Chapter 4

XIX

Tatham was returning alone from a run with the West Cumbrian hounds. The December day was nearly done, and he saw the pageant of its going from a point on the outskirts of his own park. The park, a great space of wild land extending some miles to the north through a sparsely peopled county, was bounded and intersected throughout its northerly section by various high moorland roads. At a cross-road, leading to Duddon on the left, and to a remote valley running up the eastern side of Blencathra on the right, he reined up his horse to look for a moment at the sombre glow which held the western heaven; amid which the fells of Thirlmere and Derwentwater stood superbly ranged in threatening blacks and purples. To the east and over the waste of Flitterdale, that great flat "moss" in which the mountains die away, there was the prophecy of moonrise; a pearly radiance in the air, a peculiar whiteness in the mists that had gathered along the river, a silver message in the sky. But the wind was rising, and the westerly clouds rushing up. The top of Blencathra was already hidden; it might be a wild night.

Only one luminous point was to be seen, at first, in all the wide and splendid landscape. It shone from Threlfall Tower, a dark and indistinguishable mass amid its hanging woods.

"Old Melrose--counting out his money!"

But as the scornful fancy crossed his mind, a few other dim and scattered lights began to prick the gloom of the fast-darkening valley. That twinkle far away, in the direction of St. John's Vale, might it not be the light of Green Cottage--of Lydia's lamp?

He sat his horse, motionless, consumed with longing and grief. Yet, hard exercise in the open air, always seemed to bring him a kind of physical comfort. "It _was_ a jolly _run_!" he thought, yet half ashamed. His young blood was in love with life, through all heartache.

Suddenly, a whirring sound from the road on his right, and the flash of moving lamps. He saw that a small motor was approaching, and his mare began to fidget.

"Gently, old girl!"

The motor approached and slowed at the corner.

"Hallo Undershaw! is that you?"

The motor stopped and Undershaw jumped out, and turned off his engine. Tatham's horse was pirouetting.

"All right," said Undershaw; "I'll walk by you a bit. Turn her up your road."

The beautiful mare quieted down, and presently the two were in close talk, while the motor left to itself blazed on the lonely moorland road.

Undershaw was describing a visit he had paid that morning to old Brand, the bailiff, who was now quietly and uncomplainingly losing hold on life.

"He may go any time--perhaps to-night. The elder son's departure has finished him. I told the lad that if he cared to stay till his father's death, you would see that he got work meanwhile on the estate; but he was wild to go--not a scrap of filial affection that I could make out!--and the poor old fellow has scarcely spoken since he left the house. So there he is, left with the feeble old wife, and the half-witted son, who grows queerer and madder than ever. I needn't say the woman was very grateful--"

"Don't!" said Tatham; "it's a beastly world."

They moved on in silence, till Undershaw resumed:

"Dixon came to the surgery this afternoon, and I understood from him that he thinks Melrose is breaking up fast. He tries to live as usual; and his temper is appalling. But Dixon sees a great change."

"Well, it'll scarcely be possible to say that his decease 'cast a gloom over the countryside.' Will it?" laughed Tatham.

"What'll Faversham do? That's what I keep asking myself."

"Do? Why, go off with the shekels, and be damned to us! I understand that just at present he's paying rather high for them, which is some satisfaction. That creature Nash told one of our men the other day that Melrose now treats him like dirt, and finds his chief amusement in stopping anything he wants to do."

"Then he'd better look sharp after the will," said Undershaw, with a smile. "Melrose is game for any number of tricks yet. But I don't judge Faversham quite as you do. I believe he has all sorts of grand ideas in his head about what he'll do when he comes in."

"I daresay! You need 'em when you begin with taking soiled money. Mrs. Melrose got the quarterly payment of her allowance yesterday, from an Italian bank--twenty-five pounds minus ten pounds, which seems to be mortgaged in some way. Melrose's solicitors gracefully let her know that the allowance was raised by twenty pounds! On fifteen pounds therefore she and the girl are expected to exist for the quarter--_and_ support the old father. And yesterday just after my mother had shown me the check, I saw Faversham in Pengarth, driving a Rolls-Royce car, brand-new, with a dark fellow beside him whom I know quite well as a Bond Street dealer. I conclude Faversham was taking him to see the collections--_his_ collections!"

"It looks ugly I grant. But I believe he'll provide for the girl as soon as he can."

"And I hope she'll refuse it!" cried Tatham. "And I believe she will. She's a girl of spirit. She talks of going on the stage. My mother has found out that she's got a voice, and she dances divinely. My mother's actually got a teacher for her from London, whom we put up in the village."

"A lovely little girl!" said Undershaw. "And she's getting over her hardships. But the mother--" He shook his head.

"You think she's in a bad way?"

"Send her back to Italy as soon as you can. She's pining for her own people. Life's been a bit too hard for her, and she never was but a poor thing. Well, I must go."

Tatham stayed his horse. Undershaw, added as though by an afterthought:

"I was at Green Cottage this morning. Mrs. Penfold's rather knocked up with nursing her sister. She chattered to me about Faversham. He used to be a good deal there but they've broken with him too; apparently, because of Mainstairs. Miss Lydia couldn't stand it. She was _so_ devoted to the people."

The man on horseback made some inaudible reply, and they began to talk of a couple of sworn inquiries about to be held on the Threlfall estate by the officials of the Local Government Board, into the housing and sanitation of three of the chief villages on Melrose's property. The department had been induced to move by a committee of local gentlemen, in which Tatham had taken a leading part. The whole affair had reduced itself indeed so far to a correspondence duel between Tatham, as representing a scandalized neighbourhood, and Faversham, as representing Melrose.

Tatham's letters, in which a man, with no natural gift for the pen, had developed a surprising amount of effective sarcasm, had all appeared in the local press; with Faversham's ingenious and sophistical replies. Tatham discussed them now with Undershaw in a tone of passionate bitterness. The doctor said little. He had his own shrewd ideas on the situation.

* * * * *

When Undershaw left him, Tatham rode on, up the forest lane, till again the trees fell away, the wide valley with its boundary fells opened before him, and again his eye sought through the windy dusk for the far-gleaming light that spoke to him of Lydia. His mind was full of fresh agitation, stirred by Undershaw's remark about her. The idea of a breach between Lydia and Faversham was indeed most welcome, since it seemed to restore Lydia to that pedestal from which it had been so hard and strange to see her descend. It gave him back the right to worship her! And yet, the notion did nothing--now--to revive any hope for himself. He kept the distant light in view for long, his heart full of a tenderness which, though he did not know it, had already parted with much of the bitterness of unsatisfied passion. Unconsciously, the healing process was on its way; the healing of the normal man, on whom a wound is no sooner inflicted than all the reparative powers of life rush together for its cure.

* * * *

But while Tatham, wrapped in thoughts of Lydia, was thus drawing homeward, across the higher ground of the estate, down through the Duddon woods, as they fell gently to the river, a little figure was hurrying, with the step of a fugitive, and half-nervous, half-exultant looks from side to side. The moon had risen. It was not dark in the woods, and Felicia, amid the _boschi_ of the Apuan Alps, had never been frightened of the night or of any ill befalling her. In Lucca itself she might be insulted; on the hills, never. She had the independence, and--generally speaking--the strength of the working girl. So that the enterprise on which she was launched--the quest of her father--presented itself to her as nothing particularly difficult. She had indeed to keep it from her mother and Lady Tatham, and to find means of escaping them. That she calmly took steps to do, not bothering her head much about it.

As to the rest of the business, there was a station on the Keswick line close to the gate of the park, and she had looked out a train which would take her conveniently to Whitebeck, which was only half a mile from Threlfall. From Duddon to Whitebeck took eight minutes in the train. She would be at Whitebeck a little after five; allowing an hour for her adventure at the Tower, and some little margin, she would catch a train back between six and seven, which would allow of her slipping into Duddon a little after seven, unnoticed, and in good time to dress for dinner. Her Italian blood betrayed itself throughout, alike in the keen pleasure she took in the various devices of her small plot; in the entire absence of any hampering scruples as to the disobedience and deceit which it involved; and in the practical intelligence with which she was ready to carry it out. She had brooded over it for days; and this afternoon a convenient opportunity had arisen. Her mother was in her room with a headache; Lady Tatham had had to go to Carlisle on business.

As she hastened, almost running, through the park, she was planning, by fits and starts, what she would say to her father. But still more was the thinking of Tatham--asking herself questions about him, with little thrills of excitement, and little throbbings of delicious fear.

Here she was, at the gate of the park. Just ten minutes to her train! She hurried on. A few labourers were in the road coming home tired from their work; a few cottage doors were ajar, showing the bright fire, and the sprawling children within. Some of the men as they passed looked with curiosity at the slim stranger; but she was well muffled up in her new furs--Victoria's gift--and her large felt hat; they saw little more than the tips of her small nose and chin.

The train came in just as she reached the station. She took her ticket for Whitebeck, and as the train jogged along, she looked out of the window at the valley in the dim moonrise, her mind working tumultuously. Lady Tatham had told her much; Hesketh, Lady Tatham's maid, and the old coachman who had been teaching her to ride, had told her more. She knew that before she reached Whitebeck she would have passed the boundary between the Duddon and Threlfall estates. She was now indeed on her father's land, the land which in justice ought to be hers some day; which in Italy would be hers by law, or part of it anyway, whatever pranks her father might play. But here in England a man might rob his child of every penny if he pleased. That was strange when England was such a great country--such a splendid country. "I _love_ England!" she thought passionately, as she leant back with folded arms and closed eyes.

And straightway on the dusk rose the image of Tatham--Tatham on horseback, as she had seen him set out for the hunt that morning; and she felt her eyes grow a little wet. Why? Oh! because he was so tall and splendid--and he sat his horse like a king--and everybody loved him--and she was living in his house--and so, whether he would or no, he must take notice of her sometimes. One evening had he not let her mend his glove? And another evening, when she was practising her dancing for Lady Tatham, had he not come in to look? Ah, well, wait till she could sing and dance properly, till--perhaps--he saw her on the stage! Her newly discovered singing voice, which was the excitement of the moment for Lady Tatham and Netta, was to Felicia like some fairy force within her, struggling to be at large, which would some day carve out her fortunes, and bring her to Tatham--on equal terms.

For her pride had flourished and fed upon her love. She no longer talked of Tatham to her mother or any one else. But deep in her heart lay the tenacious, pursuing instinct.

And besides--suppose--she made an impression on her father--on his cruel old heart? Such things do happen. It's silly to say they don't. "I _am_ pretty--and now my clothes are all right--and my hands have come nearly white. He'll see I'm not a girl to be ashamed of. And if my father did give me a _dot_--why then I'd send my mother to _his_ mother! That's how we'd do it in Italy. I'm as well-born as he--nearly--and if I had a _dot_--"

The yellow-haired girl at any rate was quite out of the way. No one spoke of her; no one mentioned her. That was all right.

And as to Threlfall and her father, if she was able to soften him at all it would not be in the least necessary to drive that bad young man, Mr. Faversham, to despair. Compromise--bargaining--settle most things. She fell to imagining--with a Latin clearness and realism--how it might be handled. Only it would have to be done before her father died. For if Mr. Faversham once took all the money and all the land, there would be no _dot_ for her, even if he were willing to give it her. For Lord Tatham would never take a farthing from Mr. Faversham, not even through his wife. "And so it would be no use to me," thought Felicia, quietly, but regretfully.

Whitebeck station. Out she tripped, asked her way to Threlfall, and hurried off into the dark, followed by the curious looks of the station-master.

She was soon at the park gate, and passed through it with a beating heart. She had heard of the bloodhounds; and the sound of a bark in the distance--though it was only the collie at the farm--gave her a start of terror.

The Whitebeck gate was but a short distance from the house, and as she turned a corner, the Tower rose suddenly before her. She held her breath; it looked so big, so darkly magnificent. She thought of all the tales that had been told her, the rooms full of silver and gold--the _arazzi_--the _stucchi_--the cabinets and sculpture. She had grown up in an atmosphere of perpetual bric-a-brac; she had seen the big Florentine shops; she could imagine what it was like.

There were lights in two of the windows; and the smoke from several chimneys rose wind-beaten against the woods behind. The moon stood immediately over the roof, and the shadow of the house stretched beyond the forecourt almost to her feet.

She lingered a few minutes, fascinated, gazing at this huge place where her father lived--her father whom she had never seen since she was a baby. The moon lit up her tiny figure, and her small white face, as she stood in the open, alone in the wintry silence.

Then, swiftly, and instead of going up to the front door, she turned to the right along a narrow flagged path that skirted the forecourt and led to the back of the house.

She knew exactly what to do. She had planned it all with Hesketh, Hesketh, who was the daughter of a farmer on the Duddon estate, fifty years old, a born gossip, and acquainted with every man, woman and child in the neighbourhood. Did not Hesketh go to the same chapel with Thomas Dixon and his wife? And had she not a romantic soul, far above furbelows--a soul which had flung itself into the cause of the "heiress," to the point of keeping the child's secret, even from her ladyship? Hesketh indeed had suffered sharply from qualms of conscience in this respect. But Felicia had spared her as much as possible, by keeping the precise moment of her escapade to herself.

She groped her way round, till she came to a side path leading to an entrance. The path indeed was that by which Faversham had been originally carried into the Tower, across the foot-bridge. Peering over a low wall that bounded the path, she looked startled into an abyss of leafless trees, with a bright gleam of moonlit water far below. In front of her was a door and steps, and some rays of light penetrating through the shuttered windows beside the door, showed that there was life within.

Felicia mounted the steps and knocked. No one came. At last she found a bell and rang it--cautiously. Steps approached. The door was opened, and a gray-haired woman stood on the threshold.

"Well, what's your business?" she said sharply. It was evident that she was short-sighted, and did not clearly see the person outside.

"Please, I want to speak to Mr. Melrose."

The clear, low voice arrested the old woman.

"Eh?" she said testily. "And who may you be? You cawn't see Mr. Melrose, anyways."

"I want to see him particularly. Are you Mrs. Dixon?"

"Aye--a'am Mrs. Dixon. But aa've no time to goa chatterin' at doors wi' yoong women; soa if yo'll juist gie me yor business, I'll tell Muster Faversham, when he's got time to see to 't."

"It's not Mr. Faversham I want to see--it's Mr. Melrose. Mrs. Dixon, don't you remember me?"

Mrs. Dixon stepped back in puzzled annoyance, so as to let a light from the passage shine upon the stranger's face. She stood motionless.

Felicia stepped within.

"I am Miss Melrose," she said, with composure, "Felicia Melrose. You knew me when I was a child. And I wish to see my father."

