Scene VII.--IDYLL

Now fast beside the pathway stood A ruin’d village, shagg’d with wood, A melancholy place.--_William Stewart Rose_.

Maude Juxon had failed to materialize at the time of Flora’s visit, because she was on the other side of the great chalky billows, enjoying life after her usual manner, that is to say by wasting it in vain pursuits. Had Flora dropped into the Thorlund valley earlier, she would certainly have seen the notorious little tandem of asses in front of the rectory. So glorious was the evening that Maude determined to give herself the gratification of calling upon Dr. Berry, to offer him a drive through the serene and poetic atmosphere.

The spoilt beauty had soon forgiven the scholar for that indiscreet praise of herself before her husband. Indeed she liked him the better for his panegyric, which at least convinced her of the thorough genuineness of his nature. She knew that he liked her; it flattered her that he should think her clever. She had been indeed so impressed by this fact that she spent two terrible days struggling to compose an equal number of original lines of poetry; and when the effort brought forth, after much ruffling of silken hair and puckering of pretty brows, nothing but a silly series of ragged syllables, she shamelessly copied Sir Nicholas Breton’s “Farewell to the World” from an old book of English poetry which she discovered in the house, and this inky forgery was crumpled in her pocket when she jumped into the cart.

The rector was in the church, said the housekeeper, and thither Maude repaired, to discover him unpoetically engaged in discussing the condition of the roof with a pair of ruddy sheep-farmers. Some mossy tiles had been worked awry by wind and weather, and in time of rain a puddle would occur symbolically in the vicinity of the font. As Maude’s bright colours illuminated the porch, the first bucolic was expressing his conviction that a certain handy labourer in his employ would experience no difficulty in resettling the recalcitrant tiles: the second bucolic indifferently suggested that the repairer should be summoned forthwith; the rector dreamily concurred, and the meeting was adjourned.

“Now you are coming for a drive,” said Maude, when the farmers had clamped away, side by side like twin brethren. “I am sure you deserve it, after being shut up with those things. What funny voices they have, and the red on their cheeks is just like blobs of paint! Why is it that big men squeak, and little men bellow? How can you talk to them? I shouldn’t know what to say after I had exhausted the weather.”

“With these men, fortunately, that subject cannot be exhausted,” said the poet. “It is very kind of you to invite me to drive with you on this magnificent evening, but I always find you kind and good,” he went on, gazing into the marvellous flora of her hat with his calm thought-filled eyes. “I have not seen you for three days, and in that time have made, I am ashamed to say, no appreciable progress with my work. I dream too much. Even when I sit beside my table I am unable to control my thoughts. I am carried away beyond the border, and there wander at will tween truths and half-truths. And there I am lost, and when I awake it is late, and nothing has been recorded.”

“Oh!” exclaimed Maude. “I hope you don’t talk like that to the sheep-men and the cow-men?”

“I speak upon such matters to you only,” he replied tenderly. “Because I know you understand.”

He dropped the church key among the weeds on the gravel walk, and did not appear to notice his loss until Maude stooped and picked it up for him.

“Look at my cart!” she exclaimed, with childish pleasure. “Doesn’t it shine? I have just had it varnished, and those pink lines painted round it. May I have some of your poppies?”

“Let me gather them for you,” said the scholar, as she hovered about the border. “You will soil your gloves.”

Immediately he began to decollate all manner of poppies, scarlet, white, and variegated, great sleep-scented globes of blossom, ragged, and fluffy, and seed-capped, until Maude arrested his hand with a scream of laughter.

“No, no! What could I do with those things--as big as cabbages? It is the pink Shirley ones I want.”

Laughing and chattering, she selected half-a-dozen of the prettiest, and fastened them into her dress; while the abashed scholar strewed the flowers of his own selection about the turf.

“Don’t waste them,” cried Maude. “Go and stick them about the heads of my donkeys.”

The poet did so, but as he bent his silvered head over the long ears of the little steeds, a voice out of the breeze from the garden of the Strath sardonically whispered, “Oh, scholar, scholar! How has your wisdom served you? Has it fitted you for nothing better than to deck a donkey’s head with poppies? Reason and infatuation, to say truth, keep little company together.”

“You too must wear a flower,” said Maude, approaching him. “Here is a pink rose for you.” She lifted her dainty self on tip-toe, and fastened the bloom into his coat with perfumed white-gloved fingers, rattling on, “We must preserve the scheme of colour. I like every thing on me and near me pink. When I die I should like to be carried away on one of those delicious pink clouds we see at sunset.”

