at length. "There is no harm that I can see in my telling you that I know how intimate you are with Mr. Francis. I am wondering whether possibly I may be aiding him and you by seeing you; that is the truth. For your intimacy with Mr. Francis was very close as long as three-and-twenty years ago--at the time, let us say, of the violent death of Harold Harmsworth. That is so, I believe." "Certainly," said the doctor. "I received, I may tell you, two thousand pounds for the service I did Mr. Francis at the coroner's inquest." Geoffrey looked up quickly. "Ah! that sounds genuine," he said. "About that you must decide for yourself," said the doctor. Geoffrey snapped down the lid of the cigarette box, took out of his coat pocket the revolver he had put there, and laid it on the table close to the doctor's hand. "I have decided, you see, to trust you," he said. "Perhaps my parting with that revolver is an unconvincing proof, for it would certainly be incautious of you to shoot me here and now, but I can think of nothing better. There it is, anyhow." Dr. Armytage took up the revolver and opened it. "Six chambers, all loaded, I perceive," he said. "Let me return it you as I received it. I have no use for it." Geoffrey took it from his hand and put it back in the table drawer. "And now let us talk," he said. An extraordinary look of relief crossed the doctor's face; the whole man seemed to brighten to the eye. "I hardly dared hope you would trust me," he said, "and your affection for your friend must have been strong. But let us waste no more time. Yes, your suspicions were quite correct. Harry Vail has no bitterer enemy than his uncle. He has made no less than three attempts to put him out of the way." "You speak as if you were sure of it," said Geoffrey. "I am; but what evidence have we? It would not take a barrister ten minutes to tear it to shreds, for it is entirely circumstantial, and weak at that. There is the devilish cunning of the man. Again, if we are to save Harry, we must save him in spite of himself, for he believes not a word of it, and we deal with a man who is cunning and utterly unscrupulous--far more cunning, probably, than you and I put together. But we have one great advantage over him." "What is that?" asked Geoffrey. "The fact that he counts on me to be his accomplice. If we succeed, I am to have ten thousand pounds." At these words, distrust again flared high in Geoffrey's mind, refusing to be darkened--a beacon. "God give you your portion in hell," he cried, "if you are playing a double game!" The doctor showed no sign of resentment, but he did not immediately reply. "This will not do at all," he said at length. "Either you trust me, or you do not. If you do not, I will go: we are but wasting words. I may remind you, however, that if I am playing a double game, my conduct in wishing to see you is utterly unaccountable; but if not, that it will be barely possible for me alone to save your friend, for it is my strong impression that Mr. Francis's man--Sanders, is it not?--will help his master. Come, which is it to be?" "Yes, I trust you," said Geoffrey in great agitation. "I ought never to have said that. Please go on." "I can give you no certain details yet," said the doctor, "but the attempt will be made between Harry's return to Vail from Lady Oxted's, where he goes in a few days, and his moving to London before the marriage. So much I have gathered from Mr. Francis. It is, you will understand, of the utmost importance to him that the marriage should never be consummated. More exactly than that I can not tell you, but I want you, in any case, to hold yourself in readiness to come to Vail, or anywhere else, at a moment's notice, and at a word from me." "Yes, I promise that," said Geoffrey. "The particulars I can not give you," continued the doctor, "for I do not yet know them; indeed, I doubt whether Mr. Francis has yet worked them out himself. But to-day, as we were coming up in the train, he blew on his flute a long time, and then said suddenly to me: 'I have a new hobby; the properties of certain powerful drugs. We will have some great talks about drugs when we are in London.' From this I gathered that he means to poison Harry." "The damned old man!" exclaimed Geoffrey. "Precisely. Now, his motive you know or guess: he is heir. But from what I have seen of him lately, he sets less store by that than on the fact that Harry's death will give him the Luck." "The Luck! He doesn't believe in the Luck!" cried Geoffrey. "I have heard him laugh at Harry a hundred times for pretending to believe in it." "There you are wrong," said the doctor. "I should be rather tempted to say that the Luck is the only thing in the world he does believe in. I tell you this for an obvious reason: he is not sane on the point; we are dealing with a monomaniac, and he is more to be feared than a sane man. He will run greater risks to secure his end. But it is late: I must go. During the next week I shall certainly learn the whole of Mr. Francis's plans, for I shall refuse to help him in any way unless I know all. Good-bye. You will please stop in London till you hear from me." Geoffrey got up. "Tell me," he said, "when did you determine to help Harry?" "I do not think that if I told you, you would trust me the more," said the doctor. "I assure you I shall not trust you less." Dr. Armytage took his umbrella from the corner. "A fortnight ago only," he said, "on the day I first saw Harry. Think of me as you will, so long as you do what I tell you. I really care very little about anything else, even whether you trust or mistrust me, provided only you behave as if you trusted me. Yes, till I saw him, and spent the evening with him on the day you left; prescribed for his agitated nerves, and gave him a sleeping-draught----" "I'm glad I didn't know that before," said Geoffrey frankly. "It might certainly have caused you some uneasiness. But not till then did I decide to save him if I could, and not to do--the other thing. And every day strengthened my decision, and the thought of the ten thousand pounds grew less attractive. My reason is hard to give you, convincingly, at any rate. It was due, perhaps, to a great charm and attractiveness which Lord Vail possesses; it was due, perhaps, to an idea in my own mind that I would not commit murder. That sounds a little crude, does it not? But we are dealing with crudities. Good-bye again." Geoffrey held out his hand. "I trust you," he said, "quite completely. And so, it seems, does Harry. I do not believe that we are both wrong." Dr. Armytage turned quickly away without a word. A moment afterward the street door banged behind him. CHAPTER XXII LADY OXTED HAS A BAD NIGHT Harry was sitting cross-legged on the hearth rug after dinner, poking the fire in an idiotic manner with the tongs. Gun cotton would have smouldered out under so illiterate a stroke. He was also talking with about equal vivacity and vacuity to Lady Oxted and Evie, but while his conversation was not more than difficult to bear, his poking of the fire was quite intolerable. Lady Oxted got swiftly and silently up from her chair, and, in the manner of a stooping hawk, took the instrument from him. "We can attend better, dear Harry," she said, "to your most interesting conversation if you do not distract our minds by making a bayonet of improper fire irons. You can do that after we have gone to bed." "They are improper," said Harry, "but my sense of delicacy forbade my telling you so. How a respectable woman like you could tolerate their presence in the house has been more than I was able to imagine. But now the ice is broken-- Oh, I never told you about the ice house! 'More I did." Lord Oxted looked up from the evening paper which he was reading distractedly but diligently, and made a bee line for the door. His exit, though made without protest, was somewhat marked. He had no manners, as his wife often told him. "The ice house," said Harry, as if he were giving out a text to a diminishing congregation, and a spicy emphasis was required to retain the rest, "and the gun, and the sluice." The shadow of Lord Oxted lingered a moment in the doorway at this alluring selection, but immediately disappeared on the next words: "I'll make your blood run cold!" "Has the Luck been singing its nursery rhymes?" asked Lady Oxted, uncertain what to do with that white elephant, the tongs. "Singing!" cried Harry, digging the shovel into the fire. "Singing quo' she! My good woman, I can and will a tale unfold which, if you have tears, prepare to shed them now," said he, with a felicitous air. Lady Oxted annexed the shovel also. Thus there were two white elephants. "I am not the washerwoman, Harry," she remarked with reason. "No, dear aunt," said he, growing suddenly grave. "And if I hadn't been so absurdly happy to-night, I shouldn't have made a joke of it, for, indeed, it was no joke. Anyhow, the doctor congratulated me on my admirable nerves." "Some people when they prepare to tell a story," said Lady Oxted, "begin at the beginning. Others--this is without prejudice--begin at the end and work laboriously and slowly backward. Let me at least ask you, Harry, not to be slow. Tell us about the doctor, as we are to go backward. Did his name begin with an A?" "Quite right," said Harry, "and it went on with an R." Lady Oxted dropped her white elephants on the carpet and sat down by Evie. "Armytage?" she asked, and the fooling was gone from her voice. "Right again. You had much better tell the whole story for yourself, hadn't you?" "No; when other people begin to talk about the Luck, I take no part in the conversation," said she, "except, at least, when Geoffrey is here, and then I talk of bears and bulls." The Harry who had played bayonet with the tongs had by this time vanished; vanished also were the flying skirts of farce, and in absolute silence on the part of his audience, and in gravity on his own, he told them the three adventures, narrating only the salient facts, and alluding neither directly nor otherwise to Geoffrey or his uncle. But while his tale was yet young, Evie crossed from the sofa where she had been sitting with Lady Oxted and joined Harry on the hearth rug. One hand held her fan, the other was on her lap. Of the latter Harry easily possessed himself, and the tale of the gun was told with it in his. But as he spoke of the raking gash that riddled the cornice and ceiling of the gun room, it was suddenly withdrawn and laid on his shoulder. "O Harry, Harry!" she murmured. He turned and stopped, spontaneously responsive. "My darling," he said, "I ought never to have told you. Only I could not help telling you some time, and why not now? Was it not better to tell you like this, making no confidence of it?" If ever a word ought to have carried the weight of a hint, the word was here. But Lady Oxted showed not the slightest sign of following her husband, or saying she must write two notes. "Go on, Harry," she said. "We are waiting. So the gun went off?" But Harry turned to the girl. "It is with you," he said. "Will you have the third adventure or not? Simply as you wish. Here am I, anyhow." "Yes, tell us," she said. At the end Lady Oxted rose crisply. "I never heard of such impotent magic in all my life," she said. "Really, Harry, if you must tell us supernatural experiences in the evening, we have a right to expect to be pleasantly frightened. But I have never been less frightened. You whistled your way into an ice house; you took up a gun carelessly; you stood on a piece of unsafe stonework.--If I were you, Evie, I should buy him a nice leading-rein." These brutalities were effective, and banished the subject, and, without pausing to comment or let others comment, Lady Oxted sent for her husband, and they sat down to a table of bridge. "The only thing I insist on," he said, "is that my wife shall be my partner. Her curious processes of thought, when she is engaged in this kind of brain work, are a shade less disconcerting and obscure to me than they would be to others. _Aimer c'est tout comprendre._ And if I do not quite understand them all," he added, as he cut for deal, "I understand more than anybody else.--Eh, dear Violet?" Lady Oxted's brow was always clouded when she played bridge, and to-night the blackness of the thunderstorm that sat there was not appreciably denser than usual. She played with a curious and unfortunate mixture of timorousness when the declaration was with her, and a lively confidence in the unparalleled strength of her partner's hand when the declaration was passed to her. Thus at the end of two hours, as these methods to-night were more marked than usual, the house of Oxted was sensibly impoverished. But with the rising from the card table her disquieted looks showed no betterment, and her husband offered consolation. "We can easily sell the Grosvenor Square house," he said, "if it is that which is bothering you, Violet; and if that is not enough we can give up coffee after dinner, and have no parties. The world is too much with us." "And with the proceeds we can buy a handbook on bridge," said she with spirit. "I will give it you for a present at Christmas, Bob. Let us go to bed." Lady Oxted employed, in the almost daily conduct of her life, methods which she characterized as diplomatic. A less indulgent critic than herself might have labelled them with a shorter and directer word, yet not have felt that he was harsh, for the diplomatic methods did not exclude what we may elegantly term evasions of the truth. To-night, for instance, she talked with Evie for a few minutes only in her bedroom, and exacted a promise that she would go to bed at once, for she looked very tired. For herself she would have it known that her head was splitting, that if she got influenza again she would turn atheist. With these immoderate statements she secured herself from interruption, and went, not to bed, but to the smoking room, where she found Harry alone. The rustling of her dress made him look up quickly, and the most undiplomatic disappointment was evident on his face. "No, I am not Evie," remarked this clear-sighted lady. "She is tired and has gone to bed, so I came for a chat with you. Dear Harry, it is so nice to see you again! But what terrible adventures you have been through! I want to hear of them more particularly, but I thought it would frighten Evie to talk of them longer. That is why I was abrupt to you." "And so she is tired! Diplomacy?" said Harry. "Yes, just a touch of diplomacy," assented Lady Oxted, "for she looked scared and frightened. Now were you alone when all these things happened, or was Dr. Armytage there? And how did Dr. Armytage come to be at Vail at all?" "He came to Vail," said Harry, "on the evening of the third affair, the breaking of the sluice. I telegraphed for him because I was frightened about my uncle. He is liable, you know, to cardiac attacks, and I was afraid of one coming on." "He was naturally agitated at your series of escapes," said Lady Oxted. "Naturally," said Harry. Lady Oxted rose with some impatience, and threw diplomacy aside. "Your efforts at dissimulation are pitiable, Harry," said she. "If you won't tell me what happened, say so: I am going to fish no more." Harry did not immediately reply, and Lady Oxted continued. "Seriously speaking," she said, "I think I ought to know. If there is nothing more, if your conscience allows you to say that there is nothing to tell, I am content. If you can not say that, I think you ought to tell me." "Do you not think that you are putting an unfair pressure on me?" asked Harry. "No, for you are no longer only your own master. You must consider not only yourself, but Evie. In her mother's absence I have a certain duty toward her. I do not ask you from curiosity, but because of the relations in which both you and I stand to her. You have within the last few weeks been in three positions of extreme personal danger. Can you, however vaguely, account for this? Have there been no suspicious circumstances of any kind which might lead any one to think that these were not entirely accidents? You say that Geoffrey was in the house on all these occasions. Did he take it all as lightly as you seem to?" "I would rather not bring Geoffrey into it," said Harry. "Have you quarrelled?" "Yes, I suppose you may say that we have quarrelled," he replied. "Harry, why will you not tell me, and save my asking you all these questions? I intend to go on asking them. Was your quarrel with Geoffrey connected in any way with these accidents?" "Oh, give me a minute!" cried Harry. "I want to make up my mind whether I am going to tell you or not. I suppose, if I did not, you would go to Geoff." "Certainly I should," said Lady Oxted promptly, although this had not occurred to her. "Well, it is better that I should tell you than he," said Harry, and without more words he told her all that he had purposely left unsaid, from the mistaken direction which had sent him to the ice house instead of the summerhouse, down to the scene in the smoking room when he had parted with Geoffrey. She heard him in silence without question or interruption, and when he had finished, still she said nothing. Apt and ready as she was for the ordinary social emergency, she could frame nothing for this. She could not say what she thought, outspokenly like Geoffrey, for Harry's sake; she would not say what she did not think, in spite of her diplomatic tendencies, for her own. At last the silence became portentous, and Harry broke it. "Have I then lost another friend in addition to Geoffrey?" he said, in a voice that was not very steady. He could not have given her a better lead. "Ah! do not say things like that, Harry," she said. "You do not think it possible, in the first place, and even if you did it would be no part of wisdom to say it. But I tell you frankly that, though Geoffrey seems to me to have spoken most hastily and unwisely, yet I can understand what he felt. There are, I don't deny that I see it, many curious circumstances about all these adventures, which lend reasonableness--pardon me--to his suspicions." "I know--I know all that," said Harry, "but I find it a sheer impossibility to believe them in any degree at all. Geoffrey's suspicions are out of the question. That being so, I can not away with what he has done, with the speaking to my uncle like that; I can not away with that condition of mind to which, however plausible the idea, the idea was possible." Lady Oxted was a quick thinker; she knew, moreover, that to decide wrong was better than not to decide at all; and before Harry had finished speaking, she was determined on her line of action. Geoffrey, she rightly guessed, had at least as much influence with Harry as herself, yet even Geoffrey, in all the heat and horror of these adventures, had been powerless to move him. Her chance, then, speaking at this cooler distance, had scarcely the slightest prospect of success, and secret coalition with Geoffrey was evidently preferable to open collision with Harry. "I see--I quite see," she said; "but, O Harry, do not throw away a friend lightly! Geoff is a good fellow, and you must remember that it was for your sake that he risked and suffered a quarrel with you. Friends are not so common as sparrows! You will not find them under every house-roof. Don't do anything in a hurry: wait. No situation is hopeless until you have given time a chance to work. Don't write, if you have not already done so, any angry letter; or worse, any dignified, calm, world-without-end letter. It is so easy to make an estrangement permanent! You can always do that." "I haven't written at all," said Harry. "I tried to, but I could not do it. There is no hurry; besides, Geoffrey will not expect to hear from me; Dr. Armytage wrote to tell him not to." Lady Oxted just succeeded in suppressing the exclamation of surprise that was on her lips. "That was very kind of him, and wise as well," she said. "He is both the one and the other," said Harry. "He was down at Vail a week. I liked him immensely. But I don't mind telling you that I was glad to get away, to part with him, with Uncle Francis, with the Luck for a time. I felt as if there were some occult conjuncture against me, and I didn't like it. I had continually to keep a hold on myself, to make an effort not to be scared. But here I am being beautifully relaxed. I feel secure--yes, that's the word." Lady Oxted continued her diplomatic course. "There is nothing so catching as superstition," she said, "and all the evening, since you told Evie and me about it, I have been wondering-- Oh, it must be all nonsense!" she cried. "You mean the Luck?" asked Harry. "Is Saul also among the prophets?" "Yes, I mean the Luck. How does the nursery rhyme go? Fire and frost and rain, isn't it? Well, there they all were, and it is no use denying it." "Not the slightest," said Harry. "Certainly it is very strange. Harry, I don't like the Luck at all. It's uncanny. I wish you would smash it, or throw it into the sea. Yet, somehow, I feel as if you were safe as long as you are here, away from it. I wish you would stop here till your marriage. Then you go away, you see, for six weeks, and in the meantime some burglar might be kind enough to steal it." Harry shook his head. "No, I put the good things it has brought me much higher than the evil," he said. "And it is going to bring me another very good thing--the best. After that, if you like, I will smash it." "Well, stay here till your marriage, anyhow." "I must go down to Vail once, to see that they have finished up. The house was upside down when I was there. But, barring a couple of days then, there is nothing I should like better. You will have nearly a month of me, though. Consider well." "Then stop till I tell you I can not bear you any longer. I am a candid woman, and fond of giving pain, and I promise to speak out. Dear me, it is nearly one! I must go to bed, and if I dream of the Luck it will be your fault." Lady Oxted did not dream at all for a very long time that night: she was at her wits' end what to do. All Scotland Yard, with all the detectives of improbable fiction thrown in to aid, were powerless to help, for the evidence against Mr. Francis in Harry's story, though conclusive to her own mind, would weigh lighter than chaff in cross-examination. And no further evidence was procurable until Mr. Francis made another attempt, and at the thought she shuddered. What, too, was that sinister doctor doing at Vail? What was the meaning of the seeming friendliness in averting a final rupture between Harry and Geoffrey? He had written, according to his own account, a letter to Geoffrey which should avoid this, but what did his letter really contain? It was far more likely that he had told him that the rupture was final, for clearly he and Mr. Francis would not want to risk the possibility of Geoffrey, who knew all, and whose attitude was so avowedly hostile, coming down to Vail again. The only consolation was that Harry for the present was safe, and that she could go up to London next day and see Geoffrey. But what could they do even together? What defence was possible when the blow might fall at any moment from any unsuspected quarter? By degrees, as she paced her room, a kind of clearness came to her. Mr. Francis's design was evident: he had shown his hand by the nature of his earlier attempts, in which he had tried to stop Harry's marriage. Then, in the miscarriage of that, he had turned to directer deeds--fouler they could scarcely be, but of more violent sort. There had been a species of awful art in his doings; he had taken, with a fiend's gusto and pleasure in the ingenuity of it (so she pictured), Harry's avowed superstition in the power of the Luck, to compass his ends. As a musician takes a subject, and on this theme works out a fugue; as an artist paints a portrait in a definite preconceived scheme of colour, so had Mr. Francis taken the Luck, and the dangers it was thought to bring to its possessor: these he had elaborated, put into practical shape. It must have dwelt in his mind like a lunatic's idea; not only, as in the case of the gun, did he make his opportunity, but, as in the affair of the ice house, he must have been alert, receptive, instinctively and instantaneously turning to his ends whatever chance put in his way. This thought brought her a certain feeling of relief on the one hand, but on the other it added an indefinite terror. No man morally sane could devise and steadily prosecute so finished a scheme; the very thoroughness and consistency of the three attempts stamped them as the work of a madman. Nine tenths of the blood murderously shed on the earth was to be put down to a spasm of ungovernable anger and hate, which at the moment possessed the murderer; this long premeditation, this careful following of one idea by which frost, fire, and rain should be the direct causes of Harry's death, was not to be attributed--so devilish and so finished was the application--to a sane author. Here lay the consolation: her shuddering horror of the white-haired old gentleman, with his flute-playing and his boyish yet courtly manner, was a little assuaged, and gave way to mere human pity for a mind deranged. But simultaneously, as if with a clash of cymbals, her fear of him, defenceless, bewildered, broke out: that cunning of a madman was far more formidable than the schemings of a sane man. He would soon, maddened by failure, reck nothing of what happened to him, so that he attained his object. What, then, looking at it thus, was his object? The mere death of Harry, merely the lust for blood? That seemed hardly possible. She could not put him down as a homicidal maniac, since it seemed that he had no desire to kill for killing's sake, and the world was not yet staggered with a catalogue of subtle, undetected murders. Nor was the explanation that he wished to inherit Vail and its somewhat insufficient revenues more satisfactory. He was old; he had, so far as any one could guess, no wish for more of this world's goods than he possessed under Harry's generosity; the motive could scarcely be here. Then in a flash a more likely solution struck her. The Luck--perhaps he wanted the Luck! A year of ownership, so she told herself, had already affected even Harry's sanity in this regard. What if here was a man, old and already poised on the edge of his dug grave, who all his life long had dreamed of and itched for it, believing God knew what was in store for its possessor? This, she guessed, was the taint of blood, the same that so mysteriously, though uncriminally, possessed Harry. Here, perhaps, was the cause, not the fire and the frost and the rain, but the belief in their perils, coupled with the belief in great and unwonted good fortune which the possession of it gave. Mr. Francis had more than once, in her hearing, laughed at Harry for his fantastic allegiance to the heirloom, but this, if anything, confirmed Lady Oxted in her theory. This cunning was of consistency with the rest. Long since she had dismissed her maid, and tired with fruitless thought, and baffled with but dimly cipherable perils, she finished her undressing and blew out the lights. But through all the dark hours she was clutched by the night-hag. Now the Luck appeared to her like the Grail in Parsifal, emitting an unearthly radiance, but even as she gazed she would suddenly be stricken with the knowledge that the brightness of it was not of heavenly but of diabolic birth; a piercing light emanated therefrom, but of infernal red, and voices from the pit moaned round it. Then it would be gone, and for a little while a wriggling darkness succeeded, but slowly the break in the blackness which heralded its coming would begin to shine again and grow intolerably bright; faint lines where it would shortly appear, stretched themselves upon the fields of vision, growing momentarily more distinct, but instead of the Luck, there came, first in outline, then in awful and indelible vividness, the features of Mr. Francis, now very kind and gentle, now a mask of tormented fury. Next morning she found that her resolve to see Geoffrey without delay had not been diminished by the scattered phantoms of the night, and some lame toothache excuse served her end. She did not certainly know whether he was in London or not, and for safety's sake she sent him two telegrams--the one to his father's house in Kent, the second to his lodging in Orchard Street--both bidding him come to lunch that day in Grosvenor Square without fail. The one addressed to London found him first, since, after his interview with Dr. Armytage, he had stayed on there; and this, followed after an hour's interval by the other sent on from his father's house, constituted a call of urgency. He therefore obeyed the summons, leaving a note for Dr. Armytage, as had been agreed between them, to say when he should be in again, and where he had gone. The conference began after lunch. Each found it in a measure a relief to be able to confide the secret haunting sense of peril to another. Each, on the other hand, was horrified to find that some one else shared the apprehensions each still hoped might be phantasmal. Geoffrey, on his part, had his account of his dealings with Dr. Armytage to add to Lady Oxted's information; she her own conviction that they were dealing with a man not morally sane, whose one desire was to have and to hold the Luck. To her, this alliance with Dr. Armytage, of which Geoffrey told her, seemed but a doubtful gain. "What does one know of him?" she asked. "Nothing that is not bad. Mr. Francis could not have chosen a more apt or a more unscrupulous tool. He got two thousand pounds, you tell me, for his services in connection with the Harmsworth case: what will he not do for ten? Oh, we may be dealing with a cunning of which we have no conception! What if all this was told you simply to blind you? Nothing can be more probable, and how admirably it has succeeded! Already you trust the man--their object, as far as you are concerned, is gained." "I had to trust him or distrust him," said Geoffrey, "and I chose to do the former. If I had chosen the latter, the door would have closed on him, and I do not see that we should be any better off than we are now. If he is dealing straight with us, we have an immense advantage in knowing all he knows of Mr. Francis's plans; if he is not, he can, at the most, give us misleading information, which is not worse than none at all." Lady Oxted considered this in silence a moment. "Yes, that is true," she said; "yet, somehow, my flesh misgives me to be allied with that man. O Geoffrey, is it because this awful Luck has cast a spell on us that we imagine Harry surrounded by these intimate and immediate perils? Are our fears real? Let us tell ourselves that we are ordinary people, living in an age of prose and police-men; we are not under the Doges! This is the nineteenth century," she said, rising, "or the twentieth, if you will; we look out on Grosvenor Square--a hansom is driving by." She stopped suddenly. "I am wrong," she said; "it is not driving by. It has stopped at the door. And Dr. Armytage has rung the bell. Oh, what shall I do?" she cried. "God in heaven! what are we to do? What has he come to tell us?" Geoffrey got up. "Now quietly, quietly, Lady Oxted," he said. "He has come on a matter of importance, or he would have waited till I returned to Orchard Street. I have decided to trust him, and I suggest, therefore, that we see him together. It is our best chance; it may be our only one." "But I don't trust him," said Lady Oxted. "I distrust him from head to heels." And she bit her finger nails, a thing she had not done since the days of the schoolroom. "Very well; then I shall run on my own lines," and he got up to leave the room. "Wait, Geoffrey," she said. "You are absolutely determined?" "Absolutely." "I yield, then. You, at any rate, have some plan, and I have none.--Yes, show Dr. Armytage in," she said to the man who had brought his card. CHAPTER XXIII THE MEETING IN GROSVENOR SQUARE The doctor entered with the brusqueness of a man who had no knowledge of, or at any rate no regard for, the usages of polite society. He treated Lady Oxted to little more than his profile and an imperceptible pause, which indulgence might construe into a bow, then walked straight up to Geoffrey, with a face businesslike, concentrated. "I had important information," he said, "which I was desirous of telling you without delay. My hansom is waiting." Geoffrey felt his heart thump riotously, a heavy repeated blow. "We have to act immediately, you mean?" he asked. "No, not that," said the doctor. "I only thought----" and he looked for a brief moment at Lady Oxted. She rose. "How do you do, Dr. Armytage?" she said. "Mr. Langham and I were, when you entered, talking about the same business as that on which you have come. Harry Vail, I must tell you, is a great friend of mine; he is staying with me now. Last night he told me the history of the past fortnight very fully. It will not therefore surprise you to learn that I came up to London to-day to see Mr. Langham." "It does not surprise me in the least," he said. "I take it, then, that you wish me to speak before you. If that is so, I will send my hansom away." He was back again immediately, and waited till the others had sat down, warming his hands at the fire, with his back turned to them. The silence, so to speak, was of his own making, and neither thought to interrupt it. Then, facing them, he spoke. "There is no need, therefore," he began, as if continuing his private train of thought, "that I should speak at any length of what has already happened. Harry, I gather, has told you, Lady Oxted, of his three escapes; he has told you also of his quarrel with his friend here, and the reason of it." There was something in this bald abruptness which pleased Lady Oxted. It looked genuine, but at the same time she made to herself the conscious reservation that it might be a piece of acting. If acting, it was a very decent performance. She gave a silent assent. "You have asked me to speak before you," he went on, "but in doing so I am somewhat at a personal disadvantage. I have no reason to suppose that you trust me; indeed, there is no reason why you should. You know of me, probably, as an intimate friend of Mr. Francis, and when it appears that I am a traitor to him you naturally ask yourself if I am really so. But"--and he paused a moment--"but I do not think that this need much concern me. I am here to tell you in what manner Mr. Francis hopes to kill his nephew. It is our object, I take it, to prevent that." There was something in his tone that smacked of the lecture, so dry and precise was it. But a clearer observer of him than either of his present audience, to whom the words he said were so much more just now than the man who said them, would have seen that an intense agitation quivered beneath the surface. The man was desperately in earnest about something. "There is one more preliminary word," he went on. "We are dealing, so far as my observations go, with a man who is scarcely sane. In the psychology of crime we find that such patient, calculated attempts to take life are usually associated with something else that indicates cerebral disorder--some fixed idea, in short, of an insane character, which is usually the motive for the homicidal desire. That symptom is present here." "The Luck!" exclaimed Lady Oxted. "Precisely. The idea of owning the Luck possesses our--our patient. He believes that it brings its owner dangers possibly, and risks, but compensations of an overwhelming weight. He believes, I may tell you, that it will keep off death, perhaps indefinitely. And to an old man that is a consideration of some importance, especially if he has such an exuberant love of life as Mr. Francis has. On the other hand, we must remember that before the last outbreak, if we may call it such, Mr. Francis procured the death of a man who stood in no relation to the Luck. Yes, he shot young Harmsworth," he said slowly, looking at Lady Oxted, "for nothing more nor less than the insurance money. One may have doubts whether all crime of violent kind is not a form of insanity. But that particular form of insanity is punished with hanging." It is by strange pathways that a woman's mind sometimes moves: she may take short cuts of the most dubious and fallacious kind to avoid a minute's traversing of the safe road, or walk a mile round in order to avoid a puddle over which she could easily step, but she at any rate knows when she has arrived, and at this juncture Lady Oxted got up and held out her hand to the doctor. "I entreat your pardon," she said, "and, in any case, I trust you now." A certain brightness shone in those dark, sad eyes, as he took her hand. "I am glad to know that," he said, "and I advise you, if possible, to continue trusting me. You will have a trial of faith before long." Geoffrey moved impatiently; all three seemed to have forgotten their manners. "Oh, go on, man--go on!" he exclaimed. "Bear in mind, then," said the doctor, "that we may be dealing with a lunatic. This fixed idea inclines me to that belief; the murder of young Harmsworth pulls the other way. But Mr. Francis has now made his plans; he told me them this morning, for I, as you will see, am to figure in them. And what he will do is this." The doctor again paused, and adjusted his finger-tips together. "He expects Harry," he said, "to return to Vail before the end of the month; he and his servant will return about the same time, or perhaps a day or two earlier, for there will be a few arrangements to make. I shall also accompany Mr. Francis, so he tells me, on the ground of his continued ill health." "Ah, those heart attacks!" said Lady Oxted; "are they genuine?" "Perfectly; they are also dangerous. To continue: On the night appointed--that is to say, as soon as we are all there--I am to administer to Harry a drug called metholycine. In all respects it is suitable for Mr. Francis's purpose, and a small dose produces within a very few minutes complete unconsciousness, to which, if no antidote or restorative is applied, succeeds death. It also is extremely volatile, more so even than aconite, and a very few hours after death no trace of it would be found in the stomach or other parts of the body. The drug, however, is exceedingly hard to get; no chemist would conceivably give it to any unauthorized person; but a few years ago I was experimenting with it, and it so happens that I still have some in my possession. Mr. Francis has a most retentive memory, and though I have no recollection of having ever mentioned this fact to him, he asked me this morning whether I had any left. He did so in so quiet and normal a voice that for the moment I was off my guard, and told him I had. But perhaps, after all, it was a lucky occurrence, for he seemed very much pleased, and played on his flute for a time. Then he came back to me and told me what I have already told you, and what I shall now tell you." There was something strangely grim about the composure of the doctor's manner. You would have said he spoke of Danish politics; more grim, perhaps, was this mention of the flute-playing. Certainly it added an extreme vividness to his narrative, and the flute-player was more horrible than the man who planned death. "In this respect, then, first of all," continued the icy voice, "I am useful to him. In the second place, Mr. Francis seems to have a singular horror of doing himself--actually, and with his hands--this deed. In another way also I shall be of service to him, and here I must touch on things more gruesome, but it is best that you should know all. The drug is to be administered late at night, after the servants are out of the way. It is almost completely without taste or odour, and Mr. Francis's suggestion is that a whisky and soda, which he tells me Harry always takes before going to bed, should be the vehicle. Ten minutes after he has taken it he will be unconscious, but he will live for another half hour. During that time we shall carry him down to the plate closet, where the Luck is kept with the rest of the plate; there Sanders will be. That part will be in Sanders's hands, but he will not use firearms, for fear of the noise of the report reaching the servants, and the blow that kills him, you understand, looking at the occurrence from the point of view of the coroner, must be dealt while he is still alive. Otherwise, the absence of effusion of blood and other details would show a doctor that he was already dead when his skull was broken--this is the idea--by a battering blow. Here, again, Mr. Francis anticipates that I shall be of use to him in determining when unconsciousness is quite complete, and death not yet immediate. He has a curiously strong desire that Harry should feel no pain, for he is very fond of him." Lady Oxted and Geoffrey alike were glued to his words, both paler than their wont. As the doctor paused they sought each other's eyes, and found there horror beyond all speech. "Some of the most valuable of the plate," continued the doctor, "will be taken, and, of course, the Luck. The plate will be the perquisite of Sanders; the Luck Mr. Francis will keep secretly, the presumption being that it was stolen also. Why, then, you may ask, should not Mr. Francis simply steal the Luck? For this reason: that as long as Harry lives it is his; on his death it becomes Mr. Francis's. Thus, morning will show the plate closet rifled, and Harry, clubbed to death, on the floor. The plan is complete and ingenious; indeed, it has no weak point. It will appear that Harry, after the servants had gone to bed, drank his whisky and soda, and, hearing something stirring, went downstairs. Finding the door of the plate closet open, he entered, and was instantly felled by a blow on the side of the head, which killed him. The burglars did not arouse any one else in the house, and escaped (even the details are arranged) by the same way as they entered--through the window of the gun room, which looks out, you are aware, on to the garden beds which adjoin the sweep of the carriage drive. Footprints of large, heavy boots will be found there; Mr. Francis bought a pair to-day at some cheap, ready-made shop." Again, a horror palpable as a draught of cold air passed through the auditors, seeming to each to lift the hair upon the scalp. These trivial details of boots and flute-playing were of almost more intimate touch than the crime itself; they brought it at any rate into the range of realities, to the time of to-day or next week, to a familiar setting. Again the doctor spoke. "I have already taken one precaution," he said. "I have emptied from its bottle the real metholycine and substituted common salt. I went to my house hurriedly, after seeing Mr. Francis, to get it, and I brought it away in my pocket. I shall be glad to dispose of it; it is not a thing to carry about." He drew out a small packet, folded up with the precision of a dispensing chemist, and opened it. It contained an ounce of white coarse-grained powder, very like to ordinary salt, and, without more words, he emptied it on the fire. The red-hot coal blackened where he poured, then grew red again, and for a moment an aura of yellow flame flickered over the place. "And Mr. Francis will not find it easy to get more," said the doctor. The effect of this was great and immediate. Both Lady Oxted and Geoffrey felt as much relieved as if an imminent danger had been removed, though the logic of their relief, seeing that they both trusted Dr. Armytage, in whose domain the poison lay, was not capable of bearing examination. At any rate, Lady Oxted sat briskly up from the cramped huddling of the position in which she had listened to the doctor's story, and clapped her hands. "Ha! check number one," she said. "And what next, Dr. Armytage?" "That depends on what end you have in view," said he. "Is Harry's safety all?" "Yes, but his safety must be certain," she said. "I must see that man in a criminal lunatic asylum, or in penal servitude. Harry will never be safe till he is behind bars." "I agree with you," said Geoffrey. Dr. Armytage left the fireplace, where he had been standing since the beginning of the interview, and sat down. "Do you realize what that demands?" he said. "It means that Mr. Francis must be allowed to make the attempt." "Which we have already frustrated," said Lady Oxted, pointing to the fireplace. Dr. Armytage shook his head. "If the idea is to catch him red-handed, that is not sufficient," he said. "Harry takes whisky and soda and salt one night, very little salt, for the drug is potent. He may or he may not notice the salt. What then? Sanders, meantime, is waiting in the plate closet. No doubt we can thus catch Sanders. But that is all." Lady Oxted rang the bell. "We can do nothing," she said, "except go straight to Scotland Yard and put the whole matter in the hands of the police. You will please come with me, Dr. Armytage--Geoffrey too. To us, of course, the evidence is overwhelming: look at it, from the Harmsworth case onward--" and she stopped suddenly and looked at the doctor. "Good heavens! I never thought of that!" she said. The doctor rose. "I, as you may imagine, have thought a good deal of that," he said. "Is it possible by any means to get hold of this man Sanders?" asked Lady Oxted at length. "Get me a hansom," she said to the man who answered the bell. "I should prefer to try that first," said the doctor, "and I will see what I can do. It may be possible to buy the man; he may be scamp enough to be venal. But if we have to go to Scotland Yard, we have to go to Scotland Yard. But for the moment we need not; Harry is safe with you for ten days more, and Mr. Francis is not thinking of leaving London for ten days. Something, perhaps, may turn up in the interval. If not, I am ready." Lady Oxted felt that no words could meet the situation, and did not make the attempt. "Then the hansom shall take me to the station instead," she said. "I have just time to catch my train.--Drive with me there, Geoffrey." She stood up, drawing on her gloves. "Please let me hear from you, Dr. Armytage," she said, "or if you have any communication to make which had better not be written, come down to Oxted, or wire for me to come up. At present, then, there is nothing more to be said." She shook hands, and the three went out through the hall and across the broad pavement to where the hansom was waiting. Lady Oxted got in first, and Geoffrey was already on the step to follow, when a man crossing the road came from behind the hansom and stepped on to the pavement close to where the doctor was standing. "Dear fellow," said a very familiar voice, "what a glorious afternoon!" The thing was so sudden that the doctor had literally no time to lose his nerve. "Get in and don't look round," he said very low to Geoffrey. But he was too late. At the sound of that voice, Geoffrey had already looked round, and he and Mr. Francis for one stricken moment stared at each other. But the pleasant smile did not fade from the old man's face; rather, it seemed fixed there. Simultaneously, from inside the hansom came Lady Oxted's voice. "Get in, Geoff," she said; "we haven't too much time." Mr. Francis advanced a step, so that he could see into the hansom. "Ah, and Lady Oxted too!" he remarked gently.--"Drive on, cabman." The horse broke into a rapid trot, and he and the doctor were left standing together. Mr. Francis stood looking after the diminishing vehicle for a moment, still smiling. "And Lady Oxted, and Lady Oxted," he continued to murmur to himself. Then he turned briskly to his companion and in gentle, low-modulated tones and without haste: "A charming woman--one whom one is delighted to call friend," he said. "And dear Geoffrey too--dear Geoffrey, Harry's great friend. How nice to have even so short a glimpse of him! What good fortune to meet you all together like this! Well, well, I must go on. Good-bye, for the present, my dear man." He turned from him, walked three paces away, then stopped and faced round again. For the moment the doctor thought his eye or his brain had played him some inexplicable trick; he could barely credit that the face now looking at him was the same as that which two seconds ago had been so smiling a show of sunlit urbanity. Now it was scarce human; a fiend or a wild beast, mad with passion and hate, glared at him. The iris of the eye seemed to have swelled till the white was invisible; from each, a pin-point of a pupil was focused on him. Great veins stood out on his forehead and neck, blue and dilated; the lips were drawn back from the mouth till the gums appeared, showing two rows of white and very even teeth. The pleasant rosiness of the face was blotched and mottled with patches of white and purple, the forehead and corners of the quivering mouth were streaked with corrugations so deeply cut that the dividing ridges of flesh cast shadows therein. The stamp of humanity was obliterated. He stood there for perhaps five seconds, his lower jaw working gently up and down as if chewing, and a little foam gathered on his lips. Each moment the doctor expected him either to fall senseless on the pavement or to spring upon him, for it seemed impossible that any human frame could contain so raging an energy of emotion, and yet neither break nor give it outlet. Then the horrible chewing of the jaw ceased, and the man or beast wiped the froth from his lips. "You black, treacherous scoundrel!" he said, very softly. "Do you think I am the sort of man to be thwarted by a faithless subordinate?" He came a step nearer; his mouth still seemed to be forming words, but it was as if the human nature of the man had been so effaced as to preclude speech, and he stood chattering and gesticulating like some angry ape. Yet the resemblance roused in the doctor no sense of the ludicrous, but only a deep-seated horror at this thing which had doffed its humanity like a cloak and become part of the brute creation. He summoned all his courage to his aid--an empty effort, for he knew within himself that if this travesty of a man came but one step nearer he would, in spite of himself, simply turn tail and run from it. But Mr. Francis came no nearer, nor did he speak again, and before the lapse of another five seconds he turned away and walked quickly down toward the corner of the square without looking back. The doctor followed him with his eye, and saw him hail a hansom at the end of Upper Grosvenor Street, get in, and drive northward. He himself stood there, his brain a tumult of bewildered conjecture, and did not see who it was rapidly approaching him till the figure was by him, and he heard his own name called. "I got down as soon as I could stop the cab," said Geoffrey. "He has gone? Where? What has happened?" "He knows I have betrayed him," said the doctor. "That is all. And for the moment he was no longer human. In this mood he will not stop to weigh risks or consequences. Before anything else we must find out where he is going--probably to his own flat, where we must watch him--possibly first to my house--ah! yes, for the metholycine. Thank God, that is harmless!" There were no cabs about, so they started to walk northward in the direction Mr. Francis had taken. At the corner of Green Street they found a disengaged hansom, and drove to 32 Wimpole Street. Here the doctor got out. "Drive on to his flat in Wigmore Street," he said to Geoffrey, "and ask the porter if he has come in. Then come back here." Three minutes later Geoffrey returned. "He came in a minute or two before me," he said. "He has kept his cab." The doctor pointed to a row of bottles on a shelf in his cabinet. "The metholycine is missing," he said. "He came here, where he is known to the servants, told the man he had instructions from me to take a certain bottle from my cases, and was allowed. I asked if he appeared in any way strange or excited. Not a bit of it; he had a smile and a joke as usual. Come on!" "Where?" asked Geoffrey. "To see where his cab goes. By the way, what of Lady Oxted?" "She went on to catch her train. It is far better she should be with Harry. I told her I would telegraph all that happened." "Quite so. Here is Wigmore Street. We will wait in this entry. There is his cab still at the door. Ah! we must have a cab waiting too." He stepped out of the entry, hailed a cab from a rank a little way down the street, and said a few words to the man, pointing out to him the hansom he was to keep in sight. He drew up at the curb opposite their place of observation. Not forty yards in front was Mr. Francis's hansom. The sober, respectable street dozed in the haze of the afternoon sun with the air of a professional man resting for a little from his work. Vehicles were but few, the pavements only sparsely populous, and the roadway nearly empty. The driver of Mr. Francis's cab had got down from his perch, and was talking to the hall porter of the house of flats and pulling at a laggard pipe. Then suddenly both porter and cabman looked up as if they had been called from within, and disappeared into the entry, to come back with various small pieces of luggage. Then the cabman mounted his box, and with the other's assistance drew up a portmanteau on to the roof. At that moment Mr. Francis stepped across the pavement and entered the cab. He had on a straw hat, in his hand was the morocco flute case, on his mouth a smile and thanks to the porter. Sanders followed, and, after a word, got in after him. At the same instant of time the doctor and Geoffrey had sprung into their places, and the two cabs started together. The passage of half a dozen streets was sufficient to make their destination tolerably certain, and when Mr. Francis's cab turned into the steep decline leading to the departure platform at Paddington, the matter was practically beyond doubt. Here the doctor stopped the cab, and they got out. "It is certain," said Geoffrey, though no word had passed between them. "Look! it is ten minutes past five; the fast train to Vail will start in seven minutes. Now what are we to do?" "Harry is at Oxted," said the doctor, as if speaking to himself. "Yes, we only want to be perfectly certain that Mr. Francis goes to Vail." "I will find that out," said Geoffrey. He walked down the incline, past Sanders, who was busy with the luggage, and into the booking office. There was a considerable number of passengers waiting, but Mr. Francis was already high up in the queue. Geoffrey waited with his back turned till he heard him speak to the clerk. "One first and one second single to Vail," he said. With this their information was complete, and he rejoined the doctor. * * * * * Harry at Oxted, Mr. Francis with luggage for a prolonged stay at Vail, here was the sum of it, and the movements were duly telegraphed to Lady Oxted. So far all was well, in such degree as anything could be well in this dark business, and by mutual consent they determined to leave all further deliberations till the morrow. They were fully informed and prepared for all moves. To-morrow, it might be, Mr. Francis would show for what reason he had gone to Vail. CHAPTER XXIV JIM GOES TO BED Geoffrey, in spite of, or perhaps owing to his anxieties, slept long and late, and it was already after ten when he came half dressed from his bedroom to the adjoining sitting room, in quest of letters. But there was no word either from Dr. Armytage or Lady Oxted, and here no news was distinctly good news. No fresh complication had arisen; Harry, it might be certainly assumed, was safe at Oxted, Mr. Francis, as certainly, at Vail, though his safety was a matter of infinitesimal moment. Yet, in spite of this, Geoffrey had no morning face; an intolerable presage of disaster sat heavy on him, and he brooded sombrely over his meal, reading the paper, yet not noting its contents, and the paragraphs were Dutch to him. Even here in London, the fog centre, one must believe of created things; the morning was one of fine and exquisite beauty. Primrose-coloured sunshine flooded the town, the air was brisk with the cleanly smell of autumnal frost. How clearly could he picture to himself what this same hour was like at Vail, how familiar and intimate was the memory of such mornings, when he and Harry had stepped after breakfast into the sparkling coolness of the young day, and the sunshine from without met with a glad thrill of welcome the sunshine from within! The lake lay level and shining--the brain picture had the vividness of authentic hallucination--a wisp of mist still hanging in places over it. Level and shining, too, were the lawns; a pearly mysterious halo moved with the moving shadow of the head. Blackbirds scurried and chuckled over the grass, the beeches were golden in their autumn liveries, a solemn glee even smiled in the gray and toned red of the square house. At that, regret as bitter as tears surged up within him; never again, so he thought, could the particular happiness of those unreflecting days be his; tragedy, like drops from some corroding drug, had fallen in sting and smoke upon him; over that fair scene slept on the wing the destroying angel; between himself and Harry had risen the barrier of irreconcilable estrangement. And, like a monstrous spider, spinning threads God knew where, or to catch what heedless footstep, Mr. Francis stretched his web over every outlet from that house, and sat in each, malign and poisonous. These vague forebodings and the mordancy of regret grew to be unbearable, and, taking his hat, Geoffrey walked out westward, aimlessly enough, only seeking to dull misgivings by the sight of many human faces. The crowd had for him an absorbing fascination; to be in the midst of folk was to put the rein on private fancies, for the spectacle of life claimed all the attention. But this morning this healthful prescription seemed to have lost its efficacy, or the drugs were stale and impotent, and the air was dark with winged fears that came to roost within him, chatting evilly together. Yet the streets were better than his own room, and for nearly two hours he wandered up and down the jostling pavements. Then returning to Orchard Street, he entered his weary room, and his heart stood suddenly still, for on the table was lying a telegram. For a moment he stood by the door, as if fearing even to go near it; then with a stride and an inserted finger the pink sheet was before his eye. "Harry has just left for Vail," it ran, "passing through London. Sanders has telegraphed that his master is dangerously ill, and he must come at once to see him alive. Take this direct to Dr. Armytage." The shock was as of fire or cold water, disabling for the moment, but bracing beyond words. All the brooding, the regret, the dull, vague aches of the morning had passed as completely as a blink of summer lightning, and Geoffrey knew himself to be strung up again to the level of intelligent activity. As he drove to Wimpole Street he examined the chronology of the message: it had been sent off, it appeared, three hours ago; it was likely that even now Harry was passing through London. A cab was standing at the doctor's door, which was open, a servant by it. At the same moment of receiving these impressions he was aware of two figures in the hall beyond, and he stopped. One was with its back to him, but on the sound of his step it turned round. "O Geoff," said Harry, holding out his hand, "Uncle Francis is ill, very dangerously ill. I am going to Vail at once, and was just coming to see you first. But now you are here." By a flash of intuition, unerring and instantaneous, Geoffrey saw precisely what was in Harry's mind, and knew that next moment an opportunity so vitally desirable, yet vitally dishonourable to accept, would be given him, that he had no idea whether in his nature there was that which should be strong enough to resist it. "Won't you come with me?" asked Harry, low and almost timidly. "Can't you--in case we are in time--just ask his forgiveness for the wrong you did him? He is very ill, perhaps dying--dying, Geoff." At this moment the doctor stepped forward, Bradshaw in hand, to the brighter light by the open door. In passing Geoffrey, he made a faint but unmistakable command of assent. His finger was on the open page, and he spoke immediately. "We can catch the 3.15, Harry," he said. "Shall I telegraph to them to meet it?" "Please," said Harry, still looking at the other.--"Geoffrey!" he said again, and touched him on the arm. Geoffrey heard the leaf of the Bradshaw flutter, and the sound of his name lingered in his ears. Much, perhaps, was to gain by going, and the price? The price was just deliberate deception on a solemn matter. To say "yes" was to declare to his friend that he desired the forgiveness of that horrible man whom he soberly believed to be guilty of the most monstrous designs. But the momentous debate was but momentary. "No, Harry, I can not," he said. The two turned from each other without further words, and Geoffrey took a step to where the doctor stood. "I came to have a word with you," he said, and together they went into the consulting room. Scarcely had the door closed behind them, when Geoffrey drew the telegram from his pocket. "I have just found this from Lady Oxted," he said. "Probably she has telegraphed the same to you. Now, how did Harry come here, and what has passed between you?" The doctor glanced at the sheet. "Yes, she telegraphed to me also," he said. "Harry's coming was pure luck. He wanted me to go with him down to Vail, to see if anything can be done for Mr. Francis. I hope," he added, with a humour too grim for smiles, "to be able to do a great deal for Mr. Francis." "So you are going, thank the Lord!" said Geoffrey. "And do you believe in this illness?" "He may have had another attack," said the doctor with a shrug; "indeed, it is not improbable after the agitation of yesterday. Again, he may not, and it is a subtle man." "It is a trap, you mean, to get Harry there." "Possibly, and if so, a trap laid in a hurry. Else he would never have telegraphed to Harry at Lady Oxted's. He might have guessed it would be passed on to us. I am sorry, by the way, that you could not manage to say 'yes' to his wish that you should go with him. But I respect you for saying 'no.'" "I couldn't do otherwise," said Geoffrey. "All the same, if it appears desirable, I shall come to Vail." "Ah, you will come secretly on your own account, just as you would have if you had not seen Harry. That will do just as well. Now I can give you three minutes. I shall be in the house; you, I suppose, will not. How can I communicate with you?" Geoffrey thought a moment, and his eye brightened. "In two ways--no less," he said. "Listen carefully, please. At any appointed time, tap at the portrait of old Francis in the hall. I shall be just behind it, and will open it. Or, secondly, go to the window of the gun room, open it and call me very gently. I shall be within three yards of you, in the centre of the box hedge just outside. I will do whichever seems to you best." "Does Mr. Francis know of either?" asked the doctor after a pause. "He knows of the passage inside the house; of that I am sure. I don't know that he knows of the box hedge." "Then we will choose that. Now, how will you get to Vail? You must not go by the same train as we. You must not run the risk of Harry seeing you." "Then I shall go by the next, 5.17, same as Mr. Francis went by yesterday. It gets in at half past six. I will be at the box hedge soon after seven." "Very good," said the doctor. "Now, in turn, listen to me. Mr. Francis believes he has the metholycine with him; he has also Sanders. It seems to me therefore probable that he will attempt to carry the thing out in the way he indicated to me, which I told you and Lady Oxted." Geoffrey shook his head. "Not likely," he said. "You hold the evidence of the metholycine he has taken from your cabinet." "Yes, but he is desperate, and the drug almost untraceable. Also the fact that he has the metholycine from my cabinet may be supposed to shut my mouth. It looks very much as if I was his accomplice, does it not? He will guess that this is awkward for me, as indeed it would be, were not the metholycine common salt." "Ha!" said Geoffrey. "Go on." "I suspect--I feel sure, then--that his plans are more or less the same as before, only he and Sanders will have to carry it through alone. I see no reason why they should alter the idea of the supposed burglary. It is simple and convincing, and my mouth is sealed in two ways." "How two?" asked Geoffrey. "Two--so Mr. Francis thinks: Harmsworth and metholycine. Now the metholycine will fail, and they will have to get Harry into their power some other way. Also, Mr. Francis will be very anxious, as I told you, that he should not suffer pain. Of that I am certain; it is a fixed idea with him. Probably, also, the attempt will be made as planned, late, when the servants are in bed. Now, is there not a groom in the stables very like Harry?" Geoffrey stared. "Yes, the image of him," he said. "And what about him?" "Go down to the stables as soon as you get to Vail, and tell him he is wanted at the house. He knows you, I suppose. Walk up with him yourself, and let him be in the box hedge with you." For a moment the excitement of adventure overpowered all else in Geoffrey's mind. "Ah, you have some idea!" he cried. "Nothing, except that it may be useful to--have two Harrys in the house. Allowing time for this, you should be at the box hedge by eight. That shall be the appointed hour." "But what shall I tell Jim?" "Jim is the name of the groom? Tell him that it may be in his power to save his master from great peril. Harry is liked by his servants, is he not? All that we know at present is that he must wait in the box hedge with you in case we need him. But supposing he is swiftly and secretly needed, how are we to get him into the house?" "By the secret passage within," said Geoffrey, quick as an echo. "Good again. It looks as if the Luck was with us. And this passage comes out at the back of old Francis's portrait? Bad place." "Yes, but also at the bottom of the main stairs, through a panel between them and the hall." "That is better. There, then--O God, help us all! And now you must go. Harry is waiting for me. I dare not risk trying to convince him. He quarrelled with you, his best friend, for the suspicion--I can serve him better by going with him." They went out together and found Harry in the hall. He detained Geoffrey with his hand, and the doctor passed on into the dining room. "You will lunch here, Harry," he said. "It is ready." From outside the lad closed the door. Geoffrey knew that a bad moment was coming, and set his teeth. But the moment was worse than he anticipated, for Harry's voice when he spoke was broken, and his eyes moist. "O Geoffrey," he said, "can not you do what I asked? If you knew what it meant to me! There are two men in the world whom I love. There, you understand--and I can not bear it, simply I can not bear it!" The temptation had been severe before; it was a trifle to this. "No, I can't!" cried Geoffrey, eager to get the words spoken, for each moment made them harder to speak. "O Harry, some day you will understand. Before your marriage--I give it a date--I swear to you in God's name that you will understand how it is that I can not come with you to ask Mr. Francis's forgiveness!" Disappointment deepened on Harry's face, and a gleam of anger shone there. "I will not ask you a third time," he said, and went into the dining room. Geoffrey had still three hours to wait in London before the starting of his train, and these were chequered with an incredible crowd of various hopes and fears. At one time he hugged himself on the obvious superiority of their dispositions against Mr. Francis; he would even smile to think of the toils enveloping that evil schemer; again mere exhilaration at the unknown and the violent would boil up in effervescence; another moment, and an anguish of distrust would seize him. What if, after all, Dr. Armytage had been playing with him, how completely and successfully, he writhed to think? A week ago the sweat would have broken out on him to picture Harry travelling down to Vail with that man of sinister repute, to be alone in the house with him, Mr. Francis, and the foxlike servant. Had he been hoodwinked throughout? Was the doctor even now smiling to himself behind his paper at the facility of his victim? At the thought, London turned hell; he had taken the bait like a silly staring fish; even now he was already hauled, as it were, on to dry land, there to gasp innocuously, impotent to stir or warn, while who knew what ghastly subaqueous drama might even now be going on? He had trusted the doctor on evidence of the most diaphanous kind, unsupported by any testimony of another. The sleeping-draught given to Harry, the brushing aside of the revolver he had passed to him, when to shoot was impossible--these, with a calculated gravity of face and an assumption of anxious sincerity, had been enough to convince him of the man's honesty. He could have screamed aloud at the thought, and every moment whirled Harry nearer, helpless and unsuspecting, to that house of death! Meantime the journey of the two had been for the most part a silent passage. Each was absorbed in his own thoughts and anxieties: Harry, restless, impatient, eager for the quicker falling behind of wayside stations, while the doctor brooded with half-closed eyelids, intent, it would seem, on the pattern of the carriage mat, his thoughts inconjecturable. Once only, as the train yelled through Slough, did he speak, but then with earnestness. "Don't let your uncle know I have come, Harry," he said. "It may be that Sanders has unnecessarily alarmed you. So see him first yourself, and if this has been a heart attack like to what he had before, and he seems now to be quietly recuperating, do not let him know I am here. It may only alarm him for his condition." "Pray God it may be so!" said Harry. The doctor looked steadfastly at the carriage mat. "Medically speaking," he said, "I insist on this. I should also wish that you would guard against all possibility of his knowing I am here. Sanders, I suppose, looks after him. I should therefore not wish Sanders to know." "Oh, he can keep a secret," said Harry. "Very likely; but I would rather he had no secret to keep. I am not speaking without reason. If, as you fear, and as the telegram seems to indicate, this attack has been unusually severe, I must assure you that it is essential that no agitating influence of any kind should come near him. If he is in real danger, of course I will see him." "Would it not be likely to reassure him to know you are here?" asked Harry. "I have told you that I think not," said the doctor, "unless there is absolute need of me. I hope"--and the word did not stick in his throat "that quiet will again restore him." A trap was waiting for them at the station, driven by Jim, and the doctor had an opportunity of judging how far the likeness between the two might be hoped to deceive one who knew them both. Even now, with the one in livery, the other in ordinary dress, it was extraordinary, not only in superficialities, but somehow essentially, and he felt that it was worth while to have arranged to profit by it, should opportunity occur. The groom had a note for Harry, which he tore open hastily. "Ah! that is good," he said, and handed it to the doctor. It was but a matter of a couple of lines, signed by Templeton, saying merely that the severity of the attack was past, and at the time of writing Mr. Francis was sleeping, being looked after by Sanders, who had not left him since the seizure. And to the one reader this account brought an up-springing of hope, to the other the conviction that his estimate of Mr. Francis's illness was correct. Harry went upstairs immediately on his arrival, leaving the doctor in the hall. Templeton, usually a man of wood, had perceptibly started when he opened the door to them and saw the doctor, and now, instead of discreetly retiring on the removal of their luggage, he hung about, aimlessly poking the fire, putting a crooked chair straight, and a straight chair crooked, and fidgeting with the blinds. All at once the strangeness of his manner struck the doctor. "What have you got to tell me?" he asked suddenly. The blind crashed down to its full length as the butler's hand dropped the retaining string. The rigid control of domestic service was snapped; he was a frightened man speaking to his equal. "This is a strange illness of Mr. Francis's," he said. The doctor was alive to seize every chance. "How strange?" he asked. "Mr. Francis has had these attacks before." "I sent for the doctor from Didcot, as soon as it occurred, unknown to him or Sanders," said Templeton, "but he was not allowed to see him. Why is that, sir? There was Sanders telegraphing for his lordship, and saying that Mr. Francis was dying, yet refusing to let the doctor see him. But perhaps he was expecting you, sir." "He does not know I am here, Templeton, nor must he know. Look to that; see that the servants do not tell Sanders I am here. Now, what do you mean? You think Mr. Francis is not ill at all." "Does a man in the jaws of death, I may say, play the flute?" asked the butler. "Play the flute?" "Yes, sir. It was during the servants' dinner hour--but I had no stomach for my meat to-day, and went upstairs--when we might have been at dinner perhaps five minutes, and along the top passage to his lordship's room to see if they had it ready. Well, sir, I heard coming from Mr. Francis's room--very low and guarded, so that I should have heard nothing had I not stood outside a moment listening, you may say, but I did not know for what--a little lively tune I have heard him play a score of times. But in a minute it ceased, and then I heard two voices talking, and after that Mr. Francis laughed. That from a man who was sleeping, so Sanders told us." "This is all very strange," said the doctor. "Ay, and then the door opened, and out came that man Sanders; black as hell he looked when he saw me! But little I cared for his black looks, and I just asked him how his master was. Very bad, he told me, and wandering, and he wondered whether his lordship would get here in time." The doctor came a step nearer. "Templeton," he said, "I rely on you to obey me implicitly. It is necessary that neither Mr. Francis nor Sanders know I am here. Things which I can not yet tell you may depend on this. And see to this: let me have the room I had before, and put his lordship into the room opening from it. Lock the door of it which leads into the passage, and lose the key, so that the only entrance is through my room. If he asks why his room is changed, make any paltry excuse: say the electric light in his room is gone wrong--anything. But make his usual room look as if it was occupied; go up there during dinner, turn down the bed, put a nightshirt on it, and leave a sponge, brushes, and so on." "Master Harry!" gasped the butler, his mind suddenly reverting to old days. The doctor frowned. "Come," he said, "do not get out of hand like that. Do as I bid you, and try to look yourself. I can tell you no more." Harry came down from the sick room a few minutes later, with a brow markedly clearer. "He is much better, ever so much better, Sanders thinks," he said. "He was sleeping, but when he wakes he will be told I have come." "Ah! that is good," said the doctor. "Did Sanders tell you about the attack?" "Yes, it came on while he was dressing this morning. Luckily, Sanders was with him; but for an hour, he tells me, he thought that every breath might be his last. He's a trump, that man, and there's a head on his shoulders too. He has hardly left him for five minutes." "Will Sanders sleep in his room to-night?" asked the doctor. "Yes, he has his meals brought to him there too, so that it will be easy for you not to be seen by him, since you make such a point of it. Oh, thank God, he is so much better! Ah, look! we are going to have one of those curious low mists to-night." The doctor followed Harry to one of the windows which Templeton had left unshuttered, and looked out. The autumn twilight was fast closing in, and after the hot sun of the day, the mist, in the sudden coolness of its withdrawal, was forming very thickly and rapidly over the lake. There was a little draught of wind toward the house, not sufficient to disperse it, but only to slide it gently, like a sheet, over the lawns. It lay very low, in thickness not perhaps exceeding five feet over the higher stretches of the lawn, but as the surface of it was level, it must have been some few feet thicker where the ground declined toward the lake. It appeared to be of extraordinary density, and spread very swiftly and steadily, so that even while they watched, it had pushed on till, like flood water, it struck the wall of the house, and presently lawn and lake were both entirely vanished, and they looked out, as from a mountain-top, over a level sea of cloud, pricked here and there by plantations and the higher shrubs. Above, the night was clear, and a young moon rode high in a heaven that silently filled with stars. Geoffrey, meantime, had followed two hours behind them; his train was punctual, and it was only a little after seven when he found himself, having walked from the station, at the edge of the woods, looking down on to this same curious sea of mist. The monstrous birds of the box hedge stood out upon it, like great aquatic creatures swimming there, for the hedge itself was submerged, and the descent into it was like a plunge into a bath. Not wishing to risk being seen from the house, he made a wide circuit round it toward the lake. Here the mist rose above his head, baffling and blinding; but striking the edge of the lake, he followed it, guided as much by the sobbing of the ripples against the bank as by the vague muffled outline, till he reached the inlet of the stream which fed it. From this point the ground rose rapidly, and in a few minutes he could look over the mist again and see the house already twinkling with scattered lights, moored like some great ship in that white sea. A few hundred yards more brought him to the stables, and, conveniently for his purpose, at the gate stood Jim and a helper, their work over, smoking and chatting. Geoffrey approached till it was certain they could see who he was. "Is that you, Jim?" he said. "They want you at the house." Jim knocked out his pipe and followed. His clothes had "evening out" stamped upon them, and there seemed to be an unpleasing curtailment of his liberty in prospect. "Come round by the lake," said Geoffrey in a low voice, when the groom had joined him. "I have something to tell you." He waited till they were certainly out of ear-shot. "Now, Jim," he said, "it's just this. We believe that an attempt will be made to-night to murder Lord Vail. I want your help, though I can't yet tell you in what way you can help, because I don't know. But will you do all you can or are told to do?" "Gawd bless my soul!" said Jim. Then, with a return to his ordinary impassivity, "yes, sir, I'll do anything you tell me to help." "Come on, then. You can trust me that you shall run no unreasonable risks." "I'm not thinking you'll let them murder me instead, sir," said Jim. "And may I ask who is going to do the murdering?" Geoffrey hesitated a moment, but on reflection there seemed to him to be no reason for concealing anything. "We believe--Dr. Armytage and I, that is--that Sanders, Mr. Francis's man, will attempt it." Jim whistled under his breath. "Bring him on," he said. "Lord! I should like to have a go at that Sanders, sir! He walks into the stable yard as if every horse in the place belonged to him." They had by this time skirted the lake again, and the booming of the sluice sounded near at hand. Then, striking for higher ground, they saw they had already passed the house, and close in front of them swam the birds of the box hedge. The mist had sunk back a little, and now they sat, as if in a receding tide, on the long peninsula of the hedge itself, visible above the drift, and black in the moonlight. "This way," said Geoffrey, and groping round to the back of it they found the overgrown door and entered. Thence, going cautiously and feeling their way, they passed down the length of it, and soon saw in front of them, like a blurred moon, the light from the gun-room windows. The time had been calculated to a nicety, for they had been there scarcely five minutes, when a shadow moved across the blind, which was then rolled up, and the window silently lifted a crack. The figure, owing to the density of the mist, was indistinguishable, but Geoffrey recognised the doctor's voice when it whispered his name. He touched Jim to make him follow, and together they stood close by the window. "Good you have Jim with you," said the doctor, "and you have told him we may need him. I want him inside the house; so go with him through the secret passage, and open the panel by the stairs which you told me of. I shall be there, and I will tell you what we are going to do. Harry has gone to dress, and the house is quiet. Wait, Geoffrey. Take this." And he handed him out a rook rifle and eight or ten cartridges. "Put these inside the hedge," he whispered, "and come round at once with Jim." Five minutes later Geoffrey gently opened the panel of the door, and the doctor glided in like a ghost, latching it noiselessly behind him. His face brooded and gloomed no laugh; it was alert and active. "There is very little time," he said; "so, first for you, Geoffrey. Go back for the rifle and cartridges, and get somewhere in cover where you can command the front of the house. What course events will take outside I can not say. But the Luck and the plate will be stolen, and they will have to get them away somehow. You must stop that. Sanders, I suspect, will try to remove them." "Beg your pardon, sir," put in Jim, "but Sanders was down at the stable this afternoon, and said that the door of the coach house and one of the loose boxes was to be left unlocked to-night, in case a doctor was wanted for Mr. Francis. He said he could put to himself, sir, so that none of us need sit up." The doctor's keen face grew a shade more animate, his mouth bordered on a smile. "Good lad!" he said.--"Well, that's your job, Geoffrey: you must use your discretion entirely. You may have to deal with a pretty desperate man, and it is possible you will feel safer with that rifle." "Where shall I go?" asked Geoffrey. "I thought the summerhouse on the knoll would be a good place; it stands above the mist." "Excellent. And for Jim?" "We must be guided by the course of events. Jim will have to wait here, in any case, probably till eleven, or even later. Then I expect he will go to bed in Harry's room, where I--I can't tell you: it is all in the clouds at present. I want to spare Harry horror. Anyhow, he will stop here until I tap twice on the panel outside. Now I can not wait. Harry may be down any minute; we dine at a quarter past. Ah! this is for you, Geoffrey," and he handed him a packet of sandwiches--"and this for you, Jim.--Now, you to the summerhouse, Geoffrey--Jim waits here: I dine with Harry. Yes, your hand, and yours. God help our work!" Though never a voluminous talker, the doctor was even more silent than usual at dinner that night, and, despite the alertness of his eye, confessed to an extreme fatigue. Thus it was that, soon after ten, he and Harry went upstairs; he straight to his room, the latter to tap discreetly at the door of the sick room and learn the latest of the patient. The change of Harry's room from the one he usually occupied to that communicating with the doctor's caused no comment, either silent or spoken, from him, nor did the loss of the key seem to him in any way remarkable. He came straight from his visit to Mr. Francis, to give the news to the doctor. "Still sleeping," he said, "and sleeping very quietly, so Sanders tells me. And I--I feel as if I should sleep the clock round! I really think I shall go to bed at once." He went through the doctor's room and turned on his light, then appeared again in the doorway. "Got everything you want?" he asked. "Have a whisky and soda?" A confused idea of metholycine, a distinct idea that he did not wish Harry to run the risk of being seen by Sanders going to another room than the ordinary, made itself felt in the doctor's reply. "Not for worlds!" he said. "A poisonous habit." "That means I mustn't have any, does it?" asked Harry from the doorway. "Now that is hard lines. I want some, but not enough to go and fetch it from the hall myself. Do have some: give me an excuse." "Not even that," said the doctor. "Well, good-night," said the lad, and he closed the door between the two rooms. For so tired a man, the doctor on the closing of the door exhibited a considerable briskness. Very quickly and quietly he took off dress coat, shoes, and shirt, and buttoning a dark-gray coat over his vest, set his door ajar, and switched off his light. The hour for action, he well realized, might strike any moment, but he was prepared, as far as preparation was possible. Outside there was waiting Geoffrey with the rook rifle; inside the secret passage the spurious Harry--both, he knew, calm and bland for any emergency. Meanwhile the real Harry was safe for the present; none but he and Templeton knew of the change of room, and none could reach him but through the chamber he himself occupied. But an intricate and subtle passage was likely to be ahead, and as yet its windings were unconjecturable. As a working hypothesis, for he could find no better, he had assumed that Mr. Francis's plans were in the main unaltered. Harry, drugged and unconscious, was to be taken to the plate closet at some hour in this dead night, where Sanders would be waiting. Yet this conjecture might be utterly at fault; in any case the drugged whisky, mixed as it now was with innocuous salt, could not have the effect desired, and for anything unforeseen (and here was at least one step untraceable), he must have every sense alert, to interpret to the best of his ability the smallest clew that came from the room opposite. Mr. Francis and Sanders were there now, firearms were not to be feared: here was the sum of his certainties. This also, and this from his study of Mr. Francis he considered probable to the verge of certainty, Harry would be unconscious when the death blow was given. In the dark, time may either fly with swallows' wings or lag with the tortoise, for the watch in a man's brain is an unaccountable mechanism, and the doctor had no idea how long he had been waiting, when he heard the latch of a door open somewhere in the passage outside. Two noiseless steps took him to his own, and through the crack, where he had left it ajar, he saw a long perpendicular chink of light; bright it seemed and near. Without further audible sound this grew gradually fainter, and with the most stealthy precautions he opened his own door and peered out. Some fifteen yards distant, moving very slowly down the passage, were two figures--those of Mr. Francis and his valet. The latter was dressed in ordinary clothes, the former, vividly visible by the light of the candle the servant carried, in a light garish dressing gown and red slippers. At this moment they paused opposite the door of the room Harry usually occupied, and here held a word of inaudible colloquy. There was a table just outside the door, fronting the top of the stairs, and a dim lamp on a bracket hung above it. On it Mr. Francis put down a small bottle, and what looked like an ordinary table napkin, and the two went down the stairs. It was the time for caution and rapidity; already, as he knew, luck had favoured him, in that neither had entered Harry's room, and after giving them some ten seconds' law, he went noiselessly over the thick carpet of the passage to the table and opened the bottle Mr. Francis had left there. The unmistakable fumes of chloroform greeted his nostril, and he stood awhile in unutterable perplexity. Fresh and valuable as this evidence was, it was difficult to form any certain conclusions about it. Conceivably, the chloroform was an additional precaution, in case Harry had not drunk the whisky; conceivably also the metholycine idea had been altogether abandoned in the absence of a skilled operator. That at least he could easily settle, and turning into the bedroom Harry usually occupied, he switched on the electric light. Templeton had followed his instructions about making the room look habitable, but on the dressing table stood what was perhaps not the work of Templeton. A cut-glass bottle was there on a tray, with a glass and a siphon. He spilled a teaspoonful of the spirit into the glass and tasted it. Salt. So much, then, was certain: one or both of the figures he had seen go downstairs would return here, with the chloroform; and still cudgelling his brains over the main problem, as to why Mr. Francis had gone downstairs at all, he lingered not, but felt his way down to the bottom of the flight. Here he paused, but hearing nothing, tapped twice at the panel which opened into the secret passage. It was at once withdrawn, and Jim stepped out. "Come!" he whispered. With the same rapid stealthiness they ascended again, crossed the landing, and entered Harry's bedroom. The bed stood facing the door in an angle between the window and the wall, and the doctor drew the curtain across the window, which was deep and with a seat in it. "Undress at once," he said to Jim. "They might notice that your clothes were not lying about if they have a light. Quick! off with them--coat, waistcoat, shirt, trousers, boots, as naked as your mother bore you. There is a nightshirt, put it on. Now get into bed, and lie with your face half covered. Do not stir or make any sound whatever till I turn up the light or call to you. I shall be behind the curtain." There were two electric lamps in the room, one by the door, the other with its own switch over the bed. The doctor had lit both, and as soon as the groom was in bed, extinguished the one by the door. Then, crossing the room, he got up behind the curtain in the window seat, and from there turned off the other. "And when I turn up the light, Jim," he whispered, "throw off anything that may have been placed over your face, and spring up in bed. Till then be asleep. You understand?" "Yes, sir," said Jim softly. At that moment, with the suddenness of a long-forgotten memory returned, the doctor guessed why Mr. Francis had gone downstairs. The glory of the guess was so great that he could not help speaking. "He has gone for the Luck," he said. "Yes, sir," said Jim again, and there were darkness and silence. Interminable eons passed, or may be ten minutes, but at the end of infinite time came scarcely sound, but an absence of complete silence, from the door. From behind the thick curtains the doctor could see nothing, but a moment later came the gentle sigh of the scraped carpet, and from that, or from the infallible sixth sense that awakes only in the dark, he knew that some one had entered. Then from closer at hand he heard the faintest shuffle of movement, and he knew that, whoever this was in the room besides the groom and himself, he was not a couple of yards distant. After another while the least vibration sounded from the glasses in the tray, as if a hand had touched them unwittingly, and again dead stillness succeeded, till the doctor's ears sang with it. Then from the bed his ear suddenly focused the breathings of two persons--one very short and quick, the other a slow, steady respiration, and simultaneously with that his nostril caught the whiff of chloroform. Again the rustle of linen sounded, and hearing that, he held his breath and counted the pulse which throbbed in his own temples. Twenty times it beat, and on the twentieth stroke his finger pressed the switch of the light, and he drew back the curtain. Already Jim was sitting up in bed, bland and impassive in face, and his left hand flung the reeking napkin from him. By the bedside crouched a white-haired figure clad in a blue dressing gown; close by it on the floor stood the leather case which held the Luck; the right hand was still stretched over the bed, though the napkin which it had held was plucked from it. His face was flushed with colour; the bright blue eyes, a little puckered up in this sudden change from darkness to the glare of the electric light, moved slowly from Jim to the doctor and back again. But no word passed the thin, compressed lips. Suddenly the alertness of the face was gone like a burst bubble; the mouth opened and drooped, the eyes grew staring and sightless; the left hand only seemed to retain its vitality, and felt gropingly on the carpet for the Luck. Then, with a slow, supreme effort, the figure half raised itself, drawing the jewel tight to its breast, folding both arms about it, with fingers intertwined in the strap that carried it. Then it collapsed completely, rolled over, and lay face downward on the floor. For one moment neither of the others stirred; then, recovering himself, the doctor stepped down from the window seat. "Put on your coat and trousers, Jim," he said, "and come with me quickly. Yes, leave him--it--there. I will come back presently. We have to catch Sanders now, and we must go without a light. You behaved admirably. Now follow me." "Is it dead, sir?" whispered Jim. "I think so. Come!" In the eagerness of their pursuit they crossed the passage without looking to right hand or left, and felt their way down the many-angled stairs. The hall was faintly lit by the pallor of moonshine that came through the skylight, and without difficulty they found the baize door leading into the servants' parts. But here with the shuttered windows reigned the darkness of Egypt, and despairing of finding his way, the doctor lit a match to guide them to the farther end of the passage where was the plate closet. But when they reached it, it was to find the door open and none within. In all directions stood boxes with forced lids. Here a dozen spoons were scattered on the floor, here a saltcellar; but the rifling had been fairly complete. "How long do you suppose we were waiting in the dark?" he asked Jim. "Anyhow, it was long enough for Sanders and Mr. Francis to have taken most of the plate. I had thought they would do that after--afterward. Now, where is the plate, and where is Sanders?" "Can't say, sir," said Jim. The match which had showed the disorder of the place had burned out, and the doctor, still frowning over the next step, had just lit another, when from outside there rang out the sharp ping of a rifle shot. "That is Geoffrey!" he said, "and what in God's name is happening? Upstairs again." They groped their way back along the basement to the door leading into the hall. Close to this went up the back stairs forming the servants' communication with the upper story, and, seeing these, the doctor clicked his tongue against his teeth. "That's how we missed him," he said; "he went this way up to Mr. Francis, while we were going down the front stairs." "Yes, sir," said Jim. They passed through into the hall, and a draught of cold air met them. There was no longer any reason for secret movements, and the doctor turned on the electric light. The front door was open, and the wreaths of dense mist streamed in. "Go and see if you can help Mr. Geoffrey, Jim," he said, "if you can find him. It is clear that Sanders has left the house: who else could have opened that door? I must see to that which we left upstairs." He ran up. The room door as they had left it was open; on the floor still lay what they had left there. But it was lying no longer on its face; the sightless eyes were turned to the ceiling, and the Luck was no longer clasped, with fingers intertwined in its strap, to the breast. The doctor fought down an immense repugnance against touching the body; but the instinct of saving life, however remote that chance, prevailed, and taking hold of one of the hands, he felt for the pulse. But as he touched it two of the fingers fell backward, dislocated or broken. Then, with a swift hissing intake of his breath, he pressed his finger on the wrist. But the search for the pulse was vain. CHAPTER XXV MR. FRANCIS SLEEPS It was about a quarter past eight when Geoffrey left Jim in the secret passage, and, in accordance with his instructions, went back to the box hedge where he had concealed the rifle and cartridges. With these he skirted wide up the short grassy slope that led to the summerhouse, and trying the door, found it unlocked. It stood, as he had supposed, some fifteen feet above the level of the mist that lay round the house below, and was admirably situated for the observation of any movement or manoeuvre that might be made, for it commanded a clear view past the front of the house down to the lake, while the road from the stables passed not fifty yards from it, joining the carriage sweep: from the carriage sweep at right angles ran the drive. Clearly, then, if Jim's account of Sanders's visit and order to the stables covered a design, the working out of it must take place before his eyes. The summerhouse stood close to the background of wood in which last summer Evie and Mr. Francis had once walked, a mere black blot against the blackness of the trees, and Geoffrey, pulling a chair to the open door, sat commandingly invisible. His rifle he leaned against the wall, ready to his hand, and it was in more than moderate composure that he ate the sandwiches with which the doctor had provided him. There was, he expected, a long vigil in front of him before any active share in the operations should stand to his name; the first act would be played in that great square ship of a house that lay anchored out in the sea of mist. What should pass there in the next two hours he strenuously forbore to conjecture; for it was his business to keep his brain cool, and avoid all thoughts which might heat that or render his hand unsteady. That short interview with the doctor had given him a confidence that made firm the shifting quicksands of fear which all day had quaked within him, for the man had spoken to him with authority, masterful and decided, which had stilled the shudderings and perplexities of the last twelve hours. He had to see to it that they should not awake again. At intervals of seemingly incalculable length the clock from the stable drowsily told the hour, and but for that and the slow wheeling of the young moon, he could have believed that time had ceased. No breath of wind stirred in the trees behind, or shredded the opaque levels of the mist in front; a death and stagnation lay over the world, and no sound but the muffled murmur of the sluice from the lake broke the silence. The world spun in space, and the sound of the invisible outpouring waters might have been the rustle of its passage through interstellar space. Then the spell and soothing of the stillness laid hold of him; the hour of action was near, the intolerable fret of anxiety nearly over. Inside the house that dark, keen-eyed man was not one whom the prudent would care to see in opposition (and on which side he was Geoffrey no longer entertained a doubt's shadow), nor, for that matter, was his lieutenant, the impassive, spurious Harry. By his unwilling means last summer had Mr. Francis made the first of his vile attempts; by his means, perhaps, this should be the last. Geoffrey could rest assured that they would do all that lay in the power of two very cool heads: his business was to see that his own part should not be less well done. Some years ago--or was the stroke still resonant?--half past ten had struck on the stable clock; and since eleven had not yet sounded, it was earlier than he had suspected, when there came a noise which sent his heart hammering for a moment in his throat. He could not at once localize or identify it, and, though still obscure and muffled, he had only just decided that it could not be very far off, before he guessed what it was. Its direction and its nature came to him together: some vehicle was being cautiously driven over the grass toward the house from the stables, and on the moment he caught sight of it. It was moving at a very slow pace, more than half drowned in the mist, and all he could see of it was the head and back of a horse, the head and shoulders of the man who led it, and the box seat and rail of some vehicle of the wagonette type. It reached the gravel walk with a crisp, crunching sound, and drew up there. Then he heard the unmistakable rattle of the brake being put hard on, and the man, tying the reins in a knot, looped them round the whip-holder. He then left it, not forty yards from where Geoffrey sat, and was swallowed up in the fog going toward the house. The curtain was up for the second act. What had the first been? The thing had passed so quickly and silently that he could almost have believed that his imagination had played him some trick, were it not for the sight of that truncated horse and carriage which testified to its reality. There, without doubt, was the carriage from the stables, of which Jim had told them; but he could not have sworn to the identity of the man who led it, in the uncertain light. And he picked up his rifle and laid it across his knees, prepared again to wait. Soon afterward eleven struck, and, while the strokes were still vibrating, came the second interruption to his silent waiting. Out of the mist between the wagonette and the house dimly appeared two heads moving slowly toward the carriage, and rising gradually as they climbed the slope above the level mist, till they were distinct and clear as far as the shoulders. They walked about a yard apart, and words low and inaudible to the watcher passed between them. Arrived at the carriage, they seemed to set something down, and then with an effort hoist it into the body of the vehicle. And as they again raised themselves, Geoffrey saw that the one head sparkled whitely in the moonshine, and he well knew to whom those venerable locks belonged. Then there came audible words. "Come back, then, Sanders," said Mr. Francis, "and wait at the top of the back stairs, while I go very gently to his room to see if it is all right. In any case I shall use the chloroform. Then, when I call you, come and help me to carry him down to the plate closet. There I shall leave you, and go back to bed. Afterward, drive hard to the village, leave the plate at the cottage I told you of, and bring the doctor back. Are you ready? Where is the--ah! thank you. No, I prefer to carry it myself. The Luck! the Luck! At last--at last!" He raised a hand above his head; it grasped a case. The man's face was turned upward toward the moon, and Geoffrey, looking thereon, could scarcely stifle an exclamation of horror. "It is not a man's face," he said to himself. "It is some mad incarnation of Satan!" In another minute all was silent again, the inhuman figures had vanished; again only the section of horse and cart appeared above the mist. For a moment Geoffrey hesitated, unwilling by any possible risk to lose the ultimate success, but the chance of being heard or seen by those retreated figures was infinitesimal, and he crept crouchingly down the slope to where the wagonette stood. Then, opening the door, he lifted out, exerting his whole strength, the load the two had put there, and, bent double under the ponderous weight, made his way back to the summerhouse. The burden clinked and rang as he moved: there could be no doubt what his prize was. He had not long been back at his post when muffled, rapid footsteps again rivetted him, and he saw a moving dark shape coming with great swiftness up from the house. As before, with the rising of the ground, it grew freer of the mist, till when it reached the carriage he could easily recognise the head and shoulders of Sanders. Somehow, and if possible without the cost of human life, he must have stopped. He had already swung a small case easily recognisable by the watcher on to the box, and he himself was in the act of mounting, when an idea struck Geoffrey. Taking quick but careful aim, he fired at the horse, just below the ear. At so short a range a miss would have been an incredible thing, and with the report of the rifle the head sank out of sight into the mist. Then he stood up. "If you move, Sanders, I fire!" he cried. "This time at you!" But even as he said the words, the box was already empty. The man had slipped down with astonishing rapidity behind the wagonette, and when Geoffrey next saw him dimly through the mist he was already some yards away. Even while he hesitated, with another cartridge yet in his hand, he was gone, and waiting only to put it in, he ran down to the cart. The case, the same beyond a doubt as was in Mr. Francis's hand ten minutes ago, which he had seen Sanders swing on to the box just now, before mounting himself, was gone also. At that he ran down, at the top of the speed he dare use, after the vanished figure. Once he heard the crunch of gravel to the right, and turned that way, already bewildered by this blind pursuit in the mist; once he thought he heard the rustle of bushes to his left, and turned there. Then, beyond any doubt, he heard his own name called. At that he stopped. "Who is it?" he cried. "Me, sir--Jim," said an imperturbable voice close to him. "Ah! is Harry--is his lordship safe?" "Yes, sir, quite safe. The doctor sent me out to see if I could help you." Before Geoffrey could reply, a sudden wild cry rang out into the night, broken short by the sound of a great splash. "My Gawd, what's that?" cried Jim, startled for once. "I shouldn't wonder if it was Sanders," said Geoffrey. "Come to the lake, Jim. God forgive us for trying to rescue the devil! I wonder if he can swim?" "Like a stone, sir, I hope," said Jim cheerfully. The roar of the sluice was a guide to them, but they had lost each other twenty times before they reached the lake. In that dense and blinding mist, here risen high above their heads, even sound came muffled and uncertain, and it was through trampled flower beds and the swishing of shrubs against their faces that they gained the edge and stood on the foaming sluice. The water was very high, the noise bewildering to the senses; and yet, despite the fact that five minutes ago Geoffrey had been hesitating whether or not to shoot at that vague runner through the fog, caring nothing whether he killed him, yet now he did not hesitate to run a risk himself, in order to save from drowning what had been within an ace of being the mark for his bullet. "He must be here," he said to Jim; "the pull of the water would drag him against the sluice." "You're not going in after that vermin, Mr. Geoffrey?" asked Jim incredulously. Geoffrey did not reply, but kicked off his boots and threw his coat on the grass. "Stand by to give me a hand," he said, and plunged out of sight. "Well, I'm damned!" said Jim, and took up his stand close to the edge of the water gate. The risk he had been willing to run for his master he had faced without question, indeed with a certain blitheness of spirit; but to bear a toothache for Sanders's life appeared to him a bargain that demanded consideration. But even as he wondered, a voice from close to his feet called him. "Give a hand," bubbled Geoffrey from the water; "I've got him. I dived straight on to him." Jim caught hold of Geoffrey first by the hair, and from that guided his grasp to a dripping shirt collar. Then, after Geoffrey had got a foothold on the steep bank, between them they dragged the nerveless and empty-handed figure from the water and laid it on the grass. "Dead or alive, that is the only question," said Geoffrey. "Get back to the house, Jim, and bring the doctor here. I don't know what to do to a drowned man." Jim made an obvious call on his resolution. To stay here with that dripping clay at his feet was a task that demanded more courage than he had needed to get into Harry's bed. "No, sir," he said. "You run back to the house and get your wet things off. I'll stay here!" and he set his teeth. Geoffrey could not deny the common sense of this, nor indeed had he any wish to, and shuffled and groped back to the house. As yet he knew nothing except that Harry was safe, and for the present his curiosity was gorged with that satisfying assurance. The hall door he found open, the hall empty and lit, and running upstairs, he saw the door of Harry's bedroom open, and went in. The doctor was there; he was just covering with a sheet that which he had removed from the floor on to Harry's bed. He turned round as Geoffrey entered. "Quick!" said the latter. "Go down to the sluice. Sanders lost his way in the fog, and fell in. We fished him out, alive or dead I don't know." His eye fell on the covered shape on the bed with an awful and sudden misgiving, for it was Harry's room. "Not----" he began. The doctor turned back the sheet for a moment, and then replaced it quickly. "Go to my room very quietly, Geoffrey," he said, "for Harry is asleep next door, and get your wet things off. Put on blankets or something, or clothes of mine. By the sluice, you say?" It was some half hour later that Geoffrey heard slow, stumbling steps on the stairs, and barefooted and wrapped in blankets he went out into the passage. Jim and the doctor were carrying what he had found in the ooze of the lake into Harry's room, and they laid it on the floor by the bed. "It was no use," said the doctor. "I could not arouse the least sign of vitality. Cover the face. Let us leave them." He stood in silence a moment after this was done. "So they lie together," he said, "in obedience to the inscrutable decrees of God. In his just and merciful hands we leave them." So the three went out, leaving the two there. * * * * * The doctor led the way down into the hall, Geoffrey in his blankets following him. Jim had brought the rest of his clothes out from the chamber of death, and stayed in the passage dressing himself, for it was better there than in the room. No word passed between the others till he had joined them. Then said the doctor: "None of us will be able to go to bed till we have pieced together what has happened in the last two hours. So----" "Two hours!" interrupted Geoffrey. "Yes, it is now only a little after twelve. It was soon after ten that Harry went to his uncle's room, before going to bed, and found him sleeping. "He sleeps now," said Geoffrey. Then in a whisper, "Tell me, did Sanders kill him?" The doctor shook his head. "No; Mr. Francis, I feel sure, was dead when--when Sanders came. But he took the Luck, so I imagine, from him. I left him clasping the Luck; I returned to find it gone. And two fingers of his hand were broken. But where is the Luck?" "That I think I can tell you," said Geoffrey, "when my turn comes. But begin at the beginning. I left Jim before dinner in the secret passage." So, in a few words, the doctor told all that had happened inside the house from the moment when he opened his door and saw the two, who now lay upstairs, talking in the passage, down to his return from the plate closet to find the Luck torn from Mr. Francis's death grip. Then Geoffrey took on the tale to its completion. At the end he laid his hand on the groom's shoulder, with the action of a friend and an equal. "We have done the talking," he said, "but here's the fellow who did the hard thing in this night's work. I could no more have borne that--that man creeping across the room to where I lay in bed----" "Than I could have jumped into the lake in the dark, sir," said Jim, "when all that was to be found was-- Lord love us all!" Then there was silence for a while, for the events were still too awful and too close for chattering. The doctor broke it. "There are two more things to be done," he said: "one, to bring back the plate from the summerhouse; the other, Harry. He must be told everything, but to-morrow will be as well as to-night. By the way, Geoffrey, where will you sleep?--You too, Jim? Can you get into the stable so late?" "Yes, sir; thank you, sir," said Jim. "I'll wake the helper.--I brought in the rifle, Mr. Geoffrey; you left it by the lake.--Shall I help bring in the plate, sir?" "No, we must get Templeton and another man in any case," said the doctor. "It must be stowed somewhere to-night; the lock of the plate closet is forced. So get you to bed, Jim. Shake hands like a man, for you are one." "Jim, you devil, say good-night to a man," said Geoffrey, and pleasure and pride made the groom laugh outright. "But you won't tell Harry to-night?" said Geoffrey, after a moment. "Hush! What's that?--My God, Harry!" The gleam of a candle shone through the door leading to the staircase, and Harry advanced two steps into the hall. "I woke just now," he said, speaking to the doctor, "and--Geoffrey!" "Call Jim back," said the doctor.--"Steady, Harry. Not a word!" Geoffrey gathered his blankets round him and went to the hall door, which the groom had just closed behind him. He came back at once in answer to the call. "But what is it? What is it all?" cried Harry. "Where is my uncle? I woke, as I began to tell you, and thought I heard people moving about, and got uneasy. I thought he might be worse, or something. Then I went through into your room, Dr. Armytage, but you were not there. His door, too, was open, and there was a light burning, but he was not there. Where is he? What is it?" he cried again. "Geoffrey--Jim--what are you doing here?" He looked from one to the other bewildered, but for a moment none could speak. "Oh, for the love of God, tell me!" he cried again. Jim's right hand went to his head in salutation. "Please, my lord, it's late; I'd better go," he said feebly. "No, wait," said Harry. "Damn it all, do what you are told! The doctor wishes you to stop, so stop. But why and how is Geoff here, and Jim? And where is he?" Both of the other young men looked at the doctor, and without more words he told the story for the second time, with as direct a brevity as was possible. No word of any kind interrupted him, but in Harry's eyes a wondering horror deepened and grew convinced. Once only did any sound come from him, and that when the doctor said that beyond doubt Mr. Francis was not sane; but then a long sigh, it would seem of unutterable relief, moaned from his lips. He heard of the plot, as originally told by his uncle to the doctor, of all the business of the metholycine, of all the communications going on between his uncle's supposed accomplice and Geoffrey, of the scene on the pavement of Grosvenor Square. Then came for the second time that evening the events of the last two hours, but Harry's head had sunk on his hands, and the eyes of the others no longer looked at him, for it was not seemly to behold so great an amazement of horror and grief. At length the words were all spoken, and for a long space there was silence, while the truth, bitter and burning as vitriol, ate into the poor lad's brain. Then said Harry, his face still buried: "As God sees you, Dr. Armytage, this is true?" "It is true, Harry," said he. "Geoffrey?" asked the same hard cold voice. "God help you, yes!" "And Jim?" "Yes, my lord, as far as this night's work goes." Harry got up from his chair, quietly and steadily. He advanced to the groom and grasped both his hands in his. Still, without a word, he turned to the doctor with the same action. Then, still steadily, he walked across the hearth rug to Geoffrey, and the doctor moved from where he stood, touched Jim on the shoulder, and withdrew with him. Not till then did Harry speak, but now his mouth quivered, and the tension grew to snapping point. "Geoff, Geoff!" he said, and the blessed relief of tears came to him. EPILOGUE Evie was sitting in one of the low window seats in the hall at Vail, regarding with all the gravity due to the subject her two months' old baby, that soft little atom round which revolved the world and the stars and all space. Her discoveries about it were in number like the sands of the sea, but far more remarkable. This afternoon they had been, and still continued to be, epoch-making. "His nose," she said, after a long pause, to Lady Oxted, who was sitting by the fire, "is at present like mine--that is to say, it is no particular nose, but it will certainly be like Harry's, which is perpendicular. That's a joke, dear aunt, the sort of thing which people who write society stories think clever. It isn't, really." Lady Oxted sighed. "And his brains exactly resemble both yours and Harry's, dear," she said--"that is to say, they are no particular brains." Evie took no notice whatever of this vitriolic comment. "And its eyes are certainly Harry's eyes," she went on. "Oh, I went to see Jim's wife to-day, you know the dairymaid whom Harry was supposed---- Well, I went to see her. Jim was there too. I love Jim. You know the resemblance to Harry is simply ridiculous. I was in continual fear lest I should forget it was Jim and say, 'Come, darling, it's time to go.' And then Harry might have behaved as I once did. Oh, here's nurse.--What a bore you are, nurse, O my own angelic!" Evie gave up a kiss-smothered baby, and went across to where Lady Oxted was sitting. "And Mrs. Jim's baby, I must allow, has its points," she continued. "That's why I'm sure that Geoff's eyes are like Harry's, because Geoff's eyes are exactly like Jim's baby's eyes, and Jim is Harry. By the way, where is the spurious Geoff,--the old one, I mean?" "The old one went out within five minutes of his arrival here," said Lady Oxted. "I tried to make myself agreeable to him, but apparently I failed, for he simply yawned in my face, and said, 'Where's Harry?'" "Yes, Aunt Violet," said Evie, "you and I sha'n't get a look in while those men are here, and we had better resign ourselves to it, and take two nice little back seats. In fact, I felt a little neglected this morning. Harry woke with a great stretch and said, 'By gad, it's Tuesday!--Geoff and the beloved doctor come to-day,' and he never even said good-morning to the wife of his bosom." "He's tiring of you," remarked Lady Oxted. "I know; isn't it sad, and we have been married less than a year? As I was saying, he got up at once, instead of going to sleep again, and I heard him singing in his bath. Oh, I just love that husband of mine," she said. "So you have told me before," said Lady Oxted acidly. "What a prickly aunt!" said Evie. "Dear Aunt Violet, if Geoffrey and the beloved physician and Jim weren't such darlings, all of them, I should be jealous of them--I should indeed." "What a lot of darlings you have, Evie!" said the other. "I know I have. I wish there were twice as many. For the whole point of the world is the darlings. A person with no darlings is dead--dead and buried. And the more darlings you have, by so much the more is the world alive. Isn't it so? I have lots--oh, and the world is good! All those I have, and you, and Harry even, and I might include my own Geoff. Also Uncle Bob, especially when he is rude to you." The prickly aunt was tender enough, and Evie knew it. "Oh, my dear!" she said. "It makes my old blood skip and sing to see you so happy. And Harry--my goodness, what a happy person Harry is!" "I trust and believe he is," Evie said, "and my hope and exceeding reward are that he may always be. But to-day--to-day----" she said. Lady Oxted was silent. "Just think," said Evie, "what was happening a year ago. At this hour a year ago Harry was here with the doctor and his uncle and his uncle's servant. And then evening fell, as it is falling now. Later came Geoffrey and Jim. Oh, I can't yet bear to think of it!" "I think if I were Harry I should be rather fond of those three," said Lady Oxted. "Being a woman, I am in love with them all, like you." "Of course you are," said Evie. "Oh, yes, Jim was just going out when I was with his wife, to meet the others." "To meet them?" asked Lady Oxted. "Yes; Harry said it was a secret, but it's such a dear one I must tell you. They were going together--it was Harry's idea--to the church. The two graves, his uncle's and that other man's, are side by side. I asked if I might come too, but he said certainly not; I was not in that piece!" "And then?" Evie got up. "I think they were just going to say their prayers there," she said. "Oh, I love those men. They don't talk and talk, but just go and do simple little things like that." "And the women sit at home and do the talking," said Lady Oxted. "Yes, you and me, that is. Oh, I daresay we are more subtle and complicated--and who knows or cares what else?--but we are not quite so simple. One must weigh the one with the other. And who cares which is the best? To each is a part given." "You had a big part given you, Evie," said the other. "I know I had, and feebly was it performed. Ah, that morning! Just one word from Dr. Armytage, 'Come!'" Evie returned to the fire again and sat down. "If Geoffrey had not been here the night before," she said, "the night when it took place, I don't know what would have happened to Harry. There would have been a raving lunatic, I think. As it was, he just howled and wept, so he told me, and Geoff sat by him and said: 'Cheer up, old chap!' and 'Damn it all, Harry!--yes, I don't care,' and gave him a whisky and soda, and slapped him on the back, and did all the things that men do. They didn't kiss each other and scream, and say that nobody loved them, as we should have done. And as like as not they played a game of billiards afterward, and felt immensely better. I suppose David and Jonathan were like that. Oh, I want Harry always to have a lot of men friends," she cried. "How I should hate it if he only went dangling along after his wife! But he loves me best of all. So don't deny it." "Oh, I don't anticipate his eloping with the doctor," said Lady Oxted. Outside the evening was fast falling. It was now a little after sunset, and, as a year ago, a young moon, silver and slim, was climbing the sky, where still lingered the reflected fire from the west in ribbons and feathers of rosy cloud. But to-night no mist, low hanging and opaque, fit cover for crouching danger, hung over lake and lawn; the air was crisp with autumnal frost, the hoarse tumult from the sluice subdued and low after a long St. Martin's summer. The four men--Jim, servantlike and respectful, little distance from the rest--had left the churchyard and strolled slowly in the direction of the stable and the house. Opposite the stable gate Jim would have turned in, but Harry detained him. "No, Jim," he said, "come with us a little farther," and like man and man, not master and groom, he put his arm through that of the other. Then, by an instinctive movement, the doctor and Geoffrey closed up also, and thus linked they walked by the edge of the lake, and paused together at the sluice. "And it was here," said Harry, "that one day the sluice broke, and down I went. Eh, a bad half hour!" "Yes, my lord," sad Jim, grown suddenly bold, "and here it was that Mr. Geoffrey jumped in of a black night after a black villain." "And somewhere here it is," said Geoffrey, "that the Luck lies. How low the lake is! I have never seen it so low." They had approached to the very margin of the water, where little ripples, children of the breeze at sunset, broke and laughed on the steep sides of ooze discovered by the drought. Their sharp edges were caught by the fires overhead, and turned to scrolls of liquid flame. "And that was the end of the Luck," said the doctor. "The Luck!" cried Harry. "It was the curse that drove us all mad. I would sooner keep a cobra in the house than that thing. Madness and crime and death were its gifts. Ah, if I had guessed--if I had only guessed!" Even as he spoke, his eye caught a steadfast gleam that shone from the edge of the sunken water. For a moment he thought that it was but one of the runes of flame that played over the reflecting surface of the lake, but this was steady, not suddenly kindled and consumed. Then in a flash the truth of the matter was his: the leather case had rotted and fallen away in the water. Here, within a foot of the edge of the lake, lay his Luck. He disjoined himself from the others, took one step forward and bent down. With a reluctant cluck the mud gave up the jewel, and he held it high, growing each moment more resplendent as the ooze dripped sullenly from it. The great diamonds awoke, they winked and blazed, sunset and moon and evening star were reflected there, and who knows what authentic fires of hell? There was a glow of sapphire, a glimmer of pearl, a gleam of gold. But two steps more took Harry on to the stone slab that covered the sluice, and there on the scene of one of its crimes he laid the priceless thing. Then, as a man with his heel crushes the life out of some poisonous creeping horror, he stamped and stamped on it, and stamped yet again. This way and that flew the jewels; diamond and sapphire were dust; the pearls, unbroken, leaped like flicked peas, some into the lake, others into the outflowing thunder of the sluice. Then, taking the crumbled and shapeless remnant, he flung it far into mid water. "And the curse is gone from the house!" he cried. THE END 
1260	----	Transcribed from the 1897 Service & Paton edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org JANE EYRE AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY BY CHARLOTTE BRONTE _ILLUSTRATED BY F. H. TOWNSEND_ London SERVICE & PATON 5 HENRIETTA STREET 1897 _The Illustrations_ _in this Volume are the copyright of_ SERVICE & PATON, _London_ TO W. M. THACKERAY, ESQ., This Work IS RESPECTFULLY INSCRIBED BY THE AUTHOR PREFACE A preface to the first edition of "Jane Eyre" being unnecessary, I gave none: this second edition demands a few words both of acknowledgment and miscellaneous remark. My thanks are due in three quarters. To the Public, for the indulgent ear it has inclined to a plain tale with few pretensions. To the Press, for the fair field its honest suffrage has opened to an obscure aspirant. To my Publishers, for the aid their tact, their energy, their practical sense and frank liberality have afforded an unknown and unrecommended Author. The Press and the Public are but vague personifications for me, and I must thank them in vague terms; but my Publishers are definite: so are certain generous critics who have encouraged me as only large-hearted and high-minded men know how to encourage a struggling stranger; to them, _i.e._, to my Publishers and the select Reviewers, I say cordially, Gentlemen, I thank you from my heart. Having thus acknowledged what I owe those who have aided and approved me, I turn to another class; a small one, so far as I know, but not, therefore, to be overlooked. I mean the timorous or carping few who doubt the tendency of such books as "Jane Eyre:" in whose eyes whatever is unusual is wrong; whose ears detect in each protest against bigotry--that parent of crime--an insult to piety, that regent of God on earth. I would suggest to such doubters certain obvious distinctions; I would remind them of certain simple truths. Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns. These things and deeds are diametrically opposed: they are as distinct as is vice from virtue. Men too often confound them: they should not be confounded: appearance should not be mistaken for truth; narrow human doctrines, that only tend to elate and magnify a few, should not be substituted for the world-redeeming creed of Christ. There is--I repeat it--a difference; and it is a good, and not a bad action to mark broadly and clearly the line of separation between them. The world may not like to see these ideas dissevered, for it has been accustomed to blend them; finding it convenient to make external show pass for sterling worth--to let white-washed walls vouch for clean shrines. It may hate him who dares to scrutinise and expose--to rase the gilding, and show base metal under it--to penetrate the sepulchre, and reveal charnel relics: but hate as it will, it is indebted to him. Ahab did not like Micaiah, because he never prophesied good concerning him, but evil; probably he liked the sycophant son of Chenaannah better; yet might Ahab have escaped a bloody death, had he but stopped his ears to flattery, and opened them to faithful counsel. There is a man in our own days whose words are not framed to tickle delicate ears: who, to my thinking, comes before the great ones of society, much as the son of Imlah came before the throned Kings of Judah and Israel; and who speaks truth as deep, with a power as prophet-like and as vital--a mien as dauntless and as daring. Is the satirist of "Vanity Fair" admired in high places? I cannot tell; but I think if some of those amongst whom he hurls the Greek fire of his sarcasm, and over whom he flashes the levin-brand of his denunciation, were to take his warnings in time--they or their seed might yet escape a fatal Rimoth-Gilead. Why have I alluded to this man? I have alluded to him, Reader, because I think I see in him an intellect profounder and more unique than his contemporaries have yet recognised; because I regard him as the first social regenerator of the day--as the very master of that working corps who would restore to rectitude the warped system of things; because I think no commentator on his writings has yet found the comparison that suits him, the terms which rightly characterise his talent. They say he is like Fielding: they talk of his wit, humour, comic powers. He resembles Fielding as an eagle does a vulture: Fielding could stoop on carrion, but Thackeray never does. His wit is bright, his humour attractive, but both bear the same relation to his serious genius that the mere lambent sheet-lightning playing under the edge of the summer- cloud does to the electric death-spark hid in its womb. Finally, I have alluded to Mr. Thackeray, because to him--if he will accept the tribute of a total stranger--I have dedicated this second edition of "JANE EYRE." CURRER BELL. _December_ 21_st_, 1847. NOTE TO THE THIRD EDITION I avail myself of the opportunity which a third edition of "Jane Eyre" affords me, of again addressing a word to the Public, to explain that my claim to the title of novelist rests on this one work alone. If, therefore, the authorship of other works of fiction has been attributed to me, an honour is awarded where it is not merited; and consequently, denied where it is justly due. This explanation will serve to rectify mistakes which may already have been made, and to prevent future errors. CURRER BELL. _April_ 13_th_, 1848. CHAPTER I There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no company, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further out-door exercise was now out of the question. I was glad of it: I never liked long walks, especially on chilly afternoons: dreadful to me was the coming home in the raw twilight, with nipped fingers and toes, and a heart saddened by the chidings of Bessie, the nurse, and humbled by the consciousness of my physical inferiority to Eliza, John, and Georgiana Reed. The said Eliza, John, and Georgiana were now clustered round their mama in the drawing-room: she lay reclined on a sofa by the fireside, and with her darlings about her (for the time neither quarrelling nor crying) looked perfectly happy. Me, she had dispensed from joining the group; saying, "She regretted to be under the necessity of keeping me at a distance; but that until she heard from Bessie, and could discover by her own observation, that I was endeavouring in good earnest to acquire a more sociable and childlike disposition, a more attractive and sprightly manner--something lighter, franker, more natural, as it were--she really must exclude me from privileges intended only for contented, happy, little children." "What does Bessie say I have done?" I asked. "Jane, I don't like cavillers or questioners; besides, there is something truly forbidding in a child taking up her elders in that manner. Be seated somewhere; and until you can speak pleasantly, remain silent." A breakfast-room adjoined the drawing-room, I slipped in there. It contained a bookcase: I soon possessed myself of a volume, taking care that it should be one stored with pictures. I mounted into the window- seat: gathering up my feet, I sat cross-legged, like a Turk; and, having drawn the red moreen curtain nearly close, I was shrined in double retirement. Folds of scarlet drapery shut in my view to the right hand; to the left were the clear panes of glass, protecting, but not separating me from the drear November day. At intervals, while turning over the leaves of my book, I studied the aspect of that winter afternoon. Afar, it offered a pale blank of mist and cloud; near a scene of wet lawn and storm-beat shrub, with ceaseless rain sweeping away wildly before a long and lamentable blast. I returned to my book--Bewick's History of British Birds: the letterpress thereof I cared little for, generally speaking; and yet there were certain introductory pages that, child as I was, I could not pass quite as a blank. They were those which treat of the haunts of sea-fowl; of "the solitary rocks and promontories" by them only inhabited; of the coast of Norway, studded with isles from its southern extremity, the Lindeness, or Naze, to the North Cape-- "Where the Northern Ocean, in vast whirls, Boils round the naked, melancholy isles Of farthest Thule; and the Atlantic surge Pours in among the stormy Hebrides." Nor could I pass unnoticed the suggestion of the bleak shores of Lapland, Siberia, Spitzbergen, Nova Zembla, Iceland, Greenland, with "the vast sweep of the Arctic Zone, and those forlorn regions of dreary space,--that reservoir of frost and snow, where firm fields of ice, the accumulation of centuries of winters, glazed in Alpine heights above heights, surround the pole, and concentre the multiplied rigours of extreme cold." Of these death-white realms I formed an idea of my own: shadowy, like all the half-comprehended notions that float dim through children's brains, but strangely impressive. The words in these introductory pages connected themselves with the succeeding vignettes, and gave significance to the rock standing up alone in a sea of billow and spray; to the broken boat stranded on a desolate coast; to the cold and ghastly moon glancing through bars of cloud at a wreck just sinking. I cannot tell what sentiment haunted the quite solitary churchyard, with its inscribed headstone; its gate, its two trees, its low horizon, girdled by a broken wall, and its newly-risen crescent, attesting the hour of eventide. The two ships becalmed on a torpid sea, I believed to be marine phantoms. The fiend pinning down the thief's pack behind him, I passed over quickly: it was an object of terror. So was the black horned thing seated aloof on a rock, surveying a distant crowd surrounding a gallows. Each picture told a story; mysterious often to my undeveloped understanding and imperfect feelings, yet ever profoundly interesting: as interesting as the tales Bessie sometimes narrated on winter evenings, when she chanced to be in good humour; and when, having brought her ironing-table to the nursery hearth, she allowed us to sit about it, and while she got up Mrs. Reed's lace frills, and crimped her nightcap borders, fed our eager attention with passages of love and adventure taken from old fairy tales and other ballads; or (as at a later period I discovered) from the pages of Pamela, and Henry, Earl of Moreland. With Bewick on my knee, I was then happy: happy at least in my way. I feared nothing but interruption, and that came too soon. The breakfast- room door opened. "Boh! Madam Mope!" cried the voice of John Reed; then he paused: he found the room apparently empty. "Where the dickens is she!" he continued. "Lizzy! Georgy! (calling to his sisters) Joan is not here: tell mama she is run out into the rain--bad animal!" "It is well I drew the curtain," thought I; and I wished fervently he might not discover my hiding-place: nor would John Reed have found it out himself; he was not quick either of vision or conception; but Eliza just put her head in at the door, and said at once-- "She is in the window-seat, to be sure, Jack." And I came out immediately, for I trembled at the idea of being dragged forth by the said Jack. "What do you want?" I asked, with awkward diffidence. "Say, 'What do you want, Master Reed?'" was the answer. "I want you to come here;" and seating himself in an arm-chair, he intimated by a gesture that I was to approach and stand before him. John Reed was a schoolboy of fourteen years old; four years older than I, for I was but ten: large and stout for his age, with a dingy and unwholesome skin; thick lineaments in a spacious visage, heavy limbs and large extremities. He gorged himself habitually at table, which made him bilious, and gave him a dim and bleared eye and flabby cheeks. He ought now to have been at school; but his mama had taken him home for a month or two, "on account of his delicate health." Mr. Miles, the master, affirmed that he would do very well if he had fewer cakes and sweetmeats sent him from home; but the mother's heart turned from an opinion so harsh, and inclined rather to the more refined idea that John's sallowness was owing to over-application and, perhaps, to pining after home. John had not much affection for his mother and sisters, and an antipathy to me. He bullied and punished me; not two or three times in the week, nor once or twice in the day, but continually: every nerve I had feared him, and every morsel of flesh in my bones shrank when he came near. There were moments when I was bewildered by the terror he inspired, because I had no appeal whatever against either his menaces or his inflictions; the servants did not like to offend their young master by taking my part against him, and Mrs. Reed was blind and deaf on the subject: she never saw him strike or heard him abuse me, though he did both now and then in her very presence, more frequently, however, behind her back. Habitually obedient to John, I came up to his chair: he spent some three minutes in thrusting out his tongue at me as far as he could without damaging the roots: I knew he would soon strike, and while dreading the blow, I mused on the disgusting and ugly appearance of him who would presently deal it. I wonder if he read that notion in my face; for, all at once, without speaking, he struck suddenly and strongly. I tottered, and on regaining my equilibrium retired back a step or two from his chair. "That is for your impudence in answering mama awhile since," said he, "and for your sneaking way of getting behind curtains, and for the look you had in your eyes two minutes since, you rat!" Accustomed to John Reed's abuse, I never had an idea of replying to it; my care was how to endure the blow which would certainly follow the insult. "What were you doing behind the curtain?" he asked. "I was reading." "Show the book." I returned to the window and fetched it thence. "You have no business to take our books; you are a dependent, mama says; you have no money; your father left you none; you ought to beg, and not to live here with gentlemen's children like us, and eat the same meals we do, and wear clothes at our mama's expense. Now, I'll teach you to rummage my bookshelves: for they _are_ mine; all the house belongs to me, or will do in a few years. Go and stand by the door, out of the way of the mirror and the windows." I did so, not at first aware what was his intention; but when I saw him lift and poise the book and stand in act to hurl it, I instinctively started aside with a cry of alarm: not soon enough, however; the volume was flung, it hit me, and I fell, striking my head against the door and cutting it. The cut bled, the pain was sharp: my terror had passed its climax; other feelings succeeded. "Wicked and cruel boy!" I said. "You are like a murderer--you are like a slave-driver--you are like the Roman emperors!" I had read Goldsmith's History of Rome, and had formed my opinion of Nero, Caligula, etc. Also I had drawn parallels in silence, which I never thought thus to have declared aloud. "What! what!" he cried. "Did she say that to me? Did you hear her, Eliza and Georgiana? Won't I tell mama? but first--" He ran headlong at me: I felt him grasp my hair and my shoulder: he had closed with a desperate thing. I really saw in him a tyrant, a murderer. I felt a drop or two of blood from my head trickle down my neck, and was sensible of somewhat pungent suffering: these sensations for the time predominated over fear, and I received him in frantic sort. I don't very well know what I did with my hands, but he called me "Rat! Rat!" and bellowed out aloud. Aid was near him: Eliza and Georgiana had run for Mrs. Reed, who was gone upstairs: she now came upon the scene, followed by Bessie and her maid Abbot. We were parted: I heard the words-- "Dear! dear! What a fury to fly at Master John!" "Did ever anybody see such a picture of passion!" Then Mrs. Reed subjoined-- "Take her away to the red-room, and lock her in there." Four hands were immediately laid upon me, and I was borne upstairs. CHAPTER II I resisted all the way: a new thing for me, and a circumstance which greatly strengthened the bad opinion Bessie and Miss Abbot were disposed to entertain of me. The fact is, I was a trifle beside myself; or rather _out_ of myself, as the French would say: I was conscious that a moment's mutiny had already rendered me liable to strange penalties, and, like any other rebel slave, I felt resolved, in my desperation, to go all lengths. "Hold her arms, Miss Abbot: she's like a mad cat." "For shame! for shame!" cried the lady's-maid. "What shocking conduct, Miss Eyre, to strike a young gentleman, your benefactress's son! Your young master." "Master! How is he my master? Am I a servant?" "No; you are less than a servant, for you do nothing for your keep. There, sit down, and think over your wickedness." They had got me by this time into the apartment indicated by Mrs. Reed, and had thrust me upon a stool: my impulse was to rise from it like a spring; their two pair of hands arrested me instantly. "If you don't sit still, you must be tied down," said Bessie. "Miss Abbot, lend me your garters; she would break mine directly." Miss Abbot turned to divest a stout leg of the necessary ligature. This preparation for bonds, and the additional ignominy it inferred, took a little of the excitement out of me. "Don't take them off," I cried; "I will not stir." In guarantee whereof, I attached myself to my seat by my hands. "Mind you don't," said Bessie; and when she had ascertained that I was really subsiding, she loosened her hold of me; then she and Miss Abbot stood with folded arms, looking darkly and doubtfully on my face, as incredulous of my sanity. "She never did so before," at last said Bessie, turning to the Abigail. "But it was always in her," was the reply. "I've told Missis often my opinion about the child, and Missis agreed with me. She's an underhand little thing: I never saw a girl of her age with so much cover." Bessie answered not; but ere long, addressing me, she said--"You ought to be aware, Miss, that you are under obligations to Mrs. Reed: she keeps you: if she were to turn you off, you would have to go to the poorhouse." I had nothing to say to these words: they were not new to me: my very first recollections of existence included hints of the same kind. This reproach of my dependence had become a vague sing-song in my ear: very painful and crushing, but only half intelligible. Miss Abbot joined in-- "And you ought not to think yourself on an equality with the Misses Reed and Master Reed, because Missis kindly allows you to be brought up with them. They will have a great deal of money, and you will have none: it is your place to be humble, and to try to make yourself agreeable to them." "What we tell you is for your good," added Bessie, in no harsh voice, "you should try to be useful and pleasant, then, perhaps, you would have a home here; but if you become passionate and rude, Missis will send you away, I am sure." "Besides," said Miss Abbot, "God will punish her: He might strike her dead in the midst of her tantrums, and then where would she go? Come, Bessie, we will leave her: I wouldn't have her heart for anything. Say your prayers, Miss Eyre, when you are by yourself; for if you don't repent, something bad might be permitted to come down the chimney and fetch you away." They went, shutting the door, and locking it behind them. The red-room was a square chamber, very seldom slept in, I might say never, indeed, unless when a chance influx of visitors at Gateshead Hall rendered it necessary to turn to account all the accommodation it contained: yet it was one of the largest and stateliest chambers in the mansion. A bed supported on massive pillars of mahogany, hung with curtains of deep red damask, stood out like a tabernacle in the centre; the two large windows, with their blinds always drawn down, were half shrouded in festoons and falls of similar drapery; the carpet was red; the table at the foot of the bed was covered with a crimson cloth; the walls were a soft fawn colour with a blush of pink in it; the wardrobe, the toilet-table, the chairs were of darkly polished old mahogany. Out of these deep surrounding shades rose high, and glared white, the piled- up mattresses and pillows of the bed, spread with a snowy Marseilles counterpane. Scarcely less prominent was an ample cushioned easy-chair near the head of the bed, also white, with a footstool before it; and looking, as I thought, like a pale throne. This room was chill, because it seldom had a fire; it was silent, because remote from the nursery and kitchen; solemn, because it was known to be so seldom entered. The house-maid alone came here on Saturdays, to wipe from the mirrors and the furniture a week's quiet dust: and Mrs. Reed herself, at far intervals, visited it to review the contents of a certain secret drawer in the wardrobe, where were stored divers parchments, her jewel-casket, and a miniature of her deceased husband; and in those last words lies the secret of the red-room--the spell which kept it so lonely in spite of its grandeur. Mr. Reed had been dead nine years: it was in this chamber he breathed his last; here he lay in state; hence his coffin was borne by the undertaker's men; and, since that day, a sense of dreary consecration had guarded it from frequent intrusion. My seat, to which Bessie and the bitter Miss Abbot had left me riveted, was a low ottoman near the marble chimney-piece; the bed rose before me; to my right hand there was the high, dark wardrobe, with subdued, broken reflections varying the gloss of its panels; to my left were the muffled windows; a great looking-glass between them repeated the vacant majesty of the bed and room. I was not quite sure whether they had locked the door; and when I dared move, I got up and went to see. Alas! yes: no jail was ever more secure. Returning, I had to cross before the looking- glass; my fascinated glance involuntarily explored the depth it revealed. All looked colder and darker in that visionary hollow than in reality: and the strange little figure there gazing at me, with a white face and arms specking the gloom, and glittering eyes of fear moving where all else was still, had the effect of a real spirit: I thought it like one of the tiny phantoms, half fairy, half imp, Bessie's evening stories represented as coming out of lone, ferny dells in moors, and appearing before the eyes of belated travellers. I returned to my stool. Superstition was with me at that moment; but it was not yet her hour for complete victory: my blood was still warm; the mood of the revolted slave was still bracing me with its bitter vigour; I had to stem a rapid rush of retrospective thought before I quailed to the dismal present. All John Reed's violent tyrannies, all his sisters' proud indifference, all his mother's aversion, all the servants' partiality, turned up in my disturbed mind like a dark deposit in a turbid well. Why was I always suffering, always browbeaten, always accused, for ever condemned? Why could I never please? Why was it useless to try to win any one's favour? Eliza, who was headstrong and selfish, was respected. Georgiana, who had a spoiled temper, a very acrid spite, a captious and insolent carriage, was universally indulged. Her beauty, her pink cheeks and golden curls, seemed to give delight to all who looked at her, and to purchase indemnity for every fault. John no one thwarted, much less punished; though he twisted the necks of the pigeons, killed the little pea-chicks, set the dogs at the sheep, stripped the hothouse vines of their fruit, and broke the buds off the choicest plants in the conservatory: he called his mother "old girl," too; sometimes reviled her for her dark skin, similar to his own; bluntly disregarded her wishes; not unfrequently tore and spoiled her silk attire; and he was still "her own darling." I dared commit no fault: I strove to fulfil every duty; and I was termed naughty and tiresome, sullen and sneaking, from morning to noon, and from noon to night. My head still ached and bled with the blow and fall I had received: no one had reproved John for wantonly striking me; and because I had turned against him to avert farther irrational violence, I was loaded with general opprobrium. "Unjust!--unjust!" said my reason, forced by the agonising stimulus into precocious though transitory power: and Resolve, equally wrought up, instigated some strange expedient to achieve escape from insupportable oppression--as running away, or, if that could not be effected, never eating or drinking more, and letting myself die. What a consternation of soul was mine that dreary afternoon! How all my brain was in tumult, and all my heart in insurrection! Yet in what darkness, what dense ignorance, was the mental battle fought! I could not answer the ceaseless inward question--_why_ I thus suffered; now, at the distance of--I will not say how many years, I see it clearly. I was a discord in Gateshead Hall: I was like nobody there; I had nothing in harmony with Mrs. Reed or her children, or her chosen vassalage. If they did not love me, in fact, as little did I love them. They were not bound to regard with affection a thing that could not sympathise with one amongst them; a heterogeneous thing, opposed to them in temperament, in capacity, in propensities; a useless thing, incapable of serving their interest, or adding to their pleasure; a noxious thing, cherishing the germs of indignation at their treatment, of contempt of their judgment. I know that had I been a sanguine, brilliant, careless, exacting, handsome, romping child--though equally dependent and friendless--Mrs. Reed would have endured my presence more complacently; her children would have entertained for me more of the cordiality of fellow-feeling; the servants would have been less prone to make me the scapegoat of the nursery. Daylight began to forsake the red-room; it was past four o'clock, and the beclouded afternoon was tending to drear twilight. I heard the rain still beating continuously on the staircase window, and the wind howling in the grove behind the hall; I grew by degrees cold as a stone, and then my courage sank. My habitual mood of humiliation, self-doubt, forlorn depression, fell damp on the embers of my decaying ire. All said I was wicked, and perhaps I might be so; what thought had I been but just conceiving of starving myself to death? That certainly was a crime: and was I fit to die? Or was the vault under the chancel of Gateshead Church an inviting bourne? In such vault I had been told did Mr. Reed lie buried; and led by this thought to recall his idea, I dwelt on it with gathering dread. I could not remember him; but I knew that he was my own uncle--my mother's brother--that he had taken me when a parentless infant to his house; and that in his last moments he had required a promise of Mrs. Reed that she would rear and maintain me as one of her own children. Mrs. Reed probably considered she had kept this promise; and so she had, I dare say, as well as her nature would permit her; but how could she really like an interloper not of her race, and unconnected with her, after her husband's death, by any tie? It must have been most irksome to find herself bound by a hard-wrung pledge to stand in the stead of a parent to a strange child she could not love, and to see an uncongenial alien permanently intruded on her own family group. A singular notion dawned upon me. I doubted not--never doubted--that if Mr. Reed had been alive he would have treated me kindly; and now, as I sat looking at the white bed and overshadowed walls--occasionally also turning a fascinated eye towards the dimly gleaming mirror--I began to recall what I had heard of dead men, troubled in their graves by the violation of their last wishes, revisiting the earth to punish the perjured and avenge the oppressed; and I thought Mr. Reed's spirit, harassed by the wrongs of his sister's child, might quit its abode--whether in the church vault or in the unknown world of the departed--and rise before me in this chamber. I wiped my tears and hushed my sobs, fearful lest any sign of violent grief might waken a preternatural voice to comfort me, or elicit from the gloom some haloed face, bending over me with strange pity. This idea, consolatory in theory, I felt would be terrible if realised: with all my might I endeavoured to stifle it--I endeavoured to be firm. Shaking my hair from my eyes, I lifted my head and tried to look boldly round the dark room; at this moment a light gleamed on the wall. Was it, I asked myself, a ray from the moon penetrating some aperture in the blind? No; moonlight was still, and this stirred; while I gazed, it glided up to the ceiling and quivered over my head. I can now conjecture readily that this streak of light was, in all likelihood, a gleam from a lantern carried by some one across the lawn: but then, prepared as my mind was for horror, shaken as my nerves were by agitation, I thought the swift darting beam was a herald of some coming vision from another world. My heart beat thick, my head grew hot; a sound filled my ears, which I deemed the rushing of wings; something seemed near me; I was oppressed, suffocated: endurance broke down; I rushed to the door and shook the lock in desperate effort. Steps came running along the outer passage; the key turned, Bessie and Abbot entered. "Miss Eyre, are you ill?" said Bessie. "What a dreadful noise! it went quite through me!" exclaimed Abbot. "Take me out! Let me go into the nursery!" was my cry. "What for? Are you hurt? Have you seen something?" again demanded Bessie. "Oh! I saw a light, and I thought a ghost would come." I had now got hold of Bessie's hand, and she did not snatch it from me. "She has screamed out on purpose," declared Abbot, in some disgust. "And what a scream! If she had been in great pain one would have excused it, but she only wanted to bring us all here: I know her naughty tricks." "What is all this?" demanded another voice peremptorily; and Mrs. Reed came along the corridor, her cap flying wide, her gown rustling stormily. "Abbot and Bessie, I believe I gave orders that Jane Eyre should be left in the red-room till I came to her myself." "Miss Jane screamed so loud, ma'am," pleaded Bessie. "Let her go," was the only answer. "Loose Bessie's hand, child: you cannot succeed in getting out by these means, be assured. I abhor artifice, particularly in children; it is my duty to show you that tricks will not answer: you will now stay here an hour longer, and it is only on condition of perfect submission and stillness that I shall liberate you then." "O aunt! have pity! Forgive me! I cannot endure it--let me be punished some other way! I shall be killed if--" "Silence! This violence is all most repulsive:" and so, no doubt, she felt it. I was a precocious actress in her eyes; she sincerely looked on me as a compound of virulent passions, mean spirit, and dangerous duplicity. Bessie and Abbot having retreated, Mrs. Reed, impatient of my now frantic anguish and wild sobs, abruptly thrust me back and locked me in, without farther parley. I heard her sweeping away; and soon after she was gone, I suppose I had a species of fit: unconsciousness closed the scene. CHAPTER III The next thing I remember is, waking up with a feeling as if I had had a frightful nightmare, and seeing before me a terrible red glare, crossed with thick black bars. I heard voices, too, speaking with a hollow sound, and as if muffled by a rush of wind or water: agitation, uncertainty, and an all-predominating sense of terror confused my faculties. Ere long, I became aware that some one was handling me; lifting me up and supporting me in a sitting posture, and that more tenderly than I had ever been raised or upheld before. I rested my head against a pillow or an arm, and felt easy. In five minutes more the cloud of bewilderment dissolved: I knew quite well that I was in my own bed, and that the red glare was the nursery fire. It was night: a candle burnt on the table; Bessie stood at the bed- foot with a basin in her hand, and a gentleman sat in a chair near my pillow, leaning over me. I felt an inexpressible relief, a soothing conviction of protection and security, when I knew that there was a stranger in the room, an individual not belonging to Gateshead, and not related to Mrs. Reed. Turning from Bessie (though her presence was far less obnoxious to me than that of Abbot, for instance, would have been), I scrutinised the face of the gentleman: I knew him; it was Mr. Lloyd, an apothecary, sometimes called in by Mrs. Reed when the servants were ailing: for herself and the children she employed a physician. "Well, who am I?" he asked. I pronounced his name, offering him at the same time my hand: he took it, smiling and saying, "We shall do very well by-and-by." Then he laid me down, and addressing Bessie, charged her to be very careful that I was not disturbed during the night. Having given some further directions, and intimates that he should call again the next day, he departed; to my grief: I felt so sheltered and befriended while he sat in the chair near my pillow; and as he closed the door after him, all the room darkened and my heart again sank: inexpressible sadness weighed it down. "Do you feel as if you should sleep, Miss?" asked Bessie, rather softly. Scarcely dared I answer her; for I feared the next sentence might be rough. "I will try." "Would you like to drink, or could you eat anything?" "No, thank you, Bessie." "Then I think I shall go to bed, for it is past twelve o'clock; but you may call me if you want anything in the night." Wonderful civility this! It emboldened me to ask a question. "Bessie, what is the matter with me? Am I ill?" "You fell sick, I suppose, in the red-room with crying; you'll be better soon, no doubt." Bessie went into the housemaid's apartment, which was near. I heard her say-- "Sarah, come and sleep with me in the nursery; I daren't for my life be alone with that poor child to-night: she might die; it's such a strange thing she should have that fit: I wonder if she saw anything. Missis was rather too hard." Sarah came back with her; they both went to bed; they were whispering together for half-an-hour before they fell asleep. I caught scraps of their conversation, from which I was able only too distinctly to infer the main subject discussed. "Something passed her, all dressed in white, and vanished"--"A great black dog behind him"--"Three loud raps on the chamber door"--"A light in the churchyard just over his grave," etc., etc. At last both slept: the fire and the candle went out. For me, the watches of that long night passed in ghastly wakefulness; strained by dread: such dread as children only can feel. No severe or prolonged bodily illness followed this incident of the red- room; it only gave my nerves a shock of which I feel the reverberation to this day. Yes, Mrs. Reed, to you I owe some fearful pangs of mental suffering, but I ought to forgive you, for you knew not what you did: while rending my heart-strings, you thought you were only uprooting my bad propensities. Next day, by noon, I was up and dressed, and sat wrapped in a shawl by the nursery hearth. I felt physically weak and broken down: but my worse ailment was an unutterable wretchedness of mind: a wretchedness which kept drawing from me silent tears; no sooner had I wiped one salt drop from my cheek than another followed. Yet, I thought, I ought to have been happy, for none of the Reeds were there, they were all gone out in the carriage with their mama. Abbot, too, was sewing in another room, and Bessie, as she moved hither and thither, putting away toys and arranging drawers, addressed to me every now and then a word of unwonted kindness. This state of things should have been to me a paradise of peace, accustomed as I was to a life of ceaseless reprimand and thankless fagging; but, in fact, my racked nerves were now in such a state that no calm could soothe, and no pleasure excite them agreeably. Bessie had been down into the kitchen, and she brought up with her a tart on a certain brightly painted china plate, whose bird of paradise, nestling in a wreath of convolvuli and rosebuds, had been wont to stir in me a most enthusiastic sense of admiration; and which plate I had often petitioned to be allowed to take in my hand in order to examine it more closely, but had always hitherto been deemed unworthy of such a privilege. This precious vessel was now placed on my knee, and I was cordially invited to eat the circlet of delicate pastry upon it. Vain favour! coming, like most other favours long deferred and often wished for, too late! I could not eat the tart; and the plumage of the bird, the tints of the flowers, seemed strangely faded: I put both plate and tart away. Bessie asked if I would have a book: the word _book_ acted as a transient stimulus, and I begged her to fetch Gulliver's Travels from the library. This book I had again and again perused with delight. I considered it a narrative of facts, and discovered in it a vein of interest deeper than what I found in fairy tales: for as to the elves, having sought them in vain among foxglove leaves and bells, under mushrooms and beneath the ground-ivy mantling old wall-nooks, I had at length made up my mind to the sad truth, that they were all gone out of England to some savage country where the woods were wilder and thicker, and the population more scant; whereas, Lilliput and Brobdignag being, in my creed, solid parts of the earth's surface, I doubted not that I might one day, by taking a long voyage, see with my own eyes the little fields, houses, and trees, the diminutive people, the tiny cows, sheep, and birds of the one realm; and the corn-fields forest-high, the mighty mastiffs, the monster cats, the tower-like men and women, of the other. Yet, when this cherished volume was now placed in my hand--when I turned over its leaves, and sought in its marvellous pictures the charm I had, till now, never failed to find--all was eerie and dreary; the giants were gaunt goblins, the pigmies malevolent and fearful imps, Gulliver a most desolate wanderer in most dread and dangerous regions. I closed the book, which I dared no longer peruse, and put it on the table, beside the untasted tart. Bessie had now finished dusting and tidying the room, and having washed her hands, she opened a certain little drawer, full of splendid shreds of silk and satin, and began making a new bonnet for Georgiana's doll. Meantime she sang: her song was-- "In the days when we went gipsying, A long time ago." I had often heard the song before, and always with lively delight; for Bessie had a sweet voice,--at least, I thought so. But now, though her voice was still sweet, I found in its melody an indescribable sadness. Sometimes, preoccupied with her work, she sang the refrain very low, very lingeringly; "A long time ago" came out like the saddest cadence of a funeral hymn. She passed into another ballad, this time a really doleful one. "My feet they are sore, and my limbs they are weary; Long is the way, and the mountains are wild; Soon will the twilight close moonless and dreary Over the path of the poor orphan child. Why did they send me so far and so lonely, Up where the moors spread and grey rocks are piled? Men are hard-hearted, and kind angels only Watch o'er the steps of a poor orphan child. Yet distant and soft the night breeze is blowing, Clouds there are none, and clear stars beam mild, God, in His mercy, protection is showing, Comfort and hope to the poor orphan child. Ev'n should I fall o'er the broken bridge passing, Or stray in the marshes, by false lights beguiled, Still will my Father, with promise and blessing, Take to His bosom the poor orphan child. There is a thought that for strength should avail me, Though both of shelter and kindred despoiled; Heaven is a home, and a rest will not fail me; God is a friend to the poor orphan child." "Come, Miss Jane, don't cry," said Bessie as she finished. She might as well have said to the fire, "don't burn!" but how could she divine the morbid suffering to which I was a prey? In the course of the morning Mr. Lloyd came again. "What, already up!" said he, as he entered the nursery. "Well, nurse, how is she?" Bessie answered that I was doing very well. "Then she ought to look more cheerful. Come here, Miss Jane: your name is Jane, is it not?" "Yes, sir, Jane Eyre." "Well, you have been crying, Miss Jane Eyre; can you tell me what about? Have you any pain?" "No, sir." "Oh! I daresay she is crying because she could not go out with Missis in the carriage," interposed Bessie. "Surely not! why, she is too old for such pettishness." I thought so too; and my self-esteem being wounded by the false charge, I answered promptly, "I never cried for such a thing in my life: I hate going out in the carriage. I cry because I am miserable." "Oh fie, Miss!" said Bessie. The good apothecary appeared a little puzzled. I was standing before him; he fixed his eyes on me very steadily: his eyes were small and grey; not very bright, but I dare say I should think them shrewd now: he had a hard-featured yet good-natured looking face. Having considered me at leisure, he said-- "What made you ill yesterday?" "She had a fall," said Bessie, again putting in her word. "Fall! why, that is like a baby again! Can't she manage to walk at her age? She must be eight or nine years old." "I was knocked down," was the blunt explanation, jerked out of me by another pang of mortified pride; "but that did not make me ill," I added; while Mr. Lloyd helped himself to a pinch of snuff. As he was returning the box to his waistcoat pocket, a loud bell rang for the servants' dinner; he knew what it was. "That's for you, nurse," said he; "you can go down; I'll give Miss Jane a lecture till you come back." Bessie would rather have stayed, but she was obliged to go, because punctuality at meals was rigidly enforced at Gateshead Hall. "The fall did not make you ill; what did, then?" pursued Mr. Lloyd when Bessie was gone. "I was shut up in a room where there is a ghost till after dark." I saw Mr. Lloyd smile and frown at the same time. "Ghost! What, you are a baby after all! You are afraid of ghosts?" "Of Mr. Reed's ghost I am: he died in that room, and was laid out there. Neither Bessie nor any one else will go into it at night, if they can help it; and it was cruel to shut me up alone without a candle,--so cruel that I think I shall never forget it." "Nonsense! And is it that makes you so miserable? Are you afraid now in daylight?" "No: but night will come again before long: and besides,--I am unhappy,--very unhappy, for other things." "What other things? Can you tell me some of them?" How much I wished to reply fully to this question! How difficult it was to frame any answer! Children can feel, but they cannot analyse their feelings; and if the analysis is partially effected in thought, they know not how to express the result of the process in words. Fearful, however, of losing this first and only opportunity of relieving my grief by imparting it, I, after a disturbed pause, contrived to frame a meagre, though, as far as it went, true response. "For one thing, I have no father or mother, brothers or sisters." "You have a kind aunt and cousins." Again I paused; then bunglingly enounced-- "But John Reed knocked me down, and my aunt shut me up in the red-room." Mr. Lloyd a second time produced his snuff-box. "Don't you think Gateshead Hall a very beautiful house?" asked he. "Are you not very thankful to have such a fine place to live at?" "It is not my house, sir; and Abbot says I have less right to be here than a servant." "Pooh! you can't be silly enough to wish to leave such a splendid place?" "If I had anywhere else to go, I should be glad to leave it; but I can never get away from Gateshead till I am a woman." "Perhaps you may--who knows? Have you any relations besides Mrs. Reed?" "I think not, sir." "None belonging to your father?" "I don't know. I asked Aunt Reed once, and she said possibly I might have some poor, low relations called Eyre, but she knew nothing about them." "If you had such, would you like to go to them?" I reflected. Poverty looks grim to grown people; still more so to children: they have not much idea of industrious, working, respectable poverty; they think of the word only as connected with ragged clothes, scanty food, fireless grates, rude manners, and debasing vices: poverty for me was synonymous with degradation. "No; I should not like to belong to poor people," was my reply. "Not even if they were kind to you?" I shook my head: I could not see how poor people had the means of being kind; and then to learn to speak like them, to adopt their manners, to be uneducated, to grow up like one of the poor women I saw sometimes nursing their children or washing their clothes at the cottage doors of the village of Gateshead: no, I was not heroic enough to purchase liberty at the price of caste. "But are your relatives so very poor? Are they working people?" "I cannot tell; Aunt Reed says if I have any, they must be a beggarly set: I should not like to go a begging." "Would you like to go to school?" Again I reflected: I scarcely knew what school was: Bessie sometimes spoke of it as a place where young ladies sat in the stocks, wore backboards, and were expected to be exceedingly genteel and precise: John Reed hated his school, and abused his master; but John Reed's tastes were no rule for mine, and if Bessie's accounts of school-discipline (gathered from the young ladies of a family where she had lived before coming to Gateshead) were somewhat appalling, her details of certain accomplishments attained by these same young ladies were, I thought, equally attractive. She boasted of beautiful paintings of landscapes and flowers by them executed; of songs they could sing and pieces they could play, of purses they could net, of French books they could translate; till my spirit was moved to emulation as I listened. Besides, school would be a complete change: it implied a long journey, an entire separation from Gateshead, an entrance into a new life. "I should indeed like to go to school," was the audible conclusion of my musings. "Well, well! who knows what may happen?" said Mr. Lloyd, as he got up. "The child ought to have change of air and scene," he added, speaking to himself; "nerves not in a good state." Bessie now returned; at the same moment the carriage was heard rolling up the gravel-walk. "Is that your mistress, nurse?" asked Mr. Lloyd. "I should like to speak to her before I go." Bessie invited him to walk into the breakfast-room, and led the way out. In the interview which followed between him and Mrs. Reed, I presume, from after-occurrences, that the apothecary ventured to recommend my being sent to school; and the recommendation was no doubt readily enough adopted; for as Abbot said, in discussing the subject with Bessie when both sat sewing in the nursery one night, after I was in bed, and, as they thought, asleep, "Missis was, she dared say, glad enough to get rid of such a tiresome, ill-conditioned child, who always looked as if she were watching everybody, and scheming plots underhand." Abbot, I think, gave me credit for being a sort of infantine Guy Fawkes. On that same occasion I learned, for the first time, from Miss Abbot's communications to Bessie, that my father had been a poor clergyman; that my mother had married him against the wishes of her friends, who considered the match beneath her; that my grandfather Reed was so irritated at her disobedience, he cut her off without a shilling; that after my mother and father had been married a year, the latter caught the typhus fever while visiting among the poor of a large manufacturing town where his curacy was situated, and where that disease was then prevalent: that my mother took the infection from him, and both died within a month of each other. Bessie, when she heard this narrative, sighed and said, "Poor Miss Jane is to be pitied, too, Abbot." "Yes," responded Abbot; "if she were a nice, pretty child, one might compassionate her forlornness; but one really cannot care for such a little toad as that." "Not a great deal, to be sure," agreed Bessie: "at any rate, a beauty like Miss Georgiana would be more moving in the same condition." "Yes, I doat on Miss Georgiana!" cried the fervent Abbot. "Little darling!--with her long curls and her blue eyes, and such a sweet colour as she has; just as if she were painted!--Bessie, I could fancy a Welsh rabbit for supper." "So could I--with a roast onion. Come, we'll go down." They went. CHAPTER IV From my discourse with Mr. Lloyd, and from the above reported conference between Bessie and Abbot, I gathered enough of hope to suffice as a motive for wishing to get well: a change seemed near,--I desired and waited it in silence. It tarried, however: days and weeks passed: I had regained my normal state of health, but no new allusion was made to the subject over which I brooded. Mrs. Reed surveyed me at times with a severe eye, but seldom addressed me: since my illness, she had drawn a more marked line of separation than ever between me and her own children; appointing me a small closet to sleep in by myself, condemning me to take my meals alone, and pass all my time in the nursery, while my cousins were constantly in the drawing-room. Not a hint, however, did she drop about sending me to school: still I felt an instinctive certainty that she would not long endure me under the same roof with her; for her glance, now more than ever, when turned on me, expressed an insuperable and rooted aversion. Eliza and Georgiana, evidently acting according to orders, spoke to me as little as possible: John thrust his tongue in his cheek whenever he saw me, and once attempted chastisement; but as I instantly turned against him, roused by the same sentiment of deep ire and desperate revolt which had stirred my corruption before, he thought it better to desist, and ran from me tittering execrations, and vowing I had burst his nose. I had indeed levelled at that prominent feature as hard a blow as my knuckles could inflict; and when I saw that either that or my look daunted him, I had the greatest inclination to follow up my advantage to purpose; but he was already with his mama. I heard him in a blubbering tone commence the tale of how "that nasty Jane Eyre" had flown at him like a mad cat: he was stopped rather harshly-- "Don't talk to me about her, John: I told you not to go near her; she is not worthy of notice; I do not choose that either you or your sisters should associate with her." Here, leaning over the banister, I cried out suddenly, and without at all deliberating on my words-- "They are not fit to associate with me." Mrs. Reed was rather a stout woman; but, on hearing this strange and audacious declaration, she ran nimbly up the stair, swept me like a whirlwind into the nursery, and crushing me down on the edge of my crib, dared me in an emphatic voice to rise from that place, or utter one syllable during the remainder of the day. "What would Uncle Reed say to you, if he were alive?" was my scarcely voluntary demand. I say scarcely voluntary, for it seemed as if my tongue pronounced words without my will consenting to their utterance: something spoke out of me over which I had no control. "What?" said Mrs. Reed under her breath: her usually cold composed grey eye became troubled with a look like fear; she took her hand from my arm, and gazed at me as if she really did not know whether I were child or fiend. I was now in for it. "My Uncle Reed is in heaven, and can see all you do and think; and so can papa and mama: they know how you shut me up all day long, and how you wish me dead." Mrs. Reed soon rallied her spirits: she shook me most soundly, she boxed both my ears, and then left me without a word. Bessie supplied the hiatus by a homily of an hour's length, in which she proved beyond a doubt that I was the most wicked and abandoned child ever reared under a roof. I half believed her; for I felt indeed only bad feelings surging in my breast. November, December, and half of January passed away. Christmas and the New Year had been celebrated at Gateshead with the usual festive cheer; presents had been interchanged, dinners and evening parties given. From every enjoyment I was, of course, excluded: my share of the gaiety consisted in witnessing the daily apparelling of Eliza and Georgiana, and seeing them descend to the drawing-room, dressed out in thin muslin frocks and scarlet sashes, with hair elaborately ringletted; and afterwards, in listening to the sound of the piano or the harp played below, to the passing to and fro of the butler and footman, to the jingling of glass and china as refreshments were handed, to the broken hum of conversation as the drawing-room door opened and closed. When tired of this occupation, I would retire from the stairhead to the solitary and silent nursery: there, though somewhat sad, I was not miserable. To speak truth, I had not the least wish to go into company, for in company I was very rarely noticed; and if Bessie had but been kind and companionable, I should have deemed it a treat to spend the evenings quietly with her, instead of passing them under the formidable eye of Mrs. Reed, in a room full of ladies and gentlemen. But Bessie, as soon as she had dressed her young ladies, used to take herself off to the lively regions of the kitchen and housekeeper's room, generally bearing the candle along with her. I then sat with my doll on my knee till the fire got low, glancing round occasionally to make sure that nothing worse than myself haunted the shadowy room; and when the embers sank to a dull red, I undressed hastily, tugging at knots and strings as I best might, and sought shelter from cold and darkness in my crib. To this crib I always took my doll; human beings must love something, and, in the dearth of worthier objects of affection, I contrived to find a pleasure in loving and cherishing a faded graven image, shabby as a miniature scarecrow. It puzzles me now to remember with what absurd sincerity I doated on this little toy, half fancying it alive and capable of sensation. I could not sleep unless it was folded in my night-gown; and when it lay there safe and warm, I was comparatively happy, believing it to be happy likewise. Long did the hours seem while I waited the departure of the company, and listened for the sound of Bessie's step on the stairs: sometimes she would come up in the interval to seek her thimble or her scissors, or perhaps to bring me something by way of supper--a bun or a cheese-cake--then she would sit on the bed while I ate it, and when I had finished, she would tuck the clothes round me, and twice she kissed me, and said, "Good night, Miss Jane." When thus gentle, Bessie seemed to me the best, prettiest, kindest being in the world; and I wished most intensely that she would always be so pleasant and amiable, and never push me about, or scold, or task me unreasonably, as she was too often wont to do. Bessie Lee must, I think, have been a girl of good natural capacity, for she was smart in all she did, and had a remarkable knack of narrative; so, at least, I judge from the impression made on me by her nursery tales. She was pretty too, if my recollections of her face and person are correct. I remember her as a slim young woman, with black hair, dark eyes, very nice features, and good, clear complexion; but she had a capricious and hasty temper, and indifferent ideas of principle or justice: still, such as she was, I preferred her to any one else at Gateshead Hall. It was the fifteenth of January, about nine o'clock in the morning: Bessie was gone down to breakfast; my cousins had not yet been summoned to their mama; Eliza was putting on her bonnet and warm garden-coat to go and feed her poultry, an occupation of which she was fond: and not less so of selling the eggs to the housekeeper and hoarding up the money she thus obtained. She had a turn for traffic, and a marked propensity for saving; shown not only in the vending of eggs and chickens, but also in driving hard bargains with the gardener about flower-roots, seeds, and slips of plants; that functionary having orders from Mrs. Reed to buy of his young lady all the products of her parterre she wished to sell: and Eliza would have sold the hair off her head if she could have made a handsome profit thereby. As to her money, she first secreted it in odd corners, wrapped in a rag or an old curl-paper; but some of these hoards having been discovered by the housemaid, Eliza, fearful of one day losing her valued treasure, consented to intrust it to her mother, at a usurious rate of interest--fifty or sixty per cent.; which interest she exacted every quarter, keeping her accounts in a little book with anxious accuracy. Georgiana sat on a high stool, dressing her hair at the glass, and interweaving her curls with artificial flowers and faded feathers, of which she had found a store in a drawer in the attic. I was making my bed, having received strict orders from Bessie to get it arranged before she returned (for Bessie now frequently employed me as a sort of under- nurserymaid, to tidy the room, dust the chairs, &c.). Having spread the quilt and folded my night-dress, I went to the window-seat to put in order some picture-books and doll's house furniture scattered there; an abrupt command from Georgiana to let her playthings alone (for the tiny chairs and mirrors, the fairy plates and cups, were her property) stopped my proceedings; and then, for lack of other occupation, I fell to breathing on the frost-flowers with which the window was fretted, and thus clearing a space in the glass through which I might look out on the grounds, where all was still and petrified under the influence of a hard frost. From this window were visible the porter's lodge and the carriage-road, and just as I had dissolved so much of the silver-white foliage veiling the panes as left room to look out, I saw the gates thrown open and a carriage roll through. I watched it ascending the drive with indifference; carriages often came to Gateshead, but none ever brought visitors in whom I was interested; it stopped in front of the house, the door-bell rang loudly, the new-comer was admitted. All this being nothing to me, my vacant attention soon found livelier attraction in the spectacle of a little hungry robin, which came and chirruped on the twigs of the leafless cherry-tree nailed against the wall near the casement. The remains of my breakfast of bread and milk stood on the table, and having crumbled a morsel of roll, I was tugging at the sash to put out the crumbs on the window-sill, when Bessie came running upstairs into the nursery. "Miss Jane, take off your pinafore; what are you doing there? Have you washed your hands and face this morning?" I gave another tug before I answered, for I wanted the bird to be secure of its bread: the sash yielded; I scattered the crumbs, some on the stone sill, some on the cherry-tree bough, then, closing the window, I replied-- "No, Bessie; I have only just finished dusting." "Troublesome, careless child! and what are you doing now? You look quite red, as if you had been about some mischief: what were you opening the window for?" I was spared the trouble of answering, for Bessie seemed in too great a hurry to listen to explanations; she hauled me to the washstand, inflicted a merciless, but happily brief scrub on my face and hands with soap, water, and a coarse towel; disciplined my head with a bristly brush, denuded me of my pinafore, and then hurrying me to the top of the stairs, bid me go down directly, as I was wanted in the breakfast-room. I would have asked who wanted me: I would have demanded if Mrs. Reed was there; but Bessie was already gone, and had closed the nursery-door upon me. I slowly descended. For nearly three months, I had never been called to Mrs. Reed's presence; restricted so long to the nursery, the breakfast, dining, and drawing-rooms were become for me awful regions, on which it dismayed me to intrude. I now stood in the empty hall; before me was the breakfast-room door, and I stopped, intimidated and trembling. What a miserable little poltroon had fear, engendered of unjust punishment, made of me in those days! I feared to return to the nursery, and feared to go forward to the parlour; ten minutes I stood in agitated hesitation; the vehement ringing of the breakfast-room bell decided me; I _must_ enter. "Who could want me?" I asked inwardly, as with both hands I turned the stiff door-handle, which, for a second or two, resisted my efforts. "What should I see besides Aunt Reed in the apartment?--a man or a woman?" The handle turned, the door unclosed, and passing through and curtseying low, I looked up at--a black pillar!--such, at least, appeared to me, at first sight, the straight, narrow, sable-clad shape standing erect on the rug: the grim face at the top was like a carved mask, placed above the shaft by way of capital. Mrs. Reed occupied her usual seat by the fireside; she made a signal to me to approach; I did so, and she introduced me to the stony stranger with the words: "This is the little girl respecting whom I applied to you." _He_, for it was a man, turned his head slowly towards where I stood, and having examined me with the two inquisitive-looking grey eyes which twinkled under a pair of bushy brows, said solemnly, and in a bass voice, "Her size is small: what is her age?" "Ten years." "So much?" was the doubtful answer; and he prolonged his scrutiny for some minutes. Presently he addressed me--"Your name, little girl?" "Jane Eyre, sir." In uttering these words I looked up: he seemed to me a tall gentleman; but then I was very little; his features were large, and they and all the lines of his frame were equally harsh and prim. "Well, Jane Eyre, and are you a good child?" Impossible to reply to this in the affirmative: my little world held a contrary opinion: I was silent. Mrs. Reed answered for me by an expressive shake of the head, adding soon, "Perhaps the less said on that subject the better, Mr. Brocklehurst." "Sorry indeed to hear it! she and I must have some talk;" and bending from the perpendicular, he installed his person in the arm-chair opposite Mrs. Reed's. "Come here," he said. I stepped across the rug; he placed me square and straight before him. What a face he had, now that it was almost on a level with mine! what a great nose! and what a mouth! and what large prominent teeth! "No sight so sad as that of a naughty child," he began, "especially a naughty little girl. Do you know where the wicked go after death?" "They go to hell," was my ready and orthodox answer. "And what is hell? Can you tell me that?" "A pit full of fire." "And should you like to fall into that pit, and to be burning there for ever?" "No, sir." "What must you do to avoid it?" I deliberated a moment; my answer, when it did come, was objectionable: "I must keep in good health, and not die." "How can you keep in good health? Children younger than you die daily. I buried a little child of five years old only a day or two since,--a good little child, whose soul is now in heaven. It is to be feared the same could not be said of you were you to be called hence." Not being in a condition to remove his doubt, I only cast my eyes down on the two large feet planted on the rug, and sighed, wishing myself far enough away. "I hope that sigh is from the heart, and that you repent of ever having been the occasion of discomfort to your excellent benefactress." "Benefactress! benefactress!" said I inwardly: "they all call Mrs. Reed my benefactress; if so, a benefactress is a disagreeable thing." "Do you say your prayers night and morning?" continued my interrogator. "Yes, sir." "Do you read your Bible?" "Sometimes." "With pleasure? Are you fond of it?" "I like Revelations, and the book of Daniel, and Genesis and Samuel, and a little bit of Exodus, and some parts of Kings and Chronicles, and Job and Jonah." "And the Psalms? I hope you like them?" "No, sir." "No? oh, shocking! I have a little boy, younger than you, who knows six Psalms by heart: and when you ask him which he would rather have, a gingerbread-nut to eat or a verse of a Psalm to learn, he says: 'Oh! the verse of a Psalm! angels sing Psalms;' says he, 'I wish to be a little angel here below;' he then gets two nuts in recompense for his infant piety." "Psalms are not interesting," I remarked. "That proves you have a wicked heart; and you must pray to God to change it: to give you a new and clean one: to take away your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh." I was about to propound a question, touching the manner in which that operation of changing my heart was to be performed, when Mrs. Reed interposed, telling me to sit down; she then proceeded to carry on the conversation herself. "Mr. Brocklehurst, I believe I intimated in the letter which I wrote to you three weeks ago, that this little girl has not quite the character and disposition I could wish: should you admit her into Lowood school, I should be glad if the superintendent and teachers were requested to keep a strict eye on her, and, above all, to guard against her worst fault, a tendency to deceit. I mention this in your hearing, Jane, that you may not attempt to impose on Mr. Brocklehurst." Well might I dread, well might I dislike Mrs. Reed; for it was her nature to wound me cruelly; never was I happy in her presence; however carefully I obeyed, however strenuously I strove to please her, my efforts were still repulsed and repaid by such sentences as the above. Now, uttered before a stranger, the accusation cut me to the heart; I dimly perceived that she was already obliterating hope from the new phase of existence which she destined me to enter; I felt, though I could not have expressed the feeling, that she was sowing aversion and unkindness along my future path; I saw myself transformed under Mr. Brocklehurst's eye into an artful, noxious child, and what could I do to remedy the injury? "Nothing, indeed," thought I, as I struggled to repress a sob, and hastily wiped away some tears, the impotent evidences of my anguish. "Deceit is, indeed, a sad fault in a child," said Mr. Brocklehurst; "it is akin to falsehood, and all liars will have their portion in the lake burning with fire and brimstone; she shall, however, be watched, Mrs. Reed. I will speak to Miss Temple and the teachers." "I should wish her to be brought up in a manner suiting her prospects," continued my benefactress; "to be made useful, to be kept humble: as for the vacations, she will, with your permission, spend them always at Lowood." "Your decisions are perfectly judicious, madam," returned Mr. Brocklehurst. "Humility is a Christian grace, and one peculiarly appropriate to the pupils of Lowood; I, therefore, direct that especial care shall be bestowed on its cultivation amongst them. I have studied how best to mortify in them the worldly sentiment of pride; and, only the other day, I had a pleasing proof of my success. My second daughter, Augusta, went with her mama to visit the school, and on her return she exclaimed: 'Oh, dear papa, how quiet and plain all the girls at Lowood look, with their hair combed behind their ears, and their long pinafores, and those little holland pockets outside their frocks--they are almost like poor people's children! and,' said she, 'they looked at my dress and mama's, as if they had never seen a silk gown before.'" "This is the state of things I quite approve," returned Mrs. Reed; "had I sought all England over, I could scarcely have found a system more exactly fitting a child like Jane Eyre. Consistency, my dear Mr. Brocklehurst; I advocate consistency in all things." "Consistency, madam, is the first of Christian duties; and it has been observed in every arrangement connected with the establishment of Lowood: plain fare, simple attire, unsophisticated accommodations, hardy and active habits; such is the order of the day in the house and its inhabitants." "Quite right, sir. I may then depend upon this child being received as a pupil at Lowood, and there being trained in conformity to her position and prospects?" "Madam, you may: she shall be placed in that nursery of chosen plants, and I trust she will show herself grateful for the inestimable privilege of her election." "I will send her, then, as soon as possible, Mr. Brocklehurst; for, I assure you, I feel anxious to be relieved of a responsibility that was becoming too irksome." "No doubt, no doubt, madam; and now I wish you good morning. I shall return to Brocklehurst Hall in the course of a week or two: my good friend, the Archdeacon, will not permit me to leave him sooner. I shall send Miss Temple notice that she is to expect a new girl, so that there will be no difficulty about receiving her. Good-bye." "Good-bye, Mr. Brocklehurst; remember me to Mrs. and Miss Brocklehurst, and to Augusta and Theodore, and Master Broughton Brocklehurst." "I will, madam. Little girl, here is a book entitled the 'Child's Guide,' read it with prayer, especially that part containing 'An account of the awfully sudden death of Martha G---, a naughty child addicted to falsehood and deceit.'" With these words Mr. Brocklehurst put into my hand a thin pamphlet sewn in a cover, and having rung for his carriage, he departed. Mrs. Reed and I were left alone: some minutes passed in silence; she was sewing, I was watching her. Mrs. Reed might be at that time some six or seven and thirty; she was a woman of robust frame, square-shouldered and strong-limbed, not tall, and, though stout, not obese: she had a somewhat large face, the under jaw being much developed and very solid; her brow was low, her chin large and prominent, mouth and nose sufficiently regular; under her light eyebrows glimmered an eye devoid of ruth; her skin was dark and opaque, her hair nearly flaxen; her constitution was sound as a bell--illness never came near her; she was an exact, clever manager; her household and tenantry were thoroughly under her control; her children only at times defied her authority and laughed it to scorn; she dressed well, and had a presence and port calculated to set off handsome attire. Sitting on a low stool, a few yards from her arm-chair, I examined her figure; I perused her features. In my hand I held the tract containing the sudden death of the Liar, to which narrative my attention had been pointed as to an appropriate warning. What had just passed; what Mrs. Reed had said concerning me to Mr. Brocklehurst; the whole tenor of their conversation, was recent, raw, and stinging in my mind; I had felt every word as acutely as I had heard it plainly, and a passion of resentment fomented now within me. Mrs. Reed looked up from her work; her eye settled on mine, her fingers at the same time suspended their nimble movements. "Go out of the room; return to the nursery," was her mandate. My look or something else must have struck her as offensive, for she spoke with extreme though suppressed irritation. I got up, I went to the door; I came back again; I walked to the window, across the room, then close up to her. _Speak_ I must: I had been trodden on severely, and _must_ turn: but how? What strength had I to dart retaliation at my antagonist? I gathered my energies and launched them in this blunt sentence-- "I am not deceitful: if I were, I should say I loved you; but I declare I do not love you: I dislike you the worst of anybody in the world except John Reed; and this book about the liar, you may give to your girl, Georgiana, for it is she who tells lies, and not I." Mrs. Reed's hands still lay on her work inactive: her eye of ice continued to dwell freezingly on mine. "What more have you to say?" she asked, rather in the tone in which a person might address an opponent of adult age than such as is ordinarily used to a child. That eye of hers, that voice stirred every antipathy I had. Shaking from head to foot, thrilled with ungovernable excitement, I continued-- "I am glad you are no relation of mine: I will never call you aunt again as long as I live. I will never come to see you when I am grown up; and if any one asks me how I liked you, and how you treated me, I will say the very thought of you makes me sick, and that you treated me with miserable cruelty." "How dare you affirm that, Jane Eyre?" "How dare I, Mrs. Reed? How dare I? Because it is the _truth_. You think I have no feelings, and that I can do without one bit of love or kindness; but I cannot live so: and you have no pity. I shall remember how you thrust me back--roughly and violently thrust me back--into the red-room, and locked me up there, to my dying day; though I was in agony; though I cried out, while suffocating with distress, 'Have mercy! Have mercy, Aunt Reed!' And that punishment you made me suffer because your wicked boy struck me--knocked me down for nothing. I will tell anybody who asks me questions, this exact tale. People think you a good woman, but you are bad, hard-hearted. _You_ are deceitful!" {How dare I, Mrs. Reed? How dare I? Because it is the truth: p30.jpg} Ere I had finished this reply, my soul began to expand, to exult, with the strangest sense of freedom, of triumph, I ever felt. It seemed as if an invisible bond had burst, and that I had struggled out into unhoped- for liberty. Not without cause was this sentiment: Mrs. Reed looked frightened; her work had slipped from her knee; she was lifting up her hands, rocking herself to and fro, and even twisting her face as if she would cry. "Jane, you are under a mistake: what is the matter with you? Why do you tremble so violently? Would you like to drink some water?" "No, Mrs. Reed." "Is there anything else you wish for, Jane? I assure you, I desire to be your friend." "Not you. You told Mr. Brocklehurst I had a bad character, a deceitful disposition; and I'll let everybody at Lowood know what you are, and what you have done." "Jane, you don't understand these things: children must be corrected for their faults." "Deceit is not my fault!" I cried out in a savage, high voice. "But you are passionate, Jane, that you must allow: and now return to the nursery--there's a dear--and lie down a little." "I am not your dear; I cannot lie down: send me to school soon, Mrs. Reed, for I hate to live here." "I will indeed send her to school soon," murmured Mrs. Reed _sotto voce_; and gathering up her work, she abruptly quitted the apartment. I was left there alone--winner of the field. It was the hardest battle I had fought, and the first victory I had gained: I stood awhile on the rug, where Mr. Brocklehurst had stood, and I enjoyed my conqueror's solitude. First, I smiled to myself and felt elate; but this fierce pleasure subsided in me as fast as did the accelerated throb of my pulses. A child cannot quarrel with its elders, as I had done; cannot give its furious feelings uncontrolled play, as I had given mine, without experiencing afterwards the pang of remorse and the chill of reaction. A ridge of lighted heath, alive, glancing, devouring, would have been a meet emblem of my mind when I accused and menaced Mrs. Reed: the same ridge, black and blasted after the flames are dead, would have represented as meetly my subsequent condition, when half-an-hour's silence and reflection had shown me the madness of my conduct, and the dreariness of my hated and hating position. Something of vengeance I had tasted for the first time; as aromatic wine it seemed, on swallowing, warm and racy: its after-flavour, metallic and corroding, gave me a sensation as if I had been poisoned. Willingly would I now have gone and asked Mrs. Reed's pardon; but I knew, partly from experience and partly from instinct, that was the way to make her repulse me with double scorn, thereby re-exciting every turbulent impulse of my nature. I would fain exercise some better faculty than that of fierce speaking; fain find nourishment for some less fiendish feeling than that of sombre indignation. I took a book--some Arabian tales; I sat down and endeavoured to read. I could make no sense of the subject; my own thoughts swam always between me and the page I had usually found fascinating. I opened the glass-door in the breakfast-room: the shrubbery was quite still: the black frost reigned, unbroken by sun or breeze, through the grounds. I covered my head and arms with the skirt of my frock, and went out to walk in a part of the plantation which was quite sequestrated; but I found no pleasure in the silent trees, the falling fir-cones, the congealed relics of autumn, russet leaves, swept by past winds in heaps, and now stiffened together. I leaned against a gate, and looked into an empty field where no sheep were feeding, where the short grass was nipped and blanched. It was a very grey day; a most opaque sky, "onding on snaw," canopied all; thence flakes felt it intervals, which settled on the hard path and on the hoary lea without melting. I stood, a wretched child enough, whispering to myself over and over again, "What shall I do?--what shall I do?" All at once I heard a clear voice call, "Miss Jane! where are you? Come to lunch!" It was Bessie, I knew well enough; but I did not stir; her light step came tripping down the path. "You naughty little thing!" she said. "Why don't you come when you are called?" Bessie's presence, compared with the thoughts over which I had been brooding, seemed cheerful; even though, as usual, she was somewhat cross. The fact is, after my conflict with and victory over Mrs. Reed, I was not disposed to care much for the nursemaid's transitory anger; and I _was_ disposed to bask in her youthful lightness of heart. I just put my two arms round her and said, "Come, Bessie! don't scold." The action was more frank and fearless than any I was habituated to indulge in: somehow it pleased her. "You are a strange child, Miss Jane," she said, as she looked down at me; "a little roving, solitary thing: and you are going to school, I suppose?" I nodded. "And won't you be sorry to leave poor Bessie?" "What does Bessie care for me? She is always scolding me." "Because you're such a queer, frightened, shy little thing. You should be bolder." "What! to get more knocks?" "Nonsense! But you are rather put upon, that's certain. My mother said, when she came to see me last week, that she would not like a little one of her own to be in your place.--Now, come in, and I've some good news for you." "I don't think you have, Bessie." "Child! what do you mean? What sorrowful eyes you fix on me! Well, but Missis and the young ladies and Master John are going out to tea this afternoon, and you shall have tea with me. I'll ask cook to bake you a little cake, and then you shall help me to look over your drawers; for I am soon to pack your trunk. Missis intends you to leave Gateshead in a day or two, and you shall choose what toys you like to take with you." "Bessie, you must promise not to scold me any more till I go." "Well, I will; but mind you are a very good girl, and don't be afraid of me. Don't start when I chance to speak rather sharply; it's so provoking." "I don't think I shall ever be afraid of you again, Bessie, because I have got used to you, and I shall soon have another set of people to dread." "If you dread them they'll dislike you." "As you do, Bessie?" "I don't dislike you, Miss; I believe I am fonder of you than of all the others." "You don't show it." "You little sharp thing! you've got quite a new way of talking. What makes you so venturesome and hardy?" "Why, I shall soon be away from you, and besides"--I was going to say something about what had passed between me and Mrs. Reed, but on second thoughts I considered it better to remain silent on that head. "And so you're glad to leave me?" "Not at all, Bessie; indeed, just now I'm rather sorry." "Just now! and rather! How coolly my little lady says it! I dare say now if I were to ask you for a kiss you wouldn't give it me: you'd say you'd _rather_ not." "I'll kiss you and welcome: bend your head down." Bessie stooped; we mutually embraced, and I followed her into the house quite comforted. That afternoon lapsed in peace and harmony; and in the evening Bessie told me some of her most enchanting stories, and sang me some of her sweetest songs. Even for me life had its gleams of sunshine. CHAPTER V Five o'clock had hardly struck on the morning of the 19th of January, when Bessie brought a candle into my closet and found me already up and nearly dressed. I had risen half-an-hour before her entrance, and had washed my face, and put on my clothes by the light of a half-moon just setting, whose rays streamed through the narrow window near my crib. I was to leave Gateshead that day by a coach which passed the lodge gates at six a.m. Bessie was the only person yet risen; she had lit a fire in the nursery, where she now proceeded to make my breakfast. Few children can eat when excited with the thoughts of a journey; nor could I. Bessie, having pressed me in vain to take a few spoonfuls of the boiled milk and bread she had prepared for me, wrapped up some biscuits in a paper and put them into my bag; then she helped me on with my pelisse and bonnet, and wrapping herself in a shawl, she and I left the nursery. As we passed Mrs. Reed's bedroom, she said, "Will you go in and bid Missis good- bye?" "No, Bessie: she came to my crib last night when you were gone down to supper, and said I need not disturb her in the morning, or my cousins either; and she told me to remember that she had always been my best friend, and to speak of her and be grateful to her accordingly." "What did you say, Miss?" "Nothing: I covered my face with the bedclothes, and turned from her to the wall." "That was wrong, Miss Jane." "It was quite right, Bessie. Your Missis has not been my friend: she has been my foe." "O Miss Jane! don't say so!" "Good-bye to Gateshead!" cried I, as we passed through the hall and went out at the front door. The moon was set, and it was very dark; Bessie carried a lantern, whose light glanced on wet steps and gravel road sodden by a recent thaw. Raw and chill was the winter morning: my teeth chattered as I hastened down the drive. There was a light in the porter's lodge: when we reached it, we found the porter's wife just kindling her fire: my trunk, which had been carried down the evening before, stood corded at the door. It wanted but a few minutes of six, and shortly after that hour had struck, the distant roll of wheels announced the coming coach; I went to the door and watched its lamps approach rapidly through the gloom. "Is she going by herself?" asked the porter's wife. "Yes." "And how far is it?" "Fifty miles." "What a long way! I wonder Mrs. Reed is not afraid to trust her so far alone." The coach drew up; there it was at the gates with its four horses and its top laden with passengers: the guard and coachman loudly urged haste; my trunk was hoisted up; I was taken from Bessie's neck, to which I clung with kisses. "Be sure and take good care of her," cried she to the guard, as he lifted me into the inside. "Ay, ay!" was the answer: the door was slapped to, a voice exclaimed "All right," and on we drove. Thus was I severed from Bessie and Gateshead; thus whirled away to unknown, and, as I then deemed, remote and mysterious regions. I remember but little of the journey; I only know that the day seemed to me of a preternatural length, and that we appeared to travel over hundreds of miles of road. We passed through several towns, and in one, a very large one, the coach stopped; the horses were taken out, and the passengers alighted to dine. I was carried into an inn, where the guard wanted me to have some dinner; but, as I had no appetite, he left me in an immense room with a fireplace at each end, a chandelier pendent from the ceiling, and a little red gallery high up against the wall filled with musical instruments. Here I walked about for a long time, feeling very strange, and mortally apprehensive of some one coming in and kidnapping me; for I believed in kidnappers, their exploits having frequently figured in Bessie's fireside chronicles. At last the guard returned; once more I was stowed away in the coach, my protector mounted his own seat, sounded his hollow horn, and away we rattled over the "stony street" of L-. The afternoon came on wet and somewhat misty: as it waned into dusk, I began to feel that we were getting very far indeed from Gateshead: we ceased to pass through towns; the country changed; great grey hills heaved up round the horizon: as twilight deepened, we descended a valley, dark with wood, and long after night had overclouded the prospect, I heard a wild wind rushing amongst trees. Lulled by the sound, I at last dropped asleep; I had not long slumbered when the sudden cessation of motion awoke me; the coach-door was open, and a person like a servant was standing at it: I saw her face and dress by the light of the lamps. "Is there a little girl called Jane Eyre here?" she asked. I answered "Yes," and was then lifted out; my trunk was handed down, and the coach instantly drove away. I was stiff with long sitting, and bewildered with the noise and motion of the coach: Gathering my faculties, I looked about me. Rain, wind, and darkness filled the air; nevertheless, I dimly discerned a wall before me and a door open in it; through this door I passed with my new guide: she shut and locked it behind her. There was now visible a house or houses--for the building spread far--with many windows, and lights burning in some; we went up a broad pebbly path, splashing wet, and were admitted at a door; then the servant led me through a passage into a room with a fire, where she left me alone. I stood and warmed my numbed fingers over the blaze, then I looked round; there was no candle, but the uncertain light from the hearth showed, by intervals, papered walls, carpet, curtains, shining mahogany furniture: it was a parlour, not so spacious or splendid as the drawing-room at Gateshead, but comfortable enough. I was puzzling to make out the subject of a picture on the wall, when the door opened, and an individual carrying a light entered; another followed close behind. The first was a tall lady with dark hair, dark eyes, and a pale and large forehead; her figure was partly enveloped in a shawl, her countenance was grave, her bearing erect. "The child is very young to be sent alone," said she, putting her candle down on the table. She considered me attentively for a minute or two, then further added-- "She had better be put to bed soon; she looks tired: are you tired?" she asked, placing her hand on my shoulder. "A little, ma'am." "And hungry too, no doubt: let her have some supper before she goes to bed, Miss Miller. Is this the first time you have left your parents to come to school, my little girl?" I explained to her that I had no parents. She inquired how long they had been dead: then how old I was, what was my name, whether I could read, write, and sew a little: then she touched my cheek gently with her forefinger, and saying, "She hoped I should be a good child," dismissed me along with Miss Miller. The lady I had left might be about twenty-nine; the one who went with me appeared some years younger: the first impressed me by her voice, look, and air. Miss Miller was more ordinary; ruddy in complexion, though of a careworn countenance; hurried in gait and action, like one who had always a multiplicity of tasks on hand: she looked, indeed, what I afterwards found she really was, an under-teacher. Led by her, I passed from compartment to compartment, from passage to passage, of a large and irregular building; till, emerging from the total and somewhat dreary silence pervading that portion of the house we had traversed, we came upon the hum of many voices, and presently entered a wide, long room, with great deal tables, two at each end, on each of which burnt a pair of candles, and seated all round on benches, a congregation of girls of every age, from nine or ten to twenty. Seen by the dim light of the dips, their number to me appeared countless, though not in reality exceeding eighty; they were uniformly dressed in brown stuff frocks of quaint fashion, and long holland pinafores. It was the hour of study; they were engaged in conning over their to-morrow's task, and the hum I had heard was the combined result of their whispered repetitions. Miss Miller signed to me to sit on a bench near the door, then walking up to the top of the long room she cried out-- "Monitors, collect the lesson-books and put them away!" Four tall girls arose from different tables, and going round, gathered the books and removed them. Miss Miller again gave the word of command-- "Monitors, fetch the supper-trays!" The tall girls went out and returned presently, each bearing a tray, with portions of something, I knew not what, arranged thereon, and a pitcher of water and mug in the middle of each tray. The portions were handed round; those who liked took a draught of the water, the mug being common to all. When it came to my turn, I drank, for I was thirsty, but did not touch the food, excitement and fatigue rendering me incapable of eating: I now saw, however, that it was a thin oaten cake shared into fragments. The meal over, prayers were read by Miss Miller, and the classes filed off, two and two, upstairs. Overpowered by this time with weariness, I scarcely noticed what sort of a place the bedroom was, except that, like the schoolroom, I saw it was very long. To-night I was to be Miss Miller's bed-fellow; she helped me to undress: when laid down I glanced at the long rows of beds, each of which was quickly filled with two occupants; in ten minutes the single light was extinguished, and amidst silence and complete darkness I fell asleep. The night passed rapidly. I was too tired even to dream; I only once awoke to hear the wind rave in furious gusts, and the rain fall in torrents, and to be sensible that Miss Miller had taken her place by my side. When I again unclosed my eyes, a loud bell was ringing; the girls were up and dressing; day had not yet begun to dawn, and a rushlight or two burned in the room. I too rose reluctantly; it was bitter cold, and I dressed as well as I could for shivering, and washed when there was a basin at liberty, which did not occur soon, as there was but one basin to six girls, on the stands down the middle of the room. Again the bell rang: all formed in file, two and two, and in that order descended the stairs and entered the cold and dimly lit schoolroom: here prayers were read by Miss Miller; afterwards she called out-- "Form classes!" A great tumult succeeded for some minutes, during which Miss Miller repeatedly exclaimed, "Silence!" and "Order!" When it subsided, I saw them all drawn up in four semicircles, before four chairs, placed at the four tables; all held books in their hands, and a great book, like a Bible, lay on each table, before the vacant seat. A pause of some seconds succeeded, filled up by the low, vague hum of numbers; Miss Miller walked from class to class, hushing this indefinite sound. A distant bell tinkled: immediately three ladies entered the room, each walked to a table and took her seat. Miss Miller assumed the fourth vacant chair, which was that nearest the door, and around which the smallest of the children were assembled: to this inferior class I was called, and placed at the bottom of it. Business now began, the day's Collect was repeated, then certain texts of Scripture were said, and to these succeeded a protracted reading of chapters in the Bible, which lasted an hour. By the time that exercise was terminated, day had fully dawned. The indefatigable bell now sounded for the fourth time: the classes were marshalled and marched into another room to breakfast: how glad I was to behold a prospect of getting something to eat! I was now nearly sick from inanition, having taken so little the day before. The refectory was a great, low-ceiled, gloomy room; on two long tables smoked basins of something hot, which, however, to my dismay, sent forth an odour far from inviting. I saw a universal manifestation of discontent when the fumes of the repast met the nostrils of those destined to swallow it; from the van of the procession, the tall girls of the first class, rose the whispered words-- "Disgusting! The porridge is burnt again!" "Silence!" ejaculated a voice; not that of Miss Miller, but one of the upper teachers, a little and dark personage, smartly dressed, but of somewhat morose aspect, who installed herself at the top of one table, while a more buxom lady presided at the other. I looked in vain for her I had first seen the night before; she was not visible: Miss Miller occupied the foot of the table where I sat, and a strange, foreign-looking, elderly lady, the French teacher, as I afterwards found, took the corresponding seat at the other board. A long grace was said and a hymn sung; then a servant brought in some tea for the teachers, and the meal began. Ravenous, and now very faint, I devoured a spoonful or two of my portion without thinking of its taste; but the first edge of hunger blunted, I perceived I had got in hand a nauseous mess; burnt porridge is almost as bad as rotten potatoes; famine itself soon sickens over it. The spoons were moved slowly: I saw each girl taste her food and try to swallow it; but in most cases the effort was soon relinquished. Breakfast was over, and none had breakfasted. Thanks being returned for what we had not got, and a second hymn chanted, the refectory was evacuated for the schoolroom. I was one of the last to go out, and in passing the tables, I saw one teacher take a basin of the porridge and taste it; she looked at the others; all their countenances expressed displeasure, and one of them, the stout one, whispered-- "Abominable stuff! How shameful!" A quarter of an hour passed before lessons again began, during which the schoolroom was in a glorious tumult; for that space of time it seemed to be permitted to talk loud and more freely, and they used their privilege. The whole conversation ran on the breakfast, which one and all abused roundly. Poor things! it was the sole consolation they had. Miss Miller was now the only teacher in the room: a group of great girls standing about her spoke with serious and sullen gestures. I heard the name of Mr. Brocklehurst pronounced by some lips; at which Miss Miller shook her head disapprovingly; but she made no great effort to check the general wrath; doubtless she shared in it. A clock in the schoolroom struck nine; Miss Miller left her circle, and standing in the middle of the room, cried-- "Silence! To your seats!" Discipline prevailed: in five minutes the confused throng was resolved into order, and comparative silence quelled the Babel clamour of tongues. The upper teachers now punctually resumed their posts: but still, all seemed to wait. Ranged on benches down the sides of the room, the eighty girls sat motionless and erect; a quaint assemblage they appeared, all with plain locks combed from their faces, not a curl visible; in brown dresses, made high and surrounded by a narrow tucker about the throat, with little pockets of holland (shaped something like a Highlander's purse) tied in front of their frocks, and destined to serve the purpose of a work-bag: all, too, wearing woollen stockings and country-made shoes, fastened with brass buckles. Above twenty of those clad in this costume were full-grown girls, or rather young women; it suited them ill, and gave an air of oddity even to the prettiest. I was still looking at them, and also at intervals examining the teachers--none of whom precisely pleased me; for the stout one was a little coarse, the dark one not a little fierce, the foreigner harsh and grotesque, and Miss Miller, poor thing! looked purple, weather-beaten, and over-worked--when, as my eye wandered from face to face, the whole school rose simultaneously, as if moved by a common spring. What was the matter? I had heard no order given: I was puzzled. Ere I had gathered my wits, the classes were again seated: but as all eyes were now turned to one point, mine followed the general direction, and encountered the personage who had received me last night. She stood at the bottom of the long room, on the hearth; for there was a fire at each end; she surveyed the two rows of girls silently and gravely. Miss Miller approaching, seemed to ask her a question, and having received her answer, went back to her place, and said aloud-- "Monitor of the first class, fetch the globes!" While the direction was being executed, the lady consulted moved slowly up the room. I suppose I have a considerable organ of veneration, for I retain yet the sense of admiring awe with which my eyes traced her steps. Seen now, in broad daylight, she looked tall, fair, and shapely; brown eyes with a benignant light in their irids, and a fine pencilling of long lashes round, relieved the whiteness of her large front; on each of her temples her hair, of a very dark brown, was clustered in round curls, according to the fashion of those times, when neither smooth bands nor long ringlets were in vogue; her dress, also in the mode of the day, was of purple cloth, relieved by a sort of Spanish trimming of black velvet; a gold watch (watches were not so common then as now) shone at her girdle. Let the reader add, to complete the picture, refined features; a complexion, if pale, clear; and a stately air and carriage, and he will have, at least, as clearly as words can give it, a correct idea of the exterior of Miss Temple--Maria Temple, as I afterwards saw the name written in a prayer-book intrusted to me to carry to church. The superintendent of Lowood (for such was this lady) having taken her seat before a pair of globes placed on one of the tables, summoned the first class round her, and commenced giving a lesson on geography; the lower classes were called by the teachers: repetitions in history, grammar, &c., went on for an hour; writing and arithmetic succeeded, and music lessons were given by Miss Temple to some of the elder girls. The duration of each lesson was measured by the clock, which at last struck twelve. The superintendent rose-- "I have a word to address to the pupils," said she. The tumult of cessation from lessons was already breaking forth, but it sank at her voice. She went on-- "You had this morning a breakfast which you could not eat; you must be hungry:--I have ordered that a lunch of bread and cheese shall be served to all." The teachers looked at her with a sort of surprise. "It is to be done on my responsibility," she added, in an explanatory tone to them, and immediately afterwards left the room. The bread and cheese was presently brought in and distributed, to the high delight and refreshment of the whole school. The order was now given "To the garden!" Each put on a coarse straw bonnet, with strings of coloured calico, and a cloak of grey frieze. I was similarly equipped, and, following the stream, I made my way into the open air. The garden was a wide inclosure, surrounded with walls so high as to exclude every glimpse of prospect; a covered verandah ran down one side, and broad walks bordered a middle space divided into scores of little beds: these beds were assigned as gardens for the pupils to cultivate, and each bed had an owner. When full of flowers they would doubtless look pretty; but now, at the latter end of January, all was wintry blight and brown decay. I shuddered as I stood and looked round me: it was an inclement day for outdoor exercise; not positively rainy, but darkened by a drizzling yellow fog; all under foot was still soaking wet with the floods of yesterday. The stronger among the girls ran about and engaged in active games, but sundry pale and thin ones herded together for shelter and warmth in the verandah; and amongst these, as the dense mist penetrated to their shivering frames, I heard frequently the sound of a hollow cough. As yet I had spoken to no one, nor did anybody seem to take notice of me; I stood lonely enough: but to that feeling of isolation I was accustomed; it did not oppress me much. I leant against a pillar of the verandah, drew my grey mantle close about me, and, trying to forget the cold which nipped me without, and the unsatisfied hunger which gnawed me within, delivered myself up to the employment of watching and thinking. My reflections were too undefined and fragmentary to merit record: I hardly yet knew where I was; Gateshead and my past life seemed floated away to an immeasurable distance; the present was vague and strange, and of the future I could form no conjecture. I looked round the convent-like garden, and then up at the house--a large building, half of which seemed grey and old, the other half quite new. The new part, containing the schoolroom and dormitory, was lit by mullioned and latticed windows, which gave it a church-like aspect; a stone tablet over the door bore this inscription:-- "Lowood Institution.--This portion was rebuilt A.D. ---, by Naomi Brocklehurst, of Brocklehurst Hall, in this county." "Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven."--St. Matt. v. 16. I read these words over and over again: I felt that an explanation belonged to them, and was unable fully to penetrate their import. I was still pondering the signification of "Institution," and endeavouring to make out a connection between the first words and the verse of Scripture, when the sound of a cough close behind me made me turn my head. I saw a girl sitting on a stone bench near; she was bent over a book, on the perusal of which she seemed intent: from where I stood I could see the title--it was "Rasselas;" a name that struck me as strange, and consequently attractive. In turning a leaf she happened to look up, and I said to her directly-- "Is your book interesting?" I had already formed the intention of asking her to lend it to me some day. "I like it," she answered, after a pause of a second or two, during which she examined me. "What is it about?" I continued. I hardly know where I found the hardihood thus to open a conversation with a stranger; the step was contrary to my nature and habits: but I think her occupation touched a chord of sympathy somewhere; for I too liked reading, though of a frivolous and childish kind; I could not digest or comprehend the serious or substantial. "You may look at it," replied the girl, offering me the book. I did so; a brief examination convinced me that the contents were less taking than the title: "Rasselas" looked dull to my trifling taste; I saw nothing about fairies, nothing about genii; no bright variety seemed spread over the closely-printed pages. I returned it to her; she received it quietly, and without saying anything she was about to relapse into her former studious mood: again I ventured to disturb her-- "Can you tell me what the writing on that stone over the door means? What is Lowood Institution?" "This house where you are come to live." "And why do they call it Institution? Is it in any way different from other schools?" "It is partly a charity-school: you and I, and all the rest of us, are charity-children. I suppose you are an orphan: are not either your father or your mother dead?" "Both died before I can remember." "Well, all the girls here have lost either one or both parents, and this is called an institution for educating orphans." "Do we pay no money? Do they keep us for nothing?" "We pay, or our friends pay, fifteen pounds a year for each." "Then why do they call us charity-children?" "Because fifteen pounds is not enough for board and teaching, and the deficiency is supplied by subscription." "Who subscribes?" "Different benevolent-minded ladies and gentlemen in this neighbourhood and in London." "Who was Naomi Brocklehurst?" "The lady who built the new part of this house as that tablet records, and whose son overlooks and directs everything here." "Why?" "Because he is treasurer and manager of the establishment." "Then this house does not belong to that tall lady who wears a watch, and who said we were to have some bread and cheese?" "To Miss Temple? Oh, no! I wish it did: she has to answer to Mr. Brocklehurst for all she does. Mr. Brocklehurst buys all our food and all our clothes." "Does he live here?" "No--two miles off, at a large hall." "Is he a good man?" "He is a clergyman, and is said to do a great deal of good." "Did you say that tall lady was called Miss Temple?" "Yes." "And what are the other teachers called?" "The one with red cheeks is called Miss Smith; she attends to the work, and cuts out--for we make our own clothes, our frocks, and pelisses, and everything; the little one with black hair is Miss Scatcherd; she teaches history and grammar, and hears the second class repetitions; and the one who wears a shawl, and has a pocket-handkerchief tied to her side with a yellow ribband, is Madame Pierrot: she comes from Lisle, in France, and teaches French." "Do you like the teachers?" "Well enough." "Do you like the little black one, and the Madame ---?--I cannot pronounce her name as you do." "Miss Scatcherd is hasty--you must take care not to offend her; Madame Pierrot is not a bad sort of person." "But Miss Temple is the best--isn't she?" "Miss Temple is very good and very clever; she is above the rest, because she knows far more than they do." "Have you been long here?" "Two years." "Are you an orphan?" "My mother is dead." "Are you happy here?" "You ask rather too many questions. I have given you answers enough for the present: now I want to read." But at that moment the summons sounded for dinner; all re-entered the house. The odour which now filled the refectory was scarcely more appetising than that which had regaled our nostrils at breakfast: the dinner was served in two huge tin-plated vessels, whence rose a strong steam redolent of rancid fat. I found the mess to consist of indifferent potatoes and strange shreds of rusty meat, mixed and cooked together. Of this preparation a tolerably abundant plateful was apportioned to each pupil. I ate what I could, and wondered within myself whether every day's fare would be like this. After dinner, we immediately adjourned to the schoolroom: lessons recommenced, and were continued till five o'clock. The only marked event of the afternoon was, that I saw the girl with whom I had conversed in the verandah dismissed in disgrace by Miss Scatcherd from a history class, and sent to stand in the middle of the large schoolroom. The punishment seemed to me in a high degree ignominious, especially for so great a girl--she looked thirteen or upwards. I expected she would show signs of great distress and shame; but to my surprise she neither wept nor blushed: composed, though grave, she stood, the central mark of all eyes. "How can she bear it so quietly--so firmly?" I asked of myself. "Were I in her place, it seems to me I should wish the earth to open and swallow me up. She looks as if she were thinking of something beyond her punishment--beyond her situation: of something not round her nor before her. I have heard of day-dreams--is she in a day-dream now? Her eyes are fixed on the floor, but I am sure they do not see it--her sight seems turned in, gone down into her heart: she is looking at what she can remember, I believe; not at what is really present. I wonder what sort of a girl she is--whether good or naughty." Soon after five p.m. we had another meal, consisting of a small mug of coffee, and half-a-slice of brown bread. I devoured my bread and drank my coffee with relish; but I should have been glad of as much more--I was still hungry. Half-an-hour's recreation succeeded, then study; then the glass of water and the piece of oat-cake, prayers, and bed. Such was my first day at Lowood. CHAPTER VI The next day commenced as before, getting up and dressing by rushlight; but this morning we were obliged to dispense with the ceremony of washing; the water in the pitchers was frozen. A change had taken place in the weather the preceding evening, and a keen north-east wind, whistling through the crevices of our bedroom windows all night long, had made us shiver in our beds, and turned the contents of the ewers to ice. Before the long hour and a half of prayers and Bible-reading was over, I felt ready to perish with cold. Breakfast-time came at last, and this morning the porridge was not burnt; the quality was eatable, the quantity small. How small my portion seemed! I wished it had been doubled. In the course of the day I was enrolled a member of the fourth class, and regular tasks and occupations were assigned me: hitherto, I had only been a spectator of the proceedings at Lowood; I was now to become an actor therein. At first, being little accustomed to learn by heart, the lessons appeared to me both long and difficult; the frequent change from task to task, too, bewildered me; and I was glad when, about three o'clock in the afternoon, Miss Smith put into my hands a border of muslin two yards long, together with needle, thimble, &c., and sent me to sit in a quiet corner of the schoolroom, with directions to hem the same. At that hour most of the others were sewing likewise; but one class still stood round Miss Scatcherd's chair reading, and as all was quiet, the subject of their lessons could be heard, together with the manner in which each girl acquitted herself, and the animadversions or commendations of Miss Scatcherd on the performance. It was English history: among the readers I observed my acquaintance of the verandah: at the commencement of the lesson, her place had been at the top of the class, but for some error of pronunciation, or some inattention to stops, she was suddenly sent to the very bottom. Even in that obscure position, Miss Scatcherd continued to make her an object of constant notice: she was continually addressing to her such phrases as the following:-- "Burns" (such it seems was her name: the girls here were all called by their surnames, as boys are elsewhere), "Burns, you are standing on the side of your shoe; turn your toes out immediately." "Burns, you poke your chin most unpleasantly; draw it in." "Burns, I insist on your holding your head up; I will not have you before me in that attitude," &c. &c. A chapter having been read through twice, the books were closed and the girls examined. The lesson had comprised part of the reign of Charles I., and there were sundry questions about tonnage and poundage and ship- money, which most of them appeared unable to answer; still, every little difficulty was solved instantly when it reached Burns: her memory seemed to have retained the substance of the whole lesson, and she was ready with answers on every point. I kept expecting that Miss Scatcherd would praise her attention; but, instead of that, she suddenly cried out-- "You dirty, disagreeable girl! you have never cleaned your nails this morning!" Burns made no answer: I wondered at her silence. "Why," thought I, "does she not explain that she could neither clean her nails nor wash her face, as the water was frozen?" My attention was now called off by Miss Smith desiring me to hold a skein of thread: while she was winding it, she talked to me from time to time, asking whether I had ever been at school before, whether I could mark, stitch, knit, &c.; till she dismissed me, I could not pursue my observations on Miss Scatcherd's movements. When I returned to my seat, that lady was just delivering an order of which I did not catch the import; but Burns immediately left the class, and going into the small inner room where the books were kept, returned in half a minute, carrying in her hand a bundle of twigs tied together at one end. This ominous tool she presented to Miss Scatcherd with a respectful curtesy; then she quietly, and without being told, unloosed her pinafore, and the teacher instantly and sharply inflicted on her neck a dozen strokes with the bunch of twigs. Not a tear rose to Burns' eye; and, while I paused from my sewing, because my fingers quivered at this spectacle with a sentiment of unavailing and impotent anger, not a feature of her pensive face altered its ordinary expression. "Hardened girl!" exclaimed Miss Scatcherd; "nothing can correct you of your slatternly habits: carry the rod away." Burns obeyed: I looked at her narrowly as she emerged from the book-closet; she was just putting back her handkerchief into her pocket, and the trace of a tear glistened on her thin cheek. The play-hour in the evening I thought the pleasantest fraction of the day at Lowood: the bit of bread, the draught of coffee swallowed at five o'clock had revived vitality, if it had not satisfied hunger: the long restraint of the day was slackened; the schoolroom felt warmer than in the morning--its fires being allowed to burn a little more brightly, to supply, in some measure, the place of candles, not yet introduced: the ruddy gloaming, the licensed uproar, the confusion of many voices gave one a welcome sense of liberty. On the evening of the day on which I had seen Miss Scatcherd flog her pupil, Burns, I wandered as usual among the forms and tables and laughing groups without a companion, yet not feeling lonely: when I passed the windows, I now and then lifted a blind, and looked out; it snowed fast, a drift was already forming against the lower panes; putting my ear close to the window, I could distinguish from the gleeful tumult within, the disconsolate moan of the wind outside. Probably, if I had lately left a good home and kind parents, this would have been the hour when I should most keenly have regretted the separation; that wind would then have saddened my heart; this obscure chaos would have disturbed my peace! as it was, I derived from both a strange excitement, and reckless and feverish, I wished the wind to howl more wildly, the gloom to deepen to darkness, and the confusion to rise to clamour. Jumping over forms, and creeping under tables, I made my way to one of the fire-places; there, kneeling by the high wire fender, I found Burns, absorbed, silent, abstracted from all round her by the companionship of a book, which she read by the dim glare of the embers. "Is it still 'Rasselas'?" I asked, coming behind her. "Yes," she said, "and I have just finished it." And in five minutes more she shut it up. I was glad of this. "Now," thought I, "I can perhaps get her to talk." I sat down by her on the floor. "What is your name besides Burns?" "Helen." "Do you come a long way from here?" "I come from a place farther north, quite on the borders of Scotland." "Will you ever go back?" "I hope so; but nobody can be sure of the future." "You must wish to leave Lowood?" "No! why should I? I was sent to Lowood to get an education; and it would be of no use going away until I have attained that object." "But that teacher, Miss Scatcherd, is so cruel to you?" "Cruel? Not at all! She is severe: she dislikes my faults." "And if I were in your place I should dislike her; I should resist her. If she struck me with that rod, I should get it from her hand; I should break it under her nose." "Probably you would do nothing of the sort: but if you did, Mr. Brocklehurst would expel you from the school; that would be a great grief to your relations. It is far better to endure patiently a smart which nobody feels but yourself, than to commit a hasty action whose evil consequences will extend to all connected with you; and besides, the Bible bids us return good for evil." "But then it seems disgraceful to be flogged, and to be sent to stand in the middle of a room full of people; and you are such a great girl: I am far younger than you, and I could not bear it." "Yet it would be your duty to bear it, if you could not avoid it: it is weak and silly to say you _cannot bear_ what it is your fate to be required to bear." I heard her with wonder: I could not comprehend this doctrine of endurance; and still less could I understand or sympathise with the forbearance she expressed for her chastiser. Still I felt that Helen Burns considered things by a light invisible to my eyes. I suspected she might be right and I wrong; but I would not ponder the matter deeply; like Felix, I put it off to a more convenient season. "You say you have faults, Helen: what are they? To me you seem very good." "Then learn from me, not to judge by appearances: I am, as Miss Scatcherd said, slatternly; I seldom put, and never keep, things, in order; I am careless; I forget rules; I read when I should learn my lessons; I have no method; and sometimes I say, like you, I cannot _bear_ to be subjected to systematic arrangements. This is all very provoking to Miss Scatcherd, who is naturally neat, punctual, and particular." "And cross and cruel," I added; but Helen Burns would not admit my addition: she kept silence. "Is Miss Temple as severe to you as Miss Scatcherd?" At the utterance of Miss Temple's name, a soft smile flitted over her grave face. "Miss Temple is full of goodness; it pains her to be severe to any one, even the worst in the school: she sees my errors, and tells me of them gently; and, if I do anything worthy of praise, she gives me my meed liberally. One strong proof of my wretchedly defective nature is, that even her expostulations, so mild, so rational, have not influence to cure me of my faults; and even her praise, though I value it most highly, cannot stimulate me to continued care and foresight." "That is curious," said I, "it is so easy to be careful." "For _you_ I have no doubt it is. I observed you in your class this morning, and saw you were closely attentive: your thoughts never seemed to wander while Miss Miller explained the lesson and questioned you. Now, mine continually rove away; when I should be listening to Miss Scatcherd, and collecting all she says with assiduity, often I lose the very sound of her voice; I fall into a sort of dream. Sometimes I think I am in Northumberland, and that the noises I hear round me are the bubbling of a little brook which runs through Deepden, near our house;--then, when it comes to my turn to reply, I have to be awakened; and having heard nothing of what was read for listening to the visionary brook, I have no answer ready." "Yet how well you replied this afternoon." "It was mere chance; the subject on which we had been reading had interested me. This afternoon, instead of dreaming of Deepden, I was wondering how a man who wished to do right could act so unjustly and unwisely as Charles the First sometimes did; and I thought what a pity it was that, with his integrity and conscientiousness, he could see no farther than the prerogatives of the crown. If he had but been able to look to a distance, and see how what they call the spirit of the age was tending! Still, I like Charles--I respect him--I pity him, poor murdered king! Yes, his enemies were the worst: they shed blood they had no right to shed. How dared they kill him!" Helen was talking to herself now: she had forgotten I could not very well understand her--that I was ignorant, or nearly so, of the subject she discussed. I recalled her to my level. "And when Miss Temple teaches you, do your thoughts wander then?" "No, certainly, not often; because Miss Temple has generally something to say which is newer than my own reflections; her language is singularly agreeable to me, and the information she communicates is often just what I wished to gain." "Well, then, with Miss Temple you are good?" "Yes, in a passive way: I make no effort; I follow as inclination guides me. There is no merit in such goodness." "A great deal: you are good to those who are good to you. It is all I ever desire to be. If people were always kind and obedient to those who are cruel and unjust, the wicked people would have it all their own way: they would never feel afraid, and so they would never alter, but would grow worse and worse. When we are struck at without a reason, we should strike back again very hard; I am sure we should--so hard as to teach the person who struck us never to do it again." "You will change your mind, I hope, when you grow older: as yet you are but a little untaught girl." "But I feel this, Helen; I must dislike those who, whatever I do to please them, persist in disliking me; I must resist those who punish me unjustly. It is as natural as that I should love those who show me affection, or submit to punishment when I feel it is deserved." "Heathens and savage tribes hold that doctrine, but Christians and civilised nations disown it." "How? I don't understand." "It is not violence that best overcomes hate--nor vengeance that most certainly heals injury." "What then?" "Read the New Testament, and observe what Christ says, and how He acts; make His word your rule, and His conduct your example." "What does He say?" "Love your enemies; bless them that curse you; do good to them that hate you and despitefully use you." "Then I should love Mrs. Reed, which I cannot do; I should bless her son John, which is impossible." In her turn, Helen Burns asked me to explain, and I proceeded forthwith to pour out, in my own way, the tale of my sufferings and resentments. Bitter and truculent when excited, I spoke as I felt, without reserve or softening. Helen heard me patiently to the end: I expected she would then make a remark, but she said nothing. "Well," I asked impatiently, "is not Mrs. Reed a hard-hearted, bad woman?" "She has been unkind to you, no doubt; because you see, she dislikes your cast of character, as Miss Scatcherd does mine; but how minutely you remember all she has done and said to you! What a singularly deep impression her injustice seems to have made on your heart! No ill-usage so brands its record on my feelings. Would you not be happier if you tried to forget her severity, together with the passionate emotions it excited? Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs. We are, and must be, one and all, burdened with faults in this world: but the time will soon come when, I trust, we shall put them off in putting off our corruptible bodies; when debasement and sin will fall from us with this cumbrous frame of flesh, and only the spark of the spirit will remain,--the impalpable principle of light and thought, pure as when it left the Creator to inspire the creature: whence it came it will return; perhaps again to be communicated to some being higher than man--perhaps to pass through gradations of glory, from the pale human soul to brighten to the seraph! Surely it will never, on the contrary, be suffered to degenerate from man to fiend? No; I cannot believe that: I hold another creed: which no one ever taught me, and which I seldom mention; but in which I delight, and to which I cling: for it extends hope to all: it makes Eternity a rest--a mighty home, not a terror and an abyss. Besides, with this creed, I can so clearly distinguish between the criminal and his crime; I can so sincerely forgive the first while I abhor the last: with this creed revenge never worries my heart, degradation never too deeply disgusts me, injustice never crushes me too low: I live in calm, looking to the end." Helen's head, always drooping, sank a little lower as she finished this sentence. I saw by her look she wished no longer to talk to me, but rather to converse with her own thoughts. She was not allowed much time for meditation: a monitor, a great rough girl, presently came up, exclaiming in a strong Cumberland accent-- "Helen Burns, if you don't go and put your drawer in order, and fold up your work this minute, I'll tell Miss Scatcherd to come and look at it!" Helen sighed as her reverie fled, and getting up, obeyed the monitor without reply as without delay. CHAPTER VII My first quarter at Lowood seemed an age; and not the golden age either; it comprised an irksome struggle with difficulties in habituating myself to new rules and unwonted tasks. The fear of failure in these points harassed me worse than the physical hardships of my lot; though these were no trifles. During January, February, and part of March, the deep snows, and, after their melting, the almost impassable roads, prevented our stirring beyond the garden walls, except to go to church; but within these limits we had to pass an hour every day in the open air. Our clothing was insufficient to protect us from the severe cold: we had no boots, the snow got into our shoes and melted there: our ungloved hands became numbed and covered with chilblains, as were our feet: I remember well the distracting irritation I endured from this cause every evening, when my feet inflamed; and the torture of thrusting the swelled, raw, and stiff toes into my shoes in the morning. Then the scanty supply of food was distressing: with the keen appetites of growing children, we had scarcely sufficient to keep alive a delicate invalid. From this deficiency of nourishment resulted an abuse, which pressed hardly on the younger pupils: whenever the famished great girls had an opportunity, they would coax or menace the little ones out of their portion. Many a time I have shared between two claimants the precious morsel of brown bread distributed at tea-time; and after relinquishing to a third half the contents of my mug of coffee, I have swallowed the remainder with an accompaniment of secret tears, forced from me by the exigency of hunger. Sundays were dreary days in that wintry season. We had to walk two miles to Brocklebridge Church, where our patron officiated. We set out cold, we arrived at church colder: during the morning service we became almost paralysed. It was too far to return to dinner, and an allowance of cold meat and bread, in the same penurious proportion observed in our ordinary meals, was served round between the services. At the close of the afternoon service we returned by an exposed and hilly road, where the bitter winter wind, blowing over a range of snowy summits to the north, almost flayed the skin from our faces. I can remember Miss Temple walking lightly and rapidly along our drooping line, her plaid cloak, which the frosty wind fluttered, gathered close about her, and encouraging us, by precept and example, to keep up our spirits, and march forward, as she said, "like stalwart soldiers." The other teachers, poor things, were generally themselves too much dejected to attempt the task of cheering others. How we longed for the light and heat of a blazing fire when we got back! But, to the little ones at least, this was denied: each hearth in the schoolroom was immediately surrounded by a double row of great girls, and behind them the younger children crouched in groups, wrapping their starved arms in their pinafores. A little solace came at tea-time, in the shape of a double ration of bread--a whole, instead of a half, slice--with the delicious addition of a thin scrape of butter: it was the hebdomadal treat to which we all looked forward from Sabbath to Sabbath. I generally contrived to reserve a moiety of this bounteous repast for myself; but the remainder I was invariably obliged to part with. The Sunday evening was spent in repeating, by heart, the Church Catechism, and the fifth, sixth, and seventh chapters of St. Matthew; and in listening to a long sermon, read by Miss Miller, whose irrepressible yawns attested her weariness. A frequent interlude of these performances was the enactment of the part of Eutychus by some half-dozen of little girls, who, overpowered with sleep, would fall down, if not out of the third loft, yet off the fourth form, and be taken up half dead. The remedy was, to thrust them forward into the centre of the schoolroom, and oblige them to stand there till the sermon was finished. Sometimes their feet failed them, and they sank together in a heap; they were then propped up with the monitors' high stools. I have not yet alluded to the visits of Mr. Brocklehurst; and indeed that gentleman was from home during the greater part of the first month after my arrival; perhaps prolonging his stay with his friend the archdeacon: his absence was a relief to me. I need not say that I had my own reasons for dreading his coming: but come he did at last. One afternoon (I had then been three weeks at Lowood), as I was sitting with a slate in my hand, puzzling over a sum in long division, my eyes, raised in abstraction to the window, caught sight of a figure just passing: I recognised almost instinctively that gaunt outline; and when, two minutes after, all the school, teachers included, rose _en masse_, it was not necessary for me to look up in order to ascertain whose entrance they thus greeted. A long stride measured the schoolroom, and presently beside Miss Temple, who herself had risen, stood the same black column which had frowned on me so ominously from the hearthrug of Gateshead. I now glanced sideways at this piece of architecture. Yes, I was right: it was Mr. Brocklehurst, buttoned up in a surtout, and looking longer, narrower, and more rigid than ever. I had my own reasons for being dismayed at this apparition; too well I remembered the perfidious hints given by Mrs. Reed about my disposition, &c.; the promise pledged by Mr. Brocklehurst to apprise Miss Temple and the teachers of my vicious nature. All along I had been dreading the fulfilment of this promise,--I had been looking out daily for the "Coming Man," whose information respecting my past life and conversation was to brand me as a bad child for ever: now there he was. He stood at Miss Temple's side; he was speaking low in her ear: I did not doubt he was making disclosures of my villainy; and I watched her eye with painful anxiety, expecting every moment to see its dark orb turn on me a glance of repugnance and contempt. I listened too; and as I happened to be seated quite at the top of the room, I caught most of what he said: its import relieved me from immediate apprehension. "I suppose, Miss Temple, the thread I bought at Lowton will do; it struck me that it would be just of the quality for the calico chemises, and I sorted the needles to match. You may tell Miss Smith that I forgot to make a memorandum of the darning needles, but she shall have some papers sent in next week; and she is not, on any account, to give out more than one at a time to each pupil: if they have more, they are apt to be careless and lose them. And, O ma'am! I wish the woollen stockings were better looked to!--when I was here last, I went into the kitchen-garden and examined the clothes drying on the line; there was a quantity of black hose in a very bad state of repair: from the size of the holes in them I was sure they had not been well mended from time to time." He paused. "Your directions shall be attended to, sir," said Miss Temple. "And, ma'am," he continued, "the laundress tells me some of the girls have two clean tuckers in the week: it is too much; the rules limit them to one." "I think I can explain that circumstance, sir. Agnes and Catherine Johnstone were invited to take tea with some friends at Lowton last Thursday, and I gave them leave to put on clean tuckers for the occasion." Mr. Brocklehurst nodded. "Well, for once it may pass; but please not to let the circumstance occur too often. And there is another thing which surprised me; I find, in settling accounts with the housekeeper, that a lunch, consisting of bread and cheese, has twice been served out to the girls during the past fortnight. How is this? I looked over the regulations, and I find no such meal as lunch mentioned. Who introduced this innovation? and by what authority?" "I must be responsible for the circumstance, sir," replied Miss Temple: "the breakfast was so ill prepared that the pupils could not possibly eat it; and I dared not allow them to remain fasting till dinner-time." "Madam, allow me an instant. You are aware that my plan in bringing up these girls is, not to accustom them to habits of luxury and indulgence, but to render them hardy, patient, self-denying. Should any little accidental disappointment of the appetite occur, such as the spoiling of a meal, the under or the over dressing of a dish, the incident ought not to be neutralised by replacing with something more delicate the comfort lost, thus pampering the body and obviating the aim of this institution; it ought to be improved to the spiritual edification of the pupils, by encouraging them to evince fortitude under temporary privation. A brief address on those occasions would not be mistimed, wherein a judicious instructor would take the opportunity of referring to the sufferings of the primitive Christians; to the torments of martyrs; to the exhortations of our blessed Lord Himself, calling upon His disciples to take up their cross and follow Him; to His warnings that man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God; to His divine consolations, "If ye suffer hunger or thirst for My sake, happy are ye." Oh, madam, when you put bread and cheese, instead of burnt porridge, into these children's mouths, you may indeed feed their vile bodies, but you little think how you starve their immortal souls!" Mr. Brocklehurst again paused--perhaps overcome by his feelings. Miss Temple had looked down when he first began to speak to her; but she now gazed straight before her, and her face, naturally pale as marble, appeared to be assuming also the coldness and fixity of that material; especially her mouth, closed as if it would have required a sculptor's chisel to open it, and her brow settled gradually into petrified severity. Meantime, Mr. Brocklehurst, standing on the hearth with his hands behind his back, majestically surveyed the whole school. Suddenly his eye gave a blink, as if it had met something that either dazzled or shocked its pupil; turning, he said in more rapid accents than he had hitherto used-- "Miss Temple, Miss Temple, what--_what_ is that girl with curled hair? Red hair, ma'am, curled--curled all over?" And extending his cane he pointed to the awful object, his hand shaking as he did so. "It is Julia Severn," replied Miss Temple, very quietly. "Julia Severn, ma'am! And why has she, or any other, curled hair? Why, in defiance of every precept and principle of this house, does she conform to the world so openly--here in an evangelical, charitable establishment--as to wear her hair one mass of curls?" "Julia's hair curls naturally," returned Miss Temple, still more quietly. "Naturally! Yes, but we are not to conform to nature; I wish these girls to be the children of Grace: and why that abundance? I have again and again intimated that I desire the hair to be arranged closely, modestly, plainly. Miss Temple, that girl's hair must be cut off entirely; I will send a barber to-morrow: and I see others who have far too much of the excrescence--that tall girl, tell her to turn round. Tell all the first form to rise up and direct their faces to the wall." Miss Temple passed her handkerchief over her lips, as if to smooth away the involuntary smile that curled them; she gave the order, however, and when the first class could take in what was required of them, they obeyed. Leaning a little back on my bench, I could see the looks and grimaces with which they commented on this manoeuvre: it was a pity Mr. Brocklehurst could not see them too; he would perhaps have felt that, whatever he might do with the outside of the cup and platter, the inside was further beyond his interference than he imagined. He scrutinised the reverse of these living medals some five minutes, then pronounced sentence. These words fell like the knell of doom-- "All those top-knots must be cut off." Miss Temple seemed to remonstrate. "Madam," he pursued, "I have a Master to serve whose kingdom is not of this world: my mission is to mortify in these girls the lusts of the flesh; to teach them to clothe themselves with shame-facedness and sobriety, not with braided hair and costly apparel; and each of the young persons before us has a string of hair twisted in plaits which vanity itself might have woven; these, I repeat, must be cut off; think of the time wasted, of--" Mr. Brocklehurst was here interrupted: three other visitors, ladies, now entered the room. They ought to have come a little sooner to have heard his lecture on dress, for they were splendidly attired in velvet, silk, and furs. The two younger of the trio (fine girls of sixteen and seventeen) had grey beaver hats, then in fashion, shaded with ostrich plumes, and from under the brim of this graceful head-dress fell a profusion of light tresses, elaborately curled; the elder lady was enveloped in a costly velvet shawl, trimmed with ermine, and she wore a false front of French curls. These ladies were deferentially received by Miss Temple, as Mrs. and the Misses Brocklehurst, and conducted to seats of honour at the top of the room. It seems they had come in the carriage with their reverend relative, and had been conducting a rummaging scrutiny of the room upstairs, while he transacted business with the housekeeper, questioned the laundress, and lectured the superintendent. They now proceeded to address divers remarks and reproofs to Miss Smith, who was charged with the care of the linen and the inspection of the dormitories: but I had no time to listen to what they said; other matters called off and enchanted my attention. Hitherto, while gathering up the discourse of Mr. Brocklehurst and Miss Temple, I had not, at the same time, neglected precautions to secure my personal safety; which I thought would be effected, if I could only elude observation. To this end, I had sat well back on the form, and while seeming to be busy with my sum, had held my slate in such a manner as to conceal my face: I might have escaped notice, had not my treacherous slate somehow happened to slip from my hand, and falling with an obtrusive crash, directly drawn every eye upon me; I knew it was all over now, and, as I stooped to pick up the two fragments of slate, I rallied my forces for the worst. It came. "A careless girl!" said Mr. Brocklehurst, and immediately after--"It is the new pupil, I perceive." And before I could draw breath, "I must not forget I have a word to say respecting her." Then aloud: how loud it seemed to me! "Let the child who broke her slate come forward!" Of my own accord I could not have stirred; I was paralysed: but the two great girls who sit on each side of me, set me on my legs and pushed me towards the dread judge, and then Miss Temple gently assisted me to his very feet, and I caught her whispered counsel-- "Don't be afraid, Jane, I saw it was an accident; you shall not be punished." The kind whisper went to my heart like a dagger. "Another minute, and she will despise me for a hypocrite," thought I; and an impulse of fury against Reed, Brocklehurst, and Co. bounded in my pulses at the conviction. I was no Helen Burns. "Fetch that stool," said Mr. Brocklehurst, pointing to a very high one from which a monitor had just risen: it was brought. "Place the child upon it." And I was placed there, by whom I don't know: I was in no condition to note particulars; I was only aware that they had hoisted me up to the height of Mr. Brocklehurst's nose, that he was within a yard of me, and that a spread of shot orange and purple silk pelisses and a cloud of silvery plumage extended and waved below me. Mr. Brocklehurst hemmed. "Ladies," said he, turning to his family, "Miss Temple, teachers, and children, you all see this girl?" Of course they did; for I felt their eyes directed like burning-glasses against my scorched skin. "You see she is yet young; you observe she possesses the ordinary form of childhood; God has graciously given her the shape that He has given to all of us; no signal deformity points her out as a marked character. Who would think that the Evil One had already found a servant and agent in her? Yet such, I grieve to say, is the case." A pause--in which I began to steady the palsy of my nerves, and to feel that the Rubicon was passed; and that the trial, no longer to be shirked, must be firmly sustained. "My dear children," pursued the black marble clergyman, with pathos, "this is a sad, a melancholy occasion; for it becomes my duty to warn you, that this girl, who might be one of God's own lambs, is a little castaway: not a member of the true flock, but evidently an interloper and an alien. You must be on your guard against her; you must shun her example; if necessary, avoid her company, exclude her from your sports, and shut her out from your converse. Teachers, you must watch her: keep your eyes on her movements, weigh well her words, scrutinise her actions, punish her body to save her soul: if, indeed, such salvation be possible, for (my tongue falters while I tell it) this girl, this child, the native of a Christian land, worse than many a little heathen who says its prayers to Brahma and kneels before Juggernaut--this girl is--a liar!" Now came a pause of ten minutes, during which I, by this time in perfect possession of my wits, observed all the female Brocklehursts produce their pocket-handkerchiefs and apply them to their optics, while the elderly lady swayed herself to and fro, and the two younger ones whispered, "How shocking!" Mr. Brocklehurst resumed. "This I learned from her benefactress; from the pious and charitable lady who adopted her in her orphan state, reared her as her own daughter, and whose kindness, whose generosity the unhappy girl repaid by an ingratitude so bad, so dreadful, that at last her excellent patroness was obliged to separate her from her own young ones, fearful lest her vicious example should contaminate their purity: she has sent her here to be healed, even as the Jews of old sent their diseased to the troubled pool of Bethesda; and, teachers, superintendent, I beg of you not to allow the waters to stagnate round her." With this sublime conclusion, Mr. Brocklehurst adjusted the top button of his surtout, muttered something to his family, who rose, bowed to Miss Temple, and then all the great people sailed in state from the room. Turning at the door, my judge said-- "Let her stand half-an-hour longer on that stool, and let no one speak to her during the remainder of the day." There was I, then, mounted aloft; I, who had said I could not bear the shame of standing on my natural feet in the middle of the room, was now exposed to general view on a pedestal of infamy. What my sensations were no language can describe; but just as they all rose, stifling my breath and constricting my throat, a girl came up and passed me: in passing, she lifted her eyes. What a strange light inspired them! What an extraordinary sensation that ray sent through me! How the new feeling bore me up! It was as if a martyr, a hero, had passed a slave or victim, and imparted strength in the transit. I mastered the rising hysteria, lifted up my head, and took a firm stand on the stool. Helen Burns asked some slight question about her work of Miss Smith, was chidden for the triviality of the inquiry, returned to her place, and smiled at me as she again went by. What a smile! I remember it now, and I know that it was the effluence of fine intellect, of true courage; it lit up her marked lineaments, her thin face, her sunken grey eye, like a reflection from the aspect of an angel. Yet at that moment Helen Burns wore on her arm "the untidy badge;" scarcely an hour ago I had heard her condemned by Miss Scatcherd to a dinner of bread and water on the morrow because she had blotted an exercise in copying it out. Such is the imperfect nature of man! such spots are there on the disc of the clearest planet; and eyes like Miss Scatcherd's can only see those minute defects, and are blind to the full brightness of the orb. CHAPTER VIII Ere the half-hour ended, five o'clock struck; school was dismissed, and all were gone into the refectory to tea. I now ventured to descend: it was deep dusk; I retired into a corner and sat down on the floor. The spell by which I had been so far supported began to dissolve; reaction took place, and soon, so overwhelming was the grief that seized me, I sank prostrate with my face to the ground. Now I wept: Helen Burns was not here; nothing sustained me; left to myself I abandoned myself, and my tears watered the boards. I had meant to be so good, and to do so much at Lowood: to make so many friends, to earn respect and win affection. Already I had made visible progress: that very morning I had reached the head of my class; Miss Miller had praised me warmly; Miss Temple had smiled approbation; she had promised to teach me drawing, and to let me learn French, if I continued to make similar improvement two months longer: and then I was well received by my fellow-pupils; treated as an equal by those of my own age, and not molested by any; now, here I lay again crushed and trodden on; and could I ever rise more? "Never," I thought; and ardently I wished to die. While sobbing out this wish in broken accents, some one approached: I started up--again Helen Burns was near me; the fading fires just showed her coming up the long, vacant room; she brought my coffee and bread. "Come, eat something," she said; but I put both away from me, feeling as if a drop or a crumb would have choked me in my present condition. Helen regarded me, probably with surprise: I could not now abate my agitation, though I tried hard; I continued to weep aloud. She sat down on the ground near me, embraced her knees with her arms, and rested her head upon them; in that attitude she remained silent as an Indian. I was the first who spoke-- "Helen, why do you stay with a girl whom everybody believes to be a liar?" "Everybody, Jane? Why, there are only eighty people who have heard you called so, and the world contains hundreds of millions." "But what have I to do with millions? The eighty, I know, despise me." "Jane, you are mistaken: probably not one in the school either despises or dislikes you: many, I am sure, pity you much." "How can they pity me after what Mr. Brocklehurst has said?" "Mr. Brocklehurst is not a god: nor is he even a great and admired man: he is little liked here; he never took steps to make himself liked. Had he treated you as an especial favourite, you would have found enemies, declared or covert, all around you; as it is, the greater number would offer you sympathy if they dared. Teachers and pupils may look coldly on you for a day or two, but friendly feelings are concealed in their hearts; and if you persevere in doing well, these feelings will ere long appear so much the more evidently for their temporary suppression. Besides, Jane"--she paused. "Well, Helen?" said I, putting my hand into hers: she chafed my fingers gently to warm them, and went on-- "If all the world hated you, and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved you, and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends." "No; I know I should think well of myself; but that is not enough: if others don't love me I would rather die than live--I cannot bear to be solitary and hated, Helen. Look here; to gain some real affection from you, or Miss Temple, or any other whom I truly love, I would willingly submit to have the bone of my arm broken, or to let a bull toss me, or to stand behind a kicking horse, and let it dash its hoof at my chest--" "Hush, Jane! you think too much of the love of human beings; you are too impulsive, too vehement; the sovereign hand that created your frame, and put life into it, has provided you with other resources than your feeble self, or than creatures feeble as you. Besides this earth, and besides the race of men, there is an invisible world and a kingdom of spirits: that world is round us, for it is everywhere; and those spirits watch us, for they are commissioned to guard us; and if we were dying in pain and shame, if scorn smote us on all sides, and hatred crushed us, angels see our tortures, recognise our innocence (if innocent we be: as I know you are of this charge which Mr. Brocklehurst has weakly and pompously repeated at second-hand from Mrs. Reed; for I read a sincere nature in your ardent eyes and on your clear front), and God waits only the separation of spirit from flesh to crown us with a full reward. Why, then, should we ever sink overwhelmed with distress, when life is so soon over, and death is so certain an entrance to happiness--to glory?" I was silent; Helen had calmed me; but in the tranquillity she imparted there was an alloy of inexpressible sadness. I felt the impression of woe as she spoke, but I could not tell whence it came; and when, having done speaking, she breathed a little fast and coughed a short cough, I momentarily forgot my own sorrows to yield to a vague concern for her. Resting my head on Helen's shoulder, I put my arms round her waist; she drew me to her, and we reposed in silence. We had not sat long thus, when another person came in. Some heavy clouds, swept from the sky by a rising wind, had left the moon bare; and her light, streaming in through a window near, shone full both on us and on the approaching figure, which we at once recognised as Miss Temple. "I came on purpose to find you, Jane Eyre," said she; "I want you in my room; and as Helen Burns is with you, she may come too." We went; following the superintendent's guidance, we had to thread some intricate passages, and mount a staircase before we reached her apartment; it contained a good fire, and looked cheerful. Miss Temple told Helen Burns to be seated in a low arm-chair on one side of the hearth, and herself taking another, she called me to her side. "Is it all over?" she asked, looking down at my face. "Have you cried your grief away?" "I am afraid I never shall do that." "Why?" "Because I have been wrongly accused; and you, ma'am, and everybody else, will now think me wicked." "We shall think you what you prove yourself to be, my child. Continue to act as a good girl, and you will satisfy us." "Shall I, Miss Temple?" "You will," said she, passing her arm round me. "And now tell me who is the lady whom Mr. Brocklehurst called your benefactress?" "Mrs. Reed, my uncle's wife. My uncle is dead, and he left me to her care." "Did she not, then, adopt you of her own accord?" "No, ma'am; she was sorry to have to do it: but my uncle, as I have often heard the servants say, got her to promise before he died that she would always keep me." "Well now, Jane, you know, or at least I will tell you, that when a criminal is accused, he is always allowed to speak in his own defence. You have been charged with falsehood; defend yourself to me as well as you can. Say whatever your memory suggests is true; but add nothing and exaggerate nothing." I resolved, in the depth of my heart, that I would be most moderate--most correct; and, having reflected a few minutes in order to arrange coherently what I had to say, I told her all the story of my sad childhood. Exhausted by emotion, my language was more subdued than it generally was when it developed that sad theme; and mindful of Helen's warnings against the indulgence of resentment, I infused into the narrative far less of gall and wormwood than ordinary. Thus restrained and simplified, it sounded more credible: I felt as I went on that Miss Temple fully believed me. In the course of the tale I had mentioned Mr. Lloyd as having come to see me after the fit: for I never forgot the, to me, frightful episode of the red-room: in detailing which, my excitement was sure, in some degree, to break bounds; for nothing could soften in my recollection the spasm of agony which clutched my heart when Mrs. Reed spurned my wild supplication for pardon, and locked me a second time in the dark and haunted chamber. I had finished: Miss Temple regarded me a few minutes in silence; she then said-- "I know something of Mr. Lloyd; I shall write to him; if his reply agrees with your statement, you shall be publicly cleared from every imputation; to me, Jane, you are clear now." She kissed me, and still keeping me at her side (where I was well contented to stand, for I derived a child's pleasure from the contemplation of her face, her dress, her one or two ornaments, her white forehead, her clustered and shining curls, and beaming dark eyes), she proceeded to address Helen Burns. "How are you to-night, Helen? Have you coughed much to-day?" "Not quite so much, I think, ma'am." "And the pain in your chest?" "It is a little better." Miss Temple got up, took her hand and examined her pulse; then she returned to her own seat: as she resumed it, I heard her sigh low. She was pensive a few minutes, then rousing herself, she said cheerfully-- "But you two are my visitors to-night; I must treat you as such." She rang her bell. "Barbara," she said to the servant who answered it, "I have not yet had tea; bring the tray and place cups for these two young ladies." And a tray was soon brought. How pretty, to my eyes, did the china cups and bright teapot look, placed on the little round table near the fire! How fragrant was the steam of the beverage, and the scent of the toast! of which, however, I, to my dismay (for I was beginning to be hungry) discerned only a very small portion: Miss Temple discerned it too. "Barbara," said she, "can you not bring a little more bread and butter? There is not enough for three." Barbara went out: she returned soon-- "Madam, Mrs. Harden says she has sent up the usual quantity." Mrs. Harden, be it observed, was the housekeeper: a woman after Mr. Brocklehurst's own heart, made up of equal parts of whalebone and iron. "Oh, very well!" returned Miss Temple; "we must make it do, Barbara, I suppose." And as the girl withdrew she added, smiling, "Fortunately, I have it in my power to supply deficiencies for this once." Having invited Helen and me to approach the table, and placed before each of us a cup of tea with one delicious but thin morsel of toast, she got up, unlocked a drawer, and taking from it a parcel wrapped in paper, disclosed presently to our eyes a good-sized seed-cake. "I meant to give each of you some of this to take with you," said she, "but as there is so little toast, you must have it now," and she proceeded to cut slices with a generous hand. We feasted that evening as on nectar and ambrosia; and not the least delight of the entertainment was the smile of gratification with which our hostess regarded us, as we satisfied our famished appetites on the delicate fare she liberally supplied. Tea over and the tray removed, she again summoned us to the fire; we sat one on each side of her, and now a conversation followed between her and Helen, which it was indeed a privilege to be admitted to hear. Miss Temple had always something of serenity in her air, of state in her mien, of refined propriety in her language, which precluded deviation into the ardent, the excited, the eager: something which chastened the pleasure of those who looked on her and listened to her, by a controlling sense of awe; and such was my feeling now: but as to Helen Burns, I was struck with wonder. The refreshing meal, the brilliant fire, the presence and kindness of her beloved instructress, or, perhaps, more than all these, something in her own unique mind, had roused her powers within her. They woke, they kindled: first, they glowed in the bright tint of her cheek, which till this hour I had never seen but pale and bloodless; then they shone in the liquid lustre of her eyes, which had suddenly acquired a beauty more singular than that of Miss Temple's--a beauty neither of fine colour nor long eyelash, nor pencilled brow, but of meaning, of movement, of radiance. Then her soul sat on her lips, and language flowed, from what source I cannot tell. Has a girl of fourteen a heart large enough, vigorous enough, to hold the swelling spring of pure, full, fervid eloquence? Such was the characteristic of Helen's discourse on that, to me, memorable evening; her spirit seemed hastening to live within a very brief span as much as many live during a protracted existence. They conversed of things I had never heard of; of nations and times past; of countries far away; of secrets of nature discovered or guessed at: they spoke of books: how many they had read! What stores of knowledge they possessed! Then they seemed so familiar with French names and French authors: but my amazement reached its climax when Miss Temple asked Helen if she sometimes snatched a moment to recall the Latin her father had taught her, and taking a book from a shelf, bade her read and construe a page of Virgil; and Helen obeyed, my organ of veneration expanding at every sounding line. She had scarcely finished ere the bell announced bedtime! no delay could be admitted; Miss Temple embraced us both, saying, as she drew us to her heart-- "God bless you, my children!" Helen she held a little longer than me: she let her go more reluctantly; it was Helen her eye followed to the door; it was for her she a second time breathed a sad sigh; for her she wiped a tear from her cheek. On reaching the bedroom, we heard the voice of Miss Scatcherd: she was examining drawers; she had just pulled out Helen Burns's, and when we entered Helen was greeted with a sharp reprimand, and told that to-morrow she should have half-a-dozen of untidily folded articles pinned to her shoulder. "My things were indeed in shameful disorder," murmured Helen to me, in a low voice: "I intended to have arranged them, but I forgot." Next morning, Miss Scatcherd wrote in conspicuous characters on a piece of pasteboard the word "Slattern," and bound it like a phylactery round Helen's large, mild, intelligent, and benign-looking forehead. She wore it till evening, patient, unresentful, regarding it as a deserved punishment. The moment Miss Scatcherd withdrew after afternoon school, I ran to Helen, tore it off, and thrust it into the fire: the fury of which she was incapable had been burning in my soul all day, and tears, hot and large, had continually been scalding my cheek; for the spectacle of her sad resignation gave me an intolerable pain at the heart. About a week subsequently to the incidents above narrated, Miss Temple, who had written to Mr. Lloyd, received his answer: it appeared that what he said went to corroborate my account. Miss Temple, having assembled the whole school, announced that inquiry had been made into the charges alleged against Jane Eyre, and that she was most happy to be able to pronounce her completely cleared from every imputation. The teachers then shook hands with me and kissed me, and a murmur of pleasure ran through the ranks of my companions. Thus relieved of a grievous load, I from that hour set to work afresh, resolved to pioneer my way through every difficulty: I toiled hard, and my success was proportionate to my efforts; my memory, not naturally tenacious, improved with practice; exercise sharpened my wits; in a few weeks I was promoted to a higher class; in less than two months I was allowed to commence French and drawing. I learned the first two tenses of the verb _Etre_, and sketched my first cottage (whose walls, by-the- bye, outrivalled in slope those of the leaning tower of Pisa), on the same day. That night, on going to bed, I forgot to prepare in imagination the Barmecide supper of hot roast potatoes, or white bread and new milk, with which I was wont to amuse my inward cravings: I feasted instead on the spectacle of ideal drawings, which I saw in the dark; all the work of my own hands: freely pencilled houses and trees, picturesque rocks and ruins, Cuyp-like groups of cattle, sweet paintings of butterflies hovering over unblown roses, of birds picking at ripe cherries, of wren's nests enclosing pearl-like eggs, wreathed about with young ivy sprays. I examined, too, in thought, the possibility of my ever being able to translate currently a certain little French story which Madame Pierrot had that day shown me; nor was that problem solved to my satisfaction ere I fell sweetly asleep. Well has Solomon said--"Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith." I would not now have exchanged Lowood with all its privations for Gateshead and its daily luxuries. CHAPTER IX But the privations, or rather the hardships, of Lowood lessened. Spring drew on: she was indeed already come; the frosts of winter had ceased; its snows were melted, its cutting winds ameliorated. My wretched feet, flayed and swollen to lameness by the sharp air of January, began to heal and subside under the gentler breathings of April; the nights and mornings no longer by their Canadian temperature froze the very blood in our veins; we could now endure the play-hour passed in the garden: sometimes on a sunny day it began even to be pleasant and genial, and a greenness grew over those brown beds, which, freshening daily, suggested the thought that Hope traversed them at night, and left each morning brighter traces of her steps. Flowers peeped out amongst the leaves; snow-drops, crocuses, purple auriculas, and golden-eyed pansies. On Thursday afternoons (half-holidays) we now took walks, and found still sweeter flowers opening by the wayside, under the hedges. I discovered, too, that a great pleasure, an enjoyment which the horizon only bounded, lay all outside the high and spike-guarded walls of our garden: this pleasure consisted in prospect of noble summits girdling a great hill-hollow, rich in verdure and shadow; in a bright beck, full of dark stones and sparkling eddies. How different had this scene looked when I viewed it laid out beneath the iron sky of winter, stiffened in frost, shrouded with snow!--when mists as chill as death wandered to the impulse of east winds along those purple peaks, and rolled down "ing" and holm till they blended with the frozen fog of the beck! That beck itself was then a torrent, turbid and curbless: it tore asunder the wood, and sent a raving sound through the air, often thickened with wild rain or whirling sleet; and for the forest on its banks, _that_ showed only ranks of skeletons. April advanced to May: a bright serene May it was; days of blue sky, placid sunshine, and soft western or southern gales filled up its duration. And now vegetation matured with vigour; Lowood shook loose its tresses; it became all green, all flowery; its great elm, ash, and oak skeletons were restored to majestic life; woodland plants sprang up profusely in its recesses; unnumbered varieties of moss filled its hollows, and it made a strange ground-sunshine out of the wealth of its wild primrose plants: I have seen their pale gold gleam in overshadowed spots like scatterings of the sweetest lustre. All this I enjoyed often and fully, free, unwatched, and almost alone: for this unwonted liberty and pleasure there was a cause, to which it now becomes my task to advert. Have I not described a pleasant site for a dwelling, when I speak of it as bosomed in hill and wood, and rising from the verge of a stream? Assuredly, pleasant enough: but whether healthy or not is another question. That forest-dell, where Lowood lay, was the cradle of fog and fog-bred pestilence; which, quickening with the quickening spring, crept into the Orphan Asylum, breathed typhus through its crowded schoolroom and dormitory, and, ere May arrived, transformed the seminary into an hospital. Semi-starvation and neglected colds had predisposed most of the pupils to receive infection: forty-five out of the eighty girls lay ill at one time. Classes were broken up, rules relaxed. The few who continued well were allowed almost unlimited license; because the medical attendant insisted on the necessity of frequent exercise to keep them in health: and had it been otherwise, no one had leisure to watch or restrain them. Miss Temple's whole attention was absorbed by the patients: she lived in the sick-room, never quitting it except to snatch a few hours' rest at night. The teachers were fully occupied with packing up and making other necessary preparations for the departure of those girls who were fortunate enough to have friends and relations able and willing to remove them from the seat of contagion. Many, already smitten, went home only to die: some died at the school, and were buried quietly and quickly, the nature of the malady forbidding delay. While disease had thus become an inhabitant of Lowood, and death its frequent visitor; while there was gloom and fear within its walls; while its rooms and passages steamed with hospital smells, the drug and the pastille striving vainly to overcome the effluvia of mortality, that bright May shone unclouded over the bold hills and beautiful woodland out of doors. Its garden, too, glowed with flowers: hollyhocks had sprung up tall as trees, lilies had opened, tulips and roses were in bloom; the borders of the little beds were gay with pink thrift and crimson double daisies; the sweetbriars gave out, morning and evening, their scent of spice and apples; and these fragrant treasures were all useless for most of the inmates of Lowood, except to furnish now and then a handful of herbs and blossoms to put in a coffin. But I, and the rest who continued well, enjoyed fully the beauties of the scene and season; they let us ramble in the wood, like gipsies, from morning till night; we did what we liked, went where we liked: we lived better too. Mr. Brocklehurst and his family never came near Lowood now: household matters were not scrutinised into; the cross housekeeper was gone, driven away by the fear of infection; her successor, who had been matron at the Lowton Dispensary, unused to the ways of her new abode, provided with comparative liberality. Besides, there were fewer to feed; the sick could eat little; our breakfast-basins were better filled; when there was no time to prepare a regular dinner, which often happened, she would give us a large piece of cold pie, or a thick slice of bread and cheese, and this we carried away with us to the wood, where we each chose the spot we liked best, and dined sumptuously. My favourite seat was a smooth and broad stone, rising white and dry from the very middle of the beck, and only to be got at by wading through the water; a feat I accomplished barefoot. The stone was just broad enough to accommodate, comfortably, another girl and me, at that time my chosen comrade--one Mary Ann Wilson; a shrewd, observant personage, whose society I took pleasure in, partly because she was witty and original, and partly because she had a manner which set me at my ease. Some years older than I, she knew more of the world, and could tell me many things I liked to hear: with her my curiosity found gratification: to my faults also she gave ample indulgence, never imposing curb or rein on anything I said. She had a turn for narrative, I for analysis; she liked to inform, I to question; so we got on swimmingly together, deriving much entertainment, if not much improvement, from our mutual intercourse. And where, meantime, was Helen Burns? Why did I not spend these sweet days of liberty with her? Had I forgotten her? or was I so worthless as to have grown tired of her pure society? Surely the Mary Ann Wilson I have mentioned was inferior to my first acquaintance: she could only tell me amusing stories, and reciprocate any racy and pungent gossip I chose to indulge in; while, if I have spoken truth of Helen, she was qualified to give those who enjoyed the privilege of her converse a taste of far higher things. True, reader; and I knew and felt this: and though I am a defective being, with many faults and few redeeming points, yet I never tired of Helen Burns; nor ever ceased to cherish for her a sentiment of attachment, as strong, tender, and respectful as any that ever animated my heart. How could it be otherwise, when Helen, at all times and under all circumstances, evinced for me a quiet and faithful friendship, which ill-humour never soured, nor irritation never troubled? But Helen was ill at present: for some weeks she had been removed from my sight to I knew not what room upstairs. She was not, I was told, in the hospital portion of the house with the fever patients; for her complaint was consumption, not typhus: and by consumption I, in my ignorance, understood something mild, which time and care would be sure to alleviate. I was confirmed in this idea by the fact of her once or twice coming downstairs on very warm sunny afternoons, and being taken by Miss Temple into the garden; but, on these occasions, I was not allowed to go and speak to her; I only saw her from the schoolroom window, and then not distinctly; for she was much wrapped up, and sat at a distance under the verandah. One evening, in the beginning of June, I had stayed out very late with Mary Ann in the wood; we had, as usual, separated ourselves from the others, and had wandered far; so far that we lost our way, and had to ask it at a lonely cottage, where a man and woman lived, who looked after a herd of half-wild swine that fed on the mast in the wood. When we got back, it was after moonrise: a pony, which we knew to be the surgeon's, was standing at the garden door. Mary Ann remarked that she supposed some one must be very ill, as Mr. Bates had been sent for at that time of the evening. She went into the house; I stayed behind a few minutes to plant in my garden a handful of roots I had dug up in the forest, and which I feared would wither if I left them till the morning. This done, I lingered yet a little longer: the flowers smelt so sweet as the dew fell; it was such a pleasant evening, so serene, so warm; the still glowing west promised so fairly another fine day on the morrow; the moon rose with such majesty in the grave east. I was noting these things and enjoying them as a child might, when it entered my mind as it had never done before:-- "How sad to be lying now on a sick bed, and to be in danger of dying! This world is pleasant--it would be dreary to be called from it, and to have to go who knows where?" And then my mind made its first earnest effort to comprehend what had been infused into it concerning heaven and hell; and for the first time it recoiled, baffled; and for the first time glancing behind, on each side, and before it, it saw all round an unfathomed gulf: it felt the one point where it stood--the present; all the rest was formless cloud and vacant depth; and it shuddered at the thought of tottering, and plunging amid that chaos. While pondering this new idea, I heard the front door open; Mr. Bates came out, and with him was a nurse. After she had seen him mount his horse and depart, she was about to close the door, but I ran up to her. "How is Helen Burns?" "Very poorly," was the answer. "Is it her Mr. Bates has been to see?" "Yes." "And what does he say about her?" "He says she'll not be here long." This phrase, uttered in my hearing yesterday, would have only conveyed the notion that she was about to be removed to Northumberland, to her own home. I should not have suspected that it meant she was dying; but I knew instantly now! It opened clear on my comprehension that Helen Burns was numbering her last days in this world, and that she was going to be taken to the region of spirits, if such region there were. I experienced a shock of horror, then a strong thrill of grief, then a desire--a necessity to see her; and I asked in what room she lay. "She is in Miss Temple's room," said the nurse. "May I go up and speak to her?" "Oh no, child! It is not likely; and now it is time for you to come in; you'll catch the fever if you stop out when the dew is falling." The nurse closed the front door; I went in by the side entrance which led to the schoolroom: I was just in time; it was nine o'clock, and Miss Miller was calling the pupils to go to bed. It might be two hours later, probably near eleven, when I--not having been able to fall asleep, and deeming, from the perfect silence of the dormitory, that my companions were all wrapt in profound repose--rose softly, put on my frock over my night-dress, and, without shoes, crept from the apartment, and set off in quest of Miss Temple's room. It was quite at the other end of the house; but I knew my way; and the light of the unclouded summer moon, entering here and there at passage windows, enabled me to find it without difficulty. An odour of camphor and burnt vinegar warned me when I came near the fever room: and I passed its door quickly, fearful lest the nurse who sat up all night should hear me. I dreaded being discovered and sent back; for I _must_ see Helen,--I must embrace her before she died,--I must give her one last kiss, exchange with her one last word. Having descended a staircase, traversed a portion of the house below, and succeeded in opening and shutting, without noise, two doors, I reached another flight of steps; these I mounted, and then just opposite to me was Miss Temple's room. A light shone through the keyhole and from under the door; a profound stillness pervaded the vicinity. Coming near, I found the door slightly ajar; probably to admit some fresh air into the close abode of sickness. Indisposed to hesitate, and full of impatient impulses--soul and senses quivering with keen throes--I put it back and looked in. My eye sought Helen, and feared to find death. Close by Miss Temple's bed, and half covered with its white curtains, there stood a little crib. I saw the outline of a form under the clothes, but the face was hid by the hangings: the nurse I had spoken to in the garden sat in an easy-chair asleep; an unsnuffed candle burnt dimly on the table. Miss Temple was not to be seen: I knew afterwards that she had been called to a delirious patient in the fever-room. I advanced; then paused by the crib side: my hand was on the curtain, but I preferred speaking before I withdrew it. I still recoiled at the dread of seeing a corpse. "Helen!" I whispered softly, "are you awake?" She stirred herself, put back the curtain, and I saw her face, pale, wasted, but quite composed: she looked so little changed that my fear was instantly dissipated. "Can it be you, Jane?" she asked, in her own gentle voice. "Oh!" I thought, "she is not going to die; they are mistaken: she could not speak and look so calmly if she were." I got on to her crib and kissed her: her forehead was cold, and her cheek both cold and thin, and so were her hand and wrist; but she smiled as of old. "Why are you come here, Jane? It is past eleven o'clock: I heard it strike some minutes since." "I came to see you, Helen: I heard you were very ill, and I could not sleep till I had spoken to you." "You came to bid me good-bye, then: you are just in time probably." "Are you going somewhere, Helen? Are you going home?" "Yes; to my long home--my last home." "No, no, Helen!" I stopped, distressed. While I tried to devour my tears, a fit of coughing seized Helen; it did not, however, wake the nurse; when it was over, she lay some minutes exhausted; then she whispered-- "Jane, your little feet are bare; lie down and cover yourself with my quilt." I did so: she put her arm over me, and I nestled close to her. After a long silence, she resumed, still whispering-- "I am very happy, Jane; and when you hear that I am dead, you must be sure and not grieve: there is nothing to grieve about. We all must die one day, and the illness which is removing me is not painful; it is gentle and gradual: my mind is at rest. I leave no one to regret me much: I have only a father; and he is lately married, and will not miss me. By dying young, I shall escape great sufferings. I had not qualities or talents to make my way very well in the world: I should have been continually at fault." "But where are you going to, Helen? Can you see? Do you know?" "I believe; I have faith: I am going to God." "Where is God? What is God?" "My Maker and yours, who will never destroy what He created. I rely implicitly on His power, and confide wholly in His goodness: I count the hours till that eventful one arrives which shall restore me to Him, reveal Him to me." "You are sure, then, Helen, that there is such a place as heaven, and that our souls can get to it when we die?" "I am sure there is a future state; I believe God is good; I can resign my immortal part to Him without any misgiving. God is my father; God is my friend: I love Him; I believe He loves me." "And shall I see you again, Helen, when I die?" "You will come to the same region of happiness: be received by the same mighty, universal Parent, no doubt, dear Jane." Again I questioned, but this time only in thought. "Where is that region? Does it exist?" And I clasped my arms closer round Helen; she seemed dearer to me than ever; I felt as if I could not let her go; I lay with my face hidden on her neck. Presently she said, in the sweetest tone-- "How comfortable I am! That last fit of coughing has tired me a little; I feel as if I could sleep: but don't leave me, Jane; I like to have you near me." "I'll stay with you, _dear_ Helen: no one shall take me away." "Are you warm, darling?" "Yes." "Good-night, Jane." "Good-night, Helen." She kissed me, and I her, and we both soon slumbered. When I awoke it was day: an unusual movement roused me; I looked up; I was in somebody's arms; the nurse held me; she was carrying me through the passage back to the dormitory. I was not reprimanded for leaving my bed; people had something else to think about; no explanation was afforded then to my many questions; but a day or two afterwards I learned that Miss Temple, on returning to her own room at dawn, had found me laid in the little crib; my face against Helen Burns's shoulder, my arms round her neck. I was asleep, and Helen was--dead. Her grave is in Brocklebridge churchyard: for fifteen years after her death it was only covered by a grassy mound; but now a grey marble tablet marks the spot, inscribed with her name, and the word "Resurgam." CHAPTER X Hitherto I have recorded in detail the events of my insignificant existence: to the first ten years of my life I have given almost as many chapters. But this is not to be a regular autobiography. I am only bound to invoke Memory where I know her responses will possess some degree of interest; therefore I now pass a space of eight years almost in silence: a few lines only are necessary to keep up the links of connection. When the typhus fever had fulfilled its mission of devastation at Lowood, it gradually disappeared from thence; but not till its virulence and the number of its victims had drawn public attention on the school. Inquiry was made into the origin of the scourge, and by degrees various facts came out which excited public indignation in a high degree. The unhealthy nature of the site; the quantity and quality of the children's food; the brackish, fetid water used in its preparation; the pupils' wretched clothing and accommodations--all these things were discovered, and the discovery produced a result mortifying to Mr. Brocklehurst, but beneficial to the institution. Several wealthy and benevolent individuals in the county subscribed largely for the erection of a more convenient building in a better situation; new regulations were made; improvements in diet and clothing introduced; the funds of the school were intrusted to the management of a committee. Mr. Brocklehurst, who, from his wealth and family connections, could not be overlooked, still retained the post of treasurer; but he was aided in the discharge of his duties by gentlemen of rather more enlarged and sympathising minds: his office of inspector, too, was shared by those who knew how to combine reason with strictness, comfort with economy, compassion with uprightness. The school, thus improved, became in time a truly useful and noble institution. I remained an inmate of its walls, after its regeneration, for eight years: six as pupil, and two as teacher; and in both capacities I bear my testimony to its value and importance. During these eight years my life was uniform: but not unhappy, because it was not inactive. I had the means of an excellent education placed within my reach; a fondness for some of my studies, and a desire to excel in all, together with a great delight in pleasing my teachers, especially such as I loved, urged me on: I availed myself fully of the advantages offered me. In time I rose to be the first girl of the first class; then I was invested with the office of teacher; which I discharged with zeal for two years: but at the end of that time I altered. Miss Temple, through all changes, had thus far continued superintendent of the seminary: to her instruction I owed the best part of my acquirements; her friendship and society had been my continual solace; she had stood me in the stead of mother, governess, and, latterly, companion. At this period she married, removed with her husband (a clergyman, an excellent man, almost worthy of such a wife) to a distant county, and consequently was lost to me. From the day she left I was no longer the same: with her was gone every settled feeling, every association that had made Lowood in some degree a home to me. I had imbibed from her something of her nature and much of her habits: more harmonious thoughts: what seemed better regulated feelings had become the inmates of my mind. I had given in allegiance to duty and order; I was quiet; I believed I was content: to the eyes of others, usually even to my own, I appeared a disciplined and subdued character. But destiny, in the shape of the Rev. Mr. Nasmyth, came between me and Miss Temple: I saw her in her travelling dress step into a post-chaise, shortly after the marriage ceremony; I watched the chaise mount the hill and disappear beyond its brow; and then retired to my own room, and there spent in solitude the greatest part of the half-holiday granted in honour of the occasion. I walked about the chamber most of the time. I imagined myself only to be regretting my loss, and thinking how to repair it; but when my reflections were concluded, and I looked up and found that the afternoon was gone, and evening far advanced, another discovery dawned on me, namely, that in the interval I had undergone a transforming process; that my mind had put off all it had borrowed of Miss Temple--or rather that she had taken with her the serene atmosphere I had been breathing in her vicinity--and that now I was left in my natural element, and beginning to feel the stirring of old emotions. It did not seem as if a prop were withdrawn, but rather as if a motive were gone: it was not the power to be tranquil which had failed me, but the reason for tranquillity was no more. My world had for some years been in Lowood: my experience had been of its rules and systems; now I remembered that the real world was wide, and that a varied field of hopes and fears, of sensations and excitements, awaited those who had courage to go forth into its expanse, to seek real knowledge of life amidst its perils. I went to my window, opened it, and looked out. There were the two wings of the building; there was the garden; there were the skirts of Lowood; there was the hilly horizon. My eye passed all other objects to rest on those most remote, the blue peaks; it was those I longed to surmount; all within their boundary of rock and heath seemed prison-ground, exile limits. I traced the white road winding round the base of one mountain, and vanishing in a gorge between two; how I longed to follow it farther! I recalled the time when I had travelled that very road in a coach; I remembered descending that hill at twilight; an age seemed to have elapsed since the day which brought me first to Lowood, and I had never quitted it since. My vacations had all been spent at school: Mrs. Reed had never sent for me to Gateshead; neither she nor any of her family had ever been to visit me. I had had no communication by letter or message with the outer world: school-rules, school-duties, school-habits and notions, and voices, and faces, and phrases, and costumes, and preferences, and antipathies--such was what I knew of existence. And now I felt that it was not enough; I tired of the routine of eight years in one afternoon. I desired liberty; for liberty I gasped; for liberty I uttered a prayer; it seemed scattered on the wind then faintly blowing. I abandoned it and framed a humbler supplication; for change, stimulus: that petition, too, seemed swept off into vague space: "Then," I cried, half desperate, "grant me at least a new servitude!" Here a bell, ringing the hour of supper, called me downstairs. I was not free to resume the interrupted chain of my reflections till bedtime: even then a teacher who occupied the same room with me kept me from the subject to which I longed to recur, by a prolonged effusion of small talk. How I wished sleep would silence her. It seemed as if, could I but go back to the idea which had last entered my mind as I stood at the window, some inventive suggestion would rise for my relief. Miss Gryce snored at last; she was a heavy Welshwoman, and till now her habitual nasal strains had never been regarded by me in any other light than as a nuisance; to-night I hailed the first deep notes with satisfaction; I was debarrassed of interruption; my half-effaced thought instantly revived. "A new servitude! There is something in that," I soliloquised (mentally, be it understood; I did not talk aloud), "I know there is, because it does not sound too sweet; it is not like such words as Liberty, Excitement, Enjoyment: delightful sounds truly; but no more than sounds for me; and so hollow and fleeting that it is mere waste of time to listen to them. But Servitude! That must be matter of fact. Any one may serve: I have served here eight years; now all I want is to serve elsewhere. Can I not get so much of my own will? Is not the thing feasible? Yes--yes--the end is not so difficult; if I had only a brain active enough to ferret out the means of attaining it." I sat up in bed by way of arousing this said brain: it was a chilly night; I covered my shoulders with a shawl, and then I proceeded _to think_ again with all my might. "What do I want? A new place, in a new house, amongst new faces, under new circumstances: I want this because it is of no use wanting anything better. How do people do to get a new place? They apply to friends, I suppose: I have no friends. There are many others who have no friends, who must look about for themselves and be their own helpers; and what is their resource?" I could not tell: nothing answered me; I then ordered my brain to find a response, and quickly. It worked and worked faster: I felt the pulses throb in my head and temples; but for nearly an hour it worked in chaos; and no result came of its efforts. Feverish with vain labour, I got up and took a turn in the room; undrew the curtain, noted a star or two, shivered with cold, and again crept to bed. A kind fairy, in my absence, had surely dropped the required suggestion on my pillow; for as I lay down, it came quietly and naturally to my mind.