BOOK III

HAROLD FRANCE

I

THE wedding took place early in September. Immediately after the announcement of the duke’s intentions, France had rushed upstairs to Julia and indulged in such an outburst of rage that she fled to another part of the castle, and left him to wreak his vengeance on the furniture. Having relieved himself, he was able to meet the relative, for whom his lukewarm affection had turned to hatred, with his usual glassy surface, and, silent at all times, save when delivering himself of anecdotes, he was not in danger of betraying himself in the unguarded word. He held out until a week before the wedding, and then had a heart attack and parted from his sympathetic cousin for his semi-annual pilgrimage to Paris.

“Of course we’ll have to get out of this,” he said to Julia as he was leaving. “He wants us to stay, but you know what that means. Our day is over, curse him. Nothin’ for us but White Lodge. Lucky I couldn’t rent it again. _Luck!_ Mine’s gone. I don’t know when I’ll be back. Am really goin’ to Paris this time. You go to Hertfordshire and settle yourself. Make it comfortable, but no extravagance.”

“Couldn’t we take a flat in town?” asked Julia.

“Town? Not I. There’s good shootin’ and huntin’ in Hertfordshire, and that’s all I’ve got left. Hate town. Thank heaven, I can chuck politics. That’s my only comfort.”

“But you love society; at least, your position in it.”

“What’s the good without a fortune? Besides, we’re not an hour from town at White Lodge, and there’s good enough society in the county. Mind you return every call.”

Then, much to Julia’s delight, he took himself off.

The duke and his new duchess, a youngish aunt of Bridgit Herbert’s, who had angled quietly for him ever since he had emerged from his seclusion and entertained his neighbors, cordially invited Julia to remain at Bosquith for the rest of the season, but she was anxious to get away and readjust herself in solitude. Besides, her presence was necessary at White Lodge; and it is hardly necessary to state that she won the duke’s approval by doing the obvious thing.

In truth she was somewhat dazed, in no state for a display of originality. The unexpected trick of fate had disconcerted her hardly less than her husband, for not only had she grown into her position as the future duchess of Kingsborough during the past five years, but she was profoundly shocked to find that her mother’s planets had made a mistake.

Nothing had occurred to disturb her belief in the ancient and romantic science of astrology since her arrival in England. On the contrary, some of the cleverest and most eminent men she had met professed tolerance of it, and, she suspected, felt something more. On the other hand, she had found England so full of other fads, with no possible scientific basis, that her respect for astrology had grown rather than diminished. But she could only conclude that the whole thing was a monstrous delusion. Like many religions it filled a want, and its picturesque qualities had captured men’s imaginations and enabled it to survive. She received several incredulous letters from her mother on the subject of the duke’s marriage, finally one filled with concentrated astonishment, fury, and despair. This was some time later, when Julia had written that she must cease to hope, as there was no doubt the new duchess would have a family. Mrs. Edis ended her letter characteristically:—

“I have lived in a fool’s paradise for years. Now I simply exist until my time comes to die. I might have endured this annihilation of my only religion, but not of the crowning ambition of my life. In this matter I feel that you are to blame. You should have had children. You should have managed the duke so that he would never have thought of marriage, instead of becoming a woman of an entirely different and alien generation, as I find you in your letters. I should prefer that you do not write to me until I write again. Of course I do not forget that you are my child and the only one I have left, now that your wretched brother and his wife are dead—for I do not count this fidgeting grandchild I have on my hands—but so great is my disappointment in you that I cannot face the prospect of your letters at present—filled as I know they will be with that silly shallow modern philosophy which makes the best of things in the shortest possible time.”

Julia felt sorry for her mother long before she received this letter, but she soon discovered that this was her only regret, barring the fact that she must see more of her husband. For a fortnight she was quite alone at White Lodge, a charmingly situated property not far from the village of Stanmore and facing a wild expanse of heath. The housekeeper engaged the servants, leaving her young mistress to a complete liberty and solitude for the first time in her life. As Julia wandered through the thick woods of the little park between the garden and the heath, or rode alone in the dawn, or explored the historic villages and romantic lanes and properties of Hertfordshire, she realized how weary she was of the pleasant uniformity of London society, of entertaining in the country for sportsmen and statesmen; admitted once for all that to be a great peeress of Britain would bore her to death. Whatever ambitions she might develop, now that she was free to be an individual ignored by the planets, to be a great lady was not of them, and during these delightful weeks she dreamed of discovering some overlaid talent with which she should achieve a real place in life.

It did not occur to her to leave her husband. Noblesse oblige would have kept her at his side in his fallen fortunes, even had she not felt an even keener sympathy for him than when he had struggled for life during the early months of their marriage. She had ceased to fear him, forgotten her prophetic moments, so secure did she feel in her power to manage him, and so little, for the past year at least, had she seen of him. She would console him to the best of her ability for the bitterest disappointment such a man could feel, make White Lodge as brilliant as possible, dress on fifty pounds a year, and ask nothing in return but the liberty to study, and develop the talents she was sure she possessed, deeply buried as they might be. Before a week had passed, she had completely readjusted herself, and looked forward eagerly to several years of comparative quiet during which her mind should mature and make ready for the great discovery.

But a quiet life was not for Julia, then or ever.

II

JULIA, after the light supper which she had been thankful to substitute for the long dinner of the past four years, wandered slowly through the fields drinking in that peace which descends upon Hertfordshire at nightfall, in all its perfection. She leaned her arms on a fence, enjoying the Wordsworthian landscape: the wide fields with their hayricks like houses, the quiet cattle, the slowly moving stream, the soft masses of wood melting into the low sky. The red band had faded behind the sharp church spire. The night moths fluttered. The stillness was too soft to be profound, too sweet to inspire awe.

But although she loved this twilight beauty and peace of England, of which she had had but a taste now and again, being usually at table during the most poetical hour of the English day, she felt a sudden antagonism to it to-night, as too perfect, too finished a thing for the world to possess while so many of its dark problems were unsolved. Although she had persistently refused to study the underworld under the escort of Bridgit, turning instinctively from all that would shatter the illusions among which she chose to live, she had not been able to shut out bare knowledge, and Nigel’s second and fourth books had been even more enlightening than his first. She smiled as she thought of Nigel, whom she had not seen since the end of her first matrimonial vacation. He had left England soon after and not returned. His father, incensed at his avowed Socialism, and mortified at the conspicuous failure of his third book, an exquisite bit of pure art, had definitely renounced him, and he was living quietly and happily in picturesque corners of Europe. Julia, knowing his passionate love of beauty, envied him the power to gratify it, his complete surrender to the artistic life. She wondered why he kept on writing of the grimy horrors of England, when he might give the world his dreams of the wonderland beyond the Channel. To be sure, that unique combination of the propagandist and the artist made for greatness, but his last book, which she had finished only an hour since, had darkened her mind, and unfitted her for surrender to the beauty and peace of the English twilight.

Why was the enlightened class so stupid? Why did it not eliminate poverty and the terrible pictures that must haunt every sensitive mind, instead of waiting for mob rule, and its inevitable sequence of a dictator and return to first principles? Socialism must come from above. When the laboring classes used the word they meant democracy, in which every man would have a chance to acquire riches; mere comfort and security, with no opportunity to loot the universal till, had no charms for them. Man is adventurous and greedy, and the lower his place in the scale, the more insensate his dreams.

Nigel’s books, in their cold impersonal realism, did not inspire her with any great respect or liking for the poor. She knew that he was employing his art and his seductive story-telling faculty not only in the cause of humanity, but to help avert a convulsion in which his own class would go down. She knew that if it came to open war, a blood-revolution, the theories and principles of which his reason approved would fly off on the red winds and he would get behind the guns on his own side. The intellectual aristocrat may serve the cause of general humanity in entire honesty and conviction, but the moment class is arrayed against class he will fight, not with the passions of his brain, but of his instincts, and with that almost fanatical contempt and hatred of the common people when daring to assert themselves he has inherited with his brain cells. Nigel had admitted this freely to Julia, confessed that while he was keen to devote every year of his life and every phase of his talent to eliminating poverty, he never heard of a laborer’s strike which inconvenienced the public that he did not burn at their impudence and long for their annihilation.

“But it is this duality that makes the game interesting,” he had concluded. “I only hope I shall never be put to the test. There are many other things I should enjoy writing about far more, but I always feel that I don’t matter in the least. If I was given a brain on top of my instincts, it was to advance the cause of humanity and civilization. At all events that is the way I see things, by such light as I possess.”

He had gone on to say that he had become an advocate of Socialism because, so far, it was the best solution the human mind had evolved, but that all the artist in him lamented its lack of appeal to any part of man but his brain. Unpicturesque, dry, hard, but growing more practical and expedient year by year, if it failed eventually, it would only be through lack of a soul.

Would Nigel be the man to find this soul? He had a measure of genius; why not? She felt proud of him that he could induce the thought, then, in a moment of hardly realized sex jealousy, wished that it might be discovered by some woman. Herself? Why not? But at this point she laughed aloud, and turned her face toward home. Banish the ugly facts of life. Enjoy this divine peace while it lasted.

She left the field and sauntered down the crooked lane full of sweet scents and haunted by the white night moths. Skirting the wall that surrounded White Lodge, she entered by the front gates, but, loath to leave the twilight, mounted a stump and leaned her arms on the coping. The heath, a wild rolling bit of nature, mysterious in the dusk, was deserted but for a gypsy caravan. She remained out every night until dusk had melted into dark, ravished by the serene beauty of this typical bit of England, believing that in time it would help her to solve the riddle of her mind. For her soul she asked nothing, believing her capacity for happiness in any form to have been killed long since, but demanding some mental compensation more personal and permanent than books. If she dreamed long enough in this wonderful English twilight, gave her imagination rein—who could tell? And there was something more than a possibility that this liberty to dream and develop might spin out indefinitely. Even if the war with those tiresome Boers should prove as brief as the duke and her South African acquaintance predicted, Harold, deprived of other diversions, might go out to South Africa for such excitement and sport as the campaign would be sure to afford. And big game might exert its fascinations for a year or more.

She lifted her head suddenly, then thrust it forward, and peered into the shadows on the other side of the avenue. The trees of the park were closely planted, and their aisles, dim at noon, were black at this hour. But something moved, a shadow in a shadow! Julia, who had rarely known a tremor of fear, felt her knees shake, her breath come short. It could hardly be a poacher, for the preserves were behind the house, nearly a quarter of a mile away; no poacher would be lurking by the park gates when he could slip into the coverts at a dozen points. There was a lodge at the gates, but it was untenanted. No one at the house could hear her, no matter how loudly she might call, and—and—she watched the shadows with dilating eyes—there was no doubt that a man moved within twenty yards of her.

Suddenly it occurred to her that it must be one of the gypsies come to beg, and watching for his opportunity. She caught at the tails of her flying courage, and stepped out into the avenue.

“What do you wish?” she asked firmly. “If you have come to beg, I have no money here, but you can go to the house and I will tell them to give you food.” Then, as there was neither answer nor movement, she added with a fair assumption of indifference, “You can follow me.”

She started up the avenue, walking deliberately, while filled with a wild desire to run. For still there came no answer from the depths of that black plantation, nor, for a moment or two, any movement. Then she heard the soft crackling of twigs under a light foot, and, glancing irresistibly over her shoulder, saw a moving shadow. She felt her skin turn cold, and once more that insidious trembling attacked her limbs. She realized with both horror and indignation that she was in the grip of fear, she who had gone through earthquake and hurricane! For a moment mortification routed terror, gave her a momentary respite, and she halted and called sharply:—

“Why don’t you come into the avenue? Come out at once and walk ahead of me.”

The steps halted. There was no other answer. “Peace!” That was no word for a dark plantation at night! It was a silence so profound and so awful that it seemed to shriek. Julia clenched her shaking hands, took a step forward and peered into the wood. A shadow detached itself from the darker background and swayed deliberately.

Courage fled. In full surrender to fear, the most awful sensation that the human nerves can experience, she dashed up the avenue. In the confusion of her brain she fancied that she was standing still, that her feet had turned to lead, that her breath had left her body. Then the confusion was cut by a flash of thought. It was no man there, but some evil spirit that haunted the plantation. As every house on Nevis and St. Kitts had its ghost, she had grown up in a firm and unconcerned belief in the visits of the dead to their ancient haunts, and Bosquith boasted seven ghosts. But she had never seen one, and to accept a popular creed and find yourself pursued by a hollow visitant in a lonely park, far from human support, induces mental states entirely unrelated. It might even be a vampire! Julia shrieked, sobbed, almost leaped, as she heard that light crackling of twigs not three yards behind her.

Suddenly the steps ran ahead of her. Her wide staring eyes saw that shadow within a shadow, barely outlined, flit past among the trees, then stop, sway again. She sprang back among the trees on her side of the avenue. The shadow came slowly forward, then turned suddenly and ran back into the depths. Julia crouched with chattering teeth. They were plainly audible. So was her panting breath.

Again there was silence. Julia’s body, by a mere reaction independent of her will, recovered its power of motion and darted up the avenue once more. Again that light crackling of autumn leaves. But her will showed a flicker of vitality, moved in the depths of her disorganized brain. She visualized it, as she had once seen it in a diagram, dragged it upward, ordered it to keep her from fainting, to hold her strength until she reached the garden. She could see the lights of the house. Her mind grew clearer. She realized that she was running like a deer. A few more steps! Then she heard those behind bear down upon her with the swiftness and noise of an express train. She was caught about the waist. As she lost consciousness she heard a loud guffaw.

She opened her eyes, realized that she lay on a garden bench, that a heavily breathing creature stood beside her. For a moment she dared not lift her eyes, seized again with a fear that seemed to distend every nerve in her body, even as she felt something vaguely familiar in the form beside her. There was another burst of intense amusement. She sprang to her feet with blazing eyes and confronted her husband.

“You!” she gasped. “You!”

France rocked to and fro with mirth. “Yes!” he finally ejaculated. “Gad! I’m as much out of breath as you are—holdin’ my sides! What a lark! Never knew it would be such fun to frighten anybody. Rippin’ sensation. And you were frightened dumb, by Jove! Hardly believed it of you, but suddenly thought I’d try.”