Mrs. Dixon's face seemed to have fallen into chaos under the shock. She stood staring at the visitor, her mouth working.

"Muster Melrose's däater!" she said, at last. "T' baby--as was! Aye--yo' feature him! An' yo're stayin' ower ta Duddon--wi' her ladyship. I know. Dixon towd me. Bit yo' shouldna' coom here, Missie! Yo' canno' see your feyther."

"Why not?" said Felicia imperiously. "I mean to see him. Here I am in the house. Take me to him at once!"

And suddenly closing the entrance door behind her, she moved on toward an inner passage dimly lit, of which she had caught sight.

Mrs. Dixon clung to her arm.

"Noa, noa! Coom in here, Missie--coom in _here_! Dixon!--where are yo'? Dixon!"

She raised her voice. A chair was pushed back in the kitchen, on the other side of the passage. An old man who, to judge from his aspect, had been roused by his wife's call from a nap after his tea, appeared in a doorway.

Mrs. Dixon drew Felicia toward him, and into the kitchen, as he retreated thither. Then she shut and bolted the door.

"This is t' yoong lady!" she said in a breathless whisper to her husband. "Muster-Melrose's däater! She's coom fra Duddon. An' she's fer seein' her feyther."

Old Dixon had grown very pale. But otherwise he showed no surprise. He looked frowning at Felicia.

"Yo' canno' do that, Miss Melrose. Yo'r feyther wunna see yo'. He's an owd man noo, and we darena disturb him."

Felicia argued with the pair, first quietly, then with a heaving breast, and some angry tears. Dixon soon dropped the struggle, so far as words went. He left that to his wife. But he stood firmly against the door, looking on.

"You shan't keep me here!" said Felicia at last with a stamp. "I'll call some one! I'll make a noise!"

A queer, humorous look twinkled over Dixon's face. Then--suddenly--he moved from the door. His expression had grown hesitating--soft.

"Varra well, then. Yo' shall goa--if you mun goa."

His wife protested. He turned upon her.

"She shall goa!" he repeated, striking the dresser beside him. "Her feyther's an old man--an' sick. Mebbe he'll be meetin' his Mäaker face to face, before the year's oot; yo' canno' tell. He's weakenin' fasst. An' he's ben a hard mon to his awn flesh and blood. There'll be a reckonin'! An' the Lord's sent him this yan chance o' repentance. I'll not stan' i' the Lord's way--whativer. Coom along, Missie!"

And entirely regardless of his wife's entreaties, the old Methodist resolutely opened the kitchen door, and beckoned to Felicia. He was lame now and walked with a stick, his shoulders bent. But he neither paused, nor spoke to her again. Murmuring to himself, he led her along the inner passage, and opened the door into the great gallery.

A blaze of light and colour, a rush of heated air. Felicia was dazzled by the splendour of the great show within--the tapestries, the pictures, the gleaming reflections on lacquer and intarsia, on ebony or Sèvres. But the atmosphere was stifling. Melrose now could only live in the temperature of a hothouse.

Dixon threw open a door, and without a word beckoned to Felicia to enter. He hesitated a moment, evidently as to whether he should announce her; and then, stepping forward, he cleared his throat.

"Muster Melrose, theer's soom one as wants to speak to you!"

"What do you mean, you old fool!" said a deep, angry voice on the other side of a great lacquer screen; "didn't I tell you I wasn't to be disturbed?"

Felicia walked round the screen. Dixon, with an excited look at her, retired through the door which he closed behind him.

"Father!" said Felicia, in a low, trembling voice.

An old man who was writing at a large inlaid table, in the midst of a confusion of objects which the girl's eyes had no time to take in, turned sharply at the sound.

The two stared at each other. Melrose slowly revolved on his chair, pen in hand. Felicia stood, with eyes downcast, her cheeks burning, her hands lightly clasped.

Melrose spoke first.

"H'm--so they've sent _you_ here?"

She looked up.

"No one sent me. I--I wished to see you--before we went away; because you are my father--and I mightn't ever see you--if I didn't now. And I wanted to ask you"--her voice quivered--"not to be angry any more with mother and me. We never meant to vex you--by coming. But we were so poor--and mother is ill. Yes, she _is_ ill!--she is--it's no shamming. Won't you forgive us?--won't you give mother a little more money?--and won't you"--she clasped her hands entreatingly--"won't you give me a _dot_? I may want to be married--and you are so rich? And I wouldn't ever trouble you again--I--"

She broke off, intimidated, paralyzed by the strange fixed look of the old wizard before her--his flowing hair, his skullcap, his white and sunken features. And yet mysteriously she recognized herself in him. She realized through every fibre that he was indeed her father.

"You would have done better not to trouble me again!" said Melrose, with slow emphasis. "Your mother seems to pay no attention whatever to what I say. We shall see. So you want a _dot_? And, pray, what do you want a _dot_ for? Who's going to marry you? Tatham?"

The tone was more mocking than fierce; but Felicia shrank under it.

"Oh, no, _no_! But I _might_ want to marry," she added piteously. "And in Italy--one can't marry--without a _dot_!"

"Your mother should have thought of these things when she ran away."

Felicia was silent a moment. Then, without invitation, she seated herself on the edge of a chair that stood near him.

"That was so long ago," she said timidly--yet confidingly. "And I was a baby. Couldn't you--couldn't you forget it now?"

Melrose surveyed her.

"I suppose you like being at Duddon?" he asked her abruptly, without answering her question.

She clasped her hands fervently.

"It's like heaven! They're so good to us."

"No doubt!"--the tone was sarcastic. "Well, let them provide for you. Who gave you those clothes? Lady Tatham?"

She nodded. Her lip trembled. Her startled eyes looked at him piteously.

"You've been living at Lucca?"

"Near Lucca--on the mountains."

"H'm. Is that all true--about your grandfather?"

"That he's ill? Of course, it's true!" she said indignantly. "We don't tell lies. He's had a stroke--he's dying. And we could hardly give him any food he could eat. You see--"

She edged a little closer, and began a voluble, confidential account of their life in the mountains. Her voice was thin and childish, but sweet; and every now and then she gave a half-frightened, half-excited laugh. Melrose watched her frowning; but he did not stop her. Her bright eyes and brows, with their touches of velvet black, the quick movement of her pink lips, the rose-leaf delicacy of her colour, seemed to hold him. Among the pretty things with which the room was crowded she was the prettiest; and he probably was conscious of it. Propped up against the French bureau stood a Watteau drawing in red chalk--a _sanguine_--he had bought in Paris on a recent visit. The eyes of the old connoisseur went from the living face to the drawing, comparing them.

At last Felicia paused. Her smiles died away. She looked at him wistfully.

"Mother's awfully sorry she--she offended you so. Won't you forgive her now--and poor Babbo--about the little statue?"

She hardly dared breathe the last words, as she timidly dropped her eyes.

There were tears in her voice, and yet she was not very far from hysterical laughter. The whole scene was so fantastic--ridiculous! The room with its lumber; its confusion of glittering things; this old man frowning at her--for no reason! For after all--what had she done? Even the _contadini_--they were rough often--they couldn't read or write--but they loved their grandchildren.

As he caught her reference to the bronze Hermes, Melrose's face changed. He rose, stretching out a hand toward a bell on the table.

"You must go!" he said, sharply. "You ought never to have come. You'll get nothing by it. Tell your mother so. This is the second attack she has made on me--through her tools. If she attempts another, she may take the consequences!"

Felicia too stood up. A rush of anger and despair choked her.

"And you won't--you won't even say a kind word to me!" she said, panting. "You won't kiss me?"

For answer, he seized her by the hands, and drew her toward the light. There, for a few intolerable seconds he looked closely, with a kind of savage curiosity, into her face, studying her features, her hair, her light form. Then pushing her from him, he opened that same drawer in the French cabinet that Undershaw had once seen him open, fumbled a little, and took out something that glittered.

"Take that. But if you come here again it will be the worse for you, and for your mother. When I say a thing I mean it. Now, go! Dixon shall take you to the train."

Felicia glanced at the Renaissance jewel in her hand--delicate Venus in gold and pearl, set in a hoop of diamonds. "I won't have it!" she said, dashing it from her with a sob of passion. "And we won't take your money either--not a farthing! We've got friends who'll help us. And I'll keep my mother myself. You shan't give her anything--nor my grandfather. So you needn't threaten us! You can't do us any harm!"

She looked him scornfully over from head to foot, a little fury, with blazing eyes.

Melrose laughed.

"I thought you came to get a _dot_ out of me," he said, with lifted brows, admiring her in spite of himself. "You seem to have a good spice of the Melrose temper in you. I'm sorry I can't treat you as you seem to wish. Your mother settled that. Well--that'll do--that'll do! We can't bandy words any more. Dixon!"

He touched the hand-bell beside him.

Felicia hurried to the door, sobbing with excitement. As she reached it Dixon entered. Melrose spoke a few peremptory words to him, and she found herself walking through the gallery, Dixon's hand on her arm, while he muttered and lamented beside her.

"'And the Lord hardened Pharaoh's heart.' Aye, it's the Lord--it's the Lord. Oh! Missie, Missie--I was a fool to let yo' in. Yo've been nowt but a new stone o' stumblin'; an' the Lord knows there's offences enoof already!"

Meanwhile, in the room from which his daughter had been driven, Melrose had risen from his seat, and was moving hither and thither, every now and then taking up some object in the crowded tables, pretending to look at it, and putting it down again. He was pursued, tormented all the while by swarming thoughts--visualizations. That child would outlive him--her father--perhaps by a half century. The flesh and blood sprung from his own life, would go on enjoying and adventuring, for fifty years, perhaps, after he had been laid in his resented grave. And the mind which would have had no existence had he not lived, would hold till death the remembrance of what he had just said and done--a child's only remembrance of her father.

He stood, looking back upon his life, and quite conscious of some fatal element in the moment which had just gone by. It struck him as a kind of moral tale. Some men would say that God had once more, and finally, offered him "a place of repentance"--through this strange and tardy apparition of his daughter. A ghostly smile flickered. The man of the world knew best. "Let no man break with his own character." That was the real text which applied. And he had followed it. Circumstance and his own will had determined, twenty years earlier, that he had had enough of women-kind. His dealings with them had been many and various! But at a given moment he had put an end to them forever. And no false sentimentalism should be allowed to tamper with the thing done.

At this point he found himself sinking into his chair; and must needs confess himself somewhat shaken by what had happened. He was angry with his physical weakness, and haunted in spite of himself by the hue and fragrance of that youth he had just been watching--there--at the corner of the table--beside the Watteau sketch. He sat staring at the drawing....

Till the threatened vitality within again asserted itself; beat off the besieging thoughts; and clutched fiercely at some new proof of its own strength. The old man raised himself, and laid his hand on the telephone which connected his room with that of Faversham.

How, in Dixon's custody, Felicia reached the station, and stumbled into the train, and how, at the other end, she groped her way into the gates of Duddon and began the long woodland ascent to the castle, Felicia never afterward knew. But when she had gone a few steps along the winding drive Where the intermittent and stormy moonlight was barely enough to guide her, she felt her strength suddenly fail her. She could never climb the long hill to the house--she could never fight the wind that was rising in her face. She must sit down, till some one came--to help.

She sank down upon a couch of moss, at the foot of a great oak-tree which was still thick with withered leaf. The mental agitation, and the sheer physical fatigue of her mad attempt had utterly worn out her barely recovered strength. "I shall faint," she thought, "and no one will know where I am!" She tried to concentrate her will on the resolution not to faint. Straightening her back and head against the tree, she clasped her hands rigidly on her knee. From time to time a wave of passionate recollection would rush through her; and her heart would beat so fast, that again the terror of sinking into some unknown infinite would string up her will to resistance. In this alternate yielding and recoil, this physical and mental struggle, she passed minutes which seemed to her interminable. At last resistance was all but overwhelmed.

"Come to me!--oh, do come to me!"

She seemed to be pouring her very life into the cry. But, probably, the words were only spoken in the mind.

* * * * *

A little later she woke up in bewilderment. She was no longer on the moss. She was being carried--carried firmly and speedily--in some one's arms. She tried to open her eyes.

"Where am I?"

A voice said:

"That's better! Don't be afraid. You'd fainted I think. I can carry you quite safely."

Infinite bliss rushed in upon the girl's fluttering sense. She was too feeble, too weak, to struggle. Instead she let her head sink on Tatham's shoulder. Her right hand clung to his coat.

The young man mounted the hill, marvelling at the lightness of the burden he held; touched, embarrassed, yet sometimes inclined to laugh or scold. What had she been about? He had come in from hunting to find her absence just discovered, and the house roused. Victoria and Cyril Boden were exploring other roads through the garden and park; he had run down the long hill to the station lodge in case the theory started at once by Victoria that she had escaped, unknown to any one, in order to force an interview with her father should turn out to be the right one.

Presently a trembling voice said in the darkness, while some soft curls of hair tickled his cheek:

"I've been to Threlfall. Will Lady Tatham be very angry?"

"Well, she was a bit worried," said Tatham, wondering if the occasion ought not to be improved. "She guessed--you might have gone there. There's bad weather coming--and she was anxious what might happen to you. Ah! there's the rain!"

Two or three large drops descended on Felicia's cheek as it lay upturned on his shoulder; a pattering began on the oak-leaves overhead; the moonlight was blotted out, and when Felicia opened her eyes, it was on a heavy darkness.

"Stupid!" cried Tatham. "Why didn't I think of bringing a mackintosh cape?"

"Mayn't I walk?" asked Felicia, meekly. "I think I could."

"I expect you'd better not. You were pretty bad when I found you. It's no trouble to me to carry you, and I know every inch of these roads."

And indeed by now he would have been very loath to quit his task. There was something tormentingly attractive in this warm softness of the girl's tiny form upon his breast. The thought darted across him--"If I had ever held Lydia so!" It was a pang; but it passed; and what remained was a tenderness of soul, evoked by Lydia, but passing out now beyond Lydia.

Poor little foolish thing! He supposed she had been trampled on, as his mother had been. But his mother could defend herself. What chance had this child against the old tyrant! An eager, protective sympathy--a warm pity--arose in him; greatly quickened by this hand and arm that clung to him.

The rain began to drive against them.

"Do you mind getting wet?" he said laughing, almost in her ear.

"Not a bit! I--I didn't mean to give any trouble."

The tone was penitent. Tatham, forgetting all thoughts of admonition, reassured her.

"You didn't give any. Except--Your mother of course was very anxious about you."

"But I couldn't tell her!" sighed the voice on his shoulder. "She'd have stopped it."

Tatham smiled unseen.

"I'm afraid your father wasn't kind to you," he said, after a pause.

