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Title: Prisoners
       Fast Bound In Misery And Iron

Author: Mary Cholmondeley

Release Date: July 16, 2006 [EBook #18834]

Language: English

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[Illustration: "HER EYES TURNED TOWARDS IT MECHANICALLY BECAUSE IT
CONTAINED ... THE MAN OF WHOM SHE WAS THINKING"]




PRISONERS

FAST BOUND IN MISERY AND IRON

By

MARY CHOLMONDELEY

_Author of_

"Red Pottage"


"But for failing of love on our
part, therefore is all our travail."

--JULIAN OF NORWICH.


DODD, MEAD & COMPANY
NEW YORK MCMVI

Copyright, 1905, 1906, by

COLVER PUBLISHING COMPANY

Copyright, 1906, by

MARY CHOLMONDELEY

_Published, September, 1906_




To
My Brother
Reginald





ILLUSTRATIONS


"Her eyes turned towards it mechanically
because it contained ... the man of
whom she was thinking"                       _Frontispiece_

"A deathlike silence followed the _delegato's_
words"                                         _Page_ 36

"'Is she worth it?' he said with sudden
passion"                                          "   46

"'You are all blinder one than the other, that
it's Andrea I'm grieving for'"                    "   80

"If Fay had come in then he would have killed
her, done her to death with the chains he
had worn so patiently for her sake"               "  146

"Fay noticed for the first time how lightly
Wentworth walked, how square his shoulders
were"                                             "  184




CHAPTER I

    Grim Fate was tender, contemplating you,
      And fairies brought their offerings at your birth;
    You take the rose-leaf pathway as your due,
      Your rightful meed the choicest gifts of earth.

    --ARTHUR C. LEGGE.


Fay stood on her balcony, and looked over the ilexes of her villa at
Frascati; out across the grey-green of the Campagna to the little
compressed city which goes by the great name of Rome.

How small it looked, what a huddled speck with a bubble dome, to be
represented by so stupendous a name!

She gazed at it without seeing it. Her eyes turned towards it
mechanically because it contained somewhere within its narrow precincts
the man of whom she was thinking, of whom she was always thinking.

It was easy to see that Fay--the Duchess of Colle Alto--was an
Englishwoman, in spite of her historic Italian name.

She had the look of perfect though not robust health, the reflection
over her whole being of a childhood spent much in the open air. She was
twenty-three, but her sweet fair face, with its delicate irregular
features, was immature, childish. It gave no impression of experience,
or thought, or of having met life. She was obviously not of those who
criticise or judge themselves. In how many faces we see the conflict, or
the remains of conflict with a dual nature. Fay, as she was called by
her family, seemed all of a piece with herself. Her unharassed
countenance showed it, especially when, as at this moment, she looked
harassed. Anxiety was evidently a foreign element. It sat ill upon her
smooth face, as if it might slide off at any moment. Fay's violet eyes
were her greatest charm. She looked at you with a deprecating, timid,
limpid gaze, in which no guile existed, any more than steadfastness, any
more than unselfishness, any more than courage.

Fay had come into the world anxious to please. She had never shown any
particular wish to give pleasure. If she had been missed out of her
somewhat oppressed and struggling home when she married, it is probable
that the sense of her absence was tinged by relief.

She had never intended to marry the Duke of Colle Alto. It is difficult
to say why that sedate distinguished personage married her.

Fay's face had a very sweet and endearing promise in it which drew men's
eyes after her. I don't know what it meant, and they did not know
either, but they instinctively lessened the distance between themselves
and it. A very thin string will tow a very heavy body if there is no
resistance, and the pace is slow. The duke looked at Fay, who was at
that moment being taken out for her first season by her grandmother,
Lady Bellairs. Fay tried to please him, as was her wont with all except
men with beards. She liked to have him in attendance. Her violet eyes
lighted up with genuine pleasure when he came to see her.

It is perhaps difficult for the legions of women who do not please
easily, and for the handful whose interests lie outside themselves, and
who are not desirous of pleasing indiscriminately, it is difficult for
either to realise the passionate desire to please which possesses and
saps the life of some of their sisters. Admiration with them is not a
luxury, any more than a hot-water bottle is a luxury to the aged, or a
foot rest to a gouty foot. It is a necessity of life. After a becoming
interval, the interstices of which had been filled with flowers, the
duke proposed to Lady Bellairs for Fay's hand. Fay did not wish to marry
him. He was not in the least her ideal. Neither did she wish to remain
unmarried, neither did she wish to part with her grave, distinguished
suitor who was an ornament to herself. And she was distinctly averse to
living any longer in the paternal home, lost in a remote crease in a
Hampshire down. Poor women have only too frequently to deal with these
complicated situations, with which blundering, egotistic male minds are
seldom in perfect sympathy.

Fay had never willingly relinquished any of the men who had cared for
her, and some had cared much. These last had as a rule torn themselves
away from her, leaving hearts, or other fragments of themselves, behind,
and were not to be cajoled back again, even by one of her little
gilt-edged notes. But the duke did not break away. He had selected her,
she pleased him, he desired to marry an Englishwoman. He had the
approval of Lady Bellairs.

The day came when Fay was suddenly and adroitly confronted with the fact
that she must marry him, or lose him.

Many confirmed bachelors who openly regret that they have never come
across a woman to whom they cared to tie themselves for life might be
in a position to descant on the inability of wives to enter into their
husbands' inmost feelings, if only they--the bachelors--had known on a
past occasion how to act with sudden promptitude on the top of patience.

The duke played the waiting game, and then hit hard. He had coolly
allowed himself to be trifled with, until the moment arrived when it did
not suit him to be trifled with any longer.

The marriage had not proved a marked success, nor an entire failure. The
duke was an irreproachable husband, but, like many men who marry when
they are no longer young, he aged suddenly after marriage. He quickly
became bald and stout. His tact except in these two particulars remained
flawless. He never allowed his deep chagrin to appear when, three years
after his marriage, he still remained without a son to continue his
historic name.

He was polite to his wife at all times, mildly sarcastic as to her
extravagance. Fay was not exorbitantly extravagant; but then the duke
was not exorbitantly rich. One of Fay's arts, as unconscious as that of
a kitten, was to imply past unhappiness, spoken of with a cheerful
resignation which greatly endeared her to others--and to herself. The
duke had understood that she had not had a very happy home, and he had
honestly endeavoured to make her new home happy. In the early days of
his marriage he made many small experiments in the hope of pleasing the
pretty creature who had thrown in her lot with his. Possibly also there
may have been other subtle, patient attempts to win somewhat from her of
another nature. Possibly there may have been veiled disappointments,
and noiseless retreats under cover of night.

However these things may have been, after the first year Fay made the
discovery that she was unhappily married. The duke was kind, in kindness
he never failed; but he was easily jealous--at least she thought so; and
he appeared quite unable to see in their true light her amicable little
flirtations with his delightful compatriots. After one or two annoying
incidents, in which the compatriots had shown several distinctly
un-English characteristics, the duke became, in his wife's eyes,
tiresome, strict, a burden. Perhaps, also, she felt the Englishwoman's
surprise at the inadequate belief in a woman's power of guarding her own
virtue, which remains in some nations an hereditary masculine instinct.
She felt that she could take care of herself, which was, in reality,
just what she could not do, as her imperturbable, watchful husband was
well aware.

But was he aware of the subject of her thoughts at this moment? It was
more than probable that he was. But Fay had not the faintest suspicion
that he had guessed anything.

One of her many charms was a certain youthful innocence of mind, which
imputed no evil to others, which never suspected that others would
impute it to her. Her husband was wearisome. He looked coldly on her if
she smiled on young men, and she had to smile at them when they smiled
at her. But, she reasoned, of course all the time he really knew that he
could trust her entirely. There was no harm in Fay's nature, no venom,
there were no dark places, no strong passions, with their awful
possibilities for good and evil. She had already given much pain in her
short life, but inadvertently. She was of that large class of whom it
may truly be said when evil comes, that they are more sinned against
than sinning. They always somehow gravitate into the places where people
_are_ sinned against, just as some people never attend a cricket-match
without receiving a ball on their persons.

And now trouble had come upon her. She had at last fallen in love. I
would not venture to assert that she had fallen in very deep, that the
"breakers of the boundless deep" had engulfed her. Some of us make
shipwreck in a teacup tempest, and when our serenity is restored--there
is nothing calmer than a teacup after its storm--our experience serves,
after a decent interval, as an agreeable fringe to our confidential
conversation.

Anyhow, Fay had fallen in love. I feel bound to add that for some time
before that event happened life had become intolerably dull. The advent
to Rome of her distant connection, Michael Carstairs, had been at this
juncture a source of delight to her. She had, before her marriage,
flirted with him a very little--not as much as she could have wished;
but Lady Bellairs, who was fond of him, had promptly intervened, and the
young man had disappeared into his examinations. That was four years
ago.

In reality Fay had half-forgotten him; but when she saw him suddenly,
pale, handsome, distinguished, across a ballroom in Rome, and, after a
moment's uncertainty, realised who he was, she felt the same pleasurable
surprise, soft as the fall of dew, which pervades the feminine heart
when, in looking into an unused drawer, it inadvertently haps upon a
length of new ribbon, bought, carefully put away, and forgotten.

Fay went gently up to Michael, conscious of her beauty and her wonderful
jewels, and held out her hand with a little deprecating smile.

"And so we meet again at last," she said.

He turned red and white.

"At last," he said with difficulty.

She looked more closely at him. The dreamy, poetic face had changed
during those four years. She became dimly aware that he had not only
grown from a youth into a man, but that some other transformation had
been painfully wrought in him.

Instinctively her beaming face became grave to match his. She was slow
to see what others were feeling, but quick to reflect their mood. She
sighed gently, vaguely stirred, in spite of herself, by something--she
knew not what--in her companion's face.

"It is four years since I saw you," she said.

And from her lowered voice it seemed as if her life were rooted in
memory alone.

"Four years," said Michael, who, promising young diplomat as he was,
appeared only able to repeat parrot-wise her last words after her.

A pause.

"Do you know my husband?"

"I do not."

"May I introduce him to you?"

Fay made a little sign, and the duke approached, superb, decorated,
dignified, with the polished pallor as if the skin were a little too
tight, which is the Charybdis of many who have avoided the Scylla of
wrinkles.

The elder Italian and the grave, fair, young Englishman bowed to each
other, were made known to each other.

That night as the duke drove home with his wife he said to her in his
admirable English:

"Your young cousin is an enthusiast, a dreamer, a sensitive, what your
Tennyson calls a Sir Galahad. In Italy we make of such men a priest, a
cardinal. He is not an _homme d'affaires_. It was not well to put him
into diplomacy. One may make a religion of art. One may even for a time
make a religion of a woman. But of the English diplomacy one does not
make a religion."

Fay lay awake that night. From a disused pigeon-hole in her mind she
drew out and unfolded to its short length that attractive remnant, that
half-forgotten episode of her teens. She remembered everything--I mean
everything she wished to remember. Michael's face had recalled it all,
those exquisite days which he had taken so much more seriously than she
had, the sudden ruthless intervention of Lady Bellairs, the end of the
daydream. Fay, whose attention had been adroitly diverted to other
channels, had never wondered how he took their separation at the time.
Now that she saw him again she was aware that he had taken it--to heart.

During that sleepless night Fay persuaded herself that Michael had not
been alone in his suffering. She also had felt the parting with equal
poignancy.

They met again a few days later by chance in an old cloistered, deserted
garden. How often she had walked in that garden as she was doing now
with English friends! His presence gave the place its true significance.
They met as those who have between them the bond of a common sorrow.

"And what have you been doing all these four years?" she asked him, as
they wandered somewhat apart.

"I have been working."

"You never came to say good-bye before you went to that place in Germany
to study."

"I was told I had better not come."

"I suppose grandmamma told you that."

"She did, most kindly and wisely."

A pause.

She was leaning in the still May sunshine against an old grey tomb of
carved stone. Two angels with spread wings upheld the defaced
inscription. Above it, over it, round it, like desire impotently defying
death, a flood of red roses clambered and clung. Were they trying to
wake some votary who slept below? A great twisted sentinel cypress kept
its own dark counsel. Against its shadow Fay's figure in her white
gossamer gown showed more ethereal and exquisite even than in memory.
She seemed at one with this wonderful, passionate southern spring, which
trembled between rapture and anguish. The red roses and the white irises
were everywhere. Even the unkept grass in which her light feet were set
was wild with white daisies.

"Do you remember our last walk on the down that day in spring?" she said
suddenly.

She had forgotten it until last night.

"I remember it."

"It was May then. It is May again now."

He did not answer. The roses left off calling to the dead, and suddenly
enfolded the two young grave creatures leaning against the tomb, in a
gust of hot perfume.

"Do you remember," Fay's voice was tremulous, "how you gave me a bit of
pink may?"

"I remember."

"I was looking at it yesterday. It is not very pink now."

It was true. In all shallow meanings, and when she had not had time to
get her mind into a tangle, Fay was perfectly truthful. She had
yesterday been turning over the contents of a little cedar box in which
she kept her childish possessions, and she had found in an envelope a
brown unsightly ghost of what had once been a may-blossom on a Hampshire
down. She had remembered the vivid sunshine, the wheeling seagull, the
soft south wind blowing in from the sea. Michael had kissed her under
the thin dappled shade of the flowering tree, and she had kissed him
back.