“You coward! You brute!” One has to be calm and detached to find original phrases. In moments of real emotion the time-worn and the ready-made dart out of the mind as naturally as thought of dinner above hunger. “For anything that calls itself a man—”

“No insults, my lady, or I’ll do worse. It’s you are the coward—only time I ever got a rise out of you! Didn’t know you had any kind of excitement in you, by gad!”

“You brute! You brute!”

Julia, as much astounded as indignant, and vaguely alarmed, as she had sometimes been in the early months of her married life, turned to walk to the house in a dignified retreat. But France caught her in his arms.

“No you don’t, my lady. Give me a kiss.”

Then, for the first time, passion flamed in Julia. The twilight turned crimson. She beat him on the chest, the face, the head. She kicked him, and strove to unite her hands about his neck and choke him. She longed for a knife, for a pistol. She seethed with hatred and the desire to do murder. And France only laughed, and brushed off her hands with his great hairy ones, while with one arm he clasped her hard and rained kisses on her unprotected face. And he never ceased laughing with an intense quiet amusement, his eyes glittering as they did when he went to hangings, when he once had happened to witness natives tortured in the Congo, as they did at certain performances in Paris calculated to gratify the primitive lusts of man. France had always envied those Eastern potentates that amused themselves with the death agonies of their slaves just before heads were sliced off; but for him and his sort there are still compensations to be found in the depths of civilization.

III

MRS. WINSTONE sat in her charming drawing-room in Tilney Street, by a fire that cast a warm glow over her delicate good looks, further enhanced by a tea-gown of violet Liberty velveteen and Irish lace. The tea-table was beside her, and grouped about it were Mr. Pirie, Mrs. Macmanus, and Lord Algy—reinstated in her affections after an interval of fickleness; all were comfortably nibbling muffins and drinking their horrid mess of tea and cream while looking as gloomy as possible.

It was “black week” of December, 1899. Methuen, Gatacre, and Buller had met with humiliating reverses in South Africa, Sir George White was shut up in Ladysmith with twelve thousand men, and the Boers were proving themselves possessed of a generalship, which, combined with the stores of ammunition they had been accumulating since the Jameson Raid, a complete knowledge of their puzzling hills, the strategic devices they had learned from the natives, and an indomitable spirit, had finally succeeded in quenching optimism in Great Britain.

“Jove, you know,” said Algy, “it can’t be only that they’re on their own ground—cursed ground, too, you know. Fancy the beggars knowin’ how to fight.”

Mr. Pirie crossed his legs and smiled complacently. “I flatter myself that I was one of the three or four men in England that anticipated this. Wolsely warned us. Butler warned us. We wouldn’t listen. How could we be expected to when the South Africans here never believed the Boers would fight? And here we are!”

“I won’t believe it—that they can hold out a month longer,” said Mrs. Macmanus, resolutely. “It’s only a temporary advantage, because no British general would ever count upon a trickery of which he is incapable himself. And what is life without hope? I hated the thought of the war. Is it true that Bobs and Kitchener are to be sent out?”

“Beginning of Chapter II. Wish I were not too old to go out. You’ll be volunteering, Algy, I suppose?”

Lord Algy looked up with something like animation in his pale eyes. “Rather,” he said. “One more lump, please. Was accepted yesterday.” And two months later, with as little fuss, he died at Pieter’s Hill.

“Oh, dear!” cried Mrs. Winstone. “What will become of us all? Fancy your doin’ such a thing, Algy! All the men are goin’, whether they have to or not. London will be too dull. Geoffrey Herbert’s regiment is under orders, and such ducks are in it. I wonder if Bridgit cares?”

“She won’t miss him,” said Mrs. Macmanus, dryly. “She could hardly see less of him there than here, but she’s got a heart and no doubt would spare a tear if he fell.”

“I’ll tell you who cares,” said Pirie, “and that’s Jones. He’s loaded down with Kaffirs, and is in a blue funk. Glad I unloaded when every one else was rushin’ at ’em—thought the war would be over in two weeks, old Jones did, ha! ha! He can’t get rid of a share.”

“Will it matter to Ishbel?” asked Algy.

“Not a bit,” said Mrs. Winstone. “She’s paid him off long since, and opened a dressmakin’ establishment, besides her hat shop. It’ll be just her luck to have all the smart people go into mournin’ at once.”

“Well, thank heaven the jingoes have shut up a bit—what is the matter?”

Mrs. Winstone had exclaimed, “How odd! I just saw Julia go up the stairs.”

At the same moment a maid entered and announced that Mrs. France did not wish any tea, but would wait upstairs until Mrs. Winstone was free.

“Tell her I’ll be with her presently, unless she’ll change her mind and come down. Now, what can be the matter? Come to think of it, I haven’t seen her since she went to White Lodge in August or September. Haven’t got over my disappointment yet, and preferred to forget her for a while. I do hope France hasn’t been misbehavin’ himself.”

“You may be sure he has,” said Mrs. Macmanus; “consolin’ himself for his second facer—no doubt he’s heard the news from Bosquith.”

“What a bore,” exclaimed Mrs. Winstone. “Julia gave me the impression when she first arrived in England that she’d rear at too heavy a bit; but she should be well broken in by this time.”

“Do you think so?” asked Pirie. “That sort never is broken in. High-spirited filly that runs all right under a light rein, but one cut and she’s over the traces. She was clever enough to manage France as long as he was satisfied, but doubt if she’ll have any resource except open war when he’s been bored and disappointed long enough. Hope he’ll volunteer and get himself killed with the least possible delay. Front’s a good place for rascally husbands; and as they’re generally automatically brave, no matter how degenerate, let us hope for a good cleanin’ out of undesirable husbands before we polish off the Boers. Good idea! It would reconcile even Hannah to war.”

“Rather. Poor Julia! You don’t mean to tell me, Maria, that you haven’t looked after her these three months she’s been alone with France?”

“Looked after her?” cried Mrs. Winstone, indignantly. “She is a married woman of nearly five years’ standing, and quite able to look after herself. Why should I be annoyed? Do toddle along, all of you. I want to hear the worst at once. Come back to dinner, Algy, and give an account of yourself.”

She went slowly up to her bedroom after her guests had gone, endeavoring to arrange her features into a semblance of cordiality. She deeply resented Julia’s failure to capture the great prize which would have been so useful to herself. One cannot remain young and fascinating forever, and if one has not riches to substitute, the next best thing is a wealthy relative in the peerage with whom one can always be on intimate terms. She and the present Duchess of Kingsborough, a good plain soul, but astute withal, would never hit it off. Surely, Julia, if she had played her cards carefully, could have kept matrimonial ideas out of the duke’s mind. No doubt she had antagonized him with her independent notions and theories, which any really clever woman always kept to herself. Julia, in her mind, was a failure, and Mrs. Winstone detested failures.

But as she entered her bedroom and saw Julia standing by the hearth, she said brightly, “So glad to see you, dear,” and kissed the cheek presented to her. “Sorry you wouldn’t come in and meet my cronies—why—what is the matter?”

Julia had turned her face to the light.

“Good heavens! Are you ill? Really, you must be careful—you were thin and white enough already—and—and—” her irritation found vent. “Your clothes are not put on properly.”

Julia, who had looked at her aunt with longing eyes, stiffened and said coldly: “Probably not. You see, I had to run away, and I dressed in a hurry. I could not make even the attempt until Harold had drunk a certain amount—and it takes a good deal—”

“What on earth do you mean? Run away?” Mrs. Winstone sat down. “Surely you can come to town when you choose.”

“I am forbidden to leave the grounds.”

“But—you know, you really shouldn’t run away—this is only a mood of Harold’s. You should be careful to do nothing to make yourself conspicuous. You are not in a position to afford it. No doubt many ill-natured people have—laughed at you. You’ve had a frightful come-down, and that sort of thing always delights spiteful women—who envied you before. And Harold—poor thing—no doubt he guesses this—has wanted to keep quiet for a time. Upon my word, I think it is rather the decent thing to do. That is the reason I haven’t dug you out. And of course he is horribly disappointed—”

Her fluent tongue halted, and she moved uneasily. Julia’s figure was rigid, but although Mrs. Winstone had addressed the window, she felt that those big disconcerting eyes she had never quite liked were fixed upon her.

“Ah!” said Julia. “Disappointment? That is a mild word to apply to his present frame of mind, or rather the one in possession until he began upon his present course of consolation. His former was such that I am forced to leave him.”

“Now—what do you mean by that?”

“I mean that I am married either to a maniac or a fiend, and that if I remain with him long enough I shall either be killed or go mad.”

“Oh! You young things are so extravagant in your expressions—and you never were quite like any one else. France is a bad lot more or less, but you have managed him wonderfully. Go on managing him, but for heaven’s sake don’t make a fuss.”

“I’ve left him, and I shall not go back. It would be impossible to exaggerate. I haven’t enough imagination.”

“Do you mean that he—beats you?” Mrs. Winstone hesitated over the ugly word. She did so hate the ugly things of life, even mere words. She felt nothing of the morbid curiosity another woman might have felt, but as long as she could not escape this confidence, better have it over as soon as possible.

“No. For some reason he has not—yet. He locks me in a room and snaps a whip at me by the hour, promising that at a given moment it shall cut through my skin. Why he has not cut me to ribbons, I don’t know, except that he enjoys tormenting me mentally, and defers the other pleasure. He has practised every other form of mental torture he has been able to conceive. He wakes me up twenty times a night, flashing a light before my eyes, or shrieking in my ear. He makes me sit up in bed and listen to the most awful stories, and the bloodcurdling ones are not the worst. He threatens to pinch me from head to foot, but so far merely pretends to—”

“For heaven’s sake hush! I can’t listen to such things. How does he treat you before the servants?”

“Oh, always amiably.”

“I thought so. You haven’t a leg to stand on so far as the law is concerned. He’d deny everything blandly, and you would be set down as an hysteric.”

“I think he is insane.”

“Possibly. That may be the explanation of Harold France. But that will do you no good, either, so long as he is able to hide it. Two alienists must see him in a condition that is, unmistakably, insanity, and sign a certificate to that effect. Only a short time ago the husband of an American friend of mine acted at times in such an eccentric manner that there was no doubt in the minds of those who saw him as to his state. But he fooled the doctors. She feared for her life, and two of her brothers had to come over and inveigle him on board an ocean liner—in the United States, it seems, they are not so particular. And quite right in this case, for the man is now raving.”

“Do you mean to say that the laws of England will not take care of me?”

“Not unless you can persuade him to beat you before the servants. Then you might get a separation—not a divorce without infidelity. I think you had best go back to Nevis.”

“I’ll not do that. Mother has been angry with me for a long time. Just after the Tays were at Bosquith I wrote her I was unhappy and disappointed—and horrified. You see, Daniel Tay made me feel almost a child again, and I longed for my mother’s sympathy. She wrote back that I was a romantic and ungrateful child; that I had enough to make any girl happy; and that there was nothing really wrong. All men were nuisances. She seemed afraid I might run away and spoil her plans. Since then our letters have been stiff and infrequent—until the duke married, when she was more angry with me still. Now we don’t write at all. Besides, I never wish her to know of this. She may be hard, but she is old, and she has had disappointments enough.”

“And what, may I ask, do you mean to do?”

“Surely the law—”

“The law will do nothing—as matters are at present. And for heaven’s sake keep out of the courts.”

“Very well, then, I’ll go to work.”

“Work?”

“Yes. I intended to do that meanwhile, in any case. I went to Ishbel’s on the way here, but Mr. Jones is ill and I couldn’t see her. So I thought you would let me stay here—”

“Oh, of course. But I don’t like this silly idea of yours, at all. Much better you go back to Nevis. That is the only real solution. People here will think you have merely gone to pay a visit to your mother—natural enough—and when you don’t return—well, people are soon forgotten in London.”

“And I shall be comfortably buried! I shall, of course, go to Nevis sooner or later, but not while I am in trouble. And I never could remain there. After five years of England? I am as weaned as you are. I should die of inanition.”

Mrs. Winstone got up and moved about the room restlessly. In her well-ordered life few problems were permitted to enter, and not only did she resent this sudden influx of deadly seriousness, but she practised a certain form of cheap “occultism” much in vogue: avoiding everything that contained an element of darkness, depression, and disturbance, and everybody that persisted in having troubles. She manufactured an atmosphere to keep herself young and happy much as she manufactured her famous expression daily before the mirror, and anchored herself so successfully in the warm bright shallows of life that what springs of emotion she may originally have possessed had dried up long since. But she could still feel intense annoyance, and she felt it now. Moreover, she was puzzled. As the tiresome creature’s only relative in England, she should be equally criticised if she refused her shelter and sympathy in her trouble, or if she identified herself with her revolt. What in heaven’s name was to be done? Well, this was December, and the world out of London. And this war would fill everybody’s thoughts if it only lasted long enough. She returned to her chair.

“My dear! Really! What shall I say? You know I only came up for a day or two—on my way to a lot of visits. Came up to see Hannah, who is off for Rome. There are only two servants in the house. I am off again to-morrow; but of course you can stay here if you are sure he doesn’t know where you are.”

“He’ll know nothing for a week.”

“Ah! I have it! How clever of me! I’ll write him that I’ve packed you off to Nevis. That will gain time. Perhaps he’ll go there in search of you—”

“I prefer that the law should free me fairly. I’m sick of lies.”

“The law will do nothing. Put that idea out of your head. Have you any money in hand?”

“About thirty pounds.”

“The duke ought to make you a separate allowance. Possibly he would if you told him how matters stand, and promised to keep quiet.”

“He would not believe me, not for a moment. It is his cherished fiction that no member of the British aristocracy can do wrong, much less a member of his family. He would preach, tell me that I had hysterical delusions, and send for Harold. I prefer him to know nothing about it.”

“I won’t have you in a shop.”

Julia rose.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake sit down. Don’t let us talk about it any more. Stay here for the present. Something is sure to turn up. You’ll find it very dull—”

“Oh!”

“Did you bring any clothes?”

“A portmanteau, that is all.”

“Well! Better go to your room and rest. I’ll write at once to France, telling him that you sailed to-day. If he doesn’t read it for a week, so much the better.”

IV

JULIA slept the sleep of exhaustion that night. She awoke with a start, screaming, and cowered, before she realized that it was Mrs. Winstone who stood by her bed.

