Chapter 2

X

While Faversham was driving back to Threlfall, his mind possessed by a tumult of projects and images--which was a painful tumult, because his physical strength was not yet equal to coping with it--a scene was passing in a bare cottage beside the Ulls-water road, whence in due time one of those events was to arise which we call sudden or startling only because we are ignorant of the slow [Greek: anankê ] which has produced them.

An elderly man had just entered the cottage after his day's work. He was evidently dead tired, and he had sunk down on a chair beside a table which held tea things and some bread and butter. His wife could be heard moving about in the lean-to scullery behind the living-room.

The man sat motionless, his hands hanging over his knees, his head bent. He seemed to be watching the motes dancing in a shaft of dusty sunlight that had found its way into the darkened room. For the western sun was blazing on the front, the blinds were down, and the little room was like an oven. The cottage was a new one and stood in a bare plot of garden, unshaded and unsheltered, on a stretch of road which crossed the open fell. It was a labourer's cottage, but the furniture of the living-room was superior in quality to that commonly found in the cottages of the neighbourhood. A piano was crowded into one corner, and a sideboard, too large for the room, occupied the wall opposite the fireplace.

The man sitting in the chair also was clearly not an ordinary labourer. His brown suit, though worn and frayed, had once been such a suit as Messrs. Carter, tailors, of Pengarth, were accustomed to sell to their farmer clients, and it was crossed by an old-fashioned chain and seal. The suit was heavily splashed with mud; so were the thick boots; and on the drooped brow shone beads of sweat. John Brand was not much over fifty, but he was tired out in mind and body; and his soul was bitter within him.

A year before this date he had been still the nominal owner of a small freehold farm between Pengarth and Carlisle, bordering on the Threlfall property. But he was then within an ace of ruin, and irreparable calamity had since overtaken him.

How it was that he had fallen into such a plight was still more or less mysterious to a dull brain. Up to the age of forty-seven, he had been employed on his father's land, with little more than the wages of a labourer, possessing but small authority over the men working on the farm, and no liberty but such as the will of a tyrannical master allowed him. Then suddenly the father died, and Brand succeeded to the farm. All his long-checked manhood asserted itself. There was a brief period of drinking, betting, and high living. The old man had left a small sum of ready money in the bank, which to the son, who had always been denied the handling of money, seemed riches. It was soon spent, and then unexpected burdens and claims disclosed themselves. There was a debt to the bank, which there were no means of paying. And he discovered to his dismay that a spinster cousin of his mother's had lent money to his father within the preceding five years, on the security of his stock and furniture. Where the borrowed money had gone no one knew, but the spinster cousin, alarmed perhaps by exaggerated accounts of the new man's drinking habits, pressed for repayment.

Brand set his teeth, ceased to spend money, and did his best to earn it. But he was a stupid man, and the leading-strings in which his life had been held up to middle age had enfeebled such natural powers as he possessed. His knowledge was old-fashioned, his methods slovenly; and his wife, as harmless as himself, but no cleverer, could do nothing to help him. By dint, however, of living and working hard he got through two or three years, and might just have escaped his fate--for his creditors, at that stage, were all ready to give him time--had not ill-fortune thrown him across the path of Edmund Melrose. The next farm to his belonged to the Threlfall estate. Melrose's methods as a landlord had thrown out one tenant after another, till he could do nothing but put in a bailiff and work it himself. The bailiff was incompetent, and a herd of cattle made their way one morning through a broken fence that no one had troubled to mend, and did serious damage to Brand's standing crops. Melrose was asked to compensate, and flatly declined. The fence was no doubt his; but he claimed that it had been broken by one of Brand's men. Hence the accident. The statement was false, and the evidence supporting it corrupt. Moreover the whole business was only the last of a series of unneighbourly acts on the part both of the bailiff and landowner, and a sudden fury blazed up in Brand's slow mind. He took his claim to the county court and won his case; the judge allowing himself a sharp sentence or two on the management of the Threlfall property. Brand spent part of his compensation money in entertaining a group of friends at a Pengarth public. But that was the last of his triumph. Thenceforward things went mysteriously wrong with him. His creditors, first one, then all, began to tighten their pressure on him; and presently the bank manager--the Jove of Brand's little world--passed abruptly from civility or indulgence, to a peremptory reminder that debts were meant to be paid. A fresh bill of sale on furniture and stock staved off disaster for a time. But a bad season brought it once more a long step nearer, and the bank, however urgently appealed to, showed itself adamant, not only as to any further advance, but as to any postponement of their own claim. Various desperate expedients only made matters worse, and after a few more wretched months during which his farm deteriorated, and his business went still further to wreck, owing largely to his own distress of mind, Brand threw up the sponge. He sold his small remaining interest in his farm, which did not even suffice to pay his debts, and went out of it a bankrupt and broken man, prematurely aged. A neighbouring squire, indignant with what was commonly supposed to be the secret influences at work in the affair, offered him the post of bailiff in a vacant farm; and he and his family migrated to the new-built cottage on the Ullswater road.

As to these secret influences, they were plain enough to many people. Melrose who had been present on the day when the case was tried had left the court-house in a fury, in company with a certain ill-famed solicitor, one Nash, who had worked up the defence, and had served the master of Threlfall before in various litigations connected with his estates, such as the respectable family lawyers in Carlisle and Pengarth would have nothing to do with. Nash told his intimates that night that Brand would rue his audacity, and the prophecy soon dismally fulfilled itself. The local bank to which Brand owed money had been accustomed for years to deal with very large temporary balances--representing the rents of half the Threlfall estates. Nash was well known to the manager, as one of those backstairs informants, indispensable in a neighbourhood where every farmer wanted advances--now on his crops--now on his stock--and the leading bank could only escape losses by the maintenance of a surprising amount of knowledge as to each man's circumstances and character. Nash was observed on one or two occasions going in and out of the bank's private room, at moments corresponding with some of the worst crises of Brand's fortunes. And with regard to other creditors, no one could say precisely how they were worked on, but they certainly showed a surprising readiness to join in the harrying of a struggling and helpless man.

In any case Brand believed, and had good cause for believing, that he had been ruined by Melrose in revenge for the county court action. His two sons believed it also.

The tired man sat brooding over these things in the little hot room. His wife came in, and stood at the door observing him, twisting her apron in a pair of wet hands.

"Yo'll have your tea?"

"Aye. Where are t' lads?"

"Johnnie's gotten his papers. He's gane oot to speak wi' the schoolmaster. He's thinkin' o' takkin' his passage for t' laast week in t' year."

Brand made no reply. Johnnie, the elder son, was the apple of his eye. But an uncle had offered him half his passage to Quebec, and his parents could not stand in the way.

"An' Will?"

"He's cleanin' hissel'."

As she spoke, wavering steps were heard on the stairs, and while she returned to her kitchen the younger son, Will Brand, opened the door of the front room.

He was a lanky, loose-jointed youth of twenty, with a long hatchet face. His movements were strangely clumsy, and his eye wandered. The neighbours had always regarded him as feeble-witted; and about a year before this time an outburst of rough practical joking on the lad's part--sudden jumpings out from hedges to frighten school-children going home, or the sudden whoopings and howlings of a white-sheeted figure, for the startling of lovers in the gloaming--had drawn the attention of the Whitebeck policeman to his "queerness." Only his parents knew of what fits of rage he was capable.

He wore now, as he came into the living-room, an excited, quasi-triumphant look, which did not escape his father.

"What you been after, Will?"

"Helpin' Wilson."

Wilson was a neighbouring keeper, who in June and July, before the young pheasants were returned to the woods, occasionally employed Will Brand as a watcher, especially at night.

Brand made no reply. His wife brought in the tea, and he and Will helped themselves greedily. Presently Will said abruptly:

"A've made that owd gun work all right."

"Aye?" Brand's tone was interrogative, but listless.

"I shot a kestrel an' a stoat wi' un this morning."

"Yo'did, eh?"

Will nodded, his mouth crammed with bread and butter, strange lights and flickering expressions playing over his starved, bony face.

"Wilson says I'm gettin' a varra fair shot."

"Aye? I've heard tha' practisin'." Brand turned a pair of dull eyes upon his son.

"An' I wish tha' wudn't do't i' my garden!" said Mrs. Brand, with energy. "I doan't howd wi' guns an' shootin' aboot, in a sma' garden, wi' t' washin' an' aw."

"It's feyther's garden, ain't it, as long as he pays t' rent!" said Will, bringing his hand down on the table with sudden passion. "Wha's to hinder me? Mebbe yo' think Melrose 'ull be aboot."

"Howd your tongue, Willie," said his mother, mildly. "We werena taakin' o' Melrose."

"Noa--because we're aye thinkin'!"

The lad's eyes blazed as he roughly pushed his cup for a fresh supply. His mother endeavoured to soothe him by changing the subject. But neither husband nor son encouraged her. A gloomy silence fell over the tea-table. Presently Brand moved, and with halting step went to the little horsehair sofa, and stretched himself full length upon it. Such an action on his part was unheard of. Both wife and son stared at him without speaking. Then Mrs. Brand got up, fetched an old shawl, and put it over her husband who had closed his eyes. Will left the room, and sitting on a stool outside the cottage door, with the old gun between his knees, he watched the sunset as it flushed the west, and ran along the fell-tops, till little by little the summer night rose from the purple valley, or fell softly from the emerging stars, and day was done.

* * * * *

A fortnight later, Mr. Louis Delorme, the famous portrait painter, arrived at Duddon Castle. Various guests had been invited to meet him. Two guests--members of the Tatham family--had invited themselves, much to Lady Tatham's annoyance. And certain neighbours were coming to dine; among them Mrs. Penfold and her daughters.

Dinner was laid in a white-pillared loggia, built by an "Italianate" Lord Tatham in the eighteenth century on the western side of the house, communicating with the dining-room behind it, and with the Italian garden in front. It commanded the distant blue line of the Keswick and Ullswater mountains, and a foreground of wood and crag, while the Italian garden to which the marble steps of the loggia descended, with its formal patterns of bright colour, blue, purple, and crimson, lay burning in the afterglow of sunset light, which, in a northern July, will let you read till ten o'clock.

The guests gathered on the circle of smooth-shaven grass that in the centre made a space around a fountain, with a gleaming water nymph. A broad grass pathway led them to the house, so that guests emerging from it arrived in rather spectacular fashion--well seen, against the ivied walls of the castle, to the unfair advantage, as usual, of grace and good looks.