Michael's eyes turned for a long moment to the yellow weather-stained
arches of the cloister, and then he looked full at Fay with a certain
peculiar detached glance which had first made her endeavour to attract
him. There is a look in a man's face which women like Fay cannot endure,
because it means independence of them.

"I thought," he said, with the grave simplicity which apparently was
unchangeable in him whatever else might change, "that it was only I who
remembered. It has always been a comfort to me that any unhappiness
which my want of forethought, my--my culpable selfishness may have
caused, was borne by myself alone."

"I was unhappy too," she said, speaking as simply as he. She looked up
at him suddenly as she said it. There was a wet glint in her deep violet
eyes. She believed absolutely at that moment that she had been as
unhappy as he for four years. There was no suspicion in her mind that
she was not genuine. Only the sincere ever doubt their sincerity. Fay
never doubted hers. She felt what she said, and the sweet eyes turned on
Michael had the transparent fixity of a child's.

They walked unsteadily back to the others and spoke no more to each
other that day. Conscience pricked Fay that night.

"Leave him alone," it said. "You have both suffered. Let the dead past
bury its dead."

Fay's conscience was a wonderfully adaptable one with a tendency to
poetic quotation. It showed considerable tact in adopting her point of
view. Nevertheless from that generally fallacious standpoint it often
gave her quite respectable advice. "Leave him alone," said the
hoodwinked monitor. "You are married and Andrea is easily jealous.
Michael is sensitive, and has been deeply in love with you. Don't stir
him up to fall in love with you again. _Leave him alone._"

The young British matron waxed indignant. Was she, Fay, the kind of
woman to forget her duty to her husband? Was Michael the kind of man to
make love to a married woman? Such an idea was preposterous, unjust to
both of them. And people would begin to talk at once if she and her
cousin (Michael was only a distant connection) were studiously to avoid
each other, if they could not exchange a few words simply like old
friends. No one had suggested an attitude of rigid avoidance; but
throughout life Fay had always convinced herself of the advisability of
a certain wished-for course by conjuring up, only to discard it, the
extreme and most obviously senseless opposite of that course--as the
only alternative.

She imagined her husband saying: "Why won't you ask Mr. Carstairs to
dinner? He is your cousin and he is charming. What can the reason be
that you so earnestly refuse to meet him?" And then Andrea, who always
"got ideas into his head," would begin to suspect that there had been
"something" between them.

_No. No._ It would be far wiser to meet naturally now and then, and to
treat Michael like an old friend. Fay had a somewhat muffled conception
of what an old friend might be. After deep thought she came to the
conclusion that it was her duty to ask Michael frequently to the house.
When Fay once recognised a duty she performed it without delay.

She met with an unexpected obstacle in the way of its adequate
performance. The obstacle was Michael.

The young man came once, and then again after an interval of several
months, but apparently nothing would induce him to frequent the house.

Fay did not recognise her boyish eager lover in the grave sedate man,
old of his age, who had replaced him. His dignified and quite
unobtrusive resistance, which had not indifference at its core, added an
intense, a feverish, interest to Fay's life. She saw that he still cared
for her, and that he did not intend to wound himself a second time. He
had had enough. She put out all her little transparent arts during the
months that followed. The duke watched.

She had implied to her husband with a smile that she had not been very
happy at home. She implied to Michael with a smile that it was not the
duke's fault, but that she was not very happy in her married life, that
he did not care much about her, and that they had but few tastes in
common. Each lived their own life on amicable terms, but somewhat apart
from each other. She owned that she had hoped for something rather
different in marriage. She had, it seemed, started life with a very
exalted ideal of married life, which the duke's

          coarse thumb
    And finger failed to plumb.

Michael remained outwardly obdurate, but inwardly he weakened. His
tender adoration and respect for Fay, wounded and mutilated though they
had been, had nevertheless survived what in many minds must have proved
their death-blow. He still believed implicitly all she said.

But to him her marriage was the impassable barrier, a barrier as
enfranchisable as the brown earth on a coffin lid.

After many months Fay at last vaguely realised his attitude towards her.
She told herself that she respected it, that it was just what she
wished, was in fact the result of her own tactfully expressed wishes.
She seemed to remember things she had said which would have led him to
behave just as he had done. And then she turned heaven and earth to
regain her personal ascendency over him. She never would have regained
it if an accident had not befallen her. She fell in love with him during
the process.

The day came, an evil day for Michael, when he could no longer doubt it,
when he was not permitted to remain in doubt. Who shall say what waves
of boundless devotion, what passionate impulses of protection, of
compassion, of intense longing to shield her from the fire which had
devastated his own youth, passed in succession over him as he looked at
the delicate little creature who was to him the only real woman in the
world--all the rest were counterfeits--and who now, as he believed,
loved him as he had long loved her.

Michael was one of the few men who bear through life the common
masculine burden of a profound ignorance of women, coupled with an
undeviating loyalty towards them. He supposed she was suffering as he
had suffered, that it was with her now beside the fountain, under the
ilexes of her Italian garden, as it had been with him during these five
intolerable years.

How Fay wept! What a passion of tears, till her small flower-like face
was bereft of all beauty, of everything except a hideous contraction of
grief!

He stood near her, not touching her, in anguish far deeper than hers. At
last he took her clenched hand in his.

"Do not grieve so," he said brokenly. "It is not our fault. It is
greater than either of us. It has come upon us against our wills. We
have both struggled. You don't know how I have struggled, Fay, day and
night since I came to Rome. But I have been in fault. I ought never to
have come, for I knew you were living near Rome. But I did not know it
had touched you, and for myself I had hoped--I thought--that it was
past--in as far as it could pass--that I was accustomed to it. Listen,
Fay, and do not cry so bitterly. I will leave Rome at once. I will not
see you again. My poor darling, we have come to a hard place in life,
but we can do the only thing left to us--our duty."

Fay's heart contracted, and she suddenly ceased sobbing. She had never
thought of this horrible possibility that he would leave her.

She drew the hand that clasped hers to her lips and held it tightly
against her breast.

"Don't leave me," she stammered, trembling from head to foot, from sheer
terror at the thought; "I will be good. I will do what is right. We are
not like other people. We can trust each other. But I can't live without
seeing you sometimes, I could not bear it."

He withdrew his hand. They looked wildly into each other's eyes. His
convulsed face paled and paled. Even as he stood before her she knew she
was losing him, that something was tearing him from her. It was as
certain that he was going from her as if she were standing by his
deathbed.

He kissed her suddenly.

"I shall not come back," he said. And the next moment he was gone.




CHAPTER II

    Nous passons notre vie à nous forger des chaînes, et à
    nous plaindre de les porter.--VALTOUR.


For a long time Fay had stood on her balcony looking out towards Rome,
while the remembrance of the last few months pressed in upon her.

It was a week since she had seen Michael, since he had said, "I shall
not come back."

And in the meanwhile she had heard that he had resigned his appointment,
and was leaving Rome at once. She had never imagined that he would act
so quickly, with such determination. She had vaguely supposed that he
would send in his resignation, and then remain on. In novels in a
situation like theirs the man never really went away, or if he did he
came back. Fay knew very little of Michael, but nevertheless she
instinctively felt and quailed before the conviction that he really was
leaving her for ever, that he would reconstruct a life for himself
somewhere in which she could not reach him, in which she would have no
part or lot. He might suffer during the process, but he would do it. His
yea was yea, and his nay, nay. She should see him no more. Some day, not
for a long time perhaps, but some day, she should hear of his marriage.

Suddenly, without a moment's warning, her own life rose up before her,
distorted, horrible, unendurable. The ilexes, solemn in the sunset,
showed like foul shapes of disgust and nausea. The quiet Campagna with
its distant faintly outlined Sabine hills was rotten to the core.

The duke passed across a glade at a little distance, and, looking up,
smiled gravely at her, with a slight courteous gesture of his brown
hand.

She smiled mechanically in response and shrank back into her room. Her
husband had suddenly become a thing to shudder at, repulsive as a
reptile, intolerable. Her life with him, without Michael, stretched
before her like a loathsome disease, a leprosy, which in the
interminable years would gradually eat her away, a death by inches.

The first throes of a frustrated passion at the stake have probably
seldom failed to engender a fierce rebellion against the laws which
light the faggots round it.

The fire had licked Fay. She fled blindfold from it, not knowing
whither, only away from that pain, over any precipice, into any slough.

"I cannot live without him," she sobbed to herself. "This is not just a
common love affair like other people's. It is everything, my whole life!
It is not as if we were bad people! We are both upright! We always have
been! We have both done our best, but--I can't go on. What is reputation
worth, the world's opinion of me?--_nothing_."

It was not worth more to Fay at that moment than it has ever been worth
to any other poor mortal since the world's opinion first clashed with
love.

To follow love shows itself time and time again alike to the pure and to
the worldly as the only real life, the only path. But if we disbelieve
in it, and framing our lives on other lines become voluntarily
bedridden into selfishness and luxury, can we--when that in which we
have not believed comes to pass--can we suddenly rise and follow Love up
his mountain passes? We try to rise when he calls us from our sick beds.
We even go feverishly a little way with him. But unless we have learnt
the beginnings of courage and self-surrender before we set out, we seem
to turn giddy, and lose our footing. Certain precipices there are where
only the pure and strong in heart may pass, at the foot of which are the
piled bones of many passionate pilgrims.

Were Fay's delicate little bones, so subtly covered in soft white flesh,
to be added to that putrefying heap? But can we blame anyone, be they
who they may, placed howsoever they may be, who when first they undergo
a real emotion try however feebly to rise to meet it?

Fay was not wholly wise, not wholly sincere, but she made an attempt to
meet it. It was not to be expected that the attempt would be quite wise
or quite sincere either. Still it was the best she could do. She would
sacrifice herself for love. She would go away with Michael. No one would
ever speak to her again, but she did not care.

Involuntarily she unclasped a diamond Saint-Esprit from her throat which
the duke had given her, and laid it on her writing-table. She should
never wear it again. She no longer had the right to wear it. It was a
unique jewel. But what did she care for jewels now! They had served to
pass the time in the sort of waking dream in which she had lived till
Michael came. But she was awake now. She looked at herself in the glass
long and fixedly. Yes, she was beautiful. How dreadful it must be for
plain women when they loved! They must know that men could not really
care for them. They might, of course, respect and esteem them, and wish
in a lukewarm way to marry them, but they could never really love them.
She, Fay, carried with her the talisman.

A horrible doubt seized her, just when she was becoming calm. Supposing
Michael would not! Oh! but he _would_ if he cared as she did. The
sacrifice was all on the woman's side. No one thought much the worse of
men when they did these things. And Michael was so good, so honourable
that he would certainly never desert her. They would become legal
husband and wife directly Andrea divorced her.

From underneath these matted commonplaces, Fay's muffled conscience
strove to reach her with its weak voice.

"Stop, stop!" it said. "You will injure him. You will tie a noose round
his neck. You will spoil his life. And Andrea! He has been kind in a
way. And your marriage vows! And your own people at home! And Magdalen,
the sister who loves you. Remember her! Stop, stop! Let Michael go. You
were obliged to relinquish him once. Let him go again now."

Fay believed she went through a second conflict. Perhaps there lurked at
the back of her mind the image of Michael's set face--set away from her;
and that image helped her at last to say to herself, "Yes. It is right.
I will let him go."

But did she really mean it? For while she said over and over again,
"Yes, yes; we must part," she decided that it was necessary to see him
just once again, to bid him a last farewell, to strengthen him to live
without her. She could not reason it out, but she knew that it was
absolutely essential to the welfare of both that they should see each
other just once more before they parted--_for ever_. The parting no
longer loomed so awful in her mind if there was to be a meeting before
it took place. She almost forgot it directly her mind could find a
staying point on the thought of that one last sacred interview, of all
she should say, of all they would both feel.

But how to see him! He had said he would not come back. He left Rome in
a few days. She should see him officially on Thursday, when he was in
attendance on his chief. But what was the use of that? He would hardly
exchange a word with her. She might decide to see _him_ alone; but what
if he refused to see _her_? Instinctively Fay knew that he would so
refuse.

"We must part." Just so. But how to hold him? How to draw him to her
just once more? That was the crux.

In novels if a woman needs the help of the chivalrous man ever kneeling
in the background, she sends him a ring. Fay looked earnestly at her
rings. But Michael might not understand if she sent him one, and if the
duke intercepted it he would certainly entirely misconstrue the
situation.

Fay sat down at her writing-table, and got out her note-paper. Truth
compels me to state that it was of blue linen, that it had a little gilt
coronet on it, and that it was scented.

