Title: The Private Life - The wheel of time, Lord Beaupré, The visits, Collaboration, Owen Wingrave.
Author: James, Henry
Language: English
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THE PRIVATE LIFE

  THE WHEEL OF TIME     LORD BEAUPRÉ

  THE VISITS     COLLABORATION


OWEN WINGRAVE


BY

HENRY JAMES


LONDON
JAMES R. OSGOOD, McILVAINE & CO.
45, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.


1893



CONTENTS

The Private Life
The Wheel of Time
Lord Beaupré
The Visits
Collaboration
Owen Wingrave



THE PRIVATE LIFE


We talked of London, face to face with a great bristling, primeval
glacier. The hour and the scene were one of those impressions which make
up a little, in Switzerland, for the modern indignity of travel--the
promiscuities and vulgarities, the station and the hotel, the gregarious
patience, the struggle for a scrappy attention, the reduction to a
numbered state. The high valley was pink with the mountain rose, the
cool air as fresh as if the world were young. There was a faint flush of
afternoon on undiminished snows, and the fraternizing tinkle of the
unseen cattle came to us with a cropped and sun-warmed odour. The
balconied inn stood on the very neck of the sweetest pass in the
Oberland, and for a week we had had company and weather. This was felt
to be great luck, for one would have made up for the other had either
been bad.

The weather certainly would have made up for the company; but it was not
subjected to this tax, for we had by a happy chance the _fleur des
pois_: Lord and Lady Mellifont, Clare Vawdrey, the greatest (in the
opinion of many) of our literary glories, and Blanche Adney, the
greatest (in the opinion of all) of our theatrical. I mention these
first, because they were just the people whom in London, at that time,
people tried to "get." People endeavoured to "book" them six weeks
ahead, yet on this occasion we had come in for them, we had all come in
for each other, without the least wire-pulling. A turn of the game had
pitched us together, the last of August, and we recognized our luck by
remaining so, under protection of the barometer. When the golden days
were over--that would come soon enough--we should wind down opposite
sides of the pass and disappear over the crest of surrounding heights.
We were of the same general communion, we participated in the same
miscellaneous publicity. We met, in London, with irregular frequency; we
were more or less governed by the laws and the language, the traditions
and the shibboleths of the same dense social state. I think all of us,
even the ladies, "did" something, though we pretended we didn't when it
was mentioned. Such things are not mentioned indeed in London, but it
was our innocent pleasure to be different here. There had to be some way
to show the difference, inasmuch as we were under the impression that
this was our annual holiday. We felt at any rate that the conditions
were more human than in London, or that at least we ourselves were. We
were frank about this, we talked about it: it was what we were talking
about as we looked at the flushing glacier, just as some one called
attention to the prolonged absence of Lord Mellifont and Mrs. Adney. We
were seated on the terrace of the inn, where there were benches and
little tables, and those of us who were most bent on proving that we had
returned to nature were, in the queer Germanic fashion, having coffee
before meat.

The remark about the absence of our two companions was not taken up, not
even by Lady Mellifont, not even by little Adney, the fond composer; for
it had been dropped only in the briefest intermission of Clare Vawdrey's
talk. (This celebrity was "Clarence" only on the title-page.) It was
just that revelation of our being after all human that was his theme. He
asked the company whether, candidly, every one hadn't been tempted to
say to every one else: "I had no idea you were really so nice." I had
had, for my part, an idea that he was, and even a good deal nicer, but
that was too complicated to go into then; besides it is exactly my
story. There was a general understanding among us that when Vawdrey
talked we should be silent, and not, oddly enough, because he at all
expected it. He didn't, for of all abundant talkers he was the most
unconscious, the least greedy and professional. It was rather the
religion of the host, of the hostess, that prevailed among us: it was
their own idea, but they always looked for a listening circle when the
great novelist dined with them. On the occasion I allude to there was
probably no one present with whom, in London, he had not dined, and we
felt the force of this habit. He had dined even with me; and on the
evening of that dinner, as on this Alpine afternoon, I had been at no
pains to hold my tongue, absorbed as I inveterately was in a study of
the question which always rose before me, to such a height, in his fair,
square, strong stature.

This question was all the more tormenting that he never suspected
himself (I am sure) of imposing it, any more than he had ever observed
that every day of his life every one listened to him at dinner. He used
to be called "subjective" in the weekly papers, but in society no
distinguished man could have been less so. He never talked about
himself; and this was a topic on which, though it would have been
tremendously worthy of him, he apparently never even reflected. He had
his hours and his habits, his tailor and his hatter, his hygiene and his
particular wine, but all these things together never made up an
attitude. Yet they constituted the only attitude he ever adopted, and it
was easy for him to refer to our being "nicer" abroad than at home. _He_
was exempt from variations, and not a shade either less or more nice in
one place than in another. He differed from other people, but never from
himself (save in the extraordinary sense which I will presently
explain), and struck me as having neither moods nor sensibilities nor
preferences. He might have been always in the same company, so far as he
recognized any influence from age or condition or sex: he addressed
himself to women exactly as he addressed himself to men, and gossiped
with all men alike, talking no better to clever folk than to dull. I
used to feel a despair at his way of liking one subject--so far as I
could tell--precisely as much as another: there were some I hated so
myself. I never found him anything but loud and cheerful and copious,
and I never heard him utter a paradox or express a shade or play with an
idea. That fancy about our being "human" was, in his conversation, quite
an exceptional flight. His opinions were sound and second-rate, and of
his perceptions it was too mystifying to think. I envied him his
magnificent health.

Vawdrey had marched, with his even pace and his perfectly good
conscience, into the flat country of anecdote, where stories are visible
from afar like windmills and signposts; but I observed after a little
that Lady Mellifont's attention wandered. I happened to be sitting next
her. I noticed that her eyes rambled a little anxiously over the lower
slopes of the mountains. At last, after looking at her watch, she said
to me: "Do you know where they went?"

"Do you mean Mrs. Adney and Lord Mellifont?"

"Lord Mellifont and Mrs. Adney." Her ladyship's speech
seemed--unconsciously indeed--to correct me, but it didn't occur to me
that this was because she was jealous. I imputed to her no such vulgar
sentiment: in the first place, because I liked her, and in the second
because it would always occur to one quickly that it was right, in any
connection, to put Lord Mellifont first. He _was_ first--extraordinarily
first. I don't say greatest or wisest or most renowned, but essentially
at the top of the list and the head of the table. That is a position by
itself, and his wife was naturally accustomed to see him in it. My
phrase had sounded as if Mrs. Adney had taken him; but it was not
possible for him to be taken--he only took. No one, in the nature of
things, could know this better than Lady Mellifont. I had originally
been rather afraid of her, thinking her, with her stiff silences and the
extreme blackness of almost everything that made up her person, somewhat
hard, even a little saturnine. Her paleness seemed slightly grey, and
her glossy black hair metallic, like the brooches and bands and combs
with which it was inveterately adorned. She was in perpetual mourning,
and wore numberless ornaments of jet and onyx, a thousand clicking
chains and bugles and beads. I had heard Mrs. Adney call her the queen
of night, and the term was descriptive if you understood that the night
was cloudy. She had a secret, and if you didn't find it out as you knew
her better you at least perceived that she was gentle and unaffected and
limited, and also rather submissively sad. She was like a woman with a
painless malady. I told her that I had merely seen her husband and his
companion stroll down the glen together about an hour before, and
suggested that Mr. Adney would perhaps know something of their
intentions.

Vincent Adney, who, though he was fifty years old, looked like a good
little boy on whom it had been impressed that children should not talk
before company, acquitted himself with remarkable simplicity and taste
of the position of husband of a great exponent of comedy. When all was
said about her making it easy for him, one couldn't help admiring the
charmed affection with which he took everything for granted. It is
difficult for a husband who is not on the stage, or at least in the
theatre, to be graceful about a wife who is; but Adney was more than
graceful--he was exquisite, he was inspired. He set his beloved to
music; and you remember how genuine his music could be--the only English
compositions I ever saw a foreigner take an interest in. His wife was in
them, somewhere, always; they were like a free, rich translation of the
impression she produced. She seemed, as one listened, to pass laughing,
with loosened hair, across the scene. He had been only a little fiddler
at her theatre, always in his place during the acts; but she had made
him something rare and misunderstood. Their superiority had become a
kind of partnership, and their happiness was a part of the happiness of
their friends. Adney's one discomfort was that he couldn't write a play
for his wife, and the only way he meddled with her affairs was by asking
impossible people if _they_ couldn't.

Lady Mellifont, after looking across at him a moment, remarked to me
that she would rather not put any question to him. She added the next
minute: "I had rather people shouldn't see I'm nervous."

"_Are_ you nervous?"

"I always become so if my husband is away from me for any time."

"Do you imagine something has happened to him?"

"Yes, always. Of course I'm used to it."

"Do you mean his tumbling over precipices--that sort of thing?"

"I don't know exactly what it is: it's the general sense that he'll
never come back."

She said so much and kept back so much that the only way to treat the
condition she referred to seemed the jocular. "Surely he'll never
forsake you!" I laughed.

She looked at the ground a moment. "Oh, at bottom I'm easy."

"Nothing can ever happen to a man so accomplished, so infallible, so
armed at all points," I went on, encouragingly.

"Oh, you don't know how he's armed!" she exclaimed, with such an odd
quaver that I could account for it only by her being nervous. This idea
was confirmed by her moving just afterwards, changing her seat rather
pointlessly, not as if to cut our conversation short, but because she
was in a fidget. I couldn't know what was the matter with her, but I was
presently relieved to see Mrs. Adney come toward us. She had in her hand
a big bunch of wild flowers, but she was not closely attended by Lord
Mellifont. I quickly saw, however, that she had no disaster to announce;
yet as I knew there was a question Lady Mellifont would like to hear
answered, but did not wish to ask, I expressed to her immediately the
hope that his lordship had not remained in a crevasse.

"Oh, no; he left me but three minutes ago. He has gone into the house."
Blanche Adney rested her eyes on mine an instant--a mode of intercourse
to which no man, for himself, could ever object. The interest, on this
occasion, was quickened by the particular thing the eyes happened to
say. What they usually said was only: "Oh, yes, I'm charming, I know,
but don't make a fuss about it. I only want a new part--I do, I do!" At
present they added, dimly, surreptitiously, and of course sweetly--for
that was the way they did everything: "It's all right, but something did
happen. Perhaps I'll tell you later." She turned to Lady Mellifont, and
the transition to simple gaiety suggested her mastery of her profession.
"I've brought him safe. We had a charming walk."

"I'm so very glad," returned Lady Mellifont, with her faint smile;
continuing vaguely, as she got up: "He must have gone to dress for
dinner. Isn't it rather near?" She moved away, to the hotel, in her
leave-taking, simplifying fashion, and the rest of us, at the mention of
dinner, looked at each other's watches, as if to shift the
responsibility of such grossness. The head-waiter, essentially, like all
head-waiters, a man of the world, allowed us hours and places of our
own, so that in the evening, apart under the lamp, we formed a compact,
an indulged little circle. But it was only the Mellifonts who "dressed"
and as to whom it was recognized that they naturally _would_ dress: she
in exactly the same manner as on any other evening of her ceremonious
existence (she was not a woman whose habits could take account of
anything so mutable as fitness); and he, on the other hand, with
remarkable adjustment and suitability. He was almost as much a man of
the world as the head-waiter, and spoke almost as many languages; but he
abstained from courting a comparison of dress-coats and white
waistcoats, analyzing the occasion in a much finer way--into black
velvet and blue velvet and brown velvet, for instance, into delicate
harmonies of necktie and subtle informalities of shirt. He had a costume
for every function and a moral for every costume; and his functions and
costumes and morals were ever a part of the amusement of life--a part at
any rate of its beauty and romance--for an immense circle of spectators.
For his particular friends indeed these things were more than an
amusement; they were a topic, a social support and of course, in
addition, a subject of perpetual suspense. If his wife had not been
present before dinner they were what the rest of us probably would have
been putting our heads together about.

Clare Vawdrey had a fund of anecdote on the whole question: he had known
Lord Mellifont almost from the beginning. It was a peculiarity of this
nobleman that there could be no conversation about him that didn't
instantly take the form of anecdote, and a still further distinction
that there could apparently be no anecdote that was not on the whole to
his honour. If he had come into a room at any moment, people might have
said frankly: "Of course we were telling stories about you!" As
consciences go, in London, the general conscience would have been good.
Moreover it would have been impossible to imagine his taking such a
tribute otherwise than amiably, for he was always as unperturbed as an
actor with the right cue. He had never in his life needed the
prompter--his very embarrassments had been rehearsed. For myself, when
he was talked about I always had an odd impression that we were speaking
of the dead--it was with that peculiar accumulation of relish. His
reputation was a kind of gilded obelisk, as if he had been buried
beneath it; the body of legend and reminiscence of which he was to be
the subject had crystallized in advance.

This ambiguity sprang, I suppose, from the fact that the mere sound of
his name and air of his person, the general expectation he created,
were, somehow, too exalted to be verified. The experience of his
urbanity always came later; the prefigurement, the legend paled before
the reality. I remember that on the evening I refer to the reality was
particularly operative. The handsomest man of his period could never
have looked better, and he sat among us like a bland conductor
controlling by an harmonious play of arm an orchestra still a little
rough. He directed the conversation by gestures as irresistible as they
were vague; one felt as if without him it wouldn't have had anything to
call a tone. This was essentially what he contributed to any
occasion--what he contributed above all to English public life. He
pervaded it, he coloured it, he embellished it, and without him it would
scarcely have had a vocabulary. Certainly it would not have had a style;
for a style was what it had in having Lord Mellifont. He _was_ a style.
I was freshly struck with it as, in the _salle à manger_ of the little
Swiss inn, we resigned ourselves to inevitable veal. Confronted with his
form (I must parenthesize that it was not confronted much), Clare
Vawdrey's talk suggested the reporter contrasted with the bard. It was
interesting to watch the shock of characters from which, of an evening,
so much would be expected. There was however no concussion--it was all
muffled and minimized in Lord Mellifont's tact. It was rudimentary with
him to find the solution of such a problem in playing the host, assuming
responsibilities which carried with them their sacrifice. He had indeed
never been a guest in his life; he was the host, the patron, the
moderator at every board. If there was a defect in his manner (and I
suggest it under my breath), it was that he had a little more art than
any conjunction--even the most complicated--could possibly require. At
any rate one made one's reflections in noticing how the accomplished
peer handled the situation and how the sturdy man of letters was
unconscious that the situation (and least of all he himself as part of
it), was handled. Lord Mellifont poured forth treasures of tact, and
Clare Vawdrey never dreamed he was doing it.

Vawdrey had no suspicion of any such precaution even when Blanche Adney
asked him if he saw yet their third act--an inquiry into which she
introduced a subtlety of her own. She had a theory that he was to write
her a play and that the heroine, if he would only do his duty, would be
the part for which she had immemorially longed. She was forty years old
(this could be no secret to those who had admired her from the first),
and she could now reach out her hand and touch her uttermost goal. This
gave a kind of tragic passion--perfect actress of comedy as she was--to
her desire not to miss the great thing. The years had passed, and still
she had missed it; none of the things she had done was the thing she had
dreamed of, so that at present there was no more time to lose. This was
the canker in the rose, the ache beneath the smile. It made her
touching--made her sadness even sweeter than her laughter. She had done
the old English and the new French, and had charmed her generation; but
she was haunted by the vision of a bigger chance, of something truer to
the conditions that lay near her. She was tired of Sheridan and she
hated Bowdler; she called for a canvas of a finer grain. The worst of
it, to my sense, was that she would never extract her modern comedy from
the great mature novelist, who was as incapable of producing it as he
was of threading a needle. She coddled him, she talked to him, she made
love to him, as she frankly proclaimed; but she dwelt in illusions--she
would have to live and die with Bowdler.

It is difficult to be cursory over this charming woman, who was
beautiful without beauty and complete with a dozen deficiencies. The
perspective of the stage made her over, and in society she was like the
model off the pedestal. She was the picture walking about, which to the
artless social mind was a perpetual surprise--a miracle. People thought
she told them the secrets of the pictorial nature, in return for which
they gave her relaxation and tea. She told them nothing and she drank
the tea; but they had, all the same, the best of the bargain. Vawdrey
was really at work on a play; but if he had begun it because he liked
her I think he let it drag for the same reason. He secretly felt the
atrocious difficulty--knew that from his hand the finished piece would
have received no active life. At the same time nothing could be more
agreeable than to have such a question open with Blanche Adney, and from
time to time he put something very good into the play. If he deceived
Mrs. Adney it was only because in her despair she was determined to be
deceived. To her question about their third act he replied that, before
dinner, he had written a magnificent passage.

"Before dinner?" I said. "Why, _cher maître_, before dinner you were
holding us all spellbound on the terrace."

My words were a joke, because I thought his had been; but for the first
time that I could remember I perceived a certain confusion in his face.
He looked at me hard, throwing back his head quickly, the least bit like
a horse who has been pulled up short. "Oh, it was before that," he
replied, naturally enough.

"Before that you were playing billiards with _me,_" Lord Mellifont
intimated.

"Then it must have been yesterday," said Vawdrey.

But he was in a tight place. "You told me this morning you did nothing
yesterday," the actress objected.

"I don't think I really know when I do things." Vawdrey looked vaguely,
without helping himself, at a dish that was offered him.

"It's enough if _we_ know," smiled Lord Mellifont.

"I don't believe you've written a line," said Blanche Adney.

"I think I could repeat you the scene." Vawdrey helped himself to
_haricots verts._

"Oh, do--oh, do!" two or three of us cried.

"After dinner, in the salon; it will be an immense _régal_," Lord
Mellifont declared.

"I'm not sure, but I'll try," Vawdrey went on.

"Oh, you lovely man!" exclaimed the actress, who was practising
Americanisms, being resigned even to an American comedy.

"But there must be this condition," said Vawdrey: "you must make your
husband play."

"Play while you're reading? Never!"

"I've too much vanity," said Adney.

Lord Mellifont distinguished him. "You must give us the overture, before
the curtain rises. That's a peculiarly delightful moment."

"I sha'n't read--I shall just speak," said Vawdrey.

"Better still, let me go and get your manuscript," the actress
suggested.

Vawdrey replied that the manuscript didn't matter; but an hour later, in
the salon, we wished he might have had it. We sat expectant, still under
the spell of Adney's violin. His wife, in the foreground, on an ottoman,
was all impatience and profile, and Lord Mellifont, in the chair--it was
always _the_ chair, Lord Mellifont's--made our grateful little group
feel like a social science congress or a distribution of prizes.
Suddenly, instead of beginning, our tame lion began to roar out of
tune--he had clean forgotten every word. He was very sorry, but the
lines absolutely wouldn't come to him; he was utterly ashamed, but his
memory was a blank. He didn't look in the least ashamed--Vawdrey had
never looked ashamed in his life; he was only imperturbably and merrily
natural. He protested that he had never expected to make such a fool of
himself, but we felt that this wouldn't prevent the incident from taking
its place among his jolliest reminiscences. It was only _we_ who were
humiliated, as if he had played us a premeditated trick. This was an
occasion, if ever, for Lord Mellifont's tact, which descended on us all
like balm: he told us, in his charming artistic way, his way of bridging
over arid intervals (he had a _débit_--there was nothing to approach it
in England--like the actors of the Comédie Française), of his own
collapse on a momentous occasion, the delivery of an address to a mighty
multitude, when, finding he had forgotten his memoranda, he fumbled, on
the terrible platform, the cynosure of every eye, fumbled vainly in
irreproachable pockets for indispensable notes. But the point of his
story was finer than that of Vawdrey's pleasantry; for he sketched with
a few light gestures the brilliancy of a performance which had risen
superior to embarrassment, had resolved itself, we were left to divine,
into an effort recognised at the moment as not absolutely a blot on what
the public was so good as to call his reputation.

"Play up--play up!" cried Blanche Adney, tapping her husband and
remembering how, on the stage, a _contretemps_ is always drowned in
music. Adney threw himself upon his fiddle, and I said to Clare Vawdrey
that his mistake could easily be corrected by his sending for the
manuscript. If he would tell me where it was I would immediately fetch
it from his room. To this he replied: "My dear fellow, I'm afraid there
_is_ no manuscript."

"Then you've not written anything?"

"I'll write it to-morrow."

"Ah, you trifle with us," I said, in much mystification.

Vawdrey hesitated an instant. "If there _is_ anything,
you'll find it on my table."

At this moment one of the others spoke to him, and Lady Mellifont
remarked audibly, as if to correct gently our want of consideration,
that Mr. Adney was playing something very beautiful. I had noticed
before that she appeared extremely fond of music; she always listened to
it in a hushed transport. Vawdrey's attention was drawn away, but it
didn't seem to me that the words he had just dropped constituted a
definite permission to go to his room. Moreover I wanted to speak to
Blanche Adney; I had something to ask her. I had to await my chance,
however, as we remained silent awhile for her husband, after which the
conversation became general. It was our habit to go to bed early, but
there was still a little of the evening left. Before it quite waned I
found an opportunity to tell the actress that Vawdrey had given me leave
to put my hand on his manuscript. She adjured me, by all I held sacred,
to bring it immediately, to give it to her; and her insistence was proof
against my suggestion that it would now be too late for him to begin to
read: besides which the charm was broken--the others wouldn't care. It
was not too late for _her_ to begin; therefore I was to possess myself,
without more delay, of the precious pages. I told her she should be
obeyed in a moment, but I wanted her first to satisfy my just curiosity.
What had happened before dinner, while she was on the hills with Lord
Mellifont?

"How do you know anything happened?"

"I saw it in your face when you came back."

"And they call me an actress!" cried Mrs. Adney.

"What do they call _me_?" I inquired.

"You're a searcher of hearts--that frivolous thing an observer."

"I wish you'd let an observer write you a play!" I broke out.

"People don't care for what you write: you'd break any run of luck."

"Well, I see plays all round me," I declared; "the air is full of them
to-night."

"The air? Thank you for nothing! I only wish my table-drawers were."

"Did he make love to you on the glacier?" I went on.

She stared; then broke into the graduated ecstasy of her laugh. "Lord
Mellifont, poor dear? What a funny place! It would indeed be the place
for _our_ love!"

"Did he fall into a crevasse?" I continued.

Blanche Adney looked at me again as she had done for an instant when she
came up, before dinner, with her hands full of flowers. "I don't know
into what he fell. I'll tell you to-morrow."

"He did come down, then?"

"Perhaps he went up," she laughed. "It's really strange."

"All the more reason you should tell me to-night."

"I must think it over; I must puzzle it out."

"Oh, if you want conundrums I'll throw in another," I said. "What's the
matter with the master?"

"The master of what?"

"Of every form of dissimulation. Vawdrey hasn't written a line."

"Go and get his papers and we'll see."

"I don't like to expose him," I said.

"Why not, if I expose Lord Mellifont?"

"Oh, I'd do anything for that," I conceded. "But why should Vawdrey have
made a false statement? It's very curious."

"It's very curious," Blanche Adney repeated, with a musing air and her
eyes on Lord Mellifont. Then, rousing herself, she added: "Go and look
in his room."

"In Lord Mellifont's?"

She turned to me quickly. "_That_ would be a way!"

"A way to what?"

"To find out--to find out!" She spoke gaily and excitedly, but suddenly
checked herself. "We're talking nonsense," she said.

"We're mixing things up, but I'm struck with your idea. Get Lady
Mellifont to let you."

"Oh, _she_ has looked!" Mrs. Adney murmured, with the oddest dramatic
expression. Then, after a movement of her beautiful uplifted hand, as if
to brush away a fantastic vision, she exclaimed imperiously: "Bring me
the scene--bring me the scene!"

"I go for it," I answered; "but don't tell me I can't write a play."

She left me, but my errand was arrested by the approach of a lady who
had produced a birthday-book--we had been threatened with it for several
evenings--and who did me the honour to solicit my autograph. She had
been asking the others, and she couldn't decently leave me out. I could
usually remember my name, but it always took me some time to recall my
date, and even when I had done so I was never very sure. I hesitated
between two days and I remarked to my petitioner that I would sign on
both if it would give her any satisfaction. She said that surely I had
been born only once; and I replied of course that on the day I made her
acquaintance I had been born again. I mention the feeble joke only to
show that, with the obligatory inspection of the other autographs, we
gave some minutes to this transaction. The lady departed with her book,
and then I became aware that the company had dispersed. I was alone in
the little salon that had been appropriated to our use. My first
impression was one of disappointment: if Vawdrey had gone to bed I
didn't wish to disturb him. While I hesitated, however. I recognised
that Vawdrey had not gone to bed. A window was open, and the sound of
voices outside came in to me: Blanche was on the terrace with her
dramatist, and they were talking about the stars. I went to the window
for a glimpse--the Alpine night was splendid. My friends had stepped out
together; the actress had picked up a cloak; she looked as I had seen
her look in the wing of the theatre. They were silent awhile, and I
heard the roar of a neighbouring torrent. I turned back into the room,
and its quiet lamplight gave me an idea. Our companions had
dispersed--it was late for a pastoral country--and we three should have
the place to ourselves. Clare Vawdrey had written his scene--it was
magnificent; and his reading it to us there, at such an hour, would be
an episode intensely memorable. I would bring down his manuscript and
meet the two with it as they came in.

I quitted the salon for this purpose; I had been in Vawdrey's room and
knew it was on the second floor, the last in a long corridor. A minute
later my hand was on the knob of his door, which I naturally pushed open
without knocking. It was equally natural that in the absence of its
occupant the room should be dark; the more so as, the end of the
corridor being at that hour unlighted, the obscurity was not immediately
diminished by the opening of the door. I was only aware at first that I
had made no mistake and that, the window-curtains not being drawn, I was
confronted with a couple of vague starlighted apertures. Their aid,
however, was not sufficient to enable me to find what I had come for,
and my hand, in my pocket, was already on the little box of matches that
I always carried for cigarettes. Suddenly I withdrew it with a start,
uttering an ejaculation, an apology. I had entered the wrong room; a
glance prolonged for three seconds showed me a figure seated at a table
near one of the windows--a figure I had at first taken for a
travelling-rug thrown over a chair. I retreated, with a sense of
intrusion; but as I did so I became aware, more rapidly than it takes me
to express it, in the first place that this was Vawdrey's room and in
the second that, most singularly, Vawdrey himself sat before me.
Checking myself on the threshold I had a momentary feeling of
bewilderment, but before I knew it I had exclaimed: "Hullo! is that you,
Vawdrey?"

He neither turned nor answered me, but my question received an immediate
and practical reply in the opening of a door on the other side of the
passage. A servant, with a candle, had come out of the opposite room,
and in this flitting illumination I definitely recognised the man whom,
an instant before, I had to the best of my belief left below in
conversation with Mrs. Adney. His back was half turned to me, and he
bent over the table in the attitude of writing, but I was conscious that
I was in no sort of error about his identity. "I beg your pardon--I
thought you were downstairs," I said; and as the personage gave no sign
of hearing me I added: "If you're busy I won't disturb you." I backed
out, closing the door--I had been in the place, I suppose, less than a
minute. I had a sense of mystification, which however deepened
infinitely the next instant. I stood there with my hand still on the
knob of the door, overtaken by the oddest impression of my life. Vawdrey
was at his table, writing, and it was a very natural place for him to
be; but why was he writing in the dark and why hadn't he answered me? I
waited a few seconds for the sound of some movement, to see if he
wouldn't rouse himself from his abstraction--a fit conceivable in a
great writer--and call out: "Oh, my dear fellow, is it you?" But I heard
only the stillness, I felt only the starlighted dusk of the room, with
the unexpected presence it enclosed. I turned away, slowly retracing my
steps, and came confusedly downstairs. The lamp was still burning in the
salon, but the room was empty. I passed round to the door of the hotel
and stepped out. Empty too was the terrace. Blanche Adney and the
gentleman with her had apparently come in. I hung about five minutes;
then I went to bed.

I slept badly, for I was agitated. On looking back at these queer
occurrences (you will see presently that they were queer), I perhaps
suppose myself more agitated than I was; for great anomalies are never
so great at first as after we have reflected upon them. It takes us some
time to exhaust explanations. I was vaguely nervous--I had been sharply
startled; but there was nothing I could not clear up by asking Blanche
Adney, the first thing in the morning, who had been with her on the
terrace. Oddly enough, however, when the morning dawned--it dawned
admirably--I felt less desire to satisfy myself on this point than to
escape, to brush away the shadow of my stupefaction. I saw the day would
be splendid, and the fancy took me to spend it, as I had spent happy
days of youth, in a lonely mountain ramble. I dressed early, partook of
conventional coffee, put a big roll into one pocket and a small flask
into the other, and, with a stout stick in my hand, went forth into the
high places. My story is not closely concerned with the charming hours I
passed there--hours of the kind that make intense memories. If I roamed
away half of them on the shoulders of the hills, I lay on the sloping
grass for the other half and, with my cap pulled over my eyes (save a
peep for immensities of view), listened, in the bright stillness, to the
mountain bee and felt most things sink and dwindle. Clare Vawdrey grew
small, Blanche Adney grew dim, Lord Mellifont grew old, and before the
day was over I forgot that I had ever been puzzled. When in the late
afternoon I made my way down to the inn there was nothing I wanted so
much to find out as whether dinner would not soon be ready. To-night I
dressed, in a manner, and by the time I was presentable they were all at
table.

In their company again my little problem came back to me, so that I was
curious to see if Vawdrey wouldn't look at me the least bit queerly. But
he didn't look at me at all; which gave me a chance both to be patient
and to wonder why I should hesitate to ask him my question across the
table. I did hesitate, and with the consciousness of doing so came back
a little of the agitation I had left behind me, or below me, during the
day. I wasn't ashamed of my scruple, however: it was only a fine
discretion. What I vaguely felt was that a public inquiry wouldn't have
been fair. Lord Mellifont was there, of course, to mitigate with his
perfect manner all consequences; but I think it was present to me that
with these particular elements his lordship would not be at home. The
moment we got up, therefore, I approached Mrs. Adney, asking her
whether, as the evening was lovely, she wouldn't take a turn with me
outside.

"You've walked a hundred miles; had you not better be quiet?" she
replied.

"I'd walk a hundred miles more to get you to tell me something."

She looked at me an instant, with a little of the queerness that I had
sought, but had not found, in Clare Vawdrey's eyes. "Do you mean what
became of Lord Mellifont?"

"Of Lord Mellifont?" With my new speculation I had lost that thread.

"Where's your memory, foolish man? We talked of it last evening."

"Ah, yes!" I cried, recalling; "we shall have lots to discuss." I drew
her out to the terrace, and before we had gone three steps I said to
her: "Who was with you here last night?"

"Last night?" she repeated, as wide of the mark as I had been.

"At ten o'clock--just after our company broke up. You came out here with
a gentleman; you talked about the stars."

She stared a moment; then she gave her laugh. "Are you jealous of dear
Vawdrey?"

"Then it was he?"

"Certainly it was."

"And how long did he stay?"

"You have it badly. He stayed about a quarter of an hour--perhaps rather
more. We walked some distance; he talked about his play. There you have
it all; that is the only witchcraft I have used."

"And what did Vawdrey do afterwards?"

"I haven't the least idea. I left him and went to bed."

"At what time did you go to bed?"

"At what time did _you_? I happen to remember that I parted from Mr.
Vawdrey at ten twenty-five," said Mrs. Adney. "I came back into the
salon to pick up a book, and I noticed the clock."

"In other words you and Vawdrey distinctly lingered here from about five
minutes past ten till the hour you mention?"

"I don't know how distinct we were, but we were very jolly. _Où
voulez-vous en venir_?" Blanche Adney asked.

"Simply to this, dear lady: that at the time your companion was occupied
in the manner you describe, he was also engaged in literary composition
in his own room."

She stopped short at this, and her eyes had an expression in the
darkness. She wanted to know if I challenged her veracity; and I replied
that, on the contrary, I backed it up--it made the case so interesting.
She returned that this would only be if she should back up mine; which,
however, I had no difficulty in persuading her to do, after I had
related to her circumstantially the incident of my quest of the
manuscript--the manuscript which, at the time, for a reason I could now
understand, appeared to have passed so completely out of her own head.

"His talk made me forget it--I forgot I sent you for it. He made up for
his fiasco in the salon: he declaimed me the scene," said my companion.
She had dropped on a bench to listen to me and, as we sat there, had
briefly cross-examined me. Then she broke out into fresh laughter. "Oh,
the eccentricities of genius!"

"They seem greater even than I supposed."

"Oh, the mysteries of greatness!"

"You ought to know all about them, but they take me by surprise."

"Are you absolutely certain it was Mr. Vawdrey?" my companion asked.

"If it wasn't he, who in the world was it? That a strange gentleman,
looking exactly like him, should be sitting in his room at that hour of
the night and writing at his table _in the dark_," I insisted, "would be
practically as wonderful as my own contention."

"Yes, why in the dark?" mused Mrs. Adney.

"Cats can see in the dark," I said.

She smiled at me dimly. "Did it look like a cat?"

"No, dear lady, but I'll tell you what it did look like--it looked like
the author of Vawdrey's admirable works. It looked infinitely more like
him than our friend does himself," I declared.

"Do you mean it was somebody he gets to do them?"

"Yes, while he dines out and disappoints you."

"Disappoints me?" murmured Mrs. Adney artlessly.

"Disappoints _me_--disappoints every one who looks in him for the genius
that created the pages they adore. Where is it in his talk?"

"Ah, last night he was splendid," said the actress.

"He's always splendid, as your morning bath is splendid, or a sirloin of
beef, or the railway service to Brighton. But he's never rare."

"I see what you mean."

"That's what makes you such a comfort to talk to. I've often
wondered--now I know. There are two of them."

"What a delightful idea!"

"One goes out, the other stays at home. One is the genius, the other's
the bourgeois, and it's only the bourgeois whom we personally know. He
talks, he circulates, he's awfully popular, he flirts with you--"

"Whereas it's the genius _you_ are privileged to see!" Mrs. Adney broke
in. "I'm much obliged to you for the distinction."

I laid my hand on her arm. "See him yourself. Try it, test it, go to his
room."

"Go to his room? It wouldn't be proper!" she exclaimed, in the tone of
her best comedy.

"Anything is proper in such an inquiry. If you see him, it settles it."

"How charming--to settle it!" She thought a moment, then she sprang up.
"Do you mean _now_?"

"Whenever you like."

"But suppose I should find the wrong one?" said Blanche Adney, with an
exquisite effect.

"The wrong one? Which one do you call the right?"

"The wrong one for a lady to go and see. Suppose I shouldn't find--the
genius?"

"Oh, I'll look after the other," I replied. Then, as I had happened to
glance about me, I added: "Take care--here comes Lord Mellifont."

"I wish you'd look after _him_," my interlocutress murmured.

"What's the matter with him?"

"That's just what I was going to tell you."

"Tell me now; he's not coming."

Blanche Adney looked a moment. Lord Mellifont, who appeared to have
emerged from the hotel to smoke a meditative cigar, had paused, at a
distance from us, and stood admiring the wonders of the prospect,
discernible even in the dusk. We strolled slowly in another direction,
and she presently said: "My idea is almost as droll as yours."

"I don't call mine droll: it's beautiful."

"There's nothing so beautiful as the droll," Mrs. Adney declared.

"You take a professional view. But I'm all ears." My curiosity was
indeed alive again.

"Well then, my dear friend, if Clare Vawdrey is double (and I'm bound to
say I think that the more of him the better), his lordship there has the
opposite complaint: he isn't even whole."

We stopped once more, simultaneously. "I don't understand."

"No more do I. But I have a fancy that if there are two of Mr. Vawdrey,
there isn't so much as one, all told, of Lord Mellifont."

I considered a moment, then I laughed out. "I think I see what you
mean!"

"That's what makes _you_ a comfort. Did you ever see him alone?"

I tried to remember. "Oh, yes; he has been to see me."

"Ah, then he wasn't alone."

"And I've been to see him, in his study."

"Did he know you were there?"

"Naturally--I was announced."

Blanche Adney glanced at me like a lovely conspirator. "You mustn't be
announced!" With this she walked on.

I rejoined her, breathless. "Do you mean one must come upon him when he
doesn't know it?"

"You must take him unawares. You must go to his room--that's what you
must do."

If I was elated by the way our mystery opened out, I was also,
pardonably, a little confused. "When I know he's not there?"

"When you know he _is_."

"And what shall I see?"

"You won't see anything!" Mrs. Adney cried as we turned round.

We had reached the end of the terrace, and our movement brought us face
to face with Lord Mellifont, who, resuming his walk, had now, without
indiscretion, overtaken us. The sight of him at that moment was
illuminating, and it kindled a great backward train, connecting itself
with one's general impression of the personage. As he stood there
smiling at us and waving a practised hand into the transparent night (he
introduced the view as if it had been a candidate and "supported" the
very Alps), as he rose before us in the delicate fragrance of his cigar
and all his other delicacies and fragrances, with more perfections,
somehow, heaped upon his handsome head than one had ever seen
accumulated before, he struck me as so essentially, so conspicuously and
uniformly the public character that I read in a flash the answer to
Blanche Adney's riddle. He was all public and had no corresponding
private life, just as Clare Vawdrey was all private and had no
corresponding public one. I had heard only half my companion's story,
yet as we joined Lord Mellifont (he had followed us--he liked Mrs.
Adney; but it was always to be conceived of him that he accepted society
rather than sought it), as we participated for half an hour in the
distributed wealth of his conversation, I felt with unabashed duplicity
that we had, as it were, found him out. I was even more deeply diverted
by that whisk of the curtain to which the actress had just treated me
than I had been by my own discovery; and if I was not ashamed of my
share of her secret any more than of having divided my own with her
(though my own was, of the two mysteries, the more glorious for the
personage involved), this was because there was no cruelty in my
advantage, but on the contrary an extreme tenderness and a positive
compassion. Oh, he was safe with me, and I felt moreover rich and
enlightened, as if I had suddenly put the universe into my pocket. I had
learned what an affair of the spot and the moment a great appearance may
be. It would doubtless be too much to say that I had always suspected
the possibility, in the background of his lordship's being, of some such
beautiful instance; but it is at least a fact that, patronising as it
sounds, I had been conscious of a certain reserve of indulgence for him.
I had secretly pitied him for the perfection of his performance, had
wondered what blank face such a mask had to cover, what was left to him
for the immitigable hours in which a man sits down with himself, or,
more serious still, with that intenser self, his lawful wife. How was he
at home and what did he do when he was alone? There was something in
Lady Mellifont that gave a point to these researches--something that
suggested that even to her he was still the public character and that
she was haunted by similar questionings. She had never cleared them up:
that was her eternal trouble. We therefore knew more than she did,
Blanche Adney and I; but we wouldn't tell her for the world, nor would
she probably thank us for doing so. She preferred the relative grandeur
of uncertainty. She was not at home with him, so she couldn't say; and
with her he was not alone, so he couldn't show her. He represented to
his wife and he was a hero to his servants, and what one wanted to
arrive at was what really became of him when no eye could see. He
rested, presumably; but what form of rest could repair such a plenitude
of presence? Lady Mellifont was too proud to pry, and as she had never
looked through a keyhole she remained dignified and unassuaged.

It may have been a fancy of mine that Blanche Adney drew out our
companion, or it may be that the practical irony of our relation to him
at such a moment made me see him more vividly: at any rate he never had
struck me as so dissimilar from what he would have been if we had not
offered him a reflection of his image. We were only a concourse of two,
but he had never been more public. His perfect manner had never been
more perfect, his remarkable tact had never been more remarkable. I had
a tacit sense that it would all be in the morning papers, with a leader,
and also a secretly exhilarating one that I knew something that wouldn't
be, that never could be, though any enterprising journal would give one
a fortune for it. I must add, however, that in spite of my enjoyment--it
was almost sensual, like that of a consummate dish--I was eager to be
alone again with Mrs. Adney, who owed me an anecdote. It proved
impossible, that evening, for some of the others came out to see what we
found so absorbing; and then Lord Mellifont bespoke a little music from
the fiddler, who produced his violin and played to us divinely, on our
platform of echoes, face to face with the ghosts of the mountains.
Before the concert was over I missed our actress and, glancing into the
window of the salon, saw that she was established with Vawdrey, who was
reading to her from a manuscript. The great scene had apparently been
achieved and was doubtless the more interesting to Blanche from the new
lights she had gathered about its author. I judged it discreet not to
disturb them, and I went to bed without seeing her again. I looked out
for her betimes the next morning and, as the promise of the day was
fair, proposed to her that we should take to the hills, reminding her of
the high obligation she had incurred. She recognised the obligation and
gratified me with her company; but before we had strolled ten yards up
the pass she broke out with intensity: "My dear friend, you've no idea
how it works in me! I can think of nothing else."

"Than your theory about Lord Mellifont?"

"Oh, bother Lord Mellifont! I allude to yours about Mr. Vawdrey, who is
much the more interesting person of the two. I'm fascinated by that
vision of his--what-do-you-call-it?"

"His alternative identity?"

"His other self: that's easier to say."

"You accept it, then, you adopt it?"

"Adopt it? I rejoice in it! It became tremendously vivid to me last
evening."

"While he read to you there?"

"Yes, as I listened to him, watched him. It simplified everything,
explained everything."

"That's indeed the blessing of it. Is the scene very fine?"

"Magnificent, and he reads beautifully."

"Almost as well as the other one writes!" I laughed.

This made my companion stop a moment, laying her hand on my arm. "You
utter my very impression. I felt that he was reading me the work of
another man."

"What a service to the other man!"

"Such a totally different person," said Mrs. Adney. We talked of this
difference as we went on, and of what a wealth it constituted, what a
resource for life, such a duplication of character.

"It ought to make him live twice as long as other people," I observed.

"Ought to make which of them?"

"Well, both; for after all they're members of a firm, and one of them
couldn't carry on the business without the other. Moreover mere survival
would be dreadful for either."

Blanche Adney was silent a little; then she exclaimed: "I don't know--I
wish he _would_ survive!"

"May I, on my side, inquire which?"

"If you can't guess I won't tell you."

"I know the heart of woman. You always prefer the other."

She halted again, looking round her. "Off here, away from my husband, I
_can_ tell you. I'm in love with him!"

"Unhappy woman, he has no passions," I answered.

"That's exactly why I adore him. Doesn't a woman with my history know
that the passions of others are insupportable? An actress, poor thing,
can't care for any love that's not all on _her_ side; she can't afford
to be repaid. My marriage proves that: marriage is ruinous. Do you know
what was in my mind last night, all the while Mr. Vawdrey was reading me
those beautiful speeches? An insane desire to see the author." And
dramatically, as if to hide her shame, Blanche Adney passed on.

"We'll manage that," I returned. "I want another glimpse of him myself.
But meanwhile please remember that I've been waiting more than
forty-eight hours for the evidence that supports your sketch, intensely
suggestive and plausible, of Lord Mellifont's private life."

"Oh, Lord Mellifont doesn't interest me."

"He did yesterday," I said.

"Yes, but that was before I fell in love. You blotted him out with your
story."

"You'll make me sorry I told it. Come," I pleaded, "if you don't let me
know how your idea came into your head I shall imagine you simply made
it up."

"Let me recollect then, while we wander in this grassy valley."

We stood at the entrance of a charming crooked gorge, a portion of whose
level floor formed the bed of a stream that was smooth with swiftness.
We turned into it, and the soft walk beside the clear torrent drew us on
and on; till suddenly, as we continued and I waited for my companion to
remember, a bend of the valley showed us Lady Mellifont coming toward
us. She was alone, under the canopy of her parasol, drawing her sable
train over the turf; and in this form, on the devious ways, she was a
sufficiently rare apparition. She usually took a footman, who marched
behind her on the highroads and whose livery was strange to the
mountaineers. She blushed on seeing us, as if she ought somehow to
justify herself; she laughed vaguely and said she had come out for a
little early stroll. We stood together a moment, exchanging platitudes,
and then she remarked that she had thought she might find her husband.

"Is he in this quarter?" I inquired.

"I supposed he would be. He came out an hour ago to sketch."

"Have you been looking for him?" Mrs. Adney asked.

"A little; not very much," said Lady Mellifont.

Each of the women rested her eyes with some intensity, as it seemed to
me, on the eyes of the other.

"We'll look for him _for_ you, if you like," said Mrs. Adney.

"Oh, it doesn't matter. I thought I'd join him."

"He won't make his sketch if you don't," my companion hinted.

"Perhaps he will if _you_ do," said Lady Mellifont.

"Oh, I dare say he'll turn up," I interposed.

"He certainly will if he knows we're here!" Blanche Adney retorted.

"Will you wait while we search?" I asked of Lady Mellifont.

She repeated that it was of no consequence; upon which Mrs. Adney went
on: "We'll go into the matter for our own pleasure."

"I wish you a pleasant expedition," said her ladyship, and was turning
away when I sought to know if we should inform her husband that she had
followed him. She hesitated a moment; then she jerked out oddly: "I
think you had better not." With this she took leave of us, floating a
little stiffly down the gorge.

My companion and I watched her retreat, then we exchanged a stare, while
a light ghost of a laugh rippled from the actress's lips. "She might be
walking in the shrubberies at Mellifont!"

"She suspects it, you know," I replied.