Before hostess or neighbours appeared, however, Mr. Delorme and a certain Gerald Tatham, Lady Tatham's brother-in-law, had the green circle to themselves. Gerald Tatham was one of the uninvited guests. He considered himself entitled to descend on Duddon twice a year, and generally left it having borrowed money of his nephew, in elaborate forgetfulness of a similar transaction twelve months earlier still undischarged. He was married, but his wife did not pay visits with him. Victoria greatly preferred her--plain and silent as she was--to her husband; but realizing what a relief it must be to a woman to get such a man off her hands as often as possible, she never pressed her to come to Duddon. Meanwhile Gerald Tatham passed as an agreeable person, well versed in all those affairs of his neighbours which they would gladly have kept to themselves, and possessed of certain odd pockets of knowledge, sporting or financial, which helped him to earn the honest or doubtful pennies on which his existence depended.

Delorme and he got on excellently. Gerald respected the painter as a person whose brush, in a strangely constituted world, was able to supply him with an income which even the sons of land or commerce might envy; and secretly despised him for a lack of grandfathers, for his crop of black curls, his southern complexion and his foreign birth. Delorme thought Gerald an idler of no account, and perceived in him the sure signs of a decadence which was rapidly drawing the English aristocratic class into the limbo of things that were. But Gerald was an insatiable hawker of gossip; and a fashionable painter, with an empire among young and pretty women, must keep himself well stocked with that article.

So the two walked up and down together, talking pleasantly enough. Presently Delorme, sweeping a powerful hand before him, exclaimed on the beauty of the castle and its surroundings.

"Yes--a pretty place," said Gerald, carelessly, "and, for once, money enough to keep it up."

"Your nephew is a lucky fellow. Why don't they marry him."

"No hurry! When it does come off my sister-in-law will do something absurd."

"Something sentimental? I'll bet you she doesn't! Democracy is all very well--except when it comes to marriage. Then even idealists like Lady Tatham knock under."

"I wish you may be right. Anyway, she won't send him to New York!"

"No need! Blue blood--impoverished!--that's my forecast."

Gerald smiled--ungenially.

"Victoria would positively dislike an heiress. Jolly easy to take that sort of line--on forty thousand a year! But as to birth, the family, in my opinion, has a right to be considered."

Delorme hesitated a moment, then threw a provocative look at his companion, the look of the alien to whom English assumptions are sometimes intolerable.

"Pretty mixed--your stocks--some of them--by now!"

"Not ours. You'd find, if you looked into it, that we've descended very straight. There's been no carelessness."

Delorme threw up his hands.

"Good heavens! Carelessness, as you call it, is the only hope for a family nowadays. A strong blood--that's what you want--a blood that will stand this modern life--and you'll never get that by mating in and in. Ah! here come the others."

They turned, and saw a stream of people coming round the corner of the house. The rector and Mrs. Deacon--the gold cross on the rector's waistcoat shining in the diffused light. Lady Barbara Woolson, the other uninvited guest, Victoria's first cousin; a young man in a dinner jacket and black tie walking with Lady Tatham; a Madonnalike woman in black, hand in hand with a tall schoolboy; and two elderly gentlemen.

But in front--some little way in front--there walked a pair for whom all the rest appeared to be mere escort and attendance; so vivid, so charged with meaning they seemed, among the summer flowers, and under the summer sky.

A slender girl in white, and a tall youth looking down upon her, treading the grass just slightly in advance of her, with a happy deference, as though he led in the fairy queen. So delicate were her proportions, so bright her hair, and so compelling the charm that floated round her, that Delorme, dropping his cigarette, hastily put up his eyeglasses, and fell into his native tongue.

"Sapristi!--quelle petite fée avez-vous là?"

"My sister-in-law talked of some neighbours--"

"Mais elle entre en reine! My dear fellow, it looks dangerous."

Gerald pulled his moustaches, looking hard at the advancing pair.

"A pretty little minx--I must have it out with Victoria." But his tone was doubtful. It was not easy to have things out with Victoria.

* * * * *

The dinner under the loggia went gaily. Not many courses; much fruit; a shimmer of tea-roses before the guests; and the scent of roses blowing in from the garden outside.

Victoria had Delorme on her right, and Lydia sat next the great man. Tatham could only glance at her from afar. On his right, he had his cousin, Lady Barbara, whom he cordially disliked. Her yearly visit, always fixed and announced by herself, was a time of trial both for him and his mother, but they endured it out of a sentimental and probably mistaken belief that the late Lord Tatham had--in her youth--borne her a cousinly affection. Lady Barbara was a committee-woman, indefatigable, and indiscriminate. She lived and gloried in a chronic state of overwork, for which no one but herself saw the necessity. Her conversation about it only confirmed the frivolous persons whom she tried to convert to "social service," in their frivolity. After a quarter of an hour's conversation with her, Tatham was generally dumb, and as nearly rude as his temperament allowed. While, as to his own small efforts, his cottages, County Council, and the rest, no blandishments would have drawn from him a word about them; although, like many of us, Lady Barbara would gladly have purchased leave to talk about her own achievements by a strictly moderate amount of listening to other people's.

On his other side sat a very different person--the sweet-faced lady, whose boy of fourteen sitting opposite kept up with her through dinner a shy telegraphy of eye and smile. They were evidently alone in the world, and everything to each other. She was a widow--a Mrs. Edward Manisty, whose husband, a brilliant but selfish man of letters, had died some four years before this date. His wife had never found out that he was selfish; her love had haloed him; though she had plenty of character of her own. She herself was an American, a New Englander by birth, carrying with her still the perfume of a quiet life begun among the hills of Vermont, and in sight of the Adirondacks; a life fundamentally Puritan and based on Puritan ideals; yet softened and expanded by the modern forces of art, travel, and books. Lucy Manisty had attracted her husband, when he, a weary cosmopolitan, had met her first in Rome, by just this touch of something austerely sweet, like the scent of lavender or dewy grass; and she had it still--mingled with a kind humour--in her middle years, which were so lonely but for her boy. She and Victoria Tatham had made friends on the warm soil of Italy, and through a third person, a rare and charming woman, whose death had first made them really known to each other.

"I never saw anything so attractive!" Mrs. Manisty was murmuring in Tatham's ear.

He followed the direction of her eyes, and his fair skin reddened.

"She is very pretty, isn't she?"

"Very--like a Verrocchio angel--who has been to college! She is an artist?"

"She paints. She admires Delorme."

"That one can see. And he admires her!"

"We--my mother--wants him to paint her."

"He will--if he knows his own business."

"A Miss Penfold?" said Lady Barbara, putting up her eyeglass. "You say she paints. The modern girl must always _do_ something! _My_ girls have been brought up for _home_."

A remark that drove Tatham into a rash defence of the modern girl to which he was quite unequal, and in which indeed he was half-hearted, for his fundamental ideas were quite as old-fashioned as Lady Barbara's. But Lydia, for him, was of no date; only charm itself, one with all the magic and grace that had ever been in the world, or would be.

Suddenly he saw that she was looking at him--a bright, signalling look, only to tell him how hugely well she was getting on with Delorme. He smiled in return, but inwardly he was discontented. Always this gay camaraderie--like a boy's. Not the slightest tremor in it. Not a touch of consciousness--or of sex. He could not indeed have put it so. All he knew was that he was always thirstily seeking something she showed no signs of giving him.

But he himself was being rapidly swept off his feet. Since their meeting at Threlfall, which had been interrupted by Melrose's freakish return, there had been other meetings, as delightful as before, yet no more conclusive or encouraging. He and Lydia had indeed grown intimate. He had revealed to her thoughts and feelings which he had unveiled for no one else--not even for Victoria--since he was a boy at school with boyish friendships. And she had handled them with such delicacy, such sweetness; such frankness too, in return as to her own "ideas," those stubborn intractable ideas, which made him frown to think of. Yet all the time--he knew it--there had been no flirting on her part. Never had she given him the smallest ground to think her in love with him. On the contrary, she had maintained between them for all her gentleness, from beginning to end, that soft, intangible barrier which at once checked and challenged him.

Passion ran high in him. And, moreover, he was beginning to be more than vaguely jealous. He had seen for himself how much there was in common between her and Faversham; during the last fortnight he had met Faversham at the cottage on several occasions; and there had been references to other visits from the new agent. He understood perfectly that Lydia was broadly, humanly interested in the man's task: the poet, the enthusiast in her was stirred by what he might do, if he would, for the humble folk she loved. But still, there they were--meeting constantly. "And he can talk to her about all the things I can't!"

His earlier optimism had quite passed by now; probably, though unconsciously, under the influence of Lydia's nascent friendship with Faversham. There had sprung up in him instead a constant agitation and disquiet that could no longer be controlled. No help--but rather danger--lay in waiting....

Delorme had now turned away from Lydia to his hostess, and Lydia was talking to Squire Andover on her other side, a jolly old boy, with a gracious, absent look, who inclined his head to her paternally. Tatham knew very well that there was no one in the county who was more rigidly tied to caste or rank. But he was kind always to the outsider--kind therefore to Lydia. Good heavens!--as if there was any one at the table fit to tie her shoe-string!

His pulses raced. The heat, the golden evening, the flowers, all the lavish colour and scents of nature, seemed to be driving him toward speech--toward some expression of himself, which must be risked, even if it lead him to disaster.

* * * * *

The dinner which appeared to Tatham interminable, and was really so short, by Victoria's orders, that Squire Andover felt resentfully he had had nothing to eat, at last broke up. The gentlemen lingered smoking on the loggia. The ladies dispersed through the garden, and Delorme--after a look round the male company--quietly went with them. So did the gentleman in the dinner jacket and black tie. Tatham, impatiently doing his duty as host, could only follow the fugitives with his eyes, their pale silks and muslins, among the flowers and under the trees.

But his guests, over their cigars, were busy with some local news, and, catching Faversham's name, Tatham presently recalled his thoughts sufficiently to listen to what was being said. The topic, naturally, was Faversham's appointment. Every landowner there was full of it. He had been seen in Brampton on market day driving in a very decent motor; and since his accession he had succeeded in letting two or three of the derelict farms, on a promise of repairs and improvements which had been at last wrung out of Melrose. It was rumoured also that the most astonishing things were happening in the house and the gardens.

"Who on earth is the man, and where does he come from?" asked a short, high-shouldered man with a blunt, pugnacious face. He was an ex-officer, a J.P., and one of the most active Conservative wire-pullers of the neighbourhood. He and Victoria Tatham were the best of friends. They differed on almost all subjects. He was a mass of prejudices, large and small, and Victoria laughed at him. But when she wanted to help any particularly lame dog over any particularly high stile, she always went to Colonel Barton. A cockney doctor attached to the Workhouse had once described him to her as--'eart of gold, 'edd of feathers'--and the label had stuck.

"A Londoner, picked up badly hurt on the road, by Undershaw, I understand, and carried into the lion's den," said Andover, in answer to Barton. "And now they say he is obtaining the most extraordinary influence over the old boy."

"And the house--turned into a perfect palace!" said the rector, throwing up his hands.