“A beautiful thought,” he said reverently, touching her hand lightly as it brushed a petal from his coat. “And beautifully expressed by a true poetic mind.”

“I am clever?” cried Maude eagerly. “I really am a little clever?”

He smiled upon her, as he replied devoutly, “Cleverness is a small thing. It is an attribute we allow even to the lower animals. You are inspired.”

Then he submitted to be packed into the little cart and driven from the valley.

At the sign-post Maude whipped her leader round to the right, and they descended the slope which ended among the ruins of Queensmore. The little lady had been silent for some minutes. That copied poem made itself uncomfortable in her pocket. She knew that her companion was widely read. He might recognise it, and she would be shamefully unmasked. She did not so much mind his discovering her shallowness, because it was somewhat of a strain to maintain the part; but what she did fear was lest a forced acknowledgement of her sheer ignorance might also deprive her of beauty in his eyes. She did not want to lose her present hold upon him. She liked him, she told herself, immensely, because he was handsome and dignified, so immeasurably, if unconsciously, superior to all the men she had known. She had seen her husband standing by his side. She could never have believed it possible for two men to be so widely different; the one had seemingly all the gifts Nature had to bestow; the other had--mere money.

She refused to consider Herbert Juxon’s healthy mind and honest heart, and resolutely turned her eyes from his excessive forbearance. She had received a letter from him that morning. Somehow his kindly utterances always irritated her. He was coming to her on Saturday; he wished he could take her upon the Continent for a time, but business was holding him closely to the city; he intended to look out for a house in the country, which he hoped might suit her health; it was his ambition to make her happy. But his kindly words and thoughts were merely hailstones upon this butterfly.

The wheels jolted round a bend in the grass-grown road, and the entrance to what had been the village appeared before them. On a dark winter’s day the scene would have inspired with melancholy; then, mellowed with sunshine and enriched by flowering grasses, lush reeds and lichens, it made a gratifying picture for the artist. Ruin and decay were all around; here, brambles choked the bleak foundation of a former ale-house, the bricks and woodwork of which had been carted away; there, a roofless cottage gaped with doorless mouth and stared with empty window sockets.

The church had been a low thatched building with a shingled spire. The remains were tottering upon a slight eminence beside a gigantic yew. The thatch sagged heavily, loaded with moist mosses of an emerald green, and the rotten rafters snagged inward like broken ribs. The interior was stripped bare. Its bell miles away was used for calling children to school; its encaustic tiles and fittings had been distributed abroad; its font and brasses had passed into the hands of collectors of antiques; even the burying place had been rifled, and the old grave stones taken to fill gaps in walls or to floor pig-sties.

A portion of the parsonage stood gaunt and spectral, its windows gloomy gaps fringed with ivy, its garden a pasture ground for straying cattle and adventurous sheep. The roof was golden with lichen, and the gutter-line broken picturesquely into a dog-tooth pattern by tiles, jutting off, awaiting removal by October winds. Swallows were darting in and out of the space once occupied by the door, where old parson Hooper had often entered in ragged red-lined coat and stiff gloves eager to count his gold. The village green beyond, where a rust-red pump leaned far out of the perpendicular, was a mere field, lined geometrically by four cart-tracks. White butterflies were swarming, and fruit-trees grew unpruned, and all the old gardens writhed with caterpillars; the grass and reeds fluttered lazily; a gentle sound issued through the vacant windows that were left.

Maude tried to be solemn as they drove through this desolation. She quickly found herself incapable of sustaining the effort, and dropping the reins demanded from her companion accurate information as to whether _asinus vulgaris_ really delighted in consuming herbaceous plants of a spiny character.

“By refusing to do so the animal would destroy a long cherished belief,” the scholar replied.

“Then their little hearts shall rejoice,” said Maude. “There are enough thistles here to feed a hundred donkeys for a year. I will tie one of the reins round this pump, and the beasts may eat prickles while we explore.”

When the tethering process had been accomplished they roamed through the village of the past, and presently entered the churchyard. A low tomb beneath a cypress offered a shady resting-place which met with Maude’s approval, and thither she led the scholar, who was prepared to indulge her smallest whim. Seating themselves upon the sunken masonry, they watched the drops of sunlight filtering through the leaves, and making satin-like patches upon the mouldering and mossy stones which sealed down the bodies of those who long ago had taken the mystic road, which, in the words of a wise Greek, is not of difficult passage, nor uneven, nor full of windings, but all very straight and downhill, and can be gone along with shut eyes.