--"Those who want situations advertise; you must advertise in the _---shire Herald_." "How? I know nothing about advertising." Replies rose smooth and prompt now:-- "You must enclose the advertisement and the money to pay for it under a cover directed to the editor of the _Herald_; you must put it, the first opportunity you have, into the post at Lowton; answers must be addressed to J.E., at the post-office there; you can go and inquire in about a week after you send your letter, if any are come, and act accordingly." This scheme I went over twice, thrice; it was then digested in my mind; I had it in a clear practical form: I felt satisfied, and fell asleep. With earliest day, I was up: I had my advertisement written, enclosed, and directed before the bell rang to rouse the school; it ran thus:-- "A young lady accustomed to tuition" (had I not been a teacher two years?) "is desirous of meeting with a situation in a private family where the children are under fourteen" (I thought that as I was barely eighteen, it would not do to undertake the guidance of pupils nearer my own age). "She is qualified to teach the usual branches of a good English education, together with French, Drawing, and Music" (in those days, reader, this now narrow catalogue of accomplishments, would have been held tolerably comprehensive). "Address, J.E., Post-office, Lowton, --- shire." This document remained locked in my drawer all day: after tea, I asked leave of the new superintendent to go to Lowton, in order to perform some small commissions for myself and one or two of my fellow-teachers; permission was readily granted; I went. It was a walk of two miles, and the evening was wet, but the days were still long; I visited a shop or two, slipped the letter into the post-office, and came back through heavy rain, with streaming garments, but with a relieved heart. The succeeding week seemed long: it came to an end at last, however, like all sublunary things, and once more, towards the close of a pleasant autumn day, I found myself afoot on the road to Lowton. A picturesque track it was, by the way; lying along the side of the beck and through the sweetest curves of the dale: but that day I thought more of the letters, that might or might not be awaiting me at the little burgh whither I was bound, than of the charms of lea and water. My ostensible errand on this occasion was to get measured for a pair of shoes; so I discharged that business first, and when it was done, I stepped across the clean and quiet little street from the shoemaker's to the post-office: it was kept by an old dame, who wore horn spectacles on her nose, and black mittens on her hands. "Are there any letters for J.E.?" I asked. She peered at me over her spectacles, and then she opened a drawer and fumbled among its contents for a long time, so long that my hopes began to falter. At last, having held a document before her glasses for nearly five minutes, she presented it across the counter, accompanying the act by another inquisitive and mistrustful glance--it was for J.E. "Is there only one?" I demanded. "There are no more," said she; and I put it in my pocket and turned my face homeward: I could not open it then; rules obliged me to be back by eight, and it was already half-past seven. Various duties awaited me on my arrival. I had to sit with the girls during their hour of study; then it was my turn to read prayers; to see them to bed: afterwards I supped with the other teachers. Even when we finally retired for the night, the inevitable Miss Gryce was still my companion: we had only a short end of candle in our candlestick, and I dreaded lest she should talk till it was all burnt out; fortunately, however, the heavy supper she had eaten produced a soporific effect: she was already snoring before I had finished undressing. There still remained an inch of candle: I now took out my letter; the seal was an initial F.; I broke it; the contents were brief. "If J.E., who advertised in the _---shire Herald_ of last Thursday, possesses the acquirements mentioned, and if she is in a position to give satisfactory references as to character and competency, a situation can be offered her where there is but one pupil, a little girl, under ten years of age; and where the salary is thirty pounds per annum. J.E. is requested to send references, name, address, and all particulars to the direction:-- "Mrs. Fairfax, Thornfield, near Millcote, ---shire." I examined the document long: the writing was old-fashioned and rather uncertain, like that of an elderly lady. This circumstance was satisfactory: a private fear had haunted me, that in thus acting for myself, and by my own guidance, I ran the risk of getting into some scrape; and, above all things, I wished the result of my endeavours to be respectable, proper, _en regle_. I now felt that an elderly lady was no bad ingredient in the business I had on hand. Mrs. Fairfax! I saw her in a black gown and widow's cap; frigid, perhaps, but not uncivil: a model of elderly English respectability. Thornfield! that, doubtless, was the name of her house: a neat orderly spot, I was sure; though I failed in my efforts to conceive a correct plan of the premises. Millcote, ---shire; I brushed up my recollections of the map of England, yes, I saw it; both the shire and the town. ---shire was seventy miles nearer London than the remote county where I now resided: that was a recommendation to me. I longed to go where there was life and movement: Millcote was a large manufacturing town on the banks of the A-; a busy place enough, doubtless: so much the better; it would be a complete change at least. Not that my fancy was much captivated by the idea of long chimneys and clouds of smoke--"but," I argued, "Thornfield will, probably, be a good way from the town." Here the socket of the candle dropped, and the wick went out. Next day new steps were to be taken; my plans could no longer be confined to my own breast; I must impart them in order to achieve their success. Having sought and obtained an audience of the superintendent during the noontide recreation, I told her I had a prospect of getting a new situation where the salary would be double what I now received (for at Lowood I only got 15 pounds per annum); and requested she would break the matter for me to Mr. Brocklehurst, or some of the committee, and ascertain whether they would permit me to mention them as references. She obligingly consented to act as mediatrix in the matter. The next day she laid the affair before Mr. Brocklehurst, who said that Mrs. Reed must be written to, as she was my natural guardian. A note was accordingly addressed to that lady, who returned for answer, that "I might do as I pleased: she had long relinquished all interference in my affairs." This note went the round of the committee, and at last, after what appeared to me most tedious delay, formal leave was given me to better my condition if I could; and an assurance added, that as I had always conducted myself well, both as teacher and pupil, at Lowood, a testimonial of character and capacity, signed by the inspectors of that institution, should forthwith be furnished me. This testimonial I accordingly received in about a month, forwarded a copy of it to Mrs. Fairfax, and got that lady's reply, stating that she was satisfied, and fixing that day fortnight as the period for my assuming the post of governess in her house. I now busied myself in preparations: the fortnight passed rapidly. I had not a very large wardrobe, though it was adequate to my wants; and the last day sufficed to pack my trunk,--the same I had brought with me eight years ago from Gateshead. The box was corded, the card nailed on. In half-an-hour the carrier was to call for it to take it to Lowton, whither I myself was to repair at an early hour the next morning to meet the coach. I had brushed my black stuff travelling-dress, prepared my bonnet, gloves, and muff; sought in all my drawers to see that no article was left behind; and now having nothing more to do, I sat down and tried to rest. I could not; though I had been on foot all day, I could not now repose an instant; I was too much excited. A phase of my life was closing to-night, a new one opening to-morrow: impossible to slumber in the interval; I must watch feverishly while the change was being accomplished. "Miss," said a servant who met me in the lobby, where I was wandering like a troubled spirit, "a person below wishes to see you." "The carrier, no doubt," I thought, and ran downstairs without inquiry. I was passing the back-parlour or teachers' sitting-room, the door of which was half open, to go to the kitchen, when some one ran out-- "It's her, I am sure!--I could have told her anywhere!" cried the individual who stopped my progress and took my hand. I looked: I saw a woman attired like a well-dressed servant, matronly, yet still young; very good-looking, with black hair and eyes, and lively complexion. "Well, who is it?" she asked, in a voice and with a smile I half recognised; "you've not quite forgotten me, I think, Miss Jane?" In another second I was embracing and kissing her rapturously: "Bessie! Bessie! Bessie!" that was all I said; whereat she half laughed, half cried, and we both went into the parlour. By the fire stood a little fellow of three years old, in plaid frock and trousers. "That is my little boy," said Bessie directly. "Then you are married, Bessie?" "Yes; nearly five years since to Robert Leaven, the coachman; and I've a little girl besides Bobby there, that I've christened Jane." "And you don't live at Gateshead?" "I live at the lodge: the old porter has left." "Well, and how do they all get on? Tell me everything about them, Bessie: but sit down first; and, Bobby, come and sit on my knee, will you?" but Bobby preferred sidling over to his mother. "You're not grown so very tall, Miss Jane, nor so very stout," continued Mrs. Leaven. "I dare say they've not kept you too well at school: Miss Reed is the head and shoulders taller than you are; and Miss Georgiana would make two of you in breadth." "Georgiana is handsome, I suppose, Bessie?" "Very. She went up to London last winter with her mama, and there everybody admired her, and a young lord fell in love with her: but his relations were against the match; and--what do you think?--he and Miss Georgiana made it up to run away; but they were found out and stopped. It was Miss Reed that found them out: I believe she was envious; and now she and her sister lead a cat and dog life together; they are always quarrelling--" "Well, and what of John Reed?" "Oh, he is not doing so well as his mama could wish. He went to college, and he got--plucked, I think they call it: and then his uncles wanted him to be a barrister, and study the law: but he is such a dissipated young man, they will never make much of him, I think." "What does he look like?" "He is very tall: some people call him a fine-looking young man; but he has such thick lips." "And Mrs. Reed?" "Missis looks stout and well enough in the face, but I think she's not quite easy in her mind: Mr. John's conduct does not please her--he spends a deal of money." "Did she send you here, Bessie?" "No, indeed: but I have long wanted to see you, and when I heard that there had been a letter from you, and that you were going to another part of the country, I thought I'd just set off, and get a look at you before you were quite out of my reach." "I am afraid you are disappointed in me, Bessie." I said this laughing: I perceived that Bessie's glance, though it expressed regard, did in no shape denote admiration. "No, Miss Jane, not exactly: you are genteel enough; you look like a lady, and it is as much as ever I expected of you: you were no beauty as a child." I smiled at Bessie's frank answer: I felt that it was correct, but I confess I was not quite indifferent to its import: at eighteen most people wish to please, and the conviction that they have not an exterior likely to second that desire brings anything but gratification. "I dare say you are clever, though," continued Bessie, by way of solace. "What can you do? Can you play on the piano?" "A little." There was one in the room; Bessie went and opened it, and then asked me to sit down and give her a tune: I played a waltz or two, and she was charmed. "The Miss Reeds could not play as well!" said she exultingly. "I always said you would surpass them in learning: and can you draw?" "That is one of my paintings over the chimney-piece." It was a landscape in water colours, of which I had made a present to the superintendent, in acknowledgment of her obliging mediation with the committee on my behalf, and which she had framed and glazed. "Well, that is beautiful, Miss Jane! It is as fine a picture as any Miss Reed's drawing-master could paint, let alone the young ladies themselves, who could not come near it: and have you learnt French?" "Yes, Bessie, I can both read it and speak it." "And you can work on muslin and canvas?" "I can." "Oh, you are quite a lady, Miss Jane! I knew you would be: you will get on whether your relations notice you or not. There was something I wanted to ask you. Have you ever heard anything from your father's kinsfolk, the Eyres?" "Never in my life." "Well, you know Missis always said they were poor and quite despicable: and they may be poor; but I believe they are as much gentry as the Reeds are; for one day, nearly seven years ago, a Mr. Eyre came to Gateshead and wanted to see you; Missis said you were at school fifty miles off; he seemed so much disappointed, for he could not stay: he was going on a voyage to a foreign country, and the ship was to sail from London in a day or two. He looked quite a gentleman, and I believe he was your father's brother." "What foreign country was he going to, Bessie?" "An island thousands of miles off, where they make wine--the butler did tell me--" "Madeira?" I suggested. "Yes, that is it--that is the very word." "So he went?" "Yes; he did not stay many minutes in the house: Missis was very high with him; she called him afterwards a 'sneaking tradesman.' My Robert believes he was a wine-merchant." "Very likely," I returned; "or perhaps clerk or agent to a wine-merchant." Bessie and I conversed about old times an hour longer, and then she was obliged to leave me: I saw her again for a few minutes the next morning at Lowton, while I was waiting for the coach. We parted finally at the door of the Brocklehurst Arms there: each went her separate way; she set off for the brow of Lowood Fell to meet the conveyance which was to take her back to Gateshead, I mounted the vehicle which was to bear me to new duties and a new life in the unknown environs of Millcote. CHAPTER XI A new chapter in a novel is something like a new scene in a play; and when I draw up the curtain this time, reader, you must fancy you see a room in the George Inn at Millcote, with such large figured papering on the walls as inn rooms have; such a carpet, such furniture, such ornaments on the mantelpiece, such prints, including a portrait of George the Third, and another of the Prince of Wales, and a representation of the death of Wolfe. All this is visible to you by the light of an oil lamp hanging from the ceiling, and by that of an excellent fire, near which I sit in my cloak and bonnet; my muff and umbrella lie on the table, and I am warming away the numbness and chill contracted by sixteen hours' exposure to the rawness of an October day: I left Lowton at four o'clock a.m., and the Millcote town clock is now just striking eight. Reader, though I look comfortably accommodated, I am not very tranquil in my mind. I thought when the coach stopped here there would be some one to meet me; I looked anxiously round as I descended the wooden steps the "boots" placed for my convenience, expecting to hear my name pronounced, and to see some description of carriage waiting to convey me to Thornfield. Nothing of the sort was visible; and when I asked a waiter if any one had been to inquire after a Miss Eyre, I was answered in the negative: so I had no resource but to request to be shown into a private room: and here I am waiting, while all sorts of doubts and fears are troubling my thoughts. It is a very strange sensation to inexperienced youth to feel itself quite alone in the world, cut adrift from every connection, uncertain whether the port to which it is bound can be reached, and prevented by many impediments from returning to that it has quitted. The charm of adventure sweetens that sensation, the glow of pride warms it; but then the throb of fear disturbs it; and fear with me became predominant when half-an-hour elapsed and still I was alone. I bethought myself to ring the bell. "Is there a place in this neighbourhood called Thornfield?" I asked of the waiter who answered the summons. "Thornfield? I don't know, ma'am; I'll inquire at the bar." He vanished, but reappeared instantly-- "Is your name Eyre, Miss?" "Yes." "Person here waiting for you." I jumped up, took my muff and umbrella, and hastened into the inn-passage: a man was standing by the open door, and in the lamp-lit street I dimly saw a one-horse conveyance. "This will be your luggage, I suppose?" said the man rather abruptly when he saw me, pointing to my trunk in the passage. "Yes." He hoisted it on to the vehicle, which was a sort of car, and then I got in; before he shut me up, I asked him how far it was to Thornfield. "A matter of six miles." "How long shall we be before we get there?" "Happen an hour and a half." He fastened the car door, climbed to his own seat outside, and we set off. Our progress was leisurely, and gave me ample time to reflect; I was content to be at length so near the end of my journey; and as I leaned back in the comfortable though not elegant conveyance, I meditated much at my ease. "I suppose," thought I, "judging from the plainness of the servant and carriage, Mrs. Fairfax is not a very dashing person: so much the better; I never lived amongst fine people but once, and I was very miserable with them. I wonder if she lives alone except this little girl; if so, and if she is in any degree amiable, I shall surely be able to get on with her; I will do my best; it is a pity that doing one's best does not always answer. At Lowood, indeed, I took that resolution, kept it, and succeeded in pleasing; but with Mrs. Reed, I remember my best was always spurned with scorn. I pray God Mrs. Fairfax may not turn out a second Mrs. Reed; but if she does, I am not bound to stay with her! let the worst come to the worst, I can advertise again. How far are we on our road now, I wonder?" I let down the window and looked out; Millcote was behind us; judging by the number of its lights, it seemed a place of considerable magnitude, much larger than Lowton. We were now, as far as I could see, on a sort of common; but there were houses scattered all over the district; I felt we were in a different region to Lowood, more populous, less picturesque; more stirring, less romantic. The roads were heavy, the night misty; my conductor let his horse walk all the way, and the hour and a half extended, I verily believe, to two hours; at last he turned in his seat and said-- "You're noan so far fro' Thornfield now." Again I looked out: we were passing a church; I saw its low broad tower against the sky, and its bell was tolling a quarter; I saw a narrow galaxy of lights too, on a hillside, marking a village or hamlet. About ten minutes after, the driver got down and opened a pair of gates: we passed through, and they clashed to behind us. We now slowly ascended a drive, and came upon the long front of a house: candlelight gleamed from one curtained bow-window; all the rest were dark. The car stopped at the front door; it was opened by a maid-servant; I alighted and went in. "Will you walk this way, ma'am?" said the girl; and I followed her across a square hall with high doors all round: she ushered me into a room whose double illumination of fire and candle at first dazzled me, contrasting as it did with the darkness to which my eyes had been for two hours inured; when I could see, however, a cosy and agreeable picture presented itself to my view. A snug small room; a round table by a cheerful fire; an arm-chair high- backed and old-fashioned, wherein sat the neatest imaginable little elderly lady, in widow's cap, black silk gown, and snowy muslin apron; exactly like what I had fancied Mrs. Fairfax, only less stately and milder looking. She was occupied in knitting; a large cat sat demurely at her feet; nothing in short was wanting to complete the beau-ideal of domestic comfort. A more reassuring introduction for a new governess could scarcely be conceived; there was no grandeur to overwhelm, no stateliness to embarrass; and then, as I entered, the old lady got up and promptly and kindly came forward to meet me. "How do you do, my dear? I am afraid you have had a tedious ride; John drives so slowly; you must be cold, come to the fire." "Mrs. Fairfax, I suppose?" said I. "Yes, you are right: do sit down." She conducted me to her own chair, and then began to remove my shawl and untie my bonnet-strings; I begged she would not give herself so much trouble. "Oh, it is no trouble; I dare say your own hands are almost numbed with cold. Leah, make a little hot negus and cut a sandwich or two: here are the keys of the storeroom." And she produced from her pocket a most housewifely bunch of keys, and delivered them to the servant. "Now, then, draw nearer to the fire," she continued. "You've brought your luggage with you, haven't you, my dear?" "Yes, ma'am." "I'll see it carried into your room," she said, and bustled out. "She treats me like a visitor," thought I. "I little expected such a reception; I anticipated only coldness and stiffness: this is not like what I have heard of the treatment of governesses; but I must not exult too soon." She returned; with her own hands cleared her knitting apparatus and a book or two from the table, to make room for the tray which Leah now brought, and then herself handed me the refreshments. I felt rather confused at being the object of more attention than I had ever before received, and, that too, shown by my employer and superior; but as she did not herself seem to consider she was doing anything out of her place, I thought it better to take her civilities quietly. "Shall I have the pleasure of seeing Miss Fairfax to-night?" I asked, when I had partaken of what she offered me. "What did you say, my dear? I am a little deaf," returned the good lady, approaching her ear to my mouth. I repeated the question more distinctly. "Miss Fairfax? Oh, you mean Miss Varens! Varens is the name of your future pupil." "Indeed! Then she is not your daughter?" "No,--I have no family." I should have followed up my first inquiry, by asking in what way Miss Varens was connected with her; but I recollected it was not polite to ask too many questions: besides, I was sure to hear in time. "I am so glad," she continued, as she sat down opposite to me, and took the cat on her knee; "I am so glad you are come; it will be quite pleasant living here now with a companion. To be sure it is pleasant at any time; for Thornfield is a fine old hall, rather neglected of late years perhaps, but still it is a respectable place; yet you know in winter-time one feels dreary quite alone in the best quarters. I say alone--Leah is a nice girl to be sure, and John and his wife are very decent people; but then you see they are only servants, and one can't converse with them on terms of equality: one must keep them at due distance, for fear of losing one's authority. I'm sure last winter (it was a very severe one, if you recollect, and when it did not snow, it rained and blew), not a creature but the butcher and postman came to the house, from November till February; and I really got quite melancholy with sitting night after night alone; I had Leah in to read to me sometimes; but I don't think the poor girl liked the task much: she felt it confining. In spring and summer one got on better: sunshine and long days make such a difference; and then, just at the commencement of this autumn, little Adela Varens came and her nurse: a child makes a house alive all at once; and now you are here I shall be quite gay." My heart really warmed to the worthy lady as I heard her talk; and I drew my chair a little nearer to her, and expressed my sincere wish that she might find my company as agreeable as she anticipated. "But I'll not keep you sitting up late to-night," said she; "it is on the stroke of twelve now, and you have been travelling all day: you must feel tired. If you have got your feet well warmed, I'll show you your bedroom. I've had the room next to mine prepared for you; it is only a small apartment, but I thought you would like it better than one of the large front chambers: to be sure they have finer furniture, but they are so dreary and solitary, I never sleep in them myself." I thanked her for her considerate choice, and as I really felt fatigued with my long journey, expressed my readiness to retire. She took her candle, and I followed her from the room. First she went to see if the hall-door was fastened; having taken the key from the lock, she led the way upstairs. The steps and banisters were of oak; the staircase window was high and latticed; both it and the long gallery into which the bedroom doors opened looked as if they belonged to a church rather than a house. A very chill and vault-like air pervaded the stairs and gallery, suggesting cheerless ideas of space and solitude; and I was glad, when finally ushered into my chamber, to find it of small dimensions, and furnished in ordinary, modern style. When Mrs. Fairfax had bidden me a kind good-night, and I had fastened my door, gazed leisurely round, and in some measure effaced the eerie impression made by that wide hall, that dark and spacious staircase, and that long, cold gallery, by the livelier aspect of my little room, I remembered that, after a day of bodily fatigue and mental anxiety, I was now at last in safe haven. The impulse of gratitude swelled my heart, and I knelt down at the bedside, and offered up thanks where thanks were due; not forgetting, ere I rose, to implore aid on my further path, and the power of meriting the kindness which seemed so frankly offered me before it was earned. My couch had no thorns in it that night; my solitary room no fears. At once weary and content, I slept soon and soundly: when I awoke it was broad day. The chamber looked such a bright little place to me as the sun shone in between the gay blue chintz window curtains, showing papered walls and a carpeted floor, so unlike the bare planks and stained plaster of Lowood, that my spirits rose at the view. Externals have a great effect on the young: I thought that a fairer era of life was beginning for me, one that was to have its flowers and pleasures, as well as its thorns and toils. My faculties, roused by the change of scene, the new field offered to hope, seemed all astir. I cannot precisely define what they expected, but it was something pleasant: not perhaps that day or that month, but at an indefinite future period. I rose; I dressed myself with care: obliged to be plain--for I had no article of attire that was not made with extreme simplicity--I was still by nature solicitous to be neat. It was not my habit to be disregardful of appearance or careless of the impression I made: on the contrary, I ever wished to look as well as I could, and to please as much as my want of beauty would permit. I sometimes regretted that I was not handsomer; I sometimes wished to have rosy cheeks, a straight nose, and small cherry mouth; I desired to be tall, stately, and finely developed in figure; I felt it a misfortune that I was so little, so pale, and had features so irregular and so marked. And why had I these aspirations and these regrets? It would be difficult to say: I could not then distinctly say it to myself; yet I had a reason, and a logical, natural reason too. However, when I had brushed my hair very smooth, and put on my black frock--which, Quakerlike as it was, at least had the merit of fitting to a nicety--and adjusted my clean white tucker, I thought I should do respectably enough to appear before Mrs. Fairfax, and that my new pupil would not at least recoil from me with antipathy. Having opened my chamber window, and seen that I left all things straight and neat on the toilet table, I ventured forth. Traversing the long and matted gallery, I descended the slippery steps of oak; then I gained the hall: I halted there a minute; I looked at some pictures on the walls (one, I remember, represented a grim man in a cuirass, and one a lady with powdered hair and a pearl necklace), at a bronze lamp pendent from the ceiling, at a great clock whose case was of oak curiously carved, and ebon black with time and rubbing. Everything appeared very stately and imposing to me; but then I was so little accustomed to grandeur. The hall-door, which was half of glass, stood open; I stepped over the threshold. It was a fine autumn morning; the early sun shone serenely on embrowned groves and still green fields; advancing on to the lawn, I looked up and surveyed the front of the mansion. It was three storeys high, of proportions not vast, though considerable: a gentleman's manor-house, not a nobleman's seat: battlements round the top gave it a picturesque look. Its grey front stood out well from the background of a rookery, whose cawing tenants were now on the wing: they flew over the lawn and grounds to alight in a great meadow, from which these were separated by a sunk fence, and where an array of mighty old thorn trees, strong, knotty, and broad as oaks, at once explained the etymology of the mansion's designation. Farther off were hills: not so lofty as those round Lowood, nor so craggy, nor so like barriers of separation from the living world; but yet quiet and lonely hills enough, and seeming to embrace Thornfield with a seclusion I had not expected to find existent so near the stirring locality of Millcote. A little hamlet, whose roofs were blent with trees, straggled up the side of one of these hills; the church of the district stood nearer Thornfield: its old tower-top looked over a knoll between the house and gates. I was yet enjoying the calm prospect and pleasant fresh air, yet listening with delight to the cawing of the rooks, yet surveying the wide, hoary front of the hall, and thinking what a great place it was for one lonely little dame like Mrs. Fairfax to inhabit, when that lady appeared at the door. "What! out already?" said she. "I see you are an early riser." I went up to her, and was received with an affable kiss and shake of the hand. "How do you like Thornfield?" she asked. I told her I liked it very much. "Yes," she said, "it is a pretty place; but I fear it will be getting out of order, unless Mr. Rochester should take it into his head to come and reside here permanently; or, at least, visit it rather oftener: great houses and fine grounds require the presence of the proprietor." "Mr. Rochester!" I exclaimed. "Who is he?" "The owner of Thornfield," she responded quietly. "Did you not know he was called Rochester?" Of course I did not--I had never heard of him before; but the old lady seemed to regard his existence as a universally understood fact, with which everybody must be acquainted by instinct. "I thought," I continued, "Thornfield belonged to you." "To me? Bless you, child; what an idea! To me! I am only the housekeeper--the manager. To be sure I am distantly related to the Rochesters by the mother's side, or at least my husband was; he was a clergyman, incumbent of Hay--that little village yonder on the hill--and that church near the gates was his. The present Mr. Rochester's mother was a Fairfax, and second cousin to my husband: but I never presume on the connection--in fact, it is nothing to me; I consider myself quite in the light of an ordinary housekeeper: my employer is always civil, and I expect nothing more." "And the little girl--my pupil!" "She is Mr. Rochester's ward; he commissioned me to find a governess for her. He intended to have her brought up in ---shire, I believe. Here she comes, with her 'bonne,' as she calls her nurse." The enigma then was explained: this affable and kind little widow was no great dame; but a dependant like myself. I did not like her the worse for that; on the contrary, I felt better pleased than ever. The equality between her and me was real; not the mere result of condescension on her part: so much the better--my position was all the freer. As I was meditating on this discovery, a little girl, followed by her attendant, came running up the lawn. I looked at my pupil, who did not at first appear to notice me: she was quite a child, perhaps seven or eight years old, slightly built, with a pale, small-featured face, and a redundancy of hair falling in curls to her waist. "Good morning, Miss Adela," said Mrs. Fairfax. "Come and speak to the lady who is to teach you, and to make you a clever woman some day." She approached. "C'est la ma gouverante!" said she, pointing to me, and addressing her nurse; who answered-- "Mais oui, certainement." "Are they foreigners?" I inquired, amazed at hearing the French language. "The nurse is a foreigner, and Adela was born on the Continent; and, I believe, never left it till within six months ago. When she first came here she could speak no English; now she can make shift to talk it a little: I don't understand her, she mixes it so with French; but you will make out her meaning very well, I dare say." Fortunately I had had the advantage of being taught French by a French lady; and as I had always made a point of conversing with Madame Pierrot as often as I could, and had besides, during the last seven years, learnt a portion of French by heart daily--applying myself to take pains with my accent, and imitating as closely as possible the pronunciation of my teacher, I had acquired a certain degree of readiness and correctness in the language, and was not likely to be much at a loss with Mademoiselle Adela. She came and shook hand with me when she heard that I was her governess; and as I led her in to breakfast, I addressed some phrases to her in her own tongue: she replied briefly at first, but after we were seated at the table, and she had examined me some ten minutes with her large hazel eyes, she suddenly commenced chattering fluently. "Ah!" cried she, in French, "you speak my language as well as Mr. Rochester does: I can talk to you as I can to him, and so can Sophie. She will be glad: nobody here understands her: Madame Fairfax is all English. Sophie is my nurse; she came with me over the sea in a great ship with a chimney that smoked--how it did smoke!--and I was sick, and so was Sophie, and so was Mr. Rochester. Mr. Rochester lay down on a sofa in a pretty room called the salon, and Sophie and I had little beds in another place. I nearly fell out of mine; it was like a shelf. And Mademoiselle--what is your name?" "Eyre--Jane Eyre." "Aire? Bah! I cannot say it. Well, our ship stopped in the morning, before it was quite daylight, at a great city--a huge city, with very dark houses and all smoky; not at all like the pretty clean town I came from; and Mr. Rochester carried me in his arms over a plank to the land, and Sophie came after, and we all got into a coach, which took us to a beautiful large house, larger than this and finer, called an hotel. We stayed there nearly a week: I and Sophie used to walk every day in a great green place full of trees, called the Park; and there were many children there besides me, and a pond with beautiful birds in it, that I fed with crumbs." "Can you understand her when she runs on so fast?" asked Mrs. Fairfax. I understood her very well, for I had been accustomed to the fluent tongue of Madame Pierrot. "I wish," continued the good lady, "you would ask her a question or two about her parents: I wonder if she remembers them?" "Adele," I inquired, "with whom did you live when you were in that pretty clean town you spoke of?" "I lived long ago with mama; but she is gone to the Holy Virgin. Mama used to teach me to dance and sing, and to say verses. A great many gentlemen and ladies came to see mama, and I used to dance before them, or to sit on their knees and sing to them: I liked it. Shall I let you hear me sing now?" She had finished her breakfast, so I permitted her to give a specimen of her accomplishments. Descending from her chair, she came and placed herself on my knee; then, folding her little hands demurely before her, shaking back her curls and lifting her eyes to the ceiling, she commenced singing a song from some opera. It was the strain of a forsaken lady, who, after bewailing the perfidy of her lover, calls pride to her aid; desires her attendant to deck her in her brightest jewels and richest robes, and resolves to meet the false one that night at a ball, and prove to him, by the gaiety of her demeanour, how little his desertion has affected her. The subject seemed strangely chosen for an infant singer; but I suppose the point of the exhibition lay in hearing the notes of love and jealousy warbled with the lisp of childhood; and in very bad taste that point was: at least I thought so. Adele sang the canzonette tunefully enough, and with the _naivete_ of her age. This achieved, she jumped from my knee and said, "Now, Mademoiselle, I will repeat you some poetry." Assuming an attitude, she began, "La Ligue des Rats: fable de La Fontaine." She then declaimed the little piece with an attention to punctuation and emphasis, a flexibility of voice and an appropriateness of gesture, very unusual indeed at her age, and which proved she had been carefully trained. "Was it your mama who taught you that piece?" I asked. "Yes, and she just used to say it in this way: 'Qu' avez vous donc? lui dit un de ces rats; parlez!' She made me lift my hand--so--to remind me to raise my voice at the question. Now shall I dance for you?" "No, that will do: but after your mama went to the Holy Virgin, as you say, with whom did you live then?" "With Madame Frederic and her husband: she took care of me, but she is nothing related to me. I think she is poor, for she had not so fine a house as mama. I was not long there. Mr. Rochester asked me if I would like to go and live with him in England, and I said yes; for I knew Mr. Rochester before I knew Madame Frederic, and he was always kind to me and gave me pretty dresses and toys: but you see he has not kept his word, for he has brought me to England, and now he is gone back again himself, and I never see him." After breakfast, Adele and I withdrew to the library, which room, it appears, Mr. Rochester had directed should be used as the schoolroom. Most of the books were locked up behind glass doors; but there was one bookcase left open containing everything that could be needed in the way of elementary works, and several volumes of light literature, poetry, biography, travels, a few romances, &c. I suppose he had considered that these were all the governess would require for her private perusal; and, indeed, they contented me amply for the present; compared with the scanty pickings I had now and then been able to glean at Lowood, they seemed to offer an abundant harvest of entertainment and information. In this room, too, there was a cabinet piano, quite new and of superior tone; also an easel for painting and a pair of globes. I found my pupil sufficiently docile, though disinclined to apply: she had not been used to regular occupation of any kind. I felt it would be injudicious to confine her too much at first; so, when I had talked to her a great deal, and got her to learn a little, and when the morning had advanced to noon, I allowed her to return to her nurse. I then proposed to occupy myself till dinner-time in drawing some little sketches for her use. As I was going upstairs to fetch my portfolio and pencils, Mrs. Fairfax called to me: "Your morning school-hours are over now, I suppose," said she. She was in a room the folding-doors of which stood open: I went in when she addressed me. It was a large, stately apartment, with purple chairs and curtains, a Turkey carpet, walnut-panelled walls, one vast window rich in slanted glass, and a lofty ceiling, nobly moulded. Mrs. Fairfax was dusting some vases of fine purple spar, which stood on a sideboard. "What a beautiful room!" I exclaimed, as I looked round; for I had never before seen any half so imposing. "Yes; this is the dining-room. I have just opened the window, to let in a little air and sunshine; for everything gets so damp in apartments that are seldom inhabited; the drawing-room yonder feels like a vault." She pointed to a wide arch corresponding to the window, and hung like it with a Tyrian-dyed curtain, now looped up. Mounting to it by two broad steps, and looking through, I thought I caught a glimpse of a fairy place, so bright to my novice-eyes appeared the view beyond. Yet it was merely a very pretty drawing-room, and within it a boudoir, both spread with white carpets, on which seemed laid brilliant garlands of flowers; both ceiled with snowy mouldings of white grapes and vine-leaves, beneath which glowed in rich contrast crimson couches and ottomans; while the ornaments on the pale Parian mantelpiece were of sparkling Bohemian glass, ruby red; and between the windows large mirrors repeated the general blending of snow and fire. "In what order you keep these rooms, Mrs. Fairfax!" said I. "No dust, no canvas coverings: except that the air feels chilly, one would think they were inhabited daily." "Why, Miss Eyre, though Mr. Rochester's visits here are rare, they are always sudden and unexpected; and as I observed that it put him out to find everything swathed up, and to have a bustle of arrangement on his arrival, I thought it best to keep the rooms in readiness." "Is Mr. Rochester an exacting, fastidious sort of man?" "Not particularly so; but he has a gentleman's tastes and habits, and he expects to have things managed in conformity to them." "Do you like him? Is he generally liked?" "Oh, yes; the family have always been respected here. Almost all the land in this neighbourhood, as far as you can see, has belonged to the Rochesters time out of mind." "Well, but, leaving his land out of the question, do you like him? Is he liked for himself?" "I have no cause to do otherwise than like him; and I believe he is considered a just and liberal landlord by his tenants: but he has never lived much amongst them." "But has he no peculiarities? What, in short, is his character?" "Oh! his character is unimpeachable, I suppose. He is rather peculiar, perhaps: he has travelled a great deal, and seen a great deal of the world, I should think. I dare say he is clever, but I never had much conversation with him." "In what way is he peculiar?" "I don't know--it is not easy to describe--nothing striking, but you feel it when he speaks to you; you cannot be always sure whether he is in jest or earnest, whether he is pleased or the contrary; you don't thoroughly understand him, in short--at least, I don't: but it is of no consequence, he is a very good master." This was all the account I got from Mrs. Fairfax of her employer and mine. There are people who seem to have no notion of sketching a character, or observing and describing salient points, either in persons or things: the good lady evidently belonged to this class; my queries puzzled, but did not draw her out. Mr. Rochester was Mr. Rochester in her eyes; a gentleman, a landed proprietor--nothing more: she inquired and searched no further, and evidently wondered at my wish to gain a more definite notion of his identity. When we left the dining-room, she proposed to show me over the rest of the house; and I followed her upstairs and downstairs, admiring as I went; for all was well arranged and handsome. The large front chambers I thought especially grand: and some of the third-storey rooms, though dark and low, were interesting from their air of antiquity. The furniture once appropriated to the lower apartments had from time to time been removed here, as fashions changed: and the imperfect light entering by their narrow casement showed bedsteads of a hundred years old; chests in oak or walnut, looking, with their strange carvings of palm branches and cherubs' heads, like types of the Hebrew ark; rows of venerable chairs, high-backed and narrow; stools still more antiquated, on whose cushioned tops were yet apparent traces of half-effaced embroideries, wrought by fingers that for two generations had been coffin-dust. All these relics gave to the third storey of Thornfield Hall the aspect of a home of the past: a shrine of memory. I liked the hush, the gloom, the quaintness of these retreats in the day; but I by no means coveted a night's repose on one of those wide and heavy beds: shut in, some of them, with doors of oak; shaded, others, with wrought old English hangings crusted with thick work, portraying effigies of strange flowers, and stranger birds, and strangest human beings,--all which would have looked strange, indeed, by the pallid gleam of moonlight. "Do the servants sleep in these rooms?" I asked. "No; they occupy a range of smaller apartments to the back; no one ever sleeps here: one would almost say that, if there were a ghost at Thornfield Hall, this would be its haunt." "So I think: you have no ghost, then?" "None that I ever heard of," returned Mrs. Fairfax, smiling. "Nor any traditions of one? no legends or ghost stories?" "I believe not. And yet it is said the Rochesters have been rather a violent than a quiet race in their time: perhaps, though, that is the reason they rest tranquilly in their graves now." "Yes--'after life's fitful fever they sleep well,'" I muttered. "Where are you going now, Mrs. Fairfax?" for she was moving away. "On to the leads; will you come and see the view from thence?" I followed still, up a very narrow staircase to the attics, and thence by a ladder and through a trap-door to the roof of the hall. I was now on a level with the crow colony, and could see into their nests. Leaning over the battlements and looking far down, I surveyed the grounds laid out like a map: the bright and velvet lawn closely girdling the grey base of the mansion; the field, wide as a park, dotted with its ancient timber; the wood, dun and sere, divided by a path visibly overgrown, greener with moss than the trees were with foliage; the church at the gates, the road, the tranquil hills, all reposing in the autumn day's sun; the horizon bounded by a propitious sky, azure, marbled with pearly white. No feature in the scene was extraordinary, but all was pleasing. When I turned from it and repassed the trap-door, I could scarcely see my way down the ladder; the attic seemed black as a vault compared with that arch of blue air to which I had been looking up, and to that sunlit scene of grove, pasture, and green hill, of which the hall was the centre, and over which I had been gazing with delight. Mrs. Fairfax stayed behind a moment to fasten the trap-door; I, by drift of groping, found the outlet from the attic, and proceeded to descend the narrow garret staircase. I lingered in the long passage to which this led, separating the front and back rooms of the third storey: narrow, low, and dim, with only one little window at the far end, and looking, with its two rows of small black doors all shut, like a corridor in some Bluebeard's castle. While I paced softly on, the last sound I expected to hear in so still a region, a laugh, struck my ear. It was a curious laugh; distinct, formal, mirthless. I stopped: the sound ceased, only for an instant; it began again, louder: for at first, though distinct, it was very low. It passed off in a clamorous peal that seemed to wake an echo in every lonely chamber; though it originated but in one, and I could have pointed out the door whence the accents issued. "Mrs. Fairfax!" I called out: for I now heard her descending the great stairs. "Did you hear that loud laugh? Who is it?" "Some of the servants, very likely," she answered: "perhaps Grace Poole." "Did you hear it?" I again inquired. "Yes, plainly: I often hear her: she sews in one of these rooms. Sometimes Leah is with her; they are frequently noisy together." The laugh was repeated in its low, syllabic tone, and terminated in an odd murmur. "Grace!" exclaimed Mrs. Fairfax. I really did not expect any Grace to answer; for the laugh was as tragic, as preternatural a laugh as any I ever heard; and, but that it was high noon, and that no circumstance of ghostliness accompanied the curious cachinnation; but that neither scene nor season favoured fear, I should have been superstitiously afraid. However, the event showed me I was a fool for entertaining a sense even of surprise. The door nearest me opened, and a servant came out,--a woman of between thirty and forty; a set, square-made figure, red-haired, and with a hard, plain face: any apparition less romantic or less ghostly could scarcely be conceived. "Too much noise, Grace," said Mrs. Fairfax. "Remember directions!" Grace curtseyed silently and went in. "She is a person we have to sew and assist Leah in her housemaid's work," continued the widow; "not altogether unobjectionable in some points, but she does well enough. By-the-bye, how have you got on with your new pupil this morning?" The conversation, thus turned on Adele, continued till we reached the light and cheerful region below. Adele came running to meet us in the hall, exclaiming-- "Mesdames, vous etes servies!" adding, "J'ai bien faim, moi!" We found dinner ready, and waiting for us in Mrs. Fairfax's room. CHAPTER XII The promise of a smooth career, which my first calm introduction to Thornfield Hall seemed to pledge, was not belied on a longer acquaintance with the place and its inmates. Mrs. Fairfax turned out to be what she appeared, a placid-tempered, kind-natured woman, of competent education and average intelligence. My pupil was a lively child, who had been spoilt and indulged, and therefore was sometimes wayward; but as she was committed entirely to my care, and no injudicious interference from any quarter ever thwarted my plans for her improvement, she soon forgot her little freaks, and became obedient and teachable. She had no great talents, no marked traits of character, no peculiar development of feeling or taste which raised her one inch above the ordinary level of childhood; but neither had she any deficiency or vice which sunk her below it. She made reasonable progress, entertained for me a vivacious, though perhaps not very profound, affection; and by her simplicity, gay prattle, and efforts to please, inspired me, in return, with a degree of attachment sufficient to make us both content in each other's society. This, _par parenthese_, will be thought cool language by persons who entertain solemn doctrines about the angelic nature of children, and the duty of those charged with their education to conceive for them an idolatrous devotion: but I am not writing to flatter parental egotism, to echo cant, or prop up humbug; I am merely telling the truth. I felt a conscientious solicitude for Adele's welfare and progress, and a quiet liking for her little self: just as I cherished towards Mrs. Fairfax a thankfulness for her kindness, and a pleasure in her society proportionate to the tranquil regard she had for me, and the moderation of her mind and character. Anybody may blame me who likes, when I add further, that, now and then, when I took a walk by myself in the grounds; when I went down to the gates and looked through them along the road; or when, while Adele played with her nurse, and Mrs. Fairfax made jellies in the storeroom, I climbed the three staircases, raised the trap-door of the attic, and having reached the leads, looked out afar over sequestered field and hill, and along dim sky-line--that then I longed for a power of vision which might overpass that limit; which might reach the busy world, towns, regions full of life I had heard of but never seen--that then I desired more of practical experience than I possessed; more of intercourse with my kind, of acquaintance with variety of character, than was here within my reach. I valued what was good in Mrs. Fairfax, and what was good in Adele; but I believed in the existence of other and more vivid kinds of goodness, and what I believed in I wished to behold. Who blames me? Many, no doubt; and I shall be called discontented. I could not help it: the restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes. Then my sole relief was to walk along the corridor of the third storey, backwards and forwards, safe in the silence and solitude of the spot, and allow my mind's eye to dwell on whatever bright visions rose before it--and, certainly, they were many and glowing; to let my heart be heaved by the exultant movement, which, while it swelled it in trouble, expanded it with life; and, best of all, to open my inward ear to a tale that was never ended--a tale my imagination created, and narrated continuously; quickened with all of incident, life, fire, feeling, that I desired and had not in my actual existence. It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex. When thus alone, I not unfrequently heard Grace Poole's laugh: the same peal, the same low, slow ha! ha! which, when first heard, had thrilled me: I heard, too, her eccentric murmurs; stranger than her laugh. There were days when she was quite silent; but there were others when I could not account for the sounds she made. Sometimes I saw her: she would come out of her room with a basin, or a plate, or a tray in her hand, go down to the kitchen and shortly return, generally (oh, romantic reader, forgive me for telling the plain truth!) bearing a pot of porter. Her appearance always acted as a damper to the curiosity raised by her oral oddities: hard-featured and staid, she had no point to which interest could attach. I made some attempts to draw her into conversation, but she seemed a person of few words: a monosyllabic reply usually cut short every effort of that sort. The other members of the household, viz., John and his wife, Leah the housemaid, and Sophie the French nurse, were decent people; but in no respect remarkable; with Sophie I used to talk French, and sometimes I asked her questions about her native country; but she was not of a descriptive or narrative turn, and generally gave such vapid and confused answers as were calculated rather to check than encourage inquiry. October, November, December passed away. One afternoon in January, Mrs. Fairfax had begged a holiday for Adele, because she had a cold; and, as Adele seconded the request with an ardour that reminded me how precious occasional holidays had been to me in my own childhood, I accorded it, deeming that I did well in showing pliability on the point. It was a fine, calm day, though very cold; I was tired of sitting still in the library through a whole long morning: Mrs. Fairfax had just written a letter which was waiting to be posted, so I put on my bonnet and cloak and volunteered to carry it to Hay; the distance, two miles, would be a pleasant winter afternoon walk. Having seen Adele comfortably seated in her little chair by Mrs. Fairfax's parlour fireside, and given her her best wax doll (which I usually kept enveloped in silver paper in a drawer) to play with, and a story-book for change of amusement; and having replied to her "Revenez bientot, ma bonne amie, ma chere Mdlle. Jeannette," with a kiss I set out. The ground was hard, the air was still, my road was lonely; I walked fast till I got warm, and then I walked slowly to enjoy and analyse the species of pleasure brooding for me in the hour and situation. It was three o'clock; the church bell tolled as I passed under the belfry: the charm of the hour lay in its approaching dimness, in the low-gliding and pale-beaming sun. I was a mile from Thornfield, in a lane noted for wild roses in summer, for nuts and blackberries in autumn, and even now possessing a few coral treasures in hips and haws, but whose best winter delight lay in its utter solitude and leafless repose. If a breath of air stirred, it made no sound here; for there was not a holly, not an evergreen to rustle, and the stripped hawthorn and hazel bushes were as still as the white, worn stones which causewayed the middle of the path. Far and wide, on each side, there were only fields, where no cattle now browsed; and the little brown birds, which stirred occasionally in the hedge, looked like single russet leaves that had forgotten to drop. This lane inclined up-hill all the way to Hay; having reached the middle, I sat down on a stile which led thence into a field. Gathering my mantle about me, and sheltering my hands in my muff, I did not feel the cold, though it froze keenly; as was attested by a sheet of ice covering the causeway, where a little brooklet, now congealed, had overflowed after a rapid thaw some days since. From my seat I could look down on Thornfield: the grey and battlemented hall was the principal object in the vale below me; its woods and dark rookery rose against the west. I lingered till the sun went down amongst the trees, and sank crimson and clear behind them. I then turned eastward. On the hill-top above me sat the rising moon; pale yet as a cloud, but brightening momentarily, she looked over Hay, which, half lost in trees, sent up a blue smoke from its few chimneys: it was yet a mile distant, but in the absolute hush I could hear plainly its thin murmurs of life. My ear, too, felt the flow of currents; in what dales and depths I could not tell: but there were many hills beyond Hay, and doubtless many becks threading their passes. That evening calm betrayed alike the tinkle of the nearest streams, the sough of the most remote. A rude noise broke on these fine ripplings and whisperings, at once so far away and so clear: a positive tramp, tramp, a metallic clatter, which effaced the soft wave-wanderings; as, in a picture, the solid mass of a crag, or the rough boles of a great oak, drawn in dark and strong on the foreground, efface the aerial distance of azure hill, sunny horizon, and blended clouds where tint melts into tint. The din was on the causeway: a horse was coming; the windings of the lane yet hid it, but it approached. I was just leaving the stile; yet, as the path was narrow, I sat still to let it go by. In those days I was young, and all sorts of fancies bright and dark tenanted my mind: the memories of nursery stories were there amongst other rubbish; and when they recurred, maturing youth added to them a vigour and vividness beyond what childhood could give. As this horse approached, and as I watched for it to appear through the dusk, I remembered certain of Bessie's tales, wherein figured a North-of-England spirit called a "Gytrash," which, in the form of horse, mule, or large dog, haunted solitary ways, and sometimes came upon belated travellers, as this horse was now coming upon me. It was very near, but not yet in sight; when, in addition to the tramp, tramp, I heard a rush under the hedge, and close down by the hazel stems glided a great dog, whose black and white colour made him a distinct object against the trees. It was exactly one form of Bessie's Gytrash--a lion-like creature with long hair and a huge head: it passed me, however, quietly enough; not staying to look up, with strange pretercanine eyes, in my face, as I half expected it would. The horse followed,--a tall steed, and on its back a rider. The man, the human being, broke the spell at once. Nothing ever rode the Gytrash: it was always alone; and goblins, to my notions, though they might tenant the dumb carcasses of beasts, could scarce covet shelter in the commonplace human form. No Gytrash was this,--only a traveller taking the short cut to Millcote. He passed, and I went on; a few steps, and I turned: a sliding sound and an exclamation of "What the deuce is to do now?" and a clattering tumble, arrested my attention. Man and horse were down; they had slipped on the sheet of ice which glazed the causeway. The dog came bounding back, and seeing his master in a predicament, and hearing the horse groan, barked till the evening hills echoed the sound, which was deep in proportion to his magnitude. He snuffed round the prostrate group, and then he ran up to me; it was all he could do,--there was no other help at hand to summon. I obeyed him, and walked down to the traveller, by this time struggling himself free of his steed. His efforts were so vigorous, I thought he could not be much hurt; but I asked him the question-- "Are you injured, sir?" I think he was swearing, but am not certain; however, he was pronouncing some formula which prevented him from replying to me directly. "Can I do anything?" I asked again. "You must just stand on one side," he answered as he rose, first to his knees, and then to his feet. I did; whereupon began a heaving, stamping, clattering process, accompanied by a barking and baying which removed me effectually some yards' distance; but I would not be driven quite away till I saw the event. This was finally fortunate; the horse was re-established, and the dog was silenced with a "Down, Pilot!" The traveller now, stooping, felt his foot and leg, as if trying whether they were sound; apparently something ailed them, for he halted to the stile whence I had just risen, and sat down. I was in the mood for being useful, or at least officious, I think, for I now drew near him again. "If you are hurt, and want help, sir, I can fetch some one either from Thornfield Hall or from Hay." "Thank you: I shall do: I have no broken bones,--only a sprain;" and again he stood up and tried his foot, but the result extorted an involuntary "Ugh!" Something of daylight still lingered, and the moon was waxing bright: I could see him plainly. His figure was enveloped in a riding cloak, fur collared and steel clasped; its details were not apparent, but I traced the general points of middle height and considerable breadth of chest. He had a dark face, with stern features and a heavy brow; his eyes and gathered eyebrows looked ireful and thwarted just now; he was past youth, but had not reached middle-age; perhaps he might be thirty-five. I felt no fear of him, and but little shyness. Had he been a handsome, heroic- looking young gentleman, I should not have dared to stand thus questioning him against his will, and offering my services unasked. I had hardly ever seen a handsome youth; never in my life spoken to one. I had a theoretical reverence and homage for beauty, elegance, gallantry, fascination; but had I met those qualities incarnate in masculine shape, I should have known instinctively that they neither had nor could have sympathy with anything in me, and should have shunned them as one would fire, lightning, or anything else that is bright but antipathetic. If even this stranger had smiled and been good-humoured to me when I addressed him; if he had put off my offer of assistance gaily and with thanks, I should have gone on my way and not felt any vocation to renew inquiries: but the frown, the roughness of the traveller, set me at my ease: I retained my station when he waved to me to go, and announced-- "I cannot think of leaving you, sir, at so late an hour, in this solitary lane, till I see you are fit to mount your horse." He looked at me when I said this; he had hardly turned his eyes in my direction before. "I should think you ought to be at home yourself," said he, "if you have a home in this neighbourhood: where do you come from?" "From just below; and I am not at all afraid of being out late when it is moonlight: I will run over to Hay for you with pleasure, if you wish it: indeed, I am going there to post a letter." "You live just below--do you mean at that house with the battlements?" pointing to Thornfield Hall, on which the moon cast a hoary gleam, bringing it out distinct and pale from the woods that, by contrast with the western sky, now seemed one mass of shadow. "Yes, sir." "Whose house is it?" "Mr. Rochester's." "Do you know Mr. Rochester?" "No, I have never seen him." "He is not resident, then?" "No." "Can you tell me where he is?" "I cannot." "You are not a servant at the hall, of course. You are--" He stopped, ran his eye over my dress, which, as usual, was quite simple: a black merino cloak, a black beaver bonnet; neither of them half fine enough for a lady's-maid. He seemed puzzled to decide what I was; I helped him. "I am the governess." "Ah, the governess!" he repeated; "deuce take me, if I had not forgotten! The governess!" and again my raiment underwent scrutiny. In two minutes he rose from the stile: his face expressed pain when he tried to move. "I cannot commission you to fetch help," he said; "but you may help me a little yourself, if you will be so kind." "Yes, sir." "You have not an umbrella that I can use as a stick?" "No." "Try to get hold of my horse's bridle and lead him to me: you are not afraid?" I should have been afraid to touch a horse when alone, but when told to do it, I was disposed to obey. I put down my muff on the stile, and went up to the tall steed; I endeavoured to catch the bridle, but it was a spirited thing, and would not let me come near its head; I made effort on effort, though in vain: meantime, I was mortally afraid of its trampling fore-feet. The traveller waited and watched for some time, and at last he laughed. {I was mortally afraid of its trampling forefeet: p107.jpg} "I see," he said, "the mountain will never be brought to Mahomet, so all you can do is to aid Mahomet to go to the mountain; I must beg of you to come here." I came. "Excuse me," he continued: "necessity compels me to make you useful." He laid a heavy hand on my shoulder, and leaning on me with some stress, limped to his horse. Having once caught the bridle, he mastered it directly and sprang to his saddle; grimacing grimly as he made the effort, for it wrenched his sprain. "Now," said he, releasing his under lip from a hard bite, "just hand me my whip; it lies there under the hedge." I sought it and found it. "Thank you; now make haste with the letter to Hay, and return as fast as you can." A touch of a spurred heel made his horse first start and rear, and then bound away; the dog rushed in his traces; all three vanished, "Like heath that, in the wilderness, The wild wind whirls away." I took up my muff and walked on. The incident had occurred and was gone for me: it _was_ an incident of no moment, no romance, no interest in a sense; yet it marked with change one single hour of a monotonous life. My help had been needed and claimed; I had given it: I was pleased to have done something; trivial, transitory though the deed was, it was yet an active thing, and I was weary of an existence all passive. The new face, too, was like a new picture introduced to the gallery of memory; and it was dissimilar to all the others hanging there: firstly, because it was masculine; and, secondly, because it was dark, strong, and stern. I had it still before me when I entered Hay, and slipped the letter into the post-office; I saw it as I walked fast down-hill all the way home. When I came to the stile, I stopped a minute, looked round and listened, with an idea that a horse's hoofs might ring on the causeway again, and that a rider in a cloak, and a Gytrash-like Newfoundland dog, might be again apparent: I saw only the hedge and a pollard willow before me, rising up still and straight to meet the moonbeams; I heard only the faintest waft of wind roaming fitful among the trees round Thornfield, a mile distant; and when I glanced down in the direction of the murmur, my eye, traversing the hall-front, caught a light kindling in a window: it reminded me that I was late, and I hurried on. I did not like re-entering Thornfield. To pass its threshold was to return to stagnation; to cross the silent hall, to ascend the darksome staircase, to seek my own lonely little room, and then to meet tranquil Mrs. Fairfax, and spend the long winter evening with her, and her only, was to quell wholly the faint excitement wakened by my walk,--to slip again over my faculties the viewless fetters of an uniform and too still existence; of an existence whose very privileges of security and ease I was becoming incapable of appreciating. What good it would have done me at that time to have been tossed in the storms of an uncertain struggling life, and to have been taught by rough and bitter experience to long for the calm amidst which I now repined! Yes, just as much good as it would do a man tired of sitting still in a "too easy chair" to take a long walk: and just as natural was the wish to stir, under my circumstances, as it would be under his. I lingered at the gates; I lingered on the lawn; I paced backwards and forwards on the pavement; the shutters of the glass door were closed; I could not see into the interior; and both my eyes and spirit seemed drawn from the gloomy house--from the grey-hollow filled with rayless cells, as it appeared to me--to that sky expanded before me,--a blue sea absolved from taint of cloud; the moon ascending it in solemn march; her orb seeming to look up as she left the hill-tops, from behind which she had come, far and farther below her, and aspired to the zenith, midnight dark in its fathomless depth and measureless distance; and for those trembling stars that followed her course; they made my heart tremble, my veins glow when I viewed them. Little things recall us to earth; the clock struck in the hall; that sufficed; I turned from moon and stars, opened a side- door, and went in. The hall was not dark, nor yet was it lit, only by the high-hung bronze lamp; a warm glow suffused both it and the lower steps of the oak staircase. This ruddy shine issued from the great dining-room, whose two- leaved door stood open, and showed a genial fire in the grate, glancing on marble hearth and brass fire-irons, and revealing purple draperies and polished furniture, in the most pleasant radiance. It revealed, too, a group near the mantelpiece: I had scarcely caught it, and scarcely become aware of a cheerful mingling of voices, amongst which I seemed to distinguish the tones of Adele, when the door closed. I hastened to Mrs. Fairfax's room; there was a fire there too, but no candle, and no Mrs. Fairfax. Instead, all alone, sitting upright on the rug, and gazing with gravity at the blaze, I beheld a great black and white long-haired dog, just like the Gytrash of the lane. It was so like it that I went forward and said--"Pilot" and the thing got up and came to me and snuffed me. I caressed him, and he wagged his great tail; but he looked an eerie creature to be alone with, and I could not tell whence he had come. I rang the bell, for I wanted a candle; and I wanted, too, to get an account of this visitant. Leah entered. "What dog is this?" "He came with master." "With whom?" "With master--Mr. Rochester--he is just arrived." "Indeed! and is Mrs. Fairfax with him?" "Yes, and Miss Adele; they are in the dining-room, and John is gone for a surgeon; for master has had an accident; his horse fell and his ankle is sprained." "Did the horse fall in Hay Lane?" "Yes, coming down-hill; it slipped on some ice." "Ah! Bring me a candle will you Leah?" Leah brought it; she entered, followed by Mrs. Fairfax, who repeated the news; adding that Mr. Carter the surgeon was come, and was now with Mr. Rochester: then she hurried out to give orders about tea, and I went upstairs to take off my things. CHAPTER XIII Mr. Rochester, it seems, by the surgeon's orders, went to bed early that night; nor did he rise soon next morning. When he did come down, it was to attend to business: his agent and some of his tenants were arrived, and waiting to speak with him. Adele and I had now to vacate the library: it would be in daily requisition as a reception-room for callers. A fire was lit in an apartment upstairs, and there I carried our books, and arranged it for the future schoolroom. I discerned in the course of the morning that Thornfield Hall was a changed place: no longer silent as a church, it echoed every hour or two to a knock at the door, or a clang of the bell; steps, too, often traversed the hall, and new voices spoke in different keys below; a rill from the outer world was flowing through it; it had a master: for my part, I liked it better. Adele was not easy to teach that day; she could not apply: she kept running to the door and looking over the banisters to see if she could get a glimpse of Mr. Rochester; then she coined pretexts to go downstairs, in order, as I shrewdly suspected, to visit the library, where I knew she was not wanted; then, when I got a little angry, and made her sit still, she continued to talk incessantly of her "ami, Monsieur Edouard Fairfax _de_ Rochester," as she dubbed him (I had not before heard his prenomens), and to conjecture what presents he had brought her: for it appears he had intimated the night before, that when his luggage came from Millcote, there would be found amongst it a little box in whose contents she had an interest. "Et cela doit signifier," said she, "qu'il y aura la dedans un cadeau pour moi, et peut-etre pour vous aussi, mademoiselle. Monsieur a parle de vous: il m'a demande le nom de ma gouvernante, et si elle n'etait pas une petite personne, assez mince et un peu pale. J'ai dit qu'oui: car c'est vrai, n'est-ce pas, mademoiselle?" I and my pupil dined as usual in Mrs. Fairfax's parlour; the afternoon was wild and snowy, and we passed it in the schoolroom. At dark I allowed Adele to put away books and work, and to run downstairs; for, from the comparative silence below, and from the cessation of appeals to the door-bell, I conjectured that Mr. Rochester was now at liberty. Left alone, I walked to the window; but nothing was to be seen thence: twilight and snowflakes together thickened the air, and hid the very shrubs on the lawn. I let down the curtain and went back to the fireside. In the clear embers I was tracing a view, not unlike a picture I remembered to have seen of the castle of Heidelberg, on the Rhine, when Mrs. Fairfax came in, breaking up by her entrance the fiery mosaic I had been piercing together, and scattering too some heavy unwelcome thoughts that were beginning to throng on my solitude. "Mr. Rochester would be glad if you and your pupil would take tea with him in the drawing-room this evening," said she: "he has been so much engaged all day that he could not ask to see you before." "When is his tea-time?" I inquired. "Oh, at six o'clock: he keeps early hours in the country. You had better change your frock now; I will go with you and fasten it. Here is a candle." "Is it necessary to change my frock?" "Yes, you had better: I always dress for the evening when Mr. Rochester is here." This additional ceremony seemed somewhat stately; however, I repaired to my room, and, with Mrs. Fairfax's aid, replaced my black stuff dress by one of black silk; the best and the only additional one I had, except one of light grey, which, in my Lowood notions of the toilette, I thought too fine to be worn, except on first-rate occasions. "You want a brooch," said Mrs. Fairfax. I had a single little pearl ornament which Miss Temple gave me as a parting keepsake: I put it on, and then we went downstairs. Unused as I was to strangers, it was rather a trial to appear thus formally summoned in Mr. Rochester's presence. I let Mrs. Fairfax precede me into the dining-room, and kept in her shade as we crossed that apartment; and, passing the arch, whose curtain was now dropped, entered the elegant recess beyond. Two wax candles stood lighted on the table, and two on the mantelpiece; basking in the light and heat of a superb fire, lay Pilot--Adele knelt near him. Half reclined on a couch appeared Mr. Rochester, his foot supported by the cushion; he was looking at Adele and the dog: the fire shone full on his face. I knew my traveller with his broad and jetty eyebrows; his square forehead, made squarer by the horizontal sweep of his black hair. I recognised his decisive nose, more remarkable for character than beauty; his full nostrils, denoting, I thought, choler; his grim mouth, chin, and jaw--yes, all three were very grim, and no mistake. His shape, now divested of cloak, I perceived harmonised in squareness with his physiognomy: I suppose it was a good figure in the athletic sense of the term--broad chested and thin flanked, though neither tall nor graceful. Mr. Rochester must have been aware of the entrance of Mrs. Fairfax and myself; but it appeared he was not in the mood to notice us, for he never lifted his head as we approached. "Here is Miss Eyre, sir," said Mrs. Fairfax, in her quiet way. He bowed, still not taking his eyes from the group of the dog and child. "Let Miss Eyre be seated," said he: and there was something in the forced stiff bow, in the impatient yet formal tone, which seemed further to express, "What the deuce is it to me whether Miss Eyre be there or not? At this moment I am not disposed to accost her." I sat down quite disembarrassed. A reception of finished politeness would probably have confused me: I could not have returned or repaid it by answering grace and elegance on my part; but harsh caprice laid me under no obligation; on the contrary, a decent quiescence, under the freak of manner, gave me the advantage. Besides, the eccentricity of the proceeding was piquant: I felt interested to see how he would go on. He went on as a statue would, that is, he neither spoke nor moved. Mrs. Fairfax seemed to think it necessary that some one should be amiable, and she began to talk. Kindly, as usual--and, as usual, rather trite--she condoled with him on the pressure of business he had had all day; on the annoyance it must have been to him with that painful sprain: then she commended his patience and perseverance in going through with it. "Madam, I should like some tea," was the sole rejoinder she got. She hastened to ring the bell; and when the tray came, she proceeded to arrange the cups, spoons, &c., with assiduous celerity. I and Adele went to the table; but the master did not leave his couch. "Will you hand Mr. Rochester's cup?" said Mrs. Fairfax to me; "Adele might perhaps spill it." I did as requested. As he took the cup from my hand, Adele, thinking the moment propitious for making a request in my favour, cried out-- "N'est-ce pas, monsieur, qu'il y a un cadeau pour Mademoiselle Eyre dans votre petit coffre?" "Who talks of cadeaux?" said he gruffly. "Did you expect a present, Miss Eyre? Are you fond of presents?" and he searched my face with eyes that I saw were dark, irate, and piercing. "I hardly know, sir; I have little experience of them: they are generally thought pleasant things." "Generally thought? But what do _you_ think?" "I should be obliged to take time, sir, before I could give you an answer worthy of your acceptance: a present has many faces to it, has it not? and one should consider all, before pronouncing an opinion as to its nature." "Miss Eyre, you are not so unsophisticated as Adele: she demands a 'cadeau,' clamorously, the moment she sees me: you beat about the bush." "Because I have less confidence in my deserts than Adele has: she can prefer the claim of old acquaintance, and the right too of custom; for she says you have always been in the habit of giving her playthings; but if I had to make out a case I should be puzzled, since I am a stranger, and have done nothing to entitle me to an acknowledgment." "Oh, don't fall back on over-modesty! I have examined Adele, and find you have taken great pains with her: she is not bright, she has no talents; yet in a short time she has made much improvement." "Sir, you have now given me my 'cadeau;' I am obliged to you: it is the meed teachers most covet--praise of their pupils' progress." "Humph!" said Mr. Rochester, and he took his tea in silence. "Come to the fire," said the master, when the tray was taken away, and Mrs. Fairfax had settled into a corner with her knitting; while Adele was leading me by the hand round the room, showing me the beautiful books and ornaments on the consoles and chiffonnieres. We obeyed, as in duty bound; Adele wanted to take a seat on my knee, but she was ordered to amuse herself with Pilot. "You have been resident in my house three months?" "Yes, sir." "And you came from--?" "From Lowood school, in ---shire." "Ah! a charitable concern. How long were you there?" "Eight years." "Eight years! you must be tenacious of life. I thought half the time in such a place would have done up any constitution! No wonder you have rather the look of another world. I marvelled where you had got that sort of face. When you came on me in Hay Lane last night, I thought unaccountably of fairy tales, and had half a mind to demand whether you had bewitched my horse: I am not sure yet. Who are your parents?" "I have none." "Nor ever had, I suppose: do you remember them?" "No." "I thought not. And so you were waiting for your people when you sat on that stile?" "For whom, sir?" "For the men in green: it was a proper moonlight evening for them. Did I break through one of your rings, that you spread that damned ice on the causeway?" I shook my head. "The men in green all forsook England a hundred years ago," said I, speaking as seriously as he had done. "And not even in Hay Lane, or the fields about it, could you find a trace of them. I don't think either summer or harvest, or winter moon, will ever shine on their revels more." Mrs. Fairfax had dropped her knitting, and, with raised eyebrows, seemed wondering what sort of talk this was. "Well," resumed Mr. Rochester, "if you disown parents, you must have some sort of kinsfolk: uncles and aunts?" "No; none that I ever saw." "And your home?" "I have none." "Where do your brothers and sisters live?" "I have no brothers or sisters." "Who recommended you to come here?" "I advertised, and Mrs. Fairfax answered my advertisement." "Yes," said the good lady, who now knew what ground we were upon, "and I am daily thankful for the choice Providence led me to make. Miss Eyre has been an invaluable companion to me, and a kind and careful teacher to Adele." "Don't trouble yourself to give her a character," returned Mr. Rochester: "eulogiums will not bias me; I shall judge for myself. She began by felling my horse." "Sir?" said Mrs. Fairfax. "I have to thank her for this sprain." The widow looked bewildered. "Miss Eyre, have you ever lived in a town?" "No, sir." "Have you seen much society?" "None but the pupils and teachers of Lowood, and now the inmates of Thornfield." "Have you read much?" "Only such books as came in my way; and they have not been numerous or very learned." "You have lived the life of a nun: no doubt you are well drilled in religious forms;--Brocklehurst, who I understand directs Lowood, is a parson, is he not?" "Yes, sir." "And you girls probably worshipped him, as a convent full of religieuses would worship their director." "Oh, no." "You are very cool! No! What! a novice not worship her priest! That sounds blasphemous." "I disliked Mr. Brocklehurst; and I was not alone in the feeling. He is a harsh man; at once pompous and meddling; he cut off our hair; and for economy's sake bought us bad needles and thread, with which we could hardly sew." "That was very false economy," remarked Mrs. Fairfax, who now again caught the drift of the dialogue. "And was that the head and front of his offending?" demanded Mr. Rochester. "He starved us when he had the sole superintendence of the provision department, before the committee was appointed; and he bored us with long lectures once a week, and with evening readings from books of his own inditing, about sudden deaths and judgments, which made us afraid to go to bed." "What age were you when you went to Lowood?" "About ten." "And you stayed there eight years: you are now, then, eighteen?" I assented. "Arithmetic, you see, is useful; without its aid, I should hardly have been able to guess your age. It is a point difficult to fix where the features and countenance are so much at variance as in your case. And now what did you learn at Lowood? Can you play?" "A little." "Of course: that is the established answer. Go into the library--I mean, if you please.--(Excuse my tone of command; I am used to say, 'Do this,' and it is done: I cannot alter my customary habits for one new inmate.)--Go, then, into the library; take a candle with you; leave the door open; sit down to the piano, and play a tune." I departed, obeying his directions. "Enough!" he called out in a few minutes. "You play _a little_, I see; like any other English school-girl; perhaps rather better than some, but not well." I closed the piano and returned. Mr. Rochester continued--"Adele showed me some sketches this morning, which she said were yours. I don't know whether they were entirely of your doing; probably a master aided you?" "No, indeed!" I interjected. "Ah! that pricks pride. Well, fetch me your portfolio, if you can vouch for its contents being original; but don't pass your word unless you are certain: I can recognise patchwork." "Then I will say nothing, and you shall judge for yourself, sir." I brought the portfolio from the library. "Approach the table," said he; and I wheeled it to his couch. Adele and Mrs. Fairfax drew near to see the pictures. "No crowding," said Mr. Rochester: "take the drawings from my hand as I finish with them; but don't push your faces up to mine." He deliberately scrutinised each sketch and painting. Three he laid aside; the others, when he had examined them, he swept from him. "Take them off to the other table, Mrs. Fairfax," said he, "and look at them with Adele;--you" (glancing at me) "resume your seat, and answer my questions. I perceive those pictures were done by one hand: was that hand yours?" "Yes." "And when did you find time to do them? They have taken much time, and some thought." "I did them in the last two vacations I spent at Lowood, when I had no other occupation." "Where did you get your copies?" "Out of my head." "That head I see now on your shoulders?" "Yes, sir." "Has it other furniture of the same kind within?" "I should think it may have: I should hope--better." He spread the pictures before him, and again surveyed them alternately. While he is so occupied, I will tell you, reader, what they are: and first, I must premise that they are nothing wonderful. The subjects had, indeed, risen vividly on my mind. As I saw them with the spiritual eye, before I attempted to embody them, they were striking; but my hand would not second my fancy, and in each case it had wrought out but a pale portrait of the thing I had conceived. These pictures were in water-colours. The first represented clouds low and livid, rolling over a swollen sea: all the distance was in eclipse; so, too, was the foreground; or rather, the nearest billows, for there was no land. One gleam of light lifted into relief a half-submerged mast, on which sat a cormorant, dark and large, with wings flecked with foam; its beak held a gold bracelet set with gems, that I had touched with as brilliant tints as my palette could yield, and as glittering distinctness as my pencil could impart. Sinking below the bird and mast, a drowned corpse glanced through the green water; a fair arm was the only limb clearly visible, whence the bracelet had been washed or torn. The second picture contained for foreground only the dim peak of a hill, with grass and some leaves slanting as if by a breeze. Beyond and above spread an expanse of sky, dark blue as at twilight: rising into the sky was a woman's shape to the bust, portrayed in tints as dusk and soft as I could combine. The dim forehead was crowned with a star; the lineaments below were seen as through the suffusion of vapour; the eyes shone dark and wild; the hair streamed shadowy, like a beamless cloud torn by storm or by electric travail. On the neck lay a pale reflection like moonlight; the same faint lustre touched the train of thin clouds from which rose and bowed this vision of the Evening Star. The third showed the pinnacle of an iceberg piercing a polar winter sky: a muster of northern lights reared their dim lances, close serried, along the horizon. Throwing these into distance, rose, in the foreground, a head,--a colossal head, inclined towards the iceberg, and resting against it. Two thin hands, joined under the forehead, and supporting it, drew up before the lower features a sable veil, a brow quite bloodless, white as bone, and an eye hollow and fixed, blank of meaning but for the glassiness of despair, alone were visible. Above the temples, amidst wreathed turban folds of black drapery, vague in its character and consistency as cloud, gleamed a ring of white flame, gemmed with sparkles of a more lurid tinge. This pale crescent was "the likeness of a kingly crown;" what it diademed was "the shape which shape had none." "Were you happy when you painted these pictures?" asked Mr. Rochester presently. "I was absorbed, sir: yes, and I was happy. To paint them, in short, was to enjoy one of the keenest pleasures I have ever known." "That is not saying much. Your pleasures, by your own account, have been few; but I daresay you did exist in a kind of artist's dreamland while you blent and arranged these strange tints. Did you sit at them long each day?" "I had nothing else to do, because it was the vacation, and I sat at them from morning till noon, and from noon till night: the length of the midsummer days favoured my inclination to apply." "And you felt self-satisfied with the result of your ardent labours?" "Far from it. I was tormented by the contrast between my idea and my handiwork: in each case I had imagined something which I was quite powerless to realise." "Not quite: you have secured the shadow of your thought; but no more, probably. You had not enough of the artist's skill and science to give it full being: yet the drawings are, for a school-girl, peculiar. As to the thoughts, they are elfish. These eyes in the Evening Star you must have seen in a dream. How could you make them look so clear, and yet not at all brilliant? for the planet above quells their rays. And what meaning is that in their solemn depth? And who taught you to paint wind? There is a high gale in that sky, and on this hill-top. Where did you see Latmos? For that is Latmos. There! put the drawings away!" I had scarce tied the strings of the portfolio, when, looking at his watch, he said abruptly-- "It is nine o'clock: what are you about, Miss Eyre, to let Adele sit up so long? Take her to bed." Adele went to kiss him before quitting the room: he endured the caress, but scarcely seemed to relish it more than Pilot would have done, nor so much. "I wish you all good-night, now," said he, making a movement of the hand towards the door, in token that he was tired of our company, and wished to dismiss us. Mrs. Fairfax folded up her knitting: I took my portfolio: we curtseyed to him, received a frigid bow in return, and so withdrew. "You said Mr. Rochester was not strikingly peculiar, Mrs. Fairfax," I observed, when I rejoined her in her room, after putting Adele to bed. "Well, is he?" "I think so: he is very changeful and abrupt." "True: no doubt he may appear so to a stranger, but I am so accustomed to his manner, I never think of it; and then, if he has peculiarities of temper, allowance should be made." "Why?" "Partly because it is his nature--and we can none of us help our nature; and partly because he has painful thoughts, no doubt, to harass him, and make his spirits unequal." "What about?" "Family troubles, for one thing." "But he has no family." "Not now, but he has had--or, at least, relatives. He lost his elder brother a few years since." "His _elder_ brother?" "Yes. The present Mr. Rochester has not been very long in possession of the property; only about nine years." "Nine years is a tolerable time. Was he so very fond of his brother as to be still inconsolable for his loss?" "Why, no--perhaps not. I believe there were some misunderstandings between them. Mr. Rowland Rochester was not quite just to Mr. Edward; and perhaps he prejudiced his father against him. The old gentleman was fond of money, and anxious to keep the family estate together. He did not like to diminish the property by division, and yet he was anxious that Mr. Edward should have wealth, too, to keep up the consequence of the name; and, soon after he was of age, some steps were taken that were not quite fair, and made a great deal of mischief. Old Mr. Rochester and Mr. Rowland combined to bring Mr. Edward into what he considered a painful position, for the sake of making his fortune: what the precise nature of that position was I never clearly knew, but his spirit could not brook what he had to suffer in it. He is not very forgiving: he broke with his family, and now for many years he has led an unsettled kind of life. I don't think he has ever been resident at Thornfield for a fortnight together, since the death of his brother without a will left him master of the estate; and, indeed, no wonder he shuns the old place." "Why should he shun it?" "Perhaps he thinks it gloomy." The answer was evasive. I should have liked something clearer; but Mrs. Fairfax either could not, or would not, give me more explicit information of the origin and nature of Mr. Rochester's trials. She averred they were a mystery to herself, and that what she knew was chiefly from conjecture. It was evident, indeed, that she wished me to drop the subject, which I did accordingly. CHAPTER XIV For several subsequent days I saw little of Mr. Rochester. In the mornings he seemed much engaged with business, and, in the afternoon, gentlemen from Millcote or the neighbourhood called, and sometimes stayed to dine with him. When his sprain was well enough to admit of horse exercise, he rode out a good deal; probably to return these visits, as he generally did not come back till late at night. During this interval, even Adele was seldom sent for to his presence, and all my acquaintance with him was confined to an occasional rencontre in the hall, on the stairs, or in the gallery, when he would sometimes pass me haughtily and coldly, just acknowledging my presence by a distant nod or a cool glance, and sometimes bow and smile with gentlemanlike affability. His changes of mood did not offend me, because I saw that I had nothing to do with their alternation; the ebb and flow depended on causes quite disconnected with me. One day he had had company to dinner, and had sent for my portfolio; in order, doubtless, to exhibit its contents: the gentlemen went away early, to attend a public meeting at Millcote, as Mrs. Fairfax informed me; but the night being wet and inclement, Mr. Rochester did not accompany them. Soon after they were gone he rang the bell: a message came that I and Adele were to go downstairs. I brushed Adele's hair and made her neat, and having ascertained that I was myself in my usual Quaker trim, where there was nothing to retouch--all being too close and plain, braided locks included, to admit of disarrangement--we descended, Adele wondering whether the _petit coffre_ was at length come; for, owing to some mistake, its arrival had hitherto been delayed. She was gratified: there it stood, a little carton, on the table when we entered the dining-room. She appeared to know it by instinct. "Ma boite! ma boite!" exclaimed she, running towards it. "Yes, there is your 'boite' at last: take it into a corner, you genuine daughter of Paris, and amuse yourself with disembowelling it," said the deep and rather sarcastic voice of Mr. Rochester, proceeding from the depths of an immense easy-chair at the fireside. "And mind," he continued, "don't bother me with any details of the anatomical process, or any notice of the condition of the entrails: let your operation be conducted in silence: tiens-toi tranquille, enfant; comprends-tu?" Adele seemed scarcely to need the warning--she had already retired to a sofa with her treasure, and was busy untying the cord which secured the lid. Having removed this impediment, and lifted certain silvery envelopes of tissue paper, she merely exclaimed-- "Oh ciel! Que c'est beau!" and then remained absorbed in ecstatic contemplation. "Is Miss Eyre there?" now demanded the master, half rising from his seat to look round to the door, near which I still stood. "Ah! well, come forward; be seated here." He drew a chair near his own. "I am not fond of the prattle of children," he continued; "for, old bachelor as I am, I have no pleasant associations connected with their lisp. It would be intolerable to me to pass a whole evening _tete-a-tete_ with a brat. Don't draw that chair farther off, Miss Eyre; sit down exactly where I placed it--if you please, that is. Confound these civilities! I continually forget them. Nor do I particularly affect simple-minded old ladies. By-the-bye, I must have mine in mind; it won't do to neglect her; she is a Fairfax, or wed to one; and blood is said to be thicker than water." He rang, and despatched an invitation to Mrs. Fairfax, who soon arrived, knitting-basket in hand. "Good evening, madam; I sent to you for a charitable purpose. I have forbidden Adele to talk to me about her presents, and she is bursting with repletion: have the goodness to serve her as auditress and interlocutrice; it will be one of the most benevolent acts you ever performed." Adele, indeed, no sooner saw Mrs. Fairfax, than she summoned her to her sofa, and there quickly filled her lap with the porcelain, the ivory, the waxen contents of her "boite;" pouring out, meantime, explanations and raptures in such broken English as she was mistress of. "Now I have performed the part of a good host," pursued Mr. Rochester, "put my guests into the way of amusing each other, I ought to be at liberty to attend to my own pleasure. Miss Eyre, draw your chair still a little farther forward: you are yet too far back; I cannot see you without disturbing my position in this comfortable chair, which I have no mind to do." I did as I was bid, though I would much rather have remained somewhat in the shade; but Mr. Rochester had such a direct way of giving orders, it seemed a matter of course to obey him promptly. We were, as I have said, in the dining-room: the lustre, which had been lit for dinner, filled the room with a festal breadth of light; the large fire was all red and clear; the purple curtains hung rich and ample before the lofty window and loftier arch; everything was still, save the subdued chat of Adele (she dared not speak loud), and, filling up each pause, the beating of winter rain against the panes. Mr. Rochester, as he sat in his damask-covered chair, looked different to what I had seen him look before; not quite so stern--much less gloomy. There was a smile on his lips, and his eyes sparkled, whether with wine or not, I am not sure; but I think it very probable. He was, in short, in his after-dinner mood; more expanded and genial, and also more self- indulgent than the frigid and rigid temper of the morning; still he looked preciously grim, cushioning his massive head against the swelling back of his chair, and receiving the light of the fire on his granite- hewn features, and in his great, dark eyes; for he had great, dark eyes, and very fine eyes, too--not without a certain change in their depths sometimes, which, if it was not softness, reminded you, at least, of that feeling. He had been looking two minutes at the fire, and I had been looking the same length of time at him, when, turning suddenly, he caught my gaze fastened on his physiognomy. "You examine me, Miss Eyre," said he: "do you think me handsome?" I should, if I had deliberated, have replied to this question by something conventionally vague and polite; but the answer somehow slipped from my tongue before I was aware--"No, sir." "Ah! By my word! there is something singular about you," said he: "you have the air of a little _nonnette_; quaint, quiet, grave, and simple, as you sit with your hands before you, and your eyes generally bent on the carpet (except, by-the-bye, when they are directed piercingly to my face; as just now, for instance); and when one asks you a question, or makes a remark to which you are obliged to reply, you rap out a round rejoinder, which, if not blunt, is at least brusque. What do you mean by it?" "Sir, I was too plain; I beg your pardon. I ought to have replied that it was not easy to give an impromptu answer to a question about appearances; that tastes mostly differ; and that beauty is of little consequence, or something of that sort." "You ought to have replied no such thing. Beauty of little consequence, indeed! And so, under pretence of softening the previous outrage, of stroking and soothing me into placidity, you stick a sly penknife under my ear! Go on: what fault do you find with me, pray? I suppose I have all my limbs and all my features like any other man?" "Mr. Rochester, allow me to disown my first answer: I intended no pointed repartee: it was only a blunder." "Just so: I think so: and you shall be answerable for it. Criticise me: does my forehead not please you?" He lifted up the sable waves of hair which lay horizontally over his brow, and showed a solid enough mass of intellectual organs, but an abrupt deficiency where the suave sign of benevolence should have risen. "Now, ma'am, am I a fool?" "Far from it, sir. You would, perhaps, think me rude if I inquired in return whether you are a philanthropist?" "There again! Another stick of the penknife, when she pretended to pat my head: and that is because I said I did not like the society of children and old women (low be it spoken!). No, young lady, I am not a general philanthropist; but I bear a conscience;" and he pointed to the prominences which are said to indicate that faculty, and which, fortunately for him, were sufficiently conspicuous; giving, indeed, a marked breadth to the upper part of his head: "and, besides, I once had a kind of rude tenderness of heart. When I was as old as you, I was a feeling fellow enough, partial to the unfledged, unfostered, and unlucky; but Fortune has knocked me about since: she has even kneaded me with her knuckles, and now I flatter myself I am hard and tough as an India-rubber ball; pervious, though, through a chink or two still, and with one sentient point in the middle of the lump. Yes: does that leave hope for me?" "Hope of what, sir?" "Of my final re-transformation from India-rubber back to flesh?" "Decidedly he has had too much wine," I thought; and I did not know what answer to make to his queer question: how could I tell whether he was capable of being re-transformed? "You looked very much puzzled, Miss Eyre; and though you are not pretty any more than I am handsome, yet a puzzled air becomes you; besides, it is convenient, for it keeps those searching eyes of yours away from my physiognomy, and busies them with the worsted flowers of the rug; so puzzle on. Young lady, I am disposed to be gregarious and communicative to-night." With this announcement he rose from his chair, and stood, leaning his arm on the marble mantelpiece: in that attitude his shape was seen plainly as well as his face; his unusual breadth of chest, disproportionate almost to his length of limb. I am sure most people would have thought him an ugly man; yet there was so much unconscious pride in his port; so much ease in his demeanour; such a look of complete indifference to his own external appearance; so haughty a reliance on the power of other qualities, intrinsic or adventitious, to atone for the lack of mere personal attractiveness, that, in looking at him, one inevitably shared the indifference, and, even in a blind, imperfect sense, put faith in the confidence. "I am disposed to be gregarious and communicative to-night," he repeated, "and that is why I sent for you: the fire and the chandelier were not sufficient company for me; nor would Pilot have been, for none of these can talk. Adele is a degree better, but still far below the mark; Mrs. Fairfax ditto; you, I am persuaded, can suit me if you will: you puzzled me the first evening I invited you down here. I have almost forgotten you since: other ideas have driven yours from my head; but to-night I am resolved to be at ease; to dismiss what importunes, and recall what pleases. It would please me now to draw you out--to learn more of you--therefore speak." Instead of speaking, I smiled; and not a very complacent or submissive smile either. "Speak," he urged. "What about, sir?" "Whatever you like. I leave both the choice of subject and the manner of treating it entirely to yourself." Accordingly I sat and said nothing: "If he expects me to talk for the mere sake of talking and showing off, he will find he has addressed himself to the wrong person," I thought. "You are dumb, Miss Eyre." I was dumb still. He bent his head a little towards me, and with a single hasty glance seemed to dive into my eyes. "Stubborn?" he said, "and annoyed. Ah! it is consistent. I put my request in an absurd, almost insolent form. Miss Eyre, I beg your pardon. The fact is, once for all, I don't wish to treat you like an inferior: that is" (correcting himself), "I claim only such superiority as must result from twenty years' difference in age and a century's advance in experience. This is legitimate, _et j'y tiens_, as Adele would say; and it is by virtue of this superiority, and this alone, that I desire you to have the goodness to talk to me a little now, and divert my thoughts, which are galled with dwelling on one point--cankering as a rusty nail." He had deigned an explanation, almost an apology, and I did not feel insensible to his condescension, and would not seem so. "I am willing to amuse you, if I can, sir--quite willing; but I cannot introduce a topic, because how do I know what will interest you? Ask me questions, and I will do my best to answer them." "Then, in the first place, do you agree with me that I have a right to be a little masterful, abrupt, perhaps exacting, sometimes, on the grounds I stated, namely, that I am old enough to be your father, and that I have battled through a varied experience with many men of many nations, and roamed over half the globe, while you have lived quietly with one set of people in one house?" "Do as you please, sir." "That is no answer; or rather it is a very irritating, because a very evasive one. Reply clearly." "I don't think, sir, you have a right to command me, merely because you are older than I, or because you have seen more of the world than I have; your claim to superiority depends on the use you have made of your time and experience." "Humph! Promptly spoken. But I won't allow that, seeing that it would never suit my case, as I have made an indifferent, not to say a bad, use of both advantages. Leaving superiority out of the question, then, you must still agree to receive my orders now and then, without being piqued or hurt by the tone of command. Will you?" I smiled: I thought to myself Mr. Rochester _is_ peculiar--he seems to forget that he pays me 30 pounds per annum for receiving his orders. "The smile is very well," said he, catching instantly the passing expression; "but speak too." "I was thinking, sir, that very few masters would trouble themselves to inquire whether or not their paid subordinates were piqued and hurt by their orders." "Paid subordinates! What! you are my paid subordinate, are you? Oh yes, I had forgotten the salary! Well then, on that mercenary ground, will you agree to let me hector a little?" "No, sir, not on that ground; but, on the ground that you did forget it, and that you care whether or not a dependent is comfortable in his dependency, I agree heartily." "And will you consent to dispense with a great many conventional forms and phrases, without thinking that the omission arises from insolence?" "I am sure, sir, I should never mistake informality for insolence: one I rather like, the other nothing free-born would submit to, even for a salary." "Humbug! Most things free-born will submit to anything for a salary; therefore, keep to yourself, and don't venture on generalities of which you are intensely ignorant. However, I mentally shake hands with you for your answer, despite its inaccuracy; and as much for the manner in which it was said, as for the substance of the speech; the manner was frank and sincere; one does not often see such a manner: no, on the contrary, affectation, or coldness, or stupid, coarse-minded misapprehension of one's meaning are the usual rewards of candour. Not three in three thousand raw school-girl-governesses would have answered me as you have just done. But I don't mean to flatter you: if you are cast in a different mould to the majority, it is no merit of yours: Nature did it. And then, after all, I go too fast in my conclusions: for what I yet know, you may be no better than the rest; you may have intolerable defects to counterbalance your few good points." "And so may you," I thought. My eye met his as the idea crossed my mind: he seemed to read the glance, answering as if its import had been spoken as well as imagined-- "Yes, yes, you are right," said he; "I have plenty of faults of my own: I know it, and I don't wish to palliate them, I assure you. God wot I need not be too severe about others; I have a past existence, a series of deeds, a colour of life to contemplate within my own breast, which might well call my sneers and censures from my neighbours to myself. I started, or rather (for like other defaulters, I like to lay half the blame on ill fortune and adverse circumstances) was thrust on to a wrong tack at the age of one-and-twenty, and have never recovered the right course since: but I might have been very different; I might have been as good as you--wiser--almost as stainless. I envy you your peace of mind, your clean conscience, your unpolluted memory. Little girl, a memory without blot or contamination must be an exquisite treasure--an inexhaustible source of pure refreshment: is it not?" "How was your memory when you were eighteen, sir?" "All right then; limpid, salubrious: no gush of bilge water had turned it to fetid puddle. I was your equal at eighteen--quite your equal. Nature meant me to be, on the whole, a good man, Miss Eyre; one of the better kind, and you see I am not so. You would say you don't see it; at least I flatter myself I read as much in your eye (beware, by-the-bye, what you express with that organ; I am quick at interpreting its language). Then take my word for it,--I am not a villain: you are not to suppose that--not to attribute to me any such bad eminence; but, owing, I verily believe, rather to circumstances than to my natural bent, I am a trite commonplace sinner, hackneyed in all the poor petty dissipations with which the rich and worthless try to put on life. Do you wonder that I avow this to you? Know, that in the course of your future life you will often find yourself elected the involuntary confidant of your acquaintances' secrets: people will instinctively find out, as I have done, that it is not your forte to tell of yourself, but to listen while others talk of themselves; they will feel, too, that you listen with no malevolent scorn of their indiscretion, but with a kind of innate sympathy; not the less comforting and encouraging because it is very unobtrusive in its manifestations." "How do you know?--how can you guess all this, sir?" "I know it well; therefore I proceed almost as freely as if I were writing my thoughts in a diary. You would say, I should have been superior to circumstances; so I should--so I should; but you see I was not. When fate wronged me, I had not the wisdom to remain cool: I turned desperate; then I degenerated. Now, when any vicious simpleton excites my disgust by his paltry ribaldry, I cannot flatter myself that I am better than he: I am forced to confess that he and I are on a level. I wish I had stood firm--God knows I do! Dread remorse when you are tempted to err, Miss Eyre; remorse is the poison of life." "Repentance is said to be its cure, sir." "It is not its cure. Reformation may be its cure; and I could reform--I have strength yet for that--if--but where is the use of thinking of it, hampered, burdened, cursed as I am? Besides, since happiness is irrevocably denied me, I have a right to get pleasure out of life: and I _will_ get it, cost what it may." "Then you will degenerate still more, sir." "Possibly: yet why should I, if I can get sweet, fresh pleasure? And I may get it as sweet and fresh as the wild honey the bee gathers on the moor." "It will sting--it will taste bitter, sir." "How do you know?--you never tried it. How very serious--how very solemn you look: and you are as ignorant of the matter as this cameo head" (taking one from the mantelpiece). "You have no right to preach to me, you neophyte, that have not passed the porch of life, and are absolutely unacquainted with its mysteries." "I only remind you of your own words, sir: you said error brought remorse, and you pronounced remorse the poison of existence." "And who talks of error now? I scarcely think the notion that flittered across my brain was an error. I believe it was an inspiration rather than a temptation: it was very genial, very soothing--I know that. Here it comes again! It is no devil, I assure you; or if it be, it has put on the robes of an angel of light. I think I must admit so fair a guest when it asks entrance to my heart." "Distrust it, sir; it is not a true angel." "Once more, how do you know? By what instinct do you pretend to distinguish between a fallen seraph of the abyss and a messenger from the eternal throne--between a guide and a seducer?" "I judged by your countenance, sir, which was troubled when you said the suggestion had returned upon you. I feel sure it will work you more misery if you listen to it." "Not at all--it bears the most gracious message in the world: for the rest, you are not my conscience-keeper, so don't make yourself uneasy. Here, come in, bonny wanderer!" He said this as if he spoke to a vision, viewless to any eye but his own; then, folding his arms, which he had half extended, on his chest, he seemed to enclose in their embrace the invisible being. "Now," he continued, again addressing me, "I have received the pilgrim--a disguised deity, as I verily believe. Already it has done me good: my heart was a sort of charnel; it will now be a shrine." "To speak truth, sir, I don't understand you at all: I cannot keep up the conversation, because it has got out of my depth. Only one thing, I know: you said you were not as good as you should like to be, and that you regretted your own imperfection;--one thing I can comprehend: you intimated that to have a sullied memory was a perpetual bane. It seems to me, that if you tried hard, you would in time find it possible to become what you yourself would approve; and that if from this day you began with resolution to correct your thoughts and actions, you would in a few years have laid up a new and stainless store of recollections, to which you might revert with pleasure." "Justly thought; rightly said, Miss Eyre; and, at this moment, I am paving hell with energy." "Sir?" "I am laying down good intentions, which I believe durable as flint. Certainly, my associates and pursuits shall be other than they have been." "And better?" "And better--so much better as pure ore is than foul dross. You seem to doubt me; I don't doubt myself: I know what my aim is, what my motives are; and at this moment I pass a law, unalterable as that of the Medes and Persians, that both are right." "They cannot be, sir, if they require a new statute to legalise them." "They are, Miss Eyre, though they absolutely require a new statute: unheard-of combinations of circumstances demand unheard-of rules." "That sounds a dangerous maxim, sir; because one can see at once that it is liable to abuse." "Sententious sage! so it is: but I swear by my household gods not to abuse it." "You are human and fallible." "I am: so are you--what then?" "The human and fallible should not arrogate a power with which the divine and perfect alone can be safely intrusted." "What power?" "That of saying of any strange, unsanctioned line of action,--'Let it be right.'" "'Let it be right'--the very words: you have pronounced them." "_May_ it be right then," I said, as I rose, deeming it useless to continue a discourse which was all darkness to me; and, besides, sensible that the character of my interlocutor was beyond my penetration; at least, beyond its present reach; and feeling the uncertainty, the vague sense of insecurity, which accompanies a conviction of ignorance. "Where are you going?" "To put Adele to bed: it is past her bedtime." "You are afraid of me, because I talk like a Sphynx." "Your language is enigmatical, sir: but though I am bewildered, I am certainly not afraid." "You _are_ afraid--your self-love dreads a blunder." "In that sense I do feel apprehensive--I have no wish to talk nonsense." "If you did, it would be in such a grave, quiet manner, I should mistake it for sense. Do you never laugh, Miss Eyre? Don't trouble yourself to answer--I see you laugh rarely; but you can laugh very merrily: believe me, you are not naturally austere, any more than I am naturally vicious. The Lowood constraint still clings to you somewhat; controlling your features, muffling your voice, and restricting your limbs; and you fear in the presence of a man and a brother--or father, or master, or what you will--to smile too gaily, speak too freely, or move too quickly: but, in time, I think you will learn to be natural with me, as I find it impossible to be conventional with you; and then your looks and movements will have more vivacity and variety than they dare offer now. I see at intervals the glance of a curious sort of bird through the close-set bars of a cage: a vivid, restless, resolute captive is there; were it but free, it would soar cloud-high. You are still bent on going?" "It has struck nine, sir." "Never mind,--wait a minute: Adele is not ready to go to bed yet. My position, Miss Eyre, with my back to the fire, and my face to the room, favours observation. While talking to you, I have also occasionally watched Adele (I have my own reasons for thinking her a curious study,--reasons that I may, nay, that I shall, impart to you some day). She pulled out of her box, about ten minutes ago, a little pink silk frock; rapture lit her face as she unfolded it; coquetry runs in her blood, blends with her brains, and seasons the marrow of her bones. 'Il faut que je l'essaie!' cried she, 'et a l'instant meme!' and she rushed out of the room. She is now with Sophie, undergoing a robing process: in a few minutes she will re-enter; and I know what I shall see,--a miniature of Celine Varens, as she used to appear on the boards at the rising of--But never mind that. However, my tenderest feelings are about to receive a shock: such is my presentiment; stay now, to see whether it will be realised." Ere long, Adele's little foot was heard tripping across the hall. She entered, transformed as her guardian had predicted. A dress of rose-coloured satin, very short, and as full in the skirt as it could be gathered, replaced the brown frock she had previously worn; a wreath of rosebuds circled her forehead; her feet were dressed in silk stockings and small white satin sandals. "Est-ce que ma robe va bien?" cried she, bounding forwards; "et mes souliers? et mes bas? Tenez, je crois que je vais danser!" And spreading out her dress, she chasseed across the room till, having reached Mr. Rochester, she wheeled lightly round before him on tip-toe, then dropped on one knee at his feet, exclaiming-- "Monsieur, je vous remercie mille fois de votre bonte;" then rising, she added, "C'est comme cela que maman faisait, n'est-ce pas, monsieur?" "Pre-cise-ly!" was the answer; "and, 'comme cela,' she charmed my English gold out of my British breeches' pocket. I have been green, too, Miss Eyre,--ay, grass green: not a more vernal tint freshens you now than once freshened me. My Spring is gone, however, but it has left me that French floweret on my hands, which, in some moods, I would fain be rid of. Not valuing now the root whence it sprang; having found that it was of a sort which nothing but gold dust could manure, I have but half a liking to the blossom, especially when it looks so artificial as just now. I keep it and rear it rather on the Roman Catholic principle of expiating numerous sins, great or small, by one good work. I'll explain all this some day. Good-night." CHAPTER XV Mr. Rochester did, on a future occasion, explain it. It was one afternoon, when he chanced to meet me and Adele in the grounds: and while she played with Pilot and her shuttlecock, he asked me to walk up and down a long beech avenue within sight of her. He then said that she was the daughter of a French opera-dancer, Celine Varens, towards whom he had once cherished what he called a "_grande passion_." This passion Celine had professed to return with even superior ardour. He thought himself her idol, ugly as he was: he believed, as he said, that she preferred his "_taille d'athlete_" to the elegance of the Apollo Belvidere. "And, Miss Eyre, so much was I flattered by this preference of the Gallic sylph for her British gnome, that I installed her in an hotel; gave her a complete establishment of servants, a carriage, cashmeres, diamonds, dentelles, &c. In short, I began the process of ruining myself in the received style, like any other spoony. I had not, it seems, the originality to chalk out a new road to shame and destruction, but trode the old track with stupid exactness not to deviate an inch from the beaten centre. I had--as I deserved to have--the fate of all other spoonies. Happening to call one evening when Celine did not expect me, I found her out; but it was a warm night, and I was tired with strolling through Paris, so I sat down in her boudoir; happy to breathe the air consecrated so lately by her presence. No,--I exaggerate; I never thought there was any consecrating virtue about her: it was rather a sort of pastille perfume she had left; a scent of musk and amber, than an odour of sanctity. I was just beginning to stifle with the fumes of conservatory flowers and sprinkled essences, when I bethought myself to open the window and step out on to the balcony. It was moonlight and gaslight besides, and very still and serene. The balcony was furnished with a chair or two; I sat down, and took out a cigar,--I will take one now, if you will excuse me." Here ensued a pause, filled up by the producing and lighting of a cigar; having placed it to his lips and breathed a trail of Havannah incense on the freezing and sunless air, he went on-- "I liked bonbons too in those days, Miss Eyre, and I was _croquant_--(overlook the barbarism)--_croquant_ chocolate comfits, and smoking alternately, watching meantime the equipages that rolled along the fashionable streets towards the neighbouring opera-house, when in an elegant close carriage drawn by a beautiful pair of English horses, and distinctly seen in the brilliant city-night, I recognised the 'voiture' I had given Celine. She was returning: of course my heart thumped with impatience against the iron rails I leant upon. The carriage stopped, as I had expected, at the hotel door; my flame (that is the very word for an opera inamorata) alighted: though muffed in a cloak--an unnecessary encumbrance, by-the-bye, on so warm a June evening--I knew her instantly by her little foot, seen peeping from the skirt of her dress, as she skipped from the carriage-step. Bending over the balcony, I was about to murmur 'Mon ange'--in a tone, of course, which should be audible to the ear of love alone--when a figure jumped from the carriage after her; cloaked also; but that was a spurred heel which had rung on the pavement, and that was a hatted head which now passed under the arched _porte cochere_ of the hotel. "You never felt jealousy, did you, Miss Eyre? Of course not: I need not ask you; because you never felt love. You have both sentiments yet to experience: your soul sleeps; the shock is yet to be given which shall waken it. You think all existence lapses in as quiet a flow as that in which your youth has hitherto slid away. Floating on with closed eyes and muffled ears, you neither see the rocks bristling not far off in the bed of the flood, nor hear the breakers boil at their base. But I tell you--and you may mark my words--you will come some day to a craggy pass in the channel, where the whole of life's stream will be broken up into whirl and tumult, foam and noise: either you will be dashed to atoms on crag points, or lifted up and borne on by some master-wave into a calmer current--as I am now. "I like this day; I like that sky of steel; I like the sternness and stillness of the world under this frost. I like Thornfield, its antiquity, its retirement, its old crow-trees and thorn-trees, its grey facade, and lines of dark windows reflecting that metal welkin: and yet how long have I abhorred the very thought of it, shunned it like a great plague-house? How I do still abhor--" He ground his teeth and was silent: he arrested his step and struck his boot against the hard ground. Some hated thought seemed to have him in its grip, and to hold him so tightly that he could not advance. We were ascending the avenue when he thus paused; the hall was before us. Lifting his eye to its battlements, he cast over them a glare such as I never saw before or since. Pain, shame, ire, impatience, disgust, detestation, seemed momentarily to hold a quivering conflict in the large pupil dilating under his ebon eyebrow. Wild was the wrestle which should be paramount; but another feeling rose and triumphed: something hard and cynical: self-willed and resolute: it settled his passion and petrified his countenance: he went on-- "During the moment I was silent, Miss Eyre, I was arranging a point with my destiny. She stood there, by that beech-trunk--a hag like one of those who appeared to Macbeth on the heath of Forres. 'You like Thornfield?' she said, lifting her finger; and then she wrote in the air a memento, which ran in lurid hieroglyphics all along the house-front, between the upper and lower row of windows, 'Like it if you can! Like it if you dare!' "'I will like it,' said I; 'I dare like it;' and" (he subjoined moodily) "I will keep my word; I will break obstacles to happiness, to goodness--yes, goodness. I wish to be a better man than I have been, than I am; as Job's leviathan broke the spear, the dart, and the habergeon, hindrances which others count as iron and brass, I will esteem but straw and rotten wood." Adele here ran before him with her shuttlecock. "Away!" he cried harshly; "keep at a distance, child; or go in to Sophie!" Continuing then to pursue his walk in silence, I ventured to recall him to the point whence he had abruptly diverged-- "Did you leave the balcony, sir," I asked, "when Mdlle. Varens entered?" I almost expected a rebuff for this hardly well-timed question, but, on the contrary, waking out of his scowling abstraction, he turned his eyes towards me, and the shade seemed to clear off his brow. "Oh, I had forgotten Celine! Well, to resume. When I saw my charmer thus come in accompanied by a cavalier, I seemed to hear a hiss, and the green snake of jealousy, rising on undulating coils from the moonlit balcony, glided within my waistcoat, and ate its way in two minutes to my heart's core. Strange!" he exclaimed, suddenly starting again from the point. "Strange that I should choose you for the confidant of all this, young lady; passing strange that you should listen to me quietly, as if it were the most usual thing in the world for a man like me to tell stories of his opera-mistresses to a quaint, inexperienced girl like you! But the last singularity explains the first, as I intimated once before: you, with your gravity, considerateness, and caution were made to be the recipient of secrets. Besides, I know what sort of a mind I have placed in communication with my own: I know it is one not liable to take infection: it is a peculiar mind: it is a unique one. Happily I do not mean to harm it: but, if I did, it would not take harm from me. The more you and I converse, the better; for while I cannot blight you, you may refresh me." After this digression he proceeded-- "I remained in the balcony. 'They will come to her boudoir, no doubt,' thought I: 'let me prepare an ambush.' So putting my hand in through the open window, I drew the curtain over it, leaving only an opening through which I could take observations; then I closed the casement, all but a chink just wide enough to furnish an outlet to lovers' whispered vows: then I stole back to my chair; and as I resumed it the pair came in. My eye was quickly at the aperture. Celine's chamber-maid entered, lit a lamp, left it on the table, and withdrew. The couple were thus revealed to me clearly: both removed their cloaks, and there was 'the Varens,' shining in satin and jewels,--my gifts of course,--and there was her companion in an officer's uniform; and I knew him for a young roue of a vicomte--a brainless and vicious youth whom I had sometimes met in society, and had never thought of hating because I despised him so absolutely. On recognising him, the fang of the snake Jealousy was instantly broken; because at the same moment my love for Celine sank under an extinguisher. A woman who could betray me for such a rival was not worth contending for; she deserved only scorn; less, however, than I, who had been her dupe. "They began to talk; their conversation eased me completely: frivolous, mercenary, heartless, and senseless, it was rather calculated to weary than enrage a listener. A card of mine lay on the table; this being perceived, brought my name under discussion. Neither of them possessed energy or wit to belabour me soundly, but they insulted me as coarsely as they could in their little way: especially Celine, who even waxed rather brilliant on my personal defects--deformities she termed them. Now it had been her custom to launch out into fervent admiration of what she called my '_beaute male_:' wherein she differed diametrically from you, who told me point-blank, at the second interview, that you did not think me handsome. The contrast struck me at the time and--" Adele here came running up again. "Monsieur, John has just been to say that your agent has called and wishes to see you." "Ah! in that case I must abridge. Opening the window, I walked in upon them; liberated Celine from my protection; gave her notice to vacate her hotel; offered her a purse for immediate exigencies; disregarded screams, hysterics, prayers, protestations, convulsions; made an appointment with the vicomte for a meeting at the Bois de Boulogne. Next morning I had the pleasure of encountering him; left a bullet in one of his poor etiolated arms, feeble as the wing of a chicken in the pip, and then thought I had done with the whole crew. But unluckily the Varens, six months before, had given me this filette Adele, who, she affirmed, was my daughter; and perhaps she may be, though I see no proofs of such grim paternity written in her countenance: Pilot is more like me than she. Some years after I had broken with the mother, she abandoned her child, and ran away to Italy with a musician or singer. I acknowledged no natural claim on Adele's part to be supported by me, nor do I now acknowledge any, for I am not her father; but hearing that she was quite destitute, I e'en took the poor thing out of the slime and mud of Paris, and transplanted it here, to grow up clean in the wholesome soil of an English country garden. Mrs. Fairfax found you to train it; but now you know that it is the illegitimate offspring of a French opera-girl, you will perhaps think differently of your post and protegee: you will be coming to me some day with notice that you have found another place--that you beg me to look out for a new governess, &c.--Eh?" "No: Adele is not answerable for either her mother's faults or yours: I have a regard for her; and now that I know she is, in a sense, parentless--forsaken by her mother and disowned by you, sir--I shall cling closer to her than before. How could I possibly prefer the spoilt pet of a wealthy family, who would hate her governess as a nuisance, to a lonely little orphan, who leans towards her as a friend?" "Oh, that is the light in which you view it! Well, I must go in now; and you too: it darkens." But I stayed out a few minutes longer with Adele and Pilot--ran a race with her, and played a game of battledore and shuttlecock. When we went in, and I had removed her bonnet and coat, I took her on my knee; kept her there an hour, allowing her to prattle as she liked: not rebuking even some little freedoms and trivialities into which she was apt to stray when much noticed, and which betrayed in her a superficiality of character, inherited probably from her mother, hardly congenial to an English mind. Still she had her merits; and I was disposed to appreciate all that was good in her to the utmost. I sought in her countenance and features a likeness to Mr. Rochester, but found none: no trait, no turn of expression announced relationship. It was a pity: if she could but have been proved to resemble him, he would have thought more of her. It was not till after I had withdrawn to my own chamber for the night, that I steadily reviewed the tale Mr. Rochester had told me. As he had said, there was probably nothing at all extraordinary in the substance of the narrative itself: a wealthy Englishman's passion for a French dancer, and her treachery to him, were every-day matters enough, no doubt, in society; but there was something decidedly strange in the paroxysm of emotion which had suddenly seized him when he was in the act of expressing the present contentment of his mood, and his newly revived pleasure in the old hall and its environs. I meditated wonderingly on this incident; but gradually quitting it, as I found it for the present inexplicable, I turned to the consideration of my master's manner to myself. The confidence he had thought fit to repose in me seemed a tribute to my discretion: I regarded and accepted it as such. His deportment had now for some weeks been more uniform towards me than at the first. I never seemed in his way; he did not take fits of chilling hauteur: when he met me unexpectedly, the encounter seemed welcome; he had always a word and sometimes a smile for me: when summoned by formal invitation to his presence, I was honoured by a cordiality of reception that made me feel I really possessed the power to amuse him, and that these evening conferences were sought as much for his pleasure as for my benefit. I, indeed, talked comparatively little, but I heard him talk with relish. It was his nature to be communicative; he liked to open to a mind unacquainted with the world glimpses of its scenes and ways (I do not mean its corrupt scenes and wicked ways, but such as derived their interest from the great scale on which they were acted, the strange novelty by which they were characterised); and I had a keen delight in receiving the new ideas he offered, in imagining the new pictures he portrayed, and following him in thought through the new regions he disclosed, never startled or troubled by one noxious allusion. The ease of his manner freed me from painful restraint: the friendly frankness, as correct as cordial, with which he treated me, drew me to him. I felt at times as if he were my relation rather than my master: yet he was imperious sometimes still; but I did not mind that; I saw it was his way. So happy, so gratified did I become with this new interest added to life, that I ceased to pine after kindred: my thin crescent-destiny seemed to enlarge; the blanks of existence were filled up; my bodily health improved; I gathered flesh and strength. And was Mr. Rochester now ugly in my eyes? No, reader: gratitude, and many associations, all pleasurable and genial, made his face the object I best liked to see; his presence in a room was more cheering than the brightest fire. Yet I had not forgotten his faults; indeed, I could not, for he brought them frequently before me. He was proud, sardonic, harsh to inferiority of every description: in my secret soul I knew that his great kindness to me was balanced by unjust severity to many others. He was moody, too; unaccountably so; I more than once, when sent for to read to him, found him sitting in his library alone, with his head bent on his folded arms; and, when he looked up, a morose, almost a malignant, scowl blackened his features. But I believed that his moodiness, his harshness, and his former faults of morality (I say _former_, for now he seemed corrected of them) had their source in some cruel cross of fate. I believed he was naturally a man of better tendencies, higher principles, and purer tastes than such as circumstances had developed, education instilled, or destiny encouraged. I thought there were excellent materials in him; though for the present they hung together somewhat spoiled and tangled. I cannot deny that I grieved for his grief, whatever that was, and would have given much to assuage it. Though I had now extinguished my candle and was laid down in bed, I could not sleep for thinking of his look when he paused in the avenue, and told how his destiny had risen up before him, and dared him to be happy at Thornfield. "Why not?" I asked myself. "What alienates him from the house? Will he leave it again soon? Mrs. Fairfax said he seldom stayed here longer than a fortnight at a time; and he has now been resident eight weeks. If he does go, the change will be doleful. Suppose he should be absent spring, summer, and autumn: how joyless sunshine and fine days will seem!" I hardly know whether I had slept or not after this musing; at any rate, I started wide awake on hearing a vague murmur, peculiar and lugubrious, which sounded, I thought, just above me. I wished I had kept my candle burning: the night was drearily dark; my spirits were depressed. I rose and sat up in bed, listening. The sound was hushed. I tried again to sleep; but my heart beat anxiously: my inward tranquillity was broken. The clock, far down in the hall, struck two. Just then it seemed my chamber-door was touched; as if fingers had swept the panels in groping a way along the dark gallery outside. I said, "Who is there?" Nothing answered. I was chilled with fear. All at once I remembered that it might be Pilot, who, when the kitchen- door chanced to be left open, not unfrequently found his way up to the threshold of Mr. Rochester's chamber: I had seen him lying there myself in the mornings. The idea calmed me somewhat: I lay down. Silence composes the nerves; and as an unbroken hush now reigned again through the whole house, I began to feel the return of slumber. But it was not fated that I should sleep that night. A dream had scarcely approached my ear, when it fled affrighted, scared by a marrow-freezing incident enough. This was a demoniac laugh--low, suppressed, and deep--uttered, as it seemed, at the very keyhole of my chamber door. The head of my bed was near the door, and I thought at first the goblin-laugher stood at my bedside--or rather, crouched by my pillow: but I rose, looked round, and could see nothing; while, as I still gazed, the unnatural sound was reiterated: and I knew it came from behind the panels. My first impulse was to rise and fasten the bolt; my next, again to cry out, "Who is there?" Something gurgled and moaned. Ere long, steps retreated up the gallery towards the third-storey staircase: a door had lately been made to shut in that staircase; I heard it open and close, and all was still. "Was that Grace Poole? and is she possessed with a devil?" thought I. Impossible now to remain longer by myself: I must go to Mrs. Fairfax. I hurried on my frock and a shawl; I withdrew the bolt and opened the door with a trembling hand. There was a candle burning just outside, and on the matting in the gallery. I was surprised at this circumstance: but still more was I amazed to perceive the air quite dim, as if filled with smoke; and, while looking to the right hand and left, to find whence these blue wreaths issued, I became further aware of a strong smell of burning. Something creaked: it was a door ajar; and that door was Mr. Rochester's, and the smoke rushed in a cloud from thence. I thought no more of Mrs. Fairfax; I thought no more of Grace Poole, or the laugh: in an instant, I was within the chamber. Tongues of flame darted round the bed: the curtains were on fire. In the midst of blaze and vapour, Mr. Rochester lay stretched motionless, in deep sleep. "Wake! wake!" I cried. I shook him, but he only murmured and turned: the smoke had stupefied him. Not a moment could be lost: the very sheets were kindling, I rushed to his basin and ewer; fortunately, one was wide and the other deep, and both were filled with water. I heaved them up, deluged the bed and its occupant, flew back to my own room, brought my own water-jug, baptized the couch afresh, and, by God's aid, succeeded in extinguishing the flames which were devouring it. The hiss of the quenched element, the breakage of a pitcher which I flung from my hand when I had emptied it, and, above all, the splash of the shower-bath I had liberally bestowed, roused Mr. Rochester at last. Though it was now dark, I knew he was awake; because I heard him fulminating strange anathemas at finding himself lying in a pool of water. "Is there a flood?" he cried. "No, sir," I answered; "but there has been a fire: get up, do; you are quenched now; I will fetch you a candle." "In the name of all the elves in Christendom, is that Jane Eyre?" he demanded. "What have you done with me, witch, sorceress? Who is in the room besides you? Have you plotted to drown me?" "I will fetch you a candle, sir; and, in Heaven's name, get up. Somebody has plotted something: you cannot too soon find out who and what it is." "There! I am up now; but at your peril you fetch a candle yet: wait two minutes till I get into some dry garments, if any dry there be--yes, here is my dressing-gown. Now run!" I did run; I brought the candle which still remained in the gallery. He took it from my hand, held it up, and surveyed the bed, all blackened and scorched, the sheets drenched, the carpet round swimming in water. "What is it? and who did it?" he asked. I briefly related to him what had transpired: the strange laugh I had heard in the gallery: the step ascending to the third storey; the smoke,--the smell of fire which had conducted me to his room; in what state I had found matters there, and how I had deluged him with all the water I could lay hands on. {"What is it and who did it?" he asked: p140.jpg} He listened very gravely; his face, as I went on, expressed more concern than astonishment; he did not immediately speak when I had concluded. "Shall I call Mrs. Fairfax?" I asked. "Mrs. Fairfax? No; what the deuce would you call her for? What can she do? Let her sleep unmolested." "Then I will fetch Leah, and wake John and his wife." "Not at all: just be still. You have a shawl on. If you are not warm enough, you may take my cloak yonder; wrap it about you, and sit down in the arm-chair: there,--I will put it on. Now place your feet on the stool, to keep them out of the wet. I am going to leave you a few minutes. I shall take the candle. Remain where you are till I return; be as still as a mouse. I must pay a visit to the second storey. Don't move, remember, or call any one." He went: I watched the light withdraw. He passed up the gallery very softly, unclosed the staircase door with as little noise as possible, shut it after him, and the last ray vanished. I was left in total darkness. I listened for some noise, but heard nothing. A very long time elapsed. I grew weary: it was cold, in spite of the cloak; and then I did not see the use of staying, as I was not to rouse the house. I was on the point of risking Mr. Rochester's displeasure by disobeying his orders, when the light once more gleamed dimly on the gallery wall, and I heard his unshod feet tread the matting. "I hope it is he," thought I, "and not something worse." He re-entered, pale and very gloomy. "I have found it all out," said he, setting his candle down on the washstand; "it is as I thought." "How, sir?" He made no reply, but stood with his arms folded, looking on the ground. At the end of a few minutes he inquired in rather a peculiar tone-- "I forget whether you said you saw anything when you opened your chamber door." "No, sir, only the candlestick on the ground." "But you heard an odd laugh? You have heard that laugh before, I should think, or something like it?" "Yes, sir: there is a woman who sews here, called Grace Poole,--she laughs in that way. She is a singular person." "Just so. Grace Poole--you have guessed it. She is, as you say, singular--very. Well, I shall reflect on the subject. Meantime, I am glad that you are the only person, besides myself, acquainted with the precise details of to-night's incident. You are no talking fool: say nothing about it. I will account for this state of affairs" (pointing to the bed): "and now return to your own room. I shall do very well on the sofa in the library for the rest of the night. It is near four:--in two hours the servants will be up." "Good-night, then, sir," said I, departing. He seemed surprised--very inconsistently so, as he had just told me to go. "What!" he exclaimed, "are you quitting me already, and in that way?" "You said I might go, sir." "But not without taking leave; not without a word or two of acknowledgment and good-will: not, in short, in that brief, dry fashion. Why, you have saved my life!--snatched me from a horrible and excruciating death! and you walk past me as if we were mutual strangers! At least shake hands." He held out his hand; I gave him mine: he took it first in one, them in both his own. "You have saved my life: I have a pleasure in owing you so immense a debt. I cannot say more. Nothing else that has being would have been tolerable to me in the character of creditor for such an obligation: but you: it is different;--I feel your benefits no burden, Jane." He paused; gazed at me: words almost visible trembled on his lips,--but his voice was checked. "Good-night again, sir. There is no debt, benefit, burden, obligation, in the case." "I knew," he continued, "you would do me good in some way, at some time;--I saw it in your eyes when I first beheld you: their expression and smile did not"--(again he stopped)--"did not" (he proceeded hastily) "strike delight to my very inmost heart so for nothing. People talk of natural sympathies; I have heard of good genii: there are grains of truth in the wildest fable. My cherished preserver, goodnight!" Strange energy was in his voice, strange fire in his look. "I am glad I happened to be awake," I said: and then I was going. "What! you _will_ go?" "I am cold, sir." "Cold? Yes,--and standing in a pool! Go, then, Jane; go!" But he still retained my hand, and I could not free it. I bethought myself of an expedient. "I think I hear Mrs. Fairfax move, sir," said I. "Well, leave me:" he relaxed his fingers, and I was gone. I regained my couch, but never thought of sleep. Till morning dawned I was tossed on a buoyant but unquiet sea, where billows of trouble rolled under surges of joy. I thought sometimes I saw beyond its wild waters a shore, sweet as the hills of Beulah; and now and then a freshening gale, wakened by hope, bore my spirit triumphantly towards the bourne: but I could not reach it, even in fancy--a counteracting breeze blew off land, and continually drove me back. Sense would resist delirium: judgment would warn passion. Too feverish to rest, I rose as soon as day dawned. CHAPTER XVI I both wished and feared to see Mr. Rochester on the day which followed this sleepless night: I wanted to hear his voice again, yet feared to meet his eye. During the early part of the morning, I momentarily expected his coming; he was not in the frequent habit of entering the schoolroom, but he did step in for a few minutes sometimes, and I had the impression that he was sure to visit it that day. But the morning passed just as usual: nothing happened to interrupt the quiet course of Adele's studies; only soon after breakfast, I heard some bustle in the neighbourhood of Mr. Rochester's chamber, Mrs. Fairfax's voice, and Leah's, and the cook's--that is, John's wife--and even John's own gruff tones. There were exclamations of "What a mercy master was not burnt in his bed!" "It is always dangerous to keep a candle lit at night." "How providential that he had presence of mind to think of the water-jug!" "I wonder he waked nobody!" "It is to be hoped he will not take cold with sleeping on the library sofa," &c. To much confabulation succeeded a sound of scrubbing and setting to rights; and when I passed the room, in going downstairs to dinner, I saw through the open door that all was again restored to complete order; only the bed was stripped of its hangings. Leah stood up in the window-seat, rubbing the panes of glass dimmed with smoke. I was about to address her, for I wished to know what account had been given of the affair: but, on advancing, I saw a second person in the chamber--a woman sitting on a chair by the bedside, and sewing rings to new curtains. That woman was no other than Grace Poole. There she sat, staid and taciturn-looking, as usual, in her brown stuff gown, her check apron, white handkerchief, and cap. She was intent on her work, in which her whole thoughts seemed absorbed: on her hard forehead, and in her commonplace features, was nothing either of the paleness or desperation one would have expected to see marking the countenance of a woman who had attempted murder, and whose intended victim had followed her last night to her lair, and (as I believed), charged her with the crime she wished to perpetrate. I was amazed--confounded. She looked up, while I still gazed at her: no start, no increase or failure of colour betrayed emotion, consciousness of guilt, or fear of detection. She said "Good morning, Miss," in her usual phlegmatic and brief manner; and taking up another ring and more tape, went on with her sewing. "I will put her to some test," thought I: "such absolute impenetrability is past comprehension." "Good morning, Grace," I said. "Has anything happened here? I thought I heard the servants all talking together a while ago." "Only master had been reading in his bed last night; he fell asleep with his candle lit, and the curtains got on fire; but, fortunately, he awoke before the bed-clothes or the wood-work caught, and contrived to quench the flames with the water in the ewer." "A strange affair!" I said, in a low voice: then, looking at her fixedly--"Did Mr. Rochester wake nobody? Did no one hear him move?" She again raised her eyes to me, and this time there was something of consciousness in their expression. She seemed to examine me warily; then she answered-- "The servants sleep so far off, you know, Miss, they would not be likely to hear. Mrs. Fairfax's room and yours are the nearest to master's; but Mrs. Fairfax said she heard nothing: when people get elderly, they often sleep heavy." She paused, and then added, with a sort of assumed indifference, but still in a marked and significant tone--"But you are young, Miss; and I should say a light sleeper: perhaps you may have heard a noise?" "I did," said I, dropping my voice, so that Leah, who was still polishing the panes, could not hear me, "and at first I thought it was Pilot: but Pilot cannot laugh; and I am certain I heard a laugh, and a strange one." She took a new needleful of thread, waxed it carefully, threaded her needle with a steady hand, and then observed, with perfect composure-- "It is hardly likely master would laugh, I should think, Miss, when he was in such danger: You must have been dreaming." "I was not dreaming," I said, with some warmth, for her brazen coolness provoked me. Again she looked at me; and with the same scrutinising and conscious eye. "Have you told master that you heard a laugh?" she inquired. "I have not had the opportunity of speaking to him this morning." "You did not think of opening your door and looking out into the gallery?" she further asked. She appeared to be cross-questioning me, attempting to draw from me information unawares. The idea struck me that if she discovered I knew or suspected her guilt, she would be playing of some of her malignant pranks on me; I thought it advisable to be on my guard. "On the contrary," said I, "I bolted my door." "Then you are not in the habit of bolting your door every night before you get into bed?" "Fiend! she wants to know my habits, that she may lay her plans accordingly!" Indignation again prevailed over prudence: I replied sharply, "Hitherto I have often omitted to fasten the bolt: I did not think it necessary. I was not aware any danger or annoyance was to be dreaded at Thornfield Hall: but in future" (and I laid marked stress on the words) "I shall take good care to make all secure before I venture to lie down." "It will be wise so to do," was her answer: "this neighbourhood is as quiet as any I know, and I never heard of the hall being attempted by robbers since it was a house; though there are hundreds of pounds' worth of plate in the plate-closet, as is well known. And you see, for such a large house, there are very few servants, because master has never lived here much; and when he does come, being a bachelor, he needs little waiting on: but I always think it best to err on the safe side; a door is soon fastened, and it is as well to have a drawn bolt between one and any mischief that may be about. A deal of people, Miss, are for trusting all to Providence; but I say Providence will not dispense with the means, though He often blesses them when they are used discreetly." And here she closed her harangue: a long one for her, and uttered with the demureness of a Quakeress. I still stood absolutely dumfoundered at what appeared to me her miraculous self-possession and most inscrutable hypocrisy, when the cook entered. "Mrs. Poole," said she, addressing Grace, "the servants' dinner will soon be ready: will you come down?" "No; just put my pint of porter and bit of pudding on a tray, and I'll carry it upstairs." "You'll have some meat?" "Just a morsel, and a taste of cheese, that's all." "And the sago?" "Never mind it at present: I shall be coming down before teatime: I'll make it myself." The cook here turned to me, saying that Mrs. Fairfax was waiting for me: so I departed. I hardly heard Mrs. Fairfax's account of the curtain conflagration during dinner, so much was I occupied in puzzling my brains over the enigmatical character of Grace Poole, and still more in pondering the problem of her position at Thornfield and questioning why she had not been given into custody that morning, or, at the very least, dismissed from her master's service. He had almost as much as declared his conviction of her criminality last night: what mysterious cause withheld him from accusing her? Why had he enjoined me, too, to secrecy? It was strange: a bold, vindictive, and haughty gentleman seemed somehow in the power of one of the meanest of his dependants; so much in her power, that even when she lifted her hand against his life, he dared not openly charge her with the attempt, much less punish her for it. Had Grace been young and handsome, I should have been tempted to think that tenderer feelings than prudence or fear influenced Mr. Rochester in her behalf; but, hard-favoured and matronly as she was, the idea could not be admitted. "Yet," I reflected, "she has been young once; her youth would be contemporary with her master's: Mrs. Fairfax told me once, she had lived here many years. I don't think she can ever have been pretty; but, for aught I know, she may possess originality and strength of character to compensate for the want of personal advantages. Mr. Rochester is an amateur of the decided and eccentric: Grace is eccentric at least. What if a former caprice (a freak very possible to a nature so sudden and headstrong as his) has delivered him into her power, and she now exercises over his actions a secret influence, the result of his own indiscretion, which he cannot shake off, and dare not disregard?" But, having reached this point of conjecture, Mrs. Poole's square, flat figure, and uncomely, dry, even coarse face, recurred so distinctly to my mind's eye, that I thought, "No; impossible! my supposition cannot be correct. Yet," suggested the secret voice which talks to us in our own hearts, "you are not beautiful either, and perhaps Mr. Rochester approves you: at any rate, you have often felt as if he did; and last night--remember his words; remember his look; remember his voice!" I well remembered all; language, glance, and tone seemed at the moment vividly renewed. I was now in the schoolroom; Adele was drawing; I bent over her and directed her pencil. She looked up with a sort of start. "Qu' avez-vous, mademoiselle?" said she. "Vos doigts tremblent comme la feuille, et vos joues sont rouges: mais, rouges comme des cerises!" "I am hot, Adele, with stooping!" She went on sketching; I went on thinking. I hastened to drive from my mind the hateful notion I had been conceiving respecting Grace Poole; it disgusted me. I compared myself with her, and found we were different. Bessie Leaven had said I was quite a lady; and she spoke truth--I was a lady. And now I looked much better than I did when Bessie saw me; I had more colour and more flesh, more life, more vivacity, because I had brighter hopes and keener enjoyments. "Evening approaches," said I, as I looked towards the window. "I have never heard Mr. Rochester's voice or step in the house to-day; but surely I shall see him before night: I feared the meeting in the morning; now I desire it, because expectation has been so long baffled that it is grown impatient." When dusk actually closed, and when Adele left me to go and play in the nursery with Sophie, I did most keenly desire it. I listened for the bell to ring below; I listened for Leah coming up with a message; I fancied sometimes I heard Mr. Rochester's own tread, and I turned to the door, expecting it to open and admit him. The door remained shut; darkness only came in through the window. Still it was not late; he often sent for me at seven and eight o'clock, and it was yet but six. Surely I should not be wholly disappointed to-night, when I had so many things to say to him! I wanted again to introduce the subject of Grace Poole, and to hear what he would answer; I wanted to ask him plainly if he really believed it was she who had made last night's hideous attempt; and if so, why he kept her wickedness a secret. It little mattered whether my curiosity irritated him; I knew the pleasure of vexing and soothing him by turns; it was one I chiefly delighted in, and a sure instinct always prevented me from going too far; beyond the verge of provocation I never ventured; on the extreme brink I liked well to try my skill. Retaining every minute form of respect, every propriety of my station, I could still meet him in argument without fear or uneasy restraint; this suited both him and me. A tread creaked on the stairs at last. Leah made her appearance; but it was only to intimate that tea was ready in Mrs. Fairfax's room. Thither I repaired, glad at least to go downstairs; for that brought me, I imagined, nearer to Mr. Rochester's presence. "You must want your tea," said the good lady, as I joined her; "you ate so little at dinner. I am afraid," she continued, "you are not well to- day: you look flushed and feverish." "Oh, quite well! I never felt better." "Then you must prove it by evincing a good appetite; will you fill the teapot while I knit off this needle?" Having completed her task, she rose to draw down the blind, which she had hitherto kept up, by way, I suppose, of making the most of daylight, though dusk was now fast deepening into total obscurity. "It is fair to-night," said she, as she looked through the panes, "though not starlight; Mr. Rochester has, on the whole, had a favourable day for his journey." "Journey!--Is Mr. Rochester gone anywhere? I did not know he was out." "Oh, he set off the moment he had breakfasted! He is gone to the Leas, Mr. Eshton's place, ten miles on the other side Millcote. I believe there is quite a party assembled there; Lord Ingram, Sir George Lynn, Colonel Dent, and others." "Do you expect him back to-night?" "No--nor to-morrow either; I should think he is very likely to stay a week or more: when these fine, fashionable people get together, they are so surrounded by elegance and gaiety, so well provided with all that can please and entertain, they are in no hurry to separate. Gentlemen especially are often in request on such occasions; and Mr. Rochester is so talented and so lively in society, that I believe he is a general favourite: the ladies are very fond of him; though you would not think his appearance calculated to recommend him particularly in their eyes: but I suppose his acquirements and abilities, perhaps his wealth and good blood, make amends for any little fault of look." "Are there ladies at the Leas?" "There are Mrs. Eshton and her three daughters--very elegant young ladies indeed; and there are the Honourable Blanche and Mary Ingram, most beautiful women, I suppose: indeed I have seen Blanche, six or seven years since, when she was a girl of eighteen. She came here to a Christmas ball and party Mr. Rochester gave. You should have seen the dining-room that day--how richly it was decorated, how brilliantly lit up! I should think there were fifty ladies and gentlemen present--all of the first county families; and Miss Ingram was considered the belle of the evening." "You saw her, you say, Mrs. Fairfax: what was she like?" "Yes, I saw her. The dining-room doors were thrown open; and, as it was Christmas-time, the servants were allowed to assemble in the hall, to hear some of the ladies sing and play. Mr. Rochester would have me to come in, and I sat down in a quiet corner and watched them. I never saw a more splendid scene: the ladies were magnificently dressed; most of them--at least most of the younger ones--looked handsome; but Miss Ingram was certainly the queen." "And what was she like?" "Tall, fine bust, sloping shoulders; long, graceful neck: olive complexion, dark and clear; noble features; eyes rather like Mr. Rochester's: large and black, and as brilliant as her jewels. And then she had such a fine head of hair; raven-black and so becomingly arranged: a crown of thick plaits behind, and in front the longest, the glossiest curls I ever saw. She was dressed in pure white; an amber-coloured scarf was passed over her shoulder and across her breast, tied at the side, and descending in long, fringed ends below her knee. She wore an amber-coloured flower, too, in her hair: it contrasted well with the jetty mass of her curls." "She was greatly admired, of course?" "Yes, indeed: and not only for her beauty, but for her accomplishments. She was one of the ladies who sang: a gentleman accompanied her on the piano. She and Mr. Rochester sang a duet." "Mr. Rochester? I was not aware he could sing." "Oh! he has a fine bass voice, and an excellent taste for music." "And Miss Ingram: what sort of a voice had she?" "A very rich and powerful one: she sang delightfully; it was a treat to listen to her;--and she played afterwards. I am no judge of music, but Mr. Rochester is; and I heard him say her execution was remarkably good." "And this beautiful and accomplished lady, she is not yet married?" "It appears not: I fancy neither she nor her sister have very large fortunes. Old Lord Ingram's estates were chiefly entailed, and the eldest son came in for everything almost." "But I wonder no wealthy nobleman or gentleman has taken a fancy to her: Mr. Rochester, for instance. He is rich, is he not?" "Oh! yes. But you see there is a considerable difference in age: Mr. Rochester is nearly forty; she is but twenty-five." "What of that? More unequal matches are made every day." "True: yet I should scarcely fancy Mr. Rochester would entertain an idea of the sort. But you eat nothing: you have scarcely tasted since you began tea." "No: I am too thirsty to eat. Will you let me have another cup?" I was about again to revert to the probability of a union between Mr. Rochester and the beautiful Blanche; but Adele came in, and the conversation was turned into another channel. When once more alone, I reviewed the information I had got; looked into my heart, examined its thoughts and feelings, and endeavoured to bring back with a strict hand such as had been straying through imagination's boundless and trackless waste, into the safe fold of common sense. Arraigned at my own bar, Memory having given her evidence of the hopes, wishes, sentiments I had been cherishing since last night--of the general state of mind in which I had indulged for nearly a fortnight past; Reason having come forward and told, in her own quiet way a plain, unvarnished tale, showing how I had rejected the real, and rabidly devoured the ideal;--I pronounced judgment to this effect:-- That a greater fool than Jane Eyre had never breathed the breath of life; that a more fantastic idiot had never surfeited herself on sweet lies, and swallowed poison as if it were nectar. "_You_," I said, "a favourite with Mr. Rochester? _You_ gifted with the power of pleasing him? _You_ of importance to him in any way? Go! your folly sickens me. And you have derived pleasure from occasional tokens of preference--equivocal tokens shown by a gentleman of family and a man of the world to a dependent and a novice. How dared you? Poor stupid dupe!--Could not even self-interest make you wiser? You repeated to yourself this morning the brief scene of last night?--Cover your face and be ashamed! He said something in praise of your eyes, did he? Blind puppy! Open their bleared lids and look on your own accursed senselessness! It does good to no woman to be flattered by her superior, who cannot possibly intend to marry her; and it is madness in all women to let a secret love kindle within them, which, if unreturned and unknown, must devour the life that feeds it; and, if discovered and responded to, must lead, _ignis-fatuus_-like, into miry wilds whence there is no extrication. "Listen, then, Jane Eyre, to your sentence: to-morrow, place the glass before you, and draw in chalk your own picture, faithfully, without softening one defect; omit no harsh line, smooth away no displeasing irregularity; write under it, 'Portrait of a Governess, disconnected, poor, and plain.' "Afterwards, take a piece of smooth ivory--you have one prepared in your drawing-box: take your palette, mix your freshest, finest, clearest tints; choose your most delicate camel-hair pencils; delineate carefully the loveliest face you can imagine; paint it in your softest shades and sweetest lines, according to the description given by Mrs. Fairfax of Blanche Ingram; remember the raven ringlets, the oriental eye;--What! you revert to Mr. Rochester as a model! Order! No snivel!--no sentiment!--no regret! I will endure only sense and resolution. Recall the august yet harmonious lineaments, the Grecian neck and bust; let the round and dazzling arm be visible, and the delicate hand; omit neither diamond ring nor gold bracelet; portray faithfully the attire, aerial lace and glistening satin, graceful scarf and golden rose; call it 'Blanche, an accomplished lady of rank.' "Whenever, in future, you should chance to fancy Mr. Rochester thinks well of you, take out these two pictures and compare them: say, 'Mr. Rochester might probably win that noble lady's love, if he chose to strive for it; is it likely he would waste a serious thought on this indigent and insignificant plebeian?'" "I'll do it," I resolved: and having framed this determination, I grew calm, and fell asleep. I kept my word. An hour or two sufficed to sketch my own portrait in crayons; and in less than a fortnight I had completed an ivory miniature of an imaginary Blanche Ingram. It looked a lovely face enough, and when compared with the real head in chalk, the contrast was as great as self- control could desire. I derived benefit from the task: it had kept my head and hands employed, and had given force and fixedness to the new impressions I wished to stamp indelibly on my heart. Ere long, I had reason to congratulate myself on the course of wholesome discipline to which I had thus forced my feelings to submit. Thanks to it, I was able to meet subsequent occurrences with a decent calm, which, had they found me unprepared, I should probably have been unequal to maintain, even externally. CHAPTER XVII A week passed, and no news arrived of Mr. Rochester: ten days, and still he did not come. Mrs. Fairfax said she should not be surprised if he were to go straight from the Leas to London, and thence to the Continent, and not show his face again at Thornfield for a year to come; he had not unfrequently quitted it in a manner quite as abrupt and unexpected. When I heard this, I was beginning to feel a strange chill and failing at the heart. I was actually permitting myself to experience a sickening sense of disappointment; but rallying my wits, and recollecting my principles, I at once called my sensations to order; and it was wonderful how I got over the temporary blunder--how I cleared up the mistake of supposing Mr. Rochester's movements a matter in which I had any cause to take a vital interest. Not that I humbled myself by a slavish notion of inferiority: on the contrary, I just said-- "You have nothing to do with the master of Thornfield, further than to receive the salary he gives you for teaching his protegee, and to be grateful for such respectful and kind treatment as, if you do your duty, you have a right to expect at his hands. Be sure that is the only tie he seriously acknowledges between you and him; so don't make him the object of your fine feelings, your raptures, agonies, and so forth. He is not of your order: keep to your caste, and be too self-respecting to lavish the love of the whole heart, soul, and strength, where such a gift is not wanted and would be despised." I went on with my day's business tranquilly; but ever and anon vague suggestions kept wandering across my brain of reasons why I should quit Thornfield; and I kept involuntarily framing advertisements and pondering conjectures about new situations: these thoughts I did not think to check; they might germinate and bear fruit if they could. Mr. Rochester had been absent upwards of a fortnight, when the post brought Mrs. Fairfax a letter. "It is from the master," said she, as she looked at the direction. "Now I suppose we shall know whether we are to expect his return or not." And while she broke the seal and perused the document, I went on taking my coffee (we were at breakfast): it was hot, and I attributed to that circumstance a fiery glow which suddenly rose to my face. Why my hand shook, and why I involuntarily spilt half the contents of my cup into my saucer, I did not choose to consider. "Well, I sometimes think we are too quiet; but we run a chance of being busy enough now: for a little while at least," said Mrs. Fairfax, still holding the note before her spectacles. Ere I permitted myself to request an explanation, I tied the string of Adele's pinafore, which happened to be loose: having helped her also to another bun and refilled her mug with milk, I said, nonchalantly-- "Mr. Rochester is not likely to return soon, I suppose?" "Indeed he is--in three days, he says: that will be next Thursday; and not alone either. I don't know how many of the fine people at the Leas are coming with him: he sends directions for all the best bedrooms to be prepared; and the library and drawing-rooms are to be cleaned out; I am to get more kitchen hands from the George Inn, at Millcote, and from wherever else I can; and the ladies will bring their maids and the gentlemen their valets: so we shall have a full house of it." And Mrs. Fairfax swallowed her breakfast and hastened away to commence operations. The three days were, as she had foretold, busy enough. I had thought all the rooms at Thornfield beautifully clean and well arranged; but it appears I was mistaken. Three women were got to help; and such scrubbing, such brushing, such washing of paint and beating of carpets, such taking down and putting up of pictures, such polishing of mirrors and lustres, such lighting of fires in bedrooms, such airing of sheets and feather-beds on hearths, I never beheld, either before or since. Adele ran quite wild in the midst of it: the preparations for company and the prospect of their arrival, seemed to throw her into ecstasies. She would have Sophie to look over all her "toilettes," as she called frocks; to furbish up any that were "_passees_," and to air and arrange the new. For herself, she did nothing but caper about in the front chambers, jump on and off the bedsteads, and lie on the mattresses and piled-up bolsters and pillows before the enormous fires roaring in the chimneys. From school duties she was exonerated: Mrs. Fairfax had pressed me into her service, and I was all day in the storeroom, helping (or hindering) her and the cook; learning to make custards and cheese-cakes and French pastry, to truss game and garnish desert-dishes. The party were expected to arrive on Thursday afternoon, in time for dinner at six. During the intervening period I had no time to nurse chimeras; and I believe I was as active and gay as anybody--Adele excepted. Still, now and then, I received a damping check to my cheerfulness; and was, in spite of myself, thrown back on the region of doubts and portents, and dark conjectures. This was when I chanced to see the third-storey staircase door (which of late had always been kept locked) open slowly, and give passage to the form of Grace Poole, in prim cap, white apron, and handkerchief; when I watched her glide along the gallery, her quiet tread muffled in a list slipper; when I saw her look into the bustling, topsy-turvy bedrooms,--just say a word, perhaps, to the charwoman about the proper way to polish a grate, or clean a marble mantelpiece, or take stains from papered walls, and then pass on. She would thus descend to the kitchen once a day, eat her dinner, smoke a moderate pipe on the hearth, and go back, carrying her pot of porter with her, for her private solace, in her own gloomy, upper haunt. Only one hour in the twenty-four did she pass with her fellow-servants below; all the rest of her time was spent in some low-ceiled, oaken chamber of the second storey: there she sat and sewed--and probably laughed drearily to herself,--as companionless as a prisoner in his dungeon. The strangest thing of all was, that not a soul in the house, except me, noticed her habits, or seemed to marvel at them: no one discussed her position or employment; no one pitied her solitude or isolation. I once, indeed, overheard part of a dialogue between Leah and one of the charwomen, of which Grace formed the subject. Leah had been saying something I had not caught, and the charwoman remarked-- "She gets good wages, I guess?" "Yes," said Leah; "I wish I had as good; not that mine are to complain of,--there's no stinginess at Thornfield; but they're not one fifth of the sum Mrs. Poole receives. And she is laying by: she goes every quarter to the bank at Millcote. I should not wonder but she has saved enough to keep her independent if she liked to leave; but I suppose she's got used to the place; and then she's not forty yet, and strong and able for anything. It is too soon for her to give up business." "She is a good hand, I daresay," said the charwoman. "Ah!--she understands what she has to do,--nobody better," rejoined Leah significantly; "and it is not every one could fill her shoes--not for all the money she gets." "That it is not!" was the reply. "I wonder whether the master--" The charwoman was going on; but here Leah turned and perceived me, and she instantly gave her companion a nudge. "Doesn't she know?" I heard the woman whisper. Leah shook her head, and the conversation was of course dropped. All I had gathered from it amounted to this,--that there was a mystery at Thornfield; and that from participation in that mystery I was purposely excluded. Thursday came: all work had been completed the previous evening; carpets were laid down, bed-hangings festooned, radiant white counterpanes spread, toilet tables arranged, furniture rubbed, flowers piled in vases: both chambers and saloons looked as fresh and bright as hands could make them. The hall, too, was scoured; and the great carved clock, as well as the steps and banisters of the staircase, were polished to the brightness of glass; in the dining-room, the sideboard flashed resplendent with plate; in the drawing-room and boudoir, vases of exotics bloomed on all sides. Afternoon arrived: Mrs. Fairfax assumed her best black satin gown, her gloves, and her gold watch; for it was her part to receive the company,--to conduct the ladies to their rooms, &c. Adele, too, would be dressed: though I thought she had little chance of being introduced to the party that day at least. However, to please her, I allowed Sophie to apparel her in one of her short, full muslin frocks. For myself, I had no need to make any change; I should not be called upon to quit my sanctum of the schoolroom; for a sanctum it was now become to me,--"a very pleasant refuge in time of trouble." It had been a mild, serene spring day--one of those days which, towards the end of March or the beginning of April, rise shining over the earth as heralds of summer. It was drawing to an end now; but the evening was even warm, and I sat at work in the schoolroom with the window open. "It gets late," said Mrs. Fairfax, entering in rustling state. "I am glad I ordered dinner an hour after the time Mr. Rochester mentioned; for it is past six now. I have sent John down to the gates to see if there is anything on the road: one can see a long way from thence in the direction of Millcote." She went to the window. "Here he is!" said she. "Well, John" (leaning out), "any news?" "They're coming, ma'am," was the answer. "They'll be here in ten minutes." Adele flew to the window. I followed, taking care to stand on one side, so that, screened by the curtain, I could see without being seen. The ten minutes John had given seemed very long, but at last wheels were heard; four equestrians galloped up the drive, and after them came two open carriages. Fluttering veils and waving plumes filled the vehicles; two of the cavaliers were young, dashing-looking gentlemen; the third was Mr. Rochester, on his black horse, Mesrour, Pilot bounding before him; at his side rode a lady, and he and she were the first of the party. Her purple riding-habit almost swept the ground, her veil streamed long on the breeze; mingling with its transparent folds, and gleaming through them, shone rich raven ringlets. "Miss Ingram!" exclaimed Mrs. Fairfax, and away she hurried to her post below. The cavalcade, following the sweep of the drive, quickly turned the angle of the house, and I lost sight of it. Adele now petitioned to go down; but I took her on my knee, and gave her to understand that she must not on any account think of venturing in sight of the ladies, either now or at any other time, unless expressly sent for: that Mr. Rochester would be very angry, &c. "Some natural tears she shed" on being told this; but as I began to look very grave, she consented at last to wipe them. A joyous stir was now audible in the hall: gentlemen's deep tones and ladies' silvery accents blent harmoniously together, and distinguishable above all, though not loud, was the sonorous voice of the master of Thornfield Hall, welcoming his fair and gallant guests under its roof. Then light steps ascended the stairs; and there was a tripping through the gallery, and soft cheerful laughs, and opening and closing doors, and, for a time, a hush. "Elles changent de toilettes," said Adele; who, listening attentively, had followed every movement; and she sighed. "Chez maman," said she, "quand il y avait du monde, je le suivais partout, au salon et a leurs chambres; souvent je regardais les femmes de chambre coiffer et habiller les dames, et c'etait si amusant: comme cela on apprend." "Don't you feel hungry, Adele?" "Mais oui, mademoiselle: voila cinq ou six heures que nous n'avons pas mange." "Well now, while the ladies are in their rooms, I will venture down and get you something to eat." And issuing from my asylum with precaution, I sought a back-stairs which conducted directly to the kitchen. All in that region was fire and commotion; the soup and fish were in the last stage of projection, and the cook hung over her crucibles in a frame of mind and body threatening spontaneous combustion. In the servants' hall two coachmen and three gentlemen's gentlemen stood or sat round the fire; the abigails, I suppose, were upstairs with their mistresses; the new servants, that had been hired from Millcote, were bustling about everywhere. Threading this chaos, I at last reached the larder; there I took possession of a cold chicken, a roll of bread, some tarts, a plate or two and a knife and fork: with this booty I made a hasty retreat. I had regained the gallery, and was just shutting the back-door behind me, when an accelerated hum warned me that the ladies were about to issue from their chambers. I could not proceed to the schoolroom without passing some of their doors, and running the risk of being surprised with my cargo of victualage; so I stood still at this end, which, being windowless, was dark: quite dark now, for the sun was set and twilight gathering. Presently the chambers gave up their fair tenants one after another: each came out gaily and airily, with dress that gleamed lustrous through the dusk. For a moment they stood grouped together at the other extremity of the gallery, conversing in a key of sweet subdued vivacity: they then descended the staircase almost as noiselessly as a bright mist rolls down a hill. Their collective appearance had left on me an impression of high- born elegance, such as I had never before received. I found Adele peeping through the schoolroom door, which she held ajar. "What beautiful ladies!" cried she in English. "Oh, I wish I might go to them! Do you think Mr. Rochester will send for us by-and-bye, after dinner?" "No, indeed, I don't; Mr. Rochester has something else to think about. Never mind the ladies to-night; perhaps you will see them to-morrow: here is your dinner." She was really hungry, so the chicken and tarts served to divert her attention for a time. It was well I secured this forage, or both she, I, and Sophie, to whom I conveyed a share of our repast, would have run a chance of getting no dinner at all: every one downstairs was too much engaged to think of us. The dessert was not carried out till after nine and at ten footmen were still running to and fro with trays and coffee- cups. I allowed Adele to sit up much later than usual; for she declared she could not possibly go to sleep while the doors kept opening and shutting below, and people bustling about. Besides, she added, a message might possibly come from Mr. Rochester when she was undressed; "et alors quel dommage!" I told her stories as long as she would listen to them; and then for a change I took her out into the gallery. The hall lamp was now lit, and it amused her to look over the balustrade and watch the servants passing backwards and forwards. When the evening was far advanced, a sound of music issued from the drawing-room, whither the piano had been removed; Adele and I sat down on the top step of the stairs to listen. Presently a voice blent with the rich tones of the instrument; it was a lady who sang, and very sweet her notes were. The solo over, a duet followed, and then a glee: a joyous conversational murmur filled up the intervals. I listened long: suddenly I discovered that my ear was wholly intent on analysing the mingled sounds, and trying to discriminate amidst the confusion of accents those of Mr. Rochester; and when it caught them, which it soon did, it found a further task in framing the tones, rendered by distance inarticulate, into words. The clock struck eleven. I looked at Adele, whose head leant against my shoulder; her eyes were waxing heavy, so I took her up in my arms and carried her off to bed. It was near one before the gentlemen and ladies sought their chambers. The next day was as fine as its predecessor: it was devoted by the party to an excursion to some site in the neighbourhood. They set out early in the forenoon, some on horseback, the rest in carriages; I witnessed both the departure and the return. Miss Ingram, as before, was the only lady equestrian; and, as before, Mr. Rochester galloped at her side; the two rode a little apart from the rest. I pointed out this circumstance to Mrs. Fairfax, who was standing at the window with me-- "You said it was not likely they should think of being married," said I, "but you see Mr. Rochester evidently prefers her to any of the other ladies." "Yes, I daresay: no doubt he admires her." "And she him," I added; "look how she leans her head towards him as if she were conversing confidentially; I wish I could see her face; I have never had a glimpse of it yet." "You will see her this evening," answered Mrs. Fairfax. "I happened to remark to Mr. Rochester how much Adele wished to be introduced to the ladies, and he said: 'Oh! let her come into the drawing-room after dinner; and request Miss Eyre to accompany her.'" "Yes; he said that from mere politeness: I need not go, I am sure," I answered. "Well, I observed to him that as you were unused to company, I did not think you would like appearing before so gay a party--all strangers; and he replied, in his quick way--'Nonsense! If she objects, tell her it is my particular wish; and if she resists, say I shall come and fetch her in case of contumacy.'" "I will not give him that trouble," I answered. "I will go, if no better may be; but I don't like it. Shall you be there, Mrs. Fairfax?" "No; I pleaded off, and he admitted my plea. I'll tell you how to manage so as to avoid the embarrassment of making a formal entrance, which is the most disagreeable part of the business. You must go into the drawing- room while it is empty, before the ladies leave the dinner-table; choose your seat in any quiet nook you like; you need not stay long after the gentlemen come in, unless you please: just let Mr. Rochester see you are there and then slip away--nobody will notice you." "Will these people remain long, do you think?" "Perhaps two or three weeks, certainly not more. After the Easter recess, Sir George Lynn, who was lately elected member for Millcote, will have to go up to town and take his seat; I daresay Mr. Rochester will accompany him: it surprises me that he has already made so protracted a stay at Thornfield." It was with some trepidation that I perceived the hour approach when I was to repair with my charge to the drawing-room. Adele had been in a state of ecstasy all day, after hearing she was to be presented to the ladies in the evening; and it was not till Sophie commenced the operation of dressing her that she sobered down. Then the importance of the process quickly steadied her, and by the time she had her curls arranged in well-smoothed, drooping clusters, her pink satin frock put on, her long sash tied, and her lace mittens adjusted, she looked as grave as any judge. No need to warn her not to disarrange her attire: when she was dressed, she sat demurely down in her little chair, taking care previously to lift up the satin skirt for fear she should crease it, and assured me she would not stir thence till I was ready. This I quickly was: my best dress (the silver-grey one, purchased for Miss Temple's wedding, and never worn since) was soon put on; my hair was soon smoothed; my sole ornament, the pearl brooch, soon assumed. We descended. Fortunately there was another entrance to the drawing-room than that through the saloon where they were all seated at dinner. We found the apartment vacant; a large fire burning silently on the marble hearth, and wax candles shining in bright solitude, amid the exquisite flowers with which the tables were adorned. The crimson curtain hung before the arch: slight as was the separation this drapery formed from the party in the adjoining saloon, they spoke in so low a key that nothing of their conversation could be distinguished beyond a soothing murmur. Adele, who appeared to be still under the influence of a most solemnising impression, sat down, without a word, on the footstool I pointed out to her. I retired to a window-seat, and taking a book from a table near, endeavoured to read. Adele brought her stool to my feet; ere long she touched my knee. "What is it, Adele?" "Est-ce que je ne puis pas prendrie une seule de ces fleurs magnifiques, mademoiselle? Seulement pour completer ma toilette." "You think too much of your 'toilette,' Adele: but you may have a flower." And I took a rose from a vase and fastened it in her sash. She sighed a sigh of ineffable satisfaction, as if her cup of happiness were now full. I turned my face away to conceal a smile I could not suppress: there was something ludicrous as well as painful in the little Parisienne's earnest and innate devotion to matters of dress. A soft sound of rising now became audible; the curtain was swept back from the arch; through it appeared the dining-room, with its lit lustre pouring down light on the silver and glass of a magnificent dessert-service covering a long table; a band of ladies stood in the opening; they entered, and the curtain fell behind them. There were but eight; yet, somehow, as they flocked in, they gave the impression of a much larger number. Some of them were very tall; many were dressed in white; and all had a sweeping amplitude of array that seemed to magnify their persons as a mist magnifies the moon. I rose and curtseyed to them: one or two bent their heads in return, the others only stared at me. They dispersed about the room, reminding me, by the lightness and buoyancy of their movements, of a flock of white plumy birds. Some of them threw themselves in half-reclining positions on the sofas and ottomans: some bent over the tables and examined the flowers and books: the rest gathered in a group round the fire: all talked in a low but clear tone which seemed habitual to them. I knew their names afterwards, and may as well mention them now. First, there was Mrs. Eshton and two of her daughters. She had evidently been a handsome woman, and was well preserved still. Of her daughters, the eldest, Amy, was rather little: naive, and child-like in face and manner, and piquant in form; her white muslin dress and blue sash became her well. The second, Louisa, was taller and more elegant in figure; with a very pretty face, of that order the French term _minois chiffone_: both sisters were fair as lilies. Lady Lynn was a large and stout personage of about forty, very erect, very haughty-looking, richly dressed in a satin robe of changeful sheen: her dark hair shone glossily under the shade of an azure plume, and within the circlet of a band of gems. Mrs. Colonel Dent was less showy; but, I thought, more lady-like. She had a slight figure, a pale, gentle face, and fair hair. Her black satin dress, her scarf of rich foreign lace, and her pearl ornaments, pleased me better than the rainbow radiance of the titled dame. But the three most distinguished--partly, perhaps, because the tallest figures of the band--were the Dowager Lady Ingram and her daughters, Blanche and Mary. They were all three of the loftiest stature of women. The Dowager might be between forty and fifty: her shape was still fine; her hair (by candle-light at least) still black; her teeth, too, were still apparently perfect. Most people would have termed her a splendid woman of her age: and so she was, no doubt, physically speaking; but then there was an expression of almost insupportable haughtiness in her bearing and countenance. She had Roman features and a double chin, disappearing into a throat like a pillar: these features appeared to me not only inflated and darkened, but even furrowed with pride; and the chin was sustained by the same principle, in a position of almost preternatural erectness. She had, likewise, a fierce and a hard eye: it reminded me of Mrs. Reed's; she mouthed her words in speaking; her voice was deep, its inflections very pompous, very dogmatical,--very intolerable, in short. A crimson velvet robe, and a shawl turban of some gold-wrought Indian fabric, invested her (I suppose she thought) with a truly imperial dignity. Blanche and Mary were of equal stature,--straight and tall as poplars. Mary was too slim for her height, but Blanche was moulded like a Dian. I regarded her, of course, with special interest. First, I wished to see whether her appearance accorded with Mrs. Fairfax's description; secondly, whether it at all resembled the fancy miniature I had painted of her; and thirdly--it will out!--whether it were such as I should fancy likely to suit Mr. Rochester's taste. As far as person went, she answered point for point, both to my picture and Mrs. Fairfax's description. The noble bust, the sloping shoulders, the graceful neck, the dark eyes and black ringlets were all there;--but her face? Her face was like her mother's; a youthful unfurrowed likeness: the same low brow, the same high features, the same pride. It was not, however, so saturnine a pride! she laughed continually; her laugh was satirical, and so was the habitual expression of her arched and haughty lip. Genius is said to be self-conscious. I cannot tell whether Miss Ingram was a genius, but she was self-conscious--remarkably self-conscious indeed. She entered into a discourse on botany with the gentle Mrs. Dent. It seemed Mrs. Dent had not studied that science: though, as she said, she liked flowers, "especially wild ones;" Miss Ingram had, and she ran over its vocabulary with an air. I presently perceived she was (what is vernacularly termed) _trailing_ Mrs. Dent; that is, playing on her ignorance--her _trail_ might be clever, but it was decidedly not good- natured. She played: her execution was brilliant; she sang: her voice was fine; she talked French apart to her mamma; and she talked it well, with fluency and with a good accent. Mary had a milder and more open countenance than Blanche; softer features too, and a skin some shades fairer (Miss Ingram was dark as a Spaniard)--but Mary was deficient in life: her face lacked expression, her eye lustre; she had nothing to say, and having once taken her seat, remained fixed like a statue in its niche. The sisters were both attired in spotless white. And did I now think Miss Ingram such a choice as Mr. Rochester would be likely to make? I could not tell--I did not know his taste in female beauty. If he liked the majestic, she was the very type of majesty: then she was accomplished, sprightly. Most gentlemen would admire her, I thought; and that he _did_ admire her, I already seemed to have obtained proof: to remove the last shade of doubt, it remained but to see them together. You are not to suppose, reader, that Adele has all this time been sitting motionless on the stool at my feet: no; when the ladies entered, she rose, advanced to meet them, made a stately reverence, and said with gravity-- "Bon jour, mesdames." And Miss Ingram had looked down at her with a mocking air, and exclaimed, "Oh, what a little puppet!" Lady Lynn had remarked, "It is Mr. Rochester's ward, I suppose--the little French girl he was speaking of." Mrs. Dent had kindly taken her hand, and given her a kiss. Amy and Louisa Eshton had cried out simultaneously--"What a love of a child!" And then they had called her to a sofa, where she now sat, ensconced between them, chattering alternately in French and broken English; absorbing not only the young ladies' attention, but that of Mrs. Eshton and Lady Lynn, and getting spoilt to her heart's content. At last coffee is brought in, and the gentlemen are summoned. I sit in the shade--if any shade there be in this brilliantly-lit apartment; the window-curtain half hides me. Again the arch yawns; they come. The collective appearance of the gentlemen, like that of the ladies, is very imposing: they are all costumed in black; most of them are tall, some young. Henry and Frederick Lynn are very dashing sparks indeed; and Colonel Dent is a fine soldierly man. Mr. Eshton, the magistrate of the district, is gentleman-like: his hair is quite white, his eyebrows and whiskers still dark, which gives him something of the appearance of a "pere noble de theatre." Lord Ingram, like his sisters, is very tall; like them, also, he is handsome; but he shares Mary's apathetic and listless look: he seems to have more length of limb than vivacity of blood or vigour of brain. And where is Mr. Rochester? He comes in last: I am not looking at the arch, yet I see him enter. I try to concentrate my attention on those netting-needles, on the meshes of the purse I am forming--I wish to think only of the work I have in my hands, to see only the silver beads and silk threads that lie in my lap; whereas, I distinctly behold his figure, and I inevitably recall the moment when I last saw it; just after I had rendered him, what he deemed, an essential service, and he, holding my hand, and looking down on my face, surveyed me with eyes that revealed a heart full and eager to overflow; in whose emotions I had a part. How near had I approached him at that moment! What had occurred since, calculated to change his and my relative positions? Yet now, how distant, how far estranged we were! So far estranged, that I did not expect him to come and speak to me. I did not wonder, when, without looking at me, he took a seat at the other side of the room, and began conversing with some of the ladies. No sooner did I see that his attention was riveted on them, and that I might gaze without being observed, than my eyes were drawn involuntarily to his face; I could not keep their lids under control: they would rise, and the irids would fix on him. I looked, and had an acute pleasure in looking,--a precious yet poignant pleasure; pure gold, with a steely point of agony: a pleasure like what the thirst-perishing man might feel who knows the well to which he has crept is poisoned, yet stoops and drinks divine draughts nevertheless. Most true is it that "beauty is in the eye of the gazer." My master's colourless, olive face, square, massive brow, broad and jetty eyebrows, deep eyes, strong features, firm, grim mouth,--all energy, decision, will,--were not beautiful, according to rule; but they were more than beautiful to me; they were full of an interest, an influence that quite mastered me,--that took my feelings from my own power and fettered them in his. I had not intended to love him; the reader knows I had wrought hard to extirpate from my soul the germs of love there detected; and now, at the first renewed view of him, they spontaneously arrived, green and strong! He made me love him without looking at me. I compared him with his guests. What was the gallant grace of the Lynns, the languid elegance of Lord Ingram,--even the military distinction of Colonel Dent, contrasted with his look of native pith and genuine power? I had no sympathy in their appearance, their expression: yet I could imagine that most observers would call them attractive, handsome, imposing; while they would pronounce Mr. Rochester at once harsh-featured and melancholy-looking. I saw them smile, laugh--it was nothing; the light of the candles had as much soul in it as their smile; the tinkle of the bell as much significance as their laugh. I saw Mr. Rochester smile:--his stern features softened; his eye grew both brilliant and gentle, its ray both searching and sweet. He was talking, at the moment, to Louisa and Amy Eshton. I wondered to see them receive with calm that look which seemed to me so penetrating: I expected their eyes to fall, their colour to rise under it; yet I was glad when I found they were in no sense moved. "He is not to them what he is to me," I thought: "he is not of their kind. I believe he is of mine;--I am sure he is--I feel akin to him--I understand the language of his countenance and movements: though rank and wealth sever us widely, I have something in my brain and heart, in my blood and nerves, that assimilates me mentally to him. Did I say, a few days since, that I had nothing to do with him but to receive my salary at his hands? Did I forbid myself to think of him in any other light than as a paymaster? Blasphemy against nature! Every good, true, vigorous feeling I have gathers impulsively round him. I know I must conceal my sentiments: I must smother hope; I must remember that he cannot care much for me. For when I say that I am of his kind, I do not mean that I have his force to influence, and his spell to attract; I mean only that I have certain tastes and feelings in common with him. I must, then, repeat continually that we are for ever sundered:--and yet, while I breathe and think, I must love him." Coffee is handed. The ladies, since the gentlemen entered, have become lively as larks; conversation waxes brisk and merry. Colonel Dent and Mr. Eshton argue on politics; their wives listen. The two proud dowagers, Lady Lynn and Lady Ingram, confabulate together. Sir George--whom, by-the-bye, I have forgotten to describe,--a very big, and very fresh-looking country gentleman, stands before their sofa, coffee- cup in hand, and occasionally puts in a word. Mr. Frederick Lynn has taken a seat beside Mary Ingram, and is showing her the engravings of a splendid volume: she looks, smiles now and then, but apparently says little. The tall and phlegmatic Lord Ingram leans with folded arms on the chair-back of the little and lively Amy Eshton; she glances up at him, and chatters like a wren: she likes him better than she does Mr. Rochester. Henry Lynn has taken possession of an ottoman at the feet of Louisa: Adele shares it with him: he is trying to talk French with her, and Louisa laughs at his blunders. With whom will Blanche Ingram pair? She is standing alone at the table, bending gracefully over an album. She seems waiting to be sought; but she will not wait too long: she herself selects a mate. Mr. Rochester, having quitted the Eshtons, stands on the hearth as solitary as she stands by the table: she confronts him, taking her station on the opposite side of the mantelpiece. "Mr. Rochester, I thought you were not fond of children?" "Nor am I." "Then, what induced you to take charge of such a little doll as that?" (pointing to Adele). "Where did you pick her up?" "I did not pick her up; she was left on my hands." "You should have sent her to school." "I could not afford it: schools are so dear." "Why, I suppose you have a governess for her: I saw a person with her just now--is she gone? Oh, no! there she is still, behind the window- curtain. You pay her, of course; I should think it quite as expensive,--more so; for you have them both to keep in addition." I feared--or should I say, hoped?--the allusion to me would make Mr. Rochester glance my way; and I involuntarily shrank farther into the shade: but he never turned his eyes. "I have not considered the subject," said he indifferently, looking straight before him. "No, you men never do consider economy and common sense. You should hear mama on the chapter of governesses: Mary and I have had, I should think, a dozen at least in our day; half of them detestable and the rest ridiculous, and all incubi--were they not, mama?" "Did you speak, my own?" The young lady thus claimed as the dowager's special property, reiterated her question with an explanation. "My dearest, don't mention governesses; the word makes me nervous. I have suffered a martyrdom from their incompetency and caprice. I thank Heaven I have now done with them!" Mrs. Dent here bent over to the pious lady and whispered something in her ear; I suppose, from the answer elicited, it was a reminder that one of the anathematised race was present. "Tant pis!" said her Ladyship, "I hope it may do her good!" Then, in a lower tone, but still loud enough for me to hear, "I noticed her; I am a judge of physiognomy, and in hers I see all the faults of her class." "What are they, madam?" inquired Mr. Rochester aloud. "I will tell you in your private ear," replied she, wagging her turban three times with portentous significancy. "But my curiosity will be past its appetite; it craves food now." "Ask Blanche; she is nearer you than I." "Oh, don't refer him to me, mama! I have just one word to say of the whole tribe; they are a nuisance. Not that I ever suffered much from them; I took care to turn the tables. What tricks Theodore and I used to play on our Miss Wilsons, and Mrs. Greys, and Madame Jouberts! Mary was always too sleepy to join in a plot with spirit. The best fun was with Madame Joubert: Miss Wilson was a poor sickly thing, lachrymose and low- spirited, not worth the trouble of vanquishing, in short; and Mrs. Grey was coarse and insensible; no blow took effect on her. But poor Madame Joubert! I see her yet in her raging passions, when we had driven her to extremities--spilt our tea, crumbled our bread and butter, tossed our books up to the ceiling, and played a charivari with the ruler and desk, the fender and fire-irons. Theodore, do you remember those merry days?" "Yaas, to be sure I do," drawled Lord Ingram; "and the poor old stick used to cry out 'Oh you villains childs!'--and then we sermonised her on the presumption of attempting to teach such clever blades as we were, when she was herself so ignorant." "We did; and, Tedo, you know, I helped you in prosecuting (or persecuting) your tutor, whey-faced Mr. Vining--the parson in the pip, as we used to call him. He and Miss Wilson took the liberty of falling in love with each other--at least Tedo and I thought so; we surprised sundry tender glances and sighs which we interpreted as tokens of 'la belle passion,' and I promise you the public soon had the benefit of our discovery; we employed it as a sort of lever to hoist our dead-weights from the house. Dear mama, there, as soon as she got an inkling of the business, found out that it was of an immoral tendency. Did you not, my lady-mother?" "Certainly, my best. And I was quite right: depend on that: there are a thousand reasons why liaisons between governesses and tutors should never be tolerated a moment in any well-regulated house; firstly--" "Oh, gracious, mama! Spare us the enumeration! _Au reste_, we all know them: danger of bad example to innocence of childhood; distractions and consequent neglect of duty on the part of the attached--mutual alliance and reliance; confidence thence resulting--insolence accompanying--mutiny and general blow-up. Am I right, Baroness Ingram, of Ingram Park?" "My lily-flower, you are right now, as always." "Then no more need be said: change the subject." Amy Eshton, not hearing or not heeding this dictum, joined in with her soft, infantine tone: "Louisa and I used to quiz our governess too; but she was such a good creature, she would bear anything: nothing put her out. She was never cross with us; was she, Louisa?" "No, never: we might do what we pleased; ransack her desk and her workbox, and turn her drawers inside out; and she was so good-natured, she would give us anything we asked for." "I suppose, now," said Miss Ingram, curling her lip sarcastically, "we shall have an abstract of the memoirs of all the governesses extant: in order to avert such a visitation, I again move the introduction of a new topic. Mr. Rochester, do you second my motion?" "Madam, I support you on this point, as on every other." "Then on me be the onus of bringing it forward. Signior Eduardo, are you in voice to-night?" "Donna Bianca, if you command it, I will be." "Then, signior, I lay on you my sovereign behest to furbish up your lungs and other vocal organs, as they will be wanted on my royal service." "Who would not be the Rizzio of so divine a Mary?" "A fig for Rizzio!" cried she, tossing her head with all its curls, as she moved to the piano. "It is my opinion the fiddler David must have been an insipid sort of fellow; I like black Bothwell better: to my mind a man is nothing without a spice of the devil in him; and history may say what it will of James Hepburn, but I have a notion, he was just the sort of wild, fierce, bandit hero whom I could have consented to gift with my hand." "Gentlemen, you hear! Now which of you most resembles Bothwell?" cried Mr. Rochester. "I should say the preference lies with you," responded Colonel Dent. "On my honour, I am much obliged to you," was the reply. Miss Ingram, who had now seated herself with proud grace at the piano, spreading out her snowy robes in queenly amplitude, commenced a brilliant prelude; talking meantime. She appeared to be on her high horse to-night; both her words and her air seemed intended to excite not only the admiration, but the amazement of her auditors: she was evidently bent on striking them as something very dashing and daring indeed. "Oh, I am so sick of the young men of the present day!" exclaimed she, rattling away at the instrument. "Poor, puny things, not fit to stir a step beyond papa's park gates: nor to go even so far without mama's permission and guardianship! Creatures so absorbed in care about their pretty faces, and their white hands, and their small feet; as if a man had anything to do with beauty! As if loveliness were not the special prerogative of woman--her legitimate appanage and heritage! I grant an ugly _woman_ is a blot on the fair face of creation; but as to the _gentlemen_, let them be solicitous to possess only strength and valour: let their motto be:--Hunt, shoot, and fight: the rest is not worth a fillip. Such should be my device, were I a man." "Whenever I marry," she continued after a pause which none interrupted, "I am resolved my husband shall not be a rival, but a foil to me. I will suffer no competitor near the throne; I shall exact an undivided homage: his devotions shall not be shared between me and the shape he sees in his mirror. Mr. Rochester, now sing, and I will play for you." "I am all obedience," was the response. "Here then is a Corsair-song. Know that I doat on Corsairs; and for that reason, sing it _con spirito_." "Commands from Miss Ingram's lips would put spirit into a mug of milk and water." "Take care, then: if you don't please me, I will shame you by showing how such things _should_ be done." "That is offering a premium on incapacity: I shall now endeavour to fail." "Gardez-vous en bien! If you err wilfully, I shall devise a proportionate punishment." "Miss Ingram ought to be clement, for she has it in her power to inflict a chastisement beyond mortal endurance." "Ha! explain!" commanded the lady. "Pardon me, madam: no need of explanation; your own fine sense must inform you that one of your frowns would be a sufficient substitute for capital punishment." "Sing!" said she, and again touching the piano, she commenced an accompaniment in spirited style. "Now is my time to slip away," thought I: but the tones that then severed the air arrested me. Mrs. Fairfax had said Mr. Rochester possessed a fine voice: he did--a mellow, powerful bass, into which he threw his own feeling, his own force; finding a way through the ear to the heart, and there waking sensation strangely. I waited till the last deep and full vibration had expired--till the tide of talk, checked an instant, had resumed its flow; I then quitted my sheltered corner and made my exit by the side-door, which was fortunately near. Thence a narrow passage led into the hall: in crossing it, I perceived my sandal was loose; I stopped to tie it, kneeling down for that purpose on the mat at the foot of the staircase. I heard the dining-room door unclose; a gentleman came out; rising hastily, I stood face to face with him: it was Mr. Rochester. "How do you do?" he asked. "I am very well, sir." "Why did you not come and speak to me in the room?" I thought I might have retorted the question on him who put it: but I would not take that freedom. I answered-- "I did not wish to disturb you, as you seemed engaged, sir." "What have you been doing during my absence?" "Nothing particular; teaching Adele as usual." "And getting a good deal paler than you were--as I saw at first sight. What is the matter?" "Nothing at all, sir." "Did you take any cold that night you half drowned me?" "Not the least." "Return to the drawing-room: you are deserting too early." "I am tired, sir." He looked at me for a minute. "And a little depressed," he said. "What about? Tell me." "Nothing--nothing, sir. I am not depressed." "But I affirm that you are: so much depressed that a few more words would bring tears to your eyes--indeed, they are there now, shining and swimming; and a bead has slipped from the lash and fallen on to the flag. If I had time, and was not in mortal dread of some prating prig of a servant passing, I would know what all this means. Well, to-night I excuse you; but understand that so long as my visitors stay, I expect you to appear in the drawing-room every evening; it is my wish; don't neglect it. Now go, and send Sophie for Adele. Good-night, my--" He stopped, bit his lip, and abruptly left me. CHAPTER XVIII Merry days were these at Thornfield Hall; and busy days too: how different from the first three months of stillness, monotony, and solitude I had passed beneath its roof! All sad feelings seemed now driven from the house, all gloomy associations forgotten: there was life everywhere, movement all day long. You could not now traverse the gallery, once so hushed, nor enter the front chambers, once so tenantless, without encountering a smart lady's-maid or a dandy valet. The kitchen, the butler's pantry, the servants' hall, the entrance hall, were equally alive; and the saloons were only left void and still when the blue sky and halcyon sunshine of the genial spring weather called their occupants out into the grounds. Even when that weather was broken, and continuous rain set in for some days, no damp seemed cast over enjoyment: indoor amusements only became more lively and varied, in consequence of the stop put to outdoor gaiety. I wondered what they were going to do the first evening a change of entertainment was proposed: they spoke of "playing charades," but in my ignorance I did not understand the term. The servants were called in, the dining-room tables wheeled away, the lights otherwise disposed, the chairs placed in a semicircle opposite the arch. While Mr. Rochester and the other gentlemen directed these alterations, the ladies were running up and down stairs ringing for their maids. Mrs. Fairfax was summoned to give information respecting the resources of the house in shawls, dresses, draperies of any kind; and certain wardrobes of the third storey were ransacked, and their contents, in the shape of brocaded and hooped petticoats, satin sacques, black modes, lace lappets, &c., were brought down in armfuls by the abigails; then a selection was made, and such things as were chosen were carried to the boudoir within the drawing-room. Meantime, Mr. Rochester had again summoned the ladies round him, and was selecting certain of their number to be of his party. "Miss Ingram is mine, of course," said he: afterwards he named the two Misses Eshton, and Mrs. Dent. He looked at me: I happened to be near him, as I had been fastening the clasp of Mrs. Dent's bracelet, which had got loose. "Will you play?" he asked. I shook my head. He did not insist, which I rather feared he would have done; he allowed me to return quietly to my usual seat. He and his aids now withdrew behind the curtain: the other party, which was headed by Colonel Dent, sat down on the crescent of chairs. One of the gentlemen, Mr. Eshton, observing me, seemed to propose that I should be asked to join them; but Lady Ingram instantly negatived the notion. "No," I heard her say: "she looks too stupid for any game of the sort." Ere long a bell tinkled, and the curtain drew up. Within the arch, the bulky figure of Sir George Lynn, whom Mr. Rochester had likewise chosen, was seen enveloped in a white sheet: before him, on a table, lay open a large book; and at his side stood Amy Eshton, draped in Mr. Rochester's cloak, and holding a book in her hand. Somebody, unseen, rang the bell merrily; then Adele (who had insisted on being one of her guardian's party), bounded forward, scattering round her the contents of a basket of flowers she carried on her arm. Then appeared the magnificent figure of Miss Ingram, clad in white, a long veil on her head, and a wreath of roses round her brow; by her side walked Mr. Rochester, and together they drew near the table. They knelt; while Mrs. Dent and Louisa Eshton, dressed also in white, took up their stations behind them. A ceremony followed, in dumb show, in which it was easy to recognise the pantomime of a marriage. At its termination, Colonel Dent and his party consulted in whispers for two minutes, then the Colonel called out-- "Bride!" Mr. Rochester bowed, and the curtain fell. A considerable interval elapsed before it again rose. Its second rising displayed a more elaborately prepared scene than the last. The drawing- room, as I have before observed, was raised two steps above the dining- room, and on the top of the upper step, placed a yard or two back within the room, appeared a large marble basin--which I recognised as an ornament of the conservatory--where it usually stood, surrounded by exotics, and tenanted by gold fish--and whence it must have been transported with some trouble, on account of its size and weight. Seated on the carpet, by the side of this basin, was seen Mr. Rochester, costumed in shawls, with a turban on his head. His dark eyes and swarthy skin and Paynim features suited the costume exactly: he looked the very model of an Eastern emir, an agent or a victim of the bowstring. Presently advanced into view Miss Ingram. She, too, was attired in oriental fashion: a crimson scarf tied sash-like round the waist: an embroidered handkerchief knotted about her temples; her beautifully-moulded arms bare, one of them upraised in the act of supporting a pitcher, poised gracefully on her head. Both her cast of form and feature, her complexion and her general air, suggested the idea of some Israelitish princess of the patriarchal days; and such was doubtless the character she intended to represent. She approached the basin, and bent over it as if to fill her pitcher; she again lifted it to her head. The personage on the well-brink now seemed to accost her; to make some request:--"She hasted, let down her pitcher on her hand, and gave him to drink." From the bosom of his robe he then produced a casket, opened it and showed magnificent bracelets and earrings; she acted astonishment and admiration; kneeling, he laid the treasure at her feet; incredulity and delight were expressed by her looks and gestures; the stranger fastened the bracelets on her arms and the rings in her ears. It was Eliezer and Rebecca: the camels only were wanting. The divining party again laid their heads together: apparently they could not agree about the word or syllable the scene illustrated. Colonel Dent, their spokesman, demanded "the tableau of the whole;" whereupon the curtain again descended. On its third rising only a portion of the drawing-room was disclosed; the rest being concealed by a screen, hung with some sort of dark and coarse drapery. The marble basin was removed; in its place, stood a deal table and a kitchen chair: these objects were visible by a very dim light proceeding from a horn lantern, the wax candles being all extinguished. Amidst this sordid scene, sat a man with his clenched hands resting on his knees, and his eyes bent on the ground. I knew Mr. Rochester; though the begrimed face, the disordered dress (his coat hanging loose from one arm, as if it had been almost torn from his back in a scuffle), the desperate and scowling countenance, the rough, bristling hair might well have disguised him. As he moved, a chain clanked; to his wrists were attached fetters. "Bridewell!" exclaimed Colonel Dent, and the charade was solved. A sufficient interval having elapsed for the performers to resume their ordinary costume, they re-entered the dining-room. Mr. Rochester led in Miss Ingram; she was complimenting him on his acting. "Do you know," said she, "that, of the three characters, I liked you in the last best? Oh, had you but lived a few years earlier, what a gallant gentleman-highwayman you would have made!" "Is all the soot washed from my face?" he asked, turning it towards her. "Alas! yes: the more's the pity! Nothing could be more becoming to your complexion than that ruffian's rouge." "You would like a hero of the road then?" "An English hero of the road would be the next best thing to an Italian bandit; and that could only be surpassed by a Levantine pirate." "Well, whatever I am, remember you are my wife; we were married an hour since, in the presence of all these witnesses." She giggled, and her colour rose. "Now, Dent," continued Mr. Rochester, "it is your turn." And as the other party withdrew, he and his band took the vacated seats. Miss Ingram placed herself at her leader's right hand; the other diviners filled the chairs on each side of him and her. I did not now watch the actors; I no longer waited with interest for the curtain to rise; my attention was absorbed by the spectators; my eyes, erewhile fixed on the arch, were now irresistibly attracted to the semicircle of chairs. What charade Colonel Dent and his party played, what word they chose, how they acquitted themselves, I no longer remember; but I still see the consultation which followed each scene: I see Mr. Rochester turn to Miss Ingram, and Miss Ingram to him; I see her incline her head towards him, till the jetty curls almost touch his shoulder and wave against his cheek; I hear their mutual whisperings; I recall their interchanged glances; and something even of the feeling roused by the spectacle returns in memory at this moment. I have told you, reader, that I had learnt to love Mr. Rochester: I could not unlove him now, merely because I found that he had ceased to notice me--because I might pass hours in his presence, and he would never once turn his eyes in my direction--because I saw all his attentions appropriated by a great lady, who scorned to touch me with the hem of her robes as she passed; who, if ever her dark and imperious eye fell on me by chance, would withdraw it instantly as from an object too mean to merit observation. I could not unlove him, because I felt sure he would soon marry this very lady--because I read daily in her a proud security in his intentions respecting her--because I witnessed hourly in him a style of courtship which, if careless and choosing rather to be sought than to seek, was yet, in its very carelessness, captivating, and in its very pride, irresistible. There was nothing to cool or banish love in these circumstances, though much to create despair. Much too, you will think, reader, to engender jealousy: if a woman, in my position, could presume to be jealous of a woman in Miss Ingram's. But I was not jealous: or very rarely;--the nature of the pain I suffered could not be explained by that word. Miss Ingram was a mark beneath jealousy: she was too inferior to excite the feeling. Pardon the seeming paradox; I mean what I say. She was very showy, but she was not genuine: she had a fine person, many brilliant attainments; but her mind was poor, her heart barren by nature: nothing bloomed spontaneously on that soil; no unforced natural fruit delighted by its freshness. She was not good; she was not original: she used to repeat sounding phrases from books: she never offered, nor had, an opinion of her own. She advocated a high tone of sentiment; but she did not know the sensations of sympathy and pity; tenderness and truth were not in her. Too often she betrayed this, by the undue vent she gave to a spiteful antipathy she had conceived against little Adele: pushing her away with some contumelious epithet if she happened to approach her; sometimes ordering her from the room, and always treating her with coldness and acrimony. Other eyes besides mine watched these manifestations of character--watched them closely, keenly, shrewdly. Yes; the future bridegroom, Mr. Rochester himself, exercised over his intended a ceaseless surveillance; and it was from this sagacity--this guardedness of his--this perfect, clear consciousness of his fair one's defects--this obvious absence of passion in his sentiments towards her, that my ever- torturing pain arose. I saw he was going to marry her, for family, perhaps political reasons, because her rank and connections suited him; I felt he had not given her his love, and that her qualifications were ill adapted to win from him that treasure. This was the point--this was where the nerve was touched and teased--this was where the fever was sustained and fed: _she could not charm him_. If she had managed the victory at once, and he had yielded and sincerely laid his heart at her feet, I should have covered my face, turned to the wall, and (figuratively) have died to them. If Miss Ingram had been a good and noble woman, endowed with force, fervour, kindness, sense, I should have had one vital struggle with two tigers--jealousy and despair: then, my heart torn out and devoured, I should have admired her--acknowledged her excellence, and been quiet for the rest of my days: and the more absolute her superiority, the deeper would have been my admiration--the more truly tranquil my quiescence. But as matters really stood, to watch Miss Ingram's efforts at fascinating Mr. Rochester, to witness their repeated failure--herself unconscious that they did fail; vainly fancying that each shaft launched hit the mark, and infatuatedly pluming herself on success, when her pride and self-complacency repelled further and further what she wished to allure--to witness _this_, was to be at once under ceaseless excitation and ruthless restraint. Because, when she failed, I saw how she might have succeeded. Arrows that continually glanced off from Mr. Rochester's breast and fell harmless at his feet, might, I knew, if shot by a surer hand, have quivered keen in his proud heart--have called love into his stern eye, and softness into his sardonic face; or, better still, without weapons a silent conquest might have been won. "Why can she not influence him more, when she is privileged to draw so near to him?" I asked myself. "Surely she cannot truly like him, or not like him with true affection! If she did, she need not coin her smiles so lavishly, flash her glances so unremittingly, manufacture airs so elaborate, graces so multitudinous. It seems to me that she might, by merely sitting quietly at his side, saying little and looking less, get nigher his heart. I have seen in his face a far different expression from that which hardens it now while she is so vivaciously accosting him; but then it came of itself: it was not elicited by meretricious arts and calculated manoeuvres; and one had but to accept it--to answer what he asked without pretension, to address him when needful without grimace--and it increased and grew kinder and more genial, and warmed one like a fostering sunbeam. How will she manage to please him when they are married? I do not think she will manage it; and yet it might be managed; and his wife might, I verily believe, be the very happiest woman the sun shines on." I have not yet said anything condemnatory of Mr. Rochester's project of marrying for interest and connections. It surprised me when I first discovered that such was his intention: I had thought him a man unlikely to be influenced by motives so commonplace in his choice of a wife; but the longer I considered the position, education, &c., of the parties, the less I felt justified in judging and blaming either him or Miss Ingram for acting in conformity to ideas and principles instilled into them, doubtless, from their childhood. All their class held these principles: I supposed, then, they had reasons for holding them such as I could not fathom. It seemed to me that, were I a gentleman like him, I would take to my bosom only such a wife as I could love; but the very obviousness of the advantages to the husband's own happiness offered by this plan convinced me that there must be arguments against its general adoption of which I was quite ignorant: otherwise I felt sure all the world would act as I wished to act. But in other points, as well as this, I was growing very lenient to my master: I was forgetting all his faults, for which I had once kept a sharp look-out. It had formerly been my endeavour to study all sides of his character: to take the bad with the good; and from the just weighing of both, to form an equitable judgment. Now I saw no bad. The sarcasm that had repelled, the harshness that had startled me once, were only like keen condiments in a choice dish: their presence was pungent, but their absence would be felt as comparatively insipid. And as for the vague something--was it a sinister or a sorrowful, a designing or a desponding expression?--that opened upon a careful observer, now and then, in his eye, and closed again before one could fathom the strange depth partially disclosed; that something which used to make me fear and shrink, as if I had been wandering amongst volcanic-looking hills, and had suddenly felt the ground quiver and seen it gape: that something, I, at intervals, beheld still; and with throbbing heart, but not with palsied nerves. Instead of wishing to shun, I longed only to dare--to divine it; and I thought Miss Ingram happy, because one day she might look into the abyss at her leisure, explore its secrets and analyse their nature. Meantime, while I thought only of my master and his future bride--saw only them, heard only their discourse, and considered only their movements of importance--the rest of the party were occupied with their own separate interests and pleasures. The Ladies Lynn and Ingram continued to consort in solemn conferences, where they nodded their two turbans at each other, and held up their four hands in confronting gestures of surprise, or mystery, or horror, according to the theme on which their gossip ran, like a pair of magnified puppets. Mild Mrs. Dent talked with good-natured Mrs. Eshton; and the two sometimes bestowed a courteous word or smile on me. Sir George Lynn, Colonel Dent, and Mr. Eshton discussed politics, or county affairs, or justice business. Lord Ingram flirted with Amy Eshton; Louisa played and sang to and with one of the Messrs. Lynn; and Mary Ingram listened languidly to the gallant speeches of the other. Sometimes all, as with one consent, suspended their by-play to observe and listen to the principal actors: for, after all, Mr. Rochester and--because closely connected with him--Miss Ingram were the life and soul of the party. If he was absent from the room an hour, a perceptible dulness seemed to steal over the spirits of his guests; and his re-entrance was sure to give a fresh impulse to the vivacity of conversation. The want of his animating influence appeared to be peculiarly felt one day that he had been summoned to Millcote on business, and was not likely to return till late. The afternoon was wet: a walk the party had proposed to take to see a gipsy camp, lately pitched on a common beyond Hay, was consequently deferred. Some of the gentlemen were gone to the stables: the younger ones, together with the younger ladies, were playing billiards in the billiard-room. The dowagers Ingram and Lynn sought solace in a quiet game at cards. Blanche Ingram, after having repelled, by supercilious taciturnity, some efforts of Mrs. Dent and Mrs. Eshton to draw her into conversation, had first murmured over some sentimental tunes and airs on the piano, and then, having fetched a novel from the library, had flung herself in haughty listlessness on a sofa, and prepared to beguile, by the spell of fiction, the tedious hours of absence. The room and the house were silent: only now and then the merriment of the billiard-players was heard from above. It was verging on dusk, and the clock had already given warning of the hour to dress for dinner, when little Adele, who knelt by me in the drawing-room window-seat, suddenly exclaimed-- "Voila, Monsieur Rochester, qui revient!" I turned, and Miss Ingram darted forwards from her sofa: the others, too, looked up from their several occupations; for at the same time a crunching of wheels and a splashing tramp of horse-hoofs became audible on the wet gravel. A post-chaise was approaching. "What can possess him to come home in that style?" said Miss Ingram. "He rode Mesrour (the black horse), did he not, when he went out? and Pilot was with him:--what has he done with the animals?" As she said this, she approached her tall person and ample garments so near the window, that I was obliged to bend back almost to the breaking of my spine: in her eagerness she did not observe me at first, but when she did, she curled her lip and moved to another casement. The post-chaise stopped; the driver rang the door-bell, and a gentleman alighted attired in travelling garb; but it was not Mr. Rochester; it was a tall, fashionable-looking man, a stranger. "How provoking!" exclaimed Miss Ingram: "you tiresome monkey!" (apostrophising Adele), "who perched you up in the window to give false intelligence?" and she cast on me an angry glance, as if I were in fault. Some parleying was audible in the hall, and soon the new-comer entered. He bowed to Lady Ingram, as deeming her the eldest lady present. "It appears I come at an inopportune time, madam," said he, "when my friend, Mr. Rochester, is from home; but I arrive from a very long journey, and I think I may presume so far on old and intimate acquaintance as to instal myself here till he returns." His manner was polite; his accent, in speaking, struck me as being somewhat unusual,--not precisely foreign, but still not altogether English: his age might be about Mr. Rochester's,--between thirty and forty; his complexion was singularly sallow: otherwise he was a fine-looking man, at first sight especially. On closer examination, you detected something in his face that displeased, or rather that failed to please. His features were regular, but too relaxed: his eye was large and well cut, but the life looking out of it was a tame, vacant life--at least so I thought. The sound of the dressing-bell dispersed the party. It was not till after dinner that I saw him again: he then seemed quite at his ease. But I liked his physiognomy even less than before: it struck me as being at the same time unsettled and inanimate. His eye wandered, and had no meaning in its wandering: this gave him an odd look, such as I never remembered to have seen. For a handsome and not an unamiable-looking man, he repelled me exceedingly: there was no power in that smooth-skinned face of a full oval shape: no firmness in that aquiline nose and small cherry mouth; there was no thought on the low, even forehead; no command in that blank, brown eye. As I sat in my usual nook, and looked at him with the light of the girandoles on the mantelpiece beaming full over him--for he occupied an arm-chair drawn close to the fire, and kept shrinking still nearer, as if he were cold, I compared him with Mr. Rochester. I think (with deference be it spoken) the contrast could not be much greater between a sleek gander and a fierce falcon: between a meek sheep and the rough-coated keen-eyed dog, its guardian. He had spoken of Mr. Rochester as an old friend. A curious friendship theirs must have been: a pointed illustration, indeed, of the old adage that "extremes meet." Two or three of the gentlemen sat near him, and I caught at times scraps of their conversation across the room. At first I could not make much sense of what I heard; for the discourse of Louisa Eshton and Mary Ingram, who sat nearer to me, confused the fragmentary sentences that reached me at intervals. These last were discussing the stranger; they both called him "a beautiful man." Louisa said he was "a love of a creature," and she "adored him;" and Mary instanced his "pretty little mouth, and nice nose," as her ideal of the charming. "And what a sweet-tempered forehead he has!" cried Louisa,--"so smooth--none of those frowning irregularities I dislike so much; and such a placid eye and smile!" And then, to my great relief, Mr. Henry Lynn summoned them to the other side of the room, to settle some point about the deferred excursion to Hay Common. I was now able to concentrate my attention on the group by the fire, and I presently gathered that the new-comer was called Mr. Mason; then I learned that he was but just arrived in England, and that he came from some hot country: which was the reason, doubtless, his face was so sallow, and that he sat so near the hearth, and wore a surtout in the house. Presently the words Jamaica, Kingston, Spanish Town, indicated the West Indies as his residence; and it was with no little surprise I gathered, ere long, that he had there first seen and become acquainted with Mr. Rochester. He spoke of his friend's dislike of the burning heats, the hurricanes, and rainy seasons of that region. I knew Mr. Rochester had been a traveller: Mrs. Fairfax had said so; but I thought the continent of Europe had bounded his wanderings; till now I had never heard a hint given of visits to more distant shores. I was pondering these things, when an incident, and a somewhat unexpected one, broke the thread of my musings. Mr. Mason, shivering as some one chanced to open the door, asked for more coal to be put on the fire, which had burnt out its flame, though its mass of cinder still shone hot and red. The footman who brought the coal, in going out, stopped near Mr. Eshton's chair, and said something to him in a low voice, of which I heard only the words, "old woman,"--"quite troublesome." "Tell her she shall be put in the stocks if she does not take herself off," replied the magistrate. "No--stop!" interrupted Colonel Dent. "Don't send her away, Eshton; we might turn the thing to account; better consult the ladies." And speaking aloud, he continued--"Ladies, you talked of going to Hay Common to visit the gipsy camp; Sam here says that one of the old Mother Bunches is in the servants' hall at this moment, and insists upon being brought in before 'the quality,' to tell them their fortunes. Would you like to see her?" "Surely, colonel," cried Lady Ingram, "you would not encourage such a low impostor? Dismiss her, by all means, at once!" "But I cannot persuade her to go away, my lady," said the footman; "nor can any of the servants: Mrs. Fairfax is with her just now, entreating her to be gone; but she has taken a chair in the chimney-corner, and says nothing shall stir her from it till she gets leave to come in here." "What does she want?" asked Mrs. Eshton. "'To tell the gentry their fortunes,' she says, ma'am; and she swears she must and will do it." "What is she like?" inquired the Misses Eshton, in a breath. "A shockingly ugly old creature, miss; almost as black as a crock." "Why, she's a real sorceress!" cried Frederick Lynn. "Let us have her in, of course." "To be sure," rejoined his brother; "it would be a thousand pities to throw away such a chance of fun." "My dear boys, what are you thinking about?" exclaimed Mrs. Lynn. "I cannot possibly countenance any such inconsistent proceeding," chimed in the Dowager Ingram. "Indeed, mama, but you can--and will," pronounced the haughty voice of Blanche, as she turned round on the piano-stool; where till now she had sat silent, apparently examining sundry sheets of music. "I have a curiosity to hear my fortune told: therefore, Sam, order the beldame forward." "My darling Blanche! recollect--" "I do--I recollect all you can suggest; and I must have my will--quick, Sam!" "Yes--yes--yes!" cried all the juveniles, both ladies and gentlemen. "Let her come--it will be excellent sport!" The footman still lingered. "She looks such a rough one," said he. "Go!" ejaculated Miss Ingram, and the man went. Excitement instantly seized the whole party: a running fire of raillery and jests was proceeding when Sam returned. "She won't come now," said he. "She says it's not her mission to appear before the 'vulgar herd' (them's her words). I must show her into a room by herself, and then those who wish to consult her must go to her one by one." "You see now, my queenly Blanche," began Lady Ingram, "she encroaches. Be advised, my angel girl--and--" "Show her into the library, of course," cut in the "angel girl." "It is not my mission to listen to her before the vulgar herd either: I mean to have her all to myself. Is there a fire in the library?" "Yes, ma'am--but she looks such a tinkler." "Cease that chatter, blockhead! and do my bidding." Again Sam vanished; and mystery, animation, expectation rose to full flow once more. "She's ready now," said the footman, as he reappeared. "She wishes to know who will be her first visitor." "I think I had better just look in upon her before any of the ladies go," said Colonel Dent. "Tell her, Sam, a gentleman is coming." Sam went and returned. "She says, sir, that she'll have no gentlemen; they need not trouble themselves to come near her; nor," he added, with difficulty suppressing a titter, "any ladies either, except the young, and single." "By Jove, she has taste!" exclaimed Henry Lynn. Miss Ingram rose solemnly: "I go first," she said, in a tone which might have befitted the leader of a forlorn hope, mounting a breach in the van of his men. "Oh, my best! oh, my dearest! pause--reflect!" was her mama's cry; but she swept past her in stately silence, passed through the door which Colonel Dent held open, and we heard her enter the library. A comparative silence ensued. Lady Ingram thought it "le cas" to wring her hands: which she did accordingly. Miss Mary declared she felt, for her part, she never dared venture. Amy and Louisa Eshton tittered under their breath, and looked a little frightened. The minutes passed very slowly: fifteen were counted before the library- door again opened. Miss Ingram returned to us through the arch. Would she laugh? Would she take it as a joke? All eyes met her with a glance of eager curiosity, and she met all eyes with one of rebuff and coldness; she looked neither flurried nor merry: she walked stiffly to her seat, and took it in silence. "Well, Blanche?" said Lord Ingram. "What did she say, sister?" asked Mary. "What did you think? How do you feel?--Is she a real fortune-teller?" demanded the Misses Eshton. "Now, now, good people," returned Miss Ingram, "don't press upon me. Really your organs of wonder and credulity are easily excited: you seem, by the importance of you all--my good mama included--ascribe to this matter, absolutely to believe we have a genuine witch in the house, who is in close alliance with the old gentleman. I have seen a gipsy vagabond; she has practised in hackneyed fashion the science of palmistry and told me what such people usually tell. My whim is gratified; and now I think Mr. Eshton will do well to put the hag in the stocks to-morrow morning, as he threatened." Miss Ingram took a book, leant back in her chair, and so declined further conversation. I watched her for nearly half-an-hour: during all that time she never turned a page, and her face grew momently darker, more dissatisfied, and more sourly expressive of disappointment. She had obviously not heard anything to her advantage: and it seemed to me, from her prolonged fit of gloom and taciturnity, that she herself, notwithstanding her professed indifference, attached undue importance to whatever revelations had been made her. {During all that time she never turned a page: p184.jpg} Meantime, Mary Ingram, Amy and Louisa Eshton, declared they dared not go alone; and yet they all wished to go. A negotiation was opened through the medium of the ambassador, Sam; and after much pacing to and fro, till, I think, the said Sam's calves must have ached with the exercise, permission was at last, with great difficulty, extorted from the rigorous Sibyl, for the three to wait upon her in a body. Their visit was not so still as Miss Ingram's had been: we heard hysterical giggling and little shrieks proceeding from the library; and at the end of about twenty minutes they burst the door open, and came running across the hall, as if they were half-scared out of their wits. "I am sure she is something not right!" they cried, one and all. "She told us such things! She knows all about us!" and they sank breathless into the various seats the gentlemen hastened to bring them. Pressed for further explanation, they declared she had told them of things they had said and done when they were mere children; described books and ornaments they had in their boudoirs at home: keepsakes that different relations had presented to them. They affirmed that she had even divined their thoughts, and had whispered in the ear of each the name of the person she liked best in the world, and informed them of what they most wished for. Here the gentlemen interposed with earnest petitions to be further enlightened on these two last-named points; but they got only blushes, ejaculations, tremors, and titters, in return for their importunity. The matrons, meantime, offered vinaigrettes and wielded fans; and again and again reiterated the expression of their concern that their warning had not been taken in time; and the elder gentlemen laughed, and the younger urged their services on the agitated fair ones. In the midst of the tumult, and while my eyes and ears were fully engaged in the scene before me, I heard a hem close at my elbow: I turned, and saw Sam. "If you please, miss, the gipsy declares that there is another young single lady in the room who has not been to her yet, and she swears she will not go till she has seen all. I thought it must be you: there is no one else for it. What shall I tell her?" "Oh, I will go by all means," I answered: and I was glad of the unexpected opportunity to gratify my much-excited curiosity. I slipped out of the room, unobserved by any eye--for the company were gathered in one mass about the trembling trio just returned--and I closed the door quietly behind me. "If you like, miss," said Sam, "I'll wait in the hall for you; and if she frightens you, just call and I'll come in." "No, Sam, return to the kitchen: I am not in the least afraid." Nor was I; but I was a good deal interested and excited. CHAPTER XIX The library looked tranquil enough as I entered it, and the Sibyl--if Sibyl she were--was seated snugly enough in an easy-chair at the chimney- corner. She had on a red cloak and a black bonnet: or rather, a broad- brimmed gipsy hat, tied down with a striped handkerchief under her chin. An extinguished candle stood on the table; she was bending over the fire, and seemed reading in a little black book, like a prayer-book, by the light of the blaze: she muttered the words to herself, as most old women do, while she read; she did not desist immediately on my entrance: it appeared she wished to finish a paragraph. I stood on the rug and warmed my hands, which were rather cold with sitting at a distance from the drawing-room fire. I felt now as composed as ever I did in my life: there was nothing indeed in the gipsy's appearance to trouble one's calm. She shut her book and slowly looked up; her hat-brim partially shaded her face, yet I could see, as she raised it, that it was a strange one. It looked all brown and black: elf- locks bristled out from beneath a white band which passed under her chin, and came half over her cheeks, or rather jaws: her eye confronted me at once, with a bold and direct gaze. "Well, and you want your fortune told?" she said, in a voice as decided as her glance, as harsh as her features. "I don't care about it, mother; you may please yourself: but I ought to warn you, I have no faith." "It's like your impudence to say so: I expected it of you; I heard it in your step as you crossed the threshold." "Did you? You've a quick ear." "I have; and a quick eye and a quick brain." "You need them all in your trade." "I do; especially when I've customers like you to deal with. Why don't you tremble?" "I'm not cold." "Why don't you turn pale?" "I am not sick." "Why don't you consult my art?" "I'm not silly." The old crone "nichered" a laugh under her bonnet and bandage; she then drew out a short black pipe, and lighting it began to smoke. Having indulged a while in this sedative, she raised her bent body, took the pipe from her lips, and while gazing steadily at the fire, said very deliberately--"You are cold; you are sick; and you are silly." "Prove it," I rejoined. "I will, in few words. You are cold, because you are alone: no contact strikes the fire from you that is in you. You are sick; because the best of feelings, the highest and the sweetest given to man, keeps far away from you. You are silly, because, suffer as you may, you will not beckon it to approach, nor will you stir one step to meet it where it waits you." She again put her short black pipe to her lips, and renewed her smoking with vigour. "You might say all that to almost any one who you knew lived as a solitary dependent in a great house." "I might say it to almost any one: but would it be true of almost any one?" "In my circumstances." "Yes; just so, in _your_ circumstances: but find me another precisely placed as you are." "It would be easy to find you thousands." "You could scarcely find me one. If you knew it, you are peculiarly situated: very near happiness; yes, within reach of it. The materials are all prepared; there only wants a movement to combine them. Chance laid them somewhat apart; let them be once approached and bliss results." "I don't understand enigmas. I never could guess a riddle in my life." "If you wish me to speak more plainly, show me your palm." "And I must cross it with silver, I suppose?" "To be sure." I gave her a shilling: she put it into an old stocking-foot which she took out of her pocket, and having tied it round and returned it, she told me to hold out my hand. I did. She approached her face to the palm, and pored over it without touching it. "It is too fine," said she. "I can make nothing of such a hand as that; almost without lines: besides, what is in a palm? Destiny is not written there." "I believe you," said I. "No," she continued, "it is in the face: on the forehead, about the eyes, in the lines of the mouth. Kneel, and lift up your head." "Ah! now you are coming to reality," I said, as I obeyed her. "I shall begin to put some faith in you presently." I knelt within half a yard of her. She stirred the fire, so that a ripple of light broke from the disturbed coal: the glare, however, as she sat, only threw her face into deeper shadow: mine, it illumined. "I wonder with what feelings you came to me to-night," she said, when she had examined me a while. "I wonder what thoughts are busy in your heart during all the hours you sit in yonder room with the fine people flitting before you like shapes in a magic-lantern: just as little sympathetic communion passing between you and them as if they were really mere shadows of human forms, and not the actual substance." "I feel tired often, sleepy sometimes, but seldom sad." "Then you have some secret hope to buoy you up and please you with whispers of the future?" "Not I. The utmost I hope is, to save money enough out of my earnings to set up a school some day in a little house rented by myself." "A mean nutriment for the spirit to exist on: and sitting in that window- seat (you see I know your habits )--" "You have learned them from the servants." "Ah! you think yourself sharp. Well, perhaps I have: to speak truth, I have an acquaintance with one of them, Mrs. Poole--" I started to my feet when I heard the name. "You have--have you?" thought I; "there is diablerie in the business after all, then!" "Don't be alarmed," continued the strange being; "she's a safe hand is Mrs. Poole: close and quiet; any one may repose confidence in her. But, as I was saying: sitting in that window-seat, do you think of nothing but your future school? Have you no present interest in any of the company who occupy the sofas and chairs before you? Is there not one face you study? one figure whose movements you follow with at least curiosity?" "I like to observe all the faces and all the figures." "But do you never single one from the rest--or it may be, two?" "I do frequently; when the gestures or looks of a pair seem telling a tale: it amuses me to watch them." "What tale do you like best to hear?" "Oh, I have not much choice! They generally run on the same theme--courtship; and promise to end in the same catastrophe--marriage." "And do you like that monotonous theme?" "Positively, I don't care about it: it is nothing to me." "Nothing to you? When a lady, young and full of life and health, charming with beauty and endowed with the gifts of rank and fortune, sits and smiles in the eyes of a gentleman you--" "I what?" "You know--and perhaps think well of." "I don't know the gentlemen here. I have scarcely interchanged a syllable with one of them; and as to thinking well of them, I consider some respectable, and stately, and middle-aged, and others young, dashing, handsome, and lively: but certainly they are all at liberty to be the recipients of whose smiles they please, without my feeling disposed to consider the transaction of any moment to me." "You don't know the gentlemen here? You have not exchanged a syllable with one of them? Will you say that of the master of the house!" "He is not at home." "A profound remark! A most ingenious quibble! He went to Millcote this morning, and will be back here to-night or to-morrow: does that circumstance exclude him from the list of your acquaintance--blot him, as it were, out of existence?" "No; but I can scarcely see what Mr. Rochester has to do with the theme you had introduced." "I was talking of ladies smiling in the eyes of gentlemen; and of late so many smiles have been shed into Mr. Rochester's eyes that they overflow like two cups filled above the brim: have you never remarked that?" "Mr. Rochester has a right to enjoy the society of his guests." "No question about his right: but have you never observed that, of all the tales told here about matrimony, Mr. Rochester has been favoured with the most lively and the most continuous?" "The eagerness of a listener quickens the tongue of a narrator." I said this rather to myself than to the gipsy, whose strange talk, voice, manner, had by this time wrapped me in a kind of dream. One unexpected sentence came from her lips after another, till I got involved in a web of mystification; and wondered what unseen spirit had been sitting for weeks by my heart watching its workings and taking record of every pulse. "Eagerness of a listener!" repeated she: "yes; Mr. Rochester has sat by the hour, his ear inclined to the fascinating lips that took such delight in their task of communicating; and Mr. Rochester was so willing to receive and looked so grateful for the pastime given him; you have noticed this?" "Grateful! I cannot remember detecting gratitude in his face." "Detecting! You have analysed, then. And what did you detect, if not gratitude?" I said nothing. "You have seen love: have you not?--and, looking forward, you have seen him married, and beheld his bride happy?" "Humph! Not exactly. Your witch's skill is rather at fault sometimes." "What the devil have you seen, then?" "Never mind: I came here to inquire, not to confess. Is it known that Mr. Rochester is to be married?" "Yes; and to the beautiful Miss Ingram." "Shortly?" "Appearances would warrant that conclusion: and, no doubt (though, with an audacity that wants chastising out of you, you seem to question it), they will be a superlatively happy pair. He must love such a handsome, noble, witty, accomplished lady; and probably she loves him, or, if not his person, at least his purse. I know she considers the Rochester estate eligible to the last degree; though (God pardon me!) I told her something on that point about an hour ago which made her look wondrous grave: the corners of her mouth fell half an inch. I would advise her blackaviced suitor to look out: if another comes, with a longer or clearer rent-roll,--he's dished--" "But, mother, I did not come to hear Mr. Rochester's fortune: I came to hear my own; and you have told me nothing of it." "Your fortune is yet doubtful: when I examined your face, one trait contradicted another. Chance has meted you a measure of happiness: that I know. I knew it before I came here this evening. She has laid it carefully on one side for you. I saw her do it. It depends on yourself to stretch out your hand, and take it up: but whether you will do so, is the problem I study. Kneel again on the rug." "Don't keep me long; the fire scorches me." {She did not stoop towards me, but only gazed, leaning back in her chair: p190.jpg} I knelt. She did not stoop towards me, but only gazed, leaning back in her chair. She began muttering,-- "The flame flickers in the eye; the eye shines like dew; it looks soft and full of feeling; it smiles at my jargon: it is susceptible; impression follows impression through its clear sphere; where it ceases to smile, it is sad; an unconscious lassitude weighs on the lid: that signifies melancholy resulting from loneliness. It turns from me; it will not suffer further scrutiny; it seems to deny, by a mocking glance, the truth of the discoveries I have already made,--to disown the charge both of sensibility and chagrin: its pride and reserve only confirm me in my opinion. The eye is favourable. "As to the mouth, it delights at times in laughter; it is disposed to impart all that the brain conceives; though I daresay it would be silent on much the heart experiences. Mobile and flexible, it was never intended to be compressed in the eternal silence of solitude: it is a mouth which should speak much and smile often, and have human affection for its interlocutor. That feature too is propitious. "I see no enemy to a fortunate issue but in the brow; and that brow professes to say,--'I can live alone, if self-respect, and circumstances require me so to do. I need not sell my soul to buy bliss. I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld, or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.' The forehead declares, 'Reason sits firm and holds the reins, and she will not let the feelings burst away and hurry her to wild chasms. The passions may rage furiously, like true heathens, as they are; and the desires may imagine all sorts of vain things: but judgment shall still have the last word in every argument, and the casting vote in every decision. Strong wind, earthquake-shock, and fire may pass by: but I shall follow the guiding of that still small voice which interprets the dictates of conscience.' "Well said, forehead; your declaration shall be respected. I have formed my plans--right plans I deem them--and in them I have attended to the claims of conscience, the counsels of reason. I know how soon youth would fade and bloom perish, if, in the cup of bliss offered, but one dreg of shame, or one flavour of remorse were detected; and I do not want sacrifice, sorrow, dissolution--such is not my taste. I wish to foster, not to blight--to earn gratitude, not to wring tears of blood--no, nor of brine: my harvest must be in smiles, in endearments, in sweet--That will do. I think I rave in a kind of exquisite delirium. I should wish now to protract this moment _ad infinitum_; but I dare not. So far I have governed myself thoroughly. I have acted as I inwardly swore I would act; but further might try me beyond my strength. Rise, Miss Eyre: leave me; the play is played out'." Where was I? Did I wake or sleep? Had I been dreaming? Did I dream still? The old woman's voice had changed: her accent, her gesture, and all were familiar to me as my own face in a glass--as the speech of my own tongue. I got up, but did not go. I looked; I stirred the fire, and I looked again: but she drew her bonnet and her bandage closer about her face, and again beckoned me to depart. The flame illuminated her hand stretched out: roused now, and on the alert for discoveries, I at once noticed that hand. It was no more the withered limb of eld than my own; it was a rounded supple member, with smooth fingers, symmetrically turned; a broad ring flashed on the little finger, and stooping forward, I looked at it, and saw a gem I had seen a hundred times before. Again I looked at the face; which was no longer turned from me--on the contrary, the bonnet was doffed, the bandage displaced, the head advanced. "Well, Jane, do you know me?" asked the familiar voice. "Only take off the red cloak, sir, and then--" "But the string is in a knot--help me." "Break it, sir." "There, then--'Off, ye lendings!'" And Mr. Rochester stepped out of his disguise. "Now, sir, what a strange idea!" "But well carried out, eh? Don't you think so?" "With the ladies you must have managed well." "But not with you?" "You did not act the character of a gipsy with me." "What character did I act? My own?" "No; some unaccountable one. In short, I believe you have been trying to draw me out--or in; you have been talking nonsense to make me talk nonsense. It is scarcely fair, sir." "Do you forgive me, Jane?" "I cannot tell till I have thought it all over. If, on reflection, I find I have fallen into no great absurdity, I shall try to forgive you; but it was not right." "Oh, you have been very correct--very careful, very sensible." I reflected, and thought, on the whole, I had. It was a comfort; but, indeed, I had been on my guard almost from the beginning of the interview. Something of masquerade I suspected. I knew gipsies and fortune-tellers did not express themselves as this seeming old woman had expressed herself; besides I had noted her feigned voice, her anxiety to conceal her features. But my mind had been running on Grace Poole--that living enigma, that mystery of mysteries, as I considered her. I had never thought of Mr. Rochester. "Well," said he, "what are you musing about? What does that grave smile signify?" "Wonder and self-congratulation, sir. I have your permission to retire now, I suppose?" "No; stay a moment; and tell me what the people in the drawing-room yonder are doing." "Discussing the gipsy, I daresay." "Sit down!--Let me hear what they said about me." "I had better not stay long, sir; it must be near eleven o'clock. Oh, are you aware, Mr. Rochester, that a stranger has arrived here since you left this morning?" "A stranger!--no; who can it be? I expected no one; is he gone?" "No; he said he had known you long, and that he could take the liberty of installing himself here till you returned." "The devil he did! Did he give his name?" "His name is Mason, sir; and he comes from the West Indies; from Spanish Town, in Jamaica, I think." Mr. Rochester was standing near me; he had taken my hand, as if to lead me to a chair. As I spoke he gave my wrist a convulsive grip; the smile on his lips froze: apparently a spasm caught his breath. "Mason!--the West Indies!" he said, in the tone one might fancy a speaking automaton to enounce its single words; "Mason!--the West Indies!" he reiterated; and he went over the syllables three times, growing, in the intervals of speaking, whiter than ashes: he hardly seemed to know what he was doing. "Do you feel ill, sir?" I inquired. "Jane, I've got a blow; I've got a blow, Jane!" He staggered. "Oh, lean on me, sir." "Jane, you offered me your shoulder once before; let me have it now." "Yes, sir, yes; and my arm." He sat down, and made me sit beside him. Holding my hand in both his own, he chafed it; gazing on me, at the same time, with the most troubled and dreary look. "My little friend!" said he, "I wish I were in a quiet island with only you; and trouble, and danger, and hideous recollections removed from me." "Can I help you, sir?--I'd give my life to serve you." "Jane, if aid is wanted, I'll seek it at your hands; I promise you that." "Thank you, sir. Tell me what to do,--I'll try, at least, to do it." "Fetch me now, Jane, a glass of wine from the dining-room: they will be at supper there; and tell me if Mason is with them, and what he is doing." I went. I found all the party in the dining-room at supper, as Mr. Rochester had said; they were not seated at table,--the supper was arranged on the sideboard; each had taken what he chose, and they stood about here and there in groups, their plates and glasses in their hands. Every one seemed in high glee; laughter and conversation were general and animated. Mr. Mason stood near the fire, talking to Colonel and Mrs. Dent, and appeared as merry as any of them. I filled a wine-glass (I saw Miss Ingram watch me frowningly as I did so: she thought I was taking a liberty, I daresay), and I returned to the library. Mr. Rochester's extreme pallor had disappeared, and he looked once more firm and stern. He took the glass from my hand. "Here is to your health, ministrant spirit!" he said. He swallowed the contents and returned it to me. "What are they doing, Jane?" "Laughing and talking, sir." "They don't look grave and mysterious, as if they had heard something strange?" "Not at all: they are full of jests and gaiety." "And Mason?" "He was laughing too." "If all these people came in a body and spat at me, what would you do, Jane?" "Turn them out of the room, sir, if I could." He half smiled. "But if I were to go to them, and they only looked at me coldly, and whispered sneeringly amongst each other, and then dropped off and left me one by one, what then? Would you go with them?" "I rather think not, sir: I should have more pleasure in staying with you." "To comfort me?" "Yes, sir, to comfort you, as well as I could." "And if they laid you under a ban for adhering to me?" "I, probably, should know nothing about their ban; and if I did, I should care nothing about it." "Then, you could dare censure for my sake?" "I could dare it for the sake of any friend who deserved my adherence; as you, I am sure, do." "Go back now into the room; step quietly up to Mason, and whisper in his ear that Mr. Rochester is come and wishes to see him: show him in here and then leave me." "Yes, sir." I did his behest. The company all stared at me as I passed straight among them. I sought Mr. Mason, delivered the message, and preceded him from the room: I ushered him into the library, and then I went upstairs. At a late hour, after I had been in bed some time, I heard the visitors repair to their chambers: I distinguished Mr. Rochester's voice, and heard him say, "This way, Mason; this is your room." He spoke cheerfully: the gay tones set my heart at ease. I was soon asleep. CHAPTER XX I had forgotten to draw my curtain, which I usually did, and also to let down my window-blind. The consequence was, that when the moon, which was full and bright (for the night was fine), came in her course to that space in the sky opposite my casement, and looked in at me through the unveiled panes, her glorious gaze roused me. Awaking in the dead of night, I opened my eyes on her disk--silver-white and crystal clear. It was beautiful, but too solemn; I half rose, and stretched my arm to draw the curtain. Good God! What a cry! The night--its silence--its rest, was rent in twain by a savage, a sharp, a shrilly sound that ran from end to end of Thornfield Hall. My pulse stopped: my heart stood still; my stretched arm was paralysed. The cry died, and was not renewed. Indeed, whatever being uttered that fearful shriek could not soon repeat it: not the widest-winged condor on the Andes could, twice in succession, send out such a yell from the cloud shrouding his eyrie. The thing delivering such utterance must rest ere it could repeat the effort. It came out of the third storey; for it passed overhead. And overhead--yes, in the room just above my chamber-ceiling--I now heard a struggle: a deadly one it seemed from the noise; and a half-smothered voice shouted-- "Help! help! help!" three times rapidly. "Will no one come?" it cried; and then, while the staggering and stamping went on wildly, I distinguished through plank and plaster:-- "Rochester! Rochester! for God's sake, come!" A chamber-door opened: some one ran, or rushed, along the gallery. Another step stamped on the flooring above and something fell; and there was silence. I had put on some clothes, though horror shook all my limbs; I issued from my apartment. The sleepers were all aroused: ejaculations, terrified murmurs sounded in every room; door after door unclosed; one looked out and another looked out; the gallery filled. Gentlemen and ladies alike had quitted their beds; and "Oh! what is it?"--"Who is hurt?"--"What has happened?"--"Fetch a light!"--"Is it fire?"--"Are there robbers?"--"Where shall we run?" was demanded confusedly on all hands. But for the moonlight they would have been in complete darkness. They ran to and fro; they crowded together: some sobbed, some stumbled: the confusion was inextricable. "Where the devil is Rochester?" cried Colonel Dent. "I cannot find him in his bed." "Here! here!" was shouted in return. "Be composed, all of you: I'm coming." And the door at the end of the gallery opened, and Mr. Rochester advanced with a candle: he had just descended from the upper storey. One of the ladies ran to him directly; she seized his arm: it was Miss Ingram. "What awful event has taken place?" said she. "Speak! let us know the worst at once!" "But don't pull me down or strangle me," he replied: for the Misses Eshton were clinging about him now; and the two dowagers, in vast white wrappers, were bearing down on him like ships in full sail. "All's right!--all's right!" he cried. "It's a mere rehearsal of Much Ado about Nothing. Ladies, keep off, or I shall wax dangerous." And dangerous he looked: his black eyes darted sparks. Calming himself by an effort, he added-- "A servant has had the nightmare; that is all. She's an excitable, nervous person: she construed her dream into an apparition, or something of that sort, no doubt; and has taken a fit with fright. Now, then, I must see you all back into your rooms; for, till the house is settled, she cannot be looked after. Gentlemen, have the goodness to set the ladies the example. Miss Ingram, I am sure you will not fail in evincing superiority to idle terrors. Amy and Louisa, return to your nests like a pair of doves, as you are. Mesdames" (to the dowagers), "you will take cold to a dead certainty, if you stay in this chill gallery any longer." And so, by dint of alternate coaxing and commanding, he contrived to get them all once more enclosed in their separate dormitories. I did not wait to be ordered back to mine, but retreated unnoticed, as unnoticed I had left it. Not, however, to go to bed: on the contrary, I began and dressed myself carefully. The sounds I had heard after the scream, and the words that had been uttered, had probably been heard only by me; for they had proceeded from the room above mine: but they assured me that it was not a servant's dream which had thus struck horror through the house; and that the explanation Mr. Rochester had given was merely an invention framed to pacify his guests. I dressed, then, to be ready for emergencies. When dressed, I sat a long time by the window looking out over the silent grounds and silvered fields and waiting for I knew not what. It seemed to me that some event must follow the strange cry, struggle, and call. No: stillness returned: each murmur and movement ceased gradually, and in about an hour Thornfield Hall was again as hushed as a desert. It seemed that sleep and night had resumed their empire. Meantime the moon declined: she was about to set. Not liking to sit in the cold and darkness, I thought I would lie down on my bed, dressed as I was. I left the window, and moved with little noise across the carpet; as I stooped to take off my shoes, a cautious hand tapped low at the door. "Am I wanted?" I asked. "Are you up?" asked the voice I expected to hear, viz., my master's. "Yes, sir." "And dressed?" "Yes." "Come out, then, quietly." I obeyed. Mr. Rochester stood in the gallery holding a light. "I want you," he said: "come this way: take your time, and make no noise." My slippers were thin: I could walk the matted floor as softly as a cat. He glided up the gallery and up the stairs, and stopped in the dark, low corridor of the fateful third storey: I had followed and stood at his side. "Have you a sponge in your room?" he asked in a whisper. "Yes, sir." "Have you any salts--volatile salts?" "Yes." "Go back and fetch both." I returned, sought the sponge on the washstand, the salts in my drawer, and once more retraced my steps. He still waited; he held a key in his hand: approaching one of the small, black doors, he put it in the lock; he paused, and addressed me again. "You don't turn sick at the sight of blood?" "I think I shall not: I have never been tried yet." I felt a thrill while I answered him; but no coldness, and no faintness. "Just give me your hand," he said: "it will not do to risk a fainting fit." I put my fingers into his. "Warm and steady," was his remark: he turned the key and opened the door. I saw a room I remembered to have seen before, the day Mrs. Fairfax showed me over the house: it was hung with tapestry; but the tapestry was now looped up in one part, and there was a door apparent, which had then been concealed. This door was open; a light shone out of the room within: I heard thence a snarling, snatching sound, almost like a dog quarrelling. Mr. Rochester, putting down his candle, said to me, "Wait a minute," and he went forward to the inner apartment. A shout of laughter greeted his entrance; noisy at first, and terminating in Grace Poole's own goblin ha! ha! _She_ then was there. He made some sort of arrangement without speaking, though I heard a low voice address him: he came out and closed the door behind him. "Here, Jane!" he said; and I walked round to the other side of a large bed, which with its drawn curtains concealed a considerable portion of the chamber. An easy-chair was near the bed-head: a man sat in it, dressed with the exception of his coat; he was still; his head leant back; his eyes were closed. Mr. Rochester held the candle over him; I recognised in his pale and seemingly lifeless face--the stranger, Mason: I saw too that his linen on one side, and one arm, was almost soaked in blood. "Hold the candle," said Mr. Rochester, and I took it: he fetched a basin of water from the washstand: "Hold that," said he. I obeyed. He took the sponge, dipped it in, and moistened the corpse-like face; he asked for my smelling-bottle, and applied it to the nostrils. Mr. Mason shortly unclosed his eyes; he groaned. Mr. Rochester opened the shirt of the wounded man, whose arm and shoulder were bandaged: he sponged away blood, trickling fast down. "Is there immediate danger?" murmured Mr. Mason. "Pooh! No--a mere scratch. Don't be so overcome, man: bear up! I'll fetch a surgeon for you now, myself: you'll be able to be removed by morning, I hope. Jane," he continued. "Sir?" "I shall have to leave you in this room with this gentleman, for an hour, or perhaps two hours: you will sponge the blood as I do when it returns: if he feels faint, you will put the glass of water on that stand to his lips, and your salts to his nose. You will not speak to him on any pretext--and--Richard, it will be at the peril of your life if you speak to her: open your lips--agitate yourself--and I'll not answer for the consequences." Again the poor man groaned; he looked as if he dared not move; fear, either of death or of something else, appeared almost to paralyse him. Mr. Rochester put the now bloody sponge into my hand, and I proceeded to use it as he had done. He watched me a second, then saying, "Remember!--No conversation," he left the room. I experienced a strange feeling as the key grated in the lock, and the sound of his retreating step ceased to be heard. Here then I was in the third storey, fastened into one of its mystic cells; night around me; a pale and bloody spectacle under my eyes and hands; a murderess hardly separated from me by a single door: yes--that was appalling--the rest I could bear; but I shuddered at the thought of Grace Poole bursting out upon me. I must keep to my post, however. I must watch this ghastly countenance--these blue, still lips forbidden to unclose--these eyes now shut, now opening, now wandering through the room, now fixing on me, and ever glazed with the dulness of horror. I must dip my hand again and again in the basin of blood and water, and wipe away the trickling gore. I must see the light of the unsnuffed candle wane on my employment; the shadows darken on the wrought, antique tapestry round me, and grow black under the hangings of the vast old bed, and quiver strangely over the doors of a great cabinet opposite--whose front, divided into twelve panels, bore, in grim design, the heads of the twelve apostles, each enclosed in its separate panel as in a frame; while above them at the top rose an ebon crucifix and a dying Christ. According as the shifting obscurity and flickering gleam hovered here or glanced there, it was now the bearded physician, Luke, that bent his brow; now St. John's long hair that waved; and anon the devilish face of Judas, that grew out of the panel, and seemed gathering life and threatening a revelation of the arch-traitor--of Satan himself--in his subordinate's form. Amidst all this, I had to listen as well as watch: to listen for the movements of the wild beast or the fiend in yonder side den. But since Mr. Rochester's visit it seemed spellbound: all the night I heard but three sounds at three long intervals,--a step creak, a momentary renewal of the snarling, canine noise, and a deep human groan. Then my own thoughts worried me. What crime was this that lived incarnate in this sequestered mansion, and could neither be expelled nor subdued by the owner?--what mystery, that broke out now in fire and now in blood, at the deadest hours of night? What creature was it, that, masked in an ordinary woman's face and shape, uttered the voice, now of a mocking demon, and anon of a carrion-seeking bird of prey? And this man I bent over--this commonplace, quiet stranger--how had he become involved in the web of horror? and why had the Fury flown at him? What made him seek this quarter of the house at an untimely season, when he should have been asleep in bed? I had heard Mr. Rochester assign him an apartment below--what brought him here! And why, now, was he so tame under the violence or treachery done him? Why did he so quietly submit to the concealment Mr. Rochester enforced? Why _did_ Mr. Rochester enforce this concealment? His guest had been outraged, his own life on a former occasion had been hideously plotted against; and both attempts he smothered in secrecy and sank in oblivion! Lastly, I saw Mr. Mason was submissive to Mr. Rochester; that the impetuous will of the latter held complete sway over the inertness of the former: the few words which had passed between them assured me of this. It was evident that in their former intercourse, the passive disposition of the one had been habitually influenced by the active energy of the other: whence then had arisen Mr. Rochester's dismay when he heard of Mr. Mason's arrival? Why had the mere name of this unresisting individual--whom his word now sufficed to control like a child--fallen on him, a few hours since, as a thunderbolt might fall on an oak? Oh! I could not forget his look and his paleness when he whispered: "Jane, I have got a blow--I have got a blow, Jane." I could not forget how the arm had trembled which he rested on my shoulder: and it was no light matter which could thus bow the resolute spirit and thrill the vigorous frame of Fairfax Rochester. "When will he come? When will he come?" I cried inwardly, as the night lingered and lingered--as my bleeding patient drooped, moaned, sickened: and neither day nor aid arrived. I had, again and again, held the water to Mason's white lips; again and again offered him the stimulating salts: my efforts seemed ineffectual: either bodily or mental suffering, or loss of blood, or all three combined, were fast prostrating his strength. He moaned so, and looked so weak, wild, and lost, I feared he was dying; and I might not even speak to him. The candle, wasted at last, went out; as it expired, I perceived streaks of grey light edging the window curtains: dawn was then approaching. Presently I heard Pilot bark far below, out of his distant kennel in the courtyard: hope revived. Nor was it unwarranted: in five minutes more the grating key, the yielding lock, warned me my watch was relieved. It could not have lasted more than two hours: many a week has seemed shorter. Mr. Rochester entered, and with him the surgeon he had been to fetch. "Now, Carter, be on the alert," he said to this last: "I give you but half-an-hour for dressing the wound, fastening the bandages, getting the patient downstairs and all." "But is he fit to move, sir?" "No doubt of it; it is nothing serious; he is nervous, his spirits must be kept up. Come, set to work." Mr. Rochester drew back the thick curtain, drew up the holland blind, let in all the daylight he could; and I was surprised and cheered to see how far dawn was advanced: what rosy streaks were beginning to brighten the east. Then he approached Mason, whom the surgeon was already handling. "Now, my good fellow, how are you?" he asked. "She's done for me, I fear," was the faint reply. "Not a whit!--courage! This day fortnight you'll hardly be a pin the worse of it: you've lost a little blood; that's all. Carter, assure him there's no danger." "I can do that conscientiously," said Carter, who had now undone the bandages; "only I wish I could have got here sooner: he would not have bled so much--but how is this? The flesh on the shoulder is torn as well as cut. This wound was not done with a knife: there have been teeth here!" "She bit me," he murmured. "She worried me like a tigress, when Rochester got the knife from her." "You should not have yielded: you should have grappled with her at once," said Mr. Rochester. "But under such circumstances, what could one do?" returned Mason. "Oh, it was frightful!" he added, shuddering. "And I did not expect it: she looked so quiet at first." "I warned you," was his friend's answer; "I said--be on your guard when you go near her. Besides, you might have waited till to-morrow, and had me with you: it was mere folly to attempt the interview to-night, and alone." "I thought I could have done some good." "You thought! you thought! Yes, it makes me impatient to hear you: but, however, you have suffered, and are likely to suffer enough for not taking my advice; so I'll say no more. Carter--hurry!--hurry! The sun will soon rise, and I must have him off." "Directly, sir; the shoulder is just bandaged. I must look to this other wound in the arm: she has had her teeth here too, I think." "She sucked the blood: she said she'd drain my heart," said Mason. I saw Mr. Rochester shudder: a singularly marked expression of disgust, horror, hatred, warped his countenance almost to distortion; but he only said-- "Come, be silent, Richard, and never mind her gibberish: don't repeat it." "I wish I could forget it," was the answer. "You will when you are out of the country: when you get back to Spanish Town, you may think of her as dead and buried--or rather, you need not think of her at all." "Impossible to forget this night!" "It is not impossible: have some energy, man. You thought you were as dead as a herring two hours since, and you are all alive and talking now. There!--Carter has done with you or nearly so; I'll make you decent in a trice. Jane" (he turned to me for the first time since his re-entrance), "take this key: go down into my bedroom, and walk straight forward into my dressing-room: open the top drawer of the wardrobe and take out a clean shirt and neck-handkerchief: bring them here; and be nimble." I went; sought the repository he had mentioned, found the articles named, and returned with them. "Now," said he, "go to the other side of the bed while I order his toilet; but don't leave the room: you may be wanted again." I retired as directed. "Was anybody stirring below when you went down, Jane?" inquired Mr. Rochester presently. "No, sir; all was very still." "We shall get you off cannily, Dick: and it will be better, both for your sake, and for that of the poor creature in yonder. I have striven long to avoid exposure, and I should not like it to come at last. Here, Carter, help him on with his waist-coat. Where did you leave your furred cloak? You can't travel a mile without that, I know, in this damned cold climate. In your room?--Jane, run down to Mr. Mason's room,--the one next mine,--and fetch a cloak you will see there." Again I ran, and again returned, bearing an immense mantle lined and edged with fur. "Now, I've another errand for you," said my untiring master; "you must away to my room again. What a mercy you are shod with velvet, Jane!--a clod-hopping messenger would never do at this juncture. You must open the middle drawer of my toilet-table and take out a little phial and a little glass you will find there,--quick!" I flew thither and back, bringing the desired vessels. "That's well! Now, doctor, I shall take the liberty of administering a dose myself, on my own responsibility. I got this cordial at Rome, of an Italian charlatan--a fellow you would have kicked, Carter. It is not a thing to be used indiscriminately, but it is good upon occasion: as now, for instance. Jane, a little water." He held out the tiny glass, and I half filled it from the water-bottle on the washstand. "That will do;--now wet the lip of the phial." I did so; he measured twelve drops of a crimson liquid, and presented it to Mason. "Drink, Richard: it will give you the heart you lack, for an hour or so." "But will it hurt me?--is it inflammatory?" "Drink! drink! drink!" Mr. Mason obeyed, because it was evidently useless to resist. He was dressed now: he still looked pale, but he was no longer gory and sullied. Mr. Rochester let him sit three minutes after he had swallowed the liquid; he then took his arm-- "Now I am sure you can get on your feet," he said--"try." The patient rose. "Carter, take him under the other shoulder. Be of good cheer, Richard; step out--that's it!" "I do feel better," remarked Mr. Mason. "I am sure you do. Now, Jane, trip on before us away to the backstairs; unbolt the side-passage door, and tell the driver of the post-chaise you will see in the yard--or just outside, for I told him not to drive his rattling wheels over the pavement--to be ready; we are coming: and, Jane, if any one is about, come to the foot of the stairs and hem." It was by this time half-past five, and the sun was on the point of rising; but I found the kitchen still dark and silent. The side-passage door was fastened; I opened it with as little noise as possible: all the yard was quiet; but the gates stood wide open, and there was a post-chaise, with horses ready harnessed, and driver seated on the box, stationed outside. I approached him, and said the gentlemen were coming; he nodded: then I looked carefully round and listened. The stillness of early morning slumbered everywhere; the curtains were yet drawn over the servants' chamber windows; little birds were just twittering in the blossom-blanched orchard trees, whose boughs drooped like white garlands over the wall enclosing one side of the yard; the carriage horses stamped from time to time in their closed stables: all else was still. The gentlemen now appeared. Mason, supported by Mr. Rochester and the surgeon, seemed to walk with tolerable ease: they assisted him into the chaise; Carter followed. "Take care of him," said Mr. Rochester to the latter, "and keep him at your house till he is quite well: I shall ride over in a day or two to see how he gets on. Richard, how is it with you?" "The fresh air revives me, Fairfax." "Leave the window open on his side, Carter; there is no wind--good-bye, Dick." "Fairfax--" "Well what is it?" "Let her be taken care of; let her be treated as tenderly as may be: let her--" he stopped and burst into tears. "I do my best; and have done it, and will do it," was the answer: he shut up the chaise door, and the vehicle drove away. "Yet would to God there was an end of all this!" added Mr. Rochester, as he closed and barred the heavy yard-gates. This done, he moved with slow step and abstracted air towards a door in the wall bordering the orchard. I, supposing he had done with me, prepared to return to the house; again, however, I heard him call "Jane!" He had opened the portal and stood at it, waiting for me. "Come where there is some freshness, for a few moments," he said; "that house is a mere dungeon: don't you feel it so?" "It seems to me a splendid mansion, sir." "The glamour of inexperience is over your eyes," he answered; "and you see it through a charmed medium: you cannot discern that the gilding is slime and the silk draperies cobwebs; that the marble is sordid slate, and the polished woods mere refuse chips and scaly bark. Now _here_" (he pointed to the leafy enclosure we had entered) "all is real, sweet, and pure." He strayed down a walk edged with box, with apple trees, pear trees, and cherry trees on one side, and a border on the other full of all sorts of old-fashioned flowers, stocks, sweet-williams, primroses, pansies, mingled with southernwood, sweet-briar, and various fragrant herbs. They were fresh now as a succession of April showers and gleams, followed by a lovely spring morning, could make them: the sun was just entering the dappled east, and his light illumined the wreathed and dewy orchard trees and shone down the quiet walks under them. "Jane, will you have a flower?" He gathered a half-blown rose, the first on the bush, and offered it to me. "Thank you, sir." "Do you like this sunrise, Jane? That sky with its high and light clouds which are sure to melt away as the day waxes warm--this placid and balmly atmosphere?" "I do, very much." "You have passed a strange night, Jane." "Yes, sir." "And it has made you look pale--were you afraid when I left you alone with Mason?" "I was afraid of some one coming out of the inner room." "But I had fastened the door--I had the key in my pocket: I should have been a careless shepherd if I had left a lamb--my pet lamb--so near a wolf's den, unguarded: you were safe." "Will Grace Poole live here still, sir?" "Oh yes! don't trouble your head about her--put the thing out of your thoughts." "Yet it seems to me your life is hardly secure while she stays." "Never fear--I will take care of myself." "Is the danger you apprehended last night gone by now, sir?" "I cannot vouch for that till Mason is out of England: nor even then. To live, for me, Jane, is to stand on a crater-crust which may crack and spue fire any day." "But Mr. Mason seems a man easily led. Your influence, sir, is evidently potent with him: he will never set you at defiance or wilfully injure you." "Oh, no! Mason will not defy me; nor, knowing it, will he hurt me--but, unintentionally, he might in a moment, by one careless word, deprive me, if not of life, yet for ever of happiness." "Tell him to be cautious, sir: let him know what you fear, and show him how to avert the danger." He laughed sardonically, hastily took my hand, and as hastily threw it from him. "If I could do that, simpleton, where would the danger be? Annihilated in a moment. Ever since I have known Mason, I have only had to say to him 'Do that,' and the thing has been done. But I cannot give him orders in this case: I cannot say 'Beware of harming me, Richard;' for it is imperative that I should keep him ignorant that harm to me is possible. Now you look puzzled; and I will puzzle you further. You are my little friend, are you not?" "I like to serve you, sir, and to obey you in all that is right." "Precisely: I see you do. I see genuine contentment in your gait and mien, your eye and face, when you are helping me and pleasing me--working for me, and with me, in, as you characteristically say, '_all that is right_:' for if I bid you do what you thought wrong, there would be no light-footed running, no neat-handed alacrity, no lively glance and animated complexion. My friend would then turn to me, quiet and pale, and would say, 'No, sir; that is impossible: I cannot do it, because it is wrong;' and would become immutable as a fixed star. Well, you too have power over me, and may injure me: yet I dare not show you where I am vulnerable, lest, faithful and friendly as you are, you should transfix me at once." "If you have no more to fear from Mr. Mason than you have from me, sir, you are very safe." "God grant it may be so! Here, Jane, is an arbour; sit down." The arbour was an arch in the wall, lined with ivy; it contained a rustic seat. Mr. Rochester took it, leaving room, however, for me: but I stood before him. "Sit," he said; "the bench is long enough for two. You don't hesitate to take a place at my side, do you? Is that wrong, Jane?" I answered him by assuming it: to refuse would, I felt, have been unwise. "Now, my little friend, while the sun drinks the dew--while all the flowers in this old garden awake and expand, and the birds fetch their young ones' breakfast out of the Thornfield, and the early bees do their first spell of work--I'll put a case to you, which you must endeavour to suppose your own: but first, look at me, and tell me you are at ease, and not fearing that I err in detaining you, or that you err in staying." "No, sir; I am content." "Well then, Jane, call to aid your fancy:--suppose you were no longer a girl well reared and disciplined, but a wild boy indulged from childhood upwards; imagine yourself in a remote foreign land; conceive that you there commit a capital error, no matter of what nature or from what motives, but one whose consequences must follow you through life and taint all your existence. Mind, I don't say a _crime_; I am not speaking of shedding of blood or any other guilty act, which might make the perpetrator amenable to the law: my word is _error_. The results of what you have done become in time to you utterly insupportable; you take measures to obtain relief: unusual measures, but neither unlawful nor culpable. Still you are miserable; for hope has quitted you on the very confines of life: your sun at noon darkens in an eclipse, which you feel will not leave it till the time of setting. Bitter and base associations have become the sole food of your memory: you wander here and there, seeking rest in exile: happiness in pleasure--I mean in heartless, sensual pleasure--such as dulls intellect and blights feeling. Heart-weary and soul-withered, you come home after years of voluntary banishment: you make a new acquaintance--how or where no matter: you find in this stranger much of the good and bright qualities which you have sought for twenty years, and never before encountered; and they are all fresh, healthy, without soil and without taint. Such society revives, regenerates: you feel better days come back--higher wishes, purer feelings; you desire to recommence your life, and to spend what remains to you of days in a way more worthy of an immortal being. To attain this end, are you justified in overleaping an obstacle of custom--a mere conventional impediment which neither your conscience sanctifies nor your judgment approves?" He paused for an answer: and what was I to say? Oh, for some good spirit to suggest a judicious and satisfactory response! Vain aspiration! The west wind whispered in the ivy round me; but no gentle Ariel borrowed its breath as a medium of speech: the birds sang in the tree-tops; but their song, however sweet, was inarticulate. Again Mr. Rochester propounded his query: "Is the wandering and sinful, but now rest-seeking and repentant, man justified in daring the world's opinion, in order to attach to him for ever this gentle, gracious, genial stranger, thereby securing his own peace of mind and regeneration of life?" "Sir," I answered, "a wanderer's repose or a sinner's reformation should never depend on a fellow-creature. Men and women die; philosophers falter in wisdom, and Christians in goodness: if any one you know has suffered and erred, let him look higher than his equals for strength to amend and solace to heal." "But the instrument--the instrument! God, who does the work, ordains the instrument. I have myself--I tell it you without parable--been a worldly, dissipated, restless man; and I believe I have found the instrument for my cure in--" He paused: the birds went on carolling, the leaves lightly rustling. I almost wondered they did not check their songs and whispers to catch the suspended revelation; but they would have had to wait many minutes--so long was the silence protracted. At last I looked up at the tardy speaker: he was looking eagerly at me. "Little friend," said he, in quite a changed tone--while his face changed too, losing all its softness and gravity, and becoming harsh and sarcastic--"you have noticed my tender penchant for Miss Ingram: don't you think if I married her she would regenerate me with a vengeance?" He got up instantly, went quite to the other end of the walk, and when he came back he was humming a tune. "Jane, Jane," said he, stopping before me, "you are quite pale with your vigils: don't you curse me for disturbing your rest?" "Curse you? No, sir." "Shake hands in confirmation of the word. What cold fingers! They were warmer last night when I touched them at the door of the mysterious chamber. Jane, when will you watch with me again?" "Whenever I can be useful, sir." "For instance, the night before I am married! I am sure I shall not be able to sleep. Will you promise to sit up with me to bear me company? To you I can talk of my lovely one: for now you have seen her and know her." "Yes, sir." "She's a rare one, is she not, Jane?" "Yes, sir." "A strapper--a real strapper, Jane: big, brown, and buxom; with hair just such as the ladies of Carthage must have had. Bless me! there's Dent and Lynn in the stables! Go in by the shrubbery, through that wicket." As I went one way, he went another, and I heard him in the yard, saying cheerfully-- "Mason got the start of you all this morning; he was gone before sunrise: I rose at four to see him off." CHAPTER XXI Presentiments are strange things! and so are sympathies; and so are signs; and the three combined make one mystery to which humanity has not yet found the key. I never laughed at presentiments in my life, because I have had strange ones of my own. Sympathies, I believe, exist (for instance, between far-distant, long-absent, wholly estranged relatives asserting, notwithstanding their alienation, the unity of the source to which each traces his origin) whose workings baffle mortal comprehension. And signs, for aught we know, may be but the sympathies of Nature with man. When I was a little girl, only six years old, I one night heard Bessie Leaven say to Martha Abbot that she had been dreaming about a little child; and that to dream of children was a sure sign of trouble, either to one's self or one's kin. The saying might have worn out of my memory, had not a circumstance immediately followed which served indelibly to fix it there. The next day Bessie was sent for home to the deathbed of her little sister. Of late I had often recalled this saying and this incident; for during the past week scarcely a night had gone over my couch that had not brought with it a dream of an infant, which I sometimes hushed in my arms, sometimes dandled on my knee, sometimes watched playing with daisies on a lawn, or again, dabbling its hands in running water. It was a wailing child this night, and a laughing one the next: now it nestled close to me, and now it ran from me; but whatever mood the apparition evinced, whatever aspect it wore, it failed not for seven successive nights to meet me the moment I entered the land of slumber. I did not like this iteration of one idea--this strange recurrence of one image, and I grew nervous as bedtime approached and the hour of the vision drew near. It was from companionship with this baby-phantom I had been roused on that moonlight night when I heard the cry; and it was on the afternoon of the day following I was summoned downstairs by a message that some one wanted me in Mrs. Fairfax's room. On repairing thither, I found a man waiting for me, having the appearance of a gentleman's servant: he was dressed in deep mourning, and the hat he held in his hand was surrounded with a crape band. "I daresay you hardly remember me, Miss," he said, rising as I entered; "but my name is Leaven: I lived coachman with Mrs. Reed when you were at Gateshead, eight or nine years since, and I live there still." "Oh, Robert! how do you do? I remember you very well: you used to give me a ride sometimes on Miss Georgiana's bay pony. And how is Bessie? You are married to Bessie?" "Yes, Miss: my wife is very hearty, thank you; she brought me another little one about two months since--we have three now--and both mother and child are thriving." "And are the family well at the house, Robert?" "I am sorry I can't give you better news of them, Miss: they are very badly at present--in great trouble." "I hope no one is dead," I said, glancing at his black dress. He too looked down at the crape round his hat and replied-- "Mr. John died yesterday was a week, at his chambers in London." "Mr. John?" "Yes." "And how does his mother bear it?" "Why, you see, Miss Eyre, it is not a common mishap: his life has been very wild: these last three years he gave himself up to strange ways, and his death was shocking." "I heard from Bessie he was not doing well." "Doing well! He could not do worse: he ruined his health and his estate amongst the worst men and the worst women. He got into debt and into jail: his mother helped him out twice, but as soon as he was free he returned to his old companions and habits. His head was not strong: the knaves he lived amongst fooled him beyond anything I ever heard. He came down to Gateshead about three weeks ago and wanted missis to give up all to him. Missis refused: her means have long been much reduced by his extravagance; so he went back again, and the next news was that he was dead. How he died, God knows!--they say he killed himself." I was silent: the things were frightful. Robert Leaven resumed-- "Missis had been out of health herself for some time: she had got very stout, but was not strong with it; and the loss of money and fear of poverty were quite breaking her down. The information about Mr. John's death and the manner of it came too suddenly: it brought on a stroke. She was three days without speaking; but last Tuesday she seemed rather better: she appeared as if she wanted to say something, and kept making signs to my wife and mumbling. It was only yesterday morning, however, that Bessie understood she was pronouncing your name; and at last she made out the words, 'Bring Jane--fetch Jane Eyre: I want to speak to her.' Bessie is not sure whether she is in her right mind, or means anything by the words; but she told Miss Reed and Miss Georgiana, and advised them to send for you. The young ladies put it off at first; but their mother grew so restless, and said, 'Jane, Jane,' so many times, that at last they consented. I left Gateshead yesterday: and if you can get ready, Miss, I should like to take you back with me early to-morrow morning." "Yes, Robert, I shall be ready: it seems to me that I ought to go." "I think so too, Miss. Bessie said she was sure you would not refuse: but I suppose you will have to ask leave before you can get off?" "Yes; and I will do it now;" and having directed him to the servants' hall, and recommended him to the care of John's wife, and the attentions of John himself, I went in search of Mr. Rochester. He was not in any of the lower rooms; he was not in the yard, the stables, or the grounds. I asked Mrs. Fairfax if she had seen him;--yes: she believed he was playing billiards with Miss Ingram. To the billiard- room I hastened: the click of balls and the hum of voices resounded thence; Mr. Rochester, Miss Ingram, the two Misses Eshton, and their admirers, were all busied in the game. It required some courage to disturb so interesting a party; my errand, however, was one I could not defer, so I approached the master where he stood at Miss Ingram's side. She turned as I drew near, and looked at me haughtily: her eyes seemed to demand, "What can the creeping creature want now?" and when I said, in a low voice, "Mr. Rochester," she made a movement as if tempted to order me away. I remember her appearance at the moment--it was very graceful and very striking: she wore a morning robe of sky-blue crape; a gauzy azure scarf was twisted in her hair. She had been all animation with the game, and irritated pride did not lower the expression of her haughty lineaments. "Does that person want you?" she inquired of Mr. Rochester; and Mr. Rochester turned to see who the "person" was. He made a curious grimace--one of his strange and equivocal demonstrations--threw down his cue and followed me from the room. "Well, Jane?" he said, as he rested his back against the schoolroom door, which he had shut. "If you please, sir, I want leave of absence for a week or two." "What to do?--where to go?" "To see a sick lady who has sent for me." "What sick lady?--where does she live?" "At Gateshead; in ---shire." "-shire? That is a hundred miles off! Who may she be that sends for people to see her that distance?" "Her name is Reed, sir--Mrs. Reed." "Reed of Gateshead? There was a Reed of Gateshead, a magistrate." "It is his widow, sir." "And what have you to do with her? How do you know her?" "Mr. Reed was my uncle--my mother's brother." "The deuce he was! You never told me that before: you always said you had no relations." "None that would own me, sir. Mr. Reed is dead, and his wife cast me off." "Why?" "Because I was poor, and burdensome, and she disliked me." "But Reed left children?