"It was horrible--horrible!" The little body he held shuddered closer to him. "Why does he hate us so? and I lost my temper too--I stamped at him. But he looks so old--so old! I think he'll die soon."

"That would be happiest," said Tatham, gravely.

"I told him we would never take any money from him again. I must earn it--I will! Your mother will lend me a little--for my training. I'll pay it back."

"You poor child!" he murmured.

At that moment they emerged upon the last section of the broad avenue leading to the house. And the electric light in the pillared porch threw long rays toward them.

"Please put me down," said Felicia, with decision. "I can walk quite well."

He obeyed her. But her weakness was still such, that she could only walk with help. Guiding, supporting her, he half led, half carried her along.

As they reached the lighted porch, she looked up, her face sparkling with rain, a touch of mischief in her hollow-ringed eyes.

"How much will they scold?"

"Can't say, I am sure! I think you'll have to bear it."

"Never mind!" Her white cheeks dimpled. "It's Duddon! I'd rather be scolded at Duddon, than petted anywhere else."

Tatham flushed suddenly. So did she. And as the door opened Felicia walked with composure past the stately butler.

"Is Lady Tatham in the library?"

Netta Melrose, full of fears, wept that evening over her daughter's rash disobedience. Victoria administered what reproof she could; and Felicia was reduced to a heated defence of herself, sitting up in bed, with a pair of hot cheeks and tearful eyes. But when all the lights were out, and she was alone, she thought no more of any such nips and pricks. The night was joy around her, and as she sank to sleep; Tatham, in dream, still held her, still carried her through the darkness and the rain.

XX

While Felicia was making her vain attempt upon her father's pity, Faversham was sitting immersed in correspondence in his own room at the farther end of the gallery. He heard nothing of the girl's arrival or departure. Sound travelled but little through the thick walls of the Tower, and the gallery, muffled with rich carpets, with hangings and furniture, deadened both step and voice.

The agent was busy with some typewritten evidence that Melrose was preparing wherewith to fight the Government officials now being sent down from London to inquire into the state of some portion of the property. The evidence had been collected by Nash, and Faversham read it with disgust. He knew well that the great mass of it was perjured stuff, bought at a high price. Yet both in public and private he would have to back up all the lies and evasions that his master, and the pack of obscure hangers-on who lived upon his pay, chose to put forward.

He set his teeth as he read. The iron of his servitude was cutting its way into life, deeper and deeper. Could he go on bearing it? For weeks he had lived with Melrose on terms of sheer humiliation--rated, or mocked at, his advice spurned, the wretched Nash and his crew ostentatiously preferred to him, even put over him. "No one shall ever say I haven't earned my money," he would say to himself fiercely, as the intolerable days went by. His only abiding hope and compensation lay in his intense belief that Melrose was a dying man. All those feelings of natural gratitude, with which six months before he had entered on his task, were long since rooted up. He hated his tyrant, and he wished him dead. But the more he dwelt for consolation on the prospect of Melrose's disappearance, the more attractive became to him the vision of his own coming reign. Some day he would be his own master, and the master of these hoards. Some day he would emerge from the cloud of hatred and suspicion in which he habitually walked; some day he would be able once more to follow the instincts of an honest man; some day he would be able again--perhaps--to look Lydia Penfold in the face! Endurance for a few more months, on the best terms he could secure, lest the old madman should even yet revoke his gifts; and then--a transformation scene--on the details of which his thoughts dwelt perpetually, by way of relief from the present. Tatham and the rest of his enemies, who were now hunting and reviling him, would be made to understand that if he had stooped, he had stooped with a purpose; and that the end _did_ in this case justify the means.

A countryside cleansed, comforted, remade; a great estate ideally managed; a great power to be greatly used; scope for experiment, for public service, for self-realization--he greedily, passionately, foresaw them all. Let him be patient. Nothing could interfere with his dream, but some foolish refusal of the conditions on which alone it could come true.

Often, when this mood of self-assertion was on him, he would go back in thought to his boyish holidays in Oxford, and to his uncle. He saw the kind old fellow in his shepherd plaid suit, black tie, and wide-awake, taking his constitutional along the Woodstock road, or playing a mild game of croquet in the professorial garden; or he recalled him among his gems--those rare and beautiful things, bought with the savings of a lifetime, loved, each of them, for its own sake, and bequeathed at death, with the tender expression of a wish--no tyrannical condition!--to the orphan boy whom he had fathered.

The thought of what would--what must be--Uncle Mackworth's judgment on his present position, was perhaps the most tormenting element in Faversham's consciousness. He faced it, however, with frankness. His uncle would have condemned him--wholly. The notion of serving a bad man, for money, would have been simply inconceivable to that straight and innocent soul. Are there not still herbs to be eaten under hedgerows, with the sauce of liberty and self-respect?

No doubt. But man is entitled to self-fulfilment; and men pursue vastly different ways of obtaining it. The perplexities of practical ethics are infinite; and mixed motives fit a mixed world.

At least he had not bartered away his uncle's treasure. The gems still stood to him as the symbol of something he had lost, and might some day recover. It was really time he got them out of Melrose's clutches...

...The room was oppressively hot! It was a raw December night, but the heating system of the Tower was now so perfect, and to Faversham's mind so excessive, that every corner of the large house was bathed in a temperature which seemed to keep Melrose alive, while it half suffocated every other inmate.

Suddenly the telephone bell on his writing-desk rang. His room was now connected with Melrose's room, at the other end of the house, as well as with Pengarth. He put his ear to the receiver.

"Yes?"

"I want to speak to you."

He rose unwillingly. But at least he could air the room, which he would not have ventured to do, if Melrose were coming to him as usual for the ten minutes' hectoring, which now served as conversation between them, before bedtime. Going to the window which gave access to the terrace outside, he unclosed the shutters, and threw open the glass doors. He perceived that it had begun to rain, and that the night was darkening. He stood drinking in the moist coolness of the air for a few seconds, and then leaving the window open, and forgetting to extinguish the electric light on his table he went out of the room.

He found Melrose in his chair, his aspect thunderous and excited.

"Was it by your plotting, sir, that that girl got in?" said the old man, as he entered.

Faversham stood amazed.

"What girl?"

Melrose angrily described Felicia's visit, adding that if Faversham knew nothing about it, it was his duty to know. Dixon deserved dismissal for his abominable conduct; "and you, sir, are paid a large salary, not only to manage--or mismanage--my affairs, but also to protect your employer from annoyance. I expect you to do it!"

Faversham took the charge quietly. His whole relation to Melrose had altered so rapidly for the worse during the preceding weeks that no injustice or unreason surprised him. And yet there was something strange--something monstrous--in the old man's venomous temper. After all his bribes, after all his tyranny, did he still feel something in Faversham escape him?--some deep-driven defiance, or hope, intangible? He seemed indeed to be always on the watch now for fresh occasions of attack that should test his own power, and Faversham's submission.

Presently, he abruptly left the subject of his daughter, and Faversham did not pursue it. What was the good of inquiring into the details of the girl's adventure? He guessed pretty accurately at what had happened; the scorn which had been poured on the suppliant; the careless indifference with which she had been dismissed--through the rain and the night. Yet another scandal for a greedy neighbourhood!--another story to reach the ears of the dwellers in a certain cottage, with the embellishments, no doubt, which the popular hatred of both himself and Melrose was certain to supply. He felt himself buried a little deeper under the stoning of his fellows. But at the same time he was conscious--as of a danger point--of a new and passionate exasperation in himself. His will must control it.

Melrose, however, proceeded to give it fresh cause. He took up a letter from Nash containing various complaints of Faversham, which had reached him that evening.

"You have been browbeating our witnesses, sir! Nash reports them as discouraged, and possibly no longer willing to come forward. What business had you to jeopardize my interests by posing as the superior person? The evidence had been good enough for Nash--and myself. It might have been good enough for you."

Faversham smiled, as he lit his cigarette.

"The two men you refer to--whom you asked me to see yesterday--were a couple of the feeblest liars I ever had to do with. Tatham's counsel would have turned them inside out in five minutes. You seem to forget the other side are employing counsel."

"I forgot nothing!" said Melrose hotly. "But I expect you to follow your instructions."

"The point is--am I advising you in this matter, or am I merely your agent? You seem to expect me to act in both capacities. And I confess I find it difficult."

Melrose fretted and fumed. He raised one point after another, criticising Faversham's action and advice in regard to the housing inquiries, as though he were determined to pick a quarrel. Faversham met him on the whole with wonderful composure, often yielding in appearance, but in reality getting the best of it throughout. Under the mask of the discussion, however, the temper of both men was rising fast. It was as though two deep-sea currents, converging far down, were struggling unseen toward the still calm surface, there to meet in storm and convulsion.

Again, Melrose changed the conversation. He was by now extraordinarily pale. All the flushed excitement in which Faversham had found him had disappeared. He was more spectral, more ghostly--and ghastly--than Faversham had ever seen him. His pincerlike fingers played with the jewel which Felicia had thrown down upon the table. He took it up, put on his eyeglass, peered at it, put it down again. Then he turned an intent and evil eye on Faversham.

"I have now something of a quite different nature to say to you. You have, I imagine, expected it. You will, perhaps, guess at it. And I cannot imagine for one moment that you will make any difficulty about it."

Faversham's pulse began to race.

He suspended his cigarette.

"What is it?"

"I am asked to send a selection of antique gems to the Loan Exhibition which is being got up by the 'Amis du Louvre' in Paris, after Christmas. I desire to send both the Arconati Bacchus and the Medusa--in fact all those now in the case committed to my keeping."

"I have no objection," said Faversham. But he had suddenly lost colour.

"I can only send them in my own name," said Melrose slowly.

"That difficulty is not insurmountable. I can lend them to you."

Melrose's composure gave way. He brought his hand heavily down on the table.

"I shall send them in--as my own property--in my own name!"

Faversham eyed him.

"But they are not--they will not be--your property."

"I offer you three thousand pounds for them!--four thousand--five thousand--if you want more you can have it. Drive the best bargain you can!" sneered Melrose, trying to smile.

"I refuse your offer--your very generous offer--with great regret--but I refuse!" Faversham had risen to his feet.

"And your reason?--for a behaviour so--so vilely ungrateful!"

"Simply, that the gems were left to me--by an uncle I loved--who was a second father to me--who asked me not to sell them. I have warned you not once, or twice, that I should never sell them."

"No! You expected both to get hold of my property--and to keep your own!"

"Insult me as you like," said Faversham, quietly. "I probably deserve it. But you will not alter my determination."

He stood leaning on the back of a chair, looking down on Melrose. Some bondage had broken in his soul! A tide of some beneficent force seemed to be flooding its dry wastes.

Melrose paused. In the silence each measured the other. Then Melrose said in a voice which had grown husky:

"So--the first return you are asked to make, for all that has been lavished upon you, you meet with--this refusal. That throws a new light upon your character. I never proposed to leave my fortune to an adventurer! I proposed to leave it to a gentleman, capable of understanding an obligation. We have mistaken each other--and our arrangement--drops. Unless you consent to the very small request--the very advantageous proposal rather--which I have just made you--you will leave this room--as penniless--except for any savings you may have made out of your preposterous salary--as penniless--as you came into it!"

Faversham raised himself. He drew a long breath, as of a man delivered.

"Do what you like, Mr. Melrose. There was a time when it seemed as if our cooperation might have been of service to both. But some devil in you--and a greedy mind in me--the temptation of your money--oh, I confess it, frankly--have ruined our partnership--and indeed--much else! I resume my freedom--I leave your house to-morrow. And now, please--return me my gems!"

He peremptorily held out his hand. Melrose glared upon him. Then slowly the old man reopened the little drawer at his elbow, took thence the shagreen case, and pushed it toward Faversham.

Faversham replaced it in his breast pocket.

"Thank you. Now, Mr. Melrose, I should advise you to go to bed. Your health is not strong enough to stand these disputes. Shall I call Dixon? As soon as possible my accounts shall be in your hands."

"Leave the room, sir!" cried Melrose, choking with rage, and motioning toward the door.

On the threshold Faversham turned, and gave one last look at the dark figure of Melrose, and the medley of objects surrounding it; at Madame Elisabeth's Sèvres vases, on the upper shelf of the Riesener table; at the Louis Seize clock, on the panelled wall, which was at that moment striking eight.

As he closed the door behind him, he was aware of Dixon who had just entered the gallery from the servants' quarters. The old butler hurried toward him to ask if he should announce dinner. "Not for me," said Faversham; "you had better ask Mr. Melrose. To-morrow, Dixon, I shall be leaving this house--for good."

Dixon stared, his face working:

"I thowt--I heard yo'--" he said, and paused.

"You heard us disputing. Mr. Melrose and I have had a quarrel. Bring me something to my room, when you have looked after him. I will come and speak to you later."

Faversham walked down the gallery to his own door. He had to pass on the way a splendid Nattier portrait of Marie Leczinska which had arrived only that morning from Paris, and was standing on the floor, leaning sideways against a chair, as Melrose had placed it himself, so as to get a good light on it. The picture was large. Faversham picked his way round it. If his thoughts had not been so entirely preoccupied, he would probably have noticed a slight movement of something behind the portrait as he passed. But exultation held him; he walked on air.

He returned to his own room, where the window was still wide open. As he entered, he mechanically turned on the central light, not noticing that the reading lamp upon his table was not in its place. But he saw that some papers which had been on his desk when he left the room were now on the floor. He supposed the wind which was rising had dislodged them. Stooping to lift them up, he was surprised to see a large mud-stain on the topmost sheet. It looked like a footprint, as though some one had first knocked the papers off the table, and then trodden on them. He turned on a fresh switch. There was another mark on the floor just beyond the table--and another--nearer the door. They were certainly footprints! But who could have entered the room during his absence? And where was the invader? At the same time he perceived that his reading lamp had been overturned and was lying on the floor, broken.

Filled with a vague anxiety, he returned to the door he had just closed. As he laid his hand upon it, a shot rang through the house--a cry--the sound of a fierce voice--a fall.

And the next minute the door he held was violently burst open in his face, he himself was knocked backward over a chair, and a man carrying a gun, whose face was muffled in some dark material, rushed across the room, leapt through the window, and disappeared into the night.

* * * * *

Faversham ran into the gallery. The first thing he saw was the Nattier portrait lying on its face beside a chair overturned. Beyond it, a dark object on the floor. At the same moment, he perceived Dixon standing horror-struck, at the farther end of the gallery, with the handle of the door leading to the servants' quarters still in his grasp. Then the old man too ran.

The two men were brought up by the same obstacle. The body of Edmund Melrose lay between them.