“It is heavenly,” said Maude with a sigh, firmly believing she was perfectly happy, and fortunately ignorant of the saying of another Greek, that a woman knows only two happy days, that of her marriage, and that of her funeral.

Dr. Berry was leaning forward, his beautifully shaped hands clasped between his knees, his eyes fixed upon an inscription still faintly legible beside a laurel, “Here innocence and beauty lie.” A beautiful woman was close beside him and in her soul, he believed, innocence was personified. The gently rounded summit of Deadman’s Hill rose in the distance. Clearly outlined against the rosy sky stood the tall rugged post which marked the spot of the gallows where former villains had been compelled to submit to fate. The gallows had long ago been swept away. The post, which stood as its representative, cast a long narrow shadow across the ruins.

“Say something,” urged the pink idol.

“I shall remember this,” he answered dreamily.

Maude flushed a little. She did not like to be reminded of the future, when her dainty bloom must ripen off and the wrinkle assert its tyranny. “Ruins always make people sad,” she said a little crossly. “The only ruins which could deject me would be those of my prettiness,” she went on in a lower voice.

“Dear lady,” murmured the poet, taking her hand impulsively. “Beauty will never leave you. It is the soul gazing from your eyes that gives you loveliness, and the soul does not age. Fifty years hence there may be snow upon your head and lines along your brow, but the beauty that is within can defy the years.”

Maude conceived that moment profitable for the production of her borrowed master-piece. Releasing her hand, she burrowed into her pocket and brought forth an inky ball of manuscript, which she unrolled with blushes and smoothed modestly upon her knee, saying in a small faltering voice:

“You’ve never asked if I have written anything, but I--I’ve listened to you so often I want you to--to hear what I have done. Will you let me read you a little poem of my own?”

Her heart began to thump.

“My sister! My dear sister!” the scholar cried. “This is indeed a privilege. How selfish I have been! Completely engrossed in my own work, I had forgotten yours. Let me put myself in the disciple’s place and learn.”

He stretched himself upon the grass by her feet, and in that posture of humility put back his uncovered head, that he might behold her pretty features, and the brilliant curls fluttering beneath the brim of her hat.

“I am ready,” he murmured.

“It is sad,” said Maude warningly.

“We poets love the sorrowful theme. The sweetest music is also the saddest. But read! I am impatient to hear.”

“It is called Farewell to the World,” she murmured, with shy deprecation, and then hurriedly, “I believe you don’t want to hear it. I’m sure you’ll think it stupid.”

“I shall feel only admiration, with perhaps some little envy,” he answered. “But why are you so diffident? Am not I a poor weaver of fancies, like yourself?”

His encouragement was so kindly and sincere that Maude gained courage. With increasing colour she began to read:

“Go! Bid the world, with all its trash, farewell.”

“Slower,” he entreated with upraised hand. “The music is lost when the time gallops.”

Maude’s fear began to be dissipated when the title and opening line passed unchallenged. She continued with more confidence, until her dainty voice sounded disdainfully the last of the stanza, “Leave it, I say, and bid the world farewell.”

A few moments of silence intervened before the poet spoke:

“For freshness of conception, strength of imagery, and purity of line, that verse is only to be surpassed by the best work of the Elizabethan poets. It recalls indeed to my mind Sir Nicholas Breton’s--”

“Oh!” Maude interrupted, dreadfully pale. “You don’t think I--” And there she stopped in dire confusion.

“Indeed the similarity is but upon the surface,” he continued. “We all have our models. The Elizabethan, to whom I have just referred, had neither your originality nor your strength of metaphor. To draw from the model is one thing; to improve upon it is another. Talent may copy, but genius will improve.”

Maude breathed again and, after resolutely repelling the idea that she was acting with shameless wickedness, read the second stanza with boldness, the third and last with impudence, and sat, joyous in her sins, awaiting the verdict.

“That verse again,” he prayed.

When she had complied with this request, he repeated the first line in a resonant voice, with his eyes fixed upon the ruined church:

“Then let us lie as dead, till there we live.”