She thought a long time. At least she bit the little silver owl at the
end of her pen for a long time. She tore up several sheets. At last she
wrote in her large, slanting, dashing handwriting:

     "_I know that we must part. You are right and I wish it too. It is
     all like a terrible dream, and what will the awakening be?_" (Fay
     did not quite know what she meant by this, but it impressed her
     deeply as she wrote it, and a tear dropped on "the awakening" and
     made it look like "reckoning." She was not of those, however, who
     having once written one word ever think it can be mistaken for
     another; and really reckoning did quite as well as awakening.)
     "_But I must see you once before you go. I have something of urgent
     importance to say to you._" (It was not clear to Fay what the
     matter of importance was. But has not everyone in love laboured
     daily under a burden as big as Christian's, of subjects which
     demand instant discussion, or the bearer may fall into a state of
     melancholia? Fay was convinced as she wrote that there was
     something she ached to say to him: and also the point was to say
     something that would bring him.) "_Don't fail me. You have never
     failed me yet. You left me before when it was right we should part.
     Did I try to keep you then? Did I say one word to hold you back?_"
     (Fay's heart swelled as she wrote those words. She saw, bathed in a
     new light, her own courage and uprightness in the past. She
     realised her extraordinary strength of character. She had not
     faltered then.) "_I did not falter then. I will not do so now,
     though this time is harder than the first._" (It certainly was.)
     "_You have to come to my little party on Thursday with your chief.
     I cannot speak to you then. I am closely watched. When the others_
     _have gone come back through the gardens. The door by the fountain
     will be unlocked, and come up the balcony steps to my sitting-room.
     The balcony window will be open. You know that I should not ask you
     to do this unless it was urgent. Will you fail me at the last? For
     we shall never meet again, Michael!_"

Fay closed the note, directed it, pinned it into the lace of her inmost
vest--the wife of an Italian distrusts pockets and postal
arrangements--and then wept her heart out, her vain, selfish little
heart, which for the first time in her life was not wholly vain, nor
wholly selfish. Perhaps it was not her fault if she was cruel. It takes
many steadfast years, many prayers, many acts of humble service before
we may hope to reach the place where we are content to bear alone the
brunt of that pang, and to guard the one we love even from ourselves.




CHAPTER III

    There will no man do for your sake, I think,
      What I would have done for the least word said.
    I had wrung life dry for your lips to drink,
      Broken it up for your daily bread.

    --A. C. SWINBURNE.


A witty bishop was once heard to remark that one of the difficulties of
his social life lay in the fact that all women of forty were exactly
alike, and it was impossible to recall their individual label, to which
archdeacon, or canon, or form of spinster good works, they belonged. It
would be dangerous, irreverent, to pry further into the recesses of the
episcopal, or even of the suffragan, mind. There are snowy peaks where
we lay helpers should fear to tread. But it may be stated, without
laying ourselves open to a suspicion of wishing to undermine the Church,
that when the woman of forty in her turn acidly announces, as she not
infrequently does, that all young men seem to her exactly alike, she is
in a parlous condition.

Yet many women had said that Michael was exactly like every other young
man. And to all except the very few who knew him well he certainly did
appear to be--not an individual at all--but only an indistinguished unit
of a vast army.

His obvious good looks were like the good looks of others. He looked
well bred, but to look that is as common in a certain class as it is
rare in another. He had the spare, wiry figure, tall and lightly built,
square in the shoulders, and thin in the flank; he had the clear
weather-beaten complexion, the clean, nervous, capable hand, and the
self-effacing manner, which we associate with myriads of well-born,
machine-trained, perfectly groomed, expensively educated, uneducated
Englishmen. Our public schools turn them out by the thousand. The "lost
legion" is made up of them. The unburied bones of the pioneers of new
colonies are mostly theirs. They die of thirst in "the never never
country," under a tree, leaving their initials cut in its trunk; they
fall by hundreds in our wars. They are born leaders where acumen and
craft are not needed. Large game was made for them, and they for it.
They are the vermin destroyers of the universe. They throw life from
them with both hands, they play the game of life with a levity which
they never showed in the business of cricket and football.

They are essentially not of the stuff of which those dull persons, the
thinkers, the politicians, the educationalists, are made. No profession
knows them except the army. They have no opinions worth hearing. Only
the women who are to marry them listen to them. They are sometimes
squeezed into Parliament and are borne with there like children. About
one in a hundred of them can earn his own living, and then it is as a
land agent.

They make adorable country squires, and picturesque, simple-minded,
painstaking men of rank. They know by a sort of hereditary instinct how
to deal with a labouring man, and a horse, and how to break in a dog.
They give themselves no airs. We have _millions_ of men like this, and
it is doubtful whether the nation finds much use for them, except at
coronations, where they look beautiful; or on county councils, where
they can hold an opinion without the preliminary fatigue of forming it;
and on the bloodstained fringes of our empire, where they serenely meet
their dreadful deaths.

In the ranks of that vast army I descry Michael, and I wonder what it is
in him that makes me able to descry him at all. He is like thousands of
other men. In what is he unlike?

I think it must be something in his expression. Of many ugly men it has
been said with truth that one never observes their ugliness. Something
in the character redeems it. With Michael's undeniable good looks it was
the same. One did not notice them. They were not admired, except,
possibly, for the first moment, or across a room. His rather
insignificant grey eyes were the only thing one remembered him by, the
only part of him which seemed to represent him.

It was as if out of the narrow window of a fortress _our friend_ for a
moment looked out; that "friend of our infinite dreams" who in dreams,
but, alas! never by day, comes softly to us across the white fields of
youth; who, later on, in dreams but never by day, overtakes us with
unbearable happiness in his hand in which to steep our exhaustion on the
hillside; who when our hair is grey comes to us still in dreams but
never by day, down the darkening valley, to tell us that our worn out
romantic hopes are but the alphabet of his language.

Such a look there was in Michael's eyes, and what it meant who shall
say? Once and again at long intervals we pass in the thoroughfare of
life young faces which have the same expression, as if they saw beyond,
as if they looked past their own youth across to an immortal youth, from
their own life to an unquenchable, upwelling spring of life. When
Michael spoke, which was little, his words verged on the commonplace. He
explained the obvious with modest directness. He had thought out and
made his own a small selection of platitudes. It is at first a shock to
some of us when we discover that a beautiful spiritual nature is linked
with a tranquil commonplace mind and narrow abilities.

When Michael's eyes rested on anything his still glance seemed to pass
through it, into its essence. An inscrutable Fate had willed that his
eyes should not rest on any woman save Fay.

Was her little hand to rend his illusions from him; or did he perhaps
see her as she was, as her husband, her shrewd old grandmother, her
sister even, had never seen her? Fay had revealed to Michael that of
which many men who write glibly of passion die in ignorance, the wonder
and awe of love, clothed in a woman's form, walking the earth. And in a
reverent and grateful loyalty Michael would have laid down his life for
her, as gladly as Dante would have done for "his lady." But Michael
would have laid down his in silence, as one casts off a glove. He had
never read the "New Life." It is improbable that it would have made any
impression on him if he had read it. He never associated words or books
or poetry with feelings. What he felt he held sacred. He was
unconsciously by nature that which others of the artistic temperament
consciously are in a lesser degree, and are doomed to try to express.
Michael never wanted to express anything, had no impulse of
self-revelation, no interest in his own mental experiences.

While Fay was turning over her little _bric-a-brac_ assortment of
feelings, her toy renunciations, her imitation convictions, Michael was
slowly making the great renunciation without even taking himself into
his confidence. To go away. To see her no more. This was death by
inches. As he sat hour after hour in his little room behind the Embassy
it seemed to him as if, by some frightful exertion of his will, he were
wading with incredible slowness out to sea, over endless flats in
inch-deep water, which after an interminable journey would be deep
enough to drown him at last.

The nausea and horror of this slow death were upon him. Nevertheless, he
meant to move towards it. And where Michael's eye was fixed there his
foot followed. He was not of those who rend themselves by violent
conflict. If he had ever been asked to give his reason for any action of
his life, from the greatest to the smallest, he would have looked at the
questioner in mild surprise, and would have said: "It was the only thing
to do."

To him vacillation and doubt were unknown. A certain wisdom could never
be his, for he saw no alternatives. He never balanced two courses of
action against each other.

"There were no two ways about it," he said to his godfather, the Bishop
of Lostford, respecting a decision where there were several
alternatives, which he had endeavoured to set before Michael with
impartiality. But Michael saw only one course, and took it.

And now again he only saw one course, and he meant to take it. He
sickened under it, but his mind was made up. Fay's letter which duly
reached him only made him suffer. It did not alter his determination to
go. Certainly, he would see her again, if she desired it so intensely,
and had something vitally important to tell him, though he disliked the
suggestion of a clandestine meeting. Still it was Fay's suggestion, and
Fay could do no wrong. But he knew that nothing she could do or say,
nothing new that she could spring upon him would have power to shake his
decision to leave Rome on Friday. _It was the only thing to do._




CHAPTER IV

    L'on fait plus souvent des trahisons par faiblesse que
    par un dessein formé de trahir.--LA ROCHEFOUCAULD.


Fay's evening-party was a success. Her parties generally were. It was a
small gathering, for as it was May but few of the residents had come
down to the villas. Some of the guests had motored out from Rome. My
impression is that Fay enjoyed the evening. She certainly enjoyed the
brilliancy which excitement had momentarily added to her beauty.

All the time she was saying to herself, "If people only knew. What a
contrast between what these people think and what I really am. Perhaps
this is the last time I shall have a party here. Perhaps I shall not be
here to-morrow. Perhaps Michael will insist on taking me away with him,
from this death in life, this hell on earth."

What large imposing words! How well they sounded! Yes, in a way Fay was
enjoying herself.

Often during the evening she saw the grave, kindly eyes of the duke upon
her. Once he came up to her, and paid her a little exquisite compliment.
Her disgust and hatred of him were immediately forgotten. She smiled
back at him. She did not love him of course. A man like that did not
know what love was. But Fay had never yet felt harshly towards any man
who admired her. The husband who did not understand her watched her with
something of the indulgent, protecting expression which we see on the
face of the owner of an enchanting puppy, which is ready to gallop on
india rubber legs after any pair of boots which appears on its low
horizon.

       *       *       *       *       *

The guests had ebbed away by degrees. Lord John Alington, a tall, bald,
boring Englishman, and one or two others, remained behind, arranging
some expedition with the duke.

Michael's chief had long since gone. Michael did not depart with him,
but took his leave a few moments later. Michael's departure from Rome
the following day on urgent affairs was generally known. The duke had
watched him bid Fay a mechanical farewell, and had then expressed an
urbane regret at his departure. The thin, pinched face of the young man
appealed to the elder one. The duke had liked him from the first.

"It is time he went," he said to himself as he watched Michael leave the
room. As Michael left it Fay's excitement dropped from her, and she
became conscious of an enormous fatigue. A few minutes later she dragged
herself up the great pictured staircase to her little boudoir
overlooking the garden, and sank down exhausted on a couch. Her pretty
Italian maid was waiting for her in the adjoining bedroom, and came to
her, and began to unfasten her jewels.

Fay dismissed her for the night, saying she was not going to bed yet.
She often stayed up late reading. She was of those who say that they
have no time for reading in the day, and who like to look up (or rather,
to say afterwards they looked up) to find the solemn moon peering in at
them.

To-night there was no solemn or otherwise disposed moon.

Fay's heart suddenly began to beat so wildly that it seemed as if she
would suffocate. What violent emotion was this which was flooding her,
sweeping away all landmarks, covering, as by one great inrolling tidal
wave, all the familiar country of her heart? Whither was she being swept
in the midst of this overwhelming roaring torrent? Out to sea? To some
swift destruction? Where? Where?

She clutched the arm of the sofa and trembled. She had known so many
small emotions. What was this? And like a second wave on the top of the
first a sea of recklessness broke over and engulfed her. _What next?_
She did not know. She did not care. Michael, his face and hand. These
were the only realities. In another moment she should see him, feel him,
hold him, never, never let him go again.

In the intense stillness a whisper came up through the orange blossom
below her balcony:

"Fay."

She was on the balcony in a moment. The scent of the orange blossom had
become alive and confused everything.

"Come up," she said almost inaudibly.

"I cannot."

"You must. I must speak to you."

"Come down here then. I am not coming up."

She ran down, and felt rather than saw Michael's presence at the foot of
the little stair.

He was breathing hard. He did not move towards her.

"You sent for me, so I came," he said. "Tell me quickly what I can do
for you, how I can serve you. I cannot remain here more than a moment. I
endanger your safety as it is."

It was all so different from what she had expected, from what she had
pictured to herself. He was so determined and stern; and it had never
struck her as possible that he would not come up to her room, that the
interview would be so short.

"I can't speak here," she said, angry tears smarting in her eyes.

"You can and must. Tell me quickly, dearest, why you sent for me. You
said it was all-important. I am here, I will do your bidding, if you
will only say what it is."

"Take me with you," she gasped inaudibly.

She had not meant to say that. She was merely the mouthpiece of
something vast, of some blind destructive force that was rending her.
She swayed against the railings, clinging to them with both hands.

Even as she spoke her voiceless whisper was drowned in a sound but very
little louder. There was a distant stir, a movement as of waking bees in
the house.

He had not heard her. He was listening intently.

"Go back instantly and shut the window," he said, and in a moment she
felt he was gone.

She crept feebly up the stairs to her room and sank down again on the
couch, broken, half dead.

