PART I

I

HAD Zeus Gildersedge been a man susceptible to the more beneficent influences of nature, history might have chronicled him as a man rich in the finer æstheticisms of the soul.

The Hun was ever a Hun, though he stormed through the Vale of Tempe or gazed upon Lombardic lakes, splendid under a cloudless sky. Worthy follower of some commercial Attila was Zeus Gildersedge, a being granite to all nobler truths, impervious, irresponsive, unimpressionable, mute. Orpheus would have abandoned him in despair. A fabulist might have classed him with Lot’s wife petrified in the plain beyond Sodom.

Zeus Gildersedge, misanthrope and consumer of opium, maintained a monasticism in his vices and kept the world at bay behind the red-brick wall that bounded his patrimony. Imagine an antique, gabled house perched on a hill overlooking the sea, a house of quaint archaicness, warm of bosom, opulent in roof and the glittering lozenges of its casements, girdled with a belt of cypresses and yews. The place had derived a profuse and negligent picturesqueness from its master’s avarice. Roses bloom even for a miser, and Zeus Gildersedge was content to suffer the magnanimity of nature. Ivy festooned the casements; wistaria panoplied the porch; roses, red and white, reared the banners of Junetide on the walls. The garden was a delectable wilderness, a dusky pleasaunce smothered with flowering shrubs that claimed a lusty and superabundant liberty. From the garden green downs dipped southward to black cliffs and an opalescent sea. North, east, and west upland and wooded valley stretched dim and variable as a region of romance.

Gold, opium, tobacco, and claret—these were the genii who watched over Zeus Gildersedge’s autumn years. He was mean in a cosmopolitan sense, save in the satisfying of his especial sins. In his youth and prime he had been a brisk swashbuckler in the mercenary wars of commerce. He had lived between the boards of his ledger, had married a wife, and begotten one child. He had buried the one and stood half in awe of the other. Now, at sixty, he lurked like a decapod in his solitary den, and stretched out his lean, hungry tentacles to grip rentals, dividends, and the like into his mercenary maw. A hard, flint-eyed old ragamuffin, tough for all his wine-bibbing, with a soul of leather and a heart of clay, he was never seen abroad save when he trudged five miles down-hill in his green coat and greasy hat to deposit pelf in the bank at Rilchester or to collect the rentals of sundry squalid cottages he owned in that town. You might see him on a Monday morning standing at cottage doors and ciphering solemnly in a dirty, little, blue-leaved ledger. He never gave away a halfpenny. If he favored any one with a letter, he never stamped the envelope. As for charities, he looked on them as the sentimental hobbies of a fond and spendthrift public. There was no parson in Christendom who could have wheedled a donation out of him, pleaded he ever so plausibly.

It would be but a reasonable inference that such a father should possess something peculiar in the way of a child, and Joan Gildersedge might have been apostrophized as the supremest possible contrast to her sire. Under the gray thatch of the one lurked much that was ignoble in the mind—avarice, an ignorant insolence, a coarse and blasphemous infidelity. Zeus Gildersedge personified much that was brutally typical of a British Midas. His daughter, with a strong and innocent perversity of soul, might have given Shakespeare a Virgilia and to civilization a star that could have regenerated a decaying chivalry.

The girl had received no education in the scholastic sense. She had escaped certain of the tawdry and superficial embellishments of civilization. From her meagre mine of literature—meagre numerically, but boasting intrinsic opulence—the girl had culled a strange medley of facts and sentiments. Shakespeare had unbosomed to her a god-man speaking to a precocious child. She had dreamed through _The Faerie Queene_ and Tasso’s _Jerusalem Delivered_. History had bulked largely in her calendar. She could have described to you the campaigns of Julian the Apostate, the Pandects of Justinian, the life of Savonarola, done to death in Medicean Florence. She was innocently wise, yet supremely ignorant, nor had she ever entered a church. A pure pagan, religion had never created in her a false and penitential humility, an erotic brooding upon the supposed shortcomings of her own nature. She was cheerfully positive, not a mawkish and emotional negation of sense. With the ingenious idealism of a child she estimated the world generously and boasted of no instinctive cynicism. Evil was a quality to be studied vaguely and dispassionately in books. No harm had touched her heart, nor had she learned to mistrust others. She had read of murder, adultery, theft, and the like. She supposed these things to exist, yet even intuition had not prompted her to project sin into the narrow and visible world that girded her youth.

Fortunately for Joan Gildersedge, she had arrived at no candid comprehension of her father’s character. He was the only old man experience had as yet apportioned to her, and she could claim no examples to contradict the habitual surliness of age. Zeus Gildersedge’s perpetual plaint was that of dire poverty, a protestation that his daughter had come to consider as inevitable as sunrise. True, he was morose, shabby, hard, reticent, and unlovely. Yet these very shortcomings had no air of strangeness for the girl. She had grown up under the shadow of avarice and ethical annihilation, and had come to consider such things among the natural phenomena of nature. She was neither particularly happy nor particularly miserable. None of the common experiences of girlhood had been hers. She had known neither love nor sympathy, friendship nor pleasure, brimming life nor the lack of it. And yet in the May of her girlhood she evidenced the example of a soul evolving within itself, of an individuality bourgeoning spontaneously under the sun, a stately plant starting into purple and red amid ruins and solitude. Unconscious of the inevitable law working in her own being, she followed her fashionless instincts, unknown of others, unknown even of herself.

Picture a low-ceilinged, mullion-windowed room, hung with faded red curtains, carpeted with gray drugget, embellished with sundry oil-paintings of dingy landscapes and impossible rusticities. Four high-backed oak chairs stood stiffly round the heavy mahogany table. A tattered rug thresholded the fireless grate. An escritoire stood against one wall, a melancholy bookcase against another. A cheap French clock on the mantel-piece chided the prodigal hours. On either side Romanesque warriors in bronze straddled impetuous chargers.

By a window, whose lozenged panes were swept by festoons of ivy, Zeus Gildersedge sat in a cane-backed arm-chair. An antique round table stood beside him, bearing a decanter of claret, a small phial of laudanum, a couple of glasses, a tobacco-jar, ink-pot, and quill pen. He was a short, spare man, clad in rusty gray, collarless, dishevelled, unkempt as to beard and poll. The slant light of the western sun seemed to impress a peculiar pallor upon his waxen face. There were numberless wrinkles about his gray eyes, with their minutely contracted pupils. His mouth ran a hard, tense, anæmic line under his large nose. Eyebrows and beard were bushy, leonine, barbaric. A lethargic arrogance appeared to possess the man, a mean, self-centred torpor that seemed in actual harmony with the atmosphere of the room.

Zeus Gildersedge was figuring lazily on the back of a dirty envelope, the cuffs of his gray shirt hanging unbuttoned over his bony wrists. A financial journal lay open on his knees. Now and again he would yawn soundlessly, and sip the glass that held the brown-red Lethe that he loved. As he scribbled, his hands quivered slightly. Hunched in his chair he looked like some sinister troll concocting mischief over his cups.

On a sudden some subtle savor assailed his nostrils, a steaming scent of sacrifice that caused Zeus Gildersedge to straighten alertly in his chair. He sniffed the air with his big, carnivorous nose. The paper, with an expostulatory murmur, slipped from his knees to the floor.

“Onions, is it!”

A more vigorous investigation approved the villany.

“Damn that woman! She’s always cooking two vegetables, the glutton!”

He rose and rang the bell, and stood listening to the solitary clangor that came echoing through the silent house. The sordid minutiæ of his avaricious household were ever weighing on the man’s mind. Zeus Gildersedge could break his heart, or his apology for that organ, over the untimely disappearance of a pound of butter.

A stout wench answered the bell, a loosely ample person, with red cheeks, glossy jet hair, and scintillant brown eyes. Her hair was fringed about a sensual face; she wore a red-flannel blouse, a black skirt, and certain tawdry fripperies that denounced the donor. She was Zeus Gildersedge’s only servant, and might indeed have been included with his opium and his claret as an especial luxury selfishly cherished for the sake of avarice.

“What d’yer want?”

There was a familiar and insolent frankness in the voice that seemed to imply that no very abundant respect was wasted between master and servant.

“What are you cooking onions for?”

“To eat, of course.”

“Pah! you cook enough for a tavern. What’s the use of talking to you of economy. I’ll take it out of your wages.”

“No, you won’t,” said the woman by the doorway, pouting out her lips. “I’m not here to starve.”

Zeus Gildersedge turned his back on her.

“Bring in supper,” he snarled.

“You’re crusty to-night, master.”

“Don’t answer me, woman. Bring in supper.”

“Miss Joan ain’t in.”

“Bring in supper.”

“Taters and sheeps’ ribs. I hope that’ll suit. Wouldn’t ruin a pauper. Have any cheese?”

“Bread’s enough for a Christian.”

“It’s stale; but you’ll eat less. Ain’t we economic!”

Zeus Gildersedge returned to his chair and his paper, muttering under his breath. He had not been seated five minutes when a young girl entered the room, an old sun-hat trimmed with red roses in one hand, a basket of primroses in the other. She set the basket on the table and seated herself down in a window-seat with the air of one who has learned the wisdom of self-repression in her intercourse with her father. Joan Gildersedge could read the man’s humor as fairly as she could decipher the face of the sky. His prevailing mood in her presence was gray, northerly, and cheerless. She knew that it was useless to approach him when the cloud of avaricious calculation hung low over his brain.

Considered feature by feature, Joan Gildersedge escaped the vulgar charge of being declared pretty. Considered as an individual creation, as a woman, she possessed a charm that was inevitable and unique. She had great, gray eyes, a large chin, a clear, satiny complexion, and delicate coloring. Her hair was abundant, glossed with a golden tinge, drawn back loosely and knotted low upon her neck. Her neck, indeed, was the most lovely portion of her figure—long, graceful, with a perfect sweep from her shoulders, smooth, stately as a gracious tower. She had long limbs, a big yet somewhat bony frame, a bosom girlish and hollowed under the shoulders. There was a rich and generous amplitude about her face and figure that made her appear womanly beyond her years.

Zeus Gildersedge thrust the envelope on which he had been scribbling into his breast coat-pocket. He turned and looked at the girl over his shoulder with a blank apathy that was scarcely parental. Joan Gildersedge had always been an inexplicable phenomenon to her father. Strangely enough, he stood in certain awe of her, having conceived against his will a species of wintry respect for the strong and mysterious magic of her youth. Her simple serenity baffled his Philistian prejudices. Her very obedience seemed the calm wisdom of one who humors the moods of a comrade deserving more of pity than contempt. Probably Zeus Gildersedge guessed shrewdly in his heart that he had begotten a being whose star dwarfed his petty, trafficking, miserable world. The girl’s soulful superiority often angered Zeus Gildersedge, exaggerating his rough and rugged mannerisms towards his child.

“You’re late,” was his salutation.

For answer she lifted her basket of golden blooms, like a child who offers an oblation to some god.

“But I have gathered all these flowers.”

Zeus Gildersedge sniffed and rustled the pages of his paper. Nothing was beautiful to him that did not proffer profitable barter.

“Can’t feed on primroses. You’ve got a new dress on—eh?”

“Not very new, father.”

“The more reason you should be careful. My bills for finery are big enough in the year. I can do with a suit of clothes for three years; a woman grumbles if she has only three dresses in twelve months. Superlative vanity. Pity we are not born with fur.”

The girl laughed, a laugh devoid of malice or of self-justification. She took the flowers from her basket and began to bind them into posies, her large hands looking very white in the light of the sun. She was unvexed by such economical tirades, having grown as accustomed to her father’s grumblings as to the growling of the sea.

“You ought to be grateful for having only one daughter,” she said, “since I am such a burden.”

“I am,” retorted the man, surlily, burying his face behind the pages of finance.

Supper was laid on the heavy mahogany table by the woman Rebecca. Zeus Gildersedge drew his cane-backed chair before the steaming dish of stew. He ate meagrely himself, but watched his daughter’s plate with a species of perpetual dissatisfaction. Her healthy appetite irritated his more ascetic instincts. It even grieved him to see the last crust filched from the trencher.

It had grown dusk by the time the table had been cleared, and Rebecca, lighting a single candle, set it on Zeus Gildersedge’s table by the window. She was bidden to close the casement lest the draught should waste the wax. The girl Joan was hovering between the bookcase and the door. Her restless vacillation brought a characteristic rebuke from the man by the table.

“Sit down, sit down.”

The girl caught up her hat.

“I’m for the garden.”

“Get out, then, and don’t fuss. What the devil are you going to do out there in the dark?”

Joan Gildersedge was kneeling on the window-seat, peering up through the casement, the candle-light glimmering on the gold in her hair.

“The sky streams stars,” she said.

“Damn the stars!”

“They are splendid.”

“The sun’s a useful fellow; the stars, idle devils, a pack of loafers debauching round the moon. They don’t ripen the crops or fruit. Talk common-sense.”

“The moon’s better than candle-light, father.”

“Rot! you can’t tote up figures by moonlight.”

Joan Gildersedge abandoned the philosopher to his ledger and took refuge amid the yew-trees, sombre under the stars. The trees seemed to whisper to her cheering natural lore, a calm optimism that baffled care. Before her stretched an unkempt, dusky lawn, rank grass running riot to the very curb of a low, red-brick wall. Beyond, the dark swell of a hill leaped southward to the cliffs, and below shone the subastral silver of the sea.

The girl leaned against a great pine whose boughs arabesqued the sky. A quiet breeze came, sighed, and played about her face. She stood there motionless in the half-gloom, her hands hanging listless, her eyes glimmering under the dusky coronal that swept her forehead. The solitude seemed to symbolize the solemn calm of the Universal Spirit, a soundless sympathy that enveloped the world.

The stars, the sea, the night breeze, and a woman’s soul! Eternal tones evolving harmony from chaotic discords! Avarice, brutality, unlovely ignorance, and lust! Joan Gildersedge was Joan Gildersedge despite these excrescences of a debased progenitor. They touched her no more than clay can scratch a diamond. Though they enveloped her external being, they could not transform her soul. She lived within herself, conscious, spontaneous, inevitable. Her desires were spreading in prophetic dreams over a more magnanimous horizon. She was a gem hid in a casket, waiting for the lifting of the lid that she might shine.

Behind the casement the candle had completed its limitation of liberty. A hand rattled on the window-frame. Zeus Gildersedge’s nightly luxury had flickered to its socket, measured by two inches of wax nicked off neatly with an avaricious thumb-nail. His daughter, obeying the tyranny of greed, went slowly from under the starlight to bed.

II

THE village of Saltire straggled red-roofed up a green valley that branched northward from the shimmering ringlets of the Mallan. It was a sensuous patch of color, smothered up in woodland, warm and sun-steeped, overrun with roses. On either flank hills ascended, barriering the Saltire homesteads with tiers of trees. Sun and moon climbed over nebulous pines and larches to shine on red roof and flower-enamelled garden. Southward, moorland and meadow stretched towards the port of Rilchester and the sea.

Antiquarians had found in Saltire relics of considerable archæological interest. The guide-books expatiated sentimentally upon the wonders of St. Winifred’s Well, and on the church whose Norman nave had attached unto itself an Early English choir. Saltire was one of the wondrous few churches of repute where Cromwell had not stabled his horses. Sundry fine brasses blazoned the walls. Two crusaders slept cross-kneed in the chancel. Even a poet of distinction had written an ode under the patriarchal yew-tree in the churchyard. As for the cottages huddled under the benediction of the tower, they were as varied in humor as the centuries that had given them birth. Elizabethan, Jacobite, Georgian, a museum of British bourgeois architecture. There were only two new buildings in the village—a bald, blatant, granite-eyed chapel and a tavern, florid and cheerful. At the two village shops you could purchase all manner of merchandise, teething-powders and stationery, boot-polish and bacon.

Though the woodland valley above the Mallan burned a glorious Arcady, worthy of the glimmering armor of Arthurian princes, its inhabitants could hardly boast much kinship with such æsthetic surroundings. The Saltire folk, big-wigs and boors alike, were far from being Utopian either in morality or in creed. An oppressive narrowness took its text from the pulpit. For the Saltire sinners hell flamed with all its puerile and astounding fury. An atmosphere of stolid self-satisfaction pervaded the social ethics of the place. The philosophy of the local potentates smacked of vinegar; the average intelligence recalled the biblical “needle’s eye,” since nothing bulky could pass through it. There were clerical sermons on a Sunday and clerical arrogances during the week, flavored with an apathetic egotism and sour charity. The ladies of the village indulged largely in sundry Christian philanthropies, and yet were consistently unchristian in every larger sense. The laboring folk toiled, drank, and begot children. Suns came and went, but Saltire endured in pristine narrowness of soul.

The local celebrities were well differentiated and quaintly characteristic. There was the Reverend Jacob Mince, the vicar, lean, complacent, uxorious, and parsonic, a man who intoned through his nose, patronized creation, and was very wise concerning cabbages. Mrs. Mince, the vicaress, big, pallid, with a melancholy air of dilapidated Protestantism, contrasted with Mrs. Marjoy, the doctor’s wife, whose red face tilted its spectacles in the defence of virtue. Then there were the three Misses Snodley, maiden ladies of irreproachable morals, who drove a donkey chaise, delighted in scandal, and indulged in missionary work at a discreet distance. Lastly stood Mrs. Jumble, the intellectual light of the village, a most precise and pompous person, who read Shakespeare and delivered decretals on the conduct of life generally. In truth, there were numberless folk whose virtues it would be wearisome to chronicle and whose vices were inevitable and commonplace. Saltire was an orthodox and Christian village. It knew not Spinoza and would have martyred Kant.