"And she doesn't want him to know it. There won't be any sketch."

"Unless we overtake him," I subjoined. "In that case we shall find him
producing one, in the most graceful attitude, and the queer thing is
that it will be brilliant."

"Let us leave him alone--he'll have to come home without it."

"He'd rather never come home. Oh, he'll find a public!"

"Perhaps he'll do it for the cows," Blanche Adney suggested; and as I
was on the point of rebuking her profanity she went on: "That's simply
what I happened to discover."

"What are you speaking of?"

"The incident of day before yesterday."

"Ah, let's have it at last!"

"That's all it was--that I was like Lady Mellifont: I couldn't find
him."

"Did you lose him?"

"He lost _me_--that appears to be the way of it. He thought I was gone."

"But you did find him, since you came home with him."

"It was he who found _me_. That again is what must happen. He's there
from the moment he knows somebody else is."

"I understand his intermissions," I said after a short reflection, "but
I don't quite seize the law that governs them."

"Oh, it's a fine shade, but I caught it at that moment. I had started to
come home. I was tired, and I had insisted on his not coming back with
me. We had found some rare flowers--those I brought home--and it was he
who had discovered almost all of them. It amused him very much, and I
knew he wanted to get more; but I was weary and I quitted him. He let me
go--where else would have been his tact?--and I was too stupid then to
have guessed that from the moment I was not there no flower would be
gathered. I started homeward, but at the end of three minutes I found I
had brought away his penknife--he had lent it to me to trim a
branch--and I knew he would need it. I turned back a few steps, to call
him, but before I spoke I looked about for him. You can't understand
what happened then without having the place before you."

"You must take me there," I said.

"We may see the wonder here. The place was simply one that offered no
chance for concealment--a great gradual hillside, without obstructions
or trees. There were some rocks below me, behind which I myself had
disappeared, but from which on coming back I immediately emerged again."

"Then he must have seen you."

"He was too utterly gone, for some reason best known to himself. It was
probably some moment of fatigue--he's getting on, you know, so that,
with the sense of returning solitude, the reaction had been
proportionately great, the extinction proportionately complete. At any
rate the stage was as bare as your hand."

"Could he have been somewhere else?"

"He couldn't have been, in the time, anywhere but where I had left him.
Yet the place was utterly empty--as empty as this stretch of valley
before us. He had vanished--he had ceased to be. But as soon as my voice
rang out (I uttered his name), he rose before me like the rising sun."

"And where did the sun rise?"

"Just where it ought to--just where he would have been and where I
should have seen him had he been like other people."

I had listened with the deepest interest, but it was my duty to think of
objections. "How long a time elapsed between the moment you perceived
his absence and the moment you called?"

"Oh, only an instant. I don't pretend it was long."

"Long enough for you to be sure?" I said.

"Sure he wasn't there?"

"Yes, and that you were not mistaken, not the victim of some hocus-pocus
of your eyesight."

"I may have been mistaken, but I don't believe it. At any rate, that's
just why I want you to look in his room."

I thought a moment. "How _can_ I, when even his wife doesn't dare to?"

"She _wants_ to; propose it to her. It wouldn't take much to make her.
She does suspect."

I thought another moment. "Did he seem to know?"

"That I had missed him? So it struck me, but he thought he had been
quick enough."

"Did you speak of his disappearance?"

"Heaven forbid! It seemed to me too strange."

"Quite right. And how did he look?"

Trying to think it out again and reconstitute her miracle, Blanche Adney
gazed abstractedly up the valley. Suddenly she exclaimed: "Just as he
looks now!" and I saw Lord Mellifont stand before us with his
sketch-block. I perceived, as we met him, that he looked neither
suspicious nor blank: he looked simply, as he did always, everywhere,
the principal feature of the scene. Naturally he had no sketch to show
us, but nothing could better have rounded off our actual conception of
him than the way he fell into position as we approached. He had been
selecting his point of view; he took possession of it with a flourish of
the pencil. He leaned against a rock; his beautiful little box of
water-colours reposed on a natural table beside him, a ledge of the bank
which showed how inveterately nature ministered to his convenience. He
painted while he talked and he talked while he painted; and if the
painting was as miscellaneous as the talk, the talk would equally have
graced an album. We waited while the exhibition went on, and it seemed
indeed as if the conscious profiles of the peaks were interested in his
success. They grew as black as silhouettes in paper, sharp against a
livid sky from which, however, there would be nothing to fear till Lord
Mellifont's sketch should be finished. Blanche Adney communed with me
dumbly, and I could read the language of her eyes: "Oh, if _we_ could
only do it as well as that! He fills the stage in a way that beats us."
We could no more have left him than we could have quitted the theatre
till the play was over; but in due time we turned round with him and
strolled back to the inn, before the door of which his lordship,
glancing again at his picture, tore the fresh leaf from the block and
presented it with a few happy words to Mrs. Adney. Then he went into the
house; and a moment later, looking up from where we stood, we saw him,
above, at the window of his sitting-room (he had the best apartments),
watching the signs of the weather.

"He'll have to rest after this," Blanche said, dropping her eyes on her
water-colour.

"Indeed he will!" I raised mine to the window: Lord Mellifont had
vanished. "He's already reabsorbed."

"Reabsorbed?" I could see the actress was now thinking of something
else.

"Into the immensity of things. He has lapsed again; there's an
_entr'acte_."

"It ought to be long." Mrs. Adney looked up and down the terrace, and at
that moment the head-waiter appeared in the doorway. Suddenly she turned
to this functionary with the question: "Have you seen Mr. Vawdrey
lately?"

The man immediately approached. "He left the house five minutes ago--for
a walk, I think. He went down the pass; he had a book."

I was watching the ominous clouds. "He had better have had an umbrella."

The waiter smiled. "I recommended him to take one."

"Thank you," said Mrs. Adney; and the Oberkellner withdrew. Then she
went on, abruptly: "Will you do me a favour?"

"Yes, if you'll do _me_ one. Let me see if your picture is signed."

She glanced at the sketch before giving it to me. "For a wonder it
isn't."

"It ought to be, for full value. May I keep it awhile?"

"Yes, if you'll do what I ask. Take an umbrella and go after Mr.
Vawdrey."

"To bring him to Mrs. Adney?"

"To keep him out--as long as you can."

"I'll keep him as long as the rain holds off."

"Oh, never mind the rain!" my companion exclaimed.

"Would you have us drenched?"

"Without remorse." Then with a strange light in her eyes she added: "I'm
going to try."

"To try?"

"To see the real one. Oh, if I can get at him!" she broke out with
passion.

"Try, try!" I replied. "I'll keep our friend all day."

"If I can get at the one who does it"--and she paused, with shining
eyes--"if I can have it out with him I shall get my part!"

"I'll keep Vawdrey for ever!" I called after her as she passed quickly
into the house.

Her audacity was communicative, and I stood there in a glow of
excitement. I looked at Lord Mellifont's water-colour and I looked at
the gathering storm; I turned my eyes again to his lordship's windows
and then I bent them on my watch. Vawdrey had so little the start of me
that I should have time to overtake him--time even if I should take five
minutes to go up to Lord Mellifont's sitting-room (where we had all been
hospitably received), and say to him, as a messenger, that Mrs. Adney
begged he would bestow upon his sketch the high consecration of his
signature. As I again considered this work of art I perceived there was
something it certainly did lack: what else then but so noble an
autograph? It was my duty to supply the deficiency without delay, and in
accordance with this conviction I instantly re-entered the hotel. I went
up to Lord Mellifont's apartments; I reached the door of his salon.
Here, however, I was met by a difficulty of which my extravagance had
not taken account. If I were to knock I should spoil everything; yet was
I prepared to dispense with this ceremony? I asked myself the question,
and it embarrassed me; I turned my little picture round and round, but
it didn't give me the answer I wanted. I wanted it to say: "Open the
door gently, gently, without a sound, yet very quickly: then you will
see what you will see." I had gone so far as to lay my hand, upon the
knob when I became aware (having my wits so about me), that exactly in
the manner I was thinking of--gently, gently, without a sound--another
door had moved, on the opposite side of the hall. At the same instant I
found myself smiling rather constrainedly upon Lady Mellifont, who, on
seeing me, had checked herself on the threshold of her room. For a
moment, as she stood there, we exchanged two or three ideas that were
the more singular for being unspoken. We had caught each other hovering,
and we understood each other; but as I stepped over to her (so that we
were separated from the sitting-room by the width of the hall), her lips
formed the almost soundless entreaty: "Don't!" I could see in her
conscious eyes everything that the word expressed--the confession of her
own curiosity and the dread of the consequences of mine. "_Don't!_" she
repeated, as I stood before her. From the moment my experiment could
strike her as an act of violence I was ready to renounce it; yet I
thought I detected in her frightened face a still deeper betrayal--a
possibility of disappointment if I should give way. It was as if she had
said: "I'll let you do it if you'll take the responsibility. Yes, with
some one else I'd surprise him. But it would never do for him to think
it was I."

"We soon found Lord Mellifont," I observed, in allusion to our encounter
with her an hour before, "and he was so good as to give this lovely
sketch to Mrs. Adney, who has asked me to come up and beg him to put in
the omitted signature."

Lady Mellifont took the drawing from me, and I could guess the struggle
that went on in her while she looked at it. She was silent for some
time; then I felt that all her delicacies and dignities, all her old
timidities and pieties were fighting against her opportunity. She turned
away from me and, with the drawing, went back to her room. She was
absent for a couple of minutes, and when she reappeared I could see that
she had vanquished her temptation; that even, with a kind of resurgent
horror, she had shrunk from it. She had deposited the sketch in the
room. "If you will kindly leave the picture with me, I will see that
Mrs. Adney's request is attended to," she said, with great courtesy and
sweetness, but in a manner that put an end to our colloquy.

I assented, with a somewhat artificial enthusiasm perhaps, and then, to
ease off our separation, remarked that we were going to have a change of
weather.

"In that case we shall go--we shall go immediately," said Lady
Mellifont. I was amused at the eagerness with which she made this
declaration: it appeared to represent a coveted flight into safety, an
escape with her threatened secret. I was the more surprised therefore
when, as I was turning away, she put out her hand to take mine. She had
the pretext of bidding me farewell, but as I shook hands with her on
this supposition I felt that what the movement really conveyed was: "I
thank you for the help you would have given me, but it's better as it
is. If I should know, who would help me then?" As I went to my room to
get my umbrella I said to myself: "She's sure, but she won't put it to
the proof."

A quarter of an hour later I had overtaken Clare Vawdrey in the pass,
and shortly after this we found ourselves looking for refuge. The storm
had not only completely gathered, but it had broken at the last with
extraordinary rapidity. We scrambled up a hillside to an empty cabin, a
rough structure that was hardly more than a shed for the protection of
cattle. It was a tolerable shelter however, and it had fissures through
which we could watch the splendid spectacle of the tempest. This
entertainment lasted an hour--an hour that has remained with me as full
of odd disparities. While the lightning played with the thunder and the
rain gushed in on our umbrellas, I said to myself that Clare Vawdrey was
disappointing. I don't know exactly what I should have predicated of a
great author exposed to the fury of the elements, I can't say what
particular Manfred attitude I should have expected my companion to
assume, but it seemed to me somehow that I shouldn't have looked to him
to regale me in such a situation with stories (which I had already
heard), about the celebrated Lady Ringrose. Her ladyship formed the
subject of Vawdrey's conversation during this prodigious scene, though
before it was quite over he had launched out on Mr. Chafer, the scarcely
less notorious reviewer. It broke my heart to hear a man like Vawdrey
talk of reviewers. The lightning projected a hard clearness upon the
truth, familiar to me for years, to which the last day or two had added
transcendent support--the irritating certitude that for personal
relations this admirable genius thought his second-best good enough. It
was, no doubt, as society was made, but there was a contempt in the
distinction which could not fail to be galling to an admirer. The world
was vulgar and stupid, and the real man would have been a fool to come
out for it when he could gossip and dine by deputy. None the less my
heart sank as I felt my companion practice this economy. I don't know
exactly what I wanted; I suppose I wanted him to make an exception for
_me_. I almost believed he would, if he had known how I worshipped his
talent. But I had never been able to translate this to him, and his
application of his principle was relentless. At any rate I was more than
ever sure that at such an hour his chair at home was not empty: _there_
was the Manfred attitude, _there_ were the responsive flashes. I could
only envy Mrs. Adney her presumable enjoyment of them.

The weather drew off at last, and the rain abated sufficiently to allow
us to emerge from our asylum and make our way back to the inn, where we
found on our arrival that our prolonged absence had produced some
agitation. It was judged apparently that the fury of the elements might
have placed us in a predicament. Several of our friends were at the
door, and they seemed a little disconcerted when it was perceived that
we were only drenched. Clare Vawdrey, for some reason, was wetter than
I, and he took his course to his room. Blanche Adney was among the
persons collected to look out for us, but as Vawdrey came toward her she
shrank from him, without a greeting; with a movement that I observed as
almost one of estrangement she turned her back on him and went quickly
into the salon. Wet as I was I went in after her; on which she
immediately flung round and faced me. The first thing I saw was that she
had never been so beautiful. There was a light of inspiration in her
face, and she broke out to me in the quickest whisper, which was at the
same time the loudest cry, I have ever heard: "I've got my _part!_"

"You went to his room--I was right?"

"Right?" Blanche Adney repeated. "Ah, my dear fellow!" she murmured.

"He was there--you saw him?"

"He saw me. It was the hour of my life!"

"It must have been the hour of his, if you were half as lovely as you
are at this moment."

"He's splendid," she pursued, as if she didn't hear me. "He _is_ the one
who does it!" I listened, immensely impressed, and she added: "We
understood each other."

"By flashes of lightning?"

"Oh, I didn't see the lightning then!"

"How long were you there?" I asked with admiration.

"Long enough to tell him I adore him."

"Ah, that's what I've never been able to tell him!" I exclaimed
ruefully.

"I shall have my part--I shall have my part!" she continued, with
triumphant indifference; and she flung round the room with the joy of a
girl, only checking herself to say: "Go and change your clothes."

"You shall have Lord Mellifont's signature," I said.

"Oh, bother Lord Mellifont's signature! He's far nicer than Mr.
Vawdrey," she went on irrelevantly.

"Lord Mellifont?" I pretended to inquire.

"Confound Lord Mellifont!" And Blanche Adney, in her elation, brushed by
me, whisking again through the open door. Just outside of it she came
upon her husband; whereupon, with a charming cry of "We're talking of
you, my love!" she threw herself upon him and kissed him.

I went to my room and changed my clothes, but I remained there till the
evening. The violence of the storm had passed over us, but the rain had
settled down to a drizzle. On descending to dinner I found that the
change in the weather had already broken up our party. The Mellifonts
had departed in a carriage and four, they had been followed by others,
and several vehicles had been bespoken for the morning. Blanche Adney's
was one of them, and on the pretext that she had preparations to make
she quitted us directly after dinner. Clare Vawdrey asked me what was
the matter with her--she suddenly appeared to dislike him. I forget what
answer I gave, but I did my best to comfort him by driving away with him
the next day. Mrs. Adney had vanished when we came down; but they made
up their quarrel in London, for he finished his play, which she
produced. I must add that she is still, nevertheless, in want of the
great part. I have a beautiful one in my head, but she doesn't come to
see me to stir me up about it. Lady Mellifont always drops me a kind
word when we meet, but that doesn't console me.



THE WHEEL OF TIME


I


"And your daughter?" said Lady Greyswood; "tell me about her. She must
be nice."

"Oh, yes, she's nice enough. She's a great comfort."

Mrs. Knocker hesitated a moment, then she went on: "Unfortunately she's
not good-looking--not a bit."

"That doesn't matter, when they're not ill-natured," rejoined,
insincerely, Lady Greyswood, who had the remains of great beauty.

"Oh, but poor Fanny is quite extraordinarily plain. I assure you it does
matter. She knows it herself; she suffers from it. It's the sort of
thing that makes a great difference in a girl's life."

"But if she's charming, if she's clever!" said Lady Greyswood, with more
benevolence than logic. "I've known plain women who were liked."

"Do you mean _me_, my dear?" her old friend straightforwardly inquired.
"But I'm not so awfully liked!"

"You?" Lady Greyswood exclaimed. "Why, you're grand!"

"I'm not so repulsive as I was when I was young perhaps, but that's not
saying much."

"As when you were young!" laughed Lady Greyswood. "You sweet thing, you
_are_ young. I thought India dried people up."

"Oh, when you're a mummy to begin with!" Mrs. Knocker returned, with her
trick of self-abasement. "Of course I've not been such a fool as to keep
my children there. My girl _is_ clever," she continued, "but she's
afraid to show it. Therefore you may judge whether, with her unfortunate
appearance, she's charming."

"She shall show it to _me!_ You must let me do everything for her."

"Does that include finding her a husband? I should like her to show it
to someone who'll marry her."

"_I_'ll marry her!" said Lady Greyswood, who was handsomer than ever
when she laughed and looked capable.

"What a blessing to meet you this way on the threshold of home! I give
you notice that I shall cling to you. But that's what I meant; that's
the thing the want of beauty makes so difficult--as if it were not
difficult enough at the best."

"My dear child, one meets plenty of ugly women with husbands," Lady
Greyswood argued, "and often with very nice ones."

"Yes, mine is very nice. There are men who don't mind one's face, for
whom beauty isn't indispensable, but they are rare. I don't understand
them. If I'd been a man about to marry I should have gone in for looks.
However, the poor child will _have_ something," Mrs. Knocker continued.

Lady Greyswood rested thoughtful eyes on her. "Do you mean she'll be
well off?"

"We shall do everything we can for her. We're not in such misery as we
used to be. We've managed to save in India, strange to say, and six
months ago my husband came into money (more than we had ever dreamed
of), by the death of his poor brother. We feel quite opulent (it's
rather nice!) and we should expect to do something decent for our
daughter. I don't mind it's being known."

"It _shall_ be known!" said Lady Greyswood, getting up. "Leave the dear
child to me!" The old friends embraced, for the porter of the hotel had
come in to say that the carriage ordered for her ladyship was at the
door. They had met in Paris by the merest chance, in the court of an
inn, after a separation of years, just as Lady Greyswood was going home.
She had been to Aix-les-Bains early in the season and was resting on her
way back to England. Mrs. Knocker and the General, bringing their
eastern exile to a close, had arrived only the night before from
Marseilles and were to wait in Paris for their children, a tall girl and
two younger boys, who, inevitably dissociated from their parents, had
been for the past two years with a devoted aunt, their father's maiden
sister, at Heidelberg. The reunion of the family was to take place with
jollity in Paris, whither this good lady was now hurrying with her
drilled and demoralized charges. Mrs. Knocker had come to England to see
them two years before, and the period at Heidelberg had been planned
during this visit. With the termination of her husband's service a new
life opened before them all, and they had plans of comprehensive
rejoicing for the summer--plans involving however a continuance, for a
few months, of useful foreign opportunities, during which various
questions connected with the organization of a final home in England
were practically to be dealt with. There was to be a salubrious house on
the continent, taken in some neighbourhood that would both yield a
stimulus to plain Fanny's French (her German was much commended), and
permit of frequent "running over" for the General. With these
preoccupations Mrs. Knocker, after her delightful encounter with Lady
Greyswood, was less keenly conscious of the variations of destiny than
she had been when, at the age of twenty, that intimate friend of her
youth, beautiful, loveable and about to be united to a nobleman of
ancient name, was brightly, almost insolently alienated. The less
attractive of the two girls had married only several years later, and
her marriage had perhaps emphasised the divergence of their ways. To-day
however the inequality, as Mrs. Knocker would have phrased it, rather
dropped out of the impression produced by the somewhat wasted and faded
dowager, exquisite still, but unexpectedly appealing, who made no secret
(an attempt that in an age of such publicity would have been useless),
of what she had had, in vulgar parlance, to put up with, or of her
having been left badly off. She had spoken of her children--she had had
no less than six--but she had evidently thought it better not to speak
of her husband. That somehow made up, on Mrs. Knocker's part, for some
ancient aches.

It was not till a year after this incident that, one day in London, in
her little house in Queen Street, Lady Greyswood said to her third son,
Maurice--the one she was fondest of, the one who on his own side had
given her most signs of affection:

"I don't see what there is for you but to marry a girl of a certain
fortune."

"Oh, that's not my line! I may be an idiot, but I'm not mercenary," the
young man declared. He was not an idiot, but there was an examination,
rather stiff indeed, to which, without success, he had gone up twice.
The diplomatic service was closed to him by this catastrophe; nothing
else appeared particularly open; he was terribly at leisure. There had
been a theory none the less that he was the ablest of the family. Two of
his brothers had been squeezed into the army and had declared rather
crudely that they would do their best to keep Maurice out. They were not
put to any trouble in this respect however, as he professed a complete
indifference to the trade of arms. His mother, who was vague about
everything except the idea that people ought to like him, if only for
his extraordinary good looks, thought it strange there shouldn't be some
opening for him in political life, or something to be picked up even in
the City. But no bustling borough solicited the advantage of his
protection, no eminent statesman in want of a secretary took him by the
hand, no great commercial house had been keeping a stool for him.
Maurice, in a word, was not "approached" from any quarter, and meanwhile
he was as irritating as the intending traveller who allows you the
pleasure of looking out his railway-connections. Poor Lady Greyswood
fumbled the social Bradshaw in vain. The young man had only one marked
taste, with which his mother saw no way to deal--an invincible passion
for photography. He was perpetually taking shots at his friends, but she
couldn't open premises for him in Baker Street. He smoked endless
cigarettes--she was sure they made him languid. She would have been more
displeased with him if she had not felt so vividly that someone ought to
do something for him; nevertheless she almost lost patience at his
remark about not being mercenary. She was on the point of asking him
what he called it to live on his relations, but she checked the words as
she remembered that she herself was the only one who did much for him.
Nevertheless, as she hated open professions of disinterestedness, she
replied that that was a nonsensical tone. Whatever one should get in
such a way one would give quite as much, even if it didn't happen to be
money; and when he inquired in return what it was (beyond the disgrace
of his failures) that she judged a fellow like him would bring to his
bride, she replied that he would bring himself, his personal qualities
(she didn't like to be more definite about his appearance), his name,
his descent, his connections--good honest commodities all, for which any
girl of proper feeling would be glad to pay. Such a name as that of the
Glanvils was surely worth something, and she appealed to him to try what
he could do with it.

"Surely I can do something better with it than sell it," said Maurice.

"I should like then very much to hear what," she replied very calmly,
waiting reasonably for his answer. She waited to no purpose; the
question baffled him, like those of his examinations. She explained that
she meant of course that he should care for the girl, who might easily
have a worse fault than the command of bread and butter. To humour her,
for he was always good-natured, he said after a moment, smiling:

"Dear mother, is she pretty?"

"Is who pretty?"

"The young lady you have in your eye. Of course I see you've picked her
out."

She coloured slightly at this--she had planned a more gradual
revelation. For an instant she thought of saying that she had only had a
general idea, for the form of his question embarrassed her; but on
reflection she determined to be frank and practical. "Well, I confess I
_am_ thinking of a girl--a very nice one. But she hasn't great beauty."

"Oh, then it's of no use."

"But she's delightful, and she'll have thirty thousand pounds down, to
say nothing of expectations."

Maurice Glanvil looked at his mother. "She must be hideous--for you to
admit it. Therefore if she's rich she becomes quite impossible; for how
can a fellow have the air of having been bribed with gold to marry a
monster?"

"Fanny Knocker isn't the least a monster, and I can see that she'll
improve. She's tall, and she's quite strong, and there's nothing at all
disagreeable about her. Remember that you can't have everything."

"I thought you contended that I could!" said Maurice, amused at his
mother's description of her young friend's charms. He had never heard
anyone damned, as regards that sort of thing, with fainter praise. He
declared that he would be perfectly capable of marrying a poor girl, but
that the prime necessity in any young person he should think of would be
the possession of a face--to put it at the least--that it would give him
positive pleasure to look at. "I don't ask for much, but I do ask for
beauty," he went on. "My eye must be gratified--I must have a wife I can
photograph."

Lady Greyswood was tempted to answer that he himself had good looks
enough to make a handsome couple, but she withheld the remark as
injudicious, though effective, for it was a part of her son's amiability
that he appeared to have no conception of his plastic side. He would
have been disgusted if she had put it forward; if he had the ideal he
had just described it was not because his own profile was his standard.
What she herself saw in it was a force for coercing heiresses. She had
however to be patient, and she promised herself to be adroit; which was
all the easier as she really liked Fanny Knocker.

The girl's parents had at last taken a house in Ennismore Gardens, and
the friend of her mother's youth had been confronted with the question
of redeeming the pledges uttered in Paris. This unsophisticated and
united family, with relations to visit and schoolboys' holidays to
outlive, had spent the winter in the country and had but lately begun to
talk of itself, extravagantly of course, through Mrs. Knocker's droll
lips, as open to social attentions. Lady Greyswood had not been false to
her vows; she had on the contrary recognised from the first that, if he
could only be made to see it, Fanny Knocker would be just the person to
fill out poor Maurice's blanks. She had kept this confidence to herself,
but it had made her very kind to the young lady. One of the forms of
this kindness had been an ingenuity in keeping her from coming to Queen
Street until Maurice should have been prepared. Was he to be regarded as
prepared now that he asserted he would have nothing to do with Miss
Knocker? This was a question that worried Lady Greyswood, who at any
rate said to herself that she had told him the worst. Her idea had been
to sound her old friend only after the young people should have met and
Fanny should have fallen in love. Such a catastrophe for Fanny belonged
for Lady Greyswood to that order of convenience that she could always
take for granted.

She had found the girl, as she expected, ugly and awkward, but had also
discovered a charm of character in her intelligent timidity. No one knew
better than this observant woman how thankless a task in general it was
in London to "take out" a plain girl; she had seen the nicest creatures,
in the brutality of balls, participate only through wistful, almost
tearful eyes; her little drawing-room, at intimate hours, had been
shaken by the confidences of desperate mothers. None the less she felt
sure that Fanny's path would not be rugged; thirty thousand pounds were
a fine set of features, and her anxiety was rather on the score of the
expectations of the young lady's parents. Mrs. Knocker had dropped
remarks suggestive of a high imagination, of the conviction that there
might be a real efficacy in what they were doing for their daughter. The
danger, in other words, might well be that no younger son need apply--a
possibility that made Lady Greyswood take all her precautions. The
acceptability of her favourite child was consistent with the rejection
of those of other people--on which indeed it even directly depended. She
remembered on the other hand the proverb about taking your horse to the
water; the crystalline spring of her young friend's homage might
overflow, but she couldn't compel her boy to drink. The clever way was
to break down his prejudice--to get him to consent to give poor Fanny a
chance. Therefore if she was careful not to worry him she let him see
her project as something patient and deeply wise; she had the air of
waiting resignedly for the day on which, in the absence of other
solutions, he would say to her: "Well, let me have a look at my fate!"
Meanwhile moreover she was nothing if not conscientious, and as she had
made up her mind about the girl's susceptibility she had a scruple
against exposing her. This exposure would not be justified so long as
Maurice's theoretic rigour should remain unabated.

She felt virtuous in carrying her scruple to the point of rudeness; she
knew that Jane Knocker wondered why, though so attentive in a hundred
ways, she had never definitely included the poor child in any invitation
to Queen Street. There came a moment when it gave her pleasure to
suspect that her old friend had begun to explain this omission by the
idea of a positive exaggeration of good faith--an honest recognition of
the detrimental character of the young man in ambush there. As Maurice,
though much addicted to kissing his mother at home, never dangled about
her in public, he had remained a mythical figure to Mrs. Knocker: he had
been absent (culpably--there was a touch of the inevitable incivility in
it), on each of the occasions on which, after their arrival in London,
she and her husband dined with Lady Greyswood. This astute woman knew
that her delightful Jane was whimsical enough to be excited
good-humouredly by a mystery: she might very well want to make Maurice's
acquaintance in just the degree in which she guessed that his mother's
high sense of honour kept him out of the way. Moreover she desired
intensely that her daughter should have the sort of experience that
would help her to take confidence. Lady Greyswood knew that no one had
as yet asked the girl to dinner and that this particular attention was
the one for which her mother would be most grateful. No sooner had she
arrived at these illuminations than, with deep diplomacy, she requested
the pleasure of the company of her dear Jane and the General. Mrs.
Knocker accepted with delight--she always accepted with delight--so that
nothing remained for Lady Greyswood but to make sure of Maurice in
advance. After this was done she had only to wait. When the dinner, on a
day very near at hand, took place (she had jumped at the first evening
on which the Knockers were free), she had the gratification of seeing
her prevision exactly fulfilled. Her whimsical Jane had thrown the game
into her hands, had been taken at the very last moment with one of her
Indian headaches and, infinitely apologetic and explanatory, had hustled
poor Fanny off with the General. The girl, flurried and frightened by
her responsibility, sat at dinner next to Maurice, who behaved
beautifully--not in the least as the victim of a trick; and when a
fortnight later Lady Greyswood was able to divine that her mind from
that evening had been filled with a virginal ecstasy, she was also
fortunately able to feel serenely, delightfully guiltless.



II


She knew this fact about Fanny's mind, she believed, some time before
Jane Knocker knew it; but she also had reason to think that Jane Knocker
had known it for some time before she spoke of it. It was not till the
middle of June, after a succession of encounters between the young
people, that her old friend came one morning to discuss the
circumstance. Mrs. Knocker asked her if she suspected it, and she
promptly replied that it had never occurred to her. She added that she
was extremely sorry and that it had probably in the first instance been
the fault of that injudicious dinner.

"Ah, the day of my headache--my miserable headache?" said her visitor.
"Yes, very likely that did it. He's so dreadfully good-looking."

"Poor child, he can't help that. Neither can I!" Lady Greyswood ventured
to add.

"He comes by it honestly. He seems very nice."

"He's nice enough, but he hasn't a farthing, you know, and his
expectations are _nil._" They considered, they turned the matter about,
they wondered what they had better do. In the first place there was no
room for doubt; of course Mrs. Knocker hadn't sounded the girl, but a
mother, a true mother was never reduced to that. If Fanny was in every
relation of life so painfully, so constitutionally awkward, the still
depths of her shyness, of her dissimulation even, in such a predicament
as this, might easily be imagined. She would give no sign that she could
possibly smother, she would say nothing and do nothing, watching
herself, poor child, with trepidation; but she would suffer, and some
day when the question of her future should really come up--it might
after all in the form of some good proposal--they would find themselves
beating against a closed door. That was what they had to think of; that
was why Mrs. Knocker had come over. Her old friend cross-examined her
with a troubled face, but she was very impressive with her reasons, her
intuitions.

"I'll send him away in a moment, if you'd like that," Lady Greyswood
said at last. "I'll try and get him to go abroad."

Her visitor made no direct reply to this, and no reply at all for some
moments. "What does he expect to do--what does he want to do?" she
asked.

"Oh, poor boy, he's looking--he's trying to decide. He asks nothing of
anyone. If he would only knock at a few doors! But he's too proud."

"Do you call him _very_ clever?" Fanny's mother demanded.

"Yes, decidedly--and good and kind and true. But he has been unlucky."

"Of course he can't bear her!" said Mrs. Knocker with a little dry
laugh.

Lady Greyswood stared; then she broke out: "Do you mean you'd be
willing?----"

"He's very charming."

"Ah, but you must have great ideas."

"He's very well connected," said Mrs. Knocker, snapping the tight
elastic on her umbrella.

"Oh, my dear Jane--'connected'!" Lady Greyswood gave a sigh of the
sweetest irony.

"He's connected with you, to begin with."

Lady Greyswood put out her hand and held her visitor's for a moment. "Of
course it isn't as if he were a different sort of person. Of course I
should like it!" she added.

"Does he dislike her _very_ much?"

Lady Greyswood looked at her friend with a smile. "He resembles
Fanny--he doesn't tell. But what would her father say?" she went on.

"He doesn't know it."

"You've not talked with him?"

Mrs. Knocker hesitated a moment. "He thinks she's all right." Both the
ladies laughed a little at the density of men; then the visitor said: "I
wanted to see you first."

This circumstance gave Lady Greyswood food for thought; it suggested
comprehensively that in spite of a probable deficiency of zeal on the
General's part the worthy man would not be the great obstacle. She had
begun so quickly to turn over in her mind the various ways in which this
new phase of the business might make it possible the real obstacle
should be surmounted that she scarcely heard her companion say next:
"The General will only want his daughter to be happy. He has no definite
ambitions for her. I dare say Maurice could make him like him." It was
something more said by her companion about Maurice that sounded sharply
through her reverie. "But unless the idea appeals to _him_ a bit there's
no use talking about it."

At this Lady Greyswood spoke with decision. "It _shall_ appeal to him.
Leave it to me! Kiss your dear child for me," she added as the ladies
embraced and separated.

In the course of the day she made up her mind, and when she again
broached the question to her son (it befell that very evening) she felt
that she stood on firmer ground. She began by mentioning to him that her
dear old friend had the same charming dream--for the girl--that _she_
had; she sketched with a light hand a picture of their preconcerted
happiness in the union of their children. When he replied that he
couldn't for the life of him imagine what the Knockers could see in a
poor beggar of a younger son who had publicly come a cropper, she took
pains to prove that he was as good as anyone else and much better than
many of the young men to whom persons of sense were often willing to
confide their daughters. She had been in much tribulation over the
circumstance announced to her in the morning, not knowing whether, in
her present enterprise, to keep it back or put it forward. If Maurice
should happen not to take it in the right way it was the sort of thing
that might dish the whole experiment. He might be bored, he might be
annoyed, he might be horrified--there was no limit, in such cases, to
the perversity, to the possible brutality of even the most amiable man.
On the other hand he might be pleased, touched, flattered--if he didn't
dislike the girl too much. Lady Greyswood could indeed imagine that it
might be unpleasant to know that a person who was disagreeable to you
was in love with you; so that there was just that risk to run. She
determined to run it only if there should be absolutely no other card to
play. Meanwhile she said: "Don't you see, now, how intelligent she is,
in her quiet way, and how perfect she is at home--without any nonsense
or affectation or ill-nature? She's not a bit stupid, she's remarkably
clever. She can do a lot of things; she has no end of talents. Many
girls with a quarter of her abilities would make five times the show."

"My dear mother, she's a great swell, I freely admit it. She's far too
good for me. What in the world puts it into your two heads that she
would look at me?"

At this Lady Greyswood was tempted to speak; but after an instant she
said instead: "She _has_ looked at you, and you've seen how. You've seen
her several times now, and she has been remarkably nice to you."

"Nice? Ah, poor girl, she's frightened to death!"

"Believe me--I read her," Lady Greyswood replied.

"She knows she has money and she thinks I'm after it. She thinks I'm a
ravening wolf and she's scared."

"I happen to know as a fact that she's in love with you!" Before she
could check herself Lady Greyswood had played her card, and though she
held her breath a little after doing so she felt that it had been a good
moment. "If I hadn't known it," she hastened further to declare, "I
should never have said another word." Maurice burst out laughing--how in
the world _did_ she know it? When she put the evidence before him she
had the pleasure of seeing that he listened without irritation; and this
emboldened her to say: "Don't you think you could _try_ to like her?"

Maurice was lounging on a sofa opposite to her; jocose but embarrassed,
he had thrown back his head, and while he stretched himself his eyes
wandered over the upper expanse of the room. "It's very kind of her and
of her mother, and I'm much obliged and all that, though a fellow feels
rather an ass in talking about such a thing. Of course also I don't
pretend--before such a proof of wisdom--that I think her in the least a
fool. But, oh, dear----!" And the young man broke off with laughing
impatience, as if he had too much to say. His mother waited an instant,
then she uttered a persuasive, interrogative sound, and he went on:
"It's only a pity she's so awful!"

"So awful?" murmured Lady Greyswood.

"Dear mother, she's about as ugly a woman as ever turned round on you.
If there were only just a touch or two less of it!"

Lady Greyswood got up: she stood looking in silence at the tinted shade
of the lamp. She remained in this position so long that he glanced at
her--he was struck with the sadness in her face. He would have been in
error however if he had suspected that this sadness was assumed for the
purpose of showing him that she was wounded by his resistance, for the
reflection that his last words caused her to make was as disinterested
as it was melancholy. Here was an excellent, a charming girl--a girl,
she was sure, with a rare capacity for devotion--whose future was
reduced to nothing by the mere accident, in her face, of a certain want
of drawing. A man could settle her fate with a laugh, could give her
away with a snap of his fingers. She seemed to see Maurice administer to
poor Fanny's image the little displeased shove with which he would have
disposed of an ill-seasoned dish. Moreover he greatly exaggerated. Her
heart grew heavy with a sense of the hardness of the lot of women, and
when she looked again at her son there were tears in her eyes that
startled him. "Poor girl--poor girl!" she simply sighed, in a tone that
was to reverberate in his mind and to constitute in doing so a real
appeal to his imagination. After a moment she added: "We'll talk no more
about her--no, no!"

All the same she went three days later to see Mrs. Knocker and say to
her: "My dear creature, I think it's all right."

"Do you mean he'll take us up?"

"He'll come and see you, and you must give him plenty of chances." What
Lady Greyswood would have liked to be able to say, crudely and
comfortably, was: "He'll try to manage it--he promises to do what he
can." What she did say, however, was: "He's greatly prepossessed in the
dear child's favour."

"Then I dare say he'll be very nice."

"If I didn't think he'd behave like a gentleman I wouldn't raise a
finger. The more he sees of her the more he'll be sure to like her."

"Of course with poor Fanny that's the only thing one can build on," said
Mrs. Knocker. "There's so much to get over."

Lady Greyswood hesitated a moment. "Maurice _has_ got over it. But I
should tell you that at first he doesn't want it known."

"Doesn't want what known?"

"Why, the footing on which he comes. You see it's just the least bit
experimental."

"For what do you take me?" asked Mrs. Knocker. "The child shall never
dream that anything has passed between us. No more of course shall her
father."

"It's too delightful of you to leave it that way," Lady Greyswood
replied. "We must surround her happiness with every safeguard."

Mrs. Knocker sat pensive for some moments. "So that if nothing comes of
it there's no harm done? That idea--that nothing may come of it--makes
one a little nervous," she added.

"Of course I can't absolutely answer for my poor boy!" said Lady
Greyswood, with just the faintest ring of impatience. "But he's much
affected by what he knows--I told him. That's what moves him."

"He must of course be perfectly free."

"The great thing is for her not to know."

Mrs. Knocker considered. "Are you very sure?" She had apparently had a
profounder second thought.

"Why, my dear--with the risk!"

"Isn't the risk, after all, greater the other way? Mayn't it help the
matter on, mayn't it do the poor child a certain degree of good, the
idea that, as you say, he's prepossessed in her favour? It would perhaps
cheer her up, as it were, and encourage her, so that by the very fact of
being happier about herself she may make a better impression. That's
what she wants, poor thing--to be helped to hold up her head, to take
herself more seriously, to believe that people can like her. And fancy,
when it's a case of such a beautiful young man who's all ready to!"

"Yes, he's all ready to," Lady Greyswood conceded. "Of course it's a
question for your own discretion. I can't advise you, for you know your
child. But it seems to me a case for tremendous caution."

"Oh, trust me for that!" said Mrs. Knocker. "We shall be very kind to
him," she smiled, as her visitor got up.

"He'll appreciate that. But it's too nice of you to leave it so."

Mrs. Knocker gave a hopeful shrug. "He has only to be civil to Blake!"

"Ah, he isn't a brute!" Lady Greyswood exclaimed, caressing her.

After this she passed a month of no little anxiety. She asked her son no
question, and for two or three weeks he offered her no other information
than to say two or three times that Miss Knocker really could ride; but
she learned from her old friend everything she wanted to know.
Immediately after the conference of the two ladies Maurice, in the Row,
had taken an opportunity of making up to the girl. She rode every day
with her father, and Maurice rode, though possessed of nothing in life
to put a leg across; and he had been so well received that this proved
the beginning of a custom. He had a canter with the young lady most days
in the week, and when they parted it was usually to meet again in the
evening. His relations with the household in Ennismore Gardens were
indeed not left greatly to his initiative; he became on the spot the
subject of perpetual invitations and arrangements, the centre of the
friendliest manœuvres; so that Lady Greyswood was struck with Jane
Knocker's feverish energy in the good cause--the ingenuity, the bribery,
the cunning that an exemplary mother might be inspired to practise. She
herself did nothing, she left it all to poor Jane, and this perhaps gave
her for the moment a sense of contemplative superiority. She wondered if
_she_ would in any circumstances have plotted so almost fiercely for one
of her children. She was glad her old friend's design had her full
approbation; she held her breath a little when she said to herself:
"Suppose I hadn't liked it--suppose it had been for Chumleigh!"
Chumleigh was the present Lord Greyswood, whom his mother still called
by his earlier designation. Fanny Knocker's thirty thousand would have
been by no means enough for Chumleigh. Lady Greyswood, in spite of her
suspense, was detached enough to be amused when her accomplice told her
that "Blake" had said that Maurice really could ride. The two mothers
thanked God for the riding--the riding would see them through. Lady
Greyswood had watched Fanny narrowly in the Park, where, in the saddle,
she looked no worse than lots of girls. She had no idea how Maurice got
his mounts--she knew Chumleigh had none to give him; but there were
directions in which she would have encouraged him to incur almost any
liability. He was evidently amused and beguiled; he fell into
comfortable attitudes on the soft cushions that were laid for him and
partook with relish of the dainties that were served; he had his fill of
the theatres, of the opera--entertainments of which he was fond. She
could see he didn't care for the sort of people he met in Ennismore
Gardens, but this didn't matter: so much as that she didn't ask of him.
She knew that when he should have something to tell her he would speak;
and meanwhile she pretended to be a thousand miles away. The only thing
that worried her was that he had dropped photography. She said to Mrs.
Knocker more than once: "Does he make love?--that's what I want to
know!" to which this lady replied with her incongruous drollery: "My
dear, how can I make out? He's so little like Blake!" But she added that
she believed Fanny was intensely happy. Lady Greyswood had been struck
with the girl's looking so, and she rejoiced to be able to declare in
perfectly good faith that she thought her greatly improved. "Didn't I
tell you?" returned Mrs. Knocker to this with a certain accent of
triumph. It made Lady Greyswood nervous, for she took it to mean that
Fanny had had a hint from her mother of Maurice's possible intentions.
She was afraid to ask her old friend directly if this were definitely
true: poor Fanny's improvement was after all not a gain sufficient to
make up for the cruelty that would reside in the sense of being
rejected.

One day, in Queen Street, Maurice said in an abrupt, conscientious way:
"You were right about Fanny Knocker--she's a remarkably clever and a
thoroughly nice girl; a fellow can really talk with her. But oh mother!"

"Well, my dear?"

The young man's face wore a strange smile. "Oh mother!" he expressively,
quite tragically repeated. "But it's all right!" he presently added in a
different tone, and Lady Greyswood was reassured. This confidence,
however, received a shock a little later, on the evening of a day that
had been intensely hot. A torrid wave had passed over London, and in the
suffocating air the pleasures of the season had put on a purple face.
Lady Greyswood, whose own fine lowness of tone no temperature could
affect, knew, in her bedimmed drawing-room, exactly the detail of her
son's engagements. She pitied him--_she_ had managed to keep clear; she
had in particular a vision of a distribution of prizes, by one of the
princesses, at a big horticultural show; she saw the sweltering starers
(and at what, after all?) under a huge glass roof, while there passed
before her, in a blur of crimson, the glimpse of uncomfortable cheeks
under an erratic white bonnet, together also with the sense that some of
Jane Knocker's ideas of pleasure were of the oddest (she had such
_lacunes_), and some of the ordeals to which she exposed poor Fanny
singularly ill-chosen. Maurice came in, perspiring but pale (nothing
could make _him_ ugly!) to dress for dinner, and though he was in a
great hurry he found time to pant: "Oh mother, what I'm going through
for you!"

"Do you mean rushing about so--in this weather? We shall have a change
to-night."

"I hope so! There are people for whom it doesn't do at all; ah, not a
bit!" said Maurice with a laugh that she didn't fancy. But he went
upstairs before she could think of anything to reply, and after he had
dressed he passed out without speaking to her again. The next morning,
on entering her room, her maid mentioned as a delicate duty that Mr.
Glanvil, whose door stood wide open and whose bed was untouched, had
apparently not yet come in. While, however, her ladyship was in the
first freshness of meditation on this singular fact the morning's
letters were brought up, and as it happened that the second envelope she
glanced at was addressed in Maurice's hand she was quickly in possession
of an explanation still more startling than his absence. He wrote from a
club, at nine o'clock the previous evening, to announce that he was
taking the night train for the continent. He hadn't dressed for dinner,
he had dressed otherwise, and having stuffed a few things with
surreptitious haste into a Gladstone bag, had slipped unperceived out of
the house and into a hansom. He had sent to Ennismore Gardens, from his
club, an apology--a request he should not be waited for; and now he
should just have time to get to Charing Cross. He was off he didn't know
where, but he was off he did know why. "You'll know why, dear mother
too, I think," this wonderful communication continued; "you'll know why,
because I haven't deceived you. I've done what I could, but I've broken
down. I felt to-day that it was no use; there was a moment, at that
beastly exhibition, when I saw it, when the question was settled. The
truth rolled over me in a stifling wave. After that I made up my mind
there was nothing to do but to bolt. I meant to put it off till
to-morrow, and to tell you first, but while I was dressing to-day it
struck me irresistibly that my true course is to break now--never to
enter the house or go near her again. I was afraid of a scene with you
about this. I haven't uttered a word of 'love' to her (heaven save us!)
but my position this afternoon became definitely false, and that fact
prescribes the course I am taking. You shall hear from me again in a day
or two. I have the greatest regard for her, but I can't bear to look at
her. I don't care a bit for money, but, hang it, I _must_ have beauty!
Please send me twenty pounds, _poste restante_, Boulogne."