Melrose had fallen on his face. As Faversham and Dixon lifted him, they saw that he was still breathing, though _in extremis_. He had been shot through the breast, and a pool of blood lay beneath him, blotting out the faded blues and yellow greens of a Persian carpet.

At the command of her husband, Mrs. Dixon, who had hurried after him, ran for brandy, crying also for help. Faversham snatched a cushion, put it under the dying man's head, and loosened his clothing. Melrose's eyelids fluttered once or twice, then sank. With a low groan, a gush of blood from the mouth, he passed away while Dixon prayed.

"May the Lord have mercy--mercy!"

The old man rocked to and fro beside the corpse in an anguish. Mrs. Dixon coming with the brandy in her hand was stopped by a gesture from Faversham.

"No use!" He touched Dixon on the shoulder. "Dixon--this is murder! You must go at once for Doctor Undershaw and the police. Take the motor. Mrs. Dixon and I will stay here. But first--tell me--after I spoke to you here--did you go in to Mr. Melrose?"

"I knocked, sir. But he shouted to me--angry like--to go away--till he rang. I went back to t' kitchen, and I had nobbut closed yon door behind me--when I heard t' firin'. I brast it open again--an' saw a man--wi' summat roun' his head--fleein' doon t' gallery. My God!--my God!--"

"The man who did it was in the gallery while you and I were speaking to each other," said Faversham, calmly, as he rose; "and he got in through my window, while I was with Mr. Melrose." He described briefly the passage of the murderer through his own room. "Tell the police to have the main line stations watched without a moment's delay. The man's game would be to get to one or other of them across country. There'll be no marks on him--he fired from a distance--but his boots are muddy. About five foot ten I should think--a weedy kind of fellow. Go and wake Tonson, and be back as quick as you possibly can. And listen!--on your way to the stables call the gardener. Send him for the farm men, and tell them to search the garden, and the woods by the river. They'll find me there. Or stay--one of them can come here, and remain with Mrs. Dixon, while I'm gone. Let them bring lanterns--quick!"

In less than fifteen minutes the motor, with Dixon and the new chauffeur, Tonson, had left the Tower, and was rushing at forty miles an hour along the Pengarth road.

Meanwhile, Faversham and the farm-labourers were searching the garden, the hanging woods, and the river banks. Footprints were found all along the terrace, and it was plain that the murderer had climbed the low enclosing wall. But beyond, and all in the darkness, nothing could be traced.

Faversham returned to the house, and began to examine the gallery. The hiding-place of Melrose's assailant was soon discovered. Behind the Nattier portrait, and the carved and gilt chair which Melrose had himself moved from its place in the morning, there were muddy marks on the floor and the wainscotting, which showed that a man had been crouching there. The picture, a large and imposing canvas--Marie Leczinska, sitting on a blue sofa, in a gala dress of rose-pink velvet with trimming of black fur--had been more than sufficient to conceal him. Then--had he knocked to attract Melrose's attention, having ascertained from Dixon's short colloquy at the library door, after Faversham had left the room, that the master of the Tower was still within?--or had Melrose suddenly come out into the gallery, perhaps to give some order to Dixon?

Faversham thought the latter more probable. As Melrose appeared, the murderer had risen hastily from his hiding-place, upsetting the picture and the chair. Melrose had received a charge of duck shot full in the breast, with fatal effect. The range was so short that the shot had scattered but little. A few pellets, however, could be traced in the wooden frames of the tapestries; and one had broken a majolica dish standing on a cabinet.

A man of the people then--using probably some old muzzle-loader, begged or borrowed? Faversham's thought ran to the young fellow who had denounced Melrose with such fervour at Mainstairs the day of Lydia Penfold's visit to the stricken village. But, good heavens!--there were a score of men on Melrose's estate, with at least as good reason--or better--for shooting, as that man. Take the Brands! But old Brand was gone to his rest, the elder son had sailed for Canada, and the younger seemed to be a harmless, half-witted chap, of no account.

Yet, clearly the motive had been revenge, not burglary. There were plenty of costly trifles on the tables and cabinets of the gallery. Not one of them had been touched.

Faversham moved to and fro in the silence, while Mrs. Dixon sat moaning to herself beside the dead man, whose face she had covered. The lavish electric light in the gallery, which had been Melrose's latest whim, shone upon its splendid contents; on the nymphs and cupids, the wreaths and temples of the Boucher tapestries, on the gleaming surfaces of the china, the dull gold of the _ormolu_. The show represented the desires, the huntings, the bargains of a lifetime; and in its midst lay Melrose, tripped at last, silenced at last, the stain of his life-blood spreading round him.

Faversham looked down upon him, shuddering. Then perceiving that the door into the library stood ajar, he entered the room. There stood the chair on which he had leant, when the chains of his slavery fell from him. There--on the table--was the jewel--the little Venus with fluttering enamel drapery, standing tiptoe within her hoop of diamonds, which he had seen Melrose take up and handle during their dispute. Why was it there? Faversham had no idea.

And there on the writing-desk lay a large sheet of paper with a single line written upon it in Melrose's big and sprawling handwriting. That was new. It had not been there, when Faversham last stood beside the table. The pen was thrown down upon it, and a cigar lay in the ashtray, as though the writer had been disturbed either by a sudden sound, or by the irruption of some thought which had led him into the gallery to call Dixon.

Faversham stooped to look at it:

"I hereby revoke all the provisions of the will executed by me on ..."

No more. The paper was worthless. The will would stand. Faversham stood motionless, the silence booming in his ears.

"A fool would put that in his pocket," he said to himself, contemptuously. Then conscious of a new swarm of ideas assailing him, of new dangers, and a new wariness, he returned to the gallery, pacing it till the police appeared. They came in force, within the hour, accompanied by Undershaw.

* * * * *

The old chiming clock set in the garden-front of Duddon had not long struck ten. Cyril Boden had just gone to bed. Victoria sat with her feet on the fender in Tatham's study still discussing with him Felicia's astonishing performance of the afternoon. She found him eagerly interested in it, to a degree which surprised her; and they passed from it only to go zealously together into various plans for the future of mother and daughter--plans as intelligent as they were generous. The buzz of a motor coming up the drive surprised them. There were no visitors in the house, and none expected. Victoria rose in amazement as Undershaw walked into the room.

"A horrible thing has happened. I felt that you must know before anybody--with those two poor things in your house. Dixon has told me that Miss Melrose saw her father this afternoon. I have come to bring you the sequel."

He told his story. Mother and son turned pale looks upon each other. Within a couple of hours of the moment when he had turned his daughter from his doors! Seldom indeed do the strokes of the gods fall so fitly. There was an awful satisfaction in the grim story to some of the deepest instincts of the soul.

"Some poor devil he has ruined, I suppose!" said Tatham, his grave young face lifted to the tragic height of the event. "Any clue?"

"None--except that, as I have told you, Faversham himself saw the murderer, except his face, and Dixon saw his back. A slight man in corduroys--that's all Dixon can say. Faversham and the Dixons were alone in the house, except for a couple of maids. Perhaps"--he hesitated--"I had better tell you some other facts that Faversham told me--and the Superintendent of Police. They will of course come out at the inquest. He and Melrose had had a violent quarrel immediately before the murder. Melrose threatened to revoke his will, and Faversham left him, understanding that all dispositions in his favour would be cancelled. He came out of the room, spoke to Dixon in the gallery and walked to his own sitting-room. Melrose apparently sat down at once to write a codicil revoking the will. He was disturbed, came out into the gallery, and was shot dead. The few lines he wrote are of course of no validity. The will holds, and Faversham is the heir--to everything. You see"--he paused again--"some awkward suggestions might be made."

"But," cried Tatham, "you say Dixon saw the man? And the muddy footmarks--in the house--and on the terrace!"

* * * * *

"Don't mistake me, for heaven's sake," said Undershaw, quickly. "It is impossible that Faversham should have fired the shot! But in the present state of public opinion you will easily imagine what else may be said. There is a whole tribe of Melrose's hangers-on who hate Faversham like poison; who have been plotting to pull him down, and will be furious to find him after all in secure possession of the estate and the money. I feel tolerably certain they will put up some charge or other."

"What--of procuring the thing?"

Undershaw nodded.

Tatham considered a moment. Then he rang, and when Hurst appeared, all white and disorganized under the stress of the news just communicated to him by Undershaw's chauffeur, he ordered his horse for eight o'clock in the morning. Victoria looked at him puzzled; then it seemed she understood.

But every other thought was soon swallowed up in the remembrance of the widow and daughter.

"Not to-night--not to-night," pleaded Undershaw who had seen Netta Melrose professionally, only that morning. "I dread the mere shock for Mrs. Melrose. Let them have their sleep! I will be over early to-morrow."

XXI

By the first dawn of the new day Tatham was in the saddle. Just as he was starting from the house, there arrived a messenger, and a letter was put into his hand. It was from Undershaw, who, on leaving Duddon the night before, had motored back to the Tower, and taken Faversham in charge. The act bore testimony to the little doctor's buffeted but still surviving regard for this man, whom he had pulled from the jaws of death. He reported in his morning letter that he had passed some of the night in conversation with Faversham, and wished immediately to pass on certain facts learnt from it, first of all to Tatham, and then to any friend of Faversham's they might concern.

He told, accordingly, the full story of the gems, leading up to the quarrel between the two men, as Faversham had told it to him.

"Faversham," he wrote, "left the old man, convinced that all was at an end as to the will and the inheritance. And now he is as much the heir as ever! I find him bewildered; for his _mind_, in that tragic half-hour, had absolutely renounced. What he will do, no one can say. As to the murderer, we have discussed all possible clues--with little light. But the morning will doubtless bring some new facts. That Faversham has not the smallest fraction of responsibility for the murder is clear to any sane man who talks with him. But that there will be a buzz of slanderous tongues as soon as ever the story is public property, I am convinced. So I send you these fresh particulars as quickly as possible--for your guidance."

Tatham thrust the letter into his pocket, and rode away through the December dawn. His mother would soon be in the thick of her own task with the two unconscious ones at Duddon. _His_ duty lay--with Lydia! The "friend" was all alive in him, reaching out to her in a manly and generous emotion.

The winter sunrise was a thing of beauty. It chimed with the intensity of feeling in the young man's breast. The sky was a light saffron over the eastern fells, and the mountains rose into it indistinguishably blue, the light mists wrapped about their feet. Among the mists, plane behind plane, the hedgerow trees, still faintly afire with their last leaf, stood patterned on the azure of the fells. And as he rode on, the first rays of the light mounting a gap in the Helvellyn range struck upon the valleys below. The shadows ran blue along the frosty grass; here and there the withered leaf began to blaze; the streams rejoiced. Under their sycamores and yews, the white-walled farms sent up their morning smoke; the cocks were crowing; and as he mounted the upland on which the cottage stood, from a height in front of him, a tiny church--one of the smallest and loneliest in the fells--sent forth a summoning bell. The sound, with all its weight of association, sank and echoed through the morning stillness; the fells repeated it, a voice of worship toward God, of appeal toward man.

In Tatham, fashioned to the appeal by all the accidents of blood and nurture, the sound made for a deepened spirit and a steadied mood. He pressed on toward the little house and garden that now began to show through the trees.

Lydia had not long come downstairs when she heard the horse at the gate. The cottage breakfast was nominally at half-past eight. But Mrs. Penfold never appeared, and Susy was always professionally late, it being understood that inspiration--when it alights--is a midnight visitant, and must be wooed at suitable hours.

Lydia was generally down to the minute, and read prayers to their two maids. Mrs. Penfold made a great point of family prayers, but rarely or never attended them. Susy did not like to be read to by anybody. Lydia therefore had the little function to herself. She chose her favourite psalms, and prayers from the most various sources. The maids liked it because they loved Lydia; and Lydia, having once begun, would not willingly have given it up.

But the ceremony was over; and she had just opened the casement to see who their visitor might be, when Tatham rode up to the porch.

"May I speak to you for ten minutes?"

His aspect warned her of things unusual. He tied up his horse, and she took him into their little sitting-room, and closed the door.

"You haven't seen a newspaper?"

She assured him their post would not arrive from Keswick for another hour, and stood expectant.

"I wanted to tell you before any one else, because there are things to explain. We're friends--Lydia?"

He approached her eagerly. His colour had leapt; but his eyes reassured.

"Always," she said simply, and she put her hand in his.

Then he told her. He saw her waver, and sink, ghost-like, on a chair. It was clear enough that the news had for her no ordinary significance. His heart knew pain--the reflex of a past anguish; only to be lost at once in the desire to soothe and shield her.

"Mr. Faversham was there?" she asked him, trembling.

"He did not see the shot fired. The murderer rushing from the gallery brushed past him as he was coming out of his room, and escaped."

"There had been a quarrel?"

He gave her in outline the contents of Undershaw's letter.

"He still inherits?" Her eyes, shone as he came to the climax of the story--Faversham's refusal of the gems--Melrose's threat. The trembling of her delicate mouth urged him for more--and yet more--light.

"Everything--land, money, collections--under the will made in August. You see"--he added, sorely against his will, yet compelled, by the need of protecting her from shock--"the opportuneness of the murder. Their relations had been very bad for some time."

"Opportuneness?" She just breathed it. He put out his hand again, and took hers.

"You know--Faversham has enemies?"

She nodded.

"I've been one myself," he said frankly. "I believe you knew it. But this thing's brought me up sharp. One may think as one likes of Faversham's conduct--but you knew--and I know--that he's not the man to pay another man to commit murder!"

"And that's what they'll say?" The colour had rushed back into her cheeks.

"That's what some fool _might_ say, because of the grudge against him. Well, now, we've got to find the murderer!" He rose, speaking in his most cheerful and practical voice, "I'm going on to see what the police have been doing. The inquest will probably begin to-morrow. But I wanted to prevent your being startled by this horrible news. Trust me to let you know--and to help--all I can."

Then for a moment, he seemed to lose his self-possession. He stood before her awkwardly conscious--a moral trespasser--who might have been passing bounds. But it was her turn to be frank. She came and put both her hands on his arm--looking up--drawing her breath with difficulty.

"Harry, I'm going to tell you. I ought to have told you more that night--but how could I? It was only just then I knew--that I cared. A little later Mr. Faversham asked me to marry him, and I refused, because--because of this money. I couldn't take it--I begged him not to. Never mind!" She threw her head back, gulping down tears. "He thought me unreasonable. But--"

"He refused--and left you!" cried Tatham, drinking in the sweetness of her pale beauty, as Orpheus might have watched the vanishing Eurydice.

"He had such great ambitions--as to what he'd do--with this money," she said, lightly brushing her wet eyes, and trying to smile. "It wasn't the mere fortune! Oh, I knew that!"