Saltire Hall stood on a bluff, oak-girdled hill-side that sloped southward towards the water-meadows of the Mallan. Elizabethan in mood and feature, its tall chimney-stacks towered above the trees, its casements glimmered silver through the green. A rose-flecked terrace, archaic gardens, fish-ponds, and a wild fragment of park-land maintained a sympathetic setting to the house, over whose eaves a quaint melancholy brooded, as though the old manor found the Victorian present incompatible with the past.

There was a considerable gradation between bewigged and dark-featured Jacobites and the person of John Strong, Esq., a brazen bullionist, plump with the prosperity of a successful mercantile career. Saltire Hall—armor, ancestors, memories included—had fallen into the callous hands of a nineteenth-century tea merchant. John Strong, Esq., in the plenitude of years had gotten unto himself a picturesque and peaceful habitation. He had embarked his family upon the duck-pond of county society. He had become a power in Christendom, a ponderous autocrat heading the notabilities of an English village. He was a great man so long as he remained within two leagues of the village pump.

John Strong lived a British patriarch in his own household. His philosophy bulwarked itself upon solid state principles. He was orthodox to the backbone, a discreet and conventional Christian, an upholder of the monarchy, and a most punctilious church-warden. He possessed the arrogance of conviction begotten of long success. He could forgive a debt, but could not pardon any impropriety that based its being upon original intuition. His prejudices were like caltrops strewn before the advance of any unfamiliar philosophy. Question his convictions and he would vote you a fool or a prig, according to your age. He was as incapable of stomaching argument as a Jew of breakfasting off bacon.

John Strong numbered among his household chattels a daughter and a son. Twenty years had elapsed since their mother had been clamped down under a marble slab in a suburban cemetery. Judith, the daughter, mistressed the house Martha-like under her father’s supervision. Gabriel, the son, basked in the sunshine of parental favor and accepted with indolent resignation the somewhat enervating ease of fatherly patronage.

Gabriel Strong had emerged from a university circle when a certain sensuous æstheticism had claimed many disciples from the ripening generation. He had imbibed certain fine sentimentalities, some affectations, much psychical color, and not a little genuine idealism. A contemplative and somewhat lazy youth, he was a member of the romantic school, a man tinged with a tender Celtic melancholy, something of a fatalist regarding the materialisms of life, and not very fervent over any particular creed. His father, who believed in culture without comprehending its significance, simultaneously admired and patronized his son. John Strong had received his education at a third-rate boarding-school, and yet appreciated in an obtuse and mercenary manner the social advantages of Eton and Oxford. He had considered culture as a creditable investment in the person of his heir. He intended him to be a gentleman of independence, singularity, and distinction. Strangely enough, he had no desire to make a mercantile Stylites of him on an office-stool.

Now Gabriel Strong had eccentricities; and he was something of a poet. Not that a poetic inclination can be considered as an eccentricity in these days when the knack is too universal to be genuine. Gabriel had much of the Maurice de Guérin about him. He would trudge miles to see the sea on a moonlight night, or tumble up at dawn to watch the sun rise over the woods. He was mobile, impressionable, sensitive as dew swinging on the gossamer of a spider’s web. This very sensitiveness tempted to make him weak and pusillanimous in the minor affairs of life. Living largely in his own mental atmosphere, he approached actual existence with a listless apathy born of contempt. The past with its golden pageantry of splendor and romance alone inspired in him the desire of being.

On a certain April morning the master of Saltire Hall stood watching several workmen who were laying the foundations of a new cow-house at the home farm attached to the estate. The local bailiff had been listening with discreet reverence to the tea merchant’s views on certain agricultural technicalities. John Strong delighted in Arcadian hobbies and devoured much scientific literature on the subject. He had his own beasts, pigs, and poultry; his own crops; his own dairy; his own drainage system, septic tank included. Possibly he lost some hundreds a year in his farming, but that was a detail in his expenditure that gave him no qualms of conscience.

Having meditated sufficiently over the new cow-house walls, Squire Strong, as he loved to be called, plodded back alone over the meadows towards the oak-trees dewing the park. John Strong was in an ambitious mood. His cogitations rose from the contemplation of liquid manure to the consideration of matrimony as a social investment. John Strong had many choice schemes—agricultural, matrimonial, ethical: he had promised a new vestry to the Reverend Jacob Mince. He had purchased sundry prize bullocks for the improvement of his stock. Moreover, he had cast an eye upon the luxurious comeliness of the Honorable Ophelia Gusset, and was inclined to purchase her as a mate for Gabriel, his son.

John Strong, threading the rose-garden and passing betwixt high hedges of yew, climbed the western stairway that led to the terrace fronting the house. The morning rejoiced in mild heat, and John Strong was corpulent and somewhat asthmatic. As he stood wiping his forehead with a red silk handkerchief his son Gabriel emerged from the French window of the library, the pockets of his Norfolk jacket padded with a sketch-book, a paint-box, matches and tobacco, and a volume of Swinburne’s poems. Tall and slim as a cypress, with a finely chiselled face, a sallow yet bronzed complexion, Gabriel Strong won admiration even from the dispassionate glance of a father. A red scarf was knotted under the collar of his flannel shirt. There was a certain Dantesque air about him. He reminded one of some slim and romantic figure taken from a pre-Raphaelite wood-cut.

“Off sketching, eh?”

“To Cambron Head.”

“A ten-mile walk. Young blood runs brisk. I suppose the Saltire bounds are too narrow for the new generation. You young folk are too damned expansive, too sentimental. No man ever earned good dollars by sentiment. You’ll be back to dinner?”

“Perhaps.”

The elder gentleman, with his hands thrust deep into his pockets, had established himself against the balustrading of the southern stairway of the terrace. Sentiment did not express itself vividly upon his countenance. He had a big, clean-shaven jaw, a thick, protuberant lower lip, a somewhat Semitic nose, and gray, lustreless eyes. A rough tweed suit, a soft felt hat, and buck-skin gaiters constituted an attire that John Strong deemed in keeping with his rustic habits. He was a short man, thick-set, with a certain solid arrogance of demeanor. His keen northern nature took life prosaically upon business principles.

“Stent’s getting on fast with the cow-house,” he remarked. “I’m having twenty stalls, each to hold a couple of beasts. The drinking-troughs are to be on the self-replenishing system. Stent advises a ‘Stafford-brick’ floor. I think they’re going to overstep the estimate. Still, I sha’n’t worry about fifty pounds or so. Work well done is worth cash.”

Gabriel Strong received the news with an air of languid and exotic enthusiasm. His father’s farming ventures did not interest him vastly; even the excellences of artificial manure awoke no joy in him. Father and son were always colliding dismally on such topics. Gabriel found it a perpetual trial of filial respect to escape from appearing bored by his father’s hobbies.

“Those heifers are to come from Heatherstoke at the end of the week,” the elder man continued. “I shall drive into Rilchester and take you with me. I want to see Murchison about that fencing. And, by-the-way, I heard from the major by the morning’s post. He sent me Mold & Company’s price-list; I have been looking it over; their prices are ten per cent. more reasonable than those of that London firm. These Americans bust our manufacturers. Be back to dinner, now.”

Thirty years of tyranny over his commercial minions had developed in John Strong a certain abrupt and peremptory method of address. He often spoke to his son with something of the air he would unconsciously have adopted to his office-boy. It was unintentional, but it often irritated.

“I may be late,” quoth Gabriel, looking out over wood, hill, and meadow towards the sea.

“The Gussets and Colonel Delaware are dining with us at seven. Don’t forget it.”

“I had, as a matter of fact.”

“What a memory you have for actualities. I believe you’d let this place go to rack and ruin in six months.”

“Bad farming produces artistic effects. I should as a matter of principle let my thorn hedges grow as they liked, and I should welcome red poppies into my fields of wheat.”

“And grow beans for the scent, I suppose. Reserve your eccentricities for dinner-time; Ophelia Gusset will expect to be entertained.”

John Strong scrutinized his son’s face for any confession of color or confusion.

“I have a great admiration for Ophelia,” he suggested. “Really fine women are rare in the country—women of style and spirit. A smart girl is a relief after giggling children bred in parsonages and flouncing hoydens fit only for milk-pans.”

Gabriel retorted monosyllabically. He rarely indulged in filial confidences.

“Ophelia Gusset won’t be a spinster long,” resumed the pandar. “If I were a youngster, by George! I’d make a bid for the girl. Don’t fag yourself or you’ll be sleepy to-night. You must talk, you know; girls don’t like a dull dog, and the Gussets are up to date.”

Gabriel moved slowly down the steps.

“I shall be back by six,” he said.

“Very good. Don’t go and break your neck on those damned cliffs.”

The day was lusty with the red sap of youth. A myriad shafts of gold streamed upon the bourgeoning woods. The earth piled flowers in her green lap and gemmed her bosom glorious with many colors. Poplars waved their stately towers of amber athwart the blue. Wind flowers shivered in the breeze. Nature seemed a Greek girl flashing a primrose kirtle over emerald lawns. Flowers, purple and red, burned where her white feet had smitten the earth with desire.

Gabriel Strong strode on towards the sea, a young Paris red and radiant from the solemn sigh of Ida’s pines. It was the man now who wandered through the meadows, threaded the woods, and climbed gaunt moorland smiting into a golden south—the man of fire and fibre, the passionate pilgrim following the wild torch of desire. Legend lore and love were brilliant in his being. In solitude he found his own strength, his own soul. Elsewhere, like the damsel in some ancient fable, it changed suddenly into a withered, morose, and quaking hag.

As a man of leisure, Gabriel Strong had suffered in strength from the enervation of parental patronage. Like many men of considerable mental culture, he was content to endure the small tryannies of life, not troubling to assert his individuality against people by whom he was misunderstood. Silence is the best harness to baffle fools. He was free in his own world of thought, a serf in the domain of domestic trifles. He was amiable, somewhat indolent, a detester of argument. His father’s platitudes bored but did not rouse him. He was sleepily indifferent to trivial criticism. Consequently he had earned in the domestic circle a reputation for docility which was undeserved. The parental prejudices were beneath his horizon. He ignored them by being reservedly amiable. It was not in his nature to quarrel about the number of pips in an orange.

A two hours’ pilgrimage, and the cliffs rose solemn and stupendous above the azured silver of the sea. Sinuously strong the waves rolled with lambent thunder upon the black bosoms of the rocks. Gulls winged pearl-bright over the blue. Arcs of smooth greensward cut the heavens. A solemn noise, like the superstitious murmurs of a world, rose with a multitudinous monotony from the strand.

Gabriel, weary yet exultant, stretched himself on a hillock that verged the cliff. To the east dense banks of gorse were bursting into flame. To the west a deep indenture in the rocks crescented a bay whose threshold of foam and pavement of gilded sand stretched solemn under the adamantine shadows of the cliffs. Bulwarked by great buttresses of stone, a small lagoon lay sheltered from the waves. Amber, purple, and green, it glimmered in the manifold lights and shadows of the place. At flood the sea poured strife into its calm; at ebb, a fathom deep, it took its temper from the sky.

Gabriel Strong lay and stared at the clouds in a stupor of sensuous delight. The sun beat upon him warm and beneficent, a guerdon of gold. The sea sang like a Norse giant; the wind tossed the torches of the gorse upon the downs. Liberty seemed to tread the waves; her feet smote foam from the green, brilliant billows.

The heart of the man upon the cliff expanded in the sunshine; his soul awoke in the wind and pinioned through a more splendid atmosphere. He read lyrics, sang, shouted to the sea, saw gulls wheeling at the sound of his voice. Snatches of Shakespearian verse, stately and tender, moved in his brain. He could fancy Tristram’s sails rising out of the west or Spanish galleons ploughing solemn under the sun.

Possibly he had never comprehended to the full the prophetic pain of his own emotions. As yet he had suffered no bruising by the world; nor had he learned the ignominies that assail a generous instinct and sentiment too rich for barter. Sad are the revelations that meet the idealist in the Gehenna of actuality. Like Dante, he will often discover himself an exile wandering through the world with eyes fixed on a dream face cloistered in heaven.

Coincidences astonish us; we smite our breasts and call upon that mysterious genius named of men Providence. Gabriel, turning upon his elbow and resting his head on his palm, gazed absorbedly at the sea and sand clasped by the black crescent of the rocks. As from the illumined pages of a book, a poem in the flesh gleamed out to confront his philosophy.

The bay shone solitary as some inlet echoing to a primeval sea. Yet sudden from behind a giant bowlder stranded under the umbrage of the cliff a white figure came pillaring the yellow sand. With hair blowing over bosom, stringing the breeze with golden scourges, a girl ran towards the margin of the lagoon. Her limbs gleamed snowy in the sun. The waters received her with a gush of foam, and a myriad dimples tonguing diamond-like over the pool. White arms glimmered amid a wheel of streaming hair. The man on the cliff crouched low and crimsoned like one caught in the act of theft.

Again, bewildered as a mortal who had seen Diana bathing in some forest mere, he watched the girl rise pure and radiant from the waters. He saw her wring the salt sea from her streaming hair, her large, fair face turned wistfully towards the south. He saw all this, conceived great awe and sudden sanctity of soul. And when the rocks had hidden her from sight, he arose and turned homeward towards Saltire and the woods, a strange melancholy, an indefinite sadness burdening his being.

III

FIVE miles from Saltire Hall stood Gabingly Castle, a modern “mediæval” structure, devoted to the fortunes of Lord Gerald Gusset, a Georgian peer. The Gussets of Gabingly were the social autocrats of the neighborhood, dispensing fame from their crested card-cases. It had been a great day for John Strong of Saltire when the Honorable Misses Gusset had partaken of tea in the “red drawing-room” of the hall. Mincing Lane and the City had faded into an irreferable past.

At Saltire that night the panelled dining-room was lit by lamps hung with crimson lace. The table was scintillant with silver, decorated with luxurious flowers and broad-leafed palms.

Dinner-tables often resemble a suburban street where every person prays to be preserved from his neighbor. And Gabriel Strong was in no mood for word-fencing that evening. Preoccupied with his own thoughts, he surveyed his partner with a melancholy reserve that was eminently Byronic.

“Sherry, please,” said the Honorable Miss Gusset, crumbling bread with her plump pink fingers and casting an amused smile at the reticent being at her elbow. “I had always heard, Mr. Strong, that you were such a garrulous and enlightened person!”

Gabriel looked into the woman’s brown eyes.

“Apparently my reputation has been assailed,” he said; “consider me a dullard; I deserve the taunt.”

Miss Blanche Gusset reprimanded him with playful scorn.

“Young man,” she said, “have you reflected that it is rude to seem bored over the soup? I must ask you to consider my reputation.”

The rebuked one smiled.

“Who could imperil the treasure?” he asked.

“You forget, sir, that Mrs. Marjoy, with her quince-jelly eyes and her peony complexion, considers herself the one fascinating woman in Saltire. When I tell you that she has been squinting at us venomously through her spectacles you should be able to foresee the future.”

“Need you dread the lady?”

“My dear Gabriel, Mrs. Marjoy will relate to all her friends how bored you were by me at your father’s dinner-table. Remember that I am still in the marriage market and must defend myself against the calumnies of my fellow-shes.”

“Hence my responsibility.”

“To aid me in maintaining an eligible exterior.”

Blanche Gusset, Gabriel’s neighbor, was a pert, plump, and slangy young person, very rubicund and very pushful. Her vitality was phenomenal, her vigor Amazonian. She feared neither sun nor freckles, frumps nor fashions. Moreover, she was the one woman in the neighborhood who could attack and rout the redoubtable Mrs. Marjoy, that most Christian Medusa, who attended the eucharist fasting and concocted malignities an hour later over the breakfast-table.

Her sister Ophelia, who faced her over the silver and the flowers, proffered a contrast that was peculiar and piquant. The elder sister, a tall and supersensuous blonde, listened with languid frigidity to the banalities of the Reverend Jacob Mince. She was a large woman with eyes of a brilliant blue, supercilious yet pleasurable lips, and a Circassian countenance. A chain of amethysts glittered over the fulness of her broad bosom. Her fair hair was coiled in masses above her forehead, overshadowing her eyes and throwing into evidence the somewhat heavy sensuousness of her face. She talked little, and with an air of luxurious slothfulness that seemed in keeping with her expression of delectable and Lilith-like torpor.

Above the blaze of hot-house flowers the eyes of this complacent beauty met those of Gabriel Strong. The pair had seen much of each other that winter in an incidental and desultory fashion. Castle Gabingly had been something of a hermitage, and a Greek-faced youth such as Gabriel had more vivid interest for the lady Ophelia than monotonous novels and the society of Lord Gerald her father. Gabriel Strong had fine eyes, a quick tongue, and a certain cynical quaintness in his attitude towards women.

Miss Blanche Gusset reverted to the silent being at her elbow.

“Are you asleep yet, Moses?”

“Why a Semitic title?”

“I often call people by the name that slips first off my tongue.”