"What I want, Jane, is to get at this," Lady Greyswood said, later in
the day, with an austerity that was sensible even through her tears.
"Does the child know, or doesn't she, what was at stake?"

"She hasn't an inkling of it--how should she? I recognised that it was
best not to tell her--and I didn't."

On this, as Mrs. Knocker's tears had also flowed, Lady Greyswood kissed
her. But she didn't believe her. Fanny herself, however, for the rest of
the season, proved inscrutable. "She's a character!" Lady Greyswood
reflected with admiration. In September, in Yorkshire, the girl was
taken seriously ill.



III


After luncheon at the Crisfords'--the big Sunday banquets of twenty
people and a dozen courses--the men, lingering a little in the
dining-room, dawdling among displaced chairs and dropped napkins while
the ladies rustled away, ended by shuffling in casual pairs up to the
studio, where coffee was served and where, presently, before the
cigarettes were smoked out, Mrs. Crisford always reappeared to usher in
her contingent. The studio was high and handsome, and luncheon at the
Crisfords' was, in the common esteem, more amusing than almost anything
else in London except dinner. It was Bohemia with excellent
service--Bohemia not debtor but creditor. Upstairs the pictures,
finished or nearly finished, and arranged in a shining row, gave an
obviousness of topic, so that conversation could easily touch bottom.
Maurice Glanvil, who had never been in the house before, looked about
and wondered; he was struck with the march of civilization--the rise of
the social tide. There were new notes in English life, which he caught
quickly with his fresh sense; during his long absence--twenty years of
France and Italy--all sorts of things had happened. In his youth, in
England, artists and authors and actors--people of that general
kind--were not nearly so "smart." Maurice Glanvil was forty-nine to-day,
and he thought a great deal of his youth. He regretted it, he missed it,
he tried to beckon it back; but the differences in London made him feel
that it had gone forever. There might perhaps be some sudden
compensation in being fifty, some turn of the dim telescope, some view
from the brow of the hill; it was a round, gross, stupid number, which
probably would make one pompous, make one think one's self venerable.
Meanwhile at any rate it was odious to be forty-nine. Maurice observed
the young now more than he had ever done; observed them, that is, as the
young. He wished he could have had a son, to be twenty with again; his
daughter was only eighteen, but fond as he was of her he couldn't live
instinctively into her girlishness. It was not that there was not plenty
of it, for she was simple, sweet, indefinite, without the gifts that the
boy would have had, the gifts--what had become of them now?--that he
himself used to have.

The youngest person present, before the ladies came in, was the young
man who had sat next to Vera and whom, being on the same side of the
long table, he had not had under his eye. Maurice noticed him now,
noticed that he was very good-looking, fair and fresh and clean,
impeccable in his straight smoothness; also that apparently knowing none
of the other guests and moving by himself about the studio with visible
interest in the charming things, he had the modesty of his age and of
his position. He had however something more besides, which had begun to
prompt this observer to speak to him in order to hear the sound of his
voice--a strange, elusive resemblance, lost in the profile but
flickering straight out of the full face, to someone Maurice had known.
For a minute Glanvil was worried by it--he had a sense that a name would
suddenly come to him if he should see the lips in motion; but as he was
on the point of laying the ghost by an experiment Mrs. Crisford led in
her companions. His daughter was among them, and in company, as he was
constantly anxious about her appearance and her attitude, she had at
moments the faculty of drawing his attention from everything else. The
poor child, the only fruit of his odd, romantic union, the _coup de
foudre_ of his youth, with her strangely beautiful mother, whose own
mother had been a Russian and who had died in giving birth to her--his
short, colourless, insignificant Vera was excessively, incorrigibly
plain. She had been the disappointment of his life, but he greatly
pitied her. Her want of beauty, with her antecedents, had been one of
the strangest tricks of fate; she was acutely conscious of it and, being
good and docile, would have liked to please. She did sometimes, to her
father's delight, in spite of everything; she had been educated abroad,
on foreign lines, near her mother's people. He had brought her to
England to take her out, to do what he could for her; but he was not
unaware that in England her manners, which had been thought very pretty
on the continent, would strike some persons as artificial. They were
exactly what her mother's had been; they made up to a certain extent for
the want of other resemblance. An extreme solicitude at any rate as to
the impression they might make was the source of his habit, in London,
of watching her covertly. He tried to see at a given moment how she
looked, if she were happy; it was always with an intention of
encouragement, and there was a frequent exchange between them of little
invisible affectionate signs. She wore charming clothes, but she was
terribly short; in England the girls were gigantic and it was only the
tallest who were noticed. Their manners, alas, had nothing to do with
it--many of them indeed hadn't any manners. As soon as he had got near
Vera he said to her, scanning her through his single glass from head to
foot:

"Who is the young man who sat next you? the one at the other end of the
room."

"I don't know his name, papa--I didn't catch it."

"Was he civil--did he talk to you?"

"Oh, a great deal, papa--about all sorts of things."

Something in the tone of her voice made him look with greater intensity
and even with greater tenderness than usual into her little dim green
eyes. "Then you're all right--you're getting on?"

She gave her effusive smile--the one that perhaps wouldn't do in
England. "Oh beautifully, papa--everyone's so kind."

She never complained, was a brave little optimist, full of sweet
resources; but he had detected to-day as soon as he looked at her the
particular shade of her content. It made him continue, after an
hesitation: "He didn't say anything about his relations--anything that
could give you a clue?"

Vera thought a moment. "Not that I can remember--unless that Mr.
Crisford is painting the portrait of his mother. Ah, there it is!" the
girl exclaimed, looking across the room at a large picture on an easel,
which the young man had just approached and from which their host had
removed the drapery that covered it. Maurice Glanvil had observed this
drapery, and as the artist unveiled the canvas with a flourish he saw
that he had been waiting for the ladies to show it, to produce a
surprise, a grand effect. Everyone moved toward it, and Maurice, with
his daughter beside him, recognised that the production, a portrait, was
striking, a great success for Crisford--the figure, down to the knees,
with an extraordinary look of life, of a tall, handsome woman of middle
age, in full dress, in black. Yet he saw it for the moment vaguely,
through a preoccupation, that of a discovery which he had just made and
which had recalled to him an incident of his youth--his juxtaposition,
in London, at a dinner, to a girl, insurmountably charmless to him, who
had fallen in love with him (so that she was nearly to die of it),
within the first five minutes, before he had even spoken; as he had
subsequently learned from a communication made him by his poor mother--a
reminder uttered with a pointless bitterness that he had failed to
understand and accompanied with unsuspected details, much later--too
late, long after his marriage and shortly before her death. He said to
himself that he must look out, and he wondered if poor Vera would also
be insurmountably charmless to the good-looking young man. "But what a
likeness, papa--what a likeness!" he heard her murmur at his elbow with
suppressed excitement.

"How can you tell, my dear, if you haven't seen her?"

"I mean to the gentleman--the son."

Everyone was exclaiming "How wonderfully clever--how beautiful!" and
under cover of the agitation and applause Maurice Glanvil had drawn
nearer the picture. The movement had brought him close to the young man
of whom he had been talking with Vera and who, with his happy eyes on
the painted figure, seemed to smile in acknowledgment of the artist's
talent and of the sitter's charm.

"Do you know who the lady is?" Maurice said to him.

He turned his bright face to his interlocutor. "She's my mother--Mrs.
Tregent. Isn't it wonderful?"

His eyes, his lips, his voice flashed a light into Glanvil's
uncertainty--the tormenting resemblance was simply a prolonged echo of
Fanny Knocker, in whose later name, precisely, he recognised the name
pronounced by the young man. Maurice Glanvil stared in some
bewilderment; this stately, splendid lady, with a face so vivid that it
was handsome, was what that unfortunate girl had become? The eyes, as if
they picked him out, looked at him strangely from the canvas; the face,
with all its difference, asserted itself, and he felt himself turning as
red as if he had been in the presence of the original. Young Tregent,
pleased and proud, had given way to the pressing spectators, placing
himself at Vera's other side; and Maurice heard the girl exclaim to him
in one of her pretty effusions: "How beautiful she must be, and how
amiable!"

"She is indeed--it's not a bit flattered." And while Maurice still
stared, more and more mystified--for "flattered, flattered!" was the
unspoken solution in which he had instantly taken refuge--his neighbour
continued: "I wish you could know her--you must; she's delightful. She
couldn't come here to-day--they asked her: she has people lunching at
home."

"I should be so glad; perhaps we may meet her somewhere," said Vera.

"If I ask her and if you'll let her I'm sure she'll come to see you,"
the young man responded. Maurice had glanced at him while the face of
the portrait watched them with the oddest, the grimmest effect. He was
filled with a confusion of feelings, asking himself half-a-dozen
questions at once. Was young Tregent, with his attentive manner, "making
up" to Vera? was he going out of his way in answering for his mother's
civility? Little did he know what he was taking on himself! Above all
was Fanny Knocker to-day this extraordinary figure--extraordinary in the
light of the early plainness that had made him bolt? He became conscious
of an extreme curiosity, an irresistible desire to see her.

"Oh, papa," said Vera, "Mr. Tregent's so kind; he's so good as to
promise us a visit from his mother."

The young man's friendly eyes were still on the child's face. "I'll tell
her all about you. Oh, if I ask her she'll come!" he repeated.

"Does she do everything you ask her?" the girl inquired.

"She likes to know my friends!"

Maurice hesitated, wondering if he were in the presence of a smooth
young humbug to whom compliments cost nothing, or in that of an
impression really made--made by his little fluttered, unpopular Vera. He
had a horror of exposing his child to risks, but his curiosity was
greater than his caution. "Your mother mustn't come to us--it's our duty
to go to her," he said to Mr. Tregent; "I had the honour of knowing
her--a long time ago. Her mother and mine were intimate friends. Be so
good as to mention my name to her, that of Maurice Glanvil, and to tell
her how glad I have been to make your acquaintance. And now, my dear
child," he added to Vera, "we must take leave."

During the rest of that day it never occurred to him that there might be
an awkwardness in his presenting himself, even after many years, before
a person with whom he had broken as he had broken with Fanny Knocker.
This was partly because he held, justly enough, that he had never
committed himself, and partly because the intensity of his desire to
measure with his own eyes the change represented--misrepresented
perhaps--by the picture was a force greater than any embarrassment. His
mother had told him that the poor girl had cruelly suffered, but there
was no present intensity in that idea. With her expensive portrait, her
grand air, her handsome son, she somehow embodied success, whereas he
himself, standing for mere bereavement and disappointment, was a failure
not to be surpassed. With Vera that evening he was very silent; she saw
him smoke endless cigarettes and wondered what he was thinking of. She
guessed indeed, but she was too subtle a little person to attempt to
fall in with his thoughts or to be willing to betray her own by asking
him random questions about Mrs. Tregent. She had expressed as they came
away from their luncheon-party a natural surprise at the coincidence of
his having known the mother of her amusing neighbour, but the only other
words that dropped from her on the subject were contained in a question
that, before she went to bed, she put to him with abrupt gaiety, while
she carefully placed a marker in a book she had not been reading.

"When is it then that we're to call upon this wonderful old friend?"

He looked at her through the smoke of his cigarette. "I don't know. We
must wait a little, to allow her time to give some sign."

"Oh, I see!" And Vera took leave of him with one of her sincere little
kisses.



IV


He had not long to wait for the sign from Mrs. Tregent; it arrived the
very next morning in the shape of an invitation to dinner. This
invitation was immediately accepted, but a fortnight was still to
intervene--a trial to Maurice Glanvil's patience. The promptitude of the
demonstration gave him pleasure--it showed him no bitterness had
survived. What place was there indeed for resentment, since she had
married and given birth to children and thought so well of the face God
had conferred on her as to wish to hand it on to her posterity? Her
husband was in Parliament, or had been--that came back to him from his
mother's story. He caught himself reverting to her with a frequency that
surprised him; he was haunted by the image of that bright, strong woman
on Crisford's canvas, in whom there was just enough of Fanny Knocker to
put a sort of defiance into the difference. He wanted to see it again,
and his opportunity was at hand in the form of a visit to Mrs. Crisford.
He called on this lady, without his daughter, four days after he had
lunched with her, and, finding her at home, he presently led the
conversation to the portrait and to his ardent desire for another
glimpse of it. Mrs. Crisford gratified this eagerness--perhaps he struck
her as a possible sitter; it was late in the afternoon and her husband
was out: she led him into the studio. Mrs. Tregent, splendid and serene,
stood there as if she had been watching for him. There was no doubt the
picture was a masterpiece. Maurice had mentioned that he had known the
original years before and then had lost sight of her. He questioned his
hostess with artful detachment.

"What sort of a person has she become--agreeable, popular?"

"Everyone adores her--she's so clever."

"Really--remarkably?"

"Extraordinarily--one of the cleverest women I've ever known, and quite
one of the most charming."

Maurice looked at the portrait--at the super-subtle smile which seemed
to tell him Mrs. Tregent knew they were talking about her; a kind of
smile he had never expected to live to see in Fanny Knocker's eyes. Then
he asked: "Has she literally become as handsome as that?"

Mrs. Crisford hesitated. "She's beautiful."

"Beautiful?" Maurice echoed.

"What shall I say? It's a peculiar charm! It's her spirit. One sees that
her life has been beautiful in spite of her sorrows!" Mrs. Crisford
added.

"What sorrows has she had?" Maurice coloured a little as soon as he had
spoken.

"Oh, lots of deaths. She has lost her husband; she has lost several
children."

"Ah, that's new to me. Was her marriage happy?"

"It must have been for Mr. Tregent. If it wasn't for her, no one ever
knew."

"But she has a son," said Maurice.

"Yes, the only one--such a dear. She thinks all the world of him."

At this moment a message was brought to Mrs. Crisford, and she asked to
be excused while she went to say a word to someone who was waiting.
Maurice Glanvil in this way was left alone for five minutes with the
intensity of the presence evoked by the artist. He found himself
agitated, excited by it: the face of the portrait was so intelligent and
conscious that as he stood there he felt as if some strange
communication had taken place between his being and Mrs. Tregent's. The
idea made him nervous: he moved about the room and ended by turning his
back. Mrs. Crisford reappeared, but he soon took leave of her; and when
he had got home (he had settled himself in South Kensington, in a little
undiscriminated house which he had hated from the first), he learned
from his daughter that she had had a visit from young Tregent. He had
asked first for Mr. Glanvil and then, in the second instance, for
herself, telling her when admitted, as if to attenuate his possible
indiscretion, that his mother had charged him to try to see her even if
he should not find her father. Vera had never before received a
gentleman alone, and the incident had left traces of emotion. "Poor
little thing!" Maurice said to himself: he always took a melancholy view
of any happiness of his daughter's, tending to believe, in his
pessimism, that it could only lead to some refinement of humiliation. He
encouraged her however to talk about young Tregent, who, according to
her account, had been extravagantly amusing. He had said moreover that
his mother was tremendously impatient to renew such an old acquaintance.
"Why in the world doesn't she, then?" Maurice asked himself; "why
doesn't she come and see Vera?" He reflected afterwards that such an
expectation was unreasonable, but it represented at the moment a kind of
rebellion of his conscience. Then, as he had begun to be a little
ashamed of his curiosity, he liked to think that Mrs. Tregent would have
quite as much. On the morrow he knocked at her door--she lived in a
"commodious" house in Manchester Square--and had the satisfaction, as he
had chosen his time carefully, of learning that she had just come in.

Upstairs, in a high, quiet, old-fashioned drawing-room, she was before
him. What he saw was a tall woman in black, in her bonnet, with a white
face, smiling intensely--smiling and smiling before she spoke. He
quickly perceived that she was agitated and was making an heroic effort,
which would presently be successful, not to show it. But it was above
all clear to him that she wasn't Fanny Knocker--was simply another
person altogether. She had nothing in common with Fanny Knocker--it was
impossible to meet her on the ground of any former acquaintance. What
acquaintance had he ever had with this graceful, harmonious, expressive
English matron, whose smile had a singular radiance? That rascal of a
Crisford had done her such perfect justice that he felt as if he had
before him the portrait of which the image in the studio had been the
original. There were nevertheless things to be said, and they said them
on either side, sinking together, with friendly exclamations and
exaggerated laughs, on the sofa, where her nearness seemed the span of
all the distance that separated her from the past. The phrase that
hummed through everything, to his sense, was his own inarticulate "How
could I have known? how could I have known?" How could he have foreseen
that time and life and happiness (it was probably more than anything
happiness), would transpose her into such a different key? Her whole
personality revealed itself from moment to moment as something so
agreeable that even after all these years he felt himself blushing for
the crass stupidity of his mistake. Yes, he was turning red, and she
could see it and would know why: a perception that could only constitute
for her a magnificent triumph, a revenge. All his natural and acquired
coolness, his experience of life, his habit of society, everything that
contributed to make him a man of the world, were of no avail to cover
his confusion. He took refuge from it almost angrily in trying to prove
to himself that she had on a second look a likeness to the ugly girl he
had not thought good enough--in trying to trace Fanny Knocker in her
fair, ripe bloom, the fine irregularity of her features. To put his
finger on the identity would make him feel better. Some of the facts of
the girl's crooked face were still there--conventional beauty was
absent; but the proportions and relations had changed, and the
expression and the spirit: she had accepted herself or ceased to
care--had found oblivion and activity and appreciation. What Maurice
mainly discovered however in this intenser observation was an attitude
of hospitality toward himself which immediately effaced the presumption
of "triumph." Vulgar vanity was far from her, and the grossness of
watching her effect upon him: she was watching only the lost vision that
had come back, the joy that, if for a single hour, she had found again.
She herself had no measure of the alteration that struck him, and there
was no substitution for her in the face that her deep eyes seemed to
brush with their hovering. Presently they were talking like old friends,
and before long each was in possession of the principal facts concerning
the other. Many things had come and gone and the common fate had pressed
them hard. Her parents were dead, and her husband and her first-born
children. He, on his side, had lost his mother and his wife. They
matched bereavements and compared bruises, and in the way she expressed
herself there was a charm which forced him, as he wondered, to remember
that Fanny Knocker had at least been intelligent.

"I wish I could have seen your wife--you must tell me all about her,"
she said. "Haven't you some portraits?"

"Some poor little photographs. I'll show them to you. She was very
pretty and very gentle; she was also very un-English. But she only lived
a year. She wasn't clever and accomplished--like you."

"Ah, me; you don't know _me!_"

"No, but I want to--oh particularly. I'm prepared to give a good deal of
time to the study."

"We must be friends," said Mrs. Tregent. "I shall take an extraordinary
interest in your daughter."

"She'll be grateful for it. She's a good little reasonable thing,
without a scrap of beauty."

"You care greatly for that," said Mrs. Tregent.

He hesitated a moment. "Don't you?"

She smiled at him with her basking candour. "I used to. That's my
husband," she added, with an odd, though evidently accidental,
inconsequence. She had reached out to a table for a photograph in a
silver frame. "He was very good to me."

Maurice saw that Mr. Tregent had been many years older than his wife--a
prosperous, prosaic, parliamentary person whom she couldn't impose on a
man of the world. He sat an hour, and they talked of the mutilated
season of their youth: he wondered at the things she remembered. In this
little hour he felt his situation change--something strange and
important take place: he seemed to see why he had come back to England.
But there was an implication that worried him--it was in the very air, a
reverberation of that old assurance of his mother's. He wished to clear
the question up--it would matter for the beginning of a new friendship.
Had she had any sense of injury when he took to his heels, any glimpse
of the understanding on which he had begun to come to Ennismore Gardens?
He couldn't find out to-day except by asking her, which, at their time
of life, after so many years and consolations, would be legitimate and
even amusing. When he took leave of her he held her hand a moment,
hesitating; then he brought out:

"Did they ever tell you--a hundred years ago--that between your mother
and mine there was a great question of our marrying?"

She stared--she broke into a laugh. "_Was_ there?"

"Did you ever know it? Did you ever suspect it?"

She hesitated and, for the first time since he had been in the room,
ceased for an instant to look straight at him. She only answered, still
laughing however: "Poor dears--they were altogether too deep!"

She evidently wished to convey that she had never known. Maurice was a
little disappointed: at present he would have preferred her knowledge.
But as he walked home across the park, through Kensington Gardens, he
felt it impossible to believe in her ignorance.



V


At the end of a month he broke out to her. "I can't get over it, it's so
extraordinary--the difference between your youth and your maturity!"

"Did you expect me to be an eternal child?" Mrs. Tregent asked
composedly.

"No, it isn't that." He stopped--it would be difficult to explain.

"What is it then?" she inquired, with her systematic refusal to
acknowledge a complication. There was always, to Maurice Glanvil's ear,
in her impenetrability to allusion, the faintest, softest glee, and it
gave her on this occasion the appearance of recognising his difficulty
and being amused at it. She would be excusable to be a little
cold-blooded. He really knew however that the penalty was all in his own
reflections, for it had not taken him even a month to perceive that she
was supremely, almost strangely indulgent. There was nothing he was
ready to say that she might not hear, and her absence of coquetry was a
remarkable rest to him.

"It isn't what I expected--it's what I didn't expect. To say exactly
what I mean, it's the way you've improved."

"I've improved? I'm so glad!"

"Surely you've been aware of it--you've been conscious of the
transformation."

"As an improvement? I don't know. I've been conscious of changes
enough--of all the stages and strains and lessons of life. I've been
aware of growing old, and I hold, in dissent from the usual belief, that
there's no fool like a young fool. One is never, I suppose, such a fool
as one _has_ been, and that may count perhaps as amelioration. But I
can't flatter myself that I've had two different identities. I've had to
make one, such as it is, do for everything. I think I've been happier
than I originally supposed I should be--and yet I had my happiness too
as a girl. At all events if you were to scratch me, as they say, you'd
still find----" She paused a moment, and he really hung upon her lips:
there was such a charm of tone in whatever she said. "You'd still find,
underneath, the blowsy girl----" With this she again checked herself
and, slightly to his surprise, gave a nervous laugh.

"The blowsy girl?" he repeated, with an artlessness of interrogation
that made her laugh again.

"Whom you went with that hot day to see the princess give the prizes."

"Oh yes--that dreadful day!" he answered gravely, musingly, with the
whole scene pictured by her words and without contesting the manner in
which she qualified herself. It was the nearest allusion that had passed
between them to that crudest conception of his boyhood, his flight from
Ennismore Gardens. Almost every day for a month he had come to see her,
and they had talked of a thousand things; never yet however had they
made any explicit mention of this remote instance of premature wisdom.
Moreover if he now felt the need of going back it was not to be
apologetic, to do penance; he had nothing to explain, for his behaviour,
as he considered it, still struck him, given the circumstances, as
natural. It was to himself indeed that explanations were owing, for he
had been the one who had been most deceived. He liked Mrs. Tregent
better than he had ever liked a woman--that is he liked her for more
reasons. He had liked his poor little wife only for one, which was after
all no reason at all: he had been in love with her. In spite of the
charm that the renewal of acquaintance with his old friend had so
unexpectedly added to his life there was a vague torment in his relation
with her, the sense of a revenge (oh a very kind one!) to take, a
haunting idea that he couldn't pacify. He could still feel sore at the
trick that had been played him. Even after a month the curiosity with
which he had approached her was not assuaged; in a manner indeed it had
only borrowed force from all she had insisted on doing for him. She was
literally doing everything now; gently, gaily, with a touch so familiar
that protestations on his part would have been pedantic, she had taken
his life in hand. Rich as she was she had known how to give him lessons
in economy; she had taught him how to manage in London on his means. A
month ago his servants had been horrid--to-day they were the best he had
ever known. For Vera she was plainly a providence--her behaviour to Vera
was transcendent.

He had privately made up his mind that Vera had in truth had her _coup
de foudre_--that if she had had a chance she would have laid down her
little life for Arthur Tregent; yet two circumstances, he could
perceive, had helped to postpone, to attenuate even somewhat, her full
consciousness of what had befallen her. One of these influences had been
the prompt departure of the young man from London; the other was simply
the diversion produced by Mrs. Tregent's encompassing art. It had had
immediate consequences for the child: it was like a drama in perpetual
climaxes. This surprising benefactress rejoiced in her society, took her
"out," treated her as if there were mysterious injustices to repair.
Vera was agitated not a little by such a change in her life; she had
English kindred enough, uncles and aunts and cousins; but she had felt
herself lost in her father's family and was principally aware, among
them, of their strangeness and their indifference. They affected her
mainly as mere number and stature. Mrs. Tregent's was a performance
unpromised and uninterrupted, and the girl desired to know if all
English people took so generous a view of friendship. Maurice laughed at
this question and, without meeting his daughter's eyes, answered in the
negative. Vera guessed so many things that he didn't know what she would
be guessing next. He saw her caught up to the blue like Ganymede, and
surrendered her contentedly. She had been the occupation of his life,
yet to Mrs. Tregent he was willing to part with her; this lady was the
only person of whom he would not have been jealous. Even in the young
man's absence moreover Vera lived with the son of the house and breathed
his air; Manchester Square was full of him, his photograph was on every
table. How often she spoke of him to his mother Maurice had no means of
knowing, nor whether Mrs. Tregent encouraged such a topic; he had reason
to believe indeed that there were reserves on either side, and he felt
that he could trust his old friend's prudence as much as her liberality.
The attitude of forbearance from rash allusions, which was Maurice's
own, could not at any rate keep Arthur from being a presence in the
little drama which had begun for them all, as the older man was more and
more to recognise with nervous prefigurements, on that occasion at the
Crisfords'.

Arthur Tregent had gone to Ireland to spend a few weeks with an old
university friend--the gentleman indeed, at Cambridge, had been his
tutor--who had lately, in a district classified as "disturbed," come
into a bewildering heritage. He had chosen in short for a study of the
agrarian question on the spot the moment of the year when London was
most absorbing. Maurice Glanvil made no remark to his mother on this
anomaly, and she offered him no explanation of it; they talked in fact
of almost everything except Arthur. Mrs. Tregent had to her constant
visitor the air of feeling that she owed him in relation to her son an
apology which she had not the materials for making. It was certainly a
high standard of courtesy that would suggest to her that he ought to
have put himself out for these social specimens; but it was obvious that
her standard was high. Maurice Glanvil smiled when he thought to what
bare civility the young man would have deemed himself held had he known
of a certain passage of private history. But he knew nothing--Maurice
was sure of that; his reason for going away had been quite another
matter. That Vera's brooding parent should have had such an insight into
the young man's motives is a proof of the amount of reflection that he
devoted to him. He had not seen much of him and in truth he found him
provoking, but he was haunted by the odd analogy of which he had had a
glimpse on their first encounter. The late Mr. Tregent had had
"interests in the north," and the care of them had naturally devolved
upon his son, who by the mother's account had shown an admirable
capacity for business. The late Mr. Tregent had also been actively
political, and it was fondly hoped, in Manchester Square at least, that
the day was not distant when his heir would, in turn and as a
representative of the same respectabilities, speak reported words in
debate. Maurice himself, vague about the House of Commons, had nothing
to say against his making a figure there. Accordingly if these natural
gifts continued to remind him of his own fastidiously clever youth, it
was with the difference that Arthur Tregent's cleverness struck him as
much the greater of the two. If the changes in England were marked this
indeed was in general one of them, that the sharp young men were still
sharper than of yore. When they had ability at any rate they showed it
all; Maurice would never have pretended that he had shown all his. He
had not cared whether anyone knew it. It was not however this superior
intensity which provoked him, and poor young Tregent could not be held
responsible for his irritation. If the circumstance in which they most
resembled each other was the disposition to escape from plain girls who
aspired to them, such a characteristic, as embodied in the object of
Vera's admiration, was purely interesting, was even amusing, to Vera's
father; but it would have gratified him to be able to ascertain from
Mrs. Tregent whether, to her knowledge, her son thought his child really
repulsive, and what annoyed him was the fact that such an inquiry was
practically impossible. Arthur was provoking in short because he had an
advantage--an advantage residing in the fact that his mother's friend
couldn't ask questions about him without appearing to indulge in hints
and overtures. The idea of this officiousness was odious to Maurice
Glanvil; so that he confined himself to meditating in silence on the
happiness it would be for poor Vera to marry a beautiful young man with
a fortune and a future.

Though the opportunity for this recreation--it engaged much of his
time--should be counted as one of the pleasant results of his intimacy
with Mrs. Tregent, yet the sense, perverse enough, that he had a ground
of complaint against her subsisted even to the point of finally
steadying him while he expressed his grievance. This happened in the
course of one of those afternoon hours that had now become indispensable
to him--hours of belated tea and egotistical talk in the long summer
light and the chastened roar of London.

"No, it wasn't fair," he said, "and I wasn't well used--a hundred years
ago. I'm sore about it now; you ought to have notified me, to have
instructed me. Why didn't you, in common honesty? Why didn't my poor
mother, who was so eager and shrewd? Why didn't yours? She used to talk
to me. Heaven forgive me for saying it, but our mothers weren't up to
the mark! You may tell me they didn't know; to which I reply that mine
was universally supposed, and by me in particular, to know everything
that could be known. No, it wasn't well managed, and the consequence has
been this odious discovery, an awful shock to a man of my time of life
and under the effect of which I now speak to you, that for a quarter of
a century I've been a fool."

"What would you have wished us to do?" Mrs. Tregent asked as she gave
him another cup of tea.

"Why, to have said 'Wait, wait--at any price; have patience and hold
on!' They ought to have told me, _you_ ought to have told me, that your
conditions at that time were a temporary phase and that you would
infallibly break your shell. You ought to have warned me, they ought to
have warned me, that there would be wizardry in the case, that you were
to be the subject, at a given moment, of a transformation absolutely
miraculous. I couldn't know it by inspiration; I measured you by the
common law--how could I do anything else? But it wasn't kind to leave me
in error."

Maurice Glanvil treated himself without scruple to this fine ironic
flight, this sophistry which eased his nerves, because though it brought
him nearer than he had yet come to putting his finger, visibly to Mrs.
Tregent, on the fact that he had once tried to believe he could marry
her and had found her too ugly, their present relation was so
extraordinary and his present appreciation so liberal as to make almost
any freedom excusable, especially as his companion had the advantage of
being to all intents and purposes a different person from the one he
talked of, while he suffered the ignominy of being the same.

"There has been no miracle," said Mrs. Tregent after a moment. "I've
never known anything but the common, ah the very common, law, and
anything that I may have become only the common things have made me."

He shook his head. "You wore a disfiguring mask, a veil, a disguise. One
fine day you dropped them all and showed the world the real creature."

"It wasn't one fine day--it was little by little."

"Well, one fine day I saw the result; the process doesn't matter. To
arrive at a goal invisible from the starting-point is no doubt an
incident in the life of a certain number of women. But what is
absolutely unprecedented is to have traversed such a distance."

"Hadn't I a single redeeming point?" Mrs. Tregent demanded.

He hesitated a little, and while he hesitated she looked at him. Her
look was but of an instant, but it told him everything, told him, in one
misty moonbeam, all she had known of old. She had known perfectly--she
had been as conscious of the conditions of his experiment as of the
invincibility of his repugnance. Whether her mother had betrayed him
didn't matter; she had read everything clear and had had to accept the
cruel truth. He was touched as he had never been by that moment's
communication; he was, unexpectedly, almost awestruck, for there was
something still more in it than he had guessed. "I was letting my fancy
play just now," he answered, apologetically. "It was I who was
wanting--it was I who was the idiot!"

"Don't say that. You were so kind." And hereupon Mrs. Tregent startled
her visitor by bursting into tears.

She recovered herself indeed, and they forbore on that occasion, in the
interest of the decorum expected of persons of their age and in their
circumstances, to rake over these smouldering ashes; but such a
conversation had made a difference, and from that day onward Maurice
Glanvil was awake to the fact that he had been the passion of this
extraordinary woman's life. He felt humiliated for an hour, but after
that his pleasure was almost as great as his wonder. For wonder there
was plenty of room, but little by little he saw how things had come to
pass. She was not subjected to the ordeal of telling him or to the
abasement of any confession, but day by day he sounded, with a purity of
gratitude that renewed, in his spirit, the sources of youth, the depths
of everything that her behaviour implied. Of such a studied tenderness
as she showed him the roots could only be in some unspeakably sacred
past. She had not to explain, she had not to clear up inconsistencies,
she had only to let him be with her. She had striven, she had accepted,
she had conformed, but she had thought of him every day of her life. She
had taken up duties and performed them, she had banished every weakness
and practised every virtue, but the still, hidden flame had never been
quenched. His image had interposed, his reality had remained, and she
had never denied herself the sweetness of hoping that she should see him
again and that she should know him. She had never raised a little finger
for it, but fortune had answered her prayer. Women were capable of these
mysteries of sentiment, these intensities of fidelity and there were
moments in which Maurice Glanvil's heart beat strangely before a vision
really so sublime. He seemed to understand now by what miracle Fanny
Knocker had been beautified--the miracle of heroic docilities and
accepted pangs and vanquished egotisms. It had never come in a night,
but it had come by living for others. She was living for others still;
it was impossible for him to see anything else at last than that she was
living for him. The time of passion was over, but the time of service
was long. When all this became vivid to him he felt that he couldn't
recognise it enough and yet that recognition might only be tacit and, as
it were, circuitous. He couldn't say to her even humorously "It's very
kind of you to be in love with such a donkey," for these words would
have implied somehow that he had rights--an attitude from which his
renovated delicacy shrank. He bowed his head before such charity and
seemed to see moreover that Mrs. Tregent's desire to befriend him was a
feeling independent of any prospect of gain and indifferent to any
chance of reward. It would be described vulgarly, after so much had come
and gone, as the state of being "in love"--the state of the instinctive
and the simple, which they both had left far behind; so that there was a
certain sort of reciprocity which would almost constitute an insult to
it.



VI


He soared on these high thoughts till, toward the end of July (Mrs.
Tregent stayed late in town--she was awaiting her son's return) he made
the discovery that to some persons, perhaps indeed to many, he had all
the air of being in love. This image was flashed back to him from the
irreverent lips of a lady who knew and admired Mrs. Tregent and who
professed amusement at his surprise, at his artless declaration that he
had no idea he had made himself conspicuous. She assured him that
everyone was talking about him--though people after all had a tenderness
for elderly romance; and she left him divided between the acute sense
that he was comical (he had a horror of that) and the pale perception of
something that he could "help" still less. At the end of a few hours of
reflection he had sacrificed the penalty to the privilege; he was about
to be fifty, and he knew Fanny Knocker's age--no one better; but he
cared no straw for vulgar judgments and moreover could think of plenty
of examples of unions admired even after longer delays. For three days
he enjoyed the luxury of admitting to himself without reserve how
indispensable she had become to him; as the third drew to a close he was
more nervous than really he had ever been in his life, for this was the
evening on which, after many hindrances, Mrs. Tregent had agreed to dine
with him. He had planned the occasion for a month--he wanted to show her
how well he had learned from her how to live on his income. Her
occupations had always interposed--she was teaching him new lessons; but
at last she gave him the joy of sitting at his table. At the evening's
end he begged her to remain after the others, and he asked one of the
ladies who had been present, and who was going to a pair of parties, to
be so good as to take Vera away. This indeed had been arranged in
advance, and when, in the discomposed drawing-room, of which the windows
stood open to the summer night, he was alone with his old friend, he saw
in her face that she knew it had been arranged. He saw more than
this--that she knew what he was waiting to say and that if, after a
visible reluctance, she had consented to come, it was in order to meet
him, with whatever effort, on the ground he had chosen--meet him once
and then leave it forever. This was why, without interrupting him, but
before he had finished, putting out her hand to his own, with a strange
clasp of refusal, she was ready to show him, in a woeful but beautiful
headshake to which nothing could add, that it was impossible at this
time of day for them to marry. She stayed only a moment, but in that
moment he had to accept the knowledge that by as much as it might have
been of old, by so much might it never be again. After she had gone he
walked up and down the drawing-room half the night. He sent the servants
to bed, he blew out the candles; the forsaken place was lighted only by
the lamps in the street. He gave himself the motive of waiting for Vera
to come back, but in reality he threshed about in the darkness because
his cheeks had begun to burn. There was a sting for him in Mrs.
Tregent's refusal, and this sting was sharper even than the
disappointment of his desire. It was a reproach to his delicacy; it made
him feel as if he had been an ass for the second time. When she was
young and free his faith had been too poor and his perceptions too
dense; he had waited to show her that he only bargained for certainties
and only recognised success. He dropped into a chair at last and sat
there a long time, his elbows on his knees, his face in his hands,
trying to cover up his humiliation, waiting for it to ebb. As the sounds
of the night died away it began to come back to him that she had given
him a promise to which a rich meaning could be attached. What was it
that before going away she had said about Vera, in words he had been at
the moment too disconcerted to take in? Little by little he
reconstructed these words with comfort; finally, when after hearing a
carriage stop at the door he hastily pulled himself together and went
down to admit his daughter, the sight of the child on his threshold, as
the brougham that had restored her drove away, brought them all back in
their generosity.

"Have you danced?" he asked.

She hesitated. "A little, papa."

He knew what that meant--she had danced once. He followed her upstairs
in silence; she had not wasted her time--she had had her humiliation.
Ah, clearly she was too short! Yet on the landing above, where her
bedroom candle stood, she tried to be gay with him, asking him about his
own party and whether the people had stayed late.

"Mrs. Tregent stayed after the others. She spoke very kindly of you."

The girl looked at her father with an anxiety that showed through her
smile. "What did she say?"

He hesitated, as Vera had done a moment before. "That you must be our
compensation."

His daughter's eyes, still wondering, turned away. "What did she mean?"

"That it's all right, darling!" And he supplied the deficiencies of this
explanation with a long kiss for good-night.

The next day he went to see Mrs. Tregent, who wore the air of being glad
to have something at once positive and pleasant to say. She announced
immediately that Arthur was coming back.

"I congratulate you." Then, as they exchanged one of their looks of
unreserved recognition, Maurice added: "Now it's for Vera and me to go."

"To go?"

"Without more delay. It's high time we should take ourselves off."

Mrs. Tregent was silent a moment. "Where shall you go?"

"To our old haunts, abroad. We must see some of our old friends. We
shall spend six months away."

"Then what becomes of _my_ months?"

"Your months?"

"Those it's all arranged she's to spend at Blankley." Blankley was Mrs.
Tregent's house in Derbyshire, and she laughed as she went on: "Those
that I spoke of last evening. Don't look as if we had never discussed it
and settled it!"

"What shall I do without her?" Maurice Glanvil presently demanded.

"What will you do _with_ her?" his hostess replied, with a world of
triumphant meaning. He was not prepared to say, in the sense of her
question, and he took refuge in remarking that he noted her avoidance of
any suggestion that he too would be welcome in Derbyshire; which led her
to continue, with unshrinking frankness: "Certainly, I don't want you a
bit. Leave us alone."

"Is it safe?"

"Of course I can't absolutely answer for anything, but at least it will
be safer than with _you_," said Mrs. Tregent.

Maurice Glanvil turned this over. "Does he dislike me?"

"What an idea!"

But the question had brought the colour to her face, and the sight of
this, with her evasive answer, kindled in Maurice's heart a sudden
relief, a delight almost, that was strange enough. Arthur was in
opposition, plainly, and that was why he had so promptly quitted London,
that was why Mrs. Tregent had refused Mr. Glanvil. The idea was an
instant balm. "He'd be quite right, poor fellow!" Maurice declared.
"I'll go abroad alone."

"Let me keep her six months," said Mrs. Tregent. "I'll try it--I'll try
it!"

"I wouldn't interfere for the world."

"It's an immense responsibility; but I should like so to succeed."

"She's an angel!" Maurice said.

"That's what gives me courage."

"But she mustn't dream of any plot," he added.

"For what do you take me?" Mrs. Tregent exclaimed with a smile which
lightened up for him intensely that far-away troubled past as to which
she had originally baffled his inquiry.

The joy of perceiving in an aversion to himself a possible motive for
Arthur's absence was so great in him that before he took leave of her he
ventured to say to his old friend: "Does he like her at all?"

"He likes her very much."

Maurice remembered how much he had liked Fanny Knocker and been willing
to admit it to his mother; but he presently observed: "Of course he
can't think her in the least pretty."

"As you say, she's an angel," Mrs. Tregent rejoined.

"She would pass for one better if she were a few inches taller."

"It doesn't matter," said Mrs. Tregent.

"One must remember that in that respect, at her age, she won't change,"
Maurice pursued, wondering after he had spoken whether he had pressed
upon the second pronoun.

"No, she won't change. But she's a darling!" Mrs. Tregent exclaimed; and
it was in these meagre words, which were only half however of what
passed between them, that an extraordinary offer was made and accepted.
They were so ready to understand each other that no insistence and no
professions now were necessary, and that Maurice Glanvil had not even
broken into a murmur of gratitude at this quick revelation of his old
friend's beautiful conception of a nobler remedy--the endeavour to place
their union outside themselves, to make their children know the
happiness they had missed. They had not needed to teach each other what
they saw, what they guessed, what moved them with pity and hope, and
there were transitions enough safely skipped in the simple conversation
I have preserved. But what Mrs. Tregent was ready to do for him filled
Maurice Glanvil, for days after this, with an even greater wonder, and
it seemed to him that not till then had she fully shown him that she had
forgiven him.

Six months, however, proved much more than sufficient for her attempt to
test the plasticity of her son. Maurice Glanvil went abroad, but was
nervous and restless, wandering from place to place, revisiting old
scenes and old friends, reverting, with a conscious, an even amused
incongruity, and yet with an effect that was momentarily soothing, to
places at which he had stayed with his wife, but feeling all the while
that he was really staking his child's happiness. It only half reassured
him to feel that Vera would never know what poor Fanny Knocker had been
condemned to know, for the daily contact was cruel from the moment the
issue was uncertain; and it only half helped him to reflect that she was
not so plain as Fanny, for had not Arthur Tregent given him the
impression that the young man of the present was intrinsically even more
difficult to please than the young man of the past? The letters he
received from Blankley conveyed no information about Arthur beyond the
fact that he was at home; only once Vera mentioned that he was
"remarkably good" to her. Toward the end of November he found himself in
Paris, submitting reluctantly to social accidents which put off from day
to day his return to London, when, one morning in the Rue de Rivoli, he
had to stop short to permit the passage of a vehicle which had emerged
from the court of an hotel. It was an open cab--the day was mild and
bright--with a small quantity of neat, leathery luggage, which Maurice
vaguely recognised as English, stowed in the place beside the
driver--luggage from which his eyes shifted straight to the occupant of
the carriage, a young man with his face turned to the allurements of
travel and the urbanity of farewell to bowing waiters still visible in
it. The young man was so bright and so on his way, as it were, that
Maurice, standing there to make room for him, felt for the instant that
he too had taken a tip. The feeling became acute as he recognised that
this humiliating obligation was to no less a person than Arthur Tregent.
It was Arthur who was so much on his way--it was Arthur who was catching
a train. He noticed his mother's friend as the cab passed into the
street, and, with a quick demonstration, caused the driver to pull up.
He jumped out, and under the arcade the two men met with every
appearance of cordiality, but with conscious confusion. Each of them
coloured perceptibly, and Maurice was angry with himself for blushing
before a boy. Long afterwards he remembered how cold, and even how hard,
was the handsome clearness of the young eyes that met his own in an
artificial smile.

"You here? I thought you were at Blankley."

"I left Blankley yesterday; I'm on my way to Spain."

"To Spain? How charming!"

"To join a friend there--just for a month or two."

"Interesting country--well worth seeing. Your mother's all right?"

"Oh, yes, all right. And Miss Glanvil----" Arthur Tregent went on,
cheerfully.

"Vera's all right?" interrupted Maurice, with a still gayer tone.

"Everyone, everything's all right!" Arthur laughed.

"Well, I mustn't keep you. Bon voyage!"

Maurice Glanvil, after the young man had driven on, flattered himself
that in this brief interview he had suppressed every indication of
surprise; but that evening he crossed the Channel, and on the morrow he
went down to Blankley. "To Spain--to Spain!" the words kept repeating
themselves in his ears. He, when he had taken flight in a similar
conjunction, had only got, for the time, as far as Boulogne; and he was
reminded afresh of the progress of the species. When he was introduced
into the drawing-room at Blankley--a chintzy, flowery, friendly
expanse--Mrs. Tregent rose before him alone and offered him a face that
she had never shown before. She was white and she looked scared; she
faltered in her movement to meet him.

"I met Arthur in Paris, so I thought I might come."

Oh, yes; there was pain in her face, and a kind of fear of him that
frightened him, but their hands found each other's hands while she
replied: "He went off--I didn't know it."