--you must have cousins? Sir George Lynn was talking of a Reed of Gateshead yesterday, who, he said, was one of the veriest rascals on town; and Ingram was mentioning a Georgiana Reed of the same place, who was much admired for her beauty a season or two ago in London." "John Reed is dead, too, sir: he ruined himself and half-ruined his family, and is supposed to have committed suicide. The news so shocked his mother that it brought on an apoplectic attack." "And what good can you do her? Nonsense, Jane! I would never think of running a hundred miles to see an old lady who will, perhaps, be dead before you reach her: besides, you say she cast you off." "Yes, sir, but that is long ago; and when her circumstances were very different: I could not be easy to neglect her wishes now." "How long will you stay?" "As short a time as possible, sir." "Promise me only to stay a week--" "I had better not pass my word: I might be obliged to break it." "At all events you _will_ come back: you will not be induced under any pretext to take up a permanent residence with her?" "Oh, no! I shall certainly return if all be well." "And who goes with you? You don't travel a hundred miles alone." "No, sir, she has sent her coachman." "A person to be trusted?" "Yes, sir, he has lived ten years in the family." Mr. Rochester meditated. "When do you wish to go?" "Early to-morrow morning, sir." "Well, you must have some money; you can't travel without money, and I daresay you have not much: I have given you no salary yet. How much have you in the world, Jane?" he asked, smiling. I drew out my purse; a meagre thing it was. "Five shillings, sir." He took the purse, poured the hoard into his palm, and chuckled over it as if its scantiness amused him. Soon he produced his pocket-book: "Here," said he, offering me a note; it was fifty pounds, and he owed me but fifteen. I told him I had no change. "I don't want change; you know that. Take your wages." I declined accepting more than was my due. He scowled at first; then, as if recollecting something, he said-- "Right, right! Better not give you all now: you would, perhaps, stay away three months if you had fifty pounds. There are ten; is it not plenty?" "Yes, sir, but now you owe me five." "Come back for it, then; I am your banker for forty pounds." "Mr. Rochester, I may as well mention another matter of business to you while I have the opportunity." "Matter of business? I am curious to hear it." "You have as good as informed me, sir, that you are going shortly to be married?" "Yes; what then?" "In that case, sir, Adele ought to go to school: I am sure you will perceive the necessity of it." "To get her out of my bride's way, who might otherwise walk over her rather too emphatically? There's sense in the suggestion; not a doubt of it. Adele, as you say, must go to school; and you, of course, must march straight to--the devil?" "I hope not, sir; but I must seek another situation somewhere." "In course!" he exclaimed, with a twang of voice and a distortion of features equally fantastic and ludicrous. He looked at me some minutes. "And old Madam Reed, or the Misses, her daughters, will be solicited by you to seek a place, I suppose?" "No, sir; I am not on such terms with my relatives as would justify me in asking favours of them--but I shall advertise." "You shall walk up the pyramids of Egypt!" he growled. "At your peril you advertise! I wish I had only offered you a sovereign instead of ten pounds. Give me back nine pounds, Jane; I've a use for it." "And so have I, sir," I returned, putting my hands and my purse behind me. "I could not spare the money on any account." "Little niggard!" said he, "refusing me a pecuniary request! Give me five pounds, Jane." "Not five shillings, sir; nor five pence." "Just let me look at the cash." "No, sir; you are not to be trusted." "Jane!" "Sir?" "Promise me one thing." "I'll promise you anything, sir, that I think I am likely to perform." "Not to advertise: and to trust this quest of a situation to me. I'll find you one in time." "I shall be glad so to do, sir, if you, in your turn, will promise that I and Adele shall be both safe out of the house before your bride enters it." "Very well! very well! I'll pledge my word on it. You go to-morrow, then?" "Yes, sir; early." "Shall you come down to the drawing-room after dinner?" "No, sir, I must prepare for the journey." "Then you and I must bid good-bye for a little while?" "I suppose so, sir." "And how do people perform that ceremony of parting, Jane? Teach me; I'm not quite up to it." "They say, Farewell, or any other form they prefer." "Then say it." "Farewell, Mr. Rochester, for the present." "What must I say?" "The same, if you like, sir." "Farewell, Miss Eyre, for the present; is that all?" "Yes?" "It seems stingy, to my notions, and dry, and unfriendly. I should like something else: a little addition to the rite. If one shook hands, for instance; but no--that would not content me either. So you'll do no more than say Farewell, Jane?" "It is enough, sir: as much good-will may be conveyed in one hearty word as in many." "Very likely; but it is blank and cool--'Farewell.'" "How long is he going to stand with his back against that door?" I asked myself; "I want to commence my packing." The dinner-bell rang, and suddenly away he bolted, without another syllable: I saw him no more during the day, and was off before he had risen in the morning. I reached the lodge at Gateshead about five o'clock in the afternoon of the first of May: I stepped in there before going up to the hall. It was very clean and neat: the ornamental windows were hung with little white curtains; the floor was spotless; the grate and fire-irons were burnished bright, and the fire burnt clear. Bessie sat on the hearth, nursing her last-born, and Robert and his sister played quietly in a corner. "Bless you!--I knew you would come!" exclaimed Mrs. Leaven, as I entered. "Yes, Bessie," said I, after I had kissed her; "and I trust I am not too late. How is Mrs. Reed?--Alive still, I hope." "Yes, she is alive; and more sensible and collected than she was. The doctor says she may linger a week or two yet; but he hardly thinks she will finally recover." "Has she mentioned me lately?" "She was talking of you only this morning, and wishing you would come, but she is sleeping now, or was ten minutes ago, when I was up at the house. She generally lies in a kind of lethargy all the afternoon, and wakes up about six or seven. Will you rest yourself here an hour, Miss, and then I will go up with you?" Robert here entered, and Bessie laid her sleeping child in the cradle and went to welcome him: afterwards she insisted on my taking off my bonnet and having some tea; for she said I looked pale and tired. I was glad to accept her hospitality; and I submitted to be relieved of my travelling garb just as passively as I used to let her undress me when a child. Old times crowded fast back on me as I watched her bustling about--setting out the tea-tray with her best china, cutting bread and butter, toasting a tea-cake, and, between whiles, giving little Robert or Jane an occasional tap or push, just as she used to give me in former days. Bessie had retained her quick temper as well as her light foot and good looks. Tea ready, I was going to approach the table; but she desired me to sit still, quite in her old peremptory tones. I must be served at the fireside, she said; and she placed before me a little round stand with my cup and a plate of toast, absolutely as she used to accommodate me with some privately purloined dainty on a nursery chair: and I smiled and obeyed her as in bygone days. She wanted to know if I was happy at Thornfield Hall, and what sort of a person the mistress was; and when I told her there was only a master, whether he was a nice gentleman, and if I liked him. I told her he was rather an ugly man, but quite a gentleman; and that he treated me kindly, and I was content. Then I went on to describe to her the gay company that had lately been staying at the house; and to these details Bessie listened with interest: they were precisely of the kind she relished. In such conversation an hour was soon gone: Bessie restored to me my bonnet, &c., and, accompanied by her, I quitted the lodge for the hall. It was also accompanied by her that I had, nearly nine years ago, walked down the path I was now ascending. On a dark, misty, raw morning in January, I had left a hostile roof with a desperate and embittered heart--a sense of outlawry and almost of reprobation--to seek the chilly harbourage of Lowood: that bourne so far away and unexplored. The same hostile roof now again rose before me: my prospects were doubtful yet; and I had yet an aching heart. I still felt as a wanderer on the face of the earth; but I experienced firmer trust in myself and my own powers, and less withering dread of oppression. The gaping wound of my wrongs, too, was now quite healed; and the flame of resentment extinguished. "You shall go into the breakfast-room first," said Bessie, as she preceded me through the hall; "the young ladies will be there." In another moment I was within that apartment. There was every article of furniture looking just as it did on the morning I was first introduced to Mr. Brocklehurst: the very rug he had stood upon still covered the hearth. Glancing at the bookcases, I thought I could distinguish the two volumes of Bewick's British Birds occupying their old place on the third shelf, and Gulliver's Travels and the Arabian Nights ranged just above. The inanimate objects were not changed; but the living things had altered past recognition. Two young ladies appeared before me; one very tall, almost as tall as Miss Ingram--very thin too, with a sallow face and severe mien. There was something ascetic in her look, which was augmented by the extreme plainness of a straight-skirted, black, stuff dress, a starched linen collar, hair combed away from the temples, and the nun-like ornament of a string of ebony beads and a crucifix. This I felt sure was Eliza, though I could trace little resemblance to her former self in that elongated and colourless visage. The other was as certainly Georgiana: but not the Georgiana I remembered--the slim and fairy-like girl of eleven. This was a full-blown, very plump damsel, fair as waxwork, with handsome and regular features, languishing blue eyes, and ringleted yellow hair. The hue of her dress was black too; but its fashion was so different from her sister's--so much more flowing and becoming--it looked as stylish as the other's looked puritanical. In each of the sisters there was one trait of the mother--and only one; the thin and pallid elder daughter had her parent's Cairngorm eye: the blooming and luxuriant younger girl had her contour of jaw and chin--perhaps a little softened, but still imparting an indescribable hardness to the countenance otherwise so voluptuous and buxom. Both ladies, as I advanced, rose to welcome me, and both addressed me by the name of "Miss Eyre." Eliza's greeting was delivered in a short, abrupt voice, without a smile; and then she sat down again, fixed her eyes on the fire, and seemed to forget me. Georgiana added to her "How d'ye do?" several commonplaces about my journey, the weather, and so on, uttered in rather a drawling tone: and accompanied by sundry side-glances that measured me from head to foot--now traversing the folds of my drab merino pelisse, and now lingering on the plain trimming of my cottage bonnet. Young ladies have a remarkable way of letting you know that they think you a "quiz" without actually saying the words. A certain superciliousness of look, coolness of manner, nonchalance of tone, express fully their sentiments on the point, without committing them by any positive rudeness in word or deed. A sneer, however, whether covert or open, had now no longer that power over me it once possessed: as I sat between my cousins, I was surprised to find how easy I felt under the total neglect of the one and the semi- sarcastic attentions of the other--Eliza did not mortify, nor Georgiana ruffle me. The fact was, I had other things to think about; within the last few months feelings had been stirred in me so much more potent than any they could raise--pains and pleasures so much more acute and exquisite had been excited than any it was in their power to inflict or bestow--that their airs gave me no concern either for good or bad. "How is Mrs. Reed?" I asked soon, looking calmly at Georgiana, who thought fit to bridle at the direct address, as if it were an unexpected liberty. "Mrs. Reed? Ah! mama, you mean; she is extremely poorly: I doubt if you can see her to-night." "If," said I, "you would just step upstairs and tell her I am come, I should be much obliged to you." Georgiana almost started, and she opened her blue eyes wild and wide. "I know she had a particular wish to see me," I added, "and I would not defer attending to her desire longer than is absolutely necessary." "Mama dislikes being disturbed in an evening," remarked Eliza. I soon rose, quietly took off my bonnet and gloves, uninvited, and said I would just step out to Bessie--who was, I dared say, in the kitchen--and ask her to ascertain whether Mrs. Reed was disposed to receive me or not to- night. I went, and having found Bessie and despatched her on my errand, I proceeded to take further measures. It had heretofore been my habit always to shrink from arrogance: received as I had been to-day, I should, a year ago, have resolved to quit Gateshead the very next morning; now, it was disclosed to me all at once that that would be a foolish plan. I had taken a journey of a hundred miles to see my aunt, and I must stay with her till she was better--or dead: as to her daughters' pride or folly, I must put it on one side, make myself independent of it. So I addressed the housekeeper; asked her to show me a room, told her I should probably be a visitor here for a week or two, had my trunk conveyed to my chamber, and followed it thither myself: I met Bessie on the landing. "Missis is awake," said she; "I have told her you are here: come and let us see if she will know you." I did not need to be guided to the well-known room, to which I had so often been summoned for chastisement or reprimand in former days. I hastened before Bessie; I softly opened the door: a shaded light stood on the table, for it was now getting dark. There was the great four-post bed with amber hangings as of old; there the toilet-table, the armchair, and the footstool, at which I had a hundred times been sentenced to kneel, to ask pardon for offences by me uncommitted. I looked into a certain corner near, half-expecting to see the slim outline of a once dreaded switch which used to lurk there, waiting to leap out imp-like and lace my quivering palm or shrinking neck. I approached the bed; I opened the curtains and leant over the high-piled pillows. Well did I remember Mrs. Reed's face, and I eagerly sought the familiar image. It is a happy thing that time quells the longings of vengeance and hushes the promptings of rage and aversion. I had left this woman in bitterness and hate, and I came back to her now with no other emotion than a sort of ruth for her great sufferings, and a strong yearning to forget and forgive all injuries--to be reconciled and clasp hands in amity. The well-known face was there: stern, relentless as ever--there was that peculiar eye which nothing could melt, and the somewhat raised, imperious, despotic eyebrow. How often had it lowered on me menace and hate! and how the recollection of childhood's terrors and sorrows revived as I traced its harsh line now! And yet I stooped down and kissed her: she looked at me. "Is this Jane Eyre?" she said. "Yes, Aunt Reed. How are you, dear aunt?" I had once vowed that I would never call her aunt again: I thought it no sin to forget and break that vow now. My fingers had fastened on her hand which lay outside the sheet: had she pressed mine kindly, I should at that moment have experienced true pleasure. But unimpressionable natures are not so soon softened, nor are natural antipathies so readily eradicated. Mrs. Reed took her hand away, and, turning her face rather from me, she remarked that the night was warm. Again she regarded me so icily, I felt at once that her opinion of me--her feeling towards me--was unchanged and unchangeable. I knew by her stony eye--opaque to tenderness, indissoluble to tears--that she was resolved to consider me bad to the last; because to believe me good would give her no generous pleasure: only a sense of mortification. I felt pain, and then I felt ire; and then I felt a determination to subdue her--to be her mistress in spite both of her nature and her will. My tears had risen, just as in childhood: I ordered them back to their source. I brought a chair to the bed-head: I sat down and leaned over the pillow. "You sent for me," I said, "and I am here; and it is my intention to stay till I see how you get on." "Oh, of course! You have seen my daughters?" "Yes." "Well, you may tell them I wish you to stay till I can talk some things over with you I have on my mind: to-night it is too late, and I have a difficulty in recalling them. But there was something I wished to say--let me see--" The wandering look and changed utterance told what wreck had taken place in her once vigorous frame. Turning restlessly, she drew the bedclothes round her; my elbow, resting on a corner of the quilt, fixed it down: she was at once irritated. "Sit up!" said she; "don't annoy me with holding the clothes fast. Are you Jane Eyre?" "I am Jane Eyre." "I have had more trouble with that child than any one would believe. Such a burden to be left on my hands--and so much annoyance as she caused me, daily and hourly, with her incomprehensible disposition, and her sudden starts of temper, and her continual, unnatural watchings of one's movements! I declare she talked to me once like something mad, or like a fiend--no child ever spoke or looked as she did; I was glad to get her away from the house. What did they do with her at Lowood? The fever broke out there, and many of the pupils died. She, however, did not die: but I said she did--I wish she had died!" "A strange wish, Mrs. Reed; why do you hate her so?" "I had a dislike to her mother always; for she was my husband's only sister, and a great favourite with him: he opposed the family's disowning her when she made her low marriage; and when news came of her death, he wept like a simpleton. He would send for the baby; though I entreated him rather to put it out to nurse and pay for its maintenance. I hated it the first time I set my eyes on it--a sickly, whining, pining thing! It would wail in its cradle all night long--not screaming heartily like any other child, but whimpering and moaning. Reed pitied it; and he used to nurse it and notice it as if it had been his own: more, indeed, than he ever noticed his own at that age. He would try to make my children friendly to the little beggar: the darlings could not bear it, and he was angry with them when they showed their dislike. In his last illness, he had it brought continually to his bedside; and but an hour before he died, he bound me by vow to keep the creature. I would as soon have been charged with a pauper brat out of a workhouse: but he was weak, naturally weak. John does not at all resemble his father, and I am glad of it: John is like me and like my brothers--he is quite a Gibson. Oh, I wish he would cease tormenting me with letters for money? I have no more money to give him: we are getting poor. I must send away half the servants and shut up part of the house; or let it off. I can never submit to do that--yet how are we to get on? Two-thirds of my income goes in paying the interest of mortgages. John gambles dreadfully, and always loses--poor boy! He is beset by sharpers: John is sunk and degraded--his look is frightful--I feel ashamed for him when I see him." She was getting much excited. "I think I had better leave her now," said I to Bessie, who stood on the other side of the bed. "Perhaps you had, Miss: but she often talks in this way towards night--in the morning she is calmer." I rose. "Stop!" exclaimed Mrs. Reed, "there is another thing I wished to say. He threatens me--he continually threatens me with his own death, or mine: and I dream sometimes that I see him laid out with a great wound in his throat, or with a swollen and blackened face. I am come to a strange pass: I have heavy troubles. What is to be done? How is the money to be had?" Bessie now endeavoured to persuade her to take a sedative draught: she succeeded with difficulty. Soon after, Mrs. Reed grew more composed, and sank into a dozing state. I then left her. More than ten days elapsed before I had again any conversation with her. She continued either delirious or lethargic; and the doctor forbade everything which could painfully excite her. Meantime, I got on as well as I could with Georgiana and Eliza. They were very cold, indeed, at first. Eliza would sit half the day sewing, reading, or writing, and scarcely utter a word either to me or her sister. Georgiana would chatter nonsense to her canary bird by the hour, and take no notice of me. But I was determined not to seem at a loss for occupation or amusement: I had brought my drawing materials with me, and they served me for both. Provided with a case of pencils, and some sheets of paper, I used to take a seat apart from them, near the window, and busy myself in sketching fancy vignettes, representing any scene that happened momentarily to shape itself in the ever-shifting kaleidoscope of imagination: a glimpse of sea between two rocks; the rising moon, and a ship crossing its disk; a group of reeds and water-flags, and a naiad's head, crowned with lotus- flowers, rising out of them; an elf sitting in a hedge-sparrow's nest, under a wreath of hawthorn-bloom. One morning I fell to sketching a face: what sort of a face it was to be, I did not care or know. I took a soft black pencil, gave it a broad point, and worked away. Soon I had traced on the paper a broad and prominent forehead and a square lower outline of visage: that contour gave me pleasure; my fingers proceeded actively to fill it with features. Strongly-marked horizontal eyebrows must be traced under that brow; then followed, naturally, a well-defined nose, with a straight ridge and full nostrils; then a flexible-looking mouth, by no means narrow; then a firm chin, with a decided cleft down the middle of it: of course, some black whiskers were wanted, and some jetty hair, tufted on the temples, and waved above the forehead. Now for the eyes: I had left them to the last, because they required the most careful working. I drew them large; I shaped them well: the eyelashes I traced long and sombre; the irids lustrous and large. "Good! but not quite the thing," I thought, as I surveyed the effect: "they want more force and spirit;" and I wrought the shades blacker, that the lights might flash more brilliantly--a happy touch or two secured success. There, I had a friend's face under my gaze; and what did it signify that those young ladies turned their backs on me? I looked at it; I smiled at the speaking likeness: I was absorbed and content. "Is that a portrait of some one you know?" asked Eliza, who had approached me unnoticed. I responded that it was merely a fancy head, and hurried it beneath the other sheets. Of course, I lied: it was, in fact, a very faithful representation of Mr. Rochester. But what was that to her, or to any one but myself? Georgiana also advanced to look. The other drawings pleased her much, but she called that "an ugly man." They both seemed surprised at my skill. I offered to sketch their portraits; and each, in turn, sat for a pencil outline. Then Georgiana produced her album. I promised to contribute a water-colour drawing: this put her at once into good humour. She proposed a walk in the grounds. Before we had been out two hours, we were deep in a confidential conversation: she had favoured me with a description of the brilliant winter she had spent in London two seasons ago--of the admiration she had there excited--the attention she had received; and I even got hints of the titled conquest she had made. In the course of the afternoon and evening these hints were enlarged on: various soft conversations were reported, and sentimental scenes represented; and, in short, a volume of a novel of fashionable life was that day improvised by her for my benefit. The communications were renewed from day to day: they always ran on the same theme--herself, her loves, and woes. It was strange she never once adverted either to her mother's illness, or her brother's death, or the present gloomy state of the family prospects. Her mind seemed wholly taken up with reminiscences of past gaiety, and aspirations after dissipations to come. She passed about five minutes each day in her mother's sick-room, and no more. Eliza still spoke little: she had evidently no time to talk. I never saw a busier person than she seemed to be; yet it was difficult to say what she did: or rather, to discover any result of her diligence. She had an alarm to call her up early. I know not how she occupied herself before breakfast, but after that meal she divided her time into regular portions, and each hour had its allotted task. Three times a day she studied a little book, which I found, on inspection, was a Common Prayer Book. I asked her once what was the great attraction of that volume, and she said, "the Rubric." Three hours she gave to stitching, with gold thread, the border of a square crimson cloth, almost large enough for a carpet. In answer to my inquiries after the use of this article, she informed me it was a covering for the altar of a new church lately erected near Gateshead. Two hours she devoted to her diary; two to working by herself in the kitchen-garden; and one to the regulation of her accounts. She seemed to want no company; no conversation. I believe she was happy in her way: this routine sufficed for her; and nothing annoyed her so much as the occurrence of any incident which forced her to vary its clockwork regularity. She told me one evening, when more disposed to be communicative than usual, that John's conduct, and the threatened ruin of the family, had been a source of profound affliction to her: but she had now, she said, settled her mind, and formed her resolution. Her own fortune she had taken care to secure; and when her mother died--and it was wholly improbable, she tranquilly remarked, that she should either recover or linger long--she would execute a long-cherished project: seek a retirement where punctual habits would be permanently secured from disturbance, and place safe barriers between herself and a frivolous world. I asked if Georgiana would accompany her. "Of course not. Georgiana and she had nothing in common: they never had had. She would not be burdened with her society for any consideration. Georgiana should take her own course; and she, Eliza, would take hers." Georgiana, when not unburdening her heart to me, spent most of her time in lying on the sofa, fretting about the dulness of the house, and wishing over and over again that her aunt Gibson would send her an invitation up to town. "It would be so much better," she said, "if she could only get out of the way for a month or two, till all was over." I did not ask what she meant by "all being over," but I suppose she referred to the expected decease of her mother and the gloomy sequel of funeral rites. Eliza generally took no more notice of her sister's indolence and complaints than if no such murmuring, lounging object had been before her. One day, however, as she put away her account-book and unfolded her embroidery, she suddenly took her up thus-- "Georgiana, a more vain and absurd animal than you was certainly never allowed to cumber the earth. You had no right to be born, for you make no use of life. Instead of living for, in, and with yourself, as a reasonable being ought, you seek only to fasten your feebleness on some other person's strength: if no one can be found willing to burden her or himself with such a fat, weak, puffy, useless thing, you cry out that you are ill-treated, neglected, miserable. Then, too, existence for you must be a scene of continual change and excitement, or else the world is a dungeon: you must be admired, you must be courted, you must be flattered--you must have music, dancing, and society--or you languish, you die away. Have you no sense to devise a system which will make you independent of all efforts, and all wills, but your own? Take one day; share it into sections; to each section apportion its task: leave no stray unemployed quarters of an hour, ten minutes, five minutes--include all; do each piece of business in its turn with method, with rigid regularity. The day will close almost before you are aware it has begun; and you are indebted to no one for helping you to get rid of one vacant moment: you have had to seek no one's company, conversation, sympathy, forbearance; you have lived, in short, as an independent being ought to do. Take this advice: the first and last I shall offer you; then you will not want me or any one else, happen what may. Neglect it--go on as heretofore, craving, whining, and idling--and suffer the results of your idiocy, however bad and insuperable they may be. I tell you this plainly; and listen: for though I shall no more repeat what I am now about to say, I shall steadily act on it. After my mother's death, I wash my hands of you: from the day her coffin is carried to the vault in Gateshead Church, you and I will be as separate as if we had never known each other. You need not think that because we chanced to be born of the same parents, I shall suffer you to fasten me down by even the feeblest claim: I can tell you this--if the whole human race, ourselves excepted, were swept away, and we two stood alone on the earth, I would leave you in the old world, and betake myself to the new." She closed her lips. "You might have spared yourself the trouble of delivering that tirade," answered Georgiana. "Everybody knows you are the most selfish, heartless creature in existence: and _I_ know your spiteful hatred towards me: I have had a specimen of it before in the trick you played me about Lord Edwin Vere: you could not bear me to be raised above you, to have a title, to be received into circles where you dare not show your face, and so you acted the spy and informer, and ruined my prospects for ever." Georgiana took out her handkerchief and blew her nose for an hour afterwards; Eliza sat cold, impassable, and assiduously industrious. True, generous feeling is made small account of by some, but here were two natures rendered, the one intolerably acrid, the other despicably savourless for the want of it. Feeling without judgment is a washy draught indeed; but judgment untempered by feeling is too bitter and husky a morsel for human deglutition. It was a wet and windy afternoon: Georgiana had fallen asleep on the sofa over the perusal of a novel; Eliza was gone to attend a saint's-day service at the new church--for in matters of religion she was a rigid formalist: no weather ever prevented the punctual discharge of what she considered her devotional duties; fair or foul, she went to church thrice every Sunday, and as often on week-days as there were prayers. I bethought myself to go upstairs and see how the dying woman sped, who lay there almost unheeded: the very servants paid her but a remittent attention: the hired nurse, being little looked after, would slip out of the room whenever she could. Bessie was faithful; but she had her own family to mind, and could only come occasionally to the hall. I found the sick-room unwatched, as I had expected: no nurse was there; the patient lay still, and seemingly lethargic; her livid face sunk in the pillows: the fire was dying in the grate. I renewed the fuel, re-arranged the bedclothes, gazed awhile on her who could not now gaze on me, and then I moved away to the window. The rain beat strongly against the panes, the wind blew tempestuously: "One lies there," I thought, "who will soon be beyond the war of earthly elements. Whither will that spirit--now struggling to quit its material tenement--flit when at length released?" In pondering the great mystery, I thought of Helen Burns, recalled her dying words--her faith--her doctrine of the equality of disembodied souls. I was still listening in thought to her well-remembered tones--still picturing her pale and spiritual aspect, her wasted face and sublime gaze, as she lay on her placid deathbed, and whispered her longing to be restored to her divine Father's bosom--when a feeble voice murmured from the couch behind: "Who is that?" I knew Mrs. Reed had not spoken for days: was she reviving? I went up to her. "It is I, Aunt Reed." "Who--I?" was her answer. "Who are you?" looking at me with surprise and a sort of alarm, but still not wildly. "You are quite a stranger to me--where is Bessie?" "She is at the lodge, aunt." "Aunt," she repeated. "Who calls me aunt? You are not one of the Gibsons; and yet I know you--that face, and the eyes and forehead, are quiet familiar to me: you are like--why, you are like Jane Eyre!" I said nothing: I was afraid of occasioning some shock by declaring my identity. "Yet," said she, "I am afraid it is a mistake: my thoughts deceive me. I wished to see Jane Eyre, and I fancy a likeness where none exists: besides, in eight years she must be so changed." I now gently assured her that I was the person she supposed and desired me to be: and seeing that I was understood, and that her senses were quite collected, I explained how Bessie had sent her husband to fetch me from Thornfield. "I am very ill, I know," she said ere long. "I was trying to turn myself a few minutes since, and find I cannot move a limb. It is as well I should ease my mind before I die: what we think little of in health, burdens us at such an hour as the present is to me. Is the nurse here? or is there no one in the room but you?" I assured her we were alone. "Well, I have twice done you a wrong which I regret now. One was in breaking the promise which I gave my husband to bring you up as my own child; the other--" she stopped. "After all, it is of no great importance, perhaps," she murmured to herself: "and then I may get better; and to humble myself so to her is painful." She made an effort to alter her position, but failed: her face changed; she seemed to experience some inward sensation--the precursor, perhaps, of the last pang. "Well, I must get it over. Eternity is before me: I had better tell her.--Go to my dressing-case, open it, and take out a letter you will see there." I obeyed her directions. "Read the letter," she said. It was short, and thus conceived:-- "Madam,--Will you have the goodness to send me the address of my niece, Jane Eyre, and to tell me how she is? It is my intention to write shortly and desire her to come to me at Madeira. Providence has blessed my endeavours to secure a competency; and as I am unmarried and childless, I wish to adopt her during my life, and bequeath her at my death whatever I may have to leave.--I am, Madam, &c., &c., "JOHN EYRE, Madeira." It was dated three years back. "Why did I never hear of this?" I asked. "Because I disliked you too fixedly and thoroughly ever to lend a hand in lifting you to prosperity. I could not forget your conduct to me, Jane--the fury with which you once turned on me; the tone in which you declared you abhorred me the worst of anybody in the world; the unchildlike look and voice with which you affirmed that the very thought of me made you sick, and asserted that I had treated you with miserable cruelty. I could not forget my own sensations when you thus started up and poured out the venom of your mind: I felt fear as if an animal that I had struck or pushed had looked up at me with human eyes and cursed me in a man's voice.--Bring me some water! Oh, make haste!" "Dear Mrs. Reed," said I, as I offered her the draught she required, "think no more of all this, let it pass away from your mind. Forgive me for my passionate language: I was a child then; eight, nine years have passed since that day." She heeded nothing of what I said; but when she had tasted the water and drawn breath, she went on thus-- "I tell you I could not forget it; and I took my revenge: for you to be adopted by your uncle, and placed in a state of ease and comfort, was what I could not endure. I wrote to him; I said I was sorry for his disappointment, but Jane Eyre was dead: she had died of typhus fever at Lowood. Now act as you please: write and contradict my assertion--expose my falsehood as soon as you like. You were born, I think, to be my torment: my last hour is racked by the recollection of a deed which, but for you, I should never have been tempted to commit." "If you could but be persuaded to think no more of it, aunt, and to regard me with kindness and forgiveness" "You have a very bad disposition," said she, "and one to this day I feel it impossible to understand: how for nine years you could be patient and quiescent under any treatment, and in the tenth break out all fire and violence, I can never comprehend." "My disposition is not so bad as you think: I am passionate, but not vindictive. Many a time, as a little child, I should have been glad to love you if you would have let me; and I long earnestly to be reconciled to you now: kiss me, aunt." I approached my cheek to her lips: she would not touch it. She said I oppressed her by leaning over the bed, and again demanded water. As I laid her down--for I raised her and supported her on my arm while she drank--I covered her ice-cold and clammy hand with mine: the feeble fingers shrank from my touch--the glazing eyes shunned my gaze. "Love me, then, or hate me, as you will," I said at last, "you have my full and free forgiveness: ask now for God's, and be at peace." Poor, suffering woman! it was too late for her to make now the effort to change her habitual frame of mind: living, she had ever hated me--dying, she must hate me still. The nurse now entered, and Bessie followed. I yet lingered half-an-hour longer, hoping to see some sign of amity: but she gave none. She was fast relapsing into stupor; nor did her mind again rally: at twelve o'clock that night she died. I was not present to close her eyes, nor were either of her daughters. They came to tell us the next morning that all was over. She was by that time laid out. Eliza and I went to look at her: Georgiana, who had burst out into loud weeping, said she dared not go. There was stretched Sarah Reed's once robust and active frame, rigid and still: her eye of flint was covered with its cold lid; her brow and strong traits wore yet the impress of her inexorable soul. A strange and solemn object was that corpse to me. I gazed on it with gloom and pain: nothing soft, nothing sweet, nothing pitying, or hopeful, or subduing did it inspire; only a grating anguish for _her_ woes--not _my_ loss--and a sombre tearless dismay at the fearfulness of death in such a form. Eliza surveyed her parent calmly. After a silence of some minutes she observed-- "With her constitution she should have lived to a good old age: her life was shortened by trouble." And then a spasm constricted her mouth for an instant: as it passed away she turned and left the room, and so did I. Neither of us had dropt a tear. CHAPTER XXII Mr. Rochester had given me but one week's leave of absence: yet a month elapsed before I quitted Gateshead. I wished to leave immediately after the funeral, but Georgiana entreated me to stay till she could get off to London, whither she was now at last invited by her uncle, Mr. Gibson, who had come down to direct his sister's interment and settle the family affairs. Georgiana said she dreaded being left alone with Eliza; from her she got neither sympathy in her dejection, support in her fears, nor aid in her preparations; so I bore with her feeble-minded wailings and selfish lamentations as well as I could, and did my best in sewing for her and packing her dresses. It is true, that while I worked, she would idle; and I thought to myself, "If you and I were destined to live always together, cousin, we would commence matters on a different footing. I should not settle tamely down into being the forbearing party; I should assign you your share of labour, and compel you to accomplish it, or else it should be left undone: I should insist, also, on your keeping some of those drawling, half-insincere complaints hushed in your own breast. It is only because our connection happens to be very transitory, and comes at a peculiarly mournful season, that I consent thus to render it so patient and compliant on my part." At last I saw Georgiana off; but now it was Eliza's turn to request me to stay another week. Her plans required all her time and attention, she said; she was about to depart for some unknown bourne; and all day long she stayed in her own room, her door bolted within, filling trunks, emptying drawers, burning papers, and holding no communication with any one. She wished me to look after the house, to see callers, and answer notes of condolence. One morning she told me I was at liberty. "And," she added, "I am obliged to you for your valuable services and discreet conduct! There is some difference between living with such an one as you and with Georgiana: you perform your own part in life and burden no one. To-morrow," she continued, "I set out for the Continent. I shall take up my abode in a religious house near Lisle--a nunnery you would call it; there I shall be quiet and unmolested. I shall devote myself for a time to the examination of the Roman Catholic dogmas, and to a careful study of the workings of their system: if I find it to be, as I half suspect it is, the one best calculated to ensure the doing of all things decently and in order, I shall embrace the tenets of Rome and probably take the veil." I neither expressed surprise at this resolution nor attempted to dissuade her from it. "The vocation will fit you to a hair," I thought: "much good may it do you!" When we parted, she said: "Good-bye, cousin Jane Eyre; I wish you well: you have some sense." I then returned: "You are not without sense, cousin Eliza; but what you have, I suppose, in another year will be walled up alive in a French convent. However, it is not my business, and so it suits you, I don't much care." "You are in the right," said she; and with these words we each went our separate way. As I shall not have occasion to refer either to her or her sister again, I may as well mention here, that Georgiana made an advantageous match with a wealthy worn-out man of fashion, and that Eliza actually took the veil, and is at this day superior of the convent where she passed the period of her novitiate, and which she endowed with her fortune. How people feel when they are returning home from an absence, long or short, I did not know: I had never experienced the sensation. I had known what it was to come back to Gateshead when a child after a long walk, to be scolded for looking cold or gloomy; and later, what it was to come back from church to Lowood, to long for a plenteous meal and a good fire, and to be unable to get either. Neither of these returnings was very pleasant or desirable: no magnet drew me to a given point, increasing in its strength of attraction the nearer I came. The return to Thornfield was yet to be tried. My journey seemed tedious--very tedious: fifty miles one day, a night spent at an inn; fifty miles the next day. During the first twelve hours I thought of Mrs. Reed in her last moments; I saw her disfigured and discoloured face, and heard her strangely altered voice. I mused on the funeral day, the coffin, the hearse, the black train of tenants and servants--few was the number of relatives--the gaping vault, the silent church, the solemn service. Then I thought of Eliza and Georgiana; I beheld one the cynosure of a ball-room, the other the inmate of a convent cell; and I dwelt on and analysed their separate peculiarities of person and character. The evening arrival at the great town of--scattered these thoughts; night gave them quite another turn: laid down on my traveller's bed, I left reminiscence for anticipation. I was going back to Thornfield: but how long was I to stay there? Not long; of that I was sure. I had heard from Mrs. Fairfax in the interim of my absence: the party at the hall was dispersed; Mr. Rochester had left for London three weeks ago, but he was then expected to return in a fortnight. Mrs. Fairfax surmised that he was gone to make arrangements for his wedding, as he had talked of purchasing a new carriage: she said the idea of his marrying Miss Ingram still seemed strange to her; but from what everybody said, and from what she had herself seen, she could no longer doubt that the event would shortly take place. "You would be strangely incredulous if you did doubt it," was my mental comment. "I don't doubt it." The question followed, "Where was I to go?" I dreamt of Miss Ingram all the night: in a vivid morning dream I saw her closing the gates of Thornfield against me and pointing me out another road; and Mr. Rochester looked on with his arms folded--smiling sardonically, as it seemed, at both her and me. I had not notified to Mrs. Fairfax the exact day of my return; for I did not wish either car or carriage to meet me at Millcote. I proposed to walk the distance quietly by myself; and very quietly, after leaving my box in the ostler's care, did I slip away from the George Inn, about six o'clock of a June evening, and take the old road to Thornfield: a road which lay chiefly through fields, and was now little frequented. It was not a bright or splendid summer evening, though fair and soft: the haymakers were at work all along the road; and the sky, though far from cloudless, was such as promised well for the future: its blue--where blue was visible--was mild and settled, and its cloud strata high and thin. The west, too, was warm: no watery gleam chilled it--it seemed as if there was a fire lit, an altar burning behind its screen of marbled vapour, and out of apertures shone a golden redness. I felt glad as the road shortened before me: so glad that I stopped once to ask myself what that joy meant: and to remind reason that it was not to my home I was going, or to a permanent resting-place, or to a place where fond friends looked out for me and waited my arrival. "Mrs. Fairfax will smile you a calm welcome, to be sure," said I; "and little Adele will clap her hands and jump to see you: but you know very well you are thinking of another than they, and that he is not thinking of you." But what is so headstrong as youth? What so blind as inexperience? These affirmed that it was pleasure enough to have the privilege of again looking on Mr. Rochester, whether he looked on me or not; and they added--"Hasten! hasten! be with him while you may: but a few more days or weeks, at most, and you are parted from him for ever!" And then I strangled a new-born agony--a deformed thing which I could not persuade myself to own and rear--and ran on. They are making hay, too, in Thornfield meadows: or rather, the labourers are just quitting their work, and returning home with their rakes on their shoulders, now, at the hour I arrive. I have but a field or two to traverse, and then I shall cross the road and reach the gates. How full the hedges are of roses! But I have no time to gather any; I want to be at the house. I passed a tall briar, shooting leafy and flowery branches across the path; I see the narrow stile with stone steps; and I see--Mr. Rochester sitting there, a book and a pencil in his hand; he is writing. Well, he is not a ghost; yet every nerve I have is unstrung: for a moment I am beyond my own mastery. What does it mean? I did not think I should tremble in this way when I saw him, or lose my voice or the power of motion in his presence. I will go back as soon as I can stir: I need not make an absolute fool of myself. I know another way to the house. It does not signify if I knew twenty ways; for he has seen me. "Hillo!" he cries; and he puts up his book and his pencil. "There you are! Come on, if you please." I suppose I do come on; though in what fashion I know not; being scarcely cognisant of my movements, and solicitous only to appear calm; and, above all, to control the working muscles of my face--which I feel rebel insolently against my will, and struggle to express what I had resolved to conceal. But I have a veil--it is down: I may make shift yet to behave with decent composure. "And this is Jane Eyre? Are you coming from Millcote, and on foot? Yes--just one of your tricks: not to send for a carriage, and come clattering over street and road like a common mortal, but to steal into the vicinage of your home along with twilight, just as if you were a dream or a shade. What the deuce have you done with yourself this last month?" "I have been with my aunt, sir, who is dead." "A true Janian reply! Good angels be my guard! She comes from the other world--from the abode of people who are dead; and tells me so when she meets me alone here in the gloaming! If I dared, I'd touch you, to see if you are substance or shadow, you elf!--but I'd as soon offer to take hold of a blue _ignis fatuus_ light in a marsh. Truant! truant!" he added, when he had paused an instant. "Absent from me a whole month, and forgetting me quite, I'll be sworn!" I knew there would be pleasure in meeting my master again, even though broken by the fear that he was so soon to cease to be my master, and by the knowledge that I was nothing to him: but there was ever in Mr. Rochester (so at least I thought) such a wealth of the power of communicating happiness, that to taste but of the crumbs he scattered to stray and stranger birds like me, was to feast genially. His last words were balm: they seemed to imply that it imported something to him whether I forgot him or not. And he had spoken of Thornfield as my home--would that it were my home! He did not leave the stile, and I hardly liked to ask to go by. I inquired soon if he had not been to London. "Yes; I suppose you found that out by second-sight." "Mrs. Fairfax told me in a letter." "And did she inform you what I went to do?" "Oh, yes, sir! Everybody knew your errand." "You must see the carriage, Jane, and tell me if you don't think it will suit Mrs. Rochester exactly; and whether she won't look like Queen Boadicea, leaning back against those purple cushions. I wish, Jane, I were a trifle better adapted to match with her externally. Tell me now, fairy as you are--can't you give me a charm, or a philter, or something of that sort, to make me a handsome man?" "It would be past the power of magic, sir;" and, in thought, I added, "A loving eye is all the charm needed: to such you are handsome enough; or rather your sternness has a power beyond beauty." Mr. Rochester had sometimes read my unspoken thoughts with an acumen to me incomprehensible: in the present instance he took no notice of my abrupt vocal response; but he smiled at me with a certain smile he had of his own, and which he used but on rare occasions. He seemed to think it too good for common purposes: it was the real sunshine of feeling--he shed it over me now. "Pass, Janet," said he, making room for me to cross the stile: "go up home, and stay your weary little wandering feet at a friend's threshold." All I had now to do was to obey him in silence: no need for me to colloquise further. I got over the stile without a word, and meant to leave him calmly. An impulse held me fast--a force turned me round. I said--or something in me said for me, and in spite of me-- "Thank you, Mr. Rochester, for your great kindness. I am strangely glad to get back again to you: and wherever you are is my home--my only home." I walked on so fast that even he could hardly have overtaken me had he tried. Little Adele was half wild with delight when she saw me. Mrs. Fairfax received me with her usual plain friendliness. Leah smiled, and even Sophie bid me "bon soir" with glee. This was very pleasant; there is no happiness like that of being loved by your fellow-creatures, and feeling that your presence is an addition to their comfort. I that evening shut my eyes resolutely against the future: I stopped my ears against the voice that kept warning me of near separation and coming grief. When tea was over and Mrs. Fairfax had taken her knitting, and I had assumed a low seat near her, and Adele, kneeling on the carpet, had nestled close up to me, and a sense of mutual affection seemed to surround us with a ring of golden peace, I uttered a silent prayer that we might not be parted far or soon; but when, as we thus sat, Mr. Rochester entered, unannounced, and looking at us, seemed to take pleasure in the spectacle of a group so amicable--when he said he supposed the old lady was all right now that she had got her adopted daughter back again, and added that he saw Adele was "prete a croquer sa petite maman Anglaise"--I half ventured to hope that he would, even after his marriage, keep us together somewhere under the shelter of his protection, and not quite exiled from the sunshine of his presence. A fortnight of dubious calm succeeded my return to Thornfield Hall. Nothing was said of the master's marriage, and I saw no preparation going on for such an event. Almost every day I asked Mrs. Fairfax if she had yet heard anything decided: her answer was always in the negative. Once she said she had actually put the question to Mr. Rochester as to when he was going to bring his bride home; but he had answered her only by a joke and one of his queer looks, and she could not tell what to make of him. One thing specially surprised me, and that was, there were no journeyings backward and forward, no visits to Ingram Park: to be sure it was twenty miles off, on the borders of another county; but what was that distance to an ardent lover? To so practised and indefatigable a horseman as Mr. Rochester, it would be but a morning's ride. I began to cherish hopes I had no right to conceive: that the match was broken off; that rumour had been mistaken; that one or both parties had changed their minds. I used to look at my master's face to see if it were sad or fierce; but I could not remember the time when it had been so uniformly clear of clouds or evil feelings. If, in the moments I and my pupil spent with him, I lacked spirits and sank into inevitable dejection, he became even gay. Never had he called me more frequently to his presence; never been kinder to me when there--and, alas! never had I loved him so well. CHAPTER XXIII A splendid Midsummer shone over England: skies so pure, suns so radiant as were then seen in long succession, seldom favour even singly, our wave- girt land. It was as if a band of Italian days had come from the South, like a flock of glorious passenger birds, and lighted to rest them on the cliffs of Albion. The hay was all got in; the fields round Thornfield were green and shorn; the roads white and baked; the trees were in their dark prime; hedge and wood, full-leaved and deeply tinted, contrasted well with the sunny hue of the cleared meadows between. On Midsummer-eve, Adele, weary with gathering wild strawberries in Hay Lane half the day, had gone to bed with the sun. I watched her drop asleep, and when I left her, I sought the garden. It was now the sweetest hour of the twenty-four:--"Day its fervid fires had wasted," and dew fell cool on panting plain and scorched summit. Where the sun had gone down in simple state--pure of the pomp of clouds--spread a solemn purple, burning with the light of red jewel and furnace flame at one point, on one hill-peak, and extending high and wide, soft and still softer, over half heaven. The east had its own charm or fine deep blue, and its own modest gem, a casino and solitary star: soon it would boast the moon; but she was yet beneath the horizon. I walked a while on the pavement; but a subtle, well-known scent--that of a cigar--stole from some window; I saw the library casement open a handbreadth; I knew I might be watched thence; so I went apart into the orchard. No nook in the grounds more sheltered and more Eden-like; it was full of trees, it bloomed with flowers: a very high wall shut it out from the court, on one side; on the other, a beech avenue screened it from the lawn. At the bottom was a sunk fence; its sole separation from lonely fields: a winding walk, bordered with laurels and terminating in a giant horse-chestnut, circled at the base by a seat, led down to the fence. Here one could wander unseen. While such honey-dew fell, such silence reigned, such gloaming gathered, I felt as if I could haunt such shade for ever; but in threading the flower and fruit parterres at the upper part of the enclosure, enticed there by the light the now rising moon cast on this more open quarter, my step is stayed--not by sound, not by sight, but once more by a warning fragrance. Sweet-briar and southernwood, jasmine, pink, and rose have long been yielding their evening sacrifice of incense: this new scent is neither of shrub nor flower; it is--I know it well--it is Mr. Rochester's cigar. I look round and I listen. I see trees laden with ripening fruit. I hear a nightingale warbling in a wood half a mile off; no moving form is visible, no coming step audible; but that perfume increases: I must flee. I make for the wicket leading to the shrubbery, and I see Mr. Rochester entering. I step aside into the ivy recess; he will not stay long: he will soon return whence he came, and if I sit still he will never see me. But no--eventide is as pleasant to him as to me, and this antique garden as attractive; and he strolls on, now lifting the gooseberry-tree branches to look at the fruit, large as plums, with which they are laden; now taking a ripe cherry from the wall; now stooping towards a knot of flowers, either to inhale their fragrance or to admire the dew-beads on their petals. A great moth goes humming by me; it alights on a plant at Mr. Rochester's foot: he sees it, and bends to examine it. "Now, he has his back towards me," thought I, "and he is occupied too; perhaps, if I walk softly, I can slip away unnoticed." I trode on an edging of turf that the crackle of the pebbly gravel might not betray me: he was standing among the beds at a yard or two distant from where I had to pass; the moth apparently engaged him. "I shall get by very well," I meditated. As I crossed his shadow, thrown long over the garden by the moon, not yet risen high, he said quietly, without turning-- "Jane, come and look at this fellow." I had made no noise: he had not eyes behind--could his shadow feel? I started at first, and then I approached him. "Look at his wings," said he, "he reminds me rather of a West Indian insect; one does not often see so large and gay a night-rover in England; there! he is flown." The moth roamed away. I was sheepishly retreating also; but Mr. Rochester followed me, and when we reached the wicket, he said-- "Turn back: on so lovely a night it is a shame to sit in the house; and surely no one can wish to go to bed while sunset is thus at meeting with moonrise." It is one of my faults, that though my tongue is sometimes prompt enough at an answer, there are times when it sadly fails me in framing an excuse; and always the lapse occurs at some crisis, when a facile word or plausible pretext is specially wanted to get me out of painful embarrassment. I did not like to walk at this hour alone with Mr. Rochester in the shadowy orchard; but I could not find a reason to allege for leaving him. I followed with lagging step, and thoughts busily bent on discovering a means of extrication; but he himself looked so composed and so grave also, I became ashamed of feeling any confusion: the evil--if evil existent or prospective there was--seemed to lie with me only; his mind was unconscious and quiet. "Jane," he recommenced, as we entered the laurel walk, and slowly strayed down in the direction of the sunk fence and the horse-chestnut, "Thornfield is a pleasant place in summer, is it not?" "Yes, sir." "You must have become in some degree attached to the house,--you, who have an eye for natural beauties, and a good deal of the organ of Adhesiveness?" "I am attached to it, indeed." "And though I don't comprehend how it is, I perceive you have acquired a degree of regard for that foolish little child Adele, too; and even for simple dame Fairfax?" "Yes, sir; in different ways, I have an affection for both." "And would be sorry to part with them?" "Yes." "Pity!" he said, and sighed and paused. "It is always the way of events in this life," he continued presently: "no sooner have you got settled in a pleasant resting-place, than a voice calls out to you to rise and move on, for the hour of repose is expired." "Must I move on, sir?" I asked. "Must I leave Thornfield?" "I believe you must, Jane. I am sorry, Janet, but I believe indeed you must." This was a blow: but I did not let it prostrate me. "Well, sir, I shall be ready when the order to march comes." "It is come now--I must give it to-night." "Then you _are_ going to be married, sir?" "Ex-act-ly--pre-cise-ly: with your usual acuteness, you have hit the nail straight on the head." "Soon, sir?" "Very soon, my--that is, Miss Eyre: and you'll remember, Jane, the first time I, or Rumour, plainly intimated to you that it was my intention to put my old bachelor's neck into the sacred noose, to enter into the holy estate of matrimony--to take Miss Ingram to my bosom, in short (she's an extensive armful: but that's not to the point--one can't have too much of such a very excellent thing as my beautiful Blanche): well, as I was saying--listen to me, Jane! You're not turning your head to look after more moths, are you? That was only a lady-clock, child, 'flying away home.' I wish to remind you that it was you who first said to me, with that discretion I respect in you--with that foresight, prudence, and humility which befit your responsible and dependent position--that in case I married Miss Ingram, both you and little Adele had better trot forthwith. I pass over the sort of slur conveyed in this suggestion on the character of my beloved; indeed, when you are far away, Janet, I'll try to forget it: I shall notice only its wisdom; which is such that I have made it my law of action. Adele must go to school; and you, Miss Eyre, must get a new situation." "Yes, sir, I will advertise immediately: and meantime, I suppose--" I was going to say, "I suppose I may stay here, till I find another shelter to betake myself to:" but I stopped, feeling it would not do to risk a long sentence, for my voice was not quite under command. "In about a month I hope to be a bridegroom," continued Mr. Rochester; "and in the interim, I shall myself look out for employment and an asylum for you." "Thank you, sir; I am sorry to give--" "Oh, no need to apologise! I consider that when a dependent does her duty as well as you have done yours, she has a sort of claim upon her employer for any little assistance he can conveniently render her; indeed I have already, through my future mother-in-law, heard of a place that I think will suit: it is to undertake the education of the five daughters of Mrs. Dionysius O'Gall of Bitternutt Lodge, Connaught, Ireland. You'll like Ireland, I think: they're such warm-hearted people there, they say." "It is a long way off, sir." "No matter--a girl of your sense will not object to the voyage or the distance." "Not the voyage, but the distance: and then the sea is a barrier--" "From what, Jane?" "From England and from Thornfield: and--" "Well?" "From _you_, sir." I said this almost involuntarily, and, with as little sanction of free will, my tears gushed out. I did not cry so as to be heard, however; I avoided sobbing. The thought of Mrs. O'Gall and Bitternutt Lodge struck cold to my heart; and colder the thought of all the brine and foam, destined, as it seemed, to rush between me and the master at whose side I now walked, and coldest the remembrance of the wider ocean--wealth, caste, custom intervened between me and what I naturally and inevitably loved. "It is a long way," I again said. "It is, to be sure; and when you get to Bitternutt Lodge, Connaught, Ireland, I shall never see you again, Jane: that's morally certain. I never go over to Ireland, not having myself much of a fancy for the country. We have been good friends, Jane; have we not?" "Yes, sir." "And when friends are on the eve of separation, they like to spend the little time that remains to them close to each other. Come! we'll talk over the voyage and the parting quietly half-an-hour or so, while the stars enter into their shining life up in heaven yonder: here is the chestnut tree: here is the bench at its old roots. Come, we will sit there in peace to-night, though we should never more be destined to sit there together." He seated me and himself. "It is a long way to Ireland, Janet, and I am sorry to send my little friend on such weary travels: but if I can't do better, how is it to be helped? Are you anything akin to me, do you think, Jane?" I could risk no sort of answer by this time: my heart was still. "Because," he said, "I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you--especially when you are near me, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous Channel, and two hundred miles or so of land come broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapt; and then I've a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly. As for you,--you'd forget me." "That I _never_ should, sir: you know--" Impossible to proceed. "Jane, do you hear that nightingale singing in the wood? Listen!" In listening, I sobbed convulsively; for I could repress what I endured no longer; I was obliged to yield, and I was shaken from head to foot with acute distress. When I did speak, it was only to express an impetuous wish that I had never been born, or never come to Thornfield. "Because you are sorry to leave it?" The vehemence of emotion, stirred by grief and love within me, was claiming mastery, and struggling for full sway, and asserting a right to predominate, to overcome, to live, rise, and reign at last: yes,--and to speak. "I grieve to leave Thornfield: I love Thornfield:--I love it, because I have lived in it a full and delightful life,--momentarily at least. I have not been trampled on. I have not been petrified. I have not been buried with inferior minds, and excluded from every glimpse of communion with what is bright and energetic and high. I have talked, face to face, with what I reverence, with what I delight in,--with an original, a vigorous, an expanded mind. I have known you, Mr. Rochester; and it strikes me with terror and anguish to feel I absolutely must be torn from you for ever. I see the necessity of departure; and it is like looking on the necessity of death." "Where do you see the necessity?" he asked suddenly. "Where? You, sir, have placed it before me." "In what shape?" "In the shape of Miss Ingram; a noble and beautiful woman,--your bride." "My bride! What bride? I have no bride!" "But you will have." "Yes;--I will!--I will!" He set his teeth. "Then I must go:--you have said it yourself." "No: you must stay! I swear it--and the oath shall be kept." "I tell you I must go!" I retorted, roused to something like passion. "Do you think I can stay to become nothing to you? Do you think I am an automaton?--a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong!--I have as much soul as you,--and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh;--it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal,--as we are!" "As we are!" repeated Mr. Rochester--"so," he added, enclosing me in his arms. Gathering me to his breast, pressing his lips on my lips: "so, Jane!" "Yes, so, sir," I rejoined: "and yet not so; for you are a married man--or as good as a married man, and wed to one inferior to you--to one with whom you have no sympathy--whom I do not believe you truly love; for I have seen and heard you sneer at her. I would scorn such a union: therefore I am better than you--let me go!" "Where, Jane? To Ireland?" "Yes--to Ireland. I have spoken my mind, and can go anywhere now." "Jane, be still; don't struggle so, like a wild frantic bird that is rending its own plumage in its desperation." "I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you." Another effort set me at liberty, and I stood erect before him. "And your will shall decide your destiny," he said: "I offer you my hand, my heart, and a share of all my possessions." "You play a farce, which I merely laugh at." "I ask you to pass through life at my side--to be my second self, and best earthly companion." "For that fate you have already made your choice, and must abide by it." "Jane, be still a few moments: you are over-excited: I will be still too." A waft of wind came sweeping down the laurel-walk, and trembled through the boughs of the chestnut: it wandered away--away--to an indefinite distance--it died. The nightingale's song was then the only voice of the hour: in listening to it, I again wept. Mr. Rochester sat quiet, looking at me gently and seriously. Some time passed before he spoke; he at last said-- "Come to my side, Jane, and let us explain and understand one another." "I will never again come to your side: I am torn away now, and cannot return." "But, Jane, I summon you as my wife: it is you only I intend to marry." I was silent: I thought he mocked me. "Come, Jane--come hither." "Your bride stands between us." He rose, and with a stride reached me. "My bride is here," he said, again drawing me to him, "because my equal is here, and my likeness. Jane, will you marry me?" Still I did not answer, and still I writhed myself from his grasp: for I was still incredulous. "Do you doubt me, Jane?" "Entirely." "You have no faith in me?" "Not a whit." "Am I a liar in your eyes?" he asked passionately. "Little sceptic, you _shall_ be convinced. What love have I for Miss Ingram? None: and that you know. What love has she for me? None: as I have taken pains to prove: I caused a rumour to reach her that my fortune was not a third of what was supposed, and after that I presented myself to see the result; it was coldness both from her and her mother. I would not--I could not--marry Miss Ingram. You--you strange, you almost unearthly thing!--I love as my own flesh. You--poor and obscure, and small and plain as you are--I entreat to accept me as a husband." "What, me!" I ejaculated, beginning in his earnestness--and especially in his incivility--to credit his sincerity: "me who have not a friend in the world but you--if you are my friend: not a shilling but what you have given me?" "You, Jane, I must have you for my own--entirely my own. Will you be mine? Say yes, quickly." "Mr. Rochester, let me look at your face: turn to the moonlight." "Why?" "Because I want to read your countenance--turn!" "There! you will find it scarcely more legible than a crumpled, scratched page. Read on: only make haste, for I suffer." His face was very much agitated and very much flushed, and there were strong workings in the features, and strange gleams in the eyes. "Oh, Jane, you torture me!" he exclaimed. "With that searching and yet faithful and generous look, you torture me!" "How can I do that? If you are true, and your offer real, my only feelings to you must be gratitude and devotion--they cannot torture." "Gratitude!" he ejaculated; and added wildly--"Jane accept me quickly. Say, Edward--give me my name--Edward--I will marry you." "Are you in earnest? Do you truly love me? Do you sincerely wish me to be your wife?" "I do; and if an oath is necessary to satisfy you, I swear it." "Then, sir, I will marry you." "Edward--my little wife!" "Dear Edward!" "Come to me--come to me entirely now," said he; and added, in his deepest tone, speaking in my ear as his cheek was laid on mine, "Make my happiness--I will make yours." "God pardon me!" he subjoined ere long; "and man meddle not with me: I have her, and will hold her." "There is no one to meddle, sir. I have no kindred to interfere." "No--that is the best of it," he said. And if I had loved him less I should have thought his accent and look of exultation savage; but, sitting by him, roused from the nightmare of parting--called to the paradise of union--I thought only of the bliss given me to drink in so abundant a flow. Again and again he said, "Are you happy, Jane?" And again and again I answered, "Yes." After which he murmured, "It will atone--it will atone. Have I not found her friendless, and cold, and comfortless? Will I not guard, and cherish, and solace her? Is there not love in my heart, and constancy in my resolves? It will expiate at God's tribunal. I know my Maker sanctions what I do. For the world's judgment--I wash my hands thereof. For man's opinion--I defy it." But what had befallen the night? The moon was not yet set, and we were all in shadow: I could scarcely see my master's face, near as I was. And what ailed the chestnut tree? it writhed and groaned; while wind roared in the laurel walk, and came sweeping over us. "We must go in," said Mr. Rochester: "the weather changes. I could have sat with thee till morning, Jane." "And so," thought I, "could I with you." I should have said so, perhaps, but a livid, vivid spark leapt out of a cloud at which I was looking, and there was a crack, a crash, and a close rattling peal; and I thought only of hiding my dazzled eyes against Mr. Rochester's shoulder. The rain rushed down. He hurried me up the walk, through the grounds, and into the house; but we were quite wet before we could pass the threshold. He was taking off my shawl in the hall, and shaking the water out of my loosened hair, when Mrs. Fairfax emerged from her room. I did not observe her at first, nor did Mr. Rochester. The lamp was lit. The clock was on the stroke of twelve. "Hasten to take off your wet things," said he; "and before you go, good- night--good-night, my darling!" He kissed me repeatedly. When I looked up, on leaving his arms, there stood the widow, pale, grave, and amazed. I only smiled at her, and ran upstairs. "Explanation will do for another time," thought I. Still, when I reached my chamber, I felt a pang at the idea she should even temporarily misconstrue what she had seen. But joy soon effaced every other feeling; and loud as the wind blew, near and deep as the thunder crashed, fierce and frequent as the lightning gleamed, cataract-like as the rain fell during a storm of two hours' duration, I experienced no fear and little awe. Mr. Rochester came thrice to my door in the course of it, to ask if I was safe and tranquil: and that was comfort, that was strength for anything. Before I left my bed in the morning, little Adele came running in to tell me that the great horse-chestnut at the bottom of the orchard had been struck by lightning in the night, and half of it split away. CHAPTER XXIV As I rose and dressed, I thought over what had happened, and wondered if it were a dream. I could not be certain of the reality till I had seen Mr. Rochester again, and heard him renew his words of love and promise. While arranging my hair, I looked at my face in the glass, and felt it was no longer plain: there was hope in its aspect and life in its colour; and my eyes seemed as if they had beheld the fount of fruition, and borrowed beams from the lustrous ripple. I had often been unwilling to look at my master, because I feared he could not be pleased at my look; but I was sure I might lift my face to his now, and not cool his affection by its expression. I took a plain but clean and light summer dress from my drawer and put it on: it seemed no attire had ever so well become me, because none had I ever worn in so blissful a mood. I was not surprised, when I ran down into the hall, to see that a brilliant June morning had succeeded to the tempest of the night; and to feel, through the open glass door, the breathing of a fresh and fragrant breeze. Nature must be gladsome when I was so happy. A beggar-woman and her little boy--pale, ragged objects both--were coming up the walk, and I ran down and gave them all the money I happened to have in my purse--some three or four shillings: good or bad, they must partake of my jubilee. The rooks cawed, and blither birds sang; but nothing was so merry or so musical as my own rejoicing heart. Mrs. Fairfax surprised me by looking out of the window with a sad countenance, and saying gravely--"Miss Eyre, will you come to breakfast?" During the meal she was quiet and cool: but I could not undeceive her then. I must wait for my master to give explanations; and so must she. I ate what I could, and then I hastened upstairs. I met Adele leaving the schoolroom. "Where are you going? It is time for lessons." "Mr. Rochester has sent me away to the nursery." "Where is he?" "In there," pointing to the apartment she had left; and I went in, and there he stood. "Come and bid me good-morning," said he. I gladly advanced; and it was not merely a cold word now, or even a shake of the hand that I received, but an embrace and a kiss. It seemed natural: it seemed genial to be so well loved, so caressed by him. "Jane, you look blooming, and smiling, and pretty," said he: "truly pretty this morning. Is this my pale, little elf? Is this my mustard- seed? This little sunny-faced girl with the dimpled cheek and rosy lips; the satin-smooth hazel hair, and the radiant hazel eyes?" (I had green eyes, reader; but you must excuse the mistake: for him they were new-dyed, I suppose.) "It is Jane Eyre, sir." "Soon to be Jane Rochester," he added: "in four weeks, Janet; not a day more. Do you hear that?" I did, and I could not quite comprehend it: it made me giddy. The feeling, the announcement sent through me, was something stronger than was consistent with joy--something that smote and stunned. It was, I think almost fear. "You blushed, and now you are white, Jane: what is that for?" "Because you gave me a new name--Jane Rochester; and it seems so strange." "Yes, Mrs. Rochester," said he; "young Mrs. Rochester--Fairfax Rochester's girl-bride." "It can never be, sir; it does not sound likely. Human beings never enjoy complete happiness in this world. I was not born for a different destiny to the rest of my species: to imagine such a lot befalling me is a fairy tale--a day-dream." "Which I can and will realise. I shall begin to-day. This morning I wrote to my banker in London to send me certain jewels he has in his keeping,--heirlooms for the ladies of Thornfield. In a day or two I hope to pour them into your lap: for every privilege, every attention shall be yours that I would accord a peer's daughter, if about to marry her." "Oh, sir!--never rain jewels! I don't like to hear them spoken of. Jewels for Jane Eyre sounds unnatural and strange: I would rather not have them." "I will myself put the diamond chain round your neck, and the circlet on your forehead,--which it will become: for nature, at least, has stamped her patent of nobility on this brow, Jane; and I will clasp the bracelets on these fine wrists, and load these fairy-like fingers with rings." "No, no, sir! think of other subjects, and speak of other things, and in another strain. Don't address me as if I were a beauty; I am your plain, Quakerish governess." "You are a beauty in my eyes, and a beauty just after the desire of my heart,--delicate and aerial." "Puny and insignificant, you mean. You are dreaming, sir,--or you are sneering. For God's sake don't be ironical!" "I will make the world acknowledge you a beauty, too," he went on, while I really became uneasy at the strain he had adopted, because I felt he was either deluding himself or trying to delude me. "I will attire my Jane in satin and lace, and she shall have roses in her hair; and I will cover the head I love best with a priceless veil." "And then you won't know me, sir; and I shall not be your Jane Eyre any longer, but an ape in a harlequin's jacket--a jay in borrowed plumes. I would as soon see you, Mr. Rochester, tricked out in stage-trappings, as myself clad in a court-lady's robe; and I don't call you handsome, sir, though I love you most dearly: far too dearly to flatter you. Don't flatter me." He pursued his theme, however, without noticing my deprecation. "This very day I shall take you in the carriage to Millcote, and you must choose some dresses for yourself. I told you we shall be married in four weeks. The wedding is to take place quietly, in the church down below yonder; and then I shall waft you away at once to town. After a brief stay there, I shall bear my treasure to regions nearer the sun: to French vineyards and Italian plains; and she shall see whatever is famous in old story and in modern record: she shall taste, too, of the life of cities; and she shall learn to value herself by just comparison with others." "Shall I travel?--and with you, sir?" "You shall sojourn at Paris, Rome, and Naples: at Florence, Venice, and Vienna: all the ground I have wandered over shall be re-trodden by you: wherever I stamped my hoof, your sylph's foot shall step also. Ten years since, I flew through Europe half mad; with disgust, hate, and rage as my companions: now I shall revisit it healed and cleansed, with a very angel as my comforter." I laughed at him as he said this. "I am not an angel," I asserted; "and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself. Mr. Rochester, you must neither expect nor exact anything celestial of me--for you will not get it, any more than I shall get it of you: which I do not at all anticipate." "What do you anticipate of me?" "For a little while you will perhaps be as you are now,--a very little while; and then you will turn cool; and then you will be capricious; and then you will be stern, and I shall have much ado to please you: but when you get well used to me, you will perhaps like me again,--_like_ me, I say, not _love_ me. I suppose your love will effervesce in six months, or less. I have observed in books written by men, that period assigned as the farthest to which a husband's ardour extends. Yet, after all, as a friend and companion, I hope never to become quite distasteful to my dear master." "Distasteful! and like you again! I think I shall like you again, and yet again: and I will make you confess I do not only _like_, but _love_ you--with truth, fervour, constancy." "Yet are you not capricious, sir?" "To women who please me only by their faces, I am the very devil when I find out they have neither souls nor hearts--when they open to me a perspective of flatness, triviality, and perhaps imbecility, coarseness, and ill-temper: but to the clear eye and eloquent tongue, to the soul made of fire, and the character that bends but does not break--at once supple and stable, tractable and consistent--I am ever tender and true." "Had you ever experience of such a character, sir? Did you ever love such an one?" "I love it now." "But before me: if I, indeed, in any respect come up to your difficult standard?" "I never met your likeness. Jane, you please me, and you master me--you seem to submit, and I like the sense of pliancy you impart; and while I am twining the soft, silken skein round my finger, it sends a thrill up my arm to my heart. I am influenced--conquered; and the influence is sweeter than I can express; and the conquest I undergo has a witchery beyond any triumph I can win. Why do you smile, Jane? What does that inexplicable, that uncanny turn of countenance mean?" "I was thinking, sir (you will excuse the idea; it was involuntary), I was thinking of Hercules and Samson with their charmers--" "You were, you little elfish--" "Hush, sir! You don't talk very wisely just now; any more than those gentlemen acted very wisely. However, had they been married, they would no doubt by their severity as husbands have made up for their softness as suitors; and so will you, I fear. I wonder how you will answer me a year hence, should I ask a favour it does not suit your convenience or pleasure to grant." "Ask me something now, Jane,--the least thing: I desire to be entreated--" "Indeed I will, sir; I have my petition all ready." "Speak! But if you look up and smile with that countenance, I shall swear concession before I know to what, and that will make a fool of me." "Not at all, sir; I ask only this: don't send for the jewels, and don't crown me with roses: you might as well put a border of gold lace round that plain pocket handkerchief you have there." "I might as well 'gild refined gold.' I know it: your request is granted then--for the time. I will remand the order I despatched to my banker. But you have not yet asked for anything; you have prayed a gift to be withdrawn: try again." "Well then, sir, have the goodness to gratify my curiosity, which is much piqued on one point." He looked disturbed. "What? what?" he said hastily. "Curiosity is a dangerous petition: it is well I have not taken a vow to accord every request--" "But there can be no danger in complying with this, sir." "Utter it, Jane: but I wish that instead of a mere inquiry into, perhaps, a secret, it was a wish for half my estate." "Now, King Ahasuerus! What do I want with half your estate? Do you think I am a Jew-usurer, seeking good investment in land? I would much rather have all your confidence. You will not exclude me from your confidence if you admit me to your heart?" "You are welcome to all my confidence that is worth having, Jane; but for God's sake, don't desire a useless burden! Don't long for poison--don't turn out a downright Eve on my hands!" "Why not, sir? You have just been telling me how much you liked to be conquered, and how pleasant over-persuasion is to you. Don't you think I had better take advantage of the confession, and begin and coax and entreat--even cry and be sulky if necessary--for the sake of a mere essay of my power?" "I dare you to any such experiment. Encroach, presume, and the game is up." "Is it, sir? You soon give in. How stern you look now! Your eyebrows have become as thick as my finger, and your forehead resembles what, in some very astonishing poetry, I once saw styled, 'a blue-piled thunderloft.' That will be your married look, sir, I suppose?" "If that will be _your_ married look, I, as a Christian, will soon give up the notion of consorting with a mere sprite or salamander. But what had you to ask, thing,--out with it?" "There, you are less than civil now; and I like rudeness a great deal better than flattery. I had rather be a _thing_ than an angel. This is what I have to ask,--Why did you take such pains to make me believe you wished to marry Miss Ingram?" "Is that all? Thank God it is no worse!" And now he unknit his black brows; looked down, smiling at me, and stroked my hair, as if well pleased at seeing a danger averted. "I think I may confess," he continued, "even although I should make you a little indignant, Jane--and I have seen what a fire-spirit you can be when you are indignant. You glowed in the cool moonlight last night, when you mutinied against fate, and claimed your rank as my equal. Janet, by-the-bye, it was you who made me the offer." "Of course I did. But to the point if you please, sir--Miss Ingram?" "Well, I feigned courtship of Miss Ingram, because I wished to render you as madly in love with me as I was with you; and I knew jealousy would be the best ally I could call in for the furtherance of that end." "Excellent! Now you are small--not one whit bigger than the end of my little finger. It was a burning shame and a scandalous disgrace to act in that way. Did you think nothing of Miss Ingram's feelings, sir?" "Her feelings are concentrated in one--pride; and that needs humbling. Were you jealous, Jane?" "Never mind, Mr. Rochester: it is in no way interesting to you to know that. Answer me truly once more. Do you think Miss Ingram will not suffer from your dishonest coquetry? Won't she feel forsaken and deserted?" "Impossible!--when I told you how she, on the contrary, deserted me: the idea of my insolvency cooled, or rather extinguished, her flame in a moment." "You have a curious, designing mind, Mr. Rochester. I am afraid your principles on some points are eccentric." "My principles were never trained, Jane: they may have grown a little awry for want of attention." "Once again, seriously; may I enjoy the great good that has been vouchsafed to me, without fearing that any one else is suffering the bitter pain I myself felt a while ago?" "That you may, my good little girl: there is not another being in the world has the same pure love for me as yourself--for I lay that pleasant unction to my soul, Jane, a belief in your affection." I turned my lips to the hand that lay on my shoulder. I loved him very much--more than I could trust myself to say--more than words had power to express. "Ask something more," he said presently; "it is my delight to be entreated, and to yield." I was again ready with my request. "Communicate your intentions to Mrs. Fairfax, sir: she saw me with you last night in the hall, and she was shocked. Give her some explanation before I see her again. It pains me to be misjudged by so good a woman." "Go to your room, and put on your bonnet," he replied. "I mean you to accompany me to Millcote this morning; and while you prepare for the drive, I will enlighten the old lady's understanding. Did she think, Janet, you had given the world for love, and considered it well lost?" "I believe she thought I had forgotten my station, and yours, sir." "Station! station!--your station is in my heart, and on the necks of those who would insult you, now or hereafter.--Go." I was soon dressed; and when I heard Mr. Rochester quit Mrs. Fairfax's parlour, I hurried down to it. The old lady, had been reading her morning portion of Scripture--the Lesson for the day; her Bible lay open before her, and her spectacles were upon it. Her occupation, suspended by Mr. Rochester's announcement, seemed now forgotten: her eyes, fixed on the blank wall opposite, expressed the surprise of a quiet mind stirred by unwonted tidings. Seeing me, she roused herself: she made a sort of effort to smile, and framed a few words of congratulation; but the smile expired, and the sentence was abandoned unfinished. She put up her spectacles, shut the Bible, and pushed her chair back from the table. "I feel so astonished," she began, "I hardly know what to say to you, Miss Eyre. I have surely not been dreaming, have I? Sometimes I half fall asleep when I am sitting alone and fancy things that have never happened. It has seemed to me more than once when I have been in a doze, that my dear husband, who died fifteen years since, has come in and sat down beside me; and that I have even heard him call me by my name, Alice, as he used to do. Now, can you tell me whether it is actually true that Mr. Rochester has asked you to marry him? Don't laugh at me. But I really thought he came in here five minutes ago, and said that in a month you would be his wife." "He has said the same thing to me," I replied. "He has! Do you believe him? Have you accepted him?" "Yes." She looked at me bewildered. "I could never have thought it. He is a proud man: all the Rochesters were proud: and his father, at least, liked money. He, too, has always been called careful. He means to marry you?" "He tells me so." She surveyed my whole person: in her eyes I read that they had there found no charm powerful enough to solve the enigma. "It passes me!" she continued; "but no doubt, it is true since you say so. How it will answer, I cannot tell: I really don't know. Equality of position and fortune is often advisable in such cases; and there are twenty years of difference in your ages. He might almost be your father." "No, indeed, Mrs. Fairfax!" exclaimed I, nettled; "he is nothing like my father! No one, who saw us together, would suppose it for an instant. Mr. Rochester looks as young, and is as young, as some men at five-and- twenty." "Is it really for love he is going to marry you?" she asked. I was so hurt by her coldness and scepticism, that the tears rose to my eyes. "I am sorry to grieve you," pursued the widow; "but you are so young, and so little acquainted with men, I wished to put you on your guard. It is an old saying that 'all is not gold that glitters;' and in this case I do fear there will be something found to be different to what either you or I expect." "Why?--am I a monster?" I said: "is it impossible that Mr. Rochester should have a sincere affection for me?" "No: you are very well; and much improved of late; and Mr. Rochester, I daresay, is fond of you. I have always noticed that you were a sort of pet of his. There are times when, for your sake, I have been a little uneasy at his marked preference, and have wished to put you on your guard: but I did not like to suggest even the possibility of wrong. I knew such an idea would shock, perhaps offend you; and you were so discreet, and so thoroughly modest and sensible, I hoped you might be trusted to protect yourself. Last night I cannot tell you what I suffered when I sought all over the house, and could find you nowhere, nor the master either; and then, at twelve o'clock, saw you come in with him." "Well, never mind that now," I interrupted impatiently; "it is enough that all was right." "I hope all will be right in the end," she said: "but believe me, you cannot be too careful. Try and keep Mr. Rochester at a distance: distrust yourself as well as him. Gentlemen in his station are not accustomed to marry their governesses." I was growing truly irritated: happily, Adele ran in. "Let me go,--let me go to Millcote too!" she cried. "Mr. Rochester won't: though there is so much room in the new carriage. Beg him to let me go mademoiselle." "That I will, Adele;" and I hastened away with her, glad to quit my gloomy monitress. The carriage was ready: they were bringing it round to the front, and my master was pacing the pavement, Pilot following him backwards and forwards. "Adele may accompany us, may she not, sir?" "I told her no. I'll have no brats!--I'll have only you." "Do let her go, Mr. Rochester, if you please: it would be better." "Not it: she will be a restraint." He was quite peremptory, both in look and voice. The chill of Mrs. Fairfax's warnings, and the damp of her doubts were upon me: something of unsubstantiality and uncertainty had beset my hopes. I half lost the sense of power over him. I was about mechanically to obey him, without further remonstrance; but as he helped me into the carriage, he looked at my face. "What is the matter?" he asked; "all the sunshine is gone. Do you really wish the bairn to go? Will it annoy you if she is left behind?" "I would far rather she went, sir." "Then off for your bonnet, and back like a flash of lightning!" cried he to Adele. She obeyed him with what speed she might. "After all, a single morning's interruption will not matter much," said he, "when I mean shortly to claim you--your thoughts, conversation, and company--for life." Adele, when lifted in, commenced kissing me, by way of expressing her gratitude for my intercession: she was instantly stowed away into a corner on the other side of him. She then peeped round to where I sat; so stern a neighbour was too restrictive to him, in his present fractious mood, she dared whisper no observations, nor ask of him any information. "Let her come to me," I entreated: "she will, perhaps, trouble you, sir: there is plenty of room on this side." He handed her over as if she had been a lapdog. "I'll send her to school yet," he said, but now he was smiling. Adele heard him, and asked if she was to go to school "sans mademoiselle?" "Yes," he replied, "absolutely sans mademoiselle; for I am to take mademoiselle to the moon, and there I shall seek a cave in one of the white valleys among the volcano-tops, and mademoiselle shall live with me there, and only me." "She will have nothing to eat: you will starve her," observed Adele. "I shall gather manna for her morning and night: the plains and hillsides in the moon are bleached with manna, Adele." "She will want to warm herself: what will she do for a fire?" "Fire rises out of the lunar mountains: when she is cold, I'll carry her up to a peak, and lay her down on the edge of a crater." "Oh, qu' elle y sera mal--peu comfortable! And her clothes, they will wear out: how can she get new ones?" Mr. Rochester professed to be puzzled. "Hem!" said he. "What would you do, Adele? Cudgel your brains for an expedient. How would a white or a pink cloud answer for a gown, do you think? And one could cut a pretty enough scarf out of a rainbow." "She is far better as she is," concluded Adele, after musing some time: "besides, she would get tired of living with only you in the moon. If I were mademoiselle, I would never consent to go with you." "She has consented: she has pledged her word." "But you can't get her there; there is no road to the moon: it is all air; and neither you nor she can fly." "Adele, look at that field." We were now outside Thornfield gates, and bowling lightly along the smooth road to Millcote, where the dust was well laid by the thunderstorm, and, where the low hedges and lofty timber trees on each side glistened green and rain-refreshed. "In that field, Adele, I was walking late one evening about a fortnight since--the evening of the day you helped me to make hay in the orchard meadows; and, as I was tired with raking swaths, I sat down to rest me on a stile; and there I took out a little book and a pencil, and began to write about a misfortune that befell me long ago, and a wish I had for happy days to come: I was writing away very fast, though daylight was fading from the leaf, when something came up the path and stopped two yards off me. I looked at it. It was a little thing with a veil of gossamer on its head. I beckoned it to come near me; it stood soon at my knee. I never spoke to it, and it never spoke to me, in words; but I read its eyes, and it read mine; and our speechless colloquy was to this effect-- "It was a fairy, and come from Elf-land, it said; and its errand was to make me happy: I must go with it out of the common world to a lonely place--such as the moon, for instance--and it nodded its head towards her horn, rising over Hay-hill: it told me of the alabaster cave and silver vale where we might live. I said I should like to go; but reminded it, as you did me, that I had no wings to fly. "'Oh,' returned the fairy, 'that does not signify! Here is a talisman will remove all difficulties;' and she held out a pretty gold ring. 'Put it,' she said, 'on the fourth finger of my left hand, and I am yours, and you are mine; and we shall leave earth, and make our own heaven yonder.' She nodded again at the moon. The ring, Adele, is in my breeches-pocket, under the disguise of a sovereign: but I mean soon to change it to a ring again." "But what has mademoiselle to do with it? I don't care for the fairy: you said it was mademoiselle you would take to the moon?" "Mademoiselle is a fairy," he said, whispering mysteriously. Whereupon I told her not to mind his badinage; and she, on her part, evinced a fund of genuine French scepticism: denominating Mr. Rochester "un vrai menteur," and assuring him that she made no account whatever of his "contes de fee," and that "du reste, il n'y avait pas de fees, et quand meme il y en avait:" she was sure they would never appear to him, nor ever give him rings, or offer to live with him in the moon. The hour spent at Millcote was a somewhat harassing one to me. Mr. Rochester obliged me to go to a certain silk warehouse: there I was ordered to choose half-a-dozen dresses. I hated the business, I begged leave to defer it: no--it should be gone through with now. By dint of entreaties expressed in energetic whispers, I reduced the half-dozen to two: these however, he vowed he would select himself. With anxiety I watched his eye rove over the gay stores: he fixed on a rich silk of the most brilliant amethyst dye, and a superb pink satin. I told him in a new series of whispers, that he might as well buy me a gold gown and a silver bonnet at once: I should certainly never venture to wear his choice. With infinite difficulty, for he was stubborn as a stone, I persuaded him to make an exchange in favour of a sober black satin and pearl-grey silk. "It might pass for the present," he said; "but he would yet see me glittering like a parterre." Glad was I to get him out of the silk warehouse, and then out of a jewellers shop: the more he bought me, the more my cheek burned with a sense of annoyance and degradation. As we re-entered the carriage, and I sat back feverish and fagged, I remembered what, in the hurry of events, dark and bright, I had wholly forgotten--the letter of my uncle, John Eyre, to Mrs. Reed: his intention to adopt me and make me his legatee. "It would, indeed, be a relief," I thought, "if I had ever so small an independency; I never can bear being dressed like a doll by Mr. Rochester, or sitting like a second Danae with the golden shower falling daily round me. I will write to Madeira the moment I get home, and tell my uncle John I am going to be married, and to whom: if I had but a prospect of one day bringing Mr. Rochester an accession of fortune, I could better endure to be kept by him now." And somewhat relieved by this idea (which I failed not to execute that day), I ventured once more to meet my master's and lover's eye, which most pertinaciously sought mine, though I averted both face and gaze. He smiled; and I thought his smile was such as a sultan might, in a blissful and fond moment, bestow on a slave his gold and gems had enriched: I crushed his hand, which was ever hunting mine, vigorously, and thrust it back to him red with the passionate pressure. "You need not look in that way," I said; "if you do, I'll wear nothing but my old Lowood frocks to the end of the chapter. I'll be married in this lilac gingham: you may make a dressing-gown for yourself out of the pearl-grey silk, and an infinite series of waistcoats out of the black satin." He chuckled; he rubbed his hands. "Oh, it is rich to see and hear her?" he exclaimed. "Is she original? Is she piquant? I would not exchange this one little English girl for the Grand Turk's whole seraglio, gazelle- eyes, houri forms, and all!" The Eastern allusion bit me again. "I'll not stand you an inch in the stead of a seraglio," I said; "so don't consider me an equivalent for one. If you have a fancy for anything in that line, away with you, sir, to the bazaars of Stamboul without delay, and lay out in extensive slave- purchases some of that spare cash you seem at a loss to spend satisfactorily here." "And what will you do, Janet, while I am bargaining for so many tons of flesh and such an assortment of black eyes?" "I'll be preparing myself to go out as a missionary to preach liberty to them that are enslaved--your harem inmates amongst the rest. I'll get admitted there, and I'll stir up mutiny; and you, three-tailed bashaw as you are, sir, shall in a trice find yourself fettered amongst our hands: nor will I, for one, consent to cut your bonds till you have signed a charter, the most liberal that despot ever yet conferred." "I would consent to be at your mercy, Jane." "I would have no mercy, Mr. Rochester, if you supplicated for it with an eye like that. While you looked so, I should be certain that whatever charter you might grant under coercion, your first act, when released, would be to violate its conditions." "Why, Jane, what would you have? I fear you will compel me to go through a private marriage ceremony, besides that performed at the altar. You will stipulate, I see, for peculiar terms--what will they be?" "I only want an easy mind, sir; not crushed by crowded obligations. Do you remember what you said of Celine Varens?--of the diamonds, the cashmeres you gave her? I will not be your English Celine Varens. I shall continue to act as Adele's governess; by that I shall earn my board and lodging, and thirty pounds a year besides. I'll furnish my own wardrobe out of that money, and you shall give me nothing but--" "Well, but what?" "Your regard; and if I give you mine in return, that debt will be quit." "Well, for cool native impudence and pure innate pride, you haven't your equal," said he. We were now approaching Thornfield. "Will it please you to dine with me to-day?" he asked, as we re-entered the gates. "No, thank you, sir." "And what for, 'no, thank you?' if one may inquire." "I never have dined with you, sir: and I see no reason why I should now: till--" "Till what? You delight in half-phrases." "Till I can't help it." "Do you suppose I eat like an ogre or a ghoul, that you dread being the companion of my repast?" "I have formed no supposition on the subject, sir; but I want to go on as usual for another month." "You will give up your governessing slavery at once." "Indeed, begging your pardon, sir, I shall not. I shall just go on with it as usual. I shall keep out of your way all day, as I have been accustomed to do: you may send for me in the evening, when you feel disposed to see me, and I'll come then; but at no other time." "I want a smoke, Jane, or a pinch of snuff, to comfort me under all this, 'pour me donner une contenance,' as Adele would say; and unfortunately I have neither my cigar-case, nor my snuff-box. But listen--whisper. It is your time now, little tyrant, but it will be mine presently; and when once I have fairly seized you, to have and to hold, I'll just--figuratively speaking--attach you to a chain like this" (touching his watch-guard). "Yes, bonny wee thing, I'll wear you in my bosom, lest my jewel I should tyne." He said this as he helped me to alight from the carriage, and while he afterwards lifted out Adele, I entered the house, and made good my retreat upstairs. He duly summoned me to his presence in the evening. I had prepared an occupation for him; for I was determined not to spend the whole time in a _tete-a-tete_ conversation. I remembered his fine voice; I knew he liked to sing--good singers generally do. I was no vocalist myself, and, in his fastidious judgment, no musician, either; but I delighted in listening when the performance was good. No sooner had twilight, that hour of romance, began to lower her blue and starry banner over the lattice, than I rose, opened the piano, and entreated him, for the love of heaven, to give me a song. He said I was a capricious witch, and that he would rather sing another time; but I averred that no time was like the present. "Did I like his voice?" he asked. "Very much." I was not fond of pampering that susceptible vanity of his; but for once, and from motives of expediency, I would e'en soothe and stimulate it. "Then, Jane, you must play the accompaniment." "Very well, sir, I will try." I did try, but was presently swept off the stool and denominated "a little bungler." Being pushed unceremoniously to one side--which was precisely what I wished--he usurped my place, and proceeded to accompany himself: for he could play as well as sing. I hied me to the window-recess. And while I sat there and looked out on the still trees and dim lawn, to a sweet air was sung in mellow tones the following strain:-- "The truest love that ever heart Felt at its kindled core, Did through each vein, in quickened start, The tide of being pour. Her coming was my hope each day, Her parting was my pain; The chance that did her steps delay Was ice in every vein. I dreamed it would be nameless bliss, As I loved, loved to be; And to this object did I press As blind as eagerly. But wide as pathless was the space That lay our lives between, And dangerous as the foamy race Of ocean-surges green. And haunted as a robber-path Through wilderness or wood; For Might and Right, and Woe and Wrath, Between our spirits stood. I dangers dared; I hindrance scorned; I omens did defy: Whatever menaced, harassed, warned, I passed impetuous by. On sped my rainbow, fast as light; I flew as in a dream; For glorious rose upon my sight That child of Shower and Gleam. Still bright on clouds of suffering dim Shines that soft, solemn joy; Nor care I now, how dense and grim Disasters gather nigh. I care not in this moment sweet, Though all I have rushed o'er Should come on pinion, strong and fleet, Proclaiming vengeance sore: Though haughty Hate should strike me down, Right, bar approach to me, And grinding Might, with furious frown, Swear endless enmity. My love has placed her little hand With noble faith in mine, And vowed that wedlock's sacred band Our nature shall entwine. My love has sworn, with sealing kiss, With me to live--to die; I have at last my nameless bliss. As I love--loved am I!" He rose and came towards me, and I saw his face all kindled, and his full falcon-eye flashing, and tenderness and passion in every lineament. I quailed momentarily--then I rallied. Soft scene, daring demonstration, I would not have; and I stood in peril of both: a weapon of defence must be prepared--I whetted my tongue: as he reached me, I asked with asperity, "whom he was going to marry now?" "That was a strange question to be put by his darling Jane." "Indeed! I considered it a very natural and necessary one: he had talked of his future wife dying with him. What did he mean by such a pagan idea? _I_ had no intention of dying with him--he might depend on that." "Oh, all he longed, all he prayed for, was that I might live with him! Death was not for such as I." "Indeed it was: I had as good a right to die when my time came as he had: but I should bide that time, and not be hurried away in a suttee." "Would I forgive him for the selfish idea, and prove my pardon by a reconciling kiss?" "No: I would rather be excused." Here I heard myself apostrophised as a "hard little thing;" and it was added, "any other woman would have been melted to marrow at hearing such stanzas crooned in her praise." I assured him I was naturally hard--very flinty, and that he would often find me so; and that, moreover, I was determined to show him divers rugged points in my character before the ensuing four weeks elapsed: he should know fully what sort of a bargain he had made, while there was yet time to rescind it. "Would I be quiet and talk rationally?" "I would be quiet if he liked, and as to talking rationally, I flattered myself I was doing that now." He fretted, pished, and pshawed. "Very good," I thought; "you may fume and fidget as you please: but this is the best plan to pursue with you, I am certain. I like you more than I can say; but I'll not sink into a bathos of sentiment: and with this needle of repartee I'll keep you from the edge of the gulf too; and, moreover, maintain by its pungent aid that distance between you and myself most conducive to our real mutual advantage." From less to more, I worked him up to considerable irritation; then, after he had retired, in dudgeon, quite to the other end of the room, I got up, and saying, "I wish you good-night, sir," in my natural and wonted respectful manner, I slipped out by the side-door and got away. The system thus entered on, I pursued during the whole season of probation; and with the best success. He was kept, to be sure, rather cross and crusty; but on the whole I could see he was excellently entertained, and that a lamb-like submission and turtle-dove sensibility, while fostering his despotism more, would have pleased his judgment, satisfied his common-sense, and even suited his taste less. In other people's presence I was, as formerly, deferential and quiet; any other line of conduct being uncalled for: it was only in the evening conferences I thus thwarted and afflicted him. He continued to send for me punctually the moment the clock struck seven; though when I appeared before him now, he had no such honeyed terms as "love" and "darling" on his lips: the best words at my service were "provoking puppet," "malicious elf," "sprite," "changeling," &c. For caresses, too, I now got grimaces; for a pressure of the hand, a pinch on the arm; for a kiss on the cheek, a severe tweak of the ear. It was all right: at present I decidedly preferred these fierce favours to anything more tender. Mrs. Fairfax, I saw, approved me: her anxiety on my account vanished; therefore I was certain I did well. Meantime, Mr. Rochester affirmed I was wearing him to skin and bone, and threatened awful vengeance for my present conduct at some period fast coming. I laughed in my sleeve at his menaces. "I can keep you in reasonable check now," I reflected; "and I don't doubt to be able to do it hereafter: if one expedient loses its virtue, another must be devised." Yet after all my task was not an easy one; often I would rather have pleased than teased him. My future husband was becoming to me my whole world; and more than the world: almost my hope of heaven. He stood between me and every thought of religion, as an eclipse intervenes between man and the broad sun. I could not, in those days, see God for His creature: of whom I had made an idol. CHAPTER XXV The month of courtship had wasted: its very last hours were being numbered. There was no putting off the day that advanced--the bridal day; and all preparations for its arrival were complete. _I_, at least, had nothing more to do: there were my trunks, packed, locked, corded, ranged in a row along the wall of my little chamber; to-morrow, at this time, they would be far on their road to London: and so should I (D.V.),--or rather, not I, but one Jane Rochester, a person whom as yet I knew not. The cards of address alone remained to nail on: they lay, four little squares, in the drawer. Mr. Rochester had himself written the direction, "Mrs. Rochester, --- Hotel, London," on each: I could not persuade myself to affix them, or to have them affixed. Mrs. Rochester! She did not exist: she would not be born till to-morrow, some time after eight o'clock a.m.; and I would wait to be assured she had come into the world alive before I assigned to her all that property. It was enough that in yonder closet, opposite my dressing-table, garments said to be hers had already displaced my black stuff Lowood frock and straw bonnet: for not to me appertained that suit of wedding raiment; the pearl-coloured robe, the vapoury veil pendent from the usurped portmanteau. I shut the closet to conceal the strange, wraith-like apparel it contained; which, at this evening hour--nine o'clock--gave out certainly a most ghostly shimmer through the shadow of my apartment. "I will leave you by yourself, white dream," I said. "I am feverish: I hear the wind blowing: I will go out of doors and feel it." It was not only the hurry of preparation that made me feverish; not only the anticipation of the great change--the new life which was to commence to-morrow: both these circumstances had their share, doubtless, in producing that restless, excited mood which hurried me forth at this late hour into the darkening grounds: but a third cause influenced my mind more than they. I had at heart a strange and anxious thought. Something had happened which I could not comprehend; no one knew of or had seen the event but myself: it had taken place the preceding night. Mr. Rochester that night was absent from home; nor was he yet returned: business had called him to a small estate of two or three farms he possessed thirty miles off--business it was requisite he should settle in person, previous to his meditated departure from England. I waited now his return; eager to disburthen my mind, and to seek of him the solution of the enigma that perplexed me. Stay till he comes, reader; and, when I disclose my secret to him, you shall share the confidence. I sought the orchard, driven to its shelter by the wind, which all day had blown strong and full from the south, without, however, bringing a speck of rain. Instead of subsiding as night drew on, it seemed to augment its rush and deepen its roar: the trees blew steadfastly one way, never writhing round, and scarcely tossing back their boughs once in an hour; so continuous was the strain bending their branchy heads northward--the clouds drifted from pole to pole, fast following, mass on mass: no glimpse of blue sky had been visible that July day. It was not without a certain wild pleasure I ran before the wind, delivering my trouble of mind to the measureless air-torrent thundering through space. Descending the laurel walk, I faced the wreck of the chestnut-tree; it stood up black and riven: the trunk, split down the centre, gasped ghastly. The cloven halves were not broken from each other, for the firm base and strong roots kept them unsundered below; though community of vitality was destroyed--the sap could flow no more: their great boughs on each side were dead, and next winter's tempests would be sure to fell one or both to earth: as yet, however, they might be said to form one tree--a ruin, but an entire ruin. "You did right to hold fast to each other," I said: as if the monster- splinters were living things, and could hear me. "I think, scathed as you look, and charred and scorched, there must be a little sense of life in you yet, rising out of that adhesion at the faithful, honest roots: you will never have green leaves more--never more see birds making nests and singing idyls in your boughs; the time of pleasure and love is over with you: but you are not desolate: each of you has a comrade to sympathise with him in his decay." As I looked up at them, the moon appeared momentarily in that part of the sky which filled their fissure; her disk was blood-red and half overcast; she seemed to throw on me one bewildered, dreary glance, and buried herself again instantly in the deep drift of cloud. The wind fell, for a second, round Thornfield; but far away over wood and water, poured a wild, melancholy wail: it was sad to listen to, and I ran off again. Here and there I strayed through the orchard, gathered up the apples with which the grass round the tree roots was thickly strewn; then I employed myself in dividing the ripe from the unripe; I carried them into the house and put them away in the store-room. Then I repaired to the library to ascertain whether the fire was lit, for, though summer, I knew on such a gloomy evening Mr. Rochester would like to see a cheerful hearth when he came in: yes, the fire had been kindled some time, and burnt well. I placed his arm-chair by the chimney-corner: I wheeled the table near it: I let down the curtain, and had the candles brought in ready for lighting. More restless than ever, when I had completed these arrangements I could not sit still, nor even remain in the house: a little time-piece in the room and the old clock in the hall simultaneously struck ten. "How late it grows!" I said. "I will run down to the gates: it is moonlight at intervals; I can see a good way on the road. He may be coming now, and to meet him will save some minutes of suspense." The wind roared high in the great trees which embowered the gates; but the road as far as I could see, to the right hand and the left, was all still and solitary: save for the shadows of clouds crossing it at intervals as the moon looked out, it was but a long pale line, unvaried by one moving speck. A puerile tear dimmed my eye while I looked--a tear of disappointment and impatience; ashamed of it, I wiped it away. I lingered; the moon shut herself wholly within her chamber, and drew close her curtain of dense cloud: the night grew dark; rain came driving fast on the gale. "I wish he would come! I wish he would come!" I exclaimed, seized with hypochondriac foreboding. I had expected his arrival before tea; now it was dark: what could keep him? Had an accident happened? The event of last night again recurred to me. I interpreted it as a warning of disaster. I feared my hopes were too bright to be realised; and I had enjoyed so much bliss lately that I imagined my fortune had passed its meridian, and must now decline. "Well, I cannot return to the house," I thought; "I cannot sit by the fireside, while he is abroad in inclement weather: better tire my limbs than strain my heart; I will go forward and meet him." I set out; I walked fast, but not far: ere I had measured a quarter of a mile, I heard the tramp of hoofs; a horseman came on, full gallop; a dog ran by his side. Away with evil presentiment! It was he: here he was, mounted on Mesrour, followed by Pilot. He saw me; for the moon had opened a blue field in the sky, and rode in it watery bright: he took his hat off, and waved it round his head. I now ran to meet him. "There!" he exclaimed, as he stretched out his hand and bent from the saddle: "You can't do without me, that is evident. Step on my boot-toe; give me both hands: mount!" I obeyed: joy made me agile: I sprang up before him. A hearty kissing I got for a welcome, and some boastful triumph, which I swallowed as well as I could. He checked himself in his exultation to demand, "But is there anything the matter, Janet, that you come to meet me at such an hour? Is there anything wrong?" "No, but I thought you would never come. I could not bear to wait in the house for you, especially with this rain and wind." "Rain and wind, indeed! Yes, you are dripping like a mermaid; pull my cloak round you: but I think you are feverish, Jane: both your cheek and hand are burning hot. I ask again, is there anything the matter?" "Nothing now; I am neither afraid nor unhappy." "Then you have been both?" "Rather: but I'll tell you all about it by-and-bye, sir; and I daresay you will only laugh at me for my pains." "I'll laugh at you heartily when to-morrow is past; till then I dare not: my prize is not certain. This is you, who have been as slippery as an eel this last month, and as thorny as a briar-rose? I could not lay a finger anywhere but I was pricked; and now I seem to have gathered up a stray lamb in my arms. You wandered out of the fold to seek your shepherd, did you, Jane?" "I wanted you: but don't boast. Here we are at Thornfield: now let me get down." He landed me on the pavement. As John took his horse, and he followed me into the hall, he told me to make haste and put something dry on, and then return to him in the library; and he stopped me, as I made for the staircase, to extort a promise that I would not be long: nor was I long; in five minutes I rejoined him. I found him at supper. "Take a seat and bear me company, Jane: please God, it is the last meal but one you will eat at Thornfield Hall for a long time." I sat down near him, but told him I could not eat. "Is it because you have the prospect of a journey before you, Jane? Is it the thoughts of going to London that takes away your appetite?" "I cannot see my prospects clearly to-night, sir; and I hardly know what thoughts I have in my head. Everything in life seems unreal." "Except me: I am substantial enough--touch me." "You, sir, are the most phantom-like of all: you are a mere dream." He held out his hand, laughing. "Is that a dream?" said he, placing it close to my eyes. He had a rounded, muscular, and vigorous hand, as well as a long, strong arm. "Yes; though I touch it, it is a dream," said I, as I put it down from before my face. "Sir, have you finished supper?" "Yes, Jane." I rang the bell and ordered away the tray. When we were again alone, I stirred the fire, and then took a low seat at my master's knee. "It is near midnight," I said. "Yes: but remember, Jane, you promised to wake with me the night before my wedding." "I did; and I will keep my promise, for an hour or two at least: I have no wish to go to bed." "Are all your arrangements complete?" "All, sir." "And on my part likewise," he returned, "I have settled everything; and we shall leave Thornfield to-morrow, within half-an-hour after our return from church." "Very well, sir." "With what an extraordinary smile you uttered that word--'very well,' Jane! What a bright spot of colour you have on each cheek! and how strangely your eyes glitter! Are you well?" "I believe I am." "Believe! What is the matter? Tell me what you feel." "I could not, sir: no words could tell you what I feel. I wish this present hour would never end: who knows with what fate the next may come charged?" "This is hypochondria, Jane. You have been over-excited, or over-fatigued." "Do you, sir, feel calm and happy?" "Calm?--no: but happy--to the heart's core." I looked up at him to read the signs of bliss in his face: it was ardent and flushed. "Give me your confidence, Jane," he said: "relieve your mind of any weight that oppresses it, by imparting it to me. What do you fear?--that I shall not prove a good husband?" "It is the idea farthest from my thoughts." "Are you apprehensive of the new sphere you are about to enter?--of the new life into which you are passing?" "No." "You puzzle me, Jane: your look and tone of sorrowful audacity perplex and pain me. I want an explanation." "Then, sir, listen. You were from home last night?" "I was: I know that; and you hinted a while ago at something which had happened in my absence:--nothing, probably, of consequence; but, in short, it has disturbed you. Let me hear it. Mrs. Fairfax has said something, perhaps? or you have overheard the servants talk?--your sensitive self-respect has been wounded?" "No, sir." It struck twelve--I waited till the time-piece had concluded its silver chime, and the clock its hoarse, vibrating stroke, and then I proceeded. "All day yesterday I was very busy, and very happy in my ceaseless bustle; for I am not, as you seem to think, troubled by any haunting fears about the new sphere, et cetera: I think it a glorious thing to have the hope of living with you, because I love you. No, sir, don't caress me now--let me talk undisturbed. Yesterday I trusted well in Providence, and believed that events were working together for your good and mine: it was a fine day, if you recollect--the calmness of the air and sky forbade apprehensions respecting your safety or comfort on your journey. I walked a little while on the pavement after tea, thinking of you; and I beheld you in imagination so near me, I scarcely missed your actual presence. I thought of the life that lay before me--_your_ life, sir--an existence more expansive and stirring than my own: as much more so as the depths of the sea to which the brook runs are than the shallows of its own strait channel. I wondered why moralists call this world a dreary wilderness: for me it blossomed like a rose. Just at sunset, the air turned cold and the sky cloudy: I went in, Sophie called me upstairs to look at my wedding-dress, which they had just brought; and under it in the box I found your present--the veil which, in your princely extravagance, you sent for from London: resolved, I suppose, since I would not have jewels, to cheat me into accepting something as costly. I smiled as I unfolded it, and devised how I would tease you about your aristocratic tastes, and your efforts to masque your plebeian bride in the attributes of a peeress. I thought how I would carry down to you the square of unembroidered blond I had myself prepared as a covering for my low-born head, and ask if that was not good enough for a woman who could bring her husband neither fortune, beauty, nor connections. I saw plainly how you would look; and heard your impetuous republican answers, and your haughty disavowal of any necessity on your part to augment your wealth, or elevate your standing, by marrying either a purse or a coronet." "How well you read me, you witch!" interposed Mr. Rochester: "but what did you find in the veil besides its embroidery? Did you find poison, or a dagger, that you look so mournful now?" "No, no, sir; besides the delicacy and richness of the fabric, I found nothing save Fairfax Rochester's pride; and that did not scare me, because I am used to the sight of the demon. But, sir, as it grew dark, the wind rose: it blew yesterday evening, not as it blows now--wild and high--but 'with a sullen, moaning sound' far more eerie. I wished you were at home. I came into this room, and the sight of the empty chair and fireless hearth chilled me. For some time after I went to bed, I could not sleep--a sense of anxious excitement distressed me. The gale still rising, seemed to my ear to muffle a mournful under-sound; whether in the house or abroad I could not at first tell, but it recurred, doubtful yet doleful at every lull; at last I made out it must be some dog howling at a distance. I was glad when it ceased. On sleeping, I continued in dreams the idea of a dark and gusty night. I continued also the wish to be with you, and experienced a strange, regretful consciousness of some barrier dividing us. During all my first sleep, I was following the windings of an unknown road; total obscurity environed me; rain pelted me; I was burdened with the charge of a little child: a very small creature, too young and feeble to walk, and which shivered in my cold arms, and wailed piteously in my ear. I thought, sir, that you were on the road a long way before me; and I strained every nerve to overtake you, and made effort on effort to utter your name and entreat you to stop--but my movements were fettered, and my voice still died away inarticulate; while you, I felt, withdrew farther and farther every moment." "And these dreams weigh on your spirits now, Jane, when I am close to you? Little nervous subject! Forget visionary woe, and think only of real happiness! You say you love me, Janet: yes--I will not forget that; and you cannot deny it. _Those_ words did not die inarticulate on your lips. I heard them clear and soft: a thought too solemn perhaps, but sweet as music--'I think it is a glorious thing to have the hope of living with you, Edward, because I love you.' Do you love me, Jane?--repeat it." "I do, sir--I do, with my whole heart." "Well," he said, after some minutes' silence, "it is strange; but that sentence has penetrated my breast painfully. Why? I think because you said it with such an earnest, religious energy, and because your upward gaze at me now is the very sublime of faith, truth, and devotion: it is too much as if some spirit were near me. Look wicked, Jane: as you know well how to look: coin one of your wild, shy, provoking smiles; tell me you hate me--tease me, vex me; do anything but move me: I would rather be incensed than saddened." "I will tease you and vex you to your heart's content, when I have finished my tale: but hear me to the end." "I thought, Jane, you had told me all. I thought I had found the source of your melancholy in a dream." I shook my head. "What! is there more? But I will not believe it to be anything important. I warn you of incredulity beforehand. Go on." The disquietude of his air, the somewhat apprehensive impatience of his manner, surprised me: but I proceeded. "I dreamt another dream, sir: that Thornfield Hall was a dreary ruin, the retreat of bats and owls. I thought that of all the stately front nothing remained but a shell-like wall, very high and very fragile-looking. I wandered, on a moonlight night, through the grass- grown enclosure within: here I stumbled over a marble hearth, and there over a fallen fragment of cornice. Wrapped up in a shawl, I still carried the unknown little child: I might not lay it down anywhere, however tired were my arms--however much its weight impeded my progress, I must retain it. I heard the gallop of a horse at a distance on the road; I was sure it was you; and you were departing for many years and for a distant country. I climbed the thin wall with frantic perilous haste, eager to catch one glimpse of you from the top: the stones rolled from under my feet, the ivy branches I grasped gave way, the child clung round my neck in terror, and almost strangled me; at last I gained the summit. I saw you like a speck on a white track, lessening every moment. The blast blew so strong I could not stand. I sat down on the narrow ledge; I hushed the scared infant in my lap: you turned an angle of the road: I bent forward to take a last look; the wall crumbled; I was shaken; the child rolled from my knee, I lost my balance, fell, and woke." "Now, Jane, that is all." "All the preface, sir; the tale is yet to come. On waking, a gleam dazzled my eyes; I thought--Oh, it is daylight! But I was mistaken; it was only candlelight. Sophie, I supposed, had come in. There was a light in the dressing-table, and the door of the closet, where, before going to bed, I had hung my wedding-dress and veil, stood open; I heard a rustling there. I asked, 'Sophie, what are you doing?' No one answered; but a form emerged from the closet; it took the light, held it aloft, and surveyed the garments pendent from the portmanteau. 'Sophie! Sophie!' I again cried: and still it was silent. I had risen up in bed, I bent forward: first surprise, then bewilderment, came over me; and then my blood crept cold through my veins. Mr. Rochester, this was not Sophie, it was not Leah, it was not Mrs. Fairfax: it was not--no, I was sure of it, and am still--it was not even that strange woman, Grace Poole." "It must have been one of them," interrupted my master. "No, sir, I solemnly assure you to the contrary. The shape standing before me had never crossed my eyes within the precincts of Thornfield Hall before; the height, the contour were new to me." "Describe it, Jane." "It seemed, sir, a woman, tall and large, with thick and dark hair hanging long down her back. I know not what dress she had on: it was white and straight; but whether gown, sheet, or shroud, I cannot tell." "Did you see her face?" "Not at first. But presently she took my veil from its place; she held it up, gazed at it long, and then she threw it over her own head, and turned to the mirror. At that moment I saw the reflection of the visage and features quite distinctly in the dark oblong glass." "And how were they?" "Fearful and ghastly to me--oh, sir, I never saw a face like it! It was a discoloured face--it was a savage face. I wish I could forget the roll of the red eyes and the fearful blackened inflation of the lineaments!" "Ghosts are usually pale, Jane." "This, sir, was purple: the lips were swelled and dark; the brow furrowed: the black eyebrows widely raised over the bloodshot eyes. Shall I tell you of what it reminded me?" "You may." "Of the foul German spectre--the Vampyre." "Ah!--what did it do?" "Sir, it removed my veil from its gaunt head, rent it in two parts, and flinging both on the floor, trampled on them." {It removed my veil from its gaunt head, rent it in two parts, and flinging both on the floor, trampled on them: p272.jpg} "Afterwards?" "It drew aside the window-curtain and looked out; perhaps it saw dawn approaching, for, taking the candle, it retreated to the door. Just at my bedside, the figure stopped: the fiery eyes glared upon me--she thrust up her candle close to my face, and extinguished it under my eyes. I was aware her lurid visage flamed over mine, and I lost consciousness: for the second time in my life--only the second time--I became insensible from terror." "Who was with you when you revived?" "No one, sir, but the broad day. I rose, bathed my head and face in water, drank a long draught; felt that though enfeebled I was not ill, and determined that to none but you would I impart this vision. Now, sir, tell me who and what that woman was?" "The creature of an over-stimulated brain; that is certain. I must be careful of you, my treasure: nerves like yours were not made for rough handling." "Sir, depend on it, my nerves were not in fault; the thing was real: the transaction actually took place." "And your previous dreams, were they real too? Is Thornfield Hall a ruin? Am I severed from you by insuperable obstacles? Am I leaving you without a tear--without a kiss--without a word?" "Not yet." "Am I about to do it? Why, the day is already commenced which is to bind us indissolubly; and when we are once united, there shall be no recurrence of these mental terrors: I guarantee that." "Mental terrors, sir! I wish I could believe them to be only such: I wish it more now than ever; since even you cannot explain to me the mystery of that awful visitant." "And since I cannot do it, Jane, it must have been unreal." "But, sir, when I said so to myself on rising this morning, and when I looked round the room to gather courage and comfort from the cheerful aspect of each familiar object in full daylight, there--on the carpet--I saw what gave the distinct lie to my hypothesis,--the veil, torn from top to bottom in two halves!" I felt Mr. Rochester start and shudder; he hastily flung his arms round me. "Thank God!" he exclaimed, "that if anything malignant did come near you last night, it was only the veil that was harmed. Oh, to think what might have happened!" He drew his breath short, and strained me so close to him, I could scarcely pant. After some minutes' silence, he continued, cheerily-- "Now, Janet, I'll explain to you all about it. It was half dream, half reality. A woman did, I doubt not, enter your room: and that woman was--must have been--Grace Poole. You call her a strange being yourself: from all you know, you have reason so to call her--what did she do to me? what to Mason? In a state between sleeping and waking, you noticed her entrance and her actions; but feverish, almost delirious as you were, you ascribed to her a goblin appearance different from her own: the long dishevelled hair, the swelled black face, the exaggerated stature, were figments of imagination; results of nightmare: the spiteful tearing of the veil was real: and it is like her. I see you would ask why I keep such a woman in my house: when we have been married a year and a day, I will tell you; but not now. Are you satisfied, Jane? Do you accept my solution of the mystery?" I reflected, and in truth it appeared to me the only possible one: satisfied I was not, but to please him I endeavoured to appear so--relieved, I certainly did feel; so I answered him with a contented smile. And now, as it was long past one, I prepared to leave him. "Does not Sophie sleep with Adele in the nursery?" he asked, as I lit my candle. "Yes, sir." "And there is room enough in Adele's little bed for you. You must share it with her to-night, Jane: it is no wonder that the incident you have related should make you nervous, and I would rather you did not sleep alone: promise me to go to the nursery." "I shall be very glad to do so, sir." "And fasten the door securely on the inside. Wake Sophie when you go upstairs, under pretence of requesting her to rouse you in good time to- morrow; for you must be dressed and have finished breakfast before eight. And now, no more sombre thoughts: chase dull care away, Janet. Don't you hear to what soft whispers the wind has fallen? and there is no more beating of rain against the window-panes: look here" (he lifted up the curtain)--"it is a lovely night!" It was. Half heaven was pure and stainless: the clouds, now trooping before the wind, which had shifted to the west, were filing off eastward in long, silvered columns. The moon shone peacefully. "Well," said Mr. Rochester, gazing inquiringly into my eyes, "how is my Janet now?" "The night is serene, sir; and so am I." "And you will not dream of separation and sorrow to-night; but of happy love and blissful union." This prediction was but half fulfilled: I did not indeed dream of sorrow, but as little did I dream of joy; for I never slept at all. With little Adele in my arms, I watched the slumber of childhood--so tranquil, so passionless, so innocent--and waited for the coming day: all my life was awake and astir in my frame: and as soon as the sun rose I rose too. I remember Adele clung to me as I left her: I remember I kissed her as I loosened her little hands from my neck; and I cried over her with strange emotion, and quitted her because I feared my sobs would break her still sound repose. She seemed the emblem of my past life; and here I was now to array myself to meet, the dread, but adored, type of my unknown future day. CHAPTER XXVI Sophie came at seven to dress me: she was very long indeed in accomplishing her task; so long that Mr. Rochester, grown, I suppose, impatient of my delay, sent up to ask why I did not come. She was just fastening my veil (the plain square of blond after all) to my hair with a brooch; I hurried from under her hands as soon as I could. "Stop!" she cried in French. "Look at yourself in the mirror: you have not taken one peep." So I turned at the door: I saw a robed and veiled figure, so unlike my usual self that it seemed almost the image of a stranger. "Jane!" called a voice, and I hastened down. I was received at the foot of the stairs by Mr. Rochester. "Lingerer!" he said, "my brain is on fire with impatience, and you tarry so long!" He took me into the dining-room, surveyed me keenly all over, pronounced me "fair as a lily, and not only the pride of his life, but the desire of his eyes," and then telling me he would give me but ten minutes to eat some breakfast, he rang the bell. One of his lately hired servants, a footman, answered it. "Is John getting the carriage ready?" "Yes, sir." "Is the luggage brought down?" "They are bringing it down, sir." "Go you to the church: see if Mr. Wood (the clergyman) and the clerk are there: return and tell me." The church, as the reader knows, was but just beyond the gates; the footman soon returned. "Mr. Wood is in the vestry, sir, putting on his surplice." "And the carriage?" "The horses are harnessing." "We shall not want it to go to church; but it must be ready the moment we return: all the boxes and luggage arranged and strapped on, and the coachman in his seat." "Yes, sir." "Jane, are you ready?" I rose. There were no groomsmen, no bridesmaids, no relatives to wait for or marshal: none but Mr. Rochester and I. Mrs. Fairfax stood in the hall as we passed. I would fain have spoken to her, but my hand was held by a grasp of iron: I was hurried along by a stride I could hardly follow; and to look at Mr. Rochester's face was to feel that not a second of delay would be tolerated for any purpose. I wonder what other bridegroom ever looked as he did--so bent up to a purpose, so grimly resolute: or who, under such steadfast brows, ever revealed such flaming and flashing eyes. I know not whether the day was fair or foul; in descending the drive, I gazed neither on sky nor earth: my heart was with my eyes; and both seemed migrated into Mr. Rochester's frame. I wanted to see the invisible thing on which, as we went along, he appeared to fasten a glance fierce and fell. I wanted to feel the thoughts whose force he seemed breasting and resisting. At the churchyard wicket he stopped: he discovered I was quite out of breath. "Am I cruel in my love?" he said. "Delay an instant: lean on me, Jane." And now I can recall the picture of the grey old house of God rising calm before me, of a rook wheeling round the steeple, of a ruddy morning sky beyond. I remember something, too, of the green grave-mounds; and I have not forgotten, either, two figures of strangers straying amongst the low hillocks and reading the mementoes graven on the few mossy head-stones. I noticed them, because, as they saw us, they passed round to the back of the church; and I doubted not they were going to enter by the side-aisle door and witness the ceremony. By Mr. Rochester they were not observed; he was earnestly looking at my face from which the blood had, I daresay, momentarily fled: for I felt my forehead dewy, and my cheeks and lips cold. When I rallied, which I soon did, he walked gently with me up the path to the porch. We entered the quiet and humble temple; the priest waited in his white surplice at the lowly altar, the clerk beside him. All was still: two shadows only moved in a remote corner. My conjecture had been correct: the strangers had slipped in before us, and they now stood by the vault of the Rochesters, their backs towards us, viewing through the rails the old time-stained marble tomb, where a kneeling angel guarded the remains of Damer de Rochester, slain at Marston Moor in the time of the civil wars, and of Elizabeth, his wife. Our place was taken at the communion rails. Hearing a cautious step behind me, I glanced over my shoulder: one of the strangers--a gentleman, evidently--was advancing up the chancel. The service began. The explanation of the intent of matrimony was gone through; and then the clergyman came a step further forward, and, bending slightly towards Mr. Rochester, went on. "I require and charge you both (as ye will answer at the dreadful day of judgment, when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed), that if either of you know any impediment why ye may not lawfully be joined together in matrimony, ye do now confess it; for be ye well assured that so many as are coupled together otherwise than God's Word doth allow, are not joined together by God, neither is their matrimony lawful." He paused, as the custom is. When is the pause after that sentence ever broken by reply? Not, perhaps, once in a hundred years. And the clergyman, who had not lifted his eyes from his book, and had held his breath but for a moment, was proceeding: his hand was already stretched towards Mr. Rochester, as his lips unclosed to ask, "Wilt thou have this woman for thy wedded wife?"--when a distinct and near voice said-- "The marriage cannot go on: I declare the existence of an impediment." The clergyman looked up at the speaker and stood mute; the clerk did the same; Mr. Rochester moved slightly, as if an earthquake had rolled under his feet: taking a firmer footing, and not turning his head or eyes, he said, "Proceed." Profound silence fell when he had uttered that word, with deep but low intonation. Presently Mr. Wood said-- "I cannot proceed without some investigation into what has been asserted, and evidence of its truth or falsehood." "The ceremony is quite broken off," subjoined the voice behind us. "I am in a condition to prove my allegation: an insuperable impediment to this marriage exists." Mr. Rochester heard, but heeded not: he stood stubborn and rigid, making no movement but to possess himself of my hand. What a hot and strong grasp he had! and how like quarried marble was his pale, firm, massive front at this moment! How his eye shone, still watchful, and yet wild beneath! Mr. Wood seemed at a loss. "What is the nature of the impediment?" he asked. "Perhaps it may be got over--explained away?" "Hardly," was the answer. "I have called it insuperable, and I speak advisedly." The speaker came forward and leaned on the rails. He continued, uttering each word distinctly, calmly, steadily, but not loudly-- "It simply consists in the existence of a previous marriage. Mr. Rochester has a wife now living." My nerves vibrated to those low-spoken words as they had never vibrated to thunder--my blood felt their subtle violence as it had never felt frost or fire; but I was collected, and in no danger of swooning. I looked at Mr. Rochester: I made him look at me. His whole face was colourless rock: his eye was both spark and flint. He disavowed nothing: he seemed as if he would defy all things. Without speaking, without smiling, without seeming to recognise in me a human being, he only twined my waist with his arm and riveted me to his side. "Who are you?" he asked of the intruder. "My name is Briggs, a solicitor of --- Street, London." "And you would thrust on me a wife?" "I would remind you of your lady's existence, sir, which the law recognises, if you do not." "Favour me with an account of her--with her name, her parentage, her place of abode." "Certainly." Mr. Briggs calmly took a paper from his pocket, and read out in a sort of official, nasal voice:-- "'I affirm and can prove that on the 20th of October A.D. --- (a date of fifteen years back), Edward Fairfax Rochester, of Thornfield Hall, in the county of ---, and of Ferndean Manor, in ---shire, England, was married to my sister, Bertha Antoinetta Mason, daughter of Jonas Mason, merchant, and of Antoinetta his wife, a Creole, at --- church, Spanish Town, Jamaica. The record of the marriage will be found in the register of that church--a copy of it is now in my possession. Signed, Richard Mason.'" "That--if a genuine document--may prove I have been married, but it does not prove that the woman mentioned therein as my wife is still living." "She was living three months ago," returned the lawyer. "How do you know?" "I have a witness to the fact, whose testimony even you, sir, will scarcely controvert." "Produce him--or go to hell." "I will produce him first--he is on the spot. Mr. Mason, have the goodness to step forward." Mr. Rochester, on hearing the name, set his teeth; he experienced, too, a sort of strong convulsive quiver; near to him as I was, I felt the spasmodic movement of fury or despair run through his frame. The second stranger, who had hitherto lingered in the background, now drew near; a pale face looked over the solicitor's shoulder--yes, it was Mason himself. Mr. Rochester turned and glared at him. His eye, as I have often said, was a black eye: it had now a tawny, nay, a bloody light in its gloom; and his face flushed--olive cheek and hueless forehead received a glow as from spreading, ascending heart-fire: and he stirred, lifted his strong arm--he could have struck Mason, dashed him on the church-floor, shocked by ruthless blow the breath from his body--but Mason shrank away, and cried faintly, "Good God!" Contempt fell cool on Mr. Rochester--his passion died as if a blight had shrivelled it up: he only asked--"What have _you_ to say?" An inaudible reply escaped Mason's white lips. "The devil is in it if you cannot answer distinctly. I again demand, what have you to say?" "Sir--sir," interrupted the clergyman, "do not forget you are in a sacred place." Then addressing Mason, he inquired gently, "Are you aware, sir, whether or not this gentleman's wife is still living?" "Courage," urged the lawyer,--"speak out." "She is now living at Thornfield Hall," said Mason, in more articulate tones: "I saw her there last April. I am her brother." "At Thornfield Hall!" ejaculated the clergyman. "Impossible! I am an old resident in this neighbourhood, sir, and I never heard of a Mrs. Rochester at Thornfield Hall." I saw a grim smile contort Mr. Rochester's lips, and he muttered-- "No, by God! I took care that none should hear of it--or of her under that name." He mused--for ten minutes he held counsel with himself: he formed his resolve, and announced it-- "Enough! all shall bolt out at once, like the bullet from the barrel. Wood, close your book and take off your surplice; John Green (to the clerk), leave the church: there will be no wedding to-day." The man obeyed. Mr. Rochester continued, hardily and recklessly: "Bigamy is an ugly word!--I meant, however, to be a bigamist; but fate has out-manoeuvred me, or Providence has checked me,--perhaps the last. I am little better than a devil at this moment; and, as my pastor there would tell me, deserve no doubt the sternest judgments of God, even to the quenchless fire and deathless worm. Gentlemen, my plan is broken up:--what this lawyer and his client say is true: I have been married, and the woman to whom I was married lives! You say you never heard of a Mrs. Rochester at the house up yonder, Wood; but I daresay you have many a time inclined your ear to gossip about the mysterious lunatic kept there under watch and ward. Some have whispered to you that she is my bastard half-sister: some, my cast-off mistress. I now inform you that she is my wife, whom I married fifteen years ago,--Bertha Mason by name; sister of this resolute personage, who is now, with his quivering limbs and white cheeks, showing you what a stout heart men may bear. Cheer up, Dick!--never fear me!--I'd almost as soon strike a woman as you. Bertha Mason is mad; and she came of a mad family; idiots and maniacs through three generations! Her mother, the Creole, was both a madwoman and a drunkard!--as I found out after I had wed the daughter: for they were silent on family secrets before. Bertha, like a dutiful child, copied her parent in both points. I had a charming partner--pure, wise, modest: you can fancy I was a happy man. I went through rich scenes! Oh! my experience has been heavenly, if you only knew it! But I owe you no further explanation. Briggs, Wood, Mason, I invite you all to come up to the house and visit Mrs. Poole's patient, and _my wife_! You shall see what sort of a being I was cheated into espousing, and judge whether or not I had a right to break the compact, and seek sympathy with something at least human. This girl," he continued, looking at me, "knew no more than you, Wood, of the disgusting secret: she thought all was fair and legal and never dreamt she was going to be entrapped into a feigned union with a defrauded wretch, already bound to a bad, mad, and embruted partner! Come all of you--follow!" Still holding me fast, he left the church: the three gentlemen came after. At the front door of the hall we found the carriage. "Take it back to the coach-house, John," said Mr. Rochester coolly; "it will not be wanted to-day." At our entrance, Mrs. Fairfax, Adele, Sophie, Leah, advanced to meet and greet us. "To the right-about--every soul!" cried the master; "away with your congratulations! Who wants them? Not I!--they are fifteen years too late!" He passed on and ascended the stairs, still holding my hand, and still beckoning the gentlemen to follow him, which they did. We mounted the first staircase, passed up the gallery, proceeded to the third storey: the low, black door, opened by Mr. Rochester's master-key, admitted us to the tapestried room, with its great bed and its pictorial cabinet. "You know this place, Mason," said our guide; "she bit and stabbed you here." He lifted the hangings from the wall, uncovering the second door: this, too, he opened. In a room without a window, there burnt a fire guarded by a high and strong fender, and a lamp suspended from the ceiling by a chain. Grace Poole bent over the fire, apparently cooking something in a saucepan. In the deep shade, at the farther end of the room, a figure ran backwards and forwards. What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell: it grovelled, seemingly, on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing, and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head and face. "Good-morrow, Mrs. Poole!" said Mr. Rochester. "How are you? and how is your charge to-day?" "We're tolerable, sir, I thank you," replied Grace, lifting the boiling mess carefully on to the hob: "rather snappish, but not 'rageous." A fierce cry seemed to give the lie to her favourable report: the clothed hyena rose up, and stood tall on its hind-feet. "Ah! sir, she sees you!" exclaimed Grace: "you'd better not stay." "Only a few moments, Grace: you must allow me a few moments." "Take care then, sir!--for God's sake, take care!" The maniac bellowed: she parted her shaggy locks from her visage, and gazed wildly at her visitors. I recognised well that purple face,--those bloated features. Mrs. Poole advanced. "Keep out of the way," said Mr. Rochester, thrusting her aside: "she has no knife now, I suppose, and I'm on my guard." "One never knows what she has, sir: she is so cunning: it is not in mortal discretion to fathom her craft." "We had better leave her," whispered Mason. "Go to the devil!" was his brother-in-law's recommendation. "'Ware!" cried Grace. The three gentlemen retreated simultaneously. Mr. Rochester flung me behind him: the lunatic sprang and grappled his throat viciously, and laid her teeth to his cheek: they struggled. She was a big woman, in stature almost equalling her husband, and corpulent besides: she showed virile force in the contest--more than once she almost throttled him, athletic as he was. He could have settled her with a well-planted blow; but he would not strike: he would only wrestle. At last he mastered her arms; Grace Poole gave him a cord, and he pinioned them behind her: with more rope, which was at hand, he bound her to a chair. The operation was performed amidst the fiercest yells and the most convulsive plunges. Mr. Rochester then turned to the spectators: he looked at them with a smile both acrid and desolate. "That is _my wife_," said he. "Such is the sole conjugal embrace I am ever to know--such are the endearments which are to solace my leisure hours! And _this_ is what I wished to have" (laying his hand on my shoulder): "this young girl, who stands so grave and quiet at the mouth of hell, looking collectedly at the gambols of a demon, I wanted her just as a change after that fierce ragout. Wood and Briggs, look at the difference! Compare these clear eyes with the red balls yonder--this face with that mask--this form with that bulk; then judge me, priest of the gospel and man of the law, and remember with what judgment ye judge ye shall be judged! Off with you now. I must shut up my prize." We all withdrew. Mr. Rochester stayed a moment behind us, to give some further order to Grace Poole. The solicitor addressed me as he descended the stair. "You, madam," said he, "are cleared from all blame: your uncle will be glad to hear it--if, indeed, he should be still living--when Mr. Mason returns to Madeira." "My uncle! What of him? Do you know him?" "Mr. Mason does. Mr. Eyre has been the Funchal correspondent of his house for some years. When your uncle received your letter intimating the contemplated union between yourself and Mr. Rochester, Mr. Mason, who was staying at Madeira to recruit his health, on his way back to Jamaica, happened to be with him. Mr. Eyre mentioned the intelligence; for he knew that my client here was acquainted with a gentleman of the name of Rochester. Mr. Mason, astonished and distressed as you may suppose, revealed the real state of matters. Your uncle, I am sorry to say, is now on a sick bed; from which, considering the nature of his disease--decline--and the stage it has reached, it is unlikely he will ever rise. He could not then hasten to England himself, to extricate you from the snare into which you had fallen, but he implored Mr. Mason to lose no time in taking steps to prevent the false marriage. He referred him to me for assistance. I used all despatch, and am thankful I was not too late: as you, doubtless, must be also. Were I not morally certain that your uncle will be dead ere you reach Madeira, I would advise you to accompany Mr. Mason back; but as it is, I think you had better remain in England till you can hear further, either from or of Mr. Eyre. Have we anything else to stay for?" he inquired of Mr. Mason. "No, no--let us be gone," was the anxious reply; and without waiting to take leave of Mr. Rochester, they made their exit at the hall door. The clergyman stayed to exchange a few sentences, either of admonition or reproof, with his haughty parishioner; this duty done, he too departed. I heard him go as I stood at the half-open door of my own room, to which I had now withdrawn. The house cleared, I shut myself in, fastened the bolt that none might intrude, and proceeded--not to weep, not to mourn, I was yet too calm for that, but--mechanically to take off the wedding dress, and replace it by the stuff gown I had worn yesterday, as I thought, for the last time. I then sat down: I felt weak and tired. I leaned my arms on a table, and my head dropped on them. And now I thought: till now I had only heard, seen, moved--followed up and down where I was led or dragged--watched event rush on event, disclosure open beyond disclosure: but _now_, _I thought_. The morning had been a quiet morning enough--all except the brief scene with the lunatic: the transaction in the church had not been noisy; there was no explosion of passion, no loud altercation, no dispute, no defiance or challenge, no tears, no sobs: a few words had been spoken, a calmly pronounced objection to the marriage made; some stern, short questions put by Mr. Rochester; answers, explanations given, evidence adduced; an open admission of the truth had been uttered by my master; then the living proof had been seen; the intruders were gone, and all was over. I was in my own room as usual--just myself, without obvious change: nothing had smitten me, or scathed me, or maimed me. And yet where was the Jane Eyre of yesterday?--where was her life?--where were her prospects? Jane Eyre, who had been an ardent, expectant woman--almost a bride, was a cold, solitary girl again: her life was pale; her prospects were desolate. A Christmas frost had come at midsummer; a white December storm had whirled over June; ice glazed the ripe apples, drifts crushed the blowing roses; on hayfield and cornfield lay a frozen shroud: lanes which last night blushed full of flowers, to-day were pathless with untrodden snow; and the woods, which twelve hours since waved leafy and flagrant as groves between the tropics, now spread, waste, wild, and white as pine-forests in wintry Norway. My hopes were all dead--struck with a subtle doom, such as, in one night, fell on all the first-born in the land of Egypt. I looked on my cherished wishes, yesterday so blooming and glowing; they lay stark, chill, livid corpses that could never revive. I looked at my love: that feeling which was my master's--which he had created; it shivered in my heart, like a suffering child in a cold cradle; sickness and anguish had seized it; it could not seek Mr. Rochester's arms--it could not derive warmth from his breast. Oh, never more could it turn to him; for faith was blighted--confidence destroyed! Mr. Rochester was not to me what he had been; for he was not what I had thought him. I would not ascribe vice to him; I would not say he had betrayed me; but the attribute of stainless truth was gone from his idea, and from his presence I must go: _that_ I perceived well. When--how--whither, I could not yet discern; but he himself, I doubted not, would hurry me from Thornfield. Real affection, it seemed, he could not have for me; it had been only fitful passion: that was balked; he would want me no more. I should fear even to cross his path now: my view must be hateful to him. Oh, how blind had been my eyes! How weak my conduct! My eyes were covered and closed: eddying darkness seemed to swim round me, and reflection came in as black and confused a flow. Self-abandoned, relaxed, and effortless, I seemed to have laid me down in the dried-up bed of a great river; I heard a flood loosened in remote mountains, and felt the torrent come: to rise I had no will, to flee I had no strength. I lay faint, longing to be dead. One idea only still throbbed life-like within me--a remembrance of God: it begot an unuttered prayer: these words went wandering up and down in my rayless mind, as something that should be whispered, but no energy was found to express them-- "Be not far from me, for trouble is near: there is none to help." It was near: and as I had lifted no petition to Heaven to avert it--as I had neither joined my hands, nor bent my knees, nor moved my lips--it came: in full heavy swing the torrent poured over me. The whole consciousness of my life lorn, my love lost, my hope quenched, my faith death-struck, swayed full and mighty above me in one sullen mass. That bitter hour cannot be described: in truth, "the waters came into my soul; I sank in deep mire: I felt no standing; I came into deep waters; the floods overflowed me." CHAPTER XXVII Some time in the afternoon I raised my head, and looking round and seeing the western sun gilding the sign of its decline on the wall, I asked, "What am I to do?" But the answer my mind gave--"Leave Thornfield at once"--was so prompt, so dread, that I stopped my ears. I said I could not bear such words now. "That I am not Edward Rochester's bride is the least part of my woe," I alleged: "that I have wakened out of most glorious dreams, and found them all void and vain, is a horror I could bear and master; but that I must leave him decidedly, instantly, entirely, is intolerable. I cannot do it." But, then, a voice within me averred that I could do it and foretold that I should do it. I wrestled with my own resolution: I wanted to be weak that I might avoid the awful passage of further suffering I saw laid out for me; and Conscience, turned tyrant, held Passion by the throat, told her tauntingly, she had yet but dipped her dainty foot in the slough, and swore that with that arm of iron he would thrust her down to unsounded depths of agony. "Let me be torn away," then I cried. "Let another help me!" "No; you shall tear yourself away, none shall help you: you shall yourself pluck out your right eye; yourself cut off your right hand: your heart shall be the victim, and you the priest to transfix it." I rose up suddenly, terror-struck at the solitude which so ruthless a judge haunted,--at the silence which so awful a voice filled. My head swam as I stood erect. I perceived that I was sickening from excitement and inanition; neither meat nor drink had passed my lips that day, for I had taken no breakfast. And, with a strange pang, I now reflected that, long as I had been shut up here, no message had been sent to ask how I was, or to invite me to come down: not even little Adele had tapped at the door; not even Mrs. Fairfax had sought me. "Friends always forget those whom fortune forsakes," I murmured, as I undrew the bolt and passed out. I stumbled over an obstacle: my head was still dizzy, my sight was dim, and my limbs were feeble. I could not soon recover myself. I fell, but not on to the ground: an outstretched arm caught me. I looked up--I was supported by Mr. Rochester, who sat in a chair across my chamber threshold. "You come out at last," he said. "Well, I have been waiting for you long, and listening: yet not one movement have I heard, nor one sob: five minutes more of that death-like hush, and I should have forced the lock like a burglar. So you shun me?--you shut yourself up and grieve alone! I would rather you had come and upbraided me with vehemence. You are passionate. I expected a scene of some kind. I was prepared for the hot rain of tears; only I wanted them to be shed on my breast: now a senseless floor has received them, or your drenched handkerchief. But I err: you have not wept at all! I see a white cheek and a faded eye, but no trace of tears. I suppose, then, your heart has been weeping blood?" "Well, Jane! not a word of reproach? Nothing bitter--nothing poignant? Nothing to cut a feeling or sting a passion? You sit quietly where I have placed you, and regard me with a weary, passive look." "Jane, I never meant to wound you thus. If the man who had but one little ewe lamb that was dear to him as a daughter, that ate of his bread and drank of his cup, and lay in his bosom, had by some mistake slaughtered it at the shambles, he would not have rued his bloody blunder more than I now rue mine. Will you ever forgive me?" Reader, I forgave him at the moment and on the spot. There was such deep remorse in his eye, such true pity in his tone, such manly energy in his manner; and besides, there was such unchanged love in his whole look and mien--I forgave him all: yet not in words, not outwardly; only at my heart's core. "You know I am a scoundrel, Jane?" ere long he inquired wistfully--wondering, I suppose, at my continued silence and tameness, the result rather of weakness than of will. "Yes, sir." "Then tell me so roundly and sharply--don't spare me." "I cannot: I am tired and sick. I want some water." He heaved a sort of shuddering sigh, and taking me in his arms, carried me downstairs. At first I did not know to what room he had borne me; all was cloudy to my glazed sight: presently I felt the reviving warmth of a fire; for, summer as it was, I had become icy cold in my chamber. He put wine to my lips; I tasted it and revived; then I ate something he offered me, and was soon myself. I was in the library--sitting in his chair--he was quite near. "If I could go out of life now, without too sharp a pang, it would be well for me," I thought; "then I should not have to make the effort of cracking my heart-strings in rending them from among Mr. Rochester's. I must leave him, it appears. I do not want to leave him--I cannot leave him." "How are you now, Jane?" "Much better, sir; I shall be well soon." "Taste the wine again, Jane." I obeyed him; then he put the glass on the table, stood before me, and looked at me attentively. Suddenly he turned away, with an inarticulate exclamation, full of passionate emotion of some kind; he walked fast through the room and came back; he stooped towards me as if to kiss me; but I remembered caresses were now forbidden. I turned my face away and put his aside. "What!--How is this?" he exclaimed hastily. "Oh, I know! you won't kiss the husband of Bertha Mason? You consider my arms filled and my embraces appropriated?" "At any rate, there is neither room nor claim for me, sir." "Why, Jane? I will spare you the trouble of much talking; I will answer for you--Because I have a wife already, you would reply.--I guess rightly?" "Yes." "If you think so, you must have a strange opinion of me; you must regard me as a plotting profligate--a base and low rake who has been simulating disinterested love in order to draw you into a snare deliberately laid, and strip you of honour and rob you of self-respect. What do you say to that? I see you can say nothing in the first place, you are faint still, and have enough to do to draw your breath; in the second place, you cannot yet accustom yourself to accuse and revile me, and besides, the flood-gates of tears are opened, and they would rush out if you spoke much; and you have no desire to expostulate, to upbraid, to make a scene: you are thinking how _to act_--_talking_ you consider is of no use. I know you--I am on my guard." "Sir, I do not wish to act against you," I said; and my unsteady voice warned me to curtail my sentence. "Not in your sense of the word, but in mine you are scheming to destroy me. You have as good as said that I am a married man--as a married man you will shun me, keep out of my way: just now you have refused to kiss me. You intend to make yourself a complete stranger to me: to live under this roof only as Adele's governess; if ever I say a friendly word to you, if ever a friendly feeling inclines you again to me, you will say,--'That man had nearly made me his mistress: I must be ice and rock to him;' and ice and rock you will accordingly become." I cleared and steadied my voice to reply: "All is changed about me, sir; I must change too--there is no doubt of that; and to avoid fluctuations of feeling, and continual combats with recollections and associations, there is only one way--Adele must have a new governess, sir." "Oh, Adele will go to school--I have settled that already; nor do I mean to torment you with the hideous associations and recollections of Thornfield Hall--this accursed place--this tent of Achan--this insolent vault, offering the ghastliness of living death to the light of the open sky--this narrow stone hell, with its one real fiend, worse than a legion of such as we imagine. Jane, you shall not stay here, nor will I. I was wrong ever to bring you to Thornfield Hall, knowing as I did how it was haunted. I charged them to conceal from you, before I ever saw you, all knowledge of the curse of the place; merely because I feared Adele never would have a governess to stay if she knew with what inmate she was housed, and my plans would not permit me to remove the maniac elsewhere--though I possess an old house, Ferndean Manor, even more retired and hidden than this, where I could have lodged her safely enough, had not a scruple about the unhealthiness of the situation, in the heart of a wood, made my conscience recoil from the arrangement. Probably those damp walls would soon have eased me of her charge: but to each villain his own vice; and mine is not a tendency to indirect assassination, even of what I most hate. "Concealing the mad-woman's neighbourhood from you, however, was something like covering a child with a cloak and laying it down near a upas-tree: that demon's vicinage is poisoned, and always was. But I'll shut up Thornfield Hall: I'll nail up the front door and board the lower windows: I'll give Mrs. Poole two hundred a year to live here with _my wife_, as you term that fearful hag: Grace will do much for money, and she shall have her son, the keeper at Grimsby Retreat, to bear her company and be at hand to give her aid in the paroxysms, when _my wife_ is prompted by her familiar to burn people in their beds at night, to stab them, to bite their flesh from their bones, and so on--" "Sir," I interrupted him, "you are inexorable for that unfortunate lady: you speak of her with hate--with vindictive antipathy. It is cruel--she cannot help being mad." "Jane, my little darling (so I will call you, for so you are), you don't know what you are talking about; you misjudge me again: it is not because she is mad I hate her. If you were mad, do you think I should hate you?" "I do indeed, sir." "Then you are mistaken, and you know nothing about me, and nothing about the sort of love of which I am capable. Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own: in pain and sickness it would still be dear. Your mind is my treasure, and if it were broken, it would be my treasure still: if you raved, my arms should confine you, and not a strait waistcoat--your grasp, even in fury, would have a charm for me: if you flew at me as wildly as that woman did this morning, I should receive you in an embrace, at least as fond as it would be restrictive. I should not shrink from you with disgust as I did from her: in your quiet moments you should have no watcher and no nurse but me; and I could hang over you with untiring tenderness, though you gave me no smile in return; and never weary of gazing into your eyes, though they had no longer a ray of recognition for me.--But why do I follow that train of ideas? I was talking of removing you from Thornfield. All, you know, is prepared for prompt departure: to-morrow you shall go. I only ask you to endure one more night under this roof, Jane; and then, farewell to its miseries and terrors for ever! I have a place to repair to, which will be a secure sanctuary from hateful reminiscences, from unwelcome intrusion--even from falsehood and slander." "And take Adele with you, sir," I interrupted; "she will be a companion for you." "What do you mean, Jane? I told you I would send Adele to school; and what do I want with a child for a companion, and not my own child,--a French dancer's bastard? Why do you importune me about her! I say, why do you assign Adele to me for a companion?" "You spoke of a retirement, sir; and retirement and solitude are dull: too dull for you." "Solitude! solitude!" he reiterated with irritation. "I see I must come to an explanation. I don't know what sphynx-like expression is forming in your countenance. You are to share my solitude. Do you understand?" I shook my head: it required a degree of courage, excited as he was becoming, even to risk that mute sign of dissent. He had been walking fast about the room, and he stopped, as if suddenly rooted to one spot. He looked at me long and hard: I turned my eyes from him, fixed them on the fire, and tried to assume and maintain a quiet, collected aspect. "Now for the hitch in Jane's character," he said at last, speaking more calmly than from his look I had expected him to speak. "The reel of silk has run smoothly enough so far; but I always knew there would come a knot and a puzzle: here it is. Now for vexation, and exasperation, and endless trouble! By God! I long to exert a fraction of Samson's strength, and break the entanglement like tow!" He recommenced his walk, but soon again stopped, and this time just before me. "Jane! will you hear reason?" (he stooped and approached his lips to my ear); "because, if you won't, I'll try violence." His voice was hoarse; his look that of a man who is just about to burst an insufferable bond and plunge headlong into wild license. I saw that in another moment, and with one impetus of frenzy more, I should be able to do nothing with him. The present--the passing second of time--was all I had in which to control and restrain him--a movement of repulsion, flight, fear would have sealed my doom,--and his. But I was not afraid: not in the least. I felt an inward power; a sense of influence, which supported me. The crisis was perilous; but not without its charm: such as the Indian, perhaps, feels when he slips over the rapid in his canoe. I took hold of his clenched hand, loosened the contorted fingers, and said to him, soothingly-- "Sit down; I'll talk to you as long as you like, and hear all you have to say, whether reasonable or unreasonable." He sat down: but he did not get leave to speak directly. I had been struggling with tears for some time: I had taken great pains to repress them, because I knew he would not like to see me weep. Now, however, I considered it well to let them flow as freely and as long as they liked. If the flood annoyed him, so much the better. So I gave way and cried heartily. Soon I heard him earnestly entreating me to be composed. I said I could not while he was in such a passion. "But I am not angry, Jane: I only love you too well; and you had steeled your little pale face with such a resolute, frozen look, I could not endure it. Hush, now, and wipe your eyes." His softened voice announced that he was subdued; so I, in my turn, became calm. Now he made an effort to rest his head on my shoulder, but I would not permit it. Then he would draw me to him: no. "Jane! Jane!" he said, in such an accent of bitter sadness it thrilled along every nerve I had; "you don't love me, then? It was only my station, and the rank of my wife, that you valued? Now that you think me disqualified to become your husband, you recoil from my touch as if I were some toad or ape." These words cut me: yet what could I do or I say? I ought probably to have done or said nothing; but I was so tortured by a sense of remorse at thus hurting his feelings, I could not control the wish to drop balm where I had wounded. "I _do_ love you," I said, "more than ever: but I must not show or indulge the feeling: and this is the last time I must express it." "The last time, Jane! What! do you think you can live with me, and see me daily, and yet, if you still love me, be always cold and distant?" "No, sir; that I am certain I could not; and therefore I see there is but one way: but you will be furious if I mention it." "Oh, mention it! If I storm, you have the art of weeping." "Mr. Rochester, I must leave you." "For how long, Jane? For a few minutes, while you smooth your hair--which is somewhat dishevelled; and bathe your face--which looks feverish?" "I must leave Adele and Thornfield. I must part with you for my whole life: I must begin a new existence among strange faces and strange scenes." "Of course: I told you you should. I pass over the madness about parting from me. You mean you must become a part of me. As to the new existence, it is all right: you shall yet be my wife: I am not married. You shall be Mrs. Rochester--both virtually and nominally. I shall keep only to you so long as you and I live. You shall go to a place I have in the south of France: a whitewashed villa on the shores of the Mediterranean. There you shall live a happy, and guarded, and most innocent life. Never fear that I wish to lure you into error--to make you my mistress. Why did you shake your head? Jane, you must be reasonable, or in truth I shall again become frantic." His voice and hand quivered: his large nostrils dilated; his eye blazed: still I dared to speak. "Sir, your wife is living: that is a fact acknowledged this morning by yourself. If I lived with you as you desire, I should then be your mistress: to say otherwise is sophistical--is false." "Jane, I am not a gentle-tempered man--you forget that: I am not long- enduring; I am not cool and dispassionate. Out of pity to me and yourself, put your finger on my pulse, feel how it throbs, and--beware!" He bared his wrist, and offered it to me: the blood was forsaking his cheek and lips, they were growing livid; I was distressed on all hands. To agitate him thus deeply, by a resistance he so abhorred, was cruel: to yield was out of the question. I did what human beings do instinctively when they are driven to utter extremity--looked for aid to one higher than man: the words "God help me!" burst involuntarily from my lips. "I am a fool!" cried Mr. Rochester suddenly. "I keep telling her I am not married, and do not explain to her why. I forget she knows nothing of the character of that woman, or of the circumstances attending my infernal union with her. Oh, I am certain Jane will agree with me in opinion, when she knows all that I know! Just put your hand in mine, Janet--that I may have the evidence of touch as well as sight, to prove you are near me--and I will in a few words show you the real state of the case. Can you listen to me?" "Yes, sir; for hours if you will." "I ask only minutes. Jane, did you ever hear or know that I was not the eldest son of my house: that I had once a brother older than I?" "I remember Mrs. Fairfax told me so once." "And did you ever hear that my father was an avaricious, grasping man?" "I have understood something to that effect." "Well, Jane, being so, it was his resolution to keep the property together; he could not bear the idea of dividing his estate and leaving me a fair portion: all, he resolved, should go to my brother, Rowland. Yet as little could he endure that a son of his should be a poor man. I must be provided for by a wealthy marriage. He sought me a partner betimes. Mr. Mason, a West India planter and merchant, was his old acquaintance. He was certain his possessions were real and vast: he made inquiries. Mr. Mason, he found, had a son and daughter; and he learned from him that he could and would give the latter a fortune of thirty thousand pounds: that sufficed. When I left college, I was sent out to Jamaica, to espouse a bride already courted for me. My father said nothing about her money; but he told me Miss Mason was the boast of Spanish Town for her beauty: and this was no lie. I found her a fine woman, in the style of Blanche Ingram: tall, dark, and majestic. Her family wished to secure me because I was of a good race; and so did she. They showed her to me in parties, splendidly dressed. I seldom saw her alone, and had very little private conversation with her. She flattered me, and lavishly displayed for my pleasure her charms and accomplishments. All the men in her circle seemed to admire her and envy me. I was dazzled, stimulated: my senses were excited; and being ignorant, raw, and inexperienced, I thought I loved her. There is no folly so besotted that the idiotic rivalries of society, the prurience, the rashness, the blindness of youth, will not hurry a man to its commission. Her relatives encouraged me; competitors piqued me; she allured me: a marriage was achieved almost before I knew where I was. Oh, I have no respect for myself when I think of that act!--an agony of inward contempt masters me. I never loved, I never esteemed, I did not even know her. I was not sure of the existence of one virtue in her nature: I had marked neither modesty, nor benevolence, nor candour, nor refinement in her mind or manners--and, I married her:--gross, grovelling, mole-eyed blockhead that I was! With less sin I might have--But let me remember to whom I am speaking." "My bride's mother I had never seen: I understood she was dead. The honeymoon over, I learned my mistake; she was only mad, and shut up in a lunatic asylum. There was a younger brother, too--a complete dumb idiot. The elder one, whom you have seen (and whom I cannot hate, whilst I abhor all his kindred, because he has some grains of affection in his feeble mind, shown in the continued interest he takes in his wretched sister, and also in a dog-like attachment he once bore me), will probably be in the same state one day. My father and my brother Rowland knew all this; but they thought only of the thirty thousand pounds, and joined in the plot against me." "These were vile discoveries; but except for the treachery of concealment, I should have made them no subject of reproach to my wife, even when I found her nature wholly alien to mine, her tastes obnoxious to me, her cast of mind common, low, narrow, and singularly incapable of being led to anything higher, expanded to anything larger--when I found that I could not pass a single evening, nor even a single hour of the day with her in comfort; that kindly conversation could not be sustained between us, because whatever topic I started, immediately received from her a turn at once coarse and trite, perverse and imbecile--when I perceived that I should never have a quiet or settled household, because no servant would bear the continued outbreaks of her violent and unreasonable temper, or the vexations of her absurd, contradictory, exacting orders--even then I restrained myself: I eschewed upbraiding, I curtailed remonstrance; I tried to devour my repentance and disgust in secret; I repressed the deep antipathy I felt. "Jane, I will not trouble you with abominable details: some strong words shall express what I have to say. I lived with that woman upstairs four years, and before that time she had tried me indeed: her character ripened and developed with frightful rapidity; her vices sprang up fast and rank: they were so strong, only cruelty could check them, and I would not use cruelty. What a pigmy intellect she had, and what giant propensities! How fearful were the curses those propensities entailed on me! Bertha Mason, the true daughter of an infamous mother, dragged me through all the hideous and degrading agonies which must attend a man bound to a wife at once intemperate and unchaste. "My brother in the interval was dead, and at the end of the four years my father died too. I was rich enough now--yet poor to hideous indigence: a nature the most gross, impure, depraved I ever saw, was associated with mine, and called by the law and by society a part of me. And I could not rid myself of it by any legal proceedings: for the doctors now discovered that _my wife_ was mad--her excesses had prematurely developed the germs of insanity. Jane, you don't like my narrative; you look almost sick--shall I defer the rest to another day?" "No, sir, finish it now; I pity you--I do earnestly pity you." "Pity, Jane, from some people is a noxious and insulting sort of tribute, which one is justified in hurling back in the teeth of those who offer it; but that is the sort of pity native to callous, selfish hearts; it is a hybrid, egotistical pain at hearing of woes, crossed with ignorant contempt for those who have endured them. But that is not your pity, Jane; it is not the feeling of which your whole face is full at this moment--with which your eyes are now almost overflowing--with which your heart is heaving--with which your hand is trembling in mine. Your pity, my darling, is the suffering mother of love: its anguish is the very natal pang of the divine passion. I accept it, Jane; let the daughter have free advent--my arms wait to receive her." "Now, sir, proceed; what did you do when you found she was mad?" "Jane, I approached the verge of despair; a remnant of self-respect was all that intervened between me and the gulf. In the eyes of the world, I was doubtless covered with grimy dishonour; but I resolved to be clean in my own sight--and to the last I repudiated the contamination of her crimes, and wrenched myself from connection with her mental defects. Still, society associated my name and person with hers; I yet saw her and heard her daily: something of her breath (faugh!) mixed with the air I breathed; and besides, I remembered I had once been her husband--that recollection was then, and is now, inexpressibly odious to me; moreover, I knew that while she lived I could never be the husband of another and better wife; and, though five years my senior (her family and her father had lied to me even in the particular of her age), she was likely to live as long as I, being as robust in frame as she was infirm in mind. Thus, at the age of twenty-six, I was hopeless. "One night I had been awakened by her yells--(since the medical men had pronounced her mad, she had, of course, been shut up)--it was a fiery West Indian night; one of the description that frequently precede the hurricanes of those climates. Being unable to sleep in bed, I got up and opened the window. The air was like sulphur-steams--I could find no refreshment anywhere. Mosquitoes came buzzing in and hummed sullenly round the room; the sea, which I could hear from thence, rumbled dull like an earthquake--black clouds were casting up over it; the moon was setting in the waves, broad and red, like a hot cannon-ball--she threw her last bloody glance over a world quivering with the ferment of tempest. I was physically influenced by the atmosphere and scene, and my ears were filled with the curses the maniac still shrieked out; wherein she momentarily mingled my name with such a tone of demon-hate, with such language!--no professed harlot ever had a fouler vocabulary than she: though two rooms off, I heard every word--the thin partitions of the West India house opposing but slight obstruction to her wolfish cries. "'This life,' said I at last, 'is hell: this is the air--those are the sounds of the bottomless pit! I have a right to deliver myself from it if I can. The sufferings of this mortal state will leave me with the heavy flesh that now cumbers my soul. Of the fanatic's burning eternity I have no fear: there is not a future state worse than this present one--let me break away, and go home to God!' "I said this whilst I knelt down at, and unlocked a trunk which contained a brace of loaded pistols: I mean to shoot myself. I only entertained the intention for a moment; for, not being insane, the crisis of exquisite and unalloyed despair, which had originated the wish and design of self-destruction, was past in a second. "A wind fresh from Europe blew over the ocean and rushed through the open casement: the storm broke, streamed, thundered, blazed, and the air grew pure. I then framed and fixed a resolution. While I walked under the dripping orange-trees of my wet garden, and amongst its drenched pomegranates and pine-apples, and while the refulgent dawn of the tropics kindled round me--I reasoned thus, Jane--and now listen; for it was true Wisdom that consoled me in that hour, and showed me the right path to follow. "The sweet wind from Europe was still whispering in the refreshed leaves, and the Atlantic was thundering in glorious liberty; my heart, dried up and scorched for a long time, swelled to the tone, and filled with living blood--my being longed for renewal--my soul thirsted for a pure draught. I saw hope revive--and felt regeneration possible. From a flowery arch at the bottom of my garden I gazed over the sea--bluer than the sky: the old world was beyond; clear prospects opened thus:-- "'Go,' said Hope, 'and live again in Europe: there it is not known what a sullied name you bear, nor what a filthy burden is bound to you. You may take the maniac with you to England; confine her with due attendance and precautions at Thornfield: then travel yourself to what clime you will, and form what new tie you like. That woman, who has so abused your long- suffering, so sullied your name, so outraged your honour, so blighted your youth, is not your wife, nor are you her husband. See that she is cared for as her condition demands, and you have done all that God and humanity require of you. Let her identity, her connection with yourself, be buried in oblivion: you are bound to impart them to no living being. Place her in safety and comfort: shelter her degradation with secrecy, and leave her.' "I acted precisely on this suggestion. My father and brother had not made my marriage known to their acquaintance; because, in the very first letter I wrote to apprise them of the union--having already begun to experience extreme disgust of its consequences, and, from the family character and constitution, seeing a hideous future opening to me--I added an urgent charge to keep it secret: and very soon the infamous conduct of the wife my father had selected for me was such as to make him blush to own her as his daughter-in-law. Far from desiring to publish the connection, he became as anxious to conceal it as myself. "To England, then, I conveyed her; a fearful voyage I had with such a monster in the vessel. Glad was I when I at last got her to Thornfield, and saw her safely lodged in that third-storey room, of whose secret inner cabinet she has now for ten years made a wild beast's den--a goblin's cell. I had some trouble in finding an attendant for her, as it was necessary to select one on whose fidelity dependence could be placed; for her ravings would inevitably betray my secret: besides, she had lucid intervals of days--sometimes weeks--which she filled up with abuse of me. At last I hired Grace Poole from the Grimbsy Retreat. She and the surgeon, Carter (who dressed Mason's wounds that night he was stabbed and worried), are the only two I have ever admitted to my confidence. Mrs. Fairfax may indeed have suspected something, but she could have gained no precise knowledge as to facts. Grace has, on the whole, proved a good keeper; though, owing partly to a fault of her own, of which it appears nothing can cure her, and which is incident to her harassing profession, her vigilance has been more than once lulled and baffled. The lunatic is both cunning and malignant; she has never failed to take advantage of her guardian's temporary lapses; once to secrete the knife with which she stabbed her brother, and twice to possess herself of the key of her cell, and issue therefrom in the night-time. On the first of these occasions, she perpetrated the attempt to burn me in my bed; on the second, she paid that ghastly visit to you. I thank Providence, who watched over you, that she then spent her fury on your wedding apparel, which perhaps brought back vague reminiscences of her own bridal days: but on what might have happened, I cannot endure to reflect. When I think of the thing which flew at my throat this morning, hanging its black and scarlet visage over the nest of my dove, my blood curdles--" "And what, sir," I asked, while he paused, "did you do when you had settled her here? Where did you go?" "What did I do, Jane? I transformed myself into a will-o'-the-wisp. Where did I go? I pursued wanderings as wild as those of the March-spirit. I sought the Continent, and went devious through all its lands. My fixed desire was to seek and find a good and intelligent woman, whom I could love: a contrast to the fury I left at Thornfield--" "But you could not marry, sir." "I had determined and was convinced that I could and ought. It was not my original intention to deceive, as I have deceived you. I meant to tell my tale plainly, and make my proposals openly: and it appeared to me so absolutely rational that I should be considered free to love and be loved, I never doubted some woman might be found willing and able to understand my case and accept me, in spite of the curse with which I was burdened." "Well, sir?" "When you are inquisitive, Jane, you always make me smile. You open your eyes like an eager bird, and make every now and then a restless movement, as if answers in speech did not flow fast enough for you, and you wanted to read the tablet of one's heart. But before I go on, tell me what you mean by your 'Well, sir?' It is a small phrase very frequent with you; and which many a time has drawn me on and on through interminable talk: I don't very well know why." "I mean,--What next? How did you proceed? What came of such an event?" "Precisely! and what do you wish to know now?" "Whether you found any one you liked: whether you asked her to marry you; and what she said." "I can tell you whether I found any one I liked, and whether I asked her to marry me: but what she said is yet to be recorded in the book of Fate. For ten long years I roved about, living first in one capital, then another: sometimes in St. Petersburg; oftener in Paris; occasionally in Rome, Naples, and Florence. Provided with plenty of money and the passport of an old name, I could choose my own society: no circles were closed against me. I sought my ideal of a woman amongst English ladies, French countesses, Italian signoras, and German grafinnen. I could not find her. Sometimes, for a fleeting moment, I thought I caught a glance, heard a tone, beheld a form, which announced the realisation of my dream: but I was presently undeserved. You are not to suppose that I desired perfection, either of mind or person. I longed only for what suited me--for the antipodes of the Creole: and I longed vainly. Amongst them all I found not one whom, had I been ever so free, I--warned as I was of the risks, the horrors, the loathings of incongruous unions--would have asked to marry me. Disappointment made me reckless. I tried dissipation--never debauchery: that I hated, and hate. That was my Indian Messalina's attribute: rooted disgust at it and her restrained me much, even in pleasure. Any enjoyment that bordered on riot seemed to approach me to her and her vices, and I eschewed it. "Yet I could not live alone; so I tried the companionship of mistresses. The first I chose was Celine Varens--another of those steps which make a man spurn himself when he recalls them. You already know what she was, and how my liaison with her terminated. She had two successors: an Italian, Giacinta, and a German, Clara; both considered singularly handsome. What was their beauty to me in a few weeks? Giacinta was unprincipled and violent: I tired of her in three months. Clara was honest and quiet; but heavy, mindless, and unimpressible: not one whit to my taste. I was glad to give her a sufficient sum to set her up in a good line of business, and so get decently rid of her. But, Jane, I see by your face you are not forming a very favourable opinion of me just now. You think me an unfeeling, loose-principled rake: don't you?" "I don't like you so well as I have done sometimes, indeed, sir. Did it not seem to you in the least wrong to live in that way, first with one mistress and then another? You talk of it as a mere matter of course." "It was with me; and I did not like it. It was a grovelling fashion of existence: I should never like to return to it. Hiring a mistress is the next worse thing to buying a slave: both are often by nature, and always by position, inferior: and to live familiarly with inferiors is degrading. I now hate the recollection of the time I passed with Celine, Giacinta, and Clara." I felt the truth of these words; and I drew from them the certain inference, that if I were so far to forget myself and all the teaching that had ever been instilled into me, as--under any pretext--with any justification--through any temptation--to become the successor of these poor girls, he would one day regard me with the same feeling which now in his mind desecrated their memory. I did not give utterance to this conviction: it was enough to feel it. I impressed it on my heart, that it might remain there to serve me as aid in the time of trial. "Now, Jane, why don't you say 'Well, sir?' I have not done. You are looking grave. You disapprove of me still, I see. But let me come to the point. Last January, rid of all mistresses--in a harsh, bitter frame of mind, the result of a useless, roving, lonely life--corroded with disappointment, sourly disposed against all men, and especially against all womankind (for I began to regard the notion of an intellectual, faithful, loving woman as a mere dream), recalled by business, I came back to England. "On a frosty winter afternoon, I rode in sight of Thornfield Hall. Abhorred spot! I expected no peace--no pleasure there. On a stile in Hay Lane I saw a quiet little figure sitting by itself. I passed it as negligently as I did the pollard willow opposite to it: I had no presentiment of what it would be to me; no inward warning that the arbitress of my life--my genius for good or evil--waited there in humble guise. I did not know it, even when, on the occasion of Mesrour's accident, it came up and gravely offered me help. Childish and slender creature! It seemed as if a linnet had hopped to my foot and proposed to bear me on its tiny wing. I was surly; but the thing would not go: it stood by me with strange perseverance, and looked and spoke with a sort of authority. I must be aided, and by that hand: and aided I was. "When once I had pressed the frail shoulder, something new--a fresh sap and sense--stole into my frame. It was well I had learnt that this elf must return to me--that it belonged to my house down below--or I could not have felt it pass away from under my hand, and seen it vanish behind the dim hedge, without singular regret. I heard you come home that night, Jane, though probably you were not aware that I thought of you or watched for you. The next day I observed you--myself unseen--for half-an- hour, while you played with Adele in the gallery. It was a snowy day, I recollect, and you could not go out of doors. I was in my room; the door was ajar: I could both listen and watch. Adele claimed your outward attention for a while; yet I fancied your thoughts were elsewhere: but you were very patient with her, my little Jane; you talked to her and amused her a long time. When at last she left you, you lapsed at once into deep reverie: you betook yourself slowly to pace the gallery. Now and then, in passing a casement, you glanced out at the thick-falling snow; you listened to the sobbing wind, and again you paced gently on and dreamed. I think those day visions were not dark: there was a pleasurable illumination in your eye occasionally, a soft excitement in your aspect, which told of no bitter, bilious, hypochondriac brooding: your look revealed rather the sweet musings of youth when its spirit follows on willing wings the flight of Hope up and on to an ideal heaven. The voice of Mrs. Fairfax, speaking to a servant in the hall, wakened you: and how curiously you smiled to and at yourself, Janet! There was much sense in your smile: it was very shrewd, and seemed to make light of your own abstraction. It seemed to say--'My fine visions are all very well, but I must not forget they are absolutely unreal. I have a rosy sky and a green flowery Eden in my brain; but without, I am perfectly aware, lies at my feet a rough tract to travel, and around me gather black tempests to encounter.' You ran downstairs and demanded of Mrs. Fairfax some occupation: the weekly house accounts to make up, or something of that sort, I think it was. I was vexed with you for getting out of my sight. "Impatiently I waited for evening, when I might summon you to my presence. An unusual--to me--a perfectly new character I suspected was yours: I desired to search it deeper and know it better. You entered the room with a look and air at once shy and independent: you were quaintly dressed--much as you are now. I made you talk: ere long I found you full of strange contrasts. Your garb and manner were restricted by rule; your air was often diffident, and altogether that of one refined by nature, but absolutely unused to society, and a good deal afraid of making herself disadvantageously conspicuous by some solecism or blunder; yet when addressed, you lifted a keen, a daring, and a glowing eye to your interlocutor's face: there was penetration and power in each glance you gave; when plied by close questions, you found ready and round answers. Very soon you seemed to get used to me: I believe you felt the existence of sympathy between you and your grim and cross master, Jane; for it was astonishing to see how quickly a certain pleasant ease tranquillised your manner: snarl as I would, you showed no surprise, fear, annoyance, or displeasure at my moroseness; you watched me, and now and then smiled at me with a simple yet sagacious grace I cannot describe. I was at once content and stimulated with what I saw: I liked what I had seen, and wished to see more. Yet, for a long time, I treated you distantly, and sought your company rarely. I was an intellectual epicure, and wished to prolong the gratification of making this novel and piquant acquaintance: besides, I was for a while troubled with a haunting fear that if I handled the flower freely its bloom would fade--the sweet charm of freshness would leave it. I did not then know that it was no transitory blossom, but rather the radiant resemblance of one, cut in an indestructible gem. Moreover, I wished to see whether you would seek me if I shunned you--but you did not; you kept in the schoolroom as still as your own desk and easel; if by chance I met you, you passed me as soon, and with as little token of recognition, as was consistent with respect. Your habitual expression in those days, Jane, was a thoughtful look; not despondent, for you were not sickly; but not buoyant, for you had little hope, and no actual pleasure. I wondered what you thought of me, or if you ever thought of me, and resolved to find this out. "I resumed my notice of you. There was something glad in your glance, and genial in your manner, when you conversed: I saw you had a social heart; it was the silent schoolroom--it was the tedium of your life--that made you mournful. I permitted myself the delight of being kind to you; kindness stirred emotion soon: your face became soft in expression, your tones gentle; I liked my name pronounced by your lips in a grateful happy accent. I used to enjoy a chance meeting with you, Jane, at this time: there was a curious hesitation in your manner: you glanced at me with a slight trouble--a hovering doubt: you did not know what my caprice might be--whether I was going to play the master and be stern, or the friend and be benignant. I was now too fond of you often to simulate the first whim; and, when I stretched my hand out cordially, such bloom and light and bliss rose to your young, wistful features, I had much ado often to avoid straining you then and there to my heart." "Don't talk any more of those days, sir," I interrupted, furtively dashing away some tears from my eyes; his language was torture to me; for I knew what I must do--and do soon--and all these reminiscences, and these revelations of his feelings only made my work more difficult. "No, Jane," he returned: "what necessity is there to dwell on the Past, when the Present is so much surer--the Future so much brighter?" I shuddered to hear the infatuated assertion. "You see now how the case stands--do you not?" he continued. "After a youth and manhood passed half in unutterable misery and half in dreary solitude, I have for the first time found what I can truly love--I have found you. You are my sympathy--my better self--my good angel. I am bound to you with a strong attachment. I think you good, gifted, lovely: a fervent, a solemn passion is conceived in my heart; it leans to you, draws you to my centre and spring of life, wraps my existence about you, and, kindling in pure, powerful flame, fuses you and me in one. "It was because I felt and knew this, that I resolved to marry you. To tell me that I had already a wife is empty mockery: you know now that I had but a hideous demon. I was wrong to attempt to deceive you; but I feared a stubbornness that exists in your character. I feared early instilled prejudice: I wanted to have you safe before hazarding confidences. This was cowardly: I should have appealed to your nobleness and magnanimity at first, as I do now--opened to you plainly my life of agony--described to you my hunger and thirst after a higher and worthier existence--shown to you, not my _resolution_ (that word is weak), but my resistless _bent_ to love faithfully and well, where I am faithfully and well loved in return. Then I should have asked you to accept my pledge of fidelity and to give me yours. Jane--give it me now." A pause. "Why are you silent, Jane?" I was experiencing an ordeal: a hand of fiery iron grasped my vitals. Terrible moment: full of struggle, blackness, burning! Not a human being that ever lived could wish to be loved better than I was loved; and him who thus loved me I absolutely worshipped: and I must renounce love and idol. One drear word comprised my intolerable duty--"Depart!" "Jane, you understand what I want of you? Just this promise--'I will be yours, Mr. Rochester.'" "Mr. Rochester, I will _not_ be yours." Another long silence. "Jane!" recommenced he, with a gentleness that broke me down with grief, and turned me stone-cold with ominous terror--for this still voice was the pant of a lion rising--"Jane, do you mean to go one way in the world, and to let me go another?" "I do." "Jane" (bending towards and embracing me), "do you mean it now?" "I do." "And now?" softly kissing my forehead and cheek. "I do," extricating myself from restraint rapidly and completely. "Oh, Jane, this is bitter! This--this is wicked. It would not be wicked to love me." "It would to obey you." A wild look raised his brows--crossed his features: he rose; but he forebore yet. I laid my hand on the back of a chair for support: I shook, I feared--but I resolved. "One instant, Jane. Give one glance to my horrible life when you are gone. All happiness will be torn away with you. What then is left? For a wife I have but the maniac upstairs: as well might you refer me to some corpse in yonder churchyard. What shall I do, Jane? Where turn for a companion and for some hope?" "Do as I do: trust in God and yourself. Believe in heaven. Hope to meet again there." "Then you will not yield?" "No." "Then you condemn me to live wretched and to die accursed?" His voice rose. "I advise you to live sinless, and I wish you to die tranquil." "Then you snatch love and innocence from me? You fling me back on lust for a passion--vice for an occupation?" "Mr. Rochester, I no more assign this fate to you than I grasp at it for myself. We were born to strive and endure--you as well as I: do so. You will forget me before I forget you." "You make me a liar by such language: you sully my honour. I declared I could not change: you tell me to my face I shall change soon. And what a distortion in your judgment, what a perversity in your ideas, is proved by your conduct! Is it better to drive a fellow-creature to despair than to transgress a mere human law, no man being injured by the breach? for you have neither relatives nor acquaintances whom you need fear to offend by living with me?" This was true: and while he spoke my very conscience and reason turned traitors against me, and charged me with crime in resisting him. They spoke almost as loud as Feeling: and that clamoured wildly. "Oh, comply!" it said. "Think of his misery; think of his danger--look at his state when left alone; remember his headlong nature; consider the recklessness following on despair--soothe him; save him; love him; tell him you love him and will be his. Who in the world cares for _you_? or who will be injured by what you do?" Still indomitable was the reply--"_I_ care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself. I will keep the law given by God; sanctioned by man. I will hold to the principles received by me when I was sane, and not mad--as I am now. Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be. If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth? They have a worth--so I have always believed; and if I cannot believe it now, it is because I am insane--quite insane: with my veins running fire, and my heart beating faster than I can count its throbs. Preconceived opinions, foregone determinations, are all I have at this hour to stand by: there I plant my foot." I did. Mr. Rochester, reading my countenance, saw I had done so. His fury was wrought to the highest: he must yield to it for a moment, whatever followed; he crossed the floor and seized my arm and grasped my waist. He seemed to devour me with his flaming glance: physically, I felt, at the moment, powerless as stubble exposed to the draught and glow of a furnace: mentally, I still possessed my soul, and with it the certainty of ultimate safety. The soul, fortunately, has an interpreter--often an unconscious, but still a truthful interpreter--in the eye. My eye rose to his; and while I looked in his fierce face I gave an involuntary sigh; his gripe was painful, and my over-taxed strength almost exhausted. "Never," said he, as he ground his teeth, "never was anything at once so frail and so indomitable. A mere reed she feels in my hand!" (And he shook me with the force of his hold.) "I could bend her with my finger and thumb: and what good would it do if I bent, if I uptore, if I crushed her? Consider that eye: consider the resolute, wild, free thing looking out of it, defying me, with more than courage--with a stern triumph. Whatever I do with its cage, I cannot get at it--the savage, beautiful creature! If I tear, if I rend the slight prison, my outrage will only let the captive loose. Conqueror I might be of the house; but the inmate would escape to heaven before I could call myself possessor of its clay dwelling-place. And it is you, spirit--with will and energy, and virtue and purity--that I want: not alone your brittle frame. Of yourself you could come with soft flight and nestle against my heart, if you would: seized against your will, you will elude the grasp like an essence--you will vanish ere I inhale your fragrance. Oh! come, Jane, come!" As he said this, he released me from his clutch, and only looked at me. The look was far worse to resist than the frantic strain: only an idiot, however, would have succumbed now. I had dared and baffled his fury; I must elude his sorrow: I retired to the door. "You are going, Jane?" "I am going, sir." "You are leaving me?" "Yes." "You will not come? You will not be my comforter, my rescuer? My deep love, my wild woe, my frantic prayer, are all nothing to you?" What unutterable pathos was in his voice! How hard it was to reiterate firmly, "I am going." "Jane!" "Mr. Rochester!" "Withdraw, then,--I consent; but remember, you leave me here in anguish. Go up to your own room; think over all I have said, and, Jane, cast a glance on my sufferings--think of me." He turned away; he threw himself on his face on the sofa. "Oh, Jane! my hope--my love--my life!" broke in anguish from his lips. Then came a deep, strong sob. I had already gained the door; but, reader, I walked back--walked back as determinedly as I had retreated. I knelt down by him; I turned his face from the cushion to me; I kissed his cheek; I smoothed his hair with my hand. "God bless you, my dear master!" I said. "God keep you from harm and wrong--direct you, solace you--reward you well for your past kindness to me." "Little Jane's love would have been my best reward," he answered; "without it, my heart is broken. But Jane will give me her love: yes--nobly, generously." Up the blood rushed to his face; forth flashed the fire from his eyes; erect he sprang; he held his arms out; but I evaded the embrace, and at once quitted the room. "Farewell!" was the cry of my heart as I left him. Despair added, "Farewell for ever!" * * * * * That night I never thought to sleep; but a slumber fell on me as soon as I lay down in bed. I was transported in thought to the scenes of childhood: I dreamt I lay in the red-room at Gateshead; that the night was dark, and my mind impressed with strange fears. The light that long ago had struck me into syncope, recalled in this vision, seemed glidingly to mount the wall, and tremblingly to pause in the centre of the obscured ceiling. I lifted up my head to look: the roof resolved to clouds, high and dim; the gleam was such as the moon imparts to vapours she is about to sever. I watched her come--watched with the strangest anticipation; as though some word of doom were to be written on her disk. She broke forth as never moon yet burst from cloud: a hand first penetrated the sable folds and waved them away; then, not a moon, but a white human form shone in the azure, inclining a glorious brow earthward. It gazed and gazed on me. It spoke to my spirit: immeasurably distant was the tone, yet so near, it whispered in my heart-- "My daughter, flee temptation." "Mother, I will." So I answered after I had waked from the trance-like dream. It was yet night, but July nights are short: soon after midnight, dawn comes. "It cannot be too early to commence the task I have to fulfil," thought I. I rose: I was dressed; for I had taken off nothing but my shoes. I knew where to find in my drawers some linen, a locket, a ring. In seeking these articles, I encountered the beads of a pearl necklace Mr. Rochester had forced me to accept a few days ago. I left that; it was not mine: it was the visionary bride's who had melted in air. The other articles I made up in a parcel; my purse, containing twenty shillings (it was all I had), I put in my pocket: I tied on my straw bonnet, pinned my shawl, took the parcel and my slippers, which I would not put on yet, and stole from my room. "Farewell, kind Mrs. Fairfax!" I whispered, as I glided past her door. "Farewell, my darling Adele!" I said, as I glanced towards the nursery. No thought could be admitted of entering to embrace her. I had to deceive a fine ear: for aught I knew it might now be listening. I would have got past Mr. Rochester's chamber without a pause; but my heart momentarily stopping its beat at that threshold, my foot was forced to stop also. No sleep was there: the inmate was walking restlessly from wall to wall; and again and again he sighed while I listened. There was a heaven--a temporary heaven--in this room for me, if I chose: I had but to go in and to say-- "Mr. Rochester, I will love you and live with you through life till death," and a fount of rapture would spring to my lips. I thought of this. That kind master, who could not sleep now, was waiting with impatience for day. He would send for me in the morning; I should be gone. He would have me sought for: vainly. He would feel himself forsaken; his love rejected: he would suffer; perhaps grow desperate. I thought of this too. My hand moved towards the lock: I caught it back, and glided on. Drearily I wound my way downstairs: I knew what I had to do, and I did it mechanically. I sought the key of the side-door in the kitchen; I sought, too, a phial of oil and a feather; I oiled the key and the lock. I got some water, I got some bread: for perhaps I should have to walk far; and my strength, sorely shaken of late, must not break down. All this I did without one sound. I opened the door, passed out, shut it softly. Dim dawn glimmered in the yard. The great gates were closed and locked; but a wicket in one of them was only latched. Through that I departed: it, too, I shut; and now I was out of Thornfield. A mile off, beyond the fields, lay a road which stretched in the contrary direction to Millcote; a road I had never travelled, but often noticed, and wondered where it led: thither I bent my steps. No reflection was to be allowed now: not one glance was to be cast back; not even one forward. Not one thought was to be given either to the past or the future. The first was a page so heavenly sweet--so deadly sad--that to read one line of it would dissolve my courage and break down my energy. The last was an awful blank: something like the world when the deluge was gone by. I skirted fields, and hedges, and lanes till after sunrise. I believe it was a lovely summer morning: I know my shoes, which I had put on when I left the house, were soon wet with dew. But I looked neither to rising sun, nor smiling sky, nor wakening nature. He who is taken out to pass through a fair scene to the scaffold, thinks not of the flowers that smile on his road, but of the block and axe-edge; of the disseverment of bone and vein; of the grave gaping at the end: and I thought of drear flight and homeless wandering--and oh! with agony I thought of what I left. I could not help it. I thought of him now--in his room--watching the sunrise; hoping I should soon come to say I would stay with him and be his. I longed to be his; I panted to return: it was not too late; I could yet spare him the bitter pang of bereavement. As yet my flight, I was sure, was undiscovered. I could go back and be his comforter--his pride; his redeemer from misery, perhaps from ruin. Oh, that fear of his self-abandonment--far worse than my abandonment--how it goaded me! It was a barbed arrow-head in my breast; it tore me when I tried to extract it; it sickened me when remembrance thrust it farther in. Birds began singing in brake and copse: birds were faithful to their mates; birds were emblems of love. What was I? In the midst of my pain of heart and frantic effort of principle, I abhorred myself. I had no solace from self-approbation: none even from self-respect. I had injured--wounded--left my master. I was hateful in my own eyes. Still I could not turn, nor retrace one step. God must have led me on. As to my own will or conscience, impassioned grief had trampled one and stifled the other. I was weeping wildly as I walked along my solitary way: fast, fast I went like one delirious. A weakness, beginning inwardly, extending to the limbs, seized me, and I fell: I lay on the ground some minutes, pressing my face to the wet turf. I had some fear--or hope--that here I should die: but I was soon up; crawling forwards on my hands and knees, and then again raised to my feet--as eager and as determined as ever to reach the road. When I got there, I was forced to sit to rest me under the hedge; and while I sat, I heard wheels, and saw a coach come on. I stood up and lifted my hand; it stopped. I asked where it was going: the driver named a place a long way off, and where I was sure Mr. Rochester had no connections. I asked for what sum he would take me there; he said thirty shillings; I answered I had but twenty; well, he would try to make it do. He further gave me leave to get into the inside, as the vehicle was empty: I entered, was shut in, and it rolled on its way. Gentle reader, may you never feel what I then felt! May your eyes never shed such stormy, scalding, heart-wrung tears as poured from mine. May you never appeal to Heaven in prayers so hopeless and so agonised as in that hour left my lips; for never may you, like me, dread to be the instrument of evil to what you wholly love. CHAPTER XXVIII Two days are passed. It is a summer evening; the coachman has set me down at a place called Whitcross; he could take me no farther for the sum I had given, and I was not possessed of another shilling in the world. The coach is a mile off by this time; I am alone. At this moment I discover that I forgot to take my parcel out of the pocket of the coach, where I had placed it for safety; there it remains, there it must remain; and now, I am absolutely destitute. Whitcross is no town, nor even a hamlet; it is but a stone pillar set up where four roads meet: whitewashed, I suppose, to be more obvious at a distance and in darkness. Four arms spring from its summit: the nearest town to which these point is, according to the inscription, distant ten miles; the farthest, above twenty. From the well-known names of these towns I learn in what county I have lighted; a north-midland shire, dusk with moorland, ridged with mountain: this I see. There are great moors behind and on each hand of me; there are waves of mountains far beyond that deep valley at my feet. The population here must be thin, and I see no passengers on these roads: they stretch out east, west, north, and south--white, broad, lonely; they are all cut in the moor, and the heather grows deep and wild to their very verge. Yet a chance traveller might pass by; and I wish no eye to see me now: strangers would wonder what I am doing, lingering here at the sign-post, evidently objectless and lost. I might be questioned: I could give no answer but what would sound incredible and excite suspicion. Not a tie holds me to human society at this moment--not a charm or hope calls me where my fellow-creatures are--none that saw me would have a kind thought or a good wish for me. I have no relative but the universal mother, Nature: I will seek her breast and ask repose. I struck straight into the heath; I held on to a hollow I saw deeply furrowing the brown moorside; I waded knee-deep in its dark growth; I turned with its turnings, and finding a moss-blackened granite crag in a hidden angle, I sat down under it. High banks of moor were about me; the crag protected my head: the sky was over that. Some time passed before I felt tranquil even here: I had a vague dread that wild cattle might be near, or that some sportsman or poacher might discover me. If a gust of wind swept the waste, I looked up, fearing it was the rush of a bull; if a plover whistled, I imagined it a man. Finding my apprehensions unfounded, however, and calmed by the deep silence that reigned as evening declined at nightfall, I took confidence. As yet I had not thought; I had only listened, watched, dreaded; now I regained the faculty of reflection. What was I to do? Where to go? Oh, intolerable questions, when I could do nothing and go nowhere!--when a long way must yet be measured by my weary, trembling limbs before I could reach human habitation--when cold charity must be entreated before I could get a lodging: reluctant sympathy importuned, almost certain repulse incurred, before my tale could be listened to, or one of my wants relieved! I touched the heath: it was dry, and yet warm with the heat of the summer day. I looked at the sky; it was pure: a kindly star twinkled just above the chasm ridge. The dew fell, but with propitious softness; no breeze whispered. Nature seemed to me benign and good; I thought she loved me, outcast as I was; and I, who from man could anticipate only mistrust, rejection, insult, clung to her with filial fondness. To-night, at least, I would be her guest, as I was her child: my mother would lodge me without money and without price. I had one morsel of bread yet: the remnant of a roll I had bought in a town we passed through at noon with a stray penny--my last coin. I saw ripe bilberries gleaming here and there, like jet beads in the heath: I gathered a handful and ate them with the bread. My hunger, sharp before, was, if not satisfied, appeased by this hermit's meal. I said my evening prayers at its conclusion, and then chose my couch. {I said my evening prayers: p311.jpg} Beside the crag the heath was very deep: when I lay down my feet were buried in it; rising high on each side, it left only a narrow space for the night-air to invade. I folded my shawl double, and spread it over me for a coverlet; a low, mossy swell was my pillow. Thus lodged, I was not, at least--at the commencement of the night, cold. My rest might have been blissful enough, only a sad heart broke it. It plained of its gaping wounds, its inward bleeding, its riven chords. It trembled for Mr. Rochester and his doom; it bemoaned him with bitter pity; it demanded him with ceaseless longing; and, impotent as a bird with both wings broken, it still quivered its shattered pinions in vain attempts to seek him. Worn out with this torture of thought, I rose to my knees. Night was come, and her planets were risen: a safe, still night: too serene for the companionship of fear. We know that God is everywhere; but certainly we feel His presence most when His works are on the grandest scale spread before us; and it is in the unclouded night-sky, where His worlds wheel their silent course, that we read clearest His infinitude, His omnipotence, His omnipresence. I had risen to my knees to pray for Mr. Rochester. Looking up, I, with tear-dimmed eyes, saw the mighty Milky- way. Remembering what it was--what countless systems there swept space like a soft trace of light--I felt the might and strength of God. Sure was I of His efficiency to save what He had made: convinced I grew that neither earth should perish, nor one of the souls it treasured. I turned my prayer to thanksgiving: the Source of Life was also the Saviour of spirits. Mr. Rochester was safe; he was God's, and by God would he be guarded. I again nestled to the breast of the hill; and ere long in sleep forgot sorrow. But next day, Want came to me pale and bare. Long after the little birds had left their nests; long after bees had come in the sweet prime of day to gather the heath honey before the dew was dried--when the long morning shadows were curtailed, and the sun filled earth and sky--I got up, and I looked round me. What a still, hot, perfect day! What a golden desert this spreading moor! Everywhere sunshine. I wished I could live in it and on it. I saw a lizard run over the crag; I saw a bee busy among the sweet bilberries. I would fain at the moment have become bee or lizard, that I might have found fitting nutriment, permanent shelter here. But I was a human being, and had a human being's wants: I must not linger where there was nothing to supply them. I rose; I looked back at the bed I had left. Hopeless of the future, I wished but this--that my Maker had that night thought good to require my soul of me while I slept; and that this weary frame, absolved by death from further conflict with fate, had now but to decay quietly, and mingle in peace with the soil of this wilderness. Life, however, was yet in my possession, with all its requirements, and pains, and responsibilities. The burden must be carried; the want provided for; the suffering endured; the responsibility fulfilled. I set out. Whitcross regained, I followed a road which led from the sun, now fervent and high. By no other circumstance had I will to decide my choice. I walked a long time, and when I thought I had nearly done enough, and might conscientiously yield to the fatigue that almost overpowered me--might relax this forced action, and, sitting down on a stone I saw near, submit resistlessly to the apathy that clogged heart and limb--I heard a bell chime--a church bell. I turned in the direction of the sound, and there, amongst the romantic hills, whose changes and aspect I had ceased to note an hour ago, I saw a hamlet and a spire. All the valley at my right hand was full of pasture- fields, and cornfields, and wood; and a glittering stream ran zig-zag through the varied shades of green, the mellowing grain, the sombre woodland, the clear and sunny lea. Recalled by the rumbling of wheels to the road before me, I saw a heavily-laden waggon labouring up the hill, and not far beyond were two cows and their drover. Human life and human labour were near. I must struggle on: strive to live and bend to toil like the rest. About two o'clock p.m. I entered the village. At the bottom of its one street there was a little shop with some cakes of bread in the window. I coveted a cake of bread. With that refreshment I could perhaps regain a degree of energy: without it, it would be difficult to proceed. The wish to have some strength and some vigour returned to me as soon as I was amongst my fellow-beings. I felt it would be degrading to faint with hunger on the causeway of a hamlet. Had I nothing about me I could offer in exchange for one of these rolls? I considered. I had a small silk handkerchief tied round my throat; I had my gloves. I could hardly tell how men and women in extremities of destitution proceeded. I did not know whether either of these articles would be accepted: probably they would not; but I must try. I entered the shop: a woman was there. Seeing a respectably-dressed person, a lady as she supposed, she came forward with civility. How could she serve me? I was seized with shame: my tongue would not utter the request I had prepared. I dared not offer her the half-worn gloves, the creased handkerchief: besides, I felt it would be absurd. I only begged permission to sit down a moment, as I was tired. Disappointed in the expectation of a customer, she coolly acceded to my request. She pointed to a seat; I sank into it. I felt sorely urged to weep; but conscious how unseasonable such a manifestation would be, I restrained it. Soon I asked her "if there were any dressmaker or plain-workwoman in the village?" "Yes; two or three. Quite as many as there was employment for." I reflected. I was driven to the point now. I was brought face to face with Necessity. I stood in the position of one without a resource, without a friend, without a coin. I must do something. What? I must apply somewhere. Where? "Did she know of any place in the neighbourhood where a servant was wanted?" "Nay; she couldn't say." "What was the chief trade in this place? What did most of the people do?" "Some were farm labourers; a good deal worked at Mr. Oliver's needle-factory, and at the foundry." "Did Mr. Oliver employ women?" "Nay; it was men's work." "And what do the women do?" "I knawn't," was the answer. "Some does one thing, and some another. Poor folk mun get on as they can." She seemed to be tired of my questions: and, indeed, what claim had I to importune her? A neighbour or two came in; my chair was evidently wanted. I took leave. I passed up the street, looking as I went at all the houses to the right hand and to the left; but I could discover no pretext, nor see an inducement to enter any. I rambled round the hamlet, going sometimes to a little distance and returning again, for an hour or more. Much exhausted, and suffering greatly now for want of food, I turned aside into a lane and sat down under the hedge. Ere many minutes had elapsed, I was again on my feet, however, and again searching something--a resource, or at least an informant. A pretty little house stood at the top of the lane, with a garden before it, exquisitely neat and brilliantly blooming. I stopped at it. What business had I to approach the white door or touch the glittering knocker? In what way could it possibly be the interest of the inhabitants of that dwelling to serve me? Yet I drew near and knocked. A mild-looking, cleanly-attired young woman opened the door. In such a voice as might be expected from a hopeless heart and fainting frame--a voice wretchedly low and faltering--I asked if a servant was wanted here? "No," said she; "we do not keep a servant." "Can you tell me where I could get employment of any kind?" I continued. "I am a stranger, without acquaintance in this place. I want some work: no matter what." But it was not her business to think for me, or to seek a place for me: besides, in her eyes, how doubtful must have appeared my character, position, tale. She shook her head, she "was sorry she could give me no information," and the white door closed, quite gently and civilly: but it shut me out. If she had held it open a little longer, I believe I should have begged a piece of bread; for I was now brought low. I could not bear to return to the sordid village, where, besides, no prospect of aid was visible. I should have longed rather to deviate to a wood I saw not far off, which appeared in its thick shade to offer inviting shelter; but I was so sick, so weak, so gnawed with nature's cravings, instinct kept me roaming round abodes where there was a chance of food. Solitude would be no solitude--rest no rest--while the vulture, hunger, thus sank beak and talons in my side. I drew near houses; I left them, and came back again, and again I wandered away: always repelled by the consciousness of having no claim to ask--no right to expect interest in my isolated lot. Meantime, the afternoon advanced, while I thus wandered about like a lost and starving dog. In crossing a field, I saw the church spire before me: I hastened towards it. Near the churchyard, and in the middle of a garden, stood a well-built though small house, which I had no doubt was the parsonage. I remembered that strangers who arrive at a place where they have no friends, and who want employment, sometimes apply to the clergyman for introduction and aid. It is the clergyman's function to help--at least with advice--those who wished to help themselves. I seemed to have something like a right to seek counsel here. Renewing then my courage, and gathering my feeble remains of strength, I pushed on. I reached the house, and knocked at the kitchen-door. An old woman opened: I asked was this the parsonage? "Yes." "Was the clergyman in?" "No." "Would he be in soon?" "No, he was gone from home." "To a distance?" "Not so far--happen three mile. He had been called away by the sudden death of his father: he was at Marsh End now, and would very likely stay there a fortnight longer." "Was there any lady of the house?" "Nay, there was naught but her, and she was housekeeper;" and of her, reader, I could not bear to ask the relief for want of which I was sinking; I could not yet beg; and again I crawled away. Once more I took off my handkerchief--once more I thought of the cakes of bread in the little shop. Oh, for but a crust! for but one mouthful to allay the pang of famine! Instinctively I turned my face again to the village; I found the shop again, and I went in; and though others were there besides the woman I ventured the request--"Would she give me a roll for this handkerchief?" She looked at me with evident suspicion: "Nay, she never sold stuff i' that way." Almost desperate, I asked for half a cake; she again refused. "How could she tell where I had got the handkerchief?" she said. "Would she take my gloves?" "No! what could she do with them?" Reader, it is not pleasant to dwell on these details. Some say there is enjoyment in looking back to painful experience past; but at this day I can scarcely bear to review the times to which I allude: the moral degradation, blent with the physical suffering, form too distressing a recollection ever to be willingly dwelt on. I blamed none of those who repulsed me. I felt it was what was to be expected, and what could not be helped: an ordinary beggar is frequently an object of suspicion; a well-dressed beggar inevitably so. To be sure, what I begged was employment; but whose business was it to provide me with employment? Not, certainly, that of persons who saw me then for the first time, and who knew nothing about my character. And as to the woman who would not take my handkerchief in exchange for her bread, why, she was right, if the offer appeared to her sinister or the exchange unprofitable. Let me condense now. I am sick of the subject. A little before dark I passed a farm-house, at the open door of which the farmer was sitting, eating his supper of bread and cheese. I stopped and said-- "Will you give me a piece of bread? for I am very hungry." He cast on me a glance of surprise; but without answering, he cut a thick slice from his loaf, and gave it to me. I imagine he did not think I was a beggar, but only an eccentric sort of lady, who had taken a fancy to his brown loaf. As soon as I was out of sight of his house, I sat down and ate it. I could not hope to get a lodging under a roof, and sought it in the wood I have before alluded to. But my night was wretched, my rest broken: the ground was damp, the air cold: besides, intruders passed near me more than once, and I had again and again to change my quarters; no sense of safety or tranquillity befriended me. Towards morning it rained; the whole of the following day was wet. Do not ask me, reader, to give a minute account of that day; as before, I sought work; as before, I was repulsed; as before, I starved; but once did food pass my lips. At the door of a cottage I saw a little girl about to throw a mess of cold porridge into a pig trough. "Will you give me that?" I asked. {"Will you give me that?" I asked: p316.jpg} She stared at me. "Mother!" she exclaimed, "there is a woman wants me to give her these porridge." "Well lass," replied a voice within, "give it her if she's a beggar. T' pig doesn't want it." The girl emptied the stiffened mould into my hand, and I devoured it ravenously. As the wet twilight deepened, I stopped in a solitary bridle-path, which I had been pursuing an hour or more. "My strength is quite failing me," I said in a soliloquy. "I feel I cannot go much farther. Shall I be an outcast again this night? While the rain descends so, must I lay my head on the cold, drenched ground? I fear I cannot do otherwise: for who will receive me? But it will be very dreadful, with this feeling of hunger, faintness, chill, and this sense of desolation--this total prostration of hope. In all likelihood, though, I should die before morning. And why cannot I reconcile myself to the prospect of death? Why do I struggle to retain a valueless life? Because I know, or believe, Mr. Rochester is living: and then, to die of want and cold is a fate to which nature cannot submit passively. Oh, Providence! sustain me a little longer! Aid!--direct me!" My glazed eye wandered over the dim and misty landscape. I saw I had strayed far from the village: it was quite out of sight. The very cultivation surrounding it had disappeared. I had, by cross-ways and by- paths, once more drawn near the tract of moorland; and now, only a few fields, almost as wild and unproductive as the heath from which they were scarcely reclaimed, lay between me and the dusky hill. "Well, I would rather die yonder than in a street or on a frequented road," I reflected. "And far better that crows and ravens--if any ravens there be in these regions--should pick my flesh from my bones, than that they should be prisoned in a workhouse coffin and moulder in a pauper's grave." To the hill, then, I turned. I reached it. It remained now only to find a hollow where I could lie down, and feel at least hidden, if not secure. But all the surface of the waste looked level. It showed no variation but of tint: green, where rush and moss overgrew the marshes; black, where the dry soil bore only heath. Dark as it was getting, I could still see these changes, though but as mere alternations of light and shade; for colour had faded with the daylight. My eye still roved over the sullen swell and along the moor-edge, vanishing amidst the wildest scenery, when at one dim point, far in among the marshes and the ridges, a light sprang up. "That is an _ignis fatuus_," was my first thought; and I expected it would soon vanish. It burnt on, however, quite steadily, neither receding nor advancing. "Is it, then, a bonfire just kindled?" I questioned. I watched to see whether it would spread: but no; as it did not diminish, so it did not enlarge. "It may be a candle in a house," I then conjectured; "but if so, I can never reach it. It is much too far away: and were it within a yard of me, what would it avail? I should but knock at the door to have it shut in my face." And I sank down where I stood, and hid my face against the ground. I lay still a while: the night-wind swept over the hill and over me, and died moaning in the distance; the rain fell fast, wetting me afresh to the skin. Could I but have stiffened to the still frost--the friendly numbness of death--it might have pelted on; I should not have felt it; but my yet living flesh shuddered at its chilling influence. I rose ere long. The light was yet there, shining dim but constant through the rain. I tried to walk again: I dragged my exhausted limbs slowly towards it. It led me aslant over the hill, through a wide bog, which would have been impassable in winter, and was splashy and shaking even now, in the height of summer. Here I fell twice; but as often I rose and rallied my faculties. This light was my forlorn hope: I must gain it. Having crossed the marsh, I saw a trace of white over the moor. I approached it; it was a road or a track: it led straight up to the light, which now beamed from a sort of knoll, amidst a clump of trees--firs, apparently, from what I could distinguish of the character of their forms and foliage through the gloom. My star vanished as I drew near: some obstacle had intervened between me and it. I put out my hand to feel the dark mass before me: I discriminated the rough stones of a low wall--above it, something like palisades, and within, a high and prickly hedge. I groped on. Again a whitish object gleamed before me: it was a gate--a wicket; it moved on its hinges as I touched it. On each side stood a sable bush-holly or yew. Entering the gate and passing the shrubs, the silhouette of a house rose to view, black, low, and rather long; but the guiding light shone nowhere. All was obscurity. Were the inmates retired to rest? I feared it must be so. In seeking the door, I turned an angle: there shot out the friendly gleam again, from the lozenged panes of a very small latticed window, within a foot of the ground, made still smaller by the growth of ivy or some other creeping plant, whose leaves clustered thick over the portion of the house wall in which it was set. The aperture was so screened and narrow, that curtain or shutter had been deemed unnecessary; and when I stooped down and put aside the spray of foliage shooting over it, I could see all within. I could see clearly a room with a sanded floor, clean scoured; a dresser of walnut, with pewter plates ranged in rows, reflecting the redness and radiance of a glowing peat-fire. I could see a clock, a white deal table, some chairs. The candle, whose ray had been my beacon, burnt on the table; and by its light an elderly woman, somewhat rough-looking, but scrupulously clean, like all about her, was knitting a stocking. I noticed these objects cursorily only--in them there was nothing extraordinary. A group of more interest appeared near the hearth, sitting still amidst the rosy peace and warmth suffusing it. Two young, graceful women--ladies in every point--sat, one in a low rocking-chair, the other on a lower stool; both wore deep mourning of crape and bombazeen, which sombre garb singularly set off very fair necks and faces: a large old pointer dog rested its massive head on the knee of one girl--in the lap of the other was cushioned a black cat. A strange place was this humble kitchen for such occupants! Who were they? They could not be the daughters of the elderly person at the table; for she looked like a rustic, and they were all delicacy and cultivation. I had nowhere seen such faces as theirs: and yet, as I gazed on them, I seemed intimate with every lineament. I cannot call them handsome--they were too pale and grave for the word: as they each bent over a book, they looked thoughtful almost to severity. A stand between them supported a second candle and two great volumes, to which they frequently referred, comparing them, seemingly, with the smaller books they held in their hands, like people consulting a dictionary to aid them in the task of translation. This scene was as silent as if all the figures had been shadows and the firelit apartment a picture: so hushed was it, I could hear the cinders fall from the grate, the clock tick in its obscure corner; and I even fancied I could distinguish the click-click of the woman's knitting-needles. When, therefore, a voice broke the strange stillness at last, it was audible enough to me. "Listen, Diana," said one of the absorbed students; "Franz and old Daniel are together in the night-time, and Franz is telling a dream from which he has awakened in terror--listen!" And in a low voice she read something, of which not one word was intelligible to me; for it was in an unknown tongue--neither French nor Latin. Whether it were Greek or German I could not tell. "That is strong," she said, when she had finished: "I relish it." The other girl, who had lifted her head to listen to her sister, repeated, while she gazed at the fire, a line of what had been read. At a later day, I knew the language and the book; therefore, I will here quote the line: though, when I first heard it, it was only like a stroke on sounding brass to me--conveying no meaning:-- "'Da trat hervor Einer, anzusehen wie die Sternen Nacht.' Good! good!" she exclaimed, while her dark and deep eye sparkled. "There you have a dim and mighty archangel fitly set before you! The line is worth a hundred pages of fustian. 'Ich wage die Gedanken in der Schale meines Zornes und die Werke mit dem Gewichte meines Grimms.' I like it!" Both were again silent. "Is there ony country where they talk i' that way?" asked the old woman, looking up from her knitting. "Yes, Hannah--a far larger country than England, where they talk in no other way." "Well, for sure case, I knawn't how they can understand t' one t'other: and if either o' ye went there, ye could tell what they said, I guess?" "We could probably tell something of what they said, but not all--for we are not as clever as you think us, Hannah. We don't speak German, and we cannot read it without a dictionary to help us." "And what good does it do you?" "We mean to teach it some time--or at least the elements, as they say; and then we shall get more money than we do now." "Varry like: but give ower studying; ye've done enough for to-night." "I think we have: at least I'm tired. Mary, are you?" "Mortally: after all, it's tough work fagging away at a language with no master but a lexicon." "It is, especially such a language as this crabbed but glorious Deutsch. I wonder when St. John will come home." "Surely he will not be long now: it is just ten (looking at a little gold watch she drew from her girdle). It rains fast, Hannah: will you have the goodness to look at the fire in the parlour?" The woman rose: she opened a door, through which I dimly saw a passage: soon I heard her stir a fire in an inner room; she presently came back. "Ah, childer!" said she, "it fair troubles me to go into yond' room now: it looks so lonesome wi' the chair empty and set back in a corner." She wiped her eyes with her apron: the two girls, grave before, looked sad now. "But he is in a better place," continued Hannah: "we shouldn't wish him here again. And then, nobody need to have a quieter death nor he had." "You say he never mentioned us?" inquired one of the ladies. "He hadn't time, bairn: he was gone in a minute, was your father. He had been a bit ailing like the day before, but naught to signify; and when Mr. St. John asked if he would like either o' ye to be sent for, he fair laughed at him. He began again with a bit of a heaviness in his head the next day--that is, a fortnight sin'--and he went to sleep and niver wakened: he wor a'most stark when your brother went into t' chamber and fand him. Ah, childer! that's t' last o' t' old stock--for ye and Mr. St. John is like of different soart to them 'at's gone; for all your mother wor mich i' your way, and a'most as book-learned. She wor the pictur' o' ye, Mary: Diana is more like your father." I thought them so similar I could not tell where the old servant (for such I now concluded her to be) saw the difference. Both were fair complexioned and slenderly made; both possessed faces full of distinction and intelligence. One, to be sure, had hair a shade darker than the other, and there was a difference in their style of wearing it; Mary's pale brown locks were parted and braided smooth: Diana's duskier tresses covered her neck with thick curls. The clock struck ten. "Ye'll want your supper, I am sure," observed Hannah; "and so will Mr. St. John when he comes in." And she proceeded to prepare the meal. The ladies rose; they seemed about to withdraw to the parlour. Till this moment, I had been so intent on watching them, their appearance and conversation had excited in me so keen an interest, I had half-forgotten my own wretched position: now it recurred to me. More desolate, more desperate than ever, it seemed from contrast. And how impossible did it appear to touch the inmates of this house with concern on my behalf; to make them believe in the truth of my wants and woes--to induce them to vouchsafe a rest for my wanderings! As I groped out the door, and knocked at it hesitatingly, I felt that last idea to be a mere chimera. Hannah opened. "What do you want?" she inquired, in a voice of surprise, as she surveyed me by the light of the candle she held. "May I speak to your mistresses?" I said. "You had better tell me what you have to say to them. Where do you come from?" "I am a stranger." "What is your business here at this hour?" "I want a night's shelter in an out-house or anywhere, and a morsel of bread to eat." Distrust, the very feeling I dreaded, appeared in Hannah's face. "I'll give you a piece of bread," she said, after a pause; "but we can't take in a vagrant to lodge. It isn't likely." "Do let me speak to your mistresses." "No, not I. What can they do for you? You should not be roving about now; it looks very ill." "But where shall I go if you drive me away? What shall I do?" "Oh, I'll warrant you know where to go and what to do. Mind you don't do wrong, that's all. Here is a penny; now go--" "A penny cannot feed me, and I have no strength to go farther. Don't shut the door:--oh, don't, for God's sake!" "I must; the rain is driving in--" "Tell the young ladies. Let me see them--" "Indeed, I will not. You are not what you ought to be, or you wouldn't make such a noise. Move off." "But I must die if I am turned away." "Not you. I'm fear'd you have some ill plans agate, that bring you about folk's houses at this time o' night. If you've any followers--housebreakers or such like--anywhere near, you may tell them we are not by ourselves in the house; we have a gentleman, and dogs, and guns." Here the honest but inflexible servant clapped the door to and bolted it within. This was the climax. A pang of exquisite suffering--a throe of true despair--rent and heaved my heart. Worn out, indeed, I was; not another step could I stir. I sank on the wet doorstep: I groaned--I wrung my hands--I wept in utter anguish. Oh, this spectre of death! Oh, this last hour, approaching in such horror! Alas, this isolation--this banishment from my kind! Not only the anchor of hope, but the footing of fortitude was gone--at least for a moment; but the last I soon endeavoured to regain. "I can but die," I said, "and I believe in God. Let me try to wait His will in silence." These words I not only thought, but uttered; and thrusting back all my misery into my heart, I made an effort to compel it to remain there--dumb and still. "All men must die," said a voice quite close at hand; "but all are not condemned to meet a lingering and premature doom, such as yours would be if you perished here of want." "Who or what speaks?" I asked, terrified at the unexpected sound, and incapable now of deriving from any occurrence a hope of aid. A form was near--what form, the pitch-dark night and my enfeebled vision prevented me from distinguishing. With a loud long knock, the new-comer appealed to the door. "Is it you, Mr. St. John?" cried Hannah. "Yes--yes; open quickly." "Well, how wet and cold you must be, such a wild night as it is! Come in--your sisters are quite uneasy about you, and I believe there are bad folks about. There has been a beggar-woman--I declare she is not gone yet!--laid down there. Get up! for shame! Move off, I say!" "Hush, Hannah! I have a word to say to the woman. You have done your duty in excluding, now let me do mine in admitting her. I was near, and listened to both you and her. I think this is a peculiar case--I must at least examine into it. Young woman, rise, and pass before me into the house." {Hush, Hannah; I have a word to say to the woman: p323.jpg} With difficulty I obeyed him. Presently I stood within that clean, bright kitchen--on the very hearth--trembling, sickening; conscious of an aspect in the last degree ghastly, wild, and weather-beaten. The two ladies, their brother, Mr. St. John, the old servant, were all gazing at me. "St. John, who is it?" I heard one ask. "I cannot tell: I found her at the door," was the reply. "She does look white," said Hannah. "As white as clay or death," was responded. "She will fall: let her sit." And indeed my head swam: I dropped, but a chair received me. I still possessed my senses, though just now I could not speak. "Perhaps a little water would restore her. Hannah, fetch some. But she is worn to nothing. How very thin, and how very bloodless!" "A mere spectre!" "Is she ill, or only famished?" "Famished, I think. Hannah, is that milk? Give it me, and a piece of bread." Diana (I knew her by the long curls which I saw drooping between me and the fire as she bent over me) broke some bread, dipped it in milk, and put it to my lips. Her face was near mine: I saw there was pity in it, and I felt sympathy in her hurried breathing. In her simple words, too, the same balm-like emotion spoke: "Try to eat." "Yes--try," repeated Mary gently; and Mary's hand removed my sodden bonnet and lifted my head. I tasted what they offered me: feebly at first, eagerly soon. "Not too much at first--restrain her," said the brother; "she has had enough." And he withdrew the cup of milk and the plate of bread. "A little more, St. John--look at the avidity in her eyes." "No more at present, sister. Try if she can speak now--ask her her name." I felt I could speak, and I answered--"My name is Jane Elliott." Anxious as ever to avoid discovery, I had before resolved to assume an _alias_. "And where do you live? Where are your friends?" I was silent. "Can we send for any one you know?" I shook my head. "What account can you give of yourself?" Somehow, now that I had once crossed the threshold of this house, and once was brought face to face with its owners, I felt no longer outcast, vagrant, and disowned by the wide world. I dared to put off the mendicant--to resume my natural manner and character. I began once more to know myself; and when Mr. St. John demanded an account--which at present I was far too weak to render--I said after a brief pause-- "Sir, I can give you no details to-night." "But what, then," said he, "do you expect me to do for you?" "Nothing," I replied. My strength sufficed for but short answers. Diana took the word-- "Do you mean," she asked, "that we have now given you what aid you require? and that we may dismiss you to the moor and the rainy night?" I looked at her. She had, I thought, a remarkable countenance, instinct both with power and goodness. I took sudden courage. Answering her compassionate gaze with a smile, I said--"I will trust you. If I were a masterless and stray dog, I know that you would not turn me from your hearth to-night: as it is, I really have no fear. Do with me and for me as you like; but excuse me from much discourse--my breath is short--I feel a spasm when I speak." All three surveyed me, and all three were silent. "Hannah," said Mr. St. John, at last, "let her sit there at present, and ask her no questions; in ten minutes more, give her the remainder of that milk and bread. Mary and Diana, let us go into the parlour and talk the matter over." They withdrew. Very soon one of the ladies returned--I could not tell which. A kind of pleasant stupor was stealing over me as I sat by the genial fire. In an undertone she gave some directions to Hannah. Ere long, with the servant's aid, I contrived to mount a staircase; my dripping clothes were removed; soon a warm, dry bed received me. I thanked God--experienced amidst unutterable exhaustion a glow of grateful joy--and slept. CHAPTER XXIX The recollection of about three days and nights succeeding this is very dim in my mind. I can recall some sensations felt in that interval; but few thoughts framed, and no actions performed. I knew I was in a small room and in a narrow bed. To that bed I seemed to have grown; I lay on it motionless as a stone; and to have torn me from it would have been almost to kill me. I took no note of the lapse of time--of the change from morning to noon, from noon to evening. I observed when any one entered or left the apartment: I could even tell who they were; I could understand what was said when the speaker stood near to me; but I could not answer; to open my lips or move my limbs was equally impossible. Hannah, the servant, was my most frequent visitor. Her coming disturbed me. I had a feeling that she wished me away: that she did not understand me or my circumstances; that she was prejudiced against me. Diana and Mary appeared in the chamber once or twice a day. They would whisper sentences of this sort at my bedside-- "It is very well we took her in." "Yes; she would certainly have been found dead at the door in the morning had she been left out all night. I wonder what she has gone through?" "Strange hardships, I imagine--poor, emaciated, pallid wanderer?" "She is not an uneducated person, I should think, by her manner of speaking; her accent was quite pure; and the clothes she took off, though splashed and wet, were little worn and fine." "She has a peculiar face; fleshless and haggard as it is, I rather like it; and when in good health and animated, I can fancy her physiognomy would be agreeable." Never once in their dialogues did I hear a syllable of regret at the hospitality they had extended to me, or of suspicion of, or aversion to, myself. I was comforted. Mr. St. John came but once: he looked at me, and said my state of lethargy was the result of reaction from excessive and protracted fatigue. He pronounced it needless to send for a doctor: nature, he was sure, would manage best, left to herself. He said every nerve had been overstrained in some way, and the whole system must sleep torpid a while. There was no disease. He imagined my recovery would be rapid enough when once commenced. These opinions he delivered in a few words, in a quiet, low voice; and added, after a pause, in the tone of a man little accustomed to expansive comment, "Rather an unusual physiognomy; certainly, not indicative of vulgarity or degradation." "Far otherwise," responded Diana. "To speak truth, St. John, my heart rather warms to the poor little soul. I wish we may be able to benefit her permanently." "That is hardly likely," was the reply. "You will find she is some young lady who has had a misunderstanding with her friends, and has probably injudiciously left them. We may, perhaps, succeed in restoring her to them, if she is not obstinate: but I trace lines of force in her face which make me sceptical of her tractability." He stood considering me some minutes; then added, "She looks sensible, but not at all handsome." "She is so ill, St. John." "Ill or well, she would always be plain. The grace and harmony of beauty are quite wanting in those features." On the third day I was better; on the fourth, I could speak, move, rise in bed, and turn. Hannah had brought me some gruel and dry toast, about, as I supposed, the dinner-hour. I had eaten with relish: the food was good--void of the feverish flavour which had hitherto poisoned what I had swallowed. When she left me, I felt comparatively strong and revived: ere long satiety of repose and desire for action stirred me. I wished to rise; but what could I put on? Only my damp and bemired apparel; in which I had slept on the ground and fallen in the marsh. I felt ashamed to appear before my benefactors so clad. I was spared the humiliation. On a chair by the bedside were all my own things, clean and dry. My black silk frock hung against the wall. The traces of the bog were removed from it; the creases left by the wet smoothed out: it was quite decent. My very shoes and stockings were purified and rendered presentable. There were the means of washing in the room, and a comb and brush to smooth my hair. After a weary process, and resting every five minutes, I succeeded in dressing myself. My clothes hung loose on me; for I was much wasted, but I covered deficiencies with a shawl, and once more, clean and respectable looking--no speck of the dirt, no trace of the disorder I so hated, and which seemed so to degrade me, left--I crept down a stone staircase with the aid of the banisters, to a narrow low passage, and found my way presently to the kitchen. It was full of the fragrance of new bread and the warmth of a generous fire. Hannah was baking. Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilised by education: they grow there, firm as weeds among stones. Hannah had been cold and stiff, indeed, at the first: latterly she had begun to relent a little; and when she saw me come in tidy and well-dressed, she even smiled. "What, you have got up!" she said. "You are better, then. You may sit you down in my chair on the hearthstone, if you will." She pointed to the rocking-chair: I took it. She bustled about, examining me every now and then with the corner of her eye. Turning to me, as she took some loaves from the oven, she asked bluntly-- "Did you ever go a-begging afore you came here?" I was indignant for a moment; but remembering that anger was out of the question, and that I had indeed appeared as a beggar to her, I answered quietly, but still not without a certain marked firmness-- "You are mistaken in supposing me a beggar. I am no beggar; any more than yourself or your young ladies." After a pause she said, "I dunnut understand that: you've like no house, nor no brass, I guess?" "The want of house or brass (by which I suppose you mean money) does not make a beggar in your sense of the word." "Are you book-learned?" she inquired presently. "Yes, very." "But you've never been to a boarding-school?" "I was at a boarding-school eight years." She opened her eyes wide. "Whatever cannot ye keep yourself for, then?" "I have kept myself; and, I trust, shall keep myself again. What are you going to do with these gooseberries?" I inquired, as she brought out a basket of the fruit. "Mak' 'em into pies." "Give them to me and I'll pick them." "Nay; I dunnut want ye to do nought." "But I must do something. Let me have them." She consented; and she even brought me a clean towel to spread over my dress, "lest," as she said, "I should mucky it." "Ye've not been used to sarvant's wark, I see by your hands," she remarked. "Happen ye've been a dressmaker?" "No, you are wrong. And now, never mind what I have been: don't trouble your head further about me; but tell me the name of the house where we are." "Some calls it Marsh End, and some calls it Moor House." "And the gentleman who lives here is called Mr. St. John?" "Nay; he doesn't live here: he is only staying a while. When he is at home, he is in his own parish at Morton." "That village a few miles off? "Aye." "And what is he?" "He is a parson." I remembered the answer of the old housekeeper at the parsonage, when I had asked to see the clergyman. "This, then, was his father's residence?" "Aye; old Mr. Rivers lived here, and his father, and grandfather, and gurt (great) grandfather afore him." "The name, then, of that gentleman, is Mr. St. John Rivers?" "Aye; St. John is like his kirstened name." "And his sisters are called Diana and Mary Rivers?" "Yes." "Their father is dead?" "Dead three weeks sin' of a stroke." "They have no mother?" "The mistress has been dead this mony a year." "Have you lived with the family long?" "I've lived here thirty year. I nursed them all three." "That proves you must have been an honest and faithful servant. I will say so much for you, though you have had the incivility to call me a beggar." She again regarded me with a surprised stare. "I believe," she said, "I was quite mista'en in my thoughts of you: but there is so mony cheats goes about, you mun forgie me." "And though," I continued, rather severely, "you wished to turn me from the door, on a night when you should not have shut out a dog." "Well, it was hard: but what can a body do? I thought more o' th' childer nor of mysel: poor things! They've like nobody to tak' care on 'em but me. I'm like to look sharpish." I maintained a grave silence for some minutes. "You munnut think too hardly of me," she again remarked. "But I do think hardly of you," I said; "and I'll tell you why--not so much because you refused to give me shelter, or regarded me as an impostor, as because you just now made it a species of reproach that I had no 'brass' and no house. Some of the best people that ever lived have been as destitute as I am; and if you are a Christian, you ought not to consider poverty a crime." "No more I ought," said she: "Mr. St. John tells me so too; and I see I wor wrang--but I've clear a different notion on you now to what I had. You look a raight down dacent little crater." "That will do--I forgive you now. Shake hands." She put her floury and horny hand into mine; another and heartier smile illumined her rough face, and from that moment we were friends. Hannah was evidently fond of talking. While I picked the fruit, and she made the paste for the pies, she proceeded to give me sundry details about her deceased master and mistress, and "the childer," as she called the young people. Old Mr. Rivers, she said, was a plain man enough, but a gentleman, and of as ancient a family as could be found. Marsh End had belonged to the Rivers ever since it was a house: and it was, she affirmed, "aboon two hundred year old--for all it looked but a small, humble place, naught to compare wi' Mr. Oliver's grand hall down i' Morton Vale. But she could remember Bill Oliver's father a journeyman needlemaker; and th' Rivers wor gentry i' th' owd days o' th' Henrys, as onybody might see by looking into th' registers i' Morton Church vestry." Still, she allowed, "the owd maister was like other folk--naught mich out o' t' common way: stark mad o' shooting, and farming, and sich like." The mistress was different. She was a great reader, and studied a deal; and the "bairns" had taken after her. There was nothing like them in these parts, nor ever had been; they had liked learning, all three, almost from the time they could speak; and they had always been "of a mak' of their own." Mr. St. John, when he grew up, would go to college and be a parson; and the girls, as soon as they left school, would seek places as governesses: for they had told her their father had some years ago lost a great deal of money by a man he had trusted turning bankrupt; and as he was now not rich enough to give them fortunes, they must provide for themselves. They had lived very little at home for a long while, and were only come now to stay a few weeks on account of their father's death; but they did so like Marsh End and Morton, and all these moors and hills about. They had been in London, and many other grand towns; but they always said there was no place like home; and then they were so agreeable with each other--never fell out nor "threaped." She did not know where there was such a family for being united. Having finished my task of gooseberry picking, I asked where the two ladies and their brother were now. "Gone over to Morton for a walk; but they would be back in half-an-hour to tea." They returned within the time Hannah had allotted them: they entered by the kitchen door. Mr. St. John, when he saw me, merely bowed and passed through; the two ladies stopped: Mary, in a few words, kindly and calmly expressed the pleasure she felt in seeing me well enough to be able to come down; Diana took my hand: she shook her head at me. "You should have waited for my leave to descend," she said. "You still look very pale--and so thin! Poor child!--poor girl!" Diana had a voice toned, to my ear, like the cooing of a dove. She possessed eyes whose gaze I delighted to encounter. Her whole face seemed to me full of charm. Mary's countenance was equally intelligent--her features equally pretty; but her expression was more reserved, and her manners, though gentle, more distant. Diana looked and spoke with a certain authority: she had a will, evidently. It was my nature to feel pleasure in yielding to an authority supported like hers, and to bend, where my conscience and self-respect permitted, to an active will. "And what business have you here?" she continued. "It is not your place. Mary and I sit in the kitchen sometimes, because at home we like to be free, even to license--but you are a visitor, and must go into the parlour." "I am very well here." "Not at all, with Hannah bustling about and covering you with flour." "Besides, the fire is too hot for you," interposed Mary. "To be sure," added her sister. "Come, you must be obedient." And still holding my hand she made me rise, and led me into the inner room. "Sit there," she said, placing me on the sofa, "while we take our things off and get the tea ready; it is another privilege we exercise in our little moorland home--to prepare our own meals when we are so inclined, or when Hannah is baking, brewing, washing, or ironing." She closed the door, leaving me solus with Mr. St. John, who sat opposite, a book or newspaper in his hand. I examined first, the parlour, and then its occupant. The parlour was rather a small room, very plainly furnished, yet comfortable, because clean and neat. The old-fashioned chairs were very bright, and the walnut-wood table was like a looking-glass. A few strange, antique portraits of the men and women of other days decorated the stained walls; a cupboard with glass doors contained some books and an ancient set of china. There was no superfluous ornament in the room--not one modern piece of furniture, save a brace of workboxes and a lady's desk in rosewood, which stood on a side-table: everything--including the carpet and curtains--looked at once well worn and well saved. Mr. St. John--sitting as still as one of the dusty pictures on the walls, keeping his eyes fixed on the page he perused, and his lips mutely sealed--was easy enough to examine. Had he been a statue instead of a man, he could not have been easier. He was young--perhaps from twenty- eight to thirty--tall, slender; his face riveted the eye; it was like a Greek face, very pure in outline: quite a straight, classic nose; quite an Athenian mouth and chin. It is seldom, indeed, an English face comes so near the antique models as did his. He might well be a little shocked at the irregularity of my lineaments, his own being so harmonious. His eyes were large and blue, with brown lashes; his high forehead, colourless as ivory, was partially streaked over by careless locks of fair hair. This is a gentle delineation, is it not, reader? Yet he whom it describes scarcely impressed one with the idea of a gentle, a yielding, an impressible, or even of a placid nature. Quiescent as he now sat, there was something about his nostril, his mouth, his brow, which, to my perceptions, indicated elements within either restless, or hard, or eager. He did not speak to me one word, nor even direct to me one glance, till his sisters returned. Diana, as she passed in and out, in the course of preparing tea, brought me a little cake, baked on the top of the oven. "Eat that now," she said: "you must be hungry. Hannah says you have had nothing but some gruel since breakfast." I did not refuse it, for my appetite was awakened and keen. Mr. Rivers now closed his book, approached the table, and, as he took a seat, fixed his blue pictorial-looking eyes full on me. There was an unceremonious directness, a searching, decided steadfastness in his gaze now, which told that intention, and not diffidence, had hitherto kept it averted from the stranger. "You are very hungry," he said. "I am, sir." It is my way--it always was my way, by instinct--ever to meet the brief with brevity, the direct with plainness. "It is well for you that a low fever has forced you to abstain for the last three days: there would have been danger in yielding to the cravings of your appetite at first. Now you may eat, though still not immoderately." "I trust I shall not eat long at your expense, sir," was my very clumsily- contrived, unpolished answer. "No," he said coolly: "when you have indicated to us the residence of your friends, we can write to them, and you may be restored to home." "That, I must plainly tell you, is out of my power to do; being absolutely without home and friends." The three looked at me, but not distrustfully; I felt there was no suspicion in their glances: there was more of curiosity. I speak particularly of the young ladies. St. John's eyes, though clear enough in a literal sense, in a figurative one were difficult to fathom. He seemed to use them rather as instruments to search other people's thoughts, than as agents to reveal his own: the which combination of keenness and reserve was considerably more calculated to embarrass than to encourage. "Do you mean to say," he asked, "that you are completely isolated from every connection?" "I do. Not a tie links me to any living thing: not a claim do I possess to admittance under any roof in England." "A most singular position at your age!" Here I saw his glance directed to my hands, which were folded on the table before me. I wondered what he sought there: his words soon explained the quest. "You have never been married? You are a spinster?" Diana laughed. "Why, she can't be above seventeen or eighteen years old, St. John," said she. "I am near nineteen: but I am not married. No." I felt a burning glow mount to my face; for bitter and agitating recollections were awakened by the allusion to marriage. They all saw the embarrassment and the emotion. Diana and Mary relieved me by turning their eyes elsewhere than to my crimsoned visage; but the colder and sterner brother continued to gaze, till the trouble he had excited forced out tears as well as colour. "Where did you last reside?" he now asked. "You are too inquisitive, St. John," murmured Mary in a low voice; but he leaned over the table and required an answer by a second firm and piercing look. "The name of the place where, and of the person with whom I lived, is my secret," I replied concisely. "Which, if you like, you have, in my opinion, a right to keep, both from St. John and every other questioner," remarked Diana. "Yet if I know nothing about you or your history, I cannot help you," he said. "And you need help, do you not?" "I need it, and I seek it so far, sir, that some true philanthropist will put me in the way of getting work which I can do, and the remuneration for which will keep me, if but in the barest necessaries of life." "I know not whether I am a true philanthropist; yet I am willing to aid you to the utmost of my power in a purpose so honest. First, then, tell me what you have been accustomed to do, and what you _can_ do." I had now swallowed my tea. I was mightily refreshed by the beverage; as much so as a giant with wine: it gave new tone to my unstrung nerves, and enabled me to address this penetrating young judge steadily. "Mr. Rivers," I said, turning to him, and looking at him, as he looked at me, openly and without diffidence, "you and your sisters have done me a great service--the greatest man can do his fellow-being; you have rescued me, by your noble hospitality, from death. This benefit conferred gives you an unlimited claim on my gratitude, and a claim, to a certain extent, on my confidence. I will tell you as much of the history of the wanderer you have harboured, as I can tell without compromising my own peace of mind--my own security, moral and physical, and that of others. "I am an orphan, the daughter of a clergyman. My parents died before I could know them. I was brought up a dependant; educated in a charitable institution. I will even tell you the name of the establishment, where I passed six years as a pupil, and two as a teacher--Lowood Orphan Asylum, ---shire: you will have heard of it, Mr. Rivers?--the Rev. Robert Brocklehurst is the treasurer." "I have heard of Mr. Brocklehurst, and I have seen the school." "I left Lowood nearly a year since to become a private governess. I obtained a good situation, and was happy. This place I was obliged to leave four days before I came here. The reason of my departure I cannot and ought not to explain: it would be useless, dangerous, and would sound incredible. No blame attached to me: I am as free from culpability as any one of you three. Miserable I am, and must be for a time; for the catastrophe which drove me from a house I had found a paradise was of a strange and direful nature. I observed but two points in planning my departure--speed, secrecy: to secure these, I had to leave behind me everything I possessed except a small parcel; which, in my hurry and trouble of mind, I forgot to take out of the coach that brought me to Whitcross. To this neighbourhood, then, I came, quite destitute. I slept two nights in the open air, and wandered about two days without crossing a threshold: but twice in that space of time did I taste food; and it was when brought by hunger, exhaustion, and despair almost to the last gasp, that you, Mr. Rivers, forbade me to perish of want at your door, and took me under the shelter of your roof. I know all your sisters have done for me since--for I have not been insensible during my seeming torpor--and I owe to their spontaneous, genuine, genial compassion as large a debt as to your evangelical charity." "Don't make her talk any more now, St. John," said Diana, as I paused; "she is evidently not yet fit for excitement. Come to the sofa and sit down now, Miss Elliott." I gave an involuntary half start at hearing the _alias_: I had forgotten my new name. Mr. Rivers, whom nothing seemed to escape, noticed it at once. "You said your name was Jane Elliott?" he observed. "I did say so; and it is the name by which I think it expedient to be called at present, but it is not my real name, and when I hear it, it sounds strange to me." "Your real name you will not give?" "No: I fear discovery above all things; and whatever disclosure would lead to it, I avoid." "You are quite right, I am sure," said Diana. "Now do, brother, let her be at peace a while." But when St. John had mused a few moments he recommenced as imperturbably and with as much acumen as ever. "You would not like to be long dependent on our hospitality--you would wish, I see, to dispense as soon as may be with my sisters' compassion, and, above all, with my _charity_ (I am quite sensible of the distinction drawn, nor do I resent it--it is just): you desire to be independent of us?" "I do: I have already said so. Show me how to work, or how to seek work: that is all I now ask; then let me go, if it be but to the meanest cottage; but till then, allow me to stay here: I dread another essay of the horrors of homeless destitution." "Indeed you _shall_ stay here," said Diana, putting her white hand on my head. "You _shall_," repeated Mary, in the tone of undemonstrative sincerity which seemed natural to her. "My sisters, you see, have a pleasure in keeping you," said Mr. St. John, "as they would have a pleasure in keeping and cherishing a half-frozen bird, some wintry wind might have driven through their casement. I feel more inclination to put you in the way of keeping yourself, and shall endeavour to do so; but observe, my sphere is narrow. I am but the incumbent of a poor country parish: my aid must be of the humblest sort. And if you are inclined to despise the day of small things, seek some more efficient succour than such as I can offer." "She has already said that she is willing to do anything honest she can do," answered Diana for me; "and you know, St. John, she has no choice of helpers: she is forced to put up with such crusty people as you." "I will be a dressmaker; I will be a plain-workwoman; I will be a servant, a nurse-girl, if I can be no better," I answered. "Right," said Mr. St. John, quite coolly. "If such is your spirit, I promise to aid you, in my own time and way." He now resumed the book with which he had been occupied before tea. I soon withdrew, for I had talked as much, and sat up as long, as my present strength would permit. CHAPTER XXX The more I knew of the inmates of Moor House, the better I liked them. In a few days I had so far recovered my health that I could sit up all day, and walk out sometimes. I could join with Diana and Mary in all their occupations; converse with them as much as they wished, and aid them when and where they would allow me. There was a reviving pleasure in this intercourse, of a kind now tasted by me for the first time--the pleasure arising from perfect congeniality of tastes, sentiments, and principles. I liked to read what they liked to read: what they enjoyed, delighted me; what they approved, I reverenced. They loved their sequestered home. I, too, in the grey, small, antique structure, with its low roof, its latticed casements, its mouldering walls, its avenue of aged firs--all grown aslant under the stress of mountain winds; its garden, dark with yew and holly--and where no flowers but of the hardiest species would bloom--found a charm both potent and permanent. They clung to the purple moors behind and around their dwelling--to the hollow vale into which the pebbly bridle-path leading from their gate descended, and which wound between fern-banks first, and then amongst a few of the wildest little pasture-fields that ever bordered a wilderness of heath, or gave sustenance to a flock of grey moorland sheep, with their little mossy- faced lambs:--they clung to this scene, I say, with a perfect enthusiasm of attachment. I could comprehend the feeling, and share both its strength and truth. I saw the fascination of the locality. I felt the consecration of its loneliness: my eye feasted on the outline of swell and sweep--on the wild colouring communicated to ridge and dell by moss, by heath-bell, by flower-sprinkled turf, by brilliant bracken, and mellow granite crag. These details were just to me what they were to them--so many pure and sweet sources of pleasure. The strong blast and the soft breeze; the rough and the halcyon day; the hours of sunrise and sunset; the moonlight and the clouded night, developed for me, in these regions, the same attraction as for them--wound round my faculties the same spell that entranced theirs. Indoors we agreed equally well. They were both more accomplished and better read than I was; but with eagerness I followed in the path of knowledge they had trodden before me. I devoured the books they lent me: then it was full satisfaction to discuss with them in the evening what I had perused during the day. Thought fitted thought; opinion met opinion: we coincided, in short, perfectly. If in our trio there was a superior and a leader, it was Diana. Physically, she far excelled me: she was handsome; she was vigorous. In her animal spirits there was an affluence of life and certainty of flow, such as excited my wonder, while it baffled my comprehension. I could talk a while when the evening commenced, but the first gush of vivacity and fluency gone, I was fain to sit on a stool at Diana's feet, to rest my head on her knee, and listen alternately to her and Mary, while they sounded thoroughly the topic on which I had but touched. Diana offered to teach me German. I liked to learn of her: I saw the part of instructress pleased and suited her; that of scholar pleased and suited me no less. Our natures dovetailed: mutual affection--of the strongest kind--was the result. They discovered I could draw: their pencils and colour-boxes were immediately at my service. My skill, greater in this one point than theirs, surprised and charmed them. Mary would sit and watch me by the hour together: then she would take lessons; and a docile, intelligent, assiduous pupil she made. Thus occupied, and mutually entertained, days passed like hours, and weeks like days. As to Mr. St John, the intimacy which had arisen so naturally and rapidly between me and his sisters did not extend to him. One reason of the distance yet observed between us was, that he was comparatively seldom at home: a large proportion of his time appeared devoted to visiting the sick and poor among the scattered population of his parish. No weather seemed to hinder him in these pastoral excursions: rain or fair, he would, when his hours of morning study were over, take his hat, and, followed by his father's old pointer, Carlo, go out on his mission of love or duty--I scarcely know in which light he regarded it. Sometimes, when the day was very unfavourable, his sisters would expostulate. He would then say, with a peculiar smile, more solemn than cheerful-- "And if I let a gust of wind or a sprinkling of rain turn me aside from these easy tasks, what preparation would such sloth be for the future I propose to myself?" Diana and Mary's general answer to this question was a sigh, and some minutes of apparently mournful meditation. But besides his frequent absences, there was another barrier to friendship with him: he seemed of a reserved, an abstracted, and even of a brooding nature. Zealous in his ministerial labours, blameless in his life and habits, he yet did not appear to enjoy that mental serenity, that inward content, which should be the reward of every sincere Christian and practical philanthropist. Often, of an evening, when he sat at the window, his desk and papers before him, he would cease reading or writing, rest his chin on his hand, and deliver himself up to I know not what course of thought; but that it was perturbed and exciting might be seen in the frequent flash and changeful dilation of his eye. I think, moreover, that Nature was not to him that treasury of delight it was to his sisters. He expressed once, and but once in my hearing, a strong sense of the rugged charm of the hills, and an inborn affection for the dark roof and hoary walls he called his home; but there was more of gloom than pleasure in the tone and words in which the sentiment was manifested; and never did he seem to roam the moors for the sake of their soothing silence--never seek out or dwell upon the thousand peaceful delights they could yield. Incommunicative as he was, some time elapsed before I had an opportunity of gauging his mind. I first got an idea of its calibre when I heard him preach in his own church at Morton. I wish I could describe that sermon: but it is past my power. I cannot even render faithfully the effect it produced on me. It began calm--and indeed, as far as delivery and pitch of voice went, it was calm to the end: an earnestly felt, yet strictly restrained zeal breathed soon in the distinct accents, and prompted the nervous language. This grew to force--compressed, condensed, controlled. The heart was thrilled, the mind astonished, by the power of the preacher: neither were softened. Throughout there was a strange bitterness; an absence of consolatory gentleness; stern allusions to Calvinistic doctrines--election, predestination, reprobation--were frequent; and each reference to these points sounded like a sentence pronounced for doom. When he had done, instead of feeling better, calmer, more enlightened by his discourse, I experienced an inexpressible sadness; for it seemed to me--I know not whether equally so to others--that the eloquence to which I had been listening had sprung from a depth where lay turbid dregs of disappointment--where moved troubling impulses of insatiate yearnings and disquieting aspirations. I was sure St. John Rivers--pure-lived, conscientious, zealous as he was--had not yet found that peace of God which passeth all understanding: he had no more found it, I thought, than had I with my concealed and racking regrets for my broken idol and lost elysium--regrets to which I have latterly avoided referring, but which possessed me and tyrannised over me ruthlessly. Meantime a month was gone. Diana and Mary were soon to leave Moor House, and return to the far different life and scene which awaited them, as governesses in a large, fashionable, south-of-England city, where each held a situation in families by whose wealthy and haughty members they were regarded only as humble dependants, and who neither knew nor sought out their innate excellences, and appreciated only their acquired accomplishments as they appreciated the skill of their cook or the taste of their waiting-woman. Mr. St. John had said nothing to me yet about the employment he had promised to obtain for me; yet it became urgent that I should have a vocation of some kind. One morning, being left alone with him a few minutes in the parlour, I ventured to approach the window-recess--which his table, chair, and desk consecrated as a kind of study--and I was going to speak, though not very well knowing in what words to frame my inquiry--for it is at all times difficult to break the ice of reserve glassing over such natures as his--when he saved me the trouble by being the first to commence a dialogue. Looking up as I drew near--"You have a question to ask of me?" he said. "Yes; I wish to know whether you have heard of any service I can offer myself to undertake?" "I found or devised something for you three weeks ago; but as you seemed both useful and happy here--as my sisters had evidently become attached to you, and your society gave them unusual pleasure--I deemed it inexpedient to break in on your mutual comfort till their approaching departure from Marsh End should render yours necessary." "And they will go in three days now?" I said. "Yes; and when they go, I shall return to the parsonage at Morton: Hannah will accompany me; and this old house will be shut up." I waited a few moments, expecting he would go on with the subject first broached: but he seemed to have entered another train of reflection: his look denoted abstraction from me and my business. I was obliged to recall him to a theme which was of necessity one of close and anxious interest to me. "What is the employment you had in view, Mr. Rivers? I hope this delay will not have increased the difficulty of securing it." "Oh, no; since it is an employment which depends only on me to give, and you to accept." He again paused: there seemed a reluctance to continue. I grew impatient: a restless movement or two, and an eager and exacting glance fastened on his face, conveyed the feeling to him as effectually as words could have done, and with less trouble. "You need be in no hurry to hear," he said: "let me frankly tell you, I have nothing eligible or profitable to suggest. Before I explain, recall, if you please, my notice, clearly given, that if I helped you, it must be as the blind man would help the lame. I am poor; for I find that, when I have paid my father's debts, all the patrimony remaining to me will be this crumbling grange, the row of scathed firs behind, and the patch of moorish soil, with the yew-trees and holly-bushes in front. I am obscure: Rivers is an old name; but of the three sole descendants of the race, two earn the dependant's crust among strangers, and the third considers himself an alien from his native country--not only for life, but in death. Yes, and deems, and is bound to deem, himself honoured by the lot, and aspires but after the day when the cross of separation from fleshly ties shall be laid on his shoulders, and when the Head of that church-militant of whose humblest members he is one, shall give the word, 'Rise, follow Me!'" St. John said these words as he pronounced his sermons, with a quiet, deep voice; with an unflushed cheek, and a coruscating radiance of glance. He resumed-- "And since I am myself poor and obscure, I can offer you but a service of poverty and obscurity. _You_ may even think it degrading--for I see now your habits have been what the world calls refined: your tastes lean to the ideal, and your society has at least been amongst the educated; but _I_ consider that no service degrades which can better our race. I hold that the more arid and unreclaimed the soil where the Christian labourer's task of tillage is appointed him--the scantier the meed his toil brings--the higher the honour. His, under such circumstances, is the destiny of the pioneer; and the first pioneers of the Gospel were the Apostles--their captain was Jesus, the Redeemer, Himself." "Well?" I said, as he again paused--"proceed." He looked at me before he proceeded: indeed, he seemed leisurely to read my face, as if its features and lines were characters on a page. The conclusions drawn from this scrutiny he partially expressed in his succeeding observations. "I believe you will accept the post I offer you," said he, "and hold it for a while: not permanently, though: any more than I could permanently keep the narrow and narrowing--the tranquil, hidden office of English country incumbent; for in your nature is an alloy as detrimental to repose as that in mine, though of a different kind." "Do explain," I urged, when he halted once more. "I will; and you shall hear how poor the proposal is,--how trivial--how cramping. I shall not stay long at Morton, now that my father is dead, and that I am my own master. I shall leave the place probably in the course of a twelve-month; but while I do stay, I will exert myself to the utmost for its improvement. Morton, when I came to it two years ago, had no school: the children of the poor were excluded from every hope of progress. I established one for boys: I mean now to open a second school for girls. I have hired a building for the purpose, with a cottage of two rooms attached to it for the mistress's house. Her salary will be thirty pounds a year: her house is already furnished, very simply, but sufficiently, by the kindness of a lady, Miss Oliver; the only daughter of the sole rich man in my parish--Mr. Oliver, the proprietor of a needle- factory and iron-foundry in the valley. The same lady pays for the education and clothing of an orphan from the workhouse, on condition that she shall aid the mistress in such menial offices connected with her own house and the school as her occupation of teaching will prevent her having time to discharge in person. Will you be this mistress?" He put the question rather hurriedly; he seemed half to expect an indignant, or at least a disdainful rejection of the offer: not knowing all my thoughts and feelings, though guessing some, he could not tell in what light the lot would appear to me. In truth it was humble--but then it was sheltered, and I wanted a safe asylum: it was plodding--but then, compared with that of a governess in a rich house, it was independent; and the fear of servitude with strangers entered my soul like iron: it was not ignoble--not unworthy--not mentally degrading, I made my decision. "I thank you for the proposal, Mr. Rivers, and I accept it with all my heart." "But you comprehend me?" he said. "It is a village school: your scholars will be only poor girls--cottagers' children--at the best, farmers' daughters. Knitting, sewing, reading, writing, ciphering, will be all you will have to teach. What will you do with your accomplishments? What, with the largest portion of your mind--sentiments--tastes?" "Save them till they are wanted. They will keep." "You know what you undertake, then?" "I do." He now smiled: and not a bitter or a sad smile, but one well pleased and deeply gratified. "And when will you commence the exercise of your function?" "I will go to my house to-morrow, and open the school, if you like, next week." "Very well: so be it." He rose and walked through the room. Standing still, he again looked at me. He shook his head. "What do you disapprove of, Mr. Rivers?" I asked. "You will not stay at Morton long: no, no!" "Why? What is your reason for saying so?" "I read it in your eye; it is not of that description which promises the maintenance of an even tenor in life." "I am not ambitious." He started at the word "ambitious." He repeated, "No. What made you think of ambition? Who is ambitious? I know I am: but how did you find it out?" "I was speaking of myself." "Well, if you are not ambitious, you are--" He paused. "What?" "I was going to say, impassioned: but perhaps you would have misunderstood the word, and been displeased. I mean, that human affections and sympathies have a most powerful hold on you. I am sure you cannot long be content to pass your leisure in solitude, and to devote your working hours to a monotonous labour wholly void of stimulus: any more than I can be content," he added, with emphasis, "to live here buried in morass, pent in with mountains--my nature, that God gave me, contravened; my faculties, heaven-bestowed, paralysed--made useless. You hear now how I contradict myself. I, who preached contentment with a humble lot, and justified the vocation even of hewers of wood and drawers of water in God's service--I, His ordained minister, almost rave in my restlessness. Well, propensities and principles must be reconciled by some means." He left the room. In this brief hour I had learnt more of him than in the whole previous month: yet still he puzzled me. Diana and Mary Rivers became more sad and silent as the day approached for leaving their brother and their home. They both tried to appear as usual; but the sorrow they had to struggle against was one that could not be entirely conquered or concealed. Diana intimated that this would be a different parting from any they had ever yet known. It would probably, as far as St. John was concerned, be a parting for years: it might be a parting for life. "He will sacrifice all to his long-framed resolves," she said: "natural affection and feelings more potent still. St. John looks quiet, Jane; but he hides a fever in his vitals. You would think him gentle, yet in some things he is inexorable as death; and the worst of it is, my conscience will hardly permit me to dissuade him from his severe decision: certainly, I cannot for a moment blame him for it. It is right, noble, Christian: yet it breaks my heart!" And the tears gushed to her fine eyes. Mary bent her head low over her work. "We are now without father: we shall soon be without home and brother," she murmured. At that moment a little accident supervened, which seemed decreed by fate purposely to prove the truth of the adage, that "misfortunes never come singly," and to add to their distresses the vexing one of the slip between the cup and the lip. St. John passed the window reading a letter. He entered. "Our uncle John is dead," said he. Both the sisters seemed struck: not shocked or appalled; the tidings appeared in their eyes rather momentous than afflicting. "Dead?" repeated Diana. "Yes." She riveted a searching gaze on her brother's face. "And what then?" she demanded, in a low voice. "What then, Die?" he replied, maintaining a marble immobility of feature. "What then? Why--nothing. Read." He threw the letter into her lap. She glanced over it, and handed it to Mary. Mary perused it in silence, and returned it to her brother. All three looked at each other, and all three smiled--a dreary, pensive smile enough. "Amen! We can yet live," said Diana at last. "At any rate, it makes us no worse off than we were before," remarked Mary. "Only it forces rather strongly on the mind the picture of what _might have been_," said Mr. Rivers, "and contrasts it somewhat too vividly with what _is_." He folded the letter, locked it in his desk, and again went out. For some minutes no one spoke. Diana then turned to me. "Jane, you will wonder at us and our mysteries," she said, "and think us hard-hearted beings not to be more moved at the death of so near a relation as an uncle; but we have never seen him or known him. He was my mother's brother. My father and he quarrelled long ago. It was by his advice that my father risked most of his property in the speculation that ruined him. Mutual recrimination passed between them: they parted in anger, and were never reconciled. My uncle engaged afterwards in more prosperous undertakings: it appears he realised a fortune of twenty thousand pounds. He was never married, and had no near kindred but ourselves and one other person, not more closely related than we. My father always cherished the idea that he would atone for his error by leaving his possessions to us; that letter informs us that he has bequeathed every penny to the other relation, with the exception of thirty guineas, to be divided between St. John, Diana, and Mary Rivers, for the purchase of three mourning rings. He had a right, of course, to do as he pleased: and yet a momentary damp is cast on the spirits by the receipt of such news. Mary and I would have esteemed ourselves rich with a thousand pounds each; and to St. John such a sum would have been valuable, for the good it would have enabled him to do." This explanation given, the subject was dropped, and no further reference made to it by either Mr. Rivers or his sisters. The next day I left Marsh End for Morton. The day after, Diana and Mary quitted it for distant B-. In a week, Mr. Rivers and Hannah repaired to the parsonage: and so the old grange was abandoned. CHAPTER XXXI My home, then, when I at last find a home,--is a cottage; a little room with whitewashed walls and a sanded floor, containing four painted chairs and a table, a clock, a cupboard, with two or three plates and dishes, and a set of tea-things in delf. Above, a chamber of the same dimensions as the kitchen, with a deal bedstead and chest of drawers; small, yet too large to be filled with my scanty wardrobe: though the kindness of my gentle and generous friends has increased that, by a modest stock of such things as are necessary. It is evening. I have dismissed, with the fee of an orange, the little orphan who serves me as a handmaid. I am sitting alone on the hearth. This morning, the village school opened. I had twenty scholars. But three of the number can read: none write or cipher. Several knit, and a few sew a little. They speak with the broadest accent of the district. At present, they and I have a difficulty in understanding each other's language. Some of them are unmannered, rough, intractable, as well as ignorant; but others are docile, have a wish to learn, and evince a disposition that pleases me. I must not forget that these coarsely-clad little peasants are of flesh and blood as good as the scions of gentlest genealogy; and that the germs of native excellence, refinement, intelligence, kind feeling, are as likely to exist in their hearts as in those of the best-born. My duty will be to develop these germs: surely I shall find some happiness in discharging that office. Much enjoyment I do not expect in the life opening before me: yet it will, doubtless, if I regulate my mind, and exert my powers as I ought, yield me enough to live on from day to day. Was I very gleeful, settled, content, during the hours I passed in yonder bare, humble schoolroom this morning and afternoon? Not to deceive myself, I must reply--No: I felt desolate to a degree. I felt--yes, idiot that I am--I felt degraded. I doubted I had taken a step which sank instead of raising me in the scale of social existence. I was weakly dismayed at the ignorance, the poverty, the coarseness of all I heard and saw round me. But let me not hate and despise myself too much for these feelings; I know them to be wrong--that is a great step gained; I shall strive to overcome them. To-morrow, I trust, I shall get the better of them partially; and in a few weeks, perhaps, they will be quite subdued. In a few months, it is possible, the happiness of seeing progress, and a change for the better in my scholars may substitute gratification for disgust. Meantime, let me ask myself one question--Which is better?--To have surrendered to temptation; listened to passion; made no painful effort--no struggle;--but to have sunk down in the silken snare; fallen asleep on the flowers covering it; wakened in a southern clime, amongst the luxuries of a pleasure villa: to have been now living in France, Mr. Rochester's mistress; delirious with his love half my time--for he would--oh, yes, he would have loved me well for a while. He _did_ love me--no one will ever love me so again. I shall never more know the sweet homage given to beauty, youth, and grace--for never to any one else shall I seem to possess these charms. He was fond and proud of me--it is what no man besides will ever be.