“A dangerous habit.”

“Explain.”

“For instance, you might greet Mr. Mince as Beelzebub.”

“And not a bad thrust either. Gabriel, you are waking up. Please continue to preserve me from Mrs. Marjoy.”

“Ophelia is looking well to-night,” said the man.

Miss Blanche Gusset’s brown eyes sparkled. She popped an olive between her lips and descended once more to personal topics.

“What an arrant humbug you are,” she said. “If I had Mrs. Marjoy’s temper I should conceive some diabolical revenge. Must I apologize for not being my sister?”

“On the contrary, I am excellently placed.”

“An ambiguous compliment, my dear archangel.”

“Flattery is always ambiguous, Miss Gusset. I feel in a sympathetic mood. Please tell me how those fox cubs of yours are progressing.”

His neighbor retorted with an ironical twinkle.

“You may continue your meditations,” she said; “I shall reserve my remarks on cubs till Mrs. Marjoy begins gabbling in the drawing-room about that dear child of hers.”

When the more spiritual element had departed Gabriel discovered himself partnered by that inestimable worthy Jacob Mince. The churchman, unctuously freighted, smacked his lips over a fat Havana. Mr. Mince was a tall and complacent person, with a bald pate, a watery eye, and a receding chin. He was a species of petty pope in his own parish, dogmatizing over pond and pigsty, ploughed fields, and the village pump. There was no imaginative or expansive breadth in Mr. Mince’s opinions. Yet he was nothing of an ascetic, and was wholly Christian towards his own stomach.

Gabriel, by way of bestirring the churchman’s ardor, referred to certain political questions that were agitating the country. Sectarian squabbles amused Gabriel as a philosopher; they did not inspire him as a partisan. Dissent was an infallible red rag wherewith to inspire Mr. Mince’s temper. Like many sectarians, he was utterly intolerant of adverse criticism.

“My dear sir,” he said, in his consequential and litanical tenor, “you will hardly credit it, but I am being bothered most abominably in my own village by a certain vagrant tub-thumper, who has had the insolence to hold open-air services under my very nose.”

Gabriel professed a somewhat cynical sympathy.

“Such a reflection on your ministrations,” he observed; “as though you neglected your parish! I suppose the man is an agnostic.”

Mr. Mince frowned and puffed irritably at his cigar. He did not appreciate such suggestive sympathy.

“Not a bit of it,” he retorted; “the fellow is a mere ignorant mechanic who comes over every Sunday from Rilchester to instruct ignorant people in Christian ethics. The fellow has even had the insolence to choose the very hour of even-song for his bawling. I was discussing the matter with your father before dinner.”

Apparently Mr. Mince would have preferred rank infidelity in such a rival to the honest profession of Christian principles. In such competition a fellow-believer was more nauseous to him than the blackest atheist who ever blasphemed the Trinity. There was a certain element of personal glory in combating the malignities of a spiritual opponent. Mr. Mince desired to propound the Bible to his own credit.

“I suppose it does not matter vastly,” said Gabriel, with tactless magnanimity, “what a man is so long as he preaches Christ in the right spirit.”

Mr. Mince elevated his eyebrows.

“Not matter?”

“No.”

“My dear fellow, you do not realize the pressing peril of this astounding phenomenon of dissent. It is the most calamitous development arising from the abuse of this modern spirit of socialism.”

The topic interested Gabriel enough to inspire in him a mild antagonism.

“The very movement would suggest to me,” he said, “that the laboring classes need a living exposition of the creed and that the Church has proved inadequate to the occasion. Am I to understand that you consider a university education essential to those who desire to be the religious instructors of others?”

“Most certainly education is essential.”

“That depends, sir, does it not, upon what people call education. Classics and theology are out of date; science and the study of human nature are to the fore.”

Mr. Mince knocked the ash from his cigar and seemed displeased.

“What is science, sir,” he said, “but a blind man grubbing in a ditch. There is no hope in science. You must really rely on me as an expert in these matters. More experience is granted to those whose studies have extended through many years. We churchmen are specialists on religious education.”

Gabriel, like many enlightened mortals, demurred at subjecting reason to the dogmas of a clique. He preferred to drink of the cup of spirituality without receiving it from the hands of another. He did not believe that the Light of the World descended only upon those who knelt in a particular pew.

“I have a shrewd notion,” he said to Mr. Mince, “that these poor, as we call them, often come nearer the elemental truth than wiseacres steeped in theological learning. The nursing of a sick neighbor is a better thing than the discovering of twenty metaphorical meanings in a single text. A man is wise in proportion to the breadth and sincerity of his beliefs. Nor can I see that it requires much erudition to expound faithfully the philosophy contained in the Sermon on the Mount.”

“That does not satisfy the question,” retorted the clergyman. “Ask Dr. Marjoy what he thinks of quacks who profess to practise medicine. The analogy is admirable.”

“There—I cannot agree with you.”

Mr. Mince withdrew behind his ecclesiastical dignity.

“You are young yet, Mr. Strong,” he said, “and young men are zealots, youth itself too Utopian. Let me advise you not to take your notions from silly novels and superficial magazines. At all events, sir, I caught William Blunt, my gardener, attending one of these outdoor meetings. The man had been my gardener ten years.”

“I suppose you reprimanded him.”

Mr. Mince’s righteous anger kindled.

“Reprimand him, by Jove! I pointed out to the fellow the outrageous ingratitude of his conduct, and discharged him promptly from my service.”

“A decisive protest!”

“A well-merited lesson.”

Gabriel smiled at the blooms of a pink azalea.

“Possibly this apostle preaches powerfully,” he said.

“The usual jargon, I believe.”

“I feel inspired to hear him myself.”

Mr. Mince removed his cigar from between his lips, and stared open-mouthed.

“My dear sir, as a gentleman, and as a member of my congregation, you will not countenance such an impostor within the bounds of my parish.”

Gabriel laughed good-naturedly.

“It would be a great breach of etiquette, I suppose,” he said. “Hallo, I see the others are rising. I think it is time we joined the ladies.”

In the drawing-room Judith was at the piano, accompanying herself to the quaint measure of an old song. After the gentleman had entered her place was usurped by Miss Blanche Gusset, who dashed volubly into the strenuous sentiment of a plantation ditty. In a panelled “cosey corner” Mrs. Marjoy and Mrs. Mince sat in neighborly isolation, comparing feminine criticisms. Mrs. Marjoy was a lady who possessed no single talent herself and always sneered at the accomplishments of others.

Gabriel surrendered himself to Ophelia Gusset. She was seated alone on a sofa to the left of the fire. Ophelia was not a woman’s woman in the social sense; her virtues were egotistical and unexpansive. She found men more appreciative, less critical, more sympathetic.

“What selfish beings you men are,” she observed.

“Why such cynicism?”

“You abandon us for tobacco. I am sure you have been talking for forty minutes.”

“Politics proved powerful.”

“I did not know you were a politician.”

“No, I am not patriotic with my tongue. Mr. Mince and I had an argument on street-preaching. How easy it is to offend some people.”

Gabriel seated himself on the sofa beside Ophelia Gusset.

She was shading her face from the fire with her fan, her shoulders gleaming white through a web of lace. The red flowers at her breast shone like stars to pilot desire. A mesmeric atmosphere seemed to encircle her; her large eyes were languorous and alluring.

“You seem in queenly isolation,” said the man, noting almost unconsciously the white sweep of her shoulders. She smiled at him, and seemed none too sorry to surrender her solitude into his keeping.

“Elderly ladies are really too trying,” she said to him. “I never met such extraordinary rustics as Saltire produces.”

“Mrs. Mince and Mrs. Marjoy have been conversing for your benefit? A lecture on infant underclothing or the darning of stockings?”

“Far worse, I assure you. Missionary incidents from _The Reaper_; a dissertation on pickling onions; certain remarks from Mr. Mince’s last sermon.”

“And Mrs. Marjoy?”

“What does Mrs. Marjoy usually talk about?”

“Herself and her children and the vices of her friends.”

“Dear creature! Blanche had a thrust at her before you joined us.”

“Your sister is a brave woman.”

“It was really quite epigrammatic. Blanche declared that a spoiled child was like a spinster’s poodle—an animal that always had the best chair, clawed the visitor’s clothes, and yelped eternally for cake.”

“Excellent! excellent!”

“Mrs. Marjoy glared.”

“Heaven be thanked! I am not the doctor.”

They wandered out into the conservatory together, where tulips, red, purple, and gold, blazoned the benches. Azaleas stood starred with color amid the ascetic snow of lilies. Bowls of mignonette and violet dowered the air with odors. Many rich plants were brilliant with bloom.

The girl drew her bare arm gently from Gabriel’s. Her movements were sinuous and graceful, mesmeric as a Circe’s. He marked the rare curves of her neck and shoulders, her delicate coloring, the golden profusion of her luxurious hair. The vision of the girl bathing in the pool still burned and glimmered in his brain. He was susceptible to sensations for the moment, too prone to pander to the sensuous in art.

“Mrs. Marjoy is a great gardener,” he said, reverting to mundane malice to restrain his thoughts.

“If I were Hamlet’s Ophelia,” she answered him, “I should give her a posy of nettles.”

The man laughed and touched her hand.

“And to me?”

She pouted out her lips with a mischievous stare.

“Laurel leaves, perhaps, to wear when you are laureate.”

“Sarcasm.”

“Retort at your leisure.”

The sound of music came to them, for Judith was playing one of Schubert’s songs. Gabriel thrust his hand into a bowl of violets and proffered them in his palm.

“To be sure, I am modest enough,” she said, setting several in her bosom.

IV

AZURE and white shone the liveries of heaven. The sun, that gold-tabarded trumpeter, had pealed out the brazen clarion-cry of summer. The pavilions were spread in the woods. The fields bristled their myriad spears, still green and virgin with desirous sap. Rose had clasped rose. The meadows had unfurled their cloth of gold. The red may had bloomed and the lilac had kissed the yew.

A punctilious regularity ordered the daily details of the domestic régime. No stranger ever ventured through the rusty gates to disturb the sordid asceticism of Zeus Gildersedge’s privacy. A neighborly anathema had long ago gone forth against the house. Nor had its master troubled to appease the orthodox wrath of a society that he despised. There is a species of vanity of disfavor, and Zeus Gildersedge was a man who could chuckle over public obloquy with a heathenish pride.

The miser sat in the garden under the shadow of two yews, whose sculptured boughs arched a natural recess. A table stood before him bearing claret, a phial of opium, a ledger, and a jar of tobacco. The grass grew in feathery rankness wellnigh to Zeus Gildersedge’s knees. Foxgloves purpled the lawns. Roses ran adventurously in red riot over a rotting trellis that was half smothered in the grass. It was a tranquil refuge enough, full of greenness and the calm, clamorless quiet of the trees.

Zeus Gildersedge set his pipe aside, gulped down half a glass of claret, covered his face with a red handkerchief, and prepared for sleep. Every afternoon between two and six he would doze away the hours, his brain drugged to a sensuous slumber. Even for this miser opulent visions gleamed through the portals of sleep. His dreams partook of opiated poetry. Mountains of gold poured torrents of jacinth, chrysolite, and sardonyx into an emerald sea. Great trees bore gems for fruit, purple, vermilion, and green. Fountains tossed diamonds like spray to a glittering zenith. Each flower of the field had a pearl or a ruby betwixt its lips.

A streak of scarlet showed suddenly between the trees. A woman’s figure threaded through the green, passing the lawns knee-deep in grass, brushing the foxgloves with the swing of her coarse, black skirt. The loose strings of her lilac sun-bonnet trailed upon her shoulders. She moved slouchingly, yet with a certain loose-jointed vigor that suggested strength.

Coming to the fringe of the lawn where an old dial stood in the sun, she scanned the stretch of grass under a coarse, red hand. Zeus Gildersedge was asleep with his handkerchief over his eyes. She moved silently towards the yews and stood by the table, watching with a grin the man dozing in the chair. As he snored on obliviously she reached for the claret jug, put it to her lips, took a long draught, wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. She returned the jug noiselessly to its place, plucked a long spear of grass, and tickled the sleeping man’s chin.

Zeus Gildersedge grunted, smote the air, and clawed the handkerchief from his face. He stared about him, saw Rebecca laughing by the table, and promptly swore at her.

“What the devil do you want now?”

“Tuppence.”

“What for?”

“The tinker.”

“Let him wait for it.”

“He ain’t here yet; he’ll call this evening with a saucepan he’s been soldering. Thought I’d get the money while there was a chance of you being sober.”

Zeus Gildersedge straightened in his chair, fumbled in his pocket, and produced two coins. He laid them on the table with a melancholy and grudging deliberation as though he were disbursing thousands.

“Damn your insolence,” he said.

“Be civil yourself, master.”

The man’s eyes scanned the glass jug. He gripped it with one claw of a hand and stared at the woman blurred in the sunlight.

“You’ve been at the claret.”

The girl laughed a loud, quaking laugh of coarse merriment. She jerked forward, subsided on the man’s knees, poked her face into his.

“Taste my breath—now.”

“Get up with you.”

“Sha’n’t.”

He pushed her away from him, and she slid to the grass at his feet and lay there giggling, with her sun-bonnet fallen back from her hair. Zeus Gildersedge eyed her with mingled approbation and disfavor. He had bartered his dignity long ago, for the woman had made him her equal in dragging him to her own level. They understood each other in a coarse, abusive fashion, and were comrades of a common cult.

“Where’s Joan?” said the man, fingering his chin, while his colorless eyes shone out from his bloodless face.

“Don’t know. ’Tain’t no business of mine, though you let her gad over the country like a gypsy. You’re a fool, Zeus Gildersedge. Nice sort of father you make.”

“Joan can look after herself.”

“So can every woman till she lights on a man.”

Zeus Gildersedge shifted in his chair.

“Balderdash!” he said, with tightened lips. “The girl has pride enough to choke most men. She’s no bib-and-tucker baby.”

“A woman’s a woman, bib or no bib,” retorted the servant.

Zeus Gildersedge took ten drops of opium in a tumbler of claret, frowning as he sipped it down.

“You’re a nice bit of goods to lecture me on education.”

Rebecca plucked up a handful of grass and threw it into the man’s lap.

“There’s hay for you,” she said, grimacing. “Miss Joan’s worth twenty of me and you. Pity you don’t treat her better. I wouldn’t stand all the grubbing she stands—no, not for nothing. I wouldn’t be your daughter, neither; a fine girl like she is shut up with an old goat to feed on thistles in a tumble-down shanty. You’re too mean to have a daughter. There’s the truth for you.”

She laughed a reckless, barbaric expression of superabundant vigor, a challenge to the thin, sallow being squatting under the yews. Zeus Gildersedge regarded her with his small, calculating eyes. A slight color had crept into his cheeks. The fingers of his right hand fidgeted the buttons of his coat.

“I should like to know why I don’t pack you out of my house with an hour’s notice,” he observed, in tones that were whimsically contemplative.

The girl’s eyes glistened; her full lips parted over her large, strong teeth. She was handsome in a coarse, physical fashion. Her hair was black as a raven’s wing, her cheeks red as sun-mellowed apples, her figure profusely Rubenesque in outline. She made a broad furrow in the tall grass where she lay, supporting herself on one arm, with the sunlight glancing on her hair.

“Say the word—I’m off,” she said.

“Pack your box, then.”

“Six months’ wages.”

“And a deuced fine character.”

They both laughed. The girl gave a pouting smile, reached up, and gripped the man’s knee. Zeus Gildersedge stared into her eyes with a glance that was half critical, half human. They remained so for half a minute before the man swore and dropped back into his chair with a contemptuous chuckle.

“Threescore years and yet a fool,” he said.

“The carrier will pass at eight.”

“Shut up.”

The girl wriggled nearer in the grass, looking in the man’s face with a mischievous simper.

“I want two new dresses, and—”

“You bet.”

“I’m going to Rilchester market-day.”

“Who’s to stop you?”

“And in that little cash-box in the cupboard—”

“Hist!”

“What’s wrong?”

“Get up; she’s coming.”

“Who?”

“Joan.”

The girl Rebecca bit her lip, scrambled up, and started away some paces.

“I’ll give the tinker tuppence for mending that pan,” she said, with an intentional strenuousness. “Mutton and potatoes at eight, sharp.”

Joan Gildersedge drew near under the snow-starred vaults of a tall acacia. Her hair flashed about her shoulders magic gold; her face shone white under the dense, green boughs. A pillar of pure womanliness, pearl-bright and lovely, she moved through the deep ecstasy of the summer silence. Her eyes shone large and lucid as fine glass. An infinite wistfulness dwelt upon her mouth like moonlight on a rose. Divinely human, radiant with an incomprehensible mystery of soul, she stood before her father.

Zeus Gildersedge regarded her with a species of unwilling awe. He was man enough to realize the strange charm of this rare being who called him father. To him she was in large measure unintelligible, a denizen of an atmosphere impenetrable to his meagre, goatish vision. Her very unapproachableness, her serene temper, often created in him a rough and petulant antagonism, a strong sense of inferiority that nudged his starved and decrepit pride. She was of him, yet not his, an elusive and scintillant soul, who suffered his interdictions and his barbarisms in silence, retaining beyond his ken a species of intangible freedom that defied his power.