Tatham was silent. But he gently touched her hand with his own.

"You'll stand by him?--if he needs it?" she asked piteously.

He assured her. Then, suddenly, raising herself on tiptoe, she kissed him on the cheek. The blood flew into his face, and bending forward--timidly--he laid his lips on her soft brow. There was a pledge in it--and a farewell. She drew herself away.

"The first--and the last," she said, smiling, and sighing. "Now we're comrades. I await your news. Tell me if I can help--throw light? I know the people--the neighbourhood, well. And when you see Mr. Faversham, greet him from me. Tell him his friends here feel with him--and for him. And as to what you say--ah, no!--I'm not going to believe--I can't believe--that any one can have such--such vile thoughts! The truth will soon come out!"

She held herself steadily.

"We must find the-murderer," Tatham repeated, and took up his cap.

* * * * *

Lydia was left alone in the little breakfast-room. Susy could be heard moving about overhead; she would be down directly. Meanwhile the winter sunshine came broadly in; the singing of the tea-kettle, the crackle of the fire made domestic music. But Lydia's soul was far away. It stood beside Faversham, exulting.

"Free!"--she said to herself, passionately--"free!" and then with the hyperbole of love--"I talked and moralized--he _did it_!"

A splendid pride in him possessed her; so that for long she scarcely realized the tragedy of the murder, or the horror of the slanderous suspicion now starting through the dales. But yet, long before the day was over, she was conquered by grief and fear--a very miserable and restless Lydia. No word came from him; and she could not write. These were men's affairs, and women must hold their peace. Yet, in spirit, as the hours passed, she gave herself wholly to the man she loved; she glorified him; she trampled on her own past doubts; she protected him against a world in arms. The plant of love grew fast and furiously--watered by pity--by indignation.

Meanwhile Susy treated her sister very kindly. She specially insisted on ordering dinner, and writing various business letters; though Lydia would have been thankful to do both. And when the evening came on, Mrs. Penfold trembling with excitement and horror, chattered endlessly about the murder, as each visitor to the cottage brought some fresh detail. Lydia seldom answered her. She sat on the floor, with her face against her mother's knee, while the soft, silly voice above her head rambled and rambled on.

* * * * *

Tatham rode back to Pengarth. As he approached one of the lodge gates of Duddon, a man came toward him on a bicycle. Boden, hot and dishevelled, dismounted as he saw Tatham.

"I thought I should just meet you. Lady Tatham has had a telephone message from the Chief Constable, Colonel Marvell. There is a man missing--and a gun. Brand's younger son has not been seen for thirty-six hours. He has been helping Andover's head keeper for part of the year, as a watcher; and this man, Simpson, had let him have an old gun of his--a muzzle-loader--some months ago. That gun can't be found."

Tatham sat thunderstruck, lights breaking on his face.

"Well--there was cause enough."

Boden's eyes shone.

"Cause? It smelled to heaven! Wild justice--if you like! I was in the house yesterday afternoon," he added quietly, "just before the old man died."

"You were?" cried Tatham, amazed. Yet he knew well that whenever Boden came to recruit at Duddon, he spent half of his time among the fell-farms and cottages. His mind was invincibly human, greedy of common life and incident, whether in London or among the dales. He said little of his experiences at Duddon; not a word, for instance, to Tatham or Victoria, the night before, had revealed his own share in the old farmer's death scene; but, casually, often, some story would drop out, some unsuspected facts about their next-door neighbours, their very own people, which would set Victoria and Tatham looking at each other, and wondering.

He turned now to walk beside Tatham's horse. His plain face with its beautiful eyes, and lanky straying hair, spoke of a ruminating mind.

Tatham asked if there was any news from the railway.

"No trace so far, anywhere. All the main line stations have been closely watched. But Marvell is of opinion that if young Brand had anything to do with it he would certainly give the railway a wide berth. He is much more likely to take to the fells. They tell the most extraordinary tales of his knowledge of the mountains--especially in snow and wild weather. They say that shepherds who have lost sheep constantly go to him for help!"

"--You know him?"

"I have talked to him sometimes. A queer sulky fellow with one or two fixed ideas. He certainly hated Melrose. Whether he hated him enough to murder him is another question. When I visited them, the mother told me that Will had rushed out of the house the night before, because he could not endure the sight of his father's sufferings. The jury I suppose will have to know that. Well!--You were going on to Pengarth?"

Tatham assented. Boden paused, leaning on his bicycle.

"Take Threlfall on your way. I think Faversham would like to see you. There are some strange things being said. Preposterous things! The hatred is extraordinary."

The two men eyed each other gravely. Boden added:

"I have been telling your mother that I think I shall go over to Threlfall for a bit, if Faversham will have me."

Tatham wondered again. Faversham, prosperous, had been, it seemed to him, a special target for Boden's scorn, expressed with a fine range of revolutionary epithet.

But calamity of any kind--for this queer saint--was apt to change all the values of things.

They were just separating when Tatham, with sudden compunction, asked for news of Mrs. Melrose, and Felicia.

"I had almost forgotten them!"

"Your mother did not tell me much. They were troubled about Mrs. Melrose, I think, and Undershaw was coming. The poor little girl turned very white--no tears--but she was clinging to your mother."

Tatham's face softened, but he said nothing. The road to Threlfall presented itself, and he turned his horse toward it.

"And Miss Penfold?" said Boden, quietly. "You arrived before the newspapers? Good. I think, before I return, I shall go and have a talk with Miss Penfold."

And mounting his bicycle he rode off. Tatham looking after him, felt uncomfortably certain that Boden knew pretty well all there was to know about Lydia--Faversham--and himself. But he did not resent it.

Tatham found Threlfall a beleaguered place, police at the gates and in the house; the chief constable and the Superintendent of police established in the dining-room, as the only room tolerably free from the all encumbering collections, and interviewing one person after another.

Tatham asked to see the chief constable. He made his way into the gallery, which was guarded by police, for although the body of Melrose had been removed to an upper room, the blood-stain on the Persian carpet, the overturned chair and picture, the mud-marks on the wall remained untouched, awaiting the coroner's jury, which was to meet in the house that evening.

As Tatham approached the room which was now the headquarters of the police, he met coming out of it a couple of men; one small and sinewy, with the air of a disreputable athlete, the other a tall pasty-faced man in a shabby frock coat, with furtive eyes. The first was Nash, Melrose's legal factotum through many years; the other was one of the clerks in the Pengarth office, who was popularly supposed to have made much money out of the Threlfall estate, through a long series of small peculations never discovered by his miserly master. They passed Tatham with downcast eyes and an air of suppressed excitement which did not escape him. He found the chief constable pacing up and down, talking in subdued tones, and with a furrowed brow, to the Superintendent of police.

"Come in, come in," said Marvell heartily, at sight of the young man, who was the chief landowner of the district, and likely within a couple of years to be its lord lieutenant. "We want your help. Everything points to young Brand, and there is much reason to think he is still in the neighbourhood. What assistance can you give us?"

Tatham promised a band of searchers from the estate. The Duddon estate itself included a great deal of mountain ground, some of the loneliest and remotest in the district, where a man who knew the fells might very well take hiding. Marvell brought out a map, and they pored over it.

The superintendent of police departed.

Then Marvell, with a glance at the door to see that it was safely shut, said abruptly:

"You know, Faversham has done some unlucky things!"

Tatham eyed him interrogatively.

"It has come out that he was in the Brands' cottage about a week ago, and that he left money with the family. He says he never saw the younger son, and did not in fact know him by sight. He offered the elder one some money in order to help him with his Canadian start. The lad refused, not being willing, so his mother says--I have seen her myself this morning--to accept anything from Melrose's agent. But she, not knowing where to look for the expenses of her husband's illness, took five pounds from Faversham, and never dared tell either of her sons."

"All perfectly straightforward and natural," said Tatham.

Marvell looked worried.

"Yes. But you see how the thing may be twisted by men like those two--curs!--who have just been here. You saw them? They came, ostensibly, to answer my questions as to whether they could point us to any one with a particular grudge against Mr. Melrose."

"They could have named you a hundred!" interrupted Tatham.

"No doubt. But what their information in the end amounted to"--the chief constable came to stand immediately in front of Tatham, lowering his voice--"was that the only person with a really serious motive for destroying Melrose, was"--he jerked his thumb in the direction of Faversham's sitting-room--"our friend! They claim--both of them--to have been spectators of the growing friction between the two men. Nash says that Melrose had spoken to him once or twice of revoking, or altering his will; and both of them declare that Faversham was quite aware of the possibility. Of course these things were brought out apologetically--you understand!--with a view of 'giving Mr. Faversham the opportunity of meeting the reports in circulation,' and so on--'calming public opinion'--and the rest of it. But I see how they will work it up! Then, of course, that the man got access to the house through Faversham's room--Faversham's window left open, and the light left burning--by his own story--is unfortunate."

"But what absurdity," cried Tatham, indignantly, as he rose. "As if the man to profit by the plot would have left that codicil on the table!"

Marvell shrugged his shoulders.

"That too might be twisted. Why not a supremely clever stroke? Well, of course the thing is absurd--but disagreeable--considering the circumstances. The moral is--find the man! Good-day, Lord Tatham. I understand you will have fifty men out by this evening, assisting the police in their search?"

"At least," said Tatham, and departed.

Outside, after a moment's hesitation, he inquired of the police in charge whether Faversham was in his room. Being told that he was, he asked leave to pass along the gallery. An officer took him in charge, and he stepped, not without a shudder, past the blood-stained spot, where a cruel spirit had paid its debt. The man who led him pointed out the picture, the chair, the marks of the muddy soles on the wainscotting, and along the gallery--reconstructing the murder, in low tones, as though the dead man still lay there. A hideous oppression indeed hung over the house. Melrose's ghost held it.

The police officer knocked at Faversham's door. "Would Mr. Faversham receive Lord Tatham?"

Faversham, risen from his writing-table, looked at his visitor in a dull astonishment.

"I have come to bring you a message," said Tatham advancing, neither man offering to shake hands. "I saw Miss Penfold early this morning--before she got the newspapers. She wished me to bring you her--her sympathy. She was very much shocked." He spoke with a certain boyish embarrassment. But his blue eyes looked very straight at Faversham.

Faversham changed colour a little, and thanked him. But his aspect was that of a man worn out, incapable for the time of the normal responses of feeling. He showed no sense of strangeness, with regard to Tatham's visit, though for weeks they had not been on speaking terms. Absently offering his visitor a chair, he talked a little--disjointedly--of the events of the preceding evening, with frequent pauses for recollection.

Tatham eyed him askance.

"I say! I suppose you had no sleep?"

Faversham smiled.

"Look here--hadn't you better come to us to-night?--get out of this horrible place?" exclaimed Tatham, on a sudden but imperative impulse.

"To Duddon?" Faversham shook his head. "Thank you--impossible." Then he looked up. "Undershaw told you what I told him?"

Tatham assented. There was an awkward pause--broken at last by Faversham.

"How did Miss Melrose get home?"

"Luckily I came across her at the foot of the Duddon hill, and I helped her home. She's all right--though of course it's a ghastly shock for them."

"I never knew she was here--till she had gone," exclaimed Faversham, with sudden animation, "Otherwise--I should have helped her."

He stood erect, his pale look fixed threateningly on Tatham.

"I'm sure you would," said Tatham, heartily. "Well now, I must be off. I have promised Marvell to put as many men as possible to work in with the police. You have no idea at all as to the identity of the man who ran past you?"

"None!" Faversham repeated the word, as though groping in his memory. "None. I never saw Will Brand that I can recollect. But the description of him seems to tally with the man who knocked me over."

"Well, we'll find him," said Tatham briskly. "Any message for Green Cottage?"

"My best thanks. I am very grateful to them."

The words were formal. He sank heavily into his chair, as though wishing to end the interview. Tatham departed.

* * * * *

The inquest opened in the evening. Faversham and the Dixons gave their evidence. So did Undershaw and the police. The jury viewed the body, and leave to bury was granted. Then the inquiry adjourned.

For some ten days afterward, the whole of the Lake district hung upon the search for Brand. From the Scawfell and Buttermere group on its western verge, to the Ullswater mountains on the east; from Skiddaw and Blencathra on the north, southward through all the shoulders and edges, the tarns and ghylls of the Helvellyn range; through the craggy fells of Thirlmere, Watendlath, Easedale; over the high plateaus that run up to the Pikes, and fall in precipice to Stickle Tarn; through the wild clefts and corries of Bowfell, the Crinkles, Wetherlam and the Old Man; over the desolate backs and ridges that stretch from Kirkstone to Kentmere and Long Sleddale, the great man-hunt passed, enlisting ever fresh feet, and fresh eyes in its service. Every shepherd on the high fells became a detective, speeding news, or urging suggestions, by the old freemasonry of their tribe; while every farmhouse in certain dales, within reach of the scene of the murder, sent out its watchers by day and night, eagerly contributing its men and its wits to the chase.

For in this chase there was a hidden motive which found no expression in the local papers; of which men spoke to each other under their breaths, when they spoke at all; but which none the less became in a very short time, by the lightning spread of a few evil reports, through the stubble of popular resentment, the animating passion at the heart of it. The police and Faversham's few friends were searching for the murderer of Melrose; the public in general were soon hunting Faversham's accomplice. The discovery of Will Brand meant, in the one case, the arrest of a poor crazy fellow who had avenged by murder his father's persecution and ruin; in the other case, it meant the unmasking of an educated and smooth-spoken villain, who, finding a vast fortune in danger, had taken ingenious means to secure it. In this black suspicion there spoke the accumulated hatred of years, stored up originally, in the mind of a whole countryside, against a man who had flouted every law of good citizenship, and strained every legal right of property to breaking point; and discharging itself now, with pent-up force, upon the tyrant's tool, conceived as the murderous plotter for his millions. To realize the strength of the popular feeling, as it presently revealed itself, was to look shuddering into things elemental.

It was first made plain on the day of Melrose's funeral. In order to avoid the concourse which might attend a burial in Whitebeck parish church, lying near the main road, and accessible from many sides, it was determined to bury him in the graveyard of the little mountain chapel on the fell above the Penfolds' cottage. The hour was sunrise; and all the preparations had been as secretly made as possible. But when the dark December morning arrived, with sleet showers whitening all the slopes of Helvellyn and the gashed breast of Blencathra, a dense crowd thronged all the exits of the Tower, and lined the steep lanes leading to the chapel. Faversham, Cyril Boden, and a Carlisle solicitor occupied the only carriage which followed the hearse. Tatham and his mother met the doleful procession at the chapel. Lady Tatham, very pale and queenly, walked hand in hand with a slight girl in mourning. As the multitude outside the churchyard caught sight of the pair, a thrill ran through its ranks. Melrose's daughter, and rightful heiress--disinherited, and supplanted--by the black-haired man standing bareheaded behind the coffin. The crowd endured the mockery of the burial service in a sullen silence. Not a head uncovered. Not a voice joined in the responses.