But that lady, true to her creed, pretended not to see. “It is eleven o’clock,” she said lightly. “What a sleeper you are! I am off, but Hawks has orders to take care of you. I’ll ring for your breakfast. I’ve left my addresses for the next two months in my desk. But I hope you’ll get on. Of course I could get you invited to any of the houses, but France would hear of it, and my clever fiction would be spoiled—”

“I could not visit. I shall be very well here. You are too kind.”

Mrs. Winstone thought she was, particularly as there was not the least prospect of reward. A cutlet for a cutlet. However, noblesse oblige. She bestowed a kiss on Julia and sailed out.

After her bath and breakfast Julia made a careful toilet for the first time in many weeks. Sometimes she had not brushed or even unbraided her hair for days.

She telephoned to the house in Park Lane. Mr. Jones was better and Lady Ishbel had gone to the shop. Julia left the house immediately and drove to Bond Street.

There were several people in the show-room. She went up to the boudoir which had witnessed so many gay little teas and so many confidential chats. It was an hour before Ishbel came running up the stairs and flung her arms about Julia.

“You dear thing!” she cried. “How I have worried about you. You wouldn’t answer my notes. And you look like a ghost! I was afraid—”

“You are in trouble, too. You look worn out—”

“Oh, poor Jimmy! He’s ruined, and has had a stroke. There’s tragedy for you. How he fought—and he hated to take my jewels, poor dear. I’m hunting for a little house to take him to—he clings to me; it’s pitiful. The doctor wants him to go to a nursing home, but I couldn’t! I’ll do my best. And,” with a sudden dash into her more familiar self, “all my beaux will go to South Africa; I shall have time for my invalid. That’s all there is of my story. Tell me yours.”

“I’ve come to take you at your word—you once promised to teach me how to trim hats—to help me earn my bread—”

“So! It’s come! Bridgit and I have been expecting it.”

Julia told her story, all that could be told, as briefly as possible. She was, in truth, deeply ashamed of it, and, after her aunt’s rebuff, felt no longer any yearning for sympathy. But Ishbel wept bitterly.

“How I wish we could have rescued you in the beginning, as we planned! It was criminal of us to give it up.” She dried her eyes. “There! It has done me good to cry. Literally I have had not a moment to shed a tear on my own account. Of course I’ll put you to work at once, and when I get a little house you will live with me. It will be too nice. I’ve never had half enough of you. I suppose you could tear yourself away from Mrs. Winstone. How did she receive you?”

“Oh, she’s frightfully cut up. ‘Scandal’—‘work’—I don’t know which she fears most. But I could see she was relieved to learn that Harold had kept himself inside the law.”

“She must feel as if she were the author of a book called ‘The lost duchess!’ Well, we won’t mortify her publicly for some time. Of course you must stay out of the salesroom for a while, or France would trace you. In the workroom, no one, not even Mrs. Winstone, will be any the wiser. Will you come house-hunting with me?”

A fortnight later, Ishbel, with that latent energy of which she betrayed so little in manner and appearance, had furnished a villa in St. John’s Wood, installed Mr. Jones and the servants, and turned over the house in Park Lane to the creditors. As she was obliged to keep both a valet and a nurse for Mr. Jones, there was no spare room for Julia, but there were lodgings close by, and it was arranged that she was to dine every night at the villa.

Perhaps there is no accommodation on this round globe as dreary as a London suburban lodging, but Ishbel adorned the little rooms out of her own superfluities, and Julia was so thankful to be alone and free that she would have settled down to the dingy carpet and grimy furniture without a murmur. And she had no time to mope or think. It would be long before she recovered the buoyancy of her nature, for she had told Mrs. Winstone and Ishbel little of the horrors of those three months alone with her husband. But when indignities are too odious to take to the most intimate and sympathetic ear, the only thing to do is to banish them from the memory; and this Julia did to the best of her ability.

She found a certain fascination in working with her hands, although she did not take kindly to the crowded workroom. Ishbel, who never drove any of her people when she could avoid it, made her hours as few as possible. But her seclusion was of short duration. France wrote to Mrs. Winstone, threatening her with the law, but, taking her communication literally, flung himself off to South Africa. After his departure Julia spent a part of each day in the show-room, although she continued to trim hats; her fingers proving nimble and apt, she was determined to learn the business. In the show-room she met many of her old acquaintances, and Mrs. Winstone waxed so indignant that communication between them ceased. The duke, who never found politics amusing when his party was busy exterminating mosquitoes, and who at the moment was wholly absorbed in his wife and in his prospects of an heir, remained at Bosquith for a year on end; if he thought about Julia at all, he supposed her to be at White Lodge.

Her personal life flowed on peacefully for eight months. The past faded into the limbo of nightmares. She made little more than enough to pay for her rooms and two meals, but even had she found time to miss the beautiful garments she had loved, she would have had no occasion to use them. No one entertained. All England was in mourning. Hardly a family of any size but had lost one or more of its men, particularly if the men were officers. Ishbel’s milliners and dressmakers worked all day on black, nothing but black. So constant, and always sudden, was the demand for mourning trousseaux that she and Julia often worked at night after the women, worn out, had gone home.

And those that had no men at the front to be killed were ashamed to admit it, to be out of the fashion, and swelled the demands for mourning. The Americans, resident in London, felt “out of it” in colors, and even those come on their annual pilgrimage were advised to wear black-and-white or dull gray. Ishbel and Julia laughed sometimes over their work and speculated as to the origin of other fads, but they were too busy and too tired for more than the passing jest. All England was sad enough without pretence, and worrying not only for relatives and friends at the front, but for the nation’s prestige. Julia and Ishbel, at dinner, talked of little else but the news in the evening bulletins, and often it was of a personal nature. Nigel Herbert had been among the first to volunteer, had been wounded at Vaal Kranz, recovered, and was fighting again, besides corresponding with one of the great dailies. Two of Ishbel’s admirers had died at Ladysmith, one of enteric, the other in a reckless sortie. Still another was in hospital with two bullets in him; and beyond the brief despatch which conveyed this news to the press, she had heard nothing. His going had solved a problem, but she was thankful for her work. Geoffrey Herbert had been killed at Paardeberg, and Bridgit had gone out to the Cape with hospital supplies.

Of France not a word was heard until June 12th, when his name was among the list of wounded at the battle of Diamond Hill. Two months later Julia read of his arrival in England.

V

ON these warm August evenings Ishbel and Julia had their dinner in the garden under a beech tree. Ishbel’s bright courage seldom failed her, but she was grateful for Julia’s companionship and help during this the most trying period of her life, and Julia, glad to be necessary to some one, above all to her favorite friend, responded without any of the usual feminine fervors, and the harmony between them remained unbroken. Mr. Jones, helpless in body and bitter in mind, demanded every moment his wife could give him, but occasionally permitted Julia to take her place and read the war news aloud.

Between the defeat of the Boer forces at Diamond Hill and the beginning of Kitchener’s “drives,” there was less demand for mourning garments; the war, indeed, was believed to be over. Ishbel and Julia rose later and left the shop earlier. Both were haggard and needed rest. They made a deliberate attempt to enjoy their evening meal, refusing to discuss immediate deaths and hypothetical disaster, and tabûing personal topics. There was still plenty to discuss, and so many reminiscences of officers that had left their lives or their looks in the South African graveyard, that it was easy to steer clear of private anxieties. But one evening after the cloth was removed and they were alone, Julia said abruptly:—

“I had a letter from Harold to-day—directed to the shop. He had just learned that I had not gone to Nevis. He did not say who gave him my address—”

“Yes?” The word had a fashion of flying from Ishbel’s lips at all times. Now she sat forward in alarm. “Yes?”

“He says that I am to return to White Lodge to-morrow.”

“But of course you will not!”

“Of course not. I consulted a solicitor some time ago. He cannot compel me to live with him. On the other hand—”

“Yes?”

“As I am unable to get a legal separation I cannot prevent him from forcing himself into my rooms, annoying me in a thousand ways. He might even come to the shop and make a scene.”

“Well, it is my shop, and I can have him put out. Did you tell the solicitor other things? Is there really no chance of a legal separation?”

“He did not seem to think well of my reasons for wanting one. I could not bring myself to tell him much, and I have kept it in the background so long it seemed rather dim and flat—the little I did tell him. He said that mental cruelty existed largely in women’s imaginations. Then he consoled me by adding that if I refused to return, Harold might be betrayed into some overt act before witnesses, perhaps later give me cause for divorce. But I don’t think so. He is very cunning. His instinct for self-protection is almost abnormal. I told the lawyer I believed Harold to be insane, and he was quite shocked; said there was too much talk already of insanity in the great families of Britain, and it was doing them harm with the lower orders—intimated that it was my duty to keep such an affliction dark if it really had descended upon the house of France. When I told him I knew that at least two of Harold’s ancestors had been shut up for years at Bosquith, and not so long ago, he fairly squirmed. Then he advised me to conceal both my knowledge and my suspicions if I hoped for a divorce. The law is far more tender to its lunatics than to their victims. Harold, shut up for twenty—thirty—forty years would continue to be my husband on the off chance of his cure—while I consoled myself with the prospect of his release! On the other hand, if left at large he may give me cause for divorce. That was the only argument that appealed to me. My legal friend ended by advising me to return to Nevis—this, I feel sure, in the interests of the British aristocracy. I’d like to make over a few laws in this country.”

“That is what Bridgit says. The women of the lower classes might almost as well be slaves in the Congo. They can’t divorce a merely drunken brute, and a legal separation does them little good. If a man wants to desert his family all he has to do is to go to the Midlands or the North and disappear in a coal mine, while his wife, unable to marry a better man, sinks to the dregs in the effort to support herself, perhaps half a dozen children. The laws in this country might have been made by Turks. Who ever hears of a man being punished because he is the father of the child a wretched girl has murdered? Oh—some day—let us hope—But we have the present to deal with. Have you answered France’s letter?”

“Yes, I wrote him that I never should return to him, that I had had legal advice, that I was able to support myself, that I wished never to hear from him again. Also, that any further letters I received from him I should return unopened to his club. I did not write a page, but I fancy he cannot mistake my meaning.”

“I am afraid he will persecute you, but you must be brave. If necessary, you might hide in the country for a bit, or go over to Paris for me—”

“I shall stay here at work. He can do his worst.”

But, alas, it was always Harold France’s good fortune to be underrated. Julia, well as she knew him, had never yet gauged the depth and extent of his resources. Some strange arrest in his mental development, possibly a forgotten blow during boyhood, or a prenatal check, had left him with a quick, cunning, malicious, scheming mind which otherwise might have been brilliant, unscrupulous, and resourceful in the grand manner. Possibly it might have been useful as well; and this may have been the secret of those vague angry ambitions, always seething in the base of his cramped brain. Whatever the cause, his mind required a constant grievance to feed on, and whatever his limitations, they were never too great to interfere with the success of his devilish purposes.

Three mornings later Ishbel and Julia arrived in Bond Street at a few minutes before eleven. Royalty was expected at a quarter past, and as they ascended the stairs they were not surprised to see the forewoman, pale and trembling, standing at the turn. When royalty had arrived—unheralded—the day before, she had almost wept, and her assistant had succumbed and been obliged to leave the room. It was the first time that royalty had honored the shop in Bond Street, smart as it was, and when the princess left she had announced that on the morrow she should return with her two girls. Ishbel had felt sure that her women would not close their eyes during the night, and be quite unfit for the strain of the second visit. Therefore, she laughed merrily as she saw Miss Slocum’s twisted visage.

“Brace up! Brace up!” she cried. “You have nearly twenty minutes yet. And am I not here? Mrs. France and I will wait on their royal highnesses—”

“Oh, your ladyship,” wailed the woman. “It ain’t that—or, I mean I could stand it much better to-day. I’d made up my mind. No! It’s worse!”

“Worse?”

The woman glanced up the half flight behind her. The door leading into the show-room was closed. “Oh, your ladyship, there’s two awful creatures in there, and their royal highnesses coming in ten minutes. I told them to go—”

“But I don’t understand. Every one has a right to come here. I can’t have any of my customers put out for royalty. I am not being honored by a call. This is a shop—”

“Oh, yes, my lady, but you don’t understand. You’ve never had this sort—”

“What sort?”

The woman’s voice quavered and broke. “Tarts, my lady. Regular Piccadilly trotters, that’s what!”

Ishbel was as dismayed as the woman could wish. Followed by her equally horrified friend she brushed the forewoman aside, ran up the stair, and entered the show-room. The large windows, open to the gay subdued roar of Bond Street, let in a flood of mellow sunshine. The square room, not too large, and with a mere suggestion of the First Empire in its wall paper and scant furniture, was a severe yet delicate background for the most charming hats ever seen in London. Of every shape and size, but each touched with a fairy’s wand, these harbingers of autumn, hopefully prismatic, and mounted on slender rods, seemed to sing that woman’s face was naught without its frame, and that in them alone was the problem of the floating decoration solved.

But alas! no such fantasie was in the air this morning. “Creatures,” in truth! Two females, loudly dyed, rouged, blackened, bedecked in cheap finery, were overhauling hats, mantles, and chiffons, despite the protests of the livid assistant. Ishbel went directly up to the largest and most aggressive.

“I am so sorry,” she said with her sweet remote smile and her bright crisp manner, “but I must ask you to go. Some other time I shall be most happy to show you the things, but just now everything must be put in order as quickly as possible. I am expecting patrons who are in town only for the moment. As you see, this room is not very large. Be quick, Jeannie, will you?”

She turned her back on the two women, but the largest walked deliberately round in front of her.

“I say,” she said, “are you the boss?”

“I am—Jeannie—”

“I say. What’s a shop for if ladies can’t call and see things? Is this a private shop for your friends?”

“No, but this morning is exceptional. I really must ask you to go—” she glanced at the clock. It was nearly ten minutes past eleven, and royalty was hideously prompt. “I dislike being rude, but I must ask you to go at once.”

“Really, now!” The woman sat herself on the little sofa before the mantel and spread out her gaudy skirts. “I ain’t going to be put out. Brass is brass, and mine’s as good as any. Wot you say, Frenchie?”

“That’s what.” Her partner was holding a large hat on her uplifted arm, and twirling it from side to side. “And I want a hat. Don’t mind trying ’em all on, one by one.”

“If you don’t go at once, I shall call the police.”