"But you had a letter the next morning," Maurice said.

She stared. "How did you know that?"

"Who should know better than I? He wrote from London, explaining."

"I did what I could--I believed in it!" said Mrs Tregent. "He was
charming, for a while."

"But he broke down. She's too short, eh?" Maurice asked.

"Don't laugh; she's ill."

"What's the matter with her?"

Mrs. Tregent gave the visitor a look in which there was almost a
reproach for the question. "She has had a chill; she's in bed. You must
see her."

She took him upstairs and he saw his child. He remembered what his
mother had told him of the grievous illness of Fanny Knocker. Poor
little Vera lay there in the flush of a feverish cold which had come on
the evening before. She grew worse from the effect of a complication,
and for three days he was anxious about her; but even more than with his
alarm he held his breath before the distress, the disappointment, the
humility of his old friend. Up to this hour he had not fully measured
the strength of her desire to do something for him, or the intensity of
passion with which she had wished to do it in the particular way that
had now broken down. She had counted on her influence with her son, on
his affection and on the maternal art, and there was anguish in her
compunction for her failure, for her false estimate of the possible.
Maurice Glanvil reminded her in vain of the consoling fact that Vera had
known nothing of any plan, and he guessed indeed the reason why this
theory had no comfort. No one could be better aware than Fanny Tregent
of how much girls knew who knew nothing. It was doubtless this same sad
wisdom that kept her sombre when he expressed a confidence that his
child would promptly recover. She herself had had a terrible fight--and
yet with the physical victory, had she recovered? Her apprehension for
Vera was justified, for the poor girl was destined finally to forfeit
even the physical victory. She got better, she got up, she quitted
Blankley, she quitted England with her father, but her health had failed
and a year later it gave way. Overtaken in Rome by a second illness, she
succumbed; unlike Fanny Knocker she was never to have her revenge.



LORD BEAUPRÉ


I


Some reference had been made to Northerley, which was within an easy
drive, and Firminger described how he had dined there the night before
and had found a lot of people. Mrs. Ashbury, one of the two visitors,
inquired who these people might be, and he mentioned half-a-dozen names,
among which was that of young Raddle, which had been a good deal on
people's lips, and even in the newspapers, on the occasion, still
recent, of his stepping into the fortune, exceptionally vast even as the
product of a patent-glue, left him by a father whose ugly name on all
the vacant spaces of the world had exasperated generations of men.

"Oh, is he there?" asked Mrs. Ashbury, in a tone which might have been
taken as a vocal rendering of the act of pricking up one's ears. She
didn't hand on the information to her daughter, who was talking--if a
beauty of so few phrases could have been said to talk--with Mary
Gosselin, but in the course of a few moments she put down her teacup
with a failure of suavity and, getting up, gave the girl a poke with her
parasol. "Come, Maud, we must be stirring."

"You pay us a very short visit," said Mrs. Gosselin, intensely demure
over the fine web of her knitting. Mrs. Ashbury looked hard for an
instant into her bland eyes, then she gave poor Maud another poke. She
alluded to a reason and expressed regrets; but she got her daughter into
motion, and Guy Firminger passed through the garden with the two ladies
to put them into their carriage. Mrs. Ashbury protested particularly
against any further escort. While he was absent the other parent and
child, sitting together on their pretty lawn in the yellow light of the
August afternoon, talked of the frightful way Maud Ashbury had "gone
off," and of something else as to which there was more to say when their
third visitor came back.

"Don't think me grossly inquisitive if I ask you where they told the
coachman to drive," said Mary Gosselin as the young man dropped, near
her, into a low wicker chair, stretching his long legs as if he had been
one of the family.

Firminger stared. "Upon my word I didn't particularly notice, but I
think the old lady said 'Home'."

"There, mamma dear!" the girl exclaimed triumphantly.

But Mrs. Gosselin only knitted on, persisting in profundity. She replied
that "Home" was a feint, that Mrs. Ashbury would already have given
another order, and that it was her wish to hurry off to Northerley that
had made her keep them from going with her to the carriage, in which
they would have seen her take a suspected direction. Mary explained to
Guy Firminger that her mother had perceived poor Mrs. Ashbury to be
frantic to reach the house at which she had heard that Mr. Raddle was
staying. The young man stared again and wanted to know what she desired
to do with Mr. Raddle. Mary replied that her mother would tell him what
Mrs. Ashbury desired to do with poor Maud.

"What all Christian mothers desire," said Mrs. Gosselin. "Only she
doesn't know how."

"To marry the dear child to Mr. Raddle," Mary added, smiling.

Firminger's vagueness expanded with the subject. "Do you mean you want
to marry _your_ dear child to that little cad?" he asked of the elder
lady.

"I speak of the general duty--not of the particular case," said Mrs.
Gosselin.

"Mamma _does_ know how," Mary went on.

"Then why ain't you married?"

"Because we're not acting, like the Ashburys, with injudicious
precipitation. Is that correct?" the girl demanded, laughing, of her
mother.

"Laugh at me, my dear, as much as you like--it's very lucky you've got
me," Mrs. Gosselin declared.

"She means I can't manage for myself," said Mary to the visitor.

"What nonsense you talk!" Mrs. Gosselin murmured, counting stitches.

"I can't, mamma, I can't; I admit it," Mary continued.

"But injudicious precipitation and--what's the other thing?--creeping
prudence, seem to come out in very much the same place," the young man
objected.

"Do you mean since I too wither on the tree?"

"It only comes back to saying how hard it is nowadays to marry one's
daughters," said the lucid Mrs. Gosselin, saving Firminger, however, the
trouble of an ingenious answer. "I don't contend that, at the best, it's
easy."

But Guy Firminger would not have struck you as capable of much
conversational effort as he lounged there in the summer softness, with
ironic familiarities, like one of the old friends who rarely deviate
into sincerity. He was a robust but loose-limbed young man, with a
well-shaped head and a face smooth, fair and kind. He was in
knickerbockers, and his clothes, which had seen service, were composed
of articles that didn't match. His laced boots were dusty--he had
evidently walked a certain distance; an indication confirmed by the
lingering, sociable way in which, in his basket-seat, he tilted himself
towards Mary Gosselin. It pointed to a pleasant reason for a long walk.
This young lady, of five-and-twenty, had black hair and blue eyes; a
combination often associated with the effect of beauty. The beauty in
this case, however, was dim and latent, not vulgarly obvious; and if her
height and slenderness gave that impression of length of line which, as
we know, is the fashion, Mary Gosselin had on the other hand too much
expression to be generally admired. Every one thought her intellectual;
a few of the most simple-minded even thought her plain. What Guy
Firminger thought--or rather what he took for granted, for he was not
built up on depths of reflection--will probably appear from this
narrative.

"Yes indeed; things have come to a pass that's awful for _us_" the girl
announced.

"For _us_, you mean," said Firminger. "We're hunted like the ostrich;
we're trapped and stalked and run to earth. We go in fear--I assure you
we do."

"Are _you_ hunted, Guy?" Mrs. Gosselin asked with an inflection of her
own.

"Yes, Mrs. Gosselin, even _moi qui vous parle_, the ordinary male of
commerce, inconceivable as it may appear. I know something about it."

"And of whom do you go in fear?" Mary Gosselin took up an uncut book and
a paper-knife which she had laid down on the advent of the other
visitors.

"My dear child, of Diana and her nymphs, of the spinster at large. She's
always out with her rifle. And it isn't only that; you know there's
always a second gun, a walking arsenal, at her heels. I forget, for the
moment, who Diana's mother was, and the genealogy of the nymphs; but not
only do the old ladies know the younger ones are out, they distinctly go
_with_ them."

"Who was Diana's mother, my dear?" Mrs. Gosselin inquired of her
daughter.

"She was a beautiful old lady with pink ribbons in her cap and a genius
for knitting," the girl replied, cutting her book.

"Oh, I'm not speaking of you two dears; you're not like anyone else;
you're an immense comfort," said Guy Firminger. "But they've reduced it
to a science, and I assure you that if one were any one in particular,
if one were not protected by one's obscurity, one's life would be a
burden. Upon my honour one wouldn't escape. I've seen it, I've watched
them. Look at poor Beaupré--look at little Raddle over there. I object
to him, but I bleed for him."

"Lord Beaupré won't marry again," said Mrs. Gosselin with an air of
conviction.

"So much the worse for him!"

"Come--that's a concession to our charms!" Mary laughed.

But the ruthless young man explained away his concession. "I mean that
to be married's the only protection--or else to be engaged."

"To be permanently engaged,--wouldn't that do?" Mary Gosselin asked.

"Beautifully--I would try it if I were a _parti_."

"And how's the little boy?" Mrs. Gosselin presently inquired.

"What little boy?"

"Your little cousin--Lord Beaupré's child: isn't it a boy?"

"Oh, poor little beggar, he isn't up to much. He was awfully cut up by
scarlet fever."

"You're not the rose indeed, but you're tolerably near it," the elder
lady presently continued.

"What do you call near it? Not even in the same garden--not in any
garden at all, alas!"

"There are three lives--but after all!"

"Dear lady, don't be homicidal!"

"What do you call the 'rose'?" Mary asked of her mother.

"The title," said Mrs. Gosselin, promptly but softly.

Something in her tone made Firminger laugh aloud. "You don't mention the
property."

"Oh, I mean the whole thing."

"Is the property very large?" said Mary Gosselin.

"Fifty thousand a year," her mother responded; at which the young man
laughed out again.

"Take care, mamma, or we shall be thought to be out with our guns!" the
girl interposed; a recommendation that drew from Guy Firminger the just
remark that there would be time enough for this when his prospects
should be worth speaking of. He leaned over to pick up his hat and
stick, as if it were his time to go, but he didn't go for another
quarter of an hour, and during these minutes his prospects received some
frank consideration. He was Lord Beaupré's first cousin, and the three
intervening lives were his lordship's own, that of his little sickly
son, and that of his uncle the Major, who was also Guy's uncle and with
whom the young man was at present staying. It was from homely Trist, the
Major's house, that he had walked over to Mrs. Gosselin's. Frank
Firminger, who had married in youth a woman with something of her own
and eventually left the army, had nothing but girls, but he was only of
middle age and might possibly still have a son. At any rate his life was
a very good one. Beaupré might marry again, and, marry or not, he was
barely thirty-three and might live to a great age. The child moreover,
poor little devil, would doubtless, with the growing consciousness of an
incentive (there was none like feeling you were in people's way),
develop a capacity for duration; so that altogether Guy professed
himself, with the best will in the world, unable to take a rosy view of
the disappearance of obstacles. He treated the subject with a jocularity
that, in view of the remoteness of his chance, was not wholly tasteless,
and the discussion, between old friends and in the light of this
extravagance, was less crude than perhaps it sounds. The young man quite
declined to see any latent brilliancy in his future. They had all been
lashing him up, his poor dear mother, his uncle Frank, and Beaupré as
well, to make that future political; but even if he should get in (he
was nursing--oh, so languidly!--a possible opening), it would only be
into the shallow edge of the stream. He would stand there like a tall
idiot with the water up to his ankles. He didn't know how to swim--in
that element; he didn't know how to do anything.

"I think you're very perverse, my dear," said Mrs. Gosselin. "I'm sure
you have great dispositions."

"For what--except for sitting here and talking with you and Mary? I
revel in this sort of thing, but I scarcely like anything else."

"You'd do very well if you weren't so lazy," Mary said. "I believe
you're the very laziest person in the world."

"So do I--the very laziest in the world," the young man contentedly
replied. "But how can I regret it, when it keeps me so quiet, when (I
might even say) it makes me so amiable?"

"You'll have, one of these days, to get over your quietness, and perhaps
even a little over your amiability," Mrs. Gosselin sagaciously stated.

"I devoutly hope not."

"You'll have to perform the duties of your position."

"Do you mean keep my stump of a broom in order and my crossing
irreproachable?"

"You may say what you like; you will be a _parti_," Mrs. Gosselin
continued.

"Well, then, if the worst comes to the worst I shall do what I said just
now: I shall get some good plausible girl to see me through."

"The proper way to 'get' her will be to marry her. After you're married
you won't be a _parti_."

"Dear mamma, he'll think you're already levelling your rifle!" Mary
Gosselin laughingly wailed.

Guy Firminger looked at her a moment. "I say, Mary, wouldn't _you_ do?"

"For the good plausible girl? Should I be plausible enough?"

"Surely--what could be more natural? Everything would seem to contribute
to the suitability of our alliance. I should be known to have known you
for years--from childhood's sunny hour; I should be known to have
bullied you, and even to have been bullied _by_ you, in the period of
pinafores. My relations from a tender age with your brother, which led
to our schoolroom romps in holidays and to the happy footing on which
your mother has always been so good as to receive me here, would add to
all the presumptions of intimacy. People would accept such a conclusion
as inevitable."

"Among all your reasons you don't mention the young lady's attractions,"
said Mary Gosselin.

Firminger stared a moment, his clear eye lighted by his happy thought.
"I don't mention the young man's. They would be so obvious, on one side
and the other, as to be taken for granted."

"And is it your idea that one should pretend to be engaged to you all
one's life?"

"Oh no, simply till I should have had time to look round. I'm determined
not to be hustled and bewildered into matrimony--to be dragged to the
shambles before I know where I am. With such an arrangement as the one I
speak of I should be able to take my time, to keep my head, to make my
choice."

"And how would the young lady make hers?"

"How do you mean, hers?"

"The selfishness of men is something exquisite. Suppose the young
lady--if it's conceivable that you should find one idiotic enough to be
a party to such a transaction--suppose the poor girl herself should
happen to wish to be _really_ engaged?"

Guy Firminger thought a moment, with his slow but not stupid smile. "Do
you mean to _me_?"

"To you--or to some one else."

"Oh, if she'd give me notice I'd let her off."

"Let her off till you could find a substitute?"

"Yes--but I confess it would be a great inconvenience. People wouldn't
take the second one so seriously."

"She would have to make a sacrifice; she would have to wait till you
should know where you were," Mrs. Gosselin suggested.

"Yes, but where would _her_ advantage come in?" Mary persisted.

"Only in the pleasure of charity; the moral satisfaction of doing a
fellow a good turn," said Firminger.

"You must think people are keen to oblige you!"

"Ah, but surely I could count on _you_, couldn't I?" the young man
asked.

Mary had finished cutting her book; she got up and flung it down on the
tea-table. "What a preposterous conversation!" she exclaimed with force,
tossing the words from her as she tossed her book; and, looking round
her vaguely a moment, without meeting Guy Firminger's eye, she walked
away to the house.

Firminger sat watching her; then he said serenely to her mother: "Why
has our Mary left us?"

"She has gone to get something, I suppose."

"What has she gone to get?"

"A little stick to beat you perhaps."

"You don't mean I've been objectionable?"

"Dear, no--I'm joking. One thing is very certain," pursued Mrs.
Gosselin; "that you ought to work--to try to get on exactly as if
nothing could ever happen. Oughtn't you?" She threw off the question
mechanically as her visitor continued silent.

"I'm sure she doesn't like it!" he exclaimed, without heeding her
appeal.

"Doesn't like what?"

"My free play of mind. It's perhaps too much in the key of our old
romps."

"You're very clever; she always likes _that_," said Mrs. Gosselin. "You
ought to go in for something serious, for something honourable," she
continued, "just as much as if you had nothing at all to look to."

"Words of wisdom, dear Mrs. Gosselin," Firminger replied, rising slowly
from his relaxed attitude. "But what _have_ I to look to."

She raised her mild, deep eyes to him as he stood before her--she might
have been a fairy godmother. "Everything!"

"But you know I can't poison them!"

"That won't be necessary."

He looked at her an instant; then with a laugh: "One might think _you_
would undertake it!"

"I almost would--for _you_. Good-bye."

"Take care,--if they _should_ be carried off!" But Mrs. Gosselin only
repeated her good-bye, and the young man departed before Mary had come
back.



II


Nearly two years after Guy Firminger had spent that friendly hour in
Mrs. Gosselin's little garden in Hampshire this far-seeing woman was
enabled (by the return of her son, who at New York, in an English bank,
occupied a position they all rejoiced over--to such great things might
it duly lead), to resume possession, for the season, of the little
London house which her husband had left her to inhabit, but which her
native thrift, in determining her to let it for a term, had converted
into a source of income. Hugh Gosselin, who was thirty years old and at
twenty-three, before his father's death, had been dispatched to America
to exert himself, was understood to be doing very well--so well that his
devotion to the interests of his employers had been rewarded, for the
first time, with a real holiday. He was to remain in England from May to
August, undertaking, as he said, to make it all right if during this
time his mother should occupy (to contribute to his entertainment), the
habitation in Chester Street. He was a small, preoccupied young man,
with a sharpness as acquired as a new hat; he struck his mother and
sister as intensely American. For the first few days after his arrival
they were startled by his intonations, though they admitted that they
had had an escape when he reminded them that he might have brought with
him an accent embodied in a wife.

"When you do take one," said Mrs. Gosselin, who regarded such an
accident, over there, as inevitable, "you must charge her high for it."

It was not with this question, however, that the little family in
Chester Street was mainly engaged, but with the last incident in the
extraordinary succession of events which, like a chapter of romance, had
in the course of a few months converted their vague and impecunious
friend into a personage envied and honoured. It was as if a blight had
been cast on all Guy Firminger's hindrances. On the day Hugh Gosselin
sailed from New York the delicate little boy at Bosco had succumbed to
an attack of diphtheria. His father had died of typhoid the previous
winter at Naples; his uncle, a few weeks later, had had a fatal accident
in the hunting-field. So strangely, so rapidly had the situation cleared
up, had his fate and theirs worked for him. Guy had opened his eyes one
morning to an earldom which carried with it a fortune not alone
nominally but really great. Mrs. Gosselin and Mary had not written to
him, but they knew he was at Bosco; he had remained there after the
funeral of the late little lord. Mrs. Gosselin, who heard everything,
had heard somehow that he was behaving with the greatest consideration,
giving the guardians, the trustees, whatever they were called, plenty of
time to do everything. Everything was comparatively simple; in the
absence of collaterals there were so few other people concerned. The
principal relatives were poor Frank Firminger's widow and her girls, who
had seen themselves so near to new honours and comforts. Probably the
girls would expect their cousin Guy to marry one of them, and think it
the least he could decently do; a view the young man himself (if he were
very magnanimous) might possibly embrace. The question would be whether
he would be very magnanimous. These young ladies exhausted in their
three persons the numerous varieties of plainness. On the other hand Guy
Firminger--or Lord Beaupré, as one would have to begin to call him
now--was unmistakably kind. Mrs. Gosselin appealed to her son as to
whether their noble friend were not unmistakably kind.

"Of course I've known him always, and that time he came out to
America--when was it? four years ago--I saw him every day. I like him
awfully and all that, but since you push me, you know," said Hugh
Gosselin, "I'm bound to say that the first thing to mention in any
description of him would be--if you wanted to be quite correct--that
he's unmistakably selfish."

"I see--I see," Mrs. Gosselin unblushingly replied. "Of course I know
what you mean," she added in a moment. "But is he any more so than any
one else? Every one's unmistakably selfish."

"Every one but you and Mary," said the young man.

"And _you_, dear!" his mother smiled. "But a person may be kind, you
know--mayn't he?--at the same time that he _is_ selfish. There are
different sorts."

"Different sorts of kindness?" Hugh Gosselin asked with a laugh; and the
inquiry undertaken by his mother occupied them for the moment, demanding
a subtlety of treatment from which they were not conscious of shrinking,
of which rather they had an idea that they were perhaps exceptionally
capable. They came back to the temperate view that Guy would never put
himself out, would probably never do anything great, but might show
himself all the same a delightful member of society. Yes, he was
probably selfish, like other people; but unlike most of them he was,
somehow, amiably, attachingly, sociably, almost lovably selfish. Without
doing anything great he would yet be a great success--a big, pleasant,
gossiping, lounging and, in its way doubtless very splendid, presence.
He would have no ambition, and it was ambition that made selfishness
ugly. Hugh and his mother were sure of this last point until Mary,
before whom the discussion, when it reached this stage, happened to be
carried on, checked them by asking whether that, on the contrary, were
not just what was supposed to make it fine.

"Oh, he only wants to be comfortable," said her brother; "but he _does_
want it!"

"There'll be a tremendous rush for him," Mrs. Gosselin prophesied to her
son.

"Oh, he'll never marry. It will be too much trouble."

"It's done here without any trouble--for the men. One sees how long
you've been out of the country."

"There was a girl in New York whom he might have married--he really
liked her. But he wouldn't turn round for her."

"Perhaps she wouldn't turn round for _him_," said Mary.

"I daresay she'll turn round _now_," Mrs. Gosselin rejoined; on which
Hugh mentioned that there was nothing to be feared from her, all her
revolutions had been accomplished. He added that nothing would make any
difference--so intimate was his conviction that Beaupré would preserve
his independence.

"Then I think he's not so selfish as you say," Mary declared; "or at any
rate one will never know whether he is. Isn't married life the great
chance to show it?"

"Your father never showed it," said Mrs. Gosselin; and as her children
were silent in presence of this tribute to the departed she added,
smiling: "Perhaps you think that _I_ did!" They embraced her, to
indicate what they thought, and the conversation ended, when she had
remarked that Lord Beaupré was a man who would be perfectly easy to
manage _after_ marriage, with Hugh's exclaiming that this was doubtless
exactly why he wished to keep out of it.

Such was evidently his wish, as they were able to judge in Chester
Street when he came up to town. He appeared there oftener than was to
have been expected, not taking himself in his new character at all too
seriously to find stray half-hours for old friends. It was plain that he
was going to do just as he liked, that he was not a bit excited or
uplifted by his change of fortune. Mary Gosselin observed that he had no
imagination--she even reproached him with the deficiency to his face; an
incident which showed indeed how little seriously _she_ took him. He had
no idea of playing a part, and yet he would have been clever enough. He
wasn't even systematic about being simple; his simplicity was a series
of accidents and indifferences. Never was a man more conscientiously
superficial. There were matters on which he valued Mrs. Gosselin's
judgment and asked her advice--without, as usually appeared later, ever
taking it; such questions, mainly, as the claims of a predecessor's
servants, and those, in respect to social intercourse, of the
clergyman's family. He didn't like his parson--what was a fellow to do
when he didn't like his parson? What he did like was to talk with Hugh
about American investments, and it was amusing to Hugh, though he tried
not to show his amusement, to find himself looking at Guy Firminger in
the light of capital. To Mary he addressed from the first the oddest
snatches of confidential discourse, rendered in fact, however, by the
levity of his tone, considerably less confidential than in intention. He
had something to tell her that he joked about, yet without admitting
that it was any less important for being laughable. It was neither more
nor less than that Charlotte Firminger, the eldest of his late uncle's
four girls, had designated to him in the clearest manner the person she
considered he ought to marry. She appealed to his sense of justice, she
spoke and wrote, or at any rate she looked and moved, she sighed and
sang, in the name of common honesty. He had had four letters from her
that week, and to his knowledge there were a series of people in London,
people she could bully, whom she had got to promise to take her in for
the season. She was going to be on the spot, she was going to follow him
up. He took his stand on common honesty, but he had a mortal horror of
Charlotte. At the same time, when a girl had a jaw like that and had
marked you--really _marked_ you, mind, you felt your safety oozing away.
He had given them during the past three months, all those terrible
girls, every sort of present that Bond Street could supply: but these
demonstrations had only been held to constitute another pledge.
Therefore what was a fellow to do? Besides, there were other portents;
the air was thick with them, as the sky over battlefields was darkened
by the flight of vultures. They were flocking, the birds of prey, from
every quarter, and every girl in England, by Jove! was going to be
thrown at his head. What had he done to deserve such a fate? He wanted
to stop in England and see all sorts of things through; but how could he
stand there and face such a charge? Yet what good would it do to bolt?
Wherever he should go there would be fifty of them there first. On his
honour he could say that he didn't deserve it; he had never, to his own
sense, been a flirt, such a flirt at least as to have given anyone a
handle. He appealed candidly to Mary Gosselin to know whether his past
conduct justified such penalties. "_Have_ I been a flirt?--have I given
anyone a handle?" he inquired with pathetic intensity.

She met his appeal by declaring that he had been awful, committing
himself right and left; and this manner of treating his affliction
contributed to the sarcastic publicity (as regarded the little house in
Chester Street) which presently became its natural element. Lord
Beaupré's comical and yet thoroughly grounded view of his danger was
soon a frequent theme among the Gosselins, who however had their own
reasons for not communicating the alarm. They had no motive for
concealing their interest in their old friend, but their allusions to
him among their other friends may be said on the whole to have been
studied. His state of mind recalled of course to Mary and her mother the
queer talk about his prospects that they had had, in the country, that
afternoon on which Mrs. Gosselin had been so strangely prophetic (she
confessed that she had had a flash of divination: the future had been
mysteriously revealed to her), and poor Guy too had seen himself quite
as he was to be. He had seen his nervousness, under inevitable pressure,
deepen to a panic, and he now, in intimate hours, made no attempt to
disguise that a panic had become his portion. It was a fixed idea with
him that he should fall a victim to woven toils, be caught in a trap
constructed with superior science. The science evolved in an
enterprising age by this branch of industry, the manufacture of the trap
matrimonial, he had terrible anecdotes to illustrate; and what had he on
his lips but a scientific term when he declared, as he perpetually did,
that it was his fate to be hypnotised?

Mary Gosselin reminded him, they each in turn reminded him that his
safeguard was to fall in love: were he once to put himself under that
protection all the mothers and maids in Mayfair would not prevail
against him. He replied that this was just the impossibility; it took
leisure and calmness and opportunity and a free mind to fall in love,
and never was a man less open to such experiences. He was literally
fighting his way. He reminded the girl of his old fancy for pretending
already to have disposed of his hand if he could put that hand on a
young person who should like him well enough to be willing to
participate in the fraud. She would have to place herself in rather a
false position of course--have to take a certain amount of trouble; but
there would after all be a good deal of fun in it (there was always fun
in duping the world,) between the pair themselves, the two happy
comedians.

"Why should they both be happy?" Mary Gosselin asked. "I understand why
you should; but, frankly, I don't quite grasp the reason of _her_
pleasure."

Lord Beaupré, with his sunny human eyes, thought a moment. "Why, for
the lark, as they say, and that sort of thing. I should be awfully nice
to her."

"She would require indeed to be in want of recreation!"

"Ah, but I should want a good sort--a quiet, reasonable one, you know!"
he somewhat eagerly interposed.

"You're too delightful!" Mary Gosselin exclaimed, continuing to laugh.
He thanked her for this appreciation, and she returned to her
point--that she didn't really see the advantage his accomplice could
hope to enjoy as her compensation for extreme disturbance.

Guy Firminger stared. "But what extreme disturbance?"

"Why, it would take a lot of time; it might become intolerable."

"You mean I ought to pay her--to hire her for the season?"

Mary Gosselin considered him a moment. "Wouldn't marriage come cheaper
at once?" she asked with a quieter smile.

"You _are_ chaffing me!" he sighed forgivingly. "Of course she would
have to be good-natured enough to pity me."

"Pity's akin to love. If she were good-natured enough to want so to help
you she'd be good-natured enough to want to marry you. That would be
_her_ idea of help."

"Would it be _yours_?" Lord Beaupré asked rather eagerly.

"You're too absurd! You must sail your own boat!" the girl answered,
turning away.

That evening at dinner she stated to her companions that she had never
seen a fatuity so dense, so serene, so preposterous as his lordship's.

"Fatuity, my dear! what do you mean?" her mother inquired.

"Oh, mamma, you know perfectly." Mary Gosselin spoke with a certain
impatience.

"If you mean he's conceited I'm bound to say I don't agree with you,"
her brother observed. "He's too indifferent to everyone's opinion for
that."

"He's not vain, he's not proud, he's not pompous," said Mrs. Gosselin.

Mary was silent a moment. "He takes more things for granted than anyone
I ever saw."

"What sort of things?"

"Well, one's interest in his affairs."

"With old friends surely a gentleman may."

"Of course," said Hugh Gosselin, "old friends have in turn the right to
take for granted a corresponding interest on _his_ part."

"Well, who could be nicer to us than he is or come to see us oftener?"
his mother asked.

"He comes exactly for the purpose I speak of--to talk about himself,"
said Mary.

"There are thousands of girls who would be delighted with his talk,"
Mrs. Gosselin returned.

"We agreed long ago that he's intensely selfish," the girl went on; "and
if I speak of it to-day it's not because that in itself is anything of a
novelty. What I'm freshly struck with is simply that he more shamelessly
shows it."

"He shows it, exactly," said Hugh; "he shows all there is. There it is,
on the surface; there are not depths of it underneath."

"He's not hard," Mrs. Gosselin contended; "he's not impervious."

"Do you mean he's soft?" Mary asked.

"I mean he's yielding." And Mrs. Gosselin, with considerable expression,
looked across at her daughter. She added, before they rose from dinner,
that poor Beaupré had plenty of difficulties and that she thought, for
her part, they ought in common loyalty to do what they could to assist
him.

For a week nothing more passed between the two ladies on the subject of
their noble friend, and in the course of this week they had the
amusement of receiving in Chester Street a member of Hugh's American
circle, Mr. Bolton-Brown, a young man from New York. He was a person
engaged in large affairs, for whom Hugh Gosselin professed the highest
regard, from whom in New York he had received much hospitality, and for
whose advent he had from the first prepared his companions. Mrs.
Gosselin begged the amiable stranger to stay with them, and if she
failed to overcome his hesitation it was because his hotel was near at
hand and he should be able to see them often. It became evident that he
would do so, and, to the two ladies, as the days went by, equally
evident that no objection to such a relation was likely to arise. Mr.
Bolton-Brown was delightfully fresh; the most usual expressions acquired
on his lips a wellnigh comical novelty, the most superficial sentiments,
in the look with which he accompanied them, a really touching sincerity.
He was unmarried and good-looking, clever and natural, and if he was not
very rich was at least very free-handed. He literally strewed the path
of the ladies in Chester Street with flowers, he choked them with French
confectionery. Hugh, however, who was often rather mysterious on
monetary questions, placed in a light sufficiently clear the fact that
his friend had in Wall Street (they knew all about Wall Street),
improved each shining hour. They introduced him to Lord Beaupré, who
thought him "tremendous fun," as Hugh said, and who immediately declared
that the four must spend a Sunday at Bosco a week or two later. The date
of this visit was fixed--Mrs. Gosselin had uttered a comprehensive
acceptance; but after Guy Firminger had taken leave of them (this had
been his first appearance since the odd conversation with Mary), our
young lady confided to her mother that she should not be able to join
the little party. She expressed the conviction that it would be all that
was essential if Mrs. Gosselin should go with the two others. On being
pressed to communicate the reason of this aloofness Mary was able to
give no better one than that she never had cared for Bosco.

"What makes you hate him so?" her mother presently broke out in a tone
which brought the red to the girl's cheek. Mary denied that she
entertained for Lord Beaupré any sentiment so intense; to which Mrs.
Gosselin rejoined with some sternness and, no doubt, considerable
wisdom: "Look out what you do then, or you'll be thought by everyone to
be in love with him!"



III


I know not whether it was this danger--that of appearing to be moved to
extremes--that weighed with Mary Gosselin; at any rate when the day
arrived she had decided to be perfectly colourless and take her share of
Lord Beaupré's hospitality. On perceiving that the house, when with her
companions she reached it, was full of visitors, she consoled herself
with the sense that such a share would be of the smallest. She even
wondered whether its smallness might not be caused in some degree by the
sufficiently startling presence, in this stronghold of the single life,
of Maud Ashbury and her mother. It was true that during the Saturday
evening she never saw their host address an observation to them; but she
was struck, as she had been struck before, with the girl's cold and
magnificent beauty. It was very well to say she had "gone off"; she was
still handsomer than anyone else. She had failed in everything she had
tried; the campaign undertaken with so much energy against young Raddle
had been conspicuously disastrous. Young Raddle had married his
grandmother, or a person who might have filled such an office, and Maud
was a year older, a year more disappointed and a year more ridiculous.
Nevertheless one could scarcely believe that a creature with such
advantages would always fail, though indeed the poor girl was stupid
enough to be a warning. Perhaps it would be at Bosco, or with the master
of Bosco, that fate had appointed her to succeed. Except Mary herself
she was the only young unmarried woman on the scene, and Mary glowed
with the generous sense of not being a competitor. She felt as much out
of the question as the blooming wives, the heavy matrons, who formed the
rest of the female contingent. Before the evening closed, however, her
host, who, she saw, was delightful in his own house, mentioned to her
that he had a couple of guests who had not been invited.

"Not invited?"

"They drove up to my door as they might have done to an inn. They asked
for rooms and complained of those that were given them. Don't pretend
not to know who they are."

"Do you mean the Ashburys? How amusing!"

"Don't laugh; it freezes my blood."

"Do you really mean you're afraid of them?"

"I tremble like a leaf. Some monstrous ineluctable fate seems to look at
me out of their eyes."

"That's because you secretly admire Maud. How can you help it? She's
extremely good-looking, and if you get rid of her mother she'll become
a very nice girl."

"It's an odious thing, no doubt, to say about a young person under one's
own roof, but I don't think I ever saw any one who happened to be less
to my taste," said Guy Firminger. "I don't know why I don't turn them
out even now."

Mary persisted in sarcasm. "Perhaps you can make her have a worse time
by letting her stay."

"_Please_ don't laugh," her interlocutor repeated. "Such a fact as I
have mentioned to you seems to me to speak volumes--to show you what my
life is."

"Oh, your life, your life!" Mary Gosselin murmured, with her mocking
note.

"Don't you agree that at such a rate it may easily become impossible?"

"Many people would change with you. I don't see what there is for you to
do but to bear your cross!"

"That's easy talk!" Lord Beaupré sighed.

"Especially from me, do you mean? How do you know I don't bear mine?"

"Yours?" he asked vaguely.

"How do you know that _I_'m not persecuted, that _my_ footsteps are not
dogged, that _my_ life isn't a burden?"

They were walking in the old gardens, the proprietor of which, at this,
stopped short. "Do you mean by fellows who want to marry you?"

His tone produced on his companion's part an irrepressible peal of
hilarity; but she walked on as she exclaimed: "You speak as if there
couldn't _be_ such madmen!"

"Of course such a charming girl must be made up to," Guy Firminger
conceded as he overtook her.

"I don't speak of it; I keep quiet about it."

"You realise then, at any rate, that it's all horrid when you don't care
for them."

"I suffer in silence, because I know there are worse tribulations. It
seems to me you ought to remember that," Mary continued. "Your cross is
small compared with your crown. You've everything in the world that most
people most desire, and I'm bound to say I think your life is made very
comfortable for you. If you're oppressed by the quantity of interest and
affection you inspire you ought simply to make up your mind to bear up
and be cheerful under it."

Lord Beaupré received this admonition with perfect good humour; he
professed himself able to do it full justice. He remarked that he would
gladly give up some of his material advantages to be a little less
badgered, and that he had been quite content with his former
insignificance. No doubt, however, such annoyances were the essential
drawbacks of ponderous promotions; one had to pay for everything. Mary
was quite right to rebuke him; her own attitude, as a young woman much
admired, was a lesson to his irritability. She cut this appreciation
short, speaking of something else; but a few minutes later he broke out
irrelevantly: "Why, if you are hunted as well as I, that dodge I
proposed to you would be just the thing for us _both_!" He had evidently
been reasoning it out.

Mary Gosselin was silent at first; she only paused gradually in their
walk at a point where four long alleys met. In the centre of the circle,
on a massive pedestal, rose in Italian bronze a florid, complicated
image, so that the place made a charming old-world picture. The grounds
of Bosco were stately without stiffness and full of marble terraces and
misty avenues. The fountains in particular were royal. The girl had told
her mother in London that she disliked this fine residence, but she now
looked round her with a vague pleased sigh, holding up her glass (she
had been condemned to wear one, with a long handle, since she was
fifteen), to consider the weather-stained garden group. "What a perfect
place of its kind!" she musingly exclaimed.

"Wouldn't it really be just the thing?" Lord Beaupré went on, with the
eagerness of his idea.

"Wouldn't what be just the thing?"

"Why, the defensive alliance we've already talked of. You wanted to know
the good it would do _you_. Now you see the good it would do you!"

"I don't like practical jokes," said Mary. "The remedy's worse than the
disease," she added; and she began to follow one of the paths that took
the direction of the house.

Poor Lord Beaupré was absurdly in love with his invention; he had all
an inventor's importunity. He kept up his attempt to place his "dodge"
in a favourable light, in spite of a further objection from his
companion, who assured him that it was one of those contrivances which
break down in practice in just the proportion in which they make a
figure in theory. At last she said: "I was not sincere just now when I
told you I'm worried. I'm not worried!"

"They _don't_ buzz about you?" Guy Firminger asked.

She hesitated an instant. "They buzz about me; but at bottom it's
flattering and I don't mind it. Now please drop the subject."

He dropped the subject, though not without congratulating her on the
fact that, unlike his infirm self, she could keep her head and her
temper. His infirmity found a trap laid for it before they had proceeded
twenty yards, as was proved by his sudden exclamation of horror. "Good
Heavens--if there isn't Lottie!"

Mary perceived, in effect, in the distance a female figure coming
towards them over a stretch of lawn, and she simultaneously saw, as a
gentleman passed from behind a clump of shrubbery, that it was not
unattended. She recognized Charlotte Firminger, and she also
distinguished the gentleman. She was moved to larger mirth at the dismay
expressed by poor Firminger, but she was able to articulate: "Walking
with Mr. Brown."

Lord Beaupré stopped again before they were joined by the pair. "Does
_he_ buzz about you?"

"Mercy, what questions you ask!" his companion exclaimed.

"Does he--_please_?" the young man repeated with odd intensity.

Mary looked at him an instant; she was puzzled by the deep annoyance
that had flushed through the essential good-humour of his face. Then she
saw that this annoyance had exclusive reference to poor Charlotte; so
that it left her free to reply, with another laugh: "Well, yes--he does.
But you know I like it!"

"I don't, then!" Before she could have asked him, even had she wished
to, in what manner such a circumstance concerned him, he added with his
droll agitation: "I never invited _her_, either! Don't let her get at
me!"

"What can I do?" Mary demanded as the others advanced.

"Please take her away; keep her yourself! I'll take the American, I'll
keep _him_," he murmured, inconsequently, as a bribe.

"But I don't object to him."

"Do you like him so much?"

"Very much indeed," the girl replied.

The reply was perhaps lost upon her interlocutor, whose eye now fixed
itself gloomily on the dauntless Charlotte. As Miss Firminger came
nearer he exclaimed almost loud enough for her to hear: "I think I shall
_murder_ her some day!"

Mary Gosselin's first impression had been that, in his panic, under the
empire of that fixed idea to which he confessed himself subject, he
attributed to his kinswoman machinations and aggressions of which she
was incapable; an impression that might have been confirmed by this
young lady's decorous placidity, her passionless eyes, her
expressionless cheeks and colourless tones. She was ugly, yet she was
orthodox; she was not what writers of books called intense. But after
Mary, to oblige their host, had tried, successfully enough, to be
crafty, had drawn her on to stroll a little in advance of the two
gentlemen, she became promptly aware, by the mystical influence of
propinquity, that Miss Firminger was indeed full of views, of a purpose
single, simple and strong, which gave her the effect of a person
carrying with a stiff, steady hand, with eyes fixed and lips compressed,
a cup charged to the brim. She had driven over to lunch, driven from
somewhere in the neighbourhood; she had picked up some weak woman as an
escort. Mary, though she knew the neighbourhood, failed to recognize her
base of operations, and, as Charlotte was not specific, ended by
suspecting that, far from being entertained by friends, she had put up
at an inn and hired a fly. This suspicion startled her; it gave her for
the first time something of the measure of the passions engaged, and she
wondered to what the insecurity complained of by Guy might lead.
Charlotte, on arriving, had gone through a part of the house in quest of
its master (the servants being unable to tell her where he was), and she
had finally come upon Mr. Bolton-Brown, who was looking at old books in
the library. He had placed himself at her service, as if he had been
trained immediately to recognize in such a case his duty, and informing
her that he believed Lord Beaupré to be in the grounds, had come out
with her to help to find him. Lottie Firminger questioned her companion
about this accommodating person; she intimated that he was rather odd
but rather nice. Mary mentioned to her that Lord Beaupré thought highly
of him; she believed they were going somewhere together. At this Miss
Firminger turned round to look for them, but they had already
disappeared, and the girl became ominously dumb.

Mary wondered afterwards what profit she could hope to derive from such
proceedings; they struck her own sense, naturally, as disreputable and
desperate. She was equally unable to discover the compensation they
offered, in another variety, to poor Maud Ashbury, whom Lord Beaupré,
the greater part of the day, neglected as conscientiously as he
neglected his cousin. She asked herself if he should be blamed, and
replied that the others should be blamed first. He got rid of Charlotte
somehow after tea; she had to fall back to her mysterious lines. Mary
knew this method would have been detestable to him--he hated to force
his friendly nature; she was sorry for him and wished to lose sight of
him. She wished not to be mixed up even indirectly with his
tribulations, and the fevered faces of the Ashburys were particularly
dreadful to her. She spent as much of the long summer afternoon as
possible out of the house, which indeed on such an occasion emptied
itself of most of its inmates. Mary Gosselin asked her brother to join
her in a devious ramble; she might have had other society, but she was
in a mood to prefer his. These two were "great chums," and they had been
separated so long that they had arrears of talk to make up. They had
been at Bosco more than once, and though Hugh Gosselin said that the
land of the free (which he had assured his sister was even more enslaved
than dear old England) made one forget there were such spots on earth,
they both remembered, a couple of miles away, a little ancient church to
which the walk across the fields would be the right thing. They talked
of other things as they went, and among them they talked of Mr.
Bolton-Brown, in regard to whom Hugh, as scantily addicted to enthusiasm
as to bursts of song (he was determined not to be taken in), became, in
commendation, almost lyrical. Mary asked what he had done with his
paragon, and he replied that he believed him to have gone out stealthily
to sketch: they might come across him. He was extraordinarily clever at
water-colours, but haunted with the fear that the public practice of
such an art on Sunday was viewed with disfavour in England. Mary
exclaimed that this was the respectable fact, and when her brother
ridiculed the idea she told him she had already noticed he had lost all
sense of things at home, so that Mr. Bolton-Brown was apparently a
better Englishman than he. "He is indeed--he's awfully artificial!" Hugh
returned; but it must be added that in spite of this rigour their
American friend, when they reached the goal of their walk, was to be
perceived in an irregular attitude in the very churchyard. He was
perched on an old flat tomb, with a box of colours beside him and a
sketch half completed. Hugh asserted that this exercise was the only
thing that Mr. Bolton-Brown really cared for, but the young man
protested against the imputation in the face of an achievement so
modest. He showed his sketch to Mary however, and it consoled her for
not having kept up her own experiments; she never could make her trees
so leafy. He had found a lovely bit on the other side of the hill, a bit
he should like to come back to, and he offered to show it to his
friends. They were on the point of starting with him to look at it when
Hugh Gosselin, taking out his watch, remembered the hour at which he had
promised to be at the house again to give his mother, who wanted a
little mild exercise, his arm. His sister, at this, said she would go
back with him; but Bolton-Brown interposed an earnest inquiry. Mightn't
she let Hugh keep his appointment and let _him_ take her over the hill
and bring her home?

"Happy thought--_do_ that!" said Hugh, with a crudity that showed the
girl how completely he had lost his English sense. He perceived however
in an instant that she was embarrassed, whereupon he went on: "My dear
child, I've walked with girls so often in America that we really ought
to let poor Brown walk with one in England." I know not if it was the
effect of this plea or that of some further eloquence of their friend;
at any rate Mary Gosselin in the course of another minute had accepted
the accident of Hugh's secession, had seen him depart with an injunction
to her to render it clear to poor Brown that he had made quite a
monstrous request. As she went over the hill with her companion she
reflected that since she had granted the request it was not in her
interest to pretend she had gone out of her way. She wondered moreover
whether her brother had wished to throw them together: it suddenly
occurred to her that the whole incident might have been prearranged. The
idea made her a little angry with Hugh; it led her however to entertain
no resentment against the other party (if party Mr. Brown had been) to
the transaction. He told her all the delight that certain sweet old
corners of rural England excited in his mind, and she liked him for
hovering near some of her own secrets.

Hugh Gosselin meanwhile, at Bosco, strolling on the terrace with his
mother, who preferred walks that were as slow as conspiracies and had
had much to say to him about his extraordinary indiscretion, repeated
over and over (it ended by irritating her), that as he himself had been
out for hours with American girls it was only fair to let their friend
have a turn with an English one.