Felicia threw back her veil, and the onlookers pressed to the churchyard railings to see the delicate face, with its strong likeness to her father. She meanwhile saw only Tatham. Her eyes were fixed on him from first to last.

But there were two other ladies in the churchyard. After the hurried ceremony was over, one of them approached Faversham. He took her hand in silence, looking down into the eyes--the soul--of Lydia. With what angelic courage and cheer that look was charged, only its recipient knew.

"Come and see us," she said, softly.

He shook his head, with a look of pain. Then he pressed her hand and they separated. As he appeared at the churchyard gate, about to enter the carriage which was waiting, a grim low groan ran through the throng which filled the lane. There was something in the sound to strike a shiver through the strongest. Faversham grew perhaps a little paler, but as he seated himself in the carriage he examined the scowling faces near him with a quiet indifference, which scarcely altered when Tatham came conspicuously to the carriage-door to bid him farewell.

The days that followed reminded some of the older dalesmen of the stories told by their fathers of the great and famous hunt, a century ago, after the sheep-slaying "dog of Ennerdale," who for five months held a whole district at bay; appearing and disappearing phantom-like among the crags and mists of the high fells, keeping shepherds and farming-folk in perpetual excitement, watched for by night and day, hunted by hounds and by men, yet never to be captured; frightening lovers from their trysts, and the children from school; a presence and a terror prevading men's minds, and suspending the ordinary operations of life. So in some sort was it with the hunt for Will Brand. It was firmly believed that in the course of it he was twice seen; once in the loneliness of Skiddaw Forest, not far from the gamekeeper's hut, the only habitation in that moorland waste; and once in a storm on the slopes of Great Dodd, when a shepherd, "latin" his sheep, had suddenly perceived a wild-looking fellow, with a gun between his knees, watching him from the shelter of a rock. So far from making any effort to capture the man, the shepherd had fled in terror; but both neighbours and police firmly believed that he had seen the murderer. There were also various mysterious thefts of food reported from mountain farms, indications hotly followed up but to no purpose. Would the culprit, starved out, be forced in time to surrender; or would he die of privation and exposure among the high fells, in the snowdrifts, and leave the spring, when it came, to uncover his bones?

Toward the end of the month the snowstorms of its earlier days passed into a chilly and continuous rain; there was still snow on the heights. The steady downpour presently flooded the rivers, and sent the streams racing in torrents down the hills.

Christmas was over. The new year was at hand. One afternoon, Boden, oppressed in spirit, sallied forth from the Tower into the floods and mists of St. John's Vale. He himself had taken no part in the great pursuit. He believed now that the poor hunted creature would find his lonely end among the wintry mountains, and rejoiced to think it might be so. The adjourned inquest was to be resumed the following day, and no doubt some verdict would be returned. It was improbable, in spite of the malice at work, that any attempt would be made--legally--to incriminate Faversham.

It was of Faversham that he was chiefly thinking. When he had first proposed his companionship, the day after the murder, it had been quietly accepted, with a softened look of surprise, and he and Undershaw had since kept watch over a bewildered man, protecting him as far as they could from the hostile world at his gates.

How he would emerge--what he meant to do with Melrose's vast heritage, Boden had no idea. His life seemed to have shrunk into a dumb, trancelike state. He rarely or never left the house; he could not be induced to go either to Duddon or to the Cottage; nor would he receive visitors. He had indeed seen his solicitors, but had said not a word to Boden on the subject. It was rumoured that Nash was already endeavouring to persuade a distant cousin of Melrose and Lady Tatham to dispute the will.

Meanwhile, through Boden, Lydia Penfold had been kept in touch with a man who could not apparently bring himself to reopen their relation. Boden saw her nearly every day; they had become fast friends. Victoria too was as often at the cottage as the state of Netta Melrose allowed, and she and Lydia, born to understand each other, had at last arrived thereat.

But Mrs. Melrose was dying; and her little daughter, a more romantic figure than ever, in the public eye, was to find, it said, a second mother in Lady Tatham.

The rain clouds were swirling through the dale, as Boden reached its middle point, pushing his way against a cold westerly blast. The stream, which in summer chatters so gently to the travellers beside it, was rushing in a brown swift flood, and drowning the low meadows on its western bank. He mounted a stone foot-bridge to look at it, when, of a sudden, the curtain of cloud shrouding Blencathra was torn aside, and its high ridge, razor-sharp, appeared spectrally white, a seat of the storm-god, in a far heaven. The livid lines of just-fallen snow, outlining the cliffs and ravines of the great mountain, stamped its majesty, visionlike, on the senses. Below it, some scattered woods, inky black, bent under the storm, and the crash and darkness of the lower air threw into clear relief the pallid splendour of the mountain-top.

Boden stood enthralled, when a voice said at his elbow:

"Yo're oot on a clashy night, Muster Boden!"

He turned. Beside him stood the fugitive!--grinning weakly. Boden beheld a tottering and ghastly figure. Distress--mortal fatigue--breathed from the haggard emaciation of face and limbs. Round the shoulders was folded a sack, from which the dregs of some red dipping mixture it had once contained had dripped over the youth's chest and legs, his tattered clothes and broken boots, in streams of what, to Boden's startled sense, looked like blood. And under the slouched hat, a pair of sunken eyes looked out, expressing the very uttermost of human despair.

"Brand!--where have you been?"

"Don't touch me, sir! I'll go--don't touch me! There ha' been hunnerds after me--latin me on t' fells. They've not catcht me--an' they'd not ha' catcht me noo--but I'm wore oot. I ha' been followin yo' this half-hour, Muster Boden. I could ha' put yo' i' the river fasst enoof."

A ghastly chuckle in the darkness. Boden considered.

"Well, now--are you going to give yourself up? You see--I can do nothing to force you! But if you take my advice, you'll go quietly with me, to the police--you'll make a clean breast of it."

"Will they hang me, Muster Boden?"

"I don't think so," said Boden slowly. "What made you do it?"

"I'd planned it for months--I've follered owd Melrose many times--I've been close oop to 'im--when he had noa noshun whativver. I might ha' killt him--a doosen times over. He wor a devil--an' I paid him oot! I was creepin' round t' hoose that night--and ov a suddent, there was a door openin', an' a light. It seemed to be God sayin', 'Theer's a way, mon! go in, and do't! So I went in. An' I saw Muster Faversham coom oot--an' Dixon. An' I knew that he wor there--alone--the owd fox!--an' I waited--an' oot he came. I shot 'un straight, Muster Boden! I shot 'un straight!"

"You never told any one what you were going to do, Brand? Nobody helped you?"

"Not a soul! I'm not yo'r blabbin' sort! But now I'm done--I'm clemmed!"

And he tottered against the bridge as he spoke. Baden caught him.

"Can you walk with my help? I have some brandy."

And taking from his pocket the tiny flask that a man with a weak heart is apt to carry, he put it into a shaking hand. Brand drank it greedily.

They stumbled on together, down the narrow road, through the streaming rain. It was a mile to the Whitebeck police station. Brand gave a gasping, incoherent account of his doings during his ten days of hiding--the various barns and outhouses he had sheltered in--the food he had been able to steal--the narrow escapes he had run. And every now and then, the frenzy of his hatred for the murdered man would break in, and he would throw out hints of the various mad schemes he had entertained at different times for the destruction of his enemy.

But presently he ceased to talk. It was evident that his weakness was great; he clung heavily to Boden's arm.

They reached a point where a road branched to the left. A roar of furious water greeted their ears.

"That's t' beck unner Wanthwaite Bridge," said Brand feebly. "Wait a bit, sir."

He sank down on a stone by the roadside. Through the trees on the left the foaming river glimmered in the departing light. Boden bent over him, encouraging him with the promise of shelter and food, murmuring also of God, the help of the sinner. Suddenly the lad leapt up.

"Aye! that'll end it!--an' a good job!"

He began to run up the left-hand road. Boden pursued him, struggled with him, but in vain. Brand threw him off, reached the bridge, mounted the parapet, and from there flung himself headlong into the spate rushing furiously below.

At the same moment a dog-cart driven by two young farmers appeared on the main road of the valley. Boden's shouts reached them, and they came to his aid. But Brand had disappeared. The river swept him down like a withered branch; and it was many hours before the body was recovered, half a mile from the spot where he sank.

XXII

Boden was just coming to the end of his evidence. The adjourned inquest on Melrose, held in the large parlour of the old Whitebeck inn, was densely crowded, and the tension of a charged moment might be felt. Men sat gaping, their eyes wandering from the jury to the witness or the gray-haired coroner; to young Lord Tatham sitting beside the tall dark man who had been Mr. Melrose's agent, and was now the inheritor of his goods; to the alert and clean-shaven face of Undershaw, listening with the concentration of the scientific habit to the voice from the witness-box. And through the strained attention of the room there ran the stimulus of that gruesome new fact--the presence overhead of yet another dead man, dragged only some twenty-four hours earlier from the swollen waters of the river.

The murderer had been found--a comparatively simple proceeding. But, in the finding him, the ulcer of a hideous suspicion, spread by popular madness, and inflamed by popular hatred, had also been probed and cleansed. As Boden's evidence progressed, building up the story of Brand's sleuth-hound pursuit of his victim, and silently verified from point to point by the local knowledge of the audience, the change in the collective mind of this typical gathering of shepherds, farmers, and small tradesmen might have been compared to the sudden coming of soft weather into the iron tension, the black silence, of a great frost. Gales of compunction blew; of self-interest also; and the common judgment veered with them.

After the inevitable verdict had been recorded, a fresh jury was empanelled, and there was a stamping of sturdy Cumbrian feet up the inn stairs to view the pitiful remains of another human being, botched by Nature in the flesh, no less lamentably than Melrose in the spirit. The legal inquiry into Brand's flight and death was short and mostly formal; but the actual evidence--as compared with current gossip--of his luckless mother, now left sonless and husbandless, and as to the relations of the family with Faversham, hastened the melting process in the public mind. It showed a man in bondage indeed to a tyrant; but doing what he could to lighten the hand of the tyrant on others; privately and ineffectively generous; remorseful for the sins of another; and painfully aware of his mixed responsibility.

Yet naturally there were counter currents. Andover, the old Cumbrian squire, whose personal friction with Faversham had been sharpest, left the inn with a much puzzled mind, but not prepared as yet to surrender his main opinion of a young man, who after all had feathered his nest so uncommonly well. "They may say what they d--n please," said the furious and disappointed Nash, as he departed in company with his shabby accomplice, the sallow-faced clerk, "but he's walked off with the dibs, an' I suppose he thinks he'll jolly well keep 'em. The 'cutest young scoundrel I ever came across!" which, considering the range of the speaker's experience, was testimony indeed.

Regret, on the one hand, for a monstrous and exposed surmise; on the other, instinctive resentment of the man's huge, unearned luck under the will that Melrose would have revoked had he lived a few more hours, as contrasted with the plight of Felicia Melrose; between these poles men's minds went wavering. Colonel Barton stood at the door of the inn before Faversham emerged for a few undecided moments, and finally walked away, like Andover, with the irritable reflection that the grounds on which he had originally cut the young man still largely stood; and he was not going to kow-tow to mere money. He would go and have tea with Lady Tatham; she was a sensible woman. Harry's behaviour seemed to him sentimental.

Faversham, Boden, and Harry Tatham left the inn together and were joined by Undershaw outside. They walked silently through the irregular village street where groups stood at the cottage doors to see them pass. As they emerged upon the high road the three others perceived that they were alone. Faversham had disappeared.

"Where is he?" said Tatham, standing amazed and looking back. They had gained the crest of a hill whence, beyond the roofs of Whitebeck in the hollow, a section of the main road could be dimly seen, running west a white streak piercing the wintry dusk. Along the white streak moved something black--the figure of a man. Boden pointed to it.

"Where's he going?" The question fell involuntarily from Undershaw.

Boden did not reply. But as Undershaw spoke there flashed out a distant light on the rising ground beyond the streak of road. Above it, huddled shapes of mountains, dying fast into the darkness. They all knew it for a light in Green Cottage; the same that Tatham had watched from the Duddon moorland on the evening of the murder. They turned and walked on silently toward the lower gate of Duddon.

"What's he going to do about the money?" said Undershaw abruptly.

Boden turned upon him, almost with rage.

"For heaven's sake, give him time!--it's positively indecent to rush a man who's gone through what that man's gone through!"

Faversham pursued his way toward the swelling upland which looks south over St. John's Vale, and north toward Skiddaw. He went, led by a passionate impulse, sternly restrained till this moment. Led also by the vision of her face as it had been lifted to him beside the grave of Melrose. Since then he had never seen her. But that Boden had written to her that morning, early, after the recovery of Brand's body, he knew.

The moon shone suddenly behind him, across the waste of Flitterdale, and the lower meadows of St. John's Vale. It struck upon the low white house amid its trees.

"Is Miss Penfold at home?"

The maid recognized him at once, and in her agitation almost lost her head. As she led him in, a little figure in a white cap with streamers fluttered across the hall.

"_Oh_, Mr. Faversham!" said a soft, breathless voice.

But Mrs. Penfold did not stop to speak to him. Gathering up her voluminous black skirts, and her shawls that were falling off her shoulders, she hurried upstairs. There followed a thin girl with dark hair piled above dark eyes.

"Lydia is in the drawing-room," said Susy, with dramatic depth of voice; and the two disappeared.

When he entered, Lydia was standing by the fire. The light of some blazing wood, and of one small lamp, filled the pretty room with colour and soft shadows. Among them, the slender form in its black dress, the fair head thrown back, the outstretched hands were of a loveliness that arrested him--almost unmanned him.

She came forward.

"You've been so long coming!"

The intonation of the words expressed the yearning of many days and nights. They were not a reproach; rather, an exquisite revelation.

He took her hands, and slowly, irresistibly he drew her; and she came to him. He bowed his face upon hers, and the world stood still! Through the emotion of that supreme moment, with its mingled cup of joy and remembered bitterness there ran for him a touch of triumph natural to his temperament. She had asked no promise from him; reminded him of no condition; made no reservation. There she was upon his breast. The male pride in him was appeased. Self-respect seemed once more possible.

Hand in hand, they sat down together by the fire. He gave her an account of the double inquest, and the result.

"When we came out," he added, calmly, "there were not quite so many ready to lynch me as before."

