The Project Gutenberg eBook of The fortune-hunters and other stories, by Violet Jacob.

BY VIOLET JACOB

LONDON
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.
1910

PRINTED BY
HAZELL, WATSON AND VINEY, LD.,
LONDON AND AYLESBURY.

NOTE

Three of these stories, “Providence and Colonel Dormer,” “The Windmill,” and “Other People’s Gods,” are reprinted from The Pall Mall Magazine; “The Fortune-Hunters” and “The Buckingham Gallery” from The Woman at Home; “The Wythan Tree” from The Acorn; and “The Black Man’s Hand” and “Behind the Wall” from The Newcastle Chronicle.

“The Lights of Jerusalem” has appeared in The Cornhill Magazine, and the remaining four are new.

THE FORTUNE-HUNTERS

CHAPTER I

Mrs. Wylde was in a peculiarly idle humour; she had dismissed her gondola, and was strolling along with a book under her arm. It was hot, even for Venice, although it was only the end of May, and she had been spending the early part of the afternoon in the Frari Church, admiring Bellini’s lovely Madonna. She went along twirling her white umbrella and wondering what to do next.

The sun was pouring fiercely down upon the coloured blinds and green shutters of the houses on either side, and Lena Wylde, in her white dress and shady hat, seemed the only cool object on the long stretch of asphalte. Not many people were walking there besides herself; and on the bridge, with its flight{2} of steps, which crossed the little canal farther on, only two figures were moving. One was an old man selling iced water, who, with a bell and a cracked voice, was making a really dreadful noise; and the other was a rather short, sturdy young man in flannels, whom she at once knew to be an Englishman. He had a square face and a small dark moustache, and, as he drew near, she became certain that his figure was familiar.

“I have seen him somewhere,” she said to herself, “or else he’s remarkably like—— Why, good gracious! It’s Robert Blundell.”

“I have just come from Verona and I met Nat. He told me to be sure to say that he felt better already.”

“That’s good,” said Lena, a flash of brightness in her face. “Venice never suits Nat. He was so knocked up by the heat that I packed him off to the Austrian Tyrol while I do a little more sightseeing. I hope h{3}e’s going on there soon; the hill air is what he wants.”

“He left this morning,” said Robert. “I saw him off before coming on here.”

“Well, I am very glad you have come,” said his companion; “I was just wondering what on earth I should do with myself till it’s cooler.”

They sauntered to the Piazza and sat down in the shady arcade opposite Florian’s Café. The pigeons in the square were fluttering round a group of tourists who were throwing them handfuls of corn and Lena was watching the oft-recurring sight, when Blundell interrupted her.

A few yards away, at the other side of one of the arches, three people were sitting, a young man and two women, the younger of whom was looking towards them.

“That’s Rosamund Slade,” said she to{4} Blundell. “You don’t know her, do you? I’m very fond of her.”

The girl threw a hesitating glance at her companions, then she got up and came towards Mrs. Wylde.

“Sit down for a moment, Rose,” said Lena. “This is Mr. Blundell, a great friend of mine; he has just come. It’s days since I have seen you, isn’t it? How hot it is! I am nearly boiled. How can you wear that serge gown? I should be carried home on a shutter if I did it. Why one comes out at this hour I don’t know.”

“Where are you going?” continued Lena. “What are you by way of doing? Come with me, and when we’ve finished our coffee we will go to the Lido—do, like a dear girl.”

“I am not sure if I can,” replied Rosamund; “but I should like to immensely. Shall I ask Cousin Julia?”

And she went off towards the two backs which Robert fancied were turned somewhat aggressively in their direction.

“Do you often come to Florian’s, Miss Slade?” he asked, by way of a beginning.

“No,” she replied—“not very. I think it is delightful, all the same. It is my birthday to-day, and that’s why we are here.”

The man was rather amused. It seemed a mild sort of entertainment for a special occasion.

“You see, my cousins don’t care for it. Mrs. Molesworth hates a crowd, and Heathcote generally goes out by himself in the afternoon; sometimes I come with Mrs. Wylde. I like that very much,” she added simply.

“I dare say,” replied Robert. “Most people would like going anywhere with Mrs. Wylde.”

It was on the tip of his tongue to say, “And isn’t everybody?” but he checked himself in time.

Robert did not know many girls, but it struck him that this one was not like the few he had met. He had never seen any one so direct, so almost curt in manner, and at the same time with such a pervading{6} suggestion of timidity. He also never remembered seeing any one with such a pretty mouth; it was almost scarlet, it drooped at the corners, and the colour came and went in her face when she was spoken to. Her eyes were grey and rather long. It struck Robert—in quite an impersonal manner—that he would rather like to kiss her; then the vulgarity of his thought made him feel ill. “She’s pretty,” he said to himself; “but what a nervous-looking creature. I wonder what it is.”

“So that’s Cousin Julia,” thought Blundell, as he rose. “I don’t like her.”

“Mrs. Wylde has asked me to allow you to go out to the Lido with her,” began Mrs. Molesworth stiffly, “and she will send you home in time for dinner. Please do not be late. I am going in now, so I will leave you with her. Don’t you think”—turning to Lena—“that my son had better meet her and bring her home?”

“No, no; I shall be passing your very door. Mr. Molesworth needn’t trouble to fetch her.”

Mr. Molesworth, who had all this time been looking into a tobacconist’s window, strolled listlessly up.

Heathcote Molesworth was a young man who, from his appearance, might have been either nineteen or thirty; as a matter of fact he was four-and-twenty. He had a heavy face which would have been handsome had he possessed more chin and a pleasanter expression. At the present moment he was bored and cross, and he looked both.

“Dreadful slow place, Venice,” said Heathcote to Blundell, taking the top of his stick out of his mouth.

“I can’t see what a fellow’s to do in it. I hate these everlasting pictures and things. And they do give one such stuff to eat at our hotel; I wish I was back in England instead of fooling about here.”

Blundell looked at him with an expression which might have been amusement or curiosity, and would have continued the conversation if Mrs. Molesworth had not made a movement of departure.

“Then, good-bye,” she said. “I hope you will be sure that Rosamund is not late. Come, Heathcote.”

“Now, Rose,” said Lena, “we’ll be off to the Lido. Robert, go down to the water for a boat—a nice one. Get Number 26—Sebastiano; he always rows me. We’ll wait for you in the church.”

As he went the two women strolled across the Piazza to where the great church lifts its gorgeous mass against the sky. The sun struck hot on the bronze horses which stand above the door, and the mosaics glittered with a thousand hues, toned down and mellowed to richness by centuries of exposure to the air of the surrounding sea.

“I don’t think Mrs. Molesworth seemed anxious for you to come with me this afternoon,” said Lena. “Was there anything else she wanted you to do?”

“No, I don’t think she does; she thinks{9} I am fonder of going about with you than of going with her and Heathcote—and so I am, certainly. Heathcote is always grumbling, and I do find it very dull.”

“It’s a great pity,” answered Mrs. Wylde, looking contemplatively over the girl’s shoulder as she stood before her.

“She is annoyed with me,” continued Rose, tapping the pavement with the point of her shoe. “Do you know why?”

“I can’t like him! Besides, he doesn’t care a scrap for me; it is all Cousin Julia. But really, really,” she went on, with a tremble in her voice, “there are times when I almost think it would be better to give in than to go on like this. It wears me out.”

“My dear child!” exclaimed Lena, looking into the tearful eyes, “don’t think of such an awful thing. Wait a bit—only wait—and things may right themselves. But don’t be rash, Rosamund, whatever you do, for you’d only be twenty times more miserable after.”

Rosamund’s lips moved, and she gave Len{10}a’s hand a little squeeze, and pressed her handkerchief to her eyes.

“Now I won’t talk any more about it,” she said, “for here comes Mr. Blundell.”

At the edge of the canal the barques and gondolas were clustered round the green-painted shrine of the Virgin which stands on a pole in the water; swaying about with the lapping and gurgling from the wash of passing craft. The gondolier stood on the steps with his large hat in his hand. They got in, and Robert sat down in the bottom of the boat facing the two women. Number 26 stood erect, waiting his orders.

Sebastiano’s oar gave a twirl in the green water, and the steel prow of the long, black gondola swung slowly round; then she shot out from the floating mass of moored-up boats, leaving the noise of the Riva and the sounds of human voices at the water’s edge far behind.

“I rather think I shall go home by sea, when I do go,” said Robert, as they went gliding under the bows of the P. & O. steamer lying anchored a few hundred yards out.

“Don’t talk of going home now,” said Lena; “we have nothing to do with that at present.”

“No, indeed,” exclaimed Rosamund, her eyes on a far distant island that seemed to hang like a grey feather in the quivering heat, somewhere between sky and sea; “don’t let us think of it. We must enjoy this afternoon and forget everything horrid.” And she trailed her bare hand in the water.

Robert looked up at her and then on behind her to where Sebastiano stood, tall against the background of the retreating city. The water stretched clear and smooth in their wake till it met the shore, and the domes and towers of Venice seemed lying asleep in the grey veil of the heat; only here and there a wet oar from some distant gondola sent a silver flash flying across the mouth of the canal, or the bark of a dog in one of the sailing-boats moored by the Public Garden broke the stillness of sight and sound. The two columns supporting the Lion of St. Mark and the figure of St. Theodore and his Crocodile seemed to single themselves out from the distant mass, and to stand like sentinels watching over the drowsy city.

It was a lazy afternoon. Blundell tipped his straw hat over his eyes and began to wonder why he had not come oftener to Venice. For the last year he had been wandering about Europe doing nothing in particular except chasing the picturesque; he liked that sort of existence, and, though all his relations urged him to ‘settle down,’ he was not attracted by the idea. He had lost his mother when quite a small boy, and his father some seven years since; his sisters were both married, and now, at thirty-two, he had nothing to keep him at home; and he had been roaming about from country to country and town to town, staying where he liked, and moving on when he pleased.

He liked companionship, and, although he was by no means a man without resources, it rather bored him to be alone at home. His father, who had come unexpectedly into the property in possession of which he died, had been a poor man until that event; and Robert, though an only son, had had to work hard. Notwithstanding his hatred of office life he had thrown himself into harness, knowing he had no other chance of making his way in the{13} world; so, when his father’s death had made him master of a good income and a very nice estate, he rather missed his former occupation, distasteful as it had been. It was a few years since he had first met Nat Wylde and his wife. They were thoroughly congenial friends to him, and he could not think of any woman in the world he liked as much as he liked Lena.

They left their gondola at the landing-stage of the Lido and started for the sea-shore by the road crossing the island, past the little church with its red tower and surrounding elder-bushes. The acacias cast deep blue shadows on the hot road, and all the air was full of the scent of its white blossoms that hung like strings of pearls from the boughs. When they reached the sea-shore, the Adriatic lay spread out before them.

They sat down to rest on a bank at a safe distance from the row of wooden bathing-places, and Lena told her companions to amuse themselves in their own way, for she was too hot to move another step. Rosamund looked wistfully at the little curling line of wave that bordered the shore, and Robert saw{14} the look and held out his hand. She took it, and they ran down the slippery bank together.

It was the first time in all Rose’s life that she had been undividedly answerable for the entertainment of any young man but Heathcote, it having been no part of Mrs. Molesworth’s policy to throw her with any male person not a generation removed from her. The few men with whom she was acquainted came to see her cousin, not herself, and she had never desired the tedious importance of their society. When Lena’s umbrella had begun to look like a distant mushroom, she realised that she was embarked upon a responsible job, and, having grasped the idea, her heart was turned to water. As they went along the wet sand, with the pleasant noise of the little waves in their ears, and as silence fell upon them, a great consciousness of her own inadequacy came over the girl. She was disposed to like her companion, but she felt that, between his world and the limitations of her own, a great gulf was fixed—so great as to preclude all approach. It almost made the tears come into her eyes to think how unlike{15} other people she was; it was stupidity, of course, nothing else, she told herself.

It did not fail to strike Robert that something was troubling his companion, and the impression he had had as they sat at Florian’s Café came back. Girls were made to enjoy themselves, he supposed—at least, the few he knew generally seemed to be doing so—but this one was different. He had disliked the look of her relations, and he guessed that something had gone wrong: probably they had been bullying her, he thought. It filled his protective soul with kindness, and he wondered how he could amuse her. He would try to, and he did. So the afternoon wore on.

“Perhaps we ought,” he answered, as he looked at his watch; “but we might sit down for a few minutes on that bank and rest.”

It was a continuation of the same bank on which Lena was encamped, and it stretched for a considerable way upon the shore; a footpath ran along the top of it. As they sat talking, the sun at their backs threw long shadows over the sand at their feet. A stout,{16} elderly, unmistakably German lady, who had been taking a solitary walk on the island, and was now on her homeward way along the footpath, gave them an expressive glance as she hurried by. “It’s a shame to disturb them,” she said to herself, as she redoubled her pace.

“She actually takes us for lovers!” he thought, with contemptuous pity; “isn’t that like a German?”

“We’ll go to the Hôtel d’Angleterre, Sebastiano,” said Lena, as they were embarking for home.

Rosamund sat silent during most of the way back, with her hands in her lap. She had been in a new world, a new world and a very pleasant one—a world where people thought and talked about things she liked to think of, and longed to do and see. It was so different from anything to which she had been accustomed, that the thought of returning to her daily society was like preparing to take a cold plunge.

Now, as she sat in the gondola, drinking{17} in the beauties of sky and water and the flashing of sun upon towers and red sails, recalling again the things she had heard from Blundell, she thought how delightful it would be if only Heathcote had travelled the world as Blundell had travelled it, was interested in the things in which Blundell was interested, and could talk about them as Blundell talked.

Just before seven o’clock the boat stopped by the steps near the Hôtel d’Angleterre.

“Good-bye!” said Rose, as she landed—“and oh! thank you so much. I have enjoyed myself, and had a delightful birthday.”

“And, now, what are you going to do?” inquired Robert, when Rosamund’s figure had disappeared in the doorway of the Angleterre.

Blundell seated himself in the vacant place beside Mrs. Wylde and they started off again.

“Tell me something about that girl,” he said, when they had gone a few yards.

“I like her. But she has an expression in her face when she’s silent that sometimes goes away when she talks. There’s something rather unhappy in it.”

“Yes, she did, and she’s nice to talk to. She quite lost that nervousness, or reserve, or whatever it is, and looked as bright as possible. She’s really pretty when that happens.”

“It does her good to get away from those people. They’d be my death in a week. You’re quite right about her, Robert.”

“I shouldn’t have thought that a thing to be miserable about,” broke in Blundell.

“Don’t interrupt me,” said Lena. “She must be—let me see—about twenty, I suppose. Rather more than a year ago she went to live with Mrs. Molesworth. She has no parents, and after her father died she lived with a great-aunt. But, of course, she saw nothing of the world in the little corner of Kent where the old lady lived, and it was{19} thought better for her to be with some one who could take her out. So her guardian, Sir George Dawson, settled that she should go to Mrs. Molesworth in London. I’ve known Mrs. Molesworth slightly, just meeting her about as one does; and I think—in fact, I know—that she is trying her best to marry Rose to her son Heathcote.”

“It’s the money, you see,” continued Lena. “It would be a grand thing for him.”

“Bless me, she doesn’t like him—naturally not! and I don’t see that he cares particularly for her. But I really sometimes think that woman will succeed if she goes on long enough. Poor little Rose seems at times almost ready to give in for the sake of a quiet life. It’s a horrid situation.”

“I should think so!” said Blundell emphatically; “it’s simply iniquitous. It ought to be prevented somehow.”

His companion looked at him for a moment as if she had never seen him before, and then{20} turned away her head and stared so hard at an old gentleman in a passing gondola that he made a nervous clutch at his hat. But Lena never noticed it.

A little later she stood on the balcony of her apartment, looking at Blundell and Sebastiano disappearing up the Grand Canal.

“What a splendid idea!” she said to herself, as she watched the swaying of the gondolier’s figure as he rose and bent at his work, and the smoke of Blundell’s cigarette curling upwards. “I really think Providence must have sent him.”

CHAPTER II

When Rosamund opened the door of her cousin’s sitting-room, she found a person on the other side of it whom she had not expected to meet and who was in the act of taking his leave. He was a young man of finished and intelligent aspect, and he came towards her with an expression of pleasure.

“How fortunate!” he exclaimed. “If I{21} had left a moment earlier I should have missed you. How delightful to see you again!”

Rosamund was surprised, and, like many shy people, lost her wits at an unexpected meeting; so she merely said nothing and smiled.

Mrs. Molesworth’s face expressed an unusual benignity, and the girl had the impression that the visitor had been with her some time. He paused at the threshold as he was going out.

“Have you anything to do on Saturday?” he asked, turning to the elder woman.

“Then, will you come and have tea with me? If you will, we could arrange our expedition to see the picture I spoke of. It is a new discovery, Miss Slade, a Cima, I believe, and I want you and Mrs. Molesworth to come with me to see it one day. Would that suit you?”

“Capital. Then I will take myself away. This really has been a ‘billet de logement,’ not a visit. Good-bye! Good-bye, Miss Slade!”

“He really is very cultivated,” remarked Mrs. Molesworth, when the door had closed behind him.

Maurice Hopton got into his gondola, pleased with himself and the world in general, more especially with the former; he floated along, thinking what a sensible fellow he was, and he fairly blessed Fate for having brought him within range of the very people of all others whom he especially wished to meet.

In the early part of the year he had made the acquaintance of the Molesworth party, during a short time when he was in Florence, and had been a good deal in the society of the two women. He had not known them long before his active mind sought to discover more about them, and he accordingly wrote to a friend whose name he had heard them mention for all particulars. A sentence in the reply which his letter did not fail to bring decided him as to whether they were acquaintances worth keeping or not. It ran thus:

“As for the girl, she will have at least four or five thousand a year. My dear chap,{23} you seem to have lit on your feet, for, of course, you will not neglect such opportunities. However, there is no need for me to remind you of them, unless your foreign life has changed you a good bit.”

Maurice carefully burned the letter in the stove which did duty for a fireplace, and became more friendly than ever with Mrs. Molesworth. The more he saw of her, the more plain it became to him that he would have a difficult part to play. That she wished to arrange matters between Heathcote and Rosamund he soon found out; and from it he gathered that, for the moment at any rate, he had better direct his attentions to her, and to her alone. So he applied himself steadily to the work of getting into her good graces and making himself useful, and as his knowledge of Italian was great, and his ideas on art highly developed, he proved a most desirable companion to so indefatigable a sightseer. In a short time she fancied she could do nothing without his help.

As for Rosamund, she thought Maurice very clever, and wished that he would talk to her as he did to her cousin. But he was{24} too wise. He knew that the slightest show of his hand would be fatal, so he waited.

But he waited a little too long; and one day Mrs. Molesworth, who had a habit of making her plans suddenly, announced to him that she intended leaving for Bologna the following week. Maurice was thunderstruck; he had quite counted on her staying in Florence till May. His first idea was to press matters on, and speak to Rosamund before her departure; but, after a sleepless night and a long discussion with himself, he came to the very sensible conclusion that things were by no means far enough advanced to admit of his doing so, and that he had better occupy all his remaining time in making his position still stronger with the elder woman, trusting to his luck and judgment for meeting them again.

So the week passed, and he saw his friends off from the station, with many regrets and hopes of meeting which were cordially echoed by Mrs. Molesworth; who, as the train moved away, stood graciously at the carriage window waving her hand from behind the immense bouquet with which he had presented her.

Maurice had rooms in Venice, which he made his headquarters during the summer and autumn. Italy suited his purse as well as his tastes, and he found himself able to live in luxury, keeping a gondola and his establishment of two servants on about half the money he would have spent in England. He had a wonderful knack of picking up pretty things, which made his rooms the admiration of his friends. Altogether he took life comfortably.

“Rosamund,” said Mrs. Molesworth, as they sat at breakfast a few days later, “didn’t I hear you say that you wanted to see the Public Garden?”

“I don’t think I shall,” replied her cousin; “but there is no reason why Heathcote should not take you there this morning.”

Rosamund’s face fell, and she opened her mouth to speak, but gave a little gasp and shut it again. Of all things in the world she hated going anywhere with Heathcote; generally he was so surly and unsympathetic that it took all her pleasure away, and after{26} a talk with his mother he was sometimes still worse, because of his clumsy attempts at love-making. She was sure now that Mrs. Molesworth had been talking to him.

She would have given a great deal to be spared from going with him, for, as she had determined that there could be but one answer to the question she knew he would ask, she was both exasperated and miserable. She could not refuse to go without giving her real reason, which was out of the question.

There was a bad time coming, and she dreaded it. She was very silent through breakfast, and, when it was over, she went up to her room.

Rosamund was, by nature, one of those gentle people who, when once they have made up their minds to a course of action, stick to it with wonderful persistency, and she now determined that the time had come for her to make an effort on her own behalf. “If,” she said to herself, “Heathcote says anything to me to-day, as soon as I come home I will write to Sir George Dawson, and tell him that I have no peace here, and ask him if it isn’t possible for me to go{27} somewhere else. It’s all because of my wretched money!”

“I say, Rosamund,” shouted Heathcote from the passage, “what do you say to going to the Public Garden this morning? Will you come?”

“Come along,” he said awkwardly, and with a backward jerk of his head, “let’s be off as soon as we can, if you’ll go.”

“Very well,” said Rose, who, now that her mind was made up, felt her courage rising, “I’ll put on my things at once.”

“Come down to the steps when you’re ready, and I’ll get a boat and wait there for you. Don’t be long.”

She shut the door and began putting on her hat; then she took up a pair of gloves, looked out to see if Heathcote were at the landing-place, and, observing him angrily haranguing a large gondolier who did not understand a word he said, she hurried downstairs and out on to the Riva.

“I can’t make out whether this fool is engaged or not,” he growled, as he saw her standing beside him.

The gondolier shrugged his shoulders; he had a clear hour and a half, he said, but after that he must go for an American family at the Hôtel Roma.

“We shan’t be longer than that,” said Rosamund, thankfully seizing a chance of putting a limit to their travels and stepping into the boat.

It would be difficult to say which of the cousins was most uncomfortable during that short voyage. Heathcote, oppressed by the sense of not knowing how he should begin, never opened his mouth, except to answer the few remarks that Rosamund made. The gondolier thought them the dullest pair he had ever rowed.

At last they glided up alongside the red wall and the steps which led from the water to the Garden, and Heathcote, with a sudden access of politeness, jumped out and offered his hand to his cousin. She just touched it as she put her foot ashore, then went up the steps and paused at the top.

“I think so,” she answered; and, as she leaned over the balustrade, she met his eyes. He turned them quickly away.

In another minute the two were walking along the green turf, neither knowing where they intended going, although they stepped briskly along, as though they had some definite object in view. But the width of the peninsula which forms the Giardino Publico is not very great, and they were soon brought to a standstill by finding themselves in front of the balustrade which runs the whole way round it. Rose went up to the edge and looked over at a couple of boatmen who had moored up to an iron ring in the wall, and were enjoying a sumptuous feast of crabs and lettuce-leaves in the shade; while Heathcote stood behind her, punching holes in the ground with his stick and feeling profoundly miserable.

“There’s a splendid view from this place,” observed Rosamund, when she had exhausted her interest in the two Italians; “but it was to see the garden that we came, so we had{30} better do so. Shall we go this way?” and she pointed to a path edged with shrubs and leading away somewhere between the greenery.

Heathcote wished that it had been to see the garden that they had come, and felt, as he walked along beside her, that he must start upon the matter in hand at once and have done with it.

“Look here, let’s sit down,” he said, as they passed a wooden bench; “it’s too hot to go plunging about in the sun like this, and—and I’ve got something to say to you.”

“Well,” said Rose, looking straight at him as they seated themselves, “what is it?”

“Of course I do,” he answered; “but that’s got nothing to do with it.”

“It has—everything. Have you forgotten what I said then? Well, I have not changed, and I say the same thing now.”

“It’s very hard on me,” said the young man pettishly, “when I try my best to please you, that you should be like this. One would think, to listen to you, that I had done you an injury in asking you.”

“So you do,” she replied, “when you persist in a thing that I asked you to leave alone before.”

“Well, all I can say is, I think it’s very hard that you won’t even listen, for it isn’t only for myself that I feel it. Think how fond my mother is of you, and how she would like it,” he went on.

“I think,” she remarked sharply, “that Cousin Julia would like it better than you would. But, at any rate, there is no use in talking, Heathcote. Come, let us go home. We have only been here a quarter of an{32} hour; but I think we have both had enough.”

“Rose! Do stop. Just think how unhappy you are making me!” he cried, conscious that he had made no very valiant resistance against her decision, and that he would be narrowly questioned when he got home. “Can’t you change your mind and think about it? Do, like a dear girl.”

When they arrived at the Hôtel d’Angleterre Heathcote did not choose to go in at once, for he knew that his mother was waiting for him, and he had no desire to face her just then; so he left Rose at the door and went off into the Piazza.

Mrs. Molesworth was reading at her sitting-room window, and as she saw the two land, she wondered a good deal at their being back so early. She put down her book and watched{33} them walking up to the house, and, when the balcony hid them from her sight, she sat still and listened for their coming.

The Hôtel d’Angleterre, like many hotels in Venice, had in former days been a palace, and, the main staircase being of marble, every footfall which ascended or descended was audible; so presently she heard Rosamund’s step come up and pass the door on the way to her own room. Wondering what had become of Heathcote, she rose, with a frown of impatience, and went out on the balcony. There he was, leisurely making his way to the Piazza. She was a good deal provoked at his not having come in to tell her the result of his proposal, and, as she could not go upstairs and find it out from Rose, she sat down and tried to go on with her reading. But her thoughts refused to fix themselves on the book.

Rosamund was sitting in her room, her hat still on, with a little leather writing-case upon her knee, writing busily. On her way home from the Public Garden she had occupied herself in composing her intended letter to her guardian, and, coming in, she sat down{34} and wrote it straight off. When it was finished, she re-read it carefully, and, having sealed and directed it, put it in her pocket and went down to the hall.

The porter was sitting at his bureau at the door doing nothing, or rather, he was drumming his fingers up and down on his knees, and contemplating a grey kitten which sat demurely licking its paw on the desk beside him.

“Please have this posted as soon as possible,” said Rose, handing in the envelope to him through the opening in his glass prison.

She had a guilty feeling, now that the deed was done, though in her heart she was sure she had acted rightly; but she glanced nervously over her shoulder as she gave the man the letter, and wished herself safely upstairs.

She turned to go, but, as a shadow crossed the doorway, she looked round and saw Heathcote, who was returning from the Piazza, where he had found nothing to amuse him. She gave a violent start and turned crimson; then, not knowing exactly what to do, went upstairs without a word.

Heathcote, though not gifted with a brilliant intellect, had that kind of sharpness about everything concerning himself rarely absent in selfish people; so, having heard the porter’s words and noticed Rose’s consternation at his appearance, his curiosity was roused, and he suspected that this letter, which required so much haste, had something to do with the morning’s events. He stood till she had turned the corner of the staircase, and, when the porter passed him with the letter in his hand, he stopped him.

“Give me that,” he said. “If it is for England, I don’t think Miss Slade has put the right stamp on it.”

The man gave it to him; he knew him to be the young lady’s cousin and he took his words in good faith.

Heathcote glanced at the address: “Sir George Dawson, Bart., Dawsfield Park, Sussex, Inghilterra.”

“It’s all right,” he said, as he gave it back; “that’ll do. Deuce take her,” he thought, as he went upstairs, “I wonder what on earth she has been writing about?”

He paused outside his mother’s sitting-room door, deliberating whether he should go in or not, and, though he had little desire for an examination upon all he had said and done that morning, an overwhelming wish to tell what he had just seen, coupled with the fact that he had nowhere else to go, made him enter.

CHAPTER III

Mrs. Molesworth was still at the window with her book, and looked quickly up as the young man came in. Heathcote tossed his hat and stick down and threw himself on the sofa.

“Of course, if one starts on anything with that sort of idea in one’s head, it’s not to{37} be wondered at,” said Mrs. Molesworth, greatly vexed.

“Well, I say!” he exclaimed, raising his voice and sitting up, “one can’t do what one can’t; and I tell you she wouldn’t listen to a word I said.”

“Hush, Heathcote! Don’t shout like that at me; please remember to whom you are speaking,” said his mother, growing colder, as she always did, in proportion to her anger.

“It’s enough to make any one shout, to be blamed because a fool of a girl won’t marry me!” he cried, regardless of grammar.

“I fancy you didn’t take much trouble about it,” she said, shrugging her shoulders, “I can quite believe it; you never take pains about anything useful.”

“If I didn’t, so much the better, now that things have turned out so; there’s that much trouble saved. And I’ll tell you what,” said Heathcote, preparing to beat a retreat and delighted at having something disagreeable to fire off as a parting shot—“I was down in the hall just now, and I saw Rosamund give a letter to the porter to post to Sir George.”

His mother sat still, with her eyes fixed on the floor, as though she were searching for something she had lost.

Heathcote picked his hat up from the table and put it on, lingering as if he had more to say and slapping the tablecloth with his stick.

At this moment Rosamund came in. Heathcote had had enough of domestic discussion, so he left the room, not sorry to think that she was likely to come in for her share of trouble. His was not one of those natures which prefers to suffer alone.

Rose went and sat on the sofa that he had just left; she had a piece of work in her hand, and she began to stitch at the fleur-de-lys which formed the pattern. For some time nothing could be heard in the room but the loud ticking of a little travelling-clock, the sound of her own sewing and the turning{39} over of Mrs. Molesworth’s book-leaves. The voices of gondoliers lounging about on the Riva mingled with the occasional cry of the crab-seller, which floated up from below; and the flashing wings of a pigeon shot now and then through the sunshine and the blue air. The clock seemed to Rose to be ticking louder and louder, in a kind of crescendo, and then dropping its fussy voice to a whisper, as the minutes ran by and Mrs. Molesworth sat silent. Presently she put her book down.

“The next time you write to Sir George, Rosamund, I shall be glad if you will let me know of it; I had a message for him that might have gone in your letter.”

The blood rushed into Rose’s face; she had no idea that any one knew what she had done, and it flashed across her that Heathcote might have seen her letter in the porter’s hand.

“I did not know that you corresponded with him,” said Mrs. Molesworth, noticing her confusion, and inclined to spare her nothing. “May I ask what you find to write to him about?”

“When a girl writes to a guardian whom she hardly knows, it generally is about something particular. I should have thought you would hardly contemplate anything of much consequence without first consulting me, considering that you are under my charge.”

Rose sat trying to collect her ideas and make up her mind to speak about her letter, for, now that its existence had been discovered, she felt sure that it would be better to do so.

“He has just been speaking about it,” replied Mrs. Molesworth, who had not expected the confession to begin with a question.

“This is the second time he has asked me,” said Rose, with gathering excitement in her voice, “and I really can never, never give any other answer, Cousin Julia. You don’t know how dreadfully uncomfortable it{41} makes me, and how miserable I am—I never know when it is coming next. I begged him before to understand that it is impossible for me ever to think of him in that way; but it was no good. So I wrote to Sir George and told him, and asked him if—whether there could not be some other arrangement made. I can’t bear this much longer—indeed I can’t!”

“I am so very unhappy,” she sobbed, drying her eyes and trying to control herself. “I can’t help it!”

Mrs. Molesworth was not altogether a hard-hearted woman, and Rose’s trouble might possibly have touched her, had it not been that she was a trifle alarmed at the turn things had taken. She was always angry when she was alarmed, and she generally looked round for some one on whom to vent her anger. That person was now, unfortunately, at her very elbow.

“So that is what you have been writing about,” she said. “I must say I admire the quick way in which you settle your actions.{42} And you determined upon taking that step this morning?”

“No, not quite this morning,” answered Rose, who was checking her tears. “I made up my mind some time ago that if he said anything more I would write.”

“And you expected him to do so? You seem to have set a very high price upon yourself,” said Mrs. Molesworth.

“You are indeed shrewd!” exclaimed Mrs. Molesworth. “What good calculations on the strength of his feelings. He must have had great encouragement to make him so persevering.”

This was more than Rosamund could endure. To be supposed to have encouraged Heathcote, whom she almost loathed, when the aim of her life was to escape him! It was too much.

“Yes,” she cried, clasping her hands together; “and I see whom it has come from! Do you think I don’t know why he has not given it up long ago? or that I do{43}n’t understand who has urged him on? Oh, it is horrible! But if I hadn’t a penny in the world, all this would never have happened. I know it so well. And this morning I have written and concealed nothing—nothing! I have told Sir George everything.”

Mrs. Molesworth was horrified. She looked at Rosamund for a moment, feeling as if she were dreaming.

“Go,” she said at last; “go to your room, and leave me: and, when you have asked my pardon for what you have said, I will speak to you again—not before.”

In after times, when life had changed for Rosamund, she often thought, looking back at the days which followed, that they were the most dreadful she had ever spent. Her cousin was not a woman to whom forgiveness was easy, and, even had her offence been a smaller one, she would have found it hard to forget it herself or to allow the girl to do so; her anger knew no bounds, and she hardly noticed or spoke to her. She was angry with Heathcote too; so, after a couple of days spent by him in sulking, by his mother in unabating displeasure, and by Rose in silent{44} misery, he announced his intention of going to England. Mrs. Molesworth was not sorry that he should do so, for she had realised at last that her wishes would never be fulfilled; it would be a good thing, she thought, should Sir George Dawson write to her about his ward, to be able to mention casually that her son was not with them. It would make Rosamund’s statements sound less probable.

When Rose found that he was really going, she was sincerely thankful, even though his departure would entail a tête-à-tête with Mrs. Molesworth; and it was with a lightened heart that she saw him embark for the station on the following Saturday afternoon, with his portmanteaux behind him in the boat.

“Pray get ready in good time to go to Mr. Hopton’s,” said Mrs. Molesworth’s voice at her elbow, as she was watching the departing gondola.

Rosamund looked round, rather surprised; for it was the first time that her cousin had spoken to her for days.

“I will,” she replied. “Do you think I ought to change my dress, Cousin Julia?”

“You had better consult yourself,” was the{45} reply; “it is more natural to you than to consult me.”