Silence fell again, intensified by the ticking of the insects in the grass and the wings of the swallows cutting through the air. Dr. Berry turned abruptly and seizing Maude’s right hand pressed it passionately to his lips. He was paying his tribute then, not to face and figure, nor to dainty garments, but to a beautiful soul which was not there at all.

“I am a mere clerk,” he said in a thrilling voice. “A poor transcriber of the ideas of others, while you soar through the clouds, and drink out of the golden cup of the gods. How hollow must my poor lines have sounded upon your ears! Yet you listened patiently, and approved, condescending to stoop and lift me upon your pinions and point out to me the path to the stars. My feeble song is but a piping of pan-pipes. Yours is a trumpet blast, stirring the depths.”

“I’m so glad you like it,” said Maude, blushing deeply, and delighted by his praise.

“What is your inspiration?” he continued, gazing up into her flushed face. “Tell me what stirs your soul. It is not true, as men have said, and will still affirm, that wisdom lies latent in the mind. We are the inspired media of an influence, that influence emanating from the minds which have preceded us. One great poet of the past heard a gentle fluttering of wings above his head. Another thought he could see a butterfly quivering about his pen. I, if I may mention my unworthy self, have a strange nervousness, the sense of a presence, a quickened heart, and a pricking sensation round my forehead. When the inspiration passes I am depressed and weak.”

“I don’t know,” quavered Maude. “Oh yes! I like to smell roses.”

“It is fitting,” he said reverently. “Daintiness and sweetness make appropriate food for the divine soul. I see now that I have been misled. I have always refused to admit that the poetess, if born into this present age, would be able to break the bonds of social and domestic life, and fly upward with her song. Tell me,” he added in a low and pleading tone. “Confide in me, dear sister. Only the heart which has been wrung, and the mind which has cried, ‘The hand of God has touched me,’ could have controlled the brain to fashion such sorrowful truths as those you have recited. You have already passed through tribulation?”

A robin darted into the cypress, and his beautiful little body throbbed with song.

“Indeed I have,” said Maude pathetically. “I have had dreadful troubles, but I have never told anyone.”

Honestly she believed what she said. She did not know that her silly life had been a mere ramble through a pleasance. Never having seen suffering, she did not know what it was. But she had a husband whom she did not care for, ambitions which had not been realised, clothes which had not come up to her expectations, and friends whom she knew had scoffed at her idle ways. So she had passed indeed through the valley of tribulation.

“We do not talk of these things,” the scholar gently answered. “Like the young Laconian, we hold the fox to our bosom, and though it may gnaw, and we may wince and faint, we still declare the creature is not there. We clutch the rose tightly, and aver there are no thorns. But those who love us know, and we are glad that they should know, because we need sympathy even as the flowers need dew. I have not known suffering, and while thankful for the privilege, I confess my work lacks that refining touch which suffering alone can give. Dear sister, put your hands for one moment upon mine.”

The little lady quivering slightly, permitted him to take her hands. Her eyes were hidden by her hat, and waves of pink chased one another across her face and throat.

“Our souls are here united,” he cried triumphantly. “Beautiful and inspired poetess! Did you not feel that restful sense of approaching union when first we met? We have grown together, during these blissful days, like two blooms upon one stem. Our ideals are the same. Together we may succeed in realising them. I have perhaps--pardon the presumption--more learning, but you have far clearer sight, a more perfect mind, and a soul quickened into fire by the suffering you have undergone. We will bring these forces together. How perfectly destiny works! She brought you to me at the time when I needed you most. And I have served you a little. You were neglecting your gifts. The fires were smouldering ineffectually. I flatter myself that, if we had failed to meet, that magnificent lyric I have just heard would never have been penned by this white hand.”

“It wouldn’t,” Maude quavered.

“Then I have served you, but the debt upon my side remains still large. What a mysterious thing is this union! You have often seen a climbing plant reaching out for support, and when it finds a stem to which it may cling it grows into full perfection; but if it cannot establish the union it must wither. The same with our souls. But destiny is so kind she would not see us wither. You and I have been languishing, but now we shall grow--together and undivided.”

He pressed her hands together, and bent his head over them.

INCIDENTAL

All things are changing; and thou thyself art perpetually altering and, so to speak, wasting away always.--_Marcus Antoninus_.

The time of ripened fruit had come, and the grass was yellow and sere. Change was upon the face of the country, the prospect was mantled in mists, and the shortened evenings were dark with rain-clouds. The note of Nature’s song had altered. Autumn had taken the lyre out of summer’s reluctant hand, and as she struck her fiercer notes the foliage turned from green to gold, and the migratory birds went away.