The others, except Tatham, crowded eagerly round, while the rector described a visit he had paid to Faversham, within a few days of the agent's appointment, on behalf of a farmer's widow, a parishioner, under notice to quit.

"Hadn't been in the house for twenty years. The place is absolutely transformed! It used to be a pigsty. Now Faversham's rooms are fit for a prince. Nothing short of one of your rooms here"--he addressed Tatham, with a laughing gesture toward the house--"comparable to his sitting-room. Priceless things in it! And close by, an excellent office, with room for two clerks--one already at work--piles of blue-books, pamphlets, heavens knows what! And they are fitting up a telephone between Threlfall and some new rooms that he has taken for estate business in Pengarth."

"A _telephone_--at Threlfall!" murmured Andover.

"And Undershaw tells me that Melrose has taken the most extraordinary fancy for the young man. Everything is done for him. He may have anything he likes. And, rumour says--an enormous salary!"

"Sounds like an adventurer," grumbled Barton, "probably is."

Tatham broke in. "No, you're wrong there, Colonel. I knew Faversham at college. He's a very decent fellow--and awfully clever."

Yet, somehow, his praise stuck in his throat.

"Well, of course," said Andover with a shrug, "if he _is_ a decent fellow, as Tatham says, he won't stay long. Do you imagine Melrose is going to change his spots?--not he!"

"Somebody must really go and talk to this chap," said Barton gloomily. "I believe Melrose will lose us the next election up here. You really can't expect people to vote for Tories, if Tories are that sort."

The talk flowed on. But Tatham had ceased to listen. For some little time there had been no voices or steps in the garden outside. They had melted into the wood beyond. But now they had returned. He perceived a white figure against a distant background of clipped yew.

Rising joyously he threw down his cigarette.

"Shall we join the ladies?"

"I say, you've had a dose of Delorme."

For he had found her still with the painter, who as soon as Tatham appeared had subsided languidly into allowing Lady Barbara to talk to him.

"Oh! but so amusing!" cried Lydia, her face twinkling. "We've picked all the Academy to pieces and danced on their bones."

"Has he asked you to sit to him?"

Lydia hesitated, and in the soft light he saw her flush.

"He said something. Of course it would be a great, great honour!"

"An honour to him," said Tatham hotly.

"I'm afraid you don't know how to respect great men!" she said laughing, as they drew out of the shadow of the Italian garden with its clipped yews and cypresses, and reached a broad terrace whence the undulations of the park stretched westward and upward into the purple fissures and clefts of the mountains. Trees, fells, grass were steeped in a wan, gold light, a mingling of sunset and moonrise. The sky was clear; the gradations of colour on the hills ethereally distinct. From a clump of trees came a soft hooting of owls; and close behind them a tall hedge of roses red and white made a bower for Lydia's light form, and filled the night with perfume.

"What do great men matter?" said Tatham incoherently as they paused; "what does anything matter--but--_Lydia!_"

It was a cry of pain. A hand groped for hers. Lydia startled, looked up to see the face of Tatham looking down upon her through the warm dusk--transfigured.

"You'll let me speak, won't you? I daresay it's much too soon--I daresay you can't think of it--yet. But I love you. I love you so dearly! I can't keep it to myself. I have--ever since I first saw you. You won't be angry with me for speaking? You won't think I took you by surprise? I don't want to hurry you--I only want you to know--"

Emotion choked him. Lydia, after a murmur he couldn't catch, hid her face in her hands.

He waited; and already there crept through him the dull sense of disaster. The impulse to speak had been irresistible, and now--he wished he had not spoken.

At last she looked up.

"Oh, you have been so good to me--so sweet to me," and before he knew what she was doing, she had lifted one of his hands in her two slender ones and touched it with her lips.

Outraged--enchanted--bewildered--he tried to catch her in his arms. But she slipped away from him and with her hands behind her, she looked at him, smiling through tears, her fair hair blown back from her temples, her delicate face alive with feeling.

"I can't say yes--it wouldn't be honest if I did--it wouldn't be fair to you. But, oh, dear, I'm so sorry--so dreadfully sorry--if it's my fault--if I've misled you. I thought I'd tried hard to show what I really felt--that I wanted to be friends--but not--not this. Dear Lord Tatham, I do like and admire you so much--but--"

"You don't want to marry me!" he said bitterly, turning away.

She paused a moment.

"No"--the word came with soft decision--"no. And if I were to marry you without--without that feeling--you have a right to--I should be doing wrong--to you--and to myself. You see"--she looked down, the points of her white shoe drawing circles on the grass, as though to help out her faltering speech--"I--I'm not what I believe you think me. I've got all sorts of hard, independent notions in my mind. I want to paint--and study--and travel--I want to be free--"

"You should be free as air!" he interrupted passionately.

"Ah, but no!--not if I married. I shouldn't want to be free in that way, if--"

"If you were in love? I understand. And you're not in love with me. Why should you be?" said poor Tatham, with a new and desperate humility. "Why on earth should you be? But I'd adore you--I'd give you anything in the world you wanted."

Sounds of talking and footsteps emerged from the dusk behind them; the high notes of Lady Barbara, and the answering bass of Delorme.

"Don't let them find us," said Lydia impetuously--"I've _so_ much to say."

Tatham turned, and led the way to the pillared darkness of a pergola to their left. One side of it was formed by a high yew hedge; on the other, its rose-twined arches looked out upon the northern stretches of the park, and on the garden front of Duddon. There it lay, the great house, faintly lit; and there in front stretched its demesne, symbol of its ancient rule and of its modern power. A natural excitement passed through Lydia as they paused, and she caught its stately outline through the night. And then, the tameless something in her soul, which was her very self, rose up, rejoicing in its own strength, and yet--wistful, full of tenderness. Now!--let her play her stroke--her stroke in the new great game that was to be, in the new age, between men and women.

"Why shouldn't we just be friends?" she urged. "I know it sounds an old, stale thing to say. But it isn't. There's a new meaning in it now, because--because women are being made new. It used to be offering what we couldn't give. We could be lovers; we weren't good enough--we hadn't stuff enough--to be friends. But now--dear Lord Tatham--just try me--" She held out to him two hands, which he took against his will. "I like you so much!--I know that I should love your mother. Now that we've had this out, why shouldn't we build up something quite fresh? I want a friend--so badly!"

"And I want something--so much more than a friend!" he said, pressing her hands fiercely.

"Ah, but give it up!" she pleaded. "If you can't, I mustn't come here any more, nor you to us. And why? It would be such a waste--of what our friendship might be. You could teach me so many things. I think I could teach you some."

He dropped her hands, mastering himself with difficulty.

"It's nonsense," he said shortly; "I know it's nonsense! But--if I promised not to say anything of this kind again for a year?"

She pondered. There were compunctions, remorses, in her. As Susan had warned her, was she playing with a man's heart and life?

But her trust in her own resources, the zest of spiritual adventure, and a sheer longing to comfort him prevailed.

"You'll promise that; and I'll promise--just to be as nice to you as ever I can!" She paused. They looked at each other; the trouble in his eyes questioning the smile in hers. "Now please!--my friend!"--she slid dexterously, though very softly, into the everyday tone--"will you advise me? Mr. Delorme has asked me to sit to him. Just a sketch in the garden--for a picture he's at work on. You would like me to accept?"

She stood before him, her eyes raised, with the frank gentleness of a child. Yet there was a condition implied in the question.

Tatham broke out--passionately,

"Just tell me. There's--there's no one else?"

She suffered for him; she hastened to comfort him.

"No, no--indeed there's no one else. Though, mind, I'm free. And so are you. Shall I come to-morrow?" she asked again, with quiet insistence.

There was a gulp in Tatham's throat. Yet he rose--dismally--to her challenge.

"You would do what I like?" he asked, quivering.

"Indeed I would."

"I invited Delorme here--just to please you--and because I hoped he'd paint you."

"Then that's settled!" she said, with a little sigh of satisfaction.

"And what, please, am I to do--that _you'd_ like?" She looked up mischievously.

"Call me Lydia--forget that you ever wanted to marry me--and don't mind a rap what people say!"

He laughed, through his pain, and gravely took her hand.

"And now," said Lydia, "I think it's time to go home."

* * * * *

When all the guests were gone, when Gerald and Delorme had smoked their last interminable cigars, and Delorme had made his last mocking comments on the "old masters" who adorned the smoking-room, Tatham saw him safely to bed, and returned to his sitting-room on the ground floor. The French window was open, and he passed out into the garden. Soon, in his struggle with himself, he had left the garden and the park behind, and was climbing the slope of the fells. The play of the soft summer winds under the stars, the scents of bracken and heather and rushes, the distant throbbing sounds that rose from the woods as the wind travelled through them--and soon, the short mountain turf beneath his feet, and around and below him, the great shapes of the hills, mysteriously still, and yet, as it seemed to him, mysteriously alive--these things spoke to him and, little by little, calmed his blood.

It was the first anguish of a happy man. When, presently, he lay safe hidden in a hollow of the lonely fell, face downward among the moonlit rocks, some young and furious tears fell upon the sod. That quiet strength of will in so soft a creature--a will opposed to his will--had brought him up against the unyieldingness of the world. The joyous certainties of life were shaken to their base; and yet he could not, he did not, cease to hope.

XI

Victoria was sitting to Delorme in a corner of the Italian garden. He wished to paint her _en plein air_, and he was restlessly walking to and fro, about her, choosing a point of view. Victoria was vaguely pleased by the picturesqueness of his lion head set close on a pair of powerful shoulders, no less than by the vivacity of his dark face and southern gesture. He wore a linen jacket with bulging pockets, and a black skullcap, which gave him a masterful, pontifical air. To Victoria's thinking, indeed, he "pontified" at all times, a great deal more than was necessary.

However she sat resigned. She did not like Delorme, and her preference was all for another school of art. She had moreover a critical respect for her own features, and she did not want at all to see them rendered by what seemed to her the splashing violence of Delorme's brushwork. But Harry had asked it of her, and here she was.

Her thoughts, moreover, were full of Harry's affairs, so that the conversation between her and the painter was more or less pretence on her part.

Delorme, meanwhile, was divided between the passion of a new subject and the wrath excited in him by a newspaper article which had reached him at breakfast.

"A little more to the left, please, Lady Tatham. Admirable! One moment!" The scrabble of charcoal on paper.

Delorme stepped back. Victoria sat languidly passive.

"Did you read that article on me in _The Weekly_? The man's a fool!--knows nothing, and writes like God Almighty. A little more full face. That's it! I suppose all professions are full of these jealous beasts. Ours is cluttered up with them--men who never sell a picture, and make up by living on the compliments of their own little snarling set. But, upon my word, it makes one rather sick. Ah, that's good! You moved a trifle--that's better--just a moment!"