Rose went upstairs disappointed, and began getting ready to go out; she put on a soft-looking, straw-coloured dress and a hat with yellow poppies in it, and, having given a final glance in the glass, went downstairs to the door to wait for Mrs. Molesworth. She stood on the doorstep, looking out at the gleaming water and shading her eyes with her hand. The porter’s grey kitten, which was parading about with its tail in the air and that manner of grave aimlessness common to kittens, came and rubbed itself on her skirt; and she stooped down and stroked the absurd little creature that purred and sidled against her, causing a young man who chanced to be passing to stop and look at the picture they made.

When Rosamund raised her head, she found Robert Blundell’s eyes fixed upon her and the kitten.

“Isn’t it a dear little thing?” she said, her mind so much taken up by the little creature that she forgot to be surprised at his sudden appearance.

“Very,” replied he, picking up the grey{46} mass and letting it climb up his broad chest till it reached his shoulder. “I was looking at you both as I came by; it seemed almost a pity to disturb you.”

“And I don’t often see you,” added Robert; “at least, not as often as I should like. Do you remember the day we went with Mrs. Wylde to the Lido? How delightful that was! Where are you going now?”

“Yes, I do, a little,” said Blundell, frowning slightly. “Are you all going?”

“Cousin Julia and I are. Heathcote left this afternoon; he has gone back to England. I don’t think he cares much for this kind of life. One must either hate this place or like it very much, don’t you think?”

“I like it,” she said; “only I haven’t half seen it yet. And I think I shall like it better,” she added.

“Ah,” said Robert, wondering whether Heathcote’s departure had anything to do with the last sentence, “I am enchanted with it.”

“This is my third stay,” he answered, putting up his hand to stay the cat, which was turning round and round upon his shoulder, whisking its tail into his eyes.

He bent down—an unnecessary proceeding, for Rosamund was nearly as tall as himself—and she took the kitten, an act which it resented by springing away and darting into the house.

“Your cat hasn’t learned to take the ups and downs of life calmly,” remarked Robert, laughing, as the grey tail whisked round the corner. “You must try to teach it.”

“It’s not an easy thing to learn, neither is the learning pleasant,” said the young man gravely.

“No,” replied Rose, looking away, and not quite liking the turn the talk had taken. The subject was too real to her.

“Well, I hope you’ll like your tea-party,{48}” he said. “Hopton has very pretty rooms, I believe—not that I have ever been in them myself; but I hear they are worth seeing.”

As he continued his way, he smiled, thinking what an amusing thing it was to observe how people acted and reacted upon each other, and to watch, when occasion permitted, the different complications going on among his fellow creatures. This particular complication, into which Lena Wylde had given him a glimpse, interested him immensely, indeed, more than anything he had seen for some time, and he hoped with all his heart that Rosamund would not be sacrificed to Mrs. Molesworth’s ambition for her unprepossessing son.

He was quite sure that the girl would be miserable; how could she be otherwise, he asked himself, with such a life-companion as Heathcote Molesworth? And especially a girl like Rose—for he was by this time certain that she was no ordinary person. What an attractive picture she made when she played with the cat in the doorway!

While Robert was thus employed, Mrs. Molesworth and Rose were being rowed up{49} the Grand Canal. The elder woman leaned back under her parasol in stately silence, critically surveying the occupants of each boat as it passed and ignoring her companion, though they sat in the close proximity inevitable to two persons occupying the two best seats in a gondola. About half-way to the Rialto they struck into a little canal, and went gliding along a lane of green water; under bridges where chattering girls leaned over the parapet to watch them shoot silently out from below; round corners, from behind which came the deep cries of unseen but approaching oarsmen, whose craft swung past them with a swish of water and half an inch to spare; past fondamentas where bareheaded women sat conversing at the top of their voices with distant neighbours; and under the shadow of a red wall from which a fringe of mauve wistaria dipped almost into the water. Finally they stopped at the dark doorway which formed the entrance to Maurice Hopton’s apartment.

Hopton had no intention of letting the smallest advantage slip for want of a little trouble; he knew that, if he invited no other{50} guests but the two women to tea, he would have to devote himself to Mrs. Molesworth, and consequently have little opportunity for talk with Rose. When they arrived, rather later than the hour he had named, they found the room in possession of ten or a dozen people, and quite a chatter of voices going on. The place seemed rather dark to them, after the glaring sunshine outside, and for a moment they could hardly distinguish the slim figure of their host as he came forward to meet them. There was a lull in the talk and laughter and subdued rattle of teacups as Mrs. Molesworth’s tall presence appeared in the doorway, and one or two old ladies put up their long-handled lorgnettes to examine the new-comers.

“You did not tell me you expected any one but ourselves,” said Mrs. Molesworth rather stiffly, for she did not like surprises.

“There are only a few,” replied Maurice; “and there is one person whom I asked especially to meet you—Professor Baumschwein, author of ‘The Influence of the Jews upon the Domestic Architecture of Venice’; I remember you told me the other day that{51} you had read it. He is most anxious to be presented to you, and I have promised him half an hour’s real intellectual joy. I hope I may make you acquainted, when you have had some tea.”

“Certainly,” she replied, a good deal mollified, “I shall be very pleased.”

A short time afterwards, Mrs. Molesworth being installed in a cool corner, and deeply interested in the conversation of Professor Baumschwein, who, with a fat forefinger raised, was pouring out his mind, Maurice, knowing full well that he was likely to talk on for the next hour, looked round for Rosamund; and, not seeing her in the room, stepped out on to the balcony.

“It is so pretty,” explained Rose, “I couldn’t resist coming to look out.”

“But there is no reason why you should stand,” observed he, pulling out a basket chair which stood inside the window. “I shall follow your example for a little. It’s certainly much nicer than being in the room. How you seem to appreciate beauty!”

“I’m glad you think that. To me there is nothing like this old place for loveliness. I should like to go about a little with you and show you the things I love best. Mrs. Molesworth is always ready to do anything in that way. How you will enjoy the pictures here. You are fond of pictures, aren’t you?”

“Somehow, you and I have never talked much to each other of the things we both feel most deeply. I wonder why?” he said, looking at her from under his long eyelashes.

“I don’t know,” answered she. “Cousin Julia is so clever, you see, that she is naturally a much better person to go about with than I am. You used to enjoy Florence with her, didn’t you?”

“We must make up for lost time, you and I,” said he, without taking his eyes off her; “and we will go and see all sorts of things. You look as if a little—what shall I say?—sympathy, companionship, would be good for you. Don’t think me rude, but sometimes{53} it seems to me as if you hadn’t much. You looked so sad when I came out here a minute ago; I am sure you were thinking of something not altogether happy, although you said you were enjoying the view. Now, weren’t you?”

“Ah, I thought so. I am so sorry for you,” said the young man, in his slow, soft voice.

“But it’s nothing—nothing at all!” exclaimed Rosamund, feeling that she had confessed too much, when in reality she had said nothing. “One’s little worries are such trifles compared to some things people have to suffer.”

“Little things are not always trifles, and you ought to have everything to make you happy,” he said, looking into her eyes, and noticing how pretty their colour was. “At any rate, we seem not to have understood each other before; let us be friends now.”

Rosamund flushed a little, but put her hand into his. It seemed the only thing to do.

“Oh, please, never mind me,” she said hurriedly. “I am quite ashamed to think you should have noticed anything—that I was annoyed.”

“I notice lots of things you don’t imagine,” he answered—“about you, especially. If we are going to be friends, you won’t mind that, will you?”

Maurice was silent. At the moment he could find nothing suitable as a reply. Her simplicity puzzled him. From the lips of a more experienced woman the words would have sounded like a rebuff.

Rosamund, who was aware that Lena Wylde had met Maurice and detested him, felt sure that her friend did not know what a kind-hearted fellow he really was.

CHAPTER IV

It was a few weeks after his tea-party that Maurice Hopton strolled along an unfre{55}quented square, turning many things over in his mind.

He was thinking how well his friendship with Rosamund had lately prospered, and making mental notes on his plans for the afternoon, when he and the two ladies were to go to see the picture he had talked about on his first visit to Mrs. Molesworth at the Hôtel d’Angleterre.

There was only one cloud to stain his horizon, a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand, but one which he determined to provide against before it should pour its unmerited deluge upon his deserving but unprotected head. The cloud was the fact that Mrs. Molesworth was becoming rather restive under the discursive rhetoric of Dr. Baumschwein, who had lately accompanied them to every place of interest, ostensibly to lead them through the tortuous ways of architecture and history, and really to engage her attention while Hopton wandered undisturbed with the object of what passed for his affections. But now the wing of the innocent German could no longer cover his advance, and the necessity for a new arrange{56}ment was arising. There must be two new characters introduced into the game—two new characters who would occupy Mrs. Molesworth, Dr. Baumschwein, and each other, while he made the venture on which all would depend and which he had decided to make without delay. The time was ripe for it at last. His trouble was that he could not make up his mind who the two new characters should be; for, though he had invited several friends to go with him that afternoon, no one had been able to accept his invitation. It was most provoking.

In the centre of the open square which he was crossing was a well, surrounded by a decorated parapet about three feet high, and on this little wall was seated a small figure in a shady hat. Recognising Mrs. Wylde, Hopton emerged from the shade and crossed the blazing square, throwing away his cigarette and feeling that Heaven, from which he deserved so much, had at last bestirred itself and sent him the right person. He was sure that, if she joined his party, Lena would bring Blundell with her; for he was{57} aware of their friendship, though he called it by a different name.

She was watching his approach with all the antagonism which beset her whenever she saw him; she disliked him more than usual just now, having seen with misgiving how he had lately hung about the Molesworths. Independently of her own private hopes, she could not bear the idea of Rose’s happiness being entrusted to a man like the one who was now advancing over the scorching stones.

“Don’t take off your hat,” she said, without offering her hand; “you might get a sunstroke.”

“Certainly,” she replied, “if you will promise not to fall in backwards.”

Hopton was rather annoyed; the idea of falling backwards into the well was ridiculous, and he hated being connected with anything ridiculous. He took no notice of the remark, and, brushing some dust from the stone with his handkerchief, sat down beside her. Lena saw he was annoyed, and was pleased; it gave{58} her a kind of cheerful desire to prolong the interview.

He, however, had no wish for that; and, having secured her company for the afternoon, had only to suggest that she should bring a friend with her. Much to his satisfaction, she proposed Blundell, and, having settled it, they parted, each secretly delighted—he, because he had ensured the presence of two people who he believed would engage the attention of Mrs. Molesworth, while they did not interfere with himself; and she, because she wanted to see Hopton and Rose together, that she might judge the extent of their intimacy. Robert would be a great help to her, she thought, as she rose. She went home quickly, sent a message to Blundell, ate her luncheon, and had an hour’s rest in her room; after which she arose with a smiling face and went off to meet Mrs. Molesworth, Rosamund, Dr. Baumschwein, and the two young men.

Having traversed a perfect labyrinth of small canals, the party entered a gloomy church overlooking a piazza, where the grass grew in unmolested tufts between the crooked paving-stones. Dr. Baumschwein, who was{59} shortsighted, nearly fell down the steps which led into the damp old building, and Hopton rushed forward to succour his unconscious ally.

“Dank you! Dank you, my dear vriend!” cried the poor Professor, clutching his unseated spectacles. “And now we kom to a beautiful sbessimen of——”

“But first let us see my picture, while the light lasts,” interposed Maurice, dragging him almost by main force from a pillar for which he was making; “we can come back to this afterwards.”

He was longing to get over his own part as guide, that he might walk off into some more secluded corner of the place with Rosamund.

It took him some time to overtake and restrain the enthusiastic old man, who was more at home among the mouldering tombs and arches than in any other place in the world. While he strove with him for the mastery, Lena looked on with the keenest relish, waiting, like an astute general, to see which way the tide of war turned before bringing up her own reinforcements. Never before was a church the scene of such a{60} struggle, she reflected, as she stood a little apart and contemplated the party, all of whom, excepting herself and Maurice, were ignorant of what was going on. She and he were like two commanders of opposing forces, only he did not know who his enemy was—or, indeed, that he had one at all.

In the sacristy hung the painting which they had come to see, and into this room, with its musty smell and tattered curtains, they followed Hopton. The afternoon light struggled through the old window, striking into a dark recess and revealing the Virgin’s fair, mysterious face, as she sat enthroned against a background of golden sky, holding the Infant in her arms. On either side of her stood a saint—John the Baptist, brown and earnest; George, in his silver armour, with hands crossed upon his sword. Behind the gilded canopy, under which the painter had represented the central figure, stretched some low, distant hills; and the boughs of a solitary tree stood out dark against the sunset.

All were struck by the beauty of the picture, and stood silent, till Robert and Rosamund began to talk quietly as they leaned against{61} the window-sill opposite. At this, Maurice was instantly alert, and soon managed to insinuate himself between them; then, on some pretext of showing her another part of the building, he separated the girl from her companions and disappeared with her through the sacristy door. On returning to the church, Lena could see them walking between the pillars of the opposite aisle, through which Maurice was evidently making for the entrance to the green cloister outside. The sight determined her that he should never reach it undisturbed. It angered her that Rose should have been snatched so conspicuously from Blundell. Also, she noticed that Mrs. Molesworth’s eye was following the retreating figures, and that her whole body was not doing so only on account of the flow of broken English with which the Professor was assailing her, and from which she found escape impossible. A glance sufficed to show Lena that the pivot on which the whole situation turned was Dr. Baumschwein.

“Herr Professor,” she said, turning to him, as he paused for breath, “you are forgetting to tell us about that carved pillar.”

As Dr. Baumschwein, delighted, hurled himself towards the pillar, she saw Mrs. Molesworth speed like an arrow from a bow towards the cloister. Her joy was so great that she could hardly follow the Professor’s discourse.

But she was not a person to do things by halves; once she had undertaken her part, she had no idea of giving it up; so when, after a long afternoon, in which she succeeded in making the good old man think her the most enlightened of womankind, they all stood at the church door together, Maurice’s face, as he looked at Robert, showed that she had met with the reward of her works.

They parted outside, Mrs. Molesworth and Rosamund getting into a gondola, and Hopton and Dr. Baumschwein, who were dining together, departing in the same way. Robert and Lena walked slowly homewards.

“I want to talk to you,” said he, rubbing his chin meditatively—“that is, if you’ll listen.”

“You will be awfully surprised,” he began; “but I want to marry Miss Slade.”

“Well, I can hardly say that. But I have hoped for it so long, Robert, ever since you first met her, weeks ago! Just think of all the evenings on which I made you come in and see me when she was dining with me; and of all the times lately that you have met her with me. And I can’t tell you how glad I am, and what luck I wish you. Oh, Robert! I am so glad! You’ll let me tell Nat, won’t you? He’ll be so excited.”

“Of course. But it’s all very well,” continued he, thinking that he had never quite realised before what a nice woman she was, “but how do I know she’ll accept me? That creature Hopton does nothing but follow her about. You don’t know what{64} difficulty I had in getting near her this afternoon.”

“I don’t know?” exclaimed Lena, laughing out loud—“I don’t know? Why, you could never have done so at all if I hadn’t seized poor old Baumschwein, and left her cousin free to go and spoil their tête-à-tête. I never had so much trouble in all my life, nor listened to such a flow of learning.”

“Well, I’m hanged!” exclaimed Blundell vulgarly, “you really are the cleverest woman in the world. And to think I never suspected all that!”

“Mrs. Molesworth appropriated Hopton, and I sat in the cloister with Miss Slade for nearly half an hour, I should think, while you were in the church. I don’t think Hopton was pleased.”

“I have been thinking it over for some time,” he went on more gravely, “and I do think I should be very happy with her; and, what is far more important, I should try my best to make her happy with me. Of course, the money has nothing to do with it—you know that, don’t you?”

“She’s so pretty and charming. The only thing I fear is Hopton. I can’t bear that fellow. Not so much because he is in my way, you understand, but I hate the man himself, and I believe he would make her miserable. I don’t think he’s honest or genuine, and if he seriously means to marry, he shouldn’t go on in the way he does.”

“What do you mean?” asked Mrs. Wylde, opening her eyes. “I dislike him particularly, but I have never heard anything against his character.”

“Dear me, every one knows about her—at least, every one who lives in Venice. She is a Russian, wife of a clerk in a French bank here; he’s a good-for-nothing fellow, who drinks. She’s very handsome; surely you must have seen her.”

“I met them walking only a few days ago,” said Lena. “But this is all news to me. I hadn’t an idea of it.”

“Ah! but it has gone on for ages; I suppose people have got tired of talking. My lodgings are exactly opposite to her house. I see him going in continually.”

“Well, I look to you to save Rose from him,” she said, after a pause, “though I don’t really think she cares much for him, except as a relief from her surroundings. However, there’s no knowing, and my advice to you is this: settle it at once if you can. How can I help, I wonder, and when shall you see her again? Suppose I ask her to come out with me, and you come too. I could get myself out of the way somehow, and you might speak then. But where shall we go?”

“Anywhere—the Lido,” suggested he, remembering the last time he had been there.

“Of course—the very thing! I can’t manage to-morrow or next day, or the next day either. How about the day after that—Thursday?”

“Thank you a thousand, thousand times,” said Robert gratefully. “Thursday, then.”

Robert was not the only person who determined that evening that delay was undesirable. When Dr. Baumschwein had left, enveloped in a tartan comforter, Maurice remained at the open window, smoking into the night air which was creeping over the silent town. He was thinking furiously over the events of his unsuccessful day—of Blundell, of Mrs. Wylde, of his mistake in having invited them, of his newly departed and unconscious aide-de-camp, Baumschwein, and, above all, of Rosamund’s prospective £4,000 a year. At last he pushed his chair back, making it grate sharply over the carpetless parquet, and opened an inlaid writing-table that stood near him. He sat in front of it, pen in hand, for fully ten minutes, doing nothing; then he selected a half-sheet of writing-paper from a little orderly stack of these remnants lying under a paper-weight, and wrote down several words. They were the headings of the various ideas upon which he intended to touch in his letter to Rosamund.

Just under the window a man in a gondola on the water began singing one of the most impassioned of the passionate Venetian love{68}songs, throwing his liquid and strenuous voice boldly into the still shadows of the surrounding houses. Maurice rose and flung the sash to with a noise that made the room shake. Then he sat down again and wrote rapidly, checking off each heading on the half-sheet as he disposed of each subject. When he had finished, he took up his hat and went out to the nearest post-office.

On his way back he turned into a quiet street and stood for a moment under the balcony of a tall and rather dilapidated-looking house. He glanced up, and whistled a little tune very softly; it was the same tune which the man in the boat had annoyed him by singing. A window opened on the first floor, and a rather large white hand, startlingly white in the darkness, rested for an instant on the sill. A few words in broken English floated down to him, and the hand was waved; it was a repellent wave, and the window was abruptly closed. Maurice gave a little irritated laugh. Then he went home to bed, and slept the sleep of the just.

Mrs. Wylde was a good correspondent and had the pen of a ready writer. Her husband{69} had once remarked that it was almost worth while dispensing with her company in order to get her letters; and this remark had some pertinency, as her company was a thing of which he was fond. He was now abundantly gratified. A great part of the day following these events was spent by her in giving him a full account of all that had happened, and neither incidents nor descriptions lost anything in the telling. Lena wrote on in her cool, darkened sitting-room, smiling as she laid aside the sheets of closely-written paper. In the evening she sent for a gondola and went out into the Lagoon away from the town, returning late, and having seen no one she knew, either by land or sea. She was a good deal agitated by the doings of her friends, in spite of her smiles and her absurd letters, and determined, for the present, to leave the whole party alone. She therefore occupied herself by idling about in quiet places, looking into old shops and spending more money than she intended, and the evening before the day which was to decide Blundell’s fate found her sitting peacefully alone in her room, tired after her wanderings.{70} Seven o’clock struck on the great bell over the water and the note vibrated softly, leaving a sound in the air like the music of a swarm of bees in a lime-tree.

The light began to fade and the words on the page of her book to mix themselves up in places in which the printer had never put them. The volume dropped from her hand, and she slipped into pleasant oblivion of all earthly interests.

“Ask the signorina to come in,” said she, sitting very upright, in answer to the servant’s announcement. She felt quite certain that her visitor was Rose, and wondered very much what had brought her. Was it possible that luck had pushed her and Robert together, and that he had spoken? Her heart beat fast as she saw the new consciousness written all over her friend’s face.

“I have come to tell you,” she said, “I am going to be married. Oh, Mrs. Wylde! I do so hope you’ll be glad.”

“Glad? Of course I’m glad, if it’s any one I like—any one I think worthy of you.”

“Oh!” said Rosamund; “but you know I could never have married the other—never!”

“Oh, my dear!—my dear! how thankful I am to hear you say that! I did hope you would make the right choice. You will be happy! There’s no one I know half so straight and true and strong as Robert. You have done wisely; of that I am as certain as that I stand here.”

“Stop! stop!” she cried, “you are making a mistake—a dreadful mistake. It’s Mr. Hopton.”

Mrs. Wylde felt as though she had fallen from heaven to earth, and was, not unnaturally, unable to get up.

They stood looking at each other in silence;{72} it was all that Lena could do to restrain her tears, so bitterly was she disappointed.

“Do you love this man?” she said at last, when they were sitting together in the fast-going light.

“Yes, I do,” replied Rose. “I like him very much, but I’m afraid—I see—that you don’t.”

“And are you really marrying him because you love him?” inquired Lena again, without taking any notice of what the girl had said.

“I have a good many reasons,” she said, after a moment, “but—but I have made up my mind at last. So I have said yes; I saw him yesterday morning, and it was settled. Even Cousin Julia has consented, for she knows now that I will never marry Heathcote, and I think she will be relieved to be rid of me. Mr. Hopton—Maurice—telegraphed to his uncle in England to get my guardian’s consent, too, and he has got it; the answer came before I left the hotel.”

“Oh, I hope you will be very, very happy,” she faltered. “Oh, Rose, Rose! it must be an awful thing to be unhappy in one’s married life! Nothing on earth can make up for a sorrow of that sort—nothing, nothing. Are you quite sure this is the right thing? Can you honestly say you aren’t doing this to escape from home difficulties? I can’t feel that you are quite single-minded.”

Rosamund turned away her head. A sharp rap fell upon the door, but the two women were so much excited that they had no ears for anything but the sound of each other’s voices; and, before they had realised that they were no longer alone, Robert was standing in the doorway, and the curtain had fallen behind him.

Lena and Rose sat petrified, feeling as though they were a pair of burglars in the act of emptying a safe, and Blundell was the policeman. Rose sprang up from her chair, colouring violently. Fortunately it had grown so dark that no one could see her face.

“Good-bye,” she stammered. “I must go now. It’s quite late, and I’ve stayed too long.”

And, without looking at the young man, she pushed aside the curtain and was gone.

“You will come back?” she cried. “You must come back! I shall dine in an hour. Go, and return here then, and dine with me. Please, please, Rose, if you love me, come back!”

“Yes, yes; all right,” said the girl hurriedly, as she disappeared down the stone stairs.

Blundell stood at the window; he read in the two women’s faces that something unusual was going on, and his own fears suggested to him but too accurately what it was.

“Robert! Robert! it’s too late!” exclaimed his friend, almost hysterically, as she re-entered. “It’s settled, and they are engaged. Oh, how too, too unlucky!”

“I was afraid of it,” he said slowly. “I pray and hope that he may be good to her.”

“He won’t,” said Lena. “I’m sure of it! It’s all as bad as bad can be; she is accepting him to get away from her present life. I{75} could see that as soon as I began to talk to her. She has no idea of the sort of man he really is; she has no experience. It is bad enough you should be rejected for him at all; but to be rejected for his sake when she does not even love him is worse.”

“I haven’t been rejected,” said he. “I haven’t even had that satisfaction.”

They sat together until the clock warned them it was nearly time for Rose to return.

“I am afraid this is a tremendous disappointment to you,” she said, as he was leaving.

“It is,” he answered quietly. “I think I must go away from here; I will go and join Nat in the Tyrol. I can’t look on at Hopton. I shall come round and say good-bye to you to-morrow. You have done so much for me; how can I ever thank you enough?”

“I shall go too,” said Lena. “I don’t want to spoil Rose’s comfort by my hatred of it all, and I have not the power of pretending that I like it. I shall go to Nat as soon as I can get ready. I could start at any time after to-morrow. Will you wait for me till then?”

CHAPTER V

Three men were sitting at dinner in two different places, each thinking of the same subject, though with hardly the same feelings. The subject was the engagement of Rosamund Slade to Maurice Hopton; and the three men were Sir George Dawson, Bart., General Henry Hopton, C.B., and Robert Blundell.

The feelings of Sir George Dawson, as he sat in the comfortable dining-room of Dawsfield Park, Sussex, enjoying the pleasures of the table, to which he was by no means indifferent, were those of complacency. For some time past his conscience, usually a robust organ, had given him signs that it was not at its ease. The cause of its disorder was the letter that Rose had written, which he had read with annoyance and finally put away in his desk as a matter to be attended to when he should have more humour to deal with it. It had spread before him dire possibilities. He had pictured himself, as he read it for the third time, being forced to disturb all his habits by the hunting up of a new home for his ward. Worse still—but this was almost{77} too horrible to think of—he had seen himself impelled by public opinion to endure the society of a girl in his orderly home, a girl who would certainly turn the house topsy-turvy and unhinge the snug machinery of the establishment; his forehead had grown moist at the idea. The letter had lain unanswered for so long that, one day, coming across it among his papers, it burst upon him with a fresh horror, and he determined that, before the week was out, he would concoct some sort of reply.

While he was in this state of mind, a distant neighbour, General Hopton, sent to ask him for a business interview, with the request that it might take place that afternoon. This warrior possessed the best pheasant-shooting for miles around, and was, though a new-comer to the county, a man to be propitiated in consequence; and Sir George Dawson was glad to be able to write him an obliging reply. When he arrived and revealed his business, his astonished host felt as though an angel from heaven had come down to loose him from his difficulties. General Hopton’s errand was undertaken, at his nephew{78} Maurice’s request, to ask consent of Rosamund’s guardian to their marriage.

General Hopton was not calculated to remind the disinterested eye of an angel, for he was shaped like a jargonelle pear and had a disturbing complexion; but, whatever his appearance, Sir George would have had the same feelings. He asked a few questions, for form’s sake, about Maurice’s character, and being informed by his guest—who knew nothing about his nephew—that he was “a very decent young fellow,” gave his consent with outward condescension and inward thankfulness. The General was easily persuaded to stay the night, and a wire was sent for his servant and his clothes. Then the two old hypocrites sat down to a comfortable meal together—one delighted at having rid himself of an inconvenient responsibility; and the other at having provided, at somebody else’s expense, for one of the most impecunious members of his own family.

Meanwhile, poor Blundell, as he sat in his hotel hundreds of miles away, dining alone at a little round table, felt very disconsolate. He had hardly realised until now how very{79} much he loved this crude girl, with her mixture of timidity and sense, shyness and expansion. He loved her wistful, changing eyes, her red, sensitive mouth, her quick variations of colour. He loved her as a strong man loves a weak woman; and he longed for the right to fill her life with happiness and see her receptive nature expand in the sunshine. He could not bear to think of her as Hopton’s wife, and to the bitterness of his disappointment were added dislike and distrust of the man who had got what he wanted so badly. He almost wished for a return of the days when might was right, and people could break each other’s heads openly and in comfort. How he would have enjoyed settling with Maurice! He did not for one moment believe that he would be good to Rosamund—that was the worst of it.

As he sat at his solitary dinner he congratulated himself that nothing need keep him in Venice, or prevent his starting with Lena for the Tyrol. Only one thing he had left undone, and that would serve him well as an occupation for this evening. There was a little view in a picturesque{80} street that Lena Wylde had always admired, more especially when the moon was up, and he, Robert, had said he would make her a small sketch of the place. To-night the moon would be at her best, and he resolved to go out and do the little drawing; he was very glad of the diversion, for time hung heavy on his hands. He took some drawing-things out of his portmanteau, and strolled out just as the water was beginning to break out in silver ripples and the shadows to deepen into absolute blackness.

“You don’t mind this,” she said, pointing to her morning dress, as they sat down to the table with its shaded lamps and bouquets of late-blooming tulips. “I shall walk home. M—Maurice is coming to fetch me.”

It was hardly an exhilarating meal; they spoke little, and, when they did, it was with that affected cheerfulness and spasmodic interest in their subjects which is more embarrassing than the most prolonged silence.

The girl’s heart smote her as she observed the pain in her companion’s expression, and,{81} at the same time, she felt a sharp twinge of self-pity. Nothing could go well with her, she told herself. Whatever she did, some one appeared to resent it. She had other feelings, too, though she hardly understood them, and the words spoken by Mrs. Wylde in error an hour before rose up and made her heart beat. Poor Rosamund, it was an odd frame of mind for a bride-elect! With other young women she had known, courtship and engagement had meant good-will and good wishes, but she, apparently, was to know none of these things. It was true that, after the bare consent and formal hopes for her welfare expressed by Mrs. Molesworth, she had spent a pleasant hour with her fiancé; he had spoken charmingly, painting in attractive colours the life which he would make for her, and she had seen before her the beginning of a new existence—an existence of love and trust and companionship. It had all seemed so happy, so full of promise, like a peaceful landscape seen from a dreary upland; and her starved and weary soul yearned towards it. But a blight had crept up; she felt chilled and spiritless, and, though{82} she wanted to say a good deal to Lena, she had not the heart to begin.

Dinner came to an end at last; the servant put a rug and a couple of cushioned chairs on the balcony overhanging the canal, and they went out together, as they had often done, to enjoy the night air and listen to the musicians, who, in their belanterned boat, had taken up their nightly position in front of an hotel a little way off. It was dark, for the moon at this time was late in rising; and it was not easy to tell what was shadow and what substance, as they looked across at the opposite buildings, with their dead windows and unlighted arches. The house they were in stood at the corner of a small canal leading from the great main waterway in the heart of the town. Some one opposite was throwing an electric searchlight across the houses and palaces for the edification of the tourist world. It threw up all the most admired pieces of architecture in strong relief, and defined sharply their outlines and traceries. Rose had seen it every night and the vulgar glare jarred upon her. The little side canal was so black and silent that it fascinated her;{83} the dimness, the mystery, and the quiet gave her a sensation of rest. She drew her chair into a place from which she could see some way into the narrow vista and turn her eyes from the blatant white light.

“Dear, I am afraid you think me most unkind,” said Lena presently, from her red cushions.

“I know you don’t mean to be so,” replied Rosamund; “but I am dreadfully, dreadfully disappointed. Troubles never end for me. If I could only get peace somewhere—no matter where—I shouldn’t care what happened to me. Just a little affection, ever so little, and, above all, peace, and I should be so thankful and contented! It doesn’t seem very much to want.”

“It doesn’t, but it is, all the same,” said Lena, “for peace is the hardest thing in the world to get.”

“I have, thank Heaven! but I am one of the very few people who think themselves extraordinarily lucky and never cease wondering at their own good fortune. All I long for now is that you should have it too.”

“I should be a false friend if I were not to answer honestly. Oh, Rose! it is hard to seem so brutal and to say such things, just when you most need sympathy; but, dear, dear Rose, I would do anything to see you free from this man. He’s not straight, and he’s not true. I never yet met a man who had a good word for him.”

“Can’t you stop it before it is too late?” cried Lena. “Oh, think!—think! Wait a little—put it off—anything. You don’t love him, Rose—I know you don’t!”

Tears of despair, disappointment, and mortification were gathering in the girl’s eyes. She got up, and leaned over the balcony, looking down at the little, dark canal.

Lena sat still in her place; she had never been in such a puzzling position before. Here was Rosamund, standing at the most vitally important turning-point at which a woman can stand, not knowing what to do with her life. Torn this way and that, worn out by the irritations of a daily existence in which there{85} was nothing but uncongeniality; exasperated, driven to extremity by the worry of past years, and flying for refuge to what must only plunge her into yet more irrevocable troubles. And real, true love was standing by her, if she only knew it. She would have given worlds to tell her all. She turned it over and over in her mind as she sat staring up at the blue-black sky. Could she, ought she, to speak out and betray Robert’s confidence?

She rose, and stood beside Rosamund. Down below, in the little canal, a boat was floating right under the balcony. It was a bona-fide boat, not a gondola, with two people in it—a man and a woman. The man had shipped his oars and was resting by the woman in the stern. She wore a black lace mantilla, and a dark cloak was slipping from her shoulders; a diamond glittered as she put out her hand to draw it up. The two were sitting close together in the shade without exchanging a word.

“Tourists on their honeymoon,” was Lena’s mental comment, and she wondered, as she{86} had often done, at the disregard of publicity shown by the species, though, in truth, the place chosen by the pair was solitary enough, with its dead walls, unbroken except by the corner balcony on which the two friends were standing. As it was immediately above their heads the lovers had, presumably, not noticed it.

Rosamund looked on mechanically; at another time the episode might have amused her; but she was in scant humour to be amused, and love and lovers were eminently distasteful to her just now. Of the former she was likely to know little, if Lena’s words were true. It was a bitter prospect, and she feared to go forward and yet had not the courage to go back; this rather startling incident had broken the train of her thought. It was followed by a splash, and she looked again to see what had happened, almost expecting that the demonstrative conduct of the unknown pair had been their undoing. But it was only one of the oars that had fallen into the water, and, as it floated away, the man was stretching over the side to recover it. He pushed off from the wall, and the boat ran into the middle of the canal.

At this moment the searchlight laid its great arm across the houses opposite, falling straight on the little craft. Rosamund seized her friend’s shoulder and clung to it, white and speechless. The man was Maurice Hopton! His companion drew her mantilla across her face as the light struck it, but not before Lena had had time to recognise, in the heroine of this episode, Madame de la Trappe.

Mrs. Wylde had not reached the age when saying “I told you so” to the mistakes of younger people compensate one for being no longer able to commit them oneself. She made no comment; while Rose, hardly knowing what she was doing, went back into the sitting-room and sank down on a chair, covering her face with her hands. Humiliation and anger strove within the girl’s breast; she was sick at heart, and worn out with the excitement of the day, and the tears she was generally so prone to shed would not come to her relief. Looking up, she met Lena’s brilliant eyes fixed upon her in the lamplight.