"I shall see him no more. I shall see him no more," she said to herself,
twisting her hands. What a travesty, what a mockery that one hurried
moment had been! What a parting that was no parting! He had no heart.
He did not really love her.

Through her stupor she felt rather than heard a movement in the house.
She stole out of her room to the head of the grand staircase. Nearly all
the lights had been put out. Close to a lamp in the saloon below, the
duke and Lord John were standing, looking at a map. "The Grotta Ferrata
road is the best," the duke was saying. And as he spoke a servant came
in quickly, and whispered to the duke, who left the saloon with him.

Fay fled back to her own room. Something was happening. But what? Could
it have any connection with herself and Michael? No, that seemed
impossible. And Michael must by now have left the gardens, by the
unlocked door by which he had come in.

Fay drew the reading lamp nearer to her, and opened the book of
devotions which Magdalen, her far off sister in England, had sent her.
Her eyes wandered over the page, her mind taking no heed.

"_For it is the most pain that the soul may have, to turn from God any
time by sin._"

There certainly was a sort of subdued stir in the house. A nameless fear
was invading Fay's heart. The book shook in her hand. What _could_ be
happening? And if it was, as it must be, something quite apart from her
and Michael, what did it matter, why be afraid?

"_For sin is vile, and so greatly to be hated that it may be likened to
no pain which is not sin. And to me was showed no harder hell than
sin._"

A low tap came at the window. Fay started violently, and the book
dropped on the floor.

The tap was repeated. She went to the window, and saw Michael's face
through the glass.

She opened the glass door, and he came in. His clothes were smeared and
torn, and there was blood upon his hand.

"Something has happened," he said. "I don't know what it is, but the
garden is surrounded, and there is someone watching at the door I came
in at. I have tried all the other ways. I have tried to climb the wall,
but there was glass at the top. I can't get out. And they are searching
the gardens with lanterns."

Even as he spoke they saw lights moving among the ilexes.

"They can't know," she said faintly.

"It does not seem possible. They are probably looking for someone else,
but I can't be found here at this hour without raising suspicion. Is
there any way out through the house from here?"

"Only down the grand staircase."

"I must risk it. Show me the way."

They went together down the almost dark corridor. Fay's heart sickened
at the thought that a belated servant might see them. But all was quiet.
At the head of the staircase they both peered over the balustrade. At
its foot in a narrow circle of light stood the duke and Lord John, and a
man with a tri-coloured sash. Even as they looked, the three turned and
began slowly to mount the staircase.

Fay and Michael were back in her boudoir in a moment.

"There is a way out here," he said, indicating the door into her
bedroom.

"It leads into my bedroom, and then through to Andrea's rooms. There is
no passage, and he has a dog in his room. It would bark."

"I must go back to the garden again," he said, and instantly moved to
the window. Both saw two _carabinieri_ standing with a lantern at the
foot of the balcony steps.

"If you go down now," said Fay hoarsely, "my reputation goes with you."

He looked at her.

It was as if his whole life were focussed on one burning point; how to
save her from suspicion. If he could have shrivelled into ashes at her
feet he would have done it. She saw her frightful predicament, and
almost hated him.

The animal panic of being trapped caught them both simultaneously. He
overcame it instantly, while she shook helplessly as in a palsy.

He went swiftly back to the door leading to the staircase, and glanced
through it.

"They are coming along the corridor," he said. "They will certainly come
in here."

"Stand behind the screen," she gasped. "I will say no one has been here,
and they will pass through into the other room. As soon as they have
left the room go quickly out by the staircase."

He looked round him once, and then walked behind a tall screen of
Italian leather which stood at the head of a divan.

Fay took up her book from the floor, but her numb fingers refused to
hold it. She put it on the edge of the table near her, under the lamp,
hid her shaking hands in the folds of her long white chiffon gown, and
fixed her eyes upon the page.

The words of the dead saint swam before her eyes:

"_Yea, He loveth us now as well while we are here, as He shall do while
we are there afore His blessed face. But for failing of love on our
part, therefore is all our travail._"

There were subdued footsteps outside, a tap, the duke's voice.

"May I come in?"

"Come in," she said, but she heard no words.

She made a superhuman effort.

"Come in," she said again, and this time to her relief she heard the
words distinctly.

The duke entered and held the door half closed.

"I feared to disturb you, my child," he said, "but it is unavoidable
that I disturb you. It is a relief to find that you are not yet in bed
and asleep. A very grave, a very sad event has happened which
necessitates the presence of the police commissioner. Calm yourself, my
Francesca, and my good friend the _delegato_ will explain."

The official in the sash came in. Lord John stood in the doorway.

"Duchess," said the official, "I grieve to say that one of your guests
of this evening, the Marchese di Maltagliala, has been assassinated in
the garden, or possibly in the road, and his dead body was dragged into
the garden afterwards. He was found just inside the east garden door,
which by some mischance had been left unlocked."

A deathlike silence followed the _delegato's_ words.

[Illustration: "A DEATHLIKE SILENCE FOLLOWED THE DELEGATO'S WORDS"]

Fay turned her bloodless face towards him, and her eyes never left
him. She felt Michael listening behind the screen.

"There was hardly an instant," continued the official, with a touch of
professional pride, "before the alarm was given. By a fortunate chance I
myself happened to be near. The garden was instantly surrounded. It is
being searched now. It seems hardly possible that the assassin can have
escaped. I entreat your pardon for intruding this painful subject on the
sensitive mind of a lady, and breaking in on your privacy."

"I should think he has escaped by now," said Fay hoarsely.

"It is possible, but improbable," said the official. Then he turned to
the duke. "This is, I understand from you, the only way into the house
from the garden?"

"The only way that might possibly still be open," said the duke. "The
doors on the ground floor are both locked, as we have seen."

"We greatly feared," continued the duke, turning to his wife, "that the
murderer if he were still in the garden, finding it was being searched,
might terrify you by rushing in here."

"No one has been in here," said Fay automatically.

"Have you been in this room ever since you left the saloon?" said her
husband.

"Yes. I have been reading here ever since."

"Then it is impossible that anyone should have escaped into the house
through this room," said the duke. "The duchess must have seen him. It
is no longer necessary to search the house."

The _delegato_ hesitated. He opened the glass door and spoke to the men
with the lantern.

"They are convinced that it is not possible he is concealed in the
garden," he said. "Perhaps if the duchess were deeply engaged in study
he might have serpentinely glided through into the next room without her
perceiving him. It is, I understand, the duchess's private apartment. It
might be as well--where does the duchess's apartment lead into?"

"Into my rooms," said the duke, "and my dog is there. He would have
given the alarm long ago if any stranger had passed through my room. If
he is silent no one has been near him."

There was a pause.

Fay learned what suspense means.

The _delegato_ twirled his moustaches.

He was evidently reluctant to give up the remotest chance, and yet
reluctant to inconvenience the duke further.

"It is just possible," he said, "that the assassin may have taken refuge
in here before the duchess came back to her apartment. My duties are
grave, duchess. Have I your permission?"

Fay bowed.

The duke, still urbane, but evidently finding the situation unduly
prolonged, led the way into Fay's bedroom.

This story would never have been written if Lord John had not remained
standing in the doorway.

Did Michael know he was there? He had not so far spoken, or given any
sign of his presence.

"Won't you go into my room, Lord John, and help in the capture," she
said distinctly; and as she spoke she was aware that she was only just
in time.

But Lord John would not go in, thanks. Lord John preferred to advance
heavily in her direction, and to sit down by her on the couch, telling
her not to look so terrified, that he would take care of her.

She stared wildly at him, livid and helpless.

A door was softly opened, and was instantly followed by the furious
barking of a dog.

"Go and help them," said Fay to Lord John.

But Lord John did not move. Like all bores he was conscious of his own
attractive personality. He only settled his eyeglass more firmly in his
pale eye.

"You never spoke to me all evening," he said, with jocular emphasis.
"What have I done to deserve such severity?"

In another moment the duke and the official returned, followed by
Sancho, a large Bridlington terrier, still bristling and snarling at the
official.

Fay called the dog to her, and held it forcibly, pretending to caress
it.

"No one has gone by that way," said the _delegato_ to the duke. "The dog
proves that."

"Sancho proves it," said the duke gravely.

As he spoke he paused as if suddenly arrested. His eyes were fixed on a
small Florentine mirror which hung over Fay's writing-table in the angle
of the wall. The duke's face changed, as a man's face might change, who,
conscious of no enemy, feels himself stabbed from behind in the dark.
Then he came forward, and said with a firm voice:

"We will now go once more into the gardens. Lord John, you will
accompany us."

Lord John got heavily to his feet.

"Take Sancho with you," said Fay, holding the dog with difficulty, who
was obviously excited and suspicious, its mobile nostrils working, its
eyes glued to the screen.

The duke opened the glass door, and Sancho, his attention turned, rushed
out into the night, barking furiously.

"You need have no further fear," said the duke to Fay, looking into her
eyes. "The assassin has certainly escaped."

"No doubt," said Fay.

"Unless he is hiding behind the screen all the time," said Lord John,
with his customary facetiousness. "It is about the only place in the
room he could hide in, except of course the wastepaper basket."

The _delegato_, who was not apparently a man who quickly seized the
humorous side of a remark, at once stepped back from the window, and
glanced at the wastepaper basket.

"I may as well look behind the screen," he said, and went towards it.

But before he could reach it the screen moved, and Michael came out from
behind it.

The four people in the room gazed at him spell-bound, speechless; Lord
John reeled against the wall. The duke alone retained his
self-possession.

Michael advanced into the middle of the room, and for a moment his eyes
met Fay's. Who shall say what he read in their terror-stricken depths?

Then he turned to the duke and said:

"I ask pardon of you, duke, and of the duchess, my cousin, for the
inconvenience I have caused you. I confess to the murder of the Marchese
di Maltagliala, and sought refuge in the garden. When the garden was
surrounded I sought refuge here. I did not tell the duchess what I had
done, but I implored her to let me take shelter here, and to promise not
to give me up. She ought at once to have given me up. She yielded to the
dictates of humanity and suffered me to hide in this room. Duchess, I
thank you for your noble, your self-sacrificing but unavailing desire to
shield a guilty man."

Michael went up to her, took her cold hand and kissed it. Then he turned
again to the duke.

"I offer you my apologies for this intrusion," he said, and the two men
bowed to each other.

"And now, signor," he said in Italian to the amazed official, "I am at
your service."




CHAPTER V

    Qui sait tout souffrir peut tout oser.--VAUVENARGUES.


Michael was imprisoned for the night in a cell attached to the Court of
Mandamento, and the next day was sent to Rome to await his trial at the
_assise_.

Early on the second day after he reached Rome the duke came to him. The
two men looked fixedly at each other. They exchanged no form of
greeting.

The duke made a little sign with his hand, and the warder withdrew
outside the cell door, which he left ajar.

Then the duke sat down by Michael.

"I should have come yesterday," he said in English, "but it took time to
gain permission, and also"--he nodded towards the door--"to arrange."

"For God's sake give me details," said Michael.

The duke gave them in a low voice. He described in a careful sequence
the exact position of the dead body, the wound, caused by stabbing in
the back, the strong inference that the murdered man had been attacked
in the road, and then dragged just inside the Colle Alto garden door.

"I don't see any reason why he should have gone outside the garden,"
said Michael.

"Neither do I. But the garden door was unlocked. It had been locked as
usual, my gardener swears, and the key left in the lock on the inside.
Who then opened it, if for some reason the marchese did not open it
himself?"

Michael did not answer.

"I saw the body before it was moved," continued the duke. "It was still
warm. I incline to think the marchese was murdered actually inside the
garden, and that he fell on his face where he stood, and was dragged
behind the hydrangeas. But the _delegato_ thought differently. You will
remember, Carstairs, that the dead man had been dragged by the feet."

"Did I put him on the right side or the left of the door as you go in?"

"On the left."

"On his face?"

"Yes."

There was a pause.

"You had no quarrel with the marchese, I presume?" said the duke
significantly.

"On the contrary," said Michael; "it is not known, but I had."

"Just so. Just so. About a woman?"

Michael winced.

"About a horse," he said.

"No," said the duke, with decision. "Think again. Your memory does not
serve you. It was about a woman. Was it not a dancing-girl?"

"I am not like that," said Michael, colouring.

"It is of no account what you are like, or what you are not like. What
matters is that which is quickly believed. A quarrel about a woman is
always believed, especially by women who think all turns on them. Were
you not in Paris at Easter?"

"I was."

"Was not the marchese in Paris at Easter?"

"He was. I saw him once at the Opera with the old Duke of Castelfranco."

"Just so. A quarrel about a dancing-girl at Paris at Easter. That was
how it was."

"You are right," said Michael, regaining his composure with an effort.
"I owed him a grudge. You will be careful to mention this to no one?"

"I will mention it only to one or two women on whom I can rely," said
the duke; "and to them only in the strictest confidence."

Michael nodded.

Silence fell between them, and he wondered why the duke did not go. The
warder shifted his feet in the passage.

Presently the duke began to speak in a low, even voice.