“You’re late,” quoth the man in the chair, filling a long, clay pipe and preparing to smoke.

“I had forgotten how the hours passed.”

Zeus Gildersedge stretched himself in his chair and yawned. He habitually felt ill at ease in his daughter’s presence. She had a queer knack of upsetting the equanimity of his avarice and jarring the mean structure he called his soul. They had nothing in common. Even on the tritest subjects they were out of sympathy.

“You seem to be away a good deal,” said the man, remembering the words Rebecca had thrown up at him from the grass.

“Am I?”

“What do you do with yourself all day?”

“Wander in the woods, watch the birds, collect flowers, bathe in the sea.”

“Bathe—do you!”

“Every day.”

“Beginning to find your father a dull dog, eh? We don’t do a vast amount of entertaining. Rather a quiet place this,” and he laughed.

Joan dangled her hat by the strings and watched her father with a supreme and unconscious gravity. She was ever attempting to understand his mental condition; she had never yet succeeded.

“I often wonder why we have no friends,” she said.

Zeus Gildersedge enveloped himself in an atmosphere of smoke. He distrusted in particular the developing instincts of this queen, realizing that she had little cause to recompense his authority with any great degree of gratitude. He had begotten and reared her, given her the fundamental necessities of life, but little else. She never displayed discontent in his presence, never reproached his niggard régime. Zeus Gildersedge did not expect love from her, seeing that he was barren of that sentiment himself.

“Friendship is an expensive commodity,” he observed, with a sullen yet hypocritical earnestness. “We have to pay for affection in this world; one can get plenty of sympathy by giving dinner-parties. Spend money and people will welcome you. Poverty means isolation and contempt.”

The girl’s eyes were still fixed imperturbably upon his face. She seemed to weigh his words upon the balance of a virgin intuition and to find them inadequate.

“Are we so poor?” she asked.

Zeus Gildersedge grunted.

“Pretty much so.”

“You find it a miserable experience?”

“You think so, eh?”

“If loneliness and poverty go together, you must be very poor.”

“You’re growing too clever with that tongue of yours.”

Joan leaned against the trunk of the acacia and smiled at the clouds. A cataract of golden light poured through the delicate foliage, smiting the shadowy grass with green splendor, painting quivering fleur-de-lis upon the girl’s dark dress.

“Father,” she said, gently enough, “I often wonder what you live for.”

The man in the chair bit his pipe-stem and frowned.

“You do, do you!”

“I am young, you are old. What pleasures can you find in life?”

Zeus Gildersedge eyed her keenly under his drooping lids.

“What do most men live for?” he asked her.

“How should I know?” she answered him.

“Money, gold bags, beer, and bed. You will understand it all well enough some day.”

She looked at him with her large, gray eyes, calm and incredulous.

“And what, then, of death,” she asked, “if we live for nothing more than this?”

The man straightened in his chair.

“What’s that?”

“Death.”

“What’s death to you?”

“The falling of leaves and a silence as of snow under a winter sky. I often think of death; nor is it strange to me. Do you fear the grave?”

“Stop this nonsense,” said the man, with some symptoms of rebellion.

“Are you happy?”

Zeus Gildersedge wriggled in his chair.

“When I want your sympathy I’ll ask for it,” he said. “You’re a little too forward for your years, my dear. Don’t worry your head about my future. Keep your sentimentalities for the birds and the bees and the twaddling rubbish you read in books. Damn sentiment. Supper at eight.”

When the girl had gone Zeus Gildersedge clutched his ledger to him, his brows knitted into a scowl of thought. His hands strained at the book with a tremulous intensity, while his eyes stared into space. Overhead a blackbird was pouring a deep torrent of song to join the sunlight. A slight breeze made the boughs oracular with sudden mysterious mutterings. The beneficent eyes of the universe seemed to watch with a scornful pity the vague dreads of infidelity and greed.

As though waking from some unflattering dream, Zeus Gildersedge’s hands relaxed and suffered the book to slip slowly into his lap. He breathed an oath under his breath, gulped down a mouthful of claret, and lay back in his chair chuckling.

V

‟I DETEST prigs,” said Mrs. Marjoy, as her hands flickered over the tea-tray in the drawing-room of The Hermitage. “And of that tribe commend me to young Strong as the prince of the sect.”

Mrs. Marjoy was one of those irreproachably vulgar persons whose mission in life appears to be the distilling of spiritual nostrums for the consciences of their neighbors. She was a born critic, a mercurial being ingrained with prejudice and dowered with an inordinate self-esteem. She had run “to tongue” in a remarkable degree; moreover, she scanned the world through the prisms of a none too generous philosophy.

“My dear,” quoth Mrs. Mince, balancing a large slab of cake in her saucer, “young people are naturally irreverent in these days. You would hardly believe me, but Gabriel Strong, a mere boy, had the impudence to argue with my husband on religious matters after dinner the other evening. Poor, dear Jacob came home quite upset.”

Mrs. Marjoy’s chair creaked. She was a lady who seemed to extract discords even from things inanimate. The harmonium in the church school-room was her most eloquent disciple.

“What had the young cub to say?”

“Well, my dear, he contested that he could see no harm in that ignorant nonconformist preaching at the village cross on Sundays. He snubbed poor, dear Jacob most abruptly, and declared that he should go and hear the fellow preach. Think of that—to the vicar of a parish!”

Mrs. Marjoy sniffed, a habit of hers when she wished to be expressive.

“Abominable!”

“Such bad taste!”

“Intellectual young men are always objectionable. Strong, Junior, always strikes me as a dissolute person. What do you think, my dear?”

Mrs. Mince cogitated over her cake. She was not exactly conversant with the characteristics of dissolute young men, but as the vicaress of Saltire she aimed at claiming a mild versatility in the technicalities of vice and virtue.

“Jacob declares,” she said, retreating upon an infallible authority, “that he has never met a young fellow so irreverently arrogant towards the opinions of his elders. And Jacob is such a man of the world!”

“Exactly,” said Mrs. Marjoy, with a tinge of irony. “It is so ill-bred to argue with people more experienced than one’s self.”

The Cassandra of the tray solaced herself with a second cup of anæmic tea. She had an irritable habit of shrugging her shoulders as though troubled—science forgive the expression!—with a chronic urticaria of the brain. Irritability, indeed, was her enshrouding atmosphere.

“As for those Gusset girls—” she began.

Mrs. Mince held up a horror-stricken hand.

“Such underbred young women. Why, I remember one of them coming to church in a red dress on Good Friday. The way they get up, too!”

Mrs. Marjoy plunged into detail with the fervor of a scientist.

“I told that woman Ophelia once,” she observed, “that I wondered how she could go into a public place with a low-cut blouse and no collar.”

“Really!” said Mrs. Mince, rapturously.

“She was rude, as usual. Said some necks did need covering up. It is no use giving such girls advice.”

“Absolutely useless,” observed Mrs. Mince.

The teapot was regarnished and two more slices of cake delivered to martyrdom. Mrs. Marjoy leaned back in her creaking chair and indulged in philosophies.

“The aristocracy is rotten to the core,” she remarked, with comprehensive complacency. “The broad-minded and educated middle-class forms the backbone of the country. Any third-rate actress could teach many duchesses manners.”

“My dear, your opinions are so full of commonsense.”

“I am always outspoken.”

“An excellent habit.”

“I flatter myself that I am a lady, Mrs. Mince, and I like to give people my frank opinion. I never speak wantonly and unjustly of absent neighbors. But as for those simpering and forward young Gussets, well—”

A knock at the door cut short Mrs. Marjoy’s unprejudiced diatribe. A servant entered with a letter on a salver and stood waiting. Mrs. Marjoy slit the envelope with the handle of a teaspoon, perused the contents of the note, flicked it away contemptuously into the grate.

“No answer.”

The girl disappeared. The doctor’s wife flounced back in her chair, shrugged her shoulders viciously, and surveyed her friend irritably through her spectacles.

“From those Mallabys,” she said.

“Of Catford?”

“People I never could stand. An invitation to their garden-party—such garden-parties, too! The ices made me ill there last summer; James was about all night giving me chlorodyne. Let me see, what were we talking about?”

“The Gussets,” crowed Mrs. Mince.

“Oh yes, those most immoral women. Really, my dear, I wonder John Strong lets his daughter associate with such people, but of course everybody knows that John Strong is a snob and a toady. The way the girl Ophelia flirts with that young Gabriel is absolutely indecent. They are always about fishing together, now, down in the Mallan. Most improper! You should hear James’s views on society women. I’ve just been reading that awful Gosling case in the newspapers.”

Mrs. Mince’s interest revived ostensibly. She brushed sundry crumbs from her lap and rearranged her cushions.

“A most deplorable case,” she said, with Christian unction.

“How a man can run away from his wife passes my comprehension,” said the physician’s mate. “I really do not know what we are coming to in these days, what with women like the Gussets taking the lead in society.”

Mrs. Mince sighed an orthodox and Protestant sigh.

“The young men are so different, too,” she said.

“They want discipline, my dear, what with their absurd notions of independence and their revolutionary ideas about the Church and religion. We have had three assistants in a year—such boors! There was Snooks, who fell in love with little Miss Ginge; I soon put my foot on that. Then there was Lily, who talked theosophy and smoked such pipes in the surgery that the whole house stunk. I had to forbid smoking, and Lily left. The man we have now is such a glutton; always has two helpings at dinner and eats half a cake at tea.”

“I never see him at church,” said Mrs. Mince, grievedly.

“Young men never go to church in these days,” quoth Mrs. Marjoy, with an irascible twist of her mouth. “They are too enlightened, you know. I told young Bailey, the man we had last year, that he ought to be ashamed of himself setting the villagers such a bad example. He had the insolence to say that from his own observations church-going did not improve people’s tempers. Of course, I had to get James to give him a month’s notice.”

“Young men must be a great worry in a house,” said Mrs. Mince, sympathetically.

Mrs. Marjoy twitched her shoulders.

“They are so abominably selfish,” she said.

The doctor appeared at this period of the conversation, a kindly and easy-going Briton, artificially cheery and optimistic. He shook hands with Mrs. Mince and sat down on the extreme edge of a chair. His wife gave him the dregs of the teapot, and remarked that he was late.

“Met young Strong in the village and had a chat,” he ventured, by way of justification. “Bright young chap; a little too bookish, though.”

Mrs. Marjoy sniffed.

“The rising generation reads too much,” she said. “Do you remember Bailey, who was always reading novels on a Sunday till I gave him a talking to and he left?”

Mr. Marjoy sipped his tea and sighed. He was a suppressed soul, a Prometheus bound upon the rock of matrimony.

“Bailey was not half a bad chap,” he said, meekly.

Mrs. Marjoy ignored the remark.

“What’s Grimes doing?” she asked.

“He has been seeing folk all the afternoon.”

“James, I believe that fellow’s running after that Ginge girl like Snooks did. I won’t have it, mind. I can never catch Grimes in the surgery. What the man does with himself I can’t think.”

“Grimes is all right,” said the doctor. “I must say I like young Strong.”

“A prig, my dear—an arrant prig.”

The doctor did not contradict her. He had grown wise in season and took his chastenings with reverent patience. It was not his ambition to out-talk his wife.

“You take my word for it,” said Mrs. Marjoy, with acrimony, “there will be a scandal here soon. That young Strong is a most dissolute youth; and as for the Gusset girl—well, I will be charitable and conceal my thoughts. I always try to say kind things of people, when they will let me do so by leading decent and respectable lives.”

“My dear,” said Mrs. Mince, “you are a model of tact. By-the-way, I hear the church-bell. I must attend vespers. Are you coming to hear Jacob preach?”

“I will get my prayer-book,” said the doctor’s dame.

VI

PERILOUS and fair as Calypso is the imagination to the mind of man. A strong soul girds the elf in tender subjection. Like wine, the imagination fires the senses; they are saffron spray bubbling in an iris bowl, red poppies smothered in an ecstasy of green, stars, diamonds, and the long glimmer of a moonlit sea. Odors beat upon the imaginative brain; colors burn its vision. Like a siren’s voice falls the chant of the wind through the rose-red halls of summer. To the poet the world leaps like a young lover into the bosom of the sunset. Seas clamor and the stars tune their strings.

Gabriel was an imaginative man. His heart’s cords were subtle, swift, and mystical. Songs born of the infinite strangeness of beauty were ever throbbing at his ear. His senses were as godly as Apollo’s. The scent of a pinewood smote him from afar. He could watch a hawk hovering a glimmering speck beneath the clouds. He was quick and virile, strung to the tense tones of beauty, red and blithe with the blood of June.

With too precocious a wisdom in the vanities of earth, a semi-Byronic cynicism had marred his manhood. Like Joan, he had supped too richly in his April days. Knowledge had bred contempt. To Gabriel women were so many roses, each with a canker under the petals. He had been unfortunate in his experimental philosophy. No superb contradiction had as yet given his shallow pessimism the lie. He had met women, but not a woman. No Shakespearian divinity had shamed the cynicism out of his manhood. To him Sarah Golightly of the Gayety, or Mrs. Marjoy of Saltire, or the numberless worthy daughters of uninteresting neighbors were equally null and unlovable. A melancholy being, he had brought himself to the belief that there were no Britomarts in the woman’s world of the day. He believed in the possibility of womanly loveliness, adored the ideal Beatrice devoutly, but never prognosticated the flitting of a goddess athwart his earthly path.

On the identical afternoon that Mrs. Marjoy was waxing charitable over the moral deficiencies of her acquaintances, Gabriel and his sister Judith were sessioned in the little red drawing-room at the hall. John Strong had driven into Rilchester, leaving the pair to no unwelcome solitude. Saltire Hall seemed to breathe anew through its quaint casements and antique galleries when its most Victorian master had vanished for a season.

Now Judith Strong was the one woman in the world who reclaimed her brother from the charge of callow pessimism. She was one of those grave, lovable, stately beings who shed over the world a lustre of truth. With hair of red gold, eyes dark and contemplative, a complexion delicately pale, she bore upon her face the benign and tender divineness of a young Madonna. Her soul was clear and calm as a crystal sky. A sympathetic wisdom had dowered her with a charm that graced her womanhood like a crown of pearls. To Gabriel she was sister, friend, and mother. The two loved each other with an inseparable tenderness that was, indeed, Christian. Judith had learned to comprehend the subtler instincts of her brother’s nature. He was no ordinary man, in her opinion, and she was jealous for his happiness as for her own faith. But for Judith Saltire would have been a dry desert to the man’s soul.

They had been singing together that afternoon certain old ballads and glees that would have kindled the Pepysian ardor. Judith’s long, lithe fingers were magical on the keys. Her whole being begot music. Gabriel had listened to her playing that afternoon with infinite sympathy of soul. She seemed as spiritual to him, as he sat in the window-seat and watched her, as some fair woman stolen from Rossetti’s brain.

They partook of tea together by the open window, where roses nodded against a gossamer veil of gold. Gardens stretched below into the wastes of the woods, a dim maze of yews and lilacs, laurels and stately firs. It was like some Tuscan landscape spread in quaint loveliness upon one of Angelico’s frescoes. Mystery brooded on the air. The warm hush of the summer noon was unbroken save by the distant sound of reaping in the meadows.

Judith and her brother were in a solemn humor. Music had inspired them to still thought and tenderness of mood. Brother and sister, woman and man, they were glad of each other’s sympathy, grateful for solitude and unbroken union of soul. Judith had long been troubled in her heart for her brother’s future. She knew too well the sensitive necessity that watched over such a mind as his. All women are fearful of prophesying pain for those they love. And Judith feared in measure for her brother.

“Gabriel,” she said, anon, with her stately and simple directness of expression, “it is strange to me that you do not tire of this place and the sameness of its ways. Small decorums and small circles seem so foreign to your nature. It is a year since you were in Italy. You must chafe at times in Saltire. I should have thought liberty essential to a man of your temper.”

Her brother smiled at her with an amused melancholy that often found expression on his face.

“You mean that I am too much here?” he said.

“Not for us, dear. But you are a man of talent, and—”

She hesitated a moment, gazing with an intensity of thought into the blue distance.

“Well?”

“My words were running over fast.”

“My dear girl, say anything you like to me; you are too honest for me to be offended.”

Judith drew her chair nearer to his, and, leaning her elbows on its arms, looked into her brother’s face.

“It is not good for a man to live always at home,” she said.

“Is it my fault?”

“No. I know father desires to keep you here. He is proud of you, and ambitious—God pardon me—in a mistaken way. But then, my dear Gabriel, a father must recognize the individual personality of his son. He can only wrong him till he treats him as a fellow-man and not as a child. Both of you may suffer through your amiable apathy.”

“Go on.”

“I do not pain you?”

“No, dear.”

“You see, a man to be a man must work out his destiny alone. He must not pander to mere blood relationships. And I am so proud of you that I would not have your character weakened by too much kindly sloth. You cannot develop here as you should. You think too much, see too little. And then—”

“Go on, dear.”

“Father is a good man, but prejudiced. He does not understand you. And, my dear boy, one must beware of prejudiced affections; they are stable only so long as we please the bestower. I know father wants to make a county gentleman of you, an M.P., and the like. He does not want you to work. And there I disagree with him. He will cramp your intellect and soul if you are not careful.”

Gabriel looked in her eyes and smiled.