“Tell me what I am to do,” she said, stretching out her hands like a blind person.

“There’s only one thing to do,” said Lena, leaning across the table and speaking emphatically: “break with him as soon as ever you can. You have to end all this at once. Here—here is the inkstand,” she pushed it towards her. “I will bring you paper and envelopes.”

The sight of these practical articles in front of her brought Rosamund to herself.

“Stop!” she exclaimed. “How can I write? He is coming here to-night to walk home with me. It is useless writing. He won’t get it till I’ve seen him.”

“But I will send it to his house now, at once,” urged Lena—“the very minute you have written it. You don’t dream of going on with this, Rose, surely? You can’t! You mustn’t!”

“Oh, no,” she replied wearily. “I know that quite well. But give me a little time, Mrs. Wylde.”

Lena saw that her own zeal was taking her too far. She had been too violently stirred up by the sight they had seen together to allow for the shock to Rosamund’s nerves. It had illustrated what Robert had said as{89} appropriately as a picture illustrates the story in a book.

“If I were to write now,” continued the girl quietly, “and to send the letter, he might not go back to his rooms before coming here, and I should not know whether he had received it or not. No; I will wait till he comes, and tell him myself, right out. I will give no reason but that, on thinking it over afresh, I do not believe we shall suit each other. That’s quite true. If he insists on my keeping my engagement, or tries to force me into it, I shall say plainly what I have seen. How could he—how could he! On the very day after our engagement!”

An angry light grew in her eyes and flamed up, as the scene in the canal rose afresh in her mind. Lena had never seen this side of her before, and it was something of a revelation; she wondered at her friend’s courage in facing the disagreeable business before her; and it struck her that when timid people are driven into a corner they often out-Herod Herod with their boldness. Sitting on the{90} table beside Rose, she told her in plain words all she had heard of Madame de la Trappe, and the interpretation of the episode in the dark water-way.

Before they had finished talking, the hands of the clock pointed to ten, and the maid came in to say that a gentleman was waiting below.

In the innocence of his heart, Hopton stopped before the main doorway leading to Mrs. Wylde’s house; he had never been in it in his life, and, until this evening, had not even known where she lived. Backs of houses on the Grand Canal open upon such unexpected streets, and are approached by such turnings and twistings, that he had not the vaguest idea, while waiting at the door, that he was barely fifty yards from the little canal with its blind walls. Had he been enlightened, he would possibly have worn a less complacent face.

He hit joyously with his stick at a vagrant cat which slunk by him and disappeared into the arch of the doorway. The moon was getting up, and, over the roofs above, a soft haze indicated her whereabouts in the sky.{91} Presently a shadow came between him and the glitter, and the dark figure of Rosamund advanced over the wet pavement.

“Am I late?” he said, fancying he observed a slight displeasure on her face. “I didn’t mean to be.”

“Then, mayn’t we have ever such a little walk in this lovely moonlight before I take you home?” he asked, with almost pathetic earnestness.

The words did not sound inviting, but he took her hand and drew it under his arm. She pulled it back instantly.

“Rosamund, my dearest!” exclaimed the immensely surprised Maurice, “what is the matter?”

Her heart beat so violently that she could hardly breathe; but, with all the equanimity she could muster, she looked straight at him.

Rose hurried on, her mind, now that she had spoken, containing but one idea, and that was how to reach the Hôtel d’Angleterre as soon as possible.

“I could never be happy with you,” she said breathlessly. “We do not suit each other a bit; I see it now plainly. Do not say any more, Mr. Hopton. I am so sorry, I am so ashamed of my broken word; but I will not be your wife—no, never.”

“Because I know that we are quite unsuited,” said Rose. “I am certain of it—quite certain; and I do not love you. Please listen to me. I do not love you—do you understand?”

“But, Rose, my dearest love,” he urged, “you don’t know what you are saying.”

“Listen, dear,” he said, coming closer. “I will soon change all that. I will make you{93} love me; indeed I will. How can you doubt that for a moment? I can never love any one but you. I have never wasted a thought upon any other woman—I swear it solemnly!”

“Hush! hush!” cried the girl, in horror. “How can you tell such untruths? Oh, it’s horrible to hear you!”

“They are not untruths,” persisted he, “but honest facts. Why will you not believe me?”

Then a suspicion broke in upon the young man, and with it a perfect wave of rage; for he saw that the castle that he had built was crumbling to pieces.

“It’s that vile woman!” he cried. “She has been telling you lies about me. I hated her from the very first moment I saw her!”

Rose turned her face towards him. Her desire to get home was, for the moment, forgotten, so anxious was she to bring down the whole weight of her newly acquired knowledge, and to punish the man she now hated{94} for his words about the woman who was her friend.

“No, it isn’t Mrs. Wylde,” she said. “I’ll tell you what it is. I was standing on her balcony an hour ago. Do you know that the Calle della Madalena is right underneath? You were there in a boat with—a lady. I saw you; I couldn’t help it. I had no idea it was you. I saw—everything.”

Maurice was so much taken aback that he was almost speechless, but he collected his wits as soon as he could.

“What nonsense!” he exclaimed; “it’s perfectly impossible. I have been dining at the Café San Moise, and I never left the place till I came for you. You chose to fancy that some one you saw in the darkness had a resemblance to me, I suppose. I am flattered, I must say, by your confidence.”

“It wasn’t dark,” said the girl simply; “there was the electric light.”

There was a silence as they walked along. Even science had lent a hand to betray the unlucky young man. He made a last struggle.

“And so you will give me up without a word, because you saw me with a lady you do not know anything about? You don’t know whether she is related to me or not! You don’t even know her name! It surprises me, for I had no idea you had one of those minds to which the most innocent things seem guilty.”

“I do know her name,” said the girl, in a tone of disgust, “and it’s useless for you to go on talking like that. Do stop; I will not change my mind for anything you may say or do. Please understand.”

“Is that your last word?” asked Hopton loudly, the blood running up to his pale face.

They had reached a part of the street brilliantly lit by the risen moon, and were standing by a corner over which a projecting roof threw a deep shade on the wall beside them; they themselves stood as though cut out in paper, two sharp, black figures with ungainly shadows.

“But you must come with me as far as the hotel,” exclaimed Rose, bewildered by his action, and feeling her courage ebbing in the glare of the empty black and white street.

He paid no heed to her. A sudden shout of loud laughter rose from the Piazza, where some convivial spirits were still haunting one of the cafés.

Rosamund would have to cross it to reach home, and the sound made her heart sink. She sprang a few steps after him.

“You will not leave me here alone?” she cried, laying an imploring hand on his sleeve, as the vulgar laugh rang out again, this time much nearer.

Maurice Hopton was a cad at heart. He did not care what became of the girl; she had defeated and humiliated him. He hated every one.

He shook her roughly off, so roughly that she missed her footing and staggered against the wall.

“You can go home by yourself!” he cried, completely losing all self-control. “I’m not going to take you!”

At this moment the shadow under the{97} projecting roof seemed to come to life. There was an exclamation, a rush, a shriek from Rosamund and a grasp upon Hopton which appeared to him to be choking the very life out of him.

It was no wonder that he thought this, for he wore a rather tight collar, and a great part of Blundell’s substantial hand was forced between it and the back of his neck. It was difficult to speak, and, when he tried to do so, the hand gave a twist that almost strangled him. With a final shake, the thought of which rejoiced him for many a day after, Blundell flung him from him as far as he could.

“You brute!” he exclaimed, as Hopton rolled hatless into the shadow—“you infernal brute!”

Then, with an unconscious formality that was almost comic in the midst of this violent scene, he held out his arm to Rose.

CHAPTER VI

Axensass is a little place on the Brenner Pass, consisting of about a dozen cottages, a{98} farm, and a hotel built of pitch-pine standing on the slope of a hill.

In the valley the fields lie green and peaceful, and a great bounding river runs between the grey rocks. The wind blows through the pass, bringing with it a feeling of buoyant life and purity, and driving a moving background of light cloud past the firs above. Midway between hotel and river is the railway station, a few wooden houses squatted down beside the line. The shining iron rails diminish in aggressive perspective, then plunge into a tunnel which suggests a full-stop at the end of a sentence.

On the platform a tall Englishman was loitering. He had a humorous, ugly countenance, and, though his hair was so grey as to be almost white, his face was the face of a young man. The station was very quiet, and the river’s loud voice drowned any sound of an approaching train. But from the tunnel’s mouth burst a sudden white puff, and the tall man took his stand at a place from which he could see into each compartment as it passed him. The train drew up with creaking brakes and several heads{99} appeared at the windows. The door of a first-class carriage opened, and a small figure in neat brown, with its head and hat enveloped in a voluminous gauze veil, descended. The tall man moved forward.

“Where’s Robert?” he asked, as he stood holding the little woman’s hand.

“He’s not coming after all,” said Lena. “I’ll tell you all about that as we walk up to the hotel. Nat, I’m so glad to see you!”

When a colossal dressing-bag and sundry other possessions had been piled upon a barrow, the husband and wife started slowly up the hill in their wake. The fresh scenery around seemed to produce no effect upon Lena, for she looked neither to the right nor to the left. She had too much to say.

Now and then the couple stopped still, as people do when they come to a knot in the conversation. It took them some time to reach the hotel at this rate, and the luggage had disappeared from view long before they got to the painted railing enclosing the garden. A smart, white-capped waitress was standing on the verandah as they approached; at sight of them she went into the house, and{100} reappeared carrying a little tray. She ran down the steps and presented it to Lena.

A blue envelope was lying on it. Mrs. Wylde snatched it up and tore it open; then she held it out to Nat. The contents were these:

LÉONIE

Cyril Castleman was a young man without responsibilities; he had a touch of foreign blood, a somewhat roving disposition, a large income, and an appearance a little more than passable. He possessed no property on which to spend his money and no near relations from whom to endure advice. He had been educated expensively by the retired and very retiring manufacturer who had made him an orphan; and now, though he was accountable to no man, and had enjoyed many of the best opportunities of being a first-class fool, he had just escaped from becoming one. But he had never had to do what is commonly called “a hand’s turn.”

In spite of his income he knew few people, and a slight exaggeration of manner was apt to put strangers against him. So it was that, though he had been ten days in Cairo, his{102} circle was represented by a handful of hotel acquaintances. It was one of Castleman’s saving graces that he went about the world with his eyes open, and, in order to see the face of a new land—he had never been in Egypt before—he bought a Syrian Arab pony with a wall eye.

He had been herded through the bazaars by an insufferable dragoman, seen the Sphinx and the Pyramids, and done most of the sights that lurk behind the scenes for the allurement of travelling bachelors; and had begun to hate the dragoman almost to insanity. He now rode morning and evening, and was in treaty with a biblical-looking horsedealer for another animal.

On the northern outskirts of Cairo, where tramways cease and the first of Ismail’s signal-towers comes into view, there stretches along the desert-edge a heterogeneous colony of houses. The short railway line ending at date-growing Marg seems to thread them together like beads on a string, for their mud walls lie parallel with the rails for some miles, broken only by the grounds of Khoubbeh Palace, and connecting the villages of Zeitoun{103} and Mattariah. The gardens of these flat-roofed, skulking villas, with their tumbledown gates and discoloured whitewash and infinite suggestion of squalor and secrecy, would be a revelation to the trim-minded British florist. Pergolas, low and stuffy, weighted to suffocation with vine, almost crowd out the straggling rose-bushes and orange-trees; coloured glass balls raised on sticks supply that incongruous barbarity of ornament dear to the quasi-oriental heart, and zinnias wrestle with marigolds in the undergrowth. All is loaded, luxuriant, breathless, cramped. In spring the heavy perfume from the orange-groves of Khoubbeh hangs like a cloud over the huddled anomalies of a place where desert, suburb, and railway line join hands and travel on, so to speak, together. When the Khamseen blows, the dust smothers and unifies them into one indistinguishable greyness.

The population of this quarter is composed of as many ingredients as a Christmas pudding. Levantines, Jews, clerks, scoundrels, ‘Effendis,’ and fat old women with under-bred lap-dogs compose the portion which{104} principally meets the eye. Some of the inhabitants are rich, and some are poor; but, in either case, the female half is of that sort which, on all but high occasions, lives in its dressing-gown. On Thursday it emerges, heavily powdered and befeathered, to loll in a hired victoria up and down the Abbassia road.

Towards this region Castleman turned his pony’s steps one heavenly morning. Behind him on the Abbassia parade-ground, two companies of a Sudanese regiment were moving briskly to a primitive but stirring tune. The raw veil of morning mist, which, in these days of planting and vegetation, will sometimes clothe the desert, was lifting back like a curtain, and the white stones in the little Arab graveyard beyond Zeitoun were catching the light against the dust-colour and distant purple. He was soon cantering past a group of the larger houses belonging to rich Egyptian officials that dot the fringe of the desert, and considering their closed and latticed windows with all the curiosity roused in the European male breast by the word ‘harem.’

As he went, the story that had interested{105} him in the local paper overnight came back to his mind, and he wondered whether some of it might not have been enacted in these identical surroundings. It was quite likely, he told himself, with some pleasure. Cyril had real gallantry under his expensive silk shirt, though it is to be feared that the exploits of the young foreigner of whose nationality the police seemed uncertain had caught at the flashy side of it.

There had been a great scandal. A young man had, by hook or by crook, contrived to get into the sacred family precincts of a pasha living on the outskirts of Cairo, and, though discovered and chased by no less a person than the outraged householder himself, had escaped, with gratifying success. But, where one shouting, pot-bellied gentleman heading a retinue of timorous servants may fail, the organised machinery of the law may have better luck. The word “escape,” inspiriting on one side of a frontier, only becomes triumphant upon the other. The pasha was a rich man, and the intruder was arrested in a small shipping-office in Alexandria, where he was very sensibly making arrangements to leave the{106} country, and brought back to Cairo for trial. Law and order were to have their turn, apparently. The pity was that, while the train slowed to a foot’s pace between two stations, some twenty miles off the capital, the prisoner, who had lain in a state of exhaustion since his sharp conflict with his captors, went out of the window like lightning, leaving them to rue the misplaced mercy which had removed the handcuffs for a season from the heap of half-dead humanity in the corner. It had taken some time to bring the engine to a standstill, and to get the astounded police started on the track. The search was proceeding yet, and Cyril smiled, reflecting that the vanished hero would be a man worth cultivating.

There is no place so suitable as the desert for dreams, and, when the rhythmic plunge of hoofs beats time in the sand, you may ride on indefinitely in the intoxication of monotony, with a mind revelling, undisturbed, in the visions of your own creation. A puff of orange-flower came on the hot wind—for it was spring—and Castleman, lost in an imaginary kingdom of trellised walls, intrigue, and{107} dark eyes, idled along till midday, his face desertwards. When he turned back, he crossed the line and made for the long thread of roofs; it would be charming, he thought, to ride home alongside the mud walls and try to catch a glimpse of what lay beyond them. The pony stepped daintily on the rails, lying like tram-lines on the sand, descended one side of the narrow, dry canal which separates the dwellings from the permanent way, and scrambled up the other. When they got on to the track, running under the jealous garden-walls, Cyril found that, from the saddle, he could get an excellent view into the greenery.

All was very quiet, for noonday blazed, silencing what little labour is ever visible in Egypt. From the few glimpses of life that he caught, the semi-European element seemed to predominate. An occasional patch of pink cotton dressing-gown showed on a verandah, an occasional movement by a well; otherwise all was still. Sometimes a more than usually Western establishment might be guessed from trim borders of rosemary or tidy paths.

A small grove of eucalyptus-trees, planted{108} between the canal and the railings on his left, cut the sand a short way in front of him, and, in line with it, topping a curve in the wall which was almost rubbing Cyril’s right shoulder, a small arbour reared itself above the coping. A tin crescent surmounted it, and the vine hung so heavily from its dome-shaped roof that it looked almost solid. It was evidently reached by a staircase inside the garden. Just as he passed the place a pariah dog came scurrying out of the shadow of the eucalyptus-grove.

The wall-eyed pony had never yet shown any signs of nerves, but, at the sudden movement, he whipped round like a rabbit, and, there being but a couple of yards between the canal-bank and the wall, the sand began to break away and his hind feet to slip over the edge. Cyril, who was a fair horseman, gave him his head, and threw himself as far forward as he could on his neck. Luckily, a tamarisk-root saved the situation and offered a moment’s foothold, and, with a terrific pawing of dust, horse and rider stood once more firm on the path. The pariah dog cantered away towards Zeitoun.

While they scrambled to safety a head rose above the wall and a woman entered the arbour, pulling the yashmak hastily across her mouth as Castleman looked up. She wore the usual enveloping black draperies of an Egyptian lady, and the white lawn covering the lower part of her face was thickly and richly embroidered. Above it shone the most enchanting pair of hazel eyes under straight brows, that looked all the darker for the powder thick upon the small piece of forehead and cheekbone visible. A heavy streak of paint lay under her lower lashes. There was no doubt that the unseen mouth was smiling, for he could see in the lady’s glance a fire of amusement, caused by his ridiculous struggles. She had not the doll-like appearance of such Egyptian beauties as he had met driving in closed carriages round Gezira in the afternoon, though she was evidently as much smothered in paint as they. He was a little hurt in his dignity by the episode of which she had been witness, and the fascination of her eyes lent the wound an additional smart.

He rode on, throwing into his seat all the{110} nonchalance he could command, and, when he came to a gap in the bank a few yards farther, he turned again over the railway line. She should see that he was no tourist, in the saddle for the first time! He spurred the Arab into a gallop, and circled once round in the sand before putting his head homewards, that he might observe, without turning obviously, whether she was watching his progress. Yes, there she remained, a dark spot in the arbour, leaning out over the wall and gazing intently after him.

On Tuesday, before noon, Castleman rode in the same direction; this time he did not go into the desert, but made straight for the line of houses, and proceeded at a foot’s pace along the path below the garden-walls. As he neared the arbour his heart began to beat. All yesterday he had thought of that hazel-eyed houri sitting among the vines, of the fascination of her look, of the invitation that had seemed to lurk behind it. He wondered how that arch-sportsman of whom he had read with so much gusto had begun his affair. No doubt, much in this sort of way.{111} He sat up and settled his tie as the heavy contour of the summer-house rose against the sky.

Passing under it, he looked up to meet the eyes again; she had come farther forward this time. Cyril half pulled up, lifting his hat; and, from the dark folds of her draperies, there came forward a hand holding a spray of orange-flower. It dropped at the horse’s feet.

In one moment he was out of the saddle and had picked it up; but, while he put it rather melodramatically to his lips, the lady drew back and disappeared down the staircase. There was nothing for him to do but to remount and return by the way he had come. “These things take time,” he said to himself as he did so.

On Wednesday he trod on air. How the business was going to end, or whether it would entail anything, or everything, or even nothing, was a detail to him. He understood so little of the class differences of the country he was in that he had no notion whether he was dealing with a lady of rank, a professionally light woman, or a member of some decent{112} middle-class household. In any case, he did not care; the situation appealed to his vanity, and the eyes to his senses.

He longed to write her a letter, though he was aware that such an act was out of the question, seeing that he neither knew her name nor in what tongue to address her; but he was an observant youth, and had decided that the embroidered yashmak pointed to a refinement which would probably include a knowledge of French—the language of polite Egypt. All the same, to write was impossible, and he had mother-wit enough to be sure that, were the difficulty to be solved, she would solve it herself.

He approached the place for the third time under cover of the eucalyptus-grove, and, standing half concealed among the trees, he could see her looking out anxiously along the path for something that he smiled to the very soul to think was himself. He waited a few minutes to enjoy the scene and then rode slowly out of the shadow, crossed the canal-bed, and drew up below the arbour.

A glance of such allurement rewarded him{113} that he cursed the wall, the yashmak, the daylight—everything, in short, but the ravishing creature above his head. All the high-flown eulogies of Eastern beauty which had once raised such scepticism in him, how gospel-true they were! He opened his mouth to speak. Should he say “Madame” or “Mademoiselle?” He said neither, for the lady, seeing his intention, threw a startled look into the garden beneath her, and, putting one hand to her lips, made a violent signal to him with the other to depart. As she stretched it imperiously forward, there fell from it another little branch of orange. Castleman sprang off and snatched it from the sand; the dismissal he had received was tempered by the discovery of a slip of paper tied to the flowers.

In the still vastness of the desert he unfolded the precious thing. The fact that it was written in ink sent the blood leaping to his face; people do not find inkpots awaiting their pleasure in gardens, so the note must have been penned in the house before she took her place among the trellised leaves. She had expected him! There were{114} only a few words, but they were enough for Cyril:

He had been right about the French, and the gratifying knowledge that he was no fool was agreeable, though not quite unexpected. Well—the grass should not grow under his feet! He rode back to Cairo.

That afternoon he summoned the dragoman. “Mahommed Achmed,” he said, “I have had a letter from my brother, who is anxious to get the dress of an Egyptian countryman to wear at a fancy ball. I want you to go to the bazaar and buy the whole thing—tarboosh, galabiyeh, shoes, and all—and bring them to me at once, as I must have them packed to-night.”

Nothing suited the dragoman better, and he departed towards that den of thieves behind the Mousky with the money in his hand. Of fancy-dress balls he had seen a plenty while he hung, with other knaves, round the door of Shepheard’s Hotel. Englishmen liked to make greater fools of themselves than they were already, and the Westernising{115} influences of Cairo had given him a sort of contemptuous understanding of the feeling. He smelt the usual backsheesh, and reflected, in addition, that, as a third of the sum given him would be sufficient, the balance would come very handy. Cyril watched his retreating figure, feeling almost too clever to live.

That evening, a short time before the hour named in the letter, he emerged from the train at Khoubbeh station with a bag in his hand.

Few people were about, and he made towards the houses, looking like a respectable young fellow who had done his day’s work in Cairo and was returning rather late. Once out of observation, he went down into the canal-bed, where, as it was pretty dark, he was as much lost to the world as if he had been Korah, Dathan, or Abiram.

There he divested himself of hat, coat, and collar, and opened the bag, drawing from it a pair of yellow leather shoes, which he substituted for his boots, a blue galabiyeh, and a tarboosh. He rolled up the ends of his trousers and the sleeves of his shirt,{116} and then struggled into the voluminous garment, which fell almost to his feet. It was comfortable enough, even over the shirt, for he was slight and not above middle height, and he had told the dragoman to buy the largest size. He put on the tarboosh, shaking his head to see if it sat firm, and the tassel hit him on the eyeball. The tears poured down while he groped for his handkerchief, cursing as he realised that it was in his coat pocket inside the bag. The bag had rolled into a prickly bush.

However, he emerged from his lair at last, looking, had it been possible to see him in the gloom, wonderfully natural. He was rather dark and he did not walk badly in petticoats. At a certain distance, even by daylight, he might have passed muster, but for his hands and the colour of his neck where his collar had protected it; at night, he was a figure whose presence would be natural anywhere in Egypt.

Impatience having made him early, he had to wait some time till his star should rise. Not a sound stirred, and the desert lay like a vast sea; against the sky, which was black{117} and moonless, rose the blurred silhouette of the arbour. At last he heard a step on the inside stair, and held his breath as a figure leaned over the coping.

There was a slight rustle, as though the lady had started, and something very like a giggle.

Castleman spoke French quite admirably, and, emboldened by the darkness and a changed personality, began to pour forth his admiration and the gratitude he felt for the notice bestowed on him.

“Monsieur parle bien,” said she, at the first full stop. Then she complimented him on his horsemanship, and expressed a gratifying horror of his venturesome character. Cyril began to enjoy himself immensely.

She impressed upon him the necessity of speaking low; her own voice scarcely rose above a whisper, and, the wall being high, it was sometimes all he could do to hear; but he heard quite enough to make his chest expand under the blue galabiyeh.

She asked a thousand questions. How old{118} was he? Where did he live? Was he married? Her innocence of the outer world was very charming, and the remembrance of her alluring eyes lent it an unrivalled piquancy. She seemed to have humour, too. The notion of the dragoman buying the costume for the ball-going brother who did not exist transported her with merriment.

“Mon Dieu! mon Dieu! on voit que vous comprenez bien l’intrigue. Quelle vie—la vie des hommes!” And she sighed tremulously.

It was now Cyril’s turn to ask questions; he felt as if the risk he was running gave him the right to do that; and by her trustful candour the lady seemed to feel the same thing. Her name was Léonie, she told him, and her mother—dead for some years—was a Frenchwoman. It was a sordid story. As the wife of a Levantine trader her mother had lived in Syria, and settled near Beyrout on becoming a widow, and she had survived{119} her husband only to become fascinated by the handsome appearance of an Egyptian officer, with whom she was mad enough to throw in her lot. She had forsworn everything for him, and he had promised to forswear a certain amount for her. He did so, for a couple of months, and then the inevitable set in upon the unhappy woman, who died, after a martyrdom lasting three years, leaving herself—Léonie—to the tender mercies of a Mohammedan stepfather.

“And I am a Christian,” she concluded. “Ah, monsieur! if you knew the hell in which I live!”

They talked undisturbed for nearly an hour. At this time of night the path on which he stood was as much deserted as the Sahara itself, those who moved about keeping to the road on the farther side of the houses. When they parted, his head was in a whirl, and he reproached fate for making the morrow a{120} Thursday. On that day of the week the Mohammedan world would be much in evidence, and she forbade him to return till Friday at the same time.

“I shall come on horseback,” he remarked; for he had reflected that, from the saddle, he could at least hold her hand.

But this she implored him not to do. The present arrangement was so much quieter, so much safer; Arabs neigh frightfully, and a white pony would make a patch against the dark wall in a way that might be seen, even at night. Who troubles about the actions of a man in a blue galabiyeh? And who is there who would not notice a white horse which is not tethered, yet never moves from one spot? Reluctantly he agreed.

For the following week the same scene was enacted every night. Once or twice a stray individual had gone by, but as Léonie, from her eminence at the curve of the wall, had a better view of approaching figures than Castleman, there was always time for him to stroll forward and pass the intruder innocently. Once or twice, also, he had ridden out again at noon and snatched a momen{121}t’s gaze at his divinity. He had fallen so deep into the spell wrought by her eyes and the charm of her conversation that he looked neither forward nor back. As for the eyes, he had never seen their equal, and they haunted him after his midday visits, as those strange glances we see in dreams haunt us long after the substance of the vision has flown. At last the dark half of the moon went by, and the crescent that seemed to hang emblematically over the Mohammedan city began to make matters more difficult.

One horrible evening he found the summer-house empty. Ten o’clock passed, eleven, twelve, while he watched from the eucalyptus-grove, to the shelter of which he had retired to keep his vigil. He returned home in the small hours almost beside himself.

As evening approached next day, he grew sick with terror lest his last night’s experience should be repeated, and, when he heard the rustle over his head and the thrill of her whisper, he could have fallen on his knees and given thanks aloud.

But, for all that, his joy was short-lived.{122} Léonie, stifling her sobs, gave him but too pertinent a reason for her absence.

“I could not escape last night,” she said; “my stepfather was with us till late, giving his orders. For some time we have had hints of his intentions, and now he tells us that this house is sold, and that we leave it in a week. He has bought one in the centre of Cairo. In seven days from now, mon ami, we shall be gone, and you will never see me again.”

Castleman was speechless. He knew, without being told, that, once in the heart of the city, beset on all sides by walls and windows and crowding humanity, she was as much lost to him as though she were dead.

“And that is not all,” she continued, as he stood silent; “there is more. I am to be married a month after our arrival.”

“A friend of my stepfather. I have never{123} seen him, but I believe he is rich. No doubt I shall be happy enough.”

“And I?” he asked at last. “What am I to do? Oh, Léonie! Have you no pity for me? You know I would sell my soul for you!”

He began to walk up and down like a madman. In the arbour she was weeping piteously and softly. Nothing could be done, she told him; her stepfather had a will of iron. To see it he need only look at the yashmak she wore—she, who was a Christian!

“Darling—come away with me,” he implored. “I beg of you, I entreat you! You shall never repent it, and we will live so far from here that he will never hear of you.” (It was useless to name other countries to Léonie; the outside world conveyed so little to her.) “I will arrange everything. Don’t refuse, dearest Léonie, or I shall break my heart. I cannot lose you now.”

But she would hardly listen, for the bare thought seemed to terrify her. How could such a thing be? She had no strength, no courage. She had never been so far{124} as the Pyramids—no, not even in a closed carriage!

Cyril protested and argued. He would arrange everything. All would be well, and some day she would look back, shuddering, at her own hesitation to accept life and love and freedom. He would have scaled the wall in his eagerness, had not the coping been absolutely out of his reach.

When he returned home he took with him her promise to consider the matter, and tell him her decision on the following night. He was thankful to have gained so much.

Thirty-six hours afterwards Castleman was rushing about Cairo. Léonie had screwed up her courage to the sticking-point, and he was scouring the second-hand shops in the Mousky for a lady’s riding-habit. He could not take the dragoman into his confidence this time. When he had got what he wanted, he added a felt hat and a thick veil to the collection, and returned to his hotel to pack them into a bundle; for to-night he was to don the blue galabiyeh for the last time,{125} and toss the whole outfit up the side of the wall to his love.

He had constructed a workable plan; namely, to reach the coast by the desert, as travellers had done before the days of railways. Eastward from the signal-tower lay the remains of the old Suez road; abandoned, and, in some places, impassable for wheels, it ran across the sandy waste, a sure guide to the seaport eighty miles away. A rider doing stages of twenty miles might reach Suez with three changes of horses; but for a woman totally unused to exercise it would be a tremendous undertaking, even were it to be done in twice the time Cyril would allow for himself. But he could see no other solution.

There was an Indian liner due which they could catch, should they start two days hence, and he would have time to send on the relays. The wall-eyed Syrian was temperate, and would not, in common parlance, shake an egg off his back, and he now possessed another pony. It remained for him to lay hands on six other horses. The getting of them together would probably be difficult, but to a full purse all things are possible.

Having once faced the situation, Léonie had consented to the desperate remedy more easily than he expected. She had ridden much in her youth at Beyrout, and, though she seemed to think her own death by the way quite a likely occurrence, she had decided to make the attempt. Since first mentioning her intended husband to Castleman she had heard more about him. It was the certainty of misery on one side against the possibility of salvation on the other.

The eventful evening came; Cyril had wound up his affairs and sent on his horses, and there was not a detail of which he had not thought. Léonie, dressed in the habit, was to let herself down from the arbour by an ingenious contrivance of ropes which her lover had packed into the bundle of clothes. She was to tie these securely to the trellis and do her best. The idea of this part of the performance alarmed Cyril, but she assured him that she could manage the descent; and though, for fear of tell-tale footprints, he dared not be below to receive her in his arms, he was to come along the canal-bed and watch her from it, in case of accidents. She was to{127} throw the ends of the rope-ladder over the wall, and they were to walk—he in the ditch, and she on the path—to the road where the horses would be waiting. No one meeting them would take them for anything but an English couple starting for the usual moonlight ride, and no one was likely to enter the dark garden till morning and see the incriminating rope.

It was as though the stars in their courses fought for the lovers, everything went so well. Castleman’s heart banged against his side as he found himself standing with Léonie by the ponies. In her English clothes she looked taller than she had done in the arbour, and the British suggestion of her covert coat, which, being unable to find a whole costume, he had bought with the riding-skirt, was transforming; she had wound the black veil in double thickness round her head and hat.

She sat awkwardly in her saddle, but Castleman was relieved to see that she evidently remembered something of her youthful experiences, for she seemed to have quite a respectable idea of guiding her horse. Not a soul was to be seen, and they kept close to{128} the old road. The wall-eyed pony’s canter did not appear to tire her at all. On they went, steadily, till, half-way to the second signal-tower, they pulled into a walk.

But from the muffled wrappings of her veil she protested. There would be plenty of time for that afterwards, she said faintly. Her shyness charmed him.

Soon they were cantering on again, this time a little faster. She did the first stage wonderfully.

When they had changed horses, Cyril began to think even better than he had done before of intrigue and adventure. To begin with, it was so easy. The man with the fresh ponies was instructed to camp where he was, and the liberal supply of food and blankets his employer had sent with him, added to his own natural sloth, settled the matter. Castleman did not want his tongue to be wagging in Cairo a moment sooner than was necessary.

But about the middle of the next stage Léonie’s strength gave out. Her saddle was not comfortable, she said; and, indeed, there{129} was small wonder in that, for, after an absence from it of ten years, nobody’s saddle ever is. She assured him that, if she might only rest for a little, she would get on very well. He consented in a moment. As it was, she had done wonders.

They had arrived at the foot of an eruption of hilly rock. The road was their guide and they seldom left it; Castleman had camped out in America, and, between the stars and the little compass on his watch-chain, he had so far kept their heads pretty straight. At the foot of the rocks they pulled up; he helped her off and she sat down, exhausted, waving him from her. She was quite breathless and complained of a stitch in her side. He stood by, much concerned.

This time she complied, suggesting that, while she did so, he should go up to one of the jutting rocks above their heads and thence make a careful survey of their surroundings. So far, they had met no one.

The prospect pleased Cyril, and he began to climb the eminence cheerfully; the survey{130} once made, an agreeable hour was before him.

The opalescent mystery of sand and moonlight swam round him as he looked over the solemn spaces. Nothing stirred; only the breathing and movement of the horses made the silence more profound. North and south, east and west, the desert spread. The lights of Cairo had long gone down behind the contours that rise, however flat the ground, to thrust the old horizon under a new one. He turned, satisfied, to descend again.

After one step he stood rooted; the most extraordinary things were happening below. Léonie’s hat and veil lay on the sand, and he could see her pulling up the girths of his pony, which he had loosened on dismounting. He could hear the squeak of the buckle. Another moment, and she was tearing off her coat and skirt with the hasty indecency of a quick-change clown at a circus.

She stood in the brilliancy of the sailing moon, unashamed, even as himself, in shirt and breeches!

At the sound she swung herself into his{131} empty saddle, pulled the rein of her own pony over her arm, and gave it a cut with the whip he had left on the ground. She had put on his cap too—heavens! her hair was nearly as short as his own! She lifted the cap high to him, and, with a shout like a street boy’s, was off with the two horses.