"I'm glad you let me sit," said Victoria absently. "I _stood_ to Whistler once. It nearly killed me."

"Ah, Jimmy!" said Delorme. "Jimmy was a Tartar!"

He went off at score into recollections of Whistler, drawing hard all the time.

Victoria did not listen. She was thinking of those sounds of footsteps she had heard under her window at dawn, and passing her room. This morning Harry looked as usual, except for something in the eyes, which none but she would notice. What had he been doing all those hours? There was nothing erratic or abnormal about Harry. Sound sleep from the moment he put his head on his pillow to the moment at eight o'clock when his servant with great difficulty woke him, was the rule with him.

What could have happened the night before--while he and Lydia Penfold were alone together? Victoria had seen them come back into the general company, had indeed been restlessly on the watch for their return. It had seemed to her--though how be sure in that mingled light?--both at the moment of their reappearance and afterward, that Harry was somewhat unusually pale and quiet, while the girl's look had struck her as singular--_exalteé_--the eyes shining--yet the manner composed and sweet as usual. She already divined the theorist in Lydia, the speculator with life and conduct. "But not with my Harry!" thought the mother, fiercely.

But how could she prevent it? What could she do? What can any mother do when the wave of energy--spiritual and physical--has risen or is rising to its height in the young creature, and the only question is how and where it shall break; in crash and tempest, or in a summer sea?

Delorme suddenly raised his great head from his easel.

"That was a delicious creature that sat by me last night."

"Miss Penfold? She is one of your devotees."

"She paints, so she said. _Mon Dieu_! Why do women paint?"

Victoria, roused, hotly defended the right of her sex to ply any honest art in the world that might bring them either pleasure or money.

"_Mais la peinture_!" Delorme's shoulder shrugged still higher. "It is an infernal thing, milady, painting. What can a woman make of it? She can only unsex herself. And in the end--what she produces--what is it?"

"If it pays the rent--isn't that enough?"

"But a young girl like that! What, in God's name, has she do to with paying the rent? Let her dance and sing--have a train of lovers--look beautiful!"

"The whole duty of woman!" laughed Victoria with a touch of scorn; "for our grandmothers."

"No: for all time," said Delorme stoutly. "Ask milord." He looked toward the house, and Victoria saw Tatham emerging. But she had no intention whatever of asking him. She rose hastily, excused herself on the score of needing a few minutes' rest, and went to meet her son.

"I forgot to tell you, mother," he said, as they approached each other, "Faversham's coming this afternoon. I had a letter from him this morning. He seems to be trying to make the old man behave."

"I shall be glad to see him."

Struck by something lifeless and jaded in the voice she loved, Victoria shot a glance at her son, then slipped her hand into his arm, and walked back with him to his library.

He sat down silently to his books and papers. A couple of official reports lay open, and Victoria knew that he was going to an important county meeting that evening, where he was to be in the chair. Many older men, men who had won their spurs in politics or business, would be there, and it was entirely by their wish--their kindly wish--that Harry would take the lead. They desired to see him treading in the steps of his forefathers.

Perched on the end of his writing table, she watched her son a moment. It seemed to her she saw already what the young face would be like when it was old. A pang struck her.

"Harry--is there anything wrong?"

He looked up quite simply and stretched his hand to her.

"I asked her to marry me last night."

"Well?" The colour rushed into the mother's face.

"No go. She doesn't love me. She wants us to be friends."

Victoria gasped.

"But she's coming to sit to Delorme this afternoon!"

"Because I asked her."

"Harry, dear boy, for both your sakes--either all or nothing! If she doesn't care--break it off."

"There's nothing to break off, dearest. And don't ask me not to see her. I couldn't. Who knows? She's got her ideas. Of course I've got mine. Perhaps--after all--I may win. Or, if not--perhaps"--he shaded his face with his hand--"she'll show me--how not to mind. I know she wants to."

Silence a moment. Then the lad's hand dropped. He smiled at Victoria.

"Let's fall in! There's nothing else to do anyway. She's not like other girls. When she says a thing--she means it. But so long as I can see her--I'm happy!"

"You ought to forget her!" said Victoria angrily, kissing his hair. "These things should _end_--one way or the other."

He looked perplexed.

"She doesn't think so--and I'm thankful she doesn't, mother--don't say anything to her. Promise me. She said last night--she loved you. She wants to come here. Let's give her a jolly time. Perhaps--"

The patience in his blue eyes nearly made her cry. And there was also the jealousy that no fond mother escapes, the commonest of all jealousies. He was passing out of her hands, this creature of her own flesh. Till now she had moulded and shaped him. Henceforward the lightest influence rained by this girl's eyes would mean more to him than all the intensity of her own affection.

* * * * *

Victoria's mind for the rest of the sitting was in a state of abstraction, and she sat so still that Delorme was greatly pleased with her. At luncheon she was still absent-minded, and Lady Barbara whispered in Gerald Tatham's ear that Victoria was always a poor hostess, but this time her manners were really impossible.

"But you intend to stay a fortnight, don't you?" said Gerald, not without malice.

"If I can possibly stay it out." The reply was lofty, but the situation, as Gerald knew, was commonplace. Lady Barbara's house in town was let for another fortnight, and Duddon's Castle was more agreeable and more economical than either lodgings or a hotel.

Meanwhile a pair of eyes belonging to the young man whose dinner jacket and black tie had marked him out amid the other male guests of the night before were observing matters with a more subtle and friendly spirit behind them. Cyril Boden was a Fellow of All Souls, a journalist, an advanced Radical, a charmer, and a fanatic. He hated no man. That indeed was the truth. But he hated the theories and the doings of so many men, that the difference between him and the mere revolutionary was hard to seize. He had a smooth and ruddy face, in which the eyebrows seemed to be always rising interrogatively; longish hair; stooping shoulders, and an amiable, lazy, mocking look that belied a nature of singular passion, always occupied with the most tremendous problems of life, and afraid of no solution.

He had been overworking himself in the attempt to settle a dock strike, and had come to Duddon to rest. Victoria was much attached to him in a motherly way, and he to her. They sparred a good deal; she attacking "agitators" and "demagogues," he, fierce on "feudal tyranny," especially when masked in the beauties and amenities of such a place as Duddon. But they were friends all the same, exchanging the unpaid services of friends.

In the afternoon, before Lydia Penfold appeared, Boden found amusement in teasing Delorme--an old acquaintance. Delorme was accustomed to pose in all societies as Whistler's lawful and only successor. "Pattern" and "harmony" possessed him; "finish" was only made for fools, and the story-teller in art was the unclean thing. His ambition, like Whistler's, was to paint a full length in three days, and hear it hailed a masterpiece. And, like Whistler, he had no sooner painted it than he scraped it out; which most sitters found discouraging.

Boden, meanwhile, made amends for all that was revolutionary in his politics or economics, by reaction on two subjects--art and divorce. He had old-fashioned ideas on the family, and did not want to see divorce made easy. And he was quaintly Ruskinian in matters of art, believing that all art should appeal to ethical or poetic emotion.

"Boden admires a painter because he is a good man and pays his washing bills," drawled Delorme behind his cigarette, from the lazy depths of a garden chair. "His very colours are virtues, and his pictures must be masterpieces, because he subscribes to the Dogs' Home, and doesn't beat his wife."

"Excellently put," said Boden, his hat on the back of his head, his eyes beginning to shine. "Do men gather grapes off thistles?"

"Constantly. There is no relation whatever between art and morality." Delorme smoked pugnaciously. "The greater the artist, generally speaking, the worse the man."

"I say! Really as bad as that?"

Boden waved a languid hand toward the smoke-wreathed phantom of Delorme. The circle round the two laughed, languidly also, for it was almost too hot laugh. The circle consisted of Victoria, Gerald Tatham, Mrs. Manisty, and Colonel Barton, who had reappeared at luncheon, in order to urge Tatham to see Faversham as soon as possible on certain local affairs.

"Oh! I give you my head in a charger," said Delorme, not without heat. "For you, Burne-Jones is 'pure' and I am 'decadent'; because he paints anemic knights in sham armour and I paint what I see."

"The one absolutely fatal course! Don't you agree?"

Boden turned smiling to Mrs. Manisty, of whose lovely head and soft eyes he was conscious through all the chatter.

The eyes responded.

"What do we see?" she said, with her shy smile. "Surely we only see what we think--or dream!"

"True!" cried Delorme; "but a painter thinks _in paint_."

"There you go," said Boden, "with your esoteric stuff. All your great painters have thought and felt with the multitude--painted for the multitude."

"Never." The painter jerked away his cigar, and sat up. "The multitude is a brute beast!"

"A just beast," murmured Boden.

"Anything but!" said the painter. "But you know my views. In every generation, so far as art is concerned, there are about thirty men who matter--in all the world!"

"Artists?" The voice was Lucy Manisty's.

"Good heavens, no! Artists--and judges--together. The gate of art is a deal straiter than the gate of Heaven."

Boden caught Victoria's laugh.

"Let him alone," he said, indulgently. "His is the only aristocracy I can stand--with apologies to my hostess."

"Oh, we're done for," said Victoria, quietly.

Boden turned a humorous eye, first to the great house basking in the sunshine, then to his hostess.

"Not yet. But you're doomed. As the old Yorkshireman said to his son, when they were watching the triumphs of a lion-tamer in the travelling menagerie--that 'genelman's to be wooried _soom_ day.' When the real Armageddon comes, it'll not find you in possession. _You'll_ have gone down long before."

"Really? Then who will be in possession?" asked Gerald Tatham, a very perceptible sneer in his disagreeable voice. He disliked Boden as one of "the infernal Radicals" whom Victoria would inflict on the sacred precincts of Duddon, but he was generally afraid of him in conversation.

"Merely the rich"--the tone was still nonchalant--"the Haves against the Haven'ts. No nonsense left, by that time, about 'blood' and 'family.' Society will have dropped all those little trimmings and embroideries. We shall have come to the naked fundamental things."

"The struggle of rich and poor?" said Delorme. "Precisely. That's what all you fellows who go and preach revolution to dockers are after. And what on earth would the world do without wealth? Wealth is only materialized intelligence! What's wrong with it?"

"Only that we're dying of it."

The young man paused. He sat silently smoking, his eyes--unseeing--fixed upon the house. Lucy Manisty looked at him with sympathy.

"You mean," she said, "that no one who has the power to be rich has now ever the courage to be poor?"

He nodded, and turning to her he continued in a lower voice: "And think what's lost! Are we _all_ to be smothered in this paraphernalia of servants, and motor cars and gluttonous living? There's scarcely a man--for instance--among my friends who'll dare to marry! Hundreds used to be enough--now they must have thousands--or say their wives must. And they'll sell their souls to get the thousands. Who's the better--who's the happier for it in the end? We have left ourselves nothing to love with--nothing to be happy with. What does natural beauty--or human feeling--matter to the men who spend their days speculating in the City? I know 'em. I have watched some of them for years. It's a thirst that destroys a man. To want to be rich is bad enough--to want to be rich _quick_ is death and damnation ..."