"Pay as much as you like, but don't pay with your sister!" Mrs. Gosselin
replied; while Hugh submitted that it was just his sister who was
required to make the payment _his_. She turned his logic to easy scorn
and she waited on the terrace till she had seen the two explorers
reappear. When the ladies went to dress for dinner she expressed to her
daughter her extreme disapproval of such conduct, and Mary did nothing
more to justify herself than to exclaim at first "Poor dear man!" and
then to say "I was afraid you wouldn't like it." There were reservations
in her silence that made Mrs. Gosselin uneasy, and she was glad that at
dinner Mr. Bolton-Brown had to take in Mrs. Ashbury: it served him so
right. This arrangement had in Mrs. Gosselin's eyes the added merit of
serving Mrs. Ashbury right. She was more uneasy than ever when after
dinner, in the drawing-room, she saw Mary sit for a period on the same
small sofa with the culpable American. This young couple leaned back
together familiarly, and their conversation had the air of being
desultory without being in the least difficult. At last she quitted her
place and went over to them, remarking to Mr. Bolton-Brown that she
wanted him to come and talk a bit to _her_. She conducted him to another
part of the room, which was vast and animated by scattered groups, and
held him there very persuasively, quite maternally, till the approach of
the hour at which the ladies would exchange looks and murmur
good-nights. She made him talk about America, though he wanted to talk
about England, and she judged that she gave him an impression of the
kindest attention, though she was really thinking, in alternation, of
three important things. One of these was a circumstance of which she had
become conscious only just after sitting down with him--the prolonged
absence of Lord Beaupré from the drawing-room; the second was the
absence, equally marked (to her imagination) of Maud Ashbury; the third
was a matter different altogether. "England gives one such a sense of
immemorial continuity, something that drops like a plummet-line into the
past," said the young American, ingeniously exerting himself while Mrs.
Gosselin, rigidly contemporaneous, strayed into deserts of conjecture.
Had the fact that their host was out of the room any connection with the
fact that the most beautiful, even though the most suicidal, of his
satellites had quitted it? Yet if poor Guy was taking a turn by
starlight on the terrace with the misguided girl, what had he done with
his resentment at her invasion and by what inspiration of despair had
Maud achieved such a triumph? The good lady studied Mrs. Ashbury's face
across the room; she decided that triumph, accompanied perhaps with a
shade of nervousness, looked out of her insincere eyes. An intelligent
consciousness of ridicule was at any rate less present in them than
ever. While Mrs. Gosselin had her infallible finger on the pulse of the
occasion one of the doors opened to readmit Lord Beaupré, who struck
her as pale and who immediately approached Mrs. Ashbury with a remark
evidently intended for herself alone. It led this lady to rise with a
movement of dismay and, after a question or two, leave the room. Lord
Beaupré left it again in her company. Mr. Bolton-Brown had also noticed
the incident; his conversation languished and he asked Mrs. Gosselin if
she supposed anything had happened. She turned it over a moment and then
she said: "Yes, something will have happened to Miss Ashbury."

"What do you suppose? Is she ill?"

"I don't know; we shall see. They're capable of anything."

"Capable of anything?"

"I've guessed it,--she wants to have a grievance."

"A grievance?" Mr. Bolton-Brown was mystified.

"Of course you don't understand; how should you? Moreover it doesn't
signify. But I'm so vexed with them (he's a very old friend of ours)
that really, though I dare say I'm indiscreet, I can't speak civilly of
them."

"Miss Ashbury's a wonderful type," said the young American.

This remark appeared to irritate his companion. "I see perfectly what
has happened; she has made a scene."

"A scene?" Mr. Bolton-Brown was terribly out of it.

"She has tried to be injured--to provoke him, I mean, to some act of
impatience, to some failure of temper, of courtesy. She has asked him if
he wishes her to leave the house at midnight, and he may have
answered----But no, he wouldn't!" Mrs. Gosselin suppressed the wild
supposition.

"How you read it! She looks so quiet."

"Her mother has coached her, and (I won't pretend to say _exactly_ what
has happened) they've done, somehow, what they wanted; they've got him
to do something to them that he'll have to make up for."

"What an evolution of ingenuity!" the young man laughed.

"It often answers."

"Will it in this case?"

Mrs. Gosselin was silent a moment. "It _may_."

"Really, you think?"

"I mean it might if it weren't for something else."

"I'm too judicious to ask what that is."

"I'll tell you when we're back in town," said Mrs. Gosselin, getting up.

Lord Beaupré was restored to them, and the ladies prepared to withdraw.
Before she went to bed Mrs. Gosselin asked him if there had been
anything the matter with Maud; to which he replied with abysmal
blankness (she had never seen him wear just that face) that he was
afraid Miss Ashbury was ill. She proved in fact in the morning too
unwell to return to London: a piece of news communicated to Mrs.
Gosselin at breakfast.

"She'll have to stay; I can't turn her out of the house," said Guy
Firminger.

"Very well; let her stay her fill!"

"I wish you would stay too," the young man went on.

"Do you mean to nurse her?"

"No, her mother must do that. I mean to keep me company."

"_You_? You're not going up?"

"I think I had better wait over to-day, or long enough to see what's the
matter."

"Don't you _know_ what's the matter?"

He was silent a moment. "I may have been nasty last night."

"You have compunctions? You're too good-natured."

"I dare say I hit rather wild. It will look better for me to stop over
twenty-four hours."

Mrs. Gosselin fixed her eyes on a distant object. "Let no one ever say
you're selfish!"

"_Does_ anyone ever say it?"

"You're too generous, you're too soft, you're too foolish. But if it
will give you any pleasure Mary and I will wait till to-morrow."

"And Hugh, too, won't he, and Bolton-Brown?"

"Hugh will do as he pleases. But don't keep the American."

"Why not? He's all right."

"That's why I want him to go," said Mrs. Gosselin, who could treat a
matter with candour, just as she could treat it with humour, at the
right moment.

The party at Bosco broke up and there was a general retreat to town.
Hugh Gosselin pleaded pressing business, he accompanied the young
American to London. His mother and sister came back on the morrow, and
Bolton-Brown went in to see them, as he often did, at tea-time. He found
Mrs. Gosselin alone in the drawing-room, and she took such a convenient
occasion to mention to him, what she had withheld on the eve of their
departure from Bosco, the reason why poor Maud Ashbury's frantic assault
on the master of that property would be vain. He was greatly surprised,
the more so that Hugh hadn't told him. Mrs. Gosselin replied that Hugh
didn't know: she had not seen him all day and it had only just come out.
Hugh's friend at any rate was deeply interested, and his interest took
for several minutes the form of throbbing silence. At last Mrs. Gosselin
heard a sound below, on which she said quickly: "That's Hugh--I'll tell
him now!" She left the room with the request that their visitor would
wait for Mary, who would be down in a moment. During the instants that
he spent alone the visitor lurched, as if he had been on a deck in a
blow, to the window, and stood there with his hands in his pockets,
staring vacantly into Chester Street; then, turning away, he gave
himself, with an odd ejaculation, an impatient shake which had the
effect of enabling him to meet Mary Gosselin composedly enough when she
came in. It took her mother apparently some time to communicate the news
to Hugh, so that Bolton-Brown had a considerable margin for nervousness
and hesitation before he could say to the girl, abruptly, but with an
attempt at a voice properly gay: "You must let me very heartily
congratulate you!"

Mary stared. "On what?"

"On your engagement."

"My engagement?"

"To Lord Beaupré."

Mary Gosselin looked strange; she coloured. "Who told you I'm engaged?"

"Your mother--just now."

"Oh!" the girl exclaimed, turning away. She went and rang the bell for
fresh tea, rang it with noticeable force. But she said "Thank you very
much!" before the servant came.



IV


Bolton-Brown did something that evening toward disseminating the news:
he told it to the first people he met socially after leaving Chester
Street; and this although he had to do himself a certain violence in
speaking. He would have preferred to hold his peace; therefore if he
resisted his inclination it was for an urgent purpose. This purpose was
to prove to himself that he didn't mind. A perfect indifference could be
for him the only result of any understanding Mary Gosselin might arrive
at with anyone, and he wanted to be more and more conscious of his
indifference. He was aware indeed that it required demonstration, and
this was why he was almost feverishly active. He could mentally concede
at least that he had been surprised, for he had suspected nothing at
Bosco. When a fellow was attentive in America everyone knew it, and
judged by this standard Lord Beaupré made no show: how otherwise should
_he_ have achieved that sweet accompanied ramble? Everything at any rate
was lucid now, except perhaps a certain ambiguity in Hugh Gosselin, who
on coming into the drawing-room with his mother had looked flushed and
grave and had stayed only long enough to kiss Mary and go out again.
There had been nothing effusive in the scene; but then there was nothing
effusive in any English scene. This helped to explain why Miss Gosselin
had been so blank during the minutes she spent with him before her
mother came back.

He himself wanted to cultivate tranquillity, and he felt that he did so
the next day in not going again to Chester Street. He went instead to
the British Museum, where he sat quite like an elderly gentleman, with
his hands crossed on the top of his stick and his eyes fixed on an
Assyrian bull. When he came away, however, it was with the resolution to
move briskly; so that he walked westward the whole length of Oxford
Street and arrived at the Marble Arch. He stared for some minutes at
this monument, as in the national collection he had stared at even less
intelligible ones; then brushing away the apprehension that he should
meet two persons riding together, he passed into the park. He didn't
care a straw whom he met. He got upon the grass and made his way to the
southern expanse, and when he reached the Row he dropped into a chair,
rather tired, to watch the capering procession of riders. He watched it
with a lustreless eye, for what he seemed mainly to extract from it was
a vivification of his disappointment. He had had a hope that he should
not be forced to leave London without inducing Mary Gosselin to ride
with him; but that prospect failed, for what he had accomplished in the
British Museum was the determination to go to Paris. He tried to think
of the attractions supposed to be evoked by that name, and while he was
so engaged he recognised that a gentleman on horseback, close to the
barrier of the Row, was making a sign to him. The gentleman was Lord
Beaupré, who had pulled up his horse and whose sign the young American
lost no time in obeying. He went forward to speak to his late host, but
during the instant of the transit he was able both to observe that Mary
Gosselin was not in sight and to ask himself why she was not. She rode
with her brother; why then didn't she ride with her future husband? It
was singular at such a moment to see her future husband disporting
himself alone. This personage conversed a few moments with Bolton-Brown,
said it was too hot to ride, but that he ought to be mounted (_he_ would
give him a mount if he liked) and was on the point of turning away when
his interlocutor succumbed to the temptation to put his modesty to the
test.

"Good-bye, but let me congratulate you first," said Bolton-Brown.

"Congratulate me? On what?" His look, his tone were very much what Mary
Gosselin's had been.

"Why, on your engagement. Haven't you heard of it?"

Lord Beaupré stared a moment while his horse shifted uneasily. Then he
laughed and said: "Which of them do you mean?"

"There's only one I know anything about. To Miss Gosselin," Brown added,
after a puzzled pause.

"Oh yes, I see--thanks so much!" With this, letting his horse go, Lord
Beaupré broke off, while Bolton-Brown stood looking after him and
saying to himself that perhaps he _didn't_ know! The chapter of English
oddities was long.

But on the morrow the announcement was in "The Morning Post," and that
surely made it authentic. It was doubtless only superficially singular
that Guy Firminger should have found himself unable to achieve a call in
Chester Street until this journal had been for several hours in
circulation. He appeared there just before luncheon, and the first
person who received him was Mrs. Gosselin. He had always liked her,
finding her infallible on the question of behaviour; but he was on this
occasion more than ever struck with her ripe astuteness, her independent
wisdom.

"I knew what you wanted, I knew what you needed, I knew the subject on
which you had pressed her," the good lady said; "and after Sunday I
found myself really haunted with your dangers. There was danger in the
air at Bosco, in your own defended house; it seemed to me too monstrous.
I said to myself 'We _can_ help him, poor dear, and we _must_. It's the
least one can do for so old and so good a friend.' I decided what to do:
I simply put this other story about. In London that always answers. I
knew that Mary pitied you really as much as I do, and that what she saw
at Bosco had been a revelation--had at any rate brought your situation
home to her. Yet of course she would be shy about saying out for
herself: 'Here I am--I'll do what you want.' The thing was for me to say
it _for_ her; so I said it first to that chattering American. He
repeated it to several others, and there you are! I just forced her hand
a little, but it's all right. All she has to do is not to contradict it.
It won't be any trouble and you'll be comfortable. That will be our
reward!" smiled Mrs. Gosselin.

"Yes, all she has to do is not to contradict it," Lord Beaupré replied,
musing a moment. "It _won't_ be any trouble," he added, "and I _hope_ I
shall be comfortable." He thanked Mrs. Gosselin formally and liberally,
and expressed all his impatience to assure Mary herself of his deep
obligation to her; upon which his hostess promised to send her daughter
to him on the instant: she would go and call her, so that they might be
alone. Before Mrs. Gosselin left him however she touched on one or two
points that had their little importance. Guy Firminger had asked for
Hugh, but Hugh had gone to the City, and his mother mentioned candidly
that he didn't take part in the game. She even disclosed his reason: he
thought there was a want of dignity in it. Lord Beaupré stared at this
and after a moment exclaimed: "Dignity? Dignity be hanged! One must save
one's life!"

"Yes, but the point poor Hugh makes is that one must save it by the use
of one's _own_ wits, or one's _own_ arms and legs. But do you know what
I said to him?" Mrs. Gosselin continued.

"Something very clever, I daresay."

"That if _we_ were drowning you'd be the very first to jump in. And we
may fall overboard yet!" Fidgeting there with his hands in his pockets
Lord Beaupré gave a laugh at this, but assured her that there was
nothing in the world for which they mightn't count upon him. None the
less she just permitted herself another warning, a warning, it is true,
that was in his own interest, a reminder of a peril that he ought
beforehand to look in the face. Wasn't there always the chance--just the
bare chance--that a girl in Mary's position would, in the event, decline
to let him off, decline to release him even on the day he should wish to
marry? She wasn't speaking of Mary, but there were of course girls who
would play him that trick. Guy Firminger considered this contingency;
then he declared that it wasn't a question of 'girls,' it was simply a
question of dear old Mary! If _she_ should wish to hold him, so much the
better: he would do anything in the world that she wanted. "Don't let us
dwell on such vulgarities; but I had it on my conscience!" Mrs. Gosselin
wound up.

She left him, but at the end of three minutes Mary came in, and the
first thing she said was: "Before you speak a word, please understand
this, that it's wholly mamma's doing. I hadn't dreamed of it, but she
suddenly began to tell people."

"It was charming of her, and it's charming of you!" the visitor cried.

"It's not charming of any one, I think," said Mary Gosselin, looking at
the carpet. "It's simply idiotic."

"Don't be nasty about it. It will be tremendous fun."

"I've only consented because mamma says we owe it to you," the girl went
on.

"Never mind your reason--the end justifies the means. I can never
thank you enough nor tell you what a weight it lifts off my shoulders.
Do you know I feel the difference already?--a peace that passeth
understanding!" Mary replied that this was childish; how could such a
feeble fiction last? At the very best it could live but an hour, and
then he would be no better off than before. It would bristle moreover
with difficulties and absurdities; it would be so much more trouble than
it was worth. She reminded him that so ridiculous a service had never
been asked of any girl, and at this he seemed a little struck; he said:
"Ah, well, if it's positively disagreeable to you we'll instantly drop
the idea. But I--I thought you really liked me enough----!" She turned
away impatiently, and he went on to argue imperturbably that she had
always treated him in the kindest way in the world. He added that the
worst was over, the start, they were off: the thing would be in all the
evening papers. Wasn't it much simpler to accept it? That was all they
would have to do; and all _she_ would have to do would be not to gainsay
it and to smile and thank people when she was congratulated. She would
have to _act_ a little, but that would just be part of the fun. Oh, he
hadn't the shadow of a scruple about taking the world in; the world
deserved it richly, and she couldn't deny that this was what she had
felt for him, that she had really been moved to compassion. He grew
eloquent and charged her with having recognised in his predicament a
genuine motive for charity. Their little plot would last what it
could--it would be a part of their amusement to _make_ it last. Even if
it should be but a thing of a day there would have been always so much
gained. But they would be ingenious, they would find ways, they would
have no end of sport.

"_You_ must be ingenious; I can't," said Mary. "If people scarcely ever
see us together they'll guess we're trying to humbug them."

"But they _will_ see us together. We _are_ together. We've been
together--I mean we've seen a lot of each other--all our lives."

"Ah, not _that_ way!"

"Oh, trust me to work it right!" cried the young man, whose imagination
had now evidently begun to glow in the air of their pious fraud.

"You'll find it a dreadful bore," said Mary Gosselin.

"Then I'll drop it, don't you see? And _you_'ll drop it, of course, the
moment _you_'ve had enough," Lord Beaupré punctually added. "But as
soon as you begin to realise what a lot of good you do me you won't
_want_ to drop it. That is if you're what I take you for!" laughed his
lordship.

If a third person had been present at this conversation--and there was
nothing in it surely that might not have been spoken before a trusty
listener--that person would perhaps have thought, from the immediate
expression of Mary Gosselin's face, that she was on the point of
exclaiming "You take me for too big a fool!" No such ungracious words in
fact however passed her lips; she only said after an instant: "What
reason do you propose to give, on the day you need one, for our
rupture?"

Her interlocutor stared. "To you, do you mean?"

"_I_ sha'n't ask you for one. I mean to other people."

"Oh, I'll tell them you're sick of me. I'll put everything on you, and
you'll put everything on me."

"You _have_ worked it out!" Mary exclaimed.

"Oh, I shall be intensely considerate."

"Do you call that being considerate--publicly accusing me?"

Guy Firminger stared again. "Why, isn't that the reason _you_'ll give?"

She looked at him an instant. "I won't tell you the reason I shall
give."

"Oh, I shall learn it from others."

"I hope you'll like it when you do!" said Mary, with sudden gaiety; and
she added frankly though kindly the hope that he might soon light upon
some young person who would really meet his requirements. He replied
that he shouldn't be in a hurry--that was now just the comfort; and she,
as if thinking over to the end the list of arguments against his clumsy
contrivance, broke out: "And of course you mustn't dream of giving me
anything--any tokens or presents."

"Then it won't look natural."

"That's exactly what I say. You can't make it deceive anybody."

"I _must_ give you something--something that people can see. There must
be some evidence! You can simply put my offerings away after a little
and give them back." But about this Mary was visibly serious; she
declared that she wouldn't touch anything that came from his hand, and
she spoke in such a tone that he coloured a little and hastened to say:
"Oh, all right, I shall be thoroughly careful!" This appeared to
complete their understanding; so that after it was settled that for the
deluded world they were engaged, there was obviously nothing for him to
do but to go. He therefore shook hands with her very gratefully and
departed.



V


He was able promptly to assure his accomplice that their little plot was
working to a charm; it already made such a difference for the better.
Only a week had elapsed, but he felt quite another man; his life was no
longer spent in springing to arms and he had ceased to sleep in his
boots. The ghost of his great fear was laid, he could follow out his
inclinations and attend to his neglected affairs. The news had been a
bomb in the enemy's camp, and there were plenty of blank faces to
testify to the confusion it had wrought. Every one was "sold" and every
one made haste to clap him on the back. Lottie Firminger only had
written in terms of which no notice could be taken, though of course he
expected, every time he came in, to find her waiting in his hall. Her
mother was coming up to town and he should have the family at his ears;
but, taking them as a single body, he could manage them, and that was a
detail. The Ashburys had remained at Bosco till that establishment was
favoured with the tidings that so nearly concerned it (they were
communicated to Maud's mother by the housekeeper), and then the
beautiful sufferer had found in her defeat strength to seek another
asylum. The two ladies had departed for a destination unknown; he didn't
think they had turned up in London. Guy Firminger averred that there
were precious portable objects which he was sure he should miss on
returning to his country home.

He came every day to Chester Street, and was evidently much less bored
than Mary had prefigured by this regular tribute to verisimilitude. It
was amusement enough to see the progress of their comedy and to invent
new touches for some of its scenes. The girl herself was amused; it was
an opportunity like another for cleverness such as hers and had much in
common with private theatricals, especially with the rehearsals, the
most amusing part. Moreover she was good-natured enough to be really
pleased at the service it was impossible for her not to acknowledge that
she had rendered. Each of the parties to this queer contract had
anecdotes and suggestions for the other, and each reminded the other
duly that they must at every step keep their story straight. Except for
the exercise of this care Mary Gosselin found her duties less onerous
than she had feared and her part in general much more passive than
active. It consisted indeed largely of murmuring thanks and smiling and
looking happy and handsome; as well as perhaps also in saying in answer
to many questions that nothing as yet was fixed and of trying to remain
humble when people expressed without ceremony that such a match was a
wonder for such a girl. Her mother on the other hand was devotedly
active. She treated the situation with private humour but with public
zeal and, making it both real and ideal, told so many fibs about it that
there were none left for Mary. The girl had failed to understand Mrs.
Gosselin's interest in this elaborate pleasantry; the good lady had seen
in it from the first more than she herself had been able to see. Mary
performed her task mechanically, sceptically, but Mrs. Gosselin attacked
hers with conviction and had really the air at moments of thinking that
their fable had crystallised into fact. Mary allowed her as little of
this attitude as possible and was ironical about her duplicity; warnings
which the elder lady received with gaiety until one day when repetition
had made them act on her nerves. Then she begged her daughter, with
sudden asperity, not to talk to her as if she were a fool. She had
already had words with Hugh about some aspects of the affair--so much as
this was evident in Chester Street; a smothered discussion which at the
moment had determined the poor boy to go to Paris with Bolton-Brown. The
young men came back together after Mary had been "engaged" three weeks,
but she remained in ignorance of what passed between Hugh and his mother
the night of his return. She had gone to the opera with Lady Whiteroy,
after one of her invariable comments on Mrs. Gosselin's invariable
remark that of course Guy Firminger would spend his evening in their
box. The remedy for his trouble, Lord Beaupré's prospective bride had
said, was surely worse than the disease; she was in perfect good faith
when she wondered that his lordship's sacrifices, his laborious
cultivation of appearances should "pay."

Hugh Gosselin dined with his mother and at dinner talked of Paris and of
what he had seen and done there; he kept the conversation superficial
and after he had heard how his sister, at the moment, was occupied,
asked no question that might have seemed to denote an interest in the
success of the experiment for which in going abroad he had declined
responsibility. His mother could not help observing that he never
mentioned Guy Firminger by either of his names, and it struck her as a
part of the same detachment that later, up stairs (she sat with him
while he smoked), he should suddenly say as he finished a cigar:

"I return to New York next week."

"Before your time? What for?" Mrs. Gosselin was horrified.

"Oh, mamma, you know what for!"

"Because you still resent poor Mary's good-nature?"

"I don't understand it, and I don't like things I don't understand;
therefore I'd rather not be here to see it. Besides I really can't tell
a pack of lies."

Mrs. Gosselin exclaimed and protested; she had arguments to prove that
there was no call at present for the least deflection from the truth;
all that any one had to reply to any question (and there could be none
that was embarrassing save the ostensible determination of the date of
the marriage) was that nothing was settled as yet--a form of words in
which for the life of her she couldn't see any perjury. "Why, then, go
in for anything in such bad taste, to culminate only in something so
absurd?" Hugh demanded. "If the essential part of the matter can't be
spoken of as fixed nothing is fixed, the deception becomes transparent
and they give the whole idea away. It's child's play."

"That's why it's so innocent. All I can tell you is that practically
their attitude answers; he's delighted with its success. Those dreadful
women have given him up; they've already found some other victim."

"And how is it all to end, please?"

Mrs. Gosselin was silent a moment. "Perhaps it won't end."

"Do you mean that the engagement will become real?"

Again the good lady said nothing until she broke out: "My dear boy,
can't you trust your poor old mummy?"

"Is _that_ your speculation? Is that Mary's? I never heard of anything
so odious!" Hugh Gosselin cried. But she defended his sister with
eagerness, with a gloss of coaxing, maternal indignation, declaring that
Mary's disinterestedness was complete--she had the perfect proof of it.
Hugh was conscious as he lighted another cigar that the conversation was
more fundamental than any that he had ever had with his mother, who
however hung fire but for an instant when he asked her what this
"perfect proof" might be. He didn't doubt of his sister, he admitted
that; but the perfect proof would make the whole thing more luminous. It
took finally the form of a confession from Mrs. Gosselin that the girl
evidently liked--well, greatly liked--Mr. Bolton-Brown. Yes, the good
lady had seen for herself at Bosco that the smooth young American was
making up to her and that, time and opportunity aiding, something might
very well happen which could not be regarded as satisfactory. She had
been very frank with Mary, had besought her not to commit herself to a
suitor who in the very nature of the case couldn't meet the most
legitimate of their views. Mary, who pretended not to know what their
"views" were, had denied that she was in danger; but Mrs. Gosselin had
assured her that she had all the air of it and had said triumphantly:
"Agree to what Lord Beaupré asks of you, and I'll _believe_ you." Mary
had wished to be believed--so she had agreed. That was all the
witchcraft any one had used.

Mrs. Gosselin out-talked her son, but there were two or three plain
questions that he came back to; and the first of these bore upon the
ground of her aversion to poor Bolton-Brown. He told her again, as he
had told her before, that his friend was that rare bird a maker of money
who was also a man of culture. He was a gentleman to his finger-tips,
accomplished, capable, kind, with a charming mother and two lovely
sisters (she should see them!) the sort of fellow in short whom it was
stupid not to appreciate.

"I believe it all, and if I had three daughters he should be very
welcome to one of them."

"You might easily have had three daughters who wouldn't attract him at
all! You've had the good fortune to have one who does, and I think you
do wrong to interfere with it."

"My eggs are in one basket then, and that's a reason the more for
preferring Lord Beaupré," said Mrs. Gosselin.

"Then it _is_ your calculation--?" stammered Hugh in dismay; on which
she coloured and requested that he would be a little less rough with his
mother. She would rather part with him immediately, sad as that would
be, than that he should attempt to undo what she had done. When Hugh
replied that it was not to Mary but to Beaupré himself that he judged
it important he should speak, she informed him that a rash remonstrance
might do his sister a cruel wrong. Dear Guy was _most_ attentive.

"If you mean that he really cares for her there's the less excuse for
his taking such a liberty with her. He's either in love with her or he
isn't. If he is, let him make her a serious offer; if he isn't, let him
leave her alone."

Mrs. Gosselin looked at her son with a kind of patient joy. "He's in
love with her, but he doesn't know it."

"He ought to know it, and if he's so idiotic I don't see that we ought
to consider him."

"Don't worry--he _shall_ know it!" Mrs. Gosselin cried; and, continuing
to struggle with Hugh, she insisted on the delicacy of the situation.
She made a certain impression on him, though on confused grounds; she
spoke at one moment as if he was to forbear because the matter was a
make-believe that happened to contain a convenience for a distressed
friend, and at another as if one ought to strain a point because there
were great possibilities at stake. She was most lucid when she pictured
the social position and other advantages of a peer of the realm. What
had those of an American stockbroker, however amiable and with whatever
shrill belongings in the background, to compare with them? She was
inconsistent, but she was diplomatic, and the result of the discussion
was that Hugh Gosselin became conscious of a dread of "injuring" his
sister. He became conscious at the same time of a still greater
apprehension, that of seeing her arrive at the agreeable in a tortuous,
a second-rate manner. He might keep the peace to please his mother, but
he couldn't enjoy it, and he actually took his departure, travelling in
company with Bolton-Brown, who of course before going waited on the
ladies in Chester Street to thank them for the kindness they had shown
him. It couldn't be kept from Guy Firminger that Hugh was not happy,
though when they met, which was only once or twice before he quitted
London, Mary Gosselin's brother flattered himself that he was too proud
to show it. He had always liked old loafing Guy and it was disagreeable
to him not to like him now; but he was aware that he must either quarrel
with him definitely or not at all and that he had passed his word to his
mother. Therefore his attitude was strictly negative; he took with the
parties to it no notice whatever of the "engagement," and he couldn't
help it if to other people he had the air of not being initiated. They
doubtless thought him strangely fastidious. Perhaps he was; the tone of
London struck him in some respects as very horrid; he had grown in a
manner away from it. Mary was impenetrable; tender, gay, charming, but
with no patience, as she said, for his premature flight. Except when
Lord Beaupré was present you would not have dreamed that he existed for
her. In his company--he had to be present more or less of course--she
was simply like any other English girl who disliked effusiveness. They
had each the same manner, that of persons of rather a shy tradition who
were on their guard against public "spooning." They practised their
fraud with good taste, a good taste mystifying to Bolton-Brown, who
thought their precautions excessive. When he took leave of Mary Gosselin
her eyes consented for a moment to look deep down into his. He had been
from the first of the opinion that they were beautiful, and he was more
mystified than ever.

If Guy Firminger had failed to ask Hugh Gosselin whether he had a fault
to find with what they were doing, this was, in spite of old friendship,
simply because he was too happy now to care much whom he didn't please,
to care at any rate for criticism. He had ceased to be critical himself,
and his high prosperity could take his blamelessness for granted. His
happiness would have been offensive if people generally hadn't liked
him, for it consisted of a kind of monstrous candid comfort. To take all
sorts of things for granted was still his great, his delightful
characteristic; but it didn't prevent his showing imagination and tact
and taste in particular circumstances. He made, in their little comedy,
all the right jokes and none of the wrong ones: the girl had an acute
sense that there were some jokes that would have been detestable. She
gathered that it was universally supposed she was having an
unprecedented season, and something of the glory of an enviable future
seemed indeed to hang about her. People no doubt thought it odd that she
didn't go about more with her future husband; but those who knew
anything about her knew that she had never done exactly as other girls
did. She had her own ways, her own freedoms and her own scruples.
Certainly he made the London weeks much richer than they had ever been
for a subordinate young person; he put more things into them, so that
they grew dense and complicated. This frightened her at moments,
especially when she thought with compunction that she was deceiving her
very friends. She didn't mind taking the vulgar world in, but there were
people she hated not to enlighten, to reassure. She could undeceive no
one now, and indeed she would have been ashamed. There were hours when
she wanted to stop--she had such a dread of doing too much; hours when
she thought with dismay that the fiction of the rupture was still to
come, with its horrid train of new untrue things. She spoke of it
repeatedly to her confederate, who only postponed and postponed, told
her she would never dream of forsaking him if she measured the good she
was doing him. She did measure it however when she met him in the great
world; she was of course always meeting him: that was the only way
appearances were kept up. There was a certain attitude she could allow
him to take on these occasions; it covered and carried off their
subterfuge. He could talk to her unmolested; for herself she never spoke
of anything but the charming girls, everywhere present, among whom he
could freely choose. He didn't protest, because to choose freely was
what he wanted, and they discussed these young ladies one by one. Some
she recommended, some she disparaged, but it was almost the only subject
she tolerated. It was her system in short, and she wondered he didn't
get tired of it; she was so tired of it herself.

She tried other things that she thought he might find wearisome, but his
good-humour was magnificent. He was now really for the first time
enjoying his promotion, his wealth, his insight into the terms on which
the world offered itself to the happy few, and these terms made a
mixture healing to irritation. Once, at some glittering ball, he asked
her if she should be jealous if he were to dance again with Lady
Whiteroy, with whom he had danced already, and this was the only
occasion on which he had come near making a joke of the wrong sort. She
showed him what she thought of it and made him feel that the way to be
forgiven was to spend the rest of the evening with that lovely creature.
Now that the phalanx of the pressingly nubile was held in check there
was accordingly nothing to prevent his passing his time pleasantly.
Before he had taken this effective way the diplomatic mother, when she
spied him flirting with a married woman, felt that in urging a virgin
daughter's superior claims she worked for righteousness as well as for
the poor girl. But Mary Gosselin protected these scandals practically by
the still greater scandal of her indifference; so that he was in the odd
position of having waited to be confined to know what it was to be at
large. He had in other words the maximum of security with the minimum of
privation. The lovely creatures of Lady Whiteroy's order thought Mary
Gosselin charming, but they were the first to see through her falsity.

All this carried our precious pair to the middle of July; but nearly a
month before that, one night under the summer stars, on the deck of the
steamer that was to reach New York on the morrow, something had passed
between Hugh Gosselin and his brooding American friend. The night was
warm and splendid; these were their last hours at sea, and Hugh, who had
been playing whist in the cabin, came up very late to take an
observation before turning in. It was in this way that he chanced on his
companion, who was leaning over the stern of the ship and gazing off,
beyond its phosphorescent track, at the muffled, moaning ocean, the
backward darkness, everything he had relinquished. Hugh stood by him for
a moment and then asked him what he was thinking about. Bolton-Brown
gave at first no answer; after which he turned round and, with his back
against the guard of the deck, looked up at the multiplied stars. "He
has it badly," Hugh Gosselin mentally commented. At last his friend
replied: "About something you said yesterday."

"I forget what I said yesterday."

"You spoke of your sister's intended marriage; it was the only time you
had spoken of it. You seemed to intimate that it might not after all
take place."

Hugh hesitated a little. "Well, it _won't_ take place. They're not
engaged, not really. This is a secret, a preposterous secret. I wouldn't
tell any one else, but I'm willing to tell you. It may make a difference
to you."

Bolton-Brown turned his head; he looked at Hugh a minute through the
fresh darkness. "It does make a difference to me. But I don't
understand," he added.

"Neither do I. I don't like it. It's a pretence, a temporary
make-believe, to help Beaupré through."

"Through what?"

"He's so run after."

The young American stared, ejaculated, mused. "Oh, yes--your mother told
me."

"It's a sort of invention of my mother's and a notion of his own (very
absurd, I think) till he can see his way. Mary serves as a kind of
escort for these first exposed months. It's ridiculous, but I don't know
that it hurts her."

"Oh!" said Bolton-Brown.

"I don't know either that it does her any good."

"No!" said Bolton-Brown. Then he added: "It's certainly very kind of
her."

"It's a case of old friends," Hugh explained, inadequately as he felt.
"He has always been in and out of our house."

"But how will it end?"

"I haven't the least idea."

Bolton-Brown was silent; he faced about to the stern again and stared at
the rush of the ship. Then shifting his position once more: "Won't the
engagement, before they've done, develop into the regular thing?"

Hugh felt as if his mother were listening. "I daresay not. If there were
even a remote chance of that, Mary wouldn't have consented."

"But mayn't _he_ easily find that--charming as she is--he's in love with
her?"

"He's too much taken up with himself."

"That's just a reason," said Bolton-Brown. "Love is selfish." He
considered a moment longer, then he went on: "And mayn't _she_ find--?"

"Find what?" said Hugh, as he hesitated.

"Why, that she likes him."

"She likes him of course, else she wouldn't have come to his assistance.
But her certainty about herself must have been just what made her not
object to lending herself to the arrangement. She could do it decently
because she doesn't seriously care for him. If she did--!" Hugh suddenly
stopped.

"If she did?" his friend repeated.

"It would have been odious."

"I see," said Bolton-Brown gently. "But how will they break off?"

"It will be Mary who'll break off."

"Perhaps she'll find it difficult."

"She'll require a pretext."

"I see," mused Bolton-Brown, shifting his position again.

"She'll find one," Hugh declared.

"I hope so," his companion responded.

For some minutes neither of them spoke; then Hugh asked: "Are you in
love with her?"

"Oh, my dear fellow!" Bolton-Brown wailed. He instantly added: "Will it
be any use for me to go back?"

Again Hugh felt as if his mother were listening. But he answered: "_Do_
go back."

"It's awfully strange," said Bolton-Brown. "I'll go back."

"You had better wait a couple of months, you know."

"Mayn't I lose her then?"

"No--they'll drop it all."

"I'll go back!" the American repeated, as if he hadn't heard. He was
restless, agitated; he had evidently been much affected. He fidgeted
away dimly, moved up the level length of the deck. Hugh Gosselin
lingered longer at the stern; he fell into the attitude in which he had
found the other, leaning over it and looking back at the great vague
distance they had come. He thought of his mother.



VI


To remind her fond parent of the vanity of certain expectations which
she more than suspected her of entertaining, Mary Gosselin, while she
felt herself intensely watched (it had all brought about a horrid new
situation at home) produced every day some fresh illustration of the
fact that people were no longer imposed upon. Moreover these
illustrations were not invented; the girl believed in them, and when
once she had begun to note them she saw them multiply fast. Lady
Whiteroy, for one, was distinctly suspicious; she had taken the liberty
more than once of asking the future Lady Beaupré what in the world was
the matter with her. Brilliant figure as she was and occupied with her
own pleasures, which were of a very independent nature, she had
nevertheless constituted herself Miss Gosselin's social sponsor: she
took a particular interest in her marriage, an interest all the greater
as it rested not only on a freely-professed regard for her, but on a
keen sympathy with the other party to the transaction. Lady Whiteroy,
who was very pretty and very clever and whom Mary secretly but
profoundly mistrusted, delighted in them both in short; so much so that
Mary judged herself happy to be in a false position, so certain should
she have been to be jealous had she been in a true one. This charming
woman threw out inquiries that made the girl not care to meet her eyes;
and Mary ended by forming a theory of the sort of marriage for Lord
Beaupré that Lady Whiteroy really would have appreciated. It would have
been a marriage to a fool, a marriage to Maud Ashbury or to Charlotte
Firminger. She would have her reasons for preferring that; and, as
regarded the actual prospect, she had only discovered that Mary was even
more astute than herself.

It will be understood how much our young lady was on the crest of the
wave when I mention that in spite of this complicated consciousness she
was one of the ornaments (Guy Firminger was of course another) of the
party entertained by her zealous friend and Lord Whiteroy during the
Goodwood week. She came back to town with the firm intention of putting
an end to a comedy which had more than ever become odious to her; in
consequence of which she had on this subject with her fellow-comedian a
scene--the scene she had dreaded--half-pathetic, half-ridiculous. He
appealed to her, wrestled with her, took his usual ground that she was
saving his life without really lifting a finger. He denied that the
public was not satisfied with their pretexts for postponement, their
explanations of delay; what else was expected of a man who would wish to
celebrate his nuptials on a suitable scale, but who had the misfortune
to have had, one after another, three grievous bereavements? He promised
not to molest her for the next three months, to go away till his
"mourning" was over, to go abroad, to let her do as she liked. He
wouldn't come near her, he wouldn't even write (no one would know it),
if she would let him keep up the mere form of their fiction; and he
would let her off the very first instant he definitely perceived that
this expedient had ceased to be effective. She couldn't judge of
that--she must let _him_ judge; and it was a matter in which she could
surely trust to his honour.

Mary Gosselin trusted to it, but she insisted on his going away. When he
took such a tone as that she couldn't help being moved; he breathed with
such frank, generous lips on the irritation she had stored up against
him. Guy Firminger went to Homburg, and if his confederate consented not
to clip the slender thread by which this particular engagement still
hung, she made very short work with every other. A dozen invitations,
for Cowes, for the country, for Scotland, shimmered there before her,
made a pathway of flowers, but she sent barbarous excuses. When her
mother, aghast, said to her "What then will you do?" she replied in a
very conclusive manner "I'll go home!" Mrs. Gosselin was wise enough not
to struggle; she saw that the thread was delicate, that it must dangle
in quiet air. She therefore travelled back with her daughter to homely
Hampshire, feeling that they were people of less importance than they
had been for many a week. On the August afternoons they sat again on the
little lawn on which Guy Firminger had found them the day he first
became eloquent about the perils of the desirable young bachelor; and it
was on this very spot that, toward the end of the month, and with some
surprise, they beheld Mr. Bolton-Brown once more approach. He had come
back from America; he had arrived but a few days before; he was staying,
of all places in the world, at the inn in the village.

His explanation of this caprice was of all explanations the oddest: he
had come three thousand miles for the love of water-colour. There was
nothing more sketchable than the sketchability of Hampshire--wasn't it
celebrated, classic? and he was so good as to include Mrs. Gosselin's
charming premises, and even their charming occupants, in his view of the
field. He fell to work with speed, with a sort of feverish eagerness; he
seemed possessed indeed by the frenzy of the brush. He sketched
everything on the place, and when he had represented an object once he
went straight at it again. His advent was soothing to Mary Gosselin, in
spite of his nervous activity; it must be admitted indeed that at the
moment he arrived she had already felt herself in quieter waters. The
August afternoons, the relinquishment of London, the simplified life,
had rendered her a service which, if she had freely qualified it, she
would have described as a restoration of her self-respect. If poor Guy
found any profit in such conditions as these there was no great reason
to repudiate him. She had so completely shaken off responsibility that
she took scarcely more than a languid interest in the fact, communicated
to her by Lady Whiteroy, that Charlotte Firminger had also, as the
newspapers said, "proceeded" to Homburg. Lady Whiteroy knew, for Lady
Whiteroy had "proceeded" as well; her physician had discovered in her
constitution a pressing need for the comfort imbibed in dripping
matutinal tumblers. She chronicled Charlotte's presence, and even to
some extent her behaviour, among the haunters of the spring, but it was
not till some time afterwards that Mary learned how Miss Firminger's
pilgrimage had been made under her ladyship's protection. This was a
further sign that, like Mrs. Gosselin, Lady Whiteroy had ceased to
struggle; she had, in town, only shrugged her shoulders ambiguously on
being informed that Lord Beaupré's intended was going down to her
stupid home.

The fulness of Mrs. Gosselin's renunciation was apparent during the stay
of the young American in the neighbourhood of that retreat. She occupied
herself with her knitting, her garden and the cares of a punctilious
hospitality, but she had no appearance of any other occupation. When
people came to tea Bolton-Brown was always there, and she had the
self-control to attempt to say nothing that could assuage their natural
surprise. Mrs. Ashbury came one day with poor Maud, and the two elder
ladies, as they had done more than once before, looked for some moments
into each other's eyes. This time it was not a look of defiance, it was
rather--or it would have been for an observer completely in the
secret--a look of reciprocity, of fraternity, a look of arrangement.
There was however no one completely in the secret save perhaps Mary, and
Mary didn't heed. The arrangement at any rate was ineffectual; Mrs.
Gosselin might mutely say, over the young American's eager, talkative
shoulders, "Yes, you may have him if you can get him:" the most
rudimentary experiments demonstrated that he was not to be got. Nothing
passed on this subject between Mary and her mother, whom the girl none
the less knew to be holding her breath and continuing to watch. She
counted it more and more as one unpleasant result of her conspiracy with
Guy Firminger that it almost poisoned a relation that had always been
sweet. It was to show that she was independent of it that she did as she
liked now, which was almost always as Bolton-Brown liked. When in the
first days of September--it was in the warm, clear twilight, and they
happened, amid the scent of fresh hay, to be leaning side by side on a
stile--he gave her a view of the fundamental and esoteric, as
distinguished from the convenient and superficial motive of his having
come back to England, she of course made no allusion to a prior tie. On
the other hand she insisted on his going up to London by the first train
the next day. He was to wait--that was distinctly understood--for his
satisfaction.

She desired meanwhile to write immediately to Guy Firminger, but as he
had kept his promise of not complicating their contract with letters she
was uncertain as to his actual whereabouts: she was only sure he would
have left Homburg. Lady Whiteroy had become silent, so there were no
more sidelights, and she was on the point of telegraphing to London for
an address when she received a telegram from Bosco. The proprietor of
that seat had arrived there the day before, and he found he could make
trains fit if she would on the morrow allow him to come over and see her
for a day or two. He had returned sooner than their agreement allowed,
but she answered "Come" and she showed his missive to her mother, who at
the sight of it wept with strange passion. Mary said to her "For
heaven's sake, don't let him see you!" She lost no time; she told him on
the morrow as soon as he entered the house that she couldn't keep it up
another hour.

"All right--it _is_ no use," he conceded; "they're at it again!"

"You see you've gained nothing!" she replied triumphantly. She had
instantly recognised that he was different, how much had happened.

"I've gained some of the happiest days of my life."

"Oh, that was not what you tried for!"

"Indeed it was, and I got exactly what I wanted," said Guy Firminger.
They were in the cool little drawing-room where the morning light was
dim. Guy Firminger had a sunburnt appearance, as in England people
returning from other countries are apt to have, and Mary thought he had
never looked so well. It was odd, but it was noticeable, that he had
grown much handsomer since he had become a personage. He paused a
moment, smiling at her while her mysterious eyes rested on him, and then
he added: "Nothing ever worked better. It's no use now--people see. But
I've got a start. I wanted to turn round and look about, and I _have_
turned round and looked about. There are things I've escaped. I'm afraid
you'll never understand how deeply I'm indebted to you."

"Oh, it's all right!" said Mary Gosselin.

There was another short silence, after which he went on: "I've come back
sooner than I promised, but only to be strictly fair. I began to see
that we couldn't hold out and that it was my duty to let you off. From
that moment I was bound to put an end to your situation. I might have
done so by letter, but that seemed scarcely decent. It's all I came back
for, you know, and it's why I wired to you yesterday."

Mary hesitated an instant, she reflected intensely. What had happened,
what would happen, was that if she didn't take care the signal for the
end of their little arrangement would not have appeared to come from
herself. She particularly wished it not to come from anyone else, she
had even a horror of that; so that after an instant she hastened to say:
"I was on the very point of wiring to _you_--I was only waiting for your
address."

"Wiring to me?" He seemed rather blank.

"To tell you that our absurd affair really, this time, can't go on
another day--to put a complete stop to it."

"Oh!" said Guy Firminger.

"So it's all right."

"You've always hated it!" Guy laughed; and his laugh sounded slightly
foolish to the girl.

"I found yesterday that I hated it more than ever."

Lord Beaupré showed a quickened attention. "For what
reason--yesterday?"

"I would rather not tell you, please. Perhaps some time you'll find it
out."