--But where am I wandering, and what am I saying, and above all, feeling? Whether is it better, I ask, to be a slave in a fool's paradise at Marseilles--fevered with delusive bliss one hour--suffocating with the bitterest tears of remorse and shame the next--or to be a village-schoolmistress, free and honest, in a breezy mountain nook in the healthy heart of England? Yes; I feel now that I was right when I adhered to principle and law, and scorned and crushed the insane promptings of a frenzied moment. God directed me to a correct choice: I thank His providence for the guidance! Having brought my eventide musings to this point, I rose, went to my door, and looked at the sunset of the harvest-day, and at the quiet fields before my cottage, which, with the school, was distant half a mile from the village. The birds were singing their last strains-- "The air was mild, the dew was balm." While I looked, I thought myself happy, and was surprised to find myself ere long weeping--and why? For the doom which had reft me from adhesion to my master: for him I was no more to see; for the desperate grief and fatal fury--consequences of my departure--which might now, perhaps, be dragging him from the path of right, too far to leave hope of ultimate restoration thither. At this thought, I turned my face aside from the lovely sky of eve and lonely vale of Morton--I say _lonely_, for in that bend of it visible to me there was no building apparent save the church and the parsonage, half-hid in trees, and, quite at the extremity, the roof of Vale Hall, where the rich Mr. Oliver and his daughter lived. I hid my eyes, and leant my head against the stone frame of my door; but soon a slight noise near the wicket which shut in my tiny garden from the meadow beyond it made me look up. A dog--old Carlo, Mr. Rivers' pointer, as I saw in a moment--was pushing the gate with his nose, and St. John himself leant upon it with folded arms; his brow knit, his gaze, grave almost to displeasure, fixed on me. I asked him to come in. "No, I cannot stay; I have only brought you a little parcel my sisters left for you. I think it contains a colour-box, pencils, and paper." I approached to take it: a welcome gift it was. He examined my face, I thought, with austerity, as I came near: the traces of tears were doubtless very visible upon it. "Have you found your first day's work harder than you expected?" he asked. "Oh, no! On the contrary, I think in time I shall get on with my scholars very well." "But perhaps your accommodations--your cottage--your furniture--have disappointed your expectations? They are, in truth, scanty enough; but--" I interrupted-- "My cottage is clean and weather-proof; my furniture sufficient and commodious. All I see has made me thankful, not despondent. I am not absolutely such a fool and sensualist as to regret the absence of a carpet, a sofa, and silver plate; besides, five weeks ago I had nothing--I was an outcast, a beggar, a vagrant; now I have acquaintance, a home, a business. I wonder at the goodness of God; the generosity of my friends; the bounty of my lot. I do not repine." "But you feel solitude an oppression? The little house there behind you is dark and empty." "I have hardly had time yet to enjoy a sense of tranquillity, much less to grow impatient under one of loneliness." "Very well; I hope you feel the content you express: at any rate, your good sense will tell you that it is too soon yet to yield to the vacillating fears of Lot's wife. What you had left before I saw you, of course I do not know; but I counsel you to resist firmly every temptation which would incline you to look back: pursue your present career steadily, for some months at least." "It is what I mean to do," I answered. St. John continued-- "It is hard work to control the workings of inclination and turn the bent of nature; but that it may be done, I know from experience. God has given us, in a measure, the power to make our own fate; and when our energies seem to demand a sustenance they cannot get--when our will strains after a path we may not follow--we need neither starve from inanition, nor stand still in despair: we have but to seek another nourishment for the mind, as strong as the forbidden food it longed to taste--and perhaps purer; and to hew out for the adventurous foot a road as direct and broad as the one Fortune has blocked up against us, if rougher than it. "A year ago I was myself intensely miserable, because I thought I had made a mistake in entering the ministry: its uniform duties wearied me to death. I burnt for the more active life of the world--for the more exciting toils of a literary career--for the destiny of an artist, author, orator; anything rather than that of a priest: yes, the heart of a politician, of a soldier, of a votary of glory, a lover of renown, a luster after power, beat under my curate's surplice. I considered; my life was so wretched, it must be changed, or I must die. After a season of darkness and struggling, light broke and relief fell: my cramped existence all at once spread out to a plain without bounds--my powers heard a call from heaven to rise, gather their full strength, spread their wings, and mount beyond ken. God had an errand for me; to bear which afar, to deliver it well, skill and strength, courage and eloquence, the best qualifications of soldier, statesman, and orator, were all needed: for these all centre in the good missionary. "A missionary I resolved to be. From that moment my state of mind changed; the fetters dissolved and dropped from every faculty, leaving nothing of bondage but its galling soreness--which time only can heal. My father, indeed, imposed the determination, but since his death, I have not a legitimate obstacle to contend with; some affairs settled, a successor for Morton provided, an entanglement or two of the feelings broken through or cut asunder--a last conflict with human weakness, in which I know I shall overcome, because I have vowed that I _will_ overcome--and I leave Europe for the East." He said this, in his peculiar, subdued, yet emphatic voice; looking, when he had ceased speaking, not at me, but at the setting sun, at which I looked too. Both he and I had our backs towards the path leading up the field to the wicket. We had heard no step on that grass-grown track; the water running in the vale was the one lulling sound of the hour and scene; we might well then start when a gay voice, sweet as a silver bell, exclaimed-- "Good evening, Mr. Rivers. And good evening, old Carlo. Your dog is quicker to recognise his friends than you are, sir; he pricked his ears and wagged his tail when I was at the bottom of the field, and you have your back towards me now." It was true. Though Mr. Rivers had started at the first of those musical accents, as if a thunderbolt had split a cloud over his head, he stood yet, at the close of the sentence, in the same attitude in which the speaker had surprised him--his arm resting on the gate, his face directed towards the west. He turned at last, with measured deliberation. A vision, as it seemed to me, had risen at his side. There appeared, within three feet of him, a form clad in pure white--a youthful, graceful form: full, yet fine in contour; and when, after bending to caress Carlo, it lifted up its head, and threw back a long veil, there bloomed under his glance a face of perfect beauty. Perfect beauty is a strong expression; but I do not retrace or qualify it: as sweet features as ever the temperate clime of Albion moulded; as pure hues of rose and lily as ever her humid gales and vapoury skies generated and screened, justified, in this instance, the term. No charm was wanting, no defect was perceptible; the young girl had regular and delicate lineaments; eyes shaped and coloured as we see them in lovely pictures, large, and dark, and full; the long and shadowy eyelash which encircles a fine eye with so soft a fascination; the pencilled brow which gives such clearness; the white smooth forehead, which adds such repose to the livelier beauties of tint and ray; the cheek oval, fresh, and smooth; the lips, fresh too, ruddy, healthy, sweetly formed; the even and gleaming teeth without flaw; the small dimpled chin; the ornament of rich, plenteous tresses--all advantages, in short, which, combined, realise the ideal of beauty, were fully hers. I wondered, as I looked at this fair creature: I admired her with my whole heart. Nature had surely formed her in a partial mood; and, forgetting her usual stinted step-mother dole of gifts, had endowed this, her darling, with a grand-dame's bounty. What did St. John Rivers think of this earthly angel? I naturally asked myself that question as I saw him turn to her and look at her; and, as naturally, I sought the answer to the inquiry in his countenance. He had already withdrawn his eye from the Peri, and was looking at a humble tuft of daisies which grew by the wicket. "A lovely evening, but late for you to be out alone," he said, as he crushed the snowy heads of the closed flowers with his foot. "Oh, I only came home from S-" (she mentioned the name of a large town some twenty miles distant) "this afternoon. Papa told me you had opened your school, and that the new mistress was come; and so I put on my bonnet after tea, and ran up the valley to see her: this is she?" pointing to me. "It is," said St. John. "Do you think you shall like Morton?" she asked of me, with a direct and naive simplicity of tone and manner, pleasing, if child-like. "I hope I shall. I have many inducements to do so." "Did you find your scholars as attentive as you expected?" "Quite." "Do you like your house?" "Very much." "Have I furnished it nicely?" "Very nicely, indeed." "And made a good choice of an attendant for you in Alice Wood?" "You have indeed. She is teachable and handy." (This then, I thought, is Miss Oliver, the heiress; favoured, it seems, in the gifts of fortune, as well as in those of nature! What happy combination of the planets presided over her birth, I wonder?) "I shall come up and help you to teach sometimes," she added. "It will be a change for me to visit you now and then; and I like a change. Mr. Rivers, I have been _so_ gay during my stay at S-. Last night, or rather this morning, I was dancing till two o'clock. The ---th regiment are stationed there since the riots; and the officers are the most agreeable men in the world: they put all our young knife-grinders and scissor merchants to shame." It seemed to me that Mr. St. John's under lip protruded, and his upper lip curled a moment. His mouth certainly looked a good deal compressed, and the lower part of his face unusually stern and square, as the laughing girl gave him this information. He lifted his gaze, too, from the daisies, and turned it on her. An unsmiling, a searching, a meaning gaze it was. She answered it with a second laugh, and laughter well became her youth, her roses, her dimples, her bright eyes. As he stood, mute and grave, she again fell to caressing Carlo. "Poor Carlo loves me," said she. "_He_ is not stern and distant to his friends; and if he could speak, he would not be silent." As she patted the dog's head, bending with native grace before his young and austere master, I saw a glow rise to that master's face. I saw his solemn eye melt with sudden fire, and flicker with resistless emotion. Flushed and kindled thus, he looked nearly as beautiful for a man as she for a woman. His chest heaved once, as if his large heart, weary of despotic constriction, had expanded, despite the will, and made a vigorous bound for the attainment of liberty. But he curbed it, I think, as a resolute rider would curb a rearing steed. He responded neither by word nor movement to the gentle advances made him. "Papa says you never come to see us now," continued Miss Oliver, looking up. "You are quite a stranger at Vale Hall. He is alone this evening, and not very well: will you return with me and visit him?" "It is not a seasonable hour to intrude on Mr. Oliver," answered St. John. "Not a seasonable hour! But I declare it is. It is just the hour when papa most wants company: when the works are closed and he has no business to occupy him. Now, Mr. Rivers, _do_ come. Why are you so very shy, and so very sombre?" She filled up the hiatus his silence left by a reply of her own. "I forgot!" she exclaimed, shaking her beautiful curled head, as if shocked at herself. "I am so giddy and thoughtless! _Do_ excuse me. It had slipped my memory that you have good reasons to be indisposed for joining in my chatter. Diana and Mary have left you, and Moor House is shut up, and you are so lonely. I am sure I pity you. Do come and see papa." "Not to-night, Miss Rosamond, not to-night." Mr. St. John spoke almost like an automaton: himself only knew the effort it cost him thus to refuse. "Well, if you are so obstinate, I will leave you; for I dare not stay any longer: the dew begins to fall. Good evening!" She held out her hand. He just touched it. "Good evening!" he repeated, in a voice low and hollow as an echo. She turned, but in a moment returned. "Are you well?" she asked. Well might she put the question: his face was blanched as her gown. "Quite well," he enunciated; and, with a bow, he left the gate. She went one way; he another. She turned twice to gaze after him as she tripped fairy-like down the field; he, as he strode firmly across, never turned at all. This spectacle of another's suffering and sacrifice rapt my thoughts from exclusive meditation on my own. Diana Rivers had designated her brother "inexorable as death." She had not exaggerated. CHAPTER XXXII I continued the labours of the village-school as actively and faithfully as I could. It was truly hard work at first. Some time elapsed before, with all my efforts, I could comprehend my scholars and their nature. Wholly untaught, with faculties quite torpid, they seemed to me hopelessly dull; and, at first sight, all dull alike: but I soon found I was mistaken. There was a difference amongst them as amongst the educated; and when I got to know them, and they me, this difference rapidly developed itself. Their amazement at me, my language, my rules, and ways, once subsided, I found some of these heavy-looking, gaping rustics wake up into sharp-witted girls enough. Many showed themselves obliging, and amiable too; and I discovered amongst them not a few examples of natural politeness, and innate self-respect, as well as of excellent capacity, that won both my goodwill and my admiration. These soon took a pleasure in doing their work well, in keeping their persons neat, in learning their tasks regularly, in acquiring quiet and orderly manners. The rapidity of their progress, in some instances, was even surprising; and an honest and happy pride I took in it: besides, I began personally to like some of the best girls; and they liked me. I had amongst my scholars several farmers' daughters: young women grown, almost. These could already read, write, and sew; and to them I taught the elements of grammar, geography, history, and the finer kinds of needlework. I found estimable characters amongst them--characters desirous of information and disposed for improvement--with whom I passed many a pleasant evening hour in their own homes. Their parents then (the farmer and his wife) loaded me with attentions. There was an enjoyment in accepting their simple kindness, and in repaying it by a consideration--a scrupulous regard to their feelings--to which they were not, perhaps, at all times accustomed, and which both charmed and benefited them; because, while it elevated them in their own eyes, it made them emulous to merit the deferential treatment they received. I felt I became a favourite in the neighbourhood. Whenever I went out, I heard on all sides cordial salutations, and was welcomed with friendly smiles. To live amidst general regard, though it be but the regard of working people, is like "sitting in sunshine, calm and sweet;" serene inward feelings bud and bloom under the ray. At this period of my life, my heart far oftener swelled with thankfulness than sank with dejection: and yet, reader, to tell you all, in the midst of this calm, this useful existence--after a day passed in honourable exertion amongst my scholars, an evening spent in drawing or reading contentedly alone--I used to rush into strange dreams at night: dreams many-coloured, agitated, full of the ideal, the stirring, the stormy--dreams where, amidst unusual scenes, charged with adventure, with agitating risk and romantic chance, I still again and again met Mr. Rochester, always at some exciting crisis; and then the sense of being in his arms, hearing his voice, meeting his eye, touching his hand and cheek, loving him, being loved by him--the hope of passing a lifetime at his side, would be renewed, with all its first force and fire. Then I awoke. Then I recalled where I was, and how situated. Then I rose up on my curtainless bed, trembling and quivering; and then the still, dark night witnessed the convulsion of despair, and heard the burst of passion. By nine o'clock the next morning I was punctually opening the school; tranquil, settled, prepared for the steady duties of the day. Rosamond Oliver kept her word in coming to visit me. Her call at the school was generally made in the course of her morning ride. She would canter up to the door on her pony, followed by a mounted livery servant. Anything more exquisite than her appearance, in her purple habit, with her Amazon's cap of black velvet placed gracefully above the long curls that kissed her cheek and floated to her shoulders, can scarcely be imagined: and it was thus she would enter the rustic building, and glide through the dazzled ranks of the village children. She generally came at the hour when Mr. Rivers was engaged in giving his daily catechising lesson. Keenly, I fear, did the eye of the visitress pierce the young pastor's heart. A sort of instinct seemed to warn him of her entrance, even when he did not see it; and when he was looking quite away from the door, if she appeared at it, his cheek would glow, and his marble-seeming features, though they refused to relax, changed indescribably, and in their very quiescence became expressive of a repressed fervour, stronger than working muscle or darting glance could indicate. Of course, she knew her power: indeed, he did not, because he could not, conceal it from her. In spite of his Christian stoicism, when she went up and addressed him, and smiled gaily, encouragingly, even fondly in his face, his hand would tremble and his eye burn. He seemed to say, with his sad and resolute look, if he did not say it with his lips, "I love you, and I know you prefer me. It is not despair of success that keeps me dumb. If I offered my heart, I believe you would accept it. But that heart is already laid on a sacred altar: the fire is arranged round it. It will soon be no more than a sacrifice consumed." And then she would pout like a disappointed child; a pensive cloud would soften her radiant vivacity; she would withdraw her hand hastily from his, and turn in transient petulance from his aspect, at once so heroic and so martyr-like. St. John, no doubt, would have given the world to follow, recall, retain her, when she thus left him; but he would not give one chance of heaven, nor relinquish, for the elysium of her love, one hope of the true, eternal Paradise. Besides, he could not bind all that he had in his nature--the rover, the aspirant, the poet, the priest--in the limits of a single passion. He could not--he would not--renounce his wild field of mission warfare for the parlours and the peace of Vale Hall. I learnt so much from himself in an inroad I once, despite his reserve, had the daring to make on his confidence. Miss Oliver already honoured me with frequent visits to my cottage. I had learnt her whole character, which was without mystery or disguise: she was coquettish but not heartless; exacting, but not worthlessly selfish. She had been indulged from her birth, but was not absolutely spoilt. She was hasty, but good-humoured; vain (she could not help it, when every glance in the glass showed her such a flush of loveliness), but not affected; liberal-handed; innocent of the pride of wealth; ingenuous; sufficiently intelligent; gay, lively, and unthinking: she was very charming, in short, even to a cool observer of her own sex like me; but she was not profoundly interesting or thoroughly impressive. A very different sort of mind was hers from that, for instance, of the sisters of St. John. Still, I liked her almost as I liked my pupil Adele; except that, for a child whom we have watched over and taught, a closer affection is engendered than we can give an equally attractive adult acquaintance. She had taken an amiable caprice to me. She said I was like Mr. Rivers, only, certainly, she allowed, "not one-tenth so handsome, though I was a nice neat little soul enough, but he was an angel." I was, however, good, clever, composed, and firm, like him. I was a _lusus naturae_, she affirmed, as a village schoolmistress: she was sure my previous history, if known, would make a delightful romance. One evening, while, with her usual child-like activity, and thoughtless yet not offensive inquisitiveness, she was rummaging the cupboard and the table-drawer of my little kitchen, she discovered first two French books, a volume of Schiller, a German grammar and dictionary, and then my drawing-materials and some sketches, including a pencil-head of a pretty little cherub-like girl, one of my scholars, and sundry views from nature, taken in the Vale of Morton and on the surrounding moors. She was first transfixed with surprise, and then electrified with delight. "Had I done these pictures? Did I know French and German? What a love--what a miracle I was! I drew better than her master in the first school in S-. Would I sketch a portrait of her, to show to papa?" "With pleasure," I replied; and I felt a thrill of artist-delight at the idea of copying from so perfect and radiant a model. She had then on a dark-blue silk dress; her arms and her neck were bare; her only ornament was her chestnut tresses, which waved over her shoulders with all the wild grace of natural curls. I took a sheet of fine card-board, and drew a careful outline. I promised myself the pleasure of colouring it; and, as it was getting late then, I told her she must come and sit another day. She made such a report of me to her father, that Mr. Oliver himself accompanied her next evening--a tall, massive-featured, middle-aged, and grey-headed man, at whose side his lovely daughter looked like a bright flower near a hoary turret. He appeared a taciturn, and perhaps a proud personage; but he was very kind to me. The sketch of Rosamond's portrait pleased him highly: he said I must make a finished picture of it. He insisted, too, on my coming the next day to spend the evening at Vale Hall. I went. I found it a large, handsome residence, showing abundant evidences of wealth in the proprietor. Rosamond was full of glee and pleasure all the time I stayed. Her father was affable; and when he entered into conversation with me after tea, he expressed in strong terms his approbation of what I had done in Morton school, and said he only feared, from what he saw and heard, I was too good for the place, and would soon quit it for one more suitable. "Indeed," cried Rosamond, "she is clever enough to be a governess in a high family, papa." I thought I would far rather be where I am than in any high family in the land. Mr. Oliver spoke of Mr. Rivers--of the Rivers family--with great respect. He said it was a very old name in that neighbourhood; that the ancestors of the house were wealthy; that all Morton had once belonged to them; that even now he considered the representative of that house might, if he liked, make an alliance with the best. He accounted it a pity that so fine and talented a young man should have formed the design of going out as a missionary; it was quite throwing a valuable life away. It appeared, then, that her father would throw no obstacle in the way of Rosamond's union with St. John. Mr. Oliver evidently regarded the young clergyman's good birth, old name, and sacred profession as sufficient compensation for the want of fortune. It was the 5th of November, and a holiday. My little servant, after helping me to clean my house, was gone, well satisfied with the fee of a penny for her aid. All about me was spotless and bright--scoured floor, polished grate, and well-rubbed chairs. I had also made myself neat, and had now the afternoon before me to spend as I would. The translation of a few pages of German occupied an hour; then I got my palette and pencils, and fell to the more soothing, because easier occupation, of completing Rosamond Oliver's miniature. The head was finished already: there was but the background to tint and the drapery to shade off; a touch of carmine, too, to add to the ripe lips--a soft curl here and there to the tresses--a deeper tinge to the shadow of the lash under the azured eyelid. I was absorbed in the execution of these nice details, when, after one rapid tap, my door unclosed, admitting St. John Rivers. "I am come to see how you are spending your holiday," he said. "Not, I hope, in thought? No, that is well: while you draw you will not feel lonely. You see, I mistrust you still, though you have borne up wonderfully so far. I have brought you a book for evening solace," and he laid on the table a new publication--a poem: one of those genuine productions so often vouchsafed to the fortunate public of those days--the golden age of modern literature. Alas! the readers of our era are less favoured. But courage! I will not pause either to accuse or repine. I know poetry is not dead, nor genius lost; nor has Mammon gained power over either, to bind or slay: they will both assert their existence, their presence, their liberty and strength again one day. Powerful angels, safe in heaven! they smile when sordid souls triumph, and feeble ones weep over their destruction. Poetry destroyed? Genius banished? No! Mediocrity, no: do not let envy prompt you to the thought. No; they not only live, but reign and redeem: and without their divine influence spread everywhere, you would be in hell--the hell of your own meanness. While I was eagerly glancing at the bright pages of "Marmion" (for "Marmion" it was), St. John stooped to examine my drawing. His tall figure sprang erect again with a start: he said nothing. I looked up at him: he shunned my eye. I knew his thoughts well, and could read his heart plainly; at the moment I felt calmer and cooler than he: I had then temporarily the advantage of him, and I conceived an inclination to do him some good, if I could. "With all his firmness and self-control," thought I, "he tasks himself too far: locks every feeling and pang within--expresses, confesses, imparts nothing. I am sure it would benefit him to talk a little about this sweet Rosamond, whom he thinks he ought not to marry: I will make him talk." I said first, "Take a chair, Mr. Rivers." But he answered, as he always did, that he could not stay. "Very well," I responded, mentally, "stand if you like; but you shall not go just yet, I am determined: solitude is at least as bad for you as it is for me. I'll try if I cannot discover the secret spring of your confidence, and find an aperture in that marble breast through which I can shed one drop of the balm of sympathy." "Is this portrait like?" I asked bluntly. "Like! Like whom? I did not observe it closely." "You did, Mr. Rivers." He almost started at my sudden and strange abruptness: he looked at me astonished. "Oh, that is nothing yet," I muttered within. "I don't mean to be baffled by a little stiffness on your part; I'm prepared to go to considerable lengths." I continued, "You observed it closely and distinctly; but I have no objection to your looking at it again," and I rose and placed it in his hand. "A well-executed picture," he said; "very soft, clear colouring; very graceful and correct drawing." "Yes, yes; I know all that. But what of the resemblance? Who is it like?" Mastering some hesitation, he answered, "Miss Oliver, I presume." "Of course. And now, sir, to reward you for the accurate guess, I will promise to paint you a careful and faithful duplicate of this very picture, provided you admit that the gift would be acceptable to you. I don't wish to throw away my time and trouble on an offering you would deem worthless." He continued to gaze at the picture: the longer he looked, the firmer he held it, the more he seemed to covet it. "It is like!" he murmured; "the eye is well managed: the colour, light, expression, are perfect. It smiles!" "Would it comfort, or would it wound you to have a similar painting? Tell me that. When you are at Madagascar, or at the Cape, or in India, would it be a consolation to have that memento in your possession? or would the sight of it bring recollections calculated to enervate and distress?" He now furtively raised his eyes: he glanced at me, irresolute, disturbed: he again surveyed the picture. "That I should like to have it is certain: whether it would be judicious or wise is another question." Since I had ascertained that Rosamond really preferred him, and that her father was not likely to oppose the match, I--less exalted in my views than St. John--had been strongly disposed in my own heart to advocate their union. It seemed to me that, should he become the possessor of Mr. Oliver's large fortune, he might do as much good with it as if he went and laid his genius out to wither, and his strength to waste, under a tropical sun. With this persuasion I now answered-- "As far as I can see, it would be wiser and more judicious if you were to take to yourself the original at once." By this time he had sat down: he had laid the picture on the table before him, and with his brow supported on both hands, hung fondly over it. I discerned he was now neither angry nor shocked at my audacity. I saw even that to be thus frankly addressed on a subject he had deemed unapproachable--to hear it thus freely handled--was beginning to be felt by him as a new pleasure--an unhoped-for relief. Reserved people often really need the frank discussion of their sentiments and griefs more than the expansive. The sternest-seeming stoic is human after all; and to "burst" with boldness and good-will into "the silent sea" of their souls is often to confer on them the first of obligations. "She likes you, I am sure," said I, as I stood behind his chair, "and her father respects you. Moreover, she is a sweet girl--rather thoughtless; but you would have sufficient thought for both yourself and her. You ought to marry her." "_Does_ she like me?" he asked. "Certainly; better than she likes any one else. She talks of you continually: there is no subject she enjoys so much or touches upon so often." "It is very pleasant to hear this," he said--"very: go on for another quarter of an hour." And he actually took out his watch and laid it upon the table to measure the time. "But where is the use of going on," I asked, "when you are probably preparing some iron blow of contradiction, or forging a fresh chain to fetter your heart?" "Don't imagine such hard things. Fancy me yielding and melting, as I am doing: human love rising like a freshly opened fountain in my mind and overflowing with sweet inundation all the field I have so carefully and with such labour prepared--so assiduously sown with the seeds of good intentions, of self-denying plans. And now it is deluged with a nectarous flood--the young germs swamped--delicious poison cankering them: now I see myself stretched on an ottoman in the drawing-room at Vale Hall at my bride Rosamond Oliver's feet: she is talking to me with her sweet voice--gazing down on me with those eyes your skilful hand has copied so well--smiling at me with these coral lips. She is mine--I am hers--this present life and passing world suffice to me. Hush! say nothing--my heart is full of delight--my senses are entranced--let the time I marked pass in peace." I humoured him: the watch ticked on: he breathed fast and low: I stood silent. Amidst this hush the quartet sped; he replaced the watch, laid the picture down, rose, and stood on the hearth. "Now," said he, "that little space was given to delirium and delusion. I rested my temples on the breast of temptation, and put my neck voluntarily under her yoke of flowers. I tasted her cup. The pillow was burning: there is an asp in the garland: the wine has a bitter taste: her promises are hollow--her offers false: I see and know all this." I gazed at him in wonder. "It is strange," pursued he, "that while I love Rosamond Oliver so wildly--with all the intensity, indeed, of a first passion, the object of which is exquisitely beautiful, graceful, fascinating--I experience at the same time a calm, unwarped consciousness that she would not make me a good wife; that she is not the partner suited to me; that I should discover this within a year after marriage; and that to twelve months' rapture would succeed a lifetime of regret. This I know." "Strange indeed!" I could not help ejaculating. "While something in me," he went on, "is acutely sensible to her charms, something else is as deeply impressed with her defects: they are such that she could sympathise in nothing I aspired to--co-operate in nothing I undertook. Rosamond a sufferer, a labourer, a female apostle? Rosamond a missionary's wife? No!" "But you need not be a missionary. You might relinquish that scheme." "Relinquish! What! my vocation? My great work? My foundation laid on earth for a mansion in heaven? My hopes of being numbered in the band who have merged all ambitions in the glorious one of bettering their race--of carrying knowledge into the realms of ignorance--of substituting peace for war--freedom for bondage--religion for superstition--the hope of heaven for the fear of hell? Must I relinquish that? It is dearer than the blood in my veins. It is what I have to look forward to, and to live for." After a considerable pause, I said--"And Miss Oliver? Are her disappointment and sorrow of no interest to you?" "Miss Oliver is ever surrounded by suitors and flatterers: in less than a month, my image will be effaced from her heart. She will forget me; and will marry, probably, some one who will make her far happier than I should do." "You speak coolly enough; but you suffer in the conflict. You are wasting away." "No. If I get a little thin, it is with anxiety about my prospects, yet unsettled--my departure, continually procrastinated. Only this morning, I received intelligence that the successor, whose arrival I have been so long expecting, cannot be ready to replace me for three months to come yet; and perhaps the three months may extend to six." "You tremble and become flushed whenever Miss Oliver enters the schoolroom." Again the surprised expression crossed his face. He had not imagined that a woman would dare to speak so to a man. For me, I felt at home in this sort of discourse. I could never rest in communication with strong, discreet, and refined minds, whether male or female, till I had passed the outworks of conventional reserve, and crossed the threshold of confidence, and won a place by their heart's very hearthstone. "You are original," said he, "and not timid. There is something brave in your spirit, as well as penetrating in your eye; but allow me to assure you that you partially misinterpret my emotions. You think them more profound and potent than they are. You give me a larger allowance of sympathy than I have a just claim to. When I colour, and when I shade before Miss Oliver, I do not pity myself. I scorn the weakness. I know it is ignoble: a mere fever of the flesh: not, I declare, the convulsion of the soul. _That_ is just as fixed as a rock, firm set in the depths of a restless sea. Know me to be what I am--a cold hard man." I smiled incredulously. "You have taken my confidence by storm," he continued, "and now it is much at your service. I am simply, in my original state--stripped of that blood-bleached robe with which Christianity covers human deformity--a cold, hard, ambitious man. Natural affection only, of all the sentiments, has permanent power over me. Reason, and not feeling, is my guide; my ambition is unlimited: my desire to rise higher, to do more than others, insatiable. I honour endurance, perseverance, industry, talent; because these are the means by which men achieve great ends and mount to lofty eminence. I watch your career with interest, because I consider you a specimen of a diligent, orderly, energetic woman: not because I deeply compassionate what you have gone through, or what you still suffer." "You would describe yourself as a mere pagan philosopher," I said. "No. There is this difference between me and deistic philosophers: I believe; and I believe the Gospel. You missed your epithet. I am not a pagan, but a Christian philosopher--a follower of the sect of Jesus. As His disciple I adopt His pure, His merciful, His benignant doctrines. I advocate them: I am sworn to spread them. Won in youth to religion, she has cultivated my original qualities thus:--From the minute germ, natural affection, she has developed the overshadowing tree, philanthropy. From the wild stringy root of human uprightness, she has reared a due sense of the Divine justice. Of the ambition to win power and renown for my wretched self, she has formed the ambition to spread my Master's kingdom; to achieve victories for the standard of the cross. So much has religion done for me; turning the original materials to the best account; pruning and training nature. But she could not eradicate nature: nor will it be eradicated 'till this mortal shall put on immortality.'" Having said this, he took his hat, which lay on the table beside my palette. Once more he looked at the portrait. "She _is_ lovely," he murmured. "She is well named the Rose of the World, indeed!" "And may I not paint one like it for you?" "_Cui bono_? No." He drew over the picture the sheet of thin paper on which I was accustomed to rest my hand in painting, to prevent the cardboard from being sullied. What he suddenly saw on this blank paper, it was impossible for me to tell; but something had caught his eye. He took it up with a snatch; he looked at the edge; then shot a glance at me, inexpressibly peculiar, and quite incomprehensible: a glance that seemed to take and make note of every point in my shape, face, and dress; for it traversed all, quick, keen as lightning. His lips parted, as if to speak: but he checked the coming sentence, whatever it was. "What is the matter?" I asked. "Nothing in the world," was the reply; and, replacing the paper, I saw him dexterously tear a narrow slip from the margin. It disappeared in his glove; and, with one hasty nod and "good-afternoon," he vanished. "Well!" I exclaimed, using an expression of the district, "that caps the globe, however!" I, in my turn, scrutinised the paper; but saw nothing on it save a few dingy stains of paint where I had tried the tint in my pencil. I pondered the mystery a minute or two; but finding it insolvable, and being certain it could not be of much moment, I dismissed, and soon forgot it. CHAPTER XXXIII When Mr. St. John went, it was beginning to snow; the whirling storm continued all night. The next day a keen wind brought fresh and blinding falls; by twilight the valley was drifted up and almost impassable. I had closed my shutter, laid a mat to the door to prevent the snow from blowing in under it, trimmed my fire, and after sitting nearly an hour on the hearth listening to the muffled fury of the tempest, I lit a candle, took down "Marmion," and beginning-- "Day set on Norham's castled steep, And Tweed's fair river broad and deep, And Cheviot's mountains lone; The massive towers, the donjon keep, The flanking walls that round them sweep, In yellow lustre shone"-- I soon forgot storm in music. I heard a noise: the wind, I thought, shook the door. No; it was St. John Rivers, who, lifting the latch, came in out of the frozen hurricane--the howling darkness--and stood before me: the cloak that covered his tall figure all white as a glacier. I was almost in consternation, so little had I expected any guest from the blocked-up vale that night. "Any ill news?" I demanded. "Has anything happened?" "No. How very easily alarmed you are!" he answered, removing his cloak and hanging it up against the door, towards which he again coolly pushed the mat which his entrance had deranged. He stamped the snow from his boots. "I shall sully the purity of your floor," said he, "but you must excuse me for once." Then he approached the fire. "I have had hard work to get here, I assure you," he observed, as he warmed his hands over the flame. "One drift took me up to the waist; happily the snow is quite soft yet." "But why are you come?" I could not forbear saying. "Rather an inhospitable question to put to a visitor; but since you ask it, I answer simply to have a little talk with you; I got tired of my mute books and empty rooms. Besides, since yesterday I have experienced the excitement of a person to whom a tale has been half-told, and who is impatient to hear the sequel." He sat down. I recalled his singular conduct of yesterday, and really I began to fear his wits were touched. If he were insane, however, his was a very cool and collected insanity: I had never seen that handsome-featured face of his look more like chiselled marble than it did just now, as he put aside his snow-wet hair from his forehead and let the firelight shine free on his pale brow and cheek as pale, where it grieved me to discover the hollow trace of care or sorrow now so plainly graved. I waited, expecting he would say something I could at least comprehend; but his hand was now at his chin, his finger on his lip: he was thinking. It struck me that his hand looked wasted like his face. A perhaps uncalled-for gush of pity came over my heart: I was moved to say-- "I wish Diana or Mary would come and live with you: it is too bad that you should be quite alone; and you are recklessly rash about your own health." "Not at all," said he: "I care for myself when necessary. I am well now. What do you see amiss in me?" This was said with a careless, abstracted indifference, which showed that my solicitude was, at least in his opinion, wholly superfluous. I was silenced. He still slowly moved his finger over his upper lip, and still his eye dwelt dreamily on the glowing grate; thinking it urgent to say something, I asked him presently if he felt any cold draught from the door, which was behind him. "No, no!" he responded shortly and somewhat testily. "Well," I reflected, "if you won't talk, you may be still; I'll let you alone now, and return to my book." So I snuffed the candle and resumed the perusal of "Marmion." He soon stirred; my eye was instantly drawn to his movements; he only took out a morocco pocket-book, thence produced a letter, which he read in silence, folded it, put it back, relapsed into meditation. It was vain to try to read with such an inscrutable fixture before me; nor could I, in impatience, consent to be dumb; he might rebuff me if he liked, but talk I would. "Have you heard from Diana and Mary lately?" "Not since the letter I showed you a week ago." "There has not been any change made about your own arrangements? You will not be summoned to leave England sooner than you expected?" "I fear not, indeed: such chance is too good to befall me." Baffled so far, I changed my ground. I bethought myself to talk about the school and my scholars. "Mary Garrett's mother is better, and Mary came back to the school this morning, and I shall have four new girls next week from the Foundry Close--they would have come to-day but for the snow." "Indeed!" "Mr. Oliver pays for two." "Does he?" "He means to give the whole school a treat at Christmas." "I know." "Was it your suggestion?" "No." "Whose, then?" "His daughter's, I think." "It is like her: she is so good-natured." "Yes." Again came the blank of a pause: the clock struck eight strokes. It aroused him; he uncrossed his legs, sat erect, turned to me. "Leave your book a moment, and come a little nearer the fire," he said. Wondering, and of my wonder finding no end, I complied. "Half-an-hour ago," he pursued, "I spoke of my impatience to hear the sequel of a tale: on reflection, I find the matter will be better managed by my assuming the narrator's part, and converting you into a listener. Before commencing, it is but fair to warn you that the story will sound somewhat hackneyed in your ears; but stale details often regain a degree of freshness when they pass through new lips. For the rest, whether trite or novel, it is short. "Twenty years ago, a poor curate--never mind his name at this moment--fell in love with a rich man's daughter; she fell in love with him, and married him, against the advice of all her friends, who consequently disowned her immediately after the wedding. Before two years passed, the rash pair were both dead, and laid quietly side by side under one slab. (I have seen their grave; it formed part of the pavement of a huge churchyard surrounding the grim, soot-black old cathedral of an overgrown manufacturing town in ---shire.) They left a daughter, which, at its very birth, Charity received in her lap--cold as that of the snow-drift I almost stuck fast in to-night. Charity carried the friendless thing to the house of its rich maternal relations; it was reared by an aunt-in- law, called (I come to names now) Mrs. Reed of Gateshead. You start--did you hear a noise? I daresay it is only a rat scrambling along the rafters of the adjoining schoolroom: it was a barn before I had it repaired and altered, and barns are generally haunted by rats.--To proceed. Mrs. Reed kept the orphan ten years: whether it was happy or not with her, I cannot say, never having been told; but at the end of that time she transferred it to a place you know--being no other than Lowood School, where you so long resided yourself. It seems her career there was very honourable: from a pupil, she became a teacher, like yourself--really it strikes me there are parallel points in her history and yours--she left it to be a governess: there, again, your fates were analogous; she undertook the education of the ward of a certain Mr. Rochester." "Mr. Rivers!" I interrupted. "I can guess your feelings," he said, "but restrain them for a while: I have nearly finished; hear me to the end. Of Mr. Rochester's character I know nothing, but the one fact that he professed to offer honourable marriage to this young girl, and that at the very altar she discovered he had a wife yet alive, though a lunatic. What his subsequent conduct and proposals were is a matter of pure conjecture; but when an event transpired which rendered inquiry after the governess necessary, it was discovered she was gone--no one could tell when, where, or how. She had left Thornfield Hall in the night; every research after her course had been vain: the country had been scoured far and wide; no vestige of information could be gathered respecting her. Yet that she should be found is become a matter of serious urgency: advertisements have been put in all the papers; I myself have received a letter from one Mr. Briggs, a solicitor, communicating the details I have just imparted. Is it not an odd tale?" "Just tell me this," said I, "and since you know so much, you surely can tell it me--what of Mr. Rochester? How and where is he? What is he doing? Is he well?" "I am ignorant of all concerning Mr. Rochester: the letter never mentions him but to narrate the fraudulent and illegal attempt I have adverted to. You should rather ask the name of the governess--the nature of the event which requires her appearance." "Did no one go to Thornfield Hall, then? Did no one see Mr. Rochester?" "I suppose not." "But they wrote to him?" "Of course." "And what did he say? Who has his letters?" "Mr. Briggs intimates that the answer to his application was not from Mr. Rochester, but from a lady: it is signed 'Alice Fairfax.'" I felt cold and dismayed: my worst fears then were probably true: he had in all probability left England and rushed in reckless desperation to some former haunt on the Continent. And what opiate for his severe sufferings--what object for his strong passions--had he sought there? I dared not answer the question. Oh, my poor master--once almost my husband--whom I had often called "my dear Edward!" "He must have been a bad man," observed Mr. Rivers. "You don't know him--don't pronounce an opinion upon him," I said, with warmth. "Very well," he answered quietly: "and indeed my head is otherwise occupied than with him: I have my tale to finish. Since you won't ask the governess's name, I must tell it of my own accord. Stay! I have it here--it is always more satisfactory to see important points written down, fairly committed to black and white." And the pocket-book was again deliberately produced, opened, sought through; from one of its compartments was extracted a shabby slip of paper, hastily torn off: I recognised in its texture and its stains of ultra-marine, and lake, and vermillion, the ravished margin of the portrait-cover. He got up, held it close to my eyes: and I read, traced in Indian ink, in my own handwriting, the words "JANE EYRE"--the work doubtless of some moment of abstraction. "Briggs wrote to me of a Jane Eyre:" he said, "the advertisements demanded a Jane Eyre: I knew a Jane Elliott.--I confess I had my suspicions, but it was only yesterday afternoon they were at once resolved into certainty. You own the name and renounce the _alias_?" "Yes--yes; but where is Mr. Briggs? He perhaps knows more of Mr. Rochester than you do." "Briggs is in London. I should doubt his knowing anything at all about Mr. Rochester; it is not in Mr. Rochester he is interested. Meantime, you forget essential points in pursuing trifles: you do not inquire why Mr. Briggs sought after you--what he wanted with you." "Well, what did he want?" "Merely to tell you that your uncle, Mr. Eyre of Madeira, is dead; that he has left you all his property, and that you are now rich--merely that--nothing more." "I!--rich?" "Yes, you, rich--quite an heiress." Silence succeeded. "You must prove your identity of course," resumed St. John presently: "a step which will offer no difficulties; you can then enter on immediate possession. Your fortune is vested in the English funds; Briggs has the will and the necessary documents." Here was a new card turned up! It is a fine thing, reader, to be lifted in a moment from indigence to wealth--a very fine thing; but not a matter one can comprehend, or consequently enjoy, all at once. And then there are other chances in life far more thrilling and rapture-giving: _this_ is solid, an affair of the actual world, nothing ideal about it: all its associations are solid and sober, and its manifestations are the same. One does not jump, and spring, and shout hurrah! at hearing one has got a fortune; one begins to consider responsibilities, and to ponder business; on a base of steady satisfaction rise certain grave cares, and we contain ourselves, and brood over our bliss with a solemn brow. Besides, the words Legacy, Bequest, go side by side with the words, Death, Funeral. My uncle I had heard was dead--my only relative; ever since being made aware of his existence, I had cherished the hope of one day seeing him: now, I never should. And then this money came only to me: not to me and a rejoicing family, but to my isolated self. It was a grand boon doubtless; and independence would be glorious--yes, I felt that--that thought swelled my heart. "You unbend your forehead at last," said Mr. Rivers. "I thought Medusa had looked at you, and that you were turning to stone. Perhaps now you will ask how much you are worth?" "How much am I worth?" "Oh, a trifle! Nothing of course to speak of--twenty thousand pounds, I think they say--but what is that?" "Twenty thousand pounds?" Here was a new stunner--I had been calculating on four or five thousand. This news actually took my breath for a moment: Mr. St. John, whom I had never heard laugh before, laughed now. "Well," said he, "if you had committed a murder, and I had told you your crime was discovered, you could scarcely look more aghast." "It is a large sum--don't you think there is a mistake?" "No mistake at all." "Perhaps you have read the figures wrong--it may be two thousand!" "It is written in letters, not figures,--twenty thousand." I again felt rather like an individual of but average gastronomical powers sitting down to feast alone at a table spread with provisions for a hundred. Mr. Rivers rose now and put his cloak on. "If it were not such a very wild night," he said, "I would send Hannah down to keep you company: you look too desperately miserable to be left alone. But Hannah, poor woman! could not stride the drifts so well as I: her legs are not quite so long: so I must e'en leave you to your sorrows. Good-night." He was lifting the latch: a sudden thought occurred to me. "Stop one minute!" I cried. "Well?" "It puzzles me to know why Mr. Briggs wrote to you about me; or how he knew you, or could fancy that you, living in such an out-of-the-way place, had the power to aid in my discovery." "Oh! I am a clergyman," he said; "and the clergy are often appealed to about odd matters." Again the latch rattled. "No; that does not satisfy me!" I exclaimed: and indeed there was something in the hasty and unexplanatory reply which, instead of allaying, piqued my curiosity more than ever. "It is a very strange piece of business," I added; "I must know more about it." "Another time." "No; to-night!--to-night!" and as he turned from the door, I placed myself between it and him. He looked rather embarrassed. "You certainly shall not go till you have told me all," I said. "I would rather not just now." "You shall!--you must!" "I would rather Diana or Mary informed you." Of course these objections wrought my eagerness to a climax: gratified it must be, and that without delay; and I told him so. "But I apprised you that I was a hard man," said he, "difficult to persuade." "And I am a hard woman,--impossible to put off." {And I am a hard woman,--impossible to put off: p369.jpg} "And then," he pursued, "I am cold: no fervour infects me." "Whereas I am hot, and fire dissolves ice. The blaze there has thawed all the snow from your cloak; by the same token, it has streamed on to my floor, and made it like a trampled street. As you hope ever to be forgiven, Mr. Rivers, the high crime and misdemeanour of spoiling a sanded kitchen, tell me what I wish to know." "Well, then," he said, "I yield; if not to your earnestness, to your perseverance: as stone is worn by continual dropping. Besides, you must know some day,--as well now as later. Your name is Jane Eyre?" "Of course: that was all settled before." "You are not, perhaps, aware that I am your namesake?--that I was christened St. John Eyre Rivers?" "No, indeed! I remember now seeing the letter E. comprised in your initials written in books you have at different times lent me; but I never asked for what name it stood. But what then? Surely--" I stopped: I could not trust myself to entertain, much less to express, the thought that rushed upon me--that embodied itself,--that, in a second, stood out a strong, solid probability. Circumstances knit themselves, fitted themselves, shot into order: the chain that had been lying hitherto a formless lump of links was drawn out straight,--every ring was perfect, the connection complete. I knew, by instinct, how the matter stood, before St. John had said another word; but I cannot expect the reader to have the same intuitive perception, so I must repeat his explanation. "My mother's name was Eyre; she had two brothers; one a clergyman, who married Miss Jane Reed, of Gateshead; the other, John Eyre, Esq., merchant, late of Funchal, Madeira. Mr. Briggs, being Mr. Eyre's solicitor, wrote to us last August to inform us of our uncle's death, and to say that he had left his property to his brother the clergyman's orphan daughter, overlooking us, in consequence of a quarrel, never forgiven, between him and my father. He wrote again a few weeks since, to intimate that the heiress was lost, and asking if we knew anything of her. A name casually written on a slip of paper has enabled me to find her out. You know the rest." Again he was going, but I set my back against the door. "Do let me speak," I said; "let me have one moment to draw breath and reflect." I paused--he stood before me, hat in hand, looking composed enough. I resumed-- "Your mother was my father's sister?" "Yes." "My aunt, consequently?" He bowed. "My uncle John was your uncle John? You, Diana, and Mary are his sister's children, as I am his brother's child?" "Undeniably." "You three, then, are my cousins; half our blood on each side flows from the same source?" "We are cousins; yes." I surveyed him. It seemed I had found a brother: one I could be proud of,--one I could love; and two sisters, whose qualities were such, that, when I knew them but as mere strangers, they had inspired me with genuine affection and admiration. The two girls, on whom, kneeling down on the wet ground, and looking through the low, latticed window of Moor House kitchen, I had gazed with so bitter a mixture of interest and despair, were my near kinswomen; and the young and stately gentleman who had found me almost dying at his threshold was my blood relation. Glorious discovery to a lonely wretch! This was wealth indeed!--wealth to the heart!--a mine of pure, genial affections. This was a blessing, bright, vivid, and exhilarating;--not like the ponderous gift of gold: rich and welcome enough in its way, but sobering from its weight. I now clapped my hands in sudden joy--my pulse bounded, my veins thrilled. "Oh, I am glad!--I am glad!" I exclaimed. St. John smiled. "Did I not say you neglected essential points to pursue trifles?" he asked. "You were serious when I told you you had got a fortune; and now, for a matter of no moment, you are excited." "What can you mean? It may be of no moment to you; you have sisters and don't care for a cousin; but I had nobody; and now three relations,--or two, if you don't choose to be counted,--are born into my world full-grown. I say again, I am glad!" I walked fast through the room: I stopped, half suffocated with the thoughts that rose faster than I could receive, comprehend, settle them:--thoughts of what might, could, would, and should be, and that ere long. I looked at the blank wall: it seemed a sky thick with ascending stars,--every one lit me to a purpose or delight. Those who had saved my life, whom, till this hour, I had loved barrenly, I could now benefit. They were under a yoke,--I could free them: they were scattered,--I could reunite them: the independence, the affluence which was mine, might be theirs too. Were we not four? Twenty thousand pounds shared equally would be five thousand each, justice--enough and to spare: justice would be done,--mutual happiness secured. Now the wealth did not weigh on me: now it was not a mere bequest of coin,--it was a legacy of life, hope, enjoyment. How I looked while these ideas were taking my spirit by storm, I cannot tell; but I perceived soon that Mr. Rivers had placed a chair behind me, and was gently attempting to make me sit down on it. He also advised me to be composed; I scorned the insinuation of helplessness and distraction, shook off his hand, and began to walk about again. "Write to Diana and Mary to-morrow," I said, "and tell them to come home directly. Diana said they would both consider themselves rich with a thousand pounds, so with five thousand they will do very well." "Tell me where I can get you a glass of water," said St. John; "you must really make an effort to tranquillise your feelings." "Nonsense! and what sort of an effect will the bequest have on you? Will it keep you in England, induce you to marry Miss Oliver, and settle down like an ordinary mortal?" "You wander: your head becomes confused. I have been too abrupt in communicating the news; it has excited you beyond your strength." "Mr. Rivers! you quite put me out of patience: I am rational enough; it is you who misunderstand, or rather who affect to misunderstand." "Perhaps, if you explained yourself a little more fully, I should comprehend better." "Explain! What is there to explain? You cannot fail to see that twenty thousand pounds, the sum in question, divided equally between the nephew and three nieces of our uncle, will give five thousand to each? What I want is, that you should write to your sisters and tell them of the fortune that has accrued to them." "To you, you mean." "I have intimated my view of the case: I am incapable of taking any other. I am not brutally selfish, blindly unjust, or fiendishly ungrateful. Besides, I am resolved I will have a home and connections. I like Moor House, and I will live at Moor House; I like Diana and Mary, and I will attach myself for life to Diana and Mary. It would please and benefit me to have five thousand pounds; it would torment and oppress me to have twenty thousand; which, moreover, could never be mine in justice, though it might in law. I abandon to you, then, what is absolutely superfluous to me. Let there be no opposition, and no discussion about it; let us agree amongst each other, and decide the point at once." "This is acting on first impulses; you must take days to consider such a matter, ere your word can be regarded as valid." "Oh! if all you doubt is my sincerity, I am easy: you see the justice of the case?" "I _do_ see a certain justice; but it is contrary to all custom. Besides, the entire fortune is your right: my uncle gained it by his own efforts; he was free to leave it to whom he would: he left it to you. After all, justice permits you to keep it: you may, with a clear conscience, consider it absolutely your own." "With me," said I, "it is fully as much a matter of feeling as of conscience: I must indulge my feelings; I so seldom have had an opportunity of doing so. Were you to argue, object, and annoy me for a year, I could not forego the delicious pleasure of which I have caught a glimpse--that of repaying, in part, a mighty obligation, and winning to myself lifelong friends." "You think so now," rejoined St. John, "because you do not know what it is to possess, nor consequently to enjoy wealth: you cannot form a notion of the importance twenty thousand pounds would give you; of the place it would enable you to take in society; of the prospects it would open to you: you cannot--" "And you," I interrupted, "cannot at all imagine the craving I have for fraternal and sisterly love. I never had a home, I never had brothers or sisters; I must and will have them now: you are not reluctant to admit me and own me, are you?" "Jane, I will be your brother--my sisters will be your sisters--without stipulating for this sacrifice of your just rights." "Brother? Yes; at the distance of a thousand leagues! Sisters? Yes; slaving amongst strangers! I, wealthy--gorged with gold I never earned and do not merit! You, penniless! Famous equality and fraternisation! Close union! Intimate attachment!" "But, Jane, your aspirations after family ties and domestic happiness may be realised otherwise than by the means you contemplate: you may marry." "Nonsense, again! Marry! I don't want to marry, and never shall marry." "That is saying too much: such hazardous affirmations are a proof of the excitement under which you labour." "It is not saying too much: I know what I feel, and how averse are my inclinations to the bare thought of marriage. No one would take me for love; and I will not be regarded in the light of a mere money speculation. And I do not want a stranger--unsympathising, alien, different from me; I want my kindred: those with whom I have full fellow- feeling. Say again you will be my brother: when you uttered the words I was satisfied, happy; repeat them, if you can, repeat them sincerely." "I think I can. I know I have always loved my own sisters; and I know on what my affection for them is grounded,--respect for their worth and admiration of their talents. You too have principle and mind: your tastes and habits resemble Diana's and Mary's; your presence is always agreeable to me; in your conversation I have already for some time found a salutary solace. I feel I can easily and naturally make room in my heart for you, as my third and youngest sister." "Thank you: that contents me for to-night. Now you had better go; for if you stay longer, you will perhaps irritate me afresh by some mistrustful scruple." "And the school, Miss Eyre? It must now be shut up, I suppose?" "No. I will retain my post of mistress till you get a substitute." He smiled approbation: we shook hands, and he took leave. I need not narrate in detail the further struggles I had, and arguments I used, to get matters regarding the legacy settled as I wished. My task was a very hard one; but, as I was absolutely resolved--as my cousins saw at length that my mind was really and immutably fixed on making a just division of the property--as they must in their own hearts have felt the equity of the intention; and must, besides, have been innately conscious that in my place they would have done precisely what I wished to do--they yielded at length so far as to consent to put the affair to arbitration. The judges chosen were Mr. Oliver and an able lawyer: both coincided in my opinion: I carried my point. The instruments of transfer were drawn out: St. John, Diana, Mary, and I, each became possessed of a competency. CHAPTER XXXIV It was near Christmas by the time all was settled: the season of general holiday approached. I now closed Morton school, taking care that the parting should not be barren on my side. Good fortune opens the hand as well as the heart wonderfully; and to give somewhat when we have largely received, is but to afford a vent to the unusual ebullition of the sensations. I had long felt with pleasure that many of my rustic scholars liked me, and when we parted, that consciousness was confirmed: they manifested their affection plainly and strongly. Deep was my gratification to find I had really a place in their unsophisticated hearts: I promised them that never a week should pass in future that I did not visit them, and give them an hour's teaching in their school. Mr. Rivers came up as, having seen the classes, now numbering sixty girls, file out before me, and locked the door, I stood with the key in my hand, exchanging a few words of special farewell with some half-dozen of my best scholars: as decent, respectable, modest, and well-informed young women as could be found in the ranks of the British peasantry. And that is saying a great deal; for after all, the British peasantry are the best taught, best mannered, most self-respecting of any in Europe: since those days I have seen paysannes and Bauerinnen; and the best of them seemed to me ignorant, coarse, and besotted, compared with my Morton girls. "Do you consider you have got your reward for a season of exertion?" asked Mr. Rivers, when they were gone. "Does not the consciousness of having done some real good in your day and generation give pleasure?" "Doubtless." "And you have only toiled a few months! Would not a life devoted to the task of regenerating your race be well spent?" "Yes," I said; "but I could not go on for ever so: I want to enjoy my own faculties as well as to cultivate those of other people. I must enjoy them now; don't recall either my mind or body to the school; I am out of it and disposed for full holiday." He looked grave. "What now? What sudden eagerness is this you evince? What are you going to do?" "To be active: as active as I can. And first I must beg you to set Hannah at liberty, and get somebody else to wait on you." "Do you want her?" "Yes, to go with me to Moor House. Diana and Mary will be at home in a week, and I want to have everything in order against their arrival." "I understand. I thought you were for flying off on some excursion. It is better so: Hannah shall go with you." "Tell her to be ready by to-morrow then; and here is the schoolroom key: I will give you the key of my cottage in the morning." He took it. "You give it up very gleefully," said he; "I don't quite understand your light-heartedness, because I cannot tell what employment you propose to yourself as a substitute for the one you are relinquishing. What aim, what purpose, what ambition in life have you now?" "My first aim will be to _clean down_ (do you comprehend the full force of the expression?)--to _clean down_ Moor House from chamber to cellar; my next to rub it up with bees-wax, oil, and an indefinite number of cloths, till it glitters again; my third, to arrange every chair, table, bed, carpet, with mathematical precision; afterwards I shall go near to ruin you in coals and peat to keep up good fires in every room; and lastly, the two days preceding that on which your sisters are expected will be devoted by Hannah and me to such a beating of eggs, sorting of currants, grating of spices, compounding of Christmas cakes, chopping up of materials for mince-pies, and solemnising of other culinary rites, as words can convey but an inadequate notion of to the uninitiated like you. My purpose, in short, is to have all things in an absolutely perfect state of readiness for Diana and Mary before next Thursday; and my ambition is to give them a beau-ideal of a welcome when they come." St. John smiled slightly: still he was dissatisfied. "It is all very well for the present," said he; "but seriously, I trust that when the first flush of vivacity is over, you will look a little higher than domestic endearments and household joys." "The best things the world has!" I interrupted. "No, Jane, no: this world is not the scene of fruition; do not attempt to make it so: nor of rest; do not turn slothful." "I mean, on the contrary, to be busy." "Jane, I excuse you for the present: two months' grace I allow you for the full enjoyment of your new position, and for pleasing yourself with this late-found charm of relationship; but _then_, I hope you will begin to look beyond Moor House and Morton, and sisterly society, and the selfish calm and sensual comfort of civilised affluence. I hope your energies will then once more trouble you with their strength." I looked at him with surprise. "St. John," I said, "I think you are almost wicked to talk so. I am disposed to be as content as a queen, and you try to stir me up to restlessness! To what end?" "To the end of turning to profit the talents which God has committed to your keeping; and of which He will surely one day demand a strict account. Jane, I shall watch you closely and anxiously--I warn you of that. And try to restrain the disproportionate fervour with which you throw yourself into commonplace home pleasures. Don't cling so tenaciously to ties of the flesh; save your constancy and ardour for an adequate cause; forbear to waste them on trite transient objects. Do you hear, Jane?" "Yes; just as if you were speaking Greek. I feel I have adequate cause to be happy, and I _will_ be happy. Goodbye!" Happy at Moor House I was, and hard I worked; and so did Hannah: she was charmed to see how jovial I could be amidst the bustle of a house turned topsy-turvy--how I could brush, and dust, and clean, and cook. And really, after a day or two of confusion worse confounded, it was delightful by degrees to invoke order from the chaos ourselves had made. I had previously taken a journey to S--- to purchase some new furniture: my cousins having given me _carte blanche_ to effect what alterations I pleased, and a sum having been set aside for that purpose. The ordinary sitting-room and bedrooms I left much as they were: for I knew Diana and Mary would derive more pleasure from seeing again the old homely tables, and chairs, and beds, than from the spectacle of the smartest innovations. Still some novelty was necessary, to give to their return the piquancy with which I wished it to be invested. Dark handsome new carpets and curtains, an arrangement of some carefully selected antique ornaments in porcelain and bronze, new coverings, and mirrors, and dressing-cases, for the toilet tables, answered the end: they looked fresh without being glaring. A spare parlour and bedroom I refurnished entirely, with old mahogany and crimson upholstery: I laid canvas on the passage, and carpets on the stairs. When all was finished, I thought Moor House as complete a model of bright modest snugness within, as it was, at this season, a specimen of wintry waste and desert dreariness without. The eventful Thursday at length came. They were expected about dark, and ere dusk fires were lit upstairs and below; the kitchen was in perfect trim; Hannah and I were dressed, and all was in readiness. St. John arrived first. I had entreated him to keep quite clear of the house till everything was arranged: and, indeed, the bare idea of the commotion, at once sordid and trivial, going on within its walls sufficed to scare him to estrangement. He found me in the kitchen, watching the progress of certain cakes for tea, then baking. Approaching the hearth, he asked, "If I was at last satisfied with housemaid's work?" I answered by inviting him to accompany me on a general inspection of the result of my labours. With some difficulty, I got him to make the tour of the house. He just looked in at the doors I opened; and when he had wandered upstairs and downstairs, he said I must have gone through a great deal of fatigue and trouble to have effected such considerable changes in so short a time: but not a syllable did he utter indicating pleasure in the improved aspect of his abode. This silence damped me. I thought perhaps the alterations had disturbed some old associations he valued. I inquired whether this was the case: no doubt in a somewhat crest-fallen tone. "Not at all; he had, on the contrary, remarked that I had scrupulously respected every association: he feared, indeed, I must have bestowed more thought on the matter than it was worth. How many minutes, for instance, had I devoted to studying the arrangement of this very room?--By-the-bye, could I tell him where such a book was?" I showed him the volume on the shelf: he took it down, and withdrawing to his accustomed window recess, he began to read it. Now, I did not like this, reader. St. John was a good man; but I began to feel he had spoken truth of himself when he said he was hard and cold. The humanities and amenities of life had no attraction for him--its peaceful enjoyments no charm. Literally, he lived only to aspire--after what was good and great, certainly; but still he would never rest, nor approve of others resting round him. As I looked at his lofty forehead, still and pale as a white stone--at his fine lineaments fixed in study--I comprehended all at once that he would hardly make a good husband: that it would be a trying thing to be his wife. I understood, as by inspiration, the nature of his love for Miss Oliver; I agreed with him that it was but a love of the senses. I comprehended how he should despise himself for the feverish influence it exercised over him; how he should wish to stifle and destroy it; how he should mistrust its ever conducting permanently to his happiness or hers. I saw he was of the material from which nature hews her heroes--Christian and Pagan--her lawgivers, her statesmen, her conquerors: a steadfast bulwark for great interests to rest upon; but, at the fireside, too often a cold cumbrous column, gloomy and out of place. "This parlour is not his sphere," I reflected: "the Himalayan ridge or Caffre bush, even the plague-cursed Guinea Coast swamp would suit him better. Well may he eschew the calm of domestic life; it is not his element: there his faculties stagnate--they cannot develop or appear to advantage. It is in scenes of strife and danger--where courage is proved, and energy exercised, and fortitude tasked--that he will speak and move, the leader and superior. A merry child would have the advantage of him on this hearth. He is right to choose a missionary's career--I see it now." "They are coming! they are coming!" cried Hannah, throwing open the parlour door. At the same moment old Carlo barked joyfully. Out I ran. It was now dark; but a rumbling of wheels was audible. Hannah soon had a lantern lit. The vehicle had stopped at the wicket; the driver opened the door: first one well-known form, then another, stepped out. In a minute I had my face under their bonnets, in contact first with Mary's soft cheek, then with Diana's flowing curls. They laughed--kissed me--then Hannah: patted Carlo, who was half wild with delight; asked eagerly if all was well; and being assured in the affirmative, hastened into the house. They were stiff with their long and jolting drive from Whitcross, and chilled with the frosty night air; but their pleasant countenances expanded to the cheerful firelight. While the driver and Hannah brought in the boxes, they demanded St. John. At this moment he advanced from the parlour. They both threw their arms round his neck at once. He gave each one quiet kiss, said in a low tone a few words of welcome, stood a while to be talked to, and then, intimating that he supposed they would soon rejoin him in the parlour, withdrew there as to a place of refuge. I had lit their candles to go upstairs, but Diana had first to give hospitable orders respecting the driver; this done, both followed me. They were delighted with the renovation and decorations of their rooms; with the new drapery, and fresh carpets, and rich tinted china vases: they expressed their gratification ungrudgingly. I had the pleasure of feeling that my arrangements met their wishes exactly, and that what I had done added a vivid charm to their joyous return home. Sweet was that evening. My cousins, full of exhilaration, were so eloquent in narrative and comment, that their fluency covered St. John's taciturnity: he was sincerely glad to see his sisters; but in their glow of fervour and flow of joy he could not sympathise. The event of the day--that is, the return of Diana and Mary--pleased him; but the accompaniments of that event, the glad tumult, the garrulous glee of reception irked him: I saw he wished the calmer morrow was come. In the very meridian of the night's enjoyment, about an hour after tea, a rap was heard at the door. Hannah entered with the intimation that "a poor lad was come, at that unlikely time, to fetch Mr. Rivers to see his mother, who was drawing away." "Where does she live, Hannah?" "Clear up at Whitcross Brow, almost four miles off, and moor and moss all the way." "Tell him I will go." "I'm sure, sir, you had better not. It's the worst road to travel after dark that can be: there's no track at all over the bog. And then it is such a bitter night--the keenest wind you ever felt. You had better send word, sir, that you will be there in the morning." But he was already in the passage, putting on his cloak; and without one objection, one murmur, he departed. It was then nine o'clock: he did not return till midnight. Starved and tired enough he was: but he looked happier than when he set out. He had performed an act of duty; made an exertion; felt his own strength to do and deny, and was on better terms with himself. I am afraid the whole of the ensuing week tried his patience. It was Christmas week: we took to no settled employment, but spent it in a sort of merry domestic dissipation. The air of the moors, the freedom of home, the dawn of prosperity, acted on Diana and Mary's spirits like some life-giving elixir: they were gay from morning till noon, and from noon till night. They could always talk; and their discourse, witty, pithy, original, had such charms for me, that I preferred listening to, and sharing in it, to doing anything else. St. John did not rebuke our vivacity; but he escaped from it: he was seldom in the house; his parish was large, the population scattered, and he found daily business in visiting the sick and poor in its different districts. One morning at breakfast, Diana, after looking a little pensive for some minutes, asked him, "If his plans were yet unchanged." "Unchanged and unchangeable," was the reply. And he proceeded to inform us that his departure from England was now definitively fixed for the ensuing year. "And Rosamond Oliver?" suggested Mary, the words seeming to escape her lips involuntarily: for no sooner had she uttered them, than she made a gesture as if wishing to recall them. St. John had a book in his hand--it was his unsocial custom to read at meals--he closed it, and looked up. "Rosamond Oliver," said he, "is about to be married to Mr. Granby, one of the best connected and most estimable residents in S-, grandson and heir to Sir Frederic Granby: I had the intelligence from her father yesterday." His sisters looked at each other and at me; we all three looked at him: he was serene as glass. "The match must have been got up hastily," said Diana: "they cannot have known each other long." "But two months: they met in October at the county ball at S-. But where there are no obstacles to a union, as in the present case, where the connection is in every point desirable, delays are unnecessary: they will be married as soon as S--- Place, which Sir Frederic gives up to them, can he refitted for their reception." The first time I found St. John alone after this communication, I felt tempted to inquire if the event distressed him: but he seemed so little to need sympathy, that, so far from venturing to offer him more, I experienced some shame at the recollection of what I had already hazarded. Besides, I was out of practice in talking to him: his reserve was again frozen over, and my frankness was congealed beneath it. He had not kept his promise of treating me like his sisters; he continually made little chilling differences between us, which did not at all tend to the development of cordiality: in short, now that I was acknowledged his kinswoman, and lived under the same roof with him, I felt the distance between us to be far greater than when he had known me only as the village schoolmistress. When I remembered how far I had once been admitted to his confidence, I could hardly comprehend his present frigidity. Such being the case, I felt not a little surprised when he raised his head suddenly from the desk over which he was stooping, and said-- "You see, Jane, the battle is fought and the victory won." Startled at being thus addressed, I did not immediately reply: after a moment's hesitation I answered-- "But are you sure you are not in the position of those conquerors whose triumphs have cost them too dear? Would not such another ruin you?" "I think not; and if I were, it does not much signify; I shall never be called upon to contend for such another. The event of the conflict is decisive: my way is now clear; I thank God for it!" So saying, he returned to his papers and his silence. As our mutual happiness (_i.e._, Diana's, Mary's, and mine) settled into a quieter character, and we resumed our usual habits and regular studies, St. John stayed more at home: he sat with us in the same room, sometimes for hours together. While Mary drew, Diana pursued a course of encyclopaedic reading she had (to my awe and amazement) undertaken, and I fagged away at German, he pondered a mystic lore of his own: that of some Eastern tongue, the acquisition of which he thought necessary to his plans. Thus engaged, he appeared, sitting in his own recess, quiet and absorbed enough; but that blue eye of his had a habit of leaving the outlandish- looking grammar, and wandering over, and sometimes fixing upon us, his fellow-students, with a curious intensity of observation: if caught, it would be instantly withdrawn; yet ever and anon, it returned searchingly to our table. I wondered what it meant: I wondered, too, at the punctual satisfaction he never failed to exhibit on an occasion that seemed to me of small moment, namely, my weekly visit to Morton school; and still more was I puzzled when, if the day was unfavourable, if there was snow, or rain, or high wind, and his sisters urged me not to go, he would invariably make light of their solicitude, and encourage me to accomplish the task without regard to the elements. "Jane is not such a weakling as you would make her," he would say: "she can bear a mountain blast, or a shower, or a few flakes of snow, as well as any of us. Her constitution is both sound and elastic;--better calculated to endure variations of climate than many more robust." And when I returned, sometimes a good deal tired, and not a little weather-beaten, I never dared complain, because I saw that to murmur would be to vex him: on all occasions fortitude pleased him; the reverse was a special annoyance. One afternoon, however, I got leave to stay at home, because I really had a cold. His sisters were gone to Morton in my stead: I sat reading Schiller; he, deciphering his crabbed Oriental scrolls. As I exchanged a translation for an exercise, I happened to look his way: there I found myself under the influence of the ever-watchful blue eye. How long it had been searching me through and through, and over and over, I cannot tell: so keen was it, and yet so cold, I felt for the moment superstitious--as if I were sitting in the room with something uncanny. "Jane, what are you doing?" "Learning German." "I want you to give up German and learn Hindostanee." "You are not in earnest?" "In such earnest that I must have it so: and I will tell you why." He then went on to explain that Hindostanee was the language he was himself at present studying; that, as he advanced, he was apt to forget the commencement; that it would assist him greatly to have a pupil with whom he might again and again go over the elements, and so fix them thoroughly in his mind; that his choice had hovered for some time between me and his sisters; but that he had fixed on me because he saw I could sit at a task the longest of the three. Would I do him this favour? I should not, perhaps, have to make the sacrifice long, as it wanted now barely three months to his departure. St. John was not a man to be lightly refused: you felt that every impression made on him, either for pain or pleasure, was deep-graved and permanent. I consented. When Diana and Mary returned, the former found her scholar transferred from her to her brother: she laughed, and both she and Mary agreed that St. John should never have persuaded them to such a step. He answered quietly-- "I know it." I found him a very patient, very forbearing, and yet an exacting master: he expected me to do a great deal; and when I fulfilled his expectations, he, in his own way, fully testified his approbation. By degrees, he acquired a certain influence over me that took away my liberty of mind: his praise and notice were more restraining than his indifference. I could no longer talk or laugh freely when he was by, because a tiresomely importunate instinct reminded me that vivacity (at least in me) was distasteful to him. I was so fully aware that only serious moods and occupations were acceptable, that in his presence every effort to sustain or follow any other became vain: I fell under a freezing spell. When he said "go," I went; "come," I came; "do this," I did it. But I did not love my servitude: I wished, many a time, he had continued to neglect me. One evening when, at bedtime, his sisters and I stood round him, bidding him good-night, he kissed each of them, as was his custom; and, as was equally his custom, he gave me his hand. Diana, who chanced to be in a frolicsome humour (_she_ was not painfully controlled by his will; for hers, in another way, was as strong), exclaimed-- "St. John! you used to call Jane your third sister, but you don't treat her as such: you should kiss her too." She pushed me towards him. I thought Diana very provoking, and felt uncomfortably confused; and while I was thus thinking and feeling, St. John bent his head; his Greek face was brought to a level with mine, his eyes questioned my eyes piercingly--he kissed me. There are no such things as marble kisses or ice kisses, or I should say my ecclesiastical cousin's salute belonged to one of these classes; but there may be experiment kisses, and his was an experiment kiss. When given, he viewed me to learn the result; it was not striking: I am sure I did not blush; perhaps I might have turned a little pale, for I felt as if this kiss were a seal affixed to my fetters. He never omitted the ceremony afterwards, and the gravity and quiescence with which I underwent it, seemed to invest it for him with a certain charm. As for me, I daily wished more to please him; but to do so, I felt daily more and more that I must disown half my nature, stifle half my faculties, wrest my tastes from their original bent, force myself to the adoption of pursuits for which I had no natural vocation. He wanted to train me to an elevation I could never reach; it racked me hourly to aspire to the standard he uplifted. The thing was as impossible as to mould my irregular features to his correct and classic pattern, to give to my changeable green eyes the sea-blue tint and solemn lustre of his own. Not his ascendancy alone, however, held me in thrall at present. Of late it had been easy enough for me to look sad: a cankering evil sat at my heart and drained my happiness at its source--the evil of suspense. Perhaps you think I had forgotten Mr. Rochester, reader, amidst these changes of place and fortune. Not for a moment. His idea was still with me, because it was not a vapour sunshine could disperse, nor a sand-traced effigy storms could wash away; it was a name graven on a tablet, fated to last as long as the marble it inscribed. The craving to know what had become of him followed me everywhere; when I was at Morton, I re-entered my cottage every evening to think of that; and now at Moor House, I sought my bedroom each night to brood over it. In the course of my necessary correspondence with Mr. Briggs about the will, I had inquired if he knew anything of Mr. Rochester's present residence and state of health; but, as St. John had conjectured, he was quite ignorant of all concerning him. I then wrote to Mrs. Fairfax, entreating information on the subject. I had calculated with certainty on this step answering my end: I felt sure it would elicit an early answer. I was astonished when a fortnight passed without reply; but when two months wore away, and day after day the post arrived and brought nothing for me, I fell a prey to the keenest anxiety. I wrote again: there was a chance of my first letter having missed. Renewed hope followed renewed effort: it shone like the former for some weeks, then, like it, it faded, flickered: not a line, not a word reached me. When half a year wasted in vain expectancy, my hope died out, and then I felt dark indeed. A fine spring shone round me, which I could not enjoy. Summer approached; Diana tried to cheer me: she said I looked ill, and wished to accompany me to the sea-side. This St. John opposed; he said I did not want dissipation, I wanted employment; my present life was too purposeless, I required an aim; and, I suppose, by way of supplying deficiencies, he prolonged still further my lessons in Hindostanee, and grew more urgent in requiring their accomplishment: and I, like a fool, never thought of resisting him--I could not resist him. One day I had come to my studies in lower spirits than usual; the ebb was occasioned by a poignantly felt disappointment. Hannah had told me in the morning there was a letter for me, and when I went down to take it, almost certain that the long-looked for tidings were vouchsafed me at last, I found only an unimportant note from Mr. Briggs on business. The bitter check had wrung from me some tears; and now, as I sat poring over the crabbed characters and flourishing tropes of an Indian scribe, my eyes filled again. St. John called me to his side to read; in attempting to do this my voice failed me: words were lost in sobs. He and I were the only occupants of the parlour: Diana was practising her music in the drawing-room, Mary was gardening--it was a very fine May day, clear, sunny, and breezy. My companion expressed no surprise at this emotion, nor did he question me as to its cause; he only said-- "We will wait a few minutes, Jane, till you are more composed." And while I smothered the paroxysm with all haste, he sat calm and patient, leaning on his desk, and looking like a physician watching with the eye of science an expected and fully understood crisis in a patient's malady. Having stifled my sobs, wiped my eyes, and muttered something about not being very well that morning, I resumed my task, and succeeded in completing it. St. John put away my books and his, locked his desk, and said-- "Now, Jane, you shall take a walk; and with me." "I will call Diana and Mary." "No; I want only one companion this morning, and that must be you. Put on your things; go out by the kitchen-door: take the road towards the head of Marsh Glen: I will join you in a moment." I know no medium: I never in my life have known any medium in my dealings with positive, hard characters, antagonistic to my own, between absolute submission and determined revolt. I have always faithfully observed the one, up to the very moment of bursting, sometimes with volcanic vehemence, into the other; and as neither present circumstances warranted, nor my present mood inclined me to mutiny, I observed careful obedience to St. John's directions; and in ten minutes I was treading the wild track of the glen, side by side with him. The breeze was from the west: it came over the hills, sweet with scents of heath and rush; the sky was of stainless blue; the stream descending the ravine, swelled with past spring rains, poured along plentiful and clear, catching golden gleams from the sun, and sapphire tints from the firmament. As we advanced and left the track, we trod a soft turf, mossy fine and emerald green, minutely enamelled with a tiny white flower, and spangled with a star-like yellow blossom: the hills, meantime, shut us quite in; for the glen, towards its head, wound to their very core. "Let us rest here," said St. John, as we reached the first stragglers of a battalion of rocks, guarding a sort of pass, beyond which the beck rushed down a waterfall; and where, still a little farther, the mountain shook off turf and flower, had only heath for raiment and crag for gem--where it exaggerated the wild to the savage, and exchanged the fresh for the frowning--where it guarded the forlorn hope of solitude, and a last refuge for silence. I took a seat: St. John stood near me. He looked up the pass and down the hollow; his glance wandered away with the stream, and returned to traverse the unclouded heaven which coloured it: he removed his hat, let the breeze stir his hair and kiss his brow. He seemed in communion with the genius of the haunt: with his eye he bade farewell to something. "And I shall see it again," he said aloud, "in dreams when I sleep by the Ganges: and again in a more remote hour--when another slumber overcomes me--on the shore of a darker stream!" Strange words of a strange love! An austere patriot's passion for his fatherland! He sat down; for half-an-hour we never spoke; neither he to me nor I to him: that interval past, he recommenced-- "Jane, I go in six weeks; I have taken my berth in an East Indiaman which sails on the 20th of June." "God will protect you; for you have undertaken His work," I answered. "Yes," said he, "there is my glory and joy. I am the servant of an infallible Master. I am not going out under human guidance, subject to the defective laws and erring control of my feeble fellow-worms: my king, my lawgiver, my captain, is the All-perfect. It seems strange to me that all round me do not burn to enlist under the same banner,--to join in the same enterprise." "All have not your powers, and it would be folly for the feeble to wish to march with the strong." "I do not speak to the feeble, or think of them: I address only such as are worthy of the work, and competent to accomplish it." "Those are few in number, and difficult to discover." "You say truly; but when found, it is right to stir them up--to urge and exhort them to the effort--to show them what their gifts are, and why they were given--to speak Heaven's message in their ear,--to offer them, direct from God, a place in the ranks of His chosen." "If they are really qualified for the task, will not their own hearts be the first to inform them of it?" I felt as if an awful charm was framing round and gathering over me: I trembled to hear some fatal word spoken which would at once declare and rivet the spell. "And what does _your_ heart say?" demanded St. John. "My heart is mute,--my heart is mute," I answered, struck and thrilled. "Then I must speak for it," continued the deep, relentless voice. "Jane, come with me to India: come as my helpmeet and fellow-labourer." The glen and sky spun round: the hills heaved! It was as if I had heard a summons from Heaven--as if a visionary messenger, like him of Macedonia, had enounced, "Come over and help us!" But I was no apostle,--I could not behold the herald,--I could not receive his call. "Oh, St. John!" I cried, "have some mercy!" I appealed to one who, in the discharge of what he believed his duty, knew neither mercy nor remorse. He continued-- "God and nature intended you for a missionary's wife. It is not personal, but mental endowments they have given you: you are formed for labour, not for love. A missionary's wife you must--shall be. You shall be mine: I claim you--not for my pleasure, but for my Sovereign's service." "I am not fit for it: I have no vocation," I said. He had calculated on these first objections: he was not irritated by them. Indeed, as he leaned back against the crag behind him, folded his arms on his chest, and fixed his countenance, I saw he was prepared for a long and trying opposition, and had taken in a stock of patience to last him to its close--resolved, however, that that close should be conquest for him. "Humility, Jane," said he, "is the groundwork of Christian virtues: you say right that you are not fit for the work. Who is fit for it? Or who, that ever was truly called, believed himself worthy of the summons? I, for instance, am but dust and ashes. With St. Paul, I acknowledge myself the chiefest of sinners; but I do not suffer this sense of my personal vileness to daunt me. I know my Leader: that He is just as well as mighty; and while He has chosen a feeble instrument to perform a great task, He will, from the boundless stores of His providence, supply the inadequacy of the means to the end. Think like me, Jane--trust like me. It is the Rock of Ages I ask you to lean on: do not doubt but it will bear the weight of your human weakness." "I do not understand a missionary life: I have never studied missionary labours." "There I, humble as I am, can give you the aid you want: I can set you your task from hour to hour; stand by you always; help you from moment to moment. This I could do in the beginning: soon (for I know your powers) you would be as strong and apt as myself, and would not require my help." "But my powers--where are they for this undertaking? I do not feel them. Nothing speaks or stirs in me while you talk. I am sensible of no light kindling--no life quickening--no voice counselling or cheering. Oh, I wish I could make you see how much my mind is at this moment like a rayless dungeon, with one shrinking fear fettered in its depths--the fear of being persuaded by you to attempt what I cannot accomplish!" "I have an answer for you--hear it. I have watched you ever since we first met: I have made you my study for ten months. I have proved you in that time by sundry tests: and what have I seen and elicited? In the village school I found you could perform well, punctually, uprightly, labour uncongenial to your habits and inclinations; I saw you could perform it with capacity and tact: you could win while you controlled. In the calm with which you learnt you had become suddenly rich, I read a mind clear of the vice of Demas:--lucre had no undue power over you. In the resolute readiness with which you cut your wealth into four shares, keeping but one to yourself, and relinquishing the three others to the claim of abstract justice, I recognised a soul that revelled in the flame and excitement of sacrifice. In the tractability with which, at my wish, you forsook a study in which you were interested, and adopted another because it interested me; in the untiring assiduity with which you have since persevered in it--in the unflagging energy and unshaken temper with which you have met its difficulties--I acknowledge the complement of the qualities I seek. Jane, you are docile, diligent, disinterested, faithful, constant, and courageous; very gentle, and very heroic: cease to mistrust yourself--I can trust you unreservedly. As a conductress of Indian schools, and a helper amongst Indian women, your assistance will be to me invaluable." My iron shroud contracted round me; persuasion advanced with slow sure step. Shut my eyes as I would, these last words of his succeeded in making the way, which had seemed blocked up, comparatively clear. My work, which had appeared so vague, so hopelessly diffuse, condensed itself as he proceeded, and assumed a definite form under his shaping hand. He waited for an answer. I demanded a quarter of an hour to think, before I again hazarded a reply. "Very willingly," he rejoined; and rising, he strode a little distance up the pass, threw himself down on a swell of heath, and there lay still. {He threw himself down on a swell of heath, and there lay still: p389.jpg} "I _can_ do what he wants me to do: I am forced to see and acknowledge that," I meditated,--"that is, if life be spared me. But I feel mine is not the existence to be long protracted under an Indian sun. What then? He does not care for that: when my time came to die, he would resign me, in all serenity and sanctity, to the God who gave me. The case is very plain before me. In leaving England, I should leave a loved but empty land--Mr. Rochester is not there; and if he were, what is, what can that ever be to me? My business is to live without him now: nothing so absurd, so weak as to drag on from day to day, as if I were waiting some impossible change in circumstances, which might reunite me to him. Of course (as St. John once said) I must seek another interest in life to replace the one lost: is not the occupation he now offers me truly the most glorious man can adopt or God assign? Is it not, by its noble cares and sublime results, the one best calculated to fill the void left by uptorn affections and demolished hopes? I believe I must say, Yes--and yet I shudder. Alas! If I join St. John, I abandon half myself: if I go to India, I go to premature death. And how will the interval between leaving England for India, and India for the grave, be filled? Oh, I know well! That, too, is very clear to my vision. By straining to satisfy St. John till my sinews ache, I _shall_ satisfy him--to the finest central point and farthest outward circle of his expectations. If I _do_ go with him--if I _do_ make the sacrifice he urges, I will make it absolutely: I will throw all on the altar--heart, vitals, the entire victim. He will never love me; but he shall approve me; I will show him energies he has not yet seen, resources he has never suspected. Yes, I can work as hard as he can, and with as little grudging. "Consent, then, to his demand is possible: but for one item--one dreadful item. It is--that he asks me to be his wife, and has no more of a husband's heart for me than that frowning giant of a rock, down which the stream is foaming in yonder gorge. He prizes me as a soldier would a good weapon; and that is all. Unmarried to him, this would never grieve me; but can I let him complete his calculations--coolly put into practice his plans--go through the wedding ceremony? Can I receive from him the bridal ring, endure all the forms of love (which I doubt not he would scrupulously observe) and know that the spirit was quite absent? Can I bear the consciousness that every endearment he bestows is a sacrifice made on principle? No: such a martyrdom would be monstrous. I will never undergo it. As his sister, I might accompany him--not as his wife: I will tell him so." I looked towards the knoll: there he lay, still as a prostrate column; his face turned to me: his eye beaming watchful and keen. He started to his feet and approached me. "I am ready to go to India, if I may go free." "Your answer requires a commentary," he said; "it is not clear." "You have hitherto been my adopted brother--I, your adopted sister: let us continue as such: you and I had better not marry." He shook his head. "Adopted fraternity will not do in this case. If you were my real sister it would be different: I should take you, and seek no wife. But as it is, either our union must be consecrated and sealed by marriage, or it cannot exist: practical obstacles oppose themselves to any other plan. Do you not see it, Jane? Consider a moment--your strong sense will guide you." I did consider; and still my sense, such as it was, directed me only to the fact that we did not love each other as man and wife should: and therefore it inferred we ought not to marry. I said so. "St. John," I returned, "I regard you as a brother--you, me as a sister: so let us continue." "We cannot--we cannot," he answered, with short, sharp determination: "it would not do. You have said you will go with me to India: remember--you have said that." "Conditionally." "Well--well. To the main point--the departure with me from England, the co-operation with me in my future labours--you do not object. You have already as good as put your hand to the plough: you are too consistent to withdraw it. You have but one end to keep in view--how the work you have undertaken can best be done. Simplify your complicated interests, feelings, thoughts, wishes, aims; merge all considerations in one purpose: that of fulfilling with effect--with power--the mission of your great Master. To do so, you must have a coadjutor: not a brother--that is a loose tie--but a husband. I, too, do not want a sister: a sister might any day be taken from me. I want a wife: the sole helpmeet I can influence efficiently in life, and retain absolutely till death." I shuddered as he spoke: I felt his influence in my marrow--his hold on my limbs. "Seek one elsewhere than in me, St. John: seek one fitted to you." "One fitted to my purpose, you mean--fitted to my vocation. Again I tell you it is not the insignificant private individual--the mere man, with the man's selfish senses--I wish to mate: it is the missionary." "And I will give the missionary my energies--it is all he wants--but not myself: that would be only adding the husk and shell to the kernel. For them he has no use: I retain them." "You cannot--you ought not. Do you think God will be satisfied with half an oblation? Will He accept a mutilated sacrifice? It is the cause of God I advocate: it is under His standard I enlist you. I cannot accept on His behalf a divided allegiance: it must be entire." "Oh! I will give my heart to God," I said. "_You_ do not want it." I will not swear, reader, that there was not something of repressed sarcasm both in the tone in which I uttered this sentence, and in the feeling that accompanied it. I had silently feared St. John till now, because I had not understood him. He had held me in awe, because he had held me in doubt. How much of him was saint, how much mortal, I could not heretofore tell: but revelations were being made in this conference: the analysis of his nature was proceeding before my eyes. I saw his fallibilities: I comprehended them. I understood that, sitting there where I did, on the bank of heath, and with that handsome form before me, I sat at the feet of a man, caring as I. The veil fell from his hardness and despotism. Having felt in him the presence of these qualities, I felt his imperfection and took courage. I was with an equal--one with whom I might argue--one whom, if I saw good, I might resist. He was silent after I had uttered the last sentence, and I presently risked an upward glance at his countenance. His eye, bent on me, expressed at once stern surprise and keen inquiry. "Is she sarcastic, and sarcastic to _me_!" it seemed to say. "What does this signify?" "Do not let us forget that this is a solemn matter," he said ere long; "one of which we may neither think nor talk lightly without sin. I trust, Jane, you are in earnest when you say you will serve your heart to God: it is all I want. Once wrench your heart from man, and fix it on your Maker, the advancement of that Maker's spiritual kingdom on earth will be your chief delight and endeavour; you will be ready to do at once whatever furthers that end. You will see what impetus would be given to your efforts and mine by our physical and mental union in marriage: the only union that gives a character of permanent conformity to the destinies and designs of human beings; and, passing over all minor caprices--all trivial difficulties and delicacies of feeling--all scruple about the degree, kind, strength or tenderness of mere personal inclination--you will hasten to enter into that union at once." "Shall I?" I said briefly; and I looked at his features, beautiful in their harmony, but strangely formidable in their still severity; at his brow, commanding but not open; at his eyes, bright and deep and searching, but never soft; at his tall imposing figure; and fancied myself in idea _his wife_. Oh! it would never do! As his curate, his comrade, all would be right: I would cross oceans with him in that capacity; toil under Eastern suns, in Asian deserts with him in that office; admire and emulate his courage and devotion and vigour; accommodate quietly to his masterhood; smile undisturbed at his ineradicable ambition; discriminate the Christian from the man: profoundly esteem the one, and freely forgive the other. I should suffer often, no doubt, attached to him only in this capacity: my body would be under rather a stringent yoke, but my heart and mind would be free. I should still have my unblighted self to turn to: my natural unenslaved feelings with which to communicate in moments of loneliness. There would be recesses in my mind which would be only mine, to which he never came, and sentiments growing there fresh and sheltered which his austerity could never blight, nor his measured warrior-march trample down: but as his wife--at his side always, and always restrained, and always checked--forced to keep the fire of my nature continually low, to compel it to burn inwardly and never utter a cry, though the imprisoned flame consumed vital after vital--_this_ would be unendurable. "St. John!" I exclaimed, when I had got so far in my meditation. "Well?" he answered icily. "I repeat I freely consent to go with you as your fellow-missionary, but not as your wife; I cannot marry you and become part of you." "A part of me you must become," he answered steadily; "otherwise the whole bargain is void. How can I, a man not yet thirty, take out with me to India a girl of nineteen, unless she be married to me? How can we be for ever together--sometimes in solitudes, sometimes amidst savage tribes--and unwed?" "Very well," I said shortly; "under the circumstances, quite as well as if I were either your real sister, or a man and a clergyman like yourself." "It is known that you are not my sister; I cannot introduce you as such: to attempt it would be to fasten injurious suspicions on us both. And for the rest, though you have a man's vigorous brain, you have a woman's heart and--it would not do." "It would do," I affirmed with some disdain, "perfectly well. I have a woman's heart, but not where you are concerned; for you I have only a comrade's constancy; a fellow-soldier's frankness, fidelity, fraternity, if you like; a neophyte's respect and submission to his hierophant: nothing more--don't fear." "It is what I want," he said, speaking to himself; "it is just what I want. And there are obstacles in the way: they must be hewn down. Jane, you would not repent marrying me--be certain of that; we _must_ be married. I repeat it: there is no other way; and undoubtedly enough of love would follow upon marriage to render the union right even in your eyes." "I scorn your idea of love," I could not help saying, as I rose up and stood before him, leaning my back against the rock. "I scorn the counterfeit sentiment you offer: yes, St. John, and I scorn you when you offer it." He looked at me fixedly, compressing his well-cut lips while he did so. Whether he was incensed or surprised, or what, it was not easy to tell: he could command his countenance thoroughly. "I scarcely expected to hear that expression from you," he said: "I think I have done and uttered nothing to deserve scorn." I was touched by his gentle tone, and overawed by his high, calm mien. "Forgive me the words, St. John; but it is your own fault that I have been roused to speak so unguardedly. You have introduced a topic on which our natures are at variance--a topic we should never discuss: the very name of love is an apple of discord between us. If the reality were required, what should we do? How should we feel? My dear cousin, abandon your scheme of marriage--forget it." "No," said he; "it is a long-cherished scheme, and the only one which can secure my great end: but I shall urge you no further at present. To-morrow, I leave home for Cambridge: I have many friends there to whom I should wish to say farewell. I shall be absent a fortnight--take that space of time to consider my offer: and do not forget that if you reject it, it is not me you deny, but God. Through my means, He opens to you a noble career; as my wife only can you enter upon it. Refuse to be my wife, and you limit yourself for ever to a track of selfish ease and barren obscurity. Tremble lest in that case you should be numbered with those who have denied the faith, and are worse than infidels!" He had done. Turning from me, he once more "Looked to river, looked to hill." But this time his feelings were all pent in his heart: I was not worthy to hear them uttered. As I walked by his side homeward, I read well in his iron silence all he felt towards me: the disappointment of an austere and despotic nature, which has met resistance where it expected submission--the disapprobation of a cool, inflexible judgment, which has detected in another feelings and views in which it has no power to sympathise: in short, as a man, he would have wished to coerce me into obedience: it was only as a sincere Christian he bore so patiently with my perversity, and allowed so long a space for reflection and repentance. That night, after he had kissed his sisters, he thought proper to forget even to shake hands with me, but left the room in silence. I--who, though I had no love, had much friendship for him--was hurt by the marked omission: so much hurt that tears started to my eyes. "I see you and St. John have been quarrelling, Jane," said Diana, "during your walk on the moor. But go after him; he is now lingering in the passage expecting you--he will make it up." I have not much pride under such circumstances: I would always rather be happy than dignified; and I ran after him--he stood at the foot of the stairs. "Good-night, St. John," said I. "Good-night, Jane," he replied calmly. "Then shake hands," I added. What a cold, loose touch, he impressed on my fingers! He was deeply displeased by what had occurred that day; cordiality would not warm, nor tears move him. No happy reconciliation was to be had with him--no cheering smile or generous word: but still the Christian was patient and placid; and when I asked him if he forgave me, he answered that he was not in the habit of cherishing the remembrance of vexation; that he had nothing to forgive, not having been offended. And with that answer he left me. I would much rather he had knocked me down. CHAPTER XXXV He did not leave for Cambridge the next day, as he had said he would. He deferred his departure a whole week, and during that time he made me feel what severe punishment a good yet stern, a conscientious yet implacable man can inflict on one who has offended him. Without one overt act of hostility, one upbraiding word, he contrived to impress me momently with the conviction that I was put beyond the pale of his favour. Not that St. John harboured a spirit of unchristian vindictiveness--not that he would have injured a hair of my head, if it had been fully in his power to do so. Both by nature and principle, he was superior to the mean gratification of vengeance: he had forgiven me for saying I scorned him and his love, but he had not forgotten the words; and as long as he and I lived he never would forget them. I saw by his look, when he turned to me, that they were always written on the air between me and him; whenever I spoke, they sounded in my voice to his ear, and their echo toned every answer he gave me. He did not abstain from conversing with me: he even called me as usual each morning to join him at his desk; and I fear the corrupt man within him had a pleasure unimparted to, and unshared by, the pure Christian, in evincing with what skill he could, while acting and speaking apparently just as usual, extract from every deed and every phrase the spirit of interest and approval which had formerly communicated a certain austere charm to his language and manner. To me, he was in reality become no longer flesh, but marble; his eye was a cold, bright, blue gem; his tongue a speaking instrument--nothing more. All this was torture to me--refined, lingering torture. It kept up a slow fire of indignation and a trembling trouble of grief, which harassed and crushed me altogether. I felt how--if I were his wife, this good man, pure as the deep sunless source, could soon kill me, without drawing from my veins a single drop of blood, or receiving on his own crystal conscience the faintest stain of crime. Especially I felt this when I made any attempt to propitiate him. No ruth met my ruth. _He_ experienced no suffering from estrangement--no yearning after reconciliation; and though, more than once, my fast falling tears blistered the page over which we both bent, they produced no more effect on him than if his heart had been really a matter of stone or metal. To his sisters, meantime, he was somewhat kinder than usual: as if afraid that mere coldness would not sufficiently convince me how completely I was banished and banned, he added the force of contrast; and this I am sure he did not by force, but on principle. The night before he left home, happening to see him walking in the garden about sunset, and remembering, as I looked at him, that this man, alienated as he now was, had once saved my life, and that we were near relations, I was moved to make a last attempt to regain his friendship. I went out and approached him as he stood leaning over the little gate; I spoke to the point at once. "St. John, I am unhappy because you are still angry with me. Let us be friends." "I hope we are friends," was the unmoved reply; while he still watched the rising of the moon, which he had been contemplating as I approached. "No, St. John, we are not friends as we were. You know that." "Are we not? That is wrong. For my part, I wish you no ill and all good." "I believe you, St. John; for I am sure you are incapable of wishing any one ill; but, as I am your kinswoman, I should desire somewhat more of affection than that sort of general philanthropy you extend to mere strangers." "Of course," he said. "Your wish is reasonable, and I am far from regarding you as a stranger." This, spoken in a cool, tranquil tone, was mortifying and baffling enough. Had I attended to the suggestions of pride and ire, I should immediately have left him; but something worked within me more strongly than those feelings could. I deeply venerated my cousin's talent and principle. His friendship was of value to me: to lose it tried me severely. I would not so soon relinquish the attempt to reconquer it. "Must we part in this way, St. John? And when you go to India, will you leave me so, without a kinder word than you have yet spoken?" He now turned quite from the moon and faced me. "When I go to India, Jane, will I leave you! What! do you not go to India?" "You said I could not unless I married you." "And you will not marry me! You adhere to that resolution?" Reader, do you know, as I do, what terror those cold people can put into the ice of their questions? How much of the fall of the avalanche is in their anger? of the breaking up of the frozen sea in their displeasure? "No. St. John, I will not marry you. I adhere to my resolution." The avalanche had shaken and slid a little forward, but it did not yet crash down. "Once more, why this refusal?" he asked. "Formerly," I answered, "because you did not love me; now, I reply, because you almost hate me. If I were to marry you, you would kill me. You are killing me now." His lips and cheeks turned white--quite white. "_I should kill you_--_I am killing you_? Your words are such as ought not to be used: violent, unfeminine, and untrue. They betray an unfortunate state of mind: they merit severe reproof: they would seem inexcusable, but that it is the duty of man to forgive his fellow even until seventy-and-seven times." I had finished the business now. While earnestly wishing to erase from his mind the trace of my former offence, I had stamped on that tenacious surface another and far deeper impression, I had burnt it in. "Now you will indeed hate me," I said. "It is useless to attempt to conciliate you: I see I have made an eternal enemy of you." A fresh wrong did these words inflict: the worse, because they touched on the truth. That bloodless lip quivered to a temporary spasm. I knew the steely ire I had whetted. I was heart-wrung. "You utterly misinterpret my words," I said, at once seizing his hand: "I have no intention to grieve or pain you--indeed, I have not." Most bitterly he smiled--most decidedly he withdrew his hand from mine. "And now you recall your promise, and will not go to India at all, I presume?" said he, after a considerable pause. "Yes, I will, as your assistant," I answered. A very long silence succeeded. What struggle there was in him between Nature and Grace in this interval, I cannot tell: only singular gleams scintillated in his eyes, and strange shadows passed over his face. He spoke at last. "I before proved to you the absurdity of a single woman of your age proposing to accompany abroad a single man of mine. I proved it to you in such terms as, I should have thought, would have prevented your ever again alluding to the plan. That you have done so, I regret--for your sake." I interrupted him. Anything like a tangible reproach gave me courage at once. "Keep to common sense, St. John: you are verging on nonsense. You pretend to be shocked by what I have said. You are not really shocked: for, with your superior mind, you cannot be either so dull or so conceited as to misunderstand my meaning. I say again, I will be your curate, if you like, but never your wife." Again he turned lividly pale; but, as before, controlled his passion perfectly. He answered emphatically but calmly-- "A female curate, who is not my wife, would never suit me. With me, then, it seems, you cannot go: but if you are sincere in your offer, I will, while in town, speak to a married missionary, whose wife needs a coadjutor. Your own fortune will make you independent of the Society's aid; and thus you may still be spared the dishonour of breaking your promise and deserting the band you engaged to join." Now I never had, as the reader knows, either given any formal promise or entered into any engagement; and this language was all much too hard and much too despotic for the occasion. I replied-- "There is no dishonour, no breach of promise, no desertion in the case. I am not under the slightest obligation to go to India, especially with strangers. With you I would have ventured much, because I admire, confide in, and, as a sister, I love you; but I am convinced that, go when and with whom I would, I should not live long in that climate." "Ah! you are afraid of yourself," he said, curling his lip. "I am. God did not give me my life to throw away; and to do as you wish me would, I begin to think, be almost equivalent to committing suicide. Moreover, before I definitively resolve on quitting England, I will know for certain whether I cannot be of greater use by remaining in it than by leaving it." "What do you mean?" "It would be fruitless to attempt to explain; but there is a point on which I have long endured painful doubt, and I can go nowhere till by some means that doubt is removed." "I know where your heart turns and to what it clings. The interest you cherish is lawless and unconsecrated. Long since you ought to have crushed it: now you should blush to allude to it. You think of Mr. Rochester?" It was true. I confessed it by silence. "Are you going to seek Mr. Rochester?" "I must find out what is become of him." "It remains for me, then," he said, "to remember you in my prayers, and to entreat God for you, in all earnestness, that you may not indeed become a castaway. I had thought I recognised in you one of the chosen. But God sees not as man sees: _His_ will be done--" He opened the gate, passed through it, and strayed away down the glen. He was soon out of sight. On re-entering the parlour, I found Diana standing at the window, looking very thoughtful. Diana was a great deal taller than I: she put her hand on my shoulder, and, stooping, examined my face. "Jane," she said, "you are always agitated and pale now. I am sure there is something the matter. Tell me what business St. John and you have on hands. I have watched you this half hour from the window; you must forgive my being such a spy, but for a long time I have fancied I hardly know what. St. John is a strange being--" She paused--I did not speak: soon she resumed-- "That brother of mine cherishes peculiar views of some sort respecting you, I am sure: he has long distinguished you by a notice and interest he never showed to any one else--to what end? I wish he loved you--does he, Jane?" I put her cool hand to my hot forehead; "No, Die, not one whit." "Then why does he follow you so with his eyes, and get you so frequently alone with him, and keep you so continually at his side? Mary and I had both concluded he wished you to marry him." "He does--he has asked me to be his wife." Diana clapped her hands. "That is just what we hoped and thought! And you will marry him, Jane, won't you? And then he will stay in England." "Far from that, Diana; his sole idea in proposing to me is to procure a fitting fellow-labourer in his Indian toils." "What! He wishes you to go to India?" "Yes." "Madness!" she exclaimed. "You would not live three months there, I am certain. You never shall go: you have not consented, have you, Jane?" "I have refused to marry him--" "And have consequently displeased him?" she suggested. "Deeply: he will never forgive me, I fear: yet I offered to accompany him as his sister." "It was frantic folly to do so, Jane. Think of the task you undertook--one of incessant fatigue, where fatigue kills even the strong, and you are weak. St. John--you know him--would urge you to impossibilities: with him there would be no permission to rest during the hot hours; and unfortunately, I have noticed, whatever he exacts, you force yourself to perform. I am astonished you found courage to refuse his hand. You do not love him then, Jane?" "Not as a husband." "Yet he is a handsome fellow." "And I am so plain, you see, Die. We should never suit." "Plain! You? Not at all. You are much too pretty, as well as too good, to be grilled alive in Calcutta." And again she earnestly conjured me to give up all thoughts of going out with her brother. "I must indeed," I said; "for when just now I repeated the offer of serving him for a deacon, he expressed himself shocked at my want of decency. He seemed to think I had committed an impropriety in proposing to accompany him unmarried: as if I had not from the first hoped to find in him a brother, and habitually regarded him as such." "What makes you say he does not love you, Jane?" "You should hear himself on the subject. He has again and again explained that it is not himself, but his office he wishes to mate. He has told me I am formed for labour--not for love: which is true, no doubt. But, in my opinion, if I am not formed for love, it follows that I am not formed for marriage. Would it not be strange, Die, to be chained for life to a man who regarded one but as a useful tool?" "Insupportable--unnatural--out of the question!" "And then," I continued, "though I have only sisterly affection for him now, yet, if forced to be his wife, I can imagine the possibility of conceiving an inevitable, strange, torturing kind of love for him, because he is so talented; and there is often a certain heroic grandeur in his look, manner, and conversation. In that case, my lot would become unspeakably wretched. He would not want me to love him; and if I showed the feeling, he would make me sensible that it was a superfluity, unrequired by him, unbecoming in me. I know he would." "And yet St. John is a good man," said Diana. "He is a good and a great man; but he forgets, pitilessly, the feelings and claims of little people, in pursuing his own large views. It is better, therefore, for the insignificant to keep out of his way, lest, in his progress, he should trample them down. Here he comes! I will leave you, Diana." And I hastened upstairs as I saw him entering the garden. But I was forced to meet him again at supper. During that meal he appeared just as composed as usual. I had thought he would hardly speak to me, and I was certain he had given up the pursuit of his matrimonial scheme: the sequel showed I was mistaken on both points. He addressed me precisely in his ordinary manner, or what had, of late, been his ordinary manner--one scrupulously polite. No doubt he had invoked the help of the Holy Spirit to subdue the anger I had roused in him, and now believed he had forgiven me once more. For the evening reading before prayers, he selected the twenty-first chapter of Revelation. It was at all times pleasant to listen while from his lips fell the words of the Bible: never did his fine voice sound at once so sweet and full--never did his manner become so impressive in its noble simplicity, as when he delivered the oracles of God: and to-night that voice took a more solemn tone--that manner a more thrilling meaning--as he sat in the midst of his household circle (the May moon shining in through the uncurtained window, and rendering almost unnecessary the light of the candle on the table): as he sat there, bending over the great old Bible, and described from its page the vision of the new heaven and the new earth--told how God would come to dwell with men, how He would wipe away all tears from their eyes, and promised that there should be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, nor any more pain, because the former things were passed away. The succeeding words thrilled me strangely as he spoke them: especially as I felt, by the slight, indescribable alteration in sound, that in uttering them, his eye had turned on me. "He that overcometh shall inherit all things; and I will be his God, and he shall be my son. But," was slowly, distinctly read, "the fearful, the unbelieving, &c., shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone, which is the second death." Henceforward, I knew what fate St. John feared for me. A calm, subdued triumph, blent with a longing earnestness, marked his enunciation of the last glorious verses of that chapter. The reader believed his name was already written in the Lamb's book of life, and he yearned after the hour which should admit him to the city to which the kings of the earth bring their glory and honour; which has no need of sun or moon to shine in it, because the glory of God lightens it, and the Lamb is the light thereof. In the prayer following the chapter, all his energy gathered--all his stern zeal woke: he was in deep earnest, wrestling with God, and resolved on a conquest. He supplicated strength for the weak-hearted; guidance for wanderers from the fold: a return, even at the eleventh hour, for those whom the temptations of the world and the flesh were luring from the narrow path. He asked, he urged, he claimed the boon of a brand snatched from the burning. Earnestness is ever deeply solemn: first, as I listened to that prayer, I wondered at his; then, when it continued and rose, I was touched by it, and at last awed. He felt the greatness and goodness of his purpose so sincerely: others who heard him plead for it, could not but feel it too. The prayer over, we took leave of him: he was to go at a very early hour in the morning. Diana and Mary having kissed him, left the room--in compliance, I think, with a whispered hint from him: I tendered my hand, and wished him a pleasant journey. "Thank you, Jane. As I said, I shall return from Cambridge in a fortnight: that space, then, is yet left you for reflection. If I listened to human pride, I should say no more to you of marriage with me; but I listen to my duty, and keep steadily in view my first aim--to do all things to the glory of God. My Master was long-suffering: so will I be. I cannot give you up to perdition as a vessel of wrath: repent--resolve, while there is yet time. Remember, we are bid to work while it is day--warned that 'the night cometh when no man shall work.' Remember the fate of Dives, who had his good things in this life. God give you strength to choose that better part which shall not be taken from you!" He laid his hand on my head as he uttered the last words. He had spoken earnestly, mildly: his look was not, indeed, that of a lover beholding his mistress, but it was that of a pastor recalling his wandering sheep--or better, of a guardian angel watching the soul for which he is responsible. All men of talent, whether they be men of feeling or not; whether they be zealots, or aspirants, or despots--provided only they be sincere--have their sublime moments, when they subdue and rule. I felt veneration for St. John--veneration so strong that its impetus thrust me at once to the point I had so long shunned. I was tempted to cease struggling with him--to rush down the torrent of his will into the gulf of his existence, and there lose my own. I was almost as hard beset by him now as I had been once before, in a different way, by another. I was a fool both times. To have yielded then would have been an error of principle; to have yielded now would have been an error of judgment. So I think at this hour, when I look back to the crisis through the quiet medium of time: I was unconscious of folly at the instant. I stood motionless under my hierophant's touch. My refusals were forgotten--my fears overcome--my wrestlings paralysed. The Impossible--_i.e._, my marriage with St. John--was fast becoming the Possible. All was changing utterly with a sudden sweep. Religion called--Angels beckoned--God commanded--life rolled together like a scroll--death's gates opening, showed eternity beyond: it seemed, that for safety and bliss there, all here might be sacrificed in a second. The dim room was full of visions. "Could you decide now?" asked the missionary. The inquiry was put in gentle tones: he drew me to him as gently. Oh, that gentleness! how far more potent is it than force! I could resist St. John's wrath: I grew pliant as a reed under his kindness. Yet I knew all the time, if I yielded now, I should not the less be made to repent, some day, of my former rebellion. His nature was not changed by one hour of solemn prayer: it was only elevated. "I could decide if I were but certain," I answered: "were I but convinced that it is God's will I should marry you, I could vow to marry you here and now--come afterwards what would!" "My prayers are heard!" ejaculated St. John. He pressed his hand firmer on my head, as if he claimed me: he surrounded me with his arm, _almost_ as if he loved me (I say _almost_--I knew the difference--for I had felt what it was to be loved; but, like him, I had now put love out of the question, and thought only of duty). I contended with my inward dimness of vision, before which clouds yet rolled. I sincerely, deeply, fervently longed to do what was right; and only that. "Show me, show me the path!" I entreated of Heaven. I was excited more than I had ever been; and whether what followed was the effect of excitement the reader shall judge. All the house was still; for I believe all, except St. John and myself, were now retired to rest. The one candle was dying out: the room was full of moonlight. My heart beat fast and thick: I heard its throb. Suddenly it stood still to an inexpressible feeling that thrilled it through, and passed at once to my head and extremities. The feeling was not like an electric shock, but it was quite as sharp, as strange, as startling: it acted on my senses as if their utmost activity hitherto had been but torpor, from which they were now summoned and forced to wake. They rose expectant: eye and ear waited while the flesh quivered on my bones. "What have you heard? What do you see?" asked St. John. I saw nothing, but I heard a voice somewhere cry-- "Jane! Jane! Jane!"--nothing more. "O God! what is it?" I gasped. I might have said, "Where is it?" for it did not seem in the room--nor in the house--nor in the garden; it did not come out of the air--nor from under the earth--nor from overhead. I had heard it--where, or whence, for ever impossible to know! And it was the voice of a human being--a known, loved, well-remembered voice--that of Edward Fairfax Rochester; and it spoke in pain and woe, wildly, eerily, urgently. "I am coming!" I cried. "Wait for me! Oh, I will come!" I flew to the door and looked into the passage: it was dark. I ran out into the garden: it was void. "Where are you?" I exclaimed. The hills beyond Marsh Glen sent the answer faintly back--"Where are you?" I listened. The wind sighed low in the firs: all was moorland loneliness and midnight hush. "Down superstition!" I commented, as that spectre rose up black by the black yew at the gate. "This is not thy deception, nor thy witchcraft: it is the work of nature. She was roused, and did--no miracle--but her best." I broke from St. John, who had followed, and would have detained me. It was _my_ time to assume ascendency. _My_ powers were in play and in force. I told him to forbear question or remark; I desired him to leave me: I must and would be alone. He obeyed at once. Where there is energy to command well enough, obedience never fails. I mounted to my chamber; locked myself in; fell on my knees; and prayed in my way--a different way to St. John's, but effective in its own fashion. I seemed to penetrate very near a Mighty Spirit; and my soul rushed out in gratitude at His feet. I rose from the thanksgiving--took a resolve--and lay down, unscared, enlightened--eager but for the daylight. CHAPTER XXXVI The daylight came. I rose at dawn. I busied myself for an hour or two with arranging my things in my chamber, drawers, and wardrobe, in the order wherein I should wish to leave them during a brief absence. Meantime, I heard St. John quit his room. He stopped at my door: I feared he would knock--no, but a slip of paper was passed under the door. I took it up. It bore these words-- "You left me too suddenly last night. Had you stayed but a little longer, you would have laid your hand on the Christian's cross and the angel's crown. I shall expect your clear decision when I return this day fortnight. Meantime, watch and pray that you enter not into temptation: the spirit, I trust, is willing, but the flesh, I see, is weak. I shall pray for you hourly.--Yours, ST. JOHN." "My spirit," I answered mentally, "is willing to do what is right; and my flesh, I hope, is strong enough to accomplish the will of Heaven, when once that will is distinctly known to me. At any rate, it shall be strong enough to search--inquire--to grope an outlet from this cloud of doubt, and find the open day of certainty." It was the first of June; yet the morning was overcast and chilly: rain beat fast on my casement. I heard the front-door open, and St. John pass out. Looking through the window, I saw him traverse the garden. He took the way over the misty moors in the direction of Whitcross--there he would meet the coach. "In a few more hours I shall succeed you in that track, cousin," thought I: "I too have a coach to meet at Whitcross. I too have some to see and ask after in England, before I depart for ever." It wanted yet two hours of breakfast-time. I filled the interval in walking softly about my room, and pondering the visitation which had given my plans their present bent. I recalled that inward sensation I had experienced: for I could recall it, with all its unspeakable strangeness. I recalled the voice I had heard; again I questioned whence it came, as vainly as before: it seemed in _me_--not in the external world. I asked was it a mere nervous impression--a delusion? I could not conceive or believe: it was more like an inspiration. The wondrous shock of feeling had come like the earthquake which shook the foundations of Paul and Silas's prison; it had opened the doors of the soul's cell and loosed its bands--it had wakened it out of its sleep, whence it sprang trembling, listening, aghast; then vibrated thrice a cry on my startled ear, and in my quaking heart and through my spirit, which neither feared nor shook, but exulted as if in joy over the success of one effort it had been privileged to make, independent of the cumbrous body. "Ere many days," I said, as I terminated my musings, "I will know something of him whose voice seemed last night to summon me. Letters have proved of no avail--personal inquiry shall replace them." At breakfast I announced to Diana and Mary that I was going a journey, and should be absent at least four days. "Alone, Jane?" they asked. "Yes; it was to see or hear news of a friend about whom I had for some time been uneasy." They might have said, as I have no doubt they thought, that they had believed me to be without any friends save them: for, indeed, I had often said so; but, with their true natural delicacy, they abstained from comment, except that Diana asked me if I was sure I was well enough to travel. I looked very pale, she observed. I replied, that nothing ailed me save anxiety of mind, which I hoped soon to alleviate. It was easy to make my further arrangements; for I was troubled with no inquiries--no surmises. Having once explained to them that I could not now be explicit about my plans, they kindly and wisely acquiesced in the silence with which I pursued them, according to me the privilege of free action I should under similar circumstances have accorded them. I left Moor House at three o'clock p.m., and soon after four I stood at the foot of the sign-post of Whitcross, waiting the arrival of the coach which was to take me to distant Thornfield. Amidst the silence of those solitary roads and desert hills, I heard it approach from a great distance. It was the same vehicle whence, a year ago, I had alighted one summer evening on this very spot--how desolate, and hopeless, and objectless! It stopped as I beckoned. I entered--not now obliged to part with my whole fortune as the price of its accommodation. Once more on the road to Thornfield, I felt like the messenger-pigeon flying home. It was a journey of six-and-thirty hours. I had set out from Whitcross on a Tuesday afternoon, and early on the succeeding Thursday morning the coach stopped to water the horses at a wayside inn, situated in the midst of scenery whose green hedges and large fields and low pastoral hills (how mild of feature and verdant of hue compared with the stern North- Midland moors of Morton!) met my eye like the lineaments of a once familiar face. Yes, I knew the character of this landscape: I was sure we were near my bourne. "How far is Thornfield Hall from here?" I asked of the ostler. "Just two miles, ma'am, across the fields." "My journey is closed," I thought to myself. I got out of the coach, gave a box I had into the ostler's charge, to be kept till I called for it; paid my fare; satisfied the coachman, and was going: the brightening day gleamed on the sign of the inn, and I read in gilt letters, "The Rochester Arms." My heart leapt up: I was already on my master's very lands. It fell again: the thought struck it:-- "Your master himself may be beyond the British Channel, for aught you know: and then, if he is at Thornfield Hall, towards which you hasten, who besides him is there? His lunatic wife: and you have nothing to do with him: you dare not speak to him or seek his presence. You have lost your labour--you had better go no farther," urged the monitor. "Ask information of the people at the inn; they can give you all you seek: they can solve your doubts at once. Go up to that man, and inquire if Mr. Rochester be at home." The suggestion was sensible, and yet I could not force myself to act on it. I so dreaded a reply that would crush me with despair. To prolong doubt was to prolong hope. I might yet once more see the Hall under the ray of her star. There was the stile before me--the very fields through which I had hurried, blind, deaf, distracted with a revengeful fury tracking and scourging me, on the morning I fled from Thornfield: ere I well knew what course I had resolved to take, I was in the midst of them. How fast I walked! How I ran sometimes! How I looked forward to catch the first view of the well-known woods! With what feelings I welcomed single trees I knew, and familiar glimpses of meadow and hill between them! At last the woods rose; the rookery clustered dark; a loud cawing broke the morning stillness. Strange delight inspired me: on I hastened. Another field crossed--a lane threaded--and there were the courtyard walls--the back offices: the house itself, the rookery still hid. "My first view of it shall be in front," I determined, "where its bold battlements will strike the eye nobly at once, and where I can single out my master's very window: perhaps he will be standing at it--he rises early: perhaps he is now walking in the orchard, or on the pavement in front. Could I but see him!--but a moment! Surely, in that case, I should not be so mad as to run to him? I cannot tell--I am not certain. And if I did--what then? God bless him! What then? Who would be hurt by my once more tasting the life his glance can give me? I rave: perhaps at this moment he is watching the sun rise over the Pyrenees, or on the tideless sea of the south." I had coasted along the lower wall of the orchard--turned its angle: there was a gate just there, opening into the meadow, between two stone pillars crowned by stone balls. From behind one pillar I could peep round quietly at the full front of the mansion. I advanced my head with precaution, desirous to ascertain if any bedroom window-blinds were yet drawn up: battlements, windows, long front--all from this sheltered station were at my command. The crows sailing overhead perhaps watched me while I took this survey. I wonder what they thought. They must have considered I was very careful and timid at first, and that gradually I grew very bold and reckless. A peep, and then a long stare; and then a departure from my niche and a straying out into the meadow; and a sudden stop full in front of the great mansion, and a protracted, hardy gaze towards it. "What affectation of diffidence was this at first?" they might have demanded; "what stupid regardlessness now?" Hear an illustration, reader. A lover finds his mistress asleep on a mossy bank; he wishes to catch a glimpse of her fair face without waking her. He steals softly over the grass, careful to make no sound; he pauses--fancying she has stirred: he withdraws: not for worlds would he be seen. All is still: he again advances: he bends above her; a light veil rests on her features: he lifts it, bends lower; now his eyes anticipate the vision of beauty--warm, and blooming, and lovely, in rest. How hurried was their first glance! But how they fix! How he starts! How he suddenly and vehemently clasps in both arms the form he dared not, a moment since, touch with his finger! How he calls aloud a name, and drops his burden, and gazes on it wildly! He thus grasps and cries, and gazes, because he no longer fears to waken by any sound he can utter--by any movement he can make. He thought his love slept sweetly: he finds she is stone dead. I looked with timorous joy towards a stately house: I saw a blackened ruin. No need to cower behind a gate-post, indeed!--to peep up at chamber lattices, fearing life was astir behind them! No need to listen for doors opening--to fancy steps on the pavement or the gravel-walk! The lawn, the grounds were trodden and waste: the portal yawned void. The front was, as I had once seen it in a dream, but a well-like wall, very high and very fragile-looking, perforated with paneless windows: no roof, no battlements, no chimneys--all had crashed in. And there was the silence of death about it: the solitude of a lonesome wild. No wonder that letters addressed to people here had never received an answer: as well despatch epistles to a vault in a church aisle. The grim blackness of the stones told by what fate the Hall had fallen--by conflagration: but how kindled? What story belonged to this disaster? What loss, besides mortar and marble and wood-work had followed upon it? Had life been wrecked as well as property? If so, whose? Dreadful question: there was no one here to answer it--not even dumb sign, mute token. In wandering round the shattered walls and through the devastated interior, I gathered evidence that the calamity was not of late occurrence. Winter snows, I thought, had drifted through that void arch, winter rains beaten in at those hollow casements; for, amidst the drenched piles of rubbish, spring had cherished vegetation: grass and weed grew here and there between the stones and fallen rafters. And oh! where meantime was the hapless owner of this wreck? In what land? Under what auspices? My eye involuntarily wandered to the grey church tower near the gates, and I asked, "Is he with Damer de Rochester, sharing the shelter of his narrow marble house?" Some answer must be had to these questions. I could find it nowhere but at the inn, and thither, ere long, I returned. The host himself brought my breakfast into the parlour. I requested him to shut the door and sit down: I had some questions to ask him. But when he complied, I scarcely knew how to begin; such horror had I of the possible answers. And yet the spectacle of desolation I had just left prepared me in a measure for a tale of misery. The host was a respectable-looking, middle-aged man. "You know Thornfield Hall, of course?" I managed to say at last. "Yes, ma'am; I lived there once." "Did you?" Not in my time, I thought: you are a stranger to me. "I was the late Mr. Rochester's butler," he added. The late! I seem to have received, with full force, the blow I had been trying to evade. "The late!" I gasped. "Is he dead?" "I mean the present gentleman, Mr. Edward's father," he explained. I breathed again: my blood resumed its flow. Fully assured by these words that Mr. Edward--_my_ Mr. Rochester (God bless him, wherever he was!)--was at least alive: was, in short, "the present gentleman." Gladdening words! It seemed I could hear all that was to come--whatever the disclosures might be--with comparative tranquillity. Since he was not in the grave, I could bear, I thought, to learn that he was at the Antipodes. "Is Mr. Rochester living at Thornfield Hall now?" I asked, knowing, of course, what the answer would be, but yet desirous of deferring the direct question as to where he really was. "No, ma'am--oh, no! No one is living there. I suppose you are a stranger in these parts, or you would have heard what happened last autumn,--Thornfield Hall is quite a ruin: it was burnt down just about harvest-time. A dreadful calamity! such an immense quantity of valuable property destroyed: hardly any of the furniture could be saved. The fire broke out at dead of night, and before the engines arrived from Millcote, the building was one mass of flame. It was a terrible spectacle: I witnessed it myself." "At dead of night!" I muttered. Yes, that was ever the hour of fatality at Thornfield. "Was it known how it originated?" I demanded. "They guessed, ma'am: they guessed. Indeed, I should say it was ascertained beyond a doubt. You are not perhaps aware," he continued, edging his chair a little nearer the table, and speaking low, "that there was a lady--a--a lunatic, kept in the house?" "I have heard something of it." "She was kept in very close confinement, ma'am: people even for some years was not absolutely certain of her existence. No one saw her: they only knew by rumour that such a person was at the Hall; and who or what she was it was difficult to conjecture. They said Mr. Edward had brought her from abroad, and some believed she had been his mistress. But a queer thing happened a year since--a very queer thing." I feared now to hear my own story. I endeavoured to recall him to the main fact. "And this lady?" "This lady, ma'am," he answered, "turned out to be Mr. Rochester's wife! The discovery was brought about in the strangest way. There was a young lady, a governess at the Hall, that Mr. Rochester fell in--" "But the fire," I suggested. "I'm coming to that, ma'am--that Mr. Edward fell in love with. The servants say they never saw anybody so much in love as he was: he was after her continually. They used to watch him--servants will, you know, ma'am--and he set store on her past everything: for all, nobody but him thought her so very handsome. She was a little small thing, they say, almost like a child. I never saw her myself; but I've heard Leah, the house-maid, tell of her. Leah liked her well enough. Mr. Rochester was about forty, and this governess not twenty; and you see, when gentlemen of his age fall in love with girls, they are often like as if they were bewitched. Well, he would marry her." "You shall tell me this part of the story another time," I said; "but now I have a particular reason for wishing to hear all about the fire. Was it suspected that this lunatic, Mrs. Rochester, had any hand in it?" "You've hit it, ma'am: it's quite certain that it was her, and nobody but her, that set it going. She had a woman to take care of her called Mrs. Poole--an able woman in her line, and very trustworthy, but for one fault--a fault common to a deal of them nurses and matrons--she _kept a private bottle of gin by her_, and now and then took a drop over-much. It is excusable, for she had a hard life of it: but still it was dangerous; for when Mrs. Poole was fast asleep after the gin and water, the mad lady, who was as cunning as a witch, would take the keys out of her pocket, let herself out of her chamber, and go roaming about the house, doing any wild mischief that came into her head. They say she had nearly burnt her husband in his bed once: but I don't know about that. However, on this night, she set fire first to the hangings of the room next her own, and then she got down to a lower storey, and made her way to the chamber that had been the governess's--(she was like as if she knew somehow how matters had gone on, and had a spite at her)--and she kindled the bed there; but there was nobody sleeping in it, fortunately. The governess had run away two months before; and for all Mr. Rochester sought her as if she had been the most precious thing he had in the world, he never could hear a word of her; and he grew savage--quite savage on his disappointment: he never was a wild man, but he got dangerous after he lost her. He would be alone, too. He sent Mrs. Fairfax, the housekeeper, away to her friends at a distance; but he did it handsomely, for he settled an annuity on her for life: and she deserved it--she was a very good woman. Miss Adele, a ward he had, was put to school. He broke off acquaintance with all the gentry, and shut himself up like a hermit at the Hall." "What! did he not leave England?" "Leave England? Bless you, no! He would not cross the door-stones of the house, except at night, when he walked just like a ghost about the grounds and in the orchard as if he had lost his senses--which it is my opinion he had; for a more spirited, bolder, keener gentleman than he was before that midge of a governess crossed him, you never saw, ma'am. He was not a man given to wine, or cards, or racing, as some are, and he was not so very handsome; but he had a courage and a will of his own, if ever man had. I knew him from a boy, you see: and for my part, I have often wished that Miss Eyre had been sunk in the sea before she came to Thornfield Hall." "Then Mr. Rochester was at home when the fire broke out?" "Yes, indeed was he; and he went up to the attics when all was burning above and below, and got the servants out of their beds and helped them down himself, and went back to get his mad wife out of her cell. And then they called out to him that she was on the roof, where she was standing, waving her arms, above the battlements, and shouting out till they could hear her a mile off: I saw her and heard her with my own eyes. She was a big woman, and had long black hair: we could see it streaming against the flames as she stood. I witnessed, and several more witnessed, Mr. Rochester ascend through the sky-light on to the roof; we heard him call 'Bertha!' We saw him approach her; and then, ma'am, she yelled and gave a spring, and the next minute she lay smashed on the pavement." {The next minute she lay smashed on the pavement: p413.jpg} "Dead?" "Dead! Ay, dead as the stones on which her brains and blood were scattered." "Good God!" "You may well say so, ma'am: it was frightful!" He shuddered. "And afterwards?" I urged. "Well, ma'am, afterwards the house was burnt to the ground: there are only some bits of walls standing now." "Were any other lives lost?" "No--perhaps it would have been better if there had." "What do you mean?" "Poor Mr. Edward!" he ejaculated, "I little thought ever to have seen it! Some say it was a just judgment on him for keeping his first marriage secret, and wanting to take another wife while he had one living: but I pity him, for my part." "You said he was alive?" I exclaimed. "Yes, yes: he is alive; but many think he had better be dead." "Why? How?" My blood was again running cold. "Where is he?" I demanded. "Is he in England?" "Ay--ay--he's in England; he can't get out of England, I fancy--he's a fixture now." What agony was this! And the man seemed resolved to protract it. "He is stone-blind," he said at last. "Yes, he is stone-blind, is Mr. Edward." I had dreaded worse. I had dreaded he was mad. I summoned strength to ask what had caused this calamity. "It was all his own courage, and a body may say, his kindness, in a way, ma'am: he wouldn't leave the house till every one else was out before him. As he came down the great staircase at last, after Mrs. Rochester had flung herself from the battlements, there was a great crash--all fell. He was taken out from under the ruins, alive, but sadly hurt: a beam had fallen in such a way as to protect him partly; but one eye was knocked out, and one hand so crushed that Mr. Carter, the surgeon, had to amputate it directly. The other eye inflamed: he lost the sight of that also. He is now helpless, indeed--blind and a cripple." "Where is he? Where does he now live?" "At Ferndean, a manor-house on a farm he has, about thirty miles off: quite a desolate spot." "Who is with him?" "Old John and his wife: he would have none else. He is quite broken down, they say." "Have you any sort of conveyance?" "We have a chaise, ma'am, a very handsome chaise." "Let it be got ready instantly; and if your post-boy can drive me to Ferndean before dark this day, I'll pay both you and him twice the hire you usually demand." CHAPTER XXXVII The manor-house of Ferndean was a building of considerable antiquity, moderate size, and no architectural pretensions, deep buried in a wood. I had heard of it before. Mr. Rochester often spoke of it, and sometimes went there. His father had purchased the estate for the sake of the game covers. He would have let the house, but could find no tenant, in consequence of its ineligible and insalubrious site. Ferndean then remained uninhabited and unfurnished, with the exception of some two or three rooms fitted up for the accommodation of the squire when he went there in the season to shoot. To this house I came just ere dark on an evening marked by the characteristics of sad sky, cold gale, and continued small penetrating rain. The last mile I performed on foot, having dismissed the chaise and driver with the double remuneration I had promised. Even when within a very short distance of the manor-house, you could see nothing of it, so thick and dark grew the timber of the gloomy wood about it. Iron gates between granite pillars showed me where to enter, and passing through them, I found myself at once in the twilight of close-ranked trees. There was a grass-grown track descending the forest aisle between hoar and knotty shafts and under branched arches. I followed it, expecting soon to reach the dwelling; but it stretched on and on, it wound far and farther: no sign of habitation or grounds was visible. I thought I had taken a wrong direction and lost my way. The darkness of natural as well as of sylvan dusk gathered over me. I looked round in search of another road. There was none: all was interwoven stem, columnar trunk, dense summer foliage--no opening anywhere. I proceeded: at last my way opened, the trees thinned a little; presently I beheld a railing, then the house--scarce, by this dim light, distinguishable from the trees; so dank and green were its decaying walls. Entering a portal, fastened only by a latch, I stood amidst a space of enclosed ground, from which the wood swept away in a semicircle. There were no flowers, no garden-beds; only a broad gravel-walk girdling a grass-plat, and this set in the heavy frame of the forest. The house presented two pointed gables in its front; the windows were latticed and narrow: the front door was narrow too, one step led up to it. The whole looked, as the host of the Rochester Arms had said, "quite a desolate spot." It was as still as a church on a week-day: the pattering rain on the forest leaves was the only sound audible in its vicinage. "Can there be life here?" I asked. Yes, life of some kind there was; for I heard a movement--that narrow front-door was unclosing, and some shape was about to issue from the grange. It opened slowly: a figure came out into the twilight and stood on the step; a man without a hat: he stretched forth his hand as if to feel whether it rained. Dusk as it was, I had recognised him--it was my master, Edward Fairfax Rochester, and no other. I stayed my step, almost my breath, and stood to watch him--to examine him, myself unseen, and alas! to him invisible. It was a sudden meeting, and one in which rapture was kept well in check by pain. I had no difficulty in restraining my voice from exclamation, my step from hasty advance. His form was of the same strong and stalwart contour as ever: his port was still erect, his hair was still raven black; nor were his features altered or sunk: not in one year's space, by any sorrow, could his athletic strength be quelled or his vigorous prime blighted. But in his countenance I saw a change: that looked desperate and brooding--that reminded me of some wronged and fettered wild beast or bird, dangerous to approach in his sullen woe. The caged eagle, whose gold-ringed eyes cruelty has extinguished, might look as looked that sightless Samson. And, reader, do you think I feared him in his blind ferocity?--if you do, you little know me. A soft hope blest with my sorrow that soon I should dare to drop a kiss on that brow of rock, and on those lips so sternly sealed beneath it: but not yet. I would not accost him yet. He descended the one step, and advanced slowly and gropingly towards the grass-plat. Where was his daring stride now? Then he paused, as if he knew not which way to turn. He lifted his hand and opened his eyelids; gazed blank, and with a straining effort, on the sky, and toward the amphitheatre of trees: one saw that all to him was void darkness. He stretched his right hand (the left arm, the mutilated one, he kept hidden in his bosom); he seemed to wish by touch to gain an idea of what lay around him: he met but vacancy still; for the trees were some yards off where he stood. He relinquished the endeavour, folded his arms, and stood quiet and mute in the rain, now falling fast on his uncovered head. At this moment John approached him from some quarter. "Will you take my arm, sir?" he said; "there is a heavy shower coming on: had you not better go in?" "Let me alone," was the answer. John withdrew without having observed me. Mr. Rochester now tried to walk about: vainly,--all was too uncertain. He groped his way back to the house, and, re-entering it, closed the door. I now drew near and knocked: John's wife opened for me. "Mary," I said, "how are you?" She started as if she had seen a ghost: I calmed her. To her hurried "Is it really you, miss, come at this late hour to this lonely place?" I answered by taking her hand; and then I followed her into the kitchen, where John now sat by a good fire. I explained to them, in few words, that I had heard all which had happened since I left Thornfield, and that I was come to see Mr. Rochester. I asked John to go down to the turn- pike-house, where I had dismissed the chaise, and bring my trunk, which I had left there: and then, while I removed my bonnet and shawl, I questioned Mary as to whether I could be accommodated at the Manor House for the night; and finding that arrangements to that effect, though difficult, would not be impossible, I informed her I should stay. Just at this moment the parlour-bell rang. "When you go in," said I, "tell your master that a person wishes to speak to him, but do not give my name." "I don't think he will see you," she answered; "he refuses everybody." When she returned, I inquired what he had said. "You are to send in your name and your business," she replied. She then proceeded to fill a glass with water, and place it on a tray, together with candles. "Is that what he rang for?" I asked. "Yes: he always has candles brought in at dark, though he is blind." "Give the tray to me; I will carry it in." I took it from her hand: she pointed me out the parlour door. The tray shook as I held it; the water spilt from the glass; my heart struck my ribs loud and fast. Mary opened the door for me, and shut it behind me. This parlour looked gloomy: a neglected handful of fire burnt low in the grate; and, leaning over it, with his head supported against the high, old-fashioned mantelpiece, appeared the blind tenant of the room. His old dog, Pilot, lay on one side, removed out of the way, and coiled up as if afraid of being inadvertently trodden upon. Pilot pricked up his ears when I came in: then he jumped up with a yelp and a whine, and bounded towards me: he almost knocked the tray from my hands. I set it on the table; then patted him, and said softly, "Lie down!" Mr. Rochester turned mechanically to _see_ what the commotion was: but as he _saw_ nothing, he returned and sighed. "Give me the water, Mary," he said. I approached him with the now only half-filled glass; Pilot followed me, still excited. "What is the matter?" he inquired. "Down, Pilot!" I again said. He checked the water on its way to his lips, and seemed to listen: he drank, and put the glass down. "This is you, Mary, is it not?" "Mary is in the kitchen," I answered. He put out his hand with a quick gesture, but not seeing where I stood, he did not touch me. "Who is this? Who is this?" he demanded, trying, as it seemed, to _see_ with those sightless eyes--unavailing and distressing attempt! "Answer me--speak again!" he ordered, imperiously and aloud. "Will you have a little more water, sir? I spilt half of what was in the glass," I said. "_Who_ is it? _What_ is it? Who speaks?" "Pilot knows me, and John and Mary know I am here. I came only this evening," I answered. "Great God!--what delusion has come over me? What sweet madness has seized me?" "No delusion--no madness: your mind, sir, is too strong for delusion, your health too sound for frenzy." "And where is the speaker? Is it only a voice? Oh! I _cannot_ see, but I must feel, or my heart will stop and my brain burst. Whatever--whoever you are--be perceptible to the touch or I cannot live!" He groped; I arrested his wandering hand, and prisoned it in both mine. "Her very fingers!" he cried; "her small, slight fingers! If so there must be more of her." The muscular hand broke from my custody; my arm was seized, my shoulder--neck--waist--I was entwined and gathered to him. "Is it Jane? _What_ is it? This is her shape--this is her size--" "And this her voice," I added. "She is all here: her heart, too. God bless you, sir! I am glad to be so near you again." "Jane Eyre!--Jane Eyre," was all he said. "My dear master," I answered, "I am Jane Eyre: I have found you out--I am come back to you." "In truth?--in the flesh? My living Jane?" "You touch me, sir,--you hold me, and fast enough: I am not cold like a corpse, nor vacant like air, am I?" "My living darling! These are certainly her limbs, and these her features; but I cannot be so blest, after all my misery. It is a dream; such dreams as I have had at night when I have clasped her once more to my heart, as I do now; and kissed her, as thus--and felt that she loved me, and trusted that she would not leave me." "Which I never will, sir, from this day." "Never will, says the vision? But I always woke and found it an empty mockery; and I was desolate and abandoned--my life dark, lonely, hopeless--my soul athirst and forbidden to drink--my heart famished and never to be fed. Gentle, soft dream, nestling in my arms now, you will fly, too, as your sisters have all fled before you: but kiss me before you go--embrace me, Jane." "There, sir--and there!"' I pressed my lips to his once brilliant and now rayless eyes--I swept his hair from his brow, and kissed that too. He suddenly seemed to arouse himself: the conviction of the reality of all this seized him. "It is you--is it, Jane? You are come back to me then?" "I am." "And you do not lie dead in some ditch under some stream? And you are not a pining outcast amongst strangers?" "No, sir! I am an independent woman now." "Independent! What do you mean, Jane?" "My uncle in Madeira is dead, and he left me five thousand pounds." "Ah! this is practical--this is real!" he cried: "I should never dream that. Besides, there is that peculiar voice of hers, so animating and piquant, as well as soft: it cheers my withered heart; it puts life into it.--What, Janet! Are you an independent woman? A rich woman?" "If you won't let me live with you, I can build a house of my own close up to your door, and you may come and sit in my parlour when you want company of an evening." "But as you are rich, Jane, you have now, no doubt, friends who will look after you, and not suffer you to devote yourself to a blind lameter like me?" "I told you I am independent, sir, as well as rich: I am my own mistress." "And you will stay with me?" "Certainly--unless you object. I will be your neighbour, your nurse, your housekeeper. I find you lonely: I will be your companion--to read to you, to walk with you, to sit with you, to wait on you, to be eyes and hands to you. Cease to look so melancholy, my dear master; you shall not be left desolate, so long as I live." He replied not: he seemed serious--abstracted; he sighed; he half-opened his lips as if to speak: he closed them again. I felt a little embarrassed. Perhaps I had too rashly over-leaped conventionalities; and he, like St. John, saw impropriety in my inconsiderateness. I had indeed made my proposal from the idea that he wished and would ask me to be his wife: an expectation, not the less certain because unexpressed, had buoyed me up, that he would claim me at once as his own. But no hint to that effect escaping him and his countenance becoming more overcast, I suddenly remembered that I might have been all wrong, and was perhaps playing the fool unwittingly; and I began gently to withdraw myself from his arms--but he eagerly snatched me closer. "No--no--Jane; you must not go. No--I have touched you, heard you, felt the comfort of your presence--the sweetness of your consolation: I cannot give up these joys. I have little left in myself--I must have you. The world may laugh--may call me absurd, selfish--but it does not signify. My very soul demands you: it will be satisfied, or it will take deadly vengeance on its frame." "Well, sir, I will stay with you: I have said so." "Yes--but you understand one thing by staying with me; and I understand another. You, perhaps, could make up your mind to be about my hand and chair--to wait on me as a kind little nurse (for you have an affectionate heart and a generous spirit, which prompt you to make sacrifices for those you pity), and that ought to suffice for me no doubt. I suppose I should now entertain none but fatherly feelings for you: do you think so? Come--tell me." "I will think what you like, sir: I am content to be only your nurse, if you think it better." "But you cannot always be my nurse, Janet: you are young--you must marry one day." "I don't care about being married." "You should care, Janet: if I were what I once was, I would try to make you care--but--a sightless block!" He relapsed again into gloom. I, on the contrary, became more cheerful, and took fresh courage: these last words gave me an insight as to where the difficulty lay; and as it was no difficulty with me, I felt quite relieved from my previous embarrassment. I resumed a livelier vein of conversation. "It is time some one undertook to rehumanise you," said I, parting his thick and long uncut locks; "for I see you are being metamorphosed into a lion, or something of that sort. You have a 'faux air' of Nebuchadnezzar in the fields about you, that is certain: your hair reminds me of eagles' feathers; whether your nails are grown like birds' claws or not, I have not yet noticed." "On this arm, I have neither hand nor nails," he said, drawing the mutilated limb from his breast, and showing it to me. "It is a mere stump--a ghastly sight! Don't you think so, Jane?" "It is a pity to see it; and a pity to see your eyes--and the scar of fire on your forehead: and the worst of it is, one is in danger of loving you too well for all this; and making too much of you." "I thought you would be revolted, Jane, when you saw my arm, and my cicatrised visage." "Did you? Don't tell me so--lest I should say something disparaging to your judgment. Now, let me leave you an instant, to make a better fire, and have the hearth swept up. Can you tell when there is a good fire?" "Yes; with the right eye I see a glow--a ruddy haze." "And you see the candles?" "Very dimly--each is a luminous cloud." "Can you see me?" "No, my fairy: but I am only too thankful to hear and feel you." "When do you take supper?" "I never take supper." "But you shall have some to-night. I am hungry: so are you, I daresay, only you forget." Summoning Mary, I soon had the room in more cheerful order: I prepared him, likewise, a comfortable repast. My spirits were excited, and with pleasure and ease I talked to him during supper, and for a long time after. There was no harassing restraint, no repressing of glee and vivacity with him; for with him I was at perfect ease, because I knew I suited him; all I said or did seemed either to console or revive him. Delightful consciousness! It brought to life and light my whole nature: in his presence I thoroughly lived; and he lived in mine. Blind as he was, smiles played over his face, joy dawned on his forehead: his lineaments softened and warmed. After supper, he began to ask me many questions, of where I had been, what I had been doing, how I had found him out; but I gave him only very partial replies: it was too late to enter into particulars that night. Besides, I wished to touch no deep-thrilling chord--to open no fresh well of emotion in his heart: my sole present aim was to cheer him. Cheered, as I have said, he was: and yet but by fits. If a moment's silence broke the conversation, he would turn restless, touch me, then say, "Jane." "You are altogether a human being, Jane? You are certain of that?" {You are altogether a human being, Jane? You are certain of that?: p422.jpg} "I conscientiously believe so, Mr. Rochester." "Yet how, on this dark and doleful evening, could you so suddenly rise on my lone hearth? I stretched my hand to take a glass of water from a hireling, and it was given me by you: I asked a question, expecting John's wife to answer me, and your voice spoke at my ear." "Because I had come in, in Mary's stead, with the tray." "And there is enchantment in the very hour I am now spending with you. Who can tell what a dark, dreary, hopeless life I have dragged on for months past? Doing nothing, expecting nothing; merging night in day; feeling but the sensation of cold when I let the fire go out, of hunger when I forgot to eat: and then a ceaseless sorrow, and, at times, a very delirium of desire to behold my Jane again. Yes: for her restoration I longed, far more than for that of my lost sight. How can it be that Jane is with me, and says she loves me? Will she not depart as suddenly as she came? To-morrow, I fear I shall find her no more." A commonplace, practical reply, out of the train of his own disturbed ideas, was, I was sure, the best and most reassuring for him in this frame of mind. I passed my finger over his eyebrows, and remarked that they were scorched, and that I would apply something which would make them grow as broad and black as ever. "Where is the use of doing me good in any way, beneficent spirit, when, at some fatal moment, you will again desert me--passing like a shadow, whither and how to me unknown, and for me remaining afterwards undiscoverable? "Have you a pocket-comb about you, sir?" "What for, Jane?" "Just to comb out this shaggy black mane. I find you rather alarming, when I examine you close at hand: you talk of my being a fairy, but I am sure, you are more like a brownie." "Am I hideous, Jane?" "Very, sir: you always were, you know." "Humph! The wickedness has not been taken out of you, wherever you have sojourned." "Yet I have been with good people; far better than you: a hundred times better people; possessed of ideas and views you never entertained in your life: quite more refined and exalted." "Who the deuce have you been with?" "If you twist in that way you will make me pull the hair out of your head; and then I think you will cease to entertain doubts of my substantiality." "Who have you been with, Jane?" "You shall not get it out of me to-night, sir; you must wait till to-morrow; to leave my tale half told, will, you know, be a sort of security that I shall appear at your breakfast table to finish it. By the bye, I must mind not to rise on your hearth with only a glass of water then: I must bring an egg at the least, to say nothing of fried ham." "You mocking changeling--fairy-born and human-bred! You make me feel as I have not felt these twelve months. If Saul could have had you for his David, the evil spirit would have been exorcised without the aid of the harp." "There, sir, you are redd up and made decent. Now I'll leave you: I have been travelling these last three days, and I believe I am tired. Good night." "Just one word, Jane: were there only ladies in the house where you have been?" I laughed and made my escape, still laughing as I ran upstairs. "A good idea!" I thought with glee. "I see I have the means of fretting him out of his melancholy for some time to come." Very early the next morning I heard him up and astir, wandering from one room to another. As soon as Mary came down I heard the question: "Is Miss Eyre here?" Then: "Which room did you put her into? Was it dry? Is she up? Go and ask if she wants anything; and when she will come down." I came down as soon as I thought there was a prospect of breakfast. Entering the room very softly, I had a view of him before he discovered my presence. It was mournful, indeed, to witness the subjugation of that vigorous spirit to a corporeal infirmity. He sat in his chair--still, but not at rest: expectant evidently; the lines of now habitual sadness marking his strong features. His countenance reminded one of a lamp quenched, waiting to be re-lit--and alas! it was not himself that could now kindle the lustre of animated expression: he was dependent on another for that office! I had meant to be gay and careless, but the powerlessness of the strong man touched my heart to the quick: still I accosted him with what vivacity I could. "It is a bright, sunny morning, sir," I said. "The rain is over and gone, and there is a tender shining after it: you shall have a walk soon." I had wakened the glow: his features beamed. "Oh, you are indeed there, my skylark! Come to me. You are not gone: not vanished? I heard one of your kind an hour ago, singing high over the wood: but its song had no music for me, any more than the rising sun had rays. All the melody on earth is concentrated in my Jane's tongue to my ear (I am glad it is not naturally a silent one): all the sunshine I can feel is in her presence." The water stood in my eyes to hear this avowal of his dependence; just as if a royal eagle, chained to a perch, should be forced to entreat a sparrow to become its purveyor. But I would not be lachrymose: I dashed off the salt drops, and busied myself with preparing breakfast. Most of the morning was spent in the open air. I led him out of the wet and wild wood into some cheerful fields: I described to him how brilliantly green they were; how the flowers and hedges looked refreshed; how sparklingly blue was the sky. I sought a seat for him in a hidden and lovely spot, a dry stump of a tree; nor did I refuse to let him, when seated, place me on his knee. Why should I, when both he and I were happier near than apart? Pilot lay beside us: all was quiet. He broke out suddenly while clasping me in his arms-- "Cruel, cruel deserter! Oh, Jane, what did I feel when I discovered you had fled from Thornfield, and when I could nowhere find you; and, after examining your apartment, ascertained that you had taken no money, nor anything which could serve as an equivalent! A pearl necklace I had given you lay untouched in its little casket; your trunks were left corded and locked as they had been prepared for the bridal tour. What could my darling do, I asked, left destitute and penniless? And what did she do? Let me hear now." Thus urged, I began the narrative of my experience for the last year. I softened considerably what related to the three days of wandering and starvation, because to have told him all would have been to inflict unnecessary pain: the little I did say lacerated his faithful heart deeper than I wished. I should not have left him thus, he said, without any means of making my way: I should have told him my intention. I should have confided in him: he would never have forced me to be his mistress. Violent as he had seemed in his despair, he, in truth, loved me far too well and too tenderly to constitute himself my tyrant: he would have given me half his fortune, without demanding so much as a kiss in return, rather than I should have flung myself friendless on the wide world. I had endured, he was certain, more than I had confessed to him. "Well, whatever my sufferings had been, they were very short," I answered: and then I proceeded to tell him how I had been received at Moor House; how I had obtained the office of schoolmistress, &c. The accession of fortune, the discovery of my relations, followed in due order. Of course, St. John Rivers' name came in frequently in the progress of my tale. When I had done, that name was immediately taken up. "This St. John, then, is your cousin?" "Yes." "You have spoken of him often: do you like him?" "He was a very good man, sir; I could not help liking him." "A good man. Does that mean a respectable well-conducted man of fifty? Or what does it mean?" "St John was only twenty-nine, sir." "'_Jeune encore_,' as the French say. Is he a person of low stature, phlegmatic, and plain. A person whose goodness consists rather in his guiltlessness of vice, than in his prowess in virtue." "He is untiringly active. Great and exalted deeds are what he lives to perform." "But his brain? That is probably rather soft? He means well: but you shrug your shoulders to hear him talk?" "He talks little, sir: what he does say is ever to the point. His brain is first-rate, I should think not impressible, but vigorous." "Is he an able man, then?" "Truly able." "A thoroughly educated man?" "St. John is an accomplished and profound scholar." "His manners, I think, you said are not to your taste?--priggish and parsonic?" "I never mentioned his manners; but, unless I had a very bad taste, they must suit it; they are polished, calm, and gentlemanlike." "His appearance,--I forget what description you gave of his appearance;--a sort of raw curate, half strangled with his white neckcloth, and stilted up on his thick-soled high-lows, eh?" "St. John dresses well. He is a handsome man: tall, fair, with blue eyes, and a Grecian profile." (Aside.) "Damn him!"--(To me.) "Did you like him, Jane?" "Yes, Mr. Rochester, I liked him: but you asked me that before." I perceived, of course, the drift of my interlocutor. Jealousy had got hold of him: she stung him; but the sting was salutary: it gave him respite from the gnawing fang of melancholy. I would not, therefore, immediately charm the snake. "Perhaps you would rather not sit any longer on my knee, Miss Eyre?" was the next somewhat unexpected observation. "Why not, Mr. Rochester?" "The picture you have just drawn is suggestive of a rather too overwhelming contrast. Your words have delineated very prettily a graceful Apollo: he is present to your imagination,--tall, fair, blue- eyed, and with a Grecian profile. Your eyes dwell on a Vulcan,--a real blacksmith, brown, broad-shouldered: and blind and lame into the bargain." "I never thought of it, before; but you certainly are rather like Vulcan, sir." "Well, you can leave me, ma'am: but before you go" (and he retained me by a firmer grasp than ever), "you will be pleased just to answer me a question or two." He paused. "What questions, Mr. Rochester?" Then followed this cross-examination. "St. John made you schoolmistress of Morton before he knew you were his cousin?" "Yes." "You would often see him? He would visit the school sometimes?" "Daily." "He would approve of your plans, Jane? I know they would be clever, for you are a talented creature!" "He approved of them--yes." "He would discover many things in you he could not have expected to find? Some of your accomplishments are not ordinary." "I don't know about that." "You had a little cottage near the school, you say: did he ever come there to see you?" "Now and then?" "Of an evening?" "Once or twice." A pause. "How long did you reside with him and his sisters after the cousinship was discovered?" "Five months." "Did Rivers spend much time with the ladies of his family?" "Yes; the back parlour was both his study and ours: he sat near the window, and we by the table." "Did he study much?" "A good deal." "What?" "Hindostanee." "And what did you do meantime?" "I learnt German, at first." "Did he teach you?" "He did not understand German." "Did he teach you nothing?" "A little Hindostanee." "Rivers taught you Hindostanee?" "Yes, sir." "And his sisters also?" "No." "Only you?" "Only me." "Did you ask to learn?" "No." "He wished to teach you?" "Yes." A second pause. "Why did he wish it? Of what use could Hindostanee be to you?" "He intended me to go with him to India." "Ah! here I reach the root of the matter. He wanted you to marry him?" "He asked me to marry him." "That is a fiction--an impudent invention to vex me." "I beg your pardon, it is the literal truth: he asked me more than once, and was as stiff about urging his point as ever you could be." "Miss Eyre, I repeat it, you can leave me. How often am I to say the same thing? Why do you remain pertinaciously perched on my knee, when I have given you notice to quit?" "Because I am comfortable there." "No, Jane, you are not comfortable there, because your heart is not with me: it is with this cousin--this St. John. Oh, till this moment, I thought my little Jane was all mine! I had a belief she loved me even when she left me: that was an atom of sweet in much bitter. Long as we have been parted, hot tears as I have wept over our separation, I never thought that while I was mourning her, she was loving another! But it is useless grieving. Jane, leave me: go and marry Rivers." "Shake me off, then, sir,--push me away, for I'll not leave you of my own accord." "Jane, I ever like your tone of voice: it still renews hope, it sounds so truthful. When I hear it, it carries me back a year. I forget that you have formed a new tie. But I am not a fool--go--" "Where must I go, sir?" "Your own way--with the husband you have chosen." "Who is that?" "You know--this St. John Rivers." "He is not my husband, nor ever will be. He does not love me: I do not love him. He loves (as he _can_ love, and that is not as you love) a beautiful young lady called Rosamond. He wanted to marry me only because he thought I should make a suitable missionary's wife, which she would not have done. He is good and great, but severe; and, for me, cold as an iceberg. He is not like you, sir: I am not happy at his side, nor near him, nor with him. He has no indulgence for me--no fondness. He sees nothing attractive in me; not even youth--only a few useful mental points.--Then I must leave you, sir, to go to him?" I shuddered involuntarily, and clung instinctively closer to my blind but beloved master. He smiled. "What, Jane! Is this true? Is such really the state of matters between you and Rivers?" "Absolutely, sir! Oh, you need not be jealous! I wanted to tease you a little to make you less sad: I thought anger would be better than grief. But if you wish me to love you, could you but see how much I _do_ love you, you would be proud and content. All my heart is yours, sir: it belongs to you; and with you it would remain, were fate to exile the rest of me from your presence for ever." Again, as he kissed me, painful thoughts darkened his aspect. "My seared vision! My crippled strength!" he murmured regretfully. I caressed, in order to soothe him. I knew of what he was thinking, and wanted to speak for him, but dared not. As he turned aside his face a minute, I saw a tear slide from under the sealed eyelid, and trickle down the manly cheek. My heart swelled. "I am no better than the old lightning-struck chestnut-tree in Thornfield orchard," he remarked ere long. "And what right would that ruin have to bid a budding woodbine cover its decay with freshness?" "You are no ruin, sir--no lightning-struck tree: you are green and vigorous. Plants will grow about your roots, whether you ask them or not, because they take delight in your bountiful shadow; and as they grow they will lean towards you, and wind round you, because your strength offers them so safe a prop." Again he smiled: I gave him comfort. "You speak of friends, Jane?" he asked. "Yes, of friends," I answered rather hesitatingly: for I knew I meant more than friends, but could not tell what other word to employ. He helped me. "Ah! Jane. But I want a wife." "Do you, sir?" "Yes: is it news to you?" "Of course: you said nothing about it before." "Is it unwelcome news?" "That depends on circumstances, sir--on your choice." "Which you shall make for me, Jane. I will abide by your decision." "Choose then, sir--_her who loves you best_." "I will at least choose--_her I love best_. Jane, will you marry me?" "Yes, sir." "A poor blind man, whom you will have to lead about by the hand?" "Yes, sir." "A crippled man, twenty years older than you, whom you will have to wait on?" "Yes, sir." "Truly, Jane?" "Most truly, sir." "Oh! my darling! God bless you and reward you!" "Mr. Rochester, if ever I did a good deed in my life--if ever I thought a good thought--if ever I prayed a sincere and blameless prayer--if ever I wished a righteous wish,--I am rewarded now. To be your wife is, for me, to be as happy as I can be on earth." "Because you delight in sacrifice." "Sacrifice! What do I sacrifice? Famine for food, expectation for content. To be privileged to put my arms round what I value--to press my lips to what I love--to repose on what I trust: is that to make a sacrifice? If so, then certainly I delight in sacrifice." "And to bear with my infirmities, Jane: to overlook my deficiencies." "Which are none, sir, to me. I love you better now, when I can really be useful to you, than I did in your state of proud independence, when you disdained every part but that of the giver and protector." "Hitherto I have hated to be helped--to be led: henceforth, I feel I shall hate it no more. I did not like to put my hand into a hireling's, but it is pleasant to feel it circled by Jane's little fingers. I preferred utter loneliness to the constant attendance of servants; but Jane's soft ministry will be a perpetual joy. Jane suits me: do I suit her?" "To the finest fibre of my nature, sir." "The case being so, we have nothing in the world to wait for: we must be married instantly." He looked and spoke with eagerness: his old impetuosity was rising. "We must become one flesh without any delay, Jane: there is but the licence to get--then we marry." "Mr. Rochester, I have just discovered the sun is far declined from its meridian, and Pilot is actually gone home to his dinner. Let me look at your watch." "Fasten it into your girdle, Janet, and keep it henceforward: I have no use for it." "It is nearly four o'clock in the afternoon, sir. Don't you feel hungry?" "The third day from this must be our wedding-day, Jane. Never mind fine clothes and jewels, now: all that is not worth a fillip." "The sun has dried up all the rain-drops, sir. The breeze is still: it is quite hot." "Do you know, Jane, I have your little pearl necklace at this moment fastened round my bronze scrag under my cravat? I have worn it since the day I lost my only treasure, as a memento of her." "We will go home through the wood: that will be the shadiest way." He pursued his own thoughts without heeding me. "Jane! you think me, I daresay, an irreligious dog: but my heart swells with gratitude to the beneficent God of this earth just now. He sees not as man sees, but far clearer: judges not as man judges, but far more wisely. I did wrong: I would have sullied my innocent flower--breathed guilt on its purity: the Omnipotent snatched it from me. I, in my stiff- necked rebellion, almost cursed the dispensation: instead of bending to the decree, I defied it. Divine justice pursued its course; disasters came thick on me: I was forced to pass through the valley of the shadow of death. _His_ chastisements are mighty; and one smote me which has humbled me for ever. You know I was proud of my strength: but what is it now, when I must give it over to foreign guidance, as a child does its weakness? Of late, Jane--only--only of late--I began to see and acknowledge the hand of God in my doom. I began to experience remorse, repentance; the wish for reconcilement to my Maker. I began sometimes to pray: very brief prayers they were, but very sincere. "Some days since: nay, I can number them--four; it was last Monday night, a singular mood came over me: one in which grief replaced frenzy--sorrow, sullenness. I had long had the impression that since I could nowhere find you, you must be dead. Late that night--perhaps it might be between eleven and twelve o'clock--ere I retired to my dreary rest, I supplicated God, that, if it seemed good to Him, I might soon be taken from this life, and admitted to that world to come, where there was still hope of rejoining Jane. "I was in my own room, and sitting by the window, which was open: it soothed me to feel the balmy night-air; though I could see no stars and only by a vague, luminous haze, knew the presence of a moon. I longed for thee, Janet! Oh, I longed for thee both with soul and flesh! I asked of God, at once in anguish and humility, if I had not been long enough desolate, afflicted, tormented; and might not soon taste bliss and peace once more. That I merited all I endured, I acknowledged--that I could scarcely endure more, I pleaded; and the alpha and omega of my heart's wishes broke involuntarily from my lips in the words--'Jane! Jane! Jane!'" "Did you speak these words aloud?" "I did, Jane. If any listener had heard me, he would have thought me mad: I pronounced them with such frantic energy." "And it was last Monday night, somewhere near midnight?" "Yes; but the time is of no consequence: what followed is the strange point. You will think me superstitious,--some superstition I have in my blood, and always had: nevertheless, this is true--true at least it is that I heard what I now relate. "As I exclaimed 'Jane! Jane! Jane!' a voice--I cannot tell whence the voice came, but I know whose voice it was--replied, 'I am coming: wait for me;' and a moment after, went whispering on the wind the words--'Where are you?' "I'll tell you, if I can, the idea, the picture these words opened to my mind: yet it is difficult to express what I want to express. Ferndean is buried, as you see, in a heavy wood, where sound falls dull, and dies unreverberating. 'Where are you?' seemed spoken amongst mountains; for I heard a hill-sent echo repeat the words. Cooler and fresher at the moment the gale seemed to visit my brow: I could have deemed that in some wild, lone scene, I and Jane were meeting. In spirit, I believe we must have met. You no doubt were, at that hour, in unconscious sleep, Jane: perhaps your soul wandered from its cell to comfort mine; for those were your accents--as certain as I live--they were yours!" Reader, it was on Monday night--near midnight--that I too had received the mysterious summons: those were the very words by which I replied to it. I listened to Mr. Rochester's narrative, but made no disclosure in return. The coincidence struck me as too awful and inexplicable to be communicated or discussed. If I told anything, my tale would be such as must necessarily make a profound impression on the mind of my hearer: and that mind, yet from its sufferings too prone to gloom, needed not the deeper shade of the supernatural. I kept these things then, and pondered them in my heart. "You cannot now wonder," continued my master, "that when you rose upon me so unexpectedly last night, I had difficulty in believing you any other than a mere voice and vision, something that would melt to silence and annihilation, as the midnight whisper and mountain echo had melted before. Now, I thank God! I know it to be otherwise. Yes, I thank God!" He put me off his knee, rose, and reverently lifting his hat from his brow, and bending his sightless eyes to the earth, he stood in mute devotion. Only the last words of the worship were audible. "I thank my Maker, that, in the midst of judgment, he has remembered mercy. I humbly entreat my Redeemer to give me strength to lead henceforth a purer life than I have done hitherto!" Then he stretched his hand out to be led. I took that dear hand, held it a moment to my lips, then let it pass round my shoulder: being so much lower of stature than he, I served both for his prop and guide. We entered the wood, and wended homeward. CHAPTER XXXVIII--CONCLUSION Reader, I married him. A quiet wedding we had: he and I, the parson and clerk, were alone present. When we got back from church, I went into the kitchen of the manor-house, where Mary was cooking the dinner and John cleaning the knives, and I said-- "Mary, I have been married to Mr. Rochester this morning." The housekeeper and her husband were both of that decent phlegmatic order of people, to whom one may at any time safely communicate a remarkable piece of news without incurring the danger of having one's ears pierced by some shrill ejaculation, and subsequently stunned by a torrent of wordy wonderment. Mary did look up, and she did stare at me: the ladle with which she was basting a pair of chickens roasting at the fire, did for some three minutes hang suspended in air; and for the same space of time John's knives also had rest from the polishing process: but Mary, bending again over the roast, said only-- "Have you, Miss? Well, for sure!" A short time after she pursued--"I seed you go out with the master, but I didn't know you were gone to church to be wed;" and she basted away. John, when I turned to him, was grinning from ear to ear. "I telled Mary how it would be," he said: "I knew what Mr. Edward" (John was an old servant, and had known his master when he was the cadet of the house, therefore, he often gave him his Christian name)--"I knew what Mr. Edward would do; and I was certain he would not wait long neither: and he's done right, for aught I know. I wish you joy, Miss!" and he politely pulled his forelock. "Thank you, John. Mr. Rochester told me to give you and Mary this." I put into his hand a five-pound note. Without waiting to hear more, I left the kitchen. In passing the door of that sanctum some time after, I caught the words-- "She'll happen do better for him nor ony o't' grand ladies." And again, "If she ben't one o' th' handsomest, she's noan faal and varry good-natured; and i' his een she's fair beautiful, onybody may see that." I wrote to Moor House and to Cambridge immediately, to say what I had done: fully explaining also why I had thus acted. Diana and Mary approved the step unreservedly. Diana announced that she would just give me time to get over the honeymoon, and then she would come and see me. "She had better not wait till then, Jane," said Mr. Rochester, when I read her letter to him; "if she does, she will be too late, for our honeymoon will shine our life long: its beams will only fade over your grave or mine." How St. John received the news, I don't know: he never answered the letter in which I communicated it: yet six months after he wrote to me, without, however, mentioning Mr. Rochester's name or alluding to my marriage. His letter was then calm, and, though very serious, kind. He has maintained a regular, though not frequent, correspondence ever since: he hopes I am happy, and trusts I am not of those who live without God in the world, and only mind earthly things. You have not quite forgotten little Adele, have you, reader? I had not; I soon asked and obtained leave of Mr. Rochester, to go and see her at the school where he had placed her. Her frantic joy at beholding me again moved me much. She looked pale and thin: she said she was not happy. I found the rules of the establishment were too strict, its course of study too severe for a child of her age: I took her home with me. I meant to become her governess once more, but I soon found this impracticable; my time and cares were now required by another--my husband needed them all. So I sought out a school conducted on a more indulgent system, and near enough to permit of my visiting her often, and bringing her home sometimes. I took care she should never want for anything that could contribute to her comfort: she soon settled in her new abode, became very happy there, and made fair progress in her studies. As she grew up, a sound English education corrected in a great measure her French defects; and when she left school, I found in her a pleasing and obliging companion: docile, good-tempered, and well-principled. By her grateful attention to me and mine, she has long since well repaid any little kindness I ever had it in my power to offer her. My tale draws to its close: one word respecting my experience of married life, and one brief glance at the fortunes of those whose names have most frequently recurred in this narrative, and I have done. I have now been married ten years. I know what it is to live entirely for and with what I love best on earth. I hold myself supremely blest--blest beyond what language can express; because I am my husband's life as fully as he is mine. No woman was ever nearer to her mate than I am: ever more absolutely bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. I know no weariness of my Edward's society: he knows none of mine, any more than we each do of the pulsation of the heart that beats in our separate bosoms; consequently, we are ever together. To be together is for us to be at once as free as in solitude, as gay as in company. We talk, I believe, all day long: to talk to each other is but a more animated and an audible thinking. All my confidence is bestowed on him, all his confidence is devoted to me; we are precisely suited in character--perfect concord is the result. Mr. Rochester continued blind the first two years of our union; perhaps it was that circumstance that drew us so very near--that knit us so very close: for I was then his vision, as I am still his right hand. Literally, I was (what he often called me) the apple of his eye. He saw nature--he saw books through me; and never did I weary of gazing for his behalf, and of putting into words the effect of field, tree, town, river, cloud, sunbeam--of the landscape before us; of the weather round us--and impressing by sound on his ear what light could no longer stamp on his eye. Never did I weary of reading to him; never did I weary of conducting him where he wished to go: of doing for him what he wished to be done. And there was a pleasure in my services, most full, most exquisite, even though sad--because he claimed these services without painful shame or damping humiliation. He loved me so truly, that he knew no reluctance in profiting by my attendance: he felt I loved him so fondly, that to yield that attendance was to indulge my sweetest wishes. One morning at the end of the two years, as I was writing a letter to his dictation, he came and bent over me, and said--"Jane, have you a glittering ornament round your neck?" I had a gold watch-chain: I answered "Yes." "And have you a pale blue dress on?" {And have you a pale blue dress on?: p435.jpg} I had. He informed me then, that for some time he had fancied the obscurity clouding one eye was becoming less dense; and that now he was sure of it. He and I went up to London. He had the advice of an eminent oculist; and he eventually recovered the sight of that one eye. He cannot now see very distinctly: he cannot read or write much; but he can find his way without being led by the hand: the sky is no longer a blank to him--the earth no longer a void. When his first-born was put into his arms, he could see that the boy had inherited his own eyes, as they once were--large, brilliant, and black. On that occasion, he again, with a full heart, acknowledged that God had tempered judgment with mercy. My Edward and I, then, are happy: and the more so, because those we most love are happy likewise. Diana and Mary Rivers are both married: alternately, once every year, they come to see us, and we go to see them. Diana's husband is a captain in the navy, a gallant officer and a good man. Mary's is a clergyman, a college friend of her brother's, and, from his attainments and principles, worthy of the connection. Both Captain Fitzjames and Mr. Wharton love their wives, and are loved by them. As to St. John Rivers, he left England: he went to India. He entered on the path he had marked for himself; he pursues it still. A more resolute, indefatigable pioneer never wrought amidst rocks and dangers. Firm, faithful, and devoted, full of energy, and zeal, and truth, he labours for his race; he clears their painful way to improvement; he hews down like a giant the prejudices of creed and caste that encumber it. He may be stern; he may be exacting; he may be ambitious yet; but his is the sternness of the warrior Greatheart, who guards his pilgrim convoy from the onslaught of Apollyon. His is the exaction of the apostle, who speaks but for Christ, when he says--"Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me." His is the ambition of the high master-spirit, which aims to fill a place in the first rank of those who are redeemed from the earth--who stand without fault before the throne of God, who share the last mighty victories of the Lamb, who are called, and chosen, and faithful. St. John is unmarried: he never will marry now. Himself has hitherto sufficed to the toil, and the toil draws near its close: his glorious sun hastens to its setting. The last letter I received from him drew from my eyes human tears, and yet filled my heart with divine joy: he anticipated his sure reward, his incorruptible crown. I know that a stranger's hand will write to me next, to say that the good and faithful servant has been called at length into the joy of his Lord. And why weep for this? No fear of death will darken St. John's last hour: his mind will be unclouded, his heart will be undaunted, his hope will be sure, his faith steadfast. His own words are a pledge of this-- "My Master," he says, "has forewarned me. Daily He announces more distinctly,--'Surely I come quickly!' and hourly I more eagerly respond,--'Amen; even so come, Lord Jesus!'" 
583	----	The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins CONTENTS First Epoch THE STORY BEGUN BY WALTER HARTRIGHT THE STORY CONTINUED BY VINCENT GILMORE THE STORY CONTINUED BY MARIAN HALCOMBE Second Epoch THE STORY CONTINUED BY MARIAN HALCOMBE. THE STORY CONTINUED BY FREDERICK FAIRLIE, ESQ. THE STORY CONTINUED BY ELIZA MICHELSON THE STORY CONTINUED IN SEVERAL NARRATIVES THE NARRATIVE OF HESTER PINHORN THE NARRATIVE OF THE DOCTOR THE NARRATIVE OF JANE GOULD THE NARRATIVE OF THE TOMBSTONE THE NARRATIVE OF WALTER HARTRIGHT Third Epoch THE STORY CONTINUED BY WALTER HARTRIGHT. THE STORY CONTINUED BY MRS. CATHERICK THE STORY CONTINUED BY WALTER HARTRIGHT THE STORY CONTINUED BY ISIDOR, OTTAVIO, BALDASSARE FOSCO THE STORY CONCLUDED BY WALTER HARTRIGHT THE STORY BEGUN BY WALTER HARTRIGHT (of Clement's Inn, Teacher of Drawing) This is the story of what a Woman's patience can endure, and what a Man's resolution can achieve. If the machinery of the Law could be depended on to fathom every case of suspicion, and to conduct every process of inquiry, with moderate assistance only from the lubricating influences of oil of gold, the events which fill these pages might have claimed their share of the public attention in a Court of Justice. But the Law is still, in certain inevitable cases, the pre-engaged servant of the long purse; and the story is left to be told, for the first time, in this place. As the Judge might once have heard it, so the Reader shall hear it now. No circumstance of importance, from the beginning to the end of the disclosure, shall be related on hearsay evidence. When the writer of these introductory lines (Walter Hartright by name) happens to be more closely connected than others with the incidents to be recorded, he will describe them in his own person. When his experience fails, he will retire from the position of narrator; and his task will be continued, from the point at which he has left it off, by other persons who can speak to the circumstances under notice from their own knowledge, just as clearly and positively as he has spoken before them. Thus, the story here presented will be told by more than one pen, as the story of an offence against the laws is told in Court by more than one witness--with the same object, in both cases, to present the truth always in its most direct and most intelligible aspect; and to trace the course of one complete series of events, by making the persons who have been most closely connected with them, at each successive stage, relate their own experience, word for word. Let Walter Hartright, teacher of drawing, aged twenty-eight years, be heard first. II It was the last day of July. The long hot summer was drawing to a close; and we, the weary pilgrims of the London pavement, were beginning to think of the cloud-shadows on the corn-fields, and the autumn breezes on the sea-shore. For my own poor part, the fading summer left me out of health, out of spirits, and, if the truth must be told, out of money as well. During the past year I had not managed my professional resources as carefully as usual; and my extravagance now limited me to the prospect of spending the autumn economically between my mother's cottage at Hampstead and my own chambers in town. The evening, I remember, was still and cloudy; the London air was at its heaviest; the distant hum of the street-traffic was at its faintest; the small pulse of the life within me, and the great heart of the city around me, seemed to be sinking in unison, languidly and more languidly, with the sinking sun. I roused myself from the book which I was dreaming over rather than reading, and left my chambers to meet the cool night air in the suburbs. It was one of the two evenings in every week which I was accustomed to spend with my mother and my sister. So I turned my steps northward in the direction of Hampstead. Events which I have yet to relate make it necessary to mention in this place that my father had been dead some years at the period of which I am now writing; and that my sister Sarah and I were the sole survivors of a family of five children. My father was a drawing-master before me. His exertions had made him highly successful in his profession; and his affectionate anxiety to provide for the future of those who were dependent on his labours had impelled him, from the time of his marriage, to devote to the insuring of his life a much larger portion of his income than most men consider it necessary to set aside for that purpose. Thanks to his admirable prudence and self-denial my mother and sister were left, after his death, as independent of the world as they had been during his lifetime. I succeeded to his connection, and had every reason to feel grateful for the prospect that awaited me at my starting in life. The quiet twilight was still trembling on the topmost ridges of the heath; and the view of London below me had sunk into a black gulf in the shadow of the cloudy night, when I stood before the gate of my mother's cottage. I had hardly rung the bell before the house door was opened violently; my worthy Italian friend, Professor Pesca, appeared in the servant's place; and darted out joyously to receive me, with a shrill foreign parody on an English cheer. On his own account, and, I must be allowed to add, on mine also, the Professor merits the honour of a formal introduction. Accident has made him the starting-point of the strange family story which it is the purpose of these pages to unfold. I had first become acquainted with my Italian friend by meeting him at certain great houses where he taught his own language and I taught drawing. All I then knew of the history of his life was, that he had once held a situation in the University of Padua; that he had left Italy for political reasons (the nature of which he uniformly declined to mention to any one); and that he had been for many years respectably established in London as a teacher of languages. Without being actually a dwarf--for he was perfectly well proportioned from head to foot--Pesca was, I think, the smallest human being I ever saw out of a show-room. Remarkable anywhere, by his personal appearance, he was still further distinguished among the rank and file of mankind by the harmless eccentricity of his character. The ruling idea of his life appeared to be, that he was bound to show his gratitude to the country which had afforded him an asylum and a means of subsistence by doing his utmost to turn himself into an Englishman. Not content with paying the nation in general the compliment of invariably carrying an umbrella, and invariably wearing gaiters and a white hat, the Professor further aspired to become an Englishman in his habits and amusements, as well as in his personal appearance. Finding us distinguished, as a nation, by our love of athletic exercises, the little man, in the innocence of his heart, devoted himself impromptu to all our English sports and pastimes whenever he had the opportunity of joining them; firmly persuaded that he could adopt our national amusements of the field by an effort of will precisely as he had adopted our national gaiters and our national white hat. I had seen him risk his limbs blindly at a fox-hunt and in a cricket-field; and soon afterwards I saw him risk his life, just as blindly, in the sea at Brighton. We had met there accidentally, and were bathing together. If we had been engaged in any exercise peculiar to my own nation I should, of course, have looked after Pesca carefully; but as foreigners are generally quite as well able to take care of themselves in the water as Englishmen, it never occurred to me that the art of swimming might merely add one more to the list of manly exercises which the Professor believed that he could learn impromptu. Soon after we had both struck out from shore, I stopped, finding my friend did not gain on me, and turned round to look for him. To my horror and amazement, I saw nothing between me and the beach but two little white arms which struggled for an instant above the surface of the water, and then disappeared from view. When I dived for him, the poor little man was lying quietly coiled up at the bottom, in a hollow of shingle, looking by many degrees smaller than I had ever seen him look before. During the few minutes that elapsed while I was taking him in, the air revived him, and he ascended the steps of the machine with my assistance. With the partial recovery of his animation came the return of his wonderful delusion on the subject of swimming. As soon as his chattering teeth would let him speak, he smiled vacantly, and said he thought it must have been the Cramp. When he had thoroughly recovered himself, and had joined me on the beach, his warm Southern nature broke through all artificial English restraints in a moment. He overwhelmed me with the wildest expressions of affection--exclaimed passionately, in his exaggerated Italian way, that he would hold his life henceforth at my disposal--and declared that he should never be happy again until he had found an opportunity of proving his gratitude by rendering me some service which I might remember, on my side, to the end of my days. I did my best to stop the torrent of his tears and protestations by persisting in treating the whole adventure as a good subject for a joke; and succeeded at last, as I imagined, in lessening Pesca's overwhelming sense of obligation to me. Little did I think then--little did I think afterwards when our pleasant holiday had drawn to an end--that the opportunity of serving me for which my grateful companion so ardently longed was soon to come; that he was eagerly to seize it on the instant; and that by so doing he was to turn the whole current of my existence into a new channel, and to alter me to myself almost past recognition. Yet so it was. If I had not dived for Professor Pesca when he lay under water on his shingle bed, I should in all human probability never have been connected with the story which these pages will relate--I should never, perhaps, have heard even the name of the woman who has lived in all my thoughts, who has possessed herself of all my energies, who has become the one guiding influence that now directs the purpose of my life. III Pesca's face and manner, on the evening when we confronted each other at my mother's gate, were more than sufficient to inform me that something extraordinary had happened. It was quite useless, however, to ask him for an immediate explanation. I could only conjecture, while he was dragging me in by both hands, that (knowing my habits) he had come to the cottage to make sure of meeting me that night, and that he had some news to tell of an unusually agreeable kind. We both bounced into the parlour in a highly abrupt and undignified manner. My mother sat by the open window laughing and fanning herself. Pesca was one of her especial favourites and his wildest eccentricities were always pardonable in her eyes. Poor dear soul! from the first moment when she found out that the little Professor was deeply and gratefully attached to her son, she opened her heart to him unreservedly, and took all his puzzling foreign peculiarities for granted, without so much as attempting to understand any one of them. My sister Sarah, with all the advantages of youth, was, strangely enough, less pliable. She did full justice to Pesca's excellent qualities of heart; but she could not accept him implicitly, as my mother accepted him, for my sake. Her insular notions of propriety rose in perpetual revolt against Pesca's constitutional contempt for appearances; and she was always more or less undisguisedly astonished at her mother's familiarity with the eccentric little foreigner. I have observed, not only in my sister's case, but in the instances of others, that we of the young generation are nothing like so hearty and so impulsive as some of our elders. I constantly see old people flushed and excited by the prospect of some anticipated pleasure which altogether fails to ruffle the tranquillity of their serene grandchildren. Are we, I wonder, quite such genuine boys and girls now as our seniors were in their time? Has the great advance in education taken rather too long a stride; and are we in these modern days, just the least trifle in the world too well brought up? Without attempting to answer those questions decisively, I may at least record that I never saw my mother and my sister together in Pesca's society, without finding my mother much the younger woman of the two. On this occasion, for example, while the old lady was laughing heartily over the boyish manner in which we tumbled into the parlour, Sarah was perturbedly picking up the broken pieces of a teacup, which the Professor had knocked off the table in his precipitate advance to meet me at the door. "I don't know what would have happened, Walter," said my mother, "if you had delayed much longer. Pesca has been half mad with impatience, and I have been half mad with curiosity. The Professor has brought some wonderful news with him, in which he says you are concerned; and he has cruelly refused to give us the smallest hint of it till his friend Walter appeared." "Very provoking: it spoils the Set," murmured Sarah to herself, mournfully absorbed over the ruins of the broken cup. While these words were being spoken, Pesca, happily and fussily unconscious of the irreparable wrong which the crockery had suffered at his hands, was dragging a large arm-chair to the opposite end of the room, so as to command us all three, in the character of a public speaker addressing an audience. Having turned the chair with its back towards us, he jumped into it on his knees, and excitedly addressed his small congregation of three from an impromptu pulpit. "Now, my good dears," began Pesca (who always said "good dears" when he meant "worthy friends"), "listen to me. The time has come--I recite my good news--I speak at last." "Hear, hear!" said my mother, humouring the joke. "The next thing he will break, mamma," whispered Sarah, "will be the back of the best arm-chair." "I go back into my life, and I address myself to the noblest of created beings," continued Pesca, vehemently apostrophising my unworthy self over the top rail of the chair. "Who found me dead at the bottom of the sea (through Cramp); and who pulled me up to the top; and what did I say when I got into my own life and my own clothes again?" "Much more than was at all necessary," I answered as doggedly as possible; for the least encouragement in connection with this subject invariably let loose the Professor's emotions in a flood of tears. "I said," persisted Pesca, "that my life belonged to my dear friend, Walter, for the rest of my days--and so it does. I said that I should never be happy again till I had found the opportunity of doing a good Something for Walter--and I have never been contented with myself till this most blessed day. Now," cried the enthusiastic little man at the top of his voice, "the overflowing happiness bursts out of me at every pore of my skin, like a perspiration; for on my faith, and soul, and honour, the something is done at last, and the only word to say now is--Right-all-right!" It may be necessary to explain here that Pesca prided himself on being a perfect Englishman in his language, as well as in his dress, manners, and amusements. Having picked up a few of our most familiar colloquial expressions, he scattered them about over his conversation whenever they happened to occur to him, turning them, in his high relish for their sound and his general ignorance of their sense, into compound words and repetitions of his own, and always running them into each other, as if they consisted of one long syllable. "Among the fine London Houses where I teach the language of my native country," said the Professor, rushing into his long-deferred explanation without another word of preface, "there is one, mighty fine, in the big place called Portland. You all know where that is? Yes, yes--course-of-course. The fine house, my good dears, has got inside it a fine family. A Mamma, fair and fat; three young Misses, fair and fat; two young Misters, fair and fat; and a Papa, the fairest and the fattest of all, who is a mighty merchant, up to his eyes in gold--a fine man once, but seeing that he has got a naked head and two chins, fine no longer at the present time. Now mind! I teach the sublime Dante to the young Misses, and ah!--my-soul-bless-my-soul!--it is not in human language to say how the sublime Dante puzzles the pretty heads of all three! No matter--all in good time--and the more lessons the better for me. Now mind! Imagine to yourselves that I am teaching the young Misses to-day, as usual. We are all four of us down together in the Hell of Dante. At the Seventh Circle--but no matter for that: all the Circles are alike to the three young Misses, fair and fat,--at the Seventh Circle, nevertheless, my pupils are sticking fast; and I, to set them going again, recite, explain, and blow myself up red-hot with useless enthusiasm, when--a creak of boots in the passage outside, and in comes the golden Papa, the mighty merchant with the naked head and the two chins.--Ha! my good dears, I am closer than you think for to the business, now. Have you been patient so far? or have you said to yourselves, 'Deuce-what-the-deuce! Pesca is long-winded to-night?'" We declared that we were deeply interested. The Professor went on: "In his hand, the golden Papa has a letter; and after he has made his excuse for disturbing us in our Infernal Region with the common mortal Business of the house, he addresses himself to the three young Misses, and begins, as you English begin everything in this blessed world that you have to say, with a great O. 'O, my dears,' says the mighty merchant, 'I have got here a letter from my friend, Mr.----'(the name has slipped out of my mind; but no matter; we shall come back to that; yes, yes--right-all-right). So the Papa says, 'I have got a letter from my friend, the Mister; and he wants a recommend from me, of a drawing-master, to go down to his house in the country.' My-soul-bless-my-soul! when I heard the golden Papa say those words, if I had been big enough to reach up to him, I should have put my arms round his neck, and pressed him to my bosom in a long and grateful hug! As it was, I only bounced upon my chair. My seat was on thorns, and my soul was on fire to speak but I held my tongue, and let Papa go on. 'Perhaps you know,' says this good man of money, twiddling his friend's letter this way and that, in his golden fingers and thumbs, 'perhaps you know, my dears, of a drawing-master that I can recommend?' The three young Misses all look at each other, and then say (with the indispensable great O to begin) "O, dear no, Papa! But here is Mr. Pesca' At the mention of myself I can hold no longer--the thought of you, my good dears, mounts like blood to my head--I start from my seat, as if a spike had grown up from the ground through the bottom of my chair--I address myself to the mighty merchant, and I say (English phrase) 'Dear sir, I have the man! The first and foremost drawing-master of the world! Recommend him by the post to-night, and send him off, bag and baggage (English phrase again--ha!), send him off, bag and baggage, by the train to-morrow!' 'Stop, stop,' says Papa; 'is he a foreigner, or an Englishman?' 'English to the bone of his back,' I answer. 'Respectable?' says Papa. 'Sir,' I say (for this last question of his outrages me, and I have done being familiar with him--) 'Sir! the immortal fire of genius burns in this Englishman's bosom, and, what is more, his father had it before him!' 'Never mind,' says the golden barbarian of a Papa, 'never mind about his genius, Mr. Pesca. We don't want genius in this country, unless it is accompanied by respectability--and then we are very glad to have it, very glad indeed. Can your friend produce testimonials--letters that speak to his character?' I wave my hand negligently. 'Letters?' I say. 'Ha! my-soul-bless-my-soul! I should think so, indeed! Volumes of letters and portfolios of testimonials, if you like!' 'One or two will do,' says this man of phlegm and money. 'Let him send them to me, with his name and address. And--stop, stop, Mr. Pesca--before you go to your friend, you had better take a note.' 'Bank-note!' I say, indignantly. 'No bank-note, if you please, till my brave Englishman has earned it first.' 'Bank-note!' says Papa, in a great surprise, 'who talked of bank-note? I mean a note of the terms--a memorandum of what he is expected to do. Go on with your lesson, Mr. Pesca, and I will give you the necessary extract from my friend's letter.' Down sits the man of merchandise and money to his pen, ink, and paper; and down I go once again into the Hell of Dante, with my three young Misses after me. In ten minutes' time the note is written, and the boots of Papa are creaking themselves away in the passage outside. From that moment, on my faith, and soul, and honour, I know nothing more! The glorious thought that I have caught my opportunity at last, and that my grateful service for my dearest friend in the world is as good as done already, flies up into my head and makes me drunk. How I pull my young Misses and myself out of our Infernal Region again, how my other business is done afterwards, how my little bit of dinner slides itself down my throat, I know no more than a man in the moon. Enough for me, that here I am, with the mighty merchant's note in my hand, as large as life, as hot as fire, and as happy as a king! Ha! ha! ha! right-right-right-all-right!" Here the Professor waved the memorandum of terms over his head, and ended his long and voluble narrative with his shrill Italian parody on an English cheer." My mother rose the moment he had done, with flushed cheeks and brightened eyes. She caught the little man warmly by both hands. "My dear, good Pesca," she said, "I never doubted your true affection for Walter--but I am more than ever persuaded of it now!" "I am sure we are very much obliged to Professor Pesca, for Walter's sake," added Sarah. She half rose, while she spoke, as if to approach the arm-chair, in her turn; but, observing that Pesca was rapturously kissing my mother's hands, looked serious, and resumed her seat. "If the familiar little man treats my mother in that way, how will he treat ME?" Faces sometimes tell truth; and that was unquestionably the thought in Sarah's mind, as she sat down again. Although I myself was gratefully sensible of the kindness of Pesca's motives, my spirits were hardly so much elevated as they ought to have been by the prospect of future employment now placed before me. When the Professor had quite done with my mother's hand, and when I had warmly thanked him for his interference on my behalf, I asked to be allowed to look at the note of terms which his respectable patron had drawn up for my inspection. Pesca handed me the paper, with a triumphant flourish of the hand. "Read!" said the little man majestically. "I promise you my friend, the writing of the golden Papa speaks with a tongue of trumpets for itself." The note of terms was plain, straightforward, and comprehensive, at any rate. It informed me, First, That Frederick Fairlie, Esquire, of Limmeridge House. Cumberland, wanted to engage the services of a thoroughly competent drawing-master, for a period of four months certain. Secondly, That the duties which the master was expected to perform would be of a twofold kind. He was to superintend the instruction of two young ladies in the art of painting in water-colours; and he was to devote his leisure time, afterwards, to the business of repairing and mounting a valuable collection of drawings, which had been suffered to fall into a condition of total neglect. Thirdly, That the terms offered to the person who should undertake and properly perform these duties were four guineas a week; that he was to reside at Limmeridge House; and that he was to be treated there on the footing of a gentleman. Fourthly, and lastly, That no person need think of applying for this situation unless he could furnish the most unexceptionable references to character and abilities. The references were to be sent to Mr. Fairlie's friend in London, who was empowered to conclude all necessary arrangements. These instructions were followed by the name and address of Pesca's employer in Portland Place--and there the note, or memorandum, ended. The prospect which this offer of an engagement held out was certainly an attractive one. The employment was likely to be both easy and agreeable; it was proposed to me at the autumn time of the year when I was least occupied; and the terms, judging by my personal experience in my profession, were surprisingly liberal. I knew this; I knew that I ought to consider myself very fortunate if I succeeded in securing the offered employment--and yet, no sooner had I read the memorandum than I felt an inexplicable unwillingness within me to stir in the matter. I had never in the whole of my previous experience found my duty and my inclination so painfully and so unaccountably at variance as I found them now. "Oh, Walter, your father never had such a chance as this!" said my mother, when she had read the note of terms and had handed it back to me. "Such distinguished people to know," remarked Sarah, straightening herself in the chair; "and on such gratifying terms of equality too!" "Yes, yes; the terms, in every sense, are tempting enough," I replied impatiently. "But before I send in my testimonials, I should like a little time to consider----" "Consider!" exclaimed my mother. "Why, Walter, what is the matter with you?" "Consider!" echoed my sister. "What a very extraordinary thing to say, under the circumstances!" "Consider!" chimed in the Professor. "What is there to consider about? Answer me this! Have you not been complaining of your health, and have you not been longing for what you call a smack of the country breeze? Well! there in your hand is the paper that offers you perpetual choking mouthfuls of country breeze for four months' time. Is it not so? Ha! Again--you want money. Well! Is four golden guineas a week nothing? My-soul-bless-my-soul! only give it to me--and my boots shall creak like the golden Papa's, with a sense of the overpowering richness of the man who walks in them! Four guineas a week, and, more than that, the charming society of two young misses! and, more than that, your bed, your breakfast, your dinner, your gorging English teas and lunches and drinks of foaming beer, all for nothing--why, Walter, my dear good friend--deuce-what-the-deuce!--for the first time in my life I have not eyes enough in my head to look, and wonder at you!" Neither my mother's evident astonishment at my behaviour, nor Pesca's fervid enumeration of the advantages offered to me by the new employment, had any effect in shaking my unreasonable disinclination to go to Limmeridge House. After starting all the petty objections that I could think of to going to Cumberland, and after hearing them answered, one after another, to my own complete discomfiture, I tried to set up a last obstacle by asking what was to become of my pupils in London while I was teaching Mr. Fairlie's young ladies to sketch from nature. The obvious answer to this was, that the greater part of them would be away on their autumn travels, and that the few who remained at home might be confided to the care of one of my brother drawing-masters, whose pupils I had once taken off his hands under similar circumstances. My sister reminded me that this gentleman had expressly placed his services at my disposal, during the present season, in case I wished to leave town; my mother seriously appealed to me not to let an idle caprice stand in the way of my own interests and my own health; and Pesca piteously entreated that I would not wound him to the heart by rejecting the first grateful offer of service that he had been able to make to the friend who had saved his life. The evident sincerity and affection which inspired these remonstrances would have influenced any man with an atom of good feeling in his composition. Though I could not conquer my own unaccountable perversity, I had at least virtue enough to be heartily ashamed of it, and to end the discussion pleasantly by giving way, and promising to do all that was wanted of me. The rest of the evening passed merrily enough in humorous anticipations of my coming life with the two young ladies in Cumberland. Pesca, inspired by our national grog, which appeared to get into his head, in the most marvellous manner, five minutes after it had gone down his throat, asserted his claims to be considered a complete Englishman by making a series of speeches in rapid succession, proposing my mother's health, my sister's health, my health, and the healths, in mass, of Mr. Fairlie and the two young Misses, pathetically returning thanks himself, immediately afterwards, for the whole party. "A secret, Walter," said my little friend confidentially, as we walked home together. "I am flushed by the recollection of my own eloquence. My soul bursts itself with ambition. One of these days I go into your noble Parliament. It is the dream of my whole life to be Honourable Pesca, M.P.!" The next morning I sent my testimonials to the Professor's employer in Portland Place. Three days passed, and I concluded, with secret satisfaction, that my papers had not been found sufficiently explicit. On the fourth day, however, an answer came. It announced that Mr. Fairlie accepted my services, and requested me to start for Cumberland immediately. All the necessary instructions for my journey were carefully and clearly added in a postscript. I made my arrangements, unwillingly enough, for leaving London early the next day. Towards evening Pesca looked in, on his way to a dinner-party, to bid me good-bye. "I shall dry my tears in your absence," said the Professor gaily, "with this glorious thought. It is my auspicious hand that has given the first push to your fortune in the world. Go, my friend! When your sun shines in Cumberland (English proverb), in the name of heaven make your hay. Marry one of the two young Misses; become Honourable Hartright, M.P.; and when you are on the top of the ladder remember that Pesca, at the bottom, has done it all!" I tried to laugh with my little friend over his parting jest, but my spirits were not to be commanded. Something jarred in me almost painfully while he was speaking his light farewell words. When I was left alone again nothing remained to be done but to walk to the Hampstead cottage and bid my mother and Sarah good-bye. IV The heat had been painfully oppressive all day, and it was now a close and sultry night. My mother and sister had spoken so many last words, and had begged me to wait another five minutes so many times, that it was nearly midnight when the servant locked the garden-gate behind me. I walked forward a few paces on the shortest way back to London, then stopped and hesitated. The moon was full and broad in the dark blue starless sky, and the broken ground of the heath looked wild enough in the mysterious light to be hundreds of miles away from the great city that lay beneath it. The idea of descending any sooner than I could help into the heat and gloom of London repelled me. The prospect of going to bed in my airless chambers, and the prospect of gradual suffocation, seemed, in my present restless frame of mind and body, to be one and the same thing. I determined to stroll home in the purer air by the most roundabout way I could take; to follow the white winding paths across the lonely heath; and to approach London through its most open suburb by striking into the Finchley Road, and so getting back, in the cool of the new morning, by the western side of the Regent's Park. I wound my way down slowly over the heath, enjoying the divine stillness of the scene, and admiring the soft alternations of light and shade as they followed each other over the broken ground on every side of me. So long as I was proceeding through this first and prettiest part of my night walk my mind remained passively open to the impressions produced by the view; and I thought but little on any subject--indeed, so far as my own sensations were concerned, I can hardly say that I thought at all. But when I had left the heath and had turned into the by-road, where there was less to see, the ideas naturally engendered by the approaching change in my habits and occupations gradually drew more and more of my attention exclusively to themselves. By the time I had arrived at the end of the road I had become completely absorbed in my own fanciful visions of Limmeridge House, of Mr. Fairlie, and of the two ladies whose practice in the art of water-colour painting I was so soon to superintend. I had now arrived at that particular point of my walk where four roads met--the road to Hampstead, along which I had returned, the road to Finchley, the road to West End, and the road back to London. I had mechanically turned in this latter direction, and was strolling along the lonely high-road--idly wondering, I remember, what the Cumberland young ladies would look like--when, in one moment, every drop of blood in my body was brought to a stop by the touch of a hand laid lightly and suddenly on my shoulder from behind me. I turned on the instant, with my fingers tightening round the handle of my stick. There, in the middle of the broad bright high-road--there, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven--stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments, her face bent in grave inquiry on mine, her hand pointing to the dark cloud over London, as I faced her. I was far too seriously startled by the suddenness with which this extraordinary apparition stood before me, in the dead of night and in that lonely place, to ask what she wanted. The strange woman spoke first. "Is that the road to London?" she said. I looked attentively at her, as she put that singular question to me. It was then nearly one o'clock. All I could discern distinctly by the moonlight was a colourless, youthful face, meagre and sharp to look at about the cheeks and chin; large, grave, wistfully attentive eyes; nervous, uncertain lips; and light hair of a pale, brownish-yellow hue. There was nothing wild, nothing immodest in her manner: it was quiet and self-controlled, a little melancholy and a little touched by suspicion; not exactly the manner of a lady, and, at the same time, not the manner of a woman in the humblest rank of life. The voice, little as I had yet heard of it, had something curiously still and mechanical in its tones, and the utterance was remarkably rapid. She held a small bag in her hand: and her dress--bonnet, shawl, and gown all of white--was, so far as I could guess, certainly not composed of very delicate or very expensive materials. Her figure was slight, and rather above the average height--her gait and actions free from the slightest approach to extravagance. This was all that I could observe of her in the dim light and under the perplexingly strange circumstances of our meeting. What sort of a woman she was, and how she came to be out alone in the high-road, an hour after midnight, I altogether failed to guess. The one thing of which I felt certain was, that the grossest of mankind could not have misconstrued her motive in speaking, even at that suspiciously late hour and in that suspiciously lonely place. "Did you hear me?" she said, still quietly and rapidly, and without the least fretfulness or impatience. "I asked if that was the way to London." "Yes," I replied, "that is the way: it leads to St. John's Wood and the Regent's Park. You must excuse my not answering you before. I was rather startled by your sudden appearance in the road; and I am, even now, quite unable to account for it." "You don't suspect me of doing anything wrong, do you? I have done nothing wrong. I have met with an accident--I am very unfortunate in being here alone so late. Why do you suspect me of doing wrong?" She spoke with unnecessary earnestness and agitation, and shrank back from me several paces. I did my best to reassure her. "Pray don't suppose that I have any idea of suspecting you," I said, "or any other wish than to be of assistance to you, if I can. I only wondered at your appearance in the road, because it seemed to me to be empty the instant before I saw you." She turned, and pointed back to a place at the junction of the road to London and the road to Hampstead, where there was a gap in the hedge. "I heard you coming," she said, "and hid there to see what sort of man you were, before I risked speaking. I doubted and feared about it till you passed; and then I was obliged to steal after you, and touch you." Steal after me and touch me? Why not call to me? Strange, to say the least of it. "May I trust you?" she asked. "You don't think the worse of me because I have met with an accident?" She stopped in confusion; shifted her bag from one hand to the other; and sighed bitterly. The loneliness and helplessness of the woman touched me. The natural impulse to assist her and to spare her got the better of the judgment, the caution, the worldly tact, which an older, wiser, and colder man might have summoned to help him in this strange emergency. "You may trust me for any harmless purpose," I said. "If it troubles you to explain your strange situation to me, don't think of returning to the subject again. I have no right to ask you for any explanations. Tell me how I can help you; and if I can, I will." "You are very kind, and I am very, very thankful to have met you." The first touch of womanly tenderness that I had heard from her trembled in her voice as she said the words; but no tears glistened in those large, wistfully attentive eyes of hers, which were still fixed on me. "I have only been in London once before," she went on, more and more rapidly, "and I know nothing about that side of it, yonder. Can I get a fly, or a carriage of any kind? Is it too late? I don't know. If you could show me where to get a fly--and if you will only promise not to interfere with me, and to let me leave you, when and how I please--I have a friend in London who will be glad to receive me--I want nothing else--will you promise?" She looked anxiously up and down the road; shifted her bag again from one hand to the other; repeated the words, "Will you promise?" and looked hard in my face, with a pleading fear and confusion that it troubled me to see. What could I do? Here was a stranger utterly and helplessly at my mercy--and that stranger a forlorn woman. No house was near; no one was passing whom I could consult; and no earthly right existed on my part to give me a power of control over her, even if I had known how to exercise it. I trace these lines, self-distrustfully, with the shadows of after-events darkening the very paper I write on; and still I say, what could I do? What I did do, was to try and gain time by questioning her. "Are you sure that your friend in London will receive you at such a late hour as this?" I said. "Quite sure. Only say you will let me leave you when and how I please--only say you won't interfere with me. Will you promise?" As she repeated the words for the third time, she came close to me and laid her hand, with a sudden gentle stealthiness, on my bosom--a thin hand; a cold hand (when I removed it with mine) even on that sultry night. Remember that I was young; remember that the hand which touched me was a woman's. "Will you promise?" "Yes." One word! The little familiar word that is on everybody's lips, every hour in the day. Oh me! and I tremble, now, when I write it. We set our faces towards London, and walked on together in the first still hour of the new day--I, and this woman, whose name, whose character, whose story, whose objects in life, whose very presence by my side, at that moment, were fathomless mysteries to me. It was like a dream. Was I Walter Hartright? Was this the well-known, uneventful road, where holiday people strolled on Sundays? Had I really left, little more than an hour since, the quiet, decent, conventionally domestic atmosphere of my mother's cottage? I was too bewildered--too conscious also of a vague sense of something like self-reproach--to speak to my strange companion for some minutes. It was her voice again that first broke the silence between us. "I want to ask you something," she said suddenly. "Do you know many people in London?" "Yes, a great many." "Many men of rank and title?" There was an unmistakable tone of suspicion in the strange question. I hesitated about answering it. "Some," I said, after a moment's silence. "Many"--she came to a full stop, and looked me searchingly in the face--"many men of the rank of Baronet?" Too much astonished to reply, I questioned her in my turn. "Why do you ask?" "Because I hope, for my own sake, there is one Baronet that you don't know." "Will you tell me his name?" "I can't--I daren't--I forget myself when I mention it." She spoke loudly and almost fiercely, raised her clenched hand in the air, and shook it passionately; then, on a sudden, controlled herself again, and added, in tones lowered to a whisper "Tell me which of them YOU know." I could hardly refuse to humour her in such a trifle, and I mentioned three names. Two, the names of fathers of families whose daughters I taught; one, the name of a bachelor who had once taken me a cruise in his yacht, to make sketches for him. "Ah! you DON'T know him," she said, with a sigh of relief. "Are you a man of rank and title yourself?" "Far from it. I am only a drawing-master." As the reply passed my lips--a little bitterly, perhaps--she took my arm with the abruptness which characterised all her actions. "Not a man of rank and title," she repeated to herself. "Thank God! I may trust HIM." I had hitherto contrived to master my curiosity out of consideration for my companion; but it got the better of me now. "I am afraid you have serious reason to complain of some man of rank and title?" I said. "I am afraid the baronet, whose name you are unwilling to mention to me, has done you some grievous wrong? Is he the cause of your being out here at this strange time of night?" "Don't ask me: don't make me talk of it," she answered. "I'm not fit now. I have been cruelly used and cruelly wronged. You will be kinder than ever, if you will walk on fast, and not speak to me. I sadly want to quiet myself, if I can." We moved forward again at a quick pace; and for half an hour, at least, not a word passed on either side. From time to time, being forbidden to make any more inquiries, I stole a look at her face. It was always the same; the lips close shut, the brow frowning, the eyes looking straight forward, eagerly and yet absently. We had reached the first houses, and were close on the new Wesleyan college, before her set features relaxed and she spoke once more. "Do you live in London?" she said. "Yes." As I answered, it struck me that she might have formed some intention of appealing to me for assistance or advice, and that I ought to spare her a possible disappointment by warning her of my approaching absence from home. So I added, "But to-morrow I shall be away from London for some time. I am going into the country." "Where?" she asked. "North or south?" "North--to Cumberland." "Cumberland!" she repeated the word tenderly. "Ah! wish I was going there too. I was once happy in Cumberland." I tried again to lift the veil that hung between this woman and me. "Perhaps you were born," I said, "in the beautiful Lake country." "No," she answered. "I was born in Hampshire; but I once went to school for a little while in Cumberland. Lakes? I don't remember any lakes. It's Limmeridge village, and Limmeridge House, I should like to see again." It was my turn now to stop suddenly. In the excited state of my curiosity, at that moment, the chance reference to Mr. Fairlie's place of residence, on the lips of my strange companion, staggered me with astonishment. "Did you hear anybody calling after us?" she asked, looking up and down the road affrightedly, the instant I stopped. "No, no. I was only struck by the name of Limmeridge House. I heard it mentioned by some Cumberland people a few days since." "Ah! not my people. Mrs. Fairlie is dead; and her husband is dead; and their little girl may be married and gone away by this time. I can't say who lives at Limmeridge now. If any more are left there of that name, I only know I love them for Mrs. Fairlie's sake." She seemed about to say more; but while she was speaking, we came within view of the turnpike, at the top of the Avenue Road. Her hand tightened round my arm, and she looked anxiously at the gate before us. "Is the turnpike man looking out?" she asked. He was not looking out; no one else was near the place when we passed through the gate. The sight of the gas-lamps and houses seemed to agitate her, and to make her impatient. "This is London," she said. "Do you see any carriage I can get? I am tired and frightened. I want to shut myself in and be driven away." I explained to her that we must walk a little further to get to a cab-stand, unless we were fortunate enough to meet with an empty vehicle; and then tried to resume the subject of Cumberland. It was useless. That idea of shutting herself in, and being driven away, had now got full possession of her mind. She could think and talk of nothing else. We had hardly proceeded a third of the way down the Avenue Road when I saw a cab draw up at a house a few doors below us, on the opposite side of the way. A gentleman got out and let himself in at the garden door. I hailed the cab, as the driver mounted the box again. When we crossed the road, my companion's impatience increased to such an extent that she almost forced me to run. "It's so late," she said. "I am only in a hurry because it's so late." "I can't take you, sir, if you're not going towards Tottenham Court Road," said the driver civilly, when I opened the cab door. "My horse is dead beat, and I can't get him no further than the stable." "Yes, yes. That will do for me. I'm going that way--I'm going that way." She spoke with breathless eagerness, and pressed by me into the cab. I had assured myself that the man was sober as well as civil before I let her enter the vehicle. And now, when she was seated inside, I entreated her to let me see her set down safely at her destination. "No, no, no," she said vehemently. "I'm quite safe, and quite happy now. If you are a gentleman, remember your promise. Let him drive on till I stop him. Thank you--oh! thank you, thank you!" My hand was on the cab door. She caught it in hers, kissed it, and pushed it away. The cab drove off at the same moment--I started into the road, with some vague idea of stopping it again, I hardly knew why--hesitated from dread of frightening and distressing her--called, at last, but not loudly enough to attract the driver's attention. The sound of the wheels grew fainter in the distance--the cab melted into the black shadows on the road--the woman in white was gone. Ten minutes or more had passed. I was still on the same side of the way; now mechanically walking forward a few paces; now stopping again absently. At one moment I found myself doubting the reality of my own adventure; at another I was perplexed and distressed by an uneasy sense of having done wrong, which yet left me confusedly ignorant of how I could have done right. I hardly knew where I was going, or what I meant to do next; I was conscious of nothing but the confusion of my own thoughts, when I was abruptly recalled to myself--awakened, I might almost say--by the sound of rapidly approaching wheels close behind me. I was on the dark side of the road, in the thick shadow of some garden trees, when I stopped to look round. On the opposite and lighter side of the way, a short distance below me, a policeman was strolling along in the direction of the Regent's Park. The carriage passed me--an open chaise driven by two men. "Stop!" cried one. "There's a policeman. Let's ask him." The horse was instantly pulled up, a few yards beyond the dark place where I stood. "Policeman!" cried the first speaker. "Have you seen a woman pass this way?" "What sort of woman, sir?" "A woman in a lavender-coloured gown----" "No, no," interposed the second man. "The clothes we gave her were found on her bed. She must have gone away in the clothes she wore when she came to us. In white, policeman. A woman in white." "I haven't seen her, sir." "If you or any of your men meet with the woman, stop her, and send her in careful keeping to that address. I'll pay all expenses, and a fair reward into the bargain." The policeman looked at the card that was handed down to him. "Why are we to stop her, sir? What has she done?" "Done! She has escaped from my Asylum. Don't forget; a woman in white. Drive on." V "She has escaped from my Asylum!" I cannot say with truth that the terrible inference which those words suggested flashed upon me like a new revelation. Some of the strange questions put to me by the woman in white, after my ill-considered promise to leave her free to act as she pleased, had suggested the conclusion either that she was naturally flighty and unsettled, or that some recent shock of terror had disturbed the balance of her faculties. But the idea of absolute insanity which we all associate with the very name of an Asylum, had, I can honestly declare, never occurred to me, in connection with her. I had seen nothing, in her language or her actions, to justify it at the time; and even with the new light thrown on her by the words which the stranger had addressed to the policeman, I could see nothing to justify it now. What had I done? Assisted the victim of the most horrible of all false imprisonments to escape; or cast loose on the wide world of London an unfortunate creature, whose actions it was my duty, and every man's duty, mercifully to control? I turned sick at heart when the question occurred to me, and when I felt self-reproachfully that it was asked too late. In the disturbed state of my mind, it was useless to think of going to bed, when I at last got back to my chambers in Clement's Inn. Before many hours elapsed it would be necessary to start on my journey to Cumberland. I sat down and tried, first to sketch, then to read--but the woman in white got between me and my pencil, between me and my book. Had the forlorn creature come to any harm? That was my first thought, though I shrank selfishly from confronting it. Other thoughts followed, on which it was less harrowing to dwell. Where had she stopped the cab? What had become of her now? Had she been traced and captured by the men in the chaise? Or was she still capable of controlling her own actions; and were we two following our widely parted roads towards one point in the mysterious future, at which we were to meet once more? It was a relief when the hour came to lock my door, to bid farewell to London pursuits, London pupils, and London friends, and to be in movement again towards new interests and a new life. Even the bustle and confusion at the railway terminus, so wearisome and bewildering at other times, roused me and did me good. My travelling instructions directed me to go to Carlisle, and then to diverge by a branch railway which ran in the direction of the coast. As a misfortune to begin with, our engine broke down between Lancaster and Carlisle. The delay occasioned by this accident caused me to be too late for the branch train, by which I was to have gone on immediately. I had to wait some hours; and when a later train finally deposited me at the nearest station to Limmeridge House, it was past ten, and the night was so dark that I could hardly see my way to the pony-chaise which Mr. Fairlie had ordered to be in waiting for me. The driver was evidently discomposed by the lateness of my arrival. He was in that state of highly respectful sulkiness which is peculiar to English servants. We drove away slowly through the darkness in perfect silence. The roads were bad, and the dense obscurity of the night increased the difficulty of getting over the ground quickly. It was, by my watch, nearly an hour and a half from the time of our leaving the station before I heard the sound of the sea in the distance, and the crunch of our wheels on a smooth gravel drive. We had passed one gate before entering the drive, and we passed another before we drew up at the house. I was received by a solemn man-servant out of livery, was informed that the family had retired for the night, and was then led into a large and lofty room where my supper was awaiting me, in a forlorn manner, at one extremity of a lonesome mahogany wilderness of dining-table. I was too tired and out of spirits to eat or drink much, especially with the solemn servant waiting on me as elaborately as if a small dinner party had arrived at the house instead of a solitary man. In a quarter of an hour I was ready to be taken up to my bedchamber. The solemn servant conducted me into a prettily furnished room--said, "Breakfast at nine o'clock, sir"--looked all round him to see that everything was in its proper place, and noiselessly withdrew. "What shall I see in my dreams to-night?" I thought to myself, as I put out the candle; "the woman in white? or the unknown inhabitants of this Cumberland mansion?" It was a strange sensation to be sleeping in the house, like a friend of the family, and yet not to know one of the inmates, even by sight! VI When I rose the next morning and drew up my blind, the sea opened before me joyously under the broad August sunlight, and the distant coast of Scotland fringed the horizon with its lines of melting blue. The view was such a surprise, and such a change to me, after my weary London experience of brick and mortar landscape, that I seemed to burst into a new life and a new set of thoughts the moment I looked at it. A confused sensation of having suddenly lost my familiarity with the past, without acquiring any additional clearness of idea in reference to the present or the future, took possession of my mind. Circumstances that were but a few days old faded back in my memory, as if they had happened months and months since. Pesca's quaint announcement of the means by which he had procured me my present employment; the farewell evening I had passed with my mother and sister; even my mysterious adventure on the way home from Hampstead--had all become like events which might have occurred at some former epoch of my existence. Although the woman in white was still in my mind, the image of her seemed to have grown dull and faint already. A little before nine o'clock, I descended to the ground-floor of the house. The solemn man-servant of the night before met me wandering among the passages, and compassionately showed me the way to the breakfast-room. My first glance round me, as the man opened the door, disclosed a well-furnished breakfast-table, standing in the middle of a long room, with many windows in it. I looked from the table to the window farthest from me, and saw a lady standing at it, with her back turned towards me. The instant my eyes rested on her, I was struck by the rare beauty of her form, and by the unaffected grace of her attitude. Her figure was tall, yet not too tall; comely and well-developed, yet not fat; her head set on her shoulders with an easy, pliant firmness; her waist, perfection in the eyes of a man, for it occupied its natural place, it filled out its natural circle, it was visibly and delightfully undeformed by stays. She had not heard my entrance into the room; and I allowed myself the luxury of admiring her for a few moments, before I moved one of the chairs near me, as the least embarrassing means of attracting her attention. She turned towards me immediately. The easy elegance of every movement of her limbs and body as soon as she began to advance from the far end of the room, set me in a flutter of expectation to see her face clearly. She left the window--and I said to myself, The lady is dark. She moved forward a few steps--and I said to myself, The lady is young. She approached nearer--and I said to myself (with a sense of surprise which words fail me to express), The lady is ugly! Never was the old conventional maxim, that Nature cannot err, more flatly contradicted--never was the fair promise of a lovely figure more strangely and startlingly belied by the face and head that crowned it. The lady's complexion was almost swarthy, and the dark down on her upper lip was almost a moustache. She had a large, firm, masculine mouth and jaw; prominent, piercing, resolute brown eyes; and thick, coal-black hair, growing unusually low down on her forehead. Her expression--bright, frank, and intelligent--appeared, while she was silent, to be altogether wanting in those feminine attractions of gentleness and pliability, without which the beauty of the handsomest woman alive is beauty incomplete. To see such a face as this set on shoulders that a sculptor would have longed to model--to be charmed by the modest graces of action through which the symmetrical limbs betrayed their beauty when they moved, and then to be almost repelled by the masculine form and masculine look of the features in which the perfectly shaped figure ended--was to feel a sensation oddly akin to the helpless discomfort familiar to us all in sleep, when we recognise yet cannot reconcile the anomalies and contradictions of a dream. "Mr. Hartright?" said the lady interrogatively, her dark face lighting up with a smile, and softening and growing womanly the moment she began to speak. "We resigned all hope of you last night, and went to bed as usual. Accept my apologies for our apparent want of attention; and allow me to introduce myself as one of your pupils. Shall we shake hands? I suppose we must come to it sooner or later--and why not sooner?" These odd words of welcome were spoken in a clear, ringing, pleasant voice. The offered hand--rather large, but beautifully formed--was given to me with the easy, unaffected self-reliance of a highly-bred woman. We sat down together at the breakfast-table in as cordial and customary a manner as if we had known each other for years, and had met at Limmeridge House to talk over old times by previous appointment. "I hope you come here good-humouredly determined to make the best of your position," continued the lady. "You will have to begin this morning by putting up with no other company at breakfast than mine. My sister is in her own room, nursing that essentially feminine malady, a slight headache; and her old governess, Mrs. Vesey, is charitably attending on her with restorative tea. My uncle, Mr. Fairlie, never joins us at any of our meals: he is an invalid, and keeps bachelor state in his own apartments. There is nobody else in the house but me. Two young ladies have been staying here, but they went away yesterday, in despair; and no wonder. All through their visit (in consequence of Mr. Fairlie's invalid condition) we produced no such convenience in the house as a flirtable, danceable, small-talkable creature of the male sex; and the consequence was, we did nothing but quarrel, especially at dinner-time. How can you expect four women to dine together alone every day, and not quarrel? We are such fools, we can't entertain each other at table. You see I don't think much of my own sex, Mr. Hartright--which will you have, tea or coffee?--no woman does think much of her own sex, although few of them confess it as freely as I do. Dear me, you look puzzled. Why? Are you wondering what you will have for breakfast? or are you surprised at my careless way of talking? In the first case, I advise you, as a friend, to have nothing to do with that cold ham at your elbow, and to wait till the omelette comes in. In the second case, I will give you some tea to compose your spirits, and do all a woman can (which is very little, by-the-bye) to hold my tongue." She handed me my cup of tea, laughing gaily. Her light flow of talk, and her lively familiarity of manner with a total stranger, were accompanied by an unaffected naturalness and an easy inborn confidence in herself and her position, which would have secured her the respect of the most audacious man breathing. While it was impossible to be formal and reserved in her company, it was more than impossible to take the faintest vestige of a liberty with her, even in thought. I felt this instinctively, even while I caught the infection of her own bright gaiety of spirits--even while I did my best to answer her in her own frank, lively way. "Yes, yes," she said, when I had suggested the only explanation I could offer, to account for my perplexed looks, "I understand. You are such a perfect stranger in the house, that you are puzzled by my familiar references to the worthy inhabitants. Natural enough: I ought to have thought of it before. At any rate, I can set it right now. Suppose I begin with myself, so as to get done with that part of the subject as soon as possible? My name is Marian Halcombe; and I am as inaccurate as women usually are, in calling Mr. Fairlie my uncle, and Miss Fairlie my sister. My mother was twice married: the first time to Mr. Halcombe, my father; the second time to Mr. Fairlie, my half-sister's father. Except that we are both orphans, we are in every respect as unlike each other as possible. My father was a poor man, and Miss Fairlie's father was a rich man. I have got nothing, and she has a fortune. I am dark and ugly, and she is fair and pretty. Everybody thinks me crabbed and odd (with perfect justice); and everybody thinks her sweet-tempered and charming (with more justice still). In short, she is an angel; and I am---- Try some of that marmalade, Mr. Hartright, and finish the sentence, in the name of female propriety, for yourself. What am I to tell you about Mr. Fairlie? Upon my honour, I hardly know. He is sure to send for you after breakfast, and you can study him for yourself. In the meantime, I may inform you, first, that he is the late Mr. Fairlie's younger brother; secondly, that he is a single man; and thirdly, that he is Miss Fairlie's guardian. I won't live without her, and she can't live without me; and that is how I come to be at Limmeridge House. My sister and I are honestly fond of each other; which, you will say, is perfectly unaccountable, under the circumstances, and I quite agree with you--but so it is. You must please both of us, Mr. Hartright, or please neither of us: and, what is still more trying, you will be thrown entirely upon our society. Mrs. Vesey is an excellent person, who possesses all the cardinal virtues, and counts for nothing; and Mr. Fairlie is too great an invalid to be a companion for anybody. I don't know what is the matter with him, and the doctors don't know what is the matter with him, and he doesn't know himself what is the matter with him. We all say it's on the nerves, and we none of us know what we mean when we say it. However, I advise you to humour his little peculiarities, when you see him to-day. Admire his collection of coins, prints, and water-colour drawings, and you will win his heart. Upon my word, if you can be contented with a quiet country life, I don't see why you should not get on very well here. From breakfast to lunch, Mr. Fairlie's drawings will occupy you. After lunch, Miss Fairlie and I shoulder our sketch-books, and go out to misrepresent Nature, under your directions. Drawing is her favourite whim, mind, not mine. Women can't draw--their minds are too flighty, and their eyes are too inattentive. No matter--my sister likes it; so I waste paint and spoil paper, for her sake, as composedly as any woman in England. As for the evenings, I think we can help you through them. Miss Fairlie plays delightfully. For my own poor part, I don't know one note of music from the other; but I can match you at chess, backgammon, ecarte, and (with the inevitable female drawbacks) even at billiards as well. What do you think of the programme? Can you reconcile yourself to our quiet, regular life? or do you mean to be restless, and secretly thirst for change and adventure, in the humdrum atmosphere of Limmeridge House?" She had run on thus far, in her gracefully bantering way, with no other interruptions on my part than the unimportant replies which politeness required of me. The turn of the expression, however, in her last question, or rather the one chance word, "adventure," lightly as it fell from her lips, recalled my thoughts to my meeting with the woman in white, and urged me to discover the connection which the stranger's own reference to Mrs. Fairlie informed me must once have existed between the nameless fugitive from the Asylum, and the former mistress of Limmeridge House. "Even if I were the most restless of mankind," I said, "I should be in no danger of thirsting after adventures for some time to come. The very night before I arrived at this house, I met with an adventure; and the wonder and excitement of it, I can assure you, Miss Halcombe, will last me for the whole term of my stay in Cumberland, if not for a much longer period." "You don't say so, Mr. Hartright! May I hear it?" "You have a claim to hear it. The chief person in the adventure was a total stranger to me, and may perhaps be a total stranger to you; but she certainly mentioned the name of the late Mrs. Fairlie in terms of the sincerest gratitude and regard." "Mentioned my mother's name! You interest me indescribably. Pray go on." I at once related the circumstances under which I had met the woman in white, exactly as they had occurred; and I repeated what she had said to me about Mrs. Fairlie and Limmeridge House, word for word. Miss Halcombe's bright resolute eyes looked eagerly into mine, from the beginning of the narrative to the end. Her face expressed vivid interest and astonishment, but nothing more. She was evidently as far from knowing of any clue to the mystery as I was myself. "Are you quite sure of those words referring to my mother?" she asked. "Quite sure," I replied. "Whoever she may be, the woman was once at school in the village of Limmeridge, was treated with especial kindness by Mrs. Fairlie, and, in grateful remembrance of that kindness, feels an affectionate interest in all surviving members of the family. She knew that Mrs. Fairlie and her husband were both dead; and she spoke of Miss Fairlie as if they had known each other when they were children." "You said, I think, that she denied belonging to this place?" "Yes, she told me she came from Hampshire." "And you entirely failed to find out her name?" "Entirely." "Very strange. I think you were quite justified, Mr. Hartright, in giving the poor creature her liberty, for she seems to have done nothing in your presence to show herself unfit to enjoy it. But I wish you had been a little more resolute about finding out her name. We must really clear up this mystery, in some way. You had better not speak of it yet to Mr. Fairlie, or to my sister. They are both of them, I am certain, quite as ignorant of who the woman is, and of what her past history in connection with us can be, as I am myself. But they are also, in widely different ways, rather nervous and sensitive; and you would only fidget one and alarm the other to no purpose. As for myself, I am all aflame with curiosity, and I devote my whole energies to the business of discovery from this moment. When my mother came here, after her second marriage, she certainly established the village school just as it exists at the present time. But the old teachers are all dead, or gone elsewhere; and no enlightenment is to be hoped for from that quarter. The only other alternative I can think of----" At this point we were interrupted by the entrance of the servant, with a message from Mr. Fairlie, intimating that he would be glad to see me, as soon as I had done breakfast. "Wait in the hall," said Miss Halcombe, answering the servant for me, in her quick, ready way. "Mr. Hartright will come out directly. I was about to say," she went on, addressing me again, "that my sister and I have a large collection of my mother's letters, addressed to my father and to hers. In the absence of any other means of getting information, I will pass the morning in looking over my mother's correspondence with Mr. Fairlie. He was fond of London, and was constantly away from his country home; and she was accustomed, at such times, to write and report to him how things went on at Limmeridge. Her letters are full of references to the school in which she took so strong an interest; and I think it more than likely that I may have discovered something when we meet again. The luncheon hour is two, Mr. Hartright. I shall have the pleasure of introducing you to my sister by that time, and we will occupy the afternoon in driving round the neighbourhood and showing you all our pet points of view. Till two o'clock, then, farewell." She nodded to me with the lively grace, the delightful refinement of familiarity, which characterised all that she did and all that she said; and disappeared by a door at the lower end of the room. As soon as she had left me, I turned my steps towards the hall, and followed the servant, on my way, for the first time, to the presence of Mr. Fairlie. VII My conductor led me upstairs into a passage which took us back to the bedchamber in which I had slept during the past night; and opening the door next to it, begged me to look in. "I have my master's orders to show you your own sitting-room, sir," said the man, "and to inquire if you approve of the situation and the light." I must have been hard to please, indeed, if I had not approved of the room, and of everything about it. The bow-window looked out on the same lovely view which I had admired, in the morning, from my bedroom. The furniture was the perfection of luxury and beauty; the table in the centre was bright with gaily bound books, elegant conveniences for writing, and beautiful flowers; the second table, near the window, was covered with all the necessary materials for mounting water-colour drawings, and had a little easel attached to it, which I could expand or fold up at will; the walls were hung with gaily tinted chintz; and the floor was spread with Indian matting in maize-colour and red. It was the prettiest and most luxurious little sitting-room I had ever seen; and I admired it with the warmest enthusiasm. The solemn servant was far too highly trained to betray the slightest satisfaction. He bowed with icy deference when my terms of eulogy were all exhausted, and silently opened the door for me to go out into the passage again. We turned a corner, and entered a long second passage, ascended a short flight of stairs at the end, crossed a small circular upper hall, and stopped in front of a door covered with dark baize. The servant opened this door, and led me on a few yards to a second; opened that also, and disclosed two curtains of pale sea-green silk hanging before us; raised one of them noiselessly; softly uttered the words, "Mr. Hartright," and left me. I found myself in a large, lofty room, with a magnificent carved ceiling, and with a carpet over the floor, so thick and soft that it felt like piles of velvet under my feet. One side of the room was occupied by a long book-case of some rare inlaid wood that was quite new to me. It was not more than six feet high, and the top was adorned with statuettes in marble, ranged at regular distances one from the other. On the opposite side stood two antique cabinets; and between them, and above them, hung a picture of the Virgin and Child, protected by glass, and bearing Raphael's name on the gilt tablet at the bottom of the frame. On my right hand and on my left, as I stood inside the door, were chiffoniers and little stands in buhl and marquetterie, loaded with figures in Dresden china, with rare vases, ivory ornaments, and toys and curiosities that sparkled at all points with gold, silver, and precious stones. At the lower end of the room, opposite to me, the windows were concealed and the sunlight was tempered by large blinds of the same pale sea-green colour as the curtains over the door. The light thus produced was deliciously soft, mysterious, and subdued; it fell equally upon all the objects in the room; it helped to intensify the deep silence, and the air of profound seclusion that possessed the place; and it surrounded, with an appropriate halo of repose, the solitary figure of the master of the house, leaning back, listlessly composed, in a large easy-chair, with a reading-easel fastened on one of its arms, and a little table on the other. If a man's personal appearance, when he is out of his dressing-room, and when he has passed forty, can be accepted as a safe guide to his time of life--which is more than doubtful--Mr. Fairlie's age, when I saw him, might have been reasonably computed at over fifty and under sixty years. His beardless face was thin, worn, and transparently pale, but not wrinkled; his nose was high and hooked; his eyes were of a dim greyish blue, large, prominent, and rather red round the rims of the eyelids; his hair was scanty, soft to look at, and of that light sandy colour which is the last to disclose its own changes towards grey. He was dressed in a dark frock-coat, of some substance much thinner than cloth, and in waistcoat and trousers of spotless white. His feet were effeminately small, and were clad in buff-coloured silk stockings, and little womanish bronze-leather slippers. Two rings adorned his white delicate hands, the value of which even my inexperienced observation detected to be all but priceless. Upon the whole, he had a frail, languidly-fretful, over-refined look--something singularly and unpleasantly delicate in its association with a man, and, at the same time, something which could by no possibility have looked natural and appropriate if it had been transferred to the personal appearance of a woman. My morning's experience of Miss Halcombe had predisposed me to be pleased with everybody in the house; but my sympathies shut themselves up resolutely at the first sight of Mr. Fairlie. On approaching nearer to him, I discovered that he was not so entirely without occupation as I had at first supposed. Placed amid the other rare and beautiful objects on a large round table near him, was a dwarf cabinet in ebony and silver, containing coins of all shapes and sizes, set out in little drawers lined with dark purple velvet. One of these drawers lay on the small table attached to his chair; and near it were some tiny jeweller's brushes, a wash-leather "stump," and a little bottle of liquid, all waiting to be used in various ways for the removal of any accidental impurities which might be discovered on the coins. His frail white fingers were listlessly toying with something which looked, to my uninstructed eyes, like a dirty pewter medal with ragged edges, when I advanced within a respectful distance of his chair, and stopped to make my bow. "So glad to possess you at Limmeridge, Mr. Hartright," he said in a querulous, croaking voice, which combined, in anything but an agreeable manner, a discordantly high tone with a drowsily languid utterance. "Pray sit down. And don't trouble yourself to move the chair, please. In the wretched state of my nerves, movement of any kind is exquisitely painful to me. Have you seen your studio? Will it do?" "I have just come from seeing the room, Mr. Fairlie; and I assure you----" He stopped me in the middle of the sentence, by closing his eyes, and holding up one of his white hands imploringly. I paused in astonishment; and the croaking voice honoured me with this explanation-- "Pray excuse me. But could you contrive to speak in a lower key? In the wretched state of my nerves, loud sound of any kind is indescribable torture to me. You will pardon an invalid? I only say to you what the lamentable state of my health obliges me to say to everybody. Yes. And you really like the room?" "I could wish for nothing prettier and nothing more comfortable," I answered, dropping my voice, and beginning to discover already that Mr. Fairlie's selfish affectation and Mr. Fairlie's wretched nerves meant one and the same thing. "So glad. You will find your position here, Mr. Hartright, properly recognised. There is none of the horrid English barbarity of feeling about the social position of an artist in this house. So much of my early life has been passed abroad, that I have quite cast my insular skin in that respect. I wish I could say the same of the gentry--detestable word, but I suppose I must use it--of the gentry in the neighbourhood. They are sad Goths in Art, Mr. Hartright. People, I do assure you, who would have opened their eyes in astonishment, if they had seen Charles the Fifth pick up Titian's brush for him. Do you mind putting this tray of coins back in the cabinet, and giving me the next one to it? In the wretched state of my nerves, exertion of any kind is unspeakably disagreeable to me. Yes. Thank you." As a practical commentary on the liberal social theory which he had just favoured me by illustrating, Mr. Fairlie's cool request rather amused me. I put back one drawer and gave him the other, with all possible politeness. He began trifling with the new set of coins and the little brushes immediately; languidly looking at them and admiring them all the time he was speaking to me. "A thousand thanks and a thousand excuses. Do you like coins? Yes. So glad we have another taste in common besides our taste for Art. Now, about the pecuniary arrangements between us--do tell me--are they satisfactory?" "Most satisfactory, Mr. Fairlie." "So glad. And--what next? Ah! I remember. Yes. In reference to the consideration which you are good enough to accept for giving me the benefit of your accomplishments in art, my steward will wait on you at the end of the first week, to ascertain your wishes. And--what next? Curious, is it not? I had a great deal more to say: and I appear to have quite forgotten it. Do you mind touching the bell? In that corner. Yes. Thank you." I rang; and a new servant noiselessly made his appearance--a foreigner, with a set smile and perfectly brushed hair--a valet every inch of him. "Louis," said Mr. Fairlie, dreamily dusting the tips of his fingers with one of the tiny brushes for the coins, "I made some entries in my tablettes this morning. Find my tablettes. A thousand pardons, Mr. Hartright, I'm afraid I bore you." As he wearily closed his eyes again, before I could answer, and as he did most assuredly bore me, I sat silent, and looked up at the Madonna and Child by Raphael. In the meantime, the valet left the room, and returned shortly with a little ivory book. Mr. Fairlie, after first relieving himself by a gentle sigh, let the book drop open with one hand, and held up the tiny brush with the other, as a sign to the servant to wait for further orders. "Yes. Just so!" said Mr. Fairlie, consulting the tablettes. "Louis, take down that portfolio." He pointed, as he spoke, to several portfolios placed near the window, on mahogany stands. "No. Not the one with the green back--that contains my Rembrandt etchings, Mr. Hartright. Do you like etchings? Yes? So glad we have another taste in common. The portfolio with the red back, Louis. Don't drop it! You have no idea of the tortures I should suffer, Mr. Hartright, if Louis dropped that portfolio. Is it safe on the chair? Do YOU think it safe, Mr. Hartright? Yes? So glad. Will you oblige me by looking at the drawings, if you really think they are quite safe. Louis, go away. What an ass you are. Don't you see me holding the tablettes? Do you suppose I want to hold them? Then why not relieve me of the tablettes without being told? A thousand pardons, Mr. Hartright; servants are such asses, are they not? Do tell me--what do you think of the drawings? They have come from a sale in a shocking state--I thought they smelt of horrid dealers' and brokers' fingers when I looked at them last. CAN you undertake them?" Although my nerves were not delicate enough to detect the odour of plebeian fingers which had offended Mr. Fairlie's nostrils, my taste was sufficiently educated to enable me to appreciate the value of the drawings, while I turned them over. They were, for the most part, really fine specimens of English water-colour art; and they had deserved much better treatment at the hands of their former possessor than they appeared to have received. "The drawings," I answered, "require careful straining and mounting; and, in my opinion, they are well worth----" "I beg your pardon," interposed Mr. Fairlie. "Do you mind my closing my eyes while you speak? Even this light is too much for them. Yes?" "I was about to say that the drawings are well worth all the time and trouble----" Mr. Fairlie suddenly opened his eyes again, and rolled them with an expression of helpless alarm in the direction of the window. "I entreat you to excuse me, Mr. Hartright," he said in a feeble flutter. "But surely I hear some horrid children in the garden--my private garden--below?" "I can't say, Mr. Fairlie. I heard nothing myself." "Oblige me--you have been so very good in humouring my poor nerves--oblige me by lifting up a corner of the blind. Don't let the sun in on me, Mr. Hartright! Have you got the blind up? Yes? Then will you be so very kind as to look into the garden and make quite sure?" I complied with this new request. The garden was carefully walled in, all round. Not a human creature, large or small, appeared in any part of the sacred seclusion. I reported that gratifying fact to Mr. Fairlie. "A thousand thanks. My fancy, I suppose. There are no children, thank Heaven, in the house; but the servants (persons born without nerves) will encourage the children from the village. Such brats--oh, dear me, such brats! Shall I confess it, Mr. Hartright?