“You fond traitor!” he said.

“No, I am not that,” she answered. “I only want to save you both pain in the future. It is not likely that you will be content to be a boy forever. Some strong circumstance must inevitably set you at variance with father’s prejudices. Then will come struggle and rebellion, anger and reproaches, and sad days. You are a strong man, only you do not respect your strength. I do not think that you realize your responsibilities towards yourself. Filial obedience is good, but honest and manly independence is better.”

They were silent a moment as in mutual thought. A slight breeze stirred the roses; the noise of reaping waxed in the meadows.

“Where did you gather all this wisdom, little woman?”

“From my instincts, dear. Instincts are a woman’s reason. I have been thinking much, debating much in my mind. And I am not at ease as to your future. Pardon me.”

Gabriel reached for Judith’s hand. His bronzed fingers clasped her white ones. They looked into each other’s eyes.

“What would you have me do?” he asked.

“Not surrender to father’s whims in everything. Emancipate yourself by degrees; teach him to respect your individuality; prepare him to recognize your freedom.”

“Yes.”

“Choose your own sphere; you are six-and-twenty. Ask him for an allowance; travel a year or two; work and develop your own powers.”

Gabriel pressed her hand.

“Any more?”

“And oh, Gabriel, don’t let him marry you off-hand from worldly and ambitious motives. Be a man; think and choose for yourself. Don’t give up your soul to a girl because for one month she seems lovely and desirable.”

The man’s face clouded even in the sun.

“You are very frank with me,” he said.

“I am your sister, and I love you.”

“You are a good woman, dear, and I will ponder what you have said to me.”

“And you are not hurt?”

“Who is hurt by a good woman’s love?”

Strangely enough, that same evening, over his after-dinner port, John Strong expounded his principles with regard to the union of the sexes.

“There are many mistaken notions abroad about matrimony,” he said, snuffing the smoke from a favorite cigar. “People drag too much silly sentimentalism into the question. What is marriage but a delicate investment in flesh. I know life, and I give you my word, my boy, that there’s precious little difference between women when you come to study them in detail. One is tall, another short, some pretty, some plain; they all have tempers, they all love dress, they are all vain—much of a muchness. Love is generally a hysterical prejudice. Take my advice and marry by reason.”

Gabriel besought further paternal advice on the subject. His father expanded. He loved dogmatism and was in his element.

“Take a practical view of the question,” he said. “When I see a fine, handsome, good-tempered girl, born of good stock into an excellent social position, possessing grit and savoir faire, then I say to myself, ‘Wise William who secures that investment.’ That, sir, is what I call a reasonable marriage.”

Gabriel meditated a moment over his claret.

“You do not believe in the worth of the deeper sentiments?” he said.

“Poetry, sir, is very well between calf covers and gold lettering, but for God’s sake keep poetical notions out of plain, honest existence. They are ruinous.”

“You think so?”

“I don’t theorize. I know.”

Gabriel smiled one of his melancholy smiles. Traitor to his own craft, he half believed his father’s dictum to be true. His pessimism with regard to the present levelled his expectations to a mundane tone. Sentiment might have suited a Laura or a Fiametta. It was obsolete according to modern notions. An up-to-date woman did not stand in need of poetry and heroics.

“Too much nonsense is talked,” John Strong continued, “on mental attraction, psychical magnetism, and the like. Common-sense is the thing. Consider women as so many nuts. Take any one, it doesn’t matter much which, provided it is not worm-eaten. And if one particular nut has a golden shell, nab it, my boy, and don’t talk about psychology. Poetical impracticabilities have ruined plenty of clever men. So long as a woman has a pretty face, a healthy body, and a fairly amiable mind, don’t you grumble. Give her good pin-money and plenty of honest animal affection and she’ll do. We’ve got to live in this world, not dream.”

VII

LOVELY were the Mallan valleys where the woods came down to drink of the golden meads. The trees clambered up against the clouds, wild yet imperturbable, silent yet steeped in mysterious music that spoke to the soul. Larch and cedar, birch and pine, oak and mountain-ash stood as on the slopes of a great amphitheatre and watched the Mallan moving to the sea. Willows dipped their branches in the stream. Gnarled, cloven oaks thrust their rough fists into the white bosoms of flowering thorns. The Mallan banks were all of gold, of golden tissue spread upon green velvet. Moon-faced daisies whitened the long, languorous grass where wild sorrel shone like flame in the western sun. The blue bloom of summer and a great stillness covered the woods.

The Mallan burned brilliant in the sun. Rippleless, it stretched a band of blackened silver betwixt its sedges. A ring of eddies, a splash of foam, or a golden gleam darting swift and evanescent through the crystal darkness told of the life below. The blue-and-white mosaics of heaven shone on its idle bosom. Dragon-flies, blue, green, and scarlet, skimmed gossamer bright over rush and flag. Gnats played in the shallows and the moorhen paddled in the shade.

Weary of whipping the irresponsive water, the girl kneeling in the grass laid down her rod and glanced at her companion under the broad brim of her rose-laden hat. A June splendor burned upon her face. Her light summer dress of some greenish and opalescent fabric hung about her figure with a cool luxuriousness, tinted as with the cold glimmer of a fading west.

“No sport,” she cried to the man down stream, in her rich, full-throated voice, a voice that seemed in keeping with the opulence of her beauty.

“None,” came the echo.

“I’m bored.”

“At fifty yards!”

Ophelia smiled. Her lips were long and pleasurable, and a physical and sensuous magic seemed radiated from her figure. Her eyes fell into a contemplative stare as she watched the man draw near, swinging his fly to dry in the sun. He was bareheaded and his bronzed and handsome face shone eager to the west. His eyes had a habit of kindling when their glance lighted on the girl’s face. He was a clean-limbed man withal, supple as a young ash, sanguine, keenly sensitive, a man such as women love.

“No sport,” he said, smiling in the sun.

“An empty day, a wasted day. Am I a sentimentalist?”

The woman laughed a laugh that was peculiarly witching.

“We are both unimpeachable.”

“Such enthusiasts.”

“Model piscators, always gossiping, never keeping cover, missing rises, letting our wits wander. Gabriel, you are making a horrible cockney of me. I could not look my Scotch gillie in the face.”

An indefinite suggestiveness appeared even in these sparse, jesting words. The trout silvering the Mallan’s shadows were poorly imperilled by the girl and the man upon the bank. Too human a Providence interfered with the genuine bigotry of sport. The fish, had they known it, were but dumb players in the opening stagecraft of an eternal and stage-worn play.

“We must catch something,” said the girl, decisively, plucking at the grass that caressed her dress.

“Even though it be a cold.”

“Don’t be flippant.”

“Nay, I am serious for your sake.”

“That is very good of you.”

“I am a most serious Walton, a most complete angler.”

“For compliments.”

“I land too many as it is.”

The girl smoothed the creases from her skirt, Gabriel watching her hands gliding over the green undulations with a pleasurable languor. Her hair, full of light, curled over her ears and neck, and her shoulders were peculiarly graceful, as she stood half stooping, her long lashes sweeping her sunburned cheeks. A sudden upward glance and her eyes met Gabriel’s. A passionate challenge flashed in the sun. Ophelia’s cheeks kindled. Gabriel flushed an echo of red under his bronzed skin. They were both silent awhile as in thought.

The girl stretched out her arms like Clytie appealing the setting sun. A golden glow streamed above the woods; the scent of grass lay heavy on the air; a great silence abode over the meadows.

“I am stiff and it is growing late.”

“You are tired?”

“No.”

“Shall I try one more cast?”

“Yes. I will watch you.”

A kingfisher flashed, a living sapphire, before their eyes. Gabriel drew back behind the willows and walked on silently in the long grass. The girl watched him awhile, and then followed, her green skirt sweeping the golden flowers at her feet. She was as fair and perilous as La Belle Dame Sans Merci, perilous with her proud eyes and her glimmering hair.

Gabriel had seen rings swaying on the still silver of the stream. He was on his knees crawling towards the bank. Ophelia, poring over the sensations of her own heart, had drawn near with an unconscious egotism of desire. Not reasoning on the scene before her, she drew nearer still with the western sunlight beating on her face. The man by the bank had half risen from his crouching posture. A swing of the rod, a swishing of tackle, a twinging start of pain. The silver trout had escaped temptation through the flash of a woman’s arm.

Gabriel turned, dropped the rod, came to the girl with warm self-anger. A blue dun-fly specked her green sleeve; her lips were parted over her teeth; the fingers of her right hand gripped the twine. She tugged once at it, winced, and smiled in the man’s face. Gabriel fumbled for a knife and cut the line short.

“Clumsy beast that I am!”

“No,” she said, with a laugh, “better arm than cheek. There’s philosophic vanity for you.”

“Shall we go back home at once? I will ride for Marjoy.”

“Nonsense. Take the hook out here.”

“I?”

“Yes.”

“I shall hurt you.”

“Nonsense. Cut the sleeve.”

He began at the wrist and slit the silk wellnigh to the shoulder with his knife. The green folds fell away, baring the full, round arm white and glimmering in the sunlight. A thin blood track rubied the skin below the shoulder where the fly dipped its wings in the crimson stream. Gabriel’s fingers quivered against the girl’s wrist. They looked into each other’s eyes—a sudden, deep, and questioning look.

“Well?”

“Am I to take the thing out?”

A smile wandered over her lips. The man’s hands still touched her wrist.

“I have nerve. Push the barb through; the rest is easy.”

“I feel a brute.”

“Don’t be sentimental. I would rather you did it than any other man in the world.”

The contradiction passed unheeded, for their eyes were still at gaze into the opposing depths. They could hear each other breathing. Gabriel’s fingers touched the girl’s arm. She shivered and laughed a little, sucking in her breath betwixt her lips.

He steadied his hands against her arm. It was soon ended. A twist, a quiver, a passionate fumbling of fingers, and the barb of steel was tossed into the river.

“I have hurt you.”

Her eyes had grown dark with large and lustrous pupils; the sunlight dusted amber in her hair.

“No.”

“Not a little?”

“Perhaps—a little.”

A streak of blood veined the white satin of her skin. The man went red to the temples, bent suddenly, pressed his lips to the wound, and drew back panting.

“Pardon me, I could not help it.”

“Nor I.”

She laughed very softly. Her hand still rested in his; her fingers were as glowing metal in his palm.

“You rogue!”

“Let me bind it up.”

“You may.”

“Am I forgiven?”

She darted up her lips to his as he bound his handkerchief about her arm. They stood staring in each other’s eyes, breathing hard, straining towards each other. In another minute the girl was sitting amid the feathery grass with the man’s head upon her knees.

VIII

UNDER the gloom of seven tall chestnut-trees stood the village school. It was an antique building covered with roses and bounded towards the church by an old-fashioned garden, where the massed scarlet of an array of Oriental poppies contrasted with the white roses on the walls. It was evening, and the western sun glittered on the casements through the shimmering foliage of the trees. Children were playing over the graves in the church-yard, youth mocking at death. By the lych-gate stood a village Abraham cogitating over his evening pipe.

In the “club-room” of the school-house Mrs. Mince, in a magenta blouse and a dark-blue skirt, was flicking the dust from the library shelves with a red-and-white duster. Around her shone scriptural oleographs, texts, and a goodly horde of irreproachable books. Over the fireplace hung a scroll depicting Faith, Hope, and Charity footing it cheerily over emerald grass. Some sylvan humorist had dowered Charity with a pair of spectacles and a very obvious mustache.

Mrs. Mince was in the act of returning _Hints on Heaven_ to its niche upon a shelf when the eldest Miss Snodley appeared before her, a celestial vision, bearing work-bag and Bible. Miss Zinia Snodley was an excessively thin little lady with prominent teeth, pince-nez, and a high forehead. Her hair was dragged back tyrannically and fastened in a diminutive and irritable bob at the back of her head. She had a habit of tilting her sparrow’s beak of a nose in the air and of chirping volubly with a species of declamatory splutter.

She thrust out a thin hand, its fingers primly extended and pressed into line, and beamed excitably in the vicaress’s big and pallid face.

“Such news, my dear! I am quite out of breath hurrying here to tell you all about it before the others came. Such news!”

Mrs. Mince sat down with some deliberation; she knew the length of Miss Snodley’s despatches.

“Quite romantic,” spluttered Miss Zinia. “He proposed to her in the Gabingly rose-garden, you know. I heard all about it—”

“About what?” interjected the vicaress.

“Young Strong’s engagement, my dear.”

Mrs. Mince held up her duster.

“Not to that woman!”

“There, I knew you would be amazed. They tell me Ophelia fainted; frightful affectation in a great, strapping girl like that; but then, my dear, those big creatures are always so emotional. I told my cousin Herbert years ago that I would never marry, and the poor fellow got engaged to a dissenter two months afterwards out of pique. Men are so inferior in these days. And those Gusset girls are shocking; they remind me of the pictures of that awful man Rossetti. You should have known my grandfather; he was such a gentleman, and could quote Latin like a native.”

Mrs. Mince adjusted the patent ventilator in the roof and remarked that the room seemed “stuffy.”

“Of course I had foreseen the thing for weeks,” she said, with emphasis, not desirous of appearing too markedly impressed. “I expected the affair every day. Mr. Mince is very intimate with dear Lord Gerald.”

Mrs. Marjoy’s spectacles glittered in the doorway. The pair pounced upon her, both speaking at once, as though eager to claim precedence in the sensation. At the conclusion thereof Mrs. Marjoy displayed the deficiencies in her dental array.

“A mere matter of decency,” she observed, with superlative sagacity. “The Gusset girl had to avoid a scandal. These society women are impossible. Ask my husband; he’s a man of the world.”

It was the evening of “The Guild” meeting, and the room was soon surcharged with the matrons of Saltire. Their work-bags, pamphlets, and gloves littered the deal table with its green baize cover. Unfortunately these ladies were not unique, in that they were moved to be charitable to other women’s reputations only by active moral endeavor. Spontaneously invidious, they only transcended their natural impulse towards mendacity by the power of spiritual pride. Venus ruled the room that evening. Many minutes passed before Mrs. Mince could reclaim her sisters from worldly discussion and direct their energies to the prescribed philanthropies of the hour.

After the concluding prayer the members of the Saltire Christian Guild again reverted with ardor to matrimonial topics. Mrs. Jumble, Saltire’s intellectual luminary, discussed the problem with certain of her more youthful disciples. Mrs. Jumble possessed a liking for epigrams; she revered the Johnsonian spirit, and had embraced the dignity of a judge summing up evidence. Moreover, her Roman nose lent color to the latter illusion.

“Marriage, Miss Ginge,” she said, addressing that simpering young lady—“marriage is a most serious and imposing circumstance, the mingling of two individualities in the alembic of love. To be frank, I consider Paul something of a pedant. He was a fanatic who did not comprehend the full significance of woman in religious evolution. Now, dear John would have made an admirable husband, so cultured, so reposeful, so Victorian. Never marry a fanatic, my dear, even though he be insane on the subject of potato-growing. Fanatics are unpleasant persons to live with. As for the present example, after a thorough sifting of individual eccentricities I should expect this alliance to lead to prodigious domestic problems. The begetting of an unwieldy family is the fundamental error of matrimony. Mr. Strong is a poet, I believe. Tin trumpets and sonneteering do not harmonize kindly. Poets and artists are generally undisciplined beings. I could quote you a certain remark of Giotto’s; but you are over young, Miss Ginge, to listen to realisms. Candidly, I foresee a fiasco in the approaching marriage.”

There was one woman in Saltire who aspired to a higher philosophy than that of a monthly nurse. To Judith Strong nothing was more repugnant than the subjection of a brother’s character to the tyranny of trivial tongues. For the prevalent physical estimate of marriage she had a superlative loathing, nor did she love the rustic oracles and their lore.

Judith Strong was one of those rare women blessed with superb instincts, instincts angel-winged towards heaven. Her spiritual rosary was strung with no sordid stones. Her aspirations were of the highest, her ideals begotten of the blood of Christ. She had that power peculiar to women who are great of soul, the power of seeing beyond the curtain of the present and of gazing prophetic into eternal truth. Men might deceive her; women never.

Now Ophelia Gusset was a physical being, a mere houri; a rampant, worldly, yet lovely egotist. She believed in a life of sensations. While fanatics struggled on cloud-solemn Sinai to take the tablets from the Eternal Hands, this fair and complacent pagan garlanded the golden calf, and stared into the mirror of pleasure to satiate her soul. Nor was it a matter for amazement that Judith Strong thought of her future sister with forebodings and repugnance.

There are men whose destinies are balanced upon a woman’s influence; Gabriel Strong was such a man. His sister knew that he was too sensitive to the sensuous waves of life, too easily intoxicated by poetic exaltation of the senses. Like many imaginative men, his fancies, wine-radiant bacchanals, overleaped his reason. Wisdom walked not at his right hand, but pursued him afar off. A unique woman’s love, or a Jesuitical discipline, were the two powers either of which could have steeled his manhood. He needed some ineffably tender and all-wise Beatrice to absorb his soul. As it was, he was to partner a crude Cressida in the perilous path of spiritual evolution. When the mob applauded and gabbled of gold and honor, Judith lifted the curtain covering the hot egotism of this woman’s soul, and found no saving balm there, but a scourge.