There was silence again, till suddenly Boden addressed Colonel Barton, who was sitting opposite half asleep in the sun.

"I say, what's the name of a village, about two miles from here, I walked through while you were all at church this morning?--the most God-forsaken place I ever saw!--a horrible, insanitary hole!"

"Mainstairs!" said Barton, promptly, waking up. "That's the only village hereabout that fits the description. But Melrose owns two or three of them."

"The man that owns that village ought to be hung," said Boden with quiet ferocity. "In any decent state of society he would be hung."

Barton shrugged his shoulders.

"I'm on the sanitary authority. We've summoned him till we're tired, to put those cottages in repair. No use. Now, we've told him that we shall repair them ourselves and send in the bill to him. That's stirred him, and he's immediately given everybody notice to quit--says he'll close the whole village. But the people won't go. There are no other cottages for miles--they've taken to stoning our inspectors."

"And you think our land system's going to last on these terms?" said Boden, his eyes flaming.

The little Tory opposite drew himself up.

"It's not the system--it's the man."

"The system's judged--that permits the man."

"Melrose is unique," said Barton, hotly; "we are a model county, but for the Melrose estate."

"But the exception is damning! It compromises you all. That such a place as Mainstairs should be _possible_--that's the point!"

"For you Socialists, I daresay!" cried Barton. "The rest of us know better than to expect a perfect world!"

Boden laughed, the passion dying from his face.

"Ah, well, we shall have to make you march--you fellows in possession. No hope--unless we are 'behind you with a bradawl!'"

"On the contrary! We marched before you Socialists were thought of. Who have put the bulk of the cottages of England in repair during the last half century, I should like to know--and built most of the new ones? The landlords of England! Who stands in the way of reform at the present moment? The small owner. And who are the small owners? Mainly Radical tradesmen."

Boden looked at him--then queerly smiled. "I daresay. I trust no man--further than I can see him. But if what you say is true, why don't you Conservatives--in your own interest--coerce men like Melrose? He's giving you away, every month he exists."

"Well, Tatham's at it," said Barton quietly; "we're all at it. And there's a new agent just appointed. Something to be hoped from him."

"Who is it?"

"You didn't hear us discussing him last night? A man called Claude Faversham."

"Claude Faversham? A tall, dark fellow--writes a little--does a little law--but mostly unemployed? Oh, I know him perfectly. Faversham? You don't mean it!" Boden threw himself back in his chair with a sarcastic lip, and relit his pipe. As he watched the spirals of smoke he recalled the few incidents of his acquaintance with the young man. They had both been among the original members of a small club in London, frequented by men of letters and junior barristers. Faversham had long since dropped out of the club, and was now the companion, so Boden understood, of much richer men, and a great frequenter of the Stock Exchange, where money is mysteriously made without working for it. That fact alone was enough for Cyril Boden. He felt an instinctive, almost a fanatical, antipathy toward the new agent. On the one side the worshippers of the Unbought and the Unpriced; on the other Mammon and all his troop. It was so that Boden habitually envisaged his generation. It was so, and by no other test, that he divided the sheep from the goats.

Meanwhile, Lydia Penfold, driving a diminutive pony, was slowly approaching the castle through the avenue of splendid oaks which led up to it. Faversham was walking beside her. He had overtaken her at the beginning of the avenue, and had sent on his motor that he might have the pleasure of her society.

The daintiness of her white dress, with all its pretty details, the touch of blue in her hat, and at her waist, delighted his eyes. It pleased him that there was not a trace in her of Bohemian carelessness in these respects. Everything was simple, but everything was considered. She knew her own beauty; that was clear. It gave her self-possession; but, so far as he could see, without a trace of conceit. He had never met a young girl with whom he could talk so easily.

She had greeted him with her most friendly smile. But it seemed to him nevertheless that she was a little pensive and overcast.

"You dined here last night?" he asked her. "Did the lion roar properly?"

"Magnificently. You weren't there?"

"No. Undershaw put down his foot. I shan't submit much longer!"

"You're really getting strong?"

Her kind eyes considered him. He had often marveled that one so young should be mistress of such a look--so softly frank and unafraid.

"A Hercules! Besides, the work's so interesting, one's no time to think of one's game leg!"

"You're getting to know the estate?"

"I've been motoring about it for a fortnight, that's something for a beginning. And I've got plenty of things to tell you."

He plunged into them. It was evident that he was resuming topics familiar to them both. Their talk indeed showed them already intimate, sharers in a common enterprise, where she was often inspiration, and he executive and practical force. Ever since, indeed, she had said to him with that kindled, eager look--"Accept! Accept!"--he had been sharply aware of how best to approach, to attract her. She was, it seemed, no mere passive girl. She was in her measure a thinker--a character. He perceived in her--deep down--enthusiasms and compassions, that seemed often as though they shook her beyond her strength. They made him uncomfortable; they were strange to his own mind; and yet they moved and influenced him. During the short time, for instance, that she had lived in their midst, she had made friends everywhere--so he discovered--among these Cumbria folk. She never harangued about them; a few words, a few looks, burning from an inward fire--these expressed her: as when, twice, he had met her at dusk, with the aspect of a wounded spirit, coming out of hovels that he himself must now be ashamed of, since they were Melrose's hovels.

"I've just come from Mainstairs," he said to her abruptly, as the house in front drew nearer.

The colour rushed into Lydia's cheeks.

"Are you going to put that right?"

"I'm going to try. I've been talking to your old friend Dobbs. I saw his poor daughter, and I went into most of the cottages."

Somewhat to his dismay he saw the delicate face beside him quiver, and the eyes cloud. But the emotion was driven back.

"You're too late--for Bessie!" she said--how sadly! The accent touched him.

"The girl is really dying? Was it diphtheria?"

"She has been dying for months--and in such _pain_."

"It is paralysis?"

"After diphtheria. Did they show you the graves in the churchyard?--they call it the Innocents' Corner. Thirty children died in that village last year and the year before."

There was silence a little.

"I wonder what I can do," said Faversham, at last, reflectively. "I have been working out a number of new proposals--and I submit them to Mr. Melrose to-night."

She looked wistfully at the speaker.

"Good luck! But Mr. Melrose is hard to move."

Faversham assented.

"The hope lies in his being now an old man--and anxious to get rid of responsibilities. I shall try to show him that bad citizenship costs more money than good."

"I hope--oh! I _hope_--you'll succeed!" she said fervently. Her emotion infected him. He smiled down upon her.

"That ought to make me succeed! But of course I have no experience. I am a townsman."

"You've always been a Londoner?"

"Practically, always. But I was tired of London before all this happened--dying to get out of it."

And he began a short account of himself, more intimate than any he had yet given her; to which Lydia listened with her open, friendly look, perhaps a little shyer than before. And so different, instinctively, is the way in which a man will tell his story to a woman, from that in which he tells it to a man, that the same half-ironic, half-bitter narrative which had repelled Tatham, attracted Lydia. Her sympathy rose at once to meet it. He was an orphan, and till now lonely and unsuccessful; tormented, too, by unsatisfied ideals and ambitions. Her imagination was pitiful and quick; she imagined she understood. She liked his frankness; it flattered and touched her. She liked his deep rich voice, and his dark face, with its lean strength, and almost southern colour. During his illness he had grown a small peaked beard, and it pleased her artistic sense, by giving him a look of Cardinal Richelieu--as that great man stood figured in an old French print she had picked up once in a box on the Paris quays. Moreover his friendship offered her so much fresh knowledge of the world and life. Here, again, was comradeship. She was lucky indeed. Harry Tatham--and now this clever, interesting man, entering on his task. It was a great responsibility. She would not fail either of her new friends! They knew--she had made--she would make it quite plain, that she was not setting her cap at either. Wider insights, fresh powers, honourable, legitimate powers, for her sex--it was these she was after.

In all all this Lydia was perfectly sincere. But the Comic Spirit sitting aloft took note.

They paused a moment on the edge of the plateau on which the house stood--the ground breaking from it to the west. A group of cottages appeared amid the woods far away.

"If all estates were like this estate!" cried Lydia, pointing to them, "and all cottages like their cottages!"

Faversham flushed and stiffened.

"Oh! the Tathams are always perfection!"

Lydia's eyebrows lifted.

"It is a crime?"

"No--but one hears too much of it."

"Not from them!" The tone was indignant.

"I daresay."

Suddenly, he threw her a look which startled her. She descended from her pony-cart at the steps of the castle, her breath fluttering a little. What had happened?

"Her ladyship is in the garden," said the footman who received them. And he led the way through a door in the wall of the side court. They followed--in a constrained silence. Lydia felt puzzled, and rather angry.

Faversham recovered himself.

"I apologize! They have all the virtues."

His voice was lowered--for her ear; there was deference in his smile. But somehow Lydia was conscious of a note of stormy self-assertion in him, which was new to her; something strong and stubborn, which refused to take her lead as usual.

Lady Tatham advanced. The eyes of a group of people sitting in a circle under the shade of a spreading yew tree turned toward them.

Boden, who had given Faversham a perfunctory greeting, fell back into his chair again, and watched the new agent's reception with coolly smiling eyes.

Tatham came hurrying up to greet them. No one but Lydia could have distinguished any change in the boyish voice and look. But it was there. She felt it.

He turned from her to Faversham.

"Awfully glad to see you. Hope you're quite fit again."

"Very nearly all right, thank you."

"Are you actually at work? Great excitement everywhere about you!"

Tatham stood, with his straw hat tilted toward the back of his head, and his hands on his sides, observing his guest.

Faversham shrugged his shoulders.

"I feel horribly nervous!"

"Well you may!" laughed Tatham. "Never mind. We'll all back you up, if you'll let us."

"As far as I am concerned--the smallest contributions thankfully received. Who are these people here?"

Tatham introduced him.

Then to Lydia:

"Delorme is waiting for you." He carried her off.

By this time Mr. Andover, the old grizzled squire who had been Lydia's partner at dinner the night before, had dropped in, and various other residents from the neighbourhood. They gathered eagerly round Faversham, in the deep shade of the yews.

And before long, the new man had produced an excellent first impression upon these country gentlemen who were now to be his neighbours. It was evident that he was anxious to remove grievances. His tone as to his employer was guarded, but not at all servile; and he made the impression of a man of ability accustomed to business, though modestly avowing his ignorance of rural affairs; independent, yet anxious to do his best with a great trust.

After half an hour's discussion, Barton drew Victoria aside, and said to her excitedly that the new agent was "a capital fellow!"