The spirit of change had settled upon the Bethel of Thorlund. The interior was in better order than formerly. The spider had been routed, and the mouse discomfited; the strong coarse flowers of autumn glimmered dimly at the east, where the old hangings had been replaced by new; the brass-work shone, and the damp altar itself awoke one day from a long lethargy to find itself resplendent in a new green mantle. The sleep which hung so long upon the rector’s eyes had been in some part dissipated. Foolish Maude was the murderess of that slumber. Through her trivial and wholly terrestrial mind Dr. Berry perceived that one side of his environment lacked the beauty which was requisite for his bodily peace. Hitherto his mind had been so fully occupied in its strange flights that his charge the church had been but lightly included. But, subsequent to that memorable evening in the churchyard of ruined Queensmore, his lower self noted, with a distinct uneasiness, a certain lack of harmony between dreamland and the earthly vision. His manner of life had made stains which he would willingly have seen eliminated. The neglected church was one of these blots. He opened his eyes, and removed this reproach, in order that his poetic soul might no longer receive offence. This partial awakening was not spiritual, because at the same time he attended more carefully to his own appearance. His hair was more thoughtfully arranged, and his shoes were more elegant. Selfishness was the root, pride the stem, and vanity the bloom of this sudden growth, which had been raised into being and propagated as a pastime by Maude.

Change had come also over the spirit of the influence. It was stronger, more assertive, and more binding. It was at the same time more sinister. Conway and Drayton had become drifting particles controlled by the house, the instruments of its will, like electrons imprisoned within the atom. They roamed the garden in a perpetual state of dreams, responding to every breath from the hidden chamber, where the heart of the Strath was beating. Had Drayton been able to remind his companion of those past days of profligacy, Conway might have shaken his head with a perplexed smile. Had the older man been told of his former struggles to keep oil in the lamp of life, he would probably have replied, “I am thankful such misfortunes have never occurred to me.”

As for Lone Nance she was noisy no longer. The Strath supplied what had been wanting in her. Had she wandered again into the country, she would doubtless have been seized by the former wildness, and claimed by the old evils; the borrowed reason would have left her; she would have sunk again to the level of the animals. Conway would often sit and gaze upon her face. Though she was brown and tanned, she brought back for him fair-haired Winifred, walking sadly through the orchard in glimmering white, her small pale face set towards the road, watching the night for the lover who did not come.

Flora too had changed since that evening when her soul had been stripped bare. She had the feeling that youth was departing from her, and that her woman’s pride of beauty was beginning to wane. Mr. Price regarded her with apprehension, believing her to be ill. But she was not ill. She was only undergoing her punishment for having defied the first principles of the drama. She had come to regard her former opinions with a sort of loathing akin to fear. She confessed that she was an unnatural woman, after all her boastings of having made a step in advance of the remainder of her sex. What had actually occurred during her visit to the house of the drama she did not know; but she carried away a dream that evening which became a cloud darkening her life.

Upon a cheerless afternoon when a mass of grey vapour spread across the sky dropping warm rain at intervals, Conway brought his fellow-dreamer to Kingsmore vicarage.

Flora flushed when the leading character of the Strath entered. She had never been backward in speaking to any man, but then she was afraid. She knew that she desired to attract Conway, that she would still draw back if she could make him approach, but the knowledge came to her that power was wanting. She had lost the old art. At a glance she understood that he had no real affection for her. Could she have come to the Strath with a pure mind, as a humble heroine seeking development, as one anxious to discharge the high, if seemingly commonplace, functions of a woman, even as Nancy Reed had unwittingly approached the house, it might have been otherwise.

Mr. Price sought possession of Drayton, and Flora stood in the garden with the man whom she desired to shrink from, but could not. The rain had ceased, but the grass was mantled with film, and all the trees dripped moisture. The girl was cold; she was wearing white, which did not suit her. She might have recalled to him Winifred, as she had done once before, because she too was fair-haired, but she did not. Conway appeared to have forgotten that she was near. Once Flora would have been enraged at being thus slighted, but now she was pitying herself. A cluster rose, still showing a few blooms, wreathed an old-fashioned archway, and Flora in passing brushed against one of the flowers, and shivered when it became immediately resolved into a number of wet petals about their feet.

“I have changed a little lately,” she said with a new timidity. “I can touch a rose now.”