“Police? Wot for? Ain’t we behaving ourselves proper? I call that libel, I do.”

At this moment the door, which Ishbel had taken care to close, flew open, and royalty entered, followed by two slim young daughters. The eyes of the lady on the sofa bulged, but her presence of mind did not desert her. She sprang to her feet and threw her arm round Ishbel’s waist.

“Your hats are too sweet, dearie,” she exclaimed. “I shall take four to-day and come back to-morrow—”

At the same moment the other woman, who had dropped the hat, lit a cigarette.

Royalty gasped, made a motion not unlike that of a mother hen when she spreads her wings to protect her chicks from a sudden shower, then shooed her girls out and down the stairs.

Ishbel made no motion to detain her. No explanation was possible. She saw ruin, but she merely removed her waist from the embrace of the woman and turned her white composed face upon both of the invaders.

“Will you explain what spite you have against me?” she asked.

“Oh!” cried Julia, passionately. “Can’t you see? France has sent them.”

“Right you are, dearie,” said the younger cocotte, smoking comfortably. “And here we stay till you pack up and go home to your lawful husband. Lucky you are to have one. Oh, yes, my lady, you can call in the bobbies, but this is the middle of Bond Street, and we’ll raise such a hell of a row as we’re being dragged out there won’t be anybody else coming up here in a hurry.”

Julia turned to her. “If I leave this shop and promise never to return, will you agree to do the same?”

“If you go back to your husband. If you don’t, here we, and more of us, come every day, unless, of course, her ladyship has us put out! Your leaving the shop won’t help matters any. You go back to White Lodge. France is an old pal of mine, but it isn’t often we see his brass. Jolly lark this is, too.”

“Very well,” said Julia. “I shall go.”

“You shall not!” cried Ishbel, passionately. “My business is ruined in any case. We can go to America—”

“And leave Mr. Jones? He is dependent upon you for shelter. Your business is not ruined. Of course the princess will not come again, but you have powerful friends that will explain to her and prevent the story from spreading—”

“Right you are. France ain’t aiming to spite her. But he’ll ruin every friend you’ve got unless you go home, double quick.”

“I shall go this afternoon.” And Julia ran down the stairs and out of the building before Ishbel could detain her.

VI

JULIA took a closed fly at Stanmore, and in the avenue of White Lodge her eyes moved constantly from one window to the other. But on this bright hot afternoon there was neither sound nor motion in the woods. She feared that the house might be without servants, but as the fly entered the garden she saw that the windows were open and that smoke rose from the kitchen chimney. White Lodge was built round three sides of a shallow court, and after dismissing the fly, she attempted to open the door on her right, as it was close to the stair which communicated with the hallway outside her own rooms. But this door was locked. So apparently were the central doors, but the one opposite and leading into the dining room was open, and not caring to ring and announce herself, she crossed the court and entered; although this meant that she must traverse the entire house to reach the comparative shelter of her own apartment. The large rooms were full of light, but she was nearly ten minutes arriving at her destination, for she opened every door warily, and explored dark corridors with her eyes before she put her foot in them. But even on the twisted stair she met no one, and the house was as silent as the wood.

When she entered her boudoir, she saw that the door leading into her bedroom was closed. For a moment she was grateful, as it was a room of hideous memories, and she intended to sleep on her wide sofa as long as she was obliged to remain at White Lodge. Then she remembered that its inner door led into France’s rooms, and that she intended to move a heavy piece of furniture across it.

She opened the door cautiously and looked in. This room was very dark and close; the heavy curtains were drawn across the windows. By such light as she had let in she could define nothing but shapeless masses of heavy furniture, not an outline; it would have been difficult to tell a man from a bedpost. She was about to close the door and ring for a servant when the one opposite opened and the big frame of her husband seemed to fill the sudden panel of light. There was not a key in the boudoir, nor time to move furniture. Julia retreated behind a table.

France crossed the inner room at his leisure and entered. Julia almost relieved the tension of her feelings by laughing aloud. Every man that had come back from the Boer war looked ten years older, but she had seen no one before that looked ridiculous as well. Not only were his stiff hair and moustache gray and his bony face gaunt, but the copper color of the tan he had acquired during the months preceding his weeks in hospital clung to his pallid face in patches, making him look as if afflicted with some foul disease; and he had lost a front tooth. His glassy eyes, however, were less dull, and moved restlessly.

“Howd’y do?” he said. “Didn’t expect you till to-night or to-morrow. Good girls! Good girls!”

He was about to turn the corner of the table when he paused abruptly and his jaw fell. He found himself looking into the barrel of a small revolver.

“Sit down,” said Julia. “I’m willing to talk to you for a few moments, but if you come a step nearer, I’ll shoot.”

France made a movement as if he would spring. The pistol advanced, and he stood staring into the thing. He was a brave man on the battlefield, but he had never looked into the mouth of a firearm at close range, and he disliked the sensation it induced. He gave a loud laugh and sat down.

“Oh, well, my lady, have your dramatics. I can wait. What’ve you got to say? Seems to me you should have a good deal. Nice pair of liars you and your aunt!”

Julia took the chair directly opposite his.

“I have come back—”

“Oh, I say! That thing will go off. Pistols were not made for women to fool with.”

Julia put the pistol in her lap.

“I have returned to White Lodge to protect Ishbel, and for no other reason. Your plot was fiendish, and you won out. But I win now. I shall not leave you again, but I shall be my own mistress. I shall no longer call you names nor attempt to make you understand how I loathe you, but if you ever enter my rooms again or attempt to touch me, here or elsewhere, I shall shoot you without further notice!”

“Oh, you will! And how long do you think you can keep that sort of heroics up? You’ve got to sleep, and there’s not a key in your rooms.”

“There will be to-morrow. I left orders with the locksmith in Stanmore. I need not sleep to-night, and I shall meet him when he comes, and stand guard with this pistol. You interfere at your peril.”

“And do you think that keys can keep me out?”

“I shall use both keys and heavy pieces of furniture. You cannot enter without making noise enough to rouse me. And if you succeeded, you would gain nothing. I can always kill myself. I would boil in oil before you should ever touch me again.”

“You are hard for such a young ’un,” muttered France. “Gad, your eyes are like ice!” He made a motion as if to cover his own eyes, but they flashed with exultation, and he dropped his hand.

“Look here,” he said. “You can’t get the best of me. I gave you to understand there was to be no compromise. You were to come back to me, or your Ishbel would be ruined. Well, that’s what I meant. You chuck that pistol, and you do everything else I tell you to do, or I send those tarts back to the shop.”

“I can do no more to protect Ishbel than I have done already. But I shall not live to see my best friend disgraced and ruined.”

“Curse you!” shouted France. “Curse you!”

“Now suppose you listen to me a moment. Since you left England I have consulted not only a solicitor but an alienist—”

“A—a—what—”

“I believe you to be mad—”

“Don’t! Don’t!” France’s face was gray and loose. His eyes rolled with terror.

But Julia went on remorselessly, pressing the suggestion home.

“The doctor told me that it might be years before you would develop acute mania. Unfortunately, your rotten spot has not developed the lust to kill, or you would easily be got rid of. You can practise your former methods of cruelty on me no more, but let this fact compensate you—keep you quiet. Use it as a cud; chew on it and exult. It should satisfy you for the rest of your life. This is it: you have destroyed my youth, you have killed my soul, you have ruined my power of enjoyment in anything, you have left me nothing but a mind to carry me through the rest of my days. Even if you had died in Africa, I should never have given even a thought to loving and being loved like other women. For me you symbolize man and all the horrors that are in him. I live because my mind compels it, and because my mother is still alive. If this statement does not give you food for gloating, if you are incapable of understanding what I mean, then—” She laid her pistol on the table again and tapped it significantly.

But France took no notice of the pistol. He was staring at her with his jaw relaxed, and his eyes still full of horror.

“Did—didn’t—he say I might never go mad?”

“So you have thought of it yourself?”

“No—no—not really. But out there when I lay all night on that cursed veldt, and expected to die before they found me—I thought—thought—I had gone pretty far here, even for me—No! No! _No!_ I never really thought it—it was only when I came to in hospital I was jolly glad to find that it had only been delirium—any one might mistake delirium—curse you, you red-headed witch! I had forgotten all about it.”

“And do you suppose that even if you had no inherited tendency to insanity, you could go the pace you did, do the things you have done for years, and not rot your brain—”

“How many men go the pace—”

“Not yours. If you hadn’t compelled me to return to you, I should have had you watched—”

“You mean to say you’d lock me up—”

“I shouldn’t waste a minute. You ought to be locked up on general principles. It’s a half-baked civilization that permits you and your sort to be at large. Strange laws! Strange justice!”

France gathered himself together and stood up, but he leaned heavily on the table. “You’ve got your revenge,” he said thickly. “Nothin’ I ever did crueller to you or any one than tell a man his brain’s rotten—and makin’ him believe it! Oh, God! Those eyes! If ever I do go mad, I’ll see nothing else.”

“Better think no more about it.” Julia, having subdued her keeper, felt a pang of remorse and pity. “Take my advice and go to Bosquith for the shooting—”

“And see that brat?”

“The duke will think the more of you. Remember he is not compelled to allow you a thousand a year. He has a sensitive vanity, and resents lack of attention. Besides, the sport will do you good.”

“And you?”

“I shall stay here.”

“And never leave the place?”

“I shall go to London for the day whenever I choose, and I shall ride and walk about the country. I have no desire to see any of my neighbors.”

“Very well. I’ll go. I’ve got to pull myself together. I can’t do it here. I’m still off my feed, or you wouldn’t have bowled me over like this. Before I come back, I’ll have thought out how to deal with you—”

Julia tapped the pistol again. “I have five others. I shall conceal them in different parts of the house, and carry this always.”

France gave a strangled cry and began to curse, with reviving enthusiasm.

Julia rose and leaned across the table.

“Be careful,” she said softly. “Keep calm. You are forty-six, your heart is not good, and blood cannot surge through your brain much longer with impunity. Unless you choose to court apoplexy—”

But France had bolted from the room. An hour later he was on his way to Bosquith.

VII

HE didn’t return for a month. During that time Julia did not go to London. She was glad to be alone and to rest. For the first time she realized how tired she was, and enjoyed lying in bed late and being waited on. She felt as hard as she appeared to France, and cynically made up her mind to select from life such of its physical and mental pleasures as she could command and enjoy, since personality was denied her. She saw no hope in the future except the preservation of her bodily and mental integrity. Whatever else France might compel her to do, or however live, she must submit, as she could not spend her life flourishing a pistol. Now that she had found herself, knew that she no longer feared him, she guessed that he would take no further pleasure in frightening her; but the mere fact of his presence in the house year after year was enough to turn her into a mere shell. That she was already one she did not quite believe, despite her bitter declaration, for she knew the tenacity of youth and the buoyancy of her nature; but ten—twenty—thirty years!

And how long would her nerves last? To be forced to live under the same roof with a man whose mere glance made her nerves crawl was bad enough, but to sleep night after night, for months on end (save when she could persuade him to visit), a few yards from a possible lunatic, must wear down the stoutest defences of will and reason. There was a double cause for sleeping with one pistol under her pillow and another under a book on the table beside her bed. The situation had something of grim humor in it as well as adventurous excitement, and Julia shrugged her shoulders and felt grateful that she had inherited her mother’s nerves.

But she thought as little as possible, since thinking did no good. Moreover, in years she was young, and although her spirit was curdled and dark at present, its quality was fine and high; and for such spirits life is rarely long enough to bury hope, save for brief moments, alive.

For the present she read and walked and rode, her surface contentment increased by the cheering news from Ishbel that one of her powerful aunts, who was a personal friend of the outraged royal lady, had made a satisfactory explanation; and the princess, to signify her forgiveness and sympathy, had ordered several hats sent to her for inspection. It was not to be expected that she would risk a second shock by venturing into the shop in Bond Street again, but she was a conscientious soul, always recognizing the duties toward mere mortals imposed upon those of divine origin; and as discretion was a part of her equipment, the story never got about town. Ishbel’s business was saved. But it was a long time before Julia dared to enter that shop again.

She heard France return, late one night. She rose at once, put on her dressing-gown, and sat on the edge of her bed-sofa, waiting. But although he made an even greater noise and fuss than usual, summoning the entire staff of servants from their beds to wait on him, and spent at least an hour in the dining-room, he did not pass her door.

She met him on the following day in the living-room, a few moments before luncheon. He greeted her with an almost regal courtesy, asked after her health, and then preceded her into the dining-room. During the meal, although he looked the personification of serene amiability, he did not address a remark to her. Julia, puzzled but relieved, noted that he looked far better than when he had gone to Bosquith, that his hands were steadier, and that he drank nothing. At the end of the meal he rose with a slight bow as if dismissing her—from his thoughts, no doubt!—and left the room without smoking. It was probable that he was nursing his nerves.

The next day she learned that he had bought a string of hunters and a pack of fifty couples. A corresponding number of grooms and helpers appeared in the stables, as well as a pack huntsman, a kennel huntsman, and whippers-in. Hunting is the most expensive luxury, counting out dissipations, in which an Englishman can indulge, and Julia wondered at his sudden extravagance. True, he had never stinted himself in anything, and he was one of the best-dressed men in England, but, then, he had always schemed to make some one else pay, and since his social restoration his tailor had “carried” him. Relieved as she was at his avoidance of her, and to be excused from making conversation at the table, curiosity overcame her in the course of a week, and one night at dinner, when the servants had left the room, she asked him if he had joined the Hertfordshire.

“I have,” he said graciously.

“I thought hunting was so terribly expensive.”

“What of that?” he asked, with his new grand air. “Whatever is due my position I am not likely to forget.”

He uttered this copy-book sentiment, so different from his usual loose slang, as if he had rehearsed it, and Julia began to perceive that he had cut out a new rôle for himself, and was wearing it with his usual methodical consistency.

“But can you afford it? You know this is a matter which does not admit of debt—”

“I am not in the habit of being catechised, but I am willing to gratify you. I satisfied myself at Bosquith that neither my cousin nor his child has many months to live.”

“But I heard that the child was healthy, and that the duke was uncommonly well.”

“They are both in the last stages of tuberculosis, Bright’s disease, or diabetes, I have not made up my mind which. And I also satisfied myself that Margaret will have no more children.”