"He'll do the job, you'll see! Melrose is breaking up--thank God! Every one who's seen him lately says he's not half the man he was. He'll have to give this fellow a free hand. That estate has been a plague-spot! But we'll get it cleared up now."

Victoria wondered. Secretly, she doubted the power of any man to manage Melrose even _moriturus_.

Meanwhile it had not escaped her that the new agent and Lydia Penfold had arrived together. It had struck her also that their manner toward each other, as she went to meet them, had been the manner of persons just emerged from a somewhat intimate conversation. And she already perceived the nascent jealousy in Harry.

Well, no doubt the agent also was to be practised on by these newfangled arts. For no girl could have had the audacity to make the compact Lydia Penfold had made with Harry, if she were already in love with another man! No. Faversham, it was plain, would be the next added to her train. Victoria beheld the golden-haired creature as the modern Circe, surrounded by troops of ex-suitors--lovers transmogrified to Friends--docile at the heel of the sorceress. You took your chance, received your "No," and subsided cheerfully into the pen. Victoria vowed to herself that her Harry should do nothing of the kind!

She looked round her for the presumptuous maiden. There she was, under a fountain wall in the Italian garden, her white dress gleaming from the warm shadow in which the stone was steeped; Delorme, with an easel, in front. He was making a rapid charcoal sketch of her, and she was sitting daintily erect, talking and smiling at intervals. A little way off, a group of people, critical observers of the proceeding, lounged on the grass or in garden chairs; among them, Tatham. And as he sat watching the sitting, his hat drawn forward over his brow and eyes, although he chatted occasionally with Mrs. Manisty beside him, his mother was miserably certain that he was in truth alive to nothing but the white vision under the wall--the delicate three-quarter face, with its pointed chin, and the wisps of gold hair blowing about the temples.

And the owner of the face! Was she quite unmoved by a situation which might, Victoria felt, have strained the nerves even of the experienced?

A slight incident seemed to show that she was not unmoved. Lydia had shown a keen, girlish pleasure in the prospect of sitting to Delorme, the god, professionally, of her idolatry. Yet the sketch, for that afternoon, came to nothing. For after an hour's sitting Delorme, as usual, became restless and excited, exclaimed at the difficulty of the subject, cursed the light, and finally, in a fit of disgust, wiped out everything he had done. Lydia rose from her seat, looking rather white, and threw a strange, appealing glance--the mother caught it--at her young host. Tatham sprang up, released her instantly and peremptorily, though Delorme implored for another half-hour. Lydia, unheard by the artist, gave soft thanks to her deliverer, and, presently, there they were--she and Harry--strolling up and down the rose-alleys together, as though nothing, absolutely nothing, had happened.

And yet Harry had only asked her to marry him the night before, and she had only refused! Impossible to suppose that it was the mere plotting of the finished coquette. This lover required neither teasing nor kindling.

However, there it was. This little struggling artist had refused Harry; and she had refused Duddon.

For one could not be so absurd as to ignore _that_. Victoria, sitting in the shade beside Lady Barbara, who had gone to sleep, looked dreamily round on the rose-red pile of building, on the great engirdling woods, the hills, the silver reaches of river--interwoven now with the dark tree-masses, now with glades of sunlit pasture. Duddon was one of the great possessions of England. And this slip of a girl, with her home-made blouses, and her joy in making twenty pounds out of her drawings, wherewith to pay the rent, had put it aside, apparently without a moment's hesitation. Magnanimity--or stupidity?

The next moment Victoria was despising her own amazement. "One takes one's own lofty feelings for granted--but never other people's! She says she doesn't love him--and that's the reason. And I straightway don't believe her. What snobs we all are! One's astonishment betrays one's standard. Gerald says, 'What have the poor to do with fine feelings?' and I detest him for it. But I'm no better."

Suddenly, on the other side of the yew hedge behind her--voices. Harry and Lydia Penfold, in eager and laughing discussion. And all at once a name reached her ears:

"Lydia"--pronounced rather shyly, in Tatham's voice.

"_Lydia!"_ No doubt by the bidding of the young lady.

"I did not know I was so old-fashioned," thought Lady Tatham indignantly.

Yet the tone in which the name was given was neither caressing nor tender. It simply meant, of course, that the young woman was breaking him in to her ideas; her absurd ideas, from which Harry must be protected.

They emerged from the shrubbery and came toward her. Lydia timidly approached Victoria. With Tatham she had not apparently been timid. But for his mother she was all deference.

"Isn't there a flower-show here to-morrow? May Susan and I come and help?"

The speaker raised her eyes to Lady Tatham, and Victoria read in them something beautiful and appealing, that at once moved and angered her. The girl seemed to offer her heart to Tatham's mother.

"_I can't marry your son!--but let me love you--be your friend!--the friend of both_."

Was that what it meant?

What could Victoria do? There was Harry hovering in the background, with that eager, pale look. She was helpless. Mechanically she said, "We shall be delighted--grateful. I will send for you."

Thenceforward, however, Lydia allowed Tatham no more private speech with her. She made herself agreeable to all Victoria's guests in turn. Delorme fell head over ears in love with her, so judicious, yet so evidently sincere were the flatteries she turned upon him, and so docile her consent to another sitting. Sweet, grave Lucy Manisty watched her with fascination. The Manisty boy dragged her to the Long Pond, to show her the water-beasts there, as the best way of marking his approval. Colonel Barton forgot politics to chat with her; and the mocking speculation in Cyril Boden's eyes gradually softened, as the girl's charm and beauty penetrated, little by little, through all the company.

Faversham alone seemed to have no innings with her till he was about to take his departure. Then Victoria noticed that Lydia made a quick movement toward him, and they stood together a few minutes, talking--certainly not as strangers.

Gerald Tatham also noticed it. There were few things, within his powers, that he left unnoticed.

"Now _that_ would be suitable!" he said in Lady Barbara's ear, nodding toward the pair. "You saw how they came in together. But of course it's a blind. Any one with half an eye can see that she's just fishing for Harry!"

XII

Faversham sped home through the winding Cumbrian lanes, driven by the new chauffeur just imported from Manchester. The hedges were thick with meadow-sweet and its scent, mingled with that of new-mown hay, hung in the hot, still air. In front of him the Ullswater mountains showed dimly blue. It was a country he was beginning to love. His heart rose to it.

Small wonder in that! For here, in this northern landscape, so strange to him but three months ago, he had first stumbled on Success--and he had first met Lydia.

Was there any chance for him? Through all his talks with the country neighbours, or with Lady Tatham, he had been keenly on the watch for anything that might show him what Lydia's position in the Duddon Castle circle actually was. That Tatham was in love with her was clear. Mrs. Penfold's chatter as to the daily homage paid by the castle to the cottage, through every channel--courtesies or gifts--that the Tathams' delicacy could invent, or the Penfolds' delicacy accept, had convinced him on that point. And Faversham had seen for himself at Duddon that Tatham hung upon her every movement and always knew where she was and to whom she was talking; nor had the long conversation in the rose-walk escaped him.

Well, of course, in the case of any other girl in the world than Lydia, such things would be conclusive. Who was likely to refuse Tatham, plus the Tatham estates? But unless he had mistaken her altogether--her detachment, her unworldliness, her high spirit--Lydia Penfold was not the girl to marry an estate. And if Tatham himself had touched her heart--"would she have allowed me the play with her that she has done this last fortnight?" She would have been absorbed, preoccupied; and she had been neither. He thought of her kind eyes, her frank, welcoming ways, her intense interest in his fortunes. Impossible--if she were in love with or on the point of an engagement to Harry Tatham.

She had forgiven him for his touch of jealous ill-temper! As they stood together at the last in the Duddon garden, she had said, "I _must_ hear about to-night! send me a word!" And he carried still, stamped upon his mind, the vision of her--half shy, half eager--looking up.

For the rest, the passion that was rapidly rising in the veins of a man full of life and will, surprised the man himself, excited in him a new complacency and self-respect. For years he had said to himself that he could only marry money. He remembered with a blush one or two rather sordid steps in that direction--happily futile. But Lydia was penniless; and he could make her rich. For his career was only beginning; and on wealth, the wealth which is power, he was more than ever determined.

A turn in the road brought Threlfall into view. The new agent sat with folded arms, gazing at the distant outline, and steadily pulling himself together to meet the ordeal of the evening. It was by Melrose's own wish he had drawn up a careful scheme of the alterations and improvements which seemed to him imperatively necessary in the financial interests of the estate; and he had added to it a statement--very cautious and diplomatic--of the various public and private quarrels in which Melrose was now concerned, with suggestions as to what could be done to straighten them out. With regard to two or three of them litigation was already going on; had, indeed, been going on interminably. Faversham was certain that with a little good-will and a very moderate amount of money he could settle the majority of them in a week.

So far Melrose had been fairly amenable--had given a curt assent, for instance, to the conditions on which Faversham had proposed to relet two of the vacant farms, and to one or two other changes. But Faversham realized that he possessed no true knowledge of the old man's mind and temperament. Exultant though he often felt in his new office, and the preposterously large salary attached to it, he reminded himself constantly that he trod on unsure ground. Once or twice he had been conscious of a strange sense as of some couchant beast beside him ready to spring; also of some curious weakening and disintegration in Melrose, even since he had first known him. He seemed to be more incalculable, less to be depended on. His memory was often faulty, and his irritability hardly sane.

Faversham indeed was certain, from his own observation, that the mere excitement of opening and exploring the huge collections he had accumulated, during these twenty years, in the locked rooms of the house, had imposed a sharp nervous strain on a man now past seventy, who for all the latter part of his life had taken no exercise and smoked incessantly.

Supposing he were suddenly to fall ill and die--what would happen to the house and its collections, or to the immense fortune, the proportions of which the new agent was now slowly beginning to appreciate? All sorts of questions with regard to the vanished wife and child were now rising insistently in Faversham's mind. Were they really dead, and if so, how and where? Once or twice, since his acceptance of the agency, Melrose had repeated to him with emphasis: "I am alone in the world." Dixon and his wife preserved an absolute silence on the subject, and loyalty to his employer forbade Faversham to question them or any other of Melrose's dependents. It struck him, indeed, that Mrs. Dixon had shown a curious agitation when, that morning, Faversham had conveyed to her Melrose's instructions to prepare a certain room on the first floor as the agent's future bedroom.

"Aye, sir, aye--but it wor Mrs. Melrose's room," she had said, looking down, her lip twitching a little, her old hands fumbling with the strings of her apron.

Faversham had asked uncomfortably whether there were not some other room in a less conspicuous part of the house to which he might be transferred, the once dismantled drawing-room being now wanted to house the fine things that were constantly coming to light. Mrs. Dixon shook her head. All the available rooms were still full of what she called "stoof." And then she had abruptly left him.