As for John Strong, his paternal satisfaction had waxed ecstatic over the fulfilment of his prophecies. He beamed on all creation, even as a man who had received a baronetcy, a seat in Parliament, or some Titanic legacy. So beneficent and seraphic was his humor that Mr. Mince seized the auspicious season, and ventured to persuade him to reseat Saltire church and to retile the floor of the chancel.

Various preliminaries had been amicably settled. Lord Gerald Gusset was a cheery, mellow, and casual being. He was nothing of a prig with regard to his own nativity, and would welcome any man as a retainer, provided he possessed money, passable manners, and a good tailor. The Saltire alliance was no mere sentimental affair. John Strong had disbursed generously to his son’s profit; had engaged to buy The Friary, an old manor-house in the neighborhood, and to allow Gabriel five thousand a year. There was to be no legal settlement in the affair. Lord Gerald and John Strong gossiped amicably over their port, and discussed details with a gentlemanly levity that suited the consideration of such sordid trifles. John Strong was eager to promise; the lord not unwilling to receive. Legalities were shouldered into dusty oblivion. John Strong preferred a free hand, and was not above professing extreme generosity in order to obtain an unfettered monopoly of his son’s future. Gabriel was still to be his son, paid and pampered out of the paternal pocket.

IX

JUDITH’S brother had chosen to sink his deeper convictions and to embrace expediency as his lawful spouse. A callow pessimism had persuaded him to scoff at what he chose to denounce as “the mad posing of hyper-æsthetical principles.” He loved Ophelia Gusset in a rich physical fashion; the mediæval spirituality of the poets had cheated him too long. He began to believe Dante a fool and Petrarch a person who had sentimentally wasted his opportunities. Five thousand a year, a romantic home, a superb and comely wife—these facts suggested compromises that were not to be contemned. What could not money give him—Spanish orange-groves, Italian cypress thickets, brilliant books, pictures, opulence in mood and movement. Were there not thousands of unfortunates scrambling in life’s gutters for bare bread! Pandering to that glib-mouthed sophist known as “common-sense,” he abandoned certain spiritual ideals as the mere excrescences of youth. Having kissed expediency upon both cold cheeks, he was prepared for her to lead him into her most splendid habitation.

Coincidence, predestination, or the voice of the subconscious soul! What matters it which we accept, provided we recognize the intense motive power a single circumstance may exert upon some individual atom. Gabriel Strong, poling out his light “outrigger” from the Saltire Hall boat-house, had no vision of judgment before his eyes. He bared his elbows, swung out manfully, heard the ripples prattling at the prow. He was a man who loved to possess his physical moments in solitude. The quickened blood set streams of thought aspinning, the deeper breathing etherealized the brain.

There had been heavy rain in the night, and blue shadows covered the woods. A haze of heat shimmered above the mist-dimmed hills. Infinite freshness breathed from the dew-brilliant meadows. May seemed to have lifted once again her fair young face to the sun. A deep splendor shone upon wood and meadow, a green radiance dappled over with gold. Earth smiled through her tears; the shadowy trees shook pearls from their stately towers.

“Young man, my ribbon.”

The hail came like elfin music from under the green canopy of a willow. There was a suggestive beauty in the voice that had spoken. Gabriel, dreamer of dreams, had imagined himself supreme in most egotistic solitude. He “backed water” spontaneously. His sculls foamed in the tide.

Philosophy or no philosophy, he saw a young girl standing above him on the bank, with sudden sunlight streaming through her loosened hair. Her face shone like ivory under the green foliage arching her head. The water ran silver bright below the grass and water-weeds at her feet. There was a strange queenliness in her manner as she looked down upon him and pointed with one white hand at the rippling shallows.

“My ribbon.”

Gabriel colored with a curious spontaneity that was particularly boyish. The girl stood above him like some golden child peering deep-eyed from the green umbrage of romance. Her left hand was hooked in the unfastened collar of her blouse. Her shapely throat showed to its ivory base betwixt the golden curtaining of her hair.

“My ribbon,” she explained, with no lessening of her unmeditated stateliness. “I have dropped it in the water. You will give it me.”

A sudden memory swept out from the shadows of days past. Gabriel had seen that face, that cloud of hair, before. He remembered as in a forsaken dream, the blue sea and yellow sand, the black cliffs crescenting the still lagoon. A great silence seemed to fall within his heart as of a forest awed by the full moon.

A band of light blue silk floated amid the green weeds. Gabriel reached for it, pressed out the water with his fingers, stood up in the shallow boat, and hesitated. The girl did not move from her grassy dais under the willow. Her shadow fell athwart the water. When Gabriel looked at her, her eyes were not on the ribbon but upon his face.

The coincidence decided him. He took the near scull from the swivel, poled in, stepped into the bow as the stem brushed the bank, took the painter, gripped a tuft of coarse grass, and scrambled ashore. He twisted the rope round the straggling root of a willow and stood up.

“Thank you.”

The ribbon passed between them; their fingers touched. It was mere mesmerism, nothing more. Gabriel felt stolid.

“I am afraid the color will run,” he remarked.

“Will it?”

“I am not an authority.”

She looked at him with a certain critical candor, and said nothing. The man colored, though he considered himself a metaphysician.

She had a number of pins in a kerchief on the grass, and without more ado she began calmly to bind her hair. The man could see that it was damp and lustreless, not yet reburnished by the sun. The girl had been bathing in the Mallan. The idea inspired him. It was so mediæval—nay, classic.

“Do not let me waste your time.”

“I am not in a hurry,” he answered.

“You want to talk to me.”

“I?”

“You do not go.”

“Why should I?”

There was a curious and superb simplicity about her that confounded custom. Gabriel had a glib tongue on most occasions. For the nonce he discovered gaucherie in his constitution.

“You are fond of the river?” said the girl, smoothing the blue ribbon between her fingers.

“I am fond of being alone.”

“So am I.”

“Do you mean that for a hint?”

“I am always alone. What should I hint at? I dislike obscurities.”

“I was only sensitive for your sake,” said the man, with a smile.

“That is chivalry, is it not?”

“Perhaps.”

“You may talk to me—if you like.”

Gabriel considered her with an elemental sense of awe. Her manner was so essentially natural that he could imagine no flaw in her modesty. He had had abundant experience of coquettes. The girl did not appeal to him as such, rather as a Diana or a Belphœbe.

She sat down a short distance from him, and flicked her skirt over her feet. She had bound back her hair over her neck in rich and ample clusters. Her blouse was still open at the throat.

“Do you live here?”

“At Saltire. And you?”

“With my father, on the hills above Rilchester. Are you twenty yet?”

Gabriel smiled in such fashion that her eyes echoed his.

“I am older than you are,” he said.

“Much?”

“You are illogical; how should I know?”

“You do not look older; I am twenty. I like your face; you have gray eyes, so have I. I like your hair, too; it is dark and shines in the sun. What shall we talk about?”

“As we have begun.”

“Our ages?”

“Ourselves, rather.”

“I never talk about myself.”

“Why not?”

“I never have any one to talk to.”

The sense that he had passed back to childhood seized upon Gabriel with intense vividness. An artificial intellectuality appeared to have fallen from his being. The rust of experience no longer roughened his soul. He faced his deeper self, and the impression startled him. His manhood seemed to untrammel itself from the intricacies of world-wise philosophy; and he stood in the sun.

“You are lonely?” he said, with a sympathetic flexion of voice.

Her face brightened with a peculiarly luminous look, and her eyes held his.

“No.”

“You have friends?”

“None.”

“Strange.”

“Is it?”

“I imagine so. Even the most reserved being possesses some one he can call a friend. Perhaps you are jealous of conferring the epithet.”

“What epithet?”

“Friend.”

“My father does not believe in friends.”

“No?”

“He says they are too expensive.”

Gabriel smiled, but the girl’s face was unceasingly solemn. Her expression, indeed, appeared to partake of the perpetual seriousness of an earnest nature. A calm, unconscious melancholy shone forth from her mind like a glimmer of sunlight reflected from some golden shrine.

“Your father must be something of a cynic.”

“My father is poor.”

“Only in gold, perhaps.”

“In mind, too,” she said, with transcendent and ingenuous candor.

“But you love him?”

“I do not know,” she retorted, with a certain contemplative sincerity. “I have only read of love. I know Britomart and Florimel. I do not think Britomart would have loved my father.”

“Why not?”

“I do not know.”

“Perhaps I ought not to ask you.”

They lapsed suddenly into silence. The girl with the gray eyes was looking afar into the shadows of the woods. The water murmured at their feet, a calm, unceasing monologue like the soft prattle of a mother.

The silence proved but a prelude to one of the girl’s strange and flashing interrogations of the enigmas of life.

“Do you believe in a God?” she said.

“You ask strange questions.”

“Do I?”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps because I never talk to any one. People only speak to me in books. And one reads of so many gods—Zeus and Apollo, Allah and Christ, Venus, and great Ormuzd. Some mysterious sorrow often seems to tantalize my soul. All nature, the sea, the winds, yearn for something that can never be, and my soul echoes them. I stretch out my hands blindly, as to a dark sky. There should be power and light beyond, yet my heart gropes under the dim stars. There is often great hunger in me, hunger that I cannot satisfy. I yearn for something—what, I cannot tell. I wonder what we live for?”

“Perhaps to die.”

“And then?”

“There men disagree.”

She mused a moment like a Cassandra.

“All men seem to disagree,” she said.

Probably another half-hour passed before the girl rose from the grass with the consciousness of parting. Gabriel, soft-fibred pessimist, stood beside her with an utter sense of unreality bearing upon his brain.

“Good-bye; I must go home.”

“And I, too.”

She flushed a very little and her eyes kindled.

“Do you know—” she began.

“Well?”

“I am feeling lonely for the first time in my life.”

Gabriel said nothing.

“You will tell me your name?”

“Yes. Gabriel Strong.”

“I like it.”

“And yours?”

“Joan Gildersedge.”

She made a step towards him suddenly and extended her hand.

“You may kiss it,” she said. “They did that in the old days.”

And then she left him.

But Gabriel rowed home slowly down the Mallan with his head bowed down in thought. There were certain words of an old legend stirring in his heart, and the girl’s eyes followed him.

“Now when Tristan and Iseult had drunk of the potion, Love, who never resteth but besetteth all hearts, crept softly into the hearts of the twain. But it was not wine that was therein, though like unto it, but bitter pain and enduring sorrow of heart, of which the twain at last lay dead.”

X

‟GABRIEL, dear,” said the Honorable Ophelia Gusset, looking up at her fiancé from the blue shadows of her parasol, “you are very dull to-day; I hope I am not boring you too utterly.”

The man standing by the garden-chair looked down at the face that belied somewhat in its aggressive stare the mild method of the girl’s reproof.

“You are charming, and I—I am gauche.”

“But why?”

“These functions always make me melancholy. I begin moralizing the moment I am one of a crowd, an egotistical habit of mine. Please ignore my cynicism.”

“Cynicism, indeed!”

“Well, you see, dear, this sort of affair is such a revulsion. When one has been elemental for an hour or two, these social inanities rather try one’s patience. I detest turning myself into a species of orthodox dummy, wound up to spout commonplaces to equally commonplace people. Laugh me out of it with those eyes of yours.”

The girl’s mood was not all for peace on the instant. Where a woman does not understand, she waxes querulous, especially if the enigma touches her heart.

“You might be sympathetic enough to realize that you no longer have only your own morbid humors to consider.”

“Pardon me, I am selfish.”

“So early?”

“You shall reform me.”

Ophelia flashed a queer look at him from her strangely magnetic eyes. A sudden quick spasm of passion seemed to pass through both frames. The electric sentiment met—and sparked desire. Gabriel colored under his straw hat.

“You have wonderful eyes.”

“Have I? Well—”

“I suppose we cannot help it.”

“What does it matter?”

The man sighed.

“It will not be long,” he said.

“And yet—”

She laughed—a deep quaver of passion.

“I am much of an Eve,” she said. “If you have any pity, do get me an ice.”

Mrs. Mince had prepared a garden-party at the Saltire vicarage, a cosmopolitan affair that effectually repaid the neighborhood for courtesies accorded during the year. It was one of those thoroughly inane and tiresome functions where every individual seemed intent on covering his or her identity with a facile and vapid mask. People smiled upon one another with a suspicious reserve and insulted one another’s immortality with that effete social patois that distinguishes such gatherings. Women “my deared” plentifully and dissected one another’s toilets. Men looked bored and bunched together in corners to talk with a vicious and morose earnestness. It was a mock festival in the name of pleasure, where the local culture displayed its rites for the edification of the young.

“You should go out and get to know people,” ran John Strong’s favorite dogma to his son. “Mix in society; it will give you ease, my boy, and gentlemanly fluency in conversation.” Unfortunately ideas did not bloom under the Saltire bonnets, and the higher culture was not to be culled from the tents of propriety.

Mrs. Marjoy and Miss Zinia Snodley were partnering each other under the shade of Mr. Mince’s walnut-tree. The doctor’s wife was dressed in damask red, with a dowdy black hat perched ungracefully on her crisp, black hair. Her gloves were grease-stained and her unbrushed jacket bore a generous covering of dust and discarded hair. Mrs. Marjoy always declared that really handsome women could wear anything, and that style was a personal magnetism, and not the result of milliner’s craft. Mrs. Marjoy lived up to the ideal with admirable sincerity. It cannot be said that in the matter of personal proof she converted others. Mrs. Marjoy’s art was crude and elemental; her friends designated it with the title of slovenliness. They even whispered that Mrs. Marjoy might so far sink her convictions as to manicure her nails.

Four ladies were amusing themselves at croquet on a neighboring lawn, and the voices of tennis-players came from the vicarage meadow. The tea-table had attracted quite a crowd of votaries, and Mr. Mince, with his parsonic leer, was running about with dishes of cake and fruit. “He is such a charming man!” to quote Miss Snodley. The day found Mrs. Marjoy in one of her fervid moods. The doctor had been playing croquet with pretty Mrs. Grandison, a dainty, warm-hearted creature, the wife of an artist who had taken a cottage near Saltire for the summer. And Mrs. Marjoy hated all pretty women, not through any realization of inferiority, but with the zest of a being who believed herself entitled to the Juno’s share of popular devotion. Mrs. Marjoy was a woman who never looked in any other mirror save that of confident egotism. At that very moment she was in the midst of a candid critique, while her husband was smiling over his teacup into Mrs. Grandison’s gentle, blue eyes.

“Don’t you think that woman shockingly overdressed, Zinia?” she said. “That is the worst of being an inferior person; a woman like that has to rely wholly on her costumier. London people are so abominably self-confident. That chit there might really have come from behind a bar.”

“These affairs are always so mixed!” said Miss Snodley, with a simper.

“Poor, dear Mrs. Mince, she always will ask everybody. I believe in lady-like selections. Look at her talking to Miss Ginge; she detests that girl, but that shows what a thorough woman of the world she is. We Christian ladies, my dear Zinia, have to suffer our social inferiors with cultured resignation. I never hurt anybody’s feelings. It is really an effort at times to be charitable and to do justice to one’s neighbors. But that is the essence of Christianity, my dear. Hallo, there’s young Strong and his mistress.”

Ophelia, with Gabriel at her side, moved across the lawn in the direction of the rose-walk. The girl was superbly dressed and indubitably lovely. She moved with her usual complacent hauteur, the semi-languid and physical egotism that betrayed her fibre. Gabriel appeared melancholy. They were both of them silent.

“Young Strong looks bored.”

“Poor fellow!”

“No good can come of such a scandalous intrigue,” said the doctor’s wife. “It’s nothing more, my dear Zinia. They are going to live at The Friary. Nice dance that woman’ll lead him. Serve the prig right. She’s all vanity and lace.”

“Perhaps they will be happy,” said Miss Snodley, with a sigh.

“I believe marriage improves many women, and then—children. They must make such a difference to a woman.”

Mrs. Marjoy twitched her shoulders.

“Don’t be sentimental, Zinia. I always try to eliminate my own prejudices, but that Gusset girl is a regular harpy. Did you ever see a really good woman dress like that? Ah, here’s James; my dear, you look bored.”

The doctor tilted his Panama hat and smiled somewhat apologetically at his wife.

“That awful dowdy has been exhausting you with her chatter.”

“Mrs. Grandison?”

“Of course.”

“Mrs. Grandison is really a charming little woman,” observed the doctor. “We have been talking about children; she has two such quaint little elves, and she adores them. They have not been spoiled.”

Mrs. Marjoy sniffed; her spectacles glittered.

“You are always admiring other people’s children, James.”

“Yes, my dear.”

“Are you aware of the fact that I have had no tea?”

The doctor displayed immediate concern.

“I will get you some at once.”

“Don’t trouble; it’s of no consequence.”

“But Miss Snodley—”

“Of course you will be delighted to wait on Miss Snodley. Bring us one of those small tables. I’m not going to have crumbs all over my dress.”

Later in the afternoon, Gabriel, who had left Ophelia chatting with Sir Mark Melluish, an amusing old ragamuffin who reminded one of a walking edition of Punch, unearthed Dr. Marjoy from a pool of millinery and engaged him with a casual friendliness in a thoroughly orthodox gossip. The doctor knew most folk in the neighborhood; for bad debts had made him vigilant. He was, in fact, the very species of person Gabriel needed.