"I owe you an apology," he said. "I saw you standing behind the screen,
reflected in a little mirror, and for one moment I thought you had done
me a great injury. It was only for a moment. I regained myself quickly.
I would have saved you if I could. But I owe you an apology for a
suspicion unworthy of either of us."

"It was natural," said Michael. He was greatly drawn to this man.

"I may in some matters be deceived," continued the duke, "for in my time
I have deceived others, and have not been found out. I don't know why
you were in my wife's rooms that night. Nevertheless, I clearly know two
things: one, that you did not murder the marchese, and the other, that
there was nothing wrong between you and my wife. With you her honour was
safe. You and I are combining now to guard only her reputation before
the world."

Michael did not answer. He nodded again.

"At the price," continued the duke, "probably of your best years."

"I am content to pay the price," said Michael. "It was the only thing to
do." Then he coloured like a girl, and raised his eyes to the duke's. "I
went to her that night to say good-bye," he said. "That was why the
garden door was unlocked. I love her. I have loved her for years."

It seemed as if everything between the two men had become transparent.

"I know it," said the duke. "She also, the duchess, is in love with
you."

Michael drew back perceptibly. His manner changed.

"A little--not much," continued the duke. "I watched her, when you gave
up yourself. She could have saved you. She could save you still--by a
word. But she will not speak it. She appeared to love me a little once.
I was not deceived. I knew. She loves you a little now. Why do you
deceive yourself, my friend? There is only one person for whom she has a
permanent and deep affection--for her very charming self."

The words fell into the silence of the bare room. Michael's thin hands,
tightly clenched, shook a little.

The duke bent towards him.

"Is she worth it?" he said, with sudden passion.

No answer. Michael hid his face in his hands.

"Is she worth it?" said the duke again.

Michael looked up suddenly at the duke, and the elder man winced at the
expression in his face. He looked through the duke, through his veiled
despair and disillusion, beyond him.

"Yes, she is worth it," he said. "You do not understand her because you
only love her in part. I meant to serve her by leaving Rome, but now I
can't leave it. What I can do for her I will. It is no sacrifice--I am
glad to do it--to have the chance. I have always wished--to serve
her--to put my hands under her feet."

The sudden radiance in Michael's face passed. He looked down
embarrassed, annoyed with himself.

"There remains then but one other person to be considered," said the
duke, looking closely at him. "The beautiful heroine, the young lover,
these are now accommodated. All is _en régle_. But that dull elderly
person who takes the _rôle_ of husband on these occasions! Is there not
a husband somewhere? What of him? Will he indeed fold his arms as on the
stage? Will he indeed stand by as serenely as you suppose and suffer an
innocent man to make this sacrifice for the sake of his--honour?"

"He will, only because he must," said Michael, catching his breath. "I
had thought of that. He can do nothing. Have I not accused myself? And
his honour is also hers. They stand and fall together."

[Illustration: "'IS SHE WORTH IT?' HE SAID WITH SUDDEN PASSION"]

"They stand and fall together," said the duke slowly. "Yes, that is
true. And he is old. He is finished. He is the head of a great house.
His honour is perhaps the only thing that still means anything to
him. Nevertheless, it is strange to me that you think he would consent
to keep it at so great a cost, the cost perhaps of twenty years. That
were impossible.... He could not permit _that_. But--one little year--at
most. That perhaps his conscience might permit. One little year! You are
young. Supposing he has within him," he laid his hand on his heart,
"that of which his wife does not know, which means that his release is
_sure_. Do you understand? Supposing it must come soon--very soon--her
release--and yours. Perhaps then----" There was a long pause. "Perhaps
then his conscience might suffer him to keep silence."

Michael's hand made a slight movement. The duke took it in his, and held
it firmly.

"Listen," he said at last. "Once when I was young, twenty years ago, I
loved. I too would fain have served a woman, would have put my hands
under her feet. There is always one such a woman in life, but only one.
She was to me the world. But I could only trouble her life. She was
married. She had children. I knew I ought to go. I meant to go. She
prayed me to go. I promised her to go--nevertheless I stayed. And at
last--inasmuch as she loved me very much--I broke up her home, her life,
her honour, she was separated from her children. She lost all, and then
when all was gone she died. The only thing which I could keep from her
was poverty, which would have been nothing to her. She never reproached
me. There is no reproach in love. But--she died in disgrace, and alone.
From the first to the last it was her white hands under my feet. That
was how I served the one woman I have deeply loved, the one creature
who deeply loved me." The duke's voice had become almost inaudible. "You
have done better than I," he said.

Then he kissed Michael on the forehead, and went out.

They never met again.




CHAPTER VI

    The year slid like a corpse afloat.--D. G. ROSSETTI.


And how did it fare with Fay during the days that followed Michael's
arrest?

Much sympathy was felt for her. Lord John, wallowing in the delicious
novelty of finding eager listeners, went about extolling her courage and
unselfishness to the skies. Her conduct was considered perfectly natural
and womanly. No man condemned her for trying to shield her cousin from
the consequences of his crime. Women said they would have done the same,
and envied her her romantic situation.

And Fay, shut up in her darkened room in her romantic situation--she who
adored romantic situations--what were Fay's thoughts?

There is a travail of soul which toils with hard crying up the dark
valley of decision, and brings forth in anguish the life entrusted to
it. Perhaps it is the great renunciation. Perhaps it is only the loyal
inevitable deed which is struggling to come forth, to be allowed to live
for our healing and comfort.

But there is another travail of soul, barren, unavailing, which flings
itself down, and tosses in impotent misery from side to side, from mood
to mood, as in a sickly trance.

Such was Fay's.

Her decision not to speak had been made in the moment when she had let
Michael accuse himself, and she kept silence. But that she did not know.
She thought it was still to make.

"I must speak. I must speak," she said to herself all through the
endless day after Michael's arrest, all through the endless night, until
the dawn came up behind the ilexes, the tranquil dawn that knew all, and
found her shuddering and wild-eyed.

"I must speak. I cannot let Michael suffer for me, even to save my
reputation."

_Her reputation!_ How little she had cared for it twenty-four hours ago,
when passion clutched the reins!

But now---- The public shame of it--the divorce which in her eyes must
ensue--Andrea! Her courteous, sedate, inexorable husband, whose will she
could not bend, whom she could not cajole, whose mind was a closed book
to her; a book which had lain by her hand for three years, which she had
never had the curiosity to open!--Fay feared her husband, as we all fear
what we do not understand. He would divorce her--and then---- And
Magdalen at home--and----

A flood of suffocating emotion swept over her, full of ugly swimming and
crawling reptiles, and invertebrate horrors, the inevitable scavengers
of the sea of selfish passion.

Fay shrank back for very life. She could not pass through that flood and
live. Nevertheless she felt herself pushed towards it.

"But I have no choice. I _must_ speak. He is innocent. He is doing this
to shield me because he loves me. But I also love him, far, far more
than he loves me, and I will prove it."

Fay went in imagination through a fearful and melodramatic scene, in
which she revealed everything before a public tribunal. She saw her
husband's face darken against her, her lover's lighten as she saved him.
She saw her slender figure standing alone, bearing the whole shock,
serene, unshaken. The vision moved her to tears.

Was it a prophetic vision?

It was quite light now, and she crept to her husband's room. She had not
seen him during the previous day. He had been out the whole of it. She
felt drawn towards him by calamity, by the loneliness of her misery.

The duke was not asleep. He was lying in bed with his hands clasped
behind his head. His sallow face, worn by a sleepless night, and perhaps
by a wounding memory, was turned towards the light, and the new day
dealt harshly with it. There were heavy lines under the eyes. The eyes
looked steadily in front of him, plunged deep in a past which had
something of the irrevocable tenderness of the dawn in it, the holy
reflection of an inalienable love.

He did not stir as his wife came in. His eyes only moved, resting upon
her for a moment, focussing her with difficulty, as if withdrawn from
something at a great distance, and then they turned once more to the
window.

A pale primrose light had risen above the blue tangled mist of ilexes
and olives. The cypresses stood half-veiled in mist, half-sharply clear
against the stainless pallor of the upper sky.

"I am so miserable, Andrea."

He did not speak.

"I cannot sleep."

Still no answer.

"I am convinced that Michael is innocent."

"It goes without saying."

"Then they can't convict him, can they?"

"They will convict him," said the duke, and for a moment he bent his
eyes upon her. "Has he not accused himself?"

"They won't--hang him?"

The duke shrugged his shoulders. He did not think fit to enlighten his
wife's ignorance of the fact that in Italy there is no capital
punishment.

"But if he has not done it, and we know he has not," faltered Fay.

"He is perhaps shielding someone," said the duke, "the real murderer."

"I don't see how that could be."

"He may have his reasons. The real murderer is perhaps a friend--or
a--woman. Your cousin is a romantic. It is always better for a romantic
if he had not been born. But generally a female millstone is in
readiness to tie itself round him, and cast him into the sea. The world
is not fitted to him. It is to egotistic persons like you and me, my
Francesca, to whom the world is most admirably adapted."

"I don't see how the murderer could be a woman. Women don't murder men
on the high road."

"No, not on the high road. You are in the right. How dusty, how dirty is
the high road! But I have known, not once nor twice, women to murder men
very quietly. Oh! so gently and cleanly--to let them die. I am much
older than you, but you will perhaps also live to see a woman do this,
Francesca. And now retire to your room, and let me counsel you to take
some rest. Your beauty needs it."

She burst into tears.

"How little you care!" she said between her sobs, "how heartless you
are! I will never believe they will convict him. He is innocent, and his
innocence will come to light."

"I think the light will not be suffered to fall upon it," said the duke.

Afterwards, years afterwards, Fay remembered that conversation with
wonder that its significance had escaped her. But at the time she could
see nothing, feel nothing except her own anguish.

She left her husband's room. There was no help or sympathy in him. She
went back to her own room and flung herself face downwards on her bed.
Let no one think she did not suffer.

A faint ray of comfort presently came to her at the thought that
Michael's innocence might after all come to light. It might be proved in
spite of himself.

She would pray incessantly that the real murderer might give himself up,
or that suspicion should fall on him, and he should be dragged to
justice. And then, if--_after all_--Michael were convicted and his life
endangered, then she _must_ speak. But--not till then. Not now when all
might yet go well without her confession.... And it was not as if she
were guilty of unfaithfulness. She had not done anything wrong beyond
imprudence. Yes, she had certainly been imprudent; that she saw. But she
had done nothing _wrong_. It could not be right to confess to what in
public opinion amounted to unfaithfulness on her part, and dishonourable
conduct on his, when it was not so. They were both innocent. It would be
telling a lie to let anyone think either of them could be guilty of such
a sordid crime. It looked sordid now. Why should she drag down his name
with hers into the mud--unless it were absolutely necessary.... And she
must remember how distressed Michael would be if she said a word, if she
flung her good name from her, which he had risked all to save. Some
semblance of calm returned to her, as she thus reached the only
conclusion which the bias of her mind would permit. The stream ran
docilely in the little groove cut out for it.

During the days and weeks that followed Fay shut herself up, and prayed
incessantly for Michael.

She prayed all through the interminable interval before the trial.

"If it goes against him, I will speak," she said.

Yet all the time Michael who loved her knew that she would not speak.
Her husband who could have loved her, and who watched her struggle with
compassion, knew that she would not speak. Only Fay who did not know
herself believed that she would speak.

       *       *       *       *       *

The day came when the duke gravely informed her that Michael was found
guilty of murder.

Fay's prayers it seemed had not availed. She prayed no more. There was
no help in God. Probably there was no God to pray to. Her sister
Magdalen seemed to think there was. But how could she tell? Besides,
Magdalen had such a calm temperament, and nothing had ever happened to
make her unhappy, or to shake her faith. It was different for Magdalen.

Evidently there was no justice anywhere, only a blind chance. "The truth
will out," Fay had said to herself over and over again. She had tried to
have faith. But the truth had not come out. She was being pushed, pushed
over the edge of the precipice. Oh, why had Michael fallen in love with
her when they were boy and girl! She remembered with horror and disgust
those early days, that exquisite dawn of young passion in the time of
primroses. It had brought her to _this_--to this horrible place of tears
and shame and shuddering--to these wretched days and hideous nights. Oh,
why, why, had he loved her! Why had she let herself love him!

Suddenly she said to herself, "They may reprieve him yet. If his
sentence is not commuted to imprisonment I will speak, so help me God I
will."

It could never be known whether she would have kept that oath, for the
next day she heard that Michael had been sentenced to fifteen years'
imprisonment. Why had Andrea been so cruel as to let her imagine for a
whole horrible night that Michael's would be a death sentence, when in
Italy it seemed there was no capital punishment as in England? It was
just like Andrea to torture her needlessly! When the sentence reached
her Fay drew breath. The horrible catastrophe had been averted. To a man
of Michael's temperament the living grave to which he was consigned was
infinitely worse than death. But what was Michael's temperament to Fay?
She shut her eyes to the cell of an Italian prison. Michael would live,
and in time the truth would come to light, and he would be released.

She impressed this conviction with tears on his half-brother Wentworth
Maine, the kind, silent elder brother, Michael's greatest friend, who
had come out to Italy to be near him, and who heard sentence given
against him with a set face, and an unshaken belief in his innocence.
Even to Wentworth Michael had said nothing, could be induced to say no
word. He confessed to the murder. That was all.