He continued to look at her brightly and fixedly with his confused
cheerfulness. Then he said with a vague, courteous alacrity: "I see, I
see!" She had an impression that he didn't see; but it didn't matter,
she was nervous and quite preferred that he shouldn't. They both got up,
and in a moment he exclaimed: "Well, I'm intensely sorry it's over! It
has been so charming."

"You've been very good about it; I mean very reasonable," Mary said, to
say something. Then she felt in her nervousness that this was just what
she ought not to have said: it sounded ironical and provoking, whereas
she had meant it as pure good-nature. "Of course you'll stay to
luncheon?" she continued. She was bound in common hospitality to speak
of that, and he answered that it would give him the greatest pleasure.
After this her apprehension increased, and it was confirmed in
particular by the manner in which he suddenly asked:

"By the way, what reason shall we give?"

"What reason?"

"For our rupture. Don't let us seem to have quarrelled."

"We can't help that," said Mary. "Nothing else will account for our
behaviour."

"Well, I sha'n't say anything about _you_."

"Do you mean you'll let people think it was yourself who were tired of
it?"

"I mean I sha'n't _blame_ you."

"You ought to behave as if you cared!" said Mary.

Guy Firminger laughed, but he looked worried and he evidently was
puzzled. "You must act as if you had jilted me."

"You're not the sort of person unfortunately that people jilt."

Lord Beaupré appeared to accept this statement as incontestable; not
with elation however, but with candid regret, the slightly embarrassed
recognition of a fundamental obstacle. "Well, it's no one's business, at
any rate, is it?"

"No one's, and that's what I shall say if people question me. Besides,"
Mary added, "they'll see for themselves."

"What will they see?"

"I mean they'll understand. And now we had better join mamma."

It was his evident inclination to linger in the room after he had said
this that gave her complete alarm. Mrs. Gosselin was in another room, in
which she sat in the morning, and Mary moved in that direction, pausing
only in the hall for him to accompany her. She wished to get him into
the presence of a third person. In the hall he joined her, and in doing
so laid his hand gently on her arm. Then looking into her eyes with all
the pleasantness of his honesty, he said: "It will be very easy for me
to appear to care--for I _shall_ care. I shall care immensely!" Lord
Beaupré added smiling.

Anything, it struck her, was better than that--than that he should say:
"We'll keep on, if you like (_I_ should!) only this time it will be
serious. Hold me to it--do; don't let me go; lead me on to the
altar--really!" Some such words as these, she believed, were rising to
his lips, and she had an insurmountable horror of hearing them. It was
as if, well enough meant on _his_ part, they would do her a sort of
dishonour, so that all her impulse was quickly to avert them. That was
not the way she wanted to be asked in marriage. "Thank you very much,"
she said, "but it doesn't in the least matter. You will seem to have
been jilted--so it's all right!"

"All right! You mean--?" He hesitated, he had coloured a little: his
eyes questioned her.

"I'm engaged to be married--in earnest."

"Oh!" said Lord Beaupré.

"You asked me just now if I had a special reason for having been on the
point of telegraphing to you, and I said I had. That was my special
reason."

"I see!" said Lord Beaupré. He looked grave for a few seconds, then he
gave an awkward smile. But he behaved with perfect tact and discretion,
didn't even ask her who the gentleman in the case might be. He
congratulated her in the dark, as it were, and if the effect of this was
indeed a little odd she liked him for his quick perception of the fine
fitness of pulling up short. Besides, he extracted the name of the
gentleman soon enough from her mother, in whose company they now
immediately found themselves. Mary left Guy Firminger with the good lady
for half an hour before luncheon; and when the girl came back it was to
observe that she had been crying again. It was dreadful--what she might
have been saying. Their guest, however, at luncheon was not lachrymose;
he was natural, but he was talkative and gay. Mary liked the way he now
behaved, and more particularly the way he departed immediately after the
meal. As soon as he was gone Mrs. Gosselin broke out suppliantly:
"Mary!" But her daughter replied:

"I know, mamma, perfectly what you're going to say, and if you attempt
to say it I shall leave the room." With this threat (day after day, for
the following time) she kept the terrible appeal unuttered until it was
too late for an appeal to be of use. That afternoon she wrote to
Bolton-Brown that she accepted his offer of marriage.

Guy Firminger departed altogether; he went abroad again and to far
countries. He was therefore not able to be present at the nuptials of
Miss Gosselin and the young American whom he had entertained at Bosco,
which took place in the middle of November. Had he been in England
however he probably would have felt impelled by a due regard for past
verisimilitude to abstain from giving his countenance to such an
occasion. His absence from the country contributed to the needed even if
astonishing effect of his having been jilted; so, likewise, did the
reputed vastness of Bolton-Brown's young income, which in London was
grossly exaggerated. Hugh Gosselin had perhaps a little to do with this;
as he had sacrificed a part of his summer holiday, he got another month
and came out to his sister's wedding. He took public comfort in his
brother-in-law; nevertheless he listened with attention to a curious
communication made him by his mother after the young couple had started
for Italy; even to the point of bringing out the inquiry (in answer to
her assertion that poor Guy had been ready to place everything he had at
Mary's feet): "Then why the devil didn't he do it?"

"From simple delicacy! He didn't want to make her feel as if she had
lent herself to an artifice only on purpose to get hold of him--to treat
her as if she too had been at bottom one of the very harpies she helped
him to elude."

Hugh thought a moment. "That _was_ delicate."

"He's the dearest creature in the world. He's on his guard, he's
prudent, he tested himself by separation. Then he came back to England
in love with her. She might have had it all!"

"I'm glad she didn't get it _that_ way."

"She had only to wait--to put an end to their artifice, harmless as it
was, for the present, but still wait. She might have broken off in a way
that would have made it come on again better."

"That's exactly what she didn't want."

"I mean as a quite separate incident," said Mrs. Gosselin.

"_I_ loathed their artifice, harmless as it was!" her son observed.

Mrs. Gosselin for a moment made no answer; then she turned away from the
fire into which she had been pensively gazing with the ejaculation "Poor
dear Guy!"

"I can't for the life of me see that he's to be pitied."

"He'll marry Charlotte Firminger."

"If he's such an ass as that it's his own affair."

"Bessie Whiteroy will bring it about."

"What has _she_ to do with it?"

"She wants to get hold of him."

"Then why will she marry him to another woman?"

"Because in that way she can select the other--a woman he won't care
for. It will keep him from taking some one that's nicer."

Hugh Gosselin stared--he laughed aloud. "Lord, mamma, you're deep!"

"Indeed I am, I see much more."

"What do you see?"

"Mary won't in the least care for America. Don't tell me she will," Mrs.
Gosselin added, "for you know perfectly you don't believe it."

"She'll care for her husband, she'll care for everything that concerns
him."

"He's very nice, in his little way he's delightful. But as an
alternative to Lord Beaupré he's ridiculous!"

"Mary's in a position in which she has nothing to do with alternatives."

"For the present, yes, but not for ever. She'll have enough of your New
York; they'll come back here. I see the future dark," Mrs. Gosselin
pursued, inexorably musing.

"Tell me then all you see."

"She'll find poor Guy wretchedly married, and she'll be very sorry for
him."

"Do you mean that he'll make love to her? You give a queer account of
your paragon."

"He'll value her sympathy. I see life as it is."

"You give a queer account of your daughter."

"I don't give _any_ account. She'll behave perfectly," Mrs. Gosselin
somewhat inconsequently subjoined.

"Then what are you afraid of?"

"She'll be sorry for him, and it will be all a worry."

"A worry to whom?"

The good lady was silent a moment. "To me," she replied. "And to you as
well."

"Then they mustn't come back."

"That will be a greater worry still."

"Surely not a greater--a smaller. We'll put up with the lesser evil."

"Nothing will prevent her coming to a sense, eventually, of what _might_
have been. And when they _both_ recognize it----"

"It will be very dreadful!" Hugh exclaimed, completing gaily his
mother's phrase. "I don't see, however," he added, "what in all this you
do with Bessie Whiteroy."

"Oh, he'll be tired of her; she's hard, she'll have become despotic. I
see life as it is," the good lady repeated.

"Then all I can say is that it's not very nice! But they sha'n't come
back: _I_'ll attend to that!" said Hugh Gosselin, who has attended to it
up to this time successfully, though the rest of his mother's prophecy
is so far accomplished (it was her second hit) as that Charlotte
Firminger is now, strange as it may seem, Lady Beaupré.



THE VISITS


The other day, after her death, when they were discussing her, someone
said in reference to the great number of years she had lived, the people
she had seen and the stories she knew: "What a pity no one ever took any
notes of her talk!" For a London epitaph that was almost exhaustive, and
the subject presently changed. One of the listeners had taken many
notes, but he didn't confess it on the spot. The following story is a
specimen of my exactitude--I took it down, _verbatim_, having that
faculty, the day after I heard it. I choose it, at hazard, among those
of her reminiscences that I have preserved; it's not worse than the
others. I will give you some of the others too--when occasion offers--so
that you may judge.

I met in town that year a dear woman whom I had scarcely seen since I
was a girl; she had dropped out of the world; she came up but once in
five years. We had been together as very young creatures, and then we
had married and gone our ways. It was arranged between us that after I
should have paid a certain visit in August in the west of England I
would take her--it would be very convenient, she was just over the
Cornish border--on the way to my other engagements: I would work her in,
as you say nowadays. She wanted immensely to show me her home, and she
wanted still more to show me her girl, who had not come up to London,
choosing instead, after much deliberation, to go abroad for a month with
her brother and her brother's coach--he had been cramming for
something--and Mrs. Coach of course. All that Mrs. Chantry had been able
to show me in town was her husband, one of those country gentlemen with
a moderate property and an old place who are a part of the essence in
their own neighbourhood and not a part of anything anywhere else.

A couple of days before my visit to Chantry Court the people to whom I
had gone from town took me over to see some friends of theirs who lived,
ten miles away, in a place that was supposed to be fine. As it was a
long drive we stayed to luncheon; and then as there were gardens and
other things that were more or less on show we struggled along to tea,
so as to get home just in time for dinner. There were a good many other
people present, and before luncheon a very pretty girl came into the
drawing-room, a real maiden in her flower, less than twenty, fresh and
fair and charming, with the expression of some one I knew. I asked who
she was, and was told she was Miss Chantry, so that in a moment I spoke
to her, mentioning that I was an old friend of her mother's and that I
was coming to pay them a visit. She looked rather frightened and blank,
was apparently unable to say that she had ever heard of me, and hinted
at no pleasure in the idea that she was to hear of me again. But this
didn't prevent my perceiving that she was lovely, for I was wise enough
even then not to think it necessary to measure people by the impression
that one makes on them. I saw that any I should make on Louisa Chantry
would be much too clumsy a test. She had been staying at the house at
which I was calling; she had come alone, as the people were old friends
and to a certain extent neighbours, and was going home in a few days. It
was a daughterless house, but there was inevitable young life: a couple
of girls from the vicarage, a married son and his wife, a young man who
had "ridden over" and another young man who was staying.

Louisa Chantry sat opposite to me at luncheon, but too far for
conversation, and before we got up I had discovered that if her manner
to me had been odd it was not because she was inanimate. She was on the
contrary in a state of intense though carefully muffled vibration. There
was some fever in her blood, but no one perceived it, no one, that is,
with an exception--an exception which was just a part of the very
circumstance. This single suspicion was lodged in the breast of the
young man whom I have alluded to as staying in the house. He was on the
same side of the table as myself and diagonally facing the girl;
therefore what I learned about him was for the moment mainly what she
told me; meaning by "she" her face, her eyes, her movements, her whole
perverted personality. She was extremely on her guard, and I should
never have guessed her secret but for an accident. The accident was that
the only time she dropped her eyes upon him during the repast I happened
to notice it. It might not have been much to notice, but it led to my
seeing that there was a little drama going on and that the young man
would naturally be the hero. It was equally natural that in this
capacity he should be the cause of my asking my left-hand neighbour, who
happened to be my host, for some account of him. But "Oh, that fellow?
he's my nephew," was a description which, to appear copious, required
that I should know more about the uncle.

We had coffee on the terrace of the house; a terrace laid out in one
quarter, oddly and charmingly, in grass where the servants who waited
upon us seemed to tread, processionally, on soundless velvet. There I
had a good look at my host's nephew and a longer talk with my friend's
daughter, in regard to whom I had become conscious of a faint, formless
anxiety. I remember saying to her, gropingly, instinctively: "My dear
child, can I do anything for you? I shall perhaps see your mother before
you do. Can I for instance say anything to her _from_ you?" This only
made her blush and turn away; and it was not till too many days had
passed that I guessed that what had looked out at me unwittingly in her
little gazing trepidation was something like "Oh, just take me away in
spite of myself!" Superficially, conspicuously, there was nothing in the
young man to take her away from. He was a person of the middle
condition, and save that he didn't look at all humble might have passed
for a poor relation. I mean that he had rather a seedy, shabby air, as
if he were wearing out old clothes (he had on faded things that didn't
match); and I formed vaguely the theory that he was a specimen of the
numerous youthful class that goes to seek its fortune in the colonies,
keeps strange company there and comes home without a penny. He had a
brown, smooth, handsome face, a slightly swaggering, self-conscious
ease, and was probably objected to in the house. He hung about, smoking
cigarettes on the terrace, and nobody seemed to have much to say to
him--a circumstance which, as he managed somehow to convey, left him
absolutely indifferent. Louisa Chantry strolled away with one of the
girls from the vicarage; the party on the terrace broke up and the
nephew disappeared.

It was settled that my friends and I should take leave at half-past
five, and I begged to be abandoned in the interval to my devices. I
turned into the library and, mounted on ladders, I handled old books and
old prints and soiled my gloves. Most of the others had gone to look at
the church, and I was left in possession. I wandered into the rooms in
which I knew there were pictures; and if the pictures were not good
there was some interesting china which I followed from corner to corner
and from cabinet to cabinet. At last I found myself on the threshold of
a small room which appeared to terminate the series and in which,
between the curtains draping the doorways, there appeared to be rows of
rare old plates on velvet screens. I was on the point of going in when I
became aware that there was something else beside, something which threw
me back. Two persons were standing side by side at the window, looking
out together with their backs to me--two persons as to whom I
immediately felt that they believed themselves to be alone and
unwatched. One of them was Louisa Chantry, the other was the young man
whom my host had described as his nephew. They were so placed as not to
see me, and when I recognized them I checked myself instinctively. I
hesitated a moment; then I turned away altogether. I can't tell you why,
except that if I had gone in I should have had somehow the air of
discovering them. There was no visible reason why they should have been
embarrassed by discovery, inasmuch as, so far as I could see, they were
doing no harm, were only standing more or less together, without
touching, and for the moment apparently saying nothing. Were they
watching something out of the window? I don't know; all I know is that
the observation I had made at luncheon gave me a sense of
responsibility. I might have taken my responsibility the other way and
broken up their communion; but I didn't feel this to be sufficiently my
business. Later on I wished I had.

I passed through the rooms again, and then out of the house. The gardens
were ingenious, but they made me think (I have always that conceited
habit) how much cleverer _I_ should have been about them. Presently I
met several of the rest of the party coming back from the church; on
which my hostess took possession of me, declaring there was a point of
view I must absolutely be treated to. I saw she was a walking woman and
that this meant half a mile in the park. But I was good for that, and we
wandered off together while the others returned to the house. It was
present to me that I ought to ask my companion, for Helen Chantry's
sake, a question about Louisa--whether for instance she had happened to
notice the way the girl seemed to be going. But it was difficult to say
anything without saying too much; so that to begin with I merely risked
the observation that our young friend was remarkably pretty. As the
point admitted of no discussion this didn't take us very far; nor was
the subject much enlarged by our unanimity as to the fact that she was
also remarkably nice. I observed that I had had very little chance to
talk with her, for which I was sorry, having known her mother for years.
My hostess, at this, looked vaguely round, as if she had missed her for
the first time. "Sure enough, she has not been about. I daresay she's
been writing to her mother--she's always writing to her mother." "Not
always," I mentally reflected; but I waited discreetly, admiring
everything and rising to the occasion and the views, before I inquired
casually who the young man might be who had sat two or three below me at
luncheon--the rather good-looking young man, with the regular features
and the brownish clothes--not the one with the moustache.

"Oh, poor Jack Brandon," said my companion, in a tone calculated to make
him seem no one in particular.

"Is he very poor?" I asked, with a laugh.

"Oh dear, yes. There are nine of them--fancy!--all boys; and there's
nothing for anyone but the eldest. He's my husband's nephew--his poor
mother's my sister-in-law. He sometimes turns up here when he has
nothing better to do; but I don't think he likes us much." I saw she
meant that they didn't like _him_; and I exposed myself to suspicion by
asking if he had been with them long. But my friend was not very
plastic, and she simplified my whole theory of the case by replying
after she had thought a moment that she wasn't clear about it--she
thought he had come only the morning before. It seemed to me I could
safely feel a little further, so I inquired if he were likely to stay
many days. "Oh dear, no; he'll go to-morrow!" said my hostess. There was
nothing whatever to show that she saw a connection between my odd
interest in Mr. Brandon and the subject of our former reference; there
was only a quick lucidity on the subject of the young man's departure.
It reassured me, for no great complications would have arisen in
forty-eight hours.

In retracing our steps we passed again through a part of the gardens.
Just after we had entered them my hostess, begging me to excuse her,
called at a man who was raking leaves to ask him a question about his
wife. I heard him reply "Oh, she's very bad, my lady," and I followed my
course. Presently my lady turned round with him, as if to go to see his
wife, who apparently was ill and on the place. I continued to look about
me--there were such charming things; and at the end of five minutes I
missed my way--I had not taken the direction of the house. Suddenly at
the turn of a walk, the angle of a great clipped hedge, I found myself
face to face with Jack Brandon. He was moving rapidly, looking down,
with his hands in his pockets, and he started and stared at me a moment.
I said "Oh, how d'ye do?" and I was on the point of adding "Won't you
kindly show me the right way?" But with a summary salute and a queer
expression of face he had already passed me. I looked after him an
instant and I all but stopped him; then one of the faintest voices of
the air told me that Louisa Chantry would not be far off, that in fact
if I were to go on a few steps I should find her. I continued and I
passed through an arched aperture of the hedge, a kind of door in the
partition. This corner of the place was like an old French garden, a
little inclosed apartment, with statues set into the niches of the high
walls of verdure. I paused in admiration; then just opposite to me I saw
poor Louisa. She was on a bench, with her hands clasped in her lap, her
head bent, her eyes staring down before her. I advanced on the grass,
attracting her attention; and I was close to her before she looked at
me, before she sprang up and showed me a face convulsed with nameless
pain. She was so pale that I thought she was ill--I had a vision of her
companion's having rushed off for help. She stood gazing at me with
expanded eyes and parted lips, and what I was mainly conscious of was
that she had become ten years older. Whatever troubled her it was
something pitiful--something that prompted me to hold out my two hands
to her and exclaim tenderly "My poor child, my poor child!" She wavered
a moment, as if she wanted to escape me but couldn't trust herself to
run; she looked away from me, turning her head this way and that. Then
as I went close to her she covered her face with her two hands, she let
me lay mine upon her and draw her to my breast. As she dropped her head
upon it she burst into tears, sobbing soundlessly and tragically. I
asked her no question, I only held her so long as she would, letting her
pour out the passion which I felt at the same time she made a tremendous
effort to smother. She couldn't smother it, but she could break away
violently; and this she quickly did, hurrying out of the nook where our
little scene--and some other greater scene, I judged, just before
it--had taken place, and leaving me infinitely mystified. I sat down on
the bench a moment and thought it over; then I succeeded in discovering
a path to the house.

The carriage was at the door for our drive home, but my companions, who
had had tea, were waiting for our hostess, of whom they wished to take
leave and who had not yet come in. I reported her as engaged with the
wife of one of the gardeners, but we lingered a little in the hall, a
largeish group, to give her time to arrive. Two other persons were
absent, one of whom was Louisa Chantry and the other the young man whom
I had just seen quitting her in the garden. While I sat there, a trifle
abstracted, still somewhat agitated by the sequel to that incident and
at the same time impatient of our last vague dawdle, one of the footmen
presented me with a little folded note. I turned away to open it, and at
the very moment our hostess fortunately came in. This diverted the
attention of the others from the action of the footman, whom, after I
had looked at the note, I immediately followed into the drawing-room. He
led me through it and through two or three others to the door of the
little retreat in which, nearly an hour before, I had come upon Louisa
Chantry and Mr. Brandon. The note was from Louisa, it contained the
simple words "Would you very kindly speak to me an instant before you
go?" She was waiting for me in the most sequestered spot she had been
able to select, and there the footman left us. The girl came straight at
me and in an instant she had grasped my hands. I became aware that her
condition had changed; her tears were gone, she had a concentrated
purpose. I could scarcely see her beautiful young face--it was pressed,
beseechingly, so close to mine. I only felt, as her dry, shining eyes
almost dazzled me, that a strong light had been waved back and forth
before me. Her words at first seemed to me incoherent; then I understood
that she was asking me for a pledge.

"Excuse me, forgive me for bringing you here--to say something I can't
say before all those people. _Do_ forgive me--it was so awfully kind of
you to come. I couldn't think of any other way--just for two seconds. I
want you to swear to me," she went on, with her hands now raised and
intensely clasped.

"To swear, dearest child?"

"I'm not your dearest child--I'm not anyone's! But _don't_ tell mamma.
Promise me--promise me," she insisted.

"Tell her what?--I don't understand."

"Oh, you do--you do!" she kept on; "and if you're going to Chantry
you'll see her, you'll be with her, you may see her before I do. On my
knees I ask you for a vow!"

She seemed on the point of throwing herself at my feet, but I stopped
her, I kept her erect. "When shall _you_ see your mother?"

"As soon as I can. I want to get home--I want to get home!" With this I
thought she was going to cry again, but she controlled herself and only
pressed me with feverish eyes.

"You have some great trouble--for heaven's sake tell me what it is."

"It isn't anything--it will pass. Only don't breathe it to mamma!"

"How can I breathe it if I don't know what it is?"

"You do know--you know what I mean." Then after an instant's pause she
added: "What I did in the garden."

"_What_ did you do in the garden?"

"I threw myself on your neck and I sobbed--I behaved like a maniac."

"Is that all you mean?"

"It's what I don't want mamma to know--it's what I beseech you to keep
silent about. If you don't I'll never, never go home. Have _mercy_ on
me!" the poor child quavered.

"Dear girl, I only want to be tender to you--to be perfect. But tell me
first: has anyone acted wrongly to you?"

"No one--_no_ one. I speak the truth."

She looked into my eyes, and I looked far into hers. They were wild with
pain and yet they were so pure that they made me confusedly believe her.
I hesitated a moment; then I risked the question: "Isn't Mr. Brandon
responsible for anything?"

"For nothing--for nothing! Don't blame _him_!" the girl passionately
cried.

"He hasn't made love to you?"

"Not a word--before God! Oh, it was too awful!" And with this she broke
away from me, flung herself on her knees before a sofa, burying her face
in it and in her arms. "Promise me, promise me, promise me!" she
continued to wail.

I was horribly puzzled but I was immeasurably touched. I stood looking a
moment at her extravagant prostration; then I said "I'm dreadfully in
the dark, but I promise."

This brought her to her feet again, and again she seized my hands.
"Solemnly, sacredly?" she panted.

"Solemnly, sacredly."

"Not a syllable--not a hint?"

"Dear Louisa," I said kindly, "when I promise I perform."

"You see I don't know you. And when do you go to Chantry?"

"Day after to-morrow. And when do you?"

"To-morrow if I can."

"Then you'll see your mother first--it will be all right," I said
smiling.

"All right, all right!" she repeated, with her woeful eyes. "Go, go!"
she added, hearing a step in the adjoining room.

The footman had come back to announce that my friends were seated in the
carriage, and I was careful to say before him in a different tone: "Then
there's nothing more I can do for you?"

"Nothing--good-bye," said Louisa, tearing herself away too abruptly to
take my kiss, which, to follow the servant again, I left unbestowed. I
felt awkward and guilty as I took leave of the company, murmuring
something to my entertainers about having had an arrangement to make
with Miss Chantry. Most of the people bade us good-bye from the steps,
but I didn't see Jack Brandon. On our drive home in the waning afternoon
my other friends doubtless found me silent and stupid.

I went to Chantry two days later, and was disappointed to find that the
daughter of the house had not returned, though indeed after parting with
her I had been definitely of the opinion that she was much more likely
to go to bed and be ill. Her mother however had not heard that she was
ill, and my inquiry about the young lady was of course full of
circumspection. It was a little difficult, for I had to talk about her,
Helen being particularly delighted that we had already made
acquaintance. No day had been fixed for her return, but it came over my
friend that she oughtn't to be absent during too much of my visit. She
was the best thing they had to show--she was the flower and the charm of
the place. It had other charms as well--it was a sleepy, silvery old
home, exquisitely grey and exquisitely green; a house where you could
have confidence in your leisure: it would be as genuine as the butter
and the claret. The very look of the pleasant, prosaic drawing-room
suggested long mornings of fancy work, of Berlin wool and premeditated
patterns, new stitches and mild pauses. My good Helen was always in the
middle of something eternal, of which the past and the future were
rolled up in oilcloth and tissue paper, and the intensest moments of
conversation were when it was spread out for pensive opinions. These
used to drop sometimes even from Christopher Chantry when he straddled
vaguely in with muddy leggings and the raw materials of a joke. He had a
mind like a large, full milk-pan, and his wit was as thick as cream.

One evening I came down to dinner a little early and, to my surprise,
found my troubled maiden in possession of the drawing-room. She was
evidently troubled still, and had been waiting there in the hope of
seeing me alone. We were too quickly interrupted by her parents,
however, and I had no conversation with her till I sat down to the piano
after dinner and beckoned to her to come and stand by it. Her father had
gone off to smoke; her mother dozed by one of the crackling little fires
of the summer's end.

"Why didn't you come home the day you told me you meant to?"

She fixed her eyes on my hands. "I couldn't, I couldn't!"

"You look to me as if you were very ill."

"I am," the girl said simply.

"You ought to see some one. Something ought to be done."

She shook her head with quiet despair. "It would be no use--no one would
know."

"What do you mean--would know?"

"No one would understand."

"You ought to make them!"

"Never--never!" she repeated. "Never!"

"I confess _I_ don't," I replied, with a kind of angry renunciation. I
played louder, with the passion of my uneasiness and the aggravation of
my responsibility.

"No, you don't indeed," said Louisa Chantry.

I had only to accept this disadvantage, and after a moment I went on:
"What became of Mr. Brandon?"

"I don't know."

"Did he go away?"

"That same evening."

"Which same evening?"

"The day you were there. I never saw him again."

I was silent a minute, then I risked: "And you never will, eh?"

"Never--never."

"Then why shouldn't you get better?"

She also hesitated, after which she answered: "Because I'm going to
die."

My music ceased, in spite of me, and we sat looking at each other. Helen
Chantry woke up with a little start and asked what was the matter. I
rose from the piano and I couldn't help saying "Dear Helen, I haven't
the least idea." Louisa sprang up, pressing her hand to her left side,
and the next instant I cried aloud "She's faint--she's ill--do come to
her!" Mrs. Chantry bustled over to us, and immediately afterwards the
girl had thrown herself on her mother's breast, as she had thrown
herself days before on mine; only this time without tears, without
cries, in the strangest, most tragic silence. She was not faint, she was
only in despair--that at least is the way I really saw her. There was
something in her contact that scared poor Helen, that operated a sudden
revelation: I can see at this hour the queer frightened look she gave me
over Louisa's shoulder. The girl however in a moment disengaged herself,
declaring that she was not ill, only tired, very tired, and wanted to go
to bed. "Take her, take her--go with her," I said to her mother; and I
pushed them, got them out of the room, partly to conceal my own
trepidation. A few moments after they had gone Christopher Chantry came
in, having finished his cigar, and I had to mention to him--to explain
their absence--that his daughter was so fatigued that she had withdrawn
under her mother's superintendence. "Didn't she seem done up, awfully
done up? What on earth, at that confounded place, did she go in for?"
the dear man asked with his pointless kindness. I couldn't tell him this
was just what I myself wanted to know; and while I pretended to read I
wondered inextinguishably what indeed she had "gone in" for. It had
become still more difficult to keep my vow than I had expected; it was
also very difficult that evening to converse with Christopher Chantry.
His wife's continued absence rendered some conversation necessary; yet
it had the advantage of making him remark, after it had lasted an hour,
that he must go to see what was the matter. He left me, and soon
afterwards I betook myself to my room; bedtime was elastic in the early
sense at Chantry. I knew I should only have to wait awhile for Helen to
come to me, and in fact by eleven o'clock she arrived.

"She's in a very strange state--something happened there."

"And _what_ happened, pray?"

"I can't make out; she won't tell me."

"Then what makes you suppose so?"

"She has broken down utterly; she says there was something."

"Then she does tell you?"

"Not a bit. She only begins and then stops short--she says it's too
dreadful."

"Too dreadful?"

"She says it's _horrible_," my poor friend murmured, with tears in her
eyes and tragic speculation in her mild maternal face.

"But in what way? Does she give you no facts, no clue?"

"It was something she did."

We looked at each other a moment. "Did?" I echoed. "Did to whom?"

"She won't tell me--she says she _can't_. She tries to bring it out, but
it sticks in her throat."

"Nonsense. She did nothing," I said.

"What _could_ she do?" Helen asked, gazing at me.

"She's ill, she's in a fever, her mind's wandering."

"So I say to her father."

"And what does _she_ say to him?"

"Nothing--she won't speak to him. He's with her now, but she only lies
there letting him hold her hand, with her face turned away from him and
her eyes closed."

"You must send for the doctor immediately."

"I've already sent for him."

"Should you like me to sit up with her?"

"Oh, I'll do that!" Helen said. Then she asked: "But if you were there
the other day, what did you see?"

"Nothing whatever," I resolutely answered.

"_Really_ nothing?"

"Really, my dear child."

"But was there nobody there who could have made up to her?"

I hesitated a moment. "My poor Helen, you should have seen them!"

"She wouldn't look at anybody that wasn't remarkably nice," Helen mused.

"Well--I don't want to abuse your friends--but nobody was remarkably
nice. Believe me, she hasn't looked at anybody, and nothing whatever has
occurred. She's ill, and it's a mere morbid fancy."

"It's a mere morbid fancy----!" Mrs. Chantry gobbled down this formula.
I felt that I was giving her another still more acceptable, and which
she as promptly adopted, when I added that Louisa would soon get over
it.

I may as well say at once that Louisa never got over it. There followed
an extraordinary week, which I look back upon as one of the most
uncomfortable of my life. The doctor had something to say about the
action of his patient's heart--it was weak and slightly irregular, and
he was anxious to learn whether she had lately been exposed to any
violent shock or emotion--but he could give no name to the disorder
under the influence of which she had begun unmistakably to sink. She lay
on the sofa in her room--she refused to go to bed, and in the absence of
complications it was not insisted on--utterly white, weak and
abstracted, shaking her head at all suggestion, waving away all
nourishment save the infinitesimally little that enabled her to stretch
out her hand from time to time (at intervals of very unequal length) and
begin "Mother, mother!" as if she were mustering courage for a supreme
confession. The courage never came; she was haunted by a strange impulse
to speak, which in turn was checked on her lips by some deeper horror or
some stranger fear. She seemed to seek relief spasmodically from some
unforgettable consciousness and then to find the greatest relief of all
in impenetrable silence. I knew these things only from her mother, for
before me (I went gently in and out of her room two or three times a
day) she gave no sign whatever. The little local doctor, after the first
day, acknowledged himself at sea and expressed a desire to consult with
a colleague at Exeter. The colleague journeyed down to us and shuffled
and stammered: he recommended an appeal to a high authority in London.
The high authority was summoned by telegraph and paid us a flying visit.
He enunciated the valuable opinion that it was a very curious case and
dropped the striking remark that in so charming a home a young lady
ought to bloom like a flower. The young lady's late hostess came over,
but she could throw no light on anything: all that she had ever noticed
was that Louisa had seemed "rather blue" for a day or two before she
brought her visit to a close. Our days were dismal enough and our nights
were dreadful, for I took turns with Helen in sitting up with the girl.
Chantry Court itself seemed conscious of the riddle that made its
chambers ache; it bowed its grey old head over the fate of its daughter.
The people who had been coming were put off; dinner became a ceremony
enacted mainly by the servants. I sat alone with Christopher Chantry,
whose honest hair, in his mystification, stuck out as if he had been
overhauling accounts. My hours with Louisa were even more intensely
silent, for she almost never looked at me. In the watches of the night
however I at last saw more clearly into what she was thinking of. Once
when I caught her wan eyes resting upon me I took advantage of it to
kneel down by her bed and speak to her with the utmost tenderness.

"If you can't say it to your mother, can you say it perhaps to _me_?"

She gazed at me for some time. "What does it matter now--if I'm dying?"

I shook my head and smiled. "You won't die if you get it off your mind."

"You'd be cruel to him," she said. "He's innocent--he's innocent."

"Do you mean _you're_ guilty? What trifle are you magnifying?"

"Do you call it a trifle----?" She faltered and paused.

"Certainly I do, my dear." Then I risked a great stroke. "I've often
done it myself!"

"_You_? Never, never! I was cruel to him," she added.

This puzzled me; I couldn't work it into my conception. "How were you
cruel?"

"In the garden. I changed suddenly, I drove him away, I told him he
filled me with horror."

"Why did you do that?"

"Because my shame came over me."

"Your shame?"

"What I had done in the house."

"And what had you done?"

She lay a few moments with her eyes closed, as if she were living it
over. "I broke out to him, I told him," she began at last. But she
couldn't continue, she was powerless to utter it.

"Yes, I know what you told him. Millions of girls have told young men
that before."

"They've been asked, they've been asked! They didn't speak _first_! I
didn't even know him, he didn't care for me, I had seen him for the
first time the day before. I said strange things to him, and he behaved
like a gentleman."

"Well he might!"

"Then before he could turn round, when we had simply walked out of the
house together and strolled in the garden--it was as if I were borne
along in the air by the wonder of what I had said--it rolled over me
that I was lost."

"Lost?"

"That I had been horrible--that I had been mad. Nothing could never
unsay it. I frightened him--I almost struck him."

"Poor fellow!" I smiled.

"Yes--pity him. He was kind. But he'll see me that way--always!"

I hesitated as to the answer it was best to make to this; then I
produced: "Don't think he'll remember you--he'll see other girls."

"Ah, he'll _forget_ me!" she softly and miserably wailed; and I saw that
I had said the wrong thing. I bent over her more closely, to kiss her,
and when I raised my head her mother was on the other side of the bed.
She fell on her knees there for the same purpose, and when Louisa felt
her lips she stretched out her arms to embrace her. She had the strength
to draw her close, and I heard her begin again, for the hundredth time,
"Mother, mother----"

"Yes, my own darling."

Then for the hundredth time I heard her stop. There was an intensity in
her silence. It made me wildly nervous; I got up and turned away.

"Mother, mother," the girl repeated, and poor Helen replied with a sound
of passionate solicitation. But her daughter only exhaled in the waiting
hush, while I stood at the window where the dawn was faint, the most
miserable moan in the world. "I'm dying," she said, articulately; and
she died that night, after an hour, unconscious. The doctor arrived
almost at the moment; this time he was sure it must have been the heart.
The poor parents were in stupefaction, and I gave up half my visits and
stayed with them a month. But in spite of their stupefaction I kept my
vow.



COLLABORATION


I don't know how much people care for my work, but they like my studio
(of which indeed I am exceedingly fond myself), as they show by their
inclination to congregate there at dusky hours on winter afternoons, or
on long dim evenings when the place looks well with its rich
combinations and low-burning lamps and the bad pictures (my own) are not
particularly visible. I won't go into the question of how many of these
are purchased, but I rejoice in the distinction that my invitations are
never declined. Some of my visitors have been good enough to say that on
Sunday evenings in particular there is no pleasanter place in
Paris--where so many places are pleasant--none friendlier to easy talk
and repeated cigarettes, to the exchange of points of view and the
comparison of accents. The air is as international as only Parisian air
can be; women, I surmise, think they look well in it; they come also
because they fancy they are doing something Bohemian, just as many of
the men come because they suppose they are doing something correct. The
old heraldic cushions on the divans, embossed with rusty gold, are
favourable both to expansion and to contraction--that of course of
contracting parties--and the Italian brocade on the walls appeals to
one's highest feelings. Music makes its home there--though I confess I
am not quite the master of _that_ house, and when it is going on in a
truly receptive hush I enjoy the way my company leans back and gazes
through the thin smoke of cigarettes up at the distant Tiepolo in the
almost palatial ceiling. I make sure the piano, the tobacco and the tea
are all of the best.

For the conversation, I leave that mostly to take care of itself. There
are discussions of course and differences--sometimes even a violent
circulation of sense and sound; but I have a consciousness that beauty
flourishes and that harmonies prevail in the end. I have occasionally
known a visitor to be rude to me because he disliked another visitor's
opinions--I had seen an old habitué slip away without bidding me good
night on the arrival of some confident specimen of _les jeunes_; but as
a general thing we have it out together on the spot--the place is really
a chamber of justice, a temple of reconciliation: we understand each
other if we only sit up late enough. Art protects her children in the
long run--she only asks them to trust her. She is like the Catholic
Church--she guarantees paradise to the faithful. Music moreover is a
universal solvent; though I've not an infallible ear I've a sufficient
sense of the matter for that. Ah, the wounds I've known it to heal--the
bridges I've known it to build--the ghosts I've known it to lay! Though
I've seen people stalk out I've never observed them not to steal back.
My studio in short is the theatre of a cosmopolite drama, a comedy
essentially "of character."

One of the liveliest scenes of the performance was the evening, last
winter, on which I became aware that one of my compatriots--an American,
my good friend Alfred Bonus--was engaged in a controversy somewhat
acrimonious, on a literary subject, with Herman Heidenmauer, the young
composer who had been playing to us divinely a short time before and
whom I thought of neither as a disputant nor as an Englishman. I
perceived in a moment that something had happened to present him in this
combined character to poor Bonus, who was so ardent a patriot that he
lived in Paris rather than in London, who had met his interlocutor for
the first time on this occasion, and who apparently had been misled by
the perfection with which Heidenmauer spoke English--he spoke it really
better than Alfred Bonus. The young musician, a born Bavarian, had spent
a few years in England, where he had a commercial step-brother planted
and more or less prosperous--a helpful man who had watched over his
difficult first steps, given him a temporary home, found him publishers
and pupils, smoothed the way to a stupefied hearing for his first
productions. He knew his London and might at a first glance have been
taken for one of its products; but he had, in addition to a genius of
the sort that London fosters but doesn't beget, a very German soul. He
brought me a note from an old friend on the other side of the Channel,
and I liked him as soon as I looked at him; so much indeed that I could
forgive him for making me feel thin and empirical, conscious that _he_
was one of the higher kind whom the future has looked in the face. He
had met through his gold spectacles her deep eyes, and some mutual
communication had occurred. This had given him a confidence which passed
for conceit only with those who didn't know the reason.

I guessed the reason early, and, as may be imagined, he didn't grudge me
the knowledge. He was happy and various--as little as possible the mere
long-haired musicmonger. His hair was short--it was only his legs and
his laughter that were long. He was fair and rosy, and his gold
spectacles glittered as if in response to the example set them by his
beautiful young golden beard. You would have been sure he was an artist
without going so far as to decide upon his particular passion; for you
would have been conscious that whatever this passion might be it was
acquainted with many of the others and mixed with them to its profit.
Yet these discoveries had not been fully made by Alfred Bonus, whose
occupation was to write letters to the American journals about the way
the "boys" were coming on in Paris; for in such a case he probably would
not have expected such nebulous greatness to condense at a moment's
notice. Bonus is clever and critical, and a sort of self-appointed
emissary or agent of the great republic. He has it at heart to prove
that the Americans in Europe _do_ get on--taking for granted on the part
of the Americans at home an interest in this subject greater, as I often
assure him, than any really felt. "Come, now, do _I_ get on?" I often
ask him; and I sometimes push the inquiry so far as to stammer: "And
you, my dear Bonus, do _you_ get on?" He is apt to look a little injured
on such occasions, as if he would like to say in reply: "Don't you call
it success to have Sunday evenings at which I'm a regular attendant? And
can you question for a moment the figure I make at them?" It has even
occurred to me that he suspects me of painting badly on purpose to spite
him--that is to interfere with his favourite dogma. Therefore to spite
me in return he's in the heroic predicament of refusing to admit that
I'm a failure. He takes a great interest in the plastic arts, but his
intensest sympathy is for literature. This sentiment is somewhat
starved, as in that school the boys languish as yet on a back seat. To
show what they are doing Bonus has to retreat upon the studios, but
there is nothing he enjoys so much as having, when the rare chance
offers, a good literary talk. He follows the French movement closely and
explains it profusely to our compatriots, whom he mystifies, but who
guess he's rather loose.

I forget how his conversation with Heidenmauer began--it was, I think,
some difference of opinion about one of the English poets that set them
afloat. Heidenmauer knows the English poets, and the French, and the
Italian, and the Spanish, and the Russian--he is a wonderful
representative of that Germanism which consists in the negation of
intellectual frontiers. It is the English poets that, if I'm not
mistaken, he loves best, and probably the harm was done by his having
happened to say so. At any rate Alfred Bonus let him have it, without
due notice perhaps, which is rather Alfred's way, on the question (a
favourite one with my compatriot) of the backward state of literature in
England, for which after all Heidenmauer was not responsible. Bonus
believes in responsibility--the responsibility of others, an attitude
which tends to make some of his friends extremely secretive, though
perhaps it would have been justified--as to this I'm not sure--had
Heidenmauer been, under the circumstances, technically British. Before
he had had time to explain that he was not, the other persons present
had become aware that a kind of challenge had passed--that nation, in a
sudden startled flurry, somehow found itself pitted against nation.
There was much vagueness at first as to which of the nations were
engaged and as to what their quarrel was about, the question coming
presently to appear less simple than the spectacle (so easily
conceivable) of a German's finding it hot for him in a French house, a
house French enough at any rate to give countenance to the idea of his
quick defeat.

How could the right cause fail of protection in any house of which
Madame de Brindes and her charming daughter were so good as to be
assiduous frequenters? I recollect perfectly the pale gleam of joy in
the mother's handsome face when she gathered that what had happened was
that a detested German was on his defence. She wears her eternal
mourning (I admit it's immensely becoming) for a triple woe, for
multiplied griefs and wrongs, all springing from the crash of the
Empire, from the battlefields of 1870. Her husband fell at Sedan, her
father and her brother on still darker days; both her own family and
that of M. de Brindes, their general situation in life, were, as may be
said, creations of the Empire, so that from one hour to the other she
found herself sinking with the wreck. You won't recognise her under the
name I give her, but you may none the less have admired, between their
pretty lemon-coloured covers, the touching tales of Claude Lorrain. She
plies an ingenious, pathetic pen and has reconciled herself to effort
and privation for the sake of her daughter. I say privation, because
these distinguished women are poor, receive with great modesty and have
broken with a hundred of those social sanctities than are dearer to
French souls than to any others. They have gone down into the
market-place, and Paule de Brindes, who is three-and-twenty to-day and
has a happy turn for keeping a water-colour liquid, earns a hundred
francs here and there. She is not so handsome as her mother, but she has
magnificent hair and what the French call a look of race, and is, or at
least was till the other day, a frank and charming young woman. There is
something exquisite in the way these ladies are earnestly,
conscientiously modern. From the moment they accept necessities they
accept them all, and poor Madame de Brindes flatters herself that she
has made her dowerless daughter one of us others. The girl goes out
alone, talks with young men and, although she only paints landscape,
takes a free view of the _convenances_. Nothing can please either of
them more than to tell them they have thrown over their superstitions.
They haven't, thank heaven; and when I want to be reminded of some of
the prettiest in the world--of a thousand fine scruples and pleasant
forms, and of what grace can do for the sake of grace--I know where to
go for it.

It was a part of this pious heresy--much more august in the way they
presented it than some of the aspects of the old faith--that Paule
should have become "engaged," quite like a _jeune mees_, to my brilliant
friend Félix Vendemer. He is such a votary of the modern that he was
inevitably interested in the girl of the future and had matched one
reform with another, being ready to marry without a penny, as the
clearest way of expressing his appreciation, this favourable specimen of
the type. He simply fell in love with Mademoiselle de Brindes and
behaved, on his side, equally like one of us others, except that he
begged me to ask her mother for her hand. I was inspired to do so with
eloquence, and my friends were not insensible of such an opportunity to
show that they now lived in the world of realities. Vendemer's sole
fortune is his genius, and he and Paule, who confessed to an answering
flame, plighted their troth like a pair of young rustics or (what comes
for French people to the same thing) young Anglo-Saxons. Madame de
Brindes thinks such doings at bottom very vulgar; but vulgar is what she
tries hard to be, she is so convinced it is the only way to make a
living. Vendemer had had at that time only the first of his successes,
which was not, as you will remember--and unfortunately for Madame de
Brindes--of this remunerative kind. Only a few people recognised the
perfection of his little volume of verse: my acquaintance with him
originated in my having been one of the few. A volume of verse was a
scanty provision to marry on, so that, still like a pair of us others,
the luckless lovers had to bide their time. Presently however came the
success (again a success only with those who care for quality, not with
the rough and ready public) of his comedy in verse at the Français.
This charming work had just been taken off (it had been found not to
make money), when the various parties to my little drama met Heidenmauer
at my studio.