“By-the-way,” he remarked, after discussing the possibilities of a local tennis tournament, “a friend of mine asked me whether I knew anything of an eccentric old fellow living somewhere near here; a bit of a miser, I believe. You are ubiquitous in these parts. I might inquire of you.”

The doctor appeared encouraged; he was in a limp and idealess mood; domesticities had depressed him. It was a relief to talk to a keen, kindly young fellow whose eyes were full of sunlight. They drew two chairs under the shade of a lime. Gabriel produced cigars. The two men exchanged a species of mischievous twinkle that was vastly human.

“Off duty, eh?”

“For half an hour.”

“Rum things, women. Take my tip—make ’em knuckle under early; now or never. Are these Murias?”

“Yes.”

“Nicotina is never in a temper. Terrible thing being a doctor. These functions make me sweat. We medicoes have to trot round and do the affable shop-walker to the community. Good for the practice, you know. By Jove, we have to salve every soul with blarney. It’s blarney, blarney, blarney from morning till night. My tongue’s dry. Going to be married soon?”

“In a month or two.”

“Fine woman your fiancée, fit to make every subaltern in the Rilchester barracks envy you like the devil. Let me see, you wanted information. What’s the person’s name?”

Gabriel appeared to flog his memory.

“I almost forget it. Gilder—Gildersleeve—Gildersedge. Ah, yes, Gildersedge! Rather a miser, my friend said.”

The doctor withdrew his cigar from his lips.

“By George! yes. I know the old beggar—a regular Silas; lives in a house smothered up in trees on the third hill beyond Rilchester—a regular hermitage, like a house out of a novel. You can’t see it for trees till you get well inside the gate. I attended there on one solitary occasion. It was the servant. Res natura. I only got paid after a lawyer’s letter. Never been there since.”

Gabriel appeared interested despite his affectation. He had turned the doctor into good grazing land, and anecdotes bristled. Dr. Marjoy had not lived fifteen years with his wife without assimilating some of her linguistical propensities.

“I remember talking with Clissold, of the bank,” he said, “and he told me that old Gildersedge’s figures totted up phenomenally. He’s worth two Scrooges. And, by Jeremy! he has a daughter; I was forgetting that daughter.”

Gabriel tilted his chair and surveyed the clouds.

“A pretty beauty, I suppose,” he said, with cynical facility. Dr. Marjoy, on the contrary, leaned forward and appeared curiously in earnest.

“I call it a damned sin,” he observed, oblivious for the moment of his surroundings.

Gabriel stared.

“I remember that girl well. She is a splendid creature, and I wondered how such an old slut had been able to create such an anomaly. Poor little beggar, she had the airs of a convent child and a queen rolled into one. And to think of that young thing being penned up with a money-crusted sot and a beast of a servant!”

Gabriel’s chair tilted forward abruptly. He sat rigid and nearly bit through his cigar.

“This sounds Russian.”

“It’s the truth.”

“Poor little woman! I suppose she’s only a child. Her surroundings must mar her in the making.”

The doctor cogitated.

“I don’t know about that,” he said; “women are queer creatures. Rear one in a regular moral hothouse, and she’ll turn out a scarlet devil. Bring up another in a dirty back garden, and she’ll grow up a regular snow-white seraph. I only saw that girl once, but I’ll swear there’s real grit in her.”

“God grant it!”

And from that moment the two men seemed to become strangely solemn.

Gabriel left Saltire that afternoon in the Gabingly carriage. He was to stay the night at the castle and to attend a flower-show next day under the auspices of the Gussets. It had already been mooted by the two parents that Gabriel should stand for the constituency at the next election. Old Sir Hercules Dimsdale was a decadent politician and none too eager to continue in the ruck of publicity. The Gusset influence was powerful, and John Strong ambitious. He was too old, he declared, to contest the seat himself; his pride should be perfected in his son.

The dust flew from the wake of the thoroughbreds that whirled the Gusset escutcheon through the streets of Saltire. Ophelia lounged in one corner of the landau, a mass of intricate millinery, her sunshade shadowing her somewhat peevish face. Her sister sat upright in the corresponding corner, with her hat awry and her hands ungloved. Gabriel faced them both on the front seat.

Ophelia was out of temper with the world at large. The parched and dusty weather suited neither her complexion nor her humor. Moreover, the Mince function had been deplorably dull, and Gabriel less the beau chevalier than usual.

“Thank Heaven, that’s over!” she observed; “a tea-and-shrimp affair. Blanche, I believe you enjoyed yourself.”

The younger sister responded cheerily.

“Had some rattling tennis and a smack at Mrs. Marjoy. Really, old Mince keeps his grass in better order than his parish.”

“Sir Mark Melluish was the only bearable person I could discover. Gabriel, you must have lunched on suet-pudding. I never saw such a bored creature.”

The man smiled philosophically.

“These functions always addle my brain. I am beginning to recover.”

“For Heaven’s sake, hurry up, then.”

“My poor boy,” said Blanche, with a sly twinkle, “see what you have taken upon yourself. Awful responsibility being engaged. You must keep up appearances till you’re married, and then you can be as rude as you like. Only another month or so. Cheer up.”

Gabriel passed half an hour alone with Ophelia in the conservatory that evening. Her humor had changed, and the man’s brain was full of the fumes of her beauty ere she had ended. Gabriel’s window at Gabingly looked southward over the woods towards the sea. A full moon swam in a crystal sky that night, bathing the earth in mysterious splendor. A transcendent calm seemed to have compassed the sun-wearied trees. The world breathed anew under the benisons of the stars, and there was no sound to shake the silver web of sleep.

Gabriel crouched in the window-seat and stared out into the night. The glimmering spirelets of the forest thrust up multitudinous on the hill-side. The dark swell of the moors ran dim and distant beyond the far spirals of the Mallan. A great melancholy had fallen upon the man’s soul. His face shone white in the light of the moon. The cool breeze breathing from the sea seemed savored with a spiritual purity that wounded hope.

Restless visions glimmered in his brain. He saw himself and his own being circled in fire that fed upon his manhood. A girl’s face haunted him; her voice played through the moonlight. He beheld a figure radiant with a divine womanliness moving within the coil of sin and squalor, the sordid earthliness of an unlovely life. Forgotten chivalry had stirred his manhood like some ghostly trumpet-cry out of the past. He breathed out aspirations to the stars, dreams fair and impossibly pathetic. Joan Gildersedge! Joan Gildersedge! To dare, to suffer, to liberate, to love! Life born of sacrifice! Divine passion instinct with the inevitable yearnings of the soul!

The castle clock chimed midnight. In the echoing silence that ensued, sundry quick-snapping chords struck from a mandolin startled his abandonment. He stood up half wearily, passed a hand over his forehead, stared into space. Again the summons sounded from a neighboring casement. The man moved to and fro in the shadowy room like a soul that paces the darkened chamber of the flesh. Pierced by a sudden flashing pessimism, he moved to the door, opened it noiselessly, stepped out, turned and withdrew the key. Moonlight flooded from a large lancet window into the long gallery. And was this life! To sow unto corruption, to surrender the spirit to the dominion of the senses! Gabriel shuddered, but obeyed.

XI

FOR several days a morbid dejection had possessed the heavens, and clouds pressed gray and ponderous from over the sea. Rain had fallen perpetually, beating the beauty from the flowers, weighing down the foliage. A chill atmosphere had swept like the breath of an ice giant into the radiant loggias of summer. The wind never rested. It moaned and imprecated, pleaded and besought, broke forth into wild gusts of desperate blasphemy. The trees whispered together like shivering and misty ghosts before the gates of death. Their dim arms gesticulated in the rain. Their green bosoms stirred with a troubled breathing, impotent and piteous.

Atmospheric conditions exert an undue influence over minds that have wandered from the radiance of health into the twilight of morbidity. The stanch, big-chested toiler takes the storm into his bosom and laughs like a Norseman buffeting ice-brilliant seas. To those of feeble moral vitality the drearier passages of life are packed with intangible temptations and imagined possibilities for sin. The man whose heart is warm and clean cares nothing for rough weather. It is the bleached æsthetic who turns pessimist or sensualist to cheat his own shivering and hungry soul. Give the world a Tolstoï, rugged viking struggling giant-like towards the truth, rather than some De Musset or Baudelaire hugging an impotent sexuality in the lap of a prostituted art. The world needs prophets, not pessimists. Pessimism is the result of moral dyspepsia. It is a nobler thing to lift some simple lamp of truth to light the hearts of men than to build a brilliant philosophic system for the entangling of the intellect.

Zeus Gildersedge had suffered for a week from an exaggerated melancholia. Evil weather always appeared to irritate his opiated brain, inspiring a more sinister barbarism, a more restless temper. No man can quench utterly his primitive intuitions. When the wind howled Zeus Gildersedge shivered, drew his ragged philosophy closer about his soul, and warmed his marrow with a more generous share of wine. The wind woke the coward in him, revealed that native superstition that is lodged deep in every heart. Moreover, certain words that he had heard in the silence of his own garden had haunted his brain like the emissaries of an outraged God. He had been drinking heavily, and taking more opium than even his Mithridatic body could tolerate. His hands trembled more; his moods were violent and spasmodic; an unusual restlessness interfered with his mechanical régime.

It was the evening of a gray and blustering day. The rain had ceased, and streaks of silvery light were ribbing the clouds. A calm had fallen; the wind breathed in infrequent stanzas, showering rattling moisture from the leaves. A rich perfume refreshed the atmosphere, the scent of foliage drenched yet shimmering in the awakening sun.

Joan Gildersedge came over the meadows from the sea. She loved rough weather and the cold kisses of the rain upon her face. Her rough frieze skirt hung drenched about her knees, and her hair was dark and wet with the storm. A rich color had risen in her cheeks, scourged by the wet west wind.

Joan looked long at the breaking sky before setting the iron gate grating on its rusty hinges. The gravel drive was green with grass and weeds. As she threaded its tangled shadows, the cypresses, stirred by the wind, shook long showers of glittering dew. At one point a large seringa overweighted by the storm bowed over to touch the trailing branches of an untrimmed laurel. Joan had to bend beneath this rustic yoke. A spray of green leaves brushed her lips, leaves pure and fresh as the lips they had touched.

As she drew from the shadows of the shrubs sounds sinister in their suggestiveness smote upon her ears. Two voices were in altercation—the one shrill, strenuous, feminine, the other the untutored growl of a man scorning compulsion. Joan Gildersedge stood still and listened. The window of the dining-room stood open; she could hear plainly enough what passed within.

“I tell you I sha’n’t,” said the woman’s voice, very rapidly. “Do yer think I’m going to sell myself for fifteen pounds a year? You go and cheat your grandmother. You’re drunk, Zeus Gildersedge, and what do I care for an old sot of sixty. Am I to drudge and scrape and sell myself here for nothing? I’ve had enough of it, I tell you. You give me that key, old light of love, and I’ll help myself for once. Come along now, or I’ll make no sport for you.”

The man’s voice retorted, thick and tangled, the expression of a clouded and cunning intellect.

“You think I’m drunk, eh?”

“Half an’ half.”

“You’re a pretty beauty. Give you the key of my strong-box, eh? Nice game, that. Pretty old gudgeon you think you’re talking to. I’m drunk, am I? Not fuddled enough yet to be fooled by such as you.”

The woman’s voice rose shriller.

“You’re a man, you are. Take all and give nothing. Taunt me, would you?”

“Who’s to blame? Speak up.”

“That’s manly, that is. Put it all off your own shoulders; shove all the blame on mine. You’re the saint, are you, and I the sinner? You owe me a quarter’s wages. I’ll have that and more—fifty gold sovereigns, not a farthing less. ’Ain’t I earned it by sacrificing my immortal soul to an old scarecrow like you?”

“You have, you innocent.”

“Give me the key, then.”

An outbreak of blasphemy greeted the appeal. Zeus Gildersedge chuckled and swore in alternation. He had lost every shred of that quality that might have been christened by courtesy self-control.

“That’s right,” jeered the feminine voice, “cheat a woman and then laugh over it. More drink! Whiskey—neat, too! Half a tumbler! Nice stuff for a respectable man of sixty! You’ll be seeing devils in a jiffy.”

The clatter of glass sounded in the room. Joan Gildersedge slipped round towards the porch under the shadows of the trees. She was pale, but very bright and keen about the eyes. Her lips were compressed into a thin, straight line. The look of childish repose had left her face as she stood in the porch and listened.

Rebecca’s voice rose again, less shrewish, more persuasive.

“I reckon it’s no good ranting,” she said; “there’s only one thing as will make you generous, and I suppose you know what that is!”

“I reckon I do,” came the thick and lethargic response. “Pour me out some more whiskey, Becky.”

“You’ll have your own way, I suppose. Half a glass, not a drop more. Why don’t you slip into one of your chuck-me-under-the-chin moods and give me that key?”

Zeus Gildersedge’s voice seemed weaker; his voice had less edge than before.

“You leave that key alone.”

“What go you’ve got for a man of sixty!”

“You know that, eh?”

“Don’t I. Look at me; what am I here for?”

They both laughed unrestrainedly. Joan, standing in the porch, with rain dripping monotonously from the leaves, seemed to stiffen into stone. Her hands gripped the trellis of the porch. She seemed to steady herself as one who meets the onrush of some storm-driven billow or as a virgin martyr facing the flames. In these few seconds the dream-cloak had been shrivelled about her soul. She trod the furnace; fire licked her limbs. The mordant realism of life burned at last before her reason.

“I’m damned sleepy,” said the man’s voice, ending in a prolonged yawn.

“That there whiskey’s heavy stuff.”

“Where’s Joan, eh?”

“Out still.”

“That girl’s a bit mad; you— It’s all right, Becky, keep your temper straight; I’ll pay.”

There was an indefinite muttering in the room that Joan could not unravel. She heard a sleepy chuckle, a series of yawns. Rebecca’s voice reduced to an insinuating cadence.

“It’s time I cooked supper. Go to sleep, uncle, dear; there’s your handkerchief to keep the flies off. Ta-ta! I’ll vanish.”

From Zeus Gildersedge there came no response. Silence followed, broken by the drip of the rain and the sound of heavy breathing. A quarter of an hour passed with preternatural slowness. Joan had been listening for the noise of Rebecca’s footsteps in the hall, but had heard nothing. The heavy oak door stood ajar. She pushed it open silently, slipped in, and peered into the darkening room.

Zeus Gildersedge sat in his big chair, his head fallen back upon the cushion as in deep sleep. Bending over him stood the woman Rebecca, with her back turned towards the door. The woman had unbuttoned Zeus Gildersedge’s flannel shirt at the neck, and her hand was groping in his bosom. Even as Joan watched her Rebecca drew up a small key fastened about the man’s neck by a long noose of twine. She cut the string with a knife, turned suddenly, saw Joan standing in the doorway.

The servant’s brown eyes darkened and the sullen look on her sensual face grew the more expressive. Her fingers closed and hid the key. She made one step, stood motionless, her figure thrown into a hesitating stoop. Before her stood Joan, tall, silent, and implacable, a pale and purposeful Athene. There was a grim look in the girl’s gray eyes.

“Give me that key.”

Rebecca’s fingers closed the tighter. Her broad figure seemed to stiffen with an obstinate insolence; her large, florid face was repulsively confident.

“Give me that key.”

“Sha’n’t.”

“You will.”

“Master promised it me.”

“Don’t lie.”

“A liar, am I?”

It was done with a quietness that was peculiarly impressive. Joan Gildersedge had advanced with her eyes fixed on the woman’s face. A powerful purpose seemed concentrated in her every movement. She was half a head taller than Rebecca; her strong, white hand fastened on the woman’s wrist. She drew Rebecca’s hand towards her so steadily that an observer would hardly have guessed that the woman’s muscles were rigidly resistant.

“Open your hand.”

There was a moment’s obstinacy. The white hand tightened; the firm mouth grew a shade paler; the gray eyes outstared the brown. It was a battle of willpower, and the conclusion was inevitable. Rebecca’s fingers unclosed upon the key.

“Take it, then.”

The two women still eyed each other—the one stern and keen as a white frost, the other florid and furtive, subduedly vindictive.

“You’ll tell him?”

Joan nodded.

“Nice old gentleman, your father, when—”

The revulsion was instantaneous. Sudden color surged into the girl’s face; her eyes flamed. Like a figure of divine vengeance she stood as at the gate of Eden, hounding shame into the dark unknown.

“Woman—”

“Ah!”

“You have fouled a home. You are unclean. You go to-night.”

A sudden grim sympathy leaped lightning-like from face to face. Rebecca cringed, gave back a step. The gray eyes scathed her with a scorn that stripped her soul naked in the sun. She gave a hoarse cry, cowered back, a woman scourged by a woman’s scorn.

“Miss Joan—”

“Don’t speak to me.”

Rebecca’s hands clutched her bosom. She still retreated, strove to speak, but choked in her throat. Sudden elemental shame had stricken her, shame shining from the divine cleanliness that drove her into the dark.

“I’ll go. Don’t jeer; don’t look at me like that. Give me my money.”

“Your hire.”

The words stung like flame. The woman slunk away like a Judas, crept into the hall silently, stooping and holding her throat. In the shadows she turned with the snarl of a smitten brute.