“Oh! I see. Then you expect to succeed shortly.”

“Within a year.”

“Then perhaps when you have what you’ve always most wanted in life, you will let me go my own way.”

For the first time his glassy eyes lit a small sinister torch, although they did not meet hers. They had not met hers since his return.

“You will be my duchess and do your little to support the prestige of the great house into which you have had the good fortune to marry. If you leave me, or in any way bring discredit upon me and my family, you know one penalty. Others you will learn if you cause me even the lightest displeasure.”

Julia laughed outright. “Really, Harold, you were about the only man I had never thought funny—for good and sufficient reasons! Now you are too absurd, with your airs of superiority over the mere female, and your new rôle of stage lord. You were more impressive when you were the ordinary male brute, for at least you were natural. You never were intended for an actor.”

“Actor?” His tones were still even. It seemed impossible to ruffle him. “I have told you that I expect to be Duke of Kingsborough in six months.”

“Even so. What duke do you know that puts on such airs? Even Kingsborough pretends to be simple and democratic.”

“The great peers of England have made a mistake in affecting a democracy it is impossible they should feel. They have only lowered the dignity of their position. I propose to raise it. When I am Kingsborough, I shall restore the ancient glories of Bosquith, and live as the old feudal lords lived, with an army of retainers, and a tenantry to whom my lightest word is law. I shall entertain as kings have forgotten how to entertain, and in no village on my estates anywhere shall an election ever be held again.”

“Good Lord! Do you fancy you can turn back the clock? This is the twentieth century.”

“I am not the only one who believes that the clock will turn back—to absolute monarchy. It is the only solution—barring Socialism—if we are to escape mob rule.”

This was the one thoughtful remark he had made, and she looked at him with a trifle less suspicion, then remembered having read an intensely conservative article in one of the reviews, not long since. She had left it in the library, she recalled. But it was odd that he should open a review. She had never known him to read anything but French novels and the _Pink ’Un_. Was he trying to educate his mind, late in life? Far be it from her to discourage him, even if it did lead to impossible dreams. She rose from the table.

“Well, it will be picturesque,” she said. “I suppose I shall wear gold brocade to breakfast—”

“I have not risen,” said France, in an even remote tone.

“Oh? What? Are you practising on me?”

France turned almost purple. But he made no reply. He merely rose with great dignity and left the room. Julia watched him cross the court with as much interest as amusement. His back was imposing, regal. Nature certainly had started in a lavish mood to fashion him, then suffered from a fit of spleen when she finished his shoulders, and vented it on his head—without and within! Poor devil, what mortifications awaited him! For the moment she forgot the bitter debt she owed him.

VIII

ON the following day, at luncheon, France remarked:—

“I shall leave cards on the county. When they are returned, no one will be admitted. I do not wish you to have any relations with my neighbors.”

“I haven’t the least desire to have any relations with our neighbors.”

“And you will exercise on foot hereafter. I shall want all the mounts.”

“Very well.”

“If you wish to go to London, you will walk to Stanmore. I have given orders at the stables that none are to be taken from you, and the servants will take none to Stanmore.”

“Very well.”

Julia looked up, and their eyes met for the first time. In his was the strange glitter that had terrified her early in her married life and with which she had grown horribly familiar during her previous sojourn at White Lodge. It was an expression of utterly soulless mirth, such, no doubt, as lit the eyes of savages while watching their victims at the stake. She saw at once that he was devising new methods of tormenting her and debated whether it would be wiser to laugh at him or to let him think he was accomplishing his purpose. Being now poised and entirely without fear, it was her disposition to reveal herself, if only as a compensation for what he had made her suffer; but, on the other hand, she wanted what peace she could get; she felt no desire to vary the monotony of her life by egging him on to a point where, in spite of her pistols and her courage, he could easily, with his devilish resource, make her life unbearable. She believed that if she possessed her soul in patience, he would weary of the game and leave, even if he did not fulfil her hopes and go quite out of his mind first. She decided to temporize, and dropped her eyes.

“You make my life very hard, but I can only submit,” she murmured.

“I wish you never to forget that you are, so to speak, a prisoner of state.”

Julia controlled her muscles and replied demurely:—

“The king commands. I have only to obey. I shall probably expire of ennui, but, after all, I am only a woman, so what matter?”

“Quite so!”

Julia raised her lashes. The dancing glitter in his eyes was appalling. There was no doubt in her mind at that moment that his complete loss of reason was but a question of months. So much the better if she must merely humor a madman; that, at least, was “managing” without loss of self-respect. She sighed, and looked wistfully out of the window.

“I suppose you do not intend to permit me to follow the hounds?”

“Certainly not. I intend that you shall remain within the walls of White Lodge for the rest of your life and do nothing.”

“Oh, very well.”

Having banished all expression from her eyes, she looked at him again. This time he was regarding her with condescension and approval. “You may go to your room,” he said.

She thanked him and retired in good order.

He did not address her again for quite a month. Then he informed her that there would be a large hunt breakfast at the house on the following morning, and commanded her to appear. He had already entertained a number of red-coated men at breakfast, and Julia wondered at their complaisance in admitting him to something like intimacy; for, in spite of the position he had enjoyed for a time as a respectable benedict and heir to a dukedom, he had never made a friend, and it was patent that he was swallowed with many grimaces. But she guessed that noblesse oblige had much to do with it. The man had been accepted when placed in a position by his powerful relative to press home his social rights; therefore, was it impossible, in his fallen fortunes, to retreat to their old position, unless he proved himself a flagrant cad. Besides, he had fought bravely in South Africa, and personal courage and patriotism compensate for many shortcomings. Moreover, he was an admirable cross-country rider. He was safe enough for the present.

She dressed herself with some excitement on the following morning, for it was long since gayety of any sort had entered her life. But when she stood in her house gown among some twenty men and women in pink coats and riding habits, all chattering of the prospective meet, and of the one two days before, she felt sadly out of it, and wished she had been permitted to remain in seclusion. It was nearly two years since she had presided at a hunt breakfast, and then she had worn her own habit, and been as keen for the chase as any of her guests. But as she stood with a group of women waiting for breakfast to be announced, and answering polite questions, assuring her indifferent neighbors that her frail health alone forbade her joining them in the field, she was astonished to find that she did not envy them, nor did she feel the least desire to race across the country after a frantic fox. It seemed such a futile attempt at self-delusion in the matter of pleasure. What had come over her? Had she seen too much of the serious side of life during her eight months in London?

If she had wondered at France’s benevolence in permitting her to meet his guests and preside at his table, she was not long receiving enlightenment. They sat opposite each other in the table’s width, and before ten minutes had passed, he opened upon her batteries which hardly could be called masked. She had almost forgotten him, and was laughing merrily at a sally of the good-natured youth who sat on her left, when France leaned across the table and said softly:—

“Not so loud, my dear. You have forgotten your manners this last year. This is not Nevis.”

Julia was so completely taken by surprise that to her intense annoyance she colored violently. But she instantly understood his new tactics, and blazing defiance on him, regardless of consequences, turned to her neighbor. Whatever she might submit to in private, pride commanded that she hold her own in public.

But every time that she answered a remark addressed to her by some one opposite, his dry sarcastic glance crossed hers, and once he said, raising his voice: “Workin’ in a bonnet shop doesn’t improve manners, by Jove. But my wife is only a child yet, and my cousin Kingsborough and Lady Arabella worked too hard over her not to have been rewarded if she could have remained with them. Of course, I’m only a rough sailor.”

There was an intense and painful pause after this speech, although Julia paid no attention, and once more permitted her musical laugh, not the least of her charms, to ring out. She fancied this was the last time the county would honor White Lodge, but shrewdly surmised that it was the last time they would be invited. They had been brought together to satisfy her husband’s passion for inflicting torment.

And not once did he betray himself. He looked superior, tolerant, lightly annoyed, but never vicious. His guests pronounced him a cad by the grace of God, but too great an ass to know what he was up to. They had long since accepted the fact that he was off his head about his wife; and, although this was damned uncomfortable, could only conclude that he was trying in his blundering way to apologize for her; why, heaven only knew, as she could give him cards and spades on breeding. Julia secretly hoped that he would suddenly lose his self-control and burst out in a torrent of abuse, but France still had sentinels posted at every turn in his brain, and played his part throughout the breakfast without an instant’s lapse. He laughed tolerantly whenever he caught her making an observation or airing an opinion, but it was not until just before they rose from the table that he made another attack. The incessant sporting talk had ceased for a moment, and some one had mentioned Nigel Herbert’s books, apropos of his fine record in South Africa.

“Is he goin’ to hammer away at Socialism for the rest of his life?” asked one of the young women. “Awful bore, because he’s an old pal of mine, and I’d like to read him. Do use your influence, Mrs. France. He thinks a towerin’ lot of your opinion.”

“Oh, now! now!” broke in France. “Don’t encourage my little wife in any of her nonsense. She’s straight, all right, but an awful little goose about men. Hope you haven’t turned her head, Lansing,” addressing the young man beside her. “She’s only a child yet, and devoted to me, but I don’t want to be teased noon and night for a new toy.”

“By God,” muttered one of the men, “let’s take him to the duck pond. Serves us right for coming here. Wish I’d opposed his election. Silly asses, all of us. Leopards don’t change spots. But she’s a brick.”

Julia, at least, had won the admiration of the company by her attitude, after the first attack, of serene unconsciousness. She might have been deaf and blind, and at the same time there was no betraying note of defiance in her voice or flash in her eyes. It was impossible to call France cruel, but the guests, as they filed out, and got on their mounts as quickly as possible, voted that it must be harder to be shut up with a bounder like that than to have lost the prospect of being a duchess.

After they had gone, and Julia had brought the angry blood from her head by a long tramp in the opposite direction, she recalled a visit she had once paid with France to the castle of a young peer of the realm who had married a wealthy American girl for whom he had conceived an intense dislike. This man had appeared to take a peculiar pleasure in mortifying his wife in company, by an irresistible play of wit directed at herself. Julia had felt a passionate sympathy for the helpless young duchess, who had neither the subtlety of tongue nor the bad manners of the man who was spending her money, and had expressed her wrath to France in no measured terms. France forgot nothing. When he felt the time had come for a new weapon, he selected one that is in every husband’s armory, and, although he used it clumsily, possessing nothing of the young duke’s cold irony and glancing wit, there was no chance that it should miss its aim.

Julia was apprehensive that France, irritated at his failure to provoke her to retort, if not to tears, might seek other vengeance. But when they met on the following day it was evident by the expression of his eyes that he was quite satisfied. The arrogance of his manner, indeed, led her to suspect that his faith in himself was too great to recognize failure if it sprang at him, and for small mercies she was thankful.

It was nearly three months before he addressed another remark to her beyond polite phrases calculated to impress the servants. But one morning, shortly after the first of the year, he sent her word that he wished her presence in the library. She went at once and found him sitting before the table in a magisterial attitude. Before him was a long itemized bill.

“You have been ordering books,” he said in a voice of cutting reproof, as if speaking to a dependant who must be shown his place. “I gave you no permission to run up bills of any sort.”

“I have always ordered books—for years, at least—it did not occur to me.”

This time Julia was deeply mortified, and showed it as plainly as he could wish.

“You pretend to loathe me—your own word—and yet you are not too proud to run up bills for me to pay.”

Julia’s gorge rose, and her humiliation fled. “You compel me to live with you, and I am entitled to compensation. Besides, after all, you are my husband and I see no reason why you should not pay my bills. If you permit me to live away from you, that is another matter. I had nothing charged to you while I was earning my living.”

“If you want books, my lady, you can write to your mother for the money to pay for them. Silly ass I was to marry a girl without a penny. Who else would have married you if I hadn’t, and you thrown at my head? You ought to be thankful for bread and butter and a roof. No girl has a right to marry a man in my position unless she brings him her weight in gold.”

“What a pity I shall cost you so much when I’m a duchess,” said Julia, mildly. “You would better let me go at once.”

“When you are a duchess, you’ll have clothes, but you’ll have no books, and no more liberty than you have here. As for this bill, I’ll pay it—when I get ready—but I shall write to-day and tell them that you have no further credit. You can go now.”

Julia, as she left the room, felt dismayed for the first time. What should she do without books? The winter was very wet, and English winters are very long, and often wet. She was forced to remain indoors a good deal; and to sit and hold her hands!

In the course of another month she found a new cause for uneasiness. Several times she awakened suddenly in the night and listened to heavy breathing outside her door; and when France was unable to hunt he prowled unceasingly about the house in the daytime. It was all very well to wish he would go quite out of his mind, but to be forced to accompany him through the various stages might be too great an ordeal even for her sound nerves.

IX

SHE stood one morning at her window, staring out at the rain. She had evaded the question for days, but she faced it now. What was she to do? She had always despised women with nerves, the strong fibre of her brain and the steel frame in her apparently frail body balancing her otherwise abundant femininity. When women had complained to her of nerves, cried out that they hated life, she had felt like an entomologist looking at specimens on a pin. When they had demanded sympathy she had asked them why, if they didn’t like their life, they didn’t go out and make another. Bridgit and Ishbel had done it, and she had heard of many others, although few of these were in her own class. Had not her sense of fate been so strong, she should have gone herself years ago.

These superfluous women had not taken kindly to her advice, and when she had added that strength was the greatest achievement of the human character, they had merely stared at her. These confidences had not been many, but one woman had replied petulantly that politics and charities were not in her line, and one had reminded her gently that a woman did not always hold her fate in her hands. She had despised this woman more than any of the others. In her youthful arrogance and consciousness of powers of some sort, she had equal contempt for the woman who submitted to detested conditions, and for the man who was too poor to keep up his position and yet grumbled, without seeking the obvious remedy.

But her spirit was chastened. She had discovered one woman, at least, that was quite helpless, and it seemed to her highly ironic that this, of all women, should be herself. She had felt her independence so keenly during the eight months she had earned her bread, working as hard as any of her humble associates, after she had persuaded Ishbel that she was broken in. She had often been tried to the point of fainting, for she had been accustomed always to the open-air life, and it would take more than eight months and a strong will to make a well-oiled machine of her; but she had persisted, never thought of looking for easier work, always rejoicing in her liberty and in the independent spirit that had bought it. Moreover, she had formed the habit of work, and soon after her return to White Lodge she had begun almost automatically to wish for a regular occupation of some sort. She had understood then why Ishbel loved her business as she never had loved society and its pleasures. But after she had made over all the clothes she had left behind at her flight, and retrimmed all her hats, she realized that there is no joy to be got out of useless work; with the exception of the hunt breakfast she had not even crossed the path of one of her neighbors. Her evening gowns alone had proved necessary, as France, the day after his return, had issued an edict that she was to dress for dinner.