--I sadly want a reform in the construction of children. Nature's only idea seems to be to make them machines for the production of incessant noise. Surely our delightful Raffaello's conception is infinitely preferable?" He pointed to the picture of the Madonna, the upper part of which represented the conventional cherubs of Italian Art, celestially provided with sitting accommodation for their chins, on balloons of buff-coloured cloud. "Quite a model family!" said Mr. Fairlie, leering at the cherubs. "Such nice round faces, and such nice soft wings, and--nothing else. No dirty little legs to run about on, and no noisy little lungs to scream with. How immeasurably superior to the existing construction! I will close my eyes again, if you will allow me. And you really can manage the drawings? So glad. Is there anything else to settle? if there is, I think I have forgotten it. Shall we ring for Louis again?" Being, by this time, quite as anxious, on my side, as Mr. Fairlie evidently was on his, to bring the interview to a speedy conclusion, I thought I would try to render the summoning of the servant unnecessary, by offering the requisite suggestion on my own responsibility. "The only point, Mr. Fairlie, that remains to be discussed," I said, "refers, I think, to the instruction in sketching which I am engaged to communicate to the two young ladies." "Ah! just so," said Mr. Fairlie. "I wish I felt strong enough to go into that part of the arrangement--but I don't. The ladies who profit by your kind services, Mr. Hartright, must settle, and decide, and so on, for themselves. My niece is fond of your charming art. She knows just enough about it to be conscious of her own sad defects. Please take pains with her. Yes. Is there anything else? No. We quite understand each other--don't we? I have no right to detain you any longer from your delightful pursuit--have I? So pleasant to have settled everything--such a sensible relief to have done business. Do you mind ringing for Louis to carry the portfolio to your own room?" "I will carry it there myself, Mr. Fairlie, if you will allow me." "Will you really? Are you strong enough? How nice to be so strong! Are you sure you won't drop it? So glad to possess you at Limmeridge, Mr. Hartright. I am such a sufferer that I hardly dare hope to enjoy much of your society. Would you mind taking great pains not to let the doors bang, and not to drop the portfolio? Thank you. Gently with the curtains, please--the slightest noise from them goes through me like a knife. Yes. GOOD morning!" When the sea-green curtains were closed, and when the two baize doors were shut behind me, I stopped for a moment in the little circular hall beyond, and drew a long, luxurious breath of relief. It was like coming to the surface of the water after deep diving, to find myself once more on the outside of Mr. Fairlie's room. As soon as I was comfortably established for the morning in my pretty little studio, the first resolution at which I arrived was to turn my steps no more in the direction of the apartments occupied by the master of the house, except in the very improbable event of his honouring me with a special invitation to pay him another visit. Having settled this satisfactory plan of future conduct in reference to Mr. Fairlie, I soon recovered the serenity of temper of which my employer's haughty familiarity and impudent politeness had, for the moment, deprived me. The remaining hours of the morning passed away pleasantly enough, in looking over the drawings, arranging them in sets, trimming their ragged edges, and accomplishing the other necessary preparations in anticipation of the business of mounting them. I ought, perhaps, to have made more progress than this; but, as the luncheon-time drew near, I grew restless and unsettled, and felt unable to fix my attention on work, even though that work was only of the humble manual kind. At two o'clock I descended again to the breakfast-room, a little anxiously. Expectations of some interest were connected with my approaching reappearance in that part of the house. My introduction to Miss Fairlie was now close at hand; and, if Miss Halcombe's search through her mother's letters had produced the result which she anticipated, the time had come for clearing up the mystery of the woman in white. VIII When I entered the room, I found Miss Halcombe and an elderly lady seated at the luncheon-table. The elderly lady, when I was presented to her, proved to be Miss Fairlie's former governess, Mrs. Vesey, who had been briefly described to me by my lively companion at the breakfast-table, as possessed of "all the cardinal virtues, and counting for nothing." I can do little more than offer my humble testimony to the truthfulness of Miss Halcombe's sketch of the old lady's character. Mrs. Vesey looked the personification of human composure and female amiability. A calm enjoyment of a calm existence beamed in drowsy smiles on her plump, placid face. Some of us rush through life, and some of us saunter through life. Mrs. Vesey SAT through life. Sat in the house, early and late; sat in the garden; sat in unexpected window-seats in passages; sat (on a camp-stool) when her friends tried to take her out walking; sat before she looked at anything, before she talked of anything, before she answered Yes, or No, to the commonest question--always with the same serene smile on her lips, the same vacantly-attentive turn of the head, the same snugly-comfortable position of her hands and arms, under every possible change of domestic circumstances. A mild, a compliant, an unutterably tranquil and harmless old lady, who never by any chance suggested the idea that she had been actually alive since the hour of her birth. Nature has so much to do in this world, and is engaged in generating such a vast variety of co-existent productions, that she must surely be now and then too flurried and confused to distinguish between the different processes that she is carrying on at the same time. Starting from this point of view, it will always remain my private persuasion that Nature was absorbed in making cabbages when Mrs. Vesey was born, and that the good lady suffered the consequences of a vegetable preoccupation in the mind of the Mother of us all. "Now, Mrs. Vesey," said Miss Halcombe, looking brighter, sharper, and readier than ever, by contrast with the undemonstrative old lady at her side, "what will you have? A cutlet?" Mrs. Vesey crossed her dimpled hands on the edge of the table, smiled placidly, and said, "Yes, dear." "What is that opposite Mr. Hartright? Boiled chicken, is it not? I thought you liked boiled chicken better than cutlet, Mrs. Vesey?" Mrs. Vesey took her dimpled hands off the edge of the table and crossed them on her lap instead; nodded contemplatively at the boiled chicken, and said, "Yes, dear." "Well, but which will you have, to-day? Shall Mr. Hartright give you some chicken? or shall I give you some cutlet?" Mrs. Vesey put one of her dimpled hands back again on the edge of the table; hesitated drowsily, and said, "Which you please, dear." "Mercy on me! it's a question for your taste, my good lady, not for mine. Suppose you have a little of both? and suppose you begin with the chicken, because Mr. Hartright looks devoured by anxiety to carve for you." Mrs. Vesey put the other dimpled hand back on the edge of the table; brightened dimly one moment; went out again the next; bowed obediently, and said, "If you please, sir." Surely a mild, a compliant, an unutterably tranquil and harmless old lady! But enough, perhaps, for the present, of Mrs. Vesey. All this time, there were no signs of Miss Fairlie. We finished our luncheon; and still she never appeared. Miss Halcombe, whose quick eye nothing escaped, noticed the looks that I cast, from time to time, in the direction of the door. "I understand you, Mr. Hartright," she said; "you are wondering what has become of your other pupil. She has been downstairs, and has got over her headache; but has not sufficiently recovered her appetite to join us at lunch. If you will put yourself under my charge, I think I can undertake to find her somewhere in the garden." She took up a parasol lying on a chair near her, and led the way out, by a long window at the bottom of the room, which opened on to the lawn. It is almost unnecessary to say that we left Mrs. Vesey still seated at the table, with her dimpled hands still crossed on the edge of it; apparently settled in that position for the rest of the afternoon. As we crossed the lawn, Miss Halcombe looked at me significantly, and shook her head. "That mysterious adventure of yours," she said, "still remains involved in its own appropriate midnight darkness. I have been all the morning looking over my mother's letters, and I have made no discoveries yet. However, don't despair, Mr. Hartright. This is a matter of curiosity; and you have got a woman for your ally. Under such conditions success is certain, sooner or later. The letters are not exhausted. I have three packets still left, and you may confidently rely on my spending the whole evening over them." Here, then, was one of my anticipations of the morning still unfulfilled. I began to wonder, next, whether my introduction to Miss Fairlie would disappoint the expectations that I had been forming of her since breakfast-time. "And how did you get on with Mr. Fairlie?" inquired Miss Halcombe, as we left the lawn and turned into a shrubbery. "Was he particularly nervous this morning? Never mind considering about your answer, Mr. Hartright. The mere fact of your being obliged to consider is enough for me. I see in your face that he WAS particularly nervous; and, as I am amiably unwilling to throw you into the same condition, I ask no more." We turned off into a winding path while she was speaking, and approached a pretty summer-house, built of wood, in the form of a miniature Swiss chalet. The one room of the summer-house, as we ascended the steps of the door, was occupied by a young lady. She was standing near a rustic table, looking out at the inland view of moor and hill presented by a gap in the trees, and absently turning over the leaves of a little sketch-book that lay at her side. This was Miss Fairlie. How can I describe her? How can I separate her from my own sensations, and from all that has happened in the later time? How can I see her again as she looked when my eyes first rested on her--as she should look, now, to the eyes that are about to see her in these pages? The water-colour drawing that I made of Laura Fairlie, at an after period, in the place and attitude in which I first saw her, lies on my desk while I write. I look at it, and there dawns upon me brightly, from the dark greenish-brown background of the summer-house, a light, youthful figure, clothed in a simple muslin dress, the pattern of it formed by broad alternate stripes of delicate blue and white. A scarf of the same material sits crisply and closely round her shoulders, and a little straw hat of the natural colour, plainly and sparingly trimmed with ribbon to match the gown, covers her head, and throws its soft pearly shadow over the upper part of her face. Her hair is of so faint and pale a brown--not flaxen, and yet almost as light; not golden, and yet almost as glossy--that it nearly melts, here and there, into the shadow of the hat. It is plainly parted and drawn back over her ears, and the line of it ripples naturally as it crosses her forehead. The eyebrows are rather darker than the hair; and the eyes are of that soft, limpid, turquoise blue, so often sung by the poets, so seldom seen in real life. Lovely eyes in colour, lovely eyes in form--large and tender and quietly thoughtful--but beautiful above all things in the clear truthfulness of look that dwells in their inmost depths, and shines through all their changes of expression with the light of a purer and a better world. The charm--most gently and yet most distinctly expressed--which they shed over the whole face, so covers and transforms its little natural human blemishes elsewhere, that it is difficult to estimate the relative merits and defects of the other features. It is hard to see that the lower part of the face is too delicately refined away towards the chin to be in full and fair proportion with the upper part; that the nose, in escaping the aquiline bend (always hard and cruel in a woman, no matter how abstractedly perfect it may be), has erred a little in the other extreme, and has missed the ideal straightness of line; and that the sweet, sensitive lips are subject to a slight nervous contraction, when she smiles, which draws them upward a little at one corner, towards the cheek. It might be possible to note these blemishes in another woman's face but it is not easy to dwell on them in hers, so subtly are they connected with all that is individual and characteristic in her expression, and so closely does the expression depend for its full play and life, in every other feature, on the moving impulse of the eyes. Does my poor portrait of her, my fond, patient labour of long and happy days, show me these things? Ah, how few of them are in the dim mechanical drawing, and how many in the mind with which I regard it! A fair, delicate girl, in a pretty light dress, trifling with the leaves of a sketch-book, while she looks up from it with truthful, innocent blue eyes--that is all the drawing can say; all, perhaps, that even the deeper reach of thought and pen can say in their language, either. The woman who first gives life, light, and form to our shadowy conceptions of beauty, fills a void in our spiritual nature that has remained unknown to us till she appeared. Sympathies that lie too deep for words, too deep almost for thoughts, are touched, at such times, by other charms than those which the senses feel and which the resources of expression can realise. The mystery which underlies the beauty of women is never raised above the reach of all expression until it has claimed kindred with the deeper mystery in our own souls. Then, and then only, has it passed beyond the narrow region on which light falls, in this world, from the pencil and the pen. Think of her as you thought of the first woman who quickened the pulses within you that the rest of her sex had no art to stir. Let the kind, candid blue eyes meet yours, as they met mine, with the one matchless look which we both remember so well. Let her voice speak the music that you once loved best, attuned as sweetly to your ear as to mine. Let her footstep, as she comes and goes, in these pages, be like that other footstep to whose airy fall your own heart once beat time. Take her as the visionary nursling of your own fancy; and she will grow upon you, all the more clearly, as the living woman who dwells in mine. Among the sensations that crowded on me, when my eyes first looked upon her--familiar sensations which we all know, which spring to life in most of our hearts, die again in so many, and renew their bright existence in so few--there was one that troubled and perplexed me: one that seemed strangely inconsistent and unaccountably out of place in Miss Fairlie's presence. Mingling with the vivid impression produced by the charm of her fair face and head, her sweet expression, and her winning simplicity of manner, was another impression, which, in a shadowy way, suggested to me the idea of something wanting. At one time it seemed like something wanting in HER: at another, like something wanting in myself, which hindered me from understanding her as I ought. The impression was always strongest in the most contradictory manner, when she looked at me; or, in other words, when I was most conscious of the harmony and charm of her face, and yet, at the same time, most troubled by the sense of an incompleteness which it was impossible to discover. Something wanting, something wanting--and where it was, and what it was, I could not say. The effect of this curious caprice of fancy (as I thought it then) was not of a nature to set me at my ease, during a first interview with Miss Fairlie. The few kind words of welcome which she spoke found me hardly self-possessed enough to thank her in the customary phrases of reply. Observing my hesitation, and no doubt attributing it, naturally enough, to some momentary shyness on my part, Miss Halcombe took the business of talking, as easily and readily as usual, into her own hands. "Look there, Mr. Hartright," she said, pointing to the sketch-book on the table, and to the little delicate wandering hand that was still trifling with it. "Surely you will acknowledge that your model pupil is found at last? The moment she hears that you are in the house, she seizes her inestimable sketch-book, looks universal Nature straight in the face, and longs to begin!" Miss Fairlie laughed with a ready good-humour, which broke out as brightly as if it had been part of the sunshine above us, over her lovely face. "I must not take credit to myself where no credit is due," she said, her clear, truthful blue eyes looking alternately at Miss Halcombe and at me. "Fond as I am of drawing, I am so conscious of my own ignorance that I am more afraid than anxious to begin. Now I know you are here, Mr. Hartright, I find myself looking over my sketches, as I used to look over my lessons when I was a little girl, and when I was sadly afraid that I should turn out not fit to be heard." She made the confession very prettily and simply, and, with quaint, childish earnestness, drew the sketch-book away close to her own side of the table. Miss Halcombe cut the knot of the little embarrassment forthwith, in her resolute, downright way. "Good, bad, or indifferent," she said, "the pupil's sketches must pass through the fiery ordeal of the master's judgment--and there's an end of it. Suppose we take them with us in the carriage, Laura, and let Mr. Hartright see them, for the first time, under circumstances of perpetual jolting and interruption? If we can only confuse him all through the drive, between Nature as it is, when he looks up at the view, and Nature as it is not when he looks down again at our sketch-books, we shall drive him into the last desperate refuge of paying us compliments, and shall slip through his professional fingers with our pet feathers of vanity all unruffled." "I hope Mr. Hartright will pay ME no compliments," said Miss Fairlie, as we all left the summer-house. "May I venture to inquire why you express that hope?" I asked. "Because I shall believe all that you say to me," she answered simply. In those few words she unconsciously gave me the key to her whole character: to that generous trust in others which, in her nature, grew innocently out of the sense of her own truth. I only knew it intuitively then. I know it by experience now. We merely waited to rouse good Mrs. Vesey from the place which she still occupied at the deserted luncheon-table, before we entered the open carriage for our promised drive. The old lady and Miss Halcombe occupied the back seat, and Miss Fairlie and I sat together in front, with the sketch-book open between us, fairly exhibited at last to my professional eyes. All serious criticism on the drawings, even if I had been disposed to volunteer it, was rendered impossible by Miss Halcombe's lively resolution to see nothing but the ridiculous side of the Fine Arts, as practised by herself, her sister, and ladies in general. I can remember the conversation that passed far more easily than the sketches that I mechanically looked over. That part of the talk, especially, in which Miss Fairlie took any share, is still as vividly impressed on my memory as if I had heard it only a few hours ago. Yes! let me acknowledge that on this first day I let the charm of her presence lure me from the recollection of myself and my position. The most trifling of the questions that she put to me, on the subject of using her pencil and mixing her colours; the slightest alterations of expression in the lovely eyes that looked into mine with such an earnest desire to learn all that I could teach, and to discover all that I could show, attracted more of my attention than the finest view we passed through, or the grandest changes of light and shade, as they flowed into each other over the waving moorland and the level beach. At any time, and under any circumstances of human interest, is it not strange to see how little real hold the objects of the natural world amid which we live can gain on our hearts and minds? We go to Nature for comfort in trouble, and sympathy in joy, only in books. Admiration of those beauties of the inanimate world, which modern poetry so largely and so eloquently describes, is not, even in the best of us, one of the original instincts of our nature. As children, we none of us possess it. No uninstructed man or woman possesses it. Those whose lives are most exclusively passed amid the ever-changing wonders of sea and land are also those who are most universally insensible to every aspect of Nature not directly associated with the human interest of their calling. Our capacity of appreciating the beauties of the earth we live on is, in truth, one of the civilised accomplishments which we all learn as an Art; and, more, that very capacity is rarely practised by any of us except when our minds are most indolent and most unoccupied. How much share have the attractions of Nature ever had in the pleasurable or painful interests and emotions of ourselves or our friends? What space do they ever occupy in the thousand little narratives of personal experience which pass every day by word of mouth from one of us to the other? All that our minds can compass, all that our hearts can learn, can be accomplished with equal certainty, equal profit, and equal satisfaction to ourselves, in the poorest as in the richest prospect that the face of the earth can show. There is surely a reason for this want of inborn sympathy between the creature and the creation around it, a reason which may perhaps be found in the widely-differing destinies of man and his earthly sphere. The grandest mountain prospect that the eye can range over is appointed to annihilation. The smallest human interest that the pure heart can feel is appointed to immortality. We had been out nearly three hours, when the carriage again passed through the gates of Limmeridge House. On our way back I had let the ladies settle for themselves the first point of view which they were to sketch, under my instructions, on the afternoon of the next day. When they withdrew to dress for dinner, and when I was alone again in my little sitting-room, my spirits seemed to leave me on a sudden. I felt ill at ease and dissatisfied with myself, I hardly knew why. Perhaps I was now conscious for the first time of having enjoyed our drive too much in the character of a guest, and too little in the character of a drawing-master. Perhaps that strange sense of something wanting, either in Miss Fairlie or in myself, which had perplexed me when I was first introduced to her, haunted me still. Anyhow, it was a relief to my spirits when the dinner-hour called me out of my solitude, and took me back to the society of the ladies of the house. I was struck, on entering the drawing-room, by the curious contrast, rather in material than in colour, of the dresses which they now wore. While Mrs. Vesey and Miss Halcombe were richly clad (each in the manner most becoming to her age), the first in silver-grey, and the second in that delicate primrose-yellow colour which matches so well with a dark complexion and black hair, Miss Fairlie was unpretendingly and almost poorly dressed in plain white muslin. It was spotlessly pure: it was beautifully put on; but still it was the sort of dress which the wife or daughter of a poor man might have worn, and it made her, so far as externals went, look less affluent in circumstances than her own governess. At a later period, when I learnt to know more of Miss Fairlie's character, I discovered that this curious contrast, on the wrong side, was due to her natural delicacy of feeling and natural intensity of aversion to the slightest personal display of her own wealth. Neither Mrs. Vesey nor Miss Halcombe could ever induce her to let the advantage in dress desert the two ladies who were poor, to lean to the side of the one lady who was rich. When the dinner was over we returned together to the drawing-room. Although Mr. Fairlie (emulating the magnificent condescension of the monarch who had picked up Titian's brush for him) had instructed his butler to consult my wishes in relation to the wine that I might prefer after dinner, I was resolute enough to resist the temptation of sitting in solitary grandeur among bottles of my own choosing, and sensible enough to ask the ladies' permission to leave the table with them habitually, on the civilised foreign plan, during the period of my residence at Limmeridge House. The drawing-room, to which we had now withdrawn for the rest of the evening, was on the ground-floor, and was of the same shape and size as the breakfast-room. Large glass doors at the lower end opened on to a terrace, beautifully ornamented along its whole length with a profusion of flowers. The soft, hazy twilight was just shading leaf and blossom alike into harmony with its own sober hues as we entered the room, and the sweet evening scent of the flowers met us with its fragrant welcome through the open glass doors. Good Mrs. Vesey (always the first of the party to sit down) took possession of an arm-chair in a corner, and dozed off comfortably to sleep. At my request Miss Fairlie placed herself at the piano. As I followed her to a seat near the instrument, I saw Miss Halcombe retire into a recess of one of the side windows, to proceed with the search through her mother's letters by the last quiet rays of the evening light. How vividly that peaceful home-picture of the drawing-room comes back to me while I write! From the place where I sat I could see Miss Halcombe's graceful figure, half of it in soft light, half in mysterious shadow, bending intently over the letters in her lap; while, nearer to me, the fair profile of the player at the piano was just delicately defined against the faintly-deepening background of the inner wall of the room. Outside, on the terrace, the clustering flowers and long grasses and creepers waved so gently in the light evening air, that the sound of their rustling never reached us. The sky was without a cloud, and the dawning mystery of moonlight began to tremble already in the region of the eastern heaven. The sense of peace and seclusion soothed all thought and feeling into a rapt, unearthly repose; and the balmy quiet, that deepened ever with the deepening light, seemed to hover over us with a gentler influence still, when there stole upon it from the piano the heavenly tenderness of the music of Mozart. It was an evening of sights and sounds never to forget. We all sat silent in the places we had chosen--Mrs. Vesey still sleeping, Miss Fairlie still playing, Miss Halcombe still reading--till the light failed us. By this time the moon had stolen round to the terrace, and soft, mysterious rays of light were slanting already across the lower end of the room. The change from the twilight obscurity was so beautiful that we banished the lamps, by common consent, when the servant brought them in, and kept the large room unlighted, except by the glimmer of the two candles at the piano. For half an hour more the music still went on. After that the beauty of the moonlight view on the terrace tempted Miss Fairlie out to look at it, and I followed her. When the candles at the piano had been lighted Miss Halcombe had changed her place, so as to continue her examination of the letters by their assistance. We left her, on a low chair, at one side of the instrument, so absorbed over her reading that she did not seem to notice when we moved. We had been out on the terrace together, just in front of the glass doors, hardly so long as five minutes, I should think; and Miss Fairlie was, by my advice, just tying her white handkerchief over her head as a precaution against the night air--when I heard Miss Halcombe's voice--low, eager, and altered from its natural lively tone--pronounce my name. "Mr. Hartright," she said, "will you come here for a minute? I want to speak to you." I entered the room again immediately. The piano stood about half-way down along the inner wall. On the side of the instrument farthest from the terrace Miss Halcombe was sitting with the letters scattered on her lap, and with one in her hand selected from them, and held close to the candle. On the side nearest to the terrace there stood a low ottoman, on which I took my place. In this position I was not far from the glass doors, and I could see Miss Fairlie plainly, as she passed and repassed the opening on to the terrace, walking slowly from end to end of it in the full radiance of the moon. "I want you to listen while I read the concluding passages in this letter," said Miss Halcombe. "Tell me if you think they throw any light upon your strange adventure on the road to London. The letter is addressed by my mother to her second husband, Mr. Fairlie, and the date refers to a period of between eleven and twelve years since. At that time Mr. and Mrs. Fairlie, and my half-sister Laura, had been living for years in this house; and I was away from them completing my education at a school in Paris." She looked and spoke earnestly, and, as I thought, a little uneasily as well. At the moment when she raised the letter to the candle before beginning to read it, Miss Fairlie passed us on the terrace, looked in for a moment, and seeing that we were engaged, slowly walked on. Miss Halcombe began to read as follows:-- "'You will be tired, my dear Philip, of hearing perpetually about my schools and my scholars. Lay the blame, pray, on the dull uniformity of life at Limmeridge, and not on me. Besides, this time I have something really interesting to tell you about a new scholar. "'You know old Mrs. Kempe at the village shop. Well, after years of ailing, the doctor has at last given her up, and she is dying slowly day by day. Her only living relation, a sister, arrived last week to take care of her. This sister comes all the way from Hampshire--her name is Mrs. Catherick. Four days ago Mrs. Catherick came here to see me, and brought her only child with her, a sweet little girl about a year older than our darling Laura----'" As the last sentence fell from the reader's lips, Miss Fairlie passed us on the terrace once more. She was softly singing to herself one of the melodies which she had been playing earlier in the evening. Miss Halcombe waited till she had passed out of sight again, and then went on with the letter-- "'Mrs. Catherick is a decent, well-behaved, respectable woman; middle-aged, and with the remains of having been moderately, only moderately, nice-looking. There is something in her manner and in her appearance, however, which I can't make out. She is reserved about herself to the point of downright secrecy, and there is a look in her face--I can't describe it--which suggests to me that she has something on her mind. She is altogether what you would call a walking mystery. Her errand at Limmeridge House, however, was simple enough. When she left Hampshire to nurse her sister, Mrs. Kempe, through her last illness, she had been obliged to bring her daughter with her, through having no one at home to take care of the little girl. Mrs. Kempe may die in a week's time, or may linger on for months; and Mrs. Catherick's object was to ask me to let her daughter, Anne, have the benefit of attending my school, subject to the condition of her being removed from it to go home again with her mother, after Mrs. Kempe's death. I consented at once, and when Laura and I went out for our walk, we took the little girl (who is just eleven years old) to the school that very day.'" Once more Miss Fairlie's figure, bright and soft in its snowy muslin dress--her face prettily framed by the white folds of the handkerchief which she had tied under her chin--passed by us in the moonlight. Once more Miss Halcombe waited till she was out of sight, and then went on-- "'I have taken a violent fancy, Philip, to my new scholar, for a reason which I mean to keep till the last for the sake of surprising you. Her mother having told me as little about the child as she told me of herself, I was left to discover (which I did on the first day when we tried her at lessons) that the poor little thing's intellect is not developed as it ought to be at her age. Seeing this I had her up to the house the next day, and privately arranged with the doctor to come and watch her and question her, and tell me what he thought. His opinion is that she will grow out of it. But he says her careful bringing-up at school is a matter of great importance just now, because her unusual slowness in acquiring ideas implies an unusual tenacity in keeping them, when they are once received into her mind. Now, my love, you must not imagine, in your off-hand way, that I have been attaching myself to an idiot. This poor little Anne Catherick is a sweet, affectionate, grateful girl, and says the quaintest, prettiest things (as you shall judge by an instance), in the most oddly sudden, surprised, half-frightened way. Although she is dressed very neatly, her clothes show a sad want of taste in colour and pattern. So I arranged, yesterday, that some of our darling Laura's old white frocks and white hats should be altered for Anne Catherick, explaining to her that little girls of her complexion looked neater and better all in white than in anything else. She hesitated and seemed puzzled for a minute, then flushed up, and appeared to understand. Her little hand clasped mine suddenly. She kissed it, Philip, and said (oh, so earnestly!), "I will always wear white as long as I live. It will help me to remember you, ma'am, and to think that I am pleasing you still, when I go away and see you no more." This is only one specimen of the quaint things she says so prettily. Poor little soul! She shall have a stock of white frocks, made with good deep tucks, to let out for her as she grows----'" Miss Halcombe paused, and looked at me across the piano. "Did the forlorn woman whom you met in the high-road seem young?" she asked. "Young enough to be two- or three-and-twenty?" "Yes, Miss Halcombe, as young as that." "And she was strangely dressed, from head to foot, all in white?" "All in white." While the answer was passing my lips Miss Fairlie glided into view on the terrace for the third time. Instead of proceeding on her walk, she stopped, with her back turned towards us, and, leaning on the balustrade of the terrace, looked down into the garden beyond. My eyes fixed upon the white gleam of her muslin gown and head-dress in the moonlight, and a sensation, for which I can find no name--a sensation that quickened my pulse, and raised a fluttering at my heart--began to steal over me. "All in white?" Miss Halcombe repeated. "The most important sentences in the letter, Mr. Hartright, are those at the end, which I will read to you immediately. But I can't help dwelling a little upon the coincidence of the white costume of the woman you met, and the white frocks which produced that strange answer from my mother's little scholar. The doctor may have been wrong when he discovered the child's defects of intellect, and predicted that she would 'grow out of them.' She may never have grown out of them, and the old grateful fancy about dressing in white, which was a serious feeling to the girl, may be a serious feeling to the woman still." I said a few words in answer--I hardly know what. All my attention was concentrated on the white gleam of Miss Fairlie's muslin dress. "Listen to the last sentences of the letter," said Miss Halcombe. "I think they will surprise you." As she raised the letter to the light of the candle, Miss Fairlie turned from the balustrade, looked doubtfully up and down the terrace, advanced a step towards the glass doors, and then stopped, facing us. Meanwhile Miss Halcombe read me the last sentences to which she had referred-- "'And now, my love, seeing that I am at the end of my paper, now for the real reason, the surprising reason, for my fondness for little Anne Catherick. My dear Philip, although she is not half so pretty, she is, nevertheless, by one of those extraordinary caprices of accidental resemblance which one sometimes sees, the living likeness, in her hair, her complexion, the colour of her eyes, and the shape of her face----'" I started up from the ottoman before Miss Halcombe could pronounce the next words. A thrill of the same feeling which ran through me when the touch was laid upon my shoulder on the lonely high-road chilled me again. There stood Miss Fairlie, a white figure, alone in the moonlight; in her attitude, in the turn of her head, in her complexion, in the shape of her face, the living image, at that distance and under those circumstances, of the woman in white! The doubt which had troubled my mind for hours and hours past flashed into conviction in an instant. That "something wanting" was my own recognition of the ominous likeness between the fugitive from the asylum and my pupil at Limmeridge House. "You see it!" said Miss Halcombe. She dropped the useless letter, and her eyes flashed as they met mine. "You see it now, as my mother saw it eleven years since!" "I see it--more unwillingly than I can say. To associate that forlorn, friendless, lost woman, even by an accidental likeness only, with Miss Fairlie, seems like casting a shadow on the future of the bright creature who stands looking at us now. Let me lose the impression again as soon as possible. Call her in, out of the dreary moonlight--pray call her in!" "Mr. Hartright, you surprise me. Whatever women may be, I thought that men, in the nineteenth century, were above superstition." "Pray call her in!" "Hush, hush! She is coming of her own accord. Say nothing in her presence. Let this discovery of the likeness be kept a secret between you and me. Come in, Laura, come in, and wake Mrs. Vesey with the piano. Mr. Hartright is petitioning for some more music, and he wants it, this time, of the lightest and liveliest kind." IX So ended my eventful first day at Limmeridge House. Miss Halcombe and I kept our secret. After the discovery of the likeness no fresh light seemed destined to break over the mystery of the woman in white. At the first safe opportunity Miss Halcombe cautiously led her half-sister to speak of their mother, of old times, and of Anne Catherick. Miss Fairlie's recollections of the little scholar at Limmeridge were, however, only of the most vague and general kind. She remembered the likeness between herself and her mother's favourite pupil, as something which had been supposed to exist in past times; but she did not refer to the gift of the white dresses, or to the singular form of words in which the child had artlessly expressed her gratitude for them. She remembered that Anne had remained at Limmeridge for a few months only, and had then left it to go back to her home in Hampshire; but she could not say whether the mother and daughter had ever returned, or had ever been heard of afterwards. No further search, on Miss Halcombe's part, through the few letters of Mrs. Fairlie's writing which she had left unread, assisted in clearing up the uncertainties still left to perplex us. We had identified the unhappy woman whom I had met in the night-time with Anne Catherick--we had made some advance, at least, towards connecting the probably defective condition of the poor creature's intellect with the peculiarity of her being dressed all in white, and with the continuance, in her maturer years, of her childish gratitude towards Mrs. Fairlie--and there, so far as we knew at that time, our discoveries had ended. The days passed on, the weeks passed on, and the track of the golden autumn wound its bright way visibly through the green summer of the trees. Peaceful, fast-flowing, happy time! my story glides by you now as swiftly as you once glided by me. Of all the treasures of enjoyment that you poured so freely into my heart, how much is left me that has purpose and value enough to be written on this page? Nothing but the saddest of all confessions that a man can make--the confession of his own folly. The secret which that confession discloses should be told with little effort, for it has indirectly escaped me already. The poor weak words, which have failed to describe Miss Fairlie, have succeeded in betraying the sensations she awakened in me. It is so with us all. Our words are giants when they do us an injury, and dwarfs when they do us a service. I loved her. Ah! how well I know all the sadness and all the mockery that is contained in those three words. I can sigh over my mournful confession with the tenderest woman who reads it and pities me. I can laugh at it as bitterly as the hardest man who tosses it from him in contempt. I loved her! Feel for me, or despise me, I confess it with the same immovable resolution to own the truth. Was there no excuse for me? There was some excuse to be found, surely, in the conditions under which my term of hired service was passed at Limmeridge House. My morning hours succeeded each other calmly in the quiet and seclusion of my own room. I had just work enough to do, in mounting my employer's drawings, to keep my hands and eyes pleasurably employed, while my mind was left free to enjoy the dangerous luxury of its own unbridled thoughts. A perilous solitude, for it lasted long enough to enervate, not long enough to fortify me. A perilous solitude, for it was followed by afternoons and evenings spent, day after day and week after week alone in the society of two women, one of whom possessed all the accomplishments of grace, wit, and high-breeding, the other all the charms of beauty, gentleness, and simple truth, that can purify and subdue the heart of man. Not a day passed, in that dangerous intimacy of teacher and pupil, in which my hand was not close to Miss Fairlie's; my cheek, as we bent together over her sketch-book, almost touching hers. The more attentively she watched every movement of my brush, the more closely I was breathing the perfume of her hair, and the warm fragrance of her breath. It was part of my service to live in the very light of her eyes--at one time to be bending over her, so close to her bosom as to tremble at the thought of touching it; at another, to feel her bending over me, bending so close to see what I was about, that her voice sank low when she spoke to me, and her ribbons brushed my cheek in the wind before she could draw them back. The evenings which followed the sketching excursions of the afternoon varied, rather than checked, these innocent, these inevitable familiarities. My natural fondness for the music which she played with such tender feeling, such delicate womanly taste, and her natural enjoyment of giving me back, by the practice of her art, the pleasure which I had offered to her by the practice of mine, only wove another tie which drew us closer and closer to one another. The accidents of conversation; the simple habits which regulated even such a little thing as the position of our places at table; the play of Miss Halcombe's ever-ready raillery, always directed against my anxiety as teacher, while it sparkled over her enthusiasm as pupil; the harmless expression of poor Mrs. Vesey's drowsy approval, which connected Miss Fairlie and me as two model young people who never disturbed her--every one of these trifles, and many more, combined to fold us together in the same domestic atmosphere, and to lead us both insensibly to the same hopeless end. I should have remembered my position, and have put myself secretly on my guard. I did so, but not till it was too late. All the discretion, all the experience, which had availed me with other women, and secured me against other temptations, failed me with her. It had been my profession, for years past, to be in this close contact with young girls of all ages, and of all orders of beauty. I had accepted the position as part of my calling in life; I had trained myself to leave all the sympathies natural to my age in my employer's outer hall, as coolly as I left my umbrella there before I went upstairs. I had long since learnt to understand, composedly and as a matter of course, that my situation in life was considered a guarantee against any of my female pupils feeling more than the most ordinary interest in me, and that I was admitted among beautiful and captivating women much as a harmless domestic animal is admitted among them. This guardian experience I had gained early; this guardian experience had sternly and strictly guided me straight along my own poor narrow path, without once letting me stray aside, to the right hand or to the left. And now I and my trusty talisman were parted for the first time. Yes, my hardly-earned self-control was as completely lost to me as if I had never possessed it; lost to me, as it is lost every day to other men, in other critical situations, where women are concerned. I know, now, that I should have questioned myself from the first. I should have asked why any room in the house was better than home to me when she entered it, and barren as a desert when she went out again--why I always noticed and remembered the little changes in her dress that I had noticed and remembered in no other woman's before--why I saw her, heard her, and touched her (when we shook hands at night and morning) as I had never seen, heard, and touched any other woman in my life? I should have looked into my own heart, and found this new growth springing up there, and plucked it out while it was young. Why was this easiest, simplest work of self-culture always too much for me? The explanation has been written already in the three words that were many enough, and plain enough, for my confession. I loved her. The days passed, the weeks passed; it was approaching the third month of my stay in Cumberland. The delicious monotony of life in our calm seclusion flowed on with me, like a smooth stream with a swimmer who glides down the current. All memory of the past, all thought of the future, all sense of the falseness and hopelessness of my own position, lay hushed within me into deceitful rest. Lulled by the Syren-song that my own heart sung to me, with eyes shut to all sight, and ears closed to all sound of danger, I drifted nearer and nearer to the fatal rocks. The warning that aroused me at last, and startled me into sudden, self-accusing consciousness of my own weakness, was the plainest, the truest, the kindest of all warnings, for it came silently from HER. We had parted one night as usual. No word had fallen from my lips, at that time or at any time before it, that could betray me, or startle her into sudden knowledge of the truth. But when we met again in the morning, a change had come over her--a change that told me all. I shrank then--I shrink still--from invading the innermost sanctuary of her heart, and laying it open to others, as I have laid open my own. Let it be enough to say that the time when she first surprised my secret was, I firmly believe, the time when she first surprised her own, and the time, also, when she changed towards me in the interval of one night. Her nature, too truthful to deceive others, was too noble to deceive itself. When the doubt that I had hushed asleep first laid its weary weight on her heart, the true face owned all, and said, in its own frank, simple language--I am sorry for him; I am sorry for myself. It said this, and more, which I could not then interpret. I understood but too well the change in her manner, to greater kindness and quicker readiness in interpreting all my wishes, before others--to constraint and sadness, and nervous anxiety to absorb herself in the first occupation she could seize on, whenever we happened to be left together alone. I understood why the sweet sensitive lips smiled so rarely and so restrainedly now, and why the clear blue eyes looked at me, sometimes with the pity of an angel, sometimes with the innocent perplexity of a child. But the change meant more than this. There was a coldness in her hand, there was an unnatural immobility in her face, there was in all her movements the mute expression of constant fear and clinging self-reproach. The sensations that I could trace to herself and to me, the unacknowledged sensations that we were feeling in common, were not these. There were certain elements of the change in her that were still secretly drawing us together, and others that were, as secretly, beginning to drive us apart. In my doubt and perplexity, in my vague suspicion of something hidden which I was left to find by my own unaided efforts, I examined Miss Halcombe's looks and manner for enlightenment. Living in such intimacy as ours, no serious alteration could take place in any one of us which did not sympathetically affect the others. The change in Miss Fairlie was reflected in her half-sister. Although not a word escaped Miss Halcombe which hinted at an altered state of feeling towards myself, her penetrating eyes had contracted a new habit of always watching me. Sometimes the look was like suppressed anger, sometimes like suppressed dread, sometimes like neither--like nothing, in short, which I could understand. A week elapsed, leaving us all three still in this position of secret constraint towards one another. My situation, aggravated by the sense of my own miserable weakness and forgetfulness of myself, now too late awakened in me, was becoming intolerable. I felt that I must cast off the oppression under which I was living, at once and for ever--yet how to act for the best, or what to say first, was more than I could tell. From this position of helplessness and humiliation I was rescued by Miss Halcombe. Her lips told me the bitter, the necessary, the unexpected truth; her hearty kindness sustained me under the shock of hearing it; her sense and courage turned to its right use an event which threatened the worst that could happen, to me and to others, in Limmeridge House. X It was on a Thursday in the week, and nearly at the end of the third month of my sojourn in Cumberland. In the morning, when I went down into the breakfast-room at the usual hour, Miss Halcombe, for the first time since I had known her, was absent from her customary place at the table. Miss Fairlie was out on the lawn. She bowed to me, but did not come in. Not a word had dropped from my lips, or from hers, that could unsettle either of us--and yet the same unacknowledged sense of embarrassment made us shrink alike from meeting one another alone. She waited on the lawn, and I waited in the breakfast-room, till Mrs. Vesey or Miss Halcombe came in. How quickly I should have joined her: how readily we should have shaken hands, and glided into our customary talk, only a fortnight ago. In a few minutes Miss Halcombe entered. She had a preoccupied look, and she made her apologies for being late rather absently. "I have been detained," she said, "by a consultation with Mr. Fairlie on a domestic matter which he wished to speak to me about." Miss Fairlie came in from the garden, and the usual morning greeting passed between us. Her hand struck colder to mine than ever. She did not look at me, and she was very pale. Even Mrs. Vesey noticed it when she entered the room a moment after. "I suppose it is the change in the wind," said the old lady. "The winter is coming--ah, my love, the winter is coming soon!" In her heart and in mine it had come already! Our morning meal--once so full of pleasant good-humoured discussion of the plans for the day--was short and silent. Miss Fairlie seemed to feel the oppression of the long pauses in the conversation, and looked appealingly to her sister to fill them up. Miss Halcombe, after once or twice hesitating and checking herself, in a most uncharacteristic manner, spoke at last. "I have seen your uncle this morning, Laura," she said. "He thinks the purple room is the one that ought to be got ready, and he confirms what I told you. Monday is the day--not Tuesday." While these words were being spoken Miss Fairlie looked down at the table beneath her. Her fingers moved nervously among the crumbs that were scattered on the cloth. The paleness on her cheeks spread to her lips, and the lips themselves trembled visibly. I was not the only person present who noticed this. Miss Halcombe saw it, too, and at once set us the example of rising from table. Mrs. Vesey and Miss Fairlie left the room together. The kind sorrowful blue eyes looked at me, for a moment, with the prescient sadness of a coming and a long farewell. I felt the answering pang in my own heart--the pang that told me I must lose her soon, and love her the more unchangeably for the loss. I turned towards the garden when the door had closed on her. Miss Halcombe was standing with her hat in her hand, and her shawl over her arm, by the large window that led out to the lawn, and was looking at me attentively. "Have you any leisure time to spare," she asked, "before you begin to work in your own room?" "Certainly, Miss Halcombe. I have always time at your service." "I want to say a word to you in private, Mr. Hartright. Get your hat and come out into the garden. We are not likely to be disturbed there at this hour in the morning." As we stepped out on to the lawn, one of the under-gardeners--a mere lad--passed us on his way to the house, with a letter in his hand. Miss Halcombe stopped him. "Is that letter for me?" she asked. "Nay, miss; it's just said to be for Miss Fairlie," answered the lad, holding out the letter as he spoke. Miss Halcombe took it from him and looked at the address. "A strange handwriting," she said to herself. "Who can Laura's correspondent be? Where did you get this?" she continued, addressing the gardener. "Well, miss," said the lad, "I just got it from a woman." "What woman?" "A woman well stricken in age." "Oh, an old woman. Any one you knew?" "I canna' tak' it on mysel' to say that she was other than a stranger to me." "Which way did she go?" "That gate," said the under-gardener, turning with great deliberation towards the south, and embracing the whole of that part of England with one comprehensive sweep of his arm. "Curious," said Miss Halcombe; "I suppose it must be a begging-letter. There," she added, handing the letter back to the lad, "take it to the house, and give it to one of the servants. And now, Mr. Hartright, if you have no objection, let us walk this way." She led me across the lawn, along the same path by which I had followed her on the day after my arrival at Limmeridge. At the little summer-house, in which Laura Fairlie and I had first seen each other, she stopped, and broke the silence which she had steadily maintained while we were walking together. "What I have to say to you I can say here." With those words she entered the summer-house, took one of the chairs at the little round table inside, and signed to me to take the other. I suspected what was coming when she spoke to me in the breakfast-room; I felt certain of it now. "Mr. Hartright," she said, "I am going to begin by making a frank avowal to you. I am going to say--without phrase-making, which I detest, or paying compliments, which I heartily despise--that I have come, in the course of your residence with us, to feel a strong friendly regard for you. I was predisposed in your favour when you first told me of your conduct towards that unhappy woman whom you met under such remarkable circumstances. Your management of the affair might not have been prudent, but it showed the self-control, the delicacy, and the compassion of a man who was naturally a gentleman. It made me expect good things from you, and you have not disappointed my expectations." She paused--but held up her hand at the same time, as a sign that she awaited no answer from me before she proceeded. When I entered the summer-house, no thought was in me of the woman in white. But now, Miss Halcombe's own words had put the memory of my adventure back in my mind. It remained there throughout the interview--remained, and not without a result. "As your friend," she proceeded, "I am going to tell you, at once, in my own plain, blunt, downright language, that I have discovered your secret--without help or hint, mind, from any one else. Mr. Hartright, you have thoughtlessly allowed yourself to form an attachment--a serious and devoted attachment I am afraid--to my sister Laura. I don't put you to the pain of confessing it in so many words, because I see and know that you are too honest to deny it. I don't even blame you--I pity you for opening your heart to a hopeless affection. You have not attempted to take any underhand advantage--you have not spoken to my sister in secret. You are guilty of weakness and want of attention to your own best interests, but of nothing worse. If you had acted, in any single respect, less delicately and less modestly, I should have told you to leave the house without an instant's notice, or an instant's consultation of anybody. As it is, I blame the misfortune of your years and your position--I don't blame YOU. Shake hands--I have given you pain; I am going to give you more, but there is no help for it--shake hands with your friend, Marian Halcombe, first." The sudden kindness--the warm, high-minded, fearless sympathy which met me on such mercifully equal terms, which appealed with such delicate and generous abruptness straight to my heart, my honour, and my courage, overcame me in an instant. I tried to look at her when she took my hand, but my eyes were dim. I tried to thank her, but my voice failed me. "Listen to me," she said, considerately avoiding all notice of my loss of self-control. "Listen to me, and let us get it over at once. It is a real true relief to me that I am not obliged, in what I have now to say, to enter into the question--the hard and cruel question as I think it--of social inequalities. Circumstances which will try you to the quick, spare me the ungracious necessity of paining a man who has lived in friendly intimacy under the same roof with myself by any humiliating reference to matters of rank and station. You must leave Limmeridge House, Mr. Hartright, before more harm is done. It is my duty to say that to you; and it would be equally my duty to say it, under precisely the same serious necessity, if you were the representative of the oldest and wealthiest family in England. You must leave us, not because you are a teacher of drawing----" She waited a moment, turned her face full on me, and reaching across the table, laid her hand firmly on my arm. "Not because you are a teacher of drawing," she repeated, "but because Laura Fairlie is engaged to be married." The last word went like a bullet to my heart. My arm lost all sensation of the hand that grasped it. I never moved and never spoke. The sharp autumn breeze that scattered the dead leaves at our feet came as cold to me, on a sudden, as if my own mad hopes were dead leaves too, whirled away by the wind like the rest. Hopes! Betrothed, or not betrothed, she was equally far from me. Would other men have remembered that in my place? Not if they had loved her as I did. The pang passed, and nothing but the dull numbing pain of it remained. I felt Miss Halcombe's hand again, tightening its hold on my arm--I raised my head and looked at her. Her large black eyes were rooted on me, watching the white change on my face, which I felt, and which she saw. "Crush it!" she said. "Here, where you first saw her, crush it! Don't shrink under it like a woman. Tear it out; trample it under foot like a man!" The suppressed vehemence with which she spoke, the strength which her will--concentrated in the look she fixed on me, and in the hold on my arm that she had not yet relinquished--communicated to mine, steadied me. We both waited for a minute in silence. At the end of that time I had justified her generous faith in my manhood--I had, outwardly at least, recovered my self-control. "Are you yourself again?" "Enough myself, Miss Halcombe, to ask your pardon and hers. Enough myself to be guided by your advice, and to prove my gratitude in that way, if I can prove it in no other." "You have proved it already," she answered, "by those words. Mr. Hartright, concealment is at an end between us. I cannot affect to hide from you what my sister has unconsciously shown to me. You must leave us for her sake, as well as for your own. Your presence here, your necessary intimacy with us, harmless as it has been, God knows, in all other respects, has unsteadied her and made her wretched. I, who love her better than my own life--I, who have learnt to believe in that pure, noble, innocent nature as I believe in my religion--know but too well the secret misery of self-reproach that she has been suffering since the first shadow of a feeling disloyal to her marriage engagement entered her heart in spite of her. I don't say--it would be useless to attempt to say it after what has happened--that her engagement has ever had a strong hold on her affections. It is an engagement of honour, not of love; her father sanctioned it on his deathbed, two years since; she herself neither welcomed it nor shrank from it--she was content to make it. Till you came here she was in the position of hundreds of other women, who marry men without being greatly attracted to them or greatly repelled by them, and who learn to love them (when they don't learn to hate!) after marriage, instead of before. I hope more earnestly than words can say--and you should have the self-sacrificing courage to hope too--that the new thoughts and feelings which have disturbed the old calmness and the old content have not taken root too deeply to be ever removed. Your absence (if I had less belief in your honour, and your courage, and your sense, I should not trust to them as I am trusting now) your absence will help my efforts, and time will help us all three. It is something to know that my first confidence in you was not all misplaced. It is something to know that you will not be less honest, less manly, less considerate towards the pupil whose relation to yourself you have had the misfortune to forget, than towards the stranger and the outcast whose appeal to you was not made in vain." Again the chance reference to the woman in white! Was there no possibility of speaking of Miss Fairlie and of me without raising the memory of Anne Catherick, and setting her between us like a fatality that it was hopeless to avoid? "Tell me what apology I can make to Mr. Fairlie for breaking my engagement," I said. "Tell me when to go after that apology is accepted. I promise implicit obedience to you and to your advice." "Time is every way of importance," she answered. "You heard me refer this morning to Monday next, and to the necessity of setting the purple room in order. The visitor whom we expect on Monday----" I could not wait for her to be more explicit. Knowing what I knew now, the memory of Miss Fairlie's look and manner at the breakfast-table told me that the expected visitor at Limmeridge House was her future husband. I tried to force it back; but something rose within me at that moment stronger than my own will, and I interrupted Miss Halcombe. "Let me go to-day," I said bitterly. "The sooner the better." "No, not to-day," she replied. "The only reason you can assign to Mr. Fairlie for your departure, before the end of your engagement, must be that an unforeseen necessity compels you to ask his permission to return at once to London. You must wait till to-morrow to tell him that, at the time when the post comes in, because he will then understand the sudden change in your plans, by associating it with the arrival of a letter from London. It is miserable and sickening to descend to deceit, even of the most harmless kind--but I know Mr. Fairlie, and if you once excite his suspicions that you are trifling with him, he will refuse to release you. Speak to him on Friday morning: occupy yourself afterwards (for the sake of your own interests with your employer) in leaving your unfinished work in as little confusion as possible, and quit this place on Saturday. It will be time enough then, Mr. Hartright, for you, and for all of us." Before I could assure her that she might depend on my acting in the strictest accordance with her wishes, we were both startled by advancing footsteps in the shrubbery. Some one was coming from the house to seek for us! I felt the blood rush into my cheeks and then leave them again. Could the third person who was fast approaching us, at such a time and under such circumstances, be Miss Fairlie? It was a relief--so sadly, so hopelessly was my position towards her changed already--it was absolutely a relief to me, when the person who had disturbed us appeared at the entrance of the summer-house, and proved to be only Miss Fairlie's maid. "Could I speak to you for a moment, miss?" said the girl, in rather a flurried, unsettled manner. Miss Halcombe descended the steps into the shrubbery, and walked aside a few paces with the maid. Left by myself, my mind reverted, with a sense of forlorn wretchedness which it is not in any words that I can find to describe, to my approaching return to the solitude and the despair of my lonely London home. Thoughts of my kind old mother, and of my sister, who had rejoiced with her so innocently over my prospects in Cumberland--thoughts whose long banishment from my heart it was now my shame and my reproach to realise for the first time--came back to me with the loving mournfulness of old, neglected friends. My mother and my sister, what would they feel when I returned to them from my broken engagement, with the confession of my miserable secret--they who had parted from me so hopefully on that last happy night in the Hampstead cottage! Anne Catherick again! Even the memory of the farewell evening with my mother and my sister could not return to me now unconnected with that other memory of the moonlight walk back to London. What did it mean? Were that woman and I to meet once more? It was possible, at the least. Did she know that I lived in London? Yes; I had told her so, either before or after that strange question of hers, when she had asked me so distrustfully if I knew many men of the rank of Baronet. Either before or after--my mind was not calm enough, then, to remember which. A few minutes elapsed before Miss Halcombe dismissed the maid and came back to me. She, too, looked flurried and unsettled now. "We have arranged all that is necessary, Mr. Hartright," she said. "We have understood each other, as friends should, and we may go back at once to the house. To tell you the truth, I am uneasy about Laura. She has sent to say she wants to see me directly, and the maid reports that her mistress is apparently very much agitated by a letter that she has received this morning--the same letter, no doubt, which I sent on to the house before we came here." We retraced our steps together hastily along the shrubbery path. Although Miss Halcombe had ended all that she thought it necessary to say on her side, I had not ended all that I wanted to say on mine. From the moment when I had discovered that the expected visitor at Limmeridge was Miss Fairlie's future husband, I had felt a bitter curiosity, a burning envious eagerness, to know who he was. It was possible that a future opportunity of putting the question might not easily offer, so I risked asking it on our way back to the house. "Now that you are kind enough to tell me we have understood each other, Miss Halcombe," I said, "now that you are sure of my gratitude for your forbearance and my obedience to your wishes, may I venture to ask who"--(I hesitated--I had forced myself to think of him, but it was harder still to speak of him, as her promised husband)--"who the gentleman engaged to Miss Fairlie is?" Her mind was evidently occupied with the message she had received from her sister. She answered in a hasty, absent way-- "A gentleman of large property in Hampshire." Hampshire! Anne Catherick's native place. Again, and yet again, the woman in white. There WAS a fatality in it. "And his name?" I said, as quietly and indifferently as I could. "Sir Percival Glyde." SIR--Sir Percival! Anne Catherick's question--that suspicious question about the men of the rank of Baronet whom I might happen to know--had hardly been dismissed from my mind by Miss Halcombe's return to me in the summer-house, before it was recalled again by her own answer. I stopped suddenly, and looked at her. "Sir Percival Glyde," she repeated, imagining that I had not heard her former reply. "Knight, or Baronet?" I asked, with an agitation that I could hide no longer. She paused for a moment, and then answered, rather coldly-- "Baronet, of course." XI Not a word more was said, on either side, as we walked back to the house. Miss Halcombe hastened immediately to her sister's room, and I withdrew to my studio to set in order all of Mr. Fairlie's drawings that I had not yet mounted and restored before I resigned them to the care of other hands. Thoughts that I had hitherto restrained, thoughts that made my position harder than ever to endure, crowded on me now that I was alone. She was engaged to be married, and her future husband was Sir Percival Glyde. A man of the rank of Baronet, and the owner of property in Hampshire. There were hundreds of baronets in England, and dozens of landowners in Hampshire. Judging by the ordinary rules of evidence, I had not the shadow of a reason, thus far, for connecting Sir Percival Glyde with the suspicious words of inquiry that had been spoken to me by the woman in white. And yet, I did connect him with them. Was it because he had now become associated in my mind with Miss Fairlie, Miss Fairlie being, in her turn, associated with Anne Catherick, since the night when I had discovered the ominous likeness between them? Had the events of the morning so unnerved me already that I was at the mercy of any delusion which common chances and common coincidences might suggest to my imagination? Impossible to say. I could only feel that what had passed between Miss Halcombe and myself, on our way from the summer-house, had affected me very strangely. The foreboding of some undiscoverable danger lying hid from us all in the darkness of the future was strong on me. The doubt whether I was not linked already to a chain of events which even my approaching departure from Cumberland would be powerless to snap asunder--the doubt whether we any of us saw the end as the end would really be--gathered more and more darkly over my mind. Poignant as it was, the sense of suffering caused by the miserable end of my brief, presumptuous love seemed to be blunted and deadened by the still stronger sense of something obscurely impending, something invisibly threatening, that Time was holding over our heads. I had been engaged with the drawings little more than half an hour, when there was a knock at the door. It opened, on my answering; and, to my surprise, Miss Halcombe entered the room. Her manner was angry and agitated. She caught up a chair for herself before I could give her one, and sat down in it, close at my side. "Mr. Hartright," she said, "I had hoped that all painful subjects of conversation were exhausted between us, for to-day at least. But it is not to be so. There is some underhand villainy at work to frighten my sister about her approaching marriage. You saw me send the gardener on to the house, with a letter addressed, in a strange handwriting, to Miss Fairlie?" "Certainly." "The letter is an anonymous letter--a vile attempt to injure Sir Percival Glyde in my sister's estimation. It has so agitated and alarmed her that I have had the greatest possible difficulty in composing her spirits sufficiently to allow me to leave her room and come here. I know this is a family matter on which I ought not to consult you, and in which you can feel no concern or interest----" "I beg your pardon, Miss Halcombe. I feel the strongest possible concern and interest in anything that affects Miss Fairlie's happiness or yours." "I am glad to hear you say so. You are the only person in the house, or out of it, who can advise me. Mr. Fairlie, in his state of health and with his horror of difficulties and mysteries of all kinds, is not to be thought of. The clergyman is a good, weak man, who knows nothing out of the routine of his duties; and our neighbours are just the sort of comfortable, jog-trot acquaintances whom one cannot disturb in times of trouble and danger. What I want to know is this: ought I at once to take such steps as I can to discover the writer of the letter? or ought I to wait, and apply to Mr. Fairlie's legal adviser to-morrow? It is a question--perhaps a very important one--of gaining or losing a day. Tell me what you think, Mr. Hartright. If necessity had not already obliged me to take you into my confidence under very delicate circumstances, even my helpless situation would, perhaps, be no excuse for me. But as things are I cannot surely be wrong, after all that has passed between us, in forgetting that you are a friend of only three months' standing." She gave me the letter. It began abruptly, without any preliminary form of address, as follows-- "Do you believe in dreams? I hope, for your own sake, that you do. See what Scripture says about dreams and their fulfilment (Genesis xl. 8, xli. 25; Daniel iv. 18-25), and take the warning I send you before it is too late. "Last night I dreamed about you, Miss Fairlie. I dreamed that I was standing inside the communion rails of a church--I on one side of the altar-table, and the clergyman, with his surplice and his prayer-book, on the other. "After a time there walked towards us, down the aisle of the church, a man and a woman, coming to be married. You were the woman. You looked so pretty and innocent in your beautiful white silk dress, and your long white lace veil, that my heart felt for you, and the tears came into my eyes. "They were tears of pity, young lady, that heaven blesses and instead of falling from my eyes like the everyday tears that we all of us shed, they turned into two rays of light which slanted nearer and nearer to the man standing at the altar with you, till they touched his breast. The two rays sprang ill arches like two rainbows between me and him. I looked along them, and I saw down into his inmost heart. "The outside of the man you were marrying was fair enough to see. He was neither tall nor short--he was a little below the middle size. A light, active, high-spirited man--about five-and-forty years old, to look at. He had a pale face, and was bald over the forehead, but had dark hair on the rest of his head. His beard was shaven on his chin, but was let to grow, of a fine rich brown, on his cheeks and his upper lip. His eyes were brown too, and very bright; his nose straight and handsome and delicate enough to have done for a woman's. His hands the same. He was troubled from time to time with a dry hacking cough, and when he put up his white right hand to his mouth, he showed the red scar of an old wound across the back of it. Have I dreamt of the right man? You know best, Miss Fairlie and you can say if I was deceived or not. Read next, what I saw beneath the outside--I entreat you, read, and profit. "I looked along the two rays of light, and I saw down into his inmost heart. It was black as night, and on it were written, in the red flaming letters which are the handwriting of the fallen angel, 'Without pity and without remorse. He has strewn with misery the paths of others, and he will live to strew with misery the path of this woman by his side.' I read that, and then the rays of light shifted and pointed over his shoulder; and there, behind him, stood a fiend laughing. And the rays of light shifted once more, and pointed over your shoulder; and there behind you, stood an angel weeping. And the rays of light shifted for the third time, and pointed straight between you and that man. They widened and widened, thrusting you both asunder, one from the other. And the clergyman looked for the marriage-service in vain: it was gone out of the book, and he shut up the leaves, and put it from him in despair. And I woke with my eyes full of tears and my heart beating--for I believe in dreams. "Believe too, Miss Fairlie--I beg of you, for your own sake, believe as I do. Joseph and Daniel, and others in Scripture, believed in dreams. Inquire into the past life of that man with the scar on his hand, before you say the words that make you his miserable wife. I don't give you this warning on my account, but on yours. I have an interest in your well-being that will live as long as I draw breath. Your mother's daughter has a tender place in my heart--for your mother was my first, my best, my only friend." There the extraordinary letter ended, without signature of any sort. The handwriting afforded no prospect of a clue. It was traced on ruled lines, in the cramped, conventional, copy-book character technically termed "small hand." It was feeble and faint, and defaced by blots, but had otherwise nothing to distinguish it. "That is not an illiterate letter," said Miss Halcombe, "and at the same time, it is surely too incoherent to be the letter of an educated person in the higher ranks of life. The reference to the bridal dress and veil, and other little expressions, seem to point to it as the production of some woman. What do you think, Mr. Hartright?" "I think so too. It seems to me to be not only the letter of a woman, but of a woman whose mind must be----" "Deranged?" suggested Miss Halcombe. "It struck me in that light too." I did not answer. While I was speaking, my eyes rested on the last sentence of the letter: "Your mother's daughter has a tender place in my heart--for your mother was my first, my best, my only friend." Those words and the doubt which had just escaped me as to the sanity of the writer of the letter, acting together on my mind, suggested an idea, which I was literally afraid to express openly, or even to encourage secretly. I began to doubt whether my own faculties were not in danger of losing their balance. It seemed almost like a monomania to be tracing back everything strange that happened, everything unexpected that was said, always to the same hidden source and the same sinister influence. I resolved, this time, in defence of my own courage and my own sense, to come to no decision that plain fact did not warrant, and to turn my back resolutely on everything that tempted me in the shape of surmise. "If we have any chance of tracing the person who has written this," I said, returning the letter to Miss Halcombe, "there can be no harm in seizing our opportunity the moment it offers. I think we ought to speak to the gardener again about the elderly woman who gave him the letter, and then to continue our inquiries in the village. But first let me ask a question. You mentioned just now the alternative of consulting Mr. Fairlie's legal adviser to-morrow. Is there no possibility of communicating with him earlier? Why not to-day?" "I can only explain," replied Miss Halcombe, "by entering into certain particulars, connected with my sister's marriage-engagement, which I did not think it necessary or desirable to mention to you this morning. One of Sir Percival Glyde's objects in coming here on Monday, is to fix the period of his marriage, which has hitherto been left quite unsettled. He is anxious that the event should take place before the end of the year." "Does Miss Fairlie know of that wish?" I asked eagerly. "She has no suspicion of it, and after what has happened, I shall not take the responsibility upon myself of enlightening her. Sir Percival has only mentioned his views to Mr. Fairlie, who has told me himself that he is ready and anxious, as Laura's guardian, to forward them. He has written to London, to the family solicitor, Mr. Gilmore. Mr. Gilmore happens to be away in Glasgow on business, and he has replied by proposing to stop at Limmeridge House on his way back to town. He will arrive to-morrow, and will stay with us a few days, so as to allow Sir Percival time to plead his own cause. If he succeeds, Mr. Gilmore will then return to London, taking with him his instructions for my sister's marriage-settlement. You understand now, Mr. Hartright, why I speak of waiting to take legal advice until to-morrow? Mr. Gilmore is the old and tried friend of two generations of Fairlies, and we can trust him, as we could trust no one else." The marriage-settlement! The mere hearing of those two words stung me with a jealous despair that was poison to my higher and better instincts. I began to think--it is hard to confess this, but I must suppress nothing from beginning to end of the terrible story that I now stand committed to reveal--I began to think, with a hateful eagerness of hope, of the vague charges against Sir Percival Glyde which the anonymous letter contained. What if those wild accusations rested on a foundation of truth? What if their truth could be proved before the fatal words of consent were spoken, and the marriage-settlement was drawn? I have tried to think since, that the feeling which then animated me began and ended in pure devotion to Miss Fairlie's interests, but I have never succeeded in deceiving myself into believing it, and I must not now attempt to deceive others. The feeling began and ended in reckless, vindictive, hopeless hatred of the man who was to marry her. "If we are to find out anything," I said, speaking under the new influence which was now directing me, "we had better not let another minute slip by us unemployed. I can only suggest, once more, the propriety of questioning the gardener a second time, and of inquiring in the village immediately afterwards." "I think I may be of help to you in both cases," said Miss Halcombe, rising. "Let us go, Mr. Hartright, at once, and do the best we can together." I had the door in my hand to open it for her--but I stopped, on a sudden, to ask an important question before we set forth. "One of the paragraphs of the anonymous letter," I said, "contains some sentences of minute personal description. Sir Percival Glyde's name is not mentioned, I know--but does that description at all resemble him?" "Accurately--even in stating his age to be forty-five----" Forty-five; and she was not yet twenty-one! Men of his age married wives of her age every day--and experience had shown those marriages to be often the happiest ones. I knew that--and yet even the mention of his age, when I contrasted it with hers, added to my blind hatred and distrust of him. "Accurately," Miss Halcombe continued, "even to the scar on his right hand, which is the scar of a wound that he received years since when he was travelling in Italy. There can be no doubt that every peculiarity of his personal appearance is thoroughly well known to the writer of the letter." "Even a cough that he is troubled with is mentioned, if I remember right?" "Yes, and mentioned correctly. He treats it lightly himself, though it sometimes makes his friends anxious about him." "I suppose no whispers have ever been heard against his character?" "Mr. Hartright! I hope you are not unjust enough to let that infamous letter influence you?" I felt the blood rush into my cheeks, for I knew that it HAD influenced me. "I hope not," I answered confusedly. "Perhaps I had no right to ask the question." "I am not sorry you asked it," she said, "for it enables me to do justice to Sir Percival's reputation. Not a whisper, Mr. Hartright, has ever reached me, or my family, against him. He has fought successfully two contested elections, and has come out of the ordeal unscathed. A man who can do that, in England, is a man whose character is established." I opened the door for her in silence, and followed her out. She had not convinced me. If the recording angel had come down from heaven to confirm her, and had opened his book to my mortal eyes, the recording angel would not have convinced me. We found the gardener at work as usual. No amount of questioning could extract a single answer of any importance from the lad's impenetrable stupidity. The woman who had given him the letter was an elderly woman; she had not spoken a word to him, and she had gone away towards the south in a great hurry. That was all the gardener could tell us. The village lay southward of the house. So to the village we went next. XII Our inquiries at Limmeridge were patiently pursued in all directions, and among all sorts and conditions of people. But nothing came of them. Three of the villagers did certainly assure us that they had seen the woman, but as they were quite unable to describe her, and quite incapable of agreeing about the exact direction in which she was proceeding when they last saw her, these three bright exceptions to the general rule of total ignorance afforded no more real assistance to us than the mass of their unhelpful and unobservant neighbours. The course of our useless investigations brought us, in time, to the end of the village at which the schools established by Mrs. Fairlie were situated. As we passed the side of the building appropriated to the use of the boys, I suggested the propriety of making a last inquiry of the schoolmaster, whom we might presume to be, in virtue of his office, the most intelligent man in the place. "I am afraid the schoolmaster must have been occupied with his scholars," said Miss Halcombe, "just at the time when the woman passed through the village and returned again. However, we can but try." We entered the playground enclosure, and walked by the schoolroom window to get round to the door, which was situated at the back of the building. I stopped for a moment at the window and looked in. The schoolmaster was sitting at his high desk, with his back to me, apparently haranguing the pupils, who were all gathered together in front of him, with one exception. The one exception was a sturdy white-headed boy, standing apart from all the rest on a stool in a corner--a forlorn little Crusoe, isolated in his own desert island of solitary penal disgrace. The door, when we got round to it, was ajar, and the school-master's voice reached us plainly, as we both stopped for a minute under the porch. "Now, boys," said the voice, "mind what I tell you. If I hear another word spoken about ghosts in this school, it will be the worse for all of you. There are no such things as ghosts, and therefore any boy who believes in ghosts believes in what can't possibly be; and a boy who belongs to Limmeridge School, and believes in what can't possibly be, sets up his back against reason and discipline, and must be punished accordingly. You all see Jacob Postlethwaite standing up on the stool there in disgrace. He has been punished, not because he said he saw a ghost last night, but because he is too impudent and too obstinate to listen to reason, and because he persists in saying he saw the ghost after I have told him that no such thing can possibly be. If nothing else will do, I mean to cane the ghost out of Jacob Postlethwaite, and if the thing spreads among any of the rest of you, I mean to go a step farther, and cane the ghost out of the whole school." "We seem to have chosen an awkward moment for our visit," said Miss Halcombe, pushing open the door at the end of the schoolmaster's address, and leading the way in. Our appearance produced a strong sensation among the boys. They appeared to think that we had arrived for the express purpose of seeing Jacob Postlethwaite caned. "Go home all of you to dinner," said the schoolmaster, "except Jacob. Jacob must stop where he is; and the ghost may bring him his dinner, if the ghost pleases." Jacob's fortitude deserted him at the double disappearance of his schoolfellows and his prospect of dinner. He took his hands out of his pockets, looked hard at his knuckles, raised them with great deliberation to his eyes, and when they got there, ground them round and round slowly, accompanying the action by short spasms of sniffing, which followed each other at regular intervals--the nasal minute guns of juvenile distress. "We came here to ask you a question, Mr. Dempster," said Miss Halcombe, addressing the schoolmaster; "and we little expected to find you occupied in exorcising a ghost. What does it all mean? What has really happened?" "That wicked boy has been frightening the whole school, Miss Halcombe, by declaring that he saw a ghost yesterday evening," answered the master; "and he still persists in his absurd story, in spite of all that I can say to him." "Most extraordinary," said Miss Halcombe, "I should not have thought it possible that any of the boys had imagination enough to see a ghost. This is a new accession indeed to the hard labour of forming the youthful mind at Limmeridge, and I heartily wish you well through it, Mr. Dempster. In the meantime, let me explain why you see me here, and what it is I want." She then put the same question to the schoolmaster which we had asked already of almost every one else in the village. It was met by the same discouraging answer Mr. Dempster had not set eyes on the stranger of whom we were in search. "We may as well return to the house, Mr. Hartright," said Miss Halcombe; "the information we want is evidently not to be found." She had bowed to Mr. Dempster, and was about to leave the schoolroom, when the forlorn position of Jacob Postlethwaite, piteously sniffing on the stool of penitence, attracted her attention as she passed him, and made her stop good-humouredly to speak a word to the little prisoner before she opened the door. "You foolish boy," she said, "why don't you beg Mr. Dempster's pardon, and hold your tongue about the ghost?" "Eh!--but I saw t' ghaist," persisted Jacob Postlethwaite, with a stare of terror and a burst of tears. "Stuff and nonsense! You saw nothing of the kind. Ghost indeed! What ghost----" "I beg your pardon, Miss Halcombe," interposed the schoolmaster a little uneasily--"but I think you had better not question the boy. The obstinate folly of his story is beyond all belief; and you might lead him into ignorantly----" "Ignorantly what?" inquired Miss Halcombe sharply. "Ignorantly shocking your feelings," said Mr. Dempster, looking very much discomposed. "Upon my word, Mr. Dempster, you pay my feelings a great compliment in thinking them weak enough to be shocked by such an urchin as that!" She turned with an air of satirical defiance to little Jacob, and began to question him directly. "Come!" she said, "I mean to know all about this. You naughty boy, when did you see the ghost?" "Yestere'en, at the gloaming," replied Jacob. "Oh! you saw it yesterday evening, in the twilight? And what was it like?" "Arl in white--as a ghaist should be," answered the ghost-seer, with a confidence beyond his years. "And where was it?" "Away yander, in t' kirkyard--where a ghaist ought to be." "As a 'ghaist' should be--where a 'ghaist' ought to be--why, you little fool, you talk as if the manners and customs of ghosts had been familiar to you from your infancy! You have got your story at your fingers' ends, at any rate. I suppose I shall hear next that you can actually tell me whose ghost it was?" "Eh! but I just can," replied Jacob, nodding his head with an air of gloomy triumph. Mr. Dempster had already tried several times to speak while Miss Halcombe was examining his pupil, and he now interposed resolutely enough to make himself heard. "Excuse me, Miss Halcombe," he said, "if I venture to say that you are only encouraging the boy by asking him these questions." "I will merely ask one more, Mr. Dempster, and then I shall be quite satisfied. Well," she continued, turning to the boy, "and whose ghost was it?" "T' ghaist of Mistress Fairlie," answered Jacob in a whisper. The effect which this extraordinary reply produced on Miss Halcombe fully justified the anxiety which the schoolmaster had shown to prevent her from hearing it. Her face crimsoned with indignation--she turned upon little Jacob with an angry suddenness which terrified him into a fresh burst of tears--opened her lips to speak to him--then controlled herself, and addressed the master instead of the boy. "It is useless," she said, "to hold such a child as that responsible for what he says. I have little doubt that the idea has been put into his head by others. If there are people in this village, Mr. Dempster, who have forgotten the respect and gratitude due from every soul in it to my mother's memory, I will find them out, and if I have any influence with Mr. Fairlie, they shall suffer for it." "I hope--indeed, I am sure, Miss Halcombe--that you are mistaken," said the schoolmaster. "The matter begins and ends with the boy's own perversity and folly. He saw, or thought he saw, a woman in white, yesterday evening, as he was passing the churchyard; and the figure, real or fancied, was standing by the marble cross, which he and every one else in Limmeridge knows to be the monument over Mrs. Fairlie's grave. These two circumstances are surely sufficient to have suggested to the boy himself the answer which has so naturally shocked you?" Although Miss Halcombe did not seem to be convinced, she evidently felt that the schoolmaster's statement of the case was too sensible to be openly combated. She merely replied by thanking him for his attention, and by promising to see him again when her doubts were satisfied. This said, she bowed, and led the way out of the schoolroom. Throughout the whole of this strange scene I had stood apart, listening attentively, and drawing my own conclusions. As soon as we were alone again, Miss Halcombe asked me if I had formed any opinion on what I had heard. "A very strong opinion," I answered; "the boy's story, as I believe, has a foundation in fact. I confess I am anxious to see the monument over Mrs. Fairlie's grave, and to examine the ground about it." "You shall see the grave." She paused after making that reply, and reflected a little as we walked on. "What has happened in the schoolroom," she resumed, "has so completely distracted my attention from the subject of the letter, that I feel a little bewildered when I try to return to it. Must we give up all idea of making any further inquiries, and wait to place the thing in Mr. Gilmore's hands to-morrow?" "By no means, Miss Halcombe. What has happened in the schoolroom encourages me to persevere in the investigation." "Why does it encourage you?" "Because it strengthens a suspicion I felt when you gave me the letter to read." "I suppose you had your reasons, Mr. Hartright, for concealing that suspicion from me till this moment?" "I was afraid to encourage it in myself. I thought it was utterly preposterous--I distrusted it as the result of some perversity in my own imagination. But I can do so no longer. Not only the boy's own answers to your questions, but even a chance expression that dropped from the schoolmaster's lips in explaining his story, have forced the idea back into my mind. Events may yet prove that idea to be a delusion, Miss Halcombe; but the belief is strong in me, at this moment, that the fancied ghost in the churchyard, and the writer of the anonymous letter, are one and the same person." She stopped, turned pale, and looked me eagerly in the face. "What person?" "The schoolmaster unconsciously told you. When he spoke of the figure that the boy saw in the churchyard he called it 'a woman in white.'" "Not Anne Catherick?" "Yes, Anne Catherick." She put her hand through my arm and leaned on it heavily. "I don't know why," she said in low tones, "but there is something in this suspicion of yours that seems to startle and unnerve me. I feel----" She stopped, and tried to laugh it off. "Mr. Hartright," she went on, "I will show you the grave, and then go back at once to the house. I had better not leave Laura too long alone. I had better go back and sit with her." We were close to the churchyard when she spoke. The church, a dreary building of grey stone, was situated in a little valley, so as to be sheltered from the bleak winds blowing over the moorland all round it. The burial-ground advanced, from the side of the church, a little way up the slope of the hill. It was surrounded by a rough, low stone wall, and was bare and open to the sky, except at one extremity, where a brook trickled down the stony hill-side, and a clump of dwarf trees threw their narrow shadows over the short, meagre grass. Just beyond the brook and the trees, and not far from one of the three stone stiles which afforded entrance, at various points, to the churchyard, rose the white marble cross that distinguished Mrs. Fairlie's grave from the humbler monuments scattered about it. "I need go no farther with you," said Miss Halcombe, pointing to the grave. "You will let me know if you find anything to confirm the idea you have just mentioned to me. Let us meet again at the house." She left me. I descended at once to the churchyard, and crossed the stile which led directly to Mrs. Fairlie's grave. The grass about it was too short, and the ground too hard, to show any marks of footsteps. Disappointed thus far, I next looked attentively at the cross, and at the square block of marble below it, on which the inscription was cut. The natural whiteness of the cross was a little clouded, here and there, by weather stains, and rather more than one half of the square block beneath it, on the side which bore the inscription, was in the same condition. The other half, however, attracted my attention at once by its singular freedom from stain or impurity of any kind. I looked closer, and saw that it had been cleaned--recently cleaned, in a downward direction from top to bottom. The boundary line between the part that had been cleaned and the part that had not was traceable wherever the inscription left a blank space of marble--sharply traceable as a line that had been produced by artificial means. Who had begun the cleansing of the marble, and who had left it unfinished? I looked about me, wondering how the question was to be solved. No sign of a habitation could be discerned from the point at which I was standing--the burial-ground was left in the lonely possession of the dead. I returned to the church, and walked round it till I came to the back of the building; then crossed the boundary wall beyond, by another of the stone stiles, and found myself at the head of a path leading down into a deserted stone quarry. Against one side of the quarry a little two-room cottage was built, and just outside the door an old woman was engaged in washing. I walked up to her, and entered into conversation about the church and burial-ground. She was ready enough to talk, and almost the first words she said informed me that her husband filled the two offices of clerk and sexton. I said a few words next in praise of Mrs. Fairlie's monument. The old woman shook her head, and told me I had not seen it at its best. It was her husband's business to look after it, but he had been so ailing and weak for months and months past, that he had hardly been able to crawl into church on Sundays to do his duty, and the monument had been neglected in consequence. He was getting a little better now, and in a week or ten days' time he hoped to be strong enough to set to work and clean it. This information--extracted from a long rambling answer in the broadest Cumberland dialect--told me all that I most wanted to know. I gave the poor woman a trifle, and returned at once to Limmeridge House. The partial cleansing of the monument had evidently been accomplished by a strange hand. Connecting what I had discovered, thus far, with what I had suspected after hearing the story of the ghost seen at twilight, I wanted nothing more to confirm my resolution to watch Mrs. Fairlie's grave, in secret, that evening, returning to it at sunset, and waiting within sight of it till the night fell. The work of cleansing the monument had been left unfinished, and the person by whom it had been begun might return to complete it. On getting back to the house I informed Miss Halcombe of what I intended to do. She looked surprised and uneasy while I was explaining my purpose, but she made no positive objection to the execution of it. She only said, "I hope it may end well." Just as she was leaving me again, I stopped her to inquire, as calmly as I could, after Miss Fairlie's health. She was in better spirits, and Miss Halcombe hoped she might be induced to take a little walking exercise while the afternoon sun lasted. I returned to my own room to resume setting the drawings in order. It was necessary to do this, and doubly necessary to keep my mind employed on anything that would help to distract my attention from myself, and from the hopeless future that lay before me. From time to time I paused in my work to look out of window and watch the sky as the sun sank nearer and nearer to the horizon. On one of those occasions I saw a figure on the broad gravel walk under my window. It was Miss Fairlie. I had not seen her since the morning, and I had hardly spoken to her then. Another day at Limmeridge was all that remained to me, and after that day my eyes might never look on her again. This thought was enough to hold me at the window. I had sufficient consideration for her to arrange the blind so that she might not see me if she looked up, but I had no strength to resist the temptation of letting my eyes, at least, follow her as far as they could on her walk. She was dressed in a brown cloak, with a plain black silk gown under it. On her head was the same simple straw hat which she had worn on the morning when we first met. A veil was attached to it now which hid her face from me. By her side trotted a little Italian greyhound, the pet companion of all her walks, smartly dressed in a scarlet cloth wrapper, to keep the sharp air from his delicate skin. She did not seem to notice the dog. She walked straight forward, with her head drooping a little, and her arms folded in her cloak. The dead leaves, which had whirled in the wind before me when I had heard of her marriage engagement in the morning, whirled in the wind before her, and rose and fell and scattered themselves at her feet as she walked on in the pale waning sunlight. The dog shivered and trembled, and pressed against her dress impatiently for notice and encouragement. But she never heeded him. She walked on, farther and farther away from me, with the dead leaves whirling about her on the path--walked on, till my aching eyes could see her no more, and I was left alone again with my own heavy heart. In another hour's time I had done my work, and the sunset was at hand. I got my hat and coat in the hall, and slipped out of the house without meeting any one. The clouds were wild in the western heaven, and the wind blew chill from the sea. Far as the shore was, the sound of the surf swept over the intervening moorland, and beat drearily in my ears when I entered the churchyard. Not a living creature was in sight. The place looked lonelier than ever as I chose my position, and waited and watched, with my eyes on the white cross that rose over Mrs. Fairlie's grave. XIII The exposed situation of the churchyard had obliged me to be cautious in choosing the position that I was to occupy. The main entrance to the church was on the side next to the burial-ground, and the door was screened by a porch walled in on either side. After some little hesitation, caused by natural reluctance to conceal myself, indispensable as that concealment was to the object in view, I had resolved on entering the porch. A loophole window was pierced in each of its side walls. Through one of these windows I could see Mrs. Fairlie's grave. The other looked towards the stone quarry in which the sexton's cottage was built. Before me, fronting the porch entrance, was a patch of bare burial-ground, a line of low stone wall, and a strip of lonely brown hill, with the sunset clouds sailing heavily over it before the strong, steady wind. No living creature was visible or audible--no bird flew by me, no dog barked from the sexton's cottage. The pauses in the dull beating of the surf were filled up by the dreary rustling of the dwarf trees near the grave, and the cold faint bubble of the brook over its stony bed. A dreary scene and a dreary hour. My spirits sank fast as I counted out the minutes of the evening in my hiding-place under the church porch. It was not twilight yet--the light of the setting sun still lingered in the heavens, and little more than the first half-hour of my solitary watch had elapsed--when I heard footsteps and a voice. The footsteps were approaching from the other side of the church, and the voice was a woman's. "Don't you fret, my dear, about the letter," said the voice. "I gave it to the lad quite safe, and the lad he took it from me without a word. He went his way and I went mine, and not a living soul followed me afterwards--that I'll warrant." These words strung up my attention to a pitch of expectation that was almost painful. There was a pause of silence, but the footsteps still advanced. In another moment two persons, both women, passed within my range of view from the porch window. They were walking straight towards the grave; and therefore they had their backs turned towards me. One of the women was dressed in a bonnet and shawl. The other wore a long travelling-cloak of a dark-blue colour, with the hood drawn over her head. A few inches of her gown were visible below the cloak. My heart beat fast as I noted the colour--it was white. After advancing about half-way between the church and the grave they stopped, and the woman in the cloak turned her head towards her companion. But her side face, which a bonnet might now have allowed me to see, was hidden by the heavy, projecting edge of the hood. "Mind you keep that comfortable warm cloak on," said the same voice which I had already heard--the voice of the woman in the shawl. "Mrs. Todd is right about your looking too particular, yesterday, all in white. I'll walk about a little while you're here, churchyards being not at all in my way, whatever they may be in yours. Finish what you want to do before I come back, and let us be sure and get home again before night." With those words she turned about, and retracing her steps, advanced with her face towards me. It was the face of an elderly woman, brown, rugged, and healthy, with nothing dishonest or suspicious in the look of it. Close to the church she stopped to pull her shawl closer round her. "Queer," she said to herself, "always queer, with her whims and her ways, ever since I can remember her. Harmless, though--as harmless, poor soul, as a little child." She sighed--looked about the burial-ground nervously--shook her head, as if the dreary prospect by no means pleased her, and disappeared round the corner of the church. I doubted for a moment whether I ought to follow and speak to her or not. My intense anxiety to find myself face to face with her companion helped me to decide in the negative. I could ensure seeing the woman in the shawl by waiting near the churchyard until she came back--although it seemed more than doubtful whether she could give me the information of which I was in search. The person who had delivered the letter was of little consequence. The person who had written it was the one centre of interest, and the one source of information, and that person I now felt convinced was before me in the churchyard. While these ideas were passing through my mind I saw the woman in the cloak approach close to the grave, and stand looking at it for a little while. She then glanced all round her, and taking a white linen cloth or handkerchief from under her cloak, turned aside towards the brook. The little stream ran into the churchyard under a tiny archway in the bottom of the wall, and ran out again, after a winding course of a few dozen yards, under a similar opening. She dipped the cloth in the water, and returned to the grave. I saw her kiss the white cross, then kneel down before the inscription, and apply her wet cloth to the cleansing of it. After considering how I could show myself with the least possible chance of frightening her, I resolved to cross the wall before me, to skirt round it outside, and to enter the churchyard again by the stile near the grave, in order that she might see me as I approached. She was so absorbed over her employment that she did not hear me coming until I had stepped over the stile. Then she looked up, started to her feet with a faint cry, and stood facing me in speechless and motionless terror. "Don't be frightened," I said. "Surely you remember me?" I stopped while I spoke--then advanced a few steps gently--then stopped again--and so approached by little and little till I was close to her. If there had been any doubt still left in my mind, it must have been now set at rest. There, speaking affrightedly for itself--there was the same face confronting me over Mrs. Fairlie's grave which had first looked into mine on the high-road by night. "You remember me?" I said. "We met very late, and I helped you to find the way to London. Surely you have not forgotten that?" Her features relaxed, and she drew a heavy breath of relief. I saw the new life of recognition stirring slowly under the death-like stillness which fear had set on her face. "Don't attempt to speak to me just yet," I went on. "Take time to recover yourself--take time to feel quite certain that I am a friend." "You are very kind to me," she murmured. "As kind now as you were then." She stopped, and I kept silence on my side. I was not granting time for composure to her only, I was gaining time also for myself. Under the wan wild evening light, that woman and I were met together again, a grave between us, the dead about us, the lonesome hills closing us round on every side. The time, the place, the circumstances under which we now stood face to face in the evening stillness of that dreary valley--the lifelong interests which might hang suspended on the next chance words that passed between us--the sense that, for aught I knew to the contrary, the whole future of Laura Fairlie's life might be determined, for good or for evil, by my winning or losing the confidence of the forlorn creature who stood trembling by her mother's grave--all threatened to shake the steadiness and the self-control on which every inch of the progress I might yet make now depended. I tried hard, as I felt this, to possess myself of all my resources; I did my utmost to turn the few moments for reflection to the best account. "Are you calmer now?" I said, as soon as I thought it time to speak again. "Can you talk to me without feeling frightened, and without forgetting that I am a friend?" "How did you come here?" she asked, without noticing what I had just said to her. "Don't you remember my telling you, when we last met, that I was going to Cumberland? I have been in Cumberland ever since--I have been staying all the time at Limmeridge House." "At Limmeridge House!" Her pale face brightened as she repeated the words, her wandering eyes fixed on me with a sudden interest. "Ah, how happy you must have been!" she said, looking at me eagerly, without a shadow of its former distrust left in her expression. I took advantage of her newly-aroused confidence in me to observe her face, with an attention and a curiosity which I had hitherto restrained myself from showing, for caution's sake. I looked at her, with my mind full of that other lovely face which had so ominously recalled her to my memory on the terrace by moonlight. I had seen Anne Catherick's likeness in Miss Fairlie. I now saw Miss Fairlie's likeness in Anne Catherick--saw it all the more clearly because the points of dissimilarity between the two were presented to me as well as the points of resemblance. In the general outline of the countenance and general proportion of the features--in the colour of the hair and in the little nervous uncertainty about the lips--in the height and size of the figure, and the carriage of the head and body, the likeness appeared even more startling than I had ever felt it to be yet. But there the resemblance ended, and the dissimilarity, in details, began. The delicate beauty of Miss Fairlie's complexion, the transparent clearness of her eyes, the smooth purity of her skin, the tender bloom of colour on her lips, were all missing from the worn weary face that was now turned towards mine. Although I hated myself even for thinking such a thing, still, while I looked at the woman before me, the idea would force itself into my mind that one sad change, in the future, was all that was wanting to make the likeness complete, which I now saw to be so imperfect in detail. If ever sorrow and suffering set their profaning marks on the youth and beauty of Miss Fairlie's face, then, and then only, Anne Catherick and she would be the twin-sisters of chance resemblance, the living reflections of one another. I shuddered at the thought. There was something horrible in the blind unreasoning distrust of the future which the mere passage of it through my mind seemed to imply. It was a welcome interruption to be roused by feeling Anne Catherick's hand laid on my shoulder. The touch was as stealthy and as sudden as that other touch which had petrified me from head to foot on the night when we first met. "You are looking at me, and you are thinking of something," she said, with her strange breathless rapidity of utterance. "What is it?" "Nothing extraordinary," I answered. "I was only wondering how you came here." "I came with a friend who is very good to me. I have only been here two days." "And you found your way to this place yesterday?" "How do you know that?" "I only guessed it." She turned from me, and knelt down before the inscription once more. "Where should I go if not here?" she said. "The friend who was better than a mother to me is the only friend I have to visit at Limmeridge. Oh, it makes my heart ache to see a stain on her tomb! It ought to be kept white as snow, for her sake. I was tempted to begin cleaning it yesterday, and I can't help coming back to go on with it to-day. Is there anything wrong in that? I hope not. Surely nothing can be wrong that I do for Mrs. Fairlie's sake?" The old grateful sense of her benefactress's kindness was evidently the ruling idea still in the poor creature's mind--the narrow mind which had but too plainly opened to no other lasting impression since that first impression of her younger and happier days. I saw that my best chance of winning her confidence lay in encouraging her to proceed with the artless employment which she had come into the burial-ground to pursue. She resumed it at once, on my telling her she might do so, touching the hard marble as tenderly as if it had been a sentient thing, and whispering the words of the inscription to herself, over and over again, as if the lost days of her girlhood had returned and she was patiently learning her lesson once more at Mrs. Fairlie's knees. "Should you wonder very much," I said, preparing the way as cautiously as I could for the questions that were to come, "if I owned that it is a satisfaction to me, as well as a surprise, to see you here? I felt very uneasy about you after you left me in the cab." She looked up quickly and suspiciously. "Uneasy," she repeated. "Why?" "A strange thing happened after we parted that night. Two men overtook me in a chaise. They did not see where I was standing, but they stopped near me, and spoke to a policeman on the other side of the way." She instantly suspended her employment. The hand holding the damp cloth with which she had been cleaning the inscription dropped to her side. The other hand grasped the marble cross at the head of the grave. Her face turned towards me slowly, with the blank look of terror set rigidly on it once more. I went on at all hazards--it was too late now to draw back. "The two men spoke to the policeman," I said, "and asked him if he had seen you. He had not seen you; and then one of the men spoke again, and said you had escaped from his Asylum." She sprang to her feet as if my last words had set the pursuers on her track. "Stop! and hear the end," I cried. "Stop! and you shall know how I befriended you. A word from me would have told the men which way you had gone--and I never spoke that word. I helped your escape--I made it safe and certain. Think, try to think. Try to understand what I tell you." My manner seemed to influence her more than my words. She made an effort to grasp the new idea. Her hands shifted the damp cloth hesitatingly from one to the other, exactly as they had shifted the little travelling-bag on the night when I first saw her. Slowly the purpose of my words seemed to force its way through the confusion and agitation of her mind. Slowly her features relaxed, and her eyes looked at me with their expression gaining in curiosity what it was fast losing in fear. "YOU don't think I ought to be back in the Asylum, do you?" she said. "Certainly not. I am glad you escaped from it--I am glad I helped you." "Yes, yes, you did help me indeed; you helped me at the hard part," she went on a little vacantly. "It was easy to escape, or I should not have got away. They never suspected me as they suspected the others. I was so quiet, and so obedient, and so easily frightened. The finding London was the hard part, and there you helped me. Did I thank you at the time? I thank you now very kindly." "Was the Asylum far from where you met me? Come! show that you believe me to be your friend, and tell me where it was." She mentioned the place--a private Asylum, as its situation informed me; a private Asylum not very far from the spot where I had seen her--and then, with evident suspicion of the use to which I might put her answer, anxiously repeated her former inquiry, "You don't think I ought to be taken back, do you?" "Once again, I am glad you escaped--I am glad you prospered well after you left me," I answered. "You said you had a friend in London to go to. Did you find the friend?" "Yes. It was very late, but there was a girl up at needle-work in the house, and she helped me to rouse Mrs. Clements. Mrs. Clements is my friend. A good, kind woman, but not like Mrs. Fairlie. Ah no, nobody is like Mrs. Fairlie!" "Is Mrs. Clements an old friend of yours? Have you known her a long time?" "Yes, she was a neighbour of ours once, at home, in Hampshire, and liked me, and took care of me when I was a little girl. Years ago, when she went away from us, she wrote down in my Prayer-book for me where she was going to live in London, and she said, 'If you are ever in trouble, Anne, come to me. I have no husband alive to say me nay, and no children to look after, and I will take care of you.' Kind words, were they not? I suppose I remember them because they were kind. It's little enough I remember besides--little enough, little enough!" "Had you no father or mother to take care of you?" "Father?--I never saw him--I never heard mother speak of him. Father? Ah, dear! he is dead, I suppose." "And your mother?" "I don't get on well with her. We are a trouble and a fear to each other." A trouble and a fear to each other! At those words the suspicion crossed my mind, for the first time, that her mother might be the person who had placed her under restraint. "Don't ask me about mother," she went on. "I'd rather talk of Mrs. Clements. Mrs. Clements is like you, she doesn't think that I ought to be back in the Asylum, and she is as glad as you are that I escaped from it. She cried over my misfortune, and said it must be kept secret from everybody." Her "misfortune." In what sense was she using that word? In a sense which might explain her motive in writing the anonymous letter? In a sense which might show it to be the too common and too customary motive that has led many a woman to interpose anonymous hindrances to the marriage of the man who has ruined her? I resolved to attempt the clearing up of this doubt before more words passed between us on either side. "What misfortune?" I asked. "The misfortune of my being shut up," she answered, with every appearance of feeling surprised at my question. "What other misfortune could there be?" I determined to persist, as delicately and forbearingly as possible. It was of very great importance that I should be absolutely sure of every step in the investigation which I now gained in advance. "There is another misfortune," I said, "to which a woman may be liable, and by which she may suffer lifelong sorrow and shame." "What is it?" she asked eagerly. "The misfortune of believing too innocently in her own virtue, and in the faith and honour of the man she loves," I answered. She looked up at me with the artless bewilderment of a child. Not the slightest confusion or change of colour--not the faintest trace of any secret consciousness of shame struggling to the surface appeared in her face--that face which betrayed every other emotion with such transparent clearness. No words that ever were spoken could have assured me, as her look and manner now assured me, that the motive which I had assigned for her writing the letter and sending it to Miss Fairlie was plainly and distinctly the wrong one. That doubt, at any rate, was now set at rest; but the very removal of it opened a new prospect of uncertainty. The letter, as I knew from positive testimony, pointed at Sir Percival Glyde, though it did not name him. She must have had some strong motive, originating in some deep sense of injury, for secretly denouncing him to Miss Fairlie in such terms as she had employed, and that motive was unquestionably not to be traced to the loss of her innocence and her character. Whatever wrong he might have inflicted on her was not of that nature. Of what nature could it be? "I don't understand you," she said, after evidently trying hard, and trying in vain, to discover the meaning of the words I had last said to her. "Never mind," I answered. "Let us go on with what we were talking about. Tell me how long you stayed with Mrs. Clements in London, and how you came here." "How long?" she repeated. "I stayed with Mrs. Clements till we both came to this place, two days ago." "You are living in the village, then?" I said. "It is strange I should not have heard of you, though you have only been here two days." "No, no, not in the village. Three miles away at a farm. Do you know the farm? They call it Todd's Corner." I remembered the place perfectly--we had often passed by it in our drives. It was one of the oldest farms in the neighbourhood, situated in a solitary, sheltered spot, inland at the junction of two hills. "They are relations of Mrs. Clements at Todd's Corner," she went on, "and they had often asked her to go and see them. She said she would go, and take me with her, for the quiet and the fresh air. It was very kind, was it not? I would have gone anywhere to be quiet, and safe, and out of the way. But when I heard that Todd's Corner was near Limmeridge--oh! I was so happy I would have walked all the way barefoot to get there, and see the schools and the village and Limmeridge House again. They are very good people at Todd's Corner. I hope I shall stay there a long time. There is only one thing I don't like about them, and don't like about Mrs. Clements----" "What is it?" "They will tease me about dressing all in white--they say it looks so particular. How do they know? Mrs. Fairlie knew best. Mrs. Fairlie would never have made me wear this ugly blue cloak! Ah! she was fond of white in her lifetime, and here is white stone about her grave--and I am making it whiter for her sake. She often wore white herself, and she always dressed her little daughter in white. Is Miss Fairlie well and happy? Does she wear white now, as she used when she was a girl?" Her voice sank when she put the questions about Miss Fairlie, and she turned her head farther and farther away from me. I thought I detected, in the alteration of her manner, an uneasy consciousness of the risk she had run in sending the anonymous letter, and I instantly determined so to frame my answer as to surprise her into owning it. "Miss Fairlie was not very well or very happy this morning," I said. She murmured a few words, but they were spoken so confusedly, and in such a low tone, that I could not even guess at what they meant. "Did you ask me why Miss Fairlie was neither well nor happy this morning?" I continued. "No," she said quickly and eagerly--"oh no, I never asked that." "I will tell you without your asking," I went on. "Miss Fairlie has received your letter." She had been down on her knees for some little time past, carefully removing the last weather-stains left about the inscription while we were speaking together. The first sentence of the words I had just addressed to her made her pause in her occupation, and turn slowly without rising from her knees, so as to face me. The second sentence literally petrified her. The cloth she had been holding dropped from her hands--her lips fell apart--all the little colour that there was naturally in her face left it in an instant. "How do you know?" she said faintly. "Who showed it to you?" The blood rushed back into her face--rushed overwhelmingly, as the sense rushed upon her mind that her own words had betrayed her. She struck her hands together in despair. "I never wrote it," she gasped affrightedly; "I know nothing about it!" "Yes," I said, "you wrote it, and you know about it. It was wrong to send such a letter, it was wrong to frighten Miss Fairlie. If you had anything to say that it was right and necessary for her to hear, you should have gone yourself to Limmeridge House--you should have spoken to the young lady with your own lips." She crouched down over the flat stone of the grave, till her face was hidden on it, and made no reply. "Miss Fairlie will be as good and kind to you as her mother was, if you mean well," I went on. "Miss Fairlie will keep your secret, and not let you come to any harm. Will you see her to-morrow at the farm? Will you meet her in the garden at Limmeridge House?" "Oh, if I could die, and be hidden and at rest with YOU!" Her lips murmured the words close on the grave-stone, murmured them in tones of passionate endearment, to the dead remains beneath. "You know how I love your child, for your sake! Oh, Mrs. Fairlie! Mrs. Fairlie! tell me how to save her. Be my darling and my mother once more, and tell me what to do for the best." I heard her lips kissing the stone--I saw her hands beating on it passionately. The sound and the sight deeply affected me. I stooped down, and took the poor helpless hands tenderly in mine, and tried to soothe her. It was useless. She snatched her hands from me, and never moved her face from the stone. Seeing the urgent necessity of quieting her at any hazard and by any means, I appealed to the only anxiety that she appeared to feel, in connection with me and with my opinion of her--the anxiety to convince me of her fitness to be mistress of her own actions. "Come, come," I said gently. "Try to compose yourself, or you will make me alter my opinion of you. Don't let me think that the person who put you in the Asylum might have had some excuse----" The next words died away on my lips. The instant I risked that chance reference to the person who had put her in the Asylum she sprang up on her knees. A most extraordinary and startling change passed over her. Her face, at all ordinary times so touching to look at, in its nervous sensitiveness, weakness, and uncertainty, became suddenly darkened by an expression of maniacally intense hatred and fear, which communicated a wild, unnatural force to every feature. Her eyes dilated in the dim evening light, like the eyes of a wild animal. She caught up the cloth that had fallen at her side, as if it had been a living creature that she could kill, and crushed it in both her hands with such convulsive strength, that the few drops of moisture left in it trickled down on the stone beneath her. "Talk of something else," she said, whispering through her teeth. "I shall lose myself if you talk of that." Every vestige of the gentler thoughts which had filled her mind hardly a minute since seemed to be swept from it now. It was evident that the impression left by Mrs. Fairlie's kindness was not, as I had supposed, the only strong impression on her memory. With the grateful remembrance of her school-days at Limmeridge, there existed the vindictive remembrance of the wrong inflicted on her by her confinement in the Asylum. Who had done that wrong? Could it really be her mother? It was hard to give up pursuing the inquiry to that final point, but I forced myself to abandon all idea of continuing it. Seeing her as I saw her now, it would have been cruel to think of anything but the necessity and the humanity of restoring her composure. "I will talk of nothing to distress you," I said soothingly. "You want something," she answered sharply and suspiciously. "Don't look at me like that. Speak to me--tell me what you want." "I only want you to quiet yourself, and when you are calmer, to think over what I have said." "Said?" She paused--twisted the cloth in her hands, backwards and forwards, and whispered to herself, "What is it he said?" She turned again towards me, and shook her head impatiently. "Why don't you help me?" she asked, with angry suddenness. "Yes, yes," I said, "I will help you, and you will soon remember. I ask you to see Miss Fairlie to-morrow and to tell her the truth about the letter." "Ah! Miss Fairlie--Fairlie--Fairlie----" The mere utterance of the loved familiar name seemed to quiet her. Her face softened and grew like itself again. "You need have no fear of Miss Fairlie," I continued, "and no fear of getting into trouble through the letter. She knows so much about it already, that you will have no difficulty in telling her all. There can be little necessity for concealment where there is hardly anything left to conceal. You mention no names in the letter; but Miss Fairlie knows that the person you write of is Sir Percival Glyde----" The instant I pronounced that name she started to her feet, and a scream burst from her that rang through the churchyard, and made my heart leap in me with the terror of it. The dark deformity of the expression which had just left her face lowered on it once more, with doubled and trebled intensity. The shriek at the name, the reiterated look of hatred and fear that instantly followed, told all. Not even a last doubt now remained. Her mother was guiltless of imprisoning her in the Asylum. A man had shut her up--and that man was Sir Percival Glyde. The scream had reached other ears than mine. On one side I heard the door of the sexton's cottage open; on the other I heard the voice of her companion, the woman in the shawl, the woman whom she had spoken of as Mrs. Clements. "I'm coming! I'm coming!" cried the voice from behind the clump of dwarf trees. In a moment more Mrs. Clements hurried into view. "Who are you?" she cried, facing me resolutely as she set her foot on the stile. "How dare you frighten a poor helpless woman like that?" She was at Anne Catherick's side, and had put one arm around her, before I could answer. "What is it, my dear?" she said. "What has he done to you?" "Nothing," the poor creature answered. "Nothing. I'm only frightened." Mrs. Clements turned on me with a fearless indignation, for which I respected her. "I should be heartily ashamed of myself if I deserved that angry look," I said. "But I do not deserve it. I have unfortunately startled her without intending it. This is not the first time she has seen me. Ask her yourself, and she will tell you that I am incapable of willingly harming her or any woman." I spoke distinctly, so that Anne Catherick might hear and understand me, and I saw that the words and their meaning had reached her. "Yes, yes," she said--"he was good to me once--he helped me----" She whispered the rest into her friend's ear. "Strange, indeed!" said Mrs. Clements, with a look of perplexity. "It makes all the difference, though. I'm sorry I spoke so rough to you, sir; but you must own that appearances looked suspicious to a stranger. It's more my fault than yours, for humouring her whims, and letting her be alone in such a place as this. Come, my dear--come home now." I thought the good woman looked a little uneasy at the prospect of the walk back, and I offered to go with them until they were both within sight of home. Mrs. Clements thanked me civilly, and declined. She said they were sure to meet some of the farm-labourers as soon as they got to the moor. "Try to forgive me," I said, when Anne Catherick took her friend's arm to go away. Innocent as I had been of any intention to terrify and agitate her, my heart smote me as I looked at the poor, pale, frightened face. "I will try," she answered. "But you know too much--I'm afraid you'll always frighten me now." Mrs. Clements glanced at me, and shook her head pityingly. "Good-night, sir," she said. "You couldn't help it, I know; but I wish it was me you had frightened, and not her." They moved away a few steps. I thought they had left me, but Anne suddenly stopped, and separated herself from her friend. "Wait a little," she said. "I must say good-bye." She returned to the grave, rested both hands tenderly on the marble cross, and kissed it. "I'm better now," she sighed, looking up at me quietly. "I forgive you." She joined her companion again, and they left the burial-ground. I saw them stop near the church and speak to the sexton's wife, who had come from the cottage, and had waited, watching us from a distance. Then they went on again up the path that led to the moor. I looked after Anne Catherick as she disappeared, till all trace of her had faded in the twilight--looked as anxiously and sorrowfully as if that was the last I was to see in this weary world of the woman in white. XIV Half an hour later I was back at the house, and was informing Miss Halcombe of all that had happened. She listened to me from beginning to end with a steady, silent attention, which, in a woman of her temperament and disposition, was the strongest proof that could be offered of the serious manner in which my narrative affected her. "My mind misgives me," was all she said when I had done. "My mind misgives me sadly about the future." "The future may depend," I suggested, "on the use we make of the present. It is not improbable that Anne Catherick may speak more readily and unreservedly to a woman than she has spoken to me. If Miss Fairlie----" "Not to be thought of for a moment," interposed Miss Halcombe, in her most decided manner. "Let me suggest, then," I continued, "that you should see Anne Catherick yourself, and do all you can to win her confidence. For my own part, I shrink from the idea of alarming the poor creature a second time, as I have most unhappily alarmed her already. Do you see any objection to accompanying me to the farmhouse to-morrow?" "None whatever. I will go anywhere and do anything to serve Laura's interests. What did you say the place was called?" "You must know it well. It is called Todd's Corner." "Certainly. Todd's Corner is one of Mr. Fairlie's farms. Our dairymaid here is the farmer's second daughter. She goes backwards and forwards constantly between this house and her father's farm, and she may have heard or seen something which it may be useful to us to know. Shall I ascertain, at once, if the girl is downstairs?" She rang the bell, and sent the servant with his message. He returned, and announced that the dairymaid was then at the farm. She had not been there for the last three days, and the housekeeper had given her leave to go home for an hour or two that evening. "I can speak to her to-morrow," said Miss Halcombe, when the servant had left the room again. "In the meantime, let me thoroughly understand the object to be gained by my interview with Anne Catherick. Is there no doubt in your mind that the person who confined her in the Asylum was Sir Percival Glyde?" "There is not the shadow of a doubt. The only mystery that remains is the mystery of his MOTIVE. Looking to the great difference between his station in life and hers, which seems to preclude all idea of the most distant relationship between them, it is of the last importance--even assuming that she really required to be placed under restraint--to know why HE should have been the person to assume the serious responsibility of shutting her up----" "In a private Asylum, I think you said?" "Yes, in a private Asylum, where a sum of money, which no poor person could afford to give, must have been paid for her maintenance as a patient." "I see where the doubt lies, Mr. Hartright, and I promise you that it shall be set at rest, whether Anne Catherick assists us to-morrow or not. Sir Percival Glyde shall not be long in this house without satisfying Mr. Gilmore, and satisfying me. My sister's future is my dearest care in life, and I have influence enough over her to give me some power, where her marriage is concerned, in the disposal of it." We parted for the night. After breakfast the next morning, an obstacle, which the events of the evening before had put out of my memory, interposed to prevent our proceeding immediately to the farm. This was my last day at Limmeridge House, and it was necessary, as soon as the post came in, to follow Miss Halcombe's advice, and to ask Mr. Fairlie's permission to shorten my engagement by a month, in consideration of an unforeseen necessity for my return to London. Fortunately for the probability of this excuse, so far as appearances were concerned, the post brought me two letters from London friends that morning. I took them away at once to my own room, and sent the servant with a message to Mr. Fairlie, requesting to know when I could see him on a matter of business. I awaited the man's return, free from the slightest feeling of anxiety about the manner in which his master might receive my application. With Mr. Fairlie's leave or without it, I must go. The consciousness of having now taken the first step on the dreary journey which was henceforth to separate my life from Miss Fairlie's seemed to have blunted my sensibility to every consideration connected with myself. I had done with my poor man's touchy pride--I had done with all my little artist vanities. No insolence of Mr. Fairlie's, if he chose to be insolent, could wound me now. The servant returned with a message for which I was not unprepared. Mr. Fairlie regretted that the state of his health, on that particular morning, was such as to preclude all hope of his having the pleasure of receiving me. He begged, therefore, that I would accept his apologies, and kindly communicate what I had to say in the form of a letter. Similar messages to this had reached me, at various intervals, during my three months' residence in the house. Throughout the whole of that period Mr. Fairlie had been rejoiced to "possess" me, but had never been well enough to see me for a second time. The servant took every fresh batch of drawings that I mounted and restored back to his master with my "respects," and returned empty-handed with Mr. Fairlie's "kind compliments," "best thanks," and "sincere regrets" that the state of his health still obliged him to remain a solitary prisoner in his own room. A more satisfactory arrangement to both sides could not possibly have been adopted. It would be hard to say which of us, under the circumstances, felt the most grateful sense of obligation to Mr. Fairlie's accommodating nerves. I sat down at once to write the letter, expressing myself in it as civilly, as clearly, and as briefly as possible. Mr. Fairlie did not hurry his reply. Nearly an hour elapsed before the answer was placed in my hands. It was written with beautiful regularity and neatness of character, in violet-coloured ink, on note-paper as smooth as ivory and almost as thick as cardboard, and it addressed me in these terms-- "Mr. Fairlie's compliments to Mr. Hartright. Mr. Fairlie is more surprised and disappointed than he can say (in the present state of his health) by Mr. Hartright's application. Mr. Fairlie is not a man of business, but he has consulted his steward, who is, and that person confirms Mr. Fairlie's opinion that Mr. Hartright's request to be allowed to break his engagement cannot be justified by any necessity whatever, excepting perhaps a case of life and death. If the highly-appreciative feeling towards Art and its professors, which it is the consolation and happiness of Mr. Fairlie's suffering existence to cultivate, could be easily shaken, Mr. Hartright's present proceeding would have shaken it. It has not done so--except in the instance of Mr. Hartright himself. "Having stated his opinion--so far, that is to say, as acute nervous suffering will allow him to state anything--Mr. Fairlie has nothing to add but the expression of his decision, in reference to the highly irregular application that has been made to him. Perfect repose of body and mind being to the last degree important in his case, Mr. Fairlie will not suffer Mr. Hartright to disturb that repose by remaining in the house under circumstances of an essentially irritating nature to both sides. Accordingly, Mr. Fairlie waives his right of refusal, purely with a view to the preservation of his own tranquillity--and informs Mr. Hartright that he may go." I folded the letter up, and put it away with my other papers. The time had been when I should have resented it as an insult--I accepted it now as a written release from my engagement. It was off my mind, it was almost out of my memory, when I went downstairs to the breakfast-room, and informed Miss Halcombe that I was ready to walk with her to the farm. "Has Mr. Fairlie given you a satisfactory answer?" she asked as we left the house. "He has allowed me to go, Miss Halcombe." She looked up at me quickly, and then, for the first time since I had known her, took my arm of her own accord. No words could have expressed so delicately that she understood how the permission to leave my employment had been granted, and that she gave me her sympathy, not as my superior, but as my friend. I had not felt the man's insolent letter, but I felt deeply the woman's atoning kindness. On our way to the farm we arranged that Miss Halcombe was to enter the house alone, and that I was to wait outside, within call. We adopted this mode of proceeding from an apprehension that my presence, after what had happened in the churchyard the evening before, might have the effect of renewing Anne Catherick's nervous dread, and of rendering her additionally distrustful of the advances of a lady who was a stranger to her. Miss Halcombe left me, with the intention of speaking, in the first instance, to the farmer's wife (of whose friendly readiness to help her in any way she was well assured), while I waited for her in the near neighbourhood of the house. I had fully expected to be left alone for some time. To my surprise, however, little more than five minutes had elapsed before Miss Halcombe returned. "Does Anne Catherick refuse to see you?" I asked in astonishment. "Anne Catherick is gone," replied Miss Halcombe. "Gone?" "Gone with Mrs. Clements. They both left the farm at eight o'clock this morning." I could say nothing--I could only feel that our last chance of discovery had gone with them. "All that Mrs. Todd knows about her guests, I know," Miss Halcombe went on, "and it leaves me, as it leaves her, in the dark. They both came back safe last night, after they left you, and they passed the first part of the evening with Mr. Todd's family as usual. Just before supper-time, however, Anne Catherick startled them all by being suddenly seized with faintness. She had had a similar attack, of a less alarming kind, on the day she arrived at the farm; and Mrs. Todd had connected it, on that occasion, with something she was reading at the time in our local newspaper, which lay on the farm table, and which she had taken up only a minute or two before." "Does Mrs. Todd know what particular passage in the newspaper affected her in that way?" I inquired. "No," replied Miss Halcombe. "She had looked it over, and had seen nothing in it to agitate any one. I asked leave, however, to look it over in my turn, and at the very first page I opened I found that the editor had enriched his small stock of news by drawing upon our family affairs, and had published my sister's marriage engagement, among his other announcements, copied from the London papers, of Marriages in High Life. I concluded at once that this was the paragraph which had so strangely affected Anne Catherick, and I thought I saw in it, also, the origin of the letter which she sent to our house the next day." "There can be no doubt in either case. But what did you hear about her second attack of faintness yesterday evening?" "Nothing. The cause of it is a complete mystery. There was no stranger in the room. The only visitor was our dairymaid, who, as I told you, is one of Mr. Todd's daughters, and the only conversation was the usual gossip about local affairs. They heard her cry out, and saw her turn deadly pale, without the slightest apparent reason. Mrs. Todd and Mrs. Clements took her upstairs, and Mrs. Clements remained with her. They were heard talking together until long after the usual bedtime, and early this morning Mrs. Clements took Mrs. Todd aside, and amazed her beyond all power of expression by saying that they must go. The only explanation Mrs. Todd could extract from her guest was, that something had happened, which was not the fault of any one at the farmhouse, but which was serious enough to make Anne Catherick resolve to leave Limmeridge immediately. It was quite useless to press Mrs. Clements to be more explicit. She only shook her head, and said that, for Anne's sake, she must beg and pray that no one would question her. All she could repeat, with every appearance of being seriously agitated herself, was that Anne must go, that she must go with her, and that the destination to which they might both betake themselves must be kept a secret from everybody. I spare you the recital of Mrs. Todd's hospitable remonstrances and refusals. It ended in her driving them both to the nearest station, more than three hours since. She tried hard on the way to get them to speak more plainly, but without success; and she set them down outside the station-door, so hurt and offended by the unceremonious abruptness of their departure and their unfriendly reluctance to place the least confidence in her, that she drove away in anger, without so much as stopping to bid them good-bye. That is exactly what has taken place. Search your own memory, Mr. Hartright, and tell me if anything happened in the burial-ground yesterday evening which can at all account for the extraordinary departure of those two women this morning." "I should like to account first, Miss Halcombe, for the sudden change in Anne Catherick which alarmed them at the farmhouse, hours after she and I had parted, and when time enough had elapsed to quiet any violent agitation that I might have been unfortunate enough to cause. Did you inquire particularly about the gossip which was going on in the room when she turned faint?" "Yes. But Mrs. Todd's household affairs seem to have divided her attention that evening with the talk in the farmhouse parlour. She could only tell me that it was 'just the news,'--meaning, I suppose, that they all talked as usual about each other." "The dairymaid's memory may be better than her mother's," I said. "It may be as well for you to speak to the girl, Miss Halcombe, as soon as we get back." My suggestion was acted on the moment we returned to the house. Miss Halcombe led me round to the servants' offices, and we found the girl in the dairy, with her sleeves tucked up to her shoulders, cleaning a large milk-pan and singing blithely over her work. "I have brought this gentleman to see your dairy, Hannah," said Miss Halcombe. "It is one of the sights of the house, and it always does you credit." The girl blushed and curtseyed, and said shyly that she hoped she always did her best to keep things neat and clean. "We have just come from your father's," Miss Halcombe continued. "You were there yesterday evening, I hear, and you found visitors at the house?" "Yes, miss." "One of them was taken faint and ill, I am told. I suppose nothing was said or done to frighten her? You were not talking of anything very terrible, were you?" "Oh no, miss!" said the girl, laughing. "We were only talking of the news." "Your sisters told you the news at Todd's Corner, I suppose?" "Yes, miss." "And you told them the news at Limmeridge House?" "Yes, miss. And I'm quite sure nothing was said to frighten the poor thing, for I was talking when she was taken ill. It gave me quite a turn, miss, to see it, never having been taken faint myself." Before any more questions could be put to her, she was called away to receive a basket of eggs at the dairy door. As she left us I whispered to Miss Halcombe-- "Ask her if she happened to mention, last night, that visitors were expected at Limmeridge House." Miss Halcombe showed me, by a look, that she understood, and put the question as soon as the dairymaid returned to us. "Oh yes, miss, I mentioned that," said the girl simply. "The company coming, and the accident to the brindled cow, was all the news I had to take to the farm." "Did you mention names? Did you tell them that Sir Percival Glyde was expected on Monday?" "Yes, miss--I told them Sir Percival Glyde was coming. I hope there was no harm in it--I hope I didn't do wrong." "Oh no, no harm. Come, Mr. Hartright, Hannah will begin to think us in the way, if we interrupt her any longer over her work." We stopped and looked at one another the moment we were alone again. "Is there any doubt in your mind, NOW, Miss Halcombe?" "Sir Percival Glyde shall remove that doubt, Mr. Hartright--or Laura Fairlie shall never be his wife." XV As we walked round to the front of the house a fly from the railway approached us along the drive. Miss Halcombe waited on the door-steps until the fly drew up, and then advanced to shake hands with an old gentleman, who got out briskly the moment the steps were let down. Mr. Gilmore had arrived. I looked at him, when we were introduced to each other, with an interest and a curiosity which I could hardly conceal. This old man was to remain at Limmeridge House after I had left it, he was to hear Sir Percival Glyde's explanation, and was to give Miss Halcombe the assistance of his experience in forming her judgment; he was to wait until the question of the marriage was set at rest; and his hand, if that question were decided in the affirmative, was to draw the settlement which bound Miss Fairlie irrevocably to her engagement. Even then, when I knew nothing by comparison with what I know now, I looked at the family lawyer with an interest which I had never felt before in the presence of any man breathing who was a total stranger to me. In external appearance Mr. Gilmore was the exact opposite of the conventional idea of an old lawyer. His complexion was florid--his white hair was worn rather long and kept carefully brushed--his black coat, waistcoat, and trousers fitted him with perfect neatness--his white cravat was carefully tied, and his lavender-coloured kid gloves might have adorned the hands of a fashionable clergyman, without fear and without reproach. His manners were pleasantly marked by the formal grace and refinement of the old school of politeness, quickened by the invigorating sharpness and readiness of a man whose business in life obliges him always to keep his faculties in good working order. A sanguine constitution and fair prospects to begin with--a long subsequent career of creditable and comfortable prosperity--a cheerful, diligent, widely-respected old age--such were the general impressions I derived from my introduction to Mr. Gilmore, and it is but fair to him to add, that the knowledge I gained by later and better experience only tended to confirm them. I left the old gentleman and Miss Halcombe to enter the house together, and to talk of family matters undisturbed by the restraint of a stranger's presence. They crossed the hall on their way to the drawing-room, and I descended the steps again to wander about the garden alone. My hours were numbered at Limmeridge House--my departure the next morning was irrevocably settled--my share in the investigation which the anonymous letter had rendered necessary was at an end. No harm could be done to any one but myself if I let my heart loose again, for the little time that was left me, from the cold cruelty of restraint which necessity had forced me to inflict upon it, and took my farewell of the scenes which were associated with the brief dream-time of my happiness and my love. I turned instinctively to the walk beneath my study-window, where I had seen her the evening before with her little dog, and followed the path which her dear feet had trodden so often, till I came to the wicket gate that led into her rose garden. The winter bareness spread drearily over it now. The flowers that she had taught me to distinguish by their names, the flowers that I had taught her to paint from, were gone, and the tiny white paths that led between the beds were damp and green already. I went on to the avenue of trees, where we had breathed together the warm fragrance of August evenings, where we had admired together the myriad combinations of shade and sunlight that dappled the ground at our feet. The leaves fell about me from the groaning branches, and the earthy decay in the atmosphere chilled me to the bones. A little farther on, and I was out of the grounds, and following the lane that wound gently upward to the nearest hills. The old felled tree by the wayside, on which we had sat to rest, was sodden with rain, and the tuft of ferns and grasses which I had drawn for her, nestling under the rough stone wall in front of us, had turned to a pool of water, stagnating round an island of draggled weeds. I gained the summit of the hill, and looked at the view which we had so often admired in the happier time. It was cold and barren--it was no longer the view that I remembered. The sunshine of her presence was far from me--the charm of her voice no longer murmured in my ear. She had talked to me, on the spot from which I now looked down, of her father, who was her last surviving parent--had told me how fond of each other they had been, and how sadly she missed him still when she entered certain rooms in the house, and when she took up forgotten occupations and amusements with which he had been associated. Was the view that I had seen, while listening to those words, the view that I saw now, standing on the hill-top by myself? I turned and left it--I wound my way back again, over the moor, and round the sandhills, down to the beach. There was the white rage of the surf, and the multitudinous glory of the leaping waves--but where was the place on which she had once drawn idle figures with her parasol in the sand--the place where we had sat together, while she talked to me about myself and my home, while she asked me a woman's minutely observant questions about my mother and my sister, and innocently wondered whether I should ever leave my lonely chambers and have a wife and a house of my own? Wind and wave had long since smoothed out the trace of her which she had left in those marks on the sand, I looked over the wide monotony of the sea-side prospect, and the place in which we two had idled away the sunny hours was as lost to me as if I had never known it, as strange to me as if I stood already on a foreign shore. The empty silence of the beach struck cold to my heart. I returned to the house and the garden, where traces were left to speak of her at every turn. On the west terrace walk I met Mr. Gilmore. He was evidently in search of me, for he quickened his pace when we caught sight of each other. The state of my spirits little fitted me for the society of a stranger; but the meeting was inevitable, and I resigned myself to make the best of it. "You are the very person I wanted to see," said the old gentleman. "I had two words to say to you, my dear sir; and if you have no objection I will avail myself of the present opportunity. To put it plainly, Miss Halcombe and I have been talking over family affairs--affairs which are the cause of my being here--and in the course of our conversation she was naturally led to tell me of this unpleasant matter connected with the anonymous letter, and of the share which you have most creditably and properly taken in the proceedings so far. That share, I quite understand, gives you an interest which you might not otherwise have felt, in knowing that the future management of the investigation which you have begun will be placed in safe hands. My dear sir, make yourself quite easy on that point--it will be placed in MY hands." "You are, in every way, Mr. Gilmore, much fitter to advise and to act in the matter than I am. Is it an indiscretion on my part to ask if you have decided yet on a course of proceeding?" "So far as it is possible to decide, Mr. Hartright, I have decided. I mean to send a copy of the letter, accompanied by a statement of the circumstances, to Sir Percival Glyde's solicitor in London, with whom I have some acquaintance. The letter itself I shall keep here to show to Sir Percival as soon as he arrives. The tracing of the two women I have already provided for, by sending one of Mr. Fairlie's servants--a confidential person--to the station to make inquiries. The man has his money and his directions, and he will follow the women in the event of his finding any clue. This is all that can be done until Sir Percival comes on Monday. I have no doubt myself that every explanation which can be expected from a gentleman and a man of honour, he will readily give. Sir Percival stands very high, sir--an eminent position, a reputation above suspicion--I feel quite easy about results--quite easy, I am rejoiced to assure you. Things of this sort happen constantly in my experience. Anonymous letters--unfortunate woman--sad state of society. I don't deny that there are peculiar complications in this case; but the case itself is, most unhappily, common--common." "I am afraid, Mr. Gilmore, I have the misfortune to differ from you in the view I take of the case." "Just so, my dear sir--just so. I am an old man, and I take the practical view. You are a young man, and you take the romantic view. Let us not dispute about our views. I live professionally in an atmosphere of disputation, Mr. Hartright, and I am only too glad to escape from it, as I am escaping here. We will wait for events--yes, yes, yes--we will wait for events. Charming place this. Good shooting? Probably not, none of Mr. Fairlie's land is preserved, I think. Charming place, though, and delightful people. You draw and paint, I hear, Mr. Hartright? Enviable accomplishment. What style?" We dropped into general conversation, or rather, Mr. Gilmore talked and I listened. My attention was far from him, and from the topics on which he discoursed so fluently. The solitary walk of the last two hours had wrought its effect on me--it had set the idea in my mind of hastening my departure from Limmeridge House. Why should I prolong the hard trial of saying farewell by one unnecessary minute? What further service was required of me by any one? There was no useful purpose to be served by my stay in Cumberland--there was no restriction of time in the permission to leave which my employer had granted to me. Why not end it there and then? I determined to end it. There were some hours of daylight still left--there was no reason why my journey back to London should not begin on that afternoon. I made the first civil excuse that occurred to me for leaving Mr. Gilmore, and returned at once to the house. On my way up to my own room I met Miss Halcombe on the stairs. She saw, by the hurry of my movements and the change in my manner, that I had some new purpose in view, and asked what had happened. I told her the reasons which induced me to think of hastening my departure, exactly as I have told them here. "No, no," she said, earnestly and kindly, "leave us like a friend--break bread with us once more. Stay here and dine, stay here and help us to spend our last evening with you as happily, as like our first evenings, as we can. It is my invitation--Mrs. Vesey's invitation----" she hesitated a little, and then added, "Laura's invitation as well." I promised to remain. God knows I had no wish to leave even the shadow of a sorrowful impression with any one of them. My own room was the best place for me till the dinner bell rang. I waited there till it was time to go downstairs. I had not spoken to Miss Fairlie--I had not even seen her--all that day. The first meeting with her, when I entered the drawing-room, was a hard trial to her self-control and to mine. She, too, had done her best to make our last evening renew the golden bygone time--the time that could never come again. She had put on the dress which I used to admire more than any other that she possessed--a dark blue silk, trimmed quaintly and prettily with old-fashioned lace; she came forward to meet me with her former readiness--she gave me her hand with the frank, innocent good-will of happier days. The cold fingers that trembled round mine--the pale cheeks with a bright red spot burning in the midst of them--the faint smile that struggled to live on her lips and died away from them while I looked at it, told me at what sacrifice of herself her outward composure was maintained. My heart could take her no closer to me, or I should have loved her then as I had never loved her yet. Mr. Gilmore was a great assistance to us. He was in high good-humour, and he led the conversation with unflagging spirit. Miss Halcombe seconded him resolutely, and I did all I could to follow her example. The kind blue eyes, whose slightest changes of expression I had learnt to interpret so well, looked at me appealingly when we first sat down to table. Help my sister--the sweet anxious face seemed to say--help my sister, and you will help me. We got through the dinner, to all outward appearance at least, happily enough. When the ladies had risen from table, and Mr. Gilmore and I were left alone in the dining-room, a new interest presented itself to occupy our attention, and to give me an opportunity of quieting myself by a few minutes of needful and welcome silence. The servant who had been despatched to trace Anne Catherick and Mrs. Clements returned with his report, and was shown into the dining-room immediately. "Well," said Mr. Gilmore, "what have you found out?" "I have found out, sir," answered the man, "that both the women took tickets at our station here for Carlisle." "You went to Carlisle, of course, when you heard that?" "I did, sir, but I am sorry to say I could find no further trace of them." "You inquired at the railway?" "Yes, sir." "And at the different inns?" "Yes, sir." "And you left the statement I wrote for you at the police station?" "I did, sir." "Well, my friend, you have done all you could, and I have done all I could, and there the matter must rest till further notice. We have played our trump cards, Mr. Hartright," continued the old gentleman when the servant had withdrawn. "For the present, at least, the women have outmanoeuvred us, and our only resource now is to wait till Sir Percival Glyde comes here on Monday next. Won't you fill your glass again? Good bottle of port, that--sound, substantial, old wine. I have got better in my own cellar, though." We returned to the drawing-room--the room in which the happiest evenings of my life had been passed--the room which, after this last night, I was never to see again. Its aspect was altered since the days had shortened and the weather had grown cold. The glass doors on the terrace side were closed, and hidden by thick curtains. Instead of the soft twilight obscurity, in which we used to sit, the bright radiant glow of lamplight now dazzled my eyes. All was changed--indoors and out all was changed. Miss Halcombe and Mr. Gilmore sat down together at the card-table--Mrs. Vesey took her customary chair. There was no restraint on the disposal of THEIR evening, and I felt the restraint on the disposal of mine all the more painfully from observing it. I saw Miss Fairlie lingering near the music-stand. The time had been when I might have joined her there. I waited irresolutely--I knew neither where to go nor what to do next. She cast one quick glance at me, took a piece of music suddenly from the stand, and came towards me of her own accord. "Shall I play some of those little melodies of Mozart's which you used to like so much?" she asked, opening the music nervously, and looking down at it while she spoke. Before I could thank her she hastened to the piano. The chair near it, which I had always been accustomed to occupy, stood empty. She struck a few chords--then glanced round at me--then looked back again at her music. "Won't you take your old place?" she said, speaking very abruptly and in very low tones. "I may take it on the last night," I answered. She did not reply--she kept her attention riveted on the music--music which she knew by memory, which she had played over and over again, in former times, without the book. I only knew that she had heard me, I only knew that she was aware of my being close to her, by seeing the red spot on the cheek that was nearest to me fade out, and the face grow pale all over. "I am very sorry you are going," she said, her voice almost sinking to a whisper, her eyes looking more and more intently at the music, her fingers flying over the keys of the piano with a strange feverish energy which I had never noticed in her before. "I shall remember those kind words, Miss Fairlie, long after to-morrow has come and gone." The paleness grew whiter on her face, and she turned it farther away from me. "Don't speak of to-morrow," she said. "Let the music speak to us of to-night, in a happier language than ours." Her lips trembled--a faint sigh fluttered from them, which she tried vainly to suppress. Her fingers wavered on the piano--she struck a false note, confused herself in trying to set it right, and dropped her hands angrily on her lap. Miss Halcombe and Mr. Gilmore looked up in astonishment from the card-table at which they were playing. Even Mrs. Vesey, dozing in her chair, woke at the sudden cessation of the music, and inquired what had happened. "You play at whist, Mr. Hartright?" asked Miss Halcombe, with her eyes directed significantly at the place I occupied. I knew what she meant--I knew she was right, and I rose at once to go to the card-table. As I left the piano Miss Fairlie turned a page of the music, and touched the keys again with a surer hand. "I WILL play it," she said, striking the notes almost passionately. "I WILL play it on the last night." "Come, Mrs. Vesey," said Miss Halcombe, "Mr. Gilmore and I are tired of ecarte--come and be Mr. Hartright's partner at whist." The old lawyer smiled satirically. His had been the winning hand, and he had just turned up a king. He evidently attributed Miss Halcombe's abrupt change in the card-table arrangements to a lady's inability to play the losing game. The rest of the evening passed without a word or a look from her. She kept her place at the piano, and I kept mine at the card-table. She played unintermittingly--played as if the music was her only refuge from herself. Sometimes her fingers touched the notes with a lingering fondness--a soft, plaintive, dying tenderness, unutterably beautiful and mournful to hear; sometimes they faltered and failed her, or hurried over the instrument mechanically, as if their task was a burden to them. But still, change and waver as they might in the expression they imparted to the music, their resolution to play never faltered. She only rose from the piano when we all rose to say Good-night. Mrs. Vesey was the nearest to the door, and the first to shake hands with me. "I shall not see you again, Mr. Hartright," said the old lady. "I am truly sorry you are going away. You have been very kind and attentive, and an old woman like me feels kindness and attention. I wish you happy, sir--I wish you a kind good-bye." Mr. Gilmore came next. "I hope we shall have a future opportunity of bettering our acquaintance, Mr. Hartright. You quite understand about that little matter of business being safe in my hands? Yes, yes, of course. Bless me, how cold it is! Don't let me keep you at the door. Bon voyage, my dear sir--bon voyage, as the French say." Miss Halcombe followed. "Half-past seven to-morrow morning," she said--then added in a whisper, "I have heard and seen more than you think. Your conduct to-night has made me your friend for life." Miss Fairlie came last. I could not trust myself to look at her when I took her hand, and when I thought of the next morning. "My departure must be a very early one," I said. "I shall be gone, Miss Fairlie, before you----" "No, no," she interposed hastily, "not before I am out of my room. I shall be down to breakfast with Marian. I am not so ungrateful, not so forgetful of the past three months----" Her voice failed her, her hand closed gently round mine--then dropped it suddenly. Before I could say "Good-night" she was gone. The end comes fast to meet me--comes inevitably, as the light of the last morning came at Limmeridge House. It was barely half-past seven when I went downstairs, but I found them both at the breakfast-table waiting for me. In the chill air, in the dim light, in the gloomy morning silence of the house, we three sat down together, and tried to eat, tried to talk. The struggle to preserve appearances was hopeless and useless, and I rose to end it. As I held out my hand, as Miss Halcombe, who was nearest to me, took it, Miss Fairlie turned away suddenly and hurried from the room. "Better so," said Miss Halcombe, when the door had closed--"better so, for you and for her." I waited a moment before I could speak--it was hard to lose her, without a parting word or a parting look. I controlled myself--I tried to take leave of Miss Halcombe in fitting terms; but all the farewell words I would fain have spoken dwindled to one sentence. "Have I deserved that you should write to me?" was all I could say. "You have nobly deserved everything that I can do for you, as long as we both live. Whatever the end is you shall know it." "And if I can ever be of help again, at any future time, long after the memory of my presumption and my folly is forgotten . . ." I could add no more. My voice faltered, my eyes moistened in spite of me. She caught me by both hands--she pressed them with the strong, steady grasp of a man--her dark eyes glittered--her brown complexion flushed deep--the force and energy of her face glowed and grew beautiful with the pure inner light of her generosity and her pity. "I will trust you--if ever the time comes I will trust you as my friend and HER friend, as my brother and HER brother." She stopped, drew me nearer to her--the fearless, noble creature--touched my forehead, sister-like, with her lips, and called me by my Christian name. "God bless you, Walter!" she said. "Wait here alone and compose yourself--I had better not stay for both our sakes--I had better see you go from the balcony upstairs." She left the room. I turned away towards the window, where nothing faced me but the lonely autumn landscape--I turned away to master myself, before I too left the room in my turn, and left it for ever. A minute passed--it could hardly have been more--when I heard the door open again softly, and the rustling of a woman's dress on the carpet moved towards me. My heart beat violently as I turned round. Miss Fairlie was approaching me from the farther end of the room. She stopped and hesitated when our eyes met, and when she saw that we were alone. Then, with that courage which women lose so often in the small emergency, and so seldom in the great, she came on nearer to me, strangely pale and strangely quiet, drawing one hand after her along the table by which she walked, and holding something at her side in the other, which was hidden by the folds of her dress. "I only went into the drawing-room," she said, "to look for this. It may remind you of your visit here, and of the friends you leave behind you. You told me I had improved very much when I did it, and I thought you might like----" She turned her head away, and offered me a little sketch, drawn throughout by her own pencil, of the summer-house in which we had first met. The paper trembled in her hand as she held it out to me--trembled in mine as I took it from her. I was afraid to say what I felt--I only answered, "It shall never leave me--all my life long it shall be the treasure that I prize most. I am very grateful for it--very grateful to you, for not letting me go away without bidding you good-bye." "Oh!" she said innocently, "how could I let you go, after we have passed so many happy days together!" "Those days may never return, Miss Fairlie--my way of life and yours are very far apart. But if a time should come, when the devotion of my whole heart and soul and strength will give you a moment's happiness, or spare you a moment's sorrow, will you try to remember the poor drawing-master who has taught you? Miss Halcombe has promised to trust me--will you promise too?" The farewell sadness in the kind blue eyes shone dimly through her gathering tears. "I promise it," she said in broken tones. "Oh, don't look at me like that! I promise it with all my heart." I ventured a little nearer to her, and held out my hand. "You have many friends who love you, Miss Fairlie. Your happy future is the dear object of many hopes. May I say, at parting, that it is the dear object of MY hopes too?" The tears flowed fast down her cheeks. She rested one trembling hand on the table to steady herself while she gave me the other. I took it in mine--I held it fast. My head drooped over it, my tears fell on it, my lips pressed it--not in love; oh, not in love, at that last moment, but in the agony and the self-abandonment of despair. "For God's sake, leave me!" she said faintly. The confession of her heart's secret burst from her in those pleading words. I had no right to hear them, no right to answer them--they were the words that banished me, in the name of her sacred weakness, from the room. It was all over. I dropped her hand, I said no more. The blinding tears shut her out from my eyes, and I dashed them away to look at her for the last time. One look as she sank into a chair, as her arms fell on the table, as her fair head dropped on them wearily. One farewell look, and the door had closed upon her--the great gulf of separation had opened between us--the image of Laura Fairlie was a memory of the past already. The End of Hartright's Narrative. THE STORY CONTINUED BY VINCENT GILMORE (of Chancery Lane, Solicitor) I I write these lines at the request of my friend, Mr. Walter Hartright. They are intended to convey a description of certain events which seriously affected Miss Fairlie's interests, and which took place after the period of Mr. Hartright's departure from Limmeridge House. There is no need for me to say whether my own opinion does or does not sanction the disclosure of the remarkable family story, of which my narrative forms an important component part. Mr. Hartright has taken that responsibility on himself, and circumstances yet to be related will show that he has amply earned the right to do so, if he chooses to exercise it. The plan he has adopted for presenting the story to others, in the most truthful and most vivid manner, requires that it should be told, at each successive stage in the march of events, by the persons who were directly concerned in those events at the time of their occurrence. My appearance here, as narrator, is the necessary consequence of this arrangement. I was present during the sojourn of Sir Percival Glyde in Cumberland, and was personally concerned in one important result of his short residence under Mr. Fairlie's roof. It is my duty, therefore, to add these new links to the chain of events, and to take up the chain itself at the point where, for the present only Mr. Hartright has dropped it. I arrived at Limmeridge House on Friday the second of November. My object was to remain at Mr. Fairlie's until the arrival of Sir Percival Glyde. If that event led to the appointment of any given day for Sir Percival's union with Miss Fairlie, I was to take the necessary instructions back with me to London, and to occupy myself in drawing the lady's marriage-settlement. On the Friday I was not favoured by Mr. Fairlie with an interview. He had been, or had fancied himself to be, an invalid for years past, and he was not well enough to receive me. Miss Halcombe was the first member of the family whom I saw. She met me at the house door, and introduced me to Mr. Hartright, who had been staying at Limmeridge for some time past. I did not see Miss Fairlie until later in the day, at dinner-time. She was not looking well, and I was sorry to observe it. She is a sweet lovable girl, as amiable and attentive to every one about her as her excellent mother used to be--though, personally speaking, she takes after her father. Mrs. Fairlie had dark eyes and hair, and her elder daughter, Miss Halcombe, strongly reminds me of her. Miss Fairlie played to us in the evening--not so well as usual, I thought. We had a rubber at whist, a mere profanation, so far as play was concerned, of that noble game. I had been favourably impressed by Mr. Hartright on our first introduction to one another, but I soon discovered that he was not free from the social failings incidental to his age. There are three things that none of the young men of the present generation can do. They can't sit over their wine, they can't play at whist, and they can't pay a lady a compliment. Mr. Hartright was no exception to the general rule. Otherwise, even in those early days and on that short acquaintance, he struck me as being a modest and gentlemanlike young man. So the Friday passed. I say nothing about the more serious matters which engaged my attention on that day--the anonymous letter to Miss Fairlie, the measures I thought it right to adopt when the matter was mentioned to me, and the conviction I entertained that every possible explanation of the circumstances would be readily afforded by Sir Percival Glyde, having all been fully noticed, as I understand, in the narrative which precedes this. On the Saturday Mr. Hartright had left before I got down to breakfast. Miss Fairlie kept her room all day, and Miss Halcombe appeared to me to be out of spirits. The house was not what it used to be in the time of Mr. and Mrs. Philip Fairlie. I took a walk by myself in the forenoon, and looked about at some of the places which I first saw when I was staying at Limmeridge to transact family business, more than thirty years since. They were not what they used to be either. At two o'clock Mr. Fairlie sent to say he was well enough to see me. HE had not altered, at any rate, since I first knew him. His talk was to the same purpose as usual--all about himself and his ailments, his wonderful coins, and his matchless Rembrandt etchings. The moment I tried to speak of the business that had brought me to his house, he shut his eyes and said I "upset" him. I persisted in upsetting him by returning again and again to the subject. All I could ascertain was that he looked on his niece's marriage as a settled thing, that her father had sanctioned it, that he sanctioned it himself, that it was a desirable marriage, and that he should be personally rejoiced when the worry of it was over. As to the settlements, if I would consult his niece, and afterwards dive as deeply as I pleased into my own knowledge of the family affairs, and get everything ready, and limit his share in the business, as guardian, to saying Yes, at the right moment--why, of course he would meet my views, and everybody else's views, with infinite pleasure. In the meantime, there I saw him, a helpless sufferer, confined to his room. Did I think he looked as if he wanted teasing? No. Then why tease him? I might, perhaps, have been a little astonished at this extraordinary absence of all self-assertion on Mr. Fairlie's part, in the character of guardian, if my knowledge of the family affairs had not been sufficient to remind me that he was a single man, and that he had nothing more than a life-interest in the Limmeridge property. As matters stood, therefore, I was neither surprised nor disappointed at the result of the interview. Mr. Fairlie had simply justified my expectations--and there was an end of it. Sunday was a dull day, out of doors and in. A letter arrived for me from Sir Percival Glyde's solicitor, acknowledging the receipt of my copy of the anonymous letter and my accompanying statement of the case. Miss Fairlie joined us in the afternoon, looking pale and depressed, and altogether unlike herself. I had some talk with her, and ventured on a delicate allusion to Sir Percival. She listened and said nothing. All other subjects she pursued willingly, but this subject she allowed to drop. I began to doubt whether she might not be repenting of her engagement--just as young ladies often do, when repentance comes too late. On Monday Sir Percival Glyde arrived. I found him to be a most prepossessing man, so far as manners and appearance were concerned. He looked rather older than I had expected, his head being bald over the forehead, and his face somewhat marked and worn, but his movements were as active and his spirits as high as a young man's. His meeting with Miss Halcombe was delightfully hearty and unaffected, and his reception of me, upon my being presented to him, was so easy and pleasant that we got on together like old friends. Miss Fairlie was not with us when he arrived, but she entered the room about ten minutes afterwards. Sir Percival rose and paid his compliments with perfect grace. His evident concern on seeing the change for the worse in the young lady's looks was expressed with a mixture of tenderness and respect, with an unassuming delicacy of tone, voice, and manner, which did equal credit to his good breeding and his good sense. I was rather surprised, under these circumstances, to see that Miss Fairlie continued to be constrained and uneasy in his presence, and that she took the first opportunity of leaving the room again. Sir Percival neither noticed the restraint in her reception of him, nor her sudden withdrawal from our society. He had not obtruded his attentions on her while she was present, and he did not embarrass Miss Halcombe by any allusion to her departure when she was gone. His tact and taste were never at fault on this or on any other occasion while I was in his company at Limmeridge House. As soon as Miss Fairlie had left the room he spared us all embarrassment on the subject of the anonymous letter, by adverting to it of his own accord. He had stopped in London on his way from Hampshire, had seen his solicitor, had read the documents forwarded by me, and had travelled on to Cumberland, anxious to satisfy our minds by the speediest and the fullest explanation that words could convey. On hearing him express himself to this effect, I offered him the original letter, which I had kept for his inspection. He thanked me, and declined to look at it, saying that he had seen the copy, and that he was quite willing to leave the original in our hands. The statement itself, on which he immediately entered, was as simple and satisfactory as I had all along anticipated it would be. Mrs. Catherick, he informed us, had in past years laid him under some obligations for faithful services rendered to his family connections and to himself. She had been doubly unfortunate in being married to a husband who had deserted her, and in having an only child whose mental faculties had been in a disturbed condition from a very early age. Although her marriage had removed her to a part of Hampshire far distant from the neighbourhood in which Sir Percival's property was situated, he had taken care not to lose sight of her--his friendly feeling towards the poor woman, in consideration of her past services, having been greatly strengthened by his admiration of the patience and courage with which she supported her calamities. In course of time the symptoms of mental affliction in her unhappy daughter increased to such a serious extent, as to make it a matter of necessity to place her under proper medical care. Mrs. Catherick herself recognised this necessity, but she also felt the prejudice common to persons occupying her respectable station, against allowing her child to be admitted, as a pauper, into a public Asylum. Sir Percival had respected this prejudice, as he respected honest independence of feeling in any rank of life, and had resolved to mark his grateful sense of Mrs. Catherick's early attachment to the interests of himself and his family, by defraying the expense of her daughter's maintenance in a trustworthy private Asylum. To her mother's regret, and to his own regret, the unfortunate creature had discovered the share which circumstances had induced him to take in placing her under restraint, and had conceived the most intense hatred and distrust of him in consequence. To that hatred and distrust--which had expressed itself in various ways in the Asylum--the anonymous letter, written after her escape, was plainly attributable. If Miss Halcombe's or Mr. Gilmore's recollection of the document did not confirm that view, or if they wished for any additional particulars about the Asylum (the address of which he mentioned, as well as the names and addresses of the two doctors on whose certificates the patient was admitted), he was ready to answer any question and to clear up any uncertainty. He had done his duty to the unhappy young woman, by instructing his solicitor to spare no expense in tracing her, and in restoring her once more to medical care, and he was now only anxious to do his duty towards Miss Fairlie and towards her family, in the same plain, straightforward way. I was the first to speak in answer to this appeal. My own course was plain to me. It is the great beauty of the Law that it can dispute any human statement, made under any circumstances, and reduced to any form. If I had felt professionally called upon to set up a case against Sir Percival Glyde, on the strength of his own explanation, I could have done so beyond all doubt. But my duty did not lie in this direction--my function was of the purely judicial kind. I was to weigh the explanation we had just heard, to allow all due force to the high reputation of the gentleman who offered it, and to decide honestly whether the probabilities, on Sir Percival's own showing, were plainly with him, or plainly against him. My own conviction was that they were plainly with him, and I accordingly declared that his explanation was, to my mind, unquestionably a satisfactory one. Miss Halcombe, after looking at me very earnestly, said a few words, on her side, to the same effect--with a certain hesitation of manner, however, which the circumstances did not seem to me to warrant. I am unable to say, positively, whether Sir Percival noticed this or not. My opinion is that he did, seeing that he pointedly resumed the subject, although he might now, with all propriety, have allowed it to drop. "If my plain statement of facts had only been addressed to Mr. Gilmore," he said, "I should consider any further reference to this unhappy matter as unnecessary. I may fairly expect Mr. Gilmore, as a gentleman, to believe me on my word, and when he has done me that justice, all discussion of the subject between us has come to an end. But my position with a lady is not the same. I owe to her--what I would concede to no man alive--a PROOF of the truth of my assertion. You cannot ask for that proof, Miss Halcombe, and it is therefore my duty to you, and still more to Miss Fairlie, to offer it. May I beg that you will write at once to the mother of this unfortunate woman--to Mrs. Catherick--to ask for her testimony in support of the explanation which I have just offered to you." I saw Miss Halcombe change colour, and look a little uneasy. Sir Percival's suggestion, politely as it was expressed, appeared to her, as it appeared to me, to point very delicately at the hesitation which her manner had betrayed a moment or two since. "I hope, Sir Percival, you don't do me the injustice to suppose that I distrust you," she said quickly. "Certainly not, Miss Halcombe. I make my proposal purely as an act of attention to YOU. Will you excuse my obstinacy if I still venture to press it?" He walked to the writing-table as he spoke, drew a chair to it, and opened the paper case. "Let me beg you to write the note," he said, "as a favour to ME. It need not occupy you more than a few minutes. You have only to ask Mrs. Catherick two questions. First, if her daughter was placed in the Asylum with her knowledge and approval. Secondly, if the share I took in the matter was such as to merit the expression of her gratitude towards myself? Mr. Gilmore's mind is at ease on this unpleasant subject, and your mind is at ease--pray set my mind at ease also by writing the note." "You oblige me to grant your request, Sir Percival, when I would much rather refuse it." With those words Miss Halcombe rose from her place and went to the writing-table. Sir Percival thanked her, handed her a pen, and then walked away towards the fireplace. Miss Fairlie's little Italian greyhound was lying on the rug. He held out his hand, and called to the dog good-humouredly. "Come, Nina," he said, "we remember each other, don't we?" The little beast, cowardly and cross-grained, as pet-dogs usually are, looked up at him sharply, shrank away from his outstretched hand, whined, shivered, and hid itself under a sofa. It was scarcely possible that he could have been put out by such a trifle as a dog's reception of him, but I observed, nevertheless, that he walked away towards the window very suddenly. Perhaps his temper is irritable at times. If so, I can sympathise with him. My temper is irritable at times too. Miss Halcombe was not long in writing the note. When it was done she rose from the writing-table, and handed the open sheet of paper to Sir Percival. He bowed, took it from her, folded it up immediately without looking at the contents, sealed it, wrote the address, and handed it back to her in silence. I never saw anything more gracefully and more becomingly done in my life. "You insist on my posting this letter, Sir Percival?" said Miss Halcombe. "I beg you will post it," he answered. "And now that it is written and sealed up, allow me to ask one or two last questions about the unhappy woman to whom it refers. I have read the communication which Mr. Gilmore kindly addressed to my solicitor, describing the circumstances under which the writer of the anonymous letter was identified. But there are certain points to which that statement does not refer. Did Anne Catherick see Miss Fairlie?" "Certainly not," replied Miss Halcombe. "Did she see you?" "No." "She saw nobody from the house then, except a certain Mr. Hartright, who accidentally met with her in the churchyard here?" "Nobody else." "Mr. Hartright was employed at Limmeridge as a drawing-master, I believe? Is he a member of one of the Water-Colour Societies?" "I believe he is," answered Miss Halcombe. He paused for a moment, as if he was thinking over the last answer, and then added-- "Did you find out where Anne Catherick was living, when she was in this neighbourhood?" "Yes. At a farm on the moor, called Todd's Corner." "It is a duty we all owe to the poor creature herself to trace her," continued Sir Percival. "She may have said something at Todd's Corner which may help us to find her. I will go there and make inquiries on the chance. In the meantime, as I cannot prevail on myself to discuss this painful subject with Miss Fairlie, may I beg, Miss Halcombe, that you will kindly undertake to give her the necessary explanation, deferring it of course until you have received the reply to that note." Miss Halcombe promised to comply with his request. He thanked her, nodded pleasantly, and left us, to go and establish himself in his own room. As he opened the door the cross-grained greyhound poked out her sharp muzzle from under the sofa, and barked and snapped at him. "A good morning's work, Miss Halcombe," I said, as soon as we were alone. "Here is an anxious day well ended already." "Yes," she answered; "no doubt. I am very glad your mind is satisfied." "My mind! Surely, with that note in your hand, your mind is at ease too?" "Oh yes--how can it be otherwise? I know the thing could not be," she went on, speaking more to herself than to me; "but I almost wish Walter Hartright had stayed here long enough to be present at the explanation, and to hear the proposal to me to write this note." I was a little surprised--perhaps a little piqued also--by these last words. "Events, it is true, connected Mr. Hartright very remarkably with the affair of the letter," I said; "and I readily admit that he conducted himself, all things considered, with great delicacy and discretion. But I am quite at a loss to understand what useful influence his presence could have exercised in relation to the effect of Sir Percival's statement on your mind or mine." "It was only a fancy," she said absently. "There is no need to discuss it, Mr. Gilmore. Your experience ought to be, and is, the best guide I can desire." I did not altogether like her thrusting the whole responsibility, in this marked manner, on my shoulders. If Mr. Fairlie had done it, I should not have been surprised. But resolute, clear-minded Miss Halcombe was the very last person in the world whom I should have expected to find shrinking from the expression of an opinion of her own. "If any doubts still trouble you," I said, "why not mention them to me at once? Tell me plainly, have you any reason to distrust Sir Percival Glyde?" "None whatever." "Do you see anything improbable, or contradictory, in his explanation?" "How can I say I do, after the proof he has offered me of the truth of it? Can there be better testimony in his favour, Mr. Gilmore, than the testimony of the woman's mother?" "None better. If the answer to your note of inquiry proves to be satisfactory, I for one cannot see what more any friend of Sir Percival's can possibly expect from him." "Then we will post the note," she said, rising to leave the room, "and dismiss all further reference to the subject until the answer arrives. Don't attach any weight to my hesitation. I can give no better reason for it than that I have been over-anxious about Laura lately--and anxiety, Mr. Gilmore, unsettles the strongest of us." She left me abruptly, her naturally firm voice faltering as she spoke those last words. A sensitive, vehement, passionate nature--a woman of ten thousand in these trivial, superficial times. I had known her from her earliest years--I had seen her tested, as she grew up, in more than one trying family crisis, and my long experience made me attach an importance to her hesitation under the circumstances here detailed, which I should certainly not have felt in the case of another woman. I could see no cause for any uneasiness or any doubt, but she had made me a little uneasy, and a little doubtful, nevertheless. In my youth, I should have chafed and fretted under the irritation of my own unreasonable state of mind. In my age, I knew better, and went out philosophically to walk it off. II We all met again at dinner-time. Sir Percival was in such boisterous high spirits that I hardly recognised him as the same man whose quiet tact, refinement, and good sense had impressed me so strongly at the interview of the morning. The only trace of his former self that I could detect reappeared, every now and then, in his manner towards Miss Fairlie. A look or a word from her suspended his loudest laugh, checked his gayest flow of talk, and rendered him all attention to her, and to no one else at table, in an instant. Although he never openly tried to draw her into the conversation, he never lost the slightest chance she gave him of letting her drift into it by accident, and of saying the words to her, under those favourable circumstances, which a man with less tact and delicacy would have pointedly addressed to her the moment they occurred to him. Rather to my surprise, Miss Fairlie appeared to be sensible of his attentions without being moved by them. She was a little confused from time to time when he looked at her, or spoke to her; but she never warmed towards him. Rank, fortune, good breeding, good looks, the respect of a gentleman, and the devotion of a lover were all humbly placed at her feet, and, so far as appearances went, were all offered in vain. On the next day, the Tuesday, Sir Percival went in the morning (taking one of the servants with him as a guide) to Todd's Corner. His inquiries, as I afterwards heard, led to no results. On his return he had an interview with Mr. Fairlie, and in the afternoon he and Miss Halcombe rode out together. Nothing else happened worthy of record. The evening passed as usual. There was no change in Sir Percival, and no change in Miss Fairlie. The Wednesday's post brought with it an event--the reply from Mrs. Catherick. I took a copy of the document, which I have preserved, and which I may as well present in this place. It ran as follows-- "MADAM,--I beg to acknowledge the receipt of your letter, inquiring whether my daughter, Anne, was placed under medical superintendence with my knowledge and approval, and whether the share taken in the matter by Sir Percival Glyde was such as to merit the expression of my gratitude towards that gentleman. Be pleased to accept my answer in the affirmative to both those questions, and believe me to remain, your obedient servant, "JANE ANNE CATHERICK." Short, sharp, and to the point; in form rather a business-like letter for a woman to write--in substance as plain a confirmation as could be desired of Sir Percival Glyde's statement. This was my opinion, and with certain minor reservations, Miss Halcombe's opinion also. Sir Percival, when the letter was shown to him, did not appear to be struck by the sharp, short tone of it. He told us that Mrs. Catherick was a woman of few words, a clear-headed, straightforward, unimaginative person, who wrote briefly and plainly, just as she spoke. The next duty to be accomplished, now that the answer had been received, was to acquaint Miss Fairlie with Sir Percival's explanation. Miss Halcombe had undertaken to do this, and had left the room to go to her sister, when she suddenly returned again, and sat down by the easy-chair in which I was reading the newspaper. Sir Percival had gone out a minute before to look at the stables, and no one was in the room but ourselves. "I suppose we have really and truly done all we can?" she said, turning and twisting Mrs. Catherick's letter in her hand. "If we are friends of Sir Percival's, who know him and trust him, we have done all, and more than all, that is necessary," I answered, a little annoyed by this return of her hesitation. "But if we are enemies who suspect him----" "That alternative is not even to be thought of," she interposed. "We are Sir Percival's friends, and if generosity and forbearance can add to our regard for him, we ought to be Sir Percival's admirers as well. You know that he saw Mr. Fairlie yesterday, and that he afterwards went out with me." "Yes. I saw you riding away together." "We began the ride by talking about Anne Catherick, and about the singular manner in which Mr. Hartright met with her. But we soon dropped that subject, and Sir Percival spoke next, in the most unselfish terms, of his engagement with Laura. He said he had observed that she was out of spirits, and he was willing, if not informed to the contrary, to attribute to that cause the alteration in her manner towards him during his present visit. If, however, there was any more serious reason for the change, he would entreat that no constraint might be placed on her inclinations either by Mr. Fairlie or by me. All he asked, in that case, was that she would recall to mind, for the last time, what the circumstances were under which the engagement between them was made, and what his conduct had been from the beginning of the courtship to the present time. If, after due reflection on those two subjects, she seriously desired that he should withdraw his pretensions to the honour of becoming her husband--and if she would tell him so plainly with her own lips--he would sacrifice himself by leaving her perfectly free to withdraw from the engagement." "No man could say more than that, Miss Halcombe. As to my experience, few men in his situation would have said as much." She paused after I had spoken those words, and looked at me with a singular expression of perplexity and distress. "I accuse nobody, and I suspect nothing," she broke out abruptly. "But I cannot and will not accept the responsibility of persuading Laura to this marriage." "That is exactly the course which Sir Percival Glyde has himself requested you to take," I replied in astonishment. "He has begged you not to force her inclinations." "And he indirectly obliges me to force them, if I give her his message." "How can that possibly be?" "Consult your own knowledge of Laura, Mr. Gilmore. If I tell her to reflect on the circumstances of her engagement, I at once appeal to two of the strongest feelings in her nature--to her love for her father's memory, and to her strict regard for truth. You know that she never broke a promise in her life--you know that she entered on this engagement at the beginning of her father's fatal illness, and that he spoke hopefully and happily of her marriage to Sir Percival Glyde on his deathbed." I own that I was a little shocked at this view of the case. "Surely," I said, "you don't mean to infer that when Sir Percival spoke to you yesterday he speculated on such a result as you have just mentioned?" Her frank, fearless face answered for her before she spoke. "Do you think I would remain an instant in the company of any man whom I suspected of such baseness as that?" she asked angrily. I liked to feel her hearty indignation flash out on me in that way. We see so much malice and so little indignation in my profession. "In that case," I said, "excuse me if I tell you, in our legal phrase, that you are travelling out of the record. Whatever the consequences may be, Sir Percival has a right to expect that your sister should carefully consider her engagement from every reasonable point of view before she claims her release from it. If that unlucky letter has prejudiced her against him, go at once, and tell her that he has cleared himself in your eyes and in mine. What objection can she urge against him after that? What excuse can she possibly have for changing her mind about a man whom she had virtually accepted for her husband more than two years ago?" "In the eyes of law and reason, Mr. Gilmore, no excuse, I daresay. If she still hesitates, and if I still hesitate, you must attribute our strange conduct, if you like, to caprice in both cases, and we must bear the imputation as well as we can." With those words she suddenly rose and left me. When a sensible woman has a serious question put to her, and evades it by a flippant answer, it is a sure sign, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, that she has something to conceal. I returned to the perusal of the newspaper, strongly suspecting that Miss Halcombe and Miss Fairlie had a secret between them which they were keeping from Sir Percival, and keeping from me. I thought this hard on both of us, especially on Sir Percival. My doubts--or to speak more correctly, my convictions--were confirmed by Miss Halcombe's language and manner when I saw her again later in the day. She was suspiciously brief and reserved in telling me the result of her interview with her sister. Miss Fairlie, it appeared, had listened quietly while the affair of the letter was placed before her in the right point of view, but when Miss Halcombe next proceeded to say that the object of Sir Percival's visit at Limmeridge was to prevail on her to let a day be fixed for the marriage she checked all further reference to the subject by begging for time. If Sir Percival would consent to spare her for the present, she would undertake to give him his final answer before the end of the year. She pleaded for this delay with such anxiety and agitation, that Miss Halcombe had promised to use her influence, if necessary, to obtain it, and there, at Miss Fairlie's earnest entreaty, all further discussion of the marriage question had ended. The purely temporary arrangement thus proposed might have been convenient enough to the young lady, but it proved somewhat embarrassing to the writer of these lines. That morning's post had brought a letter from my partner, which obliged me to return to town the next day by the afternoon train. It was extremely probable that I should find no second opportunity of presenting myself at Limmeridge House during the remainder of the year. In that case, supposing Miss Fairlie ultimately decided on holding to her engagement, my necessary personal communication with her, before I drew her settlement, would become something like a downright impossibility, and we should be obliged to commit to writing questions which ought always to be discussed on both sides by word of mouth. I said nothing about this difficulty until Sir Percival had been consulted on the subject of the desired delay. He was too gallant a gentleman not to grant the request immediately. When Miss Halcombe informed me of this I told her that I must absolutely speak to her sister before I left Limmeridge, and it was, therefore, arranged that I should see Miss Fairlie in her own sitting-room the next morning. She did not come down to dinner, or join us in the evening. Indisposition was the excuse, and I thought Sir Percival looked, as well he might, a little annoyed when he heard of it. The next morning, as soon as breakfast was over, I went up to Miss Fairlie's sitting-room. The poor girl looked so pale and sad, and came forward to welcome me so readily and prettily, that the resolution to lecture her on her caprice and indecision, which I had been forming all the way upstairs, failed me on the spot. I led her back to the chair from which she had risen, and placed myself opposite to her. Her cross-grained pet greyhound was in the room, and I fully expected a barking and snapping reception. Strange to say, the whimsical little brute falsified my expectations by jumping into my lap and poking its sharp muzzle familiarly into my hand the moment I sat down. "You used often to sit on my knee when you were a child, my dear," I said, "and now your little dog seems determined to succeed you in the vacant throne. Is that pretty drawing your doing?" I pointed to a little album which lay on the table by her side and which she had evidently been looking over when I came in. The page that lay open had a small water-colour landscape very neatly mounted on it. This was the drawing which had suggested my question--an idle question enough--but how could I begin to talk of business to her the moment I opened my lips? "No," she said, looking away from the drawing rather confusedly, "it is not my doing." Her fingers had a restless habit, which I remembered in her as a child, of always playing with the first thing that came to hand whenever any one was talking to her. On this occasion they wandered to the album, and toyed absently about the margin of the little water-colour drawing. The expression of melancholy deepened on her face. She did not look at the drawing, or look at me. Her eyes moved uneasily from object to object in the room, betraying plainly that she suspected what my purpose was in coming to speak to her. Seeing that, I thought it best to get to the purpose with as little delay as possible. "One of the errands, my dear, which brings me here is to bid you good-bye," I began. "I must get back to London to-day: and, before I leave, I want to have a word with you on the subject of your own affairs." "I am very sorry you are going, Mr. Gilmore," she said, looking at me kindly. "It is like the happy old times to have you here. "I hope I may be able to come back and recall those pleasant memories once more," I continued; "but as there is some uncertainty about the future, I must take my opportunity when I can get it, and speak to you now. I am your old lawyer and your old friend, and I may remind you, I am sure, without offence, of the possibility of your marrying Sir Percival Glyde." She took her hand off the little album as suddenly as if it had turned hot and burnt her. Her fingers twined together nervously in her lap, her eyes looked down again at the floor, and an expression of constraint settled on her face which looked almost like an expression of pain. "Is it absolutely necessary to speak of my marriage engagement?" she asked in low tones. "It is necessary to refer to it," I answered, "but not to dwell on it. Let us merely say that you may marry, or that you may not marry. In the first case, I must be prepared, beforehand, to draw your settlement, and I ought not to do that without, as a matter of politeness, first consulting you. This may be my only chance of hearing what your wishes are. Let us, therefore, suppose the case of your marrying, and let me inform you, in as few words as possible, what your position is now, and what you may make it, if you please, in the future." I explained to her the object of a marriage-settlement, and then told her exactly what her prospects were--in the first place, on her coming of age, and in the second place, on the decease of her uncle--marking the distinction between the property in which she had a life-interest only, and the property which was left at her own control. She listened attentively, with the constrained expression still on her face, and her hands still nervously clasped together in her lap. "And now," I said in conclusion, "tell me if you can think of any condition which, in the case we have supposed, you would wish me to make for you--subject, of course, to your guardian's approval, as you are not yet of age." She moved uneasily in her chair, then looked in my face on a sudden very earnestly. "If it does happen," she began faintly, "if I am----" "If you are married," I added, helping her out. "Don't let him part me from Marian," she cried, with a sudden outbreak of energy. "Oh, Mr. Gilmore, pray make it law that Marian is to live with me!" Under other circumstances I might, perhaps, have been amused at this essentially feminine interpretation of my question, and of the long explanation which had preceded it. But her looks and tones, when she spoke, were of a kind to make me more than serious--they distressed me. Her words, few as they were, betrayed a desperate clinging to the past which boded ill for the future. "Your having Marian Halcombe to live with you can easily be settled by private arrangement," I said. "You hardly understood my question, I think. It referred to your own property--to the disposal of your money. Supposing you were to make a will when you come of age, who would you like the money to go to?" "Marian has been mother and sister both to me," said the good, affectionate girl, her pretty blue eyes glistening while she spoke. "May I leave it to Marian, Mr. Gilmore?" "Certainly, my love," I answered. "But remember what a large sum it is. Would you like it all to go to Miss Halcombe?" She hesitated; her colour came and went, and her hand stole back again to the little album. "Not all of it," she said. "There is some one else besides Marian----" She stopped; her colour heightened, and the fingers of the hand that rested upon the album beat gently on the margin of the drawing, as if her memory had set them going mechanically with the remembrance of a favourite tune. "You mean some other member of the family besides Miss Halcombe?" I suggested, seeing her at a loss to proceed. The heightening colour spread to her forehead and her neck, and the nervous fingers suddenly clasped themselves fast round the edge of the book. "There is some one else," she said, not noticing my last words, though she had evidently heard them; "there is some one else who might like a little keepsake if--if I might leave it. There would be no harm if I should die first----" She paused again. The colour that had spread over her cheeks suddenly, as suddenly left them. The hand on the album resigned its hold, trembled a little, and moved the book away from her. She looked at me for an instant--then turned her head aside in the chair. Her handkerchief fell to the floor as she changed her position, and she hurriedly hid her face from me in her hands. Sad! To remember her, as I did, the liveliest, happiest child that ever laughed the day through, and to see her now, in the flower of her age and her beauty, so broken and so brought down as this! In the distress that she caused me I forgot the years that had passed, and the change they had made in our position towards one another. I moved my chair close to her, and picked up her handkerchief from the carpet, and drew her hands from her face gently. "Don't cry, my love," I said, and dried the tears that were gathering in her eyes with my own hand, as if she had been the little Laura Fairlie of ten long years ago. It was the best way I could have taken to compose her. She laid her head on my shoulder, and smiled faintly through her tears. "I am very sorry for forgetting myself," she said artlessly. "I have not been well--I have felt sadly weak and nervous lately, and I often cry without reason when I am alone. I am better now--I can answer you as I ought, Mr. Gilmore, I can indeed." "No, no, my dear," I replied, "we will consider the subject as done with for the present. You have said enough to sanction my taking the best possible care of your interests, and we can settle details at another opportunity. Let us have done with business now, and talk of something else." I led her at once into speaking on other topics. In ten minutes' time she was in better spirits, and I rose to take my leave. "Come here again," she said earnestly. "I will try to be worthier of your kind feeling for me and for my interests if you will only come again." Still clinging to the past--that past which I represented to her, in my way, as Miss Halcombe did in hers! It troubled me sorely to see her looking back, at the beginning of her career, just as I look back at the end of mine. "If I do come again, I hope I shall find you better," I said; "better and happier. God bless you, my dear!" She only answered by putting up her cheek to me to be kissed. Even lawyers have hearts, and mine ached a little as I took leave of her. The whole interview between us had hardly lasted more than half an hour--she had not breathed a word, in my presence, to explain the mystery of her evident distress and dismay at the prospect of her marriage, and yet she had contrived to win me over to her side of the question, I neither knew how nor why. I had entered the room, feeling that Sir Percival Glyde had fair reason to complain of the manner in which she was treating him. I left it, secretly hoping that matters might end in her taking him at his word and claiming her release. A man of my age and experience ought to have known better than to vacillate in this unreasonable manner. I can make no excuse for myself; I can only tell the truth, and say--so it was. The hour for my departure was now drawing near. I sent to Mr. Fairlie to say that I would wait on him to take leave if he liked, but that he must excuse my being rather in a hurry. He sent a message back, written in pencil on a slip of paper: "Kind love and best wishes, dear Gilmore. Hurry of any kind is inexpressibly injurious to me. Pray take care of yourself. Good-bye." Just before I left I saw Miss Halcombe for a moment alone. "Have you said all you wanted to Laura?" she asked. "Yes," I replied. "She is very weak and nervous--I am glad she has you to take care of her." Miss Halcombe's sharp eyes studied my face attentively. "You are altering your opinion about Laura," she said. "You are readier to make allowances for her than you were yesterday." No sensible man ever engages, unprepared, in a fencing match of words with a woman. I only answered-- "Let me know what happens. I will do nothing till I hear from you." She still looked hard in my face. "I wish it was all over, and well over, Mr. Gilmore--and so do you." With those words she left me. Sir Percival most politely insisted on seeing me to the carriage door. "If you are ever in my neighbourhood," he said, "pray don't forget that I am sincerely anxious to improve our acquaintance. The tried and trusted old friend of this family will be always a welcome visitor in any house of mine." A really irresistible man--courteous, considerate, delightfully free from pride--a gentleman, every inch of him. As I drove away to the station I felt as if I could cheerfully do anything to promote the interests of Sir Percival Glyde--anything in the world, except drawing the marriage settlement of his wife. III A week passed, after my return to London, without the receipt of any communication from Miss Halcombe. On the eighth day a letter in her handwriting was placed among the other letters on my table. It announced that Sir Percival Glyde had been definitely accepted, and that the marriage was to take place, as he had originally desired, before the end of the year. In all probability the ceremony would be performed during the last fortnight in December. Miss Fairlie's twenty-first birthday was late in March. She would, therefore, by this arrangement, become Sir Percival's wife about three months before she was of age. I ought not to have been surprised, I ought not to have been sorry, but I was surprised and sorry, nevertheless. Some little disappointment, caused by the unsatisfactory shortness of Miss Halcombe's letter, mingled itself with these feelings, and contributed its share towards upsetting my serenity for the day. In six lines my correspondent announced the proposed marriage--in three more, she told me that Sir Percival had left Cumberland to return to his house in Hampshire, and in two concluding sentences she informed me, first, that Laura was sadly in want of change and cheerful society; secondly, that she had resolved to try the effect of some such change forthwith, by taking her sister away with her on a visit to certain old friends in Yorkshire. There the letter ended, without a word to explain what the circumstances were which had decided Miss Fairlie to accept Sir Percival Glyde in one short week from the time when I had last seen her. At a later period the cause of this sudden determination was fully explained to me. It is not my business to relate it imperfectly, on hearsay evidence. The circumstances came within the personal experience of Miss Halcombe, and when her narrative succeeds mine, she will describe them in every particular exactly as they happened. In the meantime, the plain duty for me to perform--before I, in my turn, lay down my pen and withdraw from the story--is to relate the one remaining event connected with Miss Fairlie's proposed marriage in which I was concerned, namely, the drawing of the settlement. It is impossible to refer intelligibly to this document without first entering into certain particulars in relation to the bride's pecuniary affairs. I will try to make my explanation briefly and plainly, and to keep it free from professional obscurities and technicalities. The matter is of the utmost importance. I warn all readers of these lines that Miss Fairlie's inheritance is a very serious part of Miss Fairlie's story, and that Mr. Gilmore's experience, in this particular, must be their experience also, if they wish to understand the narratives which are yet to come. Miss Fairlie's expectations, then, were of a twofold kind, comprising her possible inheritance of real property, or land, when her uncle died, and her absolute inheritance of personal property, or money, when she came of age. Let us take the land first. In the time of Miss Fairlie's paternal grandfather (whom we will call Mr. Fairlie, the elder) the entailed succession to the Limmeridge estate stood thus-- Mr. Fairlie, the elder, died and left three sons, Philip, Frederick, and Arthur. As eldest son, Philip succeeded to the estate, if he died without leaving a son, the property went to the second brother, Frederick; and if Frederick died also without leaving a son, the property went to the third brother, Arthur. As events turned out, Mr. Philip Fairlie died leaving an only daughter, the Laura of this story, and the estate, in consequence, went, in course of law, to the second brother, Frederick, a single man. The third brother, Arthur, had died many years before the decease of Philip, leaving a son and a daughter. The son, at the age of eighteen, was drowned at Oxford. His death left Laura, the daughter of Mr. Philip Fairlie, presumptive heiress to the estate, with every chance of succeeding to it, in the ordinary course of nature, on her uncle Frederick's death, if the said Frederick died without leaving male issue. Except in the event, then, of Mr. Frederick Fairlie's marrying and leaving an heir (the two very last things in the world that he was likely to do), his niece, Laura, would have the property on his death, possessing, it must be remembered, nothing more than a life-interest in it. If she died single, or died childless, the estate would revert to her cousin, Magdalen, the daughter of Mr. Arthur Fairlie. If she married, with a proper settlement--or, in other words, with the settlement I meant to make for her--the income from the estate (a good three thousand a year) would, during her lifetime, be at her own disposal. If she died before her husband, he would naturally expect to be left in the enjoyment of the income, for HIS lifetime. If she had a son, that son would be the heir, to the exclusion of her cousin Magdalen. Thus, Sir Percival's prospects in marrying Miss Fairlie (so far as his wife's expectations from real property were concerned) promised him these two advantages, on Mr. Frederick Fairlie's death: First, the use of three thousand a year (by his wife's permission, while she lived, and in his own right, on her death, if he survived her); and, secondly, the inheritance of Limmeridge for his son, if he had one. So much for the landed property, and for the disposal of the income from it, on the occasion of Miss Fairlie's marriage. Thus far, no difficulty or difference of opinion on the lady's settlement was at all likely to arise between Sir Percival's lawyer and myself. The personal estate, or, in other words, the money to which Miss Fairlie would become entitled on reaching the age of twenty-one years, is the next point to consider. This part of her inheritance was, in itself, a comfortable little fortune. It was derived under her father's will, and it amounted to the sum of twenty thousand pounds. Besides this, she had a life-interest in ten thousand pounds more, which latter amount was to go, on her decease, to her aunt Eleanor, her father's only sister. It will greatly assist in setting the family affairs before the reader in the clearest possible light, if I stop here for a moment, to explain why the aunt had been kept waiting for her legacy until the death of the niece. Mr. Philip Fairlie had lived on excellent terms with his sister Eleanor, as long as she remained a single woman. But when her marriage took place, somewhat late in life, and when that marriage united her to an Italian gentleman named Fosco, or, rather, to an Italian nobleman--seeing that he rejoiced in the title of Count--Mr. Fairlie disapproved of her conduct so strongly that he ceased to hold any communication with her, and even went the length of striking her name out of his will. The other members of the family all thought this serious manifestation of resentment at his sister's marriage more or less unreasonable. Count Fosco, though not a rich man, was not a penniless adventurer either. He had a small but sufficient income of his own. He had lived many years in England, and he held an excellent position in society. These recommendations, however, availed nothing with Mr. Fairlie. In many of his opinions he was an Englishman of the old school, and he hated a foreigner simply and solely because he was a foreigner. The utmost that he could be prevailed on to do, in after years--mainly at Miss Fairlie's intercession--was to restore his sister's name to its former place in his will, but to keep her waiting for her legacy by giving the income of the money to his daughter for life, and the money itself, if her aunt died before her, to her cousin Magdalen. Considering the relative ages of the two ladies, the aunt's chance, in the ordinary course of nature, of receiving the ten thousand pounds, was thus rendered doubtful in the extreme; and Madame Fosco resented her brother's treatment of her as unjustly as usual in such cases, by refusing to see her niece, and declining to believe that Miss Fairlie's intercession had ever been exerted to restore her name to Mr. Fairlie's will. Such was the history of the ten thousand pounds. Here again no difficulty could arise with Sir Percival's legal adviser. The income would be at the wife's disposal, and the principal would go to her aunt or her cousin on her death. All preliminary explanations being now cleared out of the way, I come at last to the real knot of the case--to the twenty thousand pounds. This sum was absolutely Miss Fairlie's own on her completing her twenty-first year, and the whole future disposition of it depended, in the first instance, on the conditions I could obtain for her in her marriage-settlement. The other clauses contained in that document were of a formal kind, and need not be recited here. But the clause relating to the money is too important to be passed over. A few lines will be sufficient to give the necessary abstract of it. My stipulation in regard to the twenty thousand pounds was simply this: The whole amount was to be settled so as to give the income to the lady for her life--afterwards to Sir Percival for his life--and the principal to the children of the marriage. In default of issue, the principal was to be disposed of as the lady might by her will direct, for which purpose I reserved to her the right of making a will. The effect of these conditions may be thus summed up. If Lady Glyde died without leaving children, her half-sister Miss Halcombe, and any other relatives or friends whom she might be anxious to benefit, would, on her husband's death, divide among them such shares of her money as she desired them to have. If, on the other hand, she died leaving children, then their interest, naturally and necessarily, superseded all other interests whatsoever. This was the clause--and no one who reads it can fail, I think, to agree with me that it meted out equal justice to all parties. We shall see how my proposals were met on the husband's side. At the time when Miss Halcombe's letter reached me I was even more busily occupied than usual. But I contrived to make leisure for the settlement. I had drawn it, and had sent it for approval to Sir Percival's solicitor, in less than a week from the time when Miss Halcombe had informed me of the proposed marriage. After a lapse of two days the document was returned to me, with notes and remarks of the baronet's lawyer. His objections, in general, proved to be of the most trifling and technical kind, until he came to the clause relating to the twenty thousand pounds. Against this there were double lines drawn in red ink, and the following note was appended to them-- "Not admissible. The PRINCIPAL to go to Sir Percival Glyde, in the event of his surviving Lady Glyde, and there being no issue." That is to say, not one farthing of the twenty thousand pounds was to go to Miss Halcombe, or to any other relative or friend of Lady Glyde's. The whole sum, if she left no children, was to slip into the pockets of her husband. The answer I wrote to this audacious proposal was as short and sharp as I could make it. "My dear sir. Miss Fairlie's settlement. I maintain the clause to which you object, exactly as it stands. Yours truly." The rejoinder came back in a quarter of an hour. "My dear sir. Miss Fairlie's settlement. I maintain the red ink to which you object, exactly as it stands. Yours truly." In the detestable slang of the day, we were now both "at a deadlock," and nothing was left for it but to refer to our clients on either side. As matters stood, my client--Miss Fairlie not having yet completed her twenty-first year--Mr. Frederick Fairlie, was her guardian. I wrote by that day's post, and put the case before him exactly as it stood, not only urging every argument I could think of to induce him to maintain the clause as I had drawn it, but stating to him plainly the mercenary motive which was at the bottom of the opposition to my settlement of the twenty thousand pounds. The knowledge of Sir Percival's affairs which I had necessarily gained when the provisions of the deed on HIS side were submitted in due course to my examination, had but too plainly informed me that the debts on his estate were enormous, and that his income, though nominally a large one, was virtually, for a man in his position, next to nothing. The want of ready money was the practical necessity of Sir Percival's existence, and his lawyer's note on the clause in the settlement was nothing but the frankly selfish expression of it. Mr. Fairlie's answer reached me by return of post, and proved to be wandering and irrelevant in the extreme. Turned into plain English, it practically expressed itself to this effect: "Would dear Gilmore be so very obliging as not to worry his friend and client about such a trifle as a remote contingency? Was it likely that a young woman of twenty-one would die before a man of forty five, and die without children? On the other hand, in such a miserable world as this, was it possible to over-estimate the value of peace and quietness? If those two heavenly blessings were offered in exchange for such an earthly trifle as a remote chance of twenty thousand pounds, was it not a fair bargain? Surely, yes. Then why not make it?" I threw the letter away in disgust. Just as it had fluttered to the ground, there was a knock at my door, and Sir Percival's solicitor, Mr. Merriman, was shown in. There are many varieties of sharp practitioners in this world, but I think the hardest of all to deal with are the men who overreach you under the disguise of inveterate good-humour. A fat, well fed, smiling, friendly man of business is of all parties to a bargain the most hopeless to deal with. Mr. Merriman was one of this class. "And how is good Mr. Gilmore?" he began, all in a glow with the warmth of his own amiability. "Glad to see you, sir, in such excellent health. I was passing your door, and I thought I would look in in case you might have something to say to me. Do--now pray do let us settle this little difference of ours by word of mouth, if we can! Have you heard from your client yet?" "Yes. Have you heard from yours?" "My dear, good sir! I wish I had heard from him to any purpose--I wish, with all my heart, the responsibility was off my shoulders; but he is obstinate--or let me rather say, resolute--and he won't take it off. 'Merriman, I leave details to you. Do what you think right for my interests, and consider me as having personally withdrawn from the business until it is all over.' Those were Sir Percival's words a fortnight ago, and all I can get him to do now is to repeat them. I am not a hard man, Mr. Gilmore, as you know. Personally and privately, I do assure you, I should like to sponge out that note of mine at this very moment. But if Sir Percival won't go into the matter, if Sir Percival will blindly leave all his interests in my sole care, what course can I possibly take except the course of asserting them? My hands are bound--don't you see, my dear sir?--my hands are bound." "You maintain your note on the clause, then, to the letter?" I said. "Yes--deuce take it! I have no other alternative." He walked to the fireplace and warmed himself, humming the fag end of a tune in a rich convivial bass voice. "What does your side say?" he went on; "now pray tell me--what does your side say?" I was ashamed to tell him. I attempted to gain time--nay, I did worse. My legal instincts got the better of me, and I even tried to bargain. "Twenty thousand pounds is rather a large sum to be given up by the lady's friends at two days' notice," I said. "Very true," replied Mr. Merriman, looking down thoughtfully at his boots. "Properly put, sir--most properly put!" "A compromise, recognising the interests of the lady's family as well as the interests of the husband, might not perhaps have frightened my client quite so much," I went on. "Come, come! this contingency resolves itself into a matter of bargaining after all. What is the least you will take?" "The least we will take," said Mr. Merriman, "is nineteen- thousand-nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine-pounds-nineteen-shillings- and-elevenpence-three-farthings. Ha! ha! ha! Excuse me, Mr. Gilmore. I must have my little joke." "Little enough," I remarked. "The joke is just worth the odd farthing it was made for." Mr. Merriman was delighted. He laughed over my retort till the room rang again. I was not half so good-humoured on my side; I came back to business, and closed the interview. "This is Friday," I said. "Give us till Tuesday next for our final answer." "By all means," replied Mr. Merriman. "Longer, my dear sir, if you like." He took up his hat to go, and then addressed me again. "By the way," he said, "your clients in Cumberland have not heard anything more of the woman who wrote the anonymous letter, have they?" "Nothing more," I answered. "Have you found no trace of her?" "Not yet," said my legal friend. "But we don't despair. Sir Percival has his suspicions that Somebody is keeping her in hiding, and we are having that Somebody watched." "You mean the old woman who was with her in Cumberland," I said. "Quite another party, sir," answered Mr. Merriman. "We don't happen to have laid hands on the old woman yet. Our Somebody is a man. We have got him close under our eye here in London, and we strongly suspect he had something to do with helping her in the first instance to escape from the Asylum. Sir Percival wanted to question him at once, but I said, 'No. Questioning him will only put him on his guard--watch him, and wait.' We shall see what happens. A dangerous woman to be at large, Mr. Gilmore; nobody knows what she may do next. I wish you good-morning, sir. On Tuesday next I shall hope for the pleasure of hearing from you." He smiled amiably and went out. My mind had been rather absent during the latter part of the conversation with my legal friend. I was so anxious about the matter of the settlement that I had little attention to give to any other subject, and the moment I was left alone again I began to think over what my next proceeding ought to be. In the case of any other client I should have acted on my instructions, however personally distasteful to me, and have given up the point about the twenty thousand pounds on the spot. But I could not act with this business-like indifference towards Miss Fairlie. I had an honest feeling of affection and admiration for her--I remembered gratefully that her father had been the kindest patron and friend to me that ever man had--I had felt towards her while I was drawing the settlement as I might have felt, if I had not been an old bachelor, towards a daughter of my own, and I was determined to spare no personal sacrifice in her service and where her interests were concerned. Writing a second time to Mr. Fairlie was not to be thought of--it would only be giving him a second opportunity of slipping through my fingers. Seeing him and personally remonstrating with him might possibly be of more use. The next day was Saturday. I determined to take a return ticket and jolt my old bones down to Cumberland, on the chance of persuading him to adopt the just, the independent, and the honourable course. It was a poor chance enough, no doubt, but when I had tried it my conscience would be at ease. I should then have done all that a man in my position could do to serve the interests of my old friend's only child. The weather on Saturday was beautiful, a west wind and a bright sun. Having felt latterly a return of that fulness and oppression of the head, against which my doctor warned me so seriously more than two years since, I resolved to take the opportunity of getting a little extra exercise by sending my bag on before me and walking to the terminus in Euston Square. As I came out into Holborn a gentleman walking by rapidly stopped and spoke to me. It was Mr. Walter Hartright. If he had not been the first to greet me I should certainly have passed him. He was so changed that I hardly knew him again. His face looked pale and haggard--his manner was hurried and uncertain--and his dress, which I remembered as neat and gentlemanlike when I saw him at Limmeridge, was so slovenly now that I should really have been ashamed of the appearance of it on one of my own clerks. "Have you been long back from Cumberland?" he asked. "I heard from Miss Halcombe lately. I am aware that Sir Percival Glyde's explanation has been considered satisfactory. Will the marriage take place soon? Do you happen to know Mr. Gilmore?" He spoke so fast, and crowded his questions together so strangely and confusedly, that I could hardly follow him. However accidentally intimate he might have been with the family at Limmeridge, I could not see that he had any right to expect information on their private affairs, and I determined to drop him, as easily as might be, on the subject of Miss Fairlie's marriage. "Time will show, Mr. Hartright," I said--"time will show. I dare say if we look out for the marriage in the papers we shall not be far wrong. Excuse my noticing it, but I am sorry to see you not looking so well as you were when we last met." A momentary nervous contraction quivered about his lips and eyes, and made me half reproach myself for having answered him in such a significantly guarded manner. "I had no right to ask about her marriage," he said bitterly. "I must wait to see it in the newspapers like other people. Yes,"--he went on before I could make any apologies--"I have not been well lately. I am going to another country to try a change of scene and occupation. Miss Halcombe has kindly assisted me with her influence, and my testimonials have been found satisfactory. It is a long distance off, but I don't care where I go, what the climate is, or how long I am away." He looked about him while he said this at the throng of strangers passing us by on either side, in a strange, suspicious manner, as if he thought that some of them might be watching us. "I wish you well through it, and safe back again," I said, and then added, so as not to keep him altogether at arm's length on the subject of the Fairlies, "I am going down to Limmeridge to-day on business. Miss Halcombe and Miss Fairlie are away just now on a visit to some friends in Yorkshire." His eyes brightened, and he seemed about to say something in answer, but the same momentary nervous spasm crossed his face again. He took my hand, pressed it hard, and disappeared among the crowd without saying another word. Though he was little more than a stranger to me, I waited for a moment, looking after him almost with a feeling of regret. I had gained in my profession sufficient experience of young men to know what the outward signs and tokens were of their beginning to go wrong, and when I resumed my walk to the railway I am sorry to say I felt more than doubtful about Mr. Hartright's future. IV Leaving by an early train, I got to Limmeridge in time for dinner. The house was oppressively empty and dull. I had expected that good Mrs. Vesey would have been company for me in the absence of the young ladies, but she was confined to her room by a cold. The servants were so surprised at seeing me that they hurried and bustled absurdly, and made all sorts of annoying mistakes. Even the butler, who was old enough to have known better, brought me a bottle of port that was chilled. The reports of Mr. Fairlie's health were just as usual, and when I sent up a message to announce my arrival, I was told that he would be delighted to see me the next morning but that the sudden news of my appearance had prostrated him with palpitations for the rest of the evening. The wind howled dismally all night, and strange cracking and groaning noises sounded here, there, and everywhere in the empty house. I slept as wretchedly as possible, and got up in a mighty bad humour to breakfast by myself the next morning. At ten o'clock I was conducted to Mr. Fairlie's apartments. He was in his usual room, his usual chair, and his usual aggravating state of mind and body. When I went in, his valet was standing before him, holding up for inspection a heavy volume of etchings, as long and as broad as my office writing-desk. The miserable foreigner grinned in the most abject manner, and looked ready to drop with fatigue, while his master composedly turned over the etchings, and brought their hidden beauties to light with the help of a magnifying glass. "You very best of good old friends," said Mr. Fairlie, leaning back lazily before he could look at me, "are you QUITE well? How nice of you to come here and see me in my solitude. Dear Gilmore!" I had expected that the valet would be dismissed when I appeared, but nothing of the sort happened. There he stood, in front of his master's chair, trembling under the weight of the etchings, and there Mr. Fairlie sat, serenely twirling the magnifying glass between his white fingers and thumbs. "I have come to speak to you on a very important matter," I said, "and you will therefore excuse me, if I suggest that we had better be alone." The unfortunate valet looked at me gratefully. Mr. Fairlie faintly repeated my last three words, "better be alone," with every appearance of the utmost possible astonishment. I was in no humour for trifling, and I resolved to make him understand what I meant. "Oblige me by giving that man permission to withdraw," I said, pointing to the valet. Mr. Fairlie arched his eyebrows and pursed up his lips in sarcastic surprise. "Man?" he repeated. "You provoking old Gilmore, what can you possibly mean by calling him a man? He's nothing of the sort. He might have been a man half an hour ago, before I wanted my etchings, and he may be a man half an hour hence, when I don't want them any longer. At present he is simply a portfolio stand. Why object, Gilmore, to a portfolio stand?" "I DO object. For the third time, Mr. Fairlie, I beg that we may be alone." My tone and manner left him no alternative but to comply with my request. He looked at the servant, and pointed peevishly to a chair at his side. "Put down the etchings and go away," he said. "Don't upset me by losing my place. Have you, or have you not, lost my place? Are you sure you have not? And have you put my hand-bell quite within my reach? Yes? Then why the devil don't you go?" The valet went out. Mr. Fairlie twisted himself round in his chair, polished the magnifying glass with his delicate cambric handkerchief, and indulged himself with a sidelong inspection of the open volume of etchings. It was not easy to keep my temper under these circumstances, but I did keep it. "I have come here at great personal inconvenience," I said, "to serve the interests of your niece and your family, and I think I have established some slight claim to be favoured with your attention in return." "Don't bully me!" exclaimed Mr. Fairlie, falling back helplessly in the chair, and closing his eyes. "Please don't bully me. I'm not strong enough." I was determined not to let him provoke me, for Laura Fairlie's sake. "My object," I went on, "is to entreat you to reconsider your letter, and not to force me to abandon the just rights of your niece, and of all who belong to her. Let me state the case to you once more, and for the last time." Mr. Fairlie shook his head and sighed piteously. "This is heartless of you, Gilmore--very heartless," he said. "Never mind, go on." I put all the points to him carefully--I set the matter before him in every conceivable light. He lay back in the chair the whole time I was speaking with his eyes closed. When I had done he opened them indolently, took his silver smelling-bottle from the table, and sniffed at it with an air of gentle relish. "Good Gilmore!" he said between the sniffs, "how very nice this is of you! How you reconcile one to human nature!" "Give me a plain answer to a plain question, Mr. Fairlie. I tell you again, Sir Percival Glyde has no shadow of a claim to expect more than the income of the money. The money itself if your niece has no children, ought to be under her control, and to return to her family. If you stand firm, Sir Percival must give way--he must give way, I tell you, or he exposes himself to the base imputation of marrying Miss Fairlie entirely from mercenary motives." Mr. Fairlie shook the silver smelling-bottle at me playfully. "You dear old Gilmore, how you do hate rank and family, don't you? How you detest Glyde because he happens to be a baronet. What a Radical you are--oh, dear me, what a Radical you are!" A Radical!!! I could put up with a good deal of provocation, but, after holding the soundest Conservative principles all my life, I could NOT put up with being called a Radical. My blood boiled at it--I started out of my chair--I was speechless with Indignation. "Don't shake the room!" cried Mr. Fairlie--"for Heaven's sake don't shake the room! Worthiest of all possible Gilmores, I meant no offence. My own views are so extremely liberal that I think I am a Radical myself. Yes. We are a pair of Radicals. Please don't be angry. I can't quarrel--I haven't stamina enough. Shall we drop the subject? Yes. Come and look at these sweet etchings. Do let me teach you to understand the heavenly pearliness of these lines. Do now, there's a good Gilmore!" While he was maundering on in this way I was, fortunately for my own self-respect, returning to my senses. When I spoke again I was composed enough to treat his impertinence with the silent contempt that it deserved. "You are entirely wrong, sir," I said, "in supposing that I speak from any prejudice against Sir Percival Glyde. I may regret that he has so unreservedly resigned himself in this matter to his lawyer's direction as to make any appeal to himself impossible, but I am not prejudiced against him. What I have said would equally apply to any other man in his situation, high or low. The principle I maintain is a recognised principle. If you were to apply at the nearest town here, to the first respectable solicitor you could find, he would tell you as a stranger what I tell you as a friend. He would inform you that it is against all rule to abandon the lady's money entirely to the man she marries. He would decline, on grounds of common legal caution, to give the husband, under any circumstances whatever, an interest of twenty thousand pounds in his wife's death." "Would he really, Gilmore?" said Mr. Fairlie. "If he said anything half so horrid, I do assure you I should tinkle my bell for Louis, and have him sent out of the house immediately." "You shall not irritate me, Mr. Fairlie--for your niece's sake and for her father's sake, you shall not irritate me. You shall take the whole responsibility of this discreditable settlement on your own shoulders before I leave the room." "Don't!--now please don't!" said Mr. Fairlie. "Think how precious your time is, Gilmore, and don't throw it away. I would dispute with you if I could, but I can't--I haven't stamina enough. You want to upset me, to upset yourself, to upset Glyde, and to upset Laura; and--oh, dear me!--all for the sake of the very last thing in the world that is likely to happen. No, dear friend, in the interests of peace and quietness, positively No!" "I am to understand, then, that you hold by the determination expressed in your letter?" "Yes, please. So glad we understand each other at last. Sit down again--do!" I walked at once to the door, and Mr. Fairlie resignedly "tinkled" his hand-bell. Before I left the room I turned round and addressed him for the last time. "Whatever happens in the future, sir," I said, "remember that my plain duty of warning you has been performed. As the faithful friend and servant of your family, I tell you, at parting, that no daughter of mine should be married to any man alive under such a settlement as you are forcing me to make for Miss Fairlie." The door opened behind me, and the valet stood waiting on the threshold. "Louis," said Mr. Fairlie, "show Mr. Gilmore out, and then come back and hold up my etchings for me again. Make them give you a good lunch downstairs. Do, Gilmore, make my idle beasts of servants give you a good lunch!" I was too much disgusted to reply--I turned on my heel, and left him in silence. There was an up train at two o'clock in the afternoon, and by that train I returned to London. On the Tuesday I sent in the altered settlement, which practically disinherited the very persons whom Miss Fairlie's own lips had informed me she was most anxious to benefit. I had no choice. Another lawyer would have drawn up the deed if I had refused to undertake it. My task is done. My personal share in the events of the family story extends no farther than the point which I have just reached. Other pens than mine will describe the strange circumstances which are now shortly to follow. Seriously and sorrowfully I close this brief record. Seriously and sorrowfully I repeat here the parting words that I spoke at Limmeridge House:--No daughter of mine should have been married to any man alive under such a settlement as I was compelled to make for Laura Fairlie. The End of Mr. Gilmore's Narrative. THE STORY CONTINUED BY MARIAN HALCOMBE (in Extracts from her Diary) LIMMERIDGE HOUSE, Nov. 8.[1] [1] The passages omitted, here and elsewhere, in Miss Halcombe's Diary are only those which bear no reference to Miss Fairlie or to any of the persons with whom she is associated in these pages. This morning Mr. Gilmore left us. His interview with Laura had evidently grieved and surprised him more than he liked to confess. I felt afraid, from his look and manner when we parted, that she might have inadvertently betrayed to him the real secret of her depression and my anxiety. This doubt grew on me so, after he had gone, that I declined riding out with Sir Percival, and went up to Laura's room instead. I have been sadly distrustful of myself, in this difficult and lamentable matter, ever since I found out my own ignorance of the strength of Laura's unhappy attachment. I ought to have known that the delicacy and forbearance and sense of honour which drew me to poor Hartright, and made me so sincerely admire and respect him, were just the qualities to appeal most irresistibly to Laura's natural sensitiveness and natural generosity of nature. And yet, until she opened her heart to me of her own accord, I had no suspicion that this new feeling had taken root so deeply. I once thought time and care might remove it. I now fear that it will remain with her and alter her for life. The discovery that I have committed such an error in judgment as this makes me hesitate about everything else. I hesitate about Sir Percival, in the face of the plainest proofs. I hesitate even in speaking to Laura. On this very morning I doubted, with my hand on the door, whether I should ask her the questions I had come to put, or not. When I went into her room I found her walking up and down in great impatience. She looked flushed and excited, and she came forward at once, and spoke to me before I could open my lips. "I wanted you," she said. "Come and sit down on the sofa with me. Marian! I can bear this no longer--I must and will end it." There was too much colour in her cheeks, too much energy in her manner, too much firmness in her voice. The little book of Hartright's drawings--the fatal book that she will dream over whenever she is alone--was in one of her hands. I began by gently and firmly taking it from her, and putting it out of sight on a side-table. "Tell me quietly, my darling, what you wish to do," I said. "Has Mr. Gilmore been advising you?" She shook her head. "No, not in what I am thinking of now. He was very kind and good to me, Marian, and I am ashamed to say I distressed him by crying. I am miserably helpless--I can't control myself. For my own sake, and for all our sakes, I must have courage enough to end it." "Do you mean courage enough to claim your release?" I asked. "No," she said simply. "Courage, dear, to tell the truth." She put her arms round my neck, and rested her head quietly on my bosom. On the opposite wall hung the miniature portrait of her father. I bent over her, and saw that she was looking at it while her head lay on my breast. "I can never claim my release from my engagement," she went on. "Whatever way it ends it must end wretchedly for me. All I can do, Marian, is not to add the remembrance that I have broken my promise and forgotten my father's dying words, to make that wretchedness worse." "What is it you propose, then?" I asked. "To tell Sir Percival Glyde the truth with my own lips," she answered, "and to let him release me, if he will, not because I ask him, but because he knows all." "What do you mean, Laura, by 'all'? Sir Percival will know enough (he has told me so himself) if he knows that the engagement is opposed to your own wishes." "Can I tell him that, when the engagement was made for me by my father, with my own consent? I should have kept my promise, not happily, I am afraid, but still contentedly--" she stopped, turned her face to me, and laid her cheek close against mine--"I should have kept my engagement, Marian, if another love had not grown up in my heart, which was not there when I first promised to be Sir Percival's wife." "Laura! you will never lower yourself by making a confession to him?" "I shall lower myself, indeed, if I gain my release by hiding from him what he has a right to know." "He has not the shadow of a right to know it!" "Wrong, Marian, wrong! I ought to deceive no one--least of all the man to whom my father gave me, and to whom I gave myself." She put her lips to mine, and kissed me. "My own love," she said softly, "you are so much too fond of me, and so much too proud of me, that you forget, in my case, what you would remember in your own. Better that Sir Percival should doubt my motives, and misjudge my conduct if he will, than that I should be first false to him in thought, and then mean enough to serve my own interests by hiding the falsehood." I held her away from me in astonishment. For the first time in our lives we had changed places--the resolution was all on her side, the hesitation all on mine. I looked into the pale, quiet, resigned young face--I saw the pure, innocent heart, in the loving eyes that looked back at me--and the poor worldly cautions and objections that rose to my lips dwindled and died away in their own emptiness. I hung my head in silence. In her place the despicably small pride which makes so many women deceitful would have been my pride, and would have made me deceitful too. "Don't be angry with me, Marian," she said, mistaking my silence. I only answered by drawing her close to me again. I was afraid of crying if I spoke. My tears do not flow so easily as they ought--they come almost like men's tears, with sobs that seem to tear me in pieces, and that frighten every one about me. "I have thought of this, love, for many days," she went on, twining and twisting my hair with that childish restlessness in her fingers, which poor Mrs. Vesey still tries so patiently and so vainly to cure her of--"I have thought of it very seriously, and I can be sure of my courage when my own conscience tells me I am right. Let me speak to him to-morrow--in your presence, Marian. I will say nothing that is wrong, nothing that you or I need be ashamed of--but, oh, it will ease my heart so to end this miserable concealment! Only let me know and feel that I have no deception to answer for on my side, and then, when he has heard what I have to say, let him act towards me as he will." She sighed, and put her head back in its old position on my bosom. Sad misgivings about what the end would be weighed upon my mind, but still distrusting myself, I told her that I would do as she wished. She thanked me, and we passed gradually into talking of other things. At dinner she joined us again, and was more easy and more herself with Sir Percival than I have seen her yet. In the evening she went to the piano, choosing new music of the dexterous, tuneless, florid kind. The lovely old melodies of Mozart, which poor Hartright was so fond of, she has never played since he left. The book is no longer in the music-stand. She took the volume away herself, so that nobody might find it out and ask her to play from it. I had no opportunity of discovering whether her purpose of the morning had changed or not, until she wished Sir Percival good-night--and then her own words informed me that it was unaltered. She said, very quietly, that she wished to speak to him after breakfast, and that he would find her in her sitting-room with me. He changed colour at those words, and I felt his hand trembling a little when it came to my turn to take it. The event of the next morning would decide his future life, and he evidently knew it. I went in, as usual, through the door between our two bedrooms, to bid Laura good-night before she went to sleep. In stooping over her to kiss her I saw the little book of Hartright's drawings half hidden under her pillow, just in the place where she used to hide her favourite toys when she was a child. I could not find it in my heart to say anything, but I pointed to the book and shook my head. She reached both hands up to my cheeks, and drew my face down to hers till our lips met. "Leave it there to-night," she whispered; "to-morrow may be cruel, and may make me say good-bye to it for ever." 9th.--The first event of the morning was not of a kind to raise my spirits--a letter arrived for me from poor Walter Hartright. It is the answer to mine describing the manner in which Sir Percival cleared himself of the suspicions raised by Anne Catherick's letter. He writes shortly and bitterly about Sir Percival's explanations, only saying that he has no right to offer an opinion on the conduct of those who are above him. This is sad, but his occasional references to himself grieve me still more. He says that the effort to return to his old habits and pursuits grows harder instead of easier to him every day and he implores me, if I have any interest, to exert it to get him employment that will necessitate his absence from England, and take him among new scenes and new people. I have been made all the readier to comply with this request by a passage at the end of his letter, which has almost alarmed me. After mentioning that he has neither seen nor heard anything of Anne Catherick, he suddenly breaks off, and hints in the most abrupt, mysterious manner, that he has been perpetually watched and followed by strange men ever since he returned to London. He acknowledges that he cannot prove this extraordinary suspicion by fixing on any particular persons, but he declares that the suspicion itself is present to him night and day. This has frightened me, because it looks as if his one fixed idea about Laura was becoming too much for his mind. I will write immediately to some of my mother's influential old friends in London, and press his claims on their notice. Change of scene and change of occupation may really be the salvation of him at this crisis in his life. Greatly to my relief, Sir Percival sent an apology for not joining us at breakfast. He had taken an early cup of coffee in his own room, and he was still engaged there in writing letters. At eleven o'clock, if that hour was convenient, he would do himself the honour of waiting on Miss Fairlie and Miss Halcombe. My eyes were on Laura's face while the message was being delivered. I had found her unaccountably quiet and composed on going into her room in the morning, and so she remained all through breakfast. Even when we were sitting together on the sofa in her room, waiting for Sir Percival, she still preserved her self-control. "Don't be afraid of me, Marian," was all she said; "I may forget myself with an old friend like Mr. Gilmore, or with a dear sister like you, but I will not forget myself with Sir Percival Glyde." I looked at her, and listened to her in silent surprise. Through all the years of our close intimacy this passive force in her character had been hidden from me--hidden even from herself, till love found it, and suffering called it forth. As the clock on the mantelpiece struck eleven Sir Percival knocked at the door and came in. There was suppressed anxiety and agitation in every line of his face. The dry, sharp cough, which teases him at most times, seemed to be troubling him more incessantly than ever. He sat down opposite to us at the table, and Laura remained by me. I looked attentively at them both, and he was the palest of the two. He said a few unimportant words, with a visible effort to preserve his customary ease of manner. But his voice was not to be steadied, and the restless uneasiness in his eyes was not to be concealed. He must have felt this himself, for he stopped in the middle of a sentence, and gave up even the attempt to hide his embarrassment any longer. There was just one moment of dead silence before Laura addressed him. "I wish to speak to you, Sir Percival," she said, "on a subject that is very important to us both. My sister is here, because her presence helps me and gives me confidence. She has not suggested one word of what I am going to say--I speak from my own thoughts, not from hers. I am sure you will be kind enough to understand that before I go any farther?" Sir Percival bowed. She had proceeded thus far, with perfect outward tranquillity and perfect propriety of manner. She looked at him, and he looked at her. They seemed, at the outset, at least, resolved to understand one another plainly. "I have heard from Marian," she went on, "that I have only to claim my release from our engagement to obtain that release from you. It was forbearing and generous on your part, Sir Percival, to send me such a message. It is only doing you justice to say that I am grateful for the offer, and I hope and believe that it is only doing myself justice to tell you that I decline to accept it." His attentive face relaxed a little. But I saw one of his feet, softly, quietly, incessantly beating on the carpet under the table, and I felt that he was secretly as anxious as ever. "I have not forgotten," she said, "that you asked my father's permission before you honoured me with a proposal of marriage. Perhaps you have not forgotten either what I said when I consented to our engagement? I ventured to tell you that my father's influence and advice had mainly decided me to give you my promise. I was guided by my father, because I had always found him the truest of all advisers, the best and fondest of all protectors and friends. I have lost him now--I have only his memory to love, but my faith in that dear dead friend has never been shaken. I believe at this moment, as truly as I ever believed, that he knew what was best, and that his hopes and wishes ought to be my hopes and wishes too." Her voice trembled for the first time. Her restless fingers stole their way into my lap, and held fast by one of my hands. There was another moment of silence, and then Sir Percival spoke. "May I ask," he said, "if I have ever proved myself unworthy of the trust which it has been hitherto my greatest honour and greatest happiness to possess?" "I have found nothing in your conduct to blame," she answered. "You have always treated me with the same delicacy and the same forbearance. You have deserved my trust, and, what is of far more importance in my estimation, you have deserved my father's trust, out of which mine grew. You have given me no excuse, even if I had wanted to find one, for asking to be released from my pledge. What I have said so far has been spoken with the wish to acknowledge my whole obligation to you. My regard for that obligation, my regard for my father's memory, and my regard for my own promise, all forbid me to set the example, on my side, of withdrawing from our present position. The breaking of our engagement must be entirely your wish and your act, Sir Percival--not mine." The uneasy beating of his foot suddenly stopped, and he leaned forward eagerly across the table. "My act?" he said. "What reason can there be on my side for withdrawing?" I heard her breath quickening--I felt her hand growing cold. In spite of what she had said to me when we were alone, I began to be afraid of her. I was wrong. "A reason that it is very hard to tell you," she answered. "There is a change in me, Sir Percival--a change which is serious enough to justify you, to yourself and to me, in breaking off our engagement." His face turned so pale again that even his lips lost their colour. He raised the arm which lay on the table, turned a little away in his chair, and supported his head on his hand, so that his profile only was presented to us. "What change?" he asked. The tone in which he put the question jarred on me--there was something painfully suppressed in it. She sighed heavily, and leaned towards me a little, so as to rest her shoulder against mine. I felt her trembling, and tried to spare her by speaking myself. She stopped me by a warning pressure of her hand, and then addressed Sir Percival one more, but this time without looking at him. "I have heard," she said, "and I believe it, that the fondest and truest of all affections is the affection which a woman ought to bear to her husband. When our engagement began that affection was mine to give, if I could, and yours to win, if you could. Will you pardon me, and spare me, Sir Percival, if I acknowledge that it is not so any longer?" A few tears gathered in her eyes, and dropped over her cheeks slowly as she paused and waited for his answer. He did not utter a word. At the beginning of her reply he had moved the hand on which his head rested, so that it hid his face. I saw nothing but the upper part of his figure at the table. Not a muscle of him moved. The fingers of the hand which supported his head were dented deep in his hair. They might have expressed hidden anger or hidden grief--it was hard to say which--there was no significant trembling in them. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, to tell the secret of his thoughts at that moment--the moment which was the crisis of his life and the crisis of hers. I was determined to make him declare himself, for Laura's sake. "Sir Percival!" I interposed sharply, "have you nothing to say when my sister has said so much? More, in my opinion," I added, my unlucky temper getting the better of me, "than any man alive, in your position, has a right to hear from her." That last rash sentence opened a way for him by which to escape me if he chose, and he instantly took advantage of it. "Pardon me, Miss Halcombe," he said, still keeping his hand over his face, "pardon me if I remind you that I have claimed no such right." The few plain words which would have brought him back to the point from which he had wandered were just on my lips, when Laura checked me by speaking again. "I hope I have not made my painful acknowledgment in vain," she continued. "I hope it has secured me your entire confidence in what I have still to say?" "Pray be assured of it." He made that brief reply warmly, dropping his hand on the table while he spoke, and turning towards us again. Whatever outward change had passed over him was gone now. His face was eager and expectant--it expressed nothing but the most intense anxiety to hear her next words. "I wish you to understand that I have not spoken from any selfish motive," she said. "If you leave me, Sir Percival, after what you have just heard, you do not leave me to marry another man, you only allow me to remain a single woman for the rest of my life. My fault towards you has begun and ended in my own thoughts. It can never go any farther. No word has passed--" She hesitated, in doubt about the expression she should use next, hesitated in a momentary confusion which it was very sad and very painful to see. "No word has passed," she patiently and resolutely resumed, "between myself and the person to whom I am now referring for the first and last time in your presence of my feelings towards him, or of his feelings towards me--no word ever can pass--neither he nor I are likely, in this world, to meet again. I earnestly beg you to spare me from saying any more, and to believe me, on my word, in what I have just told you. It is the truth. Sir Percival, the truth which I think my promised husband has a claim to hear, at any sacrifice of my own feelings. I trust to his generosity to pardon me, and to his honour to keep my secret." "Both those trusts are sacred to me," he said, "and both shall be sacredly kept." After answering in those terms he paused, and looked at her as if he was waiting to hear more. "I have said all I wish to say," she added quietly--"I have said more than enough to justify you in withdrawing from your engagement." "You have said more than enough," he answered, "to make it the dearest object of my life to KEEP the engagement." With those words he rose from his chair, and advanced a few steps towards the place where she was sitting. She started violently, and a faint cry of surprise escaped her. Every word she had spoken had innocently betrayed her purity and truth to a man who thoroughly understood the priceless value of a pure and true woman. Her own noble conduct had been the hidden enemy, throughout, of all the hopes she had trusted to it. I had dreaded this from the first. I would have prevented it, if she had allowed me the smallest chance of doing so. I even waited and watched now, when the harm was done, for a word from Sir Percival that would give me the opportunity of putting him in the wrong. "You have left it to ME, Miss Fairlie, to resign you," he continued. "I am not heartless enough to resign a woman who has just shown herself to be the noblest of her sex." He spoke with such warmth and feeling, with such passionate enthusiasm, and yet with such perfect delicacy, that she raised her head, flushed up a little, and looked at him with sudden animation and spirit. "No!" she said firmly. "The most wretched of her sex, if she must give herself in marriage when she cannot give her love." "May she not give it in the future," he asked, "if the one object of her husband's life is to deserve it?" "Never!" she answered. "If you still persist in maintaining our engagement, I may be your true and faithful wife, Sir Percival--your loving wife, if I know my own heart, never!" She looked so irresistibly beautiful as she said those brave words that no man alive could have steeled his heart against her. I tried hard to feel that Sir Percival was to blame, and to say so, but my womanhood would pity him, in spite of myself. "I gratefully accept your faith and truth," he said. "The least that you can offer is more to me than the utmost that I could hope for from any other woman in the world." Her left hand still held mine, but her right hand hung listlessly at her side. He raised it gently to his lips--touched it with them, rather than kissed it--bowed to me--and then, with perfect delicacy and discretion, silently quitted the room. She neither moved nor said a word when he was gone--she sat by me, cold and still, with her eyes fixed on the ground. I saw it was hopeless and useless to speak, and I only put my arm round her, and held her to me in silence. We remained together so for what seemed a long and weary time--so long and so weary, that I grew uneasy and spoke to her softly, in the hope of producing a change. The sound of my voice seemed to startle her into consciousness. She suddenly drew herself away from me and rose to her feet. "I must submit, Marian, as well as I can," she said. "My new life has its hard duties, and one of them begins to-day." As she spoke she went to a side-table near the window, on which her sketching materials were placed, gathered them together carefully, and put them in a drawer of her cabinet. She locked the drawer and brought the key to me. "I must part from everything that reminds me of him," she said. "Keep the key wherever you please--I shall never want it again." Before I could say a word she had turned away to her book-case, and had taken from it the album that contained Walter Hartright's drawings. She hesitated for a moment, holding the little volume fondly in her hands--then lifted it to her lips and kissed it. "Oh, Laura! Laura!" I said, not angrily, not reprovingly--with nothing but sorrow in my voice, and nothing but sorrow in my heart. "It is the last time, Marian," she pleaded. "I am bidding it good-bye for ever." She laid the book on the table and drew out the comb that fastened her hair. It fell, in its matchless beauty, over her back and shoulders, and dropped round her, far below her waist. She separated one long, thin lock from the rest, cut it off, and pinned it carefully, in the form of a circle, on the first blank page of the album. The moment it was fastened she closed the volume hurriedly, and placed it in my hands. "You write to him and he writes to you," she said. "While I am alive, if he asks after me always tell him I am well, and never say I am unhappy. Don't distress him, Marian, for my sake, don't distress him. If I die first, promise you will give him this little book of his drawings, with my hair in it. There can be no harm, when I am gone, in telling him that I put it there with my own hands. And say--oh, Marian, say for me, then, what I can never say for myself--say I loved him!" She flung her arms round my neck, and whispered the last words in my ear with a passionate delight in uttering them which it almost broke my heart to hear. All the long restraint she had imposed on herself gave way in that first last outburst of tenderness. She broke from me with hysterical vehemence, and threw herself on the sofa in a paroxysm of sobs and tears that shook her from head to foot. I tried vainly to soothe her and reason with her--she was past being soothed, and past being reasoned with. It was the sad, sudden end for us two of this memorable day. When the fit had worn itself out she was too exhausted to speak. She slumbered towards the afternoon, and I put away the book of drawings so that she might not see it when she woke. My face was calm, whatever my heart might be, when she opened her eyes again and looked at me. We said no more to each other about the distressing interview of the morning. Sir Percival's name was not mentioned. Walter Hartright was not alluded to again by either of us for the remainder of the day. 10th.--Finding that she was composed and like herself this morning, I returned to the painful subject of yesterday, for the sole purpose of imploring her to let me speak to Sir Percival and Mr. Fairlie, more plainly and strongly than she could speak to either of them herself, about this lamentable marriage. She interposed, gently but firmly, in the middle of my remonstrances. "I left yesterday to decide," she said; "and yesterday HAS decided. It is too late to go back." Sir Percival spoke to me this afternoon about what had passed in Laura's room. He assured me that the unparalleled trust she had placed in him had awakened such an answering conviction of her innocence and integrity in his mind, that he was guiltless of having felt even a moment's unworthy jealousy, either at the time when he was in her presence, or afterwards when he had withdrawn from it. Deeply as he lamented the unfortunate attachment which had hindered the progress he might otherwise have made in her esteem and regard, he firmly believed that it had remained unacknowledged in the past, and that it would remain, under all changes of circumstance which it was possible to contemplate, unacknowledged in the future. This was his absolute conviction; and the strongest proof he could give of it was the assurance, which he now offered, that he felt no curiosity to know whether the attachment was of recent date or not, or who had been the object of it. His implicit confidence in Miss Fairlie made him satisfied with what she had thought fit to say to him, and he was honestly innocent of the slightest feeling of anxiety to hear more. He waited after saying those words and looked at me. I was so conscious of my unreasonable prejudice against him--so conscious of an unworthy suspicion that he might be speculating on my impulsively answering the very questions which he had just described himself as resolved not to ask--that I evaded all reference to this part of the subject with something like a feeling of confusion on my own part. At the same time I was resolved not to lose even the smallest opportunity of trying to plead Laura's cause, and I told him boldly that I regretted his generosity had not carried him one step farther, and induced him to withdraw from the engagement altogether. Here, again, he disarmed me by not attempting to defend himself. He would merely beg me to remember the difference there was between his allowing Miss Fairlie to give him up, which was a matter of submission only, and his forcing himself to give up Miss Fairlie, which was, in other words, asking him to be the suicide of his own hopes. Her conduct of the day before had so strengthened the unchangeable love and admiration of two long years, that all active contention against those feelings, on his part, was henceforth entirely out of his power. I must think him weak, selfish, unfeeling towards the very woman whom he idolised, and he must bow to my opinion as resignedly as he could--only putting it to me, at the same time, whether her future as a single woman, pining under an unhappily placed attachment which she could never acknowledge, could be said to promise her a much brighter prospect than her future as the wife of a man who worshipped the very ground she walked on? In the last case there was hope from time, however slight it might be--in the first case, on her own showing, there was no hope at all. I answered him--more because my tongue is a woman's, and must answer, than because I had anything convincing to say. It was only too plain that the course Laura had adopted the day before had offered him the advantage if he chose to take it--and that he HAD chosen to take it. I felt this at the time, and I feel it just as strongly now, while I write these lines, in my own room. The one hope left is that his motives really spring, as he says they do, from the irresistible strength of his attachment to Laura. Before I close my diary for to-night I must record that I wrote to-day, in poor Hartright's interest, to two of my mother's old friends in London--both men of influence and position. If they can do anything for him, I am quite sure they will. Except Laura, I never was more anxious about any one than I am now about Walter. All that has happened since he left us has only increased my strong regard and sympathy for him. I hope I am doing right in trying to help him to employment abroad--I hope, most earnestly and anxiously, that it will end well. 11th.--Sir Percival had an interview with Mr. Fairlie, and I was sent for to join them. I found Mr. Fairlie greatly relieved at the prospect of the "family worry" (as he was pleased to describe his niece's marriage) being settled at last. So far, I did not feel called on to say anything to him about my own opinion, but when he proceeded, in his most aggravatingly languid manner, to suggest that the time for the marriage had better be settled next, in accordance with Sir Percival's wishes, I enjoyed the satisfaction of assailing Mr. Fairlie's nerves with as strong a protest against hurrying Laura's decision as I could put into words. Sir Percival immediately assured me that he felt the force of my objection, and begged me to believe that the proposal had not been made in consequence of any interference on his part. Mr. Fairlie leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, said we both of us did honour to human nature, and then repeated his suggestion as coolly as if neither Sir Percival nor I had said a word in opposition to it. It ended in my flatly declining to mention the subject to Laura, unless she first approached it of her own accord. I left the room at once after making that declaration. Sir Percival looked seriously embarrassed and distressed, Mr. Fairlie stretched out his lazy legs on his velvet footstool, and said, "Dear Marian! how I envy you your robust nervous system! Don't bang the door!" On going to Laura's room I found that she had asked for me, and that Mrs. Vesey had informed her that I was with Mr. Fairlie. She inquired at once what I had been wanted for, and I told her all that had passed, without attempting to conceal the vexation and annoyance that I really felt. Her answer surprised and distressed me inexpressibly--it was the very last reply that I should have expected her to make. "My uncle is right," she said. "I have caused trouble and anxiety enough to you, and to all about me. Let me cause no more, Marian--let Sir Percival decide." I remonstrated warmly, but nothing that I could say moved her. "I am held to my engagement," she replied; "I have broken with my old life. The evil day will not come the less surely because I put it off. No, Marian! once again my uncle is right. I have caused trouble enough and anxiety enough, and I will cause no more." She used to be pliability itself, but she was now inflexibly passive in her resignation--I might almost say in her despair. Dearly as I love her, I should have been less pained if she had been violently agitated--it was so shockingly unlike her natural character to see her as cold and insensible as I saw her now. 12th.--Sir Percival put some questions to me at breakfast about Laura, which left me no choice but to tell him what she had said. While we were talking she herself came down and joined us. She was just as unnaturally composed in Sir Percival's presence as she had been in mine. When breakfast was over he had an opportunity of saying a few words to her privately, in a recess of one of the windows. They were not more than two or three minutes together, and on their separating she left the room with Mrs. Vesey, while Sir Percival came to me. He said he had entreated her to favour him by maintaining her privilege of fixing the time for the marriage at her own will and pleasure. In reply she had merely expressed her acknowledgments, and had desired him to mention what his wishes were to Miss Halcombe. I have no patience to write more. In this instance, as in every other, Sir Percival has carried his point with the utmost possible credit to himself, in spite of everything that I can say or do. His wishes are now, what they were, of course, when he first came here; and Laura having resigned herself to the one inevitable sacrifice of the marriage, remains as coldly hopeless and enduring as ever. In parting with the little occupations and relics that reminded her of Hartright, she seems to have parted with all her tenderness and all her impressibility. It is only three o'clock in the afternoon while I write these lines, and Sir Percival has left us already, in the happy hurry of a bridegroom, to prepare for the bride's reception at his house in Hampshire. Unless some extraordinary event happens to prevent it they will be married exactly at the time when he wished to be married--before the end of the year. My very fingers burn as I write it! 13th.--A sleepless night, through uneasiness about Laura. Towards the morning I came to a resolution to try what change of scene would do to rouse her. She cannot surely remain in her present torpor of insensibility, if I take her away from Limmeridge and surround her with the pleasant faces of old friends? After some consideration I decided on writing to the Arnolds, in Yorkshire. They are simple, kind-hearted, hospitable people, and she has known them from her childhood. When I had put the letter in the post-bag I told her what I had done. It would have been a relief to me if she had shown the spirit to resist and object. But no--she only said, "I will go anywhere with you, Marian. I dare say you are right--I dare say the change will do me good." 14th.--I wrote to Mr. Gilmore, informing him that there was really a prospect of this miserable marriage taking place, and also mentioning my idea of trying what change of scene would do for Laura. I had no heart to go into particulars. Time enough for them when we get nearer to the end of the year. 15th.--Three letters for me. The first, from the Arnolds, full of delight at the prospect of seeing Laura and me. The second, from one of the gentlemen to whom I wrote on Walter Hartright's behalf, informing me that he has been fortunate enough to find an opportunity of complying with my request. The third, from Walter himself, thanking me, poor fellow, in the warmest terms, for giving him an opportunity of leaving his home, his country, and his friends. A private expedition to make excavations among the ruined cities of Central America is, it seems, about to sail from Liverpool. The draughtsman who had been already appointed to accompany it has lost heart, and withdrawn at the eleventh hour, and Walter is to fill his place. He is to be engaged for six months certain, from the time of the landing in Honduras, and for a year afterwards, if the excavations are successful, and if the funds hold out. His letter ends with a promise to write me a farewell line when they are all on board ship, and when the pilot leaves them. I can only hope and pray earnestly that he and I are both acting in this matter for the best. It seems such a serious step for him to take, that the mere contemplation of it startles me. And yet, in his unhappy position, how can I expect him or wish him to remain at home? 16th.--The carriage is at the door. Laura and I set out on our visit to the Arnolds to-day. POLESDEAN LODGE, YORKSHIRE. 23rd.--A week in these new scenes and among these kind-hearted people has done her some good, though not so much as I had hoped. I have resolved to prolong our stay for another week at least. It is useless to go back to Limmeridge till there is an absolute necessity for our return. 24th.--Sad news by this morning's post. The expedition to Central America sailed on the twenty-first. We have parted with a true man--we have lost a faithful friend. Water Hartright has left England. 25th.--Sad news yesterday--ominous news to-day. Sir Percival Glyde has written to Mr. Fairlie, and Mr. Fairlie has written to Laura and me, to recall us to Limmeridge immediately. What can this mean? Has the day for the marriage been fixed in our absence? II LIMMERIDGE HOUSE. November 27th.--My forebodings are realised. The marriage is fixed for the twenty-second of December. The day after we left for Polesdean Lodge Sir Percival wrote, it seems, to Mr. Fairlie, to say that the necessary repairs and alterations in his house in Hampshire would occupy a much longer time in completion than he had originally anticipated. The proper estimates were to be submitted to him as soon as possible, and it would greatly facilitate his entering into definite arrangements with the workpeople, if he could be informed of the exact period at which the wedding ceremony might be expected to take place. He could then make all his calculations in reference to time, besides writing the necessary apologies to friends who had been engaged to visit him that winter, and who could not, of course, be received when the house was in the hands of the workmen. To this letter Mr. Fairlie had replied by requesting Sir Percival himself to suggest a day for the marriage, subject to Miss Fairlie's approval, which her guardian willingly undertook to do his best to obtain. Sir Percival wrote back by the next post, and proposed (in accordance with his own views and wishes from the first?) the latter part of December--perhaps the twenty-second, or twenty-fourth, or any other day that the lady and her guardian might prefer. The lady not being at hand to speak for herself, her guardian had decided, in her absence, on the earliest day mentioned--the twenty-second of December, and had written to recall us to Limmeridge in consequence. After explaining these particulars to me at a private interview yesterday, Mr. Fairlie suggested, in his most amiable manner, that I should open the necessary negotiations to-day. Feeling that resistance was useless, unless I could first obtain Laura's authority to make it, I consented to speak to her, but declared, at the same time, that I would on no consideration undertake to gain her consent to Sir Percival's wishes. Mr. Fairlie complimented me on my "excellent conscience," much as he would have complimented me, if he had been out walking, on my "excellent constitution," and seemed perfectly satisfied, so far, with having simply shifted one more family responsibility from his own shoulders to mine. This morning I spoke to Laura as I had promised. The composure--I may almost say, the insensibility--which she has so strangely and so resolutely maintained ever since Sir Percival left us, was not proof against the shock of the news I had to tell her. She turned pale and trembled violently. "Not so soon!" she pleaded. "Oh, Marian, not so soon!" The slightest hint she could give was enough for me. I rose to leave the room, and fight her battle for her at once with Mr. Fairlie. Just as my hand was on the door, she caught fast hold of my dress and stopped me. "Let me go!" I said. "My tongue burns to tell your uncle that he and Sir Percival are not to have it all their own way." She sighed bitterly, and still held my dress. "No!" she said faintly. "Too late, Marian, too late!" "Not a minute too late," I retorted. "The question of time is OUR question--and trust me, Laura, to take a woman's full advantage of it." I unclasped her hand from my gown while I spoke; but she slipped both her arms round my waist at the same moment, and held me more effectually than ever. "It will only involve us in more trouble and more confusion," she said. "It will set you and my uncle at variance, and bring Sir Percival here again with fresh causes of complaint--" "So much the better!" I cried out passionately. "Who cares for his causes of complaint? Are you to break your heart to set his mind at ease? No man under heaven deserves these sacrifices from us women. Men! They are the enemies of our innocence and our peace--they drag us away from our parents' love and our sisters' friendship--they take us body and soul to themselves, and fasten our helpless lives to theirs as they chain up a dog to his kennel. And what does the best of them give us in return? Let me go, Laura--I'm mad when I think of it!" The tears--miserable, weak, women's tears of vexation and rage--started to my eyes. She smiled sadly, and put her handkerchief over my face to hide for me the betrayal of my own weakness--the weakness of all others which she knew that I most despised. "Oh, Marian!" she said. "You crying! Think what you would say to me, if the places were changed, and if those tears were mine. All your love and courage and devotion will not alter what must happen, sooner or later. Let my uncle have his way. Let us have no more troubles and heart-burnings that any sacrifice of mine can prevent. Say you will live with me, Marian, when I am married--and say no more." But I did say more. I forced back the contemptible tears that were no relief to ME, and that only distressed HER, and reasoned and pleaded as calmly as I could. It was of no avail. She made me twice repeat the promise to live with her when she was married, and then suddenly asked a question which turned my sorrow and my sympathy for her into a new direction. "While we were at Polesdean," she said, "you had a letter, Marian----" Her altered tone--the abrupt manner in which she looked away from me and hid her face on my shoulder--the hesitation which silenced her before she had completed her question, all told me, but too plainly, to whom the half-expressed inquiry pointed. "I thought, Laura, that you and I were never to refer to him again," I said gently. "You had a letter from him?" she persisted. "Yes," I replied, "if you must know it." "Do you mean to write to him again?" I hesitated. I had been afraid to tell her of his absence from England, or of the manner in which my exertions to serve his new hopes and projects had connected me with his departure. What answer could I make? He was gone where no letters could reach him for months, perhaps for years, to come. "Suppose I do mean to write to him again," I said at last. "What then, Laura?" Her cheek grew burning hot against my neck, and her arms trembled and tightened round me. "Don't tell him about THE TWENTY-SECOND," she whispered. "Promise, Marian--pray promise you will not even mention my name to him when you write next." I gave the promise. No words can say how sorrowfully I gave it. She instantly took her arm from my waist, walked away to the window, and stood looking out with her back to me. After a moment she spoke once more, but without turning round, without allowing me to catch the smallest glimpse of her face. "Are you going to my uncle's room?" she asked. "Will you say that I consent to whatever arrangement he may think best? Never mind leaving me, Marian. I shall be better alone for a little while." I went out. If, as soon as I got into the passage, I could have transported Mr. Fairlie and Sir Percival Glyde to the uttermost ends of the earth by lifting one of my fingers, that finger would have been raised without an instant's hesitation. For once my unhappy temper now stood my friend. I should have broken down altogether and burst into a violent fit of crying, if my tears had not been all burnt up in the heat of my anger. As it was, I dashed into Mr. Fairlie's room--called to him as harshly as possible, "Laura consents to the twenty-second"--and dashed out again without waiting for a word of answer. I banged the door after me, and I hope I shattered Mr. Fairlie's nervous system for the rest of the day. 28th.--This morning I read poor Hartright's farewell letter over again, a doubt having crossed my mind since yesterday, whether I am acting wisely in concealing the fact of his departure from Laura. On reflection, I still think I am right. The allusions in his letter to the preparations made for the expedition to Central America, all show that the leaders of it know it to be dangerous. If the discovery of this makes me uneasy, what would it make HER? It is bad enough to feel that his departure has deprived us of the friend of all others to whose devotion we could trust in the hour of need, if ever that hour comes and finds us helpless; but it is far worse to know that he has gone from us to face the perils of a bad climate, a wild country, and a disturbed population. Surely it would be a cruel candour to tell Laura this, without a pressing and a positive necessity for it? I almost doubt whether I ought not to go a step farther, and burn the letter at once, for fear of its one day falling into wrong hands. It not only refers to Laura in terms which ought to remain a secret for ever between the writer and me, but it reiterates his suspicion--so obstinate, so unaccountable, and so alarming--that he has been secretly watched since he left Limmeridge. He declares that he saw the faces of the two strange men who followed him about the streets of London, watching him among the crowd which gathered at Liverpool to see the expedition embark, and he positively asserts that he heard the name of Anne Catherick pronounced behind him as he got into the boat. His own words are, "These events have a meaning, these events must lead to a result. The mystery of Anne Catherick is NOT cleared up yet. She may never cross my path again, but if ever she crosses yours, make better use of the opportunity, Miss Halcombe, than I made of it. I speak on strong conviction--I entreat you to remember what I say." These are his own expressions. There is no danger of my forgetting them--my memory is only too ready to dwell on any words of Hartright's that refer to Anne Catherick. But there is danger in my keeping the letter. The merest accident might place it at the mercy of strangers. I may fall ill--I may die. Better to burn it at once, and have one anxiety the less. It is burnt. The ashes of his farewell letter--the last he may ever write to me--lie in a few black fragments on the hearth. Is this the sad end to all that sad story? Oh, not the end--surely, surely not the end already! 29th.--The preparations for the marriage have begun. The dressmaker has come to receive her orders. Laura is perfectly impassive, perfectly careless about the question of all others in which a woman's personal interests are most closely bound up. She has left it all to the dressmaker and to me. If poor Hartright had been the baronet, and the husband of her father's choice, how differently she would have behaved! How anxious and capricious she would have been, and what a hard task the best of dressmakers would have found it to please her! 30th.--We hear every day from Sir Percival. The last news is that the alterations in his house will occupy from four to six months before they can be properly completed. If painters, paperhangers, and upholsterers could make happiness as well as splendour, I should be interested about their proceedings in Laura's future home. As it is, the only part of Sir Percival's last letter which does not leave me as it found me, perfectly indifferent to all his plans and projects, is the part which refers to the wedding tour. He proposes, as Laura is delicate, and as the winter threatens to be unusually severe, to take her to Rome, and to remain in Italy until the early part of next summer. If this plan should not be approved, he is equally ready, although he has no establishment of his own in town, to spend the season in London, in the most suitable furnished house that can be obtained for the purpose. Putting myself and my own feelings entirely out of the question (which it is my duty to do, and which I have done), I, for one, have no doubt of the propriety of adopting the first of these proposals. In either case a separation between Laura and me is inevitable. It will be a longer separation, in the event of their going abroad, than it would be in the event of their remaining in London--but we must set against this disadvantage the benefit to Laura, on the other side, of passing the winter in a mild climate, and more than that, the immense assistance in raising her spirits, and reconciling her to her new existence, which the mere wonder and excitement of travelling for the first time in her life in the most interesting country in the world, must surely afford. She is not of a disposition to find resources in the conventional gaieties and excitements of London. They would only make the first oppression of this lamentable marriage fall the heavier on her. I dread the beginning of her new life more than words can tell, but I see some hope for her if she travels--none if she remains at home. It is strange to look back at this latest entry in my journal, and to find that I am writing of the marriage and the parting with Laura, as people write of a settled thing. It seems so cold and so unfeeling to be looking at the future already in this cruelly composed way. But what other way is possible, now that the time is drawing so near? Before another month is over our heads she will be HIS Laura instead of mine! HIS Laura! I am as little able to realise the idea which those two words convey--my mind feels almost as dulled and stunned by it--as if writing of her marriage were like writing of her death. December 1st.--A sad, sad day--a day that I have no heart to describe at any length. After weakly putting it off last night, I was obliged to speak to her this morning of Sir Percival's proposal about the wedding tour. In the full conviction that I should be with her wherever she went, the poor child--for a child she is still in many things--was almost happy at the prospect of seeing the wonders of Florence and Rome and Naples. It nearly broke my heart to dispel her delusion, and to bring her face to face with the hard truth. I was obliged to tell her that no man tolerates a rival--not even a woman rival--in his wife's affections, when he first marries, whatever he may do afterwards. I was obliged to warn her that my chance of living with her permanently under her own roof, depended entirely on my not arousing Sir Percival's jealousy and distrust by standing between them at the beginning of their marriage, in the position of the chosen depositary of his wife's closest secrets. Drop by drop I poured the profaning bitterness of this world's wisdom into that pure heart and that innocent mind, while every higher and better feeling within me recoiled from my miserable task. It is over now. She has learnt her hard, her inevitable lesson. The simple illusions of her girlhood are gone, and my hand has stripped them off. Better mine than his--that is all my consolation--better mine than his. So the first proposal is the proposal accepted. They are to go to Italy, and I am to arrange, with Sir Percival's permission, for meeting them and staying with them when they return to England. In other words, I am to ask a personal favour, for the first time in my life, and to ask it of the man of all others to whom I least desire to owe a serious obligation of any kind. Well! I think I could do even more than that, for Laura's sake. 2nd.--On looking back, I find myself always referring to Sir Percival in disparaging terms. In the turn affairs have now taken. I must and will root out my prejudice against him, I cannot think how it first got into my mind. It certainly never existed in former times. Is it Laura's reluctance to become his wife that has set me against him? Have Hartright's perfectly intelligible prejudices infected me without my suspecting their influence? Does that letter of Anne Catherick's still leave a lurking distrust in my mind, in spite of Sir Percival's explanation, and of the proof in my possession of the truth of it? I cannot account for the state of my own feelings; the one thing I am certain of is, that it is my duty--doubly my duty now--not to wrong Sir Percival by unjustly distrusting him. If it has got to be a habit with me always to write of him in the same unfavourable manner, I must and will break myself of this unworthy tendency, even though the effort should force me to close the pages of my journal till the marriage is over! I am seriously dissatisfied with myself--I will write no more to-day. December 16th.--A whole fortnight has passed, and I have not once opened these pages. I have been long enough away from my journal to come back to it with a healthier and better mind, I hope, so far as Sir Percival is concerned. There is not much to record of the past two weeks. The dresses are almost all finished, and the new travelling trunks have been sent here from London. Poor dear Laura hardly leaves me for a moment all day, and last night, when neither of us could sleep, she came and crept into my bed to talk to me there. "I shall lose you so soon, Marian," she said; "I must make the most of you while I can." They are to be married at Limmeridge Church, and thank Heaven, not one of the neighbours is to be invited to the ceremony. The only visitor will be our old friend, Mr. Arnold, who is to come from Polesdean to give Laura away, her uncle being far too delicate to trust himself outside the door in such inclement weather as we now have. If I were not determined, from this day forth, to see nothing but the bright side of our prospects, the melancholy absence of any male relative of Laura's, at the most important moment of her life, would make me very gloomy and very distrustful of the future. But I have done with gloom and distrust--that is to say, I have done with writing about either the one or the other in this journal. Sir Percival is to arrive to-morrow. He offered, in case we wished to treat him on terms of rigid etiquette, to write and ask our clergyman to grant him the hospitality of the rectory, during the short period of his sojourn at Limmeridge, before the marriage. Under the circumstances, neither Mr. Fairlie nor I thought it at all necessary for us to trouble ourselves about attending to trifling forms and ceremonies. In our wild moorland country, and in this great lonely house, we may well claim to be beyond the reach of the trivial conventionalities which hamper people in other places. I wrote to Sir Percival to thank him for his polite offer, and to beg that he would occupy his old rooms, just as usual, at Limmeridge House. 17th.--He arrived to-day, looking, as I thought, a little worn and anxious, but still talking and laughing like a man in the best possible spirits. He brought with him some really beautiful presents in jewellery, which Laura received with her best grace, and, outwardly at least, with perfect self-possession. The only sign I can detect of the struggle it must cost her to preserve appearances at this trying time, expresses itself in a sudden unwillingness, on her part, ever to be left alone. Instead of retreating to her own room, as usual, she seems to dread going there. When I went upstairs to-day, after lunch, to put on my bonnet for a walk, she volunteered to join me, and again, before dinner, she threw the door open between our two rooms, so that we might talk to each other while we were dressing. "Keep me always doing something," she said; "keep me always in company with somebody. Don't let me think--that is all I ask now, Marian--don't let me think." This sad change in her only increases her attractions for Sir Percival. He interprets it, I can see, to his own advantage. There is a feverish flush in her cheeks, a feverish brightness in her eyes, which he welcomes as the return of her beauty and the recovery of her spirits. She talked to-day at dinner with a gaiety and carelessness so false, so shockingly out of her character, that I secretly longed to silence her and take her away. Sir Percival's delight and surprise appeared to be beyond all expression. The anxiety which I had noticed on his face when he arrived totally disappeared from it, and he looked, even to my eyes, a good ten years younger than he really is. There can be no doubt--though some strange perversity prevents me from seeing it myself--there can be no doubt that Laura's future husband is a very handsome man. Regular features form a personal advantage to begin with--and he has them. Bright brown eyes, either in man or woman, are a great attraction--and he has them. Even baldness, when it is only baldness over the forehead (as in his case), is rather becoming than not in a man, for it heightens the head and adds to the intelligence of the face. Grace and ease of movement, untiring animation of manner, ready, pliant, conversational powers--all these are unquestionable merits, and all these he certainly possesses. Surely Mr. Gilmore, ignorant as he is of Laura's secret, was not to blame for feeling surprised that she should repent of her marriage engagement? Any one else in his place would have shared our good old friend's opinion. If I were asked, at this moment, to say plainly what defects I have discovered in Sir Percival, I could only point out two. One, his incessant restlessness and excitability--which may be caused, naturally enough, by unusual energy of character. The other, his short, sharp, ill-tempered manner of speaking to the servants--which may be only a bad habit after all. No, I cannot dispute it, and I will not dispute it--Sir Percival is a very handsome and a very agreeable man. There! I have written it down at last, and I am glad it's over. 18th.--Feeling weary and depressed this morning, I left Laura with Mrs. Vesey, and went out alone for one of my brisk midday walks, which I have discontinued too much of late. I took the dry airy road over the moor that leads to Todd's Corner. After having been out half an hour, I was excessively surprised to see Sir Percival approaching me from the direction of the farm. He was walking rapidly, swinging his stick, his head erect as usual, and his shooting jacket flying open in the wind. When we met he did not wait for me to ask any questions--he told me at once that he had been to the farm to inquire if Mr. or Mrs. Todd had received any tidings, since his last visit to Limmeridge, of Anne Catherick. "You found, of course, that they had heard nothing?" I said. "Nothing whatever," he replied. "I begin to be seriously afraid that we have lost her. Do you happen to know," he continued, looking me in the face very attentively "if the artist--Mr. Hartright--is in a position to give us any further information?" "He has neither heard of her, nor seen her, since he left Cumberland," I answered. "Very sad," said Sir Percival, speaking like a man who was disappointed, and yet, oddly enough, looking at the same time like a man who was relieved. "It is impossible to say what misfortunes may not have happened to the miserable creature. I am inexpressibly annoyed at the failure of all my efforts to restore her to the care and protection which she so urgently needs." This time he really looked annoyed. I said a few sympathising words, and we then talked of other subjects on our way back to the house. Surely my chance meeting with him on the moor has disclosed another favourable trait in his character? Surely it was singularly considerate and unselfish of him to think of Anne Catherick on the eve of his marriage, and to go all the way to Todd's Corner to make inquiries about her, when he might have passed the time so much more agreeably in Laura's society? Considering that he can only have acted from motives of pure charity, his conduct, under the circumstances, shows unusual good feeling and deserves extraordinary praise. Well! I give him extraordinary praise--and there's an end of it. 19th.--More discoveries in the inexhaustible mine of Sir Percival's virtues. To-day I approached the subject of my proposed sojourn under his wife's roof when he brings her back to England. I had hardly dropped my first hint in this direction before he caught me warmly by the hand, and said I had made the very offer to him which he had been, on his side, most anxious to make to me. I was the companion of all others whom he most sincerely longed to secure for his wife, and he begged me to believe that I had conferred a lasting favour on him by making the proposal to live with Laura after her marriage, exactly as I had always lived with her before it. When I had thanked him in her name and mine for his considerate kindness to both of us, we passed next to the subject of his wedding tour, and began to talk of the English society in Rome to which Laura was to be introduced. He ran over the names of several friends whom he expected to meet abroad this winter. They were all English, as well as I can remember, with one exception. The one exception was Count Fosco. The mention of the Count's name, and the discovery that he and his wife are likely to meet the bride and bridegroom on the continent, puts Laura's marriage, for the first time, in a distinctly favourable light. It is likely to be the means of healing a family feud. Hitherto Madame Fosco has chosen to forget her obligations as Laura's aunt out of sheer spite against the late Mr. Fairlie for his conduct in the affair of the legacy. Now however, she can persist in this course of conduct no longer. Sir Percival and Count Fosco are old and fast friends, and their wives will have no choice but to meet on civil terms. Madame Fosco in her maiden days was one of the most impertinent women I ever met with--capricious, exacting, and vain to the last degree of absurdity. If her husband has succeeded in bringing her to her senses, he deserves the gratitude of every member of the family, and he may have mine to begin with. I am becoming anxious to know the Count. He is the most intimate friend of Laura's husband, and in that capacity he excites my strongest interest. Neither Laura nor I have ever seen him. All I know of him is that his accidental presence, years ago, on the steps of the Trinita del Monte at Rome, assisted Sir Percival's escape from robbery and assassination at the critical moment when he was wounded in the hand, and might the next instant have been wounded in the heart. I remember also that, at the time of the late Mr. Fairlie's absurd objections to his sister's marriage, the Count wrote him a very temperate and sensible letter on the subject, which, I am ashamed to say, remained unanswered. This is all I know of Sir Percival's friend. I wonder if he will ever come to England? I wonder if I shall like him? My pen is running away into mere speculation. Let me return to sober matter of fact. It is certain that Sir Percival's reception of my venturesome proposal to live with his wife was more than kind, it was almost affectionate. I am sure Laura's husband will have no reason to complain of me if I can only go on as I have begun. I have already declared him to be handsome, agreeable, full of good feeling towards the unfortunate and full of affectionate kindness towards me. Really, I hardly know myself again, in my new character of Sir Percival's warmest friend. 20th.--I hate Sir Percival! I flatly deny his good looks. I consider him to be eminently ill-tempered and disagreeable, and totally wanting in kindness and good feeling. Last night the cards for the married couple were sent home. Laura opened the packet and saw her future name in print for the first time. Sir Percival looked over her shoulder familiarly at the new card which had already transformed Miss Fairlie into Lady Glyde--smiled with the most odious self-complacency, and whispered something in her ear. I don't know what it was--Laura has refused to tell me--but I saw her face turn to such a deadly whiteness that I thought she would have fainted. He took no notice of the change--he seemed to be barbarously unconscious that he had said anything to pain her. All my old feelings of hostility towards him revived on the instant, and all the hours that have passed since have done nothing to dissipate them. I am more unreasonable and more unjust than ever. In three words--how glibly my pen writes them!--in three words, I hate him. 21st.--Have the anxieties of this anxious time shaken me a little, at last? I have been writing, for the last few days, in a tone of levity which, Heaven knows, is far enough from my heart, and which it has rather shocked me to discover on looking back at the entries in my journal. Perhaps I may have caught the feverish excitement of Laura's spirits for the last week. If so, the fit has already passed away from me, and has left me in a very strange state of mind. A persistent idea has been forcing itself on my attention, ever since last night, that something will yet happen to prevent the marriage. What has produced this singular fancy? Is it the indirect result of my apprehensions for Laura's future? Or has it been unconsciously suggested to me by the increasing restlessness and irritability which I have certainly observed in Sir Percival's manner as the wedding-day draws nearer and nearer? Impossible to say. I know that I have the idea--surely the wildest idea, under the circumstances, that ever entered a woman's head?--but try as I may, I cannot trace it back to its source. This last day has been all confusion and wretchedness. How can I write about it?--and yet, I must write. Anything is better than brooding over my own gloomy thoughts. Kind Mrs. Vesey, whom we have all too much overlooked and forgotten of late, innocently caused us a sad morning to begin with. She has been, for months past, secretly making a warm Shetland shawl for her dear pupil--a most beautiful and surprising piece of work to be done by a woman at her age and with her habits. The gift was presented this morning, and poor warm-hearted Laura completely broke down when the shawl was put proudly on her shoulders by the loving old friend and guardian of her motherless childhood. I was hardly allowed time to quiet them both, or even to dry my own eyes, when I was sent for by Mr. Fairlie, to be favoured with a long recital of his arrangements for the preservation of his own tranquillity on the wedding-day. "Dear Laura" was to receive his present--a shabby ring, with her affectionate uncle's hair for an ornament, instead of a precious stone, and with a heartless French inscription inside, about congenial sentiments and eternal friendship--"dear Laura" was to receive this tender tribute from my hands immediately, so that she might have plenty of time to recover from the agitation produced by the gift before she appeared in Mr. Fairlie's presence. "Dear Laura" was to pay him a little visit that evening, and to be kind enough not to make a scene. "Dear Laura" was to pay him another little visit in her wedding-dress the next morning, and to be kind enough, again, not to make a scene. "Dear Laura" was to look in once more, for the third time, before going away, but without harrowing his feelings by saying WHEN she was going away, and without tears--"in the name of pity, in the name of everything, dear Marian, that is most affectionate and most domestic, and most delightfully and charmingly self-composed, WITHOUT TEARS!" I was so exasperated by this miserable selfish trifling, at such a time, that I should certainly have shocked Mr. Fairlie by some of the hardest and rudest truths he has ever heard in his life, if the arrival of Mr. Arnold from Polesdean had not called me away to new duties downstairs. The rest of the day is indescribable. I believe no one in the house really knew how it passed. The confusion of small events, all huddled together one on the other, bewildered everybody. There were dresses sent home that had been forgotten--there were trunks to be packed and unpacked and packed again--there were presents from friends far and near, friends high and low. We were all needlessly hurried, all nervously expectant of the morrow. Sir Percival, especially, was too restless now to remain five minutes together in the same place. That short, sharp cough of his troubled him more than ever. He was in and out of doors all day long, and he seemed to grow so inquisitive on a sudden, that he questioned the very strangers who came on small errands to the house. Add to all this, the one perpetual thought in Laura's mind and mine, that we were to part the next day, and the haunting dread, unexpressed by either of us, and yet ever present to both, that this deplorable marriage might prove to be the one fatal error of her life and the one hopeless sorrow of mine. For the first time in all the years of our close and happy intercourse we almost avoided looking each other in the face, and we refrained, by common consent, from speaking together in private through the whole evening. I can dwell on it no longer. Whatever future sorrows may be in store for me, I shall always look back on this twenty-first of December as the most comfortless and most miserable day of my life. I am writing these lines in the solitude of my own room, long after midnight, having just come back from a stolen look at Laura in her pretty little white bed--the bed she has occupied since the days of her girlhood. There she lay, unconscious that I was looking at her--quiet, more quiet than I had dared to hope, but not sleeping. The glimmer of the night-light showed me that her eyes were only partially closed--the traces of tears glistened between her eyelids. My little keepsake--only a brooch--lay on the table at her bedside, with her prayer-book, and the miniature portrait of her father which she takes with her wherever she goes. I waited a moment, looking at her from behind her pillow, as she lay beneath me, with one arm and hand resting on the white coverlid, so still, so quietly breathing, that the frill on her night-dress never moved--I waited, looking at her, as I have seen her thousands of times, as I shall never see her again--and then stole back to my room. My own love! with all your wealth, and all your beauty, how friendless you are! The one man who would give his heart's life to serve you is far away, tossing, this stormy night, on the awful sea. Who else is left to you? No father, no brother--no living creature but the helpless, useless woman who writes these sad lines, and watches by you for the morning, in sorrow that she cannot compose, in doubt that she cannot conquer. Oh, what a trust is to be placed in that man's hands to-morrow! If ever he forgets it--if ever he injures a hair of her head!---- THE TWENTY-SECOND OF DECEMBER. Seven o'clock. A wild, unsettled morning. She has just risen--better and calmer, now that the time has come, than she was yesterday. Ten o'clock. She is dressed. We have kissed each other--we have promised each other not to lose courage. I am away for a moment in my own room. In the whirl and confusion of my thoughts, I can detect that strange fancy of some hindrance happening to stop the marriage still hanging about my mind. Is it hanging about HIS mind too? I see him from the window, moving hither and thither uneasily among the carriages at the door.--How can I write such folly! The marriage is a certainty. In less than half an hour we start for the church. Eleven o'clock. It is all over. They are married. Three o'clock. They are gone! I am blind with crying--I can write no more---- * * * * * * * * * * [The First Epoch of the Story closes here.] THE SECOND EPOCH THE STORY CONTINUED BY MARIAN HALCOMBE. I BLACKWATER PARK, HAMPSHIRE. June 11th, 1850.