“I’ll pay you for this.”

“Go.”

The woman disappeared. Joan heard footsteps on the stairs and the slamming of an attic door. She bent over her father’s chair. He was breathing heavily, stertorously, as under the influence of a narcotic or a deadening dose of alcohol. She touched his shoulder, shook him, but he never heeded her. She reknotted the twine about his neck, dropped the key into his bosom, and refastened his shirt.

Joan stood at her full height for a moment with her hands over her eyes, thinking. She had grown calm again after her passion, but the same solemn resolve abode in her mind. Childhood had elapsed in an hour, a brief sunset swallowed up in gloom. Henceforth the unknown stretched forward streaked with the imagined amber of the dawn. A woman, she had the woman’s part to play amid the stress of evil days.

Zeus Gildersedge was a spare man; his weight was inconsiderable. His daughter put her arms about him, lifted him from the chair, and laid him upon the tattered sofa. His head rolled heavy upon her shoulder; his reeking breath beat upon her cheek. She shuddered and recoiled from him with an invincible disrelish as he lay snoring and gulping in his sleep. This sodden, greed-steeped piece of clay was her father.

Joan changed her drenched dress in her bedroom, looked into Rebecca’s attic and found it empty. She descended to the kitchen. The door stood wide and the place was empty; the fire had dwindled in the grate. A square of paper scrawled over with ill-formed characters lay on the table.

“Cook your own hash,” it ran. “I shall send my cousin Jim for my box to-morrow. I’ve gone, and pretty glad to go, you bet.”

Joan crumpled the document and flicked it into the fire. She closed and locked the kitchen door and made her supper off home-baked cake and milk. It had grown dusk apace. She lit a candle, passed through the hall, locking the door, and entered the dining-room again. Her father still snored on the sofa. She set the candle on the table and seated herself in the window-seat with the casement open.

A cleft in the agate foliage showed her the wizard west. The clouds had broken, and great bars of light gleamed in the darkening sky. A purple stairway seemed to ascend to a mysterious shrine shrouded in golden vapor.

Rossetti should have painted her as she sat at the casement with the failing light bathing her face. Her neck shone like alabaster. An infinite wistfulness mingled with the awakened sense of womanhood that burned in her eyes. Virgo Victrix! A fair soul set like a white rose in the dusky tresses of the night!

Great loneliness possessed her in the empty house. Her thoughts were shimmering in the sunshine by the green banks of a river. A willow overarched her head. Through the void of solitude thought echoed thought and soul answered soul. She imagined kisses on her lips. She imagined the touch of a man’s hand.

Night came and the west faded. The solitary candle burned on, streaking the gloom with its meagre flame. For hours the girl watched on wide-eyed into the night, beside the inanimate carcass of her drunken sire. Ere dawn came she had fallen asleep in the window-seat with her head pillowed on her arm. And a smile played upon the lips of the woman who dreamed a dream.

XII

A SPIRIT of unrest had fallen upon Gabriel Strong, a passionate discontent crying like a wild, prophetic voice out of the future. He was oppressed by numberless forebodings; his own heart piped dismally a traitorous refrain. A flippant levity served to cheat the curiosity of numberless excitable neighbors. Even John Strong believed his son to be in most excellent fettle and thoroughly enamoured of so passionate a bargain.

Judith, seraph of the pearly brow, had questioned her brother out of the deep tenderness of her love for him. Evening stood golden-bosomed in the west and a glimmering silence covered the world. The two were wandering over the Saltire lawns, swaying slowly side by side under the black arches of the yews and cedars.

Gabriel’s words had failed to satisfy the girl’s soul. Her doubts had found an echo in his brain; his desire for sympathy quickened his unrest. Stirred by the dogged melancholy that held him, she broke forth into an appeal, ardent as her heart’s blood, wistful as the wild music of a wind.

“For God’s sake, Gabriel,” she said, “play the man. What is the smart of a month compared to the misery of years. If you perjure yourself, you will do much to slay two souls.”

The man boasted an artificial strength that spoke with facile scorn.

“I am as happy as I can expect to be in this world,” he argued. “I have given up heroics, and intend to see things as they are. It is an error to meditate over one’s psychical inconsistencies. Always ask yourself whether you are happy, and you are doomed to be miserable.”

Judith was not the woman to be deluded with sophistry. She had convictions—convictions that could not live on air.

“You know very well whether you are happy or not,” she said.

“I have never arrived at any such conclusion since I began to think, eight years ago.”

“A soul never attains to happiness by theorizing.”

“Possibly not. The mind of the thinker is always daring storm and shipwreck. Mentally I am a species of Raleigh, ever promising myself an El Dorado, a dream that other people always quash. I find my friends the surest iconoclasts of my ideals.”

Judith halted under the great cedar; green grass stretched brilliant at her feet; the western sunlight shone upon her face.

“Your very words betray you. You are flippant.”

“Men are often flippant when they are most in earnest,” he answered her. “Little woman, you create moral problems unnecessarily.”

Judith withstood him, gracious and beautifully eager.

“I will ask you a simple question,” she said. “Would you be happier if at this moment you were free?”

He hung his head and looked into the gloom of the trees.

“No one is free from the cradle. We are beset by eternal obligations.”

“You prevaricate.”

“Life is one long obligation. I only maintain the inevitable.”

“Gabriel, break off this alliance.”

The man laughed, half cynically, yet with a wistful scorn.

“There are many things you do not understand,” he said.

“Reconsider it.”

“I can reconsider nothing.”

Judith shook her head and looked long at him out of her large eyes.

“My heart tells me that all is not well with you,” she said.

Her brother gazed at her with a smile of melancholy tenderness.

“Judith,” he answered her, “why worry yourself over my future. A man may often repent; he can rarely alter. By my own deeds I have made this match inevitable. You can only pain me by suggesting impossibilities. I have incurred a debt—a debt heavier than you can guess. I am happier in doing my duty as a man of honor than I should be in playing the craven. You have the truth.”

Judith hid her eyes from him under her lashes.

“This is a sad world,” she said.

“Perhaps.”

“Men pledge themselves to an error and spend their blood in justifying it.”

“What of sincerity?”

“True sincerity never errs,” she said. “It looks ahead and deceives not the future. The greatest strength is that which emancipates itself from a moral lie.”

“Well and good,” he answered her; “but sheer egotism is unpardonable under certain circumstances.”

“It is the false egotism that in the beginning shackles the true.”

“Then must the true try to remedy the false. We all err. Errors are the illegitimate offspring of the soul; as their parents, we must maintain them. They are ours and of us. The laws of society saddle us with the responsibility. My dear girl, say no more.”

Thus ended Judith’s pleading with her brother ineffectually, though not for lack of eloquence or ardor. Possibly the man knew himself a fool in the deep recesses of his heart. When present in the flesh, his betrothed overpowered him with her perilous splendor. She poured her sensuous magic upon his soul, and, like Tannhäuser, he knelt before her impotent and helpless. The hashish of her beauty had lulled his deeper self to sleep.

Matters mundane were moving on apace. John Strong had draughted a company of craftsmen into the antique rooms and galleries of The Friary. Tapestries were being spread, walls garnished, friezes gilded, rich fabrics wafted into its dusky rooms. The merchant’s coffers ran gold. Truly the house was a haunt for lovers, consecrated by all the charters of romance.

September waited to hear the bells of Saltire pealing for the pair. Italy was to receive them, passionate pilgrims, treading the earth to the tune of love. Ophelia, gracious maid, had wandered from Arcady to the marts of the City of Lud to spend a novitiate amid fabrics from the loom. Her large eyes sparkled amid the splendors of Bond Street, and glib-tongued ’prentices bowed before her feet. She was very radiant, very fair, very pleasurable. Many a delectable dandy coveted unconsciously the lot of Gabriel Strong.

XIII

THE day before his journey to join the Gussets in London, Gabriel awoke in one of his errant and aspiring moods. Finality had oppressed him of late. The world seemed to have narrowed to the tangible prosaicisms of excess. The cry of his old romanticism awoke within him that morning an Arthurian spirit, the wistful questing after a mysterious unknown. Beauty gleamed anew in the wild twilight of romance. The present cringed in the dust.

Noon found him heading for the sea over the wooded hills that rolled north to Rilchester. A brisk breeze tempered the summer heat and reclaimed the hour from languor. Gabriel had certain Roman ruins as his goal—a mouldering wall, some scattered capitols, broken strands of stone, the flower-grown site of an old forum. Ruins accorded with the spirit of romance, though sentiment is not always disinterested in the consideration of things inanimate. Could Troy spare the glamour of a Helen? On the hills above Rilchester dark trees held within their shadows a house that was magical for elemental reasons. Perhaps Gabriel could have gainsaid his soul the relics of an ancient empire. Instincts more ancient perpetuated in him their power.

The woods had poured down to possess this city of the dead. Crumbling flints showed amid the claws of some huge oak’s roots. The old walls were bowered in green, mantled in ivy, plumed with gilliflower, snap-dragon, and flowering grass. The forum, an open square closed with grass banks, stood almost free of the trees. Its roadway and the foundation of its shops still showed in the turf. Fragments of pillars and pediments lay sunken in the sward. Flowers bloomed over the dead pavements, a mist of daisies, harebells, and golden ragwort. On the summit of the central mound stood the ruins of an altar, wreathed and overrun by masses of purple nightshade. Southward the sea glimmered. Around rolled the wooden hills, nebulous and haze-wrapped, guardians of mystery.

Gabriel climbed the altar mound and sentinelled himself on the mouldering stone. To the romantic mind a tender melancholy wraps the infinite with all the idyllic colors of twilight. To the eye of the poet seas are bluer, skies more splendid, moons more magical, roses more ravishing to the soul. It is only the dullard who beholds in a cloud nothing but visible vapor. Primeval man was more spiritual in many of his notions than the commercial gentleman of to-day.

Hope is often father to the fact. Desire and dream of a thing, and in some strange fashion the imagined fruit bends sudden to the hand. Day-dreams are the first dawn-shafts of great minds. Those who live for the present deserve nothing of the future. As for Gabriel, the stars would have fallen in his lap if his dreams had gotten a proportionate reward.

Thought-waves or no, there is some strong influence flowing from importunate thought. Spiritual waves of desire move betwixt soul and soul, drawing them imperceptibly towards each other. Love beacons unto love, even over hill and sea. As water to the moon, so Joan Gildersedge had been drawn from her home that day. Some vibrating lustre-light of the soul had set her wandering on the hills above the sea. Even from childhood she had haunted the gray ruins by the woods, weaving idyls out of the past, listening like Joan of France to the mysterious utterances of nature.

Thus it befell that morning that Gabriel, seated on the crumbling altar, saw the figure of a girl moving in the shadows under the trees. She moved slowly, with eyes downcast. Even in miniature her form had that superb eloquence of grace that was more than Grecian, seeing that a more than Grecian spirit abode there in the flesh.

Gabriel’s memory hailed her with that hurrying of the heart that comes with the inspiration of the breath of life. His cheeks burned in the sun. Fear touched him as with the finger of prophecy. Scoff who will, there is a divine dread that seizes on strong men in the sanctuary of passion. Even as the harp trembles as it bears the burden of some solemn song, so the highly strung soul vibrates to melodies, perilous yet divine. Only clay is passive and unfearful. The mere animal loves with his loins, and is of the earth earthy. That man is indeed to be pitied who has never felt the splendid awe that the pure loveliness of a woman can inspire.

Gabriel left the mound, color in his cheeks and on his lips a half-shy smile. If he had never believed in Schopenhauer, the faith of a pessimist failed him ignominiously at that moment. He was mediæval to the core. Nor did he believe Shakespeare to be a fool.

A warmer color had risen to Joan Gildersedge’s face. Her eyes had a lustre in the sunlight, such a light that makes a woman a thousand times more desirable than of yore.

“You are a long way from home,” she said, considering him with an ingenuous gravity that was very magical, “and yet I had a presentiment that I should meet you here to-day.”

“And so you came?”

“Yes.”

They turned back with spontaneous consent, climbed the mound together, and seated themselves side by side upon the altar stone. The scene seemed utterly natural, yet quick with a rare unreality that kindled beauty. Joan unpinned her hat and laid it beside her. A great oak overarched the mound and reared a shadowy canopy above them.

“It is nearly a month since we met,” she said.

Gabriel was staring over the sea. A wilderness of romance had risen about his soul, a wild shadow-land drowned in moonlight, swept by a complaining wind.

“It seems as yesterday,” he answered her.

“Strange that we should meet so.”

“Perhaps.”

She smiled, half mysteriously, yet with a frankness that imaged truth.

“I have passed through trouble since I spoke with you by the river,” she said.

Gabriel listened in silence as she spoke to him of much that had passed at the house amid the yews. The twain might have been in each other’s hearts for years. When he questioned her at the end thereof she showed him her hands, less white than of yore and roughened with toil.

“I am alone now,” she said.

“No one to help.”

“I do all for my father’s sake. It is better so. He is growing very decrepit.”

“You must be utterly lonely.”

“I am—at times.”

“And yet you have no friends?”

“None.”

“It is over hard.”

She smiled, and there was a look of strange happiness upon her face. Perhaps the man’s sympathy was more to her than either of them had realized. Gabriel had forgotten for a moment the eternal bathos of modernity.

“I would that I could help you,” he said.

Joan’s eyes were turned suddenly to his.

“You have helped me,” she answered.

“I?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“You have often been in my thoughts,” she said. “Pardon me if I seem too much a child. I have never been taught the shame of speaking what is uppermost in my mind. I am vastly ignorant.”

“You are wiser than I am.”

“No.”

“Pardon me, the world has not stiffened you with its multitudinous hypocrisies. We society fools are jointed up in false affectations. We cannot live like honest human beings.”

“You do not seem false to me,” she said.

“God forbid!” he answered, with a sudden stirring of his conscience.

They were both silent a season. The girl’s words had rent the sky above the man’s head. He was conscious of the perilous egotism that had taken the guise of a darkling vision to lead him onward into a shadow-land of desire.

“You should not dream too much,” he said.

His voice startled her; she looked him in the face, her instincts probing his meaning.

“Why do you say that?” she said.

“By reason of a certain melancholy wisdom.”

“And yet—”

“I have been a dreamer,” he said, “but I have played the traitor to my dreams. I suppose it was inevitable in a land such as this. One cannot always stand with one’s back to the wall and fight orthodox dullards. I have not the energy to exist as a living protest against Philistinism. We men are often fools. Have you ever read of Tantalus?”

She pondered a moment and her face lightened.

“Tantalus?”

“The man in hades.”

“Who clutched at grapes when thirst tormented him, but was baffled ever.”

“Even so.”

“Cursed by the gods.”

“I am Tantalus,” he said.

She looked into the woods, solemn as a prophetess lost in dreams. A cloud had fallen upon Gabriel’s face. The girl felt its presence, though she had not looked into his eyes again.

“I should not have imagined it,” she said; “you did not seem to me to be unhappy.”

“Perhaps not.”

“I am sorry.”

“I do not deserve that you should be sorry for my sake.”

“I cannot think that.”

Gabriel mastered self with a grimness that would have served him well on certain other occasions had he been more the man. In negative fashion this girl gave him strength to adjudicate against his own dreams. She inspired and condemned by the same pure ravishment of beauty.

“I would have you know,” he said, “that I am a man bound by chains of my own forging. The blame is mine; I accept it. I may not say, ‘Lo, here is my heart; I may surrender it into the hand of her whose head touches the stars.’ My eyes must remain mute, my soul untongued. I am no longer myself. Think over these words and you may understand in measure.”

Joan Gildersedge did not answer him for several minutes.

“I understand,” she said; “and yet you are not happy.”

“That is the mockery of life. Men think I have everything; I have nothing.”

“Then we are both lonely.”

“Nor may we help each other.”

The sky had darkened; a cloud seemed to have dimmed the sun. A wind woke restless in the woods and the flowers shivered in the waning sunlight. Joan had risen from the altar. She held her hat in her hand, but did not look at Gabriel as he stood in silence at her side.

“I wonder if I shall ever see you again,” she said.

The man had grown pale, and his eyes were stern, yet miserable.

“Perhaps,” he answered.

“I shall think of you.”

“And I also.”

“Good-bye.”

As by a sudden inspiration he kissed her hand as he had kissed it by the Mallan water. When she had left him he remained by the crumbling altar, with its screen of purple nightshade, staring out over the sea. Man-wise, he would have given heaven to have left unsaid the words he had spoken to the girl that day.

The same night he read a letter from Ophelia, a letter garrulous with vapid passion, decreeing the day when they should wed. Gabriel sat by the window as the dusk came down and watched the night embalm the world in gloom. A sonnet fell from his lips as he brooded. He wrote it down, a rough scrawl in the twilight.

“Shall I despair because the day is dead, And all thy strange, sad witchery has passed Into the gold of visions! Shall I cast My soul to where the hands of Night outspread Those cosmic epics, the emotions dread Of panting planets and of stars aghast! Shall I bemoan the raptures that outlast The sun’s swift splendors that so soon are sped!

“Have I not felt the magic of thy hand, And watched the sun make amber of thy hair! Have I not touched thee! For thy laughter planned, And delved thy glances with a grand despair! Never near mine may thy pure bosom sleep. Since thou art woe, then let me live to weep.”