She had by no means forgotten her old desire to write, but although she had essayed it more than once, particularly during the past month, she could rouse her mind to no vital interest in fiction, although she had come upon themes enough during her sojourn in the world. She wondered if such productive faculties as she may have been born with had withered under the blight of her married life; not knowing that the genius for fiction survives the death of every illusion, being, as it is, quite outside the range of personality and watered by the lost fountain of youth. She had not, however, dismissed the belief, cunningly nursed by Bridgit and Ishbel, that she had talents of some sort, and that the expression of them would manifest itself in due course.

But now? What was she to do meanwhile? Where should she seek refuge against a possible disaster in her nervous system which might wreck her life? There was nothing here. If she fled to London and obtained employment of any sort, even in an obscure shop, France would carry out his threat and ruin Ishbel, one way or another. If he dared not employ his original method again—and why not? He was cunning enough to know that one sensational episode might be explained away, but not two of the same kind. There is nothing people weary of so quickly as explanations.

If she could only take up a difficult language. She had studied French and German during four of her years in the world, and knew the power of a foreign tongue to dominate the brain. She had intended to take up Italian, and it was the resource for which she most longed at the moment. But she could as easily furnish the library downstairs.

She was about to turn from the window and go for a ten-mile tramp in the rain, since nothing was left her but physical exercise, when she saw a fly crawling up the avenue. She was not particularly interested, as the occupant was more than likely to have a dun or a writ in his pocket, but she lingered, watching idly. The least event broke the monotony of her existence.

As the fly approached the end of the avenue, the door was flung open and a man jumped out impatiently, paid the driver, and walked rapidly toward the house. It was Nigel Herbert.

Julia’s first impulse was to run downstairs and embrace him. Her spirits went up with a wild rush. But she rang the bell and asked the servant if her husband was in the house. He was tearing across country with his pack on an independent hunt. She ordered a fire built in the drawing-room, rearranged her hair, and put on a becoming house frock of apple-green cloth. She observed with some pleasure that her skin was as white as ever, if her chin and throat were not as round as when Nigel had seen her last. Excitement brought the old brilliance to her eyes, and she smiled for the first time since the hunt breakfast. She ran downstairs and into the drawing-room. Nigel, who was standing before the fire in the chill room, met her halfway and gave both her hands a close clasp.

“Oh, this is so delightful—so delightful—how did you think of it—when did you come back—” Julia delivered a volley of questions, not only because she was excited herself, but because she saw that Nigel had come charged with so much that he could say nothing at the moment.

They sat down and continued to stare at each other. Nigel was far more changed than Julia. The smooth pink face she had first known was lined and rather sallow, his eyes had lost their careless laughter, his lips their boyish pout.

“Oh, South Africa! South Africa!” said Julia, softly. “How it has changed all of you.”

“Rather!” said Nigel, sadly. “Those that are left of us. Perhaps you don’t know that I am literally the last of my name now, except my poor old father—who has forgiven me once for all. I had four brothers and six cousins when this war began. Now I have scarcely a friend of my sex. At all events I know the worst. There is no one left to mourn for but my father, and he’ll go soon. But I haven’t a pang left in me—not of that sort. God! What a cursed thing war is! A cursed, useless, souless thing! But I’ll treat that subject elsewhere. I’ve come here to see you, and I don’t fancy we’ll be uninterrupted any too long—”

“Oh, he rarely takes luncheon here—and you are to take yours with me. Do you know that I haven’t had a soul to talk to since last November?”

“I know. And that is what I have come to see you about. I—” He got up and walked to the window, then back, his hands in his pockets. “The last time I made love to you—the only time, for that matter—you put me off, turned me down—”

“Alas! I only went out that night because the romantic situation appealed to me. What a baby I was! And since! Oh! oh! oh!”

She sprang to her feet, and running over to the fire, knelt down, pretending to arrange the logs. Tragedy rose on the stage of her mind, but at the same time she felt an impulse to laugh. The hard shell in which she had fancied her spirit incased, sealed, had melted the moment the man she liked best had appeared with love in his eyes. But tragedy swept out humor and took possession. She flung her head down into her lap and burst into tears. They were the first she had shed and they beat down the last of her defences.

“Oh, Nigel! Nigel!” she sobbed. “If you knew! If you knew! I never have dared tell one-tenth. I dare not remember—”

Nigel, like most of his sex, was distracted and helpless at sight of tears. “Yes! Yes!” he exclaimed, bending over and trying to raise her. “I know. You need not tell me. Please get up. I have so much to say—I can’t say a word while you are like this.”

She let him lift her and put her back in her chair. He made no attempt to take her in his arms.

He took the chair opposite hers and smiled wryly. “I don’t fancy I’m as impulsive as I was! Ishbel told me when I returned last week. If I had heard—say, during the first year of our acquaintance—I should have got one of these new motor cars and flown to your rescue without a plan. But much water has flowed under our bridges since then!”

“Don’t you love me any longer?” Julia sat up alertly and dried her eyes.

“I’ve always loved you and I fancy I always shall. But—well, we are only young once—young in the sense of love being the one thing to live and breathe for. And, then, I have had a resource! There have been many months when I have been able to put you out of my head altogether. That is what work, productive work, does for a chap. And after—well, soon after that night at Bosquith, I hated you for a time. You could never be the same delicious wonderful child again. That would have broken my heart if I had not both hated you and taken the first train into the kingdom of Micomicon. Even when I found you so charming, when I saw so much of you, that next season, I still congratulated myself that I was jolly well over it. But—well—you never really ceased to haunt me—you had a way of asserting yourself in the most disconcerting fashion. When I heard of the duke’s marriage, I began to worry—I knew that life would not go as smoothly with you—I had heard from the girls that you managed France very cleverly, saw comparatively little of him. Out there in Africa, I never was alone at night that I didn’t find myself thinking of you. But I never guessed—When the girls told me, I thought I’d go off my head. It’s too awful! Too awful!”

“It’s not so bad now. I have five pistols in the house.”

“I know. But what a life! It is so hideous that it is almost farcical.”

“People’s troubles are generally rather absurd when you come to think of them. And I fancy I’m a good deal better off than a lot of women. Many have husbands that are worse than lunatics, and as the divorce laws won’t help them, they suffer in silence, without a ray of hope. At least I may hope mine will betray himself in public sooner or later. I can manage him in a way, and of death I have not the least fear—”

“Oh! It is all too dreadful! How old are you? Twenty-five? It’s awful! Awful! But you must end it—”

“If I could conceal two alienists in the house long enough—”

“But you can’t. Nor would their certificate give you real freedom. I’ve no doubt he’ll go raving mad in time—but when one reflects upon what he might do first! No! I have not come here without a plan, and here it is: You must go to the United States at once and get a divorce. There is a place called Reno, where one can be got at the end of about ten months. Bridgit will go with you. We held a conclave over it—we two and Ishbel—not the first! Great heaven! What an eternity ago that seems—” He laughed bitterly. “Once—was it only seven years ago?—we three talked the subject over and came to much the same conclusions, but our plans were frustrated by France’s illness. Well—we were all young then, but it was a good plan and we readopted it. You must get away from this without delay—there has been enough! When the divorce is granted, I’ll follow and marry you if you will have me. If not, we’ll provide for you in whatever part of America you choose to live in. But I hope you’ll marry me. I don’t think I ever really loved you before. When Ishbel told me! When just now you crouched by that fire!”

“Oh, how good you all are!”

“I’ve not taken to philanthropy. I want you more than I ever did when we were both careless and young and arrogant. I never thought it could be. But either Time or what you have endured with that man has annihilated everything. Can you go to-morrow?”

“Oh! I must think. I don’t know. It is all very alluring. But I am not sure.”

“You mean that you don’t love me?”

“Oh, if I could! If I could!”

Julia sprang to her feet and threw out her arms. “Away from all this!—from the memory of it! The horror! And there are other memories behind those three months! I don’t know! I have felt so sure I never could forget. And if I cannot forget, I cannot love you or any man. I have never felt so sure of anything as of that.”

“You are but twenty-five, remember. The mind is not crystallized at that age. Even memory is fluid. I believe that anything can be forgotten, given change of scene—at your age, at least. A year in the United States, and all this will be a dream. At the end of ten months in a life which is like a French poster out of drawing, you will be a different being—no, you will have lived with your old sense of humor, and be the same enchanting creature—Oh, we young people take life so tragically, my dear, and we succumb so generously to time and distance! Blessed antidotes to life! Time and change! And you are full of buoyancy, to say nothing of your brains. Once I regretted that you had any. Where would you be without them? A woman must find them a pretty good substitute when man fails her. Oh, I have learned! The land of shadows in which we writers of fiction live is peopled with the luminous egos of women as well as with their conventional shells; we have only to take our choice! And you—I shall find Julia Edis again, with all her enchanting possibilities at least half developed. Oh, you are wonderful! When one thinks of what you might have become—of the brainless women that brood and brood. Will you go?”

“I must think! I must think!” The powerful suggestion in his words seemed to have delivered Julia Edis from the tomb to which she had crept in terror, but hidden and shivered intact. She ran up and down the room, she even thrust her hands into her hair as if to lift its weight from her struggling brain, that it might think faster. Freedom! The new world! The annihilation of memory! A quick divorce which would deliver her forever from the terrifying creature she had married, over to the protection of the new world’s laws. It was an enchanting prospect. She drew in her breath as if inhaling the ozone, drinking the elixir of that land of youth and freedom. And happiness! Happiness! Why shouldn’t she love Nigel—

But she stopped short and dropped her hands. Her whole body looked paralyzed. The youth seemed to run out of her face.

“It is impossible,” she whispered. “I cannot take with me his power to avenge himself, and he will do that by ruining Ishbel—”

“We have talked all that over. Ishbel will manage to protect herself. What are bobbies for—”

“It won’t do. A policeman at the door! People would soon hear of it—and stay away. Besides he is a fiend for resource—”

“Yes—but Mr. Jones can’t last much longer. And then—well, I fancy Ishbel will marry Dark—he’s on his feet again, and will be home before long.”

“Ishbel will never give up her work. Remember she took it up because it seemed to her the most vital thing she could find in life, not because she was driven to earn her bread. And it has become a sort of religion with her.”

“Ishbel never had been in love then! But if she kept the business on, she would have a husband to protect her. You would be out of it—”

“But not yet!”

“We are none of us willing you should wait, Ishbel least of all.”

“I know, but I can’t sacrifice her. I should be a beast. Harold is capable of writing the most frightful anonymous letters to hundreds of people—”

“Why the devil isn’t he rotting in South Africa? When I think of the hundreds of fine fellows—Oh, well, I’ve given over trying to understand space and fate. But I wish I could have run across him down there. I’d have shot him like a dog if I’d got the chance, and never felt a pang.”

“So should I! That is the most dreadful result of it all—the hardness, the callousness, the cynicism—”

“Oh, it will all fall from you. We don’t change much under the armor Life forces us into. Dismiss Ishbel from your mind. Take care of yourself. What is Ishbel’s business when weighed against a lifetime of horror and demoralization? Nobody knows this better than Ishbel. I fancy if you don’t go, she’ll chuck the business. It’s a deuced unpleasant position for her. And she has made enough to live on comfortably until she can marry Dark—”

“I don’t believe it. It might be years—”

The butler entered and announced luncheon. Julia smoothed her hair, feeling much herself again.

“I can see the force of all your arguments. And I am tempted. I don’t deny it. But you must give me time to think it over. Perhaps I exaggerate about Ishbel. But there is another point: I was not consulted in regard to my first marriage. I should be something more than a fool if I rushed blindly into another, no matter what the temptations. Still—Come, you must be starved.”

X

LIFE moves in circles. Some are larger than the span between infancy and senility, but that is about the only difference we know of. It is a far cry from the primigenous mere female, or even the Sabines, to the women that compose the advance guard of their sex to-day, but when man wants to win and wear this highest product of civilization, he would better kidnap her, and pay her the compliment of arguing with her brain later. Her impulses are still primitive, but they must be taken by assault. The more he reasons, the more vigorously will she throw up mental defences, and, what is worse, in the utmost good faith with herself.

This, of course, in regard to women that already know something of life, or that have an instinctive love of liberty and independence. The maternal girl, and she is legion, may safely be left in charge of the race, and wooed in the orthodox fashion favored of society. But the women that exert a powerful attraction for men, either exceptionally advanced themselves, or exceptionally weak in character while possessing every charm of mind, women that are approaching closer and closer to that exact balance of masculine and feminine attributes which, when attained, will give them the one perfect happiness, setting them free, as it must, from the present curse of the race, the longing for completion, are already too close to independence to be won by simple methods. It is little, after all, that man can give them. They are conscious of too many resources both within themselves and in life; after a man’s novelty has worn off, they are more likely than not—certainly apt!—to find him their inferior in brain, and almost inevitably in character, full of the little weaknesses and dependencies of childhood. If they make these discoveries after marriage, the man has some small chance of keeping his spouse, particularly if he has won a measure of respect by audacity and brute force plus sympathy, but too much consideration for a woman who is almost half male while he is still but one-fourth female will lose him the game.

Nigel, of all the men that Julia had met, was the best equipped to appeal to sentimental, romantic, and clever young women, who were at the same time cultivating their wings for the higher flights. As a matter of fact, he had appealed to a good many women of various sorts in his earlier twenties when he was all freshness, frankness, adoration, and honest eager youth. Later, when he wore the literary halo with ease and modesty, his charm was not diminished; and it was easy to predict that when the war was really over and London, her mourning laid aside, roused herself to do honor to her heroes, Nigel would come in for thrice his share of lionizing. As a matter of fact, he did, and he philosophically accepted it as a compensation for the lack of better things.