--Six months to look back on--six long, lonely months since Laura and I last saw each other! How many days have I still to wait? Only one! To-morrow, the twelfth, the travellers return to England. I can hardly realise my own happiness--I can hardly believe that the next four-and-twenty hours will complete the last day of separation between Laura and me. She and her husband have been in Italy all the winter, and afterwards in the Tyrol. They come back, accompanied by Count Fosco and his wife, who propose to settle somewhere in the neighbourhood of London, and who have engaged to stay at Blackwater Park for the summer months before deciding on a place of residence. So long as Laura returns, no matter who returns with her. Sir Percival may fill the house from floor to ceiling, if he likes, on condition that his wife and I inhabit it together. Meanwhile, here I am, established at Blackwater Park, "the ancient and interesting seat" (as the county history obligingly informs me) "of Sir Percival Glyde, Bart.," and the future abiding-place (as I may now venture to add on my account) of plain Marian Halcombe, spinster, now settled in a snug little sitting-room, with a cup of tea by her side, and all her earthly possessions ranged round her in three boxes and a bag. I left Limmeridge yesterday, having received Laura's delightful letter from Paris the day before. I had been previously uncertain whether I was to meet them in London or in Hampshire, but this last letter informed me that Sir Percival proposed to land at Southampton, and to travel straight on to his country-house. He has spent so much money abroad that he has none left to defray the expenses of living in London for the remainder of the season, and he is economically resolved to pass the summer and autumn quietly at Blackwater. Laura has had more than enough of excitement and change of scene, and is pleased at the prospect of country tranquillity and retirement which her husband's prudence provides for her. As for me, I am ready to be happy anywhere in her society. We are all, therefore, well contented in our various ways, to begin with. Last night I slept in London, and was delayed there so long to-day by various calls and commissions, that I did not reach Blackwater this evening till after dusk. Judging by my vague impressions of the place thus far, it is the exact opposite of Limmeridge. The house is situated on a dead flat, and seems to be shut in--almost suffocated, to my north-country notions, by trees. I have seen nobody but the man-servant who opened the door to me, and the housekeeper, a very civil person, who showed me the way to my own room, and got me my tea. I have a nice little boudoir and bedroom, at the end of a long passage on the first floor. The servants and some of the spare rooms are on the second floor, and all the living rooms are on the ground floor. I have not seen one of them yet, and I know nothing about the house, except that one wing of it is said to be five hundred years old, that it had a moat round it once, and that it gets its name of Blackwater from a lake in the park. Eleven o'clock has just struck, in a ghostly and solemn manner, from a turret over the centre of the house, which I saw when I came in. A large dog has been woke, apparently by the sound of the bell, and is howling and yawning drearily, somewhere round a corner. I hear echoing footsteps in the passages below, and the iron thumping of bolts and bars at the house door. The servants are evidently going to bed. Shall I follow their example? No, I am not half sleepy enough. Sleepy, did I say? I feel as if I should never close my eyes again. The bare anticipation of seeing that dear face, and hearing that well-known voice to-morrow, keeps me in a perpetual fever of excitement. If I only had the privileges of a man, I would order out Sir Percival's best horse instantly, and tear away on a night-gallop, eastward, to meet the rising sun--a long, hard, heavy, ceaseless gallop of hours and hours, like the famous highwayman's ride to York. Being, however, nothing but a woman, condemned to patience, propriety, and petticoats for life, I must respect the house-keeper's opinions, and try to compose myself in some feeble and feminine way. Reading is out of the question--I can't fix my attention on books. Let me try if I can write myself into sleepiness and fatigue. My journal has been very much neglected of late. What can I recall--standing, as I now do, on the threshold of a new life--of persons and events, of chances and changes, during the past six months--the long, weary, empty interval since Laura's wedding-day? Walter Hartright is uppermost in my memory, and he passes first in the shadowy procession of my absent friends. I received a few lines from him, after the landing of the expedition in Honduras, written more cheerfully and hopefully than he has written yet. A month or six weeks later I saw an extract from an American newspaper, describing the departure of the adventurers on their inland journey. They were last seen entering a wild primeval forest, each man with his rifle on his shoulder and his baggage at his back. Since that time, civilisation has lost all trace of them. Not a line more have I received from Walter, not a fragment of news from the expedition has appeared in any of the public journals. The same dense, disheartening obscurity hangs over the fate and fortunes of Anne Catherick, and her companion, Mrs. Clements. Nothing whatever has been heard of either of them. Whether they are in the country or out of it, whether they are living or dead, no one knows. Even Sir Percival's solicitor has lost all hope, and has ordered the useless search after the fugitives to be finally given up. Our good old friend Mr. Gilmore has met with a sad check in his active professional career. Early in the spring we were alarmed by hearing that he had been found insensible at his desk, and that the seizure was pronounced to be an apoplectic fit. He had been long complaining of fulness and oppression in the head, and his doctor had warned him of the consequences that would follow his persistency in continuing to work, early and late, as if he were still a young man. The result now is that he has been positively ordered to keep out of his office for a year to come, at least, and to seek repose of body and relief of mind by altogether changing his usual mode of life. The business is left, accordingly, to be carried on by his partner, and he is himself, at this moment, away in Germany, visiting some relations who are settled there in mercantile pursuits. Thus another true friend and trustworthy adviser is lost to us--lost, I earnestly hope and trust, for a time only. Poor Mrs. Vesey travelled with me as far as London. It was impossible to abandon her to solitude at Limmeridge after Laura and I had both left the house, and we have arranged that she is to live with an unmarried younger sister of hers, who keeps a school at Clapham. She is to come here this autumn to visit her pupil--I might almost say her adopted child. I saw the good old lady safe to her destination, and left her in the care of her relative, quietly happy at the prospect of seeing Laura again in a few months' time. As for Mr. Fairlie, I believe I am guilty of no injustice if I describe him as being unutterably relieved by having the house clear of us women. The idea of his missing his niece is simply preposterous--he used to let months pass in the old times without attempting to see her--and in my case and Mrs. Vesey's, I take leave to consider his telling us both that he was half heart-broken at our departure, to be equivalent to a confession that he was secretly rejoiced to get rid of us. His last caprice has led him to keep two photographers incessantly employed in producing sun-pictures of all the treasures and curiosities in his possession. One complete copy of the collection of the photographs is to be presented to the Mechanics' Institution of Carlisle, mounted on the finest cardboard, with ostentatious red-letter inscriptions underneath, "Madonna and Child by Raphael. In the possession of Frederick Fairlie, Esquire." "Copper coin of the period of Tiglath Pileser. In the possession of Frederick Fairlie, Esquire." "Unique Rembrandt etching. Known all over Europe as THE SMUDGE, from a printer's blot in the corner which exists in no other copy. Valued at three hundred guineas. In the possession of Frederick Fairlie, Esq." Dozens of photographs of this sort, and all inscribed in this manner, were completed before I left Cumberland, and hundreds more remain to be done. With this new interest to occupy him, Mr. Fairlie will be a happy man for months and months to come, and the two unfortunate photographers will share the social martyrdom which he has hitherto inflicted on his valet alone. So much for the persons and events which hold the foremost place in my memory. What next of the one person who holds the foremost place in my heart? Laura has been present to my thoughts all the while I have been writing these lines. What can I recall of her during the past six months, before I close my journal for the night? I have only her letters to guide me, and on the most important of all the questions which our correspondence can discuss, every one of those letters leaves me in the dark. Does he treat her kindly? Is she happier now than she was when I parted with her on the wedding-day? All my letters have contained these two inquiries, put more or less directly, now in one form, and now in another, and all, on that point only, have remained without reply, or have been answered as if my questions merely related to the state of her health. She informs me, over and over again, that she is perfectly well--that travelling agrees with her--that she is getting through the winter, for the first time in her life, without catching cold--but not a word can I find anywhere which tells me plainly that she is reconciled to her marriage, and that she can now look back to the twenty-second of December without any bitter feelings of repentance and regret. The name of her husband is only mentioned in her letters, as she might mention the name of a friend who was travelling with them, and who had undertaken to make all the arrangements for the journey. "Sir Percival" has settled that we leave on such a day--"Sir Percival" has decided that we travel by such a road. Sometimes she writes "Percival" only, but very seldom--in nine cases out of ten she gives him his title. I cannot find that his habits and opinions have changed and coloured hers in any single particular. The usual moral transformation which is insensibly wrought in a young, fresh, sensitive woman by her marriage, seems never to have taken place in Laura. She writes of her own thoughts and impressions, amid all the wonders she has seen, exactly as she might have written to some one else, if I had been travelling with her instead of her husband. I see no betrayal anywhere of sympathy of any kind existing between them. Even when she wanders from the subject of her travels, and occupies herself with the prospects that await her in England, her speculations are busied with her future as my sister, and persistently neglect to notice her future as Sir Percival's wife. In all this there is no undertone of complaint to warn me that she is absolutely unhappy in her married life. The impression I have derived from our correspondence does not, thank God, lead me to any such distressing conclusion as that. I only see a sad torpor, an unchangeable indifference, when I turn my mind from her in the old character of a sister, and look at her, through the medium of her letters, in the new character of a wife. In other words, it is always Laura Fairlie who has been writing to me for the last six months, and never Lady Glyde. The strange silence which she maintains on the subject of her husband's character and conduct, she preserves with almost equal resolution in the few references which her later letters contain to the name of her husband's bosom friend, Count Fosco. For some unexplained reason the Count and his wife appear to have changed their plans abruptly, at the end of last autumn, and to have gone to Vienna instead of going to Rome, at which latter place Sir Percival had expected to find them when he left England. They only quitted Vienna in the spring, and travelled as far as the Tyrol to meet the bride and bridegroom on their homeward journey. Laura writes readily enough about the meeting with Madame Fosco, and assures me that she has found her aunt so much changed for the better--so much quieter, and so much more sensible as a wife than she was as a single woman--that I shall hardly know her again when I see her here. But on the subject of Count Fosco (who interests me infinitely more than his wife), Laura is provokingly circumspect and silent. She only says that he puzzles her, and that she will not tell me what her impression of him is until I have seen him, and formed my own opinion first. This, to my mind, looks ill for the Count. Laura has preserved, far more perfectly than most people do in later life, the child's subtle faculty of knowing a friend by instinct, and if I am right in assuming that her first impression of Count Fosco has not been favourable, I for one am in some danger of doubting and distrusting that illustrious foreigner before I have so much as set eyes on him. But, patience, patience--this uncertainty, and many uncertainties more, cannot last much longer. To-morrow will see all my doubts in a fair way of being cleared up, sooner or later. Twelve o'clock has struck, and I have just come back to close these pages, after looking out at my open window. It is a still, sultry, moonless night. The stars are dull and few. The trees that shut out the view on all sides look dimly black and solid in the distance, like a great wall of rock. I hear the croaking of frogs, faint and far off, and the echoes of the great clock hum in the airless calm long after the strokes have ceased. I wonder how Blackwater Park will look in the daytime? I don't altogether like it by night. 12th.--A day of investigations and discoveries--a more interesting day, for many reasons, than I had ventured to anticipate. I began my sight-seeing, of course, with the house. The main body of the building is of the time of that highly-overrated woman, Queen Elizabeth. On the ground floor there are two hugely long galleries, with low ceilings lying parallel with each other, and rendered additionally dark and dismal by hideous family portraits--every one of which I should like to burn. The rooms on the floor above the two galleries are kept in tolerable repair, but are very seldom used. The civil housekeeper, who acted as my guide, offered to show me over them, but considerately added that she feared I should find them rather out of order. My respect for the integrity of my own petticoats and stockings infinitely exceeds my respect for all the Elizabethan bedrooms in the kingdom, so I positively declined exploring the upper regions of dust and dirt at the risk of soiling my nice clean clothes. The housekeeper said, "I am quite of your opinion, miss," and appeared to think me the most sensible woman she had met with for a long time past. So much, then, for the main building. Two wings are added at either end of it. The half-ruined wing on the left (as you approach the house) was once a place of residence standing by itself, and was built in the fourteenth century. One of Sir Percival's maternal ancestors--I don't remember, and don't care which--tacked on the main building, at right angles to it, in the aforesaid Queen Elizabeth's time. The housekeeper told me that the architecture of "the old wing," both outside and inside, was considered remarkably fine by good judges. On further investigation I discovered that good judges could only exercise their abilities on Sir Percival's piece of antiquity by previously dismissing from their minds all fear of damp, darkness, and rats. Under these circumstances, I unhesitatingly acknowledged myself to be no judge at all, and suggested that we should treat "the old wing" precisely as we had previously treated the Elizabethan bedrooms. Once more the housekeeper said, "I am quite of your opinion, miss," and once more she looked at me with undisguised admiration of my extraordinary common-sense. We went next to the wing on the right, which was built, by way of completing the wonderful architectural jumble at Blackwater Park, in the time of George the Second. This is the habitable part of the house, which has been repaired and redecorated inside on Laura's account. My two rooms, and all the good bedrooms besides, are on the first floor, and the basement contains a drawing-room, a dining-room, a morning-room, a library, and a pretty little boudoir for Laura, all very nicely ornamented in the bright modern way, and all very elegantly furnished with the delightful modern luxuries. None of the rooms are anything like so large and airy as our rooms at Limmeridge, but they all look pleasant to live in. I was terribly afraid, from what I had heard of Blackwater Park, of fatiguing antique chairs, and dismal stained glass, and musty, frouzy hangings, and all the barbarous lumber which people born without a sense of comfort accumulate about them, in defiance of the consideration due to the convenience of their friends. It is an inexpressible relief to find that the nineteenth century has invaded this strange future home of mine, and has swept the dirty "good old times" out of the way of our daily life. I dawdled away the morning--part of the time in the rooms downstairs, and part out of doors in the great square which is formed by the three sides of the house, and by the lofty iron railings and gates which protect it in front. A large circular fish-pond with stone sides, and an allegorical leaden monster in the middle, occupies the centre of the square. The pond itself is full of gold and silver fish, and is encircled by a broad belt of the softest turf I ever walked on. I loitered here on the shady side pleasantly enough till luncheon-time, and after that took my broad straw hat and wandered out alone in the warm lovely sunlight to explore the grounds. Daylight confirmed the impression which I had felt the night before, of there being too many trees at Blackwater. The house is stifled by them. They are, for the most part, young, and planted far too thickly. I suspect there must have been a ruinous cutting down of timber all over the estate before Sir Percival's time, and an angry anxiety on the part of the next possessor to fill up all the gaps as thickly and rapidly as possible. After looking about me in front of the house, I observed a flower-garden on my left hand, and walked towards it to see what I could discover in that direction. On a nearer view the garden proved to be small and poor and ill kept. I left it behind me, opened a little gate in a ring fence, and found myself in a plantation of fir-trees. A pretty winding path, artificially made, led me on among the trees, and my north-country experience soon informed me that I was approaching sandy, heathy ground. After a walk of more than half a mile, I should think, among the firs, the path took a sharp turn--the trees abruptly ceased to appear on either side of me, and I found myself standing suddenly on the margin of a vast open space, and looking down at the Blackwater lake from which the house takes its name. The ground, shelving away below me, was all sand, with a few little heathy hillocks to break the monotony of it in certain places. The lake itself had evidently once flowed to the spot on which I stood, and had been gradually wasted and dried up to less than a third of its former size. I saw its still, stagnant waters, a quarter of a mile away from me in the hollow, separated into pools and ponds by twining reeds and rushes, and little knolls of earth. On the farther bank from me the trees rose thickly again, and shut out the view, and cast their black shadows on the sluggish, shallow water. As I walked down to the lake, I saw that the ground on its farther side was damp and marshy, overgrown with rank grass and dismal willows. The water, which was clear enough on the open sandy side, where the sun shone, looked black and poisonous opposite to me, where it lay deeper under the shade of the spongy banks, and the rank overhanging thickets and tangled trees. The frogs were croaking, and the rats were slipping in and out of the shadowy water, like live shadows themselves, as I got nearer to the marshy side of the lake. I saw here, lying half in and half out of the water, the rotten wreck of an old overturned boat, with a sickly spot of sunlight glimmering through a gap in the trees on its dry surface, and a snake basking in the midst of the spot, fantastically coiled and treacherously still. Far and near the view suggested the same dreary impressions of solitude and decay, and the glorious brightness of the summer sky overhead seemed only to deepen and harden the gloom and barrenness of the wilderness on which it shone. I turned and retraced my steps to the high heathy ground, directing them a little aside from my former path towards a shabby old wooden shed, which stood on the outer skirt of the fir plantation, and which had hitherto been too unimportant to share my notice with the wide, wild prospect of the lake. On approaching the shed I found that it had once been a boat-house, and that an attempt had apparently been made to convert it afterwards into a sort of rude arbour, by placing inside it a firwood seat, a few stools, and a table. I entered the place, and sat down for a little while to rest and get my breath again. I had not been in the boat-house more than a minute when it struck me that the sound of my own quick breathing was very strangely echoed by something beneath me. I listened intently for a moment, and heard a low, thick, sobbing breath that seemed to come from the ground under the seat which I was occupying. My nerves are not easily shaken by trifles, but on this occasion I started to my feet in a fright--called out--received no answer--summoned back my recreant courage, and looked under the seat. There, crouched up in the farthest corner, lay the forlorn cause of my terror, in the shape of a poor little dog--a black and white spaniel. The creature moaned feebly when I looked at it and called to it, but never stirred. I moved away the seat and looked closer. The poor little dog's eyes were glazing fast, and there were spots of blood on its glossy white side. The misery of a weak, helpless, dumb creature is surely one of the saddest of all the mournful sights which this world can show. I lifted the poor dog in my arms as gently as I could, and contrived a sort of make-shift hammock for him to lie in, by gathering up the front of my dress all round him. In this way I took the creature, as painlessly as possible, and as fast as possible, back to the house. Finding no one in the hall I went up at once to my own sitting-room, made a bed for the dog with one of my old shawls, and rang the bell. The largest and fattest of all possible house-maids answered it, in a state of cheerful stupidity which would have provoked the patience of a saint. The girl's fat, shapeless face actually stretched into a broad grin at the sight of the wounded creature on the floor. "What do you see there to laugh at?" I asked, as angrily as if she had been a servant of my own. "Do you know whose dog it is?" "No, miss, that I certainly don't." She stooped, and looked down at the spaniel's injured side--brightened suddenly with the irradiation of a new idea--and pointing to the wound with a chuckle of satisfaction, said, "That's Baxter's doings, that is." I was so exasperated that I could have boxed her ears. "Baxter?" I said. "Who is the brute you call Baxter?" The girl grinned again more cheerfully than ever. "Bless you, miss! Baxter's the keeper, and when he finds strange dogs hunting about, he takes and shoots 'em. It's keeper's dooty miss, I think that dog will die. Here's where he's been shot, ain't it? That's Baxter's doings, that is. Baxter's doings, miss, and Baxter's dooty." I was almost wicked enough to wish that Baxter had shot the housemaid instead of the dog. Seeing that it was quite useless to expect this densely impenetrable personage to give me any help in relieving the suffering creature at our feet, I told her to request the housekeeper's attendance with my compliments. She went out exactly as she had come in, grinning from ear to ear. As the door closed on her she said to herself softly, "It's Baxter's doings and Baxter's dooty--that's what it is." The housekeeper, a person of some education and intelligence, thoughtfully brought upstairs with her some milk and some warm water. The instant she saw the dog on the floor she started and changed colour. "Why, Lord bless me," cried the housekeeper, "that must be Mrs. Catherick's dog!" "Whose?" I asked, in the utmost astonishment. "Mrs. Catherick's. You seem to know Mrs. Catherick, Miss Halcombe?" "Not personally, but I have heard of her. Does she live here? Has she had any news of her daughter?" "No, Miss Halcombe, she came here to ask for news." "When?" "Only yesterday. She said some one had reported that a stranger answering to the description of her daughter had been seen in our neighbourhood. No such report has reached us here, and no such report was known in the village, when I sent to make inquiries there on Mrs. Catherick's account. She certainly brought this poor little dog with her when she came, and I saw it trot out after her when she went away. I suppose the creature strayed into the plantations, and got shot. Where did you find it, Miss Halcombe?" "In the old shed that looks out on the lake." "Ah, yes, that is the plantation side, and the poor thing dragged itself, I suppose, to the nearest shelter, as dogs will, to die. If you can moisten its lips with the milk, Miss Halcombe, I will wash the clotted hair from the wound. I am very much afraid it is too late to do any good. However, we can but try." Mrs. Catherick! The name still rang in my ears, as if the housekeeper had only that moment surprised me by uttering it. While we were attending to the dog, the words of Walter Hartright's caution to me returned to my memory: "If ever Anne Catherick crosses your path, make better use of the opportunity, Miss Halcombe, than I made of it." The finding of the wounded spaniel had led me already to the discovery of Mrs. Catherick's visit to Blackwater Park, and that event might lead in its turn, to something more. I determined to make the most of the chance which was now offered to me, and to gain as much information as I could. "Did you say that Mrs. Catherick lived anywhere in this neighbourhood?" I asked. "Oh dear, no," said the housekeeper. "She lives at Welmingham, quite at the other end of the county--five-and-twenty miles off, at least." "I suppose you have known Mrs. Catherick for some years?" "On the contrary, Miss Halcombe, I never saw her before she came here yesterday. I had heard of her, of course, because I had heard of Sir Percival's kindness in putting her daughter under medical care. Mrs. Catherick is rather a strange person in her manners, but extremely respectable-looking. She seemed sorely put out when she found that there was no foundation--none, at least, that any of us could discover--for the report of her daughter having been seen in this neighbourhood." "I am rather interested about Mrs. Catherick," I went on, continuing the conversation as long as possible. "I wish I had arrived here soon enough to see her yesterday. Did she stay for any length of time?" "Yes," said the housekeeper, "she stayed for some time; and I think she would have remained longer, if I had not been called away to speak to a strange gentleman--a gentleman who came to ask when Sir Percival was expected back. Mrs. Catherick got up and left at once, when she heard the maid tell me what the visitor's errand was. She said to me, at parting, that there was no need to tell Sir Percival of her coming here. I thought that rather an odd remark to make, especially to a person in my responsible situation." I thought it an odd remark too. Sir Percival had certainly led me to believe, at Limmeridge, that the most perfect confidence existed between himself and Mrs. Catherick. If that was the case, why should she be anxious to have her visit at Blackwater Park kept a secret from him? "Probably," I said, seeing that the housekeeper expected me to give my opinion on Mrs. Catherick's parting words, "probably she thought the announcement of her visit might vex Sir Percival to no purpose, by reminding him that her lost daughter was not found yet. Did she talk much on that subject?" "Very little," replied the housekeeper. "She talked principally of Sir Percival, and asked a great many questions about where he had been travelling, and what sort of lady his new wife was. She seemed to be more soured and put out than distressed, by failing to find any traces of her daughter in these parts. 'I give her up,' were the last words she said that I can remember; 'I give her up, ma'am, for lost.' And from that she passed at once to her questions about Lady Glyde, wanting to know if she was a handsome, amiable lady, comely and healthy and young----Ah, dear! I thought how it would end. Look, Miss Halcombe, the poor thing is out of its misery at last!" The dog was dead. It had given a faint, sobbing cry, it had suffered an instant's convulsion of the limbs, just as those last words, "comely and healthy and young," dropped from the housekeeper's lips. The change had happened with startling suddenness--in one moment the creature lay lifeless under our hands. Eight o'clock. I have just returned from dining downstairs, in solitary state. The sunset is burning redly on the wilderness of trees that I see from my window, and I am poring over my journal again, to calm my impatience for the return of the travellers. They ought to have arrived, by my calculations, before this. How still and lonely the house is in the drowsy evening quiet! Oh me! how many minutes more before I hear the carriage wheels and run downstairs to find myself in Laura's arms? The poor little dog! I wish my first day at Blackwater Park had not been associated with death, though it is only the death of a stray animal. Welmingham--I see, on looking back through these private pages of mine, that Welmingham is the name of the place where Mrs. Catherick lives. Her note is still in my possession, the note in answer to that letter about her unhappy daughter which Sir Percival obliged me to write. One of these days, when I can find a safe opportunity, I will take the note with me by way of introduction, and try what I can make of Mrs. Catherick at a personal interview. I don't understand her wishing to conceal her visit to this place from Sir Percival's knowledge, and I don't feel half so sure, as the housekeeper seems to do, that her daughter Anne is not in the neighbourhood after all. What would Walter Hartright have said in this emergency? Poor, dear Hartright! I am beginning to feel the want of his honest advice and his willing help already. Surely I heard something. Was it a bustle of footsteps below stairs? Yes! I hear the horses' feet--I hear the rolling wheels---- II June 15th.--The confusion of their arrival has had time to subside. Two days have elapsed since the return of the travellers, and that interval has sufficed to put the new machinery of our lives at Blackwater Park in fair working order. I may now return to my journal, with some little chance of being able to continue the entries in it as collectedly as usual. I think I must begin by putting down an odd remark which has suggested itself to me since Laura came back. When two members of a family or two intimate friends are separated, and one goes abroad and one remains at home, the return of the relative or friend who has been travelling always seems to place the relative or friend who has been staying at home at a painful disadvantage when the two first meet. The sudden encounter of the new thoughts and new habits eagerly gained in the one case, with the old thoughts and old habits passively preserved in the other, seems at first to part the sympathies of the most loving relatives and the fondest friends, and to set a sudden strangeness, unexpected by both and uncontrollable by both, between them on either side. After the first happiness of my meeting with Laura was over, after we had sat down together hand in hand to recover breath enough and calmness enough to talk, I felt this strangeness instantly, and I could see that she felt it too. It has partially worn away, now that we have fallen back into most of our old habits, and it will probably disappear before long. But it has certainly had an influence over the first impressions that I have formed of her, now that we are living together again--for which reason only I have thought fit to mention it here. She has found me unaltered, but I have found her changed. Changed in person, and in one respect changed in character. I cannot absolutely say that she is less beautiful than she used to be--I can only say that she is less beautiful to me. Others, who do not look at her with my eyes and my recollections, would probably think her improved. There is more colour and more decision and roundness of outline in her face than there used to be, and her figure seems more firmly set and more sure and easy in all its movements than it was in her maiden days. But I miss something when I look at her--something that once belonged to the happy, innocent life of Laura Fairlie, and that I cannot find in Lady Glyde. There was in the old times a freshness, a softness, an ever-varying and yet ever-remaining tenderness of beauty in her face, the charm of which it is not possible to express in words, or, as poor Hartright used often to say, in painting either. This is gone. I thought I saw the faint reflection of it for a moment when she turned pale under the agitation of our sudden meeting on the evening of her return, but it has never reappeared since. None of her letters had prepared me for a personal change in her. On the contrary, they had led me to expect that her marriage had left her, in appearance at least, quite unaltered. Perhaps I read her letters wrongly in the past, and am now reading her face wrongly in the present? No matter! Whether her beauty has gained or whether it has lost in the last six months, the separation either way has made her own dear self more precious to me than ever, and that is one good result of her marriage, at any rate! The second change, the change that I have observed in her character, has not surprised me, because I was prepared for it in this case by the tone of her letters. Now that she is at home again, I find her just as unwilling to enter into any details on the subject of her married life as I had previously found her all through the time of our separation, when we could only communicate with each other by writing. At the first approach I made to the forbidden topic she put her hand on my lips with a look and gesture which touchingly, almost painfully, recalled to my memory the days of her girlhood and the happy bygone time when there were no secrets between us. "Whenever you and I are together, Marian," she said, "we shall both be happier and easier with one another, if we accept my married life for what it is, and say and think as little about it as possible. I would tell you everything, darling, about myself," she went on, nervously buckling and unbuckling the ribbon round my waist, "if my confidences could only end there. But they could not--they would lead me into confidences about my husband too; and now I am married, I think I had better avoid them, for his sake, and for your sake, and for mine. I don't say that they would distress you, or distress me--I wouldn't have you think that for the world. But--I want to be so happy, now I have got you back again, and I want you to be so happy too----" She broke off abruptly, and looked round the room, my own sitting-room, in which we were talking. "Ah!" she cried, clapping her hands with a bright smile of recognition, "another old friend found already! Your book-case, Marian--your dear-little-shabby-old-satin-wood book-case--how glad I am you brought it with you from Limmeridge! And the horrid heavy man's umbrella, that you always would walk out with when it rained! And first and foremost of all, your own dear, dark, clever, gipsy-face, looking at me just as usual! It is so like home again to be here. How can we make it more like home still? I will put my father's portrait in your room instead of in mine--and I will keep all my little treasures from Limmeridge here--and we will pass hours and hours every day with these four friendly walls round us. Oh, Marian!" she said, suddenly seating herself on a footstool at my knees, and looking up earnestly in my face, "promise you will never marry, and leave me. It is selfish to say so, but you are so much better off as a single woman--unless--unless you are very fond of your husband--but you won't be very fond of anybody but me, will you?" She stopped again, crossed my hands on my lap, and laid her face on them. "Have you been writing many letters, and receiving many letters lately?" she asked, in low, suddenly-altered tones. I understood what the question meant, but I thought it my duty not to encourage her by meeting her half way. "Have you heard from him?" she went on, coaxing me to forgive the more direct appeal on which she now ventured, by kissing my hands, upon which her face still rested. "Is he well and happy, and getting on in his profession? Has he recovered himself--and forgotten me?" She should not have asked those questions. She should have remembered her own resolution, on the morning when Sir Percival held her to her marriage engagement, and when she resigned the book of Hartright's drawings into my hands for ever. But, ah me! where is the faultless human creature who can persevere in a good resolution, without sometimes failing and falling back? Where is the woman who has ever really torn from her heart the image that has been once fixed in it by a true love? Books tell us that such unearthly creatures have existed--but what does our own experience say in answer to books? I made no attempt to remonstrate with her: perhaps, because I sincerely appreciated the fearless candour which let me see, what other women in her position might have had reasons for concealing even from their dearest friends--perhaps, because I felt, in my own heart and conscience, that in her place I should have asked the same questions and had the same thoughts. All I could honestly do was to reply that I had not written to him or heard from him lately, and then to turn the conversation to less dangerous topics. There has been much to sadden me in our interview--my first confidential interview with her since her return. The change which her marriage has produced in our relations towards each other, by placing a forbidden subject between us, for the first time in our lives; the melancholy conviction of the dearth of all warmth of feeling, of all close sympathy, between her husband and herself, which her own unwilling words now force on my mind; the distressing discovery that the influence of that ill-fated attachment still remains (no matter how innocently, how harmlessly) rooted as deeply as ever in her heart--all these are disclosures to sadden any woman who loves her as dearly, and feels for her as acutely, as I do. There is only one consolation to set against them--a consolation that ought to comfort me, and that does comfort me. All the graces and gentleness of her character--all the frank affection of her nature--all the sweet, simple, womanly charms which used to make her the darling and delight of every one who approached her, have come back to me with herself. Of my other impressions I am sometimes a little inclined to doubt. Of this last, best, happiest of all impressions, I grow more and more certain every hour in the day. Let me turn, now, from her to her travelling companions. Her husband must engage my attention first. What have I observed in Sir Percival, since his return, to improve my opinion of him? I can hardly say. Small vexations and annoyances seem to have beset him since he came back, and no man, under those circumstances, is ever presented at his best. He looks, as I think, thinner than he was when he left England. His wearisome cough and his comfortless restlessness have certainly increased. His manner--at least his manner towards me--is much more abrupt than it used to be. He greeted me, on the evening of his return, with little or nothing of the ceremony and civility of former times--no polite speeches of welcome--no appearance of extraordinary gratification at seeing me--nothing but a short shake of the hand, and a sharp "How-d'ye-do, Miss Halcombe--glad to see you again." He seemed to accept me as one of the necessary fixtures of Blackwater Park, to be satisfied at finding me established in my proper place, and then to pass me over altogether. Most men show something of their disposition in their own houses, which they have concealed elsewhere, and Sir Percival has already displayed a mania for order and regularity, which is quite a new revelation of him, so far as my previous knowledge of his character is concerned. If I take a book from the library and leave it on the table, he follows me and puts it back again. If I rise from a chair, and let it remain where I have been sitting, he carefully restores it to its proper place against the wall. He picks up stray flower-blossoms from the carpet, and mutters to himself as discontentedly as if they were hot cinders burning holes in it, and he storms at the servants if there is a crease in the tablecloth, or a knife missing from its place at the dinner-table, as fiercely as if they had personally insulted him. I have already referred to the small annoyances which appear to have troubled him since his return. Much of the alteration for the worse which I have noticed in him may be due to these. I try to persuade myself that it is so, because I am anxious not to be disheartened already about the future. It is certainly trying to any man's temper to be met by a vexation the moment he sets foot in his own house again, after a long absence, and this annoying circumstance did really happen to Sir Percival in my presence. On the evening of their arrival the housekeeper followed me into the hall to receive her master and mistress and their guests. The instant he saw her, Sir Percival asked if any one had called lately. The housekeeper mentioned to him, in reply, what she had previously mentioned to me, the visit of the strange gentleman to make inquiries about the time of her master's return. He asked immediately for the gentleman's name. No name had been left. The gentleman's business? No business had been mentioned. What was the gentleman like? The housekeeper tried to describe him, but failed to distinguish the nameless visitor by any personal peculiarity which her master could recognise. Sir Percival frowned, stamped angrily on the floor, and walked on into the house, taking no notice of anybody. Why he should have been so discomposed by a trifle I cannot say--but he was seriously discomposed, beyond all doubt. Upon the whole, it will be best, perhaps, if I abstain from forming a decisive opinion of his manners, language, and conduct in his own house, until time has enabled him to shake off the anxieties, whatever they may be, which now evidently troubled his mind in secret. I will turn over to a new page, and my pen shall let Laura's husband alone for the present. The two guests--the Count and Countess Fosco--come next in my catalogue. I will dispose of the Countess first, so as to have done with the woman as soon as possible. Laura was certainly not chargeable with any exaggeration, in writing me word that I should hardly recognise her aunt again when we met. Never before have I beheld such a change produced in a woman by her marriage as has been produced in Madame Fosco. As Eleanor Fairlie (aged seven-and-thirty), she was always talking pretentious nonsense, and always worrying the unfortunate men with every small exaction which a vain and foolish woman can impose on long-suffering male humanity. As Madame Fosco (aged three-and-forty), she sits for hours together without saying a word, frozen up in the strangest manner in herself. The hideously ridiculous love-locks which used to hang on either side of her face are now replaced by stiff little rows of very short curls, of the sort one sees in old-fashioned wigs. A plain, matronly cap covers her head, and makes her look, for the first time in her life since I remember her, like a decent woman. Nobody (putting her husband out of the question, of course) now sees in her, what everybody once saw--I mean the structure of the female skeleton, in the upper regions of the collar-bones and the shoulder-blades. Clad in quiet black or grey gowns, made high round the throat--dresses that she would have laughed at, or screamed at, as the whim of the moment inclined her, in her maiden days--she sits speechless in corners; her dry white hands (so dry that the pores of her skin look chalky) incessantly engaged, either in monotonous embroidery work or in rolling up endless cigarettes for the Count's own particular smoking. On the few occasions when her cold blue eyes are off her work, they are generally turned on her husband, with the look of mute submissive inquiry which we are all familiar with in the eyes of a faithful dog. The only approach to an inward thaw which I have yet detected under her outer covering of icy constraint, has betrayed itself, once or twice, in the form of a suppressed tigerish jealousy of any woman in the house (the maids included) to whom the Count speaks, or on whom he looks with anything approaching to special interest or attention. Except in this one particular, she is always, morning, noon, and night, indoors and out, fair weather or foul, as cold as a statue, and as impenetrable as the stone out of which it is cut. For the common purposes of society the extraordinary change thus produced in her is, beyond all doubt, a change for the better, seeing that it has transformed her into a civil, silent, unobtrusive woman, who is never in the way. How far she is really reformed or deteriorated in her secret self, is another question. I have once or twice seen sudden changes of expression on her pinched lips, and heard sudden inflexions of tone in her calm voice, which have led me to suspect that her present state of suppression may have sealed up something dangerous in her nature, which used to evaporate harmlessly in the freedom of her former life. It is quite possible that I may be altogether wrong in this idea. My own impression, however, is, that I am right. Time will show. And the magician who has wrought this wonderful transformation--the foreign husband who has tamed this once wayward English woman till her own relations hardly know her again--the Count himself? What of the Count? This in two words: He looks like a man who could tame anything. If he had married a tigress, instead of a woman, he would have tamed the tigress. If he had married me, I should have made his cigarettes, as his wife does--I should have held my tongue when he looked at me, as she holds hers. I am almost afraid to confess it, even to these secret pages. The man has interested me, has attracted me, has forced me to like him. In two short days he has made his way straight into my favourable estimation, and how he has worked the miracle is more than I can tell. It absolutely startles me, now he is in my mind, to find how plainly I see him!--how much more plainly than I see Sir Percival, or Mr. Fairlie, or Walter Hartright, or any other absent person of whom I think, with the one exception of Laura herself! I can hear his voice, as if he was speaking at this moment. I know what his conversation was yesterday, as well as if I was hearing it now. How am I to describe him? There are peculiarities in his personal appearance, his habits, and his amusements, which I should blame in the boldest terms, or ridicule in the most merciless manner, if I had seen them in another man. What is it that makes me unable to blame them, or to ridicule them in HIM? For example, he is immensely fat. Before this time I have always especially disliked corpulent humanity. I have always maintained that the popular notion of connecting excessive grossness of size and excessive good-humour as inseparable allies was equivalent to declaring, either that no people but amiable people ever get fat, or that the accidental addition of so many pounds of flesh has a directly favourable influence over the disposition of the person on whose body they accumulate. I have invariably combated both these absurd assertions by quoting examples of fat people who were as mean, vicious, and cruel as the leanest and the worst of their neighbours. I have asked whether Henry the Eighth was an amiable character? Whether Pope Alexander the Sixth was a good man? Whether Mr. Murderer and Mrs. Murderess Manning were not both unusually stout people? Whether hired nurses, proverbially as cruel a set of women as are to be found in all England, were not, for the most part, also as fat a set of women as are to be found in all England?--and so on, through dozens of other examples, modern and ancient, native and foreign, high and low. Holding these strong opinions on the subject with might and main as I do at this moment, here, nevertheless, is Count Fosco, as fat as Henry the Eighth himself, established in my favour, at one day's notice, without let or hindrance from his own odious corpulence. Marvellous indeed! Is it his face that has recommended him? It may be his face. He is a most remarkable likeness, on a large scale, of the great Napoleon. His features have Napoleon's magnificent regularity--his expression recalls the grandly calm, immovable power of the Great Soldier's face. This striking resemblance certainly impressed me, to begin with; but there is something in him besides the resemblance, which has impressed me more. I think the influence I am now trying to find is in his eyes. They are the most unfathomable grey eyes I ever saw, and they have at times a cold, clear, beautiful, irresistible glitter in them which forces me to look at him, and yet causes me sensations, when I do look, which I would rather not feel. Other parts of his face and head have their strange peculiarities. His complexion, for instance, has a singular sallow-fairness, so much at variance with the dark-brown colour of his hair, that I suspect the hair of being a wig, and his face, closely shaven all over, is smoother and freer from all marks and wrinkles than mine, though (according to Sir Percival's account of him) he is close on sixty years of age. But these are not the prominent personal characteristics which distinguish him, to my mind, from all the other men I have ever seen. The marked peculiarity which singles him out from the rank and file of humanity lies entirely, so far as I can tell at present, in the extraordinary expression and extraordinary power of his eyes. His manner and his command of our language may also have assisted him, in some degree, to establish himself in my good opinion. He has that quiet deference, that look of pleased, attentive interest in listening to a woman, and that secret gentleness in his voice in speaking to a woman, which, say what we may, we can none of us resist. Here, too, his unusual command of the English language necessarily helps him. I had often heard of the extraordinary aptitude which many Italians show in mastering our strong, hard, Northern speech; but, until I saw Count Fosco, I had never supposed it possible that any foreigner could have spoken English as he speaks it. There are times when it is almost impossible to detect by his accent that he is not a countryman of our own, and as for fluency, there are very few born Englishmen who can talk with as few stoppages and repetitions as the Count. He may construct his sentences more or less in the foreign way, but I have never yet heard him use a wrong expression, or hesitate for a moment in his choice of a word. All the smallest characteristics of this strange man have something strikingly original and perplexingly contradictory in them. Fat as he is and old as he is, his movements are astonishingly light and easy. He is as noiseless in a room as any of us women, and more than that, with all his look of unmistakable mental firmness and power, he is as nervously sensitive as the weakest of us. He starts at chance noises as inveterately as Laura herself. He winced and shuddered yesterday, when Sir Percival beat one of the spaniels, so that I felt ashamed of my own want of tenderness and sensibility by comparison with the Count. The relation of this last incident reminds me of one of his most curious peculiarities, which I have not yet mentioned--his extraordinary fondness for pet animals. Some of these he has left on the Continent, but he has brought with him to this house a cockatoo, two canary-birds, and a whole family of white mice. He attends to all the necessities of these strange favourites himself, and he has taught the creatures to be surprisingly fond of him and familiar with him. The cockatoo, a most vicious and treacherous bird towards every one else, absolutely seems to love him. When he lets it out of its cage, it hops on to his knee, and claws its way up his great big body, and rubs its top-knot against his sallow double chin in the most caressing manner imaginable. He has only to set the doors of the canaries' cages open, and to call them, and the pretty little cleverly trained creatures perch fearlessly on his hand, mount his fat outstretched fingers one by one, when he tells them to "go upstairs," and sing together as if they would burst their throats with delight when they get to the top finger. His white mice live in a little pagoda of gaily-painted wirework, designed and made by himself. They are almost as tame as the canaries, and they are perpetually let out like the canaries. They crawl all over him, popping in and out of his waistcoat, and sitting in couples, white as snow, on his capacious shoulders. He seems to be even fonder of his mice than of his other pets, smiles at them, and kisses them, and calls them by all sorts of endearing names. If it be possible to suppose an Englishman with any taste for such childish interests and amusements as these, that Englishman would certainly feel rather ashamed of them, and would be anxious to apologise for them, in the company of grown-up people. But the Count, apparently, sees nothing ridiculous in the amazing contrast between his colossal self and his frail little pets. He would blandly kiss his white mice and twitter to his canary-birds amid an assembly of English fox-hunters, and would only pity them as barbarians when they were all laughing their loudest at him. It seems hardly credible while I am writing it down, but it is certainly true, that this same man, who has all the fondness of an old maid for his cockatoo, and all the small dexterities of an organ-boy in managing his white mice, can talk, when anything happens to rouse him, with a daring independence of thought, a knowledge of books in every language, and an experience of society in half the capitals of Europe, which would make him the prominent personage of any assembly in the civilised world. This trainer of canary-birds, this architect of a pagoda for white mice, is (as Sir Percival himself has told me) one of the first experimental chemists living, and has discovered, among other wonderful inventions, a means of petrifying the body after death, so as to preserve it, as hard as marble, to the end of time. This fat, indolent, elderly man, whose nerves are so finely strung that he starts at chance noises, and winces when he sees a house-spaniel get a whipping, went into the stable-yard on the morning after his arrival, and put his hand on the head of a chained bloodhound--a beast so savage that the very groom who feeds him keeps out of his reach. His wife and I were present, and I shall not forget the scene that followed, short as it was. "Mind that dog, sir," said the groom; "he flies at everybody!" "He does that, my friend," replied the Count quietly, "because everybody is afraid of him. Let us see if he flies at me." And he laid his plump, yellow-white fingers, on which the canary-birds had been perching ten minutes before, upon the formidable brute's head, and looked him straight in the eyes. "You big dogs are all cowards," he said, addressing the animal contemptuously, with his face and the dog's within an inch of each other. "You would kill a poor cat, you infernal coward. You would fly at a starving beggar, you infernal coward. Anything that you can surprise unawares--anything that is afraid of your big body, and your wicked white teeth, and your slobbering, bloodthirsty mouth, is the thing you like to fly at. You could throttle me at this moment, you mean, miserable bully, and you daren't so much as look me in the face, because I'm not afraid of you. Will you think better of it, and try your teeth in my fat neck? Bah! not you!" He turned away, laughing at the astonishment of the men in the yard, and the dog crept back meekly to his kennel. "Ah! my nice waistcoat!" he said pathetically. "I am sorry I came here. Some of that brute's slobber has got on my pretty clean waistcoat." Those words express another of his incomprehensible oddities. He is as fond of fine clothes as the veriest fool in existence, and has appeared in four magnificent waistcoats already--all of light garish colours, and all immensely large even for him--in the two days of his residence at Blackwater Park. His tact and cleverness in small things are quite as noticeable as the singular inconsistencies in his character, and the childish triviality of his ordinary tastes and pursuits. I can see already that he means to live on excellent terms with all of us during the period of his sojourn in this place. He has evidently discovered that Laura secretly dislikes him (she confessed as much to me when I pressed her on the subject)--but he has also found out that she is extravagantly fond of flowers. Whenever she wants a nosegay he has got one to give her, gathered and arranged by himself, and greatly to my amusement, he is always cunningly provided with a duplicate, composed of exactly the same flowers, grouped in exactly the same way, to appease his icily jealous wife before she can so much as think herself aggrieved. His management of the Countess (in public) is a sight to see. He bows to her, he habitually addresses her as "my angel," he carries his canaries to pay her little visits on his fingers and to sing to her, he kisses her hand when she gives him his cigarettes; he presents her with sugar-plums in return, which he puts into her mouth playfully, from a box in his pocket. The rod of iron with which he rules her never appears in company--it is a private rod, and is always kept upstairs. His method of recommending himself to me is entirely different. He flatters my vanity by talking to me as seriously and sensibly as if I was a man. Yes! I can find him out when I am away from him--I know he flatters my vanity, when I think of him up here in my own room--and yet, when I go downstairs, and get into his company again, he will blind me again, and I shall be flattered again, just as if I had never found him out at all! He can manage me as he manages his wife and Laura, as he managed the bloodhound in the stable-yard, as he manages Sir Percival himself, every hour in the day. "My good Percival! how I like your rough English humour!"--"My good Percival! how I enjoy your solid English sense!" He puts the rudest remarks Sir Percival can make on his effeminate tastes and amusements quietly away from him in that manner--always calling the baronet by his Christian name, smiling at him with the calmest superiority, patting him on the shoulder, and bearing with him benignantly, as a good-humoured father bears with a wayward son. The interest which I really cannot help feeling in this strangely original man has led me to question Sir Percival about his past life. Sir Percival either knows little, or will tell me little, about it. He and the Count first met many years ago, at Rome, under the dangerous circumstances to which I have alluded elsewhere. Since that time they have been perpetually together in London, in Paris, and in Vienna--but never in Italy again; the Count having, oddly enough, not crossed the frontiers of his native country for years past. Perhaps he has been made the victim of some political persecution? At all events, he seems to be patriotically anxious not to lose sight of any of his own countrymen who may happen to be in England. On the evening of his arrival he asked how far we were from the nearest town, and whether we knew of any Italian gentlemen who might happen to be settled there. He is certainly in correspondence with people on the Continent, for his letters have all sorts of odd stamps on them, and I saw one for him this morning, waiting in his place at the breakfast-table, with a huge, official-looking seal on it. Perhaps he is in correspondence with his government? And yet, that is hardly to be reconciled either with my other idea that he may be a political exile. How much I seem to have written about Count Fosco! And what does it all amount to?--as poor, dear Mr. Gilmore would ask, in his impenetrable business-like way I can only repeat that I do assuredly feel, even on this short acquaintance, a strange, half-willing, half-unwilling liking for the Count. He seems to have established over me the same sort of ascendency which he has evidently gained over Sir Percival. Free, and even rude, as he may occasionally be in his manner towards his fat friend, Sir Percival is nevertheless afraid, as I can plainly see, of giving any serious offence to the Count. I wonder whether I am afraid too? I certainly never saw a man, in all my experience, whom I should be so sorry to have for an enemy. Is this because I like him, or because I am afraid of him? Chi sa?--as Count Fosco might say in his own language. Who knows? June 16th.--Something to chronicle to-day besides my own ideas and impressions. A visitor has arrived--quite unknown to Laura and to me, and apparently quite unexpected by Sir Percival. We were all at lunch, in the room with the new French windows that open into the verandah, and the Count (who devours pastry as I have never yet seen it devoured by any human beings but girls at boarding-schools) had just amused us by asking gravely for his fourth tart--when the servant entered to announce the visitor. "Mr. Merriman has just come, Sir Percival, and wishes to see you immediately." Sir Percival started, and looked at the man with an expression of angry alarm. "Mr. Merriman!" he repeated, as if he thought his own ears must have deceived him. "Yes, Sir Percival--Mr. Merriman, from London." "Where is he?" "In the library, Sir Percival." He left the table the instant the last answer was given, and hurried out of the room without saying a word to any of us. "Who is Mr. Merriman?" asked Laura, appealing to me. "I have not the least idea," was all I could say in reply. The Count had finished his fourth tart, and had gone to a side-table to look after his vicious cockatoo. He turned round to us with the bird perched on his shoulder. "Mr. Merriman is Sir Percival's solicitor," he said quietly. Sir Percival's solicitor. It was a perfectly straightforward answer to Laura's question, and yet, under the circumstances, it was not satisfactory. If Mr. Merriman had been specially sent for by his client, there would have been nothing very wonderful in his leaving town to obey the summons. But when a lawyer travels from London to Hampshire without being sent for, and when his arrival at a gentleman's house seriously startles the gentleman himself, it may be safely taken for granted that the legal visitor is the bearer of some very important and very unexpected news--news which may be either very good or very bad, but which cannot, in either case, be of the common everyday kind. Laura and I sat silent at the table for a quarter of an hour or more, wondering uneasily what had happened, and waiting for the chance of Sir Percival's speedy return. There were no signs of his return, and we rose to leave the room. The Count, attentive as usual, advanced from the corner in which he had been feeding his cockatoo, with the bird still perched on his shoulder, and opened the door for us. Laura and Madame Fosco went out first. Just as I was on the point of following them he made a sign with his hand, and spoke to me, before I passed him, in the oddest manner. "Yes," he said, quietly answering the unexpressed idea at that moment in my mind, as if I had plainly confided it to him in so many words--"yes, Miss Halcombe, something HAS happened." I was on the point of answering, "I never said so," but the vicious cockatoo ruffled his clipped wings and gave a screech that set all my nerves on edge in an instant, and made me only too glad to get out of the room. I joined Laura at the foot of the stairs. The thought in her mind was the same as the thought in mine, which Count Fosco had surprised, and when she spoke her words were almost the echo of his. She, too, said to me secretly that she was afraid something had happened. III June 16th.--I have a few lines more to add to this day's entry before I go to bed to-night. About two hours after Sir Percival rose from the luncheon-table to receive his solicitor, Mr. Merriman, in the library, I left my room alone to take a walk in the plantations. Just as I was at the end of the landing the library door opened and the two gentlemen came out. Thinking it best not to disturb them by appearing on the stairs, I resolved to defer going down till they had crossed the hall. Although they spoke to each other in guarded tones, their words were pronounced with sufficient distinctness of utterance to reach my ears. "Make your mind easy, Sir Percival," I heard the lawyer say; "it all rests with Lady Glyde." I had turned to go back to my own room for a minute or two, but the sound of Laura's name on the lips of a stranger stopped me instantly. I daresay it was very wrong and very discreditable to listen, but where is the woman, in the whole range of our sex, who can regulate her actions by the abstract principles of honour, when those principles point one way, and when her affections, and the interests which grow out of them, point the other? I listened--and under similar circumstances I would listen again--yes! with my ear at the keyhole, if I could not possibly manage it in any other way. "You quite understand, Sir Percival," the lawyer went on. "Lady Glyde is to sign her name in the presence of a witness--or of two witnesses, if you wish to be particularly careful--and is then to put her finger on the seal and say, 'I deliver this as my act and deed.' If that is done in a week's time the arrangement will be perfectly successful, and the anxiety will be all over. If not----" "What do you mean by 'if not'?" asked Sir Percival angrily. "If the thing must be done it SHALL be done. I promise you that, Merriman." "Just so, Sir Percival--just so; but there are two alternatives in all transactions, and we lawyers like to look both of them in the face boldly. If through any extraordinary circumstance the arrangement should not be made, I think I may be able to get the parties to accept bills at three months. But how the money is to be raised when the bills fall due----" "Damn the bills! The money is only to be got in one way, and in that way, I tell you again, it SHALL be got. Take a glass of wine, Merriman, before you go." "Much obliged, Sir Percival, I have not a moment to lose if I am to catch the up-train. You will let me know as soon as the arrangement is complete? and you will not forget the caution I recommended----" "Of course I won't. There's the dog-cart at the door for you. My groom will get you to the station in no time. Benjamin, drive like mad! Jump in. If Mr. Merriman misses the train you lose your place. Hold fast, Merriman, and if you are upset trust to the devil to save his own." With that parting benediction the baronet turned about and walked back to the library. I had not heard much, but the little that had reached my ears was enough to make me feel uneasy. The "something" that "had happened" was but too plainly a serious money embarrassment, and Sir Percival's relief from it depended upon Laura. The prospect of seeing her involved in her husband's secret difficulties filled me with dismay, exaggerated, no doubt, by my ignorance of business and my settled distrust of Sir Percival. Instead of going out, as I proposed, I went back immediately to Laura's room to tell her what I had heard. She received my bad news so composedly as to surprise me. She evidently knows more of her husband's character and her husband's embarrassments than I have suspected up to this time. "I feared as much," she said, "when I heard of that strange gentleman who called, and declined to leave his name." "Who do you think the gentleman was, then?" I asked. "Some person who has heavy claims on Sir Percival," she answered, "and who has been the cause of Mr. Merriman's visit here to-day." "Do you know anything about those claims?" "No, I know no particulars." "You will sign nothing, Laura, without first looking at it?" "Certainly not, Marian. Whatever I can harmlessly and honestly do to help him I will do--for the sake of making your life and mine, love, as easy and as happy as possible. But I will do nothing ignorantly, which we might, one day, have reason to feel ashamed of. Let us say no more about it now. You have got your hat on--suppose we go and dream away the afternoon in the grounds?" On leaving the house we directed our steps to the nearest shade. As we passed an open space among the trees in front of the house, there was Count Fosco, slowly walking backwards and forwards on the grass, sunning himself in the full blaze of the hot June afternoon. He had a broad straw hat on, with a violet-coloured ribbon round it. A blue blouse, with profuse white fancy-work over the bosom, covered his prodigious body, and was girt about the place where his waist might once have been with a broad scarlet leather belt. Nankeen trousers, displaying more white fancy-work over the ankles, and purple morocco slippers, adorned his lower extremities. He was singing Figaro's famous song in the Barber of Seville, with that crisply fluent vocalisation which is never heard from any other than an Italian throat, accompanying himself on the concertina, which he played with ecstatic throwings-up of his arms, and graceful twistings and turnings of his head, like a fat St. Cecilia masquerading in male attire. "Figaro qua! Figaro la! Figaro su! Figaro giu!" sang the Count, jauntily tossing up the concertina at arm's length, and bowing to us, on one side of the instrument, with the airy grace and elegance of Figaro himself at twenty years of age. "Take my word for it, Laura, that man knows something of Sir Percival's embarrassments," I said, as we returned the Count's salutation from a safe distance. "What makes you think that?" she asked. "How should he have known, otherwise, that Mr. Merriman was Sir Percival's solicitor?" I rejoined. "Besides, when I followed you out of the luncheon-room, he told me, without a single word of inquiry on my part, that something had happened. Depend upon it, he knows more than we do." "Don't ask him any questions if he does. Don't take him into our confidence!" "You seem to dislike him, Laura, in a very determined manner. What has he said or done to justify you?" "Nothing, Marian. On the contrary, he was all kindness and attention on our journey home, and he several times checked Sir Percival's outbreaks of temper, in the most considerate manner towards me. Perhaps I dislike him because he has so much more power over my husband than I have. Perhaps it hurts my pride to be under any obligations to his interference. All I know is, that I DO dislike him." The rest of the day and evening passed quietly enough. The Count and I played at chess. For the first two games he politely allowed me to conquer him, and then, when he saw that I had found him out, begged my pardon, and at the third game checkmated me in ten minutes. Sir Percival never once referred, all through the evening, to the lawyer's visit. But either that event, or something else, had produced a singular alteration for the better in him. He was as polite and agreeable to all of us, as he used to be in the days of his probation at Limmeridge, and he was so amazingly attentive and kind to his wife, that even icy Madame Fosco was roused into looking at him with a grave surprise. What does this mean? I think I can guess--I am afraid Laura can guess--and I am sure Count Fosco knows. I caught Sir Percival looking at him for approval more than once in the course of the evening. June 17th.--A day of events. I most fervently hope I may not have to add, a day of disasters as well. Sir Percival was as silent at breakfast as he had been the evening before, on the subject of the mysterious "arrangement" (as the lawyer called it) which is hanging over our heads. An hour afterwards, however, he suddenly entered the morning-room, where his wife and I were waiting, with our hats on, for Madame Fosco to join us, and inquired for the Count. "We expect to see him here directly," I said. "The fact is," Sir Percival went on, walking nervously about the room, "I want Fosco and his wife in the library, for a mere business formality, and I want you there, Laura, for a minute too." He stopped, and appeared to notice, for the first time, that we were in our walking costume. "Have you just come in?" he asked, "or were you just going out?" "We were all thinking of going to the lake this morning," said Laura. "But if you have any other arrangement to propose----" "No, no," he answered hastily. "My arrangement can wait. After lunch will do as well for it as after breakfast. All going to the lake, eh? A good idea. Let's have an idle morning--I'll be one of the party." There was no mistaking his manner, even if it had been possible to mistake the uncharacteristic readiness which his words expressed, to submit his own plans and projects to the convenience of others. He was evidently relieved at finding any excuse for delaying the business formality in the library, to which his own words had referred. My heart sank within me as I drew the inevitable inference. The Count and his wife joined us at that moment. The lady had her husband's embroidered tobacco-pouch, and her store of paper in her hand, for the manufacture of the eternal cigarettes. The gentleman, dressed, as usual, in his blouse and straw hat, carried the gay little pagoda-cage, with his darling white mice in it, and smiled on them, and on us, with a bland amiability which it was impossible to resist. "With your kind permission," said the Count, "I will take my small family here--my poor-little-harmless-pretty-Mouseys, out for an airing along with us. There are dogs about the house, and shall I leave my forlorn white children at the mercies of the dogs? Ah, never!" He chirruped paternally at his small white children through the bars of the pagoda, and we all left the house for the lake. In the plantation Sir Percival strayed away from us. It seems to be part of his restless disposition always to separate himself from his companions on these occasions, and always to occupy himself when he is alone in cutting new walking-sticks for his own use. The mere act of cutting and lopping at hazard appears to please him. He has filled the house with walking-sticks of his own making, not one of which he ever takes up for a second time. When they have been once used his interest in them is all exhausted, and he thinks of nothing but going on and making more. At the old boat-house he joined us again. I will put down the conversation that ensued when we were all settled in our places exactly as it passed. It is an important conversation, so far as I am concerned, for it has seriously disposed me to distrust the influence which Count Fosco has exercised over my thoughts and feelings, and to resist it for the future as resolutely as I can. The boat-house was large enough to hold us all, but Sir Percival remained outside trimming the last new stick with his pocket-axe. We three women found plenty of room on the large seat. Laura took her work, and Madame Fosco began her cigarettes. I, as usual, had nothing to do. My hands always were, and always will be, as awkward as a man's. The Count good-humouredly took a stool many sizes too small for him, and balanced himself on it with his back against the side of the shed, which creaked and groaned under his weight. He put the pagoda-cage on his lap, and let out the mice to crawl over him as usual. They are pretty, innocent-looking little creatures, but the sight of them creeping about a man's body is for some reason not pleasant to me. It excites a strange responsive creeping in my own nerves, and suggests hideous ideas of men dying in prison with the crawling creatures of the dungeon preying on them undisturbed. The morning was windy and cloudy, and the rapid alternations of shadow and sunlight over the waste of the lake made the view look doubly wild, weird, and gloomy. "Some people call that picturesque," said Sir Percival, pointing over the wide prospect with his half-finished walking-stick. "I call it a blot on a gentleman's property. In my great-grandfather's time the lake flowed to this place. Look at it now! It is not four feet deep anywhere, and it is all puddles and pools. I wish I could afford to drain it, and plant it all over. My bailiff (a superstitious idiot) says he is quite sure the lake has a curse on it, like the Dead Sea. What do you think, Fosco? It looks just the place for a murder, doesn't it?" "My good Percival," remonstrated the Count. "What is your solid English sense thinking of? The water is too shallow to hide the body, and there is sand everywhere to print off the murderer's footsteps. It is, upon the whole, the very worst place for a murder that I ever set my eyes on." "Humbug!" said Sir Percival, cutting away fiercely at his stick. "You know what I mean. The dreary scenery, the lonely situation. If you choose to understand me, you can--if you don't choose, I am not going to trouble myself to explain my meaning." "And why not," asked the Count, "when your meaning can be explained by anybody in two words? If a fool was going to commit a murder, your lake is the first place he would choose for it. If a wise man was going to commit a murder, your lake is the last place he would choose for it. Is that your meaning? If it is, there is your explanation for you ready made. Take it, Percival, with your good Fosco's blessing." Laura looked at the Count with her dislike for him appearing a little too plainly in her face. He was so busy with his mice that he did not notice her. "I am sorry to hear the lake-view connected with anything so horrible as the idea of murder," she said. "And if Count Fosco must divide murderers into classes, I think he has been very unfortunate in his choice of expressions. To describe them as fools only seems like treating them with an indulgence to which they have no claim. And to describe them as wise men sounds to me like a downright contradiction in terms. I have always heard that truly wise men are truly good men, and have a horror of crime." "My dear lady," said the Count, "those are admirable sentiments, and I have seen them stated at the tops of copy-books." He lifted one of the white mice in the palm of his hand, and spoke to it in his whimsical way. "My pretty little smooth white rascal," he said, "here is a moral lesson for you. A truly wise mouse is a truly good mouse. Mention that, if you please, to your companions, and never gnaw at the bars of your cage again as long as you live." "It is easy to turn everything into ridicule," said Laura resolutely; "but you will not find it quite so easy, Count Fosco, to give me an instance of a wise man who has been a great criminal." The Count shrugged his huge shoulders, and smiled on Laura in the friendliest manner. "Most true!" he said. "The fool's crime is the crime that is found out, and the wise man's crime is the crime that is NOT found out. If I could give you an instance, it would not be the instance of a wise man. Dear Lady Glyde, your sound English common sense has been too much for me. It is checkmate for me this time, Miss Halcombe--ha?" "Stand to your guns, Laura," sneered Sir Percival, who had been listening in his place at the door. "Tell him next, that crimes cause their own detection. There's another bit of copy-book morality for you, Fosco. Crimes cause their own detection. What infernal humbug!" "I believe it to be true," said Laura quietly. Sir Percival burst out laughing, so violently, so outrageously, that he quite startled us all--the Count more than any of us. "I believe it too," I said, coming to Laura's rescue. Sir Percival, who had been unaccountably amused at his wife's remark, was just as unaccountably irritated by mine. He struck the new stick savagely on the sand, and walked away from us. "Poor dear Percival!" cried Count Fosco, looking after him gaily, "he is the victim of English spleen. But, my dear Miss Halcombe, my dear Lady Glyde, do you really believe that crimes cause their own detection? And you, my angel," he continued, turning to his wife, who had not uttered a word yet, "do you think so too?" "I wait to be instructed," replied the Countess, in tones of freezing reproof, intended for Laura and me, "before I venture on giving my opinion in the presence of well-informed men." "Do you, indeed?" I said. "I remember the time, Countess, when you advocated the Rights of Women, and freedom of female opinion was one of them." "What is your view of the subject, Count?" asked Madame Fosco, calmly proceeding with her cigarettes, and not taking the least notice of me. The Count stroked one of his white mice reflectively with his chubby little finger before he answered. "It is truly wonderful," he said, "how easily Society can console itself for the worst of its shortcomings with a little bit of clap-trap. The machinery it has set up for the detection of crime is miserably ineffective--and yet only invent a moral epigram, saying that it works well, and you blind everybody to its blunders from that moment. Crimes cause their own detection, do they? And murder will out (another moral epigram), will it? Ask Coroners who sit at inquests in large towns if that is true, Lady Glyde. Ask secretaries of life-assurance companies if that is true, Miss Halcombe. Read your own public journals. In the few cases that get into the newspapers, are there not instances of slain bodies found, and no murderers ever discovered? Multiply the cases that are reported by the cases that are NOT reported, and the bodies that are found by the bodies that are NOT found, and what conclusion do you come to? This. That there are foolish criminals who are discovered, and wise criminals who escape. The hiding of a crime, or the detection of a crime, what is it? A trial of skill between the police on one side, and the individual on the other. When the criminal is a brutal, ignorant fool, the police in nine cases out of ten win. When the criminal is a resolute, educated, highly-intelligent man, the police in nine cases out of ten lose. If the police win, you generally hear all about it. If the police lose, you generally hear nothing. And on this tottering foundation you build up your comfortable moral maxim that Crime causes its own detection! Yes--all the crime you know of. And what of the rest?" "Devilish true, and very well put," cried a voice at the entrance of the boat-house. Sir Percival had recovered his equanimity, and had come back while we were listening to the Count. "Some of it may be true," I said, "and all of it may be very well put. But I don't see why Count Fosco should celebrate the victory of the criminal over Society with so much exultation, or why you, Sir Percival, should applaud him so loudly for doing it." "Do you hear that, Fosco?" asked Sir Percival. "Take my advice, and make your peace with your audience. Tell them virtue's a fine thing--they like that, I can promise you." The Count laughed inwardly and silently, and two of the white mice in his waistcoat, alarmed by the internal convulsion going on beneath them, darted out in a violent hurry, and scrambled into their cage again. "The ladies, my good Percival, shall tell me about virtue," he said. "They are better authorities than I am, for they know what virtue is, and I don't." "You hear him?" said Sir Percival. "Isn't it awful?" "It is true," said the Count quietly. "I am a citizen of the world, and I have met, in my time, with so many different sorts of virtue, that I am puzzled, in my old age, to say which is the right sort and which is the wrong. Here, in England, there is one virtue. And there, in China, there is another virtue. And John Englishman says my virtue is the genuine virtue. And John Chinaman says my virtue is the genuine virtue. And I say Yes to one, or No to the other, and am just as much bewildered about it in the case of John with the top-boots as I am in the case of John with the pigtail. Ah, nice little Mousey! come, kiss me. What is your own private notion of a virtuous man, my pret-pret-pretty? A man who keeps you warm, and gives you plenty to eat. And a good notion, too, for it is intelligible, at the least." "Stay a minute, Count," I interposed. "Accepting your illustration, surely we have one unquestionable virtue in England which is wanting in China. The Chinese authorities kill thousands of innocent people on the most frivolous pretexts. We in England are free from all guilt of that kind--we commit no such dreadful crime--we abhor reckless bloodshed with all our hearts." "Quite right, Marian," said Laura. "Well thought of, and well expressed." "Pray allow the Count to proceed," said Madame Fosco, with stern civility. "You will find, young ladies, that HE never speaks without having excellent reasons for all that he says." "Thank you, my angel," replied the Count. "Have a bon-bon?" He took out of his pocket a pretty little inlaid box, and placed it open on the table. "Chocolat a la Vanille," cried the impenetrable man, cheerfully rattling the sweetmeats in the box, and bowing all round. "Offered by Fosco as an act of homage to the charming society." "Be good enough to go on, Count," said his wife, with a spiteful reference to myself. "Oblige me by answering Miss Halcombe." "Miss Halcombe is unanswerable," replied the polite Italian; "that is to say, so far as she goes. Yes! I agree with her. John Bull does abhor the crimes of John Chinaman. He is the quickest old gentleman at finding out faults that are his neighbours', and the slowest old gentleman at finding out the faults that are his own, who exists on the face of creation. Is he so very much better in this way than the people whom he condemns in their way? English Society, Miss Halcombe, is as often the accomplice as it is the enemy of crime. Yes! yes! Crime is in this country what crime is in other countries--a good friend to a man and to those about him as often as it is an enemy. A great rascal provides for his wife and family. The worse he is the more he makes them the objects for your sympathy. He often provides also for himself. A profligate spendthrift who is always borrowing money will get more from his friends than the rigidly honest man who only borrows of them once, under pressure of the direst want. In the one case the friends will not be at all surprised, and they will give. In the other case they will be very much surprised, and they will hesitate. Is the prison that Mr. Scoundrel lives in at the end of his career a more uncomfortable place than the workhouse that Mr. Honesty lives in at the end of his career? When John-Howard-Philanthropist wants to relieve misery he goes to find it in prisons, where crime is wretched--not in huts and hovels, where virtue is wretched too. Who is the English poet who has won the most universal sympathy--who makes the easiest of all subjects for pathetic writing and pathetic painting? That nice young person who began life with a forgery, and ended it by a suicide--your dear, romantic, interesting Chatterton. Which gets on best, do you think, of two poor starving dressmakers--the woman who resists temptation and is honest, or the woman who falls under temptation and steals? You all know that the stealing is the making of that second woman's fortune--it advertises her from length to breadth of good-humoured, charitable England--and she is relieved, as the breaker of a commandment, when she would have been left to starve, as the keeper of it. Come here, my jolly little Mouse! Hey! presto! pass! I transform you, for the time being, into a respectable lady. Stop there, in the palm of my great big hand, my dear, and listen. You marry the poor man whom you love, Mouse, and one half your friends pity, and the other half blame you. And now, on the contrary, you sell yourself for gold to a man you don't care for, and all your friends rejoice over you, and a minister of public worship sanctions the base horror of the vilest of all human bargains, and smiles and smirks afterwards at your table, if you are polite enough to ask him to breakfast. Hey! presto! pass! Be a mouse again, and squeak. If you continue to be a lady much longer, I shall have you telling me that Society abhors crime--and then, Mouse, I shall doubt if your own eyes and ears are really of any use to you. Ah! I am a bad man, Lady Glyde, am I not? I say what other people only think, and when all the rest of the world is in a conspiracy to accept the mask for the true face, mine is the rash hand that tears off the plump pasteboard, and shows the bare bones beneath. I will get up on my big elephant's legs, before I do myself any more harm in your amiable estimations--I will get up and take a little airy walk of my own. Dear ladies, as your excellent Sheridan said, I go--and leave my character behind me." He got up, put the cage on the table, and paused for a moment to count the mice in it. "One, two, three, four----Ha!" he cried, with a look of horror, "where, in the name of Heaven, is the fifth--the youngest, the whitest, the most amiable of all--my Benjamin of mice!" Neither Laura nor I were in any favorable disposition to be amused. The Count's glib cynicism had revealed a new aspect of his nature from which we both recoiled. But it was impossible to resist the comical distress of so very large a man at the loss of so very small a mouse. We laughed in spite of ourselves; and when Madame Fosco rose to set the example of leaving the boat-house empty, so that her husband might search it to its remotest corners, we rose also to follow her out. Before we had taken three steps, the Count's quick eye discovered the lost mouse under the seat that we had been occupying. He pulled aside the bench, took the little animal up in his hand, and then suddenly stopped, on his knees, looking intently at a particular place on the ground just beneath him. When he rose to his feet again, his hand shook so that he could hardly put the mouse back in the cage, and his face was of a faint livid yellow hue all over. "Percival!" he said, in a whisper. "Percival! come here." Sir Percival had paid no attention to any of us for the last ten minutes. He had been entirely absorbed in writing figures on the sand, and then rubbing them out again with the point of his stick. "What's the matter now?" he asked, lounging carelessly into the boat-house. "Do you see nothing there?" said the Count, catching him nervously by the collar with one hand, and pointing with the other to the place near which he had found the mouse. "I see plenty of dry sand," answered Sir Percival, "and a spot of dirt in the middle of it." "Not dirt," whispered the Count, fastening the other hand suddenly on Sir Percival's collar, and shaking it in his agitation. "Blood." Laura was near enough to hear the last word, softly as he whispered it. She turned to me with a look of terror. "Nonsense, my dear," I said. "There is no need to be alarmed. It is only the blood of a poor little stray dog." Everybody was astonished, and everybody's eyes were fixed on me inquiringly. "How do you know that?" asked Sir Percival, speaking first. "I found the dog here, dying, on the day when you all returned from abroad," I replied. "The poor creature had strayed into the plantation, and had been shot by your keeper." "Whose dog was it?" inquired Sir Percival. "Not one of mine?" "Did you try to save the poor thing?" asked Laura earnestly. "Surely you tried to save it, Marian?" "Yes," I said, "the housekeeper and I both did our best--but the dog was mortally wounded, and he died under our hands." "Whose dog was it?" persisted Sir Percival, repeating his question a little irritably. "One of mine?" "No, not one of yours." "Whose then? Did the housekeeper know?" The housekeeper's report of Mrs. Catherick's desire to conceal her visit to Blackwater Park from Sir Percival's knowledge recurred to my memory the moment he put that last question, and I half doubted the discretion of answering it; but in my anxiety to quiet the general alarm, I had thoughtlessly advanced too far to draw back, except at the risk of exciting suspicion, which might only make matters worse. There was nothing for it but to answer at once, without reference to results. "Yes," I said. "The housekeeper knew. She told me it was Mrs. Catherick's dog." Sir Percival had hitherto remained at the inner end of the boat-house with Count Fosco, while I spoke to him from the door. But the instant Mrs. Catherick's name passed my lips he pushed by the Count roughly, and placed himself face to face with me under the open daylight. "How came the housekeeper to know it was Mrs. Catherick's dog?" he asked, fixing his eyes on mine with a frowning interest and attention, which half angered, half startled me. "She knew it," I said quietly, "because Mrs. Catherick brought the dog with her." "Brought it with her? Where did she bring it with her?" "To this house." "What the devil did Mrs. Catherick want at this house?" The manner in which he put the question was even more offensive than the language in which he expressed it. I marked my sense of his want of common politeness by silently turning away from him. Just as I moved the Count's persuasive hand was laid on his shoulder, and the Count's mellifluous voice interposed to quiet him. "My dear Percival!--gently--gently!" Sir Percival looked round in his angriest manner. The Count only smiled and repeated the soothing application. "Gently, my good friend--gently!" Sir Percival hesitated, followed me a few steps, and, to my great surprise, offered me an apology. "I beg your pardon, Miss Halcombe," he said. "I have been out of order lately, and I am afraid I am a little irritable. But I should like to know what Mrs. Catherick could possibly want here. When did she come? Was the housekeeper the only person who saw her?" "The only person," I answered, "so far as I know." The Count interposed again. "In that case why not question the housekeeper?" he said. "Why not go, Percival, to the fountain-head of information at once?" "Quite right!" said Sir Percival. "Of course the housekeeper is the first person to question. Excessively stupid of me not to see it myself." With those words he instantly left us to return to the house. The motive of the Count's interference, which had puzzled me at first, betrayed itself when Sir Percival's back was turned. He had a host of questions to put to me about Mrs. Catherick, and the cause of her visit to Blackwater Park, which he could scarcely have asked in his friend's presence. I made my answers as short as I civilly could, for I had already determined to check the least approach to any exchanging of confidences between Count Fosco and myself. Laura, however, unconsciously helped him to extract all my information, by making inquiries herself, which left me no alternative but to reply to her, or to appear in the very unenviable and very false character of a depositary of Sir Percival's secrets. The end of it was, that, in about ten minutes' time, the Count knew as much as I know of Mrs. Catherick, and of the events which have so strangely connected us with her daughter, Anne, from the time when Hartright met with her to this day. The effect of my information on him was, in one respect, curious enough. Intimately as he knows Sir Percival, and closely as he appears to be associated with Sir Percival's private affairs in general, he is certainly as far as I am from knowing anything of the true story of Anne Catherick. The unsolved mystery in connection with this unhappy woman is now rendered doubly suspicious, in my eyes, by the absolute conviction which I feel, that the clue to it has been hidden by Sir Percival from the most intimate friend he has in the world. It was impossible to mistake the eager curiosity of the Count's look and manner while he drank in greedily every word that fell from my lips. There are many kinds of curiosity, I know--but there is no misinterpreting the curiosity of blank surprise: if I ever saw it in my life I saw it in the Count's face. While the questions and answers were going on, we had all been strolling quietly back through the plantation. As soon as we reached the house the first object that we saw in front of it was Sir Percival's dog-cart, with the horse put to and the groom waiting by it in his stable-jacket. If these unexpected appearances were to be trusted, the examination of the house-keeper had produced important results already. "A fine horse, my friend," said the Count, addressing the groom with the most engaging familiarity of manner, "You are going to drive out?" "I am not going, sir," replied the man, looking at his stable-jacket, and evidently wondering whether the foreign gentleman took it for his livery. "My master drives himself." "Aha!" said the Count, "does he indeed? I wonder he gives himself the trouble when he has got you to drive for him. Is he going to fatigue that nice, shining, pretty horse by taking him very far to-day?" "I don't know, sir," answered the man. "The horse is a mare, if you please, sir. She's the highest-couraged thing we've got in the stables. Her name's Brown Molly, sir, and she'll go till she drops. Sir Percival usually takes Isaac of York for the short distances." "And your shining courageous Brown Molly for the long?" "Logical inference, Miss Halcombe," continued the Count, wheeling round briskly, and addressing me. "Sir Percival is going a long distance to-day." I made no reply. I had my own inferences to draw, from what I knew through the housekeeper and from what I saw before me, and I did not choose to share them with Count Fosco. When Sir Percival was in Cumberland (I thought to myself), he walked away a long distance, on Anne's account, to question the family at Todd's Corner. Now he is in Hampshire, is he going to drive away a long distance, on Anne's account again, to question Mrs. Catherick at Welmingham? We all entered the house. As we crossed the hall Sir Percival came out from the library to meet us. He looked hurried and pale and anxious--but for all that, he was in his most polite mood when he spoke to us. "I am sorry to say I am obliged to leave you," he began--"a long drive--a matter that I can't very well put off. I shall be back in good time to-morrow--but before I go I should like that little business-formality, which I spoke of this morning, to be settled. Laura, will you come into the library? It won't take a minute--a mere formality. Countess, may I trouble you also? I want you and the Countess, Fosco, to be witnesses to a signature--nothing more. Come in at once and get it over." He held the library door open until they had passed in, followed them, and shut it softly. I remained, for a moment afterwards, standing alone in the hall, with my heart beating fast and my mind misgiving me sadly. Then I went on to the staircase, and ascended slowly to my own room. IV June 17th.--Just as my hand was on the door of my room, I heard Sir Percival's voice calling to me from below. "I must beg you to come downstairs again," he said. "It is Fosco's fault, Miss Halcombe, not mine. He has started some nonsensical objection to his wife being one of the witnesses, and has obliged me to ask you to join us in the library." I entered the room immediately with Sir Percival. Laura was waiting by the writing-table, twisting and turning her garden hat uneasily in her hands. Madame Fosco sat near her, in an arm-chair, imperturbably admiring her husband, who stood by himself at the other end of the library, picking off the dead leaves from the flowers in the window. The moment I appeared the Count advanced to meet me, and to offer his explanations. "A thousand pardons, Miss Halcombe," he said. "You know the character which is given to my countrymen by the English? We Italians are all wily and suspicious by nature, in the estimation of the good John Bull. Set me down, if you please, as being no better than the rest of my race. I am a wily Italian and a suspicious Italian. You have thought so yourself, dear lady, have you not? Well! it is part of my wiliness and part of my suspicion to object to Madame Fosco being a witness to Lady Glyde's signature, when I am also a witness myself." "There is not the shadow of a reason for his objection," interposed Sir Percival. "I have explained to him that the law of England allows Madame Fosco to witness a signature as well as her husband." "I admit it," resumed the Count. "The law of England says, Yes, but the conscience of Fosco says, No." He spread out his fat fingers on the bosom of his blouse, and bowed solemnly, as if he wished to introduce his conscience to us all, in the character of an illustrious addition to the society. "What this document which Lady Glyde is about to sign may be," he continued, "I neither know nor desire to know. I only say this, circumstances may happen in the future which may oblige Percival, or his representatives, to appeal to the two witnesses, in which case it is certainly desirable that those witnesses should represent two opinions which are perfectly independent the one of the other. This cannot be if my wife signs as well as myself, because we have but one opinion between us, and that opinion is mine. I will not have it cast in my teeth, at some future day, that Madame Fosco acted under my coercion, and was, in plain fact, no witness at all. I speak in Percival's interest, when I propose that my name shall appear (as the nearest friend of the husband), and your name, Miss Halcombe (as the nearest friend of the wife). I am a Jesuit, if you please to think so--a splitter of straws--a man of trifles and crochets and scruples--but you will humour me, I hope, in merciful consideration for my suspicious Italian character, and my uneasy Italian conscience." He bowed again, stepped back a few paces, and withdrew his conscience from our society as politely as he had introduced it. The Count's scruples might have been honourable and reasonable enough, but there was something in his manner of expressing them which increased my unwillingness to be concerned in the business of the signature. No consideration of less importance than my consideration for Laura would have induced me to consent to be a witness at all. One look, however, at her anxious face decided me to risk anything rather than desert her. "I will readily remain in the room," I said. "And if I find no reason for starting any small scruples on my side, you may rely on me as a witness." Sir Percival looked at me sharply, as if he was about to say something. But at the same moment, Madame Fosco attracted his attention by rising from her chair. She had caught her husband's eye, and had evidently received her orders to leave the room. "You needn't go," said Sir Percival. Madame Fosco looked for her orders again, got them again, said she would prefer leaving us to our business, and resolutely walked out. The Count lit a cigarette, went back to the flowers in the window, and puffed little jets of smoke at the leaves, in a state of the deepest anxiety about killing the insects. Meanwhile Sir Percival unlocked a cupboard beneath one of the book-cases, and produced from it a piece of parchment, folded longwise, many times over. He placed it on the table, opened the last fold only, and kept his hand on the rest. The last fold displayed a strip of blank parchment with little wafers stuck on it at certain places. Every line of the writing was hidden in the part which he still held folded up under his hand. Laura and I looked at each other. Her face was pale, but it showed no indecision and no fear. Sir Percival dipped a pen in ink, and handed it to his wife. "Sign your name there," he said, pointing to the place. "You and Fosco are to sign afterwards, Miss Halcombe, opposite those two wafers. Come here, Fosco! witnessing a signature is not to be done by mooning out of window and smoking into the flowers." The Count threw away his cigarette, and joined us at the table, with his hands carelessly thrust into the scarlet belt of his blouse, and his eyes steadily fixed on Sir Percival's face. Laura, who was on the other side of her husband, with the pen in her hand, looked at him too. He stood between them holding the folded parchment down firmly on the table, and glancing across at me, as I sat opposite to him, with such a sinister mixture of suspicion and embarrassment on his face that he looked more like a prisoner at the bar than a gentleman in his own house. "Sign there," he repeated, turning suddenly on Laura, and pointing once more to the place on the parchment. "What is it I am to sign?" she asked quietly. "I have no time to explain," he answered. "The dog-cart is at the door, and I must go directly. Besides, if I had time, you wouldn't understand. It is a purely formal document, full of legal technicalities, and all that sort of thing. Come! come! sign your name, and let us have done as soon as possible." "I ought surely to know what I am signing, Sir Percival, before I write my name?" "Nonsense! What have women to do with business? I tell you again, you can't understand it." "At any rate, let me try to understand it. Whenever Mr. Gilmore had any business for me to do, he always explained it first, and I always understood him." "I dare say he did. He was your servant, and was obliged to explain. I am your husband, and am NOT obliged. How much longer do you mean to keep me here? I tell you again, there is no time for reading anything--the dog-cart is waiting at the door. Once for all, will you sign or will you not?" She still had the pen in her hand, but she made no approach to signing her name with it. "If my signature pledges me to anything," she said, "surely I have some claim to know what that pledge is?" He lifted up the parchment, and struck it angrily on the table. "Speak out!" he said. "You were always famous for telling the truth. Never mind Miss Halcombe, never mind Fosco--say, in plain terms, you distrust me." The Count took one of his hands out of his belt and laid it on Sir Percival's shoulder. Sir Percival shook it off irritably. The Count put it on again with unruffled composure. "Control your unfortunate temper, Percival," he said "Lady Glyde is right." "Right!" cried Sir Percival. "A wife right in distrusting her husband!" "It is unjust and cruel to accuse me of distrusting you," said Laura. "Ask Marian if I am not justified in wanting to know what this writing requires of me before I sign it." "I won't have any appeals made to Miss Halcombe," retorted Sir Percival. "Miss Halcombe has nothing to do with the matter." I had not spoken hitherto, and I would much rather not have spoken now. But the expression of distress in Laura's face when she turned it towards me, and the insolent injustice of her husband's conduct, left me no other alternative than to give my opinion, for her sake, as soon as I was asked for it. "Excuse me, Sir Percival," I said--"but as one of the witnesses to the signature, I venture to think that I HAVE something to do with the matter. Laura's objection seems to me a perfectly fair one, and speaking for myself only, I cannot assume the responsibility of witnessing her signature, unless she first understands what the writing is which you wish her to sign." "A cool declaration, upon my soul!" cried Sir Percival. "The next time you invite yourself to a man's house, Miss Halcombe, I recommend you not to repay his hospitality by taking his wife's side against him in a matter that doesn't concern you." I started to my feet as suddenly as if he had struck me. If I had been a man, I would have knocked him down on the threshold of his own door, and have left his house, never on any earthly consideration to enter it again. But I was only a woman--and I loved his wife so dearly! Thank God, that faithful love helped me, and I sat down again without saying a word. SHE knew what I had suffered and what I had suppressed. She ran round to me, with the tears streaming from her eyes. "Oh, Marian!" she whispered softly. "If my mother had been alive, she could have done no more for me!" "Come back and sign!" cried Sir Percival from the other side of the table. "Shall I?" she asked in my ear; "I will, if you tell me." "No," I answered. "The right and the truth are with you--sign nothing, unless you have read it first." "Come back and sign!" he reiterated, in his loudest and angriest tones. The Count, who had watched Laura and me with a close and silent attention, interposed for the second time. "Percival!" he said. "I remember that I am in the presence of ladies. Be good enough, if you please, to remember it too." Sir Percival turned on him speechless with passion. The Count's firm hand slowly tightened its grasp on his shoulder, and the Count's steady voice quietly repeated, "Be good enough, if you please, to remember it too." They both looked at each other. Sir Percival slowly drew his shoulder from under the Count's hand, slowly turned his face away from the Count's eyes, doggedly looked down for a little while at the parchment on the table, and then spoke, with the sullen submission of a tamed animal, rather than the becoming resignation of a convinced man. "I don't want to offend anybody," he said, "but my wife's obstinacy is enough to try the patience of a saint. I have told her this is merely a formal document--and what more can she want? You may say what you please, but it is no part of a woman's duty to set her husband at defiance. Once more, Lady Glyde, and for the last time, will you sign or will you not?" Laura returned to his side of the table, and took up the pen again. "I will sign with pleasure," she said, "if you will only treat me as a responsible being. I care little what sacrifice is required of me, if it will affect no one else, and lead to no ill results--" "Who talked of a sacrifice being required of You?" he broke in, with a half-suppressed return of his former violence. "I only meant," she resumed, "that I would refuse no concession which I could honourably make. If I have a scruple about signing my name to an engagement of which I know nothing, why should you visit it on me so severely? It is rather hard, I think, to treat Count Fosco's scruples so much more indulgently than you have treated mine." This unfortunate, yet most natural, reference to the Count's extraordinary power over her husband, indirect as it was, set Sir Percival's smouldering temper on fire again in an instant. "Scruples!" he repeated. "YOUR scruples! It is rather late in the day for you to be scrupulous. I should have thought you had got over all weakness of that sort, when you made a virtue of necessity by marrying me." The instant he spoke those words, Laura threw down the pen--looked at him with an expression in her eyes which, throughout all my experience of her, I had never seen in them before, and turned her back on him in dead silence. This strong expression of the most open and the most bitter contempt was so entirely unlike herself, so utterly out of her character, that it silenced us all. There was something hidden, beyond a doubt, under the mere surface-brutality of the words which her husband had just addressed to her. There was some lurking insult beneath them, of which I was wholly ignorant, but which had left the mark of its profanation so plainly on her face that even a stranger might have seen it. The Count, who was no stranger, saw it as distinctly as I did. When I left my chair to join Laura, I heard him whisper under his breath to Sir Percival, "You idiot!" Laura walked before me to the door as I advanced, and at the same time her husband spoke to her once more. "You positively refuse, then, to give me your signature?" he said, in the altered tone of a man who was conscious that he had let his own licence of language seriously injure him. "After what you have just said to me," she replied firmly, "I refuse my signature until I have read every line in that parchment from the first word to the last. Come away, Marian, we have remained here long enough." "One moment!" interposed the Count before Sir Percival could speak again--"one moment, Lady Glyde, I implore you!" Laura would have left the room without noticing him, but I stopped her. "Don't make an enemy of the Count!" I whispered. "Whatever you do, don't make an enemy of the Count!" She yielded to me. I closed the door again, and we stood near it waiting. Sir Percival sat down at the table, with his elbow on the folded parchment, and his head resting on his clenched fist. The Count stood between us--master of the dreadful position in which we were placed, as he was master of everything else. "Lady Glyde," he said, with a gentleness which seemed to address itself to our forlorn situation instead of to ourselves, "pray pardon me if I venture to offer one suggestion, and pray believe that I speak out of my profound respect and my friendly regard for the mistress of this house." He turned sharply towards Sir Percival. "Is it absolutely necessary," he asked "that this thing here, under your elbow, should be signed to-day?" "It is necessary to my plans and wishes," returned the other sulkily. "But that consideration, as you may have noticed, has no influence with Lady Glyde." "Answer my plain question plainly. Can the business of the signature be put off till to-morrow--Yes or No?" "Yes, if you will have it so." "Then what are you wasting your time for here? Let the signature wait till to-morrow--let it wait till you come back." Sir Percival looked up with a frown and an oath. "You are taking a tone with me that I don't like," he said. "A tone I won't bear from any man." "I am advising you for your good," returned the Count, with a smile of quiet contempt. "Give yourself time--give Lady Glyde time. Have you forgotten that your dog-cart is waiting at the door? My tone surprises you--ha? I dare say it does--it is the tone of a man who can keep his temper. How many doses of good advice have I given you in my time? More than you can count. Have I ever been wrong? I defy you to quote me an instance of it. Go! take your drive. The matter of the signature can wait till to-morrow. Let it wait--and renew it when you come back." Sir Percival hesitated and looked at his watch. His anxiety about the secret journey which he was to take that day, revived by the Count's words, was now evidently disputing possession of his mind with his anxiety to obtain Laura's signature. He considered for a little while, and then got up from his chair. "It is easy to argue me down," he said, "when I have no time to answer you. I will take your advice, Fosco--not because I want it, or believe in it, but because I can't stop here any longer." He paused, and looked round darkly at his wife. "If you don't give me your signature when I come back to-morrow!" The rest was lost in the noise of his opening the book-case cupboard again, and locking up the parchment once more. He took his hat and gloves off the table, and made for the door. Laura and I drew back to let him pass. "Remember to-morrow!" he said to his wife, and went out. We waited to give him time to cross the hall and drive away. The Count approached us while we were standing near the door. "You have just seen Percival at his worst, Miss Halcombe," he said. "As his old friend, I am sorry for him and ashamed of him. As his old friend, I promise you that he shall not break out to-morrow in the same disgraceful manner in which he has broken out to-day." Laura had taken my arm while he was speaking and she pressed it significantly when he had done. It would have been a hard trial to any woman to stand by and see the office of apologist for her husband's misconduct quietly assumed by his male friend in her own house--and it was a trial to HER. I thanked the Count civilly, and let her out. Yes! I thanked him: for I felt already, with a sense of inexpressible helplessness and humiliation, that it was either his interest or his caprice to make sure of my continuing to reside at Blackwater Park, and I knew after Sir Percival's conduct to me, that without the support of the Count's influence, I could not hope to remain there. His influence, the influence of all others that I dreaded most, was actually the one tie which now held me to Laura in the hour of her utmost need! We heard the wheels of the dog-cart crashing on the gravel of the drive as we came into the hall. Sir Percival had started on his journey. "Where is he going to, Marian?" Laura whispered. "Every fresh thing he does seems to terrify me about the future. Have you any suspicions?" After what she had undergone that morning, I was unwilling to tell her my suspicions. "How should I know his secrets?" I said evasively. "I wonder if the housekeeper knows?" she persisted. "Certainly not," I replied. "She must be quite as ignorant as we are." Laura shook her head doubtfully. "Did you not hear from the housekeeper that there was a report of Anne Catherick having been seen in this neighbourhood? Don't you think he may have gone away to look for her?" "I would rather compose myself, Laura, by not thinking about it at all, and after what has happened, you had better follow my example. Come into my room, and rest and quiet yourself a little." We sat down together close to the window, and let the fragrant summer air breathe over our faces. "I am ashamed to look at you, Marian," she said, "after what you submitted to downstairs, for my sake. Oh, my own love, I am almost heartbroken when I think of it! But I will try to make it up to you--I will indeed!" "Hush! hush!" I replied; "don't talk so. What is the trifling mortification of my pride compared to the dreadful sacrifice of your happiness?" "You heard what he said to me?" she went on quickly and vehemently. "You heard the words--but you don't know what they meant--you don't know why I threw down the pen and turned my back on him." She rose in sudden agitation, and walked about the room. "I have kept many things from your knowledge, Marian, for fear of distressing you, and making you unhappy at the outset of our new lives. You don't know how he has used me. And yet you ought to know, for you saw how he used me to-day. You heard him sneer at my presuming to be scrupulous--you heard him say I had made a virtue of necessity in marrying him." She sat down again, her face flushed deeply, and her hands twisted and twined together in her lap. "I can't tell you about it now," she said; "I shall burst out crying if I tell you now--later, Marian, when I am more sure of myself. My poor head aches, darling--aches, aches, aches. Where is your smelling-bottle? Let me talk to you about yourself. I wish I had given him my signature, for your sake. Shall I give it to him to-morrow? I would rather compromise myself than compromise you. After your taking my part against him, he will lay all the blame on you if I refuse again. What shall we do? Oh, for a friend to help us and advise us!--a friend we could really trust!" She sighed bitterly. I saw in her face that she was thinking of Hartright--saw it the more plainly because her last words set me thinking of him too. In six months only from her marriage we wanted the faithful service he had offered to us in his farewell words. How little I once thought that we should ever want it at all! "We must do what we can to help ourselves," I said. "Let us try to talk it over calmly, Laura--let us do all in our power to decide for the best." Putting what she knew of her husband's embarrassments and what I had heard of his conversation with the lawyer together, we arrived necessarily at the conclusion that the parchment in the library had been drawn up for the purpose of borrowing money, and that Laura's signature was absolutely necessary to fit it for the attainment of Sir Percival's object. The second question, concerning the nature of the legal contract by which the money was to be obtained, and the degree of personal responsibility to which Laura might subject herself if she signed it in the dark, involved considerations which lay far beyond any knowledge and experience that either of us possessed. My own convictions led me to believe that the hidden contents of the parchment concealed a transaction of the meanest and the most fraudulent kind. I had not formed this conclusion in consequence of Sir Percival's refusal to show the writing or to explain it, for that refusal might well have proceeded from his obstinate disposition and his domineering temper alone. My sole motive for distrusting his honesty sprang from the change which I had observed in his language and his manners at Blackwater Park, a change which convinced me that he had been acting a part throughout the whole period of his probation at Limmeridge House. His elaborate delicacy, his ceremonious politeness which harmonised so agreeably with Mr. Gilmore's old-fashioned notions, his modesty with Laura, his candour with me, his moderation with Mr. Fairlie--all these were the artifices of a mean, cunning, and brutal man, who had dropped his disguise when his practised duplicity had gained its end, and had openly shown himself in the library on that very day. I say nothing of the grief which this discovery caused me on Laura's account, for it is not to be expressed by any words of mine. I only refer to it at all, because it decided me to oppose her signing the parchment, whatever the consequences might be, unless she was first made acquainted with the contents. Under these circumstances, the one chance for us when to-morrow came was to be provided with an objection to giving the signature, which might rest on sufficiently firm commercial or legal grounds to shake Sir Percival's resolution, and to make him suspect that we two women understood the laws and obligations of business as well as himself. After some pondering, I determined to write to the only honest man within reach whom we could trust to help us discreetly in our forlorn situation. That man was Mr. Gilmore's partner, Mr. Kyrle, who conducted the business now that our old friend had been obliged to withdraw from it, and to leave London on account of his health. I explained to Laura that I had Mr. Gilmore's own authority for placing implicit confidence in his partner's integrity, discretion, and accurate knowledge of all her affairs, and with her full approval I sat down at once to write the letter, I began by stating our position to Mr. Kyrle exactly as it was, and then asked for his advice in return, expressed in plain, downright terms which he could comprehend without any danger of misinterpretations and mistakes. My letter was as short as I could possibly make it, and was, I hope, unencumbered by needless apologies and needless details. Just as I was about to put the address on the envelope an obstacle was discovered by Laura, which in the effort and preoccupation of writing had escaped my mind altogether. "How are we to get the answer in time?" she asked. "Your letter will not be delivered in London before to-morrow morning, and the post will not bring the reply here till the morning after." The only way of overcoming this difficulty was to have the answer brought to us from the lawyer's office by a special messenger. I wrote a postscript to that effect, begging that the messenger might be despatched with the reply by the eleven o'clock morning train, which would bring him to our station at twenty minutes past one, and so enable him to reach Blackwater Park by two o'clock at the latest. He was to be directed to ask for me, to answer no questions addressed to him by any one else, and to deliver his letter into no hands but mine. "In case Sir Percival should come back to-morrow before two o'clock," I said to Laura, "the wisest plan for you to adopt is to be out in the grounds all the morning with your book or your work, and not to appear at the house till the messenger has had time to arrive with the letter. I will wait here for him all the morning, to guard against any misadventures or mistakes. By following this arrangement I hope and believe we shall avoid being taken by surprise. Let us go down to the drawing-room now. We may excite suspicion if we remain shut up together too long." "Suspicion?" she repeated. "Whose suspicion can we excite, now that Sir Percival has left the house? Do you mean Count Fosco?" "Perhaps I do, Laura." "You are beginning to dislike him as much as I do, Marian." "No, not to dislike him. Dislike is always more or less associated with contempt--I can see nothing in the Count to despise." "You are not afraid of him, are you?" "Perhaps I am--a little." "Afraid of him, after his interference in our favour to-day!" "Yes. I am more afraid of his interference than I am of Sir Percival's violence. Remember what I said to you in the library. Whatever you do, Laura, don't make an enemy of the Count!" We went downstairs. Laura entered the drawing-room, while I proceeded across the hall, with my letter in my hand, to put it into the post-bag, which hung against the wall opposite to me. The house door was open, and as I crossed past it, I saw Count Fosco and his wife standing talking together on the steps outside, with their faces turned towards me. The Countess came into the hall rather hastily, and asked if I had leisure enough for five minutes' private conversation. Feeling a little surprised by such an appeal from such a person, I put my letter into the bag, and replied that I was quite at her disposal. She took my arm with unaccustomed friendliness and familiarity, and instead of leading me into an empty room, drew me out with her to the belt of turf which surrounded the large fish-pond. As we passed the Count on the steps he bowed and smiled, and then went at once into the house, pushing the hall door to after him, but not actually closing it. The Countess walked me gently round the fish-pond. I expected to be made the depositary of some extraordinary confidence, and I was astonished to find that Madame Fosco's communication for my private ear was nothing more than a polite assurance of her sympathy for me, after what had happened in the library. Her husband had told her of all that had passed, and of the insolent manner in which Sir Percival had spoken to me. This information had so shocked and distressed her, on my account and on Laura's, that she had made up her mind, if anything of the sort happened again, to mark her sense of Sir Percival's outrageous conduct by leaving the house. The Count had approved of her idea, and she now hoped that I approved of it too. I thought this a very strange proceeding on the part of such a remarkably reserved woman as Madame Fosco, especially after the interchange of sharp speeches which had passed between us during the conversation in the boat-house on that very morning. However, it was my plain duty to meet a polite and friendly advance on the part of one of my elders with a polite and friendly reply. I answered the Countess accordingly in her own tone, and then, thinking we had said all that was necessary on either side, made an attempt to get back to the house. But Madame Fosco seemed resolved not to part with me, and to my unspeakable amazement, resolved also to talk. Hitherto the most silent of women, she now persecuted me with fluent conventionalities on the subject of married life, on the subject of Sir Percival and Laura, on the subject of her own happiness, on the subject of the late Mr. Fairlie's conduct to her in the matter of her legacy, and on half a dozen other subjects besides, until she had detained me walking round and round the fish-pond for more than half an hour, and had quite wearied me out. Whether she discovered this or not, I cannot say, but she stopped as abruptly as she had begun--looked towards the house door, resumed her icy manner in a moment, and dropped my arm of her own accord before I could think of an excuse for accomplishing my own release from her. As I pushed open the door and entered the hall, I found myself suddenly face to face with the Count again. He was just putting a letter into the post-bag. After he had dropped it in and had closed the bag, he asked me where I had left Madame Fosco. I told him, and he went out at the hall door immediately to join his wife. His manner when he spoke to me was so unusually quiet and subdued that I turned and looked after him, wondering if he were ill or out of spirits. Why my next proceeding was to go straight up to the post-bag and take out my own letter and look at it again, with a vague distrust on me, and why the looking at it for the second time instantly suggested the idea to my mind of sealing the envelope for its greater security--are mysteries which are either too deep or too shallow for me to fathom. Women, as everybody knows, constantly act on impulses which they cannot explain even to themselves, and I can only suppose that one of those impulses was the hidden cause of my unaccountable conduct on this occasion. Whatever influence animated me, I found cause to congratulate myself on having obeyed it as soon as I prepared to seal the letter in my own room. I had originally closed the envelope in the usual way by moistening the adhesive point and pressing it on the paper beneath, and when I now tried it with my finger, after a lapse of full three-quarters of an hour, the envelope opened on the instant, without sticking or tearing. Perhaps I had fastened it insufficiently? Perhaps there might have been some defect in the adhesive gum? Or, perhaps----No! it is quite revolting enough to feel that third conjecture stirring in my mind. I would rather not see it confronting me in plain black and white. I almost dread to-morrow--so much depends on my discretion and self-control. There are two precautions, at all events, which I am sure not to forget. I must be careful to keep up friendly appearances with the Count, and I must be well on my guard when the messenger from the office comes here with the answer to my letter. V June 17th.--When the dinner hour brought us together again, Count Fosco was in his usual excellent spirits. He exerted himself to interest and amuse us, as if he was determined to efface from our memories all recollection of what had passed in the library that afternoon. Lively descriptions of his adventures in travelling, amusing anecdotes of remarkable people whom he had met with abroad, quaint comparisons between the social customs of various nations, illustrated by examples drawn from men and women indiscriminately all over Europe, humorous confessions of the innocent follies of his own early life, when he ruled the fashions of a second-rate Italian town, and wrote preposterous romances on the French model for a second-rate Italian newspaper--all flowed in succession so easily and so gaily from his lips, and all addressed our various curiosities and various interests so directly and so delicately, that Laura and I listened to him with as much attention and, inconsistent as it may seem, with as much admiration also, as Madame Fosco herself. Women can resist a man's love, a man's fame, a man's personal appearance, and a man's money, but they cannot resist a man's tongue when he knows how to talk to them. After dinner, while the favourable impression which he had produced on us was still vivid in our minds, the Count modestly withdrew to read in the library. Laura proposed a stroll in the grounds to enjoy the close of the long evening. It was necessary in common politeness to ask Madame Fosco to join us, but this time she had apparently received her orders beforehand, and she begged we would kindly excuse her. "The Count will probably want a fresh supply of cigarettes," she remarked by way of apology, "and nobody can make them to his satisfaction but myself." Her cold blue eyes almost warmed as she spoke the words--she looked actually proud of being the officiating medium through which her lord and master composed himself with tobacco-smoke! Laura and I went out together alone. It was a misty, heavy evening. There was a sense of blight in the air; the flowers were drooping in the garden, and the ground was parched and dewless. The western heaven, as we saw it over the quiet trees, was of a pale yellow hue, and the sun was setting faintly in a haze. Coming rain seemed near--it would fall probably with the fall of night. "Which way shall we go?" I asked "Towards the lake, Marian, if you like," she answered. "You seem unaccountably fond, Laura, of that dismal lake." "No, not of the lake but of the scenery about it. The sand and heath and the fir-trees are the only objects I can discover, in all this large place, to remind me of Limmeridge. But we will walk in some other direction if you prefer it." "I have no favourite walks at Blackwater Park, my love. One is the same as another to me. Let us go to the lake--we may find it cooler in the open space than we find it here." We walked through the shadowy plantation in silence. The heaviness in the evening air oppressed us both, and when we reached the boat-house we were glad to sit down and rest inside. A white fog hung low over the lake. The dense brown line of the trees on the opposite bank appeared above it, like a dwarf forest floating in the sky. The sandy ground, shelving downward from where we sat, was lost mysteriously in the outward layers of the fog. The silence was horrible. No rustling of the leaves--no bird's note in the wood--no cry of water-fowl from the pools of the hidden lake. Even the croaking of the frogs had ceased to-night. "It is very desolate and gloomy," said Laura. "But we can be more alone here than anywhere else." She spoke quietly and looked at the wilderness of sand and mist with steady, thoughtful eyes. I could see that her mind was too much occupied to feel the dreary impressions from without which had fastened themselves already on mine. "I promised, Marian, to tell you the truth about my married life, instead of leaving you any longer to guess it for yourself," she began. "That secret is the first I have ever had from you, love, and I am determined it shall be the last. I was silent, as you know, for your sake--and perhaps a little for my own sake as well. It is very hard for a woman to confess that the man to whom she has given her whole life is the man of all others who cares least for the gift. If you were married yourself, Marian--and especially if you were happily married--you would feel for me as no single woman CAN feel, however kind and true she may be." What answer could I make? I could only take her hand and look at her with my whole heart as well as my eyes would let me. "How often," she went on, "I have heard you laughing over what you used to call your 'poverty!' how often you have made me mock-speeches of congratulation on my wealth! Oh, Marian, never laugh again. Thank God for your poverty--it has made you your own mistress, and has saved you from the lot that has fallen on ME." A sad beginning on the lips of a young wife!--sad in its quiet plain-spoken truth. The few days we had all passed together at Blackwater Park had been many enough to show me--to show any one--what her husband had married her for. "You shall not be distressed," she said, "by hearing how soon my disappointments and my trials began--or even by knowing what they were. It is bad enough to have them on my memory. If I tell you how he received the first and last attempt at remonstrance that I ever made, you will know how he has always treated me, as well as if I had described it in so many words. It was one day at Rome when we had ridden out together to the tomb of Cecilia Metella. The sky was calm and lovely, and the grand old ruin looked beautiful, and the remembrance that a husband's love had raised it in the old time to a wife's memory, made me feel more tenderly and more anxiously towards my husband than I had ever felt yet. 'Would you build such a tomb for ME, Percival?' I asked him. 'You said you loved me dearly before we were married, and yet, since that time----' I could get no farther. Marian! he was not even looking at me! I pulled down my veil, thinking it best not to let him see that the tears were in my eyes. I fancied he had not paid any attention to me, but he had. He said, 'Come away,' and laughed to himself as he helped me on to my horse. He mounted his own horse and laughed again as we rode away. 'If I do build you a tomb,' he said, 'it will be done with your own money. I wonder whether Cecilia Metella had a fortune and paid for hers.' I made no reply--how could I, when I was crying behind my veil? 'Ah, you light-complexioned women are all sulky,' he said. 'What do you want? compliments and soft speeches? Well! I'm in a good humour this morning. Consider the compliments paid and the speeches said.' Men little know when they say hard things to us how well we remember them, and how much harm they do us. It would have been better for me if I had gone on crying, but his contempt dried up my tears and hardened my heart. From that time, Marian, I never checked myself again in thinking of Walter Hartright. I let the memory of those happy days, when we were so fond of each other in secret, come back and comfort me. What else had I to look to for consolation? If we had been together you would have helped me to better things. I know it was wrong, darling, but tell me if I was wrong without any excuse." I was obliged to turn my face from her. "Don't ask me!" I said. "Have I suffered as you have suffered? What right have I to decide?" "I used to think of him," she pursued, dropping her voice and moving closer to me, "I used to think of him when Percival left me alone at night to go among the Opera people. I used to fancy what I might have been if it had pleased God to bless me with poverty, and if I had been his wife. I used to see myself in my neat cheap gown, sitting at home and waiting for him while he was earning our bread--sitting at home and working for him and loving him all the better because I had to work for him--seeing him come in tired and taking off his hat and coat for him, and, Marian, pleasing him with little dishes at dinner that I had learnt to make for his sake. Oh! I hope he is never lonely enough and sad enough to think of me and see me as I have thought of HIM and see HIM!" As she said those melancholy words, all the lost tenderness returned to her voice, and all the lost beauty trembled back into her face. Her eyes rested as lovingly on the blighted, solitary, ill-omened view before us, as if they saw the friendly hills of Cumberland in the dim and threatening sky. "Don't speak of Walter any more," I said, as soon as I could control myself. "Oh, Laura, spare us both the wretchedness of talking of him now!" She roused herself, and looked at me tenderly. "I would rather be silent about him for ever," she answered, "than cause you a moment's pain." "It is in your interests," I pleaded; "it is for your sake that I speak. If your husband heard you----" "It would not surprise him if he did hear me." She made that strange reply with a weary calmness and coldness. The change in her manner, when she gave the answer, startled me almost as much as the answer itself. "Not surprise him!" I repeated. "Laura! remember what you are saying--you frighten me!" "It is true," she said; "it is what I wanted to tell you to-day, when we were talking in your room. My only secret when I opened my heart to him at Limmeridge was a harmless secret, Marian--you said so yourself. The name was all I kept from him, and he has discovered it." I heard her, but I could say nothing. Her last words had killed the little hope that still lived in me. "It happened at Rome," she went on, as wearily calm and cold as ever. "We were at a little party given to the English by some friends of Sir Percival's--Mr. and Mrs. Markland. Mrs. Markland had the reputation of sketching very beautifully, and some of the guests prevailed on her to show us her drawings. We all admired them, but something I said attracted her attention particularly to me. 'Surely you draw yourself?' she asked. 'I used to draw a little once,' I answered, 'but I have given it up.' 'If you have once drawn,' she said, 'you may take to it again one of these days, and if you do, I wish you would let me recommend you a master.' I said nothing--you know why, Marian--and tried to change the conversation. But Mrs. Markland persisted. 'I have had all sorts of teachers,' she went on, 'but the best of all, the most intelligent and the most attentive, was a Mr. Hartright. If you ever take up your drawing again, do try him as a master. He is a young man--modest and gentlemanlike--I am sure you will like him.' Think of those words being spoken to me publicly, in the presence of strangers--strangers who had been invited to meet the bride and bridegroom! I did all I could to control myself--I said nothing, and looked down close at the drawings. When I ventured to raise my head again, my eyes and my husband's eyes met, and I knew, by his look, that my face had betrayed me. 'We will see about Mr. Hartright,' he said, looking at me all the time, 'when we get back to England. I agree with you, Mrs. Markland--I think Lady Glyde is sure to like him.' He laid an emphasis on the last words which made my cheeks burn, and set my heart beating as if it would stifle me. Nothing more was said. We came away early. He was silent in the carriage driving back to the hotel. He helped me out, and followed me upstairs as usual. But the moment we were in the drawing-room, he locked the door, pushed me down into a chair, and stood over me with his hands on my shoulders. 'Ever since that morning when you made your audacious confession to me at Limmeridge,' he said, 'I have wanted to find out the man, and I found him in your face to-night. Your drawing-master was the man, and his name is Hartright. You shall repent it, and he shall repent it, to the last hour of your lives. Now go to bed and dream of him if you like, with the marks of my horsewhip on his shoulders.' Whenever he is angry with me now he refers to what I acknowledged to him in your presence with a sneer or a threat. I have no power to prevent him from putting his own horrible construction on the confidence I placed in him. I have no influence to make him believe me, or to keep him silent. You looked surprised to-day when you heard him tell me that I had made a virtue of necessity in marrying him. You will not be surprised again when you hear him repeat it, the next time he is out of temper----Oh, Marian! don't! don't! you hurt me!" I had caught her in my arms, and the sting and torment of my remorse had closed them round her like a vice. Yes! my remorse. The white despair of Walter's face, when my cruel words struck him to the heart in the summer-house at Limmeridge, rose before me in mute, unendurable reproach. My hand had pointed the way which led the man my sister loved, step by step, far from his country and his friends. Between those two young hearts I had stood, to sunder them for ever, the one from the other, and his life and her life lay wasted before me alike in witness of the deed. I had done this, and done it for Sir Percival Glyde. For Sir Percival Glyde. I heard her speaking, and I knew by the tone of her voice that she was comforting me--I, who deserved nothing but the reproach of her silence! How long it was before I mastered the absorbing misery of my own thoughts, I cannot tell. I was first conscious that she was kissing me, and then my eyes seemed to wake on a sudden to their sense of outward things, and I knew that I was looking mechanically straight before me at the prospect of the lake. "It is late," I heard her whisper. "It will be dark in the plantation." She shook my arm and repeated, "Marian! it will be dark in the plantation." "Give me a minute longer," I said--"a minute, to get better in." I was afraid to trust myself to look at her yet, and I kept my eyes fixed on the view. It WAS late. The dense brown line of trees in the sky had faded in the gathering darkness to the faint resemblance of a long wreath of smoke. The mist over the lake below had stealthily enlarged, and advanced on us. The silence was as breathless as ever, but the horror of it had gone, and the solemn mystery of its stillness was all that remained. "We are far from the house," she whispered. "Let us go back." She stopped suddenly, and turned her face from me towards the entrance of the boat-house. "Marian!" she said, trembling violently. "Do you see nothing? Look!" "Where?" "Down there, below us." She pointed. My eyes followed her hand, and I saw it too. A living figure was moving over the waste of heath in the distance. It crossed our range of view from the boat-house, and passed darkly along the outer edge of the mist. It stopped far off, in front of us--waited--and passed on; moving slowly, with the white cloud of mist behind it and above it--slowly, slowly, till it glided by the edge of the boat-house, and we saw it no more. We were both unnerved by what had passed between us that evening. Some minutes elapsed before Laura would venture into the plantation, and before I could make up my mind to lead her back to the house. "Was it a man or a woman?" she asked in a whisper, as we moved at last into the dark dampness of the outer air. "I am not certain." "Which do you think?" "It looked like a woman." "I was afraid it was a man in a long cloak." "It may be a man. In this dim light it is not possible to be certain." "Wait, Marian! I'm frightened--I don't see the path. Suppose the figure should follow us?" "Not at all likely, Laura. There is really nothing to be alarmed about. The shores of the lake are not far from the village, and they are free to any one to walk on by day or night. It is only wonderful we have seen no living creature there before." We were now in the plantation. It was very dark--so dark, that we found some difficulty in keeping the path. I gave Laura my arm, and we walked as fast as we could on our way back. Before we were half-way through she stopped, and forced me to stop with her. She was listening. "Hush," she whispered. "I hear something behind us." "Dead leaves," I said to cheer her, "or a twig blown off the trees." "It is summer time, Marian, and there is not a breath of wind. Listen!" I heard the sound too--a sound like a light footstep following us. "No matter who it is, or what it is," I said, "let us walk on. In another minute, if there is anything to alarm us, we shall be near enough to the house to be heard." We went on quickly--so quickly, that Laura was breathless by the time we were nearly through the plantation, and within sight of the lighted windows. I waited a moment to give her breathing-time. Just as we were about to proceed she stopped me again, and signed to me with her hand to listen once more. We both heard distinctly a long, heavy sigh behind us, in the black depths of the trees. "Who's there?" I called out. There was no answer. "Who's there?" I repeated. An instant of silence followed, and then we heard the light fall of the footsteps again, fainter and fainter--sinking away into the darkness--sinking, sinking, sinking--till they were lost in the silence. We hurried out from the trees to the open lawn beyond, crossed it rapidly; and without another word passing between us, reached the house. In the light of the hall-lamp Laura looked at me, with white cheeks and startled eyes. "I am half dead with fear," she said. "Who could it have been?" "We will try to guess to-morrow," I replied. "In the meantime say nothing to any one of what we have heard and seen." "Why not?" "Because silence is safe, and we have need of safety in this house." I sent Laura upstairs immediately, waited a minute to take off my hat and put my hair smooth, and then went at once to make my first investigations in the library, on pretence of searching for a book. There sat the Count, filling out the largest easy-chair in the house, smoking and reading calmly, with his feet on an ottoman, his cravat across his knees, and his shirt collar wide open. And there sat Madame Fosco, like a quiet child, on a stool by his side, making cigarettes. Neither husband nor wife could, by any possibility, have been out late that evening, and have just got back to the house in a hurry. I felt that my object in visiting the library was answered the moment I set eyes on them. Count Fosco rose in polite confusion and tied his cravat on when I entered the room. "Pray don't let me disturb you," I said. "I have only come here to get a book." "All unfortunate men of my size suffer from the heat," said the Count, refreshing himself gravely with a large green fan. "I wish I could change places with my excellent wife. She is as cool at this moment as a fish in the pond outside." The Countess allowed herself to thaw under the influence of her husband's quaint comparison. "I am never warm, Miss Halcombe," she remarked, with the modest air of a woman who was confessing to one of her own merits. "Have you and Lady Glyde been out this evening?" asked the Count, while I was taking a book from the shelves to preserve appearances. "Yes, we went out to get a little air." "May I ask in what direction?" "In the direction of the lake--as far as the boat-house." "Aha? As far as the boat-house?" Under other circumstances I might have resented his curiosity. But to-night I hailed it as another proof that neither he nor his wife were connected with the mysterious appearance at the lake. "No more adventures, I suppose, this evening?" he went on. "No more discoveries, like your discovery of the wounded dog?" He fixed his unfathomable grey eyes on me, with that cold, clear, irresistible glitter in them which always forces me to look at him, and always makes me uneasy while I do look. An unutterable suspicion that his mind is prying into mine overcomes me at these times, and it overcame me now. "No," I said shortly; "no adventures--no discoveries." I tried to look away from him and leave the room. Strange as it seems, I hardly think I should have succeeded in the attempt if Madame Fosco had not helped me by causing him to move and look away first. "Count, you are keeping Miss Halcombe standing," she said. The moment he turned round to get me a chair, I seized my opportunity--thanked him--made my excuses--and slipped out. An hour later, when Laura's maid happened to be in her mistress's room, I took occasion to refer to the closeness of the night, with a view to ascertaining next how the servants had been passing their time. "Have you been suffering much from the heat downstairs?" I asked. "No, miss," said the girl, "we have not felt it to speak of." "You have been out in the woods then, I suppose?" "Some of us thought of going, miss. But cook said she should take her chair into the cool court-yard, outside the kitchen door, and on second thoughts, all the rest of us took our chairs out there too." The housekeeper was now the only person who remained to be accounted for. "Is Mrs. Michelson gone to bed yet?" I inquired. "I should think not, miss," said the girl, smiling. "Mrs. Michelson is more likely to be getting up just now than going to bed." "Why? What do you mean? Has Mrs. Michelson been taking to her bed in the daytime?" "No, miss, not exactly, but the next thing to it. She's been asleep all the evening on the sofa in her own room." Putting together what I observed for myself in the library, and what I have just heard from Laura's maid, one conclusion seems inevitable. The figure we saw at the lake was not the figure of Madame Fosco, of her husband, or of any of the servants. The footsteps we heard behind us were not the footsteps of any one belonging to the house. Who could it have been? It seems useless to inquire. I cannot even decide whether the figure was a man's or a woman's. I can only say that I think it was a woman's. VI June 18th.--The misery of self-reproach which I suffered yesterday evening, on hearing what Laura told me in the boat-house, returned in the loneliness of the night, and kept me waking and wretched for hours. I lighted my candle at last, and searched through my old journals to see what my share in the fatal error of her marriage had really been, and what I might have once done to save her from it. The result soothed me a little for it showed that, however blindly and ignorantly I acted, I acted for the best. Crying generally does me harm; but it was not so last night--I think it relieved me. I rose this morning with a settled resolution and a quiet mind. Nothing Sir Percival can say or do shall ever irritate me again, or make me forget for one moment that I am staying here in defiance of mortifications, insults, and threats, for Laura's service and for Laura's sake. The speculations in which we might have indulged this morning, on the subject of the figure at the lake and the footsteps in the plantation, have been all suspended by a trifling accident which has caused Laura great regret. She has lost the little brooch I gave her for a keepsake on the day before her marriage. As she wore it when we went out yesterday evening we can only suppose that it must have dropped from her dress, either in the boat-house or on our way back. The servants have been sent to search, and have returned unsuccessful. And now Laura herself has gone to look for it. Whether she finds it or not the loss will help to excuse her absence from the house, if Sir Percival returns before the letter from Mr. Gilmore's partner is placed in my hands. One o'clock has just struck. I am considering whether I had better wait here for the arrival of the messenger from London, or slip away quietly, and watch for him outside the lodge gate. My suspicion of everybody and everything in this house inclines me to think that the second plan may be the best. The Count is safe in the breakfast-room. I heard him, through the door, as I ran upstairs ten minutes since, exercising his canary-birds at their tricks:--"Come out on my little finger, my pret-pret-pretties! Come out, and hop upstairs! One, two, three--and up! Three, two, one--and down! One, two, three--twit-twit-twit-tweet!" The birds burst into their usual ecstasy of singing, and the Count chirruped and whistled at them in return, as if he was a bird himself. My room door is open, and I can hear the shrill singing and whistling at this very moment. If I am really to slip out without being observed, now is my time. FOUR O'CLOCK. The three hours that have passed since I made my last entry have turned the whole march of events at Blackwater Park in a new direction. Whether for good or for evil, I cannot and dare not decide. Let me get back first to the place at which I left off, or I shall lose myself in the confusion of my own thoughts. I went out, as I had proposed, to meet the messenger with my letter from London at the lodge gate. On the stairs I saw no one. In the hall I heard the Count still exercising his birds. But on crossing the quadrangle outside, I passed Madame Fosco, walking by herself in her favourite circle, round and round the great fish-pond. I at once slackened my pace, so as to avoid all appearance of being in a hurry, and even went the length, for caution's sake, of inquiring if she thought of going out before lunch. She smiled at me in the friendliest manner--said she preferred remaining near the house, nodded pleasantly, and re-entered the hall. I looked back, and saw that she had closed the door before I had opened the wicket by the side of the carriage gates. In less than a quarter of an hour I reached the lodge. The lane outside took a sudden turn to the left, ran on straight for a hundred yards or so, and then took another sharp turn to the right to join the high-road. Between these two turns, hidden from the lodge on one side, and from the way to the station on the other, I waited, walking backwards and forwards. High hedges were on either side of me, and for twenty minutes, by my watch, I neither saw nor heard anything. At the end of that time the sound of a carriage caught my ear, and I was met, as I advanced towards the second turning, by a fly from the railway. I made a sign to the driver to stop. As he obeyed me a respectable-looking man put his head out of the window to see what was the matter. "I beg your pardon," I said, "but am I right in supposing that you are going to Blackwater Park?" "Yes, ma'am." "With a letter for any one?" "With a letter for Miss Halcombe, ma'am." "You may give me the letter. I am Miss Halcombe." The man touched his hat, got out of the fly immediately, and gave me the letter. I opened it at once and read these lines. I copy them here, thinking it best to destroy the original for caution's sake. "DEAR MADAM,--Your letter received this morning has caused me very great anxiety. I will reply to it as briefly and plainly as possible. "My careful consideration of the statement made by yourself, and my knowledge of Lady Glyde's position, as defined in the settlement, lead me, I regret to say, to the conclusion that a loan of the trust money to Sir Percival (or, in other words, a loan of some portion of the twenty thousand pounds of Lady Glyde's fortune) is in contemplation, and that she is made a party to the deed, in order to secure her approval of a flagrant breach of trust, and to have her signature produced against her if she should complain hereafter. It is impossible, on any other supposition, to account, situated as she is, for her execution to a deed of any kind being wanted at all. "In the event of Lady Glyde's signing such a document, as I am compelled to suppose the deed in question to be, her trustees would be at liberty to advance money to Sir Percival out of her twenty thousand pounds. If the amount so lent should not be paid back, and if Lady Glyde should have children, their fortune will then be diminished by the sum, large or small, so advanced. In plainer terms still, the transaction, for anything that Lady Glyde knows to the contrary, may be a fraud upon her unborn children. "Under these serious circumstances, I would recommend Lady Glyde to assign as a reason for withholding her signature, that she wishes the deed to be first submitted to myself, as her family solicitor (in the absence of my partner, Mr. Gilmore). No reasonable objection can be made to taking this course--for, if the transaction is an honourable one, there will necessarily be no difficulty in my giving my approval. "Sincerely assuring you of my readiness to afford any additional help or advice that may be wanted, I beg to remain, Madam, your faithful servant, "WILLIAM KYRLE." I read this kind and sensible letter very thankfully. It supplied Laura with a reason for objecting to the signature which was unanswerable, and which we could both of us understand. The messenger waited near me while I was reading to receive his directions when I had done. "Will you be good enough to say that I understand the letter, and that I am very much obliged?" I said. "There is no other reply necessary at present." Exactly at the moment when I was speaking those words, holding the letter open in my hand, Count Fosco turned the corner of the lane from the high-road, and stood before me as if he had sprung up out of the earth. The suddenness of his appearance, in the very last place under heaven in which I should have expected to see him, took me completely by surprise. The messenger wished me good-morning, and got into the fly again. I could not say a word to him--I was not even able to return his bow. The conviction that I was discovered--and by that man, of all others--absolutely petrified me. "Are you going back to the house, Miss Halcombe?" he inquired, without showing the least surprise on his side, and without even looking after the fly, which drove off while he was speaking to me. I collected myself sufficiently to make a sign in the affirmative. "I am going back too," he said. "Pray allow me the pleasure of accompanying you. Will you take my arm? You look surprised at seeing me!" I took his arm. The first of my scattered senses that came back was the sense that warned me to sacrifice anything rather than make an enemy of him. "You look surprised at seeing me!" he repeated in his quietly pertinacious way. "I thought, Count, I heard you with your birds in the breakfast-room," I answered, as quietly and firmly as I could. "Surely. But my little feathered children, dear lady, are only too like other children. They have their days of perversity, and this morning was one of them. My wife came in as I was putting them back in their cage, and said she had left you going out alone for a walk. You told her so, did you not?" "Certainly." "Well, Miss Halcombe, the pleasure of accompanying you was too great a temptation for me to resist. At my age there is no harm in confessing so much as that, is there? I seized my hat, and set off to offer myself as your escort. Even so fat an old man as Fosco is surely better than no escort at all? I took the wrong path--I came back in despair, and here I am, arrived (may I say it?) at the height of my wishes." He talked on in this complimentary strain with a fluency which left me no exertion to make beyond the effort of maintaining my composure. He never referred in the most distant manner to what he had seen in the lane, or to the letter which I still had in my hand. This ominous discretion helped to convince me that he must have surprised, by the most dishonourable means, the secret of my application in Laura's interest to the lawyer; and that, having now assured himself of the private manner in which I had received the answer, he had discovered enough to suit his purposes, and was only bent on trying to quiet the suspicions which he knew he must have aroused in my mind. I was wise enough, under these circumstances, not to attempt to deceive him by plausible explanations, and woman enough, notwithstanding my dread of him, to feel as if my hand was tainted by resting on his arm. On the drive in front of the house we met the dog-cart being taken round to the stables. Sir Percival had just returned. He came out to meet us at the house-door. Whatever other results his journey might have had, it had not ended in softening his savage temper. "Oh! here are two of you come back," he said, with a lowering face. "What is the meaning of the house being deserted in this way? Where is Lady Glyde?" I told him of the loss of the brooch, and said that Laura had gone into the plantation to look for it. "Brooch or no brooch," he growled sulkily, "I recommend her not to forget her appointment in the library this afternoon. I shall expect to see her in half an hour." I took my hand from the Count's arm, and slowly ascended the steps. He honoured me with one of his magnificent bows, and then addressed himself gaily to the scowling master of the house. "Tell me, Percival," he said, "have you had a pleasant drive? And has your pretty shining Brown Molly come back at all tired?" "Brown Molly be hanged--and the drive too! I want my lunch." "And I want five minutes' talk with you, Percival, first," returned the Count. "Five minutes' talk, my friend, here on the grass." "What about?" "About business that very much concerns you." I lingered long enough in passing through the hall-door to hear this question and answer, and to see Sir Percival thrust his hands into his pockets in sullen hesitation. "If you want to badger me with any more of your infernal scruples," he said, "I for one won't hear them. I want my lunch." "Come out here and speak to me," repeated the Count, still perfectly uninfluenced by the rudest speech that his friend could make to him. Sir Percival descended the steps. The Count took him by the arm, and walked him away gently. The "business," I was sure, referred to the question of the signature. They were speaking of Laura and of me beyond a doubt. I felt heart-sick and faint with anxiety. It might be of the last importance to both of us to know what they were saying to each other at that moment, and not one word of it could by any possibility reach my ears. I walked about the house, from room to room, with the lawyer's letter in my bosom (I was afraid by this time even to trust it under lock and key), till the oppression of my suspense half maddened me. There were no signs of Laura's return, and I thought of going out to look for her. But my strength was so exhausted by the trials and anxieties of the morning that the heat of the day quite overpowered me, and after an attempt to get to the door I was obliged to return to the drawing-room and lie down on the nearest sofa to recover. I was just composing myself when the door opened softly and the Count looked in. "A thousand pardons, Miss Halcombe," he said; "I only venture to disturb you because I am the bearer of good news. Percival--who is capricious in everything, as you know--has seen fit to alter his mind at the last moment, and the business of the signature is put off for the present. A great relief to all of us, Miss Halcombe, as I see with pleasure in your face. Pray present my best respects and felicitations, when you mention this pleasant change of circumstances to Lady Glyde." He left me before I had recovered my astonishment. There could be no doubt that this extraordinary alteration of purpose in the matter of the signature was due to his influence, and that his discovery of my application to London yesterday, and of my having received an answer to it to-day, had offered him the means of interfering with certain success. I felt these impressions, but my mind seemed to share the exhaustion of my body, and I was in no condition to dwell on them with any useful reference to the doubtful present or the threatening future. I tried a second time to run out and find Laura, but my head was giddy and my knees trembled under me. There was no choice but to give it up again and return to the sofa, sorely against my will. The quiet in the house, and the low murmuring hum of summer insects outside the open window, soothed me. My eyes closed of themselves, and I passed gradually into a strange condition, which was not waking--for I knew nothing of what was going on about me, and not sleeping--for I was conscious of my own repose. In this state my fevered mind broke loose from me, while my weary body was at rest, and in a trance, or day-dream of my fancy--I know not what to call it--I saw Walter Hartright. I had not thought of him since I rose that morning--Laura had not said one word to me either directly or indirectly referring to him--and yet I saw him now as plainly as if the past time had returned, and we were both together again at Limmeridge House. He appeared to me as one among many other men, none of whose faces I could plainly discern. They were all lying on the steps of an immense ruined temple. Colossal tropical trees--with rank creepers twining endlessly about their trunks, and hideous stone idols glimmering and grinning at intervals behind leaves and stalks and branches--surrounded the temple and shut out the sky, and threw a dismal shadow over the forlorn band of men on the steps. White exhalations twisted and curled up stealthily from the ground, approached the men in wreaths like smoke, touched them, and stretched them out dead, one by one, in the places where they lay. An agony of pity and fear for Walter loosened my tongue, and I implored him to escape. "Come back, come back!" I said. "Remember your promise to HER and to ME. Come back to us before the Pestilence reaches you and lays you dead like the rest!" He looked at me with an unearthly quiet in his face. "Wait," he said, "I shall come back. The night when I met the lost Woman on the highway was the night which set my life apart to be the instrument of a Design that is yet unseen. Here, lost in the wilderness, or there, welcomed back in the land of my birth, I am still walking on the dark road which leads me, and you, and the sister of your love and mine, to the unknown Retribution and the inevitable End. Wait and look. The Pestilence which touches the rest will pass ME." I saw him again. He was still in the forest, and the numbers of his lost companions had dwindled to very few. The temple was gone, and the idols were gone--and in their place the figures of dark, dwarfish men lurked murderously among the trees, with bows in their hands, and arrows fitted to the string. Once more I feared for Walter, and cried out to warn him. Once more he turned to me, with the immovable quiet in his face. "Another step," he said, "on the dark road. Wait and look. The arrows that strike the rest will spare me." I saw him for the third time in a wrecked ship, stranded on a wild, sandy shore. The overloaded boats were making away from him for the land, and he alone was left to sink with the ship. I cried to him to hail the hindmost boat, and to make a last effort for his life. The quiet face looked at me in return, and the unmoved voice gave me back the changeless reply. "Another step on the journey. Wait and look. The Sea which drowns the rest will spare me." I saw him for the last time. He was kneeling by a tomb of white marble, and the shadow of a veiled woman rose out of the grave beneath and waited by his side. The unearthly quiet of his face had changed to an unearthly sorrow. But the terrible certainty of his words remained the same. "Darker and darker," he said; "farther and farther yet. Death takes the good, the beautiful, and the young--and spares me. The Pestilence that wastes, the Arrow that strikes, the Sea that drowns, the Grave that closes over Love and Hope, are steps of my journey, and take me nearer and nearer to the End." My heart sank under a dread beyond words, under a grief beyond tears. The darkness closed round the pilgrim at the marble tomb--closed round the veiled woman from the grave--closed round the dreamer who looked on them. I saw and heard no more. I was aroused by a hand laid on my shoulder. It was Laura's. She had dropped on her knees by the side of the sofa. Her face was flushed and agitated, and her eyes met mine in a wild bewildered manner. I started the instant I saw her. "What has happened?" I asked. "What has frightened you?" She looked round at the half-open door, put her lips close to my ear, and answered in a whisper-- "Marian!--the figure at the lake--the footsteps last night--I've just seen her! I've just spoken to her!" "Who, for Heaven's sake?" "Anne Catherick." I was so startled by the disturbance in Laura's face and manner, and so dismayed by the first waking impressions of my dream, that I was not fit to bear the revelation which burst upon me when that name passed her lips. I could only stand rooted to the floor, looking at her in breathless silence. She was too much absorbed by what had happened to notice the effect which her reply had produced on me. "I have seen Anne Catherick! I have spoken to Anne Catherick!" she repeated as if I had not heard her. "Oh, Marian, I have such things to tell you! Come away--we may be interrupted here--come at once into my room." With those eager words she caught me by the hand, and led me through the library, to the end room on the ground floor, which had been fitted up for her own especial use. No third person, except her maid, could have any excuse for surprising us here. She pushed me in before her, locked the door, and drew the chintz curtains that hung over the inside. The strange, stunned feeling which had taken possession of me still remained. But a growing conviction that the complications which had long threatened to gather about her, and to gather about me, had suddenly closed fast round us both, was now beginning to penetrate my mind. I could not express it in words--I could hardly even realise it dimly in my own thoughts. "Anne Catherick!" I whispered to myself, with useless, helpless reiteration--"Anne Catherick!" Laura drew me to the nearest seat, an ottoman in the middle of the room. "Look!" she said, "look here!"--and pointed to the bosom of her dress. I saw, for the first time, that the lost brooch was pinned in its place again. There was something real in the sight of it, something real in the touching of it afterwards, which seemed to steady the whirl and confusion in my thoughts, and to help me to compose myself. "Where did you find your brooch?" The first words I could say to her were the words which put that trivial question at that important moment. "SHE found it, Marian." "Where?" "On the floor of the boat-house. Oh, how shall I begin--how shall I tell you about it! She talked to me so strangely--she looked so fearfully ill--she left me so suddenly!" Her voice rose as the tumult of her recollections pressed upon her mind. The inveterate distrust which weighs, night and day, on my spirits in this house, instantly roused me to warn her--just as the sight of the brooch had roused me to question her, the moment before. "Speak low," I said. "The window is open, and the garden path runs beneath it. Begin at the beginning, Laura. Tell me, word for word, what passed between that woman and you." "Shall I close the window?" "No, only speak low--only remember that Anne Catherick is a dangerous subject under your husband's roof. Where did you first see her?" "At the boat-house, Marian. I went out, as you know, to find my brooch, and I walked along the path through the plantation, looking down on the ground carefully at every step. In that way I got on, after a long time, to the boat-house, and as soon as I was inside it, I went on my knees to hunt over the floor. I was still searching with my back to the doorway, when I heard a soft, strange voice behind me say, 'Miss Fairlie.'" "Miss Fairlie!" "Yes, my old name--the dear, familiar name that I thought I had parted from for ever. I started up--not frightened, the voice was too kind and gentle to frighten anybody--but very much surprised. There, looking at me from the doorway, stood a woman, whose face I never remembered to have seen before--" "How was she dressed?" "She had a neat, pretty white gown on, and over it a poor worn thin dark shawl. Her bonnet was of brown straw, as poor and worn as the shawl. I was struck by the difference between her gown and the rest of her dress, and she saw that I noticed it. 'Don't look at my bonnet and shawl,' she said, speaking in a quick, breathless, sudden way; 'if I mustn't wear white, I don't care what I wear. Look at my gown as much as you please--I'm not ashamed of that.' Very strange, was it not? Before I could say anything to soothe her, she held out one of her hands, and I saw my brooch in it. I was so pleased and so grateful, that I went quite close to her to say what I really felt. 'Are you thankful enough to do me one little kindness?' she asked. 'Yes, indeed,' I answered, 'any kindness in my power I shall be glad to show you.' 'Then let me pin your brooch on for you, now I have found it.' Her request was so unexpected, Marian, and she made it with such extraordinary eagerness, that I drew back a step or two, not well knowing what to do. 'Ah!' she said, 'your mother would have let me pin on the brooch.' There was something in her voice and her look, as well as in her mentioning my mother in that reproachful manner, which made me ashamed of my distrust. I took her hand with the brooch in it, and put it up gently on the bosom of my dress. 'You knew my mother?' I said. 'Was it very long ago? have I ever seen you before?' Her hands were busy fastening the brooch: she stopped and pressed them against my breast. 'You don't remember a fine spring day at Limmeridge,' she said, 'and your mother walking down the path that led to the school, with a little girl on each side of her? I have had nothing else to think of since, and I remember it. You were one of the little girls, and I was the other. Pretty, clever Miss Fairlie, and poor dazed Anne Catherick were nearer to each other then than they are now!'" "Did you remember her, Laura, when she told you her name?" "Yes, I remembered your asking me about Anne Catherick at Limmeridge, and your saying that she had once been considered like me." "What reminded you of that, Laura?" "SHE reminded me. While I was looking at her, while she was very close to me, it came over my mind suddenly that we were like each other! Her face was pale and thin and weary--but the sight of it startled me, as if it had been the sight of my own face in the glass after a long illness. The discovery--I don't know why--gave me such a shock, that I was perfectly incapable of speaking to her for the moment." "Did she seem hurt by your silence?" "I am afraid she was hurt by it. 'You have not got your mother's face,' she said, 'or your mother's heart. Your mother's face was dark, and your mother's heart, Miss Fairlie, was the heart of an angel.' 'I am sure I feel kindly towards you,' I said, 'though I may not be able to express it as I ought. Why do you call me Miss Fairlie?----' 'Because I love the name of Fairlie and hate the name of Glyde,' she broke out violently. I had seen nothing like madness in her before this, but I fancied I saw it now in her eyes. 'I only thought you might not know I was married,' I said, remembering the wild letter she wrote to me at Limmeridge, and trying to quiet her. She sighed bitterly, and turned away from me. 'Not know you were married?' she repeated. 'I am here BECAUSE you are married. I am here to make atonement to you, before I meet your mother in the world beyond the grave.' She drew farther and farther away from me, till she was out of the boat-house, and then she watched and listened for a little while. When she turned round to speak again, instead of coming back, she stopped where she was, looking in at me, with a hand on each side of the entrance. 'Did you see me at the lake last night?' she said. 'Did you hear me following you in the wood? I have been waiting for days together to speak to you alone--I have left the only friend I have in the world, anxious and frightened about me--I have risked being shut up again in the mad-house--and all for your sake, Miss Fairlie, all for your sake.' Her words alarmed me, Marian, and yet there was something in the way she spoke that made me pity her with all my heart. I am sure my pity must have been sincere, for it made me bold enough to ask the poor creature to come in, and sit down in the boat-house, by my side." "Did she do so?" "No. She shook her head, and told me she must stop where she was, to watch and listen, and see that no third person surprised us. And from first to last, there she waited at the entrance, with a hand on each side of it, sometimes bending in suddenly to speak to me, sometimes drawing back suddenly to look about her. 'I was here yesterday,' she said, 'before it came dark, and I heard you, and the lady with you, talking together. I heard you tell her about your husband. I heard you say you had no influence to make him believe you, and no influence to keep him silent. Ah! I knew what those words meant--my conscience told me while I was listening. Why did I ever let you marry him! Oh, my fear--my mad, miserable, wicked fear!' She covered up her face in her poor worn shawl, and moaned and murmured to herself behind it. I began to be afraid she might break out into some terrible despair which neither she nor I could master. 'Try to quiet yourself,' I said; 'try to tell me how you might have prevented my marriage.' She took the shawl from her face, and looked at me vacantly. 'I ought to have had heart enough to stop at Limmeridge,' she answered. 'I ought never to have let the news of his coming there frighten me away. I ought to have warned you and saved you before it was too late. Why did I only have courage enough to write you that letter? Why did I only do harm, when I wanted and meant to do good? Oh, my fear--my mad, miserable, wicked fear!' She repeated those words again, and hid her face again in the end of her poor worn shawl. It was dreadful to see her, and dreadful to hear her." "Surely, Laura, you asked what the fear was which she dwelt on so earnestly?" "Yes, I asked that." "And what did she say?" "She asked me in return, if I should not be afraid of a man who had shut me up in a mad-house, and who would shut me up again, if he could? I said, 'Are you afraid still? Surely you would not be here if you were afraid now?' 'No,' she said, 'I am not afraid now.' I asked why not. She suddenly bent forward into the boat-house, and said, 'Can't you guess why?' I shook my head. 'Look at me,' she went on. I told her I was grieved to see that she looked very sorrowful and very ill. She smiled for the first time. 'Ill?' she repeated; 'I'm dying. You know why I'm not afraid of him now. Do you think I shall meet your mother in heaven? Will she forgive me if I do?' I was so shocked and so startled, that I could make no reply. 'I have been thinking of it,' she went on, 'all the time I have been in hiding from your husband, all the time I lay ill. My thoughts have driven me here--I want to make atonement--I want to undo all I can of the harm I once did.' I begged her as earnestly as I could to tell me what she meant. She still looked at me with fixed vacant eyes. 'SHALL I undo the harm?' she said to herself doubtfully. 'You have friends to take your part. If YOU know his Secret, he will be afraid of you, he won't dare use you as he used me. He must treat you mercifully for his own sake, if he is afraid of you and your friends. And if he treats you mercifully, and if I can say it was my doing----' I listened eagerly for more, but she stopped at those words." "You tried to make her go on?" "I tried, but she only drew herself away from me again, and leaned her face and arms against the side of the boat-house. 'Oh!' I heard her say, with a dreadful, distracted tenderness in her voice, 'oh! if I could only be buried with your mother! If I could only wake at her side, when the angel's trumpet sounds, and the graves give up their dead at the resurrection!'--Marian! I trembled from head to foot--it was horrible to hear her. 'But there is no hope of that,' she said, moving a little, so as to look at me again, 'no hope for a poor stranger like me. I shall not rest under the marble cross that I washed with my own hands, and made so white and pure for her sake. Oh no! oh no! God's mercy, not man's, will take me to her, where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest.' She spoke those words quietly and sorrowfully, with a heavy, hopeless sigh, and then waited a little. Her face was confused and troubled, she seemed to be thinking, or trying to think. 'What was it I said just now?' she asked after a while. 'When your mother is in my mind, everything else goes out of it. What was I saying? what was I saying?' I reminded the poor creature, as kindly and delicately as I could. 'Ah, yes, yes,' she said, still in a vacant, perplexed manner. 'You are helpless with your wicked husband. Yes. And I must do what I have come to do here--I must make it up to you for having been afraid to speak out at a better time.' 'What IS it you have to tell me?' I asked. 'The Secret that your cruel husband is afraid of,' she answered. 'I once threatened him with the Secret, and frightened him. You shall threaten him with the Secret, and frighten him too.' Her face darkened, and a hard, angry stare fixed itself in her eyes. She began waving her hand at me in a vacant, unmeaning manner. 'My mother knows the Secret,' she said. 'My mother has wasted under the Secret half her lifetime. One day, when I was grown up, she said something to ME. And the next day your husband----'" "Yes! yes! Go on. What did she tell you about your husband?" "She stopped again, Marian, at that point----" "And said no more?" "And listened eagerly. 'Hush!' she whispered, still waving her hand at me. 'Hush!' She moved aside out of the doorway, moved slowly and stealthily, step by step, till I lost her past the edge of the boat-house." "Surely you followed her?" "Yes, my anxiety made me bold enough to rise and follow her. Just as I reached the entrance, she appeared again suddenly, round the side of the boat-house. 'The Secret,' I whispered to her--'wait and tell me the Secret!' She caught hold of my arm, and looked at me with wild frightened eyes. 'Not now,' she said, 'we are not alone--we are watched. Come here to-morrow at this time--by yourself--mind--by yourself.' She pushed me roughly into the boat-house again, and I saw her no more." "Oh, Laura, Laura, another chance lost! If I had only been near you she should not have escaped us. On which side did you lose sight of her?" "On the left side, where the ground sinks and the wood is thickest." "Did you run out again? did you call after her?" "How could I? I was too terrified to move or speak." "But when you DID move--when you came out?" "I ran back here, to tell you what had happened." "Did you see any one, or hear any one, in the plantation?" "No, it seemed to be all still and quiet when I passed through it." I waited for a moment to consider. Was this third person, supposed to have been secretly present at the interview, a reality, or the creature of Anne Catherick's excited fancy? It was impossible to determine. The one thing certain was, that we had failed again on the very brink of discovery--failed utterly and irretrievably, unless Anne Catherick kept her appointment at the boat-house for the next day. "Are you quite sure you have told me everything that passed? Every word that was said?" I inquired. "I think so," she answered. "My powers of memory, Marian, are not like yours. But I was so strongly impressed, so deeply interested, that nothing of any importance can possibly have escaped me." "My dear Laura, the merest trifles are of importance where Anne Catherick is concerned. Think again. Did no chance reference escape her as to the place in which she is living at the present time?" "None that I can remember." "Did she not mention a companion and friend--a woman named Mrs. Clements?" "Oh yes! yes! I forgot that. She told me Mrs. Clements wanted sadly to go with her to the lake and take care of her, and begged and prayed that she would not venture into this neighbourhood alone." "Was that all she said about Mrs. Clements?" "Yes, that was all." "She told you nothing about the place in which she took refuge after leaving Todd's Corner?" "Nothing--I am quite sure." "Nor where she has lived since? Nor what her illness had been?" "No, Marian, not a word. Tell me, pray tell me, what you think about it. I don't know what to think, or what to do next." "You must do this, my love: You must carefully keep the appointment at the boat-house to-morrow. It is impossible to say what interests may not depend on your seeing that woman again. You shall not be left to yourself a second time. I will follow you at a safe distance. Nobody shall see me, but I will keep within hearing of your voice, if anything happens. Anne Catherick has escaped Walter Hartright, and has escaped you. Whatever happens, she shall not escape ME." Laura's eyes read mine attentively. "You believe," she said, "in this secret that my husband is afraid of? Suppose, Marian, it should only exist after all in Anne Catherick's fancy? Suppose she only wanted to see me and to speak to me, for the sake of old remembrances? Her manner was so strange--I almost doubted her. Would you trust her in other things?" "I trust nothing, Laura, but my own observation of your husband's conduct. I judge Anne Catherick's words by his actions, and I believe there is a secret." I said no more, and got up to leave the room. Thoughts were troubling me which I might have told her if we had spoken together longer, and which it might have been dangerous for her to know. The influence of the terrible dream from which she had awakened me hung darkly and heavily over every fresh impression which the progress of her narrative produced on my mind. I felt the ominous future coming close, chilling me with an unutterable awe, forcing on me the conviction of an unseen design in the long series of complications which had now fastened round us. I thought of Hartright--as I saw him in the body when he said farewell; as I saw him in the spirit in my dream--and I too began to doubt now whether we were not advancing blindfold to an appointed and an inevitable end. Leaving Laura to go upstairs alone, I went out to look about me in the walks near the house. The circumstances under which Anne Catherick had parted from her had made me secretly anxious to know how Count Fosco was passing the afternoon, and had rendered me secretly distrustful of the results of that solitary journey from which Sir Percival had returned but a few hours since. After looking for them in every direction and discovering nothing, I returned to the house, and entered the different rooms on the ground floor one after another. They were all empty. I came out again into the hall, and went upstairs to return to Laura. Madame Fosco opened her door as I passed it in my way along the passage, and I stopped to see if she could inform me of the whereabouts of her husband and Sir Percival. Yes, she had seen them both from her window more than an hour since. The Count had looked up with his customary kindness, and had mentioned with his habitual attention to her in the smallest trifles, that he and his friend were going out together for a long walk. For a long walk! They had never yet been in each other's company with that object in my experience of them. Sir Percival cared for no exercise but riding, and the Count (except when he was polite enough to be my escort) cared for no exercise at all. When I joined Laura again, I found that she had called to mind in my absence the impending question of the signature to the deed, which, in the interest of discussing her interview with Anne Catherick, we had hitherto overlooked. Her first words when I saw her expressed her surprise at the absence of the expected summons to attend Sir Percival in the library. "You may make your mind easy on that subject," I said. "For the present, at least, neither your resolution nor mine will be exposed to any further trial. Sir Percival has altered his plans--the business of the signature is put off." "Put off?" Laura repeated amazedly. "Who told you so?" "My authority is Count Fosco. I believe it is to his interference that we are indebted for your husband's sudden change of purpose." "It seems impossible, Marian. If the object of my signing was, as we suppose, to obtain money for Sir Percival that he urgently wanted, how can the matter be put off?" "I think, Laura, we have the means at hand of setting that doubt at rest. Have you forgotten the conversation that I heard between Sir Percival and the lawyer as they were crossing the hall?" "No, but I don't remember----" "I do. There were two alternatives proposed. One was to obtain your signature to the parchment. The other was to gain time by giving bills at three months. The last resource is evidently the resource now adopted, and we may fairly hope to be relieved from our share in Sir Percival's embarrassments for some time to come." "Oh, Marian, it sounds too good to be true!" "Does it, my love? You complimented me on my ready memory not long since, but you seem to doubt it now. I will get my journal, and you shall see if I am right or wrong." I went away and got the book at once. On looking back to the entry referring to the lawyer's visit, we found that my recollection of the two alternatives presented was accurately correct. It was almost as great a relief to my mind as to Laura's, to find that my memory had served me, on this occasion, as faithfully as usual. In the perilous uncertainty of our present situation, it is hard to say what future interests may not depend upon the regularity of the entries in my journal, and upon the reliability of my recollection at the time when I make them. Laura's face and manner suggested to me that this last consideration had occurred to her as well as to myself. Anyway, it is only a trifling matter, and I am almost ashamed to put it down here in writing--it seems to set the forlornness of our situation in such a miserably vivid light. We must have little indeed to depend on, when the discovery that my memory can still be trusted to serve us is hailed as if it was the discovery of a new friend! The first bell for dinner separated us. Just as it had done ringing, Sir Percival and the Count returned from their walk. We heard the master of the house storming at the servants for being five minutes late, and the master's guest interposing, as usual, in the interests of propriety, patience, and peace. * * * * * * * * * * The evening has come and gone. No extraordinary event has happened. But I have noticed certain peculiarities in the conduct of Sir Percival and the Count, which have sent me to my bed feeling very anxious and uneasy about Anne Catherick, and about the results which to-morrow may produce. I know enough by this time, to be sure, that the aspect of Sir Percival which is the most false, and which, therefore, means the worst, is his polite aspect. That long walk with his friend had ended in improving his manners, especially towards his wife. To Laura's secret surprise and to my secret alarm, he called her by her Christian name, asked if she had heard lately from her uncle, inquired when Mrs. Vesey was to receive her invitation to Blackwater, and showed her so many other little attentions that he almost recalled the days of his hateful courtship at Limmeridge House. This was a bad sign to begin with, and I thought it more ominous still that he should pretend after dinner to fall asleep in the drawing-room, and that his eyes should cunningly follow Laura and me when he thought we neither of us suspected him. I have never had any doubt that his sudden journey by himself took him to Welmingham to question Mrs. Catherick--but the experience of to-night has made me fear that the expedition was not undertaken in vain, and that he has got the information which he unquestionably left us to collect. If I knew where Anne Catherick was to be found, I would be up to-morrow with sunrise and warn her. While the aspect under which Sir Percival presented himself to-night was unhappily but too familiar to me, the aspect under which the Count appeared was, on the other hand, entirely new in my experience of him. He permitted me, this evening, to make his acquaintance, for the first time, in the character of a Man of Sentiment--of sentiment, as I believe, really felt, not assumed for the occasion. For instance, he was quiet and subdued--his eyes and his voice expressed a restrained sensibility. He wore (as if there was some hidden connection between his showiest finery and his deepest feeling) the most magnificent waistcoat he has yet appeared in--it was made of pale sea-green silk, and delicately trimmed with fine silver braid. His voice sank into the tenderest inflections, his smile expressed a thoughtful, fatherly admiration, whenever he spoke to Laura or to me. He pressed his wife's hand under the table when she thanked him for trifling little attentions at dinner. He took wine with her. "Your health and happiness, my angel!" he said, with fond glistening eyes. He ate little or nothing, and sighed, and said "Good Percival!" when his friend laughed at him. After dinner, he took Laura by the hand, and asked her if she would be "so sweet as to play to him." She complied, through sheer astonishment. He sat by the piano, with his watch-chain resting in folds, like a golden serpent, on the sea-green protuberance of his waistcoat. His immense head lay languidly on one side, and he gently beat time with two of his yellow-white fingers. He highly approved of the music, and tenderly admired Laura's manner of playing--not as poor Hartright used to praise it, with an innocent enjoyment of the sweet sounds, but with a clear, cultivated, practical knowledge of the merits of the composition, in the first place, and of the merits of the player's touch in the second. As the evening closed in, he begged that the lovely dying light might not be profaned, just yet, by the appearance of the lamps. He came, with his horribly silent tread, to the distant window at which I was standing, to be out of his way and to avoid the very sight of him--he came to ask me to support his protest against the lamps. If any one of them could only have burnt him up at that moment, I would have gone down to the kitchen and fetched it myself. "Surely you like this modest, trembling English twilight?" he said softly. "Ah! I love it. I feel my inborn admiration of all that is noble, and great, and good, purified by the breath of heaven on an evening like this. Nature has such imperishable charms, such inextinguishable tenderness for me!--I am an old, fat man--talk which would become your lips, Miss Halcombe, sounds like a derision and a mockery on mine. It is hard to be laughed at in my moments of sentiment, as if my soul was like myself, old and overgrown. Observe, dear lady, what a light is dying on the trees! Does it penetrate your heart, as it penetrates mine?" He paused, looked at me, and repeated the famous lines of Dante on the Evening-time, with a melody and tenderness which added a charm of their own to the matchless beauty of the poetry itself. "Bah!" he cried suddenly, as the last cadence of those noble Italian words died away on his lips; "I make an old fool of myself, and only weary you all! Let us shut up the window in our bosoms and get back to the matter-of-fact world. Percival! I sanction the admission of the lamps. Lady Glyde--Miss Halcombe--Eleanor, my good wife--which of you will indulge me with a game at dominoes?" He addressed us all, but he looked especially at Laura. She had learnt to feel my dread of offending him, and she accepted his proposal. It was more than I could have done at that moment. I could not have sat down at the same table with him for any consideration. His eyes seemed to reach my inmost soul through the thickening obscurity of the twilight. His voice trembled along every nerve in my body, and turned me hot and cold alternately. The mystery and terror of my dream, which had haunted me at intervals all through the evening, now oppressed my mind with an unendurable foreboding and an unutterable awe. I saw the white tomb again, and the veiled woman rising out of it by Hartright's side. The thought of Laura welled up like a spring in the depths of my heart, and filled it with waters of bitterness, never, never known to it before. I caught her by the hand as she passed me on her way to the table, and kissed her as if that night was to part us for ever. While they were all gazing at me in astonishment, I ran out through the low window which was open before me to the ground--ran out to hide from them in the darkness, to hide even from myself. We separated that evening later than usual. Towards midnight the summer silence was broken by the shuddering of a low, melancholy wind among the trees. We all felt the sudden chill in the atmosphere, but the Count was the first to notice the stealthy rising of the wind. He stopped while he was lighting my candle for me, and held up his hand warningly-- "Listen!" he said. "There will be a change to-morrow." VII June 19th.--The events of yesterday warned me to be ready, sooner or later, to meet the worst. To-day is not yet at an end, and the worst has come. Judging by the closest calculation of time that Laura and I could make, we arrived at the conclusion that Anne Catherick must have appeared at the boat-house at half-past two o'clock on the afternoon of yesterday. I accordingly arranged that Laura should just show herself at the luncheon-table to-day, and should then slip out at the first opportunity, leaving me behind to preserve appearances, and to follow her as soon as I could safely do so. This mode of proceeding, if no obstacles occurred to thwart us, would enable her to be at the boat-house before half-past two, and (when I left the table, in my turn) would take me to a safe position in the plantation before three. The change in the weather, which last night's wind warned us to expect, came with the morning. It was raining heavily when I got up, and it continued to rain until twelve o'clock--when the clouds dispersed, the blue sky appeared, and the sun shone again with the bright promise of a fine afternoon. My anxiety to know how Sir Percival and the Count would occupy the early part of the day was by no means set at rest, so far as Sir Percival was concerned, by his leaving us immediately after breakfast, and going out by himself, in spite of the rain. He neither told us where he was going nor when we might expect him back. We saw him pass the breakfast-room window hastily, with his high boots and his waterproof coat on--and that was all. The Count passed the morning quietly indoors, some part of it in the library, some part in the drawing-room, playing odds and ends of music on the piano, and humming to himself. Judging by appearances, the sentimental side of his character was persistently inclined to betray itself still. He was silent and sensitive, and ready to sigh and languish ponderously (as only fat men CAN sigh and languish) on the smallest provocation. Luncheon-time came and Sir Percival did not return. The Count took his friend's place at the table, plaintively devoured the greater part of a fruit tart, submerged under a whole jugful of cream, and explained the full merit of the achievement to us as soon as he had done. "A taste for sweets," he said in his softest tones and his tenderest manner, "is the innocent taste of women and children. I love to share it with them--it is another bond, dear ladies, between you and me." Laura left the table in ten minutes' time. I was sorely tempted to accompany her. But if we had both gone out together we must have excited suspicion, and worse still, if we allowed Anne Catherick to see Laura, accompanied by a second person who was a stranger to her, we should in all probability forfeit her confidence from that moment, never to regain it again. I waited, therefore, as patiently as I could, until the servant came in to clear the table. When I quitted the room, there were no signs, in the house or out of it, of Sir Percival's return. I left the Count with a piece of sugar between his lips, and the vicious cockatoo scrambling up his waistcoat to get at it, while Madame Fosco, sitting opposite to her husband, watched the proceedings of his bird and himself as attentively as if she had never seen anything of the sort before in her life. On my way to the plantation I kept carefully beyond the range of view from the luncheon-room window. Nobody saw me and nobody followed me. It was then a quarter to three o'clock by my watch. Once among the trees I walked rapidly, until I had advanced more than half-way through the plantation. At that point I slackened my pace and proceeded cautiously, but I saw no one, and heard no voices. By little and little I came within view of the back of the boat-house--stopped and listened--then went on, till I was close behind it, and must have heard any persons who were talking inside. Still the silence was unbroken--still far and near no sign of a living creature appeared anywhere. After skirting round by the back of the building, first on one side and then on the other, and making no discoveries, I ventured in front of it, and fairly looked in. The place was empty. I called, "Laura!"--at first softly, then louder and louder. No one answered and no one appeared. For all that I could see and hear, the only human creature in the neighbourhood of the lake and the plantation was myself. My heart began to beat violently, but I kept my resolution, and searched, first the boat-house and then the ground in front of it, for any signs which might show me whether Laura had really reached the place or not. No mark of her presence appeared inside the building, but I found traces of her outside it, in footsteps on the sand. I detected the footsteps of two persons--large footsteps like a man's, and small footsteps, which, by putting my own feet into them and testing their size in that manner, I felt certain were Laura's. The ground was confusedly marked in this way just before the boat-house. Close against one side of it, under shelter of the projecting roof, I discovered a little hole in the sand--a hole artificially made, beyond a doubt. I just noticed it, and then turned away immediately to trace the footsteps as far as I could, and to follow the direction in which they might lead me. They led me, starting from the left-hand side of the boat-house, along the edge of the trees, a distance, I should think, of between two and three hundred yards, and then the sandy ground showed no further trace of them. Feeling that the persons whose course I was tracking must necessarily have entered the plantation at this point, I entered it too. At first I could find no path, but I discovered one afterwards, just faintly traced among the trees, and followed it. It took me, for some distance, in the direction of the village, until I stopped at a point where another foot-track crossed it. The brambles grew thickly on either side of this second path. I stood looking down it, uncertain which way to take next, and while I looked I saw on one thorny branch some fragments of fringe from a woman's shawl. A closer examination of the fringe satisfied me that it had been torn from a shawl of Laura's, and I instantly followed the second path. It brought me out at last, to my great relief, at the back of the house. I say to my great relief, because I inferred that Laura must, for some unknown reason, have returned before me by this roundabout way. I went in by the court-yard and the offices. The first person whom I met in crossing the servants' hall was Mrs. Michelson, the housekeeper. "Do you know," I asked, "whether Lady Glyde has come in from her walk or not?" "My lady came in a little while ago with Sir Percival," answered the housekeeper. "I am afraid, Miss Halcombe, something very distressing has happened." My heart sank within me. "You don't mean an accident?" I said faintly. "No, no--thank God, no accident. But my lady ran upstairs to her own room in tears, and Sir Percival has ordered me to give Fanny warning to leave in an hour's time." Fanny was Laura's maid--a good affectionate girl who had been with her for years--the only person in the house whose fidelity and devotion we could both depend upon. "Where is Fanny?" I inquired. "In my room, Miss Halcombe. The young woman is quite overcome, and I told her to sit down and try to recover herself." I went to Mrs. Michelson's room, and found Fanny in a corner, with her box by her side, crying bitterly. She could give me no explanation whatever of her sudden dismissal. Sir Percival had ordered that she should have a month's wages, in place of a month's warning, and go. No reason had been assigned--no objection had been made to her conduct. She had been forbidden to appeal to her mistress, forbidden even to see her for a moment to say good-bye. She was to go without explanations or farewells, and to go at once. After soothing the poor girl by a few friendly words, I asked where she proposed to sleep that night. She replied that she thought of going to the little inn in the village, the landlady of which was a respectable woman, known to the servants at Blackwater Park. The next morning, by leaving early, she might get back to her friends in Cumberland without stopping in London, where she was a total stranger. I felt directly that Fanny's departure offered us a safe means of communication with London and with Limmeridge House, of which it might be very important to avail ourselves. Accordingly, I told her that she might expect to hear from her mistress or from me in the course of the evening, and that she might depend on our both doing all that lay in our power to help her, under the trial of leaving us for the present. Those words said, I shook hands with her and went upstairs. The door which led to Laura's room was the door of an ante-chamber opening on to the passage. When I tried it, it was bolted on the inside. I knocked, and the door was opened by the same heavy, overgrown housemaid whose lumpish insensibility had tried my patience so severely on the day when I found the wounded dog. I had, since that time, discovered that her name was Margaret Porcher, and that she was the most awkward, slatternly, and obstinate servant in the house. On opening the door she instantly stepped out to the threshold, and stood grinning at me in stolid silence. "Why do you stand there?" I said. "Don't you see that I want to come in?" "Ah, but you mustn't come in," was the answer, with another and a broader grin still. "How dare you talk to me in that way? Stand back instantly!" She stretched out a great red hand and arm on each side of her, so as to bar the doorway, and slowly nodded her addle head at me. "Master's orders," she said, and nodded again. I had need of all my self-control to warn me against contesting the matter with HER, and to remind me that the next words I had to say must be addressed to her master. I turned my back on her, and instantly went downstairs to find him. My resolution to keep my temper under all the irritations that Sir Percival could offer was, by this time, as completely forgotten--I say so to my shame--as if I had never made it. It did me good, after all I had suffered and suppressed in that house--it actually did me good to feel how angry I was. The drawing-room and the breakfast-room were both empty. I went on to the library, and there I found Sir Percival, the Count, and Madame Fosco. They were all three standing up, close together, and Sir Percival had a little slip of paper in his hand. As I opened the door I heard the Count say to him, "No--a thousand times over, no." I walked straight up to him, and looked him full in the face. "Am I to understand, Sir Percival, that your wife's room is a prison, and that your housemaid is the gaoler who keeps it?" I asked. "Yes, that is what you are to understand," he answered. "Take care my gaoler hasn't got double duty to do--take care your room is not a prison too." "Take YOU care how you treat your wife, and how you threaten ME," I broke out in the heat of my anger. "There are laws in England to protect women from cruelty and outrage. If you hurt a hair of Laura's head, if you dare to interfere with my freedom, come what may, to those laws I will appeal." Instead of answering me he turned round to the Count. "What did I tell you?" he asked. "What do you say now?" "What I said before," replied the Count--"No." Even in the vehemence of my anger I felt his calm, cold, grey eyes on my face. They turned away from me as soon as he had spoken, and looked significantly at his wife. Madame Fosco immediately moved close to my side, and in that position addressed Sir Percival before either of us could speak again. "Favour me with your attention for one moment," she said, in her clear icily-suppressed tones. "I have to thank you, Sir Percival, for your hospitality, and to decline taking advantage of it any longer. I remain in no house in which ladies are treated as your wife and Miss Halcombe have been treated here to-day!" Sir Percival drew back a step, and stared at her in dead silence. The declaration he had just heard--a declaration which he well knew, as I well knew, Madame Fosco would not have ventured to make without her husband's permission--seemed to petrify him with surprise. The Count stood by, and looked at his wife with the most enthusiastic admiration. "She is sublime!" he said to himself. He approached her while he spoke, and drew her hand through his arm. "I am at your service, Eleanor," he went on, with a quiet dignity that I had never noticed in him before. "And at Miss Halcombe's service, if she will honour me by accepting all the assistance I can offer her." "Damn it! what do you mean?" cried Sir Percival, as the Count quietly moved away with his wife to the door. "At other times I mean what I say, but at this time I mean what my wife says," replied the impenetrable Italian. "We have changed places, Percival, for once, and Madame Fosco's opinion is--mine." Sir Percival crumpled up the paper in his hand, and pushing past the Count, with another oath, stood between him and the door. "Have your own way," he said, with baffled rage in his low, half-whispering tones. "Have your own way--and see what comes of it." With those words he left the room. Madame Fosco glanced inquiringly at her husband. "He has gone away very suddenly," she said. "What does it mean?" "It means that you and I together have brought the worst-tempered man in all England to his senses," answered the Count. "It means, Miss Halcombe, that Lady Glyde is relieved from a gross indignity, and you from the repetition of an unpardonable insult. Suffer me to express my admiration of your conduct and your courage at a very trying moment." "Sincere admiration," suggested Madame Fosco. "Sincere admiration," echoed the Count. I had no longer the strength of my first angry resistance to outrage and injury to support me. My heart-sick anxiety to see Laura, my sense of my own helpless ignorance of what had happened at the boat-house, pressed on me with an intolerable weight. I tried to keep up appearances by speaking to the Count and his wife in the tone which they had chosen to adopt in speaking to me, but the words failed on my lips--my breath came short and thick--my eyes looked longingly, in silence, at the door. The Count, understanding my anxiety, opened it, went out, and pulled it to after him. At the same time Sir Percival's heavy step descended the stairs. I heard them whispering together outside, while Madame Fosco was assuring me, in her calmest and most conventional manner, that she rejoiced, for all our sakes, that Sir Percival's conduct had not obliged her husband and herself to leave Blackwater Park. Before she had done speaking the whispering ceased, the door opened, and the Count looked in. "Miss Halcombe," he said, "I am happy to inform you that Lady Glyde is mistress again in her own house. I thought it might be more agreeable to you to hear of this change for the better from me than from Sir Percival, and I have therefore expressly returned to mention it." "Admirable delicacy!" said Madame Fosco, paying back her husband's tribute of admiration with the Count's own coin, in the Count's own manner. He smiled and bowed as if he had received a formal compliment from a polite stranger, and drew back to let me pass out first. Sir Percival was standing in the hall. As I hurried to the stairs I heard him call impatiently to the Count to come out of the library. "What are you waiting there for?" he said. "I want to speak to you." "And I want to think a little by myself," replied the other. "Wait till later, Percival, wait till later." Neither he nor his friend said any more. I gained the top of the stairs and ran along the passage. In my haste and my agitation I left the door of the ante-chamber open, but I closed the door of the bedroom the moment I was inside it. Laura was sitting alone at the far end of the room, her arms resting wearily on a table, and her face hidden in her hands. She started up with a cry of delight when she saw me. "How did you get here?" she asked. "Who gave you leave? Not Sir Percival?" In my overpowering anxiety to hear what she had to tell me, I could not answer her--I could only put questions on my side. Laura's eagerness to know what had passed downstairs proved, however, too strong to be resisted. She persistently repeated her inquiries. "The Count, of course," I answered impatiently. "Whose influence in the house----" She stopped me with a gesture of disgust. "Don't speak of him," she cried. "The Count is the vilest creature breathing! The Count is a miserable Spy----!" Before we could either of us say another word we were alarmed by a soft knocking at the door of the bedroom. I had not yet sat down, and I went first to see who it was. When I opened the door Madame Fosco confronted me with my handkerchief in her hand. "You dropped this downstairs, Miss Halcombe," she said, "and I thought I could bring it to you, as I was passing by to my own room." Her face, naturally pale, had turned to such a ghastly whiteness that I started at the sight of it. Her hands, so sure and steady at all other times, trembled violently, and her eyes looked wolfishly past me through the open door, and fixed on Laura. She had been listening before she knocked! I saw it in her white face, I saw it in her trembling hands, I saw it in her look at Laura. After waiting an instant she turned from me in silence, and slowly walked away. I closed the door again. "Oh, Laura! Laura! We shall both rue the day when you called the Count a Spy!" "You would have called him so yourself, Marian, if you had known what I know. Anne Catherick was right. There was a third person watching us in the plantation yesterday, and that third person---" "Are you sure it was the Count?" "I am absolutely certain. He was Sir Percival's spy--he was Sir Percival's informer--he set Sir Percival watching and waiting, all the morning through, for Anne Catherick and for me." "Is Anne found? Did you see her at the lake?" "No. She has saved herself by keeping away from the place. When I got to the boat-house no one was there." "Yes? Yes?" "I went in and sat waiting for a few minutes. But my restlessness made me get up again, to walk about a little. As I passed out I saw some marks on the sand, close under the front of the boat-house. I stooped down to examine them, and discovered a word written in large letters on the sand. The word was--LOOK." "And you scraped away the sand, and dug a hollow place in it?" "How do you know that, Marian?" "I saw the hollow place myself when I followed you to the boat-house. Go on--go on!" "Yes, I scraped away the sand on the surface, and in a little while I came to a strip of paper hidden beneath, which had writing on it. The writing was signed with Anne Catherick's initials." "Where is it?" "Sir Percival has taken it from me." "Can you remember what the writing was? Do you think you can repeat it to me?" "In substance I can, Marian. It was very short. You would have remembered it, word for word." "Try to tell me what the substance was before we go any further." She complied. I write the lines down here exactly as she repeated them to me. They ran thus-- "I was seen with you, yesterday, by a tall, stout old man, and had to run to save myself. He was not quick enough on his feet to follow me, and he lost me among the trees. I dare not risk coming back here to-day at the same time. I write this, and hide it in the sand, at six in the morning, to tell you so. When we speak next of your wicked husband's Secret we must speak safely, or not at all. Try to have patience. I promise you shall see me again and that soon.--A. C." The reference to the "tall, stout old man" (the terms of which Laura was certain that she had repeated to me correctly) left no doubt as to who the intruder had been. I called to mind that I had told Sir Percival, in the Count's presence the day before, that Laura had gone to the boat-house to look for her brooch. In all probability he had followed her there, in his officious way, to relieve her mind about the matter of the signature, immediately after he had mentioned the change in Sir Percival's plans to me in the drawing-room. In this case he could only have got to the neighbourhood of the boat-house at the very moment when Anne Catherick discovered him. The suspiciously hurried manner in which she parted from Laura had no doubt prompted his useless attempt to follow her. Of the conversation which had previously taken place between them he could have heard nothing. The distance between the house and the lake, and the time at which he left me in the drawing-room, as compared with the time at which Laura and Anne Catherick had been speaking together, proved that fact to us at any rate, beyond a doubt. Having arrived at something like a conclusion so far, my next great interest was to know what discoveries Sir Percival had made after Count Fosco had given him his information. "How came you to lose possession of the letter?" I asked. "What did you do with it when you found it in the sand?" "After reading it once through," she replied, "I took it into the boat-house with me to sit down and look over it a second time. While I was reading a shadow fell across the paper. I looked up, and saw Sir Percival standing in the doorway watching me." "Did you try to hide the letter?" "I tried, but he stopped me. 'You needn't trouble to hide that,' he said. 'I happen to have read it.' I could only look at him helplessly--I could say nothing. 'You understand?' he went on; 'I have read it. I dug it up out of the sand two hours since, and buried it again, and wrote the word above it again, and left it ready to your hands. You can't lie yourself out of the scrape now. You saw Anne Catherick in secret yesterday, and you have got her letter in your hand at this moment. I have not caught HER yet, but I have caught YOU. Give me the letter.' He stepped close up to me--I was alone with him, Marian--what could I do?--I gave him the letter." "What did he say when you gave it to him?" "At first he said nothing. He took me by the arm, and led me out of the boat-house, and looked about him on all sides, as if he was afraid of our being seen or heard. Then he clasped his hand fast round my arm, and whispered to me, 'What did Anne Catherick say to you yesterday? I insist on hearing every word, from first to last.'" "Did you tell him?" "I was alone with him, Marian--his cruel hand was bruising my arm--what could I do?" "Is the mark on your arm still? Let me see it." "Why do you want to see it?" "I want to see it, Laura, because our endurance must end, and our resistance must begin to-day. That mark is a weapon to strike him with. Let me see it now--I may have to swear to it at some future time." "Oh, Marian, don't look so--don't talk so! It doesn't hurt me now!" "Let me see it!" She showed me the marks. I was past grieving over them, past crying over them, past shuddering over them. They say we are either better than men, or worse. If the temptation that has fallen in some women's way, and made them worse, had fallen in mine at that moment--Thank God! my face betrayed nothing that his wife could read. The gentle, innocent, affectionate creature thought I was frightened for her and sorry for her, and thought no more. "Don't think too seriously of it, Marian," she said simply, as she pulled her sleeve down again. "It doesn't hurt me now." "I will try to think quietly of it, my love, for your sake.--Well! well! And you told him all that Anne Catherick had said to you--all that you told me?" "Yes, all. He insisted on it--I was alone with him--I could conceal nothing." "Did he say anything when you had done?" "He looked at me, and laughed to himself in a mocking, bitter way. 'I mean to have the rest out of you,' he said, 'do you hear?--the rest.' I declared to him solemnly that I had told him everything I knew. 'Not you,' he answered, 'you know more than you choose to tell. Won't you tell it? You shall! I'll wring it out of you at home if I can't wring it out of you here.' He led me away by a strange path through the plantation--a path where there was no hope of our meeting you--and he spoke no more till we came within sight of the house. Then he stopped again, and said, 'Will you take a second chance, if I give it to you? Will you think better of it, and tell me the rest?' I could only repeat the same words I had spoken before. He cursed my obstinacy, and went on, and took me with him to the house. 'You can't deceive me,' he said, 'you know more than you choose to tell. I'll have your secret out of you, and I'll have it out of that sister of yours as well. There shall be no more plotting and whispering between you. Neither you nor she shall see each other again till you have confessed the truth. I'll have you watched morning, noon, and night, till you confess the truth.' He was deaf to everything I could say. He took me straight upstairs into my own room. Fanny was sitting there, doing some work for me, and he instantly ordered her out. 'I'll take good care YOU'RE not mixed up in the conspiracy,' he said. 'You shall leave this house to-day. If your mistress wants a maid, she shall have one of my choosing.' He pushed me into the room, and locked the door on me. He set that senseless woman to watch me outside, Marian! He looked and spoke like a madman. You may hardly understand it--he did indeed." "I do understand it, Laura. He is mad--mad with the terrors of a guilty conscience. Every word you have said makes me positively certain that when Anne Catherick left you yesterday you were on the eve of discovering a secret which might have been your vile husband's ruin, and he thinks you HAVE discovered it. Nothing you can say or do will quiet that guilty distrust, and convince his false nature of your truth. I don't say this, my love, to alarm you. I say it to open your eyes to your position, and to convince you of the urgent necessity of letting me act, as I best can, for your protection while the chance is our own. Count Fosco's interference has secured me access to you to-day, but he may withdraw that interference to-morrow. Sir Percival has already dismissed Fanny because she is a quick-witted girl, and devotedly attached to you, and has chosen a woman to take her place who cares nothing for your interests, and whose dull intelligence lowers her to the level of the watch-dog in the yard. It is impossible to say what violent measures he may take next, unless we make the most of our opportunities while we have them." "What can we do, Marian? Oh, if we could only leave this house, never to see it again!" "Listen to me, my love, and try to think that you are not quite helpless so long as I am here with you." "I will think so--I do think so. Don't altogether forget poor Fanny in thinking of me. She wants help and comfort too." "I will not forget her. I saw her before I came up here, and I have arranged to communicate with her to-night. Letters are not safe in the post-bag at Blackwater Park, and I shall have two to write to-day, in your interests, which must pass through no hands but Fanny's." "What letters?" "I mean to write first, Laura, to Mr. Gilmore's partner, who has offered to help us in any fresh emergency. Little as I know of the law, I am certain that it can protect a woman from such treatment as that ruffian has inflicted on you to-day. I will go into no details about Anne Catherick, because I have no certain information to give. But the lawyer shall know of those bruises on your arm, and of the violence offered to you in this room--he shall, before I rest to-night!" "But think of the exposure, Marian!" "I am calculating on the exposure. Sir Percival has more to dread from it than you have. The prospect of an exposure may bring him to terms when nothing else will." I rose as I spoke, but Laura entreated me not to leave her. "You will drive him to desperation," she said, "and increase our dangers tenfold." I felt the truth--the disheartening truth--of those words. But I could not bring myself plainly to acknowledge it to her. In our dreadful position there was no help and no hope for us but in risking the worst. I said so in guarded terms. She sighed bitterly, but did not contest the matter. She only asked about the second letter that I had proposed writing. To whom was it to be addressed? "To Mr. Fairlie," I said. "Your uncle is your nearest male relative, and the head of the family. He must and shall interfere." Laura shook her head sorrowfully. "Yes, yes," I went on, "your uncle is a weak, selfish, worldly man, I know, but he is not Sir Percival Glyde, and he has no such friend about him as Count Fosco. I expect nothing from his kindness or his tenderness of feeling towards you or towards me, but he will do anything to pamper his own indolence, and to secure his own quiet. Let me only persuade him that his interference at this moment will save him inevitable trouble and wretchedness and responsibility hereafter, and he will bestir himself for his own sake. I know how to deal with him, Laura--I have had some practice." "If you could only prevail on him to let me go back to Limmeridge for a little while and stay there quietly with you, Marian, I could be almost as happy again as I was before I was married!" Those words set me thinking in a new direction. Would it be possible to place Sir Percival between the two alternatives of either exposing himself to the scandal of legal interference on his wife's behalf, or of allowing her to be quietly separated from him for a time under pretext of a visit to her uncle's house? And could he, in that case, be reckoned on as likely to accept the last resource? It was doubtful--more than doubtful. And yet, hopeless as the experiment seemed, surely it was worth trying. I resolved to try it in sheer despair of knowing what better to do. "Your uncle shall know the wish you have just expressed," I said, "and I will ask the lawyer's advice on the subject as well. Good may come of it--and will come of it, I hope." Saying that I rose again, and again Laura tried to make me resume my seat. "Don't leave me," she said uneasily. "My desk is on that table. You can write here." It tried me to the quick to refuse her, even in her own interests. But we had been too long shut up alone together already. Our chance of seeing each other again might entirely depend on our not exciting any fresh suspicions. It was full time to show myself, quietly and unconcernedly, among the wretches who were at that very moment, perhaps, thinking of us and talking of us downstairs. I explained the miserable necessity to Laura, and prevailed on her to recognise it as I did. "I will come back again, love, in an hour or less," I said. "The worst is over for to-day. Keep yourself quiet and fear nothing." "Is the key in the door, Marian? Can I lock it on the inside?" "Yes, here is the key. Lock the door, and open it to nobody until I come upstairs again." I kissed her and left her. It was a relief to me as I walked away to hear the key turned in the lock, and to know that the door was at her own command. VIII June 19th.--I had only got as far as the top of the stairs when the locking of Laura's door suggested to me the precaution of also locking my own door, and keeping the key safely about me while I was out of the room. My journal was already secured with other papers in the table drawer, but my writing materials were left out. These included a seal bearing the common device of two doves drinking out of the same cup, and some sheets of blotting-paper, which had the impression on them of the closing lines of my writing in these pages traced during the past night. Distorted by the suspicion which had now become a part of myself, even such trifles as these looked too dangerous to be trusted without a guard--even the locked table drawer seemed to be not sufficiently protected in my absence until the means of access to it had been carefully secured as well. I found no appearance of any one having entered the room while I had been talking with Laura. My writing materials (which I had given the servant instructions never to meddle with) were scattered over the table much as usual. The only circumstance in connection with them that at all struck me was that the seal lay tidily in the tray with the pencils and the wax. It was not in my careless habits (I am sorry to say) to put it there, neither did I remember putting it there. But as I could not call to mind, on the other hand, where else I had thrown it down, and as I was also doubtful whether I might not for once have laid it mechanically in the right place, I abstained from adding to the perplexity with which the day's events had filled my mind by troubling it afresh about a trifle. I locked the door, put the key in my pocket, and went downstairs. Madame Fosco was alone in the hall looking at the weather-glass. "Still falling," she said. "I am afraid we must expect more rain." Her face was composed again to its customary expression and its customary colour. But the hand with which she pointed to the dial of the weather-glass still trembled. Could she have told her husband already that she had overheard Laura reviling him, in my company, as a "spy?" My strong suspicion that she must have told him, my irresistible dread (all the more overpowering from its very vagueness) of the consequences which might follow, my fixed conviction, derived from various little self-betrayals which women notice in each other, that Madame Fosco, in spite of her well-assumed external civility, had not forgiven her niece for innocently standing between her and the legacy of ten thousand pounds--all rushed upon my mind together, all impelled me to speak in the vain hope of using my own influence and my own powers of persuasion for the atonement of Laura's offence. "May I trust to your kindness to excuse me, Madame Fosco, if I venture to speak to you on an exceedingly painful subject?" She crossed her hands in front of her and bowed her head solemnly, without uttering a word, and without taking her eyes off mine for a moment. "When you were so good as to bring me back my handkerchief," I went on, "I am very, very much afraid you must have accidentally heard Laura say something which I am unwilling to repeat, and which I will not attempt to defend. I will only venture to hope that you have not thought it of sufficient importance to be mentioned to the Count?" "I think it of no importance whatever," said Madame Fosco sharply and suddenly. "But," she added, resuming her icy manner in a moment, "I have no secrets from my husband even in trifles. When he noticed just now that I looked distressed, it was my painful duty to tell him why I was distressed, and I frankly acknowledge to you, Miss Halcombe, that I HAVE told him." I was prepared to hear it, and yet she turned me cold all over when she said those words. "Let me earnestly entreat you, Madame Fosco--let me earnestly entreat the Count--to make some allowances for the sad position in which my sister is placed. She spoke while she was smarting under the insult and injustice inflicted on her by her husband, and she was not herself when she said those rash words. May I hope that they will be considerately and generously forgiven?" "Most assuredly," said the Count's quiet voice behind me. He had stolen on us with his noiseless tread and his book in his hand from the library. "When Lady Glyde said those hasty words," he went on, "she did me an injustice which I lament--and forgive. Let us never return to the subject, Miss Halcombe; let us all comfortably combine to forget it from this moment." "You are very kind," I said, "you relieve me inexpressibly." I tried to continue, but his eyes were on me; his deadly smile that hides everything was set, hard, and unwavering on his broad, smooth face. My distrust of his unfathomable falseness, my sense of my own degradation in stooping to conciliate his wife and himself, so disturbed and confused me, that the next words failed on my lips, and I stood there in silence. "I beg you on my knees to say no more, Miss Halcombe--I am truly shocked that you should have thought it necessary to say so much." With that polite speech he took my hand--oh, how I despise myself! oh, how little comfort there is even in knowing that I submitted to it for Laura's sake!--he took my hand and put it to his poisonous lips. Never did I know all my horror of him till then. That innocent familiarity turned my blood as if it had been the vilest insult that a man could offer me. Yet I hid my disgust from him--I tried to smile--I, who once mercilessly despised deceit in other women, was as false as the worst of them, as false as the Judas whose lips had touched my hand. I could not have maintained my degrading self-control--it is all that redeems me in my own estimation to know that I could not--if he had still continued to keep his eyes on my face. His wife's tigerish jealousy came to my rescue and forced his attention away from me the moment he possessed himself of my hand. Her cold blue eyes caught light, her dull white cheeks flushed into bright colour, she looked years younger than her age in an instant. "Count!" she said. "Your foreign forms of politeness are not understood by Englishwomen." "Pardon me, my angel! The best and dearest Englishwoman in the world understands them." With those words he dropped my hand and quietly raised his wife's hand to his lips in place of it. I ran back up the stairs to take refuge in my own room. If there had been time to think, my thoughts, when I was alone again, would have caused me bitter suffering. But there was no time to think. Happily for the preservation of my calmness and my courage there was time for nothing but action. The letters to the lawyer and to Mr. Fairlie were still to be written, and I sat down at once without a moment's hesitation to devote myself to them. There was no multitude of resources to perplex me--there was absolutely no one to depend on, in the first instance, but myself. Sir Percival had neither friends nor relatives in the neighbourhood whose intercession I could attempt to employ. He was on the coldest terms--in some cases on the worst terms with the families of his own rank and station who lived near him. We two women had neither father nor brother to come to the house and take our parts. There was no choice but to write those two doubtful letters, or to put Laura in the wrong and myself in the wrong, and to make all peaceable negotiation in the future impossible by secretly escaping from Blackwater Park. Nothing but the most imminent personal peril could justify our taking that second course. The letters must be tried first, and I wrote them. I said nothing to the lawyer about Anne Catherick, because (as I had already hinted to Laura) that topic was connected with a mystery which we could not yet explain, and which it would therefore be useless to write about to a professional man. I left my correspondent to attribute Sir Percival's disgraceful conduct, if he pleased, to fresh disputes about money matters, and simply consulted him on the possibility of taking legal proceedings for Laura's protection in the event of her husband's refusal to allow her to leave Blackwater Park for a time and return with me to Limmeridge. I referred him to Mr. Fairlie for the details of this last arrangement--I assured him that I wrote with Laura's authority--and I ended by entreating him to act in her name to the utmost extent of his power and with the least possible loss of time. The letter to Mr. Fairlie occupied me next. I appealed to him on the terms which I had mentioned to Laura as the most likely to make him bestir himself; I enclosed a copy of my letter to the lawyer to show him how serious the case was, and I represented our removal to Limmeridge as the only compromise which would prevent the danger and distress of Laura's present position from inevitably affecting her uncle as well as herself at no very distant time. When I had done, and had sealed and directed the two envelopes, I went back with the letters to Laura's room, to show her that they were written. "Has anybody disturbed you?" I asked, when she opened the door to me. "Nobody has knocked," she replied. "But I heard some one in the outer room." "Was it a man or a woman?" "A woman. I heard the rustling of her gown." "A rustling like silk?" "Yes, like silk." Madame Fosco had evidently been watching outside. The mischief she might do by herself was little to be feared. But the mischief she might do, as a willing instrument in her husband's hands, was too formidable to be overlooked. "What became of the rustling of the gown when you no longer heard it in the ante-room?" I inquired. "Did you hear it go past your wall, along the passage?" "Yes. I kept still and listened, and just heard it." "Which way did it go?" "Towards your room." I considered again. The sound had not caught my ears. But I was then deeply absorbed in my letters, and I write with a heavy hand and a quill pen, scraping and scratching noisily over the paper. It was more likely that Madame Fosco would hear the scraping of my pen than that I should hear the rustling of her dress. Another reason (if I had wanted one) for not trusting my letters to the post-bag in the hall. Laura saw me thinking. "More difficulties!" she said wearily; "more difficulties and more dangers!" "No dangers," I replied. "Some little difficulty, perhaps. I am thinking of the safest way of putting my two letters into Fanny's hands." "You have really written them, then? Oh, Marian, run no risks--pray, pray run no risks!" "No, no--no fear. Let me see--what o'clock is it now?" It was a quarter to six. There would be time for me to get to the village inn, and to come back again before dinner. If I waited till the evening I might find no second opportunity of safely leaving the house. "Keep the key turned in the lock. Laura," I said, "and don't be afraid about me. If you hear any inquiries made, call through the door, and say that I am gone out for a walk." "When shall you be back?" "Before dinner, without fail. Courage, my love. By this time to-morrow you will have a clear-headed, trustworthy man acting for your good. Mr. Gilmore's partner is our next best friend to Mr. Gilmore himself." A moment's reflection, as soon as I was alone, convinced me that I had better not appear in my walking-dress until I had first discovered what was going on in the lower part of the house. I had not ascertained yet whether Sir Percival was indoors or out. The singing of the canaries in the library, and the smell of tobacco-smoke that came through the door, which was not closed, told me at once where the Count was. I looked over my shoulder as I passed the doorway, and saw to my surprise that he was exhibiting the docility of the birds in his most engagingly polite manner to the housekeeper. He must have specially invited her to see them--for she would never have thought of going into the library of her own accord. The man's slightest actions had a purpose of some kind at the bottom of every one of them. What could be his purpose here? It was no time then to inquire into his motives. I looked about for Madame Fosco next, and found her following her favourite circle round and round the fish-pond. I was a little doubtful how she would meet me, after the outbreak of jealousy of which I had been the cause so short a time since. But her husband had tamed her in the interval, and she now spoke to me with the same civility as usual. My only object in addressing myself to her was to ascertain if she knew what had become of Sir Percival. I contrived to refer to him indirectly, and after a little fencing on either side she at last mentioned that he had gone out. "Which of the horses has he taken?" I asked carelessly. "None of them," she replied. "He went away two hours since on foot. As I understood it, his object was to make fresh inquiries about the woman named Anne Catherick. He appears to be unreasonably anxious about tracing her. Do you happen to know if she is dangerously mad, Miss Halcombe?" "I do not, Countess." "Are you going in?" "Yes, I think so. I suppose it will soon be time to dress for dinner." We entered the house together. Madame Fosco strolled into the library, and closed the door. I went at once to fetch my hat and shawl. Every moment was of importance, if I was to get to Fanny at the inn and be back before dinner. When I crossed the hall again no one was there, and the singing of the birds in the library had ceased. I could not stop to make any fresh investigations. I could only assure myself that the way was clear, and then leave the house with the two letters safe in my pocket. On my way to the village I prepared myself for the possibility of meeting Sir Percival. As long as I had him to deal with alone I felt certain of not losing my presence of mind. Any woman who is sure of her own wits is a match at any time for a man who is not sure of his own temper. I had no such fear of Sir Percival as I had of the Count. Instead of fluttering, it had composed me, to hear of the errand on which he had gone out. While the tracing of Anne Catherick was the great anxiety that occupied him, Laura and I might hope for some cessation of any active persecution at his hands. For our sakes now, as well as for Anne's, I hoped and prayed fervently that she might still escape him. I walked on as briskly as the heat would let me till I reached the cross-road which led to the village, looking back from time to time to make sure that I was not followed by any one. Nothing was behind me all the way but an empty country waggon. The noise made by the lumbering wheels annoyed me, and when I found that the waggon took the road to the village, as well as myself, I stopped to let it go by and pass out of hearing. As I looked toward it, more attentively than before, I thought I detected at intervals the feet of a man walking close behind it, the carter being in front, by the side of his horses. The part of the cross-road which I had just passed over was so narrow that the waggon coming after me brushed the trees and thickets on either side, and I had to wait until it went by before I could test the correctness of my impression. Apparently that impression was wrong, for when the waggon had passed me the road behind it was quite clear. I reached the inn without meeting Sir Percival, and without noticing anything more, and was glad to find that the landlady had received Fanny with all possible kindness. The girl had a little parlour to sit in, away from the noise of the taproom, and a clean bedchamber at the top of the house. She began crying again at the sight of me, and said, poor soul, truly enough, that it was dreadful to feel herself turned out into the world as if she had committed some unpardonable fault, when no blame could be laid at her door by anybody--not even by her master, who had sent her away. "Try to make the best of it, Fanny," I said. "Your mistress and I will stand your friends, and will take care that your character shall not suffer. Now, listen to me. I have very little time to spare, and I am going to put a great trust in your hands. I wish you to take care of these two letters. The one with the stamp on it you are to put into the post when you reach London to-morrow. The other, directed to Mr. Fairlie, you are to deliver to him yourself as soon as you get home. Keep both the letters about you and give them up to no one. They are of the last importance to your mistress's interests." Fanny put the letters into the bosom of her dress. "There they shall stop, miss," she said, "till I have done what you tell me." "Mind you are at the station in good time to-morrow morning," I continued. "And when you see the housekeeper at Limmeridge give her my compliments, and say that you are in my service until Lady Glyde is able to take you back. We may meet again sooner than you think. So keep a good heart, and don't miss the seven o'clock train." "Thank you, miss--thank you kindly. It gives one courage to hear your voice again. Please to offer my duty to my lady, and say I left all the things as tidy as I could in the time. Oh, dear! dear! who will dress her for dinner to-day? It really breaks my heart, miss, to think of it." When I got back to the house I had only a quarter of an hour to spare to put myself in order for dinner, and to say two words to Laura before I went downstairs. "The letters are in Fanny's hands," I whispered to her at the door. "Do you mean to join us at dinner?" "Oh, no, no--not for the world." "Has anything happened? Has any one disturbed you?" "Yes--just now--Sir Percival----" "Did he come in?" "No, he frightened me by a thump on the door outside. I said, 'Who's there?' 'You know,' he answered. 'Will you alter your mind, and tell me the rest? You shall! Sooner or later I'll wring it out of you. You know where Anne Catherick is at this moment.' 'Indeed, indeed,' I said, 'I don't.' 'You do!' he called back. 'I'll crush your obstinacy--mind that!--I'll wring it out of you!' He went away with those words--went away, Marian, hardly five minutes ago." He had not found Anne! We were safe for that night--he had not found her yet. "You are going downstairs, Marian? Come up again in the evening." "Yes, yes. Don't be uneasy if I am a little late--I must be careful not to give offence by leaving them too soon." The dinner-bell rang and I hastened away. Sir Percival took Madame Fosco into the dining-room, and the Count gave me his arm. He was hot and flushed, and was not dressed with his customary care and completeness. Had he, too, been out before dinner, and been late in getting back? or was he only suffering from the heat a little more severely than usual? However this might be, he was unquestionably troubled by some secret annoyance or anxiety, which, with all his powers of deception, he was not able entirely to conceal. Through the whole of dinner he was almost as silent as Sir Percival himself, and he, every now and then, looked at his wife with an expression of furtive uneasiness which was quite new in my experience of him. The one social obligation which he seemed to be self-possessed enough to perform as carefully as ever was the obligation of being persistently civil and attentive to me. What vile object he has in view I cannot still discover, but be the design what it may, invariable politeness towards myself, invariable humility towards Laura, and invariable suppression (at any cost) of Sir Percival's clumsy violence, have been the means he has resolutely and impenetrably used to get to his end ever since he set foot in this house. I suspected it when he first interfered in our favour, on the day when the deed was produced in the library, and I feel certain of it now. When Madame Fosco and I rose to leave the table, the Count rose also to accompany us back to the drawing-room. "What are you going away for?" asked Sir Percival--"I mean YOU, Fosco." "I am going away because I have had dinner enough, and wine enough," answered the Count. "Be so kind, Percival, as to make allowances for my foreign habit of going out with the ladies, as well as coming in with them." "Nonsense! Another glass of claret won't hurt you. Sit down again like an Englishman. I want half an hour's quiet talk with you over our wine." "A quiet talk, Percival, with all my heart, but not now, and not over the wine. Later in the evening, if you please--later in the evening." "Civil!" said Sir Percival savagely. "Civil behaviour, upon my soul, to a man in his own house!" I had more than once seen him look at the Count uneasily during dinner-time, and had observed that the Count carefully abstained from looking at him in return. This circumstance, coupled with the host's anxiety for a little quiet talk over the wine, and the guest's obstinate resolution not to sit down again at the table, revived in my memory the request which Sir Percival had vainly addressed to his friend earlier in the day to come out of the library and speak to him. The Count had deferred granting that private interview, when it was first asked for in the afternoon, and had again deferred granting it, when it was a second time asked for at the dinner-table. Whatever the coming subject of discussion between them might be, it was clearly an important subject in Sir Percival's estimation--and perhaps (judging from his evident reluctance to approach it) a dangerous subject as well, in the estimation of the Count. These considerations occurred to me while we were passing from the dining-room to the drawing-room. Sir Percival's angry commentary on his friend's desertion of him had not produced the slightest effect. The Count obstinately accompanied us to the tea-table--waited a minute or two in the room--went out into the hall--and returned with the post-bag in his hands. It was then eight o'clock--the hour at which the letters were always despatched from Blackwater Park. "Have you any letter for the post, Miss Halcombe?" he asked, approaching me with the bag. I saw Madame Fosco, who was making the tea, pause, with the sugar-tongs in her hand, to listen for my answer. "No, Count, thank you. No letters to-day." He gave the bag to the servant, who was then in the room; sat down at the piano, and played the air of the lively Neapolitan street-song, "La mia Carolina," twice over. His wife, who was usually the most deliberate of women in all her movements, made the tea as quickly as I could have made it myself--finished her own cup in two minutes, and quietly glided out of the room. I rose to follow her example--partly because I suspected her of attempting some treachery upstairs with Laura, partly because I was resolved not to remain alone in the same room with her husband. Before I could get to the door the Count stopped me, by a request for a cup of tea. I gave him the cup of tea, and tried a second time to get away. He stopped me again--this time by going back to the piano, and suddenly appealing to me on a musical question in which he declared that the honour of his country was concerned. I vainly pleaded my own total ignorance of music, and total want of taste in that direction. He only appealed to me again with a vehemence which set all further protest on my part at defiance. "The English and the Germans (he indignantly declared) were always reviling the Italians for their inability to cultivate the higher kinds of music. We were perpetually talking of our Oratorios, and they were perpetually talking of their Symphonies. Did we forget and did they forget his immortal friend and countryman, Rossini? What was Moses in Egypt but a sublime oratorio, which was acted on the stage instead of being coldly sung in a concert-room? What was the overture to Guillaume Tell but a symphony under another name? Had I heard Moses in Egypt? Would I listen to this, and this, and this, and say if anything more sublimely sacred and grand had ever been composed by mortal man?"--And without waiting for a word of assent or dissent on my part, looking me hard in the face all the time, he began thundering on the piano, and singing to it with loud and lofty enthusiasm--only interrupting himself, at intervals, to announce to me fiercely the titles of the different pieces of music: "Chorus of Egyptians in the Plague of Darkness, Miss Halcombe!"--"Recitativo of Moses with the tables of the Law."--"Prayer of Israelites, at the passage of the Red Sea. Aha! Aha! Is that sacred? is that sublime?" The piano trembled under his powerful hands, and the teacups on the table rattled, as his big bass voice thundered out the notes, and his heavy foot beat time on the floor. There was something horrible--something fierce and devilish--in the outburst of his delight at his own singing and playing, and in the triumph with which he watched its effect upon me as I shrank nearer and nearer to the door. I was released at last, not by my own efforts, but by Sir Percival's interposition. He opened the dining-room door, and called out angrily to know what "that infernal noise" meant. The Count instantly got up from the piano. "Ah! if Percival is coming," he said, "harmony and melody are both at an end. The Muse of Music, Miss Halcombe, deserts us in dismay, and I, the fat old minstrel, exhale the rest of my enthusiasm in the open air!" He stalked out into the verandah, put his hands in his pockets, and resumed the Recitativo of Moses, sotto voce, in the garden. I heard Sir Percival call after him from the dining-room window. But he took no notice--he seemed determined not to hear. That long-deferred quiet talk between them was still to be put off, was still to wait for the Count's absolute will and pleasure. He had detained me in the drawing-room nearly half an hour from the time when his wife left us. Where had she been, and what had she been doing in that interval? I went upstairs to ascertain, but I made no discoveries, and when I questioned Laura, I found that she had not heard anything. Nobody had disturbed her, no faint rustling of the silk dress had been audible, either in the ante-room or in the passage. It was then twenty minutes to nine. After going to my room to get my journal, I returned, and sat with Laura, sometimes writing, sometimes stopping to talk with her. Nobody came near us, and nothing happened. We remained together till ten o'clock. I then rose, said my last cheering words, and wished her good-night. She locked her door again after we had arranged that I should come in and see her the first thing in the morning. I had a few sentences more to add to my diary before going to bed myself, and as I went down again to the drawing-room after leaving Laura for the last time that weary day, I resolved merely to show myself there, to make my excuses, and then to retire an hour earlier than usual for the night. Sir Percival, and the Count and his wife, were sitting together. Sir Percival was yawning in an easy-chair, the Count was reading, Madame Fosco was fanning herself. Strange to say, HER face was flushed now. She, who never suffered from the heat, was most undoubtedly suffering from it to-night. "I am afraid, Countess, you are not quite so well as usual?" I said. "The very remark I was about to make to you," she replied. "You are looking pale, my dear." My dear! It was the first time she had ever addressed me with that familiarity! There was an insolent smile too on her face when she said the words. "I am suffering from one of my bad headaches," I answered coldly. "Ah, indeed? Want of exercise, I suppose? A walk before dinner would have been just the thing for you." She referred to the "walk" with a strange emphasis. Had she seen me go out? No matter if she had. The letters were safe now in Fanny's hands. "Come and have a smoke, Fosco," said Sir Percival, rising, with another uneasy look at his friend. "With pleasure, Percival, when the ladies have gone to bed," replied the Count. "Excuse me, Countess, if I set you the example of retiring," I said. "The only remedy for such a headache as mine is going to bed." I took my leave. There was the same insolent smile on the woman's face when I shook hands with her. Sir Percival paid no attention to me. He was looking impatiently at Madame Fosco, who showed no signs of leaving the room with me. The Count smiled to himself behind his book. There was yet another delay to that quiet talk with Sir Percival--and the Countess was the impediment this time. IX June 19th.--Once safely shut into my own room, I opened these pages, and prepared to go on with that part of the day's record which was still left to write. For ten minutes or more I sat idle, with the pen in my hand, thinking over the events of the last twelve hours. When I at last addressed myself to my task, I found a difficulty in proceeding with it which I had never experienced before. In spite of my efforts to fix my thoughts on the matter in hand, they wandered away with the strangest persistency in the one direction of Sir Percival and the Count, and all the interest which I tried to concentrate on my journal centred instead in that private interview between them which had been put off all through the day, and which was now to take place in the silence and solitude of the night. In this perverse state of my mind, the recollection of what had passed since the morning would not come back to me, and there was no resource but to close my journal and to get away from it for a little while. I opened the door which led from my bedroom into my sitting-room, and having passed through, pulled it to again, to prevent any accident in case of draught with the candle left on the dressing-table. My sitting-room window was wide open, and I leaned out listlessly to look at the night. It was dark and quiet. Neither moon nor stars were visible. There was a smell like rain in the still, heavy air, and I put my hand out of window. No. The rain was only threatening, it had not come yet. I remained leaning on the window-sill for nearly a quarter of an hour, looking out absently into the black darkness, and hearing nothing, except now and then the voices of the servants, or the distant sound of a closing door, in the lower part of the house. Just as I was turning away wearily from the window to go back to the bedroom and make a second attempt to complete the unfinished entry in my journal, I smelt the odour of tobacco-smoke stealing towards me on the heavy night air. The next moment I saw a tiny red spark advancing from the farther end of the house in the pitch darkness. I heard no footsteps, and I could see nothing but the spark. It travelled along in the night, passed the window at which I was standing, and stopped opposite my bedroom window, inside which I had left the light burning on the dressing-table. The spark remained stationary for a moment, then moved back again in the direction from which it had advanced. As I followed its progress I saw a second red spark, larger than the first, approaching from the distance. The two met together in the darkness. Remembering who smoked cigarettes and who smoked cigars, I inferred immediately that the Count had come out first to look and listen under my window, and that Sir Percival had afterwards joined him. They must both have been walking on the lawn--or I should certainly have heard Sir Percival's heavy footfall, though the Count's soft step might have escaped me, even on the gravel walk. I waited quietly at the window, certain that they could neither of them see me in the darkness of the room. "What's the matter?" I heard Sir Percival say in a low voice. "Why don't you come in and sit down?" "I want to see the light out of that window," replied the Count softly. "What harm does the light do?" "It shows she is not in bed yet. She is sharp enough to suspect something, and bold enough to come downstairs and listen, if she can get the chance. Patience, Percival--patience." "Humbug! You're always talking of patience." "I shall talk of something else presently. My good friend, you are on the edge of your domestic precipice, and if I let you give the women one other chance, on my sacred word of honour they will push you over it!" "What the devil do you mean?" "We will come to our explanations, Percival, when the light is out of that window, and when I have had one little look at the rooms on each side of the library, and a peep at the staircase as well." They slowly moved away, and the rest of the conversation between them (which had been conducted throughout in the same low tones) ceased to be audible. It was no matter. I had heard enough to determine me on justifying the Count's opinion of my sharpness and my courage. Before the red sparks were out of sight in the darkness I had made up my mind that there should be a listener when those two men sat down to their talk--and that the listener, in spite of all the Count's precautions to the contrary, should be myself. I wanted but one motive to sanction the act to my own conscience, and to give me courage enough for performing it--and that motive I had. Laura's honour, Laura's happiness--Laura's life itself--might depend on my quick ears and my faithful memory to-night. I had heard the Count say that he meant to examine the rooms on each side of the library, and the staircase as well, before he entered on any explanation with Sir Percival. This expression of his intentions was necessarily sufficient to inform me that the library was the room in which he proposed that the conversation should take place. The one moment of time which was long enough to bring me to that conclusion was also the moment which showed me a means of baffling his precautions--or, in other words, of hearing what he and Sir Percival said to each other, without the risk of descending at all into the lower regions of the house. In speaking of the rooms on the ground floor I have mentioned incidentally the verandah outside them, on which they all opened by means of French windows, extending from the cornice to the floor. The top of this verandah was flat, the rain-water being carried off from it by pipes into tanks which helped to supply the house. On the narrow leaden roof, which ran along past the bedrooms, and which was rather less, I should think, than three feet below the sills of the window, a row of flower-pots was ranged, with wide intervals between each pot--the whole being protected from falling in high winds by an ornamental iron railing along the edge of the roof. The plan which had now occurred to me was to get out at my sitting-room window on to this roof, to creep along noiselessly till I reached that part of it which was immediately over the library window, and to crouch down between the flower-pots, with my ear against the outer railing. If Sir Percival and the Count sat and smoked to-night, as I had seen them sitting and smoking many nights before, with their chairs close at the open window, and their feet stretched on the zinc garden seats which were placed under the verandah, every word they said to each other above a whisper (and no long conversation, as we all know by experience, can be carried on IN a whisper) must inevitably reach my ears. If, on the other hand, they chose to-night to sit far back inside the room, then the chances were that I should hear little or nothing--and in that case, I must run the far more serious risk of trying to outwit them downstairs. Strongly as I was fortified in my resolution by the desperate nature of our situation, I hoped most fervently that I might escape this last emergency. My courage was only a woman's courage after all, and it was very near to failing me when I thought of trusting myself on the ground floor, at the dead of night, within reach of Sir Percival and the Count. I went softly back to my bedroom to try the safer experiment of the verandah roof first. A complete change in my dress was imperatively necessary for many reasons. I took off my silk gown to begin with, because the slightest noise from it on that still night might have betrayed me. I next removed the white and cumbersome parts of my underclothing, and replaced them by a petticoat of dark flannel. Over this I put my black travelling cloak, and pulled the hood on to my head. In my ordinary evening costume I took up the room of three men at least. In my present dress, when it was held close about me, no man could have passed through the narrowest spaces more easily than I. The little breadth left on the roof of the verandah, between the flower-pots on one side and the wall and the windows of the house on the other, made this a serious consideration. If I knocked anything down, if I made the least noise, who could say what the consequences might be? I only waited to put the matches near the candle before I extinguished it, and groped my way back into the sitting-room, I locked that door, as I had locked my bedroom door--then quietly got out of the window, and cautiously set my feet on the leaden roof of the verandah. My two rooms were at the inner extremity of the new wing of the house in which we all lived, and I had five windows to pass before I could reach the position it was necessary to take up immediately over the library. The first window belonged to a spare room which was empty. The second and third windows belonged to Laura's room. The fourth window belonged to Sir Percival's room. The fifth belonged to the Countess's room. The others, by which it was not necessary for me to pass, were the windows of the Count's dressing-room, of the bathroom, and of the second empty spare room. No sound reached my ears--the black blinding darkness of the night was all round me when I first stood on the verandah, except at that part of it which Madame Fosco's window overlooked. There, at the very place above the library to which my course was directed--there I saw a gleam of light! The Countess was not yet in bed. It was too late to draw back--it was no time to wait. I determined to go on at all hazards, and trust for security to my own caution and to the darkness of the night. "For Laura's sake!" I thought to myself, as I took the first step forward on the roof, with one hand holding my cloak close round me, and the other groping against the wall of the house. It was better to brush close by the wall than to risk striking my feet against the flower-pots within a few inches of me, on the other side. I passed the dark window of the spare room, trying the leaden roof at each step with my foot before I risked resting my weight on it. I passed the dark windows of Laura's room ("God bless her and keep her to-night!"). I passed the dark window of Sir Percival's room. Then I waited a moment, knelt down with my hands to support me, and so crept to my position, under the protection of the low wall between the bottom of the lighted window and the verandah roof. When I ventured to look up at the window itself I found that the top of it only was open, and that the blind inside was drawn down. While I was looking I saw the shadow of Madame Fosco pass across the white field of the blind--then pass slowly back again. Thus far she could not have heard me, or the shadow would surely have stopped at the blind, even if she had wanted courage enough to open the window and look out? I placed myself sideways against the railing of the verandah--first ascertaining, by touching them, the position of the flower-pots on either side of me. There was room enough for me to sit between them and no more. The sweet-scented leaves of the flower on my left hand just brushed my cheek as I lightly rested my head against the railing. The first sounds that reached me from below were caused by the opening or closing (most probably the latter) of three doors in succession--the doors, no doubt, leading into the hall and into the rooms on each side of the library, which the Count had pledged himself to examine. The first object that I saw was the red spark again travelling out into the night from under the verandah, moving away towards my window, waiting a moment, and then returning to the place from which it had set out. "The devil take your restlessness! When do you mean to sit down?" growled Sir Percival's voice beneath me. "Ouf! how hot it is!" said the Count, sighing and puffing wearily. His exclamation was followed by the scraping of the garden chairs on the tiled pavement under the verandah--the welcome sound which told me they were going to sit close at the window as usual. So far the chance was mine. The clock in the turret struck the quarter to twelve as they settled themselves in their chairs. I heard Madame Fosco through the open window yawning, and saw her shadow pass once more across the white field of the blind. Meanwhile, Sir Percival and the Count began talking together below, now and then dropping their voices a little lower than usual, but never sinking them to a whisper. The strangeness and peril of my situation, the dread, which I could not master, of Madame Fosco's lighted window, made it difficult, almost impossible, for me, at first, to keep my presence of mind, and to fix my attention solely on the conversation beneath. For some minutes I could only succeed in gathering the general substance of it. I understood the Count to say that the one window alight was his wife's, that the ground floor of the house was quite clear, and that they might now speak to each other without fear of accidents. Sir Percival merely answered by upbraiding his friend with having unjustifiably slighted his wishes and neglected his interests all through the day. The Count thereupon defended himself by declaring that he had been beset by certain troubles and anxieties which had absorbed all his attention, and that the only safe time to come to an explanation was a time when they could feel certain of being neither interrupted nor overheard. "We are at a serious crisis in our affairs, Percival," he said, "and if we are to decide on the future at all, we must decide secretly to-night." That sentence of the Count's was the first which my attention was ready enough to master exactly as it was spoken. From this point, with certain breaks and interruptions, my whole interest fixed breathlessly on the conversation, and I followed it word for word. "Crisis?" repeated Sir Percival. "It's a worse crisis than you think for, I can tell you." "So I should suppose, from your behaviour for the last day or two," returned the other coolly. "But wait a little. Before we advance to what I do NOT know, let us be quite certain of what I DO know. Let us first see if I am right about the time that is past, before I make any proposal to you for the time that is to come." "Stop till I get the brandy and water. Have some yourself." "Thank you, Percival. The cold water with pleasure, a spoon, and the basin of sugar. Eau sucree, my friend--nothing more." "Sugar-and-water for a man of your age!--There! mix your sickly mess. You foreigners are all alike." "Now listen, Percival. I will put our position plainly before you, as I understand it, and you shall say if I am right or wrong. You and I both came back to this house from the Continent with our affairs very seriously embarrassed--" "Cut it short! I wanted some thousands and you some hundreds, and without the money we were both in a fair way to go to the dogs together. There's the situation. Make what you can of it. Go on." "Well, Percival, in your own solid English words, you wanted some thousands and I wanted some hundreds, and the only way of getting them was for you to raise the money for your own necessity (with a small margin beyond for my poor little hundreds) by the help of your wife. What did I tell you about your wife on our way to England?--and what did I tell you again when we had come here, and when I had seen for myself the sort of woman Miss Halcombe was?" "How should I know? You talked nineteen to the dozen, I suppose, just as usual." "I said this: Human ingenuity, my friend, has hitherto only discovered two ways in which a man can manage a woman. One way is to knock her down--a method largely adopted by the brutal lower orders of the people, but utterly abhorrent to the refined and educated classes above them. The other way (much longer, much more difficult, but in the end not less certain) is never to accept a provocation at a woman's hands. It holds with animals, it holds with children, and it holds with women, who are nothing but children grown up. Quiet resolution is the one quality the animals, the children, and the women all fail in. If they can once shake this superior quality in their master, they get the better of HIM. If they can never succeed in disturbing it, he gets the better of THEM. I said to you, Remember that plain truth when you want your wife to help you to the money. I said, Remember it doubly and trebly in the presence of your wife's sister, Miss Halcombe. Have you remembered it? Not once in all the implications that have twisted themselves about us in this house. Every provocation that your wife and her sister could offer to you, you instantly accepted from them. Your mad temper lost the signature to the deed, lost the ready money, set Miss Halcombe writing to the lawyer for the first time." "First time! Has she written again?" "Yes, she has written again to-day." A chair fell on the pavement of the verandah--fell with a crash, as if it had been kicked down. It was well for me that the Count's revelation roused Sir Percival's anger as it did. On hearing that I had been once more discovered I started so that the railing against which I leaned cracked again. Had he followed me to the inn? Did he infer that I must have given my letters to Fanny when I told him I had none for the post-bag. Even if it was so, how could he have examined the letters when they had gone straight from my hand to the bosom of the girl's dress? "Thank your lucky star," I heard the Count say next, "that you have me in the house to undo the harm as fast as you do it. Thank your lucky star that I said No when you were mad enough to talk of turning the key to-day on Miss Halcombe, as you turned it in your mischievous folly on your wife. Where are your eyes? Can you look at Miss Halcombe and not see that she has the foresight and the resolution of a man? With that woman for my friend I would snap these fingers of mine at the world. With that woman for my enemy, I, with all my brains and experience--I, Fosco, cunning as the devil himself, as you have told me a hundred times--I walk, in your English phrase, upon egg-shells! And this grand creature--I drink her health in my sugar-and-water--this grand creature, who stands in the strength of her love and her courage, firm as a rock, between us two and that poor, flimsy, pretty blonde wife of yours--this magnificent woman, whom I admire with all my soul, though I oppose her in your interests and in mine, you drive to extremities as if she was no sharper and no bolder than the rest of her sex. Percival! Percival! you deserve to fail, and you HAVE failed." There was a pause. I write the villain's words about myself because I mean to remember them--because I hope yet for the day when I may speak out once for all in his presence, and cast them back one by one in his teeth. Sir Percival was the first to break the silence again. "Yes, yes, bully and bluster as much as you like," he said sulkily; "the difficulty about the money is not the only difficulty. You would be for taking strong measures with the women yourself--if you knew as much as I do." "We will come to that second difficulty all in good time," rejoined the Count. "You may confuse yourself, Percival, as much as you please, but you shall not confuse me. Let the question of the money be settled first. Have I convinced your obstinacy? have I shown you that your temper will not let you help yourself?--Or must I go back, and (as you put it in your dear straightforward English) bully and bluster a little more?" "Pooh! It's easy enough to grumble at ME. Say what is to be done--that's a little harder." "Is it? Bah! This is what is to be done: You give up all direction in the business from to-night--you leave it for the future in my hands only. I am talking to a Practical British man--ha? Well, Practical, will that do for you?" "What do you propose if I leave it all to you?" "Answer me first. Is it to be in my hands or not?" "Say it is in your hands--what then?" "A few questions, Percival, to begin with. I must wait a little yet, to let circumstances guide me, and I must know, in every possible way, what those circumstances are likely to be. There is no time to lose. I have told you already that Miss Halcombe has written to the lawyer to-day for the second time." "How did you find it out? What did she say?" "If I told you, Percival, we should only come back at the end to where we are now. Enough that I have found it out--and the finding has caused that trouble and anxiety which made me so inaccessible to you all through to-day. Now, to refresh my memory about your affairs--it is some time since I talked them over with you. The money has been raised, in the absence of your wife's signature, by means of bills at three months--raised at a cost that makes my poverty-stricken foreign hair stand on end to think of it! When the bills are due, is there really and truly no earthly way of paying them but by the help of your wife?" "None." "What! You have no money at the bankers?" "A few hundreds, when I want as many thousands." "Have you no other security to borrow upon?" "Not a shred." "What have you actually got with your wife at the present moment?" "Nothing but the interest of her twenty thousand pounds--barely enough to pay our daily expenses." "What do you expect from your wife?" "Three thousand a year when her uncle dies." "A fine fortune, Percival. What sort of a man is this uncle? Old?" "No--neither old nor young." "A good-tempered, freely-living man? Married? No--I think my wife told me, not married." "Of course not. If he was married, and had a son, Lady Glyde would not be next heir to the property. I'll tell you what he is. He's a maudlin, twaddling, selfish fool, and bores everybody who comes near him about the state of his health." "Men of that sort, Percival, live long, and marry malevolently when you least expect it. I don't give you much, my friend, for your chance of the three thousand a year. Is there nothing more that comes to you from your wife?" "Nothing." "Absolutely nothing?" "Absolutely nothing--except in case of her death." "Aha! in the case of her death." There was another pause. The Count moved from the verandah to the gravel walk outside. I knew that he had moved by his voice. "The rain has come at last," I heard him say. It had come. The state of my cloak showed that it had been falling thickly for some little time. The Count went back under the verandah--I heard the chair creak beneath his weight as he sat down in it again. "Well, Percival," he said, "and in the case of Lady Glyde's death, what do you get then?" "If she leaves no children----" "Which she is likely to do?" "Which she is not in the least likely to do----" "Yes?" "Why, then I get her twenty thousand pounds." "Paid down?" "Paid down." They were silent once more. As their voices ceased Madame Fosco's shadow darkened the blind again. Instead of passing this time, it remained, for a moment, quite still. I saw her fingers steal round the corner of the blind, and draw it on one side. The dim white outline of her face, looking out straight over me, appeared behind the window. I kept still, shrouded from head to foot in my black cloak. The rain, which was fast wetting me, dripped over the glass, blurred it, and prevented her from seeing anything. "More rain!" I heard her say to herself. She dropped the blind, and I breathed again freely. The talk went on below me, the Count resuming it this time. "Percival! do you care about your wife?" "Fosco! that's rather a downright question." "I am a downright man, and I repeat it." "Why the devil do you look at me in that way?" "You won't answer me? Well, then, let us say your wife dies before the summer is out----" "Drop it, Fosco!" "Let us say your wife dies----" "Drop it, I tell you!" "In that case, you would gain twenty thousand pounds, and you would lose----" "I should lose the chance of three thousand a year." "The REMOTE chance, Percival--the remote chance only. And you want money, at once. In your position the gain is certain--the loss doubtful." "Speak for yourself as well as for me. Some of the money I want has been borrowed for you. And if you come to gain, my wife's death would be ten thousand pounds in your wife's pocket. Sharp as you are, you seem to have conveniently forgotten Madame Fosco's legacy. Don't look at me in that way! I won't have it! What with your looks and your questions, upon my soul, you make my flesh creep!" "Your flesh? Does flesh mean conscience in English? I speak of your wife's death as I speak of a possibility. Why not? The respectable lawyers who scribble-scrabble your deeds and your wills look the deaths of living people in the face. Do lawyers make your flesh creep? Why should I? It is my business to-night to clear up your position beyond the possibility of mistake, and I have now done it. Here is your position. If your wife lives, you pay those bills with her signature to the parchment. If your wife dies, you pay them with her death." As he spoke the light in Madame Fosco's room was extinguished, and the whole second floor of the house was now sunk in darkness. "Talk! talk!" grumbled Sir Percival. "One would think, to hear you, that my wife's signature to the deed was got already." "You have left the matter in my hands," retorted the Count, "and I have more than two months before me to turn round in. Say no more about it, if you please, for the present. When the bills are due, you will see for yourself if my 'talk! talk!' is worth something, or if it is not. And now, Percival, having done with the money matters for to-night, I can place my attention at your disposal, if you wish to consult me on that second difficulty which has mixed itself up with our little embarrassments, and which has so altered you for the worse, that I hardly know you again. Speak, my friend--and pardon me if I shock your fiery national tastes by mixing myself a second glass of sugar-and-water." "It's very well to say speak," replied Sir Percival, in a far more quiet and more polite tone than he had yet adopted, "but it's not so easy to know how to begin." "Shall I help you?" suggested the Count. "Shall I give this private difficulty of yours a name? What if I call it--Anne Catherick?" "Look here, Fosco, you and I have known each other for a long time, and if you have helped me out of one or two scrapes before this, I have done the best I could to help you in return, as far as money would go. We have made as many friendly sacrifices, on both sides, as men could, but we have had our secrets from each other, of course--haven't we?" "You have had a secret from me, Percival. There is a skeleton in your cupboard here at Blackwater Park that has peeped out in these last few days at other people besides yourself." "Well, suppose it has. If it doesn't concern you, you needn't be curious about it, need you?" "Do I look curious about it?" "Yes, you do." "So! so! my face speaks the truth, then? What an immense foundation of good there must be in the nature of a man who arrives at my age, and whose face has not yet lost the habit of speaking the truth!--Come, Glyde! let us be candid one with the other. This secret of yours has sought me: I have not sought it. Let us say I am curious--do you ask me, as your old friend, to respect your secret, and to leave it, once for all, in your own keeping?" "Yes--that's just what I do ask." "Then my curiosity is at an end. It dies in me from this moment." "Do you really mean that?" "What makes you doubt me?" "I have had some experience, Fosco, of your roundabout ways, and I am not so sure that you won't worm it out of me after all." The chair below suddenly creaked again--I felt the trellis-work pillar under me shake from top to bottom. The Count had started to his feet, and had struck it with his hand in indignation. "Percival! Percival!" he cried passionately, "do you know me no better than that? Has all your experience shown you nothing of my character yet? I am a man of the antique type! I am capable of the most exalted acts of virtue--when I have the chance of performing them. It has been the misfortune of my life that I have had few chances. My conception of friendship is sublime! Is it my fault that your skeleton has peeped out at me? Why do I confess my curiosity? You poor superficial Englishman, it is to magnify my own self-control. I could draw your secret out of you, if I liked, as I draw this finger out of the palm of my hand--you know I could! But you have appealed to my friendship, and the duties of friendship are sacred to me. See! I trample my base curiosity under my feet. My exalted sentiments lift me above it. Recognise them, Percival! imitate them, Percival! Shake hands--I forgive you." His voice faltered over the last words--faltered, as if he were actually shedding tears! Sir Percival confusedly attempted to excuse himself, but the Count was too magnanimous to listen to him. "No!" he said. "When my friend has wounded me, I can pardon him without apologies. Tell me, in plain words, do you want my help?" "Yes, badly enough." "And you can ask for it without compromising yourself?" "I can try, at any rate." "Try, then." "Well, this is how it stands:--I told you to-day that I had done my best to find Anne Catherick, and failed." "Yes, you did." "Fosco! I'm a lost man if I DON'T find her." "Ha! Is it so serious as that?" A little stream of light travelled out under the verandah, and fell over the gravel-walk. The Count had taken the lamp from the inner part of the room to see his friend clearly by the light of it. "Yes!" he said. "Your face speaks the truth this time. Serious, indeed--as serious as the money matters themselves." "More serious. As true as I sit here, more serious!" The light disappeared again and the talk went on. "I showed you the letter to my wife that Anne Catherick hid in the sand," Sir Percival continued. "There's no boasting in that letter, Fosco--she DOES know the Secret." "Say as little as possible, Percival, in my presence, of the Secret. Does she know it from you?" "No, from her mother." "Two women in possession of your private mind--bad, bad, bad, my friend! One question here, before we go any farther. The motive of your shutting up the daughter in the asylum is now plain enough to me, but the manner of her escape is not quite so clear. Do you suspect the people in charge of her of closing their eyes purposely, at the instance of some enemy who could afford to make it worth their while?" "No, she was the best-behaved patient they had--and, like fools, they trusted her. She's just mad enough to be shut up, and just sane enough to ruin me when she's at large--if you understand that?" "I do understand it. Now, Percival, come at once to the point, and then I shall know what to do. Where is the danger of your position at the present moment?" "Anne Catherick is in this neighbourhood, and in communication with Lady Glyde--there's the danger, plain enough. Who can read the letter she hid in the sand, and not see that my wife is in possession of the Secret, deny it as she may?" "One moment, Percival. If Lady Glyde does know the Secret, she must know also that it is a compromising secret for you. As your wife, surely it is her interest to keep it?" "Is it? I'm coming to that. It might be her interest if she cared two straws about me. But I happen to be an encumbrance in the way of another man. She was in love with him before she married me--she's in love with him now--an infernal vagabond of a drawing-master, named Hartright." "My dear friend! what is there extraordinary in that? They are all in love with some other man. Who gets the first of a woman's heart? In all my experience I have never yet met with the man who was Number One. Number Two, sometimes. Number Three, Four, Five, often. Number One, never! He exists, of course--but I have not met with him." "Wait! I haven't done yet. Who do you think helped Anne Catherick to get the start, when the people from the mad-house were after her? Hartright. Who do you think saw her again in Cumberland? Hartright. Both times he spoke to her alone. Stop! don't interrupt me. The scoundrel's as sweet on my wife as she is on him. He knows the Secret, and she knows the Secret. Once let them both get together again, and it's her interest and his interest to turn their information against me." "Gently, Percival--gently! Are you insensible to the virtue of Lady Glyde?" "That for the virtue of Lady Glyde! I believe in nothing about her but her money. Don't you see how the case stands? She might be harmless enough by herself; but if she and that vagabond Hartright----" "Yes, yes, I see. Where is Mr. Hartright?" "Out of the country. If he means to keep a whole skin on his bones, I recommend him not to come back in a hurry." "Are you sure he is out of the country?" "Certain. I had him watched from the time he left Cumberland to the time he sailed. Oh, I've been careful, I can tell you! Anne Catherick lived with some people at a farmhouse near Limmeridge. I went there myself, after she had given me the slip, and made sure that they knew nothing. I gave her mother a form of letter to write to Miss Halcombe, exonerating me from any bad motive in putting her under restraint. I've spent, I'm afraid to say how much, in trying to trace her, and in spite of it all, she turns up here and escapes me on my own property! How do I know who else may see her, who else may speak to her? That prying scoundrel, Hartright, may come back without my knowing it, and may make use of her to-morrow----" "Not he, Percival! While I am on the spot, and while that woman is in the neighbourhood, I will answer for our laying hands on her before Mr. Hartright--even if he does come back. I see! yes, yes, I see! The finding of Anne Catherick is the first necessity--make your mind easy about the rest. Your wife is here, under your thumb--Miss Halcombe is inseparable from her, and is, therefore, under your thumb also--and Mr. Hartright is out of the country. This invisible Anne of yours is all we have to think of for the present. You have made your inquiries?" "Yes. I have been to her mother, I have ransacked the village--and all to no purpose." "Is her mother to be depended on?" "Yes." "She has told your secret once." "She won't tell it again." "Why not? Are her own interests concerned in keeping it, as well as yours?" "Yes--deeply concerned." "I am glad to hear it, Percival, for your sake. Don't be discouraged, my friend. Our money matters, as I told you, leave me plenty of time to turn round in, and I may search for Anne Catherick to-morrow to better purpose than you. One last question before we go to bed." "What is it?" "It is this. When I went to the boat-house to tell Lady Glyde that the little difficulty of her signature was put off, accident took me there in time to see a strange woman parting in a very suspicious manner from your wife. But accident did not bring me near enough to see this same woman's face plainly. I must know how to recognise our invisible Anne. What is she like?" "Like? Come! I'll tell you in two words. She's a sickly likeness of my wife." The chair creaked, and the pillar shook once more. The Count was on his feet again--this time in astonishment. "What!!!" he exclaimed eagerly. "Fancy my wife, after a bad illness, with a touch of something wrong in her head--and there is Anne Catherick for you," answered Sir Percival. "Are they related to each other?" "Not a bit of it." "And yet so like?" "Yes, so like. What are you laughing about?" There was no answer, and no sound of any kind. The Count was laughing in his smooth silent internal way. "What are you laughing about?" reiterated Sir Percival. "Perhaps at my own fancies, my good friend. Allow me my Italian humour--do I not come of the illustrious nation which invented the exhibition of Punch? Well, well, well, I shall know Anne Catherick when I see her--and so enough for to-night. Make your mind easy, Percival. Sleep, my son, the sleep of the just, and see what I will do for you when daylight comes to help us both. I have my projects and my plans here in my big head. You shall pay those bills and find Anne Catherick--my sacred word of honour on it, but you shall! Am I a friend to be treasured in the best corner of your heart, or am I not? Am I worth those loans of money which you so delicately reminded me of a little while since? Whatever you do, never wound me in my sentiments any more. Recognise them, Percival! imitate them, Percival! I forgive you again--I shake hands again. Good-night!" Not another word was spoken. I heard the Count close the library door. I heard Sir Percival barring up the window-shutters. It had been raining, raining all the time. I was cramped by my position and chilled to the bones. When I first tried to move, the effort was so painful to me that I was obliged to desist. I tried a second time, and succeeded in rising to my knees on the wet roof. As I crept to the wall, and raised myself against it, I looked back, and saw the window of the Count's dressing-room gleam into light. My sinking courage flickered up in me again, and kept my eyes fixed on his window, as I stole my way back, step by step, past the wall of the house. The clock struck the quarter after one, when I laid my hands on the window-sill of my own room. I had seen nothing and heard nothing which could lead me to suppose that my retreat had been discovered. X June 20th.--Eight o'clock. The sun is shining in a clear sky. I have not been near my bed--I have not once closed my weary wakeful eyes. From the same window at which I looked out into the darkness of last night, I look out now at the bright stillness of the morning. I count the hours that have passed since I escaped to the shelter of this room by my own sensations--and those hours seem like weeks. How short a time, and yet how long to ME--since I sank down in the darkness, here, on the floor--drenched to the skin, cramped in every limb, cold to the bones, a useless, helpless, panic-stricken creature. I hardly know when I roused myself. I hardly know when I groped my way back to the bedroom, and lighted the candle, and searched (with a strange ignorance, at first, of where to look for them) for dry clothes to warm me. The doing of these things is in my mind, but not the time when they were done. Can I even remember when the chilled, cramped feeling left me, and the throbbing heat came in its place? Surely it was before the sun rose? Yes, I heard the clock strike three. I remember the time by the sudden brightness and clearness, the feverish strain and excitement of all my faculties which came with it. I remember my resolution to control myself, to wait patiently hour after hour, till the chance offered of removing Laura from this horrible place, without the danger of immediate discovery and pursuit. I remember the persuasion settling itself in my mind that the words those two men had said to each other would furnish us, not only with our justification for leaving the house, but with our weapons of defence against them as well. I recall the impulse that awakened in me to preserve those words in writing, exactly as they were spoken, while the time was my own, and while my memory vividly retained them. All this I remember plainly: there is no confusion in my head yet. The coming in here from the bedroom, with my pen and ink and paper, before sunrise--the sitting down at the widely-opened window to get all the air I could to cool me--the ceaseless writing, faster and faster, hotter and hotter, driving on more and more wakefully, all through the dreadful interval before the house was astir again--how clearly I recall it, from the beginning by candle-light, to the end on the page before this, in the sunshine of the new day! Why do I sit here still? Why do I weary my hot eyes and my burning head by writing more? Why not lie down and rest myself, and try to quench the fever that consumes me, in sleep? I dare not attempt it. A fear beyond all other fears has got possession of me. I am afraid of this heat that parches my skin. I am afraid of the creeping and throbbing that I feel in my head. If I lie down now, how do I know that I may have the sense and the strength to rise again? Oh, the rain, the rain--the cruel rain that chilled me last night! Nine o'clock. Was it nine struck, or eight? Nine, surely? I am shivering again--shivering, from head to foot, in the summer air. Have I been sitting here asleep? I don't know what I have been doing. Oh, my God! am I going to be ill? Ill, at such a time as this! My head--I am sadly afraid of my head. I can write, but the lines all run together. I see the words. Laura--I can write Laura, and see I write it. Eight or nine--which was it? So cold, so cold--oh, that rain last night!