Wentworth, who had never seen Fay before, as she had married just before
he came to live at his uncle's place in Hampshire near Fay's home, saw
the marks of grief in her lovely face, and was unconsciously drawn
towards her. He was shy as only men can be; but he almost forgot it in
her sympathetic presence. She came into his isolated, secluded life at
the moment when the barriers of his instinctive timidity and apathy were
broken down by his first real trouble. And he was grateful to her for
having done her best to save Michael.

"I shall never forget that," he said, when he came to bid her good-bye.
"There are very few women who would have had the courage and
unselfishness to act as you did."

Fay winced and paled, and he took his leave, bearing away with him a
grave admiration for this delicate, sensitive creature, so full of
tender compassion for him and Michael.

He made no attempt to see her again when he returned to Italy some
months later to visit Michael in prison. To visit Fay on that occasion
would have taken him somewhat out of his way, and Wentworth never went
out of his way, not out of principle, but because such a course never
occurred to him. He would have liked to see her, in order to tell her
about Michael's condition, and also to deliver in person a message which
Michael had sent to Fay by him. But when he realised that a detour would
be necessary in order to accomplish this, he wrote to Fay to tell her
with deep regret that it was impossible for him to see her, gave her
Michael's message, and returned to England by the way he came.
Nevertheless, he often thought of her, for she was inextricably
associated with the unspeakable trouble of his life, his brother's
living death.

When all was over, and the last sod had--so to speak--been cast upon
that living grave, Fay tried to take up her life again. But she could
not. She had lost heart. She dared not be alone. She shunned society. At
her earnest request her sister Magdalen came out to her for a time, from
the home in England, into which she was wedged so tightly. But even
Magdalen's calm presence brought no calm with it, and the deepening
friendship between her sister and her husband only irritated Fay.
Everything irritated Fay. She was ill at ease, restless, feebly
sarcastic, impatient.

There is a peace which passes understanding, and there is an unpeace
which passes understanding also. Fay did not know, would not know, why
she was so troubled, so weary of life, so destitute of comfort.

Had she met the great opportunity of her life, the turning point, and
missed it? I do not think so. It was not for her.

       *       *       *       *       *

A year later the duke died.

He made a dignified exit. An attack of vertigo to which he was liable
came on when he was on horseback. He was thrown and dragged, and only
survived a few days as by a miracle. His wife, who had seen little of
him during the last year, saw still less of him during the days of his
short illness. But when the end was close at hand he sent for her, and
asked her to remain in a distant recess of his room during the painful
hours.

"It will be a happier memory for you," he said gently to her between the
paroxysms of suffering, "to think that you were there."

And so propped high in a great carved bedstead in the octagonal room
where the Colle Altos were born, and where, when they could choose, they
died, the duke lay awaiting the end.

He had received extreme unction. The chanting choir had gone. The priest
had closed his pale fingers upon the crucifix, when he desired to be
left alone with his wife.

She drew near timidly and stood beside his bed.

He bent his tranquil, kindly eyes upon her.

"Good-bye, my Francesca," he said. "May God and his angels protect you,
and give you peace."

A belated compunction seized her.

"I wish I had been a better wife to you, Andrea," she said brokenly,
laying her hand on his.

He made the ghost of a courteous, deprecating gesture, and raised her
hand to his lips. The effort exhausted him. He closed his eyes and his
hand fell out of hers.

Through the open window came a sudden waft of hot carnations, a long
drawn breath of the rapturous Italian spring.

It reached the duke. He stirred slightly, and opened his eyes once more.
Once more they fell on Fay, and it seemed to her as if with the last
touch of his cold lips upon her hand their relation of husband and wife
had ceased. Even at that moment she realised with a sinking sense of
impotence how slight her hold on him from first to last had been.
Clearly he had already forgotten it, passed beyond it, would never
remember it again.

"It is spring," he said, looking full at her with tender fixity, and for
a moment she thought his mind was wandering. "Spring once more. The sun
shines. He does not see them, the spring and the sunshine. Since a year
he does not see them. Francesca, how much longer will you keep your
cousin Michael in prison?"

And thereupon the duke closed his eyes on this world, and went upon his
way.




CHAPTER VII

    A bachelor's an unfinished thing ... He wants somebody to listen to
    his talk.--EDEN PHILLPOTTS.


Reader, do you know Barford, in Hampshire? If you don't, I can tell you
how to get to it. You take train from Victoria, and you get out at
Saundersfoot. There is nothing at Saundersfoot, except a wilderness of
lodgings and a tin station and a high wind. It need not detain an active
mind beyond the necessary moment of enquiring by which road it may be
most quickly left. I cannot tell you who Saunders was, nor why the
watering-place was called after his foot. But if you walk steadily away
from it for five miles inland, along the white chalky road between the
downs, you will arrive at the little village of Barford.

There is only one road, so you cannot miss your way. Little twisty lanes
fretted with sheep-tracks drop down into it now and then from the
broad-shouldered downs on either side, but take no notice of them. If
you persevere, you will in due course see the village of Barford lying
in front of you, which, at a little distance, looks as if it had been
carelessly swept into a crease between the downs, while a few cottages
and houses on the hillside seem to have adhered to the ground, and
remained stuck where they were when the sweeping took place.

After you have passed the pond and the post office, and before you reach
the school, you will see a lodge, and an old Italian iron gateway,
flanked by a set of white wooden knobs planted in the ground on either
side, held together by chains. The white knobs are apparently there in
order to upset carriages as they drive in or out. But very few carriages
have driven in or out during the last two years, except those of the
owner of Barford Manor, Wentworth Maine. Wentworth, since he inherited
the place from his uncle five years ago, had always led a somewhat
secluded life. But during the last two years, ever since his
half-brother, Michael, had been sentenced and imprisoned in Italy,
Wentworth had withdrawn himself even more from the society of his
neighbours. He continued to shoot and hunt, and to do his duties as a
magistrate and as a supporter of the Conservative party, but his thin,
refined face had a certain worn, pinched look, which spoke of long
tracts of solitary unhappiness. And the habit of solitude was growing on
him.

The old Manor House, standing in its high-walled gardens, its sunny low
rooms looking out across the down, seemed wrapped in an atmosphere of
ancient peace, which consorted as ill with the present impression of the
place as does old Gobelin tapestry with a careful modern patch upon its
surface. The patch, however, adroitly copied, is seen to be an
innovation.

The old house, which had known so much, had sheltered so much, had kept
counsel so long, seemed to resent the artificial peace that its present
owner had somewhat laboriously constructed round himself, within its
mellow, ivied walls.

There is a fictitious tranquillity which is always on the verge of being
broken, which depends largely on uninterrupted hours, on confidential,
velvet-shod servants, on a brooding dove in a cedar, on the absence of
the inharmonious or jarring elements which pervade daily life.

Such an imitation peace, coy as a fickle mistress, Wentworth cherished.
Was it worth all the trouble he took to preserve it, when the real thing
lay at his very door?

On this February morning, as he sat looking out across the down, white
in the pale sunshine, the current of his life ran low. He had returned
the night before from one of his periodical journeys to Italy to visit
Michael in his cell. He was tired with the clang and hurry of the long
journey, depressed almost to despair by the renewed realisation of his
brother's fate. Two years--close on two years, had Michael been in
prison.

In Wentworth's faithful heart that wound never healed. To-day it bled
afresh. He bit his lip, and his face quivered.

       *       *       *       *       *

Wentworth was not as handsome as Michael, but, nevertheless, he was
distinctly good to look at, and the half-brothers, in spite of the
fifteen years' difference between their ages, bore a certain superficial
resemblance to each other. Wentworth was of middle height, lightly and
leanly built, with a high bridge on a rather thin nose, and with narrow,
clean grey eyes under light eyelashes. He looked as if he had been made
up of different shades of one colour. His light brown hair had a little
grey in it, his delicately cut face and nervous hands were both tanned,
by persistent exposure to all kinds of weather, to nearly the same
shade of indeterminate brown as his hair.

You could not look at Wentworth without seeing that he was a man who had
never even glanced at the ignoble side of life, for whose fastidious,
sensitive nature sensual lures had no attraction, a man who could not
lie, who could not stoop, whose mind was as clean as his hand, and, for
an Englishman, that is saying a good deal. He was manly in a physical
sense. He rode straight, he shot well. He could endure bodily strain
with indifference, though he was not robustly built. He was sane,
even-tempered, liable to petty resentments, mildly and resolutely
selfish, except where Michael was concerned, a conscientious and just
master--at least, just in intention--a patient and respectful son where
patience and respect had not been easy.

The strain of scholar and student in him was about evenly mixed with
that of the country gentleman. The result was a certain innate sense of
superiority which he was not in the least aware that he showed. He had
no idea that he was considered "fine," and "thinking a good deal of
himself," by the more bucolic of his country neighbours. No one could
say that Wentworth was childlike, but perhaps he was a little childish.
He certainly had a _naïf_ and unshakable belief that the impressions he
had formed as to his own character were shared by others. He supposed it
was recognised by his neighbours that they had a thinker in their midst,
and always tacitly occupied the ground which he imagined had been
conceded to him on that account.

His mother, a beautiful, foolish, whimsical, hard-riding heiress, the
last of a long line, had married the youngest son--the one brilliant,
cultivated member--of a family as ancient, as uneducated, and as prosaic
as her own. Wentworth was the result of that union. His father had died
before his talents were fully recognised: that is to say, just when it
was beginning to be perceived that he was a genius only in his own
class, and that there were hordes of educated men in the middle classes
who could beat him at every point on his own ground, except in carriage
and appearance, and whom no one regarded as specially gifted. Still, in
his own county, among his own friends, and in a society where education
and culture eke out a precarious, interloping existence, and are
regarded with distrustful curiosity, Lord Wilfrid Maine lived and died,
and was mourned as a genius.

After many years of uneasy, imprudent widowhood, the widow of the great
man had made a disastrous second marriage, and had died at Michael's
birth.

No one had disputed with Wentworth over the possession of Michael.
Wentworth, a sedate, self-centred young man of three-and-twenty, of
independent means, mainly occupied in transcribing the nullity of his
days in a voluminous diary, had taken charge of him virtually from his
first holidays, during which Michael's father had achieved the somewhat
tedious task of drinking himself to death. Michael's father had
appointed Wentworth as his son's guardian. If it had been a jealous
affection on Wentworth's part, it had also been a deep one. And it had
been returned with a single-hearted devotion on Michael's part which had
gradually knit together the hearts of the older and the younger man, as
it seemed indissolubly. No one had come between them. Once or twice
Wentworth had become uneasy, suspicious of Michael's affection for his
tutor at Eton, distrustful of the intimacies Michael formed with boys,
and, later on, with men of his own age. Wentworth had nipped a few of
these incipient friendships in the bud. He vaguely felt that each case,
judged by its own merits, was undesirable. Some of these friendships he
had not been able to nip. These he ignored; among that number was
Michael's affection for his godfather, the Bishop of Lostford. Michael's
boyish passion for Fay, Wentworth had never divined. It had come about
during the last year of his great uncle's life at Barford, which was
within a few miles of Priesthope, Fay's home. Michael had spent many
weeks at Barford with the old man, who was devoted to him. Everyone had
expected that he would make Michael his heir, but when he died soon
afterwards, it was found he had left the place, in a will dated many
years back, to Wentworth. If Michael had never mentioned his first
painful contact with life to Wentworth, it was perhaps partly because he
instinctively felt that the confidence would be coldly received, partly
also because Michael was a man of few words, to whom speech had never
taken the shape of relief.

There had no doubt been wretched moments in Wentworth's devotion to
Michael, but nevertheless it had been the best thing so far in his
somewhat colourless existence, with its hesitating essays in other
directions, its half-hearted withdrawals, its pigeon-holed emotions. He
had not been half-hearted about Michael. It is perhaps natural that we
should love very deeply those who have had the power to release us
momentarily from the airless prison of our own egotism. How often it is
a child's hand which first opens that iron door, and draws us forth into
the sunshine! With Wentworth it had been so. The pure air of the
moorland, the scent of the heather and the sea seem indissolubly mingled
with the remembrance of those whom we have loved. For did we not in
their company walk abroad into a new world, breathe a new air, while
Self, the dingy turnkey, for once slept at his post?

One of the reasons of his devotion to Michael was that Michael's
character did not apparently or perceptibly alter. He was very much the
same person in his striped convict's blouse as he had been in his Eton
jacket. But it is doubtful whether Wentworth had ever realised of what
materials that character consisted. Wentworth was of those who never get
the best out of men and women, who never divine and meet, but only come
into surprised uncomfortable contact with their deeper emotions.
Michael's passion of service for Fay would have been a great shock to
Wentworth had he suspected it. It remained for the duke to perceive the
latent power in Michael, and to be taken instantly into his confidence
on the matter, while Wentworth, unwitting, had remained for life outside
his brother's mind.