The light was fast failing as he approached the house. By the shearing away of trees and creeper, at least from all its central and eastern parts, Threlfall had now lost much of its savage picturesqueness; the formal garden within the forecourt had been to some extent restored; and the front door had received a coat or two of paint. But the whole of the west wing was still practically untouched. There they still were--the shuttered and overgrown windows. Faversham looked at them expectantly. The exploration of the house roused in him now the same kind of excitement that drives on the excavators of Delphi or Ephesus, or the divers for Spanish treasure. He and Melrose had already dug out so many precious things--things many of them which had long sunk below the surface of the old man's memory--that heaven only knew what might turn up. The passion of adventure ran high; he longed to be at the business again and was sorry to think it must some day have an end.

That broken window, for instance, now widely open in the west wing, was the window of the room they had forced on the previous day. In general, Melrose possessed some rough record of the contents of the locked rooms, and their labelled keys; but in this case both record and label had been lost. A small amount of violence, however, had sufficed to open the half-rotten door. Inside--thick darkness, save for one faint gleam through a dilapidated shutter. As Faversham advanced, groping into the room, there was a sudden scurry of mice, and a sudden flapping of something in a corner, which turned out to be a couple of bats. When he made for the window, dense cobwebs brushed against his face, and half the shutter on which he laid his hand came away at his touch and lay in fragments at his feet. The rain had come in for twenty years through a broken pane, and had completely rotted the wood. Strange noises in the chimney showed that owls had built there; and as the shutter fell a hideous nest of earwigs was disturbed, and ran hither and thither over the floor.

And when Faversham turned to look at the contents of the room, he saw Melrose in his skullcap, poking about among a medley of black objects on the floor and in a open cupboard, his withered cheeks ghastly in the sudden daylight.

"What are they?" asked Faversham, wondering.

"Silver," was the sharp reply. "Some of the finest things known."

And from the filthy cupboard Melrose's shaking hand had drawn out a ewer and basin, whence some ragged coverings fell away. It was almost entirely black; but the exquisite work of it--the spiral fluting of the ewer, its shell-like cover, the winged dragon on the handle, and, round the oval basin, the rim of chasing dolphins, could still be seen.

"That came from the Wolfgang sale--I gave six hundred for it. It's worth six thousand now--you can't find such a piece anywhere. Ah! by George!"--with a stifled shout--"and that's the Demidoff tazza!"--as Faversham lifted up a thing lying in a half-open box that might have been ebony--a shallow cup on a stem, with a young vine-crowned Bacchus for a handle. Melrose took it eagerly, put up his eyeglass, and, rubbing away with his handkerchief, searched for the mark. "There it is!--a Caduceus and 1620. And the signature--see!--'A.D. Viana.' There was a cup signed by Viana sold last week at Christie's--fetched a fabulous sum! Every single thing in this room is worth treble and quadruple what I gave for it. Talk of investments! There are no such investments as works of art. Buy 'em, I say--lock 'em up--and forget 'em for twenty years!"

With much labour, they had at last ranged the most important pieces on some trestle tables and in the cupboards of the room. A number of smaller boxes and packages still remained to be looked through. Faversham, by Melrose's directions, had written to a London firm of dealers in antique silver, directing them to send down two of their best men to clean, mend, and catalogue. Proper glazed cupboards, baize-lined, were to be put up along each side of the room; the room itself was to be repaired, whitened, and painted. Faversham already foresaw the gleaming splendour of the show, when all should be done, and these marvels of a most lovely art--these silver nymphs and fauns, these dainty sea-horses and dolphins, these temples and shrines, now holding a Hercules, now a St. Sebastian, these arabesques, garlands, festoons, running in a riot of beauty over the surface of cup and salver--had been restored to daylight and men's sight, after the burial of a generation.

But the value of what the house contained! In these days of huge prices and hungry buyers, it must be simply enormous.

Faversham often found himself speculating eagerly upon it, and always with the query in the background "For _whom_ is it all piling up?"

As they left the silver room, Melrose had made the grim remark that the contents of that room alone would make it prudent to let loose an extra couple of bloodhounds in the park at night. Dixon's frowning countenance as he followed in their wake showed an answering anxiety. For he had now been made guardian of the collections; and a raw nephew of his, chosen apparently for his honesty and his speechlessness, had been put on as manservant, Mrs. Dixon had two housemaids under her, and a girl in the kitchen. It was sometimes evident to Faversham that the agitation of these changes which had come so suddenly upon them, had aged the two old servants, just as it had tried their master.

Faversham on dismounting was told by Joseph, the new man, that Mr. Melrose would dine alone, but would be glad to see Mr. Faversham in the library after dinner.

Faversham made a quick and sparing meal in his own room, and then adjourning to his newly furnished office ran eagerly through the various papers and proposals which he had to lay before his employer.

As he did so, he was more conscious than ever before of the enormity of Melrose's whole career as a landowner. The fact was that the estate had been for years a mere field for the display of its owner's worst qualities--caprice, miserliness, jealous or vindictive love of power. The finance of it mattered nothing to him. Had he been a poorer man his landed property might have had a chance; he would have been forced to run it more or less on business lines. But his immense income came to him apparently from quite other sources--mines, railways, foreign investments; and with all the human relations involved in landowning he was totally unfit to deal.

Hence these endless quarrels with his tenants to whom he never allowed a lease; these constant evictions; these litigations as to improvements, compensation, and heaven knows what. The land was naturally of excellent quality, and many a tenant came in with high hopes, only to find that the promises on the strength of which he had taken his farm were never fulfilled, and that if it came to lawyers, Melrose generally managed "to best it." Hence, too, the rotten, insanitary cottages--maintained, Faversham could almost swear, for the mere sake of defying the local authorities and teaching "those Socialist fools" a lesson. Hence the constant charges of persecution for political reasons; and hence, too, this bad case of the Brands, which had roused such a strong and angry sympathy in the neighbourhood that Faversham felt the success of his own regime must be endangered unless some means could be found, compatible with Melrose's arrogance, of helping the ruined family.

Well, there in those clear typewritten sheets, lay his suggestions for dealing with these various injustices and infamies. They were moderate. Expensive for the moment, they would be economical in the long run. He had given them his best brains and his hardest work. And he had taken the best advice. But they meant, no doubt, a complete change in the administration and _personnel_ of the estate.

Faversham stepped into the garden, and, hanging over the low wall which edged the sandstone cliff, he looked out over the gorge of the river, across the woods, into the ravines and gullies of the fells. Mountain and wood stood dark against a saffron sky. In the dim blue above it Venus sailed. A light wind stirred the trees and the stream. Along the river meadows he could hear the cows munching and see their dusky forms moving through a thin mist. The air was amethyst and gold, and the beautiful earth shone through it, ennobled by the large indistinctness, the quiet massing of the evening tones.

His heart withdrew itself into some inner shrine where it might be with Lydia. She represented to him some force, some help, to which he turned.

Please God, he would win her!--and through a piece of honourable work--the cleansing of an ugly corner of human life. A nobler ambition than he had ever yet been conscious of, entered in. He felt himself a better man, with a purpose in the world.

Nor, at this critical moment, did he forget his uncle--the man who had been a father to him in his orphaned boyhood. What pleasure the dear old fellow would have taken in this new opening--and in Melrose's marvellous possessions! By the way--Melrose had said nothing about the gems for a long time past, and Faversham was well content to leave them in his temporary keeping. But his superstitious feeling about them--and all men have some touch of superstition--was stronger than ever. It was as though he protested anew to some hovering shape, which took the aspect now of Mackworth, now of Fortuna--"Stand by me!--even as I hold by them."

The chiming clock in the gallery--a marvel of French _horlogerie_, made for the Regent Orleans--had just finished striking eleven. Melrose, who had been speaking with energy through the soft, repeated notes, threw himself back in his chair, and lit a cigarette. His white hair shone against the panelled background of the room, and, beneath it, framed in bushy brows still black, a pair of menacing eyes fixed themselves on Faversham.

Faversham remained for a minute at the table, looking down upon it, his hand resting on the document from which he had been reading. Then he too pushed his chair slowly backward, and looked up.

"I understand then, Mr. Melrose, that these proposals of mine do not meet with your approval?"

"I have told you what I approve."

"You have approved a few matters--of minor importance. But my chief proposals"--he ran his finger lightly over the pages of his memorandum, enumerating the various headings--"these, if I have understood you correctly, are not to your mind, and you refuse to sanction them?"

The face before him was as iron.

"Let half these things wait, I tell you, and they will settle themselves. I pointed out to you when we made our bargain, that I would not have my estate run on any damned Socialist principles."

Faversham smiled; but he had grown very pale. "Your financial profit, Mr. Melrose, and the business management of your property have been my sole concern."

"I am sure that you think so. But as to what is profit and what is business, you must allow me to be the final judge."

Faversham thought a moment, then rose, and walked quietly up and down the length of the room, his hands in his pockets. The old man watched him, his haughty look and regular features illuminated by the lamp beside him. In front of him was the famous French table, crowded as usual with a multitude of miscellaneous _objets d'art_, conspicuous among them a pair of Tanagra figures, white visions of pure grace, amid the dusty confusion of their surroundings.

Suddenly Melrose flung his cigarette vehemently away.

"Faversham! Don't be a fool! I have something to say to you a deal more important than this damned nonsense!" He struck his hand on the open memorandum.

Faversham turned in astonishment.

"Sit down again!" said Melrose peremptorily, "and listen to me. I desire to put things as plainly and simply as possible. But I must have all your attention."

Faversham sat down. Melrose was now standing, his hands on the back of the chair from which he had risen.

"I have just made my will," he said abruptly. "Tomorrow I hope to sign it. It depends on you whether I sign it or not."

As the speaker paused, Faversham, leaning back and fronting him, grew visibly rigid. An intense and startled expectancy dawned in his face; his lips parted.

"My will," Melrose continued, in a deliberately even voice, "concerns a fortune of rather more--than a million sterling--allowing little or nothing for the contents of this house. I inherited a great deal, and by the methods I have adopted--not the methods, my dear Faversham, I may say, that you have been recommending to me to-night. I have more than doubled it. I have given nothing away to worthless people, and no sloppy philanthropies have stood between me and the advantages to which my knowledge and my brains entitled me. Hence these accumulations. Now, the question is, what is to be done with them? I am alone in the world. I have no interest whatever in building universities, or providing free libraries, or subsidizing hospitals. I didn't make the world, and I have never seen why I should spend my energies in trying to mend what the Demiurge has made a mess of. In my view the object of everybody should be to _live_, as acutely as possible--to get as many sensations, as many pleasant reactions as possible--out of the day. Some people get their sensations--or say they do--out of fussing about the poor. Forty years ago I got them out of politics--or racing--or high play. For years past, as you know, I have got them out of collecting works of art--and fighting the other people in the world who want the same things that I do. Perfectly legitimate in my belief! I make no apology whatever for my existence. Well, now then, I begin to be old--don't interrupt me--I don't like it, but I recognize the fact. I have various ailments. Doctors are mostly fools; but I admit that in my case they may be right; though I intend to live a good while yet in spite of them. Still--there it is--who is to have this money--and these collections? Sooner than let any rascally Chancellor of the Exchequer get at them, I would leave them to Dixon. But I confess I think Dixon would be embarrassed to know what to do with them. I don't think I possess a single relation that I don't dislike. So now we come to the point. With your leave--and by your leave--I propose to leave the money and the collections--to you!" The young man--flushed and staring--half rose in his chair.