Conway stopped when she spoke, and looked fixedly into the mist.

“Could you never hold a rose?” he said. “That is unnatural.”

It was the cruellest word he could have uttered. She shrank from him again, but gathered courage to say, as they moved on, “It is not easy to conquer any antipathy. Last summer I would faint, if I came into a room where roses were. Next year, perhaps, I shall be able to wear them.”

Nancy wore roses in her hair. Indeed she was always fragrant with flowers. Conway had been sorry to see the grass flaked all over with shell-like petals; but Nance assured him that at the Strath roses bloomed all the year round. When Flora confessed that the fragrance of the queen of blossoms had caused her to faint the gulf between them became wider.

“There is a rose-bush at Queensmore, close beside the ruins of the church,” he went on, in the abstracted manner which had been his of late. “I walked there early in the summer, when the flowers were at their best. It was close upon evening, and as I looked through the trees I thought I saw a woman, clothed in white, leaning over a tomb. When I came nearer I saw it was this bush covered with blooms. I went back and tried to make out the white woman again, but could not.”

“I drove through Queensmore once by moonlight,” said Flora.

“The ruins show us what a small thing life is,” Conway answered sagely. “They teach us that no trouble is worth taking very much to heart, because suffering, like our time here, does not last for long. You know my house?” he added sharply.

“I have been inside it once,” the girl faltered.

“Why is not that a ruin? Queensmore flourished for years after my house was abandoned, but the village has fallen, and the Strath stands. It has defied wind and weather. Its foundations are secure, and its walls sound, although creepers were rotting the bricks before any man now living was born. Do you know the secret of its strength?”

“They built for eternity in those days,” said Flora more lightly.

“It is because the house has a soul,” went on Conway, as though she had not answered. “Because it lives and breathes, and has its moods like us. If it were to die it would crumble in a day. You would understand if you lived there. The Strath resembles you and me, in that it contains a spirit, which, while it remains, preserves the fabric from corruption.”

Flora was about to reply, as pleasantly as she dared, when to her great relief little bells sounded through the damp air, and Maude Juxon came to join the party, as pink and fresh as ever, although her curls were limp, and her hat saddened by raindrops. She tripped to her friend and embraced her daintily with sympathetic comments upon her appearance.

“You are white, and thin, and ghostly,” she declared. “My dear, you should do as I tell you and take a glass of warm milk, with an egg beaten up in it, every morning directly you wake up. I have been quarrelling with myself all day,” she ran on, “because I was dull; and now I’m damp and cold. Mr. Conway, say something to make me laugh.”

“I am no comedian,” said the owner of the house, which was just then very far removed from the fantastic mood. “I live, you must remember, in a valley, and it is the inhabitants of the mountains who laugh and sing.”

“But now you are out of your valley you might laugh and sing,” suggested the beauty. “Well, I shall go into the house and search diligently for a fire. It is shivery out here. Come along, Flora. How is your mother’s cold? It is so stupid to catch colds. I never do, but then I take care of myself. A cold is so unbecoming, but of course when one is old that doesn’t matter.”

Frivolous Maude rendered her society one service. It was not easy to be depressed in her presence, and her pretty face, always laughing at nothing, quickly changed the atmosphere of any room which had been dark and dull before her arrival. When all that could be said against her had been urged, the fact remained that she was always full of life and sound, like a shallow stream bubbling with bright waters unceasingly.

Her husband came frequently on the Saturday evening, leaving early on the Monday. He too had changed; he had stopped “worrying,” to use Maude’s expression, and talked no longer of a house in the country. The careless wife would possibly have laughed as usual, had anyone suggested to her that she was spending more money than her husband could afford. When he gave up persuading her to return, she believed he had accepted his defeat. As a matter of truth Juxon was hard hit; he was in a tight corner; he had ceased begging his wife to come back because there was no longer a home to offer her. His lease had run out, and he could not afford to renew it; and while Maude fared luxuriously in her farm-house, the husband lived and slept in his office, where there would be a light showing until the small hours of morning.

He had been hard pressed before to meet his obligations on settling day, but had escaped, and made the running as strongly as ever, and he trusted that energy and ingenuity would pull him through again. He was made of tough material, this stout little stockbroker. His only fear was lest Maude might stumble across the truth. When he found it impossible to allow her all the money she asked for, he stinted himself and did his best; while she sulked and called him stingy, and told him to his face that he did not deserve her. He only smiled in his quiet way, instead of shaking her as she deserved; and refreshed by the hill breezes, went back to work, pouring all his energies into a final struggle which should decide whether he was fitted to survive, or fated to go to the wall. His work would have been less arduous, had he married a wife who would have shared his burden, and assisted him with sympathy.