--and the strokes of the clock, the strokes I can't count, keep striking in my head---- * * * * * * * * * * Note [At this place the entry in the Diary ceases to be legible. The two or three lines which follow contain fragments of words only, mingled with blots and scratches of the pen. The last marks on the paper bear some resemblance to the first two letters (L and A) of the name of Lady Glyde. On the next page of the Diary, another entry appears. It is in a man's handwriting, large, bold, and firmly regular, and the date is "June the 21st." It contains these lines--] POSTSCRIPT BY A SINCERE FRIEND The illness of our excellent Miss Halcombe has afforded me the opportunity of enjoying an unexpected intellectual pleasure. I refer to the perusal (which I have just completed) of this interesting Diary. There are many hundred pages here. I can lay my hand on my heart, and declare that every page has charmed, refreshed, delighted me. To a man of my sentiments it is unspeakably gratifying to be able to say this. Admirable woman! I allude to Miss Halcombe. Stupendous effort! I refer to the Diary. Yes! these pages are amazing. The tact which I find here, the discretion, the rare courage, the wonderful power of memory, the accurate observation of character, the easy grace of style, the charming outbursts of womanly feeling, have all inexpressibly increased my admiration of this sublime creature, of this magnificent Marian. The presentation of my own character is masterly in the extreme. I certify, with my whole heart, to the fidelity of the portrait. I feel how vivid an impression I must have produced to have been painted in such strong, such rich, such massive colours as these. I lament afresh the cruel necessity which sets our interests at variance, and opposes us to each other. Under happier circumstances how worthy I should have been of Miss Halcombe--how worthy Miss Halcombe would have been of ME. The sentiments which animate my heart assure me that the lines I have just written express a Profound Truth. Those sentiments exalt me above all merely personal considerations. I bear witness, in the most disinterested manner, to the excellence of the stratagem by which this unparalleled woman surprised the private interview between Percival and myself--also to the marvellous accuracy of her report of the whole conversation from its beginning to its end. Those sentiments have induced me to offer to the unimpressionable doctor who attends on her my vast knowledge of chemistry, and my luminous experience of the more subtle resources which medical and magnetic science have placed at the disposal of mankind. He has hitherto declined to avail himself of my assistance. Miserable man! Finally, those sentiments dictate the lines--grateful, sympathetic, paternal lines--which appear in this place. I close the book. My strict sense of propriety restores it (by the hands of my wife) to its place on the writer's table. Events are hurrying me away. Circumstances are guiding me to serious issues. Vast perspectives of success unroll themselves before my eyes. I accomplish my destiny with a calmness which is terrible to myself. Nothing but the homage of my admiration is my own. I deposit it with respectful tenderness at the feet of Miss Halcombe. I breathe my wishes for her recovery. I condole with her on the inevitable failure of every plan that she has formed for her sister's benefit. At the same time, I entreat her to believe that the information which I have derived from her Diary will in no respect help me to contribute to that failure. It simply confirms the plan of conduct which I had previously arranged. I have to thank these pages for awakening the finest sensibilities in my nature--nothing more. To a person of similar sensibility this simple assertion will explain and excuse everything. Miss Halcombe is a person of similar sensibility. In that persuasion I sign myself, Fosco. THE STORY CONTINUED BY FREDERICK FAIRLIE, ESQ., OF LIMMERIDGE HOUSE[2] [2] The manner in which Mr. Fairlie's Narrative and other Narratives that are shortly to follow it, were originally obtained, forms the subject of an explanation which will appear at a later period. It is the grand misfortune of my life that nobody will let me alone. Why--I ask everybody--why worry ME? Nobody answers that question, and nobody lets me alone. Relatives, friends, and strangers all combine to annoy me. What have I done? I ask myself, I ask my servant, Louis, fifty times a day--what have I done? Neither of us can tell. Most extraordinary! The last annoyance that has assailed me is the annoyance of being called upon to write this Narrative. Is a man in my state of nervous wretchedness capable of writing narratives? When I put this extremely reasonable objection, I am told that certain very serious events relating to my niece have happened within my experience, and that I am the fit person to describe them on that account. I am threatened if I fail to exert myself in the manner required, with consequences which I cannot so much as think of without perfect prostration. There is really no need to threaten me. Shattered by my miserable health and my family troubles, I am incapable of resistance. If you insist, you take your unjust advantage of me, and I give way immediately. I will endeavour to remember what I can (under protest), and to write what I can (also under protest), and what I can't remember and can't write, Louis must remember and write for me. He is an ass, and I am an invalid, and we are likely to make all sorts of mistakes between us. How humiliating! I am told to remember dates. Good heavens! I never did such a thing in my life--how am I to begin now? I have asked Louis. He is not quite such an ass as I have hitherto supposed. He remembers the date of the event, within a week or two--and I remember the name of the person. The date was towards the end of June, or the beginning of July, and the name (in my opinion a remarkably vulgar one) was Fanny. At the end of June, or the beginning of July, then, I was reclining in my customary state, surrounded by the various objects of Art which I have collected about me to improve the taste of the barbarous people in my neighbourhood. That is to say, I had the photographs of my pictures, and prints, and coins, and so forth, all about me, which I intend, one of these days, to present (the photographs, I mean, if the clumsy English language will let me mean anything) to present to the institution at Carlisle (horrid place!), with a view to improving the tastes of the members (Goths and Vandals to a man). It might be supposed that a gentleman who was in course of conferring a great national benefit on his countrymen was the last gentleman in the world to be unfeelingly worried about private difficulties and family affairs. Quite a mistake, I assure you, in my case. However, there I was, reclining, with my art-treasures about me, and wanting a quiet morning. Because I wanted a quiet morning, of course Louis came in. It was perfectly natural that I should inquire what the deuce he meant by making his appearance when I had not rung my bell. I seldom swear--it is such an ungentlemanlike habit--but when Louis answered by a grin, I think it was also perfectly natural that I should damn him for grinning. At any rate, I did. This rigorous mode of treatment, I have observed, invariably brings persons in the lower class of life to their senses. It brought Louis to HIS senses. He was so obliging as to leave off grinning, and inform me that a Young Person was outside wanting to see me. He added (with the odious talkativeness of servants), that her name was Fanny. "Who is Fanny?" "Lady Glyde's maid, sir." "What does Lady Glyde's maid want with me?" "A letter, sir----" "Take it." "She refuses to give it to anybody but you, sir." "Who sends the letter?" "Miss Halcombe, sir." The moment I heard Miss Halcombe's name I gave up. It is a habit of mine always to give up to Miss Halcombe. I find, by experience, that it saves noise. I gave up on this occasion. Dear Marian! "Let Lady Glyde's maid come in, Louis. Stop! Do her shoes creak?" I was obliged to ask the question. Creaking shoes invariably upset me for the day. I was resigned to see the Young Person, but I was NOT resigned to let the Young Person's shoes upset me. There is a limit even to my endurance. Louis affirmed distinctly that her shoes were to be depended upon. I waved my hand. He introduced her. Is it necessary to say that she expressed her sense of embarrassment by shutting up her mouth and breathing through her nose? To the student of female human nature in the lower orders, surely not. Let me do the girl justice. Her shoes did NOT creak. But why do Young Persons in service all perspire at the hands? Why have they all got fat noses and hard cheeks? And why are their faces so sadly unfinished, especially about the corners of the eyelids? I am not strong enough to think deeply myself on any subject, but I appeal to professional men, who are. Why have we no variety in our breed of Young Persons? "You have a letter for me, from Miss Halcombe? Put it down on the table, please, and don't upset anything. How is Miss Halcombe?" "Very well, thank you, sir." "And Lady Glyde?" I received no answer. The Young Person's face became more unfinished than ever, and I think she began to cry. I certainly saw something moist about her eyes. Tears or perspiration? Louis (whom I have just consulted) is inclined to think, tears. He is in her class of life, and he ought to know best. Let us say, tears. Except when the refining process of Art judiciously removes from them all resemblance to Nature, I distinctly object to tears. Tears are scientifically described as a Secretion. I can understand that a secretion may be healthy or unhealthy, but I cannot see the interest of a secretion from a sentimental point of view. Perhaps my own secretions being all wrong together, I am a little prejudiced on the subject. No matter. I behaved, on this occasion, with all possible propriety and feeling. I closed my eyes and said to Louis-- "Endeavour to ascertain what she means." Louis endeavoured, and the Young Person endeavoured. They succeeded in confusing each other to such an extent that I am bound in common gratitude to say, they really amused me. I think I shall send for them again when I am in low spirits. I have just mentioned this idea to Louis. Strange to say, it seems to make him uncomfortable. Poor devil! Surely I am not expected to repeat my niece's maid's explanation of her tears, interpreted in the English of my Swiss valet? The thing is manifestly impossible. I can give my own impressions and feelings perhaps. Will that do as well? Please say, Yes. My idea is that she began by telling me (through Louis) that her master had dismissed her from her mistress's service. (Observe, throughout, the strange irrelevancy of the Young Person. Was it my fault that she had lost her place?) On her dismissal, she had gone to the inn to sleep. (I don't keep the inn--why mention it to ME?) Between six o'clock and seven Miss Halcombe had come to say good-bye, and had given her two letters, one for me, and one for a gentleman in London. (I am not a gentleman in London--hang the gentleman in London!) She had carefully put the two letters into her bosom (what have I to do with her bosom?); she had been very unhappy, when Miss Halcombe had gone away again; she had not had the heart to put bit or drop between her lips till it was near bedtime, and then, when it was close on nine o'clock, she had thought she should like a cup of tea. (Am I responsible for any of these vulgar fluctuations, which begin with unhappiness and end with tea?) Just as she was WARMING THE POT (I give the words on the authority of Louis, who says he knows what they mean, and wishes to explain, but I snub him on principle)--just as she was warming the pot the door opened, and she was STRUCK OF A HEAP (her own words again, and perfectly unintelligible this time to Louis, as well as to myself) by the appearance in the inn parlour of her ladyship the Countess. I give my niece's maid's description of my sister's title with a sense of the highest relish. My poor dear sister is a tiresome woman who married a foreigner. To resume: the door opened, her ladyship the Countess appeared in the parlour, and the Young Person was struck of a heap. Most remarkable! I must really rest a little before I can get on any farther. When I have reclined for a few minutes, with my eyes closed, and when Louis has refreshed my poor aching temples with a little eau-de-Cologne, I may be able to proceed. Her ladyship the Countess---- No. I am able to proceed, but not to sit up. I will recline and dictate. Louis has a horrid accent, but he knows the language, and can write. How very convenient! Her ladyship, the Countess, explained her unexpected appearance at the inn by telling Fanny that she had come to bring one or two little messages which Miss Halcombe in her hurry had forgotten. The Young Person thereupon waited anxiously to hear what the messages were, but the Countess seemed disinclined to mention them (so like my sister's tiresome way!) until Fanny had had her tea. Her ladyship was surprisingly kind and thoughtful about it (extremely unlike my sister), and said, "I am sure, my poor girl, you must want your tea. We can let the messages wait till afterwards. Come, come, if nothing else will put you at your ease, I'll make the tea and have a cup with you." I think those were the words, as reported excitably, in my presence, by the Young Person. At any rate, the Countess insisted on making the tea, and carried her ridiculous ostentation of humility so far as to take one cup herself, and to insist on the girl's taking the other. The girl drank the tea, and according to her own account, solemnised the extraordinary occasion five minutes afterwards by fainting dead away for the first time in her life. Here again I use her own words. Louis thinks they were accompanied by an increased secretion of tears. I can't say myself. The effort of listening being quite as much as I could manage, my eyes were closed. Where did I leave off? Ah, yes--she fainted after drinking a cup of tea with the Countess--a proceeding which might have interested me if I had been her medical man, but being nothing of the sort I felt bored by hearing of it, nothing more. When she came to herself in half an hour's time she was on the sofa, and nobody was with her but the landlady. The Countess, finding it too late to remain any longer at the inn, had gone away as soon as the girl showed signs of recovering, and the landlady had been good enough to help her upstairs to bed. Left by herself, she had felt in her bosom (I regret the necessity of referring to this part of the subject a second time), and had found the two letters there quite safe, but strangely crumpled. She had been giddy in the night, but had got up well enough to travel in the morning. She had put the letter addressed to that obtrusive stranger, the gentleman in London into the post, and had now delivered the other letter into my hands as she was told. This was the plain truth, and though she could not blame herself for any intentional neglect, she was sadly troubled in her mind, and sadly in want of a word of advice. At this point Louis thinks the secretions appeared again. Perhaps they did, but it is of infinitely greater importance to mention that at this point also I lost my patience, opened my eyes, and interfered. "What is the purport of all this?" I inquired. My niece's irrelevant maid stared, and stood speechless. "Endeavour to explain," I said to my servant. "Translate me, Louis." Louis endeavoured and translated. In other words, he descended immediately into a bottomless pit of confusion, and the Young Person followed him down. I really don't know when I have been so amused. I left them at the bottom of the pit as long as they diverted me. When they ceased to divert me, I exerted my intelligence, and pulled them up again. It is unnecessary to say that my interference enabled me, in due course of time, to ascertain the purport of the Young Person's remarks. I discovered that she was uneasy in her mind, because the train of events that she had just described to me had prevented her from receiving those supplementary messages which Miss Halcombe had intrusted to the Countess to deliver. She was afraid the messages might have been of great importance to her mistress's interests. Her dread of Sir Percival had deterred her from going to Blackwater Park late at night to inquire about them, and Miss Halcombe's own directions to her, on no account to miss the train in the morning, had prevented her from waiting at the inn the next day. She was most anxious that the misfortune of her fainting-fit should not lead to the second misfortune of making her mistress think her neglectful, and she would humbly beg to ask me whether I would advise her to write her explanations and excuses to Miss Halcombe, requesting to receive the messages by letter, if it was not too late. I make no apologies for this extremely prosy paragraph. I have been ordered to write it. There are people, unaccountable as it may appear, who actually take more interest in what my niece's maid said to me on this occasion than in what I said to my niece's maid. Amusing perversity! "I should feel very much obliged to you, sir, if you would kindly tell me what I had better do," remarked the Young Person. "Let things stop as they are," I said, adapting my language to my listener. "I invariably let things stop as they are. Yes. Is that all?" "If you think it would be a liberty in me, sir, to write, of course I wouldn't venture to do so. But I am so very anxious to do all I can to serve my mistress faithfully----" People in the lower class of life never know when or how to go out of a room. They invariably require to be helped out by their betters. I thought it high time to help the Young Person out. I did it with two judicious words-- "Good-morning." Something outside or inside this singular girl suddenly creaked. Louis, who was looking at her (which I was not), says she creaked when she curtseyed. Curious. Was it her shoes, her stays, or her bones? Louis thinks it was her stays. Most extraordinary! As soon as I was left by myself I had a little nap--I really wanted it. When I awoke again I noticed dear Marian's letter. If I had had the least idea of what it contained I should certainly not have attempted to open it. Being, unfortunately for myself, quite innocent of all suspicion, I read the letter. It immediately upset me for the day. I am, by nature, one of the most easy-tempered creatures that ever lived--I make allowances for everybody, and I take offence at nothing. But as I have before remarked, there are limits to my endurance. I laid down Marian's letter, and felt myself--justly felt myself--an injured man. I am about to make a remark. It is, of course, applicable to the very serious matter now under notice, or I should not allow it to appear in this place. Nothing, in my opinion, sets the odious selfishness of mankind in such a repulsively vivid light as the treatment, in all classes of society, which the Single people receive at the hands of the Married people. When you have once shown yourself too considerate and self-denying to add a family of your own to an already overcrowded population, you are vindictively marked out by your married friends, who have no similar consideration and no similar self-denial, as the recipient of half their conjugal troubles, and the born friend of all their children. Husbands and wives TALK of the cares of matrimony, and bachelors and spinsters BEAR them. Take my own case. I considerately remain single, and my poor dear brother Philip inconsiderately marries. What does he do when he dies? He leaves his daughter to ME. She is a sweet girl--she is also a dreadful responsibility. Why lay her on my shoulders? Because I am bound, in the harmless character of a single man, to relieve my married connections of all their own troubles. I do my best with my brother's responsibility--I marry my niece, with infinite fuss and difficulty, to the man her father wanted her to marry. She and her husband disagree, and unpleasant consequences follow. What does she do with those consequences? She transfers them to ME. Why transfer them to ME? Because I am bound, in the harmless character of a single man, to relieve my married connections of all their own troubles. Poor single people! Poor human nature! It is quite unnecessary to say that Marian's letter threatened me. Everybody threatens me. All sorts of horrors were to fall on my devoted head if I hesitated to turn Limmeridge House into an asylum for my niece and her misfortunes. I did hesitate, nevertheless. I have mentioned that my usual course, hitherto, had been to submit to dear Marian, and save noise. But on this occasion, the consequences involved in her extremely inconsiderate proposal were of a nature to make me pause. If I opened Limmeridge House as an asylum to Lady Glyde, what security had I against Sir Percival Glyde's following her here in a state of violent resentment against ME for harbouring his wife? I saw such a perfect labyrinth of troubles involved in this proceeding that I determined to feel my ground, as it were. I wrote, therefore, to dear Marian to beg (as she had no husband to lay claim to her) that she would come here by herself, first, and talk the matter over with me. If she could answer my objections to my own perfect satisfaction, then I assured her that I would receive our sweet Laura with the greatest pleasure, but not otherwise. I felt, of course, at the time, that this temporising on my part would probably end in bringing Marian here in a state of virtuous indignation, banging doors. But then, the other course of proceeding might end in bringing Sir Percival here in a state of virtuous indignation, banging doors also, and of the two indignations and bangings I preferred Marian's, because I was used to her. Accordingly I despatched the letter by return of post. It gained me time, at all events--and, oh dear me! what a point that was to begin with. When I am totally prostrated (did I mention that I was totally prostrated by Marian's letter?) it always takes me three days to get up again. I was very unreasonable--I expected three days of quiet. Of course I didn't get them. The third day's post brought me a most impertinent letter from a person with whom I was totally unacquainted. He described himself as the acting partner of our man of business--our dear, pig-headed old Gilmore--and he informed me that he had lately received, by the post, a letter addressed to him in Miss Halcombe's handwriting. On opening the envelope, he had discovered, to his astonishment, that it contained nothing but a blank sheet of note-paper. This circumstance appeared to him so suspicious (as suggesting to his restless legal mind that the letter had been tampered with) that he had at once written to Miss Halcombe, and had received no answer by return of post. In this difficulty, instead of acting like a sensible man and letting things take their proper course, his next absurd proceeding, on his own showing, was to pester me by writing to inquire if I knew anything about it. What the deuce should I know about it? Why alarm me as well as himself? I wrote back to that effect. It was one of my keenest letters. I have produced nothing with a sharper epistolary edge to it since I tendered his dismissal in writing to that extremely troublesome person, Mr. Walter Hartright. My letter produced its effect. I heard nothing more from the lawyer. This perhaps was not altogether surprising. But it was certainly a remarkable circumstance that no second letter reached me from Marian, and that no warning signs appeared of her arrival. Her unexpected absence did me amazing good. It was so very soothing and pleasant to infer (as I did of course) that my married connections had made it up again. Five days of undisturbed tranquillity, of delicious single blessedness, quite restored me. On the sixth day I felt strong enough to send for my photographer, and to set him at work again on the presentation copies of my art-treasures, with a view, as I have already mentioned, to the improvement of taste in this barbarous neighbourhood. I had just dismissed him to his workshop, and had just begun coquetting with my coins, when Louis suddenly made his appearance with a card in his hand. "Another Young Person?" I said. "I won't see her. In my state of health Young Persons disagree with me. Not at home." "It is a gentleman this time, sir." A gentleman of course made a difference. I looked at the card. Gracious Heaven! my tiresome sister's foreign husband, Count Fosco. Is it necessary to say what my first impression was when I looked at my visitor's card? Surely not! My sister having married a foreigner, there was but one impression that any man in his senses could possibly feel. Of course the Count had come to borrow money of me. "Louis," I said, "do you think he would go away if you gave him five shillings?" Louis looked quite shocked. He surprised me inexpressibly by declaring that my sister's foreign husband was dressed superbly, and looked the picture of prosperity. Under these circumstances my first impression altered to a certain extent. I now took it for granted that the Count had matrimonial difficulties of his own to contend with, and that he had come, like the rest of the family, to cast them all on my shoulders. "Did he mention his business?" I asked. "Count Fosco said he had come here, sir, because Miss Halcombe was unable to leave Blackwater Park." Fresh troubles, apparently. Not exactly his own, as I had supposed, but dear Marian's. Troubles, anyway. Oh dear! "Show him in," I said resignedly. The Count's first appearance really startled me. He was such an alarmingly large person that I quite trembled. I felt certain that he would shake the floor and knock down my art-treasures. He did neither the one nor the other. He was refreshingly dressed in summer costume--his manner was delightfully self-possessed and quiet--he had a charming smile. My first impression of him was highly favourable. It is not creditable to my penetration--as the sequel will show--to acknowledge this, but I am a naturally candid man, and I DO acknowledge it notwithstanding. "Allow me to present myself, Mr. Fairlie," he said. "I come from Blackwater Park, and I have the honour and the happiness of being Madame Fosco's husband. Let me take my first and last advantage of that circumstance by entreating you not to make a stranger of me. I beg you will not disturb yourself--I beg you will not move." "You are very good," I replied. "I wish I was strong enough to get up. Charmed to see you at Limmeridge. Please take a chair." "I am afraid you are suffering to-day," said the Count. "As usual," I said. "I am nothing but a bundle of nerves dressed up to look like a man." "I have studied many subjects in my time," remarked this sympathetic person. "Among others the inexhaustible subject of nerves. May I make a suggestion, at once the simplest and the most profound? Will you let me alter the light in your room?" "Certainly--if you will be so very kind as not to let any of it in on me." He walked to the window. Such a contrast to dear Marian! so extremely considerate in all his movements! "Light," he said, in that delightfully confidential tone which is so soothing to an invalid, "is the first essential. Light stimulates, nourishes, preserves. You can no more do without it, Mr. Fairlie, than if you were a flower. Observe. Here, where you sit, I close the shutters to compose you. There, where you do NOT sit, I draw up the blind and let in the invigorating sun. Admit the light into your room if you cannot bear it on yourself. Light, sir, is the grand decree of Providence. You accept Providence with your own restrictions. Accept light on the same terms." I thought this very convincing and attentive. He had taken me in up to that point about the light, he had certainly taken me in. "You see me confused," he said, returning to his place--"on my word of honour, Mr. Fairlie, you see me confused in your presence." "Shocked to hear it, I am sure. May I inquire why?" "Sir, can I enter this room (where you sit a sufferer), and see you surrounded by these admirable objects of Art, without discovering that you are a man whose feelings are acutely impressionable, whose sympathies are perpetually alive? Tell me, can I do this?" If I had been strong enough to sit up in my chair I should, of course, have bowed. Not being strong enough, I smiled my acknowledgments instead. It did just as well, we both understood one another. "Pray follow my train of thought," continued the Count. "I sit here, a man of refined sympathies myself, in the presence of another man of refined sympathies also. I am conscious of a terrible necessity for lacerating those sympathies by referring to domestic events of a very melancholy kind. What is the inevitable consequence? I have done myself the honour of pointing it out to you already. I sit confused." Was it at this point that I began to suspect he was going to bore me? I rather think it was. "Is it absolutely necessary to refer to these unpleasant matters?" I inquired. "In our homely English phrase, Count Fosco, won't they keep?" The Count, with the most alarming solemnity, sighed and shook his head. "Must I really hear them?" He shrugged his shoulders (it was the first foreign thing he had done since he had been in the room), and looked at me in an unpleasantly penetrating manner. My instincts told me that I had better close my eyes. I obeyed my instincts. "Please break it gently," I pleaded. "Anybody dead?" "Dead!" cried the Count, with unnecessary foreign fierceness. "Mr. Fairlie, your national composure terrifies me. In the name of Heaven, what have I said or done to make you think me the messenger of death?" "Pray accept my apologies," I answered. "You have said and done nothing. I make it a rule in these distressing cases always to anticipate the worst. It breaks the blow by meeting it half-way, and so on. Inexpressibly relieved, I am sure, to hear that nobody is dead. Anybody ill?" I opened my eyes and looked at him. Was he very yellow when he came in, or had he turned very yellow in the last minute or two? I really can't say, and I can't ask Louis, because he was not in the room at the time. "Anybody ill?" I repeated, observing that my national composure still appeared to affect him. "That is part of my bad news, Mr. Fairlie. Yes. Somebody is ill." "Grieved, I am sure. Which of them is it?" "To my profound sorrow, Miss Halcombe. Perhaps you were in some degree prepared to hear this? Perhaps when you found that Miss Halcombe did not come here by herself, as you proposed, and did not write a second time, your affectionate anxiety may have made you fear that she was ill?" I have no doubt my affectionate anxiety had led to that melancholy apprehension at some time or other, but at the moment my wretched memory entirely failed to remind me of the circumstance. However, I said yes, in justice to myself. I was much shocked. It was so very uncharacteristic of such a robust person as dear Marian to be ill, that I could only suppose she had met with an accident. A horse, or a false step on the stairs, or something of that sort. "Is it serious?" I asked. "Serious--beyond a doubt," he replied. "Dangerous--I hope and trust not. Miss Halcombe unhappily exposed herself to be wetted through by a heavy rain. The cold that followed was of an aggravated kind, and it has now brought with it the worst consequence--fever." When I heard the word fever, and when I remembered at the same moment that the unscrupulous person who was now addressing me had just come from Blackwater Park, I thought I should have fainted on the spot. "Good God!" I said. "Is it infectious?" "Not at present," he answered, with detestable composure. "It may turn to infection--but no such deplorable complication had taken place when I left Blackwater Park. I have felt the deepest interest in the case, Mr. Fairlie--I have endeavoured to assist the regular medical attendant in watching it--accept my personal assurances of the uninfectious nature of the fever when I last saw it." Accept his assurances! I never was farther from accepting anything in my life. I would not have believed him on his oath. He was too yellow to be believed. He looked like a walking-West-Indian-epidemic. He was big enough to carry typhus by the ton, and to dye the very carpet he walked on with scarlet fever. In certain emergencies my mind is remarkably soon made up. I instantly determined to get rid of him. "You will kindly excuse an invalid," I said--"but long conferences of any kind invariably upset me. May I beg to know exactly what the object is to which I am indebted for the honour of your visit?" I fervently hoped that this remarkably broad hint would throw him off his balance--confuse him--reduce him to polite apologies--in short, get him out of the room. On the contrary, it only settled him in his chair. He became additionally solemn, and dignified, and confidential. He held up two of his horrid fingers and gave me another of his unpleasantly penetrating looks. What was I to do? I was not strong enough to quarrel with him. Conceive my situation, if you please. Is language adequate to describe it? I think not. "The objects of my visit," he went on, quite irrepressibly, "are numbered on my fingers. They are two. First, I come to bear my testimony, with profound sorrow, to the lamentable disagreements between Sir Percival and Lady Glyde. I am Sir Percival's oldest friend--I am related to Lady Glyde by marriage--I am an eye-witness of all that has happened at Blackwater Park. In those three capacities I speak with authority, with confidence, with honourable regret. Sir, I inform you, as the head of Lady Glyde's family, that Miss Halcombe has exaggerated nothing in the letter which she wrote to your address. I affirm that the remedy which that admirable lady has proposed is the only remedy that will spare you the horrors of public scandal. A temporary separation between husband and wife is the one peaceable solution of this difficulty. Part them for the present, and when all causes of irritation are removed, I, who have now the honour of addressing you--I will undertake to bring Sir Percival to reason. Lady Glyde is innocent, Lady Glyde is injured, but--follow my thought here!--she is, on that very account (I say it with shame), the cause of irritation while she remains under her husband's roof. No other house can receive her with propriety but yours. I invite you to open it." Cool. Here was a matrimonial hailstorm pouring in the South of England, and I was invited, by a man with fever in every fold of his coat, to come out from the North of England and take my share of the pelting. I tried to put the point forcibly, just as I have put it here. The Count deliberately lowered one of his horrid fingers, kept the other up, and went on--rode over me, as it were, without even the common coach-manlike attention of crying "Hi!" before he knocked me down. "Follow my thought once more, if you please," he resumed. "My first object you have heard. My second object in coming to this house is to do what Miss Halcombe's illness has prevented her from doing for herself. My large experience is consulted on all difficult matters at Blackwater Park, and my friendly advice was requested on the interesting subject of your letter to Miss Halcombe. I understood at once--for my sympathies are your sympathies--why you wished to see her here before you pledged yourself to inviting Lady Glyde. You are most right, sir, in hesitating to receive the wife until you are quite certain that the husband will not exert his authority to reclaim her. I agree to that. I also agree that such delicate explanations as this difficulty involves are not explanations which can be properly disposed of by writing only. My presence here (to my own great inconvenience) is the proof that I speak sincerely. As for the explanations themselves, I--Fosco--I, who know Sir Percival much better than Miss Halcombe knows him, affirm to you, on my honour and my word, that he will not come near this house, or attempt to communicate with this house, while his wife is living in it. His affairs are embarrassed. Offer him his freedom by means of the absence of Lady Glyde. I promise you he will take his freedom, and go back to the Continent at the earliest moment when he can get away. Is this clear to you as crystal? Yes, it is. Have you questions to address to me? Be it so, I am here to answer. Ask, Mr. Fairlie--oblige me by asking to your heart's content." He had said so much already in spite of me, and he looked so dreadfully capable of saying a great deal more also in spite of me, that I declined his amiable invitation in pure self-defence. "Many thanks," I replied. "I am sinking fast. In my state of health I must take things for granted. Allow me to do so on this occasion. We quite understand each other. Yes. Much obliged, I am sure, for your kind interference. If I ever get better, and ever have a second opportunity of improving our acquaintance--" He got up. I thought he was going. No. More talk, more time for the development of infectious influences--in my room, too--remember that, in my room! "One moment yet," he said, "one moment before I take my leave. I ask permission at parting to impress on you an urgent necessity. It is this, sir. You must not think of waiting till Miss Halcombe recovers before you receive Lady Glyde. Miss Halcombe has the attendance of the doctor, of the housekeeper at Blackwater Park, and of an experienced nurse as well--three persons for whose capacity and devotion I answer with my life. I tell you that. I tell you, also, that the anxiety and alarm of her sister's illness has already affected the health and spirits of Lady Glyde, and has made her totally unfit to be of use in the sick-room. Her position with her husband grows more and more deplorable and dangerous every day. If you leave her any longer at Blackwater Park, you do nothing whatever to hasten her sister's recovery, and at the same time, you risk the public scandal, which you and I, and all of us, are bound in the sacred interests of the family to avoid. With all my soul, I advise you to remove the serious responsibility of delay from your own shoulders by writing to Lady Glyde to come here at once. Do your affectionate, your honourable, your inevitable duty, and whatever happens in the future, no one can lay the blame on you. I speak from my large experience--I offer my friendly advice. Is it accepted--Yes, or No?" I looked at him--merely looked at him--with my sense of his amazing assurance, and my dawning resolution to ring for Louis and have him shown out of the room expressed in every line of my face. It is perfectly incredible, but quite true, that my face did not appear to produce the slightest impression on him. Born without nerves--evidently born without nerves. "You hesitate?" he said. "Mr. Fairlie! I understand that hesitation. You object--see, sir, how my sympathies look straight down into your thoughts!--you object that Lady Glyde is not in health and not in spirits to take the long journey, from Hampshire to this place, by herself. Her own maid is removed from her, as you know, and of other servants fit to travel with her, from one end of England to another, there are none at Blackwater Park. You object, again, that she cannot comfortably stop and rest in London, on her way here, because she cannot comfortably go alone to a public hotel where she is a total stranger. In one breath, I grant both objections--in another breath, I remove them. Follow me, if you please, for the last time. It was my intention, when I returned to England with Sir Percival, to settle myself in the neighbourhood of London. That purpose has just been happily accomplished. I have taken, for six months, a little furnished house in the quarter called St. John's Wood. Be so obliging as to keep this fact in your mind, and observe the programme I now propose. Lady Glyde travels to London (a short journey)--I myself meet her at the station--I take her to rest and sleep at my house, which is also the house of her aunt--when she is restored I escort her to the station again--she travels to this place, and her own maid (who is now under your roof) receives her at the carriage-door. Here is comfort consulted--here are the interests of propriety consulted--here is your own duty--duty of hospitality, sympathy, protection, to an unhappy lady in need of all three--smoothed and made easy, from the beginning to the end. I cordially invite you, sir, to second my efforts in the sacred interests of the family. I seriously advise you to write, by my hands, offering the hospitality of your house (and heart), and the hospitality of my house (and heart), to that injured and unfortunate lady whose cause I plead to-day." He waved his horrid hand at me--he struck his infectious breast--he addressed me oratorically, as if I was laid up in the House of Commons. It was high time to take a desperate course of some sort. It was also high time to send for Louis, and adopt the precaution of fumigating the room. In this trying emergency an idea occurred to me--an inestimable idea which, so to speak, killed two intrusive birds with one stone. I determined to get rid of the Count's tiresome eloquence, and of Lady Glyde's tiresome troubles, by complying with this odious foreigner's request, and writing the letter at once. There was not the least danger of the invitation being accepted, for there was not the least chance that Laura would consent to leave Blackwater Park while Marian was lying there ill. How this charmingly convenient obstacle could have escaped the officious penetration of the Count, it was impossible to conceive--but it HAD escaped him. My dread that he might yet discover it, if I allowed him any more time to think, stimulated me to such an amazing degree, that I struggled into a sitting position--seized, really seized, the writing materials by my side, and produced the letter as rapidly as if I had been a common clerk in an office. "Dearest Laura, Please come, whenever you like. Break the journey by sleeping in London at your aunt's house. Grieved to hear of dear Marian's illness. Ever affectionately yours." I handed these lines, at arm's length, to the Count--I sank back in my chair--I said, "Excuse me--I am entirely prostrated--I can do no more. Will you rest and lunch downstairs? Love to all, and sympathy, and so on. Good-morning." He made another speech--the man was absolutely inexhaustible. I closed my eyes--I endeavoured to hear as little as possible. In spite of my endeavours I was obliged to hear a great deal. My sister's endless husband congratulated himself, and congratulated me, on the result of our interview--he mentioned a great deal more about his sympathies and mine--he deplored my miserable health--he offered to write me a prescription--he impressed on me the necessity of not forgetting what he had said about the importance of light--he accepted my obliging invitation to rest and lunch--he recommended me to expect Lady Glyde in two or three days' time--he begged my permission to look forward to our next meeting, instead of paining himself and paining me, by saying farewell--he added a great deal more, which, I rejoice to think, I did not attend to at the time, and do not remember now. I heard his sympathetic voice travelling away from me by degrees--but, large as he was, I never heard him. He had the negative merit of being absolutely noiseless. I don't know when he opened the door, or when he shut it. I ventured to make use of my eyes again, after an interval of silence--and he was gone. I rang for Louis, and retired to my bathroom. Tepid water, strengthened with aromatic vinegar, for myself, and copious fumigation for my study, were the obvious precautions to take, and of course I adopted them. I rejoice to say they proved successful. I enjoyed my customary siesta. I awoke moist and cool. My first inquiries were for the Count. Had we really got rid of him? Yes--he had gone away by the afternoon train. Had he lunched, and if so, upon what? Entirely upon fruit-tart and cream. What a man! What a digestion! Am I expected to say anything more? I believe not. I believe I have reached the limits assigned to me. The shocking circumstances which happened at a later period did not, I am thankful to say, happen in my presence. I do beg and entreat that nobody will be so very unfeeling as to lay any part of the blame of those circumstances on me. I did everything for the best. I am not answerable for a deplorable calamity, which it was quite impossible to foresee. I am shattered by it--I have suffered under it, as nobody else has suffered. My servant, Louis (who is really attached to me in his unintelligent way), thinks I shall never get over it. He sees me dictating at this moment, with my handkerchief to my eyes. I wish to mention, in justice to myself, that it was not my fault, and that I am quite exhausted and heartbroken. Need I say more? THE STORY CONTINUED BY ELIZA MICHELSON (Housekeeper at Blackwater Park) I I am asked to state plainly what I know of the progress of Miss Halcombe's illness and of the circumstances under which Lady Glyde left Blackwater Park for London. The reason given for making this demand on me is, that my testimony is wanted in the interests of truth. As the widow of a clergyman of the Church of England (reduced by misfortune to the necessity of accepting a situation), I have been taught to place the claims of truth above all other considerations. I therefore comply with a request which I might otherwise, through reluctance to connect myself with distressing family affairs, have hesitated to grant. I made no memorandum at the time, and I cannot therefore be sure to a day of the date, but I believe I am correct in stating that Miss Halcombe's serious illness began during the last fortnight or ten days in June. The breakfast hour was late at Blackwater Park--sometimes as late as ten, never earlier than half-past nine. On the morning to which I am now referring, Miss Halcombe (who was usually the first to come down) did not make her appearance at the table. After the family had waited a quarter of an hour, the upper housemaid was sent to see after her, and came running out of the room dreadfully frightened. I met the servant on the stairs, and went at once to Miss Halcombe to see what was the matter. The poor lady was incapable of telling me. She was walking about her room with a pen in her hand, quite light-headed, in a state of burning fever. Lady Glyde (being no longer in Sir Percival's service, I may, without impropriety, mention my former mistress by her name, instead of calling her my lady) was the first to come in from her own bedroom. She was so dreadfully alarmed and distressed that she was quite useless. The Count Fosco, and his lady, who came upstairs immediately afterwards, were both most serviceable and kind. Her ladyship assisted me to get Miss Halcombe to her bed. His lordship the Count remained in the sitting-room, and having sent for my medicine-chest, made a mixture for Miss Halcombe, and a cooling lotion to be applied to her head, so as to lose no time before the doctor came. We applied the lotion, but we could not get her to take the mixture. Sir Percival undertook to send for the doctor. He despatched a groom, on horseback, for the nearest medical man, Mr. Dawson, of Oak Lodge. Mr. Dawson arrived in less than an hour's time. He was a respectable elderly man, well known all round the country, and we were much alarmed when we found that he considered the case to be a very serious one. His lordship the Count affably entered into conversation with Mr. Dawson, and gave his opinions with a judicious freedom. Mr. Dawson, not over-courteously, inquired if his lordship's advice was the advice of a doctor, and being informed that it was the advice of one who had studied medicine unprofessionally, replied that he was not accustomed to consult with amateur physicians. The Count, with truly Christian meekness of temper, smiled and left the room. Before he went out he told me that he might be found, in case he was wanted in the course of the day, at the boat-house on the banks of the lake. Why he should have gone there, I cannot say. But he did go, remaining away the whole day till seven o'clock, which was dinner-time. Perhaps he wished to set the example of keeping the house as quiet as possible. It was entirely in his character to do so. He was a most considerate nobleman. Miss Halcombe passed a very bad night, the fever coming and going, and getting worse towards the morning instead of better. No nurse fit to wait on her being at hand in the neighbourhood, her ladyship the Countess and myself undertook the duty, relieving each other. Lady Glyde, most unwisely, insisted on sitting up with us. She was much too nervous and too delicate in health to bear the anxiety of Miss Halcombe's illness calmly. She only did herself harm, without being of the least real assistance. A more gentle and affectionate lady never lived--but she cried, and she was frightened, two weaknesses which made her entirely unfit to be present in a sick-room. Sir Percival and the Count came in the morning to make their inquiries. Sir Percival (from distress, I presume, at his lady's affliction and at Miss Halcombe's illness) appeared much confused and unsettled in his mind. His lordship testified, on the contrary, a becoming composure and interest. He had his straw hat in one hand, and his book in the other, and he mentioned to Sir Percival in my hearing that he would go out again and study at the lake. "Let us keep the house quiet," he said. "Let us not smoke indoors, my friend, now Miss Halcombe is ill. You go your way, and I will go mine. When I study I like to be alone. Good-morning, Mrs. Michelson." Sir Percival was not civil enough--perhaps I ought in justice to say, not composed enough--to take leave of me with the same polite attention. The only person in the house, indeed, who treated me, at that time or at any other, on the footing of a lady in distressed circumstances, was the Count. He had the manners of a true nobleman--he was considerate towards every one. Even the young person (Fanny by name) who attended on Lady Glyde was not beneath his notice. When she was sent away by Sir Percival, his lordship (showing me his sweet little birds at the time) was most kindly anxious to know what had become of her, where she was to go the day she left Blackwater Park, and so on. It is in such little delicate attentions that the advantages of aristocratic birth always show themselves. I make no apology for introducing these particulars--they are brought forward in justice to his lordship, whose character, I have reason to know, is viewed rather harshly in certain quarters. A nobleman who can respect a lady in distressed circumstances, and can take a fatherly interest in the fortunes of an humble servant girl, shows principles and feelings of too high an order to be lightly called in question. I advance no opinions--I offer facts only. My endeavour through life is to judge not that I be not judged. One of my beloved husband's finest sermons was on that text. I read it constantly--in my own copy of the edition printed by subscription, in the first days of my widowhood--and at every fresh perusal I derive an increase of spiritual benefit and edification. There was no improvement in Miss Halcombe, and the second night was even worse than the first. Mr. Dawson was constant in his attendance. The practical duties of nursing were still divided between the Countess and myself, Lady Glyde persisting in sitting up with us, though we both entreated her to take some rest. "My place is by Marian's bedside," was her only answer. "Whether I am ill, or well, nothing will induce me to lose sight of her." Towards midday I went downstairs to attend to some of my regular duties. An hour afterwards, on my way back to the sick-room, I saw the Count (who had gone out again early, for the third time) entering the hall, to all appearance in the highest good spirits. Sir Percival, at the same moment, put his head out of the library door, and addressed his noble friend, with extreme eagerness, in these words-- "Have you found her?" His lordship's large face became dimpled all over with placid smiles, but he made no reply in words. At the same time Sir Percival turned his head, observed that I was approaching the stairs, and looked at me in the most rudely angry manner possible. "Come in here and tell me about it," he said to the Count. "Whenever there are women in a house they're always sure to be going up or down stairs." "My dear Percival," observed his lordship kindly, "Mrs. Michelson has duties. Pray recognise her admirable performance of them as sincerely as I do! How is the sufferer, Mrs. Michelson?" "No better, my lord, I regret to say." "Sad--most sad!" remarked the Count. "You look fatigued, Mrs. Michelson. It is certainly time you and my wife had some help in nursing. I think I may be the means of offering you that help. Circumstances have happened which will oblige Madame Fosco to travel to London either to-morrow or the day after. She will go away in the morning and return at night, and she will bring back with her, to relieve you, a nurse of excellent conduct and capacity, who is now disengaged. The woman is known to my wife as a person to be trusted. Before she comes here say nothing about her, if you please, to the doctor, because he will look with an evil eye on any nurse of my providing. When she appears in this house she will speak for herself, and Mr. Dawson will be obliged to acknowledge that there is no excuse for not employing her. Lady Glyde will say the same. Pray present my best respects and sympathies to Lady Glyde." I expressed my grateful acknowledgments for his lordship's kind consideration. Sir Percival cut them short by calling to his noble friend (using, I regret to say, a profane expression) to come into the library, and not to keep him waiting there any longer. I proceeded upstairs. We are poor erring creatures, and however well established a woman's principles may be she cannot always keep on her guard against the temptation to exercise an idle curiosity. I am ashamed to say that an idle curiosity, on this occasion, got the better of my principles, and made me unduly inquisitive about the question which Sir Percival had addressed to his noble friend at the library door. Who was the Count expected to find in the course of his studious morning rambles at Blackwater Park? A woman, it was to be presumed, from the terms of Sir Percival's inquiry. I did not suspect the Count of any impropriety--I knew his moral character too well. The only question I asked myself was--Had he found her? To resume. The night passed as usual without producing any change for the better in Miss Halcombe. The next day she seemed to improve a little. The day after that her ladyship the Countess, without mentioning the object of her journey to any one in my hearing, proceeded by the morning train to London--her noble husband, with his customary attention, accompanying her to the station. I was now left in sole charge of Miss Halcombe, with every apparent chance, in consequence of her sister's resolution not to leave the bedside, of having Lady Glyde herself to nurse next. The only circumstance of any importance that happened in the course of the day was the occurrence of another unpleasant meeting between the doctor and the Count. His lordship, on returning from the station, stepped up into Miss Halcombe's sitting-room to make his inquiries. I went out from the bedroom to speak to him, Mr. Dawson and Lady Glyde being both with the patient at the time. The Count asked me many questions about the treatment and the symptoms. I informed him that the treatment was of the kind described as "saline," and that the symptoms, between the attacks of fever, were certainly those of increasing weakness and exhaustion. Just as I was mentioning these last particulars, Mr. Dawson came out from the bedroom. "Good-morning, sir," said his lordship, stepping forward in the most urbane manner, and stopping the doctor, with a high-bred resolution impossible to resist, "I greatly fear you find no improvement in the symptoms to-day?" "I find decided improvement," answered Mr. Dawson. "You still persist in your lowering treatment of this case of fever?" continued his lordship. "I persist in the treatment which is justified by my own professional experience," said Mr. Dawson. "Permit me to put one question to you on the vast subject of professional experience," observed the Count. "I presume to offer no more advice--I only presume to make an inquiry. You live at some distance, sir, from the gigantic centres of scientific activity--London and Paris. Have you ever heard of the wasting effects of fever being reasonably and intelligibly repaired by fortifying the exhausted patient with brandy, wine, ammonia, and quinine? Has that new heresy of the highest medical authorities ever reached your ears--Yes or No?" "When a professional man puts that question to me I shall be glad to answer him," said the doctor, opening the door to go out. "You are not a professional man, and I beg to decline answering you." Buffeted in this inexcusably uncivil way on one cheek, the Count, like a practical Christian, immediately turned the other, and said, in the sweetest manner, "Good-morning, Mr. Dawson." If my late beloved husband had been so fortunate as to know his lordship, how highly he and the Count would have esteemed each other! Her ladyship the Countess returned by the last train that night, and brought with her the nurse from London. I was instructed that this person's name was Mrs. Rubelle. Her personal appearance, and her imperfect English when she spoke, informed me that she was a foreigner. I have always cultivated a feeling of humane indulgence for foreigners. They do not possess our blessings and advantages, and they are, for the most part, brought up in the blind errors of Popery. It has also always been my precept and practice, as it was my dear husband's precept and practice before me (see Sermon XXIX. in the Collection by the late Rev. Samuel Michelson, M.A.), to do as I would be done by. On both these accounts I will not say that Mrs. Rubelle struck me as being a small, wiry, sly person, of fifty or thereabouts, with a dark brown or Creole complexion and watchful light grey eyes. Nor will I mention, for the reasons just alleged, that I thought her dress, though it was of the plainest black silk, inappropriately costly in texture and unnecessarily refined in trimming and finish, for a person in her position in life. I should not like these things to be said of me, and therefore it is my duty not to say them of Mrs. Rubelle. I will merely mention that her manners were, not perhaps unpleasantly reserved, but only remarkably quiet and retiring--that she looked about her a great deal, and said very little, which might have arisen quite as much from her own modesty as from distrust of her position at Blackwater Park; and that she declined to partake of supper (which was curious perhaps, but surely not suspicious?), although I myself politely invited her to that meal in my own room. At the Count's particular suggestion (so like his lordship's forgiving kindness!), it was arranged that Mrs. Rubelle should not enter on her duties until she had been seen and approved by the doctor the next morning. I sat up that night. Lady Glyde appeared to be very unwilling that the new nurse should be employed to attend on Miss Halcombe. Such want of liberality towards a foreigner on the part of a lady of her education and refinement surprised me. I ventured to say, "My lady, we must all remember not to be hasty in our judgments on our inferiors--especially when they come from foreign parts." Lady Glyde did not appear to attend to me. She only sighed, and kissed Miss Halcombe's hand as it lay on the counterpane. Scarcely a judicious proceeding in a sick-room, with a patient whom it was highly desirable not to excite. But poor Lady Glyde knew nothing of nursing--nothing whatever, I am sorry to say. The next morning Mrs. Rubelle was sent to the sitting-room, to be approved by the doctor on his way through to the bedroom. I left Lady Glyde with Miss Halcombe, who was slumbering at the time, and joined Mrs. Rubelle, with the object of kindly preventing her from feeling strange and nervous in consequence of the uncertainty of her situation. She did not appear to see it in that light. She seemed to be quite satisfied, beforehand, that Mr. Dawson would approve of her, and she sat calmly looking out of window, with every appearance of enjoying the country air. Some people might have thought such conduct suggestive of brazen assurance. I beg to say that I more liberally set it down to extraordinary strength of mind. Instead of the doctor coming up to us, I was sent for to see the doctor. I thought this change of affairs rather odd, but Mrs. Rubelle did not appear to be affected by it in any way. I left her still calmly looking out of the window, and still silently enjoying the country air. Mr. Dawson was waiting for me by himself in the breakfast-room. "About this new nurse, Mrs. Michelson," said the doctor. "Yes, sir?" "I find that she has been brought here from London by the wife of that fat old foreigner, who is always trying to interfere with me. Mrs. Michelson, the fat old foreigner is a quack." This was very rude. I was naturally shocked at it. "Are you aware, sir," I said, "that you are talking of a nobleman?" "Pooh! He isn't the first quack with a handle to his name. They're all Counts--hang 'em!" "He would not be a friend of Sir Percival Glyde's, sir, if he was not a member of the highest aristocracy--excepting the English aristocracy, of course." "Very well, Mrs. Michelson, call him what you like, and let us get back to the nurse. I have been objecting to her already." "Without having seen her, sir?" "Yes, without having seen her. She may be the best nurse in existence, but she is not a nurse of my providing. I have put that objection to Sir Percival, as the master of the house. He doesn't support me. He says a nurse of my providing would have been a stranger from London also, and he thinks the woman ought to have a trial, after his wife's aunt has taken the trouble to fetch her from London. There is some justice in that, and I can't decently say No. But I have made it a condition that she is to go at once, if I find reason to complain of her. This proposal being one which I have some right to make, as medical attendant, Sir Percival has consented to it. Now, Mrs. Michelson, I know I can depend on you, and I want you to keep a sharp eye on the nurse for the first day or two, and to see that she gives Miss Halcombe no medicines but mine. This foreign nobleman of yours is dying to try his quack remedies (mesmerism included) on my patient, and a nurse who is brought here by his wife may be a little too willing to help him. You understand? Very well, then, we may go upstairs. Is the nurse there? I'll say a word to her before she goes into the sick-room." We found Mrs. Rubelle still enjoying herself at the window. When I introduced her to Mr. Dawson, neither the doctor's doubtful looks nor the doctor's searching questions appeared to confuse her in the least. She answered him quietly in her broken English, and though he tried hard to puzzle her, she never betrayed the least ignorance, so far, about any part of her duties. This was doubtless the result of strength of mind, as I said before, and not of brazen assurance, by any means. We all went into the bedroom. Mrs. Rubelle looked very attentively at the patient, curtseyed to Lady Glyde, set one or two little things right in the room, and sat down quietly in a corner to wait until she was wanted. Her ladyship seemed startled and annoyed by the appearance of the strange nurse. No one said anything, for fear of rousing Miss Halcombe, who was still slumbering, except the doctor, who whispered a question about the night. I softly answered, "Much as usual," and then Mr. Dawson went out. Lady Glyde followed him, I suppose to speak about Mrs. Rubelle. For my own part, I had made up my mind already that this quiet foreign person would keep her situation. She had all her wits about her, and she certainly understood her business. So far, I could hardly have done much better by the bedside myself. Remembering Mr. Dawson's caution to me, I subjected Mrs. Rubelle to a severe scrutiny at certain intervals for the next three or four days. I over and over again entered the room softly and suddenly, but I never found her out in any suspicious action. Lady Glyde, who watched her as attentively as I did, discovered nothing either. I never detected a sign of the medicine bottles being tampered with, I never saw Mrs. Rubelle say a word to the Count, or the Count to her. She managed Miss Halcombe with unquestionable care and discretion. The poor lady wavered backwards and forwards between a sort of sleepy exhaustion, which was half faintness and half slumbering, and attacks of fever which brought with them more or less of wandering in her mind. Mrs. Rubelle never disturbed her in the first case, and never startled her in the second, by appearing too suddenly at the bedside in the character of a stranger. Honour to whom honour is due (whether foreign or English)--and I give her privilege impartially to Mrs. Rubelle. She was remarkably uncommunicative about herself, and she was too quietly independent of all advice from experienced persons who understood the duties of a sick-room--but with these drawbacks, she was a good nurse, and she never gave either Lady Glyde or Mr. Dawson the shadow of a reason for complaining of her. The next circumstance of importance that occurred in the house was the temporary absence of the Count, occasioned by business which took him to London. He went away (I think) on the morning of the fourth day after the arrival of Mrs. Rubelle, and at parting he spoke to Lady Glyde very seriously, in my presence, on the subject of Miss Halcombe. "Trust Mr. Dawson," he said, "for a few days more, if you please. But if there is not some change for the better in that time, send for advice from London, which this mule of a doctor must accept in spite of himself. Offend Mr. Dawson, and save Miss Halcombe. I say this seriously, on my word of honour and from the bottom of my heart." His lordship spoke with extreme feeling and kindness. But poor Lady Glyde's nerves were so completely broken down that she seemed quite frightened at him. She trembled from head to foot, and allowed him to take his leave without uttering a word on her side. She turned to me when he had gone, and said, "Oh, Mrs. Michelson, I am heartbroken about my sister, and I have no friend to advise me! Do you think Mr. Dawson is wrong? He told me himself this morning that there was no fear, and no need to send for another doctor." "With all respect to Mr. Dawson," I answered, "in your ladyship's place I should remember the Count's advice." Lady Glyde turned away from me suddenly, with an appearance of despair, for which I was quite unable to account. "HIS advice!" she said to herself. "God help us--HIS advice!" The Count was away from Blackwater Park, as nearly as I remember, a week. Sir Percival seemed to feel the loss of his lordship in various ways, and appeared also, I thought, much depressed and altered by the sickness and sorrow in the house. Occasionally he was so very restless that I could not help noticing it, coming and going, and wandering here and there and everywhere in the grounds. His inquiries about Miss Halcombe, and about his lady (whose failing health seemed to cause him sincere anxiety), were most attentive. I think his heart was much softened. If some kind clerical friend--some such friend as he might have found in my late excellent husband--had been near him at this time, cheering moral progress might have been made with Sir Percival. I seldom find myself mistaken on a point of this sort, having had experience to guide me in my happy married days. Her ladyship the Countess, who was now the only company for Sir Percival downstairs, rather neglected him, as I considered--or, perhaps, it might have been that he neglected her. A stranger might almost have supposed that they were bent, now they were left together alone, on actually avoiding one another. This, of course, could not be. But it did so happen, nevertheless, that the Countess made her dinner at luncheon-time, and that she always came upstairs towards evening, although Mrs. Rubelle had taken the nursing duties entirely off her hands. Sir Percival dined by himself, and William (the man out of livery) made the remark, in my hearing, that his master had put himself on half rations of food and on a double allowance of drink. I attach no importance to such an insolent observation as this on the part of a servant. I reprobated it at the time, and I wish to be understood as reprobating it once more on this occasion. In the course of the next few days Miss Halcombe did certainly seem to all of us to be mending a little. Our faith in Mr. Dawson revived. He appeared to be very confident about the case, and he assured Lady Glyde, when she spoke to him on the subject, that he would himself propose to send for a physician the moment he felt so much as the shadow of a doubt crossing his own mind. The only person among us who did not appear to be relieved by these words was the Countess. She said to me privately, that she could not feel easy about Miss Halcombe on Mr. Dawson's authority, and that she should wait anxiously for her husband's opinion on his return. That return, his letters informed her, would take place in three days' time. The Count and Countess corresponded regularly every morning during his lordship's absence. They were in that respect, as in all others, a pattern to married people. On the evening of the third day I noticed a change in Miss Halcombe, which caused me serious apprehension. Mrs. Rubelle noticed it too. We said nothing on the subject to Lady Glyde, who was then lying asleep, completely overpowered by exhaustion, on the sofa in the sitting-room. Mr. Dawson did not pay his evening visit till later than usual. As soon as he set eyes on his patient I saw his face alter. He tried to hide it, but he looked both confused and alarmed. A messenger was sent to his residence for his medicine-chest, disinfecting preparations were used in the room, and a bed was made up for him in the house by his own directions. "Has the fever turned to infection?" I whispered to him. "I am afraid it has," he answered; "we shall know better to-morrow morning." By Mr. Dawson's own directions Lady Glyde was kept in ignorance of this change for the worse. He himself absolutely forbade her, on account of her health, to join us in the bedroom that night. She tried to resist--there was a sad scene--but he had his medical authority to support him, and he carried his point. The next morning one of the men-servants was sent to London at eleven o'clock, with a letter to a physician in town, and with orders to bring the new doctor back with him by the earliest possible train. Half an hour after the messenger had gone the Count returned to Blackwater Park. The Countess, on her own responsibility, immediately brought him in to see the patient. There was no impropriety that I could discover in her taking this course. His lordship was a married man, he was old enough to be Miss Halcombe's father, and he saw her in the presence of a female relative, Lady Glyde's aunt. Mr. Dawson nevertheless protested against his presence in the room, but I could plainly remark the doctor was too much alarmed to make any serious resistance on this occasion. The poor suffering lady was past knowing any one about her. She seemed to take her friends for enemies. When the Count approached her bedside her eyes, which had been wandering incessantly round and round the room before, settled on his face with a dreadful stare of terror, which I shall remember to my dying day. The Count sat down by her, felt her pulse and her temples, looked at her very attentively, and then turned round upon the doctor with such an expression of indignation and contempt in his face, that the words failed on Mr. Dawson's lips, and he stood for a moment, pale with anger and alarm--pale and perfectly speechless. His lordship looked next at me. "When did the change happen?" he asked. I told him the time. "Has Lady Glyde been in the room since?" I replied that she had not. The doctor had absolutely forbidden her to come into the room on the evening before, and had repeated the order again in the morning. "Have you and Mrs. Rubelle been made aware of the full extent of the mischief?" was his next question. We were aware, I answered, that the malady was considered infectious. He stopped me before I could add anything more. "It is typhus fever," he said. In the minute that passed, while these questions and answers were going on, Mr. Dawson recovered himself, and addressed the Count with his customary firmness. "It is NOT typhus fever," he remarked sharply. "I protest against this intrusion, sir. No one has a right to put questions here but me. I have done my duty to the best of my ability--" The Count interrupted him--not by words, but only by pointing to the bed. Mr. Dawson seemed to feel that silent contradiction to his assertion of his own ability, and to grow only the more angry under it. "I say I have done my duty," he reiterated. "A physician has been sent for from London. I will consult on the nature of the fever with him, and with no one else. I insist on your leaving the room." "I entered this room, sir, in the sacred interests of humanity," said the Count. "And in the same interests, if the coming of the physician is delayed, I will enter it again. I warn you once more that the fever has turned to typhus, and that your treatment is responsible for this lamentable change. If that unhappy lady dies, I will give my testimony in a court of justice that your ignorance and obstinacy have been the cause of her death." Before Mr. Dawson could answer, before the Count could leave us, the door was opened from the sitting-room, and we saw Lady Glyde on the threshold. "I MUST and WILL come in," she said, with extraordinary firmness. Instead of stopping her, the Count moved into the sitting-room, and made way for her to go in. On all other occasions he was the last man in the world to forget anything, but in the surprise of the moment he apparently forgot the danger of infection from typhus, and the urgent necessity of forcing Lady Glyde to take proper care of herself. To my astonishment Mr. Dawson showed more presence of mind. He stopped her ladyship at the first step she took towards the bedside. "I am sincerely sorry, I am sincerely grieved," he said. "The fever may, I fear, be infectious. Until I am certain that it is not, I entreat you to keep out of the room." She struggled for a moment, then suddenly dropped her arms and sank forward. She had fainted. The Countess and I took her from the doctor and carried her into her own room. The Count preceded us, and waited in the passage till I came out and told him that we had recovered her from the swoon. I went back to the doctor to tell him, by Lady Glyde's desire, that she insisted on speaking to him immediately. He withdrew at once to quiet her ladyship's agitation, and to assure her of the physician's arrival in the course of a few hours. Those hours passed very slowly. Sir Percival and the Count were together downstairs, and sent up from time to time to make their inquiries. At last, between five and six o'clock, to our great relief, the physician came. He was a younger man than Mr. Dawson, very serious and very decided. What he thought of the previous treatment I cannot say, but it struck me as curious that he put many more questions to myself and to Mrs. Rubelle than he put to the doctor, and that he did not appear to listen with much interest to what Mr. Dawson said, while he was examining Mr. Dawson's patient. I began to suspect, from what I observed in this way, that the Count had been right about the illness all the way through, and I was naturally confirmed in that idea when Mr. Dawson, after some little delay, asked the one important question which the London doctor had been sent for to set at rest. "What is your opinion of the fever?" he inquired. "Typhus," replied the physician "Typhus fever beyond all doubt." That quiet foreign person, Mrs. Rubelle, crossed her thin brown hands in front of her, and looked at me with a very significant smile. The Count himself could hardly have appeared more gratified if he had been present in the room and had heard the confirmation of his own opinion. After giving us some useful directions about the management of the patient, and mentioning that he would come again in five days' time, the physician withdrew to consult in private with Mr. Dawson. He would offer no opinion on Miss Halcombe's chances of recovery--he said it was impossible at that stage of the illness to pronounce one way or the other. The five days passed anxiously. Countess Fosco and myself took it by turns to relieve Mrs. Rubelle, Miss Halcombe's condition growing worse and worse, and requiring our utmost care and attention. It was a terribly trying time. Lady Glyde (supported, as Mr. Dawson said, by the constant strain of her suspense on her sister's account) rallied in the most extraordinary manner, and showed a firmness and determination for which I should myself never have given her credit. She insisted on coming into the sick-room two or three times every day, to look at Miss Halcombe with her own eyes, promising not to go too close to the bed, if the doctor would consent to her wishes so far. Mr. Dawson very unwillingly made the concession required of him--I think he saw that it was hopeless to dispute with her. She came in every day, and she self-denyingly kept her promise. I felt it personally so distressing (as reminding me of my own affliction during my husband's last illness) to see how she suffered under these circumstances, that I must beg not to dwell on this part of the subject any longer. It is more agreeable to me to mention that no fresh disputes took place between Mr. Dawson and the Count. His lordship made all his inquiries by deputy, and remained continually in company with Sir Percival downstairs. On the fifth day the physician came again and gave us a little hope. He said the tenth day from the first appearance of the typhus would probably decide the result of the illness, and he arranged for his third visit to take place on that date. The interval passed as before--except that the Count went to London again one morning and returned at night. On the tenth day it pleased a merciful Providence to relieve our household from all further anxiety and alarm. The physician positively assured us that Miss Halcombe was out of danger. "She wants no doctor now--all she requires is careful watching and nursing for some time to come, and that I see she has." Those were his own words. That evening I read my husband's touching sermon on Recovery from Sickness, with more happiness and advantage (in a spiritual point of view) than I ever remember to have derived from it before. The effect of the good news on poor Lady Glyde was, I grieve to say, quite overpowering. She was too weak to bear the violent reaction, and in another day or two she sank into a state of debility and depression which obliged her to keep her room. Rest and quiet, and change of air afterwards, were the best remedies which Mr. Dawson could suggest for her benefit. It was fortunate that matters were no worse, for, on the very day after she took to her room, the Count and the doctor had another disagreement--and this time the dispute between them was of so serious a nature that Mr. Dawson left the house. I was not present at the time, but I understood that the subject of dispute was the amount of nourishment which it was necessary to give to assist Miss Halcombe's convalescence after the exhaustion of the fever. Mr. Dawson, now that his patient was safe, was less inclined than ever to submit to unprofessional interference, and the Count (I cannot imagine why) lost all the self-control which he had so judiciously preserved on former occasions, and taunted the doctor, over and over again, with his mistake about the fever when it changed to typhus. The unfortunate affair ended in Mr. Dawson's appealing to Sir Percival, and threatening (now that he could leave without absolute danger to Miss Halcombe) to withdraw from his attendance at Blackwater Park if the Count's interference was not peremptorily suppressed from that moment. Sir Percival's reply (though not designedly uncivil) had only resulted in making matters worse, and Mr. Dawson had thereupon withdrawn from the house in a state of extreme indignation at Count Fosco's usage of him, and had sent in his bill the next morning. We were now, therefore, left without the attendance of a medical man. Although there was no actual necessity for another doctor--nursing and watching being, as the physician had observed, all that Miss Halcombe required--I should still, if my authority had been consulted, have obtained professional assistance from some other quarter, for form's sake. The matter did not seem to strike Sir Percival in that light. He said it would be time enough to send for another doctor if Miss Halcombe showed any signs of a relapse. In the meanwhile we had the Count to consult in any minor difficulty, and we need not unnecessarily disturb our patient in her present weak and nervous condition by the presence of a stranger at her bedside. There was much that was reasonable, no doubt, in these considerations, but they left me a little anxious nevertheless. Nor was I quite satisfied in my own mind of the propriety of our concealing the doctor's absence as we did from Lady Glyde. It was a merciful deception, I admit--for she was in no state to bear any fresh anxieties. But still it was a deception, and, as such, to a person of my principles, at best a doubtful proceeding. A second perplexing circumstance which happened on the same day, and which took me completely by surprise, added greatly to the sense of uneasiness that was now weighing on my mind. I was sent for to see Sir Percival in the library. The Count, who was with him when I went in, immediately rose and left us alone together. Sir Percival civilly asked me to take a seat, and then, to my great astonishment, addressed me in these terms-- "I want to speak to you, Mrs. Michelson, about a matter which I decided on some time ago, and which I should have mentioned before, but for the sickness and trouble in the house. In plain words, I have reasons for wishing to break up my establishment immediately at this place--leaving you in charge, of course, as usual. As soon as Lady Glyde and Miss Halcombe can travel they must both have change of air. My friends, Count Fosco and the Countess, will leave us before that time to live in the neighbourhood of London, and I have reasons for not opening the house to any more company, with a view to economising as carefully as I can. I don't blame you, but my expenses here are a great deal too heavy. In short, I shall sell the horses, and get rid of all the servants at once. I never do things by halves, as you know, and I mean to have the house clear of a pack of useless people by this time to-morrow." I listened to him, perfectly aghast with astonishment. "Do you mean, Sir Percival, that I am to dismiss the indoor servants under my charge without the usual month's warning?" I asked. "Certainly I do. We may all be out of the house before another month, and I am not going to leave the servants here in idleness, with no master to wait on." "Who is to do the cooking, Sir Percival, while you are still staying here?" "Margaret Porcher can roast and boil--keep her. What do I want with a cook if I don't mean to give any dinner-parties?" "The servant you have mentioned is the most unintelligent servant in the house, Sir Percival." "Keep her, I tell you, and have a woman in from the village to do the cleaning and go away again. My weekly expenses must and shall be lowered immediately. I don't send for you to make objections, Mrs. Michelson--I send for you to carry out my plans of economy. Dismiss the whole lazy pack of indoor servants to-morrow, except Porcher. She is as strong as a horse--and we'll make her work like a horse." "You will excuse me for reminding you, Sir Percival, that if the servants go to-morrow they must have a month's wages in lieu of a month's warning." "Let them! A month's wages saves a month's waste and gluttony in the servants' hall." This last remark conveyed an aspersion of the most offensive kind on my management. I had too much self-respect to defend myself under so gross an imputation. Christian consideration for the helpless position of Miss Halcombe and Lady Glyde, and for the serious inconvenience which my sudden absence might inflict on them, alone prevented me from resigning my situation on the spot. I rose immediately. It would have lowered me in my own estimation to have permitted the interview to continue a moment longer. "After that last remark, Sir Percival, I have nothing more to say. Your directions shall be attended to." Pronouncing those words, I bowed my head with the most distant respect, and went out of the room. The next day the servants left in a body. Sir Percival himself dismissed the grooms and stablemen, sending them, with all the horses but one, to London. Of the whole domestic establishment, indoors and out, there now remained only myself, Margaret Porcher, and the gardener--this last living in his own cottage, and being wanted to take care of the one horse that remained in the stables. With the house left in this strange and lonely condition--with the mistress of it ill in her room--with Miss Halcombe still as helpless as a child--and with the doctor's attendance withdrawn from us in enmity--it was surely not unnatural that my spirits should sink, and my customary composure be very hard to maintain. My mind was ill at ease. I wished the poor ladies both well again, and I wished myself away from Blackwater Park. II The next event that occurred was of so singular a nature that it might have caused me a feeling of superstitious surprise, if my mind had not been fortified by principle against any pagan weakness of that sort. The uneasy sense of something wrong in the family which had made me wish myself away from Blackwater Park, was actually followed, strange to say, by my departure from the house. It is true that my absence was for a temporary period only, but the coincidence was, in my opinion, not the less remarkable on that account. My departure took place under the following circumstances-- A day or two after the servants all left I was again sent for to see Sir Percival. The undeserved slur which he had cast on my management of the household did not, I am happy to say, prevent me from returning good for evil to the best of my ability, by complying with his request as readily and respectfully as ever. It cost me a struggle with that fallen nature, which we all share in common, before I could suppress my feelings. Being accustomed to self-discipline, I accomplished the sacrifice. I found Sir Percival and Count Fosco sitting together again. On this occasion his lordship remained present at the interview, and assisted in the development of Sir Percival's views. The subject to which they now requested my attention related to the healthy change of air by which we all hoped that Miss Halcombe and Lady Glyde might soon be enabled to profit. Sir Percival mentioned that both the ladies would probably pass the autumn (by invitation of Frederick Fairlie, Esquire) at Limmeridge House, Cumberland. But before they went there, it was his opinion, confirmed by Count Fosco (who here took up the conversation and continued it to the end), that they would benefit by a short residence first in the genial climate of Torquay. The great object, therefore, was to engage lodgings at that place, affording all the comforts and advantages of which they stood in need, and the great difficulty was to find an experienced person capable of choosing the sort of residence which they wanted. In this emergency the Count begged to inquire, on Sir Percival's behalf, whether I would object to give the ladies the benefit of my assistance, by proceeding myself to Torquay in their interests. It was impossible for a person in my situation to meet any proposal, made in these terms, with a positive objection. I could only venture to represent the serious inconvenience of my leaving Blackwater Park in the extraordinary absence of all the indoor servants, with the one exception of Margaret Porcher. But Sir Percival and his lordship declared that they were both willing to put up with inconvenience for the sake of the invalids. I next respectfully suggested writing to an agent at Torquay, but I was met here by being reminded of the imprudence of taking lodgings without first seeing them. I was also informed that the Countess (who would otherwise have gone to Devonshire herself) could not, in Lady Glyde's present condition, leave her niece, and that Sir Percival and the Count had business to transact together which would oblige them to remain at Blackwater Park. In short, it was clearly shown me that if I did not undertake the errand, no one else could be trusted with it. Under these circumstances, I could only inform Sir Percival that my services were at the disposal of Miss Halcombe and Lady Glyde. It was thereupon arranged that I should leave the next morning, that I should occupy one or two days in examining all the most convenient houses in Torquay, and that I should return with my report as soon as I conveniently could. A memorandum was written for me by his lordship, stating the requisites which the place I was sent to take must be found to possess, and a note of the pecuniary limit assigned to me was added by Sir Percival. My own idea on reading over these instructions was, that no such residence as I saw described could be found at any watering-place in England, and that, even if it could by chance be discovered, it would certainly not be parted with for any period on such terms as I was permitted to offer. I hinted at these difficulties to both the gentlemen, but Sir Percival (who undertook to answer me) did not appear to feel them. It was not for me to dispute the question. I said no more, but I felt a very strong conviction that the business on which I was sent away was so beset by difficulties that my errand was almost hopeless at starting. Before I left I took care to satisfy myself that Miss Halcombe was going on favourably. There was a painful expression of anxiety in her face which made me fear that her mind, on first recovering itself, was not at ease. But she was certainly strengthening more rapidly than I could have ventured to anticipate, and she was able to send kind messages to Lady Glyde, saying that she was fast getting well, and entreating her ladyship not to exert herself again too soon. I left her in charge of Mrs. Rubelle, who was still as quietly independent of every one else in the house as ever. When I knocked at Lady Glyde's door before going away, I was told that she was still sadly weak and depressed, my informant being the Countess, who was then keeping her company in her room. Sir Percival and the Count were walking on the road to the lodge as I was driven by in the chaise. I bowed to them and quitted the house, with not a living soul left in the servants' offices but Margaret Porcher. Every one must feel what I have felt myself since that time, that these circumstances were more than unusual--they were! almost suspicious. Let me, however, say again that it was impossible for me, in my dependent position, to act otherwise than I did. The result of my errand at Torquay was exactly what I had foreseen. No such lodgings as I was instructed to take could be found in the whole place, and the terms I was permitted to give were much too low for the purpose, even if I had been able to discover what I wanted. I accordingly returned to Blackwater Park, and informed Sir Percival, who met me at the door, that my journey had been taken in vain. He seemed too much occupied with some other subject to care about the failure of my errand, and his first words informed me that even in the short time of my absence another remarkable change had taken place in the house. The Count and Countess Fosco had left Blackwater Park for their new residence in St. John's Wood. I was not made aware of the motive for this sudden departure--I was only told that the Count had been very particular in leaving his kind compliments to me. When I ventured on asking Sir Percival whether Lady Glyde had any one to attend to her comforts in the absence of the Countess, he replied that she had Margaret Porcher to wait on her, and he added that a woman from the village had been sent for to do the work downstairs. The answer really shocked me--there was such a glaring impropriety in permitting an under-housemaid to fill the place of confidential attendant on Lady Glyde. I went upstairs at once, and met Margaret on the bedroom landing. Her services had not been required (naturally enough), her mistress having sufficiently recovered that morning to be able to leave her bed. I asked next after Miss Halcombe, but I was answered in a slouching, sulky way, which left me no wiser than I was before. I did not choose to repeat the question, and perhaps provoke an impertinent reply. It was in every respect more becoming to a person in my position to present myself immediately in Lady Glyde's room. I found that her ladyship had certainly gained in health during the last few days. Although still sadly weak and nervous, she was able to get up without assistance, and to walk slowly about her room, feeling no worse effect from the exertion than a slight sensation of fatigue. She had been made a little anxious that morning about Miss Halcombe, through having received no news of her from any one. I thought this seemed to imply a blamable want of attention on the part of Mrs. Rubelle, but I said nothing, and remained with Lady Glyde to assist her to dress. When she was ready we both left the room together to go to Miss Halcombe. We were stopped in the passage by the appearance of Sir Percival. He looked as if he had been purposely waiting there to see us. "Where are you going?" he said to Lady Glyde. "To Marian's room," she answered. "It may spare you a disappointment," remarked Sir Percival, "if I tell you at once that you will not find her there." "Not find her there!" "No. She left the house yesterday morning with Fosco and his wife." Lady Glyde was not strong enough to bear the surprise of this extraordinary statement. She turned fearfully pale, and leaned back against the wall, looking at her husband in dead silence. I was so astonished myself that I hardly knew what to say. I asked Sir Percival if he really meant that Miss Halcombe had left Blackwater Park. "I certainly mean it," he answered. "In her state, Sir Percival! Without mentioning her intentions to Lady Glyde!" Before he could reply her ladyship recovered herself a little and spoke. "Impossible!" she cried out in a loud, frightened manner, taking a step or two forward from the wall. "Where was the doctor? where was Mr. Dawson when Marian went away?" "Mr. Dawson wasn't wanted, and wasn't here," said Sir Percival. "He left of his own accord, which is enough of itself to show that she was strong enough to travel. How you stare! If you don't believe she has gone, look for yourself. Open her room door, and all the other room doors if you like." She took him at his word, and I followed her. There was no one in Miss Halcombe's room but Margaret Porcher, who was busy setting it to rights. There was no one in the spare rooms or the dressing-rooms when we looked into them afterwards. Sir Percival still waited for us in the passage. As we were leaving the last room that we had examined Lady Glyde whispered, "Don't go, Mrs. Michelson! don't leave me, for God's sake!" Before I could say anything in return she was out again in the passage, speaking to her husband. "What does it mean, Sir Percival? I insist--I beg and pray you will tell me what it means." "It means," he answered, "that Miss Halcombe was strong enough yesterday morning to sit up and be dressed, and that she insisted on taking advantage of Fosco's going to London to go there too." "To London!" "Yes--on her way to Limmeridge." Lady Glyde turned and appealed to me. "You saw Miss Halcombe last," she said. "Tell me plainly, Mrs. Michelson, did you think she looked fit to travel?" "Not in MY opinion, your ladyship." Sir Percival, on his side, instantly turned and appealed to me also. "Before you went away," he said, "did you, or did you not, tell the nurse that Miss Halcombe looked much stronger and better?" "I certainly made the remark, Sir Percival." He addressed her ladyship again the moment I offered that reply. "Set one of Mrs. Michelson's opinions fairly against the other," he said, "and try to be reasonable about a perfectly plain matter. If she had not been well enough to be moved do you think we should any of us have risked letting her go? She has got three competent people to look after her--Fosco and your aunt, and Mrs. Rubelle, who went away with them expressly for that purpose. They took a whole carriage yesterday, and made a bed for her on the seat in case she felt tired. To-day, Fosco and Mrs. Rubelle go on with her themselves to Cumberland." "Why does Marian go to Limmeridge and leave me here by myself?" said her ladyship, interrupting Sir Percival. "Because your uncle won't receive you till he has seen your sister first," he replied. "Have you forgotten the letter he wrote to her at the beginning of her illness? It was shown to you, you read it yourself, and you ought to remember it." "I do remember it." "If you do, why should you be surprised at her leaving you? You want to be back at Limmeridge, and she has gone there to get your uncle's leave for you on his own terms." Poor Lady Glyde's eyes filled with tears. "Marian never left me before," she said, "without bidding me good-bye." "She would have bid you good-bye this time," returned Sir Percival, "if she had not been afraid of herself and of you. She knew you would try to stop her, she knew you would distress her by crying. Do you want to make any more objections? If you do, you must come downstairs and ask questions in the dining-room. These worries upset me. I want a glass of wine." He left us suddenly. His manner all through this strange conversation had been very unlike what it usually was. He seemed to be almost as nervous and fluttered, every now and then, as his lady herself. I should never have supposed that his health had been so delicate, or his composure so easy to upset. I tried to prevail on Lady Glyde to go back to her room, but it was useless. She stopped in the passage, with the look of a woman whose mind was panic-stricken. "Something has happened to my sister!" she said. "Remember, my lady, what surprising energy there is in Miss Halcombe," I suggested. "She might well make an effort which other ladies in her situation would be unfit for. I hope and believe there is nothing wrong--I do indeed." "I must follow Marian," said her ladyship, with the same panic-stricken look. "I must go where she has gone, I must see that she is alive and well with my own eyes. Come! come down with me to Sir Percival." I hesitated, fearing that my presence might be considered an intrusion. I attempted to represent this to her ladyship, but she was deaf to me. She held my arm fast enough to force me to go downstairs with her, and she still clung to me with all the little strength she had at the moment when I opened the dining-room door. Sir Percival was sitting at the table with a decanter of wine before him. He raised the glass to his lips as we went in and drained it at a draught. Seeing that he looked at me angrily when he put it down again, I attempted to make some apology for my accidental presence in the room. "Do you suppose there are any secrets going on here?" he broke out suddenly; "there are none--there is nothing underhand, nothing kept from you or from any one." After speaking those strange words loudly and sternly, he filled himself another glass of wine and asked Lady Glyde what she wanted of him. "If my sister is fit to travel I am fit to travel" said her ladyship, with more firmness than she had yet shown. "I come to beg you will make allowances for my anxiety about Marian, and let me follow her at once by the afternoon train." "You must wait till to-morrow," replied Sir Percival, "and then if you don't hear to the contrary you can go. I don't suppose you are at all likely to hear to the contrary, so I shall write to Fosco by to-night's post." He said those last words holding his glass up to the light, and looking at the wine in it instead of at Lady Glyde. Indeed he never once looked at her throughout the conversation. Such a singular want of good breeding in a gentleman of his rank impressed me, I own, very painfully. "Why should you write to Count Fosco?" she asked, in extreme surprise. "To tell him to expect you by the midday train," said Sir Percival. "He will meet you at the station when you get to London, and take you on to sleep at your aunt's in St. John's Wood." Lady Glyde's hand began to tremble violently round my arm--why I could not imagine. "There is no necessity for Count Fosco to meet me," she said. "I would rather not stay in London to sleep." "You must. You can't take the whole journey to Cumberland in one day. You must rest a night in London--and I don't choose you to go by yourself to an hotel. Fosco made the offer to your uncle to give you house-room on the way down, and your uncle has accepted it. Here! here is a letter from him addressed to yourself. I ought to have sent it up this morning, but I forgot. Read it and see what Mr. Fairlie himself says to you." Lady Glyde looked at the letter for a moment and then placed it in my hands. "Read it," she said faintly. "I don't know what is the matter with me. I can't read it myself." It was a note of only four lines--so short and so careless that it quite struck me. If I remember correctly it contained no more than these words-- "Dearest Laura, Please come whenever you like. Break the journey by sleeping at your aunt's house. Grieved to hear of dear Marian's illness. Affectionately yours, Frederick Fairlie." "I would rather not go there--I would rather not stay a night in London," said her ladyship, breaking out eagerly with those words before I had quite done reading the note, short as it was. "Don't write to Count Fosco! Pray, pray don't write to him!" Sir Percival filled another glass from the decanter so awkwardly that he upset it and spilt all the wine over the table. "My sight seems to be failing me," he muttered to himself, in an odd, muffled voice. He slowly set the glass up again, refilled it, and drained it once more at a draught. I began to fear, from his look and manner, that the wine was getting into his head. "Pray don't write to Count Fosco," persisted Lady Glyde, more earnestly than ever. "Why not, I should like to know?" cried Sir Percival, with a sudden burst of anger that startled us both. "Where can you stay more properly in London than at the place your uncle himself chooses for you--at your aunt's house? Ask Mrs. Michelson." The arrangement proposed was so unquestionably the right and the proper one, that I could make no possible objection to it. Much as I sympathised with Lady Glyde in other respects, I could not sympathise with her in her unjust prejudices against Count Fosco. I never before met with any lady of her rank and station who was so lamentably narrow-minded on the subject of foreigners. Neither her uncle's note nor Sir Percival's increasing impatience seemed to have the least effect on her. She still objected to staying a night in London, she still implored her husband not to write to the Count. "Drop it!" said Sir Percival, rudely turning his back on us. "If you haven't sense enough to know what is best for yourself other people must know it for you. The arrangement is made and there is an end of it. You are only wanted to do what Miss Halcombe has done for you---" "Marian?" repeated her Ladyship, in a bewildered manner; "Marian sleeping in Count Fosco's house!" "Yes, in Count Fosco's house. She slept there last night to break the journey, and you are to follow her example, and do what your uncle tells you. You are to sleep at Fosco's to-morrow night, as your sister did, to break the journey. Don't throw too many obstacles in my way! don't make me repent of letting you go at all!" He started to his feet, and suddenly walked out into the verandah through the open glass doors. "Will your ladyship excuse me," I whispered, "if I suggest that we had better not wait here till Sir Percival comes back? I am very much afraid he is over-excited with wine." She consented to leave the room in a weary, absent manner. As soon as we were safe upstairs again, I did all I could to compose her ladyship's spirits. I reminded her that Mr. Fairlie's letters to Miss Halcombe and to herself did certainly sanction, and even render necessary, sooner or later, the course that had been taken. She agreed to this, and even admitted, of her own accord, that both letters were strictly in character with her uncle's peculiar disposition--but her fears about Miss Halcombe, and her unaccountable dread of sleeping at the Count's house in London, still remained unshaken in spite of every consideration that I could urge. I thought it my duty to protest against Lady Glyde's unfavourable opinion of his lordship, and I did so, with becoming forbearance and respect. "Your ladyship will pardon my freedom," I remarked, in conclusion, "but it is said, 'by their fruits ye shall know them.' I am sure the Count's constant kindness and constant attention, from the very beginning of Miss Halcombe's illness, merit our best confidence and esteem. Even his lordship's serious misunderstanding with Mr. Dawson was entirely attributable to his anxiety on Miss Halcombe's account." "What misunderstanding?" inquired her ladyship, with a look of sudden interest. I related the unhappy circumstances under which Mr. Dawson had withdrawn his attendance--mentioning them all the more readily because I disapproved of Sir Percival's continuing to conceal what had happened (as he had done in my presence) from the knowledge of Lady Glyde. Her ladyship started up, with every appearance of being additionally agitated and alarmed by what I had told her. "Worse! worse than I thought!" she said, walking about the room, in a bewildered manner. "The Count knew Mr. Dawson would never consent to Marian's taking a journey--he purposely insulted the doctor to get him out of the house." "Oh, my lady! my lady!" I remonstrated. "Mrs. Michelson!" she went on vehemently, "no words that ever were spoken will persuade me that my sister is in that man's power and in that man's house with her own consent. My horror of him is such, that nothing Sir Percival could say and no letters my uncle could write, would induce me, if I had only my own feelings to consult, to eat, drink, or sleep under his roof. But my misery of suspense about Marian gives me the courage to follow her anywhere, to follow her even into Count Fosco's house." I thought it right, at this point, to mention that Miss Halcombe had already gone on to Cumberland, according to Sir Percival's account of the matter. "I am afraid to believe it!" answered her ladyship. "I am afraid she is still in that man's house. If I am wrong, if she has really gone on to Limmeridge, I am resolved I will not sleep to-morrow night under Count Fosco's roof. My dearest friend in the world, next to my sister, lives near London. You have heard me, you have heard Miss Halcombe, speak of Mrs. Vesey? I mean to write, and propose to sleep at her house. I don't know how I shall get there--I don't know how I shall avoid the Count--but to that refuge I will escape in some way, if my sister has gone to Cumberland. All I ask of you to do, is to see yourself that my letter to Mrs. Vesey goes to London to-night, as certainly as Sir Percival's letter goes to Count Fosco. I have reasons for not trusting the post-bag downstairs. Will you keep my secret, and help me in this? it is the last favour, perhaps, that I shall ever ask of you." I hesitated, I thought it all very strange, I almost feared that her ladyship's mind had been a little affected by recent anxiety and suffering. At my own risk, however, I ended by giving my consent. If the letter had been addressed to a stranger, or to any one but a lady so well known to me by report as Mrs. Vesey, I might have refused. I thank God--looking to what happened afterwards--I thank God I never thwarted that wish, or any other, which Lady Glyde expressed to me, on the last day of her residence at Blackwater Park. The letter was written and given into my hands. I myself put it into the post-box in the village that evening. We saw nothing more of Sir Percival for the rest of the day. I slept, by Lady Glyde's own desire, in the next room to hers, with the door open between us. There was something so strange and dreadful in the loneliness and emptiness of the house, that I was glad, on my side, to have a companion near me. Her ladyship sat up late, reading letters and burning them, and emptying her drawers and cabinets of little things she prized, as if she never expected to return to Blackwater Park. Her sleep was sadly disturbed when she at last went to bed--she cried out in it several times, once so loud that she woke herself. Whatever her dreams were, she did not think fit to communicate them to me. Perhaps, in my situation, I had no right to expect that she should do so. It matters little now. I was sorry for her, I was indeed heartily sorry for her all the same. The next day was fine and sunny. Sir Percival came up, after breakfast, to tell us that the chaise would be at the door at a quarter to twelve--the train to London stopping at our station at twenty minutes after. He informed Lady Glyde that he was obliged to go out, but added that he hoped to be back before she left. If any unforeseen accident delayed him, I was to accompany her to the station, and to take special care that she was in time for the train. Sir Percival communicated these directions very hastily--walking here and there about the room all the time. Her ladyship looked attentively after him wherever he went. He never once looked at her in return. She only spoke when he had done, and then she stopped him as he approached the door, by holding out her hand. "I shall see you no more," she said, in a very marked manner. "This is our parting--our parting, it may be for ever. Will you try to forgive me, Percival, as heartily as I forgive YOU?" His face turned of an awful whiteness all over, and great beads of perspiration broke out on his bald forehead. "I shall come back," he said, and made for the door, as hastily as if his wife's farewell words had frightened him out of the room. I had never liked Sir Percival, but the manner in which he left Lady Glyde made me feel ashamed of having eaten his bread and lived in his service. I thought of saying a few comforting and Christian words to the poor lady, but there was something in her face, as she looked after her husband when the door closed on him, that made me alter my mind and keep silence. At the time named the chaise drew up at the gates. Her ladyship was right--Sir Percival never came back. I waited for him till the last moment, and waited in vain. No positive responsibility lay on my shoulders, and yet I did not feel easy in my mind. "It is of your own free will," I said, as the chaise drove through the lodge-gates, "that your ladyship goes to London?" "I will go anywhere," she answered, "to end the dreadful suspense that I am suffering at this moment." She had made me feel almost as anxious and as uncertain about Miss Halcombe as she felt herself. I presumed to ask her to write me a line, if all went well in London. She answered, "Most willingly, Mrs. Michelson." "We all have our crosses to bear, my lady," I said, seeing her silent and thoughtful, after she had promised to write. She made no reply--she seemed to be too much wrapped up in her own thoughts to attend to me. "I fear your ladyship rested badly last night," I remarked, after waiting a little. "Yes," she said, "I was terribly disturbed by dreams." "Indeed, my lady?" I thought she was going to tell me her dreams, but no, when she spoke next it was only to ask a question. "You posted the letter to Mrs. Vesey with your own hands?" "Yes, my lady." "Did Sir Percival say, yesterday, that Count Fosco was to meet me at the terminus in London?" "He did, my lady." She sighed heavily when I answered that last question, and said no more. We arrived at the station, with hardly two minutes to spare. The gardener (who had driven us) managed about the luggage, while I took the ticket. The whistle of the train was sounding when I joined her ladyship on the platform. She looked very strangely, and pressed her hand over her heart, as if some sudden pain or fright had overcome her at that moment. "I wish you were going with me!" she said, catching eagerly at my arm when I gave her the ticket. If there had been time, if I had felt the day before as I felt then, I would have made my arrangements to accompany her, even though the doing so had obliged me to give Sir Percival warning on the spot. As it was, her wishes, expressed at the last moment only, were expressed too late for me to comply with them. She seemed to understand this herself before I could explain it, and did not repeat her desire to have me for a travelling companion. The train drew up at the platform. She gave the gardener a present for his children, and took my hand, in her simple hearty manner, before she got into the carriage. "You have been very kind to me and to my sister," she said--"kind when we were both friendless. I shall remember you gratefully, as long as I live to remember any one. Good-bye--and God bless you!" She spoke those words with a tone and a look which brought the tears into my eyes--she spoke them as if she was bidding me farewell for ever. "Good-bye, my lady," I said, putting her into the carriage, and trying to cheer her; "good-bye, for the present only; good-bye, with my best and kindest wishes for happier times." She shook her head, and shuddered as she settled herself in the carriage. The guard closed the door. "Do you believe in dreams?" she whispered to me at the window. "My dreams, last night, were dreams I have never had before. The terror of them is hanging over me still." The whistle sounded before I could answer, and the train moved. Her pale quiet face looked at me for the last time--looked sorrowfully and solemnly from the window. She waved her hand, and I saw her no more. Towards five o'clock on the afternoon of that same day, having a little time to myself in the midst of the household duties which now pressed upon me, I sat down alone in my own room, to try and compose my mind with the volume of my husband's Sermons. For the first time in my life I found my attention wandering over those pious and cheering words. Concluding that Lady Glyde's departure must have disturbed me far more seriously than I had myself supposed, I put the book aside, and went out to take a turn in the garden. Sir Percival had not yet returned, to my knowledge, so I could feel no hesitation about showing myself in the grounds. On turning the corner of the house, and gaining a view of the garden, I was startled by seeing a stranger walking in it. The stranger was a woman--she was lounging along the path with her back to me, and was gathering the flowers. As I approached she heard me, and turned round. My blood curdled in my veins. The strange woman in the garden was Mrs. Rubelle! I could neither move nor speak. She came up to me, as composedly as ever, with her flowers in her hand. "What is the matter, ma'am?" she said quietly. "You here!" I gasped out. "Not gone to London! Not gone to Cumberland!" Mrs. Rubelle smelt at her flowers with a smile of malicious pity. "Certainly not," she said. "I have never left Blackwater Park." I summoned breath enough and courage enough for another question. "Where is Miss Halcombe?" Mrs. Rubelle fairly laughed at me this time, and replied in these words-- "Miss Halcombe, ma'am, has not left Blackwater Park either." When I heard that astounding answer, all my thoughts were startled back on the instant to my parting with Lady Glyde. I can hardly say I reproached myself, but at that moment I think I would have given many a year's hard savings to have known four hours earlier what I knew now. Mrs. Rubelle waited, quietly arranging her nosegay, as if she expected me to say something. I could say nothing. I thought of Lady Glyde's worn-out energies and weakly health, and I trembled for the time when the shock of the discovery that I had made would fall on her. For a minute or more my fears for the poor ladies silenced me. At the end of that time Mrs. Rubelle looked up sideways from her flowers, and said, "Here is Sir Percival, ma'am, returned from his ride." I saw him as soon as she did. He came towards us, slashing viciously at the flowers with his riding-whip. When he was near enough to see my face he stopped, struck at his boot with the whip, and burst out laughing, so harshly and so violently that the birds flew away, startled, from the tree by which he stood. "Well, Mrs. Michelson," he said, "you have found it out at last, have you?" I made no reply. He turned to Mrs. Rubelle. "When did you show yourself in the garden?" "I showed myself about half an hour ago, sir. You said I might take my liberty again as soon as Lady Glyde had gone away to London." "Quite right. I don't blame you--I only asked the question." He waited a moment, and then addressed himself once more to me. "You can't believe it, can you?" he said mockingly. "Here! come along and see for yourself." He led the way round to the front of the house. I followed him, and Mrs. Rubelle followed me. After passing through the iron gates he stopped, and pointed with his whip to the disused middle wing of the building. "There!" he said. "Look up at the first floor. You know the old Elizabethan bedrooms? Miss Halcombe is snug and safe in one of the best of them at this moment. Take her in, Mrs. Rubelle (you have got your key?); take Mrs. Michelson in, and let her own eyes satisfy her that there is no deception this time." The tone in which he spoke to me, and the minute or two that had passed since we left the garden, helped me to recover my spirits a little. What I might have done at this critical moment, if all my life had been passed in service, I cannot say. As it was, possessing the feelings, the principles, and the bringing up of a lady, I could not hesitate about the right course to pursue. My duty to myself, and my duty to Lady Glyde, alike forbade me to remain in the employment of a man who had shamefully deceived us both by a series of atrocious falsehoods. "I must beg permission, Sir Percival, to speak a few words to you in private," I said. "Having done so, I shall be ready to proceed with this person to Miss Halcombe's room." Mrs. Rubelle, whom I had indicated by a slight turn of my head, insolently sniffed at her nosegay and walked away, with great deliberation, towards the house door. "Well," said Sir Percival sharply, "what is it now?" "I wish to mention, sir, that I am desirous of resigning the situation I now hold at Blackwater Park." That was literally how I put it. I was resolved that the first words spoken in his presence should be words which expressed my intention to leave his service. He eyed me with one of his blackest looks, and thrust his hands savagely into the pockets of his riding-coat. "Why?" he said, "why, I should like to know?" "It is not for me, Sir Percival, to express an opinion on what has taken place in this house. I desire to give no offence. I merely wish to say that I do not feel it consistent with my duty to Lady Glyde and to myself to remain any longer in your service." "Is it consistent with your duty to me to stand there, casting suspicion on me to my face?" he broke out in his most violent manner. "I see what you're driving at. You have taken your own mean, underhand view of an innocent deception practised on Lady Glyde for her own good. It was essential to her health that she should have a change of air immediately, and you know as well as I do she would never have gone away if she had been told Miss Halcombe was still left here. She has been deceived in her own interests--and I don't care who knows it. Go, if you like--there are plenty of housekeepers as good as you to be had for the asking. Go when you please--but take care how you spread scandals about me and my affairs when you're out of my service. Tell the truth, and nothing but the truth, or it will be the worse for you! See Miss Halcombe for yourself--see if she hasn't been as well taken care of in one part of the house as in the other. Remember the doctor's own orders that Lady Glyde was to have a change of air at the earliest possible opportunity. Bear all that well in mind, and then say anything against me and my proceedings if you dare!" He poured out these words fiercely, all in a breath, walking backwards and forwards, and striking about him in the air with his whip. Nothing that he said or did shook my opinion of the disgraceful series of falsehoods that he had told in my presence the day before, or of the cruel deception by which he had separated Lady Glyde from her sister, and had sent her uselessly to London, when she was half distracted with anxiety on Miss Halcombe's account. I naturally kept these thoughts to myself, and said nothing more to irritate him; but I was not the less resolved to persist in my purpose. A soft answer turneth away wrath, and I suppressed my own feelings accordingly when it was my turn to reply. "While I am in your service, Sir Percival," I said, "I hope I know my duty well enough not to inquire into your motives. When I am out of your service, I hope I know my own place well enough not to speak of matters which don't concern me--" "When do you want to go?" he asked, interrupting me without ceremony. "Don't suppose I am anxious to keep you--don't suppose I care about your leaving the house. I am perfectly fair and open in this matter, from first to last. When do you want to go?" "I should wish to leave at your earliest convenience, Sir Percival." "My convenience has nothing to do with it. I shall be out of the house for good and all to-morrow morning, and I can settle your accounts to-night. If you want to study anybody's convenience, it had better be Miss Halcombe's. Mrs. Rubelle's time is up to-day, and she has reasons for wishing to be in London to-night. If you go at once, Miss Halcombe won't have a soul left here to look after her." I hope it is unnecessary for me to say that I was quite incapable of deserting Miss Halcombe in such an emergency as had now befallen Lady Glyde and herself. After first distinctly ascertaining from Sir Percival that Mrs. Rubelle was certain to leave at once if I took her place, and after also obtaining permission to arrange for Mr. Dawson's resuming his attendance on his patient, I willingly consented to remain at Blackwater Park until Miss Halcombe no longer required my services. It was settled that I should give Sir Percival's solicitor a week's notice before I left, and that he was to undertake the necessary arrangements for appointing my successor. The matter was discussed in very few words. At its conclusion Sir Percival abruptly turned on his heel, and left me free to join Mrs. Rubelle. That singular foreign person had been sitting composedly on the door-step all this time, waiting till I could follow her to Miss Halcombe's room. I had hardly walked half-way towards the house when Sir Percival, who had withdrawn in the opposite direction, suddenly stopped and called me back. "Why are you leaving my service?" he asked. The question was so extraordinary, after what had just passed between us, that I hardly knew what to say in answer to it. "Mind! I don't know why you are going," he went on. "You must give a reason for leaving me, I suppose, when you get another situation. What reason? The breaking up of the family? Is that it?" "There can be no positive objection, Sir Percival, to that reason----" "Very well! That's all I want to know. If people apply for your character, that's your reason, stated by yourself. You go in consequence of the breaking up of the family." He turned away again before I could say another word, and walked out rapidly into the grounds. His manner was as strange as his language. I acknowledge he alarmed me. Even the patience of Mrs. Rubelle was getting exhausted, when I joined her at the house door. "At last!" she said, with a shrug of her lean foreign shoulders. She led the way into the inhabited side of the house, ascended the stairs, and opened with her key the door at the end of the passage, which communicated with the old Elizabethan rooms--a door never previously used, in my time, at Blackwater Park. The rooms themselves I knew well, having entered them myself on various occasions from the other side of the house. Mrs. Rubelle stopped at the third door along the old gallery, handed me the key of it, with the key of the door of communication, and told me I should find Miss Halcombe in that room. Before I went in I thought it desirable to make her understand that her attendance had ceased. Accordingly, I told her in plain words that the charge of the sick lady henceforth devolved entirely on myself. "I am glad to hear it, ma'am," said Mrs. Rubelle. "I want to go very much." "Do you leave to-day?" I asked, to make sure of her. "Now that you have taken charge, ma'am, I leave in half an hour's time. Sir Percival has kindly placed at my disposition the gardener, and the chaise, whenever I want them. I shall want them in half an hour's time to go to the station. I am packed up in anticipation already. I wish you good-day, ma'am." She dropped a brisk curtsey, and walked back along the gallery, humming a little tune, and keeping time to it cheerfully with the nosegay in her hand. I am sincerely thankful to say that was the last I saw of Mrs. Rubelle. When I went into the room Miss Halcombe was asleep. I looked at her anxiously, as she lay in the dismal, high, old-fashioned bed. She was certainly not in any respect altered for the worse since I had seen her last. She had not been neglected, I am bound to admit, in any way that I could perceive. The room was dreary, and dusty, and dark, but the window (looking on a solitary court-yard at the back of the house) was opened to let in the fresh air, and all that could be done to make the place comfortable had been done. The whole cruelty of Sir Percival's deception had fallen on poor Lady Glyde. The only ill-usage which either he or Mrs. Rubelle had inflicted on Miss Halcombe consisted, so far as I could see, in the first offence of hiding her away. I stole back, leaving the sick lady still peacefully asleep, to give the gardener instructions about bringing the doctor. I begged the man, after he had taken Mrs. Rubelle to the station, to drive round by Mr. Dawson's, and leave a message in my name, asking him to call and see me. I knew he would come on my account, and I knew he would remain when he found Count Fosco had left the house. In due course of time the gardener returned, and said that he had driven round by Mr. Dawson's residence, after leaving Mrs. Rubelle at the station. The doctor sent me word that he was poorly in health himself, but that he would call, if possible, the next morning. Having delivered his message the gardener was about to withdraw, but I stopped him to request that he would come back before dark, and sit up that night, in one of the empty bedrooms, so as to be within call in case I wanted him. He understood readily enough my unwillingness to be left alone all night in the most desolate part of that desolate house, and we arranged that he should come in between eight and nine. He came punctually, and I found cause to be thankful that I had adopted the precaution of calling him in. Before midnight Sir Percival's strange temper broke out in the most violent and most alarming manner, and if the gardener had not been on the spot to pacify him on the instant, I am afraid to think what might have happened. Almost all the afternoon and evening he had been walking about the house and grounds in an unsettled, excitable manner, having, in all probability, as I thought, taken an excessive quantity of wine at his solitary dinner. However that may be, I heard his voice calling loudly and angrily in the new wing of the house, as I was taking a turn backwards and forwards along the gallery the last thing at night. The gardener immediately ran down to him, and I closed the door of communication, to keep the alarm, if possible, from reaching Miss Halcombe's ears. It was full half an hour before the gardener came back. He declared that his master was quite out of his senses--not through the excitement of drink, as I had supposed, but through a kind of panic or frenzy of mind, for which it was impossible to account. He had found Sir Percival walking backwards and forwards by himself in the hall, swearing, with every appearance of the most violent passion, that he would not stop another minute alone in such a dungeon as his own house, and that he would take the first stage of his journey immediately in the middle of the night. The gardener, on approaching him, had been hunted out, with oaths and threats, to get the horse and chaise ready instantly. In a quarter of an hour Sir Percival had joined him in the yard, had jumped into the chaise, and, lashing the horse into a gallop, had driven himself away, with his face as pale as ashes in the moonlight. The gardener had heard him shouting and cursing at the lodge-keeper to get up and open the gate--had heard the wheels roll furiously on again in the still night, when the gate was unlocked--and knew no more. The next day, or a day or two after, I forget which, the chaise was brought back from Knowlesbury, our nearest town, by the ostler at the old inn. Sir Percival had stopped there, and had afterwards left by the train--for what destination the man could not tell. I never received any further information, either from himself or from any one else, of Sir Percival's proceedings, and I am not even aware, at this moment, whether he is in England or out of it. He and I have not met since he drove away like an escaped criminal from his own house, and it is my fervent hope and prayer that we may never meet again. My own part of this sad family story is now drawing to an end. I have been informed that the particulars of Miss Halcombe's waking, and of what passed between us when she found me sitting by her bedside, are not material to the purpose which is to be answered by the present narrative. It will be sufficient for me to say in this place, that she was not herself conscious of the means adopted to remove her from the inhabited to the uninhabited part of the house. She was in a deep sleep at the time, whether naturally or artificially produced she could not say. In my absence at Torquay, and in the absence of all the resident servants except Margaret Porcher (who was perpetually eating, drinking, or sleeping, when she was not at work), the secret transfer of Miss Halcombe from one part of the house to the other was no doubt easily performed. Mrs. Rubelle (as I discovered for myself, in looking about the room) had provisions, and all other necessaries, together with the means of heating water, broth, and so on, without kindling a fire, placed at her disposal during the few days of her imprisonment with the sick lady. She had declined to answer the questions which Miss Halcombe naturally put, but had not, in other respects, treated her with unkindness or neglect. The disgrace of lending herself to a vile deception is the only disgrace with which I can conscientiously charge Mrs. Rubelle. I need write no particulars (and I am relieved to know it) of the effect produced on Miss Halcombe by the news of Lady Glyde's departure, or by the far more melancholy tidings which reached us only too soon afterwards at Blackwater Park. In both cases I prepared her mind beforehand as gently and as carefully as possible, having the doctor's advice to guide me, in the last case only, through Mr. Dawson's being too unwell to come to the house for some days after I had sent for him. It was a sad time, a time which it afflicts me to think of or to write of now. The precious blessings of religious consolation which I endeavoured to convey were long in reaching Miss Halcombe's heart, but I hope and believe they came home to her at last. I never left her till her strength was restored. The train which took me away from that miserable house was the train which took her away also. We parted very mournfully in London. I remained with a relative at Islington, and she went on to Mr. Fairlie's house in Cumberland. I have only a few lines more to write before I close this painful statement. They are dictated by a sense of duty. In the first place, I wish to record my own personal conviction that no blame whatever, in connection with the events which I have now related, attaches to Count Fosco. I am informed that a dreadful suspicion has been raised, and that some very serious constructions are placed upon his lordship's conduct. My persuasion of the Count's innocence remains, however, quite unshaken. If he assisted Sir Percival in sending me to Torquay, he assisted under a delusion, for which, as a foreigner and a stranger, he was not to blame. If he was concerned in bringing Mrs. Rubelle to Blackwater Park, it was his misfortune and not his fault, when that foreign person was base enough to assist a deception planned and carried out by the master of the house. I protest, in the interests of morality, against blame being gratuitously and wantonly attached to the proceedings of the Count. In the second place, I desire to express my regret at my own inability to remember the precise day on which Lady Glyde left Blackwater Park for London. I am told that it is of the last importance to ascertain the exact date of that lamentable journey, and I have anxiously taxed my memory to recall it. The effort has been in vain. I can only remember now that it was towards the latter part of July. We all know the difficulty, after a lapse of time, of fixing precisely on a past date unless it has been previously written down. That difficulty is greatly increased in my case by the alarming and confusing events which took place about the period of Lady Glyde's departure. I heartily wish I had made a memorandum at the time. I heartily wish my memory of the date was as vivid as my memory of that poor lady's face, when it looked at me sorrowfully for the last time from the carriage window. THE STORY CONTINUED IN SEVERAL NARRATIVES 1. THE NARRATIVE OF HESTER PINHORN, COOK IN THE SERVICE OF COUNT FOSCO [Taken down from her own statement] I am sorry to say that I have never learnt to read or write. I have been a hard-working woman all my life, and have kept a good character. I know that it is a sin and wickedness to say the thing which is not, and I will truly beware of doing so on this occasion. All that I know I will tell, and I humbly beg the gentleman who takes this down to put my language right as he goes on, and to make allowances for my being no scholar. In this last summer I happened to be out of place (through no fault of my own), and I heard of a situation as plain cook, at Number Five, Forest Road, St. John's Wood. I took the place on trial. My master's name was Fosco. My mistress was an English lady. He was Count and she was Countess. There was a girl to do housemaid's work when I got there. She was not over-clean or tidy, but there was no harm in her. I and she were the only servants in the house. Our master and mistress came after we got in; and as soon as they did come we were told, downstairs, that company was expected from the country. The company was my mistress's niece, and the back bedroom on the first floor was got ready for her. My mistress mentioned to me that Lady Glyde (that was her name) was in poor health, and that I must be particular in my cooking accordingly. She was to come that day, as well as I can remember--but whatever you do, don't trust my memory in the matter. I am sorry to say it's no use asking me about days of the month, and such-like. Except Sundays, half my time I take no heed of them, being a hard-working woman and no scholar. All I know is Lady Glyde came, and when she did come, a fine fright she gave us all surely. I don't know how master brought her to the house, being hard at work at the time. But he did bring her in the afternoon, I think, and the housemaid opened the door to them, and showed them into the parlour. Before she had been long down in the kitchen again with me, we heard a hurry-skurry upstairs, and the parlour bell ringing like mad, and my mistress's voice calling out for help. We both ran up, and there we saw the lady laid on the sofa, with her face ghastly white, and her hands fast clenched, and her head drawn down to one side. She had been taken with a sudden fright, my mistress said, and master he told us she was in a fit of convulsions. I ran out, knowing the neighbourhood a little better than the rest of them, to fetch the nearest doctor's help. The nearest help was at Goodricke's and Garth's, who worked together as partners, and had a good name and connection, as I have heard, all round St. John's Wood. Mr. Goodricke was in, and he came back with me directly. It was some time before he could make himself of much use. The poor unfortunate lady fell out of one fit into another, and went on so till she was quite wearied out, and as helpless as a new-born babe. We then got her to bed. Mr. Goodricke went away to his house for medicine, and came back again in a quarter of an hour or less. Besides the medicine he brought a bit of hollow mahogany wood with him, shaped like a kind of trumpet, and after waiting a little while, he put one end over the lady's heart and the other to his ear, and listened carefully. When he had done he says to my mistress, who was in the room, "This is a very serious case," he says, "I recommend you to write to Lady Glyde's friends directly." My mistress says to him, "Is it heart-disease?" And he says, "Yes, heart-disease of a most dangerous kind." He told her exactly what he thought was the matter, which I was not clever enough to understand. But I know this, he ended by saying that he was afraid neither his help nor any other doctor's help was likely to be of much service. My mistress took this ill news more quietly than my master. He was a big, fat, odd sort of elderly man, who kept birds and white mice, and spoke to them as if they were so many Christian children. He seemed terribly cut up by what had happened. "Ah! poor Lady Glyde! poor dear Lady Glyde!" he says, and went stalking about, wringing his fat hands more like a play-actor than a gentleman. For one question my mistress asked the doctor about the lady's chances of getting round, he asked a good fifty at least. I declare he quite tormented us all, and when he was quiet at last, out he went into the bit of back garden, picking trumpery little nosegays, and asking me to take them upstairs and make the sick-room look pretty with them. As if THAT did any good. I think he must have been, at times, a little soft in his head. But he was not a bad master--he had a monstrous civil tongue of his own, and a jolly, easy, coaxing way with him. I liked him a deal better than my mistress. She was a hard one, if ever there was a hard one yet. Towards night-time the lady roused up a little. She had been so wearied out, before that, by the convulsions, that she never stirred hand or foot, or spoke a word to anybody. She moved in the bed now, and stared about her at the room and us in it. She must have been a nice-looking lady when well, with light hair, and blue eyes and all that. Her rest was troubled at night--at least so I heard from my mistress, who sat up alone with her. I only went in once before going to bed to see if I could be of any use, and then she was talking to herself in a confused, rambling manner. She seemed to want sadly to speak to somebody who was absent from her somewhere. I couldn't catch the name the first time, and the second time master knocked at the door, with his regular mouthful of questions, and another of his trumpery nosegays. When I went in early the next morning, the lady was clean worn out again, and lay in a kind of faint sleep. Mr. Goodricke brought his partner, Mr. Garth, with him to advise. They said she must not be disturbed out of her rest on any account. They asked my mistress many questions, at the other end of the room, about what the lady's health had been in past times, and who had attended her, and whether she had ever suffered much and long together under distress of mind. I remember my mistress said "Yes" to that last question. And Mr. Goodricke looked at Mr. Garth, and shook his head; and Mr. Garth looked at Mr. Goodricke, and shook his head. They seemed to think that the distress might have something to do with the mischief at the lady's heart. She was but a frail thing to look at, poor creature! Very little strength at any time, I should say--very little strength. Later on the same morning, when she woke, the lady took a sudden turn, and got seemingly a great deal better. I was not let in again to see her, no more was the housemaid, for the reason that she was not to be disturbed by strangers. What I heard of her being better was through my master. He was in wonderful good spirits about the change, and looked in at the kitchen window from the garden, with his great big curly-brimmed white hat on, to go out. "Good Mrs. Cook," says he, "Lady Glyde is better. My mind is more easy than it was, and I am going out to stretch my big legs with a sunny little summer walk. Shall I order for you, shall I market for you, Mrs. Cook? What are you making there? A nice tart for dinner? Much crust, if you please--much crisp crust, my dear, that melts and crumbles delicious in the mouth." That was his way. He was past sixty, and fond of pastry. Just think of that! The doctor came again in the forenoon, and saw for himself that Lady Glyde had woke up better. He forbid us to talk to her, or to let her talk to us, in case she was that way disposed, saying she must be kept quiet before all things, and encouraged to sleep as much as possible. She did not seem to want to talk whenever I saw her, except overnight, when I couldn't make out what she was saying--she seemed too much worn down. Mr. Goodricke was not nearly in such good spirits about her as master. He said nothing when he came downstairs, except that he would call again at five o'clock. About that time (which was before master came home again) the bell rang hard from the bedroom, and my mistress ran out into the landing, and called to me to go for Mr. Goodricke, and tell him the lady had fainted. I got on my bonnet and shawl, when, as good luck would have it, the doctor himself came to the house for his promised visit. I let him in, and went upstairs along with him. "Lady Glyde was just as usual," says my mistress to him at the door; "she was awake, and looking about her in a strange, forlorn manner, when I heard her give a sort of half cry, and she fainted in a moment." The doctor went up to the bed, and stooped down over the sick lady. He looked very serious, all on a sudden, at the sight of her, and put his hand on her heart. My mistress stared hard in Mr. Goodricke's face. "Not dead!" says she, whispering, and turning all of a tremble from head to foot. "Yes," says the doctor, very quiet and grave. "Dead. I was afraid it would happen suddenly when I examined her heart yesterday." My mistress stepped back from the bedside while he was speaking, and trembled and trembled again. "Dead!" she whispers to herself; "dead so suddenly! dead so soon! What will the Count say?" Mr. Goodricke advised her to go downstairs, and quiet herself a little. "You have been sitting up all night," says he, "and your nerves are shaken. This person," says he, meaning me, "this person will stay in the room till I can send for the necessary assistance." My mistress did as he told her. "I must prepare the Count," she says. "I must carefully prepare the Count." And so she left us, shaking from head to foot, and went out. "Your master is a foreigner," says Mr. Goodricke, when my mistress had left us. "Does he understand about registering the death?" "I can't rightly tell, sir," says I, "but I should think not." The doctor considered a minute, and then says he, "I don't usually do such things," says he, "but it may save the family trouble in this case if I register the death myself. I shall pass the district office in half an hour's time, and I can easily look in. Mention, if you please, that I will do so." "Yes, sir," says I, "with thanks, I'm sure, for your kindness in thinking of it." "You don't mind staying here till I can send you the proper person?" says he. "No, sir," says I; "I'll stay with the poor lady till then. I suppose nothing more could be done, sir, than was done?" says I. "No," says he, "nothing; she must have suffered sadly before ever I saw her--the case was hopeless when I was called in." "Ah, dear me! we all come to it, sooner or later, don't we, sir?" says I. He gave no answer to that--he didn't seem to care about talking. He said, "Good-day," and went out. I stopped by the bedside from that time till the time when Mr. Goodricke sent the person in, as he had promised. She was, by name, Jane Gould. I considered her to be a respectable-looking woman. She made no remark, except to say that she understood what was wanted of her, and that she had winded a many of them in her time. How master bore the news, when he first heard it, is more than I can tell, not having been present. When I did see him he looked awfully overcome by it, to be sure. He sat quiet in a corner, with his fat hands hanging over his thick knees, and his head down, and his eyes looking at nothing. He seemed not so much sorry, as scared and dazed like, by what had happened. My mistress managed all that was to be done about the funeral. It must have cost a sight of money--the coffin, in particular, being most beautiful. The dead lady's husband was away, as we heard, in foreign parts. But my mistress (being her aunt) settled it with her friends in the country (Cumberland, I think) that she should be buried there, in the same grave along with her mother. Everything was done handsomely, in respect of the funeral, I say again, and master went down to attend the burying in the country himself. He looked grand in his deep mourning, with his big solemn face, and his slow walk, and his broad hatband--that he did! In conclusion. I have to say, in answer to questions put to me-- (1) That neither I nor my fellow-servant ever saw my master give Lady Glyde any medicine himself. (2) That he was never, to my knowledge and belief, left alone in the room with Lady Glyde. (3) That I am not able to say what caused the sudden fright, which my mistress informed me had seized the lady on her first coming into the house. The cause was never explained, either to me or to my fellow-servant. The above statement has been read over in my presence. I have nothing to add to it, or to take away from it. I say, on my oath as a Christian woman, this is the truth. (Signed) HESTER PINHORN, Her + Mark. 2. THE NARRATIVE OF THE DOCTOR To the Registrar of the Sub-District in which the undermentioned death took place.--I hereby certify that I attended Lady Glyde, aged Twenty-One last Birthday; that I last saw her on Thursday the 25th July 1850; that she died on the same day at No. 5 Forest Road, St. John's Wood, and that the cause of her death was Aneurism. Duration of disease not known. (Signed) Alfred Goodricke. Prof. Title. M.R.C.S. Eng., L.S.A. Address, 12 Croydon Gardens St. John's Wood. 3. THE NARRATIVE OF JANE GOULD I was the person sent in by Mr. Goodricke to do what was right and needful by the remains of a lady who had died at the house named in the certificate which precedes this. I found the body in charge of the servant, Hester Pinhorn. I remained with it, and prepared it at the proper time for the grave. It was laid in the coffin in my presence, and I afterwards saw the coffin screwed down previous to its removal. When that had been done, and not before, I received what was due to me and left the house. I refer persons who may wish to investigate my character to Mr. Goodricke. He will bear witness that I can be trusted to tell the truth. (Signed) JANE GOULD 4. THE NARRATIVE OF THE TOMBSTONE Sacred to the Memory of Laura, Lady Glyde, wife of Sir Percival Glyde, Bart., of Blackwater Park, Hampshire, and daughter of the late Philip Fairlie, Esq., of Limmeridge House, in this parish. Born March 27th, 1829; married December 22nd, 1849; died July 25th, 1850. 5. THE NARRATIVE OF WALTER HARTRIGHT Early in the summer of 1850 I and my surviving companions left the wilds and forests of Central America for home. Arrived at the coast, we took ship there for England. The vessel was wrecked in the Gulf of Mexico--I was among the few saved from the sea. It was my third escape from peril of death. Death by disease, death by the Indians, death by drowning--all three had approached me; all three had passed me by. The survivors of the wreck were rescued by an American vessel bound for Liverpool. The ship reached her port on the thirteenth day of October 1850. We landed late in the afternoon, and I arrived in London the same night. These pages are not the record of my wanderings and my dangers away from home. The motives which led me from my country and my friends to a new world of adventure and peril are known. From that self-imposed exile I came back, as I had hoped, prayed, believed I should come back--a changed man. In the waters of a new life I had tempered my nature afresh. In the stern school of extremity and danger my will had learnt to be strong, my heart to be resolute, my mind to rely on itself. I had gone out to fly from my own future. I came back to face it, as a man should. To face it with that inevitable suppression of myself which I knew it would demand from me. I had parted with the worst bitterness of the past, but not with my heart's remembrance of the sorrow and the tenderness of that memorable time. I had not ceased to feel the one irreparable disappointment of my life--I had only learnt to bear it. Laura Fairlie was in all my thoughts when the ship bore me away, and I looked my last at England. Laura Fairlie was in all my thoughts when the ship brought me back, and the morning light showed the friendly shore in view. My pen traces the old letters as my heart goes back to the old love. I write of her as Laura Fairlie still. It is hard to think of her, it is hard to speak of her, by her husband's name. There are no more words of explanation to add on my appearance for the second time in these pages. This narrative, if I have the strength and the courage to write it, may now go on. My first anxieties and first hopes when the morning came centred in my mother and my sister. I felt the necessity of preparing them for the joy and surprise of my return, after an absence during which it had been impossible for them to receive any tidings of me for months past. Early in the morning I sent a letter to the Hampstead Cottage, and followed it myself in an hour's time. When the first meeting was over, when our quiet and composure of other days began gradually to return to us, I saw something in my mother's face which told me that a secret oppression lay heavy on her heart. There was more than love--there was sorrow in the anxious eyes that looked on me so tenderly--there was pity in the kind hand that slowly and fondly strengthened its hold on mine. We had no concealments from each other. She knew how the hope of my life had been wrecked--she knew why I had left her. It was on my lips to ask as composedly as I could if any letter had come for me from Miss Halcombe, if there was any news of her sister that I might hear. But when I looked in my mother's face I lost courage to put the question even in that guarded form. I could only say, doubtingly and restrainedly-- "You have something to tell me." My sister, who had been sitting opposite to us, rose suddenly without a word of explanation--rose and left the room. My mother moved closer to me on the sofa and put her arms round my neck. Those fond arms trembled--the tears flowed fast over the faithful loving face. "Walter!" she whispered, "my own darling! my heart is heavy for you. Oh, my son! my son! try to remember that I am still left!" My head sank on her bosom. She had said all in saying those words. * * * * * * * * * * It was the morning of the third day since my return--the morning of the sixteenth of October. I had remained with them at the cottage--I had tried hard not to embitter the happiness of my return to THEM as it was embittered to ME. I had done all man could to rise after the shock, and accept my life resignedly--to let my great sorrow come in tenderness to my heart, and not in despair. It was useless and hopeless. No tears soothed my aching eyes, no relief came to me from my sister's sympathy or my mother's love. On that third morning I opened my heart to them. At last the words passed my lips which I had longed to speak on the day when my mother told me of her death. "Let me go away alone for a little while," I said. "I shall bear it better when I have looked once more at the place where I first saw her--when I have knelt and prayed by the grave where they have laid her to rest." I departed on my journey--my journey to the grave of Laura Fairlie. It was a quiet autumn afternoon when I stopped at the solitary station, and set forth alone on foot by the well-remembered road. The waning sun was shining faintly through thin white clouds--the air was warm and still--the peacefulness of the lonely country was overshadowed and saddened by the influence of the falling year. I reached the moor--I stood again on the brow of the hill--I looked on along the path--and there were the familiar garden trees in the distance, the clear sweeping semicircle of the drive, the high white walls of Limmeridge House. The chances and changes, the wanderings and dangers of months and months past, all shrank and shrivelled to nothing in my mind. It was like yesterday since my feet had last trodden the fragrant heathy ground. I thought I should see her coming to meet me, with her little straw hat shading her face, her simple dress fluttering in the air, and her well-filled sketch-book ready in her hand. Oh death, thou hast thy sting! oh, grave, thou hast thy victory! I turned aside, and there below me in the glen was the lonesome grey church, the porch where I had waited for the coming of the woman in white, the hills encircling the quiet burial-ground, the brook bubbling cold over its stony bed. There was the marble cross, fair and white, at the head of the tomb--the tomb that now rose over mother and daughter alike. I approached the grave. I crossed once more the low stone stile, and bared my head as I touched the sacred ground. Sacred to gentleness and goodness, sacred to reverence and grief. I stopped before the pedestal from which the cross rose. On one side of it, on the side nearest to me, the newly-cut inscription met my eyes--the hard, clear, cruel black letters which told the story of her life and death. I tried to read them. I did read as far as the name. "Sacred to the Memory of Laura----" The kind blue eyes dim with tears--the fair head drooping wearily--the innocent parting words which implored me to leave her--oh, for a happier last memory of her than this; the memory I took away with me, the memory I bring back with me to her grave! A second time I tried to read the inscription. I saw at the end the date of her death, and above it---- Above it there were lines on the marble--there was a name among them which disturbed my thoughts of her. I went round to the other side of the grave, where there was nothing to read, nothing of earthly vileness to force its way between her spirit and mine. I knelt down by the tomb. I laid my hands, I laid my head on the broad white stone, and closed my weary eyes on the earth around, on the light above. I let her come back to me. Oh, my love! my love! my heart may speak to you NOW! It is yesterday again since we parted--yesterday, since your dear hand lay in mine--yesterday, since my eyes looked their last on you. My love! my love! * * * * * * * * * * Time had flowed on, and silence had fallen like thick night over its course. The first sound that came after the heavenly peace rustled faintly like a passing breath of air over the grass of the burial-ground. I heard it nearing me slowly, until it came changed to my ear--came like footsteps moving onward--then stopped. I looked up. The sunset was near at hand. The clouds had parted--the slanting light fell mellow over the hills. The last of the day was cold and clear and still in the quiet valley of the dead. Beyond me, in the burial-ground, standing together in the cold clearness of the lower light, I saw two women. They were looking towards the tomb, looking towards me. Two. They came a little on, and stopped again. Their veils were down, and hid their faces from me. When they stopped, one of them raised her veil. In the still evening light I saw the face of Marian Halcombe. Changed, changed as if years had passed over it! The eyes large and wild, and looking at me with a strange terror in them. The face worn and wasted piteously. Pain and fear and grief written on her as with a brand. I took one step towards her from the grave. She never moved--she never spoke. The veiled woman with her cried out faintly. I stopped. The springs of my life fell low, and the shuddering of an unutterable dread crept over me from head to foot. The woman with the veiled face moved away from her companion, and came towards me slowly. Left by herself, standing by herself, Marian Halcombe spoke. It was the voice that I remembered--the voice not changed, like the frightened eyes and the wasted face. "My dream! my dream!" I heard her say those words softly in the awful silence. She sank on her knees, and raised her clasped hands to heaven. "Father! strengthen him. Father! help him in his hour of need." The woman came on, slowly and silently came on. I looked at her--at her, and at none other, from that moment. The voice that was praying for me faltered and sank low--then rose on a sudden, and called affrightedly, called despairingly to me to come away. But the veiled woman had possession of me, body and soul. She stopped on one side of the grave. We stood face to face with the tombstone between us. She was close to the inscription on the side of the pedestal. Her gown touched the black letters. The voice came nearer, and rose and rose more passionately still. "Hide your face! don't look at her! Oh, for God's sake, spare him----" The woman lifted her veil. "Sacred to the Memory of Laura, Lady Glyde----" Laura, Lady Glyde, was standing by the inscription, and was looking at me over the grave. [The Second Epoch of the Story closes here.] THE THIRD EPOCH THE STORY CONTINUED BY WALTER HARTRIGHT. I I open a new page. I advance my narrative by one week. The history of the interval which I thus pass over must remain unrecorded. My heart turns faint, my mind sinks in darkness and confusion when I think of it. This must not be, if I who write am to guide, as I ought, you who read. This must not be, if the clue that leads through the windings of the story is to remain from end to end untangled in my hands. A life suddenly changed--its whole purpose created afresh, its hopes and fears, its struggles, its interests, and its sacrifices all turned at once and for ever into a new direction--this is the prospect which now opens before me, like the burst of view from a mountain's top. I left my narrative in the quiet shadow of Limmeridge church--I resume it, one week later, in the stir and turmoil of a London street. The street is in a populous and a poor neighbourhood. The ground floor of one of the houses in it is occupied by a small newsvendor's shop, and the first floor and the second are let as furnished lodgings of the humblest kind. I have taken those two floors in an assumed name. On the upper floor I live, with a room to work in, a room to sleep in. On the lower floor, under the same assumed name, two women live, who are described as my sisters. I get my bread by drawing and engraving on wood for the cheap periodicals. My sisters are supposed to help me by taking in a little needle-work. Our poor place of abode, our humble calling, our assumed relationship, and our assumed name, are all used alike as a means of hiding us in the house-forest of London. We are numbered no longer with the people whose lives are open and known. I am an obscure, unnoticed man, without patron or friend to help me. Marian Halcombe is nothing now but my eldest sister, who provides for our household wants by the toil of her own hands. We two, in the estimation of others, are at once the dupes and the agents of a daring imposture. We are supposed to be the accomplices of mad Anne Catherick, who claims the name, the place, and the living personality of dead Lady Glyde. That is our situation. That is the changed aspect in which we three must appear, henceforth, in this narrative, for many and many a page to come. In the eye of reason and of law, in the estimation of relatives and friends, according to every received formality of civilised society, "Laura, Lady Glyde," lay buried with her mother in Limmeridge churchyard. Torn in her own lifetime from the list of the living, the daughter of Philip Fairlie and the wife of Percival Glyde might still exist for her sister, might still exist for me, but to all the world besides she was dead. Dead to her uncle, who had renounced her; dead to the servants of the house, who had failed to recognise her; dead to the persons in authority, who had transmitted her fortune to her husband and her aunt; dead to my mother and my sister, who believed me to be the dupe of an adventuress and the victim of a fraud; socially, morally, legally--dead. And yet alive! Alive in poverty and in hiding. Alive, with the poor drawing-master to fight her battle, and to win the way back for her to her place in the world of living beings. Did no suspicion, excited by my own knowledge of Anne Catherick's resemblance to her, cross my mind, when her face was first revealed to me? Not the shadow of a suspicion, from the moment when she lifted her veil by the side of the inscription which recorded her death. Before the sun of that day had set, before the last glimpse of the home which was closed against her had passed from our view, the farewell words I spoke, when we parted at Limmeridge House, had been recalled by both of us--repeated by me, recognised by her. "If ever the time comes, when the devotion of my whole heart and soul and strength will give you a moment's happiness, or spare you a moment's sorrow, will you try to remember the poor drawing-master who has taught you?" She, who now remembered so little of the trouble and terror of a later time, remembered those words, and laid her poor head innocently and trustingly on the bosom of the man who had spoken them. In that moment, when she called me by my name, when she said, "They have tried to make me forget everything, Walter; but I remember Marian, and I remember YOU"--in that moment, I, who had long since given her my love, gave her my life, and thanked God that it was mine to bestow on her. Yes! the time had come. From thousands on thousands of miles away--through forest and wilderness, where companions stronger than I had fallen by my side, through peril of death thrice renewed, and thrice escaped, the Hand that leads men on the dark road to the future had led me to meet that time. Forlorn and disowned, sorely tried and sadly changed--her beauty faded, her mind clouded--robbed of her station in the world, of her place among living creatures--the devotion I had promised, the devotion of my whole heart and soul and strength, might be laid blamelessly now at those dear feet. In the right of her calamity, in the right of her friendlessness, she was mine at last! Mine to support, to protect, to cherish, to restore. Mine to love and honour as father and brother both. Mine to vindicate through all risks and all sacrifices--through the hopeless struggle against Rank and Power, through the long fight with armed deceit and fortified Success, through the waste of my reputation, through the loss of my friends, through the hazard of my life. II My position is defined--my motives are acknowledged. The story of Marian and the story of Laura must come next. I shall relate both narratives, not in the words (often interrupted, often inevitably confused) of the speakers themselves, but in the words of the brief, plain, studiously simple abstract which I committed to writing for my own guidance, and for the guidance of my legal adviser. So the tangled web will be most speedily and most intelligibly unrolled. The story of Marian begins where the narrative of the housekeeper at Blackwater Park left off. On Lady Glyde's departure from her husband's house, the fact of that departure, and the necessary statement of the circumstances under which it had taken place, were communicated to Miss Halcombe by the housekeeper. It was not till some days afterwards (how many days exactly, Mrs. Michelson, in the absence of any written memorandum on the subject, could not undertake to say) that a letter arrived from Madame Fosco announcing Lady Glyde's sudden death in Count Fosco's house. The letter avoided mentioning dates, and left it to Mrs. Michelson's discretion to break the news at once to Miss Halcombe, or to defer doing so until that lady's health should be more firmly established. Having consulted Mr. Dawson (who had been himself delayed, by ill health, in resuming his attendance at Blackwater Park), Mrs. Michelson, by the doctor's advice, and in the doctor's presence, communicated the news, either on the day when the letter was received, or on the day after. It is not necessary to dwell here upon the effect which the intelligence of Lady Glyde's sudden death produced on her sister. It is only useful to the present purpose to say that she was not able to travel for more than three weeks afterwards. At the end of that time she proceeded to London accompanied by the housekeeper. They parted there--Mrs. Michelson previously informing Miss Halcombe of her address, in case they might wish to communicate at a future period. On parting with the housekeeper Miss Halcombe went at once to the office of Messrs. Gilmore & Kyrle to consult with the latter gentleman in Mr. Gilmore's absence. She mentioned to Mr. Kyrle what she had thought it desirable to conceal from every one else (Mrs. Michelson included)--her suspicion of the circumstances under which Lady Glyde was said to have met her death. Mr. Kyrle, who had previously given friendly proof of his anxiety to serve Miss Halcombe, at once undertook to make such inquiries as the delicate and dangerous nature of the investigation proposed to him would permit. To exhaust this part of the subject before going farther, it may be mentioned that Count Fosco offered every facility to Mr. Kyrle, on that gentleman's stating that he was sent by Miss Halcombe to collect such particulars as had not yet reached her of Lady Glyde's decease. Mr. Kyrle was placed in communication with the medical man, Mr. Goodricke, and with the two servants. In the absence of any means of ascertaining the exact date of Lady Glyde's departure from Blackwater Park, the result of the doctor's and the servants' evidence, and of the volunteered statements of Count Fosco and his wife, was conclusive to the mind of Mr. Kyrle. He could only assume that the intensity of Miss Halcombe's suffering, under the loss of her sister, had misled her judgment in a most deplorable manner, and he wrote her word that the shocking suspicion to which she had alluded in his presence was, in his opinion, destitute of the smallest fragment of foundation in truth. Thus the investigation by Mr. Gilmore's partner began and ended. Meanwhile, Miss Halcombe had returned to Limmeridge House, and had there collected all the additional information which she was able to obtain. Mr. Fairlie had received his first intimation of his niece's death from his sister, Madame Fosco, this letter also not containing any exact reference to dates. He had sanctioned his sister's proposal that the deceased lady should be laid in her mother's grave in Limmeridge churchyard. Count Fosco had accompanied the remains to Cumberland, and had attended the funeral at Limmeridge, which took place on the 30th of July. It was followed, as a mark of respect, by all the inhabitants of the village and the neighbourhood. On the next day the inscription (originally drawn out, it was said, by the aunt of the deceased lady, and submitted for approval to her brother, Mr. Fairlie) was engraved on one side of the monument over the tomb. On the day of the funeral, and for one day after it, Count Fosco had been received as a guest at Limmeridge House, but no interview had taken place between Mr. Fairlie and himself, by the former gentleman's desire. They had communicated by writing, and through this medium Count Fosco had made Mr. Fairlie acquainted with the details of his niece's last illness and death. The letter presenting this information added no new facts to the facts already known, but one very remarkable paragraph was contained in the postscript. It referred to Anne Catherick. The substance of the paragraph in question was as follows-- It first informed Mr. Fairlie that Anne Catherick (of whom he might hear full particulars from Miss Halcombe when she reached Limmeridge) had been traced and recovered in the neighbourhood of Blackwater Park, and had been for the second time placed under the charge of the medical man from whose custody she had once escaped. This was the first part of the postscript. The second part warned Mr. Fairlie that Anne Catherick's mental malady had been aggravated by her long freedom from control, and that the insane hatred and distrust of Sir Percival Glyde, which had been one of her most marked delusions in former times, still existed under a newly-acquired form. The unfortunate woman's last idea in connection with Sir Percival was the idea of annoying and distressing him, and of elevating herself, as she supposed, in the estimation of the patients and nurses, by assuming the character of his deceased wife, the scheme of this personation having evidently occurred to her after a stolen interview which she had succeeded in obtaining with Lady Glyde, and at which she had observed the extraordinary accidental likeness between the deceased lady and herself. It was to the last degree improbable that she would succeed a second time in escaping from the Asylum, but it was just possible she might find some means of annoying the late Lady Glyde's relatives with letters, and in that case Mr. Fairlie was warned beforehand how to receive them. The postscript, expressed in these terms, was shown to Miss Halcombe when she arrived at Limmeridge. There were also placed in her possession the clothes Lady Glyde had worn, and the other effects she had brought with her to her aunt's house. They had been carefully collected and sent to Cumberland by Madame Fosco. Such was the posture of affairs when Miss Halcombe reached Limmeridge in the early part of September. Shortly afterwards she was confined to her room by a relapse, her weakened physical energies giving way under the severe mental affliction from which she was now suffering. On getting stronger again, in a month's time, her suspicion of the circumstances described as attending her sister's death still remained unshaken. She had heard nothing in the interim of Sir Percival Glyde, but letters had reached her from Madame Fosco, making the most affectionate inquiries on the part of her husband and herself. Instead of answering these letters, Miss Halcombe caused the house in St. John's Wood, and the proceedings of its inmates, to be privately watched. Nothing doubtful was discovered. The same result attended the next investigations, which were secretly instituted on the subject of Mrs. Rubelle. She had arrived in London about six months before with her husband. They had come from Lyons, and they had taken a house in the neighbourhood of Leicester Square, to be fitted up as a boarding-house for foreigners, who were expected to visit England in large numbers to see the Exhibition of 1851. Nothing was known against husband or wife in the neighbourhood. They were quiet people, and they had paid their way honestly up to the present time. The final inquiries related to Sir Percival Glyde. He was settled in Paris, and living there quietly in a small circle of English and French friends. Foiled at all points, but still not able to rest, Miss Halcombe next determined to visit the Asylum in which she then supposed Anne Catherick to be for the second time confined. She had felt a strong curiosity about the woman in former days, and she was now doubly interested--first, in ascertaining whether the report of Anne Catherick's attempted personation of Lady Glyde was true, and secondly (if it proved to be true), in discovering for herself what the poor creature's real motives were for attempting the deceit. Although Count Fosco's letter to Mr. Fairlie did not mention the address of the Asylum, that important omission cast no difficulties in Miss Halcombe's way. When Mr. Hartright had met Anne Catherick at Limmeridge, she had informed him of the locality in which the house was situated, and Miss Halcombe had noted down the direction in her diary, with all the other particulars of the interview exactly as she heard them from Mr. Hartright's own lips. Accordingly she looked back at the entry and extracted the address--furnished herself with the Count's letter to Mr. Fairlie as a species of credential which might be useful to her, and started by herself for the Asylum on the eleventh of October. She passed the night of the eleventh in London. It had been her intention to sleep at the house inhabited by Lady Glyde's old governess, but Mrs. Vesey's agitation at the sight of her lost pupil's nearest and dearest friend was so distressing that Miss Halcombe considerately refrained from remaining in her presence, and removed to a respectable boarding-house in the neighbourhood, recommended by Mrs. Vesey's married sister. The next day she proceeded to the Asylum, which was situated not far from London on the northern side of the metropolis. She was immediately admitted to see the proprietor. At first he appeared to be decidedly unwilling to let her communicate with his patient. But on her showing him the postscript to Count Fosco's letter--on her reminding him that she was the "Miss Halcombe" there referred to--that she was a near relative of the deceased Lady Glyde--and that she was therefore naturally interested, for family reasons, in observing for herself the extent of Anne Catherick's delusion in relation to her late sister--the tone and manner of the owner of the Asylum altered, and he withdrew his objections. He probably felt that a continued refusal, under these circumstances, would not only be an act of discourtesy in itself, but would also imply that the proceedings in his establishment were not of a nature to bear investigation by respectable strangers. Miss Halcombe's own impression was that the owner of the Asylum had not been received into the confidence of Sir Percival and the Count. His consenting at all to let her visit his patient seemed to afford one proof of this, and his readiness in making admissions which could scarcely have escaped the lips of an accomplice, certainly appeared to furnish another. For example, in the course of the introductory conversation which took place, he informed Miss Halcombe that Anne Catherick had been brought back to him with the necessary order and certificates by Count Fosco on the twenty-seventh of July--the Count also producing a letter of explanations and instructions signed by Sir Percival Glyde. On receiving his inmate again, the proprietor of the Asylum acknowledged that he had observed some curious personal changes in her. Such changes no doubt were not without precedent in his experience of persons mentally afflicted. Insane people were often at one time, outwardly as well as inwardly, unlike what they were at another--the change from better to worse, or from worse to better, in the madness having a necessary tendency to produce alterations of appearance externally. He allowed for these, and he allowed also for the modification in the form of Anne Catherick's delusion, which was reflected no doubt in her manner and expression. But he was still perplexed at times by certain differences between his patient before she had escaped and his patient since she had been brought back. Those differences were too minute to be described. He could not say of course that she was absolutely altered in height or shape or complexion, or in the colour of her hair and eyes, or in the general form of her face--the change was something that he felt more than something that he saw. In short, the case had been a puzzle from the first, and one more perplexity was added to it now. It cannot be said that this conversation led to the result of even partially preparing Miss Halcombe's mind for what was to come. But it produced, nevertheless, a very serious effect upon her. She was so completely unnerved by it, that some little time elapsed before she could summon composure enough to follow the proprietor of the Asylum to that part of the house in which the inmates were confined. On inquiry, it turned out that the supposed Anne Catherick was then taking exercise in the grounds attached to the establishment. One of the nurses volunteered to conduct Miss Halcombe to the place, the proprietor of the Asylum remaining in the house for a few minutes to attend to a case which required his services, and then engaging to join his visitor in the grounds. The nurse led Miss Halcombe to a distant part of the property, which was prettily laid out, and after looking about her a little, turned into a turf walk, shaded by a shrubbery on either side. About half-way down this walk two women were slowly approaching. The nurse pointed to them and said, "There is Anne Catherick, ma'am, with the attendant who waits on her. The attendant will answer any questions you wish to put." With those words the nurse left her to return to the duties of the house. Miss Halcombe advanced on her side, and the women advanced on theirs. When they were within a dozen paces of each other, one of the women stopped for an instant, looked eagerly at the strange lady, shook off the nurse's grasp on her, and the next moment rushed into Miss Halcombe's arms. In that moment Miss Halcombe recognised her sister--recognised the dead-alive. Fortunately for the success of the measures taken subsequently, no one was present at that moment but the nurse. She was a young woman, and she was so startled that she was at first quite incapable of interfering. When she was able to do so her whole services were required by Miss Halcombe, who had for the moment sunk altogether in the effort to keep her own senses under the shock of the discovery. After waiting a few minutes in the fresh air and the cool shade, her natural energy and courage helped her a little, and she became sufficiently mistress of herself to feel the necessity of recalling her presence of mind for her unfortunate sister's sake. She obtained permission to speak alone with the patient, on condition that they both remained well within the nurse's view. There was no time for questions--there was only time for Miss Halcombe to impress on the unhappy lady the necessity of controlling herself, and to assure her of immediate help and rescue if she did so. The prospect of escaping from the Asylum by obedience to her sister's directions was sufficient to quiet Lady Glyde, and to make her understand what was required of her. Miss Halcombe next returned to the nurse, placed all the gold she then had in her pocket (three sovereigns) in the nurse's hands, and asked when and where she could speak to her alone. The woman was at first surprised and distrustful. But on Miss Halcombe's declaring that she only wanted to put some questions which she was too much agitated to ask at that moment, and that she had no intention of misleading the nurse into any dereliction of duty, the woman took the money, and proposed three o'clock on the next day as the time for the interview. She might then slip out for half an hour, after the patients had dined, and she would meet the lady in a retired place, outside the high north wall which screened the grounds of the house. Miss Halcombe had only time to assent, and to whisper to her sister that she should hear from her on the next day, when the proprietor of the Asylum joined them. He noticed his visitor's agitation, which Miss Halcombe accounted for by saying that her interview with Anne Catherick had a little startled her at first. She took her leave as soon after as possible--that is to say, as soon as she could summon courage to force herself from the presence of her unfortunate sister. A very little reflection, when the capacity to reflect returned, convinced her that any attempt to identify Lady Glyde and to rescue her by legal means, would, even if successful, involve a delay that might be fatal to her sister's intellects, which were shaken already by the horror of the situation to which she had been consigned. By the time Miss Halcombe had got back to London, she had determined to effect Lady Glyde's escape privately, by means of the nurse. She went at once to her stockbroker, and sold out of the funds all the little property she possessed, amounting to rather less than seven hundred pounds. Determined, if necessary, to pay the price of her sister's liberty with every farthing she had in the world, she repaired the next day, having the whole sum about her in bank-notes, to her appointment outside the Asylum wall. The nurse was there. Miss Halcombe approached the subject cautiously by many preliminary questions. She discovered, among other particulars, that the nurse who had in former times attended on the true Anne Catherick had been held responsible (although she was not to blame for it) for the patient's escape, and had lost her place in consequence. The same penalty, it was added, would attach to the person then speaking to her, if the supposed Anne Catherick was missing a second time; and, moreover, the nurse in this case had an especial interest in keeping her place. She was engaged to be married, and she and her future husband were waiting till they could save, together, between two and three hundred pounds to start in business. The nurse's wages were good, and she might succeed, by strict economy, in contributing her small share towards the sum required in two years' time. On this hint Miss Halcombe spoke. She declared that the supposed Anne Catherick was nearly related to her, that she had been placed in the Asylum under a fatal mistake, and that the nurse would be doing a good and a Christian action in being the means of restoring them to one another. Before there was time to start a single objection, Miss Halcombe took four bank-notes of a hundred pounds each from her pocket-book, and offered them to the woman, as a compensation for the risk she was to run, and for the loss of her place. The nurse hesitated, through sheer incredulity and surprise. Miss Halcombe pressed the point on her firmly. "You will be doing a good action," she repeated; "you will be helping the most injured and unhappy woman alive. There is your marriage portion for a reward. Bring her safely to me here, and I will put these four bank-notes into your hand before I claim her." "Will you give me a letter saying those words, which I can show to my sweetheart when he asks how I got the money?" inquired the woman. "I will bring the letter with me, ready written and signed," answered Miss Halcombe. "Then I'll risk it," said the nurse. "When?" "To-morrow." It was hastily agreed between them that Miss Halcombe should return early the next morning and wait out of sight among the trees--always, however, keeping near the quiet spot of ground under the north wall. The nurse could fix no time for her appearance, caution requiring that she should wait and be guided by circumstances. On that understanding they separated. Miss Halcombe was at her place, with the promised letter and the promised bank-notes, before ten the next morning. She waited more than an hour and a half. At the end of that time the nurse came quickly round the corner of the wall holding Lady Glyde by the arm. The moment they met Miss Halcombe put the bank-notes and the letter into her hand, and the sisters were united again. The nurse had dressed Lady Glyde, with excellent forethought, in a bonnet, veil, and shawl of her own. Miss Halcombe only detained her to suggest a means of turning the pursuit in a false direction, when the escape was discovered at the Asylum. She was to go back to the house, to mention in the hearing of the other nurses that Anne Catherick had been inquiring latterly about the distance from London to Hampshire, to wait till the last moment, before discovery was inevitable, and then to give the alarm that Anne was missing. The supposed inquiries about Hampshire, when communicated to the owner of the Asylum, would lead him to imagine that his patient had returned to Blackwater Park, under the influence of the delusion which made her persist in asserting herself to be Lady Glyde, and the first pursuit would, in all probability, be turned in that direction. The nurse consented to follow these suggestions, the more readily as they offered her the means of securing herself against any worse consequences than the loss of her place, by remaining in the Asylum, and so maintaining the appearance of innocence, at least. She at once returned to the house, and Miss Halcombe lost no time in taking her sister back with her to London. They caught the afternoon train to Carlisle the same afternoon, and arrived at Limmeridge, without accident or difficulty of any kind, that night. During the latter part of their journey they were alone in the carriage, and Miss Halcombe was able to collect such remembrances of the past as her sister's confused and weakened memory was able to recall. The terrible story of the conspiracy so obtained was presented in fragments, sadly incoherent in themselves, and widely detached from each other. Imperfect as the revelation was, it must nevertheless be recorded here before this explanatory narrative closes with the events of the next day at Limmeridge House. Lady Glyde's recollection of the events which followed her departure from Blackwater Park began with her arrival at the London terminus of the South Western Railway. She had omitted to make a memorandum beforehand of the day on which she took the journey. All hope of fixing that important date by any evidence of hers, or of Mrs. Michelson's, must be given up for lost. On the arrival of the train at the platform Lady Glyde found Count Fosco waiting for her. He was at the carriage door as soon as the porter could open it. The train was unusually crowded, and there was great confusion in getting the luggage. Some person whom Count Fosco brought with him procured the luggage which belonged to Lady Glyde. It was marked with her name. She drove away alone with the Count in a vehicle which she did not particularly notice at the time. Her first question, on leaving the terminus, referred to Miss Halcombe. The Count informed her that Miss Halcombe had not yet gone to Cumberland, after-consideration having caused him to doubt the prudence of her taking so long a journey without some days' previous rest. Lady Glyde next inquired whether her sister was then staying in the Count's house. Her recollection of the answer was confused, her only distinct impression in relation to it being that the Count declared he was then taking her to see Miss Halcombe. Lady Glyde's experience of London was so limited that she could not tell, at the time, through what streets they were driving. But they never left the streets, and they never passed any gardens or trees. When the carriage stopped, it stopped in a small street behind a square--a square in which there were shops, and public buildings, and many people. From these recollections (of which Lady Glyde was certain) it seems quite clear that Count Fosco did not take her to his own residence in the suburb of St. John's Wood. They entered the house, and went upstairs to a back room, either on the first or second floor. The luggage was carefully brought in. A female servant opened the door, and a man with a dark beard, apparently a foreigner, met them in the hall, and with great politeness showed them the way upstairs. In answer to Lady Glyde's inquiries, the Count assured her that Miss Halcombe was in the house, and that she should be immediately informed of her sister's arrival. He and the foreigner then went away and left her by herself in the room. It was poorly furnished as a sitting-room, and it looked out on the backs of houses. The place was remarkably quiet--no footsteps went up or down the stairs--she only heard in the room beneath her a dull, rumbling sound of men's voices talking. Before she had been long left alone the Count returned, to explain that Miss Halcombe was then taking rest, and could not be disturbed for a little while. He was accompanied into the room by a gentleman (an Englishman), whom he begged to present as a friend of his. After this singular introduction--in the course of which no names, to the best of Lady Glyde's recollection, had been mentioned--she was left alone with the stranger. He was perfectly civil, but he startled and confused her by some odd questions about herself, and by looking at her, while he asked them, in a strange manner. After remaining a short time he went out, and a minute or two afterwards a second stranger--also an Englishman--came in. This person introduced himself as another friend of Count Fosco's, and he, in his turn, looked at her very oddly, and asked some curious questions--never, as well as she could remember, addressing her by name, and going out again, after a little while, like the first man. By this time she was so frightened about herself, and so uneasy about her sister, that she had thoughts of venturing downstairs again, and claiming the protection and assistance of the only woman she had seen in the house--the servant who answered the door. Just as she had risen from her chair, the Count came back into the room. The moment he appeared she asked anxiously how long the meeting between her sister and herself was to be still delayed. At first he returned an evasive answer, but on being pressed, he acknowledged, with great apparent reluctance, that Miss Halcombe was by no means so well as he had hitherto represented her to be. His tone and manner, in making this reply, so alarmed Lady Glyde, or rather so painfully increased the uneasiness which she had felt in the company of the two strangers, that a sudden faintness overcame her, and she was obliged to ask for a glass of water. The Count called from the door for water, and for a bottle of smelling-salts. Both were brought in by the foreign-looking man with the beard. The water, when Lady Glyde attempted to drink it, had so strange a taste that it increased her faintness, and she hastily took the bottle of salts from Count Fosco, and smelt at it. Her head became giddy on the instant. The Count caught the bottle as it dropped out of her hand, and the last impression of which she was conscious was that he held it to her nostrils again. From this point her recollections were found to be confused, fragmentary, and difficult to reconcile with any reasonable probability. Her own impression was that she recovered her senses later in the evening, that she then left the house, that she went (as she had previously arranged to go, at Blackwater Park) to Mrs. Vesey's--that she drank tea there, and that she passed the night under Mrs. Vesey's roof. She was totally unable to say how, or when, or in what company she left the house to which Count Fosco had brought her. But she persisted in asserting that she had been to Mrs. Vesey's, and still more extraordinary, that she had been helped to undress and get to bed by Mrs. Rubelle! She could not remember what the conversation was at Mrs. Vesey's or whom she saw there besides that lady, or why Mrs. Rubelle should have been present in the house to help her. Her recollection of what happened to her the next morning was still more vague and unreliable. She had some dim idea of driving out (at what hour she could not say) with Count Fosco, and with Mrs. Rubelle again for a female attendant. But when, and why, she left Mrs. Vesey she could not tell; neither did she know what direction the carriage drove in, or where it set her down, or whether the Count and Mrs. Rubelle did or did not remain with her all the time she was out. At this point in her sad story there was a total blank. She had no impressions of the faintest kind to communicate--no idea whether one day, or more than one day, had passed--until she came to herself suddenly in a strange place, surrounded by women who were all unknown to her. This was the Asylum. Here she first heard herself called by Anne Catherick's name, and here, as a last remarkable circumstance in the story of the conspiracy, her own eyes informed her that she had Anne Catherick's clothes on. The nurse, on the first night in the Asylum, had shown her the marks on each article of her underclothing as it was taken off, and had said, not at all irritably or unkindly, "Look at your own name on your own clothes, and don't worry us all any more about being Lady Glyde. She's dead and buried, and you're alive and hearty. Do look at your clothes now! There it is, in good marking ink, and there you will find it on all your old things, which we have kept in the house--Anne Catherick, as plain as print!" And there it was, when Miss Halcombe examined the linen her sister wore, on the night of their arrival at Limmeridge House. These were the only recollections--all of them uncertain, and some of them contradictory--which could be extracted from Lady Glyde by careful questioning on the journey to Cumberland. Miss Halcombe abstained from pressing her with any inquiries relating to events in the Asylum--her mind being but too evidently unfit to bear the trial of reverting to them. It was known, by the voluntary admission of the owner of the mad-house, that she was received there on the twenty-seventh of July. From that date until the fifteenth of October (the day of her rescue) she had been under restraint, her identity with Anne Catherick systematically asserted, and her sanity, from first to last, practically denied. Faculties less delicately balanced, constitutions less tenderly organised, must have suffered under such an ordeal as this. No man could have gone through it and come out of it unchanged. Arriving at Limmeridge late on the evening of the fifteenth, Miss Halcombe wisely resolved not to attempt the assertion of Lady Glyde's identity until the next day. The first thing in the morning she went to Mr. Fairlie's room, and using all possible cautions and preparations beforehand, at last told him in so many words what had happened. As soon as his first astonishment and alarm had subsided, he angrily declared that Miss Halcombe had allowed herself to be duped by Anne Catherick. He referred her to Count Fosco's letter, and to what she had herself told him of the personal resemblance between Anne and his deceased niece, and he positively declined to admit to his presence, even for one minute only, a madwoman, whom it was an insult and an outrage to have brought into his house at all. Miss Halcombe left the room--waited till the first heat of her indignation had passed away--decided on reflection that Mr. Fairlie should see his niece in the interests of common humanity before he closed his doors on her as a stranger--and thereupon, without a word of previous warning, took Lady Glyde with her to his room. The servant was posted at the door to prevent their entrance, but Miss Halcombe insisted on passing him, and made her way into Mr. Fairlie's presence, leading her sister by the hand. The scene that followed, though it only lasted for a few minutes, was too painful to be described--Miss Halcombe herself shrank from referring to it. Let it be enough to say that Mr. Fairlie declared, in the most positive terms, that he did not recognise the woman who had been brought into his room--that he saw nothing in her face and manner to make him doubt for a moment that his niece lay buried in Limmeridge churchyard, and that he would call on the law to protect him if before the day was over she was not removed from the house. Taking the very worst view of Mr. Fairlie's selfishness, indolence, and habitual want of feeling, it was manifestly impossible to suppose that he was capable of such infamy as secretly recognising and openly disowning his brother's child. Miss Halcombe humanely and sensibly allowed all due force to the influence of prejudice and alarm in preventing him from fairly exercising his perceptions, and accounted for what had happened in that way. But when she next put the servants to the test, and found that they too were, in every case, uncertain, to say the least of it, whether the lady presented to them was their young mistress or Anne Catherick, of whose resemblance to her they had all heard, the sad conclusion was inevitable that the change produced in Lady Glyde's face and manner by her imprisonment in the Asylum was far more serious than Miss Halcombe had at first supposed. The vile deception which had asserted her death defied exposure even in the house where she was born, and among the people with whom she had lived. In a less critical situation the effort need not have been given up as hopeless even yet. For example, the maid, Fanny, who happened to be then absent from Limmeridge, was expected back in two days, and there would be a chance of gaining her recognition to start with, seeing that she had been in much more constant communication with her mistress, and had been much more heartily attached to her than the other servants. Again, Lady Glyde might have been privately kept in the house or in the village to wait until her health was a little recovered and her mind was a little steadied again. When her memory could be once more trusted to serve her, she would naturally refer to persons and events in the past with a certainty and a familiarity which no impostor could simulate, and so the fact of her identity, which her own appearance had failed to establish, might subsequently be proved, with time to help her, by the surer test of her own words. But the circumstances under which she had regained her freedom rendered all recourse to such means as these simply impracticable. The pursuit from the Asylum, diverted to Hampshire for the time only, would infallibly next take the direction of Cumberland. The persons appointed to seek the fugitive might arrive at Limmeridge House at a few hours' notice, and in Mr. Fairlie's present temper of mind they might count on the immediate exertion of his local influence and authority to assist them. The commonest consideration for Lady Glyde's safety forced on Miss Halcombe the necessity of resigning the struggle to do her justice, and of removing her at once from the place of all others that was now most dangerous to her--the neighbourhood of her own home. An immediate return to London was the first and wisest measure of security which suggested itself. In the great city all traces of them might be most speedily and most surely effaced. There were no preparations to make--no farewell words of kindness to exchange with any one. On the afternoon of that memorable day of the sixteenth Miss Halcombe roused her sister to a last exertion of courage, and without a living soul to wish them well at parting, the two took their way into the world alone, and turned their backs for ever on Limmeridge House. They had passed the hill above the churchyard, when Lady Glyde insisted on turning back to look her last at her mother's grave. Miss Halcombe tried to shake her resolution, but, in this one instance, tried in vain. She was immovable. Her dim eyes lit with a sudden fire, and flashed through the veil that hung over them--her wasted fingers strengthened moment by moment round the friendly arm by which they had held so listlessly till this time. I believe in my soul that the hand of God was pointing their way back to them, and that the most innocent and the most afflicted of His creatures was chosen in that dread moment to see it. They retraced their steps to the burial-ground, and by that act sealed the future of our three lives. III This was the story of the past--the story so far as we knew it then. Two obvious conclusions presented themselves to my mind after hearing it. In the first place, I saw darkly what the nature of the conspiracy had been, how chances had been watched, and how circumstances had been handled to ensure impunity to a daring and an intricate crime. While all details were still a mystery to me, the vile manner in which the personal resemblance between the woman in white and Lady Glyde had been turned to account was clear beyond a doubt. It was plain that Anne Catherick had been introduced into Count Fosco's house as Lady Glyde--it was plain that Lady Glyde had taken the dead woman's place in the Asylum--the substitution having been so managed as to make innocent people (the doctor and the two servants certainly, and the owner of the mad-house in all probability) accomplices in the crime. The second conclusion came as the necessary consequence of the first. We three had no mercy to expect from Count Fosco and Sir Percival Glyde. The success of the conspiracy had brought with it a clear gain to those two men of thirty thousand pounds--twenty thousand to one, ten thousand to the other through his wife. They had that interest, as well as other interests, in ensuring their impunity from exposure, and they would leave no stone unturned, no sacrifice unattempted, no treachery untried, to discover the place in which their victim was concealed, and to part her from the only friends she had in the world--Marian Halcombe and myself. The sense of this serious peril--a peril which every day and every hour might bring nearer and nearer to us--was the one influence that guided me in fixing the place of our retreat. I chose it in the far east of London, where there were fewest idle people to lounge and look about them in the streets. I chose it in a poor and a populous neighbourhood--because the harder the struggle for existence among the men and women about us, the less the risk of their having the time or taking the pains to notice chance strangers who came among them. These were the great advantages I looked to, but our locality was a gain to us also in another and a hardly less important respect. We could live cheaply by the daily work of my hands, and could save every farthing we possessed to forward the purpose, the righteous purpose, of redressing an infamous wrong--which, from first to last, I now kept steadily in view. In a week's time Marian Halcombe and I had settled how the course of our new lives should be directed. There were no other lodgers in the house, and we had the means of going in and out without passing through the shop. I arranged, for the present at least, that neither Marian nor Laura should stir outside the door without my being with them, and that in my absence from home they should let no one into their rooms on any pretence whatever. This rule established, I went to a friend whom I had known in former days--a wood engraver in large practice--to seek for employment, telling him, at the same time, that I had reasons for wishing to remain unknown. He at once concluded that I was in debt, expressed his regret in the usual forms, and then promised to do what he could to assist me. I left his false impression undisturbed, and accepted the work he had to give. He knew that he could trust my experience and my industry. I had what he wanted, steadiness and facility, and though my earnings were but small, they sufficed for our necessities. As soon as we could feel certain of this, Marian Halcombe and I put together what we possessed. She had between two and three hundred pounds left of her own property, and I had nearly as much remaining from the purchase-money obtained by the sale of my drawing-master's practice before I left England. Together we made up between us more than four hundred pounds. I deposited this little fortune in a bank, to be kept for the expense of those secret inquiries and investigations which I was determined to set on foot, and to carry on by myself if I could find no one to help me. We calculated our weekly expenditure to the last farthing, and we never touched our little fund except in Laura's interests and for Laura's sake. The house-work, which, if we had dared trust a stranger near us, would have been done by a servant, was taken on the first day, taken as her own right, by Marian Halcombe. "What a woman's hands ARE fit for," she said, "early and late, these hands of mine shall do." They trembled as she held them out. The wasted arms told their sad story of the past, as she turned up the sleeves of the poor plain dress that she wore for safety's sake; but the unquenchable spirit of the woman burnt bright in her even yet. I saw the big tears rise thick in her eyes, and fall slowly over her cheeks as she looked at me. She dashed them away with a touch of her old energy, and smiled with a faint reflection of her old good spirits. "Don't doubt my courage, Walter," she pleaded, "it's my weakness that cries, not ME. The house-work shall conquer it if I can't." And she kept her word--the victory was won when we met in the evening, and she sat down to rest. Her large steady black eyes looked at me with a flash of their bright firmness of bygone days. "I am not quite broken down yet," she said. "I am worth trusting with my share of the work." Before I could answer, she added in a whisper, "And worth trusting with my share in the risk and the danger too. Remember that, if the time comes!" I did remember it when the time came. As early as the end of October the daily course of our lives had assumed its settled direction, and we three were as completely isolated in our place of concealment as if the house we lived in had been a desert island, and the great network of streets and the thousands of our fellow-creatures all round us the waters of an illimitable sea. I could now reckon on some leisure time for considering what my future plan of action should be, and how I might arm myself most securely at the outset for the coming struggle with Sir Percival and the Count. I gave up all hope of appealing to my recognition of Laura, or to Marian's recognition of her, in proof of her identity. If we had loved her less dearly, if the instinct implanted in us by that love had not been far more certain than any exercise of reasoning, far keener than any process of observation, even we might have hesitated on first seeing her. The outward changes wrought by the suffering and the terror of the past had fearfully, almost hopelessly, strengthened the fatal resemblance between Anne Catherick and herself. In my narrative of events at the time of my residence in Limmeridge House, I have recorded, from my own observation of the two, how the likeness, striking as it was when viewed generally, failed in many important points of similarity when tested in detail. In those former days, if they had both been seen together side by side, no person could for a moment have mistaken them one for the other--as has happened often in the instances of twins. I could not say this now. The sorrow and suffering which I had once blamed myself for associating even by a passing thought with the future of Laura Fairlie, HAD set their profaning marks on the youth and beauty of her face; and the fatal resemblance which I had once seen and shuddered at seeing, in idea only, was now a real and living resemblance which asserted itself before my own eyes. Strangers, acquaintances, friends even who could not look at her as we looked, if she had been shown to them in the first days of her rescue from the Asylum, might have doubted if she were the Laura Fairlie they had once seen, and doubted without blame. The one remaining chance, which I had at first thought might be trusted to serve us--the chance of appealing to her recollection of persons and events with which no impostor could be familiar, was proved, by the sad test of our later experience, to be hopeless. Every little caution that Marian and I practised towards her--every little remedy we tried, to strengthen and steady slowly the weakened, shaken faculties, was a fresh protest in itself against the risk of turning her mind back on the troubled and the terrible past. The only events of former days which we ventured on encouraging her to recall were the little trivial domestic events of that happy time at Limmeridge, when I first went there and taught her to draw. The day when I roused those remembrances by showing her the sketch of the summer-house which she had given me on the morning of our farewell, and which had never been separated from me since, was the birthday of our first hope. Tenderly and gradually, the memory of the old walks and drives dawned upon her, and the poor weary pining eyes looked at Marian and at me with a new interest, with a faltering thoughtfulness in them, which from that moment we cherished and kept alive. I bought her a little box of colours, and a sketch-book like the old sketch-book which I had seen in her hands on the morning that we first met. Once again--oh me, once again!--at spare hours saved from my work, in the dull London light, in the poor London room, I sat by her side to guide the faltering touch, to help the feeble hand. Day by day I raised and raised the new interest till its place in the blank of her existence was at last assured--till she could think of her drawing and talk of it, and patiently practise it by herself, with some faint reflection of the innocent pleasure in my encouragement, the growing enjoyment in her own progress, which belonged to the lost life and the lost happiness of past days. We helped her mind slowly by this simple means, we took her out between us to walk on fine days, in a quiet old City square near at hand, where there was nothing to confuse or alarm her--we spared a few pounds from the fund at the banker's to get her wine, and the delicate strengthening food that she required--we amused her in the evenings with children's games at cards, with scrap-books full of prints which I borrowed from the engraver who employed me--by these, and other trifling attentions like them, we composed her and steadied her, and hoped all things, as cheerfully as we could from time and care, and love that never neglected and never despaired of her. But to take her mercilessly from seclusion and repose--to confront her with strangers, or with acquaintances who were little better than strangers--to rouse the painful impressions of her past life which we had so carefully hushed to rest--this, even in her own interests, we dared not do. Whatever sacrifices it cost, whatever long, weary, heartbreaking delays it involved, the wrong that had been inflicted on her, if mortal means could grapple it, must be redressed without her knowledge and without her help. This resolution settled, it was next necessary to decide how the first risk should be ventured, and what the first proceedings should be. After consulting with Marian, I resolved to begin by gathering together as many facts as could be collected--then to ask the advice of Mr. Kyrle (whom we knew we could trust), and to ascertain from him, in the first instance, if the legal remedy lay fairly within our reach. I owed it to Laura's interests not to stake her whole future on my own unaided exertions, so long as there was the faintest prospect of strengthening our position by obtaining reliable assistance of any kind. The first source of information to which I applied was the journal kept at Blackwater Park by Marian Halcombe. There were passages in this diary relating to myself which she thought it best that I should not see. Accordingly, she read to me from the manuscript, and I took the notes I wanted as she went on. We could only find time to pursue this occupation by sitting up late at night. Three nights were devoted to the purpose, and were enough to put me in possession of all that Marian could tell. My next proceeding was to gain as much additional evidence as I could procure from other people without exciting suspicion. I went myself to Mrs. Vesey to ascertain if Laura's impression of having slept there was correct or not. In this case, from consideration for Mrs. Vesey's age and infirmity, and in all subsequent cases of the same kind from considerations of caution, I kept our real position a secret, and was always careful to speak of Laura as "the late Lady Glyde." Mrs. Vesey's answer to my inquiries only confirmed the apprehensions which I had previously felt. Laura had certainly written to say she would pass the night under the roof of her old friend--but she had never been near the house. Her mind in this instance, and, as I feared, in other instances besides, confusedly presented to her something which she had only intended to do in the false light of something which she had really done. The unconscious contradiction of herself was easy to account for in this way--but it was likely to lead to serious results. It was a stumble on the threshold at starting--it was a flaw in the evidence which told fatally against us. When I next asked for the letter which Laura had written to Mrs. Vesey from Blackwater Park, it was given to me without the envelope, which had been thrown into the wastepaper basket, and long since destroyed. In the letter itself no date was mentioned--not even the day of the week. It only contained these lines:--"Dearest Mrs. Vesey, I am in sad distress and anxiety, and I may come to your house to-morrow night, and ask for a bed. I can't tell you what is the matter in this letter--I write it in such fear of being found out that I can fix my mind on nothing. Pray be at home to see me. I will give you a thousand kisses, and tell you everything. Your affectionate Laura." What help was there in those lines? None. On returning from Mrs. Vesey's, I instructed Marian to write (observing the same caution which I practised myself) to Mrs. Michelson. She was to express, if she pleased, some general suspicion of Count Fosco's conduct, and she was to ask the housekeeper to supply us with a plain statement of events, in the interests of truth. While we were waiting for the answer, which reached us in a week's time, I went to the doctor in St. John's Wood, introducing myself as sent by Miss Halcombe to collect, if possible, more particulars of her sister's last illness than Mr. Kyrle had found the time to procure. By Mr. Goodricke's assistance, I obtained a copy of the certificate of death, and an interview with the woman (Jane Gould) who had been employed to prepare the body for the grave. Through this person I also discovered a means of communicating with the servant, Hester Pinhorn. She had recently left her place in consequence of a disagreement with her mistress, and she was lodging with some people in the neighbourhood whom Mrs. Gould knew. In the manner here indicated I obtained the Narratives of the housekeeper, of the doctor, of Jane Gould, and of Hester Pinhorn, exactly as they are presented in these pages. Furnished with such additional evidence as these documents afforded, I considered myself to be sufficiently prepared for a consultation with Mr. Kyrle, and Marian wrote accordingly to mention my name to him, and to specify the day and hour at which I requested to see him on private business. There was time enough in the morning for me to take Laura out for her walk as usual, and to see her quietly settled at her drawing afterwards. She looked up at me with a new anxiety in her face as I rose to leave the room, and her fingers began to toy doubtfully, in the old way, with the brushes and pencils on the table. "You are not tired of me yet?" she said. "You are not going away because you are tired of me? I will try to do better--I will try to get well. Are you as fond of me, Walter as you used to be, now I am so pale and thin, and so slow in learning to draw?" She spoke as a child might have spoken, she showed me her thoughts as a child might have shown them. I waited a few minutes longer--waited to tell her that she was dearer to me now than she had ever been in the past times. "Try to get well again," I said, encouraging the new hope in the future which I saw dawning in her mind, "try to get well again, for Marian's sake and for mine." "Yes," she said to herself, returning to her drawing. "I must try, because they are both so fond of me." She suddenly looked up again. "Don't be gone long! I can't get on with my drawing, Walter, when you are not here to help me." "I shall soon be back, my darling--soon be back to see how you are getting on." My voice faltered a little in spite of me. I forced myself from the room. It was no time, then, for parting with the self-control which might yet serve me in my need before the day was out. As I opened the door, I beckoned to Marian to follow me to the stairs. It was necessary to prepare her for a result which I felt might sooner or later follow my showing myself openly in the streets. "I shall, in all probability, be back in a few hours," I said, "and you will take care, as usual, to let no one inside the doors in my absence. But if anything happens----" "What can happen?" she interposed quickly. "Tell me plainly, Walter, if there is any danger, and I shall know how to meet it." "The only danger," I replied, "is that Sir Percival Glyde may have been recalled to London by the news of Laura's escape. You are aware that he had me watched before I left England, and that he probably knows me by sight, although I don't know him?" She laid her hand on my shoulder and looked at me in anxious silence. I saw she understood the serious risk that threatened us. "It is not likely," I said, "that I shall be seen in London again so soon, either by Sir Percival himself or by the persons in his employ. But it is barely possible that an accident may happen. In that case, you will not be alarmed if I fail to return to-night, and you will satisfy any inquiry of Laura's with the best excuse that you can make for me? If I find the least reason to suspect that I am watched, I will take good care that no spy follows me back to this house. Don't doubt my return, Marian, however it may be delayed--and fear nothing." "Nothing!" she answered firmly. "You shall not regret, Walter, that you have only a woman to help you." She paused, and detained me for a moment longer. "Take care!" she said, pressing my hand anxiously--"take care!" I left her, and set forth to pave the way for discovery--the dark and doubtful way, which began at the lawyer's door. IV No circumstance of the slightest importance happened on my way to the offices of Messrs. Gilmore & Kyrle, in Chancery Lane. While my card was being taken in to Mr. Kyrle, a consideration occurred to me which I deeply regretted not having thought of before. The information derived from Marian's diary made it a matter of certainty that Count Fosco had opened her first letter from Blackwater Park to Mr. Kyrle, and had, by means of his wife, intercepted the second. He was therefore well aware of the address of the office, and he would naturally infer that if Marian wanted advice and assistance, after Laura's escape from the Asylum, she would apply once more to the experience of Mr. Kyrle. In this case the office in Chancery Lane was the very first place which he and Sir Percival would cause to be watched, and if the same persons were chosen for the purpose who had been employed to follow me, before my departure from England, the fact of my return would in all probability be ascertained on that very day. I had thought, generally, of the chances of my being recognised in the streets, but the special risk connected with the office had never occurred to me until the present moment. It was too late now to repair this unfortunate error in judgment--too late to wish that I had made arrangements for meeting the lawyer in some place privately appointed beforehand. I could only resolve to be cautious on leaving Chancery Lane, and not to go straight home again under any circumstances whatever. After waiting a few minutes I was shown into Mr. Kyrle's private room. He was a pale, thin, quiet, self-possessed man, with a very attentive eye, a very low voice, and a very undemonstrative manner--not (as I judged) ready with his sympathy where strangers were concerned, and not at all easy to disturb in his professional composure. A better man for my purpose could hardly have been found. If he committed himself to a decision at all, and if the decision was favourable, the strength of our case was as good as proved from that moment. "Before I enter on the business which brings me here," I said, "I ought to warn you, Mr. Kyrle, that the shortest statement I can make of it may occupy some little time." "My time is at Miss Halcombe's disposal," he replied. "Where any interests of hers are concerned, I represent my partner personally, as well as professionally. It was his request that I should do so, when he ceased to take an active part in business." "May I inquire whether Mr. Gilmore is in England?" "He is not, he is living with his relatives in Germany. His health has improved, but the period of his return is still uncertain." While we were exchanging these few preliminary words, he had been searching among the papers before him, and he now produced from them a sealed letter. I thought he was about to hand the letter to me, but, apparently changing his mind, he placed it by itself on the table, settled himself in his chair, and silently waited to hear what I had to say. Without wasting a moment in prefatory words of any sort, I entered on my narrative, and put him in full possession of the events which have already been related in these pages. Lawyer as he was to the very marrow of his bones, I startled him out of his professional composure. Expressions of incredulity and surprise, which he could not repress, interrupted me several times before I had done. I persevered, however, to the end, and as soon as I reached it, boldly asked the one important question-- "What is your opinion, Mr. Kyrle?" He was too cautious to commit himself to an answer without taking time to recover his self-possession first. "Before I give my opinion," he said, "I must beg permission to clear the ground by a few questions." He put the questions--sharp, suspicious, unbelieving questions, which clearly showed me, as they proceeded, that he thought I was the victim of a delusion, and that he might even have doubted, but for my introduction to him by Miss Halcombe, whether I was not attempting the perpetration of a cunningly-designed fraud. "Do you believe that I have spoken the truth, Mr. Kyrle?" I asked, when he had done examining me. "So far as your own convictions are concerned, I am certain you have spoken the truth," he replied. "I have the highest esteem for Miss Halcombe, and I have therefore every reason to respect a gentleman whose mediation she trusts in a matter of this kind. I will even go farther, if you like, and admit, for courtesy's sake and for argument's sake, that the identity of Lady Glyde as a living person is a proved fact to Miss Halcombe and yourself. But you come to me for a legal opinion. As a lawyer, and as a lawyer only, it is my duty to tell you, Mr. Hartright, that you have not the shadow of a case." "You put it strongly, Mr. Kyrle." "I will try to put it plainly as well. The evidence of Lady Glyde's death is, on the face of it, clear and satisfactory. There is her aunt's testimony to prove that she came to Count Fosco's house, that she fell ill, and that she died. There is the testimony of the medical certificate to prove the death, and to show that it took place under natural circumstances. There is the fact of the funeral at Limmeridge, and there is the assertion of the inscription on the tomb. That is the case you want to overthrow. What evidence have you to support the declaration on your side that the person who died and was buried was not Lady Glyde? Let us run through the main points of your statement and see what they are worth. Miss Halcombe goes to a certain private Asylum, and there sees a certain female patient. It is known that a woman named Anne Catherick, and bearing an extraordinary personal resemblance to Lady Glyde, escaped from the Asylum; it is known that the person received there last July was received as Anne Catherick brought back; it is known that the gentleman who brought her back warned Mr. Fairlie that it was part of her insanity to be bent on personating his dead niece; and it is known that she did repeatedly declare herself in the Asylum (where no one believed her) to be Lady Glyde. These are all facts. What have you to set against them? Miss Halcombe's recognition of the woman, which recognition after-events invalidate or contradict. Does Miss Halcombe assert her supposed sister's identity to the owner of the Asylum, and take legal means for rescuing her? No, she secretly bribes a nurse to let her escape. When the patient has been released in this doubtful manner, and is taken to Mr. Fairlie, does he recognise her? Is he staggered for one instant in his belief of his niece's death? No. Do the servants recognise her? No. Is she kept in the neighbourhood to assert her own identity, and to stand the test of further proceedings? No, she is privately taken to London. In the meantime you have recognised her also, but you are not a relative--you are not even an old friend of the family. The servants contradict you, and Mr. Fairlie contradicts Miss Halcombe, and the supposed Lady Glyde contradicts herself. She declares she passed the night in London at a certain house. Your own evidence shows that she has never been near that house, and your own admission is that her condition of mind prevents you from producing her anywhere to submit to investigation, and to speak for herself. I pass over minor points of evidence on both sides to save time, and I ask you, if this case were to go now into a court of law--to go before a jury, bound to take facts as they reasonably appear--where are your proofs?" I was obliged to wait and collect myself before I could answer him. It was the first time the story of Laura and the story of Marian had been presented to me from a stranger's point of view--the first time the terrible obstacles that lay across our path had been made to show themselves in their true character. "There can be no doubt," I said, "that the facts, as you have stated them, appear to tell against us, but----" "But you think those facts can be explained away," interposed Mr. Kyrle. "Let me tell you the result of my experience on that point. When an English jury has to choose between a plain fact ON the surface and a long explanation UNDER the surface, it always takes the fact in preference to the explanation. For example, Lady Glyde (I call the lady you represent by that name for argument's sake) declares she has slept at a certain house, and it is proved that she has not slept at that house. You explain this circumstance by entering into the state of her mind, and deducing from it a metaphysical conclusion. I don't say the conclusion is wrong--I only say that the jury will take the fact of her contradicting herself in preference to any reason for the contradiction that you can offer." "But is it not possible," I urged, "by dint of patience and exertion, to discover additional evidence? Miss Halcombe and I have a few hundred pounds----" He looked at me with a half-suppressed pity, and shook his head. "Consider the subject, Mr. Hartright, from your own point of view," he said. "If you are right about Sir Percival Glyde and Count Fosco (which I don't admit, mind), every imaginable difficulty would be thrown in the way of your getting fresh evidence. Every obstacle of litigation would be raised--every point in the case would be systematically contested--and by the time we had spent our thousands instead of our hundreds, the final result would, in all probability, be against us. Questions of identity, where instances of personal resemblance are concerned, are, in themselves, the hardest of all questions to settle--the hardest, even when they are free from the complications which beset the case we are now discussing. I really see no prospect of throwing any light whatever on this extraordinary affair. Even if the person buried in Limmeridge churchyard be not Lady Glyde, she was, in life, on your own showing, so like her, that we should gain nothing, if we applied for the necessary authority to have the body exhumed. In short, there is no case, Mr. Hartright--there is really no case." I was determined to believe that there WAS a case, and in that determination shifted my ground, and appealed to him once more. "Are there not other proofs that we might produce besides the proof of identity?" I asked. "Not as you are situated," he replied. "The simplest and surest of all proofs, the proof by comparison of dates, is, as I understand, altogether out of your reach. If you could show a discrepancy between the date of the doctor's certificate and the date of Lady Glyde's journey to London, the matter would wear a totally different aspect, and I should be the first to say, Let us go on." "That date may yet be recovered, Mr. Kyrle." "On the day when it is recovered, Mr. Hartright, you will have a case. If you have any prospect, at this moment, of getting at it--tell me, and we shall see if I can advise you." I considered. The housekeeper could not help us--Laura could not help us--Marian could not help us. In all probability, the only persons in existence who knew the date were Sir Percival and the Count. "I can think of no means of ascertaining the date at present," I said, "because I can think of no persons who are sure to know it, but Count Fosco and Sir Percival Glyde." Mr. Kyrle's calmly attentive face relaxed, for the first time, into a smile. "With your opinion of the conduct of those two gentlemen," he said, "you don't expect help in that quarter, I presume? If they have combined to gain large sums of money by a conspiracy, they are not likely to confess it, at any rate." "They may be forced to confess it, Mr. Kyrle." "By whom?" "By me." We both rose. He looked me attentively in the face with more appearance of interest than he had shown yet. I could see that I had perplexed him a little. "You are very determined," he said. "You have, no doubt, a personal motive for proceeding, into which it is not my business to inquire. If a case can be produced in the future, I can only say, my best assistance is at your service. At the same time I must warn you, as the money question always enters into the law question, that I see little hope, even if you ultimately established the fact of Lady Glyde's being alive, of recovering her fortune. The foreigner would probably leave the country before proceedings were commenced, and Sir Percival's embarrassments are numerous enough and pressing enough to transfer almost any sum of money he may possess from himself to his creditors. You are of course aware----" I stopped him at that point. "Let me beg that we may not discuss Lady Glyde's affairs," I said. "I have never known anything about them in former times, and I know nothing of them now--except that her fortune is lost. You are right in assuming that I have personal motives for stirring in this matter. I wish those motives to be always as disinterested as they are at the present moment----" He tried to interpose and explain. I was a little heated, I suppose, by feeling that he had doubted me, and I went on bluntly, without waiting to hear him. "There shall be no money motive," I said, "no idea of personal advantage in the service I mean to render to Lady Glyde. She has been cast out as a stranger from the house in which she was born--a lie which records her death has been written on her mother's tomb--and there are two men, alive and unpunished, who are responsible for it. That house shall open again to receive her in the presence of every soul who followed the false funeral to the grave--that lie shall be publicly erased from the tombstone by the authority of the head of the family, and those two men shall answer for their crime to ME, though the justice that sits in tribunals is powerless to pursue them. I have given my life to that purpose, and, alone as I stand, if God spares me, I will accomplish it." He drew back towards his table, and said nothing. His face showed plainly that he thought my delusion had got the better of my reason, and that he considered it totally useless to give me any more advice. "We each keep our opinion, Mr. Kyrle," I said, "and we must wait till the events of the future decide between us. In the meantime, I am much obliged to you for the attention you have given to my statement. You have shown me that the legal remedy lies, in every sense of the word, beyond our means. We cannot produce the law proof, and we are not rich enough to pay the law expenses. It is something gained to know that." I bowed and walked to the door. He called me back and gave me the letter which I had seen him place on the table by itself at the beginning of our interview. "This came by post a few days ago," he said. "Perhaps you will not mind delivering it? Pray tell Miss Halcombe, at the same time, that I sincerely regret being, thus far, unable to help her, except by advice, which will not be more welcome, I am afraid, to her than to you." I looked at the letter while he was speaking. It was addressed to "Miss Halcombe. Care of Messrs. Gilmore & Kyrle, Chancery Lane." The handwriting was quite unknown to me. On leaving the room I asked one last question. "Do you happen to know," I said, "if Sir Percival Glyde is still in Paris?" "He has returned to London," replied Mr. Kyrle. "At least I heard so from his solicitor, whom I met yesterday." After that answer I went out. On leaving the office the first precaution to be observed was to abstain from attracting attention by stopping to look about me. I walked towards one of the quietest of the large squares on the north of Holborn, then suddenly stopped and turned round at a place where a long stretch of pavement was left behind me. There were two men at the corner of the square who had stopped also, and who were standing talking together. After a moment's reflection I turned back so as to pass them. One moved as I came near, and turned the corner leading from the square into the street. The other remained stationary. I looked at him as I passed and instantly recognised one of the men who had watched me before I left England. If I had been free to follow my own instincts, I should probably have begun by speaking to the man, and have ended by knocking him down. But I was bound to consider consequences. If I once placed myself publicly in the wrong, I put the weapons at once into Sir Percival's hands. There was no choice but to oppose cunning by cunning. I turned into the street down which the second man had disappeared, and passed him, waiting in a doorway. He was a stranger to me, and I was glad to make sure of his personal appearance in case of future annoyance. Having done this, I again walked northward till I reached the New Road. There I turned aside to the west (having the men behind me all the time), and waited at a point where I knew myself to be at some distance from a cab-stand, until a fast two-wheel cab, empty, should happen to pass me. One passed in a few minutes. I jumped in and told the man to drive rapidly towards Hyde Park. There was no second fast cab for the spies behind me. I saw them dart across to the other side of the road, to follow me by running, until a cab or a cab-stand came in their way. But I had the start of them, and when I stopped the driver and got out, they were nowhere in sight. I crossed Hyde Park and made sure, on the open ground, that I was free. When I at last turned my steps homewards, it was not till many hours later--not till after dark. I found Marian waiting for me alone in the little sitting-room. She had persuaded Laura to go to rest, after first promising to show me her drawing the moment I came in. The poor little dim faint sketch--so trifling in itself, so touching in its associations--was propped up carefully on the table with two books, and was placed where the faint light of the one candle we allowed ourselves might fall on it to the best advantage. I sat down to look at the drawing, and to tell Marian, in whispers, what had happened. The partition which divided us from the next room was so thin that we could almost hear Laura's breathing, and we might have disturbed her if we had spoken aloud. Marian preserved her composure while I described my interview with Mr. Kyrle. But her face became troubled when I spoke next of the men who had followed me from the lawyer's office, and when I told her of the discovery of Sir Percival's return. "Bad news, Walter," she said, "the worst news you could bring. Have you nothing more to tell me?" "I have something to give you," I replied, handing her the note which Mr. Kyrle had confided to my care. She looked at the address and recognised the handwriting instantly. "You know your correspondent?" I said. "Too well," she answered. "My correspondent is Count Fosco." With that reply she opened the note. Her face flushed deeply while she read it--her eyes brightened with anger as she handed it to me to read in my turn. The note contained these lines-- "Impelled by honourable admiration--honourable to myself, honourable to you--I write, magnificent Marian, in the interests of your tranquillity, to say two consoling words-- "Fear nothing! "Exercise your fine natural sense and remain in retirement. Dear and admirable woman, invite no dangerous publicity. Resignation is sublime--adopt it. The modest repose of home is eternally fresh--enjoy it. The storms of life pass harmless over the valley of Seclusion--dwell, dear lady, in the valley. "Do this and I authorise you to fear nothing. No new calamity shall lacerate your sensibilities--sensibilities precious to me as my own. You shall not be molested, the fair companion of your retreat shall not be pursued. She has found a new asylum in your heart. Priceless asylum!--I envy her and leave her there. "One last word of affectionate warning, of paternal caution, and I tear myself from the charm of addressing you--I close these fervent lines. "Advance no farther than you have gone already, compromise no serious interests, threaten nobody. Do not, I implore you, force me into action--ME, the Man of Action--when it is the cherished object of my ambition to be passive, to restrict the vast reach of my energies and my combinations for your sake. If you have rash friends, moderate their deplorable ardour. If Mr. Hartright returns to England, hold no communication with him. I walk on a path of my own, and Percival follows at my heels. On the day when Mr. Hartright crosses that path, he is a lost man." The only signature to these lines was the initial letter F, surrounded by a circle of intricate flourishes. I threw the letter on the table with all the contempt that I felt for it. "He is trying to frighten you--a sure sign that he is frightened himself," I said. She was too genuine a woman to treat the letter as I treated it. The insolent familiarity of the language was too much for her self-control. As she looked at me across the table, her hands clenched themselves in her lap, and the old quick fiery temper flamed out again brightly in her cheeks and her eyes. "Walter!" she said, "if ever those two men are at your mercy, and if you are obliged to spare one of them, don't let it be the Count." "I will keep this letter, Marian, to help my memory when the time comes." She looked at me attentively as I put the letter away in my pocket-book. "When the time comes?" she repeated. "Can you speak of the future as if you were certain of it?--certain after what you have heard in Mr. Kyrle's office, after what has happened to you to-day?" "I don't count the time from to-day, Marian. All I have done to-day is to ask another man to act for me. I count from to-morrow----" "Why from to-morrow?" "Because to-morrow I mean to act for myself." "How?" "I shall go to Blackwater by the first train, and return, I hope, at night." "To Blackwater!" "Yes. I have had time to think since I left Mr. Kyrle. His opinion on one point confirms my own. We must persist to the last in hunting down the date of Laura's journey. The one weak point in the conspiracy, and probably the one chance of proving that she is a living woman, centre in the discovery of that date." "You mean," said Marian, "the discovery that Laura did not leave Blackwater Park till after the date of her death on the doctor's certificate?" "Certainly." "What makes you think it might have been AFTER? Laura can tell us nothing of the time she was in London." "But the owner of the Asylum told you that she was received there on the twenty-seventh of July. I doubt Count Fosco's ability to keep her in London, and to keep her insensible to all that was passing around her, more than one night. In that case, she must have started on the twenty-sixth, and must have come to London one day after the date of her own death on the doctor's certificate. If we can prove that date, we prove our case against Sir Percival and the Count." "Yes, yes--I see! But how is the proof to be obtained?" "Mrs. Michelson's narrative has suggested to me two ways of trying to obtain it. One of them is to question the doctor, Mr. Dawson, who must know when he resumed his attendance at Blackwater Park after Laura left the house. The other is to make inquiries at the inn to which Sir Percival drove away by himself at night. We know that his departure followed Laura's after the lapse of a few hours, and we may get at the date in that way. The attempt is at least worth making, and to-morrow I am determined it shall be made." "And suppose it fails--I look at the worst now, Walter; but I will look at the best if disappointments come to try us--suppose no one can help you at Blackwater?" "There are two men who can help me, and shall help me in London--Sir Percival and the Count. Innocent people may well forget the date--but THEY are guilty, and THEY know it. If I fail everywhere else, I mean to force a confession out of one or both of them on my own terms." All the woman flushed up in Marian's face as I spoke. "Begin with the Count," she whispered eagerly. "For my sake, begin with the Count." "We must begin, for Laura's sake, where there is the best chance of success," I replied. The colour faded from her face again, and she shook her head sadly. "Yes," she said, "you are right--it was mean and miserable of me to say that. I try to be patient, Walter, and succeed better now than I did in happier times. But I have a little of my old temper still left, and it will get the better of me when I think of the Count!" "His turn will come," I said. "But, remember, there is no weak place in his life that we know of yet." I waited a little to let her recover her self-possession, and then spoke the decisive words-- "Marian! There is a weak place we both know of in Sir Percival's life----" "You mean the Secret!" "Yes: the Secret. It is our only sure hold on him. I can force him from his position of security, I can drag him and his villainy into the face of day, by no other means. Whatever the Count may have done, Sir Percival has consented to the conspiracy against Laura from another motive besides the motive of gain. You heard him tell the Count that he believed his wife knew enough to ruin him? You heard him say that he was a lost man if the secret of Anne Catherick was known?" "Yes! yes! I did." "Well, Marian, when our other resources have failed us, I mean to know the Secret. My old superstition clings to me, even yet. I say again the woman in white is a living influence in our three lives. The End is appointed--the End is drawing us on--and Anne Catherick, dead in her grave, points the way to it still!" V The story of my first inquiries in Hampshire is soon told. My early departure from London enabled me to reach Mr. Dawson's house in the forenoon. Our interview, so far as the object of my visit was concerned, led to no satisfactory result. Mr. Dawson's books certainly showed when he had resumed his attendance on Miss Halcombe at Blackwater Park, but it was not possible to calculate back from this date with any exactness, without such help from Mrs. Michelson as I knew she was unable to afford. She could not say from memory (who, in similar cases, ever can?) how many days had elapsed between the renewal of the doctor's attendance on his patient and the previous departure of Lady Glyde. She was almost certain of having mentioned the circumstance of the departure to Miss Halcombe, on the day after it happened--but then she was no more able to fix the date of the day on which this disclosure took place, than to fix the date of the day before, when Lady Glyde had left for London. Neither could she calculate, with any nearer approach to exactness, the time that had passed from the departure of her mistress, to the period when the undated letter from Madame Fosco arrived. Lastly, as if to complete the series of difficulties, the doctor himself, having been ill at the time, had omitted to make his usual entry of the day of the week and month when the gardener from Blackwater Park had called on him to deliver Mrs. Michelson's message. Hopeless of obtaining assistance from Mr. Dawson, I resolved to try next if I could establish the date of Sir Percival's arrival at Knowlesbury. It seemed like a fatality! When I reached Knowlesbury the inn was shut up, and bills were posted on the walls. The speculation had been a bad one, as I was informed, ever since the time of the railway. The new hotel at the station had gradually absorbed the business, and the old inn (which we knew to be the inn at which Sir Percival had put up), had been closed about two months since. The proprietor had left the town with all his goods and chattels, and where he had gone I could not positively ascertain from any one. The four people of whom I inquired gave me four different accounts of his plans and projects when he left Knowlesbury. There were still some hours to spare before the last train left for London, and I drove back again in a fly from the Knowlesbury station to Blackwater Park, with the purpose of questioning the gardener and the person who kept the lodge. If they, too, proved unable to assist me, my resources for the present were at an end, and I might return to town. I dismissed the fly a mile distant from the park, and getting my directions from the driver, proceeded by myself to the house. As I turned into the lane from the high-road, I saw a man, with a carpet-bag, walking before me rapidly on the way to the lodge. He was a little man, dressed in shabby black, and wearing a remarkably large hat. I set him down (as well as it was possible to judge) for a lawyer's clerk, and stopped at once to widen the distance between us. He had not heard me, and he walked on out of sight, without looking back. When I passed through the gates myself, a little while afterwards, he was not visible--he had evidently gone on to the house. There were two women in the lodge. One of them was old, the other I knew at once, by Marian's description of her, to be Margaret Porcher. I asked first if Sir Percival was at the Park, and receiving a reply in the negative, inquired next when he had left it. Neither of the women could tell me more than that he had gone away in the summer. I could extract nothing from Margaret Porcher but vacant smiles and shakings of the head. The old woman was a little more intelligent, and I managed to lead her into speaking of the manner of Sir Percival's departure, and of the alarm that it caused her. She remembered her master calling her out of bed, and remembered his frightening her by swearing--but the date at which the occurrence happened was, as she honestly acknowledged, "quite beyond her." On leaving the lodge I saw the gardener at work not far off. When I first addressed him, he looked at me rather distrustfully, but on my using Mrs. Michelson's name, with a civil reference to himself, he entered into conversation readily enough. There is no need to describe what passed between us--it ended, as all my other attempts to discover the date had ended. The gardener knew that his master had driven away, at night, "some time in July, the last fortnight or the last ten days in the month"--and knew no more. While we were speaking together I saw the man in black, with the large hat, come out from the house, and stand at some little distance observing us. Certain suspicions of his errand at Blackwater Park had already crossed my mind. They were now increased by the gardener's inability (or unwillingness) to tell me who the man was, and I determined to clear the way before me, if possible, by speaking to him. The plainest question I could put as a stranger would be to inquire if the house was allowed to be shown to visitors. I walked up to the man at once, and accosted him in those words. His look and manner unmistakably betrayed that he knew who I was, and that he wanted to irritate me into quarrelling with him. His reply was insolent enough to have answered the purpose, if I had been less determined to control myself. As it was, I met him with the most resolute politeness, apologised for my involuntary intrusion (which he called a "trespass,") and left the grounds. It was exactly as I suspected. The recognition of me when I left Mr. Kyrle's office had been evidently communicated to Sir Percival Glyde, and the man in black had been sent to the Park in anticipation of my making inquiries at the house or in the neighbourhood. If I had given him the least chance of lodging any sort of legal complaint against me, the interference of the local magistrate would no doubt have been turned to account as a clog on my proceedings, and a means of separating me from Marian and Laura for some days at least. I was prepared to be watched on the way from Blackwater Park to the station, exactly as I had been watched in London the day before. But I could not discover at the time, whether I was really followed on this occasion or not. The man in black might have had means of tracking me at his disposal of which I was not aware, but I certainly saw nothing of him, in his own person, either on the way to the station, or afterwards on my arrival at the London terminus in the evening. I reached home on foot, taking the precaution, before I approached our own door, of walking round by the loneliest street in the neighbourhood, and there stopping and looking back more than once over the open space behind me. I had first learnt to use this stratagem against suspected treachery in the wilds of Central America--and now I was practising it again, with the same purpose and with even greater caution, in the heart of civilised London! Nothing had happened to alarm Marian during my absence. She asked eagerly what success I had met with. When I told her she could not conceal her surprise at the indifference with which I spoke of the failure of my investigations thus far. The truth was, that the ill-success of my inquiries had in no sense daunted me. I had pursued them as a matter of duty, and I had expected nothing from them. In the state of my mind at that time, it was almost a relief to me to know that the struggle was now narrowed to a trial of strength between myself and Sir Percival Glyde. The vindictive motive had mingled itself all along with my other and better motives, and I confess it was a satisfaction to me to feel that the surest way, the only way left, of serving Laura's cause, was to fasten my hold firmly on the villain who had married her. While I acknowledge that I was not strong enough to keep my motives above the reach of this instinct of revenge, I can honestly say something in my own favour on the other side. No base speculation on the future relations of Laura and myself, and on the private and personal concessions which I might force from Sir Percival if I once had him at my mercy, ever entered my mind. I never said to myself, "If I do succeed, it shall be one result of my success that I put it out of her husband's power to take her from me again." I could not look at her and think of the future with such thoughts as those. The sad sight of the change in her from her former self, made the one interest of my love an interest of tenderness and compassion which her father or her brother might have felt, and which I felt, God knows, in my inmost heart. All my hopes looked no farther on now than to the day of her recovery. There, till she was strong again and happy again--there, till she could look at me as she had once looked, and speak to me as she had once spoken--the future of my happiest thoughts and my dearest wishes ended. These words are written under no prompting of idle self-contemplation. Passages in this narrative are soon to come which will set the minds of others in judgment on my conduct. It is right that the best and the worst of me should be fairly balanced before that time. On the morning after my return from Hampshire I took Marian upstairs into my working-room, and there laid before her the plan that I had matured thus far, for mastering the one assailable point in the life of Sir Percival Glyde. The way to the Secret lay through the mystery, hitherto impenetrable to all of us, of the woman in white. The approach to that in its turn might be gained by obtaining the assistance of Anne Catherick's mother, and the only ascertainable means of prevailing on Mrs. Catherick to act or to speak in the matter depended on the chance of my discovering local particulars and family particulars first of all from Mrs. Clements. After thinking the subject over carefully, I felt certain that I could only begin the new inquiries by placing myself in communication with the faithful friend and protectress of Anne Catherick. The first difficulty then was to find Mrs. Clements. I was indebted to Marian's quick perception for meeting this necessity at once by the best and simplest means. She proposed to write to the farm near Limmeridge (Todd's Corner), to inquire whether Mrs. Clements had communicated with Mrs. Todd during the past few months. How Mrs. Clements had been separated from Anne it was impossible for us to say, but that separation once effected, it would certainly occur to Mrs. Clements to inquire after the missing woman in the neighbourhood of all others to which she was known to be most attached--the neighbourhood of Limmeridge. I saw directly that Marian's proposal offered us a prospect of success, and she wrote to Mrs. Todd accordingly by that day's post. While we were waiting for the reply, I made myself master of all the information Marian could afford on the subject of Sir Percival's family, and of his early life. She could only speak on these topics from hearsay, but she was reasonably certain of the truth of what little she had to tell. Sir Percival was an only child. His father, Sir Felix Glyde, had suffered from his birth under a painful and incurable deformity, and had shunned all society from his earliest years. His sole happiness was in the enjoyment of music, and he had married a lady with tastes similar to his own, who was said to be a most accomplished musician. He inherited the Blackwater property while still a young man. Neither he nor his wife after taking possession, made advances of any sort towards the society of the neighbourhood, and no one endeavoured to tempt them into abandoning their reserve, with the one disastrous exception of the rector of the parish. The rector was the worst of all innocent mischief-makers--an over-zealous man. He had heard that Sir Felix had left College with the character of being little better than a revolutionist in politics and an infidel in religion, and he arrived conscientiously at the conclusion that it was his bounden duty to summon the lord of the manor to hear sound views enunciated in the parish church. Sir Felix fiercely resented the clergyman's well-meant but ill-directed interference, insulting him so grossly and so publicly, that the families in the neighbourhood sent letters of indignant remonstrance to the Park, and even the tenants of the Blackwater property expressed their opinion as strongly as they dared. The baronet, who had no country tastes of any kind, and no attachment to the estate or to any one living on it, declared that society at Blackwater should never have a second chance of annoying him, and left the place from that moment. After a short residence in London he and his wife departed for the Continent, and never returned to England again. They lived part of the time in France and part in Germany--always keeping themselves in the strict retirement which the morbid sense of his own personal deformity had made a necessity to Sir Felix. Their son, Percival, had been born abroad, and had been educated there by private tutors. His mother was the first of his parents whom he lost. His father had died a few years after her, either in 1825 or 1826. Sir Percival had been in England, as a young man, once or twice before that period, but his acquaintance with the late Mr. Fairlie did not begin till after the time of his father's death. They soon became very intimate, although Sir Percival was seldom, or never, at Limmeridge House in those days. Mr. Frederick Fairlie might have met him once or twice in Mr. Philip Fairlie's company, but he could have known little of him at that or at any other time. Sir Percival's only intimate friend in the Fairlie family had been Laura's father. These were all the particulars that I could gain from Marian. They suggested nothing which was useful to my present purpose, but I noted them down carefully, in the event of their proving to be of importance at any future period. Mrs. Todd's reply (addressed, by our own wish, to a post-office at some distance from us) had arrived at its destination when I went to apply for it. The chances, which had been all against us hitherto, turned from this moment in our favour. Mrs. Todd's letter contained the first item of information of which we were in search. Mrs. Clements, it appeared, had (as we had conjectured) written to Todd's Corner, asking pardon in the first place for the abrupt manner in which she and Anne had left their friends at the farm-house (on the morning after I had met the woman in white in Limmeridge churchyard), and then informing Mrs. Todd of Anne's disappearance, and entreating that she would cause inquiries to be made in the neighbourhood, on the chance that the lost woman might have strayed back to Limmeridge. In making this request, Mrs. Clements had been careful to add to it the address at which she might always be heard of, and that address Mrs. Todd now transmitted to Marian. It was in London, and within half an hour's walk of our own lodging. In the words of the proverb, I was resolved not to let the grass grow under my feet. The next morning I set forth to seek an interview with Mrs. Clements. This was my first step forward in the investigation. The story of the desperate attempt to which I now stood committed begins here. VI The address communicated by Mrs. Todd took me to a lodging-house situated in a respectable street near the Gray's Inn Road. When I knocked the door was opened by Mrs. Clements herself. She did not appear to remember me, and asked what my business was. I recalled to her our meeting in Limmeridge churchyard at the close of my interview there with the woman in white, taking special care to remind her that I was the person who assisted Anne Catherick (as Anne had herself declared) to escape the pursuit from the Asylum. This was my only claim to the confidence of Mrs. Clements. She remembered the circumstance the moment I spoke of it, and asked me into the parlour, in the greatest anxiety to know if I had brought her any news of Anne. It was impossible for me to tell her the whole truth without, at the same time, entering into particulars on the subject of the conspiracy, which it would have been dangerous to confide to a stranger. I could only abstain most carefully from raising any false hopes, and then explain that the object of my visit was to discover the persons who were really responsible for Anne's disappearance. I even added, so as to exonerate myself from any after-reproach of my own conscience, that I entertained not the least hope of being able to trace her--that I believed we should never see her alive again--and that my main interest in the affair was to bring to punishment two men whom I suspected to be concerned in luring her away, and at whose hands I and some dear friends of mine had suffered a grievous wrong. With this explanation I left it to Mrs. Clements to say whether our interest in the matter (whatever difference there might be in the motives which actuated us) was not the same, and whether she felt any reluctance to forward my object by giving me such information on the subject of my inquiries as she happened to possess. The poor woman was at first too much confused and agitated to understand thoroughly what I said to her. She could only reply that I was welcome to anything she could tell me in return for the kindness I had shown to Anne; but as she was not very quick and ready, at the best of times, in talking to strangers, she would beg me to put her in the right way, and to say where I wished her to begin. Knowing by experience that the plainest narrative attainable from persons who are not accustomed to arrange their ideas, is the narrative which goes far enough back at the beginning to avoid all impediments of retrospection in its course, I asked Mrs. Clements to tell me first what had happened after she had left Limmeridge, and so, by watchful questioning, carried her on from point to point, till we reached the period of Anne's disappearance. The substance of the information which I thus obtained was as follows:-- On leaving the farm at Todd's Corner, Mrs. Clements and Anne had travelled that day as far as Derby, and had remained there a week on Anne's account. They had then gone on to London, and had lived in the lodging occupied by Mrs. Clements at that time for a month or more, when circumstances connected with the house and the landlord had obliged them to change their quarters. Anne's terror of being discovered in London or its neighbourhood, whenever they ventured to walk out, had gradually communicated itself to Mrs. Clements, and she had determined on removing to one of the most out-of-the-way places in England--to the town of Grimsby in Lincolnshire, where her deceased husband had passed all his early life. His relatives were respectable people settled in the town--they had always treated Mrs. Clements with great kindness, and she thought it impossible to do better than go there and take the advice of her husband's friends. Anne would not hear of returning to her mother at Welmingham, because she had been removed to the Asylum from that place, and because Sir Percival would be certain to go back there and find her again. There was serious weight in this objection, and Mrs. Clements felt that it was not to be easily removed. At Grimsby the first serious symptoms of illness had shown themselves in Anne. They appeared soon after the news of Lady Glyde's marriage had been made public in the newspapers, and had reached her through that medium. The medical man who was sent for to attend the sick woman discovered at once that she was suffering from a serious affection of the heart. The illness lasted long, left her very weak, and returned at intervals, though with mitigated severity, again and again. They remained at Grimsby, in consequence, during the first half of the new year, and there they might probably have stayed much longer, but for the sudden resolution which Anne took at this time to venture back to Hampshire, for the purpose of obtaining a private interview with Lady Glyde. Mrs. Clements did all in her power to oppose the execution of this hazardous and unaccountable project. No explanation of her motives was offered by Anne, except that she believed the day of her death was not far off, and that she had something on her mind which must be communicated to Lady Glyde, at any risk, in secret. Her resolution to accomplish this purpose was so firmly settled that she declared her intention of going to Hampshire by herself if Mrs. Clements felt any unwillingness to go with her. The doctor, on being consulted, was of opinion that serious opposition to her wishes would, in all probability, produce another and perhaps a fatal fit of illness, and Mrs. Clements, under this advice, yielded to necessity, and once more, with sad forebodings of trouble and danger to come, allowed Anne Catherick to have her own way. On the journey from London to Hampshire Mrs. Clements discovered that one of their fellow-passengers was well acquainted with the neighbourhood of Blackwater, and could give her all the information she needed on the subject of localities. In this way she found out that the only place they could go to, which was not dangerously near to Sir Percival's residence, was a large village called Sandon. The distance here from Blackwater Park was between three and four miles--and that distance, and back again, Anne had walked on each occasion when she had appeared in the neighbourhood of the lake. For the few days during which they were at Sandon without being discovered they had lived a little away from the village, in the cottage of a decent widow-woman who had a bedroom to let, and whose discreet silence Mrs. Clements had done her best to secure, for the first week at least. She had also tried hard to induce Anne to be content with writing to Lady Glyde, in the first instance; but the failure of the warning contained in the anonymous letter sent to Limmeridge had made Anne resolute to speak this time, and obstinate in the determination to go on her errand alone. Mrs. Clements, nevertheless, followed her privately on each occasion when she went to the lake, without, however, venturing near enough to the boat-house to be witness of what took place there. When Anne returned for the last time from the dangerous neighbourhood, the fatigue of walking, day after day, distances which were far too great for her strength, added to the exhausting effect of the agitation from which she had suffered, produced the result which Mrs. Clements had dreaded all along. The old pain over the heart and the other symptoms of the illness at Grimsby returned, and Anne was confined to her bed in the cottage. In this emergency the first necessity, as Mrs. Clements knew by experience, was to endeavour to quiet Anne's anxiety of mind, and for this purpose the good woman went herself the next day to the lake, to try if she could find Lady Glyde (who would be sure, as Anne said, to take her daily walk to the boat-house), and prevail on her to come back privately to the cottage near Sandon. On reaching the outskirts of the plantation Mrs. Clements encountered, not Lady Glyde, but a tall, stout, elderly gentleman, with a book in his hand--in other words, Count Fosco. The Count, after looking at her very attentively for a moment, asked if she expected to see any one in that place, and added, before she could reply, that he was waiting there with a message from Lady Glyde, but that he was not quite certain whether the person then before him answered the description of the person with whom he was desired to communicate. Upon this Mrs. Clements at once confided her errand to him, and entreated that he would help to allay Anne's anxiety by trusting his message to her. The Count most readily and kindly complied with her request. The message, he said, was a very important one. Lady Glyde entreated Anne and her good friend to return immediately to London, as she felt certain that Sir Percival would discover them if they remained any longer in the neighbourhood of Blackwater. She was herself going to London in a short time, and if Mrs. Clements and Anne would go there first, and would let her know what their address was, they should hear from her and see her in a fortnight or less. The Count added that he had already attempted to give a friendly warning to Anne herself, but that she had been too much startled by seeing that he was a stranger to let him approach and speak to her. To this Mrs. Clements replied, in the greatest alarm and distress, that she asked nothing better than to take Anne safely to London, but that there was no present hope of removing her from the dangerous neighbourhood, as she lay ill in her bed at that moment. The Count inquired if Mrs. Clements had sent for medical advice, and hearing that she had hitherto hesitated to do so, from the fear of making their position publicly known in the village, informed her that he was himself a medical man, and that he would go back with her if she pleased, and see what could be done for Anne. Mrs. Clements (feeling a natural confidence in the Count, as a person trusted with a secret message from Lady Glyde) gratefully accepted the offer, and they went back together to the cottage. Anne was asleep when they got there. The Count started at the sight of her (evidently from astonishment at her resemblance to Lady Glyde). Poor Mrs. Clements supposed that he was only shocked to see how ill she was. He would not allow her to be awakened--he was contented with putting questions to Mrs. Clements about her symptoms, with looking at her, and with lightly touching her pulse. Sandon was a large enough place to have a grocer's and druggist's shop in it, and thither the Count went to write his prescription and to get the medicine made up. He brought it back himself, and told Mrs. Clements that the medicine was a powerful stimulant, and that it would certainly give Anne strength to get up and bear the fatigue of a journey to London of only a few hours. The remedy was to be administered at stated times on that day and on the day after. On the third day she would be well enough to travel, and he arranged to meet Mrs. Clements at the Blackwater station, and to see them off by the midday train. If they did not appear he would assume that Anne was worse, and would proceed at once to the cottage. As events turned out, no such emergency as this occurred. This medicine had an extraordinary effect on Anne, and the good results of it were helped by the assurance Mrs. Clements could now give her that she would soon see Lady Glyde in London. At the appointed day and time (when they had not been quite so long as a week in Hampshire altogether), they arrived at the station. The Count was waiting there for them, and was talking to an elderly lady, who appeared to be going to travel by the train to London also. He most kindly assisted them, and put them into the carriage himself, begging Mrs. Clements not to forget to send her address to Lady Glyde. The elderly lady did not travel in the same compartment, and they did not notice what became of her on reaching the London terminus. Mrs. Clements secured respectable lodgings in a quiet neighbourhood, and then wrote, as she had engaged to do, to inform Lady Glyde of the address. A little more than a fortnight passed, and no answer came. At the end of that time a lady (the same elderly lady whom they had seen at the station) called in a cab, and said that she came from Lady Glyde, who was then at an hotel in London, and who wished to see Mrs. Clements, for the purpose of arranging a future interview with Anne. Mrs. Clements expressed her willingness (Anne being present at the time, and entreating her to do so) to forward the object in view, especially as she was not required to be away from the house for more than half an hour at the most. She and the elderly lady (clearly Madame Fosco) then left in the cab. The lady stopped the cab, after it had driven some distance, at a shop before they got to the hotel, and begged Mrs. Clements to wait for her for a few minutes while she made a purchase that had been forgotten. She never appeared again. After waiting some time Mrs. Clements became alarmed, and ordered the cabman to drive back to her lodgings. When she got there, after an absence of rather more than half an hour, Anne was gone. The only information to be obtained from the people of the house was derived from the servant who waited on the lodgers. She had opened the door to a boy from the street, who had left a letter for "the young woman who lived on the second floor" (the part of the house which Mrs. Clements occupied). The servant had delivered the letter, had then gone downstairs, and five minutes afterwards had observed Anne open the front door and go out, dressed in her bonnet and shawl. She had probably taken the letter with her, for it was not to be found, and it was therefore impossible to tell what inducement had been offered to make her leave the house. It must have been a strong one, for she would never stir out alone in London of her own accord. If Mrs. Clements had not known this by experience nothing would have induced her to go away in the cab, even for so short a time as half an hour only. As soon as she could collect her thoughts, the first idea that naturally occurred to Mrs. Clements was to go and make inquiries at the Asylum, to which she dreaded that Anne had been taken back. She went there the next day, having been informed of the locality in which the house was situated by Anne herself. The answer she received (her application having in all probability been made a day or two before the false Anne Catherick had really been consigned to safe keeping in the Asylum) was, that no such person had been brought back there. She had then written to Mrs. Catherick at Welmingham to know if she had seen or heard anything of her daughter, and had received an answer in the negative. After that reply had reached her, she was at the end of her resources, and perfectly ignorant where else to inquire or what else to do. From that time to this she had remained in total ignorance of the cause of Anne's disappearance and of the end of Anne's story. VII Thus far the information which I had received from Mrs. Clements--though it established facts of which I had not previously been aware--was of a preliminary character only. It was clear that the series of deceptions which had removed Anne Catherick to London, and separated her from Mrs. Clements, had been accomplished solely by Count Fosco and the Countess, and the question whether any part of the conduct of husband or wife had been of a kind to place either of them within reach of the law might be well worthy of future consideration. But the purpose I had now in view led me in another direction than this. The immediate object of my visit to Mrs. Clements was to make some approach at least to the discovery of Sir Percival's secret, and she had said nothing as yet which advanced me on my way to that important end. I felt the necessity of trying to awaken her recollections of other times, persons, and events than those on which her memory had hitherto been employed, and when I next spoke I spoke with that object indirectly in view. "I wish I could be of any help to you in this sad calamity," I said. "All I can do is to feel heartily for your distress. If Anne had been your own child, Mrs. Clements, you could have shown her no truer kindness--you could have made no readier sacrifices for her sake." "There's no great merit in that, sir," said Mrs. Clements simply. "The poor thing was as good as my own child to me. I nursed her from a baby, sir, bringing her up by hand--and a hard job it was to rear her. It wouldn't go to my heart so to lose her if I hadn't made her first short clothes and taught her to walk. I always said she was sent to console me for never having chick or child of my own. And now she's lost the old times keep coming back to my mind, and even at my age I can't help crying about her--I can't indeed, sir!" I waited a little to give Mrs. Clements time to compose herself. Was the light that I had been looking for so long glimmering on me--far off, as yet--in the good woman's recollections of Anne's early life? "Did you know Mrs. Catherick before Anne was born?" I asked. "Not very long, sir--not above four months. We saw a great deal of each other in that time, but we were never very friendly together." Her voice was steadier as she made that reply. Painful as many of her recollections might be, I observed that it was unconsciously a relief to her mind to revert to the dimly-seen troubles of the past, after dwelling so long on the vivid sorrows of the present. "Were you and Mrs. Catherick neighbours?" I inquired, leading her memory on as encouragingly as I could. "Yes, sir--neighbours at Old Welmingham." "OLD Welmingham? There are two places of that name, then, in Hampshire?" "Well, sir, there used to be in those days--better than three-and-twenty years ago. They built a new town about two miles off, convenient to the river--and Old Welmingham, which was never much more than a village, got in time to be deserted. The new town is the place they call Welmingham now--but the old parish church is the parish church still. It stands by itself, with the houses pulled down or gone to ruin all round it. I've lived to see sad changes. It was a pleasant, pretty place in my time." "Did you live there before your marriage, Mrs. Clements?" "No, sir--I'm a Norfolk woman. It wasn't the place my husband belonged to either. He was from Grimsby, as I told you, and he served his apprenticeship there. But having friends down south, and hearing of an opening, he got into business at Southampton. It was in a small way, but he made enough for a plain man to retire on, and settled at Old Welmingham. I went there with him when he married me. We were neither of us young, but we lived very happy together--happier than our neighbour, Mr. Catherick, lived along with his wife when they came to Old Welmingham a year or two afterwards." "Was your husband acquainted with them before that?" "With Catherick, sir--not with his wife. She was a stranger to both of us. Some gentlemen had made interest for Catherick, and he got the situation of clerk at Welmingham church, which was the reason of his coming to settle in our neighbourhood. He brought his newly-married wife along with him, and we heard in course of time she had been lady's-maid in a family that lived at Varneck Hall, near Southampton. Catherick had found it a hard matter to get her to marry him, in consequence of her holding herself uncommonly high. He had asked and asked, and given the thing up at last, seeing she was so contrary about it. When he HAD given it up she turned contrary just the other way, and came to him of her own accord, without rhyme or reason seemingly. My poor husband always said that was the time to have given her a lesson. But Catherick was too fond of her to do anything of the sort--he never checked her either before they were married or after. He was a quick man in his feelings, letting them carry him a deal too far, now in one way and now in another, and he would have spoilt a better wife than Mrs. Catherick if a better had married him. I don't like to speak ill of any one, sir, but she was a heartless woman, with a terrible will of her own--fond of foolish admiration and fine clothes, and not caring to show so much as decent outward respect to Catherick, kindly as he always treated her. My husband said he thought things would turn out badly when they first came to live near us, and his words proved true. Before they had been quite four months in our neighbourhood there was a dreadful scandal and a miserable break-up in their household. Both of them were in fault--I am afraid both of them were equally in fault." "You mean both husband and wife?" "Oh, no, sir! I don't mean Catherick--he was only to be pitied. I meant his wife and the person--" "And the person who caused the scandal?" "Yes, sir. A gentleman born and brought up, who ought to have set a better example. You know him, sir--and my poor dear Anne knew him only too well." "Sir Percival Glyde?" "Yes, Sir Percival Glyde." My heart beat fast--I thought I had my hand on the clue. How little I knew then of the windings of the labyrinths which were still to mislead me! "Did Sir Percival live in your neighbourhood at that time?" I asked. "No, sir. He came among us as a stranger. His father had died not long before in foreign parts. I remember he was in mourning. He put up at the little inn on the river (they have pulled it down since that time), where gentlemen used to go to fish. He wasn't much noticed when he first came--it was a common thing enough for gentlemen to travel from all parts of England to fish in our river." "Did he make his appearance in the village before Anne was born?" "Yes, sir. Anne was born in the June month of eighteen hundred and twenty-seven--and I think he came at the end of April or the beginning of May." "Came as a stranger to all of you? A stranger to Mrs. Catherick as well as to the rest of the neighbours?" "So we thought at first, sir. But when the scandal broke out, nobody believed they were strangers. I remember how it happened as well as if it was yesterday. Catherick came into our garden one night, and woke us by throwing up a handful of gravel from the walk at our window. I heard him beg my husband, for the Lord's sake, to come down and speak to him. They were a long time together talking in the porch. When my husband came back upstairs he was all of a tremble. He sat down on the side of the bed and he says to me, 'Lizzie! I always told you that woman was a bad one--I always said she would end ill, and I'm afraid in my own mind that the end has come already. Catherick has found a lot of lace handkerchiefs, and two fine rings, and a new gold watch and chain, hid away in his wife's drawer--things that nobody but a born lady ought ever to have--and his wife won't say how she came by them.' 'Does he think she stole them?' says I. 'No,' says he, 'stealing would be bad enough. But it's worse than that, she's had no chance of stealing such things as those, and she's not a woman to take them if she had. They're gifts, Lizzie--there's her own initials engraved inside the watch--and Catherick has seen her talking privately, and carrying on as no married woman should, with that gentleman in mourning, Sir Percival Glyde. Don't you say anything about it--I've quieted Catherick for to-night. I've told him to keep his tongue to himself, and his eyes and his ears open, and to wait a day or two, till he can be quite certain.' 'I believe you are both of you wrong,' says I. 'It's not in nature, comfortable and respectable as she is here, that Mrs. Catherick should take up with a chance stranger like Sir Percival Glyde.' 'Ay, but is he a stranger to her?' says my husband. 'You forget how Catherick's wife came to marry him. She went to him of her own accord, after saying No over and over again when he asked her. There have been wicked women before her time, Lizzie, who have used honest men who loved them as a means of saving their characters, and I'm sorely afraid this Mrs. Catherick is as wicked as the worst of them. We shall see,' says my husband, 'we shall soon see.' And only two days afterwards we did see." Mrs. Clements waited for a moment before she went on. Even in that moment, I began to doubt whether the clue that I thought I had found was really leading me to the central mystery of the labyrinth after all. Was this common, too common, story of a man's treachery and a woman's frailty the key to a secret which had been the lifelong terror of Sir Percival Glyde? "Well, sir, Catherick took my husband's advice and waited," Mrs. Clements continued. "And as I told you, he hadn't long to wait. On the second day he found his wife and Sir Percival whispering together quite familiar, close under the vestry of the church. I suppose they thought the neighbourhood of the vestry was the last place in the world where anybody would think of looking after them, but, however that may be, there they were. Sir Percival, being seemingly surprised and confounded, defended himself in such a guilty way that poor Catherick (whose quick temper I have told you of already) fell into a kind of frenzy at his own disgrace, and struck Sir Percival. He was no match (and I am sorry to say it) for the man who had wronged him, and he was beaten in the cruelest manner, before the neighbours, who had come to the place on hearing the disturbance, could run in to part them. All this happened towards evening, and before nightfall, when my husband went to Catherick's house, he was gone, nobody knew where. No living soul in the village ever saw him again. He knew too well, by that time, what his wife's vile reason had been for marrying him, and he felt his misery and disgrace, especially after what had happened to him with Sir Percival, too keenly. The clergyman of the parish put an advertisement in the paper begging him to come back, and saying that he should not lose his situation or his friends. But Catherick had too much pride and spirit, as some people said--too much feeling, as I think, sir--to face his neighbours again, and try to live down the memory of his disgrace. My husband heard from him when he had left England, and heard a second time, when he was settled and doing well in America. He is alive there now, as far as I know, but none of us in the old country--his wicked wife least of all--are ever likely to set eyes on him again." "What became of Sir Percival?" I inquired. "Did he stay in the neighbourhood?" "Not he, sir. The place was too hot to hold him. He was heard at high words with Mrs. Catherick the same night when the scandal broke out, and the next morning he took himself off." "And Mrs. Catherick? Surely she never remained in the village among the people who knew of her disgrace?" "She did, sir. She was hard enough and heartless enough to set the opinions of all her neighbours at flat defiance. She declared to everybody, from the clergyman downwards, that she was the victim of a dreadful mistake, and that all the scandal-mongers in the place should not drive her out of it, as if she was a guilty woman. All through my time she lived at Old Welmingham, and after my time, when the new town was building, and the respectable neighbours began moving to it, she moved too, as if she was determined to live among them and scandalise them to the very last. There she is now, and there she will stop, in defiance of the best of them, to her dying day." "But how has she lived through all these years?" I asked. "Was her husband able and willing to help her?" "Both able and willing, sir," said Mrs. Clements. "In the second letter he wrote to my good man, he said she had borne his name, and lived in his home, and, wicked as she was, she must not starve like a beggar in the street. He could afford to make her some small allowance, and she might draw for it quarterly at a place in London." "Did she accept the allowance?" "Not a farthing of it, sir. She said she would never be beholden to Catherick for bit or drop, if she lived to be a hundred. And she has kept her word ever since. When my poor dear husband died, and left all to me, Catherick's letter was put in my possession with the other things, and I told her to let me know if she was ever in want. 'I'll let all England know I'm in want,' she said, 'before I tell Catherick, or any friend of Catherick's. Take that for your answer, and give it to HIM for an answer, if he ever writes again.'" "Do you suppose that she had money of her own?" "Very little, if any, sir. It was said, and said truly, I am afraid, that her means of living came privately from Sir Percival Glyde." After that last reply I waited a little, to reconsider what I had heard. If I unreservedly accepted the story so far, it was now plain that no approach, direct or indirect, to the Secret had yet been revealed to me, and that the pursuit of my object had ended again in leaving me face to face with the most palpable and the most disheartening failure. But there was one point in the narrative which made me doubt the propriety of accepting it unreservedly, and which suggested the idea of something hidden below the surface. I could not account to myself for the circumstance of the clerk's guilty wife voluntarily living out all her after-existence on the scene of her disgrace. The woman's own reported statement that she had taken this strange course as a practical assertion of her innocence did not satisfy me. It seemed, to my mind, more natural and more probable to assume that she was not so completely a free agent in this matter as she had herself asserted. In that case, who was the likeliest person to possess the power of compelling her to remain at Welmingham? The person unquestionably from whom she derived the means of living. She had refused assistance from her husband, she had no adequate resources of her own, she was a friendless, degraded woman--from what source should she derive help but from the source at which report pointed--Sir Percival Glyde? Reasoning on these assumptions, and always bearing in mind the one certain fact to guide me, that Mrs. Catherick was in possession of the Secret, I easily understood that it was Sir Percival's interest to keep her at Welmingham, because her character in that place was certain to isolate her from all communication with female neighbours, and to allow her no opportunities of talking incautiously in moments of free intercourse with inquisitive bosom friends. But what was the mystery to be concealed? Not Sir Percival's infamous connection with Mrs. Catherick's disgrace, for the neighbours were the very people who knew of it--not the suspicion that he was Anne's father, for Welmingham was the place in which that suspicion must inevitably exist. If I accepted the guilty appearances described to me as unreservedly as others had accepted them, if I drew from them the same superficial conclusion which Mr. Catherick and all his neighbours had drawn, where was the suggestion, in all that I had heard, of a dangerous secret between Sir Percival and Mrs. Catherick, which had been kept hidden from that time to this? And yet, in those stolen meetings, in those familiar whisperings between the clerk's wife and "the gentleman in mourning," the clue to discovery existed beyond a doubt. Was it possible that appearances in this case had pointed one way while the truth lay all the while unsuspected in another direction? Could Mrs. Catherick's assertion, that she was the victim of a dreadful mistake, by any possibility be true? Or, assuming it to be false, could the conclusion which associated Sir Percival with her guilt have been founded in some inconceivable error? Had Sir Percival, by any chance, courted the suspicion that was wrong for the sake of diverting from himself some other suspicion that was right? Here--if I could find it--here was the approach to the Secret, hidden deep under the surface of the apparently unpromising story which I had just heard. My next questions were now directed to the one object of ascertaining whether Mr. Catherick had or had not arrived truly at the conviction of his wife's misconduct. The answers I received from Mrs. Clements left me in no doubt whatever on that point. Mrs. Catherick had, on the clearest evidence, compromised her reputation, while a single woman, with some person unknown, and had married to save her character. It had been positively ascertained, by calculations of time and place into which I need not enter particularly, that the daughter who bore her husband's name was not her husband's child. The next object of inquiry, whether it was equally certain that Sir Percival must have been the father of Anne, was beset by far greater difficulties. I was in no position to try the probabilities on one side or on the other in this instance by any better test than the test of personal resemblance. "I suppose you often saw Sir Percival when he was in your village?" I said. "Yes, sir, very often," replied Mrs. Clements. "Did you ever observe that Anne was like him?" "She was not at all like him, sir." "Was she like her mother, then?" "Not like her mother either, sir. Mrs. Catherick was dark, and full in the face." Not like her mother and not like her (supposed) father. I knew that the test by personal resemblance was not to be implicitly trusted, but, on the other hand, it was not to be altogether rejected on that account. Was it possible to strengthen the evidence by discovering any conclusive facts in relation to the lives of Mrs. Catherick and Sir Percival before they either of them appeared at Old Welmingham? When I asked my next questions I put them with this view. "When Sir Percival first arrived in your neighbourhood," I said, "did you hear where he had come from last?" "No, sir. Some said from Blackwater Park, and some said from Scotland--but nobody knew." "Was Mrs. Catherick living in service at Varneck Hall immediately before her marriage?" "Yes, sir." "And had she been long in her place?" "Three or four years, sir; I am not quite certain which." "Did you ever hear the name of the gentleman to whom Varneck Hall belonged at that time?" "Yes, sir. His name was Major Donthorne." "Did Mr. Catherick, or did any one else you knew, ever hear that Sir Percival was a friend of Major Donthorne's, or ever see Sir Percival in the neighbourhood of Varneck Hall?" "Catherick never did, sir, that I can remember--nor any one else either, that I know of." I noted down Major Donthorne's name and address, on the chance that he might still be alive, and that it might be useful at some future time to apply to him. Meanwhile, the impression on my mind was now decidedly adverse to the opinion that Sir Percival was Anne's father, and decidedly favourable to the conclusion that the secret of his stolen interviews with Mrs. Catherick was entirely unconnected with the disgrace which the woman had inflicted on her husband's good name. I could think of no further inquiries which I might make to strengthen this impression--I could only encourage Mrs. Clements to speak next of Anne's early days, and watch for any chance-suggestion which might in this way offer itself to me. "I have not heard yet," I said, "how the poor child, born in all this sin and misery, came to be trusted, Mrs. Clements, to your care." "There was nobody else, sir, to take the little helpless creature in hand," replied Mrs. Clements. "The wicked mother seemed to hate it--as if the poor baby was in fault!--from the day it was born. My heart was heavy for the child, and I made the offer to bring it up as tenderly as if it was my own." "Did Anne remain entirely under your care from that time?" "Not quite entirely, sir. Mrs. Catherick had her whims and fancies about it at times, and used now and then to lay claim to the child, as if she wanted to spite me for bringing it up. But these fits of hers never lasted for long. Poor little Anne was always returned to me, and was always glad to get back--though she led but a gloomy life in my house, having no playmates, like other children, to brighten her up. Our longest separation was when her mother took her to Limmeridge. Just at that time I lost my husband, and I felt it was as well, in that miserable affliction, that Anne should not be in the house. She was between ten and eleven years old then, slow at her lessons, poor soul, and not so cheerful as other children--but as pretty a little girl to look at as you would wish to see. I waited at home till her mother brought her back, and then I made the offer to take her with me to London--the truth being, sir, that I could not find it in my heart to stop at Old Welmingham after my husband's death, the place was so changed and so dismal to me." "And did Mrs. Catherick consent to your proposal?" "No, sir. She came back from the north harder and bitterer than ever. Folks did say that she had been obliged to ask Sir Percival's leave to go, to begin with; and that she only went to nurse her dying sister at Limmeridge because the poor woman was reported to have saved money--the truth being that she hardly left enough to bury her. These things may have soured Mrs. Catherick likely enough, but however that may be, she wouldn't hear of my taking the child away. She seemed to like distressing us both by parting us. All I could do was to give Anne my direction, and to tell her privately, if she was ever in trouble, to come to me. But years passed before she was free to come. I never saw her again, poor soul, till the night she escaped from the mad-house." "You know, Mrs. Clements, why Sir Percival Glyde shut her up?" "I only know what Anne herself told me, sir. The poor thing used to ramble and wander about it sadly. She said her mother had got some secret of Sir Percival's to keep, and had let it out to her long after I left Hampshire--and when Sir Percival found she knew it, he shut her up. But she never could say what it was when I asked her. All she could tell me was, that her mother might be the ruin and destruction of Sir Percival if she chose. Mrs. Catherick may have let out just as much as that, and no more. I'm next to certain I should have heard the whole truth from Anne, if she had really known it as she pretended to do, and as she very likely fancied she did, poor soul." This idea had more than once occurred to my own mind. I had already told Marian that I doubted whether Laura was really on the point of making any important discovery when she and Anne Catherick were disturbed by Count Fosco at the boat-house. It was perfectly in character with Anne's mental affliction that she should assume an absolute knowledge of the secret on no better grounds than vague suspicion, derived from hints which her mother had incautiously let drop in her presence. Sir Percival's guilty distrust would, in that case, infallibly inspire him with the false idea that Anne knew all from her mother, just as it had afterwards fixed in his mind the equally false suspicion that his wife knew all from Anne. The time was passing, the morning was wearing away. It was doubtful, if I stayed longer, whether I should hear anything more from Mrs. Clements that would be at all useful to my purpose. I had already discovered those local and family particulars, in relation to Mrs. Catherick, of which I had been in search, and I had arrived at certain conclusions, entirely new to me, which might immensely assist in directing the course of my future proceedings. I rose to take my leave, and to thank Mrs. Clements for the friendly readiness she had shown in affording me information. "I am afraid you must have thought me very inquisitive," I said. "I have troubled you with more questions than many people would have cared to answer." "You are heartily welcome, sir, to anything I can tell you," answered Mrs. Clements. She stopped and looked at me wistfully. "But I do wish," said the poor woman, "you could have told me a little more about Anne, sir. I thought I saw something in your face when you came in which looked as if you could. You can't think how hard it is not even to know whether she is living or dead. I could bear it better if I was only certain. You said you never expected we should see her alive again. Do you know, sir--do you know for truth--that it has pleased God to take her?" I was not proof against this appeal, it would have been unspeakably mean and cruel of me if I had resisted it. "I am afraid there is no doubt of the truth," I answered gently; "I have the certainty in my own mind that her troubles in this world are over." The poor woman dropped into her chair and hid her face from me. "Oh, sir," she said, "how do you know it? Who can have told you?" "No one has told me, Mrs. Clements. But I have reasons for feeling sure of it--reasons which I promise you shall know as soon as I can safely explain them. I am certain she was not neglected in her last moments--I am certain the heart complaint from which she suffered so sadly was the true cause of her death. You shall feel as sure of this as I do, soon--you shall know, before long, that she is buried in a quiet country churchyard--in a pretty, peaceful place, which you might have chosen for her yourself." "Dead!" said Mrs. Clements, "dead so young, and I am left to hear it! I made her first short frocks. I taught her to walk. The first time she ever said Mother she said it to me--and now I am left and Anne is taken! Did you say, sir," said the poor woman, removing the handkerchief from her face, and looking up at me for the first time, "did you say that she had been nicely buried? Was it the sort of funeral she might have had if she had really been my own child?" I assured her that it was. She seemed to take an inexplicable pride in my answer--to find a comfort in it which no other and higher considerations could afford. "It would have broken my heart," she said simply, "if Anne had not been nicely buried--but how do you know it, sir? who told you?" I once more entreated her to wait until I could speak to her unreservedly. "You are sure to see me again," I said, "for I have a favour to ask when you are a little more composed--perhaps in a day or two." "Don't keep it waiting, sir, on my account," said Mrs. Clements. "Never mind my crying if I can be of use. If you have anything on your mind to say to me, sir, please to say it now." "I only wish to ask you one last question," I said. "I only want to know Mrs. Catherick's address at Welmingham." My request so startled Mrs. Clements, that, for the moment, even the tidings of Anne's death seemed to be driven from her mind. Her tears suddenly ceased to flow, and she sat looking at me in blank amazement. "For the Lord's sake, sir!" she said, "what do you want with Mrs. Catherick!" "I want this, Mrs. Clements," I replied, "I want to know the secret of those private meetings of hers with Sir Percival Glyde. There is something more in what you have told me of that woman's past conduct, and of that man's past relations with her, than you or any of your neighbours ever suspected. There is a secret we none of us know between those two, and I am going to Mrs. Catherick with the resolution to find it out." "Think twice about it, sir!" said Mrs. Clements, rising in her earnestness and laying her hand on my arm. "She's an awful woman--you don't know her as I do. Think twice about it." "I am sure your warning is kindly meant, Mrs. Clements. But I am determined to see the woman, whatever comes of it." Mrs. Clements looked me anxiously in the face. "I see your mind is made up, sir," she said. "I will give you the address." I wrote it down in my pocket-book and then took her hand to say farewell. "You shall hear from me soon," I said; "you shall know all that I have promised to tell you." Mrs. Clements sighed and shook her head doubtfully. "An old woman's advice is sometimes worth taking, sir," she said. "Think twice before you go to Welmingham." VIII When I reached home again after my interview with Mrs. Clements, I was struck by the appearance of a change in Laura. The unvarying gentleness and patience which long misfortune had tried so cruelly and had never conquered yet, seemed now to have suddenly failed her. Insensible to all Marian's attempts to soothe and amuse her, she sat, with her neglected drawing pushed away on the table, her eyes resolutely cast down, her fingers twining and untwining themselves restlessly in her lap. Marian rose when I came in, with a silent distress in her face, waited for a moment to see if Laura would look up at my approach, whispered to me, "Try if you can rouse her," and left the room. I sat down in the vacant chair--gently unclasped the poor, worn, restless fingers, and took both her hands in mine. "What are you thinking of, Laura? Tell me, my darling--try and tell me what it is." She struggled with herself, and raised her eyes to mine. "I can't feel happy," she said, "I can't help thinking----" She stopped, bent forward a little, and laid her head on my shoulder, with a terrible mute helplessness that struck me to the heart. "Try to tell me," I repeated gently; "try to tell me why you are not happy." "I am so useless--I am such a burden on both of you," she answered, with a weary, hopeless sigh. "You work and get money, Walter, and Marian helps you. Why is there nothing I can do? You will end in liking Marian better than you like me--you will, because I am so helpless! Oh, don't, don't, don't treat me like a child!" I raised her head, and smoothed away the tangled hair that fell over her face, and kissed her--my poor, faded flower! my lost, afflicted sister! "You shall help us, Laura," I said, "you shall begin, my darling, to-day." She looked at me with a feverish eagerness, with a breathless interest, that made me tremble for the new life of hope which I had called into being by those few words. I rose, and set her drawing materials in order, and placed them near her again. "You know that I work and get money by drawing," I said. "Now you have taken such pains, now you are so much improved, you shall begin to work and get money too. Try to finish this little sketch as nicely and prettily as you can. When it is done I will take it away with me, and the same person will buy it who buys all that I do. You shall keep your own earnings in your own purse, and Marian shall come to you to help us, as often as she comes to me. Think how useful you are going to make yourself to both of us, and you will soon be as happy, Laura, as the day is long." Her face grew eager, and brightened into a smile. In the moment while it lasted, in the moment when she again took up the pencils that had been laid aside, she almost looked like the Laura of past days. I had rightly interpreted the first signs of a new growth and strength in her mind, unconsciously expressing themselves in the notice she had taken of the occupations which filled her sister's life and mine. Marian (when I told her what had passed) saw, as I saw, that she was longing to assume her own little position of importance, to raise herself in her own estimation and in ours--and, from that day, we tenderly helped the new ambition which gave promise of the hopeful, happier future, that might now not be far off. Her drawings, as she finished them, or tried to finish them, were placed in my hands. Marian took them from me and hid them carefully, and I set aside a little weekly tribute from my earnings, to be offered to her as the price paid by strangers for the poor, faint, valueless sketches, of which I was the only purchaser. It was hard sometimes to maintain our innocent deception, when she proudly brought out her purse to contribute her share towards the expenses, and wondered with serious interest, whether I or she had earned the most that week. I have all those hidden drawings in my possession still--they are my treasures beyond price--the dear remembrances that I love to keep alive--the friends in past adversity that my heart will never part from, my tenderness never forget. Am I trifling, here, with the necessities of my task? am I looking forward to the happier time which my narrative has not yet reached? Yes. Back again--back to the days of doubt and dread, when the spirit within me struggled hard for its life, in the icy stillness of perpetual suspense. I have paused and rested for a while on my forward course. It is not, perhaps, time wasted, if the friends who read these pages have paused and rested too. I took the first opportunity I could find of speaking to Marian in private, and of communicating to her the result of the inquiries which I had made that morning. She seemed to share the opinion on the subject of my proposed journey to Welmingham, which Mrs. Clements had already expressed to me. "Surely, Walter," she said, "you hardly know enough yet to give you any hope of claiming Mrs. Catherick's confidence? Is it wise to proceed to these extremities, before you have really exhausted all safer and simpler means of attaining your object? When you told me that Sir Percival and the Count were the only two people in existence who knew the exact date of Laura's journey, you forgot, and I forgot, that there was a third person who must surely know it--I mean Mrs. Rubelle. Would it not be far easier, and far less dangerous, to insist on a confession from her, than to force it from Sir Percival?" "It might be easier," I replied, "but we are not aware of the full extent of Mrs. Rubelle's connivance and interest in the conspiracy, and we are therefore not certain that the date has been impressed on her mind, as it has been assuredly impressed on the minds of Sir Percival and the Count. It is too late, now, to waste the time on Mrs. Rubelle, which may be all-important to the discovery of the one assailable point in Sir Percival's life. Are you thinking a little too seriously, Marian, of the risk I may run in returning to Hampshire? Are you beginning to doubt whether Sir Percival Glyde may not in the end be more than a match for me?" "He will not be more than your match," she replied decidedly, "because he will not be helped in resisting you by the impenetrable wickedness of the Count." "What has led you to that conclusion?" I replied, in some surprise. "My own knowledge of Sir Percival's obstinacy and impatience of the Count's control," she answered. "I believe he will insist on meeting you single-handed--just as he insisted at first on acting for himself at Blackwater Park. The time for suspecting the Count's interference will be the time when you have Sir Percival at your mercy. His own interests will then be directly threatened, and he will act, Walter, to terrible purpose in his own defence." "We may deprive him of his weapons beforehand," I said. "Some of the particulars I have heard from Mrs. Clements may yet be turned to account against him, and other means of strengthening the case may be at our disposal. There are passages in Mrs. Michelson's narrative which show that the Count found it necessary to place himself in communication with Mr. Fairlie, and there may be circumstances which compromise him in that proceeding. While I am away, Marian, write to Mr. Fairlie and say that you want an answer describing exactly what passed between the Count and himself, and informing you also of any particulars that may have come to his knowledge at the same time in connection with his niece. Tell him that the statement you request will, sooner or later, be insisted on, if he shows any reluctance to furnish you with it of his own accord." "The letter shall be written, Walter. But are you really determined to go to Welmingham?" "Absolutely determined. I will devote the next two days to earning what we want for the week to come, and on the third day I go to Hampshire." When the third day came I was ready for my journey. As it was possible that I might be absent for some little time, I arranged with Marian that we were to correspond every day--of course addressing each other by assumed names, for caution's sake. As long as I heard from her regularly, I should assume that nothing was wrong. But if the morning came and brought me no letter, my return to London would take place, as a matter of course, by the first train. I contrived to reconcile Laura to my departure by telling her that I was going to the country to find new purchasers for her drawings and for mine, and I left her occupied and happy. Marian followed me downstairs to the street door. "Remember what anxious hearts you leave here," she whispered, as we stood together in the passage. "Remember all the hopes that hang on your safe return. If strange things happen to you on this journey--if you and Sir Percival meet----" "What makes you think we shall meet?" I asked. "I don't know--I have fears and fancies that I cannot account for. Laugh at them, Walter, if you like--but, for God's sake, keep your temper if you come in contact with that man!" "Never fear, Marian! I answer for my self-control." With those words we parted. I walked briskly to the station. There was a glow of hope in me. There was a growing conviction in my mind that my journey this time would not be taken in vain. It was a fine, clear, cold morning. My nerves were firmly strung, and I felt all the strength of my resolution stirring in me vigorously from head to foot. As I crossed the railway platform, and looked right and left among the people congregated on it, to search for any faces among them that I knew, the doubt occurred to me whether it might not have been to my advantage if I had adopted a disguise before setting out for Hampshire. But there was something so repellent to me in the idea--something so meanly like the common herd of spies and informers in the mere act of adopting a disguise--that I dismissed the question from consideration almost as soon as it had risen in my mind. Even as a mere matter of expediency the proceeding was doubtful in the extreme. If I tried the experiment at home the landlord of the house would sooner or later discover me, and would have his suspicions aroused immediately. If I tried it away from home the same persons might see me, by the commonest accident, with the disguise and without it, and I should in that way be inviting the notice and distrust which it was my most pressing interest to avoid. In my own character I had acted thus far--and in my own character I was resolved to continue to the end. The train left me at Welmingham early in the afternoon. Is there any wilderness of sand in the deserts of Arabia, is there any prospect of desolation among the ruins of Palestine, which can rival the repelling effect on the eye, and the depressing influence on the mind, of an English country town in the first stage of its existence, and in the transition state of its prosperity? I asked myself that question as I passed through the clean desolation, the neat ugliness, the prim torpor of the streets of Welmingham. And the tradesmen who stared after me from their lonely shops--the trees that drooped helpless in their arid exile of unfinished crescents and squares--the dead house-carcasses that waited in vain for the vivifying human element to animate them with the breath of life--every creature that I saw, every object that I passed, seemed to answer with one accord: The deserts of Arabia are innocent of our civilised desolation--the ruins of Palestine are incapable of our modern gloom! I inquired my way to the quarter of the town in which Mrs. Catherick lived, and on reaching it found myself in a square of small houses, one story high. There was a bare little plot of grass in the middle, protected by a cheap wire fence. An elderly nursemaid and two children were standing in a corner of the enclosure, looking at a lean goat tethered to the grass. Two foot-passengers were talking together on one side of the pavement before the houses, and an idle little boy was leading an idle little dog along by a string on the other. I heard the dull tinkling of a piano at a distance, accompanied by the intermittent knocking of a hammer nearer at hand. These were all the sights and sounds of life that encountered me when I entered the square. I walked at once to the door of Number Thirteen--the number of Mrs. Catherick's house--and knocked, without waiting to consider beforehand how I might best present myself when I got in. The first necessity was to see Mrs. Catherick. I could then judge, from my own observation, of the safest and easiest manner of approaching the object of my visit. The door was opened by a melancholy middle-aged woman servant. I gave her my card, and asked if I could see Mrs. Catherick. The card was taken into the front parlour, and the servant returned with a message requesting me to mention what my business was. "Say, if you please, that my business relates to Mrs. Catherick's daughter," I replied. This was the best pretext I could think of, on the spur of the moment, to account for my visit. The servant again retired to the parlour, again returned, and this time begged me, with a look of gloomy amazement, to walk in. I entered a little room, with a flaring paper of the largest pattern on the walls. Chairs, tables, cheffonier, and sofa, all gleamed with the glutinous brightness of cheap upholstery. On the largest table, in the middle of the room, stood a smart Bible, placed exactly in the centre on a red and yellow woollen mat and at the side of the table nearest to the window, with a little knitting-basket on her lap, and a wheezing, blear-eyed old spaniel crouched at her feet, there sat an elderly woman, wearing a black net cap and a black silk gown, and having slate-coloured mittens on her hands. Her iron-grey hair hung in heavy bands on either side of her face--her dark eyes looked straight forward, with a hard, defiant, implacable stare. She had full square cheeks, a long, firm chin, and thick, sensual, colourless lips. Her figure was stout and sturdy, and her manner aggressively self-possessed. This was Mrs. Catherick. "You have come to speak to me about my daughter," she said, before I could utter a word on my side. "Be so good as to mention what you have to say." The tone of her voice was as hard, as defiant, as implacable as the expression of her eyes. She pointed to a chair, and looked me all over attentively, from head to foot, as I sat down in it. I saw that my only chance with this woman was to speak to her in her own tone, and to meet her, at the outset of our interview, on her own ground. "You are aware," I said, "that your daughter has been lost?" "I am perfectly aware of it." "Have you felt any apprehension that the misfortune of her loss might be followed by the misfortune of her death?" "Yes. Have you come here to tell me she is dead?" "I have." "Why?" She put that extraordinary question without the slightest change in her voice, her face, or her manner. She could not have appeared more perfectly unconcerned if I had told her of the death of the goat in the enclosure outside. "Why?" I repeated. "Do you ask why I come here to tell you of your daughter's death?" "Yes. What interest have you in me, or in her? How do you come to know anything about my daughter?" "In this way. I met her on the night when she escaped from the Asylum, and I assisted her in reaching a place of safety." "You did very wrong." "I am sorry to hear her mother say so." "Her mother does say so. How do you know she is dead?" "I am not at liberty to say how I know it--but I DO know it." "Are you at liberty to say how you found out my address?" "Certainly. I got your address from Mrs. Clements." "Mrs. Clements is a foolish woman. Did she tell you to come here?" "She did not." "Then, I ask you again, why did you come?" As she was determined to have her answer, I gave it to her in the plainest possible form. "I came," I said, "because I thought Anne Catherick's mother might have some natural interest in knowing whether she was alive or dead." "Just so," said Mrs. Catherick, with additional self-possession. "Had you no other motive?" I hesitated. The right answer to that question was not easy to find at a moment's notice. "If you have no other motive," she went on, deliberately taking off her slate-coloured mittens, and rolling them up, "I have only to thank you for your visit, and to say that I will not detain you here any longer. Your information would be more satisfactory if you were willing to explain how you became possessed of it. However, it justifies me, I suppose, in going into mourning. There is not much alteration necessary in my dress, as you see. When I have changed my mittens, I shall be all in black." She searched in the pocket of her gown, drew out a pair of black lace mittens, put them on with the stoniest and steadiest composure, and then quietly crossed her hands in her lap. "I wish you good morning," she said. The cool contempt of her manner irritated me into directly avowing that the purpose of my visit had not been answered yet. "I HAVE another motive in coming here," I said. "Ah! I thought so," remarked Mrs. Catherick. "Your daughter's death----" "What did she die of?" "Of disease of the heart." "Yes. Go on." "Your daughter's death has been made the pretext for inflicting serious injury on a person who is very dear to me. Two men have been concerned, to my certain knowledge, in doing that wrong. One of them is Sir Percival Glyde." "Indeed!" I looked attentively to see if she flinched at the sudden mention of that name. Not a muscle of her stirred--the hard, defiant, implacable stare in her eyes never wavered for an instant. "You may wonder," I went on, "how the event of your daughter's death can have been made the means of inflicting injury on another person." "No," said Mrs. Catherick; "I don't wonder at all. This appears to be your affair. You are interested in my affairs. I am not interested in yours." "You may ask, then," I persisted, "why I mention the matter in your presence." "Yes, I DO ask that." "I mention it because I am determined to bring Sir Percival Glyde to account for the wickedness he has committed." "What have I to do with your determination?" "You shall hear. There are certain events in Sir Percival's past life which it is necessary for my purpose to be fully acquainted with. YOU know them--and for that reason I come to YOU." "What events do you mean?" "Events that occurred at Old Welmingham when your husband was parish-clerk at that place, and before the time when your daughter was born." I had reached the woman at last through the barrier of impenetrable reserve that she had tried to set up between us. I saw her temper smouldering in her eyes--as plainly as I saw her hands grow restless, then unclasp themselves, and begin mechanically smoothing her dress over her knees. "What do you know of those events?" she asked. "All that Mrs. Clements could tell me," I answered. There was a momentary flush on her firm square face, a momentary stillness in her restless hands, which seemed to betoken a coming outburst of anger that might throw her off her guard. But no--she mastered the rising irritation, leaned back in her chair, crossed her arms on her broad bosom, and with a smile of grim sarcasm on her thick lips, looked at me as steadily as ever. "Ah! I begin to understand it all now," she said, her tamed and disciplined anger only expressing itself in the elaborate mockery of her tone and manner. "You have got a grudge of your own against Sir Percival Glyde, and I must help you to wreak it. I must tell you this, that, and the other about Sir Percival and myself, must I? Yes, indeed? You have been prying into my private affairs. You think you have found a lost woman to deal with, who lives here on sufferance, and who will do anything you ask for fear you may injure her in the opinions of the town's-people. I see through you and your precious speculation--I do! and it amuses me. Ha! ha!" She stopped for a moment, her arms tightened over her bosom, and she laughed to herself--a hard, harsh, angry laugh. "You don't know how I have lived in this place, and what I have done in this place, Mr. What's-your-name," she went on. "I'll tell you, before I ring the bell and have you shown out. I came here a wronged woman--I came here robbed of my character and determined to claim it back. I've been years and years about it--and I HAVE claimed it back. I have matched the respectable people fairly and openly on their own ground. If they say anything against me now they must say it in secret--they can't say it, they daren't say it, openly. I stand high enough in this town to be out of your reach. THE CLERGYMAN BOWS TO ME. Aha! you didn't bargain for that when you came here. Go to the church and inquire about me--you will find Mrs. Catherick has her sitting like the rest of them, and pays the rent on the day it's due. Go to the town-hall. There's a petition lying there--a petition of the respectable inhabitants against allowing a circus to come and perform here and corrupt our morals--yes! OUR morals. I signed that petition this morning. Go to the bookseller's shop. The clergyman's Wednesday evening Lectures on Justification by Faith are publishing there by subscription--I'm down on the list. The doctor's wife only put a shilling in the plate at our last charity sermon--I put half-a-crown. Mr. Churchwarden Soward held the plate, and bowed to me. Ten years ago he told Pigrum the chemist I ought to be whipped out of the town at the cart's tail. Is your mother alive? Has she got a better Bible on her table than I have got on mine? Does she stand better with her trades-people than I do with mine? Has she always lived within her income? I have always lived within mine. Ah! there IS the clergyman coming along the square. Look, Mr. What's-your-name--look, if you please!" She started up with the activity of a young woman, went to the window, waited till the clergyman passed, and bowed to him solemnly. The clergyman ceremoniously raised his hat, and walked on. Mrs. Catherick returned to her chair, and looked at me with a grimmer sarcasm than ever. "There!" she said. "What do you think of that for a woman with a lost character? How does your speculation look now?" The singular manner in which she had chosen to assert herself, the extraordinary practical vindication of her position in the town which she had just offered, had so perplexed me that I listened to her in silent surprise. I was not the less resolved, however, to make another effort to throw her off her guard. If the woman's fierce temper once got beyond her control, and once flamed out on me, she might yet say the words which would put the clue in my hands. "How does your speculation look now?" she repeated. "Exactly as it looked when I first came in," I answered. "I don't doubt the position you have gained in the town, and I don't wish to assail it even if I could. I came here because Sir Percival Glyde is, to my certain knowledge, your enemy, as well as mine. If I have a grudge against him, you have a grudge against him too. You may deny it if you like, you may distrust me as much as you please, you may be as angry as you will--but, of all the women in England, you, if you have any sense of injury, are the woman who ought to help me to crush that man." "Crush him for yourself," she said; "then come back here, and see what I say to you." She spoke those words as she had not spoken yet, quickly, fiercely, vindictively. I had stirred in its lair the serpent-hatred of years, but only for a moment. Like a lurking reptile it leaped up at me as she eagerly bent forward towards the place in which I was sitting. Like a lurking reptile it dropped out of sight again as she instantly resumed her former position in the chair. "You won't trust me?" I said. "No." "You are afraid?" "Do I look as if I was?" "You are afraid of Sir Percival Glyde?" "Am I?" Her colour was rising, and her hands were at work again smoothing her gown. I pressed the point farther and farther home, I went on without allowing her a moment of delay. "Sir Percival has a high position in the world," I said; "it would be no wonder if you were afraid of him. Sir Percival is a powerful man, a baronet, the possessor of a fine estate, the descendant of a great family----" She amazed me beyond expression by suddenly bursting out laughing. "Yes," she repeated, in tones of the bitterest, steadiest contempt. "A baronet, the possessor of a fine estate, the descendant of a great family. Yes, indeed! A great family--especially by the mother's side." There was no time to reflect on the words that had just escaped her, there was only time to feel that they were well worth thinking over the moment I left the house. "I am not here to dispute with you about family questions," I said. "I know nothing of Sir Percival's mother----" "And you know as little of Sir Percival himself," she interposed sharply. "I advise you not to be too sure of that," I rejoined. "I know some things about him, and I suspect many more." "What do you suspect?" "I'll tell you what I DON'T suspect. I DON'T suspect him of being Anne's father." She started to her feet, and came close up to me with a look of fury. "How dare you talk to me about Anne's father! How dare you say who was her father, or who wasn't!" she broke out, her face quivering, her voice trembling with passion. "The secret between you and Sir Percival is not THAT secret," I persisted. "The mystery which darkens Sir Percival's life was not born with your daughter's birth, and has not died with your daughter's death." She drew back a step. "Go!" she said, and pointed sternly to the door. "There was no thought of the child in your heart or in his," I went on, determined to press her back to her last defences. "There was no bond of guilty love between you and him when you held those stolen meetings, when your husband found you whispering together under the vestry of the church." Her pointing hand instantly dropped to her side, and the deep flush of anger faded from her face while I spoke. I saw the change pass over her--I saw that hard, firm, fearless, self-possessed woman quail under a terror which her utmost resolution was not strong enough to resist when I said those five last words, "the vestry of the church." For a minute or more we stood looking at each other in silence. I spoke first. "Do you still refuse to trust me?" I asked. She could not call the colour that had left it back to her face, but she had steadied her voice, she had recovered the defiant self-possession of her manner when she answered me. "I do refuse," she said. "Do you still tell me to go?" "Yes. Go--and never come back." I walked to the door, waited a moment before I opened it, and turned round to look at her again. "I may have news to bring you of Sir Percival which you don't expect," I said, "and in that case I shall come back." "There is no news of Sir Percival that I don't expect, except----" She stopped, her pale face darkened, and she stole back with a quiet, stealthy, cat-like step to her chair. "Except the news of his death," she said, sitting down again, with the mockery of a smile just hovering on her cruel lips, and the furtive light of hatred lurking deep in her steady eyes. As I opened the door of the room to go out, she looked round at me quickly. The cruel smile slowly widened her lips--she eyed me, with a strange stealthy interest, from head to foot--an unutterable expectation showed itself wickedly all over her face. Was she speculating, in the secrecy of her own heart, on my youth and strength, on the force of my sense of injury and the limits of my self-control, and was she considering the lengths to which they might carry me, if Sir Percival and I ever chanced to meet? The bare doubt that it might be so drove me from her presence, and silenced even the common forms of farewell on my lips. Without a word more, on my side or on hers, I left the room. As I opened the outer door, I saw the same clergyman who had already passed the house once, about to pass it again, on his way back through the square. I waited on the door-step to let him go by, and looked round, as I did so, at the parlour window. Mrs. Catherick had heard his footsteps approaching, in the silence of that lonely place, and she was on her feet at the window again, waiting for him. Not all the strength of all the terrible passions I had roused in that woman's heart, could loosen her desperate hold on the one fragment of social consideration which years of resolute effort had just dragged within her grasp. There she was again, not a minute after I had left her, placed purposely in a position which made it a matter of common courtesy on the part of the clergyman to bow to her for a second time. He raised his hat once more. I saw the hard ghastly face behind the window soften, and light up with gratified pride--I saw the head with the grim black cap bend ceremoniously in return. The clergyman had bowed to her, and in my presence, twice in one day! IX I Left the house, feeling that Mrs. Catherick had helped me a step forward, in spite of herself. Before I had reached the turning which led out of the square, my attention was suddenly aroused by the sound of a closing door behind me. I looked round, and saw an undersized man in black on the door-step of a house, which, as well as I could judge, stood next to Mrs. Catherick's place of abode--next to it, on the side nearest to me. The man did not hesitate a moment about the direction he should take. He advanced rapidly towards the turning at which I had stopped. I recognised him as the lawyer's clerk, who had preceded me in my visit to Blackwater Park, and who had tried to pick a quarrel with me, when I asked him if I could see the house. I waited where I was, to ascertain whether his object was to come to close quarters and speak on this occasion. To my surprise he passed on rapidly, without saying a word, without even looking up in my face as he went by. This was such a complete inversion of the course of proceeding which I had every reason to expect on his part, that my curiosity, or rather my suspicion, was aroused, and I determined on my side to keep him cautiously in view, and to discover what the business might be in which he was now employed. Without caring whether he saw me or not, I walked after him. He never looked back, and he led me straight through the streets to the railway station. The train was on the point of starting, and two or three passengers who were late were clustering round the small opening through which the tickets were issued. I joined them, and distinctly heard the lawyer's clerk demand a ticket for the Blackwater station. I satisfied myself that he had actually left by the train before I came away. There was only one interpretation that I could place on what I had just seen and heard. I had unquestionably observed the man leaving a house which closely adjoined Mrs. Catherick's residence. He had been probably placed there, by Sir Percival's directions, as a lodger, in anticipation of my inquiries leading me, sooner or later, to communicate with Mrs. Catherick. He had doubtless seen me go in and come out, and he had hurried away by the first train to make his report at Blackwater Park, to which place Sir Percival would naturally betake himself (knowing what he evidently knew of my movements), in order to be ready on the spot, if I returned to Hampshire. Before many days were over, there seemed every likelihood now that he and I might meet. Whatever result events might be destined to produce, I resolved to pursue my own course, straight to the end in view, without stopping or turning aside for Sir Percival or for any one. The great responsibility which weighed on me heavily in London--the responsibility of so guiding my slightest actions as to prevent them from leading accidentally to the discovery of Laura's place of refuge--was removed, now that I was in Hampshire. I could go and come as I pleased at Welmingham, and if I chanced to fail in observing any necessary precautions, the immediate results, at least, would affect no one but myself. When I left the station the winter evening was beginning to close in. There was little hope of continuing my inquiries after dark to any useful purpose in a neighbourhood that was strange to me. Accordingly, I made my way to the nearest hotel, and ordered my dinner and my bed. This done, I wrote to Marian, to tell her that I was safe and well, and that I had fair prospects of success. I had directed her, on leaving home, to address the first letter she wrote to me (the letter I expected to receive the next morning) to "The Post-Office, Welmingham," and I now begged her to send her second day's letter to the same address. I could easily receive it by writing to the postmaster if I happened to be away from the town when it arrived. The coffee-room of the hotel, as it grew late in the evening, became a perfect solitude. I was left to reflect on what I had accomplished that afternoon as uninterruptedly as if the house had been my own. Before I retired to rest I had attentively thought over my extraordinary interview with Mrs. Catherick from beginning to end, and had verified at my leisure the conclusions which I had hastily drawn in the earlier part of the day. The vestry of Old Welmingham church was the starting-point from which my mind slowly worked its way back through all that I had heard Mrs. Catherick say, and through all I had seen Mrs. Catherick do. At the time when the neighbourhood of the vestry was first referred to in my presence by Mrs. Clements, I had thought it the strangest and most unaccountable of all places for Sir Percival to select for a clandestine meeting with the clerk's wife. Influenced by this impression, and by no other, I had mentioned "the vestry of the church" before Mrs. Catherick on pure speculation--it represented one of the minor peculiarities of the story which occurred to me while I was speaking. I was prepared for her answering me confusedly or angrily, but the blank terror that seized her when I said the words took me completely by surprise. I had long before associated Sir Percival's Secret with the concealment of a serious crime which Mrs. Catherick knew of, but I had gone no further than this. Now the woman's paroxysm of terror associated the crime, either directly or indirectly, with the vestry, and convinced me that she had been more than the mere witness of it--she was also the accomplice, beyond a doubt. What had been the nature of the crime? Surely there was a contemptible side to it, as well as a dangerous side, or Mrs. Catherick would not have repeated my own words, referring to Sir Percival's rank and power, with such marked disdain as she had certainly displayed. It was a contemptible crime then and a dangerous crime, and she had shared in it, and it was associated with the vestry of the church. The next consideration to be disposed of led me a step farther from this point. Mrs. Catherick's undisguised contempt for Sir Percival plainly extended to his mother as well. She had referred with the bitterest sarcasm to the great family he had descended from--"especially by the mother's side." What did this mean? There appeared to be only two explanations of it. Either his mother's birth had been low, or his mother's reputation was damaged by some hidden flaw with which Mrs. Catherick and Sir Percival were both privately acquainted? I could only put the first explanation to the test by looking at the register of her marriage, and so ascertaining her maiden name and her parentage as a preliminary to further inquiries. On the other hand, if the second case supposed were the true one, what had been the flaw in her reputation? Remembering the account which Marian had given me of Sir Percival's father and mother, and of the suspiciously unsocial secluded life they had both led, I now asked myself whether it might not be possible that his mother had never been married at all. Here again the register might, by offering written evidence of the marriage, prove to me, at any rate, that this doubt had no foundation in truth. But where was the register to be found? At this point I took up the conclusions which I had previously formed, and the same mental process which had discovered the locality of the concealed crime, now lodged the register also in the vestry of Old Welmingham church. These were the results of my interview with Mrs. Catherick--these were the various considerations, all steadily converging to one point, which decided the course of my proceedings on the next day. The morning was cloudy and lowering, but no rain fell. I left my bag at the hotel to wait there till I called for it, and, after inquiring the way, set forth on foot for Old Welmingham church. It was a walk of rather more than two miles, the ground rising slowly all the way. On the highest point stood the church--an ancient, weather-beaten building, with heavy buttresses at its sides, and a clumsy square tower in front. The vestry at the back was built out from the church, and seemed to be of the same age. Round the building at intervals appeared the remains of the village which Mrs. Clements had described to me as her husband's place of abode in former years, and which the principal inhabitants had long since deserted for the new town. Some of the empty houses had been dismantled to their outer walls, some had been left to decay with time, and some were still inhabited by persons evidently of the poorest class. It was a dreary scene, and yet, in the worst aspect of its ruin, not so dreary as the modern town that I had just left. Here there was the brown, breezy sweep of surrounding fields for the eye to repose on--here the trees, leafless as they were, still varied the monotony of the prospect, and helped the mind to look forward to summer-time and shade. As I moved away from the back of the church, and passed some of the dismantled cottages in search of a person who might direct me to the clerk, I saw two men saunter out after me from behind a wall. The tallest of the two--a stout muscular man in the dress of a gamekeeper--was a stranger to me. The other was one of the men who had followed me in London on the day when I left Mr. Kyrle's office. I had taken particular notice of him at the time; and I felt sure that I was not mistaken in identifying the fellow on this occasion. Neither he nor his companion attempted to speak to me, and both kept themselves at a respectful distance, but the motive of their presence in the neighbourhood of the church was plainly apparent. It was exactly as I had supposed--Sir Percival was already prepared for me. My visit to Mrs. Catherick had been reported to him the evening before, and those two men had been placed on the look-out near the church in anticipation of my appearance at Old Welmingham. If I had wanted any further proof that my investigations had taken the right direction at last, the plan now adopted for watching me would have supplied it. I walked on away from the church till I reached one of the inhabited houses, with a patch of kitchen garden attached to it on which a labourer was at work. He directed me to the clerk's abode, a cottage at some little distance off, standing by itself on the outskirts of the forsaken village. The clerk was indoors, and was just putting on his greatcoat. He was a cheerful, familiar, loudly-talkative old man, with a very poor opinion (as I soon discovered) of the place in which he lived, and a happy sense of superiority to his neighbours in virtue of the great personal distinction of having once been in London. "It's well you came so early, sir," said the old man, when I had mentioned the object of my visit. "I should have been away in ten minutes more. Parish business, sir, and a goodish long trot before it's all done for a man at my age. But, bless you, I'm strong on my legs still! As long as a man don't give at his legs, there's a deal of work left in him. Don't you think so yourself, sir?" He took his keys down while he was talking from a hook behind the fireplace, and locked his cottage door behind us. "Nobody at home to keep house for me," said the clerk, with a cheerful sense of perfect freedom from all family encumbrances. "My wife's in the churchyard there, and my children are all married. A wretched place this, isn't it, sir? But the parish is a large one--every man couldn't get through the business as I do. It's learning does it, and I've had my share, and a little more. I can talk the Queen's English (God bless the Queen!), and that's more than most of the people about here can do. You're from London, I suppose, sir? I've been in London a matter of five-and-twenty year ago. What's the news there now, if you please?" Chattering on in this way, he led me back to the vestry. I looked about to see if the two spies were still in sight. They were not visible anywhere. After having discovered my application to the clerk, they had probably concealed themselves where they could watch my next proceedings in perfect freedom. The vestry door was of stout old oak, studded with strong nails, and the clerk put his large heavy key into the lock with the air of a man who knew that he had a difficulty to encounter, and who was not quite certain of creditably conquering it. "I'm obliged to bring you this way, sir," he said, "because the door from the vestry to the church is bolted on the vestry side. We might have got in through the church otherwise. This is a perverse lock, if ever there was one yet. It's big enough for a prison-door--it's been hampered over and over again, and it ought to be changed for a new one. I've mentioned that to the churchwarden fifty times over at least--he's always saying, 'I'll see about it'--and he never does see. Ah, It's a sort of lost corner, this place. Not like London--is it, sir? Bless you, we are all asleep here! We don't march with the times." After some twisting and turning of the key, the heavy lock yielded, and he opened the door. The vestry was larger than I should have supposed it to be, judging from the outside only. It was a dim, mouldy, melancholy old room, with a low, raftered ceiling. Round two sides of it, the sides nearest to the interior of the church, ran heavy wooden presses, worm-eaten and gaping with age. Hooked to the inner corner of one of these presses hung several surplices, all bulging out at their lower ends in an irreverent-looking bundle of limp drapery. Below the surplices, on the floor, stood three packing-cases, with the lids half off, half on, and the straw profusely bursting out of their cracks and crevices in every direction. Behind them, in a corner, was a litter of dusty papers, some large and rolled up like architects' plans, some loosely strung together on files like bills or letters. The room had once been lighted by a small side window, but this had been bricked up, and a lantern skylight was now substituted for it. The atmosphere of the place was heavy and mouldy, being rendered additionally oppressive by the closing of the door which led into the church. This door also was composed of solid oak, and was bolted at the top and bottom on the vestry side. "We might be tidier, mightn't we, sir?" said the cheerful clerk; "but when you're in a lost corner of a place like this, what are you to do? Why, look here now, just look at these packing-cases. There they've been, for a year or more, ready to go down to London--there they are, littering the place, and there they'll stop as long as the nails hold them together. I'll tell you what, sir, as I said before, this is not London. We are all asleep here. Bless you, WE don't march with the times!" "What is there in the packing-cases?" I asked. "Bits of old wood carvings from the pulpit, and panels from the chancel, and images from the organ-loft," said the clerk. "Portraits of the twelve apostles in wood, and not a whole nose among 'em. All broken, and worm-eaten, and crumbling to dust at the edges. As brittle as crockery, sir, and as old as the church, if not older." "And why were they going to London? To be repaired?" "That's it, sir, to be repaired, and where they were past repair, to be copied in sound wood. But, bless you, the money fell short, and there they are, waiting for new subscriptions, and nobody to subscribe. It was all done a year ago, sir. Six gentlemen dined together about it, at the hotel in the new town. They made speeches, and passed resolutions, and put their names down, and printed off thousands of prospectuses. Beautiful prospectuses, sir, all flourished over with Gothic devices in red ink, saying it was a disgrace not to restore the church and repair the famous carvings, and so on. There are the prospectuses that couldn't be distributed, and the architect's plans and estimates, and the whole correspondence which set everybody at loggerheads and ended in a dispute, all down together in that corner, behind the packing-cases. The money dribbled in a little at first--but what CAN you expect out of London? There was just enough, you know, to pack the broken carvings, and get the estimates, and pay the printer's bill, and after that there wasn't a halfpenny left. There the things are, as I said before. We have nowhere else to put them--nobody in the new town cares about accommodating us--we're in a lost corner--and this is an untidy vestry--and who's to help it?