For a black half hour he sat on a sand-heap, spent with his own wrath. He tried to remember all the foolish things he had said in the last deplorable fortnight, and he groaned at each of them. How well he understood the devilry in those eyes—now! Never, never would he be attracted by devilry any more! He knew too much about it. As he sat, with his hands round the back of his bowed head, like a man protecting himself from a downpour, there shot through his mind the remembrance of that young foreigner who was wanted by the police, and who, he had told himself, would be worth cultivating. Worth cultivating! How the young ruffian’s friends in that gardened house{132} (for he was certain he had been hiding among friends) must have enjoyed hearing of the blue galabiyeh! Where were the Mohammedan stepfather, the deceased and suffering mother, the imminent bridegroom?

Their creator was now in process of leaving the country at his, Cyril’s, expense.

Meanwhile, here he was, sitting in the dust thirty-five miles from Cairo. Of all the ...!

The P. & O. Company’s steamship Mesopotamia was leaving Suez, and the official and semi-official persons who had boarded her were preparing to take to their flotilla of boats, when the young Frenchman described in the captain’s list as M. Alphonse le Duc, of Paris, stopped one of the latter at the head of the gangway.

“I shall be infinitely obliged if you will despatch this, sir,” he said in excellent English, putting a telegram and its money equivalent into the man’s hand.

Castleman, Hôtel Continental, Cairo.

He had hesitated to the last about the sending of this message, for he was anxious to leave no traces. But two facts made him risk it—one, that he was a born gambler; and the other, that, whoever might proclaim his escape, he was certain it would not be Castleman.

THE BLACK MAN’S HAND

I was quite a young man when I first made the acquaintance of my Aunt Bessie Arnot thirty years ago, and went to stay with her at Bank Villa.

I had never met any of my Scotch relations, and Aunt Bessie, my mother’s sister, seldom left the Scotch country town in which I was to spend the next three months as her guest. I had finished my last university term and was preparing to read for the Bar, but my plans were brought to a standstill when I strained my heart in a cross-country race, and everything had to be left to slide in the general collapse which followed. The doctor said that I must make up my mind to rest in some bracing place.

My home was in the west of England, and to myself and my parents, who were anything but rich, the question of where I was to go{135} was a difficult one to answer. But Aunt Bessie answered it by suggesting that I should come to Bank Villa, where I should get strong lowland air and the good feeding I needed. Accordingly I started for the north.

My aunt, who met me on the platform of Dalbraith station, was as much unlike the hard-featured Scotswoman dear to fiction as any one could be. Everything about her was soft. She had soft eyes, a soft voice, soft grey hair, and she wore an old-fashioned Indian shawl with a pattern of soft colours. She looked at me with interest as we walked together to our destination, and I know now she was debating how much good food she would be able to cram down my throat.

We took our way across a tiny public pleasure-ground and up a road ascending between a long wall and the deep cleft laid out in nursery gardens which formed the east boundary of the town.

We were passing under a small stone house, standing on a mound which rose so steeply on the other side of the wall that the villa was perched above our heads. It was an{136} odd-looking little place, and the horrid word ‘villa’ had prepared me for something much more modern and less solid. On that grey afternoon its dark stone and the dark shrubs surrounding it were all merged into a damp monotone of colour, and its laurel-bushes pressed close about it in a way that was both exclusive and protecting; a few larger trees surrounded it too, and it had a slice of garden which crowned the bank and ended in a double row of gnarled apple-trees. It was dull, sombre, and early Victorian, and though it stood at right angles to the road, and I could not see its windows, I somehow knew by instinct that it had Venetian blinds. What made it unusual was the small semi-classic porch supported by Paladian pillars which sprang from its side, looking down upon us through the tree-stems. It reminded me of a mausoleum I had once seen in a wood. I thought how badly my aunt and her house matched each other.

I went upstairs early that night, for my journey had tired me more than I fancied; but though my belongings were unpacked, and everything was in order, I did not get{137} into bed at once. My little room was very comfortable, and I sat down at the fire, as tired people so often do, to enjoy the pleasant feeling that my next move would land me between the sheets.

Every room worth the name, whether ancient or modern, has its own expression, its distinctive atmosphere. Some rooms are churlish, some perky, some tragic, some stimulating. This one was both snug and uncouth. There were hobs on either side of the grate, and the one window was hidden by dull red moreen curtains. The armchair that I sat in would fetch, nowadays, a large sum at a sale; and the bed, which stood along the wall opposite to the window, had a chintz valance with a curious pattern of pagodas. The paper had an old-fashioned, nondescript design which I cannot now recall, but which wore the quiet, non-committal look of everything else. The dominant suggestion of it all was an unobtrusive secrecy.

There was only one object between the four walls which made any demand on the occupant, and that was the picture hanging above the mantelpiece. I lay back against{138} my cushions, and, stretching out my feet into the fender, began to study it.

It was a three-quarter-length portrait of two people—one of those pictures which, as paintings, are neither very good nor very bad—representing an Englishman and an Indian, whom, from his subordinate position behind the former’s chair, I took to be his servant. The master sat squarely on his red velvet seat, a stout, hard-mouthed individual wearing the large neckcloth of the early nineteenth century. His eyes were small and set close to a large nose, and his gold watch-chain with a tassel of hanging seals stretched ostentatiously across his stomach. He did not attract me much.

I knew enough about Indian types to guess that the native was a Madrassi, for, though he was only moderately black, the cut of his smug mutton-chop whiskers and his pugaree bore the stamp of southernmost India as I had seen it in the Indian picture-books, those delights of my youth, which had been sent home by my mother’s father, who was a Madras merchant. I wondered if it were he who hung on the wall, though the portrait{139} did not tally with any descriptions of him that I had heard.

The servant was gazing into space with his dull liquid eyes; his left hand was on the back of his master’s chair, and he pointed with his right to something outside the picture—something which ought to be standing just where my bed stood. There was a heavy gold ring on his little finger set with a red stone which was remarkable from its conical shape, for it stood up in a high point above the setting. Behind the pair was a landscape, with a white building that looked like a palace and a row of palm-trees. The date on the painting was 1833.

Imaginative people, and those who are in a nervous state, have no business to sit with their minds fixed on one particular object the last thing at night. If my aunt had only known how late it was when I turned my eyes from the couple in the tarnished gilt frame, she would, I verily believe, have come up and put me to bed like a naughty child. I lay down at last still thinking of them, and when I fell asleep I dreamed of them all night—at least, I think I dreamed, for I{140} dropped into one of those fitful slumbers in which one can never be quite sure whether one sleeps or wakes. But all night long I saw the man and his Indian servant. The strange thing was that the native no longer pointed to my bed, but to the window.

I did not strike a light in my wakeful intervals, for I was wearied out with the perpetual vision of the two men, and had no desire to give it reality. But my over-wrought nerves strove the whole time with them, not from the effort to banish them, but from a futile attempt to get the black man’s hand into its right place. I slept normally towards morning, and awoke saner and a little refreshed.

Aunt Bessie had forbidden me to appear at breakfast, and she came upstairs, when her own was over, to see how many eggs she could make me eat.

“That’s your great-uncle Julius,” she said, when I questioned her about the picture.

“I’m glad he’s not my grandfather—nor your father, either,” said I, “for I don’t like him.”

“Well, I’m afraid nobody did,” replied she, laughing, “except, possibly, that man standing behind him; and I only guess he did because he came all the way back to Scotland with him. How he managed to exist in this climate I cannot understand, and why, having served his master faithfully for so many years, he ended as he did, I cannot imagine either.”

“It’s a long story,” said Aunt Bessie, sitting down on the foot of my bed. “Uncle Julius was my father’s eldest brother, and I can remember him as an old man living in this house. He had gone out to India in his youth and settled in Madras, as your grandfather did, where he made a moderate fortune. I was dreadfully afraid of him as a child, I remember. He had a loud voice, and used Indian expressions that I did not understand, and that frightened me, because they seemed, to my childish mind, like some sort of magic.”

“No,” said Aunt Bessie; “he was gone{142} years before I knew Uncle Julius, and the only person I ever saw when I came to visit him was a man called Thomas, who seemed to be the sole creature about the place. I suppose there was a cook somewhere, but the black man had done all the cooking until he disappeared, for his master liked Indian dishes. Thomas was short and strong, with a scar on his face, which went down from one cheekbone, and gave his mouth the look of being caught up at one side in a wry smile.

“When Uncle Julius came home for good, he brought a box with him containing a number of very valuable pieces of Indian jewellery, which he lodged in the bank here. They were not his own property, but had been sent home with him by a friend who had died in India, to be kept until the owner’s daughter should come of age. Once a year he used to take them from the bank to examine them, for there were many unset stones, which he would make a list of and count over, to satisfy himself that all were safe. The black man was the only creature who knew where he kept them; for Uncle{143} Julius trusted him implicitly, and had been served by him ever since he landed in India. People said that he never forgave himself for this mistake; for one night, when the box was in his possession here, the Indian disappeared, and the jewels with him.

“Your great-uncle was a sour, hard man, but he grew sourer and harder still after the catastrophe. What humanity he had seemed to go from him; his own honesty had been unimpeachable, and it was said that the blow struck him to the earth. He shut himself up here and led the life of a hermit. He would be seen pacing about under the windows, or sitting alone in the porch looking down over the bank; and at last he did not even do that, but took what exercise he needed among those old apple-trees at the end of the garden, where he could be unseen from the road. It was as though he loathed humanity after the treachery of the person he had believed in. When he died at last—nearly eighty years old—his brain was tormented by the idea that the black man was pointing at him; for this was his room, and the picture hung{144} where it does now. You see that the hand is stretched this way.”

I made no comment as my aunt stopped, for a strange feeling was creeping over my skin, which even the sunlight coming into the room did not dispel. The hours in which I had tossed about, trying to get the hand of that native into its proper place in the picture, came back to my mind with an added horror. Uncle Julius had some justification for supposing that he pointed at him; but why had I, to whom the Indian was nothing, been perturbed half the night by the contrary direction of his hand? It was too foolish, too senseless, and I felt that I could not make myself ridiculous by telling my aunt about it. Had I experienced no thrill of misgiving, I might have spoken, but the goose-skin on my body kept me silent from shame. Because I knew myself for a fool, I would not share the knowledge.

I got up, dressed, and went out of the house as quickly as I could, for I wanted to be away from any influence which could remind me of great-uncle Julius and his servant; and, with the clean air, the feverish{145} notions of night slackened their hold upon me, and I was ready to jeer at my own folly. It was not till bedtime that my uncomfortable feelings came back.

There was nothing for it but to put away the silly creepiness which the thought of that picture gave me, by force of will. Even could I have brought myself to tell my aunt of my difficulty, there was no other room in the little house that she could have given me. I must make up my mind to live with the black man and his master for the next three months, and the sooner I got used to doing so the better. When I turned in that night, I avoided so much as glancing at the wall while I undressed.

Perhaps it was the fatigue of my sleepless hours, perhaps the day I had spent out of doors—in any case, I slept without waking; and having, as I thought, overcome my nerves and my nonsense, went to bed at night without misgivings. For a whole week I ate, thought, and rested like the healthy man I hoped soon to be again. But I took care to look at the picture as little as possible.

I suppose by the end of that time I had{146} grown over-bold. I was so much stronger, and the walks I took daily were clearing the cobwebs out of my head. I was able to catch the black man’s inscrutable eye unmoved, and to look at his ring-decked hand as if it had never come between me and sanity. It was in this comfortable mood that I put my head on the pillow one night and blew out the candle.

It must have been some time after midnight when I awoke with a jerk. The flickering firelight was dancing over the room, and something stronger than myself directed my eyes to the wall above it. The native was looking towards me as he always did, but my heart almost stopped as I saw his hand.

I say it to my shame, but, without another look in the fatal direction of the mantelpiece, I fell back in bed and drew the clothes over my head. One o’clock struck, and then two, and still I lay, with only a little corner of the sheet turned back near my mouth that I might breathe. I was damp all over, and, when at last I ventured to look out, the fire had died down, and I felt easier, because there{147} was nothing now to reveal those figures on the wall to my terrified sight. A patch of light shone in the window, but the moon, whose beam I took it to be, would show me nothing through the moreen curtains. I turned over to sleep, and sleep found me at last.

All next day I wrestled with my fears. I did not believe I had dreamed, and could not convince the logical part of my brain that what I had seen was reality. I had so far mastered myself as to determine to spend one more night in my room before proclaiming myself a coward, and drawing upon me the probable wrath and derision of my aunt. I bolstered up my courage, and went to rest with a heart which beat like a drum until I slept.

My next sensation was of waking with the same jerk, and, as I had submerged my head in the sheets, as before, I peeped out from under them. A light was again showing in a patch behind the curtains, and as I saw it I remembered with a pang that the moon was but three days old, and that I had seen the crescent go down in a rift of cloud as I walked{148} home in the dusk. God only knew what that light might be! It was not the moon, because there was no moon there; and then the certainty rushed over me that, whatever it was, the native was pointing at it.

They say that despair makes cowards brave, but, be that as it may, it is suspense that makes many people mad. I struck a light and sat up.

There is no terror so appalling as that of the unknown, and, driven by it, I sprang out of bed, dashed to the window, and, pulling back the heavy moreen, I saw that there were people in the garden.

The reality of the sight struck a new note, and almost banished the superstitious miasma that had gathered round me. In tangible things I do not think I was a coward, and the notion that some unprincipled persons had broken into my aunt’s little domain stirred my wrath. I never doubted that the light under the apple-trees was the light of a lantern, though there was no lantern to be{149} seen, and I merely took its presence for granted. A mist seemed to have arisen at the bottom of the garden which made a diffused shine through the apple-boughs, and their arms stood in sharp angles above the luminous haze.

In the midst of it the figures of two men were working at something in the ground. Their backs were towards me, and their movements made me fancy they were digging; but I could form no idea of what manner of men they were, nor could I be absolutely certain of their occupation. But, in any case, they were after no good.

The reaction from my morbid fears caused by the sharp surprise was strong on me, and I slipped on my shoes and an overcoat, and let myself softly out of the house. The luminous haze under the trees was so steady that I crept forward, guided by it and taking cover from bush to bush, till I reached the grass on which the trees stood.

A heap lay on the ground, hidden under what looked like a table-cover, and the strange suggestions of its outline made me pause, taken by a sudden panic. I stood stock still,{150} my knees shaking under me, and the cry that rose from my lungs was choked in my throat.

The men were stooping, but they turned towards me. A deep hole yawned behind them at the foot of the largest tree, and I saw that they worked neither by torch nor by lantern, but by the subdued glare of the luminous mist. It was by that light that I knew their faces. One was my great-uncle Julius, and the other was a man scarred from lip to cheekbone. I remember the sound of my own voice as I fell—nothing more.

When the world stirred next morning, I was picked up from the grass, where I lay insensible, and carried in, and for many weeks I hung between life and death. My aunt nursed me, and, when I was able to speak, my one prayer to her was that she would have the ground under the apple-trees dug up. It was the doctor who persuaded her to consent, assuring her that her refusal might cost me my life.

Three feet under the surface they uncovered a man’s skeleton, which lay with one hand{151} outstretched. On the little finger was a gold ring with a conical red stone.

I never went back to Bank Villa after my recovery, and five years later Aunt Bessie died, leaving everything to me. All her possessions are mine now, except that one portrait, which I burnt with my own hands, and Bank Villa, which I sold. It was when the new owner was doing up the house that he discovered a strange thing. Just behind the bed I had slept in—Uncle Julius’s bed—they came upon a hole in the wall which had been papered up.

PROVIDENCE AND COLONEL DORMER

Carborough is a small midland manufacturing town. It is hideous in winter and very little better in summer, and goodness only knows why I go on living in it. All the same, I do know. It is because of Theodora.

There seems to be a dull sameness in my reasons for doing things, for I settled in Carborough originally so as to be near Harsdown, where my old friend Musgrave lived. But Musgrave is dead now, and his widow, to whom Harsdown was left for her life-time, has since married a very offensive individual called Purefoy. Theodora is Musgrave’s daughter by his first wife; for he, like that miserable snippet of femininity who survives him, married twice. (I suppose I am rather free with my epithets, but, after all, I am accountable to nobody, and I shall be seventy{153} next birthday.) Musgrave was a good deal younger than I.

It was I who taught Theodora to ride. How I used to trot her out on a leading-rein in the old days at Harsdown, when she was a little creature with flying hair! Poor Tom Musgrave had a long time of ill-health before he died—the belated result of a wound he had brought back from Afghanistan—and he used to lie smoking and watching us from his long chair on the lawn, while the little girl and I galloped about the park on the other side of the sunk fence. How proud he was of her! How, in the name of fortune he could have ... but these whys and wherefores are profitless, and I must go on to the main point.

I can’t bear to think of the life that Theodora led after her stepmother remarried, and Major Middleton Purefoy came to swagger about in Tom’s place—an undersized, red-faced man, with a bridge to his nose as thin and sharp as a knife-blade. I dined there soon after they came back from their wedding tour (Mrs. Purefoy made it impossible for me to refuse), and I shall never forget{154} him, nor the airs of possession that he gave himself at dinner. Theodora sat at the table like a stone image, her eyes on the tablecloth and her thick brows drawn into a line. She caught my hand suddenly, as I said good night to her in the hall at the end of the evening.

“Don’t, my dear—don’t,” I remember imploring her. “There are things you must not say....”

(However, that’s some little time ago now, and, as I said before, I must keep to the point.)

In the suburb of Carborough in which I live, there is a high old-fashioned house enclosed by a wall; it stands not far up the road, and the boughs of its beech-trees send a pleasant shadow over the way. It is grey and severe-looking, and it has belonged for generations to the Slaters, a family of mill-owners whose long connection with the place has almost landed them in the ranks of county society. Some of the county big-wigs know them, and some do not; and no one seems able to understand why old Slater, who is rich enough to do as he pleases about anything, has not bought or built himself a{155} country place. But he seems to have no idea of doing so; perhaps he doesn’t care to go far from his business; perhaps he likes the solid old mansion in which his father and his grandfather first saw the light.

Until a couple of years ago, when the events I am going to speak of happened, I had never had a glimpse inside those walls, unless I chanced to be passing when the gates opened to let some one out—old Slater on his way to his office; his wife, a plain, charitable woman, in her heavy landau; or Dick with his terrier. I was not acquainted with any member of this family of three; and the independence with which they pursued their way, seeking nothing of any man, and taking the world as they found it, raised a barrier as thick as their own garden-wall between them and inquisitive strangers, while it increased the respect with which people spoke of them. Dick was the only one who came in for criticism, for some called him a “lout”; principally, I suppose, because he has a dark, heavy face, and is strongly built. Theodora, who is nothing if not hasty, called him a “lout” too.

Tom Musgrave had a purely business acquaintance with old Slater, and respected him as much as every one else did, also he had invested a small sum in his mills; this money Theodora has inherited, and when, a few years ago, some new arrangements were made in the business, it became necessary for her, as a shareholder, to sign certain papers.

When it is a matter of business affairs, Theodora always comes to me—at least, she did in those days—for nothing would have induced her to consult Purefoy. Mrs. Purefoy was as ignorant and unpractical as a woman can be, and any dealings with her would have meant interference from her husband, who dominated every detail of the establishment at Harsdown, like the beggar on horseback he was. So, one afternoon, when Theodora rode in to see me (as she did about twice a week), she asked me if she might interview old Slater at my house. Explanations were necessary, and he was to show her the documents himself. But, when the time came, he was called unexpectedly to London, and Dick, who had just returned from Cambridge{157} and was in the business with his father, took his place. Old Slater was punctilious, and would no more have sent an underling to meet the young lady than he would have flown.

Theodora and I sat on for some time after Dick had gone, discussing our new acquaintance. As luncheon had been announced before his talk with her came to an end, I had asked him to stay for it. Personally he did not strike me as a “lout,” and I was a good deal interested to find that he had been in the Cambridge boat. Theodora liked him too.

“It’s odd we should never have met him before,” she observed. “I have seen his mother at garden-parties often enough.”

“I fancy he works pretty hard,” said I, “and he probably likes something more energetic after being shut up in the office. I loathe garden-parties.”

“So do I, Uncle Charles,” she said (she always calls me Uncle Charles). “We’ll go to no more, shall we—you and I?”

She had slipped her arm through mine, and we were going down my front door steps, for her horse was waiting outside.

I watched her as she disappeared up the tree-bordered road. It was early spring, and the leafless twigs were like pencilling against the pure clearness of the declining afternoon. A blackbird, who was sitting on a bough, was trying his voice with a view to the future, and a little ring of purple crocuses had come up by my gate. Everything looked new and interesting, as it is apt suddenly to do when the earth is on the verge of re-awakening; and Vanity, Theodora’s horse, was shaking his head and sidling a little as he went along. Perhaps things looked interesting to him too.

I think, after myself, that Vanity was the creature Theodora loved best in the world. Poor Tom had given him to her only a month before his death. Also, he was three-parts thoroughbred, had a mouth like silk, and the best manners in the world. He was a dark bay with black points.

Any pleasure she had in her life at home she owed to Vanity; and I owed a good deal to him too, for without him I should{159} never have been able to see as much of her as I did. Mrs. Purefoy hated me, and I abominated Purefoy, and certainly neither of them would have done anything towards facilitating our meetings. Besides which, there would probably have been no means of transport; for Purefoy, who seemed to have a genius for making economies with other people’s money, had cut down the stable in the most drastic manner. His own steed was a tricycle. I suppose he felt safe on it.

Spring broke into summer and things jogged on in the usual way. Theodora came and went, and it struck me, as time passed by, that omnipresence, as a quality, seemed to be growing upon Dick Slater. Scarcely a day passed but I ran against him somewhere, and the proximity in which our respective houses stood appeared hardly to furnish a satisfactory explanation, considering the years we had lived within a stone’s-throw of each other without its happening once in a blue moon. The solution dawned upon me one afternoon, as I was going home rather later than usual from my walk, and saw{160} him coming to meet me. Theodora was in front, riding slowly along the road towards my house. In a moment they had met, and, though she did not stop, it was easy to guess by Dick’s face that that greeting had been the event of his day. He did not observe me till we passed each other in a few paces. Then he turned scarlet.

I was rather annoyed, but it was some time before I said anything to the girl. I knew that they had met a couple of times since their introduction in my house—once at a horse-show, and once when they found themselves in the same railway carriage coming from London; and Theodora admitted that she very seldom came into Carborough without catching sight of him. All the same, I treated the matter as a huge joke, and chaffed her unmercifully about it. But one day the thunderbolt fell.

It was a soft autumn morning, and, as I had been fool enough to sit up the night before into the small hours, I had got up very late, and I was tying my tie when the parlourmaid informed me from the other side of the door that Miss Musgrave was{161} in the sitting-room. I hurried downstairs, wondering what could possibly have brought her at such an hour, and as I entered the room she ran to meet me like a hurricane.

“Oh! Uncle Charles! Uncle Charles!” she cried, “I have hardly slept a wink all night—I couldn’t rest till I had come to tell you! Oh! you will be so angry—I have got into such a scrape, and you must get me out!”

“I didn’t mean it,” she broke in, “indeed, I never, never meant it! But he——”

“He?” I shouted—“who? What is it? Have you had a row with Major Purefoy?”

“It was Mr. Slater!” cried Theodora—“Dick Slater! How could he?—how could he? Oh, what a fool I have been!”

I took her by the arm and forced her to sit down. She was on the verge of tears.

I got the story from her at last. I cannot give it in the incoherent torrent of her words, and I must do the best I can to put it into{162} consecutive form. Looking back calmly now, I must admit that I was a good deal disturbed.

Behind the High Street of Carborough, and connected with it by a long, covered-in alley, there was a certain tumbledown colony of houses called ‘Gask’s Row,’ which was inhabited (it is gone now) by a few families of the very poorest class. A faint scent of cabbages pervaded it, emanating from over the battered wooden palings, for the spot was the site of an old market-garden which had been sold for building purposes during the early commercial growth of the town, and the walls of the surrounding houses seemed to stare down in contempt on this forlorn remnant of a less ambitious era. A thriving publican named Gask was the owner of the place.

Among the dwellers in Gask’s Row was an old widow-woman, whose crippled son precariously supported both her and himself by basket-making. Theodora had been interested in the pair for some time, and often, when she had come to see me, she would ride on into the High Street, and having left Vanity at{163} the stables of the Crown Hotel, disappear down Gask’s Alley to visit her friends; and once or twice—so I discovered afterwards—she had come face to face with Dick as she emerged again, and he had fetched her horse and put her into the saddle.

Well, on the previous day she had knocked at the widow’s door to find a dismal scene awaiting her. It was the usual story. The old woman’s rent was long overdue, and Gask had sent the day before to tell her that if it was not forthcoming in twenty-four hours he would put her and her son into the street. There was one-and-twopence in the house, and the debt amounted to nearly four pounds.

Theodora had not been to the cottage for some time, and it is probable that, had she gone there every day, she would have heard nothing of their trouble from either mother or son. At four o’clock Gask’s man was to return.

The girl put her hand in her pocket. The little she found there was not worth counting, and, at that moment, she owed every penny of her quarter’s money; for Vanity’s keep ran away with a good deal of it, as Major Purefoy{164} saw to it that he was not groomed for nothing. She was dismayed. The widow sat, with her hands clasped on her knee, waiting for the inevitable as best she might, and Jim, her son, was collecting their trumpery possessions into a heap. It was past a quarter to three and Gask’s man might come at any minute, he said. The cripple listened for his step with trepidation, for the man was a rough customer, and there had been rough times with him on the previous day. He entreated Theodora to go. There was no good in her staying.

She rushed out of the house blinded by her own tears, and, coming up the alley, she met Gask’s man, very drunk.

Her heart smote her as she saw his condition and thought of those two poor creatures waiting for him in the cottage.

But he took no heed. She turned away in despair, and half-way up the dark passage she nearly ran into Dick Slater’s arms.

“What is it? Oh, what has that brute been saying to you?” cried he, as his eyes fell upon her face. “I saw him turn in here, and I came because I was afraid you might meet him.”

“What has he done? What has he done?” reiterated the young man angrily. “Let me go after him—I’ll teach him to frighten you like that!”

“No, no—you don’t understand!” cried Theodora, clinging to his arm; “it’s not that—it’s nothing to do with me!”

Dick is a much more excitable man than he looks, and he was head over heels in love, and maddened, no doubt, by her touch. And her distress, I suppose, must have been the last straw.

“Don’t, don’t be so unhappy,” he burst out, as she ended; “and for Heaven’s sake don’t cry. Don’t you know that I would do anything in the whole world for you? Only let me help them, and let me do it for your sake! I will make everything right, if you will only{166} love me a little; there is nothing on this earth I will not do. Say that I may.”

At this moment a sound fell upon Theodora’s ear. It was the town clock in the High Street striking four. She lost her head utterly.

“Oh, yes, yes—anything! if you will only go!” she cried. “Oh, please, please, stop him before it’s too late—now—at once! Go, and I will stay here till you come back. Oh, thank goodness you are here!”

“Go and wait for me at the Library,” said Dick very quietly. “I will settle everything and bring your horse to you there.”

It is to be hoped that Jim and his mother slept peacefully that night in their hovel; but Theodora, in her bed at Harsdown, was in a very different plight. Dick had returned to her some time later, and, though he made no allusion to what had passed between them in Gask’s Alley, and had merely told her that all was made straight with the landlord, she had recognised vividly that he had not forgotten it, and, as he put her on Vanity’s back,{167} there came over her the realisation of what she had done. He did not so much as speak of their next meeting—so she told me afterwards—but, for all that, she recognised what she had let herself in for. Out of her own mouth she had condemned herself, and he had every right to hold her to her words. The idea was terrific.

It makes me laugh now, to look back and see myself and Theodora sitting, one at either side of my untouched breakfast-table, with the eggs-and-bacon growing cold between us. But I did not laugh then. I was very angry with Dick, and angry with her, too.

I made her drink some coffee, and, when breakfast was done, we went into my study.

We sat down to concoct the letter. Theodora was humble and penitent enough to disarm an ogre, but I was not going to be mollified. I was very stern with her.

“I really don’t know what I said to him, Uncle Charles,” protested she, as I interrogated her, pen in hand. “I was in such a state of mind that I hardly knew what I was doing.{168} If you had only seen that horrible drunken fellow, Uncle Charles, you would understand—I know you would. I don’t even remember whether I promised anything. I only know that he said he’d do it for my sake, and I begged him to help. It’s all too dreadful!” wailed Theodora, looking at me with miserable, beautiful eyes. I suppose she looked at Dick like that.

We had got no further when Maria, the parlourmaid, brought in a note for her. I had never seen the handwriting before, but, all the same, we both knew by instinct that it came from the house up the road. She read it, and then passed it to me.

“Dear Miss Musgrave [it began],—

“I know you are at Colonel Dormer’s, so I am sending this over by hand. I am writing to tell you that I see now how badly I behaved yesterday, and to ask your forgiveness for it. I have no excuse to offer for letting my feelings run away with me as I did, and taking such unpardonable advantage of your distress. But I only spoke the truth, and I am not going to take back{169} one word of it. What I want to assure you is that anything you said in your agitation shall be as if it had never been spoken. If you will do me one kindness, to show that you have forgiven me, you will let me help that woman permanently.

“I am,
“Very truly yours,
“R. Slater.”

“Well,” began Theodora, when I had finished reading, “what do you think of it, Uncle Charles?”

“What do I think of it?” said I. “There’s only one thing to think of it. The boy’s a gentleman. All the same, the next time you meet him, you had better remember that he’s a man too!”

But there was no next time for several months to come, for winter was soon upon us, and Theodora went away to pay a couple of visits. I met Dick occasionally when I was out, and, when I did, I made a point of speaking to him. Once I asked him to luncheon, and I was certain that he guessed how much I knew by the steady way in which{170} his eyes met mine when Theodora’s name was mentioned. “I don’t care if you do know,” they said. I must say I liked him.

It was when Theodora came back from her visits that a thing happened which put the affair of Dick Slater into the background. I was reading one afternoon by the fire when she walked in, rather to my surprise, for, though I knew she was due back at Harsdown that day, I did not expect her to look in so soon. She wore a long coat, and a little leather bag was in her hand.

“Why, you’ve come straight from the station,” I remarked, as I noticed it.

She shook her head, and looked at me rather strangely; and my mind went back to that other time when she had suddenly rushed in.

“Tell me,” was all I could say. “Surely it’s not Dick Slater this time!”

“But, my dear child, what are you going to do?” I exclaimed. “What in Heaven’s name——”

“I’m coming here,” she announced. “Uncle{171} Charles, you must take me in—you will, won’t you? If not, of course I can go to the Crown——”

“Don’t talk nonsense about the Crown,” I said sharply. “Really, Theodora, you are too silly.”

It seemed she had arrived at home before luncheon, and, when that meal was over, she was told that Major Purefoy would be glad to speak to her in the smoking-room. It was not often he desired her company, and she opened the door, with an apprehension of coming trouble. The fellow was sitting at his writing-table with a little pile of money and notes before him. He plunged into his subject at once. There were great retrenchments necessary at Harsdown, he said; he and his wife had been looking very carefully into things since she went away, and they had come to the decision that expenses must be cut down yet further in the stable. They meant to keep no more horses; nothing but a pony to draw the mowing-machine and go in the message-cart.

Theodora told me that the suspicion of what he had done had entered her mind with his{172} first words, and that his nervousness as he approached the point was not needed to make her sure of what was coming. She knew that when she went to the stables she would find Vanity’s box empty. She stood looking at him, dumb, as he finished his speech.

“But,” he concluded, “as you paid for his keep and his share of my groom’s attention (though nothing towards his actual stabling), I have decided that it is right to give you the whole of the price he fetched from the dealer. Here it is.”

“You have sold my horse!” cried she, “you have sold my father’s last present to me! How dared you do such a thing?”

And Theodora gathered the whole heap of money into her hand and threw it in his face.

“Never, never, never will I go back!” she said, throwing out her hands. “You needn’t ask me, Uncle Charles.”

It’s an ill wind that blows nobody good, and my age gave me the advantage of being able to offer her a home. We were extremely happy too—at least, I know I was—and all went well until the biting days of March set in, and I took to my bed and lay at death’s door with double pneumonia.

I was nearly sixty-seven, and at sixty-seven pneumonia is no joke; but, nevertheless, Theodora and a hospital nurse managed between them to drag me from that uncomfortable spot on the borderland of the next world back into my old place in this one. And the experience, as I recovered by slow steps, brought me up short against a fact which both she and I seemed to have overlooked; and I realised that my fag-end of a life was indeed a frail thing to stand between a highly impulsive and very good-looking young woman and the world. She had cut herself adrift from the Purefoys, and, though she had a good many friends, there was not one relation who could be expected to give her a home when my time should come. Her mother had been an only{174} child; Tom Musgrave’s one sister was married to an Australian, and his surviving brother—the man to inherit Harsdown after Mrs. Purefoy’s death—was a bachelor, who spent his life in exploring Africa.

The thought of all this sat on my conscience like a load and got between me and my rest at night; I had abetted the girl in leaving her home, and, instead of it, I had provided her with a makeshift. Her high spirit, her very moderate means, her rashness, her beauty, her generous heart—all these stood round me like a row of accusers, like so many possibilities of destruction. She was only twenty-six; old enough, perhaps, to take care of herself ... perhaps not....

When I had got so far, I had a relapse, and Theodora and the nurse fell to again in their uphill fight with the enemy. Then, having weighed many things over and over again in my mind, I took my final resolution; and on the very first day on which my two dragons consented to leave me alone, I induced them both to go out for a walk. Then I sent for Dick Slater.

We sat together for nearly an hour, he and{175} I. Perhaps I did an unwarrantable thing; perhaps I was clumsy, perhaps I was too out-spoken. All the same, it did not seem to offend Dick. He sat straight and stiff in his chair over against mine, like a schoolboy being lectured, and with that rather disconcerting way he has of looking straight into one’s eyes. He said but little, but it was pretty easy to see what he felt. I gave him some fatherly advice, and I told him the story of Vanity. I wished Purefoy had been in the room to see him, though it would hardly have been a safe place for the little red-faced man.