Vendemer, who has, as indeed the others have, a passion for music, was
tremendously affected by hearing him play two or three of his
compositions, and I immediately saw that the immitigable German quality
was a morsel much less bitter for him than for the two uncompromising
ladies. He went so far as to speak to Heidenmauer frankly, to thank him
with effusion, an effort of which neither of the quivering women would
have been capable. Vendemer was in the room the night Alfred Bonus
raised his little breeze; I saw him lean on the piano and listen with a
queer face looking however rather wonderingly at Heidenmauer. Before
this I had noticed the instant paleness (her face was admirably
expressive) with which Madame de Brindes saw her prospective son-in-law
make up, as it were, to the original Teuton, whose national character
was intensified to her aching mind, as it would have been to that of
most Frenchwomen in her place, by his wash of English colour. A German
was bad enough--but a German with English aggravations! Her senses were
too fine to give her the excuse of not feeling that his compositions
were interesting, and she was capable, magnanimously, of listening to
them with dropped eyes; but (much as it ever cost her not to be
perfectly courteous), she couldn't have made even the most superficial
speech to him about them. Marie de Brindes could never have spoken to
Herman Heidenmauer. It was a narrowness if you will, but a narrowness
that to my vision was enveloped in a dense atmosphere--a kind of sunset
bloom--of enriching and fortifying things. Herman Heidenmauer himself,
like the man of imagination and the lover of life that he was, would
have entered into it delightedly, been charmed with it as a fine case of
bigotry. This was conspicuous in Marie de Brindes: her loyalty to the
national idea was that of a _dévote_ to a form of worship. She never
spoke of France, but she always made me think of it, and with an
authority which the women of her race seem to me to have in the question
much more than the men. I dare say I'm rather in love with her, though,
being considerably younger, I've never told her so--as if she would in
the least mind that! I have indeed been a little checked by a spirit of
allegiance to Vendemer; suspecting always (excuse my sophistication)
that in the last analysis it is the mother's charm that he feels--or
originally felt--in the daughter's. He spoke of the elder lady to me in
those days with the insistence with which only a Frenchman can speak of
the objects of his affection. At any rate there was always something
symbolic and slightly ceremonial to me in her delicate cameo-face and
her general black-robed presence: she made me think of a priestess or a
mourner, of revolutions and sieges, detested treaties and ugly public
things. I pitied her, too, for the strife of the elements in her--for
the way she must have felt a noble enjoyment mutilated. She was too good
for that, and yet she was too rigid for anything else; and the sight of
such dismal perversions made me hate more than ever the stupid terms on
which nations have organised their intercourse.

When she gathered that one of my guests was simply cramming it down the
throat of another that the English literary mind was not even literary,
she turned away with a vague shrug and a pitiful look at her daughter
for the taste of people who took their pleasure so poorly: the truth in
question would be so obvious that it was not worth making a scene about.
Madame de Brindes evidently looked at any scene between the English and
the Americans as a quarrel proceeding vaguely from below stairs--a
squabble sordidly domestic. Her almost immediate departure with her
daughter operated as a lucky interruption, and I caught for the first
time in the straight, spare girl, as she followed her mother, a little
of the air that Vendemer had told me he found in her, the still
exaltation, the brown uplifted head that we attribute, or that at any
rate he made it visible to me that he attributed, to the dedicated Maid.
He considered that his intended bore a striking resemblance to Jeanne
d'Arc, and he marched after her on this occasion like a
square-shouldered armour-bearer. He reappeared, however, after he had
put the ladies into a cab, and half an hour later the rest of my
friends, with the sole exception of Bonus, having dispersed, he was
sitting up with me in the empty studio for another _bout de causerie_.
At first perhaps I was too occupied with reprimanding my compatriot to
give much attention to what Vendemer might have to say; I remember at
any rate that I had asked Bonus what had induced him to make so grave a
blunder. He was not even yet, it appeared, aware of his blunder, so that
I had to inquire by what odd chance he had taken Heidenmauer for a
bigoted Briton.

"If I spoke to him as one he answered as one; that's bigoted enough,"
said Alfred Bonus.

"He was confused and amused at your onslaught: he wondered what fly had
stung you."

"The fly of patriotism," Vendemer suggested.

"Do _you_ like him--a beast of a German?" Bonus demanded.

"If he's an Englishman he isn't a German--_il faut opter_. We can hang
him for the one or for the other, we can't hang him for both. I was
immensely struck with those things he played."

"They had no charm for me, or doubtless I too should have been
demoralised," Alfred said. "He seemed to know nothing about Miss
Brownrigg. Now Miss Brownrigg's great."

"I like the things and even the people you quarrel about, you big babies
of the same breast. _C'est à se tordre!_" Vendemer declared.

"I may be very abject, but I _do_ take an interest in the American
novel," Alfred rejoined.

"I hate such expressions: there's no such thing as the American novel."

"Is there by chance any such thing as the French?"

"_Pas davantage_--for the artist himself: how can you ask? I don't know
what is meant by French art and English art and American art: those seem
to me mere cataloguers' and reviewers' and tradesmen's names,
representing preoccupations utterly foreign to the artist. Art is art in
every country, and the novel (since Bonus mentions that) is the novel in
every tongue, and hard enough work they have to live up to that
privilege, without our adding another muddle to the problem. The reader,
the consumer may call things as he likes, but we leave him to his little
amusements." I suggested that we were all readers and consumers; which
only made Vendemer continue: "Yes, and only a small handful of us have
the ghost of a palate. But you and I and Bonus are of the handful."

"What do you mean by the handful?" Bonus inquired.

Vendemer hesitated a moment. "I mean the few intelligent people, and
even the few people who are not----" He paused again an instant, long
enough for me to request him not to say what they were "not," and then
went on: "People in a word who have the honour to live in the only
country worth living in."

"And pray what country is that?"

"The land of dreams--the country of art."

"Oh, the land of dreams! I live in the land of realities!" Bonus
exclaimed. "What do you all mean then by chattering so about _le roman
russe?_"

"It's a convenience--to identify the work of three or four, _là-bas_,
because we're so far from it. But do you see them _writing_ 'le roman
russe?'"

"I happen to know that that's exactly what they want to do, some of
them," said Bonus.

"Some of the idiots, then! There are plenty of those everywhere.
Anything born under that silly star is sure not to count."

"Thank God I'm not an artist!" said Bonus.

"Dear Alfred's a critic," I explained.

"And I'm not ashamed of my country," he subjoined.

"Even a critic perhaps may be an artist," Vendemer mused.

"Then as the great American critic Bonus may be the great American
artist," I went on.

"Is that what you're supposed to give us--'American' criticism?"
Vendemer asked, with dismay in his expressive, ironic face. "Take care,
take care, or it will be more American than critical, and then where
will _you_ be? However," he continued, laughing and with a change of
tone, "I may see the matter in too lurid a light, for I've just been
favoured with a judgment conceived in the purest spirit of our own
national genius." He looked at me a moment and then he remarked: "That
dear Madame de Brindes doesn't approve of my attitude."

"Your attitude?"

"Toward your German friend. She let me know it when I went down stairs
with her--told me I was much too cordial, that I must observe myself."

"And what did you reply to that?"

"I answered that the things he had played were extraordinarily
beautiful."

"And how did she meet that?"

"By saying that he's an enemy of our country."

"She had you there," I rejoined.

"Yes, I could only reply '_Chère madame, voyons!_'"

"That was meagre."

"Evidently, for it did no more for me than to give her a chance to
declare that he can't possibly be here for any good and that he belongs
to a race it's my sacred duty to loathe."

"I see what she means."

"I don't then--where artists are concerned. I said to her: '_Ah, madame,
vous savez que pour moi il n'y a que l'art!_'"

"It's very exciting!" I laughed. "How could she parry that?"

"'I know it, my dear child--but for _him_?' That's the way she parried
it. 'Very well, for him?' I asked. 'For him there's the insolence of
the victor and a secret scorn for our incurable illusions!'"

"Heidenmauer has no insolence and no secret scorn."

Vendemer was silent a moment. "Are you very sure of that?"

"Oh, I like him! He's out of all that, and far above it. But what did
Mademoiselle Paule say?" I inquired.

"She said nothing--she only looked at me."

"Happy man!"

"Not a bit. She looked at me with strange eyes, in which I could read
'Go straight, my friend--go straight!' _Oh, les femmes, les femmes!_"

"What's the matter with them now?"

"They've a mortal hatred of art!"

"It's a true, deep instinct," said Alfred Bonus.

"But what passed further with Madame de Brindes?" I went on.

"She only got into her cab, pushing her daughter first; on which I
slammed the door rather hard and came up here. _Cela m'a porté sur les
nerfs._"

"I'm afraid I haven't soothed them," Bonus said, looking for his hat.
When he had found it he added: "When the English have beaten us and
pocketed our _milliards_ I'll forgive them; but not till then!" And with
this he went off, made a little uncomfortable, I think, by Vendemer's
sharper alternatives, while the young Frenchman called after him: "My
dear fellow, at night all cats are grey!"

Vendemer, when we were left alone together, mooned about the empty
studio awhile and asked me three or four questions about Heidenmauer. I
satisfied his curiosity as well as I could, but I demanded the reason of
it. The reason he gave was that one of the young German's compositions
had already begun to haunt his memory; but that was a reason which, to
my sense, still left something unexplained. I didn't however challenge
him, before he quitted me, further than to warn him against being
deliberately perverse.

"What do you mean by being deliberately perverse?" He fixed me so with
his intensely living French eye that I became almost blushingly
conscious of a certain insincerity and, instead of telling him what I
meant, tried to get off with the deplorable remark that the prejudices
of Mesdames de Brindes were after all respectable. "That's exactly what
makes them so odious!" cried Vendemer.

A few days after this, late in the afternoon, Herman Heidenmauer came in
to see me and found the young Frenchman seated at my piano--trying to
win back from the keys some echo of a passage in the _Abendlied_ we had
listened to on the Sunday evening. They met, naturally, as good friends,
and Heidenmauer sat down with instant readiness and gave him again the
page he was trying to recover. He asked him for his address, that he
might send him the composition, and at Vendemer's request, as we sat in
the firelight, played half-a-dozen other things. Vendemer listened in
silence but to my surprise took leave of me before the lamp was brought
in. I asked him to stay to dinner (I had already appealed to Heidenmauer
to stay), but he explained that he was engaged to dine with Madame de
Brindes--_à la maison_ as he always called it. When he had gone
Heidenmauer, with whom on departing he had shaken hands without a word,
put to me the same questions about him that Vendemer had asked on the
Sunday evening about the young German, and I replied that my visitor
would find in a small volume of remarkable verse published by Lemerre,
which I placed in his hands, much of the information he desired. This
volume, which had just appeared, contained, beside a reprint of
Vendemer's earlier productions, many of them admirable lyrics, the drama
that had lately been played at the Français, and Heidenmauer took it
with him when he left me. But he left me late, and before this occurred,
all the evening, we had much talk about the French nation. In the
foreign colony of Paris the exchange of opinions on this subject is one
of the most inevitable and by no means the least interesting of
distractions; it furnishes occupation to people rather conscious of the
burden of leisure. Heidenmauer had been little in Paris, but he was all
the more open to impressions; they evidently poured in upon him and he
gave them a generous hospitality. In the diffused white light of his
fine German intelligence old colours took on new tints to me, and while
we spun fancies about the wonderful race around us I added to my little
stock of notions about his own. I saw that his admiration for our
neighbours was a very high tide, and I was struck with something bland
and unconscious (noble and serene in its absence of precautions) in the
way he let his doors stand open to it. It would have been exasperating
to many Frenchmen; he looked at them through his clear spectacles with
such an absence of suspicion that they might have anything to forgive
him, such a thin metaphysical view of instincts and passions. He had the
air of not allowing for recollections and nerves, and would doubtless
give them occasion to make afresh some of their reflections on the tact
of _ces gens-là_.

A couple of days after I had given him Vendemer's book he came back to
tell me that he found great beauty in it. "It speaks to me--it speaks to
me," he said with his air of happy proof. "I liked the songs--I liked
the songs. Besides," he added, "I like the little romantic play--it has
given me wonderful ideas; more ideas than anything has done for a long
time. Yes--yes."

"What kind of ideas?"

"Well, this kind." And he sat down to the piano and struck the keys. I
listened without more questions, and after a while I began to
understand. Suddenly he said: "Do you know the words of _that_?" and
before I could answer he was rolling out one of the lyrics of the little
volume. The poem was strange and obscure, yet irresistibly beautiful,
and he had translated it into music still more tantalizing than itself.
He sounded the words with his German accent, barely perceptible in
English but strongly marked in French. He dropped them and took them up
again; he was playing with them, feeling his way. "_This_ is my idea!"
he broke out; he had caught it, in one of its mystic mazes, and he
rendered it with a kind of solemn freshness. There was a phrase he
repeated, trying it again and again, and while he did so he chanted the
words of the song as if they were an illuminating flame, an inspiration.
I was rather glad on the whole that Vendemer didn't hear what his
pronunciation made of them, but as I was in the very act of rejoicing I
became aware that the author of the verses had opened the door. He had
pushed it gently, hearing the music; then hearing also his own poetry he
had paused and stood looking at Heidenmauer. The young German nodded and
laughed and, irreflectively, spontaneously, greeted him with a friendly
"_Was sagen Sie dazu?_" I saw Vendemer change colour; he blushed red
and, for an instant, as he stood wavering, I thought he was going to
retreat. But I beckoned him in and, on the divan beside me, patted a
place for him to sit.

He came in but didn't take this place; he went and stood before the fire
to warm his feet, turning his back to us. Heidenmauer played and played,
and after a little Vendemer turned round; he looked about him for a
seat, dropped into it and sat with his elbows on his knees and his head
in his hands. Presently Heidenmauer called out, in French, above the
music: "I like your songs--I like them immensely!" but the young
Frenchman neither spoke nor moved. When however five minutes later
Heidenmauer stopped he sprang up with an entreaty to him to go on, to go
on for the love of God. "_Foilà--foilà!_" cried the musician, and with
hands for an instant suspended he wandered off into mysterious worlds.
He played Wagner and then Wagner again--a great deal of Wagner; in the
midst of which, abruptly, he addressed himself again to Vendemer, who
had gone still further from the piano, launching to me, however from his
corner a "_Dieu, que c'est beau!_" which I saw that Heidenmauer caught.
"I've a conception for an opera, you know--I'd give anything if you'd do
the libretto!" Our German friend laughed out, after this, with clear
good nature, and the rich appeal brought Vendemer slowly to his feet
again, staring at the musician across the room and turning this time
perceptibly pale.

I felt there was a drama in the air, and it made me a little nervous; to
conceal which I said to Heidenmauer: "What's your conception? What's
your subject?"

"My conception would be realized in the subject of M. Vendemer's
play--if he'll do that for me in a great lyric manner!" And with this
the young German, who had stopped playing to answer me, quitted the
piano and Vendemer got up to meet him. "The subject is splendid--it has
taken possession of me. Will you do it with me? Will you work with me?
We shall make something great!"

"Ah, you don't know what you ask!" Vendemer answered, with his pale
smile.

"I do--I do: I've thought of it. It will be bad for me in my country; I
shall suffer for it. They won't like it--they'll abuse me for
it--they'll say of me _pis que pendre._" Heidenmauer pronounced it _bis
que bendre._

"They'll hate my libretto so?" Vendemer asked.

"Yes, your libretto--they'll say it's immoral and horrible. And they'll
say _I'm_ immoral and horrible for having worked with you," the young
composer went on, with his pleasant healthy lucidity. "You'll injure my
career. Oh yes, I shall suffer!" he joyously, exultingly cried.

"_Et moi donc!_" Vendemer exclaimed.

"Public opinion, yes. I shall also make you suffer--I shall nip your
prosperity in the bud. All that's _des bêtises--tes pétisses_," said
poor Heidenmauer. "In art there are no countries."

"Yes, art is terrible, art is monstrous," Vendemer replied, looking at
the fire.

"I love your songs--they have extraordinary beauty."

"And Vendemer has an equal taste for your compositions," I said to
Heidenmauer.

"Tempter!" Vendemer murmured to me, with a strange look.

"_C'est juste!_ I mustn't meddle--which will be all the easier as I'm
dining out and must go and dress. You two make yourselves at home and
fight it out here."

"Do you _leave_ me?" asked Vendemer, still with his strange look.

"My dear fellow, I've only just time."

"We will dine together--he and I--at one of those characteristic places,
and we will look at the matter in its different relations," said
Heidenmauer. "Then we will come back here to finish--your studio is so
good for music."

"There are some things it _isn't_ good for," Vendemer remarked, looking
at our companion.

"It's good for poetry--it's good for truth," smiled the composer.

"You'll stay _here_ and dine together," I said; "my servant can manage
that."

"No, no--we'll go out and we'll walk together. We'll talk a great deal,"
Heidenmauer went on. "The subject is so comprehensive," he said to
Vendemer, as he lighted another cigar.

"The subject?"

"Of your drama. It's so universal."

"Ah, the universe--_il n'y a que ça!_" I laughed, to Vendemer, partly
with a really amused sense of the exaggerated woe that looked out of his
poetic eyes and that seemed an appeal to me not to forsake him, to throw
myself into the scale of the associations he would have to stifle, and
partly to encourage him, to express my conviction that two such fine
minds couldn't in the long run be the worse for coming to an agreement.
I might have been a more mocking Mephistopheles handing over his pure
spirit to my literally German Faust.

When I came home at eleven o'clock I found him alone in my studio,
where, evidently, for some time, he had been moving up and down in
agitated thought. The air was thick with Bavarian fumes, with the
reverberation of mighty music and great ideas, with the echoes of that
"universe" to which I had so mercilessly consigned him. But I judged in
a moment that Vendemer was in a very different phase of his evolution
from the one in which I had left him. I had never seen his handsome,
sensitive face so intensely illumined.

"_Ça y est--ça y est!_" he exclaimed, standing there with his hands in
his pockets and looking at me.

"You've really agreed to do something together?"

"We've sworn a tremendous oath--we've taken a sacred engagement."

"My dear fellow, you're a hero."

"Wait and see! _C'est un très-grand esprit._"

"So much the better!"

"_C'est un bien beau génie._ Ah, we've risen--we soar; _nous sommes
dans les grandes espaces!_" my friend continued with his dilated eyes.

"It's very interesting--because it will cost you something."

"It will cost me everything!" said Félix Vendemer in a tone I seem to
hear at this hour. "That's just the beauty of it. It's the chance of
chances to testify for art--to affirm an indispensable truth."

"An indispensable truth?" I repeated, feeling myself soar too, but into
the splendid vague.

"Do you know the greatest crime that can be perpetrated against it?"

"Against it?" I asked, still soaring.

"Against the religion of art--against the love for beauty--against the
search for the Holy Grail?" The transfigured look with which he named
these things, the way his warm voice filled the rich room, was a
revelation of the wonderful talk that had taken place.

"Do you know--for one of _us_--the really damnable, the only
unpardonable, sin?"

"Tell me, so that I may keep clear of it!"

"To profane _our_ golden air with the hideous invention of patriotism."

"It was a clever invention in its time!" I laughed.

"I'm not talking about its time--I'm talking about, its place. It was
never anything but a fifth-rate impertinence here. In art there are no
countries--no idiotic nationalities, no frontiers, nor _douanes_, nor
still more idiotic fortresses and bayonets. It has the unspeakable
beauty of being the region in which those abominations cease, the medium
in which such vulgarities simply can't live. What therefore are we to
say of the brutes who wish to drag them all in--to crush to death with
them all the flowers of such a garden, to shut out all the light of such
a sky?" I was far from desiring to defend the "brutes" in question,
though there rose before me even at that moment a sufficiently vivid
picture of the way, later on, poor Vendemer would have to face them. I
quickly perceived indeed that the picture was, to his own eyes, a still
more crowded canvas. Félix Vendemer, in the centre of it, was an
admirable, a really sublime figure. If there had been wonderful talk
after I quitted the two poets the wonder was not over yet--it went on
far into the night for my benefit. We looked at the prospect in many
lights, turned the subject about almost every way it would go; but I am
bound to say there was one relation in which we tacitly agreed to
forbear to consider it. We neither of us uttered the name of Paule de
Brindes--the outlook in that direction would too serious. And yet if
Félix Vendemer, exquisite and incorruptible artist that he was, had
fallen in love with the idea of "testifying," it was from that direction
that the finest part of his opportunity to do so would proceed.

I was only too conscious of this when, within the week, I received a
hurried note from Madame de Brindes, begging me as a particular favour
to come and see her without delay. I had not seen Vendemer again, but I
had had a characteristic call from Heidenmauer, who, though I could
imagine him perfectly in a Prussian helmet, with a needle-gun,
perfectly, on definite occasion, a sturdy, formidable soldier, gave me a
renewed impression of inhabiting, in the expansion of his genius and the
exercise of his intelligence, no land of red tape, no province smaller
nor more pedantically administered than the totality of things. I was
reminded afresh too that _he_ foresaw no striking salon-picture, no
_chic_ of execution nor romance of martyrdom, or at any rate devoted
very little time to the consideration of such objects. He doubtless did
scant justice to poor Vendemer's attitude, though he said to me of him
by the way, with his rosy deliberation: "He has good ideas--he has good
ideas. The French mind has--for me--the taste of a very delightful
_bonbon_!" He only measured the angle of convergence, as he called it,
of their two projections. He was in short not preoccupied with the
personal gallantry of their experiment; he was preoccupied with its
"æsthetic and harmonic basis."

It was without her daughter that Madame de Brindes received me, when I
obeyed her summons, in her scrap of a _quatrième_ in the Rue de
Miromesnil.

"Ah, _cher monsieur_, how could you have permitted such a horror--how
could you have given it the countenance of your roof, of your
influence?" There were tears in her eyes, and I don't think that for the
moment I have ever been more touched by a reproach. But I pulled myself
together sufficiently to affirm my faith as well as to disengage my
responsibility. I explained that there was no horror to me in the
matter, that if I was not a German neither was I a Frenchman, and that
all I had before me was two young men inflamed by a great idea and nobly
determined to work together to give it a great form.

"A great idea--to go over to _ces gens-là?_"

"To go over to them?"

"To put yourself on their side--to throw yourself into the arms of those
who hate us--to fall into their abominable trap!"

"What do you call their abominable trap?"

"Their false _bonhomie_, the very impudence of their intrigues, their
profound, scientific deceit and their determination to get the advantage
of us by exploiting our generosity."

"You attribute to such a man as Heidenmauer too many motives and too
many calculations. He's quite ideally superior!"

"Oh, German idealism--we know what that means! We've no use for their
superiority; let them carry it elsewhere--let them leave us alone. Why
do they thrust themselves in upon us and set old wounds throbbing by
their detested presence? We don't go near _them_, or ever wish to hear
their ugly names or behold their _visages de bois_; therefore the most
rudimentary good taste, the tact one would expect even from naked
savages, might suggest to them to seek their amusements elsewhere. But
_their_ taste, _their_ tact--I can scarcely trust myself to speak!"

Madame de Brindes did speak however at considerable further length and
with a sincerity of passion which left one quite without arguments.
There was no argument to meet the fact that Vendemer's attitude wounded
her, wounded her daughter, _jusqu'au fond de l'âme_, that it
represented for them abysses of shame and suffering and that for himself
it meant a whole future compromised, a whole public alienated. It was
vain doubtless to talk of such things; if people didn't _feel_ them, if
they hadn't the fibre of loyalty, the high imagination of honour, all
explanations, all supplications were but a waste of noble emotion. M.
Vendemer's perversity was monstrous--she had had a sickening discussion
with him. What she desired of me was to make one last appeal to him, to
put the solemn truth before him, to try to bring him back to sanity. It
was as if he had temporarily lost his reason. It was to be made clear to
him, _par exemple_, that unless he should recover it Mademoiselle de
Brindes would unhesitatingly withdraw from her engagement.

"Does she _really_ feel as you do?" I asked.

"Do you think I put words into her mouth? She feels as a _fille de
France_ is obliged to feel!"

"Doesn't she love him then?"

"She adores him. But she won't take him without his honour."

"I don't understand such refinements!" I said.

"Oh, _vous autres!_" cried Madame de Brindes. Then with eyes glowing
through her tears she demanded: "Don't you know she knows how her father
died?" I was on the point of saying "What has that to do with it?" but I
withheld the question, for after all I could conceive that it might have
something. There was no disputing about tastes, and I could only express
my sincere conviction that Vendemer was profoundly attached to
Mademoiselle Paule. "Then let him prove it by making her a sacrifice!"
my strenuous hostess replied; to which I rejoined that I would repeat
our conversation to him and put the matter before him as strongly as I
could. I delayed a little to take leave, wondering if the girl would not
come in--I should have been so much more content to receive her strange
recantation from her own lips. I couldn't say this to Madame de Brindes;
but she guessed I meant it, and before we separated we exchanged a look
in which our mutual mistrust was written--the suspicion on her side that
I should not be a very passionate intercessor and the conjecture on mine
that she might be misrepresenting her daughter. This slight tension, I
must add, was only momentary, for I have had a chance of observing Paule
de Brindes since then, and the two ladies were soon satisfied that I
pitied them enough to have been eloquent.

My eloquence has been of no avail, and I have learned (it has been one
of the most interesting lessons of my life) of what transcendent stuff
the artist may sometimes be made. Herman Heidenmauer and Félix Vendemer
are, at the hour I write, immersed in their monstrous collaboration.
There were postponements and difficulties at first, and there will be
more serious ones in the future, when it is a question of giving the
finished work to the world. The world of Paris will stop its ears in
horror, the German Empire will turn its mighty back, and the authors of
what I foresee (oh, I've been treated to specimens!) as a perhaps really
epoch-making musical revelation (is Heidenmauer's style rubbing off on
me?) will perhaps have to beg for a hearing in communities fatally
unintelligent. It may very well be that they will not obtain any hearing
at all for years. I like at any rate to think that time works for them.
At present they work for themselves and for each other, amid drawbacks
of several kinds. Separating after the episode in Paris, they have met
again on alien soil, at a little place on the Genoese Riviera where
sunshine is cheap and tobacco bad, and they live (the two together) for
five francs a day, which is all they can muster between them. It appears
that when Heidenmauer's London step-brother was informed of the young
composer's unnatural alliance he instantly withdrew his subsidy. The
return of it is contingent on the rupture of the unholy union and the
destruction by flame of all the manuscript. The pair are very poor and
the whole thing depends on their staying power. They are so preoccupied
with their opera that they have no time for pot-boilers. Vendemer is in
a feverish hurry, lest perhaps he should find himself chilled. There are
still other details which contribute to the interest of the episode and
which, for me, help to render it a most refreshing, a really great
little case. It rests me, it delights me, there is something in it that
makes for civilization. In their way they are working for human
happiness. The strange course taken by Vendemer (I mean his renunciation
of his engagement) must moreover be judged in the light of the fact that
he was really in love. Something had to be sacrificed, and what he clung
to most (he's extraordinary, I admit) was the truth he had the
opportunity of proclaiming. Men give up their love for advantages every
day, but they rarely give it up for such discomforts.

Paule de Brindes was the less in love of the two; I see her often enough
to have made up my mind about that. But she's mysterious, she's odd;
there was at any rate a sufficient wrench in her life to make her often
absent-minded. Does her imagination hover about Félix Vendemer? A month
ago, going into their rooms one day when her mother was not at home (the
_bonne_ had admitted me under a wrong impression) I found her at the
piano, playing one of Heidenmauer's compositions--playing it without
notes and with infinite expression. How had she got hold of it? How had
she learned it? This was her secret--she blushed so that I didn't pry
into it. But what is she doing, under the singular circumstances, with a
composition of Herman Heidenmauer's? She never met him, she never heard
him play but that once. It will be a pretty complication if it shall
appear that the young German genius made on that occasion more than one
intense impression. This needn't appear, however, inasmuch as, being
naturally in terror of the discovery by her mother of such an anomaly,
she may count on me absolutely not to betray her. I hadn't fully
perceived how deeply susceptible she is to music. She must have a
strange confusion of feelings--a dim, haunting trouble, with a kind of
ache of impatience for the wonderful opera somewhere in the depths of
it. Don't we live fast after all, and doesn't the old order change?
Don't say art isn't mighty! I shall give you some more illustrations of
it yet.



OWEN WINGRAVE


I


"Upon my honour you must be off your head!" cried Spencer Coyle, as the
young man, with a white face, stood there panting a little and repeating
"Really, I've quite decided," and "I assure you I've thought it all
out." They were both pale, but Owen Wingrave smiled in a manner
exasperating to his interlocutor, who however still discriminated
sufficiently to see that his grimace (it was like an irrelevant leer)
was the result of extreme and conceivable nervousness.

"It was certainly a mistake to have gone so far; but that is exactly why
I feel I mustn't go further," poor Owen said, waiting mechanically,
almost humbly (he wished not to swagger, and indeed he had nothing to
swagger about) and carrying through the window to the stupid opposite
houses the dry glitter of his eyes.

"I'm unspeakably disgusted. You've made me dreadfully ill," Mr. Coyle
went on, looking thoroughly upset.

"I'm very sorry. It was the fear of the effect on you that kept me from
speaking sooner."

"You should have spoken three months ago. Don't you know your mind from
one day to the other?"

The young man for a moment said nothing. Then he replied with a little
tremor: "You're very angry with me, and I expected it. I'm awfully
obliged to you for all you've done for me. I'll do anything else for you
in return, but I can't do that. Everyone else will let me have it, of
course. I'm prepared for it--I'm prepared for everything. That's what
has taken the time: to be sure I was prepared. I think it's your
displeasure I feel most and regret most. But little by little you'll get
over it."

"_You'll_ get over it rather faster, I suppose!" Spencer Coyle
satirically exclaimed. He was quite as agitated as his young friend, and
they were evidently in no condition to prolong an encounter in which
they each drew blood. Mr. Coyle was a professional "coach"; he prepared
young men for the army, taking only three or four at a time, to whom he
applied the irresistible stimulus of which the possession was both his
secret and his fortune. He had not a great establishment; he would have
said himself that it was not a wholesale business. Neither his system,
his health nor his temper could have accommodated itself to numbers; so
he weighed and measured his pupils and turned away more applicants than
he passed. He was an artist in his line, caring only for picked subjects
and capable of sacrifices almost passionate for the individual. He liked
ardent young men (there were kinds of capacity to which he was
indifferent) and he had taken a particular fancy to Owen Wingrave. This
young man's facility really fascinated him. His candidates usually did
wonders, and he might have sent up a multitude. He was a person of
exactly the stature of the great Napoleon, with a certain flicker of
genius in his light blue eye: it had been said of him that he looked
like a pianist. The tone of his favourite pupil now expressed, without
intention indeed, a superior wisdom which irritated him. He had not
especially suffered before from Wingrave's high opinion of himself,
which had seemed justified by remarkable parts; but to-day it struck him
as intolerable. He cut short the discussion, declining absolutely to
regard their relations as terminated, and remarked to his pupil that he
had better go off somewhere (down to Eastbourne, say; the sea would
bring him round) and take a few days to find his feet and come to his
senses. He could afford the time, he was so well up: when Spencer Coyle
remembered how well up he was he could have boxed his ears. The tall,
athletic young man was not physically a subject for simplified
reasoning; but there was a troubled gentleness in his handsome face, the
index of compunction mixed with pertinacity, which signified that if it
could have done any good he would have turned both cheeks. He evidently
didn't pretend that his wisdom was superior; he only presented it as his
own. It was his own career after all that was in question. He couldn't
refuse to go through the form of trying Eastbourne or at least of
holding his tongue, though there was that in his manner which implied
that if he should do so it would be really to give Mr. Coyle a chance to
recuperate. He didn't feel a bit overworked, but there was nothing more
natural than that with their tremendous pressure Mr. Coyle should be.
Mr. Coyle's own intellect would derive an advantage from his pupil's
holiday. Mr. Coyle saw what he meant, but he controlled himself; he only
demanded, as his right, a truce of three days. Owen Wingrave granted it,
though as fostering sad illusions this went visibly against his
conscience; but before they separated the famous crammer remarked:

"All the same I feel as if I ought to see someone. I think you mentioned
to me that your aunt had come to town?"

"Oh yes; she's in Baker Street. Do go and see her," the boy said
comfortingly.

Mr. Coyle looked at him an instant. "Have you broached this folly to
her?"

"Not yet--to no one. I thought it right to speak to you first."

"Oh, what you 'think right'!" cried Spencer Coyle, outraged by his young
friend's standards. He added that he would probably call on Miss
Wingrave; after which the recreant youth got out of the house.

Owen Wingrave didn't however start punctually for Eastbourne; he only
directed his steps to Kensington Gardens, from which Mr. Coyle's
desirable residence (he was terribly expensive and had a big house) was
not far removed. The famous coach "put up" his pupils, and Owen had
mentioned to the butler that he would be back to dinner. The spring day
was warm to his young blood, and he had a book in his pocket which, when
he had passed into the gardens and, after a short stroll, dropped into a
chair, he took out with the slow, soft sigh that finally ushers in a
pleasure postponed. He stretched his long legs and began to read it; it
was a volume of Goethe's poems. He had been for days in a state of the
highest tension, and now that the cord had snapped the relief was
proportionate; only it was characteristic of him that this deliverance
should take the form of an intellectual pleasure. If he had thrown up
the probability of a magnificent career it was not to dawdle along Bond
Street nor parade his indifference in the window of a club. At any rate
he had in a few moments forgotten everything--the tremendous pressure,
Mr. Coyle's disappointment, and even his formidable aunt in Baker
Street. If these watchers had overtaken him there would surely have been
some excuse for their exasperation. There was no doubt he was perverse,
for his very choice of a pastime only showed how he had got up his
German.

"What the devil's the matter with him, do _you_ know?" Spencer Coyle
asked that afternoon of young Lechmere, who had never before observed
the head of the establishment to set a fellow such an example of bad
language. Young Lechmere was not only Wingrave's fellow-pupil, he was
supposed to be his intimate, indeed quite his best friend, and had
unconsciously performed for Mr. Coyle the office of making the promise
of his great gifts more vivid by contrast. He was short and sturdy and
as a general thing uninspired, and Mr. Coyle, who found no amusement in
believing in him, had never thought him less exciting than as he stared
now out of a face from which you could never guess whether he had caught
an idea. Young Lechmere concealed such achievements as if they had been
youthful indiscretions. At any rate he could evidently conceive no
reason why it should be thought there was anything more than usual the
matter with the companion of his studies; so Mr. Coyle had to continue:

"He declines to go up. He chucks the whole thing!"

The first thing that struck young Lechmere in the case was the freshness
it had imparted to the governor's vocabulary.

"He doesn't want to go to Sandhurst?"

"He doesn't want to go anywhere. He gives up the army altogether. He
objects," said Mr. Coyle, in a tone that made young Lechmere almost hold
his breath, "to the military profession."

"Why, it has been the profession of all his family!"

"Their profession? It has been their religion! Do you know Miss
Wingrave?"

"Oh, yes. Isn't she awful?" young Lechmere candidly ejaculated.

His instructor demurred.

"She's formidable, if you mean that, and it's right she should be;
because somehow in her very person, good maiden lady as she is, she
represents the might, she represents the traditions and the exploits of
the British army. She represents the expansive property of the English
name. I think his family can be trusted to come down on him, but every
influence should be set in motion. I want to know what yours is. Can
_you_ do anything in the matter?"

"I can try a couple of rounds with him," said young Lechmere
reflectively. "But he knows a fearful lot. He has the most extraordinary
ideas."

"Then he has told you some of them--he has taken you into his
confidence?"

"I've heard him jaw by the yard," smiled the honest youth. "He has told
me he despises it."

"What _is_ it he despises? I can't make out."

The most consecutive of Mr. Coyle's nurslings considered a moment, as if
he were conscious of a responsibility.

"Why, I think, military glory. He says we take the wrong view of it."

"He oughtn't to talk to _you_ that way. It's corrupting the youth of
Athens. It's sowing sedition."

"Oh, I'm all right!" said young Lechmere. "And he never told me he meant
to chuck it. I always thought he meant to see it through, simply because
he had to. He'll argue on any side you like. It's a tremendous pity--I'm
sure he'd have a big career."

"Tell him so, then; plead with him; struggle with him--for God's sake."

"I'll do what I can--I'll tell him it's a regular shame."

"Yes, strike _that_ note--insist on the disgrace of it."

The young man gave Mr. Coyle a more perceptive glance. "I'm sure he
wouldn't do anything dishonourable."

"Well--it won't look right. He must be made to feel _that_--work it up.
Give him a comrade's point of view--that of a brother-in-arms."

"That's what I thought we were going to be!" young Lechmere mused
romantically, much uplifted by the nature of the mission imposed on him.
"He's an awfully good sort."

"No one will think so if he backs out!" said Spencer Coyle.

"They mustn't say it to _me_!" his pupil rejoined with a flush.

Mr. Coyle hesitated a moment, noting his tone and aware that in the
perversity of things, though this young man was a born soldier, no
excitement would ever attach to _his_ alternatives save perhaps on the
part of the nice girl to whom at an early day he was sure to be placidly
united. "Do you like him very much--do you believe in him?"

Young Lechmere's life in these days was spent in answering terrible
questions; but he had never been subjected to so queer an interrogation
as this. "Believe in him? Rather!"

"Then _save_ him!"

The poor boy was puzzled, as if it were forced upon him by this
intensity that there was more in such an appeal than could appear on the
surface; and he doubtless felt that he was only entering into a complex
situation when after another moment, with his hands in his pockets, he
replied hopefully but not pompously: "I daresay I can bring him round!"



II


Before seeing young Lechmere Mr. Coyle had determined to telegraph an
inquiry to Miss Wingrave. He had prepaid the answer, which, being
promptly put into his hand, brought the interview we have just related
to a close. He immediately drove off to Baker Street, where the lady had
said she awaited him, and five minutes after he got there, as he sat
with Owen Wingrave's remarkable aunt, he repeated over several times, in
his angry sadness and with the infallibility of his experience: "He's so
intelligent--he's so intelligent!" He had declared it had been a luxury
to put such a fellow through.

"Of course he's intelligent, what else could he be? We've never, that I
know of, had but _one_ idiot in the family!" said Jane Wingrave. This
was an allusion that Mr. Coyle could understand, and it brought home to
him another of the reasons for the disappointment, the humiliation as it
were, of the good people at Paramore, at the same that it gave an
example of the conscientious coarseness he had on former occasions
observed in his interlocutress. Poor Philip Wingrave, her late brother's
eldest son, was literally imbecile and banished from view; deformed,
unsocial, irretrievable, he had been relegated to a private asylum and
had become among the friends of the family only a little hushed
lugubrious legend. All the hopes of the house, picturesque Paramore, now
unintermittently old Sir Philip's rather melancholy home (his
infirmities would keep him there to the last) were therefore collected
on the second boy's head, which nature, as if in compunction for her
previous botch, had, in addition to making it strikingly handsome,
filled with marked originalities and talents. These two had been the
only children of the old man's only son, who, like so many of his
ancestors, had given up a gallant young life to the service of his
country. Owen Wingrave the elder had received his death-cut, in
close-quarters, from an Afghan sabre; the blow had come crashing across
his skull. His wife, at that time in India, was about to give birth to
her third child; and when the event took place, in darkness and anguish,
the baby came lifeless into the world and the mother sank under the
multiplication of her woes. The second of the little boys in England,
who was at Paramore with his grandfather, became the peculiar charge of
his aunt, the only unmarried one, and during the interesting Sunday
that, by urgent invitation, Spencer Coyle, busy as he was, had, after
consenting to put Owen through, spent under that roof, the celebrated
crammer received a vivid impression of the influence exerted at least in
intention by Miss Wingrave. Indeed the picture of this short visit
remained with the observant little man a curious one--the vision of an
impoverished Jacobean house, shabby and remarkably "creepy," but full of
character still and full of felicity as a setting for the distinguished
figure of the peaceful old soldier. Sir Philip Wingrave, a relic rather
than a celebrity, was a small brown, erect octogenarian, with
smouldering eyes and a studied courtesy. He liked to do the diminished
honours of his house, but even when with a shaky hand he lighted a
bedroom candle for a deprecating guest it was impossible not to feel
that beneath the surface he was a merciless old warrior. The eye of the
imagination could glance back into his crowded Eastern past--back at
episodes in which his scrupulous forms would only have made him more
terrible.

Mr. Coyle remembered also two other figures--a faded inoffensive Mrs.
Julian, domesticated there by a system of frequent visits as the widow
of an officer and a particular friend of Miss Wingrave, and a remarkably
clever little girl of eighteen, who was this lady's daughter and who
struck the speculative visitor as already formed for other relations.
She was very impertinent to Owen, and in the course of a long walk that
he had taken with the young man and the effect of which, in much talk,
had been to clinch his high opinion of him, he had learned (for Owen
chattered confidentially) that Mrs. Julian was the sister of a very
gallant gentleman, Captain Hume-Walker, of the Artillery, who had fallen
in the Indian Mutiny and between whom and Miss Wingrave (it had been
that lady's one known concession) a passage of some delicacy, taking a
tragic turn, was believed to have been enacted. They had been engaged to
be married, but she had given way to the jealousy of her nature--had
broken with him and sent him off to his fate, which had been horrible. A
passionate sense of having wronged him, a hard eternal remorse had
thereupon taken possession of her, and when his poor sister, linked also
to a soldier, had by a still heavier blow been left almost without
resources, she had devoted herself charitably to a long expiation. She
had sought comfort in taking Mrs. Julian to live much of the time at
Paramore, where she became an unremunerated though not uncriticised
housekeeper, and Spencer Coyle suspected that it was a part of this
comfort that she could at her leisure trample on her. The impression of
Jane Wingrave was not the faintest he had gathered on that intensifying
Sunday--an occasion singularly tinged for him with the sense of
bereavement and mourning and memory, of names never mentioned, of the
far-away plaint of widows and the echoes of battles and bad news. It was
all military indeed, and Mr. Coyle was made to shudder a little at the
profession of which he helped to open the door to harmless young men.
Miss Wingrave moreover might have made such a bad conscience worse--so
cold and clear a good one looked at him out of her hard, fine eyes and
trumpeted in her sonorous voice.

She was a high, distinguished person; angular but not awkward, with a
large forehead and abundant black hair, arranged like that of a woman
conceiving perhaps excusably of her head as "noble," and irregularly
streaked to-day with white. If however she represented for Spencer Coyle
the genius of a military race it was not that she had the step of a
grenadier or the vocabulary of a camp-follower; it was only that such
sympathies were vividly implied in the general fact to which her very
presence and each of her actions and glances and tones were a constant
and direct allusion--the paramount valour of her family. If she was
military it was because she sprang from a military house and because she
wouldn't for the world have been anything but what the Wingraves had
been. She was almost vulgar about her ancestors, and if one had been
tempted to quarrel with her one would have found a fair pretext in her
defective sense of proportion. This temptation however said nothing to
Spencer Coyle, for whom as a strong character revealing itself in colour
and sound she was a spectacle and who was glad to regard her as a force
exerted on his own side. He wished her nephew had more of her narrowness
instead of being almost cursed with the tendency to look at things in
their relations. He wondered why when she came up to town she always
resorted to Baker Street for lodgings. He had never known nor heard of
Baker Street as a residence--he associated it only with bazaars and
photographers. He divined in her a rigid indifference to everything that
was not the passion of her life. Nothing really mattered to her but
that, and she would have occupied apartments in Whitechapel if they had
been a feature in her tactics. She had received her visitor in a large
cold, faded room, furnished with slippery seats and decorated with
alabaster vases and wax-flowers. The only little personal comfort for
which she appeared to have looked out was a fat catalogue of the Army
and Navy Stores, which reposed on a vast, desolate table-cover of false
blue. Her clear forehead--it was like a porcelain slate, a receptacle
for addresses and sums--had flushed when her nephew's crammer told her
the extraordinary news; but he saw she was fortunately more angry than
frightened. She had essentially, she would always have, too little
imagination for fear, and the healthy habit moreover of facing
everything had taught her that the occasion usually found her a quantity
to reckon with. Mr. Coyle saw that her only fear at present could have
been that of not being able to prevent her nephew from being absurd and
that to such an apprehension as this she was in fact inaccessible.
Practically too she was not troubled by surprise; she recognised none of
the futile, none of the subtle sentiments. If Philip had for an hour
made a fool of himself she was angry; disconcerted as she would have
been on learning that he had confessed to debts or fallen in love with a
low girl. But there remained in any annoyance the saving fact that no
one could make a fool of _her_.

"I don't know when I've taken such an interest in a young man--I think I
never have, since I began to handle them," Mr. Coyle said. "I like him,
I believe in him--it's been a delight to see how he was going."