Her hand trembled in his. The horror of his experience, the anguished sympathy of hers, spoke in the slight movement, and the pressure that answered it. Some day, but not yet, it would be possible to put it into words.

"And I might do nothing!" she breathed.

"Nothing!" He smiled upon her, but his tone brought a shudder--the shudder of the traveller who looks back upon the inch which has held him from the abyss. But for Cyril Boden's adventure of the night before, would she ever have seen him again?

"I was a long time with my solicitors this morning," he said abruptly.

"Yes?" She turned her face to his; but his morbid sense could detect in it no sign of any special interest.

"The will was opened on the day of the funeral. It was a great surprise. I had reason to suppose that it contained a distinct provision invalidating all bequests to me should I propose to hand over any of the property, or money derived from the property, to Felicia Melrose, or her mother. But it contained nothing of the kind. The first draft of the will was sent to his solicitors at the end of July. They put it into form, and it was signed the day after he communicated his intentions to me. There is no doubt whatever that he meant to insert such a clause. He spoke of it to me and to others. I thought it was done But as a matter of fact he never either drafted it himself, or gave final instructions for it. His Carlisle man--Hanson--thought it was because of his horror of death. He had put off making his will as long as possible--got it done--and then could not bring himself to touch it again! To send for it back--to finger and fuss with it--seemed to bring death nearer and he did not mean to die."

He paused, shading his eyes with his hand. The visualising sense, stimulated by the nerve strain of the preceding weeks, beheld with ghastly clearness the face of Melrose in death, with the blood-stain on the lips.

"And so," he resumed, "there was no short way out. By merely writing to Miss Melrose, to offer her a fortune, it was not possible to void the will."

He paused. The intensity of his look held her motionless.

"You remember--how I refused--when you asked me--to take any steps toward voiding it?"

Her lips made a dumb movement of assent.

"But--at last--I took them. In the final interview I had with Melrose, he threatened me with the cancelling of his will, unless I consented--Tatham has told you--to sell him my uncle's gems. I refused. And so far as words could, he there and then stripped me of his property. It is by the mere accident of his murder at that precise moment that it has come to me. Now then--what is to be done?"

Her hand slipped further into his. For a few minutes he seemed to be absorbed in the silent reconstruction of past trains of thought, emerging with a cry--though it was under his breath:

"If I took his money now--against his will--I should feel his yoke--his hateful yoke--again, on my neck! I should be his slave still."

"You shall not take it!" she said with passion.

He smiled at her suddenly.

"It is nothing to Lydia, to be poor?"

"And free--and happy--and alive!--no, nothing!"

At that he could only draw her to him again. She herself must needs bring him back to the point.

"You have decided?"

"I could of course refuse the succession. That would throw the whole property into Chancery; the personalty would go to the mother and daughter, the real estate to whatever legal heirs could be discovered. There are same distant cousins of Lady Tatham, I believe. However--that did not attract me at all."

He rose from his seat beside her, and stood looking down upon her.

"You'll realize?--you'll understand?--that it seems to me just--and desirable--that I should have some voice in the distribution of this money, this and land, rather than leave it all to the action of a court. Everything--as things are--is legally mine. The personalty is immense; there are about thirty thousand acres of land, here and elsewhere; and the collections can't be worth much less than half a million. I decline to own them; but I intend to settle what becomes of them! Nash and others say they will dispute the will. They won't. There is no case. As to the personalty and the land--well, well, you'll see! As to the collections--I mean to make them, if I can, of some use to the community. And in that effort"--he spoke slowly--"I want you to help me!"

Their eyes met; hers full of tears. She tried to speak, and could not. He came to kneel down by her and took her in his arms.

"Did you think I had sold myself to the devil last time I was here?"

"I was so harsh!--forgive ..." she said brokenly.

"No. You called things by their right names."

There was silence till he murmured:

"Isn't it strange? I had quite given up prayer--till these last weeks. To pray for any definite physical or material thing would seem to me now--as it always has done--absurd. But to reach out--to the Power beyond our weakness!"

He paused a moment and resumed:

"Boden did that for me. He came to me--at the worst. He never preached to me. He has his black times--like the rest of us. But something upholds him--and--oh! so strangely--I don't think he knew--through him--I too laid hold. But for that--I might have put an end to myself--more than once--these last weeks."

She clung to him--whispering:

"Neither of us--can ever suffer--again--without the other--to help."

They kissed once more, love and youth welling up in them, and drowning out of sight, for the moment at least, the shapes and images of pain. Then recovering his composure, hand fast in hand, Faversham began to talk more calmly, drawing out for her as best he could, so that it need not be done again--and up to the very evening of the murder--the history of the nine months which had, so to speak, thrown his whole being into the melting-pot, and through the fusing and bruising of an extraordinary experience, had remade a man. She listened in a happy bewilderment. It struck her newly--astonishingly. Her love for him had always included a tenderly maternal, pitying element. She had felt herself the maturer character. Sympathy for his task, flattered pleasure in her Egeria rôle, deepening into something warmer and intenser with every letter from him and every meeting, even when she disputed with and condemned him; love in spite of herself; love with which conscience, taste, aspiration, all quarrelled; but love nevertheless, the love which good women feel for the man that is both weaker and stronger than themselves--it was so she might have read her own past, if the high passion of this ultimate moment had not blurred it.

But "Life at her grindstone" had been busy with Faversham, and in the sifted and sharpened soul laid bare to her, the woman recognized her mate indeed. Face to face with cruelty and falsehood, in others, and with the potentialities of them in his own nature; dazzled by money and power; and at last, delivered from the tyranny of the as though by some fierce gaol-delivering angel, Faversham had found himself; and such a self as could never have been reasonably prophesied for the discontented idler who in the May meadows had first set eyes on Lydia Penfold.

He sketched for her his dream of what might be done with the treasures of the Tower.

Through all his ugly wrestle with Melrose, with its disappointments and humiliations, his excavator's joy in the rescue and the setting in order of Melrose's amazing possessions had steadily grown of late, the only pleasure of his day had come from handling, cleaning and cataloguing the lovely forgotten things of which the house was full. These surfaces of ivory and silver, of stucco or marble, of wood or canvas, pottery or porcelain, on which the human mind, in love with some fraction of the beauty interwoven with the world, had stamped an impress of itself, sometimes exquisite, sometimes whimsical, sometimes riotous--above all, _living_, life reaching to life, through the centuries: these, from a refuge or an amusement, had become an abiding delight, something, moreover, that seemed to point to a definite lifework--paid honourably by cash as well as pleasure.

What would she think, he asked her, of a great Museum for the north--a centre for students--none of your brick and iron monstrosities, rising amid slums, but a beautiful house showing its beautiful possessions to all who came; and set amid the streams and hills? And in one wing of it, perhaps, curator's rooms--where Lydia, the dear lover of nature and art, might reign and work--fitly housed?...

But his brow contracted before she could smile.

"Some time perhaps--some time--not now! Let's forget--for a little. Lydia--come away with me--let's be alone. Oh, my dear!--let's be alone!"

She was in his arms again, calming the anguish that would recur--of those nights in the Tower after the murder, when it had seemed to him that not Brand, but himself, was the prey that a whole world was hunting, with Hate for the huntsman.

But presently, as they clung to each other in the firelight, he roused himself to say:

"Now, let me see your mother; and then I must go. There is much to do. You will get a note from Lady Tatham to-night."

She looked up startled. And then it came over her, that he had never really told her what he meant to do with Melrose's money. She had no precise idea. Their minds jumped together, and she saw the first laugh in his dark eyes.

"I shan't tell you! Beloved--be good and wait! But you guess already. We meet to-morrow--at Duddon."

She asked no question. The thin mystery--for her thoughts did indeed drive through it--pleased her; especially because it seemed to please him.

Then Mrs. Penfold and Susy were brought down, and Mrs. Penfold sat amid explanations and embraces, more feather-headed and inconsequent even than usual, but happy, because Lydia caressed her, and this handsome though pale young man on the hearthrug kissed her hand and even, at command, her still pink cheek; and it seemed there was to be a marriage--only not the marriage there should have been--a substitution, clearly, of Threlfall for Duddon? Lydia would live at Threlfall; would be immensely rich; and there would be no more bloodhounds in the park.

But when Faversham was gone, and realities began to sink into the little lady's mind, as Lydia sitting at her feet, and holding her hand, tried to infuse them, dejection followed. No coronet!--and now, no fortune! She did not understand these high-stepping morals, and she went sadly to bed; though never had Lydia been so sweet to her, so ready to brush her hair by the fire as long as ever she chose, so full of daughterly promises.

Susy kissed her sister when they were alone, tenderly but absently.

"You're a rare case, Lydia--unique, I think. The Greeks would call you something--I forget! I should really like to understand the psychology of it. It might be useful."

Lydia bantered her a little--rather sorely. But the emotions of her family would always be so much "copy" to Susy; and the fact did not in the least prevent her being a warm-hearted, and, in her own way, admirable little person.

Finally, Lydia turned the tables on her, by throwing an arm round her neck, and inquiring whether Mr. Weston had not paid her a very long call the day before. Susy quietly admitted it, and added: "But I told him not to call again. I'm afraid--I'm bored with him. There are no mysteries in his character--no lights and shades at all. He is too virtuous--monotonously so. It would be of no technical advantage to me whatever, to fall in love with him."

That evening came a note from Lady Tatham:

"MY DEAR LYDIA:

"We expect you to-morrow at 11:30. Mr. Faversham has asked that we--and you--Cyril Boden, Doctor Undershaw, old Dixon, and Felicia (her poor mother is _very_ ill, and we hear news to-day of the sudden death of the old grandfather)--should meet him at that hour in Harry's library. And afterward, you will stay to lunch? My dear, you have in this house two warm friends who love you and long to see you. Each hour that passes grows more thrilling than the last....

"I have been spending some time with old Mrs. Brand--and I told her I knew you would go to her to-morrow. They have given her her dead son--and she sits with his feet against her breast. She loved him best of all. One thinks of Rizpah gathering the bones."

* * * * *

Next morning Tatham was in his library before eleven, making a pretence of attending to some County Council business, but in truth restless with expectation, and thinking of nothing but the events immediately ahead.

What was going to happen?

Faversham no doubt was going to propose some division of the Melrose inheritance with Felicia, and some adequate provision for the mother. Only a few weeks before this date Tatham had been in a mood to loathe the notion that Felicia should owe a fortune, small or great, to the charity of a greedy intruder. To-day he awaited Faversham's visit as a friend, prepared to welcome his proposals in the spirit of a friend, to put, that is, the best and not the worst interpretation upon them. After all, the fortune was legally his; and if Melrose had died intestate, Felicia and her mother would only have shared with some remote heirs with far less claim than Faversham.

He owed this change of temper--he knew--simply to the story which Undershaw had brought him of the last scene between Faversham and Melrose. That final though tardy revolt had fired the young man's feelings and drowned his wraths. In his secret mind, he left Brand's shot uncondemned; and the knowledge that before that final _coup_ was given, the man whom Melrose had alternately bribed and bullied had at last found strength to turn upon him in defiance, flinging his money in his face, had given infinite satisfaction to Harry's own hatred of a tyrant. Faversham, even more than Brand, had avenged them all. The generous, pugnacious youth was ready to take Faversham to his heart.

And yet, not without uneasiness, some dread of reaction in himself, if--by chance--they were all mistaken in their man! Neither Boden, nor Undershaw, nor he had any definite idea of the conclusions to which Faversham had come. He had not had a word to say to them on that head; although, during these ghastly weeks, when they had acted as buffers between him and an enraged populace, relations of intimacy had clearly grown up between him and Boden, and both Undershaw and Tatham had been increasingly conscious of liking, even respect, for a much-abused man.

Oh, it was--it would be--all right! Lydia would see to it!

Lydia! What a letter that was the post had brought him--what a letter, and what a woman! He sighed, thinking with a rueful though satiric spirit of all those protestations of hers in the summer, as to independence, a maiden life, and the rest. And now she confessed that, from the beginning, it had been Faversham. Why? What had she seen in him? The young man's vanity no less than his love had been sore smitten. But the pain was passing. And she was, and would always be, a dear woman, to whom he was devoted.

He had pushed aside his letters, and was pacing his library. Presently he turned and went into a small inner room, his own particular den, where he kept his college photographs, some stuffed and now decaying beasts, victims of his earliest sport, and many boxes of superb toy soldiers, the passion of his childhood. There on the wall, screened from vulgar eyes, hung five water-colour drawings. He went to look at them--sentimentally. Had the buying of anything in the world ever given him so much pleasure?

As he stood there, he was suddenly aware of a voice--girl's voice overhead, singing. He turned and saw that the window was open to the mild December air. No doubt the window on the story above was open too. It was Felicia--and the sound ceased as suddenly as it had risen. Just a phrase, a stormy phrase, from an Italian folk-song which he had heard her sing to his mother. He caught the usual words--"_morte"_--"_amore."_ They were the staple of all her songs; to tell the truth he was often bored by them. But the harsh, penetrating note--as though it were a note of anger--in the sudden sound, arrested him; and when it became silent, he still thought of it. It was a strange, big voice for so small a creature.

He was glad to hear that she could sing again. Nobody imagined that she could regret her father; but certainly the murder had sharply affected her nerves and imagination. She had got hold of the local paper before they could keep it from her; and for nights afterward, according to his mother she had not been able to sleep. He himself had tried of late to distract her. He had asked her to ride with him; he had brought her books and flowers. To no avail. She was very short and shy with him; only happy, apparently, with his mother, to whom her devotion was extraordinary. To her own mother, so Lady Tatham reported, she was as good--as gentle even--as her temperament allowed. But there was a deep discrepancy between them.

As to Mrs. Melrose, whose life, according to the doctor, was only a matter of weeks, possibly months, Victoria believed that the shock of her old father's death had affected her much more acutely than the murder of her husband. She fretted perpetually that she had left her father to strangers, and that she could not help to lay him in his grave. Felicia too had cried a little, but had soon consoled herself with the sensible reflection--so it seemed to Tatham--that at least her poor old Babbo was now out of his troubles.

His thoughts strayed on to the coming hour and Felicia's future. It amused the young man's mere love of "eventful living" to imagine her surprise, if what he shrewdly supposed was going to happen, did happen. But no one could say--little incalculable thing!--how she would take it.

The handle of the door was turned, and some one entered. He looked round, and saw Felicia. Her black dress emphasized the fairylike delicacy of her face and hands; and something in her look--some sign of smothered misery or revolt--touched Tatham sharply. He hurried to her, biding her good morning, for she had not appeared at breakfast.

"And I wanted to see you before they all come. How is your mother?"