“It isn’t a matter of thanks,” I rejoined, “it’s a matter of transferring my responsibilities.”

“Call it what you like,” he answered, “so long as the result’s the same.”

When I heard Theodora’s step in the hall, I felt like a traitor, and when she found out that he had been with me she was furious.

“It was simply shameful of Maria to let him in,” she exclaimed, “and I shall tell her so.”

But Maria is Maria (which is high praise), and the nurse said that the visitor had done me good—as, indeed, he had—so Theodora’s wrath melted; for it was no feeling against the young man which worried her, but her fears for me. She had spoken to him once or twice since the autumn, for she had felt—and rightly, I thought—that absolute avoidance of him would be undignified after his letter. She did not want him to think she was afraid of him.

As I grew stronger, my anxieties faded a little, and, reflecting on what I had done when in their grip, I told myself that, in spite of my age, I was as rash as Theodora herself. The part I had pledged myself to play struck me as a much more difficult one than I had bargained for, and it was with a feeling not much short of dismay that I attacked my companion one evening after dinner. The nurse had gone and we were settling into our old ways again.

“Don’t you think, my dear,” I began—and to my guilty mind my voice seemed to{177} vibrate with hypocrisy—“that we might ask young Slater to dine one day? Maria has told me how good he was in coming to inquire for me when I was ill. You don’t dislike him, do you—I mean, not to that extent?”

At eleven o’clock I woke. A few minutes earlier Dick had taken his leave; he would not disturb Colonel Dormer, he said, and he only hoped he had not tired him. As a matter of fact, I was rather tired, because keeping in one position with one’s eyes shut for any length of time is a strain. When I opened them, Theodora was standing with her foot on the fender, gazing into the fire. She would have looked like a white statue if her face had not been a little flushed. She{178} made Dick’s excuses; she had let him out quietly, so as not to awake me, she said.

I expressed shame for my rudeness, but she was not attentive. Suddenly she faced round on me.

“That dealer was buying for Slater—I heard it ever so long ago,” I exclaimed, terrified back into my wits. (Heaven forgive me for the lie!)

“Dear Col. Dormer,

“I was telling Miss Musgrave the other night that I have got her horse. So far, I have kept him out at Barnes’s Inn Farm, but now he is here. There is a lot of business at the office this week and I cannot use him for the next few days. Do you think she would care for a ride? If so, {179}a line to me will bring him at any hour she likes. May I have an answer?

“Very truly yours,

“R. Slater.”

She rode next day, and the day after, and the day after that; and on the last occasion Dick came to fetch the horse himself; his groom was busy, it appeared. As he led Vanity up a side road to the house behind the walls, he kissed the beast’s neck. I know that, because an acquaintance of mine was looking out of a back window and saw him do it. The acquaintance was an old lady who was a member of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and she was much touched by the incident.

“And I always thought he was such a lout,” she added irrelevantly, when she told me.

After this, we saw a good deal of him. What happened to his business in those days I can’t imagine and have never asked; but I fancy now that old Slater was in the secret, and gave his son his head.

But the climax did not come until May brought the warm weather which was health to me; and I was going up my front door-steps one evening, when the door opened, and Dick came rushing out. I caught him by the sleeve. There was that in his expression which made me hurry into the sitting-room. Theodora was there alone; but she did not look as if she had been alone long.

“Did you meet him?” she said, coming up to me. “I have promised to marry him. Oh, Uncle Charles, you don’t know how good he is!”

I really could not help smiling; for I had known it perhaps longer than she had. But it would have been too ungenerous to say so then.

THE WYTHAN TREE

The little holding of Wern Farm sat above one of those brook-threaded dingles that run down from the Black Mountains to disappear in the levels by the Wye; about half-way between valley and hill, it made an unpretentious patch in the steep green fields which fell to the wooded cleft. So modest a place was it that the low dwelling-house was a mere thatched cottage, whose whitewashed wall only topped the bank of the lane at its side by a few feet, showing a row of small windows sunk deep into the thickness of the stone. The place had an odd personality, and a stranger, condemned to climb mountainwards through the mud of the sunken lane, might, with the least touch of imagination, hurry by, lest some half-sinister face should peer at him from behind the dead-looking panes on a level with his own.

A sturdy horse-chestnut stood just inside the gate, shadowing the small yard, and exhibiting, in the smooth green bark of its trunk, the initials of a couple of generations of labouring people. The farm-buildings huddled together, low and dark; in the doorways of barn and beast-house the fowls strolled, pecking, or sat in reserved-looking groups to protest under their breath against the world, after the manner of their kind.

Inside the house, an elderly woman was tending the hearth—a hot business at the moment—for the late spring afternoon was warm. She was a strong-featured body, with tightly banded hair, as grey as the little knitted cross-over shawl which she wore, summer and winter alike. Lines of temper framed a mouth already sunken by the loss of her teeth, and her expression was the meanly preoccupied one of a person whose mental outlook is definitely sordid. That is to say, that, in spite of her fifty-four years, she was a woman to whom life had failed to teach anything.

Jane Lewis had been her husband’s second wife and his heaviest trial; she was now{183} a widow of some dozen years’ standing, a fact which had shifted the trial from the man’s shoulders to those of his son by his first marriage.

No servant stayed long at the farm. The men might endure for a few months under her rule before they shook the dust from their feet; but the women, more exposed to her influence, went down the hill in a never-ending procession; by the time the last one had departed, the place had acquired such a reputation as prevented the appearance of a successor. In this strait, Mrs. Lewis bethought her of an orphan relation, who, in return for her living, might fill the gap. The idea pleased her, as she foresaw that the girl’s dependence would be a weapon in her hands in case of difficulties; and, as for her food and clothing, she told herself, with a smile, that their cost should be an economy on the wages of a hired servant. So the matter was settled and Zillah came.

It was now six and a half years since the girl had opened the gate by the chestnut-tree, and six since, her few trumpery possessions in her hand, she had fled valley-wards through{184} the darkness. The world, she thought, must be, at least, no worse a place than the one enclosed by the four walls she had just left.

The only thing she regretted was Stephen—Stephen who, by befriending her, had brought about the crisis. Zillah was proud and clean in body and soul; she ran, panting, longing to put the span of the earth between her and the echoes of hateful abuse still ringing in her ears. She loved Stephen, and she knew that she should never see him again. When she reached the high-road, she sat down by the milestone and cried as though her heart would break, for he was gone to Abergavenny, on the other side of the mountain, and when he returned, in a week, with the heifer he had ridden away to buy, it would be too late for him to find her. Before leaving, he had given her a pair of shoes he had bought her at Llangarth fair. He was a generous fellow, and the sight of her little cold toes peeping through the worn footgear that was all she possessed had been more than he could bear. It was because of Jane’s discovery of his gift that she was sitting by the milestone. Zillah dried her eyes at last, rose, and having nothing{185} to gain in one direction more than another, turned to her left, at random, with her face towards the border of Wales.

Stephen Lewis rode homewards this last evening of April on his old brown pony. The sun was beginning to drop behind the Brecon hills, and long shadows were lying on the eastward side of every hedge and tree. He could see Wern Farm, with its thin curl of smoke, a little way above him; but he turned his head with a sigh, for the place he had loved as a boy had become to him like a plague-spot disfiguring the country-side. Instinctively he held back his beast, whose mind grew the more set upon her stable as she approached it; he had no desire to meet his stepmother a moment sooner than he need. The knowledge that she was there, awaiting him under that mounting smoke, poisoned the comfort suggested by its blue wreath.

Unlike most men as near the soil as himself, Stephen took a certain pleasure in the face of the land; his life had made him mentally solitary, and to all mentally solitary people the eye has a deal to say. There was some{186}thing sensitive in him which the woman in the farm yonder had made it necessary he should protect, and he had done so by raising a wall of dumb, cynical resistance round himself; nowadays he could sit behind it, so to speak, and enjoy the sound of her futile blows upon the stone. But, though the blows were futile, he hated her none the less; the recollection of a day, six years past and more, when he had come home to find Zillah flown, had settled that. He had returned from his fruitless search with every intention of turning his stepmother out of the house; but, with a man’s weakness, he had allowed her to stay in the end.

He thought of it bitterly now; hidden away in a locked box under his bed lay the ring he had bought at Abergavenny for Zillah. She could not have loved him, he said to himself, when she had run off like that, without a sign; at least, she might have left a message for him with some one at the farm. He had never been able to find out what passed between the two women.

His eye fell upon a patch of grass by a little runnel where the juicy stems of a tuft of{187} cuckoo-flowers rose from the rich moisture, and he remembered that the morrow was the first of May, and sighed again. It would be seven years, come October, since she had gone.

As the young man led his little mare through the farm-gate he was met by a rather uncommon sight. At the barn-door on the further side of the yard stood Peggy, the old woman who worked two days a week in the house. Her hands were tightly clasping a ladder set up against the wall, on a high rung of which stood Tom Prothero, the farm labourer. Below it was Tom’s son, a small boy, with a finger in his mouth and a bunch of greenery in his free hand.

“Put you a good big bit by that there nayal,” cried Peggy, in her cracked voice; “the little lump ere ’ave got plenty more in ’is ’and for the beast-ouse! No use to stint ’em. Wrythans be cheap ere about.”

“Cheap enough for her, even,” rejoined Tom, as well as he could for the bit of twine in his mouth. He nodded backward in the direction of the dwelling-house.

“’And me a bit more, Tommy—ther{188}e’s a good boy,” said the old woman, in the conciliatory accents which people reserve for children with whom they have nothing to do.

“What’s goin’ on?” asked Stephen. He had come so noiselessly over the mud that the party, lost in its occupation, had not heard him.

The man on the ladder turned round; there was a sheepish grin on his face as he addressed his employer.

“It’s the wythan, to be sure,” said he. “’Tis May Eve, an’ Peggy wouldn’t leave me no peace till I got the ladder up. Praper nonsense, I do call it myself.”

A smile that was half a sneer touched Stephen’s lips. He took his pipe from his pocket and began filling it as he walked to the stable with the pony. He had got beyond the superstition still rife in his corner of the world.

“The master don’t care for no witches—not ’e,” observed Tom sceptically.

“They be all the more like to come for that, if we don’t keep ’em out wi’ the wythan,” replied Peggy. “They be worse nor Christians.”

“Well, anyhow, they can’t be no worse nor some that’s ’ere already,” said Tom, as he clambered down. “If the wythan would get rid o’ her, I’d think better of it.”

Together they went to the stable door, the man carrying the ladder, and the little boy following. As Tom set it up, Stephen came out with his saddle on his arm.

“Just another bit for the beast-’ouse, master,” said Peggy; “ye wouldn’t like to lose the ould mare.”

Supper was late on the following evening. The little square window-panes looked black and solid as Stephen sat by the kitchen fire with his pipe. His thick eyelashes rested on his cheek as he looked into the coals with half-closed eyes; within the dwelling-house walls he never spoke, if he could help it. His stepmother had pushed the furniture noisily against the wall, set the candles on the shelf, and gone to bed. The house was very still.

He opened his eyes again, as he heard a{190} footstep outside followed by others. Several people were evidently coming to the house. As a rule, the yard was quiet at this hour, and he sat up, listening, drawing back his lips from the pipe between his teeth. The outer door shook under a set of determined knuckles.

When he opened it, he found half a dozen human beings crowding close to the threshold. Rain was falling, and the chestnut-boughs swished about in the rising wind. Peggy’s cracked tones mixed with their soft noise. She took hold of his arm, and her knotted fingers gripped like claws.

“I saw ’er go in,” she cried—“comin’ round the pigstye wall I were! I did see ’er wi’ my own eyes, sure enough!”

“Didn’t I tell ’ee, Tom Prothero?” cried Peggy more loudly. “Didn’t I say they be all the more likely to come to them as don’t care for ’em? Toucherous folk they be, master!”

“Hold your noise,” said Stephen, “an’ let Tom speak. What’s wrong, Tom Prothero?”

“They do say they’ve seen the witch go in,” said the man who had been on the ladder. His voice shook a little, and the scepticism of yesterday had died out of it.

“Come ’ee, master—do ’ee come now,” she entreated. “Tell ’ee I darn’t go nigh the place, an’ there’s a plate o’ good hens’ food i’ the barn, the missis told me to bring in.”

The young man carried the light across the yard, heading the small procession. As he entered the barn, one or two shrank back, and only Tom, who was inclined to take his colour from his master, ventured across the threshold.

The place was high, and one half of it was piled to the rafters with last year’s hay;{192} the other half was empty, but for some farm implements stacked by the door. The lantern sent a regiment of shadows wandering among the black beams overhead; as Stephen held it up, it revealed a heap of straw and an old horse-rug lying at the farther angle of the walls. Sure enough, there was a figure crouching upon it. As it raised itself the shuffle of retreating feet came from outside.

A slim, small woman stood up in the shine of the lantern. The traditional ragged shawl proper to witches was wrapped round her, hiding all her face, save the outlines of a cheek and a white, pointed chin. The young man strode forward and took her by the shoulder, dragging it away. It fell round her.

“Here! give me the light, man!” he cried, stretching out his disengaged hand towards Tom.

Tom Prothero had been too short a time at the farm to remember Zillah. He stood in amaze. He had believed witches to be women of considerably over five-and-twenty, and the last people men would care to treat as Stephen was treating the woman before{193} him. He put down the lantern and scratched his head.

“Be off!” said the latter ungratefully, to the only one of his servants who had stood by him.

Peggy came timorously towards him. She had just had courage enough to stay by the gate, and now drew nearer.

“If ye’ve any mind to see a man huggin’ an’ kissin’ a witch, ye’ve only to go into the barn yander,” said Tom, in a sardonic voice, as he departed to his own dwelling across the fields.

“Come in, my dear,” said Stephen at last, holding the girl’s cold hand in both of his own.

In the early light Jane Lewis and her stepson faced each other, the table at which they had breakfasted between them. There had been high words.

“Well, that’s how it is,” said the young man. “I’ve told ye, and there’s no more to be said. We’ll be called in church as soon as I can get down the hill to see to ’t.”

“Do ’ee think I’ll stop here along o’ her?” screamed Mrs. Lewis. “Do ’ee think a decent woman ’ud set down at the table wi’ a slut that’s come sneakin’ back, half-naked, to a respectable house? The Lord knows what she’ve been at all this time—I know Zillah! Only that she’s my own flesh and blood, I’d take the stick to her, I would, sooner ’n such an idle slut ’ud cross the bracken-heap at the door!”

“She’s worked enough,” said Stephen, his eyes hardening. “Who drove her out to work wi’ strangers till sickness stopped her and want brought her back to me?”

“Ah-h! She come here fast enough when she could get no more,” said Jane, with a smile{195} that deepened the pinched lines round her mouth.

“And she’ll stay, too!” cried he. “She thought to ask me for a help on to the Works at Merthyr; but she’ll never get there—not while I live, leastways.”

Jane made a spring towards the door; she was still an active woman, but her stepson was too quick for her.

“Where be you going?” he demanded, as he put his back to it. He knew very well that she was going to Peggy’s cottage. He determined that the same thing should not happen twice.

He leaned forward and took her by the wrists, bending his brown, shaven face towards her.

“There’s only one way ye’ll go,” he said, “an’ that’s down the hill. I kept ye these years out of respect for him whose wife ye were—but that’s done. Ye’ve said ye’ll not sit down wi’ Zillah, an’ ye never shall. Never one moment—never once.”

It was evening when Jane Lewis left the farm. The long shadows lay as they had lain two days before, when Stephen had read Maytime in the cuckoo-flowers. She had refused escort, and carried her small bundle herself; to-morrow Tom Prothero would bring her box down the hill. As she turned a corner of the lane she looked back. Tom’s little boy was sitting on the yard-gate, swinging a branch over his head.

“I’m going down to parson’s house i’ the morning,” said Stephen suddenly, after a long pause.

And though the words belonged to some silent train of thought, the girl by the hearth understood them.

OTHER PEOPLE’S GODS

Wilfred Sands rode through the hot February afternoon towards the little city of Central India to which his fortunes had led him. The long, low ridge of its cantonment stretched before him a few miles away, and, unseen on the lower ground behind it, lay the native town on the outskirts of which his own bungalow stood. He rode along in the happy condition of one whose sympathies are in tune with his surroundings, for he loved India, and his work brought him frequently into contact with the things that interested him most.

It was five years since he had first landed, and three since he had come to Sivapura to manage the local branch of the Bank of Bombay. His post was a small one, for Sivapura was the capital of an inconsiderable native state; but Wilfred was young in his profession, and well{198} content with destiny; for he had a little money of his own, good health, a couple of decent ponies, and a feeling for the East which made him indifferent to banishment.

His scheme of life, outside his business, was one of contemplation varied by violent exercise. He was an energetic if moderate polo player and a very much more than moderate cricketer; and these qualities brought him into touch with the soldier part of the community, which had its dwelling in the cantonment on the hill. But, in spite of these things, in a country in which members of the dominant race depend so much upon one another, he was a man of few friends and no intimacies. Soldier and civilian alike spoke well of him, but no one, except where games were concerned, saw much of him. He was fond of shooting, but he did his shooting alone; cards wearied him; and for women’s society he had little taste. There were some inclined to pity a man who stood so much apart from his fellows; but Sir Thomas Marney, the white-headed Indian general in command of the district, who knew him better than did any one else, was amused at what{199} he considered a waste of good feeling, for he suspected Sands of being perfectly contented.

Wilfred’s father had been in business in Bombay, and Sir Thomas was one of the friends of his youth; but it was not only that fact that stirred the soldier’s interest in the young man. There was a sympathy of temper which ran deeper than association. Sir Thomas Marney also loved India, with a ripe affection that had survived many disillusionments and many blows, and, as the years of his service drew to an end, he looked forward to his freedom with none of the eagerness of the traditional exile. The “white cliffs” that are supposed to inspire the returned wanderer were, to him, only the illustration of an idea to which he had been faithful all his life, and of which he needed no reminder beyond the one lying permanently at his heart. Though his undeviating wish had ever been to serve his country, he preferred to serve her at a distance.

When men who have held good positions in remote places return to end their days in England, it is much the fashion to pity{200} them for the loss of consequence which is their lot. To the slow imagination of the average stay-at-home Briton, the East, with its ceaseless undertone of tragedy and heroism, its large issues and sudden fatalities, is merely a place of perquisites, precedence, and numerous carriages and servants, and his pity for those who must exchange such value for the obscurity of a straitened provincial establishment is unfeigned. Discomfort is what he can readily understand—what may be brought home to his own cherished body any day; but he has no sympathy for that loss of spiritual elbow-room from which many of the objects of his half-contemptuous pity are suffering, because he has no experience of it.

He does not know how difficult one whose personal energies have been chiefly concerned with desperate matters—with rebellion, pestilence, or the responsibility for many lives—may find it to adjust them to the questions that convulse his new surroundings; he does not realise that eyes which have frequently seen death at closer quarters than he has seen a street-row may wander as they con{201}front those of Jones, who is passionately describing antique furniture, or the iniquities of paperhangers. There are some men who find rest, after the strenuous past years, in the trivialities that flock round modern English life, and there are some who find suffocation. General Marney knew that he was condemned to be of the latter.

But, apart from all effects of experience, he hated to think of leaving a country to whose outward face he was truly attached. He had always been a sportsman and had lived much in the open; and the shrines and gods of the common people, the groves and temples round their villages, were filled with interest for him. Without laying claim to any great learning, he understood the rustic dwellers in the Central Indian plains, their cupidity, their poverty, their superstition, and their strange inverted simplicity, as well as a European may understand them. It was because he saw in Sands a reflection of his own mind that he was attracted towards him.

Wilfred was riding home from a solitary day’s shooting to dine with his friend, and he looked forward to his evening, for the General{202} had told him that they would be alone. His sturdy country-bred pony was ascending the easy slope at a slow, tireless canter, leaving a puff of dust hanging above his tracks, and as he reached the flat stretch that crowned the rise he pulled into a walk. He had plenty of time before him, for the sun was still above the horizon. The plain on his right hand was a sea of burnt grass and karunda bushes; and, as the hot weather was not yet come, the pervading scent of karunda flowers mixed with the odour of cow-dung and goats that was the breath of the roadside village of Devigaon.

For him, there was a charm about this particular spot, though it would have been hard for a stranger to see its justification. There was nothing alluring about the filthy huts and yapping pariah dogs, and the hamlet was not even graced by the usual peepul tree, whose encircling mud platform is the haunt of the village elders and the resting-place of that piece of walking scoundrelism, the travelling sadhu.

Beyond Devigaon the ground was a mass of scrub and half-buried stones, almost un{203}rideable, and avoided even by the tracks which ran to the nearest village; but in the centre of this unpropitious place was the point of attraction for Sands. He had discovered it while threading his way among the boulders and dodging between bushes in search of a short cut to the tank lying farther in from the road. From the highway, nothing could be seen of the object round which his thoughts were circling as he rode along but a fragment of roof, cutting the skyline above the scrub.

On a patch of ground beyond the boulders stood one of those squalid isolated shrines, mostly commemorative of deceased persons, which are found in the neighbourhood of the poorer villages. A rude square of thatching, supported by four poles and backed by the inevitable piece of corrugated tin, sheltered the mound of stones which formed the shrine, creating, by the shadow of its enclosure, a gloom through which it was difficult to see clearly. The few broken cocoanut-shells lying round it, and the faint traces left by the red chendur, showed it to have been untended for some time. In the most prominent place under the roof was an upright stone slab,{204} roughly carved with the figure of a man on horseback, and bearing on either of its top corners a circle and a half-circle, which stood, respectively, for the sun and moon. The whole device had about as much relation to nature as has the drawing made by a child on a slate. What fascinated Sands was a little stone serpent placed alone beside the sculptured horseman.

It was about six inches high, and formed with real skill from a solid block. The coil of its tail made a flat base on the ground, and from it rose the delicate balance of the poised body supporting the cobra’s outspread hood. It had looked so strangely real to him on the day, some weeks ago, when he first stopped by the shrine and peeped in, for the sun was bright outside and a chink of light was lying on the little grey object that reared itself up in the shadow. He had ventured inside, bent double under the roof, and examined it curiously.

Wandering alone in the late afternoon for the partridges which would call to one another from the stony tract and the bits of cultivation about Devigaon, he had more than once{205} since that occasion laid his gun upon a boulder and turned aside to look at the cobra. He had never met a native about the spot of whom he might ask the shrine’s history; and, had he done so, it is likely that, for one reason or another, he would have heard nothing to enlighten him. He never passed on the road without thinking of the little inanimate creature which sat, with the grotesque horseman for company, over there among the baked stones and the karunda bushes. Sometimes he almost wished he could carry it away and set it in some corner of his bungalow, a reminder of the mysterious world encompassing the European influences of his life.

He sat with Sir Thomas, a few hours later, at the shaded dinner-table; the Madrassi butler had left his post behind the General’s chair, and the cigarette-box was open between the two men. The talk had dropped for a moment.

Until he had taken up his command at Sivapura, eighteen months ago, his recollection{206} of Wilfred had been that of an urchin in a pinafore.

“At twenty-nine there was such a lot before me,” he went on—“the best years of my life. And now, in a few more, it will be all done, and my time up, and nothing to look for in front.”

He met his guest’s glance, respectful, with a touch of embarrassment, and smiled.

Though sympathy alone might have dictated his reply, he spoke truth. Marney’s hair was white and his skin weather-beaten, but there was little else about him to suggest age. He had lived healthily, and his spare figure was now rewarding him for his trouble; also, certain lines which, in middle life, the meaner emotions begin to draw in many human faces, were absent.

“And I don’t seem so to myself,” continued he; “that is the tragedy. I can’t feel that in two and a half years I shall be old enough to go home and serve other people’s gods—I like my own so much better.”

The General’s bungalow stood high at the outer edge of the cantonment, and from where he sat with his guest the ground sloped away to the open country. As Wilfred lay back in his long chair his eyes were turned through the hot starlit darkness towards Devigaon. Sir Thomas’s allusion to gods made him think of the little serpent in the jungle-patch, and he wondered whether his companion had ever seen the tumbledown shrine—he who had wandered so much among such places and was so unusually familiar with village life and customs.

After a moment he began upon the subject. He had some powers of description, and, as he sat bolt upright, throwing out his hand towards the blue-black space of sky at the end of the verandah, as though he could see through it to Devigaon, the General listened in silence.

“Yes, take it,” repeated the General. “I should, if I had the fancy for it that you have. No one would care.”

“If you had seen as much as I have of the people—the low-caste village people of this part of India—you would not be surprised. Outside the bounds of a certain circle of superstition, these things mean so little to them. Hanuman and Bhiru don’t enter into their lives as Englishmen imagine they do. Heaven knows, an Englishman’s religion often doesn’t go for much in his feelings; but it is supposed to, for all that. But here, with the low-caste man, it isn’t even supposed to. He propitiates what he is told to propitiate, and that’s all. It is the lowest man who tills the soil, and religion is mainly a matter of caste. Very probably the Devigaon villagers don’t remember that the shrine exists.”

“No one ever seems to go there, certainly. The red marks on the stones are almost worn out, and the thatch of the roof is{209} falling to bits. I shoot round there very often, and I have never seen a native near the place.”

“Some other spot has developed importance,” said Sir Thomas; “some banyan root, or even a babul tree. Some tomb, Hindu or Mohammedan—it matters little which to these ignorant folk—has burst into sudden sanctity, and nobody thinks any more of your place. A recrudescence may come some day, when we are all dead, or it may not. Probably not.”

“I could take it easily enough,” said Wilfred slowly. “The snake is not too big to go into a coat pocket. But I don’t exactly feel as if I should do it.”

“If you want to be strictly honest, you can leave a rupee in its place,” said Marney, smiling again; “that would be a miracle the whole village would appreciate. But it’s ten to one you would find it where you left it in a year’s time, for probably not a soul goes there but yourself.”

“You spoke of not liking other people’s gods just now,” said Sands reflectively. “Perhaps I like them too much.”

They sat on under the white verandah arches. Now and then an isolated tom-tom beat from a native hut, and a pariah dog barked, or the sentry on the path outside passed in his round. When eleven struck on the gong of the native cavalry lines, the young man rose, remembering that there was a field-day on the morrow, and that his host would be astir early. While he mounted his pony at the porch steps, and the syce disappeared like a moth into the darkness, Sir Thomas stood at the top watching him.

“Perhaps next time I see you, you’ll tell me that the snake is in your bungalow,” said he.

Sands glanced up at him and laughed. One of the things that Marney remembered all the rest of his life was his upturned face in the light of the lantern that swung from the rafters of the porch.

“No, no,” he said. “I’m afraid of meddling with other people’s gods. Good night, sir!”

The two men did not meet at all during the next couple of weeks, for a press of business at the bank kept Wilfred unusually{211} busy, and he had barely time for a canter round the racecourse when evening set him free. Often, while he sat at his desk, listening to the click of the native clerks’ typewriters, his thoughts went back to Marney’s words. Once he had shot round Devigaon, and again looked into the shrine. One of those sudden squalls of wind that herald the hot weather had further damaged the roof, making it sag down from the pole at one corner. The grass was turning browner, and the fiery flood of light seemed like a molten sea which had left the bare bones of the shrine high and dry.

The idea of possessing the stone snake grew in his mind. He had a few brass images of gods and godlings that he had bought from time to time in the bazaar; but, though he valued them mildly, not one could inspire him with the interest he felt in the cobra. They had either been hawked at his door or haggled for amid the incongruous mercantile surroundings of shops. As likely as not, they had been made in Birmingham for the Indian market. But the snake was a true member and symbol of the stealthy jungle hierarchy; of the company of Hanuman and the Bhirus{212} lurking among the banyan roots in the dark byways of the country.

That Sir Thomas Marney knew what he was talking about was indisputable, and his own insignificant wanderings among the surrounding hamlets had shown him something of the villagers’ apathy towards all that had no bearing on gain. He turned the matter over and over. He had only realised how much he would like to have the cobra since his talk with Sir Thomas.

One stifling evening he turned his pony into the Devigaon road, his mind made up at last. He had timed himself to arrive by dusk at the place where he would leave it and take to the stony scrub. Night falls so swiftly in India that a man going across country does well to be within sight of a beaten track as the sun disappears. If he left the road with sunset, he would just have time to pick his way to the shrine, take his spoil, and return, leading his horse through the maze of thorns and boulders, before darkness should swoop down. Though, as he had told Marney, he had never met a soul near the spot, he was apprehensive of being seen.

At the side of the highway the goatherds were driving their flocks through the reddish-golden dust, and the crickets had struck up their vibrant chorus from the wayside babul trees. Little spots of fire had burst out all over the country; from fields and hillocks, from waste and tillage, from everywhere where unseen men were cooking their solitary evening messes, or gathering in groups, squatted on their heels, to pass round the common pipe. These scattered eyes of the Indian dusk did not mark him as he left the road. There was enough light to enable him to get forward briskly, and it still held as he dismounted by a thicket of karunda, and made the pony’s rein fast to a projecting branch. Not fifty yards beyond him the broken roof cut into the twilight.

He went up the stony slope, his riding-boots slipping on the grass that was like tinder beneath his feet, and paused in front of the shrine. There was not a stir nor a sound; not a breath of air moved so much as a dried blade. He could not even hear the cropping of the pony’s teeth on the other side of the stunted shrubs.

He went in under the thatch, bending his head; his eyes were still full of the twilight, and he could barely see the upright slab with the horseman; but he knew exactly where the snake stood, and put out his hand to the grey shape.

A shock of vivid pain ran up his arm like a tongue of fire; it was as though a bow had been drawn to the uttermost and an arrow shot into his wrist. He sprang backward, and his fingers brushed the image, overturning it upon the ground. As he stood, dazed and dumb, the horror of a ghastly thought struck his brain, even as the blow had struck his flesh; and there passed behind the carved horseman a slim shadow that flowed along the earth like a thread of sluggish water in a dry place.

He rushed out, holding his wrist. The pulsing blood was singing one loud word in his brain—“death! death! death!” Death, not at that vague trysting-place ahead, where we all expect to meet him, not with the touch of human-kind to stay him up till the veil should fall between humanity and his senses, but here—now—alone! The presence ran{215} beside him, even as he ran, and the passionate desire to reach his pony, the last warm, living creature he could cling to till the pursuer’s grip should fall on him, drove him on.

The darkness was gaining on him too, and every stock and stone growing more alike to his stricken eyes. He went stumbling forward, unable to concentrate his wits on his direction; already his arm was numb, and his feet became heavier at every step.

He did not know how long he struggled on, dizzy and half blind, with these strange sensations creeping on him, missing his way, and crossing his own tracks, only to cross them again. He had lost all count of time. The darkness gathering round him was darker than that of evening.

At last, through his bewilderment and above his own choking breaths, he heard the pony snort among the scrub close to him, and staggered towards the sound. Then he fell down, face foremost, almost at the startled beast’s feet.

Sir Thomas Marney had finished his dinner and was writing letters, when he was told{216} that two of ‘E’Sands-sahib’s’ servants were outside, anxious to speak to him. There was an undercurrent in his butler’s manner, as he made the request, that struck him, and, telling the man to bring them to the verandah, he went out. Wilfred’s butler and a syce were salaaming on the path. The former, as spokesman, said that he had come, well knowing the General-sahib to be his master’s friend. No one knew where the sahib was. The Arab pony had returned alone to his stable; he had been galloping, and the bridle was broken. They did not know what to do, and they had waited, hoping that the sahib would return. Perhaps he had got off and let the pony go; perhaps he might return on foot. Who knew?

The pony was well. There was nothing wrong—only a scratch on his shoulder. The syce had picked the end of a karunda thorn out of it.

He had ridden out later than usual, the man said. He had met a goatherd, too, as they came along, who told him that he had passed his sahib on the road to Devigaon.

Marney was silent. He knew now where to look for Wilfred. He could not guess what had happened, but if any accident had befallen the young man in that unfrequented place, he might lie till morning, for all the chance there was of being seen. He might, at this very moment, be there, stunned or helpless, with a broken limb. His mind was made up at once.

He dismissed the two men. The butler was to go home to Wilfred’s bungalow, and the syce was to get out his master’s dun country-bred pony and wait, with a lantern, till he should join him at the beginning of the Devigaon road. Marney ordered his horse, and sent word to his mounted orderly to be ready to come with him.

The three men left the cantonment and went at a steady canter along the road, one behind the other, the General leading and the syce{218} last. As they came parallel with the tract that he knew so well from Wilfred’s description, Marney stopped, and, leaving the syce on the road with the horses, dismounted, and bade his orderly follow him in among the bushes with the light.

When they had almost reached the heart of the scrub, he stepped suddenly back, and the orderly set it down. There lay Sands on his face, dead and cold.

They examined him all over in search of some hurt, but they could find nothing, till the General, taking up the heavy hand, gave a loud exclamation. The ray of the lantern fell upon two little livid marks inside the dead man’s wrist.

“It is Nag,” said the orderly, “the cobra. Here among the rocks he has many brothers.”

When the galloping hoof-beats of the orderly’s horse were dying out on the road, Marney, who had sent him to the hospital at Sivapura for a dhooly, stood by Sands’s body. In the lonely stillness he took the lantern, and made his way in the direction which he knew led to the shrine. He came upon it sooner than he expected.

The snake lay on its side by the horseman, but it was not at these that the General looked. What he was searching for he found. There, on the earth beside the fallen image, lay a rupee.

Early on the second morning after he had ridden into Sivapura beside Wilfred’s body he came out of the gates of the European cemetery to mount his horse. He did not speak to any one among the little crowd of Englishmen who had stood, just now, round the grave. He was too sane a man to imagine himself to have had any share in the tragedy of Sands’s death, or to torment himself with the futile idea; but his heart was heavy. The chaplain passed him in his tonga; he was going back to breakfast; his church service was in his hand, and the bag containing his surplice at his feet. They saluted each other gravely. As Marney turned up towards the ridge on which his own house stood, his lips moved.

“Other people’s gods,” he murmured. “He said he was afraid of meddling with other people’s gods.”