--that's what I want to know." My anxiety to examine the register did not dispose me to offer much encouragement to the old man's talkativeness. I agreed with him that nobody could help the untidiness of the vestry, and then suggested that we should proceed to our business without more delay. "Ay, ay, the marriage-register, to be sure," said the clerk, taking a little bunch of keys from his pocket. "How far do you want to look back, sir?" Marian had informed me of Sir Percival's age at the time when we had spoken together of his marriage engagement with Laura. She had then described him as being forty-five years old. Calculating back from this, and making due allowance for the year that had passed since I had gained my information, I found that he must have been born in eighteen hundred and four, and that I might safely start on my search through the register from that date. "I want to begin with the year eighteen hundred and four," I said. "Which way after that, sir?" asked the clerk. "Forwards to our time or backwards away from us?" "Backwards from eighteen hundred and four." He opened the door of one of the presses--the press from the side of which the surplices were hanging--and produced a large volume bound in greasy brown leather. I was struck by the insecurity of the place in which the register was kept. The door of the press was warped and cracked with age, and the lock was of the smallest and commonest kind. I could have forced it easily with the walking-stick I carried in my hand. "Is that considered a sufficiently secure place for the register?" I inquired. "Surely a book of such importance as this ought to be protected by a better lock, and kept carefully in an iron safe?" "Well, now, that's curious!" said the clerk, shutting up the book again, just after he had opened it, and smacking his hand cheerfully on the cover. "Those were the very words my old master was always saying years and years ago, when I was a lad. 'Why isn't the register' (meaning this register here, under my hand)--'why isn't it kept in an iron safe?' If I've heard him say that once, I've heard him say it a hundred times. He was the solicitor in those days, sir, who had the appointment of vestry-clerk to this church. A fine hearty old gentleman, and the most particular man breathing. As long as he lived he kept a copy of this book in his office at Knowlesbury, and had it posted up regular, from time to time, to correspond with the fresh entries here. You would hardly think it, but he had his own appointed days, once or twice in every quarter, for riding over to this church on his old white pony, to check the copy, by the register, with his own eyes and hands. 'How do I know?' (he used to say) 'how do I know that the register in this vestry may not be stolen or destroyed? Why isn't it kept in an iron safe? Why can't I make other people as careful as I am myself? Some of these days there will be an accident happen, and when the register's lost, then the parish will find out the value of my copy.' He used to take his pinch of snuff after that, and look about him as bold as a lord. Ah! the like of him for doing business isn't easy to find now. You may go to London and not match him, even THERE. Which year did you say, sir? Eighteen hundred and what?" "Eighteen hundred and four," I replied, mentally resolving to give the old man no more opportunities of talking, until my examination of the register was over. The clerk put on his spectacles, and turned over the leaves of the register, carefully wetting his finger and thumb at every third page. "There it is, sir," said he, with another cheerful smack on the open volume. "There's the year you want." As I was ignorant of the month in which Sir Percival was born, I began my backward search with the early part of the year. The register-book was of the old-fashioned kind, the entries being all made on blank pages in manuscript, and the divisions which separated them being indicated by ink lines drawn across the page at the close of each entry. I reached the beginning of the year eighteen hundred and four without encountering the marriage, and then travelled back through December eighteen hundred and three--through November and October--through---- No! not through September also. Under the heading of that month in the year I found the marriage. I looked carefully at the entry. It was at the bottom of a page, and was for want of room compressed into a smaller space than that occupied by the marriages above. The marriage immediately before it was impressed on my attention by the circumstance of the bridegroom's Christian name being the same as my own. The entry immediately following it (on the top of the next page) was noticeable in another way from the large space it occupied, the record in this case registering the marriages of two brothers at the same time. The register of the marriage of Sir Felix Glyde was in no respect remarkable except for the narrowness of the space into which it was compressed at the bottom of the page. The information about his wife was the usual information given in such cases. She was described as "Cecilia Jane Elster, of Park-View Cottages, Knowlesbury, only daughter of the late Patrick Elster, Esq., formerly of Bath." I noted down these particulars in my pocket-book, feeling as I did so both doubtful and disheartened about my next proceedings. The Secret which I had believed until this moment to be within my grasp seemed now farther from my reach than ever. What suggestions of any mystery unexplained had arisen out of my visit to the vestry? I saw no suggestions anywhere. What progress had I made towards discovering the suspected stain on the reputation of Sir Percival's mother? The one fact I had ascertained vindicated her reputation. Fresh doubts, fresh difficulties, fresh delays began to open before me in interminable prospect. What was I to do next? The one immediate resource left to me appeared to be this. I might institute inquiries about "Miss Elster of Knowlesbury," on the chance of advancing towards the main object of my investigation, by first discovering the secret of Mrs. Catherick's contempt for Sir Percival's mother. "Have you found what you wanted, sir?" said the clerk, as I closed the register-book. "Yes," I replied, "but I have some inquiries still to make. I suppose the clergyman who officiated here in the year eighteen hundred and three is no longer alive?" "No, no, sir, he was dead three or four years before I came here, and that was as long ago as the year twenty-seven. I got this place, sir," persisted my talkative old friend, "through the clerk before me leaving it. They say he was driven out of house and home by his wife--and she's living still down in the new town there. I don't know the rights of the story myself--all I know is I got the place. Mr. Wansborough got it for me--the son of my old master that I was tell you of. He's a free, pleasant gentleman as ever lived--rides to the hounds, keeps his pointers and all that. He's vestry-clerk here now as his father was before him." "Did you not tell me your former master lived at Knowlesbury?" I asked, calling to mind the long story about the precise gentleman of the old school with which my talkative friend had wearied me before he opened the register-book. "Yes, to be sure, sir," replied the clerk. "Old Mr. Wansborough lived at Knowlesbury, and young Mr. Wansborough lives there too." "You said just now he was vestry-clerk, like his father before him. I am not quite sure that I know what a vestry-clerk is." "Don't you indeed, sir?--and you come from London too! Every parish church, you know, has a vestry-clerk and a parish-clerk. The parish-clerk is a man like me (except that I've got a deal more learning than most of them--though I don't boast of it). The vestry-clerk is a sort of an appointment that the lawyers get, and if there's any business to be done for the vestry, why there they are to do it. It's just the same in London. Every parish church there has got its vestry-clerk--and you may take my word for it he's sure to be a lawyer." "Then young Mr. Wansborough is a lawyer, I suppose?" "Of course he is, sir! A lawyer in High Street, Knowlesbury--the old offices that his father had before him. The number of times I've swept those offices out, and seen the old gentleman come trotting in to business on his white pony, looking right and left all down the street and nodding to everybody! Bless you, he was a popular character!--he'd have done in London!" "How far is it to Knowlesbury from this place?" "A long stretch, sir," said the clerk, with that exaggerated idea of distances, and that vivid perception of difficulties in getting from place to place, which is peculiar to all country people. "Nigh on five mile, I can tell you!" It was still early in the forenoon. There was plenty of time for a walk to Knowlesbury and back again to Welmingham; and there was no person probably in the town who was fitter to assist my inquiries about the character and position of Sir Percival's mother before her marriage than the local solicitor. Resolving to go at once to Knowlesbury on foot, I led the way out of the vestry. "Thank you kindly, sir," said the clerk, as I slipped my little present into his hand. "Are you really going to walk all the way to Knowlesbury and back? Well! you're strong on your legs, too--and what a blessing that is, isn't it? There's the road, you can't miss it. I wish I was going your way--it's pleasant to meet with gentlemen from London in a lost corner like this. One hears the news. Wish you good-morning, sir, and thank you kindly once more." We parted. As I left the church behind me I looked back, and there were the two men again on the road below, with a third in their company, that third person being the short man in black whom I had traced to the railway the evening before. The three stood talking together for a little while, then separated. The man in black went away by himself towards Welmingham--the other two remained together, evidently waiting to follow me as soon as I walked on. I proceeded on my way without letting the fellows see that I took any special notice of them. They caused me no conscious irritation of feeling at that moment--on the contrary, they rather revived my sinking hopes. In the surprise of discovering the evidence of the marriage, I had forgotten the inference I had drawn on first perceiving the men in the neighbourhood of the vestry. Their reappearance reminded me that Sir Percival had anticipated my visit to Old Welmingham church as the next result of my interview with Mrs. Catherick--otherwise he would never have placed his spies there to wait for me. Smoothly and fairly as appearances looked in the vestry, there was something wrong beneath them--there was something in the register-book, for aught I knew, that I had not discovered yet. X Once out of sight of the church, I pressed forward briskly on my way to Knowlesbury. The road was, for the most part, straight and level. Whenever I looked back over it I saw the two spies steadily following me. For the greater part of the way they kept at a safe distance behind. But once or twice they quickened their pace, as if with the purpose of overtaking me, then stopped, consulted together, and fell back again to their former position. They had some special object evidently in view, and they seemed to be hesitating or differing about the best means of accomplishing it. I could not guess exactly what their design might be, but I felt serious doubts of reaching Knowlesbury without some mischance happening to me on the way. These doubts were realised. I had just entered on a lonely part of the road, with a sharp turn at some distance ahead, and had just concluded (calculating by time) that I must be getting near to the town, when I suddenly heard the steps of the men close behind me. Before I could look round, one of them (the man by whom I had been followed in London) passed rapidly on my left side and hustled me with his shoulder. I had been more irritated by the manner in which he and his companion had dogged my steps all the way from Old Welmingham than I was myself aware of, and I unfortunately pushed the fellow away smartly with my open hand. He instantly shouted for help. His companion, the tall man in the gamekeeper's clothes, sprang to my right side, and the next moment the two scoundrels held me pinioned between them in the middle of the road. The conviction that a trap had been laid for me, and the vexation of knowing that I had fallen into it, fortunately restrained me from making my position still worse by an unavailing struggle with two men, one of whom would, in all probability, have been more than a match for me single-handed. I repressed the first natural movement by which I had attempted to shake them off, and looked about to see if there was any person near to whom I could appeal. A labourer was at work in an adjoining field who must have witnessed all that had passed. I called to him to follow us to the town. He shook his head with stolid obstinacy, and walked away in the direction of a cottage which stood back from the high-road. At the same time the men who held me between them declared their intention of charging me with an assault. I was cool enough and wise enough now to make no opposition. "Drop your hold of my arms," I said, "and I will go with you to the town." The man in the gamekeeper's dress roughly refused. But the shorter man was sharp enough to look to consequences, and not to let his companion commit himself by unnecessary violence. He made a sign to the other, and I walked on between them with my arms free. We reached the turning in the road, and there, close before us, were the suburbs of Knowlesbury. One of the local policemen was walking along the path by the roadside. The men at once appealed to him. He replied that the magistrate was then sitting at the town-hall, and recommended that we should appear before him immediately. We went on to the town-hall. The clerk made out a formal summons, and the charge was preferred against me, with the customary exaggeration and the customary perversion of the truth on such occasions. The magistrate (an ill-tempered man, with a sour enjoyment in the exercise of his own power) inquired if any one on or near the road had witnessed the assault, and, greatly to my surprise, the complainant admitted the presence of the labourer in the field. I was enlightened, however, as to the object of the admission by the magistrate's next words. He remanded me at once for the production of the witness, expressing, at the same time, his willingness to take bail for my reappearance if I could produce one responsible surety to offer it. If I had been known in the town he would have liberated me on my own recognisances, but as I was a total stranger it was necessary that I should find responsible bail. The whole object of the stratagem was now disclosed to me. It had been so managed as to make a remand necessary in a town where I was a perfect stranger, and where I could not hope to get my liberty on bail. The remand merely extended over three days, until the next sitting of the magistrate. But in that time, while I was in confinement, Sir Percival might use any means he pleased to embarrass my future proceedings--perhaps to screen himself from detection altogether--without the slightest fear of any hindrance on my part. At the end of the three days the charge would, no doubt, be withdrawn, and the attendance of the witness would be perfectly useless. My indignation, I may almost say, my despair, at this mischievous check to all further progress--so base and trifling in itself, and yet so disheartening and so serious in its probable results--quite unfitted me at first to reflect on the best means of extricating myself from the dilemma in which I now stood. I had the folly to call for writing materials, and to think of privately communicating my real position to the magistrate. The hopelessness and the imprudence of this proceeding failed to strike me before I had actually written the opening lines of the letter. It was not till I had pushed the paper away--not till, I am ashamed to say, I had almost allowed the vexation of my helpless position to conquer me--that a course of action suddenly occurred to my mind, which Sir Percival had probably not anticipated, and which might set me free again in a few hours. I determined to communicate the situation in which I was placed to Mr. Dawson, of Oak Lodge. I had visited this gentleman's house, it may be remembered, at the time of my first inquiries in the Blackwater Park neighbourhood, and I had presented to him a letter of introduction from Miss Halcombe, in which she recommended me to his friendly attention in the strongest terms. I now wrote, referring to this letter, and to what I had previously told Mr. Dawson of the delicate and dangerous nature of my inquiries. I had not revealed to him the truth about Laura, having merely described my errand as being of the utmost importance to private family interests with which Miss Halcombe was concerned. Using the same caution still, I now accounted for my presence at Knowlesbury in the same manner, and I put it to the doctor to say whether the trust reposed in me by a lady whom he well knew, and the hospitality I had myself received in his house, justified me or not in asking him to come to my assistance in a place where I was quite friendless. I obtained permission to hire a messenger to drive away at once with my letter in a conveyance which might be used to bring the doctor back immediately. Oak Lodge was on the Knowlesbury side of Blackwater. The man declared he could drive there in forty minutes, and could bring Mr. Dawson back in forty more. I directed him to follow the doctor wherever he might happen to be, if he was not at home, and then sat down to wait for the result with all the patience and all the hope that I could summon to help me. It was not quite half-past one when the messenger departed. Before half-past three he returned, and brought the doctor with him. Mr. Dawson's kindness, and the delicacy with which he treated his prompt assistance quite as a matter of course, almost overpowered me. The bail required was offered, and accepted immediately. Before four o'clock, on that afternoon, I was shaking hands warmly with the good old doctor--a free man again--in the streets of Knowlesbury. Mr. Dawson hospitably invited me to go back with him to Oak Lodge, and take up my quarters there for the night. I could only reply that my time was not my own, and I could only ask him to let me pay my visit in a few days, when I might repeat my thanks, and offer to him all the explanations which I felt to be only his due, but which I was not then in a position to make. We parted with friendly assurances on both sides, and I turned my steps at once to Mr. Wansborough's office in the High Street. Time was now of the last importance. The news of my being free on bail would reach Sir Percival, to an absolute certainty, before night. If the next few hours did not put me in a position to justify his worst fears, and to hold him helpless at my mercy, I might lose every inch of the ground I had gained, never to recover it again. The unscrupulous nature of the man, the local influence he possessed, the desperate peril of exposure with which my blindfold inquiries threatened him--all warned me to press on to positive discovery, without the useless waste of a single minute. I had found time to think while I was waiting for Mr. Dawson's arrival, and I had well employed it. Certain portions of the conversation of the talkative old clerk, which had wearied me at the time, now recurred to my memory with a new significance, and a suspicion crossed my mind darkly which had not occurred to me while I was in the vestry. On my way to Knowlesbury, I had only proposed to apply to Mr. Wansborough for information on the subject of Sir Percival's mother. My object now was to examine the duplicate register of Old Welmingham Church. Mr. Wansborough was in his office when I inquired for him. He was a jovial, red-faced, easy-looking man--more like a country squire than a lawyer--and he seemed to be both surprised and amused by my application. He had heard of his father's copy of the register, but had not even seen it himself. It had never been inquired after, and it was no doubt in the strong room among other papers that had not been disturbed since his father's death. It was a pity (Mr. Wansborough said) that the old gentleman was not alive to hear his precious copy asked for at last. He would have ridden his favourite hobby harder than ever now. How had I come to hear of the copy? was it through anybody in the town? I parried the question as well as I could. It was impossible at this stage of the investigation to be too cautious, and it was just as well not to let Mr. Wansborough know prematurely that I had already examined the original register. I described myself, therefore, as pursuing a family inquiry, to the object of which every possible saving of time was of great importance. I was anxious to send certain particulars to London by that day's post, and one look at the duplicate register (paying, of course, the necessary fees) might supply what I required, and save me a further journey to Old Welmingham. I added that, in the event of my subsequently requiring a copy of the original register, I should make application to Mr. Wansborough's office to furnish me with the document. After this explanation no objection was made to producing the copy. A clerk was sent to the strong room, and after some delay returned with the volume. It was of exactly the same size as the volume in the vestry, the only difference being that the copy was more smartly bound. I took it with me to an unoccupied desk. My hands were trembling--my head was burning hot--I felt the necessity of concealing my agitation as well as I could from the persons about me in the room, before I ventured on opening the book. On the blank page at the beginning, to which I first turned, were traced some lines in faded ink. They contained these words-- "Copy of the Marriage Register of Welmingham Parish Church. Executed under my orders, and afterwards compared, entry by entry, with the original, by myself. (Signed) Robert Wansborough, vestry-clerk." Below this note there was a line added, in another handwriting, as follows: "Extending from the first of January, 1800, to the thirtieth of June, 1815." I turned to the month of September, eighteen hundred and three. I found the marriage of the man whose Christian name was the same as my own. I found the double register of the marriages of the two brothers. And between these entries, at the bottom of the page? Nothing! Not a vestige of the entry which recorded the marriage of Sir Felix Glyde and Cecilia Jane Elster in the register of the church! My heart gave a great bound, and throbbed as if it would stifle me. I looked again--I was afraid to believe the evidence of my own eyes. No! not a doubt. The marriage was not there. The entries on the copy occupied exactly the same places on the page as the entries in the original. The last entry on one page recorded the marriage of the man with my Christian name. Below it there was a blank space--a space evidently left because it was too narrow to contain the entry of the marriages of the two brothers, which in the copy, as in the original, occupied the top of the next page. That space told the whole story! There it must have remained in the church register from eighteen hundred and three (when the marriages had been solemnised and the copy had been made) to eighteen hundred and twenty-seven, when Sir Percival appeared at Old Welmingham. Here, at Knowlesbury, was the chance of committing the forgery shown to me in the copy, and there, at Old Welmingham, was the forgery committed in the register of the church. My head turned giddy--I held by the desk to keep myself from falling. Of all the suspicions which had struck me in relation to that desperate man, not one had been near the truth. The idea that he was not Sir Percival Glyde at all, that he had no more claim to the baronetcy and to Blackwater Park than the poorest labourer who worked on the estate, had never once occurred to my mind. At one time I had thought he might be Anne Catherick's father--at another time I had thought he might have been Anne Catherick's husband--the offence of which he was really guilty had been, from first to last, beyond the widest reach of my imagination. The paltry means by which the fraud had been effected, the magnitude and daring of the crime that it represented, the horror of the consequences involved in its discovery, overwhelmed me. Who could wonder now at the brute-restlessness of the wretch's life--at his desperate alternations between abject duplicity and reckless violence--at the madness of guilty distrust which had made him imprison Anne Catherick in the Asylum, and had given him over to the vile conspiracy against his wife, on the bare suspicion that the one and the other knew his terrible secret? The disclosure of that secret might, in past years, have hanged him--might now transport him for life. The disclosure of that secret, even if the sufferers by his deception spared him the penalties of the law, would deprive him at one blow of the name, the rank, the estate, the whole social existence that he had usurped. This was the Secret, and it was mine! A word from me, and house, lands, baronetcy, were gone from him for ever--a word from me, and he was driven out into the world, a nameless, penniless, friendless outcast! The man's whole future hung on my lips--and he knew it by this time as certainly as I did! That last thought steadied me. Interests far more precious than my own depended on the caution which must now guide my slightest actions. There was no possible treachery which Sir Percival might not attempt against me. In the danger and desperation of his position he would be staggered by no risks, he would recoil at no crime--he would literally hesitate at nothing to save himself. I considered for a minute. My first necessity was to secure positive evidence in writing of the discovery that I had just made, and in the event of any personal misadventure happening to me, to place that evidence beyond Sir Percival's reach. The copy of the register was sure to be safe in Mr. Wansborough's strong room. But the position of the original in the vestry was, as I had seen with my own eyes, anything but secure. In this emergency I resolved to return to the church, to apply again to the clerk, and to take the necessary extract from the register before I slept that night. I was not then aware that a legally-certified copy was necessary, and that no document merely drawn out by myself could claim the proper importance as a proof. I was not aware of this, and my determination to keep my present proceedings a secret prevented me from asking any questions which might have procured the necessary information. My one anxiety was the anxiety to get back to Old Welmingham. I made the best excuses I could for the discomposure in my face and manner which Mr. Wansborough had already noticed, laid the necessary fee on his table, arranged that I should write to him in a day or two, and left the office, with my head in a whirl and my blood throbbing through my veins at fever heat. It was just getting dark. The idea occurred to me that I might be followed again and attacked on the high-road. My walking-stick was a light one, of little or no use for purposes of defence. I stopped before leaving Knowlesbury and bought a stout country cudgel, short, and heavy at the head. With this homely weapon, if any one man tried to stop me I was a match for him. If more than one attacked me I could trust to my heels. In my school-days I had been a noted runner, and I had not wanted for practice since in the later time of my experience in Central America. I started from the town at a brisk pace, and kept the middle of the road. A small misty rain was falling, and it was impossible for the first half of the way to make sure whether I was followed or not. But at the last half of my journey, when I supposed myself to be about two miles from the church, I saw a man run by me in the rain, and then heard the gate of a field by the roadside shut to sharply. I kept straight on, with my cudgel ready in my hand, my ears on the alert, and my eyes straining to see through the mist and the darkness. Before I had advanced a hundred yards there was a rustling in the hedge on my right, and three men sprang out into the road. I drew aside on the instant to the footpath. The two foremost men were carried beyond me before they could check themselves. The third was as quick as lightning. He stopped, half turned, and struck at me with his stick. The blow was aimed at hazard, and was not a severe one. It fell on my left shoulder. I returned it heavily on his head. He staggered back and jostled his two companions just as they were both rushing at me. This circumstance gave me a moment's start. I slipped by them, and took to the middle of the road again at the top of my speed. The two unhurt men pursued me. They were both good runners--the road was smooth and level, and for the first five minutes or more I was conscious that I did not gain on them. It was perilous work to run for long in the darkness. I could barely see the dim black line of the hedges on either side, and any chance obstacle in the road would have thrown me down to a certainty. Ere long I felt the ground changing--it descended from the level at a turn, and then rose again beyond. Downhill the men rather gained on me, but uphill I began to distance them. The rapid, regular thump of their feet grew fainter on my ear, and I calculated by the sound that I was far enough in advance to take to the fields with a good chance of their passing me in the darkness. Diverging to the footpath, I made for the first break that I could guess at, rather than see, in the hedge. It proved to be a closed gate. I vaulted over, and finding myself in a field, kept across it steadily with my back to the road. I heard the men pass the gate, still running, then in a minute more heard one of them call to the other to come back. It was no matter what they did now, I was out of their sight and out of their hearing. I kept straight across the field, and when I had reached the farther extremity of it, waited there for a minute to recover my breath. It was impossible to venture back to the road, but I was determined nevertheless to get to Old Welmingham that evening. Neither moon nor stars appeared to guide me. I only knew that I had kept the wind and rain at my back on leaving Knowlesbury, and if I now kept them at my back still, I might at least be certain of not advancing altogether in the wrong direction. Proceeding on this plan, I crossed the country--meeting with no worse obstacles than hedges, ditches, and thickets, which every now and then obliged me to alter my course for a little while--until I found myself on a hill-side, with the ground sloping away steeply before me. I descended to the bottom of the hollow, squeezed my way through a hedge, and got out into a lane. Having turned to the right on leaving the road, I now turned to the left, on the chance of regaining the line from which I had wandered. After following the muddy windings of the lane for ten minutes or more, I saw a cottage with a light in one of the windows. The garden gate was open to the lane, and I went in at once to inquire my way. Before I could knock at the door it was suddenly opened, and a man came running out with a lighted lantern in his hand. He stopped and held it up at the sight of me. We both started as we saw each other. My wanderings had led me round the outskirts of the village, and had brought me out at the lower end of it. I was back at Old Welmingham, and the man with the lantern was no other than my acquaintance of the morning, the parish clerk. His manner appeared to have altered strangely in the interval since I had last seen him. He looked suspicious and confused--his ruddy cheeks were deeply flushed--and his first words, when he spoke, were quite unintelligible to me. "Where are the keys?" he asked. "Have you taken them?" "What keys?" I repeated. "I have this moment come from Knowlesbury. What keys do you mean?" "The keys of the vestry. Lord save us and help us! what shall I do? The keys are gone! Do you hear?" cried the old man, shaking the lantern at me in his agitation, "the keys are gone!" "How? When? Who can have taken them?" "I don't know," said the clerk, staring about him wildly in the darkness. "I've only just got back. I told you I had a long day's work this morning--I locked the door and shut the window down--it's open now, the window's open. Look! somebody has got in there and taken the keys." He turned to the casement window to show me that it was wide open. The door of the lantern came loose from its fastening as he swayed it round, and the wind blew the candle out instantly. "Get another light," I said, "and let us both go to the vestry together. Quick! quick!" I hurried him into the house. The treachery that I had every reason to expect, the treachery that might deprive me of every advantage I had gained, was at that moment, perhaps, in process of accomplishment. My impatience to reach the church was so great that I could not remain inactive in the cottage while the clerk lit the lantern again. I walked out, down the garden path, into the lane. Before I had advanced ten paces a man approached me from the direction leading to the church. He spoke respectfully as we met. I could not see his face, but judging by his voice only, he was a perfect stranger to me. "I beg your pardon, Sir Percival----" he began. I stopped him before he could say more. "The darkness misleads you," I said. "I am not Sir Percival." The man drew back directly. "I thought it was my master," he muttered, in a confused, doubtful way. "You expected to meet your master here?" "I was told to wait in the lane." With that answer he retraced his steps. I looked back at the cottage and saw the clerk coming out, with the lantern lighted once more. I took the old man's arm to help him on the more quickly. We hastened along the lane, and passed the person who had accosted me. As well as I could see by the light of the lantern, he was a servant out of livery. "Who's that?" whispered the clerk. "Does he know anything about the keys?" "We won't wait to ask him," I replied. "We will go on to the vestry first." The church was not visible, even by daytime, until the end of the lane was reached. As we mounted the rising ground which led to the building from that point, one of the village children--a boy--came close up to us, attracted by the light we carried, and recognised the clerk. "I say, measter," said the boy, pulling officiously at the clerk's coat, "there be summun up yander in the church. I heerd un lock the door on hisself--I heerd un strike a loight wi' a match." The clerk trembled and leaned against me heavily. "Come! come!" I said encouragingly. "We are not too late. We will catch the man, whoever he is. Keep the lantern, and follow me as fast as you can." I mounted the hill rapidly. The dark mass of the church-tower was the first object I discerned dimly against the night sky. As I turned aside to get round to the vestry, I heard heavy footsteps close to me. The servant had ascended to the church after us. "I don't mean any harm," he said, when I turned round on him, "I'm only looking for my master." The tones in which he spoke betrayed unmistakable fear. I took no notice of him and went on. The instant I turned the corner and came in view of the vestry, I saw the lantern-skylight on the roof brilliantly lit up from within. It shone out with dazzling brightness against the murky, starless sky. I hurried through the churchyard to the door. As I got near there was a strange smell stealing out on the damp night air. I heard a snapping noise inside--I saw the light above grow brighter and brighter--a pane of the glass cracked--I ran to the door and put my hand on it. The vestry was on fire! Before I could move, before I could draw my breath after that discovery, I was horror-struck by a heavy thump against the door from the inside. I heard the key worked violently in the lock--I heard a man's voice behind the door, raised to a dreadful shrillness, screaming for help. The servant who had followed me staggered back shuddering, and dropped to his knees. "Oh, my God!" he said, "it's Sir Percival!" As the words passed his lips the clerk joined us, and at the same moment there was another and a last grating turn of the key in the lock. "The Lord have mercy on his soul!" said the old man. "He is doomed and dead. He has hampered the lock." I rushed to the door. The one absorbing purpose that had filled all my thoughts, that had controlled all my actions, for weeks and weeks past, vanished in an instant from my mind. All remembrance of the heartless injury the man's crimes had inflicted--of the love, the innocence, the happiness he had pitilessly laid waste--of the oath I had sworn in my own heart to summon him to the terrible reckoning that he deserved--passed from my memory like a dream. I remembered nothing but the horror of his situation. I felt nothing but the natural human impulse to save him from a frightful death. "Try the other door!" I shouted. "Try the door into the church! The lock's hampered. You're a dead man if you waste another moment on it." There had been no renewed cry for help when the key was turned for the last time. There was no sound now of any kind, to give token that he was still alive. I heard nothing but the quickening crackle of the flames, and the sharp snap of the glass in the skylight above. I looked round at my two companions. The servant had risen to his feet--he had taken the lantern, and was holding it up vacantly at the door. Terror seemed to have struck him with downright idiocy--he waited at my heels, he followed me about when I moved like a dog. The clerk sat crouched up on one of the tombstones, shivering, and moaning to himself. The one moment in which I looked at them was enough to show me that they were both helpless. Hardly knowing what I did, acting desperately on the first impulse that occurred to me, I seized the servant and pushed him against the vestry wall. "Stoop!" I said, "and hold by the stones. I am going to climb over you to the roof--I am going to break the skylight, and give him some air!" The man trembled from head to foot, but he held firm. I got on his back, with my cudgel in my mouth, seized the parapet with both hands, and was instantly on the roof. In the frantic hurry and agitation of the moment, it never struck me that I might let out the flame instead of letting in the air. I struck at the skylight, and battered in the cracked, loosened glass at a blow. The fire leaped out like a wild beast from its lair. If the wind had not chanced, in the position I occupied, to set it away from me, my exertions might have ended then and there. I crouched on the roof as the smoke poured out above me with the flame. The gleams and flashes of the light showed me the servant's face staring up vacantly under the wall--the clerk risen to his feet on the tombstone, wringing his hands in despair--and the scanty population of the village, haggard men and terrified women, clustered beyond in the churchyard--all appearing and disappearing, in the red of the dreadful glare, in the black of the choking smoke. And the man beneath my feet!--the man, suffocating, burning, dying so near us all, so utterly beyond our reach! The thought half maddened me. I lowered myself from the roof, by my hands, and dropped to the ground. "The key of the church!" I shouted to the clerk. "We must try it that way--we may save him yet if we can burst open the inner door." "No, no, no!" cried the old man. "No hope! the church key and the vestry key are on the same ring--both inside there! Oh, sir, he's past saving--he's dust and ashes by this time!" "They'll see the fire from the town," said a voice from among the men behind me. "There's a ingine in the town. They'll save the church." I called to that man--HE had his wits about him--I called to him to come and speak to me. It would be a quarter of an hour at least before the town engine could reach us. The horror of remaining inactive all that time was more than I could face. In defiance of my own reason I persuaded myself that the doomed and lost wretch in the vestry might still be lying senseless on the floor, might not be dead yet. If we broke open the door, might we save him? I knew the strength of the heavy lock--I knew the thickness of the nailed oak--I knew the hopelessness of assailing the one and the other by ordinary means. But surely there were beams still left in the dismantled cottages near the church? What if we got one, and used it as a battering-ram against the door? The thought leaped through me like the fire leaping out of the shattered skylight. I appealed to the man who had spoken first of the fire-engine in the town. "Have you got your pickaxes handy?" Yes, they had. "And a hatchet, and a saw, and a bit of rope?" Yes! yes! yes! I ran down among the villagers, with the lantern in my hand. "Five shillings apiece to every man who helps me!" They started into life at the words. That ravenous second hunger of poverty--the hunger for money--roused them into tumult and activity in a moment. "Two of you for more lanterns, if you have them! Two of you for the pickaxes and the tools! The rest after me to find the beam!" They cheered--with shrill starveling voices they cheered. The women and the children fled back on either side. We rushed in a body down the churchyard path to the first empty cottage. Not a man was left behind but the clerk--the poor old clerk standing on the flat tombstone sobbing and wailing over the church. The servant was still at my heels--his white, helpless, panic-stricken face was close over my shoulder as we pushed into the cottage. There were rafters from the torn-down floor above, lying loose on the ground--but they were too light. A beam ran across over our heads, but not out of reach of our arms and our pickaxes--a beam fast at each end in the ruined wall, with ceiling and flooring all ripped away, and a great gap in the roof above, open to the sky. We attacked the beam at both ends at once. God! how it held--how the brick and mortar of the wall resisted us! We struck, and tugged, and tore. The beam gave at one end--it came down with a lump of brickwork after it. There was a scream from the women all huddled in the doorway to look at us--a shout from the men--two of them down but not hurt. Another tug all together--and the beam was loose at both ends. We raised it, and gave the word to clear the doorway. Now for the work! now for the rush at the door! There is the fire streaming into the sky, streaming brighter than ever to light us! Steady along the churchyard path--steady with the beam for a rush at the door. One, two, three--and off. Out rings the cheering again, irrepressibly. We have shaken it already, the hinges must give if the lock won't. Another run with the beam! One, two, three--and off. It's loose! the stealthy fire darts at us through the crevice all round it. Another, and a last rush! The door falls in with a crash. A great hush of awe, a stillness of breathless expectation, possesses every living soul of us. We look for the body. The scorching heat on our faces drives us back: we see nothing--above, below, all through the room, we see nothing but a sheet of living fire. "Where is he?" whispered the servant, staring vacantly at the flames. "He's dust and ashes," said the clerk. "And the books are dust and ashes--and oh, sirs! the church will be dust and ashes soon." Those were the only two who spoke. When they were silent again, nothing stirred in the stillness but the bubble and the crackle of the flames. Hark! A harsh rattling sound in the distance--then the hollow beat of horses' hoofs at full gallop--then the low roar, the all-predominant tumult of hundreds of human voices clamouring and shouting together. The engine at last. The people about me all turned from the fire, and ran eagerly to the brow of the hill. The old clerk tried to go with the rest, but his strength was exhausted. I saw him holding by one of the tombstones. "Save the church!" he cried out faintly, as if the firemen could hear him already. Save the church! The only man who never moved was the servant. There he stood, his eyes still fastened on the flames in a changeless, vacant stare. I spoke to him, I shook him by the arm. He was past rousing. He only whispered once more, "Where is he?" In ten minutes the engine was in position, the well at the back of the church was feeding it, and the hose was carried to the doorway of the vestry. If help had been wanted from me I could not have afforded it now. My energy of will was gone--my strength was exhausted--the turmoil of my thoughts was fearfully and suddenly stilled, now I knew that he was dead. I stood useless and helpless--looking, looking, looking into the burning room. I saw the fire slowly conquered. The brightness of the glare faded--the steam rose in white clouds, and the smouldering heaps of embers showed red and black through it on the floor. There was a pause--then an advance all together of the firemen and the police which blocked up the doorway--then a consultation in low voices--and then two men were detached from the rest, and sent out of the churchyard through the crowd. The crowd drew back on either side in dead silence to let them pass. After a while a great shudder ran through the people, and the living lane widened slowly. The men came back along it with a door from one of the empty houses. They carried it to the vestry and went in. The police closed again round the doorway, and men stole out from among the crowd by twos and threes and stood behind them to be the first to see. Others waited near to be the first to hear. Women and children were among these last. The tidings from the vestry began to flow out among the crowd--they dropped slowly from mouth to mouth till they reached the place where I was standing. I heard the questions and answers repeated again and again in low, eager tones all round me. "Have they found him?" "Yes."--"Where?" "Against the door, on his face."--"Which door?" "The door that goes into the church. His head was against it--he was down on his face."--"Is his face burnt?" "No." "Yes, it is." "No, scorched, not burnt--he lay on his face, I tell you."--"Who was he? A lord, they say." "No, not a lord. SIR Something; Sir means Knight." "And Baronight, too." "No." "Yes, it does."--"What did he want in there?" "No good, you may depend on it."--"Did he do it on purpose?"--"Burn himself on purpose!"--"I don't mean himself, I mean the vestry."--"Is he dreadful to look at?" "Dreadful!"--"Not about the face, though?" "No, no, not so much about the face. Don't anybody know him?" "There's a man says he does."--"Who?" "A servant, they say. But he's struck stupid-like, and the police don't believe him."--"Don't anybody else know who it is?" "Hush----!" The loud, clear voice of a man in authority silenced the low hum of talking all round me in an instant. "Where is the gentleman who tried to save him?" said the voice. "Here, sir--here he is!" Dozens of eager faces pressed about me--dozens of eager arms parted the crowd. The man in authority came up to me with a lantern in his hand. "This way, sir, if you please," he said quietly. I was unable to speak to him, I was unable to resist him when he took my arm. I tried to say that I had never seen the dead man in his lifetime--that there was no hope of identifying him by means of a stranger like me. But the words failed on my lips. I was faint, and silent, and helpless. "Do you know him, sir?" I was standing inside a circle of men. Three of them opposite to me were holding lanterns low down to the ground. Their eyes, and the eyes of all the rest, were fixed silently and expectantly on my face. I knew what was at my feet--I knew why they were holding the lanterns so low to the ground. "Can you identify him, sir?" My eyes dropped slowly. At first I saw nothing under them but a coarse canvas cloth. The dripping of the rain on it was audible in the dreadful silence. I looked up, along the cloth, and there at the end, stark and grim and black, in the yellow light--there was his dead face. So, for the first and last time, I saw him. So the Visitation of God ruled it that he and I should meet. XI The inquest was hurried for certain local reasons which weighed with the coroner and the town authorities. It was held on the afternoon of the next day. I was necessarily one among the witnesses summoned to assist the objects of the investigation. My first proceeding in the morning was to go to the post-office, and inquire for the letter which I expected from Marian. No change of circumstances, however extraordinary, could affect the one great anxiety which weighed on my mind while I was away from London. The morning's letter, which was the only assurance I could receive that no misfortune had happened in my absence, was still the absorbing interest with which my day began. To my relief, the letter from Marian was at the office waiting for me. Nothing had happened--they were both as safe and as well as when I had left them. Laura sent her love, and begged that I would let her know of my return a day beforehand. Her sister added, in explanation of this message, that she had saved "nearly a sovereign" out of her own private purse, and that she had claimed the privilege of ordering the dinner and giving the dinner which was to celebrate the day of my return. I read these little domestic confidences in the bright morning with the terrible recollection of what had happened the evening before vivid in my memory. The necessity of sparing Laura any sudden knowledge of the truth was the first consideration which the letter suggested to me. I wrote at once to Marian to tell her what I have told in these pages--presenting the tidings as gradually and gently as I could, and warning her not to let any such thing as a newspaper fall in Laura's way while I was absent. In the case of any other woman, less courageous and less reliable, I might have hesitated before I ventured on unreservedly disclosing the whole truth. But I owed it to Marian to be faithful to my past experience of her, and to trust her as I trusted herself. My letter was necessarily a long one. It occupied me until the time came for proceeding to the inquest. The objects of the legal inquiry were necessarily beset by peculiar complications and difficulties. Besides the investigation into the manner in which the deceased had met his death, there were serious questions to be settled relating to the cause of the fire, to the abstraction of the keys, and to the presence of a stranger in the vestry at the time when the flames broke out. Even the identification of the dead man had not yet been accomplished. The helpless condition of the servant had made the police distrustful of his asserted recognition of his master. They had sent to Knowlesbury overnight to secure the attendance of witnesses who were well acquainted with the personal appearance of Sir Percival Glyde, and they had communicated, the first thing in the morning, with Blackwater Park. These precautions enabled the coroner and jury to settle the question of identity, and to confirm the correctness of the servant's assertion; the evidence offered by competent witnesses, and by the discovery of certain facts, being subsequently strengthened by an examination of the dead man's watch. The crest and the name of Sir Percival Glyde were engraved inside it. The next inquiries related to the fire. The servant and I, and the boy who had heard the light struck in the vestry, were the first witnesses called. The boy gave his evidence clearly enough, but the servant's mind had not yet recovered the shock inflicted on it--he was plainly incapable of assisting the objects of the inquiry, and he was desired to stand down. To my own relief, my examination was not a long one. I had not known the deceased--I had never seen him--I was not aware of his presence at Old Welmingham--and I had not been in the vestry at the finding of the body. All I could prove was that I had stopped at the clerk's cottage to ask my way--that I had heard from him of the loss of the keys--that I had accompanied him to the church to render what help I could--that I had seen the fire--that I had heard some person unknown, inside the vestry, trying vainly to unlock the door--and that I had done what I could, from motives of humanity, to save the man. Other witnesses, who had been acquainted with the deceased, were asked if they could explain the mystery of his presumed abstraction of the keys, and his presence in the burning room. But the coroner seemed to take it for granted, naturally enough, that I, as a total stranger in the neighbourhood, and a total stranger to Sir Percival Glyde, could not be in a position to offer any evidence on these two points. The course that I was myself bound to take, when my formal examination had closed, seemed clear to me. I did not feel called on to volunteer any statement of my own private convictions; in the first place, because my doing so could serve no practical purpose, now that all proof in support of any surmises of mine was burnt with the burnt register; in the second place, because I could not have intelligibly stated my opinion--my unsupported opinion--without disclosing the whole story of the conspiracy, and producing beyond a doubt the same unsatisfactory effect an the minds of the coroner and the jury, which I had already produced on the mind of Mr. Kyrle. In these pages, however, and after the time that has now elapsed, no such cautions and restraints as are here described need fetter the free expression of my opinion. I will state briefly, before my pen occupies itself with other events, how my own convictions lead me to account for the abstraction of the keys, for the outbreak of the fire, and for the death of the man. The news of my being free on bail drove Sir Percival, as I believe, to his last resources. The attempted attack on the road was one of those resources, and the suppression of all practical proof of his crime, by destroying the page of the register on which the forgery had been committed, was the other, and the surest of the two. If I could produce no extract from the original book to compare with the certified copy at Knowlesbury, I could produce no positive evidence, and could threaten him with no fatal exposure. All that was necessary to the attainment of his end was, that he should get into the vestry unperceived, that he should tear out the page in the register, and that he should leave the vestry again as privately as he had entered it. On this supposition, it is easy to understand why he waited until nightfall before he made the attempt, and why he took advantage of the clerk's absence to possess himself of the keys. Necessity would oblige him to strike a light to find his way to the right register, and common caution would suggest his locking the door on the inside in case of intrusion on the part of any inquisitive stranger, or on my part, if I happened to be in the neighbourhood at the time. I cannot believe that it was any part of his intention to make the destruction of the register appear to be the result of accident, by purposely setting the vestry on fire. The bare chance that prompt assistance might arrive, and that the books might, by the remotest possibility, be saved, would have been enough, on a moment's consideration, to dismiss any idea of this sort from his mind. Remembering the quantity of combustible objects in the vestry--the straw, the papers, the packing-cases, the dry wood, the old worm-eaten presses--all the probabilities, in my estimation, point to the fire as the result of an accident with his matches or his light. His first impulse, under these circumstances, was doubtless to try to extinguish the flames, and failing in that, his second impulse (ignorant as he was of the state of the lock) had been to attempt to escape by the door which had given him entrance. When I had called to him, the flames must have reached across the door leading into the church, on either side of which the presses extended, and close to which the other combustible objects were placed. In all probability, the smoke and flame (confined as they were to the room) had been too much for him when he tried to escape by the inner door. He must have dropped in his death-swoon--he must have sunk in the place where he was found--just as I got on the roof to break the skylight window. Even if we had been able, afterwards, to get into the church, and to burst open the door from that side, the delay must have been fatal. He would have been past saving, long past saving, by that time. We should only have given the flames free ingress into the church--the church, which was now preserved, but which, in that event, would have shared the fate of the vestry. There is no doubt in my mind, there can be no doubt in the mind of any one, that he was a dead man before ever we got to the empty cottage, and worked with might and main to tear down the beam. This is the nearest approach that any theory of mine can make towards accounting for a result which was visible matter of fact. As I have described them, so events passed to us outside. As I have related it, so his body was found. The inquest was adjourned over one day--no explanation that the eye of the law could recognise having been discovered thus far to account for the mysterious circumstances of the case. It was arranged that more witnesses should be summoned, and that the London solicitor of the deceased should be invited to attend. A medical man was also charged with the duty of reporting on the mental condition of the servant, which appeared at present to debar him from giving any evidence of the least importance. He could only declare, in a dazed way, that he had been ordered, on the night of the fire, to wait in the lane, and that he knew nothing else, except that the deceased was certainly his master. My own impression was, that he had been first used (without any guilty knowledge on his own part) to ascertain the fact of the clerk's absence from home on the previous day, and that he had been afterwards ordered to wait near the church (but out of sight of the vestry) to assist his master, in the event of my escaping the attack on the road, and of a collision occurring between Sir Percival and myself. It is necessary to add, that the man's own testimony was never obtained to confirm this view. The medical report of him declared that what little mental faculty he possessed was seriously shaken; nothing satisfactory was extracted from him at the adjourned inquest, and for aught I know to the contrary, he may never have recovered to this day. I returned to the hotel at Welmingham so jaded in body and mind, so weakened and depressed by all that I had gone through, as to be quite unfit to endure the local gossip about the inquest, and to answer the trivial questions that the talkers addressed to me in the coffee-room. I withdrew from my scanty dinner to my cheap garret-chamber to secure myself a little quiet, and to think undisturbed of Laura and Marian. If I had been a richer man I would have gone back to London, and would have comforted myself with a sight of the two dear faces again that night. But I was bound to appear, if called on, at the adjourned inquest, and doubly bound to answer my bail before the magistrate at Knowlesbury. Our slender resources had suffered already, and the doubtful future--more doubtful than ever now--made me dread decreasing our means unnecessarily by allowing myself an indulgence even at the small cost of a double railway journey in the carriages of the second class. The next day--the day immediately following the inquest--was left at my own disposal. I began the morning by again applying at the post-office for my regular report from Marian. It was waiting for me as before, and it was written throughout in good spirits. I read the letter thankfully, and then set forth with my mind at ease for the day to go to Old Welmingham, and to view the scene of the fire by the morning light. What changes met me when I got there! Through all the ways of our unintelligible world the trivial and the terrible walk hand in hand together. The irony of circumstances holds no mortal catastrophe in respect. When I reached the church, the trampled condition of the burial-ground was the only serious trace left to tell of the fire and the death. A rough hoarding of boards had been knocked up before the vestry doorway. Rude caricatures were scrawled on it already, and the village children were fighting and shouting for the possession of the best peep-hole to see through. On the spot where I had heard the cry for help from the burning room, on the spot where the panic-stricken servant had dropped on his knees, a fussy flock of poultry was now scrambling for the first choice of worms after the rain; and on the ground at my feet, where the door and its dreadful burden had been laid, a workman's dinner was waiting for him, tied up in a yellow basin, and his faithful cur in charge was yelping at me for coming near the food. The old clerk, looking idly at the slow commencement of the repairs, had only one interest that he could talk about now--the interest of escaping all blame for his own part on account of the accident that had happened. One of the village women, whose white wild face I remembered the picture of terror when we pulled down the beam, was giggling with another woman, the picture of inanity, over an old washing-tub. There is nothing serious in mortality! Solomon in all his glory was Solomon with the elements of the contemptible lurking in every fold of his robes and in every corner of his palace. As I left the place, my thoughts turned, not for the first time, to the complete overthrow that all present hope of establishing Laura's identity had now suffered through Sir Percival's death. He was gone--and with him the chance was gone which had been the one object of all my labours and all my hopes. Could I look at my failure from no truer point of view than this? Suppose he had lived, would that change of circumstance have altered the result? Could I have made my discovery a marketable commodity, even for Laura's sake, after I had found out that robbery of the rights of others was the essence of Sir Percival's crime? Could I have offered the price of MY silence for HIS confession of the conspiracy, when the effect of that silence must have been to keep the right heir from the estates, and the right owner from the name? Impossible! If Sir Percival had lived, the discovery, from which (In my ignorance of the true nature of the Secret) I had hoped so much, could not have been mine to suppress or to make public, as I thought best, for the vindication of Laura's rights. In common honesty and common honour I must have gone at once to the stranger whose birthright had been usurped--I must have renounced the victory at the moment when it was mine by placing my discovery unreservedly in that stranger's hands--and I must have faced afresh all the difficulties which stood between me and the one object of my life, exactly as I was resolved in my heart of hearts to face them now! I returned to Welmingham with my mind composed, feeling more sure of myself and my resolution than I had felt yet. On my way to the hotel I passed the end of the square in which Mrs. Catherick lived. Should I go back to the house, and make another attempt to see her. No. That news of Sir Percival's death, which was the last news she ever expected to hear, must have reached her hours since. All the proceedings at the inquest had been reported in the local paper that morning--there was nothing I could tell her which she did not know already. My interest in making her speak had slackened. I remembered the furtive hatred in her face when she said, "There is no news of Sir Percival that I don't expect--except the news of his death." I remembered the stealthy interest in her eyes when they settled on me at parting, after she had spoken those words. Some instinct, deep in my heart, which I felt to be a true one, made the prospect of again entering her presence repulsive to me--I turned away from the square, and went straight back to the hotel. Some hours later, while I was resting in the coffee-room, a letter was placed in my hands by the waiter. It was addressed to me by name, and I found on inquiry that it had been left at the bar by a woman just as it was near dusk, and just before the gas was lighted. She had said nothing, and she had gone away again before there was time to speak to her, or even to notice who she was. I opened the letter. It was neither dated nor signed, and the handwriting was palpably disguised. Before I had read the first sentence, however, I knew who my correspondent was--Mrs. Catherick. The letter ran as follows--I copy it exactly, word for word:-- THE STORY CONTINUED BY MRS. CATHERICK SIR,--You have not come back, as you said you would. No matter--I know the news, and I write to tell you so. Did you see anything particular in my face when you left me? I was wondering, in my own mind, whether the day of his downfall had come at last, and whether you were the chosen instrument for working it. You were, and you HAVE worked it. You were weak enough, as I have heard, to try and save his life. If you had succeeded, I should have looked upon you as my enemy. Now you have failed, I hold you as my friend. Your inquiries frightened him into the vestry by night--your inquiries, without your privity and against your will, have served the hatred and wreaked the vengeance of three-and-twenty years. Thank you, sir, in spite of yourself. I owe something to the man who has done this. How can I pay my debt? If I was a young woman still I might say, "Come, put your arm round my waist, and kiss me, if you like." I should have been fond enough of you even to go that length, and you would have accepted my invitation--you would, sir, twenty years ago! But I am an old woman now. Well! I can satisfy your curiosity, and pay my debt in that way. You HAD a great curiosity to know certain private affairs of mine when you came to see me--private affairs which all your sharpness could not look into without my help--private affairs which you have not discovered, even now. You SHALL discover them--your curiosity shall be satisfied. I will take any trouble to please you, my estimable young friend! You were a little boy, I suppose, in the year twenty-seven? I was a handsome young woman at that time, living at Old Welmingham. I had a contemptible fool for a husband. I had also the honour of being acquainted (never mind how) with a certain gentleman (never mind whom). I shall not call him by his name. Why should I? It was not his own. He never had a name: you know that, by this time, as well as I do. It will be more to the purpose to tell you how he worked himself into my good graces. I was born with the tastes of a lady, and he gratified them--in other words, he admired me, and he made me presents. No woman can resist admiration and presents--especially presents, provided they happen to be just the thing she wants. He was sharp enough to know that--most men are. Naturally he wanted something in return--all men do. And what do you think was the something? The merest trifle. Nothing but the key of the vestry, and the key of the press inside it, when my husband's back was turned. Of course he lied when I asked him why he wished me to get him the keys in that private way. He might have saved himself the trouble--I didn't believe him. But I liked my presents, and I wanted more. So I got him the keys, without my husband's knowledge, and I watched him, without his own knowledge. Once, twice, four times I watched him, and the fourth time I found him out. I was never over-scrupulous where other people's affairs were concerned, and I was not over-scrupulous about his adding one to the marriages in the register on his own account. Of course I knew it was wrong, but it did no harm to me, which was one good reason for not making a fuss about it. And I had not got a gold watch and chain, which was another, still better--and he had promised me one from London only the day before, which was a third, best of all. If I had known what the law considered the crime to be, and how the law punished it, I should have taken proper care of myself, and have exposed him then and there. But I knew nothing, and I longed for the gold watch. All the conditions I insisted on were that he should take me into his confidence and tell me everything. I was as curious about his affairs then as you are about mine now. He granted my conditions--why, you will see presently. This, put in short, is what I heard from him. He did not willingly tell me all that I tell you here. I drew some of it from him by persuasion and some of it by questions. I was determined to have all the truth, and I believe I got it. He knew no more than any one else of what the state of things really was between his father and mother till after his mother's death. Then his father confessed it, and promised to do what he could for his son. He died having done nothing--not having even made a will. The son (who can blame him?) wisely provided for himself. He came to England at once, and took possession of the property. There was no one to suspect him, and no one to say him nay. His father and mother had always lived as man and wife--none of the few people who were acquainted with them ever supposed them to be anything else. The right person to claim the property (if the truth had been known) was a distant relation, who had no idea of ever getting it, and who was away at sea when his father died. He had no difficulty so far--he took possession, as a matter of course. But he could not borrow money on the property as a matter of course. There were two things wanted of him before he could do this. One was a certificate of his birth, and the other was a certificate of his parents' marriage. The certificate of his birth was easily got--he was born abroad, and the certificate was there in due form. The other matter was a difficulty, and that difficulty brought him to Old Welmingham. But for one consideration he might have gone to Knowlesbury instead. His mother had been living there just before she met with his father--living under her maiden name, the truth being that she was really a married woman, married in Ireland, where her husband had ill-used her, and had afterwards gone off with some other person. I give you this fact on good authority--Sir Felix mentioned it to his son as the reason why he had not married. You may wonder why the son, knowing that his parents had met each other at Knowlesbury, did not play his first tricks with the register of that church, where it might have been fairly presumed his father and mother were married. The reason was that the clergyman who did duty at Knowlesbury church, in the year eighteen hundred and three (when, according to his birth certificate, his father and mother OUGHT to have been married), was alive still when he took possession of the property in the New Year of eighteen hundred and twenty-seven. This awkward circumstance forced him to extend his inquiries to our neighbourhood. There no such danger existed, the former clergyman at our church having been dead for some years. Old Welmingham suited his purpose as well as Knowlesbury. His father had removed his mother from Knowlesbury, and had lived with her at a cottage on the river, a little distance from our village. People who had known his solitary ways when he was single did not wonder at his solitary ways when he was supposed to be married. If he had not been a hideous creature to look at, his retired life with the lady might have raised suspicions; but, as things were, his hiding his ugliness and his deformity in the strictest privacy surprised nobody. He lived in our neighbourhood till he came in possession of the Park. After three or four and twenty years had passed, who was to say (the clergyman being dead) that his marriage had not been as private as the rest of his life, and that it had not taken place at Old Welmingham church? So, as I told you, the son found our neighbourhood the surest place he could choose to set things right secretly in his own interests. It may surprise you to hear that what he really did to the marriage register was done on the spur of the moment--done on second thoughts. His first notion was only to tear the leaf out (in the right year and month), to destroy it privately, to go back to London, and to tell the lawyers to get him the necessary certificate of his father's marriage, innocently referring them of course to the date on the leaf that was gone. Nobody could say his father and mother had NOT been married after that, and whether, under the circumstances, they would stretch a point or not about lending him the money (he thought they would), he had his answer ready at all events, if a question was ever raised about his right to the name and the estate. But when he came to look privately at the register for himself, he found at the bottom of one of the pages for the year eighteen hundred and three a blank space left, seemingly through there being no room to make a long entry there, which was made instead at the top of the next page. The sight of this chance altered all his plans. It was an opportunity he had never hoped for, or thought of--and he took it--you know how. The blank space, to have exactly tallied with his birth certificate, ought to have occurred in the July part of the register. It occurred in the September part instead. However, in this case, if suspicious questions were asked, the answer was not hard to find. He had only to describe himself as a seven months' child. I was fool enough, when he told me his story, to feel some interest and some pity for him--which was just what he calculated on, as you will see. I thought him hardly used. It was not his fault that his father and mother were not married, and it was not his father's and mother's fault either. A more scrupulous woman than I was--a woman who had not set her heart on a gold watch and chain--would have found some excuses for him. At all events, I held my tongue, and helped to screen what he was about. He was some time getting the ink the right colour (mixing it over and over again in pots and bottles of mine), and some time afterwards in practising the handwriting. But he succeeded in the end, and made an honest woman of his mother after she was dead in her grave! So far, I don't deny that he behaved honourably enough to myself. He gave me my watch and chain, and spared no expense in buying them; both were of superior workmanship, and very expensive. I have got them still--the watch goes beautifully. You said the other day that Mrs. Clements had told you everything she knew. In that case there is no need for me to write about the trumpery scandal by which I was the sufferer--the innocent sufferer, I positively assert. You must know as well as I do what the notion was which my husband took into his head when he found me and my fine-gentleman acquaintance meeting each other privately and talking secrets together. But what you don't know is how it ended between that same gentleman and myself. You shall read and see how he behaved to me. The first words I said to him, when I saw the turn things had taken, were, "Do me justice--clear my character of a stain on it which you know I don't deserve. I don't want you to make a clean breast of it to my husband--only tell him, on your word of honour as a gentleman, that he is wrong, and that I am not to blame in the way he thinks I am. Do me that justice, at least, after all I have done for you." He flatly refused, in so many words. He told me plainly that it was his interest to let my husband and all my neighbours believe the falsehood--because, as long as they did so they were quite certain never to suspect the truth. I had a spirit of my own, and I told him they should know the truth from my lips. His reply was short, and to the point. If I spoke, I was a lost woman, as certainly as he was a lost man. Yes! it had come to that. He had deceived me about the risk I ran in helping him. He had practised on my ignorance, he had tempted me with his gifts, he had interested me with his story--and the result of it was that he made me his accomplice. He owned this coolly, and he ended by telling me, for the first time, what the frightful punishment really was for his offence, and for any one who helped him to commit it. In those days the law was not so tender-hearted as I hear it is now. Murderers were not the only people liable to be hanged, and women convicts were not treated like ladies in undeserved distress. I confess he frightened me--the mean impostor! the cowardly blackguard! Do you understand now how I hated him? Do you understand why I am taking all this trouble--thankfully taking it--to gratify the curiosity of the meritorious young gentleman who hunted him down? Well, to go on. He was hardly fool enough to drive me to downright desperation. I was not the sort of woman whom it was quite safe to hunt into a corner--he knew that, and wisely quieted me with proposals for the future. I deserved some reward (he was kind enough to say) for the service I had done him, and some compensation (he was so obliging as to add) for what I had suffered. He was quite willing--generous scoundrel!--to make me a handsome yearly allowance, payable quarterly, on two conditions. First, I was to hold my tongue--in my own interests as well as in his. Secondly, I was not to stir away from Welmingham without first letting him know, and waiting till I had obtained his permission. In my own neighbourhood, no virtuous female friends would tempt me into dangerous gossiping at the tea-table. In my own neighbourhood, he would always know where to find me. A hard condition, that second one--but I accepted it. What else was I to do? I was left helpless, with the prospect of a coming incumbrance in the shape of a child. What else was I to do? Cast myself on the mercy of my runaway idiot of a husband who had raised the scandal against me? I would have died first. Besides, the allowance WAS a handsome one. I had a better income, a better house over my head, better carpets on my floors, than half the women who turned up the whites of their eyes at the sight of me. The dress of Virtue, in our parts, was cotton print. I had silk. So I accepted the conditions he offered me, and made the best of them, and fought my battle with my respectable neighbours on their own ground, and won it in course of time--as you saw yourself. How I kept his Secret (and mine) through all the years that have passed from that time to this, and whether my late daughter, Anne, ever really crept into my confidence, and got the keeping of the Secret too--are questions, I dare say, to which you are curious to find an answer. Well! my gratitude refuses you nothing. I will turn to a fresh page and give you the answer immediately. But you must excuse one thing--you must excuse my beginning, Mr. Hartright, with an expression of surprise at the interest which you appear to have felt in my late daughter. It is quite unaccountable to me. If that interest makes you anxious for any particulars of her early life, I must refer you to Mrs. Clements, who knows more of the subject than I do. Pray understand that I do not profess to have been at all overfond of my late daughter. She was a worry to me from first to last, with the additional disadvantage of being always weak in the head. You like candour, and I hope this satisfies you. There is no need to trouble you with many personal particulars relating to those past times. It will be enough to say that I observed the terms of the bargain on my side, and that I enjoyed my comfortable income in return, paid quarterly. Now and then I got away and changed the scene for a short time, always asking leave of my lord and master first, and generally getting it. He was not, as I have already told you, fool enough to drive me too hard, and he could reasonably rely on my holding my tongue for my own sake, if not for his. One of my longest trips away from home was the trip I took to Limmeridge to nurse a half-sister there, who was dying. She was reported to have saved money, and I thought it as well (in case any accident happened to stop my allowance) to look after my own interests in that direction. As things turned out, however, my pains were all thrown away, and I got nothing, because nothing was to be had. I had taken Anne to the north with me, having my whims and fancies, occasionally, about my child, and getting, at such times, jealous of Mrs. Clements' influence over her. I never liked Mrs. Clements. She was a poor, empty-headed, spiritless woman--what you call a born drudge--and I was now and then not averse to plaguing her by taking Anne away. Not knowing what else to do with my girl while I was nursing in Cumberland, I put her to school at Limmeridge. The lady of the manor, Mrs. Fairlie (a remarkably plain-looking woman, who had entrapped one of the handsomest men in England into marrying her), amused me wonderfully by taking a violent fancy to my girl. The consequence was, she learnt nothing at school, and was petted and spoilt at Limmeridge House. Among other whims and fancies which they taught her there, they put some nonsense into her head about always wearing white. Hating white and liking colours myself, I determined to take the nonsense out of her head as soon as we got home again. Strange to say, my daughter resolutely resisted me. When she HAD got a notion once fixed in her mind she was, like other half-witted people, as obstinate as a mule in keeping it. We quarrelled finely, and Mrs. Clements, not liking to see it, I suppose, offered to take Anne away to live in London with her. I should have said Yes, if Mrs. Clements had not sided with my daughter about her dressing herself in white. But being determined she should NOT dress herself in white, and disliking Mrs. Clements more than ever for taking part against me, I said No, and meant No, and stuck to No. The consequence was, my daughter remained with me, and the consequence of that, in its turn, was the first serious quarrel that happened about the Secret. The circumstance took place long after the time I have just been writing of. I had been settled for years in the new town, and was steadily living down my bad character and slowly gaining ground among the respectable inhabitants. It helped me forward greatly towards this object to have my daughter with me. Her harmlessness and her fancy for dressing in white excited a certain amount of sympathy. I left off opposing her favourite whim on that account, because some of the sympathy was sure, in course of time, to fall to my share. Some of it did fall. I date my getting a choice of the two best sittings to let in the church from that time, and I date the clergyman's first bow from my getting the sittings. Well, being settled in this way, I received a letter one morning from that highly born gentleman (now deceased) in answer to one of mine, warning him, according to agreement, of my wishing to leave the town for a little change of air and scene. The ruffianly side of him must have been uppermost, I suppose, when he got my letter, for he wrote back, refusing me in such abominably insolent language, that I lost all command over myself, and abused him, in my daughter's presence, as "a low impostor whom I could ruin for life if I chose to open my lips and let out his Secret." I said no more about him than that, being brought to my senses as soon as those words had escaped me by the sight of my daughter's face looking eagerly and curiously at mine. I instantly ordered her out of the room until I had composed myself again. My sensations were not pleasant, I can tell you, when I came to reflect on my own folly. Anne had been more than usually crazy and queer that year, and when I thought of the chance there might be of her repeating my words in the town, and mentioning HIS name in connection with them, if inquisitive people got hold of her, I was finely terrified at the possible consequences. My worst fears for myself, my worst dread of what he might do, led me no farther than this. I was quite unprepared for what really did happen only the next day. On that next day, without any warning to me to expect him, he came to the house. His first words, and the tone in which he spoke them, surly as it was, showed me plainly enough that he had repented already of his insolent answer to my application, and that he had come in a mighty bad temper to try and set matters right again before it was too late. Seeing my daughter in the room with me (I had been afraid to let her out of my sight after what had happened the day before) he ordered her away. They neither of them liked each other, and he vented the ill-temper on HER which he was afraid to show to ME. "Leave us," he said, looking at her over his shoulder. She looked back over HER shoulder and waited as if she didn't care to go. "Do you hear?" he roared out, "leave the room." "Speak to me civilly," says she, getting red in the face. "Turn the idiot out," says he, looking my way. She had always had crazy notions of her own about her dignity, and that word "idiot" upset her in a moment. Before I could interfere she stepped up to him in a fine passion. "Beg my pardon, directly," says she, "or I'll make it the worse for you. I'll let out your Secret. I can ruin you for life if I choose to open my lips." My own words!--repeated exactly from what I had said the day before--repeated, in his presence, as if they had come from herself. He sat speechless, as white as the paper I am writing on, while I pushed her out of the room. When he recovered himself---- No! I am too respectable a woman to mention what he said when he recovered himself. My pen is the pen of a member of the rector's congregation, and a subscriber to the "Wednesday Lectures on Justification by Faith"--how can you expect me to employ it in writing bad language? Suppose, for yourself, the raging, swearing frenzy of the lowest ruffian in England, and let us get on together, as fast as may be, to the way in which it all ended. It ended, as you probably guess by this time, in his insisting on securing his own safety by shutting her up. I tried to set things right. I told him that she had merely repeated, like a parrot, the words she had heard me say and that she knew no particulars whatever, because I had mentioned none. I explained that she had affected, out of crazy spite against him, to know what she really did NOT know--that she only wanted to threaten him and aggravate him for speaking to her as he had just spoken--and that my unlucky words gave her just the chance of doing mischief of which she was in search. I referred him to other queer ways of hers, and to his own experience of the vagaries of half-witted people--it was all to no purpose--he would not believe me on my oath--he was absolutely certain I had betrayed the whole Secret. In short, he would hear of nothing but shutting her up. Under these circumstances, I did my duty as a mother. "No pauper Asylum," I said, "I won't have her put in a pauper Asylum. A Private Establishment, if you please. I have my feelings as a mother, and my character to preserve in the town, and I will submit to nothing but a Private Establishment, of the sort which my genteel neighbours would choose for afflicted relatives of their own." Those were my words. It is gratifying to me to reflect that I did my duty. Though never overfond of my late daughter, I had a proper pride about her. No pauper stain--thanks to my firmness and resolution--ever rested on MY child. Having carried my point (which I did the more easily, in consequence of the facilities offered by private Asylums), I could not refuse to admit that there were certain advantages gained by shutting her up. In the first place, she was taken excellent care of--being treated (as I took care to mention in the town) on the footing of a lady. In the second place, she was kept away from Welmingham, where she might have set people suspecting and inquiring, by repeating my own incautious words. The only drawback of putting her under restraint was a very slight one. We merely turned her empty boast about knowing the Secret into a fixed delusion. Having first spoken in sheer crazy spitefulness against the man who had offended her, she was cunning enough to see that she had seriously frightened him, and sharp enough afterwards to discover that HE was concerned in shutting her up. The consequence was she flamed out into a perfect frenzy of passion against him, going to the Asylum, and the first words she said to the nurses, after they had quieted her, were, that she was put in confinement for knowing his Secret, and that she meant to open her lips and ruin him, when the right time came. She may have said the same thing to you, when you thoughtlessly assisted her escape. She certainly said it (as I heard last summer) to the unfortunate woman who married our sweet-tempered, nameless gentleman lately deceased. If either you, or that unlucky lady, had questioned my daughter closely, and had insisted on her explaining what she really meant, you would have found her lose all her self-importance suddenly, and get vacant, and restless, and confused--you would have discovered that I am writing nothing here but the plain truth. She knew that there was a Secret--she knew who was connected with it--she knew who would suffer by its being known--and beyond that, whatever airs of importance she may have given herself, whatever crazy boasting she may have indulged in with strangers, she never to her dying day knew more. Have I satisfied your curiosity? I have taken pains enough to satisfy it at any rate. There is really nothing else I have to tell you about myself or my daughter. My worst responsibilities, so far as she was concerned, were all over when she was secured in the Asylum. I had a form of letter relating to the circumstances under which she was shut up, given me to write, in answer to one Miss Halcombe, who was curious in the matter, and who must have heard plenty of lies about me from a certain tongue well accustomed to the telling of the same. And I did what I could afterwards to trace my runaway daughter, and prevent her from doing mischief by making inquiries myself in the neighbourhood where she was falsely reported to have been seen. But these, and other trifles like them, are of little or no interest to you after what you have heard already. So far, I have written in the friendliest possible spirit. But I cannot close this letter without adding a word here of serious remonstrance and reproof, addressed to yourself. In the course of your personal interview with me, you audaciously referred to my late daughter's parentage on the father's side, as if that parentage was a matter of doubt. This was highly improper and very ungentlemanlike on your part! If we see each other again, remember, if you please, that I will allow no liberties to be taken with my reputation, and that the moral atmosphere of Welmingham (to use a favourite expression of my friend the rector's) must not be tainted by loose conversation of any kind. If you allow yourself to doubt that my husband was Anne's father, you personally insult me in the grossest manner. If you have felt, and if you still continue to feel, an unhallowed curiosity on this subject, I recommend you, in your own interests, to check it at once, and for ever. On this side of the grave, Mr. Hartright, whatever may happen on the other, THAT curiosity will never be gratified. Perhaps, after what I have just said, you will see the necessity of writing me an apology. Do so, and I will willingly receive it. I will, afterwards, if your wishes point to a second interview with me, go a step farther, and receive you. My circumstances only enable me to invite you to tea--not that they are at all altered for the worse by what has happened. I have always lived, as I think I told you, well within my income, and I have saved enough, in the last twenty years, to make me quite comfortable for the rest of my life. It is not my intention to leave Welmingham. There are one or two little advantages which I have still to gain in the town. The clergyman bows to me--as you saw. He is married, and his wife is not quite so civil. I propose to join the Dorcas Society, and I mean to make the clergyman's wife bow to me next. If you favour me with your company, pray understand that the conversation must be entirely on general subjects. Any attempted reference to this letter will be quite useless--I am determined not to acknowledge having written it. The evidence has been destroyed in the fire, I know, but I think it desirable to err on the side of caution, nevertheless. On this account no names are mentioned here, nor is any signature attached to these lines: the handwriting is disguised throughout, and I mean to deliver the letter myself, under circumstances which will prevent all fear of its being traced to my house. You can have no possible cause to complain of these precautions, seeing that they do not affect the information I here communicate, in consideration of the special indulgence which you have deserved at my hands. My hour for tea is half-past five, and my buttered toast waits for nobody. THE STORY CONTINUED BY WALTER HARTRIGHT I My first impulse, after reading Mrs. Catherick's extraordinary narrative, was to destroy it. The hardened shameless depravity of the whole composition, from beginning to end--the atrocious perversity of mind which persistently associated me with a calamity for which I was in no sense answerable, and with a death which I had risked my life in trying to avert--so disgusted me, that I was on the point of tearing the letter, when a consideration suggested itself which warned me to wait a little before I destroyed it. This consideration was entirely unconnected with Sir Percival. The information communicated to me, so far as it concerned him, did little more than confirm the conclusions at which I had already arrived. He had committed his offence, as I had supposed him to have committed it, and the absence of all reference, on Mrs. Catherick's part, to the duplicate register at Knowlesbury, strengthened my previous conviction that the existence of the book, and the risk of detection which it implied, must have been necessarily unknown to Sir Percival. My interest in the question of the forgery was now at an end, and my only object in keeping the letter was to make it of some future service in clearing up the last mystery that still remained to baffle me--the parentage of Anne Catherick on the father's side. There were one or two sentences dropped in her mother's narrative, which it might be useful to refer to again, when matters of more immediate importance allowed me leisure to search for the missing evidence. I did not despair of still finding that evidence, and I had lost none of my anxiety to discover it, for I had lost none of my interest in tracing the father of the poor creature who now lay at rest in Mrs. Fairlie's grave. Accordingly, I sealed up the letter and put it away carefully in my pocket-book, to be referred to again when the time came. The next day was my last in Hampshire. When I had appeared again before the magistrate at Knowlesbury, and when I had attended at the adjourned inquest, I should be free to return to London by the afternoon or the evening train. My first errand in the morning was, as usual, to the post-office. The letter from Marian was there, but I thought when it was handed to me that it felt unusually light. I anxiously opened the envelope. There was nothing inside but a small strip of paper folded in two. The few blotted hurriedly-written lines which were traced on it contained these words: "Come back as soon as you can. I have been obliged to move. Come to Gower's Walk, Fulham (number five). I will be on the look-out for you. Don't be alarmed about us, we are both safe and well. But come back.--Marian." The news which those lines contained--news which I instantly associated with some attempted treachery on the part of Count Fosco--fairly overwhelmed me. I stood breathless with the paper crumpled up in my hand. What had happened? What subtle wickedness had the Count planned and executed in my absence? A night had passed since Marian's note was written--hours must elapse still before I could get back to them--some new disaster might have happened already of which I was ignorant. And here, miles and miles away from them, here I must remain--held, doubly held, at the disposal of the law! I hardly know to what forgetfulness of my obligations anxiety and alarm might not have tempted me, but for the quieting influence of my faith in Marian. My absolute reliance on her was the one earthly consideration which helped me to restrain myself, and gave me courage to wait. The inquest was the first of the impediments in the way of my freedom of action. I attended it at the appointed time, the legal formalities requiring my presence in the room, but as it turned out, not calling on me to repeat my evidence. This useless delay was a hard trial, although I did my best to quiet my impatience by following the course of the proceedings as closely as I could. The London solicitor of the deceased (Mr. Merriman) was among the persons present. But he was quite unable to assist the objects of the inquiry. He could only say that he was inexpressibly shocked and astonished, and that he could throw no light whatever on the mysterious circumstances of the case. At intervals during the adjourned investigation, he suggested questions which the Coroner put, but which led to no results. After a patient inquiry, which lasted nearly three hours, and which exhausted every available source of information, the jury pronounced the customary verdict in cases of sudden death by accident. They added to the formal decision a statement, that there had been no evidence to show how the keys had been abstracted, how the fire had been caused, or what the purpose was for which the deceased had entered the vestry. This act closed the proceedings. The legal representative of the dead man was left to provide for the necessities of the interment, and the witnesses were free to retire. Resolved not to lose a minute in getting to Knowlesbury, I paid my bill at the hotel, and hired a fly to take me to the town. A gentleman who heard me give the order, and who saw that I was going alone, informed me that he lived in the neighbourhood of Knowlesbury, and asked if I would have any objection to his getting home by sharing the fly with me. I accepted his proposal as a matter of course. Our conversation during the drive was naturally occupied by the one absorbing subject of local interest. My new acquaintance had some knowledge of the late Sir Percival's solicitor, and he and Mr. Merriman had been discussing the state of the deceased gentleman's affairs and the succession to the property. Sir Percival's embarrassments were so well known all over the county that his solicitor could only make a virtue of necessity and plainly acknowledge them. He had died without leaving a will, and he had no personal property to bequeath, even if he had made one, the whole fortune which he had derived from his wife having been swallowed up by his creditors. The heir to the estate (Sir Percival having left no issue) was a son of Sir Felix Glyde's first cousin, an officer in command of an East Indiaman. He would find his unexpected inheritance sadly encumbered, but the property would recover with time, and, if "the captain" was careful, he might be a rich man yet before he died. Absorbed as I was in the one idea of getting to London, this information (which events proved to be perfectly correct) had an interest of its own to attract my attention. I thought it justified me in keeping secret my discovery of Sir Percival's fraud. The heir, whose rights he had usurped, was the heir who would now have the estate. The income from it, for the last three-and-twenty years, which should properly have been his, and which the dead man had squandered to the last farthing, was gone beyond recall. If I spoke, my speaking would confer advantage on no one. If I kept the secret, my silence concealed the character of the man who had cheated Laura into marrying him. For her sake, I wished to conceal it--for her sake, still, I tell this story under feigned names. I parted with my chance companion at Knowlesbury, and went at once to the town-hall. As I had anticipated, no one was present to prosecute the case against me--the necessary formalities were observed, and I was discharged. On leaving the court a letter from Mr. Dawson was put into my hand. It informed me that he was absent on professional duty, and it reiterated the offer I had already received from him of any assistance which I might require at his hands. I wrote back, warmly acknowledging my obligations to his kindness, and apologising for not expressing my thanks personally, in consequence of my immediate recall on pressing business to town. Half an hour later I was speeding back to London by the express train. II It was between nine and ten o'clock before I reached Fulham, and found my way to Gower's Walk. Both Laura and Marian came to the door to let me in. I think we had hardly known how close the tie was which bound us three together, until the evening came which united us again. We met as if we had been parted for months instead of for a few days only. Marian's face was sadly worn and anxious. I saw who had known all the danger and borne all the trouble in my absence the moment I looked at her. Laura's brighter looks and better spirits told me how carefully she had been spared all knowledge of the dreadful death at Welmingham, and of the true reason of our change of abode. The stir of the removal seemed to have cheered and interested her. She only spoke of it as a happy thought of Marian's to surprise me on my return with a change from the close, noisy street to the pleasant neighbourhood of trees and fields and the river. She was full of projects for the future--of the drawings she was to finish--of the purchasers I had found in the country who were to buy them--of the shillings and sixpences she had saved, till her purse was so heavy that she proudly asked me to weigh it in my own hand. The change for the better which had been wrought in her during the few days of my absence was a surprise to me for which I was quite unprepared--and for all the unspeakable happiness of seeing it, I was indebted to Marian's courage and to Marian's love. When Laura had left us, and when we could speak to one another without restraint, I tried to give some expression to the gratitude and the admiration which filled my heart. But the generous creature would not wait to hear me. That sublime self-forgetfulness of women, which yields so much and asks so little, turned all her thoughts from herself to me. "I had only a moment left before post-time," she said, "or I should have written less abruptly. You look worn and weary, Walter. I am afraid my letter must have seriously alarmed you?" "Only at first," I replied. "My mind was quieted, Marian, by my trust in you. Was I right in attributing this sudden change of place to some threatened annoyance on the part of Count Fosco?" "Perfectly right," she said. "I saw him yesterday, and worse than that, Walter--I spoke to him." "Spoke to him? Did he know where we lived? Did he come to the house?" "He did. To the house--but not upstairs. Laura never saw him--Laura suspects nothing. I will tell you how it happened: the danger, I believe and hope, is over now. Yesterday, I was in the sitting-room, at our old lodgings. Laura was drawing at the table, and I was walking about and setting things to rights. I passed the window, and as I passed it, looked out into the street. There, on the opposite side of the way, I saw the Count, with a man talking to him----" "Did he notice you at the window?" "No--at least, I thought not. I was too violently startled to be quite sure." "Who was the other man? A stranger?" "Not a stranger, Walter. As soon as I could draw my breath again, I recognised him. He was the owner of the Lunatic Asylum." "Was the Count pointing out the house to him?" "No, they were talking together as if they had accidentally met in the street. I remained at the window looking at them from behind the curtain. If I had turned round, and if Laura had seen my face at that moment----Thank God, she was absorbed over her drawing! They soon parted. The man from the Asylum went one way, and the Count the other. I began to hope they were in the street by chance, till I saw the Count come back, stop opposite to us again, take out his card-case and pencil, write something, and then cross the road to the shop below us. I ran past Laura before she could see me, and said I had forgotten something upstairs. As soon as I was out of the room I went down to the first landing and waited--I was determined to stop him if he tried to come upstairs. He made no such attempt. The girl from the shop came through the door into the passage, with his card in her hand--a large gilt card with his name, and a coronet above it, and these lines underneath in pencil: 'Dear lady' (yes! the villain could address me in that way still)--'dear lady, one word, I implore you, on a matter serious to us both.' If one can think at all, in serious difficulties, one thinks quick. I felt directly that it might be a fatal mistake to leave myself and to leave you in the dark, where such a man as the Count was concerned. I felt that the doubt of what he might do, in your absence, would be ten times more trying to me if I declined to see him than if I consented. 'Ask the gentleman to wait in the shop,' I said. 'I will be with him in a moment.' I ran upstairs for my bonnet, being determined not to let him speak to me indoors. I knew his deep ringing voice, and I was afraid Laura might hear it, even in the shop. In less than a minute I was down again in the passage, and had opened the door into the street. He came round to meet me from the shop. There he was in deep mourning, with his smooth bow and his deadly smile, and some idle boys and women near him, staring at his great size, his fine black clothes, and his large cane with the gold knob to it. All the horrible time at Blackwater came back to me the moment I set eyes on him. All the old loathing crept and crawled through me, when he took off his hat with a flourish and spoke to me, as if we had parted on the friendliest terms hardly a day since." "You remember what he said?" "I can't repeat it, Walter. You shall know directly what he said about you---but I can't repeat what he said to me. It was worse than the polite insolence of his letter. My hands tingled to strike him, as if I had been a man! I only kept them quiet by tearing his card to pieces under my shawl. Without saying a word on my side, I walked away from the house (for fear of Laura seeing us), and he followed, protesting softly all the way. In the first by-street I turned, and asked him what he wanted with me. He wanted two things. First, if I had no objection, to express his sentiments. I declined to hear them. Secondly, to repeat the warning in his letter. I asked, what occasion there was for repeating it. He bowed and smiled, and said he would explain. The explanation exactly confirmed the fears I expressed before you left us. I told you, if you remember, that Sir Percival would be too headstrong to take his friend's advice where you were concerned, and that there was no danger to be dreaded from the Count till his own interests were threatened, and he was roused into acting for himself?" "I recollect, Marian." "Well, so it has really turned out. The Count offered his advice, but it was refused. Sir Percival would only take counsel of his own violence, his own obstinacy, and his own hatred of you. The Count let him have his way, first privately ascertaining, in case of his own interests being threatened next, where we lived. You were followed, Walter, on returning here, after your first journey to Hampshire, by the lawyer's men for some distance from the railway, and by the Count himself to the door of the house. How he contrived to escape being seen by you he did not tell me, but he found us out on that occasion, and in that way. Having made the discovery, he took no advantage of it till the news reached him of Sir Percival's death, and then, as I told you, he acted for himself, because he believed you would next proceed against the dead man's partner in the conspiracy. He at once made his arrangements to meet the owner of the Asylum in London, and to take him to the place where his runaway patient was hidden, believing that the results, whichever way they ended, would be to involve you in interminable legal disputes and difficulties, and to tie your hands for all purposes of offence, so far as he was concerned. That was his purpose, on his own confession to me. The only consideration which made him hesitate, at the last moment----" "Yes?" "It is hard to acknowledge it, Walter, and yet I must. I was the only consideration. No words can say how degraded I feel in my own estimation when I think of it, but the one weak point in that man's iron character is the horrible admiration he feels for me. I have tried, for the sake of my own self-respect, to disbelieve it as long as I could; but his looks, his actions, force on me the shameful conviction of the truth. The eyes of that monster of wickedness moistened while he was speaking to me--they did, Walter! He declared that at the moment of pointing out the house to the doctor, he thought of my misery if I was separated from Laura, of my responsibility if I was called on to answer for effecting her escape, and he risked the worst that you could do to him, the second time, for my sake. All he asked was that I would remember the sacrifice, and restrain your rashness, in my own interests--interests which he might never be able to consult again. I made no such bargain with him--I would have died first. But believe him or not, whether it is true or false that he sent the doctor away with an excuse, one thing is certain, I saw the man leave him without so much as a glance at our window, or even at our side of the way." "I believe it, Marian. The best men are not consistent in good--why should the worst men be consistent in evil? At the same time, I suspect him of merely attempting to frighten you, by threatening what he cannot really do. I doubt his power of annoying us, by means of the owner of the Asylum, now that Sir Percival is dead, and Mrs. Catherick is free from all control. But let me hear more. What did the Count say of me?" "He spoke last of you. His eyes brightened and hardened, and his manner changed to what I remember it in past times--to that mixture of pitiless resolution and mountebank mockery which makes it so impossible to fathom him. 'Warn Mr. Hartright!' he said in his loftiest manner. 'He has a man of brains to deal with, a man who snaps his big fingers at the laws and conventions of society, when he measures himself with ME. If my lamented friend had taken my advice, the business of the inquest would have been with the body of Mr. Hartright. But my lamented friend was obstinate. See! I mourn his loss--inwardly in my soul, outwardly on my hat. This trivial crape expresses sensibilities which I summon Mr. Hartright to respect. They may be transformed to immeasurable enmities if he ventures to disturb them. Let him be content with what he has got--with what I leave unmolested, for your sake, to him and to you. Say to him (with my compliments), if he stirs me, he has Fosco to deal with. In the English of the Popular Tongue, I inform him--Fosco sticks at nothing. Dear lady, good morning.' His cold grey eyes settled on my face--he took off his hat solemnly--bowed, bare-headed--and left me." "Without returning? without saying more last words?" "He turned at the corner of the street, and waved his hand, and then struck it theatrically on his breast. I lost sight of him after that. He disappeared in the opposite direction to our house, and I ran back to Laura. Before I was indoors again, I had made up my mind that we must go. The house (especially in your absence) was a place of danger instead of a place of safety, now that the Count had discovered it. If I could have felt certain of your return, I should have risked waiting till you came back. But I was certain of nothing, and I acted at once on my own impulse. You had spoken, before leaving us, of moving into a quieter neighbourhood and purer air, for the sake of Laura's health. I had only to remind her of that, and to suggest surprising you and saving you trouble by managing the move in your absence, to make her quite as anxious for the change as I was. She helped me to pack up your things, and she has arranged them all for you in your new working-room here." "What made you think of coming to this place?" "My ignorance of other localities in the neighbourhood of London. I felt the necessity of getting as far away as possible from our old lodgings, and I knew something of Fulham, because I had once been at school there. I despatched a messenger with a note, on the chance that the school might still be in existence. It was in existence--the daughters of my old mistress were carrying it on for her, and they engaged this place from the instructions I had sent. It was just post-time when the messenger returned to me with the address of the house. We moved after dark--we came here quite unobserved. Have I done right, Walter? Have I justified your trust in me?" I answered her warmly and gratefully, as I really felt. But the anxious look still remained on her face while I was speaking, and the first question she asked, when I had done, related to Count Fosco. I saw that she was thinking of him now with a changed mind. No fresh outbreak of anger against him, no new appeal to me to hasten the day of reckoning escaped her. Her conviction that the man's hateful admiration of herself was really sincere, seemed to have increased a hundredfold her distrust of his unfathomable cunning, her inborn dread of the wicked energy and vigilance of all his faculties. Her voice fell low, her manner was hesitating, her eyes searched into mine with an eager fear when she asked me what I thought of his message, and what I meant to do next after hearing it. "Not many weeks have passed, Marian," I answered, "since my interview with Mr. Kyrle. When he and I parted, the last words I said to him about Laura were these: 'Her uncle's house shall open to receive her, in the presence of every soul who followed the false funeral to the grave; the lie that records her death shall be publicly erased from the tombstone by the authority of the head of the family, and the two men who have wronged her shall answer for their crime to ME, though the justice that sits in tribunals is powerless to pursue them.' One of those men is beyond mortal reach. The other remains, and my resolution remains." Her eyes lit up--her colour rose. She said nothing, but I saw all her sympathies gathering to mine in her face. "I don't disguise from myself, or from you," I went on, "that the prospect before us is more than doubtful. The risks we have run already are, it may be, trifles compared with the risks that threaten us in the future, but the venture shall be tried, Marian, for all that. I am not rash enough to measure myself against such a man as the Count before I am well prepared for him. I have learnt patience--I can wait my time. Let him believe that his message has produced its effect--let him know nothing of us, and hear nothing of us--let us give him full time to feel secure--his own boastful nature, unless I seriously mistake him, will hasten that result. This is one reason for waiting, but there is another more important still. My position, Marian, towards you and towards Laura ought to be a stronger one than it is now before I try our last chance." She leaned near to me, with a look of surprise. "How can it be stronger?" she asked. "I will tell you," I replied, "when the time comes. It has not come yet--it may never come at all. I may be silent about it to Laura for ever--I must be silent now, even to YOU, till I see for myself that I can harmlessly and honourably speak. Let us leave that subject. There is another which has more pressing claims on our attention. You have kept Laura, mercifully kept her, in ignorance of her husband's death----" "Oh, Walter, surely it must be long yet before we tell her of it?" "No, Marian. Better that you should reveal it to her now, than that accident, which no one can guard against, should reveal it to her at some future time. Spare her all the details--break it to her very tenderly, but tell her that he is dead." "You have a reason, Walter, for wishing her to know of her husband's death besides the reason you have just mentioned?" "I have." "A reason connected with that subject which must not be mentioned between us yet?--which may never be mentioned to Laura at all?" She dwelt on the last words meaningly. When I answered her in the affirmative, I dwelt on them too. Her face grew pale. For a while she looked at me with a sad, hesitating interest. An unaccustomed tenderness trembled in her dark eyes and softened her firm lips, as she glanced aside at the empty chair in which the dear companion of all our joys and sorrows had been sitting. "I think I understand," she said. "I think I owe it to her and to you, Walter, to tell her of her husband's death." She sighed, and held my hand fast for a moment--then dropped it abruptly, and left the room. On the next day Laura knew that his death had released her, and that the error and the calamity of her life lay buried in his tomb. His name was mentioned among us no more. Thenceforward, we shrank from the slightest approach to the subject of his death, and in the same scrupulous manner, Marian and I avoided all further reference to that other subject, which, by her consent and mine, was not to be mentioned between us yet. It was not the less present in our minds--it was rather kept alive in them by the restraint which we had imposed on ourselves. We both watched Laura more anxiously than ever, sometimes waiting and hoping, sometimes waiting and fearing, till the time came. By degrees we returned to our accustomed way of life. I resumed the daily work, which had been suspended during my absence in Hampshire. Our new lodgings cost us more than the smaller and less convenient rooms which we had left, and the claim thus implied on my increased exertions was strengthened by the doubtfulness of our future prospects. Emergencies might yet happen which would exhaust our little fund at the banker's, and the work of my hands might be, ultimately, all we had to look to for support. More permanent and more lucrative employment than had yet been offered to me was a necessity of our position--a necessity for which I now diligently set myself to provide. It must not be supposed that the interval of rest and seclusion of which I am now writing, entirely suspended, on my part, all pursuit of the one absorbing purpose with which my thoughts and actions are associated in these pages. That purpose was, for months and months yet, never to relax its claims on me. The slow ripening of it still left me a measure of precaution to take, an obligation of gratitude to perform, and a doubtful question to solve. The measure of precaution related, necessarily, to the Count. It was of the last importance to ascertain, if possible, whether his plans committed him to remaining in England--or, in other words, to remaining within my reach. I contrived to set this doubt at rest by very simple means. His address in St. John's Wood being known to me, I inquired in the neighbourhood, and having found out the agent who had the disposal of the furnished house in which he lived, I asked if number five, Forest Road, was likely to be let within a reasonable time. The reply was in the negative. I was informed that the foreign gentleman then residing in the house had renewed his term of occupation for another six months, and would remain in possession until the end of June in the following year. We were then at the beginning of December only. I left the agent with my mind relieved from all present fear of the Count's escaping me. The obligation I had to perform took me once more into the presence of Mrs. Clements. I had promised to return, and to confide to her those particulars relating to the death and burial of Anne Catherick which I had been obliged to withhold at our first interview. Changed as circumstances now were, there was no hindrance to my trusting the good woman with as much of the story of the conspiracy as it was necessary to tell. I had every reason that sympathy and friendly feeling could suggest to urge on me the speedy performance of my promise, and I did conscientiously and carefully perform it. There is no need to burden these pages with any statement of what passed at the interview. It will be more to the purpose to say, that the interview itself necessarily brought to my mind the one doubtful question still remaining to be solved--the question of Anne Catherick's parentage on the father's side. A multitude of small considerations in connection with this subject--trifling enough in themselves, but strikingly important when massed together--had latterly led my mind to a conclusion which I resolved to verify. I obtained Marian's permission to write to Major Donthorne, of Varneck Hall (where Mrs. Catherick had lived in service for some years previous to her marriage), to ask him certain questions. I made the inquiries in Marian's name, and described them as relating to matters of personal history in her family, which might explain and excuse my application. When I wrote the letter I had no certain knowledge that Major Donthorne was still alive--I despatched it on the chance that he might be living, and able and willing to reply. After a lapse of two days proof came, in the shape of a letter, that the Major was living, and that he was ready to help us. The idea in my mind when I wrote to him, and the nature of my inquiries will be easily inferred from his reply. His letter answered my questions by communicating these important facts-- In the first place, "the late Sir Percival Glyde, of Blackwater Park," had never set foot in Varneck Hall. The deceased gentleman was a total stranger to Major Donthorne, and to all his family. In the second place, "the late Mr. Philip Fairlie, of Limmeridge House," had been, in his younger days, the intimate friend and constant guest of Major Donthorne. Having refreshed his memory by looking back to old letters and other papers, the Major was in a position to say positively that Mr. Philip Fairlie was staying at Varneck Hall in the month of August, eighteen hundred and twenty-six, and that he remained there for the shooting during the month of September and part of October following. He then left, to the best of the Major's belief, for Scotland, and did not return to Varneck Hall till after a lapse of time, when he reappeared in the character of a newly-married man. Taken by itself, this statement was, perhaps, of little positive value, but taken in connection with certain facts, every one of which either Marian or I knew to be true, it suggested one plain conclusion that was, to our minds, irresistible. Knowing, now, that Mr. Philip Fairlie had been at Varneck Hall in the autumn of eighteen hundred and twenty-six, and that Mrs. Catherick had been living there in service at the same time, we knew also--first, that Anne had been born in June, eighteen hundred and twenty-seven; secondly, that she had always presented an extraordinary personal resemblance to Laura; and, thirdly, that Laura herself was strikingly like her father. Mr. Philip Fairlie had been one of the notoriously handsome men of his time. In disposition entirely unlike his brother Frederick, he was the spoilt darling of society, especially of the women--an easy, light-hearted, impulsive, affectionate man--generous to a fault--constitutionally lax in his principles, and notoriously thoughtless of moral obligations where women were concerned. Such were the facts we knew--such was the character of the man. Surely the plain inference that follows needs no pointing out? Read by the new light which had now broken upon me, even Mrs. Catherick's letter, in despite of herself, rendered its mite of assistance towards strengthening the conclusion at which I had arrived. She had described Mrs. Fairlie (in writing to me) as "plain-looking," and as having "entrapped the handsomest man in England into marrying her." Both assertions were gratuitously made, and both were false. Jealous dislike (which, in such a woman as Mrs. Catherick, would express itself in petty malice rather than not express itself at all) appeared to me to be the only assignable cause for the peculiar insolence of her reference to Mrs. Fairlie, under circumstances which did not necessitate any reference at all. The mention here of Mrs. Fairlie's name naturally suggests one other question. Did she ever suspect whose child the little girl brought to her at Limmeridge might be? Marian's testimony was positive on this point. Mrs. Fairlie's letter to her husband, which had been read to me in former days--the letter describing Anne's resemblance to Laura, and acknowledging her affectionate interest in the little stranger--had been written, beyond all question, in perfect innocence of heart. It even seemed doubtful, on consideration, whether Mr. Philip Fairlie himself had been nearer than his wife to any suspicion of the truth. The disgracefully deceitful circumstances under which Mrs. Catherick had married, the purpose of concealment which the marriage was intended to answer, might well keep her silent for caution's sake, perhaps for her own pride's sake also, even assuming that she had the means, in his absence, of communicating with the father of her unborn child. As this surmise floated through my mind, there rose on my memory the remembrance of the Scripture denunciation which we have all thought of in our time with wonder and with awe: "The sins of the fathers shall be visited on the children." But for the fatal resemblance between the two daughters of one father, the conspiracy of which Anne had been the innocent instrument and Laura the innocent victim could never have been planned. With what unerring and terrible directness the long chain of circumstances led down from the thoughtless wrong committed by the father to the heartless injury inflicted on the child! These thoughts came to me, and others with them, which drew my mind away to the little Cumberland churchyard where Anne Catherick now lay buried. I thought of the bygone days when I had met her by Mrs. Fairlie's grave, and met her for the last time. I thought of her poor helpless hands beating on the tombstone, and her weary, yearning words, murmured to the dead remains of her protectress and her friend: "Oh, if I could die, and be hidden and at rest with YOU!" Little more than a year had passed since she breathed that wish; and how inscrutably, how awfully, it had been fulfilled! The words she had spoken to Laura by the shores of the lake, the very words had now come true. "Oh, if I could only be buried with your mother! If I could only wake at her side when the angel's trumpet sounds and the graves give up their dead at the resurrection!" Through what mortal crime and horror, through what darkest windings of the way down to death--the lost creature had wandered in God's leading to the last home that, living, she never hoped to reach! In that sacred rest I leave her--in that dread companionship let her remain undisturbed. So the ghostly figure which has haunted these pages, as it haunted my life, goes down into the impenetrable gloom. Like a shadow she first came to me in the loneliness of the night. Like a shadow she passes away in the loneliness of the dead. III Four months elapsed. April came--the month of spring--the month of change. The course of time had flowed through the interval since the winter peacefully and happily in our new home. I had turned my long leisure to good account, had largely increased my sources of employment, and had placed our means of subsistence on surer grounds. Freed from the suspense and the anxiety which had tried her so sorely and hung over her so long, Marian's spirits rallied, and her natural energy of character began to assert itself again, with something, if not all, of the freedom and the vigour of former times. More pliable under change than her sister, Laura showed more plainly the progress made by the healing influences of her new life. The worn and wasted look which had prematurely aged her face was fast leaving it, and the expression which had been the first of its charms in past days was the first of its beauties that now returned. My closest observations of her detected but one serious result of the conspiracy which had once threatened her reason and her life. Her memory of events, from the period of her leaving Blackwater Park to the period of our meeting in the burial-ground of Limmeridge Church, was lost beyond all hope of recovery. At the slightest reference to that time she changed and trembled still, her words became confused, her memory wandered and lost itself as helplessly as ever. Here, and here only, the traces of the past lay deep--too deep to be effaced. In all else she was now so far on the way to recovery that, on her best and brightest days, she sometimes looked and spoke like the Laura of old times. The happy change wrought its natural result in us both. From their long slumber, on her side and on mine, those imperishable memories of our past life in Cumberland now awoke, which were one and all alike, the memories of our love. Gradually and insensibly our daily relations towards each other became constrained. The fond words which I had spoken to her so naturally, in the days of her sorrow and her suffering, faltered strangely on my lips. In the time when my dread of losing her was most present to my mind, I had always kissed her when she left me at night and when she met me in the morning. The kiss seemed now to have dropped between us--to be lost out of our lives. Our hands began to tremble again when they met. We hardly ever looked long at one another out of Marian's presence. The talk often flagged between us when we were alone. When I touched her by accident I felt my heart beating fast, as it used to beat at Limmeridge House--I saw the lovely answering flush glowing again in her cheeks, as if we were back among the Cumberland Hills in our past characters of master and pupil once more. She had long intervals of silence and thoughtfulness, and denied she had been thinking when Marian asked her the question. I surprised myself one day neglecting my work to dream over the little water-colour portrait of her which I had taken in the summer-house where we first met--just as I used to neglect Mr. Fairlie's drawings to dream over the same likeness when it was newly finished in the bygone time. Changed as all the circumstances now were, our position towards each other in the golden days of our first companionship seemed to be revived with the revival of our love. It was as if Time had drifted us back on the wreck of our early hopes to the old familiar shore! To any other woman I could have spoken the decisive words which I still hesitated to speak to HER. The utter helplessness of her position--her friendless dependence on all the forbearing gentleness that I could show her--my fear of touching too soon some secret sensitiveness in her which my instinct as a man might not have been fine enough to discover--these considerations, and others like them, kept me self-distrustfully silent. And yet I knew that the restraint on both sides must be ended, that the relations in which we stood towards one another must be altered in some settled manner for the future, and that it rested with me, in the first instance, to recognise the necessity for a change. The more I thought of our position, the harder the attempt to alter it appeared, while the domestic conditions on which we three had been living together since the winter remained undisturbed. I cannot account for the capricious state of mind in which this feeling originated, but the idea nevertheless possessed me that some previous change of place and circumstances, some sudden break in the quiet monotony of our lives, so managed as to vary the home aspect under which we had been accustomed to see each other, might prepare the way for me to speak, and might make it easier and less embarrassing for Laura and Marian to hear. With this purpose in view, I said, one morning, that I thought we had all earned a little holiday and a change of scene. After some consideration, it was decided that we should go for a fortnight to the sea-side. On the next day we left Fulham for a quiet town on the south coast. At that early season of the year we were the only visitors in the place. The cliffs, the beach, and the walks inland were all in the solitary condition which was most welcome to us. The air was mild--the prospects over hill and wood and down were beautifully varied by the shifting April light and shade, and the restless sea leapt under our windows, as if it felt, like the land, the glow and freshness of spring. I owed it to Marian to consult her before I spoke to Laura, and to be guided afterwards by her advice. On the third day from our arrival I found a fit opportunity of speaking to her alone. The moment we looked at one another, her quick instinct detected the thought in my mind before I could give it expression. With her customary energy and directness she spoke at once, and spoke first. "You are thinking of that subject which was mentioned between us on the evening of your return from Hampshire," she said. "I have been expecting you to allude to it for some time past. There must be a change in our little household, Walter, we cannot go on much longer as we are now. I see it as plainly as you do--as plainly as Laura sees it, though she says nothing. How strangely the old times in Cumberland seem to have come back! You and I are together again, and the one subject of interest between us is Laura once more. I could almost fancy that this room is the summer-house at Limmeridge, and that those waves beyond us are beating on our sea-shore." "I was guided by your advice in those past days," I said, "and now, Marian, with reliance tenfold greater I will be guided by it again." She answered by pressing my hand. I saw that she was deeply touched by my reference to the past. We sat together near the window, and while I spoke and she listened, we looked at the glory of the sunlight shining on the majesty of the sea. "Whatever comes of this confidence between us," I said, "whether it ends happily or sorrowfully for ME, Laura's interests will still be the interests of my life. When we leave this place, on whatever terms we leave it, my determination to wrest from Count Fosco the confession which I failed to obtain from his accomplice, goes back with me to London, as certainly as I go back myself. Neither you nor I can tell how that man may turn on me, if I bring him to bay; we only know, by his own words and actions, that he is capable of striking at me through Laura, without a moment's hesitation, or a moment's remorse. In our present position I have no claim on her which society sanctions, which the law allows, to strengthen me in resisting him, and in protecting HER. This places me at a serious disadvantage. If I am to fight our cause with the Count, strong in the consciousness of Laura's safety, I must fight it for my Wife. Do you agree to that, Marian, so far?" "To every word of it," she answered. "I will not plead out of my own heart," I went on; "I will not appeal to the love which has survived all changes and all shocks--I will rest my only vindication of myself for thinking of her, and speaking of her as my wife, on what I have just said. If the chance of forcing a confession from the Count is, as I believe it to be, the last chance left of publicly establishing the fact of Laura's existence, the least selfish reason that I can advance for our marriage is recognised by us both. But I may be wrong in my conviction--other means of achieving our purpose may be in our power, which are less uncertain and less dangerous. I have searched anxiously, in my own mind, for those means, and I have not found them. Have you?" "No. I have thought about it too, and thought in vain." "In all likelihood," I continued, "the same questions have occurred to you, in considering this difficult subject, which have occurred to me. Ought we to return with her to Limmeridge, now that she is like herself again, and trust to the recognition of her by the people of the village, or by the children at the school? Ought we to appeal to the practical test of her handwriting? Suppose we did so. Suppose the recognition of her obtained, and the identity of the handwriting established. Would success in both those cases do more than supply an excellent foundation for a trial in a court of law? Would the recognition and the handwriting prove her identity to Mr. Fairlie and take her back to Limmeridge House, against the evidence of her aunt, against the evidence of the medical certificate, against the fact of the funeral and the fact of the inscription on the tomb? No! We could only hope to succeed in throwing a serious doubt on the assertion of her death, a doubt which nothing short of a legal inquiry can settle. I will assume that we possess (what we have certainly not got) money enough to carry this inquiry on through all its stages. I will assume that Mr. Fairlie's prejudices might be reasoned away--that the false testimony of the Count and his wife, and all the rest of the false testimony, might be confuted--that the recognition could not possibly be ascribed to a mistake between Laura and Anne Catherick, or the handwriting be declared by our enemies to be a clever fraud--all these are assumptions which, more or less, set plain probabilities at defiance; but let them pass--and let us ask ourselves what would be the first consequence or the first questions put to Laura herself on the subject of the conspiracy. We know only too well what the consequence would be, for we know that she has never recovered her memory of what happened to her in London. Examine her privately, or examine her publicly, she is utterly incapable of assisting the assertion of her own case. If you don't see this, Marian, as plainly as I see it, we will go to Limmeridge and try the experiment to-morrow." "I DO see it, Walter. Even if we had the means of paying all the law expenses, even if we succeeded in the end, the delays would be unendurable, the perpetual suspense, after what we have suffered already, would be heartbreaking. You are right about the hopelessness of going to Limmeridge. I wish I could feel sure that you are right also in determining to try that last chance with the Count. IS it a chance at all?" "Beyond a doubt, Yes. It is the chance of recovering the lost date of Laura's journey to London. Without returning to the reasons I gave you some time since, I am still as firmly persuaded as ever that there is a discrepancy between the date of that journey and the date on the certificate of death. There lies the weak point of the whole conspiracy--it crumbles to pieces if we attack it in that way, and the means of attacking it are in possession of the Count. If I succeed in wresting them from him, the object of your life and mine is fulfilled. If I fail, the wrong that Laura has suffered will, in this world, never be redressed." "Do you fear failure yourself, Walter?" "I dare not anticipate success, and for that very reason, Marian, I speak openly and plainly as I have spoken now. In my heart and my conscience I can say it, Laura's hopes for the future are at their lowest ebb. I know that her fortune is gone--I know that the last chance of restoring her to her place in the world lies at the mercy of her worst enemy, of a man who is now absolutely unassailable, and who may remain unassailable to the end. With every worldly advantage gone from her, with all prospect of recovering her rank and station more than doubtful, with no clearer future before her than the future which her husband can provide, the poor drawing-master may harmlessly open his heart at last. In the days of her prosperity, Marian, I was only the teacher who guided her hand--I ask for it, in her adversity, as the hand of my wife!" Marian's eyes met mine affectionately--I could say no more. My heart was full, my lips were trembling. In spite of myself I was in danger of appealing to her pity. I got up to leave the room. She rose at the same moment, laid her hand gently on my shoulder, and stopped me. "Walter!" she said, "I once parted you both, for your good and for hers. Wait here, my brother!--wait, my dearest, best friend, till Laura comes, and tells you what I have done now!" For the first time since the farewell morning at Limmeridge she touched my forehead with her lips. A tear dropped on my face as she kissed me. She turned quickly, pointed to the chair from which I had risen, and left the room. I sat down alone at the window to wait through the crisis of my life. My mind in that breathless interval felt like a total blank. I was conscious of nothing but a painful intensity of all familiar perceptions. The sun grew blinding bright, the white sea birds chasing each other far beyond me seemed to be flitting before my face, the mellow murmur of the waves on the beach was like thunder in my ears. The door opened, and Laura came in alone. So she had entered the breakfast-room at Limmeridge House on the morning when we parted. Slowly and falteringly, in sorrow and in hesitation, she had once approached me. Now she came with the haste of happiness in her feet, with the light of happiness radiant in her face. Of their own accord those dear arms clasped themselves round me, of their own accord the sweet lips came to meet mine. "My darling!" she whispered, "we may own we love each other now?" Her head nestled with a tender contentedness on my bosom. "Oh," she said innocently, "I am so happy at last!" Ten days later we were happier still. We were married. IV The course of this narrative, steadily flowing on, bears me away from the morning-time of our married life, and carries me forward to the end. In a fortnight more we three were back in London, and the shadow was stealing over us of the struggle to come. Marian and I were careful to keep Laura in ignorance of the cause that had hurried us back--the necessity of making sure of the Count. It was now the beginning of May, and his term of occupation at the house in Forest Road expired in June. If he renewed it (and I had reasons, shortly to be mentioned, for anticipating that he would), I might be certain of his not escaping me. But if by any chance he disappointed my expectations and left the country, then I had no time to lose in arming myself to meet him as I best might. In the first fulness of my new happiness, there had been moments when my resolution faltered--moments when I was tempted to be safely content, now that the dearest aspiration of my life was fulfilled in the possession of Laura's love. For the first time I thought faint-heartedly of the greatness of the risk, of the adverse chances arrayed against me, of the fair promise of our new life, and of the peril in which I might place the happiness which we had so hardly earned. Yes! let me own it honestly. For a brief time I wandered, in the sweet guiding of love, far from the purpose to which I had been true under sterner discipline and in darker days. Innocently Laura had tempted me aside from the hard path--innocently she was destined to lead me back again. At times, dreams of the terrible past still disconnectedly recalled to her, in the mystery of sleep, the events of which her waking memory had lost all trace. One night (barely two weeks after our marriage), when I was watching her at rest, I saw the tears come slowly through her closed eyelids, I heard the faint murmuring words escape her which told me that her spirit was back again on the fatal journey from Blackwater Park. That unconscious appeal, so touching and so awful in the sacredness of her sleep, ran through me like fire. The next day was the day we came back to London--the day when my resolution returned to me with tenfold strength. The first necessity was to know something of the man. Thus far, the true story of his life was an impenetrable mystery to me. I began with such scanty sources of information as were at my own disposal. The important narrative written by Mr. Frederick Fairlie (which Marian had obtained by following the directions I had given to her in the winter) proved to be of no service to the special object with which I now looked at it. While reading it I reconsidered the disclosure revealed to me by Mrs. Clements of the series of deceptions which had brought Anne Catherick to London, and which had there devoted her to the interests of the conspiracy. Here, again, the Count had not openly committed himself--here, again, he was, to all practical purpose, out of my reach. I next returned to Marian's journal at Blackwater Park. At my request she read to me again a passage which referred to her past curiosity about the Count, and to the few particulars which she had discovered relating to him. The passage to which I allude occurs in that part of her journal which delineates his character and his personal appearance. She describes him as "not having crossed the frontiers of his native country for years past"--as "anxious to know if any Italian gentlemen were settled in the nearest town to Blackwater Park"--as "receiving letters with all sorts of odd stamps on them, and one with a large official-looking seal on it." She is inclined to consider that his long absence from his native country may be accounted for by assuming that he is a political exile. But she is, on the other hand, unable to reconcile this idea with the reception of the letter from abroad bearing "the large official-looking seal"--letters from the Continent addressed to political exiles being usually the last to court attention from foreign post-offices in that way. The considerations thus presented to me in the diary, joined to certain surmises of my own that grew out of them, suggested a conclusion which I wondered I had not arrived at before. I now said to myself--what Laura had once said to Marian at Blackwater Park, what Madame Fosco had overheard by listening at the door--the Count is a spy! Laura had applied the word to him at hazard, in natural anger at his proceedings towards herself. I applied it to him with the deliberate conviction that his vocation in life was the vocation of a spy. On this assumption, the reason for his extraordinary stay in England so long after the objects of the conspiracy had been gained, became, to my mind, quite intelligible. The year of which I am now writing was the year of the famous Crystal Palace Exhibition in Hyde Park. Foreigners in unusually large numbers had arrived already, and were still arriving in England. Men were among us by hundreds whom the ceaseless distrustfulness of their governments had followed privately, by means of appointed agents, to our shores. My surmises did not for a moment class a man of the Count's abilities and social position with the ordinary rank and file of foreign spies. I suspected him of holding a position of authority, of being entrusted by the government which he secretly served with the organisation and management of agents specially employed in this country, both men and women, and I believed Mrs. Rubelle, who had been so opportunely found to act as nurse at Blackwater Park, to be, in all probability, one of the number. Assuming that this idea of mine had a foundation in truth, the position of the Count might prove to be more assailable than I had hitherto ventured to hope. To whom could I apply to know something more of the man's history and of the man himself than I knew now? In this emergency it naturally occurred to my mind that a countryman of his own, on whom I could rely, might be the fittest person to help me. The first man whom I thought of under these circumstances was also the only Italian with whom I was intimately acquainted--my quaint little friend, Professor Pesca. The professor has been so long absent from these pages that he has run some risk of being forgotten altogether. It is the necessary law of such a story as mine that the persons concerned in it only appear when the course of events takes them up--they come and go, not by favour of my personal partiality, but by right of their direct connection with the circumstances to be detailed. For this reason, not Pesca alone, but my mother and sister as well, have been left far in the background of the narrative. My visits to the Hampstead cottage, my mother's belief in the denial of Laura's identity which the conspiracy had accomplished, my vain efforts to overcome the prejudice on her part and on my sister's to which, in their jealous affection for me, they both continued to adhere, the painful necessity which that prejudice imposed on me of concealing my marriage from them till they had learnt to do justice to my wife--all these little domestic occurrences have been left unrecorded because they were not essential to the main interest of the story. It is nothing that they added to my anxieties and embittered my disappointments--the steady march of events has inexorably passed them by. For the same reason I have said nothing here of the consolation that I found in Pesca's brotherly affection for me, when I saw him again after the sudden cessation of my residence at Limmeridge House. I have not recorded the fidelity with which my warm-hearted little friend followed me to the place of embarkation when I sailed for Central America, or the noisy transport of joy with which he received me when we next met in London. If I had felt justified in accepting the offers of service which he made to me on my return, he would have appeared again long ere this. But, though I knew that his honour and his courage were to be implicitly relied on, I was not so sure that his discretion was to be trusted, and, for that reason only, I followed the course of all my inquiries alone. It will now be sufficiently understood that Pesca was not separated from all connection with me and my interests, although he has hitherto been separated from all connection with the progress of this narrative. He was as true and as ready a friend of mine still as ever he had been in his life. Before I summoned Pesca to my assistance it was necessary to see for myself what sort of man I had to deal with. Up to this time I had never once set eyes on Count Fosco. Three days after my return with Laura and Marian to London, I set forth alone for Forest Road, St. John's Wood, between ten and eleven o'clock in the morning. It was a fine day--I had some hours to spare--and I thought it likely, if I waited a little for him, that the Count might be tempted out. I had no great reason to fear the chance of his recognising me in the daytime, for the only occasion when I had been seen by him was the occasion on which he had followed me home at night. No one appeared at the windows in the front of the house. I walked down a turning which ran past the side of it, and looked over the low garden wall. One of the back windows on the lower floor was thrown up and a net was stretched across the opening. I saw nobody, but I heard, in the room, first a shrill whistling and singing of birds, then the deep ringing voice which Marian's description had made familiar to me. "Come out on my little finger, my pret-pret-pretties!" cried the voice. "Come out and hop upstairs! One, two, three--and up! Three, two, one--and down! One, two, three--twit-twit-twit-tweet!" The Count was exercising his canaries as he used to exercise them in Marian's time at Blackwater Park. I waited a little while, and the singing and the whistling ceased. "Come, kiss me, my pretties!" said the deep voice. There was a responsive twittering and chirping--a low, oily laugh--a silence of a minute or so, and then I heard the opening of the house door. I turned and retraced my steps. The magnificent melody of the Prayer in Rossini's Moses, sung in a sonorous bass voice, rose grandly through the suburban silence of the place. The front garden gate opened and closed. The Count had come out. He crossed the road and walked towards the western boundary of the Regent's Park. I kept on my own side of the way, a little behind him, and walked in that direction also. Marian had prepared me for his high stature, his monstrous corpulence, and his ostentatious mourning garments, but not for the horrible freshness and cheerfulness and vitality of the man. He carried his sixty years as if they had been fewer than forty. He sauntered along, wearing his hat a little on one side, with a light jaunty step, swinging his big stick, humming to himself, looking up from time to time at the houses and gardens on either side of him with superb, smiling patronage. If a stranger had been told that the whole neighbourhood belonged to him, that stranger would not have been surprised to hear it. He never looked back, he paid no apparent attention to me, no apparent attention to any one who passed him on his own side of the road, except now and then, when he smiled and smirked, with an easy paternal good humour, at the nursery-maids and the children whom he met. In this way he led me on, till we reached a colony of shops outside the western terraces of the Park. Here he stopped at a pastrycook's, went in (probably to give an order), and came out again immediately with a tart in his hand. An Italian was grinding an organ before the shop, and a miserable little shrivelled monkey was sitting on the instrument. The Count stopped, bit a piece for himself out of the tart, and gravely handed the rest to the monkey. "My poor little man!" he said, with grotesque tenderness, "you look hungry. In the sacred name of humanity, I offer you some lunch!" The organ-grinder piteously put in his claim to a penny from the benevolent stranger. The Count shrugged his shoulders contemptuously, and passed on. We reached the streets and the better class of shops between the New Road and Oxford Street. The Count stopped again and entered a small optician's shop, with an inscription in the window announcing that repairs were neatly executed inside. He came out again with an opera-glass in his hand, walked a few paces on, and stopped to look at a bill of the opera placed outside a music-seller's shop. He read the bill attentively, considered a moment, and then hailed an empty cab as it passed him. "Opera Box-office," he said to the man, and was driven away. I crossed the road, and looked at the bill in my turn. The performance announced was Lucrezia Borgia, and it was to take place that evening. The opera-glass in the Count's hand, his careful reading of the bill, and his direction to the cabman, all suggested that he proposed making one of the audience. I had the means of getting an admission for myself and a friend to the pit by applying to one of the scene-painters attached to the theatre, with whom I had been well acquainted in past times. There was a chance at least that the Count might be easily visible among the audience to me and to any one with me, and in this case I had the means of ascertaining whether Pesca knew his countryman or not that very night. This consideration at once decided the disposal of my evening. I procured the tickets, leaving a note at the Professor's lodgings on the way. At a quarter to eight I called to take him with me to the theatre. My little friend was in a state of the highest excitement, with a festive flower in his button-hole, and the largest opera-glass I ever saw hugged up under his arm. "Are you ready?" I asked. "Right-all-right," said Pesca. We started for the theatre. V The last notes of the introduction to the opera were being played, and the seats in the pit were all filled, when Pesca and I reached the theatre. There was plenty of room, however, in the passage that ran round the pit--precisely the position best calculated to answer the purpose for which I was attending the performance. I went first to the barrier separating us from the stalls, and looked for the Count in that part of the theatre. He was not there. Returning along the passage, on the left-hand side from the stage, and looking about me attentively, I discovered him in the pit. He occupied an excellent place, some twelve or fourteen seats from the end of a bench, within three rows of the stalls. I placed myself exactly on a line with him. Pesca standing by my side. The Professor was not yet aware of the purpose for which I had brought him to the theatre, and he was rather surprised that we did not move nearer to the stage. The curtain rose, and the opera began. Throughout the whole of the first act we remained in our position--the Count, absorbed by the orchestra and the stage, never casting so much as a chance glance at us. Not a note of Donizetti's delicious music was lost on him. There he sat, high above his neighbours, smiling, and nodding his great head enjoyingly from time to time. When the people near him applauded the close of an air (as an English audience in such circumstances always WILL applaud), without the least consideration for the orchestral movement which immediately followed it, he looked round at them with an expression of compassionate remonstrance, and held up one hand with a gesture of polite entreaty. At the more refined passages of the singing, at the more delicate phases of the music, which passed unapplauded by others, his fat hands, adorned with perfectly-fitting black kid gloves, softly patted each other, in token of the cultivated appreciation of a musical man. At such times, his oily murmur of approval, "Bravo! Bra-a-a-a!" hummed through the silence, like the purring of a great cat. His immediate neighbours on either side--hearty, ruddy-faced people from the country, basking amazedly in the sunshine of fashionable London--seeing and hearing him, began to follow his lead. Many a burst of applause from the pit that night started from the soft, comfortable patting of the black-gloved hands. The man's voracious vanity devoured this implied tribute to his local and critical supremacy with an appearance of the highest relish. Smiles rippled continuously over his fat face. He looked about him, at the pauses in the music, serenely satisfied with himself and his fellow-creatures. "Yes! yes! these barbarous English people are learning something from ME. Here, there, and everywhere, I--Fosco--am an influence that is felt, a man who sits supreme!" If ever face spoke, his face spoke then, and that was its language. The curtain fell on the first act, and the audience rose to look about them. This was the time I had waited for--the time to try if Pesca knew him. He rose with the rest, and surveyed the occupants of the boxes grandly with his opera-glass. At first his back was towards us, but he turned round in time, to our side of the theatre, and looked at the boxes above us, using his glass for a few minutes--then removing it, but still continuing to look up. This was the moment I chose, when his full face was in view, for directing Pesca's attention to him. "Do you know that man?" I asked. "Which man, my friend?" "The tall, fat man, standing there, with his face towards us." Pesca raised himself on tiptoe, and looked at the Count. "No," said the Professor. "The big fat man is a stranger to me. Is he famous? Why do you point him out?" "Because I have particular reasons for wishing to know something of him. He is a countryman of yours--his name is Count Fosco. Do you know that name?" "Not I, Walter. Neither the name nor the man is known to me." "Are you quite sure you don't recognise him? Look again--look carefully. I will tell you why I am so anxious about it when we leave the theatre. Stop! let me help you up here, where you can see him better." I helped the little man to perch himself on the edge of the raised dais upon which the pit-seats were all placed. His small stature was no hindrance to him--here he could see over the heads of the ladies who were seated near the outermost part of the bench. A slim, light-haired man standing by us, whom I had not noticed before--a man with a scar on his left cheek--looked attentively at Pesca as I helped him up, and then looked still more attentively, following the direction of Pesca's eyes, at the Count. Our conversation might have reached his ears, and might, as it struck me, have roused his curiosity. Meanwhile, Pesca fixed his eyes earnestly on the broad, full, smiling face turned a little upward, exactly opposite to him. "No," he said, "I have never set my two eyes on that big fat man before in all my life." As he spoke the Count looked downwards towards the boxes behind us on the pit tier. The eyes of the two Italians met. The instant before I had been perfectly satisfied, from his own reiterated assertion, that Pesca did not know the Count. The instant afterwards I was equally certain that the Count knew Pesca! Knew him, and--more surprising still--FEARED him as well! There was no mistaking the change that passed over the villain's face. The leaden hue that altered his yellow complexion in a moment, the sudden rigidity of all his features, the furtive scrutiny of his cold grey eyes, the motionless stillness of him from head to foot told their own tale. A mortal dread had mastered him body and soul--and his own recognition of Pesca was the cause of it! The slim man with the scar on his cheek was still close by us. He had apparently drawn his inference from the effect produced on the Count by the sight of Pesca as I had drawn mine. He was a mild, gentlemanlike man, looking like a foreigner, and his interest in our proceedings was not expressed in anything approaching to an offensive manner. For my own part I was so startled by the change in the Count's face, so astounded at the entirely unexpected turn which events had taken, that I knew neither what to say or do next. Pesca roused me by stepping back to his former place at my side and speaking first. "How the fat man stares!" he exclaimed. "Is it at ME? Am I famous? How can he know me when I don't know him?" I kept my eye still on the Count. I saw him move for the first time when Pesca moved, so as not to lose sight of the little man in the lower position in which he now stood. I was curious to see what would happen if Pesca's attention under these circumstances was withdrawn from him, and I accordingly asked the Professor if he recognised any of his pupils that evening among the ladies in the boxes. Pesca immediately raised the large opera-glass to his eyes, and moved it slowly all round the upper part of the theatre, searching for his pupils with the most conscientious scrutiny. The moment he showed himself to be thus engaged the Count turned round, slipped past the persons who occupied seats on the farther side of him from where we stood, and disappeared in the middle passage down the centre of the pit. I caught Pesca by the arm, and to his inexpressible astonishment, hurried him round with me to the back of the pit to intercept the Count before he could get to the door. Somewhat to my surprise, the slim man hastened out before us, avoiding a stoppage caused by some people on our side of the pit leaving their places, by which Pesca and myself were delayed. When we reached the lobby the Count had disappeared, and the foreigner with the scar was gone too. "Come home," I said; "come home, Pesca to your lodgings. I must speak to you in private--I must speak directly." "My-soul-bless-my-soul!" cried the Professor, in a state of the extremest bewilderment. "What on earth is the matter?" I walked on rapidly without answering. The circumstances under which the Count had left the theatre suggested to me that his extraordinary anxiety to escape Pesca might carry him to further extremities still. He might escape me, too, by leaving London. I doubted the future if I allowed him so much as a day's freedom to act as he pleased. And I doubted that foreign stranger, who had got the start of us, and whom I suspected of intentionally following him out. With this double distrust in my mind, I was not long in making Pesca understand what I wanted. As soon as we two were alone in his room, I increased his confusion and amazement a hundredfold by telling him what my purpose was as plainly and unreservedly as I have acknowledged it here. "My friend, what can I do?" cried the Professor, piteously appealing to me with both hands. "Deuce-what-the-deuce! how can I help you, Walter, when I don't know the man?" "HE knows YOU--he is afraid of you--he has left the theatre to escape you. Pesca! there must be a reason for this. Look back into your own life before you came to England. You left Italy, as you have told me yourself, for political reasons. You have never mentioned those reasons to me, and I don't inquire into them now. I only ask you to consult your own recollections, and to say if they suggest no past cause for the terror which the first sight of you produced in that man." To my unutterable surprise, these words, harmless as they appeared to ME, produced the same astounding effect on Pesca which the sight of Pesca had produced on the Count. The rosy face of my little friend whitened in an instant, and he drew back from me slowly, trembling from head to foot. "Walter!" he said. "You don't know what you ask." He spoke in a whisper--he looked at me as if I had suddenly revealed to him some hidden danger to both of us. In less than one minute of time he was so altered from the easy, lively, quaint little man of all my past experience, that if I had met him in the street, changed as I saw him now, I should most certainly not have known him again. "Forgive me, if I have unintentionally pained and shocked you," I replied. "Remember the cruel wrong my wife has suffered at Count Fosco's hands. Remember that the wrong can never be redressed, unless the means are in my power of forcing him to do her justice. I spoke in HER interests, Pesca--I ask you again to forgive me--I can say no more." I rose to go. He stopped me before I reached the door. "Wait," he said. "You have shaken me from head to foot. You don't know how I left my country, and why I left my country. Let me compose myself, let me think, if I can." I returned to my chair. He walked up and down the room, talking to himself incoherently in his own language. After several turns backwards and forwards, he suddenly came up to me, and laid his little hands with a strange tenderness and solemnity on my breast. "On your heart and soul, Walter," he said, "is there no other way to get to that man but the chance-way through ME?" "There is no other way," I answered. He left me again, opened the door of the room and looked out cautiously into the passage, closed it once more, and came back. "You won your right over me, Walter," he said, "on the day when you saved my life. It was yours from that moment, when you pleased to take it. Take it now. Yes! I mean what I say. My next words, as true as the good God is above us, will put my life into your hands." The trembling earnestness with which he uttered this extraordinary warning, carried with it, to my mind, the conviction that he spoke the truth. "Mind this!" he went on, shaking his hands at me in the vehemence of his agitation. "I hold no thread, in my own mind, between that man Fosco, and the past time which I call back to me for your sake. If you find the thread, keep it to yourself--tell me nothing--on my knees I beg and pray, let me be ignorant, let me be innocent, let me be blind to all the future as I am now!" He said a few words more, hesitatingly and disconnectedly, then stopped again. I saw that the effort of expressing himself in English, on an occasion too serious to permit him the use of the quaint turns and phrases of his ordinary vocabulary, was painfully increasing the difficulty he had felt from the first in speaking to me at all. Having learnt to read and understand his native language (though not to speak it), in the earlier days of our intimate companionship, I now suggested to him that he should express himself in Italian, while I used English in putting any questions which might be necessary to my enlightenment. He accepted the proposal. In his smooth-flowing language, spoken with a vehement agitation which betrayed itself in the perpetual working of his features, in the wildness and the suddenness of his foreign gesticulations, but never in the raising of his voice, I now heard the words which armed me to meet the last struggle, that is left for this story to record.[3] [3] It is only right to mention here, that I repeat Pesco's statement to me with the careful suppressions and alterations which the serious nature of the subject and my own sense of duty to my friend demand. My first and last concealments from the reader are those which caution renders absolutely necessary in this portion of the narrative. "You know nothing of my motive for leaving Italy," he began, "except that it was for political reasons. If I had been driven to this country by the persecution of my government, I should not have kept those reasons a secret from you or from any one. I have concealed them because no government authority has pronounced the sentence of my exile. You have heard, Walter, of the political societies that are hidden in every great city on the continent of Europe? To one of those societies I belonged in Italy--and belong still in England. When I came to this country, I came by the direction of my chief. I was over-zealous in my younger time--I ran the risk of compromising myself and others. For those reasons I was ordered to emigrate to England and to wait. I emigrated--I have waited--I wait still. To-morrow I may be called away--ten years hence I may be called away. It is all one to me--I am here, I support myself by teaching, and I wait. I violate no oath (you shall hear why presently) in making my confidence complete by telling you the name of the society to which I belong. All I do is to put my life in your hands. If what I say to you now is ever known by others to have passed my lips, as certainly as we two sit here, I am a dead man." He whispered the next words in my ear. I keep the secret which he thus communicated. The society to which he belonged will be sufficiently individualised for the purpose of these pages, if I call it "The Brotherhood," on the few occasions when any reference to the subject will be needed in this place. "The object of the Brotherhood," Pesca went on, "is, briefly, the object of other political societies of the same sort--the destruction of tyranny and the assertion of the rights of the people. The principles of the Brotherhood are two. So long as a man's life is useful, or even harmless only, he has the right to enjoy it. But, if his life inflicts injury on the well-being of his fellow-men, from that moment he forfeits the right, and it is not only no crime, but a positive merit, to deprive him of it. It is not for me to say in what frightful circumstances of oppression and suffering this society took its rise. It is not for you to say--you Englishmen, who have conquered your freedom so long ago, that you have conveniently forgotten what blood you shed, and what extremities you proceeded to in the conquering--it is not for you to say how far the worst of all exasperations may, or may not, carry the maddened men of an enslaved nation. The iron that has entered into our souls has gone too deep for you to find it. Leave the refugee alone! Laugh at him, distrust him, open your eyes in wonder at that secret self which smoulders in him, sometimes under the everyday respectability and tranquillity of a man like me--sometimes under the grinding poverty, the fierce squalor, of men less lucky, less pliable, less patient than I am--but judge us not! In the time of your first Charles you might have done us justice--the long luxury of your own freedom has made you incapable of doing us justice now." All the deepest feelings of his nature seemed to force themselves to the surface in those words--all his heart was poured out to me for the first time in our lives--but still his voice never rose, still his dread of the terrible revelation he was making to me never left him. "So far," he resumed, "you think the society like other societies. Its object (in your English opinion) is anarchy and revolution. It takes the life of a bad king or a bad minister, as if the one and the other were dangerous wild beasts to be shot at the first opportunity. I grant you this. But the laws of the Brotherhood are the laws of no other political society on the face of the earth. The members are not known to one another. There is a president in Italy; there are presidents abroad. Each of these has his secretary. The presidents and the secretaries know the members, but the members, among themselves, are all strangers, until their chiefs see fit, in the political necessity of the time, or in the private necessity of the society, to make them known to each other. With such a safeguard as this there is no oath among us on admittance. We are identified with the Brotherhood by a secret mark, which we all bear, which lasts while our lives last. We are told to go about our ordinary business, and to report ourselves to the president, or the secretary, four times a year, in the event of our services being required. We are warned, if we betray the Brotherhood, or if we injure it by serving other interests, that we die by the principles of the Brotherhood--die by the hand of a stranger who may be sent from the other end of the world to strike the blow--or by the hand of our own bosom-friend, who may have been a member unknown to us through all the years of our intimacy. Sometimes the death is delayed--sometimes it follows close on the treachery. It is our first business to know how to wait--our second business to know how to obey when the word is spoken. Some of us may wait our lives through, and may not be wanted. Some of us may be called to the work, or to the preparation for the work, the very day of our admission. I myself--the little, easy, cheerful man you know, who, of his own accord, would hardly lift up his handkerchief to strike down the fly that buzzes about his face--I, in my younger time, under provocation so dreadful that I will not tell you of it, entered the Brotherhood by an impulse, as I might have killed myself by an impulse. I must remain in it now--it has got me, whatever I may think of it in my better circumstances and my cooler manhood, to my dying day. While I was still in Italy I was chosen secretary, and all the members of that time, who were brought face to face with my president, were brought face to face also with me." I began to understand him--I saw the end towards which his extraordinary disclosure was now tending. He waited a moment, watching me earnestly--watching till he had evidently guessed what was passing in my mind before he resumed. "You have drawn your own conclusion already," he said. "I see it in your face. Tell me nothing--keep me out of the secret of your thoughts. Let me make my one last sacrifice of myself, for your sake, and then have done with this subject, never to return to it again." He signed to me not to answer him--rose--removed his coat--and rolled up the shirt-sleeve on his left arm. "I promised you that this confidence should be complete," he whispered, speaking close at my ear, with his eyes looking watchfully at the door. "Whatever comes of it you shall not reproach me with having hidden anything from you which it was necessary to your interests to know. I have said that the Brotherhood identifies its members by a mark that lasts for life. See the place, and the mark on it for yourself." He raised his bare arm, and showed me, high on the upper part of it and in the inner side, a brand deeply burnt in the flesh and stained of a bright blood-red colour. I abstain from describing the device which the brand represented. It will be sufficient to say that it was circular in form, and so small that it would have been completely covered by a shilling coin. "A man who has this mark, branded in this place," he said, covering his arm again, "is a member of the Brotherhood. A man who has been false to the Brotherhood is discovered sooner or later by the chiefs who know him--presidents or secretaries, as the case may be. And a man discovered by the chiefs is dead. NO HUMAN LAWS CAN PROTECT HIM. Remember what you have seen and heard--draw what conclusions YOU like--act as you please. But, in the name of God, whatever you discover, whatever you do, tell me nothing! Let me remain free from a responsibility which it horrifies me to think of--which I know, in my conscience, is not my responsibility now. For the last time I say it--on my honour as a gentleman, on my oath as a Christian, if the man you pointed out at the Opera knows ME, he is so altered, or so disguised, that I do not know him. I am ignorant of his proceedings or his purposes in England. I never saw him, I never heard the name he goes by, to my knowledge, before to-night. I say no more. Leave me a little, Walter. I am overpowered by what has happened--I am shaken by what I have said. Let me try to be like myself again when we meet next." He dropped into a chair, and turning away from me, hid his face in his hands. I gently opened the door so as not to disturb him, and spoke my few parting words in low tones, which he might hear or not, as he pleased. "I will keep the memory of to-night in my heart of hearts," I said. "You shall never repent the trust you have reposed in me. May I come to you to-morrow? May I come as early as nine o'clock?" "Yes, Walter," he replied, looking up at me kindly, and speaking in English once more, as if his one anxiety now was to get back to our former relations towards each other. "Come to my little bit of breakfast before I go my ways among the pupils that I teach." "Good-night, Pesca." "Good-night, my friend." VI MY first conviction as soon as I found myself outside the house, was that no alternative was left me but to act at once on the information I had received--to make sure of the Count that night, or to risk the loss, if I only delayed till the morning, of Laura's last chance. I looked at my watch--it was ten o'clock. Not the shadow of a doubt crossed my mind of the purpose for which the Count had left the theatre. His escape from us, that evening, was beyond all question the preliminary only to his escape from London. The mark of the Brotherhood was on his arm--I felt as certain of it as if he had shown me the brand; and the betrayal of the Brotherhood was on his conscience--I had seen it in his recognition of Pesca. It was easy to understand why that recognition had not been mutual. A man of the Count's character would never risk the terrible consequences of turning spy without looking to his personal security quite as carefully as he looked to his golden reward. The shaven face, which I had pointed out at the Opera, might have been covered by a beard in Pesca's time--his dark brown hair might be a wig--his name was evidently a false one. The accident of time might have helped him as well--his immense corpulence might have come with his later years. There was every reason why Pesca should not have known him again--every reason also why he should have known Pesca, whose singular personal appearance made a marked man of him, go where he might. I have said that I felt certain of the purpose in the Count's mind when he escaped us at the theatre. How could I doubt it, when I saw, with my own eyes, that he believed himself, in spite of the change in his appearance, to have been recognised by Pesca, and to be therefore in danger of his life? If I could get speech of him that night, if I could show him that I, too knew of the mortal peril in which he stood, what result would follow? Plainly this. One of us must be master of the situation--one of us must inevitably be at the mercy of the other. I owed it to myself to consider the chances against me before I confronted them. I owed it to my wife to do all that lay in my power to lessen the risk. The chances against me wanted no reckoning up--they were all merged in one. If the Count discovered, by my own avowal, that the direct way to his safety lay through my life, he was probably the last man in existence who would shrink from throwing me off my guard and taking that way, when he had me alone within his reach. The only means of defence against him on which I could at all rely to lessen the risk, presented themselves, after a little careful thinking, clearly enough. Before I made any personal acknowledgment of my discovery in his presence, I must place the discovery itself where it would be ready for instant use against him, and safe from any attempt at suppression on his part. If I laid the mine under his feet before I approached him, and if I left instructions with a third person to fire it on the expiration of a certain time, unless directions to the contrary were previously received under my own hand, or from my own lips--in that event the Count's security was absolutely dependent upon mine, and I might hold the vantage ground over him securely, even in his own house. This idea occurred to me when I was close to the new lodgings which we had taken on returning from the sea-side. I went in without disturbing any one, by the help of my key. A light was in the hall, and I stole up with it to my workroom to make my preparations, and absolutely to commit myself to an interview with the Count, before either Laura or Marian could have the slightest suspicion of what I intended to do. A letter addressed to Pesca represented the surest measure of precaution which it was now possible for me to take. I wrote as follows-- "The man whom I pointed out to you at the Opera is a member of the Brotherhood, and has been false to his trust. Put both these assertions to the test instantly. You know the name he goes by in England. His address is No. 5 Forest Road, St. John's Wood. On the love you once bore me, use the power entrusted to you without mercy and without delay against that man. I have risked all and lost all--and the forfeit of my failure has been paid with my life." I signed and dated these lines, enclosed them in an envelope, and sealed it up. On the outside I wrote this direction: "Keep the enclosure unopened until nine o'clock to-morrow morning. If you do not hear from me, or see me, before that time, break the seal when the clock strikes, and read the contents." I added my initials, and protected the whole by enclosing it in a second sealed envelope, addressed to Pesca at his lodgings. Nothing remained to be done after this but to find the means of sending my letter to its destination immediately. I should then have accomplished all that lay in my power. If anything happened to me in the Count's house, I had now provided for his answering it with his life. That the means of preventing his escape, under any circumstances whatever, were at Pesca's disposal, if he chose to exert them, I did not for an instant doubt. The extraordinary anxiety which he had expressed to remain unenlightened as to the Count's identity--or, in other words, to be left uncertain enough about facts to justify him to his own conscience in remaining passive--betrayed plainly that the means of exercising the terrible justice of the Brotherhood were ready to his hand, although, as a naturally humane man, he had shrunk from plainly saying as much in my presence. The deadly certainty with which the vengeance of foreign political societies can hunt down a traitor to the cause, hide himself where he may, had been too often exemplified, even in my superficial experience, to allow of any doubt. Considering the subject only as a reader of newspapers, cases recurred to my memory, both in London and in Paris, of foreigners found stabbed in the streets, whose assassins could never be traced--of bodies and parts of bodies thrown into the Thames and the Seine, by hands that could never be discovered--of deaths by secret violence which could only be accounted for in one way. I have disguised nothing relating to myself in these pages, and I do not disguise here that I believed I had written Count Fosco's death-warrant, if the fatal emergency happened which authorised Pesca to open my enclosure. I left my room to go down to the ground floor of the house, and speak to the landlord about finding me a messenger. He happened to be ascending the stairs at the time, and we met on the landing. His son, a quick lad, was the messenger he proposed to me on hearing what I wanted. We had the boy upstairs, and I gave him his directions. He was to take the letter in a cab, to put it into Professor Pesca's own hands, and to bring me back a line of acknowledgment from that gentleman--returning in the cab, and keeping it at the door for my use. It was then nearly half-past ten. I calculated that the boy might be back in twenty minutes, and that I might drive to St. John's Wood, on his return, in twenty minutes more. When the lad had departed on his errand I returned to my own room for a little while, to put certain papers in order, so that they might be easily found in case of the worst. The key of the old-fashioned bureau in which the papers were kept I sealed up, and left it on my table, with Marian's name written on the outside of the little packet. This done, I went downstairs to the sitting-room, in which I expected to find Laura and Marian awaiting my return from the Opera. I felt my hand trembling for the first time when I laid it on the lock of the door. No one was in the room but Marian. She was reading, and she looked at her watch, in surprise, when I came in. "How early you are back!" she said. "You must have come away before the Opera was over." "Yes," I replied, "neither Pesca nor I waited for the end. Where is Laura?" "She had one of her bad headaches this evening, and I advised her to go to bed when we had done tea." I left the room again on the pretext of wishing to see whether Laura was asleep. Marian's quick eyes were beginning to look inquiringly at my face--Marian's quick instinct was beginning to discover that I had something weighing on my mind. When I entered the bedchamber, and softly approached the bedside by the dim flicker of the night-lamp, my wife was asleep. We had not been married quite a month yet. If my heart was heavy, if my resolution for a moment faltered again, when I looked at her face turned faithfully to my pillow in her sleep--when I saw her hand resting open on the coverlid, as if it was waiting unconsciously for mine--surely there was some excuse for me? I only allowed myself a few minutes to kneel down at the bedside, and to look close at her--so close that her breath, as it came and went, fluttered on my face. I only touched her hand and her cheek with my lips at parting. She stirred in her sleep and murmured my name, but without waking. I lingered for an instant at the door to look at her again. "God bless and keep you, my darling!" I whispered, and left her. Marian was at the stairhead waiting for me. She had a folded slip of paper in her hand. "The landlord's son has brought this for you," she said. "He has got a cab at the door--he says you ordered him to keep it at your disposal." "Quite right, Marian. I want the cab--I am going out again." I descended the stairs as I spoke, and looked into the sitting-room to read the slip of paper by the light on the table. It contained these two sentences in Pesca's handwriting-- "Your letter is received. If I don't see you before the time you mention, I will break the seal when the clock strikes." I placed the paper in my pocket-book, and made for the door. Marian met me on the threshold, and pushed me back into the room, where the candle-light fell full on my face. She held me by both hands, and her eyes fastened searchingly on mine. "I see!" she said, in a low eager whisper. "You are trying the last chance to-night." "Yes, the last chance and the best," I whispered back. "Not alone! Oh, Walter, for God's sake, not alone! Let me go with you. Don't refuse me because I'm only a woman. I must go! I will go! I'll wait outside in the cab!" It was my turn now to hold HER. She tried to break away from me and get down first to the door. "If you want to help me," I said, "stop here and sleep in my wife's room to-night. Only let me go away with my mind easy about Laura, and I answer for everything else. Come, Marian, give me a kiss, and show that you have the courage to wait till I come back." I dared not allow her time to say a word more. She tried to hold me again. I unclasped her hands, and was out of the room in a moment. The boy below heard me on the stairs, and opened the hall-door. I jumped into the cab before the driver could get off the box. "Forest Road, St. John's Wood," I called to him through the front window. "Double fare if you get there in a quarter of an hour." "I'll do it, sir." I looked at my watch. Eleven o'clock. Not a minute to lose. The rapid motion of the cab, the sense that every instant now was bringing me nearer to the Count, the conviction that I was embarked at last, without let or hindrance, on my hazardous enterprise, heated me into such a fever of excitement that I shouted to the man to go faster and faster. As we left the streets, and crossed St. John's Wood Road, my impatience so completely overpowered me that I stood up in the cab and stretched my head out of the window, to see the end of the journey before we reached it. Just as a church clock in the distance struck the quarter past, we turned into the Forest Road. I stopped the driver a little away from the Count's house, paid and dismissed him, and walked on to the door. As I approached the garden gate, I saw another person advancing towards it also from the direction opposite to mine. We met under the gas lamp in the road, and looked at each other. I instantly recognised the light-haired foreigner with the scar on his cheek, and I thought he recognised me. He said nothing, and instead of stopping at the house, as I did, he slowly walked on. Was he in the Forest Road by accident? Or had he followed the Count home from the Opera? I did not pursue those questions. After waiting a little till the foreigner had slowly passed out of sight, I rang the gate bell. It was then twenty minutes past eleven--late enough to make it quite easy for the Count to get rid of me by the excuse that he was in bed. The only way of providing against this contingency was to send in my name without asking any preliminary questions, and to let him know, at the same time, that I had a serious motive for wishing to see him at that late hour. Accordingly, while I was waiting, I took out my card and wrote under my name "On important business." The maid-servant answered the door while I was writing the last word in pencil, and asked me distrustfully what I "pleased to want." "Be so good as to take that to your master," I replied, giving her the card. I saw, by the girl's hesitation of manner, that if I had asked for the Count in the first instance she would only have followed her instructions by telling me he was not at home. She was staggered by the confidence with which I gave her the card. After staring at me, in great perturbation, she went back into the house with my message, closing the door, and leaving me to wait in the garden. In a minute or so she reappeared. "Her master's compliments, and would I be so obliging as to say what my business was?" "Take my compliments back," I replied, "and say that the business cannot be mentioned to any one but your master." She left me again, again returned, and this time asked me to walk in. I followed her at once. In another moment I was inside the Count's house. VII There was no lamp in the hall, but by the dim light of the kitchen candle, which the girl had brought upstairs with her, I saw an elderly lady steal noiselessly out of a back room on the ground floor. She cast one viperish look at me as I entered the hall, but said nothing, and went slowly upstairs without returning my bow. My familiarity with Marian's journal sufficiently assured me that the elderly lady was Madame Fosco. The servant led me to the room which the Countess had just left. I entered it, and found myself face to face with the Count. He was still in his evening dress, except his coat, which he had thrown across a chair. His shirt-sleeves were turned up at the wrists, but no higher. A carpet-bag was on one side of him, and a box on the other. Books, papers, and articles of wearing apparel were scattered about the room. On a table, at one side of the door, stood the cage, so well known to me by description, which contained his white mice. The canaries and the cockatoo were probably in some other room. He was seated before the box, packing it, when I went in, and rose with some papers in his hand to receive me. His face still betrayed plain traces of the shock that had overwhelmed him at the Opera. His fat cheeks hung loose, his cold grey eyes were furtively vigilant, his voice, look, and manner were all sharply suspicious alike, as he advanced a step to meet me, and requested, with distant civility, that I would take a chair. "You come here on business, sir?" he said. "I am at a loss to know what that business can possibly be." The unconcealed curiosity, with which he looked hard in my face while he spoke, convinced me that I had passed unnoticed by him at the Opera. He had seen Pesca first, and from that moment till he left the theatre he had evidently seen nothing else. My name would necessarily suggest to him that I had not come into his house with other than a hostile purpose towards himself, but he appeared to be utterly ignorant thus far of the real nature of my errand. "I am fortunate in finding you here to-night," I said. "You seem to be on the point of taking a journey?" "Is your business connected with my journey?" "In some degree." "In what degree? Do you know where I am going to?" "No. I only know why you are leaving London." He slipped by me with the quickness of thought, locked the door, and put the key in his pocket. "You and I, Mr. Hartright, are excellently well acquainted with one another by reputation," he said. "Did it, by any chance, occur to you when you came to this house that I was not the sort of man you could trifle with?" "It did occur to me," I replied. "And I have not come to trifle with you. I am here on a matter of life and death, and if that door which you have locked was open at this moment, nothing you could say or do would induce me to pass through it." I walked farther into the room, and stood opposite to him on the rug before the fireplace. He drew a chair in front of the door, and sat down on it, with his left arm resting on the table. The cage with the white mice was close to him, and the little creatures scampered out of their sleeping-place as his heavy arm shook the table, and peered at him through the gaps in the smartly painted wires. "On a matter of life and death," he repeated to himself. "Those words are more serious, perhaps, than you think. What do you mean?" "What I say." The perspiration broke out thickly on his broad forehead. His left hand stole over the edge of the table. There was a drawer in it, with a lock, and the key was in the lock. His finger and thumb closed over the key, but did not turn it. "So you know why I am leaving London?" he went on. "Tell me the reason, if you please." He turned the key, and unlocked the drawer as he spoke. "I can do better than that," I replied. "I can SHOW you the reason, if you like." "How can you show it?" "You have got your coat off," I said. "Roll up the shirt-sleeve on your left arm, and you will see it there." The same livid leaden change passed over his face which I had seen pass over it at the theatre. The deadly glitter in his eyes shone steady and straight into mine. He said nothing. But his left hand slowly opened the table-drawer, and softly slipped into it. The harsh grating noise of something heavy that he was moving unseen to me sounded for a moment, then ceased. The silence that followed was so intense that the faint ticking nibble of the white mice at their wires was distinctly audible where I stood. My life hung by a thread, and I knew it. At that final moment I thought with HIS mind, I felt with HIS fingers--I was as certain as if I had seen it of what he kept hidden from me in the drawer. "Wait a little," I said. "You have got the door locked--you see I don't move--you see my hands are empty. Wait a little. I have something more to say." "You have said enough," he replied, with a sudden composure so unnatural and so ghastly that it tried my nerves as no outbreak of violence could have tried them. "I want one moment for my own thoughts, if you please. Do you guess what I am thinking about?" "Perhaps I do." "I am thinking," he remarked quietly, "whether I shall add to the disorder in this room by scattering your brains about the fireplace." If I had moved at that moment, I saw in his face that he would have done it. "I advise you to read two lines of writing which I have about me," I rejoined, "before you finally decide that question." The proposal appeared to excite his curiosity. He nodded his head. I took Pesca's acknowledgment of the receipt of my letter out of my pocket-book, handed it to him at arm's length, and returned to my former position in front of the fireplace. He read the lines aloud: "Your letter is received. If I don't hear from you before the time you mention, I will break the seal when the clock strikes." Another man in his position would have needed some explanation of those words--the Count felt no such necessity. One reading of the note showed him the precaution that I had taken as plainly as if he had been present at the time when I adopted it. The expression of his face changed on the instant, and his hand came out of the drawer empty. "I don't lock up my drawer, Mr. Hartright," he said, "and I don't say that I may not scatter your brains about the fireplace yet. But I am a just man even to my enemy, and I will acknowledge beforehand that they are cleverer brains than I thought them. Come to the point, sir! You want something of me?" "I do, and I mean to have it." "On conditions?" "On no conditions." His hand dropped into the drawer again. "Bah! we are travelling in a circle," he said, "and those clever brains of yours are in danger again. Your tone is deplorably imprudent, sir--moderate it on the spot! The risk of shooting you on the place where you stand is less to me than the risk of letting you out of this house, except on conditions that I dictate and approve. You have not got my lamented friend to deal with now--you are face to face with Fosco! If the lives of twenty Mr. Hartrights were the stepping-stones to my safety, over all those stones I would go, sustained by my sublime indifference, self-balanced by my impenetrable calm. Respect me, if you love your own life! I summon you to answer three questions before you open your lips again. Hear them--they are necessary to this interview. Answer them--they are necessary to ME." He held up one finger of his right hand. "First question!" he said. "You come here possessed of information which may be true or may be false--where did you get it?" "I decline to tell you." "No matter--I shall find out. If that information is true--mind I say, with the whole force of my resolution, if--you are making your market of it here by treachery of your own or by treachery of some other man. I note that circumstance for future use in my memory, which forgets nothing, and proceed." He held up another finger. "Second question! Those lines you invited me to read are without signature. Who wrote them?" "A man whom I have every reason to depend on, and whom you have every reason to fear." My answer reached him to some purpose. His left hand trembled audibly in the drawer. "How long do you give me," he asked, putting his third question in a quieter tone, "before the clock strikes and the seal is broken?" "Time enough for you to come to my terms," I replied. "Give me a plainer answer, Mr. Hartright. What hour is the clock to strike?" "Nine, to-morrow morning." "Nine, to-morrow morning? Yes, yes--your trap is laid for me before I can get my passport regulated and leave London. It is not earlier, I suppose? We will see about that presently--I can keep you hostage here, and bargain with you to send for your letter before I let you go. In the meantime, be so good next as to mention your terms." "You shall hear them. They are simple, and soon stated. You know whose interests I represent in coming here?" He smiled with the most supreme composure, and carelessly waved his right hand. "I consent to hazard a guess," he said jeeringly. "A lady's interests, of course!" "My Wife's interests." He looked at me with the first honest expression that had crossed his face in my presence--an expression of blank amazement. I could see that I sank in his estimation as a dangerous man from that moment. He shut up the drawer at once, folded his arms over his breast, and listened to me with a smile of satirical attention. "You are well enough aware," I went on, "of the course which my inquiries have taken for many months past, to know that any attempted denial of plain facts will be quite useless in my presence. You are guilty of an infamous conspiracy! And the gain of a fortune of ten thousand pounds was your motive for it." He said nothing. But his face became overclouded suddenly by a lowering anxiety. "Keep your gain," I said. (His face lightened again immediately, and his eyes opened on me in wider and wider astonishment.) "I am not here to disgrace myself by bargaining for money which has passed through your hands, and which has been the price of a vile crime. "Gently, Mr. Hartright. Your moral clap-traps have an excellent effect in England--keep them for yourself and your own countrymen, if you please. The ten thousand pounds was a legacy left to my excellent wife by the late Mr. Fairlie. Place the affair on those grounds, and I will discuss it if you like. To a man of my sentiments, however, the subject is deplorably sordid. I prefer to pass it over. I invite you to resume the discussion of your terms. What do you demand?" "In the first place, I demand a full confession of the conspiracy, written and signed in my presence by yourself." He raised his finger again. "One!" he said, checking me off with the steady attention of a practical man. "In the second place, I demand a plain proof, which does not depend on your personal asseveration, of the date at which my wife left Blackwater Park and travelled to London." "So! so! you can lay your finger, I see, on the weak place," he remarked composedly. "Any more?" "At present, no more." "Good! you have mentioned your terms, now listen to mine. The responsibility to myself of admitting what you are pleased to call the 'conspiracy' is less, perhaps, upon the whole, than the responsibility of laying you dead on that hearthrug. Let us say that I meet your proposal--on my own conditions. The statement you demand of me shall be written, and the plain proof shall be produced. You call a letter from my late lamented friend informing me of the day and hour of his wife's arrival in London, written, signed, and dated by himself, a proof, I suppose? I can give you this. I can also send you to the man of whom I hired the carriage to fetch my visitor from the railway, on the day when she arrived--his order-book may help you to your date, even if his coachman who drove me proves to be of no use. These things I can do, and will do, on conditions. I recite them. First condition! Madame Fosco and I leave this house when and how we please, without interference of any kind on your part. Second condition! You wait here, in company with me, to see my agent, who is coming at seven o'clock in the morning to regulate my affairs. You give my agent a written order to the man who has got your sealed letter to resign his possession of it. You wait here till my agent places that letter unopened in my hands, and you then allow me one clear half-hour to leave the house--after which you resume your own freedom of action and go where you please. Third condition! You give me the satisfaction of a gentleman for your intrusion into my private affairs, and for the language you have allowed yourself to use to me at this conference. The time and place, abroad, to be fixed in a letter from my hand when I am safe on the Continent, and that letter to contain a strip of paper measuring accurately the length of my sword. Those are my terms. Inform me if you accept them--Yes or No." The extraordinary mixture of prompt decision, far-sighted cunning, and mountebank bravado in this speech, staggered me for a moment--and only for a moment. The one question to consider was, whether I was justified or not in possessing myself of the means of establishing Laura's identity at the cost of allowing the scoundrel who had robbed her of it to escape me with impunity. I knew that the motive of securing the just recognition of my wife in the birthplace from which she had been driven out as an impostor, and of publicly erasing the lie that still profaned her mother's tombstone, was far purer, in its freedom from all taint of evil passion, than the vindictive motive which had mingled itself with my purpose from the first. And yet I cannot honestly say that my own moral convictions were strong enough to decide the struggle in me by themselves. They were helped by my remembrance of Sir Percival's death. How awfully, at the last moment, had the working of the retribution THERE been snatched from my feeble hands! What right had I to decide, in my poor mortal ignorance of the future, that this man, too, must escape with impunity because he escaped ME? I thought of these things--perhaps with the superstition inherent in my nature, perhaps with a sense worthier of me than superstition. It was hard, when I had fastened my hold on him at last, to loosen it again of my own accord--but I forced myself to make the sacrifice. In plainer words, I determined to be guided by the one higher motive of which I was certain, the motive of serving the cause of Laura and the cause of Truth. "I accept your conditions," I said. "With one reservation on my part." "What reservation may that be?" he asked. "It refers to the sealed letter," I answered. "I require you to destroy it unopened in my presence as soon as it is placed in your hands." My object in making this stipulation was simply to prevent him from carrying away written evidence of the nature of my communication with Pesca. The fact of my communication he would necessarily discover, when I gave the address to his agent in the morning. But he could make no use of it on his own unsupported testimony--even if he really ventured to try the experiment--which need excite in me the slightest apprehension on Pesca's account. "I grant your reservation," he replied, after considering the question gravely for a minute or two. "It is not worth dispute--the letter shall be destroyed when it comes into my hands." He rose, as he spoke, from the chair in which he had been sitting opposite to me up to this time. With one effort he appeared to free his mind from the whole pressure on it of the interview between us thus far. "Ouf!" he cried, stretching his arms luxuriously, "the skirmish was hot while it lasted. Take a seat, Mr. Hartright. We meet as mortal enemies hereafter--let us, like gallant gentlemen, exchange polite attentions in the meantime. Permit me to take the liberty of calling for my wife." He unlocked and opened the door. "Eleanor!" he called out in his deep voice. The lady of the viperish face came in "Madame Fosco--Mr. Hartright," said the Count, introducing us with easy dignity. "My angel," he went on, addressing his wife, "will your labours of packing up allow you time to make me some nice strong coffee? I have writing business to transact with Mr. Hartright--and I require the full possession of my intelligence to do justice to myself." Madame Fosco bowed her head twice--once sternly to me, once submissively to her husband, and glided out of the room. The Count walked to a writing-table near the window, opened his desk, and took from it several quires of paper and a bundle of quill pens. He scattered the pens about the table, so that they might lie ready in all directions to be taken up when wanted, and then cut the paper into a heap of narrow slips, of the form used by professional writers for the press. "I shall make this a remarkable document," he said, looking at me over his shoulder. "Habits of literary composition are perfectly familiar to me. One of the rarest of all the intellectual accomplishments that a man can possess is the grand faculty of arranging his ideas. Immense privilege! I possess it. Do you?" He marched backwards and forwards in the room, until the coffee appeared, humming to himself, and marking the places at which obstacles occurred in the arrangement of his ideas, by striking his forehead from time to time with the palm of his hand. The enormous audacity with which he seized on the situation in which I placed him, and made it the pedestal on which his vanity mounted for the one cherished purpose of self-display, mastered my astonishment by main force. Sincerely as I loathed the man, the prodigious strength of his character, even in its most trivial aspects, impressed me in spite of myself. The coffee was brought in by Madame Fosco. He kissed her hand in grateful acknowledgment, and escorted her to the door; returned, poured out a cup of coffee for himself, and took it to the writing-table. "May I offer you some coffee, Mr. Hartright?" he said, before he sat down. I declined. "What! you think I shall poison you?" he said gaily. "The English intellect is sound, so far as it goes," he continued, seating himself at the table; "but it has one grave defect--it is always cautious in the wrong place." He dipped his pen in the ink, placed the first slip of paper before him with a thump of his hand on the desk, cleared his throat, and began. He wrote with great noise and rapidity, in so large and bold a hand, and with such wide spaces between the lines, that he reached the bottom of the slip in not more than two minutes certainly from the time when he started at the top. Each slip as he finished it was paged, and tossed over his shoulder out of his way on the floor. When his first pen was worn out, THAT went over his shoulder too, and he pounced on a second from the supply scattered about the table. Slip after slip, by dozens, by fifties, by hundreds, flew over his shoulders on either side of him till he had snowed himself up in paper all round his chair. Hour after hour passed--and there I sat watching, there he sat writing. He never stopped, except to sip his coffee, and when that was exhausted, to smack his forehead from time to time. One o'clock struck, two, three, four--and still the slips flew about all round him; still the untiring pen scraped its way ceaselessly from top to bottom of the page, still the white chaos of paper rose higher and higher all round his chair. At four o'clock I heard a sudden splutter of the pen, indicative of the flourish with which he signed his name. "Bravo!" he cried, springing to his feet with the activity of a young man, and looking me straight in the face with a smile of superb triumph. "Done, Mr. Hartright!" he announced with a self-renovating thump of his fist on his broad breast. "Done, to my own profound satisfaction--to YOUR profound astonishment, when you read what I have written. The subject is exhausted: the man--Fosco--is not. I proceed to the arrangement of my slips--to the revision of my slips--to the reading of my slips--addressed emphatically to your private ear. Four o'clock has just struck. Good! Arrangement, revision, reading, from four to five. Short snooze of restoration for myself from five to six. Final preparations from six to seven. Affair of agent and sealed letter from seven to eight. At eight, en route. Behold the programme!" He sat down cross-legged on the floor among his papers, strung them together with a bodkin and a piece of string--revised them, wrote all the titles and honours by which he was personally distinguished at the head of the first page, and then read the manuscript to me with loud theatrical emphasis and profuse theatrical gesticulation. The reader will have an opportunity, ere long, of forming his own opinion of the document. It will be sufficient to mention here that it answered my purpose. He next wrote me the address of the person from whom he had hired the fly, and handed me Sir Percival's letter. It was dated from Hampshire on the 25th of July, and it announced the journey of "Lady Glyde" to London on the 26th. Thus, on the very day (the 25th) when the doctor's certificate declared that she had died in St. John's Wood, she was alive, by Sir Percival's own showing, at Blackwater--and, on the day after, she was to take a journey! When the proof of that journey was obtained from the flyman, the evidence would be complete. "A quarter-past five," said the Count, looking at his watch. "Time for my restorative snooze. I personally resemble Napoleon the Great, as you may have remarked, Mr. Hartright--I also resemble that immortal man in my power of commanding sleep at will. Excuse me one moment. I will summon Madame Fosco, to keep you from feeling dull." Knowing as well as he did, that he was summoning Madame Fosco to ensure my not leaving the house while he was asleep, I made no reply, and occupied myself in tying up the papers which he had placed in my possession. The lady came in, cool, pale, and venomous as ever. "Amuse Mr. Hartright, my angel," said the Count. He placed a chair for her, kissed her hand for the second time, withdrew to a sofa, and, in three minutes, was as peacefully and happily asleep as the most virtuous man in existence. Madame Fosco took a book from the table, sat down, and looked at me, with the steady vindictive malice of a woman who never forgot and never forgave. "I have been listening to your conversation with my husband," she said. "If I had been in HIS place--I would have laid you dead on the hearthrug." With those words she opened her book, and never looked at me or spoke to me from that time till the time when her husband woke. He opened his eyes and rose from the sofa, accurately to an hour from the time when he had gone to sleep. "I feel infinitely refreshed," he remarked. "Eleanor, my good wife, are you all ready upstairs? That is well. My little packing here can be completed in ten minutes--my travelling-dress assumed in ten minutes more. What remains before the agent comes?" He looked about the room, and noticed the cage with his white mice in it. "Ah!" he cried piteously, "a last laceration of my sympathies still remains. My innocent pets! my little cherished children! what am I to do with them? For the present we are settled nowhere; for the present we travel incessantly--the less baggage we carry the better for ourselves. My cockatoo, my canaries, and my little mice--who will cherish them when their good Papa is gone?" He walked about the room deep in thought. He had not been at all troubled about writing his confession, but he was visibly perplexed and distressed about the far more important question of the disposal of his pets. After long consideration he suddenly sat down again at the writing-table. "An idea!" he exclaimed. "I will offer my canaries and my cockatoo to this vast Metropolis--my agent shall present them in my name to the Zoological Gardens of London. The Document that describes them shall be drawn out on the spot." He began to write, repeating the words as they flowed from his pen. "Number one. Cockatoo of transcendent plumage: attraction, of himself, to all visitors of taste. Number two. Canaries of unrivalled vivacity and intelligence: worthy of the garden of Eden, worthy also of the garden in the Regent's Park. Homage to British Zoology. Offered by Fosco." The pen spluttered again, and the flourish was attached to his signature. "Count! you have not included the mice," said Madame Fosco He left the table, took her hand, and placed it on his heart. "All human resolution, Eleanor," he said solemnly, "has its limits. MY limits are inscribed on that Document. I cannot part with my white mice. Bear with me, my angel, and remove them to their travelling cage upstairs." "Admirable tenderness!" said Madame Fosco, admiring her husband, with a last viperish look in my direction. She took up the cage carefully, and left the room. The Count looked at his watch. In spite of his resolute assumption of composure, he was getting anxious for the agent's arrival. The candles had long since been extinguished, and the sunlight of the new morning poured into the room. It was not till five minutes past seven that the gate bell rang, and the agent made his appearance. He was a foreigner with a dark beard. "Mr. Hartright--Monsieur Rubelle," said the Count, introducing us. He took the agent (a foreign spy, in every line of his face, if ever there was one yet) into a corner of the room, whispered some directions to him, and then left us together. "Monsieur Rubelle," as soon as we were alone, suggested with great politeness that I should favour him with his instructions. I wrote two lines to Pesca, authorising him to deliver my sealed letter "to the bearer," directed the note, and handed it to Monsieur Rubelle. The agent waited with me till his employer returned, equipped in travelling costume. The Count examined the address of my letter before he dismissed the agent. "I thought so!" he said, turning on me with a dark look, and altering again in his manner from that moment. He completed his packing, and then sat consulting a travelling map, making entries in his pocket-book, and looking every now and then impatiently at his watch. Not another word, addressed to myself, passed his lips. The near approach of the hour for his departure, and the proof he had seen of the communication established between Pesca and myself, had plainly recalled his whole attention to the measures that were necessary for securing his escape. A little before eight o'clock, Monsieur Rubelle came back with my unopened letter in his hand. The Count looked carefully at the superscription and the seal, lit a candle, and burnt the letter. "I perform my promise," he said, "but this matter, Mr. Hartright, shall not end here." The agent had kept at the door the cab in which he had returned. He and the maid-servant now busied themselves in removing the luggage. Madame Fosco came downstairs, thickly veiled, with the travelling cage of the white mice in her hand. She neither spoke to me nor looked towards me. Her husband escorted her to the cab. "Follow me as far as the passage," he whispered in my ear; "I may want to speak to you at the last moment." I went out to the door, the agent standing below me in the front garden. The Count came back alone, and drew me a few steps inside the passage. "Remember the Third condition!" he whispered. "You shall hear from me, Mr. Hartright--I may claim from you the satisfaction of a gentleman sooner than you think for." He caught my hand before I was aware of him, and wrung it hard--then turned to the door, stopped, and came back to me again. "One word more," he said confidentially. "When I last saw Miss Halcombe, she looked thin and ill. I am anxious about that admirable woman. Take care of her, sir! With my hand on my heart, I solemnly implore you, take care of Miss Halcombe!" Those were the last words he said to me before he squeezed his huge body into the cab and drove off. The agent and I waited at the door a few moments looking after him. While we were standing together, a second cab appeared from a turning a little way down the road. It followed the direction previously taken by the Count's cab, and as it passed the house and the open garden gate, a person inside looked at us out of the window. The stranger at the Opera again!--the foreigner with a scar on his left cheek. "You wait here with me, sir, for half an hour more!" said Monsieur Rubelle. "I do." We returned to the sitting-room. I was in no humour to speak to the agent, or to allow him to speak to me. I took out the papers which the Count had placed in my hands, and read the terrible story of the conspiracy told by the man who had planned and perpetrated it. THE STORY CONTINUED BY ISIDOR, OTTAVIO, BALDASSARE FOSCO (Count of the Holy Roman Empire, Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Brazen Crown, Perpetual Arch-Master of the Rosicrucian Masons of Mesopotamia; Attached (in Honorary Capacities) to Societies Musical, Societies Medical, Societies Philosophical, and Societies General Benevolent, throughout Europe; etc. etc. etc.) THE COUNT'S NARRATIVE In the summer of eighteen hundred and fifty I arrived in England, charged with a delicate political mission from abroad. Confidential persons were semi-officially connected with me, whose exertions I was authorised to direct, Monsieur and Madame Rubelle being among the number. Some weeks of spare time were at my disposal, before I entered on my functions by establishing myself in the suburbs of London. Curiosity may stop here to ask for some explanation of those functions on my part. I entirely sympathise with the request. I also regret that diplomatic reserve forbids me to comply with it. I arranged to pass the preliminary period of repose, to which I have just referred, in the superb mansion of my late lamented friend, Sir Percival Glyde. HE arrived from the Continent with his wife. I arrived from the Continent with MINE. England is the land of domestic happiness--how appropriately we entered it under these domestic circumstances! The bond of friendship which united Percival and myself was strengthened, on this occasion, by a touching similarity in the pecuniary position on his side and on mine. We both wanted money. Immense necessity! Universal want! Is there a civilised human being who does not feel for us? How insensible must that man be! Or how rich! I enter into no sordid particulars, in discussing this part of the subject. My mind recoils from them. With a Roman austerity, I show my empty purse and Percival's to the shrinking public gaze. Let us allow the deplorable fact to assert itself, once for all, in that manner, and pass on. We were received at the mansion by the magnificent creature who is inscribed on my heart as "Marian," who is known in the colder atmosphere of society as "Miss Halcombe." Just Heaven! with what inconceivable rapidity I learnt to adore that woman. At sixty, I worshipped her with the volcanic ardour of eighteen. All the gold of my rich nature was poured hopelessly at her feet. My wife--poor angel!--my wife, who adores me, got nothing but the shillings and the pennies. Such is the World, such Man, such Love. What are we (I ask) but puppets in a show-box? Oh, omnipotent Destiny, pull our strings gently! Dance us mercifully off our miserable little stage! The preceding lines, rightly understood, express an entire system of philosophy. It is mine. I resume. The domestic position at the commencement of our residence at Blackwater Park has been drawn with amazing accuracy, with profound mental insight, by the hand of Marian herself. (Pass me the intoxicating familiarity of mentioning this sublime creature by her Christian name.) Accurate knowledge of the contents of her journal--to which I obtained access by clandestine means, unspeakably precious to me in the remembrance--warns my eager pen from topics which this essentially exhaustive woman has already made her own. The interests--interests, breathless and immense!--with which I am here concerned, begin with the deplorable calamity of Marian's illness. The situation at this period was emphatically a serious one. Large sums of money, due at a certain time, were wanted by Percival (I say nothing of the modicum equally necessary to myself), and the one source to look to for supplying them was the fortune of his wife, of which not one farthing was at his disposal until her death. Bad so far, and worse still farther on. My lamented friend had private troubles of his own, into which the delicacy of my disinterested attachment to him forbade me from inquiring too curiously. I knew nothing but that a woman, named Anne Catherick, was hidden in the neighbourhood, that she was in communication with Lady Glyde, and that the disclosure of a secret, which would be the certain ruin of Percival, might be the result. He had told me himself that he was a lost man, unless his wife was silenced, and unless Anne Catherick was found. If he was a lost man, what would become of our pecuniary interests? Courageous as I am by nature, I absolutely trembled at the idea! The whole force of my intelligence was now directed to the finding of Anne Catherick. Our money affairs, important as they were, admitted of delay--but the necessity of discovering the woman admitted of none. I only knew her by description, as presenting an extraordinary personal resemblance to Lady Glyde. The statement of this curious fact--intended merely to assist me in identifying the person of whom we were in search--when coupled with the additional information that Anne Catherick had escaped from a mad-house, started the first immense conception in my mind, which subsequently led to such amazing results. That conception involved nothing less than the complete transformation of two separate identities. Lady Glyde and Anne Catherick were to change names, places, and destinies, the one with the other--the prodigious consequences contemplated by the change being the gain of thirty thousand pounds, and the eternal preservation of Sir Percival's secret. My instincts (which seldom err) suggested to me, on reviewing the circumstances, that our invisible Anne would, sooner or later, return to the boat-house at the Blackwater lake. There I posted myself, previously mentioning to Mrs. Michelson, the housekeeper, that I might be found when wanted, immersed in study, in that solitary place. It is my rule never to make unnecessary mysteries, and never to set people suspecting me for want of a little seasonable candour on my part. Mrs. Michelson believed in me from first to last. This ladylike person (widow of a Protestant priest) overflowed with faith. Touched by such superfluity of simple confidence in a woman of her mature years, I opened the ample reservoirs of my nature and absorbed it all. I was rewarded for posting myself sentinel at the lake by the appearance--not of Anne Catherick herself, but of the person in charge of her. This individual also overflowed with simple faith, which I absorbed in myself, as in the case already mentioned. I leave her to describe the circumstances (if she has not done so already) under which she introduced me to the object of her maternal care. When I first saw Anne Catherick she was asleep. I was electrified by the likeness between this unhappy woman and Lady Glyde. The details of the grand scheme which had suggested themselves in outline only, up to that period, occurred to me, in all their masterly combination, at the sight of the sleeping face. At the same time, my heart, always accessible to tender influences, dissolved in tears at the spectacle of suffering before me. I instantly set myself to impart relief. In other words, I provided the necessary stimulant for strengthening Anne Catherick to perform the journey to London. The best years of my life have been passed in the ardent study of medical and chemical science. Chemistry especially has always had irresistible attractions for me from the enormous, the illimitable power which the knowledge of it confers. Chemists--I assert it emphatically--might sway, if they pleased, the destinies of humanity. Let me explain this before I go further. Mind, they say, rules the world. But what rules the mind? The body (follow me closely here) lies at the mercy of the most omnipotent of all potentates--the Chemist. Give me--Fosco--chemistry; and when Shakespeare has conceived Hamlet, and sits down to execute the conception--with a few grains of powder dropped into his daily food, I will reduce his mind, by the action of his body, till his pen pours out the most abject drivel that has ever degraded paper. Under similar circumstances, revive me the illustrious Newton. I guarantee that when he sees the apple fall he shall EAT IT, instead of discovering the principle of gravitation. Nero's dinner shall transform Nero into the mildest of men before he has done digesting it, and the morning draught of Alexander the Great shall make Alexander run for his life at the first sight of the enemy the same afternoon. On my sacred word of honour it is lucky for Society that modern chemists are, by incomprehensible good fortune, the most harmless of mankind. The mass are worthy fathers of families, who keep shops. The few are philosophers besotted with admiration for the sound of their own lecturing voices, visionaries who waste their lives on fantastic impossibilities, or quacks whose ambition soars no higher than our corns. Thus Society escapes, and the illimitable power of Chemistry remains the slave of the most superficial and the most insignificant ends. Why this outburst? Why this withering eloquence? Because my conduct has been misrepresented, because my motives have been misunderstood. It has been assumed that I used my vast chemical resources against Anne Catherick, and that I would have used them if I could against the magnificent Marian herself. Odious insinuations both! All my interests were concerned (as will be seen presently) in the preservation of Anne Catherick's life. All my anxieties were concentrated on Marian's rescue from the hands of the licensed imbecile who attended her, and who found my advice confirmed from first to last by the physician from London. On two occasions only--both equally harmless to the individual on whom I practised--did I summon to myself the assistance of chemical knowledge. On the first of the two, after following Marian to the inn at Blackwater (studying, behind a convenient waggon which hid me from her, the poetry of motion, as embodied in her walk), I availed myself of the services of my invaluable wife, to copy one and to intercept the other of two letters which my adored enemy had entrusted to a discarded maid. In this case, the letters being in the bosom of the girl's dress, Madame Fosco could only open them, read them, perform her instructions, seal them, and put them back again by scientific assistance--which assistance I rendered in a half-ounce bottle. The second occasion, when the same means were employed, was the occasion (to which I shall soon refer) of Lady Glyde's arrival in London. Never at any other time was I indebted to my Art as distinguished from myself. To all other emergencies and complications my natural capacity for grappling, single-handed, with circumstances, was invariably equal. I affirm the all-pervading intelligence of that capacity. At the expense of the Chemist I vindicate the Man. Respect this outburst of generous indignation. It has inexpressibly relieved me. En route! Let us proceed. Having suggested to Mrs. Clement (or Clements, I am not sure which) that the best method of keeping Anne out of Percival's reach was to remove her to London--having found that my proposal was eagerly received, and having appointed a day to meet the travellers at the station and to see them leave it, I was at liberty to return to the house and to confront the difficulties which still remained to be met. My first proceeding was to avail myself of the sublime devotion of my wife. I had arranged with Mrs. Clements that she should communicate her London address, in Anne's interests, to Lady Glyde. But this was not enough. Designing persons in my absence might shake the simple confidence of Mrs. Clements, and she might not write after all. Who could I find capable of travelling to London by the train she travelled by, and of privately seeing her home? I asked myself this question. The conjugal part of me immediately answered--Madame Fosco. After deciding on my wife's mission to London, I arranged that the journey should serve a double purpose. A nurse for the suffering Marian, equally devoted to the patient and to myself, was a necessity of my position. One of the most eminently confidential and capable women in existence was by good fortune at my disposal. I refer to that respectable matron, Madame Rubelle, to whom I addressed a letter, at her residence in London, by the hands of my wife. On the appointed day Mrs. Clements and Anne Catherick met me at the station. I politely saw them off, I politely saw Madame Fosco off by the same train. The last thing at night my wife returned to Blackwater, having followed her instructions with the most unimpeachable accuracy. She was accompanied by Madame Rubelle, and she brought me the London address of Mrs. Clements. After-events proved this last precaution to have been unnecessary. Mrs. Clements punctually informed Lady Glyde of her place of abode. With a wary eye on future emergencies, I kept the letter. The same day I had a brief interview with the doctor, at which I protested, in the sacred interests of humanity, against his treatment of Marian's case. He was insolent, as all ignorant people are. I showed no resentment, I deferred quarrelling with him till it was necessary to quarrel to some purpose. My next proceeding was to leave Blackwater myself. I had my London residence to take in anticipation of coming events. I had also a little business of the domestic sort to transact with Mr. Frederick Fairlie. I found the house I wanted in St. John's Wood. I found Mr. Fairlie at Limmeridge, Cumberland. My own private familiarity with the nature of Marian's correspondence had previously informed me that she had written to Mr. Fairlie, proposing, as a relief to Lady Glyde's matrimonial embarrassments, to take her on a visit to her uncle in Cumberland. This letter I had wisely allowed to reach its destination, feeling at the time that it could do no harm, and might do good. I now presented myself before Mr. Fairlie to support Marian's own proposal--with certain modifications which, happily for the success of my plans, were rendered really inevitable by her illness. It was necessary that Lady Glyde should leave Blackwater alone, by her uncle's invitation, and that she should rest a night on the journey at her aunt's house (the house I had in St. John's Wood) by her uncle's express advice. To achieve these results, and to secure a note of invitation which could be shown to Lady Glyde, were the objects of my visit to Mr. Fairlie. When I have mentioned that this gentleman was equally feeble in mind and body, and that I let loose the whole force of my character on him, I have said enough. I came, saw, and conquered Fairlie. On my return to Blackwater Park (with the letter of invitation) I found that the doctor's imbecile treatment of Marian's case had led to the most alarming results. The fever had turned to typhus. Lady Glyde, on the day of my return, tried to force herself into the room to nurse her sister. She and I had no affinities of sympathy--she had committed the unpardonable outrage on my sensibilities of calling me a spy--she was a stumbling-block in my way and in Percival's--but, for all that, my magnanimity forbade me to put her in danger of infection with my own hand. At the same time I offered no hindrance to her putting herself in danger. If she had succeeded in doing so, the intricate knot which I was slowly and patiently operating on might perhaps have been cut by circumstances. As it was, the doctor interfered and she was kept out of the room. I had myself previously recommended sending for advice to London. This course had been now taken. The physician, on his arrival, confirmed my view of the case. The crisis was serious. But we had hope of our charming patient on the fifth day from the appearance of the typhus. I was only once absent from Blackwater at this time--when I went to London by the morning train to make the final arrangements at my house in St. John's Wood, to assure myself by private inquiry that Mrs. Clements had not moved, and to settle one or two little preliminary matters with the husband of Madame Rubelle. I returned at night. Five days afterwards the physician pronounced our interesting Marian to be out of all danger, and to be in need of nothing but careful nursing. This was the time I had waited for. Now that medical attendance was no longer indispensable, I played the first move in the game by asserting myself against the doctor. He was one among many witnesses in my way whom it was necessary to remove. A lively altercation between us (in which Percival, previously instructed by me, refused to interfere) served the purpose in view. I descended on the miserable man in an irresistible avalanche of indignation, and swept him from the house. The servants were the next encumbrances to get rid of. Again I instructed Percival (whose moral courage required perpetual stimulants), and Mrs. Michelson was amazed, one day, by hearing from her master that the establishment was to be broken up. We cleared the house of all the servants but one, who was kept for domestic purposes, and whose lumpish stupidity we could trust to make no embarrassing discoveries. When they were gone, nothing remained but to relieve ourselves of Mrs. Michelson--a result which was easily achieved by sending this amiable lady to find lodgings for her mistress at the sea-side. The circumstances were now exactly what they were required to be. Lady Glyde was confined to her room by nervous illness, and the lumpish housemaid (I forget her name) was shut up there at night in attendance on her mistress. Marian, though fast recovering, still kept her bed, with Mrs. Rubelle for nurse. No other living creatures but my wife, myself, and Percival were in the house. With all the chances thus in our favour I confronted the next emergency, and played the second move in the game. The object of the second move was to induce Lady Glyde to leave Blackwater unaccompanied by her sister. Unless we could persuade her that Marian had gone on to Cumberland first, there was no chance of removing her, of her own free will, from the house. To produce this necessary operation in her mind, we concealed our interesting invalid in one of the uninhabited bedrooms at Blackwater. At the dead of night Madame Fosco, Madame Rubelle, and myself (Percival not being cool enough to be trusted) accomplished the concealment. The scene was picturesque, mysterious, dramatic in the highest degree. By my directions the bed had been made, in the morning, on a strong movable framework of wood. We had only to lift the framework gently at the head and foot, and to transport our patient where we pleased, without disturbing herself or her bed. No chemical assistance was needed or used in this case. Our interesting Marian lay in the deep repose of convalescence. We placed the candles and opened the doors beforehand. I, in right of my great personal strength, took the head of the framework--my wife and Madame Rubelle took the foot. I bore my share of that inestimably precious burden with a manly tenderness, with a fatherly care. Where is the modern Rembrandt who could depict our midnight procession? Alas for the Arts! alas for this most pictorial of subjects! The modern Rembrandt is nowhere to be found. The next morning my wife and I started for London, leaving Marian secluded, in the uninhabited middle of the house, under care of Madame Rubelle, who kindly consented to imprison herself with her patient for two or three days. Before taking our departure I gave Percival Mr. Fairlie's letter of invitation to his niece (instructing her to sleep on the journey to Cumberland at her aunt's house), with directions to show it to Lady Glyde on hearing from me. I also obtained from him the address of the Asylum in which Anne Catherick had been confined, and a letter to the proprietor, announcing to that gentleman the return of his runaway patient to medical care. I had arranged, at my last visit to the metropolis, to have our modest domestic establishment ready to receive us when we arrived in London by the early train. In consequence of this wise precaution, we were enabled that same day to play the third move in the game--the getting possession of Anne Catherick. Dates are of importance here. I combine in myself the opposite characteristics of a Man of Sentiment and a Man of Business. I have all the dates at my fingers' ends. On Wednesday, the 24th of July 1850, I sent my wife in a cab to clear Mrs. Clements out of the way, in the first place. A supposed message from Lady Glyde in London was sufficient to obtain this result. Mrs. Clements was taken away in the cab, and was left in the cab, while my wife (on pretence of purchasing something at a shop) gave her the slip, and returned to receive her expected visitor at our house in St. John's Wood. It is hardly necessary to add that the visitor had been described to the servants as "Lady Glyde." In the meanwhile I had followed in another cab, with a note for Anne Catherick, merely mentioning that Lady Glyde intended to keep Mrs. Clements to spend the day with her, and that she was to join them under care of the good gentleman waiting outside, who had already saved her from discovery in Hampshire by Sir Percival. The "good gentleman" sent in this note by a street boy, and paused for results a door or two farther on. At the moment when Anne appeared at the house door and closed it this excellent man had the cab door open ready for her, absorbed her into the vehicle, and drove off. (Pass me, here, one exclamation in parenthesis. How interesting this is!) On the way to Forest Road my companion showed no fear. I can be paternal--no man more so--when I please, and I was intensely paternal on this occasion. What titles I had to her confidence! I had compounded the medicine which had done her good--I had warned her of her danger from Sir Percival. Perhaps I trusted too implicitly to these titles--perhaps I underrated the keenness of the lower instincts in persons of weak intellect--it is certain that I neglected to prepare her sufficiently for a disappointment on entering my house. When I took her into the drawing-room--when she saw no one present but Madame Fosco, who was a stranger to her--she exhibited the most violent agitation; if she had scented danger in the air, as a dog scents the presence of some creature unseen, her alarm could not have displayed itself more suddenly and more causelessly. I interposed in vain. The fear from which she was suffering I might have soothed, but the serious heart-disease, under which she laboured, was beyond the reach of all moral palliatives. To my unspeakable horror she was seized with convulsions--a shock to the system, in her condition, which might have laid her dead at any moment at our feet. The nearest doctor was sent for, and was told that "Lady Glyde" required his immediate services. To my infinite relief, he was a capable man. I represented my visitor to him as a person of weak intellect, and subject to delusions, and I arranged that no nurse but my wife should watch in the sick-room. The unhappy woman was too ill, however, to cause any anxiety about what she might say. The one dread which now oppressed me was the dread that the false Lady Glyde might die before the true Lady Glyde arrived in London. I had written a note in the morning to Madame Rubelle, telling her to join me at her husband's house on the evening of Friday the 26th, with another note to Percival, warning him to show his wife her uncle's letter of invitation, to assert that Marian had gone on before her, and to despatch her to town by the midday train, on the 26th, also. On reflection I had felt the necessity, in Anne Catherick's state of health, of precipitating events, and of having Lady Glyde at my disposal earlier than I had originally contemplated. What fresh directions, in the terrible uncertainty of my position, could I now issue? I could do nothing but trust to chance and the doctor. My emotions expressed themselves in pathetic apostrophes, which I was just self-possessed enough to couple, in the hearing of other people, with the name of "Lady Glyde." In all other respects Fosco, on that memorable day, was Fosco shrouded in total eclipse. She passed a bad night, she awoke worn out, but later in the day she revived amazingly. My elastic spirits revived with her. I could receive no answers from Percival and Madame Rubelle till the morning of the next day, the 26th. In anticipation of their following my directions, which, accident apart, I knew they would do, I went to secure a fly to fetch Lady Glyde from the railway, directing it to be at my house on the 26th, at two o'clock. After seeing the order entered in the book, I went on to arrange matters with Monsieur Rubelle. I also procured the services of two gentlemen who could furnish me with the necessary certificates of lunacy. One of them I knew personally--the other was known to Monsieur Rubelle. Both were men whose vigorous minds soared superior to narrow scruples--both were labouring under temporary embarrassments--both believed in ME. It was past five o'clock in the afternoon before I returned from the performance of these duties. When I got back Anne Catherick was dead. Dead on the 25th, and Lady Glyde was not to arrive in London till the 26th! I was stunned. Meditate on that. Fosco stunned! It was too late to retrace our steps. Before my return the doctor had officiously undertaken to save me all trouble by registering the death, on the date when it happened, with his own hand. My grand scheme, unassailable hitherto, had its weak place now--no efforts on my part could alter the fatal event of the 25th. I turned manfully to the future. Percival's interests and mine being still at stake, nothing was left but to play the game through to the end. I recalled my impenetrable calm--and played it. On the morning of the 26th Percival's letter reached me, announcing his wife's arrival by the midday train. Madame Rubelle also wrote to say she would follow in the evening. I started in the fly, leaving the false Lady Glyde dead in the house, to receive the true Lady Glyde on her arrival by the railway at three o'clock. Hidden under the seat of the carriage, I carried with me all the clothes Anne Catherick had worn on coming into my house--they were destined to assist the resurrection of the woman who was dead in the person of the woman who was living. What a situation! I suggest it to the rising romance writers of England. I offer it, as totally new, to the worn-out dramatists of France. Lady Glyde was at the station. There was great crowding and confusion, and more delay than I liked (in case any of her friends had happened to be on the spot), in reclaiming her luggage. Her first questions, as we drove off, implored me to tell her news of her sister. I invented news of the most pacifying kind, assuring her that she was about to see her sister at my house. My house, on this occasion only, was in the neighbourhood of Leicester Square, and was in the occupation of Monsieur Rubelle, who received us in the hall. I took my visitor upstairs into a back room, the two medical gentlemen being there in waiting on the floor beneath to see the patient, and to give me their certificates. After quieting Lady Glyde by the necessary assurances about her sister, I introduced my friends separately to her presence. They performed the formalities of the occasion briefly, intelligently, conscientiously. I entered the room again as soon as they had left it, and at once precipitated events by a reference of the alarming kind to "Miss Halcombe's" state of health. Results followed as I had anticipated. Lady Glyde became frightened, and turned faint. For the second time, and the last, I called Science to my assistance. A medicated glass of water and a medicated bottle of smelling-salts relieved her of all further embarrassment and alarm. Additional applications later in the evening procured her the inestimable blessing of a good night's rest. Madame Rubelle arrived in time to preside at Lady Glyde's toilet. Her own clothes were taken away from her at night, and Anne Catherick's were put on her in the morning, with the strictest regard to propriety, by the matronly hands of the good Rubelle. Throughout the day I kept our patient in a state of partially-suspended consciousness, until the dexterous assistance of my medical friends enabled me to procure the necessary order rather earlier than I had ventured to hope. That evening (the evening of the 27th) Madame Rubelle and I took our revived "Anne Catherick" to the Asylum. She was received with great surprise, but without suspicion, thanks to the order and certificates, to Percival's letter, to the likeness, to the clothes, and to the patient's own confused mental condition at the time. I returned at once to assist Madame Fosco in the preparations for the burial of the False "Lady Glyde," having the clothes and luggage of the true "Lady Glyde" in my possession. They were afterwards sent to Cumberland by the conveyance which was used for the funeral. I attended the funeral, with becoming dignity, attired in the deepest mourning. My narrative of these remarkable events, written under equally remarkable circumstances, closes here. The minor precautions which I observed in communicating with Limmeridge House are already known, so is the magnificent success of my enterprise, so are the solid pecuniary results which followed it. I have to assert, with the whole force of my conviction, that the one weak place in my scheme would never have been found out if the one weak place in my heart had not been discovered first. Nothing but my fatal admiration for Marian restrained me from stepping in to my own rescue when she effected her sister's escape. I ran the risk, and trusted in the complete destruction of Lady Glyde's identity. If either Marian or Mr. Hartright attempted to assert that identity, they would publicly expose themselves to the imputation of sustaining a rank deception, they would be distrusted and discredited accordingly, and they would therefore be powerless to place my interests or Percival's secret in jeopardy. I committed one error in trusting myself to such a blindfold calculation of chances as this. I committed another when Percival had paid the penalty of his own obstinacy and violence, by granting Lady Glyde a second reprieve from the mad-house, and allowing Mr. Hartright a second chance of escaping me. In brief, Fosco, at this serious crisis, was untrue to himself. Deplorable and uncharacteristic fault! Behold the cause, in my heart--behold, in the image of Marian Halcombe, the first and last weakness of Fosco's life! At the ripe age of sixty, I make this unparalleled confession. Youths! I invoke your sympathy. Maidens! I claim your tears. A word more, and the attention of the reader (concentrated breathlessly on myself) shall be released. My own mental insight informs me that three inevitable questions will be asked here by persons of inquiring minds. They shall be stated--they shall be answered. First question. What is the secret of Madame Fosco's unhesitating devotion of herself to the fulfilment of my boldest wishes, to the furtherance of my deepest plans? I might answer this by simply referring to my own character, and by asking, in my turn, Where, in the history of the world, has a man of my order ever been found without a woman in the background self-immolated on the altar of his life? But I remember that I am writing in England, I remember that I was married in England, and I ask if a woman's marriage obligations in this country provide for her private opinion of her husband's principles? No! They charge her unreservedly to love, honour, and obey him. That is exactly what my wife has done. I stand here on a supreme moral elevation, and I loftily assert her accurate performance of her conjugal duties. Silence, Calumny! Your sympathy, Wives of England, for Madame Fosco! Second question. If Anne Catherick had not died when she did, what should I have done? I should, in that case, have assisted worn-out Nature in finding permanent repose. I should have opened the doors of the Prison of Life, and have extended to the captive (incurably afflicted in mind and body both) a happy release. Third question. On a calm revision of all the circumstances--Is my conduct worthy of any serious blame? Most emphatically, No! Have I not carefully avoided exposing myself to the odium of committing unnecessary crime? With my vast resources in chemistry, I might have taken Lady Glyde's life. At immense personal sacrifice I followed the dictates of my own ingenuity, my own humanity, my own caution, and took her identity instead. Judge me by what I might have done. How comparatively innocent! how indirectly virtuous I appear in what I really did! I announced on beginning it that this narrative would be a remarkable document. It has entirely answered my expectations. Receive these fervid lines--my last legacy to the country I leave for ever. They are worthy of the occasion, and worthy of FOSCO. THE STORY CONCLUDED BY WALTER HARTRIGHT I When I closed the last leaf of the Count's manuscript the half-hour during which I had engaged to remain at Forest Road had expired. Monsieur Rubelle looked at his watch and bowed. I rose immediately, and left the agent in possession of the empty house. I never saw him again--I never heard more of him or of his wife. Out of the dark byways of villainy and deceit they had crawled across our path--into the same byways they crawled back secretly and were lost. In a quarter of an hour after leaving Forest Road I was at home again. But few words sufficed to tell Laura and Marian how my desperate venture had ended, and what the next event in our lives was likely to be. I left all details to be described later in the day, and hastened back to St. John's Wood, to see the person of whom Count Fosco had ordered the fly, when he went to meet Laura at the station. The address in my possession led me to some "livery stables," about a quarter of a mile distant from Forest Road. The proprietor proved to be a civil and respectable man. When I explained that an important family matter obliged me to ask him to refer to his books for the purpose of ascertaining a date with which the record of his business transactions might supply me, he offered no objection to granting my request. The book was produced, and there, under the date of "July 26th, 1850," the order was entered in these words-- "Brougham to Count Fosco, 5 Forest Road. Two o'clock. (John Owen)." I found on inquiry that the name of "John Owen," attached to the entry, referred to the man who had been employed to drive the fly. He was then at work in the stable-yard, and was sent for to see me at my request. "Do you remember driving a gentleman, in the month of July last, from Number Five Forest Road to the Waterloo Bridge station?" I asked. "Well, sir," said the man, "I can't exactly say I do." "Perhaps you remember the gentleman himself? Can you call to mind driving a foreigner last summer--a tall gentleman and remarkably fat?" The man's face brightened directly. "I remember him, sir! The fattest gentleman as ever I see, and the heaviest customer as ever I drove. Yes, yes--I call him to mind, sir! We DID go to the station, and it WAS from Forest Road. There was a parrot, or summat like it, screeching in the window. The gentleman was in a mortal hurry about the lady's luggage, and he gave me a handsome present for looking sharp and getting the boxes." Getting the boxes! I recollected immediately that Laura's own account of herself on her arrival in London described her luggage as being collected for her by some person whom Count Fosco brought with him to the station. This was the man. "Did you see the lady?" I asked. "What did she look like? Was she young or old?" "Well, sir, what with the hurry and the crowd of people pushing about, I can't rightly say what the lady looked like. I can't call nothing to mind about her that I know of excepting her name." "You remember her name?" "Yes, sir. Her name was Lady Glyde." "How do you come to remember that, when you have forgotten what she looked like?" The man smiled, and shifted his feet in some little embarrassment. "Why, to tell you the truth, sir," he said, "I hadn't been long married at that time, and my wife's name, before she changed it for mine, was the same as the lady's--meaning the name of Glyde, sir. The lady mentioned it herself. 'Is your name on your boxes, ma'am?' says I. 'Yes,' says she, 'my name is on my luggage--it is Lady Glyde.' 'Come!' I says to myself, 'I've a bad head for gentlefolks' names in general--but THIS one comes like an old friend, at any rate.' I can't say nothing about the time, sir, it might be nigh on a year ago, or it mightn't. But I can swear to the stout gentleman, and swear to the lady's name." There was no need that he should remember the time--the date was positively established by his master's order-book. I felt at once that the means were now in my power of striking down the whole conspiracy at a blow with the irresistible weapon of plain fact. Without a moment's hesitation, I took the proprietor of the livery stables aside and told him what the real importance was of the evidence of his order-book and the evidence of his driver. An arrangement to compensate him for the temporary loss of the man's services was easily made, and a copy of the entry in the book was taken by myself, and certified as true by the master's own signature. I left the livery stables, having settled that John Owen was to hold himself at my disposal for the next three days, or for a longer period if necessity required it. I now had in my possession all the papers that I wanted--the district registrar's own copy of the certificate of death, and Sir Percival's dated letter to the Count, being safe in my pocket-book. With this written evidence about me, and with the coachman's answers fresh in my memory, I next turned my steps, for the first time since the beginning of all my inquiries, in the direction of Mr. Kyrle's office. One of my objects in paying him this second visit was, necessarily, to tell him what I had done. The other was to warn him of my resolution to take my wife to Limmeridge the next morning, and to have her publicly received and recognised in her uncle's house. I left it to Mr. Kyrle to decide under these circumstances, and in Mr. Gilmore's absence, whether he was or was not bound, as the family solicitor, to be present on that occasion in the family interests. I will say nothing of Mr. Kyrle's amazement, or of the terms in which he expressed his opinion of my conduct from the first stage of the investigation to the last. It is only necessary to mention that he at once decided on accompanying us to Cumberland. We started the next morning by the early train. Laura, Marian, Mr. Kyrle, and myself in one carriage, and John Owen, with a clerk from Mr. Kyrle's office, occupying places in another. On reaching the Limmeridge station we went first to the farmhouse at Todd's Corner. It was my firm determination that Laura should not enter her uncle's house till she appeared there publicly recognised as his niece. I left Marian to settle the question of accommodation with Mrs. Todd, as soon as the good woman had recovered from the bewilderment of hearing what our errand was in Cumberland, and I arranged with her husband that John Owen was to be committed to the ready hospitality of the farm-servants. These preliminaries completed, Mr. Kyrle and I set forth together for Limmeridge House. I cannot write at any length of our interview with Mr. Fairlie, for I cannot recall it to mind without feelings of impatience and contempt, which make the scene, even in remembrance only, utterly repulsive to me. I prefer to record simply that I carried my point. Mr. Fairlie attempted to treat us on his customary plan. We passed without notice his polite insolence at the outset of the interview. We heard without sympathy the protestations with which he tried next to persuade us that the disclosure of the conspiracy had overwhelmed him. He absolutely whined and whimpered at last like a fretful child. "How was he to know that his niece was alive when he was told that she was dead? He would welcome dear Laura with pleasure, if we would only allow him time to recover. Did we think he looked as if he wanted hurrying into his grave? No. Then, why hurry him?" He reiterated these remonstrances at every available opportunity, until I checked them once for all, by placing him firmly between two inevitable alternatives. I gave him his choice between doing his niece justice on my terms, or facing the consequence of a public assertion of her existence in a court of law. Mr. Kyrle, to whom he turned for help, told him plainly that he must decide the question then and there. Characteristically choosing the alternative which promised soonest to release him from all personal anxiety, he announced with a sudden outburst of energy, that he was not strong enough to bear any more bullying, and that we might do as we pleased. Mr. Kyrle and I at once went downstairs, and agreed upon a form of letter which was to be sent round to the tenants who had attended the false funeral, summoning them, in Mr. Fairlie's name, to assemble in Limmeridge House on the next day but one. An order referring to the same date was also written, directing a statuary in Carlisle to send a man to Limmeridge churchyard for the purpose of erasing an inscription--Mr. Kyrle, who had arranged to sleep in the house, undertaking that Mr. Fairlie should hear these letters read to him, and should sign them with his own hand. I occupied the interval day at the farm in writing a plain narrative of the conspiracy, and in adding to it a statement of the practical contradiction which facts offered to the assertion of Laura's death. This I submitted to Mr. Kyrle before I read it the next day to the assembled tenants. We also arranged the form in which the evidence should be presented at the close of the reading. After these matters were settled, Mr. Kyrle endeavoured to turn the conversation next to Laura's affairs. Knowing, and desiring to know nothing of those affairs, and doubting whether he would approve, as a man of business, of my conduct in relation to my wife's life-interest in the legacy left to Madame Fosco, I begged Mr. Kyrle to excuse me if I abstained from discussing the subject. It was connected, as I could truly tell him, with those sorrows and troubles of the past which we never referred to among ourselves, and which we instinctively shrank from discussing with others. My last labour, as the evening approached, was to obtain "The Narrative of the Tombstone," by taking a copy of the false inscription on the grave before it was erased. The day came--the day when Laura once more entered the familiar breakfast-room at Limmeridge House. All the persons assembled rose from their seats as Marian and I led her in. A perceptible shock of surprise, an audible murmur of interest ran through them, at the sight of her face. Mr. Fairlie was present (by my express stipulation), with Mr. Kyrle by his side. His valet stood behind him with a smelling-bottle ready in one hand, and a white handkerchief, saturated with eau-de-Cologne, in the other. I opened the proceedings by publicly appealing to Mr. Fairlie to say whether I appeared there with his authority and under his express sanction. He extended an arm, on either side, to Mr. Kyrle and to his valet--was by them assisted to stand on his legs, and then expressed himself in these terms: "Allow me to present Mr. Hartright. I am as great an invalid as ever, and he is so very obliging as to speak for me. The subject is dreadfully embarrassing. Please hear him, and don't make a noise!" With those words he slowly sank back again into the chair, and took refuge in his scented pocket-handkerchief. The disclosure of the conspiracy followed, after I had offered my preliminary explanation, first of all, in the fewest and the plainest words. I was there present (I informed my hearers) to declare, first, that my wife, then sitting by me, was the daughter of the late Mr. Philip Fairlie; secondly, to prove by positive facts, that the funeral which they had attended in Limmeridge churchyard was the funeral of another woman; thirdly, to give them a plain account of how it had all happened. Without further preface, I at once read the narrative of the conspiracy, describing it in clear outline, and dwelling only upon the pecuniary motive for it, in order to avoid complicating my statement by unnecessary reference to Sir Percival's secret. This done, I reminded my audience of the date on the inscription in the churchyard (the 25th), and confirmed its correctness by producing the certificate of death. I then read them Sir Percival's letter of the 25th, announcing his wife's intended journey from Hampshire to London on the 26th. I next showed that she had taken that journey, by the personal testimony of the driver of the fly, and I proved that she had performed it on the appointed day, by the order-book at the livery stables. Marian then added her own statement of the meeting between Laura and herself at the mad-house, and of her sister's escape. After which I closed the proceedings by informing the persons present of Sir Percival's death and of my marriage. Mr. Kyrle rose when I resumed my seat, and declared, as the legal adviser of the family, that my case was proved by the plainest evidence he had ever heard in his life. As he spoke those words, I put my arm round Laura, and raised her so that she was plainly visible to every one in the room. "Are you all of the same opinion?" I asked, advancing towards them a few steps, and pointing to my wife. The effect of the question was electrical. Far down at the lower end of the room one of the oldest tenants on the estate started to his feet, and led the rest with him in an instant. I see the man now, with his honest brown face and his iron-grey hair, mounted on the window-seat, waving his heavy riding-whip over his head, and leading the cheers. "There she is, alive and hearty--God bless her! Gi' it tongue, lads! Gi' it tongue!" The shout that answered him, reiterated again and again, was the sweetest music I ever heard. The labourers in the village and the boys from the school, assembled on the lawn, caught up the cheering and echoed it back on us. The farmers' wives clustered round Laura, and struggled which should be first to shake hands with her, and to implore her, with the tears pouring over their own cheeks, to bear up bravely and not to cry. She was so completely overwhelmed, that I was obliged to take her from them, and carry her to the door. There I gave her into Marian's care--Marian, who had never failed us yet, whose courageous self-control did not fail us now. Left by myself at the door, I invited all the persons present (after thanking them in Laura's name and mine) to follow me to the churchyard, and see the false inscription struck off the tombstone with their own eyes. They all left the house, and all joined the throng of villagers collected round the grave, where the statuary's man was waiting for us. In a breathless silence, the first sharp stroke of the steel sounded on the marble. Not a voice was heard--not a soul moved, till those three words, "Laura, Lady Glyde," had vanished from sight. Then there was a great heave of relief among the crowd, as if they felt that the last fetters of the conspiracy had been struck off Laura herself, and the assembly slowly withdrew. It was late in the day before the whole inscription was erased. One line only was afterwards engraved in its place: "Anne Catherick, July 25th, 1850." I returned to Limmeridge House early enough in the evening to take leave of Mr. Kyrle. He and his clerk, and the driver of the fly, went back to London by the night train. On their departure an insolent message was delivered to me from Mr. Fairlie--who had been carried from the room in a shattered condition, when the first outbreak of cheering answered my appeal to the tenantry. The message conveyed to us "Mr. Fairlie's best congratulations," and requested to know whether "we contemplated stopping in the house." I sent back word that the only object for which we had entered his doors was accomplished--that I contemplated stopping in no man's house but my own--and that Mr. Fairlie need not entertain the slightest apprehension of ever seeing us or hearing from us again. We went back to our friends at the farm to rest that night, and the next morning--escorted to the station, with the heartiest enthusiasm and good will, by the whole village and by all the farmers in the neighbourhood--we returned to London. As our view of the Cumberland hills faded in the distance, I thought of the first disheartening circumstances under which the long struggle that was now past and over had been pursued. It was strange to look back and to see, now, that the poverty which had denied us all hope of assistance had been the indirect means of our success, by forcing me to act for myself. If we had been rich enough to find legal help, what would have been the result? The gain (on Mr. Kyrle's own showing) would have been more than doubtful--the loss, judging by the plain test of events as they had really happened, certain. The law would never have obtained me my interview with Mrs. Catherick. The law would never have made Pesca the means of forcing a confession from the Count. II Two more events remain to be added to the chain before it reaches fairly from the outset of the story to the close. While our new sense of freedom from the long oppression of the past was still strange to us, I was sent for by the friend who had given me my first employment in wood engraving, to receive from him a fresh testimony of his regard for my welfare. He had been commissioned by his employers to go to Paris, and to examine for them a fresh discovery in the practical application of his Art, the merits of which they were anxious to ascertain. His own engagements had not allowed him leisure time to undertake the errand, and he had most kindly suggested that it should be transferred to me. I could have no hesitation in thankfully accepting the offer, for if I acquitted myself of my commission as I hoped I should, the result would be a permanent engagement on the illustrated newspaper, to which I was now only occasionally attached. I received my instructions and packed up for the journey the next day. On leaving Laura once more (under what changed circumstances!) in her sister's care, a serious consideration recurred to me, which had more than once crossed my wife's mind, as well as my own, already--I mean the consideration of Marian's future. Had we any right to let our selfish affection accept the devotion of all that generous life? Was it not our duty, our best expression of gratitude, to forget ourselves, and to think only of HER? I tried to say this when we were alone for a moment, before I went away. She took my hand, and silenced me at the first words. "After all that we three have suffered together," she said "there can be no parting between us till the last parting of all. My heart and my happiness, Walter, are with Laura and you. Wait a little till there are children's voices at your fireside. I will teach them to speak for me in THEIR language, and the first lesson they say to their father and mother shall be--We can't spare our aunt!" My journey to Paris was not undertaken alone. At the eleventh hour Pesca decided that he would accompany me. He had not recovered his customary cheerfulness since the night at the Opera, and he determined to try what a week's holiday would do to raise his spirits. I performed the errand entrusted to me, and drew out the necessary report, on the fourth day from our arrival in Paris. The fifth day I arranged to devote to sight-seeing and amusements in Pesca's company. Our hotel had been too full to accommodate us both on the same floor. My room was on the second story, and Pesca's was above me, on the third. On the morning of the fifth day I went upstairs to see if the Professor was ready to go out. Just before I reached the landing I saw his door opened from the inside--a long, delicate, nervous hand (not my friend's hand certainly) held it ajar. At the same time I heard Pesca's voice saying eagerly, in low tones, and in his own language--"I remember the name, but I don't know the man. You saw at the Opera he was so changed that I could not recognise him. I will forward the report--I can do no more." "No more need be done," answered the second voice. The door opened wide, and the light-haired man with the scar on his cheek--the man I had seen following Count Fosco's cab a week before--came out. He bowed as I drew aside to let him pass--his face was fearfully pale--and he held fast by the banisters as he descended the stairs. I pushed open the door and entered Pesca's room. He was crouched up, in the strangest manner, in a corner of the sofa. He seemed to shrink from me when I approached him. "Am I disturbing you?" I asked. "I did not know you had a friend with you till I saw him come out." "No friend," said Pesca eagerly. "I see him to-day for the first time and the last." "I am afraid he has brought you bad news?" "Horrible news, Walter! Let us go back to London--I don't want to stop here--I am sorry I ever came. The misfortunes of my youth are very hard upon me," he said, turning his face to the wall, "very hard upon me in my later time. I try to forget them--and they will not forget ME!" "We can't return, I am afraid, before the afternoon," I replied. "Would you like to come out with me in the meantime?" "No, my friend, I will wait here. But let us go back to-day--pray let us go back." I left him with the assurance that he should leave Paris that afternoon. We had arranged the evening before to ascend the Cathedral of Notre Dame, with Victor Hugo's noble romance for our guide. There was nothing in the French capital that I was more anxious to see, and I departed by myself for the church. Approaching Notre Dame by the river-side, I passed on my way the terrible dead-house of Paris--the Morgue. A great crowd clamoured and heaved round the door. There was evidently something inside which excited the popular curiosity, and fed the popular appetite for horror. I should have walked on to the church if the conversation of two men and a woman on the outskirts of the crowd had not caught my ear. They had just come out from seeing the sight in the Morgue, and the account they were giving of the dead body to their neighbours described it as the corpse of a man--a man of immense size, with a strange mark on his left arm. The moment those words reached me I stopped and took my place with the crowd going in. Some dim foreshadowing of the truth had crossed my mind when I heard Pesca's voice through the open door, and when I saw the stranger's face as he passed me on the stairs of the hotel. Now the truth itself was revealed to me--revealed in the chance words that had just reached my ears. Other vengeance than mine had followed that fated man from the theatre to his own door--from his own door to his refuge in Paris. Other vengeance than mine had called him to the day of reckoning, and had exacted from him the penalty of his life. The moment when I had pointed him out to Pesca at the theatre in the hearing of that stranger by our side, who was looking for him too--was the moment that sealed his doom. I remembered the struggle in my own heart, when he and I stood face to face--the struggle before I could let him escape me--and shuddered as I recalled it. Slowly, inch by inch, I pressed in with the crowd, moving nearer and nearer to the great glass screen that parts the dead from the living at the Morgue--nearer and nearer, till I was close behind the front row of spectators, and could look in. There he lay, unowned, unknown, exposed to the flippant curiosity of a French mob! There was the dreadful end of that long life of degraded ability and heartless crime! Hushed in the sublime repose of death, the broad, firm, massive face and head fronted us so grandly that the chattering Frenchwomen about me lifted their hands in admiration, and cried in shrill chorus, "Ah, what a handsome man!" The wound that had killed him had been struck with a knife or dagger exactly over his heart. No other traces of violence appeared about the body except on the left arm, and there, exactly in the place where I had seen the brand on Pesca's arm, were two deep cuts in the shape of the letter T, which entirely obliterated the mark of the Brotherhood. His clothes, hung above him, showed that he had been himself conscious of his danger--they were clothes that had disguised him as a French artisan. For a few moments, but not for longer, I forced myself to see these things through the glass screen. I can write of them at no greater length, for I saw no more. The few facts in connection with his death which I subsequently ascertained (partly from Pesca and partly from other sources), may be stated here before the subject is dismissed from these pages. His body was taken out of the Seine in the disguise which I have described, nothing being found on him which revealed his name, his rank, or his place of abode. The hand that struck him was never traced, and the circumstances under which he was killed were never discovered. I leave others to draw their own conclusions in reference to the secret of the assassination as I have drawn mine. When I have intimated that the foreigner with the scar was a member of the Brotherhood (admitted in Italy after Pesca's departure from his native country), and when I have further added that the two cuts, in the form of a T, on the left arm of the dead man, signified the Italian word "Traditore," and showed that justice had been done by the Brotherhood on a traitor, I have contributed all that I know towards elucidating the mystery of Count Fosco's death. The body was identified the day after I had seen it by means of an anonymous letter addressed to his wife. He was buried by Madame Fosco in the cemetery of Pere la Chaise. Fresh funeral wreaths continue to this day to be hung on the ornamental bronze railings round the tomb by the Countess's own hand. She lives in the strictest retirement at Versailles. Not long since she published a biography of her deceased husband. The work throws no light whatever on the name that was really his own or on the secret history of his life--it is almost entirely devoted to the praise of his domestic virtues, the assertion of his rare abilities, and the enumeration of the honours conferred on him. The circumstances attending his death are very briefly noticed, and are summed up on the last page in this sentence--"His life was one long assertion of the rights of the aristocracy and the sacred principles of Order, and he died a martyr to his cause." III The summer and autumn passed after my return from Paris, and brought no changes with them which need be noticed here. We lived so simply and quietly that the income which I was now steadily earning sufficed for all our wants. In the February of the new year our first child was born--a son. My mother and sister and Mrs. Vesey were our guests at the little christening party, and Mrs. Clements was present to assist my wife on the same occasion. Marian was our boy's godmother, and Pesca and Mr. Gilmore (the latter acting by proxy) were his godfathers. I may add here that when Mr. Gilmore returned to us a year later he assisted the design of these pages, at my request, by writing the Narrative which appears early in the story under his name, and which, though first in order of precedence, was thus, in order of time, the last that I received. The only event in our lives which now remains to be recorded, occurred when our little Walter was six months old. At that time I was sent to Ireland to make sketches for certain forthcoming illustrations in the newspaper to which I was attached. I was away for nearly a fortnight, corresponding regularly with my wife and Marian, except during the last three days of my absence, when my movements were too uncertain to enable me to receive letters. I performed the latter part of my journey back at night, and when I reached home in the morning, to my utter astonishment there was no one to receive me. Laura and Marian and the child had left the house on the day before my return. A note from my wife, which was given to me by the servant, only increased my surprise, by informing me that they had gone to Limmeridge House. Marian had prohibited any attempt at written explanations--I was entreated to follow them the moment I came back--complete enlightenment awaited me on my arrival in Cumberland--and I was forbidden to feel the slightest anxiety in the meantime. There the note ended. It was still early enough to catch the morning train. I reached Limmeridge House the same afternoon. My wife and Marian were both upstairs. They had established themselves (by way of completing my amazement) in the little room which had been once assigned to me for a studio, when I was employed on Mr. Fairlie's drawings. On the very chair which I used to occupy when I was at work Marian was sitting now, with the child industriously sucking his coral upon her lap--while Laura was standing by the well-remembered drawing-table which I had so often used, with the little album that I had filled for her in past times open under her hand. "What in the name of heaven has brought you here?" I asked. "Does Mr. Fairlie know----?" Marian suspended the question on my lips by telling me that Mr. Fairlie was dead. He had been struck by paralysis, and had never rallied after the shock. Mr. Kyrle had informed them of his death, and had advised them to proceed immediately to Limmeridge House. Some dim perception of a great change dawned on my mind. Laura spoke before I had quite realised it. She stole close to me to enjoy the surprise which was still expressed in my face. "My darling Walter," she said, "must we really account for our boldness in coming here? I am afraid, love, I can only explain it by breaking through our rule, and referring to the past." "There is not the least necessity for doing anything of the kind," said Marian. "We can be just as explicit, and much more interesting, by referring to the future." She rose and held up the child kicking and crowing in her arms. "Do you know who this is, Walter?" she asked, with bright tears of happiness gathering in her eyes. "Even MY bewilderment has its limits," I replied. "I think I can still answer for knowing my own child." "Child!" she exclaimed, with all her easy gaiety of old times. "Do you talk in that familiar manner of one of the landed gentry of England? Are you aware, when I present this illustrious baby to your notice, in whose presence you stand? Evidently not! Let me make two eminent personages known to one another: Mr. Walter Hartright--THE HEIR OF LIMMERIDGE." So she spoke. In writing those last words, I have written all. The pen falters in my hand. The long, happy labour of many months is over. Marian was the good angel of our lives--let Marian end our Story.