When he stepped from the fly on that gloomy Wednesday morning and walked across the dripping garden, the dark and romantic wall of woods behind him, he looked as gallant a knight as ever came to the rescue of a damsel in distress; and Julia, as dreary as Mariana in the moated grange, was in the proper frame of mind to be taken by assault. She was still very young, she was very lonely, she was on the verge of despair; her imagination, always active, had been bred in youth by dreams, and developed later by real castles and titles, purple moors, London society, and great expectations. She hailed from the West Indies, one of the most romantic spots to look at on earth, and all the circumstances of her life there had been exceptional. She was still more or less romantically environed, when you consider the old world dinginess, inconvenience, and isolation of White Lodge, a presumptive lunatic always threatening developments, and that she was as much cut off from her friends as if she literally were in an underground dungeon with walls instead of trees dropping the constant tear. Take all this into consideration, and add the momentous fact that she had never loved, and had arrived at the susceptible age of twenty-five, that she was more attracted to Nigel than she ever had been to any man, that underneath her despair and her manufactured stolidity she was full of eager curiosity and the desire to live, and it will readily be seen that if Nigel did not win her, it was strictly his own fault.

He should have retained the fly. He should have descended upon her like a whirlwind (having ascertained that France was out of the way,—which, as a matter of fact, he did at Stanmore), refused to listen to protests, caused in her bewildered mind what psychologists call an inhibition, swept her out into the fly, up to London, on to an Atlantic liner (passage already engaged), turned her over to Mrs. Herbert (thus eliminating every possible excuse for reproach during the subsequent and less glamorous period of matrimony), joined her at the earliest possible moment in Reno (where Bridgit and Reno would have seen that she was sufficiently amused), and when she walked out of the court-house with her decree, met her with a license. That is the only way to manage them, my masters. Try it, or take a back seat, now and forever.

But Nigel, alas! in spite of his manly qualities, was the most considerate and tender of men. The very idea of kidnapping a woman would have horrified him. He had all those instincts of the hunter upon which men pride themselves, but he wanted to hunt according to the rules of the game. It would have given him the most exquisite pleasure to woo Julia day by day, in Reno or out of it, and it never occurred to him that this program might induce a yawn in Julia.

She sat up all that night thinking. It was a rosy panorama he had unrolled before her, this charming young man that she might have loved if he had not given her so many opportunities to like him. He was a rich man and would one day be richer. They would live in New York and other wonderful cities of America, play with the kaleidoscopic society American novelists wrote about, hunt in the Rockies, steep themselves in the romance of California, vary this exciting program with frequent trips to Europe and the Orient. England would be closed to them, lest France cause her arrest for bigamy, as one of many offensive actions. On the other hand, he might release her by divorce. Then she could marry according to the laws of her country, and all the world would be her oyster.

Above all, and Nigel had emphasized this point during their afternoon conversation, she would have a strong and devoted husband to protect her, to shield her from all that was harsh and unlovely in life, to study her every wish, and make her a queen among women.

Curiously enough it was this last alluring set of promises that lost him the game. Nothing he had said to Julia had appealed to her so forcibly at the moment. He had never looked so handsome and so manly, so distinguished, so perfect a specimen of his type. His face had flushed until the lines and the sallowness had disappeared, his eyes forgot the things they had looked upon this last year, forgot that their inward gaze saw his heart a tomb crowded with beloved dead; they flashed with hope and passion, with undying love for the one woman that must ever make to him the complete appeal. She had almost put her hands in his then and there. But he had left soon after, and without even kissing her. Dear knightly soul! Julia never forgot his tender consideration, but on the other hand she never regretted it.

For when she had finished visualizing the United States of America and all their centres of delight, to say nothing of certain states of Europe and Asia, which she longed unceasingly to visit; when she had dwelt upon the deep relief of turning her back forever upon Harold France (France prowling about the halls and breathing heavily against her door materially assisted Nigel at this point); when these phases were disposed of, and her imagination, weary, left the brain free to face the particular ego of Julia France, in some ways so typical of woman, in others individual and peculiar, a very different set of ideas marched to the front and argued pro and con.

Did she want another husband, no matter how good, how devoted, how generous, how strong? It was now nearly a year and a half since she had lived with France, but if the memories of her married life were no longer active, no longer embittered her existence, she had by no means buried them, and they affected her attitude toward all men. Had Nigel swept her out of England and into that strange bizarre world of America, no doubt the experiences in the new land, assisted by the fiction that she was about to begin life over, really would have annihilated memory; but thinking it all over in the cold small hours of an English winter morning, wrapped in a blanket and shovelling coals into a small unwilling English grate, she failed to visualize love as the sweetest thing in the world.

Even so, this inability to respond to the genuine love that was offered her might not have prevented her ultimate acceptance. The man’s foe was far more deadly.

Looking into herself, Julia slowly understood that what she, in her youth and inexperience, had mistaken for hardness and callousness, was in reality strength. Nature had endowed her with strength of character and independence of mind. For eighteen years her mother had dominated her, almost without her knowledge; then she had been flung into the world and treated to a succession of experiences which had left her gasping and dizzy, without either the maturity or the opportunities to develop herself with deliberation. But the subsequent years had done their work; ultimately certain influences, sufferings, horrors, terrors, had pushed her on to a point where she must sink or swim. In swimming she had proved that she belonged to the army of the strong, not to the vast and insignificant majority of her sex that found their only strength in man.

She was strong. She fully realized it for the first time. All the spurious cynicism and philosophy of youth fell away from her; she saw herself for what she was, a woman, equipped with a nature of flexible steel, able to endure any test without snapping, fashioned not so much for endurance as for conquest. Conquest of what? She speculated, that something which so long had striven for expression moving dumbly. Never mind, it was there; she should find the connection in time.

Her mind rapidly reviewed the whole field of woman. She had no statistics, but she knew that several millions of her sex were forcing the world to recognize them as breadwinners, independently of any assistance from man. It was magnificent, the opportunities of to-day, when compared with the meagre resources of the past, and the repeated struggle of woman for expression and independence almost from the dawn of history. They had found themselves at last, the twentieth century was theirs, and they were driving rapidly toward the goal of complete equality with man. But how many of these women were strong enough to go through life without love? None, she fancied, until they had undergone a process of disillusion similar to her own. Then she rejoiced in what for so long had seemed to her the harshest of destinies; for sitting there in the cold dawn, the one perfect destiny seemed to her to be an utter independence of soul and mind and body, the power to cultivate every faculty toward a state of development in which one human being, having in perfect balance the highest potencies of both sexes, should stand alone, indifferent to all extrinsic aid. And this perfect balance could be attained only by woman, unhampered as she was by the animality of man.

Perfection. The word started her off on another train of thought. How was this perfection of strength, character, mind, and poise to be attained? To stand alone without aid from man or woman was neither a means nor an end. She had none of the common need of religion. It could play little or no part in her development. Nor could happiness be found merely in perfecting self toward a standard which must inevitably deteriorate into self-righteousness. To stand alone is the most magnificent ideal of the human character, but that strength must be used toward some end beyond self. She groped along and began to see clearly. She must work for the race. She must regard herself as a chosen instrument of usefulness, as, indeed, all exceptionally gifted people were. And for this she was peculiarly equipped, not only by nature, but by life. Had she not married at all, or at the most, casually, her woman’s nature would have protested against any such program, demanded its rights first; but these sources of disturbances were choked with hideous weeds, and Julia was unable to conceive that the weeds might rot in time and the waters rise refreshed. She felt that she was fortunately accoutred, and she longed for her opportunities.

What they might be she had no inkling as yet, nor was she conscious of love for her kind, and a desire to be useful to it on general principles. Her ambition, if ambition it could be called, was centred in her brain. If she had been chosen for a work, she would perform it. What else, in fact, was there for her to do? It had not needed Bridgit and Ishbel to teach her contempt for the morbid type of female that exaggerates sex until it becomes a disease, the women that play with their nerves until they have become mere neurotic systems without either sex or brains, and that exhibit egos either in private or public whose swollen deformities cause a momentary thrill and a prolonged disgust. Abnormal without individuality. It was an ideal carefully avoided by all the sane strong women Julia had met.

For the present, she could only wait and endure. She could not even go out and study the great problems of life, those problems she had chosen to ignore. But there is hardly any greater test of strength than passive endurance; and the time of her liberation could not be far off. The day Ishbel married Lord Dark she should leave France and look for work in London.

Nigel’s fate was settled before the rising of the sun. Far away on what to Europeans seem the confines of civilization, in other words, San Francisco, a youth was growing to masterful manhood, who, in due course, would avenge him, and, incidentally, much else. But of that poor Nigel could know nothing, nor would he have felt consoled had he foreseen; when he received Julia’s letter, whose finality was as convincing as a black midnight without stars, he wished that he had left his wretched heart and bones in South Africa, retired to the country with his broken father, and began another book. There was still the Nöbel Peace Prize to work for, and he felt peculiarly fitted to win it. It may be stated here that he did, and all England (of his class, and one or two strata just below) was astonished that an Englishman should have competed for a prize that involved a damnifying of war. It deeply disapproved.

XI

THE hunting season closed. France still rode for several hours every day, but it was patent that his restlessness was increasing. When he was not riding, he was walking, and he walked more than half the night about the house and grounds. Oddly enough, however, the serenity of his mien was unruffled, and Julia came upon him several times standing before a long mirror in one of the halls, his head so high that the muscles of his neck creaked, his eyes flashing with a pride and triumph no harassed king ever felt on his coronation morn. As a rule, he left the table the moment the meal was over, preferring to take his coffee alone out of doors or in the library, but one day Julia, who was beginning to take a certain scientific interest in his developments, arrested his attention as he was about to rise.

“Didn’t you tell me once that Kingsborough and the little chap were delicate? I heard the other day that both are remarkably fit. The little boy always has been, and the duke gets stronger every day.”

She looked at him ingenuously as she spoke, quite prepared for an outburst of rage, but he only bestowed upon her a smile of withering contempt.

“They are merely indulging in what the Americans call ‘bluff.’ I happen to know that they are both full of disease and cannot last the year out. I shall be Duke of Kingsborough before Christmas.”

“How nice. That is the reason, I suppose, you don’t mind all these duns. We may be sold out any day, you know. Summonses are becoming as thick as rain, and I am told that not a man in the stables or kennels has been paid—”

“They all understand perfectly. The summonses and grumblings are a mere matter of form. I have promised an enormous rate of interest and higher wages when I have moved into Kingsborough House and Bosquith. The other estates I have already agreed to let to American millionnaires. They are impatiently awaiting Kingsborough’s death.”

“Ah? Where have you met the millionnaires?”

“They have been hunting with the Hertfordshire all winter, and we have discussed matters at my solicitor’s.”

Julia knew that he had not been to London for several months, save for the queen’s funeral, but forbore to press the subject. She remarked amiably:—

“What a fine income you will have!”

His eyes flashed. “Ah, yes! Millions.”

“Surely not quite that.”

“Millions. Kingsborough’s income alone is two millions.”

“I thought it was forty thousand pounds.”

“Forty thousand for a duke of Kingsborough! No emperor has a vaster revenue.”

“How jolly. My robes of state shall be woven of pure gold. Meanwhile, why don’t you go to Paris for a while? I notice that you are restless, since you have nothing to ride after, and nothing to kill. You keep me awake at night banging about the house.”

“Do I?” France’s eyes flashed with something besides triumph, but it passed almost at once. He was losing interest in her. As he rose, bent his head graciously and sauntered out into the garden, he forgot her absolutely in a new vision that had haunted him since the queen’s funeral. There for the first time he had seen sovereigns en masse. The sight had thrilled him; he had made up his mind to signalize his succession by the greatest banquet London had ever known; all the reigning princes of Europe should attend it. The letters of invitation were already written. He had written them many times, finding one of the keenest pleasures he had ever known in the process, congratulating himself that for the first time in his life he was about to have associates worthy of his name and ego. But although he had never heard the word paranoia, and while at Bosquith had finally dismissed from his mind the haunting thought of insanity (it was outside of reason that he, Harold France, could even sprain the wonderful organ he had inherited with other unique characteristics from the most illustrious house in Europe), nevertheless, instinct warned him to lock up his letters of invitation, and keep his grandiose dreams to himself. Only to Julia, and only when she spurred him to speech, did he admit a very little of what filled his thoughts day and night.

But he was well aware that his nerves were on edge, and he was beginning to be troubled with pains in his head. He slept little, and when he thought of it took a malicious pleasure in disturbing his prisoner, whom he could imagine sitting on the edge of her bed pistol in hand.

But it was not the pistol that kept him from breaking down the door and laughing in her face. He had anticipated amusing himself with her female terrors as soon as the hunting season closed, but he found himself grown quite indifferent not only to her charm, but to the exquisite pleasure it had once given him to torture her. His dreams and visions, his increasing delusions, filled his life. Woman was too contemptible to consider; were it not that it gratified his growing passion for autocracy to have a prisoner of state, he might have amused himself by turning her out of the house in the middle of the night and dogging her footsteps to Stanmore or Bushey.

He still compelled her attendance at table, but otherwise took no notice of her whatever. So absorbed was he that he failed to observe that his wife was now well supplied with books and no longer looked desperate or even discontented. Her three devoted friends had made an arrangement with her bookseller to send her all that she ordered from his catalogue, and Bridgit had turned over her membership with the London Library. One of the first books she sent for was a recent work on insanity. She was not long discovering that France was a paranoiac, and she wrote to her aunt, asking her to invite him to dinner, and two alienists to meet him. But Mrs. Winstone was shocked at the suggestion, not only because she hated increasingly the “grimy,” in other words serious, side of life, but because it would be a thankless task to assist in proving that a member of one of the great families of Britain was a lunatic. She chose, therefore, to believe Julia quite mistaken, that France was merely a trifle more impossible than ever, and assumed the high moral ground that it would be unfair to take advantage of a trusting guest. Julia concluded that to write to the duke would be equally ineffective, besides making an enemy of him for life, and she knew that France would not be induced to dine with either Bridgit or Ishbel. He had always hated both of them. There was nothing to do, therefore, but wait for him to develop acute mania, and to keep a pistol in her pocket; taking her walks abroad while he was forced to sleep, and locking herself in her room when she was not at table.