THE LIGHTS OF JERUSALEM

The railway line between Worcester and Hereford runs along the foot of the Malvern Hills; then, as their bold chain drops behind it, the train makes its way between successions of small fields, heavily hedged; of orchards and hop-gardens, the former much in the majority; a green, cramped, fertile land full of suggestive corners, snug and a trifle sly. It has an intimate, unheroic charm and a wealth of detail for appreciative eyes.

Joshua Gunn appreciated it, though he would have been at a loss to give reasons for his feeling, being a man of few words. His circumstances were not conducive to talk, for he was fireman on the engine of a Great Western train, a local train which ran between the two country towns. He, the engine driver and the guard saw more of that immediate stretch of country than any three{221} men alive; but while Joshua looked out on it with pleasure, it scarcely existed for the other two, for the guard was a politician and read the Western Mail in his van, and the driver was indifferent to everything but his engine.

Gunn was a quiet, dark young fellow of eight and twenty, with a reputation in the livelier part of his little world of being dull, for hardly any one knew what his interests were nor what he thought about. He did his work well and interfered with nobody, and he lived in company with a signalman, the only person with whom he was intimate, on the outskirts of Hereford town.

When the train had almost done its journey from Worcester it reached a spot at which the permanent way ran along an embankment, and here Joshua’s loyal interest in the surroundings of his appointed course would culminate. No matter what were his duties on the engine, he would contrive to be free when the embankment came in sight and the green elevation swung itself into line as they rounded the curve preceding it. The young man would lean out, with the wind of their rush blowing on his dark face, and gaze{222} down upon the picture that had captured his fancy.

Just at this spot, close under the embankment, one of the fields had merged itself with surprising abruptness into a small thickly planted orchard, and not twenty paces in from the beginning of the trees was a tiny black-and-white timbered cottage of two storeys, standing apart with the compact detachment of a doll’s house. The apple trees pressed up to within a few feet of its walls, their gnarled stems crowding thick about it, like an escort round a state prisoner, and in the dusk of their myriad leaves and branches its whitewash, crossed with black timbers, seemed to be glimmering through a green twilight. The windows were small, and looked even smaller and more secretive from the height at which Joshua saw them; and at either side of the worn stone threshold there stood, in summer, one of those tall orange lilies called by the neighbouring folk ‘the Lights of Jerusalem.’ To Joshua they were like two stiff golden angels guarding the door of this diminutive paradise of his imagination. He admired flowers and he knew many of their names,{223} for the signalman with whom he lived had a plot of garden at the foot of his box which the fireman often envied him.

Through every change of season Joshua Gunn had observed the little dwelling: under the leafless boughs of winter, in the ethereal greenery of spring, in the full-blown opulence of summer, in the time when the reddened apples burned round it like fiery globes; but the time when it pleased him most was at June’s end, when the Lights of Jerusalem were kindled by its threshold.

For a long time it chanced that he saw no signs of life about the place except the smoke stealing upward and a clothes-line stretched between the apple-trees; but one day as he leaned over the engine’s side, a girl was in the garden. She wore a large apron over her dress and her fresh face was turned up as she shaded her eyes to look at the passing train. Her light hair shone in the sun. It happened that he saw her three times in one week, twice in the garden strip under the windows and once at the back of the house beside the row of beehives, and on the last occasion some impulse made him take off his cap and hold{224} it above his head as the train ran by. The girl hesitated, and then made a timid sign of greeting with her hand; Joshua was near enough to see her face and the shy smile upon it.

That little ceremony had gone on for eight months. Sometimes the girl would be in the garden, sometimes at the door, sometimes she was not to be seen; but in any case the fireman would lean out and hold up his cap, for he could not know whether she might not be watching him go by from behind the diamond panes.

One day when Joshua’s engine had reached Hereford it was sent back on the up-line in the interval between its two journeys to take a few trucks with a gang of workmen to the embankment. Some rails were to be unloaded, for there were repairs to be done at the spot above the orchard; and as the brakes were put on and the train slowed down, the young fireman promised himself an idle half-hour in which he might see the timbered cottage at closer quarters. When the unloading was over the engine and trucks were to go on a siding a little further forward while the{225} rails were being stacked, and there steam would be shut off until it was time for the men to return.

The driver was a fat, good-natured individual, averse to exercise, and Joshua knew that during his wait he would sit on the foot-plate and smoke, and that it would be a simple matter for himself to get leave to stroll back to the green banks. He would be able to get quite close to the orchard, perhaps to within speaking distance of his unknown acquaintance. His mind was full of the idea, and he considered over and over again how he should accost her, and what he should say, supposing that he had the courage to address her at all. Perhaps she might not come out of the house; perhaps she was absent. He had not seen her as he passed in the morning. He imagined a dozen obstacles to the meeting for which he hoped.

He had easily got the permission he wanted, but when he saw the smoke rise from the apple-boughs he had half a mind to turn back. His heart beat a little as he neared the place, for he was a shy man; and as he looked at the coal-dust on his hands, he{226} wished very heartily that stoking was a cleaner occupation. He reflected with dismay that the girl whose friendly greeting had been the point of interest in his daily journeys for so long, had never been near enough to him to know what an unattractive fellow he was, and this estimate of himself disheartened him a good deal, because he did not guess how far it was from being a just one.

When he reached the embankment he stopped, his anticipations scattered to the winds. The one chance on which he had not counted had risen up to undo him.

The garden was full of people and the uniform hue of their garments gave him a sharp thrust of horror. They were black from head to toe, and they surrounded a dark object resting on rough trestles placed just outside the doorstep. It was evidently waiting for something, the sombre assembly that had descended like a swarm of devastating insects on this secret pleasure-ground of his own, to blot out its beauty with their presence. The only spots of colour were the bright Lights of Jerusalem, set like living torches beside the unpretentious pageant of death.

The young man stood on the bank looking blankly down, his hands dropped at his sides. He dared not go near to intrude upon the handful of mourners, though from over the hedge below the line he could have asked the question which tormented him. Details spring with an irony all their own to the minds of those in suspense, and he reflected that he need not have been concerned by his blackened coat and coal-stained hands. Everything was black now. The clang made by the rails, as the workmen piled them in a heap near him, sent a harsh note booming into the air.

Then his trouble lifted from him, for the cottage door opened, and the well-known figure came out between the Lights of Jerusalem. She turned the key, putting it in her pocket, and her companions raised the coffin and carried it out of the garden.

As she followed them she looked up at the line, and, perhaps from habit, Joshua’s hand went up to his cap; and, though he dropped it half way, afraid, instinctively, to force his recognition upon her at such a moment, he saw her smile.

When the humble procession had passed out of sight he went back to the engine in a kind of dream. But it was a dream with a definite purpose. In three days it would be Sunday, a free day for him, because the local train did not run. He would start from Hereford and walk along the line to the cottage, a bare seven miles, and he would at last see and speak with this girl face to face. He could not know the exact nature of the catastrophe which had happened to her, but he understood that, in its grip, she had still held to their unspoken friendship, and that the tacit bond had emerged from it, a thing which present calamity had not been able to break. He scarcely knew what he meant to do when he should meet her, but he felt as if a gate had opened. And through the gate he would go.

On Sunday morning Joshua rose to find Hereford enveloped in the mist of coming heat, and at half-past eight he dropped on to the permanent way beyond the signal-box on the Worcester line to begin his seven-mile walk alongside the sleepers. He had shaved with particular care, and had scrubbed{229} himself till not a trace remained of the coal dust of the week. He wore his dark grey Sunday suit, and even the ill-made clothes could not take much attraction from his grave brown face or make his slight figure quite uninteresting, for the touch of reserve and refinement which kept him a little aloof from the rougher part of his kind showed through inferior tailoring and looked out of his observant eyes.

The metals stretched on into the quivering greyness of the hot day as he tramped along and the sun climbed higher. On either side spread the green landscape of western England, rich and chequered. The ox-eye daisies were out at the sides of the line, and the red sorrel and the clover; and above the round heads of these last, misty clouds of tiny butterflies hung like an innocent miasma. It was almost eleven o’clock when Joshua reached his goal, and, descending the embankment, slipped through a weak place in the hedge and approached the cottage door.

The smoke still rose from the chimney, but there was neither sound nor stir within, and, having knocked unsuccessfully, the young{230} man went into the orchard. The row of beehives was in its place, and as he stood looking at them and debating what he should do, the sound of a bell came to him through the hot air. He listened, smiling at his own stupidity. Of course—she was at church!

He hastened through the garden, following the sound, and came out on a narrow country road. In front of him a stout woman was pressing forward, book in hand, with conscience-stricken haste, and in the wake of this unconscious guide he soon found himself at the lych-gate of a small square-towered church. The woman bustled through the churchyard and was lost in the deep shadow of the porch. The echo of her creaking boots filled it as she entered.

He followed her to the inner door, stepping like a thief, and peered in. The prayers had long begun, and his eye searched the kneeling congregation for the figure he wanted and stopped at a row of cross seats facing the aisle on the hither side of the chancel arch. The girl was there; he could see her attentive profile above her book, and her bright hair.{231} He knew her at once, and her unrelieved black clothes confirmed the recognition. He drew back stealthily and went out into the churchyard, for there was no vacant seat near the door.

It was rather a badly kept place, and the canopies of the yew trees shadowed groups of tombstones, ancient and grotesque, which stuck at many different angles from the coarse grass. As he turned to examine the church he noticed that a slab of stone jutted out from the wall, running along it like a bench. He sat down on it to wait as patiently as he could till the end of the service.

From inside the building came the drone of collective voices saying the Lord’s Prayer, and soon after, he heard the sound of the congregation rising. Suspense began to weigh on him. He got up and wandered about, reading epitaphs with a half-mind that scarcely took in their significance. Then the organ began and the words of the hymn carried him back to the house in the orchard.

“Jerusalem the Golden” sang the voices; and at these words the two tall orange lilies{232} by the doorstep rose before Joshua, who stood still, staring at the inner vision.

He awoke from his abstraction to see a black figure emerge quickly from the porch. She was coming towards him, her eyes blind with tears. No doubt something in the service had upset her and she had fled, unable to control herself. Joshua was standing in the shade of a tree, but with the light of the blazing noon on her wet eyes she seemed not to see him.

Then he took her hand and led her to the stone bench. She went with him, unresisting.

He had not supposed that she was so pretty, for though her eyes were swollen and her face blurred and marked by weeping, these things could not obliterate her good looks. But Joshua scarcely gave that a thought, nor did he realise for a moment how{233} extraordinary his behaviour might seem to her, considering that he was a stranger. The only thought in his mind was that she was in trouble, and that, for some perfectly unexplained but imperative reason, she would cling to him. Her sobs slackened as he sat silent, with his cap pushed back from his brow and his hand closed round hers, as if it were the most natural thing in the world; behind their backs, on the inner side of the church wall, the sermon had begun and the parson’s solitary tones were in monotonous possession.

“It were the hymn,” she said at last—“’twas about Jerusalem, and I thought—I remembered—the Lights o’ Jerusalem by the doorstep. I’ve seen them there all my life, but there’ll be no more o’ they for me, soon.”

“Father’s dead,” she continued. “He’d never left his bed for four years. I minded him. He couldn’t see nothing but from the window where his bed were. But the interest{234} he’d take! He’d call me in from the garden, and ask how it was all looking—and how the birds was building, and about the currants and the flowers and the apples. He could tell you the shape of every tree, though he hadn’t seen them for so long. And he liked the trains too. He could just see you where he was lying, an’ no more, when the train went by the white post on the bank. It made him feel a kind of cheery-like to know you were coming. ‘Twenty past eleven, Winnie,’ he’d say to me. ‘It’s time for the engine.’”

“Then he knew me?” said the young man reflectively. “Strange that I never thought of any one else being behind the windows. I only thought about you and them Lights of Jerusalem when we came round the bend.”

“He never missed looking out—not till that last day. He wouldn’t have missed you for anything.”

Inside the church the parson’s voice had stopped, and a general stamping and rustling proclaimed the end of the sermon.

“I must go. They’ll be coming out, and I{235} don’t want to meet them,” said the girl, rising quickly.

They walked back hurriedly to the cottage, for the dispersed congregation was almost treading on their heels, and she told him, with a primness that was in odd contrast with their unconventional attitude, that she did not want the neighbours to see her with a stranger so soon after the funeral. The road was empty, and they went along side by side, talking as though they had known each other for years. He learned that she was to leave her home at the end of the week and take service with the wife of a small innkeeper in Hereford. It grieved him to see how much she dreaded the change. When they came within sight of the line he looked at the green embankment with resentful eyes. Henceforth it would be a different place to him. It would bring him four disappointments daily.

“You must be going, or they’ll see you,” said she, as they stopped by the orchard.

“I’ll look for you going by to-morrow,” said{236} the girl; “there’ll be only a few days more now.”

“My dear,” said Joshua suddenly, “mind you this, I mayn’t be the sort o’ feller that’s likely to please a girl, but I’m a man that’ll wait—and I’m to be made driver next year. You can’t tell what it’ll be like at the inn. Maybe you’ll be happy, maybe not. But in any case, I’m waiting. An’ the first day you say ‘come,’ I’ll come for you. It’s funny, but it seems somehow as if you belonged to me. Could you like me, do you think?”

“Oh, I do,” she answered, simply. “But you must be going. I hear them talking on the road.”

“Oh, Winnie!” cried the man who would wait, “you won’t let it be long?”

Then he turned away, stepped through the hedge, and ran up the side of the embankment,{237} At the top he stood, holding up his cap. She was smiling at him between the Lights of Jerusalem.

When his slim figure had vanished down the line she went into the house and, sitting down, hid her face in her hands.

THE WINDMILL

There was only one break in the straight line of canal-bank stretching from nowhere to the spot on which Camilla sat, and that was the windmill.

It was a flour-mill, which fact, though she knew Holland well, and had been there often, she was not instructed enough to understand; but any one comprehending such things would have known it by the wide wooden gallery encircling its girth about twenty feet from the ground. It was an ancient mill, mellowed into rich brown by the weather-stains of a couple of centuries; and on windy days, when the sails were working, the timbers creaked and strained as the arms shot past the little windows which looked out of its surface like sunken eyes. That it was inhabited could easily be seen, for a girl’s bright form stood at a door opening on the gallery;{239} and at the side farthest from the water, where a flight of wooden steps ran up to the entrance, a patch of dahlias grew scarlet and crimson and yellow round its foot. To-day there was no grinding going on and the sails were still.

Camilla was sitting on the bank under a pollard willow, and, as she looked at the great fantastic structure which stood against the wideness of the sky, the buds and leaves of the tall plants were like silhouettes on the light. The horizon was low down, far away—a grey, even line. She was not in a very happy humour, for she had been tormenting Oliver, and he, like a sensible man, had made no sign, but had suddenly developed a college friend in Amsterdam and left her to finish the process upon other people. But, unfortunately, there was no one else she cared to torment, so she had gone off to seek entertainment alone. Oliver and Camilla were great friends, and both were staying, among other guests, at a country-house near The Hague.

As she sat under her willow, she told herself {240}that she was very unkind to Oliver; and—what was far, far worse—that he did not care.

Looking along the canal in the opposite direction to the mill, the water took a turn at right angles, and a barge was coming round the corner. As it swung about, the sail came rattling down; Camilla could hear the noise it made as it fell and showed a man’s figure standing on the deck. The boat’s nose drifted against the bank, in obedience to an unseen hand, and the man sprang out and caught a rope thrown to him, making it fast to a tree-stump on shore. The barge floated a few yards, and the line tightened.

The man came towards her, whistling softly—a tall fellow, young and lean, in his blue jersey, with eyes lighter than the tan on his face; he was so intensely absorbed in the windmill that he did not notice her sitting in her carpet of rush under the willow. He passed and stood looking up between the mill and the water. The girl was leaning over the rail; in her white cap and gold earrings, she was a touch of radiant youth poised on the crazy gallery that rested on its timbers, high above his head.

“He is down below,” called the girl. “He sits at the top of the steps and looks into the garden. I have fastened the trap-door, so he cannot come up. He is counting the dahlias; to-morrow they will be cut and taken to market—he says he will get a guilder for them.”

“What does that matter?” she answered, tossing up her chin. “You can hear every word I say.”

“But how am I to come down, blockhead? Do not I tell you that he is sitting in the doorway?”

“Plenty! plenty! But I have them all safe in here,” she said, pointing to the door behind her.

For answer she went into the mill and came out with her arms full of rope; she looked down over the rail on his lifted face.

“You told me to send it down and I have obeyed,” she said. “Are you coming up, Joris?”

Each alternate timber supporting the gallery protruded beyond it and turned upwards, curving in a rude attempt at ornament. With a glance at one of these curves, the man took up the coil, which lay like a serpent at his feet; there was not a stone to be seen on the green bank, so he knotted one end till there was sufficient weight in it to please him, and stood below the gallery, measuring its height with his eye.

He gathered the rope in his left hand, and, with the other, flung up the weighted end towards the protruding timbers; it fell a foot or so short. Gonda’s laugh floated out overhead. A second and a third time the rope shot upward, only to drop again with a thud on the turf.

As the words left her lips, the thing rose over the beam, and fell, swinging, across it. Joris eased it until the knot hung within his reach; catching it, he undid his handiwork and substituted a slip-knot, through which he passed the other end; then he drew up the rope tight. The line hung secure from timber to earth. Without so much as a glance at the gallery, he seized it, and went up hand over hand. The smile had died out of the girl’s face as he stood on the end of the beam and vaulted over the railing. Camilla could see her framed by the doorway, and hesitating whether or no she should disappear into the mill.

Before her mind was made up, he had seized{244} her round the waist and was kissing her wildly.

“You are a little fiend,” he said; “but I love you!—I love you!—I love you!”

“He can hear when he is not wanted to; besides, he is wicked enough for anything. Look at this!”

“All men are,” replied Gonda. “If I were to marry you, you would turn into one, too.”

Camilla did not catch his reply, for there was a movement in the garden patch. Had she been the girl in the gallery she could hardly have been more horrified at seeing the figure of a man emerge from among the dahlias and come round the mill. He wore wide blue trousers, and the eyes below his{245} cap were round and small and unutterably fierce. They lit upon her as she sat under the tree, and, in answer to her gesture of civility, he gave an ungracious nod and passed on. In another moment he would see the dangling rope.

“But I will buy them. Surely that is better than the trouble of taking them to market?”

Of all things in the world, Camilla most hated explanations; she merely pointed into space.

“Every one knows that,” replied she, readily. “They are the best to be had for miles round.”

He opened a little wicket and they went in among the flowers; he had no manners, and pushed through in front of her. As his back was turned, she looked over her shoulder to see if there was any sign of the lovers. She was obliged to speak very loud and she hoped they had heard the voices. They were in the gallery, looking round the curve of the mill. She laid her finger on her lips and made a sign to them that she was going into the garden with the miller. The girl smiled with understanding, recognising an ally; the man was slower witted, but his hand went civilly to his cap.

Camilla stood with her cross-grained companion among the crimson suns and golden moons of the dahlias; there were white stars, too. They were so beautiful that she felt{247} almost sympathetically towards the old ruffian who had raised such things.

“Have you any double ones?” she asked, with a view to prolonging the business.

“Over there,” said he, pointing with a knotty thumb; “and they cost double the money.”

“They have double as many petals. Does one get anything for nothing in this world?”

“Well, let us go and look at them,” she said, lifting her skirt and stepping into the long grass.

“Are you going to buy?” said the miller, standing stolidly in the path and taking his pipe out of his mouth. “I suppose you think that time and shoe-leather cost nothing, too?”

“It’s a pity to waste either,” said Camilla, becoming exasperated. “I will content myself with the cheaper ones.”

The offer was princely, but he put on a face of the most malignant disgust as he cut the flowers. Fortunately for the lovers he spent a great deal of time in trying to select the worst ones. She handed him a guilder, and, as he went into the mill for change, she ran round it to see if she might safely loose her hold on him. The sail was up in Joris’s barge and Gonda stood alone, watching it from the gallery; only the rope dangled.

“I am married,” replied Camilla, with great dignity, as she returned to the garden for her change.

As she took her way up the canal a few minutes later, the barge was coming along like a great brown-winged bird; at the mill there was not a sign of life.

“That interests me very much,” said Oliver, about a week later; “the more so as I know{249} them all perfectly. I know the mill and the miller and the girl and the girl’s young man; and the situation.”

They were strolling by the canal a mile or so from the place where she had sat among the rushes, and they could see the sails of the windmill turning in the distance; for there was a stiff breeze.

“One day I came to this part of the world by myself,” said he, “and I saw Joris sitting on a bridge in a village. I asked him for a light; then we sat and smoked together. We became very friendly, and he finally confided his love-affair, and said that, if the wind held, he was going to sail down to the mill after dark. He also did me the honour of asking my advice. He complained that, though they had been engaged for more than a year, Gonda would not marry him because she said all men were devils. Her stepfather beats her, I believe.”

“I told him he had better take her away, there and then, that very night. He said she would refuse to come. I explained to him that that did not matter, and I offered to go with him myself. He was delighted.”

“Go? Of course I went, and tackled the miller with great determination. He was asleep in the mill; but she was expecting her lover and had managed to slip out upon the bank to meet him. When Joris and I seized her, she screamed, and her stepfather came out with a lantern. I had to knock it out of his hand and hold him till Joris got her away; I had some trouble, too, for he was as strong as a bull. When they were once in the boat, and I heard the sail go up, I shook him off and jumped on board. They put me ashore a few miles off and I have never seen them since; but when he thanked me, he said that I was young too, and, no doubt, I understood these things.”

“Strictly speaking, you behaved like a villain; but you were quite right to do so,” she said.

“But will they be happy?” said Oliver, after a pause. “I have often wondered since.”

“If I could only see the girl again,” said Camilla, “I would give her the most unfailing recipe for keeping a man’s devoted affection. I am a philosopher, too, you see. To be eternally adored, a woman should do two things: one is, to put her heel on the man’s neck; and the other is, to keep it there. All the same, from what I have seen of Gonda, I fancy she knows it.”

THE BUCKINGHAM GALLERY

Alfred Fairfax walked towards Knightsbridge from Kensington Gardens, just outside the Park railings. It was a hot day, and an old man inside them was sitting on a bench holding his hat in one hand, whilst he resignedly mopped the top of his bald head with a rather loud bandanna handkerchief. Fairfax was somewhat overcome, too, but less by the heat than by the state of his feelings; for he had come to a decision and was going to put it into practice that very afternoon, if possible.

He had made up his mind to go back to her; and he had just despatched a letter to her, containing the information, from his club. He had sent it by hand, and, in a short time, he would follow it himself.

He would see her; he would tell her all the aimlessness and unrest of the past year;{253} he would ask her to forgive him, and to take him back, for he had never been really happy since they parted—never. But he had not said quite so much in the letter as he meant to say when they met. Then he would expand.

He recalled, with something as nearly amounting to shame as was possible for him, the look on her face during that last interview twelve months ago, when she had accused him of having ceased to care for her. He remembered how he had neglected her during those weeks previous to their parting; how she had offered him his freedom through her tears. He also remembered how he had refused it, shrinking from the sight of her quivering lips and the pain in her eyes; and then, how he had gone home to reconsider his words. He had assured himself that, after all, a wife would be a serious inconvenience in many ways, and that he would write and tell her how, on thinking it over, he had found it wiser to accept her proposal and break the engagement “by mutual consent.”

And so, after a week, during which his unexplained silence had made her suffer as{254} she had not known it was possible to suffer, the letter was written, signed, and posted. And he had never seen her from that day to this.

He wondered whether she had changed; how beautiful she was, and how delightful she had always been to him! He had heard vaguely from various people that she had felt her loss bitterly, though she had said little about it. The thought of this rather pleased him, and he smiled to himself as he went along, reflecting that she would certainly be ready to forget the past, and that all would go smoothly. After all, he had missed her, and the freedom he had gained had not been so exciting; for his life, since regaining it, had been just what it had always been, only without the affection which had never failed him, even when he valued it least. Yes, he had been a fool to leave her, and he would tell her so, like a man, he said to himself. And then it would all come right.

It was only four by the clock at Hyde Park Corner, and he wondered where he should put in the hour that divided him from five; then, remembering that there was{255} a portrait of her, by Aldford, in the Buckingham Gallery, he resolved to go and sit there until the proper time, and see what the picture was like. It would be cooler there, too.

A little later he was standing in the large marble hall of the Gallery. There were two or three rooms full of people and he wandered through the nearest one, staring restlessly at the yards of sea-pieces, landscapes, portraits, domestic subjects and nudities. There were pictures of boats becalmed, pictures of boats in storms, pictures of young ladies sitting still, entitled “Memories,” pictures of young ladies walking about, entitled “Will he come?” and pictures of small children playing practical jokes on phenomenally human-looking collie-dogs. He went back to the turnstile, bought a catalogue, and sat down to look in it for the thing he wished to see. There it was: “No. 238. Portrait of Miss Langard by Alexander Aldford.”

As he entered the West Room his heart jumped, for the portrait hung right opposite to the door, and it almost seemed as though she were coming to meet him. She stood straight up, looking out of the canvas with{256} her dark eyes. There was in them the same look of acute suffering before which he had shrunk on the day they parted, only it was quieter and more settled.

It struck him to the heart; he could not turn from the beautiful, unhappy face which gazed at him with its calm, steady sorrow. It was a marvellous picture. The very dress she wore was one he had known and admired, and her hair was done in the same way—piled high at the back of her head like a crown, with a soft fluff of curls over the forehead. Her hands hung straight down at her sides. Any other woman in that attitude would have looked awkward, but it was so characteristic of her that it brought her back almost more vividly than anything else.

Fairfax turned round and tried to grow interested in other things; but it was of no use, and he sat down on a leather sofa directly in front of the picture. He looked at his watch, as there was no clock in the Gallery, and found that it had stopped; first he thought of asking some stranger for the time, but the idea reminded him of street-boys and he dismissed it in consequence. He went{257} again to the man at the turnstile, and was informed by that functionary that he was not wearing his watch that afternoon. There was nothing for it but to wait quietly for twenty minutes or so and then to go slowly up to Hill Street. He returned to his seat.

There were only a few people about; no one disturbed him until two plain-looking old ladies came in, and, with the customary politeness of picture-seers, planted themselves exactly between him and the haunting face on the wall.

“There she is,” said one of the two; she wore a black mantle, and had a singularly dismal voice.

“Dear me! dear me!” exclaimed her companion, putting on her spectacles. “I should not have recognised her; you know, it is more than four years since I saw her. She is most lovely; but it is a terribly sad face, I think. Is she like that in real life?”

“When I was her governess,” replied the other, “she was the brightest and happiest creature in the world; but she was not so pretty. Indeed, I remember Sir Harry saying{258} to me one day, ‘She will never be what her mother was, Miss Millar—her mother was beautiful.’”

Fairfax sat listening intently. The lady with the spectacles moved away and left Miss Millar still gazing at her former pupil.

“She is so changed now,” said the old governess to herself, just above her breath.

Well, it should not be his fault if it were not put right; he would go off to her at once, and, should she be out, he would wait until she came in. He jumped up, and in another minute was bowling briskly along in a hansom towards Hill Street, feeling both pleased and excited. And he felt very virtuous, too.

The door of No. 61 was opened by a servant whom he had never seen before, and who, informing him that Miss Langard was at home, ushered him into the empty drawing-room, leaving the door ajar.

Fairfax stood looking round on the familiar things, feeling as if the past year had slipped{259} out of his life and he were waiting there for her, as he had so often done in the old days, and on the old terms. Everything was exactly as he had last seen it—the same tall glasses of larkspurs (she had always liked larkspurs), the same piano, open and littered with music-books, the same portrait of General Langard in uniform beside a Corinthian pillar, frowning over the mantelpiece, with a very ill-broken charger being held behind him. He went to the window and leaned his hot forehead against the pane for some minutes. His heart was beating. Would she never come? He looked about for something to do—something to keep him quiet during this tiresome delay. The Morning Post was lying at his feet; he picked it up, and, having seen the principal news in the Times at his club, turned to the society information and ran his eye over the little column.

Suddenly the paper dropped from his grasp and the room seemed to be growing dim before him. Then he snatched it up again. Yes, there it was, as plain as printer’s ink could make it: “A marriage has been arranged between Captain Thomas Stratton{260} Stanley-Mayne, 3rd Cumberland Rifles, and Leila Constance, daughter of Major-General Sir Harry Langard, K.C.B., of 61, Hill Street, Berkeley Square.”

Great heavens! Was it possible? Could it be true? And when had such a thing been settled? How had he heard no breath of it—he, who flattered himself that no occurrence in the polite world could escape his notice? She had preferred this poor soldier to him—to himself—with all his expectations and his prospective earldom? He quite forgot he had given her no chance of choosing between them; and that the result might have been the same, even had he done so, was an idea which did not occur to him for a moment.

He had been at school with Stanley-Mayne, and remembered him perfectly (as, indeed, he had some reason to do)—a large, wiry, quiet boy, with whom it was unsafe to meddle.

And now she was going to marry this fellow, and he would be left out in the cold. It was too monstrous!

But the worst of it was this: Here he{261} was, stuck in this house, and quite unable to get out again. He began to walk up and down.

All at once a door shut in the passage below, and there were steps on the staircase. Then came a quick rustle of silk skirts and a voice, whose every tone he knew by heart, called: “Tom! Tom! you have left your leather cigarette-case. I’ll throw it down to you over the banisters.”

He heard a soft flop, as the thing alighted on the slippery floor of the hall; then the door creaked, and she came in.

He looked up, to see a slender white figure carrying a bunch of dewy roses. There were roses stuck in her belt, too, and some of the pink petals were dropping on the floor. Stanley-Mayne had brought them, no doubt.

She was changed, as Miss Millar had said, though not exactly in the way he had expected.

Fairfax never entirely lost his presence of mind; he had too much instinct of self-preservation for that.

Mechanically he drew forward a chair, and, as he did so, the door opened again to admit Stanley-Mayne. Their eyes met, and a smile flickered round the soldier’s humorous mouth that made Fairfax feel ill.

THE CLAIMS OF FRIENDSHIP

The sun seemed once more to shine on Mrs. Howard-Cox. There was balm in Gilead. She sat in her boudoir looking out upon the red-hot pokers of the herbaceous border, and feeling that there was something almost prophetically royal in their scarlet and yellow complexions. Sceptres, Gold-Sticks-in-waiting, royal liveries—these things were mixing with her vision. She had been a good deal shaken by the stormy interview she had just had with her daughter Sylvia, but even that vexation had been thrust aside by the contents of the postbag. She clung to the letter she had just received as though it were a lifebelt and she, herself, were on the deck of a settling ship.

Mrs. Howard-Cox was one of those people who wear their town clothes in the country, and her tight black voile, with its insertions of blue, seemed to have as much harmony{264} with the autumn trees outside as her elaborate toupée had with her serviceable-looking skin. Her figure had suffered from lack of exercise, though her stay-maker had done her best to correct its tendencies.

Indeed, she had something to complain of; for Sylvia, who was a beauty, and who had made a powerful impression on the heart of Lord Balcartney at a garden party, was persisting in her intention of marrying a young gentleman in a marching regiment, called Smith.

Reggie Smith was a quiet-spoken, hardworking youth, with a cheerful spirit and four hundred a year besides his pay; but he was the third son of a moderately successful manufacturer; and Mrs. Howard-Cox (who was the grand-daughter of an exceedingly rich auctioneer) could not abide manufacturers. She had married a banker, and, from the giddy pinnacles of a bank, could scarcely be expected to see into the world of barter below. Nor could she really approve of any one named Smith, although till Lord Balcartney appeared she had been willing to tolerate the engagement. Some weeks ago she had forbidden Reggie the house.

She had spoken very seriously to Sylvia, and had assured her vehemently that her father would never give his consent to the marriage; but Sylvia had not been greatly impressed, knowing full well that Mr. Howard-Cox’s opinion was a mere figure of speech, and that the good little man had never, within her recollection, been allowed to indulge in such a luxury. He had done his share in growing rich, and had earned a leisure which he now employed in gardening.

The letter in Mrs. Howard-Cox’s hand was from Captain Carlton, a penniless and well-connected youth who had stayed in her house at various times, and whose name she felt to be a credit when she saw it in the local paper among the list of her guests when she gave a dance. (She was a great person for lists and functions.) Leo Carlton’s brotherly friendship with Sylvia had never given her a moment’s anxiety, and now his letter had given her a thrill of delight.

“Dear Mrs. Howard-Cox [he wrote],—

“I fear that you may be a good deal astonished by this letter. I am in a dilemma,{266} and I feel there is nobody who can help me out so well as you. You know, I expect, that I have been given charge of King Kekeloganu while he is in England, and have been told, in high quarters, to make his visit as pleasant as possible. He is quite marvellously enlightened for an African, and much interested in manufactures, and in about ten days we shall be on our way to inspect some Yorkshire mills. But, owing to a series of tiresome mistakes, we shall be at a loose end for one night. I cannot think where to take him, and the idea came to me that you might be willing to put us up. He has heard so much of the country life of the English upper classes, and I feel that there is no one who could show it to him so perfectly as yourself. You will answer me quite frankly, I am sure, or I could not dare to make such a suggestion.

“Though, of course, Kekeloganu is a most important monarch in his own country, he will not expect you to inconvenience your household by accentuating his royal position, and he is anxious to escape the trammels of etiquette as much as possible. At the same time, any little consideration you choose to{267} show him will, I know, be taken as a compliment. The native gentleman who is with him is laid up with influenza, and he has—very wisely—engaged an Englishman as his body-servant while he is in England, so his suite, which will only consist of myself and this man, will be no trouble. I should add that his habits are delightfully civilised, and quite different from those of his countrymen.

“My dear lady, what do you think? If you can help me—or, I had almost said, your country—my gratitude will be eternal....”

Mrs. Howard-Cox scarcely read the civil expressions with which this letter closed, her mind being taken up by the price and measurements of red carpets.

“You may count on me. Write describing table arrangements. Coralie Howard Cox.”