"Oh, I know how they go!" Miss Wingrave threw back her head with a
familiar briskness, as if a rapid procession of the generations had
flashed before her, rattling their scabbards and spurs. Spencer Coyle
recognised the intimation that she had nothing to learn from anybody
about the natural carriage of a Wingrave, and he even felt convicted by
her next words of being, in her eyes, with the troubled story of his
check, his weak complaint of his pupil, rather a poor creature. "If you
like him," she exclaimed, "for mercy's sake keep him quiet!"

Mr. Coyle began to explain to her that this was less easy than she
appeared to imagine; but he perceived that she understood very little of
what he said. The more he insisted that the boy had a kind of
intellectual independence, the more this struck her as a conclusive
proof that her nephew was a Wingrave and a soldier. It was not till he
mentioned to her that Owen had spoken of the profession of arms as of
something that would be "beneath" him, it was not till her attention was
arrested by this intenser light on the complexity of the problem that
Miss Wingrave broke out after a moment's stupefied reflection: "Send him
to see me immediately!"

"That's exactly what I wanted to ask your leave to do. But I've wanted
also to prepare you for the worst, to make you understand that he
strikes me as really obstinate and to suggest to you that the most
powerful arguments at your command--especially if you should be able to
put your hand on some intensely practical one--will be none too
effective."

"I think I've got a powerful argument." Miss Wingrave looked very hard
at her visitor. He didn't know in the least what it was, but he begged
her to put it forward without delay. He promised that their young man
should come to Baker Street that evening, mentioning however that he had
already urged him to spend without delay a couple of days at Eastbourne.
This led Jane Wingrave to inquire with surprise what virtue there might
be in _that_ expensive remedy, and to reply with decision when Mr. Coyle
had said "The virtue of a little rest, a little change, a little relief
to overwrought nerves," "Ah, don't coddle him--he's costing us a great
deal of money! I'll talk to him and I'll take him down to Paramore; then
I'll send him back to you straightened out."

Spencer Coyle hailed this pledge superficially with satisfaction, but
before he quitted Miss Wingrave he became conscious that he had really
taken on a new anxiety--a restlessness that made him say to himself,
groaning inwardly: "Oh, she is a grenadier at bottom, and she'll have no
tact. I don't know what her powerful argument is; I'm only afraid she'll
be stupid and make him worse. The old man's better--_he's_ capable of
tact, though he's not quite an extinct volcano. Owen will probably put
him in a rage. In short the difficulty is that the boy's the best of
them."

Spencer Coyle felt afresh that evening at dinner that the boy was the
best of them. Young Wingrave (who, he was pleased to observe, had not
yet proceeded to the seaside) appeared at the repast as usual, looking
inevitably a little self-conscious, but not too original for Bayswater.
He talked very naturally to Mrs. Coyle, who had thought him from the
first the most beautiful young man they had ever received; so that the
person most ill at ease was poor Lechmere, who took great trouble, as if
from the deepest delicacy, not to meet the eye of his misguided mate.
Spencer Coyle however paid the penalty of his own profundity in feeling
more and more worried; he could so easily see that there were all sorts
of things in his young friend that the people of Paramore wouldn't
understand. He began even already to react against the notion of his
being harassed--to reflect that after all he had a right to his
ideas--to remember that he was of a substance too fine to be in fairness
roughly used. It was in this way that the ardent little crammer, with
his whimsical perceptions and complicated sympathies, was generally
condemned not to settle down comfortably either into his displeasures or
into his enthusiasms. His love of the real truth never gave him a chance
to enjoy them. He mentioned to Wingrave after dinner the propriety of an
immediate visit to Baker Street, and the young man, looking "queer," as
he thought--that is smiling again with the exaggerated glory he had
shown in their recent interview--went off to face the ordeal. Spencer
Coyle noted that he was scared--he was afraid of his aunt; but somehow
this didn't strike him as a sign of pusillanimity. _He_ should have been
scared, he was well aware, in the poor boy's place, and the sight of his
pupil marching up to the battery in spite of his terrors was a positive
suggestion of the temperament of the soldier. Many a plucky youth would
have shirked this particular peril.

"He _has_ got ideas!" young Lechmere broke out to his instructor after
his comrade had quitted the house. He was evidently bewildered and
agitated--he had an emotion to work off. He had before dinner gone
straight at his friend, as Mr. Coyle had requested, and had elicited
from him that his scruples were founded on an overwhelming conviction of
the stupidity--the "crass barbarism" he called it--of war. His great
complaint was that people hadn't invented anything cleverer, and he was
determined to show, the only way he could, that _he_ wasn't such an ass.

"And he thinks all the great generals ought to have been shot, and that
Napoleon Bonaparte in particular, the greatest, was a criminal, a
monster for whom language has no adequate name!" Mr. Coyle rejoined,
completing young Lechmere's picture. "He favoured you, I see, with
exactly the same pearls of wisdom that he produced for me. But I want to
know what _you_ said."

"I said they were awful rot!" Young Lechmere spoke with emphasis, and he
was slightly surprised to hear Mr. Coyle laugh incongruously at this
just declaration and then after a moment continue:

"It's all very curious--I daresay there's something in it. But it's a
pity!"

"He told me when it was that the question began to strike him in that
light. Four or five years ago, when he did a lot of reading about all
the great swells and their campaigns--Hannibal and Julius Cæsar,
Marlborough and Frederick and Bonaparte. He _has_ done a lot of reading,
and he says it opened his eyes. He says that a wave of disgust rolled
over him. He talked about the 'immeasurable misery' of wars, and asked
me why nations don't tear to pieces the governments, the rulers that go
in for them. He hates poor old Bonaparte worst of all."

"Well, poor old Bonaparte was a brute. He was a frightful ruffian," Mr.
Coyle unexpectedly declared. "But I suppose you didn't admit that."

"Oh, I daresay he was objectionable, and I'm very glad we laid him on
his back. But the point I made to Wingrave was that his own behaviour
would excite no end of remark." Young Lechmere hesitated an instant,
then he added: "I told him he must be prepared for the worst."

"Of course he asked you what you meant by the 'worst,'" said Spencer
Coyle.

"Yes, he asked me that, and do you know what I said? I said people would
say that his conscientious scruples and his wave of disgust are only a
pretext. Then he asked 'A pretext for what?'"

"Ah, he rather had you there!" Mr. Coyle exclaimed with a little laugh
that was mystifying to his pupil.

"Not a bit--for I told him."

"What did you tell him?"

Once more, for a few seconds, with his conscious eyes in his
instructor's, the young man hung fire.

"Why, what we spoke of a few hours ago. The appearance he'd present of
not having----" The honest youth faltered a moment, then brought it out:
"The military temperament, don't you know? But do you know what he said
to that?" young Lechmere went on.

"Damn the military temperament!" the crammer promptly replied.

Young Lechmere stared. Mr. Coyle's tone left him uncertain if he were
attributing the phrase to Wingrave or uttering his own opinion, but he
exclaimed:

"Those were exactly his words!"

"He doesn't care," said Mr. Coyle.

"Perhaps not. But it isn't fair for him to abuse us fellows. I told him
it's the finest temperament in the world, and that there's nothing so
splendid as pluck and heroism."

"Ah! there you had _him_."

"I told him it was unworthy of him to abuse a gallant, a magnificent
profession. I told him there's no type so fine as that of the soldier
doing his duty."

"That's essentially _your_ type, my dear boy." Young Lechmere blushed;
he couldn't make out (and the danger was naturally unexpected to him)
whether at that moment he didn't exist mainly for the recreation of his
friend. But he was partly reassured by the genial way this friend
continued, laying a hand on his shoulder: "Keep _at_ him that way! we
may do something. I'm extremely obliged to you." Another doubt however
remained unassuaged--a doubt which led him to exclaim to Mr. Coyle
before they dropped the painful subject:

"He _doesn't_ care! But it's awfully odd he shouldn't!"

"So it is, but remember what you said this afternoon--I mean about your
not advising people to make insinuations to _you_."

"I believe I should knock a fellow down!" said young Lechmere. Mr. Coyle
had got up; the conversation had taken place while they sat together
after Mrs. Coyle's withdrawal from the dinner-table and the head of the
establishment administered to his disciple, on principles that were a
part of his thoroughness, a glass of excellent claret. The disciple,
also on his feet, lingered an instant, not for another "go," as he would
have called it, at the decanter, but to wipe his microscopic moustache
with prolonged and unusual care. His companion saw he had something to
bring out which required a final effort, and waited for him an instant
with a hand on the knob of the door. Then as young Lechmere approached
him Spencer Coyle grew conscious of an unwonted intensity in the round
and ingenuous face. The boy was nervous, but he tried to behave like a
man of the world. "Of course, it's between ourselves," he stammered,
"and I wouldn't breathe such a word to any one who wasn't interested in
poor Wingrave as you are. But do you think he funks it?"

Mr. Coyle looked at him so hard for an instant that he was visibly
frightened at what he had said.

"Funks it! Funks what?"

"Why, what we're talking about--the service." Young Lechmere gave a
little gulp and added with a _naïveté_ almost pathetic to Spencer
Coyle: "The dangers, you know!"

"Do you mean he's thinking of his skin?"

Young Lechmere's eyes expanded appealingly, and what his instructor saw
in his pink face--he even thought he saw a tear--was the dread of a
disappointment shocking in the degree in which the loyalty of admiration
had been great.

"Is he--is he _afraid_?" repeated the honest lad, with a quaver of
suspense.

"Dear no!" said Spencer Coyle, turning his back.

Young Lechmere felt a little snubbed and even a little ashamed; but he
felt still more relieved.



III


Less than a week after this Spencer Coyle received a note from Miss
Wingrave, who had immediately quitted London with her nephew. She
proposed that he should come down to Paramore for the following
Sunday--Owen was really so tiresome. On the spot, in that house of
examples and memories and in combination with her poor dear father, who
was "dreadfully annoyed," it might be worth their while to make a last
stand. Mr. Coyle read between the lines of this letter that the party at
Paramore had got over a good deal of ground since Miss Wingrave, in
Baker Street, had treated his despair as superficial. She was not an
insinuating woman, but she went so far as to put the question on the
ground of his conferring a particular favour on an afflicted family; and
she expressed the pleasure it would give them if he should be
accompanied by Mrs. Coyle, for whom she inclosed a separate invitation.
She mentioned that she was also writing, subject to Mr. Coyle's
approval, to young Lechmere. She thought such a nice manly boy might do
her wretched nephew some good. The celebrated crammer determined to
embrace this opportunity; and now it was the case not so much that he
was angry as that he was anxious. As he directed his answer to Miss
Wingrave's letter he caught himself smiling at the thought that at
bottom he was going to defend his young friend rather than to attack
him. He said to his wife, who was a fair, fresh, slow woman--a person of
much more presence than himself--that she had better take Miss Wingrave
at her word: it was such an extraordinary, such a fascinating specimen
of an old English home. This last allusion was amicably sarcastic--he
had already accused the good lady more than once of being in love with
Owen Wingrave. She admitted that she was, she even gloried in her
passion; which shows that the subject, between them, was treated in a
liberal spirit. She carried out the joke by accepting the invitation
with eagerness. Young Lechmere was delighted to do the same; his
instructor had good-naturedly taken the view that the little break would
freshen him up for his last spurt.

It was the fact that the occupants of Paramore did indeed take their
trouble hard that struck Spencer Coyle after he had been an hour or two
in that fine old house. This very short second visit, beginning on the
Saturday evening, was to constitute the strangest episode of his life.
As soon as he found himself in private with his wife--they had retired
to dress for dinner--they called each other's attention with effusion
and almost with alarm to the sinister gloom that was stamped on the
place. The house was admirable with its old grey front which came
forward in wings so as to form three sides of a square, but Mrs. Coyle
made no scruple to declare that if she had known in advance the sort of
impression she was going to receive she would never have put her foot in
it. She characterized it as "uncanny," she accused her husband of not
having warned her properly. He had mentioned to her in advance certain
facts, but while she almost feverishly dressed she had innumerable
questions to ask. He hadn't told her about the girl, the extraordinary
girl, Miss Julian--that is, he hadn't told her that this young lady, who
in plain terms was a mere dependent, would be in effect, and as a
consequence of the way she carried herself, the most important person in
the house. Mrs. Coyle was already prepared to announce that she hated
Miss Julian's affectations. Her husband above all hadn't told her that
they should find their young charge looking five years older.

"I couldn't imagine that," said Mr. Coyle, "nor that the character of
the crisis here would be quite so perceptible. But I suggested to Miss
Wingrave the other day that they should press her nephew in real
earnest, and she has taken me at my word. They've cut off his
supplies--they're trying to starve him out. That's not what I meant--but
indeed I don't quite _know_ to-day what I meant. Owen feels the
pressure, but he won't yield." The strange thing was that, now that he
was there, the versatile little coach felt still more that his own
spirit had been caught up by a wave of reaction. If he was there it was
because he was on poor Owen's side. His whole impression, his whole
apprehension, had on the spot become much deeper. There was something in
the dear boy's very resistance that began to charm him. When his wife,
in the intimacy of the conference I have mentioned, threw off the mask
and commended even with extravagance the stand his pupil had taken (he
was too good to be a horrid soldier and it was noble of him to suffer
for his convictions--wasn't he as upright as a young hero, even though
as pale as a Christian martyr?) the good lady only expressed the
sympathy which, under cover of regarding his young friend as a rare
exception, he had already recognised in his own soul.

For, half an hour ago, after they had had superficial tea in the brown
old hall of the house, his young friend had proposed to him, before
going to dress, to take a turn outside, and had even, on the terrace, as
they walked together to one of the far ends of it, passed his hand
entreatingly into his companion's arm, permitting himself thus a
familiarity unusual between pupil and master and calculated to show that
he had guessed whom he could most depend on to be kind to him. Spencer
Coyle on his own side had guessed something, so that he was not
surprised at the boy's having a particular confidence to make. He had
felt on arriving that each member of the party had wished to get hold of
him first, and he knew that at that moment Jane Wingrave was peering
through the ancient blur of one of the windows (the house had been
modernised so little that the thick dim panes were three centuries old)
to see if her nephew looked as if he were poisoning the visitor's mind.
Mr. Coyle lost no time therefore in reminding the youth (and he took
care to laugh as he did so) that he had not come down to Paramore to be
corrupted. He had come down to make, face to face, a last appeal to
him--he hoped it wouldn't be utterly vain. Owen smiled sadly as they
went, asking him if he thought he had the general air of a fellow who
was going to knock under.

"I think you look strange--I think you look ill," Spencer Coyle said
very honestly. They had paused at the end of the terrace.

"I've had to exercise a great power of resistance, and it rather takes
it out of one."

"Ah, my dear boy, I wish your great power--for you evidently possess
it--were exerted in a better cause!"

Owen Wingrave smiled down at his small instructor. "I don't believe
that!" Then he added, to explain why: "Isn't what you want, if you're so
good as to think well of my character, to see me exert _most_ power, in
whatever direction? Well, _this_ is the way I exert most." Owen Wingrave
went on to relate that he had had some terrible hours with his
grandfather, who had denounced him in a way to make one's hair stand up
on one's head. He had expected them not to like it, not a bit, but he
had had no idea they would make such a row. His aunt was different, but
she was equally insulting. Oh, they had made him feel they were ashamed
of him; they accused him of putting a public dishonour on their name. He
was the only one who had ever backed out--he was the first for three
hundred years. Every one had known he was to go up, and now every one
would know he was a young hypocrite who suddenly pretended to have
scruples. They talked of his scruples as you wouldn't talk of a
cannibal's god. His grandfather had called him outrageous names. "He
called me--he called me----" Here the young man faltered, his voice
failed him. He looked as haggard as was possible to a young man in such
magnificent health.

"I probably know!" said Spencer Coyle, with a nervous laugh.

Owen Wingrave's clouded eyes, as if they were following the far-off
consequences of things, rested for an instant on a distant object. Then
they met his companion's and for another moment sounded them deeply. "It
isn't true. No, it isn't. It's not _that_!"

"I don't suppose it is! But what _do_ you propose instead of it?"

"Instead of what?"

"Instead of the stupid solution of war. If you take that away you should
suggest at least a substitute."

"That's for the people in charge, for governments and cabinets," said
Owen Wingrave. "_They_'ll arrive soon enough at a substitute, in the
particular case, if they're made to understand that they'll be hung if
they don't find one. Make it a capital crime--that'll quicken the wits
of ministers!" His eyes brightened as he spoke, and he looked assured
and exalted. Mr. Coyle gave a sigh of perplexed resignation--it was a
monomania. He fancied after this for a moment that Owen was going to ask
him if he too thought he was a coward; but he was relieved to observe
that he either didn't suspect him of it or shrank uncomfortably from
putting the question to the test. Spencer Coyle wished to show
confidence, but somehow a direct assurance that he didn't doubt of his
courage appeared too gross a compliment--it would be like saying he
didn't doubt of his honesty. The difficulty was presently averted by
Owen's continuing: "My grandfather can't break the entail, but I shall
have nothing but this place, which, as you know, is small and, with the
way rents are going, has quite ceased to yield an income. He has some
money--not much, but such as it is he cuts me off. My aunt does the
same--she has let me know her intentions. She was to have left me her
six hundred a year. It was all settled; but now what's settled is that I
don't get a penny of it if I give up the army. I must add in fairness
that I have from my mother three hundred a year of my own. And I tell
you the simple truth when I say that I don't care a rap for the loss of
the money." The young man drew a long, slow breath, like a creature in
pain; then he subjoined: "_That's_ not what worries me!"

"What are you going to do?" asked Spencer Coyle.

"I don't know; perhaps nothing. Nothing great, at all events. Only
something peaceful!"

Owen gave a weary smile, as if, worried as he was, he could yet
appreciate the humorous effect of such a declaration from a Wingrave;
but what it suggested to his companion, who looked up at him with a
sense that he was after all not a Wingrave for nothing and had a
military steadiness under fire, was the exasperation that such a
programme, uttered in such a way and striking them as the last word of
the inglorious, might well have engendered on the part of his
grandfather and his aunt. "Perhaps nothing"--when he might carry on the
great tradition! Yes, he wasn't weak, and he was interesting; but there
_was_ a point of view from which he was provoking. "What _is_ it then
that worries you?" Mr. Coyle demanded.

"Oh, the house--the very air and feeling of it. There are strange voices
in it that seem to mutter at me--to say dreadful things as I pass. I
mean the general consciousness and responsibility of what I'm doing. Of
course it hasn't been easy for me--not a bit. I assure you I don't enjoy
it." With a light in them that was like a longing for justice Owen again
bent his eyes on those of the little coach; then he pursued: "I've
started up all the old ghosts. The very portraits glower at me on the
walls. There's one of my great-great-grandfather (the one the
extraordinary story you know is about--the old fellow who hangs on the
second landing of the big staircase) that fairly stirs on the
canvas--just heaves a little--when I come near it. I have to go up and
down stairs--it's rather awkward! It's what my aunt calls the family
circle. It's all constituted here, it's a kind of indestructible
presence, it stretches away into the past, and when I came back with her
the other day Miss Wingrave told me I wouldn't have the impudence to
stand in the midst of it and say such things. I had to say them to my
grandfather; but now that I've said them it seems to me that the
question's ended. I want to go away--I don't care if I never come back
again."

"Oh, you _are_ a soldier; you must fight it out!" Mr. Coyle laughed.

The young man seemed discouraged at his levity, but as they turned
round, strolling back in the direction from which they had come, he
himself smiled faintly after an instant and replied:

"Ah, we're tainted--all!"

They walked in silence part of the way to the old portico; then Spencer
Coyle, stopping short after having assured himself that he was at a
sufficient distance from the house not to be heard, suddenly put the
question: "What does Miss Julian say?"

"Miss Julian?" Owen had perceptibly coloured.

"I'm sure _she_ hasn't concealed her opinion."

"Oh, it's the opinion of the family circle, for she's a member of it of
course. And then she has her own as well."

"Her own opinion?"

"Her own family circle."

"Do you mean her mother--that patient lady?"

"I mean more particularly her father, who fell in battle. And her
grandfather, and _his_ father, and her uncles and great-uncles--they all
fell in battle."

"Hasn't the sacrifice of so many lives been sufficient? Why should she
sacrifice you?"

"Oh, she _hates_ me!" Owen declared, as they resumed their walk.

"Ah, the hatred of pretty girls for fine young men!" exclaimed Spencer
Coyle.

He didn't believe in it, but his wife did, it appeared perfectly, when
he mentioned this conversation while, in the fashion that has been
described, the visitors dressed for dinner. Mrs. Coyle had already
discovered that nothing could have been nastier than Miss Julian's
manner to the disgraced youth during the half-hour the party had spent
in the hall; and it was this lady's judgment that one must have had no
eyes in one's head not to see that she was already trying outrageously
to flirt with young Lechmere. It was a pity they had brought that silly
boy: he was down in the hall with her at that moment. Spencer Coyle's
version was different; he thought there were finer elements involved.
The girl's footing in the house was inexplicable on any ground save that
of her being predestined to Miss Wingrave's nephew. As the niece of Miss
Wingrave's own unhappy intended she had been dedicated early by this
lady to the office of healing by a union with Owen the tragic breach
that had separated their elders; and if in reply to this it was to be
said that a girl of spirit couldn't enjoy in such a matter having her
duty cut out for her, Owen's enlightened friend was ready with the
argument that a young person in Miss Julian's position would never be
such a fool as really to quarrel with a capital chance. She was familiar
at Paramore and she felt safe; therefore she might trust herself to the
amusement of pretending that she had her option. But it was all innocent
coquetry. She had a curious charm, and it was vain to pretend that the
heir of that house wouldn't seem good enough to a girl, clever as she
might be, of eighteen. Mrs. Coyle reminded her husband that the poor
young man was precisely now _not_ of that house: this problem was among
the questions that exercised their wits after the two men had taken the
turn on the terrace. Spencer Coyle told his wife that Owen was afraid of
the portrait of his great-great-grandfather. He would show it to her,
since she hadn't noticed it, on their way down stairs.

"Why of his great-great-grandfather more than of any of the others?"

"Oh, because he's the most formidable. He's the one who's sometimes
seen."

"Seen where?" Mrs. Coyle had turned round with a jerk.

"In the room he was found dead in--the White Room they've always called
it."

"Do you mean to say the house has a _ghost_?" Mrs. Coyle almost
shrieked. "You brought me here without telling me?"

"Didn't I mention it after my other visit?"

"Not a word. You only talked about Miss Wingrave."

"Oh, I was full of the story--you have simply forgotten."

"Then you should have reminded me!"

"If I had thought of it I would have held my peace, for you wouldn't
have come."

"I wish, indeed, I hadn't!" cried Mrs. Coyle. "What _is_ the story?"

"Oh, a deed of violence that took place here ages ago. I think it was in
George the First's time. Colonel Wingrave, one of their ancestors,
struck in a fit of passion one of his children, a lad just growing up, a
blow on the head of which the unhappy child died. The matter was hushed
up for the hour--some other explanation was put about. The poor boy was
laid out in one of those rooms on the other side of the house, and amid
strange smothered rumours the funeral was hurried on. The next morning,
when the household assembled, Colonel Wingrave was missing; he was
looked for vainly, and at last it occurred to some one that he might
perhaps be in the room from which his child had been carried to burial.
The seeker knocked without an answer--then opened the door. Colonel
Wingrave lay dead on the floor, in his clothes, as if he had reeled and
fallen back, without a wound, without a mark, without anything in his
appearance to indicate that he had either struggled or suffered. He was
a strong, sound man--there was nothing to account for such a
catastrophe. He is supposed to have gone to the room during the night,
just before going to bed, in some fit of compunction or some fascination
of dread. It was only after this that the truth about the boy came out.
But no one ever sleeps in the room."

Mrs. Coyle had fairly turned pale. "I hope not! Thank heaven they
haven't put _us_ there!"

"We're at a comfortable distance; but I've seen the gruesome chamber."

"Do you mean you've been _in_ it?"

"For a few moments. They're rather proud of it and my young friend
showed it to me when I was here before."

Mrs. Coyle stared. "And what is it like?"

"Simply like an empty, dull, old-fashioned bedroom, rather big, with the
things of the 'period' in it. It's panelled from floor to ceiling, and
the panels evidently, years and years ago, were painted white. But the
paint has darkened with time and there are three or four quaint little
ancient 'samplers,' framed and glazed, hung on the walls."

Mrs. Coyle looked round with a shudder. "I'm glad there are no samplers
here! I never heard anything so jumpy! Come down to dinner."

On the staircase as they went down her husband showed her the portrait
of Colonel Wingrave--rather a vigorous representation, for the place and
period, of a gentleman with a hard, handsome face, in a red coat and a
peruke. Mrs. Coyle declared that his descendant Sir Philip was
wonderfully like him; and her husband could fancy, though he kept it to
himself, that if one should have the courage to walk about the old
corridors of Paramore at night one might meet a figure that resembled
him roaming, with the restlessness of a ghost, hand in hand with the
figure of a tall boy. As he proceeded to the drawing-room with his wife
he found himself suddenly wishing that he had made more of a point of
his pupil's going to Eastbourne. The evening however seemed to have
taken upon itself to dissipate any such whimsical forebodings, for the
grimness of the family circle, as Spencer Coyle had preconceived its
composition, was mitigated by an infusion of the "neighbourhood." The
company at dinner was recruited by two cheerful couples--one of them the
vicar and his wife, and by a silent young man who had come down to fish.
This was a relief to Mr. Coyle, who had begun to wonder what was after
all expected of him and why he had been such a fool as to come, and who
now felt that for the first hours at least the situation would not have
directly to be dealt with. Indeed he found, as he had found before,
sufficient occupation for his ingenuity in reading the various symptoms
of which the picture before him was an expression. He should probably
have an irritating day on the morrow: he foresaw the difficulty of the
long decorous Sunday and how dry Jane Wingrave's ideas, elicited in a
strenuous conference, would taste. She and her father would make him
feel that they depended upon him for the impossible, and if they should
try to associate him with a merely stupid policy he might end by telling
them what he thought of it--an accident not required to make his visit a
sensible mistake. The old man's actual design was evidently to let their
friends see in it a positive mark of their being all right. The presence
of the great London coach was tantamount to a profession of faith in the
results of the impending examination. It had clearly been obtained from
Owen, rather to Spencer Coyle's surprise, that he would do nothing to
interfere with the apparent harmony. He let the allusions to his hard
work pass and, holding his tongue about his affairs, talked to the
ladies as amicably as if he had not been "cut off." When Spencer Coyle
looked at him once or twice across the table, catching his eye, which
showed an indefinable passion, he saw a puzzling pathos in his laughing
face: one couldn't resist a pang for a young lamb so visibly marked for
sacrifice. "Hang him--what a pity he's such a fighter!" he privately
sighed, with a want of logic that was only superficial.

This idea however would have absorbed him more if so much of his
attention had not been given to Kate Julian, who now that he had her
well before him struck him as a remarkable and even as a possibly
fascinating young woman. The fascination resided not in any
extraordinary prettiness, for if she was handsome, with her long Eastern
eyes, her magnificent hair and her general unabashed originality, he had
seen complexions rosier and features that pleased him more: it resided
in a strange impression that she gave of being exactly the sort of
person whom, in her position, common considerations, those of prudence
and perhaps even a little those of decorum, would have enjoined on her
not to be. She was what was vulgarly termed a dependant--penniless,
patronized, tolerated; but something in her aspect and manner signified
that if her situation was inferior, her spirit, to make up for it, was
above precautions or submissions. It was not in the least that she was
aggressive, she was too indifferent for that; it was only as if, having
nothing either to gain or to lose, she could afford to do as she liked.
It occurred to Spencer Coyle that she might really have had more at
stake than her imagination appeared to take account of; whatever it was
at any rate he had never seen a young woman at less pains to be on the
safe side. He wondered inevitably how the peace was kept between Jane
Wingrave and such an inmate as this; but those questions of course were
unfathomable deeps. Perhaps Kate Julian lorded it even over her
protectress. The other time he was at Paramore he had received an
impression that, with Sir Philip beside her, the girl could fight with
her back to the wall. She amused Sir Philip, she charmed him, and he
liked people who weren't afraid; between him and his daughter moreover
there was no doubt which was the higher in command. Miss Wingrave took
many things for granted, and most of all the rigour of discipline and
the fate of the vanquished and the captive.

But between their clever boy and so original a companion of his
childhood what odd relation would have grown up? It couldn't be
indifference, and yet on the part of happy, handsome, youthful creatures
it was still less likely to be aversion. They weren't Paul and Virginia,
but they must have had their common summer and their idyll: no nice girl
could have disliked such a nice fellow for anything but not liking
_her_, and no nice fellow could have resisted such propinquity. Mr.
Coyle remembered indeed that Mrs. Julian had spoken to him as if the
propinquity had been by no means constant, owing to her daughter's
absences at school, to say nothing of Owen's; her visits to a few
friends who were so kind as to "take her" from time to time; her
sojourns in London--so difficult to manage, but still managed by God's
help--for "advantages," for drawing and singing, especially drawing or
rather painting, in oils, in which she had had immense success. But the
good lady had also mentioned that the young people were quite brother
and sister, which _was_ a little, after all, like Paul and Virginia.
Mrs. Coyle had been right, and it was apparent that Virginia was doing
her best to make the time pass agreeably for young Lechmere. There was
no such whirl of conversation as to render it an effort for Mr. Coyle to
reflect on these things, for the tone of the occasion, thanks
principally to the other guests, was not disposed to stray--it tended to
the repetition of anecdote and the discussion of rents, topics that
huddled together like uneasy animals. He could judge how intensely his
hosts wished the evening to pass off as if nothing had happened; and
this gave him the measure of their private resentment. Before dinner was
over he found himself fidgetty about his second pupil. Young Lechmere,
since he began to cram, had done all that might have been expected of
him; but this couldn't blind his instructor to a present perception of
his being in moments of relaxation as innocent as a babe. Mr. Coyle had
considered that the amusements of Paramore would probably give him a
fillip, and the poor fellow's manner testified to the soundness of the
forecast. The fillip had been unmistakably administered; it had come in
the form of a revelation. The light on young Lechmere's brow announced
with a candour that was almost an appeal for compassion, or at least a
deprecation of ridicule, that he had never seen anything like Miss
Julian.



IV


In the drawing-room after dinner the girl found an occasion to approach
Spencer Coyle. She stood before him a moment, smiling while she opened
and shut her fan, and then she said abruptly, raising her strange eyes:
"I know what you've come for, but it isn't any use."

"I've come to look after _you_ a little. Isn't _that_ any use?"

"It's very kind. But I'm not the question of the hour. You won't do
anything with Owen."

Spencer Coyle hesitated a moment. "What will _you_ do with his young
friend?"

She stared, looked round her.

"Mr. Lechmere? Oh, poor little lad! We've been talking about Owen. He
admires him so."

"So do I. I should tell you that."

"So do we all. That's why we're in such despair."

"Personally then you'd _like_ him to be a soldier?" Spencer Coyle
inquired.

"I've quite set my heart on it. I adore the army and I'm awfully fond of
my old playmate," said Miss Julian.

Her interlocutor remembered the young man's own different version of her
attitude; but he judged it loyal not to challenge the girl.

"It's not conceivable that your old playmate shouldn't be fond of you.
He must therefore wish to please you; and I don't see why--between
you--you don't set the matter right."

"Wish to please me!" Miss Julian exclaimed. "I'm sorry to say he shows
no such desire. He thinks me an impudent wretch. I've told him what I
think of _him_, and he simply hates me."

"But you think so highly! You just told me you admire him."

"His talents, his possibilities, yes; even his appearance, if I may
allude to such a matter. But I don't admire his present behaviour."

"Have you had the question out with him?" Spencer Coyle asked.

"Oh, yes, I've ventured to be frank--the occasion seemed to excuse it.
He couldn't like what I said."

"What did you say?"

Miss Julian, thinking a moment, opened and shut her fan again.

"Why, that such conduct isn't that of a gentleman!"

After she had spoken her eyes met Spencer Coyle's, who looked into their
charming depths.

"Do you want then so much to send him off to be killed?"

"How odd for _you_ to ask that--in such a way!" she replied with a
laugh. "I don't understand your position: I thought your line was to
_make_ soldiers!"

"You should take my little joke. But, as regards Owen Wingrave, there's
no 'making' needed," Mr. Coyle added. "To my sense"--the little crammer
paused a moment, as if with a consciousness of responsibility for his
paradox--"to my sense he _is_, in a high sense of the term, a fighting
man."

"Ah, let him prove it!" the girl exclaimed, turning away.

Spencer Coyle let her go; there was something in her tone that annoyed
and even a little shocked him. There had evidently been a violent
passage between these young people, and the reflection that such a
matter was after all none of his business only made him more sore. It
was indeed a military house, and she was at any rate a person who placed
her ideal of manhood (young persons doubtless always had their ideals of
manhood) in the type of the belted warrior. It was a taste like another;
but, even a quarter of an hour later, finding himself near young
Lechmere, in whom this type was embodied, Spencer Coyle was still so
ruffled that he addressed the innocent lad with a certain magisterial
dryness. "You're not to sit up late, you know. That's not what I brought
you down for." The dinner-guests were taking leave and the bedroom
candles twinkled in a monitory row. Young Lechmere however was too
agreeably agitated to be accessible to a snub: he had a happy
preoccupation which almost engendered a grin.

"I'm only too eager for bedtime. Do you know there's an awfully jolly
room?"

"Surely they haven't put you there?"

"No indeed: no one has passed a night in it for ages. But that's exactly
what I want to do--it would be tremendous fun."

"And have you been trying to get Miss Julian's permission?"

"Oh, _she_ can't give leave, she says. But she believes in it, and she
maintains that no man dare."

"No man _shall_! A man in your critical position in particular must have
a quiet night," said Spencer Coyle.

Young Lechmere gave a disappointed but reasonable sigh.

"Oh, all right. But mayn't I sit up for a little go at Wingrave? I
haven't had any yet."

Mr. Coyle looked at his watch.

"You may smoke _one_ cigarette."

He felt a hand on his shoulder, and he turned round to see his wife
tilting candle-grease upon his coat. The ladies were going to bed and it
was Sir Philip's inveterate hour; but Mrs. Coyle confided to her husband
that after the dreadful things he had told her she positively declined
to be left alone, for no matter how short an interval, in any part of
the house. He promised to follow her within three minutes, and after the
orthodox handshakes the ladies rustled away. The forms were kept up at
Paramore as bravely as if the old house had no present heartache. The
only one of which Spencer Coyle noticed the omission was some salutation
to himself from Kate Julian. She gave him neither a word nor a glance,
but he saw her look hard at Owen Wingrave. Her mother, timid and
pitying, was apparently the only person from whom this young man caught
an inclination of the head. Miss Wingrave marshalled the three
ladies--her little procession of twinkling tapers--up the wide oaken
stairs and past the watching portrait of her ill-fated ancestor. Sir
Philip's servant appeared and offered his arm to the old man, who turned
a perpendicular back on poor Owen when the boy made a vague movement to
anticipate this office. Spencer Coyle learned afterwards that before
Owen had forfeited favour it had always, when he was at home, been his
privilege at bedtime to conduct his grandfather ceremoniously to rest.
Sir Philip's habits were contemptuously different now. His apartments
were on the lower floor and he shuffled stiffly off to them with his
valet's help, after fixing for a moment significantly on the most
responsible of his visitors the thick red ray, like the glow of stirred
embers, that always made his eyes conflict oddly with his mild manners.
They seemed to say to Spencer Coyle "We'll let the young scoundrel have
it to-morrow!" One might have gathered from them that the young
scoundrel, who had now strolled to the other end of the hall, had at
least forged a cheque. Mr. Coyle watched him an instant, saw him drop
nervously into a chair and then with a restless movement get up. The
same movement brought him back to where his late instructor stood
addressing a last injunction to young Lechmere.

"I'm going to bed and I should like you particularly to conform to what
I said to you a short time ago. Smoke a single cigarette with your
friend here and then go to your room. You'll have me down on you if I
hear of your having, during the night, tried any preposterous games."
Young Lechmere, looking down with his hands in his pockets, said
nothing--he only poked at the corner of a rug with his toe; so that
Spencer Coyle, dissatisfied with so tacit a pledge, presently went on,
to Owen: "I must request you, Wingrave, not to keep this sensitive
subject sitting up--and indeed to put him to bed and turn his key in the
door." As Owen stared an instant, apparently not understanding the
motive of so much solicitude, he added: "Lechmere has a morbid curiosity
about one of your legends--of your historic rooms. Nip it in the bud."

"Oh, the legend's rather good, but I'm afraid the room's an awful sell!"
Owen laughed.

"You know you don't _believe_ that, my boy!" young Lechmere exclaimed.

"I don't think he does," said Mr. Coyle, noticing Owen's mottled flush.

"He wouldn't try a night there himself!" young Lechmere pursued.

"I know who told you that," rejoined Owen, lighting a cigarette in an
embarrassed way at the candle, without offering one to either of his
companions.

"Well, what if she did?" asked the younger of these gentleman, rather
red. "Do you want them _all_ yourself?" he continued facetiously,
fumbling in the cigarette-box.

Owen Wingrave only smoked quietly; then he exclaimed:

"Yes--what if she did? But she doesn't know," he added.

"She doesn't know what?"

"She doesn't know anything!--I'll tuck him in!" Owen went on gaily to
Mr. Coyle, who saw that his presence, now that a certain note had been
struck, made the young men uncomfortable. He was curious, but there was
a kind of discretion, with his pupils, that he had always pretended to
practise; a discretion that however didn't prevent him as he took his
way upstairs from recommending them not to be donkeys.

At the top of the staircase, to his surprise, he met Miss Julian, who
was apparently going down again. She had not begun to undress, nor was
she perceptibly disconcerted at seeing him. She nevertheless, in a
manner slightly at variance with the rigour with which she had
overlooked him ten minutes before, dropped the words: "I'm going down to
look for something. I've lost a jewel."

"A jewel?"

"A rather good turquoise, out of my locket. As it's the only ornament I
have the honour to possess----!" And she passed down.

"Shall I go with you and help you?" asked Spencer Coyle.

The girl paused a few steps below him, looking back with her Oriental
eyes.

"Don't I hear voices in the hall?"

"Those remarkable young men are there."

"_They'll_ help me." And Kate Julian descended.

Spencer Coyle was tempted to follow her, but remembering his standard of
tact he rejoined his wife in their apartment. He delayed however to go
to bed, and though he went into his dressing-room he couldn't bring
himself even to take off his coat. He pretended for half an hour to read
a novel; after which, quietly, or perhaps I should say agitatedly, he
passed from the dressing-room into the corridor. He followed this
passage to the door of the room which he knew to have been assigned to
young Lechmere and was comforted to see that it was closed. Half an hour
earlier he had seen it standing open; therefore he could take for
granted that the bewildered boy had come to bed. It was of this he had
wished to assure himself, and having done so he was on the point of
retreating. But at the same instant he heard a sound in the room--the
occupant was doing, at the window, something which showed him that he
might knock without the reproach of waking his pupil up. Young Lechmere
came in fact to the door in his shirt and trousers. He admitted his
visitor in some surprise, and when the door was closed again Spencer
Coyle said:

"I don't want to make your life a burden to you, but I had it on my
conscience to see for myself that you're not exposed to undue
excitement."

"Oh, there's plenty of that!" said the ingenuous youth. "Miss Julian
came down again."

"To look for a turquoise?"

"So she said."

"Did she find it?"

"I don't know. I came up. I left her with poor Wingrave."

"Quite the right thing," said Spencer Coyle.

"I don't know," young Lechmere repeated uneasily. "I left them
quarrelling."

"What about?"

"I don't understand. They're a quaint pair!"

Spencer Coyle hesitated. He had, fundamentally, principles and scruples,
but what he had in particular just now was a curiosity, or rather, to
recognise it for what it was, a sympathy, which brushed them away.

"Does it strike you that _she's_ down on him?" he permitted himself to
inquire.

"Rather!--when she tells him he lies!"

"What do you mean?"

"Why, before _me_. It made me leave them; it was getting too hot. I
stupidly brought up the question of the haunted room again, and said how
sorry I was that I had had to promise you not to try my luck with it."

"You can't pry about in that gross way in other people's houses--you
can't take such liberties, you know!" Mr. Coyle interjected.

"I'm all right--see how good I am. I don't want to go _near_ the place!"
said young Lechmere, confidingly. "Miss Julian said to me 'Oh, I daresay
_you'd_ risk it, but'--and she turned and laughed at poor Owen--'that's
more than we can expect of a gentleman who has taken _his_ extraordinary
line.' I could see that something had already passed between them on the
subject--some teasing or challenging of hers. It may have been only
chaff, but his chucking the profession had evidently brought up the
question of his pluck."

"And what did Owen say?"

"Nothing at first; but presently he brought out very quietly: 'I spent
all last night in the confounded place.' We both stared and cried out at
this and I asked him what he had seen there. He said he had seen
nothing, and Miss Julian replied that he ought to tell his story better
than that--he ought to make something good of it. 'It's not a
story--it's a simple fact,' said he; on which she jeered at him and
wanted to know why, if he had done it, he hadn't told her in the
morning, since he knew what she thought of him. 'I know, but I don't
care,' said Wingrave. This made her angry, and she asked him quite
seriously whether he would care if he should know she believed him to be
trying to deceive us."

"Ah, what a brute!" cried Spencer Coyle.

"She's a most extraordinary girl--I don't know what she's up to."

"Extraordinary indeed--to be romping and bandying words at that hour of
the night with fast young men!"

Young Lechmere reflected a moment. "I mean because I think she likes
him."

Spencer Coyle was so struck with this unwonted symptom of subtlety that
he flashed out: "And do you think he likes _her_?"

But his interlocutor only replied with a puzzled sigh and a plaintive "I
don't know--I give it up!--I'm sure he _did_ see something or hear
something," young Lechmere added.

"In that ridiculous place? What makes you sure?"

"I don't know--he looks as if he had. He behaves as if he had."

"Why then shouldn't he mention it?"

Young Lechmere thought a moment. "Perhaps it's too gruesome!"

Spencer Coyle gave a laugh. "Aren't you glad then _you're_ not in it?"

"Uncommonly!"

"Go to bed, you goose," said Spencer Coyle, with another laugh. "But
before you go tell me what he said when she told him he was trying to
deceive you."

"'Take me there yourself, then, and lock me in!'"

"And _did_ she take him?"

"I don't know--I came up."

Spencer Coyle exchanged a long look with his pupil.

"I don't think they're in the hall now. Where's Owen's own room?"

"I haven't the least idea."

Mr. Coyle was perplexed; he was in equal ignorance, and he couldn't go
about trying doors. He bade young Lechmere sink to slumber, and came out
into the passage. He asked himself if he should be able to find his way
to the room Owen had formerly shown him, remembering that in common with
many of the others it had its ancient name painted upon it. But the
corridors of Paramore were intricate; moreover some of the servants
would still be up, and he didn't wish to have the appearance of roaming
over the house. He went back to his own quarters, where Mrs. Coyle soon
perceived that his inability to rest had not subsided. As she confessed
for her own part, in the dreadful place, to an increased sense of
"creepiness," they spent the early part of the night in conversation, so
that a portion of their vigil was inevitably beguiled by her husband's
account of his colloquy with little Lechmere and by their exchange of
opinions upon it. Toward two o'clock Mrs. Coyle became so nervous about
their persecuted young friend, and so possessed by the fear that that
wicked girl had availed herself of his invitation to put him to an
abominable test, that she begged her husband to go and look into the
matter at whatever cost to his own equilibrium. But Spencer Coyle,
perversely, had ended, as the perfect stillness of the night settled
upon them, by charming himself into a tremulous acquiescence in Owen's
readiness to face a formidable ordeal--an ordeal the more formidable to
an excited imagination as the poor boy now knew from the experience of
the previous night how resolute an effort he should have to make. "I
hope he _is_ there," he said to his wife: "it puts them all so in the
wrong!" At any rate he couldn't take upon himself to explore a house he
knew so little. He was inconsequent--he didn't prepare for bed. He sat
in the dressing-room with his light and his novel, waiting to find
himself nodding. At last however Mrs. Coyle turned over and ceased to
talk, and at last too he fell asleep in his chair. How long he slept he
only knew afterwards by computation; what he knew to begin with was that
he had started up, in confusion, with the sense of a sudden appalling
sound. His sense cleared itself quickly, helped doubtless by a
confirmatory cry of horror from his wife's room. But he gave no heed to
his wife; he had already bounded into the passage. There the sound was
repeated--it was the "Help! help!" of a woman in agonised terror. It
came from a distant quarter of the house, but the quarter was
sufficiently indicated. Spencer Coyle rushed straight before him, with
the sound of opening doors and alarmed voices in his ears and the
faintness of the early dawn in his eyes. At a turn of one of the
passages he came upon the white figure of a girl in a swoon on a bench,
and in the vividness of the revelation he read as he went that Kate
Julian, stricken in her pride too late with a chill of compunction for
what she had mockingly done, had, after coming to release the victim of
her derision, reeled away, overwhelmed, from the catastrophe that was
her work--the catastrophe that the next moment he found himself aghast
at on the threshold of an open door. Owen Wingrave, dressed as he had
last seen him, lay dead on the spot on which his ancestor had been
found. He looked like a young soldier on a battle-field.



THE END



*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Private Life - The wheel of time, Lord Beaupré, The visits, Collaboration, Owen Wingrave." ***

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