It was during this strain on her nerves that she began to long for the repose of the East. Orientalism was in her brain cells. What imagination her mother possessed had been projected toward the East for long before and after her birth. The science of astrology is the birthright of the East, the very word sways and parts the shadowy curtains that hang before civilizations old before the Occident was born, evokes the gorgeous heavy sinister pictures of ancient cities, of vast arid plains where only the stars were alive. This mysterious poetical science had been the romance of Julia’s youth, and the East was the one quarter of the globe, save Great Britain, that she had ever heard discussed. In London she had escaped theosophy and other made-up fads of the same nature, but although the call of the East had often and for long been overlaid in her consciousness, it never failed to make itself heard if she stood before a picture portraying India, Arabia, Persia, or read of personal adventures in the East by writers with the rare gift of atmosphere. In the loneliness and terrors and constant tension of her present life she forgot the call of the too modern, too similar life, across the Channel, hearkened increasingly to that of the East. It promised a vast repose, an endless feast of beauty, unfathomable mysteries, a life as different from that of the West as it was in the days of Mohammed, Zoroaster, or Christ.

Julia’s first passion was slowly growing in the unsatisfied depths of her mind, but that is the last name she would have given it. She was yet to realize that imaginative people with productive activities, however latent, have passions of the brain or ego as intense and profound as ever one sex compelled in the other in the interests of the race. Julia, abominating all that the word love implied (a state of mind inevitable unless she had been coarse and callous), but young, fervent, and conceptive, was both situated and tuned to be caught in the eddies of an impersonal passion. It might have been art, but she was not an artist; study and politics had failed her, and although psychology interested her, she was too restless for science in any form; therefore, she had no sooner chanced upon one or two picturesque old books of Eastern travel than she succumbed to the passion for place. She sent for no more books save those that carried her to the Orient. Her imagination blazed. She was transported into a new and enchanting world. Her good resolutions to live for the race were forgotten. The moment she was free she would fly to the East and live. She was almost happy. Then she descended into England and the purely personal life with a crash. Ishbel sent her a marked copy of a newspaper containing the announcement of Mr. Jones’s death, a week later wrote that she should marry Lord Dark as soon as a decent interval had elapsed, and commanding her to leave France and come to London, where employment awaited her.

Julia became her cool practical self at once. She packed her boxes, sent for a fly when France had gone for one of his merciless rides,—he was killing his horses,—and left this note behind her:—

“Mr. Jones is dead. Ishbel will marry Lord Dark as soon as possible. If you make a second attempt to wreck her business you will have him to reckon with. He is, in any case, well able to take care of her, and no doubt she will give up the business. As there is now no way in which you can injure her or any of my friends, I have made up my mind to leave you once for all. You will save yourself trouble by recalling that we are in the twentieth century and that the law does not compel me to live with you.

“JULIA.”

XII

BRIDGIT met Julia at the train and there was purpose in her eye. Julia laughed, knowing that her time had come, but returned the warm embrace with which she was greeted, and allowed herself to be carried without protest to the house in South Audley Street. Mrs. Herbert was no less handsome and fascinating than of old, but if anything she was still more upright of carriage, determined of eye, and expressive of ardent purpose. Widowed long before the war, Geoffrey’s death had made no change whatever in her life, although she had sent after him the sincere and hearty regret she would have felt for the loss of any friend. As she was needed in South Africa she had gone there, made herself useful without any fuss, and returned as soon as she could to her work in England. This work was now clearly defined. Bridgit Herbert, indeed, was not the woman to spend any great amount of time seeking or floundering. No dreamer, her mind, once awakened to the futilities of the life of pleasure, her energies roused, she had applied herself immediately to a survey and study of her times, and found the work which coincided with her particular talents. Horrified and disgusted with poverty, she sought and found the obvious remedy in the Socialism of the advanced and more practical of the Fabians, although the “ideology” of the older Socialists would have made little appeal to her. Soon convinced, however, that Socialism could make little headway against the individualistic and acquisitive mind of the twentieth century male, her fighting blood had warred with her direct practical mind until she had happened to go to the north with an inspector of factories, and listened to somewhat of Christabel Pankhurst’s propaganda in behalf of Woman’s Suffrage among the trade-union organizations, a factor in politics of increasing power. She was struck, not only by the abominable grievances of the working women in general and the factory women in particular, but by their intelligence; nor was she long discovering that the average of intelligence all over England was higher among poor women than among poor men. Where a man grew dull in the routine of his work and further blunted his faculties in the public house, his wife, with her manifold petty interests and schemings to make a little money go a long way, and filled with ever changing anxieties for her children, was far more alert of mind and eager for improvement. It did not take either Mrs. Pankhurst or her sleepless daughters to remind Bridgit that in this great body of women lay the future hope of Socialism, or of any reform directed against the elimination of poverty. But this army was of no more consequence at present than an army of ants. It must have the ballot, and Bridgit had spent much of her time in the last two or three years among the working women of England, educating them to a sense of their responsibilities. It was not until 1903 that the women of the middle class were generally roused from the apathy into which they had fallen, with the exception of spurts, since 1884, and the Woman’s Social and Political Union was formed by Mrs. Pankhurst; but when Julia arrived in London, the old movement was beginning to lift its head, and Bridgit Herbert was not the only hopeful and far-seeing mind at work.

“And what is it you want?” asked Julia, listening to the old familiar and beloved roar of London. They were in Mrs. Herbert’s den, and the hostess, her eyes still radiant with hospitality, was standing behind the low fire-screen with a hand on either point. Julia wondered if White Lodge were a nightmare.

“The vote. Because the time has come, men having made a mess of most things, for women to apply their higher faculties to the domestic affairs of the nation; also because the condition of poor women and children in this country is appalling, and men have proved their utter indifference to a fact which is also a factor in so many great incomes. Moreover, men have had their day, just as monarchies and aristocracies have had their day. The day of woman and the working-class is dawning, and it is high time.”

“And are women ready?”

“Those that are not can be taught. That is what we are for.”

“We? I suppose,” with a sigh of resignation, “_that_ is my métier, what I have been struggling toward all this time.”

“You recognize that you have abilities at last, then?”

“Oh, yes, and I shouldn’t wonder if I had ambition, but just now I don’t feel either ambitious or energetic. I’m wild to go to India and the rest of the East—”

“Oh, nonsense, we’ve a great fight coming, and you must brace up and be one of the generals. Time enough to idle when you are old. Just now, until we can shut France up and ask the courts to give you an income, you are going to be my secretary—”

“Do you really need one?”

“Do I? Well, rather. I had one of the best, but her mother is ill and she may not be able to return to me for months. You’ll have tons of letters to write.”

“So much the better, for I couldn’t live on even your charity.”

“Charity? When my only chance to have an intimate friend is in a secretary, I am so rushed? I’m companionless, but life is frantically interesting.”

And if Julia found herself unable to reach this pitch of enthusiasm, she certainly found the new book of life offered for her daily reading quite absorbing enough to fill her time and thoughts. Her clerical hours were short. The rest of the day, and often during half the night, she was seeing all the problems at first hand. She went daily with Bridgit to the East Side and saw poverty outside of books; poverty, unthinkable, criminal, fleshless, stinking. At night she dreamed that all the babies in the world were wailing for food, all the mothers were emaciated, with eyes of bitter resignation, all the little girls pinched and old and hard. Herded misery, hopeless filth, black despair. Julia was quite unable to recall the reverse side of the picture, in which many were healthy in spite of poverty, and cheerful if only because temperament is stronger than circumstance. She hoped that some day she should fully wake up and burn with a zeal as great as Bridgit’s, but now her brain was tired, and, had she but known it, she protested against living for others until she had lived for herself first. Quite as unconsciously her mind was made up to live her Eastern romance the moment she was free. She heard not a word from France, but guessed the truth; he had forgotten her. If this were the case, however, it might mean that at any moment he would be a dangerous lunatic, and she felt that the duke should be warned. As this was a delicate task, and as her uneasiness grew, she finally, on Bridgit’s advice, wrote to his firm of solicitors. Solicitors are probably the most conservative members of conservative England; but full of duty withal. The junior member found himself overtaken by a storm near White Lodge and craved hospitality of his patron’s distinguished kinsman. France, either because suspicion was still active in a brain not clouded, but blazing with a light unknown to common mortals, or because he happened to be in a good humor, had never appeared to better advantage. The solicitor returned to London so inflamed with indignation that the letter he wrote to Julia breathed his contempt for her entire sex. Julia shrugged her shoulders and dismissed the matter from her mind. Let them work out their own destinies.

When she was not haunting the slums, she was attending meetings: Fabian, labor, working-women, coöperators’, old and new suffrage; at all of which the eternal problem of poverty was the main topic of discussion. She was also taken to visit the slaughter-houses, where the ignorance and savagery of the women employed was primeval. She visited the textile factories of the north, where the work of women and children at the loom was relieved only by alternate hours of drudgery in the home, and where there seemed no object in living whatever. The pit-brow women, at least, had developed the strength and endurance of men, and no doubt would have proved equally efficient in war.

Manchester was a very hot bed of social reform, and Julia was shown all the horrors to which reform owed its concept. She wondered increasingly at the frail fabric of aristocracy and wealth that tottered on its heaving foundations, and conceived some measure of respect for its cleverness.

This drastic experience was enlivened now and again by glimpses of Ishbel, still the merriest, and now the happiest, of mortals. The lines of fatigue and anxiety had disappeared, she was once more the prettiest woman in London, and she needed but the halo of her future position as Countess of Dark to make good people wonder how they could have forgotten it. Julia thought her the most fortunate of women, if only because she was realizing all the romantic dreams of her girlhood on the bogs. Dark was handsome, clever, kind, almost unselfish. He was profoundly in love and he had a very decent income. Above all he had the most romantic title in the British peerage—Earl of Dark! No wonder those fluttering moths of American girls wanted titles. Such a one would make the dullest man in England look romantic to yearning republican eyes, when even an Ishbel was enchanted at the prospect of owning it.

“And yet I am the most practical of mortals—the half of me!” she said gayly, one day, as they sat in the boudoir over the shop, drinking tea unseasoned with reform. “Odd and modern combination!”

“But you’ll give up the shop?”

“Not really. It is coöperative now, and too many would suffer if I neglected it altogether, or withdrew. I must continue to see that it remains a success, for it is something to have solved the problem of living for a few women, at least.”

Julia hastily changed the subject.

“Shall you become a society beauty again?”

“I’ve hardly thought of it. I mean to be happy, and I think we’ll travel and live in the country for a year. Society is always with us. That first year! No duties shall share an hour of it.”

“Right you are. I never could love and never want to, and I’m quite resigned to becoming a torch-bearer, suffering martyrdom, if necessary, in the cause of woman, but meanwhile I’ve something up my sleeve. I dare not mention it to Bridgit again, and shall have to run away when my time comes, but I can confide in you. The moment I am free I am going to India—Persia—Arabia—and stay there until some other part of me is gratified, I hardly know what. I only know that the call is unceasing and that I never can accomplish anything here, whole-heartedly, at least, until I have got that off my mind.”

“By all means, go. It’s unhealthy to repress your strongest personal desires, and you are young yet. I wonder, by the way, if you will ever have the zeal of these other women? You have a sort of sardonic humor—”

“I want a career, and in this rising inevitable woman’s movement lies my chance. When my time comes, my zeal will be great enough—for all they can give me I’ll pay them back a hundred fold. I want power if only because nothing less will pay the debt of these last years, and I am horribly sorry for the poor of the world. When I am ready I shall jump into the arena with my torch, but I’ll find myself wholly in the East first.”

“Why not go now? I can let you have the money.”

“No, I’ll wait.”

As it happened she did not have long to wait. She and Bridgit were driving home one evening after talking to an intelligent club of East End women, when they heard the familiar cry of “Extra,” and a flaming handbill was waved in front of the window as the brougham was blocked. Bridgit, whose quick glance overlooked nothing, exclaimed, “Great heaven!” and leaned out, throwing the boy a sixpence.

“What is it?” asked Julia, languidly. She had been forced on to the platform, and was still cold from fright. “A strike?”

Bridgit lifted the tube and gave an order to the coachman that made Julia sit erect.

“Kingsborough House.” Then to her companion, “France tried to kill the duke this afternoon.”

They found Kingsborough House in confusion, the flunkys looking as flabby as if the ramrods in their backs had dissolved, leaving nothing but the sawdust stuffing. The duchess was in hysterics upstairs (“she is sure to be an anti,” remarked Mrs. Herbert); the duke was under the care of his doctor; but Lady Arabella received them, and graciously observed that she was glad to see that Julia still felt herself a member of the house of France. She told them the story, which was brief enough. France had suddenly appeared that afternoon, and upon being shown into the duke’s study had sprung upon his kinsman before the footman had closed the door, demanding that he should abdicate in his favor, threatening him with immediate death if he refused. The footman had called other footmen, and it had taken four of them to hold France down while the duke, his coat torn off and his face bleeding, had himself telephoned for the police. France meanwhile had struggled like a demon, shouting that he had come to kill not only the duke but the boy, that his time had come to live and theirs to die, that they were deliberate malicious enemies who stood between him and the greatness which would permit him to send his invitations to the crowned heads of Europe; and “heaven knows what else,” added the distressed Lady Arabella. “To think of poor Harold going mad. At first we thought he might merely have been drinking, but with the police came poor Edward’s doctor, and he pronounced him as mad as a hatter. Do stay here with me to-night, Julia. You are a clever little thing, and always keep your wits about you.”

Julia remained at Kingsborough House for several days. When the duke heard what little of her own story she was willing to tell, and that she had endeavored to protect him through his solicitors, he was honest enough to admit that he would have been hard to convince of a kinsman’s insanity, and generous enough to be grateful to her. Indeed, so relieved was he at his narrow escape, and at the report of the lunacy commission which incarcerated France for life, that he bubbled over with something like human nature; and, as the expensive sanatorium would cut deeply into his cousin’s original income, announced his intention of giving Julia for life seven hundred and fifty of the thousand pounds he had so long allowed her husband. Julia refused this offer, until the duke told her impatiently that if she did not take it he would merely pay Harold’s expenses in the sanatorium, and leave her to the courts, also that she was legally a member of his family, and pride, therefore, absurd. Julia turned this over, and concluding that the house of France owed her a good deal more than it could ever pay, consented and thought no more about it. A month later she was on a P. and O. steamer bound for India.