A few days after the despatch of this telegram a paragraph appeared in the local paper to the effect that King Kekeloganu would pay a visit of one night to Mr. and Mrs. Howard-Cox at their residence, The{268} Cedars. His Majesty, it was announced, would travel incognito, and there would be no special demonstration attending his arrival. But, as an incognito is not easy to preserve if its owner happens to be black, there was quite a little crowd assembled at the station when, in the fulness of time, the obedient Mr. Howard-Cox went to meet his guest, leaving his wife wandering excitedly from one expanse of red carpet to another and giving the final directions to her agitated household. As the carriage rolled towards The Cedars, the roads were sprinkled with onlookers, and rows of small boys occupied the fences, giving vent to criticisms and cheers as the august stranger passed. Kekeloganu, seated at his host’s right hand, with Leo Carlton opposite, seemed quite to understand what was expected of him, for he bowed and raised his hat as assiduously as if the interior of Africa had been a training-ground of courtly deportment.

Mrs. Howard-Cox, in maroon velvet, was at the hall-door when the carriage drew up, and behind her stood Sylvia and her younger daughter Dulcibell, the former rather pale, and the latter wearing an expression of the most{269} unbridled curiosity. Dulcibell was even better-looking than her sister, but, as she was only sixteen and not yet “out,” her skirt stopped at her ankles, and her thick and beautiful hair hung in a plait to her waist. As the king descended, their mother subsided in a curtsy which almost landed her on the earth; and Kekeloganu, who was dressed in a very long frock-coat, swept off his tall silk hat, displaying a head covered with black curls and a pair of eyebrows which reminded Dulcibell of hearth-brushes. Otherwise he was not a bad-looking man, and far less like a Christy-Minstrel than might have been expected, considering his clothes. When the girls had been presented, he turned to Leo and murmured some unintelligible sounds.

“His Majesty commands me to say that he is deeply grateful to you for your hospitality, and to tell you that he will pray four times a day to his god for your welfare,” said Leo, turning to his hostess.

It was evident that Kekeloganu, who was known to understand a few words of English, felt very deeply on the subject, for a kind of spasm went over his face.

“I hope ’e won’t take a fancy to one of our young ladies—nasty black beast,” said the cook, who, with her kitchen-maid, was craning out of a top window.

Mrs. Howard-Cox was beginning to move backwards up the steps, which was no easy feat, because her gown had a train. But she finally engineered herself back into the hall, where the useful Mr. Cox was again in requisition to conduct the illustrious guest to his room. Leo accompanied them, saying that he would come down to the drawing-room when he had installed Kekeloganu, and have a talk with his hostess over further details. The monarch would not appear again until dinner-time, as it was his hour for prayer. It seemed that he was exceedingly religious, and was even now disturbed, because his particular god, which, according to the rites of his religion, he carried with him, was among his baggage, in the charge of his body-servant, who had not yet arrived.

“Well, Leo,” said Mrs. Howard-Cox breathlessly, as he entered the drawing-room, “do you think His Majesty is pleased?”

“Simply delighted,” replied Carlton; “and now Robertson has arrived with his—his idol, so he is quite contented.”

“Oh, it’s red—quite red,” he said quickly. “And it has a frog’s tail.”

“I scarcely realised there were tadpoles in Africa,” mused Mrs. Howard-Cox; “one is so ignorant.”

Sylvia was sitting behind the tea-table, very silent, and busying herself with the teacups.

“May I not send some tea to his Majesty—anything to eat or drink?” inquired her mother.

“He never drinks tea,” replied the young man; “but I know he would like a whisky-and-soda. (I fear he has learnt that from me.) In fact I made bold to tell Robertson to go down for one, for I was certain you{272} would let his man ask for anything he required.”

“Of course, of course,” purred Mrs. Howard-Cox. “And now, Leo, about dinner. There are one or two things you didn’t make clear. You said he had learnt all about knives and forks, but you did not answer about the cooking—does he like his meat much done?”

“He eats it raw at home,” said Leo, looking very hard at Dulcibell again; “but I am happy to say we’ve cured him of that, too. And he has stopped asking to have the whole joint put on his plate. It’s etiquette at his court, of course.”

“I have seen him plunge his fist into a soup-tureen,” continued Leo; “but that was just after he landed. You really need not fear these kind of accidents now, and, if I may sit opposite to him at dinner, I can keep an eye on him.”

“Do you think——” began Sylvia, in a strained voice; but she stopped, for a prolonged drone floated through the house, rising{273} at times into a sharp nasal cry and punctuated by the strokes of a small drum.

For a moment the group in the drawing-room sat open-mouthed, listening. Then Dulcibell got up and stared out of the window.

The voice climbed higher, and then died away in a tempest of wavering semi-tones.

There was a knock at the door, and a man appeared, who raised his hand, and, meeting Leo’s eyes, dropped it suddenly.

“His Majesty would like to speak to you, sir,” he said, standing very erect and bringing his words out in a smart monotone.

“Thanks,” said Leo. “I’ll come. Robertson’s an old soldier,” he added, as he rose.

As Leo entered the royal bedchamber, Kekeloganu was standing in his shirt-sleeves. His frock-coat and his tall hat, which he had brought upstairs with him, lay on the bed; beside them were a coal-black wig and a little drum such as is sold in toy-shops.

“Now, don’t be an ass, Reggie, or you’ll spoil everything!” began the other.

“But I tell you I will see her!” cried the black king, seizing him by the arm.

“Well, you’re going to see her, man! Don’t, for heaven’s sake, make such a noise!”

“Now—in a few minutes; but sit down first, Reggie, and attend to me. There are one or two things I must tell you.”

“Now, look here,” said Leo, “everything is going splendidly, and if we only keep our heads we shall pull it off all right. I’ve just had a talk with mother Cox. It was pretty awful, because you pray so realistically, and I had dreadful things to explain about your religion. And that little devil, Dulcibell, was nearly too much for me—girls have no business with a sense of humour—but I stuck it out somehow. She’s a brick, all the same, for she is going to mount guard outside the old schoolroom, while you go in there and have a talk with Sylvia and fix up everything. If any one comes, Dulcibell will cough twice, and you must get into{275} the book-cupboard. She told me to tell you that.”

“Sit down, sit down, you silly ass! You really must listen to me. You’ve got to do a few odd things at dinner, just to keep up appearances. I told them I’d broken you of raw meat, and that you could use a fork—but we mustn’t overdo it. And you’ll have to talk a little—through me, of course.”

“Yes, but you mustn’t be too memorable, my boy, because I am but human, and it’s been a tough job for me already, hearing you pray.”

“If you don’t let me go in five minutes,” he said firmly, “I’ll undertake that you never forget to-night’s dinner as long as you live. I’ll surpass myself.”

Leo was cowed. He was one of the very few people who knew Reggie Smith intimately.

“Yes, and when you’ve got them, you’ll have to take my place here and keep on praying till I come back. That’ll make it perfectly safe. Mind you keep it up. Remember, it’s the high notes that tell. Now, be off.”

It was not long afterwards that Reggie and Sylvia were closeted in the old schoolroom, whilst Dulcibell sat on the stairs outside, ostentatiously lacing up her boot. Leo could see her through the key-hole of the royal chamber, which was opposite to the schoolroom, and he heartily wished he were there to help her; for, in spite of his remarks on the sense of humour in girls, he thought he had never seen anything he liked better than Dulcibell’s copper-coloured pig-tail and the beautiful outline of her cheek. But business was business, and he took up the drum and cleared his throat. The house was soon resounding.

“Well?” he said, when Kekeloganu had returned safely, “I needn’t ask if you’ve had a pleasant visit, because I can see it by your tie.”

“Am I? How odd!” exclaimed Leo, with some sarcasm. His friend’s Napoleonic callousness irritated him sometimes.

“I hope that black staining we paid so much for is fast,” he added, looking at him critically.

The party assembled with considerable ceremony that evening. Mrs. Howard-Cox’s tiara sparkled above her yellow satin and sequins. Two extra men had been hired for the occasion, and Robertson, the king’s manservant, stood behind his chair.

When Kekeloganu entered, followed by Leo, his hostess advanced to meet him, and almost sank at his feet, like a slimy yellow mushroom. It had been a cruel disappointment to her when Leo had written to say that his charge was anxious for a quiet evening, for the royal command had precluded the presence of such county magnates as she had scraped acquaintance with and hoped to invite. Only the local clergyman and his wife were present.

When dinner was announced, Kekeloganu, prompted by Leo, advanced on his hostess, holding out a sharp angle of arm. She put her hand on it, and they sailed towards the dining-room.

“Ladee veree nice,” observed the monarch, pressing Mrs. Howard-Cox’s wrist to his side.

“It is a great, great pleasure to receive your Majesty,” she replied emphatically.

“Ladee come Africa. Kekeloganu make happy,” he continued. “Much fat ladee good in Africa.”

They sat down, his Majesty at his hostess’s right and Leo opposite, for safety; and the meal began.

Soup was served, and it was noticeable that the king kept his eyes fixed on Carlton, copying his every gesture with a faithfulness that had something almost derisive about it. However, he seemed to be steering wonderfully between the pitfalls of a civilised dinner-table, and Leo, whose nerves had been a little shaken by his friend’s threat in the afternoon, was beginning to feel comparatively happy, when, with the fish, came the beginning of sorrows. He turned cold as he saw Kekelo{279}ganu grasp a handful of whitebait from his own plate and convey it, with a smile, to Mrs. Howard-Cox.

“For ladee, from Great King,” he announced, spreading his fingers wide and raining a shower of small creatures into her sherry. “Great King love much ladee.”

It was impossible for Leo to communicate with his charge in any known language, and he had to face the ghastly necessity of sitting helpless, perhaps for an hour, whilst the evil-minded Reggie took what line he thought fit. His forehead grew damp and he cursed himself for not having sufficiently realised what a remorseless scoundrel his friend could be. Oh, how he wished he knew Hindustani! But though Reggie’s soldiering had taken him to India, his own had not. He dared not look at Robertson, standing at attention behind the king. He could only address a few nonsense gutturals to the black figure opposite, and frown heavily.

Kekeloganu seemed a little abashed, for he joined his palms together and put them to his forehead.

“You will forgive him, I know,” murmured{280} the half-petrified Leo to his hostess. “It is all meant for politeness.”

Mrs. Howard-Cox gave a wan smile. Her eye was a little wild, but her good manners seemed inclined to hold. Dulcibell’s handkerchief was at her face; and the parson, who was a jolly kind of man, seemed buffeted by some inward storm. Even through his own distress, Leo pitied Sylvia.

The episode was tided over—as all episodes, however desperate, finally are—and the entrée ran its course without disaster. Kekeloganu kept silence, devoting himself to his Poulet à la Marengo, and, though he held the bones in his fingers, he only did what a good many Europeans have done before him when dining alone off game. Leo insisted upon his helping of saddle of mutton being cut up for him, and the joint also passed in peace, though Kekeloganu occasionally leaned forward and addressed him with cryptic remarks, to which he merely bowed his head, making no reply.

It was when the ices appeared that matters came to a crisis. Kekeloganu seemed more at home with his spoon than with any other implement, and, scooping up a portion of the small pink mountain that had been set before him, he conveyed it carefully to his lips.

The spoon, with its load, had scarcely disappeared from sight, when, with a shout that made Leo’s blood run cold, the king leaped from his seat like a released spring and made for the butler, evidently believing that the unexpected chill in his mouth had been a practical joke prepared for him by the innocent man. Almost before the company could breathe, he had caught him by the collar, whilst he reached out with his free hand for some instrument of punishment. The only thing handy was the ice in its silver dish; but, as the proverb says, “the brave man never lacks a weapon,” and Kekeloganu, with grinding teeth and rolling eyes, began to plaster his victim’s face with it.

Mrs. Howard-Cox screamed aloud; her husband rose irresolute in his place; the{282} parson stepped purposefully forward. With despair in his heart Leo rushed at the struggling figures and tore them asunder. Then, retaining a firm hold upon Kekeloganu, whose frenzy of rage seemed to have abated and who was making piteous gestures of abasement, he addressed himself to Mrs. Cox, begging her to excuse his Majesty, as he found himself much upset, and to allow them both to retire. She made a speechless assent and the two visitors left the room together.

They entered the king’s bedroom, and Leo, trembling with anger, put his back to the door.

“Of all the ungrateful ruffians I’ve ever met, you are the worst!” he burst out. “I’m sick of you—I’m done with you altogether! Here am I, taking every risk to see you through this affair, and this is how you thank me! I tell you frankly, I’m tired of it; and the very moment they come out of the dining-room I’ll go downstairs and tell old Cox the whole truth!”

“Not you,” said Reggie. “You speak as if you were an innocent victim. Think of{283} the part you’ve played in it. Think of your letter!”

“I don’t care—I’ll chuck everything! By George, Reggie, my friendship for you is costing me dear!”

“You see, I had to make Mrs. Cox’s enmity cost her something,” said Reggie Smith thoughtfully.

“You may have to pay, too,” said the other. “That’s my only comfort. It’ll make that girl downstairs think twice before she marries such a blackguard.”

“I think I’ll go to bed,” he said. “It’s been a hard day to-day, and it may be a harder one to-morrow. One mustn’t overtax one’s strength.”

“Well,” he said; “if you’re not hanged before you’re a field officer, you’ll go far.”

The household met in gloom next morning. Leo’s attempt at smoothing over the occurrences of the previous night had been only tepidly successful, and the tone of Mrs. Howard-Cox’s voice, when she offered him tea or coffee from behind the urn, had given him to understand what she thought of him. His “most misleading letter” (as she had called it in the interview they had overnight) would, he knew, be a witness against him for evermore; and he remembered Dulcibell’s copper-coloured plait and sighed. The claims of friendship were heavy.

The author of the trouble was breakfasting upstairs. His train for the north left at eleven o’clock, and he had sent down to say that his devotions would keep him occupied till ten-thirty, it being his god’s birthday.

But, below stairs, unknown to any one, the forces of destruction were rolling up. Leo had made an abject apology to the butler, who, being an exceedingly good fellow, was touched by his distress at what had happened. Perhaps the reported lavishness of{285} royal tips had helped him to put last night’s dinner from his mind; in any case, he assured him that he bore no malice. But the cook, to whom he was engaged, felt differently. She was a brisk woman, with a mind of her own, and she had already told the kitchen-maid that she would stay no longer in a place “where cannibals was kept.” She was giving vent to her opinions in the kitchen, when the housemaid came in, holding an envelope in her hand.

“Just look what I found last evening in “’is Majesty’s’ room!” she said. “That impident valet of his, that looks as if ’e’d swallered the poker, don’t let me in more’n ’e can ’elp; but I slipped in when dinner was on, to get a look at the idol, and this is what I found, fallen down be’ind the toilet-table.”

She held out the envelope, which was addressed to “Reginald Smith, Esquire, Duke of Clarence’s Light Infantry.”

“You see,” continued the housemaid, “’e{286} got the boot from the old woman not long ago, and ’es paying her off. My! he’s a bold one!”

“Bold ’un or no bold ’un,” exclaimed the cook, who had turned purple, “’e may play off ’is jokes on the missus; but ’e’s not goin’ to rub respectable men’s noses in damson ice while I’m alive to prevent it! Give me that letter, Emma. As soon as breakfast’s cleared, upstairs it goes along o’ me. King, indeed! ’Ark to ’im, ’owlin’! I lay ’e’ll ’owl before I’m done with ’im!”

The carriage was at the door and Leo had gone upstairs to fetch Kekeloganu, and to superintend his farewells. The red carpet was out again, and the lawn a mass of bunting. Whatever Mrs. Howard-Cox might feel, she was not going to fall short of her duty, and her august visitor should lack nothing in the way of ceremony. It was due, not so much to him as to herself, and more than due to the editor of the local paper. The girls were summoned to be present in the hall, and Dulcibell, who had been out to the stable to feed her dog, was coming in through the back passages when she overtook the cook, hurrying in the same direction and holding a paper.

“Fine doings!” she almost shouted—“fine doings, Miss Dulcie! but I see through them, and your ma shall know it before the carriage leaves! I’ll catch ’im in the ’all!”

Dulcibell saw the envelope and her heart stood still; but only for a moment, for she was a girl of resource. They were passing an open doorway, and she suddenly thrust the cook through it with all her might, slammed the door, and turned the key.

The royal carriage had scarcely gone five minutes, when the two Misses Cox put on their hats and said that they were going for a walk; and, as soon as they were out of sight of the windows, they began to run. The Cedars stood a little way back from the road, and they made for a copse not far off. In it they found their bicycles, in charge of a maid. They mounted.

They flew along till, after a quarter of an hour’s hard riding, they neared a wayside railway station.

“Bell,” said Sylvia, “you’ve been a good sister to me, and I shall not forget it. I hate leaving you alone. I only wish I could be at home to stand by you when mother finds out.”

“But you can’t, my dear, so don’t worry,” replied Dulcibell, whose eyes looked rather wet.

Soon a puff of smoke was seen in the distance, and they went on to the platform.

“He can’t show just now because I’m in the middle of washing his head, but he’ll be clean by the time we get to York,” said Leo. “I’ve got the special licence in my pocket.”

He helped Sylvia into the saloon reserved for King Kekeloganu and the train started.

Leo Carlton hung out of the window, looking back at the figure standing on the platform. Like Sylvia, he hated leaving Dulcibell alone.

But though he was obliged to do so for the present, it was a matter that he put right a couple of years later.

BEHIND THE WALL

Friday evenings set Arthur Wickham free from the Government office in which his weeks were spent. By nature he was made for an active life, but circumstances had headed him off his natural path and tethered him to London. His friends—and he had a good many—said that golf had spoilt him; that they never saw him nowadays; that it was a great pity to be utterly engrossed, body and soul, in one pursuit, and all sorts of things that friends say when other people’s doings do not exactly match their own. But two days’ golf compensated him both for their opinions and for the loss of their company on Saturdays and Sundays.

The golf-course at Shorne was a good one, lying on the high ground which sloped up behind the town. The golfers could look down over the roofs of the huddled streets{290}—for Shorne was an ancient little place—to the curving beach, beside which modern hotels and lodgings were disfiguring the sea-wall. The town seemed to be drawing back in old-fashioned distinction from these second-rate attractions to the security of the hill from which the square tower of Shorne Church looked out towards the Romney Marshes.

The golf-course tramped weekly by Wickham had flung its chain of smooth putting-greens out among the humble farmhouses and woods which lie so close to the Kentish shore, and the players could see from their elevation the chalk-scarred downs on one hand, and the sea glittering towards Dungeness on the other. Wickham liked the place better every time he came to it. He had the happy temperament which is attracted by casual sights, and the gift of loitering; so he often strolled among the walled lanes and corners and under the ilex-avenue flanking the massiveness of the church, when the business of golf was over. Shorne was full of Georgian houses, and Wickham, who had a smattering of architectural knowledge, liked Georgian houses.

One evening, when he had sent his clubs back to the inn in the High Street, he whistled to his Aberdeen terrier, Skittles, and man and dog went strolling up towards the church. They took their way between the high garden-walls which enclose the older houses, and, having no special goal, they turned at random into any byway that happened to appeal to Wickham’s fancy. The little dog ran before his master, in the perpetual search for imaginary adventure common to his kind.

The sun of the late June afternoon fell upon just and unjust, upon root and foliage, upon brickwork and stem, and a late season had saved the greens of nature from losing their translucent quality as they sprang towards the blue above them. On either side of Wickham the high walls had a foreign air which translated him, mentally, into the suburbs of some French town. The one on his left was surmounted by a trellis which dripped with a fringe of wistaria; and, above this, he could see the tall head of an acacia-tree which seemed to grow somewhere near the centre of the garden.

To many minds there is no more suggestive sight than that of a door in a dead wall, and the young man stopped before the wooden one which broke the mellow expanse of masonry at his side. It was small and weather-stained and sunk a brick’s depth in the surface; and it was old enough to have gained expression, as inanimate things, not in constant use, will gain it with the lapse of time. The secrecy of its look was enhanced by the absence of both handle and key.

Wickham paused before it; he knew that he would like to peer through the empty key-hole, and he also knew that he would not do so. He smiled at himself as he moved away.

Some paces farther on, the wistaria-plant fell over the coping, down to the level of his shoulder, and he paused again to sniff at the trusses of mauve blossom with which it was loaded. As his face came in contact with the leaves, he saw that they covered a square cavity like an unglazed window. Prejudices are strange things; though the particular assortment owned by him had forbidden him the key-hole, they were silent as he peeped{293} between the stems. He pushed them aside with his fingers.

But, if he erred in his act, his punishment was swift. A few inches from his own, a pair of eyes on the inner side of the wall were set on him with an expression which made him start back. There was no movement in them; they looked fixedly out of a pale face as absolutely still as themselves. The presence of the unknown person made no rustle behind the wistaria, and if he or she—for Wickham had no impression of sex—were annoyed by his curiosity, there was neither sound nor sign to indicate the fact. He was not sure whether the eyes were blind, and the thought made him shudder, though there could be nothing to warrant his doing so, were his suspicion correct. He walked on hurriedly. Skittles was at the next corner, waiting to see which way his master would take.

He turned up towards the church, losing the disagreeable feeling produced in him by the little incident as he went along the terrace of ilex and up the steps into the churchyard. The blue sea lay beyond the town, and the crosses and monuments in their ordered rows{294} were beginning to throw long shadows on the grass. The place was empty but for an old man who was clipping a ragged yew-bush within the chain-railing which encompassed an ordinary round-topped tombstone. Wickham’s glance fell on the inscription as he passed it: “Ellen Swaysland, born 1808, died 1865.” He had never seen that sirname before.

He entered the great porch of the Norman church, bidding Skittles wait outside, and went to the door leading to the tower, for it had occurred to him that if he climbed it he would be able to see into the garden with the acacia-tree. Soon he was at the top of the stair, and, coming out upon the tower, he looked over the parapet. Skittles was mounting guard by his stick, and the clipping of shears came up to him from Ellen Swaysland’s grave. He was above the level of the ilex-trees; there was nothing to obstruct his view of the walled-in houses between himself and the High Street.

He found the one he wanted at once; a narrow-windowed brick house, with a steep roof and stone facings. To his surprise, it had the dead look of an uninhabited building,{295} and the lawn was under high grass. The acacia stood where he had expected to find it, and round its trunk were the remains of a circular seat. A weed-grown path ran the whole length of the lower wall by which he had lately passed, and he could see the hole which looked out on the lane. The wistaria hung round it on the inside also. It seemed to have been trained down purposely in that spot.

While he watched from his isolated height a woman came out of the house, and went quickly, with an odd, shuffling gait, into the alley of bushes running down one side of the garden. It was not only her walk that was strange; and Wickham’s lips parted in an astonishment which he could not have explained. He did not know whether it was her dress or her movements which seemed to him remarkable; but he leaned over the parapet to watch her emerge from the alley and go straight to the hole in the wall. He remained where he was, fascinated, as she stood, a black spot, in the same place, until the striking of the hour from the church reminded him of the futile nature of his{296} occupation. The man below had put away his shears, and Skittles, who had at last discovered his whereabouts, was shivering and whining as he gazed at the silhouette of his master’s head and shoulders dark against the sky. Wickham came down the tower-stair.

Perhaps it was his knowledge of what the woman’s eyes were like that made him endow her figure with some sinister quality. He went home to his inn, not sorry to be welcomed back to the commonplace of the company of his dog and the harmless gossip of a waiter to whom he was an established acquaintance.

Next day was Sunday, and again Wickham left the golf-course in the evening to return to the Crown; the early train on the morrow would take him to London in good time for his office-hour. He parted with various men he knew at the golf-house, for most of these stayed at the new hotel on the esplanade, in preference to the old-fashioned inn which had become a familiar haunt to him. He made, as usual, for the church, and thence down to the High Street; and where the lane between the garden-walls crossed his way he turned into it, impelled to pass once more by the{297} half-hidden aperture at which he had seen the strange eyes. But this time he did not wish to look through. He was not anxious to meet those eyes at such close quarters again.

He had almost reached the little wooden door farther on, when it opened and the woman in black stepped out into the road a few paces in front of him. There had been no sound of footsteps in the garden to give warning of her approach. She drew the door to behind her, turning for one moment to face the young man, and her look struck his soul again with the shock of a blow.

She was a middle-aged woman—almost old—the pallor of whose face was accentuated by the uncouth lines of a close bonnet; but all detail was lost on Wickham by reason of her eyes. He was only conscious of them and of the straight eyelids which cut the iris, lying on the upper half, as a band of cloud lies on the disc of the sinking sun. The still, dead malignity, emanating from beneath that level line, made him stop involuntarily and step back a pace from her. Her lips were drawn back, perhaps in a smile; but Wickham could not have told whether she smiled or{298} not. He realised nothing, neither then nor afterwards, but that stream of expression concentrated on him from the unfocussed pupils. He felt that there was nothing in it personal to himself, and that he merely stood, by hazard, in its way, as he might have stood in the way of a bull’s-eye lantern; but his horror was not lessened because of that. She turned away, and his wits were brought back by the fury of his dog, who had evidently been unprepared to see the figure emerge from the door.

Skittles’s tail was between his legs and his growls and barking filled the lane. Wickham was so much afraid that he would pursue the retreating woman, that he laid hold of his collar and did not let go till she had disappeared round the first corner, which led down to the town. He had reached the Crown before the little terrier had ceased to whine and protest. Skittles stopped, looking behind him at intervals the whole way down the High Street.

Chance brought Wickham back to Shorne the next week sooner than he expected; for{299} some repairs in his particular department of the office liberated the clerks on the following Thursday night. Friday morning found him once more in the train with his golf-clubs, and by luncheon-time he was sitting at his own table in the window of the Crown dining-room, looking into the huddle of old houses and new shops which formed the narrow High Street.

There was more movement going on than he ever remembered seeing in the little place; but those who caused it added nothing to the liveliness of the outlook. Some event had produced an outbreak of black-coated and tall-hatted men, as a spell of summer after cold weather will produce flies from hidden corners. All moved in one direction, and all had the air of rising consciously to an occasion. The explanation could only be a funeral.

“Mr. Swaysland, sir; solicitor, sir,” replied the man, whipping his napkin under his arm, and going to the window as though he expected to see the deceased in the street.

“Swaysland—Swaysland,” he repeated, looking through the waiter’s head. Then he remembered Ellen Swaysland’s tombstone, and the man with the shears clipping the yew-bush on her grave as he entered the church last week.

“No—no,” said Wickham. “I only noticed the name in the churchyard. I suppose they’re well-known people here?”

“Lor’, yes, sir; they’ve been here for more than a hundred years. Two houses here Mr. Swaysland had. One at the bottom of this street, and one between this and the church. But he lived in the small one down here, sir. He couldn’t abide to be in the other. He hadn’t gone inside the walls since Miss Ellen’s death—his half-sister, sir. Fine garden it has too.”

“You can’t see the house from the road, the walls is that high. Old Mr. Swaysland——”

“I’m sure I couldn’t say, sir,” replied the{301} waiter, looking puzzled. Like most indoor servants, he did not know one tree from another.

“But there’s a door at the bottom of the garden—a little wooden door?” continued Wickham. “When you turn the corner of the wall, coming this way, you go straight up to the church?”

The interest on Wickham’s face appeared to please his companion. He came close to the table, and laid his hand on the empty chair opposite to the young man.

“I expect you’ve heard something about it,” said he. “Well, I was born in this town, and I’ve seen Miss Ellen myself when I was a little brat of a boy. I’m a good bit older than you, sir, if I may take the liberty to say so.”

“Miss Ellen?” said Wickham. “I know nothing about Miss Ellen. I’ve never even heard the name Swaysland before.”

“Twenty years, sir, she lived there. She was thirty-seven when they put her in that house, and she was fifty-seven when they took her out of it to lay her in the churchyard.”

“How do you mean ‘put her in’?” asked Wickham, quickly. “Was she mad?”

“Ah! that’s what nobody knows. But old Swaysland said so, and that was good enough for the doctors and lawyers. Her being mad meant a fine bit of money to her half-brother, you see—Mr. Swaysland, that is.”

“They did—between them,” said the waiter. “She never came out of them walls again. There used to be a little square hole, a little place where she could see into the road, and she used to sit there looking out, day after day. That’s when I saw her, sir, when I was a boy.”

Wickham had laid down his knife and fork; he leaned across the table, drinking in every word.

“He never went into that house again after Miss Ellen’s death, Mr. Swaysland didn’t,” continued the man. “I was too young to understand anything about it when it happened, but I heard enough about it when I grew older. My father’s sister was a kind of a nurse hereabouts, before them ladies in the{303} white caps was invented (she’s gone, now, poor soul, too), and she was sent for to Miss Ellen. Many’s the time I’ve heard her telling mother about it. Mr. Swaysland come into the room the night the lady died, but he kept out of sight of the bed till the doctor thought she was going and beckoned to him. When he come close, Miss Ellen opened her eyes, and aunt used to say they were like the eyes of a serpent. ‘Richard,’ says she, looking at him (Mr. Swaysland’s name was Richard), ‘you can’t keep me here any longer, for I’m going. Some day,’ says she, ‘your turn ’ll come, as mine’s coming now, and when it does, I’ll fetch you. You’ve kept me here for twenty years,’ she says, ‘but you won’t be able to keep me back—not then. I’ll come for you.’ And she died, with her face turned to Mr. Swaysland. Here they are now, sir,” he added, looking down the street; “they’re obliged to go the longest way. The ’osses can’t get up the asphalted lanes to the church.”

But Wickham did not look out. He saw in his mind a stranger sight than that which occupied his companion; for he was standing again, in recollection, by the door in the wall.

“It was very sudden,” replied the waiter, who was now absorbed in the passing procession; “it was last Sunday evening about this time—a little earlier, perhaps.”

“People think of queer things sometimes,” he observed apologetically. “D’you know, sir, I’ve wondered two or three times since last Sunday whether the poor lady kept her word.”

“I think she did,” said he, with a curious smile; “and, what’s more, my dog thinks so too.”

‘KINGS’ CROWNS’

The widow Stevens’s white cottage stood a little back from a lane which went from Crishowell village towards the region of the Wye. Just after you passed the wicket leading to her door you came to a small stone bridge; and, because the brook ran strong under it, Ann Stevens’s dwelling was filled day and night with the rush of hurrying water. It was near the edge of the overhanging bank, high above the flow, and many floods had eaten away the earth which rose above the smooth channel of rock and boulder. A green tangle hung over it from the red soil, scrubby elder and whips of bramble, and, with its roots almost in the eddy, grew a bush of guelder-rose—not the ‘snowball-tree’ of gardens, but the wild viburnam, whose flat flower-heads have an outer circle of large ivory-coloured blossoms.

The brook, as it ran down from the Black Mountain, was flung like a trailing ribbon upon the green carpet of Crishowell parish, and lay here in open loops and festoons, and there in hidden places—now singing amongst rocks, and now drawing its length along meadows and by ancient willow-stumps. It had acquired a semi-human personality in the parish, because of the important part it played in the lives of the inhabitants.

Up above, in the widow’s garden, a few white stones bordered the crooked path to her door, between the red flowering currants whose hanging tassels were some of spring’s earliest comers, and inside the cottage the eight-day clock ticked away the time, year in, year out, adding its steady, remorseless voice to the more impetuous voice of the water. Together the two accentuated to Ann the changelessness of her days. Twenty years ago her son Tom had left her to enlist, and she had never heard of him since.

His return was always in her thoughts—a hope that, after many years of steadfast anticipation, was beginning at last to die a lingering death. He had not been a {307}satisfactory son; but Ann had ceased to think of that as season followed season and no word came of the young fellow who had disappeared into that vast unknown tract surrounding Crishowell parish, called the world.

Ann was a tall, gaunt old woman, bony and strong. She had a little money, inherited from a brother, and she had put by a little more, earned in her hardworking life. Occasionally she went out charing, employed by the farmers’ wives, but the main part of her time was now spent at home; and neighbours, passing down the lane, would look in over the currant-bushes and see her digging her garden, which was partly laid out in vegetables. These she sold in small quantities, when her own needs were supplied. She was something of a reader, too, this lean, hard-featured old widow, and in the evening she would light her blue-glass lamp—a gift from the parson—and, putting on her spectacles, would sit down with some borrowed book. She read whatever she was given with steady, solemn interest, which did not always depend on comprehension; and when her light was out, she would lie down on her bed in the{308} inner room, with the ceaseless rush of the brook in her ears and the measured beat of the clock. And sometimes she would dream of Tom.

It was on an evening of early summer that she started for home. She had been at work all day, cleaning and scrubbing, at a farm in the hilly region above Crishowell village. She was tired as she came slowly down one of the narrow lanes. Before her, that familiar noise, the rush of water, lay like a band across the road; for the brook, which had so many meanderings to accomplish ere it reached the gully beneath her home, crossed the path fifty yards farther on. As she descended towards it she had to pass a patch of grass under the hedge, and there, among the hazel scrub, was a small tilt set on the turf, with a newly made fire before it. A man was sitting beside it smoking, and a tall young woman stood, with her hands on her hips, watching the flame rise. She bid the widow good evening.

Ann stopped and set her unemotional, considering gaze upon the couple. She looked at them with the same conscientious interest{309} that she gave to her books, and there was no sign of what she gathered from her scrutiny on her face. She merely took stock of the scene. The man took his pipe from his teeth and spat. The woman came forward; this passer-by was not of the kind from which much could be expected, but she asked her for a copper.

“Come you,” said the young woman, with a half-laughing backward glance at her mate; “I’ll tell you your luck for a copper. Maybe there’s a rich man waitin’ for you.”

The man at the fire grinned, looking at the widow’s grey head and weather-beaten face, dull with years of patiently accepted toil; at her coarse clothes and the marks of creeping age which had obliterated sex.

Ann stood taking them in slowly, completely unconscious of veiled derision or of the acid humour of the young woman’s proposal. She neither refused nor accepted.

The tinker-woman took up her hand and turned it over; then, as she looked up into the widow’s eyes, a different expression came into her own.

Perhaps something of Ann’s solid strength had penetrated from them into her vagabond soul; perhaps in them she saw a dim ray from uncomprehended sources, from a light unknown to her own insolent youth. She ceased smiling.

“Your heart’s desire be to come to you with a crown in its hand,” she said.