"Just the same." She allowed him but the slightest touch of her small fingers before she turned abruptly to the row of water-colours. "Who painted those?"

"Miss Penfold. Don't you know what a charming artist she is?"

"They are not at all well done!" said Felicia. "Amateurs have no business to paint."

"She is not an amateur!" cried Tatham. "She--"

Then again he noticed that she was hollowed-eyed, and her lip was twitching. Poor little girl!--in her black dress--soon to be motherless--and with this critical moment in front of her!

He came nearer to her in the shy, courteous way that made a dissonance so attractive with his great height and strength.

"Dear Felicia! I may, mayn't I? We're cousins. Don't be nervous--or afraid. I think it's all coming right."

She looked at him angrily.

"I'm not nervous--not the least bit! I don't care what happens."

And holding her curly head absurdly high, she went back into the library, which Victoria, Undershaw, and Cyril Boden had just entered. Tatham regretted that he had not made more time to talk with her; to prepare her mind for alternatives. It might have been wiser. But Faversham's summons had been sudden; and his own expectations were so vague!

However, there was no time now. Lydia arrived, and she and Tatham withdrew into the inner room for a few minutes, deep in consultation. Felicia watched them with furious eyes. And when they came out again, a soft flush on Lydia's cheeks, it was all that Felicia could do to prevent herself from rushing upstairs again, leaving them to have their horrid meeting to themselves.

But flight was barred. Faversham entered, accompanied by the senior solicitor to the Threlfall estate and by old Dixon, shaking with nervousness, in a black Sunday suit. Chairs had been provided. They took their seats. Tatham cleared his own table.

"No need!" said the solicitor, a gentleman with a broad, benevolent face slightly girdled by whiskers. "It's very short!"

And smiling, he took out of his pocket a document consisting apparently of two sheets of square letter paper, and amid the sudden silence, he began to read.

The first and longer sheet was done. Felicia, sitting on the edge of a stiff chair, her small feet dangling, was staring at the lawyer. Victoria was looking at her son bewildered. Boden wore an odd sort of smile. Undershaw, impassive, was playing with his watch-chain. Lydia radiant and erect, in a dress of gray-blue tweed, a veil of the same tint falling back from the harmonious fairness of her face, had her eyes on Felicia. There was a melting kindness in the eyes--as though the maternity deep in the girl's nature spoke.

A deed of gift, _inter vivos_, conveying the whole personality and real estate, recently bequeathed to Claude Faversham by Edmund Melrose, consisting of so-and-so, and so-and-so,--a long catalogue of shares and land which had taken some time to read--to Felicia Melrose, daughter of the late Edmund Melrose, subject only to an annuity to her mother, Antonetta Melrose, of £2,000 a year, to a pension for Thomas Dixon and his wife, and various other pensions and small annuities; Henry, Earl Tatham, and Victoria, Countess Tatham, appointed trustees, and to act as guardians, till the said Felicia Melrose should attain the age of twenty-four; no mention of any other person at all; the whole vast property, precisely as it had passed from Melrose to Faversham, just taken up and dropped in the lap of this little creature with the dangling feet without reservation, or deduction--now that it was done, and not merely guessed at, it showed plain for what in truth it was--one of those acts wherein the energies of the human spirit, working behind the material veil, swing for a moment into view, arresting and stunning the spectator.

"But the collections!" said Tatham, remembering them almost with relief, speaking in his mother's ear; "what about the collections?"

"We come now to the second part of the deed of gift," said the silvery voice of the lawyer. And again the astounded circle set itself to listen.

"The collections of works of art now contained in Threlfall Tower, I also convey in full property and immediate possession to the said Felicia Melrose, but on the following conditions:

"Threlfall Tower, or such portions of it as may be necessary, to be maintained permanently as a museum in which to house the said collection: a proper museum staff to be appointed; a sum of money, to be agreed upon between Claude Faversham and Felicia Melrose, to be set aside for the maintenance of the building, the expenses of installation, and the endowment of the staff; and a set of rooms in the west wing to be appropriated to the private residence of a curator, who is to be appointed, after the first curatorship, by--"

Certain public officials were named, and a few other stipulations made. Then with a couple of legal phrases and a witnessed signature, the second sheet came to an end.

There was a silence that could be heard. In the midst of it Faversham rose. He was agitated and a little incoherent.

"The rest of what has to be said is not a formal matter. If Miss Melrose, or her guardians, choose to make me the first Curator of the Threlfall Tower Museum, I am willing to accept that office at their hands, and--after, perhaps, a year--I should like to occupy the rooms I have mentioned in the west wing--with the lady who has now promised to be my wife. I know perhaps better than any one else what the house contains; and I could spend, if not my life, at any rate a term of years, in making the Tower a palace of art, a centre of design, of training, of suggestion--a House Beautiful, indeed, for the whole north of England. And my promised wife says she will help me."

He looked at Lydia. She put her hand in his. The sight of most people in the room had grown dim.

But Felicia had jumped up.

"I don't want it all! I won't have it all!" she said in a passionate excitement. "My father hated me. I told him I would never take his money. Why didn't you tell me--why didn't you warn me?" She turned to Tatham, her little body shaking, and her face threatening tears.

"Why should Mr. Faversham do such a thing? Don't let him!--don't let him! And I ought--I ought--to have been told!"

Faversham and Lydia approached her. But suddenly; putting her hands to her face, she ran to the French window of the library, opened it, and rushed into the garden.

Tatham and his mother looked at each other aghast.

"Run after her!" said Victoria in his ear. "Take this shawl!" She handed him a wrap she had brought in upon her arm.

"Yes--it's December," said Boden, smiling, to Lady Tatham; "but perhaps"--the accent was ironical--"when she comes back the seasons will have changed!"

The session broke up in excited conversation, of which Faversham was the centre.

"This is final?" said Undershaw, eying him keenly. "You intend to stand by it?"

"'Fierce work it were to do again!'" said Faversham, in a quotation recognized by Undershaw, who generally went to bed with a scientific book on one side of him, and a volume of modern poets on the other. Faversham was now radiant. He stood with his arm round Lydia. Victoria had her hand.

* * * * *

Meanwhile in the Italian garden and through the yew hedges, Daphne fled, and Apollo pursued. At last he caught her, and she sank upon a garden seat. He put the shawl round her, and stood with his hands in his pockets surveying her.

"What was the matter, Felicia?" he asked her, gently.

"It is ridiculous!" she said, sobbing. "Why wasn't I asked? I don't want a guardian! I won't have you for a guardian!" And she beat her foot angrily on the paved path.

Tatham laughed.

"You'll have to go back and behave nicely, Felicia. Haven't you any thanks for Faversham?"

"I never asked him to do it! How can I look after all that! It'll kill me. I want to sing! I want to go on the stage!"

He sat down beside her. Her dark head covered with its silky curls, her very black eyes and arched brows in her small pink face, the pointed chin, and tiny mouth, made a very winning figure of her, as she sat there, under a garden vase, and an overhanging yew. And that, although the shawl was huddled round her shoulders, and the eyes were red with tears.

"You will be able to do anything you like, Felicia. You will be terribly rich."

She gazed at him, the storm in her breast subsiding a little.

"How rich?" she asked him, pouting.

He tried to give her some idea. She sighed. "It's dreadful! What shall I do with it all!"

Then as her eyes still searched him, he saw them change--first to soft--then wild. Her colour flamed. She moved farther from him, and tried to put on a businesslike air.

"I want to ask a question."

"Ask it."

"Am I--am I as rich as any girl you would be likely to marry?"

"What an odd question! Do you think I want money?"

"I know you don't!" she said, with a wail. "That's what's so horrid! Why can't you all leave me alone?"

Then recovering herself fiercely, she began again:

"In my country--in Italy--when two people are about equally rich--a man and a girl--their relations go and talk to each other. They say, 'Will it suit you?'--the man has so much--the girl has so much--they like each other--and--wouldn't it do very well!"

She sprang up. Tatham had flushed. He looked at her in speechless amazement. She stood opposite him, making herself as tall as she could, her hands behind her.

"Lord Tatham--my mother is ill--my father is dead. You're not my guardian yet--and I don't think I'll ever let you be! So there's nobody but me to do it. I'm sorry--I know it's not quite right, quite--quite English. Well, any way! Lord Tatham, you say I have a _dot_! So that's all right. There's my hand. Will you marry me?"

She held it out. All her excitement had gone, and her colour. She was very pale, and quite calm.

"My dear Felicia!" cried Tatham, in agitation, taking the hand, "what a position to put your guardian in! You are a great heiress. I can't run off with you like this--before you've had any other chances--before you've seen anybody else."

"If you don't, I won't take a farthing! What good would it be to me!"

She came closer, and put her little hands on his shoulders as he sat--the centre of one of those sudden tumults of sense and spirit that sweep a strong man from his feet.

"Oh, won't you take care of me? I love you so!"

It was a cry of Nature. Tatham gave a great gulp, put out his arms, and caught her. There she was on the bench beside him, laughing and sobbing, gathered against his heart.

The cheerful December day shone upon them: a robin sang in the yew tree overhead....

Meanwhile the library was still full. Nobody had yet left it; and instinctively everybody was watching the French window.

Two figures appeared there, Felicia in front. She came in, her eyes cast down, a bright spot on either cheek. And while every one in the room held their breath she crossed the floor and paused in front of Faversham.

"Mr. Faversham, I ask your pardon, that I was so rude. I--" A sob rose in her throat, and she stopped a moment to control it. "Till the other day--I was just a poor girl--who never had a _lira_ to spend. All that we ate--my mother and I--we had to work for. And now--you have made me rich. It's--it's very wonderful. I only wish"--the sob rose again--"just that last time--my father had been kind to me. I thank you with all my heart. But I can't take it all, you know--I _can't!_"

She looked at him appealing--almost threatening. Faversham smiled at her.

"That doesn't lie with you! One of your trustees has already signed the deed--here comes the other." He pointed to Tatham.

"But he isn't my trustee!" insisted Felicia, the tears brimming over; "he's--"

Tatham came up to her, and gravely took her hand.

Felicia looked at him, then at Victoria, then at the circle of amazed faces. With a low cry of "Mother" she turned and fled from the room, drawing Lady Tatham with her.

A little while later, Lydia, the lawyers and Faversham having departed, found herself alone a moment in the library. In the tumult of happy excitement which possessed her, she could not sit still. Without any clear notion of where she was going, she wandered through the open door into the farther room. There, with a start, and a flush, she recognized her own drawings--five of them--in a row. So here, all the time, was her unknown friend; and she had never guessed!

At a sound in the room behind, she turned, hoping it was Lady Tatham who had come back to her. But she saw that it was Tatham himself. He came into the little room, and stood silently beside her, as though wanting her to speak first. With deep emotion she held out her hand, and wished him joy; her gesture, her eyes, all tenderness.

"She is so lovely--so touching! She will win everybody's heart!"

He looked down upon her oddly, like some one oppressed by feelings and thoughts beyond his own unravelling.

"She has been very unhappy," he said simply. "I think I can take care of her."

Lydia looked at him anxiously. A sudden slight darkening seemed to come into the day; and for one terrified moment she seemed to see Tatham--dear, generous youth!--as the truly tragic figure in their high mingled comedy.

Not Melrose--but Tatham! Then, swiftly, the cloud passed, and she laughed at herself.

"Take care of her! You will be the happiest people in the world--save two!"

He let her talk to him, the inner agitation whatever it was, disappearing. She soothed, she steadied him. Now, at last, they were to be true friends--comrades in the tasks and difficulties of life. Without words, her heart promised it--to him and Felicia.

As they left the room, she pointed, smiling, to the drawings.

"So you were the elderly solicitor, with a taste for art, I used to see in my dreams!"

His eyes lit up boyishly.

"I had to keep them here, for fear you'd find out. Now, we'll hang them properly."

It was Victoria who broke the news to Netta Melrose. She, a little wasted ghost among her pillows, received it calmly; yet with a certain bitterness mingled in the calm. What did the money matter to her? And what had she to do with this English world, and this young lord Felicia was to marry? Far within, she hungered, on the threshold of death, as she had hungered twenty years before, for the Italian sun, and the old Italian streets, with the deep eaves and the sculptured doorways, and the smells of leather and macaroni. Her father had loved them, and she had loved her father; all the more passionately the more the world disowned him. She sat in spirit beside his crushed and miserable old age, finding her only comfort in the memory of how his feeble hands had clung to her, how she had worked and starved for him.

Yet, when Felicia came to her, she cried and blessed her. And Felicia, softened by happiness, knelt down beside her, and begged and prayed her to get well. To please them all, Netta made her nurse do her hair, and put on a white jacket which Victoria had embroidered for her. And when Tatham came in to see her, she would have timidly kissed his hand had he not been so quick to see and prevent her.

Meanwhile Victoria, still conscious of the clinging of Felicia's arms about her, was comparing--secretly and inevitably--the daughter-in-law that might have been, with the daughter-in-law that was to be. Now that Fate's throw was irrevocably made, she found herself appreciating Lydia as she had never done while the chances were still open. Lydia had refused her Harry; Felicia had captured him. Perhaps she resented both actions; and would always--secretly--resent them. But yet, in Lydia--Lydia with her early maturity, her sweet poise and strength of nature, she foresaw the companion; in Felicia, the child and darling of her old age. And looking round on this crooked world, she acknowledged, now as always, that she had got more than she deserved, more--much more--than her share.

A conviction that Cyril Boden did his best to sharpen in her. With the invincible optimism of his kind, he scoffed at the misgivings which she confided to him, and to him only, on the score of Felicia's lack of training, her touchy and passionate temper, and the little unscrupulous ways that offended a fastidious observer.

"What does it matter?" he said to her--"she is in love--head over ears. You and he can make of her what you like. She will beat him if he looks at anybody else; but she will have ten children, and never have a thought or an interest that isn't his. And as to the money--"

"Yes--the money!" said Victoria, dejectedly. "What on earth will they do with it all? Harry is so rich already."

"Do with it!" Boden turned upon her. "Grow a few ideas in your landlord garden! Turn the ground of it--enrich it--change it--try experiments! How long will this England leave the land to you landowners, unless you bring some mind to it--aye, and the best of your _souls_! you--the nation's servants! Here is a great tract left desolate by one man's wickedness. Restore the waste places--build--people--teach! Heavens, what a chance!" His eyes kindled. "And when Faversham and Lydia come back--yoke them in too. Curator!--stuff! If he won't own that estate, make him govern it, and play the man. Disinterested power!--with such a wife--and such a friend! Could a man ask better of the gods! Now is your moment. Rural England turns to you, its natural leaders, to shape it afresh. Shirk--refuse--at your peril!"