"To _me_? What can you possibly mean, sir?"

"Precisely what I say. On conditions, of course. It depends on yourself. But you were brought into this house by a strange chance--you happen to suit me--to interest me. 'Provvy' as Bentham would say, seems to point to you. Here--in this drawer"--he brought his hand down strongly on the writing table--"is a will which I wrote last night. It leaves the whole of my property to you, subject to certain directions as to the works of art--to a provision for old Dixon, and so on. You can't witness it, of course, nor can Dixon; otherwise it might be signed to-night. But if we come to an understanding to-night, I can sign it to-morrow morning and get a couple of men from the farm to witness it. I think I can promise to live so long!"

There was silence. With an uncertain, swaying movement Melrose returned to his chair. The physical weakness betrayed by the action was strangely belied, however, by his imperious aspect, as of an embodied Will. His eyes never left Faversham, even while he rested heavily on the table before him for support.

Suddenly, Faversham, who had been sitting pale and motionless, looked up.

"Mr. Melrose--have you no natural heirs?"

Melrose could not altogether disguise the shock of the question. He threw himself back, however, with a smile.

"You have been listening I see to the stories that people tell."

Faversham bent forward and spoke earnestly: "I understand that your wife and child left you twenty years ago. Are they still living?"

Melrose shrugged his shoulders. "Whether they are or not, really matters nothing at all either to you or me: Mrs. Melrose left this house of her own free will. That ended the connection between us. In any case, you need have no alarm. There is no entail--even were there a son, and there never was a son. I do what I will with my own. There is no claim on me--there would be no claim on you."

"There must be--there would be--a moral claim!"

The colour rushed into Melrose's face. He drummed the table impatiently.

"We will not, if you please, argue the matter, which is for me a _chose jugée_. And no one who wishes to remain a friend of mine"--he spoke with emphasis--"will ever attempt to raise ghosts that are better left in their graves. I repeat--my property is unencumbered--my power to deal with it absolute. I propose to make you my heir--on conditions. The first is"--he looked sombrely and straight at his companion--"that I should not be harassed or distressed by any such references as those you have just made."

Faversham made no sound. His chin was propped on his hand, and his eyes pursued the intricacies of a silver cup studded with precious stones which stood on the table beside him. He thought, "The next condition will be--the gems."

"The second," Melrose resumed, after a somewhat long pause, and with a sarcastic intonation, "is that you should resist the very natural temptation of exhibiting me to the world as a penitent and reformed character. In that document you have just read you suggest to me--first, that I should retire from three lawsuits in which, whatever other people may think, I conceive that I have a perfectly good case; second"--he ticked the items off on the long tapering finger of his left hand--"that I should rebuild a score or two of cottages it would not pay me to rebuild--in which I force no one to live--and which I shall pull down when it pleases me, just to teach a parcel of busybodies to mind their own business; third--that I should surrender, hands down, to a lot of trumpery complaints and grievances got up partly to spite a landlord, partly to get money out of him; and fourthly--with regard to the right of way--that I should let that young prig Tatham, a lad just out of the nursery, dictate to me, bring the whole country about my ears, and browbeat me out of my rights. Now--I warn you--I shall do none of these things!"

The speaker paused a moment, and then turned impetuously on his companion.

"Have you any reason so far to complain of my conduct toward you?"

"Complain? You have been only too amazingly, incredibly generous."

Melrose's hand made a disdainful movement.

"I did what suited me. And I told you, to begin with, it would _not_ suit me to run my estate as though it were a University Settlement. Handle me gently--that's all. You've had your way about some of the farms--you'll get it no doubt with regard to others. But don't go about playing the reformer--on this dramatic scale!--at my expense. I don't believe in this modern wish-wash; and I don't intend to don the white sheet."

He rose, and lighting another cigarette, he dropped a log on the fire, and stood with his back to it, quietly smoking. But his eyes were all fierce life under the dome of his forehead, and his hand shook a little.

Faversham sat absolutely still. Rushing through his veins was the sense of something incredible and intoxicating. The word "million" rang in his ears. He was conscious of the years behind him--their poverty, their thwarted ambitions, their impotent discontent. And suddenly the years before him lit up; all was possible; all was changed. Yet as he sat there his pulses hurrying, words coming to his lips which dropped away again, he became conscious of two or three extremely sharp visualizations.

A room in one of the Mainstairs cottages, containing a bed, and on it a paralyzed girl, paralyzed after diphtheria--the useless hands--the vacant, miserable look--other beds in the same room filling it up--the roof so low that it seemed to be crushing down on the girl--holes in the thatch rudely mended.

Again--a corner in the Mainstairs churchyard, filled with small, crowded graves, barely grass-grown; the "Innocents' Corner."

And again, a wretched one-roomed cottage in the same row of hovels, kitchen, bedroom, and living-room in one, mud-floored, the outer door opening into it, the bed at the back, and an old husband and wife, crippled with rheumatism, sitting opposite each other on a day of pouring rain, shivering in the damp and the draughts.

Then, driving these out--the face of Colonel Barton with its blunt, stupid kindliness, and that whole group at Duddon, welcoming the new man, believing in him, ready to help him, with the instinctive trust of honest folk.

And last, but flashing through all the rest, Lydia's eyes--the light in them--and the tones of her voice--"You'll do it!--you'll do it!--you'll set it all right!"

He perfectly realized at that moment--before the brain had begun to refine on the situation--what was asked of him. He was to be Melrose's tool and accomplice in all that Melrose's tyrannical caprice chose to do with the lives of human beings; he was to forfeit the respect of good men; he was to make an enemy of Harry Tatham; and he was to hurt--and possibly alienate--Lydia.

And the price of it was a million.

He rose rather heavily to his feet, and gathered up his papers--a slim and comely figure amid the queer medley of the room.

"I must have some time to think about what you have said to me, Mr. Melrose. You've taken my breath away--you won't be surprised at that."

Melrose smiled grimly.

"Not at all. That's natural! Very well then--we meet to-morrow morning. Before eleven o'clock the will must be either signed--or cancelled. And for the present--please!--silence!"

They exchanged good-nights. Melrose looked oddly after the young man, as the door closed.

"He took it well. I suppose he's been sitting up nights over that precious memorandum. He was to be the popular hero, and I the 'shocking example.' Well, he'll get over it. I think--I have--both him--and the Medusa. And what does the will matter to me? Any one may have the gear, when I can't have it. But I'll not be dictated to--_this_ side of the Styx!"

Faversham wandered out once more into the summer night. A little path along the cliff took him down to the riverside, and he paced beside the dimly shining water, overhung by the black shadow of the woods. When he returned to the Tower, just as the light was altering, and the chill of dawn beginning, a long process of tumultuous reflection had linked the mood of the preceding evening to the mood of this new day, and of the days that were to follow. He had determined on his answer to Melrose; and he was exultantly sure of his power to deal with the future. The scruples and terrors of the evening were gone. His intelligence rose to his task.

This old man, already ill, liable at any moment to the accidents of age, and still madly absorbed, to the full extent of his powers and his time, in the pursuits of connoisseurship--what could he really do in the way of effective supervision of his agent? A little tact, a little prudent maneuvering; some money here, possibly out of his, Faversham's, own pocket; judicious temporizing there; white lying when necessary--a certain element of intrigue in Faversham rose to the business with alacrity. In the pride of his young brain and his recovered strength he did not regard it as possible that he should fail in it. After all, the law was now squeezing Melrose; and might be gently and invisibly assisted. If, as to the will itself, his lips were sealed, it would be possible to give some hint to Lydia, for friendship to interpret; to plead with her for patience, in view of the powers, the beneficent powers, that must be his--aye and hers--the darling!--some day.

The thought of them was intoxicating! A man to whom wealth had always appeared as the only gate of opportunity, was now to be rich beyond the utmost dream of his ambition. The world lay at his feet. He would use it well; he would do all things honourably. Ease, travel, a political career, wide influence, the possession of beautiful things--in a very short time they would all be in his grasp; for Melrose was near his end. Some difficulty first, but not too much; the struggle that leads to the prize!

As he softly let himself in at the side door of the Tower, and mounted to his new room, his whole nature was like a fiercely sped arrow, aflight for its goal. Of what obstacles might lie between him and his goal he had ceased to take account. Compunctions had disappeared.

Only--once--as he stood dreamily looking round the strange bedroom to which his personal possessions had been transferred, an image crossed his mind which was disagreeable. It was that of Nash, the shady solicitor in Pengarth, Melrose's factotum in many disreputable affairs, and his agent in the ruin of the Brands. A little reptile if ever there was one! Faversham had come across the creature a good deal since his appointment as agent; and was well aware that he had excited Nash's jealousy and dislike. A man to be guarded against no doubt; but what could he do? Faversham contemptuously dismissed the thought of him.

A charming old room!--though the height and the dark tone of the oak panelling sucked all the light from his pair of candles. That would be altered as soon as the electric installation, for which Melrose had just signed the contract, was complete. In the centre of the wall opposite the window, through which a chill dawn was just beginning to penetrate, stood a fine _armoire_ of carved Norman work. Faversham went to look at it, and vaguely opened one of its drawers.

There was something at the back of the drawer, a picture, apparently an old photograph, lying face downward. He drew it out, and looked at it.

He beheld a young and rather pretty woman, with a curiously flat head, staring black eyes, and sharp chin. She had a child on her knee of about a year old, an elf with delicately proud features, and a frowning, passionate look.

Who were they? The photograph was stained with age and damp; deep, too, in dust. From the woman's dress it must be a good many years old.

The answer suggested itself at once. He was now inhabiting Mrs. Melrose's room, which, according to Mrs. Dixon, had been closed for years, from the date of her flight. The photograph must have been hers; the child was hers--and Melrose's! The likeness indeed cried out.

He replaced the photograph, his mind absorbed in the excitement of its discovery. Where were they now--the forlorn pair? He had no doubt whatever that they were alive--at the old man's mercy, somewhere.

He let in the dawn, and stood long in thought beside the open window. But in the end, he satisfied himself. He would find a way of meeting all just claims, when the time arrived. Why not?