Ann stood astonished. Then she turned away and went down to the brook. Before she got there it struck her that she should pay her debts. She retraced her steps, and put a halfpenny from her day’s earnings into the young woman’s hand.

The tinker-woman turned round and cursed him. But Ann heard neither of them, for she was crossing the rush of the brook.

Nearly a week had passed since the tinker-woman had spoken her careless words. The hot high-road, which ran alongside the Wye, was thick in its white dust, and the clear{311} pink of the dog-roses was smothered under a powdery veil cast upon the hedges. The distance, which had looked thick, too, was growing definite in the coolness, for the sun had been gone some time and the long twilight had etherealised the objects that flaunted all day.

The tread of a man’s feet was muffled in dust as he came shuffling along, a tall, stooping creature, surrounded by a furtive atmosphere made of the remembrance of many failures. Though he was not old, his hair was grizzled, and the lines of his neck had lost their firmness; this was the more conspicuous because there was nothing between them and the collar of his coat. He had neither shirt nor scarf, and one foot protruded from its boot. He was unlike the ordinary tramp in one particular, for, instead of plodding on with eyes fixed before him, he looked from side to side. Now and again he would stop, staring at the fields and at the rising slope of Radnorshire across the river.

When he came to a spot where a lane met the road he sat down. Farther up it stood the little stone bridge by which Ann Steven{312}s’s cottage was set above the water. He put his arms on his knees and laid his head on them. He was physically worn out and very thirsty. He thought of the brook up yonder, sliding dark and cool over the slippery channel of rock, of the scented leaves of the great walnut-tree growing by the bridge; and, as he raised his head and looked into the lane, he caught sight of the flat, white circles of the guelder-roses woven into the hedge. ‘Kings’ Crowns,’ he had called them in his childhood, he and the children who had seen them come out, year by year. There was a bush of them, he knew, standing with its feet almost in the water, below the bank under his mother’s house. He did not know whether she was alive or dead, and perhaps he did not greatly care, for everything was dulled to him now by the deadening influences of his life since he had deserted, years and years ago, as the roadside bushes were dulled by dust. Perhaps the sight of the ‘Kings’ Crowns’ penetrated a little through the veil, for these thornless things gave him a stab of pain. He neither liked them nor hated them, but they spoke, in spite of that.

He rose at last and shuffled up the lane. The water was luring him, for raging thirst had come on him since afternoon, though he now found himself shivering. He stopped where his way sloped gently down to the bridge. It all looked just as he had seen it in his mind whenever he had chosen to think of it, which was not often. The walnut-trunk was grey beside the low parapet, and its noble leaves made a green light overhead in the falling dusk.

It was dark among the rocks as he stopped by the water-side, and, across the dimness of the overhung channel, he could see the ‘Kings’ Crowns’ looking at him like pale faces. Under that bush he had often gone down on his hands and knees to drink when he was a boy, and it was in his mind that he must get to it; he walked across a shallow and laid hold of one of its lower branches. His knees shook so much that he clung to it to steady himself as he stooped.

Then he was conscious of nothing but a terrible giddiness that took him, as the slide and rush swept by, and the brook’s voice seemed to be raised in a deafening shout that stunned him, even before he fell, with one side of his body in the water.

The branch broke in his hand, leaving a starry circle of blossom clutched between his fingers.

And, just above the spot where he lay, Ann Stevens sat at her deal table with a book in front of her. It was the dry biography of an early nineteenth-century bishop, and, though the widow had pushed her way doggedly through the good man’s barren early years to his ordination, she had wearied of it. The calm of her mind had been assailed by the tinker-woman’s speech, and she had found it hard, since its utterance, to concentrate her mind upon anything.

There was only one interpretation to “her heart’s desire,” and the overlying soil of patience deposited by time had been stirred by the bold vagrant-girl’s words. She attached no importance to them, while the preposterous image of the crown in poor Tom’s hand made{315} them a mockery. But she was disturbed, and her hard-won endurance was shaken.

It was characteristic of her to plough on with her reading, though she got so little joy of it; and it was her failure to persevere which now brought the slow tears; for overladen humanity is so curious a thing that it will bear up under the burden which breaks its back, only to weep at last for some childish triviality that takes it unawares. Ann had not wept twice in the last ten years, but, as she shut her book, a sob escaped her.

Consciously or unconsciously, it had come to be the pivot of her life—the hold she had on herself. It was a dreadful thing to lose it. It unnerved her so cruelly that she went to the inner room and sank down, dressed, as she was, on the bed, with her knotted hands clasped on her chest; she would make a determined effort to compose herself. She lay stifling her sobs, until her spirit wearied with its struggle and she dozed, losing consciousness of the familiar surroundings, one by one.

Suddenly she sat up with a great start and looked with bewildered eyes into the dimness.{316} The knowledge of some presence in it had come to her through her sleep, imperatively and sharply. The place was empty, but she rose, half dazed still, and stumbled into the other room. That was empty too, but she could not understand the turmoil in her soul, and, driven by it, she ran out.

Ever afterwards, as she thought about it, she wondered at herself, for she went straight to the edge of the overhanging bank and peered down into the brook’s bed. Beneath her, in the darkness, standing up like the pale lights of a seven-branched candlestick, were the ‘Kings’ Crowns.’

Something dark lay between their roots and the water, and the sight of its human outline called the old woman back from the illusive borderland in which she had been wandering since she awoke. Having satisfied herself that it was a fellow creature who lay on the rocks of the channel, she began to descend by a cleft in the bank which had once been cut in rough steps to the floor. She reached the bottom, stepped past the ghostly guelder-roses, and, kneeling down, looked into the face of the unconscious man.

Summer was ended, and Ann Stevens was on her way to the hill farm once more. A day’s earnings were more necessary to her now than before; for there was another mouth to feed and the doctor to pay. Tom lay in the inner room, making his slow recovery, for the low fever, brought on by exhaustion and starvation and the time he had lain in the damp of evening, half in and half out of the brook, had left him. Soon he would be able to rise and do his share and already an odd job or two had been promised to him. The bishop’s biography had been returned, unfinished.

As Ann passed the grassy place where she had met the vagrant couple, she stopped to look at the charred black mark of their fire.

“True it were, too,” she said, half aloud. “He had a ‘King’s Crown’ in his hand.”

THE FRINGE OF THE JUNGLE

We sat together outside our tents, Ewald and I, looking across the broken country that lies on the confines of the Bhilsa jungle. The sun had only just begun to decline, and Ewald had been busy all day with his maps and his writing. The little tent in which he did his office-work was being taken down and packed up, for we were to move on at daybreak on the following morning.

Ewald was a tall, spare, sunburnt man, an excellent shot; one of that vast crowd of ungregarious bachelors who serve India in her solitary places, and who lie down to rest on most nights of the year with a piece of canvas between themselves and the stars. It had been a busy day with him, and I, who was on leave and had joined him just before midday, had spent the afternoon half asleep{319} on a charpoy under the great banyan that sheltered our camp. We hoped for some shooting when we should get further into the jungle.

The camp was pitched in a hollow of the hillside, where a few square yards of even ground surrounded the banyan, and from it we looked down over the dry scrub and brown grass. Below us the tiny travellers’ bungalow with its thatched roof made a white spot in the untenanted stretch, and beyond it lay Kodria village, revealing its presence only by an occasional throbbing of tom-toms and a bit of mud wall visible under the round mass of its mango-trees. Here and there, in the expanse of scrub, the dhâk bushes were beginning to show themselves like pointing, red hands sticking up in the rustling waste.

I had been thinking of many things as I sat waiting for Ewald; for we were at the end of March, and to those who have lived through many changes of season in India the flowering of the dhâk will suggest more than the mere outbreak of claw-like scarlet blossom. They know that this flame, beginning to pierce like a tongue of fire through{320} the tinder-brown jungle, tells that the Hôli, the spring festival of the Hindoos, is at hand, and that, its rioting and debauchery once over and its emblems burnt outside the villages, the hot weather, which all through the stifling days of the feast has lain like a tiger waiting to spring, will have the world in its fell grip. To Europe, the words ‘hot weather’ stand for very little, conjuring up, maybe, some vision of oppressive skies, langour and white umbrellas; to Asia, they mean anything between a time of discomfort and tension, which to be even dimly understood must be endured, and a three months’ fight with death. For with the flowering of the dhâk the shrill pipes of the East are playing up for tragedy, and the European, riding home in the evening under a low, hot moon, hears the crickets’ intrusive and throbbing chorus in the darkness of the wayside trees crying to every British subject that the time is at hand when he must take up his little corner of the Empire’s burden and stand up with it. Then the flight of women and children to the hills begins, and the furnace doors close down upon those who are left.

Some men spend years in India and never feel its curious influences. So many human beings carry with them an impenetrable atmosphere through which nothing from outside seems able to reach them; but the country had laid its stealthy hand upon me, and at the beginning of the hot weather it always lay heavy. It was to me as if the obscene yearly riot of the Hôli let loose the forces of darkness to stalk the land in the time of stress that was coming, and that the live ember of the dhâk—the flame of the jungle, as it is called—was their forerunner. To natives, too, the associations of the dhâk blossom are sinister. In years when it is luxuriant the wiseacres of bazaar and village say that no good will come of those red fires burning in the country round. Sitting under the local peepul-tree in the evenings before the hot weather begins, when the air is heavy and vibrating with the muffled voice of the tom-tom and the dust hangs over the homeward-bound flocks of goats, they tell each other that they are a pressage of cholera. And, beyond these forebodings, the tree is sacred in their eyes, because the three divisions{322} of the leaf represent the Hindoo trinity of Birth, Life, and Death—Brama, Vishnu, and Siva. In essence the dhâk belongs to Siva, for its whole leaf is an emblem of the trident in the hand of the Great God—that God whose attribute is destruction; who waits among the shadows of every temple and village, every grove and cantonment, and who, as the heavy days draw near, is more surely than ever standing out there among the stretches of burnt grass, but whose meaning is not death alone, but Life-through-Death.

I was full of these thoughts as Ewald came out of his tent, and dropped into the camp chair which his servant had set for him.

“Well?” said he, as he stretched out his long legs, “you look solemn enough. What is it?”

“Solemn, do you call it?” said he, screwing up his eyes in a way peculiar to him.

“That’s the wrong word, but it’s difficult to find the right one,” I replied.

“With me its association, no doubt,” said he. “The strangest thing I ever knew of happened here—just over that rise and the bare bit of rock yonder. The dhâk is coming out, too. I remember that it was coming out then.”

He pointed to a ridge that broke the undergrowth about half a mile away. The red trees were starting up thick in its neighbourhood. My eye followed his hand, but I said nothing, because Ewald—the thorough Ewald—was a man who saw a subject through to the end if he began it, and there was no need for me to ask for the history I wanted to hear.

“I know this bit of the world pretty well,” he went on, “for this is the half-dozenth time I have been here, I should think. Down yonder, towards the jungle, the line runs up to Gwalior. You wouldn’t fancy, would you, looking down from this camp, that there was such a thing within fifty miles? But, just there, is a great nullah{324} dividing the country, and the permanent way runs over it. The viaduct is constantly under repair. It’s a difficult place, for a lot of reasons you wouldn’t understand unless you were in the trade, and I suppose there are seldom six consecutive months in the year when it’s not being tinkered at. It’s a kind of byword among engineers, the Lal Nullah viaduct. When you get over that bare ridge there’s a miniature ravine, a natural formation no bigger than a cutting, and if you go through it you take the shortest possible cut from Kodria to the viaduct.

“The very first bit of jungle I saw anything of when I came out, as a youngster, twenty years ago, was this one. I had a cousin in the police, and before I settled down into harness I got leave to spend a week with him, and I had no sooner arrived than he was sent hot-foot over here, and we camped in this very spot we are sitting on now. Beyond Kodria there is a little insignificant village, a miserable nest of hovels crowded together round a Mohammedan musjid, and in it lived a man called Waly {325}Gafur. He was an oldish man, a peaceable-looking individual, I believe—I never saw him—but with a reputation that covered more miles than he had ever travelled in his life.

“There were horrid stories of his treatment of his children that had leaked through even to British ears, and in the district round the natives gave him credit for supernatural powers, as they give it to all sorts of uncommon objects, animate and inanimate. People went about in terror of him. There was a potter he was supposed to have murdered, and an ugly story of a woman found brutally mauled and lying in a patch of sugar-cane, who accused him with her last breath—not that that goes for much with these people! The odd thing was that his motive did not seem to be robbery, but a mere devilish love of slaughter. He used to be absent from his village for days at a time, and nobody had a notion where he went. Well, to cut it short, Government grew tired of Waly Gafur, and when a fresh murder was reported, though nothing had been definitely brought home to the man, Bob, my cousin, was sent up here to investigate matters, and I came with him. It{326} seemed to me a great chance of seeing more of the country than is visible from a British cantonment.

“Bob had got hold of a certain amount of evidence, and he began a systematic search of the district, for Waly Gafur had disappeared as usual. I stayed up here in the camp. Bob would have no encumbrances, he said, when he was out for blood. At last he got upon his tracks, and for three days he seemed to be hunting him round in a circle. He could not make out who the man’s accomplice in his flight was, but it was evident, so he told me afterwards, that there was some one helping Waly Gafur.

“Well, the end of it was that, after all his doublings and twistings, he found him in a hut in Kodria village, and I suppose the only reason he ever found him at all was the fact that he was dying. No doubt he had been lying up in nullahs and pestiferous places, for he was in the last stages of fever, and had a wound in his head which his last victim, a native soldier at home on furlough, had evidently given him.

“Bob sent a message to tell me the news, and I set off at once to meet him. I found him under the mangoes at Kodria, talking to the headman. The whole neighbourhood appeared to be collected round them, and inside one of the mud huts Waly Gafur lay dying. It had been impossible to move him, he was so far gone. He had escaped Bob many times, and now he was going to do so again. To my raw European mind it was the most curious scene, and it struck me then, as I suppose it has struck every soul who has ever come out to this country, how impossible it would be to give the stay-at-home Briton the faintest idea of what India is like. It was all so strange to me: the mighty tree-shadows, cut sharp on the pervading dust-colour, the acrid smell, the incessant noise of native talk; the skulking yellow pariah dogs and the black spots of the kites wheeling far above; the ubiquitous tom-tom that accompanies every incident in life, every breath of the swarming native world; and Bob, standing there in his shabby khaki and frayed putties, as much an embodiment {328}of the Empire as if he were in gold-laced uniform and stiff with medals and orders!

“I had scarcely got off my pony when a native policeman came out of the hut to say that the prisoner was dead. So Bob went in to see the body, and then we left Kodria, for he had reports to write and he was longing to get back to some sort of comfort. We left the policeman in the village, and we had a pleasant evening together—my last with him, for I had to return to Bombay next morning; and before it was light I set off on my ride to the nearest point at which I could pick up the south-bound Bombay mail.

“I must say that my work seemed dull to me after Bob’s kind of life, but I settled down to it, knowing that I had my own way to make, and that I had better begin on it in earnest. I was a good deal interested when I got a letter from him telling me that Waly Gafur’s body had been taken away mysteriously, and that no one knew what had become of it or who had removed it from the hut. Since the man was undoubtedly dead, it did not matter much. He finished{329} up with the time-honoured remark that India was a rum place, and I certainly agreed with him.

“It seems odd, but I’ve never seen Bob from that day to this. He fell ill not long after and was invalided home, where he married, and I stayed out here, knocking about from place to place. I ground away, and time went by, and at last, about seven years afterwards, the Lal Nullah viaduct behaved worse than usual, and I and a man called Rollo were sent up to put it right.

“Nobody cared much about coming up to the Lal Nullah, but I was rather glad to be going with Rollo. He was a man every one had a good word for. He was very clever at his work, excellent company, good-looking and good-hearted. Natives liked him and worked well for him, his colleagues praised him; everywhere it was the same story. I thought myself lucky to be his understrapper, though I had never set eyes on him.

“We met on the platform at Ujjain and came up here together. He was a well-set-up, clear-eyed fellow, with a manner that made one feel at home with him at once, and a{330} laugh that nobody could resist; and I thought, as I took stock of him, that, so far as all but money was concerned, he must have been born with a silver spoon in his mouth. His look of good health, good luck, and good character, too, was exhilarating. His bearer had been with him for years, and seemed devoted to him. By the time we had reached the little bungalow down there I felt as if I had known him all my life. He took possession of it, for he had a lot of writing to do, and he needed more elbow-room than one gets in a tent. So, as one of us had to be on the spot, I pitched a little camp on the nullah bank near the viaduct.

“It was pretty hot, for the weather was stoking up, and Rollo used to come down to the nullah early, returning to do his office work just before midday. We dined in the bungalow and spent our evenings in the verandah. Among his other gifts Rollo could play the sitar quite wonderfully, for he had learnt it from one of the queerest of his great host of friends, a travelling sadhu—an awful scoundrel, I believe—who used to go about to the native fairs in Central India. It was{331} funny to hear his European voice singing with all the native semitones to the twanging strings.

“We had only been a few days at our work when I began to modify my opinion of Rollo. The good temper I had heard so much about seemed to be an insecure quality when one came to live with him. There were times when he would come down to the camp looking like a thundercloud, and for the whole morning life anywhere near him would be a penance. Nothing that anybody did was right. He would answer me when I spoke, and that was all, and he generally did it in a way that made my blood boil. A perfect devil of ill-temper sat in his eyes, and he cursed and swore at the coolies till I hated to listen to him. I had heard so much of his admirable way of dealing with them, that I was astonished beyond measure, and I began to suspect that the man was ill, for the hot weather was coming on, and I fancied he might be exposing himself too much to the sun. What put it into my head was the fact that when he rode from the bungalow to the nullah instead of walking he seemed{332} quite like himself—like the self I had met at Ujjain. One day I suggested to him that it was getting too hot to go on foot, even at that hour of the morning, and I was told, with a look of sullen rage, to mind my own business and to go to a very much hotter place than the Bhilsa jungle. I was furious, and I was grieved too, for I had liked him so much.

“One day I saw him thrash a coolee with his Nilgherri cane, and I wondered how he had the face to do such a thing after the opinion he had expressed to me on the way up about those who struck natives. To complicate matters, our gang was beginning to desert, and I thought that if we went on at this rate we should never have done with that blessed viaduct. Sometimes, in wild moments, I vowed to myself that I would wire, asking to be relieved, though I knew in my heart that it would be a suicidal thing to do. I couldn’t afford it. I couldn’t give health as a reason, for I never was fitter, and if I spoke the truth no one would believe me. I should be told that, if I couldn’t get on with Rollo, I wasn’t likely to be able to{333} get on with anybody else. And even yet there was something about him that would have kept me from complaining of him had there been a chance of being believed. I could not quite forget him as he had been.

“I longed to take counsel with his bearer, but I couldn’t bring myself to speak my mind about the white man to the black one; besides which, it looked to me as if the decent old Hindoo was as much puzzled as myself. Often and often I saw his looking at his master with an expression of bewildered dismay. The only thing that made Rollo endurable was that, in a couple of hours after his arrival at the nullah, that black obsession of his would begin to wear off, and by the time his pony came for him (he always rode home) he was almost right. He was moody, certainly, and dull all the evening, and he played the sitar no more; but it was possible to get on with him. At last I made up my mind that the poor devil was going mad.

“One afternoon, when Rollo had gone, the bearer appeared in the camp and approached me with many salaams. Poor old boy, he{334} looked the picture of misery, and, seeing that he had something to say, I beckoned him into the tent.

“‘And what is the matter?’ I asked, for I was determined he should speak first. ‘Has he fever? Is he in bed? He was here all the morning.’

“The sahib has seen what I see,’ he replied. ‘I have known that many days. The sahib knows what I know.’

“There was no good in beating about the bush, so I motioned him to go on. I listened, silent, to the long recital of Rollo’s virtues; I heard of the years they had lived together, of the services rendered, of the journeys taken, and finally of the dreadful change that had befallen Rollo since he had come to this evil place. There were devils here, certainly, said Sakaram, as it was well known there were in all jungles, but these were the most powerful of all. They were so powerful that not an{335} hour since they had caused the sahib to beat his servant. The old chap rolled back his sleeve and showed me a long, reddish bruise upon his brown skin.

“‘Never has he done this!’ he cried. ‘Not when, in an accursed moment, I slept when I should have waked, and so left him in his bed; and lo! when he rose and rode to the station like a mad one, the train was gone. To me it was no harm, for was it not but a day, and would not the sun rise as surely on the morrow as it had set at night? But the sahib-log do not consider these things, I know. Yet he smote me not; but now——’

“‘It is not for this that I weep,’ he continued, ‘but that these devils will kill him, and he will certainly die. Ai! Ai!’

“‘Sakaram, have you noticed that by evening the sahib is well, and that the evil goes from him before he lies down?’ said I.

“‘I have seen it,’ he said. ‘He goes forth in the morning like my own sahib, and he returns to the bungalow at noon without compassion and without reason.’

“Well, finally I settled to get up before it was light and go to the bungalow, for I was determined to see what could possibly occur in the morning to upset Rollo. Sakaram besought me to write to some one who could recall him—to do anything I could to get his master away; but I did not imagine, as he did, that Rollo would die, and I meant to find out something more before taking such a step. I dismissed him at last, telling him I should arrive early. He was a little comforted, but not much.

“As I entered the verandah next day, according to my promise, I heard Rollo whistling as he dressed, and, when he came out and found me, he gave me a friendly nod.

“‘Hullo,’ said he, ‘you’re out early. Nothing wrong down there, I hope?’

“Sakaram appeared, bringing his matches and cigarette-case. His salaam to me was{337} as impassive as if he had never seen me before.

“We stepped out into the increasing sunlight. The morning shadows were long, and the world that would soon be a clay-coloured furnace was fresh and clean. Rollo looked tired and worn, but he talked cheerily as we went along the sandy track leading to the Lal Nullah.

“‘It’s a longer way than one thinks,’ said I; ‘the path takes such an enormous left-hand loop round all that undergrowth.’

“He pointed to the bare ridge which was sticking up in front of us to the right.

“‘You can hardly ride that way,’ he went on. ‘It’s too bad even for a country-bred pony. The path pays you better, though this cuts off a good half-mile.’

“As he spoke he turned in through a division in the bushes, and we came out on the backbone of slippery rock which ascended to the ridge. There were worn places in it that showed how much it had once been used—ancient, permanent marks, not recent{338} ones. The inhabitants of Kodria and the villages beyond the bungalow had evidently taken the direct line to the nullah long before the railway was built. It was only the thinness of the upper soil on the stone that had kept the old path from being swallowed by the jungle growth, but the track was now so brown and bare that it was as easy to see as the one we had left.

“From the top of the rise we went down into a narrow cleft about a hundred yards long. On either side the banks were covered with scrub. On our left the matted growth had formed itself into a great hump, and above it was one of those bare trees which stand like deserted skeletons in the jungle land, white and solitary. The spot was cut off from its surroundings by the rock. As we entered the cleft, I was struck with violent instinctive aversion for the place. It was so obvious to me that I hurried on in advance of Rollo, and stood, when I reached the other end, looking round and waiting for him to come up.

“I was just going to say something, when I saw his face, and was shocked. He was{339} talking to himself—or I suppose he was, for his lips were moving, though I heard nothing. Then he stopped and looked back, as if some other man were behind us.

“‘What are you standing there staring at me for?’ he yelled, as he came up. ‘Get on, get out of my way, you fool!’

“He stood for a moment pouring abuse and blasphemy upon me, and then he shouldered past, pushing up against me as though it was all he could do not to strike me.

“I said nothing, though I was shaking with anger, for I saw that he was beyond reasoning with, and that one word from me might be the beginning of some hateful, irreparable quarrel. One might as well reason with a madman. He strode on in front without noticing me again, and I followed, marvelling and sick at heart. He made me think of a noble animal demented and urged to destruction by some baser force. It was horrible! When we reached the camp, I went into my tent, and he continued his way down the nullah to where the work was going on. I could foresee that we should have more desertions that day.

“I sat on my bed racking my brains. At last I had made one discovery. It was quite plain that whatever insanity or evil sprung on Rollo overtook him in the cleft among the rocks. I had almost seen it happen, and two things proved to me that its occurrence in that particular spot was no mere chance: first, Sakaram had told me how his master would leave in the morning ‘like his own sahib,’ while I, waiting for him at the camp, would see him arrive like Satan himself; secondly, both the bearer and I had noticed that when he rode all was well. And Rollo had told me that he always took the short cut on foot. For some unknown reason it was his passage through that place that did the mischief.

“In any case something had to be done. The whole affair was beyond my comprehension, but I made up my mind that he must be got away, for I began to believe, with Sakaram, that if things went on like this he would die. I had seen such an awful expression on his face when he barged up against me at the end of that loathsome by-track. Nobody could receive a shock that{341} could make him look like that on four days out of the seven without suffering—permanently. I began to think what I should say in my report. I should have to put it down to the sun, and to represent Rollo as becoming seriously ill. Yet, if he were recalled, he might return to Ajmere perfectly well, so far as bodily health went. I couldn’t give an exact account of what was happening without drawing censure and ridicule on myself, and probably my report would have no effect, and Rollo would remain where he was. But I decided to write without delay, and I only prayed that some catastrophe might not happen before the letter could reach headquarters.

“I did not go up to fetch him next day, knowing that if I did he would walk to the nullah with me. He had looked worn out overnight, and had said he would ride, for which I was truly thankful. I wondered whether he had the least recollection of what had happened in the morning; he had never yet, in the quiet evenings we spent together, made any apology for his extraordinary conduct, or for the outrageous things he had said{342} to me. He always seemed quite oblivious of anything having gone wrong in the day. And yet he had looked behind him in that strange manner as we came through that hateful little place! Whatever he saw there, how could he forget it? It was beyond me.

“I was listening for his pony’s tread when a man came running towards me. It was Rollo’s dog-boy, whom he had brought with him from Ajmere to be useful in camp. His pagaree had come untwisted and streamed out as he ran, a dirty, brick-red rag. He flung himself on his face at my feet. He had to wait till he found breath enough to speak, and when he did, he raised such an outcry that the camp began to fill with black figures from the nullah.

“The sahib was dead! The sahib lay dead in the jungle! He was killed. He was a great sahib, a strong sahib; but he was killed, and he, Budloo, had escaped by a miracle!

“I seized the frantic man, and tried to get something coherent out of him, shaking him, and demanding where Rollo lay, and who had killed him, and how; and I dragged{343} from him that Rollo had walked, sending him forward with a box of mathematical instruments. He had departed, thinking no evil, and seeing the sahib following afar off. But he had made haste, and when he was not very far from the camp he had looked and seen the sahib approaching by an evil road. The sahib did not know it was a bad place, but he knew, for a village man had told him. Before he could cry to him to hasten, the sahib turned and smote the air, struggling as though he were fighting with some badmash. He had fought terribly, though there was no man to be seen. The sahib was a strong man, a great man—where was there a stronger? But he had fallen. Had he not seen him fall as he stood at the joining of the ways? Then he had run, for he was afraid.

“I had some difficulty in getting any one to go with me, the effect of the dog-boy’s story upon the men was so great. But my servant and three of the boldest spirits followed as I ran to the place where Rollo had dropped. The dog-boy refused to move. This time he might not escape, he explained,{344} and he was a poor man. All his family were poor. Why should he die? Even now I told myself that Rollo, who was already affected by the sun, had had a sunstroke.

“He was not dead. He lay unconscious, half-way through that cursed cleft. The skeleton tree held up its dry, white arms against the baking sky, and the lump of tangled, withered scrub was like a cushion at its feet. He was not twenty paces from it. The sandy track on which he lay was marked and trampled round him, but the prints of his own boots were half obliterated by other marks that I could not make out. They were not the tracks of any beast I knew, nor were they quite like those of a man. They were at the side nearest to the tree. I could not stay to examine them, for Rollo could not be left in his unconscious state to lie in that fiery heat that struck from the rocks as if from the walls of an oven. We raised him up, I and my servant, while two of the coolies held my coat over his head for shelter as we went. The third had fled at the entrance to the cleft.

“For more than a week old Sakaram and{345} I nursed Rollo in the white bungalow down there. I managed to get a doctor from Jhansi to come out to us for a couple of days. He was a dull man, and not best pleased at being sent out into the Bhilsa jungle in the heat. He called the case ‘sunstroke,’ but he admitted that it was not quite like most of the sunstroke cases he had seen. He added the comprehensive word ‘shock,’ which covered everything, and left as soon as he could, thankful to see the last of us, and to turn his face once more to civilisation. I was glad to see the last of him, too, for his only merit in my eyes was that he had assured me that the patient was perfectly sane. I made no confidences to him. Rollo was recovering, and that was all that mattered.

“One night I sat alone in the verandah. Rollo was asleep inside the bungalow, and I had slept there every night since his illness. In a few days he would be up. The full moon was high, and the sharp white light brought out every detail of the country. It was as clear as day. The jungle lay in a black line, and a faint tom-toming came from the Lal Nullah. The only other sound was{346} the bearer’s voice talking on and on to some one in the verandah at the other side of the house.

“There was nobody living in it besides myself, Sakaram, and Rollo, so I went into my room, and peeped through the chick to see who the stranger was. Just below the window, squatting on his heels by the old man, was a tall young sadhu, with a twist of saffron loin-cloth about his waist. The grey ash smeared on his face and body made him look like a corpse in the strong moonlight. His long hair was heaped in a lump on the top of his head, and plastered with clay; his thin beard wagged as he talked, and his iron tongs and bowl glittered on the verandah floor as the moon touched them. He wore the half-sinister, half-detached expression, that mixture of the snake, the somnambulist, and the graven image that belongs to none but his like. I knew him for an unmitigated ruffian, and it annoyed me to see the touch of deference in the worthy old bearer’s manner. But what he was saying attracted my attention.

“‘I have heard of this sahib, for I know{347} him who taught him wisdom in the making of music,’ said he.

“‘And thou sayest that he was first made mad and pursued of devils?’ he continued.

“‘It is true, Maharaj. His friend, the other sahib, knows it even as I do.’

“‘Then there is another sahib?’ asked the sadhu, with the wanton, vagabond curiosity that will wander down any side-issue; ‘what manner of man is he?’

“‘If the sahib in his foolishness had not walked in the accursed place he had been well now. The blame is his,’ said the sadhu.

“‘Then this jungle is accursed?’ faltered Sakaram, edging nearer to his companion.

“‘I said not so. But the spot where he fell is an accursed spot. It is there that the murderer, Waly Gafur, is buried. He lies under the white tree that has arms like a man.’

“I stepped out through the chick. Sakaram sprang to his feet with a cry. The sadhu rose more slowly; he looked sideways at me and began to sing softly on two or three notes in a nasal minor. It was the perfection of insolence. I should have liked to kick him, but I did not want to drive him away. I had some use for him now.

“‘Tell this man to go,’ said I to Sakaram; ‘but tell him if he comes back in the morning a reward shall be his.’

“Next day the sadhu came, and he and I took the road to the ridge together. I made him walk in front of me, for I’d no mind to have a character of his sort treading close upon my heels. His supple grey body slipped through the flaming dhâk bushes, and we soon stood looking down into the cleft. It was easy to see he had some misgivings.

“I turned back my coat and showed him the revolver in its leather case that hung at my belt.

“‘Show me the spot, and there is reward,’ I said. ‘Show it not, and I shall know that thou hast lied, and there will be reward of another kind.’ I tapped my belt.

“He went up to the tangled lump at the foot of the bare tree and tore the twigs and matted grass apart; then he beckoned to me, holding the rent open.

“I looked in, and there, choked and hidden, smothered by the growth, was the remains of a crumbling Mohammedan tomb that had once been whitewashed. The clay it was built of broke asunder in clods under his hands, for only the matted stuff held it together.

“‘I spoke truth,’ said he; and again the insolence in him swam up into his face, like a submerged creature swimming to the surface of a still pond.

“Having seen all I wanted, I held out a little heap of silver. He came near, and I dropped the coins one by one into his palm. I think he would have liked to demand more, but perhaps the presence of that companion at my belt dissuaded him.

“I hated to think that I had bargained{350} with one who looked like the very embodiment of the world’s age-long wickedness, but I felt I had left the ordinary respectable conditions of life somewhere far outside the Bhilsa jungle and this plague-spot of a place.

“He climbed the track, and stood a moment against the sky, turning his head back over his shoulder towards me. He was singing again in his nasal minor. I drew the pistol from its case, but before it was out he had vanished. I went up and stood on the spot where he had been, and I saw a kind of ripple running along the bushes as he passed through them, like the movement made on water by a shark’s fin, but no more.

“One still night very soon afterwards I returned to the ridge. Rollo had been sitting up in the verandah, and next day he was to leave for a hill-station. Another man was coming in his place. The moon was still brilliant, though she was on the wane. I was smoking, and when my cigarette was half finished I ran down between the rocks and threw it into the matted covering that had woven itself round Waly Gafur’s bones. Then I stepped back and waited till the{351} crawling flame began its work. It shot up suddenly, showing the broken outline of the hidden tomb. There was not a breath of wind down here in this accursed cleft, and I was certain that the flame would not spread beyond it. But, in any case, I was going to risk it. It makes me shudder now to think of the mad thing I did. But that tomb had to go.

“‘Just look at that light!’ exclaimed he. ‘What can it be? Good Lord! I hope the grass doesn’t catch.’

“We stood gazing at it. All at once the flames shot up, and the top boughs of the bare tree, which could just be seen from the bungalow, rose, white and gaunt, in the blaze.

“‘Being ill plays the devil with your nerves,’ said he. ‘I can hardly bear to look at that thing.’”

Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:

galabiyech=> galabiyeh {pg 120}

galubiyeh=> galabiyeh {pg 132}

which seemed to to him=> which seemed to him {pg 295}

	PAGE
The Fortune-Hunters	1
Léonie	101
The Black Man’s Hand	134
Providence and Colonel Dormer	152
The Wythan Tree	181
Other People’s Gods	197
The Lights of Jerusalem	220
The Windmill	238
The Buckingham Gallery	252
The Claims of Friendship	263
Behind the Wall	289
‘Kings’ Crowns’	305
The Fringe of the Jungle	318