Some men and women are half conscious that they are thus left out, are
companions only of "the outer court" of the lives of others. But
Wentworth never suspected this, partly because he regarded as friendship
a degree of intimacy which most men and all women regard as
acquaintanceship. He did not know there was anything more. Those from
whom others need much, learn perforce, whether they will or no, to what
heights, to what depths human nature can climb and--fall. But Wentworth
was not a person on whom others made large demands. But if his love for
Michael had been his one tangible happiness, it had become now his one
real pain.

Contrary to all his habits, he sat on, hour after hour, motionless,
inert, watching the cloud shadows pass across the down. He tried to
rouse himself. He told himself that he must settle back into his old
occupations. He must get forward with his history of Sussex, and write
up his diary. He must come to some decision about the allotment scheme
on his property in Saundersfoot. He must go over and help Colonel
Bellairs not to make a fool of himself about the disputed right of way
across his property where it joined Wentworth's own land. Colonel
Bellairs always bungled into business matters of the simplest nature as
a bumble bee bungles into a spider's web. For Colonel Bellairs to touch
business of any kind was immediately to become hopelessly and
inextricably involved in it, with much furious buzzing. His mere
presence entangled the plainest matter into a confused cocoon, with
himself struggling in the middle.

Wentworth must save the old autocrat from putting himself in the wrong,
when he was so plainly in the right. Wentworth must at any rate, if he
could do nothing else this morning, read his letters, which had
accumulated during his short absence.

Without moving from his chair he turned over, with a groan, the pile of
envelopes waiting for him at his elbow. Invitations, bills, tenants'
complaints, an unexpected dividend. It was all one to him. The Bishop
of Lostford--so his secretary wrote--accepted Wentworth's invitation to
dine and sleep at Barford that night, after holding a confirmation at
Saundersfoot. Wentworth had forgotten he had asked him. Very well, he
must remember to order a room to be got ready. That was all. A
subscription earnestly solicited by the daughter of a neighbouring
clergyman for a parish library. Why could he not be left in peace? Oh!
what was the use of anything--of life, health, money, intellect, if
existence was always to be like this, if every day was to be like this,
only like this? This weary, dry-as-dust grind, this making a handful of
bricks out of a cartload of straw, this distaste and fatigue, and sense
of being duped by satisfaction, which was only another form of
dissatisfaction, after all. What was the use of living exactly as you
liked, _if you did not like it?_ Oh, Michael! Michael! Michael! He
forgot that he had often been nearly as miserable as this when Michael
had been free and happy. Not quite, but nearly. Now he attributed the
whole of his recurrent wretchedness, which was largely temperamental, to
his distress about his brother's fate.

That wound, never healed, bled afresh. Who felt for him in his trouble?
Who, among all his friends, cared, or understood? No one. That was the
way of the world.

Fay's sweet, forlorn face, snowdrop pale under its long black veil, rose
suddenly before him, as he had seen it some weeks ago, when he had met
her walking in the woods near her father's house. She had gone back to
her old home after the duke's death. She, at least, had grieved for him
and Michael with an intensity which he had never forgotten. Even in her
widowed desolation she had remembered Michael, and always asked after
him when Wentworth went over to Priesthope. And Wentworth was often
there, for one reason or another. Michael, too, had asked after her, and
had sent her a message by his brother. Should he go over to-day and
deliver it in person? Among his letters was a scrawling, illegible note,
already several days old, from Colonel Bellairs, Fay's father, about the
right of way. The matter, it seemed, was more urgent than Wentworth had
realised. Any matter pertaining to Colonel Bellairs was always, in the
opinion of the latter, of momentous urgency.

Colonel Bellairs asked Wentworth to come over to luncheon the first day
he could, and to walk over the debatable ground with him.

Wentworth looked at his watch, started up and rang the bell, and ordered
his cob Conrad to be brought round at once.




CHAPTER VIII

    Le plus grand élément des mauvaises actions secrètes, des lâchetés
    inconnues, est peut-être un honheur incomplet.

    --BALZAC.


When Fay, in her panic-stricken widowhood, had fled back to her old home
in Hampshire, she found all very much as she had left it, except that
her father's hair was damply dyed, her sister Magdalen's frankly grey,
and the pigtail of Bessie, the youngest daughter, was now an imposing
bronze coil in the nape of her neck.

But if little else was radically changed in the old home except the hair
of the family, nevertheless, the whole place had somehow declined and
shrunk in Fay's eyes during the three years of her marriage. The dear
old gabled Tudor house, with its twisted chimneys, looked much the same
from the outside, but within, in spite of its wealth of old pictures and
cabinets and china, it had contracted the dim, melancholy aspect which
is the result of prolonged scarcity of money. Nothing had been spent on
the place for years. Magdalen seemed to have faded together with the
curtains, and the darned carpets, and the bleached chintzes.

Colonel Bellairs alone, a handsome man of sixty, had remained remarkably
young for his age. The balance, however, was made even by the fact that
those who lived with him grew old before their time. It had been so
with his wife. It was obviously so with his eldest daughter. Many men as
superficially affectionate as Colonel Bellairs, and at heart as callous,
as exacting and as inconsiderate, have made endurable husbands. But
Colonel Bellairs was not only irresolute and vacillating and incapable
of even the most necessary decisions, but he was an inveterate enemy of
all decision on the part of others, inimical to all suggested
arrangements or plans for household convenience. The words "spring
cleaning" could never be mentioned in his presence. The thing itself
could only be achieved by stealth. A month at the seaside for the sake
of the children was a subject that could not be approached. All small
feminine social arrangements, dependent for their accomplishment on the
use of the horses, were mown down like grass. Colonel Bellairs hated
what he called "living by clockwork."

You may read, if you care to do so, in the faces of many gentle-tempered
and apparently prosperous married women, an enormous fatigue. Wicked,
blood-curdling husbands do not bring this look into women's faces. It is
men like Colonel Bellairs who hold the recipe for calling it into
existence.

Mrs. Bellairs, a beautiful woman, with high spirits, but not
high-spirited, became more and more silent and apathetic year by year,
yielded more and more and more, yielded at last without expostulation
equally at every point, when she should have yielded and when she should
have stood firm, yielded at last even where her children's health and
well-being were concerned.

Apathy and health are seldom housemates for long together. Mrs. Bellairs
gradually declined from her chair to her sofa. She made no effort to
live after her youngest daughter was born. She could have done so if she
had wished it, but she seemed to have no wish on the subject, or on any
other subject. There is an Arabian proverb which seems to embody in it
all the melancholy of the desert, and Mrs. Bellairs exemplified it. "It
is better to sit than to stand. It is better to lie than to sit. It is
better to sleep than to lie. It is better to die than to sleep."

Fay had been glad enough, as we have seen, to escape from home by
marriage. No such way of escape had apparently presented itself for the
elder sister. As Magdalen and Fay sat together on the terrace in front
of the house, the contrast between the sisters was more marked than the
ten years' difference of age seemed to warrant.

Magdalen was a tall, thin woman of thirty-five, who looked older than
her age. She had evidently been extremely pretty once. Perhaps she might
even have been young once. But it must have been a long time ago. She
was a faded, distinguished-looking person, with a slight stoop, and a
worn, delicately-featured face, and humorous, tranquil eyes. Her thick
hair was grey. She looked as if she had borne for many years the brunt
of continued ill health, or the ill health of others, as if she had been
obliged to lift heavy weights too young. Perhaps she had. Everything
about her personality seemed fragile except her peace of mind. You could
not look at Magdalen without seeing that she was a happy creature.

But very few did look at her when Fay was beside her. Fay's beauty had
increased in some ways and diminished in others during the year of her
widowhood. She had become slightly thinner and paler, but not to the
extent when beauty suffers wrong. A very young face can bear a worn
look, and even have its charm enhanced thereby. The mark of suffering on
Fay's childlike face and in her deep violet eyes had brought with it an
expression which might easily be mistaken for spirituality, especially
by those--and they are very many--to whom a pallid and attenuated aspect
are the outward signs of spirituality.

That she was miserable was obvious. _But why was she so restless?_
Magdalen had often silently asked herself that question during the past
year. Even Bessie, the youngest sister, had noticed Fay's continual
restlessness and had commented on it, had advised her sister to embark
on a course of reading, and to endeavour to interest herself in work for
others.

She had also, with the untempered candour of eighteen, suggested to Fay
that she should cease to make a slave of Magdalen. It is hardly
necessary to add that Fay and Bessie did not materially increase the sum
of each other's happiness.

As Magdalen and Fay were sitting together in the sun the door into the
garden opened, and Bessie stalked slowly towards them across the grass,
in a short cycling skirt.

"It surely is not necessary to be quite so badly dressed as Bessie,"
said Fay with instant irritation. "If she must wear one of those hideous
short skirts, it might at any rate be well cut. I have told her so often
enough."

Since Bessie had been guilty of the enormity of suggesting a course of
reading, Fay had made many sarcastic comments on Bessie's direful
clothes.

"I must advise her to take dress more seriously," said Magdalen
absently. She was depressed by a faint misgiving about Bessie. Bessie
was to have lunched to-day with congenial archæological friends,
intelligent owners of interesting fossils. Nevertheless, when
Wentworth's cob Conrad was seen courteously allowing himself to be
conducted to the stable she instantly decided to lunch at home, and to
visit her friends when they were not expecting her, in the afternoon.
_It could make no difference to them_, she had told Magdalen, who shook
her head over that well-known phrase, which Colonel Bellairs had long
since established as "a household word." Bessie was not to be moved by
Magdalen's disapproval, however. She retired to her chamber, donned a
certain enamel brooch which she only wore on Sundays, and appeared at
luncheon.

It was not a particularly cheerful meal. Wentworth was silent and
depressed. Colonel Bellairs did not for an instant cease to speak about
the right of way during the whole of luncheon, even when his back was
turned while he was bending over a ham on the sideboard. And the moment
luncheon was over he had marched Wentworth off to the scene of the
dispute.

Magdalen was vaguely uneasy at the tiny incident of Bessie's change of
plan, and was glad it had escaped Fay's notice. Most things about Bessie
did escape Fay's notice except her clothes. Bessie was not at eighteen
an ingratiating person. No one had ever called her the sunbeam of the
home. She had preserved throughout her solemn childhood and flinty
youth a sort of resentful protest against the attitude of her family at
her advent, namely, that she was not wanted. Her mother had died at her
birth, and for several years afterwards her father had studiously
ignored her presence in the house, not without a sense of melancholy
satisfaction at this proof of his devotion to her mother.

"No, no. It may be unreasonable. It may be foolish," he was wont to say
to friends who had not accused him of unreasonableness, "but don't ask
me to be fond of that child. I can't look at her without remembering
what her birth cost me."

Bessie was a fine, strong young woman, with a perfectly impassive
handsome face--no Bellairs could achieve plainness--and the manner of
one who moves among fellow creatures who do not come up to the standard
of conduct which she has selected as the lowest permissible to herself
and others. Bessie had not so far evinced a preference for anyone in her
own family circle, or outside it. Her affections consisted so far of a
distinct dislike of and contempt for her father. She had accorded to Fay
a solemn compassion when first the latter returned to Priesthope.
Indeed, the estrangement between the sisters, brought about by the
suggested course of reading, had been the unfortunate result of a
cogitating pity on Bessie's part for the lamentable want of regulation
of Fay's mind.

Bessie liked Magdalen, though she disapproved of her manner of life as
weak and illogical. You could not love Bessie any more than you could
love an ironclad. She bore the same resemblance to a woman that an iron
building does to a house. She was not in reality harder than tin or
granite or asphalt, or her father; but it would not be an over-statement
to suggest that she lacked softness.

She advanced with precision to the bench on which her sisters were
sitting.

"I am now going to cycle to the Carters'," she said to Magdalen. "I
forgot to mention till this moment that I met Aunt Mary this morning at
the Wind Farm, and that she gave me a letter for father, and said that
she and Aunt Aggie were lunching with the Copes."

"Poor Copes!" ejaculated Fay.

"And would both come on here afterwards to an early tea," continued
Bessie, taking no notice of the interruption. "Aunt Mary desired that
you would not have hot scones for tea, as Aunt Aggie is always depressed
after them. She said there was no objection to them cold, and buttered,
but not hot."

"I shall have tea in my own room then," once more broke in Fay. "I can't
stand Aunt Mary. She is always preaching at me."

"It is a pity that Fay is disinclined to share the undoubted burden of
entertaining our relatives," said Bessie, addressing herself exclusively
to Magdalen, "as I do not feel able to defer my visit to the Carters any
longer."

Magdalen struggled hard against a smile, and kept it under.

"Possibly the aunts are coming over to consult father about a private
matter," she said. "The letter beforehand to prepare his mind looks like
it. So it would be best if you and Fay were not there. The aunts'
affairs generally require the deepest secrecy."

"And then father lets it all out at dinner before the servants," said
Bessie over her shoulder as she departed.

When she was out of hearing Fay said with exasperation, "You are not
wise to give way so much to Bessie, Magdalen. She is selfishness itself.
Why did not you insist on her staying and helping with the aunts? She
never considers you."

Magdalen was silent.

"I hate sitting here with the house staring at me," said Fay. "I can't
think why you are so fond of this bench. Let us go into the beech
avenue."

For a long time past Magdalen had noticed that Fay always wanted to be
somewhere she was not.