That very day Maude had received a message which, stated concisely, ran thus: “Could you obtain a more inexpensive cottage? I have suffered an unexpected reverse. Nothing to worry about, but clients have been more dilatory than usual in paying purchase price of their investments and differences owing on speculations. And when they are behindhand I must find the money.” The little lady had driven into Kingsmore to send a telegram in reply. A telegram was so much less troublesome than a letter. On this occasion she was not extravagant, as all she had to say in response to her husband’s note was the single word, “Nonsense.” It was very inconsiderate of Herbert, she thought. She had told him so often that she did not want to be troubled with business matters. As for that reverse, if it was of no importance, as he implied, why on earth did he want to mention it to her? She was most distinctly an injured person and a long-suffering wife.

The influence of the Strath extended even to Kingsmore vicarage. Conway and Drayton had brought it with them, and the heartless little lady was no doubt its object. So far Maude had escaped. She had come, as she thought, to visit her friend that day by mere chance, not knowing that she had been led to that place by the destiny which was then weaving her idle phrases into a net through the meshes of which she would not escape until she had learnt to know herself.

It was natural, she thought, that she should speak to Conway concerning the house of which she had heard so much. She longed to behold for herself its china and pictures. The garden, she owned, did not interest her in the least, because she liked order as represented by carpet-bedding and level lawns. Then she knew that Drayton was a writer. Dr. Berry had spoken kindly of him.

“I can criticise,” Maude declared, with wicked confidence. “I must see your work and give you my opinion, Mr. Drayton.”

The scribe muttered something which sounded complimentary, but he did not display any of Dr. Berry’s enthusiasm. He was not in the least a clever man, but his eyes were open, and he was well aware that Maude was sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal.

“Is it true you have a stone floor in the hall?” went on the lady frivolous, turning to Conway.

“And the floor of what you call the saloon is of real solid oak?” she went on, when he had replied.

“It is not solid now,” he said.

“Marvellously preserved,” interpolated Mr. Price, swamping his saucer by adding to the contents of his tea-cup his customary three lumps of sugar.

“And there are mirrors round the walls, and candlesticks--what do you call those things with a lot of branches?--and old pictures, and windows with those quaint diamond panes of yellow glass,” Maude cried. “Oh, Mr. Conway, you shall give a dance. Just a little dance for us.”

“Don’t, Maude,” said Flora.

“Be quiet, Flora. Mr. Conway, it would be perfect, and we will wear fancy costumes and masks, and believe we are those wicked people of the eighteenth century one reads about--yes, a masked ball, and I will help you with the supper.”

“My dear lady, the place would frighten you to death,” said Mr. Price.

“Of course I know the house is haunted,” said Maude flippantly. “But these gentlemen have not been frightened to death, and I don’t mind groans and rattling of chains and all that sort of thing, so long as I don’t see real ghosts in white sheets. Besides we shall be making such a noise the ghosts won’t be given a chance. I shan’t be frightened. Why, with people all round me I believe I might endure one glimpse at the wicked baronet himself.”

“The Strath is not haunted,” said Drayton stolidly.

“Then we must have that dance,” cried Maude. “Yes, Mr. Conway, you have promised. No outsiders. Just us, and Dr. Berry, of course.”

“Certainly we might have a dance,” agreed Conway with some spirit.

“At the end of the month,” cried Maude. “You need not worry, Mr. Conway. Flora and I will attend to all the preliminaries, and I know we shall have a lovely time.”

“I do not see the use of wearing masks,” objected the squarson. “As there are to be so few of us it will be impossible to conceal our identity.”

“Masks will be appropriate,” said Drayton almost sharply; and his voice settled the matter.

When the two men who were bound for Thorlund left the vicarage rain was again falling. On this return journey they talked incessantly; but it was not until they reached the summit of the hill, and saw the ivied roof of the Strath among the wet trees, that the thought of the proposed masquerade recurred to their minds. It was Conway who touched upon the subject by remarking:

“Do you imagine that a dance would give offence?”

Drayton understood and answered, as he inclined his head towards the dreamy hollow, “Not if the suggestion came from there.”