They went in silence through the little wood that bounded the gardens,
and passed into the great, bare, grey aisle of the beech avenue.

In a past generation a wide drive had led through this avenue to the
house. It had been the south approach to Priesthope. But in these
impoverished days, the road, with its sweep of turf on either side, had
been neglected, and was now little more than a mossy cart-rut, with a
fallen tree across it.

The two sisters sat down on a crooked arm of the fallen tree.

It was a soft, tranquil afternoon, flooded with meek February sunshine.
Far away between the green-grey trunks of the trees, the sea glinted
like a silver ribbon. Everything was very still, with the stillness set
deep in peace of one who loves and awaits in awe love's next word. The
earth lay in the sunshine, and listened for the whisper of spring. Faint
birdnotes threaded the high windless spaces near the tree-tops.

"Look!" said Magdalen, "the first crocus."

What is there, what can there be in the first yellow crocus peering
against the brown earth, that can reach with instant healing, like a
child's "soft absolving touch," the inflamed, aching, unrest of the
spirit? It does not seek to comfort us. Then how does comfort reach
through with the crocus; as if the whole under-world were peace and joy,
and were breaking through the thin sod to enfold us?

Fay looked at the flame-pure, upturned face of the little forerunner,
absently at first, and then with growing absorption, until two large
tears slowly welled up into her eyes and blotted it out. She shivered,
and crept a little closer to her sister. She felt alienated from she
knew not what, dreadfully cold and alone in the sunshine, with her cheek
against her sister's shoulder. Though she did not realise it, something
long frost-bound in her mind was yielding, shifting, breaking up. The
first miserable shudder of the thaw was upon her.

She glanced up at Magdalen, who was looking into the heart of the
crocus, and a sudden anger seized her at the still rapture of her
sister's face. The contrast between her own gnawing misery and
Magdalen's serenity cut her like a knife. What right had Magdalen to be
so happy? Why should she have been exempted from all trouble? What had
she done that anguish could never reach her? Fay's love for Magdalen,
and at this time Magdalen was the only person for whom she had any
affection--had all the violent recoils, the mutinous anger, the sudden
desire to wound on the one side, all the tender patience and grieved
understanding on the other which are the outcome of a real attachment
between a bond woman and a free one.

The one craved, the other relinquished; the one was consumed with
unrest, the other had reached some inner stronghold of peace. The one
was imprisoned in self, the other was freed, released. The one made
demands, the other was willing to serve. It seems as if only the free
can serve.

"I am very miserable," said Fay suddenly. She was pushed once more by
the same blind impulse that had taken her to her husband's room the
night after Michael's arrest.

She used almost the same words. And as the duke had made no answer then,
so Magdalen made none now. She had not lived in the same house with Fay
for nearly a year for nothing.

Magdalen's silence acted as a goad.

"You think, and father thinks," continued Fay, her voice shaking, "you
are all blinder one than the other, that it's Andrea I'm grieving for.
It's not."

"I know that," said Magdalen. "You never cared much about him. I have
often wondered what it could be that was distressing you so deeply."

Fay winced. Magdalen had noticed something, after all.

"I have sometimes feared,"--continued Magdalen with the deliberation of
one who has long since made up her mind not to speak until the opening
comes, and not to be silent when it does come--"I have sometimes feared
that your heart was locked up in an Italian prison."

"My heart!" said Fay, and her visible astonishment at a not very
astonishing inference was not lost on Magdalen. "My heart!" she laughed
bitterly. "Do you really suppose after all I've suffered, all I've gone
through, that I'm so silly as to be in love with anyone in prison or out
of it? I suppose you mean poor dear Michael. I hate men, and their
selfish, stupid, blundering ways."

Fay had often alluded to the larger sex _en bloc_ as blunderers since
the night she had told Michael to stand behind the screen.

"There are two blunderers coming towards us now," said Magdalen, as the
distant figures of Colonel Bellairs and Wentworth appeared in the beech
avenue.

Both women experienced a distinct sense of relief.

Colonel Bellairs had many qualities as a parent which made him a kind of
forcing-house for the development of virtue in those of his own family.
He was as guano spread over the roots of the patience of others; as a
pruning hook to their selfishness. But he had one great compensating
quality as a father. He never for one moment thought that any man,
however young, visited the house except for the refreshment and solace
of his own society. He never encouraged anyone to come with a view to
becoming acquainted with his daughters. His own problematic re-marriage,
often discussed in all its pros and cons with Magdalen, was the only
possible alliance that ever occupied his thoughts. In this respect he
was an ideal parent in his daughters' eyes, an inhumanly selfish one
according to his two sisters, Lady Blore and Miss Bellairs, at this
moment stepping out towards Priesthope from the north lodge.

[Illustration: "'YOU ARE ALL BLINDER ONE THAN THE OTHER, THAT IT'S
ANDREA I'M GRIEVING FOR'"]

Wentworth had almost given up hope of a word with Fay until he saw her
sitting with Magdalen in the avenue. The world would be a much harder
place than it already is for women to live in if men concealed their
feelings. A reverent and assiduous study of the nobler sex leads the
student to believe that they imagine they conceal them. But it is women
who early in life are taught to acquire this art, at any rate when they
are bored. Half the happy married women of our acquaintance would be the
widows of determined suicides if women allowed it to appear when they
were bored as quickly as men do.

Wentworth had no idea that he was not an impassable barrier of reserve.
He often said of himself: "I am a very reserved man, I know. It is a
fault of character. I regret it, but I can't help it. I have not the art
of chatting about my deepest feelings at five o'clock tea as a man must
do who lays himself out to be popular with women. What I feel it is my
nature to conceal."

His reserve on this occasion was concentrated in his face, which
remained unmoved. But the lofty impassiveness on which he prided himself
did not reach down to his legs. Those members, which had been dragging
themselves in a sort of feeble semi-paralysis in the wake of the
ruthless Colonel Bellairs, now straightened themselves, and gave signs
of returning energy. Magdalen from a distance noted the change.
Wentworth for the first time was interested in what Colonel Bellairs
was saying. His own voice, which had become almost extinct, revived.
There was also a hint of spring in the air. Not being a person of much
self-knowledge, he mentioned that fact to Colonel Bellairs.

Colonel Bellairs looked at him with the suspicion which appears to be
the one light shadow that lies across the sunny life of the bore.

"I said so half an hour ago," he remarked severely, "when we were
inspecting my new manure tanks, and you said you did not notice it."

"You were right all the same," said the younger man.

What an interest would be added to life if it were possible to ascertain
how many thousands of times people like Colonel Bellairs are limply
assured that they are in the right! The mistake of statistics is that
they are always compiled on such dull subjects. Who cares to know how
many infants are born, and how many deaf mutes exist? But we should
devour statistics, we should read nothing else if only they dealt with
matters of real interest: if they recorded how often Mr. Simpson, the
decadent poet, had said he was "a child of nature," how often, if ever,
the Duchess of Inveraven and Mr. Brown, the junior curate at
Salvage-on-Sea, had owned they had been in the wrong; whether it was
true that an Archbishop had ever really said "I am sorry" without an
"if" after it, and, if so, on what occasion; and whether any novelist
exists who has not affirmed at least five hundred times that criticism
is a lost art.

"Is the right-of-way dispute progressing?" said Magdalen to her father
as the two men came up and stopped in front of them.

Colonel Bellairs implied that it would shortly be arranged, as his
intellect was being applied to the subject.

Wentworth said emphatically, for about the thirtieth time, that the
right of a footpath, or church path across the domain was well
established and could not be set aside; but that whether it was also a
bridle path was the moot point; and whether Colonel Bellairs was
justified in his recent erection of a five-barred stile.

(I may as well add here, for fear the subject should escape my mind
later on, that at the time of these pages going to press the dispute,
often on the verge of a settlement, had reached a further and acuter
stage, being complicated by Colonel Bellairs' sudden denial even of a
church path, to the legal existence of which he had previously agreed in
writing.)

Wentworth trod upon the crocus and said he must be going home.

"We will walk back to the house with you," said Magdalen, and she led
the way with her father.

"I wish you would tell your Aunt Mary," he said to Magdalen as they
walked on, "that I will not have her servants wandering in Lindley wood.
Jones tells me they were there again last Sunday with a dog, that
accursed little yapping wool mat of Aunt Aggie's! I simply won't stand
it. I would rather you told her. It would come better from you."

"I will tell her."

Colonel Bellairs was beginning late in life to lean on Magdalen. She
was fond of him in a way, and never yielded to him. _On ne peut
s'appuyer que contre ce qui résiste._ Though Colonel Bellairs did not
know it, he was always wanting to _s'appuyer_. He had found in his
daughter something solid to lean against, which he had never found in
his wife, who had not resisted him.

"Oh! and look here, Magdalen. I had a letter from your Aunt Mary this
morning, a long rigmarole. She says she is following her letter, and is
coming to have a serious talk with me. Hang it all! Can't a man have a
moment's peace?"

Colonel Bellairs tore out of an inner pocket a bulky letter in a bold,
upright hand, marked _Private_, at the top.

"I wish to the devil she would mind her own business, and let me manage
mine," he said pettishly, thrusting the letter at Magdalen.

"I don't like to read it, as it is marked 'Private.'"

"Read it. Read it," said Colonel Bellairs irritably.

Magdalen read the voluminous epistle tranquilly from beginning to end as
she and her father walked slowly back to the house.

It was an able production, built up on a solid foundation. It dealt with
Colonel Bellairs' "obvious duty" with regard to the man to whom Magdalen
had been momentarily engaged fifteen years before, and who, owing to two
deaths in the Boer war, had unexpectedly succeeded to an earldom.

"Well! well!" said Colonel Bellairs at intervals, more interested than
he wished to appear. "What do you think of it? We noticed in the papers
a week ago that he had succeeded his cousin."

"Wait a minute, father. I have only come to my lacerated affections."

"How slow you are! Your Aunt Mary does pound away. She has a touch as
light as a coal-sack. The wonder to me is how she ever captured poor old
Blore."

"Perhaps she did it by letter. She writes uncommonly well. 'Magdalen's
joyless homelife of incessant, unselfish service.' That is very well
put, isn't it? And so is this: 'It is your duty now to inform him that
you withdraw all opposition to the renewal of the engagement, and to
invite him to Priesthope.' Really, Aunt Mary sticks at nothing. I warn
you solemnly, father, this is only the thin end of the wedge. Unless you
stand firm now, she'll want to choose our new stair carpet for us next.
Really, I think at her age she might take a little holiday, and leave
the Almighty in charge."

"Is that all you've got to say?" said Colonel Bellairs, somewhat
surprised. "Do you wish me to ask him to the house or do you not? I
don't object to him. I never did, except as a son-in-law, when he had no
visible means of subsistence."

"And no intention of making any."

"Just so. But I always rather liked him, and, and--time slips by"--(it
had indeed), "and I can't make much provision for you, in fact, almost
none, and I may marry again; in fact, it is more than likely I shall
shortly marry again." Colonel Bellairs was for a moment plunged in
introspection. "So perhaps, on the whole, it would be more generous on
my part to ignore the past and ask him to the house."

"After forbidding him to come to it?"

Colonel Bellairs began to lose his temper.

"I shall ask whom I think fit if I choose to do so. I am master in this
house. If he does not care to come, he can stay away."

"Ask him, in that case."

"You agree that on the whole that would be best."

"Not at all. I think it extremely undignified on your part, and that it
is a pity that you should be so swayed by Aunt Mary as to go by her
judgment instead of your own. You never thought of asking him till she
tried to coerce you into it."

"I am not going to be coerced by any woman, much less by that man in
petticoats," said Colonel Bellairs wrathfully. "But she will be here
directly. H'm! What on earth am I to say to her if I _don't_ ask him?...
She will be here directly."

They had reached Colonel Bellairs' study by now, and he sat down heavily
in his old leather arm-chair. Magdalen was standing on the hearthrug
near him with the letter in her hand. She held it over the fire, he
nodded, and she dropped it in.

"Perhaps, Magdalen," said her father with dignity, "it would be just as
well if I kept clear of the whole affair. Women manage these little
things best among themselves. I would rather not be dragged in. Anything
on that subject, any discussion, or interchange of opinion would come
best from _you_, eh?"

"I think so, father."

Colonel Bellairs watched his sister's letter burn, with the fixed eye of
one about to drop off into an habitual nap.

The asphyxiating atmosphere of a man's room, where a window is never
opened except to let in a dog, or to shout at a gardener, and where
years of stale tobacco brood in every nook and curtain, enveloped its
occupant with a delicious sense of snug repose, and exerted its usual
soporific charm.

"Took Mary a long time to write," he said, with a sleepy chuckle, as the
last vestige disappeared of the laboriously constructed missive which
Lady Blore had sat up half the previous night, with gold-rimmed
pince-nez on Roman nose to copy out by her bedroom candle, and had sent
to pave the way before her strong destructive feet.

The footman came in.

"Lady Blore and Miss Bellairs are in the drawing-room."

"Just pull the blinds half-way down before you go," said Colonel
Bellairs to Magdalen, "and remember other people have got letters to
write as well as her, and I'm not to be disturbed on any account."




CHAPTER IX

    On garde longtemps son premier amant